Produced by Several Project Gutenberg Volunteers






THE COMPLETE PROJECT GUTENBERG WORKS OF GEORGE MEREDITH

By George Meredith




   CONTENTS:
     The Shaving of Shagpat
     The Ordeal of Richard Feverel
     Sandra Belloni
     Rhoda Fleming
     Evan Harrington
     Vittoria
     The Adventures of Harry Richmond
     Beauchamp's Career
     The Egoist
     The Tragic Comedians
     Diana of the Crossways
     One of Our Conquerors
     Lord Ormont and his Aminta
     The Amazing Marriage
     Celt and Saxon
     Farina
     Case of General Ople
     The Tale of Chloe
     The House on the Beach
     The Gentleman of Fifty
     The Sentimentalists
     On The Idea Of Comedy And Of The Uses Of The Comic Spirit
     Miscellaneous Prose
       Introduction To W. M. Thackeray's "The Four Georges"
       A Pause In The Strife.
       Concession To The Celt.
       Leslie Stephen.
       Correspondence From The Seat Of War In Italy Letters
         Written To The 'Morning Post' From The Seat Of War In Italy.
     Poetry:
       A Reading of Life, and Other Poems
       Poems, Volume 1.
       Poems, Volume 2.
       Poems, Volume 3.





THE SHAVING OF SHAGPAT

By George Meredith

AN ARABIAN ENTERTAINMENT


1898/1909



     CONTENTS:

     THE THWACKINGS
     THE STORY OF BHANAVAR THE BEAUTIFUL
     THE BETROTHAL
     PUNISHMENT OF SHAHPESH, THE PERSIAN, ON KHIPIL, THE BUILDER
     THE GENIE KARAZ
     THE WELL OF PARAVID
     THE HORSE GARRAVEEN
     THE TALKING HAWK
     GOORELKA OF OOLB
     THE LILY OF THE ENCHANTED SEA
     STORY OF NOORNA BIN NOORKA, THE GENIE KARAZ, AND THE PRINCESS OF OOLB
     THE WILES OF RABESQURAT
     THE PALACE OF AKLIS
     THE SONS OF AKLIS
     THE SWORD OF AKLIS
     KOOROOKH
     THE VEILED FIGURE
     THE BOSOM OF NOORNA
     THE REVIVAL
     THE PLOT
     THE DISH OF POMEGRANATE GRAIN
     THE BURNING OF THE IDENTICAL
     THE FLASHES OF THE BLADE
     CONCLUSION




THE SHAVING OF SHAGPAT

BOOK I.

THE THWACKINGS
THE STORY OF BHANAVAR THE BEAUTIFUL




THE THWACKINGS

It was ordained that Shibli Bagarag, nephew to the renowned Baba
Mustapha, chief barber to the Court of Persia, should shave Shagpat, the
son of Shimpoor, the son of Shoolpi, the son of Shullum; and they had
been clothiers for generations, even to the time of Shagpat, the
illustrious.

Now, the story of Shibli Bagarag, and of the ball he followed, and of the
subterranean kingdom he came to, and of the enchanted palace he entered,
and of the sleeping king he shaved, and of the two princesses he
released, and of the Afrite held in subjection by the arts of one and
bottled by her, is it not known as 'twere written on the finger-nails of
men and traced in their corner-robes? As the poet says:

     Ripe with oft telling and old is the tale,
     But 'tis of the sort that can never grow stale.

Now, things were in that condition with Shibli Bagarag, that on a certain
day he was hungry and abject, and the city of Shagpat the clothier was
before him; so he made toward it, deliberating as to how he should
procure a meal, for he had not a dirhem in his girdle, and the
remembrance of great dishes and savoury ingredients were to him as the
illusion of rivers sheening on the sands to travellers gasping with
thirst.

And he considered his case, crying, 'Surely this comes of wandering, and
'tis the curse of the inquiring spirit! for in Shiraz, where my craft is
in favour, I should be sitting now with my uncle, Baba Mustapha, the
loquacious one, cross-legged, partaking of seasoned sweet dishes, dipping
my fingers in them, rejoicing my soul with scandal of the Court!'

Now, he came to a knoll of sand under a palm, from which the yellow domes
and mosques of the city of Shagpat, and its black cypresses, and marble
palace fronts, and shining pillars, and lofty carven arches that spanned
half-circles of the hot grey sky, were plainly visible. Then gazed he
awhile despondingly on the city of Shagpat, and groaned in contemplation
of his evil plight, as is said by the poet:

     The curse of sorrow is comparison!
        As the sun casteth shade, night showeth star,
     We, measuring what we were by what we are,
        Behold the depth to which we are undone.

Wherefore he counselleth:

     Look neither too much up, nor down at all,
     But, forward stepping, strive no more to fall.

And the advice is excellent; but, as is again said:

     The preacher preacheth, and the hearer heareth,
     But comfort first each function requireth.

And 'wisdom to a hungry stomach is thin pottage,' saith the shrewd reader
of men. Little comfort was there with Shibli Bagarag, as he looked on the
city of Shagpat the clothier! He cried aloud that his evil chance had got
the better of him, and rolled his body in the sand, beating his breast,
and conjuring up images of the profusion of dainties and the abundance of
provision in Shiraz, exclaiming, 'Well-a-way and woe's me! this it is to
be selected for the diversion of him that plotteth against man.' Truly is
it written:

     On different heads misfortunes come:
        One bears them firm, another faints,
     While this one hangs them like a drum
        Whereon to batter loud complaints.

And of the three kinds, they who bang the drum outnumber the silent ones
as do the billows of the sea the ships that swim, or the grains of sand
the trees that grow; a noisy multitude.

Now, he was in the pits of despondency, even as one that yieldeth without
further struggle to the waves of tempest at midnight, when he was ware of
one standing over him,--a woman, old, wrinkled, a very crone, with but
room for the drawing of a thread between her nose and her chin; she was,
as is cited of them who betray the doings of Time,

     Wrinkled at the rind, and overripe at the core,

and every part of her nodded and shook like a tree sapped by the waters,
and her joints were sharp as the hind-legs of a grasshopper; she was
indeed one close-wrecked upon the rocks of Time.

Now, when the old woman had scanned Shibli Bagarag, she called to him, 'O
thou! what is it with thee, that thou rollest as one reft of his wits?'

He answered her, 'I bewail my condition, which is beggary, and the lack
of that which filleth with pleasantness.'

So the old woman said, 'Tell me thy case.'

He answered her, 'O old woman, surely it was written at my birth that I
should take ruin from the readers of planets. Now, they proclaimed that I
was one day destined for great things, if I stood by my tackle, I, a
barber. Know then, that I have had many offers and bribes, seductive
ones, from the rich and the exalted in rank; and I heeded them not,
mindful of what was foretold of me. I stood by my tackle as a warrior
standeth by his arms, flourishing them. Now, when I found great things
came not to me, and 'twas the continuance of sameness and satiety with
Baba Mustapha, my uncle, in Shiraz,--the tongue-wagger, the endless
tattler,--surely I was advised by the words of the poet to go forth in
search of what was wanting, and he says:

        "Thou that dreamest an Event,
     While Circumstance is but a waste of sand,
     Arise, take up thy fortunes in thy hand,
        And daily forward pitch thy tent."

Now, I passed from city to city, proclaiming my science, holding aloft my
tackle. Wullahy! many adventures were mine, and if there's some day
propitiousness in fortune, O old woman, I'll tell thee of what befell me
in the kingdom of Shah Shamshureen: 'tis wondrous, a matter to draw down
the lower jaw with amazement! Now, so it was, that in the eyes of one
city I was honoured and in request, by reason of my calling, and I fared
sumptuously, even as a great officer of state surrounded by slaves,
lounging upon clouds of silk stuffs, circled by attentive ears: in
another city there was no beast so base as I. Wah! I was one hunted of
men and an abomination; no housing for me, nought to operate upon. I was
the lean dog that lieth in wait for offal. It seemeth certain, O old
woman, that a curse hath fallen on barbercraft in these days, because of
the Identical, whose might I know not. Everywhere it is growing in
disrepute; 'tis languishing! Nevertheless till now I have preserved my
tackle, and I would descend on yonder city to exercise it, even for a
livelihood, forgetting awhile great things, but that I dread men may have
changed there also,--and there's no stability in them, I call Allah
(whose name be praised!) to witness; so should I be a thing unsightly,
subject to hateful castigation; wherefore is it that I am in that state
described by the poet, when,

     "Dreading retreat, dreading advance to make,
     Round we revolve, like to the wounded snake."

Is not my case now a piteous one, one that toucheth the tender corner in
man and woman?'

When she that listened had heard him to an end, she shook her garments,
crying, 'O youth, son of my uncle, be comforted! for, if it is as I
think, the readers of planets were right, and thou art thus early within
reach of great things--nigh grasping them.'

Then she fell to mumbling and reciting jigs of verse, quaint measures;
and she pored along the sand to where a line had been drawn, and saw that
the footprints of the youth were traced along it. Lo, at that sight she
clapped her hands joyfully, and ran up to the youth, and peered in his
face, exclaiming, 'Great things indeed! and praise thou the readers of
planets, O nephew of the barber, they that sent thee searching the Event
thou art to master. Wullahy! have I not half a mind to call thee already
Master of the Event?'

Then she abated somewhat in her liveliness, and said to him, 'Know that
the city thou seest is the city of Shagpat, the clothier, and there's no
one living on the face of earth, nor a soul that requireth thy craft more
than he. Go therefore thou, bold of heart, brisk, full of the
sprightliness of the barber, and enter to him. Lo, thou'lt see him
lolling in his shop-front to be admired of this people--marvelled at. Oh!
no mistaking of Shagpat, and the mole might discern Shagpat among myriads
of our kind; and enter thou to him gaily, as to perform a friendly
office, one meriting thanks and gratulations, saying, ''I will preserve
thee the Identical!'' Now he'll at first feign not to understand thee,
dense of wit that he is! but mince not matters with him, perform well thy
operation, and thou wilt come to great things. What say I? 'tis certain
that when thou hast shaved Shagpat thou wilt have achieved the greatest
of things, and be most noteworthy of thy race, thou, Shibli Bagarag, even
thou! and thou wilt be Master of the Event, so named in anecdotes and
histories and records, to all succeeding generations.'

At her words the breast of Shibli Bagarag took in a great wind, and he
hung his head a moment to ponder them; and he thought, 'There's
provokingness in the speech of this old woman, and she's one that
instigateth keenly. She called me by my name! Heard I that? 'Tis a
mystery!' And he thought, 'Peradventure she is a Genie, one of an ill
tribe, and she's luring me to my perdition in this city! How if that be
so?' And again he thought, 'It cannot be! She's probably the Genie that
presided over my birth, and promised me dower of great things through the
mouths of the readers of planets.'

Now, when Shibli Bagarag had so deliberated, he lifted his sight, and lo,
the old woman was no longer before him! He stared, and rubbed his eyes,
but she was clean gone. Then ran he to the knolls and eminences that were
scattered about, to command a view, but she was nowhere visible. So he
thought, ''Twas a dream!' and he was composing himself to despair upon
the scant herbage of one of those knolls, when as he chanced to gaze down
the city below, he saw there a commotion and a crowd of people flocking
one way; he thought, ''Twas surely no dream? come not Genii, and go they
not, in the fashion of that old woman? I'll even descend on yonder city,
and try my tackle on Shagpat, inquiring for him, and if he is there, I
shall know I have had to do with a potent spirit. Allah protect me!'

So, having shut together the clasps of resolve, he arose and made for the
gates of the city, and entered it by the principal entrance. It was a
fair city, the fairest and chief of that country; prosperous, powerful; a
mart for numerous commodities, handicrafts, wares; round it a wild
country and a waste of sand, ruled by the lion in his wrath, and in it
the tiger, the camelopard, the antelope, and other animals. Hither, in
caravans, came the people of Oolb and the people of Damascus, and the
people of Vatz, and they of Bagdad, and the Ringheez, great traders, and
others, trading; and there was constant flow of intercourse between them
and the city of Shagpat. Now as Shibli Bagarag paced up one of the
streets of the city, he beheld a multitude in procession following one
that was crowned after the manner of kings, with a glittering crown, clad
in the yellow girdled robes, and he sporting a fine profusion of hair,
unequalled by all around him, save by one that was a little behind,
shadowed by his presence. So Shibli Bagarag thought, 'Is one of this
twain Shagpat? for never till now have I seen such rare growths, and
'twere indeed a bliss to slip the blade between them and those masses of
darkness that hang from them.' Then he stepped before the King, and made
himself prominent in his path, humbling himself; and it was as he
anticipated, the King prevented his removal by the slaves that would have
dragged him away, and desired a hearing as to his business, and what
brought him to the city, a stranger.

Thereupon Shibli Bagarag prostrated himself and cried, 'O great King,
Sovereign of the Time! surely I am one to be looked on with the eye of
grace; and I am nephew to Baba Mustapha, renowned in Shiraz, a barber;--I
a barber, and it is my prayer, O King of the Age, that thou take me under
thy protection and the shield of thy fair will, while I perform good work
in this city by operating on the unshorn.'

When he had spoken, the King made a point of his eyebrows, and exclaimed,
'Shiraz? So they hold out against Shagpat yet, aha? Shiraz! that nest of
them! that reptile's nest!' Then he turned to his Vizier beside him, and
said, 'What shall be done with this fellow?'

So the Vizier replied, ''Twere well, O King, he be summoned to a sense of
the loathsomeness of his craft by the agency of fifty stripes.'

The King said, ''Tis commanded!'

Then he passed forward in his majesty, and Shibli Bagarag was ware of the
power of five slaves upon him, and he was hurried at a quick pace through
the streets and before the eyes of the people, even to the common
receptacle of felons, and there received from each slave severally ten
thwacks with a thong: 'tis certain that at every thwack the thong took an
airing before it descended upon him. Then loosed they him, to wander
whither he listed; and disgust was strong in him by reason of the
disgrace and the severity of the administration of the blows. He strayed
along the streets in wretchedness, and hunger increased on him, assailing
him first as a wolf in his vitals, then as it had been a chasm yawning
betwixt his trunk and his lower members. And he thought, 'I have been
long in chase of great things, and the hope of attaining them is great;
yet, wullahy! would I barter all for one refreshing meal, and the sense
of fulness. 'Tis so, and sad is it!' And he was mindful of the poet's
words,--

     Who seeks the shadow to the substance sinneth,
     And daily craving what is not, he thinneth:
        His lean ambition how shall he attain?
     For with this constant foolishness he doeth,
     He, waxing liker to what he pursueth,
        Himself becometh what he chased in vain!

And again:

     Of honour half my fellows boast,--
        A thing that scorns and kills us:
     Methinks that honours us the most
        Which nourishes and fills us.

So he thought he would of a surety fling far away his tackle, discard
barbercraft, and be as other men, a mortal, forgotten with his
generation. And he cried aloud, 'O thou old woman! thou deceiver! what
halt thou obtained for me by thy deceits? and why put I faith in thee to
the purchase of a thwacking? Woe's me! I would thou hadst been but a
dream, thou crone! thou guileful parcel of belabouring bones!'

Now, while he lounged and strolled, and was abusing the old woman, he
looked before him, and lo, one lolling in his shop-front, and people
standing outside the shop, marking him with admiration and reverence, and
pointing him out to each other with approving gestures. He who lolled
there was indeed a miracle of hairiness, black with hair as he had been
muzzled with it, and his head as it were a berry in a bush by reason of
it. Then thought Shibli Bagarag, ''Tis Shagpat! If the mole could swear
to him, surely can I.' So he regarded the clothier, and there was naught
seen on earth like the gravity of Shagpat as he lolled before those
people, that failed not to assemble in groups and gaze at him. He was as
a sleepy lion cased in his mane; as an owl drowsy in the daylight. Now
would he close an eye, or move two fingers, but of other motion made he
none, yet the people gazed at him with eagerness. Shibli Bagarag was
astonished at them, thinking, 'Hair! hair! There is might in hair; but
there is greater might in the barber! Nevertheless here the barber is
scorned, the grower of crops held in amazing reverence.' Then thought he,
''Tis truly wondrous the crop he groweth; not even King Shamshureen,
after a thousand years, sported such mighty profusion! Him I sheared: it
was a high task!--why not this Shagpat?'

Now, long gazing on Shagpat awoke in Shibli Bagarag fierce desire to
shear him, and it was scarce in his power to restrain himself from flying
at the clothier, he saying, 'What obstacle now? what protecteth him? Nay,
why not trust to the old woman? Said she not I should first essay on
Shagpat? and 'twas my folly in appealing to the King that brought on me
that thwacking. 'Tis well! I'll trust to her words. Wullahy! will it not
lead me to great things?'

So it was, that as he thought this he continued to keep eye on Shagpat,
and the hunger that was in him passed, and became a ravenous vulture that
flew from him and singled forth Shagpat as prey; and there was no help
for it but in he must go and state his case to Shagpat, and essay
shearing him.

Now, when he was in the presence, he exclaimed, 'Peace, O vendor of
apparel, unto thee and unto thine!'

Shagpat answered, 'That with thee!'

Said Shibli Bagarag, 'I have heard of thee, O thou wonder! Wullahy! I am
here to render homage to that I behold.'

Shagpat answered, ''Tis well!'

Then said Shibli Bagarag, 'Praise my discretion! I have even this day
entered the city, and it is to thee I offer the first shave, O tangle of
glory!'

At these words Shagpat darkened, saying gruffly, 'Thy jest is offensive,
and it is unseasonable for staleness and lack of holiness.'

But Shibli Bagarag cried, 'No jest, O purveyor to the outward of us! but
a very excellent earnest.'

Thereat the face of Shagpat was as an exceeding red berry in a bush, and
he said angrily, 'Have done! no more of it! or haply my spleen will be
awakened, and that of them who see with more eyes than two.'

Nevertheless Shibli Bagarag urged him, and he winked, and gesticulated,
and pointed to his head, crying, 'Fall not, O man of the nicety of
measure, into the trap of error; for 'tis I that am a barber, and a
rarity in this city, even Shibli Bagarag of Shiraz! Know me nephew of the
renowned Baba Mustapha, chief barber to the Court of Persia. Languishest
thou not for my art? Lo! with three sweeps I'll give thee a clean poll,
all save the Identical! and I can discern and save it; fear me not, nor
distrust my skill and the cunning that is mine.'

When he had heard Shibli Bagarag to a close, the countenance of Shagpat
waxed fiery, as it had been flame kindled by travellers at night in a
thorny bramble-bush, and he ruffled, and heaved, and was as when dense
jungle-growths are stirred violently by the near approach of a wild
animal in his fury, shouting in short breaths, 'A barber! a barber! Is't
so? can it be? To me? A barber! O thou, thou reptile! filthy thing! A
barber! O dog! A barber? What? when I bid fair for the highest honours
known? O sacrilegious wretch! monster! How? are the Afrites jealous, that
they send thee to jibe me?'

Thereupon he set up a cry for his wife, and that woman rushed to him from
an inner room, and fell upon Shibli Bagarag, belabouring him.

So, when she was weary of this, she said, 'O light of my eyes! O golden
crop and adorable man! what hath he done to thee?'

Shagpat answered, ''Tis a barber! and he hath sworn to shave me, and
leave me not save shorn!'

Hardly had Shagpat spoken this, when she became limp with the hearing of
it. Then Shibli Bagarag slunk from the shop; but without the crowd had
increased, seeing an altercation, and as he took to his heels they
followed him, and there was uproar in the streets of the city and in the
air above them, as of raging Genii, he like a started quarry doubling
this way and that, and at the corners of streets and open places,
speeding on till there was no breath in his body, the cry still after him
that he had bearded Shagpat. At last they came up with him, and
belaboured him each and all; it was a storm of thwacks that fell on the
back of Shibli Bagarag. When they had wearied themselves in this fashion,
they took him as had he been a stray bundle or a damaged bale, and hurled
him from the gates of the city into the wilderness once more.

Now, when he was alone, he staggered awhile and then flung himself to the
earth, looking neither to the right nor to the left, nor above. All he
could think was, 'O accursed old woman!' and this he kept repeating to
himself for solace; as the poet says:

     'Tis sure the special privilege of hate,
     To curse the authors of our evil state.

As he was thus complaining, behold the very old woman before him! And she
wheezed, and croaked, and coughed, and shook herself, and screwed her
face into a pleasing pucker, and assumed womanish airs, and swayed
herself, like as do the full moons of the harem when the eye of the
master is upon them. Having made an end of these prettinesses, she said,
in a tone of soft insinuation, 'O youth, nephew of the barber, look upon
me.'

Shibli Bagarag knew her voice, and he would not look, thinking, 'Oh, what
a dreadful old woman is this! just calling on her name in detestation
maketh her present to us.' So the old woman, seeing him resolute to shun
her, leaned to him, and put one hand to her dress, and squatted beside
him, and said, 'O youth, thou hast been thwacked!'

He groaned, lifting not his face, nor saying aught. Then said she, 'Art
thou truly in search of great things, O youth?'

Still he groaned, answering no syllable. And she continued, ''Tis surely
in sweet friendliness I ask. Art thou not a fair youth, one to entice a
damsel to perfect friendliness?'

Louder yet did he groan at her words, thinking, 'A damsel, verily!' So
the old woman said, 'I wot thou art angry with me; but now look up, O
nephew of the barber! no time for vexation. What says the poet?--

     "Cares the warrior for his wounds
     When the steed in battle bounds?"

Moreover:

     "Let him who grasps the crown strip not for shame,
     Lest he expose what gain'd it blow and maim!"

So be it with thee and thy thwacking, O foolish youth! Hide it from
thyself, thou silly one! What! thou hast been thwacked, and refusest the
fruit of it--which is resoluteness, strength of mind, sternness in
pursuit of the object!'

Then she softened her tone to persuasiveness, saying, ''Twas written I
should be the head of thy fortune, O Shibli Bagarag! and thou'lt be
enviable among men by my aid, so look upon me, and (for I know thee
famished) thou shah presently be supplied with viands and bright wines
and sweetmeats, delicacies to cheer thee.'

Now, the promise of food and provision was powerful with Shibli Bagarag,
and he looked up gloomily. And the old woman smiled archly at him, and
wriggled in her seat like a dusty worm, and said, 'Dost thou find me
charming, thou fair youth?'

He was nigh laughing in her face, but restrained himself to reply, 'Thou
art that thou art!'

Said she, 'Not so, but that I shall be.' Then she said, 'O youth, pay me
now a compliment!'

Shibli Bagarag was at a loss what further to say to the old woman, for
his heart cursed her for her persecutions, and ridiculed her for her
vanities. At last he bethought himself of the saying of the poet, truly
the offspring of fine wit, where he says:

     Expect no flatteries from me,
        While I am empty of good things;
     I'll call thee fair, and I'll agree
        Thou boldest Love in silken strings,
   When thou bast primed me from thy plenteous store!
     But, oh! till then a clod am I:
        No seed within to throw up flowers:
     All's drouthy to the fountain dry:
        To empty stomachs Nature lowers:
   The lake was full where heaven look'd fair of yore!

So, when he had spoken that, the old woman laughed and exclaimed, 'Thou
art apt! it is well said! Surely I excuse thee till that time! Now
listen! 'Tis written we work together, and I know it by divination. Have
I not known thee wandering, and on thy way to this city of Shagpat, where
thou'lt some day sit throned? Now I propose to thee this--and 'tis an
excellent proposal--that I lead thee to great things, and make thee
glorious, a sitter in high seats, Master of an Event?'

Cried he, 'A proposal honourable to thee, and pleasant in the ear.'

She added, 'Provided thou marry me in sweet marriage.'

Thereat he stared on vacancy with a serious eye, and he could scarce
credit her earnestness, but she repeated the same. So presently he
thought, 'This old hag appeareth deep in the fountain of events, and she
will be a right arm to me in the mastering of one, a torch in darkness,
seeing there is wisdom in her as well as wickedness. The thwackings?--sad
was their taste, but they're in the road leading to greatness, and I
cannot say she put me out of that road in putting me where they were. Her
age?--shall I complain of that when it is a sign she goeth shortly
altogether?'

As he was thus debating he regarded the old woman stealthily, and she was
in agitation, so that her joints creaked like forest branches in a wind,
and the puckers of her visage moved as do billows of the sea to and fro,
and the anticipations of a fair young bride are not more eager than what
was visible in the old woman. Wheedlingly she looked at him, and shaped
her mouth like a bird's bill to soften it; and she drew together her
dress, to give herself the look of slimness, using all fascinations. He
thought, ''Tis a wondrous old woman! Marriage would seem a thing of
moment to her, yet is the profit with me, and I'll agree to it.' So he
said, ''Tis a pact between us, O old woman!'

Now, the eyes of the old woman brightened when she heard him, and were as
the eyes of a falcon that eyeth game, hungry with red fire, and she
looked brisk with impatience, laughing a low laugh and saying, 'O youth,
I must claim of thee, as is usual in such cases, the kiss of contract.'

So Shibli Bagarag was mindful of what is written,

   If thou wouldst take the great leap, be ready for the little jump,

and he stretched out his mouth to the forehead of the old woman. When he
had done so, it was as though she had been illuminated, as when light is
put in the hollow of a pumpkin. Then said she, 'This is well! this is a
fair beginning! Now look, for thy fortune will of a surety follow. Call
me now sweet bride, and knocker at the threshold of hearts!'

So Shibli Bagarag sighed, and called her this, and he said, 'Forget not
my condition, O old woman, and that I am nigh famished.'

Upon that she nodded gravely, and arose and shook her garments together,
and beckoned for Shibli Bagarag to follow her; and the two passed through
the gates of the city, and held on together through divers streets and
thoroughfares till they came before the doors of a palace with a pillared
entrance; and the old woman passed through the doors of the palace as one
familiar to them, and lo! they were in a lofty court, built all of
marble, and in the middle of it a fountain playing, splashing silvery.
Shibli Bagarag would have halted here to breathe the cool refreshingness
of the air, but the old woman would not; and she hurried on even to the
opening of a spacious Hall, and in it slaves in circle round a raised
seat, where sat one that was their lord, and it was the Chief Vizier of
the King.

Then the old woman turned round sharply to Shibli Bagarag, and said, 'How
of thy tackle, O my betrothed?'

He answered, 'The edge is keen, the hand ready.'

Then said she, ''Tis well.'

So the old woman put her two hands on the shoulders of Shibli Bagarag,
saying, 'Make thy reverence to him on the raised seat; have faith in thy
tackle and in me. Renounce not either, whatsoever ensueth. Be not
abashed, O my bridegroom to be!'

Thereupon she thrust him in; and Shibli Bagarag was abashed, and played
foolishly with his fingers, knowing not what to do. So when the Chief
Vizier saw him he cried out, 'Who art thou, and what wantest thou?'

Now, the back of Shibli Bagarag tingled when he heard the Vizier's voice,
and he said, 'I am, O man of exalted condition, he whom men know as
Shibli Bagarag, nephew to Baba Mustapha, the renowned of Shiraz; myself
barber likewise, proud of my art, prepared to exercise it.'

Then said the Chief Vizier, 'This even to our faces! Wonderful is the
audacity of impudence! Know, O nephew of the barber, thou art among them
that honour not thy art. Is it not written, For one thing thou shaft be
crowned here, for that thing be thwacked there? So also it is written,
The tongue of the insolent one is a lash and a perpetual castigation to
him. And it is written, O Shibli Bagarag, that I reap honour from thee,
and there is no help but that thou be made an example of.'

So the Chief Vizier uttered command, and Shibli Bagarag was ware of the
power of five slaves upon him; and they seized him familiarly, and placed
him in position, and made ready his clothing for the reception of fifty
other thwacks with a thong, each several thwack coming down on him with a
hiss, as it were a serpent, and with a smack, as it were the mouth of
satisfaction; and the people assembled extolled the Chief Vizier, saying,
'Well and valiantly done, O stay of the State! and such-like to the
accursed race of barbers.'

Now, when they had passed before the Chief Vizier and departed, lo! he
fell to laughing violently, so that his hair was agitated and was as a
sand-cloud over him, and his countenance behind it was as the sun of the
desert reflected ripplingly on the waters of a bubbling spring, for it
had the aspect of merriness; and the Chief Vizier exclaimed, 'O Shibli
Bagarag, have I not made fair show?'

And Shibli Bagarag said, 'Excellent fair show, O mighty one!' Yet knew he
not in what, but he was abject by reason of the thwacks.

So the Vizier said, 'Thou lookest lean, even as one to whom Fortune oweth
a long debt. Tell me now of thy barbercraft: perchance thy gain will be
great thereby?'

And Shibli Bagarag answered, 'My gain has been great, O eminent in rank,
but of evil quality, and I am content not to increase it.' And he broke
forth into lamentations, crying in excellent verse:--

     Why am I thus the sport of all--
     A thing Fate knocketh like a ball
     From point to point of evil chance,
     Even as the sneer of Circumstance?
     While thirsting for the highest fame,
      I hunger like the lowest beast:
     To be the first of men I aim
      And find myself the least.

Now, the Vizier delayed not when he heard this to have a fair supply set
before Shibli Bagarag, and meats dressed in divers fashions, spiced, and
coloured, and with herbs, and wines in golden goblets, and slaves in
attendance. So Shibli Bagarag ate and drank, and presently his soul arose
from its prostration, and he cried, 'Wullahy! the head cook of King
Shamshureen could have worked no better as regards the restorative
process.'

Then said the Chief Vizier, 'O Shibli Bagarag, where now is thy tackle?'

And Shibli Bagarag winked and nodded and turned his head in the manner of
the knowing ones, and he recited the verse:

     'Tis well that we are sometimes circumspect,
      And hold ourselves in witless ways deterred:
     One thwacking made me seriously reflect;
      A SECOND turned the cream of love to curd:
     Most surely that profession I reject
      Before the fear of a prospective THIRD.

So the Vizier said, ''Tis well, thou turnest verse neatly' And he
exclaimed extemporaneously:

   If thou wouldst have thy achievement as high

     As the wings of Ambition can fly:
   If thou the clear summit of hope wouldst attain,
     And not have thy labour in vain;
   Be steadfast in that which impell'd, for the peace
     Of earth he who leaves must have trust:
   He is safe while he soars, but when faith shall cease,
     Desponding he drops to the dust.

Then said he, 'Fear no further thwacking, but honour and prosperity in
the place of it. What says the poet?--

     "We faint, when for the fire
      There needs one spark;
     We droop, when our desire
      Is near its mark."

How near to it art thou, O Shibli Bagarag! Know, then, that among this
people there is great reverence for the growing of hair, and he that is
hairiest is honoured most, wherefore are barbers creatures of especial
abhorrence, and of a surety flourish not. And so it is that I owe my
station to the esteem I profess for the cultivation of hair, and to my
persecution of the clippers of it. And in this kingdom is no one that
beareth such a crop as I, saving one, a clothier, an accursed one!--and
may a blight fall upon him for his vanity and his affectation of solemn
priestliness, and his lolling in his shop-front to be admired and
marvelled at by the people. So this fellow I would disgrace and bring to
scorn,--this Shagpat! for he is mine enemy, and the eye of the King my
master is on him. Now I conceive thy assistance in this matter, Shibli
Bagarag,--thou, a barber.'

When Shibli Bagarag heard mention of Shagpat, and the desire for
vengeance in the Vizier, he was as a new man, and he smelt the sweetness
of his own revenge as a vulture smelleth the carrion from afar, and he
said, 'I am thy servant, thy slave, O Vizier!' Then smiled he as to his
own soul, and he exclaimed, 'On my head be it!'

And it was to him as when sudden gusts of perfume from garden roses of
the valley meet the traveller's nostril on the hill that overlooketh the
valley, filling him with ecstasy and newness of life, delicate visions.
And he cried, 'Wullahy! this is fair; this is well! I am he that was
appointed to do thy work, O man in office! What says the poet?--

     "The destined hand doth strike the fated blow:
     Surely the arrow's fitted to the bow!"

And he says:

     "The feathered seed for the wind delayeth,
     The wind above the garden swayeth,
     The garden of its burden knoweth,
     The burden falleth, sinketh, soweth."'

So the Vizier chuckled and nodded, saying, 'Right, right! aptly spoken, O
youth of favour! 'Tis even so, and there is wisdom in what is written:

       "Chance is a poor knave;
        Its own sad slave;
        Two meet that were to meet:
        Life 's no cheat."'

Upon that he cried, 'First let us have with us the Eclipser of Reason,
and take counsel with her, as is my custom.'

Now, the Vizier made signal to a slave in attendance, and the slave
departed from the Hall, and the Vizier led Shibli Bagarag into a closer
chamber, which had a smooth floor of inlaid silver and silken hangings,
the windows looking forth on the gardens of the palace and its fountains
and cool recesses of shade and temperate sweetness. While they sat there
conversing in this metre and that, measuring quotations, lo! the old
woman, the affianced of Shibli Bagarag--and she sumptuously arrayed, in
perfect queenliness, her head bound in a circlet of gems and gold, her
figure lustrous with a full robe of flowing crimson silk; and she wore
slippers embroidered with golden traceries, and round her waist a girdle
flashing with jewels, so that to look on she was as a long falling water
in the last bright slant of the sun. Her hair hung disarranged, and
spread in a scattered fashion off her shoulders; and she was younger by
many moons, her brow smooth where Shibli Bagarag had given the kiss of
contract, her hand soft and white where he had taken it. Shibli Bagarag
was smitten with astonishment at sight of her, and he thought, 'Surely
the aspect of this old woman would realise the story of Bhanavar the
Beautiful; and it is a story marvellous to think of; yet how great is the
likeness between Bhanavar and this old woman that groweth younger!'

And he thought again, 'What if the story of Bhanavar be a true one; this
old woman such as she--no other?'

So, while he considered her, the Vizier exclaimed, 'Is she not fair--my
daughter?'

And the youth answered, 'She is, O Vizier, that she is!'

But the Vizier cried, 'Nay, by Allah! she is that she will be.' And the
Vizier said, ''Tis she that is my daughter; tell me thy thought of her,
as thou thinkest it.'

And Shibli Bagarag replied, 'O Vizier, my thought of her is, she seemeth
indeed as Bhanavar the Beautiful--no other.'

Then the Vizier and the Eclipser of Reason exclaimed together, 'How of
Bhanavar and her story, O youth? We listen!'

So Shibli Bagarag leaned slightly on a cushion of a couch, and narrated
as followeth.




AND THIS IS THE STORY OF BHANAVAR THE BEAUTIFUL

Know that at the foot of a lofty mountain of the Caucasus there lieth a
deep blue lake; near to this lake a nest of serpents, wise and ancient.
Now, it was the habit of a damsel to pass by the lake early at morn, on
her way from the tents of her tribe to the pastures of the flocks. As she
pressed the white arch of her feet on the soft green-mossed grasses by
the shore of the lake she would let loose her hair, looking over into the
water, and bind the braid again round her temples and behind her ears, as
it had been in a lucent mirror: so doing she would laugh. Her laughter
was like the falls of water at moonrise; her loveliness like the very
moonrise; and she was stately as a palm-tree standing before the moon.

This was Bhanavar the Beautiful.

Now, the damsel was betrothed to the son of a neighbouring Emir, a youth
comely, well-fashioned, skilled with the bow, apt in all exercises; one
that sat his mare firm as the trained falcon that fixeth on the plunging
bull of the plains; fair and terrible in combat as the lightning that
strideth the rolling storm; and it is sung by the poet:

     When on his desert mare I see
        My prince of men,
        I think him then
     As high above humanity
     As he shines radiant over me.

     Lo! like a torrent he doth bound,
        Breasting the shock
        From rock to rock:
     A pillar of storm, he shakes the ground,

     His turban on his temples wound.

     Match me for worth to be adored
        A youth like him
        In heart and limb!
     Swift as his anger is his sword;
     Softer than woman his true word.

Now, the love of this youth for the damsel Bhanavar was a consuming
passion, and the father of the damsel and the father of the youth looked
fairly on the prospect of their union, which was near, and was plighted
as the union of the two tribes. So they met, and there was no voice
against their meeting, and all the love that was in them they were free
to pour forth far from the hearing of men, even where they would. Before
the rising of the sun, and ere his setting, the youth rode swiftly from
the green tents of the Emir his father, to waylay her by the waters of
the lake; and Bhanavar was there, bending over the lake, her image in the
lake glowing like the fair fulness of the moon; and the youth leaned to
her from his steed, and sang to her verses of her great loveliness ere
she was wistful of him. Then she turned to him, and laughed lightly a
welcome of sweetness, and shook the falls of her hair across the blushes
of her face and her bosom; and he folded her to him, and those two would
fondle together in the fashion of the betrothed ones (the blessing of
Allah be on them all!), gazing on each other till their eyes swam with
tears, and they were nigh swooning with the fulness of their bliss.
Surely 'twas an innocent and tender dalliance, and their prattle was that
of lovers till the time of parting, he showing her how she looked
best--she him; and they were forgetful of all else that is, in their
sweet interchange of flatteries; and the world was a wilderness to them
both when the youth parted with Bhanavar by the brook which bounded the
tents of her tribe.

It was on a night when they were so together, the damsel leaning on his
arm, her eyes toward the lake, and lo! what seemed the reflection of a
large star in the water; and there was darkness in the sky above it,
thick clouds, and no sight of the heavens; so she held her face to him
sideways and said, 'What meaneth this, O my betrothed? for there is
reflected in yonder lake a light as of a star, and there is no star
visible this night.'

The youth trembled as one in trouble of spirit, and exclaimed, 'Look not
on it, O my soul! It is of evil omen.'

But Bhanavar kept her gaze constantly on the light, and the light
increased in lustre; and the light became, from a pale sad splendour,
dazzling in its brilliancy. Listening, they heard presently a gurgling
noise as of one deeply drinking. Then the youth sighed a heavy sigh and
said, 'This is the Serpent of the Lake drinking of its waters, as is her
wont once every moon, and whoso heareth her drink by the sheening of that
light is under a destiny dark and imminent; so know I my days are
numbered, and it was foretold of me, this!' Now the youth sought to
dissuade Bhanavar from gazing on the light, and he flung his whole body
before her eyes, and clasped her head upon his breast, and clung about
her, caressing her; yet she slipped from him, and she cried, 'Tell me of
this serpent, and of this light.'

So he said, 'Seek not to hear of it, O my betrothed!'

Then she gazed at the light a moment more intently, and turned her fair
shape toward him, and put up her long white fingers to his chin, and
smoothed him with their softness, whispering, 'Tell me of it, my life!'

And so it was that her winningness melted him, and he said, 'Bhanavar!
the serpent is the Serpent of the Lake; old, wise, powerful; of the brood
of the sacred mountain, that lifteth by day a peak of gold, and by night
a point of solitary silver. In her head, upon her forehead, between her
eyes, there is a Jewel, and it is this light.'

Then she said, 'How came the Jewel there, in such a place?'

He answered, ''Tis the growth of one thousand years in the head of the
serpent.'

She cried, 'Surely precious?'

He answered, 'Beyond price!'

As he spake the tears streamed from him, and he was shaken with grief,
but she noted nought of this, and watched the wonder of the light, and
its increasing, and quivering, and lengthening; and the light was as an
arrow of beams and as a globe of radiance. Desire for the Jewel waxed in
her, and she had no sight but for it alone, crying, ''Tis a Jewel
exceeding in preciousness all jewels that are, and for the possessing it
would I forfeit all that is.'

So he said sorrowfully, 'Our love, O Bhanavar? and our hopes of
espousal?'

But she cried, 'No question of that! Prove now thy passion for me, O
warrior! and win for me that Jewel.'

Then he pleaded with her, and exclaimed, 'Urge not this! The winning of
the Jewel is worth my life; and my life, O Bhanavar--surely its breath is
but the love of thee.'

So she said, 'Thou fearest a risk?'

And he replied, 'Little fear I; my life is thine to cast away. This Jewel
it is evil to have, and evil followeth the soul that hath it.'

Upon that she cried, 'A trick to cheat me of the Jewel! thy love is
wanting at the proof.'

And she taunted the youth her betrothed, and turned from him, and
hardened at his tenderness, and made her sweet shape as a thorn to his
caressing, and his heart was charged with anguish for her. So at the
last, when he had wept a space in silence, he cried, 'Thou hast willed
it; the Jewel shall be thine, O my soul!'

Then said he, 'Thou hast willed it, O Bhanavar! and my life is as a grain
of sand weighed against thy wishes; Allah is my witness! Meet me
therefore here, O my beloved, at the end of one quarter-moon, even
beneath the shadow of this palm-tree, by the lake, and at this hour, and
I will deliver into thy hands the Jewel. So farewell! Wind me once about
with thine arms, that I may take comfort from thee.'

When their kiss was over the youth led her silently to the brook of their
parting--the clear, cold, bubbling brook--and passed from her sight; and
the damsel was exulting, and leapt and made circles in her glee, and she
danced and rioted and sang, and clapped her hands, crying, 'If I am now
Bhanavar the Beautiful how shall I be when that Jewel is upon me, the
bright light which beameth in the darkness, and needeth to light it no
other light? Surely there will be envy among the maidens and the widows,
and my name and the odour of my beauty will travel to the courts of far
kings.'

So was she jubilant; and her sisters that met her marvelled at her and
the deep glow that was upon her, even as the glow of the Great Desert
when the sun has fallen; and they said among themselves, 'She is covered
all over with the blush of one that is a bride, and the bridegroom's kiss
yet burneth upon Bhanavar!'

So they undressed her and she lay among them, and was all night even as a
bursting rose in a vase filled with drooping lilies; and one of the
maidens that put her hand on the left breast of Bhanavar felt it full,
and the heart beneath it panting and beating swifter than the ground is
struck by hooves of the chosen steed sent by the Chieftain to the city of
his people with news of victory and the summons for rejoicing.

Now, the nights and the days of Bhanavar were even as this night, and she
was as an unquiet soul till the appointed time for the meeting with her
lover had come. Then when the sun was lighting with slant beam the green
grass slope by the blue brook before her, Bhanavar arrayed herself and
went forth gaily, as a martial queen to certain conquest; and of all the
flowers that nodded to the setting,--yea, the crimson, purple, pure
white, streaked-yellow, azure, and saffron, there was no flower fairer in
its hues than Bhanavar, nor bird of the heavens freer in its glittering
plumage, nor shape of loveliness such as hers. Truly, when she had taken
her place under the palm by the waters of the lake, that was no
exaggeration of the poet, where he says:

     Snows of the mountain-peaks were mirror'd there
      Beneath her feet, not whiter than they were;
     Not rosier in the white, that falling flush
      Broad on the wave, than in her cheek the blush.

And again:

     She draws the heavens down to her,
        So rare she is, so fair she is;
     They flutter with a crown to her,
        And lighten only where she is.

And he exclaims, in verse that applieth to her:

        Exquisite slenderness!
         Sleek little antelope!
          Serpent of sweetness!
           Eagle that soaringly
           Wins me adoringly!
          Teach me thy fleetness,
         Vision of loveliness;
        Turn to my tenderness!

Now, when the sun was lost to earth, and all was darkness, Bhanavar fixed
her eyes upon an opening arch of foliage in the glade through which the
youth her lover should come to her, and clasped both hands across her
bosom, so shaken was she with eager longing and expectation. In her
hunger for his approach, she would at whiles pluck up the herbage about
her by the roots, and toss handfuls this way and that, chiding the
peaceful song of the nightbird in the leaves above her head; and she was
sinking with fretfulness, when lo! from the opening arch of the glade a
sudden light, and Bhanavar knew it for the Jewel in the fingers of her
betrothed, by the strength of its effulgence. Then she called to him
joyfully a cry of welcome, and quickened his coming with her calls, and
the youth alighted from his mare and left it to pasture, and advanced to
her, holding aloft the Jewel. And the Jewel was of great size and purity,
round, and all-luminous, throwing rays and beams everywhere about it, a
miracle to behold,--the light in it shining, and as the very life of the
blood, a sweet crimson, a ruby, a softer rose, an amethyst of tender
hues: it was a full globe of splendours, showing like a very kingdom of
the Blest; and blessed was the eye beholding it! So when he was within
reach of her arm, the damsel sprang to him and caught from his hand the
Jewel, and held it before her eyes, and danced with it, and pressed it on
her bosom, and was as a creature giddy with great joy in possessing it.
And she put the Jewel in her bosom, and looked on the youth to thank him
for the Jewel with all her beauty; for the passion of a mighty pride in
him who had won for her the Jewel exalted Bhanavar, and she said sweetly,
'Now hast thou proved to me thy love of me, and I am thine, O my
betrothed,--wholly thine. Kiss me, then, and cease not kissing me, for
bliss is in me.'

But the youth eyed her sorrowfully, even as one that hath great yearning,
and no power to move or speak.

So she said again, in the low melody of deep love-tones, 'Kiss me, O my
lover! for I desire thy kiss.'

Still he spake not, and was as a pillar of stone.

And she started, and cried, 'Thou art whole? without a hurt?' Then sought
she to coax him to her with all the softness of her half-closed eyes and
budded lips, saying, ''Twas an idle fear! and I have thee, and thou art
mine, and I am thine; so speak to me, my lover! for there is no music
like the music of thy voice, and the absence of it is the absence of all
sweetness, and there is no pleasure in life without it.'

So the tenderness of her fondling melted the silence in him, and
presently his tongue was loosed, and he breathed in pain of spirit, and
his words were the words of the proverb:

   He that fighteth with poison is no match for the prick of a thorn.

And he said, 'Surely, O Bhanavar, my love for thee surpasseth what is
told of others that have loved before us, and I count no loss a loss that
is for thy sake.' And he sighed, and sang:

     Sadder than is the moon's lost light,
      Lost ere the kindling of dawn,
      To travellers journeying on,

     The shutting of thy fair face from my sight.
      Might I look on thee in death,
      With bliss I would yield my breath.

     Oh! what warrior dies
     With heaven in his eyes?
     O Bhanavar! too rich a prize!
      The life of my nostrils art thou,
      The balm-dew on my brow;

   Thou art the perfume I meet as I speed o'er the plains,
   The strength of my arms, the blood of my veins.

Then said he, 'I make nothing matter of complaint, Allah witnesseth! not
even the long parting from her I love. What will be, will be: so was it
written! 'Tis but a scratch, O my soul! yet am I of the dead and them
that are passed away. 'Tis hard; but I smile in the face of bitterness.'

Now, at his words the damsel clutched him with both her hands, and the
blood went from her, and she was as a block of white marble, even as one
of those we meet in the desert, leaning together, marking the wrath of
the All-powerful on forgotten cities. And the tongue of the damsel was
dry, and she was without speech, gazing at him with wide-open eyes, like
one in trance. Then she started as a dreamer wakeneth, and flung herself
quickly on the breast of the youth, and put up the sleeve from his arm,
and beheld by the beams of the quarter-crescent that had risen through
the leaves, a small bite on the arm of the youth her betrothed, spotted
with seven spots of blood in a crescent; so she knew that the poison of
the serpent had entered by that bite; and she loosened herself to the
violence of her anguish, shrieking the shrieks of despair, so that the
voice of her lamentation was multiplied about and made many voices in the
night. Her spirit returned not to her till the crescent of the moon was
yellow to its fall; and lo! the youth was sighing heavy sighs and leaning
to the ground on one elbow, and she flung herself by him on the ground,
seeking for herbs that were antidotes to the poison of the serpent,
grovelling among the grasses and strewn leaves of the wood, peering at
them tearfully by the pale beams, and startling the insects as she moved.
When she had gathered some, she pressed them and bruised them, and laid
them along his lips, that were white as the ball of an eye; and she made
him drink drops of the juices of the herbs, wailing and swaying her body
across him, as one that seeketh vainly to give brightness again to the
flames of a dying fire. But now his time was drawing nigh, and he was
weak, and took her hand in his and gazed on her face, sighing, and said,
'There is nothing shall keep me by thee now, O my betrothed, my
beautiful! Weep not, for it is the doing of fate, and not thy doing. So
ere I go, and the grave-cloth separates thy heart from my heart, listen
to me. Lo, that Jewel! it is the giver of years and of powers, and of
loveliness beyond mortal, yet the wearing of it availeth not in the
pursuit of happiness. Now art thou Queen over the serpents of this lake:
it was the Queen-serpent I slew, and her vengeance is on me here. Now art
thou mighty, O Bhanavar! and look to do well by thy tribe, and that from
which I spring, recompensing my father for his loss, pouring ointment on
his affliction, for great is the grief of the old man, and he loveth me,
and is childless.'

Then the youth fell back and was still; and Bhanavar put her ear to his
mouth, and heard what seemed an inner voice murmuring in him, and it was
of his infancy and his boyhood, and of his father the Emir's first gift
to him, his horse Zoora, in old times. Presently the youth revived
somewhat, and looked upon her; but his sight was glazed with a film, and
she sang her name to him ere he knew her, and the sad sweetness of her
name filled his soul, and he replied to her with it weakly, like a far
echo that groweth fainter, 'Bhanavar! Bhanavar! Bhanavar!' Then a change
came over him, and the pain of the poison and the passion of the
death-throe, and he was wistful of her no more; but she lay by him,
embracing him, and in the last violence of his anguish he hugged her to
his breast. Then it was over, and he sank. And the twain were as a great
wave heaving upon the shore; lo, part is wasted where it falleth; part
draweth back into the waters. So was it!

Now the chill of dawn breathed blue on the lake and was astir among the
dewy leaves of the wood, when Bhanavar arose from the body of the youth,
and as she rose she saw that his mare Zoora, his father's first gift, was
snuffing at the ear of her dead master, and pawing him. At that sight the
tears poured from her eyelids, and she sobbed out to the mare, 'O Zoora!
never mare bore nobler burden on her back than thou in Zurvan my
betrothed. Zoora! thou weepest, for death is first known to thee in the
dearest thing that was thine; as to me, in the dearest that was mine! And
O Zoora, steed of Zurvan my betrothed, there's no loveliness for us in
life, for the loveliest is gone; and let us die, Zoora, mare of Zurvan my
betrothed, for what is dying to us, O Zoora, who cherish beyond all that
which death has taken?'

So spake she to Zoora the mare, kissing her, and running her fingers
through the long white mane of the mare. Then she stooped to the body of
her betrothed, and toiled with it to lift it across the crimson
saddle-cloth that was on the back of Zoora; and the mare knelt to her,
that she might lay on her back the body of Zurvan; when that was done,
Bhanavar paced beside Zoora the mare, weeping and caressing her,
reminding her of the deeds of Zurvan, and the battles she had borne him
to, and his greatness and his gentleness. And the mare went without
leading. It was broad light when they had passed the glade and the covert
of the wood. Before them, between great mountains, glimmered a space of
rolling grass fed to deep greenness by many brooks. The shadow of a
mountain was over it, and one slant of the rising sun, down a glade of
the mountain, touched the green tent of the Emir, where it stood a little
apart from the others of his tribe. Goats and asses of the tribe were
pasturing in the quiet, but save them nothing moved among the tents, and
it was deep peacefulness. Bhanavar led Zoora slowly before the tent of
the Emir, and disburdened Zoora of the helpless weight, and spread the
long fair limbs of the youth lengthwise across the threshold of the
Emir's tent, sitting away from it with clasped hands, regarding it. Ere
long the Emir came forth, and his foot was on the body of his son, and he
knew death on the chin and the eyes of Zurvan, his sole son. Now the Emir
was old, and with the shock of that sight the world darkened before him,
and he gave forth a groan and stumbled over the sunken breast of Zurvan,
and stretched over him as one without life. When Bhanavar saw that old
man stretched over the body of his son, she sickened, and her ear was
filled with the wailings of grief that would arise, and she stood up and
stole away from the habitations of the tribe, stricken with her guilt,
and wandered beyond the mountains, knowing not whither she went, looking
on no living thing, for the sight of a thing that moved was hateful to
her, and all sounds were sounds of lamentation for a great loss.

Now, she had wandered on alone two days and two nights, and nigh morn she
was seized with a swoon of weariness, and fell forward with her face to
the earth, and lay there prostrate, even as one that is adoring the
shrine; and it was on the sands of the desert she was lying. It chanced
that the Chieftain of a desert tribe passed at midday by the spot, and
seeing the figure of a damsel unshaded' by any shade of tree or herb or
tent-covering, and prostrate on the sands, he reined his steed and leaned
forward to her, and called to her. Then as she answered nothing he
dismounted, and thrust his arm softly beneath her and lifted her gently;
and her swoon had the whiteness of death, so that he thought her dead
verily, and the marvel of her great loveliness in death smote the heart
on his ribs as with a blow, and the powers of life went from him a moment
as he looked on her and the long dark wet lashes that clung to her
colourless face, as at night in groves where the betrothed ones wander,
the slender leaves of the acacia spread darkly over the full moon. And he
cried, ''Tis a loveliness that maketh the soul yearn to the cold bosom of
death, so lovely, exceeding all that liveth, is she!'

After he had contemplated her longwhile, he snatched his sight from her,
and swung her swiftly on the back of his mare, and leaned her on one arm,
and sped westward over the sands of the desert, halting not till he was
in the hum of many tents, and the sun of that day hung a red half-circle
across the sand. He alighted before the tent of his mother, and sent
women in to her. When his mother came forth to the greetings of her son,
he said no word, but pointed to the damsel where he had leaned her at the
threshold of her tent. His mother kissed him on the forehead, and turned
her shoulder to peer upon the damsel. But when she had close view of
Bhanavar, she spat, and scattered her hair, and stamped, and cried aloud,
'Away with her! this slut of darkness! there's poison on her very skirts,
and evil in the look of her.'

Then said he, 'O Rukrooth, my mother! art thou lost to charity and the
uses of kindliness and the laws of hospitality, that thou talkest this of
the damsel, a stranger? Take her now in, and if she be past help, as I
fear; be it thy care to give her decent burial; and if she live, O my
mother, tend her for the love of thy son, and for the love of him be
gentle with her.'

While he spake, Rukrooth his mother knelt over the damsel, as a cat that
sniffeth the suspected dish; and she flashed her eyes back on him,
exclaiming scornfully, 'So art thou befooled, and the poison is already
in thee! But I will not have her, O my son! and thou, Ruark, my son,
neither shalt thou have her. What! will I not die to save thee from a
harm? Surely thy frown is little to me, my son, if I save thee from a
harm; and the damsel here is--I shudder to think what; but never lay
shadow across my threshold dark as this!'

Now, Ruark gazed upon his mother, and upon Bhanavar, and the face of
Bhanavar was as a babe in sleep, and his soul melted to the parted
sweetness of her soft little curved red lips and her closed eyelids, and
her innocent open hands, where she lay at the threshold of the tent,
unconscious of hardness and the sayings of the unjust. So he cried
fiercely, 'No paltering, O Rukrooth, my mother: and if not to thy tent,
then to mine!'

When she heard him say that in the voice of his anger, Rukrooth fixed her
eyes on him sorrowfully, and sighed, and went up to him and drew his head
once against her heart, and retreated into the tent, bidding the women
that were there bring in the body of the damsel.

It was the morning of another day when Bhanavar awoke; and she awoke in a
dream of Zoora, the mare of Zurvan her betrothed, that was dead, and the
name of Zoora was on her tongue as she started up. She was on a couch of
silk and leopard-skins; at her feet a fair young girl with a fan of
pheasant feathers. She stared at the hangings of the tent, which were
richer than those of her own tribe; the cloths, and the cushions, and the
embroideries; and the strangeness of all was pain to her, she knew not
why. Then wept she bitterly, and with her tears the memory of what had
been came back to her, and she opened her arms to take into them the
little girl that fanned her, that she might love something and be beloved
awhile; and the child sobbed with her. After a time Bhanavar said, 'Where
am I, and amongst whom, my child, my sister?'

And the child answered her, 'Surely in the tent of the mother of Ruark,
the chief, even chief of the Beni-Asser, and he found thee in the desert,
nigh dead. 'Tis so; and this morning will Ruark be gone to meet the
challenge of Ebn Asrac, and they will fight at the foot of the Snow
Mountains, and the shadow of yonder date-palm will be over our tent here
at the hour they fight, and I shall sing for Ruark, and kneel here in the
darkness of the shadow.'

While the child was speaking there entered to them a tall aged woman,
with one swathe of a turban across her long level brows; and she had hard
black eyes, and close lips and a square chin; and it was the mother of
Ruark. She strode forward toward Bhanavar to greet her, and folded her
legs before the damsel. Presently she said, 'Tell me thy story, and of
thy coming into the hands of Ruark my son.'

Bhanavar shuddered. So Rukrooth dismissed the little maiden from the
chamber of the tent, and laid her left hand on one arm of Bhanavar, and
said, 'I would know whence comest thou, that we may deal well by thee and
thy people that have lost thee.'

The touch of a hand was as the touch of a corpse to Bhanavar, and the
damsel was constrained to speak by a power she knew not of, and she told
all to Rukrooth of what had been, the great misery, and the wickedness
that was hers. Then Ruark's mother took hold of Bhanavar a strong grasp,
and eyed her long, piteously, and with reproach, and rocked forward and
back, and kept rocking to and fro, crying at intervals, 'O Ruark! my son!
my son! this feared I, and thou art not the first! and I saw it, I saw
it! Well-away! why came she in thy way, why, Ruark, my son, my fire-eye?
Canst thou be saved by me, fated that thou art, thou fair-face? And wilt
thou be saved by me, my son, ere thy story be told in tears as this one,
that is as thine to me? And thou wilt seize a jewel, Ruark, O thou soul
of wrath, my son, my dazzling Chief, and seize it to wear it, and think
it bliss, this lovely jewel; but 'tis an anguish endless and for ever, my
son! Woe's me! an anguish is she without end.'

Rukrooth continued moaning, and the thought that was in the mother of
Ruark struck Bhanavar like a light in the land of despair that darkly
illumineth the dreaded gulfs and abysses of the land, and she knew
herself black in evil; and the scourge of her guilt was upon her, and she
cursed herself before Rukrooth, and fawned before her, abasing her body.
So Rukrooth was drawn to the damsel by the violence of her self-accusing
and her abandonment to grief, and lifted her, and comforted her, and
after awhile they had gentle speech together, and the two women opened
their hearts and wept. Then it was agreed between them that Bhanavar
should depart from the encampment of the tribe before the return of
Ruark, and seek shelter among her own people again, and aid them and the
tribe of Zurvan, her betrothed, by the might of the Jewel which was hers,
fulfilling the desire of Zurvan. The mind of the damsel was lowly, and
her soul yearned for the blessing of Rukrooth.

Darkness hung over the tent from the shadow of the date-palm when
Bhanavar departed, and the blessing of Rukrooth was on her head. She went
forth fairly mounted on a fresh steed; beside her two warriors of them
that were left to guard the encampment of the tribe of Ruark in his
absence; and Rukrooth watched at the threshold of her tent for the coming
of Ruark.

When it was middle night, and the splendour of the moon was beaming on
the edge of the desert, Bhanavar alighted to rest by the twigs of a
tamarisk that stood singly on the sands. The two warriors tied the
fetlocks of their steeds, and spread shawls for her, and watched over her
while she slept. And the damsel dreamed, and the roaring of the lion was
hoarse in her dream, and it was to her as were she the red whirlwind of
the desert before whom all bowed in terror, the Arab, the wild horsemen,
and the caravans of pilgrimage; and none could stay her, neither could
she stay herself, for the curse of Allah was on men by reason of her
guilt; and she went swinging great folds of darkness across kingdoms and
empires of earth where joy was and peace of spirit; and in her track
amazement and calamity, and the whitened bones of noble youths, valorous
chieftains. In that horror of her dream she stood up suddenly, and thrust
forth her hands as to avert an evil, and advanced a step; and with the
act her dream was cloven and she awoke, and lo! it was sunrise; and where
had been two warriors of the Beni-Asser, were now five, and besides her
own steed five others, one the steed of Ruark, and Ruark with them that
watched over her: pale was the visage of the Chief. Ruark eyed Bhanavar,
and signalled to his followers, and they, when they had lifted the damsel
to her steed and placed her in their front, mounted likewise, and
flourished their lances with cries, and jerked their heels to the flanks
of their steeds, and stretched forward till their beards were mixed with
the tossing manes, and the dust rose after them crimson in the sun. So
they coursed away, speeding behind their Chief and Bhanavar; sweet were
the desert herbs under their crushing hooves! Ere the shadow of the
acacia measured less than its height they came upon a spring of silver
water, and Ruark leaped from his steed, and Bhanavar from hers, and they
performed their ablutions by that spring, and ate and drank, and watered
their steeds. While they were there Bhanavar lifted her eyes to Ruark,
and said, 'Whither takest thou me, O my Chief?'

His brow was stern, and he answered, 'Surely to the dwelling of thy
tribe.'

Then she wept, and pulled her veil close, murmuring, ''Tis well!'

They spake no further, and pursued their journey toward the mountains and
across the desert that was as a sea asleep in the blazing heat, and the
sun till his setting threw no shade upon the sands bigger than what was
broad above them. By the beams of the growing moon they entered the first
gorge of the mountains. Here they relaxed the swiftness of their pace,
picking their way over broken rocks and stunted shrubs, and the mesh of
spotted creeping plants; all around them in shadow a freshness of noisy
rivulets and cool scents of flowers, asphodel and rose blooming in plots
from the crevices of the crags. These, as the troop advanced, wound and
widened, gradually receding, and their summits, which were silver in the
moonlight, took in the distance a robe of purple, and the sides of the
mountains were rounded away in purple beyond a space of emerald pasture.
Now, Ruark beheld the heaviness of Bhanavar, and that she drooped in her
seat, and he halted her by a cave at the foot of the mountains, browed
with white broom. Before it, over grass and cresses, ran a rill, a branch
from others, larger ones, that went hurrying from the heights to feed the
meadows below, and Bhanavar dipped her hand in the rill, and thought, 'I
am no more as thou, rill of the mountain, but a desert thing! Thy way is
forward, thy end before thee; but I go this way and that; my end is dark
to me; not a life is mine that will have its close kissing the cold
cheeks of the saffron-crocus. Cold art thou, and I--flames! They that
lean to thee are refreshed, they that touch me perish.' Then she looked
forth on the stars that were above the purple heights, and the blushes of
inner heaven that streamed up the sky, and a fear of meeting the eyes of
her kindred possessed her, and she cried out to Ruark, 'O Chief of the
Beni-Asser, must this be? and is there no help for it, but that I return
among them that look on me basely?'

Ruark stooped to her and said, 'Tell me thy name.'

She answered, 'Bhanavar is my name with that people.'

And he whispered, 'Surely when they speak of thee they say not Bhanavar
solely, but Bhanavar the Beautiful?'

She started and sought the eye of the Chief, and it was fixed on her face
in a softened light, as if his soul had said that thing. Then she sighed,
and exclaimed, 'Unhappy are the beautiful! born to misery! Allah dressed
them in his grace and favour for their certain wretchedness! Lo, their
countenances are as the sun, their existence as the desert; barren are
they in fruits and waters, a snare to themselves and to others!'

Now, the Chief leaned to her yet nearer, saying, 'Show me the Jewel.'

Bhanavar caught up her hands and clenched them, and she cried bitterly,
''Tis known to thee! She told thee, and there be none that know it not!'

Arising, she thrust her hand into her bosom, and held forth the Jewel in
the palm of her white hand. When Ruark beheld the marvel of the Jewel,
and the redness moving in it as of a panting heart, and the flashing eye
of fire that it was, and all its glory, he cried, 'It was indeed a Jewel
for queens to covet from the Serpent, and a prize the noblest might risk
all to win as a gift for thee.'

Then she said, 'Thy voice is friendly with me, O Ruark! and thou scornest
not the creature that I am. Counsel me as to my dealing with the Jewel.'

Surely the eyes of the Chief met the eyes of Bhanavar as when the
brightest stars of midnight are doubled in a clear dark lake, and he sang
in measured music:

     'Shall I counsel the moon in her ascending?
   Stay under that tall palm-tree through the night;
     Rest on the mountain-slope
     By the couching antelope,
   O thou enthroned supremacy of light!
    And for ever the lustre thou art lending,
   Lean on the fair long brook that leaps and leaps,--
     Silvery leaps and falls.
     Hang by the mountain walls,
   Moon! and arise no more to crown the steeps,
    For a danger and dolour is thy wending!

And, O Bhanavar, Bhanavar the Beautiful! shall I counsel thee, moon of
loveliness,--bright, full, perfect moon!--counsel thee not to ascend and
be seen and worshipped of men, sitting above them in majesty, thou that
art thyself the Jewel beyond price? Wah! What if thou cast it from
thee?--thy beauty remaineth!'

And Bhanavar smote her palms in the moonlight, and exclaimed, 'How then
shall I escape this in me, which is a curse to them that approach me?'

And he replied:

     Long we the less for the pearl of the sea
     Because in its depths there 's the death we flee?
     Long we the less, the less, woe's me!
     Because thou art deathly,--the less for thee?

She sang aloud among the rocks and the caves and the illumined waters:

     Destiny! Destiny! why am I so dark?
      I that have beauty and love to be fair.
     Destiny! Destiny! am I but a spark
      Track'd under heaven in flames and despair?
     Destiny! Destiny! why am I desired
      Thus like a poisonous fruit, deadly sweet?
     Destiny! Destiny! lo, my soul is tired,
      Make me thy plaything no more, I entreat!

Ruark laughed low, and said, 'What is this dread of Rukrooth my mother
which weigheth on thee but silliness! For she saw thee willing to do well
by her; and thou with thy Jewel, O Bhanavar, do thou but well by thyself,
and there will be no woman such as thou in power and excellence of
endowments, as there is nowhere one such as thou in beauty.' Then he
sighed to her, 'Dare I look up to thee, O my Queen of Serpents?' And he
breathed as one that is losing breath, and the words came from him, 'My
soul is thine!'

When she heard him say this, great trouble was on the damsel, for his
voice was not the voice of Zurvan her betrothed; and she remembered the
sorrow of Rukrooth. She would have fled from him, but a dread of the
displeasure of the Chief restrained her, knowing Ruark a soul of wrath.
Her eyelids dropped and the Chief gazed on her eagerly, and sang in a
passion of praises of her; the fires of his love had a tongue, his speech
was a torrent of flame at the feet of the damsel. And Bhanavar exclaimed,
'Oh, what am I, what am I, who have slain my love, my lover!--that one
should love me and call on me for love? My life is a long weeping for
him! Death is my wooer!'

Ruark still pleaded with her, and she said in fair gentleness, 'Speak not
of it now in the freshness of my grief! Other times and seasons are
there. My soul is but newly widowed!'

Fierce was the eye of the Chief, and he sprang up, crying, 'By the life
of my head, I know thy wiles and the reading of these delays: but I'll
never leave thee, nor lose sight of thee, Bhanavar! And think not to fly
from me, thou subtle, brilliant Serpent! for thy track is my track, and
thy condition my condition, and thy fate my fate. By Allah! this is so.'

Then he strode from her swiftly, and called to his Arabs. They had
kindled a fire to roast the flesh of a buffalo, slaughtered by them from
among a herd, and were laughing and singing beside the flames of the
fire. So by the direction of their Chief the Arabs brought slices of
sweet buffalo-flesh to Bhanavar, with cakes of grain: and Bhanavar ate
alone, and drank from the waters before her. Then they laid for her a
couch within the cave, and the aching of her spirit was lulled, and she
slept there a dreamless sleep till morning.

By the morning light Bhanavar looked abroad for the Chief, and he was
nowhere by. A pang of violent hope struck through her, and she pressed
her bosom, praying he might have left her, and climbed the clefts and
ledges of the mountain to search over the fair expanse of pasture beyond,
for a trace of him departing. The sun was on the heads of the heavy
flowers, and a flood of gold down the gorges, and a delicate rose hue on
the distant peaks and upper dells of snow, which were as a crown to the
scene she surveyed; but no sight of Ruark had she. And now she was
beginning to rejoice, but on a sudden her eye caught far to east a
glimpse of something in motion across an even slope of the lower hills
leaning to the valley; and it was a herd that rushed forward, like a
black torrent of the mountains flinging foam this way and that, and after
the herd and at the sides of the herd she distinguished the white cloaks
and scarfs and glittering steel of the Arabs of Ruark. Presently she saw
a horseman break from the rest, and race in a line toward her. She knew
this one for Ruark, and sighed and descended slowly to meet him. The
greeting of the Chief was sharp, his manner wild, and he said little ere
he said, 'I will see thee under the light of the Jewel, so tie it in a
band and set it on thy brow, Bhanavar!'

Her mouth was open to intercede with his desire, but his forehead became
black as night, and he shouted in the thunder of his lion-voice, 'Do
this!'

She took the Jewel from its warm bed in her bosom, and held it, and got
together a band of green weeds, and set it in the middle of the band, and
tied the band on her brow, and lifted her countenance to the Chief. Ruark
stood back from her and gazed on her; and he would have veiled his sight
from her, but his hand fell. Then the might of her loveliness seized
Bhanavar likewise, and the full orbs of her eyes glowed on the Chief as
on a mirror, and she moved her serpent figure scornfully, and smiled,
saying, 'Is it well?'

And he, when he could speak, replied, ''Tis well! I have seen thee! for
now can I die this day, if it be that I am to die. And well it is! for
now know I there is truly no place but the tomb can hold me from thee!'

Bhanavar put the Jewel from her brow into her bosom, and questioned him,
'What is thy dread this day, O my Chief?'

He answered her gravely, 'I have seen Rukrooth my mother while I slept;
and she was weeping, weeping by a stream, yea, a stream of blood; and it
was a stream that flowed in a hundred gushes from her own veins. The sun
of this dawn now, seest thou not? 'tis overcrimson; the vulture hangeth
low down yonder valley.' And he cried to her, 'Haste! mount with me; for
I have told Rukrooth a thing; and I know that woman crafty in the
thwarting of schemes; such a fox is she where aught accordeth not with
her forecastings, and the judgment of her love for me! By Allah! 'twere
well we clash not; for that I will do I do, and that she will do doth
she.'

So the twain mounted their steeds, and Ruark gathered his Arabs and
placed them, some in advance, some on either side of Bhanavar; and they
rode forward to the head of the valley, and across the meadows, through
the blushing crowds of flowers, baths of freshest scents, cool breezes
that awoke in the nostrils of the mares neighings of delight; and these
pranced and curvetted and swung their tails, and gave expression to their
joy in many graceful fashions; but a gloom was on Ruark, and a quick fire
in his falcon-eye, and he rode with heels alert on the flanks of his
mare, dashing onward to right and left, as do they that beat the jungle
for the crouching tiger. Once, when he was well-nigh half a league in
front, he wheeled his mare, and raced back full on Bhanavar, grasping her
bridle, and hissing between his teeth, 'Not a soul shall have thee save
I: by the tomb of my fathers, never, while life is with us!'

And he taunted her with bitter names, and was as one in the madness of
intoxication, drunken with the aspect of her matchless beauty and with
exceeding love for her. And Bhanavar knew that the dread of a mishap was
on the mind of the Chief.

Now, the space of pasture was behind them a broad lake of gold and
jasper, and they entered a region of hills, heights, and fastnesses,
robed in forests that rose in rounded swells of leafage, each over
each--above all points of snow that were as flickering silver flames in
the farthest blue. This was the country of Bhanavar, and she gazed
mournfully on the glades of golden green and the glens of iron blackness,
and the wild flowers, wild blossoms, and weeds well known to her that
would not let her memory rest, and were wistful of what had been. And she
thought, 'My sisters tend the flocks, my mother spinneth with the maidens
of the tribe, my father hunteth; how shall I come among them but strange?
Coldly will they regard me; I shall feel them shudder when they take me
to their bosoms.'

She looked on Ruark to speak with him, but the mouth of the Chief was set
and white; and even while she looked, cries of treason and battle arose
from the Arabs that were ahead, hidden by a branching wind of the way
round a mountain slant. Then the eyes of the Chief reddened, his nostrils
grew wide, and the darkness of his face was as flame mixed with smoke,
and he seized Bhanavar and hastened onward, and lo! yonder were his men
overmatched, and warriors of the mountains bursting on them from an
ambush on all sides. Ruark leapt in his seat, and the light of combat was
on him, and he dug his knees into his mare, and shouted the war-cry of
his tribe, lifting his hands as it were to draw down wrath from the very
heavens, and rushed to the encounter. Says the poet:

   Hast thou seen the wild herd by the jungle galloping close?
   With a thunder of hooves they trample what heads may oppose:
   Terribly, crushingly, tempest-like, onward they sweep:
   But a spring from the reeds, and the panther is sprawling in air,
   And with muzzle to dust and black beards foam-lash'd, here and there,
   Scatter'd they fly, crimson-eyed, track'd with blood to the deep.

Such was the onset of Ruark, his stroke the stroke of death; and ere the
echoes had ceased rolling from that cry of his, the mountain-warriors
were scattered before him on the narrow way, hurled down the scrub of the
mountain, even as dead leaves and loosened stones; so like an arm of
lightning was the Chief!

Now Ruark pursued them, and was lost to Bhanavar round a slope of the
mountain. She quickened her pace to mark him in the glory of the battle,
and behold! a sudden darkness enveloped her, and she felt herself in the
swathe of tightened folds, clasped in an arm, and borne rapidly she knew
not whither, for she could hear and see nothing. It was to her as were
she speeding constantly downward in darkness to the lower realms of the
Genii of the Caucasus, and every sense, and even that of fear, was
stunned in her. How long an interval had elapsed she knew not, when the
folds were unwound; but it was light of day, and the faces of men, and
they were warriors that were about her, warriors of the mountain; but of
Ruark and his Arabs no voice. So she said to them, 'What do ye with me?'

And one among them, that was a youth of dignity and grace, and a
countenance like morning on the mountains, answered, 'The will of
Rukrooth, O lady! and it is the plight of him we bow to with Rukrooth,
mother of the Desert-Chief.'

She cried, 'Is he here, the Prince, that I may speak with him?'

The same young warrior made answer, 'Not so; forewarned was he, and well
for him!'

Bhanavar drew her robe about her and was mute. Ere the setting of the
moon they journeyed on with her; and continued so three days and nights
through the defiles and ravines and matted growths of the mountains. On
the fourth dawn they were on the summit of a lofty mountain-rise; below
them the sun, shooting a current of gold across leagues of sea. Then he
that had spoken with Bhanavar said, 'A sail will come,' and a sail came
from under the sun. Scarce had the ship grated shore when the warriors
lifted Bhanavar, and waded through the water with her, and placed her
unwetted in the ship, and one, the fair youth among the warriors, sprang
on board with her, remaining by her. So the captain pushed off, and the
wind filled the sails, and Bhanavar was borne over the lustre of the sea,
that was as a changing opal in its lustre, even as a melted jewel flowing
from the fingers of the maker, the Almighty One. The ship ceased not
sailing till they came to a narrow strait, where the sea was but a river
between fair sloping hills alight with towers and palaces, opening a way
to a great city that was in its radiance over the waters of the sea as
the aspect of myriad sheeny white doves breasting the wave. Hitherto the
young warrior had held aloof in coldness of courtesy from Bhanavar; but
now he sat by her, and said, 'The bond between my prince and Rukrooth is
accomplished, and it was to snatch thee from the Chief of the Beni-Asser
and bring thee even to this city.'

Bhanavar exclaimed, 'Allah be praised in all things, and his will be
done!'

The youth continued, 'Thou art alone here, O lady, exposed to the perils
of loneliness; surely it were well if I linger with thee awhile, and see
to thy welfare in this city, even as a brother with a sister; and I will
deal honourably by thee.'

Bhanavar looked on the young warrior and blushed at his exceeding
sweetness with her; the soft freshness of his voice was to her as the
blossom-laden breeze in the valleys of the mountains, and she breathed
low the words of her gratitude, saying, 'If I am not a burden, let this
be so.'

Then said he, 'Know me by my name, which is Almeryl; and that we seem
indeed of one kin, make known unto me thine.'

She replied, 'Ill-omened is it, this name of Bhanavar!'

The youth among warriors gazed on her a moment with the fluttering eye of
bashfulness, and said, 'Can they that have marked thee call thee other
than Bhanavar the Beautiful?'

She remembered that Ruark had spoken in like manner, and the curse of her
beauty smote her, and she thought, 'This fair youth, he hath not a mother
to watch over him and ward off souls of evil. I dread there will come a
mishap to him through me; Allah shield him from it!' And she sought to
dissuade him from resting by her, but he cried, ''Tis but a choice to
dwell with thee or with the dogs in the street outside thy door, O
Bhanavar!'

Now, the ship sailed close up to the quay, and cast anchor there in the
midst of other ships of merchandise. Almeryl then threw a robe over his
mountain dress and spoke with the captain apart, and he and Bhanavar took
leave of the captain, and landed on the quay among the porters, and of
these one stepped forward to them and shouted cheerily, 'Where be the
burdens and the bales, O ye, fair couple fashioned in the eye of elegant
proportions? Ye twin palm-trees, male and female! Wullahy! broad is the
back of your servant.'

Almeryl beckoned to him that he should follow them, and he followed them,
blessing the wind that had brought them to that city and the day. So they
passed through the streets and lanes of the city, and the porter pointed
out this house and that house wanting an occupant, and Almeryl fixed on
one in an open thoroughfare that had before it a grass-plot, and behind a
garden with fountains and flowers, and grass-knolls shaded by trees; and
he paid down the half of its price, and had it furnished before nightfall
sumptuously, and women in it to wait on Bhanavar, and stuffs and goods,
and scents for the bath,--all luxuries whatsoever that tradesmen and
merchants there could give in exchange for gold. Then Almeryl dismissed
the porter in Allah's name, and gladdened his spirit with a gift over the
due of his hire that exalted him in the eyes of the porter, and the
porter went from him, exclaiming, 'In extremity Ukleet is thy slave!' and
he sang:

   Shouldst thou see a slim youth with a damsel arriving,
   Be sure 'tis the hour when thy fortune is thriving;
   A generous fee makes the members so supple
   That over the world they could carry this couple.

Now so it was that the youth Almeryl and the damsel Bhanavar abode in the
city they had come to weeks and months, and life to either of them as the
flowing of a gentle stream, even as brother and sister lived they,
chastely, and with temperate feasting. Surely the youth loved her with a
great love, and the heart of Bhanavar turned not from him, and was won
utterly by his gentleness and nobleness and devotion; and they relied on
each other's presence for any joy, and were desolate in absence, as the
poet says:

        When we must part, love,
        Such is my smart, love,
        Sweetness is savourless,
        Fairness is favourless!
        But when in sight, love,
        We two unite, love,
        Earth has no sour to me;
        Life is a flower to me!

And with the increase of every day their passion increased, and the
revealing light in their eyes brightened and was humid, as is sung by him
that luted to the rage of hearts:

        Evens star yonder
         Comes like a crown on us,
        Larger and fonder
         Grows its orb down on us;
        So, love, my love for thee
         Blossoms increasingly;
        So sinks it in the sea,
         Waxing unceasingly.

On a night, when the singing-girls had left them, the youth could contain
himself no more, and caught the two hands of Bhanavar in his, saying,
'This that is in my soul for thee thou knowest, O Bhanavar! and 'tis
spoken when I move and when I breathe, O my loved one! Tell me then the
cause of thy shunning me whenever I would speak of it, and be plain with
thee.'

For a moment Bhanavar sought to release herself from his hold, but the
love in his eyes entangled her soul as in a net, and she sank forward to
him, and sighed under his chin, ''Twas indeed my very love of thee that
made me.'

The twain embraced and kissed a long kiss, and leaned sideways together,
and Bhanavar said, 'Hear me, what I am.'

Then she related the story of the Serpent and the Jewel, and of the death
of her betrothed. When it was ended, Almeryl cried, 'And was this
all?--this that severed us?' And he said, 'Hear what I am.'

So he told Bhanavar how Rukrooth, the mother of Ruark, had sent
messengers to the Prince his father, warning him of the passage of Ruark
through the mountains with one a Queen of Serpents, a sorceress, that had
bewitched him and enthralled him in a mighty love for her, to the ruin of
Ruark; and how the Chief was on his way with her to demand her in
marriage at the hands of her parents; and the words of Rukrooth were, 'By
the service that was between thee and my husband, and by the death he
died, O Prince, rescue the Chief my son from this damsel, and entrap her
from him, and have her sent even to the city of the inland sea, for no
less a distance than that keepeth Ruark from her.'

And Almeryl continued, 'I questioned the messengers myself, and they told
me the marvel of thy loveliness and the peril to him that looked on it,
so I swore there was no power should keep me from a sight of thee, O my
loved one! my prize! my life! my sleek antelope of the hills! Surely when
my father appointed the warriors to lie in wait for thy coming, I slipped
among them, so that they thought it ordered by him I should head them.
The rest is known to thee, O my fountain of blissfulness! but the
treachery to Ruark was the treachery of Ebn Asrac, not of such warriors
as we; and I would have fallen on Ebn Asrac, had not Ruark so routed that
man without faith. 'Twas all as I have said, blessed be Allah and his
decrees!'

Bhanavar gazed on her beloved, and the bridal dew overflowed her
underlids, and she loosed her hair to let it flow, part over her
shoulders, part over his, and in sighs that were the measure of music she
sang:

     I thought not to love again!
      But now I love as I loved not before;
     I love not; I adore!
   O my beloved, kiss, kiss me! waste thy kisses like a rain.
     Are not thy red lips fain?
      Oh, and so softly they greet!
      Am I not sweet?
    Sweet must I be for thee, or sweet in vain:
     Sweet to thee only, my dear love!
    The lamps and censers sink, but cannot cheat
     These eyes of thine that shoot above
     Trembling lustres of the dove!
    A darkness drowns all lustres: still I see
      Thee, my love, thee!
    Thee, my glory of gold, from head to feet!
   Oh, how the lids of the world close quite when our lips meet!

Almeryl strained her to him, and responded:

     My life was midnight on the mountain side;
      Cold stars were on the heights:
     There, in my darkness, I had lived and died,
      Content with nameless lights.
     Sudden I saw the heavens flush with a beam,
      And I ascended soon,
     And evermore over mankind supreme,
      Stood silver in the moon.

And he fell playfully into a new metre, singing:

     Who will paint my beloved
      In musical word or colour?
     Earth with an envy is moved:
      Sea-shells and roses she brings,
      Gems from the green ocean-springs,
      Fruits with the fairy bloom-dews,
      Feathers of Paradise hues,
      Waters with jewel-bright falls,
      Ore from the Genii-halls:
     All in their splendour approved;
     All; but, match'd with my beloved,
      Darker, and denser, and duller.

Then she kissed him for that song, and sang:

     Once to be beautiful was my pride,
      And I blush'd in love with my own bright brow:
     Once, when a wooer was by my side,
      I worshipp'd the object that had his vow:
     Different, different, different now,
      Different now is my beauty to me:
     Different, different, different now!
      For I prize it alone because prized by thee.

Almeryl stretched his arm to the lattice, and drew it open, letting in
the soft night wind, and the sound of the fountain and the bulbul and the
beam of the stars, and versed to her in the languor of deep love:

     Whether we die or we live,
      Matters it now no more:
     Life has nought further to give:
      Love is its crown and its core.
     Come to us either, we're rife,--
      Death or life!

     Death can take not away,
      Darkness and light are the same:
     We are beyond the pale ray,
      Wrapt in a rosier flame:
     Welcome which will to our breath;
      Life or death!

So did these two lovers lute and sing in the stillness of the night,
pouring into each other's ears melodies from the new sea of fancy and
feeling that flowed through them.

Ere they ceased their sweet interchange of tenderness, which was but one
speech from one soul, a glow of light ran up the sky, and the edge of a
cloud was fired; and in the blooming of dawn Almeryl hung over Bhanavar,
and his heart ached to see the freshness of her wondrous loveliness; and
he sang, looking on her:

     The rose is living in her cheeks,
      The lily in her rounded chin;
     She speaks but when her whole soul speaks,
      And then the two flow out and in,
     And mix their red and white to make
      The hue for which I'd Paradise forsake.

     Her brow from her black falling hair
      Ascends like morn: her nose is clear
     As morning hills, and finely fair
      With pearly nostrils curving near
     The red bow of her upper lip;
      Her bosom's the white wave beneath the ship.

     The fair full earth, the enraptured skies,
      She images in constant play:
     Night and the stars are in her eyes,
      But her sweet face is beaming day,
     A bounteous interblush of flowers:
      A dewy brilliance in a dale of bowers.

Then he said, 'And this morning shall our contract of marriage be written
and witnessed?'

She answered, 'As my lord willeth; I am his.'

Said he, 'And it is thy desire?'

She nestled to him and dinted his bare arm with the pearls of her mouth
for a reply.

So that morning their contract of marriage was written, and witnessed by
the legal number of witnesses in the presence of the Cadi, with his
license on it endorsed; and Bhanavar was the bride of Almeryl, he her
husband. Never was youth blessed in a bride like that youth!

Now, the twain lived together the circle of a full year of delightful
marriage, and love lessened not in them, but was as the love of the first
day. Little cared they, having each other, for the loneliness of their
dwelling in that city, where they knew none save the porter Ukleet, who
went about their commissions. Sometimes to amuse themselves with his
drolleries, they sent for him, and were bountiful with him, and made him
drink with them on the lawn of their garden leaning to an inlet of the
sea; and then he would entertain them with all the scandal and gossip of
the city, and its little folk and great. When he was outrageously
extravagant in these stories of his, Bhanavar exclaimed, 'Are such
things, now? can it be true?'

And he nodded in his conceit, and replied loftily, ''Tis certain, O my
Prince and Princess! ye be from the mountains, unused to the follies and
dissipations of men where they herd; and ye know them not, men!'

The lamps being lit in the garden to the edges of the water, where they
lay one evening, Ukleet, who had been in his briskest mood, became grave,
and put his forefinger to the side of his nose and began, 'Hear ye aught
of the great tidings? Wullahy! no other than the departure of the wife of
Boolp, the broker, into darkness. 'Tis of Boolp ye hire this house, and
had ye a hundred houses in this city ye might have had them from Boolp
the broker, he that's rich; and glory to them whom Allah prospereth, say
I! And I mention this matter, for 'tis certain now Boolp will take
another wife to him to comfort him, for there be two things beloved of
Boolp, and therein manifesteth he taste and the discernment of
excellence, and what is approved; and of these two things let the love of
his hoards of the yellow-skinned treasure go first, and after that
attachment to the silver-skinned of creation, the fair, the rapturous;
even to them! So by this see ye not Boolp will yearn in his soul for
another spouse? Now, O ye well-matched pair! what a chance were this,
knew ye but a damsel of the mountains, exquisite in symmetry, a moon to
enrapture the imagination of Boolp, and in the nature of things herit his
possessions! for Boolp is an old man, even very old.'

They laughed, and cried, 'We know not of such a damsel, and the broker
must go unmarried for us.'

When next Ukleet sat before them, Almeryl took occasion to speak of Boolp
again, and said, 'This broker, O Ukleet, is he also a lender of money?'

Ukleet replied, 'O my Prince, he is or he is not: 'tis of the maybes. I
wot truly Boolp is one that baiteth the hook of an emergency.'

The brows of the Prince were downcast, and he said no more; but on the
following morning he left Bhanavar early under a pretext, and sallied
forth from the house of their abode alone.

Since their union in that city they had not been once apart, and Bhanavar
grieved and thought, 'Waneth his love for me?' and she called her women
to her, and dressed in this dress and that dress, and was satisfied with
none. The dews of the bath stood cold upon her, and she trembled, and
fled from mirror to mirror, and in each she was the same surpassing
vision of loveliness. Then her women held a glass to her, and she
examined herself closely, if there might be a fleck upon her anywhere,
and all was as the snow of the mountains on her round limbs sloping in
the curves of harmony, and the faint rose of the dawn on slants of snow
was their hue. Twining her fingers and sighing, she thought, 'It is not
that! he cannot but think me beautiful.' She smiled a melancholy smile at
her image in the glass, exclaiming, 'What availeth it, thy beauty? for he
is away and looketh not on thee, thou vain thing! And what of thy
loveliness if the light illumine it not, for he is the light to thee, and
it is darkness when he's away.'

Suddenly she thought, 'What's that which needeth to light it no other
light? I had well-nigh forgotten it in my bliss, the Jewel!' Then she
went to a case of ebony-wood, where she kept the Jewel, and drew it
forth, and shone in the beam of a pleasant imagination, thinking, ''Twill
surprise him!' And she robed herself in a robe of saffron, and set lesser
gems of the diamond and the emerald in the braid of her hair, and knotted
the Serpent Jewel firmly in a band of gold-threaded tissue, and had it
woven in her hair among the braids. In this array she awaited his coming,
and pleased her mind with picturing his astonishment and the joy that
would be his. Mute were the women who waited on her, for in their lives
they had seen no such sight as Bhanavar beneath the beams of the Jewel,
and the whole chamber was aglow with her.

Now, in her anxiety she sent them one and one repeatedly to look forth at
the window for the coming of the Prince. So, when he came not she went
herself to look forth, and stretched her white neck beyond the casement.
While her head was exposed, she heard a cry of some one from the house in
the street opposite, and Bhanavar beheld in the house of the broker an
old wrinkled fellow that gesticulated to her in a frenzy. She snatched
her veil down and drew in her head in anger at him, calling to her maids,
'What is yonder hideous old dotard?'

And they answered, laughing, ''Tis indeed Boolp the broker, O fair
mistress and mighty!'

To divert herself she made them tell her of Boolp, and they told her a
thousand anecdotes of the broker, and verses of him, and the constancy of
his amorous condition, and his greediness. And Bhanavar was beguiled of
her impatience till it was evening, and the Prince returned to her. So
they embraced, and she greeted him as usual, waiting what he would say,
searching his countenance for a token of wonderment; but the youth knew
not that aught was added to her beauty, for he looked nowhere save in her
eyes. Bhanavar was nigh weeping with vexation, and pushed him from her,
and chid him with lack of love and weariness of her; and the eye of the
Prince rose to her brow to read it, and he saw the Jewel. Almeryl clapped
his hands, crying, 'Wondrous! And this thy surprise for me, my fond one?
beloved of mine!' Then he gazed on her a space, and said, 'Knowest thou,
thou art terrible in thy beauty, Bhanavar, and hast the face of lightning
under that Jewel of the Serpent?'

She kissed him, whispering, 'Not lightning to thee! Yet lovest thou
Bhanavar?'

He replied, 'Surely so; and all save Bhanavar in this world is the
darkness of oblivion to me.'

When it was the next morning, Almeryl rose to go forth again. Ere he had
passed the curtain of the chamber Bhanavar caught him by the arm, and she
was trembling violently. Her visage was a wild inquiry: 'Thou goest?--and
again? There is something hidden from me!'

Almeryl took her to his heart, and caressed her with fond flatteries,
saying, 'Ask but what is beating under these two pomegranates, and thou
learnest all of me.'

But she stamped her foot, crying, 'No! no! I will hear it! There's a
mystery.'

So he said, 'Well, then, it is this only; small matter enough. I have a
business with the captain of the vessel that brought us hither, and I
must see him ere he setteth sail; no other than that, thou jealous,
watchful star! Pierce me with thine eyes; it is no other than that.'

She levelled her lids at him till her lustrous black eyelashes were as
arrows, and mimicked him softly, 'No other than that?'

And he replied, 'Even so.'

Then she clung to him like a hungry creature, repeating, 'Even so,' and
let him go. Alone, she summoned a slave, a black, and bade him fetch to
her without delay Ukleet the porter, and the porter was presently ushered
in to her, protesting service and devotion. So, she questioned him of
Almeryl, and the Prince's business abroad, what he knew of it. Ukleet
commenced reciting verses on the ills of jealousy, but Bhanavar checked
him with an eye that Ukleet had seen never before in woman or in man, and
he gaped at her helplessly, as one that has swallowed a bone. She
laughed, crying, 'Learn, O thou fellow, to answer my like by the letter.'

Now, what she heard from Ukleet when he had recovered his wits, was that
the Prince had a business with none save the lenders of money. So she
spake to Ukleet in a kindly tone, 'Thou art mine, to serve me?'

He was as one fascinated, and delivered himself, 'Yea, O my mistress!
with tongue-service, toe-service, back-service, brain-service, whatso
pleaseth thy sweet presence.'

Said she, 'Hie over to the broker opposite, and bring him hither to me.'

Ukleet departed, saying, 'To hear is to obey.'

She sat gazing on the Jewel and its counterchanging splendours in her
hand, and the thought of Almeryl and his necessity was her only thought.
Not ten minutes of the hour had passed before the women waiting on her
announced Ukleet and the broker Boolp. Bhanavar gave little heed to the
old fellow's grimaces, and the compliments he addressed her, but handed
him the Jewel and desired his valuation of its worth. The face of Boolp
was a keen edge when he regarded Bhanavar, but the sight of the Jewel
sharpened it tenfold, and he tossed his arms, exclaiming, 'A jewel,
this!'

So Bhanavar cried to him, 'Fix a price for it, O thou broker!'

And Boolp, the old miser, debated, and began prating,

'O lady! the soul of thy slave is abashed by a double beam, this the
jewel of jewels, thou truly of thy sex; and saving thee there's no jewel
of worth like this one, and together ye be--wullahy! never felt I aught
like this since my espousal of Soolka that 's gone, and 'twas nothing
like it then! Now, O my Princess, confess it freely--this is but a
pretext, this valuation of the Jewel, and Ukleet our go-between; and
leave the rewarding of him to me. Wullahy! I can be generous, and my days
of favour with fair ladies be not yet over. Blessed be Allah for this
day! And thinkest thou those eyes fell on me with discriminating
observation ere my sense of perception was struck by thee? Not so, for I
had noted thee, O moon of hearts, from my window yonder.'

In this fashion Boolp the broker went on prating, and bowing, and
screwing the corners of his little acid eyes to wink the wink of common
accord between himself and Bhanavar. Meantime she had spoken aside to one
of her women, and a second black slave entered the chamber, bearing in
his hand a twisted scourge, and that slave laid it on the back of Boolp
the broker, and by this means he was brought quickly to the valuation of
the Jewel. Then he named a sum that was a great sum, but not the value of
the Jewel to the fiftieth part, nay nor the five-hundredth part, of its
value; and Ukleet remonstrated with him, but he was resolute, saying,
'Even that sum leaves me a beggar.'

So Bhanavar said, 'My desire is for immediate payment of the money, and
the Jewel is thine for that sum.'

Now the broker went to fetch the money, and returned with it in bags of
gold one-half the amount, and bags of silver one-third, and the remainder
in writing made due at a certain period for payment. And he groaned and
handed her the money, and took the Jewel in his hands; ejaculating, 'In
the name of Allah!'

That evening, when it was dark and the lamps lit in the chamber, and the
wine set and the nosegay, Almeryl asked of Bhanavar to see her under the
light of the Jewel. She warded him with an excuse, but he was earnest
with her. So she feigned that he teased her, saying, ''Tis that thou art
no longer content with me as I am, O my husband!' Then she said, 'Wert
thou successful in thy dealings this day?'

His arm slackened round her, and he answered nothing. So she cried, 'Fie
on thee, thou foolish one! and what is thy need of running over this
city? Know I not thy case and thine occasion, O my beloved? Surely I am
Queen of Serpents, a mistress of enchantments, a diviner of things
hidden, and I know thee. Here, then, is what thou requirest, and conceal
not from me thy necessity another time, my husband!'

Upon that she pointed his eye to the money-bags of gold and of silver.
Almeryl was amazed, and asked her, 'How came these? for I was at the last
extremity, without coin of any kind.'

She answered, 'How, but by the Serpents!'

And he exclaimed, 'Would that I might work as that porter worketh, rather
than this!'

Now, seeing he bewailed her use of the powers of the Jewel, Bhanavar fell
between his arms, and related to him her discovery of his condition, and
how she disposed of the Jewel to the broker, and of the scourging of
Boolp; and he praised her, and clave to her, and they laughed and
delighted their souls in plenteousness, and bliss was their portion; as
the poet says,

     Bliss that is born of mutual esteem
     And tried companionship, I truly deem
     A well-based palace, wherein fountains rise
     From springs that have their sources in the skies.

So were they for awhile. It happened that one day, that was the last day
of the year since her wearing of the Jewel, Ukleet said to them, 'Be
wary! the Vizier Aswarak hath his eye on you, and it is no cool one. I
say nothing: the wise are discreet in their tellings of the great. 'Tis
certain the broker Boolp forgetteth not his treatment here.'

They smiled, turning to each other, and said, 'We live innocently, we
harm no one, what should we fear?'

During the night of that day Bhanavar awoke and kissed the Prince; and
lo! he shuddered in his sleep as with the grave-cold. A second time she
was awakened on the breast of Almeryl by a dream of the Serpents of the
Lake Karatis--the lake of the Jewel; and she stood up, and there was in
the street a hum of voices, and she saw there before the house armed men
with naked steel in their hands. Scarce had she called Almeryl to her,
when the outer door of their house was forced, and she shrieked to him,
''Tis thou they come for: fly, O my Prince, my husband! the way of the
garden is clear.'

But he said sadly, 'Nay, what am I? it is thou they would win from me.
I'll leave thee not in this life.'

So she cried, 'O my soul, then together!--but I shall hinder thee, and be
a burden to thy flight.'

And she called on the All-powerful for aid, and ran with him into the
garden of the house, and lo! by the water side at the end of the garden a
boat full of armed soldiers with scimitars. So these fell upon them, and
bound them, and haled them into the house again, where was the dark
Vizier Aswarak, and certain officers of the night watch with a force. The
Vizier cried when he saw them, 'I accuse thee, Prince Almeryl, of being
here in the city of our lord the King, to conspire against him and his
authority.'

Almeryl faced the Vizier firmly, and replied, 'I knew not in my life I
had made an enemy; but there is one here who telleth that of me.'

The Vizier frowned, saying, 'Thou deniest this? And thou here, and thy
father at war with the sovereignty of our lord the King!'

Almeryl beheld his danger, and he said, 'Is this so?'

Then cried the Vizier, 'Hear him! is not that a fair simulation?' So he
called to the guard, 'Shackle him!' When that was done, he ordered the
house to be sacked, and the women and the slaves he divided for a spoil,
but he reserved Bhanavar to himself: and lo! twice she burst away from
them that held her to hang upon the lips of Almeryl, and twice was she
torn from him as a grape-bunch is torn from the streaming vine, and the
third time she swooned and the anguish of life left her.

Now, Bhanavar was borne to the harem of the Vizier, and for days she
suffered no morsel of food to enter her mouth, and was dying, had not the
Vizier in the cunning of his dissimulation fed her with distant glimpses
of Almeryl, to show her he yet lived. Then she thought, 'While my beloved
liveth, life is due to me'; and she ate and drank and reassumed her fair
fulness and the queenliness that was hers; but the Vizier had no love of
her, and respected her, considering in his mind, 'Time will exhaust the
fury of this tigress, and she is a fruit worth the waiting for. Wullahy!
I shall have possessed her ere the days of over-ripening.'

There was in the harem of the Vizier a mountain-girl that had been
brought there in her childhood, and trained to play upon the lute and
accompany her voice with the instrument. To this little damsel Bhanavar
gave her heart, and would listen all day, as in a trance, to her luting,
till the desire to escape from that bondage and gather tidings of Almeryl
mastered her, and she persuaded one of the blacks of the harem with a
bribe to procure her an interview with the porter Ukleet. So at a certain
hour of the night Ukleet was introduced into the garden of the harem, and
he was in the darkness of that garden a white-faced porter with knees
that knocked the dread-march together; but Bhanavar strengthened his
soul, and he said to her, ''Twas the doing of Boolp the broker: and he
whispered the Vizier of thee and thy beauty, O my mistress! Surely thy
punishment and this ruin is but part payment to Boolp of the price of the
Jewel, the great Jewel that's in the hands of the Vizier.'

Then she questioned him: 'And Almeryl, the Prince, my husband, what of
him?'

Ukleet was dumb, and Bhanavar asked to hear no more. Surely she was at
the gates of pale spirits within an hour of her interview with Ukleet,
and there was no blessedness for her save in death, the stiffer of ills,
the drug that is infallible. As is said:

     Dark is that last stage of sorrow
     Which from Death alone can borrow
     Comfort:--

Bhanavar would have died then, but in a certain pause of her fever the
Vizier stood by her. She looked at him long as she lay, and the life in
her large eyes was ebbing away slowly; but there seemed presently a
check, as an eddy comes in the stream, and the light of intelligence
flowed like a reviving fire into her eyes, and her heart quickened with
desire of life while she looked on the Vizier. So she passed the pitch of
that fever, and bloomed anew in her beauty, and cherished it, for she had
a purpose.

Now, there was rejoicing in the harem of the Vizier Aswarak when Bhanavar
arose from the couch; and the Vizier exulted, thinking, 'I have tamed
this wild beauty, or she had reached death in that extremity.' So he
allowed Bhanavar greater freedom and indulgences, and Bhanavar feigned to
give her soul to the pleasures women delight in, and the Vizier buried
her in gems and trinkets and costly raiment, robes of exquisite silks,
the choicest of Samarcand and China; and he permitted her to make
purchases among certain of the warehouses of the city and the shops of
the tradesmen, jewellers and others, so that she went about as she would,
but for the slaves that attended her and the overseer of the harem. This
continued, and Aswarak became urgent with her, and to remove suspicion
from him she named a day from that period when she would be his. Meantime
she contrived to see Ukleet the porter frequently, and within a week of
her engagement with the Vizier she gazed from a lattice-window of the
harem, and beheld in the garden, by the beams of the moon, Ukleet, and he
was looking as on the watch for her. So she sent to him the little
mountain-girl she loved, but Ukleet would tell her nothing; then went she
herself, greeting him graciously, for his service was other than that of
self-seeking.

Ukleet said, 'O Lady, mistress of hearts, moon of the tides of will! 'tis
certain I was thy slave from the hour I beheld thee first, and of the
Prince, thy husband; Allah rest his soul! Now these be my tidings.
Wullahy! the King is one maddened with the reports I've spread about of
thy beauty, yea! raging. And I have a friend in his palace, even an
under-cook, acute in the interpreting of wishes. There was he always
gabbling of thy case, O my Princess, till the head-cook seized hold on
it, and so it went to the chamberlain, thence to the chief of the
eunuchs, and from him in a natural course, to the King. Now from the King
the tracking of this tale went to the under-cook down again, and from him
to me. So was I summoned to the King, and the King discoursed with me--I
with him, in fair fluency; he in ejaculations of desire to have sight of
thee, I in expatiation on that he would see when he had his desire. Now
in this have I not done thee a service, O sovereign of fancies?'

Bhanavar mused and said, 'On the after-morrow I pass through the city to
make a selection of goods, and I shall pass at noon by the great mosque,
on my way to the shop of Ebn Roulchook, the King's jeweller, beyond the
meat-market. Of a surety, I know not how my lord the King may see me.'

Said the porter, ''Tis enough! on my head be it.' And he went from her,
singing the song:

     How little a thing serves Fortune's turn
      When she's intent on doing!
     How easily the world may burn
      When kings come out a-wooing!

Now, ere she set forth on the after-morrow to make her purchases,
Bhanavar sent word to the Vizier Aswarak that she would see him, and he
came to her drunken with alacrity, for he augured favourably that her
reluctance was melting toward him: so she said, 'O my master, my time of
mourning is at an end, and I would look well before thee, even as one
worthy of being thy bride; so bestow on me, I pray thee, for my wearing
that day, the jewels that be in thy treasury, the brightest and clearest
of them, and the largest.'

The Vizier Aswarak replied, and he was one in great satisfaction of soul,
'All that I have are thine. Wullahy! and one, a marvel, that I bought of
Boolp the broker, that had it from an African merchant.' So he commanded
the box wherein he had deposited the Jewel to be brought to him there in
the chamber of Bhanavar, and took forth the Serpent Jewel between his
forefinger and thumb, and laughed at the eager eyes of Bhanavar when she
beheld it, saying, ''Tis thine! thy bridal gift the day I possess thee.'

Bhanavar trembled at the sight of the Jewel, and its redness was to her
as the blood of Zurvan and Almeryl. She stretched her hand out for it and
cried, 'This day, O my lord, make it mine.'

So the Vizier said, 'Nay, what I have spoken will I keep to; it has cost
me much.'

Bhanavar looked at him, and uttered in a soft tone, 'Truly it has cost
thee much.'

Then she exclaimed, as in play, 'See me, how I look by its beam.' And in
her guile she snatched the Jewel from him, and held it to her brow. Then
Aswarak started from her and feared her, for the red light of the Jewel
glowed, and darkened the chamber with its beam, darkening all save the
lustre that was on the visage of Bhanavar. He shouted, 'What's this! Art
thou a sorceress?'

She removed the Jewel, and ceased glaring on him, and said, 'Nothing but
thy poor slave!'

Then he coaxed her to give him the Jewel, and she would not; he commanded
her peremptorily, and she hesitated; so he grasped her tightened hand,
and his face loured with wrath; yet she withheld the Jewel from him
laughing; and he was stirred to extreme wrath, and drew from his girdle
the naked scimitar, and menaced her with it. And he looked mighty; but
she dreaded him little, and stood her full height before him, daring him,
and she was as the tigress defending a cub from a wilder beast. Now when
he was about to call in the armed slaves of the palace, she said, 'I warn
thee, Vizier Aswarak! tempt me not to match them that serve me with them
that serve thee.'

He ground his teeth in fury, crying, 'A conspiracy! and in the harem!
Now, thou traitress! the logic of the lash shall be tried upon thee.' And
he roared, 'Ho! ye without there! ho!'

But ere the slaves had entered Bhanavar rubbed the Jewel on her bosom,
muttering, 'I have forborne till now! Now will I have a sacrifice, though
I be it.' And rubbing the Jewel, she sang,

     Hither! hither!
      Come to your Queen;
     Come through the grey wall,
      Come through the green!

There was heard a noise like the noise of a wind coming down a narrow
gorge above falling waters, a hissing and a rushing of wings, and behold!
Bhanavar was circled by rings and rings of serpent-folds that glowed
round her, twisted each in each, with the fierceness of fire, she like a
flame rising up white in the midst of them. The black slaves, when they
had lifted the curtain of the harem-chamber, shrieked to see her, and
Aswarak crouched at her feet with the aspect of an angry beast carved in
stone. Then Bhanavar loosed on either of the slaves a serpent, saying,
'What these have seen they shall not say.' And while the sweat dropped
heavily from the forehead of Aswarak, she stepped out of the circle of
serpents, singing,

        Over! over!
         Hie to the lake!
        Sleep with the left eye,
         Keep the right awake.

Then the serpents spread with a great whirr, and flew through the high
window and the walls as they had come, and she said to the Vizier, 'What
now? Fearest thou? I have spared thee, thou that madest me desolate! and
thy slaves are a sacrifice for thee. Now this I ask: Where lies my
beloved, the Prince my husband? Speak nothing of him, save the place of
his burial!'

So he told her, 'In the burial-ground of the great prison.'

She rolled her eyes on the Vizier darkly, exclaiming, 'Even where the
felons lie entombed, he lieth!' And she began to pant, pale with what she
had done, and leaned to the floor, and called,

     Yellow stripe, with freckle red,
     Coil and curl, and watch by my head.

And a serpent with yellow stripes and red freckles came like a javelin
down to her, and coiled and curled round her head, and she slept an hour.
When she arose the Vizier was yet there, sitting with folded knees. So
she sped the serpent to the Lake Karatis, and called her women to her,
and went to an inner room, and drew an outer robe and a vest over that
she had on, and passed the Vizier, and said, 'Art thou not rejoiced in
thy bride, O Aswarak? 'Twas a wondrous clemency, hers! Now but four more
days and thou claimest her. Say nothing of what thou hast seen, or thou
wilt shortly see nothing further to say, my master.'

So she left the Vizier sitting still in that chamber, and mounted a mule,
attended by slaves on foot before and behind her, and passed through the
streets till she came to the shop of Ebn Roulchook. The King was in
disguise at the extremity of the shop, and while she examined this and
that of the precious stones, Bhanavar for a moment made bare the beauty,
of her face, and love's fires took fast hold of the King, and he cried,
'I marvel not at the eloquence of the porter.'

Now, she made Ebn Roulchook bring to her a circlet of gold, with a hollow
in the frontal centre, and fit into that hollow the Serpent Jewel. So,
while she laughed and chatted with her women Bhanavar lifted the circlet,
and made her countenance wholly bare even to the neck and the beginning
slope of the bosom, and fixed the circlet to her head with the Jewel
burning on her brow. Then when he beheld the glory of excelling
loveliness that she was, and the splendour in her eyes under the Jewel,
the King shouted and parted with his disguise, and Ebn Roulchook and the
women and slaves with Bhanavar fled to the courtyard that was behind the
shop, leaving Bhanavar alone with the King. Surely Bhanavar returned not
to the dwelling of the Vizier.

Now, the King Mashalleed espoused Bhanavar, and she became his queen and
ruled him, and her word was the dictate of the land. Then caused she the
body of Almeryl, with the severed head of the Prince, to be disinterred,
and entombed secretly in the palace; and she had lamps lit in the vault,
and the pall spread, and the readers of the Koran to read by the tomb;
and then she stole to the tomb hourly, in the day and in the night,
wailing of him and her utter misery, repeating verses at the side of the
tomb, and they were,

        Take me to thee!
       Like the deep-rooted tree,
      My life is half in earth, and draws
     Thence all sweetness; oh may my being pause
        Soon beside thee!

        Welcome me soon!
       As to the queenly moon,
      Man's homage to my beauty sets;
     Yet am I a rose-shrub budding regrets:
        Welcome me soon.

        Soul of my soul!
       Have me not half, but whole.
      Dear dust, thou art my eyes, my breath!
     Draw me to thee down the dark sea of death,
        Soul of my soul!

And she sang:

     Sad are they who drink life's cup
      Till they have come to the bitter-sweet:
     Better at once to toss it up,
      And trample it beneath the feet;
     For venom-charged as serpents' eggs
      'Tis then, and knows not other change.
    Early, early, early, have I reached the dregs
   Of life, and loathe and love the bittersweet, revenge!

Then turned she aside, and sang musingly:

     I came to his arms like the flower of the spring,
     And he was my bird of the radiant wing:
     He flutter'd above me a moment, and won
     The bliss of my breast as a beam of the sun,
     Untouch'd and untasted till then--

The voice in her throat was like a drowning creature, and she rose up,
and chanted wildly:

        I weep again?

    What play is this? for the thing is dead in me long since:
     Will all the reviving rain
    Of heaven bring me back my Prince?
     But I, when I weep, when I weep,
       Blood will I weep!
       And when I weep,
     Sons for fathers shall weep;
     Mothers for sons shall weep;
     Wives for husbands shall weep!
    Earth shall complain of floods red and deep,
        When I weep!

Upon that she ran up a secret passage to her chamber and rubbed the
Jewel, and called the serpents, to delight her soul with the sight of her
power, and rolled and sported madly among them, clutching them by the
necks till their thin little red tongues hung out, and their eyes were as
discoloured blisters of venom. Then she arose, and her arms and neck and
lips were glazed with the slime of the serpents, and she flung off her
robes to the close-fitting silken inner vest looped across her bosom with
pearls, and whirled in a mazy dance-measure among them, and sang
melancholy melodies, making them delirious, fascinating them; and they
followed her round and round, in twines and twists and curves, with
arched heads and stiffened tails; and the chamber swam like an undulating
sea of shifting sapphire lit by the moon of midnight. Not before the moon
of midnight was in the sky ceased Bhanavar sporting with the serpents,
and she sank to sleep exhausted in their midst.

Such was the occupation of the Queen of Mashalleed when he came not to
her. The women and slaves of the palace dreaded her, and the King himself
was her very slave.

Meanwhile the plot of her unforgivingness against Aswarak ripened: and
the Vizier beholding the bride he had lost Queen of Mashalleed his
master, it was as she conceived, that his heart was eaten with jealousy
and fierce rage. Bhanavar as she came across him spake mildly, and gave
him gentle looks, sad glances, suffering not his fires to abate, the
torment of his love to cool. Each night he awoke with a serpent in his
bed; the beam of her beauty was as the constant bite of a serpent,
poisoning his blood, and he deluded his soul with the belief that
Bhanavar loved him notwithstanding, and that she was seized forcibly from
him by the King. 'Otherwise,' thought he, 'why loosed she not a serpent
from the host to strangle me even as yonder black slaves?' Bhanavar knew
the mind of Aswarak, and considered, 'The King is cunning and weak, a
slave to his desires, and in the bondage of the jewel, my beauty. The
Vizier is unscrupulous, a hatcher of intrigues; but that he dreads me and
hopes a favour of me, he would have wrought against me ere now. 'Tis then
a combat 'twixt him and me. O my soul, art thou dreaming of a fair youth
that was the bliss of thy bosom night and day, night and day? The Vizier
shall die!'

One morning, and it was a year from the day she had become Queen of
Mashalleed, Bhanavar sprang up quickly from the side of the King; and he
was gazing on her in amazement and loathing. She flew to her chamber,
chasing forth her women, and ran to a mirror. Therein she saw three lines
that were on her brow, lines of age, and at the corners of her mouth and
about her throat a slackness of skin, the skin no longer its soft rosy
white, but withered brown as leaves of the forest. She shrieked, and fell
back in a swoon of horror. When she recovered, she ran to the mirror
again, and it was the same sight. And she rose from swooning a third
time, and still she beheld the visage of a hag; nothing of beauty there
save the hair and the brilliant eyes. Then summoned she the serpents in a
circle, and the number of them was that of the days in the year: and she
bared her wrist and seized one, a gray-silver with sapphire spots, and
hissed at him till he hissed, and foam whitened the lips of each.
Thereupon she cried:

        Treble-tongue and throat of hell,
        What is come upon me, tell!

And the Serpent replied,

        Jewel Queen! beauty's price!
        'Tis the time for sacrifice!

She grasped another, one of leaden colour, with yellow bars and silver
crescents, and cried:

        Treble-tongue and throat of fire,
        Name the creature ye require!

And the Serpent replied:

        Ruby lip! poison tooth!
        We are hungry for a youth.

She grasped another that writhed in her fingers like liquid emerald, and
cried:

        Treble-tongue and throat of glue!
        How to know the one that's due?

And the Serpent replied:

        Breast of snow! baleful bliss!
        He that wooing wins a kiss.

She clutched one at her elbow, a hairy serpent with yellow languid eyes
in flame-sockets and livid-lustrous length--a disease to look on, and
cried:

        Treble-tongue and throat of gall!
        There's a youth beneath the pall.

And the Serpent replied:

        Brilliant eye! bloody tear!
        He has fed us for a year.

She squeezed that hairy serpent till her finger-points whitened in his
neck, and he dropped lifelessly, crying:

        Treble-tongues and things of mud!
        Sprang my beauty from his blood?

And the Serpents rose erect, replying:

        Yearly one of us must die;
         Yearly for us dieth one;
        Else the Queen an ugly lie
         Lives till all our lives be done!

Bhanavar stood up, and hurried them to Karatis. When she was alone she
fell toward the floor, repeating, ''Tis the Curse!' Suddenly she thought,
'Yet another year my beauty shall be nourished by my vengeance, yet
another! And, O Vizier, the kiss shall be thine, the kiss of doom; for I
have doomed thee ere now. Thou, thou shalt restore me to my beauty: that
only love I now my Prince is lost.'

So she veiled her face in the close veil of the virtuous, and despatched
Ukleet, whom she exalted in the palace of the King, to the Vizier; and
Ukleet stood before Aswarak, and said, 'O Vizier, my mistress truly is
longing for you with excessive longing, and in what she now undergoeth is
forgotten an evil done by you to her; and she bids you come and concert
with her a scheme deliberately as to the getting rid of this tyrant who
is an affliction to her, and her life is lessened by him.'

The Vizier was deceived by his passion, and he chuckled and exclaimed,
'My very dream! and to mind me of her, then, she sent the serpents!
Wullahy, in the matter of women, wait! For, as the poet declareth:

     'Tis vanity our souls for such to vex;
     Patience is a harvest of the sex.''

And they fret themselves not overlong for husbands that are gone, these
young beauties. I know them. Tell the Queen of Serpents I am even hers to
the sole of my foot.'

So it was understood between them that the Vizier should be at the gate
of the garden of the palace that night, disguised; and the Vizier
rejoiced, thinking, 'If she have not the Jewel with her, it shall go ill
with me, and I foiled this time!'

Ukleet then proceeded to the house of Boolp the broker, fronting the
gutted ruins where Bhanavar had been happy in her innocence with Almeryl,
the mountain prince, her husband. Boolp was engaged haggling with a
slave-merchant the price of a fair slave, and Ukleet said to him,'Yet
awhile delay, O Boolp, ere you expend a fraction of treasure, for truly a
mighty bargain of jewels is waiting for you at the palace of my lord the
King. So come thither with all your money-bags of gold and silver, and
your securities, and your bonds and dues in writing, for 'tis the
favourite of the King requireth you to complete a bargain with her, and
the price of her jewels is the price of a kingdom.'

Said Boolp, 'Hearing is compliance in such a case.'

And Ukleet continued, 'What a fortune is yours, O Boolp! truly the tide
of fortune setteth into your lap. Fail not, wullahy! to come with all you
possess, or if you have not enough when she requireth it to complete the
bargain, my mistress will break off with you. I know not if she intend
even other game for you, O lucky one!'

Boolp hitched his girdle and shrugged, saying, ''Tis she will fail, I
wot,--she, in having therewith to complete the bargain between us. Wa!
wa!--there! I've done this before now. Wullahy! if she have not enough of
her rubies and pearls to outweigh me and my gold, go to, Boolp will
school her! What says the poet?--

  ''Earth and ocean search, East, West, and North, to the South,
   None will match the bright rubies and pearls of her mouth.''

'Aha! what? O Ukleet! And he says:

      ''The lovely ones a bargain made
      With me, and I renounced my trade,
     Half-ruined; 'Ah!' said they, 'return and win!
     To even scales ourselves we will throw in!'''

How so? But let discreetness reign and security flourisheth!'

Ukleet nodded at him, and repeated the distich:

     Men of worth and men of wits
     Shoot with two arrows, and make two hits.

So he arranged with Boolp the same appointment as with the Vizier, and
returned to Queen Bhanavar.

Now, in the dark of night Aswarak stood within the gate of the
palace-garden of Mashalleed that was ajar, and a hand from a veiled
figure reached to him, and he caught it, in the fulness of his delusion,
crying, 'Thou, my Queen?' But the hand signified silence, and drew him
past the tank of the garden and through a court of the palace into a
passage lit with lamps, and on into a close-curtained chamber, and beyond
a heavy curtain into another, a circular passage descending between black
hangings, and at the bottom a square vault draped with black, and in it
precious woods burning, oils in censers, and the odour of ambergris and
myrrh and musk floating in clouds, and the sight of the Vizier was for a
time obscured by the thickness of the incenses floating. As he became
familiar with the place, he saw marked therein a board spread at one end
with viands and wines, and the nosegay in a water-vase, and cups of gold
and a service of gold,--every preparation for feasting mightily. So the
soul of Aswarak leapt, and he cried, 'Now unveil thyself, O moon of our
meeting, my mistress!'

The voice of Bhanavar answered him, 'Not till we have feasted and
drunken, and it seemeth little in our eyes. Surely the chamber is secure:
could I have chosen one better for our meeting, O Aswarak?'

Upon that he entreated her to sit with him to the feast, but she cried,
'Nay! delay till the other is come.'

Cried he, 'Another?'

But she exclaimed, 'Hush!' and saying thus went forward to the foot of
the passage, and Boolp was there, following Ukleet, both of them under a
weight of bags and boxes. So she welcomed the broker, and led him to the
feast, he coughing and wheezing and blinking, unwitting the vexation of
the Vizier, nor that one other than himself was there. When Boolp heard
the voice of the Vizier, in astonishment, addressing him, he started back
and fell upon his bags, and the task of coaxing him to the board was as
that of haling a distempered beast to the water. Then they sat and
feasted together, and Ukleet with them; and if Aswarak or Boolp waxed
impatient of each other's presence, he whispered to them, 'Only wait! see
what she reserveth for you.' And Bhanavar mused with herself, 'Truly that
reserved shall be not long coming!' So they drank, and wine got the
mastery of Aswarak, so that he made no secret of his passion, and began
to lean to her and verse extemporaneously in her ear; and she stinted not
in her replies, answering to his urgency in girlish guise, sighing behind
the veil, as if under love's influence. And the Vizier pressed close, and
sang:

   'Tis said that love brings beauty to the cheeks
    Of them that love and meet, but mine are pale;
   For merciless disdain on me she wreaks,
    And hides her visage from my passionate tale:
   I have her only, only when she speaks.
        Bhanavar, unveil!

   I have thee, and I have thee not! Like one
    Lifted by spirits to a shining dale
   In Paradise, who seeks to leap and run
    And clasp the beauty, but his foot doth fail,
   For he is blind: ah! then more woful none!
        Bhanavar, unveil!

He thrust the wine-cup to her, and she lifted it under her veil, and then
sang, in answer to him:

   My beauty! for thy worth
        Thank the Vizier!

   He gives thee second birth:
        Thank the Vizier!

   His blooming form without a fault:
        Thank the Vizier!

   Is at thy foot in this blest vault:
        Thank the Vizier!

   He knoweth not he telleth such a truth,
        Thank the Vizier!

   That thou, thro' him, spring'st fresh in blushing youth:
        Thank the Vizier!

   He knoweth little now, but he shall soon be wise:
        Thank the Vizier!

   This meeting bringeth bloom to cheeks and lips and eyes:
        Thank the Vizier!

   O my beloved in this blest vault, if I love thee for aye,
        Thank the Vizier!

   Thine am I, thine! and learns his soul what it has taught--to die,
        Thank the Vizier!

Now, Aswarak divined not her meaning, and was enraptured with her, and
cried, 'Wullahy! so and such thy love! Thine am I, thine! And what a
music is thy voice, O my mistress! 'Twere a bliss to Eblis in his torment
could he hear it. Life of my head! and is thy beauty increased by me?
Nay, thou flatterer!' Then he said to her, 'Away with these importunate
dogs! 'tis the very hour of tenderness! Wullahy! they offend my nostril:
stung am I at the sight of them.'

She rejoined,--

        O Aswarak! star of the morn!
   Thou that wakenest my beauty from night and scorn,
        Thy time is near, and when 'tis come,
   Long will a jackal howl that this thy request had been dumb.
        O Aswarak! star of the morn!

So the Vizier imaged in his mind the neglect of Mashalleed from these
words, and said, 'Leave the King to my care, O Queen of Serpents, and
expend no portion of thy power on him; but hasten now the going of these
fellows; my heart is straitened by them, and I, wullahy! would gladly see
a serpent round the necks of either.'

She continued,--

     O Aswarak! star of the morn!
   Lo! the star must die when splendider light is born;
     In stronger floods the beam will drown:
   Shrink, thou puny orb, and dread to bring me my crown,
     O Aswarak! star of the morn!

Then said she, 'Hark awhile at those two! There's a disputation between
them.'

So they hearkened, and Ukleet was pledging Boolp, and passing the cup to
him; but a sullenness had seized the broker, and he refused it, and
Ukleet shouted, 'Out, boon-fellow! and what a company art thou, that thou
refusest the pledge of friendliness? Plague on all sulkers!'

And the broker, the old miser, obstinate as are the half-fuddled, began
to mumble, 'I came not here to drink, O Ukleet, but to make a bargain;
and my bags be here, and I like not yonder veil, nor the presence of
yonder Vizier, nor the secresy of this. Now, by the Prophet and that
interdict of his, I'll drink no further.'

And Ukleet said, 'Let her not mark your want of fellowship, or 'twill go
ill with you. Here be fine wines, spirited wines! choice flavours! and
you drink not! Where's the soul in you, O Boolp, and where's the life in
you, that you yield her to the Vizier utterly? Surely she waiteth a
gallant sign from you, so challenge her cheerily.'

Quoth Boolp, 'I care not. Shall I leave my wealth and all I possess void
of eyes? and she so that I recognise her not behind the veil?'

Ukleet pushed the old miser jeeringly: 'You not recognise her? Oh, Boolp,
a pretty dissimulation! Pledge her now a cup to the snatching of the
veil, and bethink you of a fitting verse, a seemly compliment,--something
sugary.'

Then Boolp smoothed his head, and was bothered; and tapped it, and
commenced repeating to Bhanavar:

       I saw the moon behind a cloud,
     And I was cold as one that's in his shroud:
        And I cried, Moon!--

Ukleet chorused him, 'Moon!' and Boolp was deranged in what he had to
say, and gasped,--

     Moon! I cried, Moon!--and I cried, Moon!

Then the Vizier and Ukleet laughed till they fell on their backs; so
Bhanavar took up his verse where he left it, singing,--

          And to the cry
     Moon did make fair the following reply:
     'Dotard, be still! for thy desire
     Is to embrace consuming fire.'

Then said Boolp, 'O my mistress, the laws of conviviality have till now
restrained me; but my coming here was on business, and with me my bags,
in good faith. So let us transact this matter of the jewels, and after
that the song of--

            ''Thou and I
             A cup will try,''

even as thou wilt.'

Bhanavar threw aside her outer robe and veil, and appeared in a dress of
sumptuous blue, spotted with gold bees; her face veiled with a veil of
gauzy silver, and she was as the moon in summer heavens, and strode mar
jestically forward, saying, 'The jewels? 'tis but one. Behold!'

The lamps were extinguished, and in her hand was the glory of the Serpent
Jewel, no other light save it in the vaulted chamber.

So the old miser perked his chin and brows, and cried wondering, 'I know
it, this Jewel, O my mistress.'

She turned to the Vizier, and said, lifting the red gloom of the Jewel on
him, 'And thou?'

Aswarak ate his under-lip.

Then she cried, 'There's much ye know in common, ye two.'

Thereupon Bhanavar passed from the feast on to the centre of the vault,
and stood before the tomb of Almeryl, and drew the cloth from it; and
they saw by the glow of the Jewel that it was a tomb. When she had
mounted some steps at the side of the tomb, she beckoned them to come,
crying, in a voice of sobs, 'This which is here, likewise ye may know.'

So they came with the coldness of a mystery in their blood, and looked as
she looked intently over a tomb. The lid was of glass, and through the
glass of the lid the Jewel flung a dark rosy ray on the body of Almeryl
lying beneath it.

Now, the miser was perplexed at the sight; but Aswarak stepped backward
in defiance, bellowing, ''Twas for this I was tricked to come here! Is 't
fooling me a second time? By Allah! look to it; not a second time will
Aswarak be fooled.'

Then she ran to him, and exclaimed, 'Fooled? For what cam'st thou to me?'

And he, foaming and grinding his breath, 'Thou woman of wiles!  thou
serpent! but I'll be gone from here.'

So she faltered in sweetness, knowing him doomed, and loving to dally
with him in her wickedness, 'Indeed if thou cam'st not for my kiss--'

Then said the Vizier, 'Yet a further guile! Was't not an outrage to bring
me here?'

She faltered again, leaning the fair length of her limbs on a couch,
''Tis ill that we are not alone, else could these lips convince thee
well: else indeed!'

And the Vizier cried, 'Chase then these intruders from us, O thou
sorceress, and above all serpents in power! for thou poisonest with a
touch; and the eye and the ear alike take in thy poisons greedily. Thou
overcomest the senses, the reason, the judgment; yea, vindictiveness,
wrath, suspicions; leading the soul captive with a breath of thine, as
'twere a breeze from the gardens of bliss.'

Bhanavar changed her manner a little, lisping, 'And why that starting
from the tomb of a dead harmless youth? And that abuse of me?'

He peered at her inquiringly, echoing 'Why?'

And she repeated, as a child might repeat it, 'Why that?'

Then the Vizier smote his forehead in the madness of utter perplexity,
changing his eye from Bhanavar to the tomb of Almeryl, doubting her
truth, yet dreading to disbelieve it. So she saw him fast enmeshed in her
subtleties, and clapped her hands crying, 'Come again with me to the
tomb, and note if there be aught I am to blame in, O Aswarak, and plight
thyself to me beside it.'

He did nothing save to widen his eye at her somewhat; and she said, 'The
two are yonside the tomb, and they hear us not, and see us not by this
light of the Jewel; so come up to it boldly with me; free thy mind of its
doubt, and for a reconcilement kiss me on the way.'

Aswarak moved not forward; but as Bhanavar laid the Jewel in her bosom he
tore the veil from her darkened head, and caught her to him and kissed
her. Then Bhanavar laughed and shouted, 'How is it with thee, Vizier
Aswarak?'

He was tottering, and muttered, ''Tis a death-chill hath struck me even
to my marrow.'

So she drew the Jewel forth once more, and rubbed it ablaze, and the
noise of the Serpents neared; and they streamed into the vault and under
it in fiery jets, surrounding Bhanavar, and whizzing about her till in
their velocity they were indivisible; and she stood as a fountain of fire
clothed in flashes of the underworld, the new loveliness of her face
growing vivid violet like an incessant lightning above them. Then
stretched she her two hands, and sang to the Serpents:--

        Hither, hither, to the feast!
        Hither to the sacrifice!
        Virtue for my sake hath ceased:
        Now to make an end of Vice!

        Twisted-tail and treble-tongue,
        Swelling length and greedy maw!
        I have had a horrid wrong;
        Retribution is the law!

        Ye that suck'd my youthful lord,
        Now shall make another meal:
        Seize the black Vizier abhorr'd;
        Seize him! seize him throat and heel!

        Set your serpent wits to find
        Tortures of a new device:
        Have him! have him heart and mind!
        Hither to the sacrifice'

Then she whirled with them round and round as a tempest whirls; and when
she had wound them to a fury, lo, she burst from the hissing circle and
dragged Ukleet from the vault into the passage, and blocked the entrance
to the vault. So was Queen Bhanavar avenged.

Now, she said to Ukleet, 'Ransom presently the broker,--him they will not
harm,' and hastened to the King that he might see her in her beauty. The
King reclined on cushions in the harem with a fair slave-girl, newly from
the mountains, toying with the pearls in her locks. Then thought
Bhanavar, 'Let him not slight me!' So she drew a rose-coloured veil over
her face and sat beside Mashalleed. The King continued his fondling with
the girl, saying to her, 'Was there no destiny foretold of thy coming to
the palace of the King to rule it, O Nashta, starbeam in the waters! and
hadst thou no dream of it?'

Bhanavar struck the King's arm, but he noticed her not, and Nashta
laughed. Then Bhanavar controlled her trembling and said, 'A word, O
King! and vouchsafe me a hearing.'

The King replied languidly, still looking on Nashta, ''Tis a command that
the voice of none that are crabbed and hideous be heard in the harem, and
I find comfort in it, O Nashta! but speak thou, my fountain of
sweet-dropping lute-notes!'

Bhanavar caught the King's hand and said, 'I have to speak with thee;
'tis the Queen. Chase from us this little wax puppet a space.'

The King disengaged his hand and leaned it over to Nashta, who began
playing with it, and fitting on it a ring, giggling. Then, as he answered
nothing, Bhanavar came nearer and slapped him on the cheek. Mashalleed
started to his feet, and his hand grasped his girdle; but that
wrathfulness was stayed when he beheld the veil slide from her visage. So
he cried, 'My Queen! my soul!'

She pointed to Nashta, and the King chid the girl, and sent her forth
lean with his shifted displeasure, as a kitten slinks wet from a
fish-pond where it had thought to catch a great fish. Then Bhanavar
exclaimed, 'There was a change in thy manner to me before that creature.'

He sought to dissimulate with her, but at last he confessed, 'I was truly
this morning the victim of a sorcery.'

Thereupon she cried, 'And thou went angered to find me not by thee on the
couch, but one in my place, a hag of ugliness. Hear then the case, O
Mashalleed! Surely that old crone had a dream, and it was that if she
slept one night by the King she would arise fresh in health from her
ills, and with powers lasting a year to heal others of all maladies with
a touch. So she came to me, petitioning me to bring this about. O my lord
the King, did I well in being privy to her desire?'

The King could not doubt this story of Bhanavar, seeing her constant
loveliness, and the arch of her flashing brow, and the oval of her cheek
and chin smooth as milk. So he said, 'O my Queen! I had thought to go, as
I must, gladly; but how shall I go, knowing thy truth, thy beauty
unchanged; thee faithful, a follower of the injunctions of the Prophet in
charitable deeds?'

Cried she, 'And whither goeth my lord, and on what errand?'

He answered, 'The people of a province southward have raised the standard
of revolt and mocked my authority; they have been joined by certain of
the Arab chiefs subject to my dominion, and have defeated my armies. 'Tis
to subdue them I go; yea, to crush them. Yet, wallaby! I know not. Care I
if kingdoms fall away, and nations, so that I have thee? Nay, let all
pass, so that thou remain by me.'

Bhanavar paced from him to a mirror, and frowned at the reflection of her
fairness, thinking, 'Such had he spoken to the girl Nashta, or another,
this King!' And she thought, 'I have been beloved by the noblest three on
earth; I will ask no more of love; vengeance I have had. 'Tis time that I
demand of my beauty nothing save power, and I will make this King my
stepping-stone to power, rejoicing my soul with the shock of armies.'

Now, she persuaded Mashalleed to take her with him on his expedition
against the Arabs; and they set forth, heading a great assemblage of
warriors, southward to the land bordering the Desert. The King credited
the suggestions of Bhanavar, that Aswarak had disappeared to join the
rebels, and pressed forward in his eagerness to inflict a chastisement
signal in swiftness upon them and that traitor; so eagerly Mashalleed
journeyed to his army in advance, that the main body, with Bhanavar, was
left by him long behind. She had encouraged him, saying, 'I shall love
thee much if thou art speedy in winning success.' The Queen was housed on
an elephant, harnessed with gold, and with silken purple trappings; from
the rose-hued curtains of her palanquin she looked on a mighty march of
warriors, filling the extent of the plains; all day she fed her sight on
them. Surely the story of her beauty became noised among the guards of
her person that rode and ran beneath the royal elephant, till the
soldiers of Mashalleed spake but of the beauty of the Queen, and Bhanavar
was as a moon shining over that sea of men.

Now, they had passed the cultivated fields, and were halting by the ford
of a river bordering the Desert, when lo! a warrior on the yonside,
riding in a cloud of dust, and his shout was, 'The King Mashalleed is
defeated, and flying.' Then the Captains of the host witnessed to the
greatness of Allah, and were troubled with a dread, fearing to advance;
but Bhanavar commanded a horse to be saddled for her, and mounted it, and
plunged through the ford singly; so they followed her, and all day she
rode forward on horseback, touching neither food nor drink. By night she
was a league beyond the foremost of them, and fell upon the King encamped
in the Desert, with the loose remnant of his forces. Mashalleed, when he
had looked on her, forgot his affliction, and stood up to embrace her,
but Bhanavar spurned him, crying, 'A time for this in the time of
disgrace?' Then she said, 'How came it?'

He answered, 'There was a Chief among the enemy, an Arab, before the
terror of whom my people fled.'

Cried she, 'Conquer him on the morrow, and till then I eat not, drink
not, sleep not.'

On the morrow Mashalleed again encountered the rebels, and Bhanavar,
seated on her elephant, from a sand-hillock under a palm, beheld the
prowess of the Arab Chief and the tempest of battle that he was. She
thought, 'I have seen but one mighty in combat like that one, Ruark, the
Chief of the Beni-Asser.' Thereupon she coursed toward the King, even
where the arrows gloomed like locusts, thick and dark in the air aloof,
and said, 'The victory is with yonder Chief! Hurl on him three of thy
sons of valour.'

The three were selected, and made onslaught on this Chief, and perished
under his arm.

Bhanavar saw them fall, and exclaimed, 'Another attack on him, and with
thrice three!'

Her will was the mandate of Mashalleed, and these likewise were ordered
forth, and closed on the Chief, but he darted from their toils and
wheeled about them, spearing them one by one till the nine were in the
dust. Bhanavar compressed her dry lips and muttered to the King, 'Head
thou a body against him.'

Mashalleed gathered round his standard the chosen of his warriors, and
smoothed his beard, and headed them. Then the Chief struck his lance
behind him, and stretched rapidly a half-circle across the sand, and
halted on a knoll. When they neared him he retreated in a further
half-circle, and continued this wise, wasting the fury of Mashalleed,
till he stood among his followers. There, as the King hesitated and
prepared to retreat, he and the others of the tribe levelled their lances
and hung upon his rear, fretting them, slaughtering captains of the
troop. When Mashalleed turned to face his pursuer, the Chief was alone,
immovable on his mare, fronting the ranks. Then Bhanavar taunted the
King, and he essayed the capture of that Chief a second time and a third,
and it was each time as the first. Bhanavar looked about her with rapid
eyes, murmuring, 'Oh, what a Chief is he! Oh that a cloud would fall, a
smoke arise, to blind these hosts, that I might sling my serpents on him
unseen, for I will not be vanquished, though it be by Ruark!' So she drew
to the King, and the altercation between them was fierce in the fury of
the battle, he saying, ''Tis a feint of the Chief, this challenge; and I
must succour the left of my army by the well, that he is overmatching
with numbers'; and she, 'If thou head them not, then will I, and thou
shalt behold a woman do what thou durst not, and lose her love and win
her scorn.' While they spake the Arabs they looked on seemed to flutter
and waver, and the Chief was backing to them, calling to them as 'twere
words of shame to rally them. Seeing this, Mashalleed charged against the
Chief once more, and lo! the Arabs opened to receive him, closing on his
band of warriors like waters whitened by the storm on a fleet of
swift-scudding vessels: and there was a dust and a tumult visible, such
as is seen in the darkness when a vessel struck by the lightning-bolt is
sinking--flashes of steel, lifting of hands, rolling of horsemen and
horses. Then Bhanavar groaned aloud, 'They are lost! Shame to us! only
one hope is left-that 'tis Ruark, this Chief!' Now, the view of the plain
cleared, and with it she beheld the army of Mashalleed broken, the King
borne down by a dust of Arabs; so she unveiled her face and rode on the
host with the horsemen that guarded her, glorious with a crown of gold
and the glowing Jewel on her brow. When she was a javelin's flight from
them the Arabs shouted and paused in terror, for the light of her head
was as the sun setting between clouds of thunder; but that Chief dashed
forward like a flame beaten level by the wind, crying, 'Bhanavar;
Bhanavar!' and she knew the features of Ruark; so she said, 'Even I!' And
he cried again, 'Bhanavar! Bhanavar!' and was as one stricken by a shaft.
Then Bhanavar threw on him certain of the horsemen with her, and he
suffered them without a sign to surround him and grasp his mare by the
bridle-rein, and bring him, disarmed, before the Queen. At sight of Ruark
a captive the Arabs fell into confusion, and lost heart, and were
speedily chased and scattered from the scene like a loose spray before
the wind; but Mashalleed the King rejoiced mightily and praised Bhanavar,
and the whole army of the King praised her, magnifying her.

Now, with Ruark she interchanged no syllable, and said not farewell to
him when she departed with Mashalleed, to encounter other tribes; and the
Chief was bound and conducted a prisoner to the city of the inland sea,
and cast into prison, in expectation of Death the releaser, and continued
there wellnigh a year, eating the bitter bread of captivity. In the
evening of every seventh day there came to him a little mountain girl,
that sat by him and leaned a lute to her bosom, singing of the mountain
and the desert, but he turned his face from her to the wall. One day she
sang of Death the releaser, and Ruark thought, ''Tis come! she warneth
me! Merciful is Allah!' On the morning that followed Ukleet entered the
cell, and with him three slaves, blacks, armed with scimitars. So Ruark
stood up and bore witness to his faith, saying, 'Swift with the stroke!'
but Ukleet exclaimed, 'Fear not! the end is not yet.'

Then said he, 'Peace with thee! These slaves, O Chief, excelling in
martial qualities! surely they're my retinue, and the retinue of them of
my rank in the palace; and where I go they go; for the exalted have more
shadows than one! yea, three have they in my case, even very grimly black
shadows, whereon the idle expend not laughter, and whoso joketh in their
hearing, 'tis, wullahy! the last joke of that person. In such-wise are
the powerful known among men, they that stand very prominent in the beams
of prosperity! Now this of myself; but for thee--of a surety the Queen
Bhanavar, my mistress, will be here by the time of the rising of the
moon. In the name of Allah!' Saying that he departed in his greatness,
and Ruark watched for her that rose in his soul as the moon in the
heavens.

Meanwhile Bhanavar had mused, ''Tis this day, the day when the Serpents
desire their due, and the King Mashalleed they shall have; for what is
life to him but a treachery and a dalliance, and what is my hold on him
but this Jewel of the Serpents? He has had the profit of beauty, and he
shall yield the penalty: my kiss is for him, my serpent-kiss. And I will
release Ruark, and espouse him, and war with kings, sultans, emperors,
infidels, subduing them till they worship me.'

She flashed her figure in the glass, and was lovely therein as one in the
light of Paradise; but ere she reached the King Mashalleed, lo! the hour
of the Serpents had struck, and her beauty melted from her as snow melts
from off the rock; and she was suddenly haggard in utter uncomeliness,
and knew it not, but marched, smiling a grand smile, on to the King. Now
as Mashalleed lifted his eyes to her he started amazed, crying, 'The hag
again!' and she said, 'What of the hag, O my lord the King?' Thereat he
was yet more amazed, and exclaimed, 'The hag of ugliness with the voice
of Bhanavar! Has then the Queen lent that loathsomeness her voice also?'

Bhanavar chilled a moment, and looked on the faces of the women present,
and they were staring at her, the younger ones tittering, and among them
Nashta, whom she hated. So she cried, 'Away with ye!' But the King
commanded them, 'Stay!' Then the Queen leaned to him, saying, 'I will
speak with my lord alone'; whereat he shrank from her, and spat. Ice and
flame shivered through the blood of Bhanavar, yet such was her eagerness
to give the kiss to Mashalleed, that she leaned to him, still wooing him
to her with smiles. Then the King seized her violently, and flung her
over the marble floor to the very basin of the fountain, and the crown
that was on her brow fell and rolled to the feet of Nashta. The girl
lifted it, laughing, and was in the act of fitting it to her fair head
amid the chuckles of her companions, when a slap from the hand of
Bhanavar spun her twice round, and she dropped to the marble insensible.
The King bellowed in wrath, and ran to Nashta, crying to the Queen,
'Surrender that crown to her, foul hag!' But Bhanavar had bent over the
basin of the fountain, and beheld the image of her change therein, and
was hurrying from the hall and down the corridors of the palace to the
private chamber. So he made bare the steel by his side, and followed her
with a number of the harem guard, menacing her, and commanding her to
surrender the crown with the Jewel. Ere she could lay hand on a veil, he
was beside her, and she was encompassed. In that extremity Bhanavar
plucked the Jewel from her crown, and rubbed it, calling the Serpents to
her. One came, one only, and that one would not move from her to sling
himself about the neck of Mashalleed, but whirled round her, hissing:

        Every hour a serpent dies,
        Till we have the sacrifice:
        Sweeten, sweeten, with thy kiss,
        Quick! a soul for Karatis.

Surely the King bit his breath, marvelling, and his fury became an awful
fear, and he fell back from her, molesting her no further. Then she
squeezed the serpent till his body writhed in knots, and veiled herself,
and sprang down a secret passage to the garden, and it was the time of
the rising of the moon. Coolness and soothingness dropped on her as a
balm from the great light, and she gazed on it murmuring, as in a memory:

     Shall I counsel the moon in her ascending?
     Stay under that dark palm-tree through the night,
        Rest on the mountain slope,
        By the couching antelope,
     O thou enthroned supremacy of light!
      And for ever the lustre thou art lending
     Lean on the fair long brook that leaps and leaps,
        Silvery leaps and falls:
        Hang by the mountain-walls,
     Moon! and arise no more to crown the steeps,
      For a danger and dolour is thy wending!

And she panted and sighed, and wept, crying, 'Who, who will kiss me or
have my kiss now, that I may indeed be as yonder beam? Who, that I may be
avenged on this King? And who sang that song of the ascending of the
moon, that comes to me as a part of me from old times?' As she gazed on
the circled radiance swimming under a plume of palm leaves, she
exclaimed, 'Ruark! Ruark the Chief!' So she clasped her hands to her
bosom, and crouched under the shadows of the garden, and fled through the
garden gates and the streets of the city, heavily veiled, to the prison
where Ruark awaited her within the walls and Ukleet without. The Governor
of the prison had been warned by Ukleet of her coming, and the doors and
bars opened before her unchallenged, till she stood in the cell of Ruark;
her eyes, that were alone unveiled, scanned the countenance of the Chief,
the fevered lustre-jet of his looks, and by the little moonlight in the
cell she saw with a glance the straw-heap and the fetters, and the
black-bread and water untasted on the bench--signs of his misery and
desire for her coming. So she greeted him with the word of peace, and he
replied with the name of the All-Merciful. Then said she, 'O Ruark, of
Rukrooth thy mother tell me somewhat.'

He answered, 'I know nought of her since that day. Allah have her in his
keeping!'

So she cried, 'How? What say'st thou, Ruark? 'tis a riddle.'

Then he, 'The oath of Ruark is no rope of sand! He swore to see her not
till he had set eyes on Bhanavar.'

She knelt by the Chief, saying in a soft voice, 'Very greatly the Chief
of the Beni-Asser loved Bhanavar.' And she thought, 'Yea! greatly and
verily love I him; and he shall be no victim of the Serpents, for I defy
them and give them other prey.' So she said in deeper notes, 'Ruark! the
Queen is come hither to release thee. O my Chief! O thou soul of wrath!
Ruark, my fire-eye! my eagle of the desert! where is one on earth beloved
as thou art by Bhanavar?' The dark light in his eyes kindled as light in
the eyes of a lion, and she continued, 'Ruark, what a yoke is hers who
weareth this crown! He that is my lord, how am I mated to him save in
loathing? O my Chief, my lion! hadst thou no dream of Bhanavar, that she
would come hither to unbind thee and lift thee beside her, and live with
thee in love and veilless loveliness,--thine? Yea! and in power over
lands and nations and armies, lording the infidel, taming them to
submission, exulting in defiance and assaults and victories and
magnanimities--thou and she?' Then while his breast heaved like a broad
wave, the Queen started to her feet, crying, 'Lo, she is here! and this
she offereth thee, Ruark!'

A shrill cry parted from her lips, and to the clapping of her hands
slaves entered the cell with lamps, and instruments to strike off the
fetters from the Chief; and they released him, and Ruark leaned on their
shoulders to bear the weight of a limb, so was he weakened by captivity;
but Bhanavar thrust them from the Chief, and took the pressure of his
elbow on her own shoulder, and walked with him thus to the door of the
cell, he sighing as one in a dream that dreameth the bliss of bliss. Now
they had gone three paces onward, and were in the light of many lamps,
when behold! the veil of Bhanavar caught in the sleeve of Ruark as he
lifted it, and her visage became bare. She shrieked, and caught up her
two hands to her brow, but the slaves had a glimpse of her, and said
among themselves, 'This is not the Queen.' And they murmured, ''Tis an
impostor! one in league with the Chief.' Bhanavar heard them say, 'Arrest
her with him at the Governor's gate,' and summoned her soul, thinking,
'He loveth me, the Chief! he will look into my eyes and mark not the
change. What need I then to dread his scorn when I ask of him the kiss:
now must it be given, or we are lost, both of us!' and she raised her
head on Ruark, and said to him, 'my Chief, ere we leave these walls and
join our fates, wilt thou plight thyself to me with a kiss?'

Ruark leapt to her like the bounding leopard, and gave her the kiss, as
were it his whole soul he gave. Then in a moment Bhanavar felt the blush
of beauty burn over her, and drew the veil down on her face, and suffered
the slaves to arrest her with Ruark, and bring her before the Governor,
and from the Governor to the King in his council-chamber, with the Chief
of the Beni-Asser.

Now, the King Mashalleed called to her, 'Thou traitress! thou sorceress!
thou serpent!'

And she answered under the veil, 'What, O my lord the King! and wherefore
these evil names of me?'

Cried he, 'Thou thing of guile! and thou hast pleaded with me for the
life of the Chief thus long to visit him in secret! Life of my head I but
Mashalleed is not one to be fooled.'

So she said, ''Tis Bhanavar! hast thou forgotten her?'

Then he waxed white with rage, exclaiming, 'Yea, 'tis she! a serpent in
the slough! and Ukleet in the torture hath told of thee what is known to
him. Unveil! unveil!'

She threw the veil from her figure, and smiled, for Mashalleed was mute,
the torrent of invective frozen on his mouth when he beheld the miracle
of beauty that she was, the splendid jewel of throbbing loveliness. So to
scourge him with the bitter lash of jealousy, Bhanavar turned her eyes on
Ruark, and said sweetly, 'Yet shalt thou live to taste again the bliss of
the Desert. Pleasant was our time in it, O my Chief!' The King glared and
choked, and she said again, 'Nor he conquered thee, but I; and I that
conquered thee, little will it be for me to conquer him: his threats are
the winds of idleness.'

Surely the world darkened before the eyes of Mashalleed, and he arose and
called to his guard hoarsely, 'Have off their heads!' They hesitated,
dreading the Queen, and he roared, 'Slay them!'

Bhanavar beheld the winking of the steel, but ere the scimitars
descended, she seized Ruark, and they stood in a whizzing ring of
serpents, the sound of whom was as the hum of a thousand wires struck by
storm-winds. Then she glowed, towering over them with the Chief clasped
to her, and crying:

     King of vileness! match thy slaves
     With my creatures of the caves.

And she sang to the Serpents:

     Seize upon him! sting him thro'!
     Thrice this day shall pay your due.

But they, instead of obeying her injunction, made narrower their circle
round Bhanavar and the Chief. She yellowed, and took hold of the nearest
Serpent horribly, crying:

        Dare against me to rebel,
        Ye, the bitter brood of hell?

And the Serpent gasped in reply:

        One the kiss to us secures:
        Give us ours, and we are yours.

Thereupon another of the Serpents swung on, the feet of Ruark, winding
his length upward round the body of the Chief; so she tugged at that one,
tearing it from him violently, and crying:

        Him ye shall not have, I swear!
        Seize the King that's crouching there.

And that Serpent hissed:

        This is he the kiss ensures:
        Give us ours, and we are yours.

Another and another Serpent she flung from the Chief, and they began to
swarm venomously, answering her no more. Then Ruark bore witness to his
faith, and folded his arms with the grave smile she had known in the
desert; and Bhanavar struggled and tussled with the Serpents in
fierceness, strangling and tossing them to right and left. 'Great is
Allah!' cried all present, and the King trembled, for never was sight
like that seen, the hall flashing with the Serpents, and a woman-serpent,
their Queen, raging to save one from their fury, shrieking at intervals:

        Never, never shall ye fold,
        Save with me the man I hold.

But now the hiss and scream of the Serpents and the noise of their
circling was quickened to a slurred savage sound and they closed on
Ruark, and she felt him stifling and that they were relentless. So in the
height of the tempest Bhanavar seized the Jewel in the gold circlet on
her brow and cast it from her. Lo! the Serpents instantly abated their
frenzy, and flew all of them to pluck the Jewel, chasing the one that had
it in his fangs through the casement, and the hall breathed empty of
them. Then in the silence that was, Bhanavar veiled her face and said to
the Chief, 'Pass from the hall while they yet dread me. No longer am I
Queen of Serpents.'

But he replied, 'Nay! said I not my soul is thine?'

She cried to him, 'Seest thou not the change in me? I was bound to those
Serpents for my beauty, and 'tis gone! Now am I powerless, hateful to
look on, O Ruark my Chief!'

He remained still, saying, 'What thou hast been thou art.'

She exclaimed, 'O true soul, the light is hateful to me as I to the
light; but I will yet save thee to comfort Rukrooth, thy mother.'

So she drew him with her swiftly from the hall of the King ere the King
had recovered his voice of command; but now the wrath of the All-powerful
was upon her and him! Surely within an hour from the flight of the
Serpents, the slaves and soldiers of Mashalleed laid at his feet two
heads that were the heads of Ruark and Bhanavar; and they said, 'O great
King, we tracked them to her chamber and through to a passage and a vault
hung with black, wherein were two corpses, one in a tomb and one
unburied, and we slew them there, clasping each other, O King of the
age!'

Mashalleed gazed upon the head of Bhanavar and sighed, for death had made
the head again fair with a wondrous beauty, a loveliness never before
seen on earth.




THE BETROTHAL

Now, when Shibli Bagarag had ceased speaking, the Vizier smiled gravely,
and shook his beard with satisfaction, and said to the Eclipser of
Reason, 'What opinest thou of this nephew of the barber, O Noorna bin
Noorka?'

She answered, "O Feshnavat, my father, truly I am content with the
bargain of my betrothal. He, Wullahy, is a fair youth of flowing speech.'
Then she said, 'Ask thou him what he opineth of me, his betrothed?"

So the Vizier put that interrogation to Shibli Bagarag, and the youth was
in perplexity; thinking, 'Is it possible to be joyful in the embrace of
one that hath brought thwackings upon us, serious blows?' Thinking, 'Yet
hath she, when the mood cometh, kindly looks; and I marked her eye
dwelling on me admiringly!' And he thought, 'Mayhap she that groweth
younger and counteth nature backwards, hath a history that would affect
me; or, it may be, my kisses--wah! I like not to give them, and it is
said,

     "Love is wither'd by the withered lip";

and that,

     "On bones become too prominent he'll trip."

Yet put the case, that my kisses--I shower them not, Allah the All-seeing
is my witness! and they be given daintily as 'twere to the leaf of a
nettle, or over-hot pilau. Yet haply kisses repeated might restore her to
a bloom, and it is certain youth is somehow stolen from her, if the
Vizier Feshnavat went before her, and his blood be her blood; and he is
powerful, she wise. I'll decide to act the part of a rejoicer, and
express of her opinions honeyed to the soul of that sex.'

Now, while he was thus debating he hung his head, and the Vizier awaited
his response, knitting his brows angrily at the delay, and at the last he
cried, 'What! no answer? how 's this? Shall thy like dare hold debate
when questioned of my like? And is my daughter Noorna bin Noorka,
thinkest thou, a slave-girl in the market,--thou haggling at her price, O
thou nephew of the barber?'

So Shibli Bagarag exclaimed, 'O exalted one, bestower of the bride!
surely I debated with myself but for appropriate terms; and I delayed to
select the metre of the verse fitting my thoughts of her, and my wondrous
good fortune, and the honour done me.'

Then the Vizier, 'Let us hear: we listen.'

And Shibli Bagarag was advised to deal with illustrations in his dilemma,
by-ways of expression, and spake in extemporaneous verse, and with a full
voice:

   The pupils of the Sage for living Beauty sought;
   And one a Vision clasped, and one a Model wrought.
  'I have it!' each exclaimed, and rivalry arose:
  'Paint me thy Maid of air!' 'Thy Grace of clay disclose.'
  'What! limbs that cannot move!' 'What! lips that melt away!'
  'Keep thou thy Maid of air!' 'Shroud up thy Grace of clay!'
  'Twas thus, contending hot, they went before the Sage,
   And knelt at the wise wells of cold ascetic age.
  'The fairest of the twain, O father, thou record':

He answered, 'Fairest she who's likest to her lord.'

Said they, 'What fairer thing matched with them might prevail?'

The Sage austerely smiled, and said, 'Yon monkey's tail.'

  'Tis left for after-time his wisdom to declare:
   That's loveliest we best love, and to ourselves compare.
   Yet lovelier than all hands shape or fancies build,
   The meanest thing of earth God with his fire hath filled.

Now, when Shibli Bagarag ceased, Noorna bin Noorka cried, 'Enough, O
wondrous turner of verse, thou that art honest!' And she laughed loudly,
rustling like a bag of shavings, and rolling in her laughter.

Then said she, 'O my betrothed, is not the thing thou wouldst say no
other than--

     "Each to his mind doth the fairest enfold,
     For broken long since was Beauty's mould";

and, "Thou that art old, withered, I cannot flatter thee, as I can in no
way pay compliments to the monkey's tail of high design; nevertheless the
Sage would do thee honour"? So read I thy illustration, O keen of wit!
and thou art forgiven its boldness, my betrothed,--Wullahy! utterly so.'

Now, the youth was abashed at her discernment, and the kindliness of her
manner won him to say:

   There's many a flower of sweetness, there's many a gem of earth
   Would thrill with bliss our being, could we perceive its worth.
   O beauteous is creation, in fashion and device!
   If I have fail'd to think thee fair, 'tis blindness is my vice.

And she answered him:

     I've proved thy wit and power of verse,
     That is at will diffuse and terse:
     Lest thou commence to lie--be dumb!
     I am content: the time will come!

Then she said to the Vizier Feshnavat, 'O my father, there is all in this
youth, the nephew of the barber, that's desirable for the undertaking;
and his feet will be on a level with the task we propose for him, he the
height of man above it. 'Tis clear that vanity will trip him, but honesty
is a strong upholder; and he is one that hath the spirit of enterprise
and the mask of dissimulation: gratitude I observe in him; and it is as I
thought when I came upon him on the sand-hill outside the city, that his
star is clearly in a web with our star, he destined for the Shaving of
Shagpat.'

So the Vizier replied, 'He hath had thwackings, yet is he not deterred
from making further attempt on Shagpat. I think well of him, and I augur
hopefully. Wullahy! the Cadi shall be sent for; I can sleep in his
secresy; and he shall perform the ceremonies of betrothal, even now and
where we sit, and it shall be for him to write the terms of contract: so
shall we bind the youth firmly to us, and he will be one of us as we are,
devoted to the undertaking by three bonds--the bond of vengeance, the
bond of ambition, and that of love.'

Now, so it was that the Vizier despatched a summons for the attendance of
the Cadi, and he came and performed between Shibli Bagarag and Noorna bin
Noorka ceremonies of betrothal, and wrote terms of contract; and they
were witnessed duly by the legal number of witnesses, and so worded that
he had no claim on her as wife till such time as the Event to which he
bound himself was mastered. Then the fees being paid, and compliments
interchanged, the Vizier exclaimed, 'Be ye happy! and let the weak cling
to the strong; and be ye two to one in this world, and no split halves
that betray division and stick not together when the gum is heated.' Then
he made a sign to the Cadi and them that had witnessed the contract to
follow him, leaving the betrothed ones to their own company.

So when they were alone Noorna gazed on the youth wistfully, and said in
a soft tone, 'Thou art dazed with the adventure, O youth! Surely there is
one kiss owing me: art thou willing? Am I reduced to beg it of thee? Or
dream'st thou?'

He lifted his head and replied, 'Even so.'

Thereat he stood up languidly, and went to her and kissed her. And she
smiled and said, 'I wot it will be otherwise, and thou wilt learn
swiftness of limb, brightness of eye, and the longing for earthly
beatitude, when next I ask thee, O my betrothed!'

Lo! while she spake, new light seemed in her; and it was as if a splendid
jewel were struggling to cast its beams through the sides of a crystal
vase smeared with dust and old dirt and spinnings of the damp spider. He
was amazed, and cried, 'How's this? What change is passing in thee?'

She said, 'Joy in thy kiss, and that I have 'scaped Shagpat.'

Then he: 'Shagpat? How? had that wretch claim over thee ere I came?'

But she looked fearfully at the corners of the room and exclaimed, 'Hush,
my betrothed! speak not of him in that fashion, 'tis dangerous; and my
power cannot keep off his emissaries at all times.' Then she said, 'O my
betrothed, know me a sorceress ensorcelled; not that I seem, but that I
shall be! Wait thou for the time and it will reward thee. What! thou
think'st to have plucked a wrinkled o'erripe fruit,--a mouldy pomegranate
under the branches, a sour tamarind? 'Tis well! I say nought, save that
time will come, and be thou content. It is truly as I said, that I have
thee between me and Shagpat; and that honoured one of this city thought
fit in his presumption to demand me in marriage at the hands of my
father, knowing me wise, and knowing the thing that transformed me to
this, the abominable fellow! Surely my father entertained not his
proposal save with scorn; but the King looked favourably on it, and it is
even now matter of reproach to Feshnavat, my father, that he withholdeth
me from Shagpat.'

Quoth Shibli Bagarag, 'A clothier, O Noorna, control the Vizier! and
demand of him his daughter in marriage! and a clothier influence the King
against his Vizier!'--tis, wullahy! a riddle.'

She replied, ''Tis even so, eyes of mine, my betrothed! but thou know'st
not Shagpat, and that he is. Lo! the King, and all of this city save we
three, are held in enchantment by him, and made foolish by one hair
that's in his head.'

Shibli Bagarag started in his seat like one that shineth with a
discovery, and cried, 'The Identical!'

Then she, sighing, ''Tis that indeed! but the Identical of Identicals,
the chief and head of them, and I, woe's me! I, the planter of it.'

So he said, 'How so?'

But she cried, 'I'll tell thee not here, nor aught of myself and him, and
the Genie held in bondage by me, till thou art proved by adventure, and
we float peacefully on the sea of the Bright Lily: there shalt thou see
me as I am, and hear my story, and marvel at it; for 'tis wondrous, and a
manifestation of the Power that dwelleth unseen.'

So Shibli Bagarag pondered awhile on the strange nature of the things she
hinted, and laughter seized him as he reflected on Shagpat, and the whole
city enchanted by one hair in his head; and he exclaimed, 'O Noorna,
knoweth he, Shagpat, of the might in him?'

She answered, 'Enough for his vain soul that homage is paid to him, and
he careth not for the wherefore!'

Shibli Bagarag fixed his eyes on the deep-flowered carpets of the floor,
as if reading there a matter quaintly written, and smiled, saying, 'What
boldness was mine--the making offer to shear Shagpat, the lion in his
lair, he that holdeth a whole city in enchantment! Wah! 'twas an instance
of daring!'

And Noorna said, 'Not only an entire city, but other cities affected by
him, as witness Oolb, whither thou wilt go; and there be governments and
states, and conditions of men remote, that hang upon him, Shagpat. 'Tis
even so; I swell not his size. When thou hast mastered the Event, and
sent him forth shivering from thy blade like the shorn lamb, 'twill be
known how great a thing has been achieved, and a record for the
generations to come; choice is that historian destined to record it!'

Quoth he, looking eagerly at her, 'O Noorna, what is it in thy speech
affecteth me? Surely it infuseth the vigour of wine, old wine; and I
shiver with desire to shave Shagpat, and spin threads for the historian
to weave in order. I, wullahy! had but dry visions of the greatness
destined for me till now, my betrothed! Shall I master an Event in
shaving him, and be told of to future ages? By Allah and his Prophet
(praise be to that name!), this is greatness! Say, Noorna, hadst thou
foreknowledge of me and my coming to this city?'

So she said, 'I was on the roofs one night among the stars ere moonrise,
O my betrothed, and 'twas close on the rise of this very month's moon.
The star of our enemy, Shagpat, was large and red, mine as it were
menaced by its proximity, nigh swallowed in its haughty beams and the
steady overbearings of its effulgence. 'Twas so as it had long been, when
suddenly, lo! a star from the upper heaven that shot down between them
wildly, and my star took lustre from it; and the star of Shagpat trembled
like a ring on a tightened rope, and waved and flickered, and seemed to
come forward and to retire; and 'twas presently as a comet in the sky,
bright,--a tadpole, with large head and lengthy tail, in the assembly of
the planets. This I saw: and that the stranger star was stationed by my
star, shielding it, and that it drew nearer to my star, and entered its
circle, and that the two stars seemed mixing the splendour that was
theirs. Now, that sight amazed me, and my heart in its beating quickened
with the expectation of things approaching. Surely I rendered praise, and
pressed both hands on my bosom, and watched, and behold! the comet, the
illumined tadpole, was becoming restless beneath the joint rays of the
twain that were dominating him; and he diminished, and lashed his tail
uneasily, half madly, darting as do captured beasts from the fetters that
constrain them. Then went there from thy star--for I know now 'twas
thine--a momentary flash across the head of the tadpole, and again
another and another, rapidly, pertinaciously. And from thy star there
passed repeated flashes across the head of the tadpole, till his
brilliance was as 'twere severed from him, and he, like drossy silver, a
dead shape in the conspicuous heavens. And he became yellow as the
rolling eyes of sick wretches in pain, and shrank in his place like pale
parchment at the touch of flame; dull was he as an animal fascinated by
fear, and deprived of all power to make head against the foe, darkness,
that now beset him, and usurped part of his yet lively tail, and settled
on his head, and coated part of his body. So when this tadpole, that was
once terrible to me, became turbaned, shoed, and shawled with darkness,
and there was little of him remaining visible, lo! a concluding flash
shot from thy star, and he fell heavily down the sky and below the hills,
into the sea, that is the Enchanted Sea, whose Queen is Rabesqurat,
Mistress of Illusions. Now when my soul recovered from amazement at the
marvels seen, I arose and went from the starry roofs to consult my books
of magic, and 'twas revealed to me that one was wandering to a junction
with my destiny, and that by his means the great aim would of a surety be
accomplished--Shagpat Shaved! So my purpose was to discover him; and I
made calculations, and summoned them that serve me to search for such a
youth as thou art; fairly, O my betrothed, did I preconceive thee. And so
it was that I traced a magic line from the sand-hills to the city, and
from the outer hills to the sand-hills; and whoso approached by that line
I knew was he marked out as my champion, my betrothed,--a youth destined
for great things. Was I right? The egg hatcheth. Thou art already proved
by thwackings, seasoned to the undertaking, and I doubt not thou art he
that will finish with that tadpole Shagpat, and sit in the high seat, thy
name an odour in distant lands, a joy to the historian, the Compiler of
Events, thou Master of the Event, the greatest which time will witness
for ages to come.'

When she had spoken Shibli Bagarag considered her words, and the
knowledge that he was selected by destiny as Master of the Event inflated
him; and he was a hawk in eagerness, a peacock in pride, an ostrich in
fulness of chest, crying, 'O Noorna bin Noorka! is't really so? Truly it
must be, for the readers of planets were also busy with me at the time of
my birth, interpreting of me in excessive agitation; and the thing they
foretold is as thou foretellest. I am, wullahy! marked: I walk manifest
in the eye of Providence.'

Thereupon he exulted, and his mind strutted through the future of his
days, and down the ladder of all time, exacting homage from men, his
brethren; and 'twas beyond the art of Noorna to fix him to the present
duties of the enterprise: he was as feathered seed before the breath of
vanity.

Now, while the twain discoursed, she of the preparations for shaving
Shagpat, he of his completion of the deed, and the honours due to him as
Master of the Event, Feshnavat the Vizier returned to them from his
entertainment of the Cadi; and he had bribed him to silence with a mighty
bribe. So he called to them--

'Ho! be ye ready to commence the work? and have ye advised together as to
the beginning? True is that triplet:

     "Whatever enterprize man hath,
     For waking love or curbing wrath,
     'Tis the first step that makes a path."

And how have ye determined as to that first step?'

Noorna replied, 'O my father! we have not decided, and there hath been
yet no deliberation between us as to that.'

Then he said, 'All this while have ye talked, and no deliberation as to
that! Lo, I have drawn the Cadi to our plot, and bribed him with a mighty
bribe; and I have prepared possible disguises for this nephew of the
barber; and I have had the witnesses of thy betrothal despatched to
foreign parts, far kingdoms in the land of Roum, to prevent tattling and
gabbling; and ye that were left alone for debating as to the great deed,
ye have not yet deliberated as to that! Is't known to ye, O gabblers,
aught of the punishment inflicted by Shahpesh, the Persian, on Khipil,
the Builder?--a punishment that, by Allah!'

Shibli Bagarag said, 'How of that punishment, O Vizier?'

And the Vizier narrated as followeth.




AND THIS IS THE PUNISHMENT OF SHAHPESH, THE PERSIAN, ON KHIPIL, THE
BUILDER

They relate that Shahpesh, the Persian, commanded the building of a
palace, and Khipil was his builder. The work lingered from the first year
of the reign of Shahpesh even to his fourth. One day Shahpesh went to the
riverside where it stood, to inspect it. Khipil was sitting on a marble
slab among the stones and blocks; round him stretched lazily the masons
and stonecutters and slaves of burden; and they with the curve of
humorous enjoyment on their lips, for he was reciting to them adventures,
interspersed with anecdotes and recitations and poetic instances, as was
his wont. They were like pleased flocks whom the shepherd hath led to a
pasture freshened with brooks, there to feed indolently; he, the
shepherd, in the midst.

Now, the King said to him, 'O Khipil, show me my palace where it
standeth, for I desire to gratify my sight with its fairness.'

Khipil abased himself before Shahpesh, and answered, ''Tis even here, O
King of the age, where thou delightest the earth with thy foot and the
ear of thy slave with sweetness. Surely a site of vantage, one that
dominateth earth, air, and water, which is the builder's first and chief
requisition for a noble palace, a palace to fill foreign kings and
sultans with the distraction of envy; and it is, O Sovereign of the time,
a site, this site I have chosen, to occupy the tongues of travellers and
awaken the flights of poets!'

Shahpesh smiled and said, 'The site is good! I laud the site! Likewise I
laud the wisdom of Ebn Busrac, where he exclaims:

     "Be sure, where Virtue faileth to appear,
     For her a gorgeous mansion men will rear;
     And day and night her praises will be heard,
     Where never yet she spake a single word."'

Then said he, 'O Khipil, my builder, there was once a farm servant that,
having neglected in the seed-time to sow, took to singing the richness of
his soil when it was harvest, in proof of which he displayed the
abundance of weeds that coloured the land everywhere. Discover to me now
the completeness of my halls and apartments, I pray thee, O Khipil, and
be the excellence of thy construction made visible to me!'

Quoth Khipil, 'To hear is to obey.'

He conducted Shahpesh among the unfinished saloons and imperfect courts
and roofless rooms, and by half erected obelisks, and columns pierced and
chipped, of the palace of his building. And he was bewildered at the
words spoken by Shahpesh; but now the King exalted him, and admired the
perfection of his craft, the greatness of his labour, the speediness of
his construction, his assiduity; feigning not to behold his negligence.

Presently they went up winding balusters to a marble terrace, and the
King said, 'Such is thy devotion and constancy in toil, Khipil, that thou
shaft walk before me here.'

He then commanded Khipil to precede him, and Khipil was heightened with
the honour. When Khipil had paraded a short space he stopped quickly, and
said to Shahpesh, 'Here is, as it chanceth, a gap, O King! and we can go
no further this way.'

Shahpesh said, 'All is perfect, and it is my will thou delay not to
advance.'

Khipil cried, 'The gap is wide, O mighty King, and manifest, and it is an
incomplete part of thy palace.'

Then said Shahpesh, 'O Khipil, I see no distinction between one part and
another; excellent are all parts in beauty and proportion, and there can
be no part incomplete in this palace that occupieth the builder four
years in its building: so advance, do my bidding.'

Khipil yet hesitated, for the gap was of many strides, and at the bottom
of the gap was a deep water, and he one that knew not the motion of
swimming. But Shahpesh ordered his guard to point their arrows in the
direction of Khipil, and Khipil stepped forward hurriedly, and fell in
the gap, and was swallowed by the water below. When he rose the second
time, succour reached him, and he was drawn to land trembling, his teeth
chattering. And Shahpesh praised him, and said, 'This is an apt
contrivance for a bath, Khipil O my builder! well conceived; one that
taketh by surprise; and it shall be thy reward daily when much talking
hath fatigued thee.'

Then he bade Khipil lead him to the hall of state. And when they were
there Shahpesh said, 'For a privilege, and as a mark of my approbation, I
give thee permission to sit in the marble chair of yonder throne, even in
my presence, O Khipil.'

Khipil said, 'Surely, O King, the chair is not yet executed.'

And Shahpesh exclaimed, 'If this be so, thou art but the length of thy
measure on the ground, O talkative one!'

Khipil said, 'Nay, 'tis not so, O King of splendours! blind that I am!
yonder's indeed the chair.'

And Khipil feared the King, and went to the place where the chair should
be, and bent his body in a sitting posture, eyeing the King, and made
pretence to sit in the chair of Shahpesh, as in conspiracy to amuse his
master.

Then said Shahpesh, 'For a token that I approve thy execution of the
chair, thou shalt be honoured by remaining seated in it up to the hour of
noon; but move thou to the right or to the left, showing thy soul
insensible of the honour done thee, transfixed thou shah be with twenty
arrows and five.'

The King then left him with a guard of twenty-five of his body-guard; and
they stood around him with bent bows, so that Khipil dared not move from
his sitting posture. And the masons and the people crowded to see Khipil
sitting on his master's chair, for it became rumoured about. When they
beheld him sitting upon nothing, and he trembling to stir for fear of the
loosening of the arrows, they laughed so that they rolled upon the floor
of the hall, and the echoes of laughter were a thousand-fold. Surely the
arrows of the guards swayed with the laughter that shook them.

Now, when the time had expired for his sitting in the chair, Shahpesh
returned to him, and he was cramped, pitiable to see; and Shahpesh said,
'Thou hast been exalted above men, O Khipil! for that thou didst execute
for thy master has been found fitting for thee.'

Then he bade Khipil lead the way to the noble gardens of dalliance and
pleasure that he had planted and contrived. And Khipil went in that state
described by the poet, when we go draggingly, with remonstrating members,

     Knowing a dreadful strength behind,
      And a dark fate before.

They came to the gardens, and behold, these were full of weeds and
nettles, the fountains dry, no tree to be seen--a desert. And Shahpesh
cried, 'This is indeed of admirable design, O Khipil! Feelest thou not
the coolness of the fountains?--their refreshingness? Truly I am grateful
to thee! And these flowers, pluck me now a handful, and tell me of their
perfume.'

Khipil plucked a handful of the nettles that were there in the place of
flowers, and put his nose to them before Shahpesh, till his nose was
reddened; and desire to rub it waxed in him, and possessed him, and
became a passion, so that he could scarce refrain from rubbing it even in
the King's presence. And the King encouraged him to sniff and enjoy their
fragrance, repeating the poet's words:

     Methinks I am a lover and a child,
      A little child and happy lover, both!
     When by the breath of flowers I am beguiled
      From sense of pain, and lulled in odorous sloth.
     So I adore them, that no mistress sweet
      Seems worthier of the love which they awake:
     In innocence and beauty more complete,
      Was never maiden cheek in morning lake.
     Oh, while I live, surround me with fresh flowers!
      Oh, when I die, then bury me in their bowers!

And the King said, 'What sayest thou, O my builder? that is a fair
quotation, applicable to thy feelings, one that expresseth them?'

Khipil answered, ''Tis eloquent, O great King! comprehensiveness would be
its portion, but that it alludeth not to the delight of chafing.'

Then Shahpesh laughed, and cried, 'Chafe not! it is an ill thing and a
hideous! This nosegay, O Khipil, it is for thee to present to thy
mistress. Truly she will receive thee well after its presentation! I will
have it now sent in thy name, with word that thou followest quickly. And
for thy nettled nose, surely if the whim seize thee that thou desirest
its chafing, to thy neighbour is permitted what to thy hand is refused.'

The King set a guard upon Khipil to see that his orders were executed,
and appointed a time for him to return to the gardens.

At the hour indicated Khipil stood before Shahpesh again. He was pale,
saddened; his tongue drooped like the tongue of a heavy bell, that when
it soundeth giveth forth mournful sounds only: he had also the look of
one battered with many beatings. So the King said, 'How of the
presentation of the flowers of thy culture, O Khipil?'

He answered, 'Surely, O King, she received me with wrath, and I am shamed
by her.'

And the King said, 'How of my clemency in the matter of the chafing?'

Khipil answered, 'O King of splendours! I made petition to my neighbours
whom I met, accosting them civilly and with imploring, for I ached to
chafe, and it was the very raging thirst of desire to chafe that was
mine, devouring eagerness for solace of chafing. And they chafed me, O
King; yet not in those parts which throbbed for the chafing, but in those
which abhorred it.'

Then Shahpesh smiled and said, ''Tis certain that the magnanimity of
monarchs is as the rain that falleth, the sun that shineth: and in this
spot it fertilizeth richness; in that encourageth rankness. So art thou
but a weed, O Khipil! and my grace is thy chastisement.'

Now, the King ceased not persecuting Khipil, under pretence of doing him
honour and heaping favours on him. Three days and three nights was Khipil
gasping without water, compelled to drink of the drought of the fountain,
as an honour at the hands of the King. And he was seven days and seven
nights made to stand with stretched arms, as they were the branches of a
tree, in each hand a pomegranate. And Shahpesh brought the people of his
court to regard the wondrous pomegranate shoot planted by Khipil, very
wondrous, and a new sort, worthy the gardens of a King. So the wisdom of
the King was applauded, and men wotted he knew how to punish offences in
coin, by the punishment inflicted on Khipil the builder. Before that time
his affairs had languished, and the currents of business instead of
flowing had become stagnant pools. It was the fashion to do as did
Khipil, and fancy the tongue a constructor rather than a commentator; and
there is a doom upon that people and that man which runneth to seed in
gabble, as the poet says in his wisdom:

   If thou wouldst be famous, and rich in splendid fruits,
   Leave to bloom the flower of things, and dig among the roots.

Truly after Khipil's punishment there were few in the dominions of
Shahpesh who sought to win the honours bestowed by him on gabblers and
idlers: as again the poet:

     When to loquacious fools with patience rare
     I listen, I have thoughts of Khipil's chair:
     His bath, his nosegay, and his fount I see,--
     Himself stretch'd out as a pomegranate-tree.
     And that I am not Shahpesh I regret,
     So to inmesh the babbler in his net.
     Well is that wisdom worthy to be sung,
     Which raised the Palace of the Wagging Tongue!

And whoso is punished after the fashion of Shahpesh, the Persian, on
Khipil the Builder, is said to be one 'in the Palace of the Wagging
Tongue' to this time.




THE GENIE KARAZ

Now, when the voice of the Vizier had ceased, Shibli Bagarag exclaimed,
'O Vizier, this night, no later, I'll surprise Shagpat, and shave him
while he sleepeth: and he shall wake shorn beside his spouse. Wullahy!
I'll delay no longer, I, Shibli Bagarag.'

Said the Vizier, 'Thou?'

And he replied, 'Surely, O Vizier! thou knowest little of my dexterity.'

So the Vizier laughed, and Noorna bin Noorka laughed, and he was at a
loss to interpret the cause of their laughter. Then said Noorna, 'O my
betrothed, there's not a doubt among us of thy dexterity, nor question of
thy willingness; but this shaving of Shagpat, wullahy! 'tis longer work
than what thou makest of it.'

And he cried, 'How? because of the Chief of Identicals planted by thee in
his head?'

She answered, 'Because of that; but 'tis the smallest opposer, that.'

Then the Vizier said, 'Let us consult.'

So Shibli Bagarag gave ear, and the Vizier continued, 'There's first, the
Chief of Identicals planted by thee in the head of that presumptuous
fellow, O my daughter! By what means shall that be overcome?'

She said, 'I rank not that first, O Feshnavat, my father; surely I rank
first the illusions with which Rabesqurat hath surrounded him, and made
it difficult to know him from his semblances, whenever real danger
threateneth him.'

The Vizier assented, saying, 'Second, then, the Chief of Identicals?'

She answered, 'Nay, O my father; second, the weakness that's in man, and
the little probability of his finishing with Shagpat at one effort; and
there is but a sole chance for whoso attempteth, and if he faileth, 'tis
forever he faileth.'

So the Vizier said, 'Even I knew not 'twas so grave! Third, then, the
Chief of Identicals?'

She replied, 'Third! which showeth the difficulty of the task. Read ye
not, first, how the barber must come upon Shagpat and fix him for his
operation; second, how the barber must be possessed of more than mortal
strength to master him in so many strokes; third, how the barber must
have a blade like no other blade in this world in sharpness, in temper,
in velocity of sweep, that he may reap this crop which flourisheth on
Shagpat, and with it the magic hair which defieth edge of mortal blades?'

Now, the Vizier sighed at the words, saying, 'Powerful is Shagpat. I knew
not the thing I undertook. I fear his mastery of us, and we shall be
contemned--objects for the red finger of scorn.'

Noorna turned to Shibli Bagarag and asked, 'Do the three bonds of
enterprise--vengeance, ambition, and love--shrink in thee from this great
contest?'

Shibli Bagarag said, ''Tis terrible! on my head be it!'

She gazed at him a moment tenderly, and said, 'Thou art worthy of what is
in store for thee, O my betrothed! and I think little of the dangers, in
contemplation of the courage in thee. Lo, if vengeance and ambition spur
thee so, how will not love when added to the two?'

Then said she, 'As to the enchantments and spells that shall overreach
him, and as to the blade wherewith to shear him?'

Feshnavat exclaimed, 'Yonder 's indeed where we stumble and are tripped
at starting.'

But she cried, 'What if I know of a sword that nought on earth or under
resisteth, and before the keen edge of which all Illusions and Identicals
are as summer grass to the scythe?'

They both shouted, 'The whereabout of that sword, O Noorna!'

So she said, ''Tis in Aklis, in the mountains of the Koosh; and the seven
sons of Aklis sharpen it day and night till the adventurer cometh to
claim it for his occasion. Whoso succeedeth in coming to them they know
to have power over the sword, and 'tis then holiday for them. Many are
the impediments, and they are as holes where the fox haunteth. So they
deliver to his hand the sword till his object is attained, his Event
mastered, smitten through with it; and 'tis called the Sword of Events.
Surely, with it the father of the Seven vanquished the mighty Roc,
Kroojis, that threatened mankind with ruin, and a stain of the Roc's
blood is yet on the hilt of the sword. How sayest thou, O
Feshnavat,--shall we devote ourselves to get possession of that Sword?'

So the Vizier brightened at her words, and said, 'O excellent in wisdom
and star of counsel! speak further, and as to the means.'

Noorna bin Noorka continued, 'Thou knowest, O my father, I am proficient
in the arts of magic, and I am what I am, and what I shall be, by its
uses. 'Tis known to thee also that I hold a Genie in bondage, and can
utter ten spells and one spell in a breath. Surely my services to the
youth in his attainment of the Sword will be beyond price! Now to reach
Aklis and the Sword there are three things needed--charms: and one is a
phial full of the waters of Paravid from the wells in the mountain
yon-side the desert; and one, certain hairs that grow in the tail of the
horse Garraveen, he that roameth wild in the meadows of Melistan; and
one, that the youth gather and bear to Aklis, for the white antelope
Gulrevaz, the Lily of the Lovely Light that groweth in the hollow of the
crags over the Enchanted Sea: with these spells he will command the Sword
of Aklis, and nothing can bar him passage. Moreover I will expend in his
aid all my subtleties, my transformations, the stores of my wisdom. Many
seek this Sword, and people the realms of Rabesqurat, or are beasts in
Aklis, or crowned Apes, or go to feed the Roc, Kroojis, in the abyss
beneath the Roc's-egg bridge; but there's virtue in Shibli Bagarag:
wullahy! I am wistful in him of the hand of Destiny, and he will succeed
in this undertaking if he dareth it.'

Shibli Bagarag cried, 'At thy bidding, O Noorna! Care I for dangers? I'm
on fire to wield the Sword, and master the Event.'

Thereupon, Noorna bin Noorka arose instantly, and took him by the cheeks
a tender pinch, and praised him. Then drew she round him a circle with
her forefinger that left a mark like the shimmering of evanescent green
flame, saying, 'White was the day I set eyes on thee!' Round the Vizier,
her father, she drew a like circle; and she took an unguent, and traced
with it characters on the two circles, and letters of strange form,
arrowy, lance-like, like leaning sheaves, and crouching baboons, and
kicking jackasses, and cocks a-crow, and lutes slack-strung; and she
knelt and mumbled over and over words of magic, like the drone of a bee
to hear, and as a roll of water, nothing distinguishable. After that she
sought for an unguent of a red colour, and smeared it on a part of the
floor by the corner of the room, and wrote on it in silver fluid a word
that was the word 'Eblis,' and over that likewise she droned awhile.
Presently she arose with a white-heated face, the sweat on her brow, and
said to Shibli Bagarag and Feshnavat hurriedly and in a harsh tone, 'How?
have ye fear?'

They answered, 'Our faith is in Allah, our confidence in thee.'

Said she then, 'I summon the Genie I hold in bondage. He will be
wrathful; but ye are secure from him. He's this moment in the farthest
region of earth, doing ill, as is his wont, and the wont of the stock of
Eblis.'

So the Vizier said, 'He'll be no true helper, this Genie, and I care not
for his company.'

She answered, 'O my father! leave thou that to me. What says the poet?--

     "It is the sapiency of fools,
     To shrink from handling evil tools."'

Now, while she was speaking, she suddenly inclined her ear as to a
distant noise; but they heard nothing. Then, after again listening, she
cried in a sharp voice, 'Ho! muffle your mouths with both hands, and stir
not from the ring of the circles, as ye value life and its blessings.'

So they did as she bade them, and watched her curiously. Lo! she swathed
the upper and lower part of her face in linen, leaving the lips and eyes
exposed; and she took water from an ewer, and sprinkled it on her head,
and on her arms and her feet, muttering incantations. Then she listened a
third time, and stooped to the floor, and put her lips to it, and called
the name, 'Karaz!' And she called this name seven times loudly, sneezing
between whiles. Then, as it were in answer to her summons, there was a
deep growl of thunder, and the palace rocked, tottering; and the air
became smoky and full of curling vapours. Presently they were aware of
the cry of a Cat, and its miaulings; and the patch of red unguent on the
floor parted and they beheld a tawny Cat with an arched back. So Noorna
bin Noorka frowned fiercely at the Cat, and cried, 'This is thy shape, O
Karaz; change! for it serves not the purpose.'

The Cat changed, and was a Leopard with glowing yellow eyes, crouched for
the spring. So Noorna bin Noorka stamped, and cried again, 'This is thy
shape, O Karaz; change! for it serves not the purpose.'

And the Leopard changed, and was a Serpent with many folds, sleek,
curled, venomous, hissing.

Noorna bin Noorka cried in wrath, 'This is thy shape, O Karaz; change! or
thou'lt be no other till Eblis is accepted in Paradise.'

And the Serpent vanished. Lo! in its place a Genie of terrible aspect,
black as a solitary tree seared by lightning; his forehead ridged and
cloven with red streaks; his hair and ears reddened; his eyes like two
hollow pits dug by the shepherd for the wolf, and the wolf in them. He
shouted, 'What work is it now, thou accursed traitress?'

Noorna replied, 'I've need of thee!'

He said, 'What shape?'

She answered, 'The shape of an Ass that will carry two on its back, thou
Perversity!'

Upon that, he cried, 'O faithless woman, how long shall I be the slave of
thy plotting? Now, but for that hair of my head, plucked by thy hand
while I slept, I were free, no doer of thy tasks. Say, who be these that
mark us?'

She answered, 'One, the Vizier Feshnavat; and one, Shibli Bagarag of
Shiraz, he that's destined to shave Shagpat, the son of Shimpoor, the son
of Shoolpi, the son of Shullum; and the youth is my betrothed.'

Now, at her words the whole Genie became as live coal with anger, and he
panted black and bright, and made a stride toward Shibli Bagarag, and
stretched his arm out to seize him; but Noorna, blew quickly on the
circles she had drawn, and the circles rose up in a white flame high as
the heads of those present, and the Genie shrank hastily back from the
flame, and was seized with fits of sneezing. Then she said in scorn,
'Easily, O Karaz, is a woman outwitted! Surely I could not guess what
would be thy action! and I was wanting in foresight and insight! and I am
a woman bearing the weight of my power as a woodman staggereth under the
logs he hath felled!'

So she taunted him, and he still sneezing and bent double with the might
of the sneeze. Then said Noorna in a stern voice, 'No more altercation
between us! Wait thou here till I reappear, Karaz!'

Thereupon, she went from them; and the two, Feshnavat and Shibli Bagarag,
feared greatly being left with the Genie, for he became all colours, and
loured on them each time that he ceased sneezing. He was clearly menacing
them when Noorna returned, and in her hand a saddle made of hide, traced
over with mystic characters and gold stripes.

So she cried, 'Take this!' Then, seeing he hesitated, she unclosed from
her left palm a powder, and scattered

it over him; and he grew meek, and the bending knee of obedience was his,
and he took the saddle. So she said, ''Tis well! Go now, and wait outside
the city in the shape of an Ass, with this saddle on thy back.'

The Genie groaned, and said, 'To hear is to obey!' And he departed with
those words, for she held him in bondage. Then she calmed down the white
flames of the circles that enclosed Shibli Bagarag and the Vizier
Feshnavat, and they stepped forth, marvelling at the greatness of her
sorceries that held such a Genie in bondage.




THE WELL OF PARAVID

Now, there was haste in the movements of Noorna bin Noorka, and she
arrayed herself and clutched Shibli Bagarag by the arm, and the twain
departed from Feshnavat the Vizier, and came to the outside of the city,
and lo! there was the Genie by a well under a palm, and he standing in
the shape of an Ass, saddled. So they mounted him, and in a moment they
were in the midst of the desert, and naught round them save the hot
glimmer of the sands and the grey of the sky. Surely, the Ass went at
such a pace as never Ass went before in this world, resting not by the
rivulets, nor under the palms, nor beside the date-boughs; it was as if
the Ass scurried without motion of his legs, so swiftly went he. At last
the desert gave signs of a border on the low line of the distance, and
this grew rapidly higher as they advanced, revealing a country of hills
and rocks, and at the base of these the Ass rested.

So Noorna, said, 'This desert that we have passed, O my betrothed, many
are they that perish in it, and reach not the well; but give thanks to
Allah that it is passed.'

Then said she, 'Dismount, and be wary of moving to the front or to the
rear of this Ass, and measure thy distance from the lash of his tail.'

So Shibli Bagarag dismounted, and followed her up the hills and the
rocks, through ravines and gorges of the rocks, and by tumbling torrents,
among hanging woods, over perilous precipices, where no sun hath pierced,
and the bones of travellers whiten in loneliness; and they continued
mounting upward by winding paths, now closed in by coverts, now upon open
heights having great views, and presently a mountain was disclosed to
them, green at the sides high up it; and Noorna bin Noorka said to Shibli
Bagarag, 'Mount here, for the cunning of this Ass can furnish him no
excuse further for making thee food for the birds of prey.'

So Shibli Bagarag mounted, and they ceased not to ascend the green slopes
till the grass became scanty and darkness fell, and they were in a region
of snow and cold. Then Noorna bin Noorka tethered the Ass to a stump of a
tree and breathed in his ear, and the Ass became as a creature carved in
stone; and she drew from her bosom two bags of silk, and blew in one and
entered it, bidding Shibli Bagarag do likewise with the other bag; and he
obeyed her, drawing it up to his neck, and the delightfulness of warmth
came over him. Then said she, 'To-morrow, at noon, we shall reach near
the summit of the mountain and the Well of Paravid, if my power last over
this Ass; and from that time thou wilt be on the high road to greatness,
so fail not to remember what I have done for thee, and be not guilty of
ingratitude when thy hand is the stronger.'

He promised her, and they lay and slept. When he awoke the sun was
half-risen, and he looked at Noorna bin Noorka in the silken bag, and she
was yet in the peacefulness of pleasant dreams; but for the Ass, surely
his eyes rolled, and his head and fore legs were endued with life, while
his latter half seemed of stone. And the youth called to Noorna bin
Noorka, and pointed to her the strangeness of the condition of the Ass.
As she cast eyes on him she cried out, and rushed to him, and took him by
the ears and blew up his nostrils, and the animal was quiet. Then she and
Shibli Bagarag mounted him again, and she said to him, 'It is well thou
wert more vigilant than I, and that the sun rose not on this Ass while I
slept, or my enchantment would have thawed on him, and he would have
'scaped us.'

She gave her heel to the Ass, and the Ass hung his tail in sullenness and
drooped his head; and she laughed, crying, 'Karaz, silly fellow! do thy
work willingly, and take wisely thine outwitting.'

She jeered him as they journeyed, and made the soul of Shibli Bagarag
merry, so that he jerked in his seat upon the Ass. Now, as they ascended
the mountain they came to the opening of a cavern, and Noorna bin Noorka
halted the Ass, and said to Shibli Bagarag, 'We part here, and I wait for
thee in this place. Take this phial, and fill it with the waters of the
well, after thy bath. The way is before thee--speed on it.'

He climbed the sides of the mountain, and was soon hidden in the clefts
and beyond the perches of the vulture. She kept her eyes on the rocky
point when he disappeared, awaiting his return; and the sun went over her
head and sank on the yon-side of the mountain, and it was by the beams of
the moon that she beheld Shibli Bagarag dropping from the crags and
ledges of rock, sliding and steadying himself downward till he reached
her with the phial in his hand, filled; and he was radiant, as it were
divine with freshness, so that Noorna, before she spoke welcome to him,
was lost in contemplating the warm shine of his visage, calling to mind
the poet's words:

     The wealth of light in sun and moon,
      All nature's wealth,
     Hath mortal beauty for a boon
      When match'd with health.

Then said she, 'O Shibli Bagarag, 'tis achieved, this first of thy tasks;
for mutely on the fresh red of thy mouth, my betrothed, speaketh the
honey of persuasiveness, and the children of Aklis will not resist thee.'
So she took the phial from him and led forth the Ass, and the twain
mounted the Ass and descended the slopes of the mountain in moonlight;
and Shibli Bagarag said, 'Lo! I have marked wonders, and lived a life
since our parting; and this well, 'tis a miracle to dip in it, and by it
sit many maidens weeping and old men babbling, and youths that were idle
youths striking bubbles from the surface of the water. The well is
rounded with marble, and the sky is clear in it, cool in it, the whole
earth imaged therein.'

Then Noorna said, 'Hadst thou a difficulty in obtaining the waters of the
well?'

He answered, 'Surely all was made smooth for me by thy aid. Now when I
came to the well I marked not them by it, but plunged, and the depth of
that well seemed to me the very depth of the earth itself, so went I ever
downward; and when I was near the bottom of the well I had forgotten life
above, and lo! no sooner had I touched the bottom of the well when my
head emerged from the surface: 'twas wondrous! But for a sign that
touched the bottom of the well, see, O Noorna bin Noorka, the Jewel, the
one of myriads that glitter at the bottom, and I plucked it for a gift to
thee.'

So Noorna took the Jewel from his hand that was torn and crimson, and she
cried, 'Thou fair youth, thou bleedest with the plucking of it, and it
was written, no hand shall pluck a jewel at the bottom of that well
without letting of blood. Even so it is! Worthy art thou, and I was not
mistaken in thee.'

At her words Shibli Bagarag burst forth into praises of her, and he sang:

       'What is my worthiness
        Match'd with thy worth?
        Darkness and earthiness,
        Dust and dearth!

O Noorna, thou art wise above women: great and glorious over them.'

In this fashion the youth lauded her that was his betrothed, but she
exclaimed, 'Hush! or the jealousy of this Ass will be aroused, and of a
surety he'll spill us.'

Then he laughed and she laughed till the tail of Karaz trembled.




THE HORSE GARRAVEEN

Now, they descended leisurely the slopes of the mountain, and when they
were again in the green of its base, Noorna called to the Ass, 'Ho!
Karaz! Sniff now the breezes, for the end of our journey by night is the
meadows of Melistan. Forward in thy might, and bray not when we are in
them, for thy comfort's sake!'

The Ass sniffed, turning to the four quarters, and chose a certain
direction, and bore them swiftly over hills and streams eddying in
silver; over huge mounds of sand, where the tents of Bedouins stood in
white clusters; over lakes smooth as the cheeks of sleeping loveliness;
by walls of cities, mosques, and palaces; under towers that rose as an
armed man with the steel on his brows and the frown of battle; by the
shores of the pale foaming sea it bore them, going at a pace that the
Arab on his steed outstrippeth not. So when the sun was red and the dews
were blushing with new light, they struggled from a wilderness of barren
broken ground, and saw beneath them, in the warm beams, green, peaceful,
deep, the meadows of Melistan. They were meadows dancing with flowers, as
it had been fresh damsels of the mountain, fair with variety of colours
that were so many gleams of changing light as the breezes of the morn
swept over them; lavish of hues, of sweetness, of pleasantness, fir for
the souls of the blest.

Then, after they had gazed awhile, Noorna bin Noorka said, 'In these
meadows the Horse Garraveen roameth at will. Heroes of bliss bestride him
on great days. He is black to look on; speed quivers in his flanks like
the lightning; his nostrils are wide with flame; there is that in his eye
which is settled fire, and that in his hoofs which is ready thunder; when
he paws the earth kingdoms quake: no animal liveth with blood like the
Horse Garraveen. He is under a curse, for that he bore on his back one
who defied the Prophet. Now, to make him come to thee thou must blow the
call of battle, and to catch him thou must contrive to strike him on the
fetlock as he runs with this musk-ball which I give thee; and to tame him
thou must trace between his eyes a figure or the crescent with thy
forenail. When that is done, bring him to me here, where I await thee,
and I will advise thee further.'

So she said, 'Go!' and Shibli Bagarag showed her the breadth of his
shoulders, and stepped briskly toward the meadows, and was soon brushing
among the flowers and soft mosses of the meadows, lifting his nostrils to
the joyful smells, looking about him with the broad eye of one that
hungereth for a coming thing. The birds went up above him, and the trees
shook and sparkled, and the waters of brooks and broad rivers flashed
like waving mirrors waved by the slave-girls in sport when the beauties
of the harem riot and dip their gleaming shoulders in the bath. He
wandered on, lost in the gladness that lived, till the loud neigh of a
steed startled him, and by the banks of a river before him he beheld the
Horse Garraveen stooping to drink of the river; glorious was the look of
the creature,--silver-hoofed, fashioned in the curves of beauty and
swiftness. So Shibli Bagarag put up his two hands and blew the call of
battle, and the Horse Garraveen arched his neck at the call, and swung
upon his haunches, and sought the call, answering it, and tossing his
mane as he advanced swiftly. Then, as he neared, Shibli Bagarag held the
musk-ball in his fingers, and aimed at the fetlock of the Horse
Garraveen, and flung it, and struck him so that he stumbled and fell. He
snorted fiercely as he bent to the grass, but Shibli Bagarag ran to him,
and grasped strongly the tuft of hair hanging forward between his ears,
and traced between his fine eyes a figure of the crescent with his
forenail, and the Horse ceased plunging, and was gentle as a colt by its
mother's side, and suffered Shibli Bagarag to bestride him, and spurn him
with his heel to speed, and bore him fleetly across the fair length of
the golden meadows to where Noorna bin Noorka sat awaiting him. She
uttered a cry of welcome, saying, 'This is achieved with diligence and
skill, O my betrothed! and on thy right wrist I mark strength like a
sleeping leopard, and the children of Aklis will not resist thee.'

So she bade him alight from the Horse, but he said, 'Nay.' And she called
to him again to alight, but he cried, 'I will not alight from him! By
Allah! such a bounding wave of bliss have I never yet had beneath me, and
I will give him rein once again; as the poet says:

       "Divinely rings the rushing air
        When I am on my mettled mare:
        When fast along the plains we fly,
        A creature of the heavens am I."

Then she levelled her brows at him, and said gravely, 'This is the
temptation thou art falling into, as have thousands before thy time. Give
him the rein a second time, and he will bear thee to the red pit, and
halt upon the brink, and pitch thee into it among bleeding masses and
skeletons of thy kind, where they lie who were men like to thee, and were
borne away by the Horse Garraveen.'

He gave no heed to her words, taunting her, and making the animal prance
up and prove its spirit.

And she cried reproachfully, 'O fool! is it thus our great aim will be
defeated by thy silly conceit? Lo, now, the greatness and the happiness
thou art losing for this idle vanity is to be as a dunghill cock matched
with an ostrich; and think not to escape the calamities thou bringest on
thyself, for as is said,

        No runner can outstrip his fate;

and it will overtake thee, though thou part like an arrow from the bow.'

He still made a jest of her remonstrance, trying the temper of the
animal, and rejoicing in its dark flushes of ireful vigour.

And she cried out furiously, 'How! art thou past counsel? then will we
match strength with strength ere 'tis too late, though it weaken both.'

Upon that, she turned quickly to the Ass and stroked it from one
extremity to the other, crying, 'Karaz! Karaz!' shouting, 'Come forth in
thy power!' And the Ass vanished, and the Genie stood in his place, tall,
dark, terrible as a pillar of storm to travellers ranging the desert. He
exclaimed, 'What is it, O woman? Charge me with thy command!'

And she said, 'Wrestle with him thou seest on the Horse Garraveen, and
fling him from his seat.'

Then he yelled a glad yell, and stooped to Shibli Bagarag on the horse
and enveloped him, and seized him, and plucked him from the Horse, and
whirled him round, and flung him off. The youth went circling in the air,
high in it, and descended, circling, at a distance in the deep
meadow-waters. When he crept up the banks he saw the Genie astride the
Horse Garraveen, with a black flame round his head; and the Genie urged
him to speed and put him to the gallop, and was soon lost to sight, as he
had been a thunderbeam passing over a still lake at midnight. And Shibli
Bagarag was smitten with the wrong and the folly of his act, and sought
to hide his sight from Noorna; but she called to him, 'Look up, O youth!
and face the calamity. Lo, we have now lost the service of Karaz! for
though I utter ten spells and one spell in a breath, the Horse Garraveen
will ere that have stretched beyond the circle of my magic, and the Genie
will be free to do his ill deeds and plot against us. Sad is it! but
profit thou by a knowledge of thy weakness.'

Then said she, 'See, I have not failed to possess myself of the three
hairs of Garraveen, and there is that to rejoice in.'

She displayed them, and they were sapphire hairs, and had a flickering
light; and they seemed to live, wriggling their lengths, and were as
snakes with sapphire skins. Then she said, 'Thy right wrist, O my
betrothed!'

He gave her his right wrist, and she tied round it the three hairs of
Garraveen, exclaiming, 'Thus do skilful carpenters make stronger what has
broken and indicated disaster. Surely, I confide in thy star? I have
faith in my foresight?'

And she cried, 'Eyes of mine, what sayest thou to me? Lo, we must part
awhile: it is written.'

Said he, 'Leave me not, my betrothed: what am I without thy counsel? And
go not from me, or this adventure will come to miserable issue.'

So she said, 'Thou beginnest to feel my worth?'

He answered, 'O Noorna! was woman like thee before in this world? Surely
'tis a mask I mark thee under; yet art thou perforce of sheer wisdom and
sweet manners lovely in my sight; and I have a thirst to hear thee and
look on thee.'

While he spake, a beam of struggling splendour burst from her, and she
said, 'O thou dear youth, yes! I must even go. But I go glad of heart,
knowing thee prepared to love me. I must go to counteract the
machinations of Karaz, for he's at once busy, vindictive, and cunning,
and there's no time for us to lose; so farewell, my betrothed, and make
thy wits keen to know me when we next meet.'

So he said, 'And I--whither go I?'

She answered, 'To the City of Oolb straightway.'

Then he, 'But I know not its bearing from this spot: how reach it?'

She answered, 'What! thou with the phial of Paravid in thy vest, that
endoweth, a single drop of it, the flowers, the herbage, the very stones
and desert sands, with a tongue to articulate intelligible talk?'

Said he, 'Is it so?'

She answered, 'Even so.'

Ere Slubli Bagarag could question her further she embraced him, and blew
upon his eyes, and he was blinded by her breath, and saw not her
departure, groping for a seat on the rocks, and thinking her still by
him. Sight returned not to him till long after weariness had brought the
balm of sleep upon his eyelids.




THE TALKING HAWK

Now, when he awoke he found himself alone in that place, the moon shining
over the low meadows and flower-cups fair with night-dew. Odours of
night-flowers were abroad, filling the cool air with deliciousness, and
he heard in the gardens below songs of the bulbul: it was like a dream to
his soul, and he lay somewhile contemplating the rich loveliness of the
scene, that showed no moving thing. Then rose he and bethought him of the
words of Noorna, and of the City of Oolb, and the phial of the waters of
Paravid in his vest; and he drew it forth, and dropped a drop of it on
the rock where he had reclined. A deep harmony seemed suddenly to awake
inside the rock, and to his interrogation as to the direction of Oolb, he
heard, 'The path of the shadows of the moon.'

Thereupon he advanced to a prominent part of the rocks above the meadows,
and beheld the shadows of the moon thrown forward into dimness across a
waste of sand. And he stepped downward to the level of sand, and went the
way of the shadows till it was dawn. Then dropped he a drop of the waters
of the phial on a spike of lavender, and there was a voice said to him in
reply to what he questioned, 'The path of the shadows of the sun.'

The shadows of the sun were thrown forward across the same waste of sand,
and he turned and pursued his way, resting at noon beneath a date-tree,
and refreshing himself at a clear spring beside it. Surely he was joyful
as he went, and elated with high prospects, singing:

     Sun and moon with their bright fingers
      Point the hero's path;

     If in his great work he lingers,
      Well may they be wroth.

Now, the extent of the duration of his travel was four days and an equal
number of nights; and it was on the fifth morn that he entered the gates
of a city by the sea, even at that hour when the inhabitants were rising
from sleep: fair was the sea beyond it, and the harbour was crowded with
vessels, ships stored with merchandise--silks, dates, diamonds, Damascus
steel, huge bales piled on the decks for the land of Roum and other
lands. Shibli Bagarag thought, 'There's scarce a doubt but that one of
those sails will set for Oolb shortly. Wullahy! if I knew which, I'd
board her and win a berth in her.' Presently he thought, 'I'll go to the
public fountain and question it with the speech-winning waters.'
Thereupon he passed down the streets of the city and came to an open
space, where stood the fountain, and sprinkled it with Paravid; and the
fountain spake, saying, 'Where men are, question not dumb things.'

Cried he, 'Faileth Paravid in its power? Have I done aught to baffle
myself?'

Then he thought, ''Twere nevertheless well to do as the fountain
directeth, and question men while I see them.' And he walked about among
the people, and came to the quays of the harbour where the ships lay
close in, many of them an easy leap from shore, and considered whom to
address. So, as he loitered about the quays, meditating on the means at
the disposal of the All-Wise, and marking the vessels wistfully, behold,
there advanced to him one at a quick pace, in the garb of a sailor. He
observed Shibli Bagarag attentively a moment, and exclaimed as it were in
the plenitude of respect and with the manner of one that is abashed,
'Surely, thou art Shibli Bagarag, the nephew of the barber, him we watch
for.'

So Shibli Bagarag marvelled at this recognition, and answered, 'Am I then
already famous to that extent?'

And he that accosted him said, ''Tis certain the trumpet was blown before
thy steps, and there is not a man in this city but knoweth of thy
destination to the City of Oolb, and that thou art upon the track of
great things, one chosen to bring about imminent changes.'

Then said Shibli Bagarag, 'For this I praise Noorna bin Noorka, daughter
of Feshnavat, Vizier of the King that ruleth in the city of Shagpat! She
saw me, that I was marked for greatness. Wullahy, the eagle knoweth me
from afar, and proclaimeth me; the antelope of the hills scenteth the
coming of one not as other men, and telleth his tidings; the wind of the
desert shapeth its gust to a meaning, so that the stranger may wot Shibli
Bagarag is at hand!'

He puffed his chest, and straightened his legs like the cock, and was as
a man upon whom the Sultan has bestowed a dress of honour, even as the
plumed peacock. Then the other said:

'Know that I am captain of yonder vessel, that stands farthest out from
the harbour with her sails slackened; and she is laden with figs and
fruits which I exchange for silks, spices, and other merchandise, with
the people of Oolb. Now, what says the poet?--

       "Delay in thine undertaking
        Is disaster of thy own making";

and he says also:

     "Greatness is solely for them that succeed;
     'Tis a rotten applause that gives earlier meed."

Therefore it is advisable for thee to follow me on board without loss of
time, and we will sail this very night for the City of Oolb.'

Now, Shibli Bagarag was ruled by the words of the captain albeit he
desired to stay awhile and receive the homage of the people of that city.
So he followed him into a boat that was by, and the twain were rowed by
sailors to the ship. Then, when they were aboard the captain set sail,
and they were soon in the hollows of deep waters. There was a berth in
the ship set apart for Shibli Bagarag, and one for the captain. Shibli
Bagarag, when he entered his berth, beheld at the head of his couch a
hawk; its eyes red as rubies, its beak sharp as the curve of a scimitar.
So he called out to the captain, and the captain came to him; but when he
saw the hawk, he plucked his turban from his head, and dashed it at the
hawk, and afterward ran to it, trying to catch it; and the hawk flitted
from corner to corner of the berth, he after it with open arms. Then he
took a sword, but the hawk flew past him, and fixed on the back part of
his head, tearing up his hair by the talons, and pecking over his
forehead at his eyes. And Shibli Bagarag heard the hawk scream the name
'Karaz,' and he looked closely at the Captain of the vessel, and knew him
for the Genie Karaz. Then trembled he with exceeding terror, cursing his
credulities, for he saw himself in the hands of the Genie, and nothing
but this hawk friendly to him on the fearful waters. When the hawk had
torn up a certain hair, the Genie stiffened, and glowed like copper in
the furnace, the whole length of him; and he descended heavily through
the bottom of the ship, and sank into the waters beneath, which hissed
and smoked as at a bar of heated iron. Then Shibli Bagarag gave thanks to
the Prophet, and praised the hawk, but the hawk darted out of the cabin,
and he followed it on deck, and, lo! the vessel was in flames, and the
hawk in a circle of the flames; and the flames soared with it, and left
it no outlet. Now, as Shibli Bagarag watched the hawk, the flames
stretched out towards him and took hold of his vestments. So he delayed
not to commend his soul to the All-merciful, and bore witness to his
faith, and plunged into the sea headlong. When he rose, the ship had
vanished, and all was darkness where it had been; so he buffeted with the
billows, thinking his last hour had come, and there was no help for him
in this world; and the spray shaken from the billows blinded him, the
great walls of water crumbled over him; strength failed him, and his
memory ceased to picture images of the old time--his heart to beat with
ambition; and to keep the weight of his head above the surface was
becoming a thing worth the ransom of kings. As he was sinking and turning
his eyes upward, he heard a flutter as of fledgling's wings, and the two
red ruby eyes of the hawk were visible above him, like steady fires in
the gloom. And the hawk perched on him, and buried itself among the wet
hairs of his head, and presently taking the Identical in its beak, the
hawk lifted him half out of water, and bore him a distance, and dropped
him. This the hawk did many times, and at the last, Shibli Bagarag felt
land beneath him, and could wade through the surges to the shore. He gave
thanks to the Supreme Disposer, kneeling prostrate on the shore, and fell
into a sleep deep in peacefulness as a fathomless well, unruffled by a
breath.

Now, when it was dawn Shibli Bagarag awoke and looked inland, and saw
plainly the minarets of a city shining in the first beams, and the front
of yellow mountains, and people moving about the walls and on the towers
and among the pastures round the city; so he made toward them, and
inquired of them the name of their city. And they stared at him, crying,
'What! know'st thou not the City of Oolb? the hawk on thy shoulder could
tell thee that much.' He looked and saw that the hawk was on his
shoulder; and its left wing was scorched, the plumage blackened. So he
said to the hawk, 'Is it profitable, O preserving bird, to ask of thee
questions?'

The hawk shook its wings and closed an eye.

So he said, 'Do I well in entering this city?'

The hawk shook its wings again and closed an eye.

So he said, 'To what house shall I direct my steps in this strange city
for the attainment of the purpose I have?'

The hawk flew, and soared, and alighted on the topmost of the towers of
Oolb. So when it returned he said, 'O bird! rare bird! my counsellor! it
is an indication, this alighting on the highest tower, that thou advisest
me to go straight to the palace of the King?'

The hawk flapped its wings and winked both eyes; so Shibli Bagarag took
forth the phial from his breast, remembering the virtues of the waters of
the Well of Paravid, and touched his lips with them, that he might be
endowed with flowing speech before the King of Oolb. As he did this the
phial was open, and the hawk leaned to it and dipped its beak into the
water; and he entered the city and passed through the long streets
towards the palace of the King, and craved audience of him as one that
had a thing marvellous to tell. So the King commanded that Shibli Bagarag
should be brought before him, for he was a lover of marvels. As he went
into the presence of the King, Shibli Bagarag listened to the hawk, for
the hawk spake his language, and it said, 'Proclaim to the King a new
wonder--"the talking hawk."'

So when he had bent his body to the King, he proclaimed the new wonder;
and the King seemed not to observe the hawk, and said, 'From what city
art thou?'

He answered, 'Native, O King, to Shiraz; newly from the City of Shagpat.'

And the King asked, 'How is it with that hairy wonder?'

He answered, 'The dark forest flourisheth about him.'

And the King said, 'That is well! We of the City of Oolb take our
fashions from them of the City of Shagpat, and it is but yesterday that I
bastinadoed a barber that strayed among us.'

Shibli Bagarag sighed when he heard the King, and thought to himself,
'How unfortunate is the race of barbers, once honourable and in esteem!
Surely it will not be otherwise till Shagpat is shaved!' And the King
called out to him for the cause of his sighing; so he said, 'I sigh, O
King of the age, considering how like may be the case of the barber
bastinadoed but yesterday, in his worth and value, to that of Roomdroom,
the reader of planets, that was a barber.'

And he related the story of Roomdroom for the edification of the King and
the exaltation of barbercraft, delivering himself neatly and winningly
and pointedly, so that the story should apply, which was its merit and
its origin.




GOORELKA OF OOLB

When Shibli Bagarag had finished his narration of the case of Roomdroom
the barber, the King of Oolb said, 'O thou, native of Shiraz, there is
persuasion and sweetness and fascination on thy tongue, and I am touched
with compassion for the soles of Baba Mustapha, that I bastinadoed but
yesterday, and he was from Shiraz likewise.'

Now, the heart of Shibli Bagarag leapt when he heard mention of Baba
Mustapha; and he knew him for his uncle that was searching him. He would
have cried aloud his relationship, but the hawk whispered in his ear.
Then the hawk said to him, 'There is danger in the King's muteness
respecting me, for I am visible to him. Proclaim the spirit of prophecy.'

So he proclaimed that spirit, and the King said, 'Prophesy to me of
barbercraft.'

And he cried, 'O King of the age, the barber is abased, trodden
underfoot, given over to the sneers and the gibes of them that flatter
the powerful ones; he is as the winter worm, as the crocodile in the
slime of his sleep by the bank, as the sick eagle before moulting. But I
say, O King, that he will come forth like the serpent in a new skin,
shaming the old one; he slept a caterpillar, and will come forth a
butterfly; he sank a star, and lo! he riseth a constellation.'

Now, while he was speaking in the fervour of his soul, the King said
something to one of the court officers surrounding him, and there was
brought to the King a basin, a soap-bowl, and barber's tackle. When
Shibli Bagarag saw these, the uses of the barber rushed upon his mind,
and desire to sway the tackle pushed him forward and agitated him, so
that he could not keep his hands from them.

Then the King exclaimed, 'It is as I thought. Our passions betray
themselves, and our habits; so is it written. By Allah! I swear thou art
thyself none other than a barber, O youth.'

Shibli Bagwrag was nigh fainting with terror at this discovery of the
King, but the hawk said in his ear, 'Proclaim speech in the tackle.' So
he proclaimed speech in the tackle; and the King smiled doubtfully, and
said, 'If this be a cheat, Shiraz will not see thy face more.'

Then the hawk whispered in his ear, 'Drop on the tackle secretly a drop
from the phial.' This he did, spreading his garments, and commanded the
tackle to speak. And the tackle spake, each portion of it, confusedly as
the noise of Babel. So the King marvelled greatly, and said, ''Tis a
greater wonder than the talking hawk, the talking tackle. Wullahy! it
ennobleth barbercraft! Yet it were well to comprehend the saying of the
tackle.'

Then the hawk flew to the tackle and fluttered about it, and lo! the
blade and the brush stood up and said in a shrill tone, 'It is ordained
that Shagpat shall be shaved, and that Shibli Bagarag shall shave him.'

The King bit the forefinger of amazement, and said, 'What then ensueth, O
talking tackle?'

And the brush and the blade stood up, and said in a shrill tone, 'Honour
to Shibli Bagarag and barbers! Shame unto Shagpat and his fellows!'

Upon that, the King cried, 'Enough, O talking tackle; I will forestall
the coming thing. I will be shaved! wullahy, that will I!'

Then the hawk whispered to Shibli Bagarag, 'Forward and shear him!' So he
stepped forth and seized the tackle, and addressed himself keenly to the
shaving of the King of Oolb, lathering him and performing his task with
perfect skill. And the courtiers crowded to follow the example of the
King, and Shibli Bagarag shaved them, all of them. Now, when they were
shaved, fear smote them, the fear of ridicule, and each laughed at the
change that was in the other; but the King cried, 'See that order is
issued for the people of Oolb to be as we before to-morrow's sun. So is
laughter taken in reverse.' And the King said aside to Shibli Bagarag,
'Say now, what may be thy price for yonder hawk?'

And the hawk bade him say, 'The loan of thy cockleshell.'

The King mused, and said, 'That is much to ask, for it is that which
beareth the Princess my daughter to the Lily of the Enchanted Sea, which
she nourisheth; and if 'tis harmed, she will be stricken with ugliness,
as was the daughter of the Vizier Feshnavat, who tended it before her.
Yet is this hawk a bird of price. What be its qualities, besides the gift
of speech?'

Shibli Bagarag answered, 'To counsel in extremity; to forewarn; to
counteract enchantments and foul magic.'

Upon that the King said, 'Follow me!'

And the King led the way from the hall, through many spacious chambers
fair with mirrors and silks and precious woods, and smooth marble floors,
down into a vault lit by a lamp that was shaped like an eye. Round the
vault were hung helm-pieces, and swords, and rich-studded housings; and
there were silken dresses, and costly shawls, and tall vases and jars of
China, tapestries, and gold services. And the King said, 'Take thy choice
of these in exchange for the hawk.'

But Shibli Bagarag said, 'Nought save a loan of the cockle-shell, King!'

Then the King threatened him, saying, 'There is a virtue in each of the
things thou seest: the China jar is brimmed with wine, and remaineth so
though a thousand drink of it; the dress of Samarcand rendereth the
wearer invisible; yet thou refusest to exchange them for thy hawk!'

And the King swore by the beard of his father he would seize perforce the
hawk and shut up Shibli Bagarag in the vault, if he fell not into his
bargain. Shibli Bagarag was advised by the hawk to accept the China jar
and the dress of Samarcand, and handed the hawk to the King in exchange
for these things. So the King took the hawk upon his wrist and departed
with it to the apartments of his daughter, and Shibli Bagarag went to the
chamber prepared for him in the palace.

Now, when it was night, Shibli Bagarag heard a noise at his lattice, and
he arose and peered through it, and lo! the hawk was fluttering without;
so he let it in, and caressed it, and the hawk bade him put on his silken
dress and carry forth his China jar, and go the round of the palace, and
offer drink to the sentinels and the slaves. So he did as the hawk
directed, and the sentinels and slaves were aware of a China jar brimmed
with wine that was lifted to their lips, but him that lifted it they saw
not: surely, they drank deep of the draught of astonishment.

Then the hawk flew before him, and he followed it to a chamber lit with
golden lamps, gorgeously hung, and full of a dusky splendour and the
faint sparkle of gems, ruby, amethyst, topaz, and beryl; in it there was
the hush of sleep, and the heart of Shibli Bagarag told him that one
beautiful was near. So he approached on tiptoe a couch of blue silk,
bordered with gold-wire, and inwoven with stars of blue turquoise stones,
as it had been the heavens of midnight. On the couch lay one, a woman,
pure in loveliness; the dark fringes of her closed lids like living
flashes of darkness, her mouth like an unstrung bow and as a double
rosebud, even as two isles of coral between which in the clear
transparent watery beds the pearls shine freshly.

And the hawk said to Shibli Bagarag, 'This is the Princess Goorelka, the
daughter of the King of Oolb, a sorceress, the Guardian of the Lily of
the Enchanted Sea. Beneath her pillow is the cockle-shell; grasp it, but
gaze not upon her.'

He approached and slid his arm beneath the pillow of the Princess, and
grasped the cockle-shell; but ere he drew it forth he gazed upon her, and
the lustre of her countenance transfixed him as with a javelin, so that
he could not stir, nor move his eyes from the contemplation of her
sweetness of feature. The hawk darted at him fiercely, and pecked at him
to draw his attention from her, and he stepped back, yet he continued
taking fatal draughts from the magic cup of her beauty. Then the hawk
screamed a loud scream of anguish, and the Princess awoke, and started
half-way from the couch, and stared about her, and saw the bird in
agitation. As she looked at the bird a shudder passed over her, and she
snatched a veil and drew it over her face, murmuring, 'I dream, or I am
under the eye of a man.' Then she felt beneath the pillow, and knew that
the cockle-shell had been touched; and in a moment she leapt from her
couch, and ran to a mirror and saw herself as she was, a full-moon made
to snare the wariest and sit singly high on a throne in the hearts of
men. At the sight of her beauty she smiled and seemed at peace, murmuring
still, 'I am under the eye of a man, or I dream.' Now, while she so
murmured she arrayed herself, and took the cockle-shell, and passed
through the ante-room among her women sleeping; and Shibli Bagarag
tracked her till she came to the vault; and she entered it and walked to
the corner from which had hung the dress of Samarcand. When she saw it
gone her face waxed pale, and she gazed slowly at all points, muttering,
'There is no further doubt but that I am under the eye of a man!'
Thereupon she ran hastily from the vault, and passed between the
sentinels of the palace, and saw them where they lay drowsy with
intoxication: so she knew that the China jar and the dress of Samarcand
had been used that night, and for no purpose friendly to her wishes. Then
she passed down the palace steps, and through the gates of the palace and
the city, till she came to the shore of the sea; there she launched the
cockle-shell and took the wind in her garments, and sat in it, filling it
to overflowing, yet it floated. And Shibli Bagarag waded to the
cockle-shell and took hold of it, and was drawn along by its motion
swiftly through the waters, so that a foam swept after him; and Goorelka
marked the foam. Now, they had passage over the billows smoothly, and
soon the length of the sea was darkened with two high rocks, and between
them there was a narrow channel of the sea, roughened with moonlight. So
they sped between the rocks, and came upon a purple sea, dark-blue
overhead, with large stars leaning to the waves. There was a soft
whisperingness in the breath of the breezes that swung there, and many
sails of charmed ships were seen in momentary gleams, flapping the mast
idly far away. Warm as new milk from the full udders were the waters of
that sea, and figures of fair women stretched lengthwise with the
current, and lifted a head as they rushed rolling by. Truly it was
enchanted even to the very bed!




THE LILY OF THE ENCHANTED SEA

Now, after the cockle-shell had skimmed calmly awhile, it began to pitch
and grew unquiet, and came upon a surging foam, pale, and with
scintillating bubbles. The surges increased in volume, and boiled,
hissing as with anger, like savage animals. Presently, the cockle-shell
rose upon one very lofty swell, and Shibli Bagarag lost hold of it, and
lo! it was overturned and engulfed in the descent of the great mountain
of water, and the Princess Goorelka was immersed in the depths. She would
have sunk, but Shibli Bagarag caught hold of her, and supported her to
the shore by the strength of his right arm. The shore was one of sand and
shells, their wet cheeks sparkling in the moonlight; over it hung a
promontory, a huge jut of black rock. Now, the Princess when she landed,
seeing not him that supported her, delayed not to run beneath the rock,
and ascended by steps cut from the base of the rock. And Shibli Bagarag
followed her by winding paths round the rock, till she came to the
highest peak commanding the circle of the Enchanted Sea, and glimpses of
enthralled vessels, and mariners bewitched on board; long paths of
starlight rippled into the distant gloom, and the reflection of the moon
opposite was as a wide nuptial sheet of silver on the waters: islands,
green and white, and with soft music floating from their foliage, sailed
slowly to and fro. Surely, to dwell reclining among the slopes of those
islands a man would forfeit Paradise! Now, the Princess, as she stood
upon the peak, knew that she was not alone, and pretended to slip from
her footing, and Shibli Bagarag called out and ran to her; but she turned
in the direction of his voice and laughed, and he knew he was outwitted.
Then, to deceive her, he dropped from the phial twenty drops round her on
the rock, and those twenty drops became twenty voices, so that she was
bewildered with their calls, and stopped her ears, and ran from them, and
descended from the eminence nimbly, slipping over ledges and leaping the
abysses. And Shibli Bagarag followed her, clutching at the trailers and
tearing them with him, letting loose a torrent of stones and earth, till
on a sudden they stood together above a greenswarded basin of the rock
opening to the sea; and in the middle of the basin, lo! in stature like a
maiden of the mountains, and one that droopeth her head pensively
thinking of her absent lover, the Enchanted Lily. Wonder knocked at the
breast of Shibli Bagarag when he saw that queenly flower waving its
illumined head to the breeze: he could not retain a cry of rapture. As he
did this the Princess stretched her hand to where he was and groped a
moment, and caught him by the silken dress and tore in it a great rent,
and by the rent he stood revealed to her. Then said she, 'O youth, thou
halt done ill to follow me here, and the danger of it is past computing;
surely, the motive was a deep one, nought other than the love of me.'

She spoke winningly, sweet words to a luted voice, and the youth fell
upon his knees before her, smitten by her beauty; and he said, 'I
followed thee here as I would follow such loveliness to the gates of
doom, O Princess of Oolb.'

She smiled and said playfully, 'I will read by thy hand whether thou be
one faithful in love.'

She took his hand and sprinkled on it earth and gravel, and commenced
scanning it curiously. As she scanned it her forehead wrinkled up, and a
shot like black lightning travelled across her countenance, withering its
beauty: she cried in a forced voice, 'Aha! it is well, O youth, for thee
and for me that thou lovest me, and art faithful in love.'

The look of the Princess of Oolb and her voice affrighted the soul of
Shibli Bagarag, and he would have turned from her; but she held him, and
went to the Lily, and emptied into the palm of her hand the dew that was
in the Lily, and raised it to the lips of Shibli Bagarag, bidding him
drink as a pledge for her sake and her love, and to appease his thirst.
As he was about to drink, there fell into the palm of the Princess from
above what seemed a bolt of storm scattering the dew; and after he had
blinked with the suddenness of the action he looked and beheld the hawk,
its red eyes inflamed with wrath. And the hawk screamed into the ear of
Shibli Bagarag, 'Pluck up the Lily ere it is too late, O fool!--the dew
was poison! Pluck it by the root with thy right hand!'

So thereat he strode to the Lily, and grasped it, and pulled with his
strength; and the Lily was loosened, and yielded, and came forth
streaming with blood from the bulb of the root; surely the bulb of the
root was a palpitating heart, yet warm, even as that we have within our
bosoms.

Now, from the terror of that sight the Princess hid her eyes, and shrank
away. And the lines of malice, avarice, and envy seemed ageing her at
every breath. Then the hawk pecked at her three pecks, and perched on a
corner of rock, and called shrilly the name 'Karaz!' And the Genie Karaz
came slanting down the night air, like a preying bird, and stood among
them. So the hawk cried, 'See, O Karaz, the freshness of thy Princess of
Oolb'; and the Genie regarded her till loathing curled his lip, for she
grew in ghastliness to the colour of a frog, and a frog's face was hers,
a camel's back, a pelican's throat, the legs of a peacock.

Then the hawk cried, 'Is this how ye meet, ye lovers,--ye that will be
wedded?' And the hawk made his tongue as a thorn to them. At the last it
exclaimed, 'Now let us fight our battle, Karaz!'

But the Genie said, 'Nay, there will come a time for that, traitress!'

The hawk cried, 'Thou delayest, till the phial of Paravid, the hairs of
Garraveen, and this Lily, my three helps, are expended, thinking Aklis,
for which we barter them, striketh but a single blow? That is well! Go,
then, and take thy Princess, and obtain permission of the King of Oolb,
her father, to wed her, O Karaz!'

The hawk whistled with laughter, and the Genie was stung with its
mockeries, and clutched the Princess of Oolb in a bunch, and arose from
the ground with her, slanting up the night-air like fire, till he was
seen high up even as an angry star reddening the seas beneath.

When he was lost to the eye, Shibli Bagarag drew a long breath and cried
aloud, 'The likeness of that Princess of Oolb in her ugliness to Noorna,
my betrothed, is a thing marvellous, if it be not she herself.' And he
reflected, 'Yet she seemed not to recognize and claim me'; and thought,
'I am bound to her by gratitude, and I should have rescued her from
Karaz, but I know not if it be she. Wullahy! I am bewildered; I will ask
counsel of the hawk.' He looked to the corner of the rock where the hawk
had perched, but the hawk was gone; as he searched for it, his eyes fell
upon the bed of earth where the Lily stood ere he plucked it, and lo! in
the place of the Lily, there was a damsel dressed in white shining silks,
fairer than the enchanted flower, straighter than the stalk of it; her
head slightly drooping, like the moon on a border of the night; her bosom
like the swell of the sea in moonlight; her eyes dark, under a low arch
of darker lashes, like stars on the skirts of storm; and she was the very
dream of loveliness, formed to freeze with awe, and to inflame with
passion. So Shibli Bagarag gazed at her with adoration, his hands
stretched half-way to her as if to clasp her, fearing she was a vision
and would fade; and the damsel smiled a sweet smile, and lifted her
antelope eyes, and said, 'Who am I, and to whom might I be likened, O
youth?'

And he answered, 'Who thou art, O young perfection, I know not, if not a
Houri of Paradise; but thou art like the Princess of Oolb, yet lovelier,
oh lovelier! And thy voice is the voice of Noorna, my betrothed; yet
purer, sweeter, younger.'

So the damsel laughed a laugh like a sudden sweeping of wild chords of
music, and said, 'O youth, saw'st thou not the ascent of Noorna, thy
betrothed, gathered in a bunch by Karaz?'

And he answered, 'I saw her; but I knew not, O damsel of beauty; surely I
was bewildered, amazed, without power to contend with the Genie.'

Then she said, 'Wouldst thou release her? So kiss me on the lips, on the
eyes, and on the forehead, three kisses each time; and with the first
say, "By the well of Paravid"; and with the second, "By the strength of
Garraveen!" and with the third, "By the Lily of the Sea!"'

Now, the heart of the youth bounded at her words, and he went to her, and
trembling kissed her all bashfully on the lips, on the eyes, and on the
forehead, saying each time as she directed. Then she took him by the
hand, and stepped from the bed of earth, crying joyfully, 'Thanks be to
Allah and the Prophet! Noorna, is released from the sorceries that held
her, and powerful.'

So, while he was wondering, she said, 'Knowest thou not the woman, thy
betrothed?'

He answered, 'O damsel of beauty, I am charged with many feelings; doubts
and hopes are mixed in me. Say first who thou art, and fill my two ears
with bliss.'

And she said, 'I will leave my name to other lips; surely I am the
daughter of the Vizier Feshnavat, betrothed to a wandering youth,--a
barber, who sickened at the betrothal, and consoled himself with a
proverb when he gave me the kiss of contract, and knew not how with truth
to pay me a compliment.'

Now, Shibli Bagarag saw this was indeed Noorna bin Noorka, his betrothed,
and he fell before her in love and astonishment; but she lifted him to
her neck, and embraced him, saying, 'Said I not truly when I said "I am
that I shall be"? My youth is not as that of Bhanavar the Beautiful,
gained at another's cost, but my own, and stolen from me by wicked
sorceries.' And he cried, 'Tell me, O Noorna, my betrothed, how this
matter came to pass?'

She said, 'On our way to Aklis.'

She bade him grasp the Lily, and follow her; and he followed her down the
rock and over the bright shells upon the sand, admiring her stateliness,
her willowy lightness, her slimness as of the palm-tree. Then she waded
in the water, and began to strike out with her arms, and swim boldly,--he
likewise; and presently they came to a current that hurried them off in
its course, and carried them as weeds, streaming rapidly. He was bearing
witness to his faith as a man that has lost hope of life, when a strong
eddy stayed him, and whirled him from the current into the calm water. So
he looked for Noorna, and saw her safe beside him flinging back the wet
tresses from her face, that was like the full moon growing radiant behind
a dispersing cloud. And she said, 'Ask not for the interpretation of
wonders in this sea, for they cluster like dates on a date branch.
Surely, to be with me is enough?'

And she bewitched him in the midst of the waters, making him oblivious of
all save her, so that he hugged the golden net of her smiles and fair
flatteries, and swam with an exulting stroke, giving his breast broadly
to the low billows, and shouting verses of love and delight to her. And
while they swam sweetly, behold, there was seen a pearly shell of
flashing crimson, amethyst, and emerald, that came scudding over the
waves toward them, raised to the wind, fan-shaped, and in its front two
silver seats. When she saw it, Noorna cried, 'She has sent me this,
Rabesqurat! Perchance is she favourable to my wishes, and this were
well!'

Then she swayed in the water sideways, and drew the shell to her, and the
twain climbed into it, and sat each on one of the silver seats, folded
together. In its lightness it was as a foam-bubble before the wind on the
blue water, and bore them onward airily. At his feet Shibli Bagarag
beheld a stool of carved topaz, and above his head the arch of the shell
was inlaid with wreaths of gems: never was vessel fairer than that.

Now, while they were speeding over the water, Noorna said, 'The end of
this fair sea is Aklis, and beyond it is the Koosh. So while the wind is
our helmsman, and we go circled by the quiet of this sea, I'll tell thee
of myself, if thou carest to hear.'

And he cried with the ardour of love, 'Surely, I would hear of nought
save thyself, Noorna, and the music of the happy garden compareth not in
sweetness with it. I long for the freshness of thy voice, as the desert
camel for the green spring, O my betrothed!'

So she said, 'And now give ear to the following':--




AND THIS IS THE STORY OF NOORNA BIN NOORKA, THE GENIE KARAZ, AND THE
PRINCESS OF OOLB

Know, that when I was a babe, I lay on my mother's bosom in the
wilderness, and it was the bosom of death. Surely, I slept and smiled,
and dreamed the infant's dream, and knew not the coldness of the thing I
touched. So were we even as two dead creatures lying there; but life was
in me, and I awoke with hunger at the time of feeding, and turned to my
mother, and put up my little mouth to her for nourishment, and sucked
her, but nothing came. I cried, and commenced chiding her, and after a
while it was as decreed, that certain horsemen of a troop passing through
the wilderness beheld me, and seeing my distress and the helpless being I
was, their hearts were stirred, and they were mindful of what the poet
says concerning succour given to the poor, helpless, and innocent of this
world, and took me up, and mixed for me camel's milk and water from the
bags, and comforted me, and bore me with them, after they had paid
funeral rites to the body of my mother.

Now, the rose-bud showeth if the rose-tree be of the wilds or of the
garden, and the chief of that troop seeing me born to the uses of
gentleness, carried me in his arms with him to his wife, and persuaded
her that was childless to make me the child of their adoption. So I abode
with them during the period of infancy and childhood, caressed and cared
for, as is said:

     The flower a stranger's hand may gather,
      Strikes root into the stranger's breast;
     Affection is our mother, father,
      Friend, and of cherishers the best.

And I loved them as their own child, witting not but that I was their
child, till on a day while I played among some children of my years, the
daughter of the King of Oolb passed by us on a mule, with her slaves and
drawn swords, and called to me, 'Thou little castaway!' and had me
brought to her, and peered upon my face in a manner that frightened me,
for I was young. Then she put me down from the neck of her mule where she
had seated me, saying, 'Child of a dead mother and a runaway father, what
need I fear from thy like, and the dreams of a love-sick Genie?' So she
departed, but I forgot not her words, and dwelt upon them, and grew
fevered with them, and drooped. Now, when he saw my bloom of health gone,
heaviness on my feet, the light hollowed from my eyes, my benefactor,
Ravaloke--he that I had thought my father--took me between his knees, and
asked me what it was and the cause of my ailing; and I told him.

Then said he, 'This is so: thou art not my child; but I love thee as
mine, O my little Desert-flower; and why the Princess should fancy fear
of thee I like not to think; but fear thou her, for she is a mask of
wiles and a vine trailing over pitfalls; such a sorceress the world
knoweth not as Goorelka of Oolb.'

Now, I was penetrated by what he said, and ceased to be a companion to
them that loved childish games and romps, and meditated by myself in
gardens and closets, feigning sleep when the elder ones discoursed, that
I might learn something of this mystery, and all that was spoken
perplexed me more, as the sage declareth:

     Who in a labyrinth wandereth without clue,
     More that he wandereth doth himself undo.

Though I was quick as the quick-eyed falcon, I discovered nought, flying
ever at false game,--

     A follower of misleading beams,
     A cheated soul, the mock of dreams.

At times I thought that it was the King of Oolb was my father, and
plotted to come in his path; and there were kings and princes of far
countries whom I sought to encounter, that they might claim me; but none
claimed me. O my betrothed, few gave me love beside Ravaloke, and when
the wife that he cherished died, he solely, for I was lost in waywardness
and the slave of moody imaginings. 'Tis said:

   If thou the love of the world for thyself wouldst gain,
     mould thy breast
   Liker the world to become, for its like the world loveth best;

and this was not I then.

Now, the sons and daughters of men are used to celebrate the days of
their birth with gifts and rejoicings, but I could only celebrate that
day which delivered me from death into the hands of Ravaloke, as none
knew my birth-hour. When it was the twelfth return of this event,
Ravaloke, my heart's father, called me to him and pressed in my hand a
glittering coin, telling me to buy with it in the bazaars what I would.
So I went forth, attended by a black slave, after the mid-noon, for I was
eager to expend my store, and cared not for the great heat. Scarcely had
we passed the cheese-market and were hurrying on to shops of the
goldsmiths and jewellers, when I saw an old man, a beggar, in a dirty
yellow turban and pieced particoloured cloth-stuff, and linen in rags his
other gear. So lean was he, and looked so weak that I wondered he did
other than lay his length on the ground; and as he asked me for alms his
voice had a piteousness that made me to weep, and I punished my slave for
seeking to drive him away, and gave my one piece of gold into his hand.
Then he asked me what I required of him in exchange, and I said, 'What
can a poor old man that is a beggar give?' He laughed, and asked me then
what I had intended to buy with that piece of money. So, beginning to
regret the power that was gone from me of commanding with my gold piece
this and that fine thing, I mused, and said, 'Truly, a blue dress
embroidered with gold, and a gold crown, and gold bracelets set with
turquoise stones,--these, and toys; but could I buy in this city a book
of magic, that were my purchase.'

The old fellow smiled, and said to my black slave, 'And thou, hadst thou
this coin, what were thy purchase therewith?'

He, scoffing the old beggar, answered, 'A plaister for sores as broad as
my back, and a camel's hump, O thou old villain!'

The old man grunted in his chest, and said, 'Thou art but a camel
thyself, to hinder a true Mussulman from passing in peace down a street
of Oolb; so 'twere a good purchase and a fitting: know'st thou what is
said of the blessing given by them that receive a charity?

  "'Tis the fertilizing dew that streameth after the sun,
   Strong as the breath of Allah to bless life well begun."

So is my blessing on the little damsel, and she shall have her wish,
wullahy, thou black face! and thou thine.'

This spake the old man, and hobbled off while my slave was jeering him.
So I strolled through the bazaars and thought no more of the old man's
words, and longed to purchase a hundred fineries, and came to the
confectioner's, and smelt the smell of his musk-scented sweetmeats and
lemon sweets and sugared pistachios that are delicious to crunch between
the teeth. My mouth watered, and I said to my slave, 'O Kadrab, a coin,
though 'twere small, would give us privilege in yonder shop to select,
and feast, and approve the skill of the confectioner.'

He grinned, and displayed in his black fist a petty coin of exchange, but
would not let me have it till I had sworn to give no more away to
beggars. So even as we were hurrying into the shop, another old beggar
wretcheder than the first fronted me, and I was moved, and forgot my
promise to Kadrab, and gave him the money. Then was Kadrab wroth, and
kicked the old beggar with his fore-foot, lifting him high in air, and
lo! he did not alight, but rose over the roofs of the houses and beyond
the city, till he was but a speck in the blue of the sky above. So Kadrab
bit his forefinger amazed, and glanced at his foot, and at what was
visible of the old beggarman, and again at his foot, thinking but of what
he had done with it, and the might manifested in that kick, fool that he
was! All the way homeward he kept scanning the sky and lifting his foot
aloft, and I saw him bewildered with a strange conceit, as the poet has
exclaimed in his scorn:

     Oh, world diseased! oh, race empirical!
     Where fools are the fathers of every miracle!

Now, when I was in my chamber, what saw I there but a dress of very
costly blue raiment with gold-work broidery and a lovely circlet of gold,
and gold bracelets set with stones of turquoise, and a basket of gold
woven wire, wherein were toys, wondrous ones--soldiers that cut off each
other's heads and put them on again, springing antelopes, palm-trees that
turned to fountains, and others; and lo! a book in red binding, with
figures on it and clasps of gold, a great book! So I clapped my hands
joyfully, crying, 'The old beggar has done it!' and robed myself in the
dress, and ran forth to tell Ravaloke. As I ran by a window looking on
the inner court, I saw below a crowd of all the slaves of Ravaloke round
one that was seeking to escape from them, and 'twas Kadrab with a camel's
hump on his back, and a broad brown plaister over it, the wretch howling,
peering across his shoulder, and trying to bolt from his burden, as a
horse that would run from his rider. Then I saw that Kadrab also had his
wish, his camel's hump, and thought, 'The old beggar, what was he but a
Genie?' Surely Ravaloke caressed me when he heard of the adventure, and
what had befallen Kadrab was the jest of the city; but for me I spared
little time away from that book, and studied in it incessantly the ways
and windings of magic, till I could hold communication with Genii, and
wield charms to summon them, and utter spells that subdue them,
discovering the haunts of talismans that enthral Afrites and are powerful
among men. There was that Kadrab coming to me daily to call out in the
air for the old beggarman to rid him of his hump; and he would waste
hours looking up into the sky moodily for him, and cursing the five toes
of his foot, for he doubted not the two beggars were one, and that he was
punished for the kick, and lamented it direly, saying in the thick of his
whimperings, 'I'd give the foot that did it to be released from my hump,
O my fair mistress.' So I pitied him, and made a powder and a spell, and
my first experiment in magic was to relieve Kadrab of his hump, and I
succeeded in loosening it, and it came away from him, and sank into the
ground of the garden where we stood. So I told Kadrab to say nothing of
this, but the idle-pated fellow blabbed it over the city, and it came to
the ears of Goorelka. Then she sent for me to visit her, and by the
advice of Ravaloke I went, and she fondled me, and sought to get at the
depth of my knowledge by a spell that tieth every faculty save the
tongue, and it is the spell of vain longing. Now, because I baffled her
arts she knew me more cunning than I seemed, and as night advanced she
affected to be possessed with pleasure in me, and took me in her arms and
sought to fascinate me, and I heard her mutter once, 'Shall I doubt the
warning of Karaz?' So presently she said, 'Come with me'; and I went with
her under the curtain of that apartment into another, a long saloon,
wherein were couches round a fountain, and beyond it an aviary lit with
lamps: when we were there she whistled, and immediately there was a
concert of birds, a wondrous accord of exquisite piping, and she leaned
on a couch and took me by her to listen; sweet and passionate was the
harmony of the birds; but I let not my faculties lull, and observed that
round the throat of every bird was a ringed mark of gold and stamps of
divers gems similar in colour to a ring on the forefinger of her right
hand, which she dazzled my sight with as she flashed it. When we had
listened a long hour to this music, the Princess gazed on me as if to
mark the effect of a charm, and I saw disappointment on her lovely face,
and she bit her lip and looked spiteful, saying, 'Thou art far gone in
the use of magic, and wary, O girl!' Then she laughed unnaturally, and
called slaves to bring in sweet drinks to us, and I drank with her, and
became less wary, and she fondled me more, calling me tender names,
heaping endearments on me; and as the hour of the middle-night approached
I was losing all suspicion in deep languor, and sighed at the song of the
birds, the long love-song, and dozed awake with eyes half shut. I felt
her steal from me, and continued still motionless without alarm: so was I
mastered. What hour it was or what time had passed I cannot say, when a
bird that was chained on a perch before me--a very quaint bird, with a
topknot awry, and black, heavy bill, and ragged gorgeousness of
plumage--the only object between my lids and darkness, suddenly, in the
midst of the singing, let loose a hoarse laugh that was followed by peals
of laughter from the other birds. Thereat I started up, and beheld the
Princess standing over a brazier, and she seized a slipper from her foot
and flung it at the bird that had first laughed, and struck him off his
perch, and went to him and seized him and shook him, crying, 'Dare to
laugh again!' and he kept clearing his throat and trying to catch the
tune he had lost, pitching a high note and a low note; but the marvel of
this laughter of the bird wakened me thoroughly, and I thanked the bird
in my soul, and said to Goorelka, 'More wondrous than their singing, this
laughter, O Princess!'

She would not speak till she had beaten every bird in the aviary, and
then said in the words of the poet:

   Shall they that deal in magic match degrees of wonder?
   From the bosom of one cloud comes the lightning and the thunder.

Then said she, 'O Noorna! I'll tell thee truly my intent, which was to
enchant thee; but I find thee wise, so let us join our powers, and thou
shah become mighty as a sorceress.'

Now, Ravaloke had said to me, 'Her friendship is fire, her enmity frost;
so be cold to the former, to the latter hot,' and I dissembled and
replied, 'Teach me, O Princess!'

So she asked me what I could do. Could I plant a mountain in the sea and
people it? could I anchor a purple cloud under the sun and live there a
year with them I delighted in? could I fix the eyes of the world upon one
head and make the nations bow to it; change men to birds, fishes to men;
and so on--a hundred sorceries that I had never attempted and dreamed not
of my betrothed! I had never offended Allah by a misuse of my powers.
When I told her, she cried, 'Thou art then of a surety she that's fitted
for the custody of the Lily of the Light, so come with me.'

Now, I had heard of the Lily, even this thou holdest may its influence be
unwithering!--and desired to see it. So she led me from the palace to the
shore of the sea, and flung a cockleshell on the waters, and seated
herself in it with me in her lap; and we scudded over the waters, and
entered this Enchanted Sea, and stood by the Lily. Then, I that loved
flowers undertook the custody of this one, knowing not the consequences
and the depth of her wiles. 'Tis truly said:

     The overwise themselves hoodwink,
   For simple eyesight is a modest thing:
     They on the black abysm's brink
   Smile, and but when they fall bitterly think,
   What difference 'twixt the fool and me, Creation's King?

Nevertheless for awhile nothing evil resulted, and I had great joy in the
flower, and tended it with exceeding watchfulness, and loved it, so that
I was brought in my heart to thank the Princess and think well of her.

Now, one summer eve as Ravaloke rested under the shade of his garden
palm, and I studied beside him great volumes of magic, it happened that
after I had read certain pages I closed one of the books marked on the
cover 'Alif,' and shut the clasp louder than I intended, so that he who
was dozing started up, and his head was in the sloped sun in an instant,
and I observed the shadow of his head lengthen out along the grass-plot
towards the mossed wall, and it shot up the wall, darkening it--then
drawing back and lessening, then darting forth like a beast of darkness
irritable for prey. I was troubled, for whatso is seen while the volume
Alif is in use hath a portent; but the discovery of what this might be
baffled me. So I determined to watch events, and it was not many days ere
Ravaloke, who was the leader of the armies of the King of Oolb, was
called forth to subdue certain revolted tributaries of the King, and at
my entreaty took me with him, and I saw battles and encounters lasting a
day's length. Once we were encamped in a fruitful country by a brook
running with a bright eye between green banks, and I that had freedom and
the password of the camp wandered down to it, and refreshed my forehead
with its coolness. So, as I looked under the falling drops, lo! on the
opposite bank the old beggar that had given me such fair return for my
alms and Kadrab his hump! I heard him call, 'This night is the key to the
mystery,' and he was gone. Every incantation I uttered was insufficient
to bring him back. Surely, I hurried to the tents and took no sleep,
watching zealously by the tent of Ravaloke, crouched in its shadow. About
the time of the setting of the moon I heard footsteps approach the tent
within the circle of the guard, and it was a youth that held in his hand
naked steel. When he was by the threshold of the tent, I rose before him
and beheld the favourite of Ravaloke, even the youth he had destined to
espouse me; so I reproached him, and he wept, denying not the intention
he had to assassinate Ravaloke, and when his soul was softened he
confessed to me, ''Twas that I might win the Princess Goorelka, and she
urged me to it, promising the King would promote me to the vacant post of
Ravaloke.'

Then I said to him, 'Lov'st thou Goorelka?'

And he answered, 'Yea, though I know my doom in loving her; and that it
will be the doom of them now piping to her pleasure and denied the
privilege of laughter.'

So I thought, 'Oh, cruel sorceress! the birds are men!' And as I mused,
my breast melted with pity at their desire to laugh, and the little
restraint they had upon themselves notwithstanding her harshness; for
could they think of their changed condition and folly without laughter?
and the folly that sent them fresh mates in misery was indeed matter for
laughter, fed to fulness by constant meditation on the perch. Meantime, I
uncharmed the youth and bade him retire quickly; but as he was going, he
said, 'Beware of the Genie Karaz!' Then I held him back, and after a
parley he told me what he had heard the Princess say, and it was that
Karaz had seen me and sworn to possess me for my beauty. 'Strangely
smiled Goorelka when she spake that,' said he.

Now, the City of Oolb fronts the sea, and behind it is a mountain and a
wood, where the King met Ravaloke on his return victorious over the
rebels. So, to escape the eye of the King I parted with Ravaloke, and
sought to enter the city by a circuitous way; but the paths wound about
and zigzagged, and my slaves suffered nightfall to surprise us in the
entanglements of the wood. I sent them in different directions to strike
into the main path, retaining Kadrab at the bridle of my mule; but that
creature now began to address me in a familiar tone, and he said
something of love for me that enraged me, so that I hit him a blow. Then
came from him sounds like the neighing of mares, and lo! he seized me and
rose with me in the air, and I thought the very heavens were opening to
that black beast, when on a sudden he paused, and shot down with me from
heights of the stars to the mouth of a cavern by the Putrid Sea, and
dragged me into a cavern greatly illuminated, hung like a palace chamber,
and supported on pillars of shining jasper. Then I fell upon the floor in
a swoon, and awaking saw Kadrab no longer, but in his place a Genie. O my
soul, thou halt seen him!--I thought at once, ''tis Karaz!' and when he
said to me, 'This is thy abode, O lady! and I he that have sworn to
possess thee from the hour I saw thee in the chamber of Goorelka,' then
was I certain 'twas Karaz. So, collecting the strength of my soul, I
said, in the words of the poet:

     'Woo not a heart preoccupied!
     What thorn is like a loathing bride?
     Mark ye the shrubs how they turn from the sea,
        The sea's rough whispers shun?
     But like the sun of heaven be,
     And every flower will open wide.
     Woo with the shining patience we
        Beheld in heaven's sun.'

Then he sang:

     Exquisite lady! name the smart
        That fills thy heart.
     Thou art the foot and I the worm:
        Prescribe the Term.

Finding him compliant, I said, 'O great Genie, truly the search of my
life has been to discover him that is, my father, and how I was left in
the wilderness. There 's no peace for me, nor understanding the word of
love, till I hear by whom I was left a babe on the bosom of a dead
mother.'

He exclaimed, and his eyes twinkled, ''Tis that? that shalt thou know in
a span of time. O my mistress, hast thou seen the birds of Goorelka? Thy
father Feshnavat is among them, perched like a bird.'

So I cried, 'And tell me how he may be disenchanted.'

He said, 'Swear first to be mine unreluctantly.'

Then I said, 'What is thy oath?'

He answered, 'I swear, when I swear, by the Identical.'

Thereupon I questioned him concerning the Identical, what it was; and he,
not suspecting, revealed to me the mighty hair in his head now in the
head of Shagpat, even that. So I swore by that to give myself to the
possessor of the Identical, and flattered him. Then said he, 'O lovely
damsel, I am truly one of the most powerful of the Genii; yet am I in
bondage to that sorceress Goorelka by reason of a ring she holdeth; and
could I get that ring from her and be slave to nothing mortal an hour, I
could light creation as a torch, and broil the inhabitants of earth at
one fire.'

I thought, 'That ring is known to me!' And he continued, 'Surely I cannot
assist thee in this work other than by revealing the means of
disenchantment, and it is to keep the birds laughing uninterruptedly an
hour; then are they men again, and take the forms of men that are
laughers--I know not why.'

So I cried, ''Tis well! carry me back to Oolb.'

Then the Genie lifted me into the air, and ceased not speeding rapidly
through it, till I was on the roof of the house of Ravaloke. O sweet
youth! moon of my soul! from that time to the disenchantment of
Feshnavat, I pored over my books, trying experiments in magic, dreadful
ones, hunting for talismans to countervail Goorelka; but her power was
great, and 'twas not in me to get her away from the birds one hour to
free them. On a certain occasion I had stolen to them, and kept them
laughing with stories of man to within an instant of the hour; and they
were laughing exultingly with the easy happy laugh of them that perceive
deliverance sure, when she burst in and beat them even to the door of
death. I saw too in her eyes, that glowed like the eyes of wild cats in
the dark, she suspected me, and I called Allah to aid the just cause
against the sinful, and prepared to war with her.

Now, my desire, which was to liberate my father and his fellows in
tribulation, I knew pure, and had no fear of the sequel, as is declared:

   Fear nought so much as Fear itself; for arm'd with Fear the Foe
   Finds passage to the vital part, and strikes a double blow.

So one day as I leaned from my casement looking on the garden seaward, I
saw a strange red and yellow-feathered bird that flew to the branch of a
citron-tree opposite, with a ring in its beak; and the bird was singing,
and with every note the ring dropped from its bill, and it descended
swiftly in an arrowy slant downward, and seized it ere it reached the
ground, and commenced singing afresh. When I had marked this to happen
many times, I thought, 'How like is this bird to an innocent soul
possessed of magic and using its powers! Lo, it seeketh still to sing as
one of the careless, and cannot relinquish the ring and be as the
careless, and between the two there is neither peace for it nor
pleasure.' Now, while my eyes were on the pretty bird, dwelling on it, I
saw it struck suddenly by an arrow beneath the left wing, and the bird
fluttered to my bosom and dropped in it the ring from its beak. Then it
sprang weakly, and sought to fly and soar, and fluttered; but a blue film
lodged over its eyes, and its panting was quickly ended. So I looked at
the ring and knew it for that one I had noted on the finger of Goorelka.
Red blushed my bliss, and 'twas revealed to me that the bird was of the
birds of the Princess that had escaped from her with the ring. I buried
the bird, weeping for it, and flew to my books, and as I read a glow
stole over me. O my betrothed, eyes of my soul! I read that the possessor
of that ring was mistress of the marvellous hair which is a magnet to the
homage of men, so that they crowd and crush and hunger to adore it, even
the Identical! This was the power that peopled the aviary of Goorelka,
and had well-nigh conquered all the resistance of my craft.

Now, while I read there arose a hubbub and noise in the outer court, and
shrieks of slaves. The noise approached with rapid strides, and before I
could close my books Goorelka burst in upon me, crying, 'Noorna! Noorna!'
Wild and haggard was her head, and she rushed to my books and saw them
open at the sign of the ring: then began our combat. She menaced me as
never mortal was menaced. Rapid lightning-flashes were her
transformations, and she was a serpent, a scorpion, a lizard, a lioness
in succession, but I leapt perpetually into fresh rings of fire and of
witched water; and at the fiftieth transformation, she fell on the floor
exhausted, a shuddering heap. Seeing that, I ran from her to the aviary
in her palace, and hurried over a story of men to the birds, that rocked
them on their perches with chestquakes of irresistible laughter. Then
flew I back to the Princess, and she still puffing on the floor,
commenced wheedling and begging the ring of me, stinting no promises. At
last she cried, 'Girl! what is this ring to thee without beauty? Thy
beauty is in my keeping.'

And I exclaimed, 'How? how?' smitten to the soul.

She answered, 'Yea; and I can wear it as my own, adding it to my own,
when thou'rt a hag!'

My betrothed! I was on the verge of giving her the ring for this secret,
when a violent remote laughter filled the inner hollow of my ears, and it
increased, till the Princess heard it; and now the light of my casement
was darkened with birds, the birds of Goorelka, laughing as on a wind of
laughter. So I opened to them, and they darted in, laughing all of them,
till I could hold out no longer, and the infection of laughter seized me,
and I rolled with it; and the Princess, she too laughed a hyaena-laugh
under a cat's grin, and we all of us remained in this wise some minutes,
laughing the breath out of our bodies, as if death would take us. Whoso
in the City of Oolb heard us, the slaves, the people, and the King,
laughed, knowing not the cause. This day is still remembered in Oolb as
the day of laughter. Now, at a stroke of the hour the laughter ceased,
and I saw in the chamber a crowd of youths and elders of various ranks;
but their visages were become long and solemn as that of them that have
seen a dark experience. 'Tis certain they laughed little in their lives
from that time, and the muscles of their cheeks had rest. So I caught
down my veil, and cried to the Princess, 'My father is among these; point
him out to me.'

Ere she replied one stepped forth, even Feshnavat, my father, and called
me by name, and knew me by a spot on the left arm, and made himself known
to me, and told me the story of my dead mother, how she had missed her
way from the caravan in the desert, and he searching her was set upon by
robbers, and borne on their expeditions. Nothing said he of the sorceries
of Goorelka, and I, not wishing to provoke the Princess, suffered his
dread to exist. So I kissed him, and bowed my head to him, and she fled
from the sight of innocent happiness. Then took I the ring, and summoned
Karaz, and ordered him to reinstate all those princes and chiefs and
officers in their possessions and powers, on what part of earth soever
that might be. Never till I stood as the Lily and thy voice sweetened the
name of love in my ears, heard I aught of delicate delightfulness, like
the sound of their gratitude. Many wooed me to let them stay by me and
guard me, and do service all their lives to me; but this I would not
allow, and though they were fair as moons, some of them, I responded not
to their soft glances, speaking calmly the word of farewell, for I was
burdened with other thoughts.

Now, when the Genie had done my bidding, he returned to me joyfully. My
soul sickened to think myself his by a promise; but I revolved the words
of my promise, and saw in them a loophole of escape. So, when he claimed
me, I said, 'Ay! ay! lay thy head in my lap,' as if my mind treasured it.
Then he lay there, and revealed to me his plans for the destruction of
men. 'Or,' said he, 'they shall be our slaves and burden-beasts, for
there 's now no restraint on me, now thou art mistress of the ring, and
mine.' Thereupon his imagination swelled, and he saw his evil will
enthroned, and the hopes of men beneath his heel, crying, 'And the more I
crush them the thicker they crowd, for the Identical compelleth their
very souls to adore in spite of distaste.'

Then said I, 'Tell me, O Genie! is the Identical subservient to me in
another head save thine?'

He answered, 'Nay I in another head 'tis a counteraction to the power of
the Ring, the Ring powerless over it.'

And I said, 'Must it live in a head, the Identical?'

Cried he, 'Woe to what else holdeth it!'

I whispered in his hairy pointed red ear, 'Sleep! sleep!' and lulled him
with a song, and he slept, being weary with my commissioning. Then I bade
Feshnavat, my father, fetch me one of my books of magic, and read in it
of the discovery of the Identical by means of the Ring; and I took the
Ring and hung it on a hair of my own head over the head of the Genie, and
saw one of the thin lengths begin to twist and dart and writhe, and shift
lustres as a creature in anguish. So I put the Ring on my forefinger, and
turned the hair round and round it, and tugged. Lo, with a noise that
stunned me, the hair came out! O my betrothed, what shrieks and roars
were those: with which the Genie awoke, finding himself bare of the
Identical! Oolb heard them, and the sea foamed like the mouth of madness,
as the Genie sped thunder-like over it, following me in mid-air. Such a
flight was that! Now, I found it not possible to hold the Identical, for
it twisted and stung, and was nigh slipping from me while I flew. I saw
white on a corner of the Desert, a city, and I descended on it by the
shop of a clothier that sat quietly by his goods and stuffs, thinking of
fate less than of kabobs and stews and rare seasonings. That city hath
now his name. Wullahy, had I not then sown in his head that hair which he
weareth yet, how had I escaped Karaz, and met thee? Wondrous are the
decrees of Providence! Praise be to Allah for them! So the Genie, when he
found himself baffled by me, and Shagpat with the mighty hair in his
head, the Identical, he yelled, and fetched Shagpat a slap that sent him
into the middle of the street; but Kadza screamed after him, and there
was immediately such lamentation in the city about Shagpat, and such
tearing of hair about him, that I perceived at once the virtue that was
in the Identical. As for Karaz, finding his claim as possessor of the
Identical no more valid, he vanished, and has been my rebellious slave
since, till thou, O my betrothed, mad'st me spend him in curing thy folly
on the horse Garraveen, and he escaped from my circles beyond the
dominion of the Ring; yet had he his revenge, for I that was keeper of
the Lily, had, I now learned ruefully, a bond of beauty with it, and
whatever was a stain to one withered the other. Then that sorceress
Goorelka stole my beauty from me by sprinkling a blight on the petals of
the fair flower, and I became as thou first saw'st me. But what am I as I
now am? Blissful! blissful! Surely I grew humble with the loss of beauty,
and by humility wise, so that I assisted Feshnavat to become Vizier by
the Ring, and watched for thy coming to shave Shagpat, as a star
watcheth; for 'tis written, 'A barber alone shall be shearer of the
Identical'; and he only, my betrothed, hath power to plant it in Aklis,
where it groweth as a pillar, bringing due reverence to Aklis.




THE WILES OF RABESQURAT

Now, when Noorna bin Noorka had made an end of her narration, she folded
her hands and was mute awhile; and to the ear of Shibli Bagarag it seemed
as if a sweet instrument had on a sudden ceased luting. So, as he leaned,
listening for her voice to recommence, she said quickly, 'See yonder fire
on the mountain's height!'

He looked and saw a great light on the summit of a lofty mountain before
them.

Then said she, 'That is Aklis! and it is ablaze, knowing a visitant near.
Tighten now the hairs of Garraveen about thy wrist; touch thy lips with
the waters of Paravid; hold before thee the Lily, and make ready to enter
the mountain. Lo, my betrothed, thou art in possession of the three means
that melt opposition, and the fault is thine if thou fail.'

He did as she directed; and they were taken on a tide and advanced
rapidly to the mountain, so that the waters smacked and crackled beneath
the shell, covering it with silver showering arches of glittering spray.
Then the fair beams of the moon became obscured, and the twain reddened
with the reflection of the fire, and the billows waxed like riotous
flames; and presently the shell rose upon the peak of many waves swollen
to one, and looking below, they saw in the scarlet abyss of waters at
their feet a monstrous fish, with open jaws and one baleful eye; and the
fish was lengthy as a caravan winding through the desert, and covered
with fiery scales. Shibli Bagarag heard the voice of Noorna shriek
affrightedly, 'Karaz!' and as they were sliding on the down slope, she
stood upright in the shell, pronouncing rapidly some words in magic; and
the shell closed upon them both, pressing them together, and writing
darkness on their very eyeballs. So, while they were thus, they felt
themselves gulped in, and borne forward with terrible swiftness, they
knew not where, like one that hath a dream of sinking; and outside the
shell a rushing, gurgling noise, and a noise as of shouting multitudes,
and muffled multitudes muttering complaints and yells and querulous
cries, told them they were yet speeding through the body of the depths in
the belly of the fish. Then there came a shock, and the shell was struck
with light, and they were sensible of stillness without motion. Then a
blow on the shell shivered it to fragments, and they were blinded with
seas of brilliancy on all sides from lamps and tapers and crystals,
cornelians and gems of fiery lustre, liquid lights and flashing mirrors,
and eyes of crowding damsels, bright ones. So, when they had risen, and
could bear to gaze on the insufferable splendour, they saw sitting on a
throne of coral and surrounded by slaves with scimitars, a fair Queen,
with black eyes, kindlers of storms, torches in the tempest, and with
floating tresses, crowned with a circlet of green-spiked precious stones
and masses of crimson weed with flaps of pearl; and she was robed with a
robe of amber, and had saffron sandals, loose silvery-silken trousers
tied in at the ankle, the ankle white as silver; wonderful was the
quivering of rays from the jewels upon her when she but moved a finger!
Now, as they stood with their hands across their brows, she cried out, 'O
ye traversers of my sea! how is this, that I am made to thank Karaz for a
sight of ye?'

And Noorna bin Noorka answered, 'Surely, O Queen Rabesqurat, the haven of
our voyage was Aklis, and we feared delay, seeing the fire of the
mountain ablaze with expectations of us.'

Then the Queen cried angrily, ''Tis well thou hadst wit to close the
shell, O Noorna, or there would have been delay indeed. Say, is not the
road to Aklis through my palace? And it is the road thousands travel.'

So Noorna bin Noorka said, 'O Queen, this do they; but are they of them
that reach Aklis?'

And the Queen cried violently, purpling with passion, 'This to me! when I
helped ye to the plucking of the Lily?'

Now, the Queen muttered an imprecation, and called the name 'Abarak!' and
lo, a door opened in one of the pillars of jasper leading from the
throne, and there came forth a little man, humped, with legs like bows,
and arms reaching to his feet; in his hand a net weighted with leaden
weights. So the Queen levelled her finger at Noorna, and he spun the net
above her head, and dropped it on her shoulder, and dragged her with him
to the pillar. When Shibli Bagarag saw that, the world darkened to him,
and he rushed upon Abarak; but Noorna called swiftly in his ear, 'Wait!
wait! Thou by thy spells art stronger than all here save Abarak. Be true!
Remember the seventh pillar!' Then, with a spurn from the hand of Abarak,
the youth fell back senseless at the feet of the Queen.

Now, with the return of consciousness his hearing was bewitched with
strange delicious melodies, the touch of stringed instruments, and others
breathed into softly as by the breath of love, delicate, tender, alive
with enamoured bashfulness. Surely, the soul that heard them dissolved
like a sweet in the goblet, mingling with so much ecstasy of sound; and
those melodies filling the white cave of the ear were even at once to
drown the soul in delightfulness and buoy it with bliss, as a
heavy-leaved flower is withered and refreshed by sun and dews. Surely,
the youth ceased not to listen, and oblivion of cares and aught other in
this life, save that hidden luting and piping, pillowed his drowsy head.
At last there was a pause, and it seemed every maze of music had been
wandered through. Opening his eyes hurriedly, as with the loss of the
music his own breath had gone likewise, he beheld a garden golden with
the light of lamps hung profusely from branches and twigs of trees by the
glowing cheeks of fruits, apple and grape, pomegranate and quince; and he
was reclining on a bank piled with purple cushions, his limbs clad in the
richest figured silks, fringed like the ends of clouds round the sun,
with amber fringes. He started up, striving to recall the confused memory
of his adventures and what evil had befallen him, and he would have
struggled with the vision of these glories, but it mastered him with the
strength of a potent drug, so that the very name of his betrothed was
forgotten by him, and he knew not whither he would, or the thing he
wished for. Now, when he had risen from the soft green bank that was his
couch, lo, at his feet a damsel weeping! So he lifted her by the hand,
and she arose and looked at him, and began plaining of love and its
tyrannies, softening him, already softened. Then said she, 'What I suffer
there is another, lovelier than I, suffering; thou the cause of it, O
cruel youth!'

He said, 'How, O damsel? what of my cruelty? Surely, I know nothing of
it.'

But she exclaimed, 'Ah, worse to feign forgetfulness!'

Now, he was bewildered at the words of the damsel, and followed her
leading till they entered a dell in the garden canopied with foliage, and
beyond it a green rise, and on the rise a throne. So he looked earnestly,
and beheld thereon Queen Rabesqurat, she sobbing, her dark hair pouring
in streams from the crown of her head. Seeing him, she cleared her eyes,
and advanced to meet him timidly and with hesitating steps; but he shrank
from her, and the Queen shrieked with grief, crying, 'Is there in this
cold heart no relenting?'

Then she said to him winningly, and in a low voice, 'O youth, my husband,
to whom I am a bride!'

He marvelled, saying, 'This is a game, for indeed I am no husband,
neither have I a bride . . . yet have I confused memory of some betrothal
. . .'

Thereupon she cried, 'Said I not so? and I the betrothed.'

Still he exclaimed, 'I cannot think it! Wullahy, it were a wonder!'

So she said, 'Consider how a poor youth of excellent proportions came to
a flourishing Court before one, a widowed Queen, and she cast eyes of
love on him, and gave him rule over her and all that was hers when he had
achieved a task, and they were wedded. Oh, the bliss of it! Knit together
with bond and a writing; and these were the dominions, I the Queen, woe's
me!--thou the youth!'

Now, he was roiled by the enchantments of the Queen, caught in the snare
of her beguilings; and he let her lead him to a seat beside her on the
throne, and sat there awhile in the midst of feastings, mazed, thinking,
'What life have I lived before this, if the matter be as I behold?'
thinking, ''Tis true I have had visions of a widowed queen, and I a poor
youth that came to her court, and espoused her, sitting in the vacant
seat beside her, ruling a realm; but it was a dream, a dream,--yet, wah!
here is she, here am I, yonder my dominions!' Then he thought, 'I will
solve it!' So, on a sudden he said to her beside him, 'O Queen, sovereign
of hearts! enlighten me as to a perplexity.'

She answered, 'The voice of my lord is music in the ear of the bride.'

Then said he, in the tone of one doubting realities, 'O fair Queen, is
there truly now such a one as Shagpat in the world?'

She laughed at his speech and the puzzled appearance of his visage,
replying, 'Surely there liveth one, Shagpat by name in the world; strange
is the history of him, his friends, and enemies; and it would bear
recital.'

Then he said, 'And one, the daughter of a Vizier, Vizier to the King in
the City of Shagpat?'

Thereat, she shook her head, saying, 'I know nought of that one.'

Now, Shibli Bagarag was mindful of his thwackings; and in this the wisdom
of Noorna, is manifest, that the sting of them yet chased away doubts of
illusion regarding their having been, as the poet says,

     If thou wouldst fix remembrance--thwack!
        'Tis that oblivion controls;
     I care not if't be on the back,
        Or on the soles.

He thought, 'Wah! yet feel I the thong, and the hiss of it as of the
serpent in the descent, and the smack of it as the mouth of satisfaction
in its contact with tender regions. This, wullahy! was no dream.'
Nevertheless, he was ashamed to allude thereto before the Queen, and he
said, 'O my mistress, another question, one only! This Shagpat--is he
shaved?'

She said, 'Clean shorn!'

Quoth he, astonished, grief-stricken, with drawn lips, 'By which hand,
chosen above men?'

And she exclaimed, 'O thou witty one that feignest not to know! Wullahy!
by this hand of thine, O my lord and king, daring that it is; dexterous!
surely so! And the shaving of Shagpat was the task achieved,--I the dower
of it, and the rich reward.'

Now, he was meshed yet deeper in the net of her subtleties, and by her
calling him 'lord and king'; and she gave a signal for fresh
entertainments, exhausting the resources of her art, the mines of her
wealth, to fascinate him. Ravishments of design and taste were on every
side, and he was in the lap of abundance, beguiled by magic, caressed by
beauty and a Queen. Marvel not that he was dazzled, and imagined himself
already come to the great things foretold of him by the readers of
planets and the casters of nativities in Shiraz. He assisted in beguiling
himself, trusting wilfully to the two witnesses of things visible; as is
declared by him of wise sayings:

     There is in every wizard-net a hole,
     So the entangler first must blind the soul.

And it is again said by that same teacher:

     Ye that the inner spirit's sight would seal,
     Nought credit but what outward orbs reveal.

And the soul of Shibli Bagarag was blinded by Rabesqurat in the depths of
the Enchanted Sea. She sang to him, luting deliriously; and he was
intoxicated with the blissfulness of his fortune, and took a lute and
sang to her love-verses in praise of her, rhyming his rapture. Then they
handed the goblet to each other, and drank till they were on fire with
the joy of things, and life blushed beauteousness. Surely, Rabesqurat was
becoming forgetful of her arts through the strength of those draughts,
till her eye marked the Lily by his side, which he grasped constantly,
the bright flower, and she started and said, 'One grant, O my King, my
husband!'

So he said courteously, 'All grants are granted to the lovely, the
fascinating; and their grief will be lack of aught to ask for?'

Then said she, 'O my husband, my King, I am jealous of that silly flower:
laugh at my weakness, but fling it from thee.'

Now, he was about to cast it from him, when a vanity possessed his mind,
and he exclaimed, 'See first the thing I will do, a wonder.'

She cried, 'No wonders, my life! I am sated with them.'

And he said, 'I am oblivious, O Queen, of how I came by this flower and
this phial; but thou shalt hear a thing beyond the power of common magic,
and see that I am something.'

Now, she plucked at him to abstain from his action, but he held the phial
to the flower. She signed imperiously to some slaves to stay his right
wrist, and they seized on it; but not all of them together could withhold
him from dropping a drop into the petals of the flower, and lo, the Lily
spake, a voice from it like the voice of Noorna, saying, 'Remember the
Seventh Pillar.' Thereat, he lifted his eyes to his brows and frowned
back memory to his aid, and the scene of Karaz, Rabesqurat, Abarak, and
his betrothed was present to him. So perceiving that, the Queen delayed
not while he grasped the phial to take in her hands some water from a
basin near, and flung it over him, crying, 'Oblivion!' And while his mind
was straining to bring back images of what had happened, he fell forward
once more at the feet of Rabesqurat, senseless as a stone falls; such was
the force of her enchantments.

Now, when he awoke the second time he was in the bosom of darkness, and
the Lily gone from his hand; so he lifted the phial to make certain of
that, and groped about till he came to what seemed an urn to the touch,
and into this he dropped a drop, and asked for the Lily; and a voice
said, 'I caught a light from it in passing.' And he came in the darkness
to a tree, and a bejewelled bank, and other urns, and swinging lamps
without light, and a running water, and a grassy bank, and flowers, and a
silver seat, sprinkling each; and they said all in answer to his question
of the Lily, 'I caught a light from it in passing.' At the last he
stumbled upon the steps of a palace, and ascended them, endowing the
steps with speech as he went, and they said, 'The light of it went over
us.' He groped at the porch of the palace, and gave the door a voice, and
it opened on jasper hinges, shrieking, 'The light of it went through me.'
Then he entered a spacious hall, scattering drops, and voices exclaimed,
'We glow with the light of it.' He passed, groping his way through other
halls and dusk chambers, scattering drops, and as he advanced the voices
increased in the fervour of their replies, saying sequently: 'We blush
with the light of it; We beam with the light of it; We burn with the
light of it.' So, presently he found himself in a long low room, sombrely
lit, roofed with crystals; and in a corner of the room, lo! a damsel on a
couch of purple, she white as silver, spreading radiance. Of such
lustrous beauty was she that beside her, the Princess Goorelka as Shibli
Bagarag first beheld her, would have paled like a morning moon; even
Noorna had waned as Both a flower in fierce heat; and the Queen of
Enchantments was but the sun behind a sand-storm, in comparison with that
effulgent damsel on the length of the purple couch. Well for him he wilt
of the magic which floated through that palace; as is said,

     Tempted by extremes,
     The soul is most secure;
   Too vivid loveliness blinds with its beams,
   And eyes turned inward perceive the lure.

Pulling down his turban hastily, he stepped on tiptoe to within arm's
reach of her, and, looking another way, inclined over her soft vermeil
mouth the phial slowly till it brimmed the neck, and dropped a drop of
Paravid between the bow of those sweet lips. Still not daring to gaze on
her, he said then, 'My question is of the Lily, the Lily of the Sea, and
where is it, O marvel?'

And he heard a voice answer in the tones of a silver bell, clear as a
wind in strung wires, 'Where I lie, lies the Lily, the Lily of the Sea; I
with it, it with me.'

Said he, 'O breather of music, tell me how I may lay hand on the flower
of beauty to bear it forth.'

And he heard the voice, 'An equal space betwixt my right side and my
left, and from the shoulder one span and half a span downward.'

Still without power to eye her, he measured the space and the spans, his
hand beneath the coverlids of the couch, and at a spot of the bosom his
hand sank in, and he felt a fluttering thing, fluttering like a frighted
bird in the midst of the fire. And the voice said, 'Quick, seize it, and
draw it out, and tie it to my feet by the twines of red silk about it.'

He seized it and drew it out, and it was a heart--a heart of
blood-streaming with crimson, palpitating. Tears flashed on his sight
beholding it, and pity took the seat of fear, and he turned his eyes full
on her, crying, 'O sad fair thing! O creature of anguish! O painful
beauty! Oh, what have I done to thee?'

But she panted, and gasped short and shorter gasps, pointing with one
finger to her feet. Then he took the warm living heart while it yet leapt
and quivered and sobbed; and he held it with a trembling hand, and tied
it by the red twines of silk about it to her feet, staining their
whiteness. When that was done, his whole soul melted with pity and
swelled with sorrow, and ere he could meet her eyes a swoon overcame him.
Surely, when the world dawned to him a third time in those regions the
damsel was no longer there, but in her place the Lily of Light. He
thought, 'It was a vision, that damsel! a terrible one; one to terrify
and bewilder! a bitter sweetness! Oh, the heart, the heart!' Reflecting
on the heart brought to his lids an overcharging of tears, and he wept
violently awhile. Then was he warned by the thought of his betrothed to
take the Lily and speed with it from the realms of Rabesqurat; and he
stole along the halls of the palace, and by the plashing fountains, and
across the magic courts, passing chambers of sleepers, fair dreamers, and
through ante-rooms crowded with thick-lipped slaves. Lo, as he held the
Lily to light him on, and the light of the Lily fell on them that were
asleep, they paled and shrank, and were such as the death-chill maketh of
us. So he called upon his head the protection of Allah, and went swifter,
to chase from his limbs the shudder of awe; and there were some that
slept not, but stared at him with fixed eyes, eyes frozen by the light of
the Lily, and he shunned those, for they were like spectres, haunting
spirits. After he had coursed the length of the palace, he came to a
steep place outside it, a rock with steps cut in stairs, and up these he
went till he came to a small door in the rock, and lying by it a bar; so
he seized the bar and smote the door, and the door shivered, for on his
right wrist were the hairs of Garraveen. Bending his body, he slipped
through the opening, and behold, an orchard dropping blossoms and ripe
golden fruits, streams flowing through it over sands, and brooks bounding
above glittering gems, and long dewy grasses, profusion of scented
flowers, shade and sweetness. So he let himself down to the ground, which
was an easy leap from the aperture, and walked through the garden,
holding the Lily behind him, for here it darkened all, and the glowing
orchard was a desert by its light. Presently, his eye fell on a couch
swinging between two almond trees, and advancing to it he beheld the
black-eyed Queen gathered up, folded temptingly, like a swaying fruit;
she with the gold circlet on her head, and she was fair as blossom of the
almond in a breeze of the wafted rose-leaf. Sweetly was she gathered up,
folded temptingly, and Shibli Bagarag refrained from using the Lily,
thinking, ''Tis like the great things foretold of me, this having of
Queens within the very grasp, swinging to and fro as if to taunt
backwardness!' Then he thought, ''Tis an enchantress! I will yet try her.'
So he made a motion of flourishing the Lily once or twice, but forbore,
fascinated, for she had on her fair face the softness of sleep, her lips
closed in dimples, and the wicked fire shut from beneath her lids.
Mastering his mind, the youth at last held the Lily to her, and saw a
sight to blacken the world and all bright things with its hideousness.
Scarce had he time to thrust the Lily in his robes, when the Queen
started up and clapped her hands, crying hurriedly, 'Abarak! Abarak!' and
the little man appeared in a moment at the door by which Shibli Bagarag
had entered the orchard. So, she cried still, 'Abarak!' and he moved
toward her. Then she said, 'How came this youth here, prying in my
private walks, my bowers? Speak!'

He answered, 'By the aid of Garraveen only, O Queen! and there is no
force resisteth the bar so wielded.'

Rabesqurat looked under her brows at Shibli Bagarag and saw the horror on
his face, and she cried out to Abarak in an agony, 'Fetch me the mirror!'
Then Abarak ran, and returned ere the Queen had drawn seven impatient
breaths, and in one hand he bore a sack, in the other a tray: so he
emptied the contents of the sack on the surface of the tray; surely they
were human eyes! and the Queen flung aside her tresses, and stood over
them. The youth saw her smile at them, and assume tender and taunting
manners before them, and imperious manners, killing glances, till in each
of the eyes there was a sparkle. Then she flung back her head as one that
feedeth on a mighty triumph, exclaiming, 'Yet am I Rabesqurat! wide is my
sovereignty.' Sideways then she regarded Shibli Bagarag, and it seemed
she was urging Abarak to do a deed beyond his powers, he frowning and
pointing to the right wrist of the youth. So she clenched her hands an
instant with that feeling which knocketh a nail in the coffin of a desire
not dead, and controlled herself, and went to the youth, breaking into
beams of beauty; and an enchanting sumptuousness breathed round her, so
that in spite of himself he suffered her to take him by the hand and lead
him from that orchard through the shivered door and into the palace and
the hall of the jasper pillars. Strange thrills went up his arm from the
touch of that Queen, and they were as little snakes twisting and darting
up, biting poison-bites of irritating blissfulness.

Now, the hall was spread for a feast, and it was hung with lamps of
silver, strewn with great golden goblets, and viands, coloured meats, and
ordered fruits on shining platters. Then said she to Shibli Bagarag, 'O
youth! there shall be no deceit, no guile between us. Thou art but my
guest, I no bride to thee, so take the place of the guest beside me.'

He took his seat beside her, Abarak standing by, and she helped the youth
to this dish and that dish, from the serving of slaves, caressing him
with flattering looks to starve aversion and nourish tender fellowship.
And he was like one that slideth down a hill and can arrest his descent
with a foot, yet faileth that freewill. When he had eaten and drunk with
her, the Queen said, 'O youth, no other than my guest! art thou not a
prince in the country thou comest from?'

In a moment the pride of the barber forsook him, and he equivocated,
saying, 'O Queen! there is among the stars somewhere, as was divined by
the readers of planets, a crown hanging for me, and I search a point of
earth to intercept its fall.'

She marked him beguiled by vanity, and put sweetmeats to his mouth,
exclaiming, 'Thy manners be those of a prince!' Then she sang to him of
the loneliness of her life, and of one with whom she wished to share her
state,--such as he. And at her signal came troops of damsels that stood
in rings and luted sweetly on the same theme--the Queen's loneliness, her
love. And he said to the Queen, 'Is this so?'

She answered, 'Too truly so!'

Now, he thought, 'She shall at least speak the thing that is, if she look
it not.' So he took the goblet, and contrived to drop a drop from the
phial of Paravid therein without her observing him; and he handed her the
goblet, she him; and they drank. Surely, the change that came over the
Queen was an enchantment, and her eyes shot lustre, her tongue was
loosed, and she laughed like one intoxicated, lolling in her seat, lost
to majesty and the sway of her magic, crying, 'O Abarak! Abarak! little
man, long my slave and my tool; ugly little man! And O Shibli Bagarag!
nephew of the barber! weak youth! small prince of the tackle! have I not
nigh fascinated thee? And thou wilt forfeit those two silly eyes of thine
to the sack. And, O Abarak, Abarak! little man, have I flattered thee? So
fetter I the strong with my allurements! and I stay the arrow in its
flight! and I blunt the barb of high intents! Wah! I have drunk a potent
stuff; I talk! Wullahy! I know there is a danger menacing Shagpat, and
the eyes of all Genii are fixed on him. And if he be shaved, what changes
will follow! But 'tis in me to delude the barber, wullahy! and I will
avert the calamity. I will save Shagpat!'

While the Queen Rabesqurat prated in this wise with flushed face, Shibli
Bagarag was smitten with the greatness of his task, and reproached his
soul with neglect of it. And he thought, 'I am powerful by spells as none
before me have been, and 'twas by my weakness the Queen sought to tangle
me. I will clasp the Seventh Pillar and make an end of it, by Allah and
his Prophet (praised be the name!), and I will reach Aklis by a short
path and shave Shagpat with the sword.'

So he looked up, and Abarak was before him, the lifted nostrils of the
little man wide with the flame of anger. And Abarak said, 'O youth,
regard me with the eyes of judgement! Now, is it not frightful to rate me
little?--an instigation of the evil one to repute me ugly?'

The promptings of wisdom counselled Shibli Bagarag to say, 'Frightful
beyond contemplation, O Abarak! one to shame our species! Surely, there
is a moon between thy legs, a pear upon thy shoulders, and the cock that
croweth is no match for thee in measure.'

Abarak cried, 'We be aggrieved, we two! O youth, son of my uncle, I will
give thee means of vengeance; give thou me means.'

Shibli Bagarag felt scorn at the Queen, and her hollowness, and he said,
''Tis well; take this Lily and hold it to her.'

Now, the Queen jeered Abarak, and as he approached her she shouted,
'What! thou small of build! mite of creation! sour mixture! thou puppet
of mine! thou! comest thou to seek a second kiss against the compact,
knowing that I give not the well-favoured of mortals beyond one, a
second.

Little delayed Abarak at this to put her to the test of the Lily, and he
held the flower to her, and saw the sight, and staggered back like one
stricken with a shaft. When he could get a breath he uttered such a howl
that Rabesqurat in her drunkenness was fain to save her ears, and the
hall echoed as with the bellows of a thousand beasts of the forest. Then,
to glut his revenge he ran for the sack, and emptied the contents of it,
the Queen's mirror, before her; and the sackful of eyes, they saw the
sight, and sickened, rolling their whites. That done, Abarak gave Shibli
Bagarag the bar of iron, and bade him smite the pillars, all save the
seventh; and he smote them strengthily, crumbling them at a blow, and
bringing down the great hall and its groves, and glasses and gems, lamps,
traceries, devices, a heap of ruin, the seventh pillar alone standing.
Then, while he pumped back breath into his body, Abarak said, 'There's no
delaying in this place now, O youth! Say, halt thou spells for the
entering of Aklis?'

He answered, 'Three!'

Then said Abarak, ''Tis well! Surely now, if thou takest me in thy
service, I'll help thee to master the Event, and serve thee faithfully,
requiring nought from thee save a sight of the Event, and 'tis I that
myself missed one, wiled by Rabesqurat.'

Quoth Shibli Bagarag, 'Thou?'

He answered, 'No word of it now. Is't agreed?'

So Shibli Bagarag cried, 'Even so.'

Thereupon, the twain entered the pillar, leaving Rabesqurat prone, and
the waves of the sea bounding toward her where she lay. Now, they
descended and ascended flights of slippery steps, and sped together along
murky passages, in which light never was, and under arches of caves with
hanging crystals, groping and tumbling on hurriedly, till they came to an
obstruction, and felt an iron door, frosty to the touch. Then Abarak said
to Shibli Bagarag, 'Smite!' And the youth lifted the bar to his right
shoulder, and smote; and the door obeyed the blow, and discovered an
opening into a strange dusky land, as it seemed a valley, on one side of
which was a ragged copper sun setting low, large as a warrior's battered
shield, giving deep red lights to a brook that fell, and over a flat
stream a red reflection, and to the sides of the hills a dark red glow.
The sky was a brown colour; the earth a deeper brown, like the skins of
tawny lions. Trees with reddened stems stood about the valley, scattered
and in groups, showing between their leaves the cheeks of melancholy
fruits swarthily tinged, and toward the centre of the valley a shining
palace was visible, supported by massive columns of marble reddened by
that copper sun. Shibli Bagarag was awed at the stillness that hung
everywhere, and said to Abarak, 'Where am I, O Abarak? the look of this
place is fearful!'

And the little man answered, 'Where, but beneath the mountains in Aklis?
Wullahy! I should know it, I that keep the passage of the seventh
pillar!'

Then the thought of his betrothed Noorna, and her beauty, and the words,
'Remember the seventh pillar,' struck the heart of Shibli Bagarag, and he
exclaimed passionately, 'Is she in safety? Noorna, my companion, my
betrothed, netted by thee, O Abarak!'

Abarak answered sharply, 'Speak not of betrothals in this place, or the
sword of Aklis will move without a hand!'

But Shibli Bagarag waxed the colour of the sun that was over them, and
cried, 'By Allah! I will smite thee with the bar, if thou swear not to
her safety, and point not out to me where she now is.'

Then said Abarak, 'Thou wilt make a better use of the bar by lifting it
to my shoulder, and poising it, and peering through it.'

Shibli Bagarag lifted the bar to the shoulder of Abarak, and poised it,
and peered through the length of it, and lo! there was a sea tossing in
tumult, and one pillar standing erect in the midst of the sea; and on the
pillar, above the washing waves, with hair blown back, and flapping
raiment, pale but smiling still, Noorna, his betrothed!

Now, when he saw her, he made a rush to the door of the passage; but
Abarak blocked the way, crying, 'Fool! a step backward in Aklis is
death!'

And when he had wrestled with him and reined him, Abarak said, 'Haste to
reach the Sword from the sons of Aklis, if thou wouldst save her.'

He drew him to the brink of the stream, and whistled a parrot's whistle;
and Shibli Bagarag beheld a boat draped with drooping white lotuses that
floated slowly toward them; and when it was near, he and Abarak entered
it, and saw one, a veiled figure, sitting in the stern, who neither moved
to them nor spake, but steered the boat to a certain point of land across
the stream, where stood an elephant ready girt for travellers to mount
him; and the elephant kneeled among the reeds as they approached, that
they might mount him, and when they had each taken a seat, moved off,
waving his trunk. Presently the elephant came to a halt, and went upon
his knees again, and the two slid off his back, and were among black
slaves that bowed to the ground before them, and led them to the shining
gates of the palace in silence. Now, on the first marble step of the
palace there sat an old white-headed man dressed like a dervish, who held
out at arm's length a branch of gold with golden singing-birds between
its leaves, saying, 'This for the strongest of ye!'

Abarak exclaimed, 'I am that one'; and he held forth his hand for the
branch.

But Shibli Bagarag cried, 'Nay, 'tis mine. Wullahy, what has not the
strength of this hand overthrown?'

Then the brows of Abarak twisted; his limbs twitched, and he bawled, 'To
the proof!' waking all the echoes of Aklis. Shibli Bagarag was tempted in
his desire for the golden branch to lift the iron bar upon Abarak, when
lo! the phial of Paravid fell from his vest, and he took it, and
sprinkled a portion of the waters over the singing birds, and in a moment
they burst into a sweet union of voices, singing, in the words of the
poet:

     When for one serpent were two asses match?
     How shall one foe but with wiles master double?
     So let the strong keep for ever good watch,
     Lest their strength prove a snare, and themselves a mere bubble;
     For vanity maketh the strongest most weak,
     As lions and men totter after the struggle.
     Ye heroes, be modest! while combats ye seek,
     The cunning one trippeth ye both with a juggle.

Now, at this verse of the birds Shibli Bagarag fixed his eye on the old
man, and the beard of the old man shrivelled; he waxed in size, and flew
up in a blaze and with a baffled shout bearing the branch; surely, his
features were those of Karaz, and Shibli Bagarag knew him by the length
of his limbs, his stiff ears, and copper skin. Then he laughed a loud
laugh, but Abarak sobbed, saying, 'By this know I that I never should
have seized the Sword, even though I had vanquished the illusions of
Rabesqurat, which held me fast half-way.'

So Shibli Bagarag stared at him, and said, 'Wert thou also a searcher, O
Abarak?'

But Abarak cried, 'Rouse not the talkative tongue of the past, O youth!
Wullahy! relinquish the bar that is my bar, won by me, for the Sword is
within thy grip, and they await thee up yonder steps. Go! go! and look
for me here on thy return.'




THE PALACE OF AKLIS

Now, Shibli Bagarag assured himself of his three spells, and made his
heart resolute, and hastened up the reddened marble steps of the Palace;
and when he was on the topmost step, lo! one with a man's body and the
head of a buffalo, that prostrated himself, and prayed the youth
obsequiously to enter the palace with the title of King. So Shibli
Bagarag held his head erect, and followed him with the footing of a
Sultan, and passed into a great hall, with fountains in it that were
fountains of gems, pearls, chrysolites, thousand-hued jewels, and by the
margin of the fountains were shapes of men with the heads of
beasts-wolves, foxes, lions, bears, oxen, sheep, serpents, asses, that
stretched their hands to the falls, and loaded their vestments with
brilliants, loading them without cessation, so that from the vestments of
each there was another pouring of the liquid lights. Then he with the
buffalo's head bade Shibli Bagarag help himself from the falls; but
Shibli Bagarag refused, for his soul was with Noorna, his betrothed; and
he saw her pale on that solitary pillar in the tumult of the sea, and
knew her safety depended on his faithfulness.

He cried, 'The Sword of Aklis! nought save the Sword!'

Now, at these words the fox-heads and the sheep-heads and the ass-heads
and the other heads of beasts were lifted up, and lo! they put their
hands to their ears, and tapped their foreheads with the finger of
reflection, as creatures seeking to bring to mind a serious matter. Then
the fountains rose higher, and flung jets of radiant jewels, and a
drenching spray of gems upon them, and new thirst aroused them to renew
their gulping of the falls, and a look of eagerness was even in the eyes
of the ass-heads and the silly sheep-heads; surely, Shibli Bagarag
laughed to see them! Now, when he had pressed his lips to recover his
sight from the dazzling of those wondrous fountains, he heard himself
again addressed by the title of King, and there was before him a lofty
cock with a man's head. So he resumed the majesty of his march, and
followed the fine-stepping cock into another hall, spacious, and clouded
with heavy scents and perfumes burning in censers and urns, musk, myrrh,
ambergris, and livelier odours, gladdening the nostril like wine, making
the soul reel as with a draught of the forbidden drink. Here, before a
feast that would prick the dead with appetite, were shapes of beasts with
heads of men, asses, elephants, bulls, horses, swine, foxes,
river-horses, dromedaries; and they ate and drank as do the famished with
munch and gurgle, clacking their lips joyfully. Shibli Bagarag remembered
the condition of his frame when first he looked upon the City of Shagpat,
and was incited to eat and accede to the invitation of the cock with the
man's head, and sit among these merry feeders and pickers of
mouth-watering morsels, when, with the City of Shagpat, lo! he had a
vision of Shagpat, hairier than at their interview, arrogant in
hairiness; his head remote in contemptuous waves and curls and frizzes,
and bushy protuberances of hair, lost in it, like an idolatrous temple in
impenetrable thickets. Then the yearning of the Barber seized Shibli
Bagarag, and desire to shear Shagpat was as a mighty overwhelming wave in
his bosom, and he shouted, 'The Sword of Aklis! nought save the Sword!'

Now, at these words the beasts with men's heads wagged their tails, all
of them, from right to left, and kept their jaws from motion, staring
stupidly at the dishes; but the dishes began to send forth stealthy
steams, insidious whispers to the nose, silver intimations of
savouriness, so that they on a sudden set up a howl, and Shibli Bagarag
puckered his garments from them as from devouring dogs, and hastened from
that hall to a third, where at the entrance a damsel stood that smiled to
him, and led him into a vast marbled chamber, forty cubits high, hung
with draperies, and in it a hundred doors; and he was in the midst of a
very rose-garden of young beauties, such as the Blest behold in Paradise,
robed in the colours of the rising and setting sun; plump, with long,
black, languishing, almond-shaped eyes, and undulating figures. So they
cried to him, 'What greeting, O our King?'

Now, he counted twenty and seven of them, and, fitting his gallantry to
verse, answered:

     Poor are the heavens that have not ye
      To swell their glowing plenty;
     Up there but one bright moon I see,
      Here mark I seven-and-twenty.

The damsels laughed and flung back their locks at his flattery, sporting
with him; and he thought, 'These be sweet maidens! I will know if they be
illusions like Rabesqurat'; so, as they were romping, he slung his right
arm round one, and held the Lily to her, but there was no change in her
save that she winked somewhat and her eyes watered; and it was so with
the others, for when they saw him hold the Lily to one they made him do
so to them likewise. Then he took the phial, and touched their lips with
the waters, and lo! they commenced luting and laughing, and singing
verses, and prattling, laughing betweenwhiles at each other; and one, a
noisy one, with long, black, unquiet tresses, and a curved foot and
roguish ankle, sang as she twirled:

     My heart is another's, I cannot be tender;
     Yet if thou storm it, I fain must surrender.

And another, a fresh-cheeked, fair-haired, full-eyed damsel, strong upon
her instep and stately in the bearing of her shoulders, sang shrilly:

     I'm of the mountains, and he that comes to me
     Like eagle must win, and like hurricane woo me.

And another, reclining on a couch buried in dusky silks, like a butterfly
under the leaves, a soft ball of beauty, sang moaningly:

     Here like a fruit on the branch am I swaying;
     Snatch ere I fall, love! there's death in delaying.

And another, light as an antelope on the hills, with antelope eyes edged
with kohl, and timid, graceful movements, and small, white, rounded ears,
sang clearly:

     Swiftness is mine, and I fly from the sordid;
     Follow me, follow! and you'll be rewarded.

And another, with large limbs and massive mould, that stepped like a cow
leisurely cropping the pasture, and shook with jewels amid her black hair
and above her brown eyes, and round her white neck and her wrists, and on
her waist, even to her ankle, sang as with a kiss upon every word:

     Sweet 'tis in stillness and bliss to be basking!
     He who would have me, may have for the asking.

And another, with eyebrows like a bow, and arrows of fire in her eyes,
and two rosebuds her full moist parted pouting lips, sang, clasping her
hands, and voiced like the tremulous passionate bulbul in the shadows of
the moon:

     Love is my life, and with love I live only;
     Give me life, lover, and leave me not lonely.

And a seventh, a very beam of beauty, and the perfection of all that is
imagined in fairness and ample grace of expression and proportion, lo!
she came straight to Shibli Bagarag, and took him by the hand and pierced
him with lightning glances, singing:

     Were we not destined to meet by one planet?
     Can a fate sever us?--can it, ah! can it?

And she sang tender songs to him, mazing him with blandishments, so that
the aim of existence and the summit of ambition now seemed to him the
life of a king in that palace among the damsels; and he thought, 'Wah!
these be no illusions, and they speak the thing that is in them. Wullahy,
loveliness is their portion; they call me King.'

Then she that had sung to him said, 'Surely we have been waiting thee
long to crown thee our King! Thou hast been in some way delayed, O
glorious one!'

And he answered, 'O fair ones, transcending in affability, I have
stumbled upon obstructions in my journey hither, and I have met with
adventures, but of this crowning that was to follow them I knew nought.
Wullahy, thrice have I been saluted King; I whom fate selecteth for the
shaving of Shagpat, and till now it was a beguilement, all emptiness.'

They marked his bewildered state, and some knelt before him, some held
their arms out adoringly, some leaned to him with glistening looks, and
he was fast falling a slave to their flatteries, succumbing to them;
imagination fired him with the splendours due to one that was a king, and
the thought of wearing a crown again took possession of his soul, and he
cried, 'Crown me, O my handmaidens, and delay not to crown me; for, as
the poet says:

       "The king without his crown
        Hath a forehead like the clown";

and the circle of my head itcheth for the symbols of majesty.'

At these words of Shibli Bagarag they arose quickly and clapped their
hands, and danced with the nimble step of gladness, exclaiming, 'O our
King! pleasant will be the time with him!' And one smoothed his head and
poured oil upon it; one brought him garments of gold and silk inwoven;
one fetched him slippers like the sun's beam in brightness; others stood
together in clusters, and with lutes and wood-instruments, low-toned,
singing odes to him; and lo! one took a needle and threaded it, and gave
the thread into the hands of Shibli Bagarag, and with the point of the
needle she pricked certain letters on his right wrist, and afterwards
pricked the same letters on a door in the wall. Then she said to him, 'Is
it in thy power to make those letters speak?'

He answered, 'We will prove how that may be.'

So he flung some drops from the phial over the letters, and they glowed
the colour of blood and flashed with a report, and it was as if a fiery
forked-tongue had darted before them and spake the words written, and
they were, 'This is the crown of him who bath achieved his aim and
resteth here.' Thereupon, she stuck the needle in the door, and he pulled
the thread, and the door drew apart, and lo! a small chamber, and on a
raised cushion of blue satin a glittering crown, thick with jewels as a
frost, such as Ambition pineth to wear, and the knees of men weaken and
bend beholding, and it lanced lights about it like a living sun. Beside
the cushion was a vacant throne, radiant as morning in the East, ablaze
with devices in gold and gems, a seat to fill the meanest soul with
sensations of majesty and tempt dervishes to the sitting posture. Shibli
Bagarag was intoxicated at the sight, and he thought, 'Wah! but if I sit
on this throne and am a king, with that crown I can command men and
things! and I have but to say, Fetch Noorna, my betrothed, from yonder
pillar in the midst of the uproarious sea!--Let the hairy Shagpat be
shaved! and behold, slaves, thousands of them, do my bidding! Wullahy,
this is greatness!' Now, he made a rush to the throne, but the damsels
held him back, crying, 'Not for thy life till we have crowned thee, our
master and lord!'

Then they took the crown and crowned him with it; and he sat upon the
throne calmly, serenely, like a Sultan of the great race accustomed to
sovereignty, tempering the awfulness of his brows with benignant glances.
So, while he sat the damsels hid their faces and started some paces from
him, as unable to bear the splendour of his presence, and in a moment,
lo! the door closed between him and them, and he was in darkness. Then he
heard a voice of the damsels cry in the hall, 'The ninety and ninth!
Peace now for us and blissfulness with our lords, for now all are filled
save the door of the Sword, which maketh the hundredth.' After that he
heard the same voice say, 'Leave them, O my sisters!'

So he listened to the noise of their departing, and knew he had been
duped. Surely his soul cursed him as he sat crowned and throned in that
darkness! He seized the crown to dash it to the earth, but the crown was
fixed on his forehead and would not come off; neither had he force to
rise from the throne. Now, the thought of Noorna, his betrothed, where
she rested waiting for him to deliver her, filled Shibli Bagarag with the
extremes of anguish; and he lifted his right arm and dashed it above his
head in the violence of his grief, striking in the motion a hidden gong
that gave forth a burst of thunder and a roll of bellowings, and lo! the
door opened before him, and the throne as he sat on it moved out of the
chamber into the hall where he had seen the damsels that duped him, and
on every side of the hall doors opened; and he marvelled to see men, old
and young, beardless and venerable, sitting upon thrones and crowned with
crowns, motionless, with eyes like stones in the recesses. He thought,
'These be other dupes! Wallaby! a drop of the waters of Paravid upon
their lips might reveal mysteries, and guide me to the Sword of my
seeking.' So, as he considered how to get at them from the seat of his
throne, his gaze fell on a mirror, and he beheld the crown on his
forehead what it was, bejewelled asses' ears stiffened upright, and
skulls of monkeys grinning with gems! The sight of that crowning his head
convulsed Shibli Bagarag with laughter, and, as he laughed, his seat upon
the throne was loosened, and he pitched from it, but the crown stuck to
him and was tenacious of its hold as the lion that pounceth upon a
victim. He bowed to the burden of necessity, and took the phial, and
touched the lips of one that sat crowned on a throne with the waters in
the phial; and it was a man of exceeding age, whitened with time, and in
the long sweep of his beard like a mountain clad with snow from the peak
that is in the sky to the base that slopeth to the valley. Then he
addressed the old man on his throne, saying, 'Tell me, O King! how camest
thou here? and in search of what?'

The old man's lips moved, and he muttered in deep tones, 'When cometh he
of the ninety-and-ninth door?'

So Shibli Bagarag cried, 'Surely he is before thee, in Aklis.'

And the old man said, 'Let him ask no secrets; but when he hath reached
the Sword forget not to flash it in this hall, for the sake of
brotherhood in adventure.'

After that he would answer no word to any questioning.




THE SONS OF AKLIS

Now, Shibli Bagarag thought, 'The poet is right in Aklis as elsewhere, in
his words:

     "The cunning of our oft-neglected wit
     Doth best the keyhole of occasion fit";

and whoso looketh for help from others looketh the wrong way in an
undertaking. Wah! I will be bold and batter at the hundredth door, which
is the door of the Sword.' So he advanced straightway to the door, which
was one of solid silver, charactered with silver letters, and knocked
against it three knocks; and a voice within said, 'What spells?'

He answered, 'Paravid; Garraveen; and the Lily of the Sea!'

Upon that the voice said, 'Enter by virtue of the spells!' and the silver
door swung open, discovering a deep pit, lightened by a torch, and across
it, bridging it, a string of enormous eggs, rocs' eggs, hollowed, and so
large that a man might walk through them without stooping. At the side of
each egg three lamps were suspended from a claw, and the shell passage
was illumined with them from end to end. Shibli Bagarag thought, 'These
eggs are of a surety the eggs of the Roc mastered by Aklis with his
sword!' Now, as the sight of Shibli Bagarag grew familiar to the place,
he beheld at the bottom of the pit a fluttering mass of blackness and two
sickly eyes that glittered below.

Then thought he, 'Wah! if that be the Roc, and it not dead, will the bird
suffer one to defile its eggs with other than the sole of the foot,
naked?' He undid his sandals and kicked off the slippers given him by the
damsels that had duped him, and went into the first egg over the abyss,
and into the second, and into the third, and into the fourth, and into
the fifth. Surely the eggs swung with him, and bent; and the fear of
their breaking and he falling into the maw of the terrible bird made him
walk unevenly. When he had come to the seventh egg, which was the last,
it shook and swung violently, and he heard underneath the flapping of the
wings of the Roc, as with eagerness expecting a victim to prey upon. He
sustained his soul with the firmness of resolve and darted himself
lengthwise to the landing, clutching a hold with his right hand; as he
did so, the bridge of eggs broke, and he heard the feathers of the bird
in agitation, and the bird screaming a scream of disappointment as he
scrambled up the sides of the pit.

Now, Shibli Bagarag failed not to perform two prostrations to Allah, and
raised the song of gratitude for his preservation when he found himself
in safety. Then he looked up, and lo! behind a curtain, steps leading to
an anteroom, and beyond that a chamber like the chamber of kings where
they sit in state dispensing judgements, like the sun at noon in
splendour; and in the chamber seven youths, tall and comely young men,
calm as princes in their port, each one dressed in flowing robes, and
with a large glowing pearl in the front of their turbans. They advanced
to meet him, saying, 'Welcome to Aklis, thou that art proved worthy! 'Tis
holiday now with us'; and they took him by the hand and led him with them
in silence past fountain-jets and porphyry pillars to where a service
with refreshments was spread, meats, fowls with rice, sweetmeats,
preserves, palateable mixtures, and monuments of the cook's art, goblets
of wine like liquid rubies. Then one of the youths said to Shibli
Bagarag, 'Thou hast come to us crowned, O our guest! Now, it is not our
custom to pay homage, but thou shalt presently behold them that will, so
let not thy kingliness droop with us, but feast royally.'

And Shibli Bagarag said, 'O my princes, surely it is a silly matter to
crown a mouse! Humility hath depressed my stature! Wullahy, I have had
warning in the sticking of this crown to my brows, and it sticketh like
an abomination.'

They laughed at him, saying, 'It was the heaviness of that crown which
overweighted thee in the bridge of the abyss, and few be they that bear
it and go not to feed the Roc.'

Now, they feasted together, interchanging civilities, offering to each
other choice morsels, dainties. And the anecdotes of Shibli Bagarag, his
simplicity and his honesty, and his vanity and his airiness, and the
betraying tongue of the barber, diverted the youths; and they plied him
with old wine till his stores of merriment broke forth and were as a
river swollen by torrents of the mountain; and the seven youths laughed
at him, spluttering with laughter, lurching with it. Surely, he described
to them the loquacity of Baba Mustapha his uncle, and they laughed so
that their chins were uppermost; but at his mention of Shagpat greater
gravity was theirs, and they smoothed their faces solemnly, and the sun
of their merriment was darkened for awhile. Then they took to flinging
about pellets of a sugared preparation, and reciting verses in praise of
jovial living, challenging to drink this one and that one, passing the
cup with a stanza. Shibli Bagarag thought, 'What a life is this led by
these youths! a fair one! 'Tis they that be the sons of Aklis who sharpen
the Sword of Events; yet live they in jollity, skimming from the
profusion of abundance that which floateth!'

Now, marking him contemplative, one of the youths shouted, 'The King
lacketh homage!'

And another called, 'Admittance for his people!'

Then the seven arose and placed Shibli Bagarag on an elevation in the
midst of them, and lo! a troop of black slaves leading by the collar,
asses, and by a string, monkeys. Now, for the asses they brayed to the
Evil One, and the monkeys were prankish, pulling against the string, till
they caught sight of Shibli Bagarag. Then was it as if they had been
awestricken; and they came forward to him with docile steps, eyeing the
crown on his head, and prostrated themselves, the asses and the monkeys,
like creatures in whom glowed the lamp of reason and the gift of
intelligence. So Shibli Bagarag drooped his jaw and was ashamed, and he
cried, 'my princes! am I a King of these?'

They answered, 'A King in mightiness! Sultan of a race!'

So he said, 'It is certain I shall need physic to support such a
sovereignty! And I must be excused liberal allowances of old wine to sit
in state among them. Wullahy! they were best gone for awhile. Send them
from me, O my princes! I sicken.'

And he called to the animals, 'Away! begone!' frowning.

Then said the youths, 'Well commanded! and like a King! See, they troop
from thy presence obediently.'

Now the animals fled from before the brows of Shibli Bagarag, and when
the chamber was empty of them the seven young men said, 'Of a surety thou
wert flattered to observe the aspect of these animals at beholding thee.'

But he cried, 'Not so, O my princes; there is nought flattering in the
homage of asses and monkeys.'

Then they said, 'O Sultan of asses, ruler of monkeys, better that than
thyself an ass and an ape! As was said by Shah Kasirwan, "I prefer being
king of beasts worshipped by beasts, rather than a crowned beast
worshipped by men"; and it was well said. Wullahy! the kings of Roum
quote it.'

Now Shibli Bagarag was not rendered oblivious of the Sword of his quest
by the humour of these youths, or the wine-bibbings, and he exclaimed
while they were turning up the heels of their cups, 'O ye sons of Aklis,
know that I have come hither for the Sword sharpened by your hands, for
the releasing of my betrothed, Noorna bin Noorka, daughter of the Vizier
Feshnavat, and for the shaving of Shagpat.'

While he was proceeding to recount the story of his search for the Sword,
they said, 'Enough, O potentate of the braying class and of the
scratching tribe! we have seen thee through the eye of Aklis since the
time of thy first thwacking. What says the poet?

     "A day for toil and a day for rest
     Gives labour zeal, and pleasure zest."

So, of thy seeking let us hear to-morrow; but now drink with us, and make
merry, and touch the springs of memory; spout forth verses, quaint ones,
suitable to the hour and the entertainment. Wullahy! drink with us! taste
life! Let the humours flow.'

Then they made a motion to some slaves, and presently a clattering of
anklets struck the ear of Shibli Bagarag: and he beheld dancing-girls,
moons of beauty and elegance, and they danced wild dances, and dances
graceful and leopard-like and serpent-like in movement; and the youths
flung flowers at them, applauding them. Then came other sets of dancers
even lovelier, more languishing; and again others with tambourines and
musical instruments, that sang ravishingly. So the senses of Shibli
Bagarag were all taken with what he saw and heard, and ate and drank; and
by degrees a mist came before his eyes, and the sweet sounds and voices
of the girls grew distant, and it was with difficulty he kept his back
from the length of the cushions that were about him. Then he thought of
Noorna, and that she sang to him and danced, and when he rose to embrace
her she was Rabesqurat by the light of the Lily! And he thought of
Shagpat, and that in shaving him the blade was checked in its rapid
sweep, and blunted by a stumpy twine of hair that waxed in size and
became the head of Karaz that gulped at him a wide devouring gulp, and
took him in, and flew up with him, leaving Shagpat half sheared. Then he
thought himself struggling halfway down the throat of the monstrous Roc,
and that, when he was wholly inside the Roc, he was in a wide-arched
passage crowded with lamps, and at the end of the passage Noorna in the
clutch of Karaz, she shouting, 'The Sword, the Sword!'

Now, while he felt for the Sword wherewith to release her from the Genie,
his eyes opened, and he saw day through a casement, and that he had
reposed on an embroidered couch in the corner of a stately room
ornamented with carvings of blue and gold. So while he wondered and
yawned, gaping, slaves started up from the floor and led him to a bath of
coloured marble, and bathed him in perfumed waters, and dressed him in a
dress of yellow silk, rich and ample. Then they paraded before him
through lesser apartments and across terraces, till they came to a great
hall; loftier and more spacious than any he had yet beheld, with
fountains at the two ends, and in the centre a tree with golden spreading
branches and leaves of gold; among the leaves gold-feathered birds, and
fruits of all seasons and every description--the drooping grape and the
pleasant-smelling quince, and the blood-red pomegranate, and the apricot,
and the green and rosy apple, and the gummy date, and the oily
pistachio-nut, and peaches, and citrons, and oranges, and the plum, and
the fig. Surely, they were countless in number, melting with ripeness,
soft, full to bursting; and the birds darted among them like sun-flashes.
Now, Shibli Bagarag thought, 'This is a wondrous tree! Wullahy! there is
nought like it save the tree in the hall of the Prophet in Paradise,
feeding the faithful!' As he regarded it he heard his name spoken in the
hall, and turning he beheld seven youths in royal garments, that were
like the youths he had feasted with, and yet unlike them, pale, and stern
in their manners, their courtesy as the courtesy of kings. They said,
'Sit with us and eat the morning's meal, O our guest!'

So he sat with them under the low branches of the tree; and they whistled
the tune of one bird and of another bird, and of another, and lo! those
different birds flew down with golden baskets hanging from their bills,
and in the baskets fruits and viands and sweetmeats, and cool drinks. And
Shibli Bagarag ate from the baskets of the birds, watching the action of
the seven youths and the difference that was in them. He sought to make
them recognise him and acknowledge their carouse of the evening that was
past, but they stared at him strangely and seemed offended at the
allusion, neither would they hear mention of the Sword of his seeking.
Presently, one of the youths stood upon his feet and cried, "The time for
kings to sit in judgement!"

And the youths arose and led Shibli Bagarag to a hall of ebony, and
seated him on the upper seat, themselves standing about him; and lo!
asses and monkeys came before him, complaining of the injustice of men
and their fellows, in brays and bellows and hoots. Now, at the sight of
them again Shibli Bagarag was enraged, and he said to the youths, 'How!
do ye not mock me, O masters of Aklis!'

But they said only, 'The burden of his crown is for the King.'

He cooled, thinking, 'I will use a spell.' So he touched the lips of an
animal with the waters of Paravid, and the animal prated volubly in our
language of the kick this ass had given him, and the jibe of that monkey,
and of his desire of litigation with such and such a beast for pasture;
and the others when they spake had the same complaints to make. Shibli
Bagarag listened to them gravely, and it was revealed to him that he who
ruleth over men hath a labour and duties of hearing and judging and
dispensing judgement similar to those of him who ruleth over apes and
asses. Then said he, 'O youths, my princes! methinks the sitting in this
seat giveth a key to secret sources of wisdom; and I see what it is, the
glory and the exaltation coveted by men.' Now, he took from the asses and
the monkeys one, and said to it, 'Be my chief Vizier,' and to another,
'Be my Chamberlain!' and to another, 'Be my Treasurer!' and so on, till a
dispute arose between the animals, and jealousy of each other was visible
in their glances, and they appealed to him clamorously. So he said, 'What
am I to ye?'

They answered, 'Our King!'

And he said, 'How so?'

They answered, 'By the crowning of the brides of Aklis.'

Then he said, 'What be ye, O my subjects?'

They answered, 'Men that were searchers of the Sword and plunged into the
tank of temptation.'

And he said, 'How that?'

They answered, 'By the lures of vanity, the blinding of ambition, and
tasting the gall of the Roc.'

So Shibli Bagarag leaned to the seven youths, saying, 'O my princes, but
for not tasting the gall of the Roc I might be as one of these. Wullahy!
I the King am warned by base creatures.' Then he said to the animals,
'Have ye still a longing for the crown?'

And they cried, all of them, 'O light of the astonished earth, we care
for nought other than it.'

So he said, 'And is it known to ye how to dispossess the wearer of his
burden?'

They answered, 'By a touch of the gall of the Roc on his forehead.'

Then he lifted his arms, crying, 'Hie out of my presence! and whoso of ye
fetcheth a drop of the gall, with that one will I exchange the crown.'

At these words some moved hastily, but the most faltered, as doubting and
incredulous that he would propose such an exchange; and one, an old
monkey, sat down and crossed his legs, and made a study of Shibli
Bagarag, as of a sovereign that held forth a deceiving bargain. But he
cried again, 'Hie and haste! as my head is now cased I think it not the
honoured part.'

Then the old monkey arose with a puzzled look, half scornful, and made
for the door slowly, turning his head toward Shibli Bagarag betweenwhiles
as he went, and scratching his lower limbs with the mute reflectiveness
of age and extreme caution.

Now, when they were gone, Shibli Bagarag looked in the eyes of the seven
youths, and saw they were content with him, and his countenance was
brightened with approval. So he descended from his seat, and went with
them from the hall of ebony to a court where horses were waiting saddled,
and slaves with hawks on their wrists stood in readiness; and they
mounted each a horse, but he loitered. The seven youths divined his
feeling, and cried impatiently, 'Come! no lingering in Aklis!' So he
mounted likewise, and they emerged from the palace, and entered the hills
that glowed under the copper sun, and started a milk-white antelope with
ruby spots, and chased it from its cover over the sand-hills, a hawk
being let loose to worry it and distress its timid beaming eyes. When the
creature was quite overcome, one of the youths struck his heel into his
horse's side and flung a noose over the head of the quarry, and drew it
with them, gently petting it the way home to the palace. At the gates of
the palace it was released, and lo! it went up the steps, and passed
through the halls as one familiar with them. Now, when they were all
assembled in the anteroom of the hall, where Shibli Bagarag had first
seen the seven youths, sons of Aklis, in their jollity, one of them said
to the Antelope, 'We have need of thee to speak a word with Aklis, O our
sister!'

So the same youth requested the use of the phial of Paravid, and Shibli
Bagarag applied it carefully, tenderly, to the mouth of the Antelope.
Then the Antelope spake in a silver-ringing voice, saying, 'What is it, O
my brothers?'

They answered, 'Thou knowest we dare not attempt interchange of speech
with Aklis, seeing that we disobeyed him in visiting the kingdoms of the
earth: so it is for thee to question him as to the object of this youth,
and it is the Shaving of Shagpat.'

So she said, ''Tis well; I wot of it.'

Then she advanced to the curtain concealing the abyss of the Roc and the
bridge of its eggs, and went behind it. There was a pause, and they heard
her say presently in a grave voice, toned with reverence, 'How is it, O
our father? is it a good thing that thy Sword be in use at this season?'

And they heard the Voice answer from a depth, ''Twere well it rust not!'

They heard her say, 'O our father Aklis, and we wish to know if be held
in favour by thee, and thou sanction it with thy Sword.'

And they heard the Voice answer, 'The Shaving of Shagpat is my Sword
alone equal to, and he that shaveth him performeth a service to mankind
ranking next my vanquishing of the Roc.'

Then they heard her say, 'And it is thy will we teach him the mysteries
of the Sword, and that which may be done with it?'

And they heard the Voice answer, 'Even so!'

After that the Voice was still, and soon the Antelope returned from
behind the curtain, and the youths caressed her with brotherly caresses,
and took a circle of hands about her, and so moved to the great Hall of
the gorgeous Tree, and fed her from the branches. Now, while they were
there, Shibli Bagarag advanced to the Antelope, and knelt at her feet,
and said, 'O Princess of Aklis, surely I am betrothed to one constant as
a fixed star, and brighter; a mistress of magic, and innocent as the
bleating lamb; and she is now on a pillar, chained there, in the midst of
the white wrathful sea, wailing for me to deliver her with this Sword of
my seeking. So, now, I pray thee help me to the Sword swiftly, that I may
deliver her.'

The youths, her brothers, clamoured and interposed, saying, 'Take thy
shape ere that, O Gulrevaz, our sister!'

But she cried, 'He is betrothed! not till he graspeth the Sword. Tell
him, the youth, our conditions, and for what exchange the Sword is
yielded.'

And they said, 'The conditions are, thou part with thy spells, all of
them, O youth!'

And he said, 'There is no condition harsh that exchangeth the Sword; O ye
Seven, I agree!'

Then she said, ''Tis well! nobility is in the soul of this youth. Go
before us now to the Cave of Chrysolites, O my brothers.'

So these departed before, and she in her antelope form followed footing
gracefully, and made Shibli Bagarag repeat the story of his betrothal as
they went.




THE SWORD OF AKLIS

Now, when they had made the passage of many halls, built of different
woods, filled with divers wonders, they descended a sloping vault, and
came to a narrow way in the earth, hung with black, at the end of it a
stedfast blaze like a sun, that grew larger as they advanced, and they
heard the sea above them. The noise of it, and its plunging and weltering
and its pitilessness, struck on the heart of Shibli Bagarag as with a
blow, and he cried, 'Haste, haste, O Princess! perchance she is even now
calling to me with her tongue, and I not aiding her; delayed by the
temptation of this crown and the guile of the Brides.'

She checked him, and said, 'In Aklis no haste!' Then she said, 'Look!'
And lo, fronting them the single blaze became two fires; and drawing
nigh, Shibli Bagarag beheld them what they were, angry eyes in the head
of a great lion, a model of majesty, and passion was in his mane and
power was in his forepaws; so while he lashed his tail as a tempest
whippeth the tawny billows at night, and was lifting himself for a roar,
she said, 'A hair of Garraveen, and touch him with it!'

Shibli Bagarag pushed up his sleeve and broke one of the three sapphire
hairs and stepped forward to the lion, holding in his right hand the hair
of vivid light. The lion crouched, and was in the vigour of the spring
when that hair touched him, and he trembled, tumbling on his knees and
letting the twain pass. So they advanced beyond him, and lo! the Cave of
Chrysolites irradiate with beams, breaks of brilliance, confluences of
lively hues, restless rays, meeting, vanishing, flooding splendours, now
scattered in dazzling joints and spars, now uniting in momentary disks of
radiance. In the centre of the cave glowed a furnace, and round it he
distinguished the seven youths, swarthier and sterner than before, dark
sweat standing on the brows of each. Their words were brief, and they
wore each a terrible frown, saying to him, without further salutation,
'Thrust in the flame of this furnace thy right wrist.'

At the same moment, the Antelope said in his ear, 'Do thou their bidding,
and be not backward! In Aklis fear is ruin, and hesitation a destroyer.'

He fixed his mind on the devotedness of Noorna, and held his nether lip
tightly between his teeth, and thrust his right wrist in the flame of the
furnace. The wrist reddened, and became transparent with heat, but he
felt no pain, only that his whole arm was thrice its natural weight. Then
the flame of the furnace fell, and the seven youths made him kneel by a
brook of golden waters and dip his forehead up to his eyes in the waters.
Then they took him to the other side of the cave, and his sight was
strengthened to mark the glory of the Sword, where it hung in slings, a
little way from the wall, outshining the lights of the cave, and throwing
them back with its superior force and stedfastness of lustre. Lo! the
length of it was as the length of crimson across the sea when the sun is
sideways on the wave, and it seemed full a mile long, the whole blade
sheening like an arrested lightning from the end to the hilt; the hilt
two large live serpents twined together, with eyes like sombre jewels,
and sparkling spotted skins, points of fire in their folds, and
reflections of the emerald and topaz and ruby stones, studded in the
blood-stained haft. Then the seven young men, sons of Aklis, said to
Shibli Bagarag, 'Surrender the Lily!' And when he had given into their
hands the Lily, they said, 'Grasp the handle of the Sword!'

Now, he beheld the Sword and the ripples of violet heat that were
breathing down it, and those two venomous serpents twined together, and
the size of it, its ponderousness; and to essay lifting it appeared to
him a madness, but he concealed his thought, and, setting his soul on the
safety of Noorna, went forward to it boldly, and piercing his right arm
between the twists of the serpents, grasped the jewelled haft. Surely,
the Sword moved from the slings as if a giant had swayed it! But what
amazed him was the marvel of the blade, for its sharpness was such that
nothing stood in its way, and it slipped through everything as we pass
through still water, the stone columns, blocks of granite by the walls,
the walls of earth, and the thick solidity of the ground beneath his
feet. They bade him say to the Sword, 'Sleep!' and it was no longer than
a knife in the girdle. Likewise, they bade him hiss on the heads of the
serpents, and say, 'Wake!' and while he held it lengthwise it shot
lengthening out. Then they bade him hold in one hand the sapphire hair
that conquered the lion, and with the edge of the Sword touch one point
of it. So he did that, and it split in half, and the two halves he also
split; and he split those four, and those eight, till the hairs were thin
as light and not distinguishable from it. When Shibli Bagarag saw the
power of the Sword, he exulted and cried, 'Praise be to the science of
them that forecast events and the haps of life!' Now, in the meantime he
marked the youths take those hairs of Garraveen that he had split, and
tie them round the neck of the Antelope, and empty the contents of the
phial down her throat; and they put the bulb of the Lily, that was a
heart, in her mouth, and she swallowed it till the flower covered her
face. Then they took each a handful of the golden waters of the brook
flowing through the cave, and flung the waters over her, exclaiming, 'By
the three spells that have power in Aklis, and by which these waters are
a blessing!'

In the passing of a flash she took her shape, and was a damsel taller
than the tallest of them that descend from the mountains, a vision of
loveliness, with queenly brows, closed red lips, and large full black
eyes; her hair black, and on it a net of amber strung with pearls. To
look upon her was to feel the tyranny of love, love's pangs of alarm and
hope and anguish; and she was dressed in a dress of white silk, threaded
with gold and sapphire, showing in shadowy beams her rounded figure and
the stateliness that was hers. So she ran to her brothers and embraced
them, calling them by their names, catching their hands, caressing them
as one that had been long parted from them. Then, seeing Shibli Bagarag
as he stood transfixed with the javelins of loveliness that flew from her
on all sides, she cried: 'What, O Master of the Event! halt thou nought
for the Sword but to gaze before thee in silliness?'

Then he said, 'O rare in beauty! marvel of Aklis and the world! surely
the paradise of eyes is thy figure and the glory of thy face!'

But she shouted, 'To work with the Sword! Shame on thee! is there not
one, a bright one, a miracle in faithfulness, that awaiteth thy rescue on
the pillar?'

And she repeated the praises he had spoken of Noorna bin Noorka, his
betrothed. Then he grasped the Sword firmly, remembering the love of
Noorna, and crying, 'Lead me from this, O ye sons of Aklis, and thou,
Princess Gulrevaz, lead me, that I may come to her.'

So they said, 'Follow us!' and he sheathed the Sword in his girdle with
the word 'Sleep!' and followed them, his heart beating violently.




KOOROOKH

Now, they sped from the Cave of Chrysolites by another passage than that
by which they entered it, and nothing but the light of the Sword to guide
them. By that light Shibli Bagarag could distinguish glimmering shapes,
silent and statue-like, to the right and the left of them, their visages
hidden in a veil of heavy webs; and he saw what seemed in the dusk broad
halls, halls of council, and again black pools and black groves, and
columns of crowded porticoes,--all signs of an underground kingdom. They
came to some steps and mounted these severally, coming to a platform, in
the middle of which leapt a fountain, the top spray of it touched with a
beam of earth and the air breathed by men. Here he heard the youths
dabble with the dark waters, and he discerned Gulrevaz tossing it in her
two hands, calling, 'Koorookh! Koorookh!' Then they said to him, 'Stir
this fountain with the Sword, O Master of the Event!' So he stirred the
fountain, and the whole body of it took a leap toward the light that was
like the shoot of a long lance of silver in the moon's rays, and lo! in
its place the ruffled feathers of a bird. Then the seven youths and the
Princess and Shibli Bagarag got up under its feathers like a brood of
water-fowl; and the bird winged straight up as doth a blinded bee,
ascending, and passing in the ascent a widening succession of winding
terraces, till he observed the copper sun of Aklis and the red lands
below it. Thrice, in the exuberance of his gladness, he waved the Sword,
and the sun lost that dulness on its disk and took a bright flame, and
threw golden arrows everywhere; and the pastures were green, the streams
clear, the sands sparkling. The bird flew, and circled, and hung poised a
moment, presently descending on the roof of the palace. Now, there was
here a piece of solid glass, propped on two crossed bars of gold, and it
was shaped like an eye, and might have been taken for one of the eyes
inhabiting the head of some monstrous Genie. Shibli Bagarag ran to it
when he was afoot, and peered through it. Surely, it was the first object
of his heart that he beheld--Noorna, his betrothed, pale on the pillar;
she with her head between her hands and her hair scattered by the storm,
as one despairing. Still he looked, and he save swimming round the pillar
that monstrous fish, with its sole baleful eye, which had gulped them
both in the closed shell of magic pearl; and he knew the fish for Karaz,
the Genie, their enemy. Then he turned to the Princess, with an imploring
voice for counsel how to reach her and bring her rescue; but she said,
'The Sword is in thy hands, none of us dare wield it'; and the seven
youths answered likewise. So, left to himself, he drew the Sword from his
girdle, and hissed on the heads of the serpents, at the same time holding
it so that it might lengthen out inimitably. Then he leaned it over the
eye of the glass, in the direction of the pillar besieged by the billows,
and lo! with one cut, even at that distance, he divided the fishy
monster, and with another severed the chains that had fettered Noorna;
and she arose and smiled blissfully to the sky, and stood upright, and
signalled him to lay the point of the blade on the pillar. When he had
done this, knowing her wisdom, she put a foot boldly upon the blade and
ran up it toward him, and she was half-way up the blade, when suddenly a
kite darted down upon her, pecking at her eyes, to confuse her. She waxed
unsteady and swayed this way and that, balancing with one arm and
defending herself from the attacks of the kite with another. It seemed to
Shibli Bagarag she must fall and be lost; and the sweat started on his
forehead in great drops big as nuts. Seeing that and the agitation of his
limbs, Gulrevaz cried, 'O Master of the Event, let us hear it!'

But he shrieked, 'The kite! the kite! she is running up the blade, and
the kite is at her eyes! and she swaying, swaying! falling, falling!'

So the Princess exclaimed, 'A kite! Koorookh is match for a kite!'

Then she smoothed the throat of Koorookh, and clasped round it a collar
of bright steel, roughened with secret characters; and she took a hoop of
gold, and passed the bird through it, urging it all the while with one
strange syllable; and the bird went up with a strong whirr of the wing
till he was over the sea, and caught sight of Noorna tottering beneath
him on the blade, and the kite pecking fiercely at her. Thereat he
fluttered eagerly a twinkle of time, and the next was down with his beak
in the neck of the kite, crimsoned in it. Now, by the shouts and
exclamations of Shibli Bagarag, the Princess and the seven youths, her
brothers, knew that the bird had performed well his task, and that the
fight was between Koorookh and the kite. Then he cried gladly to them,
'Joy for us, and Allah be praised! The kite is dropping, and she leaneth
on one wing of Koorookh!'

And he cried in anguish, 'What see I? The kite is become a white ball,
rolling down the blade toward her; and it will of a surety destroy her.'
And he called to her, thinking vainly his voice might reach her. So the
Princess said, 'A white ball? 'tis I that am match for a white ball!'

Now, she seized from the corner of the palace-roof a bow and an arrow,
and her brothers lifted her to a level with the hilt of the Sword,
leaning on the eye of glass. Then she planted one foot on the shoulder of
Shibli Bagarag as he bent peering through the eye, and fitted the arrow
to a level of the Sword, slanting its slant, and let it fly, doubling the
bow. Shibli Bagarag saw the ball roll to within a foot of Noorna, when it
was as if stricken by a gleam of light, and burst, and was a black cloud
veined with fire, swathing her in folds. He lost all sight of Noorna; and
where she had been were vivid flashes, and then a great flame, and in the
midst a red serpent and a green serpent twisted as in the death-struggle.
So he cried, 'A red serpent and a green serpent!'

And the sons of Aklis exclaimed, 'A red serpent? 'Tis we that are match
for a red serpent!'

Thereupon they descended steps through the palace roof, and while the
fight between those two serpents was rageing, Shibli Bagarag beheld seven
small bright birds, bee-catchers, that entered the flame, bearing in
their bills slips of a herb, and hovering about the heal of the red
serpent, distracting it. Then he saw the red serpent hiss and snap at
one, darting out its tongue, and lo! on the fork of its tongue the little
bird let fall the slip of herb in its bill, and in an instant the serpent
changed from red to yellow and from yellow to pale-spotted blue, and from
that to a speckled indigo-colour, writhing at every change, and hissing
fire from its open jaws. Meantime the green serpent was released and was
making circles round the flame, seeking to complete some enchantment,
when suddenly the whole scene vanished, and Shibli Bagarag again beheld
Noorna steadying her steps on the blade, and leaning on one wing of
Koorookh. She advanced up the blade, coming nearer and nearer; and he
thought her close, and breathed quick and ceased looking through the
glass. When he gazed abroad, lo! she was with Koorookh, on a far hill
beyond the stream in outer Aklis. So he said to the Princess Gulrevaz, 'O
Princess, comes she not to me here in the palace?'

But the Princess shook her head, and said, 'She hath not a spell! She
waiteth for thee yonder with Koorookh. Now, look through the glass once
more.'

He looked through the glass, and there on a plain, as he had first seen
it when Noorna appeared to him, was the City of Shagpat, and in the
streets of the city a vast assembly, and a procession passing on, its
front banner surmounted by the Crescent, and bands with curled and curved
instruments playing, and slaves scattering gold and clashing cymbals,
every demonstration and evidence of a great day and a high occasion in
the City of Shagpat! So he peered yet keenlier through the glass, and
behold, the Vizier Feshnavat, father of Noorna, walking in fetters,
subject to the jibes and evil-speaking of the crowds of people, his
turban off, and he in a robe of drab-coloured stuff, in the scorned
condition of an unbeliever. Shibli Bagarag peered yet more earnestly
through the glass eye, and in the centre of the procession, clad
gorgeously in silks and stuffs, woven with gold and gems, a crown upon
his head, and the appanages of supremacy and majesty about him, was
Shagpat. He paced upon a yellow flooring that was unrolled before him
from a mighty roll; and there were slaves that swarmed on all sides of
him, supporting upon gold pans and platters the masses of hair that
spread bushily before and behind, and to the right and left of him. Truly
the gravity of his demeanour exceeded that which is attained by Sheiks
and Dervishes after much drinking of the waters of wisdom, and fasting,
and abnegation of the pleasures that betray us to folly in this world!
Now, when he saw Shagpat, the soul of Shibli Bagarag was quickened to do
his appointed work upon him, shear him, and release the Vizier Feshnavat.
Desire to shave Shagpat was as a salt thirst rageing in him, as the dream
of munching to one that starveth; even as the impelling of violent
tempests to skiffs on the sea; and he hungered to be at him, crying, as
he peered, ''Tis he! even he, Shagpat!'

Then he turned to the Princess Gulrevaz, and said, ''Tis Shagpat,
exalted, clothed with majesty, O thou morning star of Aklis!'

She said, 'Koorookh is given thee, and waiteth to carry ye both; and for
me I will watch that this glass send forth a beam to light ye to that
city; so farewell, O thou that art loved! And delay in nothing to finish
the work in hand.'

Now, when he had set his face from the Princess he descended through the
roof of the palace, and met the seven youths returning, and they
accompanied him through the halls of the palace to that hall where the
damsels had duped him. He was mindful of his promise to the old man
crowned, and flashed the Sword a strong flash, so that he who looked on
it would be seared in the eyelashes. Then the doors of the recesses flew
apart, eight-and-ninety in number, and he beheld divers sitters on
thrones, with the diadem of asses' ears stiffened upright, and monkeys'
skulls grinning with gems; they having on each countenance the look of
sovereigns and the serenity of high estate. Shibli Bagarag laughed at
them, and he thought, 'Wullahy! was I one of these? I, the beloved of
Noorna, destined Master of the Event!' and he thought, 'Of a surety, if
these sitters could but laugh at themselves, there would be a release for
them, and the crown would topple off which getteth the homage of asses
and monkeys!' He would have spoken to them, but the sons of Aklis said,
'They have seen the flashing of the Sword, and 'twere well they wake
not.' As they went from the hall the seven youths said, 'Reflect upon the
age of these sitters, that have been sitting in the chairs from three to
eleven generations back! And they were searchers of the Sword like thee,
but were duped! In like manner, the hen sitteth in complacency, but she
bringeth forth and may cackle; 'tis owing to the aids of Noorna that thou
art not one of these sitters, O Master of the Event!' Now, they paced
through the hall of dainty provender, and through the hall of the
jewel-fountains, coming to the palace steps, where stood Abarak leaning
on his bar. As they advanced to Abarak, there was a clamour in the halls
behind, that gathered in noise like a torrent, and approached, and
presently the Master was ware of a sharp stroke on his forehead with a
hairy finger, and then a burn, and the Crown that had clung to him
toppled off; surely it fell upon the head of the old monkey, the cautious
and wise one, he that had made a study of Shibli Bagarag. Thereupon that
monkey stalked scornfully from them; and Abarak cried, 'O Master of the
Event! it was better for me to keep the passage of the Seventh Pillar,
than be an ape of this order. Wah! the flashing of the Sword scorcheth
them, and they scamper.'




THE VEILED FIGURE

Verily there was lightning in Aklis as Shibli Bagarag flashed the Sword
over the clamouring beasts: the shape of the great palace stood forth
vividly, and a wide illumination struck up the streams, and gilded the
large hanging leaves, and drew the hills glimmeringly together, and
scattered fires on the flat faces of the rocks. Then the seven youths
said quickly, 'Away! out of Aklis, O Master of the Event! from city to
city of earth this light is visible, and men will know that Fate is in
travail, and an Event preparing for them, and Shagpat will be warned by
the portent; wherefore lose not the happy point of time on which thy star
is manifest.' And they cried again, 'Away! out of Aklis!' with gestures
of impatience, urging his departure.

Then said he, 'O youths, Sons of Aklis, it is written that gratitude is
the poor man's mine of wealth, and the rich man's flower of beauty; and I
have but that to give ye for all this aid and friendliness of yours.'

But they exclaimed, 'No aid or friendliness in Aklis! By the gall of the
Roc! it is well for thee thou camest armed with potent spells, and hadst
one to advise and inspirit thee, or thou wouldst have stayed here to
people Aklis, and grazed in a strange shape.'

Now, the seven waxed in impatience, and he laid their hands upon his head
and moved from them with Abarak, to where in the dusk the elephant that
had brought them stood. Then the elephant kneeled and took the twain upon
his back, and bore them across the dark land to that reach of the river
where the boat was moored in readiness. They entered the boat silently
among its drapery of lotuses, and the Veiled Figure ferried them over the
stream that rippled not with their motion. As they were crossing, desire
to know that Veiled Figure counselled Shibli Bagarag evilly to draw the
Sword again, and flash it, so that the veil became transparent. Then,
when Abarak turned to him for the reason of the flashing of the Sword, he
beheld the eyes of the youth fixed in horror, glaring as at sights beyond
the tomb. He said nought, but as the boat's-head whispered among the
reeds and long flowers of the opposite marge, he took Shibli Bagarag by
the shoulders and pushed him out of the boat, and leaped out likewise,
leading him from the marge forcibly, hurrying him forward from it, he at
the heels of the youth propelling him; and crying in out-of-breath voice
at intervals, 'What sight? what sight?' But the youth was powerless of
speech, and when at last he opened his lips, the little man shrank from
him, for he laughed as do the insane, a peal of laughter ended by gasps;
then a louder peal, presently softer; then a peal that started all the
echoes in Aklis. After awhile, as Abarak still cried in his ear, 'What
sight?' he looked at him with a large eye, saying querulously, 'Is it
written I shall be pushed by the shoulder through life? And is it in the
pursuit of further thwackings?'

Abarak heeded him not, crying still, 'What sight?' and Shibli Bagarag
lowered his tone, and jerked his body, pronouncing the name 'Rabesqurat!'
Then Abarak exclaimed, ''Tis as I weened. Oh, fool! to flash the Sword
and peer through the veil! Truly, there be few wits will bear that
sight!' On a sudden he cried, 'No cure but one, and that a sleep in the
bosom of the betrothed!'

Thereupon he hurried the youth yet faster across the dark lawns of Aklis
toward the passage of the Seventh Pillar, by which the twain had entered
that kingdom. And Shibli Bagarag saw as in a dream the shattered door,
shattered by the bar, remembering dimly as a thing distant in years the
netting of the Queen, and Noorna chained upon the pillar; he remembered
Shagpat even vacantly in his mind, as one sheaf of barley amid other
sheaves of the bearded field, so was he overcome by the awfulness of that
sight behind the veil of the Veiled Figure!

As they advanced to the passage, he was aware of an impediment to its
entrance, as it had been a wall of stone there; and seeing Abarak enter
the passage without let, he kicked hard in front at the invisible
obstruction, but there was no coming by. Abarak returned to him, and took
his right arm, and raised the sleeve from his wrist, and lo, the two
remaining hairs of Garraveen twisted round it in sapphire winds. Cried
he, 'Oh, the generosity of Gulrevaz! she has left these two hairs that he
may accomplish swiftly the destiny marked for him! but now, since his
gazing through that veil, he must part with them to get out of Aklis.'
And he muttered, 'His star is a strange one! one that leadeth him to
fortune by the path of frowns! to greatness by the aid of thwackings!
Truly the ways of Allah are wonderful!' Shibli Bagarag resisted him in
nothing, and Abarak loosed the two bright hairs from his wrist, and those
two hairs swelled and took glittering scales, and were sapphire snakes
with wings of intense emerald; and they rose in the air spirally
together, each over each, so that to see them one would fancy in the
darkness a fountain of sapphire waters flashed with the sheen of emerald.
When they had reached a height loftier than the topmost palace-towers of
Aklis, they descended like javelins into the earth, and in a moment
re-appeared, in the shape of Genii when they are charitably disposed to
them they visit; not much above the mortal size, nor overbright, save for
a certain fire in their eyes when they turned them; and they were clothed
each from head to foot in an armour of sapphire plates shot with steely
emerald. Surely the dragon-fly that darteth all day in the blaze over
pools is like what they were. Abarak bit his forefinger and said, 'Who be
ye, O sons of brilliance?'

They answered, 'Karavejis and Veejravoosh, slaves of the Sword.'

Then he said, 'Come with us now, O slaves of the Sword, and help us to
the mountain of outer Aklis.'

They answered, 'O thou, there be but two means for us of quitting Aklis:
on the wrist of the Master, or down the blade of the Sword! and from the
wrist of the Master we have been loosed, and no one of thy race can tie
us to it again.'

Abarak said, 'How then shall the Master leave Aklis?'

They answered, 'By Allah in Aklis! he can carve a way whither he will
with the Sword.'

But Abarak cried, 'O Karavejis and Veejravoosh! he bath peered through
the veil of the Ferrying Figure.'

Now, when they heard his words, the visages of the Genii darkened, and
they exclaimed sorrowfully, 'Serve we such a one?'

And they looked at Shibli Bagarag a look of anger, so that he, whose wits
were in past occurrences, imagined them his enemy and the foe of Noorna
split in two, crying, 'How? Is Karaz a couple? and do I multiply him with
strokes of the Sword?'

Thereupon he drew the Sword from his girdle in wrath, flourishing it; and
Karavejis and Veejravoosh felt the might of the Sword, and prostrated
themselves to the ground at his feet. And Abarak said, 'Arise, and bring
us swiftly to the mountain of outer Aklis.'

Then said they, 'Seek a passage down yonder brook in the moonbeams; and
it is the sole passage for him now.'

Abarak went with them to the brook that was making watery music to itself
between banks of splintered rock and over broad slabs of marble, bubbling
here and there about the roots of large-leaved water-flowers, and
catching the mirrored moon of Aklis in whirls, breaking it in lances.
Then they waded into the water knee-deep, and the two Genii seized hold
of a great slab of marble in the middle of the water, and under was a
hollow brimmed with the brook, that the brook partly filled and flowed
over. Then the Genii said to Abarak, 'Plunge!' and they said the same to
Shibli Bagarag. The swayer of the Sword replied, as it had been a simple
occasion, a common matter, and a thing for the exercise of civility,
'With pleasure and all willingness!' Thereupon he tightened his girth,
and arrowing his two hands, flung up his heels and disappeared in the
depths, Abarak following. Surely, those two went diving downward till it
seemed to each there was no bottom in the depth, and they would not cease
to feel the rushing of the water in their ears till the time anticipated
by mortals.




THE BOSOM OF NOORNA

Now, while a thousand sparks of fire were bursting on the sight of the
two divers, and they speeded heels uppermost to the destiny marked out
for them by the premeditations of the All-Wise, lo! Noorna was on the
mountain in outer Aklis with Koorookh, waiting for the appearance of her
betrothed, Sword in hand. She saw beams from the blazing eye of Aklis,
and knew by the redness of it that one, a mortal, was peering on the
earth and certain of created things. So she waited awhile in patience for
the return of her betrothed, with the head of Koorookh in her lap,
caressing the bird, and teaching it words of our language; and the bird
fashioned its bill to the pronouncing of names, such as 'Noorna' and
'Feshnavat,' and 'Goorelka'; and it said 'Karaz,' and stuck not at the
name 'Shagpat,' and it learnt to say even 'Shagpat shall be shaved!
Shagpat shall be shaved!' but no effort of Noorna could teach it to say,
'Shibli Bagarag,' the bird calling instead, 'Shiparack, Shiplabarack,
Shibblisharack.' And Noorna chid it with her forefinger, crying, 'O
Koorookh! wilt thou speak all names but that one of my betrothed?'

So she said again, 'Shibli Bagarag.' And the bird answered, imitating its
best, 'Shibberacavarack.' Noorna was wroth with it, crying, 'Oh naughty
bird! is the name of my beloved hateful to thee?'

And she chid Koorookh angrily, he with a heavy eye sulking, and keeping
the sullen feathers close upon his poll. Now, she thought, 'There is in
this a meaning and I will fathom it.' So she counted the letters in the
name of her betrothed, that were thirteen, and spelt them backwards,
afterwards multiplying them by an equal number, and fashioning words from
the selection of every third and seventh letter. Then took she the leaf
from a tree and bade Koorookh fly with her to the base of the mountain
sloping from Aklis to the sea, and there wrote with a pin's point on the
leaf the words fashioned, dipping the leaf in the salt ripple by the
beach, till they were distinctly traced. And it was revealed to her that
Shibli Bagarag bore now a name that might be uttered by none, for that
the bearer of it had peered through the veil of the ferrying figure in
Aklis. When she knew that, her grief was heavy, and she sat on the cold
stones of the beach and among the bright shells, weeping in anguish,
loosing her hair, scattering it wildly, exclaiming, 'Awahy! woe on me!
Was ever man more tired than he before entering Aklis, he that was in
turns abased and beloved and exalted! yet his weakness clingeth to him,
even in Aklis and with the Wondrous Sword in his grasp.'

Then she thought, 'Still he had strength to wield the Sword, for I marked
the flashing of it, and 'twas he that leaned forward the blade to me; and
he possesses the qualities that bring one gloriously to the fruits of
enterprise!' And she thought, 'Of a surety, if Abarak be with him, and a
single of the three slaves of the Sword that I released from the tail of
Garraveen, Ravejoura, Karavejis, and Veejravoosh, he will yet come
through, and I may revive him in my bosom for the task.' So, thinking
upon that, the sweet crimson surprised her cheeks, and she arose and drew
Koorookh with her along the beach till they came to some rocks piled
ruggedly and the waves breaking over them. She mounted these, and stepped
across them to the entrance of a cavern, where flowed a full water
swiftly to the sea, rolling smooth bulks over and over, and with a
translucent light in each, showing precious pebbles in the bed of the
water below; agates of size, limpid cornelians, plates of polished jet,
rubies, diamonds innumerable that were smitten into sheen by slant rays
of the level sun, the sun just losing its circle behind lustrous billows
of that Enchanted Sea. She turned to Koorookh a moment, saying, with a
coax of smiles, 'Will my bird wait here for me, even at this point?'
Koorookh clapped both his wings, and she said again, petting him, 'He
will keep watch to pluck me from the force of water as I roll past, that
I be not carried to the sea, and lost?'

Koorookh still clapped his wings, and she entered under the arch of the
cavern. It was roofed with crystals, a sight of glory, with golden lamps
at intervals, still centres of a thousand beams. Taking the sandal from
her left foot and tucking up the folds of her trousers to the bend of her
clear white knee, she advanced, half wading, up the winds of the cavern,
and holding by the juts of granite here and there, till she came to a
long straight lane in the cavern, and at the end of it, far down, a solid
pillar of many-coloured water that fell into the current, as it had been
one block of gleaming marble from the roof, without ceasing. Now, she
made toward it, and fixed her eye warily wide on it, and it was bright,
flawless in brilliancy; but while she gazed a sudden blot was visible,
and she observed in the body of the fall two dark objects plumping
downward one after the other, like bolts, and they splashed in the
current and were carried off by the violence of its full sweep, shooting
by her where she stood, rapidly; but she, knotting her garments round the
waist to give her limbs freedom and swiftness, ran a space, and then bent
and plunged, catching, as she rose, the foremost to her bosom, and
whirled away under the flashing crystals like a fish scaled with
splendours that hath darted and seized upon a prey, and is bearing it
greedily to some secure corner of the deeps to swallow the quivering
repast at leisure. Surely, the heart of Noorna was wise of what she bore
against her bosom; and it beat exulting strokes in the midst of the rush
and roar and gurgle of the torrent, and the gulping sounds and
multitudinous outcries of the headlong water. That verse of the poet
would apply to her where he says:

     Lead me to the precipice,
     And bid me leap the dark abyss:
      I care not what the danger be,
     So my beloved, my beauteous vision,
      Be but the prize I bear with me,
    For she to Paradise can turn Perdition.

Praise be to him that planteth love, the worker of this marvel, within
us! Now, she sped in the manner narrated through the mazes of the cavern,
coming suddenly to the point at the entrance where perched Koorookh
gravely upon one leg, like a bird with an angling beak: he caught at her
as she was hurling toward the sea, and drew her to the bank of rock, that
burden on her bosom; and it was Shibli Bagarag, her betrothed, his eyes
closed, his whole countenance colourless. Behind him like a shadow
streamed Abarak, and Noorna kneeled by the waterside and fetched the
little man from it likewise; he was without a change, as if drawn from a
familiar element; and when he had prostrated himself thrice and called on
the Prophet's name in the form of thanksgiving, he wrung his beard of the
wet, and had wit to bless the action of Noorna, that saved him. Then the
two raised Shibli Bagarag from the rock, and reclined him lengthwise
under the wings of Koorookh, and Noorna stretched herself there beside
him with one arm about his neck, the fair head of the youth on her bosom.
And she said to Abarak, 'He hath dreamed many dreams, my betrothed, but
never one so sweet as that I give him. Already, see, the hue returneth to
his cheek and the dimples of pleasure.' So was it; and she said, 'Mount,
O thou of the net and the bar! and stride Koorookh across the neck, for
it is nigh the setting of the moon, and by dawn we must be in our middle
flight, seen of men, a cloud over them.'

Said Abarak, 'To hear is to obey!'

He bestrode the neck of Koorookh and sat with dangling feet, till she
cried, 'Rise!' and the bird spread its wings and flapped them wide,
rising high in the silver rays, and flying rapidly forward with the three
on him from the mountain in front of Aklis, and the white sea with its
enchanted isles and wonders; flying and soaring till the earth was as
what might be held in the hollow of the hand, and the kingdoms of the
earth a mingled heap of shining dust in the midst.




THE REVIVAL

Now, the feathers of Koorookh in his flight were ruffled by a chill
breeze, and they were speeding through a light glow of cold rose-colour.
Then said Noorna, ''Tis the messenger of morning, the blush. Oh, what
changes will date from this day!'

The glow of rose became golden, and they beheld underneath them, on one
side, the rim of the rising red sun, and rays streaming over the earth
and its waters. And Noorna said, 'I must warn Feshnavat, my father, and
prepare him for our coming.'

So she plucked a feather from Koorookh and laid the quill downward,
letting it drop. Then said she, 'Now for the awakening of my betrothed!'

Thereupon she hugged his head a moment, and kissed him on the eyelids,
the cheeks, and the lips, crying, 'By this means only!' Crying that, she
pushed him, sliding, from the back of the bird, and he parted from them,
falling headforemost in the air like a stricken eagle. Then she called to
Koorookh, 'Seize him!' and the bird slanted his beak and closed his
wings, the two, Abarak and Noorna, clinging to him tightly; and he was
down like an arrow between Shibli Bagarag and the ground, spreading
beneath him like a tent, and Noorna caught the youth gently to her lap;
then she pushed him off again, intercepting his descent once more, till
they were on a level with one of the mountains of the earth, from which
the City of Shagpat is visible among the yellow sands like a white spot
in the yolk of an egg. So by this time the eyes of the youth gave
symptoms of a desire to look upon the things that be, peeping faintly
beneath the lashes, and she exclaimed joyfully, raising her white hands
above her head, 'One plunge in the lake, and life will be his again!'

Below them was a green lake, tinted by the dawn with crimson and yellow,
deep, and with high banks. As they crossed it to the middle, she slipped
off the youth from Koorookh, and he with a great plunge was received into
the stillness of the lake. Meanwhile Koorookh quivered his wings and
seized him when he arose, bearing him to an end of the lake, where stood
one dressed like a Dervish, and it was the Vizier Feshnavat, the father
of Noorna. So when he saw them, he shouted the shout of congratulation,
catching Noorna to his breast, and Shibli Bagarag stretched as doth a
heavy sleeper in his last doze, saying, in a yawning voice, 'What
trouble? I wot there is nought more for us now that Shagpat is shaved!
Oh, I have had a dream, a dream! He that is among Houris in Paradise
dreameth not a dream like that. And I dreamed--'tis gone!'

Then said he, staring at them, 'Who be ye? What is this?'

Noorna, took him again to her bosom, and held him there; and she plucked
a herb, and squeezed it till a drop from it fell on either of his lids,
applying to them likewise a dew from the serpents of the Sword, and he
awoke to the reality of things. Surely, then he prostrated himself and
repeated the articles of his faith, taking one hand of his betrothed and
kissing her; and he embraced Abarak and Feshnavat, saying to the father
of Noorna, 'I know, O Feshnavat, that by my folly and through my weakness
I have lost time in this undertaking, but it shall be short work now with
Shagpat. This thy daughter, the Eclipser of Reason, was ever such a prize
as she? I will deserve her. Wullahy! I am now a new man, sprung like fire
from ashes. Lo, I am revived by her for the great work.'

Said Abarak: 'O Master of the Event, secure now without delay the two
slaves of the Sword, and lean the blade toward Aklis.'

Upon that, he ran up rapidly to the summit of the mountain and drew the
Sword from his girdle, and leaned it toward Aklis, and it lengthened out
over lands, the blade of it a beam of solid brilliance. Presently, from
forth the invisible remoteness they saw the two Genii, Karavejis and
Veejravoosh, and they were footing the blade swiftly, like stars,
speeding up till they were within reach of the serpents of the hilt, when
they dropped to the earth, bowing their heads; so he commanded them to
rise, crying, 'Search ye the earth and its confines, and bring hither
tidings of the Genie Karaz.'

They said, 'To hear is to obey.'

Then they began to circle each round the other, circling more and more
sharply till beyond the stretch of sight, and Shibli Bagarag said to
Feshnavat, 'Am I not awake, O Feshnavat? I will know where is Karaz ere I
seek to operate on Shagpat, for it is well spoken of the poet:

       "Obstructions first remove
        Ere thou thy cunning prove";

and I will encounter this Karaz that was our Ass, ere I try the great
shave.'

Then said he, turning quickly, 'Yonder is the light from Aklis striking
on the city, and I mark Shagpat, even he, illumined by it, singled out,
where he sitteth on the roof of the palace by the market-place.'

So they looked, and it was as he had spoken, that Shagpat was singled out
in the midst of the city by the wondrous beams of the eye of Aklis, and
made prominent in effulgence.

Said Abarak, climbing to the level of observation, 'He hath a redness
like the inside of a halved pomegranate.'

Feshnavat stroked his chin, exclaiming, 'He may be likened to a mountain
goat in the midst of a forest roaring with conflagration.'

Said Shibli Bagarag, 'Now is he the red-maned lion, the bristling boar,
the uncombed buffalo, the plumaged cock, but soon will he be like nothing
else save the wrinkled kernel of a shaggy fruit. Lo, now, the Sword! it
leapeth to be at him, and 'twill be as the keen icicle of winter to that
perishing foliage, that doomed crop! So doth the destined minute destroy
with a flash the hoarded arrogance of ages; and the destined hand doeth
what creation failed to perform; and 'tis by order, destiny, and
preordainment, that the works of this world come to pass. This know I,
and I witness thereto that am of a surety ordained to the Shaving of
Shagpat!'

Then he stood apart and gazed from Shagpat to the city that now began to
move with the morning; elephants and coursers saddled by the gates of the
King's palace were visible, and camels blocking the narrow streets, and
the markets bustling. Surely, though the sun illumined that city, it was
as a darkness behind Shagpat singled by the beams of Aklis.




THE PLOT

Now, while Shibli Bagarag gazed on Shagpat kindled by the beams of Aklis,
lo, the Genii Karavejis and Veejravoosh circling each other in swift
circles like two sapphire rings toward him, and they whirled to a point
above his head, and fell and prostrated themselves at his feet: so he
cried, 'O ye slaves of the Sword, my servitors! how of the whereabout of
Karaz?'

They answered, 'O Master of the Event, we found him after many circlings
far off, and 'twas by the borders of the Putrid Sea. We came not close on
him, for he is stronger than we without the Sword, but it seemed he was
distilling drops of an oil from certain substances, large thickened drops
that dropped into a phial.'

Then Shibli Bagarag said, 'The season of weakness with me is over, and
they that confide in my strength, my cunning, my watchfulness, my
wielding of the Sword, have nought to fear for themselves. Now, this is
my plot, O Feshnavat,--that part of it in which thou art to have a share.
'Tis that thou depart forthwith to the City yonder, and enter thy palace
by a back entrance, and I will see that thou art joined within an hour of
thy arrival there by Baba Mustapha, my uncle, the gabbler. He is there,
as I guess by signs; I have had warnings of him. Discover him speedily.
Thy task is then to induce him to make an attempt on the head of Shagpat
in all wiliness, as he and thou think well to devise. He will fail, as I
know, but what is that saying of the poet?

     "Persist, if thou wouldst truly reach thine ends,
     For failures oft are but advising friends."

And he says:

     "Every failure is a step advanced,
     To him who will consider how it chanced."

Wherefore, will I that this attempt be made, keeping the counsel that is
mine. Thou must tell Baba Mustapha I wait without the city to reward him
by my powers of reward with all that he best loveth. So, when he has
failed in his attempt on Shagpat, and blows fall plenteously upon him,
and he is regaled with the accustomed thwacking, as I have tasted it in
this undertaking, do thou waste no further word on him, for his part is
over, and as is said:

     "Waste not a word in enterprise!
     Against--or for--the minute flies."

'Tis then for thee, O Feshnavat, to speed to the presence of the King in
his majesty, and thou wilt find means of coming to him by a disguise.
Once in the Hall of Council, challenge the tongue of contradiction to
affirm Shagpat other than a bald-pate bewigged. This is for thee to do.'

Quoth Feshnavat plaintively, after thought, 'And what becometh of me, O
thou Master of the Event?'

Shibli Bagarag said, 'The clutch of the executioner will be upon thee, O
Feshnavat, and a clamouring multitude around; short breathing-time given
thee, O father of Noorna, ere the time of breathing is commanded to
cease. Now, in that respite the thing that will occur, 'tis for thee to
see and mark; sure, never will reverse of things be more complete, and
the other side of the picture more rapidly exhibited, if all go as I
conceive and plot, and the trap be not premature nor too perfect for the
trappers; as the poet has declared:

  "Ye that intrigue, to thy slaves proper portions adapt;
   Perfectest plots burst too often, for all are not apt."

And I witness likewise to the excellence of his saying:

       "To master an Event,
        Study men!
        The minutes are well spent
        Only then."

Also 'tis he that says:

  "The man of men who knoweth men, the Man of men is he!
   His army is the human race, and every foe must flee."

So have I apportioned to thee thy work, to Baba Mustapha his; reserving
to myself the work that is mine!'

Thereat Feshnavat exclaimed, 'O Master of the Event, may I be thy
sacrifice! on my head be it! and for thee to command is for me to obey!
but surely, this Sword of thine that is in thy girdle, the marvellous
blade--'tis alone equal to the project and the shave; and the matter
might be consummated, the great thing done, even from this point whence
we behold Shagpat visible, as 'twere brought forward toward us by the
beams! And this Sword swayed by thee, and with thy skill and strength and
the hardihood of hand that is thine, wullahy! 'twould shear him now, this
moment, taking the light of Aklis for a lather.'

Shibli Bagarag knotted the brows of impatience, crying, 'Hast thou
forgotten Karaz in thy calculations? I know of a surety what this Sword
will do, and I wot the oil he distilleth strengtheneth Shagpat but
against common blades. Yet shall it not be spoken of me, Shibli Bagarag,
that I was tripped by my own conceit; the poet counselleth:

  "When for any mighty end thou hast the aid of heaven,
   Mount until thy strength shall match those great means which are
   given":

nor that I was overthrown in despising mine enemy, forgetful of the
saying of the sage:

  "Read the features of thy foe, wherever he may find thee,
   Small he is, seen face to face, but thrice his size behind thee."

Wullahy! this Karaz is a Genie of craft and resources, one of a mighty
stock, and I must close with Shagpat to be sure of him; and that I am not
deceived by semblances, opposing guile with guile, and guile deeper than
his, for that he awaiteth it not, thinking I have leaped in fancy beyond
the Event, and am puffed by the after-breaths of adulation, I!--thinking
I pluck the blossoms in my hunger for the fruit, that I eat the chick of
the yet unlaid egg, O Feshnavat. As is said, and the warrior beareth
witness to the wisdom of it:

     "His weapon I'll study; my own conceal;
     So with two arms to his one shall I deal."

The same also testifieth:

  "'Tis folly of the hero, though resistless in the field,
   To stake the victory on his steel, and fling away the shield."

And likewise:

     "Examine thine armour in every joint,
     For slain was the Giant, and by a pin's point."

Wah! 'tis certain there will need subtlety in this undertaking, and a
plot plotted, so do thou my bidding, and fail not in the part assigned to
thee.'

Now, Feshnavat was persuaded by his words, and cried, 'In diligence,
discretion, and the virtues which characterize subordinates, I go, and I
delay not! I will perform the thing required of me, O Master of the
Event.' And he repeated in verse:

     With danger beset, be the path crooked or narrow,
     Thou art the bow, and I the arrow.

Then embraced he his daughter, kissing her on the forehead and the eyes,
and tightening the girdle of his robe, departed, with the name of Allah
on his lips, in the direction of the City.

So Shibli Bagarag called to him the two Genii, and his command was,
'Soar, ye slaves of the Sword, till the range of earth and its mountains
and seas and deserts are a cluster in the orb of the eye, Shiraz
conspicuous as a rose among garlands, and the ruby consorted with other
gems in a setting. In Shiraz or the country adjoining ye will come upon
one Baba Mustapha by name; and, if he be alone, ye may recognize him by
his forlorn look and the hang of his cheeks, his vacancy as of utter
abandonment; if in company, 'twill be the only talker that's he; seize on
him, give him a taste of thin air, and deposit him without speech on the
roof of a palace, where ye will see Feshnavat in yonder city: this do ere
the shadows of the palm-tree by the well in the plain move up the mounds
that enclose the fortified parts.'

Cried Karavejis and Veejravoosh, 'To hear is to obey.'

Up into the sky, like two bright balls tossed by jugglers, the two Genii
shot; and, watching them, Noorna bin Noorka said, 'My life, there is a
third wanting, Ravejoura; and with aid of the three, earth could have
planted no obstruction to thy stroke; but thou wert tempted by the third
temptation in Aklis, and left not the Hall in triumph, the Hall of the
Duping Brides!'

He answered, 'That is so, my soul; and the penalty is mine, by which I am
made to employ deceits ere I strike.'

And she said, ''Tis to the generosity of Gulrevaz thou owest Karavejis
and Veejravoosh; and I think she was generous, seeing thee true to me in
love, she that hath sorrows!'

So he said, 'What of the sorrows of Gulrevaz? Tell me of them.'

But she said, 'Nay, O my betrothed! wouldst thou have this tongue
blistered, and a consuming spark shot against this bosom?'

Then he: 'Make it clear to me.'

She put her mouth to his ear, saying, 'There is a curse on whoso telleth
of things in Aklis, and to tattle of the Seven and their sister
forerunneth wretchedness.'

Surely, he stooped to that fair creature, and folded her to his heart,
his whole soul heaving to her; and he cried again and again, 'Shall harm
hap to thee through me? by Allah, no!'

And he closed the privileged arm of the bridegroom round her waist, that
had the yieldingness of the willow-branchlet, the flowingness of the
summer sea-wave, and seemed as 'twere melting honey-like at the first
gentle pressure; she leaning her head shyly on his shoulder, yet
confiding in his faithfulness; it was that she was shy of the great bliss
in her bosom, and was made timid by the fervour of her affection; as is
sung:

     Deeper than the source of blushes
     Is the power that makes them start;
     Up in floods the red stream rushes,
     At one whisper of the heart.

And it is sung in words present to the youth as he surveyed her:

     O beauty of the bride! O beauty of the bride!
     Her bashful joys like serpents sting her tenderness to
     tears:
   Her hopes are sleeping eagles in the shining of the spheres;
     O beauty of the bride! O beauty of the bride!
   And she's a lapping antelope that from her image flees;
   And she's a dove caught in two hands, to pant as she shall
     please;
     O beauty of the bride! O beauty of the bride!
   Like torrents over Paradise her lengthy tresses roll:
   She moves as doth a swaying rose, and chides her hasty soul;
   The thing she will, that will she not, yet can no will  control
     O beauty, beauty, beauty of the bride!

They were thus together, Abarak leaning under one wing of Koorookh for
shade up the slope of the hill, and Shibli Bagarag called to him, 'Ho,
Abarak! look if there be aught impending over the City.'

So he arose and looked, crying, 'One with plunging legs, high up in air
over the City, between two bright bodies.' Shibli Bagarag exclaimed,
''Tis well! The second chapter of the Event is opened; so call it, thou
that tellest of the Shaving of Shagpat. It will be the shortest.'

Then he said, 'The shadow of yonder palm is now a slanted spear up the
looped wall of the City. Now, the time of Shagpat's triumph, and his
greatest majesty, will be when yonder walls chase the shadow of the palm
up this hill; and then will Baba Mustapha be joining the chorus of
creatures that shriek toward even ere they snooze. There's not an ape in
the woods, nor hyaena in the forest, nor birds on the branches, nor frogs
in the marsh that will outnoise Baba Mustapha under the thong! Wullahy,
'twill grieve his soul in aftertime when he sitteth secure in honours,
courted, with a thousand ears at his bidding, that so much breath 'scaped
him without toll of the tongue! But as the poet says truly:

     "The chariot of Events lifteth many dusty heels,
     And many, high and of renown, it crusheth with its wheels."

Wah! I have had my share of the thong, and am I, Master of the Event, to
be squeamish in attaining an end by its means? Nay, by this Sword!'

Thereat, he strode once again to the summit of the hill, and in a moment
the Genii fronted him like two shot arrows quivering from the flight. So
he cried, 'It is done?'

They answered, 'In faithfulness.'

So he beckoned to Noorna, and she came forward swiftly to him,
exclaiming, 'I read the plot, and the thing required of me; so say
nought, but embrace me ere I leave thee, my betrothed, my master!'

He embraced her, and led her to where the Genii stood. Then said he to
the Genii, 'Convey her to the City, O ye slaves of the Sword, and watch
over her there. If ye let but an evil wind ruffle the hair of her head,
lo! I sever ye with a stroke that shaketh the under worlds. Remain by her
till the shrieks of Baba Mustapha greet ye, and then will follow
commotion among the crowd, and cries for Shagpat to show himself to the
people, cries also of death to Feshnavat; and there will be an assembly
in the King's Hall of Justice; thither lead ye my betrothed, and watch
over her.' And he said to Noorna, 'Thou knowest my design?'

So she said, 'When condemnation is passed on Feshnavat, that I appear in
the hall as bride of Shagpat, and so rescue him that is my father.' And
she cried, 'Oh, fair delightful time that is coming! my happiness and thy
honour on earth dateth from it. Farewell, O my betrothed, beloved youth!
Eyes of mine! these Genii will be by, and there's no cause for fear or
sorrow, and 'tis for thee to look like morning that speeds the march of
light. Thou, my betrothed, art thou not all that enslaveth the heart of
woman?'

Cried Shibli Bagarag, 'And thou, O Noorna, all that enraptureth the soul
of man! Allah keep thee, my life!'

Lo! while they were wasting the rich love in their hearts, the Genii rose
up with Noorna, and she, waving her hand to him, was soon distant and as
the white breast of a bird turned to the sun. Then went he to where
Abarak was leaning, and summoned Koorookh, and the twain mounted him, and
rose up high over the City of Shagpat to watch the ripening of the Event,
as a vulture watcheth over the desert.




THE DISH OF POMEGRANATE GRAIN

Now, in the City of Shagpat, Kadza, spouse of Shagpat, she that had
belaboured Shibli Bagarag, had a dream while these things were doing; and
it was a dream of danger and portent to the glory of her eyes, Shagpat.
So, at the hour when he was revealed to Shibli Bagarag, made luminous by
the beams of Aklis, Kadza went to an inner chamber, and greased her hands
and her eyelids, and drank of a phial, and commenced tugging at a brass
ring fixed in the floor, and it yielded and displayed an opening, over
which she stooped the upper half of her leanness, and pitching her note
high, called 'Karaz!' After that, she rose and retreated from the hole
hastily, and in the winking of an eye it was filled, as 'twere a pillar
of black smoke, by the body of the Genie, he breathing hard with mighty
travel. So he cried to her between his pantings and puffings, 'Speak!
where am I wanted, and for what?'

Now, Kadza was affrighted at the terribleness of his manner, and the
great smell of the Genie was an intoxication in her nostril, so that she
reeled and could just falter out, 'Danger to the Identical!'

Then he, in a voice like claps of thunder, 'Out with it!'

She answered beseechingly, ''Tis a dream I had, O Genie; a dream of
danger to him.'

While she spake, the Genie clenched his fists and stamped so that the
palace shook and the earth under it, exclaiming, 'O abominable Kadza! a
dream is it? another dream? Wilt thou cease dreaming awhile, thou silly
woman? Know I not he that's powerful against us is in Aklis, crowned ape,
and that his spells are gone? And I was distilling drops to defy the
Sword and strengthen Shagpat from assault, yet bringest thou me from my
labour by the Putrid Sea with thy accursed dream!' Thereat, he frowned
and shot fire at her from his eyes, so that she singed, and the room
thickened with a horrible smell of burning. She feared greatly and
trembled, but he cooled himself against the air, crying presently in a
diminished voice, 'Let's hear this dream, thou foolish Kadza! 'Tis as
well to hear it. Probably Rabesqurat hath sent thee some sign from Aklis,
where she ferryeth a term. What's that saying:

  "A woman's at the core of every plot man plotteth,
   And like an ill-reared fruit, first at the core it rotteth."

So, out with it, thou Kadza!'

Now, the urgency of that she had dreamed overcame fear in Kadza, and she
said, 'O great Genie and terrible, my dream was this. Lo! I saw an
assemblage of the beasts of the forests and them that inhabit wild
places. And there was the elephant and the rhinoceros and the
hippopotamus, and the camel and the camelopard, and the serpent and the
striped tiger; also the antelope, the hyena, the jackal, and above them,
eminent in majesty, the lion. Surely, he sat as 'twere on a high seat,
and they like suppliants thronging the presence: this I saw, the heart on
my ribs beating for Shagpat. And there appeared among the beasts a monkey
all ajoint with tricks, jerking with malice, he looking as 'twere hungry
for the doing of things detestable; and the lion scorned him, and I
marked him ridicule the lion: 'twas so. And the lion began to scowl, and
the other beasts marked the displeasure of the lion. Then chased they
that monkey from the presence, and for awhile he was absent, and the lion
sat in his place gravely, with calm, receiving homage of the other
beasts; and down to his feet came the eagle that's lord of air, and
before him kneeled the great elephant, and the subtle serpent eyed him
with awe. But soon did that monkey, the wretched animal! reappear, and
there was no peace for the lion, he worrying till close within stretch of
the lion's paw! Wah! the lion might have crushed him, but that he's
magnanimous. And so it was that as the monkey advanced the lion roared to
him, "Begone!"

'And the monkey cried, "Who commandeth?"

'So the lion roared, "The King of beasts and thy King!"

'Then that monkey cried, "Homage to the King of beasts and my King! Allah
keep him in his seat, and I would he were visible."

'So the lion roared, "He sitteth here acknowledged, thou graceless
animal! and he's before thee apparent."

'Then the monkey affected eagerness, and gazed about him, and peered on
this beast and on that, exclaiming like one that's injured and under
slight, "What's this I've done, and wherein have I offended, that he
should be hidden from me when pointed out?"

'So the lion roared, "'Tis I where I sit, thou offensive monkey!"

'Then that monkey in the upper pitch of amazement, "Thou! Is it for
created thing to acknowledge a king without a tail? And, O beasts of the
forest and the wilderness, how say ye? Am I to blame that I bow not to
one that hath it not?"

'Upon that, the lion rose, and roared in the extreme of wrath; but the
word he was about to utter was checked in him, for 'twas manifest that
where he would have lashed a tail he shook a stump, wagging it as the dog
doth. Lo! when the lion saw that, the majesty melted from him, and in a
moment the plumpness of content and prosperity forsook him, so that his
tawny skin hung flabbily and his jaw drooped, and shame deprived him of
stateliness; abashed was he! Now, seeing the lion shamed in this manner,
my heart beat violently for Shagpat, so that I awoke with the strength of
its beating, and 'twas hidden from me whether the monkey was punished by
the lion, or exalted by the other beasts in his place, or how came it
that the lion's tail was lost, witched from him by that villain of
mischief, the monkey; but, O great Genie, I knew there was a lion among
men, reverenced, and with enemies; that lion, he that espoused me and my
glory, Shagpat! 'Twas enough to know that and tremble at the omen of my
dream, O Genie. Wherefore I thought it well to summon thee here, that
thou mightest set a guard over Shagpat, and shield him from the
treacheries that beset him.'

When Kadza had ceased speaking, the Genie glowered at her awhile in
silence. Then said he, 'What creature is that, Kadza, which tormenteth
like the tongue of a woman, is small as her pretensions to virtue, and
which showeth how the chapters of her history should be read by the holy
ones, even in its manner of movement?'

Cried Kadza, 'The flea that hoppeth!'

So he said, ''Tis well! Hast thou strength to carry one of my weight, O
Kadza?'

She answered in squeamishness, 'I, wullahy! I'm but a woman, Genie,
though the wife of Shagpat: and to carry thee is for the camel and the
elephant and the horse.'

Then he, 'Tighten thy girdle, and when tightened, let a loose loop hang
from it.'

She did that, and he gave her a dark powder in her hand, saying, 'Swallow
the half of this, and what remaineth mix with water, and sprinkle over
thee.'

That did she, and thereupon he exclaimed, 'Now go, and thy part is to
move round Shagpat; and a wind will strike thee from one quarter, and
from which quarter it striketh is the one of menace and danger to
Shagpat.'

So Kadza was diligent in doing what the Genie commanded, and sought for
Shagpat, and moved round him many times; but no wind struck her. She went
back to the Genie, and told him of this, and the Genie cried, 'What? no
wind? not one from Aklis? Then will Shagpat of a surety triumph, and we
with him.'

Now, there was joy on the features of Kadza and Karaz, till suddenly he
said, 'Halt in thy song! How if there be danger and menace above? and
'tis the thing that may be.'

Then he seized Kadza, and slung her by him, and went into the air, and up
it till the roofs of the City of Shagpat were beneath their feet, all on
them visible. And under an awning, on the roof of a palace, there was the
Vizier Feshnavat and Baba Mustapha, they ear to lip in consultation, and
Baba Mustapha brightening with the matter revealed to him, and bobbing
his head, and breaking on the speech of the Vizier. Now, when he saw them
the Genie blew from his nostrils a double stream of darkness which curled
in a thick body round and round him, and Kadza slung at his side was
enveloped in it, as with folds of a huge serpent. Then the Genie hung
still, and lo! two radiant figures swept toward the roof he watched, and
between them Noorna bin Noorka, her long dark hair borne far backward,
and her robe of silken stuff fluttering and straining on the pearl
buttons as she flew. There was that in her beauty and the silver
clearness of her temples and her eyes, and her cheeks, and her neck, and
chin and ankles, that made the Genie shudder with love of her, and he was
nigh dropping Kadza to the ground, forgetful of all save Noorna. When he
recovered, and it was by tightening his muscles till he was all over hard
knots, Noorna was seated on a cushion, and descending he heard her speak
his name. Then sniffed he the air, and said to Kadza, 'O spouse of
Shagpat, a plot breweth, and the odour of it is in my nostril. Fearest
thou a scorching for his sake thou adorest, the miracle of men?'

She answered, 'On my head be it, and my eyes!'

He said, 'I shall alight thee behind the pole of awning on yonder roof,
where are the two bright figures and the dingy one, and the Vizier
Feshnavat and Noorna bin Noorka. A flame will spring up severing thee
from them; but thou'rt secure from it by reason of the powder I gave
thee, all save the hair that's on thee. Thou'lt have another shape than
that which is thine, even that of a slave of Noorna bin Noorka, and say
to her when she asketh thy business with her, "O my mistress, let the
storm gather-in the storm-bird when it would surprise men." Do this, and
thy part's done, O Kadza!'

Thereupon he swung a circle, and alighted her behind the pole of awning
on the roof, and vanished, and the circle of flame rose up, and Kadza
passed through it slightly scorched, and answered to the question of
Noorna, 'O my mistress, let the storm gather-in the storm-bird when it
would surprise men.' Now, when Noorna beheld her, and heard her voice,
she pierced the disguise, and was ware of the wife of Shagpat, and
glanced her large eyes over Kadza from head to sole till they rested on
the loose loop in her girdle. Seeing that, she rose up, and stretched her
arms, and spread open the palm of her hand, and slapped Kadza on the
cheek and ear a hard slap, so that she heard bells; and ere she ceased to
hear them, another, so that Kadza staggered back and screamed, and
Feshnavat was moved to exclaim, 'What has the girl, thy favourite,
offended in, O my daughter?'

So Noorna continued slapping Kadza, and cried, 'Is she not sluttish? and
where's the point of decency established in her, this Luloo? Shall her
like appear before thee and me with loose girdle!'

Then she pointed to the girdle, and Kadza tightened the loose loop, and
fell upon the ground to avoid the slaps, and Noorna knelt by her, and
clutched at a portion of her dress and examined it, peering intently; and
she caught up another part, and knotted it as if to crush a living
creature, hunting over her, and grasping at her; and so it was that while
she tore strips from the garments of Kadza, Feshnavat jumped suddenly in
wrath, and pinched over his garments, crying, 'Tis unbearable! 'Tis I
know not what other than a flea that persecuteth me:'

Upon that, Noorna ran to him, and while they searched together for the
flea, Baba Mustapha fidgeted and worried in his seat, lurching to the
right and to the left, muttering curses; and it was evident he too was
persecuted, and there was no peace on the roof of that palace, but
pinching and howling and stretching of limbs, and curses snarled in the
throat and imprecations on the head of the tormenting flea. Surely, the
soul of Kadza rejoiced, for she knew the flea was Karaz, whom she had
brought with her in the loose loop of her girdle through the circle of
flame which was a barrier against him. She glistened at the triumph of
the flea, but Noorna strode to her, and took her to the side of the roof,
and pitched her down it, and closed the passage to her. Then ran she to
Karavejis and Veejravoosh, whispering in the ear of each, 'No word of the
Sword?' and afterward aloud, 'What think ye will be the term of the
staying of my betrothed in Aklis, crowned ape?'

They answered, 'O pearl of the morn, crowned ape till such time as
Shagpat be shaved.'

So she beat her breast, crying, 'Oh, utter stagnation, till Shagpat be
shaved! and oh, stoppage in the tide of business, dense cloud upon the
face of beauty, and frost on the river of events, till Shagpat be shaved!
And oh! my betrothed, crowned ape in Aklis till Shagpat be shaved!'

Then she lifted her hands and arms, and said, 'To him where he is, ye
Genii! and away, for he needeth comfort.'

Thereat the glittering spirits dissolved and thinned, and were as taper
gleams of curved light across the water in their ascent of the heavens.
When they were gone Noorna, exclaimed, 'Now for the dish of pomegrante
grain, O Baba Mustapha, and let nothing delay us further.'

Quoth Baba Mustapha, ''Tis ordered, O my princess and fair mistress, from
the confectioner's; and with it the sleepy drug from the seller of
medicaments--accursed flea!'

Now, she laughed, and said, 'What am I, O Baba Mustapha?'

So he said, 'Not thou, O bright shooter of beams, but I, wullahy! I'm but
a bundle of points through the pertinacity of this flea! a house of
irritabilities! a mere mass of fretfulness! and I've no thought but for
the chasing of this unlucky flea: was never flea like it in the world
before this flea; and 'tis a flea to anger the holy ones, and make the
saintly Dervish swear at such a flea.' He wriggled and curled where he
sat, and Noorna cried, 'What! shall we be defeated by a flea, we that
would shave Shagpat, and release this city and the world from bondage?'
And she looked up to the sky that was then without a cloud, blazing with
the sun on his mid seat, and exclaimed, 'O star of Shagpat! wilt thou
constantly be in the ascendant, and defeat us, the liberators of men,
with a flea?'

Now, whenever one of the twain, Baba Mustapha and the Vizier Feshnavat,
commenced speaking of the dish of pomegranate grain, the torment of the
flea took all tongue from him, and was destruction to the gravity of
council and deliberation. The dish of pomegranate grain was brought to
them by slaves, and the drug to induce sleep, yet neither could say aught
concerning it, they were as jointy grasshoppers through the action of the
flea, and the torment of the flea became a madness, they shrieking, ''Tis
now with thee! 'Tis now with me! Fires of the damned on this flea!' In
their extremity, they called to Allah for help, but no help came, save
when they abandoned all speech concerning the dish of pomegranate grain,
then were they for a moment eased of the flea. So Noorna recognized the
presence of her enemy Karaz, and his malicious working; and she went and
fetched a jar brimmed with water for the bath, and stirred it with her
forefinger, and drew on it a flame from the rays of the sun till there
rose up from the jar a white thick smoke. She rustled her raiment, making
the wind of it collect round Baba Mustapha and Feshnavat, and did this
till the sweat streamed from their brows and bodies, and they were
sensible of peace and the absence of the flea. Then she whisked away the
smoke, and they were attended by slaves with fresh robes, and were as new
men, and sat together over the dish of pomegranate grain, praising the
wisdom of Noorna and her power. Then Baba Mustapha revived in briskness,
and cried, 'Here the dish! and 'tis in my hands an instrument, an
instrument of vengeance! and one to endow the skilful wielder of it with
glory. And 'tis as I designed it,--sweet, seasoned, savoury,--a flattery
to the eye and no deceiver to the palate. Wah! and such an instrument in
the hands of the discerning and the dexterous, and the discreet and the
judicious, and them gifted with determination, is't not such as sufficeth
for the overturning of empires and systems, O my mistress, fair one,
sapphire of this city? And is't not written that I shall beguile Shagpat
by its means, and master the Event, and shame the King of Oolb and his
Court? And I shall then sit in state among men, and surround myself with
adornments and with slaves, mute, that speak not save at the signal, and
are as statues round the cushions of their lord--that's myself. And I
shall surround myself with the flatteries of wealth, and walk bewildered
in silks and stuffs and perfumeries; and sweet young beauties shall I
have about me, antelopes of grace, as I like them, and select them,
long-eyed, lazy, fond of listening, and with bashful looks that timidly
admire the dignity that's in man.'

While he was prating Noorna took the dish in her lap, and folded her
silvery feet beneath her, and commenced whipping into it the drug: and
she whipped it dexterously and with equal division among the grain,
whipping it and the flea with it, but she feigned not to mark the flea
and whipped harder. Then took she colour and coloured it saffron, and
laid over it gold-leaf, so that it glittered and was an enticing sight;
and the dish was of gold, crusted over with devices and patterns, and
heads of golden monsters, a ravishment of skill in him that executed it,
cumbrous with ornate golden workmanship; likewise there were places round
the dish for sticks of perfume and cups carved for the storing of
perfumed pellets, and into these Noorna put myrrh and ambergris and rich
incenses, aloes, sandalwood, prepared essences, divers keen and sweet
scents. Then when all was in readiness, she put the dish upon the knee of
Baba Mustapha, and awoke him from his babbling reverie with a shout, and
said, 'An instrument verily, O Baba Mustapha! and art thou a cat to shave
Shagpat with that tongue of thine?'

Now, he arose and made the sign of obedience and said, ''Tis well, O lady
of grace and bright wit! and now for the cap of Shiraz and the Persian
robe, and my twenty slaves and seven to follow me to the mansion of
Shagpat. I'll do: I'll act.'

So she motioned to a slave to bring the cap of Shiraz and the Persian
robe, and in these Baba Mustapha arrayed himself. Then called he for the
twenty-and-seven slaves, and they were ranged, some to go before, some to
follow him. And he was exalted, and made the cap of Shiraz nod in his
conceit, crying, 'Am I not leader in this complot? Wullahy! all bow to me
and acknowledge it.' Then, to check himself, he called out sternly to the
slaves, 'Ho ye! forward to the mansion of Shagpat; and pass at a slow
pace through the streets of the city--solemnly, gravely, as before a
potentate; then will the people inquire of ye, Who't is ye marshal, and
what mighty one? and ye will answer, He's from the court of Shiraz,
nothing less than a Vizier--bearing homage to Shagpat, even this dish of
pomegranate grain.'

So they said, 'To hear is to obey.'

Upon that he waved his hand and stalked majestically, and they descended
from the roof into the street, criers running in front to clear the way.
When Baba Mustapha was hidden from view by a corner of the street, Noorna
shrank in her white shoulders and laughed, and was like a flashing pearl
as she swayed and dimpled with laughter. And she cried, 'True are those
words of the poet, and I testify to them in the instance of Baba
Mustapha:

  "With feathers of the cock, I'll fashion a vain creature;
   With feathers of the owl, I'll make a judge in feature";

Is not the barber elate and lofty? He goeth forth to the mastery of this
Event as go many, armed with nought other than their own conceit: and
'tis written:

     "Fools from their fate seek not to urge:
     The coxcomb carrieth his scourge."'

So Feshnavat smoothed his face, and said, 'Is't not also written?--

     "Oft may the fall of fools make wise men moan!
     Too often hangs the house on one loose stone!"

'Tis so, O Noorna, my daughter, and I am as a reed shaken by the wind of
apprehensiveness, and doubt in me is a deep root as to the issue of this
undertaking, for the wrath of the King will be terrible, and the clamour
of the people soundeth in my ears already. If Shibli Bagarag fail in one
stroke, where be we? 'Tis certain I knew not the might in Shagpat when I
strove with him, and he's powerful beyond the measure of man's subtlety;
and yonder flies a rook without fellow--an omen; and all's ominous, and
ominous of ill: and I marked among the troop of slaves that preceded Baba
Mustapha one that squinted, and that's an omen; and, O my daughter, I
counsel that thou by thy magic speed us to some remote point in the
Caucasus, where we may abide the unravelling of this web securely, one
way or the other way. 'Tis my counsel, O Noorna.'

Then she, 'Abandon my betrothed? and betray him on the very stroke of the
Sword? and diminish him by a withdrawal of that faith in his right wrist
which strengtheneth it more than Karavejis and Veejravoosh wound round it
in coils?' And she leaned her head, and cried, 'Hark! hear'st thou?
there's shouting in the streets of Shiraz and of Shagpat! Shall we merit
the punishment of Shahpesh the Persian on Khipil the builder, while the
Event is mastering? I'll mark this interview between Baba Mustapha and
Shagpat; and do thou, O my father, rest here on this roof till the King's
guard of horsemen and soldiers of the law come hither for thee, and go
with them sedately, fearing nought, for I shall be by thee in the garb of
an old woman; and preserve thy composure in the presence of the King and
Shagpat exalted, and allow not the thing that happeneth let fly from thee
the shaft of speech, but remain a slackened bow till the strength of my
betrothed is testified, fearing nought, for fear is that which defeateth
men, and 'tis declared in a distich,--

     "The strongest weapon one can see
     In mortal hands is constancy."

And for us to flee now would rank us with that King described by the
poet:

     "A king of Ind there was who fought a fight
     From the first gleam of morn till fall of night;
     But when the royal tent his generals sought,
     Proclaiming victory, fled was he who fought.
     Despair possessed them, till they chanced to spy
     A Dervish that paced on with downward eye;
     They questioned of the King; he answer'd slow,
     'Ye fought but one, the King a double, foe."'

And, O my father, they interpreted of this that the King had been
vanquished, he that was victor, by the phantom army of his fears.'

Now, the Vizier cried, 'Be the will of Allah achieved and consummated!'
and he was silenced by her wisdom and urgency, and sat where he was,
diverting not the arch on his brow from its settled furrow. He was as one
that thirsteth, and whose eye hath marked a snake of swift poison by the
water, so thirsted he for the Event, yet hung with dread from advancing;
but Noorna bin Noorka busied herself about the roof, drawing circles to
witness the track of an enemy, and she clapped her hands and cried,
'Luloo!' and lo, a fair slave-girl that came to her and stood by with
bent head, like a white lily by a milk-white antelope; so Noorna clouded
her brow a moment, as when the moon darkeneth behind a scud, and cried,
'Speak! art thou in league with Karaz, girl?'

Luloo strained her hands to her temples, exclaiming, 'With the terrible
Genie?--I?--in league with him? my mistress, surely the charms I wear,
and the amulets, I wear them as a protection from that Genie, and a
safeguard, he that carrieth off the maidens and the young sucklings,
walking under the curse of mothers.'

Said Noorna, 'O Luloo, have I boxed those little ears of thine this day?'

The fair slave-girl smiled a smile of submissive tenderness, and
answered, 'Not this day, nor once since Luloo was rescued from the wicked
old merchant by thy overbidding, and was taken to the arms of a wise kind
sister, wiser and kinder than any she had been stolen from, she that is
thy slave for ever.'

She said this weeping, and Noorna mused, ''Twas as I divined, that
wretched Kadza: her grief 's to come!' Then spake she aloud as to
herself, 'Knew I, or could one know, I should this day be a bride?' And,
hearing that, Luloo shrieked, 'Thou a bride, and torn from me, and we two
parted? and I, a poor drooping tendril, left to wither? for my life is
round thee and worthless away from thee, O cherisher of the fallen
flower.'

And she sobbed out wailful verses and words, broken and without a
meaning; but Noorna caught her by the arm and swung her, and bade her
fetch on the instant a robe of blue, and pile in her chamber robes of
amber and saffron and grey, bridal-robes of many-lighted silks,
plum-coloured, peach-coloured, of the colour of musk mixed with pale
gold, together with bridal ornaments and veils of the bride, and a
jewelled circlet for the brow. When this was done, Noorna went with Luloo
to her chamber, attended by slave-girls, and arrayed herself in the first
dress of blue, and swayed herself before the mirror, and rattled the gold
pieces in her hair and on her neck with laughter. And Luloo was
bewildered, and forgot her tears to watch the gaiety of her mistress; and
lo! Noorna, made her women take off one set of ornaments with every
dress, and with every dress she put on another set; and after she had
gone the round of the different dresses, she went to the bathroom with
Luloo, and at her bidding Luloo entered the bath beside Noorna, and the
twain dipped and shouldered in the blue water, and were as when a single
star is by the full moon on a bright midnight pouring lustre about. And
Noorna splashed Luloo, and said, 'This night we shall not sleep together,
O Luloo, nor lie close, thy bosom on mine.'

Thereat, Luloo wept afresh, and cried, 'Ah, cruel! and 'tis a sweet
thought for thee, and thou'lt have no mind for me, tossing on my hateful
lonely couch.'

Tenderly Noorna eyed Luloo, and the sprinkles of the bath fell with the
tears of both, and they clung together, and were like the lily and its
bud on one stalk in a shower. Then, when Noorna had spent her affection,
she said, 'O thou of the long downward lashes, thy love was constant when
I stood under a curse and was an old woman--a hag! Carest thou so little
to learn the name of him that claimeth me?'

Luloo replied, 'I thought of no one save myself and my loss, O my lost
pearl; happy is he, a youth of favour. Oh, how I shall hate him that
taketh thee from me. Tell me now his name, O sovereign of hearts!'

So Noorna smoothed the curves and corners of her mouth and calmed her
countenance, crying in a deep tone and a voice as of reverence,
'Shagpat!'

Now, at that name Luloo drank in her breath and was awed, and sank in
herself, and had just words to ask, 'Hath he demanded thee again in
marriage, O my mistress?'

Said Noorna, 'Even so.'

Luloo muttered, 'Great is the Dispenser of our fates!'

And she spake no further, but sighed and took napkins and summoned the
slave-girls, and arrayed Noorna silently in the robe of blue and bridal
ornaments. Then Noorna said to them that thronged about her, 'Put on,
each of ye, a robe of white, ye that are maidens, and a fillet of blue,
and a sash of saffron, and abide my coming.'

And she said to Luloo, 'Array thyself in a robe of blue, even as mine,
and let trinkets lurk in thy tresses, and abide my coming.'

Then went she forth from them, and veiled her head and swathed her figure
in raiment of a coarse white stuff, and was as the moon going behind a
hill of dusky snow; and she left the house, and passed along the streets
and by the palaces, till she came to the palace of her father, now filled
by Shagpat. Before the palace grouped a great concourse and a multitude
of all ages and either sex in that city, despite the blaze and the heat.
Like roaring of a sea beyond the mountains was the noise that issued from
them, and their eyes were a fire of beams against the portal of the
palace. Now, she saw in the crowd one Shafrac, a shoemaker, and
addressed him, saying, 'O Shafrac, the shoemaker, what's this assembly
and how got together? for the poet says:

     "Ye string not such assemblies in the street,
     Save when some high Event should be complete."'

He answered, ''Tis an Event complete. Wullahy! the deputation from Shiraz
to Shagpat, and the submission of that vain city to the might of
Shagpat.' And he asked her, jestingly, 'Art thou a witch, to guess that,
O veiled and virtuous one?'

Quoth she, 'I read the thing that cometh ere 'tis come, and I read danger
to Shagpat in this deputation from Shiraz, and this dish of pomegranate
grain.'

So Shafrac cried, 'By the beard of my fathers and that of Shagpat! let's
speak of this to Zeel, the garlic-seller.'

He broadened to one that was by him, and said, 'O Zeel, what's thy mind?
Here's a woman, a wise woman, a witch, and she sees danger to Shagpat in
this deputation from Shiraz and this dish of pomegranate grain.'

Now, Zeel screwed his visage and gazed up into his forehead, and said,
''Twere best to consult with Bootlbac, the drum-beater.'

The two then called to Bootlbac, the drum-beater, and told him the
matter, and Bootlbac pondered, and tapped his brow and beat on his
stomach, and said, 'Krooz el Krazawik, the carrier, is good in such a
case.'

Now, from Krooz el Krazawik, the carrier, they went to Dob, the
confectioner; and from Dob, the confectioner, to Azawool, the builder;
and from Azawool, the builder, to Tcheik, the collector of taxes; and
each referred to some other, till perplexity triumphed and was a cloud
over them, and the words, 'Danger to Shagpat,' went about like bees, and
were canvassing, when suddenly a shrill voice rose from the midst,
dominating other voices, and it was that of Kadza, and she cried, 'Who
talks here of danger to Shagpat, and what wretch is it?'

Now, Tcheik pointed out Azawool, and Azawool Dob, and Dob Krooz el
Krazawik, and he Bootlbac, and the drum-beater shrugged his shoulder at
Zeel, and Zeel stood away from Shafrac, and Shafrac seized Noorna and
shouted, ''Tis she, this woman, the witch!'

Kadza fronted Noorna, and called to her, 'O thing of infamy, what's this
talk of thine concerning danger to our glory, Shagpat?'

Then Noorna replied, 'I say it, O Kadza! and I say it; there's danger
threateneth him, and from that deputation and that dish of pomegranate
grain.'

Now, Kadza laughed a loose laugh, and jeered at Noorna, crying, 'Danger
to Shagpat! he that's attended by Genii, and watched over by the greatest
of them, day and night incessantly?'

And Noorna said, 'I ask pardon of the Power that seeth, and of thee, if I
be wrong. Wah! am I not also of them that watch over Shagpat? So then let
thou and I go into the palace and examine the doings of this deputation
and this dish of pomegranate grain.'

Now, Kadza remembered the scene on the roofs of the Vizier Feshnavat, and
relaxed in her look of suspicion, and said, ''Tis well! Let's in to
them.'

Thereupon the twain threaded through the crowd and locked at the portals
of the palace, and it was opened to them and they entered, and lo! the
hand that opened the portals was the hand of a slave of the Sword, and
against corners of the Court leaned slaves silly with slumber. So Kadza
went up to them, and beat them, and shook them, and they yawned and
mumbled, 'Excellent grain! good grain! the grain of Shiraz!' And she beat
them with what might was hers, till some fell sideways and some forward,
still mumbling, 'Excellent pomegranate grain!' Kadza was beside herself
with anger and vexation at them, tearing them and cuffing them; but
Noorna cried, 'O Kadza! what said I? there's danger to Shagpat in this
dish of pomegranate grain! and what's that saying:

    "'Tis much against the Master's wish
     That slaves too greatly praise his dish."

Wullahy! I like not this talk of the grain of Shiraz.'

Now, while Noorna spake, the eyes of Kadza became like those of the
starved wild-cat, and she sprang off and along the marble of the Court,
and clawed a passage through the air and past the marble pillars of the
palace toward the first room of reception, Noorna following her. And in
the first room were slaves leaning and lolling like them about the Court,
and in the second room and in the third room, silent all of them and
senseless. So at this sight the spark of suspicion became a mighty flame
in the bosom of Kadza, and horror burst out at all ends of her, and she
shuddered, and cried, 'What for us, and where's our hope if Shagpat be
shorn, and he lopped of the Identical, shamed like the lion of my dream!'

And Noorna clasped her hands, and said, ''Tis that I fear! Seek for him,
O Kadza!'

So Kadza ran to a window and looked forth over the garden of the palace,
and it was a fair garden with the gleam of a fountain and watered plants
and cool arches of shade, thick bowers, fragrant alleys, long sheltered
terraces, and beyond the garden a summer-house of marble fanned by the
broad leaves of a palm. Now, when Kadza had gazed a moment, she shrieked,
'He's there! Shagpat! giveth he not the light of a jewel to the house
that holdeth him? Awahy! and he's witched there for an ill purpose.'

Then tore she from that room like a mad wild thing after its stolen cubs,
and sped along corridors of the palace, and down the great flight of
steps into the garden and across the garden, knocking over the
ablution-pots in her haste; and Noorna had just strength to withhold her
from dashing through the doors of the summer-house to come upon Shagpat,
she straining and crying, 'He's there, I say, O wise woman! Shagpat!
let's into him.'

But Noorna clung to her, and spake in her ear, 'Wilt thou blow the fire
that menaces him, O Kadza? and what are two women against the assailants
of such a mighty one as he?' Then said she, 'Watch, rather, and avail
thyself of yonder window by the blue-painted pillar.'

So Kadza crept up to the blue-painted pillar which was on the right side
of the porch, and the twain peered through the window. Noorna beheld the
Dish of Pomegranate Grain; and it was on the floor, empty of the grain,
and Baba Mustapha was by it alone making a lather, and he was twitching
his mouth and his legs, and flinging about his arms, and Noorna heard him
mutter wrathfully, 'O accursed flea! art thou at me again?' And she heard
him mutter as in anguish, 'No peace for thee, O pertinacious flea! and my
steadiness of hand will be gone, now when I have him safe as the hawk his
prey, mine enemy, this Shagpat that abused me: thou abominable flea! And,
O thou flea, wilt thou, vile thing! hinder me from mastering the Event,
and releasing this people and the world from enchantment and bondage? And
shall I fail to become famous to the ages and the times because of such
as thee, flea?'

So Kadza whispered to Noorna, 'What's that he's muttering? Is't of
Shagpat? for I mark him not here, nor the light by which he's girt.'

She answered, 'Listen with the ear and the eye and all the senses.'

Now, presently they heard Baba Mustapha say in a louder tone, like one
that is secure from interruption, 'Two lathers, and this the third! a
potent lather! and I wot there's not a hair in this world resisteth the
sweep of my blade over such a lather as--Ah! flea of iniquity and
abomination! what! am I doomed to thy torments?--so let's spread! Lo!
this lather, is't not the pride of Shiraz? and the polish and smoothness
it sheddeth, is't not roseate? my invention! as the poet says,--O
accursed flea! now the knee-joint, now the knee-cap, and 'tis but a hop
for thee to the arm-pit. Fires of the pit without bottom seize thee! is
no place sacred from thee, and art thou a restless soul, infernal flea?
So then, peace awhile, and here's for the third lather.'

While he was speaking Baba Mustapha advanced to a large white object that
sat motionless, upright like a snow-mound on a throne of cushions, and
commenced lathering. When she saw that, Kadza tossed up her head and her
throat, and a shriek was coming from her, for she was ware of Shagpat;
but Noorna stifled the shriek, and clutched her fast, whispering, 'He's
safe if thou have but patience, thou silly Kadza! and the flea will
defeat this fellow if thou spoil it not.'

So Kadza said, looking up, 'Is 't seen of Allah, and be the Genii still
in their depths?' but she constrained herself, peering and perking out
her chin, and lifting one foot and the other foot, as on furnaces of fire
in the excess of the fury she smothered. And lo, Baba Mustapha worked
diligently, and Shagpat was behind an exulting lather, even as one pelted
with wheaten flour-balls or balls of powdery perfume, and his hairiness
was as branches of the forest foliage bent under a sudden fall of
overwhelming snow that filleth the pits and sharpeneth the wolves with
hunger, and teacheth new cunning to the fox. A fox was Baba Mustapha in
his stratagems, and a wolf in the fierceness of his setting upon Shagpat.
Surely he drew forth the blade that was to shear Shagpat, and made with
it in the air a preparatory sweep and flourish; and the blade frolicked
and sent forth a light, and seemed eager for Shagpat. So Baba Mustapha
addressed his arm to the shearing, and inclined gently the edge of the
blade, and they marked him let it slide twice to a level with the head of
Shagpat, and at the third time it touched, and Kadza howled, but from
Baba Mustapha there burst a howl to madden the beasts; and he flung up
his blade, and wrenched open his robe, crying, 'A flea was it to bite in
that fashion? Now, I swear by the Merciful, a fang like that's common to
tigers and hyaenas and ferocious animals.'

Then looked he for the mark of the bite, plaining of its pang, and he
could find the mark nowhere. So, as he caressed himself, eyeing Shagpat
sheepishly and with gathering awe, Noorna said hurriedly to Kadza, 'Away
now, and call them in, the crowd about the palace, that they may behold
the triumph of Shagpat, for 'tis ripe, O Kadza!'

And Kadza replied, 'Thou'rt a wise woman, and I'll have thee richly
rewarded. Lo, I'm as a camel lightened of fifty loads, and the glory of
Shagpat see I as a new sun rising in the desert. Wullahy! thou'rt wise,
and I'll do thy bidding.'

Now, she went flying back to the palace, and called shrill calls to the
crowd, and collected them in the palace, and headed them through the
garden, and it was when Baba Mustapha had summoned courage for a second
essay, and was in the act of standing over Shagpat to operate on him,
that the crowd burst the doors, and he was quickly seized by them, and
tugged at and hauled at and pummelled, and torn and vituperated, and as a
wrecked vessel on stormy waters, plunging up and down with tattered
sails, when the crew fling overboard freight and ballast and provision.
Surely his time would have been short with that mob, but Noorna made
Kadza see the use of examining him before the King, and there were in
that mob sheikhs and fakirs, holy men who listened to the words of Kadza,
and exerted themselves to rescue Baba Mustapha, and quieted the rage that
was prevailing, and bore Baba Mustapha with them to the great palace of
the King, which was in the centre of that City. Now, when the King heard
of the attempt on Shagpat, and the affair of the Pomegranate Grain, he
gave orders for the admission of the people, as many of them as could be
contained in the Hall of Justice: and he set a guard over Baba Mustapha,
and commanded that Shagpat should be brought to the palace even as he
then was, and with the lather on him. So the regal mandate went forth,
and Shagpat was brought in state on cushions, and the potency of the drug
preserved his sedateness through all this, and he remained motionless in
sleep, folded in the centre of calm and satisfaction, while this tumult
was rageing and the City shook with uproar. But the people, when they saw
him whitened behind a lather, wrath at Baba Mustapha's polluting touch
and the audacity of barbercraft wrestled in them with the outpouring of
reverence for Shagpat, and a clamour arose for the instant sacrifice of
Baba Mustapha at the foot of their idol Shagpat. And the whole of the
City of Shagpat, men, women, and children, and the sheikhs and the
dervishes and crafts of the City besieged the King's palace in that
middle hour of the noon, clamouring for the sacrifice of Baba Mustapha at
the feet of their idol Shagpat.




THE BURNING OF THE IDENTICAL

Now, the Great Hall for the dispensing of justice in the palace of the
King was one on which the architect and the artificers had lavished all
their arts and subtleties of design and taste and their conceptions of
uniformity and grandeur, so that none entered it without a sense of
abasement, and the soul acknowledged awfulness and power in him that
ruled and sat eminent on the throne of that Hall. For, lo! the throne was
of solid weighty gold, overhung with rich silks and purples; and the hall
was lofty, with massive pillars, fifty on either side, ranging in
stateliness down toward the blaze of the throne; and the pillars were
pillars of porphyry and of jasper and precious marble, carven over all of
them with sentences of the cunningest wisdom, distichs of excellence,
odes of the poet, stanzas sharp with the incisiveness of wit, and that
solve knotty points with but one stroke; and these pillars were each the
gift of a mighty potentate of earth or of a Genie.

In the centre of the Hall a fountain set up a glittering jet, and spread
abroad the breath of freshness, leaping a height of sixty feet, and
shimmering there in a wide bright canopy with dropping silver sides. It
was rumoured of the waters of this fountain that they were fed
underground from the waters of the Sacred River, brought there in the
reign of El Rasoon, a former sovereign in the City of Shagpat, by the
labours of Zak,--a Genie subject to the magic of Azrooka, the Queen of El
Rasoon; but, of a surety, none of earth were like to them in silveriness
and sweet coolingness, and they were as wine to the weary.

Now, the King sat on his throne in the Hall, and around him his
ministers, and Emirs, and chamberlains, and officers of state, and black
slaves, and the soldiers of his guard armed with naked scimitars. And the
King was as a sun in splendour, severely grave, and a frown on his
forehead to darken kingdoms, for the attempt on Shagpat had stirred his
kingly wrath, and awakened zeal for the punishment of all conspirators
and offenders. So when Shagpat was borne in to the King upon his throne
of cushions where he sat upright, smiling and inanimate, the King
commanded that he should be placed at his side, the place of honour; and
Shagpat was as a moon behind the whiteness of the lathers; even as we
behold moon and sun together in the heavens, was Shagpat by the King.

There was great hubbub in the Hall at the entrance of Shagpat, and a hum
of rage and muttered vehemence passed among the assembled people that
filled the hall like a cavern of the sea, the sea roaring outside; but
presently the King spake, and all hushed. Then said he, 'O people!
thought I to see a day that would shame Shagpat? he that has brought
honour and renown upon me and all of this city, so that we shine a
constellation and place of pilgrimage to men in remote islands and
corners of the earth? Yea! and to Afrites and Genii? Have I not
castigated barbers, and brought barbercraft to degradation, so that no
youth is taught to exercise it? And through me the tackle of the barber,
is't not a rusty and abominated weapon, and as a sword thrown by and
broken, for that it dishonoured us? Surely, too, I have esteemed Shagpat
precious.'

While he spake, the King gazed on Shagpat, and was checked by passion at
beholding him under the lather, so that the people praised Shagpat and
the King. Then said he, 'O people, who shall forecast disasters and
triumphs? Lo, I had this day at dawn intelligence from recreant Oolb, and
its King and Court, and of their return to do honour to Shagpat! And I
had this day at dawn tidings, O people, from Shiraz, and of the adhesion
of that vain city and its provinces to the might of Shagpat! So commenced
the day, yet is he, the object of the world's homage, within a few hours
defiled by a lather and the hand of an impious one!'

At these words of the King there rose a shout of vindictiveness and fury;
but he cried, 'Punishment on the offenders in season, O people! Probably
we have not abased ourselves for the honour that has befallen us in
Shagpat, and the distinction among nations and tribes and races, and
creeds and sects, that we enjoy because of Shagpat. Behold! in abasement
voluntarily undertaken there is exceeding brightness and exaltation; for
how is the sun a sun save that daily he dippeth in darkness, to rise
again freshly majestic? So then, be mine the example, O people of the
City of Shagpat!'

Thereupon lo, the King descended from his throne, and stripped to the
loins, flinging away his glittering crown and his robes, and abased
himself to the dust with loud cries and importunities and howls, and
penitential ejaculations and sobbings; and it was in that Hall as when
the sun goeth down in storm. Likewise the ministers of the King, and the
Viziers and Emirs and officers of state, and slaves, and soldiers of the
guard, bared their limbs, and fell beside the King with violent outcries
and wailings; and the whole of the people in the Hall prostrated their
bodies with wailings and lamentations. And Baba Mustapha feigned to
bewail himself, and Noorna bin Noorka knelt beside Kadza, and shrieked
loudest, striking her breast and scattering her hair; and that Hall was
as a pit full of serpents writhing, and of tigers and lions and wild
beasts howling, each pitching his howl a note above his neighbours, so
that the tone rose and sank, and there was no one soul erect in that Hall
save Shagpat, he on his throne of cushions smiling behind the lathers,
inanimate, serene as they that sin not. After an hour's lapse there came
a pause, and the people hearkened for the voice of the King; but in the
intervals a louder moan would strike their ears, and they whispered among
themselves, "Tis that of the fakir, El Zoop!' and the moaning and howling
prevailed again. And again they heard another moan, a deep one, as of the
earth in its throes, and said among themselves, ''Tis that of Bootlbac,
the drumbeater!' and this led off to the howl of Areep, the dervish; and
this was followed by the shriek of Zeel, the garlic-seller; and the waul
of Krooz el Krazawik, the carrier; and the complainings of Dob, the
confectioner; and the groan of Sallap, the broker; and the yell of
Azawool, the builder. There would have been no end to it known; but the
King rose and commenced plucking his beard and his hair,--they likewise
in silence. When he had performed this ceremony a space, the King called,
and a basin of water was brought to him, and handed round by slaves, and
all dipped in it their hands, and renewed their countenances and
re-arranged their limbs; and the Hall brightened with the eye of the
King, and he cried, 'O people, lo, the plot is revealed to me, and 'tis a
deep one; but, by this beard, we'll strike at the root of it, and a blow
of deadliness. Surely we have humiliated ourselves, and vengeance is
ours! How say ye?'

A noise like the first sullen growl of a vexed wild beast which telleth
that fury is fast travelling and the teeth will flash, followed these
words; and the King called to his soldiers of the guard, 'Ho! forth with
this wretch that dared defile Shagpat, the holy one! and on your heads be
it to fetch hither Feshnavat, the son of Feil, that was my Vizier, he
that was envious of Shagpat, and whom we spared in our clemency.'

Some of the guard went from the Hall to fulfil the King's injunction on
Feshnavat, others thrust forth Baba Mustapha in the eyes of the King.
Baba Mustapha was quaking as a frog quaketh for water, and he trembled
and was a tongueless creature deserted of his lower limbs, and with
eyeballs goggling, through exceeding terror. Now, when the King saw him,
he contracted his brows as one that peereth on a small and minute object,
crying, 'How! is't such as he, this monster of audaciousness and horrible
presumption? Truly 'tis said:

     "For ruin and the deeds preluding change,
     Fear not great Beasts, nor Eagles when they range:
     But dread the crawling worm or pismire mean,
     Satan selects them, for they are unseen."

And this wretch is even of that sort, the select of Satan! Off with the
top of the reptile, and away with him!'

Now, at the issue of the mandate Baba Mustapha choked, and horror blocked
the throat of confession in him, so that he did nought save stagger
imploringly; but the prompting of Noorna sent Kadza to the foot of the
throne, and Kadza bent her body and exclaimed, 'O King of the age! 'tis
Kadza, the espoused of Shagpat thy servant, that speaketh; and lo! a wise
woman has said in my ear, "How if this emissary and instrument of the
Evil One, this barber, this filthy fellow, be made to essay on Shagpat
before the people his science and his malice? for 'tis certain that
Shagpat is surrounded where he sitteth by Genii invisible, defended by
them, and no harm can hap to him, but an illumination of glory and
triumph manifest": and for this barber, his punishment can afterwards be
looked to, O great King!'

The King mused awhile and sank in his beard. Then said he to them that
had hold of Baba Mustapha watching for the signal, 'I have thought over
it, and the means of bringing double honour on the head of Shagpat. So
release this fellow, and put in his hands the tackle taken from him.'

This was done, and the people applauded the wisdom of the King, and
crowded forward with sharpness of expectation; but Baba Mustapha, when he
felt in his hands the tackle, the familiar instruments, strength and wit
returned to him in petty measures, and he thought, 'Perchance there'll
yet be time for my nephew to strike, if he fail me not; fool that I was
to look for glory, and not leave the work to him, for this Shagpat is a
mighty one, powerful in fleas, and it needeth something other than tackle
to combat such as he. A mighty one, said I? by Allah, he's awful in his
mightiness!'

So Baba Mustapha kept delaying, and feigned to sharpen the blade, and the
King called to him, 'Haste! to the work! is it for thee, vile wretch, to
make preparation for the accursed thing in our presence?' And the people
murmured and waxed impatient, and the King called again, 'Thou'lt essay
this, thou wretch, without a head, let but another minute pass.' So when
Baba Mustapha could delay no longer, he sighed heavily and his trembling
returned, and the power of Shagpat smote him with an invisible hand, so
that he could scarce move; but dread pricked him against dread, and he
advanced upon Shagpat to shear him, and assumed the briskness of the
barber, and was in the act of bending over him to bring the blade into
play, when, behold, one of the chamberlains of the King stood up in the
presence and spake a word that troubled him, and the King rose and
hurried to a balcony looking forth on the Desert, and on three sides of
the Desert three separate clouds of dust were visible, and from these
clouds presently emerged horsemen with spears and pennons and plumes; and
he could discern the flashing of their helms and the glistening of
steel-plates and armour of gold and silver. Seeing this, the colour went
from the cheeks of the King and his face became as a pinched pomegranate,
and he cried aloud, 'What visitation's this? Awahy! we are beset, and
here's abasement brought on us without self-abasing!' Meantime these
horsemen detached themselves from the main bodies and advanced at a
gallop, wheeling and circling round each other, toward the walls of the
city, and when they were close they lowered their arms and made signs of
amity, and proclaimed their mission and the name of him they served. So
tidings were brought to the King that the Lords of three cities, with
vast retinues, were come, by reason of a warning, to pay homage to
Shagpat, the son of Shimpoor; and these three cities were the cities of
Oolb, and of Gaf, and of Shiraz, even these!

Now, when the King heard of it, he rejoiced with an exceeding joy, and
arrayed himself in glory, and mounted a charger, the pride of his
stables, and rode out to meet the Lords of the three cities surrounded by
the horsemen of his guard. And it was within half-a-mile of the city
walls that the four sovereigns met, and dismounted and saluted and
embraced, and bestowed on one another kingly flatteries, and the titles
of Cousin and Brother. So when the unctions of Royalty were over, these
three Kings rode back to the city with the King that was their host, and
the horsemen of the three kingdoms pitched their tents and camped outside
the walls, making cheer. Then the King of the City of Shagpat related to
the three Kings the story of Shagpat and the attempt that had been made
on him; and in the great Hall of Justice he ordained the erecting of
thrones for them whereon to sit; and they, when they had paid homage to
Shagpat, sat by him there on either side. Then the King cried, 'This
likewise owe we to Shagpat, our glory! See, now, how the might that's in
him shall defeat the machinations of evil, O my cousins of Oolb, and of
Gaf, and of Shiraz.' Thereupon he called, 'Bring forth the barber!'

So Baba Mustapha was thrust forth by the soldiers of the guard; and the
King of Shiraz, who was no other than the great King Shahpushan,
exclaimed, when he beheld Baba Mustapha, 'He? why, it is the prince of
barbers and talkative ones! Hath he not operated on my head, the head of
me in old time? Truly now, if it be in man to shave Shagpat, the hand of
this barber will do it!'

And the King of Oolb peered on Baba Mustapha, crying, 'Even this fellow I
bastinadoed!'

And the King of Gaf, that was Kresnuk, famous in the annals of the time,
said aloud, 'I'm amazed at the pertinacity of this barber! To my court he
came, searching some silly nephew, and would have shaved us all in spite
of our noses; yea, talked my chief Vizier into a dead sleep, and so
thinned him. And there was no safety from him save in thongs and stripes
and lashes!'

Now, upon that the King of the City cried, 'Be the will of Allah
achieved, and the inviolacy of Shagpat made manifest! Thou barber, thou!
do thy worst to contaminate him, and take the punishment in store for
thee. And if it is written thou succeed, then keep thy filthy life: small
chance of that!'

Baba Mustapha remembered the poet's words:

     The abyss is worth a leap, however wide,
     When life, sweet life, is on the other side.

And he controlled himself to the mastery of his members, and stepped
forward to essay once more the Shaving of Shagpat. Lo, the great Hall was
breathless, nought heard save the splashing of the fountain in its fall,
and the rustle of the robe of Baba Mustapha as he aired his right arm,
hovering round Shagpat like a bird about the nest; and he was buzzing as
a bee ere it entereth the flower, and quivered like a butterfly when 'tis
fluttering over a blossom; and Baba Mustapha sniffed at Shagpat within
arm's reach, fearing him, so that the people began to hum with a great
rapture, and the King Shahpushan cried, 'Aha! mark him! this monkey
knoweth the fire!'

But the King of the City of Shagpat was wroth, and commanded his guards
to flourish their scimitars, and the keen light cut the chords of
indecision in Baba Mustapha, and drove him upon Shagpat with a dash of
desperation; and lo! he stretched his hand and brought down the blade
upon the head of Shagpat. Then was the might of Shagpat made manifest,
for suddenly in his head the Identical rose up straight, even to a level
with the roof of that hall, burning as it had been an angry flame of many
fiery colours, and Baba Mustapha was hurled from him a great space like a
ball that reboundeth, and he was twisting after the fashion of envenomed
serpents, sprawling and spurning, and uttering cries of horror. Surely,
to see that sight the four Kings and the people bit their forefingers,
and winked till the water stood in their eyes, and Kadza, turning about,
exclaimed, 'This owe we to the wise woman! where lurketh she?' So she
called about the hall, 'wise woman! wise woman!'

Now, when she could find Noorna bin Noorka nowhere in that crowd, she
shrieked exultingly, ''Twas a Genie! Wullahy! all Afrites, male and
female, are in the service of Shagpat, my light, my eyes, my sun! I his
moon!'

Meantime the King of the City called to Baba Mustapha, 'Hast thou had
enough of barbering, O vile one? Ho! a second essay on the head of
Shagpat! so shall the might that's in him be indisputable, bruited
abroad, and a great load upon the four winds.'

Now, Baba Mustapha was persuaded by the scimitars of the guard to a
second essay on the head of Shagpat, and the second time he was shot away
from Shagpat through the crowd and great assemblage to the extreme end of
the hall, where he lay writhing about, abandoned in loathliness; and he
in his despondency, and despite of protestation and the slackness of his
limbs, was pricked again by the scimitars of the guard to a third essay
on the head of Shagpat, the people jeering at him, for they were joyous,
light of heart; and lo! the third time he was shot off violently, and
whirled away like a stone from a sling, even into the outer air and
beyond the city walls, into the distance of waste places. And now a great
cry rose from the people, as it were a song of triumph, for the Identical
stood up wrathfully from the head of Shagpat, burning in brilliance,
blinding to look on, he sitting inanimate beneath it; and it waxed in
size and pierced through the roof of the hall, and was a sight to the
streets of the city; and the horsemen camped without the walls beheld it,
and marvelled, and it was as a pillar of fire to the solitudes of the
Desert afar, and the wild Arab and wandering Bedouins and caravans of
pilgrimage. Distant cities asked the reason of that appearance, and the
cunning fakir interpreted it, and the fervent dervish expounded from it,
and messengers flew from gate to gate and from land to land in
exultation, and barbers hid their heads, and were friendly with the fox
in his earth, because of that light. So the Identical burned on the head
of Shagpat as in wrath, and with exceeding splendour of attraction, three
nights and three days; and the fishes of the sea shoaled to the sea's
surface and stared at it, and the fowls of the air congregated about the
fury of the light with screams and mad flutters, till the streets and
mosques and minarets and bright domes and roofs and cupolas of the City
of Shagpat were blackened with scorched feathers of the vulture and the
eagle and the rook and the raven and the hawk, and other birds, sacred
and obscene; so was the triumph of Shagpat made manifest to men and the
end of the world by the burning of the Identical three days and three
nights.




THE FLASHES OF THE BLADE

Now, it was the morning of the fourth day, and lo! at the first leap of
the sun of that day the flame of the Identical abated in its fierceness,
and it dwindled and darkened, and tapered and flickered feebly,
descending from its altitude in the heavens and through the ceiling of
the Hall, and lay down to sleep among the intricate lengths and frizzled
convolutions and undulating weights flowing from Shagpat, an
undistinguished hair, even as the common hairs of his head. So, upon
that, the four fasting Kings breathed, and from the people of the City
there went up a mighty shout of gladness and congratulation at the glory
they had witnessed; and they took the air deeply into their chests, and
were as divers that have been long fathoms-deep under water, and ascend
and puff hard and press the water from their eyes, that yet refuse to
acknowledge with a recognition the things that be and the sights above,
so mazed are they with those unmentionable marvels and treasures and
profusion of jewels, and splendid lazy growths and lavish filmy
illuminations, and multitudinous pearls and sheering shells, that lie
heaped in the beds of the ocean. As the poet has said:

        After too strong a beam,
         Too bright a glory,
        We ask, Is this a dream
         Or magic story?

And he says:

     When I've had rapturous visions such as make
     The sun turn pale, and suddenly awake,
     Long must I pull at memory in this beard,
     Ere I remember men and things revered.

So was it with the people of the City, and they stood in the Hall and
winked staringly at one another, shouting and dancing at intervals,
capering with mad gravity, exclaiming on the greatness of that they had
witnessed. And Zeel the garlic-seller fell upon Mob the confectioner, and
cried, 'Was this so, O Dob? Wullahy! this glory, was it verily?' And Dob
peered dimly upon Zeel, whispering solemnly, 'Say, now, art thou of a
surety that Zeel the garlic-seller known to me, my boon-fellow?' And the
twain turned to Sallap the broker, and exchanged interjections with him,
and with Azawool the builder, and with Krooz el Krazawik the carrier; and
they accosted Bootlbac the drum-beater, where he stood apart, drumming
the air as to a march of triumph, and no word would he utter, neither to
Zeel, nor to Sallap, nor to Krooz el Krazawik, nor to Azawool his
neighbour, nor to any present, but continued drumming on the air rapidly
as in answer, increasing in the swiftness of his drumming till it was a
rage to mark him, and the excitement about Bootlbac became as a mad eddy
in the midst of a mighty stream, he drumming the air with exceeding
swiftness to various measures, beating before him as on the tightened
skin, lost to all presences save the Identical and Shagpat. So they edged
away from Bootlbac in awe, saying, 'He's inspired, Bootlbac! 'tis the
triumph of Shagpat he drummeth.' They feigned to listen to him till their
ears deceived them, and they rejoiced in the velocity of the soundless
tune of Bootlbac the drum-beater, and were stirred by it, excited to a
forgetfulness of their fasting. Such was the force of the inspiration of
Bootlbac the drum-beater, caused by the burning of the Identical.

Now, the four Kings, when they had mastered their wits, gazed in silence
on Shagpat, and sighed and shook their heads, and were as they that have
swallowed a potent draught and ponder sagely over the gulp. Surely, the
visages of the Kings of Shiraz and of Gaf and of Oolb betokened dread of
Shagpat and amazement at him; but the King of the City exulted, and the
shining of content was on his countenance, and he cried, 'Wondrous!' and
again, 'Wullahy, wondrous!' and 'Oh, glory!' And he laughed and clucked
and chuckled, and the triumph of Shagpat was to him as a new jewel in his
crown outshining all others, and he was for awhile as the cock smitten
with the pride of his comb, the peacock magnified by admiration of his
tail. Then he cried, 'For this, praise we Allah and the Prophet. Wullahy,
'twas wondrous!' and he went off again into a roll of cluckings and
chucklings and exclamations of delight, crying, 'Need they further proof
of the power in Shagpat now? Has he not manifested it? So true is that
saying--

     "The friend that flattereth weakeneth at length;
     It is the foe that calleth forth our strength."

Wondrous! and never knew earth a thing to equal it in the range of
marvels!'

Now, ere the last word was spoken by the King, there passed through the
sky a mighty flash. Those in the Hall saw it, and the horsemen of the
three cities encamped without the walls were nigh blinded by the keenness
of its blaze. So they looked into the height, and saw straight over the
City a speck of cloud, but no thunder came from it; and the King cried,
'These be Genii! the issue of this miracle is yet to come! look for it,
and exult.' Then he turned to the other Kings, but they were leaning to
right and left in their seats, as do the intoxicated, without strength to
answer his questioning. So he exclaimed, 'A curse on my head! have I
forgotten the laws of hospitality? my cousins are famished!' He was
giving orders for the spreading of a sumptuous banquet when there passed
through the sky another mighty flash. They awaited the thunder this time
confidently, yet none came. Suddenly the King exclaimed, ''Tis the wrath
of Shagpat that his assailants remain uncastigated!' Then cried he to the
eunuchs of the guard, 'Hither with Feshnavat, the son of Feil!' And the
King said to Feshnavat, 'Thou plotter! envious of Shagpat!' Here the
King, Kresnuk, fell forward at the feet of Shagpat from sheer inanition,
and the King of the City ordered instantly wines and viands to be brought
into the Hall, and commenced saying to Feshnavat, in the words of the
wise entablature:

    '"Of reckless mercy thus the Sage declared:
     More culpable the sparer than the spared;
     For he that breaks one law, breaks one alone:
     But who thwarts Justice flouts Law's sovereign throne."

And have I not been over-merciful in thy case?'

As the King was haranguing Feshnavat, his nostril took in the steam of
the viands and the fresh odours of the wines, and he could delay no
longer to satisfy his craving, but caught up the goblet, and drank from
it till his visage streamed the tears of contentment. Lo, while he put
forth his hand tremblingly, as to continue the words of his condemnation
of the Vizier, the heavens were severed by a third flash, one exceeding
in fierceness the other flashes; and now the Great Hall rocked, and the
pillars and thrones trembled, and the eyes of Shagpat opened. He made no
motion, but sat like a wonder of stone, looking before him. Surely, Kadza
shrieked, and rushed forward to him from the crowd, yet he said nothing,
and was as one frozen. So the King cried, 'He waketh! the flashes
preceded his wakening! Now shall he see the vengeance of kings on his
enemies.' Thereupon he made a signal, and the scimitars of the guard were
in air over the head of Feshnavat, when darkness as of the dropping of
night fell upon all, and the darkness spake, saying, 'I am Abarak of the
Bar, preceder of the Event!'

Then it was light, but the ears of every soul present were pierced with
the wailing of wild animals, and on all sides from the Desert hundreds of
them were seen making toward the City, some swiftly, others at a heavy
pace; and when they were come near they crouched and fawned, and dropped
their dry tongues as in awe. There was the serpent, meek as before the
days of sin, and the leopard slinking to get among the legs of men, and
the lion came trundling along in utter flabbiness, raising not his head.
Soon the streets were thronged with elephants and lions and sullen
tigers, and wild cats and wolves, not a tail erect among them: great was
the marvel! So the King cried, 'We 're in the thick of wonders; banquet
we lightly while they increase upon us! What's yonder little man?' This
was Abarak that stood before the King, and exclaimed, 'I am the darkness
that announceth the mastery of the Event, as a shadow before the sun's
approach, and it is the Shaving of Shagpat!' The world darkened before
the eyes of the King when he heard this, and in a moment Abarak was
clutched by the soldiers of the guard, and dragged beside Feshnavat to
await the final blow; and this would have parted two heads from two
bodies at one stroke, but now Noorna bin Noorka entered the hall, veiled
and in the bright garb of a bride, with veiled attendants about her, and
the people opened to give her passage to the throne of the King. So she
said, 'Delay the stroke yet awhile, O Head of the Magnanimous! I am she
claimed by Shagpat; surely, I am bride of him that is Master of the
Event, and the hour of bridals is the hour of clemency.'

The King looked at Shagpat, perplexed; but the eye of Shagpat gazed as
into the distance of another world. Then said he, 'We shall hear nought
from the mouth of Shagpat till he is avenged, and till then he is silent
with exceeding wrath.' Hearing this, Noorna ran quickly to a window of
the Hall, and let loose a white dove from her bosom.

Then came there that flash which is recorded in old traditions as the
fourth of the flashes of thunderless lightnings, after the passing of
which, hundreds of fakirs that had been awaiting it saw nothing further
on this earth. Down through the Hall it swept; and lo! when the Kings and
the people recovered their sight to regard Shagpat, he was, one side of
him, clean shorn, the shaven side shining as the very moon!

Surely from that moment there was no longer aught mortal in the combat
that ensued. For now, while amazement and horror palsied all present, the
Genie Karaz, uttering a howl of fury, shot down the length of the Hall
like a black storm-bolt, and caught up Shagpat, and whirled off with him
into the air; and they beheld him dive and dodge the lightnings that
beset him from upper heaven, catching Shagpat from them, now by the
heels, now by the hair remaining one side his head. This lasted a full
hour, when the Genie paused a second, and made a sheer descent into the
earth. Then saw they the wings of Koorookh, each a league in length,
overshadow the entire land, and on the neck of the bird sat Shibli
Bagarag cleaving through the earth with his blade, and he sat on Koorookh
as the moon sits on the midnight. There was no light save the light shed
abroad by the flashes of the blade, and in these they beheld the air
suffocated with Afrites and Genii in a red and brown and white heat,
followers of Karaz. Strokes of the blade clove them, and their blood was
fire that flowed over the feathers of Koorookh, lighting him in a
conflagration; but the bird flew constantly to a fountain of earth below
and extinguished it. Then the battle recommenced, and the solid earth
yawned at the gashes made by the mighty blade, and its depths revealed
how Karaz was flying with Shagpat from circle to circle of the
under-regions, hurrying with him downward to the lowest circle, that was
flaming to points, like the hair of vast heads. Presently they saw a
wondrous quivering flash divide the Genie, and his heels and head fell
together in the abysses, leaving Shagpat prone on great brasiers of penal
flame. Then the blade made another hissing sweep over Shagpat, leaving
little of the wondrous growths on him save a topknot.

But now was the hour struck when Rabesqurat could be held no longer
serving the ferry in Aklis; and the terrible Queen streamed in the sky,
like a red disastrous comet, and dived, eagle-like, into the depths,
re-ascending with Shagpat in her arms, cherishing him; and lo, there were
suddenly a thousand Shagpats multiplied about, and the hand of Shibli
Bagarag became exhausted with hewing at them. The scornful laugh of the
Queen was heard throughout earth as she triumphed over Shibli Bagarag
with hundreds of Shagpats, Illusions; and he knew not where to strike at
the Shagpat, and was losing all sleight of hand, dexterity, and cunning.
Noorna shrieked, thinking him lost; but Abarak seized his bar, and
leaning it in the direction of Aklis, blew a pellet from it that struck
on the eye of Aklis, and this sent out a stretching finger of beams, and
singled forth very Shagpat from the myriads of semblances, so that he
glowed and was ruddy, the rest cowering pale, and dissolving like
salt-grains in water.

Then saw earth and its inhabitants how the Genie Karaz re-ascended in the
shape of a vulture with a fire beak, pecking at the eyes of him that
wielded the Sword, so that he was bewildered and shook this way and that
over the neck of Koorookh, striking wildly, languidly cleaving towers and
palaces, and monuments of earth underneath him. Now, Shibli Bagarag
discerned his danger, and considered, 'The power of the Sword is to sever
brains and thoughts. Great is Allah! I'll seek my advantage in that.'

So he whirled Koorookh thrice in the crimson smoke of the atmosphere, and
put the blade between the first and second thought in the head of
Rabesqurat, whereby the sense of the combat became immediately confused
in her mind, and she used her powers as the fool does, equally against
all, for the sake of mischief solely--no longer mistress of her own
Illusions; and she began doubling and trebling Shibli Bagarag on the neck
of monstrous birds, speeding in draggled flightiness from one point of
the sky to another. Even in the terror of the combat, Shibli Bagarag was
fair to burst into a fit of violent laughter at the sight of the Queen
wagging her neck loosely, perking it like a mad raven; and he took heart,
and swept the blade rapidly over Shagpat as she dandled him, leaving
Shagpat but one hair remaining on him; yet was that the Identical; and it
arose, and was a serpent in his head, and from its jaws issued a river of
fiery serpents: these and a host of Afrites besieged Shibli Bagarag; and
now, to defend himself, he unloosed the twin Genii, Karavejis and
Veejravoosh, from the wrist of that hand which wielded the Sword of
Aklis, and these alternately interwound before and about him, and were
even as a glittering armour of emerald plates, warding from him the
assaults of the host; and lo! he flew, and the battle followed him over
blazing cities and lands on fire with the slanting hail of sparkles.

By this time every soul in the City of Shagpat, kings and people, all
save Abarak and Noorna bin Noorka, were overcome and prostrate with their
faces to the ground; but Noorna watched the conflict eagerly, and saw the
head of Shagpat sprouting incessant fresh crops of hair, despite the
pertinacious shearing of her betrothed. Then she smote her hands, and
cried, 'Yea! though I lose my beauty and the love of my betrothed, I must
join in this, or he'll be lost.' So, saying to Abarak, 'Watch over me,'
she went into the air, and, as she passed Rabesqurat, was multiplied into
twenty damsels of loveliness. Then Abarak beheld a scorpion following the
twenty in mid-air, and darting stings among them. Noorna tossed a ring,
and it fell in a circle of flame round the scorpion. So, while the
scorpion was shooting in squares to escape from the circle, the
fire-beaked vulture flew to it, and fluttered a dense rain which
swallowed the flame, and the scorpion and vulture assailed Noorna, that
was changed to a golden hawk in the midst of nineteen other golden hawks.
Now, as Rabesqurat came scudding by, and saw the encounter, she made the
twenty hawks a hundred. The Genie Karaz howled at her, and pinioned her
to a pillar below in the Desert, with Shagpat in her arms. But, as he
soared aloft to renew the fight with Noorna, Shibli Bagarag loosed to her
aid the Slaves of the Sword, and Abarak marked him slope to a distant
corner of earth, and reascend in a cloud, which drew swiftly over the
land toward the Great Hall. Lo, Shibli Bagarag stepped from it through a
casement of the Hall, and with him Shagpat, a slack weight, mated out of
all power of motion. Koorookh swooped low, on his back Baba Mustapha, and
Shibli Bagarag flung Abarak beside him on the bird. Then Koorookh whirred
off with them; and while the heavens raged, Shibli Bagarag prepared a
rapid lather, and dashed it over Shagpat, and commenced shearing him with
lightning sweeps of the blade. 'Twas as a racing wheel of fire to see
him! Suddenly he desisted, and wiped the sweat from his face. Then
calling on the name of Allah, he gave a last keen cunning sweep with the
blade, and following that, the earth awfully quaked and groaned, as if
speaking in the abysmal tongue the Mastery of the Event to all men. Aklis
was revealed in burning beams as of a sun, and the trouble of the air
ceased, vapours slowly curling to the four quarters. Shibli Bagarag had
smitten clean through the Identical! Terribly had Noorna and those that
aided her been oppressed by the multitude of their enemies; but, in a
moment these melted away, and Karaz, together with the scorpion that was
Goorelka, vanished. Day was on the baldness of Shagpat.




CONCLUSION

So was shaved Shagpat, the son of Shimpoor, the son of Shoolpi, the son
of Shullum, by Shibli Bagarag, of Shiraz, according to preordainment.

The chronicles relate, that no sooner had he mastered the Event, than men
on the instant perceived what illusion had beguiled them, and, in the
words of the poet,--

     The blush with which their folly they confess
     Is the first prize of his supreme success.

Even Bootlbac, the drum-beater, drummed in homage to him, and the four
Kings were they that were loudest in their revilings of the spouse of
Kadza, and most obsequious in praises of the Master. The King of the City
was fain to propitiate his people by a voluntary resignation of his
throne to Shibli Bagarag, and that King took well to heart the wisdom of
the sage, when he says:

     Power, on Illusion based, o'ertoppeth all;
     The more disastrous is its certain fall!

Surely Shibli Bagarag returned the Sword to the Sons of Aklis, flashing
it in midnight air, and they, with the others, did reverence to his
achievement. They were now released from the toil of sharpening the Sword
a half-cycle of years, to wander in delight on the fair surface of the
flowery earth, breathing its roses, wooing its brides; for the mastery of
an Event lasteth among men the space of one cycle of years, and after
that a fresh Illusion springeth to befool mankind, and the Seven must
expend the concluding half-cycle in preparing the edge of the Sword for a
new mastery. As the poet declareth in his scorn:

     Some doubt Eternity: from life begun,
     Has folly ceased within them, sire to son?
     So, ever fresh Illusions will arise
     And lord creation, until men are wise.

And he adds:

     That is a distant period; so prepare
     To fight the false, O youths, and never spare!
     For who would live in chronicles renowned
     Must combat folly, or as fool be crowned.

Now, for the Kings of Shiraz and of Gaf, Shibli Bagarag entertained them
in honour; but the King of Oolb he disgraced and stripped of his robes,
to invest Baba Mustapha in those royal emblems--a punishment to the
treachery of the King of Oolb, as is said by Aboo Eznol:

     When nations with opposing forces, rash,
      Shatter each other, thou that wouldst have stood
      Apart to profit by the monstrous feud,
     Thou art the surest victim of the crash.

     Take colours of whichever side thou wilt,
      And stedfastly thyself in battle range;
      Yet, having taken, shouldst thou dare to change,
     Suspicion hunts thee as a thing of guilt.

Baba Mustapha, was pronounced Sovereign of Oolb, amid the acclamations of
the guard encamped under the command of Ravaloke, without the walls.

No less did Shibli Bagarag honour the benefactor of Noorna, making him
chief of his armies; and he, with his own hand, bestowed on the good old
warrior the dress of honour presented to him by the Seven Sons,
charactered with all the mysteries of Aklis, a marvel lost to men in the
failure to master the Illusion now dominating earth.

So, then, of all that had worshipped Shagpat, only Kadza clung to him,
and she departed with him into the realms of Rabesqurat, who reigned
there, divided against herself by the stroke of the Sword. The Queen is
no longer mighty, for the widening of her power has weakened it, she
being now the mistress of the single-thoughted, and them that follow one
idea to the exclusion of a second. The failure in the unveiling of her
last-cherished Illusion was in the succumbing frailty of him that
undertook the task, the world and its wise men having come to the belief
that in thwackings there was ignominy to the soul of man, and a tarnish
on the lustre of heroes. On that score, hear the words of the poet, a
vain protest:

        Ye that nourish hopes of fame!
        Ye who would be known in song!
     Ponder old history, and duly frame
     Your souls to meek acceptance of the thong.

        Lo! of hundreds who aspire,
        Eighties perish-nineties tire!
     They who bear up, in spite of wrecks and wracks,
     Were season 'd by celestial hail of thwacks.

        Fortune in this mortal race
        Builds on thwackings for its base;
     Thus the All-Wise doth make a flail a staff,
     And separates his heavenly corn from chaff.

        Think ye, had he never known
        Noorna a belabouring crone,
     Shibli Bagarag would have shaved Shagpat
     The unthwack'd lives in chronicle a rat!

       'Tis the thwacking in this den
        Maketh lions of true men!
     So are we nerved to break the clinging mesh
     Which tames the noblest efforts of poor flesh.

Feshnavat became the Master's Vizier, and Abarak remained at the right
hand of Shibli Bagarag, his slave in great adventure. No other condition
than bondage gave peace to Abarak. He was of the class enumerated by the
sage:

     Who, with the strength of giants, are but tools,
     The weighty hands which serve selected fools.

Now, this was how it was in the case of Baba Mustapha, and the four
Kings, and Feshnavat, and Abarak, and Ravaloke, and Kadza, together with
Shagpat; but, in the case of Noorna bin Noorka, surely she was withering
from a sting of the scorpion shot against her bosom, but the Seven Sons
of Aklis gave her a pass into Aklis on the wings of Koorookh, and
Gulrevaz, the daughter of Aklis, tended her, she that was alone capable
of restoring her, and counteracting the malice of the scorpion by the
hand of purity. So Noorna, prospered; but Shibli Bagarag drooped in
uncertainty of her state, and was as a reaper in a field of harvest,
around whom lie the yellow sheaves, and the brown beam of autumn on his
head, the blaze of plenty; yet is he joyless and stands musing, for one
is away who should be there, and without whom the goblet of Success
giveth an unsweetened draught, and there is nothing pleasant in life, and
the flower on the summit of achievement is blighted. At last, as he was
listlessly dispensing justice in the Great Hall, seven days after the
mastery of the Event, lo, Noorna, in air, borne by Gulrevaz, she fair and
fresh in the revival of health and beauty, and the light of constant
love. Of her entry into the Great Hall, to the embrace of her betrothed,
the poet exclaims, picturing her in a rapture:

   Her march is music, and my soul obeys
    Each motion, as a lute to cunning fingers
   I see the earth throb for her as she sways
    Wave-like in air, and like a great flower lingers
   Heavily over all, as loath to leave
   What loves her so, and for her loss would grieve.

   But oh, what other hand than heaven's can paint
    Her eyes, and that black bow from which their lightning
   Pierces afar! long lustrous eyes, that faint
    In languor, or with stormy passion brightening:
   Within them world in world lights up from sleep,
   And gives a glimpse of the eternal deep.

   Sigh round her, odorous winds; and, envious rose,
    So vainly envious, with such blushes gifted,
   Bow to her; die, strangled with jealous throes,
    O Bulbul! when she sings with brow uplifted;
   Gather her, happy youth, and for thy gain
   Thank Him who could such loveliness ordain.

Surely the Master of the Event advanced to her in the glory of a Sultan,
and seated her beside him in majesty, and their contract of marriage was
read aloud in the Hall, and witnessed, and sealed: joyful was he! Then
commenced that festival which lasted forty days, and is termed the
Festival of the honours of hospitality to the Sons of Aldis, wherein the
head-cook of the palace, Uruish, performed wonders in his science, and
menaced the renown of Zrmack, the head-cook of King Shamshureen. Even so
the confectioner, Dob, excelled himself in devices and inventions, and
his genius urged him to depict in sugars and pastes the entire adventures
of Shibli Bagarag in search of the Sword. Honour we Uruish and Do-b! as
the poet sayeth:

     Divide not this fraternal twain;
     One are they, and one should for ever remain:
     As to sweet close in fine music we look,
     So the Confectioner follows the Cook.

And one of the Sons of Aklis, Zaragal, beholding this masterpiece of Dob,
which was served to the guests in the Great Hall on the fortieth evening,
was fair to exclaim in extemporaneous verse:

        Have I been wafted to a rise
        Of banquet spread in Paradise,
        Dower'd with consuming powers divine;--
        That I, who have not fail'd to dine,
               And greatly,
        Fall thus upon the cater and wine
               Sedately?

So there was feasting in the Hall, and in the City, and over Earth; great
pledging the Sovereign of Barbers, who had mastered an Event, and become
the benefactor of his craft and of his kind. 'Tis certain the race of the
Bagarags endured for many centuries, and his seed were the rulers of men,
and the seal of their empire stamped on mighty wax the Tackle of Barbers.

Now, of the promise made by the Sons of Aklis to visit Shibli Bagarag
before their compulsory return to the labour of the Sword, and recount to
him the marvel of their antecedent adventures; and of the love and grief
nourished in the souls of men by the beauty and sorrowful eyes of
Gulrevaz, that was mined the Bleeding Lily, and of her engagement to tell
her story, on condition of receiving the first-born of Noorna to nurse
for a season in Aklis; and of Shibli Bagarag's restoration of towns and
monuments destroyed by his battle with Karaz; and of the constancy of
passion of Shibli Bagarag for Noorna, and his esteem for her sweetness,
and his reverence for her wisdom; and of the glory of his reign, and of
the Songs and Sentences of Noorna, and of his Laws for the protection and
upholding of women, in honour of Noorna, concerning which the Sage has
said:

     Were men once clad in them, we should create
     A race not following, but commanding, fate:

--of all these records, and of the reign of Baba Mustapha in Oolb, surely
the chronicles give them in fulness; and they that have searched say of
them, there is matter therein for the amusement of generations.




     ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS

     A woman's at the core of every plot man plotteth
     Arm'd with Fear the Foe finds passage to the vital part
     Delay in thine undertaking Is disaster of thy own making
     Every failure is a step advanced
     Failures oft are but advising friends
     Fear nought so much as Fear itself
     How little a thing serves Fortune's turn
     If thou wouldst fix remembrance--thwack!
     Lest thou commence to lie--be dumb!
     Like an ill-reared fruit, first at the core it rotteth
     More culpable the sparer than the spared
     No runner can outstrip his fate
     Nought credit but what outward orbs reveal
     Persist, if thou wouldst truly reach thine ends
     Ripe with oft telling and old is the tale
     The curse of sorrow is comparison!
     The king without his crown hath a forehead like the clown
     The overwise themselves hoodwink
     'Tis the first step that makes a path
     Too often hangs the house on one loose stone
     Vanity maketh the strongest most weak
     When to loquacious fools with patience rare I listen
     Where fools are the fathers of every miracle
     Who in a labyrinth wandereth without clue






THE ORDEAL OF RICHARD FEVEREL

By George Meredith

1905




CONTENTS
I.        THE INMATES OF RAYNHAM ABBEY
II.       FATES SELECTED THE FOURTEENTH BIRTHDAY TO TRY THE STRENGTH
III.      THE MAGIAN CONFLICT
IV.       ARSON
V.        ADRIAN PLIES HIS HOOK
VI.       JUVENILE STRATAGEMS
VII.      DAPHNE'S BOWER
VIII.     THE BITTER CUP
IX.       A FINE DISTINCTION
X.        RICHARD PASSES THROUGH HIS PRELIMINARY ORDEAL
XI.       THE LAST ACT OF THE BAKEWELL COMEDY IS CLOSED IN A LETTER
XII.      THE BLOSSOMING SEASON
XIII.     THE MAGNETIC AGE
XIV.      AN ATTRACTION
XV.       FERDINAND AND MIRANDA
XVI.      UNMASKING OF MASTER RIPTON THOMPSON
XVII.     GOOD WINE AND GOOD BLOOD
XVIII.    THE SYSTEM ENCOUNTERS THE WILD OATS SPECIAL PLEA
XIX.      A DIVERSION PLAYED ON A PENNY WHISTLE
XX.       CELEBRATES THE TIME-HONOURED TREATMENT OF A DRAGON BY THE HERO
XXI.      RICHARD IS SUMMONED TO TOWN TO HEAR A SERMON
XXII.     INDICATES THE APPROACHES OF FEVER
XXIII.    CRISIS IN THE APPLE-DISEASE
XXIV.     OF THE SPRING PRIMROSE AND THE AUTUMNAL
XXV.      IN WHICH THE HERO TAKES A STEP
XXVI.     RECORDS THE RAPID DEVELOPMENT OF THE HERO
XXVII.    CONTAINS AN INTERCESSION FOR THE HEROINE
XXVIII.   PREPARATIONS FOR ACTION WERE CONDUCTED UNDER THE APRIL OF LOVERS
XIX.      THE LAST ACT OF THE COMEDY TAKES THE PLACE OF THE FIRST
XXX.      CELEBRATES THE BREAKFAST
XXXI.     THE PHILOSOPHER APPEARS IN PERSON
XXXII.    PROCESSION OF THE CAKE
XXXIII.   NURSING THE DEVIL
XXXIV.    CONQUEST OF AN EPICURE
XXXV.     CLARE'S MARRIAGE
XXXVI.    A DINNER-PARTY AT RICHMOND
XXXVII.   MRS. BERRY ON MATRIMONY
XXXVIII.  AN ENCHANTRESS
XXXIX.    THE LITTLE BIRD AND THE FALCON: A BERRY TO THE RESCUE!
XL.       CLARE'S DIARY
XLI.      AUSTIN RETURNS
XLII.     NATURE SPEAKS
XLIII.    AGAIN THE MAGIAN CONFLICT
XLIV.     THE LAST SCENE
XLV.      LADY BLANDISH TO AUSTIN WENTWORTH




CHAPTER I

Some years ago a book was published under the title of "The Pilgrim's
Scrip." It consisted of a selection of original aphorisms by an anonymous
gentleman, who in this bashful manner gave a bruised heart to the world.

He made no pretension to novelty. "Our new thoughts have thrilled dead
bosoms," he wrote; by which avowal it may be seen that youth had
manifestly gone from him, since he had ceased to be jealous of the
ancients. There was a half-sigh floating through his pages for those days
of intellectual coxcombry, when ideas come to us affecting the embraces
of virgins, and swear to us they are ours alone, and no one else have
they ever visited: and we believe them.

For an example of his ideas of the sex he said:

"I expect that Woman will be the last thing civilized by Man."

Some excitement was produced in the bosoms of ladies by so monstrous a
scorn of them.

One adventurous person betook herself to the Heralds' College, and there
ascertained that a Griffin between two Wheatsheaves, which stood on the
title-page of the book, formed the crest of Sir Austin Absworthy Bearne
Feverel, Baronet, of Raynham Abbey, in a certain Western county folding
Thames: a man of wealth and honour, and a somewhat lamentable history.

The outline of the baronet's story was by no means new. He had a wife,
and he had a friend. His marriage was for love; his wife was a beauty;
his friend was a sort of poet. His wife had his whole heart, and his
friend all his confidence. When he selected Denzil Somers from among his
college chums, it was not on account of any similarity of disposition
between them, but from his intense worship of genius, which made him
overlook the absence of principle in his associate for the sake of such
brilliant promise. Denzil had a small patrimony to lead off with, and
that he dissipated before he left college; thenceforth he was dependent
upon his admirer, with whom he lived, filling a nominal post of bailiff
to the estates, and launching forth verse of some satiric and sentimental
quality; for being inclined to vice, and occasionally, and in a quiet
way, practising it, he was of course a sentimentalist and a satirist,
entitled to lash the Age and complain of human nature. His earlier poems,
published under the pseudonym of Diaper Sandoe, were so pure and
bloodless in their love passages, and at the same time so biting in their
moral tone, that his reputation was great among the virtuous, who form
the larger portion of the English book-buying public. Election-seasons
called him to ballad-poetry on behalf of the Tory party. Dialer possessed
undoubted fluency, but did tittle, though Sir Austin was ever expecting
much of him.

A languishing, inexperienced woman, whose husband in mental and in moral
stature is more than the ordinary height above her, and who, now that her
first romantic admiration of his lofty bearing has worn off, and her
fretful little refinements of taste and sentiment are not instinctively
responded to, is thrown into no wholesome household collision with a
fluent man, fluent in prose and rhyme. Lady Feverel, when she first
entered on her duties at Raynham, was jealous of her husband's friend. By
degrees she tolerated him. In time he touched his guitar in her chamber,
and they played Rizzio and Mary together.

       "For I am not the first who found
        The name of Mary fatal!"

says a subsequent sentimental alliterative love-poem of Diaper's.

Such was the outline of the story. But the baronet could fill it up. He
had opened his soul to these two. He had been noble Love to the one, and
to the other perfect Friendship. He had bid them be brother and sister
whom he loved, and live a Golden Age with him at Raynham. In fact, he had
been prodigal of the excellences of his nature, which it is not good to
be, and, like Timon, he became bankrupt, and fell upon bitterness.

The faithless lady was of no particular family; an orphan daughter of an
admiral who educated her on his half-pay, and her conduct struck but at
the man whose name she bore.

After five years of marriage, and twelve of friendship, Sir Austin was
left to his loneliness with nothing to ease his heart of love upon save a
little baby boy in a cradle. He forgave the man: he put him aside as poor
for his wrath. The woman he could not forgive; she had sinned every way.
Simple ingratitude to a benefactor was a pardonable transgression, for he
was not one to recount and crush the culprit under the heap of his good
deeds. But her he had raised to be his equal, and he judged her as his
equal. She had blackened the world's fair aspect for him.

In the presence of that world, so different to him now, he preserved his
wonted demeanor, and made his features a flexible mask. Mrs. Doria Forey,
his widowed sister, said that Austin might have retired from his
Parliamentary career for a time, and given up gaieties and that kind of
thing; her opinion, founded on observation of him in public and private,
was, that the light thing who had taken flight was but a feather on her
brother's Feverel-heart, and his ordinary course of life would be
resumed. There are times when common men cannot bear the weight of just
so much. Hippias Feverel, one of his brothers, thought him immensely
improved by his misfortune, if the loss of such a person could be so
designated; and seeing that Hippias received in consequence free quarters
at Raynham, and possession of the wing of the Abbey she had inhabited, it
is profitable to know his thoughts. If the baronet had given two or three
blazing dinners in the great hall he would have deceived people
generally, as he did his relatives and intimates. He was too sick for
that: fit only for passive acting.

The nursemaid waking in the night beheld a solitary figure darkening a
lamp above her little sleeping charge, and became so used to the sight as
never to wake with a start. One night she was strangely aroused by a
sound of sobbing. The baronet stood beside the cot in his long black
cloak and travelling cap. His fingers shaded a lamp, and reddened against
the fitful darkness that ever and anon went leaping up the wall. She
could hardly believe her senses to see the austere gentleman, dead
silent, dropping tear upon tear before her eyes. She lay stone-still in a
trance of terror and mournfulness, mechanically counting the tears as
they fell, one by one. The hidden face, the fall and flash of those heavy
drops in the light of the lamp he held, the upright, awful figure,
agitated at regular intervals like a piece of clockwork by the low
murderous catch of his breath: it was so piteous to her poor human nature
that her heart began wildly palpitating. Involuntarily the poor girl
cried out to him, "Oh, sir!" and fell a-weeping. Sir Austin turned the
lamp on her pillow, and harshly bade her go to sleep, striding from the
room forthwith. He dismissed her with a purse the next day.

Once, when he was seven years old, the little fellow woke up at night to
see a lady bending over him. He talked of this the neat day, but it was
treated as a dream; until in the course of the day his uncle Algernon was
driven home from Lobourne cricket-ground with a broken leg. Then it was
recollected that there was a family ghost; and, though no member of the
family believed in the ghost, none would have given up a circumstance
that testified to its existence; for to possess a ghost is a distinction
above titles.

Algernon Feverel lost his leg, and ceased to be a gentleman in the
Guards. Of the other uncles of young Richard, Cuthbert, the sailor,
perished in a spirited boat expedition against a slaving negro chief up
the Niger. Some of the gallant lieutenant's trophies of war decorated the
little boy's play-shed at Raynham, and he bequeathed his sword to
Richard, whose hero he was. The diplomatist and beau, Vivian, ended his
flutterings from flower to flower by making an improper marriage, as is
the fate of many a beau, and was struck out of the list of visitors.
Algernon generally occupied the baronet's disused town-house, a wretched
being, dividing his time between horse and card exercise: possessed, it
was said, of the absurd notion that a man who has lost his balance by
losing his leg may regain it by sticking to the bottle. At least,
whenever he and his brother Hippias got together, they never failed to
try whether one leg, or two, stood the bottle best. Much of a puritan as
Sir Austin was in his habits, he was too good a host, and too thorough a
gentleman, to impose them upon his guests. The brothers, and other
relatives, might do as they would while they did not disgrace the name,
and then it was final: they must depart to behold his countenance no
more.

Algernon Feverel was a simple man, who felt, subsequent to his
misfortune, as he had perhaps dimly fancied it before, that his career
lay in his legs, and was now irrevocably cut short. He taught the boy
boxing, and shooting, and the arts of fence, and superintended the
direction of his animal vigour with a melancholy vivacity. The remaining
energies of Algernon's mind were devoted to animadversions on swift
bowling. He preached it over the county, struggling through laborious
literary compositions, addressed to sporting newspapers, on the Decline
of Cricket. It was Algernon who witnessed and chronicled young Richard's
first fight, which was with young Tom Blaize of Belthorpe Farm, three
years the boy's senior.

Hippias Feverel was once thought to be the genius of the family. It was
his ill luck to have strong appetites and a weak stomach; and, as one is
not altogether fit for the battle of life who is engaged in a perpetual
contention with his dinner, Hippias forsook his prospects at the Bar,
and, in the embraces of dyspepsia, compiled his ponderous work on the
Fairy Mythology of Europe. He had little to do with the Hope of Raynham
beyond what he endured from his juvenile tricks.

A venerable lady, known as Great-Aunt Grantley, who had money to bequeath
to the heir, occupied with Hippias the background of the house and shared
her candles with him. These two were seldom seen till the dinner hour,
for which they were all day preparing, and probably all night
remembering, for the Eighteenth Century was an admirable trencherman, and
cast age aside while there was a dish on the table.

Mrs. Doris Foray was the eldest of the three sisters of the baronet, a
florid affable woman, with fine teeth, exceedingly fine light wavy hair,
a Norman nose, and a reputation for understanding men; and that, with
these practical creatures, always means the art of managing them. She had
married an expectant younger son of a good family, who deceased before
the fulfilment of his prospects; and, casting about in her mind the
future chances of her little daughter and sole child, Clare, she marked
down a probability. The far sight, the deep determination, the resolute
perseverance of her sex, where a daughter is to be provided for and a man
to be overthrown, instigated her to invite herself to Raynham, where,
with that daughter, she fixed herself.

The other two Feverel ladies were the wife of Colonel Wentworth and the
widow of Mr. Justice Harley: and the only thing remarkable about them was
that they were mothers of sons of some distinction.

Austin Wentworth's story was of that wretched character which to be
comprehended, that justice should be dealt him, must be told out and
openly; which no one dares now do.

For a fault in early youth, redeemed by him nobly, according to his
light, he was condemned to undergo the world's harsh judgment: not for
the fault--for its atonement.

"--Married his mother's housemaid," whispered Mrs. Doria, with a ghastly
look, and a shudder at young men of republican sentiments, which he was
reputed to entertain. "'The compensation for Injustice,' says the
'Pilgrim's Scrip,' is, that in that dark Ordeal we gather the worthiest
around us."

And the baronet's fair friend, Lady Blandish, and some few true men and
women, held Austin Wentworth high.

He did not live with his wife; and Sir Austin, whose mind was bent on the
future of our species, reproached him with being barren to posterity,
while knaves were propagating.

The principal characteristic of the second nephew, Adrian Harley, was his
sagacity. He was essentially the wise youth, both in counsel and in
action.

"In action," the "Pilgrim's Scrip" observes, "Wisdom goes by majorities."

Adrian had an instinct for the majority, and, as the world invariably
found him enlisted in its ranks, his appellation of wise youth was
acquiesced in without irony.

The wise youth, then, had the world with him, but no friends. Nor did he
wish for those troublesome appendages of success. He caused himself to be
required by people who could serve him; feared by such as could injure.
Not that he went out of the way to secure his end, or risked the expense
of a plot. He did the work as easily as he ate his daily bread. Adrian
was an epicurean; one whom Epicurus would have scourged out of his
garden, certainly: an epicurean of our modern notions. To satisfy his
appetites without rashly staking his character, was the wise youth's
problem for life. He had no intimates except Gibbon and Horace, and the
society of these fine aristocrats of literature helped him to accept
humanity as it had been, and was; a supreme ironic procession, with
laughter of Gods in the background. Why not laughter of mortals also?
Adrian had his laugh in his comfortable corner. He possessed peculiar
attributes of a heathen God. He was a disposer of men: he was polished,
luxurious, and happy--at their cost. He lived in eminent self-content, as
one lying on soft cloud, lapt in sunshine. Nor Jove, nor Apollo, cast eye
upon the maids of earth with cooler fire of selection, or pursued them in
the covert with more sacred impunity. And he enjoyed his reputation for
virtue as something additional. Stolen fruits are said to be sweet;
undeserved rewards are exquisite.

The best of it was, that Adrian made no pretences. He did not solicit the
favourable judgment of the world. Nature and he attempted no other
concealment than the ordinary mask men wear. And yet the world would
proclaim him moral, as well as wise, and the pleasing converse every way
of his disgraced cousin Austin.

In a word, Adrian Harley had mastered his philosophy at the early age of
one-and-twenty. Many would be glad to say the same at that age
twice-told: they carry in their breasts a burden with which Adrian's was
not loaded. Mrs. Doria was nearly right about his heart. A singular
mishap (at his birth, possibly, or before it) had unseated that organ,
and shaken it down to his stomach, where it was a much lighter, nay, an
inspiring weight, and encouraged him merrily onward. Throned there it
looked on little that did not arrive to gratify it. Already that region
was a trifle prominent in the person of the wise youth, and carried, as
it were, the flag of his philosophical tenets in front of him. He was
charming after dinner, with men or with women: delightfully sarcastic:
perhaps a little too unscrupulous in his moral tone, but that his moral
reputation belied him, and it must be set down to generosity of
disposition.

Such was Adrian Harley, another of Sir Austin's intellectual favourites,
chosen from mankind to superintend the education of his son at Raynham.
Adrian had been destined for the Church. He did not enter into Orders. He
and the baronet had a conference together one day, and from that time
Adrian became a fixture in the Abbey. His father died in his promising
son's college term, bequeathing him nothing but his legal complexion, and
Adrian became stipendiary officer in his uncle's household.

A playfellow of Richard's occasionally, and the only comrade of his age
that he ever saw, was Master Ripton Thompson, the son of Sir Austin's
solicitor, a boy without a character.

A comrade of some description was necessary, for Richard was neither to
go to school nor to college. Sir Austin considered that the schools were
corrupt, and maintained that young lads might by parental vigilance be
kept pretty secure from the Serpent until Eve sided with him: a period
that might be deferred, he said. He had a system of education for his
son. How it worked we shall see.




CHAPTER II

October, shone royally on Richard's fourteenth birthday. The brown
beechwoods and golden birches glowed to a brilliant sun. Banks of
moveless cloud hung about the horizon, mounded to the west, where slept
the wind. Promise of a great day for Raynham, as it proved to be, though
not in the manner marked out.

Already archery-booths and cricketing-tents were rising on the lower
grounds towards the river, whither the lads of Bursley and Lobourne, in
boats and in carts, shouting for a day of ale and honour, jogged merrily
to match themselves anew, and pluck at the lining laurel from each
other's brows, line manly Britons. The whole park was beginning to be
astir and resound with holiday cries. Sir Austin Feverel, a thorough good
Tory, was no game-preserver, and could be popular whenever he chose,
which Sir Males Papworth, on the other side of the river, a fast-handed
Whig and terror to poachers, never could be. Half the village of Lobourne
was seen trooping through the avenues of the park. Fiddlers and gipsies
clamoured at the gates for admission: white smocks, and slate, surmounted
by hats of serious brim, and now and then a scarlet cloak, smacking of
the old country, dotted the grassy sweeps to the levels.

And all the time the star of these festivities was receding further and
further, and eclipsing himself with his reluctant serf Ripton, who kept
asking what they were to do and where they were going, and how late it
was in the day, and suggesting that the lads of Lobourne would be calling
out for them, and Sir Austin requiring their presence, without getting
any attention paid to his misery or remonstrances. For Richard had been
requested by his father to submit to medical examination like a boor
enlisting for a soldier, and he was in great wrath.

He was flying as though he would have flown from the shameful thought of
what had been asked of him. By-and-by he communicated his sentiments to
Ripton, who said they were those of a girl: an offensive remark,
remembering which, Richard, after they had borrowed a couple of guns at
the bailiff's farm, and Ripton had fired badly, called his friend a fool.

Feeling that circumstances were making him look wonderfully like one,
Ripton lifted his head and retorted defiantly, "I'm not!"

This angry contradiction, so very uncalled for, annoyed Richard, who was
still smarting at the loss of the birds, owing to Ripton's bad shot, and
was really the injured party. He, therefore bestowed the abusive epithet
on Ripton anew, and with increase of emphasis.

"You shan't call me so, then, whether I am or not," says Ripton, and
sucks his lips.

This was becoming personal. Richard sent up his brows, and stared at his
defier an instant. He then informed him that he certainly should call him
so, and would not object to call him so twenty times.

"Do it, and see!" returns Ripton, rocking on his feet, and breathing
quick.

With a gravity of which only boys and other barbarians are capable,
Richard went through the entire number, stressing the epithet to increase
the defiance and avoid monotony, as he progressed, while Ripton bobbed
his head every time in assent, as it were, to his comrade's accuracy, and
as a record for his profound humiliation. The dog they had with them
gazed at the extraordinary performance with interrogating wags of the
tail.

Twenty times, duly and deliberately, Richard repeated the obnoxious word.

At the twentieth solemn iteration of Ripton's capital shortcoming, Ripton
delivered a smart back-hander on Richard's mouth, and squared
precipitately; perhaps sorry when the deed was done, for he was a
kind-hearted lad, and as Richard simply bowed in acknowledgment of the
blow he thought he had gone too far. He did not know the young gentleman
he was dealing with. Richard was extremely cool.

"Shall we fight here?" he said.

"Anywhere you like," replied Ripton.

"A little more into the wood, I think. We may be interrupted." And
Richard led the way with a courteous reserve that somewhat chilled
Ripton's ardour for the contest. On the skirts of the wood, Richard threw
off his jacket and waistcoat, and, quite collected, waited for Ripton to
do the same. The latter boy was flushed and restless; older and broader,
but not so tight-limbed and well-set. The Gods, sole witnesses of their
battle, betted dead against him. Richard had mounted the white cockade of
the Feverels, and there was a look in him that asked for tough work to
extinguish. His brows, slightly lined upward at the temples, converging
to a knot about the well-set straight nose; his full grey eyes, open
nostrils, and planted feet, and a gentlemanly air of calm and alertness,
formed a spirited picture of a young combatant. As for Ripton, he was all
abroad, and fought in school-boy style--that is, he rushed at the foe
head foremost, and struck like a windmill. He was a lumpy boy. When he
did hit, he made himself felt; but he was at the mercy of science. To see
him come dashing in, blinking and puffing and whirling his arms abroad
while the felling blow went straight between them, you perceived that he
was fighting a fight of desperation, and knew it. For the dreaded
alternative glared him in the face that, if he yielded, he must look like
what he had been twenty times calumniously called; and he would die
rather than yield, and swing his windmill till he dropped. Poor boy! he
dropped frequently. The gallant fellow fought for appearances, and down
he went. The Gods favour one of two parties. Prince Turnus was a noble
youth; but he had not Pallas at his elbow. Ripton was a capital boy; he
had no science. He could not prove he was not a fool! When one comes to
think of it, Ripton did choose the only possible way, and we should all
of us have considerable difficulty in proving the negative by any other.
Ripton came on the unerring fist again and again; and if it was true, as
he said in short colloquial gasps, that he required as much beating as an
egg to be beaten thoroughly, a fortunate interruption alone saved our
friend from resembling that substance. The boys heard summoning voices,
and beheld Mr. Morton of Poer Hall and Austin Wentworth stepping towards
them.

A truce was sounded, jackets were caught up, guns shouldered, and off
they trotted in concert through the depths of the wood, not stopping till
that and half-a-dozen fields and a larch plantation were well behind
them.

When they halted to take breath, there was a mutual study of faces.
Ripton's was much discoloured, and looked fiercer with its natural
war-paint than the boy felt. Nevertheless, he squared up dauntlessly on
the new ground, and Richard, whose wrath was appeased, could not refrain
from asking him whether he had not really had enough.

"Never!" shouts the noble enemy.

"Well, look here," said Richard, appealing to common sense, "I'm tired of
knocking you down. I'll say you're not a fool, if you'll give me your
hand."

Ripton demurred an instant to consult with honour, who bade him catch at
his chance.

He held out his hand. "There!" and the boys grasped hands and were fast
friends. Ripton had gained his point, and Richard decidedly had the best
of it. So, they were on equal ground. Both, could claim a victory, which
was all the better for their friendship.

Ripton washed his face and comforted his nose at a brook, and was now
ready to follow his friend wherever he chose to lead. They continued to
beat about for birds. The birds on the Raynham estates were found
singularly cunning, and repeatedly eluded the aim of these prime shots,
so they pushed their expedition into the lands of their neighbors, in
search of a stupider race, happily oblivious of the laws and conditions
of trespass; unconscious, too, that they were poaching on the demesne of
the notorious Farmer Blaize, the free-trade farmer under the shield of
the Papworths, no worshipper of the Griffin between two Wheatsheaves;
destined to be much allied with Richard's fortunes from beginning to end.
Farmer Blaize hated poachers, and, especially young chaps poaching, who
did it mostly from impudence. He heard the audacious shots popping right
and left, and going forth to have a glimpse at the intruders, and
observing their size, swore he would teach my gentlemen a thing, lords or
no lords.

Richard had brought down a beautiful cock-pheasant, and was exulting over
it, when the farmer's portentous figure burst upon them, cracking an
avenging horsewhip. His salute was ironical.

"Havin' good sport, gentlemen, are ye?"

"Just bagged a splendid bird!" radiant Richard informed him.

"Oh!" Farmer Blaize gave an admonitory flick of the whip.

"Just let me clap eye on't, then."

"Say, please," interposed Ripton, who was not blind to doubtful aspects.

Farmer Blaize threw up his chin, and grinned grimly.

"Please to you, sir? Why, my chap, you looks as if ye didn't much mind
what come t'yer nose, I reckon. You looks an old poacher, you do. Tall ye
what 'tis'!" He changed his banter to business, "That bird's mine! Now
you jest hand him over, and sheer off, you dam young scoundrels! I know
ye!" And he became exceedingly opprobrious, and uttered contempt of the
name of Feverel.

Richard opened his eyes.

"If you wants to be horsewhipped, you'll stay where y'are!" continued the
farmer. "Giles Blaize never stands nonsense!"

"Then we'll stay," quoth Richard.

"Good! so be't! If you will have't, have't, my men!"

As a preparatory measure, Farmer Blaize seized a wing of the bird, on
which both boys flung themselves desperately, and secured it minus the
pinion.

"That's your game," cried the farmer. "Here's a taste of horsewhip for
ye. I never stands nonsense!" and sweetch went the mighty whip, well
swayed. The boys tried to close with him. He kept his distance and lashed
without mercy. Black blood was made by Farmer Blaize that day! The boys
wriggled, in spite of themselves. It was like a relentless serpent
coiling, and biting, and stinging their young veins to madness. Probably
they felt the disgrace of the contortions they were made to go through
more than the pain, but the pain was fierce, for the farmer laid about
from a practised arm, and did not consider that he had done enough till
he was well breathed and his ruddy jowl inflamed. He paused, to receive
the remainder of the cock-pheasant in his face.

"Take your beastly bird," cried Richard.

"Money, my lads, and interest," roared the farmer, lashing out again.

Shameful as it was to retreat, there was but that course open to them.
They decided to surrender the field.

"Look! you big brute," Richard shook his gun, hoarse with passion, "I'd
have shot you, if I'd been loaded. Mind if I come across you when I'm
loaded, you coward, I'll fire!" The un-English nature of this threat
exasperated Farmer Blaize, and he pressed the pursuit in time to bestow a
few farewell stripes as they were escaping tight-breeched into neutral
territory. At the hedge they parleyed a minute, the farmer to inquire if
they had had a mortal good tanning and were satisfied, for when they
wanted a further instalment of the same they were to come for it to
Belthorpe Farm, and there it was in pickle: the boys meantime exploding
in menaces and threats of vengeance, on which the farmer contemptuously
turned his back. Ripton had already stocked an armful of flints for the
enjoyment of a little skirmishing. Richard, however, knocked them all
out, saying, "No! Gentlemen don't fling stones; leave that to the
blackguards."

"Just one shy at him!" pleaded Ripton, with his eye on Farmer Blaize's
broad mark, and his whole mind drunken with a sudden revelation of the
advantages of light troops in opposition to heavies.

"No," said Richard, imperatively, "no stones," and marched briskly away.
Ripton followed with a sigh. His leader's magnanimity was wholly beyond
him. A good spanking mark at the farmer would have relieved Master
Ripton; it would have done nothing to console Richard Feverel for the
ignominy he had been compelled to submit to. Ripton was familiar with the
rod, a monster much despoiled of his terrors by intimacy. Birch-fever was
past with this boy. The horrible sense of shame, self-loathing, universal
hatred, impotent vengeance, as if the spirit were steeped in abysmal
blackness, which comes upon a courageous and sensitive youth condemned
for the first time to taste this piece of fleshly bitterness, and suffer
what he feels is a defilement, Ripton had weathered and forgotten. He was
seasoned wood, and took the world pretty wisely; not reckless of
castigation, as some boys become, nor oversensitive as to dishonour, as
his friend and comrade beside him was.

Richard's blood was poisoned. He had the fever on him severely. He would
not allow stone-flinging, because it was a habit of his to discountenance
it. Mere gentlemanly considerations has scarce shielded Farmer Blaize,
and certain very ungentlemanly schemes were coming to ghastly heads in
the tumult of his brain; rejected solely from their glaring
impracticability even to his young intelligence. A sweeping and
consummate vengeance for the indignity alone should satisfy him.
Something tremendous must be done; and done without delay. At one moment
he thought of killing all the farmer's cattle; next of killing him;
challenging him to single combat with the arms, and according to the
fashion of gentlemen. But the farmer was a coward; he would refuse. Then
he, Richard Feverel, would stand by the farmer's bedside, and rouse him;
rouse him to fight with powder and ball in his own chamber, in the
cowardly midnight, where he might tremble, but dare not refuse.

"Lord!" cried simple Ripton, while these hopeful plots were raging in his
comrade's brain, now sparkling for immediate execution, and anon lapsing
disdainfully dark in their chances of fulfilment, "how I wish you'd have
let me notch him, Ricky! I'm a safe shot. I never miss. I should feel
quite jolly if I'd spanked him once. We should have had the beat of him
at that game. I say!" and a sharp thought drew Ripton's ideas nearer
home, "I wonder whether my nose is as bad as he says! Where can I see
myself?"

To these exclamations Richard was deaf, and he trudged steadily forward,
facing but one object.

After tearing through innumerable hedges, leaping fences, jumping dykes,
penetrating brambly copses, and getting dirty, ragged, and tired, Ripton
awoke from his dream of Farmer Blaize and a blue nose to the vivid
consciousness of hunger; and this grew with the rapidity of light upon
him, till in the course of another minute he was enduring the extremes of
famine, and ventured to question his leader whither he was being
conducted. Raynham was out of sight. They were a long way down the
valley, miles from Lobourne, in a country of sour pools, yellow brooks,
rank pasturage, desolate heath. Solitary cows were seen; the smoke of a
mud cottage; a cart piled with peat; a donkey grazing at leisure,
oblivious of an unkind world; geese by a horse-pond, gabbling as in the
first loneliness of creation; uncooked things that a famishing boy cannot
possibly care for, and must despise. Ripton was in despair.

"Where are you going to?" he inquired with a voice of the last time of
asking, and halted resolutely.

Richard now broke his silence to reply, "Anywhere."

"Anywhere!" Ripton took up the moody word. "But ain't you awfully
hungry?" he gasped vehemently, in a way that showed the total emptiness
of his stomach.

"No," was Richard's brief response.

"Not hungry!" Ripton's amazement lent him increased vehemence. "Why, you
haven't had anything to eat since breakfast! Not hungry? I declare I'm
starving. I feel such a gnawing I could eat dry bread and cheese!"

Richard sneered: not for reasons that would have actuated a similar
demonstration of the philosopher.

"Come," cried Ripton, "at all events, tell us where you're going to
stop."

Richard faced about to make a querulous retort. The injured and hapless
visage that met his eye disarmed him. The lad's nose, though not exactly
of the dreaded hue, was really becoming discoloured. To upbraid him would
be cruel. Richard lifted his head, surveyed the position, and exclaiming
"Here!" dropped down on a withered bank, leaving Ripton to contemplate
him as a puzzle whose every new move was a worse perplexity.




CHAPTER III

Among boys there are laws of honour and chivalrous codes, not written or
formally taught, but intuitively understood by all, and invariably acted
upon by the loyal and the true. The race is not nearly civilized, we must
remember. Thus, not to follow your leader whithersoever he may think
proper to lead; to back out of an expedition because the end of it frowns
dubious, and the present fruit of it is discomfort; to quit a comrade on
the road, and return home without him: these are tricks which no boy of
spirit would be guilty of, let him come to any description of mortal
grief in consequence. Better so than have his own conscience denouncing
him sneak. Some boys who behave boldly enough are not troubled by this
conscience, and the eyes and the lips of their fellows have to supply the
deficiency. They do it with just as haunting, and even more horrible
pertinacity, than the inner voice, and the result, if the probation be
not very severe and searching, is the same. The leader can rely on the
faithfulness of his host: the comrade is sworn to serve. Master Ripton
Thompson was naturally loyal. The idea of turning off and forsaking his
friend never once crossed his mind, though his condition was desperate,
and his friend's behaviour that of a Bedlamite. He announced several
times impatiently that they would be too late for dinner. His friend did
not budge. Dinner seemed nothing to him. There he lay plucking grass, and
patting the old dog's nose, as if incapable of conceiving what a thing
hunger was. Ripton took half-a-dozen turns up and down, and at last flung
himself down beside the taciturn boy, accepting his fate.

Now, the chance that works for certain purposes sent a smart shower from
the sinking sun, and the wet sent two strangers for shelter in the lane
behind the hedge where the boys reclined. One was a travelling tinker,
who lit a pipe and spread a tawny umbrella. The other was a burly young
countryman, pipeless and tentless. They saluted with a nod, and began
recounting for each other's benefit the daylong-doings of the weather, as
it had affected their individual experience and followed their
prophecies. Both had anticipated and foretold a bit of rain before night,
and therefore both welcomed the wet with satisfaction. A monotonous
betweenwhiles kind of talk they kept droning, in harmony with the still
hum of the air. From the weather theme they fell upon the blessings of
tobacco; how it was the poor man's friend, his company, his consolation,
his comfort, his refuge at night, his first thought in the morning.

"Better than a wife!" chuckled the tinker. "No curtain-lecturin' with a
pipe. Your pipe an't a shrew."

"That be it!" the other chimed in. "Your pipe doan't mak' ye out wi' all
the cash Saturday evenin'."

"Take one," said the tinker, in the enthusiasm of the moment, handing a
grimy short clay. Speed-the-Plough filled from the tinker's pouch, and
continued his praises.

"Penny a day, and there y'are, primed! Better than a wife? Ha, ha!"

"And you can get rid of it, if ye wants for to, and when ye wants," added
tinker.

"So ye can!" Speed-the-Plough took him up. "And ye doan't want for to.
Leastways, t'other case. I means pipe."

"And," continued tinker, comprehending him perfectly, it don't bring
repentance after it."

"Not nohow, master, it doan't! And"--Speed-the-Plough cocked his eye--"it
doan't eat up half the victuals, your pipe doan't."

Here the honest yeoman gesticulated his keen sense of a clincher, which
the tinker acknowledged; and having, so to speak, sealed up the subject
by saying the best thing that could be said, the two smoked for some time
in silence to the drip and patter of the shower.

Ripton solaced his wretchedness by watching them through the briar hedge.
He saw the tinker stroking a white cat, and appealing to her, every now
and then, as his missus, for an opinion or a confirmation; and he thought
that a curious sight. Speed-the-Plough was stretched at full length, with
his boots in the rain, and his head amidst the tinker's pots, smoking,
profoundly contemplative. The minutes seemed to be taken up alternately
by the grey puffs from their mouths.

It was the tinker who renewed the colloquy. Said he, "Times is bad!"

His companion assented, "Sure-ly!"

"But it somehow comes round right," resumed the tinker. "Why, look here.
Where's the good o' moping? I sees it all come round right and tight. Now
I travels about. I've got my beat. 'Casion calls me t'other day to
Newcastle!--Eh?"

"Coals!" ejaculated Speed-the-Plough sonorously.

"Coals!" echoed the tinker. "You ask what I goes there for, mayhap? Never
you mind. One sees a mort o' life in my trade. Not for coals it isn't.
And I don't carry 'em there, neither. Anyhow, I comes back. London's my
mark. Says I, I'll see a bit o' the sea, and steps aboard a collier. We
were as nigh wrecked as the prophet Paul."

"--A--who's him?" the other wished to know.

"Read your Bible," said the tinker. "We pitched and tossed--'tain't that
game at sea 'tis on land, I can tell ye! I thinks, down we're
a-going--say your prayers, Bob Tiles! That was a night, to be sure! But
God's above the devil, and here I am, ye see." Speed-the-Plough lurched
round on his elbow and regarded him indifferently. "D'ye call that
doctrin'? He bean't al'ays, or I shoo'n't be scrapin' my heels wi'
nothin' to do, and, what's warse, nothin' to eat. Why, look heer. Luck's
luck, and bad luck's the con-trary. Varmer Bollop, t'other day, has's
rick burnt down. Next night his gran'ry's burnt. What do he tak' and go
and do? He takes and goes and hangs unsel', and turns us out of his
employ. God warn't above the devil then, I thinks, or I can't make out
the reckonin'."

The tinker cleared his throat, and said it was a bad case.

"And a darn'd bad case. I'll tak' my oath on't!" cried Speed-the-Plough.
"Well, look heer! Heer's another darn'd bad case. I threshed for Varmer
Blaize Blaize o' Beltharpe afore I goes to Varmer Bollop. Varmer Blaize
misses pilkins. He swears our chaps steals pilkins. 'Twarn't me steals
'em. What do he tak' and go and do? He takes and tarns us off, me and
another, neck and crop, to scuffle about and starve, for all he keers.
God warn't above the devil then, I thinks. Not nohow, as I can see!"

The tinker shook his head, and said that was a bad case also.

"And you can't mend it," added Speed-the-Plough. "It's bad, and there it
be. But I'll tell ye what, master. Bad wants payin' for." He nodded and
winked mysteriously. "Bad has its wages as well's honest work, I'm
thinkin'. Varmer Bollop I don't owe no grudge to: Varmer Blaize I do. And
I shud like to stick a Lucifer in his rick some dry windy night."
Speed-the-Plough screwed up an eye villainously. "He wants hittin' in the
wind,--jest where the pocket is, master, do Varmer Blaize, and he'll cry
out 'O Lor'!' Varmer Blaize will. You won't get the better o' Varmer
Blaize by no means, as I makes out, if ye doan't hit into him jest
there."

The tinker sent a rapid succession of white clouds from his mouth, and
said that would be taking the devil's side of a bad case.
Speed-the-Plough observed energetically that, if Farmer Blaize was on the
other, he should be on that side.

There was a young gentleman close by, who thought with him. The hope of
Raynham had lent a careless half-compelled attention to the foregoing
dialogue, wherein a common labourer and a travelling tinker had
propounded and discussed one of the most ancient theories of transmundane
dominion and influence on mundane affairs. He now started to his feet,
and came tearing through the briar hedge, calling out for one of them to
direct them the nearest road to Bursley. The tinker was kindling
preparations for his tea, under the tawny umbrella. A loaf was set forth,
oh which Ripton's eyes, stuck in the edge, fastened ravenously.
Speed-the-Plough volunteered information that Bursley was a good three
mile from where they stood, and a good eight mile from Lobourne.

"I'll give you half-a-crown for that loaf, my good fellow," said Richard
to the tinker.

"It's a bargain;" quoth the tinker, "eh, missus?"

His cat replied by humping her back at the dog.

The half-crown was tossed down, and Ripton, who had just succeeded in
freeing his limbs from the briar, prickly as a hedgehog, collared the
loaf.

"Those young squires be sharp-set, and no mistake," said the tinker to
his companion. "Come! we'll to Bursley after 'em, and talk it out over a
pot o' beer." Speed-the-Plough was nothing loath, and in a short time
they were following the two lads on the road to Bursley, while a
horizontal blaze shot across the autumn and from the Western edge of the
rain-cloud.




CHAPTER IV

Search for the missing boys had been made everywhere over Raynham, and
Sir Austin was in grievous discontent. None had seen them save Austin
Wentworth and Mr. Morton. The baronet sat construing their account of the
flight of the lads when they were hailed, and resolved it into an act of
rebellion on the part of his son. At dinner he drank the young heir's
health in ominous silence. Adrian Harley stood up in his place to propose
the health. His speech was a fine piece of rhetoric. He warmed in it
till, after the Ciceronic model, inanimate objects were personified, and
Richard's table-napkin and vacant chair were invoked to follow the steps
of a peerless father, and uphold with his dignity the honour of the
Feverels. Austin Wentworth, whom a soldier's death compelled to take his
father's place in support of the toast, was tame after such
magniloquence. But the reply, the thanks which young Richard should have
delivered in person were not forthcoming. Adrian's oratory had given but
a momentary life to napkin and chair. The company of honoured friends,
and aunts and uncles, remotest cousins, were glad to disperse and seek
amusement in music and tea. Sir Austin did his utmost to be hospitable
cheerful, and requested them to dance. If he had desired them to laugh he
would have been obeyed, and in as hearty a manner.

"How triste!" said Mrs. Doria Forey to Lobourne's curate, as that most
enamoured automaton went through his paces beside her with professional
stiffness.

"One who does not suffer can hardly assent," the curate answered, basking
in her beams.

"Ah, you are good!" exclaimed the lady. "Look at my Clare. She will not
dance on her cousin's birthday with anyone but him. What are we to do to
enliven these people?"

"Alas, madam! you cannot do for all what you do for one," the curate
sighed, and wherever she wandered in discourse, drew her back with silken
strings to gaze on his enamoured soul.

He was the only gratified stranger present. The others had designs on the
young heir. Lady Attenbury of Longford House had brought her
highly-polished specimen of market-ware, the Lady Juliana Jaye, for a
first introduction to him, thinking he had arrived at an age to estimate
and pine for her black eyes and pretty pert mouth. The Lady Juliana had
to pair off with a dapper Papworth, and her mama was subjected to the
gallantries of Sir Miles, who talked land and steam-engines to her till
she was sick, and had to be impertinent in self-defence. Lady Blandish,
the delightful widow, sat apart with Adrian, and enjoyed his sarcasms on
the company. By ten at night the poor show ended, and the rooms were
dark, dark as the prognostics multitudinously hinted by the disappointed
and chilled guests concerning the probable future of the hope of Raynham.
Little Clare kissed her mama, curtsied to the lingering curate, and went
to bed like a very good girl. Immediately the maid had departed, little
Clare deliberately exchanged night, attire for that of day. She was noted
as an obedient child. Her light was allowed to burn in her room for
half-an-hour, to counteract her fears of the dark. She took the light,
and stole on tiptoe to Richard's room. No Richard was there. She peeped
in further and further. A trifling agitation of the curtains shot her
back through the door and along the passage to her own bedchamber with
extreme expedition. She was not much alarmed, but feeling guilty she was
on her guard. In a short time she was prowling about the passages again.
Richard had slighted and offended the little lady, and was to be asked
whether he did not repent such conduct toward his cousin; not to be asked
whether he had forgotten to receive his birthday kiss from her; for, if
he did not choose to remember that, Miss Clare would never remind him of
it, and to-night should be his last chance of a reconciliation. Thus she
meditated, sitting on a stair, and presently heard Richard's voice below
in the hall, shouting for supper.

"Master Richard has returned," old Benson the butler tolled out
intelligence to Sir Austin.

"Well?" said the baronet.

"He complains of being hungry," the butler hesitated, with a look of
solemn disgust.

"Let him eat."

Heavy Benson hesitated still more as he announced that the boy had called
for wine. It was an unprecedented thing. Sir Austin's brows were
portending an arch, but Adrian suggested that he wanted possibly to drink
his birthday, and claret was conceded.

The boys were in the vortex of a partridge-pie when Adrian strolled in to
them. They had now changed characters. Richard was uproarious. He drank a
health with every glass; his cheeks were flushed and his eyes brilliant.
Ripton looked very much like a rogue on the tremble of detection, but his
honest hunger and the partridge-pie shielded him awhile from Adrian's
scrutinizing glance. Adrian saw there was matter for study, if it were
only on Master Ripton's betraying nose, and sat down to hear and mark.

"Good sport, gentlemen, I trust to hear?" he began his quiet banter, and
provoked a loud peal of laughter from Richard.

"Ha, ha! I say, Rip: 'Havin' good sport, gentlemen, are ye?' You remember
the farmer! Your health, parson! We haven't had our sport yet. We're
going to have some first-rate sport. Oh, well! we haven't much show of
birds. We shot for pleasure, and returned them to the proprietors. You're
fond of game, parson! Ripton is a dead shot in what Cousin Austin calls
the Kingdom of 'would-have-done' and 'might-have-been.' Up went the
birds, and cries Rip, 'I've forgotten to load!' Oh, ho!--Rip! some more
claret.--Do just leave that nose of yours alone.--Your health, Ripton
Thompson! The birds hadn't the decency to wait for him, and so, parson,
it's their fault, and not Rip's, you haven't a dozen brace at your feet.
What have you been doing at home, Cousin Rady?"

"Playing Hamlet, in the absence of the Prince of Denmark. The day without
you, my dear boy, must be dull, you know."

  "'He speaks: can I trust what he says is sincere?
   There's an edge to his smile that cuts much like a sneer.'

"Sandoe's poems! You know the couplet, Mr. Rady. Why shouldn't I quote
Sandoe? You know you like him, Rady. But, if you've missed me, I'm sorry.
Rip and I have had a beautiful day. We've made new acquaintances. We've
seen the world. I'm the monkey that has seen the world, and I'm going to
tell you all about it. First, there's a gentleman who takes a rifle for a
fowling-piece. Next, there's a farmer who warns everybody, gentleman and
beggar, off his premises. Next, there's a tinker and a ploughman, who
think that God is always fighting with the devil which shall command the
kingdoms of the earth. The tinker's for God, and the ploughman"--

"I'll drink your health, Ricky," said Adrian, interrupting.

"Oh, I forgot, parson;--I mean no harm, Adrian. I'm only telling what
I've heard."

"No harm, my dear boy," returned Adrian. "I'm perfectly aware that
Zoroaster is not dead. You have been listening to a common creed. Drink
the Fire-worshippers, if you will."

"Here's to Zoroaster, then!" cried Richard. "I say, Rippy! we'll drink
the Fire-worshippers to-night won't we?"

A fearful conspiratorial frown, that would not have disgraced Guido
Fawkes, was darted back from the, plastic features of Master Ripton.

Richard gave his lungs loud play.

"Why, what did you say about Blaizes, Rippy? Didn't you say it was fun?"

Another hideous and silencing frown was Ripton's answer. Adrian matched
the innocent youths, and knew that there was talking under the table.
"See," thought he, "this boy has tasted his first scraggy morsel of life
today, and already he talks like an old stager, and has, if I mistake
not, been acting too. My respected chief," he apostrophized Sir Austin,
"combustibles are only the more dangerous for compression. This boy will
be ravenous for Earth when he is let loose, and very soon make his share
of it look as foolish as yonder game-pie!"--a prophecy Adrian kept to
himself.

Uncle Algernon shambled in to see his nephew before the supper was
finished, and his more genial presence brought out a little of the plot.

"Look here, uncle!" said Richard. "Would you let a churlish old brute of
a farmer strike you without making him suffer for it?"

"I fancy I should return the compliment, my lad," replied his uncle.

"Of course you would! So would I. And he shall suffer for it." The boy
looked savage, and his uncle patted him down.

"I've boxed his son; I'll box him," said Richard, shouting for more wine.

"What, boy! Is it old Blaize has been putting you up!"

"Never mind, uncle!" The boy nodded mysteriously.

'Look there!' Adrian read on Ripton's face, he says 'never mind,' and
lets it out!

"Did we beat to-day, uncle?"

"Yes, boy; and we'd beat them any day they bowl fair. I'd beat them on
one leg. There's only Watkins and Featherdene among them worth a
farthing."

"We beat!" cries Richard. "Then we'll have some more wine, and drink
their healths."

The bell was rung; wine ordered. Presently comes in heavy Benson, to say
supplies are cut off. One bottle, and no more. The Captain whistled:
Adrian shrugged.

The bottle, however, was procured by Adrian subsequently. He liked
studying intoxicated urchins.

One subject was at Richard's heart, about which he was reserved in the
midst of his riot. Too proud to inquire how his father had taken his
absence, he burned to hear whether he was in disgrace. He led to it
repeatedly, and it was constantly evaded by Algernon and Adrian. At last,
when the boy declared a desire to wish his father good-night, Adrian had
to tell him that he was to go straight to bed from the supper-table.
Young Richard's face fell at that, and his gaiety forsook him. He marched
to his room without another word.

Adrian gave Sir Austin an able version of his son's behaviour and
adventures; dwelling upon this sudden taciturnity when he heard of his
father's resolution not to see him. The wise youth saw that his chief was
mollified behind his moveless mask, and went to bed, and Horace, leaving
Sir Austin in his study. Long hours the baronet sat alone. The house had
not its usual influx of Feverels that day. Austin Wentworth was staying
at Poer Hall, and had only come over for an hour. At midnight the house
breathed sleep. Sir Austin put on his cloak and cap, and took the lamp to
make his rounds. He apprehended nothing special, but with a mind never at
rest he constituted himself the sentinel of Raynham. He passed the
chamber where the Great-Aunt Grantley lay, who was to swell Richard's
fortune, and so perform her chief business on earth. By her door he
murmured, "Good creature! you sleep with a sense of duty done," and paced
on, reflecting, "She has not made money a demon of discord," and blessed
her. He had his thoughts at Hippias's somnolent door, and to them the
world might have subscribed.

A monomaniac at large, watching over sane people in slumber! thinks
Adrian Harley, as he hears Sir Austin's footfall, and truly that was a
strange object to see.--Where is the fortress that has not one weak gate?
where the man who is sound at each particular angle? Ay, meditates the
recumbent cynic, more or less mad is not every mother's son? Favourable
circumstances--good air, good company, two or three good rules rigidly
adhered to--keep the world out of Bedlam. But, let the world fly into a
passion, and is not Bedlam the safest abode for it?

Sir Austin ascended the stairs, and bent his steps leisurely toward the
chamber where his son was lying in the left wing of the Abbey. At the end
of the gallery which led to it he discovered a dim light. Doubting it an
illusion, Sir Austin accelerated his pace. This wing had aforetime a bad
character. Notwithstanding what years had done to polish it into fair
repute, the Raynham kitchen stuck to tradition, and preserved certain
stories of ghosts seen there, that effectually blackened it in the
susceptible minds of new house-maids and under-crooks, whose fears would
not allow the sinner to wash his sins. Sir Austin had heard of the tales
circulated by his domestics underground. He cherished his own belief, but
discouraged theirs, and it was treason at Raynham to be caught traducing
the left wing. As the baronet advanced, the fact of a light burning was
clear to him. A slight descent brought him into the passage, and he
beheld a poor human candle standing outside his son's chamber. At the
same moment a door closed hastily. He entered Richard's room. The boy was
absent. The bed was unpressed: no clothes about: nothing to show that he
had been there that night. Sir Austin felt vaguely apprehensive. Has he
gone to my room to await me? thought the father's heart. Something like a
tear quivered in his arid eyes as he meditated and hoped this might be
so. His own sleeping-room faced that of his son. He strode to it with a
quick heart. It was empty. Alarm dislodged anger from his jealous heart,
and dread of evil put a thousand questions to him that were answered in
air. After pacing up and down his room he determined to go and ask the
boy Thompson, as he called Ripton, what was known to him.

The chamber assigned to Master Ripton Thompson was at the northern
extremity of the passage, and overlooked Lobourne and the valley to the
West. The bed stood between the window and the door. Six Austin found the
door ajar, and the interior dark. To his surprise, the boy Thompson's
couch, as revealed by the rays of his lamp, was likewise vacant. He was
turning back when he fancied he heard the sibilation of a whispering in
the room. Sir Austin cloaked the lamp and trod silently toward the
window. The heads of his son Richard and the boy Thompson were seen
crouched against the glass, holding excited converse together. Sir Austin
listened, but he listened to a language of which he possessed not the
key. Their talk was of fire, and of delay: of expected agrarian
astonishment: of a farmer's huge wrath: of violence exercised upon
gentlemen, and of vengeance: talk that the boys jerked out by fits, and
that came as broken links of a chain impossible to connect. But they
awake curiosity. The baronet condescended to play the spy upon his son.

Over Lobourne and the valley lay black night and innumerable stars.

"How jolly I feel!" exclaimed Ripton, inspired by claret; and then, after
a luxurious pause--"I think that fellow has pocketed his guinea, and cut
his lucky."

Richard allowed a long minute to pass, during which the baronet waited
anxiously for his voice, hardly recognizing it when he heard its altered
tones.

"If he has, I'll go; and I'll do it myself."

"You would?" returned Master Ripton. "Well, I'm hanged!--I say, if you
went to school, wouldn't you get into rows! Perhaps he hasn't found the
place where the box was stuck in. I think he funks it. I almost wish you
hadn't done it, upon my honour--eh? Look there! what was that? That
looked like something.--I say! do you think we shall ever be found out?"

Master Ripton intoned this abrupt interrogation verb seriously.

"I don't think about it," said Richard, all his faculties bent on signs
from Lobourne.

"Well, but," Ripton persisted, "suppose we are found out?"

"If we are, I must pay for it."

Sir Austin breathed the better for this reply. He was beginning to gather
a clue to the dialogue. His son was engaged in a plot, and was, moreover,
the leader of the plot. He listened for further enlightenment.

"What was the fellow's name?" inquired Ripton.

His companion answered, "Tom Bakewell."

"I'll tell you what," continued Ripton. "You let it all clean out to your
cousin and uncle at supper.--How capital claret is with partridge-pie!
What a lot I ate!--Didn't you see me frown?"

The young sensualist was in an ecstasy of gratitude to his late
refection, and the slightest word recalled him to it. Richard answered
him:

"Yes; and felt your kick. It doesn't matter. Rady's safe, and uncle never
blabs."

"Well, my plan is to keep it close. You're never safe if you don't.--I
never drank much claret before," Ripton was off again. "Won't I now,
though! claret's my wine. You know, it may come out any day, and then
we're done for," he rather incongruously appended.

Richard only took up the business-thread of his friend's rambling
chatter, and answered:

"You've got nothing to do with it, if we are."

"Haven't I, though! I didn't stick-in the box but I'm an accomplice,
that's clear. Besides," added Ripton, "do you think I should leave you to
bear it all on your shoulders? I ain't that sort of chap, Ricky, I can
tell you."

Sir Austin thought more highly of the boy Thompson. Still it looked a
detestable conspiracy, and the altered manner of his son impressed him
strangely. He was not the boy of yesterday. To Sir Austin it seemed as if
a gulf had suddenly opened between them. The boy had embarked, and was on
the waters of life in his own vessel. It was as vain to call him back as
to attempt to erase what Time has written with the Judgment Blood! This
child, for whom he had prayed nightly in such a fervour and humbleness to
God, the dangers were about him, the temptations thick on him, and the
devil on board piloting. If a day had done so much, what would years do?
Were prayers and all the watchfulness he had expended of no avail?

A sensation of infinite melancholy overcame the poor gentleman--a thought
that he was fighting with a fate in this beloved boy.

He was half disposed to arrest the two conspirators on the spot, and make
them confess, and absolve themselves; but it seemed to him better to keep
an unseen eye over his son: Sir Austin's old system prevailed.

Adrian characterized this system well, in saying that Sir Austin wished
to be Providence to his son.

If immeasurable love were perfect wisdom, one human being might almost
impersonate Providence to another. Alas! love, divine as it is, can do no
more than lighten the house it inhabits--must take its shape, sometimes
intensify its narrowness--can spiritualize, but not expel, the old
lifelong lodgers above-stairs and below.

Sir Austin decided to continue quiescent.

The valley still lay black beneath the large autumnal stars, and the
exclamations of the boys were becoming fevered and impatient. By-and-by
one insisted that he had seen a twinkle. The direction he gave was out of
their anticipations. Again the twinkle was announced. Both boys started
to their feet. It was a twinkle in the right direction now.

"He's done it!" cried Richard, in great heat. "Now you may say old
Blaize'll soon be old Blazes, Rip. I hope he's asleep."

"I'm sure he's snoring!--Look there! He's alight fast enough. He's dry.
He'll burn.--I say," Ripton re-assumed the serious intonation, "do you
think they'll ever suspect us?"

"What if they do? We must brunt it."

"Of course we will. But, I say! I wish you hadn't given them the scent,
though. I like to look innocent. I can't when I know people suspect me.
Lord! look there! Isn't it just beginning to flare up!"

The farmer's grounds were indeed gradually standing out in sombre
shadows.

"I'll fetch my telescope," said Richard. Ripton, somehow not liking to be
left alone, caught hold of him.

"No; don't go and lose the best of it. Here, I'll throw open the window,
and we can see."

The window was flung open, and the boys instantly stretched half their
bodies out of it; Ripton appearing to devour the rising flames with his
mouth: Richard with his eyes.

Opaque and statuesque stood the figure of the baronet behind them. The
wind was low. Dense masses of smoke hung amid the darting snakes of fire,
and a red malign light was on the neighbouring leafage. No figures could
be seen. Apparently the flames had nothing to contend against, for they
were making terrible strides into the darkness.

"Oh!" shouted Richard, overcome by excitement, "if I had my telescope! We
must have it! Let me go and fetch it! I Will!"

The boys struggled together, and Sir Austin stepped back. As he did so, a
cry was heard in the passage. He hurried out, closed the chamber, and
came upon little Clare lying senseless along the door.




CHAPTER V

In the morning that followed this night, great gossip was interchanged
between Raynham and Lobourne. The village told how Farmer Blaize, of
Belthorpe Farm, had his Pick feloniously set fire to; his stables had
caught fire, himself had been all but roasted alive in the attempt to
rescue his cattle, of which numbers had perished in the flames. Raynham
counterbalanced arson with an authentic ghost seen by Miss Clare in the
left wing of the Abbey--the ghost of a lady, dressed in deep mourning, a
scar on her forehead and a bloody handkerchief at her breast, frightful
to behold! and no wonder the child was frightened out of her wits, and
lay in a desperate state awaiting the arrival of the London doctors. It
was added that the servants had all threatened to leave in a body, and
that Sir Austin to appease them had promised to pull down the entire left
wing, like a gentleman; for no decent creature, said Lobourne, could
consent to live in a haunted house.

Rumour for the nonce had a stronger spice of truth than usual. Poor
little Clare lay ill, and the calamity that had befallen Farmer Blaize,
as regards his rick, was not much exaggerated. Sir Austin caused an
account of it be given him at breakfast, and appeared so scrupulously
anxious to hear the exact extent of injury sustained by the farmer that
heavy Benson went down to inspect the scene. Mr. Benson returned, and,
acting under Adrian's malicious advice, framed a formal report of the
catastrophe, in which the farmer's breeches figured, and certain cooling
applications to a part of the farmer's person. Sir Austin perused it
without a smile. He took occasion to have it read out before the two
boys, who listened very demurely, as to ordinary newspaper incident; only
when the report particularized the garments damaged, and the unwonted
distressing position Farmer Blaize was reduced to in his bed, indecorous
fit of sneezing laid hold of Master Ripton Thompson, and Richard bit his
lip and burst into loud laughter, Ripton joining him, lost to
consequences.

"I trust you feel for this poor man," said Sir Austin to his son,
somewhat sternly. He saw no sign of feeling.

It was a difficult task for Sir Austin to keep his old countenance toward
the hope of Raynham, knowing him the accomplice-incendiary, and believing
the deed to have been unprovoked and wanton. But he must do so, he knew,
to let the boy have a fair trial against himself. Be it said, moreover,
that the baronet's possession of his son's secret flattered him. It
allowed him to act, and in a measure to feel, like Providence; enabled
him to observe and provide for the movements of creatures in the dark. He
therefore treated the boy as he commonly did, and Richard saw no change
in his father to make him think he was suspected.

The youngster's game was not so easy against Adrian.  Adrian did not
shoot or fish. Voluntarily he did nothing to work off the destructive
nervous fluid, or whatever it may be, which is in man's nature; so that
two culprit boys once in his power were not likely to taste the gentle
hand of mercy; and Richard and Ripton paid for many a trout and partridge
spared. At every minute of the day Ripton was thrown into sweats of
suspicion that discovery was imminent, by some stray remark or message
from Adrian. He was as a fish with the hook in his gills, mysteriously
caught without having nibbled; and dive into what depths he would he was
sensible of a summoning force that compelled him perpetually towards the
gasping surface, which he seemed inevitably approaching when the
dinner-bell sounded. There the talk was all of Farmer Blaize. If it
dropped, Adrian revived it, and his caressing way with Ripton was just
such as a keen sportsman feels toward the creature that had owned his
skill, and is making its appearance for the world to acknowledge the
same. Sir Austin saw the manoeuvres, and admired Adrian's shrewdness. But
he had to check the young natural lawyer, for the effect of so much
masked examination upon Richard was growing baneful. This fish also felt
the hook in his gills, but this fish was more of a pike, and lay in
different waters, where there were old stumps and black roots to wind
about, and defy alike strong pulling and delicate handling. In other
words, Richard showed symptoms of a disposition to take refuge in lies.

"You know the grounds, my dear boy," Adrian observed to him. "Tell me; do
you think it easy to get to the rick unperceived? I hear they suspect one
of the farmer's turned-off hands."

"I tell you I don't know the grounds," Richard sullenly replied.

"Not?" Adrian counterfeited courteous astonishment. "I thought Mr.
Thompson said you were over there yesterday?"

Ripton, glad to speak the truth, hurriedly assured Adrian that it was not
he had said so.

"Not? You had good sport, gentlemen, hadn't you?"

"Oh, yes!" mumbled the wretched victims, reddening as they remembered, in
Adrian's slightly drawled rusticity of tone, Farmer Blaize's first
address to them.

"I suppose you were among the Fire-worshippers last night, too?"
persisted Adrian. "In some countries, I hear, they manage their best
sport at night-time, and beat up for game with torches. It must be a fine
sight. After all, the country would be dull if we hadn't a rip here and
there to treat us to a little conflagration."

"A rip!" laughed Richard, to his friend's disgust and alarm at his
daring. "You don't mean this Rip, do you?"

"Mr. Thompson fire a rick? I should as soon suspect you, my dear
boy.--You are aware, young gentlemen, that it is rather a serious thing
eh? In this country, you know, the landlord has always been the pet of
the Laws. By the way," Adrian continued, as if diverging to another
topic, "you met two gentlemen of the road in your explorations yesterday,
Magians. Now, if I were a magistrate of the county, like Sir Miles
Papworth, my suspicions would light upon those gentlemen. A tinker and a
ploughman, I think you said, Mr. Thompson. Not? Well, say two ploughmen."

"More likely two tinkers," said Richard.

"Oh! if you wish to exclude the ploughman--was he out of employ?"

Ripton, with Adrian's eyes inveterately fixed on him, stammered an
affirmative.

"The tinker, or the ploughman?"

"The ploughm--" Ingenuous Ripton looking about, as if to aid himself
whenever he was able to speak the truth, beheld Richard's face blackening
at him, and swallowed back half the word.

"The ploughman!" Adrian took him up cheerily. "Then we have here a
ploughman out of employ. Given a ploughman out of employ, and a rick
burnt. The burning of a rick is an act of vengeance, and a ploughman out
of employ is a vengeful animal. The rick and the ploughman are advancing
to a juxtaposition. Motive being established, we have only to prove their
proximity at a certain hour, and our ploughman voyages beyond seas."

"Is it transportation for rick-burning?" inquired Ripton aghast.

Adrian spoke solemnly: "They shave your head. You are manacled. Your diet
is sour bread and cheese-parings. You work in strings of twenties and
thirties. ARSON is branded on your backs in an enormous A. Theological
works are the sole literary recreation of the well-conducted and
deserving. Consider the fate of this poor fellow, and what an act of
vengeance brings him to! Do you know his name?"

"How should I know his name?" said Richard, with an assumption of
innocence painful to see.

Sir Austin remarked that no doubt it would soon be known, and Adrian
perceived that he was to quiet his line, marvelling a little at the
baronet's blindness to what was so clear. He would not tell, for that
would ruin his influence with Richard; still he wanted some present
credit for his discernment and devotion. The boys got away from dinner,
and, after deep consultation, agreed upon a course of conduct, which was
to commiserate with Farmer Blaize loudly, and make themselves look as
much like the public as it was possible for two young malefactors to
look, one of whom already felt Adrian's enormous A devouring his back
with the fierceness of the Promethean eagle, and isolating him forever
from mankind. Adrian relished their novel tactics sharply, and led them
to lengths of lamentation for Farmer Blaize. Do what they might, the hook
was in their gills. The farmer's whip had reduced them to bodily
contortions; these were decorous compared with the spiritual writhings
they had to perform under Adrian's manipulation. Ripton was fast becoming
a coward, and Richard a liar, when next morning Austin Wentworth came
over from Poer Hall bringing news that one Mr. Thomas Bakewell, yeoman,
had been arrested on suspicion of the crime of Arson and lodged in jail,
awaiting the magisterial pleasure of Sir Miles Papworth. Austin's eye
rested on Richard as he spoke these terrible tidings. The hope of Raynham
returned his look, perfectly calm, and had, moreover, the presence of
mind not to look at Ripton.




CHAPTER VI

As soon as they could escape, the boys got together into an obscure
corner of the park, and there took counsel of their extremity.

"Whatever shall we do now?" asked Ripton of his leader.

Scorpion girt with fire was never in a more terrible prison-house than
poor Ripton, around whom the raging element he had assisted to create
seemed to be drawing momently narrower circles.

"There's only one chance," said Richard, coming to a dead halt, and
folding his arms resolutely.

His comrade inquired with the utmost eagerness what that chance might be.

Richard fixed his eyes on a flint, and replied: "We must rescue that
fellow from jail."

Ripton gazed at his leader, and fell back with astonishment. "My dear
Ricky! but how are we to do it?"

Richard, still perusing his flint, replied: "We must manage to get a file
in to him and a rope. It can be done, I tell you. I don't care what I
pay. I don't care what I do. He must be got out."

"Bother that old Blaize!" exclaimed Ripton, taking off his cap to wipe
his frenzied forehead, and brought down his friend's reproof.

"Never mind old Blaize now. Talk about letting it out! Look at you. I'm
ashamed of you. You talk about Robin Hood and King Richard! Why, you
haven't an atom of courage. Why, you let it out every second of the day.
Whenever Rady begins speaking you start; I can see the perspiration
rolling down you. Are you afraid?--And then you contradict yourself. You
never keep to one story. Now, follow me. We must risk everything to get
him out. Mind that! And keep out of Adrian's way as much as you can. And
keep to one story."

With these sage directions the young leader marched his companion-culprit
down to inspect the jail where Tom Bakewell lay groaning over the results
of the super-mundane conflict, and the victim of it that he was.

In Lobourne Austin Wentworth had the reputation of the poor man's friend;
a title he earned more largely ere he went to the reward God alone can
give to that supreme virtue. Dame Bakewell, the mother of Tom, on hearing
of her son's arrest, had run to comfort him and render him what help she
could; but this was only sighs and tears, and, oh deary me! which only
perplexed poor Tom, who bade her leave an unlucky chap to his fate, and
not make himself a thundering villain. Whereat the dame begged him to
take heart, and he should have a true comforter. "And though it's a
gentleman that's coming to you, Tom--for he never refuses a poor body,"
said Mrs. Bakewell, "it's a true Christian, Tom! and the Lord knows if
the sight of him mayn't be the saving of you, for he's light to look on,
and a sermon to listen to, he is!"

Tom was not prepossessed by the prospect of a sermon, and looked a sullen
dog enough when Austin entered his cell. He was surprised at the end of
half-an-hour to find himself engaged in man-to-man conversation with a
gentleman and a Christian. When Austin rose to go Tom begged permission
to shake his hand.

"Take and tell young master up at the Abbey that I an't the chap to
peach. He'll know. He's a young gentleman as'll make any man do as he
wants 'em! He's a mortal wild young gentleman! And I'm a Ass! That's
where 'tis. But I an't a blackguard. Tell him that, sir!"

This was how it came that Austin eyed young Richard seriously while he
told the news at Raynham. The boy was shy of Austin more than of Adrian.
Why, he did not know; but he made it a hard task for Austin to catch him
alone, and turned sulky that instant. Austin was not clever like Adrian:
he seldom divined other people's ideas, and always went the direct road
to his object; so instead of beating about and setting the boy on the
alert at all points, crammed to the muzzle with lies, he just said, "Tom
Bakewell told me to let you know he does not intend to peach on you," and
left him.

Richard repeated the intelligence to Ripton, who cried aloud that Tom was
a brick.

"He shan't suffer for it," said Richard, and pondered on a thicker rope
and sharper file.

"But will your cousin tell?" was Ripton's reflection.

"He!" Richard's lip expressed contempt. "A ploughman refuses to peach,
and you ask if one of our family will?"

Ripton stood for the twentieth time reproved on this point.

The boys had examined the outer walls of the jail, and arrived at the
conclusion that Tom's escape might be managed if Tom had spirit, and the
rope and file could be anyway reached to him. But to do this, somebody
must gain admittance to his cell, and who was to be taken into their
confidence?

"Try your cousin," Ripton suggested, after much debate.

Richard, smiling, wished to know if he meant Adrian.

"No, no!" Ripton hurriedly reassured him. "Austin."

The same idea was knocking at Richard's head.

"Let's get the rope and file first," said he, and to Bursley they went
for those implements to defeat the law, Ripton procuring the file at one
shop and Richard the rope at another, with such masterly cunning did they
lay their measures for the avoidance of every possible chance of
detection. And better to assure this, in a wood outside Bursley Richard
stripped to his shirt and wound the rope round his body, tasting the
tortures of anchorites and penitential friars, that nothing should be
risked to make Tom's escape a certainty. Sir Austin saw the marks at
night as his son lay asleep, through the half-opened folds of his
bed-gown.

It was a severe stroke when, after all their stratagems and trouble,
Austin Wentworth refused the office the boys had zealously designed for
him. Time pressed. In a few days poor Tom would have to face the
redoubtable Sir Miles, and get committed, for rumours of overwhelming
evidence to convict him were rife about Lobourne, and Farmer Blaize's
wrath was unappeasable. Again and again young Richard begged his cousin
not to see him disgraced, and to help him in this extremity. Austin
smiled on him.

"My dear Ricky," said he, "there are two ways of getting out of a scrape:
a long way and a short way. When you've tried the roundabout method, and
failed, come to me, and I'll show you the straight route."

Richard was too entirely bent upon the roundabout method to consider this
advice more than empty words, and only ground his teeth at Austin's
unkind refusal.

He imparted to Ripton, at the eleventh hour, that they must do it
themselves, to which Ripton heavily assented.

On the day preceding poor Tom's doomed appearance before the magistrate,
Dame Bakewell had an interview with Austin, who went to Raynham
immediately, and sought Adrian's counsel upon what was to be done.
Homeric laughter and nothing else could be got out of Adrian when he
heard of the doings of these desperate boys: how they had entered Dame
Bakewell's smallest of retail shops, and purchased tea, sugar, candles,
and comfits of every description, till the shop was clear of customers:
how they had then hurried her into her little back-parlour, where Richard
had torn open his shirt and revealed the coils of rope, and Ripton
displayed the point of a file from a serpentine recess in his jacket: how
they had then told the astonished woman that the rope she saw and the
file she saw were instruments for the liberation of her son; that there
existed no other means on earth to save him, they, the boys, having
unsuccessfully attempted all: how upon that Richard had tried with the
utmost earnestness to persuade her to disrobe and wind the rope round her
own person: and Ripton had aired his eloquence to induce her to secrete
the file: how, when she resolutely objected to the rope, both boys began
backing the file, and in an evil hour, she feared, said Dame Bakewell,
she had rewarded the gracious permission given her by Sir Miles Papworth
to visit her son, by tempting Tom to file the Law. Though, thanks be to
the Lord! Dame Bakewell added, Tom had turned up his nose at the file,
and so she had told young Master Richard, who swore very bad for a young
gentleman.

"Boys are like monkeys," remarked Adrian, at the close of his explosions,
"the gravest actors of farcical nonsense that the world possesses. May I
never be where there are no boys! A couple of boys left to themselves
will furnish richer fun than any troop of trained comedians. No: no Art
arrives at the artlessness of nature in matters of comedy. You can't
simulate the ape. Your antics are dull. They haven't the charming
inconsequence of the natural animal. Lack at these two! Think of the
shifts they are put to all day long! They know I know all about it, and
yet their serenity of innocence is all but unruffled in my presence.
You're sorry to think about the end of the business, Austin? So am I! I
dread the idea of the curtain going down. Besides, it will do Ricky a
world of good. A practical lesson is the best lesson."

"Sinks deepest," said Austin, "but whether he learns good or evil from it
is the question at stake."

Adrian stretched his length at ease.

"This will be his first nibble at experience, old Time's fruit, hateful
to the palate of youth! for which season only hath it any nourishment!
Experience! You know Coleridge's capital simile?--Mournful you call it?
Well! all wisdom is mournful. 'Tis therefore, coz, that the wise do love
the Comic Muse. Their own high food would kill them. You shall find great
poets, rare philosophers, night after night on the broad grin before a
row of yellow lights and mouthing masks. Why? Because all's dark at home.
The stage is the pastime of great minds. That's how it comes that the
stage is now down. An age of rampant little minds, my dear Austin! How I
hate that cant of yours about an Age of Work--you, and your Mortons, and
your parsons Brawnley, rank radicals all of you, base materialists! What
does Diaper Sandoe sing of your Age of Work? Listen!

     'An Age of betty tit for tat,
      An Age of busy gabble:
     An Age that's like a brewer's vat,
      Fermenting for the rabble!

     'An Age that's chaste in Love, but lax
      To virtuous abuses:
     Whose gentlemen and ladies wax
      Too dainty for their uses.

     'An Age that drives an Iron Horse,
      Of Time and Space defiant;
     Exulting in a Giant's Force,
      And trembling at the Giant.

     'An Age of Quaker hue and cut,
      By Mammon misbegotten;
     See the mad Hamlet mouth and strut!
      And mark the Kings of Cotton!

     'From this unrest, lo, early wreck'd,
      A Future staggers crazy,
     Ophelia of the Ages, deck'd
      With woeful weed and daisy!'"

Murmuring, "Get your parson Brawnley to answer that!" Adrian changed the
resting-place of a leg, and smiled. The Age was an old battle-field
between him and Austin.

"My parson Brawnley, as you call him, has answered it," said Austin, "not
by hoping his best, which would probably leave the Age to go mad to your
satisfaction, but by doing it. And he has and will answer your Diaper
Sandoe in better verse, as he confutes him in a better life."

"You don't see Sandoe's depth," Adrian replied. "Consider that phrase,
'Ophelia of the Ages'! Is not Brawnley, like a dozen other leading
spirits--I think that's your term just the metaphysical Hamlet to drive
her mad? She, poor maid! asks for marriage and smiling babes, while my
lord lover stands questioning the Infinite, and rants to the Impalpable."

Austin laughed. "Marriage and smiling babes she would have in abundance,
if Brawnley legislated. Wait till you know him. He will be over at Poer
Hall shortly, and you will see what a Man of the Age means. But now,
pray, consult with me about these boys."

"Oh, those boys!" Adrian tossed a hand. "Are there boys of the Age as
well as men? Not? Then boys are better than men: boys are for all Ages.
What do you think, Austin? They've been studying Latude's Escape. I found
the book open in Ricky's room, on the top of Jonathan Wild. Jonathan
preserved the secrets of his profession, and taught them nothing. So
they're going to make a Latude of Mr. Tom Bakewell. He's to be Bastille
Bakewell, whether he will or no. Let them. Let the wild colt run free! We
can't help them. We can only look on. We should spoil the play."

Adrian always made a point of feeding the fretful beast Impatience with
pleasantries--a not congenial diet; and Austin, the most patient of human
beings, began to lose his self-control.

"You talk as if Time belonged to you, Adrian. We have but a few hours
left us. Work first, and joke afterwards. The boy's fate is being decided
now."

"So is everybody's, my dear Austin!" yawned the epicurean.

"Yes, but this boy is at present under our guardianship--under yours
especially."

"Not yet! not yet!" Adrian interjected languidly. "No getting into
scrapes when I have him. The leash, young hound! the collar, young colt!
I'm perfectly irresponsible at present."

"You may have something different to deal with when you are responsible,
if you think that."

"I take my young prince as I find him, coz: a Julian, or a Caracalla: a
Constantine, or a Nero. Then, if he will play the fiddle to a
conflagration, he shall play it well: if he must be a disputatious
apostate, at any rate he shall understand logic and men, and have the
habit of saying his prayers."

"Then you leave me to act alone?" said Austin, rising.

"Without a single curb!" Adrian gesticulated an acquiesced withdrawal.
"I'm sure you would not, still more certain you cannot, do harm. And be
mindful of my prophetic words: Whatever's done, old Blaize will have to
be bought off. There's the affair settled at once. I suppose I must go to
the chief to-night and settle it myself. We can't see this poor devil
condemned, though it's nonsense to talk of a boy being the prime
instigator."

Austin cast an eye at the complacent languor of the wise youth, his
cousin, and the little that he knew of his fellows told him he might talk
forever here, and not be comprehended. The wise youth's two ears were
stuffed with his own wisdom. One evil only Adrian dreaded, it was
clear--the action of the law.

As he was moving away, Adrian called out to him, "Stop, Austin! There!
don't be anxious! You invariably take the glum side. I've done something.
Never mind what. If you go down to Belthorpe, be civil, but not
obsequious. You remember the tactics of Scipio Africanus against the
Punic elephants? Well, don't say a word--in thine ear, coz: I've turned
Master Blaize's elephants. If they charge, 'twill bye a feint, and back
to the destruction of his serried ranks! You understand. Not? Well, 'tis
as well. Only, let none say that I sleep. If I must see him to-night, I
go down knowing he has not got us in his power." The wise youth yawned,
and stretched out a hand for any book that might be within his reach.
Austin left him to look about the grounds for Richard.




CHAPTER VII

A little laurel-shaded temple of white marble looked out on the river
from a knoll bordering the Raynham beechwoods, and was dubbed by Adrian
Daphne's Bower. To this spot Richard had retired, and there Austin found
him with his head buried in his hands, a picture of desperation, whose
last shift has been defeated. He allowed Austin to greet him and sit by
him without lifting his head. Perhaps his eyes were not presentable.

"Where's your friend?" Austin began.

"Gone!" was the answer, sounding cavernous from behind hair and fingers.
An explanation presently followed, that a summons had come for him in the
morning from Mr. Thompson; and that Mr. Ripton had departed against his
will.

In fact, Ripton had protested that he would defy his parent and remain by
his friend in the hour of adversity and at the post of danger. Sir Austin
signified his opinion that a boy should obey his parent, by giving orders
to Benson for Ripton's box to be packed and ready before noon; and
Ripton's alacrity in taking the baronet's view of filial duty was as
little feigned as his offer to Richard to throw filial duty to the winds.
He rejoiced that the Fates had agreed to remove him from the very hot
neighbourhood of Lobourne, while he grieved, like an honest lad, to see
his comrade left to face calamity alone. The boys parted amicably, as
they could hardly fail to do, when Ripton had sworn fealty to the
Feverals with a warmth that made him declare himself bond, and due to
appear at any stated hour and at any stated place to fight all the
farmers in England, on a mandate from the heir of the house.

"So you're left alone," said Austin, contemplating the boy's shapely
head. "I'm glad of it. We never know what's in us till we stand by
ourselves."

There appeared to be no answer forthcoming. Vanity, however, replied at
last, "He wasn't much support."

"Remember his good points now he's gone, Ricky."

"Oh! he was staunch," the boy grumbled.

"And a staunch friend is not always to be found. Now, have you tried your
own way of rectifying this business, Ricky?"

"I have done everything."

"And failed!"

There was a pause, and then the deep-toned evasion--

"Tom Bakewell's a coward!"

"I suppose, poor fellow," said Austin, in his kind way, "he doesn't want
to get into a deeper mess. I don't think he's a coward."

"He is a coward," cried Richard. "Do you think if I had a file I would
stay in prison? I'd be out the first night! And he might have had the
rope, too--a rope thick enough for a couple of men his size and weight.
Ripton and I and Ned Markham swung on it for an hour, and it didn't give
way. He's a coward, and deserves his fate. I've no compassion for a
coward."

"Nor I much," said Austin.

Richard had raised his head in the heat of his denunciation of poor Tom.
He would have hidden it had he known the thought in Austin's clear eyes
while he faced them.

"I never met a coward myself," Austin continued. "I have heard of one or
two. One let an innocent man die for him."

"How base!" exclaimed the boy.

"Yes, it was bad," Austin acquiesced.

"Bad!" Richard scorned the poor contempt. "How I would have spurned him!
He was a coward!"

"I believe he pleaded the feelings of his family in his excuse, and tried
every means to get the man off. I have read also in the confessions of a
celebrated philosopher, that in his youth he committed some act of
pilfering, and accused a young servant-girl of his own theft, who was
condemned and dismissed for it, pardoning her guilty accuser."

"What a coward!" shouted Richard. "And he confessed it publicly?"

"You may read it yourself."

"He actually wrote it down, and printed it?"

"You have the book in your father's library. Would you have done so
much?"

Richard faltered. No! he admitted that he never could have told people.

"Then who is to call that man a coward?" said Austin. "He expiated his
cowardice as all who give way in moments of weakness, and are not
cowards, must do. The coward chooses to think 'God does not see.' I shall
escape.' He who is not a coward, and has succumbed, knows that God has
seen all, and it is not so hard a task for him to make his heart bare to
the world. Worse, I should fancy it, to know myself an impostor when men
praised me."

Young Richard's eyes were wandering on Austin's gravely cheerful face. A
keen intentness suddenly fixed them, and he dropped his head.

"So I think you're wrong, Ricky, in calling this poor Tom a coward
because he refuses to try your means of escape," Austin resumed. "A
coward hardly objects to drag in his accomplice. And, where the person
involved belongs to a great family, it seems to me that for a poor
plough-lad to volunteer not to do so speaks him anything but a coward."

Richard was dumb. Altogether to surrender his rope and file was a fearful
sacrifice, after all the time, trepidation, and study he had spent on
those two saving instruments. If he avowed Tom's manly behaviour, Richard
Feverel was in a totally new position. Whereas, by keeping Tom a coward,
Richard Feverel was the injured one, and to seem injured is always a
luxury; sometimes a necessity, whether among boys or men.

In Austin the Magian conflict would not have lasted long. He had but a
blind notion of the fierceness with which it raged in young Richard.
Happily for the boy, Austin was not a preacher. A single instance, a cant
phrase, a fatherly manner, might have wrecked him, by arousing ancient or
latent opposition. The born preacher we feel instinctively to be our foe.
He may do some good to the wretches that have been struck down and lie
gasping on the battlefield: he rouses antagonism in the strong. Richard's
nature, left to itself, wanted little more than an indication of the
proper track, and when he said, "Tell me what I can do, Austin?" he had
fought the best half of the battle. His voice was subdued. Austin put his
hand on the boy's shoulder.

"You must go down to Farmer Blaize."

"Well!" said Richard, sullenly divining the deed of penance.

"You'll know what to say to him when you're there."

The boy bit his lip and frowned. "Ask a favour of that big brute, Austin?
I can't!"

"Just tell him the whole case, and that you don't intend to stand by and
let the poor fellow suffer without a friend to help him out of his
scrape."

"But, Austin," the boy pleaded, "I shall have to ask him to help off Tom
Bakewell! How can I ask him, when I hate him?"

Austin bade him go, and think nothing of the consequences till he got
there.

Richard groaned in soul.

"You've no pride, Austin."

"Perhaps not."

"You don't know what it is to ask a favour of a brute you hate."

Richard stuck to that view of the case, and stuck to it the faster the
more imperatively the urgency of a movement dawned upon him.

"Why," continued the boy, "I shall hardly be able to keep my fists off
him!"

"Surely you've punished him enough, boy?" said Austin.

"He struck me!" Richard's lip quivered. "He dared not come at me with his
hands. He struck me with a whip. He'll be telling everybody that he
horsewhipped me, and that I went down and begged his pardon. Begged his
pardon! A Feverel beg his pardon! Oh, if I had my will!"

"The man earns his bread, Ricky. You poached on his grounds. He turned
you off, and you fired his rick."

"And I'll pay him for his loss. And I won't do any more."

"Because you won't ask a favour of him?"

"No! I will not ask a favour of him."

Austin looked at the boy steadily. "You prefer to receive a favour from
poor Tom Bakewell?"

At Austin's enunciation of this obverse view of the matter Richard raised
his brow. Dimly a new light broke in upon him. "Favour from Tom Bakewell,
the ploughman? How do you mean, Austin?"

"To save yourself an unpleasantness you permit a country lad to sacrifice
himself for you? I confess I should not have so much pride."

"Pride!" shouted Richard, stung by the taunt, and set his sight hard at
the blue ridges of the hills.

Not knowing for the moment what else to do, Austin drew a picture of Tom
in prison, and repeated Tom's volunteer statement. The picture, though
his intentions were far from designing it so, had to Richard, whose
perception of humour was infinitely keener, a horrible chaw-bacon smack
about it. Visions of a grinning lout, open from ear to ear, unkempt,
coarse, splay-footed, rose before him and afflicted him with the
strangest sensations of disgust and comicality, mixed up with pity and
remorse--a sort of twisted pathos. There lay Tom; hobnail Tom! a
bacon-munching, reckless, beer-swilling animal! and yet a man; a dear
brave human heart notwithstanding; capable of devotion and unselfishness.
The boy's better spirit was touched, and it kindled his imagination to
realize the abject figure of poor clodpole Tom, and surround it with a
halo of mournful light. His soul was alive. Feelings he had never known
streamed in upon him as from an ethereal casement, an unwonted
tenderness, an embracing humour, a consciousness of some ineffable glory,
an irradiation of the features of humanity. All this was in the bosom of
the boy, and through it all the vision of an actual hob-nail Tom, coarse,
unkempt, open from ear to ear; whose presence was a finger of shame to
him and an oppression of clodpole; yet toward whom he felt just then a
loving-kindness beyond what he felt for any living creature. He laughed
at him, and wept over him. He prized him, while he shrank from him. It
was a genial strife of the angel in him with constituents less divine;
but the angel was uppermost and led the van--extinguished loathing,
humanized laughter, transfigured pride--pride that would persistently
contemplate the corduroys of gaping Tom, and cry to Richard, in the very
tone of Adrian's ironic voice, "Behold your benefactor!"

Austin sat by the boy, unaware of the sublimer tumult he had stirred.
Little of it was perceptible in Richard's countenance. The lines of his
mouth were slightly drawn; his eyes hard set into the distance. He
remained thus many minutes. Finally he jumped to his legs, saying, "I'll
go at once to old Blaize and tell him."

Austin grasped his hand, and together they issued out of Daphne's Bower,
in the direction of Lobourne.




CHAPTER VIII

Farmer Blaize was not so astonished at the visit of Richard Feverel as
that young gentleman expected him to be. The farmer, seated in his
easy-chair in the little low-roofed parlour of an old-fashioned
farm-house, with a long clay pipe on the table at his elbow, and a
veteran pointer at his feet, had already given audience to three
distinguished members of the Feverel blood, who had come separately,
according to their accustomed secretiveness, and with one object. In the
morning it was Sir Austin himself. Shortly after his departure, arrived
Austin Wentworth; close on his heels, Algernon, known about Lobourne as
the Captain, popular wherever he was known. Farmer Blaize reclined in
considerable elation. He had brought these great people to a pretty low
pitch. He had welcomed them hospitably, as a British yeoman should; but
not budged a foot in his demands: not to the baronet: not to the Captain:
not to good young Mr. Wentworth. For Farmer Blaize was a solid
Englishman; and, on hearing from the baronet a frank confession of the
hold he had on the family, he determined to tighten his hold, and only
relax it in exchange for tangible advantages--compensation to his pocket,
his wounded person, and his still more wounded sentiments: the total
indemnity being, in round figures, three hundred pounds, and a spoken
apology from the prime offender, young Mister Richard. Even then there
was a reservation. Provided, the farmer said, nobody had been tampering
with any of his witnesses. In that ease Farmer Blaize declared the money
might go, and he would transport Tom Bakewell, as he had sworn he would.
And it goes hard, too, with an accomplice, by law, added the farmer,
knocking the ashes leisurely out of his pipe. He had no wish to bring any
disgrace anywhere; he respected the inmates of Raynham Abbey, as in duty
bound; he should be sorry to see them in trouble. Only no tampering with
his witnesses. He was a man for Law. Rank was much: money was much: but
Law was more. In this country Law was above the sovereign. To tamper with
the Law was treason to the realm.

"I come to you direct," the baronet explained. "I tell you candidly what
way I discovered my son to be mixed up in this miserable affair. I
promise you indemnity for your loss, and an apology that shall, I trust,
satisfy your feelings, assuring you that to tamper with witnesses is not
the province of a Feverel. All I ask of you in return is, not to press
the prosecution. At present it rests with you. I am bound to do all that
lies in my power for this imprisoned man. How and wherefore my son was
prompted to suggest, or assist in, such an act, I cannot explain, for I
do not know."

"Hum!" said the farmer. "I think I do."

"You know the cause?" Sir Austin stared. "I beg you to confide it to me."

"'Least, I can pretty nigh neighbour it with a gues," said the farmer.
"We an't good friends, Sir Austin, me and your son, just now--not to say
cordial. I, ye see, Sir Austin, I'm a man as don't like young gentlemen
a-poachin' on his grounds without his permission,--in special when birds
is plentiful on their own. It appear he do like it. Consequently I has to
flick this whip--as them fellers at the races: All in this 'ere Ring's
mine! as much as to say; and who's been hit, he's had fair warnin'. I'm
sorry for't, but that's just the case."

Sir Austin retired to communicate with his son, when he should find him.

Algernon's interview passed off in ale and promises. He also assured
Farmer Blaize that no Feverel could be affected by his proviso.

No less did Austin Wentworth. The farmer was satisfied.

"Money's safe, I know," said he; "now for the 'pology!" and Farmer Blaize
thrust his legs further out, and his head further back.

The farmer naturally reflected that the three separate visits had been
conspired together. Still the baronet's frankness, and the baronet's not
having reserved himself for the third and final charge, puzzled him. He
was considering whether they were a deep, or a shallow lot, when young
Richard was announced.

A pretty little girl with the roses of thirteen springs in her cheeks,
and abundant beautiful bright tresses, tripped before the boy, and
loitered shyly by the farmer's arm-chair to steal a look at the handsome
new-comer. She was introduced to Richard as the farmer's niece, Lucy
Desborough, the daughter of a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, and, what was
better, though the farmer did not pronounce it so loudly, a real good
girl.

Neither the excellence of her character, nor her rank in life, tempted
Richard to inspect the little lady. He made an awkward bow, and sat down.

The farmer's eyes twinkled. "Her father," he continued, "fought and fell
for his coontry. A man as fights for's coontry's a right to hould up his
head--ay! with any in the land. Desb'roughs o' Dorset! d'ye know that
family, Master Feverel?"

Richard did not know them, and, by his air, did not desire to become
acquainted with any offshoot of that family.

"She can make puddens and pies," the farmer went on, regardless of his
auditor's gloom. "She's a lady, as good as the best of 'em. I don't care
about their being Catholics--the Desb'roughs o' Dorset are gentlemen. And
she's good for the pianer, too! She strums to me of evenin's. I'm for the
old tunes: she's for the new. Gal-like! While she's with me she shall be
taught things use'l. She can parley-voo a good 'un and foot it, as it
goes; been in France a couple of year. I prefer the singin' of 't to the
talkin' of 't. Come, Luce! toon up--eh?--Ye wun't? That song abort the
Viffendeer--a female"--Farmer Blaize volunteered the translation of the
title--"who wears the--you guess what! and marches along with the French
sojers: a pretty brazen bit o' goods, I sh'd fancy."

Mademoiselle Lucy corrected her uncle's French, but objected to do more.
The handsome cross boy had almost taken away her voice for speech, as it
was, and sing in his company she could not; so she stood, a hand on her
uncle's chair to stay herself from falling, while she wriggled a dozen
various shapes of refusal, and shook her head at the farmer with fixed
eyes.

"Aha!" laughed the farmer, dismissing her, "they soon learn the
difference 'twixt the young 'un and the old 'un. Go along, Luce! and
learn yer lessons for to-morrow."

Reluctantly the daughter of the Royal Navy glided away. Her uncle's head
followed her to the door, where she dallied to catch a last impression of
the young stranger's lowering face, and darted through.

Farmer Blaize laughed and chuckled. "She an't so fond of her uncle as
that, every day! Not that she an't a good nurse--the kindest little soul
you'd meet of a winter's walk! She'll read t' ye, and make drinks, and
sing, too, if ye likes it, and she won't be tired. A obstinate good 'un,
she be! Bless her!"

The farmer may have designed, by these eulogies of his niece, to give his
visitor time to recover his composure, and establish a common topic. His
diversion only irritated and confused our shame-eaten youth. Richard's
intention had been to come to the farmer's threshold: to summon the
farmer thither, and in a loud and haughty tone then and there to take
upon himself the whole burden of the charge against Tom Bakewell. He had
strayed, during his passage to Belthorpe, somewhat back to his old
nature; and his being compelled to enter the house of his enemy, sit in
his chair, and endure an introduction to his family, was more than he
bargained for. He commenced blinking hard in preparation for the horrible
dose to which delay and the farmer's cordiality added inconceivable
bitters. Farmer Blaize was quite at his ease; nowise in a hurry. He spoke
of the weather and the harvest: of recent doings up at the Abbey: glanced
over that year's cricketing; hoped that no future Feverel would lose a
leg to the game. Richard saw and heard Arson in it all. He blinked harder
as he neared the cup. In a moment of silence, he seized it with a gasp.

"Mr. Blaize! I have come to tell you that I am the person who set fire to
your rick the other night."

An odd consternation formed about the farmer's mouth. He changed his
posture, and said, "Ay? that's what ye're come to tell me sir?"

"Yes!" said Richard, firmly.

"And that be all?"

"Yes!" Richard reiterated.

The farmer again changed his posture. "Then, my lad, ye've come to tell
me a lie!"

Farmer Blaize looked straight at the boy, undismayed by the dark flush of
ire he had kindled.

"You dare to call me a liar!" cried Richard, starting up.

"I say," the farmer renewed his first emphasis, and smacked his thigh
thereto, "that's a lie!"

Richard held out his clenched fist. "You have twice insulted me. You have
struck me: you have dared to call me a liar. I would have apologized--I
would have asked your pardon, to have got off that fellow in prison. Yes!
I would have degraded myself that another man should not suffer for my
deed"--

"Quite proper!" interposed the farmer.

"And you take this opportunity of insulting me afresh. You're a coward,
sir! nobody but a coward would have insulted me in his own house."

"Sit ye down, sit ye down, young master," said the farmer, indicating the
chair and cooling the outburst with his hand. "Sit ye down. Don't ye be
hasty. If ye hadn't been hasty t'other day, we sh'd a been friends yet.
Sit ye down, sir. I sh'd be sorry to reckon you out a liar, Mr. Feverel,
or anybody o' your name. I respects yer father though we're opp'site
politics. I'm willin' to think well o' you. What I say is, that as you
say an't the trewth. Mind! I don't like you none the worse for't. But it
an't what is. That's all! You knows it as well's I!"

Richard, disdaining to show signs of being pacified, angrily reseated
himself. The farmer spoke sense, and the boy, after his late interview
with Austin, had become capable of perceiving vaguely that a towering
passion is hardly the justification for a wrong course of conduct.

"Come," continued the farmer, not unkindly, "what else have you to say?"

Here was the same bitter cup he had already once drained brimming at
Richard's lips again! Alas, poor human nature! that empties to the dregs
a dozen of these evil drinks, to evade the single one which Destiny, less
cruel, had insisted upon.

The boy blinked and tossed it off.

"I came to say that I regretted the revenge I had taken on you for your
striking me."

Farmer Blaize nodded.

"And now ye've done, young gentleman?"

Still another cupful!

"I should be very much obliged," Richard formally began, but his stomach
was turned; he could but sip and sip, and gather a distaste which
threatened to make the penitential act impossible. "Very much obliged,"
he repeated: "much obliged, if you would be so kind," and it struck him
that had he spoken this at first he would have given it a wording more
persuasive with the farmer and more worthy of his own pride: more honest,
in fact: for a sense of the dishonesty of what he was saying caused him
to cringe and simulate humility to deceive the farmer, and the more he
said the less he felt his words, and, feeling them less, he inflated them
more. "So kind," he stammered, "so kind" (fancy a Feverel asking this big
brute to be so kind!) "as to do me the favour" (me the favour!) "to exert
yourself" (it's all to please Austin) "to endeavour to--hem! to" (there's
no saying it!)--

The cup was full as ever. Richard dashed at it again.

"What I came to ask is, whether you would have the kindness to try what
you could do" (what an infamous shame to have to beg like this!) "do to
save--do to ensure--whether you would have the kindness"  It seemed out
of all human power to gulp it down. The draught grew more and more
abhorrent. To proclaim one's iniquity, to apologize for one's wrongdoing;
thus much could be done; but to beg a favour of the offended party--that
was beyond the self-abasement any Feverel could consent to. Pride,
however, whose inevitable battle is against itself, drew aside the
curtains of poor Tom's prison, crying a second time, "Behold your
Benefactor!" and, with the words burning in his ears, Richard swallowed
the dose:

"Well, then, I want you, Mr. Blaize,--if you don't mind--will you help me
to get this man Bakewell off his punishment?"

To do Farmer Blaize justice, he waited very patiently for the boy, though
he could not quite see why he did not take the gate at the first offer.

"Oh!" said he, when he heard and had pondered on the request. "Hum! ha!
we'll see about it t'morrow. But if he's innocent, you know, we shan't
mak'n guilty."

"It was I did it!" Richard declared.

The farmer's half-amused expression sharpened a bit.

"So, young gentleman! and you're sorry for the night's work?"

"I shall see that you are paid the full extent of your losses."

"Thank'ee," said the farmer drily.

"And, if this poor man is released to-morrow, I don't care what the
amount is."

Farmer Blaize deflected his head twice in silence. "Bribery," one motion
expressed: "Corruption," the other.

"Now," said he, leaning forward, and fixing his elbows on his knees,
while he counted the case at his fingers' ends, "excuse the liberty, but
wishin' to know where this 'ere money's to come from, I sh'd like jest
t'ask if so be Sir Austin know o' this?"

"My father knows nothing of it," replied Richard.

The farmer flung back in his chair. "Lie number Two," said his shoulders,
soured by the British aversion to being plotted at, and not dealt with
openly.

"And ye've the money ready, young gentleman?"

"I shall ask my father for it."

"And he'll hand't out?"

"Certainly he will!"

Richard had not the slightest intention of ever letting his father into
his counsels.

"A good three hundred pounds, ye know?" the farmer suggested.

No consideration of the extent of damages, and the size of the sum,
affected young Richard, who said boldly, "He will not object when I tell
him I want that sum."

It was natural Farmer Blaize should be a trifle suspicious that a youth's
guarantee would hardly be given for his father's readiness to disburse
such a thumping bill, unless he had previously received his father's
sanction and authority.

"Hum!" said he, "why not 'a told him before?"

The farmer threw an objectionable shrewdness into his query, that caused
Richard to compress his mouth and glance high.

Farmer Blaize was positive 'twas a lie.

"Hum! Ye still hold to't you fired the rick?" he asked.

"The blame is mine!" quoth Richard, with the loftiness of a patriot of
old Rome.

"Na, na!" the straightforward Briton put him aside. "Ye did't, or ye
didn't do't. Did ye do't, or no?"

Thrust in a corner, Richard said, "I did it."

Farmer Blaize reached his hand to the bell. It was answered in an instant
by little Lucy, who received orders to fetch in a dependent at Belthorpe
going by the name of the Bantam, and made her exit as she had entered,
with her eyes on the young stranger.

"Now," said the farmer, "these be my principles. I'm a plain man, Mr.
Feverel. Above board with me, and you'll find me handsome. Try to
circumvent me, and I'm a ugly customer. I'll show you I've no animosity.
Your father pays--you apologize. That's enough for me! Let Tom Bakewell
fight't out with the Law, and I'll look on. The Law wasn't on the spot, I
suppose? so the Law ain't much witness. But I am. Leastwise the Bantam
is. I tell you, young gentleman, the Bantam saw't! It's no moral use
whatever your denyin' that ev'dence. And where's the good, sir, I ask?
What comes of 't? Whether it be you, or whether it be Tom Bakewell--ain't
all one? If I holds back, ain't it sim'lar? It's the trewth I want! And
here't comes," added the farmer, as Miss Lucy ushered in the Bantam, who
presented a curious figure for that rare divinity to enliven.




CHAPTER IX

In build of body, gait and stature, Giles Jinkson, the Bantam, was a
tolerably fair representative of the Punic elephant, whose part, with
diverse anticipations, the generals of the Blaize and Feverel forces,
from opposing ranks, expected him to play. Giles, surnamed the Bantam, on
account of some forgotten sally of his youth or infancy, moved and looked
elephantine. It sufficed that Giles was well fed to assure that Giles was
faithful--if uncorrupted. The farm which supplied to him ungrudging
provender had all his vast capacity for work in willing exercise: the
farmer who held the farm his instinct reverenced as the fountain source
of beef and bacon, to say nothing of beer, which was plentiful at
Belthorpe, and good. This Farmer Blaize well knew, and he reckoned
consequently that here was an animal always to be relied on--a sort of
human composition out of dog, horse, and bull, a cut above each of these
quadrupeds in usefulness, and costing proportionately more, but on the
whole worth the money, and therefore invaluable, as everything worth its
money must be to a wise man. When the stealing of grain had been made
known at Belthorpe, the Bantam, a fellow-thresher with Tom Bakewell, had
shared with him the shadow of the guilt. Farmer Blaize, if he hesitated
which to suspect, did not debate a second as to which he would discard;
and, when the Bantam said he had seen Tom secreting pilkins in a sack,
Farmer Blaize chose to believe him, and off went poor Tom, told to
rejoice in the clemency that spared his appearance at Sessions.

The Bantam's small sleepy orbits saw many things, and just at the right
moment, it seemed. He was certainly the first to give the clue at
Belthorpe on the night of the conflagration, and he may, therefore, have
seen poor Tom retreating stealthily from the scene, as he averred he did.
Lobourne had its say on the subject. Rustic Lobourne hinted broadly at a
young woman in the case, and, moreover, told a tale of how these
fellow-threshers had, in noble rivalry, one day turned upon each other to
see which of the two threshed the best; whereof the Bantam still bore
marks, and malice, it was said. However, there he stood, and tugged his
forelocks to the company, and if Truth really had concealed herself in
him she must have been hard set to find her unlikeliest hiding-place.

"Now," said the farmer, marshalling forth his elephant with the
confidence of one who delivers his ace of trumps, "tell this young
gentleman what ye saw on the night of the fire, Bantam!"

The Bantam jerked a bit of a bow to his patron, and then swung round,
fully obscuring him from Richard.

Richard fixed his eyes on the floor, while the Bantam in rudest Doric
commenced his narrative. Knowing what was to come, and thoroughly nerved
to confute the main incident, Richard barely listened to his barbarous
locution: but when the recital arrived at the point where the Bantam
affirmed he had seen "T'm Baak'll wi's owen hoies," Richard faced him,
and was amazed to find himself being mutely addressed by a series of
intensely significant grimaces, signs, and winks.

"What do you mean? Why are you making those faces at me?" cried the boy
indignantly.

Farmer Blaize leaned round the Bantam to have a look at him, and beheld
the stolidest mask ever given to man.

"Bain't makin' no faces at nobody," growled the sulky elephant.

The farmer commanded him to face about and finish.

"A see T'm Baak'll," the Bantam recommenced, and again the contortions of
a horrible wink were directed at Richard. The boy might well believe this
churl was lying, and he did, and was emboldened to exclaim--

"You never saw Tom Bakewell set fire to that rick!"

The Bantam swore to it, grimacing an accompaniment.

"I tell you," said Richard, "I put the lucifers there myself!"

The suborned elephant was staggered. He meant to telegraph to the young
gentleman that he was loyal and true to certain gold pieces that had been
given him, and that in the right place and at the right time he should
prove so. Why was he thus suspected? Why was he not understood?

"A thowt I see 'un, then," muttered the Bantam, trying a middle course.

This brought down on him the farmer, who roared, "Thought! Ye thought!
What d'ye mean? Speak out, and don't be thinkin'. Thought? What the
devil's that?"

"How could he see who it was on a pitch-dark night?" Richard put in.

"Thought!" the farmer bellowed louder. "Thought--Devil take ye, when ye
took ye oath on't. Hulloa! What are ye screwin' yer eye at Mr. Feverel
for?--I say, young gentleman, have you spoke to this chap before now?"

"I?" replied Richard. "I have not seen him before."

Farmer Blaize grasped the two arms of the chair he sat on, and glared his
doubts.

"Come," said he to the Bantam, "speak out, and ha' done wi't. Say what ye
saw, and none o' yer thoughts. Damn yer thoughts! Ye saw Tom Bakewell
fire that there rick!" The farmer pointed at some musk-pots in the
window. "What business ha' you to be a-thinkin'? You're a witness?
Thinkin' an't ev'dence. What'll ye say to morrow before magistrate! Mind!
what you says today, you'll stick by to-morrow."

Thus adjured, the Bantam hitched his breech. What on earth the young
gentleman meant he was at a loss to speculate. He could not believe that
the young gentleman wanted to be transported, but if he had been paid to
help that, why, he would. And considering that this day's evidence rather
bound him down to the morrow's, he determined, after much ploughing and
harrowing through obstinate shocks of hair, to be not altogether positive
as to the person. It is possible that he became thereby more a mansion of
truth than he previously had been; for the night, as he said, was so dark
that you could not see your hand before your face; and though, as he
expressed it, you might be mortal sure of a man, you could not identify
him upon oath, and the party he had taken for Tom Bakewell, and could
have sworn to, might have been the young gentleman present, especially as
he was ready to swear it upon oath.

So ended the Bantam.

No sooner had he ceased, than Farmer Blaize jumped up from his chair, and
made a fine effort to lift him out of the room from the point of his toe.
He failed, and sank back groaning with the pain of the exertion and
disappointment.

"They're liars, every one!" he cried. "Liars, perj'rers, bribers, and
c'rrupters!--Stop!" to the Bantam, who was slinking away. "You've done
for yerself already! You swore to it!"

"A din't!" said the Bantam, doggedly.

"You swore to't!" the farmer vociferated afresh.

The Bantam played a tune upon the handle of the door, and still affirmed
that he did not; a double contradiction at which the farmer absolutely
raged in his chair, and was hoarse, as he called out a third time that
the Bantam had sworn to it.

"Noa!" said the Bantam, ducking his poll. "Noa!" he repeated in a lower
note; and then, while a sombre grin betokening idiotic enjoyment of his
profound casuistical quibble worked at his jaw:

"Not up'n o-ath!" he added, with a twitch of the shoulder and an angular
jerk of the elbow.

Farmer Blaize looked vacantly at Richard, as if to ask him what he
thought of England's peasantry after the sample they had there. Richard
would have preferred not to laugh, but his dignity gave way to his sense
of the ludicrous, and he let fly a shout. The farmer was in no laughing
mood. He turned a wide eye back to the door, "Lucky for'm," he exclaimed,
seeing the Bantam had vanished, for his fingers itched to break that
stubborn head. He grew very puffy, and addressed Richard solemnly:

"Now, look ye here, Mr. Feverel! You've been a-tampering with my witness.
It's no use denyin'! I say y' 'ave, sir! You, or some of ye. I don't care
about no Feverel! My witness there has been bribed. The Bantam's been
bribed," and he shivered his pipe with an energetic thump on the
table--"bribed! I knows it! I could swear to't!"--

"Upon oath?" Richard inquired, with a grave face.

"Ay, upon oath!" said the farmer, not observing the impertinence.

"I'd take my Bible oath on't! He's been corrupted, my principal witness!
Oh! it's dam cunnin', but it won't do the trick. I'll transport Tom
Bakewell, sure as a gun. He shall travel, that man shall. Sorry for you,
Mr. Feverel--sorry you haven't seen how to treat me proper--you, or
yours. Money won't do everything--no! it won't. It'll c'rrupt a witness,
but it won't clear a felon. I'd ha' 'soused you, sir! You're a boy and'll
learn better. I asked no more than payment and apology; and that I'd ha'
taken content--always provided my witnesses weren't tampered with. Now
you must stand yer luck, all o' ye."

Richard stood up and replied, "Very well, Mr. Blaize."

"And if," continued the farmer, "Tom Bakewell don't drag you into't after
'm, why, you're safe, as I hope ye'll be, sincere!"

"It was not in consideration of my own safety that I sought this
interview with you," said Richard, head erect.

"Grant ye that," the farmer responded. "Grant ye that! Yer bold enough,
young gentleman--comes of the blood that should be! If y' had only ha'
spoke trewth!--I believe yer father--believe every word he said. I do
wish I could ha' said as much for Sir Austin's son and heir."

"What!" cried Richard, with an astonishment hardly to be feigned, "you
have seen my father?"

But Farmer Blaize had now such a scent for lies that he could detect them
where they did not exist, and mumbled gruffly,

"Ay, we knows all about that!"

The boy's perplexity saved him from being irritated. Who could have told
his father? An old fear of his father came upon him, and a touch of an
old inclination to revolt.

"My father knows of this?" said he, very loudly, and staring, as he
spoke, right through the farmer. "Who has played me false? Who would
betray me to him? It was Austin! No one knew it but Austin. Yes, and it
was Austin who persuaded me to come here and submit to these indignities.
Why couldn't he be open with me? I shall never trust him again!"

"And why not you with me, young gentleman?" said the farmer. "I sh'd
trust you if ye had."

Richard did not see the analogy. He bowed stiffly and bade him good
afternoon.

Farmer Blaize pulled the bell. "Company the young gentleman out, Lucy,"
he waved to the little damsel in the doorway. "Do the honours. And, Mr.
Richard, ye might ha' made a friend o' me, sir, and it's not too late so
to do. I'm not cruel, but I hate lies. I whipped my boy Tom, bigger than
you, for not bein' above board, only yesterday,--ay! made 'un stand
within swing o' this chair, and take's measure. Now, if ye'll come down
to me, and speak trewth before the trial--if it's only five minutes
before't; or if Sir Austin, who's a gentleman, 'll say there's been no
tamperin' with any o' my witnesses, his word for't--well and good! I'll
do my best to help off Tom Bakewell. And I'm glad, young gentleman,
you've got a conscience about a poor man, though he's a villain. Good
afternoon, sir."

Richard marched hastily out of the room, and through the garden, never so
much as deigning a glance at his wistful little guide, who hung at the
garden gate to watch him up the lane, wondering a world of fancies about
the handsome proud boy.




CHAPTER X

To have determined upon an act something akin to heroism in its way, and
to have fulfilled it by lying heartily, and so subverting the whole
structure built by good resolution, seems a sad downfall if we forget
what human nature, in its green weedy spring, is composed of. Young
Richard had quitted his cousin Austin fully resolved to do his penance
and drink the bitter cup; and he had drunk it; drained many cups to the
dregs; and it was to no purpose. Still they floated before him, brimmed,
trebly bitter. Away from Austin's influence, he was almost the same boy
who had slipped the guinea into Tom Bakewell's hand, and the lucifers
into Farmer Blaize's rick. For good seed is long ripening; a good boy is
not made in a minute. Enough that the seed was in him. He chafed on his
road to Raynham at the scene he had just endured, and the figure of
Belthorpe's fat tenant burnt like hot copper on the tablet of his brain,
insufferably condescending, and, what was worse, in the right. Richard,
obscured as his mind's eye was by wounded pride, saw that clearly, and
hated his enemy for it the more.

Heavy Benson's tongue was knelling dinner as Richard arrived at the
Abbey. He hurried up to his room to dress. Accident, or design, had laid
the book of Sir Austin's aphorisms open on the dressing-table. Hastily
combing his hair, Richard glanced down and read--

   "The Dog returneth to his vomit: the Liar must eat his Lie."

Underneath was interjected in pencil: "The Devil's mouthful!"

Young Richard ran downstairs feeling that his father had struck him in
the face.

Sir Austin marked the scarlet stain on his son's cheekbones. He sought
the youth's eye, but Richard would not look, and sat conning his plate,
an abject copy of Adrian's succulent air at that employment. How could he
pretend to the relish of an epicure when he was painfully endeavouring to
masticate The Devil's mouthful?

Heavy Benson sat upon the wretched dinner. Hippias usually the silent
member, as if awakened by the unnatural stillness, became sprightly, like
the goatsucker owl at night and spoke much of his book, his digestion,
and his dreams, and was spared both by Algernon and Adrian. One
inconsequent dream he related, about fancying himself quite young and
rich, and finding himself suddenly in a field cropping razors around him,
when, just as he had, by steps dainty as those of a French
dancing-master, reached the middle, he to his dismay beheld a path clear
of the blood, thirsty steel-crop, which he might have taken at first had
he looked narrowly; and there he was.

Hippias's brethren regarded him with eyes that plainly said they wished
he had remained there. Sir Austin, however, drew forth his note-book, and
jotted down a reflection. A composer of aphorisms can pluck blossoms even
from a razor-prop. Was not Hippias's dream the very counterpart of
Richard's position? He, had he looked narrowly, might have taken the
clear path: he, too, had been making dainty steps till he was surrounded
by the grinning blades. And from that text Sir Austin preached to his son
when they were alone. Little Clare was still too unwell to be permitted
to attend the dessert, and father and son were soon closeted together.

It was a strange meeting. They seemed to have been separated so long. The
father took his son's hand; they sat without a word passing between them.
Silence said most. The boy did not understand his father: his father
frequently thwarted him: at times he thought his father foolish: but that
paternal pressure of his hand was eloquent to him of how warmly he was
beloved. He tried once or twice to steal his hand away, conscious it was
melting him. The spirit of his pride, and old rebellion, whispered him to
be hard, unbending, resolute. Hard he had entered his father's study:
hard he had met his father's eyes. He could not meet them now. His father
sat beside him gently; with a manner that was almost meekness, so he
loved this boy. The poor gentleman's lips moved. He was praying
internally to God for him.

By degrees an emotion awoke in the boy's bosom. Love is that blessed wand
which wins the waters from the hardness of the heart. Richard fought
against it, for the dignity of old rebellion. The tears would come; hot
and struggling over the dams of pride. Shamefully fast they began to
fall. He could no longer conceal them, or check the sobs. Sir Austin drew
him nearer and nearer, till the beloved head was on his breast.

An hour afterwards, Adrian Harley, Austin Wentworth, and Algernon Feverel
were summoned to the baronet's study.

Adrian came last. There was a style of affable omnipotence about the wise
youth as he slung himself into a chair, and made an arch of the points of
his fingers, through which to gaze on his blundering kinsmen. Careless as
one may be whose sagacity has foreseen, and whose benevolent efforts have
forestalled, the point of danger at the threshold, Adrian crossed his
legs, and only intruded on their introductory remarks so far as to hum
half audibly at intervals,

     "Ripton and Richard were two pretty men,"

in parody of the old ballad. Young Richard's red eyes, and the baronet's
ruffled demeanour, told him that an explanation had taken place, and a
reconciliation. That was well. The baronet would now pay cheerfully.
Adrian summed and considered these matters, and barely listened when the
baronet called attention to what he had to say: which was elaborately to
inform all present, what all present very well knew, that a rick had been
fired, that his son was implicated as an accessory to the fact, that the
perpetrator was now imprisoned, and that Richard's family were, as it
seemed to him, bound in honour to do their utmost to effect the man's
release.

Then the baronet stated that he had himself been down to Belthorpe, his
son likewise: and that he had found every disposition in Blaize to meet
his wishes.

The lamp which ultimately was sure to be lifted up to illumine the acts
of this secretive race began slowly to dispread its rays; and, as
statement followed statement, they saw that all had known of the
business: that all had been down to Belthorpe: all save the wise youth
Adrian, who, with due deference and a sarcastic shrug, objected to the
proceeding, as putting them in the hands of the man Blaize. His wisdom
shone forth in an oration so persuasive and aphoristic that had it not
been based on a plea against honour, it would have made Sir Austin waver.
But its basis was expediency, and the baronet had a better aphorism of
his own to confute him with.

"Expediency is man's wisdom, Adrian Harley. Doing right is God's."

Adrian curbed his desire to ask Sir Austin whether an attempt to
counteract the just working of the law was doing right. The direct
application of an aphorism was unpopular at Raynham.

"I am to understand then," said he, "that Blaize consents not to press
the prosecution."

"Of course he won't," Algernon remarked. "Confound him! he'll have his
money, and what does he want besides?"

"These agricultural gentlemen are delicate customers to deal with.
However, if he really consents"--

"I have his promise," said the baronet, fondling his son.

Young Richard looked up to his father, as if he wished to speak. He said
nothing, and Sir Austin took it as a mute reply to his caresses; and
caressed him the more. Adrian perceived a reserve in the boy's manner,
and as he was not quite satisfied that his chief should suppose him to
have been the only idle, and not the most acute and vigilant member of
the family, he commenced a cross-examination of him by asking who had
last spoken with the tenant of Belthorpe?

"I think I saw him last," murmured Richard, and relinquished his father's
hand.

Adrian fastened on his prey. "And left him with a distinct and
satisfactory assurance of his amicable intentions?"

"No," said Richard.

"Not?" the Feverels joined in astounded chorus.

Richard sidled away from his father, and repeated a shamefaced "No."

"Was he hostile?" inquired Adrian, smoothing his palms, and smiling.

"Yes," the boy confessed.

Here was quite another view of their position. Adrian, generally patient
of results, triumphed strongly at having evoked it, and turned upon
Austin Wentworth, reproving him for inducing the boy to go down to
Belthorpe. Austin looked grieved. He feared that Richard had faded in his
good resolve.

"I thought it his duty to go," he observed.

"It was!" said the baronet, emphatically.

"And you see what comes of it, sir," Adrian struck in. "These
agricultural gentlemen, I repeat, are delicate customers to deal with.
For my part I would prefer being in the hands of a policeman. We are
decidedly collared by Blaize. What were his words, Ricky? Give it in his
own Doric."

"He said he would transport Tom Bakewell."

Adrian smoothed his palms, and smiled again. Then they could afford to
defy Mr. Blaize, he informed them significantly, and made once more a
mysterious allusion to the Punic elephant, bidding his relatives be at
peace. They were attaching, in his opinion, too much importance to
Richard's complicity. The man was a fool, and a very extraordinary
arsonite, to have an accomplice at all. It was a thing unknown in the
annals of rick-burning. But one would be severer than law itself to say
that a boy of fourteen had instigated to crime a full-grown man. At that
rate the boy was 'father of the man' with a vengeance, and one might hear
next that 'the baby was father of the boy.' They would find common sense
a more benevolent ruler than poetical metaphysics.

When he had done, Austin, with his customary directness, asked him what
he meant.

"I confess, Adrian," said the baronet, hearing him expostulate with
Austin's stupidity, "I for one am at a loss. I have heard that this man,
Bakewell, chooses voluntarily not to inculpate my son. Seldom have I
heard anything that so gratified me. It is a view of innate nobleness in
the rustic's character which many a gentleman might take example from. We
are bound to do our utmost for the man." And, saying that he should pay a
second visit to Belthorpe, to inquire into the reasons for the farmer's
sudden exposition of vindictiveness, Sir Austin rose.

Before he left the room, Algernon asked Richard if the farmer had
vouchsafed any reasons, and the boy then spoke of the tampering with the
witnesses, and the Bantam's "Not upon oath!" which caused Adrian to choke
with laughter. Even the baronet smiled at so cunning a distinction as
that involved in swearing a thing, and not swearing it upon oath.

"How little," he exclaimed, "does one yeoman know another! To elevate a
distinction into a difference is the natural action of their minds. I
will point that out to Blaize. He shall see that the idea is native
born."

Richard saw his father go forth. Adrian, too, was ill at ease.

"This trotting down to Belthorpe spoils all," said he. "The affair would
pass over to-morrow--Blaize has no witnesses. The old rascal is only
standing out for more money."

"No, he isn't," Richard corrected him. "It's not that. I'm sure he
believes his witnesses have been tampered with, as he calls it."

"What if they have, boy?" Adrian put it boldly. "The ground is cut from
under his feet."

"Blaize told me that if my father would give his word there had been
nothing of the sort, he would take it. My father will give his word."

"Then," said Adrian, "you had better stop him from going down."

Austin looked at Adrian keenly, and questioned him whether he thought the
farmer was justified in his suspicions. The wise youth was not to be
entrapped. He had only been given to understand that the witnesses were
tolerably unstable, and, like the Bantam, ready to swear lustily, but not
upon the Book. How given to understand, he chose not to explain, but he
reiterated that the chief should not be allowed to go down to Belthorpe.

Sir Austin was in the lane leading to the farm when he heard steps of
some one running behind him. It was dark, and he shook off the hand that
laid hold of his cloak, roughly, not recognizing his son.

"It's I, sir," said Richard panting. "Pardon me. You mustn't go in
there."

"Why not?" said the baronet, putting his arm about him.

"Not now," continued the boy. "I will tell you all to-night. I must see
the farmer myself. It was my fault, sir. I-I lied to him--the Liar must
eat his Lie. Oh, forgive me for disgracing you, sir. I did it--I hope I
did it to save Tom Bakewell. Let me go in alone, and speak the truth."

"Go, and I will wait for you here," said his father.

The wind that bowed the old elms, and shivered the dead leaves in the
air, had a voice and a meaning for the baronet during that half-hour's
lonely pacing up and down under the darkness, awaiting his boy's return.
The solemn gladness of his heart gave nature a tongue. Through the
desolation flying overhead--the wailing of the Mother of Plenty across
the bare-swept land--he caught intelligible signs of the beneficent order
of the universe, from a heart newly confirmed in its grasp of the
principle of human goodness, as manifested in the dear child who had just
left him; confirmed in its belief in the ultimate victory of good within
us, without which nature has neither music nor meaning, and is rock,
stone, tree, and nothing more.

In the dark, the dead leaves beating on his face, he had a word for his
note-book: "There is for the mind but one grasp of happiness: from that
uppermost pinnacle of wisdom, whence we see that this world is well
designed."




CHAPTER XI

Of all the chief actors in the Bakewell Comedy, Master Ripton Thompson
awaited the fearful morning which was to decide Tom's fate, in
dolefullest mood, and suffered the gravest mental terrors. Adrian, on
parting with him, had taken casual occasion to speak of the position of
the criminal in modern Europe, assuring him that International Treaty now
did what Universal Empire had aforetime done, and that among Atlantic
barbarians now, as among the Scythians of old, an offender would find
precarious refuge and an emissary haunting him.

In the paternal home, under the roofs of Law, and removed from the
influence of his conscienceless young chief, the staggering nature of the
act he had put his hand to, its awful felonious aspect, overwhelmed
Ripton. He saw it now for the first time. "Why, it's next to murder!" he
cried out to his amazed soul, and wandered about the house with a prickly
skin. Thoughts of America, and commencing life afresh as an innocent
gentleman, had crossed his disordered brain. He wrote to his friend
Richard, proposing to collect disposable funds, and embark, in case of
Tom's breaking his word, or of accidental discovery. He dared not confide
the secret to his family, as his leader had sternly enjoined him to avoid
any weakness of that kind; and, being by nature honest and communicative,
the restriction was painful, and melancholy fell upon the boy. Mama
Thompson attributed it to love.

The daughters of parchment rallied him concerning Miss Clare Forey. His
hourly letters to Raynham, and silence as to everything and everybody
there, his nervousness, and unwonted propensity to sudden inflammation of
the cheeks, were set down for sure signs of the passion. Miss Letitia
Thompson, the pretty and least parchmenty one, destined by her Papa for
the heir of Raynham, and perfectly aware of her brilliant future, up to
which she had, since Ripton's departure, dressed and grimaced, and
studied cadences (the latter with such success, though not yet fifteen,
that she languished to her maid, and melted the small factotum
footman)--Miss Letty, whose insatiable thirst for intimations about the
young heir Ripton could not satisfy, tormented him daily in revenge, and
once, quite unconsciously, gave the lad a fearful turn; for after dinner,
when Mr. Thompson read the paper by the fire, preparatory to sleeping at
his accustomed post, and Mama Thompson and her submissive female brood
sat tasking the swift intricacies of the needle, and emulating them with
the tongue, Miss Letty stole behind Ripton's chair, and introduced
between him and his book the Latin initial letter, large and illuminated,
of the theme she supposed to be absorbing him, as it did herself. The
unexpected vision of this accusing Captain of the Alphabet, this
resplendent and haunting A. fronting him bodily, threw Ripton straight
back in his chair, while Guilt, with her ancient indecision what colours
to assume on detection, flew from red to white, from white to red, across
his fallen chaps. Letty laughed triumphantly. Amor, the word she had in
mind, certainly has a connection with Arson.

But the delivery of a letter into Master Ripton's hands, furnished her
with other and likelier appearances to study. For scarce had Ripton
plunged his head into the missive than he gave way to violent transports,
such as the healthy-minded little damsel, for all her languishing
cadences, deemed she really could express were a downright declaration to
be made to her. The boy did not stop at table. Quickly recollecting the
presence of his family, he rushed to his own room. And now the girl's
ingenuity was taxed to gain possession of that letter. She succeeded, of
course, she being a huntress with few scruples and the game unguarded.
With the eyes of amazement she read this foreign matter:

"Dear Ripton,--If Tom had been committed I would have shot old Blaize.
Do you know my father was behind us that night when Clare saw the ghost
and heard all we said before the fire burst out. It is no use trying to
conceal anything from him. Well as you are in an awful state I will tell
you all about it. After you left Ripton I had a conversation with Austin
and he persuaded me to go down to old Blaize and ask him to help off Tom.
I went for I would have done anything for Tom after what he said to
Austin and I defied the old churl to do his worst. Then he said if my
father paid the money and nobody had tampered with his witnesses he would
not mind if Tom did get off and he had his chief witness in called the
Bantam very like his master I think and the Bantam began winking at me
tremendously as you say, and said he had sworn he saw Tom Bakewell but
not upon oath. He meant not on the Bible. He could swear to it but not
on the Bible. I burst out laughing and you should have seen the rage old
Blaize was in. It was splendid fun. Then we had a consultation at home
Austin Rady my father Uncle Algernon who has come down to us again and
your friend in prosperity and adversity R.D.F. My father said he would
go down to old Blaize and give him the word of a gentleman we had not
tampered with his witnesses and when he was gone we were all talking and
Rady says he must not see the farmer. I am as certain as I live that it
was Rady bribed the Bantam. Well I ran and caught up my father and told
him not to go in to old Blaize but I would and eat my words and tell him
the truth. He waited for me in the lane. Never mind what passed between
me and old Blaize. He made me beg and pray of him not to press it
against Tom and then to complete it he brought in a little girl a niece
of his and says to me, she's your best friend after all and told me to
thank her. A little girl twelve years of age. What business had she to
mix herself up in my matters. Depend upon it Ripton, wherever there is
mischief there are girls I think. She had the insolence to notice my
face, and ask me not to be unhappy. I was polite of course but I would
not look at her. Well the morning came and Tom was had up before Sir
Miles Papworth. It was Sir Miles gout gave us the time or Tom would have
been had up before we could do anything. Adrian did not want me to go
but my father said I should accompany him and held my hand all the time.
I shall be careful about getting into these scrapes again. When you have
done anything honourable you do not mind but getting among policemen and
magistrates makes you ashamed of yourself. Sir Miles was very attentive
to my father and me and dead against Tom. We sat beside him and Tom was
brought in, Sir Miles told my father that if there was one thing that
showed a low villain it was rick-burning. What do you think of that.
I looked him straight in the face and he said to me he was doing me a
service in getting Tom committed and clearing the country of such fellows
and Rady began laughing. I hate Rady. My father said his son was not in
haste to inherit and have estates of his own to watch and Sir Miles
laughed too. I thought we were discovered at first. Then they began the
examination of Tom. The Tinker was the first witness and he proved that
Tom had spoken against old Blaize and said something about burning his
rick. I wished I had stood in the lane to Bursley with him alone. Our
country lawyer we engaged for Tom cross-questioned him and then he said
he was not ready to swear to the exact words that had passed between him
and Tom. I should think not. Then came another who swore he had seen
Tom lurking about the farmer's grounds that night. Then came the Bantam
and I saw him look at Rady. I was tremendously excited and my father
kept pressing my hand. Just fancy my being brought to feel that a word
from that fellow would make me miserable for life and he must perjure
himself to help me. That comes of giving way to passion. My father says
when we do that we are calling in the devil as doctor. Well the Bantam
was told to state what he had seen and the moment he began Rady who was
close by me began to shake and he was laughing I knew though his face was
as grave as Sir Miles. You never heard such a rigmarole but I could not
laugh. He said he thought he was certain he had seen somebody by the
rick and it was Tom Bakewell who was the only man he knew who had a
grudge against Farmer Blaize and if the object had been a little bigger
he would not mind swearing to Tom and would swear to him for he was dead
certain it was Tom only what he saw looked smaller and it was pitch-dark
at the time. He was asked what time it was he saw the person steal away
from the rick and then he began to scratch his head and said supper-time.
Then they asked what time he had supper and he said nine o'clock by the
clock and we proved that at nine o'clock Tom was drinking in the
ale-house with the Tinker at Bursley and Sir Miles swore and said he was
afraid he could not commit Tom and when he heard that Tom looked up at me
and I say he is a noble fellow and no one shall sneer at Tom while I
live. Mind that. Well Sir Miles asked us to dine with him and Tom was
safe and I am to have him and educate him if I like for my servant and I
will. And I will give money to his mother and make her rich and he shall
never repent he knew me. I say Rip. The Bantam must have seen me. It
was when I went to stick in the lucifers. As we were all going home from
Sir Miles's at night he has lots of red-faced daughters but I did not
dance with them though they had music and were full of fun and I did not
care to I was so delighted and almost let it out. When we left and rode
home Rady said to my father the Bantam was not such a fool as he was
thought and my father said one must be in a state of great personal
exaltation to apply that epithet to any man and Rady shut his mouth and I
gave my pony a clap of the heel for joy. I think my father suspects what
Rady did and does not approve of it. And he need not have done it after
all and might have spoilt it. I have been obliged to order him not to
call me Ricky for he stops short at Rick so that everybody knows what he
means. My dear Austin is going to South America. My pony is in capital
condition. My father is the cleverest and best man in the world. Clare
is a little better. I am quite happy. I hope we shall meet soon my dear
Old Rip and we will not get into any more tremendous scrapes will we.--I
remain,
          Your sworn friend,
               "RICHARD DORIA FEVEREL."

"P.S. I am to have a nice River Yacht. Good-bye, Rip. Mind you learn to
box. Mind you are not to show this to any of your friends on pain of my
displeasure.

"N.B. Lady B. was so angry when I told her that I had not come to her
before. She would do anything in the world for me. I like her next best
to my father and Austin. Good-bye old Rip."

Poor little Letitia, after three perusals of this ingenuous epistle,
where the laws of punctuation were so disregarded, resigned it to one of
the pockets of her brother Ripton's best jacket, deeply smitten with the
careless composer. And so ended the last act of the Bakewell Comedy, in
which the curtain closes with Sir Austin's pointing out to his friends
the beneficial action of the System in it from beginning to end.




CHAPTER XII

Laying of ghosts is a public duty, and, as the mystery of the apparition
that had frightened little Clare was never solved on the stage of events
at Raynham, where dread walked the Abbey, let us go behind the scenes a
moment. Morally superstitious as the baronet was, the character of his
mind was opposed to anything like spiritual agency in the affairs of men,
and, when the matter was made clear to him, it shook off a weight of
weakness and restored his mental balance; so that from this time he went
about more like the man he had once been, grasping more thoroughly the
great truth, that This World is well designed. Nay, he could laugh on
hearing Adrian, in reminiscence of the ill luck of one of the family
members at its first manifestation, call the uneasy spirit, Algernon's
Leg.

Mrs. Doria was outraged. She maintained that her child had seen ---- Not
to believe in it was almost to rob her of her personal property. After
satisfactorily studying his old state of mind in her, Sir Austin, moved
by pity, took her aside one day and showed her that her Ghost could write
words in the flesh. It was a letter from the unhappy lady who had given
Richard birth,--brief cold lines, simply telling him his house would be
disturbed by her no more. Cold lines, but penned by what heart-broken
abnegation, and underlying them with what anguish of soul! Like most who
dealt with him, Lady Feverel thought her husband a man fatally stern and
implacable, and she acted as silly creatures will act when they fancy
they see a fate against them: she neither petitioned for her right nor
claimed it: she tried to ease her heart's yearning by stealth, and, now
she renounced all. Mrs. Doria, not wanting in the family tenderness and
softness, shuddered at him for accepting the sacrifice so composedly: but
he bade her to think how distracting to this boy would be the sight of
such relations between mother and father. A few years, and as man he
should know, and judge, and love her. "Let this be her penance, not
inflicted by me!" Mrs. Doria bowed to the System for another, not opining
when it would be her turn to bow for herself.

Further behind the scenes we observe Rizzio and Mary grown older, much
disenchanted: she discrowned, dishevelled,--he with gouty fingers on a
greasy guitar. The Diaper Sandoe of promise lends his pen for small
hires. His fame has sunk; his bodily girth has sensibly increased. What
he can do, and will do, is still his theme; meantime the juice of the
juniper is in requisition, and it seems that those small hires cannot be
performed without it. Returning from her wretched journey to her
wretcheder home, the lady had to listen to a mild reproof from easy-going
Diaper,--a reproof so mild that he couched it in blank verse: for, seldom
writing metrically now, he took to talking it. With a fluent sympathetic
tear, he explained to her that she was damaging her interests by these
proceedings; nor did he shrink from undertaking to elucidate wherefore.
Pluming a smile upon his succulent mouth, he told her that the poverty
she lived in was utterly unbefitting her gentle nurture, and that he had
reason to believe--could assure her--that an annuity was on the point of
being granted her by her husband. And Diaper broke his bud of a smile
into full flower as he delivered this information. She learnt that he had
applied to her husband for money. It is hard to have one's prop of
self-respect cut away just when we are suffering a martyr's agony at the
stake. There was a five minutes' tragic colloquy in the recesses behind
the scenes,--totally tragic to Diaper, who had fondly hoped to bask in
the warm sun of that annuity, and re-emerge from his state of grub. The
lady then wrote the letter Sir Austin held open to his sister. The
atmosphere behind the scenes is not wholesome, so, having laid the Ghost,
we will return and face the curtain.

That infinitesimal dose of The World which Master Ripton Thompson had
furnished to the System with such instantaneous and surprising effect was
considered by Sir Austin to have worked well, and to be for the time
quite sufficient, so that Ripton did not receive a second invitation to
Raynham, and Richard had no special intimate of his own age to rub his
excessive vitality against, and wanted none. His hands were full enough
with Tom Bakewell. Moreover, his father and he were heart in heart. The
boy's mind was opening, and turned to his father affectionately reverent.
At this period, when the young savage grows into higher influences, the
faculty of worship is foremost in him. At this period Jesuits will stamp
the future of their chargeling flocks; and all who bring up youth by a
System, and watch it, know that it is the malleable moment. Boys
possessing any mental or moral force to give them a tendency, then
predestinate their careers; or, if under supervision, take the impress
that is given them: not often to cast it off, and seldom to cast it off
altogether.

In Sir Austin's Note-book was written: "Between Simple Boyhood and
Adolescence--The Blossoming Season--on the threshold of Puberty, there is
one Unselfish Hour--say, Spiritual Seed-time."

He took care that good seed should be planted in Richard, and that the
most fruitful seed for a youth, namely, Example, should be of a kind to
germinate in him the love of every form of nobleness.

"I am only striving to make my son a Christian," he said, answering them
who persisted in expostulating with the System. And to these instructions
he gave an aim: "First be virtuous," he told his son, "and then serve
your country with heart and soul." The youth was instructed to cherish an
ambition for statesmanship, and he and his father read history and the
speeches of British orators to some purpose; for one day Sir Austin found
him leaning cross-legged, and with his hand to his chin, against a
pedestal supporting the bust of Chatham, contemplating the hero of our
Parliament, his eyes streaming with tears.

People said the baronet carried the principle of Example so far that he
only retained his boozing dyspeptic brother Hippias at Raynham in order
to exhibit to his son the woeful retribution nature wreaked upon a life
of indulgence; poor Hippias having now become a walking complaint. This
was unjust, but there is no doubt he made use of every illustration to
disgust or encourage his son that his neighbourhood afforded him, and did
not spare his brother, for whom Richard entertained a contempt in
proportion to his admiration of his father, and was for flying into
penitential extremes which Sir Austin had to soften.

The boy prayed with his father morning and night.

"How is it, sir," he said one night, "I can't get Tom Bakewell to pray?"

"Does he refuse?" Sir Austin asked.

"He seems to be ashamed to," Richard replied. "He wants to know what is
the good? and I don't know what to tell him."

"I'm afraid it has gone too far with him," said Sir Austin, "and until he
has had some deep sorrows he will not find the divine want of Prayer.
Strive, my son, when you represent the people, to provide for their
education. He feels everything now through a dull impenetrable rind.
Culture is half-way to heaven. Tell him, my son, should he ever be
brought to ask how he may know the efficacy of Prayer, and that his
prayer will be answered, tell him (he quoted The Pilgrim's Scrip):

"'Who rises from Prayer a better man, his prayer is answered.'"

"I will, sir," said Richard, and went to sleep happy.

Happy in his father and in himself, the youth now lived. Conscience was
beginning to inhabit him, and he carried some of the freightage known to
men; though in so crude a form that it overweighed him, now on this side,
now on that.

The wise youth Adrian observed these further progressionary developments
in his pupil, soberly cynical. He was under Sir Austin's interdict not to
banter him, and eased his acrid humours inspired by the sight of a
felonious young rick-burner turning saint, by grave affectations of
sympathy and extreme accuracy in marking the not widely-distant dates of
his various changes. The Bread-and-water phase lasted a fortnight: the
Vegetarian (an imitation of his cousin Austin), little better than a
month: the religious, somewhat longer: the religious-propagandist (when
he was for converting the heathen of Lobourne and Burnley, and the
domestics of the Abbey, including Tom Bakewell), longer still, and hard
to bear;--he tried to convert Adrian! All the while Tom was being
exercised like a raw recruit. Richard had a drill-sergeant from the
nearest barracks down for him, to give him a proper pride in himself, and
marched him to and fro with immense satisfaction, and nearly broke his
heart trying to get the round-shouldered rustic to take in the rudiments
of letters: for the boy had unbounded hopes for Tom, as a hero in grain.

Richard's pride also was cast aside. He affected to be, and really
thought he was, humble. Whereupon Adrian, as by accident, imparted to him
the fact that men were animals, and he an animal with the rest of them.

"I an animal!" cries Richard in scorn, and for weeks he was as troubled
by this rudiment of self-knowledge as Tom by his letters. Sir Austin had
him instructed in the wonders of anatomy, to restore his self-respect.

Seed-Time passed thus smoothly, and adolescence came on, and his cousin
Clare felt what it was to be of an opposite sex to him. She too was
growing, but nobody cared how she grew. Outwardly even her mother seemed
absorbed in the sprouting of the green off-shoot of the Feverel tree, and
Clare was his handmaiden, little marked by him.

Lady Blandish honestly loved the boy. She would tell him: "If I had been
a girl, I would have had you for my husband." And he with the frankness
of his years would reply: "And how do you know I would have had you?"
causing her to laugh and call him a silly boy, for had he not heard her
say she would have had him? Terrible words, he knew not then the meaning
of!

"You don't read your father's Book," she said. Her own copy was bound in
purple velvet, gilt-edged, as decorative ladies like to have holier
books, and she carried it about with her, and quoted it, and (Adrian
remarked to Mrs. Doria) hunted a noble quarry, and deliberately aimed at
him therewith, which Mrs. Doria chose to believe, and regretted her
brother would not be on his guard.

"See here," said Lady Blandish, pressing an almondy finger-nail to one of
the Aphorisms, which instanced how age and adversity must clay-enclose us
ere we can effectually resist the magnetism of any human creature in our
path. "Can you understand it, child?"

Richard informed her that when she read he could.

"Well, then, my squire," she touched his cheek and ran her fingers
through his hair, "learn as quick as you can not to be all hither and yon
with a hundred different attractions, as I was before I met a wise man to
guide me."

"Is my father very wise?" Richard asked.

"I think so," the lady emphasized her individual judgment.

"Do you--" Richard broke forth, and was stopped by a beating of his
heart.

"Do I--what?" she calmly queried.

"I was going to say, do you--I mean, I love him so much."

Lady Blandish smiled and slightly coloured.

They frequently approached this theme, and always retreated from it;
always with the same beating of heart to Richard, accompanied by the
sense of a growing mystery, which, however, did not as yet generally
disturb him.

Life was made very pleasant to him at Raynham, as it was part of Sir
Austin's principle of education that his boy should be thoroughly joyous
and happy; and whenever Adrian sent in a satisfactory report of his
pupil's advancement, which he did pretty liberally, diversions were
planned, just as prizes are given to diligent school-boys, and Richard
was supposed to have all his desires gratified while he attended to his
studies. The System flourished. Tall, strong, bloomingly healthy, he took
the lead of his companions on land and water, and had more than one
bondsman in his service besides Ripton Thompson--the boy without a
Destiny! Perhaps the boy with a Destiny was growing up a trifle too
conscious of it. His generosity to his occasional companions was
princely, but was exercised something too much in the manner of a prince;
and, notwithstanding his contempt for baseness, he would overlook that
more easily than an offence to his pride, which demanded an utter
servility when it had once been rendered susceptible. If Richard had his
followers he had also his feuds. The Papworths were as subservient as
Ripton, but young Ralph Morton, the nephew of Mr. Morton, and a match for
Richard in numerous promising qualities, comprising the noble science of
fisticuffs, this youth spoke his mind too openly, and moreover would not
be snubbed. There was no middle course for Richard's comrades between
high friendship or absolute slavery. He was deficient in those
cosmopolite habits and feelings which enable boys and men to hold
together without caring much for each other; and, like every insulated
mortal, he attributed the deficiency, of which he was quite aware, to the
fact of his possessing a superior nature. Young Ralph was a lively
talker: therefore, argued Richard's vanity, he had no intellect. He was
affable: therefore he was frivolous. The women liked him: therefore he
was a butterfly. In fine, young Ralph was popular, and our superb prince,
denied the privilege of despising, ended by detesting him.

Early in the days of their contention for leadership, Richard saw the
absurdity of affecting to scorn his rival. Ralph was an Eton boy, and
hence, being robust, a swimmer and a cricketer. A swimmer and a cricketer
is nowhere to be scorned in youth's republic. Finding that manoeuvre
would not do, Richard was prompted once or twice to entrench himself
behind his greater wealth and his position; but he soon abandoned that
also, partly because his chilliness to ridicule told him he was exposing
himself, and chiefly that his heart was too chivalrous. And so he was
dragged into the lists by Ralph, and experienced the luck of champions.
For cricket, and for diving, Ralph bore away the belt: Richard's
middle-stump tottered before his ball, and he could seldom pick up more
than three eggs underwater to Ralph's half-dozen. He was beaten, too, in
jumping and running. Why will silly mortals strive to the painful
pinnacles of championship? Or why, once having reached them, not have the
magnanimity and circumspection to retire into private life immediately?
Stung by his defeats, Richard sent one of his dependent Papworths to Poer
Hall, with a challenge to Ralph Barthrop Morton; matching himself to swim
across the Thames and back, once, trice, or thrice, within a less time
than he, Ralph Barthrop Morton, would require for the undertaking. It was
accepted, and a reply returned, equally formal in the trumpeting of
Christian names, wherein Ralph Barthrop Morton acknowledged the challenge
of Richard Doria Feverel, and was his man. The match came off on a
midsummer morning, under the direction of Captain Algernon. Sir Austin
was a spectator from the cover of a plantation by the river-side, unknown
to his son, and, to the scandal of her sex, Lady Blandish accompanied the
baronet. He had invited her attendance, and she, obeying her frank
nature, and knowing what The Pilgrim's Scrip said about prudes, at once
agreed to view the match, pleasing him mightily. For was not here a woman
worthy the Golden Ages of the world? one who could look upon man as a
creature divinely made, and look with a mind neither tempted, nor
taunted, by the Serpent! Such a woman was rare. Sir Austin did not
discompose her by uttering his praises. She was conscious of his approval
only in an increased gentleness of manner, and something in his voice and
communications, as if he were speaking to a familiar, a very high
compliment from him. While the lads were standing ready for the signal to
plunge from the steep decline of greensward into the shining waters, Sir
Austin called upon her to admire their beauty, and she did, and even
advanced her head above his shoulder delicately. In so doing, and just as
the start was given, a bonnet became visible to Richard. Young Ralph was
heels in air before he moved, and then he dropped like lead. He was
beaten by several lengths.

The result of the match was unaccountable to all present, and Richard's
friends unanimously pressed him to plead a false start. But though the
youth, with full confidence in his better style and equal strength, had
backed himself heavily against his rival, and had lost his little
river-yacht to Ralph, he would do nothing of the sort. It was the Bonnet
had beaten him, not Ralph. The Bonnet, typical of the mystery that caused
his heart those violent palpitations, was his dear, detestable enemy.

And now, as he progressed from mood to mood, his ambition turned towards
a field where Ralph could not rival him, and where the Bonnet was
etherealized, and reigned glorious mistress. A cheek to the pride of a
boy will frequently divert him to the path where lie his subtlest powers.
Richard gave up his companions, servile or antagonistic: he relinquished
the material world to young Ralph, and retired into himself, where he was
growing to be lord of kingdoms where Beauty was his handmaid, and History
his minister and Time his ancient harper, and sweet Romance his bride;
where he walked in a realm vaster and more gorgeous than the great
Orient, peopled with the heroes that have been. For there is no princely
wealth, and no loftiest heritage, to equal this early one that is made
bountifully common to so many, when the ripening blood has put a spark to
the imagination, and the earth is seen through rosy mists of a thousand
fresh-awakened nameless and aimless desires; panting for bliss and taking
it as it comes; making of any sight or sound, perforce of the enchantment
they carry with them, a key to infinite, because innocent, pleasure. The
passions then are gambolling cubs; not the ravaging gluttons they grow
to. They have their teeth and their talons, but they neither tear nor
bite. They are in counsel and fellowship with the quickened heart and
brain. The whole sweet system moves to music.

Something akin to the indications of a change in the spirit of his son,
which were now seen, Sir Austin had marked down to be expected, as due to
his plan. The blushes of the youth, his long vigils, his clinging to
solitude, his abstraction, and downcast but not melancholy air, were
matters for rejoicing to the prescient gentleman. "For it comes," said he
to Dr. Clifford of Lobourne, after consulting him medically on the
youth's behalf and being assured of his soundness, "it comes of a
thoroughly sane condition. The blood is healthy, the mind virtuous:
neither instigates the other to evil, and both are perfecting toward the
flower of manhood. If he reach that pure--in the untainted fulness and
perfection of his natural powers--I am indeed a happy father! But one
thing he will owe to me: that at one period of his life he knew paradise,
and could read God's handwriting on the earth! Now those abominations
whom you call precocious boys--your little pet monsters, doctor!--and who
can wonder that the world is what it is? when it is full of them--as they
will have no divine time to look back upon in their own lives, how can
they believe in innocence and goodness, or be other than sons of
selfishness and the Devil? But my boy," and the baronet dropped his voice
to a key that was touching to hear, "my boy, if he fall, will fall from
an actual region of purity. He dare not be a sceptic as to that. Whatever
his darkness, he will have the guiding light of a memory behind him. So
much is secure."

To talk nonsense, or poetry, or the dash between the two, in a tone of
profound sincerity, and to enunciate solemn discordances with received
opinion so seriously as to convey the impression of a spiritual insight,
is the peculiar gift by which monomaniacs, having first persuaded
themselves, contrive to influence their neighbours, and through them to
make conquest of a good half of the world, for good or for ill. Sir
Austin had this gift. He spoke as if he saw the truth, and, persisting in
it so long, he was accredited by those who did not understand him, and
silenced them that did.

"We shall see," was all the argument left to Dr. Clifford, and other
unbelievers.

So far certainly the experiment had succeeded. A comelier, bracer, better
boy was nowhere to be met. His promise was undeniable. The vessel, too,
though it lay now in harbour and had not yet been proved by the buffets
of the elements on the great ocean, had made a good trial trip, and got
well through stormy weather, as the records of the Bakewell Comedy
witnessed to at Raynham. No augury could be hopefuller. The Fates must
indeed be hard, the Ordeal severe, the Destiny dark, that could destroy
so bright a Spring! But, bright as it was, the baronet relaxed nothing of
his vigilant supervision. He said to his intimates: "Every act, every
fostered inclination, almost every thought, in this Blossoming Season,
bears its seed for the Future. The living Tree now requires incessant
watchfulness." And, acting up to his light, Sir Austin did watch. The
youth submitted to an examination every night before he sought his bed;
professedly to give an account of his studies, but really to recapitulate
his moral experiences of the day. He could do so, for he was pure. Any
wildness in him that his father noted, any remoteness or richness of
fancy in his expressions, was set down as incidental to the Blossoming
Season. There is nothing like a theory for binding the wise. Sir Austin,
despite his rigid watch and ward, knew less of his son than the servant
of his household. And he was deaf, as well as blind. Adrian thought it
his duty to tell him that the youth was consuming paper. Lady Blandish
likewise hinted at his mooning propensities. Sir Austin from his lofty
watch-tower of the System had foreseen it, he said. But when he came to
hear that the youth was writing poetry, his wounded heart had its reasons
for being much disturbed.

"Surely," said Lady Blandish, "you knew he scribbled?"

"A very different thing from writing poetry," said the baronet. "No
Feverel has ever written poetry."

"I don't think it's a sign of degeneracy," the lady remarked. "He rhymes
very prettily to me."

A London phrenologist, and a friendly Oxford Professor of poetry, quieted
Sir Austin's fears.

The phrenologist said he was totally deficient in the imitative faculty;
and the Professor, that he was equally so in the rhythmic, and instanced
several consoling false quantities in the few effusions submitted to him.
Added to this, Sir Austin told Lady Blandish that Richard had, at his
best, done what no poet had ever been known to be capable of doing: he
had, with his own hands, and in cold blood, committed his virgin
manuscript to the flames: which made Lady Blandish sigh forth, "Poor
boy!"

Killing one's darling child is a painful imposition. For a youth in his
Blossoming Season, who fancies himself a poet, to be requested to destroy
his first-born, without a reason (though to pretend a reason cogent
enough to justify the request were a mockery), is a piece of abhorrent
despotism, and Richard's blossoms withered under it. A strange man had
been introduced to him, who traversed and bisected his skull with
sagacious stiff fingers, and crushed his soul while, in an infallible
voice, declaring him the animal he was making him feel such an animal!
Not only his blossoms withered, his being seemed to draw in its shoots
and twigs. And when, coupled thereunto (the strange man having departed,
his work done), his father, in his tenderest manner, stated that it would
give him pleasure to see those same precocious, utterly valueless,
scribblings among the cinders, the last remaining mental blossoms
spontaneously fell away. Richard's spirit stood bare. He protested not.
Enough that it could be wished! He would not delay a minute in doing it.
Desiring his father to follow him, he went to a drawer in his room, and
from a clean-linen recess, never suspected by Sir Austin, the secretive
youth drew out bundle after bundle: each neatly tied, named, and
numbered: and pitched them into flames. And so Farewell my young
Ambition! and with it farewell all true confidence between Father and
Son.




CHAPTER XIII

It was now, as Sir Austin had written it down, The Magnetic Age: the Age
of violent attractions, when to hear mention of love is dangerous, and to
see it, a communication of the disease. People at Raynham were put on
their guard by the baronet, and his reputation for wisdom was severely
criticized in consequence of the injunctions he thought fit to issue
through butler and housekeeper down to the lower household, for the
preservation of his son from any visible symptom of the passion. A
footman and two housemaids are believed to have been dismissed on the
report of heavy Benson that they were in or inclining to the state; upon
which an undercook and a dairymaid voluntarily threw up their places,
averring that "they did not want no young men, but to have their sex
spied after by an old wretch like that," indicating the ponderous butler,
"was a little too much for a Christian woman," and then they were
ungenerous enough to glance at Benson's well-known marital calamity,
hinting that some men met their deserts. So intolerable did heavy
Benson's espionage become, that Raynham would have grown depopulated of
its womankind had not Adrian interfered, who pointed out to the baronet
what a fearful arm his butler was wielding. Sir Austin acknowledged it
despondently. "It only shows," said he, with a fine spirit of justice,
"how all but impossible it is to legislate where there are women!"

"I do not object," he added; "I hope I am too just to object to the
exercise of their natural inclinations. All I ask from them is
discreetness."

"Ay," said Adrian, whose discreetness was a marvel.

"No gadding about in couples," continued the baronet, "no kissing in
public. Such occurrences no boy should witness. Whenever people of both
sexes are thrown together, they will be silly; and where they are
high-fed, uneducated, and barely occupied, it must be looked for as a
matter of course. Let it be known that I only require discreetness."

Discreetness, therefore, was instructed to reign at the Abbey. Under
Adrian's able tuition the fairest of its domestics acquired that virtue.

Discreetness, too, was enjoined to the upper household. Sir Austin, who
had not previously appeared to notice the case of Lobourne's hopeless
curate, now desired Mrs. Doria to interdict, or at least discourage, his
visits, for the appearance of the man was that of an embodied sigh and
groan.

"Really, Austin!" said Mrs. Doria, astonished to find her brother more
awake than she had supposed, "I have never allowed him to hope."

"Let him see it, then," replied the baronet; "let him see it."

"The man amuses me," said Mrs. Doria. "You know, we have few amusements
here, we inferior creatures. I confess I should like a barrel-organ
better; that reminds one of town and the opera; and besides, it plays
more than one tune. However, since you think my society bad for him, let
him stop away."

With the self-devotion of a woman she grew patient and sweet the moment
her daughter Clare was spoken of, and the business of her life in view.
Mrs. Doria's maternal heart had betrothed the two cousins, Richard and
Clare; had already beheld them espoused and fruitful. For this she
yielded the pleasures of town; for this she immured herself at Raynham;
for this she bore with a thousand follies, exactions, inconveniences,
things abhorrent to her, and heaven knows what forms of torture and
self-denial, which are smilingly endured by that greatest of voluntary
martyrs--a mother with a daughter to marry. Mrs. Doria, an amiable widow,
had surely married but for her daughter Clare. The lady's hair no woman
could possess without feeling it her pride. It was the daily theme of her
lady's-maid,--a natural aureole to her head. She was gay, witty, still
physically youthful enough to claim a destiny; and she sacrificed it to
accomplish her daughter's! sacrificed, as with heroic scissors, hair,
wit, gaiety--let us not attempt to enumerate how much! more than may be
said. And she was only one of thousands; thousands who have no portion of
the hero's reward; for he may reckon on applause, and condolence, and
sympathy, and honour; they, poor slaves! must look for nothing but the
opposition of their own sex and the sneers of ours. O, Sir Austin! had
you not been so blinded, what an Aphorism might have sprung from this
point of observation! Mrs. Doria was coolly told, between sister and
brother, that during the Magnetic Age her daughter's presence at Raynham
was undesirable. Instead of nursing offence, her sole thought was the
mountain of prejudice she had to contend against. She bowed, and said,
Clare wanted sea-air--she had never quite recovered the shock of that
dreadful night. How long, Mrs. Doria wished to know, might the Peculiar
Period be expected to last?

"That," said Sir Austin, "depends. A year, perhaps. He is entering on it.
I shall be most grieved to lose you, Helen. Clare is now--how old?"

"Seventeen."

"She is marriageable."

"Marriageable, Austin! at seventeen! don't name such a thing. My child
shall not be robbed of her youth."

"Our women marry early, Helen."

"My child shall not!"

The baronet reflected a moment. He did not wish to lose his sister.

"As you are of that opinion, Helen," said he, "perhaps we may still make
arrangements to retain you with us. Would you think it advisable to send
Clare--she should know discipline--to some establishment for a few
months?"

"To an asylum, Austin?" cried Mrs. Doria, controlling her indignation as
well as she could.

"To some select superior seminary, Helen. There are such to be found."

"Austin!" Mrs. Doria exclaimed, and had to fight with a moisture in her
eyes. "Unjust! absurd!" she murmured. The baronet thought it a natural
proposition that Clare should be a bride or a schoolgirl.

"I cannot leave my child." Mrs. Doria trembled. "Where she goes, I go. I
am aware that she is only one of our sex, and therefore of no value to
the world, but she is my child. I will see, poor dear, that you have no
cause to complain of her."

"I thought," Sir Austin remarked, "that you acquiesced in my views with
regard to my son."

"Yes--generally," said Mrs. Doria, and felt culpable that she had not
before, and could not then, tell her brother that he had set up an Idol
in his house--an Idol of flesh! more retributive and abominable than wood
or brass or gold. But she had bowed to the Idol too long--she had too
entirely bound herself to gain her project by subserviency. She had, and
she dimly perceived it, committed a greater fault in tactics, in teaching
her daughter to bow to the Idol also. Love of that kind Richard took for
tribute. He was indifferent to Clare's soft eyes. The parting kiss he
gave her was ready and cold as his father could desire. Sir Austin now
grew eloquent to him in laudation of manly pursuits: but Richard thought
his eloquence barren, his attempts at companionship awkward, and all
manly pursuits and aims, life itself, vain and worthless. To what end?
sighed the blossomless youth, and cried aloud, as soon as he was relieved
of his father's society, what was the good of anything? Whatever he
did--whichever path he selected, led back to Raynham. And whatever he
did, however wretched and wayward he showed himself, only confirmed Sir
Austin more and more in the truth of his previsions. Tom Bakewell, now
the youth's groom, had to give the baronet a report of his young master's
proceedings, in common with Adrian, and while there was no harm to tell,
Tom spoke out. "He do ride like fire every day to Pig's Snout," naming
the highest hill in the neighbourhood, "and stand there and stare, never
movin', like a mad 'un. And then hoam agin all slack as if he'd been
beaten in a race by somebody."

"There is no woman in that!" mused the baronet. "He would have ridden
back as hard as he went," reflected this profound scientific humanist,
"had there been a woman in it. He would shun vast expanses, and seek
shade, concealment, solitude. The desire for distances betokens emptiness
and undirected hunger: when the heart is possessed by an image we fly to
wood and forest, like the guilty."

Adrian's report accused his pupil of an extraordinary access of cynicism.

"Exactly," said the baronet. "As I foresaw. At this period an insatiate
appetite is accompanied by a fastidious palate. Nothing but the
quintessences of existence, and those in exhaustless supplies, will
satisfy this craving, which is not to be satisfied! Hence his bitterness.
Life can furnish no food fitting for him. The strength and purity of his
energies have reached to an almost divine height, and roam through the
Inane. Poetry, love, and such-like, are the drugs earth has to offer to
high natures, as she offers to low ones debauchery. 'Tis a sign, this
sourness, that he is subject to none of the empiricisms that are afloat.
Now to keep him clear of them!"

The Titans had an easier task in storming Olympus. As yet, however, it
could not be said that Sir Austin's System had failed. On the contrary,
it had reared a youth, handsome, intelligent, well-bred, and, observed
the ladies, with acute emphasis, innocent. Where, they asked, was such
another young man to be found?

"Oh!" said Lady Blandish to Sir Austin, "if men could give their hands to
women unsoiled--how different would many a marriage be! She will be a
happy girl who calls Richard husband."

"Happy, indeed!" was the baronet's caustic ejaculation. "But where shall
I meet one equal to him, and his match?"

"I was innocent when I was a girl," said the lady.

Sir Austin bowed a reserved opinion.

"Do you think no girls innocent?"

Sir Austin gallantly thought them all so.

"No, that you know they are not," said the lady, stamping. "But they are
more innocent than boys, I am sure."

"Because of their education, madam. You see now what a youth can be.
Perhaps, when my System is published, or rather--to speak more
humbly--when it is practised, the balance may be restored, and we shall
have virtuous young men."

"It's too late for poor me to hope for a husband from one of them," said
the lady, pouting and laughing.

"It is never too late for beauty to waken love," returned the baronet,
and they trifled a little. They were approaching Daphne's Bower, which
they entered, and sat there to taste the coolness of a descending
midsummer day.

The baronet seemed in a humour for dignified fooling; the lady for
serious converse.

"I shall believe again in Arthur's knights," she said. "When I was a girl
I dreamed of one."

"And he was in quest of the San Greal?"

"If you like."

"And showed his good taste by turning aside for the more tangible San
Blandish?"

"Of course you consider it would have been so," sighed the lady,
ruffling.

"I can only judge by our generation," said Sir Austin, with a bend of
homage.

The lady gathered her mouth. "Either we are very mighty or you are very
weak."

"Both, madam."

"But whatever we are, and if we are bad, bad! we love virtue, and truth,
and lofty souls, in men: and, when we meet those qualities in them, we
are constant, and would die for them--die for them. Ah! you know men but
not women."

"The knights possessing such distinctions must be young, I presume?" said
Sir Austin.

"Old, or young!"

"But if old, they are scarce capable of enterprise?"

"They are loved for themselves, not for their deeds."

"Ah!"

"Yes--ah!" said the lady. "Intellect may subdue women--make slaves of
them; and they worship beauty perhaps as much as you do. But they only
love for ever and are mated when they meet a noble nature."

Sir Austin looked at her wistfully.

"And did you encounter the knight of your dream?"

"Not then." She lowered her eyelids. It was prettily done.

"And how did you bear the disappointment?"

"My dream was in the nursery. The day my frock was lengthened to a gown I
stood at the altar. I am not the only girl that has been made a woman in
a day, and given to an ogre instead of a true knight."

"Good God!" exclaimed Sir Austin, "women have much to bear."

Here the couple changed characters. The lady became gay as the baronet
grew earnest.

"You know it is our lot," she said. "And we are allowed many amusements.
If we fulfil our duty in producing children, that, like our virtue, is
its own reward. Then, as a widow, I have wonderful privileges."

"To preserve which, you remain a widow?"

"Certainly," she responded. "I have no trouble now in patching and
piecing that rag the world calls--a character. I can sit at your feet
every day unquestioned. To be sure, others do the same, but they are
female eccentrics, and have cast off the rag altogether."

Sir Austin drew nearer to her. "You would have made an admirable mother,
madam."

This from Sir Austin was very like positive wooing.

"It is," he continued, "ten thousand pities that you are not one."

"Do you think so?" She spoke with humility.

"I would," he went on, "that heaven had given you a daughter."

"Would you have thought her worthy of Richard?"

"Our blood, madam, should have been one!"

The lady tapped her toe with her parasol. "But I am a mother," she said.
"Richard is my son. Yes! Richard is my boy," she reiterated.

Sir Austin most graciously appended, "Call him ours, madam," and held his
head as if to catch the word from her lips, which, however, she chose to
refuse, or defer. They made the coloured West a common point for their
eyes, and then Sir Austin said:

"As you will not say 'ours,' let me. And, as you have therefore an equal
claim on the boy, I will confide to you a project I have lately
conceived."

The announcement of a project hardly savoured of a coming proposal, but
for Sir Austin to confide one to a woman was almost tantamount to a
declaration. So Lady Blandish thought, and so said her soft, deep-eyed
smile, as she perused the ground while listening to the project. It
concerned Richard's nuptials. He was now nearly eighteen. He was to marry
when he was five-and-twenty. Meantime a young lady, some years his
junior, was to be sought for in the homes of England, who would be every
way fitted by education, instincts, and blood--on each of which
qualifications Sir Austin unreservedly enlarged--to espouse so perfect a
youth and accept the honourable duty of assisting in the perpetuation of
the Feverels. The baronet went on to say that he proposed to set forth
immediately, and devote a couple of months, to the first essay in his
Coelebite search.

"I fear," said Lady Blandish, when the project had been fully unfolded,
"you have laid down for yourself a difficult task. You must not be too
exacting."

"I know it." The baronet's shake of the head was piteous.

"Even in England she will be rare. But I confine myself to no class. If I
ask for blood it is for untainted, not what you call high blood. I
believe many of the middle classes are frequently more careful--more
pure-blooded--than our aristocracy. Show me among them a God-fearing
family who educate their children--I should prefer a girl without
brothers and sisters--as a Christian damsel should be educated--say, on
the model of my son, and she may be penniless, I will pledge her to
Richard Feverel."

Lady Blandish bit her lip. "And what do you do with Richard while you are
absent on this expedition?"

"Oh!" said the baronet, "he accompanies his father."

"Then give it up. His future bride is now pinafored and
bread-and-buttery. She romps, she cries, she dreams of play and pudding.
How can he care for her? He thinks more at his age of old women like me.
He will be certain to kick against her, and destroy your plan, believe
me, Sir Austin."

"Ay? ay? do you think that?" said the baronet.

Lady Blandish gave him a multitude of reasons.

"Ay! true," he muttered. "Adrian said the same. He must not see her. How
could I think of it! The child is naked woman. He would despise her.
Naturally!"

"Naturally!" echoed the lady.

"Then, madam," and the baronet rose, "there is one thing for me to
determine upon. I must, for the first time in his life, leave him."

"Will you, indeed?" said the lady.

"It is my duty, having thus brought him up, to see that he is properly
mated,--not wrecked upon the quicksands of marriage, as a youth so
delicately trained might be; more easily than another! Betrothed, he will
be safe from a thousand snares. I may, I think, leave him for a term. My
precautions have saved him from the temptations of his season."

"And under whose charge will you leave him?" Lady Blandish inquired.

She had emerged from the temple, and stood beside Sir Austin on the upper
steps, under a clear summer twilight.

"Madam!" he took her hand, and his voice was gallant and tender, "under
whose but yours?"

As the baronet said this, he bent above her hand, and raised it to his
lips.

Lady Blandish felt that she had been wooed and asked in wedlock. She did
not withdraw her hand. The baronet's salute was flatteringly reverent. He
deliberated over it, as one going through a grave ceremony. And he, the
scorner of women, had chosen her for his homage! Lady Blandish forgot
that she had taken some trouble to arrive at it. She received the
exquisite compliment in all its unique honey-sweet: for in love we must
deserve nothing or the fine bloom of fruition is gone.

The lady's hand was still in durance, and the baronet had not recovered
from his profound inclination, when a noise from the neighbouring
beechwood startled the two actors in this courtly pantomime. They turned
their heads, and beheld the hope of Raynham on horseback surveying the
scene. The next moment he had galloped away.




CHAPTER XIV

All night Richard tossed on his bed with his heart in a rapid canter, and
his brain bestriding it, traversing the rich untasted world, and the
great Realm of Mystery, from which he was now restrained no longer.
Months he had wandered about the gates of the Bonnet, wondering, sighing,
knocking at them, and getting neither admittance nor answer. He had the
key now. His own father had given it to him. His heart was a lightning
steed, and bore him on and on over limitless regions bathed in superhuman
beauty and strangeness, where cavaliers and ladies leaned whispering upon
close green swards, and knights and ladies cast a splendour upon savage
forests, and tilts and tourneys were held in golden courts lit to a
glorious day by ladies' eyes, one pair of which, dimly visioned,
constantly distinguishable, followed him through the boskage and dwelt
upon him in the press, beaming while he bent above a hand glittering
white and fragrant as the frosted blossom of a May night.

Awhile the heart would pause and flutter to a shock: he was in the act of
consummating all earthly bliss by pressing his lips to the small white
hand. Only to do that, and die! cried the Magnetic Youth: to fling the
Jewel of Life into that one cup and drink it off! He was intoxicated by
anticipation. For that he was born. There was, then, some end in
existence, something to live for! to kiss a woman's hand, and die! He
would leap from the couch, and rush to pen and paper to relieve his
swarming sensations. Scarce was he seated when the pen was dashed aside,
the paper sent flying with the exclamation, "Have I not sworn I would
never write again?" Sir Austin had shut that safety-valve. The nonsense
that was in the youth might have poured harmlessly out, and its urgency
for ebullition was so great that he was repeatedly oblivious of his oath,
and found himself seated under the lamp in the act of composition before
pride could speak a word. Possibly the pride even of Richard Feverel had
been swamped if the act of composition were easy at such a time, and a
single idea could stand clearly foremost; but myriads were demanding the
first place; chaotic hosts, like ranks of stormy billows, pressed
impetuously for expression, and despair of reducing them to form, quite
as much as pride, to which it pleased him to refer his incapacity, threw
down the powerless pen, and sent him panting to his outstretched length
and another headlong career through the rosy-girdled land.

Toward morning the madness of the fever abated somewhat, and he went
forth into the air. A lamp was still burning in his father's room, and
Richard thought, as he looked up, that he saw the ever-vigilant head on
the watch. Instantly the lamp was extinguished, the window stood cold
against the hues of dawn.

Strong pulling is an excellent medical remedy for certain classes of
fever. Richard took to it instinctively. The clear fresh water, burnished
with sunrise, sparkled against his arrowy prow; the soft deep shadows
curled smiling away from his gliding keel. Overhead solitary morning
unfolded itself, from blossom to bud, from bud to flower; still,
delicious changes of light and colour, to whose influences he was
heedless as he shot under willows and aspens, and across sheets of
river-reaches, pure mirrors to the upper glory, himself the sole tenant
of the stream. Somewhere at the founts of the world lay the land he was
rowing toward; something of its shadowed lights might be discerned here
and there. It was not a dream, now he knew. There was a secret abroad.
The woods were full of it; the waters rolled with it, and the winds. Oh,
why could not one in these days do some high knightly deed which should
draw down ladies' eyes from their heaven, as in the days of Arthur! To
such a meaning breathed the unconscious sighs of the youth, when he had
pulled through his first feverish energy.

He was off Bursley, and had lapsed a little into that musing quietude
which follows strenuous exercise, when he heard a hail and his own name
called. It was no lady, no fairy, but young Ralph Morton, an irruption of
miserable masculine prose. Heartily wishing him abed with the rest of
mankind, Richard rowed in and jumped ashore. Ralph immediately seized his
arm, saying that he desired earnestly to have a talk with him, and
dragged the Magnetic Youth from his water-dreams, up and down the wet
mown grass. That he had to say seemed to be difficult of utterance, and
Richard, though he barely listened, soon had enough of his old rival's
gladness at seeing him, and exhibited signs of impatience; whereat Ralph,
as one who branches into matter somewhat foreign to his mind, but of
great human interest and importance, put the question to him:

"I say, what woman's name do you like best?"

"I don't know any," quoth Richard, indifferently. "Why are you out so
early?"

In answer to this, Ralph suggested that the name of Mary might be
considered a pretty name.

Richard agreed that it might be; the housekeeper at Raynham, half the
women cooks, and all the housemaids enjoyed that name; the name of Mary
was equivalent for women at home.

"Yes, I know," said Ralph. "We have lots of Marys. It's so common. Oh! I
don't like Mary best. What do you think?"

Richard thought it just like another.

"Do you know," Ralph continued, throwing off the mask and plunging into
the subject, "I'd do anything on earth for some names--one or two. It's
not Mary, nor Lucy. Clarinda's pretty, but it's like a novel. Claribel, I
like. Names beginning with 'Cl' I prefer. The 'Cl's' are always gentle
and lovely girls you would die for! Don't you think so?"

Richard had never been acquainted with any of them to inspire that
emotion. Indeed these urgent appeals to his fancy in feminine names at
five o'clock in the morning slightly surprised him, though he was but
half awake to the outer world. By degrees he perceived that Ralph was
changed. Instead of the lusty boisterous boy, his rival in manly
sciences, who spoke straightforwardly and acted up to his speech, here
was an abashed and blush-persecuted youth, who sued piteously for a
friendly ear wherein to pour the one idea possessing him. Gradually, too,
Richard apprehended that Ralph likewise was on the frontiers of the Realm
of Mystery, perhaps further toward it than he himself was; and then, as
by a sympathetic stroke, was revealed to him the wonderful beauty and
depth of meaning in feminine names. The theme appeared novel and
delicious, fitted to the season and the hour. But the hardship was, that
Richard could choose none from the number; all were the same to him; he
loved them all.

"Don't you really prefer the 'Cl's'?" said Ralph, persuasively.

"Not better than the names ending in 'a' and 'y,' Richard replied,
wishing he could, for Ralph was evidently ahead of him.

"Come under these trees," said Ralph. And under the trees Ralph
unbosomed. His name was down for the army: Eton was quitted for ever. In
a few months he would have to join his regiment, and before he left he
must say goodbye to his friends.... Would Richard tell him Mrs. Forey's
address? he had heard she was somewhere by the sea. Richard did not
remember the address, but said he would willingly take charge of any
letter and forward it.

Ralph dived his hand into his pocket. "Here it is. But don't let anybody
see it."

"My aunt's name is not Clare," said Richard, perusing what was composed
of the exterior formula. "You've addressed it to Clare herself."

That was plain to see.

"Emmeline Clementina Matilda Laura, Countess Blandish," Richard continued
in a low tone, transferring the names, and playing on the musical strings
they were to him. Then he said: "Names of ladies! How they sweeten their
names!"

He fixed his eyes on Ralph. If he discovered anything further he said
nothing, but bade the good fellow good-bye, jumped into his boat, and
pulled down the tide. The moment Ralph was hidden by an abutment of the
banks, Richard perused the address. For the first time it struck him that
his cousin Clare was a very charming creature: he remembered the look of
her eyes, and especially the last reproachful glance she gave him at
parting. What business had Ralph to write to her? Did she not belong to
Richard Feverel? He read the words again and again: Clare Doria Forey.
Why, Clare was the name he liked best--nay, he loved it. Doria, too--she
shared his own name with him. Away went his heart, not at a canter now,
at a gallop, as one who sights the quarry. He felt too weak to pull.
Clare Doria Forey--oh, perfect melody! Sliding with the tide, he heard it
fluting in the bosom of the hills.

When nature has made us ripe for love, it seldom occurs that the Fates
are behindhand in furnishing a temple for the flame.

Above green-flashing plunges of a weir, and shaken by the thunder below,
lilies, golden and white, were swaying at anchor among the reeds.
Meadow-sweet hung from the banks thick with weed and trailing bramble,
and there also hung a daughter of earth. Her face was shaded by a broad
straw hat with a flexible brim that left her lips and chin in the sun,
and, sometimes nodding, sent forth a light of promising eyes. Across her
shoulders, and behind, flowed large loose curls, brown in shadow, almost
golden where the ray touched them. She was simply dressed, befitting
decency and the season. On a closer inspection you might see that her
lips were stained. This blooming young person was regaling on dewberries.
They grew between the bank and the water. Apparently she found the fruit
abundant, for her hand was making pretty progress to her mouth.
Fastidious youth, which revolts at woman plumping her exquisite
proportions on bread-and-butter, and would (we must suppose) joyfully
have her scraggy to have her poetical, can hardly object to dewberries.
Indeed the act of eating them is dainty and induces musing. The dewberry
is a sister to the lotus, and an innocent sister. You eat: mouth, eye,
and hand are occupied, and the undrugged mind free to roam. And so it was
with the damsel who knelt there. The little skylark went up above her,
all song, to the smooth southern cloud lying along the blue: from a dewy
copse dark over her nodding hat the blackbird fluted, calling to her with
thrice mellow note: the kingfisher flashed emerald out of green osiers: a
bow-winged heron travelled aloft, seeking solitude a boat slipped toward
her, containing a dreamy youth; and still she plucked the fruit, and ate,
and mused, as if no fairy prince were invading her territories, and as if
she wished not for one, or knew not her wishes. Surrounded by the green
shaven meadows, the pastoral summer buzz, the weir-fall's thundering
white, amid the breath and beauty of wild flowers, she was a bit of
lovely human life in a fair setting; a terrible attraction. The Magnetic
Youth leaned round to note his proximity to the weir-piles, and beheld
the sweet vision. Stiller and stiller grew nature, as at the meeting of
two electric clouds. Her posture was so graceful, that though he was
making straight for the weir, he dared not dip a scull. Just then one
enticing dewberry caught her eyes. He was floating by unheeded, and saw
that her hand stretched low, and could not gather what it sought. A
stroke from his right brought him beside her. The damsel glanced up
dismayed, and her whole shape trembled over the brink. Richard sprang
from his boat into the water. Pressing a hand beneath her foot, which she
had thrust against the crumbling wet sides of the bank to save herself,
he enabled her to recover her balance, and gain safe earth, whither he
followed her.




CHAPTER XV

He had landed on an island of the still-vexed Bermoothes. The world lay
wrecked behind him: Raynham hung in mists, remote, a phantom to the vivid
reality of this white hand which had drawn him thither away thousands of
leagues in an eye-twinkle. Hark, how Ariel sang overhead! What splendour
in the heavens! What marvels of beauty about his enchanted brows! And, O
you wonder! Fair Flame! by whose light the glories of being are now first
seen....Radiant Miranda! Prince Ferdinand is at your feet.

Or is it Adam, his rib taken from his side in sleep, and thus
transformed, to make him behold his Paradise, and lose it?...

The youth looked on her with as glowing an eye. It was the First Woman to
him.

And she--mankind was all Caliban to her, saving this one princely youth.

So to each other said their changing eyes in the moment they stood
together; he pale, and she blushing.

She was indeed sweetly fair, and would have been held fair among rival
damsels. On a magic shore, and to a youth educated by a System, strung
like an arrow drawn to the head, he, it might be guessed, could fly fast
and far with her. The soft rose in her cheeks, the clearness of her eyes,
bore witness to the body's virtue; and health and happy blood were in her
bearing. Had she stood before Sir Austin among rival damsels, that
Scientific Humanist, for the consummation of his System, would have
thrown her the handkerchief for his son. The wide summer-hat, nodding
over her forehead to her brows, seemed to flow with the flowing heavy
curls, and those fire-threaded mellow curls, only half-curls, waves of
hair call them, rippling at the ends, went like a sunny red-veined
torrent down her back almost to her waist: a glorious vision to the
youth, who embraced it as a flower of beauty, and read not a feature.
There were curious features of colour in her face for him to have read.
Her brows, thick and brownish against a soft skin showing the action of
the blood, met in the bend of a bow, extending to the temples long and
level: you saw that she was fashioned to peruse the sights of earth, and
by the pliability of her brows that the wonderful creature used her
faculty, and was not going to be a statue to the gazer. Under the dark
thick brows an arch of lashes shot out, giving a wealth of darkness to
the full frank blue eyes, a mystery of meaning--more than brain was ever
meant to fathom: richer, henceforth, than all mortal wisdom to Prince
Ferdinand. For when nature turns artist, and produces contrasts of colour
on a fair face, where is the Sage, or what the Oracle, shall match the
depth of its lightest look?

Prince Ferdinand was also fair. In his slim boating-attire his figure
looked heroic. His hair, rising from the parting to the right of his
forehead, in what his admiring Lady Blandish called his plume, fell away
slanting silkily to the temples across the nearly imperceptible upward
curve of his brows there--felt more than seen, so slight it was--and gave
to his profile a bold beauty, to which his bashful, breathless air was a
flattering charm. An arrow drawn to the head, capable of flying fast and
far with her! He leaned a little forward, drinking her in with all his
eyes, and young Love has a thousand. Then truly the System triumphed,
just ere it was to fall; and could Sir Austin have been content to draw
the arrow to the head, and let it fly, when it would fly, he might have
pointed to his son again, and said to the world, "Match him!" Such keen
bliss as the youth had in the sight of her, an innocent youth alone has
powers of soul in him to experience.

"O Women!" says The Pilgrim's Scrip, in one of its solitary outbursts,
"Women, who like, and will have for hero, a rake! how soon are you not to
learn that you have taken bankrupts to your bosoms, and that the
putrescent gold that attracted you is the slime of the Lake of Sin!"

If these two were Ferdinand and Miranda, Sir Austin was not Prospero, and
was not present, or their fates might have been different.

So they stood a moment, changing eyes, and then Miranda spoke, and they
came down to earth, feeling no less in heaven.

She spoke to thank him for his aid. She used quite common simple words;
and used them, no doubt, to express a common simple meaning: but to him
she was uttering magic, casting spells, and the effect they had on him
was manifested in the incoherence of his replies, which were too foolish
to be chronicled.

The couple were again mute. Suddenly Miranda, with an exclamation of
anguish, and innumerable lights and shadows playing over her lovely face,
clapped her hands, crying aloud, "My book! my book!" and ran to the bank.

Prince Ferdinand was at her side. "What have you lost?" he said.

"My book!" she answered, her delicious curls swinging across her
shoulders to the stream. Then turning to him, "Oh, no, no! let me entreat
you not to," she said; "I do not so very much mind losing it." And in her
eagerness to restrain him she unconsciously laid her gentle hand upon his
arm, and took the force of motion out of him.

"Indeed, I do not really care for the silly book," she continued,
withdrawing her hand quickly, and reddening. "Pray, do not!"

The young gentleman had kicked off his shoes. No sooner was the spell of
contact broken than he jumped in. The water was still troubled and
discoloured by his introductory adventure, and, though he ducked his head
with the spirit of a dabchick, the book was missing. A scrap of paper
floating from the bramble just above the water, and looking as if fire
had caught its edges and it had flown from one adverse element to the
other, was all he could lay hold of; and he returned to land
disconsolately, to hear Miranda's murmured mixing of thanks and pretty
expostulations.

"Let me try again," he said.

"No, indeed!" she replied, and used the awful threat: "I will run away if
you do," which effectually restrained him.

Her eye fell on the fire-stained scrap of paper, and brightened, as she
cried, "There, there! you have what I want. It is that. I do not care for
the book. No, please! You are not to look at it. Give it me."

Before her playfully imperative injunction was fairly spoken, Richard had
glanced at the document and discovered a Griffin between two
Wheatsheaves: his crest in silver: and below--O wonderment immense! his
own handwriting!

He handed it to her. She took it, and put it in her bosom.

Who would have thought, that, where all else perished, Odes, Idyls,
Lines, Stanzas, this one Sonnet to the stars should be miraculously
reserved for such a starry fate--passing beatitude!

As they walked silently across the meadow, Richard strove to remember the
hour and the mood of mind in which he had composed the notable
production. The stars were invoked, as seeing and foreseeing all, to tell
him where then his love reclined, and so forth; Hesper was complacent
enough to do so, and described her in a couplet--

     "Through sunset's amber see me shining fair,
     As her blue eyes shine through her golden hair."

And surely no words could be more prophetic. Here were two blue eyes and
golden hair; and by some strange chance, that appeared like the working
of a divine finger, she had become the possessor of the prophecy, she
that was to fulfil it! The youth was too charged with emotion to speak.
Doubtless the damsel had less to think of, or had some trifling burden on
her conscience, for she seemed to grow embarrassed. At last she drew up
her chin to look at her companion under the nodding brim of her hat (and
the action gave her a charmingly freakish air), crying, "But where are
you going to? You are wet through. Let me thank you again; and, pray,
leave me, and go home and change instantly."

"Wet?" replied the magnetic muser, with a voice of tender interest; "not
more than one foot, I hope. I will leave you while you dry your stockings
in the sun."

At this she could not withhold a shy laugh.

"Not I, but you. You would try to get that silly book for me, and you are
dripping wet. Are you not very uncomfortable?"

In all sincerity he assured her that he was not.

"And you really do not feel that you are wet?"

He really did not: and it was a fact that he spoke truth.

She pursed her dewberry mouth in the most comical way, and her blue eyes
lightened laughter out of the half-closed lids.

"I cannot help it," she said, her mouth opening, and sounding harmonious
bells of laughter in his ears. "Pardon me, won't you?"

His face took the same soft smiling curves in admiration of her.

"Not to feel that you have been in the water, the very moment after!" she
musically interjected, seeing she was excused.

"It's true," he said; and his own gravity then touched him to join a duet
with her, which made them no longer feel strangers, and did the work of a
month of intimacy. Better than sentiment, laughter opens the breast to
love; opens the whole breast to his full quiver, instead of a corner here
and there for a solitary arrow. Hail the occasion propitious, O British
young! and laugh and treat love as an honest God, and dabble not with the
sentimental rouge. These two laughed, and the souls of each cried out to
other, "It is I it is I."

They laughed and forgot the cause of their laughter, and the sun dried
his light river clothing, and they strolled toward the blackbird's copse,
and stood near a stile in sight of the foam of the weir and the
many-coloured rings of eddies streaming forth from it.

Richard's boat, meanwhile, had contrived to shoot the weir, and was
swinging, bottom upward, broadside with the current down the rapid
backwater.

"Will you let it go?" said the damsel, eying it curiously.

"It can't be stopped," he replied, and could have added: "What do I care
for it now!"

His old life was whirled away with it, dead, drowned. His new life was
with her, alive, divine.

She flapped low the brim of her hat. "You must really not come any
farther," she softly said.

"And will you go, and not tell me who you are?" he asked, growing bold as
the fears of losing her came across him. "And will you not tell me before
you go"--his face burned--"how you came by that--that paper?"

She chose to select the easier question for answer: "You ought to know
me; we have been introduced." Sweet was her winning off-hand affability.

"Then who, in heaven's name, are you? Tell me! I never could have
forgotten you."

"You have, I think," she said.

"Impossible that we could ever have met, and I forget you!"

She looked up at him.

"Do you remember Belthorpe?"

"Belthorpe! Belthorpe!" quoth Richard, as if he had to touch his brain to
recollect there was such a place. "Do you mean old Blaize's farm?"

"Then I am old Blaize's niece." She tripped him a soft curtsey.

The magnetized youth gazed at her. By what magic was it that this divine
sweet creature could be allied with that old churl!

"Then what--what is your name?" said his mouth, while his eyes added, "O
wonderful creature! How came you to enrich the earth?"

"Have you forgot the Desboroughs of Dorset, too?" she peered at him from
a side-bend of the flapping brim.

"The Desboroughs of Dorset?" A light broke in on him. "And have you grown
to this? That little girl I saw there!"

He drew close to her to read the nearest features of the vision. She
could no more laugh off the piercing fervour of his eyes. Her volubility
fluttered under his deeply wistful look, and now neither voice was high,
and they were mutually constrained.

"You see," she murmured, "we are old acquaintances."

Richard, with his eyes still intently fixed on her, returned, "You are
very beautiful!"

The words slipped out. Perfect simplicity is unconsciously audacious. Her
overpowering beauty struck his heart, and, like an instrument that is
touched and answers to the touch, he spoke.

Miss Desborough made an effort to trifle with this terrible directness;
but his eyes would not be gainsaid, and checked her lips. She turned away
from them, her bosom a little rebellious. Praise so passionately spoken,
and by one who has been a damsel's first dream, dreamed of nightly many
long nights, and clothed in the virgin silver of her thoughts in bud,
praise from him is coin the heart cannot reject, if it would. She
quickened her steps.

"I have offended you!" said a mortally wounded voice across her shoulder.

That he should think so were too dreadful.

"Oh no, no! you would never offend me." She gave him her whole sweet
face.

"Then why--why do you leave me?"

"Because," she hesitated, "I must go."

"No. You must not go. Why must you go? Do not go."

"Indeed I must," she said, pulling at the obnoxious broad brim of her
hat; and, interpreting a pause he made for his assent to her rational
resolve, shyly looking at him, she held her hand out, and said,
"Good-bye," as if it were a natural thing to say.

The hand was pure white--white and fragrant as the frosted blossom of a
Maynight. It was the hand whose shadow, cast before, he had last night
bent his head reverentially above, and kissed--resigning himself
thereupon over to execution for payment of the penalty of such daring--by
such bliss well rewarded.

He took the hand, and held it, gazing between her eyes.

"Good-bye," she said again, as frankly as she could, and at the same time
slightly compressing her fingers on his in token of adieu. It was a
signal for his to close firmly upon hers.

"You will not go?"

"Pray, let me," she pleaded, her sweet brows suing in wrinkles.

"You will not go?" Mechanically he drew the white hand nearer his
thumping heart.

"I must," she faltered piteously.

"You will not go?"

"Oh yes! yes!"

"Tell me. Do you wish to go?"

The question was a subtle one. A moment or two she did not answer, and
then forswore herself, and said, Yes.

"Do you--you wish to go?" He looked with quivering eyelids under hers.

A fainter Yes responded.

"You wish--wish to leave me?" His breath went with the words.

"Indeed I must."

Her hand became a closer prisoner.

All at once an alarming delicious shudder went through her frame. From
him to her it coursed, and back from her to him. Forward and back love's
electric messenger rushed from heart to heart, knocking at each, till it
surged tumultuously against the bars of its prison, crying out for its
mate. They stood trembling in unison, a lovely couple under these fair
heavens of the morning.

When he could get his voice it said, "Will you go?"

But she had none to reply with, and could only mutely bend upward her
gentle wrist.

"Then, farewell!" he said, and, dropping his lips to the soft fair hand,
kissed it, and hung his head, swinging away from her, ready for death.

Strange, that now she was released she should linger by him. Strange,
that his audacity, instead of the executioner, brought blushes and timid
tenderness to his side, and the sweet words, "You are not angry with me?"

"With you, O Beloved!" cried his soul. "And you forgive me, fair
charity!"

"I think it was rude of me to go without thanking you again," she said,
and again proffered her hand.

The sweet heaven-bird shivered out his song above him. The gracious glory
of heaven fell upon his soul. He touched her hand, not moving his eyes
from her, nor speaking, and she, with a soft word of farewell, passed
across the stile, and up the pathway through the dewy shades of the
copse, and out of the arch of the light, away from his eyes.

And away with her went the wild enchantment. He looked on barren air. But
it was no more the world of yesterday. The marvellous splendours had sown
seeds in him, ready to spring up and bloom at her gaze; and in his bosom
now the vivid conjuration of her tones, her face, her shape, makes them
leap and illumine him like fitful summer lightnings ghosts of the
vanished sun.

There was nothing to tell him that he had been making love and declaring
it with extraordinary rapidity; nor did he know it. Soft flushed cheeks!
sweet mouth! strange sweet brows! eyes of softest fire! how could his
ripe eyes behold you, and not plead to keep you? Nay, how could he let
you go? And he seriously asked himself that question.

To-morrow this place will have a memory--the river and the meadow, and
the white falling weir: his heart will build a temple here; and the
skylark will be its high-priest, and the old blackbird its glossy-gowned
chorister, and there will be a sacred repast of dewberries. To-day the
grass is grass: his heart is chased by phantoms and finds rest nowhere.
Only when the most tender freshness of his flower comes across him does
he taste a moment's calm; and no sooner does it come than it gives place
to keen pangs of fear that she may not be his for ever.

Erelong he learns that her name is Lucy. Erelong he meets Ralph, and
discovers that in a day he has distanced him by a sphere. He and Ralph
and the curate of Lobourne join in their walks, and raise classical
discussions on ladies' hair, fingering a thousand delicious locks, from
those of Cleopatra to the Borgia's. "Fair! fair! all of them fair!" sighs
the melancholy curate, "as are those women formed for our perdition! I
think we have in this country what will match the Italian or the Greek."
His mind flutters to Mrs. Doria, Richard blushes before the vision of
Lucy, and Ralph, whose heroine's hair is a dark luxuriance, dissents, and
claims a noble share in the slaughter of men for dark-haired Wonders.
They have no mutual confidences, but they are singularly kind to each
other, these three children of instinct.




CHAPTER XVI

Lady Blandish, and others who professed an interest in the fortunes and
future of the systematized youth, had occasionally mentioned names of
families whose alliance according to apparent calculations, would not
degrade his blood: and over these names, secretly preserved on an open
leaf of the note-book, Sir Austin, as he neared the metropolis, distantly
dropped his eye. There were names historic and names mushroomic; names
that the Conqueror might have called in his muster-roll; names that had
been, clearly, tossed into the upper stratum of civilized lifer by a
millwheel or a merchant-stool. Against them the baronet had written M. or
Po. or Pr.--signifying, Money, Position, Principles, favouring the latter
with special brackets. The wisdom of a worldly man, which he could now
and then adopt, determined him, before he commenced his round of visits,
to consult and sound his solicitor and his physician thereanent; lawyers
and doctors being the rats who know best the merits of a house, and on
what sort of foundation it may be standing.

Sir Austin entered the great city with a sad mind. The memory of his
misfortune came upon him vividly, as if no years had intervened, and it
were but yesterday that he found the letter telling him that he had no
wife and his son no mother. He wandered on foot through the streets the
first night of his arrival, looking strangely at the shops and shows and
bustle of the world from which he had divorced himself; feeling as
destitute as the poorest vagrant. He had almost forgotten how to find his
way about, and came across his old mansion in his efforts to regain his
hotel. The windows were alight--signs of merry life within. He stared at
it from the shadow of the opposite side. It seemed to him he was a ghost
gazing upon his living past. And then the phantom which had stood there
mocking while he felt as other men--the phantom, now flesh and blood
reality, seized and convulsed his heart, and filled its unforgiving
crevices with bitter ironic venom. He remembered by the time reflection
returned to him that it was Algernon, who had the house at his disposal,
probably giving a card-party, or something of the sort. In the morning,
too, he remembered that he had divorced the world to wed a System, and
must be faithful to that exacting Spouse, who, now alone of things on
earth, could fortify and recompense him.

Mr. Thompson received his client with the dignity and emotion due to such
a rent-roll and the unexpectedness of the honour. He was a thin stately
man of law, garbed as one who gave audience to acred bishops, and
carrying on his countenance the stamp of paternity to the parchment
skins, and of a virtuous attachment to Port wine sufficient to increase
his respectability in the eyes of moral Britain. After congratulating Sir
Austin on the fortunate issue of two or three suits, and being assured
that the baronet's business in town had no concern therewith, Mr.
Thompson ventured to hope that the young heir was all his father could
desire him to be, and heard with satisfaction that he was a pattern to
the youth of the Age.

"A difficult time of life, Sir Austin!" said the old lawyer, shaking his
head. "We must keep our eyes on them--keep awake! The mischief is done in
a minute."

"We must take care to have seen where we planted, and that the root was
sound, or the mischief will do itself in site of, or under the very
spectacles of, supervision," said the baronet.

His legal adviser murmured "Exactly," as if that were his own idea,
adding, "It is my plan with Ripton, who has had the honour of an
introduction to you, and a very pleasant time he spent with my young
friend, whom he does not forget. Ripton follows the Law. He is articled
to me, and will, I trust, succeed me worthily in your confidence. I bring
him into town in the morning; I take him back at night. I think I may say
that I am quite content with him."

"Do you think," said Sir Austin, fixing his brows, "that you can trace
every act of his to its motive?"

The old lawyer bent forward and humbly requested that this might be
repeated.

"Do you"--Sir Austin held the same searching expression--"do you
establish yourself in a radiating centre of intuition: do you base your
watchfulness on so thorough an acquaintance with his character, so
perfect a knowledge of the instrument, that all its movements--even the
eccentric ones--are anticipated by you, and provided for?"

The explanation was a little too long for the old lawyer to entreat
another repetition. Winking with the painful deprecation of a deaf man,
Mr. Thompson smiled urbanely, coughed conciliatingly, and said he was
afraid he could not affirm that much, though he was happily enabled to
say that Ripton had borne an extremely good character at school.

"I find," Sir Austin remarked, as sardonically he relaxed his inspecting
pose and mien, "there are fathers who are content to be simply obeyed.
Now I require not only that my son should obey; I would have him
guiltless of the impulse to gainsay my wishes--feeling me in him stronger
than his undeveloped nature, up to a certain period, where my
responsibility ends and his commences. Man is a self-acting machine. He
cannot cease to be a machine; but, though self-acting, he may lose the
powers of self-guidance, and in a wrong course his very vitalities hurry
him to perdition. Young, he is an organism ripening to the set mechanic
diurnal round, and while so he needs all the angels to hold watch over
him that he grow straight and healthy, and fit for what machinal duties
he may have to perform"...

Mr. Thompson agitated his eyebrows dreadfully. He was utterly lost. He
respected Sir Austin's estates too much to believe for a moment he was
listening to downright folly. Yet how otherwise explain the fact of his
excellent client being incomprehensible to him? For a middle-aged
gentleman, and one who has been in the habit of advising and managing,
will rarely have a notion of accusing his understanding; and Mr. Thompson
had not the slightest notion of accusing his. But the baronet's
condescension in coming thus to him, and speaking on the subject nearest
his heart, might well affect him, and he quickly settled the case in
favour of both parties, pronouncing mentally that his honoured client had
a meaning, and so deep it was, so subtle, that no wonder he experienced
difficulty in giving it fitly significant words.

Sir Austin elaborated his theory of the Organism and the Mechanism, for
his lawyer's edification. At a recurrence of the word "healthy" Mr.
Thompson caught him up:

"I apprehended you! Oh, I agree with you, Sir Austin! entirely! Allow me
to ring for my son Ripton. I think, if you condescend to examine him, you
will say that regular habits, and a diet of nothing but law-reading--for
other forms of literature I strictly interdict--have made him all that
you instance."

Mr. Thompson's hand was on the bell. Sir Austin arrested him.

"Permit me to see the lad at his occupation," said he.

Our old friend Ripton sat in a room apart with the confidential clerk,
Mr. Beazley, a veteran of law, now little better than a document, looking
already signed and sealed, and shortly to be delivered, who enjoined
nothing from his pupil and companion save absolute silence, and sounded
his praises to his father at the close of days when it had been rigidly
observed--not caring, or considering, the finished dry old document that
he was, under what kind of spell a turbulent commonplace youth could be
charmed into stillness for six hours of the day. Ripton was supposed to
be devoted to the study of Blackstone. A tome of the classic legal
commentator lay extended outside his desk, under the partially lifted lid
of which nestled the assiduous student's head--law being thus brought
into direct contact with his brain-pan. The office-door opened, and he
heard not; his name was called, and he remained equally moveless. His
method of taking in Blackstone seemed absorbing as it was novel.

"Comparing notes, I daresay," whispered Mr. Thompson to Sir Austin. "I
call that study!"

The confidential clerk rose, and bowed obsequious senility.

"Is it like this every day, Beazley?" Mr. Thompson asked with parental
pride.

"Ahem!" the old clerk replied, "he is like this every day, sir. I could
not ask more of a mouse."

Sir Austin stepped forward to the desk. His proximity roused one of
Ripton's senses, which blew a pall to the others. Down went the lid of
the desk. Dismay, and the ardours of study, flashed together in Ripton's
face. He slouched from his perch with the air of one who means rather to
defend his position than welcome a superior, the right hand in his
waistcoat pocket fumbling a key, the left catching at his vacant stool.

Sir Austin put two fingers on the youth's shoulder, and said, leaning his
head a little on one side, in a way habitual to him, "I am glad to find
my son's old comrade thus profitably occupied. I know what study is
myself. But beware of prosecuting it too excitedly! Come! you must not be
offended at our interruption; you will soon take up the thread again.
Besides, you know, you must get accustomed to the visits of your client."

So condescending and kindly did this speech sound to Mr. Thompson, that,
seeing Ripton still preserve his appearance of disorder and sneaking
defiance, he thought fit to nod and frown at the youth, and desired him
to inform the baronet what particular part of Blackstone he was absorbed
in mastering at that moment.

Ripton hesitated an instant, and blundered out, with dubious
articulation, "The Law of Gravelkind."

"What Law?" said Sir Austin, perplexed.

"Gravelkind," again rumbled Ripton's voice.

Sir Austin turned to Mr. Thompson for an explanation. The old lawyer was
shaking his law-box.

"Singular!" he exclaimed. "He will make that mistake! What law, sir?"

Ripton read his error in the sternly painful expression of his father's
face, and corrected himself. "Gavelkind, sir."

"Ah!" said Mr. Thompson, with a sigh of relief. "Gravelkind, indeed!
Gavelkind! An old Kentish"--He was going to expound, but Sir Austin
assured him he knew it, and a very absurd law it was, adding, "I should
like to look at your son's notes, or remarks on the judiciousness of that
family arrangement, if he had any."

"You were making notes, or referring to them, as we entered," said Mr.
Thompson to the sucking lawyer; "a very good plan, which I have always
enjoined on you. Were you not?"

Ripton stammered that he was afraid he hid not any notes to show, worth
seeing.

"What were you doing then, sir?"

"Making notes," muttered Ripton, looking incarnate subterfuge.

"Exhibit!"

Ripton glanced at his desk and then at his father; at Sir Austin, and at
the confidential clerk. He took out his key. It would not fit the hole.

"Exhibit!" was peremptorily called again.

In his praiseworthy efforts to accommodate the keyhole, Ripton discovered
that the desk was already unlocked. Mr. Thompson marched to it, and held
the lid aloft. A book was lying open within, which Ripton immediately
hustled among a mass of papers and tossed into a dark corner, not before
the glimpse of a coloured frontispiece was caught by Sir Austin's eye.

The baronet smiled, and said, "You study Heraldry, too? Are you fond of
the science?"

Ripton replied that he was very fond of it--extremely attached, and threw
a further pile of papers into the dark corner.

The notes had been less conspicuously placed, and the search for them was
tedious and vain. Papers, not legal, or the fruits of study, were found,
that made Mr. Thompson more intimate with the condition of his son's
exchequer; nothing in the shape of a remark on the Law of Gavelkind.

Mr. Thompson suggested to his son that they might be among those scraps
he had thrown carelessly into the dark corner. Ripton, though he
consented to inspect them, was positive they were not there.

"What have we here?" said Mr. Thompson, seizing a neatly folded paper
addressed to the Editor of a law publication, as Ripton brought them
forth, one by one. Forthwith Mr. Thompson fixed his spectacles and read
aloud:

        "To the Editor of the 'Jurist.'

"Sir,--In your recent observations on the great case of Crim"--

Mr. Thompson hem'd! and stopped short, like a man who comes unexpectedly
upon a snake in his path. Mr. Beazley's feet shuffled. Sir Austin changed
the position of an arm.

"It's on the other side, I think," gasped Ripton.

Mr. Thompson confidently turned over, and intoned with emphasis.

"To Absalom, the son of David, the little Jew usurer of Bond Court,
Whitecross Gutters, for his introduction to Venus, I O U Five pounds,
when I can pay.

             "Signed: RIPTON THOMPSON."

Underneath this fictitious legal instrument was discreetly appended:

"(Mem. Document not binding.)"

There was a pause: an awful under-breath of sanctified wonderment and
reproach passed round the office. Sir Austin assumed an attitude. Mr.
Thompson shed a glance of severity on his confidential clerk, who parried
by throwing up his hands.

Ripton, now fairly bewildered, stuffed another paper under his father's
nose, hoping the outside perhaps would satisfy him: it was marked "Legal
Considerations." Mr. Thompson had no idea of sparing or shielding his
son. In fact, like many men whose self-love is wounded by their
offspring, he felt vindictive, and was ready to sacrifice him up to a
certain point, for the good of both. He therefore opened the paper,
expecting something worse than what he had hitherto seen, despite its
formal heading, and he was not disappointed.

The "Legal Considerations" related to the Case regarding, which Ripton
had conceived it imperative upon him to address a letter to the Editor of
the "Jurist," and was indeed a great case, and an ancient; revived
apparently for the special purpose of displaying the forensic abilities
of the Junior Counsel for the Plaintiff, Mr. Ripton Thompson, whose
assistance the Attorney-General, in his opening statement, congratulated
himself on securing; a rather unusual thing, due probably to the eminence
and renown of that youthful gentleman at the Bar of his country. So much
was seen from the copy of a report purporting to be extracted from a
newspaper, and prefixed to the Junior Counsel's remarks, or Legal
Considerations, on the conduct of the Case, the admissibility and
non-admissibility of certain evidence, and the ultimate decision of the
judges.

Mr. Thompson, senior, lifted the paper high, with the spirit of one
prepared to do execution on the criminal, and in the voice of a
town-crier, varied by a bitter accentuation and satiric sing-song tone,
deliberately read:

          "VULCAN v. MARS.

"The Attorney-General, assisted by Mr. Ripton Thompson, appeared on
behalf of the Plaintiff. Mr. Serjeant Cupid, Q.C., and Mr. Capital
Opportunity, for the Defendant."

"Oh!" snapped Mr. Thompson, senior, peering venom at the unfortunate
Ripton over his spectacles, "your notes are on that issue, sir! Thus you
employ your time, sir!"

With another side-shot at the confidential clerk, who retired immediately
behind a strong entrenchment of shrugs, Mr. Thompson was pushed by the
devil of his rancour to continue reading:

"This Case is too well known to require more than a partial summary of
particulars"...

"Ahem! we will skip the particulars, however partial," said Mr. Thompson.
"Ah!--what do you mean here, sir,--but enough! I think we may be excused
your Legal Considerations on such a Case. This is how you employ your
law-studies, sir! You put them to this purpose? Mr. Beazley! you will
henceforward sit alone. I must have this young man under my own eye. Sir
Austin! permit me to apologize to you for subjecting you to a scene so
disagreeable. It was a father's duty not to spare him."

Mr. Thompson wiped his forehead, as Brutes might have done after passing
judgment on the scion of his house.

"These papers," he went on, fluttering Ripton's precious lucubrations in
a waving judicial hand, "I shall retain. The day will come when he will
regard them with shame. And it shall be his penance, his punishment, to
do so! Stop!" he cried, as Ripton was noiselessly shutting his desk,
"have you more of them, sir; of a similar description? Rout them out! Let
us know you at your worst. What have you there--in that corner?"

Ripton was understood to say he devoted that corner to old briefs on
important cases.

Mr. Thompson thrust his trembling fingers among the old briefs, and
turned over the volume Sir Austin had observed, but without much
remarking it, for his suspicions had not risen to print.

"A Manual of Heraldry?" the baronet politely, and it may be ironically,
inquired, before it could well escape.

"I like it very much," said Ripton, clutching the book in dreadful
torment.

"Allow me to see that you have our arms and crest correct." The baronet
proffered a hand for the book.

"A Griffin between two Wheatsheaves," cried Ripton, still clutching it
nervously.

Mr. Thompson, without any notion of what he was doing, drew the book from
Ripton's hold; whereupon the two seniors laid their grey heads together
over the title-page. It set forth in attractive characters beside a
coloured frontispiece, which embodied the promise displayed there, the
entrancing adventures of Miss Random, a strange young lady.

Had there been a Black Hole within the area of those law regions to
consign Ripton to there and then, or an Iron Rod handy to mortify his
sinful flesh, Mr. Thompson would have used them. As it was, he contented
himself by looking Black Holes and Iron Rods at the detected youth, who
sat on his perch insensible to what might happen next, collapsed.

Mr. Thompson cast the wicked creature down with a "Pah!" He, however,
took her up again, and strode away with her. Sir Austin gave Ripton a
forefinger, and kindly touched his head, saying, "Good-bye, boy! At some
future date Richard will be happy to see you at Raynham."

Undoubtedly this was a great triumph to the System!




CHAPTER XVII

The conversation between solicitor and client was resumed.

"Is it possible," quoth Mr. Thompson, the moment he had ushered his
client into his private room, "that you will consent, Sir Austin, to see
him and receive him again?"

"Certainly," the baronet replied. "Why not? This by no means astonishes
me. When there is no longer danger to my son he will be welcome as he was
before. He is a schoolboy. I knew it. I expected it. The results of your
principle, Thompson!"

"One of the very worst books of that abominable class!" exclaimed the old
lawyer, opening at the coloured frontispiece, from which brazen Miss
Random smiled bewitchingly out, as if she had no doubt of captivating
Time and all his veterans on a fair field. "Pah!" he shut her to with the
energy he would have given to the office of publicly slapping her face;
"from this day I diet him on bread and water--rescind his
pocket-money!--How he could have got hold of such a book! How he--! And
what ideas! Concealing them from me as he has done so cunningly! He
trifles with vice! His mind is in a putrid state! I might have
believed--I did believe--I might have gone on believing--my son Ripton to
be a moral young man!" The old lawyer interjected on the delusion of
fathers, and sat down in a lamentable abstraction.

"The lad has come out!" said Sir Austin. "His adoption of the legal form
is amusing. He trifles with vice, true: people newly initiated are as
hardy as its intimates, and a young sinner's amusements will resemble
those of a confirmed debauchee. The satiated, and the insatiate, appetite
alike appeal to extremes. You are astonished at this revelation of your
son's condition. I expected it; though assuredly, believe me, not this
sudden and indisputable proof of it. But I knew that the seed was in him,
and therefore I have not latterly invited him to Raynham. School, and the
corruption there, will bear its fruits sooner or later. I could advise
you, Thompson, what to do with him: it would be my plan."

Mr. Thompson murmured, like a true courtier, that he should esteem it an
honour to be favoured with Sir Austin Feverel's advice: secretly
resolute, like a true Briton, to follow his own.

"Let him, then," continued the baronet, "see vice in its nakedness. While
he has yet some innocence, nauseate him! Vice, taken little by little,
usurps gradually the whole creature. My counsel to you, Thompson, would
be, to drag him through the sinks of town."

Mr. Thompson began to blink again.

"Oh, I shall punish him, Sir Austin! Do not fear me, air. I have no
tenderness for vice."

"That is not what is wanted, Thompson. You mistake me. He should be dealt
with gently. Heavens! do you hope to make him hate vice by making him a
martyr for its sake? You must descend from the pedestal of age to become
his Mentor: cause him to see how certainly and pitilessly vice itself
punishes: accompany him into its haunts"--

"Over town?" broke forth Mr. Thompson.

"Over town," said the baronet.

"And depend upon it," he added, "that, until fathers act thoroughly up to
their duty, we shall see the sights we see in great cities, and hear the
tales we hear in little villages, with death and calamity in our homes,
and a legacy of sorrow and shame to the generations to come. I do aver,"
he exclaimed, becoming excited, "that, if it were not for the duty to my
son, and the hope I cherish in him, I, seeing the accumulation of misery
we are handing down to an innocent posterity--to whom, through our sin,
the fresh breath of life will be foul--I--yes! I would hide my name! For
whither are we tending? What home is pure absolutely? What cannot our
doctors and lawyers tell us?"

Mr. Thompson acquiesced significantly.

"And what is to come of this?" Sir Austin continued. "When the sins of
the fathers are multiplied by the sons, is not perdition the final sum of
things? And is not life, the boon of heaven, growing to be the devil's
game utterly? But for my son, I would hide my name. I would not bequeath
it to be cursed by them that walk above my grave!"

This was indeed a terrible view of existence. Mr. Thompson felt uneasy.
There was a dignity in his client, an impressiveness in his speech, that
silenced remonstrating reason and the cry of long years of comfortable
respectability. Mr. Thompson went to church regularly; paid his rates and
dues without overmuch, or at least more than common, grumbling. On the
surface he was a good citizen, fond of his children, faithful to his
wife, devoutly marching to a fair seat in heaven on a path paved by
something better than a thousand a year. But here was a man sighting him
from below the surface, and though it was an unfair, unaccustomed, not to
say un-English, method of regarding one's fellow-man, Mr. Thompson was
troubled by it. What though his client exaggerated? Facts were at the
bottom of what he said. And he was acute--he had unmasked Ripton! Since
Ripton's exposure he winced at a personal application in the text his
client preached from. Possibly this was the secret source of part of his
anger against that peccant youth.

Mr. Thompson shook his head, and, with dolefully puckered visage and a
pitiable contraction of his shoulders, rose slowly up from his chair.
Apparently he was about to speak, but he straightway turned and went
meditatively to a side-recess in the room, whereof he opened a door, drew
forth a tray and a decanter labelled Port, filled a glass for his client,
deferentially invited him to partake of it; filled another glass for
himself, and drank.

That was his reply.

Sir Austin never took wine before dinner. Thompson had looked as if he
meant to speak: he waited for Thompson's words.

Mr. Thompson saw that, as his client did not join him in his glass, the
eloquence of that Porty reply was lost on his client.

Having slowly ingurgitated and meditated upon this precious draught, and
turned its flavour over and over with an aspect of potent Judicial wisdom
(one might have thought that he was weighing mankind m the balance), the
old lawyer heaved, and said, sharpening his lips over the admirable
vintage, "The world is in a very sad state, I fear, Sir Austin!"

His client gazed at him queerly.

"But that," Mr. Thompson added immediately, ill-concealing by his gaze
the glowing intestinal congratulations going on within him, "that is, I
think you would say, Sir Austin--if I could but prevail upon you--a
tolerably good character wine!"

"There's virtue somewhere, I see, Thompson!" Sir Austin murmured, without
disturbing his legal adviser's dimples.

The old lawyer sat down to finish his glass, saying, that such a wine was
not to be had everywhere.

They were then outwardly silent for a apace. Inwardly one of them was
full of riot and jubilant uproar: as if the solemn fields of law were
suddenly to be invaded and possessed by troops of Bacchanals: and to
preserve a decently wretched physiognomy over it, and keep on terms with
his companion, he had to grimace like a melancholy clown in a pantomime.

Mr. Thompson brushed back his hair. The baronet was still expectant. Mr.
Thompson sighed deeply, and emptied his glass. He combated the change
that had come over him. He tried not to see Ruby. He tried to feel
miserable, and it was not in him. He spoke, drawing what appropriate
inspirations he could from his client's countenance, to show that they
had views in common: "Degenerating sadly, I fear!"

The baronet nodded.

"According to what my wine-merchants say," continued Mr. Thompson, "there
can be no doubt about it."

Sir Austin stared.

"It's the grape, or the ground, or something," Mr. Thompson went on. "All
I can say is, our youngsters will have a bad look-out! In my opinion
Government should be compelled to send out a Commission to inquire into
the cause. To Englishmen it would be a public calamity. It surprises
me--I hear men sit and talk despondently of this extraordinary disease of
the vine, and not one of them seems to think it incumbent on him to act,
and do his best to stop it." He fronted his client like a man who accuses
an enormous public delinquency. "Nobody makes a stir! The apathy of
Englishmen will become proverbial. Pray, try it, Sir Austin! Pray, allow
me. Such a wine cannot disagree at any hour. Do! I am allowanced two
glasses three hours before dinner. Stomachic. I find it agree with me
surprisingly: quite a new man. I suppose it will last our time. It must!
What should we do? There's no Law possible without it. Not a lawyer of us
could live. Ours is an occupation which dries the blood."

The scene with Ripton had unnerved him, the wine had renovated, and
gratitude to the wine inspired his tongue. He thought that his client, of
the whimsical mind, though undoubtedly correct moral views, had need of a
glass.

"Now that very wine--Sir Austin--I think I do not err in saying, that
very wine your respected father, Sir Pylcher Feverel, used to taste
whenever he came to consult my father, when I was a boy. And I remember
one day being called in, and Sir Pylcher himself poured me out a glass. I
wish I could call in Ripton now, and do the same. No! Leniency in such a
case as that!--The wine would not hurt him--I doubt if there be much left
for him to welcome his guests with. Ha! ha! Now if I could persuade you,
Sir Austin, as you do not take wine before dinner, some day to favour me
with your company at my little country cottage I have a wine there--the
fellow to that--I think you would, I do think you would"--Mr. Thompson
meant to say, he thought his client would arrive at something of a
similar jocund contemplation of his fellows in their degeneracy that
inspirited lawyers after potation, but condensed the sensual promise into
"highly approve."

Sir Austin speculated on his legal adviser with a sour mouth comically
compressed.

It stood clear to him that Thompson before his Port, and Thompson after,
were two different men. To indoctrinate him now was too late: it was
perhaps the time to make the positive use of him he wanted.

He pencilled on a handy slip of paper: "Two prongs of a fork; the World
stuck between them--Port and the Palate: 'Tis one which fails first--Down
goes World;" and again the hieroglyph--"Port-spectacles." He said, "I
shall gladly accompany you this evening, Thompson," words that
transfigured the delighted lawyer, and ensigned the skeleton of a great
Aphorism to his pocket, there to gather flesh and form, with numberless
others in a like condition.

"I came to visit my lawyer," he said to himself. "I think I have been
dealing with The World in epitome!"




CHAPTER XVIII

The rumour circulated that Sir Austin Feverel, the recluse of Raynham,
the rank misogynist, the rich baronet, was in town, looking out a bride
for his only son and uncorrupted heir. Doctor Benjamin Bairam was the
excellent authority. Doctor Bairam had safely delivered Mrs. Deborah
Gossip of this interesting bantling, which was forthwith dandled in
dozens of feminine laps. Doctor Bairam could boast the first interview
with the famous recluse. He had it from his own lips that the object of
the baronet was to look out a bride for his only son and uncorrupted
heir; "and," added the doctor, "she'll be lucky who gets him." Which was
interpreted to mean, that he would be a catch; the doctor probably
intending to allude to certain extraordinary difficulties in the way of a
choice.

A demand was made on the publisher of The Pilgrim's Scrip for all his
outstanding copies. Conventionalities were defied. A summer-shower of
cards fell on the baronet's table.

He had few male friends. He shunned the Clubs as nests of scandal. The
cards he contemplated were mostly those of the sex, with the husband, if
there was a husband, evidently dragged in for propriety's sake. He
perused the cards and smiled. He knew their purpose. What terrible light
Thompson and Bairam had thrown on some of them! Heavens! in what a state
was the blood of this Empire.

Before commencing his campaign he called on two ancient intimates, Lord
Heddon, and his distant cousin Darley Absworthy, both Members of
Parliament, useful men, though gouty, who had sown in their time a fine
crop of wild oats, and advocated the advantage of doing so, seeing that
they did not fancy themselves the worse for it. He found one with an
imbecile son and the other with consumptive daughters. "So much," he
wrote in the Note-book, "for the Wild Oats theory!"

Darley was proud of his daughters' white and pink skins. "Beautiful
complexions," he called them. The eldest was in the market, immensely
admired. Sir Austin was introduced to her. She talked fluently and
sweetly. A youth not on his guard, a simple school-boy youth, or even a
man, might have fallen in love with her, she was so affable and fair.
There was something poetic about her. And she was quite well, she said,
the baronet frequently questioning her on that point. She intimated that
she was robust; but towards the close of their conversation her hand
would now and then travel to her side, and she breathed painfully an
instant, saying, "Isn't it odd? Dora, Adela, and myself, we all feel the
same queer sensation--about the heart, I think it is--after talking
much."

Sir Austin nodded and blinked sadly, exclaiming to his soul, "Wild oats!
wild oats!"

He did not ask permission to see Dora and Adela.

Lord Heddon vehemently preached wild oats.

"It's all nonsense, Feverel," he said, "about bringing up a lad out of
the common way. He's all the better for a little racketing when he's
green--feels his bone and muscle learns to know the world. He'll never be
a man if he hasn't played at the old game one time in his life, and the
earlier the better. I've always found the best fellows were wildish once.
I don't care what he does when he's a green-horn; besides, he's got an
excuse for it then. You can't expect to have a man, if he doesn't take a
man's food. You'll have a milksop. And, depend upon it, when he does
break out he'll go to the devil, and nobody pities him. Look what those
fellows the grocers, do when they get hold of a young--what d'ye call
'em?--apprentice. They know the scoundrel was born with a sweet tooth.
Well! they give him the run of the shop, and in a very short time he
soberly deals out the goods, a devilish deal too wise to abstract a
morsel even for the pleasure of stealing. I know you have contrary
theories. You hold that the young grocer should have a soul above sugar.
It won't do! Take my word for it, Feverel, it's a dangerous experiment,
that of bringing up flesh and blood in harness. No colt will bear it, or
he's a tame beast. And look you: take it on medical grounds. Early
excesses the frame will recover from: late ones break the constitution.
There's the case in a nutshell. How's your son?"

"Sound and well!" replied Sir Austin. "And yours?"

"Oh, Lipscombe's always the same!" Lord Heddon sighed peevishly. "He's
quiet--that's one good thing; but there's no getting the country to take
him, so I must give up hopes of that."

Lord Lipscombe entering the room just then, Sir Austin surveyed him, and
was not astonished at the refusal of the country to take him.

"Wild oats!" he thought, as he contemplated the headless, degenerate,
weedy issue and result.

Both Darley Absworthy and Lord Heddon spoke of the marriage of their
offspring as a matter of course. "And if I were not a coward," Sir Austin
confessed to himself, "I should stand forth and forbid the banns! This
universal ignorance of the inevitable consequence of sin is frightful!
The wild oats plea is a torpedo that seems to have struck the world, and
rendered it morally insensible." However, they silenced him. He was
obliged to spare their feelings on a subject to him so deeply sacred. The
healthful image of his noble boy rose before him, a triumphant living
rejoinder to any hostile argument.

He was content to remark to his doctor, that he thought the third
generation of wild oats would be a pretty thin crop!

Families against whom neither Thompson lawyer nor Bairam physician could
recollect a progenitorial blot, either on the male or female side, were
not numerous. "Only," said the doctors "you really must not be too
exacting in these days, my dear Sir Austin. It is impossible to contest
your principle, and you are doing mankind incalculable service in calling
its attention to this the gravest of its duties: but as the stream of
civilization progresses we must be a little taken in the lump, as it
were. The world is, I can assure you--and I do not look only above the
surface, you can believe--the world is awakening to the vital importance
of the question."

"Doctor," replied Sir Austin, "if you had a pure-blood Arab barb would
you cross him with a screw?"

"Decidedly not," said the doctor.

"Then permit me to say, I shall employ every care to match my son
according to his merits," Sir Austin returned. "I trust the world is
awakening, as you observe. I have been to my publisher, since my arrival
in town, with a manuscript 'Proposal for a New System of Education of our
British Youth,' which may come in opportunely. I think I am entitled to
speak on that subject."

"Certainly," said the doctor. "You will admit, Sir Austin, that, compared
with continental nations--our neighbours, for instance--we shine to
advantage, in morals, as in everything else. I hope you admit that?"

"I find no consolation in shining by comparison with a lower standard,"
said the baronet. "If I compare the enlightenment of your views--for you
admit my principle--with the obstinate incredulity of a country doctor's,
who sees nothing of the world, you are hardly flattered, I presume?"

Doctor Bairam would hardly be flattered at such a comparison, assuredly,
he interjected.

"Besides," added the baronet, "the French make no pretences, and thereby
escape one of the main penalties of hypocrisy. Whereas we!--but I am not
their advocate, credit me. It is better, perhaps, to pay our homage to
virtue. At least it delays the spread of entire corruptness."

Doctor Bairam wished the baronet success, and diligently endeavoured to
assist his search for a mate worthy of the pure-blood barb, by putting
several mamas, whom he visited, on the alert.




CHAPTER XIX

Away with Systems! Away with a corrupt World! Let us breathe the air of
the Enchanted Island.

Golden lie the meadows: golden run the streams; red gold is on the
pine-stems. The sun is coming down to earth, and walks the fields and the
waters.

The sun is coming down to earth, and the fields and the waters shout to
him golden shouts. He comes, and his heralds run before him, and touch
the leaves of oaks and planes and beeches lucid green, and the pine-stems
redder gold; leaving brightest footprints upon thickly-weeded banks,
where the foxglove's last upper-bells incline, and bramble-shoots wander
amid moist rich herbage. The plumes of the woodland are alight; and
beyond them, over the open, 'tis a race with the long-thrown shadows; a
race across the heaths and up the hills, till, at the farthest bourne of
mounted eastern cloud, the heralds of the sun lay rosy fingers and rest.

Sweet are the shy recesses of the woodland. The ray treads softly there.
A film athwart the pathway quivers many-hued against purple shade
fragrant with warm pines, deep moss-beds, feathery ferns. The little
brown squirrel drops tail, and leaps; the inmost bird is startled to a
chance tuneless note. From silence into silence things move.

Peeps of the revelling splendour above and around enliven the conscious
full heart within. The flaming West, the crimson heights, shower their
glories through voluminous leafage. But these are bowers where deep bliss
dwells, imperial joy, that owes no fealty to yonder glories, in which the
young lamb gambols and the spirits of men are glad. Descend, great
Radiance! embrace creation with beneficent fire, and pass from us! You
and the vice-regal light that succeeds to you, and all heavenly pageants,
are the ministers and the slaves of the throbbing content within.

For this is the home of the enchantment. Here, secluded from vexed
shores, the prince and princess of the island meet: here like darkling
nightingales they sit, and into eyes and ears and hands pour endless
ever-fresh treasures of their souls.

Roll on, grinding wheels of the world: cries of ships going down in a
calm, groans of a System which will not know its rightful hour of
exultation, complain to the universe. You are not heard here.

He calls her by her name, Lucy: and she, blushing at her great boldness,
has called him by his, Richard. Those two names are the key-notes of the
wonderful harmonies the angels sing aloft.

"Lucy! my beloved!"

"O Richard!"

Out in the world there, on the skirts of the woodland, a sheep-boy pipes
to meditative eve on a penny-whistle.

Love's musical instrument is as old, and as poor: it has but two stops;
and yet, you see, the cunning musician does thus much with it!

Other speech they have little; light foam playing upon waves of feeling,
and of feeling compact, that bursts only when the sweeping volume is too
wild, and is no more than their sigh of tenderness spoken.

Perhaps love played his tune so well because their natures had unblunted
edges, and were keen for bliss, confiding in it as natural food. To
gentlemen and ladies he fine-draws upon the viol, ravishingly; or blows
into the mellow bassoon; or rouses the heroic ardours of the trumpet; or,
it may be, commands the whole Orchestra for them. And they are pleased.
He is still the cunning musician. They languish, and taste ecstasy: but
it is, however sonorous, an earthly concert. For them the spheres move
not to two notes. They have lost, or forfeited and never known, the first
super-sensual spring of the ripe senses into passion; when they carry the
soul with them, and have the privileges of spirits to walk disembodied,
boundlessly to feel. Or one has it, and the other is a dead body.
Ambrosia let them eat, and drink the nectar: here sit a couple to whom
Love's simple bread and water is a finer feast.

Pipe, happy sheep-bop, Love! Irradiated angels, unfold your wings and
lift your voices!

They have out-flown philosophy. Their instinct has shot beyond the ken of
science. They were made for their Eden.

"And this divine gift was in store for me!"

So runs the internal outcry of each, clasping each: it is their recurring
refrain to the harmonies. How it illumined the years gone by and suffused
the living Future!

"You for me: I for you!"

"We are born for each other!"

They believe that the angels have been busy about them from their
cradles. The celestial hosts have worthily striven to bring them
together. And, O victory! O wonder! after toil and pain, and difficulties
exceeding, the celestial hosts have succeeded!

"Here we two sit who are written above as one!"

Pipe, happy Love! pipe on to these dear innocents!

The tide of colour has ebbed from the upper sky. In the West the sea of
sunken fire draws back; and the stars leap forth, and tremble, and retire
before the advancing moon, who slips the silver train of cloud from her
shoulders, and, with her foot upon the pine-tops, surveys heaven.

"Lucy, did you never dream of meeting me?"

"O Richard! yes; for I remembered you."

"Lucy! and did you pray that we might meet?"

"I did!"

Young as when she looked upon the lovers in Paradise, the fair Immortal
journeys onward. Fronting her, it is not night but veiled day. Full half
the sky is flushed. Not darkness, not day, but the nuptials of the two.

"My own! my own for ever! You are pledged to me? Whisper!"

He hears the delicious music.

"And you are mine?"

A soft beam travels to the fern-covert under the pinewood where they sit,
and for answer he has her eyes turned to him an instant, timidly
fluttering over the depths of his, and then downcast; for through her
eyes her soul is naked to him.

"Lucy! my bride! my life!"

The night-jar spins his dark monotony on the branch of the pine. The soft
beam travels round them, and listens to their hearts. Their lips are
locked.

Pipe no more, Love, for a time! Pipe as you will you cannot express their
first kiss; nothing of its sweetness, and of the sacredness of it
nothing. St. Cecilia up aloft, before the silver organ-pipes of Paradise,
pressing fingers upon all the notes of which Love is but one, from her
you may hear it.

So Love is silent. Out in the world there, on the skirts of the woodland,
the self-satisfied sheep-boy delivers a last complacent squint down the
length of his penny-whistle, and, with a flourish correspondingly awry,
he also marches into silence, hailed by supper. The woods are still.
There is heard but the night-jar spinning on the pine-branch, circled by
moonlight.




CHAPTER XX

Enchanted Islands have not yet rooted out their old brood of dragons.
Wherever there is romance, these monsters come by inimical attraction.
Because the heavens are certainly propitious to true lovers, the beasts
of the abysses are banded to destroy them, stimulated by innumerable sad
victories; and every love-tale is an Epic Par of the upper and lower
powers. I wish good fairies were a little more active. They seem to be
cajoled into security by the happiness of their favourites; whereas the
wicked are always alert, and circumspect. They let the little ones shut
their eyes to fancy they are not seen, and then commence.

These appointments and meetings, involving a start from the dinner-table
at the hour of contemplative digestion and prime claret; the hour when
the wise youth Adrian delighted to talk at his ease--to recline in dreamy
consciousness that a work of good was going on inside him; these
abstractions from his studies, excesses of gaiety, and glumness, heavings
of the chest, and other odd signs, but mainly the disgusting behaviour of
his pupil at the dinner-table, taught Adrian to understand, though the
young gentleman was clever in excuses, that he had somehow learnt there
was another half to the divided Apple of Creation, and had embarked upon
the great voyage of discovery of the difference between the two halves.
With his usual coolness Adrian debated whether he might be in the
observatory or the practical stage of the voyage. For himself, as a man
and a philosopher, Adrian had no objection to its being either; and he
had only to consider which was temporarily most threatening to the
ridiculous System he had to support. Richard's absence annoyed him. The
youth was vivacious, and his enthusiasm good fun; and besides, when he
left table, Adrian had to sit alone with Hippias and the Eighteenth
Century, from both of whom he had extracted all the amusement that could
be got, and he saw his digestion menaced by the society of two ruined
stomachs, who bored him just when he loved himself most. Poor Hippias was
now so reduced that he had profoundly to calculate whether a particular
dish, or an extra-glass of wine, would have a bitter effect on him and be
felt through the remainder of his years. He was in the habit of uttering
his calculations half aloud, wherein the prophetic doubts of experience,
and the succulent insinuations of appetite, contended hotly. It was
horrible to hear him, so let us pardon Adrian for tempting him to a
decision in favour of the moment.

"Happy to take wine with you," Adrian would say, and Hippias would regard
the decanter with a pained forehead, and put up the doctor.

"Drink, nephew Hippy, and think of the doctor to-morrow!" the Eighteenth
Century cheerily ruffles her cap at him, and recommends her own practice.

"It's this literary work!" interjects Hippias, handling his glass of
remorse. "I don't know what else it can be. You have no idea how anxious
I feel. I have frightful dreams. I'm perpetually anxious."

"No wonder," says Adrian, who enjoys the childish simplicity to which an
absorbed study of his sensational existence has brought poor Hippias. "No
wonder. Ten years of Fairy Mythology! Could anyone hope to sleep in peace
after that? As to your digestion, no one has a digestion who is in the
doctor's hands. They prescribe from dogmas, and don't count on the
system. They have cut you down from two bottles to two glasses. It's
absurd. You can't sleep, because your system is crying out for what it's
accustomed to."

Hippias sips his Madeira with a niggerdly confidence, but assures Adrian
that he really should not like to venture on a bottle now: it would be
rank madness to venture on a bottle now, he thinks. Last night only,
after partaking, under protest, of that rich French dish, or was it the
duck?--Adrian advised him to throw the blame on that vulgar bird.--Say
the duck, then. Last night, he was no sooner stretched in bed, than he
seemed to be of an enormous size all his limbs--his nose, his mouth, his
toes--were elephantine! An elephant was a pigmy to him. And his
hugeousness seemed to increase the instant he shut his eyes. He turned on
this side; he turned on that. He lay on his back; he tried putting his
face to the pillow; and he continued to swell. He wondered the room could
hold him--he thought he must burst it--and absolutely lit a candle, and
went to the looking-glass to see whether he was bearable.

By this time Adrian and Richard were laughing uncontrollably. He had,
however, a genial auditor in the Eighteenth Century, who declared it to
be a new disease, not known in her day, and deserving investigation. She
was happy to compare sensations with him, but hers were not of the
complex order, and a potion soon righted her. In fact, her system
appeared to be a debatable ground for aliment and medicine, on which the
battle was fought, and, when over, she was none the worse, as she
joyfully told Hippias. Never looked ploughman on prince, or village belle
on Court Beauty, with half the envy poor nineteenth-century Hippias
expended in his gaze on the Eighteenth. He was too serious to note much
the laughter of the young men.

This 'Tragedy of a Cooking-Apparatus,' as Adrian designated the malady of
Hippias, was repeated regularly ever evening. It was natural for any
youth to escape as quick as he could from such a table of stomachs.

Adrian bore with his conduct considerately, until a letter from the
baronet, describing the house and maternal System of a Mrs. Caroline
Grandison, and the rough grain of hopefulness in her youngest daughter,
spurred him to think of his duties, and see what was going on. He gave
Richard half-an-hour's start, and then put on his hat to follow his own
keen scent, leaving Hippias and the Eighteenth Century to piquet.

In the lane near Belthorpe he met a maid of the farm not unknown to him,
one Molly Davenport by name, a buxom lass, who, on seeing him, invoked
her Good Gracious, the generic maid's familiar, and was instructed by
reminiscences vivid, if ancient, to giggle.

"Are you looking for your young gentleman?" Molly presently asked.

Adrian glanced about the lane like a cool brigand, to see if the coast
was clear, and replied to her, "I am, miss. I want you to tell me about
him."

"Dear!" said the buxom lass, "was you coming for me to-night to know?"

Adrian rebuked her: for her bad grammar, apparently.

"'Cause I can't stop out long to-night," Molly explained, taking the
rebuke to refer altogether to her bad grammar.

"You may go in when you please, miss. Is that any one coming? Come here
in the shade."

"Now, get along!" said Miss Molly.

Adrian spoke with resolution. "Listen to me, Molly Davenport!" He put a
coin in her hand, which had a medical effect in calming her to attention.
"I want to know whether you have seen him at all?"

"Who? Your young gentleman? I sh'd think I did. I seen him to-night only.
Ain't he grooved handsome. He's al'ays about Beltharp now. It ain't to
fire no more ricks. He's afire 'unself. Ain't you seen 'em together? He's
after the missis"--

Adrian requested Miss Davenport to be respectful, and confine herself to
particulars. This buxom lass then told him that her young missis and
Adrian's young gentleman were a pretty couple, and met one another every
night. The girl swore for their innocence.

"As for Miss Lucy, she haven't a bit of art in her, nor have he."

"They're all nature, I suppose," said Adrian. "How is it I don't see her
at church?"

"She's Catholic, or some think," said Molly. "Her father was, and a
leftenant. She've a Cross in her bedroom. She don't go to church. I see
you there last Sunday a-lookin' so solemn," and Molly stroked her hand
down her chin to give it length.

Adrian insisted on her keeping to facts. It was dark, and in the dark he
was indifferent to the striking contrasts suggested by the lass, but he
wanted to hear facts, and he again bribed her to impart nothing but
facts. Upon which she told him further, that her young lady was an
innocent artless creature who had been to school upwards of three years
with the nuns, and had a little money of her own, and was beautiful
enough to be a lord's lady, and had been in love with Master Richard ever
since she was a little girl. Molly had got from a friend of hers up at
the Abbey, Mary Garner, the housemaid who cleaned Master Richard's room,
a bit of paper once with the young gentleman's handwriting, and had given
it to her Miss Lucy, and Miss Lucy had given her a gold sovereign for
it--just for his handwriting! Miss Lucy did not seem happy at the farm,
because of that young Tom, who was always leering at her, and to be sure
she was quite a lady, and could play, and sing, and dress with the best.

"She looks like angels in her nightgown!" Molly wound up.

The next moment she ran up close, and speaking for the first time as if
there were a distinction of position between them, petitioned: "Mr.
Harley! you won't go for doin' any harm to 'em 'cause of what I said,
will you now? Do say you won't now, Mr. Harley! She is good, though she's
a Catholic. She was kind to me when I was ill, and I wouldn't have her
crossed--I'd rather be showed up myself, I would!"

The wise youth gave no positive promise to Molly, and she had to read his
consent in a relaxation of his austerity. The noise of a lumbering foot
plodding down the lane caused her to be abruptly dismissed. Molly took to
flight, the lumbering foot accelerated its pace, and the pastoral appeal
to her flying skirts was heard--"Moll! you theyre! It be I--Bantam!" But
the sprightly Silvia would not stop to his wooing, and Adrian turned away
laughing at these Arcadians.

Adrian was a lazy dragon. All he did for the present was to hint and
tease. "It's the Inevitable!" he said, and asked himself why he should
seek to arrest it. He had no faith in the System. Heavy Benson had.
Benson of the slow thick-lidded antediluvian eye and loose-crumpled skin;
Benson, the Saurian, the woman-hater; Benson was wide awake. A sort of
rivalry existed between the wise youth and heavy Benson. The fidelity of
the latter dependant had moved the baronet to commit to him a portion of
the management of the Raynham estate, and this Adrian did not like. No
one who aspires to the honourable office of leading another by the nose
can tolerate a party in his ambition. Benson's surly instinct told him he
was in the wise youth's way, and he resolved to give his master a
striking proof of his superior faithfulness. For some weeks the Saurian
eye had been on the two secret creatures. Heavy Benson saw letters come
and go in the day, and now the young gentleman was off and out every
night, and seemed to be on wings. Benson knew whither he went, and the
object he went for. It was a woman--that was enough. The Saurian eye had
actually seen the sinful thing lure the hope of Raynham into the shades.
He composed several epistles of warning to the baronet of the work that
was going on; but before sending one he wished to record a little of
their guilty conversation; and for this purpose the faithful fellow
trotted over the dews to eavesdrop, and thereby aroused the good fairy,
in the person of Tom Bakewell, the sole confidant of Richard's state.

Tom said to his young master, "Do you know what, sir? You be watched!"

Richard, in a fury, bade him name the wretch, and Tom hung his arms, and
aped the respectable protrusion of the butler's head.

"It's he, is it?" cried Richard. "He shall rue it, Tom. If I find him
near me when we're together he shall never forget it."

"Don't hit too hard, sir," Tom suggested. "You hit mortal hard when
you're in earnest, you know."

Richard averred he would forgive anything but that, and told Tom to be
within hail to-morrow night--he knew where. By the hour of the
appointment it was out of the lover's mind.

Lady Blandish dined that evening at Raynham, by Adrian's pointed
invitation. According to custom, Richard started up and off, with few
excuses. The lady exhibited no surprise. She and Adrian likewise strolled
forth to enjoy the air of the Summer night. They had no intention of
spying. Still they may have thought, by meeting Richard and his
inamorata, there was a chance of laying a foundation of ridicule to sap
the passion. They may have thought so--they were on no spoken
understanding.

"I have seen the little girl," said Lady Blandish. "She is pretty--she
would be telling if she were well set up. She speaks well. How absurd it
is of that class to educate their women above their station! The child is
really too good for a farmer. I noticed her before I knew of this; she
has enviable hair. I suppose she doesn't paint her eyelids. Just the sort
of person to take a young man. I thought there was something wrong. I
received, the day before yesterday, an impassioned poem evidently not
intended for me. My hair was gold. My meeting him was foretold. My eyes
were homes of light fringed with night. I sent it back, correcting the
colours."

"Which was death to the rhymes," said Adrian. "I saw her this morning.
The boy hasn't bad taste. As you say, she is too good for a farmer. Such
a spark would explode any System. She slightly affected mine. The Huron
is stark mad about her."

"But we must positively write and tell his father," said Lady Blandish.

The wise youth did not see why they should exaggerate a trifle. The lady
said she would have an interview with Richard, and then write, as it was
her duty to do. Adrian shrugged, and was for going into the scientific
explanation of Richard's conduct, in which the lady had to discourage
him.

"Poor boy!" she sighed. "I am really sorry for him. I hope he will not
feel it too strongly. They feel strongly, father and son."

"And select wisely," Adrian added.

"That's another thing," said Lady Blandish.

Their talk was then of the dulness of neighbouring county people, about
whom, it seemed, there was little or no scandal afloat: of the lady's
loss of the season in town, which she professed not to regret, though she
complained of her general weariness: of whether Mr. Morton of Poer Hall
would propose to Mrs. Doria, and of the probable despair of the hapless
curate of Lobourne; and other gossip, partly in French.

They rounded the lake, and got upon the road through the park to
Lobourne. The moon had risen. The atmosphere was warm and pleasant.

"Quite a lover's night," said Lady Blandish.

"And I, who have none to love pity me!" The wise youth attempted a sigh.

"And never will have," said Lady Blandish, curtly. "You buy your loves."

Adrian protested. However, he did not plead verbally against the
impeachment, though the lady's decisive insight astonished him. He began
to respect her, relishing her exquisite contempt, and he reflected that
widows could be terrible creatures.

He had hoped to be a little sentimental with Lady Blandish, knowing her
romantic. This mixture of the harshest common sense and an air of "I know
you men," with romance and refined temperament, subdued the wise youth
more than a positive accusation supported by witnesses would have done.
He looked at the lady. Her face was raised to the moon. She knew
nothing--she had simply spoken from the fulness of her human knowledge,
and had forgotten her words. Perhaps, after all, her admiration, or
whatever feeling it was, for the baronet, was sincere, and really the
longing for a virtuous man. Perhaps she had tried the opposite set pretty
much. Adrian shrugged. Whenever the wise youth encountered a mental
difficulty he instinctively lifted his shoulders to equal altitudes, to
show that he had no doubt there was a balance in the case--plenty to be
said on both sides, which was the same to him as a definite solution.

At their tryst in the wood, abutting on Raynham Park, wrapped in
themselves, piped to by tireless Love, Richard and Lucy sat, toying with
eternal moments. How they seem as if they would never end! What mere
sparks they are when they have died out! And how in the distance of time
they revive, and extend, and glow, and make us think them full the half,
and the best of the fire, of our lives!

With the onward flow of intimacy, the two happy lovers ceased to be so
shy of common themes, and their speech did not reject all as dross that
was not pure gold of emotion.

Lucy was very inquisitive about everything and everybody at Raynham.
Whoever had been about Richard since his birth, she must know the history
of, and he for a kiss will do her bidding.

Thus goes the tender duet:

"You should know my cousin Austin, Lucy.--Darling! Beloved!"

"My own! Richard!"

"You should know my cousin Austin. You shall know him. He would take to
you best of them all, and you to him. He is in the tropics now, looking
out a place--it's a secret--for poor English working-men to emigrate to
and found a colony in that part of the world:--my white angel!"

"Dear love!"

"He is such a noble fellow! Nobody here understands him but me. Isn't it
strange? Since I met you I love him better! That's because I love all
that's good and noble better now--Beautiful! I love--I love you!"

"My Richard!"

"What do you think I've determined, Lucy? If my father--but no! my father
does love me.--No! he will not; and we will be happy together here. And I
will win my way with you. And whatever I win will be yours; for it will
be owing to you. I feel as if I had no strength but yours--none! and you
make me--O Lucy!"

His voice ebbs. Presently Lucy murmurs--

"Your father, Richard."

"Yes, my father?"

"Dearest Richard! I feel so afraid of him."

"He loves me, and will love you, Lucy."

"But I am so poor and humble, Richard."

"No one I have ever seen is like you, Lucy."

"You think so, because you"--

"What?"

"Love me," comes the blushing whisper, and the duet gives place to dumb
variations, performed equally in concert.

It is resumed.

"You are fond of the knights, Lucy. Austin is as brave as any of
them.--My own bride! Oh, how I adore you! When you are gone, I could fall
upon the grass you tread upon, and kiss it. My breast feels empty of my
heart--Lucy! if we lived in those days, I should have been a knight, and
have won honour and glory for you. Oh! one can do nothing now. My
lady-love! My lady-love!--A tear?--Lucy?"

"Dearest! Ah, Richard! I am not a lady."

"Who dares say that? Not a lady--the angel I love!"

"Think, Richard, who I am."

"My beautiful! I think that God made you, and has given you to me."

Her eyes fill with tears, and, as she lifts them heavenward to thank her
God, the light of heaven strikes on them, and she is so radiant in her
pure beauty that the limbs of the young man tremble.

"Lucy! O heavenly spirit! Lucy!"

Tenderly her lips part--"I do not weep for sorrow,"

The big bright drops lighten, and roll down, imaged in his soul.

They lean together--shadows of ineffable tenderness playing on their
thrilled cheeks and brows.

He lifts her hand, and presses his mouth to it. She has seen little of
mankind, but her soul tells her this one is different from others, and at
the thought, in her great joy, tears must come fast, or her heart will
break--tears of boundless thanksgiving. And he, gazing on those soft,
ray-illumined, dark-edged eyes, and the grace of her loose falling
tresses, feels a scarce-sufferable holy fire streaming through his
members.

It is long ere they speak in open tones.

"O happy day when we met!"

What says the voice of one, the soul of the other echoes.

"O glorious heaven looking down on us!"

Their souls are joined, are made one for evermore beneath that bending
benediction.

"O eternity of bliss!"

Then the diviner mood passes, and they drop to earth.

"Lucy! come with me to-night, and look at the place where you are some
day to live. Come, and I will row you on the lake. You remember what you
said in your letter that you dreamt?--that we were floating over the
shadow of the Abbey to the nuns at work by torchlight felling the
cypress, and they handed us each a sprig. Why, darling, it was the best
omen in the world, their felling the old trees. And you write such lovely
letters. So pure and sweet they are. I love the nuns for having taught
you."

"Ah, Richard! See! we forget! Ah!" she lifts up her face pleadingly, as
to plead against herself, "even if your father forgives my birth, he will
not my religion. And, dearest, though I would die for you I cannot change
it. It would seem that I was denying God; and--oh! it would make me
ashamed of my love."

"Fear nothing!" He winds her about with his arm. "Come! He will love us
both, and love you the more for being faithful to your father's creed.
You don't know him, Lucy. He seems harsh and stern--he is full of
kindness and love. He isn't at all a bigot. And besides, when he hears
what the nuns have done for you, won't he thank them, as I do? And--oh! I
must speak to him soon, and you must be prepared to see him soon, for I
cannot bear your remaining at Belthorpe, like a jewel in a sty. Mind! I'm
not saying a word against your uncle. I declare I love everybody and
everything that sees you and touches you. Stay! it is a wonder how you
could have grown there. But you were not born there, and your father had
good blood. Desborough!--here was a Colonel Desborough--never mind!
Come!"

She dreads to. She begs not to. She is drawn away.

The woods are silent, and then--

"What think you of that for a pretty pastoral?" says a very different
voice.

Adrian reclined against a pine overlooking the fern-covert. Lady Blandish
was recumbent upon the brown pine-droppings, gazing through a vista of
the lower greenwood which opened out upon the moon-lighted valley, her
hands clasped round one knee, her features almost stern in their set hard
expression.

They had heard, by involuntarily overhearing about as much as may be
heard in such positions, a luminous word or two.

The lady did not answer. A movement among the ferns attracted Adrian, and
he stepped down the decline across the pine-roots to behold heavy Benson
below; shaking fern-seed and spidery substances off his crumpled skin.

"Is that you, Mr. Hadrian?" called Benson, starting, as he puffed, and
exercised his handkerchief.

"Is it you, Benson, who have had the audacity to spy upon these
Mysteries?" Adrian called back, and coming close to him, added, "You look
as if you had just been well thrashed."

"Isn't it dreadful, sir?" snuffled Benson. "And his father in ignorance,
Mr. Hadrian!"

"He shall know, Benson! He shall know how, you have endangered your
valuable skin in his service. If Mr. Richard had found you there just now
I wouldn't answer for the consequences."

"Ha!" Benson spitefully retorted. "This won't go on; Mr. Hadrian. It
shan't, sir. It will be put a stop to tomorrow, sir. I call it corruption
of a young gentleman like him, and harlotry, sir, I call it. I'd have
every jade flogged that made a young innocent gentleman go on like that,
sir."

"Then, why didn't you stop it yourself, Benson? Ah, I see! you
waited--what? This is not the first time you have been attendant on
Apollo and Miss Dryope? You have written to headquarters?"

"I did my duty, Mr. Hadrian."

The wise youth returned to Lady Blandish, and informed her of Benson's
zeal. The lady's eyes flashed. "I hope Richard will treat him as he
deserves," she said.

"Shall we home?" Adrian inquired.

"Do me a favour;" the lady replied. "Get my carriage sent round to meet
me at the park-gates."

"Won't you?"--

"I want to be alone."

Adrian bowed and left her. She was still sitting with her hands clasped
round one knee, gazing towards the dim ray-strewn valley.

"An odd creature!" muttered the wise youth. "She's as odd as any of them.
She ought to be a Feverel. I suppose she's graduating for it. Hang that
confounded old ass of a Benson! He has had the impudence to steal a march
on me!"

The shadow of the cypress was lessening on the lake. The moon was
climbing high. As Richard rowed the boat, Lucy, sang to him softly. She
sang first a fresh little French song, reminding him of a day when she
had been asked to sing to him before, and he did not care to hear. "Did I
live?" he thinks. Then she sang to him a bit of one of those majestic old
Gregorian chants, that, wherever you may hear them, seem to build up
cathedral walls about you. The young man dropped the sculls. The strange
solemn notes gave a religions tone to his love, and wafted him into the
knightly ages and the reverential heart of chivalry.

Hanging between two heavens on the lake: floating to her voice: the moon
stepping over and through white shoal's of soft high clouds above and
below: floating to her void--no other breath abroad! His soul went out of
his body as he listened.

They must part. He rows her gently shoreward.

"I never was so happy as to-night," she murmurs.

"Look, my Lucy. The lights of the old place are on the lake. Look where
you are to live."

"Which is your room, Richard?"

He points it out to her.

"O Richard! that I were one of the women who wait on you! I should ask
nothing more. How happy she must be!"

"My darling angel-love. You shall be happy; but all shall wait on you,
and I foremost, Lucy."

"Dearest! may I hope for a letter?"

"By eleven to-morrow. And I?"

"Oh! you will have mine, Richard."

"Tom shall wait far it. A long one, mind! Did you like my last song?"

She pats her hand quietly against her bosom, and he knows where it rests.
O love! O heaven!

They are aroused by the harsh grating of the bow of the boat against the
shingle. He jumps out, and lifts her ashore.

"See!" she says, as the blush of his embrace subsides--"See!" and
prettily she mimics awe and feels it a little, "the cypress does point
towards us. O Richard! it does!"

And he, looking at her rather than at the cypress, delighting in her arch
grave ways--

"Why, there's hardly any shadow at all, Lucy. She mustn't dream, my
darling! or dream only of me."

"Dearest! but I do."

"To-morrow, Lucy! The letter in the morning, and you at night. O happy
to-morrow!"

"You will be sure to be there, Richard?"

"If I am not dead, Lucy."

"O Richard! pray, pray do not speak of that. I shall not survive you."

"Let us pray, Lucy, to die together, when we are to die. Death or life,
with you! Who is it yonder? I see some one--is it Tom? It's Adrian!"

"Is it Mr. Harley?" The fair girl shivered.

"How dares he come here!" cried Richard.

The figure of Adrian, instead of advancing, discreetly circled the lake.
They were stealing away when he called. His call was repeated. Lucy
entreated Richard to go to him; but the young man preferred to summon his
attendant, Tom, from within hail, and send him to know what was wanted.

"Will he have seen me? Will he have known me?" whispered Lucy,
tremulously.

"And if he does, love?" said Richard.

"Oh! if he does, dearest--I don't know, but I feel such a presentiment.
You have not spoken of him to-night, Richard. Is he good?"

"Good?" Richard clutched her hand for the innocent maiden phrase. "He's
very fond of eating; that's all I know of Adrian."

Her hand was at his lips when Tom returned.

"Well, Tom?"

"Mr. Adrian wishes particular to speak to you, sir," said Tom.

"Do go to him, dearest! Do go!" Lucy begs him.

"Oh, how I hate Adrian!" The young man grinds his teeth.

"Do go!" Lucy urges him. "Tom--good Tom--will see me home. To-morrow,
dear love! To-morrow!"

"You wish to part from me?"

"Oh, unkind! but you must not come with me now. It may be news of
importance, dearest. Think, Richard!"

"Tom! go back!"

At the imperious command the well-drilled Tom strides off a dozen paces,
and sees nothing. Then the precious charge is confided to him. A heart is
cut in twain.

Richard made his way to Adrian. "What is it you want with me, Adrian?"

"Are we seconds, or principals, O fiery one?" was Adrian's answer. "I
want nothing with you, except to know whether you have seen Benson."

"Where should I see Benson? What do I know of Benson's doings?"

"Of course not--such a secret old fist as he is! I want some one to tell
him to order Lady Blandish's carriage to be sent round to the park-gates.
I thought he might be round your way over there--I came upon him
accidentally just now in Abbey-wood. What's the matter, boy?"

"You saw him there?"

"Hunting Diana, I suppose. He thinks she's not so chaste as they say,"
continued Adrian. "Are you going to knock down that tree?"

Richard had turned to the cypress, and was tugging at the tough wood. He
left it and went to an ash.

"You'll spoil that weeper," Adrian cried. "Down she comes! But
good-night, Ricky. If you see Benson mind you tell him."

Doomed Benson following his burly shadow hove in sight on the white road
while Adrian spoke. The wise youth chuckled and strolled round the lake,
glancing over his shoulder every now and then.

It was not long before he heard a bellow for help--the roar of a dragon
in his throes. Adrian placidly sat down on the grass, and fixed his eyes
on the water. There, as the roar was being repeated amid horrid
resounding echoes, the wise youth mused in this wise--

"'The Fates are Jews with us when they delay a punishment,' says The
Pilgrim's Scrip, or words to that effect. The heavens evidently love
Benson, seeing that he gets his punishment on the spot. Master Ricky is a
peppery young man. He gets it from the apt Gruffudh. I rather believe in
race. What a noise that old ruffian makes! He'll require poulticing with
The Pilgrim's Scrip. We shall have a message to-morrow, and a hubbub, and
perhaps all go to town, which won't be bad for one who's been a prey to
all the desires born of dulness. Benson howls: there's life in the old
dog yet! He bays the moon. Look at her. She doesn't care. It's the same
to her whether we coo like turtle-doves or roar like twenty lions. How
complacent she looks! And yet she has dust as much sympathy for Benson as
for Cupid. She would smile on if both were being birched. Was that a
raven or Benson? He howls no more. It sounds guttural: frog-like
--something between the brek-kek-kek and the hoarse raven's croak. The
fellow'll be killing him. It's time to go to the rescue. A deliverer gets
more honour by coming in at the last gasp than if he forestalled
catastrophe.--Ho, there, what's the matter?"

So saying, the wise youth rose, and leisurely trotted to the scene of
battle, where stood St. George puffing over the prostrate Dragon.

"Holloa, Ricky! is it you?" said Adrian. "What's this? Whom have we
here?--Benson, as I live!"

"Make this beast get up," Richard returned, breathing hard, and shaking
his great ash-branch.

"He seems incapable, my dear boy. What have you been up to?--Benson!
Benson!--I say, Ricky, this looks bad."

"He's shamming!" Richard clamoured like a savage. "Spy upon me, will he?
I tell you, he's shamming. He hasn't had half enough. Nothing's too bad
for a spy. Let him getup!"

"Insatiate youth! do throw away that enormous weapon."

"He has written to my father," Richard shouted. "The miserable spy! Let
him get up!"

"Ooogh? I won't!" huskily groaned Benson. "Mr. Hadrian, you're a
witness--he's my back!"--Cavernous noises took up the tale of his
maltreatment.

"I daresay you love your back better than any part of your body now,"
Adrian muttered. "Come, Benson! be a man. Mr. Richard has thrown away the
stick. Come, and get off home, and let's see the extent of the damage."

"Ooogh! he's a devil! Mr. Hadrian, sir, he's a devil!" groaned Benson,
turning half over in the road to ease his aches.

Adrian caught hold of Benson's collar and lifted him to a sitting
posture. He then had a glimpse of what his hopeful pupil's hand could do
in wrath. The wretched butler's coat was slit and welted; his hat knocked
in; his flabby spirit so broken that he started and trembled if his
pitiless executioner stirred a foot. Richard stood over him, grasping his
great stick; no dawn of mercy for Benson in any corner of his features.

Benson screwed his neck round to look up at him, and immediately gasped,
"I won't get up! I won't! He's ready to murder me again!--Mr. Hadrian! if
you stand by and see it, you're liable to the law, sir--I won't get up
while he's near." No persuasion could induce Benson to try his legs while
his executioner stood by.

Adrian took Richard aside: "You've almost killed the poor devil, Ricky.
You must be satisfied with that. Look at his face."

"The coward bobbed while I struck" said Richard. "I marked his back. He
ducked. I told him he was getting it worse."

At so civilized piece of savagery, Adrian opened his mouth wide.

"Did you really? I admire that. You told him he was getting it worse?"

Adrian opened his mouth again to shake another roll of laughter out.

"Come," he said, "Excalibur has done his word. Pitch him into the lake.
And see--here comes the Blandish. You can't be at it again before a
woman. Go and meet her, and tell her the noise was an ox being
slaughtered. Or say Argus."

With a whirr that made all Benson's bruises moan and quiver, the great
ash-branch shot aloft, and Richard swung off to intercept Lady Blandish.

Adrian got Benson on his feet. The heavy butler was disposed to summon
all the commiseration he could feel for his bruised flesh. Every
half-step he attempted was like a dislocation. His groans and grunts were
frightful.

"How much did that hat cost, Benson?" said Adrian, as he put it on his
head.

"A five-and-twenty shilling beaver, Mr. Hadrian!" Benson caressed its
injuries.

"The cheapest policy of insurance I remember to have heard of!" said
Adrian.

Benson staggered, moaning at intervals to his cruel comforter.

"He's a devil, Mr. Hadrian! He's a devil, sir, I do believe, sir. Ooogh!
he's a devil!--I can't move, Mr. Hadrian. I must be fetched. And Dr.
Clifford must be sent for, sir. I shall never be fit for work again. I
haven't a sound bone in my body, Mr. Hadrian."

"You see, Benson, this comes of your declaring war upon Venus. I hope the
maids will nurse you properly. Let me see: you are friends with the
housekeeper, aren't you? All depends upon that."

"I'm only a faithful servant, Mr. Hadrian," the miserable butler snarled.

"Then you've got no friend but your bed. Get to it as quick as possible,
Benson."

"I can't move." Benson made a resolute halt. "I must be fetched," he
whinnied. "It's a shame to ask me to move, Mr. Hadrian."

"You will admit that you are heavy, Benson," said Adrian, "so I can't
carry you. However, I see Mr. Richard is very kindly returning to help
me."

At these words heavy Benson instantly found his legs, and shambled on.

Lady Blandish met Richard in dismay.

"I have been horribly frightened," she said. "Tell me, what was the
meaning of those cries I heard?"

"Only some one doing justice on a spy," said Richard, and the lady
smiled, and looked on him fondly, and put her hand through his hair.

"Was that all? I should have done it myself if I had been a man. Kiss
me."




CHAPTER XXI

By twelve o'clock at noon next day the inhabitants of Raynham Abbey knew
that Berry, the baronet's man, had arrived post-haste from town, with
orders to conduct Mr. Richard thither, and that Mr. Richard had refused
to go, had sworn he would not, defied his father, and despatched Berry to
the Shades. Berry was all that Benson was not. Whereas Benson hated
woman, Berry admired her warmly. Second to his own stately person, woman
occupied his reflections, and commanded his homage. Berry was of majestic
port, and used dictionary words. Among the maids of Raynham his conscious
calves produced all the discord and the frenzy those adornments seem
destined to create in tender bosoms. He had, moreover, the reputation of
having suffered for the sex; which assisted his object in inducing the
sex to suffer for him. What with his calves, and his dictionary words,
and the attractive halo of the mysterious vindictiveness of Venus
surrounding him, this Adonis of the lower household was a mighty man
below, and he moved as one.

On hearing the tumult that followed Berry's arrival, Adrian sent for him,
and was informed of the nature of his mission, and its result.

"You should come to me first," said Adrian. "I should have imagined you
were shrewd enough for that, Berry?"

"Pardon me, Mr. Adrian," Berry doubled his elbow to explain. "Pardon me,
sir. Acting recipient of special injunctions I was not a free agent."

"Go to Mr. Richard again, Berry. There will be a little confusion if he
holds back. Perhaps you had better throw out a hint or so of apoplexy. A
slight hint will do. And here--Berry! when you return to town, you had
better not mention anything--to quote Johnson--of Benson's spiflication."

"Certainly not, sir."

The wise youth's hint had the desired effect on Richard.

He dashed off a hasty letter by Tom to Belthorpe, and, mounting his
horse, galloped to the Bellingham station.

Sir Austin was sitting down to a quiet early dinner at his hotel, when
the Hope of Raynham burst into his room.

The baronet was not angry with his son. On the contrary, for he was
singularly just and self-accusing while pride was not up in arms, he had
been thinking all day after the receipt of Benson's letter that he was
deficient in cordiality, and did not, by reason of his excessive anxiety,
make himself sufficiently his son's companion: was not enough, as he
strove to be, mother and father to him; preceptor and friend; previsor
and associate. He had not to ask his conscience where he had lately been
to blame towards the System. He had slunk away from Raynham in the very
crisis of the Magnetic Age, and this young woman of the parish (as Benson
had termed sweet Lucy in his letter) was the consequence.

Yes! pride and sensitiveness were his chief foes, and he would trample on
them. To begin, he embraced his son: hard upon an Englishman at any
time--doubly so to one so shamefaced at emotion in cool blood, as it
were. It gave him a strange pleasure, nevertheless. And the youth seemed
to answer to it; he was excited. Was his love, then, beginning to
correspond with his father's as in those intimate days before the
Blossoming Season?

But when Richard, inarticulate at first in his haste, cried out, "My
dear, dear father! You are safe! I feared--You are better, sir? Thank
God!" Sir Austin stood away from him.

"Safe?" he said. "What has alarmed you?"

Instead of replying, Richard dropped into a chair, and seized his hand
and kissed it.

Sir Austin took a seat, and waited for his son to explain.

"Those doctors are such fools!" Richard broke out. "I was sure they were
wrong. They don't know headache from apoplexy. It's worth the ride, sir,
to see you. You left Raynham so suddenly.--But you are well! It was not
an attack of real apoplexy?"

His father's brows contorted, and he said, No, it was not. Richard
pursued:

"If you were ill, I couldn't come too soon, though, if coroners' inquests
sat on horses, those doctors would be found guilty of mare-slaughter.
Cassandra'll be knocked up. I was too early for the train at Bellingham,
and I wouldn't wait. She did the distance in four hours and
three-quarters. Pretty good, sir, wasn't it?"

"It has given you appetite for dinner, I hope," said the baronet, not so
well pleased to find that it was not simple obedience that had brought
the youth to him in such haste.

"I'm ready," replied Richard. "I shall be in time to return by the last
train to-night. I will leave Cassandra in your charge for a rest."

His father quietly helped him to soup, which he commenced gobbling with
an eagerness that might pass for appetite.

"All well at Raynham?" said the baronet.

"Quite, sir."

"Nothing new?"

"Nothing, sir."

"The same as when I left?"

"No change whatever!"

"I shall be glad to get back to the old place," said the baronet. "My
stay in town has certainly been profitable. I have made some pleasant
acquaintances who may probably favour us with a visit there in the late
autumn--people you may be pleased to know. They are very anxious to see
Raynham."

"I love the old place," cried Richard. "I never wish to leave it."

"Why, boy, before I left you were constantly begging to see town."

"Was I, sir? How odd! Well! I don't want to remain here. I've seen enough
of it."

"How did you find your way to me?"

Richard laughed, and related his bewilderment at the miles of brick, and
the noise, and the troops of people, concluding, "There's no place like
home!"

The baronet watched his symptomatic brilliant eyes, and favoured him with
a double-dealing sentence--

"To anchor the heart by any object ere we have half traversed the world,
is youth's foolishness, my son. Reverence time! A better maxim that than
your Horatian."

"He knows all!" thought Richard, and instantly drew away leagues from his
father, and threw up fortifications round his love and himself.

Dinner over, Richard looked hurriedly at his watch, and said, with much
briskness, "I shall just be in time, sir, if we walk. Will you come with
me to the station?"

The baronet did not answer.

Richard was going to repeat the question, but found his father's eyes
fixed on him so meaningly that he wavered, and played with his empty
glass.

"I think we will have a little more claret," said the baronet.

Claret was brought, and they were left alone.

The baronet then drew within arm's-reach of his son, and began:

"I am not aware what you may have thought of me, Richard, during the
years we have lived together; and indeed I have never been in a hurry to
be known to you; and, if I had died before my work was done, I should not
have complained at losing half my reward, in hearing you thank me.
Perhaps, as it is, I never may. Everything, save selfishness, has its
recompense. I shall be content if you prosper."

He fetched a breath and continued: "You had in your infancy a great
loss." Father and son coloured simultaneously. "To make that good to you
I chose to isolate myself from the world, and devote myself entirely to
your welfare; and I think it is not vanity that tells me now that the son
I have reared is one of the most hopeful of God's creatures. But for that
very reason you are open to be tempted the most, and to sink the deepest.
It was the first of the angels who made the road to hell."

He paused again. Richard fingered at his watch.

"In our House, my son, there is peculiar blood. We go to wreck very
easily. It sounds like superstition; I cannot but think we are tried as
most men are not. I see it in us all. And you, my son, are compounded of
two races. Your passions are violent. You have had a taste of revenge.
You have seen, in a small way, that the pound of flesh draws rivers of
blood. But there is now in you another power. You are mounting to the
table-land of life, where mimic battles are changed to real ones. And you
come upon it laden equally with force to create and to destroy." He
deliberated to announce the intelligence, with deep meaning: "There are
women in the world, my son!"

The young man's heart galloped back to Raynham.

"It is when you encounter them that you are thoroughly on trial. It is
when you know them that life is either a mockery to you, or, as some find
it, a gift of blessedness. They are our ordeal. Love of any human object
is the soul's ordeal; and they are ours, loving them, or not."

The young man heard the whistle of the train. He saw the moon-lighted
wood, and the vision of his beloved. He could barely hold himself down
and listen.

"I believe," the baronet spoke with little of the cheerfulness of belief,
"good women exist."

Oh, if he knew Lucy!

"But," and he gazed on Richard intently, "it is given to very few to meet
them on the threshold--I may say, to none. We find them after hard
buffeting, and usually, when we find the one fitted for us, our madness
has misshaped our destiny, our lot is cast. For women are not the end,
but the means, of life. In youth we think them the former, and thousands,
who have not even the excuse of youth, select a mate--or worse--with that
sole view. I believe women punish us for so perverting their uses. They
punish Society."

The baronet put his hand to his brow as his mind travelled into
consequences.

'Our most diligent pupil learns not so much as an earnest teacher,' says
The Pilgrim's Scrip; and Sir Austin, in schooling himself to speak with
moderation of women, was beginning to get a glimpse of their side of the
case.

Cold Blood now touched on love to Hot Blood.

Cold Blood said, "It is a passion coming in the order of nature, the ripe
fruit of our animal being."

Hot Blood felt: "It is a divinity! All that is worth living for in the
world."

Cold Blood said: "It is a fever which tests our strength, and too often
leads to perdition."

Hot Blood felt: "Lead whither it will, I follow it."

Cold Blood said: "It is a name men and women are much in the habit of
employing to sanctify their appetites."

Hot Blood felt: "It is worship; religion; life!"

And so the two parallel lines ran on.

The baronet became more personal:

"You know my love for you, my son. The extent of it you cannot know; but
you must know that it is something very deep, and--I do not wish to speak
of it--but a father must sometimes petition for gratitude, since the only
true expression of it is his son's moral good. If you care for my love,
or love me in return, aid me with all your energies to keep you what I
have made you, and guard you from the snares besetting you. It was in my
hands once. It is ceasing to be so. Remember, my son, what my love is. It
is different, I fear, with most fathers: but I am bound up in your
welfare: what you do affects me vitally. You will take no step that is
not intimate with my happiness, or my misery. And I have had great
disappointments, my son."

So far it was well. Richard loved his father, and even in his frenzied
state he could not without emotion hear him thus speak.

Unhappily, the baronet, who by some fatality never could see when he was
winning the battle, thought proper in his wisdom to water the dryness of
his sermon with a little jocoseness, on the subject of young men fancying
themselves in love, and, when they were raw and green, absolutely wanting
to be--that most awful thing, which the wisest and strongest of men
undertake in hesitation and after self-mortification and
penance--married! He sketched the Foolish Young Fellow--the object of
general ridicule and covert contempt. He sketched the Woman--the strange
thing made in our image, and with all our faculties--passing to the rule
of one who in taking her proved that he could not rule himself, and had
no knowledge of her save as a choice morsel which he would burn the whole
world, and himself in the bargain, to possess. He harped upon the Foolish
Young Fellow, till the foolish young fellow felt his skin tingle and was
half suffocated with shame and rage.

After this, the baronet might be as wise as he pleased: he had quite
undone his work. He might analyze Love and anatomize Woman. He might
accord to her her due position, and paint her fair: he might be shrewd,
jocose, gentle, pathetic, wonderfully wise: he spoke to deaf ears.

Closing his sermon with the question, softly uttered: "Have you anything
to tell me, Richard?" and hoping for a confession, and a thorough
re-establishment of confidence, the callous answer struck him cold: "I
have not."

The baronet relapsed in his chair, and made diagrams of his fingers.

Richard turned his back on further dialogue by going to the window. In
the section of sky over the street twinkled two or three stars; shining
faintly, feeling the moon. The moon was rising: the woods were lifting up
to her: his star of the woods would be there. A bed of moss set about
flowers in a basket under him breathed to his nostril of the woodland
keenly, and filled him with delirious longing.

A succession of hard sighs brought his father's hand on his shoulder.

"You have nothing you could say to me, my son? Tell me, Richard!
Remember, there is no home for the soul where dwells a shadow of
untruth!"

"Nothing at all, sir," the young man replied, meeting him with the full
orbs of his eyes.

The baronet withdrew his hand, and paced the room.

At last it grew impossible for Richard to control his impatience, and he
said: "Do you intend me to stay here, sir? Am I not to return to Raynham
at all to-night?"

His father was again falsely jocular:

"What? and catch the train after giving it ten minutes' start?"

"Cassandra will take me," said the young man earnestly. "I needn't ride
her hard, sir. Or perhaps you would lend me your Winkelried? I should be
down with him in little better than three hours."

"Even then, you know, the park-gates would be locked."

"Well, I could stable him in the village. Dowling knows the horse, and
would treat him properly. May I have him, sir?"

The cloud cleared off Richard's face as he asked. At least, if he missed
his love that night he would be near her, breathing the same air, marking
what star was above her bedchamber, hearing the hushed night-talk of the
trees about her dwelling: looking on the distances that were like hope
half fulfilled and a bodily presence bright as Hesper, since he knew her.
There were two swallows under the eaves shadowing Lucy's chamber-windows:
two swallows, mates in one nest, blissful birds, who twittered and
cheep-cheeped to the sole-lying beauty in her bed. Around these birds the
lover's heart revolved, he knew not why. He associated them with all his
close-veiled dreams of happiness. Seldom a morning passed when he did not
watch them leave the nest on their breakfast-flight, busy in the happy
stillness of dawn. It seemed to him now that if he could be at Raynham to
see them in to-morrow's dawn he would be compensated for his incalculable
loss of to-night: he would forgive and love his father, London, the life,
the world. Just to see those purple backs and white breasts flash out
into the quiet morning air! He wanted no more.

The baronet's trifling had placed this enormous boon within the young
man's visionary grasp.

He still went on trying the boy's temper.

"You know there would be nobody ready for you at Raynham. It is unfair to
disturb the maids."

Richard overrode every objection.

"Well, then, my son," said the baronet, preserving his half-jocular air,
"I must tell you that it is my wish to have you in town."

"Then you have not been ill at all, sir!" cried Richard, as in his
despair he seized the whole plot.

"I have been as well as you could have desired me to be," said his
father.

"Why did they lie to me?" the young man wrathfully exclaimed.

"I think, Richard, you can best answer that," rejoined Sir Austin, kindly
severe.

Dread of being signalized as the Foolish Young Fellow prevented Richard
from expostulating further. Sir Austin saw him grinding his passion into
powder for future explosion, and thought it best to leave him for awhile.




CHAPTER XXII

For three weeks Richard had to remain in town and endure the teachings of
the System in a new atmosphere. He had to sit and listen to men of
science who came to renew their intimacy with his father, and whom of all
men his father wished him to respect and study; practically scientific
men being, in the baronet's estimation, the only minds thoroughly mated
and enviable. He had to endure an introduction to the Grandisons, and
meet the eyes of his kind, haunted as he was by the Foolish Young Fellow.
The idea that he might by any chance be identified with him held the poor
youth in silent subjection. And it was horrible. For it was a continued
outrage on the fair image he had in his heart. The notion of the world
laughing at him because he loved sweet Lucy stung him to momentary
frenzies, and developed premature misanthropy in his spirit. Also the
System desired to show him whither young women of the parish lead us, and
he was dragged about at nighttime to see the sons and daughters of
darkness, after the fashion prescribed to Mr. Thompson; how they danced
and ogled down the high road to perdition. But from this sight possibly
the teacher learnt more than his pupil, since we find him seriously
asking his meditative hours, in the Note-book: "Wherefore Wild Oats are
only of one gender?" a question certainly not suggested to him at
Raynham; and again--"Whether men might not be attaching too rigid an
importance?"...to a subject with a dotted tail apparently, for he gives
it no other in the Note-book. But, as I apprehend, he had come to plead
in behalf of women here, and had deduced something from positive
observation. To Richard the scenes he witnessed were strange wild
pictures, likely if anything to have increased his misanthropy, but for
his love.

Certain sweet little notes from Lucy sustained the lover during the first
two weeks of exile. They ceased; and now Richard fell into such
despondency that his father in alarm had to take measures to hasten their
return to Raynham. At the close of the third week Berry laid a pair of
letters, bearing the Raynham post-mark, on the breakfast-table, and,
after reading one attentively, the baronet asked his son if he was
inclined to quit the metropolis.

"For Raynham, air?" cried Richard, and relapsed, saying, "As you will!"
aware that he had given a glimpse of the Foolish Young Fellow.

Berry accordingly received orders to make arrangements for their instant
return to Raynham.

The letter Sir Austin lifted his head from to bespeak his son's wishes
was a composition of the wise youth Adrian's, and ran thus:

"Benson is doggedly recovering. He requires great indemnities. Happy when
a faithful fool is the main sufferer in a household! I quite agree with
you that our faithful fool is the best servant of great schemes. Benson
is now a piece of history. I tell him that this is indemnity enough, and
that the sweet Muse usually insists upon gentlemen being half-flayed
before she will condescend to notice them; but Benson, I regret to say,
rejects the comfort so fine a reflection should offer, and had rather
keep his skin and live opaque. Heroism seems partly a matter of training.
Faithful folly is Benson's nature: the rest has been thrust upon.

"The young person has resigned the neighbourhood. I had an interview with
the fair Papist myself, and also with the man Blaize. They were both
sensible, though one swore and the other sighed. She is pretty. I hope
she does not paint. I can affirm that her legs are strong, for she walks
to Bellingham twice a week to take her Scarlet bath, when, having
confessed and been made clean by the Romish unction, she walks back the
brisker, of which my Protestant muscular systems is yet aware. It was on
the road to Bellingham I engaged her. She is well in the matter of hair.
Madam Godiva might challenge her, it would be a fair match. Has it never
struck you that Woman is nearer the vegetable than Man?--Mr. Blaize
intends her for his son a junction that every lover of fairy mythology
must desire to see consummated. Young Tom is heir to all the agremens of
the Beast. The maids of Lobourne say (I hear) that he is a very Proculus
among them. Possibly the envious men say it for the maids. Beauty does
not speak bad grammar--and altogether she is better out of the way."

The other letter was from Lady Blandish, a lady's letter, and said:

"I have fulfilled your commission to the best of my ability, and heartily
sad it has made me. She is indeed very much above her station--pity that
it is so! She is almost beautiful--quite beautiful at times, and not in
any way what you have been led to fancy. The poor child had no story to
tell. I have again seen her, and talked with her for an hour as kindly as
I could. I could gather nothing more than we know. It is just a woman's
history as it invariably commences. Richard is the god of her idolatry.
She will renounce him, and sacrifice herself for his sake. Are we so bad?
She asked me what she was to do. She would do whatever was imposed upon
her--all but pretend to love another, and that she never would, and, I
believe, never will. You know I am sentimental, and I confess we dropped
a few tears together. Her uncle has sent her for the Winter to the
institution where it appears she was educated, and where they are very
fond of her and want to keep her, which it would be a good thing if they
were to do. The man is a good sort of man. She was entrusted to him by
her father, and he never interferes with her religion, and is very
scrupulous about all that pertains to it, though, as he says, he is a
Christian himself. In the Spring (but the poor child does not know this)
she is to come back, and be married to his lout of a son. I am determined
to prevent that. May I not reckon on your promise to aid me? When you see
her, I am sure you will. It would be sacrilege to look on and permit such
a thing. You know, they are cousins. She asked me, where in the world
there was one like Richard? What could I answer? They were your own
words, and spoken with a depth of conviction! I hope he is really calm. I
shudder to think of him when he comes, and discovers what I have been
doing. I hope I have been really doing right! A good deed, you say, never
dies; but we cannot always know--I must rely on you. Yes, it is; I should
think, easy to suffer martyrdom when one is sure of one's cause! but then
one must be sure of it. I have done nothing lately but to repeat to
myself that saying of yours, No. 54, C. 7, P.S.; and it has consoled me,
I cannot say why, except that all wisdom consoles, whether it applies
directly or not:

"'For this reason so many fall from God, who have attained to Him; that
they cling to Him with their Weakness, not with their Strength.'

"I like to know of what you are thinking when you composed this or that
saying--what suggested it. May not one be admitted to inspect the
machinery of wisdom? I feel curious to know how thoughts--real
thoughts--are born. Not that I hope to win the secret. Here is the
beginning of one (but we poor women can never put together even two of
the three ideas which you say go to form a thought): 'When a wise man
makes a false step, will he not go farther than a fool?' It has just
flitted through me.

"I cannot get on with Gibbon, so wait your return to recommence the
readings. I dislike the sneering essence of his writings. I keep
referring to his face, until the dislike seems to become personal. How
different is it with Wordsworth! And yet I cannot escape from the thought
that he is always solemnly thinking of himself (but I do reverence him).
But this is curious; Byron was a greater egoist, and yet I do not feel
the same with him. He reminds me of a beast of the desert, savage and
beautiful; and the former is what one would imagine a superior donkey
reclaimed from the heathen to be--a very superior donkey, I mean, with
great power of speech and great natural complacency, and whose
stubbornness you must admire as part of his mission. The worst is that no
one will imagine anything sublime in a superior donkey, so my simile is
unfair and false. Is it not strange? I love Wordsworth best, and yet
Byron has the greater power over me. How is that?"

("Because," Sir Austin wrote beside the query in pencil, "women are
cowards, and succumb to Irony and Passion, rather than yield their hearts
to Excellence and Nature's Inspiration.")

The letter pursued:

"I have finished Boiardo and have taken up Berni. The latter offends me.
I suppose we women do not really care for humour. You are right in saying
we have none ourselves, and 'cackle' instead of laugh. It is true (of me,
at least) that 'Falstaff is only to us an incorrigible fat man.' I want
to know what he illustrates. And Don Quixote--what end can be served in
making a noble mind ridiculous?--I hear you say--practical. So it is. We
are very narrow, I know. But we like wit--practical again! Or in your
words (when I really think they generally come to my aid--perhaps it is
that it is often all your thought); we 'prefer the rapier thrust, to the
broad embrace, of Intelligence.'"

He trifled with the letter for some time, re-reading chosen passages as
he walked about the room, and considering he scarce knew what. There are
ideas language is too gross for, and shape too arbitrary, which come to
us and have a definite influence upon us, and yet we cannot fasten on the
filmy things and make them visible and distinct to ourselves, much less
to others. Why did he twice throw a look into the glass in the act of
passing it? He stood for a moment with head erect facing it. His eyes for
the nonce seemed little to peruse his outer features; the grey gathered
brows, and the wrinkles much action of them had traced over the circles
half up his high straight forehead; the iron-grey hair that rose over his
forehead and fell away in the fashion of Richard's plume. His general
appearance showed the tints of years; but none of their weight, and
nothing of the dignity of his youth, was gone. It was so far
satisfactory, but his eyes were wide, as one who looks at his essential
self through the mask we wear.

Perhaps he was speculating as he looked on the sort of aspect he
presented to the lady's discriminative regard. Of her feelings he had not
a suspicion. But he knew with what extraordinary lucidity women can, when
it pleases them, and when their feelings are not quite boiling under the
noonday sun, seize all the sides of a character, and put their fingers on
its weak point. He was cognizant of the total absence of the humorous in
himself (the want that most shut him out from his fellows), and perhaps
the clear-thoughted, intensely self-examining gentleman filmily
conceived, Me also, in common with the poet, she gazes on as one of the
superior--grey beasts!

He may have so conceived the case; he was capable of that
great-mindedness, and could snatch at times very luminous glances at the
broad reflector which the world of fact lying outside our narrow compass
holds up for us to see ourselves in when we will. Unhappily, the faculty
of laughter, which is due to this gift, was denied him; and having seen,
he, like the companion of friend Balsam, could go no farther. For a good
wind of laughter had relieved him of much of the blight of
self-deception, and oddness, and extravagance; had given a healthier view
of our atmosphere of life; but he had it not.

Journeying back to Bellingham in the train, with the heated brain and
brilliant eye of his son beside him, Sir Austin tried hard to feel
infallible, as a man with a System should feel; and because he could not
do so, after much mental conflict, he descended to entertain a personal
antagonism to the young woman who had stepped in between his experiment
and success. He did not think kindly of her. Lady Blandish's encomiums of
her behaviour and her beauty annoyed him. Forgetful that he had in a
measure forfeited his rights to it, he took the common ground of fathers,
and demanded, "Why he was not justified in doing all that lay in his
power to prevent his son from casting himself away upon the first
creature with a pretty face he encountered?" Deliberating thus, he lost
the tenderness he should have had for his experiment--the living, burning
youth at his elbow, and his excessive love for him took a rigorous tone.
It appeared to him politic, reasonable, and just, that the uncle of this
young woman, who had so long nursed the prudent scheme of marrying her to
his son, should not only not be thwarted in his object but encouraged and
even assisted. At least, not thwarted. Sir Austin had no glass before him
while these ideas hardened in his mind, and he had rather forgotten the
letter of Lady Blandish.

Father and son were alone in the railway carriage. Both were too
preoccupied to speak. As they neared Bellingham the dark was filling the
hollows of the country. Over the pine-hills beyond the station a last
rosy streak lingered across a green sky. Richard eyed it while they flew
along. It caught him forward: it seemed full of the spirit of his love,
and brought tears of mournful longing to his eyelids. The sad beauty of
that one spot in the heavens seemed to call out to his soul to swear to
his Lucy's truth to him: was like the sorrowful visage of his
fleur-de-luce as he called her, appealing to him for faith. That
tremulous tender way she had of half-closing and catching light on the
nether-lids, when sometimes she looked up in her lover's face--as look so
mystic-sweet that it had grown to be the fountain of his dreams: he saw
it yonder, and his blood thrilled.

Know you those wand-like touches of I know not what, before which our
grosser being melts; and we, much as we hope to be in the Awaking, stand
etherealized, trembling with new joy? They come but rarely; rarely even
in love, when we fondly think them revelations. Mere sensations they are,
doubtless: and we rank for them no higher in the spiritual scale than so
many translucent glorious polypi that quiver on the shores, the hues of
heaven running through them. Yet in the harvest of our days it is
something for the animal to have had such mere fleshly polypian
experiences to look back upon, and they give him an horizon--pale seas of
luring splendour.  One who has had them (when they do not bound him) may
find the Isles of Bliss sooner than another. Sensual faith in the upper
glories is something. "Let us remember," says The Pilgrim's Scrip, "that
Nature, though heathenish, reaches at her best to the footstool of the
Highest. She is not all dust, but a living portion of the spheres. In
aspiration it is our error to despise her, forgetting that through Nature
only can we ascend. Cherished, trained, and purified, she is then partly
worthy the divine mate who is to make her wholly so. St. Simeon saw the
Hog in Nature, and took Nature for the Hog."

It was one of these strange bodily exaltations which thrilled the young
man, he knew not how it was, for sadness and his forebodings vanished.
The soft wand touched him. At that moment, had Sir Austin spoken openly,
Richard might have fallen upon his heart. He could not.

He chose to feel injured on the common ground of fathers, and to pursue
his System by plotting. Lady Blandish had revived his jealousy of the
creature who menaced it, and jealousy of a System is unreflecting and
vindictive as jealousy of woman.

Heath-roots and pines breathed sharp in the cool autumn evening about the
Bellingham station. Richard stood a moment as he stepped from the train,
and drew the country air into his lungs with large heaves of the chest.
Leaving his father to the felicitations of the station-master, he went
into the Lobourne road to look for his faithful Tom, who had received
private orders through Berry to be in attendance with his young master's
mare, Cassandra, and was lurking in a plantation of firs unenclosed on
the borders of the road, where Richard, knowing his retainer's zest for
conspiracy too well to seek him anywhere but in the part most favoured
with shelter and concealment, found him furtively whiffing tobacco.

"What news, Tom? Is there an illness?"

Tom sent his undress cap on one side to scratch at dilemma, an old
agricultural habit to which he was still a slave in moments of abstract
thought or sudden difficulty.

"No, I don't want the rake, Mr. Richard," he whinnied with a false grin,
as he beheld his master's eye vacantly following the action.

"Speak out!" he was commanded. "I haven't had a letter for a week!"

Richard learnt the news. He took it with surprising outward calm, only
getting a little closer to Cassandra's neck, and looking very hard at Tom
without seeing a speck of him, which had the effect on Tom of making him
sincerely wish his master would punch his head at once rather than fix
him in that owl-like way.

"Go on!" said Richard, huskily. "Yes? She's gone! Well?"

Tom was brought to understand he must make the most of trifles, and
recited how he had heard from a female domestic at Belthorpe of the name
of Davenport, formerly known to him, that the young lady never slept a
wink from the hour she knew she was going, but sat up in her bed till
morning crying most pitifully, though she never complained. Hereat the
tears unconsciously streamed down Richard's cheeks. Tom said he had tried
to see her, but Mr. Adrian kept him at work, ciphering at a terrible
sum--that and nothing else all day! saying, it was to please his young
master on his return. "Likewise something in Lat'n," added Tom. "Nom'tive
Mouser!--'nough to make ye mad, sir!" he exclaimed with pathos. The
wretch had been put to acquire a Latin declension.

Tom saw her on the morning she went away, he said: she was very
sorrowful-looking, and nodded kindly to him as she passed in the fly
along with young Tom Blaize. "She have got uncommon kind eyes, sir," said
Tom, "and cryin' don't spoil them." For which his hand was wrenched.

Tom had no more to tell, save that, in rounding the road, the young lady
had hung out her hand, and seemed to move it forward and back, as much as
to sap, Good-bye, Tom! "And though she couldn't see me," said Tom, "I
took off my hat. I did take it so kind of her to think of a chap like
me." He was at high-pressure sentiment--what with his education for a
hero and his master's love-stricken state.

"You saw no more of her, Tom?"

"No, sir. That was the last!"

"That was the last you saw of her, Tom?"

"Well, sir, I saw nothin' more."

"And so she went out of sight!"

"Clean gone, that she were, sir."

"Why did they take her away? what have they done with her? where have
they taken her to?"

These red-hot questionings were addressed to the universal heaven rather
than to Tom.

"Why didn't she write?" they were resumed. "Why did she leave? She's
mine. She belongs to me! Who dared take her away? Why did she leave
without writing?--Tom!"

"Yes, sir," said the well-drilled recruit, dressing himself up to the
word of command. He expected a variation of the theme from the change of
tone with which his name had been pronounced, but it was again, "Where
have they taken her to?" and this was even more perplexing to Tom than
his hard sum in arithmetic had been. He could only draw down the corners
of his mouth hard, and glance up queerly.

"She had been crying--you saw that, Tom?"

"No mistake about that, Mr. Richard. Cryin' all night and all day, I sh'd
say."

"And she was crying when you saw her?"

"She look'd as if she'd just done for a moment, sir."

"But her face was white?"

"White as a sheet."

Richard paused to discover whether his instinct had caught a new view
from these facts. He was in a cage, always knocking against the same
bars, fly as he might. Her tears were the stars in his black night. He
clung to them as golden orbs. Inexplicable as they were, they were at
least pledges of love.

The hues of sunset had left the West. No light was there but the
steadfast pale eye of twilight. Thither he was drawn. He mounted
Cassandra, saying: "Tell them something, Tom. I shan't be home to
dinner," and rode off toward the forsaken home of light over Belthorpe,
whereat he saw the wan hand of his Lucy, waving farewell, receding as he
advanced. His jewel was stolen,--he must gaze upon the empty box.




CHAPTER XXIII

Night had come on as Richard entered the old elm-shaded, grass-bordered
lane leading down from Raynham to Belthorpe. The pale eye of twilight was
shut. The wind had tossed up the bank of Western cloud, which was now
flying broad and unlighted across the sky, broad and balmy--the charioted
South-west at full charge behind his panting coursers. As he neared the
farm his heart fluttered and leapt up. He was sure she must be there. She
must have returned. Why should she have left for good without writing? He
caught suspicion by the throat, making it voiceless, if it lived: he
silenced reason. Her not writing was now a proof that she had returned.
He listened to nothing but his imperious passion, and murmured sweet
words for her, as if she were by: tender cherishing epithet's of love in
the nest. She was there--she moved somewhere about like a silver flame in
the dear old house, doing her sweet household duties. His blood began to
sing: O happy those within, to see her, and be about her! By some
extraordinary process he contrived to cast a sort of glory round the
burly person of Farmer Blaize himself. And oh! to have companionship with
a seraph one must know a seraph's bliss, and was not young Tom to be
envied? The smell of late clematis brought on the wind enwrapped him, and
went to his brain, and threw a light over the old red-brick house, for he
remembered where it grew, and the winter rose-tree, and the jessamine,
and the passion-flower: the garden in front with the standard roses
tended by her hands; the long wall to the left striped by the branches of
the cherry, the peep of a further garden through the wall, and then the
orchard, and the fields beyond--the happy circle of her dwelling! it
flashed before his eyes while he looked on the darkness. And yet it was
the reverse of hope which kindled this light and inspired the momentary
calm he experienced: it was despair exaggerating delusion, wilfully
building up on a groundless basis. "For the tenacity of true passion is
terrible," says The Pilgrim's Scrip: "it will stand against the hosts of
heaven, God's great array of Facts, rather than surrender its aim, and
must be crushed before it will succumb--sent to the lowest pit!" He knew
she was not there; she was gone. But the power of a will strained to
madness fought at it, kept it down, conjured forth her ghost, and would
have it as he dictated. Poor youth! the great array of facts was in due
order of march.

He had breathed her name many times, and once over-loud; almost a cry for
her escaped him. He had not noticed the opening of a door and the noise
of a foot along the gravel walk. He was leaning over Cassandra's uneasy
neck watching the one window intently, when a voice addressed him out of
the darkness.

"Be that you, young gentleman?--Mr. Fev'rel?"

Richard's trance was broken. "Mr. Blaize!" he said; recognizing the
farmer's voice.

"Good even'n t' you, sir," returned the farmer. "I knew the mare though I
didn't know you. Rather bluff to-night it be. Will ye step in, Mr.
Fev'rel? it's beginning' to spit,--going to be a wildish night, I
reckon."

Richard dismounted. The farmer called one of his men to hold the mare,
and ushered the young man in. Once there, Richard's conjurations ceased.
There was a deadness about the rooms and passages that told of her
absence. The walls he touched--these were the vacant shells of her. He
had never been in the house since he knew her, and now what strange
sweetness, and what pangs!

Young Tom Blaize was in the parlour, squared over the table in
open-mouthed examination of an ancient book of the fashions for a summer
month which had elapsed during his mother's minority. Young Tom was
respectfully studying the aspects of the radiant beauties of the polite
work. He also was a thrall of woman, newly enrolled, and full of wonder.

"What, Tom!" the farmer sang out as soon as he had opened the door;
"there ye be! at yer Folly agin, are ye? What good'll them fashens do to
you, I'd like t'know? Come, shut up, and go and see to Mr. Fev'rel's
mare. He's al'ays at that ther' Folly now. I say there never were a
better name for a book than that ther' Folly! Talk about attitudes!"

The farmer laughed his fat sides into a chair, and motioned his visitor
to do likewise.

"It's a comfort they're most on 'em females," he pursued, sounding a
thwack on his knee as he settled himself agreeably in his seat. "It don't
matter much what they does, except pinchin' in--waspin' it at the waist.
Give me nature, I say--woman as she's made! eh, young gentleman?"

"You seem very lonely here," said Richard, glancing round, and at the
ceiling.

"Lonely?" quoth the farmer. "Well, for the matter o' that, we be!--jest
now, so't happens; I've got my pipe, and Tom've got his Folly. He's on
one side the table, and I'm on t'other. He gapes, and I gazes. We are a
bit lonesome. But there--it's for the best!"

Richard resumed, "I hardly expected to see you to-night, Mr. Blaize."

"Y'acted like a man in coming, young gentleman, and I does ye honour for
it!" said Farmer Blaize with sudden energy and directness.

The thing implied by the farmer's words caused Richard to take a quick
breath. They looked at each other, and looked away, the farmer thrumming
on the arm of his chair.

Above the mantel-piece, surrounded by tarnished indifferent miniatures of
high-collared, well-to-do yeomen of the anterior generation, trying their
best not to grin, and high-waisted old ladies smiling an encouraging
smile through plentiful cap-puckers, there hung a passably executed
half-figure of a naval officer in uniform, grasping a telescope under his
left arm, who stood forth clearly as not of their kith and kin. His eyes
were blue, his hair light, his bearing that of a man who knows how to
carry his head and shoulders. The artist, while giving him an epaulette
to indicate his rank, had also recorded the juvenility which a lieutenant
in the naval service can retain after arriving at that position, by
painting him with smooth cheeks and fresh ruddy lips. To this portrait
Richard's eyes were directed. Farmer Blaize observed it, and said--

"Her father, sir!"

Richard moderated his voice to praise the likeness.

"Yes," said the farmer, "pretty well. Next best to havin' her, though
it's a long way off that!"

"An old family, Mr. Blaize--is it not?" Richard asked in as careless a
tone as he could assume.

"Gentlefolks--what's left of 'em," replied the farmer with an equally
affected indifference.

"And that's her father?" said Richard, growing bolder to speak of her.

"That's her father, young gentleman!"

"Mr. Blaize," Richard turned to face him, and burst out, "where is she?"

"Gone, sir! packed off!--Can't have her here now." The farmer thrummed a
step brisker, and eyed the young man's wild face resolutely.

"Mr. Blaize," Richard leaned forward to get closer to him. He was
stunned, and hardly aware of what he was saying or doing: "Where has she
gone? Why did she leave?"

"You needn't to ask, sir--ye know," said the farmer, with a side shot of
his head.

"But she did not--it was not her wish to go?"

"No! I think she likes the place. Mayhap she likes't too well!"

"Why did you send her away to make her unhappy, Mr. Blaize?"

The farmer bluntly denied it was he was the party who made her unhappy.
"Nobody can't accuse me. Tell ye what, sir. I wunt have the busybodies
set to work about her, and there's all the matter. So let you and I come
to an understandin'."

A blind inclination to take offence made Richard sit upright. He forgot
it the next minute, and said humbly: "Am I the cause of her going?"

"Well!" returned the farmer, "to speak straight--ye be!"

"What can I do, Mr. Blaize, that she may come back again" the young
hypocrite asked.

"Now," said the farmer, "you're coming to business. Glad to hear ye talk
in that sensible way, Mr. Feverel. You may guess I wants her bad enough.
The house ain't itself now she's away, and I ain't myself. Well, sir!
This ye can do. If you gives me your promise not to meddle with her at
all--I can't mak' out how you come to be acquainted; not to try to get
her to be meetin' you--and if you'd 'a seen her when she left, you
would--when did ye meet?--last grass, wasn't it?--your word as a
gentleman not to be writing letters, and spyin' after her--I'll have her
back at once. Back she shall come!"

"Give her up!" cried Richard.

"Ay, that's it!" said the farmer. "Give her up."

The young man checked the annihilation of time that was on his mouth.

"You sent her away to protect her from me, then?" he said savagely.

"That's not quite it, but that'll do," rejoined the farmer.

"Do you think I shall harm her, sir?"

"People seem to think she'll harm you, young gentleman," the farmer said
with some irony.

"Harm me--she? What people?"

"People pretty intimate with you, sir."

"What people? Who spoke of us?" Richard began to scent a plot, and would
not be balked.

"Well, sir, look here," said the farmer. "It ain't no secret, and if it
be, I don't see why I'm to keep it. It appears your education's
peculiar!" The farmer drawled out the word as if he were describing the
figure of a snake. "You ain't to be as other young gentlemen. All the
better! You're a fine bold young gentleman, and your father's a right to
be proud of ye. Well, sir--I'm sure I thank him for't he comes to hear of
you and Luce, and of course he don't want nothin' o' that--more do I. I
meets him there! What's more I won't have nothin' of it. She be my gal.
She were left to my protection. And she's a lady, sir. Let me tell ye, ye
won't find many on 'em so well looked to as she be--my Luce! Well, Mr.
Fev'rel, it's you, or it's her--one of ye must be out o' the way. So
we're told. And Luce--I do believe she's just as anxious about yer
education as yer father she says she'll go, and wouldn't write, and'd
break it off for the sake o' your education. And she've kep' her word,
haven't she?--She's a true'n. What she says she'll do!--True blue she be,
my Luce! So now, sir, you do the same, and I'll thank ye."

Any one who has tossed a sheet of paper into the fire, and seen it
gradually brown with heat, and strike to flame, may conceive the mind of
the lover as he listened to this speech.

His anger did not evaporate in words, but condensed and sank deep. "Mr.
Blaize," he said, "this is very kind of the people you allude to, but I
am of an age now to think and act for myself--I love her, sir!" His whole
countenance changed, and the muscles of his face quivered.

"Well!" said the farmer, appeasingly, "we all do at your age--somebody or
other. It's natural!"

"I love her!" the young man thundered afresh, too much possessed by his
passion to have a sense of shame in the confession. "Farmer!" his voice
fell to supplication, "will you bring her back?"

Farmer Blaize made a queer face. He asked--what for? and where was the
promise required?--But was not the lover's argument conclusive? He said
he loved her! and he could not see why her uncle should not in
consequence immediately send for her, that they might be together. All
very well, quoth the farmer, but what's to come of it?--What was to come
of it? Why, love, and more love! And a bit too much! the farmer added
grimly.

"Then you refuse me, farmer," said Richard. "I must look to you for
keeping her away from me, not to--to--these people. You will not have her
back, though I tell you I love her better than my life?"

Farmer Blaize now had to answer him plainly, he had a reason and an
objection of his own. And it was, that her character was at stake, and
God knew whether she herself might not be in danger. He spoke with a
kindly candour, not without dignity. He complimented Richard personally,
but young people were young people; baronets' sons were not in the habit
of marrying farmers' nieces.

At first the son of a System did not comprehend him. When he did, he
said: "Farmer! if I give you my word of honour, as I hope for heaven, to
marry her when I am of age, will you have her back?"

He was so fervid that, to quiet him, the farmer only shook his head
doubtfully at the bars of the grate, and let his chest fall slowly.
Richard caught what seemed to him a glimpse of encouragement in these
signs, and observed: "It's not because you object to me, Mr. Blaize?"

The farmer signified it was not that.

"It's because my father is against me," Richard went on, and undertook to
show that love was so sacred a matter that no father could entirely and
for ever resist his son's inclinations. Argument being a cool field where
the farmer could meet and match him, the young man got on the tramroad of
his passion, and went ahead. He drew pictures of Lucy, of her truth, and
his own. He took leaps from life to death, from death to life, mixing
imprecations and prayers in a torrent. Perhaps he did move the stolid old
Englishman a little, he was so vehement, and made so visible a sacrifice
of his pride.

Farmer Blaize tried to pacify him, but it was useless. His jewel he must
have.

The farmer stretched out his hand for the pipe that allayeth botheration.
"May smoke heer now," he said. "Not when--somebody's present. Smoke in
the kitchen then. Don't mind smell?"

Richard nodded, and watched the operations while the farmer filled, and
lighted, and began to puff, as if his fate hung on them.

"Who'd a' thought, when you sat over there once, of its comin' to this?"
ejaculated the farmer, drawing ease and reflection from tobacco. "You
didn't think much of her that day, young gentleman! I introduced ye.
Well! things comes about. Can't you wait till she returns in due course,
now?"

This suggestion, the work of the pipe, did but bring on him another
torrent.

"It's queer," said the farmer, putting the mouth of the pipe to his
wrinkled-up temples.

Richard waited for him, and then he laid down the pipe altogether, as no
aid in perplexity, and said, after leaning his arm on the table and
staring at Richard an instant:

"Look, young gentleman! My word's gone. I've spoke it. I've given 'em the
'surance she shan't be back till the Spring, and then I'll have her, and
then--well! I do hope, for more reasons than one, ye'll both be
wiser--I've got my own notions about her. But I an't the man to force a
gal to marry 'gainst her inclines. Depend upon it I'm not your enemy, Mr.
Fev'rel. You're jest the one to mak' a young gal proud. So wait,--and
see. That's my 'dvice. Jest tak' and wait. I've no more to say."

Richard's impetuosity had made him really afraid of speaking his notions
concerning the projected felicity of young Tom, if indeed they were
serious.

The farmer repeated that he had no more to say; and Richard, with "Wait
till the Spring! Wait till the Spring!" dinning despair in his ears,
stood up to depart. Farmer Blaize shook his slack hand in a friendly way,
and called out at the door for young Tom, who, dreading allusions to his
Folly, did not appear. A maid rushed by Richard in the passage, and
slipped something into his grasp, which fixed on it without further
consciousness than that of touch. The mare was led forth by the Bantam. A
light rain was falling down strong warm gusts, and the trees were noisy
in the night. Farmer Blaize requested Richard at the gate to give him his
hand, and say all was well. He liked the young man for his earnestness
and honest outspeaking. Richard could not say all was well, but he gave
his hand, and knitted it to the farmer's in a sharp squeeze, when he got
upon Cassandra, and rode into the tumult.

A calm, clear dawn succeeded the roaring West, and threw its glowing grey
image on the waters of the Abbey-lake. Before sunrise Tom Bakewell was
abroad, and met the missing youth, his master, jogging Cassandra
leisurely along the Lobourne park-road, a sorry couple to look at.
Cassandra's flanks were caked with mud, her head drooped: all that was in
her had been taken out by that wild night. On what heaths and heavy
fallows had she not spent her noble strength, recklessly fretting through
the darkness!

"Take the mare," said Richard, dismounting and patting her between the
eyes. "She's done up, poor old gal! Look to her, Tom, and then come to me
in my room."

Tom asked no questions.

Three days would bring the anniversary of Richard's birth, and though Tom
was close, the condition of the mare, and the young gentleman's strange
freak in riding her out all night becoming known, prepared everybody at
Raynham for the usual bad-luck birthday, the prophets of which were full
of sad gratification. Sir Austin had an unpleasant office to require of
his son; no other than that of humbly begging Benson's pardon, and
washing out the undue blood he had spilt in taking his Pound of Flesh.
Heavy Benson was told to anticipate the demand for pardon, and practised
in his mind the most melancholy Christian deportment he could assume on
the occasion. But while his son was in this state, Sir Austin considered
that he would hardly be brought to see the virtues of the act, and did
not make the requisition of him, and heavy Benson remained drawn up
solemnly expectant at doorways, and at the foot of the staircase, a
Saurian Caryatid, wherever he could get a step in advance of the young
man, while Richard heedlessly passed him, as he passed everybody else,
his head bent to the ground, and his legs bearing him like random
instruments of whose service he was unconscious. It was a shock to
Benson's implicit belief in his patron; and he was not consoled by the
philosophic explanation, "That Good in a strong many-compounded nature is
of slower growth than any other mortal thing, and must not be forced."
Damnatory doctrines best pleased Benson. He was ready to pardon, as a
Christian should, but he did want his enemy before him on his knees. And
now, though the Saurian Eye saw more than all the other eyes in the
house, and saw that there was matter in hand between Tom and his master
to breed exceeding discomposure to the System, Benson, as he had not
received his indemnity, and did not wish to encounter fresh perils for
nothing, held his peace.

Sir Austin partly divined what was going on in the breast of his son,
without conceiving the depths of distrust his son cherished or quite
measuring the intensity of the passion that consumed him. He was very
kind and tender with him. Like a cunning physician who has, nevertheless,
overlooked the change in the disease superinduced by one false dose, he
meditated his prescriptions carefully and confidently, sure that he knew
the case, and was a match for it. He decreed that Richard's erratic
behaviour should pass unnoticed. Two days before the birthday, he asked
him whether he would object to having company? To which Richard said:
"Have whom you will, sir." The preparation for festivity commenced
accordingly.

On the birthday eve he dined with the rest. Lady Blandish was there, and
sat penitently at his right. Hippias prognosticated certain indigestion
for himself on the morrow. The Eighteenth Century wondered whether she
should live to see another birthday. Adrian drank the two-years' distant
term of his tutorship, and Algernon went over the list of the Lobourne
men who would cope with Bursley on the morrow. Sir Austin gave ear and a
word to all, keeping his mental eye for his son. To please Lady Blandish
also, Adrian ventured to make trifling jokes about London's Mrs.
Grandison; jokes delicately not decent, but so delicately so, that it was
not decent to perceive it.

After dinner Richard left them. Nothing more than commonly peculiar was
observed about him, beyond the excessive glitter of his eyes, but the
baronet said, "Yes, yes! that will pass." He and Adrian, and Lady
Blandish, took tea in the library, and sat till a late hour discussing
casuistries relating mostly to the Apple-disease. Converse very amusing
to the wise youth, who could suggest to the two chaste minds situations
of the shadiest character, with the air of a seeker after truth, and lead
them, unsuspecting, where they dared not look about them. The Aphorist
had elated the heart of his constant fair worshipper with a newly rounded
if not newly conceived sentence, when they became aware that they were
four. Heavy Benson stood among them. He said he had knocked, but received
no answer. There was, however, a vestige of surprise and dissatisfaction
on his face beholding Adrian of the company, which had not quite worn
away, and gave place, when it did vanish, to an aspect of flabby
severity.

"Well, Benson? well?" said the baronet.

The unmoving man replied: "If you please, Sir Austin--Mr. Richard!"

"Well!"

"He's out!"

"Well?"

"With Bakewell!"

"Well?"

"And a carpet-bag!"

The carpet-bag might be supposed to contain that funny thing called a
young hero's romance in the making.

Out Richard was, and with a carpet-bag, which Tom Bakewell carried. He
was on the road to Bellingham, under heavy rain, hasting like an escaped
captive, wild with joy, while Tom shook his skin, and grunted at his
discomforts. The mail train was to be caught at Bellingham. He knew where
to find her now, through the intervention of Miss Davenport, and thither
he was flying, an arrow loosed from the bow: thither, in spite of fathers
and friends and plotters, to claim her, and take her, and stand with her
against the world.

They were both thoroughly wet when they entered Bellingham, and Tom's
visions were of hot drinks. He hinted the necessity for inward
consolation to his master, who could answer nothing but "Tom! Tom! I
shall see her tomorrow!" It was bad--travelling in the wet, Tom hinted
again, to provoke the same insane outcry, and have his arm seized and
furiously shaken into the bargain. Passing the principal inn of the
place, Tom spoke plainly for brandy.

"No!" cried Richard, "there's not a moment to be lost!" and as he said
it, he reeled, and fell against Tom, muttering indistinctly of faintness,
and that there was no time to lose. Tom lifted him in his arms, and got
admission to the inn. Brandy, the country's specific, was advised by host
and hostess, and forced into his mouth, reviving him sufficiently to cry
out, "Tom! the bell's ringing: we shall be late," after which he fell
back insensible on the sofa where they had stretched him. Excitement of
blood and brain had done its work upon him. The youth suffered them to
undress him and put him to bed, and there he lay, forgetful even of love;
a drowned weed borne onward by the tide of the hours. There his father
found him.

Was the Scientific Humanist remorseful? He had looked forward to such a
crisis as that point in the disease his son was the victim of, when the
body would fail and give the spirit calm to conquer the malady, knowing
very well that the seeds of the evil were not of the spirit. Moreover, to
see him and have him was a repose after the alarm Benson had sounded.
"Mark!" he said to Lady Blandish, "when he recovers he will not care for
her."

The lady had accompanied him to the Bellingham inn on first hearing of
Richard's seizure.

"What an iron man you can be," she exclaimed, smothering her intuitions.
She was for giving the boy his bauble; promising it him, at least, if he
would only get well and be the bright flower of promise he once was.

"Can you look on him," she pleaded, "can you look on him and persevere?"

It was a hard sight for this man who loved his son so deeply. The youth
lay in his strange bed, straight and motionless, with fever on his
cheeks, and altered eyes.

Old Dr. Clifford of Lobourne was the medical attendant, who, with
head-shaking, and gathering of lips, and reminiscences of ancient
arguments, guaranteed to do all that leech could do in the matter. The
old doctor did admit that Richard's constitution was admirable, and
answered to his prescriptions like a piano to the musician. "But," he
said at a family consultation, for Sir Austin had told him how it stood
with the young man, "drugs are not much in cases of this sort. Change!
That's what's wanted, and as soon as may be. Distraction! He ought to see
the world, and know what he is made of. It's no use my talking, I know,"
added the doctor.

"On the contrary," said Sir Austin, "I am quite of your persuasion. And
the world he shall see--now."

"We have dipped him in Styx, you know, doctor," Adrian remarked.

"But, doctor," said Lady Blandish, "have you known a case of this sort
before."

"Never, my lady," said the doctor, "they're not common in these parts.
Country people are tolerably healthy-minded."

"But people--and country people--have died for love, doctor?"

The doctor had not met any of them.

"Men, or women?" inquired the baronet.

Lady Blandish believed mostly women.

"Ask the doctor whether they were healthy-minded women," said the
baronet. "No! you are both looking at the wrong end. Between a
highly-cultured being, and an emotionless animal, there is all the
difference in the world. But of the two, the doctor is nearer the truth.
The healthy nature is pretty safe. If he allowed for organization he
would be right altogether. To feel, but not to feel to excess, that is
the problem."

     "If I can't have the one I chose,
     To some fresh maid I will propose,"

Adrian hummed a country ballad.




CHAPTER XXIV

When the young Experiment again knew the hours that rolled him onward, he
was in his own room at Raynham. Nothing had changed: only a strong fist
had knocked him down and stunned him, and he opened his eyes to a grey
world: he had forgotten what he lived for. He was weak and thin, and with
a pale memory of things. His functions were the same, everything
surrounding him was the same: he looked upon the old blue hills, the
far-lying fallows, the river, and the woods: he knew them, they seemed to
have lost recollection of him. Nor could he find in familiar human faces
the secret of intimacy of heretofore. They were the same faces: they
nodded and smiled to him. What was lost he could not tell. Something had
been knocked out of him! He was sensible of his father's sweetness of
manner, and he was grieved that he could not reply to it, for every sense
of shame and reproach had strangely gone. He felt very useless. In place
of the fiery love for one, he now bore about a cold charity to all.

Thus in the heart of the young man died the Spring Primrose, and while it
died another heart was pushing forth the Primrose of Autumn.

The wonderful change in Richard, and the wisdom of her admirer, now
positively proved, were exciting matters to Lady Blandish. She was
rebuked for certain little rebellious fancies concerning him that had
come across her enslaved mind from time to time. For was he not almost a
prophet? It distressed the sentimental lady that a love like Richard's
could pass off in mere smoke, and words such as she had heard him speak
in Abbey-wood resolve to emptiness. Nay, it humiliated her personally,
and the baronet's shrewd prognostication humiliated her. For how should
he know, and dare to say, that love was a thing of the dust that could be
trodden out under the heel of science? But he had said so; and he had
proved himself right. She heard with wonderment that Richard of his own
accord had spoken to his father of the folly he had been guilty of, and
had begged his pardon. The baronet told her this, adding that the youth
had done it in a cold unwavering way, without a movement of his features:
had evidently done it to throw off the burden of the duty, he had
conceived. He had thought himself bound to acknowledge that he had been
the Foolish Young Fellow, wishing, possibly, to abjure the fact by an set
of penance. He had also given satisfaction to Benson, and was become a
renovated peaceful spirit, whose main object appeared to be to get up his
physical strength by exercise and no expenditure of speech.

In her company he was composed and courteous; even when they were alone
together, he did not exhibit a trace of melancholy. Sober he seemed, as
one who has recovered from a drunkenness and has determined to drink no
more. The idea struck her that he might be playing a part, but Tom
Bakewell, in a private conversation they had, informed her that he had
received an order from his young master, one day while boxing with him,
not to mention the young lady's name to him as long as he lived; and Tom
could only suppose that she had offended him. Theoretically wise Lady
Blandish had always thought the baronet; she was unprepared to find him
thus practically sagacious. She fell many degrees; she wanted something
to cling to; so she clung to the man who struck her low. Love, then, was
earthly; its depth could be probed by science! A man lived who could
measure it from end to end; foretell its term; handle the young cherub as
were he a shot owl! We who have flown into cousinship with the empyrean,
and disported among immortal hosts, our base birth as a child of Time is
made bare to us!--our wings are cut! Oh, then, if science is this
victorious enemy of love, let us love science! was the logic of the
lady's heart; and secretly cherishing the assurance that she should
confute him yet, and prove him utterly wrong, she gave him the fruits of
present success, as it is a habit of women to do; involuntarily partly.
The fires took hold of her. She felt soft emotions such as a girl feels,
and they flattered her. It was like youth coming back. Pure women have a
second youth. The Autumn primrose flourished.

We are advised by The Pilgrim's Scrip that--

"The ways of women, which are Involution, and their practices, which are
Opposition, are generally best hit upon by guess work, and a bold
word;"--it being impossible to track them and hunt them down in the
ordinary style.

So that we may not ourselves become involved and opposed, let us each of
us venture a guess and say a bold word as to how it came that the lady,
who trusted love to be eternal, grovelled to him that shattered her
tender faith, and loved him.

Hitherto it had been simply a sentimental dalliance, and gossips had
maligned the lady. Just when the gossips grew tired of their slander, and
inclined to look upon her charitably, she set about to deserve every word
they had said of her; which may instruct us, if you please, that gossips
have only to persist in lying to be crowned with verity, or that one has
only to endure evil mouths for a period to gain impunity. She was always
at the Abbey now. She was much closeted with the baronet. It seemed to be
understood that she had taken Mrs. Doria's place. Benson in his misogynic
soul perceived that she was taking Lady Feverel's: but any report
circulated by Benson was sure to meet discredit, and drew the gossips
upon himself; which made his meditations tragic. No sooner was one woman
defeated than another took the field! The object of the System was no
sooner safe than its great author was in danger!

"I can't think what has come to Benson" he said to Adrian.

"He seems to have received a fresh legacy of several pounds of lead,"
returned the wise youth, and imitating Dr. Clifford's manner. "Change is
what he wants! distraction! send him to Wales for a month, sir, and let
Richard go with him. The two victims of woman may do each other good."

"Unfortunately I can't do without him," said the baronet.

"Then we must continue to have him on our shoulders all day, and on our
chests all night!" Adrian ejaculated.

"I think while he preserves this aspect we won't have him at the
dinner-table," said the baronet.

Adrian thought that would be a relief to their digestions; and added:
"You know, sir, what he says?"

Receiving a negative, Adrian delicately explained to him that Benson's
excessive ponderosity of demeanour was caused by anxiety for the safety
of his master.

"You must pardon a faithful fool, sir," he continued, for the baronet
became red, and exclaimed:

"His stupidity is past belief! I have absolutely to bolt my study-door
against him."

Adrian at once beheld a charming scene in the interior of the study, not
unlike one that Benson had visually witnessed. For, like a wary prophet,
Benson, that he might have warrant for what he foretold of the future,
had a care to spy upon the present: warned haply by The Pilgrim's Scrip,
of which he was a diligent reader, and which says, rather emphatically:
"Could we see Time's full face, we were wise of him." Now to see Time's
full face, it is sometimes necessary to look through keyholes, the
veteran having a trick of smiling peace to you on one cheek and grimacing
confusion on the other behind the curtain. Decency and a sense of honour
restrain most of us from being thus wise and miserable for ever. Benson's
excuse was that he believed in his master, who was menaced. And moreover,
notwithstanding his previous tribulation, to spy upon Cupid was sweet to
him. So he peeped, and he saw a sight. He saw Time's full face; or, in
other words, he saw the wiles of woman and the weakness of man: which is
our history, as Benson would have written it, and a great many poets and
philosophers have written it.

Yet it was but the plucking of the Autumn primrose that Benson had seen:
a somewhat different operation from the plucking of the Spring one: very
innocent! Our staid elderly sister has paler blood, and has, or thinks
she has, a reason or two about the roots. She is not all instinct. "For
this high cause, and for that I know men, and know him to be the flower
of men, I give myself to him!" She makes that lofty inward exclamation
while the hand is detaching her from the roots. Even so strong a
self-justification she requires. She has not that blind glory in excess
which her younger sister can gild the longest leap with. And if,
moth-like, she desires the star, she is nervously cautious of candles.
Hence her circles about the dangerous human flame are wide and shy. She
must be drawn nearer and nearer by a fresh reason. She loves to
sentimentalize. Lady Blandish had been sentimentalizing for ten years.
She would have preferred to pursue the game. The dark-eyed dame was
pleased with her smooth life and the soft excitement that did not ruffle
it. Not willingly did she let herself be won.

"Sentimentalists," says The Pilgrim's Scrip, "are they who seek to enjoy
without incurring the Immense Debtorship for a thing done."

"It is," the writer says of Sentimentalism elsewhere, "a happy pastime
and an important science to the timid, the idle, and the heartless; but a
damning one to them who have anything to forfeit."

However, one who could set down the dying for love, as a sentimentalism,
can hardly be accepted as a clear authority. Assuredly he was not one to
avoid the incurring of the immense debtorship in any way: but he was a
bondsman still to the woman who had forsaken him, and a spoken word would
have made it seem his duty to face that public scandal which was the last
evil to him. What had so horrified the virtuous Benson, Richard had
already beheld in Daphne's Bower; a simple kissing of the fair white
hand! Doubtless the keyhole somehow added to Benson's horror. The two
similar performances, so very innocent, had wondrous opposite
consequences. The first kindled Richard to adore Woman; the second
destroyed Benson's faith in Man. But Lady Blandish knew the difference
between the two. She understood why the baronet did not speak; excused,
and respected him for it. She was content, since she must love, to love
humbly, and she had, besides, her pity for his sorrows to comfort her. A
hundred fresh reasons for loving him arose and multiplied every day. He
read to her the secret book in his own handwriting, composed for
Richard's Marriage Guide: containing Advice and Directions to a Young
Husband, full of the most tender wisdom and delicacy; so she thought;
nay, not wanting in poetry, though neither rhymed nor measured. He
expounded to her the distinctive character of the divers ages of love,
giving the palm to the flower she put forth, over that of Spring, or the
Summer rose. And while they sat and talked; "My wound has healed," he
said. "How?" she asked. "At the fountain of your eyes," he replied, and
drew the joy of new life from her blushes, without incurring further
debtor ship for a thing done.




CHAPTER XXV

Let it be some apology for the damage caused by the careering hero, and a
consolation to the quiet wretches, dragged along with him at his
chariot-wheels, that he is generally the last to know when he has made an
actual start; such a mere creature is he, like the rest of us, albeit the
head of our fates. By this you perceive the true hero, whether he be a
prince or a pot-boy, that he does not plot; Fortune does all for him. He
may be compared to one to whom, in an electric circle, it is given to
carry the battery.

We caper and grimace at his will; yet not his the will, not his the
power. 'Tis all Fortune's, whose puppet he is. She deals her
dispensations through him. Yea, though our capers be never so comical, he
laughs not. Intent upon his own business, the true hero asks little
services of us here and there; thinks it quite natural that they should
be acceded to, and sees nothing ridiculous in the lamentable contortions
we must go through to fulfil them. Probably he is the elect of Fortune,
because of that notable faculty of being intent upon his own business:
"Which is," says The Pilgrim's Scrip, "with men to be valued equal to
that force which in water makes a stream." This prelude was necessary to
the present chapter of Richard's history.

It happened that in the turn of the year, and while old earth was busy
with her flowers, the fresh wind blew, the little bird sang, and Hippias
Feverel, the Dyspepsy, amazed, felt the Spring move within him. He
communicated his delightful new sensations to the baronet, his brother,
whose constant exclamation with regard to him, was: "Poor Hippias! All
his machinery is bare!" and had no hope that he would ever be in a
condition to defend it from view. Nevertheless Hippias had that hope, and
so he told his brother, making great exposure of his machinery to effect
the explanation. He spoke of all his physical experiences exultingly, and
with wonder. The achievement of common efforts, not usually blazoned, he
celebrated as triumphs, and, of course, had Adrian on his back very
quickly. But he could bear him, or anything, now. It was such ineffable
relief to find himself looking out upon the world of mortals instead of
into the black phantasmal abysses of his own complicated frightful
structure.  "My mind doesn't so much seem to haunt itself, now," said
Hippias, nodding shortly and peering out of intense puckers to convey a
glimpse of what hellish sufferings his had been: "I feel as if I had come
aboveground."

A poor Dyspepsy may talk as he will, but he is the one who never gets
sympathy, or experiences compassion: and it is he whose groaning
petitions for charity do at last rout that Christian virtue. Lady
Blandish, a charitable soul, could not listen to Hippias, though she had
a heart for little mice and flies, and Sir Austin had also small patience
with his brother's gleam of health, which was just enough to make his
disease visible. He remembered his early follies and excesses, and bent
his ear to him as one man does to another who complains of having to pay
a debt legally incurred.

"I think," said Adrian, seeing how the communications of Hippias were
received, "that when our Nemesis takes lodgings in the stomach, it's best
to act the Spartan, smile hard, and be silent."

Richard alone was decently kind to Hippias; whether from opposition, or
real affection, could not be said, as the young man was mysterious. He
advised his uncle to take exercise, walked with him, cultivated cheerful
impressions in him, and pointed out innocent pursuits. He made Hippias
visit with him some of the poor old folk of the village, who bewailed the
loss of his cousin Austin Wentworth, and did his best to waken him up,
and give the outer world a stronger hold on him. He succeeded in nothing
but in winning his uncle's gratitude. The season bloomed scarce longer
than a week for Hippias, and then began to languish. The poor Dyspepsy's
eager grasp at beatification relaxed: he went underground again. He
announced that he felt "spongy things"--one of the more constant throes
of his malady. His bitter face recurred: he chewed the cud of horrid
hallucinations. He told Richard he must give up going about with him:
people telling of their ailments made him so uncomfortable--the birds
were so noisy, pairing--the rude bare soil sickened him.

Richard treated him with a gravity equal to his father's. He asked what
the doctors said.

"Oh! the doctors!" cried Hippias with vehement scepticism. "No man of
sense believes in medicine for chronic disorder. Do you happen to have
heard of any new remedy then, Richard? No? They advertise a great many
cures for indigestion, I assure you, my dear boy. I wonder whether one
can rely upon the authenticity of those signatures? I see no reason why
there should be no cure for such a disease?--Eh? And it's just one of the
things a quack, as they call them, would hit upon sooner than one who is
in the beaten track. Do you know, Richard, my dear boy, I've often
thought that if we could by any means appropriate to our use some of the
extraordinary digestive power that a boa constrictor has in his gastric
juices, there is really no manner of reason why we should not comfortably
dispose of as much of an ox as our stomachs will hold, and one might eat
French dishes without the wretchedness of thinking what's to follow. And
this makes me think that those fellows may, after all, have got some
truth in them: some secret that, of course, they require to be paid for.
We distrust each other in this world too much, Richard. I've felt
inclined once or twice--but it's absurd!--If it only alleviated a few of
my sufferings I should be satisfied. I've no hesitation in saying that I
should be quite satisfied if it only did away with one or two, and left
me free to eat and drink as other people do. Not that I mean to try them.
It's only a fancy--Eh? What a thing health is, my dear boy! Ah! if I were
like you! I was in love once!"

"Were you!" said Richard, coolly regarding him.

"I've forgotten what I felt!" Hippias sighed. "You've very much improved,
my dear boy."

"So people say," quoth Richard.

Hippias looked at him anxiously: "If I go to town and get the doctor's
opinion about trying a new course--Eh, Richard? will you come with me? I
should like your company. We could see London together, you know. Enjoy
ourselves," and Hippias rubbed his hands.

Richard smiled at the feeble glimmer of enjoyment promised by his uncle's
eyes, and said he thought it better they should stay where they were--an
answer that might mean anything. Hippias immediately became possessed by
the beguiling project. He went to the baronet, and put the matter before
him, instancing doctors as the object of his journey, not quacks, of
course; and requesting leave to take Richard. Sir Austin was getting
uneasy about his son's manner. It was not natural. His heart seemed to be
frozen: he had no confidences: he appeared to have no ambition--to have
lost the virtues of youth with the poison that had passed out of him. He
was disposed to try what effect a little travelling might have on him,
and had himself once or twice hinted to Richard that it would be good for
him to move about, the young man quietly replying that he did not wish to
quit Raynham at all, which was too strict a fulfilment of his father's
original views in educating him there entirely. On the day that Hippias
made his proposal, Adrian, seconded by Lady Blandish, also made one. The
sweet Spring season stirred in Adrian as well as in others: not to
pastoral measures: to the joys of the operatic world and bravura glories.
He also suggested that it would be advisable to carry Richard to town for
a term, and let him know his position, and some freedom. Sir Austin
weighed the two proposals. He was pretty certain that Richard's passion
was consumed, and that the youth was now only under the burden of its
ashes. He had found against his heart, at the Bellingham inn: a great
lock of golden hair. He had taken it, and the lover, after feeling about
for it with faint hands, never asked for it. This precious lock (Miss
Davenport had thrust it into his hand at Belthorpe as Lucy's last gift),
what sighs and tears it had weathered! The baronet laid it in Richard's
sight one day, and beheld him take it up, turn it over, and drop it down
again calmly, as if he were handling any common curiosity. It pacified
him on that score. The young man's love was dead. Dr. Clifford said
rightly: he wanted distractions. The baronet determined that Richard
should go. Hippias and Adrian then pressed their several suits as to
which should have him. Hippias, when he could forget himself, did not
lack sense. He observed that Adrian was not at present a proper companion
for Richard, and would teach him to look on life from the false point.

"You don't understand a young philosopher," said the baronet.

"A young philosopher's an old fool!" returned Hippias, not thinking that
his growl had begotten a phrase.

His brother smiled with gratification, and applauded him loudly:
"Excellent! worthy of your best days! You're wrong, though, in applying
it to Adrian. He has never been precocious. All he has done has been to
bring sound common sense to bear upon what he hears and sees. I think,
however," the baronet added, "he may want faith in the better qualities
of men." And this reflection inclined him not to let his son be alone
with Adrian. He gave Richard his choice, who saw which way his father's
wishes tended, and decided so to please him. Naturally it annoyed Adrian
extremely. He said to his chief:

"I suppose you know what you are doing, sir. I don't see that we derive
any advantage from the family name being made notorious for twenty years
of obscene suffering, and becoming a byword for our constitutional
tendency to stomachic distension before we fortunately encountered
Quackem's Pill. My uncle's tortures have been huge, but I would rather
society were not intimate with them under their several headings." Adrian
enumerated some of the most abhorrent. "You know him, sir. If he
conceives a duty, he will do it in the face of every decency--all the
more obstinate because the conception is rare. If he feels a little brisk
the morning after the pill, he sends the letter that makes us famous! We
go down to posterity with heightened characteristics, to say nothing of a
contemporary celebrity nothing less than our being turned inside-out to
the rabble. I confess I don't desire to have my machinery made bare to
them."

Sir Austin assured the wise youth that Hippias had arranged to go to Dr.
Bairam. He softened Adrian's chagrin by telling him that in about two
weeks they would follow to London: hinting also at a prospective Summer
campaign. The day was fixed for Richard to depart, and the day came.
Madame the Eighteenth Century called him to her chamber and put into his
hand a fifty-pound note, as her contribution toward his pocket-expenses.
He did not want it, he said, but she told him he was a young man, and
would soon make that fly when he stood on his own feet. The old lady did
not at all approve of the System in her heart, and she gave her
grandnephew to understand that, should he require more, he knew where to
apply, and secrets would be kept. His father presented him with a hundred
pounds--which also Richard said he did not want--he did not care for
money. "Spend it or not," said the baronet, perfectly secure in him.

Hippias had few injunctions to observe. They were to take up quarters at
the hotel, Algernon's general run of company at the house not being
altogether wholesome. The baronet particularly forewarned Hippias of the
imprudence of attempting to restrict the young man's movements, and
letting him imagine he was under surveillance. Richard having been, as it
were, pollarded by despotism, was now to grow up straight, and bloom
again, in complete independence, as far as he could feel. So did the sage
decree; and we may pause a moment to reflect how wise were his
previsions, and how successful they must have been, had not Fortune, the
great foe to human cleverness, turned against him, or he against himself.

The departure took place on a fine March morning. The bird of Winter sang
from the budding tree; in the blue sky sang the bird of Summer. Adrian
rode between Richard and Hippias to the Bellingham station, and vented
his disgust on them after his own humorous fashion, because it did not
rain and damp their ardour. In the rear came Lady Blandish and the
baronet, conversing on the calm summit of success.

"You have shaped him exactly to resemble yourself," she said, pointing
with her riding-whip to the grave stately figure of the young man.

"Outwardly, perhaps," he answered, and led to a discussion on Purity and
Strength, the lady saying that she preferred Purity.

"But you do not," said the baronet. "And there I admire the always true
instinct of women, that they all worship Strength in whatever form, and
seem to know it to be the child of heaven; whereas Purity is but a
characteristic, a garment, and can be spotted--how soon! For there are
questions in this life with which we must grapple or be lost, and when,
hunted by that cold eye of intense inner-consciousness, the clearest soul
becomes a cunning fox, if it have not courage to stand and do battle.
Strength indicates a boundless nature--like the Maker. Strength is a God
to you--Purity a toy. A pretty one, and you seem to be fond of playing
with it," he added, with unaccustomed slyness.

The lady listened, pleased at the sportive malice which showed that the
constraint on his mind had left him. It was for women to fight their
fight now; she only took part in it for amusement. This is how the ranks
of our enemies are thinned; no sooner do poor women put up a champion in
their midst than she betrays them.

"I see," she said archly, "we are the lovelier vessels; you claim the
more direct descent. Men are seedlings: Women--slips! Nay, you have said
so," she cried out at his gestured protestation, laughing.

"But I never printed it."

"Oh! what you speak answers for print with me."

Exquisite Blandish! He could not choose but love her.

"Tell me what are your plans?" she asked. "May a woman know?"

He replied, "I have none or you would share them. I shall study him in
the world. This indifference must wear off. I shall mark his inclinations
now, and he shall be what he inclines to. Occupation will be his prime
safety. His cousin Austin's plan of life appears most to his taste, and
he can serve the people that way as well as in Parliament, should he have
no stronger ambition. The clear duty of a man of any wealth is to serve
the people as he best can. He shall go among Austin's set, if he wishes
it, though personally I find no pleasure in rash imaginations, and
undigested schemes built upon the mere instinct of principles."

"Look at him now," said the lady. "He seems to care for nothing; not even
for the beauty of the day."

"Or Adrian's jokes," added the baronet.

Adrian could be seen to be trying zealously to torment a laugh, or a
confession of irritation, out of his hearers, stretching out his chin to
one, and to the other, with audible asides. Richard he treated as a new
instrument of destruction about to be let loose on the slumbering
metropolis; Hippias as one in an interesting condition; and he got so
much fun out of the notion of these two journeying together, and the
mishaps that might occur to them, that he esteemed it almost a personal
insult for his hearers not to laugh. The wise youth's dull life at
Raynham had afflicted him with many peculiarities of the professional
joker.

"Oh! the Spring! the Spring!" he cried, as in scorn of his sallies they
exchanged their unmeaning remarks on the sweet weather across him. "You
seem both to be uncommonly excited by the operations of turtles, rooks,
and daws. Why can't you let them alone?"

          'Wind bloweth,
          Cock croweth,
             Doodle-doo;
          Hippy verteth,
          Ricky sterteth,
             Sing Cuckoo!'

There's an old native pastoral!--Why don't you write a Spring sonnet,
Ricky? The asparagus-beds are full of promise, I hear, and eke the
strawberry. Berries I fancy your Pegasus has a taste for. What kind of
berry was that I saw some verses of yours about once?--amatory verses to
some kind of berry--yewberry, blueberry, glueberry! Pretty verses,
decidedly warm. Lips, eyes, bosom, legs--legs? I don't think you gave her
any legs. No legs and no nose. That appears to be the poetic taste of the
day. It shall be admitted that you create the very beauties for a chaste
people.

     'O might I lie where leans her lute!'

and offend no moral community. That's not a bad image of yours, my dear
boy:

       'Her shape is like an antelope
        Upon the Eastern hills.'

But as a candid critic, I would ask you if the likeness can be considered
correct when you give her no legs? You will see at the ballet that you
are in error about women at present, Richard. That admirable institution
which our venerable elders have imported from Gallia for the instruction
of our gaping youth, will edify and astonish you. I assure you I used,
from reading The Pilgrim's Scrip, to imagine all sorts of things about
them, till I was taken there, and learnt that they are very like us after
all, and then they ceased to trouble me. Mystery is the great danger to
youth, my son! Mystery is woman's redoubtable weapon, O Richard of the
Ordeal! I'm aware that you've had your lessons in anatomy, but nothing
will persuade you that an anatomical figure means flesh and blood. You
can't realize the fact. Do you intend to publish when you're in town?
It'll be better not to put your name. Having one's name to a volume of
poems is as bad as to an advertising pill."

"I will send you an early copy, Adrian, when I publish," quoth Richard.
"Hark at that old blackbird, uncle."

"Yes!" Hippias quavered; looking up from the usual subject of his
contemplation, and trying to take an interest in him, "fine old fellow!"

"What a chuckle he gives out before he flies! Not unlike July
nightingales. You know that bird I told you of--the blackbird that had
its mate shot, and used to come to sing to old Dame Bakewell's bird from
the tree opposite. A rascal knocked it over the day before yesterday, and
the dame says her bird hasn't sung a note since."

"Extraordinary!" Hippias muttered abstractedly. "I remember the verses."

"But where's your moral?" interposed the wrathful Adrian. "Where's
constancy rewarded?

       'The ouzel-cock so black of hue,
        With orange-tawny bill;
        The rascal with his aim so true;
        The Poet's little quill!'

"Where's the moral of that? except that all's game to the poet! Certainly
we have a noble example of the devotedness of the female, who for three
entire days refuses to make herself heard, on account of a defunct male.
I suppose that's what Ricky dwells on."

"As you please, my dear Adrian," says Richard, and points out larch-buds
to his uncle, as they ride by the young green wood.

The wise youth was driven to extremity. Such a lapse from his pupil's
heroics to this last verge of Arcadian coolness, Adrian could not believe
in. "Hark at this old blackbird!" he cried, in his turn, and pretending
to interpret his fits of song:

"Oh, what a pretty comedy!--Don't we wear the mask well, my
Fiesco?--Genoa will be our own to-morrow!--Only wait until the train has
started--jolly! jolly! jolly! We'll be winners yet!

"Not a bad verse--eh, Ricky? my Lucius Junius!"

"You do the blackbird well," said Richard, and looked at him in a manner
mildly affable.

Adrian shrugged. "You're a young man of wonderful powers," he
emphatically observed; meaning to say that Richard quite beat him; for
which opinion Richard gravely thanked him, and with this they rode into
Bellingham.

There was young Tom Blaize at the station, in his Sunday beaver and gala
waistcoat and neckcloth, coming the lord over Tom Bakewell, who had
preceded his master in charge of the baggage. He likewise was bound for
London. Richard, as he was dismounting, heard Adrian say to the baronet:
"The Beast, sir, appears to be going to fetch Beauty;" but he paid no
heed to the words. Whether young Tom heard them or not, Adrian's look
took the lord out of him, and he shrunk away into obscurity, where the
nearest approach to the fashions which the tailors of Bellingham could
supply to him, sat upon him more easily, and he was not stiffened by the
eyes of the superiors whom he sought to rival. The baronet, Lady
Blandish, and Adrian remained on horseback, and received Richard's adieux
across the palings. He shook hands with each of them in the same kindly
cold way, elicitating from Adrian a marked encomium on his style of doing
it. The train came up, and Richard stepped after his uncle into one of
the carriages.

Now surely there will come an age when the presentation of science at war
with Fortune and the Fates, will be deemed the true epic of modern life;
and the aspect of a scientific humanist who, by dint of incessant
watchfulness, has maintained a System against those active forties,
cannot be reckoned less than sublime, even though at the moment he but
sit upon his horse, on a fine March morning such as this, and smile
wistfully to behold the son of his heart, his System incarnate, wave a
serene adieu to tutelage, neither too eager nor morbidly unwilling to try
his luck alone for a term of two weeks. At present, I am aware, an
audience impatient for blood and glory scorns the stress I am putting on
incidents so minute, a picture so little imposing. An audience will come
to whom it will be given to see the elementary machinery at work: who, as
it were, from some slight hint of the straws, will feel the winds of
March when they do not blow. To them will nothing be trivial, seeing that
they will have in their eyes the invisible conflict going on around us,
whose features a nod, a smile, a laugh of ours perpetually changes. And
they will perceive, moreover, that in real life all hangs together: the
train is laid in the lifting of an eyebrow, that bursts upon the field of
thousands. They will see the links of things as they pass, and wonder
not, as foolish people now do, that this great matter came out of that
small one.

Such an audience, then, will participate in the baronet's gratification
at his son's demeanour, wherein he noted the calm bearing of experience
not gained in the usual wanton way: and will not be without some excited
apprehension at his twinge of astonishment, when, just as the train went
sliding into swiftness, he beheld the grave, cold, self-possessed young
man throw himself back in the carriage violently laughing. Science was at
a loss to account for that. Sir Austin checked his mind from inquiring,
that he might keep suspicion at a distance, but he thought it odd, and
the jarring sensation that ran along his nerves at the sight, remained
with him as he rode home.

Lady Blandish's tender womanly intuition bade her say: "You see it was
the very thing he wanted. He has got his natural spirits already."

"It was," Adrian put in his word, "the exact thing he wanted. His spirits
have returned miraculously."

"Something amused him," said the baronet, with an eye on the puffing
train.

"Probably something his uncle said or did," Lady Blandish suggested, and
led off at a gallop.

Her conjecture chanced to be quite correct. The cause for Richard's
laughter was simple enough. Hippias, on finding the carriage-door closed
on him, became all at once aware of the bright-haired hope which dwells
in Change; for one who does not woo her too frequently; and to express
his sudden relief from mental despondency at the amorous prospect, the
Dyspepsy bent and gave his hands a sharp rub between his legs: which
unlucky action brought Adrian's pastoral,

          "Hippy verteth,
          Sing cuckoo!"

in such comic colours before Richard, that a demon of laughter seized
him.

          "Hippy verteth!"

Every time he glanced at his uncle the song sprang up, and he laughed so
immoderately that it looked like madness come upon him.

"Why, why, why, what are you laughing at, my dear boy," said Hippias, and
was provoked by the contagious exercise to a modest "ha! ha!"

"Why, what are you laughing at, uncle?" cried Richard.

"I really don't know," Hippias chuckled.

"Nor I, uncle! Sing, cuckoo!"

They laughed themselves into the pleasantest mood imaginable. Hippias not
only came aboveground, he flew about in the very skies, verting like any
blithe creature of the season. He remembered old legal jokes, and
anecdotes of Circuit; and Richard laughed at them all, but more at
him--he was so genial, and childishly fresh, and innocently joyful at his
own transformation, while a lurking doubt in the bottom of his eyes, now
and then, that it might not last, and that he must go underground again,
lent him a look of pathos and humour which tickled his youthful companion
irresistibly, and made his heart warm to him.

"I tell you what, uncle," said Richard, "I think travelling's a capital
thing."

"The best thing in the world, my dear boy," Hippias returned. "It makes
me wish I had given up that Work of mine, and tried it before, instead of
chaining myself to a task. We're quite different beings in a minute. I
am. Hem! what shall we have for dinner?"

"Leave that to me, uncle. I shall order for you. You know, I intend to
make you well. How gloriously we go along! I should like to ride on a
railway every day."

Hippias remarked: "They say it rather injures the digestion."

"Nonsense! see how you'll digest to-night and to-morrow."

"Perhaps I shall do something yet," sighed Hippias, alluding to the vast
literary fame he had aforetime dreamed of. "I hope I shall have a good
night to-night."

"Of course you will! What! after laughing like that?"

"Ugh!" Hippias grunted, "I daresay, Richard, you sleep the moment you get
into bed!"

"The instant my head's on my pillow, and up the moment I wake. Health's
everything!"

"Health's everything!" echoed Hippias, from his immense distance.

"And if you'll put yourself in my hands," Richard continued, "you shall
do just as I do. You shall be well and strong, and sing 'Jolly!' like
Adrian's blackbird. You shall, upon my honour, uncle!"

He specified the hours of devotion to his uncle's recovery--no less than
twelve a day--that he intended to expend, and his cheery robustness
almost won his uncle to leap up recklessly and clutch health as his own.

"Mind," quoth Hippias, with a half-seduced smile, "mind your dishes are
not too savoury!"

"Light food and claret! Regular meals and amusement! Lend your heart to
all, but give it to none!" exclaims young Wisdom, and Hippias mutters,
"Yes! yes!" and intimates that the origin of his malady lay in his not
following that maxim earlier.

"Love ruins us, my dear boy," he said, thinking to preach Richard a
lesson, and Richard boisterously broke out:

       "The love of Monsieur Francatelli,
        It was the ruin of--et coetera."

Hippias blinked, exclaiming, "Really, my dear boy! I never saw you so
excited."

"It's the railway! It's the fun, uncle!"

"Ah!" Hippias wagged a melancholy head, "you've got the Golden Bride!
Keep her if you can. That's a pretty fable of your father's. I gave him
the idea, though. Austin filches a great many of my ideas!"

"Here's the idea in verse, uncle:

       'O sunless walkers by the tide!
        O have you seen the Golden Bride!
        They say that she is fair beyond
        All women; faithful, and more fond!

"You know, the young inquirer comes to a group of penitent sinners by the
brink of a stream. They howl, and answer:

        Faithful she is, but she forsakes:
        And fond, yet endless woe she makes:
        And fair! but with this curse she's cross'd;
        To know her not till she is lost!'

"Then the doleful party march off in single file solemnly, and the
fabulist pursues:

       'She hath a palace in the West:
        Bright Hesper lights her to her rest:
        And him the Morning Star awakes
        Whom to her charmed arms she takes.

        So lives he till he sees, alas!
        The maids of baser metal pass.'

"And prodigal of the happiness she lends him, he asks to share it with
one of them. There is the Silver Maid, and the Copper, and the Brassy
Maid, and others of them. First, you know, he tries Argentine, and finds
her only twenty to the pound, and has a worse experience with Copperina,
till he descends to the scullery; and the lower he goes, the less obscure
become the features of his Bride of Gold, and all her radiance shines
forth, my uncle."

"Verse rather blunts the point. Well, keep to her, now you've got her,"
says Hippias.

"We will, uncle!--Look how the farms fly past! Look at the cattle in the
fields! And how the lines duck, and swim up!

     'She claims the whole, and not the part--
     The coin of an unused heart!
     To gain his Golden Bride again,
     He hunts with melancholy men,'

--and is waked no longer by the Morning Star!"

"Not if he doesn't sleep till an hour before it rises!" Hippias
interjected. "You don't rhyme badly. But stick to prose. Poetry's a
Base-metal maid. I'm not sure that any writing's good for the digestion.
I'm afraid it has spoilt mine."

"Fear nothing, uncle!" laughed Richard. "You shall ride in the park with
me every day to get an appetite. You and I and the Golden Bride. You know
that little poem of Sandoe's?

     'She rides in the park on a prancing bay,
      She and her squires together;
     Her dark locks gleam from a bonnet of grey,
      And toss with the tossing feather.

     'Too calmly proud for a glance of pride
      Is the beautiful face as it passes;
     The cockneys nod to each other aside,
      The coxcombs lift their glasses.

     'And throng to her, sigh to her, you that can breach
      The ice-wall that guards her securely;
     You have not such bliss, though she smile on you each,
      As the heart that can image her purely.'

"Wasn't Sandoe once a friend of my father's? I suppose they quarrelled.
He understands the heart. What does he make his 'Humble Lover' say?

     'True, Madam, you may think to part
      Conditions by a glacier-ridge,
     But Beauty's for the largest heart,
      And all abysses Love can bridge!

"Hippias now laughed; grimly, as men laugh at the emptiness of words."

"Largest heart!" he sneered. "What's a 'glacier-ridge'? I've never seen
one. I can't deny it rhymes with 'bridge.' But don't go parading your
admiration of that person, Richard. Your father will speak to you on the
subject when he thinks fit."

"I thought they had quarrelled," said Richard. "What a pity!" and he
murmured to a pleased ear:

        "Beauty's for the largest heart!"

The flow of their conversation was interrupted by the entrance of
passengers at a station. Richard examined their faces with pleasure. All
faces pleased him. Human nature sat tributary at the feet of him and his
Golden Bride. As he could not well talk his thoughts before them, he
looked out at the windows, and enjoyed the changing landscape, projecting
all sorts of delights for his old friend Ripton, and musing hazily on the
wondrous things he was to do in the world; of the great service he was to
be to his fellow-creatures. In the midst of his reveries he was landed in
London. Tom Bakewell stood at the carriage door. A glance told Richard
that his squire had something curious on his mind; and he gave Tom the
word to speak out. Tom edged his master out of hearing, and began
sputtering a laugh.

"Dash'd if I can help it, sir!" he said. "That young Tom! He've come to
town dressed that spicy! and he don't know his way about no more than a
stag. He's come to fetch somebody from another rail, and he don't know
how to get there, and he ain't sure about which rail 'tis. Look at him,
Mr. Richard! There he goes."

Young Tom appeared to have the weight of all London on his beaver.

"Who has he come for?" Richard asked.

"Don't you know, sir? You don't like me to mention the name," mumbled
Tom, bursting to be perfectly intelligible.

"Is it for her, Tom?"

"Miss Lucy, sir."

Richard turned away, and was seized by Hippias, who begged him to get out
of the noise and pother, and caught hold of his slack arm to bear him
into a conveyance; but Richard, by wheeling half to the right, or left,
always got his face round to the point where young Tom was manoeuvring to
appear at his ease. Even when they were seated in the conveyance, Hippias
could not persuade him to drive off. He made the excuse that he did not
wish to start till there was a clear road. At last young Tom cast anchor
by a policeman, and, doubtless at the official's suggestion, bashfully
took seat in a cab, and was shot into the whirlpool of London. Richard
then angrily asked his driver what he was waiting for.

"Are you ill, my boy?" said Hippias. "Where's your colour?"

He laughed oddly, and made a random answer that he hoped the fellow would
drive fast.

"I hate slow motion after being in the railway," he said.

Hippias assured him there was something the matter with him.

"Nothing, uncle! nothing!" said Richard, looking fiercely candid.

They say, that when the skill and care of men rescue a drowned wretch
from extinction, and warm the flickering spirit into steady flame, such
pain it is, the blood forcing its way along the dry channels, and the
heavily-ticking nerves, and the sullen heart--the struggle of life and
death in him--grim death relaxing his gripe; such pain it is, he cries
out no thanks to them that pull him by inches from the depths of the dead
river. And he who has thought a love extinct, and is surprised by the old
fires, and the old tyranny, he rebels, and strives to fight clear of the
cloud of forgotten sensations that settle on him; such pain it is, the
old sweet music reviving through his frame, and the charm of his passion
filing him afresh. Still was fair Lucy the one woman to Richard. He had
forbidden her name but from an instinct of self-defence. Must the maids
of baser metal dominate him anew, it is in Lucy's shape. Thinking of her
now so near him--his darling! all her graces, her sweetness, her truth;
for, despite his bitter blame of her, he knew her true--swam in a
thousand visions before his eyes; visions pathetic, and full of glory,
that now wrung his heart, and now elated it. As well might a ship attempt
to calm the sea, as this young man the violent emotion that began to rage
in his breast. "I shall not see her!" he said to himself exultingly, and
at the same instant thought, how black was every corner of the earth but
that one spot where Lucy stood! how utterly cheerless the place he was
going to! Then he determined to bear it; to live in darkness; there was a
refuge in the idea of a voluntary martyrdom. "For if I chose I could see
her--this day within an hour!--I could see her, and touch her hand, and,
oh, heaven!--But I do not choose." And a great wave swelled through him,
and was crushed down only to swell again more stormily.

Then Tom Bakewell's words recurred to him that young Tom Blaize was
uncertain where to go for her, and that she might be thrown on this
Babylon alone. And flying from point to point, it struck him that they
had known at Raynham of her return, and had sent him to town to be out of
the way--they had been miserably plotting against him once more. "They
shall see what right they have to fear me. I'll shame them!" was the
first turn taken by his wrathful feelings, as he resolved to go, and see
her safe, and calmly return to his uncle, whom he sincerely believed not
to be one of the conspirators. Nevertheless, after forming that resolve,
he sat still, as if there were something fatal in the wheels that bore
him away from it--perhaps because he knew, as some do when passion is
lord, that his intelligence juggled with him; though none the less keenly
did he feel his wrongs and suspicions. His Golden Bride was waning fast.
But when Hippias ejaculated to cheer him: "We shall soon be there!" the
spell broke. Richard stopped the cab, saying he wanted to speak to Tom,
and would ride with him the rest of the journey. He knew well enough
which line of railway his Lucy must come by. He had studied every town
and station on the line. Before his uncle could express more than a mute
remonstrance, he jumped out and hailed Tom Bakewell, who came behind with
the boxes and baggage in a companion cab, his head a yard beyond the
window to make sure of his ark of safety, the vehicle preceding.

"What an extraordinary, impetuous boy it is," said Hippias. "We're in the
very street!"

Within a minute the stalwart Berry, despatched by the baronet to arrange
everything for their comfort, had opened the door, and made his bow.

"Mr. Richard, sir?--evaporated?" was Berry's modulated inquiry.

"Behind--among the boxes, fool!" Hippias growled, as he received Berry's
muscular assistance to alight. "Lunch ready--eh!"

"Luncheon was ordered precise at two o'clock, sir--been in attendance one
quarter of an hour. Heah!" Berry sang out to the second cab, which, with
its pyramid of luggage, remained stationary some thirty paces distant. At
his voice the majestic pile deliberately turned its back on them, and
went off in a contrary direction.




CHAPTER XXVI

On the stroke of the hour when Ripton Thompson was accustomed to consult
his gold watch for practical purposes, and sniff freedom and the
forthcoming dinner, a burglarious foot entered the clerk's office where
he sat, and a man of a scowling countenance, who looked a villain, and
whom he was afraid he knew, slid a letter into his hands, nodding that it
would be prudent for him to read, and be silent. Ripton obeyed in alarm.
Apparently the contents of the letter relieved his conscience; for he
reached down his hat, and told Mr. Beazley to inform his father that he
had business of pressing importance in the West, and should meet him at
the station. Mr. Beazley zealously waited upon the paternal Thompson
without delay, and together making their observations from the window,
they beheld a cab of many boxes, into which Ripton darted and was
followed by one in groom's dress. It was Saturday, the day when Ripton
gave up his law-readings, magnanimously to bestow himself upon his
family, and Mr. Thompson liked to have his son's arm as he walked down to
the station; but that third glass of Port which always stood for his
second, and the groom's suggestion of aristocratic acquaintances,
prevented Mr. Thompson from interfering: so Ripton was permitted to
depart.

In the cab Ripton made a study of the letter he held. It had the
preciseness of an imperial mandate.

Dear Ripton,--You are to get lodgings for a lady immediately. Not a word
to a soul. Then come along with Tom. R.D.F."

"Lodgings for a lady!" Ripton meditated aloud: "What sort of lodgings?
Where am I to get lodgings? Who's the lady?--I say!" he addressed the
mysterious messenger. "So you're Tom Bakewell, are you, Tom?"

Tom grinned his identity.

"Do you remember the rick, Tom? Ha! ha! We got out of that neatly. We
might all have been transported, though. I could have convicted you, Tom,
safe! It's no use coming across a practised lawyer. Now tell me." Ripton
having flourished his powers, commenced his examination: "Who's this
lady?"

"Better wait till you see Mr. Richard, sir," Tom resumed his scowl to
reply.

"Ah!" Ripton acquiesced. "Is she young, Tom?"

Tom said she was not old.

"Handsome, Tom?"

"Some might think one thing, some another," Tom said.

"And where does she come from now?" asked Ripton, with the friendly
cheerfulness of a baffled counsellor.

"Comes from the country, sir."

"A friend of the family, I suppose? a relation?"

Ripton left this insinuating query to be answered by a look. Tom's face
was a dead blank.

"Ah!" Ripton took a breath, and eyed the mask opposite him. "Why, you're
quite a scholar, Tom! Mr. Richard is well. All right at home?"

"Come to town this mornin' with his uncle," said Tom. "All well, thank
ye, sir."

"Ha!" cried Ripton, more than ever puzzled, "now I see. You all came to
town to-day, and these are your boxes outside. So, so! But Mr. Richard
writes for me to get lodgings for a lady. There must be some mistake--he
wrote in a hurry. He wants lodgings for you all--eh?"

"'M sure I d'n know what he wants," said Tom. "You'd better go by the
letter, sir."

Ripton re-consulted that document. "'Lodgings for a lady, and then come
along with Tom. Not a word to a soul.' I say! that looks like--but he
never cared for them. You don't mean to say, Tom, he's been running away
with anybody?"

Tom fell back upon his first reply: "Better wait till ye see Mr. Richard,
sir," and Ripton exclaimed: "Hanged if you ain't the tightest witness I
ever saw! I shouldn't like to have you in a box. Some of you country
fellows beat any number of cockneys. You do!"

Tom received the compliment stubbornly on his guard, and Ripton, as
nothing was to be got out of him, set about considering how to perform
his friend's injunctions; deciding firstly, that a lady fresh from the
country ought to lodge near the parks, in which direction he told the
cabman to drive. Thus, unaware of his high destiny, Ripton joined the
hero, and accepted his character in the New Comedy.

It is, nevertheless, true that certain favoured people do have beneficent
omens to prepare them for their parts when the hero is in full career, so
that they really may be nerved to meet him; ay, and to check him in his
course, had they that signal courage. For instance, Mrs. Elizabeth Berry,
a ripe and wholesome landlady of advertised lodgings, on the borders of
Kensington, noted, as she sat rocking her contemplative person before the
parlour fire this very March afternoon, a supernatural tendency in that
fire to burn all on one side: which signifies that a wedding approaches
the house. Why--who shall say? Omens are as impassable as heroes. It may
be because in these affairs the fire is thought to be all on one side.
Enough that the omen exists, and spoke its solemn warning to the devout
woman. Mrs. Berry, in her circle, was known as a certificated lecturer
against the snares of matrimony. Still that was no reason why she should
not like a wedding. Expectant, therefore, she watched the one glowing
cheek of Hymen, and with pleasing tremours beheld a cab of many boxes
draw up by her bit of garden, and a gentleman emerge from it in the set
of consulting an advertisement paper. The gentleman required lodgings for
a lady. Lodgings for a lady Mrs. Berry could produce, and a very roseate
smile for a gentleman; so much so that Ripton forgot to ask about the
terms, which made the landlady in Mrs. Berry leap up to embrace him as
the happy man. But her experienced woman's eye checked her enthusiasm. He
had not the air of a bridegroom: he did not seem to have a weight on his
chest, or an itch to twiddle everything with his fingers. At any rate, he
was not the bridegroom for whom omens fly abroad. Promising to have all
ready for the lady within an hour, Mrs. Berry fortified him with her
card, curtsied him back to his cab, and floated him off on her smiles.

The remarkable vehicle which had woven this thread of intrigue through
London streets, now proceeded sedately to finish its operations. Ripton
was landed at a hotel in Westminster. Ere he was halfway up the stairs, a
door opened, and his old comrade in adventure rushed down. Richard
allowed no time for salutations. "Have you done it?" was all he asked.
For answer Ripton handed him Mrs. Berry's card. Richard took it, and left
him standing there. Five minutes elapsed, and then Ripton heard the
gracious rustle of feminine garments above. Richard came a little in
advance, leading and half-supporting a figure in a black-silk mantle and
small black straw bonnet; young--that was certain, though she held her
veil so close he could hardly catch the outlines of her face; girlishly
slender, and sweet and simple in appearance. The hush that came with her,
and her soft manner of moving, stirred the silly youth to some of those
ardours that awaken the Knight of Dames in our bosoms. He felt that he
would have given considerable sums for her to lift her veil. He could see
that she was trembling--perhaps weeping. It was the master of her fate
she clung to. They passed him without speaking. As she went by, her head
passively bent, Ripton had a glimpse of noble tresses and a lovely neck;
great golden curls hung loosely behind, pouring from under her bonnet.
She looked a captive borne to the sacrifice. What Ripton, after a sight
of those curls, would have given for her just to lift her veil an instant
and strike him blind with beauty, was, fortunately for his exchequer,
never demanded of him. And he had absolutely been composing speeches as
he came along in the cab! gallant speeches for the lady, and sly
congratulatory ones for his friend, to be delivered as occasion should
serve, that both might know him a man of the world, and be at their ease.
He forgot the smirking immoralities he had revelled in. This was clearly
serious. Ripton did not require to be told that his friend was in love,
and meant that life and death business called marriage, parents and
guardians consenting or not.

Presently Richard returned to him, and said hurriedly, "I want you now to
go to my uncle at our hotel. Keep him quiet till I come. Say I had to see
you--say anything. I shall be there by the dinner hour. Rip! I must talk
to you alone after dinner."

Ripton feebly attempted to reply that he was due at home. He was very
curious to hear the plot of the New Comedy; and besides, there was
Richard's face questioning him sternly and confidently for signs of
unhesitating obedience. He finished his grimaces by asking the name and
direction of the hotel. Richard pressed his hand. It is much to obtain
even that recognition of our devotion from the hero.

Tom Bakewell also received his priming, and, to judge by his chuckles and
grins, rather appeared to enjoy the work cut out for him. In a few
minutes they had driven to their separate destinations; Ripton was left
to the unusual exercise of his fancy. Such is the nature of youth and its
thirst for romance, that only to act as a subordinate is pleasant. When
one unfurls the standard of defiance to parents and guardians, he may be
sure of raising a lawless troop of adolescent ruffians, born rebels, to
any amount. The beardless crew know that they have not a chance of pay;
but what of that when the rosy prospect of thwarting their elders is in
view? Though it is to see another eat the Forbidden Fruit, they will run
all his risks with him. Gaily Ripton took rank as lieutenant in the
enterprise, and the moment his heart had sworn the oaths, he was rewarded
by an exquisite sense of the charms of existence. London streets wore a
sly laugh to him. He walked with a dandified heel. The generous youth
ogled aristocratic carriages, and glanced intimately at the ladies,
overflowingly happy. The crossing-sweepers blessed him. He hummed lively
tunes, he turned over old jokes in his mouth unctuously, he hugged
himself, he had a mind to dance down Piccadilly, and all because a friend
of his was running away with a pretty girl, and he was in the secret.

It was only when he stood on the doorstep of Richard's hotel, that his
jocund mood was a little dashed by remembering that he had then to
commence the duties of his office, and must fabricate a plausible story
to account for what he knew nothing about--a part that the greatest of
sages would find it difficult to perform. The young, however, whom sages
well may envy, seldom fail in lifting their inventive faculties to the
level of their spirits, and two minutes of Hippias's angry complaints
against the friend he serenely inquired for, gave Ripton his cue.

"We're in the very street--within a stone's-throw of the house, and he
jumps like a harlequin out of my cab into another; he must be mad--that
boy's got madness in him!--and carries off all the boxes--my
dinner-pills, too! and keeps away the whole of the day, though he
promised to go to the doctor, and had a dozen engagements with me," said
Hippias, venting an enraged snarl to sum up his grievances.

Ripton at once told him that the doctor was not at home.

"Why, you don't mean to say he's been to the doctor?" Hippias cried out.

"He has called on him twice, sir," said Ripton, expressively. "On leaving
me he was going a third time. I shouldn't wonder that's what detains
him--he's so determined."

By fine degrees Ripton ventured to grow circumstantial, saying that
Richard's case was urgent and required immediate medical advice; and that
both he and his father were of opinion Richard should not lose an hour in
obtaining it.

"He's alarmed about himself," said Ripton, and tapped his chest.

Hippias protested he had never heard a word from his nephew of any
physical affliction.

"He was afraid of making you anxious, I think, sir."

Algernon Feverel and Richard came in while he was hammering at the
alphabet to recollect the first letter of the doctor's name. They had met
in the hall below, and were laughing heartily as they entered the room.
Ripton jumped up to get the initiative.

"Have you seen the doctor?" he asked, significantly plucking at Richard's
fingers.

Richard was all abroad at the question.

Algernon clapped him on the back. "What the deuce do you want with
doctor, boy?"

The solid thump awakened him to see matters as they were. "Oh, ay! the
doctor!" he said, smiling frankly at his lieutenant. "Why, he tells me
he'd back me to do Milo's trick in a week from the present day.--Uncle,"
he came forward to Hippias, "I hope you'll excuse me for running off as I
did. I was in a hurry. I left something at the railway. This stupid Rip
thinks I went to the doctor about myself. The fact was, I wanted to fetch
the doctor to see you here--so that you might have no trouble, you know.
You can't bear the sight of his instruments and skeletons--I've heard you
say so. You said it set all your marrow in revolt--'fried your marrow,' I
think were the words, and made you see twenty thousand different ways of
sliding down to the chambers of the Grim King. Don't you remember?"

Hippias emphatically did not remember, and he did not believe the story.
Irritation at the mad ravishment of his pill-box rendered him
incredulous. As he had no means of confuting his nephew, all he could do
safely to express his disbelief in him, was to utter petulant remarks on
his powerlessness to appear at the dinner-table that day: upon
which--Berry just then trumpeting dinner--Algernon seized one arm of the
Dyspepsy, and Richard another, and the laughing couple bore him into the
room where dinner was laid, Ripton sniggering in the rear, the really
happy man of the party.

They had fun at the dinner-table. Richard would have it; and his gaiety,
his by-play, his princely superiority to truth and heroic promise of
overriding all our laws, his handsome face, the lord and possessor of
beauty that he looked, as it were a star shining on his forehead, gained
the old complete mastery over Ripton, who had been, mentally at least,
half patronizing him till then, because he knew more of London and life,
and was aware that his friend now depended upon him almost entirely.

After a second circle of the claret, the hero caught his lieutenant's eye
across the table, and said:

"We must go out and talk over that law-business, Rip, before you go. Do
you think the old lady has any chance?"

"Not a bit!" said Ripton, authoritatively.

"But it's worth fighting--eh, Rip?"

"Oh, certainly!" was Ripton's mature opinion.

Richard observed that Ripton's father seemed doubtful. Ripton cited his
father's habitual caution. Richard made a playful remark on the necessity
of sometimes acting in opposition to fathers. Ripton agreed to it--in
certain cases.

"Yes, yes! in certain cases," said Richard.

"Pretty legal morality, gentlemen!" Algernon interjected; Hippias adding:
"And lay, too!"

The pair of uncles listened further to the fictitious dialogue, well kept
up on both sides, and in the end desired a statement of the old lady's
garrulous case; Hippias offering to decide what her chances were in law,
and Algernon to give a common-sense judgment.

"Rip will tell you," said Richard, deferentially signalling the lawyer.
"I'm a bad hand at these matters. Tell them how it stands, Rip."

Ripton disguised his excessive uneasiness under endeavours to right his
position on his chair, and, inwardly praying speed to the claret jug to
come and strengthen his wits, began with a careless aspect: "Oh, nothing!
She very curious old character! She--a--wears a wig. She--a--very curious
old character indeed! She--a--quite the old style. There's no doing
anything with her!" and Ripton took a long breath to relieve himself
after his elaborate fiction.

"So it appears," Hippias commented, and Algernon asked: "Well? and about
her wig? Somebody stole it?" while Richard, whose features were grim with
suppressed laughter, bade the narrator continue.

Ripton lunged for the claret jug. He had got an old lady like an
oppressive bundle on his brain, and he was as helpless as she was. In the
pangs of ineffectual authorship his ideas shot at her wig, and then at
her one characteristic of extreme obstinacy, and tore back again at her
wig, but she would not be animated. The obstinate old thing would remain
a bundle. Law studies seemed light in comparison with this tremendous
task of changing an old lady from a doll to a human creature. He flung
off some claret, perspired freely, and, with a mental tribute to the
cleverness of those author fellows, recommenced: "Oh, nothing!
She--Richard knows her better than I do--an old lady--somewhere down in
Suffolk. I think we had better advise her not to proceed. The expenses of
litigation are enormous! She--I think we had better advise her to stop
short, and not make any scandal."

"And not make any scandal!" Algernon took him up. "Come, come! there's
something more than a wig, then?"

Ripton was commanded to proceed, whether she did or no. The luckless
fictionist looked straight at his pitiless leader, and blurted out
dubiously, "She--there's a daughter."

"Born with effort!" ejaculated Hippias. "Must give her pause after that!
and I'll take the opportunity to stretch my length on the sofa. Heigho!
that's true what Austin says: 'The general prayer should be for a full
stomach, and the individual for one that works well; for on that basis
only are we a match for temporal matters, and able to contemplate
eternal.' Sententious, but true. I gave him the idea, though! Take care
of your stomachs, boys! and if ever you hear of a monument proposed to a
scientific cook or gastronomic doctor, send in your subscriptions. Or say
to him while he lives, Go forth, and be a Knight! Ha! They have a good
cook at this house. He suits me better than ours at Raynham. I almost
wish I had brought my manuscript to town, I feel so much better. Aha! I
didn't expect to digest at all without my regular incentive. I think I
shall give it up.--What do you say to the theatre to-night, boys!"

Richard shouted, "Bravo, uncle!"

"Let Mr. Thompson finish first," said Algernon. "I want to hear the
conclusion of the story. The old girl has a wig and a daughter. I'll
swear somebody runs away with one of the two! Fill your glass, Mr.
Thompson, and forward!"

"So somebody does," Ripton received his impetus. "And they're found in
town together," he made a fresh jerk. "She--a--that is, the old
lady--found them in company."

"She finds him with her wig on in company!" said Algernon. "Capital!
Here's matter for the lawyers!"

"And you advise her not to proceed, under such circumstances of
aggravation?" Hippias observed, humorously twinkling with his stomachic
contentment.

"It's the daughter," Ripton sighed, and surrendering to pressure, hurried
on recklessly, "A runaway match--beautiful girl!--the only son of a
baronet--married by special licence. A--the point is," he now brightened
and spoke from his own element, "the point is whether the marriage can be
annulled, as she's of the Catholic persuasion and he's a Protestant, and
they're both married under age. That's the point."

Having come to the point he breathed extreme relief, and saw things more
distinctly; not a little amazed at his leader's horrified face.

The two elders were making various absurd inquiries, when Richard sent
his chair to the floor, crying, "What a muddle you're in, Rip! You're
mixing half-a-dozen stories together. The old lady I told you about was
old Dame Bakewell, and the dispute was concerning a neighbour of hers who
encroached on her garden, and I said I'd pay the money to see her
righted!"

"Ah," said Ripton, humbly, "I was thinking of the other. Her garden!
Cabbages don't interest me"--

"Here, come along," Richard beckoned to him savagely. "I'll be back in
five minutes, uncle," he nodded coolly to either.

The young men left the room. In the hall-passage they met Berry, dressed
to return to Raynham. Richard dropped a helper to the intelligence into
his hand, and warned him not to gossip much of London. Berry bowed
perfect discreetness.

"What on earth induced you to talk about Protestants and Catholics
marrying, Rip?" said Richard, as soon as they were in the street.

"Why," Ripton answered, "I was so hard pushed for it, 'pon my honour, I
didn't know what to say. I ain't an author, you know; I can't make a
story. I was trying to invent a point, and I couldn't think of any other,
and I thought that was just the point likely to make a jolly good
dispute. Capital dinners they give at those crack hotels. Why did you
throw it all upon me? I didn't begin on the old lady."

The hero mused, "It's odd! It's impossible you could have known! I'll
tell you why, Rip! I wanted to try you. You fib well at long range, but
you don't do at close quarters and single combat. You're good behind
walls, but not worth a shot in the open. I just see what you're fit for.
You're staunch--that I am certain of. You always were. Lead the way to
one of the parks--down in that direction. You know?--where she is!"

Ripton led the way. His dinner had prepared this young Englishman to defy
the whole artillery of established morals. With the muffled roar of
London around them, alone in a dark slope of green, the hero, leaning on
his henchman, and speaking in a harsh clear undertone, delivered his
explanations. Doubtless the true heroic insignia and point of view will
be discerned, albeit in common private's uniform.

"They've been plotting against me for a year, Rip! When you see her,
you'll know what it was to have such a creature taken away from you. It
nearly killed me. Never mind what she is. She's the most perfect and
noble creature God ever made! It's not only her beauty--I don't care so
much about that!--but when you've once seen her, she seems to draw music
from all the nerves of your body; but she's such an angel. I worship her.
And her mind's like her face. She's pure gold. There, you'll see her
to-night.

"Well," he pursued, after inflating Ripton with this rapturous prospect,
"they got her away, and I recovered. It was Mister Adrian's work. What's
my father's objection to her? Because of her birth? She's educated; her
manners are beautiful--full of refinement--quick and soft! Can they show
me one of their ladies like her?--she's the daughter of a naval
lieutenant! Because she's a Catholic? What has religion to do with"--he
pronounced "Love!" a little modestly--as it were a blush in his voice.

"Well, when I recovered I thought I did not care for her. It shows how we
know ourselves! And I cared for nothing. I felt as if I had no blood. I
tried to imitate my dear Austin. I wish to God he were here. I love
Austin. He would understand her. He's coming back this year, and
then--but it'll be too late then.--Well, my father's always scheming to
make me perfect--he has never spoken to me a word about her, but I can
see her in his eyes--he wanted to give me a change, he said, and asked me
to come to town with my uncle Hippy, and I consented. It was another plot
to get me out of the way! As I live, I had no more idea of meeting her
than of flying to heaven!"

He lifted his face. "Look at those old elm branches! How they seem to mix
among the stars!--glittering fruits of Winter!"

Ripton tipped his comical nose upward, and was in duty bound to say, Yes!
though he observed no connection between them and the narrative.

"Well," the hero went on, "I came to town. There I heard she was coming,
too--coming home. It must have been fate, Ripton! Heaven forgive me! I
was angry with her, and I thought I should like to see her once--only
once--and reproach her for being false--for she never wrote to me. And,
oh, the dear angel! what she must have suffered!--I gave my uncle the
slip, and got to the railway she was coming by. There was a fellow going
to meet her--a farmer's son--and, good God! they were going to try and
make her marry him! I remembered it all then. A servant of the farm had
told me. That fellow went to the wrong station, I suppose, for we saw
nothing of him. There she was--not changed a bit!--looking lovelier than
ever! And when she saw me, I knew in a minute that she must love me till
death!--You don't know what it is yet, Rip!--Will you believe,
it?--Though I was as sure she loved me and had been true as steel, as
that I shall see her to-night, I spoke bitterly to her. And she bore it
meekly--she looked like a saint. I told her there was but one hope of
life for me--she must prove she was true, and as I give up all, so must
she. I don't know what I said. The thought of losing her made me mad. She
tried to plead with me to wait--it was for my sake, I know. I pretended,
like a miserable hypocrite, that she did not love me at all. I think I
said shameful things. Oh what noble creatures women are! She hardly had
strength to move. I took her to that place where you found us, Rip! she
went down on her knees to me, I never dreamed of anything in life so
lovely as she looked then. Her eyes were thrown up, bright with a crowd
of tears--her dark brows bent together, like Pain and Beauty meeting in
one; and her glorious golden hair swept off her shoulders as she hung
forward to my hands.--Could I lose such a prize.--If anything could have
persuaded me, would not that?--I thought of Dante's Madonna--Guido's
Magdalen.--Is there sin in it? I see none! And if there is, it's all
mine! I swear she's spotless of a thought of sin. I see her very soul?
Cease to love her? Who dares ask me? Cease to love her? Why, I live on
her!--To see her little chin straining up from her throat, as she knelt
to me!--there was one curl that fell across her throat"....

Ripton listened for more. Richard had gone off in a muse at the picture.

"Well?" said Ripton, "and how about that young farmer fellow?"

The hero's head was again contemplating the starry branches. His
lieutenant's question came to him after an interval.

"Young Tom? Why, it's young Torn Blaize--son of our old enemy, Rip! I
like the old man now. Oh! I saw nothing of the fellow."

"Lord!" cried Ripton, "are we going to get into a mess with Blaizes
again? I don't like that!"

His commander quietly passed his likes or dislikes.

"But when he goes to the train, and finds she's not there?" Ripton
suggested.

"I've provided for that. The fool went to the South-east instead of the
South-west. All warmth, all sweetness, comes with the South-west!--I've
provided for that, friend Rip. My trusty Tom awaits him there, as if by
accident. He tells him he has not seen her, and advises him to remain in
town, and go for her there to-morrow, and the day following. Tom has
money for the work. Young Tom ought to see London, you know, Rip!--like
you. We shall gain some good clear days. And when old Blaize hears of
it--what then? I have her! she's mine!--Besides, he won't hear for a
week. This Tom beats that Tom in cunning, I'll wager. Ha! ha!" the hero
burst out at a recollection. "What do you think, Rip? My father has some
sort of System with me, it appears, and when I came to town the time
before, he took me to some people--the Grandisons--and what do you think?
one of the daughters is a little girl--a nice little thing enough very
funny--and he wants me to wait for her! He hasn't said so, but I know it.
I know what he means. Nobody understands him but me. I know he loves me,
and is one of the best of men--but just consider!--a little girl who just
comes up to my elbow. Isn't it ridiculous? Did you ever hear such
nonsense?"

Ripton emphasized his opinion that it certainly was foolish.

"No, no! The die's cast!" said Richard. "They've been plotting for a year
up to this day, and this is what comes of it! If my father loves me, he
will love her. And if he loves me, he'll forgive my acting against his
wishes, and see it was the only thing to be done. Come! step out! what a
time we've been!" and away he went, compelling Ripton to the sort of
strides a drummer-boy has to take beside a column of grenadiers.

Ripton began to wish himself in love, seeing that it endowed a man with
wind so that he could breathe great sighs, while going at a tremendous
pace, and experience no sensation of fatigue. The hero was communing with
the elements, his familiars, and allowed him to pant as he pleased. Some
keen-eyed Kensington urchins, noticing the discrepancy between the
pedestrian powers of the two, aimed their wit at Mr. Thompson junior's
expense. The pace, and nothing but the pace, induced Ripton to proclaim
that they had gone too far, when they discovered that they had over shot
the mark by half a mile. In the street over which stood love's star, the
hero thundered his presence at a door, and evoked a flying housemaid, who
knew not Mrs. Berry. The hero attached significance to the fact that his
instincts should have betrayed him, for he could have sworn to that
house. The door being shut he stood in dead silence.

"Haven't you got her card?" Ripton inquired, and heard that it was in the
custody of the cabman. Neither of them could positively bring to mind the
number of the house.

"You ought to have chalked it, like that fellow in the Forty Thieves,"
Ripton hazarded a pleasantry which met with no response.

Betrayed by his instincts, the magic slaves of Love! The hero heavily
descended the steps.

Ripton murmured that they were done for. His commander turned on him, and
said: "Take all the houses on the opposite side, one after another. I'll
take these." With a wry face Ripton crossed the road, altogether subdued
by Richard's native superiority to adverse circumstances.

Then were families aroused. Then did mortals dimly guess that something
portentous was abroad. Then were labourers all day in the vineyard,
harshly wakened from their evening's nap. Hope and Fear stalked the
street, as again and again the loud companion summonses resounded.
Finally Ripton sang out cheerfully. He had Mrs. Berry before him, profuse
of mellow curtsies.

Richard ran to her and caught her hands: "She's well?--upstairs?"

"Oh, quite well! only a trifle tired with her journey, and
fluttering-like," Mrs. Berry replied to Ripton alone. The lover had flown
aloft.

The wise woman sagely ushered Ripton into her own private parlour, there
to wait till he was wanted.




CHAPTER XXVII

"In all cases where two have joined to commit an offence, punish one of
the two lightly," is the dictum of The Pilgrim's's Scrip.

It is possible for young heads to conceive proper plans of action, and
occasionally, by sheer force of will, to check the wild horses that are
ever fretting to gallop off with them. But when they have given the reins
and the whip to another, what are they to do? They may go down on their
knees, and beg and pray the furious charioteer to stop, or moderate his
pace. Alas! each fresh thing they do redoubles his ardour: There is a
power in their troubled beauty women learn the use of, and what wonder?
They have seen it kindle Ilium to flames so often! But ere they grow
matronly in the house of Menelaus, they weep, and implore, and do not, in
truth, know how terribly two-edged is their gift of loveliness. They
resign themselves to an incomprehensible frenzy; pleasant to them,
because they attribute it to excessive love. And so the very sensible
things which they can and do say, are vain.

I reckon it absurd to ask them to be quite in earnest. Are not those
their own horses in yonder team? Certainly, if they were quite in
earnest, they might soon have my gentleman as sober as a carter. A
hundred different ways of disenchanting him exist, and Adrian will point
you out one or two that shall be instantly efficacious. For Love, the
charioteer, is easily tripped, while honest jog-trot Love keeps his legs
to the end. Granted dear women are not quite in earnest, still the mere
words they utter should be put to their good account. They do mean them,
though their hearts are set the wrong way. 'Tis a despairing, pathetic
homage to the judgment of the majority, in whose faces they are flying.
Punish Helen, very young, lightly. After a certain age you may select her
for special chastisement. An innocent with Theseus, with Paris she is an
advanced incendiary.

The fair young girl was sitting as her lover had left her; trying to
recall her stunned senses. Her bonnet was un-removed, her hands clasped
on her knees; dry tears in her eyes. Like a dutiful slave, she rose to
him. And first he claimed her mouth. There was a speech, made up of all
the pretty wisdom her wild situation and true love could gather, awaiting
him there; but his kiss scattered it to fragments. She dropped to her
seat weeping, and hiding her shamed cheeks.

By his silence she divined his thoughts, and took his hand and drew it to
her lips.

He bent beside her, bidding her look at him.

"Keep your eyes so."

She could not.

"Do you fear me, Lucy?"

A throbbing pressure answered him.

"Do you love me, darling?"

She trembled from head to foot.

"Then why do you turn from me?"

She wept: "O Richard, take me home! take me home!"

"Look at me, Lucy!"

Her head shrank timidly round.

"Keep your eyes on me, darling! Now speak!"

But she could not look and speak too. The lover knew his mastery when he
had her eyes.

"You wish me to take you home?"

She faltered: "O Richard? it is not too late."

"You regret what you have done for me?"

"Dearest! it is ruin."

"You weep because you have consented to be mine?"

"Not for me! O Richard!"

"For me you weep? Look at me! For me?"

"How will it end! O Richard!"

"You weep for me?"

"Dearest! I would die for you!"

"Would you see me indifferent to everything in the world? Would you have
me lost? Do you think I will live another day in England without you? I
have staked all I have on you, Lucy. You have nearly killed me once. A
second time, and the earth will not be troubled by me. You ask me to
wait, when they are plotting against us on all sides? Darling Lucy! look
on me. Fix--your fond eyes on me. You ask me to wait when here you are
given to me when you have proved my faith--when we know we love as none
have loved. Give me your eyes! Let them tell me I have your heart!"

Where was her wise little speech? How could she match such mighty
eloquence? She sought to collect a few more of the scattered fragments.

"Dearest! your father may be brought to consent by and by, and then--oh!
if you take me home now"--

The lover stood up. "He who has been arranging that fine scheme to
disgrace and martyrize you? True, as I live! that's the reason of their
having you back. Your old servant heard him and your uncle discussing it.
He!--Lucy! he's a good man, but he must not step in between you and me. I
say God has given you to me."

He was down by her side again, his arms enfolding her.

She had hoped to fight a better battle than in the morning, and she was
weaker and softer.

Ah! why should she doubt that his great love was the first law to her?
Why should she not believe that she would wreck him by resisting? And if
she suffered, oh sweet to think it was for his sake! Sweet to shut out
wisdom; accept total blindness, and be led by him!

The hag Wisdom annoyed them little further. She rustled her garments
ominously, and vanished.

"Oh, my own Richard!" the fair girl just breathed.

He whispered, "Call me that name."

She blushed deeply.

"Call me that name," he repeated. "You said it once today."

"Dearest!"

Not that."

"O darling!"

"Not that."

"Husband!"

She was won. The rosy gate from which the word had issued was closed with
a seal.

Ripton did not enjoy his introduction to the caged bird of beauty that
night. He received a lesson in the art of pumping from the worthy
landlady below, up to an hour when she yawned, and he blinked, and their
common candle wore with dignity the brigand's hat of midnight, and cocked
a drunken eye at them from under it.




CHAPTER XXVIII

Beauty, of course, is for the hero. Nevertheless, it is not always he on
whom beauty works its most conquering influence. It is the dull
commonplace man into whose slow brain she drops like a celestial light,
and burns lastingly. The poet, for instance, is a connoisseur of beauty:
to the artist she is a model. These gentlemen by much contemplation of
her charms wax critical. The days when they had hearts being gone, they
are haply divided between the blonde and the brunette; the aquiline nose
and the Proserpine; this shaped eye and that. But go about among simple
unprofessional fellows, boors, dunderheads, and here and there you shall
find some barbarous intelligence which has had just strength enough to
conceive, and has taken Beauty as its Goddess, and knows but one form to
worship, in its poor stupid fashion, and would perish for her. Nay, more:
the man would devote all his days to her, though he is dumb as a dog.
And, indeed, he is Beauty's Dog. Almost every Beauty has her Dog. The
hero possesses her; the poet proclaims her; the painter puts her upon
canvas; and the faithful Old Dog follows her: and the end of it all is
that the faithful Old Dog is her single attendant. Sir Hero is revelling
in the wars, or in Armida's bowers; Mr. Poet has spied a wrinkle; the
brush is for the rose in its season. She turns to her Old Dog then. She
hugs him; and he, who has subsisted on a bone and a pat till there he
squats decrepit, he turns his grateful old eyes up to her, and has not a
notion that she is hugging sad memories in him: Hero, Poet, Painter, in
one scrubby one! Then is she buried, and the village hears languid howls,
and there is a paragraph in the newspapers concerning the extraordinary
fidelity of an Old Dog.

Excited by suggestive recollections of Nooredeen and the Fair Persian,
and the change in the obscure monotony of his life by his having quarters
in a crack hotel, and living familiarly with West-End people--living on
the fat of the land (which forms a stout portion of an honest youth's
romance), Ripton Thompson breakfasted next morning with his chief at
half-past eight. The meal had been fixed overnight for seven, but Ripton
slept a great deal more than the nightingale, and (to chronicle his exact
state) even half-past eight rather afflicted his new aristocratic senses
and reminded him too keenly of law and bondage. He had preferred to
breakfast at Algernon's hour, who had left word for eleven. Him, however,
it was Richard's object to avoid, so they fell to, and Ripton no longer
envied Hippias in bed. Breakfast done, they bequeathed the consoling
information for Algernon that they were off to hear a popular preacher,
and departed.

"How happy everybody looks!" said Richard, in the quiet Sunday streets.

"Yes--jolly!" said Ripton.

"When I'm--when this is over, I'll see that they are, too--as many as I
can make happy," said the hero; adding softly: "Her blind was down at a
quarter to six. I think she slept well!"

"You've been there this morning?" Ripton exclaimed; and an idea of what
love was dawned upon his dull brain.

"Will she see me, Ricky?"

"Yes. She'll see you to-day. She was tired last night."

"Positively?"

Richard assured him that the privilege would be his.

"Here," he said, coming under some trees in the park, "here's where I
talked to you last night. What a time it seems! How I hate the night!"

On the way, that Richard might have an exalted opinion of him, Ripton
hinted decorously at a somewhat intimate and mysterious acquaintance with
the sex. Headings of certain random adventures he gave.

"Well!" said his chief, "why not marry her?"

Then was Ripton shocked, and cried, "Oh!" and had a taste of the feeling
of superiority, destined that day to be crushed utterly.

He was again deposited in Mrs. Berry's charge for a term that caused him
dismal fears that the Fair Persian still refused to show her face, but
Richard called out to him, and up Ripton went, unaware of the
transformation he was to undergo. Hero and Beauty stood together to
receive him. From the bottom of the stairs he had his vivaciously
agreeable smile ready for them, and by the time he entered the room his
cheeks were painfully stiff, and his eyes had strained beyond their exact
meaning. Lucy, with one hand anchored to her lover, welcomed him kindly.
He relieved her shyness by looking so extremely silly. They sat down, and
tried to commence a conversation, but Ripton was as little master of his
tongue as he was of his eyes. After an interval, the Fair Persian having
done duty by showing herself, was glad to quit the room. Her lord and
possessor then turned inquiringly to Ripton.

"You don't wonder now, Rip?" he said.

"No, Richard!" Ripton waited to reply with sufficient solemnity, "indeed
I don't!"

He spoke differently; he looked differently. He had the Old Dog's eyes in
his head. They watched the door she had passed through; they listened for
her, as dogs' eyes do. When she came in, bonneted for a walk, his
agitation was dog-like. When she hung on her lover timidly, and went
forth, he followed without an idea of envy, or anything save the secret
raptures the sight of her gave him, which are the Old Dog's own. For
beneficent Nature requites him: His sensations cannot be heroic, but they
have a fulness and a wagging delight as good in their way. And this
capacity for humble unaspiring worship has its peculiar guerdon. When
Ripton comes to think of Miss Random now, what will he think of himself?
Let no one despise the Old Dog. Through him doth Beauty vindicate her
sex.

It did not please Ripton that others should have the bliss of beholding
her, and as, to his perceptions, everybody did, and observed her
offensively, and stared, and turned their heads back, and interchanged
comments on her, and became in a minute madly in love with her, he had to
smother low growls. They strolled about the pleasant gardens of
Kensington all the morning, under the young chestnut buds, and round the
windless waters, talking, and soothing the wild excitement of their
hearts. If Lucy spoke, Ripton pricked up his ears. She, too, made the
remark that everybody seemed to look happy, and he heard it with thrills
of joy. "So everybody is, where you are!" he would have wished to say, if
he dared, but was restrained by fears that his burning eloquence would
commit him. Ripton knew the people he met twice. It would have been
difficult to persuade him they were the creatures of accident.

From the Gardens, in contempt of Ripton's frowned protest, Richard boldly
struck into the park, where solitary carriages were beginning to perform
the circuit. Here Ripton had some justification for his jealous pangs.
The young girl's golden locks of hair; her sweet, now dreamily sad, face;
her gentle graceful figure in the black straight dress she wore; a sort
of half-conventual air she had--a mark of something not of class, that
was partly beauty's, partly maiden innocence growing conscious, partly
remorse at her weakness and dim fear of the future it was sowing--did
attract the eye-glasses. Ripton had to learn that eyes are bearable, but
eye-glasses an abomination. They fixed a spell upon his courage; for
somehow the youth had always ranked them as emblems of our nobility, and
hearing two exquisite eye-glasses, who had been to front and rear several
times, drawl in gibberish generally imputed to lords, that his heroine
was a charming little creature, just the size, but had no style,--he was
abashed; he did not fly at them and tear them. He became dejected.
Beauty's dog is affected by the eye-glass in a manner not unlike the
common animal's terror of the human eye.

Richard appeared to hear nothing, or it was homage that he heard. He
repeated to Lucy Diaper Sandoe's verses--

     "The cockneys nod to each other aside,
     The coxcombs lift their glasses,"

and projected hiring a horse for her to ride every day in the park, and
shine among the highest.

They had turned to the West, against the sky glittering through the bare
trees across the water, and the bright-edged rack. The lover, his
imagination just then occupied in clothing earthly glories in celestial,
felt where his senses were sharpest the hand of his darling falter, and
instinctively looked ahead. His uncle Algernon was leisurely jolting
towards them on his one sound leg. The dismembered Guardsman talked to a
friend whose arm supported him, and speculated from time to time on the
fair ladies driving by. The two white faces passed him unobserved.
Unfortunately Ripton, coming behind, went plump upon the Captain's live
toe--or so he pretended, crying, "Confound it, Mr. Thompson! you might
have chosen the other."

The horrible apparition did confound Ripton, who stammered that it was
extraordinary.

"Not at all," said Algernon. "Everybody makes up to that fellow.
Instinct, I suppose!"

He had not to ask for his nephew. Richard turned to face the matter.

"Sorry I couldn't wait for you this morning, uncle," he said, with the
coolness of relationship. "I thought you never walked so far."

His voice was in perfect tone--the heroic mask admirable.

Algernon examined the downcast visage at his side, and contrived to
allude to the popular preacher. He was instantly introduced to Ripton's
sister, Miss Thompson.

The Captain bowed, smiling melancholy approval of his nephew's choice of
a minister. After a few stray remarks, and an affable salute to Miss
Thompson, he hobbled away, and then the three sealed volcanoes breathed,
and Lucy's arm ceased to be squeezed quite so much up to the heroic
pitch.

This incident quickened their steps homeward to the sheltering wings of
Mrs. Berry. All that passed between them on the subject comprised a
stammered excuse from Ripton for his conduct, and a good-humoured
rejoinder from Richard, that he had gained a sister by it: at which
Ripton ventured to wish aloud Miss Desborough would only think so, and a
faint smile twitched poor Lucy's lips to please him. She hardly had
strength to reach her cage. She had none to eat of Mrs. Berry's nice
little dinner. To be alone, that she might cry and ease her heart of its
accusing weight of tears, was all she prayed for. Kind Mrs. Berry,
slipping into her bedroom to take off her things, found the fair body in
a fevered shudder, and finished by undressing her completely and putting
her to bed.

"Just an hour's sleep, or so," the mellifluous woman explained the case
to the two anxious gentlemen. "A quiet sleep and a cup of warm tea goes
for more than twenty doctors, it do--when there's the flutters," she
pursued. "I know it by myself. And a good cry beforehand's better than
the best of medicine."

She nursed them into a make-believe of eating, and retired to her softer
charge and sweeter babe, reflecting, "Lord! Lord! the three of 'em don't
make fifty! I'm as old as two and a half of 'em, to say the least." Mrs.
Berry used her apron, and by virtue of their tender years took them all
three into her heart.

Left alone, neither of the young men could swallow a morsel.

"Did you see the change come over her?" Richard whispered.

Ripton fiercely accused his prodigious stupidity.

The lover flung down his knife and fork: "What could I do? If I had said
nothing, we should have been suspected. I was obliged to speak. And she
hates a lie! See! it has struck her down. God forgive me!"

Ripton affected a serene mind: "It was a fright, Richard," he said.
"That's what Mrs. Berry means by flutters. Those old women talk in that
way. You heard what she said. And these old women know. I'll tell you
what it is. It's this, Richard!--it's because you've got a fool for your
friend!"

"She regrets it," muttered the lover. "Good God! I think she fears me."
He dropped his face in his hands.

Ripton went to the window, repeating energetically for his comfort: "It's
because you've got a fool for your friend!"

Sombre grew the street they had last night aroused. The sun was buried
alive in cloud. Ripton saw himself no more in the opposite window. He
watched the deplorable objects passing on the pavement. His aristocratic
visions had gone like his breakfast. Beauty had been struck down by his
egregious folly, and there he stood--a wretch!

Richard came to him: "Don't mumble on like that, Rip!" he said. "Nobody
blames you."

"Ah! you're very kind, Richard," interposed the wretch, moved at the face
of misery he beheld.

"Listen to me, Rip! I shall take her home to-night. Yes! If she's happier
away from me!--do you think me a brute, Ripton? Rather than have her shed
a tear, I'd!--I'll take her home to-night!"

Ripton suggested that it was sudden; adding from his larger experience,
people perhaps might talk.

The lover could not understand what they should talk about, but he said:
"If I give him who came for her yesterday the clue? If no one sees or
hears of me, what can they say? O Rip! I'll give her up. I'm wrecked for
ever! What of that? Yes--let them take her! The world in arms should
never have torn her from me, but when she cries--Yes! all's over. I'll
find him at once."

He searched in out-of-the-way corners for the hat of resolve. Ripton
looked on, wretcheder than ever.

The idea struck him:--"Suppose, Richard, she doesn't want to go?"

It was a moment when, perhaps, one who sided with parents and guardians
and the old wise world, might have inclined them to pursue their
righteous wretched course, and have given small Cupid a smack and sent
him home to his naughty Mother. Alas!(it is The Pilgrim's Scrip
interjecting) women are the born accomplices of mischief! In bustles Mrs.
Berry to clear away the refection, and finds the two knights helmed, and
sees, though 'tis dusk, that they wear doubtful brows, and guesses bad
things for her dear God Hymen in a twinkling.

"Dear! dear!" she exclaimed, "and neither of you eaten a scrap! And
there's my dear young lady off into the prettiest sleep you ever see!"

"Ha?" cried the lover, illuminated.

"Soft as a baby!" Mrs. Berry averred. "I went to look at her this very
moment, and there's not a bit of trouble in her breath. It come and it go
like the sweetest regular instrument ever made. The Black Ox haven't trod
on her foot yet! Most like it was the air of London. But only fancy, if
you had called in a doctor! Why, I shouldn't have let her take any of his
quackery. Now, there!"

Ripton attentively observed his chief, and saw him doff his hat with a
curious caution, and peer into its recess, from which, during Mrs.
Berry's speech, he drew forth a little glove--dropped there by some freak
of chance.

"Keep me, keep me, now you have me!" sang the little glove, and amused
the lover with a thousand conceits.

"When will she wake, do you think, Mrs. Berry?" he asked.

"Oh! we mustn't go for disturbing her," said the guileful good creature.
"Bless ye! let her sleep it out. And if you young gentlemen was to take
my advice, and go and take a walk for to get a appetite--everybody should
eat! it's their sacred duty, no matter what their feelings be! and I say
it who'm no chicken!--I'll frickashee this--which is a chicken--against
your return. I'm a cook, I can assure ye!"

The lover seized her two hands. "You're the best old soul in the world!"
he cried. Mrs. Berry appeared willing to kiss him. "We won't disturb her.
Let her sleep. Keep her in bed, Mrs. Berry. Will you? And we'll call to
inquire after her this evening, and come and see her to-morrow. I'm sure
you'll be kind to her. There! there!" Mrs. Berry was preparing to
whimper. "I trust her to you, you see. Good-bye, you dear old soul."

He smuggled a handful of gold into her keeping, and went to dine with his
uncles, happy and hungry.

Before they reached the hotel, they had agreed to draw Mrs. Berry into
their confidence, telling her (with embellishments) all save their names,
so that they might enjoy the counsel and assistance of that trump of a
woman, and yet have nothing to fear from her. Lucy was to receive the
name of Letitia, Ripton's youngest and best-looking sister. The heartless
fellow proposed it in cruel mockery of an old weakness of hers.

"Letitia!" mused Richard. "I like the name. Both begin with L. There's
something soft--womanlike--in the L.'s."

Material Ripton remarked that they looked like pounds on paper. The lover
roamed through his golden groves. "Lucy Feverel! that sounds better! I
wonder where Ralph is. I should like to help him. He's in love with my
cousin Clare. He'll never do anything till he marries. No man can. I'm
going to do a hundred things when it's over. We shall travel first. I
want to see the Alps. One doesn't know what the earth is till one has
seen the Alps. What a delight it will be to her! I fancy I see her eyes
gazing up at them.

  'And oh, your dear blue eyes, that heavenward glance
    With kindred beauty, banished humbleness,
    Past weeping for mortality's distress--
   Yet from your soul a tear hangs there in trance.
     And fills, but does not fall;
     Softly I hear it call
   At heaven's gate, till Sister Seraphs press
   To look on you their old love from the skies:
   Those are the eyes of Seraphs bright on your blue eyes!

"Beautiful! These lines, Rip, were written by a man who was once a friend
of my father's. I intend to find him and make them friends again. You
don't care for poetry. It's no use your trying to swallow it, Rip!"

"It sounds very nice," said Ripton, modestly shutting his mouth.

"The Alps! Italy! Rome! and then I shall go to the East," the hero
continued. "She's ready to go anywhere with me, the dear brave heart! Oh,
the glorious golden East! I dream of the desert. I dream I'm chief of an
Arab tribe, and we fly all white in the moonlight on our mares, and hurry
to the rescue of my darling! And we push the spears, and we scatter them,
and I come to the tent where she crouches, and catch her to my saddle,
and away!--Rip! what a life!"

Ripton strove to imagine he could enjoy it.

"And then we shall come home, and I shall lead Austin's life, with her to
help me. First be virtuous, Rip! and then serve your country heart and
soul. A wise man told me that. I think I shall do something."

Sunshine and cloud, cloud and sunshine, passed over the lover. Now life
was a narrow ring; now the distances extended, were winged, flew
illimitably. An hour ago and food was hateful. Now he manfully refreshed
his nature, and joined in Algernon's encomiums on Miss Letitia Thompson.

Meantime Beauty slept, watched by the veteran volunteer of the hero's
band. Lucy awoke from dreams which seemed reality, to the reality which
was a dream. She awoke calling for some friend, "Margaret!" and heard one
say, "My name is Bessy Berry, my love! not Margaret." Then she asked
piteously where she was, and where was Margaret, her dear friend, and
Mrs. Berry whispered, "Sure you've got a dearer!"

"Ah!" sighed Lucy, sinking on her pillow, overwhelmed by the strangeness
of her state.

Mrs. Berry closed the frill of her nightgown and adjusted the bedclothes
quietly.

Her name was breathed.

"Yes, my love?" she said.

"Is he here?"

"He's gone, my dear."

"Gone?--Oh, where?" The young girl started up in disorder.

"Gone, to be back, my love! Ah! that young gentleman!" Mrs. Berry
chanted: "Not a morsel have he eat; not a drop have he drunk!"

"O Mrs. Berry! why did you not make him?" Lucy wept for the famine-struck
hero, who was just then feeding mightily.

Mrs. Berry explained that to make one eat who thought the darling of his
heart like to die, was a sheer impossibility for the cleverest of women;
and on this deep truth Lucy reflected, with her eyes wide at the candle.
She wanted one to pour her feelings out to. She slid her hand from under
the bedclothes, and took Mrs. Berry's, and kissed it. The good creature
required no further avowal of her secret, but forthwith leaned her
consummate bosom to the pillow, and petitioned heaven to bless them
both!--Then the little bride was alarmed, and wondered how Mrs. Berry
could have guessed it.

"Why," said Mrs. Berry, "your love is out of your eyes, and out of
everything ye do." And the little bride wondered more. She thought she
had been so very cautious not to betray it. The common woman in them made
cheer together after their own April fashion. Following which Mrs. Berry
probed for the sweet particulars of this beautiful love-match; but the
little bride's lips were locked. She only said her lover was above her in
station.

"And you're a Catholic, my dear!"

"Yes, Mrs. Berry!"

"And him a Protestant."

"Yes, Mrs. Berry!"

"Dear, dear!--And why shouldn't ye be?" she ejaculated, seeing sadness
return to the bridal babe. "So as you was born, so shall ye be! But
you'll have to make your arrangements about the children. The girls to
worship with yet, the boys with him. It's the same God, my dear! You
mustn't blush at it, though you do look so pretty. If my young gentleman
could see you now!"

"Please, Mrs. Berry!" Lucy murmured.

"Why, he will, you know, my dear!"

"Oh, please, Mrs. Berry!"

"And you that can't bear the thoughts of it! Well, I do wish there was
fathers and mothers on both sides and dock-ments signed, and bridesmaids,
and a breakfast! but love is love, and ever will be, in spite of them."

She made other and deeper dives into the little heart, but though she
drew up pearls, they were not of the kind she searched for. The one fact
that hung as a fruit upon her tree of Love, Lucy had given her; she would
not, in fealty to her lover, reveal its growth and history, however sadly
she yearned to pour out all to this dear old Mother Confessor.

Her conduct drove Mrs. Berry from the rosy to the autumnal view of
matrimony, generally heralded by the announcement that it is a lottery.

"And when you see your ticket," said Mrs. Berry, "you shan't know whether
it's a prize or a blank. And, Lord knows! some go on thinking it's a
prize when it turns on 'em and tears 'em. I'm one of the blanks, my dear!
I drew a blank in Berry. He was a black Berry to me, my dear! Smile away!
he truly was, and I a-prizin' him as proud as you can conceive! My dear!"
Mrs. Berry pressed her hands flat on her apron. "We hadn't been a three
months man and wife, when that man--it wasn't the honeymoon, which some
can't say--that man--Yes! he kicked me. His wedded wife he kicked! Ah!"
she sighed to Lucy's large eyes, "I could have borne that. A blow don't
touch the heart," the poor creature tapped her sensitive side. "I went on
loving of him, for I'm a soft one. Tall as a Grenadier he is, and when
out of service grows his moustache. I used to call him my body-guardsman
like a Queen! I flattered him like the fools we women are. For, take my
word for it, my dear, there's nothing here below so vain as a man! That I
know. But I didn't deserve it.... I'm a superior cook .... I did not
deserve that noways." Mrs. Berry thumped her knee, and accentuated up her
climax: "I mended his linen. I saw to his adornments--he called his
clothes, the bad man! I was a servant to him, my dear! and there--it was
nine months--nine months from the day he swear to protect and cherish and
that--nine calendar months, and my gentleman is off with another woman!
Bone of his bone!--pish!" exclaimed Mrs. Berry, reckoning her wrongs over
vividly. "Here's my ring. A pretty ornament! What do it mean? I'm for
tearin' it off my finger a dozen times in the day. It's a symbol? I call
it a tomfoolery for the dead-alive to wear it, that's a widow and not a
widow, and haven't got a name for what she is in any Dixonary, I've
looked, my dear, and"--she spread out her arms--"Johnson haven't got a
name for me!"

At this impressive woe Mrs. Berry's voice quavered into sobs. Lucy spoke
gentle words to the poor outcast from Johnson. The sorrows of Autumn have
no warning for April. The little bride, for all her tender pity, felt
happier when she had heard her landlady's moving tale of the wickedness
of man, which cast in bright relief the glory of that one hero who was
hers. Then from a short flight of inconceivable bliss, she fell, shot by
one of her hundred Argus-eyed fears.

"O Mrs. Berry! I'm so young! Think of me--only just seventeen!"

Mrs. Berry immediately dried her eyes to radiance. "Young, my dear!
Nonsense! There's no so much harm in being young, here and there. I knew
an Irish lady was married at fourteen. Her daughter married close over
fourteen. She was a grandmother by thirty! When any strange man began,
she used to ask him what pattern caps grandmothers wore. They'd stare!
Bless you! the grandmother could have married over and over again. It was
her daughter's fault, not hers, you know."

"She was three years younger," mused Lucy.

"She married beneath her, my dear. Ran off with her father's bailiff's
son. 'Ah, Berry!' she'd say, 'if I hadn't been foolish, I should be my
lady now--not Granny!' Her father never forgave her--left all his estates
out of the family."

"Did her husband always love her?" Lucy preferred to know.

"In his way, my dear, he did," said Mrs. Berry, coming upon her
matrimonial wisdom. "He couldn't help himself. If he left off, he began
again. She was so clever, and did make him so comfortable. Cook! there
wasn't such another cook out of a Alderman's kitchen; no, indeed! And she
a born lady! That tells ye it's the duty of all women! She had her saying
'When the parlour fire gets low, put coals on the ketchen fire!' and a
good saying it is to treasure. Such is man! no use in havin' their hearts
if ye don't have their stomachs."

Perceiving that she grew abstruse, Mrs. Berry added briskly: "You know
nothing about that yet, my dear. Only mind me and mark me: don't neglect
your cookery. Kissing don't last: cookery do!"

Here, with an aphorism worthy a place in The Pilgrim'S Scrip, she broke
off to go posseting for her dear invalid. Lucy was quite well; very eager
to be allowed to rise and be ready when the knock should come. Mrs.
Berry, in her loving considerateness for the little bride, positively
commanded her to lie down, and be quiet, and submit to be nursed and
cherished. For Mrs. Berry well knew that ten minutes alone with the hero
could only be had while the little bride was in that unattainable
position.

Thanks to her strategy, as she thought, her object was gained. The night
did not pass before she learnt, from the hero's own mouth, that Mr.
Richards, the father of the hero, and a stern lawyer, was adverse to his
union with this young lady he loved, because of a ward of his, heiress to
an immense property, whom he desired his son to espouse; and because his
darling Letitia was a Catholic--Letitia, the sole daughter of a brave
naval officer deceased, and in the hands of a savage uncle, who wanted to
sacrifice this beauty to a brute of a son. Mrs. Berry listened
credulously to the emphatic narrative, and spoke to the effect that the
wickedness of old people formed the excuse for the wildness of young
ones. The ceremonious administration of oaths of secrecy and devotion
over, she was enrolled in the hero's band, which now numbered three, and
entered upon the duties with feminine energy, for there are no
conspirators like women. Ripton's lieutenancy became a sinecure, his rank
merely titular. He had never been married--he knew nothing about
licences, except that they must be obtained, and were not difficult--he
had not an idea that so many days' warning must be given to the clergyman
of the parish where one of the parties was resident. How should he? All
his forethought was comprised in the ring, and whenever the discussion of
arrangements for the great event grew particularly hot and important, he
would say, with a shrewd nod: "We mustn't forget the ring, you know, Mrs.
Berry!" and the new member was only prevented by natural complacence from
shouting: "Oh, drat ye! and your ring too." Mrs. Berry had acted
conspicuously in fifteen marriages, by banns, and by licence, and to have
such an obvious requisite dinned in her ears was exasperating. They could
not have contracted alliance with an auxiliary more invaluable, an
authority so profound; and they acknowledged it to themselves. The hero
marched like an automaton at her bidding; Lieutenant Thompson was
rejoiced to perform services as errand-boy in the enterprise.

"It's in hopes you'll be happier than me, I do it," said the devout and
charitable Berry. "Marriages is made in heaven, they say; and if that's
the case, I say they don't take much account of us below!"

Her own woeful experiences had been given to the hero in exchange for his
story of cruel parents.

Richard vowed to her that he would henceforth hold it a duty to hunt out
the wanderer from wedded bonds, and bring him back bound and suppliant.

"Oh, he'll come!" said Mrs. Berry, pursing prophetic wrinkles: "he'll
come of his own accord. Never anywhere will he meet such a cook as Bessy
Berry! And he know her value in his heart of hearts. And I do believe,
when he do come, I shall be opening these arms to him again, and not
slapping his impidence in the face--I'm that soft! I always was--in
matrimony, Mr. Richards!"

As when nations are secretly preparing for war, the docks and arsenals
hammer night and day, and busy contractors measure time by inches, and
the air hums around: for leagues as it were myriads of bees, so the house
and neighbourhood of the matrimonial soft one resounded in the heroic
style, and knew little of the changes of light decreed by Creation. Mrs.
Berry was the general of the hour. Down to Doctors' Commons she expedited
the hero, instructing him how boldly to face the Law, and fib: for that
the Law never could mist a fib and a bold face. Down the hero went, and
proclaimed his presence. And lo! the Law danced to him its sedatest
lovely bear's-dance. Think ye the Lawless susceptible to him than flesh
and blood? With a beautiful confidence it put the few familiar questions
to him, and nodded to his replies: then stamped the bond, and took the
fee. It must be an old vagabond at heart that can permit the irrevocable
to go so cheap, even to a hero. For only mark him when he is petitioned
by heroes and heroines to undo what he does so easily! That small archway
of Doctors' Commons seems the eye of a needle, through which the lean
purse has a way, somehow, of slipping more readily than the portly; but
once through, all are camels alike, the lean purse an especially big
camel. Dispensing tremendous marriage as it does, the Law can have no
conscience.

"I hadn't the slightest difficulty," said the exulting hero.

"Of course not!" returns Mrs. Berry. "It's as easy, if ye're in earnest,
as buying a plum bun."

Likewise the ambassador of the hero went to claim the promise of the
Church to be in attendance on a certain spot, on a certain day, and there
hear oath of eternal fealty, and gird him about with all its forces:
which the Church, receiving a wink from the Law, obsequiously engaged to
do, for less than the price of a plum-cake.

Meantime, while craftsmen and skilled women, directed by Mrs. Berry, were
toiling to deck the day at hand, Raynham and Belthorpe slept,--the former
soundly; and one day was as another to them. Regularly every morning a
letter arrived from Richard to his father, containing observations on the
phenomena of London; remarks (mainly cynical) on the speeches and acts of
Parliament; and reasons for not having yet been able to call on the
Grandisons. They were certainly rather monotonous and spiritless. The
baronet did not complain. That cold dutiful tone assured him there was no
internal trouble or distraction. "The letters of a healthful physique!"
he said to Lady Blandish, with sure insight. Complacently he sat and
smiled, little witting that his son's ordeal was imminent, and that his
son's ordeal was to be his own. Hippias wrote that his nephew was killing
him by making appointments which he never kept, and altogether neglecting
him in the most shameless way, so that his ganglionic centre was in a ten
times worse state than when he left Raynham. He wrote very bitterly, but
it was hard to feel compassion for his offended stomach.

On the other hand, young Tom Blaize was not forthcoming, and had
despatched no tidings whatever. Farmer Blaize smoked his pipe evening
after evening, vastly disturbed. London was a large place--young Tom
might be lost in it, he thought; and young Tom had his weaknesses. A wolf
at Belthorpe, he was likely to be a sheep in London, as yokels have
proved. But what had become of Lucy? This consideration almost sent
Farmer Blaize off to London direct, and he would have gone had not his
pipe enlightened him. A young fellow might play truant and get into a
scrape, but a young man and a young woman were sure to be heard of,
unless they were acting in complicity. Why, of course, young Tom had
behaved like a man, the rascal! and married her outright there, while he
had the chance. It was a long guess. Still it was the only reasonable way
of accounting for his extraordinary silence, and therefore the farmer
held to it that he had done the deed. He argued as modern men do who
think the hero, the upsetter of ordinary calculations, is gone from us.
So, after despatching a letter to a friend in town to be on the outlook
for son Tom, he continued awhile to smoke his pipe, rather elated than
not, and mused on the shrewd manner he should adopt when Master Honeymoon
did appear.

Toward the middle of the second week of Richard's absence, Tom Bakewell
came to Raynham for Cassandra, and privately handed a letter to the
Eighteenth Century, containing a request for money, and a round sum. The
Eighteenth Century was as good as her word, and gave Tom a letter in
return, enclosing a cheque on her bankers, amply providing to keep the
heroic engine in motion at a moderate pace. Tom went back, and Raynham
and Lobourne slept and dreamed not of the morrow. The System, wedded to
Time, slept, and knew not how he had been outraged--anticipated by seven
pregnant seasons. For Time had heard the hero swear to that legalizing
instrument, and had also registered an oath. Ah me! venerable Hebrew
Time! he is unforgiving. Half the confusion and fever of the world comes
of this vendetta he declares against the hapless innocents who have once
done him a wrong. They cannot escape him. They will never outlive it. The
father of jokes, he is himself no joke; which it seems the business of
men to discover.

The days roll round. He is their servant now. Mrs. Berry has a new satin
gown, a beautiful bonnet, a gold brooch, and sweet gloves, presented to
her by the hero, wherein to stand by his bride at the altar to-morrow;
and, instead of being an old wary hen, she is as much a chicken as any of
the party, such has been the magic of these articles. Fathers she sees
accepting the facts produced for them by their children; a world content
to be carved out as it pleases the hero.

At last Time brings the bridal eve, and is blest as a benefactor. The
final arrangements are made; the bridegroom does depart; and Mrs. Berry
lights the little bride to her bed. Lucy stops on the landing where there
is an old clock eccentrically correct that night. 'Tis the palpitating
pause before the gates of her transfiguration. Mrs. Berry sees her put
her rosy finger on the One about to strike, and touch all the hours
successively till she comes to the Twelve that shall sound "Wife" in her
ears on the morrow, moving her lips the while, and looking round archly
solemn when she has done; and that sight so catches at Mrs. Berry's heart
that, not guessing Time to be the poor child's enemy, she endangers her
candle by folding Lucy warmly in her arms, whimpering; "Bless you for a
darling! you innocent lamb! You shall be happy! You shall!"

Old Time gazes grimly ahead.




CHAPTER XXIX

Although it blew hard when Caesar crossed the Rubicon, the passage of
that river is commonly calm; calm as Acheron. So long as he gets his
fare, the ferryman does not need to be told whom he carries: he pulls
with a will, and heroes may be over in half-an-hour. Only when they stand
on the opposite bank, do they see what a leap they have taken. The shores
they have relinquished shrink to an infinite remoteness. There they have
dreamed: here they must act. There lie youth and irresolution: here
manhood and purpose. They are veritably in another land: a moral Acheron
divides their life. Their memories scarce seem their own! The
Philosophical Geography (about to be published) observes that each man
has, one time or other, a little Rubicon--a clear or a foul water to
cross. It is asked him: "Wilt thou wed this Fate, and give up all behind
thee?" And "I will," firmly pronounced, speeds him over. The above-named
manuscript authority informs us, that by far the greater number of
caresses rolled by this heroic flood to its sister stream below, are
those of fellows who have repented their pledge, and have tried to swim
back to the bank they have blotted out. For though every man of us may be
a hero for one fatal minute, very few remain so after a day's march even:
and who wonders that Madam Fate is indignant, and wears the features of
the terrible Universal Fate to him? Fail before her, either in heart or
in act, and lo, how the alluring loves in her visage wither and sicken to
what it is modelled on! Be your Rubicon big or small, clear or foul, it
is the same: you shall not return. On--or to Acheron!--I subscribe to
that saying of The Pilgrim's Scrip:

"The danger of a little knowledge of things is disputable: but beware the
little knowledge of one's self!"

Richard Feverel was now crossing the River of his Ordeal. Already the
mists were stealing over the land he had left: his life was cut in two,
and he breathed but the air that met his nostrils. His father, his
father's love, his boyhood and ambition, were shadowy. His poetic dreams
had taken a living attainable shape. He had a distincter impression of
the Autumnal Berry and her household than of anything at Raynham. And yet
the young man loved his father, loved his home: and I daresay Caesar
loved Rome: but whether he did or no, Caesar when he killed the Republic
was quite bald, and the hero we are dealing with is scarce beginning to
feel his despotic moustache. Did he know what he was made of? Doubtless,
nothing at all. But honest passion has an instinct that can be safer than
conscious wisdom. He was an arrow drawn to the head, flying from the bow.
His audacious mendacities and subterfuges did not strike him as in any
way criminal; for he was perfectly sure that the winning and securing of
Lucy would in the end be boisterously approved of, and in that case, were
not the means justified? Not that he took trouble to argue thus, as older
heroes and self-convicting villains are in the habit of doing; to deduce
a clear conscience. Conscience and Lucy went together.

It was a soft fair day. The Rubicon sparkled in the morning sun. One of
those days when London embraces the prospect of summer, and troops forth
all its babies. The pavement, the squares, the parks, were early alive
with the cries of young Britain. Violet and primrose girls, and organ
boys with military monkeys, and systematic bands very determined in tone
if not in tune, filled the atmosphere, and crowned the blazing procession
of omnibuses, freighted with business men, Cityward, where a column of
reddish brown smoke,--blown aloft by the South-west, marked the scene of
conflict to which these persistent warriors repaired. Richard had seen
much of early London that morning. His plans were laid. He had taken care
to ensure his personal liberty against accidents, by leaving his hotel
and his injured uncle Hippias at sunrise. To-day or to-morrow his father
was to arrive. Farmer Blaize, Tom Bakewell reported to him, was raging in
town. Another day and she might be torn from him: but to-day this miracle
of creation would be his, and then from those glittering banks yonder,
let them summon him to surrender her who dared! The position of things
looked so propitious that he naturally thought the powers waiting on love
conspired in his behalf. And she, too--since she must cross this river,
she had sworn to him to be brave, and do him honour, and wear the true
gladness of her heart in her face. Without a suspicion of folly in his
acts, or fear of results, Richard strolled into Kensington Gardens,
breakfasting on the foreshadow of his great joy, now with a vision of his
bride, now of the new life opening to him. Mountain masses of clouds,
rounded in sunlight, swung up the blue. The flowering chestnut pavilions
overhead rustled and hummed. A sound in his ears as of a banner unfolding
in the joyful distance lulled him.

He was to meet his bride at the church at a quarter past eleven. His
watch said a quarter to ten. He strolled on beneath the long-stemmed
trees toward the well dedicated to a saint obscure. Some people were
drinking at the well. A florid lady stood by a younger one, who had a
little silver mug half-way to her mouth, and evinced undisguised dislike
to the liquor of the salutary saint.

"Drink, child!" said the maturer lady. "That is only your second mug. I
insist upon your drinking three full ones every morning we're in town.
Your constitution positively requires iron!"

"But, mama," the other expostulated, "it's so nasty. I shall be sick."

"Drink!" was the harsh injunction. "Nothing to the German waters, my
dear. Here, let me taste." She took the mug and gave it a flying kiss. "I
declare I think it almost nice--not at all objectionable. Pray, taste
it," she said to a gentleman standing below them to act as cup-bearer.

An unmistakable cis-Rubicon voice replied: "Certainly, if it's good
fellowship; though I confess I don't think mutual sickness a very
engaging ceremony."

Can one never escape from one's relatives? Richard ejaculated inwardly.

Without a doubt those people were Mrs. Doria, Clare, and Adrian. He had
them under his eyes.

Clare, peeping up from her constitutional dose to make sure no man was
near to see the possible consequence of it, was the first to perceive
him. Her hand dropped.

"Now, pray, drink, and do not fuss!" said Mrs. Doria.

"Mama!" Clare gasped.

Richard came forward and capitulated honourably, since retreat was out of
the question. Mrs. Doria swam to meet him: "My own boy! My dear Richard!"
profuse of exclamations. Clare shyly greeted him. Adrian kept in the
background.

"Why, we were coming for you to-day, Richard," said Mrs. Doria, smiling
effusion; and rattled on, "We want another cavalier. This is delightful!
My dear nephew! You have grown from a boy to a man. And there's down on
his lip! And what brings you here at such an hour in the morning? Poetry,
I suppose! Here, take my, arm, child.--Clare! finish that mug and thank
your cousin for sparing you the third. I always bring her, when we are by
a chalybeate, to take the waters before breakfast. We have to get up at
unearthly hours. Think, my dear boy! Mothers are sacrifices! And so
you've been alone a fortnight with your agreeable uncle! A charming time
of it you must have had! Poor Hippias! what may be his last nostrum?"

"Nephew!" Adrian stretched his head round to the couple. "Doses of nephew
taken morning and night fourteen days! And he guarantees that it shall
destroy an iron constitution in a month."

Richard mechanically shook Adrian's hand as he spoke.

"Quite well, Ricky?"

"Yes: well enough," Richard answered.

"Well?" resumed his vigorous aunt, walking on with him, while Clare and
Adrian followed. "I really never saw you looking so handsome. There's
something about your face--look at me--you needn't blush. You've grown to
an Apollo. That blue buttoned-up frock coat becomes you admirably--and
those gloves, and that easy neck-tie. Your style is irreproachable, quite
a style of your own! And nothing eccentric. You have the instinct of
dress. Dress shows blood, my dear boy, as much as anything else.
Boy!--you see, I can't forget old habits. You were a boy when I left, and
now!--Do you see any change in him, Clare?" she turned half round to her
daughter.

"Richard is looking very well, mama," said Clare, glancing at him under
her eyelids.

"I wish I could say the same of you, my dear.--Take my arm, Richard. Are
you afraid of your aunt? I want to get used to you. Won't it be pleasant,
our being all in town together in the season? How fresh the Opera will be
to you! Austin, I hear, takes stalls. You can come to the Forey's box
when you like. We are staying with the Foreys close by here. I think it's
a little too far out, you know; but they like the neighbourhood. This is
what I have always said: Give him more liberty! Austin has seen it at
last. How do you think Clare looking?"

The question had to be repeated. Richard surveyed his cousin hastily, and
praised her looks.

"Pale!" Mrs. Doria sighed.

"Rather pale, aunt."

"Grown very much--don't you think, Richard?"

"Very tall girl indeed, aunt."

"If she had but a little more colour, my dear Richard! I'm sure I give
her all the iron she can swallow, but that pallor still continues. I
think she does not prosper away from her old companion. She was
accustomed to look up to you, Richard"--

"Did you get Ralph's letter, aunt?" Richard interrupted her.

"Absurd!" Mrs. Doria pressed his arm. "The nonsense of a boy! Why did you
undertake to forward such stuff?"

"I'm certain he loves her," said Richard, in a serious way.

The maternal eyes narrowed on him. "Life, my dear Richard, is a game of
cross-purposes," she observed, dropping her fluency, and was rather
angered to hear him laugh. He excused himself by saying that she spoke so
like his father.

"You breakfast with us," she freshened off again. "The Foreys wish to see
you; the girls are dying to know you. Do you know, you have a reputation
on account of that"--she crushed an intruding adjective--"System you were
brought up on. You mustn't mind it. For my part, I think you look a
credit to it. Don't be bashful with young women, mind! As much as you
please with the old ones. You know how to behave among men. There you
have your Drawing-room Guide! I'm sure I shall be proud of you. Am I
not?"

Mrs. Doria addressed his eyes coaxingly.

A benevolent idea struck Richard, that he might employ the minutes to
spare, in pleading the case of poor Ralph; and, as he was drawn along, he
pulled out his watch to note the precise number of minutes he could
dedicate to this charitable office.

"Pardon me," said Mrs. Doria. "You want manners, my dear boy. I think it
never happened to me before that a man consulted his watch in my
presence."

Richard mildly replied that he had an engagement at a particular hour, up
to which he was her servant.

"Fiddlededee!" the vivacious lady sang. "Now I've got you, I mean to keep
you. Oh! I've heard all about you. This ridiculous indifference that your
father makes so much of! Why, of course, you wanted to see the world! A
strong healthy young man shut up all his life in a lonely house--no
friends, no society, no amusements but those of rustics! Of course you
were indifferent! Your intelligence and superior mind alone saved you
from becoming a dissipated country boor.--Where are the others?"

Clare and Adrian came up at a quick pace.

"My damozel dropped something," Adrian explained.

Her mother asked what it was.

"Nothing, mama," said Clare, demurely, and they proceeded as before.

Overborne by his aunt's fluency of tongue, and occupied in acute
calculation of the flying minutes, Richard let many pass before he edged
in a word for Ralph. When he did, Mrs. Doria stopped him immediately.

"I must tell you, child, that I refuse to listen to such rank idiotcy."

"It's nothing of the kind, aunt."

"The fancy of a boy."

"He's not a boy. He's half-a-year older than I am!"

"You silly child! The moment you fall in love, you all think yourselves
men."

"On my honour, aunt! I believe he loves her thoroughly."

"Did he tell you so, child?"

"Men don't speak openly of those things," said Richard.

"Boys do," said Mrs. Doria.

"But listen to me in earnest, aunt. I want you to be kind to Ralph. Don't
drive him to--You maybe sorry for it. Let him--do let him write to her,
and see her. I believe women are as cruel as men in these things."

"I never encourage absurdity, Richard."

"What objection have you to Ralph, aunt?"

"Oh, they're both good families. It's not that absurdity, Richard. It
will be to his credit to remember that his first fancy wasn't a
dairymaid." Mrs. Doria pitched her accent tellingly. It did not touch her
nephew.

"Don't you want Clare ever to marry?" He put the last point of reason to
her.

Mrs. Doria laughed. "I hope so, child. We must find some comfortable old
gentleman for her."

"What infamy!" mutters Richard.

"And I engage Ralph shall be ready to dance at her wedding, or eat a
hearty breakfast--We don't dance at weddings now, and very properly. It's
a horrid sad business, not to be treated with levity.--Is that his
regiment?" she said, as they passed out of the hussar-sentinelled
gardens. "Tush, tush, child! Master Ralph will recover, as--hem! others
have done. A little headache--you call it heartache--and up you rise
again, looking better than ever. No doubt, to have a grain of sense
forced into your brains, you poor dear children! must be painful.. Girls
suffer as much as boys, I assure you. More, for their heads are weaker,
and their appetites less constant. Do I talk like your father now?
Whatever makes the boy fidget at his watch so?"

Richard stopped short. Time spoke urgently.

"I must go," he said.

His face did not seem good for trifling. Mrs. Doria would trifle in
spite.

"Listen, Clare! Richard is going. He says he has an engagement. What
possible engagement can a young man have at eleven o'clock in the
morning?--unless it's to be married!" Mrs. Doria laughed at the ingenuity
of her suggestion.

"Is the church handy, Ricky?" said Adrian. "You can still give us
half-an-hour if it is. The celibate hours strike at Twelve." And he also
laughed in his fashion.

"Won't you stay with us, Richard?" Clare asked. She blushed timidly, and
her voice shook.

Something indefinite--a sharp-edged thrill in the tones made the burning
bridegroom speak gently to her.

"Indeed, I would, Clare; I should like to please you, but I have a most
imperative appointment--that is, I promised--I must go. I shall see you
again"--

Mrs. Doria, took forcible possession of him. "Now, do come, and don't
waste words. I insist upon your having some breakfast first, and then, if
you really must go, you shall. Look! there's the house. At least you will
accompany your aunt to the door."

Richard conceded this. She little imagined what she required of him. Two
of his golden minutes melted into nothingness. They were growing to be
jewels of price, one by one more and more precious as they ran, and now
so costly-rare--rich as his blood! not to kindest relations, dearest
friends, could he give another. The die is cast! Ferryman! push off.

"Good-bye!" he cried, nodding bluffly at the three as one, and fled.

They watched his abrupt muscular stride through the grounds of the house.
He looked like resolution on the march. Mrs. Doria, as usual with her out
of her brother's hearing, began rating the System.

"See what becomes of that nonsensical education! The boy really does not
know how to behave like a common mortal. He has some paltry appointment,
or is mad after some ridiculous idea of his own, and everything must be
sacrificed to it! That's what Austin calls concentration of the
faculties. I think it's more likely to lead to downright insanity than to
greatness of any kind. And so I shall tell Austin. It's time he should be
spoken to seriously about him."

"He's an engine, my dear aunt," said Adrian. "He isn't a boy, or a man,
but an engine. And he appears to have been at high pressure since he came
to town--out all day and half the night."

"He's mad!" Mrs. Doria interjected.

"Not at all. Extremely shrewd is Master Ricky, and carries as open an eye
ahead of him as the ships before Troy. He's more than a match for any of
us. He is for me, I confess."

"Then," said Mrs. Doria, "he does astonish me!"

Adrian begged her to retain her astonishment till the right season, which
would not be long arriving.

Their common wisdom counselled them not to tell the Foreys of their
hopeful relative's ungracious behaviour. Clare had left them. When Mrs.
Doria went to her room her daughter was there, gazing down at something
in her hand, which she guiltily closed.

In answer to an inquiry why she had not gone to take off her things,
Clare said she was not hungry. Mrs. Doria lamented the obstinacy of a
constitution that no quantity of iron could affect, and eclipsed the
looking-glass, saying: "Take them off here, child, and learn to assist
yourself."

She disentangled her bonnet from the array of her spreading hair, talking
of Richard, and his handsome appearance, and extraordinary conduct. Clare
kept opening and shutting her hand, in an attitude half-pensive,
half-listless. She did not stir to undress. A joyless dimple hung in one
pale cheek, and she drew long even breaths.

Mrs. Doria, assured by the glass that she was ready to show, came to her
daughter.

"Now, really," she said, "you are too helpless, my dear. You cannot do a
thing without a dozen women at your elbow. What will become of you? You
will have to marry a millionaire.--What's the matter with you, child?"

Clare undid her tight-shut fingers, as if to some attraction of her eyes,
and displayed a small gold hoop on the palm of a green glove.

"A wedding-ring!" exclaimed Mrs. Doria, inspecting the curiosity most
daintily.

There on Clare's pale green glove lay a wedding-ring!

Rapid questions as to where, when, how, it was found, beset Clare, who
replied: "In the Gardens, mama. This morning. When I was walking behind
Richard."

"Are you sure he did not give it you, Clare?"

"Oh no, mama! he did not give it me."

"Of course not! only he does such absurd things! I thought,
perhaps--these boys are so exceedingly ridiculous! Mrs. Doria had an
idea that it might have been concerted between the two young gentlemen,
Richard and Ralph, that the former should present this token of hymeneal
devotion from the latter to the young lady of his love; but a moment's
reflection exonerated boys even from such preposterous behaviour.

"Now, I wonder," she speculated on Clare's cold face, "I do wonder
whether it's lucky to find a wedding-ring. What very quick eyes you have,
my darling!" Mrs. Doria kissed her. She thought it must be lucky, and the
circumstance made her feel tender to her child. Her child did not move to
the kiss.

"Let's see whether it fits," said Mrs. Doria, almost infantine with
surprise and pleasure.

Clare suffered her glove to be drawn off. The ring slid down her long
thin finger, and settled comfortably.

"It does!" Mrs. Doria whispered. To find a wedding ring is open to any
woman; but to find a wedding-ring that fits may well cause a
superstitious emotion. Moreover, that it should be found while walking in
the neighbourhood of the identical youth whom a mother has destined for
her daughter, gives significance to the gentle perturbation of ideas
consequent on such a hint from Fortune.

"It really fits!" she pursued. "Now I never pay any attention to the
nonsense of omens and that kind of thing" (had the ring been a horseshoe
Mrs. Doria would have pinked it up and dragged it obediently home), "but
this, I must say, is odd--to find a ring that fits!--singular! It never
happened to me. Sixpence is the most I ever discovered, and I have it
now. Mind you keep it, Clare--this ring: And," she laughed, "offer it to
Richard when he comes; say, you think he must have dropped it."

The dimple in Clare's cheek quivered.

Mother and daughter had never spoken explicitly of Richard. Mrs. Doria,
by exquisite management, had contrived to be sure that on one side there
would be no obstacle to her project of general happiness, without, as she
thought, compromising her daughter's feelings unnecessarily. It could do
no harm to an obedient young girl to hear that there was no youth in the
world like a certain youth. He the prince of his generation, she might
softly consent, when requested, to be his princess; and if never
requested (for Mrs. Doria envisaged failure), she might easily transfer
her softness to squires of lower degree. Clare had always been blindly
obedient to her mother (Adrian called them Mrs. Doria Battledoria and the
fair Shuttlecockiana), and her mother accepted in this blind obedience
the text of her entire character. It is difficult for those who think
very earnestly for their children to know when their children are
thinking on their own account. The exercise of their volition we construe
as revolt. Our love does not like to be invalided and deposed from its
command, and here I think yonder old thrush on the lawn who has just
kicked the last of her lank offspring out of the nest to go shift for
itself, much the kinder of the two, though sentimental people do shrug
their shoulders at these unsentimental acts of the creatures who never
wander from nature. Now, excess of obedience is, to one who manages most
exquisitely, as bad as insurrection. Happily Mrs. Doria saw nothing in
her daughter's manner save a want of iron. Her pallor, her lassitude, the
tremulous nerves in her face, exhibited an imperious requirement of the
mineral.

"The reason why men and women are mysterious to us, and prove
disappointing," we learn from The Pilgrim's Scrip, "is, that we will read
them from our own book; just as we are perplexed by reading ourselves
from theirs."

Mrs. Doria read her daughter from her own book, and she was gay; she
laughed with Adrian at the breakfast-table, and mock-seriously joined in
his jocose assertion that Clare was positively and by all hymeneal
auspices betrothed to the owner of that ring, be he who he may, and must,
whenever he should choose to come and claim her, give her hand to him
(for everybody agreed the owner must be masculine, as no woman would drop
a wedding-ring), and follow him whither he listed all the world over.
Amiable giggling Forey girls called Clare, The Betrothed. Dark man, or
fair? was mooted. Adrian threw off the first strophe of Clare's fortune
in burlesque rhymes, with an insinuating gipsy twang. Her aunt Forey
warned her to have her dresses in readiness. Her grandpapa Forey
pretended to grumble at bridal presents being expected from grandpapas.

This one smelt orange-flower, another spoke solemnly of an old shoe. The
finding of a wedding-ring was celebrated through all the palpitating
accessories and rosy ceremonies involved by that famous instrument. In
the midst of the general hilarity, Clare showed her deplorable want of
iron by bursting into tears.

Did the poor mocked-at heart divine what might be then enacting? Perhaps,
dimly, as we say: that is, without eyes.

At an altar stand two fair young creatures, ready with their oaths. They
are asked to fix all time to the moment, and they do so. If there is
hesitation at the immense undertaking, it is but maidenly. She conceives
as little mental doubt of the sanity of the act as he. Over them hangs a
cool young curate in his raiment of office. Behind are two apparently
lucid people, distinguished from each other by sex and age: the foremost
a bunch of simmering black satin; under her shadow a cock-robin in the
dress of a gentleman, big joy swelling out his chest, and pert
satisfaction cocking his head. These be they who stand here in place of
parents to the young couple. All is well. The service proceeds.

Firmly the bridegroom tells forth his words. This hour of the complacent
giant at least is his, and that he means to hold him bound through the
eternities, men may hear. Clearly, and with brave modesty, speaks she: no
less firmly, though her body trembles: her voice just vibrating while the
tone travels on, like a smitten vase.

Time hears sentence pronounced on him: the frail hands bind his huge
limbs and lock the chains. He is used to it: he lets them do as they
will.

Then comes that period when they are to give their troth to each other.
The Man with his right hand takes the Woman by her right hand: the Woman
with her right hand takes the Man by his right hand.--Devils dare not
laugh at whom Angels crowd to contemplate.

Their hands are joined; their blood flows as one stream. Adam and fair
Eve front the generations. Are they not lovely? Purer fountains of life
were never in two bosoms.

And then they loose their hands, and the cool curate doth bid the Man to
put a ring on the Woman's fourth finger, counting thumb. And the Man
thrusts his hand into one pocket, and into another, forward and back many
times into all his pockets. He remembers that he felt for it, and felt it
in his waistcoat pocket, when in the Gardens. And his hand comes forth
empty. And the Man is ghastly to look at!

Yet, though Angels smile, shall not Devils laugh! The curate deliberates.
The black satin bunch ceases to simmer. He in her shadow changes from a
beaming cock-robin to an inquisitive sparrow. Eyes multiply questions:
lips have no reply. Time ominously shakes his chain, and in the pause a
sound of mockery stings their ears.

Think ye a hero is one to be defeated in his first battle? Look at the
clock! there are but seven minutes to the stroke of the celibate hours:
the veteran is surely lifting his two hands to deliver fire, and his shot
will sunder them in twain so nearly united. All the jewellers of London
speeding down with sacks full of the nuptial circlet cannot save them!

The battle must be won on the field, and what does the hero now? It is an
inspiration! For who else would dream of such a reserve in the rear? None
see what he does; only that the black-satin bunch is remonstratingly
agitated, stormily shaken, and subdued: and as though the menacing cloud
had opened, and dropped the dear token from the skies at his demand, he
produces the symbol of their consent, and the service proceeds: "With
this ring I thee wed."

They are prayed over and blest. For good, or for ill, this deed is done.
The names are registered; fees fly right and left: they thank, and
salute, the curate, whose official coolness melts into a smile of
monastic gallantry: the beadle on the steps waves off a gaping world as
they issue forth bridegroom and bridesman recklessly scatter gold on him:
carriage doors are banged to: the coachmen drive off, and the scene
closes, everybody happy.




CHAPTER XXX

And the next moment the bride is weeping as if she would dissolve to one
of Dian's Virgin Fountains from the clasp of the Sun-God. She has nobly
preserved the mask imposed by comedies, till the curtain has fallen, and
now she weeps, streams with tears. Have patience, O impetuous young man!
It is your profession to be a hero. This poor heart is new to it, and her
duties involve such wild acts, such brigandage, such terrors and tasks,
she is quite unnerved. She did you honour till now. Bear with her now.
She does not cry the cry of ordinary maidens in like cases. While the
struggle went on her tender face was brave; but, alas! Omens are against
her: she holds an ever-present dreadful one on that fatal fourth finger
of hers, which has coiled itself round her dream of delight, and takes
her in its clutch like a horrid serpent. And yet she must love it. She
dares not part from it. She must love and hug it, and feed on its strange
honey, and all the bliss it gives her casts all the deeper shadow on what
is to come.

Say: Is it not enough to cause feminine apprehension, for a woman to be
married in another woman's ring?

You are amazons, ladies, at Saragossa, and a thousand citadels--wherever
there is strife, and Time is to be taken by the throat. Then shall few
men match your sublime fury. But what if you see a vulture, visible only
to yourselves, hovering over the house you are gaily led by the torch to
inhabit? Will you not crouch and be cowards?

As for the hero, in the hour of victory he pays no heed to omens. He does
his best to win his darling to confidence by caresses. Is she not his? Is
he not hers? And why, when the battle is won, does she weep? Does she
regret what she has done?

Oh, never! never! her soft blue eyes assure him, steadfast love seen
swimming on clear depths of faith in them, through the shower.

He is silenced by her exceeding beauty, and sits perplexed waiting for
the shower to pass.

Alone with Mrs. Berry, in her bedroom, Lucy gave tongue to her distress,
and a second character in the comedy changed her face.

"O Mrs. Berry! Mrs. Berry! what has happened! what has happened!"

"My darlin' child!" The bridal Berry gazed at the finger of doleful joy.
"I'd forgot all about it! And that's what've made me feel so queer ever
since, then! I've been seemin' as if I wasn't myself somehow, without my
ring. Dear! dear! what a wilful young gentleman! We ain't a match for men
in that state--Lord help us!"

Mrs. Berry sat on the edge of a chair: Lucy on the edge of the bed.

"What do you think of it, Mrs. Berry? Is it not terrible?"

"I can't say I should 'a liked it myself, my dear," Mrs. Berry candidly
responded.

"Oh! why, why, why did it happen!" the young bride bent to a flood of
fresh tears, murmuring that she felt already old--forsaken.

"Haven't you got a comfort in your religion for all accidents?" Mrs.
Berry inquired.

"None for this. I know it's wrong to cry when I am so happy. I hope he
will forgive me."

Mrs. Berry vowed her bride was the sweetest, softest, beautifulest thing
in life.

"I'll cry no more," said Lucy. "Leave me, Mrs. Berry, and come back when
I ring."

She drew forth a little silver cross, and fell upon her knees to the bed.
Mrs. Berry left the room tiptoe.

When she was called to return, Lucy was calm and tearless, and smiled
kindly to her.

"It's over now," she said.

Mrs. Berry sedately looked for her ring to follow.

"He does not wish me to go in to the breakfast you have prepared, Mrs.
Berry. I begged to be excused. I cannot eat."

Mrs. Berry very much deplored it, as she had laid out a superior nuptial
breakfast, but with her mind on her ring she nodded assentingly.

"We shall not have much packing to do, Mrs. Berry."

"No, my dear. It's pretty well all done."

"We are going to the Isle of Wight, Mrs. Berry."

"And a very suitable spot ye've chose, my dear!"

"He loves the sea. He wishes to be near it."

"Don't ye cross to-night, if it's anyways rough, my dear. It isn't
advisable." Mrs. Berry sank her voice to say, "Don't ye be soft and give
way to him there, or you'll both be repenting it."

Lucy had only been staving off the unpleasantness she had to speak. She
saw Mrs. Berry's eyes pursuing her ring, and screwed up her courage at
last.

"Mrs. Berry."

"Yes, my dear."

"Mrs. Berry, you shall have another ring."

"Another, my dear?" Berry did not comprehend. "One's quite enough for the
objeck," she remarked.

"I mean," Lucy touched her fourth finger, "I cannot part with this." She
looked straight at Mrs. Berry.

That bewildered creature gazed at her, and at the ring, till she had
thoroughly exhausted the meaning of the words, and then exclaimed,
horror-struck: "Deary me, now! you don't say that? You're to be married
again in your own religion."

The young wife repeated: "I can never part with it."

"But, my dear!" the wretched Berry wrung her hands, divided between
compassion and a sense of injury. "My dear!" she kept expostulating like
a mute.

"I know all that you would say, Mrs. Berry. I am very grieved to pain
you. It is mine now, and must be mine. I cannot give it back."

There she sat, suddenly developed to the most inflexible little heroine
in the three Kingdoms.

From her first perception of the meaning of the young bride's words, Mrs.
Berry, a shrewd physiognomist, knew that her case was hopeless, unless
she treated her as she herself had been treated, and seized the ring by
force of arms; and that she had not heart for.

"What!" she gasped faintly, "one's own lawful wedding-ring you wouldn't
give back to a body?"

"Because it is mine, Mrs. Berry. It was yours, but it is mine now. You
shall have whatever you ask for but that. Pray, forgive me! It must be
so."

Mrs. Berry rocked on her chair, and sounded her hands together. It amazed
her that this soft little creature could be thus firm. She tried
argument.

"Don't ye know, my dear, it's the fatalest thing you're inflictin' upon
me, reelly! Don't ye know that bein' bereft of one's own lawful
wedding-ring's the fatalest thing in life, and there's no prosperity
after it! For what stands in place o' that, when that's gone, my dear?
And what could ye give me to compensate a body for the loss o' that?
Don't ye know--Oh, deary me!" The little bride's face was so set that
poor Berry wailed off in despair.

"I know it," said Lucy. "I know it all. I know what I do to you. Dear,
dear Mrs. Berry! forgive me! If I parted with my ring I know it would be
fatal."

So this fair young freebooter took possession of her argument as well as
her ring.

Berry racked her distracted wits for a further appeal.

"But, my child," she counter-argued, "you don't understand. It ain't as
you think. It ain't a hurt to you now. Not a bit, it ain't. It makes no
difference now! Any ring does while the wearer's a maid. And your Mr.
Richard will find the very ring he intended for ye. And, of course,
that's the one you'll wear as his wife. It's all the same now, my dear.
It's no shame to a maid. Now do--now do--there's a darlin'!"

Wheedling availed as little as argument.

"Mrs. Berry," said Lucy, "you know what my--he spoke: 'With this ring I
thee wed.' It was with this ring. Then how could it be with another?"

Berry was constrained despondently to acknowledge that was logic.

She hit upon an artful conjecture:

"Won't it be unlucky your wearin' of the ring which served me so? Think
o' that!"

"It may! it may! it may!" cried Lucy.

"And arn't you rushin' into it, my dear?"

"Mrs. Berry," Lucy said again, "it was this ring. It cannot--it never can
be another. It was this. What it brings me I must bear. I shall wear it
till I die!"

"Then what am I to do?" the ill-used woman groaned. "What shall I tell my
husband when he come back to me, and see I've got a new ring waitin' for
him? Won't that be a welcome?"

Quoth Lucy: "How can he know it is not the same; in a plain gold ring?"

"You never see so keen a eyed man in joolry as my Berry!" returned his
solitary spouse. "Not know, my dear? Why, any one would know that've got
eyes in his head. There's as much difference in wedding-rings as there's
in wedding people! Now, do pray be reasonable, my own sweet!"

"Pray, do not ask me," pleads Lucy.

"Pray, do think better of it," urges Berry.

"Pray, pray, Mrs. Berry!" pleads Lucy.

"--And not leave your old Berry all forlorn just when you're so happy!"

"Indeed I would not, you dear, kind old creature!" Lucy faltered.

Mrs. Berry thought she had her.

"Just when you're going to be the happiest wife on earth--all you want
yours!" she pursued the tender strain. "A handsome young gentleman! Love
and Fortune smilin' on ye!"--

Lucy rose up.

"Mrs. Berry," she said, "I think we must not lose time in getting ready,
or he will be impatient."

Poor Berry surveyed her in abject wonder from the edge of her chair.
Dignity and resolve were in the ductile form she had hitherto folded
under her wing. In an hour the heroine had risen to the measure of the
hero. Without being exactly aware what creature she was dealing with,
Berry acknowledged to herself it was not one of the common run, and
sighed, and submitted.

"It's like a divorce, that it is!" she sobbed.

After putting the corners of her apron to her eyes, Berry bustled humbly
about the packing. Then Lucy, whose heart was full to her, came and
kissed her, and Berry bumped down and regularly cried. This over, she had
recourse to fatalism.

"I suppose it was to be, my dear! It's my punishment for meddlin' wi'
such matters. No, I'm not sorry. Bless ye both. Who'd 'a thought you was
so wilful?--you that any one might have taken for one of the silly-softs!
You're a pair, my dear! indeed you are! You was made to meet! But we
mustn't show him we've been crying.--Men don't like it when they're
happy. Let's wash our faces and try to bear our lot."

So saying the black-satin bunch careened to a renewed deluge. She
deserved some sympathy, for if it is sad to be married in another
person's ring, how much sadder to have one's own old accustomed lawful
ring violently torn off one's finger and eternally severed from one! But
where you have heroes and heroines, these terrible complications ensue.

They had now both fought their battle of the ring, and with equal honour
and success.

In the chamber of banquet Richard was giving Ripton his last directions.
Though it was a private wedding, Mrs. Berry had prepared a sumptuous
breakfast. Chickens offered their breasts: pies hinted savoury secrets:
things mystic, in a mash, with Gallic appellatives, jellies, creams,
fruits, strewed the table: as a tower in the midst, the cake colossal:
the priestly vesture of its nuptial white relieved by hymeneal
splendours.

Many hours, much labour and anxiety of mind, Mrs. Berry had expended upon
this breakfast, and why? There is one who comes to all feasts that have
their basis in Folly, whom criminals of trained instinct are careful to
provide against: who will speak, and whose hateful voice must somehow be
silenced while the feast is going on. This personage is The Philosopher.
Mrs. Berry knew him. She knew that he would come. She provided against
him in the manner she thought most efficacious: that is, by cheating her
eyes and intoxicating her conscience with the due and proper glories
incident to weddings where fathers dilate, mothers collapse, and marriage
settlements are flourished on high by the family lawyer: and had there
been no show of the kind to greet her on her return from the church, she
would, and she foresaw she would, have stared at squalor and emptiness,
and repented her work. The Philosopher would have laid hold of her by the
ear, and called her bad names. Entrenched behind a breakfast-table so
legitimately adorned, Mrs. Berry defied him. In the presence of that cake
he dared not speak above a whisper. And there were wines to drown him in,
should he still think of protesting; fiery wines, and cool: claret sent
purposely by the bridegroom for the delectation of his friend.

For one good hour, therefore, the labour of many hours kept him dumb.
Ripton was fortifying himself so as to forget him altogether, and the
world as well, till the next morning. Ripton was excited, overdone with
delight. He had already finished one bottle, and listened, pleasantly
flushed, to his emphatic and more abstemious chief. He had nothing to do
but to listen, and to drink. The hero would not allow him to shout
Victory! or hear a word of toasts; and as, from the quantity of oil
poured on it, his eloquence was becoming a natural force in his bosom,
the poor fellow was afflicted with a sort of elephantiasis of suppressed
emotion. At times he half-rose from his chair, and fell vacuously into it
again; or he chuckled in the face of weighty, severely-worded
instructions; tapped his chest, stretched his arms, yawned, and in short
behaved so singularly that Richard observed it, and said: "On my soul, I
don't think you know a word I'm saying."

"Every word, Ricky!" Ripton spirted through the opening. "I'm going down
to your governor, and tell him: Sir Austin! Here's your only chance of
being a happy father--no, no!--Oh! don't you fear me, Ricky! I shall talk
the old gentleman over."

His chief said:

"Look here. You had better not go down to-night. Go down the first thing
to-morrow, by the six o'clock train. Give him my letter. Listen to
me--give him my letter, and don't speak a word till he speaks. His
eyebrows will go up and down, he won't say much. I know him. If he asks
you about her, don't be a fool, but say what you think of her sensibly"--

No cork could hold in Ripton when she was alluded to. He shouted: "She's
an angel!"

Richard checked him: "Speak sensibly, I say--quietly. You can say how
gentle and good she is--my fleur-de-luce! And say, this was not her
doing. If any one's to blame, it's I. I made her marry me. Then go to
Lady Blandish, if you don't find her at the house. You may say whatever
you please to her. Give her my letter, and tell her I want to hear from
her immediately. She has seen Lucy, and I know what she thinks of her.
You will then go to Farmer Blaize. I told you Lucy happens to be his
niece--she has not lived long there. She lived with her aunt Desborough
in France while she was a child, and can hardly be called a relative to
the farmer--there's not a point of likeness between them. Poor darling!
she never knew her mother. Go to Mr. Blaize, and tell him. You will treat
him just as you would treat any other gentleman. If you are civil, he is
sure to be. And if he abuses me, for my sake and hers you will still
treat him with respect. You hear? And then write me a full account of all
that has been said and done. You will have my address the day after
to-morrow. By the way, Tom will be here this afternoon. Write out for him
where to call on you the day after to-morrow, in case you have heard
anything in the morning you think I ought to know at once, as Tom will
join me that night. Don't mention to anybody about my losing the ring,
Ripton. I wouldn't have Adrian get hold of that for a thousand pounds.
How on earth I came to lose it! How well she bore it, Rip! How
beautifully she behaved!"

Ripton again shouted: "An angel!" Throwing up the heels of his second
bottle, he said:

"You may trust your friend, Richard. Aha! when you pulled at old Mrs.
Berry I didn't know what was up. I do wish you'd let me drink her
health?"

"Here's to Penelope!" said Richard, just wetting his mouth. The carriage
was at the door: a couple of dire organs, each grinding the same tune,
and a vulture-scented itinerant band (from which not the secretest veiled
wedding can escape) worked harmoniously without in the production of
discord, and the noise acting on his nervous state made him begin to fume
and send in messages for his bride by the maid.

By and by the lovely young bride presented herself dressed for her
journey, and smiling from stained eyes.

Mrs. Berry was requested to drink some wine, which Ripton poured out for
her, enabling Mrs. Berry thereby to measure his condition.

The bride now kissed Mrs. Berry, and Mrs. Berry kissed the bridegroom, on
the plea of her softness. Lucy gave Ripton her hand, with a musical
"Good-bye, Mr. Thompson," and her extreme graciousness made him just
sensible enough to sit down before he murmured his fervent hopes for her
happiness.

"I shall take good care of him," said Mrs. Berry, focussing her eyes to
the comprehension of the company.

"Farewell, Penelope!" cried Richard. "I shall tell the police everywhere
to look out for your lord."

"Oh my dears! good-bye, and Heaven bless ye both!"

Berry quavered, touched with compunction at the thoughts of approaching
loneliness. Ripton, his mouth drawn like a bow to his ears, brought up
the rear to the carriage, receiving a fair slap on the cheek from an old
shoe precipitated by Mrs. Berry's enthusiastic female domestic.

White handkerchiefs were waved, the adieux had fallen to signs: they were
off. Then did a thought of such urgency illumine Mrs. Berry, that she
telegraphed, hand in air; awakening Ripton's lungs, for the coachman to
stop, and ran back to the house. Richard chafed to be gone, but at his
bride's intercession he consented to wait. Presently they beheld the old
black-satin bunch stream through the street-door, down the bit of garden,
and up the astonished street; halting, panting, capless at the carriage
door, a book in her hand,--a much-used, dog-leaved, steamy, greasy book,
which; at the same time calling out in breathless jerks, "There! never ye
mind looks! I ain't got a new one. Read it, and don't ye forget it!" she
discharged into Lucy's lap, and retreated to the railings, a signal for
the coachman to drive away for good.

How Richard laughed at the Berry's bridal gift! Lucy, too, lost the omen
at her heart as she glanced at the title of the volume. It was Dr.
Kitchener on Domestic Cookery!




CHAPTER XXXI

General withdrawing of heads from street-windows, emigration of organs
and bands, and a relaxed atmosphere in the circle of Mrs. Berry's abode,
proved that Dan Cupid had veritably flown to suck the life of fresh
regions. With a pensive mind she grasped Ripton's arm to regulate his
steps, and returned to the room where her creditor awaited her. In the
interval he had stormed her undefended fortress, the cake, from which
altitude he shook a dolorous head at the guilty woman. She smoothed her
excited apron, sighing. Let no one imagine that she regretted her
complicity. She was ready to cry torrents, but there must be absolute
castigation before this criminal shall conceive the sense of regret; and
probably then she will cling to her wickedness the more--such is the born
Pagan's tenacity! Mrs. Berry sighed, and gave him back his shake of the
head. O you wanton, improvident creature! said he. O you very wise old
gentleman! said she. He asked her the thing she had been doing. She
enlightened him with the fatalist's reply. He sounded a bogey's alarm of
contingent grave results. She retreated to the entrenched camp of the
fact she had helped to make.

"It's done!" she exclaimed. How could she regret what she felt comfort to
know was done? Convinced that events alone could stamp a mark on such
stubborn flesh, he determined to wait for them, and crouched silent on
the cake, with one finger downwards at Ripton's incision there, showing a
crumbling chasm and gloomy rich recess.

The eloquent indication was understood. "Dear! dear!" cried Mrs. Berry,
"what a heap o' cake, and no one to send it to!"

Ripton had resumed his seat by the table and his embrace of the claret.
Clear ideas of satisfaction had left him and resolved to a boiling geysir
of indistinguishable transports. He bubbled, and waggled, and nodded
amicably to nothing, and successfully, though not without effort,
preserved his uppermost member from the seductions of the nymph,
Gravitation, who was on the look-out for his whole length shortly.

"Ha! ha!" he shouted, about a minute after Mrs. Berry had spoken, and
almost abandoned himself to the nymph on the spot. Mrs. Berry's words had
just reached his wits.

"Why do you laugh, young man?" she inquired, familiar and motherly on
account of his condition.

Ripton laughed louder, and caught his chest on the edge of the table and
his nose on a chicken. "That's goo'!" he said, recovering, and rocking
under Mrs. Berry's eyes. "No friend!"

"I did not say, no friend," she remarked. "I said, no one; meanin', I
know not where for to send it to."

Ripton's response to this was: You put a Griffin on that cake.
Wheatsheaves each side."

"His crest?" Mrs. Berry said sweetly.

"Oldest baronetcy 'n England!" waved Ripton.

"Yes?" Mrs. Berry encouraged him on.

"You think he's Richards. We're oblige' be very close. And she's the most
lovely!--If I hear man say thing 'gainst her."

"You needn't for to cry over her, young man," said Mrs. Berry. "I wanted
for to drink their right healths by their right names, and then go about
my day's work, and I do hope you won't keep me."

Ripton stood bolt upright at her words.

"You do?" he said, and filling a bumper he with cheerfully vinous
articulation and glibness of tongue proposed the health of Richard and
Lucy Feverel, of Raynham Abbey! and that mankind should not require an
expeditious example of the way to accept the inspiring toast, he drained
his bumper at a gulp. It finished him. The farthing rushlight of his
reason leapt and expired. He tumbled to the sofa and there stretched.

Some minutes subsequent to Ripton's signalization of his devotion to the
bridal pair, Mrs. Berry's maid entered the room to say that a gentleman
was inquiring below after the young gentleman who had departed, and found
her mistress with a tottering wineglass in her hand, exhibiting every
symptom of unconsoled hysterics. Her mouth gaped, as if the fell creditor
had her by the swallow. She ejaculated with horrible exultation that she
had been and done it, as her disastrous aspect seemed to testify, and her
evident, but inexplicable, access of misery induced the sympathetic maid
to tender those caressing words that were all Mrs. Berry wanted to go off
into the self-caressing fit without delay; and she had already given the
preluding demoniac ironic outburst, when the maid called heaven to
witness that the gentleman would hear her; upon which Mrs. Berry
violently controlled her bosom, and ordered that he should be shown
upstairs instantly to see her the wretch she was. She repeated the
injunction.

The maid did as she was told, and Mrs. Berry, wishing first to see
herself as she was, mutely accosted the looking-glass, and tried to look
a very little better. She dropped a shawl on Ripton and was settled,
smoothing her agitation when her visitor was announced.

The gentleman was Adrian Harley. An interview with Tom Bakewell had put
him on the track, and now a momentary survey of the table, and its
white-vestured cake, made him whistle.

Mrs. Berry plaintively begged him to do her the favour to be seated.

"A fine morning, ma'am," said Adrian.

"It have been!" Mrs. Berry answered, glancing over her shoulder at the
window, and gulping as if to get her heart down from her mouth.

"A very fine Spring," pursued Adrian, calmly anatomizing her countenance.

Mrs. Berry smothered an adjective to "weather" on a deep sigh. Her
wretchedness was palpable. In proportion to it, Adrian waned cheerful and
brisk. He divined enough of the business to see that there was some
strange intelligence to be fished out of the culprit who sat compressing
hysterics before him; and as he was never more in his element than when
he had a sinner, and a repentant prostrate abject sinner in hand, his
affable countenance might well deceive poor Berry.

"I presume these are Mr. Thompson's lodgings?" he remarked, with a look
at the table.

Mrs. Berry's head and the whites of her eyes informed him that they were
not Mr. Thompson's lodgings.

"No?" said Adrian, and threw a carelessly inquisitive eye about him. "Mr.
Feverel is out, I suppose?"

A convulsive start at the name, and two corroborating hands dropped on
her knees, formed Mrs. Berry's reply.

"Mr. Feverel's man," continued Adrian, "told me I should be certain to
find him here. I thought he would be with his friend, Mr. Thompson. I'm
too late, I perceive. Their entertainment is over. I fancy you have been
having a party of them here, ma'am?--a bachelors' breakfast!"

In the presence of that cake this observation seemed to mask an irony so
shrewd that Mrs. Berry could barely contain herself. She felt she must
speak. Making her face as deplorably propitiating as she could, she
began:

"Sir, may I beg for to know your name?"

Mr. Harley accorded her request.

Groaning in the clutch of a pitiless truth, she continued:

"And you are Mr. Harley, that was--oh! and you've come for Mr.?"--

Mr. Richard Feverel was the gentleman Mr. Harley had come for.

"Oh! and it's no mistake, and he's of Raynham Abbey?" Mrs. Berry
inquired.

Adrian, very much amused, assured her that he was born and bred there.

"His father's Sir Austin?" wailed the black-satin bunch from behind her
handkerchief.

Adrian verified Richard's descent.

"Oh, then, what have I been and done!" she cried, and stared blankly at
her visitor. "I been and married my baby! I been and married the bread
out of my own mouth. O Mr. Harley! Mr. Harley! I knew you when you was a
boy that big, and wore jackets; and all of you. And it's my softness
that's my ruin, for I never can resist a man's asking. Look at that cake,
Mr. Harley!"

Adrian followed her directions quite coolly. "Wedding-cake, ma'am!" he
said.

"Bride-cake it is, Mr. Harley!"

"Did you make it yourself, ma'am?"

The quiet ease of the question overwhelmed Mrs. Berry and upset that
train of symbolic representations by which she was seeking to make him
guess the catastrophe and spare her the furnace of confession.

"I did not make it myself, Mr. Harley," she replied. "It's a bought cake,
and I'm a lost woman. Little I dreamed when I had him in my arms a baby
that I should some day be marrying him out of my own house! I little
dreamed that! Oh, why did he come to me! Don't you remember his old
nurse, when he was a baby in arms, that went away so sudden, and no fault
of hers, Mr. Harley! The very mornin' after the night you got into Mr.
Benson's cellar, and got so tipsy on his Madeary--I remember it as clear
as yesterday!--and Mr. Benson was that angry he threatened to use the
whip to you, and I helped put you to bed. I'm that very woman."

Adrian smiled placidly at these reminiscences of his guileless youthful
life.

"Well, ma'am! well?" he said. He would bring her to the furnace.

"Won't you see it all, kind sir?" Mrs. Berry appealed to him in pathetic
dumb show.

Doubtless by this time Adrian did see it all, and was mentally cursing at
Folly, and reckoning the immediate consequences, but he looked
uninstructed, his peculiar dimple-smile was undisturbed, his comfortable
full-bodied posture was the same. "Well, ma'am?" he spurred her on.

Mrs. Berry burst forth: "It were done this mornin', Mr. Harley, in the
church, at half-past eleven of the clock, or twenty to, by licence."

Adrian was now obliged to comprehend a case of matrimony. "Oh!" he said,
like one who is as hard as facts, and as little to be moved: "Somebody
was married this morning; was it Mr. Thompson, or Mr. Feverel?"

Mrs. Berry shuffled up to Ripton, and removed the shawl from him, saying:
"Do he look like a new married bridegroom, Mr. Harley?"

Adrian inspected the oblivious Ripton with philosophic gravity.

"This young gentleman was at church this morning?" he asked.

"Oh! quite reasonable and proper then," Mrs. Berry begged him to
understand.

"Of course, ma'am." Adrian lifted and let fall the stupid inanimate limbs
of the gone wretch, puckering his mouth queerly. "You were all reasonable
and proper, ma'am. The principal male performer, then, is my cousin, Mr.
Feverel? He was married by you, this morning, by licence at your parish
church, and came here, and ate a hearty breakfast, and left intoxicated."

Mrs. Berry flew out. "He never drink a drop, sir. A more moderate young
gentleman you never see. Oh! don't ye think that now, Mr. Harley. He was
as upright and master of his mind as you be."

"Ay!" the wise youth nodded thanks to her for the comparison, "I mean the
other form of intoxication."

Mrs. Berry sighed. She could say nothing on that score.

Adrian desired her to sit down, and compose herself, and tell him
circumstantially what had been done.

She obeyed, in utter perplexity at his perfectly composed demeanour.

Mrs. Berry, as her recital declared, was no other than that identical
woman who once in old days had dared to behold the baronet behind his
mask, and had ever since lived in exile from the Raynham world on a
little pension regularly paid to her as an indemnity. She was that woman,
and the thought of it made her almost accuse Providence for the betraying
excess of softness it had endowed her with. How was she to recognize her
baby grown a man? He came in a feigned name; not a word of the family was
mentioned. He came like an ordinary mortal, though she felt something
more than ordinary to him--she knew she did. He came bringing a beautiful
young lady, and on what grounds could she turn her back on them? Why,
seeing that all was chaste and legal, why should she interfere to make
them unhappy--so few the chances of happiness in this world! Mrs. Berry
related the seizure of her ring.

"One wrench," said the sobbing culprit, "one, and my ring was off!"

She had no suspicions, and the task of writing her name in the
vestry-book had been too enacting for a thought upon the other
signatures.

"I daresay you were exceedingly sorry for what you had done," said
Adrian.

"Indeed, sir," moaned Berry, "I were, and am."

"And would do your best to rectify the mischief--eh, ma'am?"

"Indeed, and indeed, sir, I would," she protested solemnly.

"--As, of course, you should--knowing the family. Where may these
lunatics have gone to spend the Moon?"

Mrs. Berry swimmingly replied: "To the Isle--I don't quite know, sir!"
she snapped the indication short, and jumped out of the pit she had
fallen into. Repentant as she might be, those dears should not be pursued
and cruelly balked of their young bliss! "To-morrow, if you please, Mr.
Harley: not to-day!"

"A pleasant spot," Adrian observed, smiling at his easy prey.

By a measurement of dates he discovered that the bridegroom had brought
his bride to the house on the day he had quitted Raynham, and this was
enough to satisfy Adrian's mind that there had been concoction and
chicanery. Chance, probably, had brought him to the old woman: chance
certainly had not brought him to the young one.

"Very well, ma'am," he said, in answer to her petitions for his
favourable offices with Sir Austin in behalf of her little pension and
the bridal pair, "I will tell him you were only a blind agent in the
affair, being naturally soft, and that you trust he will bless the
consummation. He will be in town to-morrow morning; but one of you two
must see him to-night. An emetic kindly administered will set our friend
here on his legs. A bath and a clean shirt, and he might go. I don't see
why your name should appear at all. Brush him up, and send him to
Bellingham by the seven o'clock train. He will find his way to Raynham;
he knows the neighbourhood best in the dark. Let him go and state the
case. Remember, one of you must go."

With this fair prospect of leaving a choice of a perdition between the
couple of unfortunates, for them to fight and lose all their virtues
over, Adrian said, "Good morning."

Mrs. Berry touchingly arrested him. "You won't refuse a piece of his
cake, Mr. Harley?"

"Oh, dear, no, ma'am," Adrian turned to the cake with alacrity. "I shall
claim a very large piece. Richard has a great many friends who will
rejoice to eat his wedding-cake. Cut me a fair quarter, Mrs. Berry. Put
it in paper, if you please. I shall be delighted to carry it to them, and
apportion it equitably according to their several degrees of
relationship."

Mrs. Berry cut the cake. Somehow, as she sliced through it, the sweetness
and hapless innocence of the bride was presented to her, and she launched
into eulogies of Lucy, and clearly showed how little she regretted her
conduct. She vowed that they seemed made for each other; that both, were
beautiful; both had spirit; both were innocent; and to part them, or make
them unhappy, would be, Mrs. Berry wrought herself to cry aloud, oh, such
a pity!

Adrian listened to it as the expression of a matter-of-fact opinion. He
took the huge quarter of cake, nodded multitudinous promises, and left
Mrs. Berry to bless his good heart.

"So dies the System!" was Adrian's comment in the street. "And now let
prophets roar! He dies respectably in a marriage-bed, which is more than
I should have foretold of the monster. Meantime," he gave the cake a
dramatic tap, "I'll go sow nightmares."




CHAPTER XXXII

Adrian really bore the news he had heard with creditable
disinterestedness, and admirable repression of anything beneath the
dignity of a philosopher. When one has attained that felicitous point of
wisdom from which one sees all mankind to be fools, the diminutive
objects may make what new moves they please, one does not marvel at them:
their sedateness is as comical as their frolic, and their frenzies more
comical still. On this intellectual eminence the wise youth had built his
castle, and he had lived in it from an early period. Astonishment never
shook the foundations, nor did envy of greater heights tempt him to
relinquish the security of his stronghold, for he saw none. Jugglers he
saw running up ladders that overtopped him, and air-balloons scaling the
empyrean; but the former came precipitately down again, and the latter
were at the mercy of the winds; while he remained tranquil on his solid
unambitious ground, fitting his morality to the laws, his conscience to
his morality, his comfort to his conscience. Not that voluntarily he cut
himself off from his fellows: on the contrary, his sole amusement was
their society. Alone he was rather dull, as a man who beholds but one
thing must naturally be. Study of the animated varieties of that one
thing excited him sufficiently to think life a pleasant play; and the
faculties he had forfeited to hold his elevated position he could
serenely enjoy by contemplation of them in others. Thus:--wonder at
Master Richard's madness: though he himself did not experience it, he was
eager to mark the effect on his beloved relatives. As he carried along
his vindictive hunch of cake, he shaped out their different attitudes of
amaze, bewilderment, horror; passing by some personal chagrin in the
prospect. For his patron had projected a journey, commencing with Paris,
culminating on the Alps, and lapsing in Rome: a delightful journey to
show Richard the highways of History and tear him from the risk of
further ignoble fascinations, that his spirit might be altogether bathed
in freshness and revived. This had been planned during Richard's absence
to surprise him.

Now the dream of travel was to Adrian what the love of woman is to the
race of young men. It supplanted that foolishness. It was his Romance, as
we say; that buoyant anticipation on which in youth we ride the airs, and
which, as we wax older and too heavy for our atmosphere, hardens to the
Hobby, which, if an obstinate animal, is a safer horse, and conducts man
at a slower pace to the sexton. Adrian had never travelled. He was aware
that his romance was earthly and had discomforts only to be evaded by the
one potent talisman possessed by his patron. His Alp would hardly be
grand to him without an obsequious landlord in the foreground: he must
recline on Mammon's imperial cushions in order to moralize becomingly on
the ancient world. The search for pleasure at the expense of discomfort,
as frantic lovers woo their mistresses to partake the shelter of a but
and batten on a crust, Adrian deemed the bitterness of beggarliness. Let
his sweet mistress be given him in the pomp and splendour due to his
superior emotions, or not at all. Consequently the wise youth had long
nursed an ineffectual passion, and it argued a great nature in him, that
at the moment when his wishes were to be crowned, he should look with
such slight touches of spleen at the gorgeous composite fabric of
Parisian cookery and Roman antiquities crumbling into unsubstantial
mockery. Assuredly very few even of the philosophers would have turned
away uncomplainingly to meaner delights the moment after.

Hippias received the first portion of the cake.

He was sitting by the window in his hotel, reading. He had fought down
his breakfast with more than usual success, and was looking forward to
his dinner at the Foreys' with less than usual timidity.

"Ah! glad you've come, Adrian," he said, and expanded his chest. "I was
afraid I should have to ride down. This is kind of you. We'll walk down
together through the park. It's absolutely dangerous to walk alone in
these streets. My opinion is, that orange-peel lasts all through the year
now, and will till legislation puts a stop to it. I give you my word I
slipped on a piece of orange-peel yesterday afternoon in Piccadilly, and
I thought I was down! I saved myself by a miracle."

"You have an appetite, I hope?" asked Adrian.

"I think I shall get one, after a bit of a walk," chirped Hippias. "Yes.
I think I feel hungry now."

"Charmed to hear it," said Adrian, and began unpinning his parcel on his
knees. "How should you define Folly?" he checked the process to inquire.

"Hm!" Hippias meditated; he prided himself on being oracular when such
questions were addressed to him. "I think I should define it to be a
slide."

"Very good definition. In other words, a piece of orange-peel; once on
it, your life and limbs are in danger, and you are saved by a miracle.
You must present that to the Pilgrim. And the monument of folly, what
would that be?"

Hippias meditated anew. "All the human race on one another's shoulders."
He chuckled at the sweeping sourness of the instance.

"Very good," Adrian applauded, "or in default of that, some symbol of the
thing, say; such as this of which I have here brought you a chip."

Adrian displayed the quarter of the cake.

"This is the monument made portable--eh?"

"Cake!" cried Hippias, retreating to his chair to dramatize his intense
disgust. "You're right of them that eat it. If I--if I don't mistake," he
peered at it, "the noxious composition bedizened in that way is what they
call wedding-cake. It's arrant poison! Who is it you want to kill? What
are you carrying such stuff about for?"

Adrian rang the bell for a knife. "To present you with your due and
proper portion. You will have friends and relatives, and can't be saved
from them, not even by miracle. It is a habit which exhibits, perhaps,
the unconscious inherent cynicism of the human mind, for people who
consider that they have reached the acme of mundane felicity, to
distribute this token of esteem to their friends, with the object
probably" (he took the knife from a waiter and went to the table to slice
the cake) "of enabling those friends (these edifices require very
delicate incision--each particular currant and subtle condiment hangs to
its neighbour--a wedding-cake is evidently the most highly civilized of
cakes, and partakes of the evils as well as the advantages of
civilization!)--I was saying, they send us these love-tokens, no doubt
(we shall have to weigh out the crumbs, if each is to have his fair
share) that we may the better estimate their state of bliss by passing
some hours in purgatory. This, as far as I can apportion it without
weights and scales, is your share, my uncle!"

He pushed the corner of the table bearing the cake towards Hippias.

"Get away!" Hippias vehemently motioned, and started from his chair.
"I'll have none of it, I tell you! It's death! It's fifty times worse
than that beastly compound Christmas pudding! What fool has been doing
this, then? Who dares send me cake? Me! It's an insult."

"You are not compelled to eat any before dinner," said Adrian, pointing
the corner of the table after him, "but your share you must take, and
appear to consume. One who has done so much to bring about the marriage
cannot in conscience refuse his allotment of the fruits. Maidens, I hear,
first cook it under their pillows, and extract nuptial dreams
therefrom--said to be of a lighter class, taken that way. It's a capital
cake, and, upon my honour, you have helped to make it--you have indeed!
So here it is."

The table again went at Hippias. He ran nimbly round it, and flung
himself on a sofa exhausted, crying: "There!... My appetite's gone for
to-day!"

"Then shall I tell Richard that you won't touch a morsel of his cake?"
said Adrian, leaning on his two hands over the table and looking at his
uncle.

"Richard?"

"Yes, your nephew: my cousin: Richard! Your companion since you've been
in town. He's married, you know. Married this morning at Kensington
parish church, by licence, at half-past eleven of the clock, or twenty
to. Married, and gone to spend his honeymoon in the Isle of Wight, a very
delectable place for a month's residence. I have to announce to you that,
thanks to your assistance, the experiment is launched, sir!"

"Richard married!"

There was something to think and to say in objection to it, but the wits
of poor Hippias were softened by the shock. His hand travelled half-way
to his forehead, spread out to smooth the surface of that seat of reason,
and then fell.

"Surely you knew all about it? you were so anxious to have him in town
under your charge...."

"Married?" Hippias jumped up--he had it. "Why, he's under age! he's an
infant."

"So he is. But the infant is not the less married. Fib like a man and pay
your fee--what does it matter? Any one who is breeched can obtain a
licence in our noble country. And the interests of morality demand that
it should not be difficult. Is it true--can you persuade anybody that you
have known nothing about it?"

"Ha! infamous joke! I wish, sir, you would play your pranks on somebody
else," said Hippias, sternly, as he sank back on the sofa. "You've done
me up for the day, I can assure you."

Adrian sat down to instil belief by gentle degrees, and put an artistic
finish to the work. He had the gratification of passing his uncle through
varied contortions, and at last Hippias perspired in conviction, and
exclaimed, "This accounts for his conduct to me. That boy must have a
cunning nothing short of infernal! I feel...I feel it just here, he drew
a hand along his midriff.

"I'm not equal to this world of fools," he added faintly, and shut his
eyes. "No, I can't dine. Eat? ha!...no. Go without me!"

Shortly after, Hippias went to bed, saying to himself, as he undressed,
"See what comes of our fine schemes! Poor Austin!" and as the pillow
swelled over his ears, "I'm not sure that a day's fast won't do me good."
The Dyspepsy had bought his philosophy at a heavy price; he had a right
to use it.

Adrian resumed the procession of the cake.

He sighted his melancholy uncle Algernon hunting an appetite in the Row,
and looking as if the hope ahead of him were also one-legged. The Captain
did not pass with out querying the ungainly parcel.

"I hope I carry it ostentatiously enough?" said Adrian.

"Enclosed is wherewithal to quiet the alarm of the land. Now may the
maids and wives of Merry England sleep secure. I had half a mind to fix
it on a pole, and engage a band to parade it. This is our dear Richard's
wedding-cake. Married at half-past eleven this morning, by licence, at
the Kensington parish church; his own ring being lost he employed the
ring of his beautiful bride's lachrymose land-lady, she standing adjacent
by the altar. His farewell to you as a bachelor, and hers as a maid, you
can claim on the spot if you think proper, and digest according to your
powers."

Algernon let off steam in a whistle. "Thompson, the solicitor's
daughter!" he said. "I met them the other day, somewhere about here. He
introduced me to her. A pretty little baggage.

"No." Adrian set him right. "'Tis a Miss Desborough, a Roman Catholic
dairymaid. Reminds one of pastoral England in the time of the
Plantagenets! He's quite equal to introducing her as Thompson's daughter,
and himself as Beelzebub's son. However, the wild animal is in Hymen's
chains, and the cake is cut. Will you have your morsel?"

"Oh, by all means!--not now." Algernon had an unwonted air of
reflection.--"Father know it?"

"Not yet. He will to-night by nine o'clock."

"Then I must see him by seven. Don't say you met me." He nodded, and
pricked his horse.

"Wants money!" said Adrian, putting the combustible he carried once more
in motion.

The women were the crowning joy of his contemplative mind. He had
reserved them for his final discharge. Dear demonstrative creatures!
Dyspepsia would not weaken their poignant outcries, or self-interest
check their fainting fits. On the generic woman one could calculate. Well
might The Pilgrim's Scrip say of her that, "She is always at Nature's
breast"; not intending it as a compliment. Each woman is Eve throughout
the ages; whereas the Pilgrim would have us believe that the Adam in men
has become warier, if not wiser; and weak as he is, has learnt a lesson
from time. Probably the Pilgrim's meaning may be taken to be, that Man
grows, and Woman does not.

At any rate, Adrian hoped for such natural choruses as you hear in the
nursery when a bauble is lost. He was awake to Mrs. Doria's maternal
predestinations, and guessed that Clare stood ready with the best form of
filial obedience. They were only a poor couple to gratify his
Mephistophelian humour, to be sure, but Mrs. Doria was equal to twenty,
and they would proclaim the diverse ways with which maidenhood and
womanhood took disappointment, while the surrounding Forey girls and
other females of the family assembly were expected to develop the finer
shades and tapering edges of an agitation to which no woman could be
cold.

All went well. He managed cleverly to leave the cake unchallenged in a
conspicuous part of the drawing-room, and stepped gaily down to dinner.
Much of the conversation adverted to Richard. Mrs. Doria asked him if he
had seen the youth, or heard of him.

"Seen him? no! Heard of him? yes!" said Adrian. "I have heard of him. I
heard that he was sublimely happy, and had eaten such a breakfast that
dinner was impossible; claret and cold chicken, cake and"--

"Cake at breakfast!" they all interjected.

"That seems to be his fancy just now."

"What an extraordinary taste!"

"You know, he is educated on a System."

One fast young male Forey allied the System and the cake in a miserable
pun. Adrian, a hater of puns, looked at him, and held the table silent,
as if he were going to speak; but he said nothing, and the young
gentleman vanished from the conversation in a blush, extinguished by his
own spark.

Mrs. Doria peevishly exclaimed, "Oh! fish-cake, I suppose! I wish he
understood a little better the obligations of relationship."

"Whether he understands them, I can't say," observed Adrian, "but I
assure you he is very energetic in extending them."

The wise youth talked innuendoes whenever he had an opportunity, that his
dear relative might be rendered sufficiently inflammable by and by at the
aspect of the cake; but he was not thought more than commonly mysterious
and deep.

"Was his appointment at the house of those Grandison people?" Mrs. Doria
asked, with a hostile upper-lip.

Adrian warmed the blindfolded parties by replying, "Do they keep a beadle
at the door?"

Mrs. Doria's animosity to Mrs. Grandison made her treat this as a piece
of satirical ingenuousness. "I daresay they do," she said.

"And a curate on hand?"

"Oh, I should think a dozen!"

Old Mr. Forey advised his punning grandson Clarence to give that house a
wide berth, where he might be disposed of and dished-up at a moment's
notice, and the scent ran off at a jest.

The Foreys gave good dinners, and with the old gentleman the excellent
old fashion remained in permanence of trooping off the ladies as soon as
they had taken their sustenance and just exchanged a smile with the
flowers and the dessert, when they rose to fade with a beautiful accord,
and the gallant males breathed under easier waistcoats, and settled to
the business of the table, sure that an hour for unbosoming and imbibing
was their own. Adrian took a chair by Brandon Forey, a barrister of
standing.

"I want to ask you," he said, "whether an infant in law can legally bind
himself."

"If he's old enough to affix his signature to an instrument, I suppose he
can," yawned Brandon.

"Is he responsible for his acts?"

"I've no doubt we could hang him."

"Then what he could do for himself, you could do for him?"

"Not quite so much; pretty near."

"For instance, he can marry?"

"That's not a criminal case, you know."

"And the marriage is valid?"

"You can dispute it."

"Yes, and the Greeks and the Trojans can fight. It holds then?"

"Both water and fire!"

The patriarch of the table sang out to Adrian that he stopped the
vigorous circulation of the claret.

"Dear me, sir!" said Adrian, "I beg pardon. The circumstances must excuse
me. The fact is, my cousin Richard got married to a dairymaid this
morning, and I wanted to know whether it held in law."

It was amusing to watch the manly coolness with which the announcement
was taken. Nothing was heard more energetic than, "Deuce he has!" and, "A
dairymaid!"

"I thought it better to let the ladies dine in peace," Adrian continued.
"I wanted to be able to console my aunt"--

"Well, but--well, but," the old gentleman, much the most excited,
puffed--"eh, Brandon? He's a boy, this young ass! Do you mean to tell me
a boy can go and marry when he pleases, and any troll he pleases, and the
marriage is good? If I thought that I'd turn every woman off my premises.
I would! from the housekeeper to the scullery-maid. I'd have no woman
near him till--till"--

"Till the young greenhorn was grey, sir?" suggested Brandon.

"Till he knew what women are made of, sir!" the old gentleman finished
his sentence vehemently. "What, d'ye think, will Feverel say to it, Mr.
Adrian?"

"He has been trying the very System you have proposed sir--one that does
not reckon on the powerful action of curiosity on the juvenile
intelligence. I'm afraid it's the very worst way of solving the problem."

"Of course it is," said Clarence. "None but a fool!"--

"At your age," Adrian relieved his embarrassment, "it is natural, my dear
Clarence, that you should consider the idea of an isolated or imprisoned
manhood something monstrous, and we do not expect you to see what amount
of wisdom it contains. You follow one extreme, and we the other. I don't
say that a middle course exists. The history of mankind shows our painful
efforts to find one, but they have invariably resolved themselves into
asceticism, or laxity, acting and reacting. The moral question is, if a
naughty little man, by reason of his naughtiness, releases himself from
foolishness, does a foolish little man, by reason of his foolishness,
save himself from naughtiness?"

A discussion, peculiar to men of the world, succeeded the laugh at Mr.
Clarence. Then coffee was handed round and the footman informed Adrian,
in a low voice, that Mrs. Doria Forey particularly wished to speak with
him. Adrian preferred not to go in alone. "Very well," he said, and
sipped his coffee. They talked on, sounding the depths of law in Brandon
Forey, and receiving nought but hollow echoes from that profound cavity.
He would not affirm that the marriage was invalid: he would not affirm
that it could not be annulled. He thought not: still he thought it would
be worth trying. A consummated and a non-consummated union were two
different things....

"Dear me!" said Adrian, "does the Law recognize that? Why, that's almost
human!"

Another message was brought to Adrian that Mrs. Doria Forey very
particularly wished to speak with him.

"What can be the matter?" he exclaimed, pleased to have his faith in
woman strengthened. The cake had exploded, no doubt.

So it proved, when the gentlemen joined the fair society. All the younger
ladies stood about the table, whereon the cake stood displayed, gaps
being left for those sitting to feast their vision, and intrude the
comments and speculations continually arising from fresh shocks of wonder
at the unaccountable apparition. Entering with the half-guilty air of men
who know they have come from a grosser atmosphere, the gallant males also
ranged themselves round the common object of curiosity.

"Here! Adrian!" Mrs. Doria cried. "Where is Adrian? Pray, come here. Tell
me! Where did this cake come from? Whose is it? What does it do here? You
know all about it, for you brought it. Clare saw you bring it into the
room. What does it mean? I insist upon a direct answer. Now do not make
me impatient, Adrian."

Certainly Mrs. Doria was equal to twenty. By her concentrated rapidity
and volcanic complexion it was evident that suspicion had kindled.

"I was really bound to bring it," Adrian protested.

"Answer me!"

The wise youth bowed: "Categorically. This cake came from the house of a
person, a female, of the name of Berry. It belongs to you partly, partly
to me, partly to Clare, and to the rest of our family, on the principle
of equal division for which purpose it is present...."

"Yes! Speak!"

"It means, my dear aunt, what that kind of cake usually does mean."

"This, then, is the Breakfast! And the ring! Adrian! where is Richard?"

Mrs. Doria still clung to unbelief in the monstrous horror.

But when Adrian told her that Richard had left town, her struggling hope
sank. "The wretched boy has ruined himself!" she said, and sat down
trembling.

Oh! that System! The delicate vituperations gentle ladies use instead of
oaths, Mrs. Doria showered on that System. She hesitated not to say that
her brother had got what he deserved. Opinionated, morbid, weak, justice
had overtaken him. Now he would see! but at what a price! at what a
sacrifice!

Mrs. Doria, commanded Adrian to confirm her fears.

Sadly the wise youth recapitulated Berry's words. "He was married this
morning at half-past eleven of the clock, or twenty to twelve, by
licence, at the Kensington parish church."

"Then that was his appointment!" Mrs. Doria murmured.

"That was the cake for breakfast!" breathed a second of her sex.

"And it was his ring!" exclaimed a third.

The men were silent, and made long faces.

Clare stood cold and sedate. She and her mother avoided each other's
eyes.

"Is it that abominable country person, Adrian?"

"The happy damsel is, I regret to say, the Papist dairymaid," said
Adrian, in sorrowful but deliberate accents.

Then arose a feminine hum, in the midst of which Mrs. Doria cried,
"Brandon!" She was a woman of energy. Her thoughts resolved to action
spontaneously.

"Brandon," she drew the barrister a little aside, "can they not be
followed, and separated? I want your advice. Cannot we separate them? A
boy! it is really shameful if he should be allowed to fall into the toils
of a designing creature to ruin himself irrevocably. Can we not,
Brandon?"

The worthy barrister felt inclined to laugh, but he answered her
entreaties: "From what I hear of the young groom I should imagine the
office perilous."

"I'm speaking of law, Brandon. Can we not obtain an order from one of
your Courts to pursue them and separate them instantly?"

"This evening?"

"Yes!"

Brandon was sorry to say she decidedly could not.

"You might call on one of your Judges, Brandon."

Brandon assured her that the Judges were a hard-worked race, and to a man
slept heavily after dinner.

"Will you do so to-morrow, the first thing in the morning? Will you
promise me to do so, Brandon?--Or a magistrate! A magistrate would send a
policeman after them. My dear Brandon! I beg--I beg you to assist us in
this dreadful extremity. It will be the death of my poor brother. I
believe he would forgive anything but this. You have no idea what his
notions are of blood."

Brandon tipped Adrian a significant nod to step in and aid.

"What is it, aunt?" asked the wise youth. "You want them followed and
torn asunder by wild policemen?"

"To-morrow!" Brandon queerly interposed.

"Won't that be--just too late?" Adrian suggested.

Mrs. Doria, sighed out her last spark of hope.

"You see," said Adrian....

"Yes! yes!" Mrs. Doria did not require any of his elucidations. "Pray be
quiet, Adrian, and let me speak. Brandon! it cannot be! it's quite
impossible! Can you stand there and tell me that boy is legally married?
I never will believe it! The law cannot be so shamefully bad as to permit
a boy--a mere child--to do such absurd things. Grandpapa!" she beckoned
to the old gentleman. "Grandpapa! pray do make Brandon speak. These
lawyers never will. He might stop it, if he would. If I were a man, do
you think I would stand here?"

"Well, my dear," the old gentleman toddled to compose her, "I'm quite of
your opinion. I believe he knows no more than you or I. My belief is they
none of them know anything till they join issue and go into Court. I want
to see a few female lawyers."

"To encourage the bankrupt perruquier, sir?" said Adrian. "They would
have to keep a large supply of wigs on hand."

"And you can jest, Adrian!" his aunt reproached him. "But I will not be
beaten. I know--I am firmly convinced that no law would ever allow a boy
to disgrace his family and ruin himself like that, and nothing shall
persuade me that it is so. Now, tell me, Brandon, and pray do speak in
answer to my questions, and please to forget you are dealing with a
woman. Can my nephew be rescued from the consequences of his folly? Is
what he has done legitimate? Is he bound for life by what he has done
while a boy?

"Well--a," Brandon breathed through his teeth. "A--hm! the matter's so
very delicate, you see, Helen."

"You're to forget that," Adrian remarked.

"A--hm! well!" pursued Brandon. "Perhaps if you could arrest and divide
them before nightfall, and make affidavit of certain facts"...

"Yes?" the eager woman hastened his lagging mouth.

"Well...hm! a...in that case...a... Or if a lunatic, you could prove him
to have been of unsound mind."...

"Oh! there's no doubt of his madness on my mind, Brandon."

"Yes! well! in that case... Or if of different religious persuasions"...

"She is a Catholic!" Mrs. Doria joyfully interjected.

"Yes! well! in that case...objections might be taken to the form of the
marriage... Might be proved fictitious... Or if he's under, say, eighteen
years"...

"He can't be much more," cried Mrs. Doria.  "I think," she appeared to
reflect, and then faltered imploringly to Adrian, "What is Richard's
age?"

The kind wise youth could not find it in his heart to strike away the
phantom straw she caught at.

"Oh! about that, I should fancy," he muttered; and found it necessary at
the same time to duck and turn his head for concealment. Mrs. Doria
surpassed his expectations.

"Yes I well, then..." Brandon was resuming with a shrug, which was meant
to say he still pledged himself to nothing, when Clare's voice was heard
from out the buzzing circle of her cousins: "Richard is nineteen years
and six months old to-day, mama."

"Nonsense, child."

"He is, mama." Clare's voice was very steadfast.

"Nonsense, I tell you. How can you know?"

"Richard is one year and nine months older than me, mama."

Mrs. Doria fought the fact by years and finally by months. Clare was too
strong for her.

"Singular child!" she mentally apostrophized the girl who scornfully
rejected straws while drowning.

"But there's the religion still!" she comforted herself, and sat down to
cogitate.

The men smiled and looked vacuous.

Music was proposed. There are times when soft music hath not charms; when
it is put to as base uses as Imperial Caesar's dust and is taken to fill
horrid pauses. Angelica Forey thumped the piano, and sang: "I'm a
laughing Gitana, ha-ha! ha-ha!" Matilda Forey and her cousin Mary
Branksburne wedded their voices, and songfully incited all young people
to Haste to the bower that love has built, and defy the wise ones of the
world; but the wise ones of the world were in a majority there, and very
few places of assembly will be found where they are not; so the glowing
appeal of the British ballad-monger passed into the bosom of the
emptiness he addressed. Clare was asked to entertain the company. The
singular child calmly marched to the instrument, and turned over the
appropriate illustrations to the ballad-monger's repertory.

Clare sang a little Irish air. Her duty done, she marched from the piano.
Mothers are rarely deceived by their daughters in these matters; but
Clare deceived her mother; and Mrs. Doria only persisted in feeling an
agony of pity for her child, that she might the more warrantably pity
herself--a not uncommon form of the emotion, for there is no juggler like
that heart the ballad-monger puts into our mouths so boldly. Remember
that she saw years of self-denial, years of a ripening scheme, rendered
fruitless in a minute, and by the System which had almost reduced her to
the condition of constitutional hypocrite. She had enough of bitterness
to brood over, and some excuse for self-pity.

Still, even when she was cooler, Mrs. Doria's energetic nature prevented
her from giving up. Straws were straws, and the frailer they were the
harder she clutched them.

She rose from her chair, and left the room, calling to Adrian to follow
her.

"Adrian," she said, turning upon him in the passage, "you mentioned a
house where this horrible cake...where he was this morning. I desire you
to take me to that woman immediately."

The wise youth had not bargained for personal servitude. He had hoped he
should be in time for the last act of the opera that night, after
enjoying the comedy of real life.

"My dear aunt"...he was beginning to insinuate.

"Order a cab to be sent for, and get your hat," said Mrs. Doria.

There was nothing for it but to obey. He stamped his assent to the
Pilgrim's dictum, that Women are practical creatures, and now reflected
on his own account, that relationship to a young fool may be a vexation
and a nuisance. However, Mrs. Doria compensated him.

What Mrs. Doria intended to do, the practical creature did not plainly
know; but her energy positively demanded to be used in some way or other,
and her instinct directed her to the offender on whom she could use it in
wrath. She wanted somebody to be angry with, somebody to abuse. She dared
not abuse her brother to his face: him she would have to console. Adrian
was a fellow-hypocrite to the System, and would, she was aware, bring her
into painfully delicate, albeit highly philosophic, ground by a
discussion of the case. So she drove to Bessy Berry simply to inquire
whither her nephew had flown.

When a soft woman, and that soft woman a sinner, is matched with a woman
of energy, she does not show much fight, and she meets no mercy. Bessy
Berry's creditor came to her in female form that night. She then beheld
it in all its terrors. Hitherto it had appeared to her as a male, a
disembodied spirit of her imagination possessing male attributes, and the
peculiar male characteristic of being moved, and ultimately silenced, by
tears. As female, her creditor was terrible indeed. Still, had it not
been a late hour, Bessy Berry would have died rather than speak openly
that her babes had sped to make their nest in the Isle of Wight. They had
a long start, they were out of the reach of pursuers, they were safe, and
she told what she had to tell. She told more than was wise of her to
tell. She made mention of her early service in the family, and of her
little pension. Alas! her little pension! Her creditor had come expecting
no payment--come; as creditors are wont in such moods, just to take it
out of her--to employ the familiar term. At once Mrs. Doria pounced upon
the pension.

"That, of course, you know is at an end," she said in the calmest manner,
and Berry did not plead for the little bit of bread to her. She only
asked a little consideration for her feelings.

True admirers of women had better stand aside from the scene. Undoubtedly
it was very sad for Adrian to be compelled to witness it. Mrs. Doria was
not generous. The Pilgrim may be wrong about the sex not growing; but its
fashion of conducting warfare we must allow to be barbarous, and
according to what is deemed the pristine, or wild cat, method. Ruin,
nothing short of it, accompanied poor Berry to her bed that night, and
her character bled till morning on her pillow.

The scene over, Adrian reconducted Mrs. Doria to her home. Mice had been
at the cake during her absence apparently. The ladies and gentlemen
present put it on the greedy mice, who were accused of having gorged and
gone to bed.

"I'm sure they're quite welcome," said Mrs. Doria. "It's a farce, this
marriage, and Adrian has quite come to my way of thinking. I would not
touch an atom of it. Why, they were married in a married woman's ring!
Can that be legal, as you call it? Oh, I'm convinced! Don't tell me.
Austin will be in town to-morrow, and if he is true to his principles, he
will instantly adopt measures to rescue his son from infamy. I want no
legal advice. I go upon common sense, common decency. This marriage is
false."

Mrs. Doria's fine scheme had become so much a part of her life, that she
could not give it up. She took Clare to her bed, and caressed and wept
over her, as she would not have done had she known the singular child,
saying, "Poor Richard! my dear poor boy! we must save him, Clare! we must
save him!" Of the two the mother showed the greater want of iron on this
occasion. Clare lay in her arms rigid and emotionless, with one of her
hands tight-locked. All she said was: "I knew it in the morning, mama."
She slept clasping Richard's nuptial ring.

By this time all specially concerned in the System knew it. The honeymoon
was shoring placidly above them. Is not happiness like another
circulating medium? When we have a very great deal of it, some poor
hearts are aching for what is taken away from them. When we have gone out
and seized it on the highways, certain inscrutable laws are sure to be at
work to bring us to the criminal bar, sooner or later. Who knows the
honeymoon that did not steal somebody's sweetness? Richard Turpin went
forth, singing "Money or life" to the world: Richard Feverel has done the
same, substituting "Happiness" for "Money," frequently synonyms. The coin
he wanted he would have, and was just as much a highway robber as his
fellow Dick, so that those who have failed to recognize him as a hero
before, may now regard him in that light. Meanwhile the world he has
squeezed looks exceedingly patient and beautiful. His coin chinks
delicious music to him. Nature and the order of things on earth have no
warmer admirer than a jolly brigand or a young man made happy by the
Jews.




CHAPTER XXXIII

And now the author of the System was on trial under the eyes of the lady
who loved him. What so kind as they? Yet are they very rigorous, those
soft watchful woman's eyes. If you are below the measure they have made
of you, you will feel it in the fulness of time. She cannot but show you
that she took you for a giant, and has had to come down a bit. You feel
yourself strangely diminishing in those sweet mirrors, till at last they
drop on you complacently level. But, oh beware, vain man, of ever waxing
enamoured of that wonderful elongation of a male creature you saw
reflected in her adoring upcast orbs! Beware of assisting to delude her!
A woman who is not quite a fool will forgive your being but a man, if you
are surely that: she will haply learn to acknowledge that no mortal
tailor could have fitted that figure she made of you respectably, and
that practically (though she sighs to think it) her ideal of you was on
the pattern of an overgrown charity-boy in the regulation jacket and
breech. For this she first scorns the narrow capacities of the tailor,
and then smiles at herself. But shouldst thou, when the hour says
plainly, Be thyself, and the woman is willing to take thee as thou art,
shouldst thou still aspire to be that thing of shanks and wrests, wilt
thou not seem contemptible as well as ridiculous? And when the fall
comes, will it not be flat on thy face, instead of to the common height
of men? You may fall miles below her measure of you, and be safe: nothing
is damaged save an overgrown charity-boy; but if you fall below the
common height of men, you must make up your mind to see her rustle her
gown, spy at the looking-glass, and transfer her allegiance. The moral of
which is, that if we pretend to be what we are not, woman, for whose
amusement the farce is performed, will find us out and punish us for it.
And it is usually the end of a sentimental dalliance.

Had Sir Austin given vent to the pain and wrath it was natural he should
feel, he might have gone to unphilosophic excesses, and, however much he
lowered his reputation as a sage, Lady Blandish would have excused him:
she would not have loved him less for seeing him closer. But the poor
gentleman tasked his soul and stretched his muscles to act up to her
conception of him. He, a man of science in life, who was bound to be
surprised by nothing in nature, it was not for him to do more than lift
his eyebrows and draw in his lips at the news delivered by Ripton
Thompson, that ill bird at Raynham.

All he said, after Ripton had handed the letters and carried his
penitential headache to bed, was: "You see, Emmeline, it is useless to
base any system on a human being."

A very philosophical remark for one who has been busily at work building
for nearly twenty years. Too philosophical to seem genuine. It revealed
where the blow struck sharpest. Richard was no longer the Richard of his
creation--his pride and his joy--but simply a human being with the rest.
The bright star had sunk among the mass.

And yet, what had the young man done? And in what had the System failed?

The lady could not but ask herself this, while she condoled with the
offended father.

"My friend," she said, tenderly taking his hand before she retired, "I
know how deeply you must be grieved. I know what your disappointment must
be. I do not beg of you to forgive him now. You cannot doubt his love for
this young person, and according to his light, has he not behaved
honourably, and as you would have wished, rather than bring her to shame?
You will think of that. It has been an accident--a misfortune--a terrible
misfortune"...

"The God of this world is in the machine--not out of it," Sir Austin
interrupted her, and pressed her hand to get the good-night over.

At any other time her mind would have been arrested to admire the phrase;
now it seemed perverse, vain, false, and she was tempted to turn the
meaning that was in it against himself, much as she pitied him.

"You know, Emmeline," he added, "I believe very little in the fortune, or
misfortune, to which men attribute their successes and reverses. They are
useful impersonations to novelists; but my opinion is sufficiently high
of flesh and blood to believe that we make our own history without
intervention. Accidents?--Terrible misfortunes?--What are
they?--Good-night."

"Good-night," she said, looking sad and troubled. "When I said,
'misfortune,' I meant, of course, that he is to blame; but--shall I leave
you his letter to me?"

"I think I have enough to meditate upon," he replied, coldly bowing.

"God bless you," she whispered. "And--may I say it? do not shut your
heart."

He assured her that he hoped not to do so and the moment she was gone he
set about shutting it as tight as he could.

If, instead of saying, Base no system on a human being, he had said,
Never experimentalize with one, he would have been nearer the truth of
his own case. He had experimented on humanity in the person of the son he
loved as his life, and at once, when the experiment appeared to have
failed, all humanity's failings fell on the shoulders of his son.
Richard's parting laugh in the train--it was explicable now: it sounded
in his ears like the mockery of this base nature of ours at every
endeavour to exalt and chasten it. The young man had plotted this. From
step to step Sir Austin traced the plot. The curious mask he had worn
since his illness; the selection of his incapable uncle Hippias for a
companion in preference to Adrian; it was an evident, well-perfected
plot. That hideous laugh would not be silenced: Base, like the rest,
treacherous, a creature of passions using his abilities solely to gratify
them--never surely had humanity such chances as in him! A Manichaean
tendency, from which the sententious eulogist of nature had been
struggling for years (and which was partly at the bottom of the System),
now began to cloud and usurp dominion of his mind. As he sat alone in the
forlorn dead-hush of his library, he saw the devil.

How are we to know when we are at the head and fountain of the fates of
them we love?

There by the springs of Richard's future, his father sat: and the devil
said to him: "Only be quiet: do nothing: resolutely do nothing: your
object now is to keep a brave face to the world, so that all may know you
superior to this human nature that has deceived you. For it is the
shameless deception, not the marriage, that has wounded you."

"Ay!" answered the baronet, "the shameless deception, not the marriage:
wicked and ruinous as it must be; a destroyer of my tenderest hopes! my
dearest schemes! Not the marriage--the shameless deception!" and he
crumpled up his son's letter to him, and tossed it into the fire.

How are we to distinguish the dark chief of the Manichaeans when he talks
our own thoughts to us?

Further he whispered, "And your System:--if you would be brave to the
world, have courage to cast the dream of it out of you: relinquish an
impossible project; see it as it is--dead: too good for men!"

"Ay!" muttered the baronet: "all who would save them perish on the
Cross!"

And so he sat nursing the devil.

By and by he took his lamp, and put on the old cloak and cap, and went to
gaze at Ripton. That exhausted debauchee and youth without a destiny
slept a dead sleep. A handkerchief was bound about his forehead, and his
helpless sunken chin and snoring nose projected up the pillow, made him
look absurdly piteous. The baronet remembered how often he had compared
his boy with this one: his own bright boy! And where was the difference
between them?

"Mere outward gilding!" said his familiar.

"Yes," he responded, "I daresay this one never positively plotted to
deceive his father: he followed his appetites unchecked, and is
internally the sounder of the two."

Ripton, with his sunken chin and snoring nose under the light of the
lamp, stood for human nature, honest, however abject.

"Miss Random, I fear very much, is a necessary establishment!" whispered
the monitor.

"Does the evil in us demand its natural food, or it corrupts the whole?"
ejaculated Sir Austin. "And is no angel of avail till that is drawn off?
And is that our conflict--to see whether we can escape the contagion of
its embrace, and come uncorrupted out of that?"

"The world is wise in its way," said the voice.

"Though it look on itself through Port wine?" he suggested, remembering
his lawyer Thompson.

"Wise in not seeking to be too wise," said the voice.

"And getting intoxicated on its drug of comfort!"

"Human nature is weak."

"And Miss Random is an establishment, and Wild Oats an institution!"

"It always has been so."

"And always will be?"

"So I fear! in spite of your very noble efforts."

"And leads--whither? And ends--where?"

Richard's laugh, taken up by horrid reverberations, as it were through
the lengths of the Lower Halls, replied.

This colloquy of two voices in a brain was concluded by Sir Austin asking
again if there were no actual difference between the flower of his hopes
and yonder drunken weed, and receiving for answer that there was a
decided dissimilarity in the smell of the couple; becoming cognizant of
which he retreated.

Sir Austin did not battle with the tempter. He took him into his bosom at
once, as if he had been ripe for him, and received his suggestions and
bowed to his dictates. Because he suffered, and decreed that he would
suffer silently, and be the only sufferer, it seemed to him that he was
great-minded in his calamity. He had stood against the world. The world
had beaten him. What then? He must shut his heart and mask his face; that
was all. To be far in advance of the mass, is as fruitless to mankind, he
reflected, as straggling in the rear. For how do we know that they move
behind us at all, or move in our track? What we win for them is lost; and
where we are overthrown we lie!

It was thus that a fine mind and a fine heart at the bounds of a nature
not great, chose to colour his retrogression and countenance his
shortcoming; and it was thus that he set about ruining the work he had
done. He might well say, as he once did, that there are hours when the
clearest soul becomes a cunning fox. For a grief that was private and
peculiar, he unhesitatingly cast the blame upon humanity; just as he had
accused it in the period of what he termed his own ordeal. How had he
borne that? By masking his face. And he prepared the ordeal for his son
by doing the same. This was by no means his idea of a man's duty in
tribulation, about which he could be strenuously eloquent.

But it was his instinct so to act, and in times of trial great natures
alone are not at the mercy of their instincts. Moreover it would cost him
pain to mask his face; pain worse than that he endured when there still
remained an object for him to open his heart to in proportion; and he
always reposed upon the Spartan comfort of bearing pain and being
passive. "Do nothing," said the devil he nursed; which meant in his case,
"Take me into you and don't cast me out." Excellent and sane is the
outburst of wrath to men, when it stops short of slaughter. For who that
locks it up to eat in solitary, can say that it is consumed? Sir Austin
had as weak a digestion for wrath, as poor Hippias for a green duckling.
Instead of eating it, it ate him. The wild beast in him was not the less
deadly because it did not roar, and the devil in him not the less active
because he resolved to do nothing.

He sat at the springs of Richard's future, in the forlorn dead-hush of
his library there, hearing the cinders click in the extinguished fire,
and that humming stillness in which one may fancy one hears the midnight
Fates busily stirring their embryos. The lamp glowed mildly on the bust
of Chatham.

Toward morning a gentle knock fell at his door. Lady Blandish glided in.
With hasty step she came straight to him, and took both his hands.

"My friend," she said, speaking tearfully, and trembling, "I feared I
should find you here. I could not sleep. How is it with you?"

"Well! Emmeline, well!" he replied, torturing his brows to fix the mask.

He wished it had been Adrian who had come to him. He had an extraordinary
longing for Adrian's society. He knew that the wise youth would divine
how to treat him, and he mentally confessed to just enough weakness to
demand a certain kind of management. Besides, Adrian, he had not a doubt,
would accept him entirely as he seemed, and not pester him in any way by
trying to unlock his heart; whereas a woman, he feared, would be waxing
too womanly, and swelling from tears and supplications to a scene, of all
things abhorred by him the most. So he rapped the floor with his foot,
and gave the lady no very welcome face when he said it was well with him.

She sat down by his side, still holding one hand firmly, and softly
detaining the other.

"Oh, my friend! may I believe you? May I speak to you?" She leaned close
to him. "You know my heart. I have no better ambition than to be your
friend. Surely I divide your grief, and may I not claim your confidence?
Who has wept more over your great and dreadful sorrows? I would not have
come to you, but I do believe that sorrow shared relieves the burden, and
it is now that you may feel a woman's aid, and something of what a woman
could be to you...."

"Be assured," he gravely said, "I thank you, Emmeline, for your
intentions."

"No, no! not for my intentions! And do not thank me. Think of him...think
of your dear boy... Our Richard, as we have called him.--Oh! do not think
it a foolish superstition of mine, but I have had a thought this night
that has kept me in torment till I rose to speak to you... Tell me first
you have forgiven him."

"A father bears no malice to his son, Emmeline."

"Your heart has forgiven him?"

My heart has taken what he gave."

"And quite forgiven him?"

"You will hear no complaints of mine."

The lady paused despondingly, and looked at him in a wistful manner,
saying with a sigh, "Yes! I know how noble you are, and different from
others!"

He drew one of his hands from her relaxed hold.

"You ought to be in bed, Emmeline."

"I cannot sleep."

"Go, and talk to me another time."

"No, it must be now. You have helped me when I struggled to rise into a
clearer world, and I think, humble as I am, I can help you now. I have
had a thought this night that if you do not pray for him and bless
him...it will end miserably. My friend, have you done so?"

He was stung and offended, and could hardly help showing it in spite of
his mask.

"Have you done so, Austin?"

"This is assuredly a new way of committing fathers to the follies of
their sons, Emmeline!"

"No, not that. But will you pray for your boy, and bless him, before the
day comes?"

He restrained himself to pronounce his words calmly:--"And I must do
this, or it will end in misery? How else can it end? Can I save him from
the seed he has sown? Consider, Emmeline, what you say. He has repeated
his cousin's sin. You see the end of that."

"Oh, so different! This young person is not, is not of the class poor
Austin Wentworth allied himself to. Indeed it is different. And he--be
just and admit his nobleness. I fancied you did. This young person has
great beauty, she has the elements of good breeding, she--indeed I think,
had she been in another position, you would not have looked upon her
unfavourably."

"She may be too good for my son!" The baronet spoke with sublime
bitterness.

"No woman is too good for Richard, and you know it."

"Pass her."

"Yes, I will speak only of him. He met her by a fatal accident. We
thought his love dead, and so did he till he saw her again. He met her,
he thought we were plotting against him, he thought he should lose her
for ever, and is the madness of an hour he did this...."

"My Emmeline pleads bravely for clandestine matches."

"Ah! do not trifle, my friend. Say: would you have had him act as young
men in his position generally do to young women beneath them?"

Sir Austin did not like the question. It probed him very severely.

"You mean," he said, "that fathers must fold their arms, and either
submit to infamous marriages, or have these creatures ruined."

"I do not mean that," exclaimed the lady, striving for what she did mean,
and how to express it. "I mean that he loved her. Is it not a madness at
his age? But what I chiefly mean is--save him from the consequences. No,
you shall not withdraw your hand. Think of his pride, his sensitiveness,
his great wild nature--wild when he is set wrong: think how intense it
is, set upon love; think, my friend, do not forget his love for you."

Sir Austin smiled an admirable smile of pity.

"That I should save him, or any one, from consequences, is asking more
than the order of things will allow to you, Emmeline, and is not in the
disposition of this world. I cannot. Consequences are the natural
offspring of acts. My child, you are talking sentiment, which is the
distraction of our modern age in everything--a phantasmal vapour
distorting the image of the life we live. You ask me to give him a golden
age in spite of himself. All that could be done, by keeping him in the
paths of virtue and truth, I did. He is become a man, and as a man he
must reap his own sowing."

The baffled lady sighed. He sat so rigid: he spoke so securely, as if
wisdom were to him more than the love of his son. And yet he did love his
son. Feeling sure that he loved his son while he spoke so loftily, she
reverenced him still, baffled as she was, and sensible that she had been
quibbled with.

"All I ask of you is to open your heart to him," she said.

He kept silent.

"Call him a man,--he is, and must ever be the child of your education, my
friend."

"You would console me, Emmeline, with the prospect that, if he ruins
himself, he spares the world of young women. Yes, that is something!"

Closely she scanned the mask. It was impenetrable. He could meet her
eyes, and respond to the pressure of her hand, and smile, and not show
what he felt. Nor did he deem it hypocritical to seek to maintain his
elevation in her soft soul, by simulating supreme philosophy over
offended love. Nor did he know that he had an angel with him then: a
blind angel, and a weak one, but one who struck upon his chance.

"Am I pardoned for coming to you?" she said, after a pause.

"Surely I can read my Emmeline's intentions," he gently replied.

"Very poor ones. I feel my weakness. I cannot utter half I have been
thinking. Oh, if I could!"

"You speak very well, Emmeline."

"At least, I am pardoned!"

"Surely so."

"And before I leave you, dear friend, shall I be forgiven?--may I beg
it?--will you bless him?"

He was again silent.

"Pray for him, Austin! pray for him ere the night is over."

As she spoke she slid down to his feet and pressed his hand to her bosom.

The baronet was startled. In very dread of the soft fit that wooed him,
he pushed back his chair, and rose, and went to the window.

"It's day already!" he said with assumed vivacity, throwing open the
shutters, and displaying the young light on the lawn.

Lady Blandish dried her tears as she knelt, and then joined him, and
glanced up silently at Richard's moon standing in wane toward the West.
She hoped it was because of her having been premature in pleading so
earnestly, that she had failed to move him, and she accused herself more
than the baronet. But in acting as she had done, she had treated him as
no common man, and she was compelled to perceive that his heart was at
present hardly superior to the hearts of ordinary men, however composed
his face might be, and apparently serene his wisdom. From that moment she
grew critical of him, and began to study her idol--a process dangerous to
idols. He, now that she seemed to have relinquished the painful subject,
drew to her, and as one who wished to smooth a foregone roughness,
murmured: "God's rarest blessing is, after all, a good woman! My Emmeline
bears her sleepless night well. She does not shame the day." He gazed
down on her with a fondling tenderness.

"I could bear many, many!" she replied, meeting his eyes, "and you would
see me look better and better, if...if only..." but she had no
encouragement to end the sentence.

Perhaps he wanted some mute form of consolation; perhaps the handsome
placid features of the dark-eyed dame touched him: at any rate their
Platonism was advanced by his putting an arm about her. She felt the arm
and talked of the morning.

Thus proximate, they by and by both heard something very like a groan
behind them, and looking round, beheld the Saurian eye. Lady Blandish
smiled, but the baronet's discomposure was not to be concealed. By a
strange fatality every stage of their innocent loves was certain to have
a human beholder.

"Oh, I'm sure I beg pardon," Benson mumbled, arresting his head in a
melancholy pendulosity. He was ordered out of the room.

"And I think I shall follow him, and try to get forty winks," said Lady
Blandish. They parted with a quiet squeeze of hands.

The baronet then called in Benson.

"Get me my breakfast as soon as you can," he said, regardless of the
aspect of injured conscience Benson sombrely presented to him. "I am
going to town early. And, Benson," he added, "you will also go to town
this afternoon, or to-morrow, if it suits you, and take your book with
you to Mr. Thompson. You will not return here. A provision will be made
for you. You can go."

The heavy butler essayed to speak, but the tremendous blow and the
baronet's gesture choked him. At the door he made another effort which
shook the rolls of his loose skin pitiably. An impatient signal sent him
out dumb,--and Raynham was quit of the one believer in the Great Shaddock
dogma.




CHAPTER XXXIV

It was the month of July. The Solent ran up green waves before a
full-blowing South-wester. Gay little yachts bounded out like foam, and
flashed their sails, light as sea-nymphs. A crown of deep Summer blue
topped the flying mountains of cloud.

By an open window that looked on the brine through nodding roses, our
young bridal pair were at breakfast, regaling worthily, both of them. Had
the Scientific Humanist observed them, he could not have contested the
fact, that as a couple who had set up to be father and mother of Britons,
they were doing their duty. Files of egg-cups with disintegrated shells
bore witness to it, and they were still at work, hardly talking from
rapidity of exercise. Both were dressed for an expedition. She had her
bonnet on, and he his yachting-hat. His sleeves were turned over at the
wrists, and her gown showed its lining on her lap. At times a chance word
might spring a laugh, but eating was the business of the hour, as I would
have you to know it always will be where Cupid is in earnest. Tribute
flowed in to them from the subject land. Neglected lies Love's
penny-whistle on which they played so prettily and charmed the spheres to
hear them. What do they care for the spheres, who have one another? Come,
eggs! come, bread and butter! come, tea with sugar in it and milk! and
welcome, the jolly hours. That is a fair interpretation of the music in
them just now. Yonder instrument was good only for the overture. After
all, what finer aspiration can lovers have, than to be free man and woman
in the heart of plenty? And is it not a glorious level to have attained?
Ah, wretched Scientific Humanist! not to be by and mark the admirable
sight of these young creatures feeding. It would have been a spell to
exorcise the Manichee, methinks.

The mighty performance came to an end, and then, with a flourish of his
table-napkin, husband stood over wife, who met him on the confident
budding of her mouth. The poetry of mortals is their daily prose. Is it
not a glorious level to have attained? A short, quick-blooded kiss,
radiant, fresh, and honest as Aurora, and then Richard says without lack
of cheer, "No letter to-day, my Lucy!" whereat her sweet eyes dwell on
him a little seriously, but he cries, "Never mind! he'll be coming down
himself some morning. He has only to know her, and all's well! eh?" and
so saying he puts a hand beneath her chin, and seems to frame her fair
face in fancy, she smiling up to be looked at.

"But one thing I do want to ask my darling," says Lucy, and dropped into
his bosom with hands of petition. "Take me on board his yacht with him
to-day--not leave me with those people! Will he? I'm a good sailor, he
knows!"

"The best afloat!" laughs Richard, hugging her, "but, you know, you
darling bit of a sailor, they don't allow more than a certain number on
board for the race, and if they hear you've been with me, there'll be
cries of foul play! Besides, there's Lady Judith to talk to you about
Austin, and Lord Mountfalcon's compliments for you to listen to, and Mr.
Morton to take care of you."

Lucy's eyes fixed sideways an instant.

"I hope I don't frown and blush as I did?" she said, screwing her pliable
brows up to him winningly, and he bent his cheek against hers, and
murmured something delicious.

"And we shall be separated for--how many hours? one, two, three hours!"
she pouted to his flatteries.

"And then I shall come on board to receive my bride's congratulations."

"And then my husband will talk all the time to Lady Judith."

"And then I shall see my wife frowning and blushing at Lord Mountfalcon."

"Am I so foolish, Richard?" she forgot her trifling to ask in an earnest
way, and had another Aurorean kiss, just brushing the dew on her lips,
for answer.

After hiding a month in shyest shade, the pair of happy sinners had
wandered forth one day to look on men and marvel at them, and had chanced
to meet Mr. Morton of Poer Hall, Austin Wentworth's friend, and Ralph's
uncle. Mr. Morton had once been intimate with the baronet, but had given
him up for many years as impracticable and hopeless, for which reason he
was the more inclined to regard Richard's misdemeanour charitably, and to
lay the faults of the son on the father; and thinking society to be the
one thing requisite to the young man, he had introduced him to the people
he knew in the island; among others to the Lady Judith Felle, a fair
young dame, who introduced him to Lord Mountfalcon, a puissant nobleman;
who introduced him to the yachtsmen beginning to congregate; so that in a
few weeks he found himself in the centre of a brilliant company, and for
the first time in his life tasted what it was to have free intercourse
with his fellow-creatures of both sews. The son of a System was,
therefore, launched; not only through the surf, but in deep waters.

Now the baronet had so far compromised between the recurrence of his
softer feelings and the suggestions of his new familiar, that he had
determined to act toward Richard with justness. The world called it
magnanimity, and even Lady Blandish had some thoughts of the same kind
when she heard that he had decreed to Richard a handsome allowance, and
had scouted Mrs. Doria's proposal for him to contest the legality of the
marriage; but Sir Austin knew well he was simply just in not withholding
money from a youth so situated. And here again the world deceived him by
embellishing his conduct. For what is it to be just to whom we love! He
knew it was not magnanimous, but the cry of the world somehow fortified
him in the conceit that in dealing perfect justice to his son he was
doing all that was possible, because so much more than common fathers
would have done. He had shut his heart.

Consequently Richard did not want money. What he wanted more, and did not
get, was a word from his father, and though he said nothing to sadden his
young bride, she felt how much it preyed upon him to be at variance with
the man whom, now that he had offended him and gone against him, he would
have fallen on his knees to; the man who was as no other man to him. She
heard him of nights when she lay by his side, and the darkness, and the
broken mutterings, of those nights clothed the figure of the strange
stern man in her mind. Not that it affected the appetites of the pretty
pair. We must not expect that of Cupid enthroned and in condition; under
the influence of sea-air, too. The files of egg-cups laugh at such an
idea. Still the worm did gnaw them. Judge, then, of their delight when,
on this pleasant morning, as they were issuing from the garden of their
cottage to go down to the sea, they caught sight of Tom Bakewell rushing
up the road with a portmanteau on his shoulders, and, some distance
behind him, discerned Adrian.

"It's all right!" shouted Richard, and ran off to meet him, and never
left his hand till he had hauled him up, firing questions at him all the
way, to where Lucy stood.

"Lucy! this is Adrian, my cousin."--"Isn't he an angel?" his eyes seemed
to add; while Lucy's clearly answered, "That he is!"

The full-bodied angel ceremoniously bowed to her, and acted with reserved
unction the benefactor he saw in their greetings. "I think we are not
strangers," he was good enough to remark, and very quickly let them know
he had not breakfasted; on hearing which they hurried him into the house,
and Lucy put herself in motion to have him served.

"Dear old Rady," said Richard, tugging at his hand again, "how glad I am
you've come! I don't mind telling you we've been horridly wretched."

"Six, seven, eight, nine eggs," was Adrian's comment on a survey of the
breakfast-table.

"Why wouldn't he write? Why didn't he answer one of my letters? But here
you are, so I don't mind now. He wants to see us, does he? We'll go up
to-night. I've a match on at eleven; my little yacht--I've called her the
'Blandish'--against Fred Cuirie's 'Begum.' I shall beat, but whether I do
or not, we'll go up to-night. What's the news? What are they all doing?"

"My dear boy!" Adrian returned, sitting comfortably down, "let me put
myself a little more on an equal footing with you before I undertake to
reply. Half that number of eggs will be sufficient for an unmarried man,
and then we'll talk. They're all very well, as well as I can recollect
after the shaking my total vacuity has had this morning. I came over by
the first boat, and the sea, the sea has made me love mother earth, and
desire of her fruits."

Richard fretted restlessly opposite his cool relative.

"Adrian! what did he say when he heard of it? I want to know exactly what
words he said."

"Well says the sage, my son! 'Speech is the small change of Silence.' He
said less than I do."

"That's how he took it!" cried Richard, and plunged in meditation.

Soon the table was cleared, and laid out afresh, and Lucy preceded the
maid bearing eggs on the tray, and sat down unbonneted, and like a
thorough-bred housewife, to pour out the tea for him.

"Now we'll commence," said Adrian, tapping his egg with meditative
cheerfulness; but his expression soon changed to one of pain, all the
more alarming for his benevolent efforts to conceal it. Could it be
possible the egg was bad? oh, horror! Lucy watched him, and waited in
trepidation.

"This egg has boiled three minutes and three-quarters," he observed,
ceasing to contemplate it.

"Dear, dear!" said Lucy, "I boiled them myself exactly that time. Richard
likes them so. And you like them hard, Mr. Harley?"

"On the contrary, I like them soft. Two minutes and a half, or
three-quarters at the outside. An egg should never rashly verge upon
hardness--never. Three minutes is the excess of temerity."

"If Richard had told me! If I had only known!" the lovely little hostess
interjected ruefully, biting her lip.

"We mustn't expect him to pay attention to such matters," said Adrian,
trying to smile.

"Hang it! there are more eggs in the house," cried Richard, and pulled
savagely at the bell.

Lucy jumped up, saying, "Oh, yes! I will go and boil some exactly the
time you like. Pray let me go, Mr. Harley."

Adrian restrained her departure with a motion of his hand. "No," he said,
"I will be ruled by Richard's tastes, and heaven grant me his digestion!"

Lucy threw a sad look at Richard, who stretched on a sofa, and left the
burden of the entertainment entirely to her. The eggs were a melancholy
beginning, but her ardour to please Adrian would not be damped, and she
deeply admired his resignation. If she failed in pleasing this glorious
herald of peace, no matter by what small misadventure, she apprehended
calamity; so there sat this fair dove with brows at work above her
serious smiling blue eyes, covertly studying every aspect of the
plump-faced epicure, that she might learn to propitiate him. "He shall
not think me timid and stupid," thought this brave girl, and indeed
Adrian was astonished to find that she could both chat and be useful, as
well as look ornamental. When he had finished one egg, behold, two fresh
ones came in, boiled according to his prescription. She had quietly given
her orders to the maid, and he had them without fuss. Possibly his look
of dismay at the offending eggs had not been altogether involuntary, and
her woman's instinct, inexperienced as she was, may have told her that he
had come prepared to be not very well satisfied with anything in Love's
cottage. There was mental faculty in those pliable brows to see through,
and combat, an unwitting wise youth.

How much she had achieved already she partly divined when Adrian said: "I
think now I'm in case to answer your questions, my dear boy--thanks to
Mrs. Richard," and he bowed to her his first direct acknowledgment of her
position. Lucy thrilled with pleasure.

"Ah!" cried Richard, and settled easily on his back.

"To begin, the Pilgrim has lost his Note-book, and has been persuaded to
offer a reward which shall maintain the happy finder thereof in an asylum
for life. Benson--superlative Benson--has turned his shoulders upon
Raynham. None know whither he has departed. It is believed that the sole
surviving member of the sect of the Shaddock-Dogmatists is under a total
eclipse of Woman."

"Benson gone?" Richard exclaimed. "What a tremendous time it seems since
I left Raynham!"

"So it is, my dear boy. The honeymoon is Mahomet's minute; or say, the
Persian King's water-pail that you read of in the story: You dip your
head in it, and when you draw it out, you discover that you have lived a
life. To resume your uncle Algernon still roams in pursuit of the lost
one--I should say, hops. Your uncle Hippias has a new and most perplexing
symptom; a determination of bride-cake to the nose. Ever since your
generous present to him, though he declares he never consumed a morsel of
it, he has been under the distressing illusion that his nose is enormous,
and I assure you he exhibits quite a maidenly timidity in following
it--through a doorway, for instance. He complains of its terrible weight.
I have conceived that Benson invisible might be sitting on it. His hand,
and the doctor's, are in hourly consultation with it, but I fear it will
not grow smaller. The Pilgrim has begotten upon it a new Aphorism: that
Size is a matter of opinion."

"Poor uncle Hippy!" said Richard, "I wonder he doesn't believe in magic.
There's nothing supernatural to rival the wonderful sensations he does
believe in. Good God! fancy coming to that!"

"I'm sure I'm very sorry," Lucy protested, "but I can't help laughing."

Charming to the wise youth her pretty laughter sounded.

"The Pilgrim has your notion, Richard. Whom does he not forestall?
'Confirmed dyspepsia is the apparatus of illusions,' and he accuses the
Ages that put faith in sorcery, of universal indigestion, which may have
been the case, owing to their infamous cookery. He says again, if you
remember, that our own Age is travelling back to darkness and ignorance
through dyspepsia. He lays the seat of wisdom in the centre of our
system, Mrs. Richard: for which reason you will understand how sensible I
am of the vast obligation I am under to you at the present moment, for
your especial care of mine."

Richard looked on at Lucy's little triumph, attributing Adrian's
subjugation to her beauty and sweetness. She had latterly received a
great many compliments on that score, which she did not care to hear, and
Adrian's homage to a practical quality was far pleasanter to the young
wife, who shrewdly guessed that her beauty would not help her much in the
struggle she had now to maintain. Adrian continuing to lecture on the
excelling virtues of wise cookery, a thought struck her: Where, where had
she tossed Mrs. Berry's book?

"So that's all about the home-people?" said Richard.

"All!" replied Adrian. "Or stay: you know Clare's going to be married?
Not? Your Aunt Helen"--

"Oh, bother my Aunt Helen! What do you think she had the impertinence to
write--but never mind! Is it to Ralph?"

"Your Aunt Helen, I was going to say, my dear boy, is an extraordinary
woman. It was from her originally that the Pilgrim first learnt to call
the female the practical animal. He studies us all, you know. The
Pilgrim's Scrip is the abstract portraiture of his surrounding relatives.
Well, your Aunt Helen"--

"Mrs. Doria Battledoria!" laughed Richard.

"--being foiled in a little pet scheme of her own--call it a System if
you like--of some ten or fifteen years' standing, with regard to Miss
Clare!"--

The fair Shuttlecockiana!"

"--instead of fretting like a man, and questioning Providence, and
turning herself and everybody else inside out, and seeing the world
upside down, what does the practical animal do? She wanted to marry her
to somebody she couldn't marry her to, so she resolved instantly to marry
her to somebody she could marry her to: and as old gentlemen enter into
these transactions with the practical animal the most readily, she fixed
upon an old gentleman; an unmarried old gentleman, a rich old gentleman,
and now a captive old gentleman. The ceremony takes place in about a week
from the present time. No doubt you will receive your invitation in a day
or two."

"And that cold, icy, wretched Clare has consented to marry an old man!"
groaned Richard. "I'll put a stop to that when I go to town."

Richard got up and strode about the room. Then he bethought him it was
time to go on board and make preparations.

"I'm off," he said. "Adrian, you'll take her. She goes in the Empress,
Mountfalcon's vessel. He starts us. A little schooner-yacht--such a
beauty! I'll have one like her some day. Good-bye, darling!" he whispered
to Lucy, and his hand and eyes lingered on her, and hers on him, seeking
to make up for the priceless kiss they were debarred from. But she
quickly looked away from him as he held her:--Adrian stood silent: his
brows were up, and his mouth dubiously contracted. He spoke at last.

"Go on the water?"

"Yes. It's only to St. Helen's. Short and sharp."

"Do you grudge me the nourishment my poor system has just received, my
son?"

"Oh, bother your system! Put on your hat, and come along. I'll put you on
board in my boat."

"Richard! I have already paid the penalty of them who are condemned to
come to an island. I will go with you to the edge of the sea, and I will
meet you there when you return, and take up the Tale of the Tritons: but,
though I forfeit the pleasure of Mrs. Richard's company, I refuse to quit
the land."

"Yes, oh, Mr. Harley!" Lucy broke from her husband, "and I will stay with
you, if you please. I don't want to go among those people, and we can see
it all from the shore.

"Dearest! I don't want to go. You don't mind? Of course, I will go if you
wish, but I would so much rather stay;" and she lengthened her plea in
her attitude and look to melt the discontent she saw gathering.

Adrian protested that she had much better go; that he could amuse himself
very well till their return, and so forth; but she had schemes in her
pretty head, and held to it to be allowed to stay in spite of Lord
Mountfalcon's disappointment, cited by Richard, and at the great risk of
vexing her darling, as she saw. Richard pished, and glanced
contemptuously at Adrian. He gave way ungraciously.

"There, do as you like. Get your things ready to leave this evening. No,
I'm not angry."--Who could be? he seemed as he looked up from her modest
fondling to ask Adrian, and seized the indemnity of a kiss on her
forehead, which, however, did not immediately disperse the shade of
annoyance he felt.

"Good heavens!" he exclaimed. "Such a day as this, and a fellow refuses
to come on the water! Well, come along to the edge of the sea." Adrian's
angelic quality had quite worn off to him. He never thought of devoting
himself to make the most of the material there was: but somebody else
did, and that fair somebody succeeded wonderfully in a few short hours.
She induced Adrian to reflect that the baronet had only to see her, and
the family muddle would be smoothed at once. He came to it by degrees;
still the gradations were rapid. Her manner he liked; she was certainly a
nice picture: best of all, she was sensible. He forgot the farmer's niece
in her, she was so very sensible. She appeared really to understand that
it was a woman's duty to know how to cook.

But the difficulty was, by what means the baronet could be brought to
consent to see her. He had not yet consented to see his son, and Adrian,
spurred by Lady Blandish, had ventured something in coming down. He was
not inclined to venture more. The small debate in his mind ended by his
throwing the burden on time. Time would bring the matter about.
Christians as well as Pagans are in the habit of phrasing this excuse for
folding their arms; "forgetful," says The Pilgrim's Scrip, "that the
devil's imps enter into no such armistice."

As she loitered along the shore with her amusing companion, Lucy had many
things to think of. There was her darling's match. The yachts were
started by pistol-shot by Lord Mountfalcon on board the Empress, and her
little heart beat after Richard's straining sails. Then there was the
strangeness of walking with a relative of Richard's, one who had lived by
his side so long. And the thought that perhaps this night she would have
to appear before the dreaded father of her husband.

"O Mr. Harley!" she said, "is it true--are we to go tonight? And me," she
faltered, "will he see me?"

"Ah! that is what I wanted to talk to you about," said Adrian. "I made
some reply to our dear boy which he has slightly misinterpreted. Our
second person plural is liable to misconstruction by an ardent mind. I
said 'see you,' and he supposed--now, Mrs. Richard, I am sure you will
understand me. Just at present perhaps it would be advisable--when the
father and son have settled their accounts, the daughter-in-law can't be
a debtor."...

Lucy threw up her blue eyes. A half-cowardly delight at the chance of a
respite from the awful interview made her quickly apprehensive.

"O Mr. Harley! you think he should go alone first?"

"Well, that is my notion. But the fact is, he is such an excellent
husband that I fancy it will require more than a man's power of
persuasion to get him to go."

"But I will persuade him, Mr. Harley." "Perhaps, if you would..."

"There is nothing I would not do for his happiness," murmured Lucy.

The wise youth pressed her hand with lymphatic approbation. They walked
on till the yachts had rounded the point.

"Is it to-night, Mr. Harley?" she asked with some trouble in her voice
now that her darling was out of sight.

"I don't imagine your eloquence even will get him to leave you to-night,"
Adrian replied gallantly. "Besides, I must speak for myself. To achieve
the passage to an island is enough for one day. No necessity exists for
any hurry, except in the brain of that impetuous boy. You must correct
it, Mrs. Richard. Men are made to be managed, and women are born
managers. Now, if you were to let him know that you don't want to go
to-night, and let him guess, after a day or two, that you would very much
rather... you might affect a peculiar repugnance. By taking it on
yourself, you see, this wild young man will not require such frightful
efforts of persuasion. Both his father and he are exceedingly delicate
subjects, and his father unfortunately is not in a position to be managed
directly. It's a strange office to propose to you, but it appears to
devolve upon you to manage the father through the son. Prodigal having
made his peace, you, who have done all the work from a distance,
naturally come into the circle of the paternal smile, knowing it due to
you. I see no other way. If Richard suspects that his father objects for
the present to welcome his daughter-in-law, hostilities will be
continued, the breach will be widened, bad will grow to worse, and I see
no end to it."

Adrian looked in her face, as much as to say: Now are you capable of this
piece of heroism? And it did seem hard to her that she should have to
tell Richard she shrank from any trial. But the proposition chimed in
with her fears and her wishes: she thought the wise youth very wise: the
poor child was not insensible to his flattery, and the subtler flattery
of making herself in some measure a sacrifice to the home she had
disturbed. She agreed to simulate as Adrian had suggested.

Victory is the commonest heritage of the hero, and when Richard came on
shore proclaiming that the Blandish had beaten the Begum by seven minutes
and three-quarters, he was hastily kissed and congratulated by his bride
with her fingers among the leaves of Dr. Kitchener, and anxiously
questioned about wine.

"Dearest! Mr. Harley wants to stay with us a little, and he thinks we
ought not to go immediately--that is, before he has had some letters, and
I feel... I would so much rather..."

"Ah! that's it, you coward!" said Richard. "Well, then, to-morrow. We had
a splendid race. Did you see us?"

"Oh, yes! I saw you and was sure my darling would win." And again she
threw on him the cold water of that solicitude about wine. "Mr. Harley
must have the best, you know, and we never drink it, and I'm so silly, I
don't know good wine, and if you would send Tom where he can get good
wine. I have seen to the dinner."

"So that's why you didn't come to meet me?"

"Pardon me, darling."

Well, I do, but Mountfalcon doesn't, and Lady Judith thinks you ought to
have been there."

"Ah, but my heart was with you!"

Richard put his hand to feel for the little heart: her eyelids softened,
and she ran away.

It is to say much of the dinner that Adrian found no fault with it, and
was in perfect good-humour at the conclusion of the service. He did not
abuse the wine they were able to procure for him, which was also much.
The coffee, too, had the honour of passing without comment. These were
sound first steps toward the conquest of an epicure, and as yet Cupid did
not grumble.

After coffee they strolled out to see the sun set from Lady Judith's
grounds. The wind had dropped. The clouds had rolled from the zenith, and
ranged in amphitheatre with distant flushed bodies over sea and land:
Titanic crimson head and chest rising from the wave faced Hyperion
falling. There hung Briareus with deep-indented trunk and ravined brows,
stretching all his hands up to unattainable blue summits. North-west the
range had a rich white glow, as if shining to the moon, and westward,
streams of amber, melting into upper rose, shot out from the dipping
disk.

"What Sandoe calls the passion-flower of heaven," said Richard under his
breath to Adrian, who was serenely chanting Greek hexameters, and
answered, in the swing of the caesura, "He might as well have said
cauliflower."

Lady Judith, with a black lace veil tied over her head, met them in the
walk. She was tall and dark; dark-haired, dark-eyed, sweet and persuasive
in her accent and manner. "A second edition of the Blandish," thinks
Adrian. She welcomed him as one who had claims on her affability. She
kissed Lucy protectingly, and remarking on the wonders of the evening,
appropriated her husband. Adrian and Lucy found themselves walking behind
them.

The sun was under. All the spaces of the sky were alight, and Richard's
fancy flamed.

"So you're not intoxicated with your immense triumph this morning?" said
Lady Judith.

"Don't laugh at me. When it's over I feel ashamed of the trouble I've
taken. Look at that glory!--I'm sure you despise me for it."

"Was I not there to applaud you? I only think such energies should be
turned into some definitely useful channel. But you must not go into the
Army."

"What else can I do?"

"You are fit for so much that is better."

"I never can be anything like Austin."

"But I think you can do more."

"Well, I thank you for thinking it, Lady Judith. Something I will do. A
man must deserve to live, as you say.

"Sauces," Adrian was heard to articulate distinctly in the rear, "Sauces
are the top tree of this science. A woman who has mastered sauces sits on
the apex of civilization."

Briareus reddened duskily seaward. The West was all a burning rose.

"How can men see such sights as those, and live idle?" Richard resumed.
"I feel ashamed of asking my men to work for me.--Or I feel so now."

"Not when you're racing the Begum, I think. There's no necessity for you
to turn democrat like Austin. Do you write now?"

"No. What is writing like mine? It doesn't deceive me. I know it's only
the excuse I'm making to myself for remaining idle. I haven't written a
line since--lately."

"Because you are so happy."

"No, not because of that. Of course I'm very happy..." He did not finish.

Vague, shapeless ambition had replaced love in yonder skies. No
Scientific Humanist was by to study the natural development, and guide
him. This lady would hardly be deemed a very proper guide to the
undirected energies of the youth, yet they had established relations of
that nature. She was five years older than he, and a woman, which may
explain her serene presumption.

The cloud-giants had broken up: a brawny shoulder smouldered over the
sea.

"We'll work together in town, at all events," said Richard,

"Why can't we go about together at night and find out people who want
help?"

Lady Judith smiled, and only corrected his nonsense by saying, "I think
we mustn't be too romantic. You will become a knight-errant, I suppose.
You have the characteristics of one."

"Especially at breakfast," Adrian's unnecessarily emphatic gastronomical
lessons to the young wife here came in.

"You must be our champion," continued Lady Judith: "the rescuer and
succourer of distressed dames and damsels. We want one badly."

"You do," said Richard, earnestly: "from what I hear: from what I know!"
His thoughts flew off with him as knight-errant hailed shrilly at
exceeding critical moment by distressed dames and damsels. Images of airy
towers hung around. His fancy performed miraculous feats. The towers
crumbled. The stars grew larger, seemed to throb with lustre. His fancy
crumbled with the towers of the air, his heart gave a leap, he turned to
Lucy.

"My darling! what have you been doing?" And as if to compensate her for
his little knight-errant infidelity, he pressed very tenderly to her.

"We have been engaged in a charming conversation on domestic cookery,"
interposed Adrian.

"Cookery! such an evening as this?" His face was a handsome likeness of
Hippias at the presentation of bridecake.

"Dearest! you know it's very useful," Lucy mirthfully pleaded.

"Indeed I quite agree with you, child," said Lady Judith, and I think you
have the laugh of us. I certainly will learn to cook some day."

"Woman's mission, in so many words," ejaculated Adrian.

"And pray, what is man's?"

"To taste thereof, and pronounce thereupon."

"Let us give it up to them," said Lady Judith to Richard. "You and I
never will make so delightful and beautifully balanced a world of it."

Richard appeared to have grown perfectly willing to give everything up to
the fair face, his bridal Hesper.

Neat day Lucy had to act the coward anew, and, as she did so, her heart
sank to see how painfully it affected him that she should hesitate to go
with him to his father. He was patient, gentle; he sat down by her side
to appeal to her reason, and used all the arguments he could think of to
persuade her.

"If we go together and make him see us both: if he sees he has nothing to
be ashamed of in you--rather everything to be proud of; if you are only
near him, you will not have to speak a word, and I'm certain--as certain
as that I live--that in a week we shall be settled happily at Raynham. I
know my father so well, Lucy. Nobody knows him but I."

Lucy asked whether Mr. Harley did not.

"Adrian? Not a bit. Adrian only knows a part of people, Lucy; and not the
best part."

Lucy was disposed to think more highly of the object of her conquest.

"Is it he that has been frightening you, Lucy?"

"No, no, Richard; oh, dear no!" she cried, and looked at him more
tenderly because she was not quite truthful.

"He doesn't know my father at all," said Richard. But Lucy had another
opinion of the wise youth, and secretly maintained it. She could not be
won to imagine the baronet a man of human mould, generous, forgiving,
full of passionate love at heart, as Richard tried to picture him, and
thought him, now that he beheld him again through Adrian's embassy. To
her he was that awful figure, shrouded by the midnight. "Why are you so
harsh?" she had heard Richard cry more than once. She was sure that
Adrian must be right.

"Well, I tell you I won't go without you," said Richard, and Lucy begged
for a little more time.

Cupid now began to grumble, and with cause. Adrian positively refused to
go on the water unless that element were smooth as a plate. The
South-west still joked boisterously at any comparison of the sort; the
days were magnificent; Richard had yachting engagements; and Lucy always
petitioned to stay to keep Adrian company, concerning it her duty as
hostess. Arguing with Adrian was an absurd idea. If Richard hinted at his
retaining Lucy, the wise youth would remark: "It's a wholesome interlude
to your extremely Cupidinous behaviour, my dear boy."

Richard asked his wife what they could possibly find to talk about.

"All manner of things," said Lucy; "not only cookery. He is so amusing,
though he does make fun of The Pilgrim's Scrip, and I think he ought not.
And then, do you know, darling--you won't think me vain?--I think he is
beginning to like me a little."

Richard laughed at the humble mind of his Beauty.

"Doesn't everybody like you, admire you? Doesn't Lord Mountfalcon, and
Mr. Morton, and Lady Judith?"

"But he is one of your family, Richard."

"And they all will, if she isn't a coward."

"Ah, no!" she sighs, and is chidden.

The conquest of an epicure, or any young wife's conquest beyond her
husband, however loyally devised for their mutual happiness, may be
costly to her. Richard in his hours of excitement was thrown very much
with Lady Judith. He consulted her regarding what he termed Lucy's
cowardice. Lady Judith said: "I think she's wrong, but you must learn to
humour little women."

"Then would you advise me to go up alone?" he asked, with a cloudy
forehead.

"What else can you do? Be reconciled yourself as quickly as you can. You
can't drag her like a captive, you know?"

It is not pleasant for a young husband, fancying his bride the peerless
flower of Creation, to learn that he must humour a little woman in her.
It was revolting to Richard.

"What I fear," he said, "is, that my father will make it smooth with me,
and not acknowledge her: so that whenever I go to him, I shall have to
leave her, and tit for tat--an abominable existence, like a ball on a
billiard-table. I won't bear that ignominy. And this I know, I know! she
might prevent it at once, if she would only be brave, and face it. You,
you, Lady Judith, you wouldn't be a coward?"

"Where my old lord tells me to go, I go," the lady coldly replied.
"There's not much merit in that. Pray, don't cite me. Women are born
cowards, you know."

"But I love the women who are not cowards."

"The little thing--your wife has not refused to go?"

"No--but tears! Who can stand tears?"

Lucy had come to drop them. Unaccustomed to have his will thwarted, and
urgent where he saw the thing to do so clearly, the young husband had
spoken strong words: and she, who knew that she would have given her life
by inches for him; who knew that she was playing a part for his
happiness, and hiding for his sake the nature that was worthy his esteem;
the poor little martyr had been weak a moment.

She had Adrian's support. The wise youth was very comfortable. He liked
the air of the Island, and he liked being petted. "A nice little woman! a
very nice little woman!" Tom Bakewell heard him murmur to himself
according to a habit he had; and his air of rather succulent patronage as
he walked or sat beside the innocent Beauty, with his head thrown back
and a smile that seemed always to be in secret communion with his marked
abdominal prominence, showed that she was gaining part of what she played
for. Wise youths who buy their loves, are not unwilling, when opportunity
offers, to try and obtain the commodity for nothing. Examinations of her
hand, as for some occult purpose, and unctuous pattings of the same, were
not infrequent. Adrian waxed now and then Anacreontic in his compliments.
Lucy would say: "That's worse than Lord Mountfalcon."

"Better English than the noble lord deigns to employ--allow that?" quoth
Adrian.

"He is very kind," said Lucy.

"To all, save to our noble vernacular," added Adrian. "He seems to scent
a rival to his dignity there."

It may be that Adrian scented a rival to his lymphatic emotions.

"We are at our ease here in excellent society," he wrote to Lady
Blandish. "I am bound to confess that the Huron has a happy fortune, or a
superlative instinct. Blindfold he has seized upon a suitable mate. She
can look at a lord, and cook for an epicure. Besides Dr. Kitchener, she
reads and comments on The Pilgrim's Scrip. The `Love' chapter, of course,
takes her fancy. That picture of Woman, `Drawn by Reverence and coloured
by Love,' she thinks beautiful, and repeats it, tossing up pretty eyes.
Also the lover's petition: 'Give me purity to be worthy the good in her,
and grant her patience to reach the good in me.' 'Tis quite taking to
hear her lisp it. Be sure that I am repeating the petition! I make her
read me her choice passages. She has not a bad voice.

"The Lady Judith I spoke of is Austin's Miss Menteith, married to the
incapable old Lord Felle, or Fellow, as the wits here call him. Lord
Mountfalcon is his cousin, and her--what? She has been trying to find
out, but they have both got over their perplexity, and act respectively
the bad man reproved and the chaste counsellor; a position in which our
young couple found them, and haply diverted its perils. They had quite
taken them in hand. Lady Judith undertakes to cure the fair Papist of a
pretty, modest trick of frowning and blushing when addressed, and his
lordship directs the exuberant energies of the original man. 'Tis thus we
fulfil our destinies, and are content. Sometimes they change pupils; my
lord educates the little dame, and my lady the hope of Raynham. Joy and
blessings unto all! as the German poet sings. Lady Judith accepted the
hand of her decrepit lord that she might be of potent service to her
fellow-creatures. Austin, you know, had great hopes of her.

"I have for the first time in my career a field of lords to study. I
think it is not without meaning that I am introduced to it by a yeoman's
niece. The language of the two social extremes is similar. I find it to
consist in an instinctively lavish use of vowels and adjectives. My lord
and Farmer Blaize speak the same tongue, only my lord's has lost its
backbone, and is limp, though fluent. Their pursuits are identical; but
that one has money, or, as the Pilgrim terms it, vantage, and the other
has not. Their ideas seem to have a special relationship in the
peculiarity of stopping where they have begun. Young Tom Blaize with
vantage would be Lord Mountfalcon. Even in the character of their
parasites I see a resemblance, though I am bound to confess that the Hon.
Peter Brayder, who is my lord's parasite, is by no means noxious.

"This sounds dreadfully democrat. Pray, don't be alarmed. The discovery
of the affinity between the two extremes of the Royal British Oak has
made me thrice conservative. I see now that the national love of a lord
is less subservience than a form of self-love; putting a gold-lace hat on
one's image, as it were, to bow to it. I see, too, the admirable wisdom
of our system:--could there be a finer balance of power than in a
community where men intellectually nil, have lawful vantage and a
gold-lace hat on? How soothing it is to intellect--that noble rebel, as
the Pilgrim has it--to stand, and bow, and know itself superior! This
exquisite compensation maintains the balance: whereas that period
anticipated by the Pilgrim, when science shall have produced an
intellectual aristocracy, is indeed horrible to contemplate. For what
despotism is so black as one the mind cannot challenge? 'Twill be an iron
Age. Wherefore, madam, I cry, and shall continue to cry, 'Vive Lord
Mountfalcon! long may he sip his Burgundy! long may the bacon-fed carry
him on their shoulders!'

"Mr. Morton (who does me the honour to call me Young Mephisto, and
Socrates missed) leaves to-morrow to get Master Ralph out of a scrape.
Our Richard has just been elected member of a Club for the promotion of
nausea. Is he happy? you ask. As much so as one who has had the
misfortune to obtain what he wanted can be. Speed is his passion. He
races from point to point. In emulation of Leander and Don Juan, he swam,
I hear, to the opposite shores the other day, or some world-shaking feat
of the sort: himself the Hero whom he went to meet: or, as they who pun
say, his Hero was a Bet. A pretty little domestic episode occurred this
morning. He finds her abstracted in the fire of his caresses: she turns
shy and seeks solitude: green jealousy takes hold of him: he lies in
wait, and discovers her with his new rival--a veteran edition of the
culinary Doctor! Blind to the Doctor's great national services, deaf to
her wild music, he grasps the intruder, dismembers him, and performs upon
him the treatment he has recommended for dressed cucumber. Tears and
shrieks accompany the descent of the gastronome. Down she rushes to
secure the cherished fragments: he follows: they find him, true to his
character, alighted and straggling over a bed of blooming flowers. Yet
ere a fairer flower can gather him, a heel black as Pluto stamps him into
earth, flowers and all:--happy burial! Pathetic tribute to his merit is
watering his grave, when by saunters my Lord Mountfalcon. 'What's the
mattah?' says his lordship, soothing his moustache. They break apart, and
'tis left to me to explain from the window. My lord looks shocked,
Richard is angry with her for having to be ashamed of himself, Beauty
dries her eyes, and after a pause of general foolishness, the business of
life is resumed. I may add that the Doctor has just been dug up, and we
are busy, in the enemy's absence, renewing old Aeson with enchanted
threads. By the way, a Papist priest has blest them."

A month had passed when Adrian wrote this letter. He was very
comfortable; so of course he thought Time was doing his duty. Not a word
did he say of Richard's return, and for some reason or other neither
Richard nor Lucy spoke of it now.

Lady Blandish wrote back: "His father thinks he has refused to come to
him. By your utter silence on the subject, I fear that it must be so.
Make him come. Bring him by force. Insist on his coming. Is he mad? He
must come at once."

To this Adrian replied, after a contemplative comfortable lapse of a day
or two, which might be laid to his efforts to adopt the lady's advice,
"The point is that the half man declines to come without the whole man.
The terrible question of sex is our obstruction."

Lady Blandish was in despair. She had no positive assurance that the
baronet would see his son; the mask put them all in the dark; but she
thought she saw in Sir Austin irritation that the offender, at least when
the opening to come and make his peace seemed to be before him, should
let days and weeks go by. She saw through the mask sufficiently not to
have any hope of his consenting to receive the couple at present; she was
sure that his equanimity was fictitious; but she pierced no farther, or
she might have started and asked herself, Is this the heart of a woman?

The lady at last wrote to Richard. She said: "Come instantly, and come
alone." Then Richard, against his judgment, gave way. "My father is not
the man I thought him!" he exclaimed sadly, and Lucy felt his eyes saying
to her: "And you, too, are not the woman I thought you." Nothing could
the poor little heart reply but strain to his bosom and sleeplessly pray
in his arms all the night.




CHAPTER XXXV

Three weeks after Richard arrived in town, his cousin Clare was married,
under the blessings of her energetic mother, and with the approbation of
her kinsfolk, to the husband that had been expeditiously chosen for her.
The gentleman, though something more than twice the age of his bride, had
no idea of approaching senility for many long connubial years to come.
Backed by his tailor and his hairdresser, he presented no such bad figure
at the altar, and none would have thought that he was an ancient admirer
of his bride's mama, as certainly none knew he had lately proposed for
Mrs. Doria before there was any question of her daughter. These things
were secrets; and the elastic and happy appearance of Mr. John Todhunter
did not betray them at the altar. Perhaps he would rather have married
the mother. He was a man of property, well born, tolerably well educated,
and had, when Mrs. Doria rejected him for the first time, the reputation
of being a fool--which a wealthy man may have in his youth; but as he
lived on, and did not squander his money--amassed it, on the contrary,
and did not seek to go into Parliament, and did other negative wise
things, the world's opinion, as usual, veered completely round, and John
Todhunter was esteemed a shrewd, sensible man--only not brilliant; that
he was brilliant could not be said of him. In fact, the man could hardly
talk, and it was a fortunate provision that no impromptu deliveries were
required of him in the marriage-service.

Mrs. Doria had her own reasons for being in a hurry. She had discovered
something of the strange impassive nature of her child; not from any
confession of Clare's, but from signs a mother can read when, her eyes
are not resolutely shut. She saw with alarm and anguish that Clare had
fallen into the pit she had been digging for her so laboriously. In vain
she entreated the baronet to break the disgraceful, and, as she said,
illegal alliance his son had contracted. Sir Austin would not even stop
the little pension to poor Berry. "At least you will do that, Austin,"
she begged pathetically. "You will show your sense of that horrid woman's
conduct?" He refused to offer up any victim to console her. Then Mrs.
Doria told him her thoughts,--and when an outraged energetic lady is
finally brought to exhibit these painfully hoarded treasures, she does
not use half words as a medium. His System, and his conduct generally
were denounced to him, without analysis. She let him understand that the
world laughed at him; and he heard this from her at a time when his mask
was still soft and liable to be acted on by his nerves. "You are weak,
Austin! weak, I tell you!" she said, and, like all angry and
self-interested people, prophecy came easy to her. In her heart she
accused him of her own fault, in imputing to him the wreck of her
project. The baronet allowed her to revel in the proclamation of a dire
future, and quietly counselled her to keep apart from him, which his
sister assured him she would do.

But to be passive in calamity is the province of no woman. Mark the race
at any hour. "What revolution and hubbub does not that little instrument,
the needle, avert from us!" says The Pilgrim's Scrip. Alas, that in
calamity women cannot stitch! Now that she saw Clare wanted other than
iron, it struck her she must have a husband, and be made secure as a
woman and a wife. This seemed the thing to do: and, as she had forced the
iron down Clare's throat, so she forced the husband, and Clare gulped at
the latter as she had at the former. On the very day that Mrs. Doria had
this new track shaped out before her, John Todhunter called at the
Foreys'. "Old John!" sang out Mrs. Doria, "show him up to me. I want to
see him particularly." He sat with her alone. He was a man multitudes of
women would have married--whom will they not?--and who would have married
any presentable woman: but women do want asking, and John never had the
word. The rape of such men is left to the practical animal. So John sat
alone with his old flame. He had become resigned to her perpetual
lamentation and living Suttee for his defunct rival. But, ha! what meant
those soft glances now--addressed to him? His tailor and his hairdresser
gave youth to John, but they had not the art to bestow upon him
distinction, and an undistinguished man what woman looks at? John was an
indistinguishable man. For that reason he was dry wood to a soft glance.

And now she said: "It is time you should marry; and you are the man to be
the guide and helper of a young woman, John. You are well
preserved--younger than most of the young men of our day. You are
eminently domestic, a good son, and will be a good husband and good
father. Some one you must marry.--What do you think of Clare for a wife
for you?"

At first John Todhunter thought it would be very much like his marrying a
baby. However, he listened to it, and that was enough for Mrs. Doria.

She went down to John's mother, and consulted with her on the propriety
of the scheme of wedding her daughter to John in accordance with his
proposition. Mrs. Todhunter's jealousy of any disturbing force in the
influence she held over her son Mrs. Doria knew to be one of the causes
of John's remaining constant to the impression she had afore-time
produced on him. She spoke so kindly of John, and laid so much stress on
the ingrained obedience and passive disposition of her daughter, that
Mrs. Todhunter was led to admit she did think it almost time John should
be seeking a mate, and that he--all things considered--would hardly find
a fitter one. And this, John Todhunter--old John no more--heard to his
amazement when, a day or two subsequently, he instanced the probable
disapproval of his mother.

The match was arranged. Mrs. Doria did the wooing. It consisted in
telling Clare that she had come to years when marriage was desirable, and
that she had fallen into habits of moping which might have the worse
effect on her future life, as it had on her present health and
appearance, and which a husband would cure. Richard was told by Mrs.
Doria that Clare had instantaneously consented to accept Mr. John
Todhunter as lord of her days, and with more than obedience--with
alacrity. At all events, when Richard spoke to Clare, the strange passive
creature did not admit constraint on her inclinations. Mrs. Doria allowed
Richard to speak to her. She laughed at his futile endeavours to undo her
work, and the boyish sentiments he uttered on the subject. "Let us see,
child," she said, "let us see which turns out the best; a marriage of
passion, or a marriage of common sense."

Heroic efforts were not wanting to arrest the union. Richard made
repeated journeys to Hounslow, where Ralph was quartered, and if Ralph
could have been persuaded to carry off a young lady who did not love him,
from the bridegroom her mother averred she did love, Mrs. Doria might
have been defeated. But Ralph in his cavalry quarters was cooler than
Ralph in the Bursley meadows. "Women are oddities, Dick," he remarked,
running a finger right and left along his upper lip. "Best leave them to
their own freaks. She's a dear girl, though she doesn't talk: I like her
for that. If she cared for me I'd go the race. She never did. It's no use
asking a girl twice. She knows whether she cares a fig for a fellow."

The hero quitted him with some contempt, As Ralph Morton was a young man,
and he had determined that John Todhunter was an old man, he sought
another private interview with Clare, and getting her alone, said:
"Clare, I've come to you for the last time. Will you marry Ralph Morton?"

To which Clare replied, "I cannot marry two husbands, Richard."

"Will you refuse to marry this old man?"

"I must do as mama wishes."

"Then you're going to marry an old man--a man you don't love, and can't
love! Oh, good God! do you know what you're doing?" He flung about in a
fury. "Do you know what it is? Clare!" he caught her two hands violently,
"have you any idea of the horror you're going to commit?"

She shrank a little at his vehemence, but neither blushed nor stammered:
answering: "I see nothing wrong in doing what mama thinks right,
Richard."

"Your mother! I tell you it's an infamy, Clare! It's a miserable sin! I
tell you, if I had done such a thing I would not live an hour after it.
And coldly to prepare for it! to be busy about your dresses! They told me
when I came in that you were with the milliner. To be smiling over the
horrible outrage! decorating yourself!"...

"Dear Richard," said Clare, "you will make me very unhappy."

"That one of my blood should be so debased!" he cried, brushing angrily
at his face. "Unhappy! I beg you to feel for yourself, Clare. But I
suppose," and he said it scornfully, "girls don't feel this sort of
shame."

She grew a trifle paler.

"Next to mama, I would wish to please you, dear Richard."

"Have you no will of your own?" he exclaimed.

She looked at him softly; a look he interpreted for the meekness he
detested in her.

"No, I believe you have none!" he added. "And what can I do? I can't step
forward and stop this accursed marriage. If you would but say a word I
would save you; but you tie my hands. And they expect me to stand by and
see it done!"

"Will you not be there, Richard?" said Clare, following the question with
her soft eyes. It was the same voice that had so thrilled him on his
marriage morn.

"Oh, my darling Clare!" he cried in the kindest way he had ever used to
her, "if you knew how I feel this!" and now as he wept she wept, and came
insensibly into his arms.

"My darling Clare!" he repeated.

She said nothing, but seemed to shudder, weeping.

"You will do it, Clare? You will be sacrificed? So lovely as you are,
too!... Clare! you cannot be quite blind. If I dared speak to you, and
tell you all.... Look up. Can you still consent?"

"I must not disobey mama," Clare murmured, without looking up from the
nest her cheek had made on his bosom.

"Then kiss me for the last time," said Richard. "I'll never kiss you
after it, Clare."

He bent his head to meet her mouth, and she threw her arms wildly round
him, and kissed him convulsively, and clung to his lips, shutting her
eyes, her face suffused with a burning red.

Then he left her, unaware of the meaning of those passionate kisses.

Argument with Mrs. Doria was like firing paper-pellets against a stone
wall. To her indeed the young married hero spoke almost indecorously, and
that which his delicacy withheld him from speaking to Clare. He could
provoke nothing more responsive from the practical animal than
"Pooh-pooh! Tush, tush! and Fiddlededee!"

"Really," Mrs. Doria said to her intimates, "that boy's education acts
like a disease on him. He cannot regard anything sensibly. He is for ever
in some mad excess of his fancy, and what he will come to at last heaven
only knows! I sincerely pray that Austin will be able to bear it."

Threats of prayer, however, that harp upon their sincerity, are not very
well worth having. Mrs. Doria had embarked in a practical controversy, as
it were, with her brother. Doubtless she did trust he would be able to
bear his sorrows to come, but one who has uttered prophecy can barely
help hoping to see it fulfilled: she had prophecied much grief to the
baronet.

Poor John Todhunter, who would rather have married the mother, and had
none of your heroic notions about the sacred necessity for love in
marriage, moved as one guiltless of offence, and deserving his happiness.
Mrs. Doria shielded him from the hero. To see him smile at Clare's
obedient figure, and try not to look paternal, was touching.

Meantime Clare's marriage served one purpose. It completely occupied
Richard's mind, and prevented him from chafing at the vexation of not
finding his father ready to meet him when he came to town. A letter had
awaited Adrian at the hotel, which said, "Detain him till you hear
further from me. Take him about with you into every form of society." No
more than that. Adrian had to extemporize, that the baronet had gone down
to Wales on pressing business, and would be back in a week or so. For
ulterior inventions and devices wherewith to keep the young gentleman in
town, he applied to Mrs. Doria. "Leave him to me," said Mrs. Doria, "I'll
manage him." And she did.

"Who can say," asks The Pilgrim's Scrip, "when he is not walking a puppet
to some woman?"

Mrs. Doria would hear no good of Lucy. "I believe," she observed, as
Adrian ventured a shrugging protest in her behalf,--"it is my firm
opinion, that a scullery-maid would turn any of you men round her little
finger--only give her time and opportunity." By dwelling on the arts of
women, she reconciled it to her conscience to do her best to divide the
young husband from his wife till it pleased his father they should live
their unhallowed union again. Without compunction, or a sense of
incongruity, she abused her brother and assisted the fulfilment of his
behests.

So the puppets were marshalled by Mrs. Doria, happy, or sad, or
indifferent. Quite against his set resolve and the tide of his feelings,
Richard found himself standing behind Clare in the church--the very
edifice that had witnessed his own marriage, and heard, "I, Clare Doria,
take thee John Pemberton," clearly pronounced. He stood with black brows
dissecting the arts of the tailor and hairdresser on unconscious John.
The back, and much of the middle, of Mr. Todhunter's head was bald; the
back shone like an egg-shell, but across the middle the artist had drawn
two long dabs of hair from the sides, and plastered them cunningly, so
that all save wilful eyes would have acknowledged the head to be covered.
The man's only pretension was to a respectable juvenility. He had a good
chest, stout limbs, a face inclined to be jolly. Mrs. Doria had no cause
to be put out of countenance at all by the exterior of her son-in-law:
nor was she. Her splendid hair and gratified smile made a light in the
church. Playing puppets must be an immense pleasure to the practical
animal. The Forey bridesmaids, five in number, and one Miss Doria, their
cousin, stood as girls do stand at these sacrifices, whether happy, sad,
or indifferent; a smile on their lips and tears in attendance. Old Mrs.
Todhunter, an exceedingly small ancient woman, was also there. "I can't
have my boy John married without seeing it done," she said, and
throughout the ceremony she was muttering audible encomiums on her John's
manly behaviour.

The ring was affixed to Clare's finger; there was no ring lost in this
common-sense marriage. The instant the clergyman bade him employ it, John
drew the ring out, and dropped it on the finger of the cold passive hand
in a businesslike way, as one who had studied the matter. Mrs. Doria
glanced aside at Richard. Richard observed Clare spread out her fingers
that the operation might be the more easily effected.

He did duty in the vestry a few minutes, and then said to his aunt:

"Now I'll go."

"You'll come to the breakfast, child? The Foreys"--

He cut her short. "I've stood for the family, and I'll do no more. I
won't pretend to eat and make merry over it."

"Richard!"

"Good-bye."

She had attained her object and she wisely gave way.

"Well. Go and kiss Clare, and shake his hand. Pray, pray be civil."

She turned to Adrian, and said: "He is going. You must go with him, and
find some means of keeping him, or he'll be running off to that woman.
Now, no words--go!"

Richard bade Clare farewell. She put up her mouth to him humbly, but he
kissed her on the forehead.

"Do not cease to love me," she said in a quavering whisper in his ear.

Mr. Todhunter stood beaming and endangering the art of the hairdresser
with his pocket-handkerchief. Now he positively was married, he thought
he would rather have the daughter than the mother, which is a reverse of
the order of human thankfulness at a gift of the Gods.

"Richard, my boy!" he said heartily, "congratulate me."

"I should be happy to, if I could," sedately replied the hero, to the
consternation of those around. Nodding to the bridesmaids and bowing to
the old lady, he passed out.

Adrian, who had been behind him, deputed to watch for a possible
unpleasantness, just hinted to John: "You know, poor fellow, he has got
into a mess with his marriage."

"Oh! ah! yes!" kindly said John, "poor fellow!"

All the puppets then rolled off to the breakfast.

Adrian hurried after Richard in an extremely discontented state of mind.
Not to be at the breakfast and see the best of the fun, disgusted him.
However, he remembered that he was a philosopher, and the strong disgust
he felt was only expressed in concentrated cynicism on every earthly
matter engendered by the conversation. They walked side by side into
Kensington Gardens. The hero was mouthing away to himself, talking by
fits.

Presently he faced Adrian, crying: "And I might have stopped it! I see it
now! I might have stopped it by going straight to him, and asking him if
he dared marry a girl who did not love him. And I never thought of it.
Good heaven! I feel this miserable affair on my conscience."

"Ah!" groaned Adrian. "An unpleasant cargo for the conscience, that! I
would rather carry anything on mine than a married couple. Do you purpose
going to him now?"

The hero soliloquized: "He's not a bad sort of man."...

"Well, he's not a Cavalier," said Adrian, "and that's why you wonder your
aunt selected him, no doubt? He's decidedly of the Roundhead type, with
the Puritan extracted, or inoffensive, if latent."

"There's the double infamy!" cried Richard, "that a man you can't call
bad, should do this damned thing!"

"Well, it's hard we can't find a villain."

"He would have listened to me, I'm sure."

"Go to him now, Richard, my son. Go to him now. It's not yet too late.
Who knows? If he really has a noble elevated superior mind--though not a
Cavalier in person, he may be one at heart--he might, to please you, and
since you put such stress upon it, abstain...perhaps with some loss of
dignity, but never mind. And the request might be singular, or seem so,
but everything has happened before in this world, you know, my dear boy.
And what an infinite consolation it is for the eccentric, that
reflection!"

The hero was impervious to the wise youth. He stared at him as if he were
but a speck in the universe he visioned.

It was provoking that Richard should be Adrian's best subject for cynical
pastime, in the extraordinary heterodoxies he started, and his worst in
the way he took it; and the wise youth, against his will, had to feel as
conscious of the young man's imaginative mental armour, as he was of his
muscular physical.

"The same sort of day!" mused Richard, looking up. "I suppose my father's
right. We make our own fates, and nature has nothing to do with it."

Adrian yawned.

"Some difference in the trees, though," Richard continued abstractedly.

"Growing bald at the top," said Adrian.

"Will you believe that my aunt Helen compared the conduct of that
wretched slave Clare to Lucy's, who, she had the cruel insolence to say,
entangled me into marriage?" the hero broke out loudly and rapidly. "You
know--I told you, Adrian--how I had to threaten and insist, and how she
pleaded, and implored me to wait."

"Ah! hum!" mumbled Adrian.

"You remember my telling you?" Richard was earnest to hear her
exonerated.

"Pleaded and implored, my dear boy? Oh, no doubt she did. Where's the
lass that doesn't."

"Call my wife by another name, if you please."

"The generic title can't be cancelled because of your having married one
of the body, my son."

"She did all she could to persuade me to wait!" emphasized Richard.

Adrian shook his head with a deplorable smile.

"Come, come, my good Ricky; not all! not all!"

Richard bellowed: "What more could she have done?"

"She could have shaved her head, for instance."

This happy shaft did stick. With a furious exclamation Richard shot in
front, Adrian following him; and asking him (merely to have his
assumption verified), whether he did not think she might have shaved her
head? and, presuming her to have done so, whether, in candour, he did not
think he would have waited--at least till she looked less of a rank
lunatic?

After a minute or so, the wise youth was but a fly buzzing about
Richard's head. Three weeks of separation from Lucy, and an excitement
deceased, caused him to have soft yearnings for the dear lovely
home-face. He told Adrian it was his intention to go down that night.
Adrian immediately became serious. He was at a loss what to invent to
detain him, beyond the stale fiction that his father was coming
to-morrow. He rendered homage to the genius of woman in these straits.
"My aunt," he thought, "would have the lie ready; and not only that, but
she would take care it did its work."

At this juncture the voice of a cavalier in the Row hailed them, proving
to be the Honourable Peter Brayder, Lord Mountfalcon's parasite. He
greeted them very cordially; and Richard, remembering some fun they had
in the Island, asked him to dine with them; postponing his return till
the next day. Lucy was his. It was even sweet to dally with the delight
of seeing her.

The Hon. Peter was one who did honour to the body he belonged to. Though
not so tall as a west of London footman, he was as shapely; and he had a
power of making his voice insinuating, or arrogant, as it suited the
exigencies of his profession. He had not a rap of money in the world; yet
he rode a horse, lived high, expended largely. The world said that the
Hon. Peter was salaried by his Lordship, and that, in common with that of
Parasite, he exercised the ancient companion profession. This the world
said, and still smiled at the Hon. Peter; for he was an engaging fellow,
and where he went not Lord Mountfalcon would not go.

They had a quiet little hotel dinner, ordered by Adrian, and made a
square at the table, Ripton Thompson being the fourth. Richard sent down
to his office to fetch him, and the two friends shook hands for the first
time since the great deed had been executed. Deep was the Old Dog's
delight to hear the praises of his Beauty sounded by such aristocratic
lips as the Hon. Peter Brayder's. All through the dinner he was throwing
out hints and small queries to get a fuller account of her; and when the
claret had circulated, he spoke a word or two himself, and heard the Hon.
Peter eulogize his taste, and wish him a bride as beautiful; at which
Ripton blushed, and said, he had no hope of that, and the Hon. Peter
assured him marriage did not break the mould.

After the wine this gentleman took his cigar on the balcony, and found
occasion to get some conversation with Adrian alone.

"Our young friend here--made it all right with the governor?" he asked
carelessly.

"Oh yes!" said Adrian. But it struck him that Brayder might be of
assistance in showing Richard a little of the `society in every form'
required by his chief's prescript. "That is," he continued, "we are not
yet permitted an interview with the august author of our being, and I
have rather a difficult post. 'Tis mine both to keep him here, and also
to find him the opportunity to measure himself with his fellow-man. In
other words, his father wants him to see something of life before he
enters upon housekeeping. Now I am proud to confess that I'm hardly equal
to the task. The demi, or damnedmonde--if it's that lie wants him to
observe--is one that I leave not got the walk to."

"Ha! ha!" laughed Brayder. "You do the keeping, I offer to parade the
demi. I must say, though, it's a queer notion of the old gentleman."

"It's the continuation of a philosophic plan," said Adrian.

Brayder followed the curvings of the whiff of his cigar with his eyes,
and ejaculated, "Infernally philosophic!"

"Has Lord Mountfalcon left the island?" Adrian inquired.

"Mount? to tell the truth I don't know where he is. Chasing some light
craft, I suppose. That's poor Mount's weakness. It's his ruin, poor
fellow! He's so confoundedly in earnest at the game."

"He ought to know it by this time, if fame speaks true," remarked Adrian.

"He's a baby about women, and always will be," said Brayder. "He's been
once or twice wanting to marry them. Now there's a woman--you've heard of
Mrs. Mount? All the world knows her.--If that woman hadn't
scandalized."--The young man joined them, and checked the communication.
Brayder winked to Adrian, and pitifully indicated the presence of an
innocent.

"A married man, you know," said Adrian.

"Yes, yes!--we won't shock him," Brayder observed. He appeared to study
the young man while they talked.

Next morning Richard was surprised by a visit from his aunt. Mrs. Doria
took a seat by his side and spoke as follows:

"My dear nephew. Now you know I have always loved you, and thought of
your welfare as if you had been my own child. More than that, I fear.
Well, now, you are thinking of returning to--to that place--are you not?
Yes. It is as I thought. Very well now, let me speak to you. You are in a
much more dangerous position than you imagine. I don't deny your father's
affection for you. It would be absurd to deny it. But you are of an age
now to appreciate his character. Whatever you may do he will always give
you money. That you are sure of; that you know. Very well. But you are
one to want more than money: you want his love. Richard, I am convinced
you will never be happy, whatever base pleasures you may be led into, if
he should withhold his love from you. Now, child, you know you have
grievously offended him. I wish not to animadvert on your conduct.--You
fancied yourself in love, and so on, and you were rash. The less said of
it the better now. But you must now--it is your duty now to do
something--to do everything that lies in your power to show him you
repent. No interruptions! Listen to me. You must consider him. Austin is
not like other men. Austin requires the most delicate management. You
must--whether you feel it or no--present an appearance of contrition. I
counsel it for the good of all. He is just like a woman, and where his
feelings are offended he wants utter subservience. He has you in town,
and he does not see you:--now you know that he and I are not in
communication: we have likewise our differences:--Well, he has you in
town, and he holds aloof:--he is trying you, my dear Richard. No: he is
not at Raynham: I do not know where he is. He is trying you, child, and
you must be patient. You must convince him that you do not care utterly
for your own gratification. If this person--I wish to speak of her with
respect, for your sake--well, if she loves you at all--if, I say, she
loves you one atom, she will repeat my solicitations for you to stay and
patiently wait here till he consents to see you. I tell you candidly,
it's your only chance of ever getting him to receive her. That you should
know. And now, Richard, I may add that there is something else you should
know. You should know that it depends entirely upon your conduct now,
whether you are to see your father's heart for ever divided from you, and
a new family at Raynham. You do not understand? I will explain. Brothers
and sisters are excellent things for young people, but a new brood of
them can hardly be acceptable to a young man. In fact, they are, and must
be, aliens. I only tell you what I have heard on good authority. Don't
you understand now? Foolish boy! if you do not humour him, he will marry
her. Oh! I am sure of it. I know it. And this you will drive him to. I do
not warn you on the score of your prospects, but of your feelings. I
should regard such a contingency, Richard, as a final division between
you. Think of the scandal! but alas, that is the least of the evils."

It was Mrs. Doria's object to produce an impression, and avoid an
argument. She therefore left him as soon as she had, as she supposed,
made her mark on the young man. Richard was very silent during the
speech, and save for an exclamation or so, had listened attentively. He
pondered on what his aunt said. He loved Lady Blandish, and yet he did
not wish to see her Lady Feverel. Mrs. Doria laid painful stress on the
scandal, and though he did not give his mind to this, he thought of it.
He thought of his mother. Where was she? But most his thoughts recurred
to his father, and something akin to jealousy slowly awakened his heart
to him. He had given him up, and had not latterly felt extremely filial;
but he could not bear the idea of a division in the love of which he had
ever been the idol and sole object. And such a man, too! so good! so
generous! If it was jealousy that roused the young man's heart to his
father, the better part of love was also revived in it. He thought of old
days: of his father's forbearance, his own wilfulness. He looked on
himself, and what he had done, with the eyes of such a man. He determined
to do all he could to regain his favour.

Mrs. Doria learnt from Adrian in the evening that her nephew intended
waiting in town another week.

"That will do," smiled Mrs. Doria. "He will be more patient at the end of
a week."

"Oh! does patience beget patience?" said Adrian. "I was not aware it was
a propagating virtue. I surrender him to you. I shan't be able to hold
him in after one week more. I assure you, my dear aunt, he's already"...

"Thank you, no explanation," Mrs. Doria begged.

When Richard saw her nest, he was informed that she had received a most
satisfactory letter from Mrs. John Todhunter: quite a glowing account of
John's behaviour: but on Richard's desiring to know the words Clare had
written, Mrs. Doria objected to be explicit, and shot into worldly
gossip.

"Clare seldom glows," said Richard.

"No, I mean for her," his aunt remarked. "Don't look like your father,
child."

"I should like to have seen the letter," said Richard.

Mrs. Doria did not propose to show it.




CHAPTER XXXVI

A Lady driving a pair of greys was noticed by Richard in his rides and
walks. She passed him rather obviously and often. She was very handsome;
a bold beauty, with shining black hair, red lips, and eyes not afraid of
men. The hair was brushed from her temples, leaving one of those fine
reckless outlines which the action of driving, and the pace, admirably
set off. She took his fancy. He liked the air of petulant gallantry about
her, and mused upon the picture, rare to him, of a glorious dashing
woman. He thought, too, she looked at him. He was not at the time
inclined to be vain, or he might have been sure she did. Once it struck
him she nodded slightly.

He asked Adrian one day in the park--who she was.

"I don't know her," said Adrian. "Probably a superior priestess of
Paphos."

"Now that's my idea of Bellona," Richard exclaimed. "Not the fury they
paint, but a spirited, dauntless, eager-looking creature like that."

"Bellona?" returned the wise youth. "I don't think her hair was black.
Red, wasn't it? I shouldn't compare her to Bellona; though, no doubt,
she's as ready to spill blood. Look at her! She does seem to scent
carnage. I see your idea. No; I should liken her to Diana emerged from
the tutorship of Master Endymion, and at nice play among the gods. Depend
upon it--they tell us nothing of the matter--Olympus shrouds the
story--but you may be certain that when she left the pretty shepherd she
had greater vogue than Venus up aloft."

Brayder joined them.

"See Mrs. Mount go by?" he said.

"Oh, that's Mrs. Mount!" cried Adrian.

"Who's Mrs. Mount?" Richard inquired.

"A sister to Miss Random, my dear boy."

"Like to know her?" drawled the Hon. Peter.

Richard replied indifferently, "No," and Mrs. Mount passed out of sight
and out of the conversation.

The young man wrote submissive letters to his father. "I have remained
here waiting to see you now five weeks," he wrote. "I have written to you
three letters, and you do not reply to them. Let me tell you again how
sincerely I desire and pray that you will come, or permit me to come to
you and throw myself at your feet, and beg my forgiveness, and hers. She
as earnestly implores it. Indeed, I am very wretched, sir. Believe me,
there is nothing I would not do to regain your esteem and the love I fear
I have unhappily forfeited. I will remain another week in the hope of
hearing from you, or seeing you. I beg of you, sir, not to drive me mad.
Whatever you ask of me I will consent to."

"Nothing he would not do!" the baronet commented as he read. "There is
nothing he would not do! He will remain another week and give me that
final chance! And it is I who drive him mad! Already he is beginning to
cast his retribution on my shoulders."

Sir Austin had really gone down to Wales to be out of the way. A
Shaddock-Dogmatist does not meet misfortune without hearing of it, and
the author of The Pilgrim'S Scrip in trouble found London too hot for
him. He quitted London to take refuge among the mountains; living there
in solitary commune with a virgin Note-book.

Some indefinite scheme was in his head in this treatment of his son. Had
he construed it, it would have looked ugly; and it settled to a vague
principle that the young man should be tried and tested.

"Let him learn to deny himself something. Let him live with his equals
for a term. If he loves me he will read my wishes." Thus he explained his
principle to Lady Blandish.

The lady wrote: "You speak of a term. Till when? May I name one to him?
It is the dreadful uncertainty that reduces him to despair. That, and
nothing else. Pray be explicit."

In return, he distantly indicated Richard's majority.

How could Lady Blandish go and ask the young man to wait a year away from
his wife? Her instinct began to open a wide eye on the idol she
worshipped.

When people do not themselves know what they mean, they succeed in
deceiving and imposing upon others. Not only was Lady Blandish mystified;
Mrs. Doria, who pierced into the recesses of everybody's mind, and had
always been in the habit of reading off her brother from infancy, and had
never known herself to be once wrong about him, she confessed she was
quite at a loss to comprehend Austin's principle. "For principle he has,"
said Mrs. Doria; "he never acts without one. But what it is, I cannot at
present perceive. If he would write, and command the boy to await his
return, all would be clear. He allows us to go and fetch him, and then
leaves us all in a quandary. It must be some woman's influence. That is
the only way to account for it."

"Singular!" interjected Adrian, "what pride women have in their sex!
Well, I have to tell you, my dear aunt, that the day after to-morrow I
hand my charge over to your keeping. I can't hold him in an hour longer.
I've had to leash him with lies till my invention's exhausted. I petition
to have them put down to the chief's account, but when the stream runs
dry I can do no more. The last was, that I had heard from him desiring me
to have the South-west bedroom ready for him on Tuesday proximate. 'So!'
says my son, 'I'll wait till then,' and from the gigantic effort he
exhibited in coming to it, I doubt any human power's getting him to wait
longer."

"We must, we must detain him," said Mrs. Doria. "If we do not, I am
convinced Austin will do something rash that he will for ever repent. He
will marry that woman, Adrian. Mark my words. Now with any other young
man!... But Richard's education! that ridiculous System!... Has he no
distraction? nothing to amuse him?"

"Poor boy! I suppose he wants his own particular playfellow."

The wise youth had to bow to a reproof.

"I tell you, Adrian, he will marry that woman."

"My dear aunt! Can a chaste man do aught more commendable?"

"Has the boy no object we can induce him to follow?--If he had but a
profession!"

"What say you to the regeneration of the streets of London, and the
profession of moral-scavenger, aunt? I assure you I have served a month's
apprenticeship with him. We sally forth on the tenth hour of the night. A
female passes. I hear him groan. 'Is she one of them, Adrian?' I am
compelled to admit she is not the saint he deems it the portion of every
creature wearing petticoats to be. Another groan; an evident internal,
'It cannot be--and yet!'...that we hear on the stage. Rollings of eyes:
impious questionings of the Creator of the universe; savage mutterings
against brutal males; and then we meet a second young person, and repeat
the performance--of which I am rather tired. It would be all very well,
but he turns upon me, and lectures me because I don't hire a house, and
furnish it for all the women one meets to live in in purity. Now that's
too much to ask of a quiet man. Master Thompson has latterly relieved me,
I'm happy to say."

Mrs. Doria thought her thoughts.

"Has Austin written to you since you were in town?"

"Not an Aphorism!" returned Adrian.

"I must see Richard to-morrow morning," Mrs. Doria ended the colloquy by
saying.

The result of her interview with her nephew was, that Richard made no
allusion to a departure on the Tuesday; and for many days afterward he
appeared to have an absorbing business on his hands: but what it was
Adrian did not then learn, and his admiration of Mrs. Doria's genius for
management rose to a very high pitch.

On a morning in October they had an early visitor in the person of the
Hon. Peter, whom they had not seen for a week or more.

"Gentlemen," he said, flourishing his cane in his most affable manner,
"I've come to propose to you to join us in a little dinner-party at
Richmond. Nobody's in town, you know. London's as dead as a stock-fish.
Nothing but the scrapings to offer you. But the weather's fine: I flatter
myself you'll find the company agreeable, What says my friend Feverel?"

Richard begged to be excused.

"No, no: positively you must come," said the Hon. Peter. "I've had some
trouble to get them together to relieve the dulness of your
incarceration. Richmond's within the rules of your prison. You can be
back by night. Moonlight on the water--lovely woman. We've engaged a
city-barge to pull us back. Eight oars--I'm not sure it isn't sixteen.
Come--the word!"

Adrian was for going. Richard said he had an appointment with Ripton.

"You're in for another rick, you two," said Adrian. "Arrange that we go.
You haven't seen the cockney's Paradise. Abjure Blazes, and taste of
peace, my son."

After some persuasion, Richard yawned wearily, and got up, and threw
aside the care that was on him, saying, "Very well. Just as you like.
We'll take old Rip with us."

Adrian consulted Brayder's eye at this. The Hon. Peter briskly declared
he should be delighted to have Feverel's friend, and offered to take them
all down in his drag.

"If you don't get a match on to swim there with the tide--eh, Feverel, my
boy?"

Richard replied that he had given up that sort of thing, at which Brayder
communicated a queer glance to Adrian, and applauded the youth.

Richmond was under a still October sun. The pleasant landscape, bathed in
Autumn, stretched from the foot of the hill to a red horizon haze. The
day was like none that Richard vividly remembered. It touched no link in
the chain of his recollection. It was quiet, and belonged to the spirit
of the season.

Adrian had divined the character of the scrapings they were to meet.
Brayder introduced them to one or two of the men, hastily and in rather
an undervoice, as a thing to get over. They made their bow to the first
knot of ladies they encountered. Propriety was observed strictly, even to
severity. The general talk was of the weather. Here and there a lady
would seize a button-hole or any little bit of the habiliments, of the
man she was addressing; and if it came to her to chide him, she did it
with more than a forefinger. This, however, was only here and there, and
a privilege of intimacy.

Where ladies are gathered together, the Queen of the assemblage may be
known by her Court of males. The Queen of the present gathering leaned
against a corner of the open window, surrounded by a stalwart Court, in
whom a practised eye would have discerned guardsmen, and Ripton, with a
sinking of the heart, apprehended lords. They were fine men, offering
inanimate homage. The trim of their whiskerage, the cut of their coats,
the high-bred indolence in their aspect, eclipsed Ripton's sense of
self-esteem. But they kindly looked over him. Occasionally one committed
a momentary outrage on him with an eye-glass, seeming to cry out in a
voice of scathing scorn, "Who's this?" and Ripton got closer to his hero
to justify his humble pretensions to existence and an identity in the
shadow of him. Richard gazed about. Heroes do not always know what to say
or do; and the cold bath before dinner in strange company is one of the
instances. He had recognized his superb Bellona in the lady by the garden
window. For Brayder the men had nods and yokes, the ladies a pretty
playfulness. He was very busy, passing between the groups, chatting,
laughing, taking the feminine taps he received, and sometimes returning
them in sly whispers. Adrian sat down and crossed his legs, looking
amused and benignant.

"Whose dinner is it?" Ripton heard a mignonne beauty ask of a cavalier.

"Mount's, I suppose," was the answer.

"Where is he? Why don't he come?"

"An affaire, I fancy."

"There he is again! How shamefully he treats Mrs. Mount!"

"She don't seem to cry over it."

Mrs. Mount was flashing her teeth and eyes with laughter at one of her
Court, who appeared to be Fool.

Dinner was announced. The ladies proclaimed extravagant appetites.
Brayder posted his three friends. Ripton found himself under the lee of a
dame with a bosom. On the other aide of him was the mignonne. Adrian was
at the lower end of the table. Ladies were in profusion, and he had his
share. Brayder drew Richard from seat to seat. A happy man had
established himself next to Mrs. Mount. Him Brayder hailed to take the
head of the table. The happy man objected, Brayder continued urgent, the
lady tenderly insisted, the happy man grimaced, dropped into the post of
honour, strove to look placable. Richard usurped his chair, and was not
badly welcomed by his neighbour.

Then the dinner commenced, and had all the attention of the company, till
the flying of the first champagne-cork gave the signal, and a hum began
to spread. Sparkling wine, that looseneth the tongue, and displayeth the
verity, hath also the quality of colouring it. The ladies laughed high;
Richard only thought them gay and natural. They flung back in their
chairs and laughed to tears; Ripton thought only of the pleasure he had
in their society. The champagne-corks continued a regular file-firing.

"Where have you been lately? I haven't seen you in the park," said Mrs.
Mount to Richard.

"No," he replied, "I've not been there." The question seemed odd: she
spoke so simply that it did not impress him. He emptied his glass, and
had it filled again.

The Hon. Peter did most of the open talking, which related to horses,
yachting, opera, and sport generally: who was ruined; by what horse, or
by what woman. He told one or two of Richard's feats. Fair smiles
rewarded the hero.

"Do you bet?" said Mrs. Mount.

"Only on myself," returned Richard.

"Bravo!" cried his Bellona, and her eye sent a lingering delirious
sparkle across her brimming glass at him.

"I'm sure you're a safe one to back," she added, and seemed to scan his
points approvingly.

Richard's cheeks mounted bloom.

"Don't you adore champagne?" quoth the dame with a bosom to Ripton.

"Oh, yes!" answered Ripton, with more candour than accuracy, "I always
drink it."

"Do you indeed?" said the enraptured bosom, ogling him. "You would be a
friend, now! I hope you don't object to a lady joining you now and then.
Champagne's my folly."

A laugh was circling among the ladies of whom Adrian was the centre;
first low, and as he continued some narration, peals resounded, till
those excluded from the fun demanded the cue, and ladies leaned behind
gentlemen to take it up, and formed an electric chain of laughter. Each
one, as her ear received it, caught up her handkerchief, and laughed, and
looked shocked afterwards, or looked shocked and then spouted laughter.
The anecdote might have been communicated to the bewildered cavaliers,
but coming to a lady of a demurer cast, she looked shocked without
laughing, and reproved the female table, in whose breasts it was
consigned to burial: but here and there a man's head was seen bent, and a
lady's mouth moved, though her face was not turned toward him, and a
man's broad laugh was presently heard, while the lady gazed unconsciously
before her, and preserved her gravity if she could escape any other
lady's eyes; failing in which, handkerchiefs were simultaneously seized,
and a second chime arose, till the tickling force subsided to a few
chance bursts.

What nonsense it is that my father writes about women! thought Richard.
He says they can't laugh, and don't understand humour. It comes, he
reflected, of his shutting himself from the world. And the idea that he
was seeing the world, and feeling wiser, flattered him. He talked
fluently to his dangerous Bellona. He gave her some reminiscences of
Adrian's whimsies.

"Oh!" said she, "that's your tutor, is it!" She eyed the young man as if
she thought he must go far and fast.

Ripton felt a push. "Look at that," said the bosom, fuming utter disgust.
He was directed to see a manly arm round the waist of the mignonne. "Now
that's what I don't like in company," the bosom inflated to observe with
sufficient emphasis. "She always will allow it with everybody. Give her a
nudge."

Ripton protested that he dared not; upon which she said, "Then I will";
and inclined her sumptuous bust across his lap, breathing wine in his
face, and gave the nudge. The mignonne turned an inquiring eye on Ripton;
a mischievous spark shot from it. She laughed, and said; "Aren't you
satisfied with the old girl?"

"Impudence!" muttered the bosom, growing grander and redder.

"Do, do fill her glass, and keep her quiet--she drinks port when there's
no more champagne," said the mignonne.

The bosom revenged herself by whispering to Ripton scandal of the
mignonne, and between them he was enabled to form a correcter estimate of
the company, and quite recovered from his original awe: so much so as to
feel a touch of jealousy at seeing his lively little neighbour still held
in absolute possession.

Mrs. Mount did not come out much; but there was a deferential manner in
the bearing of the men toward her, which those haughty creatures accord
not save to clever women; and she contrived to hold the talk with three
or four at the head of the table while she still had passages aside with
Richard.

The port and claret went very well after the champagne. The ladies here
did not ignominiously surrender the field to the gentlemen; they
maintained their position with honour. Silver was seen far out on Thames.
The wine ebbed, and the laughter. Sentiment and cigars took up the
wondrous tale.

"Oh, what a lovely night!" said the ladies, looking above.

"Charming," said the gentlemen, looking below.

The faint-smelling cool Autumn air was pleasant after the feast. Fragrant
weeds burned bright about the garden.

"We are split into couples," said Adrian to Richard, who was standing
alone, eying the landscape. "Tis the influence of the moon! Apparently we
are in Cyprus. How has my son enjoyed himself? How likes he the society
of Aspasia? I feel like a wise Greek to-night."

Adrian was jolly, and rolled comfortably as he talked. Ripton had been
carried off by the sentimental bosom. He came up to them and whispered:
"By Jove, Ricky! do you know what sort of women these are?"

Richard said he thought them a nice sort.

"Puritan!" exclaimed Adrian, slapping Ripton on the back. "Why didn't you
get tipsy, sir? Don't you ever intoxicate yourself except at lawful
marriages? Reveal to us what you have done with the portly dame?"

Ripton endured his bantering that he might hang about Richard, and watch
over him. He was jealous of his innocent Beauty's husband being in
proximity with such women. Murmuring couples passed them to and fro.

"By Jove, Ricky!" Ripton favoured his friend with another hard whisper,
"there's a woman smoking!"

"And why not, O Riptonus?" said Adrian. "Art unaware that woman
cosmopolitan is woman consummate? and dost grumble to pay the small price
for the splendid gem?"

"Well, I don't like women to smoke," said plain Ripton.

"Why mayn't they do what men do?" the hero cried impetuously. "I hate
that contemptible narrow-mindedness. It's that makes the ruin and horrors
I see. Why mayn't they do what men do? I like the women who are brave
enough not to be hypocrites. By heaven! if these women are bad, I like
them better than a set of hypocritical creatures who are all show, and
deceive you in the end."

"Bravo!" shouted Adrian. "There speaks the regenerator."

Ripton, as usual, was crushed by his leader. He had no argument. He still
thought women ought not to smoke; and he thought of one far away, lonely
by the sea, who was perfect without being cosmopolitan.

The Pilgrim's Scrip remarks that: "Young men take joy in nothing so much
as the thinking women Angels: and nothing sours men of experience more
than knowing that all are not quite so."

The Aphorist would have pardoned Ripton Thompson his first Random
extravagance, had he perceived the simple warm-hearted worship of
feminine goodness Richard's young bride had inspired in the breast of the
youth. It might possibly have taught him to put deeper trust in our
nature.

Ripton thought of her, and had a feeling of sadness. He wandered about
the grounds by himself, went through an open postern, and threw himself
down among some bushes on the slope of the hill. Lying there, and
meditating, he became aware of voices conversing.

"What does he want?" said a woman's voice. "It's another of his
villanies, I know. Upon my honour, Brayder, when I think of what I have
to reproach him for, I think I must go mad, or kill him."

"Tragic!" said the Hon. Peter. "Haven't you revenged yourself, Bella,
pretty often? Best deal openly. This is a commercial transaction. You ask
for money, and you are to have it--on the conditions: double the sum, and
debts paid."

"He applies to me!"

"You know, my dear Bella, it has long been all up between you. I think
Mount has behaved very well, considering all he knows. He's not easily
hoodwinked, you know. He resigns himself to his fate and follows other
game."

"Then the condition is, that I am to seduce this young man?"

"My dear Bella! you strike your bird like a hawk. I didn't say seduce.
Hold him in--play with him. Amuse him."

"I don't understand half-measures."

"Women seldom do."

"How I hate you, Brayder!"

"I thank your ladyship."

The two walked farther. Ripton had heard some little of the colloquy. He
left the spot in a serious mood, apprehensive of something dark to the
people he loved, though he had no idea of what the Hon. Peter's
stipulation involved.

On the voyage back to town, Richard was again selected to sit by Mrs.
Mount. Brayder and Adrian started the jokes. The pair of parasites got on
extremely well together. Soft fell the plash of the oars; softly the
moonlight curled around them; softly the banks glided by. The ladies were
in a state of high sentiment. They sang without request. All deemed the
British ballad-monger an appropriate interpreter of their emotions. After
good wine, and plenty thereof, fair throats will make men of taste
swallow that remarkable composer. Eyes, lips, hearts; darts and smarts
and sighs; beauty, duty; bosom, blossom; false one, farewell! To this
pathetic strain they melted. Mrs. Mount, though strongly requested,
declined to sing. She preserved her state. Under the tall aspens of
Brentford-ait, and on they swept, the white moon in their wake. Richard's
hand lay open by his side. Mrs. Mount's little white hand by misadventure
fell into it. It was not pressed, or soothed for its fall, or made
intimate with eloquent fingers. It lay there like a bit of snow on the
cold ground. A yellow leaf wavering down from the aspens struck Richard's
cheek, and he drew away the very hand to throw back his hair and smooth
his face, and then folded his arms, unconscious of offence. He was
thinking ambitiously of his life: his blood was untroubled, his brain
calmly working.

"Which is the more perilous?" is a problem put by the Pilgrim: "To meet
the temptings of Eve, or to pique her?"

Mrs. Mount stared at the young man as at a curiosity, and turned to flirt
with one of her Court. The Guardsmen were mostly sentimental. One or two
rattled, and one was such a good-humoured fellow that Adrian could not
make him ridiculous. The others seemed to give themselves up to a silent
waxing in length of limb. However far they sat removed, everybody was
entangled in their legs. Pursuing his studies, Adrian came to the
conclusion, that the same close intellectual and moral affinity which he
had discovered to exist between our nobility and our yeomanry, is to be
observed between the Guardsman class, and that of the corps de ballet:
they both live by the strength of their legs, where also their wits, if
they do not altogether reside there, are principally developed: both are
volage; wine, tobacco, and the moon, influence both alike; and admitting
the one marked difference that does exist, it is, after all, pretty
nearly the same thing to be coquetting and sinning on two legs as on the
point of a toe.

A long Guardsman with a deep bass voice sang a doleful song about the
twining tendrils of the heart ruthlessly torn, but required urgent
persuasions and heavy trumpeting of his lungs to get to the end: before
he had accomplished it, Adrian had contrived to raise a laugh in his
neighbourhood, so that the company was divided, and the camp split:
jollity returned to one-half, while sentiment held the other. Ripton,
blotted behind the bosom, was only lucky in securing a higher degree of
heat than was possible for the rest. "Are you cold?" she would ask,
smiling charitably.

"I am," said the mignonne, as if to excuse her conduct.

"You always appear to be," the fat one sniffed and snapped.

"Won't you warm two, Mrs. Mortimer?" said the naughty little woman.

Disdain prevented any further notice of her. Those familiar with the
ladies enjoyed their sparring, which was frequent. The mignonne was heard
to whisper: "That poor fellow will certainly be stewed."

Very prettily the ladies took and gave warmth, for the air on the water
was chill and misty. Adrian had beside him the demure one who had stopped
the circulation of his anecdote. She in nowise objected to the fair
exchange, but said "Hush!" betweenwhiles.

Past Kew and Hammersmith, on the cool smooth water; across Putney reach;
through Battersea bridge; and the City grew around them, and the shadows
of great mill-factories slept athwart the moonlight.

All the ladies prattled sweetly of a charming day when they alighted on
land. Several cavaliers crushed for the honour of conducting Mrs. Mount
to her home.

"My brougham's here; I shall go alone," said Mrs. Mount. "Some one
arrange my shawl."

She turned her back to Richard, who had a view of a delicate neck as he
manipulated with the bearing of a mailed knight.

"Which way are you going?" she asked carelessly, and, to his reply as to
the direction, said: "Then I can give you a lift," and she took his arm
with a matter-of-course air, and walked up the stairs with him.

Ripton saw what had happened. He was going to follow: the portly dame
retained him, and desired him to get her a cab.

"Oh, you happy fellow!" said the bright-eyed mignonne, passing by.

Ripton procured the cab, and stuffed it full without having to get into
it himself.

"Try and let him come in too?" said the persecuting creature, again
passing.

"Take liberties with pour men--you shan't with me," retorted the angry
bosom, and drove off.

"So she's been and gone and run away and left him after all his trouble!"
cried the pert little thing, peering into Ripton's eyes. "Now you'll
never be so foolish as to pin your faith to fat women again. There! he
shall be made happy another time." She gave his nose a comical tap, and
tripped away with her possessor.

Ripton rather forgot his friend for some minutes: Random thoughts laid
hold of him. Cabs and carriages rattled past. He was sure he had been
among members of the nobility that day, though when they went by him now
they only recognized him with an effort of the eyelids. He began to think
of the day with exultation, as an event. Recollections of the mignonne
were captivating. "Blue eyes--just what I like! And such a little
impudent nose, and red lips, pouting--the very thing I like! And her
hair? darkish, I think--say brown. And so saucy, and light on her feet.
And kind she is, or she wouldn't have talked to me like that." Thus, with
a groaning soul, he pictured her. His reason voluntarily consigned her to
the aristocracy as a natural appanage: but he did amorously wish that
Fortune had made a lord of him.

Then his mind reverted to Mrs. Mount, and the strange bits of the
conversation he had heard on the hill. He was not one to suspect anybody
positively. He was timid of fixing a suspicion. It hovered indefinitely,
and clouded people, without stirring him to any resolve. Still the
attentions of the lady toward Richard were queer. He endeavoured to
imagine they were in the nature of things, because Richard was so
handsome that any woman must take to him. "But he's married," said
Ripton, "and he mustn't go near these people if he's married." Not a high
morality, perhaps better than none at all: better for the world were it
practised more. He thought of Richard along with that sparkling dame,
alone with her. The adorable beauty of his dear bride, her pure heavenly
face, swam before him. Thinking of her, he lost sight of the mignonne who
had made him giddy.

He walked to Richard's hotel, and up and down the street there, hoping
every minute to hear his step; sometimes fancying he might have returned
and gone to bed. Two o'clock struck. Ripton could not go away. He was
sure he should not sleep if he did. At last the cold sent him homeward,
and leaving the street, on the moonlight side of Piccadilly he met his
friend patrolling with his head up and that swing of the feet proper to
men who are chanting verses.

"Old Rip!" cried Richard, cheerily. "What on earth are you doing here at
this hour of the morning?"

Ripton muttered of his pleasure at meeting him. "I wanted to shake your
hand before I went home."

Richard smiled on him in an amused kindly way. "That all? You may shake
my hand any day, like a true man as you are, old Rip! I've been speaking
about you. Do you know, that--Mrs. Mount--never saw you all the time at
Richmond, or in the boat!"

"Oh!" Ripton said, well assured that he was a dwarf "you saw her safe
home?"

"Yes. I've been there for the last couple of hours--talking. She talks
capitally: she's wonderfully clever. She's very like a man, only much
nicer. I like her."

"But, Richard, excuse me--I'm sure I don't mean to offend you--but now
you're married...perhaps you couldn't help seeing her home, but I think
you really indeed oughtn't to have gone upstairs."

Ripton delivered this opinion with a modest impressiveness.

"What do you mean?" said Richard. "You don't suppose I care for any woman
but my little darling down there." He laughed.

"No; of course not. That's absurd. What I mean is, that people perhaps
will--you know, they do--they say all manner of things, and that makes
unhappiness; and I do wish you were going home to-morrow, Ricky. I mean,
to your dear wife." Ripton blushed and looked away as he spoke.

The hero gave one of his scornful glances. "So you're anxious about my
reputation. I hate that way of looking on women. Because they have been
once misled--look how much weaker they are!--because the world has given
them an ill fame, you would treat them as contagious and keep away from
them for the sake of your character!

"It would be different with me," quoth Ripton.

"How?" asked the hero.

"Because I'm worse than you," was all the logical explanation Ripton was
capable of.

"I do hope you will go home soon," he added.

"Yes," said Richard, "and I, so do I hope so. But I've work to do now. I
dare not, I cannot, leave it. Lucy would be the last to ask me;--you saw
her letter yesterday. Now listen to me, Rip. I want to make you be just
to women."

Then he read Ripton a lecture on erring women, speaking of them as if he
had known them and studied them for years. Clever, beautiful, but
betrayed by love, it was the first duty of all true men to cherish and
redeem them. "We turn them into curses, Rip; these divine creatures." And
the world suffered for it. That--that was the root of all the evil in the
world!

"I don't feel anger or horror at these poor women, Rip! It's strange. I
knew what they were when we came home in the boat. But I do--it tears my
heart to see a young girl given over to an old man--a man she doesn't
love. That's shame!--Don't speak of it."

Forgetting to contest the premiss, that all betrayed women are betrayed
by love, Ripton was quite silenced. He, like most young men, had pondered
somewhat on this matter, and was inclined to be sentimental when he was
not hungry. They walked in the moonlight by the railings of the park.
Richard harangued at leisure, while Ripton's teeth chattered. Chivalry
might be dead, but still there was something to do, went the strain. The
lady of the day had not been thrown in the hero's path without an object,
he said; and he was sadly right there. He did not express the thing
clearly; nevertheless Ripton understood him to mean, he intended to
rescue that lady from further transgressions, and show a certain scorn of
the world. That lady, and then other ladies unknown, were to be rescued.
Ripton was to help. He and Ripton were to be the knights of this
enterprise. When appealed to, Ripton acquiesced, and shivered. Not only
were they to be knights, they would have to be Titans, for the powers of
the world, the spurious ruling Social Gods, would have to be defied and
overthrown. And Titan number one flung up his handsome bold face as if to
challenge base Jove on the spot; and Titan number two strained the upper
button of his coat to meet across his pocket-handkerchief on his chest,
and warmed his fingers under his coat-tails. The moon had fallen from her
high seat and was in the mists of the West, when he was allowed to seek
his blankets, and the cold acting on his friend's eloquence made Ripton's
flesh very contrite. The poor fellow had thinner blood than the hero; but
his heart was good. By the time he had got a little warmth about him, his
heart gratefully strove to encourage him in the conception of becoming a
knight and a Titan; and so striving Ripton fell asleep and dreamed.




CHAPTER XXXVII

Behold the hero embarked in the redemption of an erring beautiful woman.

"Alas!" writes the Pilgrim at this very time to Lady Blandish, "I cannot
get that legend of the Serpent from me, the more I think. Has he not
caught you, and ranked you foremost in his legions? For see: till you
were fashioned, the fruits hung immobile on the boughs. They swayed
before us, glistening and cold. The hand must be eager that plucked them.
They did not come down to us, and smile, and speak our language, and read
our thoughts, and know when to fly, when to follow! how surely to have
us!

"Do but mark one of you standing openly in the track of the Serpent. What
shall be done with her? I fear the world is wiser than its judges! Turn
from her, says the world. By day the sons of the world do. It darkens,
and they dance together downward. Then comes there one of the world's
elect who deems old counsel devilish; indifference to the end of evil
worse than its pursuit. He comes to reclaim her. From deepest bane will
he bring her back to highest blessing. Is not that a bait already? Poor
fish! 'tis wondrous flattering. The Serpent has slimed her so to secure
him! With slow weary steps he draws her into light: she clings to him;
she is human; part of his work, and he loves it. As they mount upward, he
looks on her more, while she, it may be, looks above. What has touched
him? What has passed out of her, and into him? The Serpent laughs below.
At the gateways of the Sun they fall together!"

This alliterative production was written without any sense of the peril
that makes prophecy.

It suited Sir Austin to write thus. It was a channel to his acrimony
moderated through his philosophy. The letter was a reply to a vehement
entreaty from Lady Blandish for him to come up to Richard and forgive him
thoroughly: Richard's name was not mentioned in it.

"He tries to be more than he is," thought the lady: and she began
insensibly to conceive him less than he was.

The baronet was conscious of a certain false gratification in his son's
apparent obedience to his wishes and complete submission; a gratification
he chose to accept as his due, without dissecting or accounting for it.
The intelligence reiterating that Richard waited, and still waited;
Richard's letters, and more his dumb abiding and practical penitence;
vindicated humanity sufficiently to stop the course of virulent
aphorisms. He could speak, we have seen, in sorrow for this frail nature
of ours, that he had once stood forth to champion. "But how long will
this last?" he demanded, with the air of Hippias. He did not reflect how
long it had lasted. Indeed, his indigestion of wrath had made of him a
moral Dyspepsy.

It was not mere obedience that held Richard from the aims of his young
wife: nor was it this new knightly enterprise he had presumed to
undertake. Hero as he was, a youth, open to the insane promptings of hot
blood, he was not a fool. There had been talk between him and Mrs. Doria
of his mother. Now that he had broken from his father, his heart spoke
for her. She lived, he knew: he knew no more. Words painfully hovering
along the borders of plain speech had been communicated to him, filling
him with moody imaginings. If he thought of her, the red was on his face,
though he could not have said why. But now, after canvassing the conduct
of his father, and throwing him aside as a terrible riddle, he asked Mrs.
Doria to tell him of his other parent. As softly as she could she told
the story. To her the shame was past: she could weep for the poor lady.
Richard dropped no tears. Disgrace of this kind is always present to a
son, and, educated as he had been, these tidings were a vivid fire in his
brain. He resolved to hunt her out, and take her from the man. Here was
work set to his hand. All her dear husband did was right to Lucy. She
encouraged him to stay for that purpose, thinking it also served another.
There was Tom Bakewell to watch over Lucy: there was work for him to do.
Whether it would please his father he did not stop to consider. As to the
justice of the act, let us say nothing.

On Ripton devolved the humbler task of grubbing for Sandoe's place of
residence; and as he was unacquainted with the name by which the poet now
went in private, his endeavours were not immediately successful. The
friends met in the evening at Lady Blandish's town-house, or at the
Foreys', where Mrs. Doria procured the reverer of the Royal Martyr, and
staunch conservative, a favourable reception. Pity, deep pity for
Richard's conduct Ripton saw breathing out of Mrs. Doria. Algernon
Feverel treated his nephew with a sort of rough commiseration, as a young
fellow who had run off the road.

Pity was in Lady Blandish's eyes, though for a different cause. She
doubted if she did well in seconding his father's unwise
scheme--supposing him to have a scheme. She saw the young husband
encompassed by dangers at a critical time. Not a word of Mrs. Mount had
been breathed to her, but the lady had some knowledge of life. She
touched on delicate verges to the baronet in her letters, and he
understood her well enough. "If he loves this person to whom he has bound
himself, what fear for him? Or are you coming to think it something that
bears the name of love because we have to veil the rightful appellation?"
So he responded, remote among the mountains. She tried very hard to speak
plainly. Finally he came to say that he denied himself the pleasure of
seeing his son specially, that he for a time might be put to the test the
lady seemed to dread. This was almost too much for Lady Blandish. Love's
charity boy so loftily serene now that she saw him half denuded--a thing
of shanks and wrists--was a trial for her true heart.

Going home at night Richard would laugh at the faces made about his
marriage. "We'll carry the day, Rip, my Lucy and I! or I'll do it
alone--what there is to do." He slightly adverted to a natural want of
courage in women, which Ripton took to indicate that his Beauty was
deficient in that quality. Up leapt the Old Dog; "I'm sure there never
was a braver creature upon earth, Richard! She's as brave as she's
lovely, I'll swear she is! Look how she behaved that day! How her voice
sounded! She was trembling... Brave? She'd follow you into battle,
Richard!"

And Richard rejoined: "Talk on, dear old Rip! She's my darling love,
whatever she is! And she is gloriously lovely. No eyes are like hers.
I'll go down to-morrow morning the first thing."

Ripton only wondered the husband of such a treasure could remain apart
from it. So thought Richard for a space.

"But if I go, Rip," he said despondently, "if I go for a day even I shall
have undone all my work with my father. She says it herself--you saw it
in her last letter."

"Yes," Ripton assented, and the words "Please remember me to dear Mr.
Thompson," fluttered about the Old Dog's heart.

It came to pass that Mrs. Berry, having certain business that led her
through Kensington Gardens, spied a figure that she had once dandled in
long clothes, and helped make a man of, if ever woman did. He was walking
under the trees beside a lady, talking to her, not indifferently. The
gentleman was her bridegroom and her babe. "I know his back," said Mrs.
Berry, as if she had branded a mark on it in infancy. But the lady was
not her bride. Mrs. Berry diverged from the path, and got before them on
the left flank; she stared, retreated, and came round upon the right.
There was that in the lady's face which Mrs. Berry did not like. Her
innermost question was, why he was not walking with his own wife? She
stopped in front of them. They broke, and passed about her. The lady made
a laughing remark to him, whereat he turned to look, and Mrs. Berry
bobbed. She had to bob a second time, and then he remembered the worthy
creature, and hailed her Penelope, shaking her hand so that he put her in
countenance again. Mrs. Berry was extremely agitated. He dismissed her,
promising to call upon her in the evening. She heard the lady slip out
something from a side of her lip, and they both laughed as she toddled
off to a sheltering tree to wipe a corner of each eye. "I don't like the
looks of that woman," she said, and repeated it resolutely.

"Why doesn't he walk arm-in-arm with her?" was her neat inquiry. "Where's
his wife?" succeeded it. After many interrogations of the sort, she
arrived at naming the lady a bold-faced thing; adding subsequently,
brazen. The lady had apparently shown Mrs. Berry that she wished to get
rid of her, and had checked the outpouring of her emotions on the breast
of her babe. "I know a lady when I see one," said Mrs. Berry. "I haven't
lived with 'em for nothing; and if she's a lady bred and born, I wasn't
married in the church alive."

Then, if not a lady, what was she? Mrs. Berry desired to know: "She's
imitation lady, I'm sure she is!" Berry vowed. "I say she don't look
proper."

Establishing the lady to be a spurious article, however, what was one to
think of a married man in company with such? "Oh no! it ain't that!" Mrs.
Berry returned immediately on the charitable tack. "Belike it's some one
of his acquaintance 've married her for her looks, and he've just met
her.... Why it'd be as bad as my Berry!" the relinquished spouse of Berry
ejaculated, in horror at the idea of a second man being so monstrous in
wickedness. "Just coupled, too!" Mrs. Berry groaned on the suspicious
side of the debate. "And such a sweet young thing for his wife! But no,
I'll never believe it. Not if he tell me so himself! And men don't do
that," she whimpered.

Women are swift at coming to conclusions in these matters; soft women
exceedingly swift: and soft women who have been betrayed are rapid beyond
measure. Mrs. Berry had not cogitated long ere she pronounced distinctly
and without a shadow of dubiosity: "My opinion is--married or not
married, and wheresomever he pick her up--she's nothin' more nor less
than a Bella Donna!" as which poisonous plant she forthwith registered
the lady in the botanical note-book of her brain. It would have
astonished Mrs. Mount to have heard her person so accurately hit off at a
glance.

In the evening Richard made good his promise, accompanied by Ripton. Mrs.
Berry opened the door to them. She could not wait to get him into the
parlour. "You're my own blessed babe; and I'm as good as your mother,
though I didn't suck ye, bein' a maid!" she cried, falling into his arms,
while Richard did his best to support the unexpected burden. Then
reproaching him tenderly for his guile--at mention of which Ripton
chuckled, deeming it his own most honourable portion of the plot--Mrs.
Berry led them into the parlour, and revealed to Richard who she was, and
how she had tossed him, and hugged him, and kissed him all over, when he
was only that big--showing him her stumpy fat arm. "I kissed ye from head
to tail, I did," said Mrs. Berry, "and you needn't be ashamed of it. It's
be hoped you'll never have nothin' worse come t'ye, my dear!"

Richard assured her he was not a bit ashamed, but warned her that she
must not do it now, Mrs. Berry admitting it was out of the question now,
and now that he had a wife, moreover. The young men laughed, and Ripton
laughing over-loudly drew on himself Mrs. Berry's attention: "But that
Mr. Thompson there--however he can look me in the face after his
inn'cence! helping blindfold an old woman! though I ain't sorry for what
I did--that I'm free for to say, and its' over, and blessed be all! Amen!
So now where is she and how is she, Mr. Richard, my dear--it's only
cuttin' off the 's' and you are as you was.--Why didn't ye bring her with
ye to see her old Berry?"

Richard hurriedly explained that Lucy was still in the Isle of Wight.

"Oh! and you've left her for a day or two?" said Mrs. Berry.

"Good God! I wish it had been a day or two," cried Richard.

"Ah! and how long have it been?" asked Mrs. Berry, her heart beginning to
beat at his manner of speaking.

"Don't talk about it," said Richard.

"Oh! you never been dudgeonin' already? Oh! you haven't been peckin' at
one another yet?" Mrs. Berry exclaimed.

Ripton interposed to tell her such fears were unfounded.

"Then how long ha' you been divided?"

In a guilty voice Ripton stammered "since September."

"September!" breathed Mrs. Berry, counting on her fingers, "September,
October, Nov--two months and more! nigh three! A young married husband
away from the wife of his bosom nigh three months! Oh my! Oh my! what do
that mean?"

"My father sent for me--I'm waiting to see him," said Richard. A few more
words helped Mrs. Berry to comprehend the condition of affairs. Then Mrs.
Berry spread her lap, flattened out her hands, fixed her eyes, and spoke.

"My dear young gentleman!--I'd like to call ye my darlin' babe! I'm going
to speak as a mother to ye, whether ye likes it or no; and what old Berry
says, you won't mind, for she's had ye when there was no conventionals
about ye, and she has the feelin's of a mother to you, though humble her
state. If there's one that know matrimony it's me, my dear, though Berry
did give me no more but nine months of it and I've known the worst of
matrimony, which, if you wants to be woeful wise, there it is for ye. For
what have been my gain? That man gave me nothin' but his name; and Bessy
Andrews was as good as Bessy Berry, though both is 'Bs,' and says he, you
was 'A,' and now you's 'B,' so you're my A B, he says, write yourself
down that, he says, the bad man, with his jokes!--Berry went to service."
Mrs. Berry's softness came upon her. "So I tell ye, Berry went to
service. He left the wife of his bosom forlorn and he went to service;
because he were allays an ambitious man, and wasn't, so to speak, happy
out of his uniform--which was his livery--not even in my arms: and he let
me know it. He got among them kitchen sluts, which was my mournin' ready
made, and worse than a widow's cap to me, which is no shame to wear, and
some say becoming. There's no man as ever lived known better than my
Berry how to show his legs to advantage, and gals look at 'em. I don't
wonder now that Berry was prostrated. His temptations was strong, and his
flesh was weak. Then what I say is, that for a young married man--be he
whomsoever he may be--to be separated from the wife of his bosom--a young
sweet thing, and he an innocent young gentleman!--so to sunder, in their
state, and be kep' from each other, I say it's as bad as bad can be! For
what is matrimony, my dears? We're told it's a holy Ordnance. And why are
ye so comfortable in matrimony? For that ye are not a sinnin'! And they
that severs ye they tempts ye to stray: and you learn too late the
meanin' o' them blessin's of the priest--as it was ordained.
Separate--what comes? Fust it's like the circulation of your blood
a-stoppin'--all goes wrong. Then there's misunderstandings--ye've both
lost the key. Then, behold ye, there's birds o' prey hoverin' over each
on ye, and it's which'll be snapped up fust. Then--Oh, dear! Oh, dear! it
be like the devil come into the world again." Mrs. Berry struck her hands
and moaned. "A day I'll give ye: I'll go so far as a week: but there's
the outside. Three months dwellin' apart! That's not matrimony, it's
divorcin'! what can it be to her but widowhood? widowhood with no cap to
show for it! And what can it be to you, my dear? Think! you been a
bachelor three months! and a bachelor man," Mrs. Berry shook her head
most dolefully, "he ain't widow woman. I don't go to compare you to
Berry, my dear young gentleman. Some men's hearts is vagabonds born--they
must go astray--it's their natur' to. But all men are men, and I know the
foundation of 'em, by reason of my woe."

Mrs. Berry paused. Richard was humorously respectful to the sermon. The
truth in the good creature's address was not to be disputed, or despised,
notwithstanding the inclination to laugh provoked by her quaint way of
putting it. Ripton nodded encouragingly at every sentence, for he saw her
drift, and wished to second it.

Seeking for an illustration of her meaning, Mrs. Berry solemnly
continued: "We all know what checked prespiration is." But neither of the
young gentlemen could resist this. Out they burst in a roar of laughter.

"Laugh away," said Mrs. Berry. "I don't mind ye. I say again, we all do
know what checked prespiration is. It fly to the lungs, it gives ye
mortal inflammation, and it carries ye off. Then I say checked matrimony
is as bad. It fly to the heart, and it carries off the virtue that's in
ye, and you might as well be dead! Them that is joined it's their
salvation not to separate! It don't so much matter before it. That Mr.
Thompson there--if he go astray, it ain't from the blessed fold. He hurt
himself alone--not double, and belike treble, for who can say now what
may be? There's time for it. I'm for holding back young people so that
they knows their minds, howsomever they rattles about their hearts. I
ain't a speeder of matrimony, and good's my reason! but where it's been
done--where they're lawfully joined, and their bodies made one, I do say
this, that to put division between 'em then, it's to make wanderin'
comets of 'em--creatures without a objeck, and no soul can say what
they's good for but to rush about!"

Mrs. Berry here took a heavy breath, as one who has said her utmost for
the time being.

"My dear old girl," Richard went up to her and, applauding her on the
shoulder, "you're a very wise old woman. But you mustn't speak to me as
if I wanted to stop here. I'm compelled to. I do it for her good
chiefly."

"It's your father that's doin' it, my dear?"

"Well, I'm waiting his pleasure."

"A pretty pleasure! puttin' a snake in the nest of young turtle-doves!
And why don't she come up to you?"

"Well, that you must ask her. The fact is, she's a little timid girl--she
wants me to see him first, and when I've made all right, then she'll
come."

"A little timid girl!" cried Mrs. Berry. "Oh, lor', how she must ha'
deceived ye to make ye think that! Look at that ring," she held out her
finger, "he's a stranger: he's not my lawful! You know what ye did to me,
my dear. Could I get my own wedding-ring back from her? 'No!' says she,
firm as a rock, 'he said, with this ring I thee wed'--I think I see her
now, with her pretty eyes and lovesome locks--a darlin'!--And that ring
she'd keep to, come life, came death. And she must ha' been a rock for me
to give in to her in that. For what's the consequence? Here am I," Mrs.
Berry smoothed down the back of her hand mournfully, "here am I in a
strange ring, that's like a strange man holdin' of me, and me a-wearin'
of it just to seem decent, and feelin' all over no better than a b--a
big--that nasty came I can't abide!--I tell you, my dear, she ain't soft,
no!--except to the man of her heart; and the best of women's too soft
there--mores our sorrow!"

"Well, well!" said Richard, who thought he knew.

"I agree with you, Mrs. Berry," Ripton struck in, "Mrs. Richard would do
anything in the world her husband asked her, I'm quite sure."

"Bless you for your good opinion, Mr. Thompson! Why, see her! she ain't
frail on her feet; she looks ye straight in the eyes; she ain't one of
your hang-down misses. Look how she behaved at the ceremony!"

"Ah!" sighed Ripton.

"And if you'd ha' seen her when she spoke to me about my ring! Depend
upon it, my dear Mr. Richard, if she blinded you about the nerve she've
got, it was somethin' she thought she ought to do for your sake, and I
wish I'd been by to counsel her, poor blessed babe!--And how much longer,
now, can ye stay divided from that darlin'?"

Richard paced up and down.

"A father's will," urged Mrs. Berry, "that's a son's law; but he mustn't
go again' the laws of his nature to do it."

"Just be quiet at present--talk of other things, there's a good woman,"
said Richard.

Mrs. Berry meekly folded her arms.

"How strange, now, our meetin' like this! meetin' at all, too!" she
remarked contemplatively. "It's them advertisements! They brings people
together from the ends of the earth, for good or for bad. I often say,
there's more lucky accidents, or unlucky ones, since advertisements was
the rule, than ever there was before. They make a number of romances,
depend upon it! Do you walk much in the Gardens, my dear?"

"Now and then," said Richard.

"Very pleasant it is there with the fine folks and flowers and titled
people," continued Mrs. Berry. "That was a handsome woman you was
a-walkin' beside, this mornin'."

"Very," said Richard.

"She was a handsome woman! or I should say, is, for her day ain't past,
and she know it. I thought at first--by her back--it might ha' been your
aunt, Mrs. Forey; for she do step out well and hold up her shoulders:
straight as a dart she be! But when I come to see her face--Oh, dear me!
says I, this ain't one of the family. They none of 'em got such bold
faces--nor no lady as I know have. But she's a fine woman--that nobody
can gainsay."

Mrs. Berry talked further of the fine woman. It was a liberty she took to
speak in this disrespectful tone of her, and Mrs. Berry was quite aware
that she was laying herself open to rebuke. She had her end in view. No
rebuke was uttered, and during her talk she observed intercourse passing
between the eyes of the young men.

"Look here, Penelope," Richard stopped her at last. "Will it make you
comfortable if I tell you I'll obey the laws of my nature and go down at
the end of the week?"

"I'll thank the Lord of heaven if you do!" she exclaimed.

"Very well, then--be happy--I will. Now listen. I want you to keep your
rooms for me--those she had. I expect, in a day or two, to bring a lady
here"--

"A lady?" faltered Mrs. Berry.

"Yes. A lady."

"May I make so bold as to ask what lady?"

"You may not. Not now. Of course you will know."

Mrs. Berry's short neck made the best imitation it could of an offended
swan's action. She was very angry. She said she did not like so many
ladies, which natural objection Richard met by saying that there was only
one lady.

"And Mrs. Berry," he added, dropping his voice. "You will treat her as
you did my dear girl, for she will require not only shelter but kindness.
I would rather leave her with you than with any one. She has been very
unfortunate."

His serious air and habitual tone of command fascinated the softness of
Berry, and it was not until he had gone that she spoke out. "Unfort'nate!
He's going to bring me an unfort'nate female! Oh! not from my babe can I
bear that! Never will I have her here! I see it. It's that bold-faced
woman he's got mixed up in, and she've been and made the young man think
he'll go for to reform her. It's one o' their arts--that is; and he's too
innocent a young man to mean anythin' else. But I ain't a house of
Magdalens no! and sooner than have her here I'd have the roof fall over
me, I would."

She sat down to eat her supper on the sublime resolve.

In love, Mrs. Berry's charity was all on the side of the law, and this is
the case with many of her sisters. The Pilgrim sneers at them for it, and
would have us credit that it is their admirable instinct which, at the
expense of every virtue save one, preserves the artificial barrier simply
to impose upon us. Men, I presume, are hardly fair judges, and should
stand aside and mark.

Early next day Mrs. Berry bundled off to Richard's hotel to let him know
her determination. She did not find him there. Returning homeward through
the park, she beheld him on horseback riding by the side of the identical
lady.

The sight of this public exposure shocked her more than the secret walk
under the trees... "You don't look near your reform yet," Mrs. Berry
apostrophized her. "You don't look to me one that'd come the Fair
Penitent till you've left off bein' fair--if then you do, which some of
ye don't. Laugh away and show yet airs! Spite o' your hat and feather,
and your ridin' habit, you're a Belle Donna." Setting her down again
absolutely for such, whatever it might signify, Mrs. Berry had a virtuous
glow.

In the evening she heard the noise of wheels stopping at the door.
"Never!" she rose from her chair to exclaim. "He ain't rided her out in
the mornin', and been and made a Magdalen of her afore dark?"

A lady veiled was brought into the house by Richard. Mrs. Berry feebly
tried to bar his progress in the passage. He pushed past her, and
conducted the lady into the parlour without speaking. Mrs. Berry did not
follow. She heard him murmur a few sentences within. Then he came out.
All her crest stood up, as she whispered vigorously, "Mr. Richard! if
that woman stay here, I go forth. My house ain't a penitentiary for
unfort'nate females, sir"--

He frowned at her curiously; but as she was on the point of renewing her
indignant protest, he clapped his hand across her mouth, and spoke words
in her ear that had awful import to her. She trembled, breathing low: "My
God, forgive, me!

"Richard?" And her virtue was humbled. "Lady Feverel is it? Your mother,
Mr. Richard?" And her virtue was humbled.




CHAPTER XXXVIII

One may suppose that a prematurely aged, oily little man; a poet in bad
circumstances; a decrepit butterfly chained to a disappointed inkstand,
will not put out strenuous energies to retain his ancient paramour when a
robust young man comes imperatively to demand his mother of him in her
person. The colloquy was short between Diaper Sandoe and Richard. The
question was referred to the poor spiritless lady, who, seeing that her
son made no question of it, cast herself on his hands. Small loss to her
was Diaper; but he was the loss of habit, and that is something to a
woman who has lived. The blood of her son had been running so long alien
from her that the sense of her motherhood smote he now with strangeness,
and Richard's stern gentleness seemed like dreadful justice come upon
her. Her heart had almost forgotten its maternal functions. She called
him Sir, till he bade her remember he was her son. Her voice sounded to
him like that of a broken-throated lamb, so painful and weak it was, with
the plaintive stop in the utterance. When he kissed her, her skin was
cold. Her thin hand fell out of his when his grasp related. "Can sin hunt
one like this?" he asked, bitterly reproaching himself for the shame she
had caused him to endure, and a deep compassion filled his breast.

Poetic justice had been dealt to Diaper the poet. He thought of all he
had sacrificed for this woman--the comfortable quarters, the friend, the
happy flights. He could not but accuse her of unfaithfulness in leaving
him in his old age. Habit had legalized his union with her. He wrote as
pathetically of the break of habit as men feel at the death of love, and
when we are old and have no fair hope tossing golden locks before us, a
wound to this our second nature is quite as sad. I know not even if it be
not actually sadder.

Day by day Richard visited his mother. Lady Blandish and Ripton alone
were in the secret. Adrian let him do as he pleased. He thought proper to
tell him that the public recognition he accorded to a particular lady
was, in the present state of the world, scarcely prudent.

"'Tis a proof to me of your moral rectitude, my son, but the world will
not think so. No one character is sufficient to cover two--in a
Protestant country especially. The divinity that doth hedge a Bishop
would have no chance, in contact with your Madam Danae. Drop the woman,
my son. Or permit me to speak what you would have her hear."

Richard listened to him with disgust. "Well, you've had my doctorial
warning," said Adrian; and plunged back into his book.

When Lady Feverel had revived to take part in the consultations Mrs.
Berry perpetually opened on the subject of Richard's matrimonial duty,
another chain was cast about him. "Do not, oh, do not offend your
father!" was her one repeated supplication. Sir Austin had grown to be a
vindictive phantom in her mind. She never wept but when she said this.

So Mrs. Berry, to whom Richard had once made mention of Lady Blandish as
the only friend he had among women, bundled off in her black-satin dress
to obtain an interview with her, and an ally. After coming to an
understanding on the matter of the visit, and reiterating many of her
views concerning young married people, Mrs. Berry said: "My lady, if I
may speak so bold, I'd say the sin that's bein' done is the sin o' the
lookers-on. And when everybody appear frightened by that young
gentleman's father, I'll say--hopin' your pardon--they no cause be
frighted at all. For though it's nigh twenty year since I knew him, and I
knew him then just sixteen months--no more--I'll say his heart's as soft
as a woman's, which I've cause for to know. And that's it. That's where
everybody's deceived by him, and I was. It's because he keeps his face,
and makes ye think you're dealin' with a man of iron, and all the while
there's a woman underneath. And a man that's like a woman he's the puzzle
o' life! We can see through ourselves, my lady, and we can see through
men, but one o' that sort--he's like somethin' out of nature. Then I
say--hopin' be excused--what's to do is for to treat him like a woman,
and not for to let him have his own way--which he don't know himself, and
is why nobody else do. Let that sweet young couple come together, and be
wholesome in spite of him, I say; and then give him time to come round,
just like a woman; and round he'll come, and give 'em his blessin', and
we shall know we've made him comfortable. He's angry because matrimony
have come between him and his son, and he, woman-like, he's wantin' to
treat what is as if it isn't. But matrimony's a holier than him. It began
long long before him, and it's be hoped will endoor longs the time after,
if the world's not coming to rack--wishin' him no harm."

Now Mrs. Berry only put Lady Blandish's thoughts in bad English. The lady
took upon herself seriously to advise Richard to send for his wife. He
wrote, bidding her come. Lucy, however, had wits, and inexperienced wits
are as a little knowledge. In pursuance of her sage plan to make the
family feel her worth, and to conquer the members of it one by one, she
had got up a correspondence with Adrian, whom it tickled. Adrian
constantly assured her all was going well: time would heal the wound if
both the offenders had the fortitude to be patient: he fancied he saw
signs of the baronet's relenting: they must do nothing to arrest those
favourable symptoms. Indeed the wise youth was languidly seeking to
produce them. He wrote, and felt, as Lucy's benefactor. So Lucy replied
to her husband a cheerful rigmarole he could make nothing of, save that
she was happy in hope, and still had fears. Then Mrs. Berry trained her
fist to indite a letter to her bride. Her bride answered it by saying she
trusted to time. "You poor marter" Mrs. Berry wrote back, "I know what
your sufferin's be. They is the only kind a wife should never hide from
her husband. He thinks all sorts of things if she can abide being away.
And you trusting to time, why it's like trusting not to catch cold out of
your natural clothes." There was no shaking Lucy's firmness.

Richard gave it up. He began to think that the life lying behind him was
the life of a fool. What had he done in it? He had burnt a rick and got
married! He associated the two acts of his existence. Where was the hero
he was to have carved out of Tom Bakewell!--a wretch he had taught to lie
and chicane: and for what? Great heavens! how ignoble did a flash from
the light of his aspirations make his marriage appear! The young man
sought amusement. He allowed his aunt to drag him into society, and sick
of that he made late evening calls on Mrs. Mount, oblivious of the
purpose he had in visiting her at all. Her man-like conversation, which
he took for honesty, was a refreshing change on fair lips.

"Call me Bella: I'll call you Dick," said she. And it came to be Bella
and Dick between them. No mention of Bella occurred in Richard's letters
to Lucy.

Mrs. Mount spoke quite openly of herself. "I pretend to be no better than
I am," she said, "and I know I'm no worse than many a woman who holds her
head high." To back this she told him stories of blooming dames of good
repute, and poured a little social sewerage into his ears.

Also she understood him. "What you want, my dear Dick, is something to
do. You went and got married like a--hum!--friends must be respectful. Go
into the Army. Try the turf. I can put you up to a trick or two--friends
should make themselves useful."

She told him what she liked in him. "You're the only man I was ever alone
with who don't talk to me of love and make me feel sick. I hate men who
can't speak to a woman sensibly.--Just wait a minute." She left him and
presently returned with, "Ah, Dick! old fellow! how are you?"--arrayed
like a cavalier, one arm stuck in her side, her hat jauntily cocked, and
a pretty oath on her lips to give reality to the costume. "What do you
think of me? Wasn't it a shame to make a woman of me when I was born to
be a man?"

"I don't know that," said Richard, for the contrast in her attire to
those shooting eyes and lips, aired her sex bewitchingly.

"What! you think I don't do it well?"

"Charming! but I can't forget..."

"Now that is too bad!" she pouted.

Then she proposed that they should go out into the midnight streets
arm-in-arm, and out they went and had great fits of laughter at her
impertinent manner of using her eyeglass, and outrageous affectation of
the supreme dandy.

"They take up men, Dick, for going about in women's clothes, and vice
versaw, I suppose. You'll bail me, old fellaa, if I have to make my bow
to the beak, won't you? Say it's becas I'm an honest woman and don't care
to hide the--a--unmentionables when I wear them--as the t'others do,"
sprinkled with the dandy's famous invocations.

He began to conceive romance in that sort of fun.

"You're a wopper, my brave Dick! won't let any peeler take me? by Jove!"

And he with many assurances guaranteed to stand by her, while she bent
her thin fingers trying the muscle of his arm; and reposed upon it more.
There was delicacy in her dandyism. She was a graceful cavalier.

"Sir Julius," as they named the dandy's attire, was frequently called for
on his evening visits to Mrs. Mount. When he beheld Sir Julius he thought
of the lady, and "vice versaw," as Sir Julius was fond of exclaiming.

Was ever hero in this fashion wooed?

The woman now and then would peep through Sir Julius. Or she would sit,
and talk, and altogether forget she was impersonating that worthy fop.

She never uttered an idea or a reflection, but Richard thought her the
cleverest woman he had ever met.

All kinds of problematic notions beset him. She was cold as ice, she
hated talk about love, and she was branded by the world.

A rumour spread that reached Mrs. Doria's ears. She rushed to Adrian
first. The wise youth believed there was nothing in it. She sailed down
upon Richard. "Is this true? that you have been seen going publicly about
with an infamous woman, Richard? Tell me! pray, relieve me!"

Richard knew of no person answering to his aunt's description in whose
company he could have been seen.

"Tell me, I say! Don't quibble. Do you know any woman of bad character?"

The acquaintance of a lady very much misjudged and ill-used by the world,
Richard admitted to.

Urgent grave advice Mrs. Doria tendered her nephew, both from the moral
and the worldly point of view, mentally ejaculating all the while: "That
ridiculous System! That disgraceful marriage!" Sir Austin in his mountain
solitude was furnished with serious stuff to brood over.

The rumour came to Lady Blandish. She likewise lectured Richard, and with
her he condescended to argue. But he found himself obliged to instance
something he had quite neglected. "Instead of her doing me harm, it's I
that will do her good."

Lady Blandish shook her head and held up her finger. "This person must be
very clever to have given you that delusion, dear."

"She is clever. And the world treats her shamefully."

"She complains of her position to you?"

"Not a word. But I will stand by her. She has no friend but me."

"My poor boy! has she made you think that?"

"How unjust you all are!" cried Richard.

"How mad and wicked is the man who can let him be tempted so!" thought
Lady Blandish.

He would pronounce no promise not to visit her, not to address her
publicly. The world that condemned her and cast her out was no
better--worse for its miserable hypocrisy. He knew the world now, the
young man said.

"My child! the world may be very bad. I am not going to defend it. But
you have some one else to think of. Have you forgotten you have a wife,
Richard?"

"Ay! you all speak of her now. There's my aunt: 'Remember you have a
wife!' Do you think I love any one but Lucy? poor little thing! Because
I am married am I to give up the society of women?"

"Of women!"

"Isn't she a woman?"

"Too much so!" sighed the defender of her sex.

Adrian became more emphatic in his warnings. Richard laughed at him. The
wise youth sneered at Mrs. Mount. The hero then favoured him with a
warning equal to his own in emphasis, and surpassing it in sincerity.

"We won't quarrel, my dear boy," said Adrian. "I'm a man of peace.
Besides, we are not fairly proportioned for a combat. Ride your steed to
virtue's goal! All I say is, that I think he'll upset you, and it's
better to go at a slow pace and in companionship with the children of the
sun. You have a very nice little woman for a wife--well, good-bye!"

To have his wife and the world thrown at his face, was unendurable to
Richard; he associated them somewhat after the manner of the rick and the
marriage. Charming Sir Julius, always gay, always honest, dispersed his
black moods.

"Why, you're taller," Richard made the discovery.

"Of course I am. Don't you remember you said I was such a little thing
when I came out of my woman's shell?"

"And how have you done it?"

"Grown to please you."

"Now, if you can do that, you can do anything."

"And so I would do anything."

"You would?"

"Honour!"

"Then"...his project recurred to him. But the incongruity of speaking
seriously to Sir Julius struck him dumb.

"Then what?" asked she.

"Then you're a gallant fellow."

"That all?"

"Isn't it enough?"

"Not quite. You were going to say something. I saw it in your eyes."

"You saw that I admired you."

"Yes, but a man mustn't admire a man."

"I suppose I had an idea you were a woman."

"What! when I had the heels of my boots raised half an inch," Sir Julius
turned one heel, and volleyed out silver laughter.

"I don't come much above your shoulder even now," she said, and proceeded
to measure her height beside him with arch up-glances.

"You must grow more."

"'Fraid I can't, Dick! Bootmakers can't do it."

"I'll show you how," and he lifted Sir Julius lightly, and bore the fair
gentleman to the looking-glass, holding him there exactly on a level with
his head. "Will that do?"

"Yes! Oh but I can't stay here."

"Why can't you?"

"Why can't I?"

He should have known then--it was thundered at a closed door in him, that
he played with fire. But the door being closed, he thought himself
internally secure.

Their eyes met. He put her down instantly.

Sir Julius, charming as he was, lost his vogue. Seeing that, the wily
woman resumed her shell. The memory, of Sir Julius breathing about her
still, doubled the feminine attraction.

"I ought to have been an actress," she said.

Richard told her he found all natural women had a similar wish.

"Yes! Ah! then! if I had been!" sighed Mrs. Mount, gazing on the pattern
of the carpet.

He took her hand, and pressed it.

"You are not happy as you are?"

"No."

"May I speak to you?"

"Yes."

Her nearest eye, setting a dimple of her cheek in motion, slid to the
corner toward her ear, as she sat with her head sideways to him,
listening. When he had gone, she said to herself: "Old hypocrites talk in
that way; but I never heard of a young man doing it, and not making love
at the same time."

Their next meeting displayed her quieter: subdued as one who had been set
thinking. He lauded her fair looks.

"Don't make me thrice ashamed," she petitioned.

But it was not only that mood with her. Dauntless defiance, that
splendidly befitted her gallant outline and gave a wildness to her bright
bold eyes, when she would call out: "Happy? who dares say I'm not happy?
D'you think if the world whips me I'll wince? D'you think I care for what
they say or do? Let them kill me! they shall never get one cry out of
me!" and flashing on the young man as if he were the congregated enemy,
add: "There! now you know me!"--that was a mood that well became her, and
helped the work. She ought to have been an actress.

"This must not go on," said Lady Blandish and Mrs. Doria in unison. A
common object brought them together. They confined their talk to it, and
did not disagree. Mrs. Doria engaged to go down to the baronet. Both
ladies knew it was a dangerous, likely to turn out a disastrous,
expedition. They agreed to it because it was something to do, and doing
anything is better than doing nothing. "Do it," said the wise youth, when
they made him a third, "do it, if you want him to be a hermit for life.
You will bring back nothing but his dead body, ladies--a Hellenic, rather
than a Roman, triumph. He will listen to you--he will accompany you to
the station--he will hand you into the carriage--and when you point to
his seat he will bow profoundly, and retire into his congenial mists."

Adrian spoke their thoughts. They fretted; they relapsed.

"Speak to him, you, Adrian," said Mrs. Doria. "Speak to the boy solemnly.
It would be almost better he should go back to that little thing he has
married."

"Almost?" Lady Blandish opened her eyes. "I have been advising it for the
last month and more."

"A choice of evils," said Mrs. Doria's sour-sweet face and shake of the
head.

Each lady saw a point of dissension, and mutually agreed, with heroic
effort, to avoid it by shutting their mouths. What was more, they
preserved the peace in spite of Adrian's artifices.

"Well, I'll talk to him again," he said. "I'll try to get the Engine on
the conventional line."

"Command him!" exclaimed Mrs. Doria.

"Gentle means are, I think, the only means with Richard," said Lady
Blandish.

Throwing banter aside, as much as he could, Adrian spoke to Richard. "You
want to reform this woman. Her manner is open--fair and free--the
traditional characteristic. We won't stop to canvass how that particular
honesty of deportment that wins your approbation has been gained. In her
college it is not uncommon. Girls, you know, are not like boys. At a
certain age they can't be quite natural. It's a bad sign if they don't
blush, and fib, and affect this and that. It wears off when they're
women. But a woman who speaks like a man, and has all those excellent
virtues you admire--where has she learned the trick? She tells you. You
don't surely approve of the school? Well, what is there in it, then?
Reform her, of course. The task is worthy of your energies. But, if you
are appointed to do it, don't do it publicly, and don't attempt it just
now. May I ask you whether your wife participates in this undertaking?"

Richard walked away from the interrogation. The wise youth, who hated
long unrelieved speeches and had healed his conscience, said no more.

Dear tender Lucy! Poor darling! Richard's eyes moistened. Her letters
seemed sadder latterly. Yet she never called to him to come, or he would
have gone. His heart leapt up to her. He announced to Adrian that he
should wait no longer for his father. Adrian placidly nodded.

The enchantress observed that her knight had a clouded brow and an absent
voice.

"Richard--I can't call you Dick now, I really don't know why"--she said,
"I want to beg a favour of you."

"Name it. I can still call you Bella, I suppose?"

"If you care to. What I want to say is this: when you meet me out--to cut
it short--please not to recognize me."

"And why?"

"Do you ask to be told that?"

"Certainly I do."

"Then look: I won't compromise you."

"I see no harm, Bella."

"No," she caressed his hand, "and there is none. I know that. But,"
modest eyelids were drooped, "other people do," struggling eyes were
raised.

"What do we care for other people?"

"Nothing. I don't. Not that!" snapping her finger, "I care for you,
though." A prolonged look followed the declaration.

"You're foolish, Bella."

"Not quite so giddy--that's all."

He did not combat it with his usual impetuosity. Adrian's abrupt inquiry
had sunk in his mind, as the wise youth intended it should. He had
instinctively refrained from speaking to Lucy of this lady. But what a
noble creature the woman was!

So they met in the park; Mrs. Mount whipped past him; and secresy added a
new sense to their intimacy.

Adrian was gratified at the result produced by his eloquence.

Though this lady never expressed an idea, Richard was not mistaken in her
cleverness. She could make evenings pass gaily, and one was not the
fellow to the other. She could make you forget she was a woman, and then
bring the fact startlingly home to you. She could read men with one
quiver of her half-closed eye-lashes. She could catch the coming mood in
a man, and fit herself to it. What does a woman want with ideas, who can
do thus much? Keenness of perception, conformity, delicacy of handling,
these be all the qualities necessary to parasites.

Love would have scared the youth: she banished it from her tongue. It may
also have been true that it sickened her. She played on his higher
nature. She understood spontaneously what would be most strange and
taking to him in a woman. Various as the Serpent of old Nile, she acted
fallen beauty, humorous indifference, reckless daring, arrogance in ruin.
And acting thus, what think you?--She did it so well because she was
growing half in earnest.

"Richard! I am not what I was since I knew you. You will not give me up
quite?"

"Never, Bella."

"I am not so bad as I'm painted!"

"You are only unfortunate."

"Now that I know you I think so, and yet I am happier."

She told him her history when this soft horizon of repentance seemed to
throw heaven's twilight across it. A woman's history, you know: certain
chapters expunged. It was dark enough to Richard.

"Did you love the man?" he asked. "You say you love no one now."

"Did I love him? He was a nobleman and I a tradesman's daughter. No. I
did not love him. I have lived to learn it. And now I should hate him, if
I did not despise him."

"Can you be deceived in love?" said Richard, more to himself than to her.

"Yes. When we're young we can be very easily deceived. If there is such a
thing as love, we discover it after we have tossed about and roughed it.
Then we find the man, or the woman, that suits us:--and then it's too
late! we can't have him."

"Singular!" murmured Richard, "she says just what my father said."

He spoke aloud: "I could forgive you if you had loved him."

"Don't be harsh, grave judge! How is a girl to distinguish?"

"You had some affection for him? He was the first?"

She chose to admit that. "Yes. And the first who talks of love to a girl
must be a fool if he doesn't blind her."

"That makes what is called first love nonsense."

"Isn't it?"

He repelled the insinuation. "Because I know it is not, Bella."

Nevertheless she had opened a wider view of the world to him, and a
colder. He thought poorly of girls. A woman a sensible, brave, beautiful
woman seemed, on comparison, infinitely nobler than those weak creatures.

She was best in her character of lovely rebel accusing foul injustice.
"What am I to do? You tell me to be different. How can I? What am I to
do? Will virtuous people let me earn my bread? I could not get a
housemaid's place! They wouldn't have me--I see their noses smelling! Yes
I can go to the hospital and sing behind a screen! Do you expect me to
bury myself alive? Why, man, I have blood: I can't become a stone. You
say I am honest, and I will be. Then let me till you that I have been
used to luxuries, and I can't do without them. I might have married
men--lots would have had me. But who marries one like me but a fool? and
I could not marry a fool. The man I marry I must respect. He could not
respect me--I should know him to be a fools and I should be worse off
than I am now. As I am now, they may look as pious as they like--I laugh
at them!"

And so forth: direr things. Imputations upon wives: horrible exultation
at the universal peccancy of husbands. This lovely outcast almost made
him think she had the right on her side, so keenly her Parthian arrows
pierced the holy centres of society, and exposed its rottenness.

Mrs. Mount's house was discreetly conducted: nothing ever occurred to
shock him there. The young man would ask himself where the difference was
between her and the Women of society? How base, too, was the army of
banded hypocrites! He was ready to declare war against them on her
behalf. His casus beli, accurately worded, would have read curiously.
Because the world refused to lure the lady to virtue with the offer of a
housemaid's place, our knight threw down his challenge. But the lady had
scornfully rebutted this prospect of a return to chastity. Then the form
of the challenge must be: Because the world declined to support the lady
in luxury for nothing! But what did that mean? In other words: she was to
receive the devil's wages without rendering him her services. Such an
arrangement appears hardly fair on the world or on the devil. Heroes will
have to conquer both before they will get them to subscribe to it.

Heroes, however, are not in the habit of wording their declarations of
war at all. Lance in rest they challenge and they charge. Like women they
trust to instinct, and graft on it the muscle of men. Wide fly the
leisurely-remonstrating hosts: institutions are scattered, they know not
wherefore, heads are broken that have not the balm of a reason why. 'Tis
instinct strikes! Surely there is something divine in instinct.

Still, war declared, where were these hosts? The hero could not charge
down on the ladies and gentlemen in a ballroom, and spoil the quadrille.
He had sufficient reticence to avoid sounding his challenge in the Law
Courts; nor could he well go into the Houses of Parliament with a
trumpet, though to come to a tussle with the nation's direct
representatives did seem the likelier method. It was likewise out of the
question that he should enter every house and shop, and battle with its
master in the cause of Mrs. Mount. Where, then, was his enemy? Everybody
was his enemy, and everybody was nowhere! Shall he convoke multitudes on
Wimbledon Common? Blue Policemen, and a distant dread of ridicule, bar
all his projects. Alas for the hero in our day!

Nothing teaches a strong arm its impotence so much as knocking at empty
air.

"What can I do for this poor woman?" cried Richard, after fighting his
phantom enemy till he was worn out.

"O Rip! old Rip!" he addressed his friend, "I'm distracted. I wish I was
dead! What good am I for? Miserable! selfish! What have I done but make
every soul I know wretched about me? I follow my own inclinations--I make
people help me by lying as hard as they can--and I'm a liar. And when
I've got it I'm ashamed of myself. And now when I do see something
unselfish for me to do, I come upon grins--I don't know where to
turn--how to act--and I laugh at myself like a devil!"

It was only friend Ripton's ear that was required, so his words went for
little: but Ripton did say he thought there was small matter to be
ashamed of in winning and wearing the Beauty of Earth. Richard added his
customary comment of "Poor little thing!"

He fought his duello with empty air till he was exhausted. A last letter
written to his father procured him no reply. Then, said he, I have tried
my utmost. I have tried to be dutiful--my father won't listen to me. One
thing I can do--I can go down to my dear girl, and make her happy, and
save her at least from some of the consequences of my rashness.

"There's nothing better for me!" he groaned. His great ambition must be
covered by a house-top: he and the cat must warm themselves on the
domestic hearth! The hero was not aware that his heart moved him to this.
His heart was not now in open communion with his mind.

Mrs. Mount heard that her friend was going--would go. She knew he was
going to his wife. Far from discouraging him, she said nobly: "Go--I
believe I have kept you. Let us have an evening together, and then go:
for good, if you like. If not, then to meet again another time. Forget
me. I shan't forget you. You're the best fellow I ever knew, Richard. You
are, on my honour! I swear I would not step in between you and your wife
to cause either of you a moment's unhappiness. When I can be another
woman I will, and I shall think of you then."

Lady Blandish heard from Adrian that Richard was positively going to his
wife. The wise youth modestly veiled his own merit in bringing it about
by saying: "I couldn't see that poor little woman left alone down there
any longer."

"Well! Yes!" said Mrs. Doria, to whom the modest speech was repeated, "I
suppose, poor boy, it's the best he can do now."

Richard bade them adieu, and went to spend his last evening with Mrs.
Mount.

The enchantress received him in state.

"Do you know this dress? No? It's the dress I wore when I first met
you--not when I first saw you. I think I remarked you, sir, before you
deigned to cast an eye upon humble me. When we first met we drank
champagne together, and I intend to celebrate our parting in the same
liquor. Will you liquor with me, old boy?"

She was gay. She revived Sir Julius occasionally. He, dispirited, left
the talking all to her.

Mrs. Mount kept a footman. At a late hour the man of calves dressed the
table for supper. It was a point of honour for Richard to sit down to it
and try to eat. Drinking, thanks to the kindly mother nature, who loves
to see her children made fools of, is always an easier matter. The
footman was diligent; the champagne corks feebly recalled the file-firing
at Richmond.

"We'll drink to what we might have been, Dick," said the enchantress.

Oh, the glorious wreck she looked.

His heart choked as he gulped the buzzing wine.

"What! down, my boy?" she cried. "They shall never see me hoist signals
of distress. We must all die, and the secret of the thing is to die game,
by Jove! Did you ever hear of Laura Fern? a superb girl! handsomer than
your humble servant--if you'll believe it--a 'Miss' in the bargain, and
as a consequence, I suppose, a much greater rake. She was in the
hunting-field. Her horse threw her, and she fell plump on a stake. It
went into her left breast. All the fellows crowded round her, and one
young man, who was in love with her--he sits in the House of Peers
now--we used to call him `Duck' because he was such a dear--he dropped
from his horse to his knees: 'Laura! Laura! my darling! speak a word to
me!--the last!' She turned over all white and bloody! 'I--I shan't be in
at the death!' and gave up the ghost! Wasn't that dying game? Here's to
the example of Laura Fenn! Why, what's the matter? See! it makes a man
turn pale to hear how a woman can die. Fill the glasses, John. Why,
you're as bad!"

"It's give me a turn, my lady," pleaded John, and the man's hand was
unsteady as he poured out the wine.

"You ought not to listen. Go, and, drink some brandy."

John footman went from the room.

"My brave Dick! Richard! what a face you've got!"

He showed a deep frown on a colourless face.

"Can't you bear to hear of blood? You know, it was only one naughty woman
out of the world. The clergyman of the parish didn't refuse to give her
decent burial. We Christians! Hurrah!"

She cheered, and laughed. A lurid splendour glanced about her like lights
from the pit.

"Pledge me, Dick! Drink, and recover yourself. Who minds? We must all
die--the good and the bad. Ashes to ashes--dust to dust--and wine for
living lips! That's poetry--almost. Sentiment: `May we never say die till
we've drunk our fill! Not bad--eh? A little vulgar, perhaps, by Jove! Do
you think me horrid?"

"Where's the wine?" Richard shouted. He drank a couple of glasses in
succession, and stared about. Was he in hell, with a lost soul raving to
him?

"Nobly spoken! and nobly acted upon, my brave Dick! Now we'll be
companions." She wished that heaven had made her such a man. "Ah! Dick!
Dick! too late! too late!"

Softly fell her voice. Her eyes threw slanting beams.

"Do you see this?"

She pointed to a symbolic golden anchor studded with gems and coiled with
a rope of hair in her bosom. It was a gift of his.

"Do you know when I stole the lock? Foolish Dick! you gave me an anchor
without a rope. Come and see."

She rose from the table, and threw herself on the sofa.

"Don't you recognize your own hair! I should know a thread of mine among
a million."

Something of the strength of Samson went out of him as he inspected his
hair on the bosom of Delilah.

"And you knew nothing of it! You hardly know it now you see it! What
couldn't a woman steal from you? But you're not vain, and that's a
protection. You're a miracle, Dick: a man that's not vain! Sit here." She
curled up her feet to give him place on the sofa. "Now let us talk like
friends that part to meet no more. You found a ship with fever on board,
and you weren't afraid to come alongside and keep her company. The fever
isn't catching, you see. Let us mingle our tears together. Ha! ha! a man
said that once to me. The hypocrite wanted to catch the fever, but he was
too old. How old are you, Dick?"

Richard pushed a few months forward.

"Twenty-one? You just look it, you blooming boy. Now tell me my age,
Adonis!--Twenty--what?"

Richard had given the lady twenty-five years.

She laughed violently. "You don't pay compliments, Dick. Best to be
honest; guess again. You don't like to? Not twenty-five, or twenty-four,
or twenty-three, or see how he begins to stare!---twenty-two. Just
twenty-one, my dear. I think my birthday's somewhere in next month. Why,
look at me, close--closer. Have I a wrinkle?"

"And when, in heaven's name!"...he stopped short.

"I understand you. When did I commence for to live? At the ripe age of
sixteen I saw a nobleman in despair because of my beauty. He vowed he'd
die. I didn't want him to do that. So to save the poor man for his
family, I ran away with him, and I dare say they didn't appreciate the
sacrifice, and he soon forgot to, if he ever did. It's the way of the
world!"

Richard seized some dead champagne, emptied the bottle into a tumbler,
and drank it off.

John footman entered to clear the table, and they were left without
further interruption.

"Bella! Bella!" Richard uttered in a deep sad voice, as he walked the
room.

She leaned on her arm, her hair crushed against a reddened cheek, her
eyes half-shut and dreamy.

"Bella!" he dropped beside her. "You are unhappy."

She blinked and yawned, as one who is awakened suddenly. "I think you
spoke," said she.

"You are unhappy, Bella. You can't conceal it. Your laugh sounds like
madness. You must be unhappy. So young, too! Only twenty-one!"

"What does it matter? Who cares for me?"

The mighty pity falling from his eyes took in her whole shape. She did
not mistake it for tenderness, as another would have done.

"Who cares for you, Bella? I do. What makes my misery now, but to see you
there, and know of no way of helping you? Father of mercy! it seems too
much to have to stand by powerless while such ruin is going on!"

Her hand was shaken in his by the passion of torment with which his frame
quaked.

Involuntarily a tear started between her eyelids. She glanced up at him
quickly, then looked down, drew her hand from his, and smoothed it, eying
it.

"Bella! you have a father alive!"

"A linendraper, dear. He wears a white neck-cloth."

This article of apparel instantaneously changed the tone of the
conversation, for he, rising abruptly, nearly squashed the lady's
lap-dog, whose squeaks and howls were piteous, and demanded the most
fervent caresses of its mistress. It was: "Oh, my poor pet Mumpsy, and he
didn't like a nasty great big ugly heavy foot an his poor soft
silky--mum--mum--back, he didn't, and he soodn't that he--mum--mum
--soodn't; and he cried out and knew the place to come to, and was oh so
sorry for what had happened to him--mum--mum--mum--and now he was going to
be made happy, his mistress make him happy--mum--mum--mum--moo-o-o-o."

"Yes!" said Richard, savagely, from the other end of the room, "you care
for the happiness of your dog."

"A course se does," Mumpsy was simperingly assured in the thick of his
silky flanks.

Richard looked for his hat. Mumpsy was deposited on the sofa in a
twinkling.

"Now," said the lady, "you must come and beg Mumpsy's pardon, whether you
meant to do it or no, because little doggies can't tell that--how should
they? And there's poor Mumpsy thinking you're a great terrible rival that
tries to squash him all flat to nothing, on purpose, pretending you
didn't see; and he's trembling, poor dear wee pet! And I may love my dog,
sir, if I like; and I do; and I won't have him ill-treated, for he's
never been jealous of you, and he is a darling, ten times truer than men,
and I love him fifty times better. So come to him with me."

First a smile changed Richard's face; then laughing a melancholy laugh,
he surrendered to her humour, and went through the form of begging
Mumpsy's pardon.

"The dear dog! I do believe he saw we were getting dull," said she.

"And immolated himself intentionally? Noble animal!"

"Well, we'll act as if we thought so. Let us be gay, Richard, and not
part like ancient fogies. Where's your fun? You can rattle; why don't
you? You haven't seen me in one of my characters--not Sir Julius: wait a
couple of minutes." She ran out.

A white visage reappeared behind a spring of flame. Her black hair was
scattered over her shoulders and fell half across her brows. She moved
slowly, and came up to him, fastening weird eyes on him, pointing a
finger at the region of witches. Sepulchral cadences accompanied the
representation. He did not listen, for he was thinking what a deadly
charming and exquisitely horrid witch she was. Something in the way her
underlids worked seemed to remind him of a forgotten picture; but a veil
hung on the picture. There could be no analogy, for this was beautiful
and devilish, and that, if he remembered rightly, had the beauty of
seraphs.

His reflections and her performance were stayed by a shriek. The spirits
of wine had run over the plate she held to the floor. She had the
coolness to put the plate down on the table, while he stamped out the
flame on the carpet. Again she shrieked: she thought she was on fire. He
fell on his knees and clasped her skirts all round, drawing his arms down
them several times.

Still kneeling, he looked up, and asked, "Do you feel safe now?"

She bent her face glaring down till the ends of her hair touched his
cheek.

Said she, "Do you?"

Was she a witch verily? There was sorcery in her breath; sorcery in her
hair: the ends of it stung him like little snakes.

"How do I do it, Dick?" she flung back, laughing.

"Like you do everything, Bella," he said, and took breath.

"There! I won't be a witch; I won't be a witch: they may burn me to a
cinder, but I won't be a witch!"

She sang, throwing her hair about, and stamping her feet.

"I suppose I look a figure. I must go and tidy myself."

"No, don't change. I like to see you so." He gazed at her with a mixture
of wonder and admiration. "I can't think you the same person--not even
when you laugh."

"Richard," her tone was serious, "you were going to speak to me of my
parents."

"How wild and awful you looked, Bella!"

"My father, Richard, was a very respectable man."

"Bella, you'll haunt me like a ghost."

"My mother died in my infancy, Richard."

"Don't put up your hair, Bella."

"I was an only child!"

Her head shook sorrowfully at the glistening fire-irons. He followed the
abstracted intentness of her look, and came upon her words.

"Ah, yes! speak of your father, Bella. Speak of him."

"Shall I haunt you, and come to your bedside, and cry, '`Tis time'?"

"Dear Bella! if you will tell me where he lives, I will go to him. He
shall receive you. He shall not refuse--he shall forgive you."

"If I haunt you, you can't forget me, Richard."

"Let me go to your father, Bella let me go to him to-morrow. I'll give
you my time. It's all I can give. O Bella! let me save you."

"So you like me best dishevelled, do you, you naughty boy! Ha! ha!" and
away she burst from him, and up flew her hair, as she danced across the
room, and fell at full length on the sofa.

He felt giddy: bewitched.

"We'll talk of everyday things, Dick," she called to him from the sofa.
"It's our last evening. Our last? Heigho! It makes me sentimental. How's
that Mr. Ripson, Pipson, Nipson?--it's not complimentary, but I can't
remember names of that sort. Why do you have friends of that sort? He's
not a gentleman. Better is he? Well, he's rather too insignificant for
me. Why do you sit off there? Come to me instantly. There--I'll sit up,
and be proper, and you'll have plenty of room. Talk, Dick!"

He was reflecting on the fact that her eyes were brown. They had a
haughty sparkle when she pleased, and when she pleased a soft languor
circled them. Excitement had dyed her cheeks deep red. He was a youth,
and she an enchantress. He a hero; she a female will-o'-the-wisp.

The eyes were languid now, set in rosy colour.

"You will not leave me yet, Richard? not yet?"

He had no thought of departing:

"It's our last night--I suppose it's our last hour together in this
world--and I don't want to meet you in the next, for poor Dick will have
to come to such a very, very disagreeable place to make the visit."

He grasped her hand at this.

"Yes, he will! too true! can't be helped: they say I'm handsome."

"You're lovely, Bella."

She drank in his homage.

"Well, we'll admit it. His Highness below likes lovely women, I hear say.
A gentleman of taste! You don't know all my accomplishments yet,
Richard."

"I shan't be astonished at anything new, Bella."

"Then hear, and wonder." Her voice trolled out some lively roulades.
"Don't you think he'll make me his prima donna below? It's nonsense to
tell me there's no singing there. And the atmosphere will be favourable
to the voice. No damp, you know. You saw the piano--why didn't you ask me
to sing before? I can sing Italian. I had a master--who made love to me.
I forgave him because of the music-stool--men can't help it on a
music-stool, poor dears!"

She went to the piano, struck the notes, and sang--

     "'My heart, my heart--I think 'twill break.'

"Because I'm such a rake. I don't know any other reason. No; I hate
sentimental songs. Won't sing that. Ta-tiddy-tiddy-iddy--a...e! How
ridiculous those women were, coming home from Richmond!

       'Once the sweet romance of story
         Clad thy moving form with grace;
        Once the world and all its glory
         Was but framework to thy face.
        Ah, too fair!--what I remember
         Might my soul recall--but no!
        To the winds this wretched ember
         Of a fire that falls so low!'

"Hum! don't much like that. Tum-te-tum-tum--accanto al fuoco--heigho! I
don't want to show off, Dick--or to break down--so I won't try that.

       'Oh! but for thee, oh! but for thee,
         I might have been a happy wife,
        And nursed a baby on my knee,
         And never blushed to give it life.'

"I used to sing that when I was a girl, sweet Richard, and didn't know at
all, at all, what it meant. Mustn't sing that sort of song in company.
We're oh! so proper--even we!

     'If I had a husband, what think you I'd do?
      I'd make it my business to keep him a lover;
     For when a young gentleman ceases to woo,
      Some other amusement he'll quickly discover.'

"For such are young gentlemen made of--made of: such are young gentlemen
made of!"

After this trifling she sang a Spanish ballad sweetly. He was in the mood
when imagination intensely vivifies everything. Mere suggestions of music
sufficed. The lady in the ballad had been wronged. Lo! it was the lady
before him; and soft horns blew; he smelt the languid night-flowers; he
saw the stars crowd large and close above the arid plain this lady
leaning at her window desolate, pouring out her abandoned heart.

Heroes know little what they owe to champagne.

The lady wandered to Venice. Thither he followed her at a leap. In Venice
she was not happy. He was prepared for the misery of any woman anywhere.
But, oh! to be with her! To glide with phantom-motion through throbbing
street; past houses muffled in shadow and gloomy legends; under storied
bridges; past palaces charged with full life in dead quietness; past
grand old towers, colossal squares, gleaming quays, and out, and on with
her, on into the silver infinity shaking over seas!

Was it the champagne? the music? or the poetry? Something of the two
former, perhaps: but most the enchantress playing upon him. How many
instruments cannot clever women play upon at the same moment! And this
enchantress was not too clever, or he might have felt her touch. She was
no longer absolutely bent on winning him, or he might have seen a
manoeuvre. She liked him--liked none better. She wished him well. Her
pique was satisfied. Still he was handsome, and he was going. What she
liked him for, she rather--very slightly--wished to do away with, or see
if it could be done away with: just as one wishes to catch a pretty
butterfly, without hurting its patterned wings. No harm intended to the
innocent insect, only one wants to inspect it thoroughly, and enjoy the
marvel of it, in one's tender possession, and have the felicity of
thinking one could crush it, if one would.

He knew her what she was, this lady. In Seville, or in Venice, the spot
was on her. Sailing the pathways of the moon it was not celestial light
that illumined her beauty. Her sin was there: but in dreaming to save, he
was soft to her sin--drowned it in deep mournfulness.

Silence, and the rustle of her dress, awoke him from his musing. She swam
wave-like to the sofa. She was at his feet.

"I have been light and careless to-night, Richard. Of course I meant it.
I must be happy with my best friend going to leave me."

Those witch underlids were working brightly.

"You will not forget me? and I shall try...try..."

Her lips twitched. She thought him such a very handsome fellow.

"If I change--if I can change... Oh! if you could know what a net I'm in,
Richard!"

Now at those words, as he looked down on her haggard loveliness, not
divine sorrow but a devouring jealousy sprang like fire in his breast,
and set him rocking with horrid pain. He bent closer to her pale
beseeching face. Her eyes still drew him down.

"Bella! No! no! promise me! swear it!"

"Lost, Richard! lost for ever! give me up!"

He cried: "I never will!" and strained her in his arms, and kissed her
passionately on the lips.

She was not acting now as she sidled and slunk her half-averted head with
a kind of maiden shame under his arm, sighing heavily, weeping, clinging
to him. It was wicked truth.

Not a word of love between them!

Was ever hero in this fashion won?




CHAPTER XXXIX

At a season when the pleasant South-western Island has few attractions to
other than invalids and hermits enamoured of wind and rain, the potent
nobleman, Lord Mountfalcon, still lingered there to the disgust of his
friends and special parasite. "Mount's in for it again," they said among
themselves. "Hang the women!" was a natural sequence. For, don't you see,
what a shame it was of the women to be always kindling such a very
inflammable subject! All understood that Cupid had twanged his bow, and
transfixed a peer of Britain for the fiftieth time: but none would
perceive, though he vouched for it with his most eloquent oaths, that
this was a totally different case from the antecedent ones. So it had
been sworn to them too frequently before. He was as a man with mighty
tidings, and no language: intensely communicative, but inarticulate. Good
round oaths had formerly compassed and expounded his noble emotions. They
were now quite beyond the comprehension of blasphemy, even when
emphasized, and by this the poor lord divinely felt the case was
different. There is something impressive in a great human hulk writhing
under the unutterable torments of a mastery he cannot contend with, or
account for, or explain by means of intelligible words. At first he took
refuge in the depths of his contempt for women. Cupid gave him line. When
he had come to vent his worst of them, the fair face now stamped on his
brain beamed the more triumphantly: so the harpooned whale rose to the
surface, and after a few convulsions, surrendered his huge length. My
lord was in love with Richard's young wife. He gave proofs of it by
burying himself beside her. To her, could she have seen it, he gave
further proofs of a real devotion, in affecting, and in her presence
feeling, nothing beyond a lively interest in her well-being. This wonder,
that when near her he should be cool and composed, and when away from her
wrapped in a tempest of desires, was matter for what powers of cogitation
the heavy nobleman possessed.

The Hon. Peter, tired of his journeys to and fro, urged him to press the
business. Lord Mountfalcon was wiser, or more scrupulous, than his
parasite. Almost every evening he saw Lucy. The inexperienced little wife
apprehended no harm in his visits. Moreover, Richard had commended her to
the care of Lord Mountfalcon, and Lady Judith. Lady Judith had left the
Island for London: Lord Mountfalcon remained. There could be no harm. If
she had ever thought so, she no longer did. Secretly, perhaps, she was
flattered. Lord Mountfalcon was as well educated as it is the fortune of
the run of titled elder sons to be: he could talk and instruct: he was a
lord: and he let her understand that he was wicked, very wicked, and that
she improved him. The heroine, in common with the hero, has her ambition
to be of use in the world--to do some good: and the task of reclaiming a
bad man is extremely seductive to good women. Dear to their tender bosoms
as old china is a bad man they are mending! Lord Mountfalcon had none of
the arts of a libertine: his gold, his title, and his person had hitherto
preserved him from having long to sigh in vain, or sigh at all, possibly:
the Hon. Peter did his villanies for him. No alarm was given to Lucy's
pure instinct, as might have been the case had my lord been over-adept.
It was nice in her martyrdom to have a true friend to support her, and
really to be able to do something for that friend. Too simple-minded to
think much of his lordship's position, she was yet a woman. "He, a great
nobleman, does not scorn to acknowledge me, and think something of me,"
may have been one of the half-thoughts passing through her now and then,
as she reflected in self-defence on the proud family she had married
into.

January was watering and freezing old earth by turns, when the Hon. Peter
travelled down to the sun of his purse with great news. He had no sooner
broached his lordship's immediate weakness, than Mountfalcon began to
plunge like a heavy dragoon in difficulties. He swore by this and that he
had come across an angel for his sins, and would do her no hurt. The next
moment he swore she must be his, though she cursed like a cat. His
lordship's illustrations were not choice. "I haven't advanced an inch,"
he groaned. "Brayder! upon my soul, that little woman could do anything
with me. By heaven! I'd marry her to-morrow. Here I am, seeing her every
day in the week out or in, and what do you think she gets me to talk
about?--history! Isn't it enough to make a fellow mad? and there am I
lecturing like a prig, and by heaven! while I'm at it I feel a pleasure
in it; and when I leave the house I should feel an immense gratification
in shooting somebody. What do they say in town?"

"Not much," said Brayder, significantly.

"When's that fellow--her husband--coming down?"

"I rather hope we've settled him for life, Mount."

Nobleman and parasite exchanged looks.

"How d'ye mean?"

Brayder hummed an air, and broke it to say, "He's in for Don Juan at a
gallop, that's all."

"The deuce! Has Bella got him?" Mountfalcon asked with eagerness.

Brayder handed my lord a letter. It was dated from the Sussex coast,
signed "Richard," and was worded thus:

"My beautiful Devil!--

"Since we're both devils together, and have found each other out, come to
me at once, or I shall be going somewhere in a hurry. Come, my bright
hell-star! I ran away from you, and now I ask you to come to me! You have
taught me how devils love, and I can't do without you. Come an hour after
you receive this."

Mountfalcon turned over the letter to see if there was any more.
"Complimentary love-epistle!" he remarked, and rising from his chair and
striding about, muttered, "The dog! how infamously he treats his wife!"

"Very bad," said Brayder.

"How did you get hold of this?"

"Strolled into Belle's dressing-room, waiting for her turned over her
pincushion hap-hazard. You know her trick."

"By Jove! I think that girl does it on purpose. Thank heaven, I haven't
written her any letters for an age. Is she going to him?"

"Not she! But it's odd, Mount!--did you ever know her refuse money
before? She tore up the cheque in style, and presented me the fragments
with two or three of the delicacies of language she learnt at your
Academy. I rather like to hear a woman swear. It embellishes her!"

Mountfalcon took counsel of his parasite as to the end the letter could
be made to serve. Both conscientiously agreed that Richard's behaviour to
his wife was infamous, and that he at least deserved no mercy. "But,"
said his lordship, "it won't do to show the letter. At first she'll be
swearing it's false, and then she'll stick to him closer. I know the
sluts."

"The rule of contrary," said Brayder, carelessly. "She must see the
trahison with her eyes. They believe their eyes. There's your chance,
Mount. You step in: you give her revenge and consolation--two birds at
one shot. That's what they like."

"You're an ass, Brayder," the nobleman exclaimed. "You're an infernal
blackguard. You talk of this little woman as if she and other women were
all of a piece. I don't see anything I gain by this confounded letter.
Her husband's a brute--that's clear."

"Will you leave it to me, Mount?"

"Be damned before I do!" muttered my lord.

"Thank you. Now see how this will end: You're too soft, Mount. You'll be
made a fool of."

"I tell you, Brayder, there's nothing to be done. If I carry her
off--I've been on the point of doing it every day--what'll come of that?
She'll look--I can't stand her eyes--I shall be a fool--worse off with
her than I am now."

Mountfalcon yawned despondently. "And what do you think?" he pursued.
"Isn't it enough to make a fellow gnash his teeth? She's"...he mentioned
something in an underbreath, and turned red as he said it.

"Hm!" Brayder put up his mouth and rapped the handle of his cane on his
chin. "That's disagreeable, Mount. You don't exactly want to act in that
character. You haven't got a diploma. Bother!"

"Do you think I love her a bit less?" broke out my lord in a frenzy. "By
heaven! I'd read to her by her bedside, and talk that infernal history to
her, if it pleased her, all day and all night."

"You're evidently graduating for a midwife, Mount."

The nobleman appeared silently to accept the imputation.

"What do they say in town?" he asked again.

Brayder said the sole question was, whether it was maid, wife, or widow.

"I'll go to her this evening," Mountfalcon resumed, after--to judge by
the cast of his face--reflecting deeply. "I'll go to her this evening.
She shall know what infernal torment she makes me suffer."

"Do you mean to say she don't know it?"

"Hasn't an idea--thinks me a friend. And so, by heaven! I'll be to her."

"A--hm!" went the Honourable Peter. "This way to the sign of the Green
Man, ladies!"

"Do you want to be pitched out of the window, Brayder?"

"Once was enough, Mount. The Salvage Man is strong. I may have forgotten
the trick of alighting on my feet. There--there! I'll be sworn she's
excessively innocent, and thinks you a disinterested friend."

"I'll go to her this evening," Mountfalcon repeated. "She shall know what
damned misery it is to see her in such a position. I can't hold out any
longer. Deceit's horrible to such a girl as that. I'd rather have her
cursing me than speaking and looking as she does. Dear little
girl!--she's only a child. You haven't an idea how sensible that little
woman is."

"Have you?" inquired the cunning one.

"My belief is, Brayder, that there are angels among women," said
Mountfalcon, evading his parasite's eye as he spoke.

To the world, Lord Mountfalcon was the thoroughly wicked man; his
parasite simply ingeniously dissipated. Full many a man of God had
thought it the easier task to reclaim the Hon. Peter.

Lucy received her noble friend by firelight that evening, and sat much in
the shade. She offered to have the candles brought in. He begged her to
allow the room to remain as it was. "I have something to say to you," he
observed with a certain solemnity.

"Yes--to me?" said Lucy, quickly.

Lord Mountfalcon knew he had a great deal to say, but how to say it, and
what it exactly was, he did not know.'

"You conceal it admirably," he began, "but you must be very lonely
here--I fear, unhappy."

"I should have been lonely, but for your kindness, my lord," said Lucy.
"I am not unhappy." Her face was in shade and could not belie her.

"Is there any help that one who would really be your friend might give
you, Mrs. Feverel?"

"None indeed that I know of," Lucy replied. "Who can help us to pay for
our sins?"

"At least you may permit me to endeavour to pay my debts, since you have
helped me to wash out some of any sins."

"Ah, my lord!" said Lucy, not displeased. It is sweet for a woman to
believe she has drawn the serpent's teeth.

"I tell you the truth," Lord Mountfalcon went on. "What object could I
have in deceiving you? I know you quite above flattery--so different from
other women!"

"Oh, pray, do not say that," interposed Lucy.

"According to my experience, then."

"But you say you have met such--such very bad women."

"I have. And now that I meet a good one, it is my misfortune."

"Your misfortune, Lord Mountfalcon?"

"Yes, and I might say more."

His lordship held impressively mute.

"How strange men are!" thought Lucy. "He had some unhappy secret."

Tom Bakewell, who had a habit of coming into the room on various
pretences during the nobleman's visits, put a stop to the revelation, if
his lordship intended to make any.

When they were alone again, Lucy said, smiling: "Do you know, I am always
ashamed to ask you to begin to read."

Mountfalcon stared. "To read?--oh! ha! yes!" he remembered his evening
duties. "Very happy, I'm sure. Let me see. Where were we?"

"The life of the Emperor Julian. But indeed I feel quite ashamed to ask
you to read, my lord. It's new to me; like a new world--hearing about
Emperors, and armies, and things that really have been on the earth we
walk upon. It fills my mind. But it must have ceased to interest you, and
I was thinking that I would not tease you any more."

"Your pleasure is mine, Mrs. Feverel. 'Pon my honour, I'd read till I was
hoarse, to hear your remarks."

"Are you laughing at me?"

"Do I look so?"

Lord Mountfalcon had fine full eyes, and by merely dropping the lids he
could appear to endow them with mental expression.

"No, you are not," said Lucy. "I must thank you for your forbearance."

The nobleman went on his honour loudly.

Now it was an object of Lucy's to have him reading; for his sake, for her
sake, and for somebody else's sake; which somebody else was probably
considered first in the matter. When he was reading to her, he seemed to
be legitimizing his presence there; and though she had no doubts or
suspicions whatever, she was easier in her heart while she had him
employed in that office. So she rose to fetch the book, laid it open on
the table at his lordship's elbow, and quietly waited to ring for candles
when he should be willing to commence.

That evening Lord Mountfalcon could not get himself up to the farce, and
he felt a pity for the strangely innocent unprotected child with anguish
hanging over her, that withheld the words he wanted to speak, or
insinuate. He sat silent and did nothing.

"What I do not like him for," said Lucy, meditatively, "is his changing
his religion. He would have been such a hero, but for that. I could have
loved him."

"Who is it you could have loved, Mrs. Feverel?" Lord Mountfalcon asked.

"The Emperor Julian."

"Oh! the Emperor Julian! Well, he was an apostate but then, you know, he
meant what he was about. He didn't even do it for a woman."

"For a woman!" cried Lucy. "What man would for a woman?"

"I would."

"You, Lord Mountfalcon?"

"Yes. I'd turn Catholic to-morrow."

"You make me very unhappy if you say that, my lord."

"Then I'll unsay it."

Lucy slightly shuddered. She put her hand upon the bell to ring for
lights.

"Do you reject a convert, Mrs. Feverel?" said the nobleman.

"Oh yes! yes! I do. One who does not give his conscience I would not
have."

"If he gives his heart and body, can he give more?"

Lucy's hand pressed the bell. She did not like the doubtful light with
one who was so unscrupulous. Lord Mountfalcon had never spoken in this
way before. He spoke better, too. She missed the aristocratic twang in
his voice, and the hesitation for words, and the fluid lordliness with
which he rolled over difficulties in speech.

Simultaneously with the sounding of the bell the door opened, and
presented Tom Bakewell. There was a double knock at the same instant at
the street door. Lucy delayed to give orders.

"Can it be a letter, Tom!--so late?" she said, changing colour. "Pray run
and see."

"That an't powst" Tom remarked, as he obeyed his mistress.

"Are you very anxious for a letter, Mrs. Feverel?" Lord Mountfalcon
inquired.

"Oh, no!--yes, I am, very." said Lucy. Her quick ear caught the tones of
a voice she remembered. "That dear old thing has come to see me," she
cried, starting up.

Tom ushered a bunch of black satin into the room.

"Mrs. Berry!" said Lucy, running up to her and kissing her.

"Me, my darlin'!" Mrs. Berry, breathless and rosy with her journey,
returned the salute. "Me truly it is, in fault of a better, for I ain't
one to stand by and give the devil his licence--roamin'! and the salt
sure enough have spilte my bride-gown at the beginnin', which ain't the
best sign. Bless ye!--Oh, here he is." She beheld a male figure in a
chair by the half light, and swung around to address him. "You bad man!"
she held aloft one of her fat fingers, "I've come on ye like a bolt, I
have, and goin' to make ye do your duty, naughty boy! But your my darlin'
babe," she melted, as was her custom, "and I'll never meet you and not
give to ye the kiss of a mother."

Before Lord Mountfalcon could find time to expostulate the soft woman had
him by the neck, and was down among his luxurious whiskers.

"Ha!" She gave a smothered shriek, and fell back. "What hair's that?"

Tom Bakewell just then illumined the transaction.

"Oh, my gracious!" Mrs. Berry breathed with horror, "I been and kiss a
strange man!"

Lucy, half-laughing, but in dreadful concern, begged the noble lord to
excuse the woful mistake.

"Extremely flattered, highly favoured, I'm sure;" said his lordship,
re-arranging his disconcerted moustache; "may I beg the pleasure of an
introduction?"

"My husband's dear old nurse--Mrs. Berry," said Lucy, taking her hand to
lend her countenance. "Lord Mountfalcon, Mrs. Berry."

Mrs. Berry sought grace while she performed a series of apologetic bobs,
and wiped the perspiration from her forehead.

Lucy put her into a chair: Lord Mountfalcon asked for an account of her
passage over to the Island; receiving distressingly full particulars, by
which it was revealed that the softness of her heart was only equalled by
the weakness of her stomach. The recital calmed Mrs. Berry down.

"Well, and where's my--where's Mr. Richard? yer husband, my dear?" Mrs.
Berry turned from her tale to question.

"Did you expect to see him here?" said Lucy, in a broken voice.

"And where else, my love? since he haven't been seen in London a whole
fortnight."

Lucy did not speak.

"We will dismiss the Emperor Julian till to-morrow, I think," said Lord
Mountfalcon, rising and bowing.

Lucy gave him her hand with mute thanks. He touched it distantly,
embraced Mrs. Berry in a farewell bow, and was shown out of the house by
Tom Bakewell.

The moment he was gone, Mrs. Berry threw up her arms. "Did ye ever know
sich a horrid thing to go and happen to a virtuous woman!" she exclaimed.
"I could cry at it, I could! To be goin' and kissin' a strange hairy man!
Oh dear me! what's cornin' next, I wonder? Whiskers! thinks I--for I know
the touch o' whiskers--'t ain't like other hair--what! have he growed a
crop that sudden, I says to myself; and it flashed on me I been and made
a awful mistake! and the lights come in, and I see that great hairy
man--beggin' his pardon--nobleman, and if I could 'a dropped through the
floor out o' sight o' men, drat 'em! they're al'ays in the way, that they
are!"--

"Mrs. Berry," Lucy checked her, "did you expect to find him here?"

"Askin' that solemn?" retorted Berry. "What him? your husband? O' course
I did! and you got him--somewheres hid."

"I have not heard from my husband for fifteen days," said Lucy, and her
tears rolled heavily off her cheeks.

"Not heer from him!--fifteen days!" Berry echoed.

"O Mrs. Berry! dear kind Mrs. Berry! have you no news? nothing to tell
me! I've borne it so long. They're cruel to me, Mrs. Berry. Oh, do you
know if I have offended him--my husband? While he wrote I did not
complain. I could live on his letters for years. But not to hear from
him! To think I have ruined him, and that he repents! Do they want to
take him from me? Do they want me dead? O Mrs. Berry! I've had no one to
speak out my heart to all this time, and I cannot, cannot help crying,
Mrs. Berry!"

Mrs. Berry was inclined to be miserable at what she heard from Lucy's
lips, and she was herself full of dire apprehension; but it was never
this excellent creature's system to be miserable in company. The sight of
a sorrow that was not positive, and could not refer to proof, set her
resolutely the other way.

"Fiddle-faddle," she said. "I'd like to see him repent! He won't find
anywheres a beauty like his own dear little wife, and he know it. Now,
look you here, my dear--you blessed weepin' pet--the man that could see
ye with that hair of yours there in ruins, and he backed by the law, and
not rush into your arms and hold ye squeezed for life, he ain't got much
man in him, I say; and no one can say that of my babe! I was sayin', look
here, to comfort ye--oh, why, to be sure he've got some surprise for ye.
And so've I, my lamb! Hark, now! His father've come to town, like a good
reasonable man at last, to u-nite ye both, and bring your bodies
together, as your hearts is, for everlastin'. Now ain't that news?"

"Oh!" cried Lucy, "that takes my last hope away. I thought he had gone to
his father." She burst into fresh tears.

Mrs. Berry paused, disturbed.

"Belike he's travellin' after him," she suggested.

"Fifteen days, Mrs. Berry!"

"Ah, fifteen weeks, my dear, after sieh a man as that. He's a regular
meteor, is Sir Austin Feverel, Raynham Abbey. Well, so hark you here. I
says to myself, that knows him--for I did think my babe was in his
natural nest--I says, the bar'net'll never write for you both to come up
and beg forgiveness, so down I'll go and fetch you up. For there was your
mistake, my dear, ever to leave your husband to go away from ye one hour
in a young marriage. It's dangerous, it's mad, it's wrong, and it's only
to be righted by your obeyin' of me, as I commands it: for I has my fits,
though I am a soft 'un. Obey me, and ye'll be happy tomorrow--or the next
to it."

Lucy was willing to see comfort. She was weary of her self-inflicted
martyrdom, and glad to give herself up to somebody else's guidance
utterly.

"But why does he not write to me, Mrs. Berry?"

"'Cause, 'cause--who can tell the why of men, my dear? But that he love
ye faithful, I'll swear. Haven't he groaned in my arms that he couldn't
come to ye?--weak wretch! Hasn't he swore how he loved ye to me, poor
young man! But this is your fault, my sweet. Yes, it be. You should 'a
followed my 'dvice at the fust--'stead o' going into your 'eroics about
this and t'other." Here Mrs. Berry poured forth fresh sentences on
matrimony, pointed especially at young couples. "I should 'a been a fool
if I hadn't suffered myself," she confessed, "so I'll thank my Berry if I
makes you wise in season."

Lucy smoothed her ruddy plump cheeks, and gazed up affectionately into
the soft woman's kind brown eyes. Endearing phrases passed from mouth to
mouth. And as she gazed Lucy blushed, as one who has something very
secret to tell, very sweet, very strange, but cannot quite bring herself
to speak it.

"Well! these's three men in my life I kissed," said Mrs. Berry, too much
absorbed in her extraordinary adventure to notice the young wife's
struggling bosom, "three men, and one a nobleman! He've got more whisker
than my Berry, I wonder what the man thought. Ten to one he'll think,
now, I was glad o' my chance--they're that vain, whether they's lords or
commons. How was I to know? I nat'ral thinks none but her husband'd sit
in that chair. Ha! and in the dark? and alone with ye?" Mrs. Berry
hardened her eyes, "and your husband away? What do this mean? Tell to me,
child, what it mean his bein' here alone without ere a candle?"

"Lord Mountfalcon is the only friend I have here," said Lucy. "He is very
kind. He comes almost every evening."

"Lord Montfalcon--that his name!" Mrs. Berry exclaimed. "I been that
flurried by the man, I didn't mind it at first. He come every evenin',
and your husband out o' sight! My goodness me! it's gettin' worse and
worse. And what do he come for, now, ma'am? Now tell me candid what ye do
together here in the dark of an evenin'."

Mrs. Berry glanced severely.

"O Mrs. Berry! please not to speak in that way--I don't like it," said
Lucy, pouting.

"What do he come for, I ask?"

"Because he is kind, Mrs. Berry. He sees me very lonely, and wishes to
amuse me. And he tells me of things I know nothing about and"--

"And wants to be a-teachin' some of his things, mayhap," Mrs. Berry
interrupted with a ruffled breast.

"You are a very ungenerous, suspicious, naughty old woman," said Lucy,
chiding her.

"And you're a silly, unsuspectin' little bird," Mrs. Berry retorted, as
she returned her taps on the cheek. "You haven't told me what ye do
together, and what's his excuse for comin'."

"Well, then, Mrs. Berry, almost every evening that he comes we read
History, and he explains the battles, and talks to me about the great
men. And he says I'm not silly, Mrs. Berry."

"That's one bit o' lime on your wings, my bird. History, indeed! History
to a young married lovely woman alone in the dark! a pretty History! Why,
I know that man's name, my dear. He's a notorious living rake, that Lord
Montfalcon. No woman's safe with him."

"Ah, but he hasn't deceived me, Mrs. Berry. He has not pretended he was
good."

"More's his art," quoth the experienced dame. "So you read History
together in the dark; my dear!"

"I was unwell to-night, Mrs. Berry. I wanted him not to see my face.
Look! there's the book open ready for him when the candles come in. And
now, you dear kind darling old thing, let me kiss you for coming to me. I
do love you. Talk of other things."

"So we will," said Mrs. Berry softening to Lucy's caresses. "So let us. A
nobleman, indeed, alone with a young wife in the dark, and she sich a
beauty! I say this shall be put a stop to now and henceforth, on the spot
it shall! He won't meneuvele Bessy Berry with his arts. There! I drop
him. I'm dyin' for a cup o' tea, my dear."

Lucy got up to ring the bell, and as Mrs. Berry, incapable of quite
dropping him, was continuing to say: "Let him go and boast I kiss him; he
ain't nothin' to be 'shamed of in a chaste woman's kiss--unawares--which
men don't get too often in their lives, I can assure 'em;"--her eye
surveyed Lucy's figure.

Lo, when Lucy returned to her, Mrs. Berry surrounded her with her arms,
and drew her into feminine depths. "Oh, you blessed!" she cried in most
meaning tone, "you good, lovin', proper little wife, you!"

"What is it, Mrs. Berry!" lisps Lucy, opening the most innocent blue
eyes.

"As if I couldn't see, you pet! It was my flurry blinded me, or I'd 'a
marked ye the fast shock. Thinkin' to deceive me!"

Mrs. Berry's eyes spoke generations. Lucy's wavered; she coloured all
over, and hid her face on the bounteous breast that mounted to her.

"You're a sweet one," murmured the soft woman, patting her back, and
rocking her. "You're a rose, you are! and a bud on your stalk. Haven't
told a word to your husband, my dear?" she asked quickly.

Lucy shook her head, looking sly and shy.

"That's right. We'll give him a surprise; let it come all at once on him,
and thinks he--losin' breath 'I'm a father!' Nor a hint even you haven't
give him?"

Lucy kissed her, to indicate it was quite a secret.

"Oh! you are a sweet one," said Bessy Berry, and rocked her more closely
and lovingly.

Then these two had a whispered conversation, from which let all of male
persuasion retire a space nothing under one mile.

Returning, after a due interval, we see Mrs. Berry counting on her
fingers' ends. Concluding the sum, she cries prophetically: "Now this
right everything--a baby in the balance! Now I say this angel-infant come
from on high. It's God's messenger, my love! and it's not wrong to say
so. He thinks you worthy, or you wouldn't 'a had one--not for all the
tryin' in the world, you wouldn't, and some tries hard enough, poor
creatures! Now let us rejice and make merry! I'm for cryin' and laughin',
one and the same. This is the blessed seal of matrimony, which Berry
never stamp on me. It's be hoped it's a boy. Make that man a grandfather,
and his grandchild a son, and you got him safe. Oh! this is what I call
happiness, and I'll have my tea a little stronger in consequence. I
declare I could get tipsy to know this joyful news."

So Mrs. Berry carolled. She had her tea a little stronger. She ate and
she drank; she rejoiced and made merry. The bliss of the chaste was hers.

Says Lucy demurely: "Now you know why I read History, and that sort of
books."

"Do I?" replies Berry. "Belike I do. Since what you done's so good, my
darlin', I'm agreeable to anything. A fig for all the lords! They can't
come anigh a baby. You may read Voyages and Travels, my dear, and
Romances, and Tales of Love and War. You cut the riddle in your own dear
way, and that's all I cares for."

"No, but you don't understand," persists Lucy. "I only read sensible
books, and talk of serious things, because I'm sure... because I have
heard say...dear Mrs. Berry! don't you understand now?"

Mrs. Berry smacked her knees. "Only to think of her bein' that
thoughtful! and she a Catholic, too! Never tell me that people of one
religion ain't as good as another, after that. Why, you want to make him
a historian, to be sure! And that rake of a lord who've been comin' here
playin' at wolf, you been and made him--unbeknown to himself--sort o'
tutor to the unborn blessed! Ha! ha! say that little women ain't got art
ekal to the cunningest of 'em. Oh! I understand. Why, to be sure, didn't
I know a lady, a widow of a clergyman: he was a postermost child, and
afore his birth that women read nothin' but Blair's 'Grave' over and over
again, from the end to the beginnin';--that's a serious book!--very hard
readin'!--and at four years of age that child that come of it reelly was
the piousest infant!--he was like a little curate. His eyes was up; he
talked so solemn." Mrs. Berry imitated the little curate's appearance and
manner of speaking. "So she got her wish, for one!"

But at this lady Lucy laughed.

They chattered on happily till bedtime. Lucy arranged for Mrs. Berry to
sleep with her. "If it's not dreadful to ye, my sweet, sleepin' beside a
woman," said Mrs. Berry. "I know it were to me shortly after my Berry,
and I felt it. It don't somehow seem nat'ral after matrimony--a woman in
your bed! I was obliged to have somebody, for the cold sheets do give ye
the creeps when you've been used to that that's different."

Upstairs they went together, Lucy not sharing these objections. Then Lucy
opened certain drawers, and exhibited pretty caps, and laced linen, all
adapted for a very small body, all the work of her own hands: and Mrs.
Berry praised them and her. "You been guessing a boy--woman-like," she
said. Then they cooed, and kissed, and undressed by the fire, and knelt
at the bedside, with their arms about each other, praying; both praying
for the unborn child; and Mrs. Berry pressed Lucy's waist the moment she
was about to breathe the petition to heaven to shield and bless that
coming life; and thereat Lucy closed to her, and felt a strong love for
her. Then Lucy got into bed first, leaving Berry to put out the light,
and before she did so, Berry leaned over her, and eyed her roguishly,
saying, "I never see ye like this, but I'm half in love with ye myself,
you blushin' beauty! Sweet's your eyes, and your hair do take one
so--lyin' back. I'd never forgive my father if he kep me away from ye
four-and-twenty hours just. Husband o' that!" Berry pointed at the young
wife's loveliness. "Ye look so ripe with kisses, and there they are
a-languishin'!--... You never look so but in your bed, ye beauty!--just
as it ought to be." Lucy had to pretend to rise to put out the light
before Berry would give up her amorous chaste soliloquy. Then they lay in
bed, and Mrs. Berry fondled her, and arranged for their departure
to-morrow, and reviewed Richard's emotions when he came to hear he was
going to be made a father by her, and hinted at Lucy's delicious shivers
when Richard was again in his rightful place, which she, Bessy Berry, now
usurped; and all sorts of amorous sweet things; enough to make one fancy
the adage subverted, that stolen fruits are sweetest; she drew such
glowing pictures of bliss within the law and the limits of the
conscience, till at last, worn out, Lucy murmured "Peepy, dear Berry,"
and the soft woman gradually ceased her chirp.

Bessy Berry did not sleep. She lay thinking of the sweet brave heart
beside her, and listening to Lucy's breath as it came and went; squeezing
the fair sleeper's hand now and then, to ease her love as her reflections
warmed. A storm of wind came howling over the Hampshire hills, and sprang
white foam on the water, and shook the bare trees. It passed, leaving a
thin cloth of snow on the wintry land. The moon shone brilliantly. Berry
heard the house-dog bark. His bark was savage and persistent. She was
roused by the noise. By and by she fancied she heard a movement in the
house; then it seemed to her that the house-door opened. She cocked her
ears, and could almost make out voices in the midnight stillness. She
slipped from the bed, locked and bolted the door of the room, assured
herself of Lucy's unconsciousness, and went on tiptoe to the window. The
trees all stood white to the north; the ground glittered; the cold was
keen. Berry wrapped her fat arms across her bosom, and peeped as close
over into the garden as the situation of the window permitted. Berry was
a soft, not a timid, woman: and it happened this night that her thoughts
were above the fears of the dark. She was sure of the voices; curiosity
without a shade of alarm held her on the watch; and gathering bundles of
her day-apparel round her neck and shoulders, she silenced the chattering
of her teeth as well as she could, and remained stationary. The low hum
of the voices came to a break; something was said in a louder tone; the
house-door quietly shut; a man walked out of the garden into the road. He
paused opposite her window, and Berry let the blind go back to its place,
and peeped from behind an edge of it. He was in the shadow of the house,
so that it was impossible to discern much of his figure. After some
minutes he walked rapidly away, and Berry returned to the bed an icicle,
from which Lucy's limbs sensitively shrank.

Next morning Mrs. Berry asked Tom Bakewell if he had been disturbed in
the night. Tom, the mysterious, said he had slept like a top. Mrs. Berry
went into the garden. The snow was partially melted; all save one spot,
just under the portal, and there she saw the print of a man's foot. By
some strange guidance it occurred to her to go and find one of Richard's
boots. She did so, and, unperceived, she measured the sole of the boot in
that solitary footmark. There could be no doubt that it fitted. She tried
it from heel to toe a dozen times.




CHAPTER XL

Sir Austin Feverel had come to town with the serenity of a philosopher
who says, 'Tis now time; and the satisfaction of a man who has not
arrived thereat without a struggle. He had almost forgiven his son. His
deep love for him had well-nigh shaken loose from wounded pride and more
tenacious vanity. Stirrings of a remote sympathy for the creature who had
robbed him of his son and hewed at his System, were in his heart of
hearts. This he knew; and in his own mind he took credit for his
softness. But the world must not suppose him soft; the world must think
he was still acting on his System. Otherwise what would his long absence
signify?--Something highly unphilosophical. So, though love was strong,
and was moving him to a straightforward course, the last tug of vanity
drew him still aslant.

The Aphorist read himself so well, that to juggle with himself was a
necessity. As he wished the world to see him, he beheld himself: one who
entirely put aside mere personal feelings: one in whom parental duty,
based on the science of life, was paramount: a Scientific Humanist, in
short.

He was, therefore, rather surprised at a coldness in Lady Blandish's
manner when he did appear. "At last!" said the lady, in a sad way that
sounded reproachfully. Now the Scientific Humanist had, of course,
nothing to reproach himself with.

But where was Richard?

Adrian positively averred he was not with his wife.

"If he had gone," said the baronet, "he would have anticipated me by a
few hours."

This, when repeated to Lady Blandish, should have propitiated her, and
shown his great forgiveness. She, however, sighed, and looked at him
wistfully.

Their converse was not happy and deeply intimate. Philosophy did not seem
to catch her mind; and fine phrases encountered a rueful assent, more
flattering to their grandeur than to their influence.

Days went by. Richard did not present himself. Sir Austin's pitch of
self-command was to await the youth without signs of impatience.

Seeing this, the lady told him her fears for Richard, and mentioned the
rumour of him that was about.

"If," said the baronet, "this person, his wife, is what you paint her, I
do not share your fears for him. I think too well of him. If she is one
to inspire the sacredness of that union, I think too well of him. It is
impossible."

The lady saw one thing to be done.

"Call her to you," she said. "Have her with you at Raynham. Recognize
her. It is the disunion and doubt that so confuses him and drives him
wild. I confess to you I hoped he had gone to her. It seems not. If she
is with you his way will be clear. Will you do that?"

Science is notoriously of slow movement. Lady Blandish's proposition was
far too hasty for Sir Austin. Women, rapid by nature, have no idea of
science.

"We shall see her there in time, Emmeline. At present let it be between
me and my son."

He spoke loftily. In truth it offended him to be asked to do anything,
when he had just brought himself to do so much.

A month elapsed, and Richard appeared on the scene.

The meeting between him and his father was not what his father had
expected and had crooned over in the Welsh mountains. Richard shook his
hand respectfully, and inquired after his health with the common social
solicitude. He then said: "During your absence, sir, I have taken the
liberty, without consulting you, to do something in which you are more
deeply concerned than myself. I have taken upon myself to find out my
mother and place her under my care. I trust you will not think I have
done wrong. I acted as I thought best."

Sir Austin replied: "You are of an age, Richard, to judge for yourself in
such a case. I would have you simply beware of deceiving yourself in
imagining that you considered any one but yourself in acting as you did."

"I have not deceived myself, sir," said Richard, and the interview was
over. Both hated an exposure of the feelings, and in that both were
satisfied: but the baronet, as one who loves, hoped and looked for tones
indicative of trouble and delight in the deep heart; and Richard gave him
none of those. The young man did not even face him as he spoke: if their
eyes met by chance, Richard's were defiantly cold. His whole bearing was
changed.

"This rash marriage has altered him," said the very just man of science
in life: and that meant: "it has debased him."

He pursued his reflections. "I see in him the desperate maturity of a
suddenly-ripened nature: and but for my faith that good work is never
lost, what should I think of the toil of my years? Lost, perhaps to me!
lost to him! It may show itself in his children."

The Philosopher, we may conceive, has contentment in benefiting embryos:
but it was a somewhat bitter prospect to Sir Austin. Bitterly he felt the
injury to himself.

One little incident spoke well of Richard. A poor woman called at the
hotel while he was missing. The baronet saw her, and she told him a tale
that threw Christian light on one part of Richard's nature. But this
might gratify the father in Sir Austin; it did not touch the man of
science. A Feverel, his son, would not do less, he thought. He sat down
deliberately to study his son.

No definite observations enlightened him. Richard ate and drank; joked
and laughed. He was generally before Adrian in calling for a fresh
bottle. He talked easily of current topics; his gaiety did not sound
forced. In all he did, nevertheless, there was not the air of a youth who
sees a future before him. Sir Austin put that down. It might be
carelessness, and wanton blood, for no one could say he had much on his
mind. The man of science was not reckoning that Richard also might have
learned to act and wear a mask. Dead subjects--this is to say, people not
on their guard--he could penetrate and dissect. It is by a rare chance,
as scientific men well know, that one has an opportunity of examining the
structure of the living.

However, that rare chance was granted to Sir Austin. They were engaged to
dine with Mrs. Doria at the Foreys', and walked down to her in the
afternoon, father and son arm-in-arm, Adrian beside them. Previously the
offended father had condescended to inform his son that it would shortly
be time for him to return to his wife, indicating that arrangements would
ultimately be ordered to receive her at Raynham. Richard had replied
nothing; which might mean excess of gratitude, or hypocrisy in concealing
his pleasure, or any one of the thousand shifts by which gratified human
nature expresses itself when all is made to run smooth with it. Now Mrs.
Berry had her surprise ready charged for the young husband. She had Lucy
in her own house waiting for him. Every day she expected him to call and
be overcome by the rapturous surprise, and every day, knowing his habit
of frequenting the park, she marched Lucy thither, under the plea that
Master Richard, whom she had already christened, should have an airing.

The round of the red winter sun was behind the bare Kensington chestnuts,
when these two parties met. Happily for Lucy and the hope she bore in her
bosom, she was perversely admiring a fair horsewoman galloping by at the
moment. Mrs. Berry plucked at her gown once or twice, to prepare her eyes
for the shock, but Lucy's head was still half averted, and thinks Mrs.
Berry, "Twon't hurt her if she go into his arms head foremost." They were
close; Mrs. Berry performed the bob preliminary. Richard held her silent
with a terrible face; he grasped her arm, and put her behind him. Other
people intervened. Lucy saw nothing to account for Berry's excessive
flutter. Berry threw it on the air and some breakfast bacon, which, she
said, she knew in the morning while she ate it, was bad for the bile, and
which probably was the cause of her bursting into tears, much to Lucy's
astonishment.

"What you ate makes you cry, Mrs. Berry?"

"It's all--" Mrs. Berry pressed at her heart and leaned sideways, "it's
all stomach, my dear. Don't ye mind," and becoming aware of her
unfashionable behaviour, she trailed off to the shelter of the elms.

"You have a singular manner with old ladies," said Sir Austin to his son,
after Berry had been swept aside.

Scarcely courteous. She behaved like a mad woman, certainly."--Are you
ill, my son?"

Richard was death-pale, his strong form smitten through with weakness.
The baronet sought Adrian's eye. Adrian had seen Lucy as they passed, and
he had a glimpse of Richard's countenance while disposing of Berry. Had
Lucy recognized them, he would have gone to her unhesitatingly. As she
did not, he thought it well, under the circumstances, to leave matters as
they were. He answered the baronet's look with a shrug.

"Are you ill, Richard?" Sir Austin again asked his son.

"Come on, sir! come on!" cried Richard.

His father's further meditations, as they stepped briskly to the Foreys',
gave poor ferry a character which one who lectures on matrimony, and has
kissed but three men in her life, shrieks to hear the very title of.

"Richard will go to his wife to-morrow," Sir Austin said to Adrian some
time before they went in to dinner.

Adrian asked him if he had chanced to see a young fair-haired lady by the
side of the old one Richard had treated so peculiarly; and to the
baronet's acknowledgment that he remembered to have observed such a
person, Adrian said: "That was his wife, sir."

Sir Austin could not dissect the living subject. As if a bullet had torn
open the young man's skull, and some blast of battle laid his palpitating
organization bare, he watched every motion of his brain and his heart;
and with the grief and terror of one whose mental habit was ever to
pierce to extremes. Not altogether conscious that he had hitherto played
with life, he felt that he was suddenly plunged into the stormful reality
of it. He projected to speak plainly to his son on all points that night.

"Richard is very gay," Mrs. Doris, whispered her brother.

"All will be right with him to-morrow," he replied; for the game had been
in his hands so long, so long had he been the God of the machine, that
having once resolved to speak plainly and to act, he was to a certain
extent secure, bad as the thing to mend might be.

"I notice he has rather a wild laugh--I don't exactly like his eyes,"
said Mrs. Doria.

"You will see a change in him to-morrow," the man of science remarked.

It was reserved for Mrs. Doria herself to experience that change. In the
middle of the dinner a telegraphic message from her son-in-law, worthy
John Todhunter, reached the house, stating that Clare was alarmingly ill,
bidding her come instantly. She cast about for some one to accompany her,
and fixed on Richard. Before he would give his consent for Richard to go,
Sir Austin desired to speak with him apart, and in that interview he said
to his son: "My dear Richard! it was my intention that we should come to
an understanding together this night. But the time is short--poor Helen
cannot spare many minutes. Let me then say that you deceived me, and that
I forgive you. We fix our seal on the past. You will bring your wife to
me when you return." And very cheerfully the baronet looked down on the
generous future he thus founded.

"Will you have her at Raynham at once, sir?" said Richard.

"Yes, my son, when you bring her."

"Are you mocking me, sir?"

"Pray, what do you mean?"

"I ask you to receive her at once."

"Well! the delay cannot be long. I do not apprehend that you will be kept
from your happiness many days."

"I think it will be some time, sir!" said Richard, sighing deeply.

"And what mental freak is this that can induce you to postpone it and
play with your first duty?"

"What is my first duty, sir?"

"Since you are married, to be with your wife."

"I have heard that from an old woman called Berry!" said Richard to
himself, not intending irony.

"Will you receive her at once?" he asked resolutely.

The baronet was clouded by his son's reception of his graciousness. His
grateful prospect had formerly been Richard's marriage--the culmination
of his System. Richard had destroyed his participation in that. He now
looked for a pretty scene in recompense:--Richard leading up his wife to
him, and both being welcomed by him paternally, and so held one
ostentatious minute in his embrace.

He said: "Before you return, I demur to receiving her."

"Very well, sir," replied his son, and stood as if he had spoken all.

"Really you tempt me to fancy you already regret your rash proceeding!"
the baronet exclaimed; and the next moment it pained him he had uttered
the words, Richard's eyes were so sorrowfully fierce. It pained him, but
he divined in that look a history, and he could not refrain from glancing
acutely and asking: "Do you?"

"Regret it, sir?" The question aroused one of those struggles in the
young man's breast which a passionate storm of tears may still, and which
sink like leaden death into the soul when tears come not. Richard's eyes
had the light of the desert.

"Do you?" his father repeated. "You tempt me--I almost fear you do." At
the thought--for he expressed his mind--the pity that he had for Richard
was not pure gold.

"Ask me what I think of her, sir! Ask me what she is! Ask me what it is
to have taken one of God's precious angels and chained her to misery! Ask
me what it is to have plunged a sword into her heart, and to stand over
her and see such a creature bleeding! Do I regret that? Why, yes, I do!
Would you?"

His eyes flew hard at his father under the ridge of his eyebrows.

Sir Austin winced and reddened. Did he understand? There is ever in the
mind's eye a certain wilfulness. We see and understand; we see and won't
understand.

"Tell me why you passed by her as you did this afternoon," he said
gravely: and in the same voice Richard answered: "I passed her because I
could not do otherwise."

"Your wife, Richard?"

"Yes! my wife!"

"If she had seen you, Richard?"

"God spared her that!"

Mrs. Doria, bustling in practical haste, and bearing Richard's hat and
greatcoat in her energetic hands, came between them at this juncture.
Dimples of commiseration were in her cheeks while she kissed her
brother's perplexed forehead. She forgot her trouble about Clare,
deploring his fatuity.

Sir Austin was forced to let his son depart. As of old, he took counsel
with Adrian, and the wise youth was soothing. "Somebody has kissed him,
sir, and the chaste boy can't get over it." This absurd suggestion did
more to appease the baronet than if Adrian had given a veritable
reasonable key to Richard's conduct. It set him thinking that it might be
a prudish strain in the young man's mind, due to the System in
difficulties.

"I may have been wrong in one thing," he said, with an air of the utmost
doubt of it. "I, perhaps, was wrong in allowing him so much liberty
during his probation."

Adrian pointed out to him that he had distinctly commanded it.

"Yes, yes; that is on me."

His was an order of mind that would accept the most burdensome charges,
and by some species of moral usury make a profit out of them.

Clare was little talked of. Adrian attributed the employment of the
telegraph to John Todhunter's uxorious distress at a toothache, or
possibly the first symptoms of an heir to his house.

"That child's mind has disease in it... She is not sound," said the
baronet.

On the door-step of the hotel, when they returned, stood Mrs. Berry. Her
wish to speak a few words with the baronet reverentially communicated,
she was ushered upstairs into his room.

Mrs. Berry compressed her person in the chair she was beckoned to occupy.

"Well' ma'am, you have something to say," observed the baronet, for she
seemed loth to commence.

"Wishin' I hadn't--" Mrs. Berry took him up, and mindful of the good rule
to begin at the beginning, pursued: "I dare say, Sir Austin, you don't
remember me, and I little thought when last we parted our meeting 'd be
like this. Twenty year don't go over one without showin' it, no more than
twenty ox. It's a might o' time,--twenty year! Leastways not quite
twenty, it ain't."

"Round figures are best," Adrian remarked.

"In them round figures a be-loved son have growed up, and got himself
married!" said Mrs. Berry, diving straight into the case.

Sir Austin then learnt that he had before him the culprit who had
assisted his son in that venture. It was a stretch of his patience to
hear himself addressed on a family matter; but he was naturally
courteous.

"He came to my house, Sir Austin, a stranger! If twenty year alters us as
have knowed each other on the earth, how must they alter they that we
parted with just come from heaven! And a heavenly babe he were! so sweet!
so strong! so fat!"

Adrian laughed aloud.

Mrs. Berry bumped a curtsey to him in her chair, continuing: "I wished
afore I spoke to say how thankful am I bound to be for my pension not cut
short, as have offended so, but that I know Sir Austin Feverel, Raynham
Abbey, ain't one o' them that likes to hear their good deeds pumlished.
And a pension to me now, it's something more than it were. For a pension
and pretty rosy cheeks in a maid, which I was--that's a bait many a
man'll bite, that won't so a forsaken wife!"

"If you will speak to the point, ma'am, I will listen to you," the
baronet interrupted her.

"It's the beginnin' that's the worst, and that's over, thank the Lord! So
I'll speak, Sir Austin, and say my say:--Lord speed me! Believin' our
idees o' matrimony to be sim'lar, then, I'll say, once married--married
for life! Yes! I don't even like widows. For I can't stop at the grave.
Not at the tomb I can't stop. My husband's my husband, and if I'm a body
at the Resurrection, I say, speaking humbly, my Berry is the husband o'
my body; and to think of two claimin' of me then--it makes me hot all
over. Such is my notion of that state 'tween man and woman. No givin' in
marriage, o' course I know; and if so I'm single."

The baronet suppressed a smile. "Really, my good woman, you wander very
much."

"Beggin' pardon, Sir Austin; but I has my point before me all the same,
and I'm comin' to it. Ac-knowledgin' our error, it'd done, and bein'
done, it's writ aloft. Oh! if you ony knew what a sweet young creature
she be! Indeed; 'taint all of humble birth that's unworthy, Sir Austin.
And she got her idees, too: She reads History! She talk that sensible as
would surprise ye. But for all that she's a prey to the artful o'
men--unpertected. And it's a young marriage--but there's no fear for her,
as far as she go. The fear's t'other way. There's that in a man--at the
commencement--which make of him Lord knows what if you any way
interferes: whereas a woman bides quiet! It's consolation catch her,
which is what we mean by seduein'. Whereas a man--he's a savage!"

Sir Austin turned his face to Adrian, who was listening with huge
delight.

"Well, ma'am, I see you have something in your mind, if you would only
come to it quickly."

"Then here's my point, Sir Austin. I say you bred him so as there ain't
another young gentleman like him in England, and proud he make me. And as
for her, I'll risk sayin'--it's done, and no harm--you might search
England through, and nowhere will ye find a maid that's his match like
his own wife. Then there they be. Are they together as should be? O Lord
no! Months they been divided. Then she all lonely and exposed, I went,
and fetched her out of seducers' ways--which they may say what they like,
but the inn'cent is most open to when they're healthy and confidin'--I
fetch her, and--the liberty--boxed her safe in my own house. So much for
that sweet! That you may do with women. But it's him--Mr. Richard--I am
bold, I know, but there--I'm in for it, and the Lord'll help me! It's
him, Sir Austin, in this great metropolis, warm from a young marriage.
It's him, and--I say nothin' of her, and how sweet she bears it, and it's
eating her at a time when Natur' should have no other trouble but the one
that's goin' on it's him, and I ask--so bold--shall there--and a
Christian gentlemen his father--shall there be a tug 'tween him as a son
and him as a husband--soon to be somethin' else? I speak bold out--I'd
have sons obey their fathers, but a priest's words spoke over them, which
they're now in my ears, I say I ain't a doubt on earth--I'm sure there
ain't one in heaven--which dooty's the holier of the two."

Sir Austin heard her to an end. Their views on the junction of the sexes
were undoubtedly akin. To be lectured on his prime subject, however, was
slightly disagreeable, and to be obliged mentally to assent to this old
lady's doctrine was rather humiliating, when it could not be averred that
he had latterly followed it out. He sat cross-legged and silent, a finger
to his temple.

"One gets so addle-gated thinkin' many things," said Mrs. Berry, simply.
"That's why we see wonder clever people goin' wrong--to my mind. I think
it's al'ays the plan in a dielemmer to pray God and walk forward."

The keen-witted soft woman was tracking the baronet's thoughts, and she
had absolutely run him down and taken an explanation out of his mouth, by
which Mrs. Berry was to have been informed that he had acted from a
principle of his own, and devolved a wisdom she could not be expected to
comprehend.

Of course he became advised immediately that it would be waste of time to
direct such an explanation to her inferior capacity.

He gave her his hand, saying, "My son has gone out of town to see his
cousin, who is ill. He will return in two or three days, and then they
will both come to me at Raynham."

Mrs. Berry took the tips of his fingers, and went half-way to the floor
perpendicularly. "He pass her like a stranger in the park this evenin',"
she faltered.

"Ah?" said the baronet. "Yes, well! they will be at Raynham before the
week is over."

Mrs. Berry was not quite satisfied. "Not of his own accord he pass that
sweet young wife of his like a stranger this day, Sir Austin!"

"I must beg you not to intrude further, ma'am."

Mrs. Berry bobbed her bunch of a body out of the room.

"All's well that ends well," she said to herself. "It's just bad
inquirin' too close among men. We must take 'em somethin' like
Providence--as they come. Thank heaven! I kep' back the baby."

In Mrs. Berry's eyes the baby was the victorious reserve.

Adrian asked his chief what he thought of that specimen of woman.

"I think I have not met a better in my life," said the baronet, mingling
praise and sarcasm.

Clare lies in her bed as placid as in the days when she breathed; her
white hands stretched their length along the sheets, at peace from head
to feet. She needs iron no more. Richard is face to face with death for
the first time. He sees the sculpture of clay--the spark gone.

Clare gave her mother the welcome of the dead. This child would have
spoken nothing but kind commonplaces had she been alive. She was dead,
and none knew her malady. On her fourth finger were two wedding-rings.

When hours of weeping had silenced the mother's anguish, she, for some
comfort she saw in it, pointed out that strange thing to Richard,
speaking low in the chamber of the dead; and then he learnt that it was
his own lost ring Clare wore in the two worlds. He learnt from her
husband that Clare's last request had been that neither of the rings
should be removed. She had written it; she would not speak it.

"I beg of my husband, and all kind people who may have the care of me
between this and the grave, to bury me with my hands untouched."

The tracing of the words showed the bodily torment she was suffering, as
she wrote them on a scrap of paper found beside her pillow.

In wonder, as the dim idea grew from the waving of Clare's dead hand,
Richard paced the house, and hung about the awful room; dreading to enter
it, reluctant to quit it. The secret Clare had buried while she lived,
arose with her death. He saw it play like flame across her marble
features. The memory of her voice was like a knife at his nerves. His
coldness to her started up accusingly: her meekness was bitter blame.

On the evening of the fourth day, her mother came to him in his bedroom,
with a face so white that he asked himself if aught worse could happen to
a mother than the loss of her child. Choking she said to him, "Read
this," and thrust a leather-bound pocket-book trembling in his hand. She
would not breathe to him what it was. She entreated him not to open it
before her.

"Tell me," she said, "tell me what you think. John must not hear of it. I
have nobody to consult but you O Richard!"

"My Diary" was written in the round hand of Clare's childhood on the
first page. The first name his eye encountered was his own.

"Richard's fourteenth birthday. I have worked him a purse and put it
under his pillow, because he is going to have plenty of money. He does
not notice me now because he has a friend now, and he is ugly, but
Richard is not, and never will be."

The occurrences of that day were subsequently recorded, and a childish
prayer to God for him set down. Step by step he saw her growing mind in
his history. As she advanced in years she began to look back, and made
much of little trivial remembrances, all bearing upon him.

"We went into the fields and gathered cowslips together, and pelted each
other, and I told him he used to call them 'coals-sleeps' when he was a
baby, and he was angry at my telling him, for he does not like to be told
he was ever a baby."

He remembered the incident, and remembered his stupid scorn of her meek
affection. Little Clare! how she lived before him in her white dress and
pink ribbons, and soft dark eyes! Upstairs she was lying dead. He read
on:

"Mama says there is no one in the world like Richard, and I am sure there
is not, not in the whole world. He says he is going to be a great General
and going to the wars. If he does I shall dress myself as a boy and go
after him, and he will not know me till I am wounded. Oh I pray he will
never, never be wounded. I wonder what I should feel if Richard was ever
to die."

Upstairs Clare was lying dead.

"Lady Blandish said there was a likeness between Richard and me. Richard
said I hope I do not hang down my head as she does. He is angry with me
because I do not look people in the face and speak out, but I know I am
not looking after earthworms."

Yes. He had told her that. A shiver seized him at the recollection.

Then it came to a period when the words: "Richard kissed me," stood by
themselves, and marked a day in her life.

Afterwards it was solemnly discovered that Richard wrote poetry. He read
one of his old forgotten compositions penned when he had that ambition.

       "Thy truth to me is truer
        Than horse, or dog, or blade;
        Thy vows to me are fewer
        Than ever maiden made.

        Thou steppest from thy splendour
        To make my life a song:
        My bosom shall be tender
        As thine has risen strong."

All the verses were transcribed. "It is he who is the humble knight,"
Clare explained at the close, "and his lady, is a Queen. Any Queen would
throw her crown away for him."

It came to that period when Clare left Raynham with her mother.

"Richard was not sorry to lose me. He only loves boys and men. Something
tells me I shall never see Raynham again. He was dressed in blue. He said
Good-bye, Clare, and kissed me on the cheek. Richard never kisses me on
the mouth. He did not know I went to his bed and kissed him while he was
asleep. He sleeps with one arm under his head, and the other out on the
bed. I moved away a bit of his hair that was over his eyes. I wanted to
cut it. I have one piece. I do not let anybody see I am unhappy, not even
mama. She says I want iron. I am sure I do not. I like to write my name.
Clare Doria Forey. Richard's is Richard Doria Feverel."

His breast rose convulsively. Clare Doria Forey! He knew the music of
that name. He had heard it somewhere. It sounded faint and mellow now
behind the hills of death.

He could not read for tears. It was midnight. The hour seemed to belong
to her. The awful stillness and the darkness were Clare's. Clare's voice
clear and cold from the grave possessed it.

Painfully, with blinded eyes, he looked over the breathless pages. She
spoke of his marriage, and her finding the ring.

"I knew it was his. I knew he was going to be married that morning. I saw
him stand by the altar when they laughed at breakfast. His wife must be
so beautiful! Richard's wife! Perhaps he will love me better now he is
married. Mama says they must be separated. That is shameful. If I can
help him I will. I pray so that he may be happy. I hope God hears poor
sinners' prayers. I am very sinful. Nobody knows it as I do. They say I
am good, but I know. When I look on the ground I am not looking after
earthworms, as he said. Oh, do forgive me, God!"

Then she spoke of her own marriage, and that it was her duty to obey her
mother. A blank in the Diary ensued.

"I have seen Richard. Richard despises me," was the next entry.

But now as he read his eyes were fixed, and the delicate feminine
handwriting like a black thread drew on his soul to one terrible
conclusion.

"I cannot live. Richard despises me. I cannot bear the touch of my
fingers or the sight of my face. Oh! I understand him now. He should not
have kissed me so that last time. I wished to die while his mouth was on
mine."

Further: "I have no escape. Richard said he would die rather than endure
it. I know he would. Why should I be afraid to do what he would do? I
think if my husband whipped me I could bear it better. He is so kind, and
tries to make me cheerful. He will soon be very unhappy. I pray to God
half the night. I seem to be losing sight of my God the more I pray."

Richard laid the book open on the table. Phantom surges seemed to be
mounting and travelling for his brain. Had Clare taken his wild words in
earnest? Did she lie there dead--he shrouded the thought.

He wrapped the thoughts in shrouds, but he was again reading.

"A quarter to one o'clock. I shall not be alive this time to-morrow. I
shall never see Richard now. I dreamed last night we were in the fields
together, and he walked with his arm round my waist. We were children,
but I thought we were married, and I showed him I wore his ring, and he
said--if you always wear it, Clare, you are as good as my wife. Then I
made a vow to wear it for ever and ever... It is not mama's fault. She
does not think as Richard and I do of these things. He is not a coward,
nor am I. He hates cowards.

"I have written to his father to make him happy. Perhaps when I am dead
he will hear what I say.

"I heard just now Richard call distinctly--Clare, come out to me. Surely
he has not gone. I am going I know not where. I cannot think. I am very
cold."

The words were written larger, and staggered towards the close, as if her
hand had lost mastery over the pen.

"I can only remember Richard now a boy. A little boy and a big boy. I am
not sure now of his voice. I can only remember certain words. 'Clari,'
and 'Don Ricardo,' and his laugh. He used to be full of fun. Once we
laughed all day together tumbling in the hay. Then he had a friend, and
began to write poetry, and be proud. If I had married a young man he
would have forgiven me, but I should not have been happier. I must have
died. God never looks on me.

"It is past two o'clock. The sheep are bleating outside. It must be very
cold in the ground. Good-bye, Richard."

With his name it began and ended. Even to herself Clare was not
over-communicative. The book was slender, yet her nineteen years of
existence left half the number of pages white.

Those last words drew him irresistibly to gaze on her. There she lay, the
same impassive Clare. For a moment he wondered she had not moved--to him
she had become so different. She who had just filled his ears with
strange tidings--it was not possible to think her dead! She seemed to
have been speaking to him all through his life. His image was on that
still heart.

He dismissed the night-watchers from the room, and remained with her
alone, till the sense of death oppressed him, and then the shock sent him
to the window to look for sky and stars. Behind a low broad pine, hung
with frosty mist, he heard a bell-wether of the flock in the silent fold.
Death in life it sounded.

The mother found him praying at the foot of Clare's bed. She knelt by his
side, and they prayed, and their joint sobs shook their bodies, but
neither of them shed many tears. They held a dark unspoken secret in
common. They prayed God to forgive her.

Clare was buried in the family vault of the Todhunters. Her mother
breathed no wish to have her lying at Lobourne.

After the funeral, what they alone upon earth knew brought them together.

"Richard," she said, "the worst is over for me. I have no one to love but
you, dear. We have all been fighting against God, and this... Richard!
you will come with me, and be united to your wife, and spare my brother
what I suffer."

He answered the broken spirit: "I have killed one. She sees me as I am. I
cannot go with you to my wife, because I am not worthy to touch her hand,
and were I to go, I should do this to silence my self-contempt. Go you to
her, and when she asks of me, say I have a death upon my head that--No!
say that I am abroad, seeking for that which shall cleanse me. If I find
it I shall come to claim her. If not, God help us all!"

She had no strength to contest his solemn words, or stay him, and he went
forth.




CHAPTER XLI

A man with a beard saluted the wise youth Adrian in the full blaze of
Piccadilly with a clap on the shoulder. Adrian glanced leisurely behind.

"Do you want to try my nerves, my dear fellow? I'm not a man of fashion,
happily, or you would have struck the seat of them. How are you?"

That was his welcome to Austin Wentworth after his long absence.

Austin took his arm, and asked for news, with the hunger of one who had
been in the wilderness five years.

"The Whigs have given up the ghost, my dear Austin. The free Briton is to
receive Liberty's pearl, the Ballot. The Aristocracy has had a cycle's
notice to quit. The Monarchy and old Madeira are going out; Demos and
Cape wines are coming in. They call it Reform. So, you see, your absence
has worked wonders. Depart for another five years, and you will return to
ruined stomachs, cracked sconces, general upset, an equality made perfect
by universal prostration."

Austin indulged him in a laugh. "I want to hear about ourselves. How is
old Ricky?"

"You know of his--what do they call it when greenhorns are licensed to
jump into the milkpails of dairymaids?--a very charming little woman she
makes, by the way--presentable! quite old Anacreon's rose in milk. Well!
everybody thought the System must die of it. Not a bit. It continued to
flourish in spite. It's in a consumption now, though--emaciated, lean,
raw, spectral! I've this morning escaped from Raynham to avoid the sight
of it. I have brought our genial uncle Hippias to town--a delightful
companion! I said to him: 'We've had a fine Spring.' 'Ugh!' he answers,
'there's a time when you come to think the Spring old.' You should have
heard how he trained out the 'old.' I felt something like decay in my sap
just to hear him. In the prize-fight of life, my dear Austin, our uncle
Hippias has been unfairly hit below the belt. Let's guard ourselves
there, and go and order dinner."

"But where's Ricky now, and what is he doing?" said Austin.

"Ask what he has done. The miraculous boy has gone and got a baby!"

"A child? Richard has one?" Austin's clear eyes shone with pleasure.

"I suppose it's not common among your tropical savages. He has one: one
as big as two. That has been the death-blow to the System. It bore the
marriage--the baby was too much for it. Could it swallow the baby,
'twould live. She, the wonderful woman, has produced a large boy. I
assure you it's quite amusing to see the System opening its mouth every
hour of the day, trying to gulp him down, aware that it would be a
consummate cure, or a happy release."

By degrees Austin learnt the baronet's proceedings, and smiled sadly.

"How has Ricky turned out?" he asked. "What sort of a character has he?"

"The poor boy is ruined by his excessive anxiety about it. Character? he
has the character of a bullet with a treble charge of powder behind it.
Enthusiasm is the powder. That boy could get up an enthusiasm for the
maiden days of Ops! He was going to reform the world, after your fashion,
Austin,--you have something to answer for. Unfortunately he began with
the feminine side of it. Cupid proud of Phoebus newly slain, or Pluto
wishing to people his kingdom, if you like, put it into the soft head of
one of the guileless grateful creatures to kiss him for his good work.
Oh, horror! he never expected that. Conceive the System in the flesh, and
you have our Richard. The consequence is, that this male Peri refuses to
enter his Paradise, though the gates are open for him, the trumpets blow,
and the fair unspotted one awaits him fruitful within. We heard of him
last that he was trying the German waters--preparatory to his undertaking
the release of Italy from the subjugation of the Teuton. Let's hope
they'll wash him. He is in the company of Lady Judith Felle--your old
friend, the ardent female Radical who married the decrepit to carry out
her principles. They always marry English lords, or foreign princes: I
admire their tactics."

"Judith is bad for him in such a state. I like her, but she was always
too sentimental," said Austin.

"Sentiment made her marry the old lord, I suppose? I like her for her
sentiment, Austin. Sentimental people are sure to live long and die fat.
Feeling, that's the slayer, coz. Sentiment! 'tis the cajolery of
existence: the soft bloom which whoso weareth, he or she is enviable.
Would that I had more!"

"You're not much changed, Adrian."

"I'm not a Radical, Austin."

Further inquiries, responded to in Adrian's figurative speech, instructed
Austin that the baronet was waiting for his son, in a posture of
statuesque offended paternity, before he would receive his
daughter-in-law and grandson. That was what Adrian meant by the efforts
of the System to swallow the baby.

"We're in a tangle," said the wise youth. "Time will extricate us, I
presume, or what is the venerable signor good for?"

Austin mused some minutes, and asked for Lucy's place of residence.

"We'll go to her by and by," said Adrian.

"I shall go and see her now," said Austin.

"Well, we'll go and order the dinner first, coz."

"Give me her address."

"Really, Austin, you carry matters with too long a beard," Adrian
objected. "Don't you care what you eat?" he roared hoarsely, looking
humorously hurt. "I daresay not. A slice out of him that's handy--sauce
du ciel! Go, batten on the baby, cannibal. Dinner at seven."

Adrian gave him his own address, and Lucy's, and strolled off to do the
better thing.

Overnight Mrs. Berry had observed a long stranger in her tea-cup. Posting
him on her fingers and starting him with a smack, he had vaulted lightly
and thereby indicated that he was positively coming the next day. She
forgot him in the bustle of her duties and the absorption of her
faculties in thoughts of the incomparable stranger Lucy had presented to
the world, till a knock at the street-door reminded her. "There he is!"
she cried, as she ran to open to him. "There's my stranger come!" Never
was a woman's faith in omens so justified. The stranger desired to see
Mrs. Richard Feverel. He said his name was Mr. Austin Wentworth. Mrs.
Berry clasped her hands, exclaiming, "Come at last!" and ran bolt out of
the house to look up and down the street. Presently she returned with
many excuses for her rudeness, saying: "I expected to see her comin'
home, Mr. Wentworth. Every day twice a day she go out to give her blessed
angel an airing. No leavin' the child with nursemaids for her! She is a
mother! and good milk, too, thank the Lord! though her heart's so low."

Indoors Mrs. Berry stated who she was, related the history of the young
couple and her participation in it, and admired the beard. "Although I'd
swear you don't wear it for ornament, now!" she said, having in the first
impulse designed a stroke at man's vanity.

Ultimately Mrs. Berry spoke of the family complication, and with dejected
head and joined hands threw out dark hints about Richard.

While Austin was giving his cheerfuller views of the case, Lucy came in
preceding the baby.

"I am Austin Wentworth," he said, taking her hand. They read each other's
faces, these two, and smiled kinship.

"Your name is Lucy?"

She affirmed it softly.

"And mine is Austin, as you know."

Mrs. Berry allowed time for Lucy's charms to subdue him, and presented
Richard's representative, who, seeing a new face, suffered himself to be
contemplated before he commenced crying aloud and knocking at the doors
of Nature for something that was due to him.

"Ain't he a lusty darlin'?" says Mrs. Berry. "Ain't he like his own
father? There can't be no doubt about zoo, zoo pitty pet. Look at his
fists. Ain't he got passion? Ain't he a splendid roarer? Oh!" and she
went off rapturously into baby-language.

A fine boy, certainly. Mrs. Berry exhibited his legs for further proof,
desiring Austin's confirmation as to their being dumplings.

Lucy murmured a word of excuse, and bore the splendid roarer out of the
room.

"She might a done it here," said Mrs. Berry. "There's no prettier sight,
I say. If her dear husband could but see that! He's off in his
heroics--he want to be doin' all sorts o' things: I say he'll never do
anything grander than that baby. You should 'a seen her uncle over that
baby--he came here, for I said, you shall see your own family, my dear,
and so she thinks. He come, and he laughed over that baby in the joy of
his heart, poor man! he cried, he did. You should see that Mr. Thompson,
Mr. Wentworth--a friend o' Mr. Richard's, and a very modest-minded young
gentleman--he worships her in his innocence. It's a sight to see him with
that baby. My belief is he's unhappy 'cause he can't anyways be
nurse-maid to him. O Mr. Wentworth! what do you think of her, sir?"

Austin's reply was as satisfactory as a man's poor speech could make it.
He heard that Lady Feverel was in the house, and Mrs. Berry prepared the
way for him to pay his respects to her. Then Mrs. Berry ran to Lucy, and
the house buzzed with new life. The simple creatures felt in Austin's
presence something good among them. "He don't speak much," said Mrs.
Berry, "but I see by his eye he mean a deal. He ain't one o' yer
long-word gentry, who's all gay deceivers, every one of 'em."

Lucy pressed the hearty suckling into her breast. "I wonder what he
thinks of me, Mrs. Berry? I could not speak to him. I loved him before I
saw him. I knew what his face was like."

"He looks proper even with a beard, and that's a trial for a virtuous
man," said Mrs. Berry. "One sees straight through the hair with him.
Think! he'll think what any man'd think--you a-suckin spite o' all your
sorrow, my sweet,--and my Berry talkin' of his Roman matrons!--here's a
English wife'll match 'em all! that's what he thinks. And now that leetle
dark under yer eye'll clear, my darlin', now he've come."

Mrs. Berry looked to no more than that; Lucy to no more than the peace
she had in being near Richard's best friend. When she sat down to tea it
was with a sense that the little room that held her was her home perhaps
for many a day.

A chop procured and cooked by Mrs. Berry formed Austin's dinner. During
the meal he entertained them with anecdotes of his travels. Poor Lucy had
no temptation to try to conquer Austin. That heroic weakness of hers was
gone.

Mrs. Berry had said: "Three cups--I goes no further," and Lucy had
rejected the proffer of more tea, when Austin, who was in the thick of a
Brazilian forest, asked her if she was a good traveller.

"I mean, can you start at a minute's notice?"

Lucy hesitated, and then said; "Yes," decisively, to which Mrs. Berry
added, that she was not a "luggage-woman"

"There used to be a train at seven o'clock," Austin remarked, consulting
his watch.

The two women were silent.

"Could you get ready to come with me to Raynham in ten minutes?"

Austin looked as if he had asked a commonplace question.

Lucy's lips parted to speak. She could not answer.

Loud rattled the teaboard to Mrs. Berry's dropping hands.

"Joy and deliverance!" she exclaimed with a foundering voice.

"Will you come?" Austin kindly asked again.

Lucy tried to stop her beating heart, as she answered, "Yes." Mrs. Berry
cunningly pretended to interpret the irresolution in her tones with a
mighty whisper: "She's thinking what's to be done with baby."

"He must learn to travel," said Austin.

"Oh!" cried Mrs. Berry, "and I'll be his nuss, and bear him, a sweet! Oh!
and think of it! me nurse-maid once more at Raynham Abbey! but it's
nurse-woman now, you must say. Let us be goin' on the spot."

She started up and away in hot haste, fearing delay would cool the
heaven-sent resolve. Austin smiled, eying his watch and Lucy alternately.
She was wishing to ask a multitude of questions. His face reassured her,
and saying: "I will be dressed instantly," she also left the room.
Talking, bustling, preparing, wrapping up my lord, and looking to their
neatnesses, they were nevertheless ready within the time prescribed by
Austin, and Mrs. Berry stood humming over the baby. "He'll sleep it
through," she said. "He's had enough for an alderman, and goes to sleep
sound after his dinner, he do, a duck!" Before they departed, Lucy ran up
to Lady Feverel. She returned for, the small one.

"One moment, Mr. Wentworth?"

"Just two," said Austin.

Master Richard was taken up, and when Lucy came back her eyes were full
of tears.

"She thinks she is never to see him again, Mr. Wentworth."

"She shall," Austin said simply.

Off they went, and with Austin near her, Lucy forgot to dwell at all upon
the great act of courage she was performing.

"I do hope baby will not wake," was her chief solicitude.

"He!" cries nurse-woman Berry, from the rear, "his little tum-tum's as
tight as he can hold, a pet! a lamb! a bird! a beauty! and ye may take
yer oath he never wakes till that's slack. He've got character of his
own, a blessed!"

There are some tremendous citadels that only want to be taken by storm.
The baronet sat alone in his library, sick of resistance, and rejoicing
in the pride of no surrender; a terror to his friends and to himself.
Hearing Austin's name sonorously pronounced by the man of calves, he
looked up from his book, and held out his hand. "Glad to see you,
Austin." His appearance betokened complete security. The next minute he
found himself escaladed.

It was a cry from Mrs. Berry that told him others were in the room
besides Austin. Lucy stood a little behind the lamp: Mrs. Berry close to
the door. The door was half open, and passing through it might be seen
the petrified figure of a fine man. The baronet glancing over the lamp
rose at Mrs. Berry's signification of a woman's personality. Austin
stepped back and led Lucy to him by the hand. "I have brought Richard's
wife, sir," he said with a pleased, perfectly uncalculating, countenance,
that was disarming. Very pale and trembling Lucy bowed. She felt her two
hands taken, and heard a kind voice. Could it be possible it belonged to
the dreadful father of her husband? She lifted her eyes nervously: her
hands were still detained. The baronet contemplated Richard's choice. Had
he ever had a rivalry with those pure eyes? He saw the pain of her
position shooting across her brows, and, uttering-gentle inquiries as to
her health, placed her in a seat. Mrs. Berry had already fallen into a
chair.

"What aspect do you like for your bedroom?--East?" said the baronet.

Lucy was asking herself wonderingly: "Am I to stay?"

"Perhaps you had better take to Richard's room at once," he pursued. "You
have the Lobourne valley there and a good morning air, and will feel more
at home."

Lucy's colour mounted. Mrs. Berry gave a short cough, as one who should
say, "The day is ours!" Undoubtedly--strange as it was to think it--the
fortress was carried.

"Lucy is rather tired," said Austin, and to hear her Christian name thus
bravely spoken brought grateful dew to her eyes.

The baronet was about to touch the bell. "But have you come alone?" he
asked.

At this Mrs. Berry came forward. Not immediately: it seemed to require
effort for her to move, and when she was within the region of the lamp,
her agitation could not escape notice. The blissful bundle shook in her
arms.

"By the way, what is he to me?" Austin inquired generally as he went and
unveiled the younger hope of Raynham. "My relationship is not so defined
as yours, sir."

An observer might have supposed that the baronet peeped at his grandson
with the courteous indifference of one who merely wished to compliment
the mother of anybody's child.

"I really think he's like Richard," Austin laughed. Lucy looked: I am
sure he is!

"As like as one to one," Mrs. Berry murmured feebly; but Grandpapa not
speaking she thought it incumbent on her to pluck up. "And he's as
healthy as his father was, Sir Austin--spite o' the might 'a beens.
Reg'lar as the clock! We never want a clock since he come. We knows the
hour o' the day, and of the night."

"You nurse him yourself, of course?" the baronet spoke to Lucy, and was
satisfied on that point.

Mrs. Berry was going to display his prodigious legs. Lucy, fearing the
consequent effect on the prodigious lungs, begged her not to wake him.
"'T'd take a deal to do that," said Mrs. Berry, and harped on Master
Richard's health and the small wonder it was that he enjoyed it,
considering the superior quality of his diet, and the lavish attentions
of his mother, and then suddenly fell silent on a deep sigh.

"He looks healthy," said the baronet, "but I am not a judge of babies."

Thus, having capitulated, Raynham chose to acknowledge its new
commandant, who was now borne away, under the directions of the
housekeeper, to occupy the room Richard had slept in when an infant.

Austin cast no thought on his success. The baronet said: "She is
extremely well-looking." He replied: "A person you take to at once."
There it ended.

But a much more animated colloquy was taking place aloft, where Lucy and
Mrs. Berry sat alone. Lucy expected her to talk about the reception they
had met with, and the house, and the peculiarities of the rooms, and the
solid happiness that seemed in store. Mrs. Berry all the while would
persist in consulting the looking-glass. Her first distinct answer was,
"My dear! tell me candid, how do I look?"

"Very nice indeed, Mrs. Berry; but could you have believed he would be so
kind, so considerate?"

"I am sure I looked a frump," returned Mrs. Berry. "Oh dear! two birds at
a shot. What do you think, now?"

"I never saw so wonderful a likeness," says Lucy.

"Likeness! look at me." Mrs. Berry was trembling and hot in the palms.

"You're very feverish, dear Berry. What can it be?"

"Ain't it like the love-flutters of a young gal, my dear."

"Go to bed, Berry, dear," says Lucy, pouting in her soft caressing way.
"I will undress you, and see to you, dear heart! You've had so much
excitement."

"Ha! ha!" Berry laughed hysterically; "she thinks it's about this
business of hers. Why, it's child's-play, my darlin'. But I didn't look
for tragedy to-night. Sleep in this house I can't, my love!"

Lucy was astonished. "Not sleep here, Mrs. Berry?--Oh! why, you silly old
thing? I know."

"Do ye!" said Mrs. Berry, with a sceptical nose.

"You're afraid of ghosts."

"Belike I am when they're six foot two in their shoes, and bellows when
you stick a pin into their calves. I seen my Berry!"

"Your husband?"

"Large as life!"

Lucy meditated on optical delusions, but Mrs. Berry described him as the
Colossus who had marched them into the library, and vowed that he had
recognized her and quaked. "Time ain't aged him," said Mrs. Berry,
"whereas me! he've got his excuse now. I know I look a frump."

Lucy kissed her: "You look the nicest, dearest old thing."

"You may say an old thing, my dear."

"And your husband is really here?"

"Berry's below!"

Profoundly uttered as this was, it chased every vestige of incredulity.

"What will you do, Mrs. Berry?"

"Go, my dear. Leave him to be happy in his own way. It's over atween us,
I see that. When I entered the house I felt there was something comin'
over me, and lo and behold ye! no sooner was we in the hall-passage--if
it hadn't been for that blessed infant I should 'a dropped. I must 'a
known his step, for my heart began thumpin', and I knew I hadn't got my
hair straight--that Mr. Wentworth was in such a hurry--nor my best gown.
I knew he'd scorn me. He hates frumps."

"Scorn you!" cried Lucy, angrily. "He who has behaved so wickedly!"

Mrs. Berry attempted to rise. "I may as well go at once," she whimpered.
"If I see him I shall only be disgracin' of myself. I feel it all on my
side already. Did ye mark him, my dear? I know I was vexin' to him at
times, I was. Those big men are so touchy about their dignity--nat'ral.
Hark at me! I'm goin' all soft in a minute. Let me leave the house, my
dear. I daresay it was good half my fault. Young women don't understand
men sufficient--not altogether--and I was a young woman then; and then
what they goes and does they ain't quite answerable for: they, feels, I
daresay, pushed from behind. Yes. I'll go. I'm a frump. I'll go. 'Tain't
in natur' for me to sleep in the same house."

Lucy laid her hands on Mrs. Berry's shoulders, and forcibly fixed her in
her seat. "Leave baby, naughty woman? I tell you he shall come to you,
and fall on his knees to you and beg your forgiveness."

"Berry on his knees!"

"Yes. And he shall beg and pray you to forgive him."

"If you get more from Martin Berry than breath-away words, great'll be my
wonder!" said Mrs. Berry.

"We will see," said Lucy, thoroughly determined to do something for the
good creature that had befriended her.

Mrs. Berry examined her gown. "Won't it seem we're runnin' after him?"
she murmured faintly.

"He is your husband, Mrs. Berry. He may be wanting to come to you now."

"Oh! Where is all I was goin' to say to that man when we met." Mrs. Berry
ejaculated. Lucy had left the room.

On the landing outside the door Lucy met a lady dressed in black, who
stopped her and asked if she was Richard's wife, and kissed her, passing
from her immediately. Lucy despatched a message for Austin, and related
the Berry history. Austin sent for the great man and said: "Do you know
your wife is here?" Before Berry had time to draw himself up to enunciate
his longest, he was requested to step upstairs, and as his young mistress
at once led the way, Berry could not refuse to put his legs in motion and
carry the stately edifice aloft.

Of the interview Mrs. Berry gave Lucy a slight sketch that night. "He
began in the old way, my dear, and says I, a true heart and plain words,
Martin Berry. So there he cuts himself and his Johnson short, and down he
goes--down on his knees. I never could 'a believed it. I kep my dignity
as a woman till I see that sight, but that done for me. I was a ripe
apple in his arms 'fore I knew where I was. There's something about a
fine man on his knees that's too much for us women. And it reely was the
penitent on his two knees, not the lover on his one. If he mean it! But
ah! what do you think he begs of me, my dear?--not to make it known in
the house just yet! I can't, I can't say that look well."

Lucy attributed it to his sense of shame at his conduct, and Mrs. Berry
did her best to look on it in that light.

"Did the bar'net kiss ye when you wished him goodnight?" she asked. Lucy
said he had not. "Then bide awake as long as ye can," was Mrs. Berry's
rejoinder. "And now let us pray blessings on that simple-speaking
gentleman who does so much 'cause he says so little."

Like many other natural people, Mrs. Berry was only silly where her own
soft heart was concerned. As she secretly anticipated, the baronet came
into her room when all was quiet. She saw him go and bend over Richard
the Second, and remain earnestly watching him. He then went to the
half-opened door of the room where Lucy slept, leaned his ear a moment,
knocked gently, and entered. Mrs. Berry heard low words interchanging
within. She could not catch a syllable, yet she would have sworn to the
context. "He've called her his daughter, promised her happiness, and
given a father's kiss to her." When Sir Austin passed out she was in a
deep sleep.




CHAPTER XLII

Briareus reddening angrily over the sea--what is that vaporous Titan? And
Hesper set in his rosy garland--why looks he so implacably sweet? It is
that one has left that bright home to go forth and do cloudy work, and he
has got a stain with which he dare not return. Far in the West fair Lucy
beckons him to come. Ah, heaven! if he might! How strong and fierce the
temptation is! how subtle the sleepless desire! it drugs his reason, his
honour. For he loves her; she is still the first and only woman to him.
Otherwise would this black spot be hell to him? otherwise would his limbs
be chained while her arms are spread open to him. And if he loves her,
why then what is one fall in the pit, or a thousand? Is not love the
password to that beckoning bliss? So may we say; but here is one whose
body has been made a temple to him, and it is desecrated.

A temple, and desecrated! For what is it fit for but for a dance of
devils? His education has thus wrought him to think.

He can blame nothing but his own baseness. But to feel base and accept
the bliss that beckons--he has not fallen so low as that.

Ah, happy English home! sweet wife! what mad miserable Wisp of the Fancy
led him away from you, high in his conceit? Poor wretch! that thought to
be he of the hundred hands, and war against the absolute Gods. Jove
whispered a light commission to the Laughing Dame; she met him; and how
did he shake Olympus? with laughter?

Sure it were better to be Orestes, the Furies howling in his ears, than
one called to by a heavenly soul from whom he is for ever outcast. He has
not the oblivion of madness. Clothed in the lights of his first passion,
robed in the splendour of old skies, she meets him everywhere; morning,
evening, night, she shines above him; waylays him suddenly in forest
depths; drops palpably on his heart. At moments he forgets; he rushes to
embrace her; calls her his beloved, and lo, her innocent kiss brings
agony of shame to his face.

Daily the struggle endured. His father wrote to him, begging him by the
love he had for him to return. From that hour Richard burnt unread all
the letters he received. He knew too well how easily he could persuade
himself: words from without might tempt him and quite extinguish the
spark of honourable feeling that tortured him, and that he clung to in
desperate self-vindication.

To arrest young gentlemen on the downward slope is both a dangerous and
thankless office. It is, nevertheless, one that fair women greatly prize,
and certain of them professionally follow. Lady Judith, as far as her sex
would permit, was also of the Titans in their battle against the absolute
Gods; for which purpose, mark you, she had married a lord incapable in
all save his acres. Her achievements she kept to her own mind: she did
not look happy over them. She met Richard accidentally in Paris; she saw
his state; she let him learn that she alone on earth understood him. The
consequence was that he was forthwith enrolled in her train. It soothed
him to be near a woman. Did she venture her guess as to the cause of his
conduct, she blotted it out with a facility women have, and cast on it a
melancholy hue he was taught to participate in. She spoke of sorrows,
personal sorrows, much as he might speak of his--vaguely, and with
self-blame. And she understood him. How the dark unfathomed wealth within
us gleams to a woman's eye! We are at compound interest immediately: so
much richer than we knew!--almost as rich as we dreamed! But then the
instant we are away from her we find ourselves bankrupt, beggared. How is
that? We do not ask. We hurry to her and bask hungrily in her orbs. The
eye must be feminine to be thus creative: I cannot say why. Lady Judith
understood Richard, and he feeling infinitely vile, somehow held to her
more feverishly, as one who dreaded the worst in missing her. The spirit
must rest; he was weak with what he suffered.

Austin found them among the hills of Nassau in Rhineland: Titans, male
and female, who had not displaced Jove, and were now adrift, prone on
floods of sentiment. The blue-flocked peasant swinging behind his oxen of
a morning, the gaily-kerchiefed fruit-woman, the jackass-driver, even the
doctor of those regions, have done more for their fellows. Horrible
reflection! Lady Judith is serene above it, but it frets at Richard when
he is out of her shadow. Often wretchedly he watches the young men of his
own age trooping to their work. Not cloud-work theirs! Work solid,
unambitious, fruitful!

Lady Judith had a nobler in prospect for the hero. He gaped blindfolded
for anything, and she gave him the map of Europe in tatters. He swallowed
it comfortably. It was an intoxicating cordial. Himself on horseback
overriding wrecks of Empires! Well might common sense cower with the
meaner animals at the picture. Tacitly they agreed to recast the
civilized globe. The quality of vapour is to melt and shape itself anew;
but it is never the quality of vapour to reassume the same shapes.
Briareus of the hundred unoccupied hands may turn to a monstrous donkey
with his hind legs aloft, or twenty thousand jabbering apes. The
phantasmic groupings of the young brain are very like those we see in the
skies, and equally the sport of the wind. Lady Judith blew. There was
plenty of vapour in him, and it always resolved into some shape or other.
You that mark those clouds of eventide, and know youth, will see the
similitude: it will not be strange, it will barely seem foolish to you,
that a young man of Richard's age, Richard's education and position,
should be in this wild state. Had he not been nursed to believe he was
born for great things? Did she not say she was sure of it? And to feel
base, yet born for better, is enough to make one grasp at anything
cloudy. Suppose the hero with a game leg. How intense is his faith to
quacks! with what a passion of longing is he not seized to break
somebody's head! They spoke of Italy in low voices. "The time will come,"
said she. "And I shall be ready," said he. What rank was he to take in
the liberating army? Captain, colonel, general in chief, or simple
private? Here, as became him, he was much more positive and specific than
she was: Simple private, he said. Yet he save himself caracoling on
horseback. Private in the cavalry, then, of course. Private in the
cavalry over-riding wrecks of Empires. She looked forth under her brows
with mournful indistinctness at that object in the distance. They read
Petrarch to get up the necessary fires. Italia mia! Vain indeed was this
speaking to those thick and mortal wounds in her fair body, but their
sighs went with the Tiber, the Arno, and the Po, and their hands joined.
Who has not wept for Italy? I see the aspirations of a world arise for
her, thick and frequent as the puffs of smoke from cigars of Pannonian
sentries!

So when Austin came Richard said he could not leave Lady Judith, Lady
Judith said she could not part with him. For his sake, mind! This Richard
verified. Perhaps he had reason to be grateful. The high road of Folly
may have led him from one that terminates worse. Ho is foolish, God
knows; but for my part I will not laugh at the hero because he has not
got his occasion. Meet him when he is, as it were, anointed by his
occasion, and he is no laughing matter.

Richard felt his safety in this which, to please the world, we must term
folly. Exhalation of vapours was a wholesome process to him, and somebody
who gave them shape and hue a beneficent Iris. He told Austin plainly he
could not leave her, and did not anticipate the day when he could.

"Why can't you go to your wife, Richard?"

"For a reason you would be the first to approve, Austin."

He welcomed Austin with every show of manly tenderness, and sadness at
heart. Austin he had always associated with his Lucy in that Hesperian
palace of the West. Austin waited patiently. Lady Judith's old lord
played on all the baths in Nassau without evoking the tune of health.
Whithersoever he listed she changed her abode. So admirable a wife was to
be pardoned for espousing an old man. She was an enthusiast even in her
connubial duties. She had the brows of an enthusiast. With occasion she
might have been a Charlotte Corday. So let her also be shielded from the
ban of ridicule. Nonsense of enthusiasts is very different from nonsense
of ninnies. She was truly a high-minded person, of that order who always
do what they see to be right, and always have confidence in their optics.
She was not unworthy of a young man's admiration, if she was unfit to be
his guide. She resumed her ancient intimacy with Austin easily, while she
preserved her new footing with Richard. She and Austin were not unlike,
only Austin never dreamed, and had not married an old lord.

The three were walking on the bridge at Limburg on the Lahn, where the
shadow of a stone bishop is thrown by the moonlight on the water brawling
over slabs of slate. A woman passed them bearing in her arms a baby,
whose mighty size drew their attention.

"What a wopper!" Richard laughed.

"Well, that is a fine fellow," said Austin, "but I don't think he's much
bigger than your boy."

"He'll do for a nineteenth-century Arminius," Richard was saying. Then he
looked at Austin.

"What was that you said?" Lady Judith asked of Austin.

"What have I said that deserves to be repeated?" Austin counterqueried
quite innocently.

"Richard has a son?"

"You didn't know it?"

"His modesty goes very far," said Lady Judith, sweeping the shadow of a
curtsey to Richard's paternity.

Richard's heart throbbed with violence. He looked again in Austin's face.
Austin took it so much as a matter of course that he said nothing more on
the subject.

"Well!" murmured Lady Judith.

When the two men were alone, Richard said in a quick voice: "Austin! you
were in earnest?"

"You didn't know it, Richard?"

"No."

"Why, they all wrote to you. Lucy wrote to you: your father, your aunt. I
believe Adrian wrote too."

"I tore up their letters," said Richard.

"He's a noble fellow, I can tell you. You've nothing to be ashamed of.
He'll soon be coming to ask about you. I made sure you knew."

"No, I never knew." Richard walked away, and then said: "What is he
like?"

"Well, he really is like you, but he has his mother's eyes."

"And she's--"

"Yes. I think the child has kept her well."

"They're both at Raynham?"

"Both."

Hence fantastic vapours! What are ye to this! Where are the dreams of the
hero when he learns he has a child? Nature is taking him to her bosom.
She will speak presently. Every domesticated boor in these hills can
boast the same, yet marvels the hero at none of his visioned prodigies as
he does when he comes to hear of this most common performance. A father?
Richard fixed his eyes as if he were trying to make out the lineaments of
his child.

Telling Austin he would be back in a few minutes, he sallied into the
air, and walked on and on. "A father!" he kept repeating to himself: "a
child!" And though he knew it not, he was striking the keynotes of
Nature. But he did know of a singular harmony that suddenly burst over
his whole being.

The moon was surpassingly bright: the summer air heavy and still. He left
the high road and pierced into the forest. His walk was rapid: the leaves
on the trees brushed his cheeks; the dead leaves heaped in the dells
noised to his feet. Something of a religious joy--a strange sacred
pleasure--was in him. By degrees it wore; he remembered himself: and now
he was possessed by a proportionate anguish. A father! he dared never see
his child. And he had no longer his phantasies to fall upon. He was
utterly bare to his sin. In his troubled mind it seemed to him that Clare
looked down on him--Clare who saw him as he was; and that to her eyes it
would be infamy for him to go and print his kiss upon his child. Then
came stern efforts to command his misery and make the nerves of his face
iron.

By the log of an ancient tree half buried in dead leaves of past summers,
beside a brook, he halted as one who had reached his journey's end. There
he discovered he had a companion in Lady Judith's little dog. He gave the
friendly animal a pat of recognition, and both were silent in the
forest-silence.

It was impossible for Richard to return; his heart was surcharged. He
must advance, and on he footed, the little dog following.

An oppressive slumber hung about the forest-branches. In the dells and on
the heights was the same dead heat. Here where the brook tinkled it was
no cool-lipped sound, but metallic, and without the spirit of water.
Yonder in a space of moonlight on lush grass, the beams were as white
fire to sight and feeling. No haze spread around. The valleys were clear,
defined to the shadows of their verges, the distances sharply distinct,
and with the colours of day but slightly softened. Richard beheld a roe
moving across a slope of sward far out of rifle-mark. The breathless
silence was significant, yet the moon shone in a broad blue heaven.
Tongue out of mouth trotted the little dog after him; crouched panting
when he stopped an instant; rose weariedly when he started afresh. Now
and then a large white night-moth flitted through the dusk of the forest.

On a barren corner of the wooded highland looking inland stood grey
topless ruins set in nettles and rank grass-blades. Richard mechanically
sat down on the crumbling flints to rest, and listened to the panting of
the dog. Sprinkled at his feet were emerald lights: hundreds of
glow-worms studded the dark dry ground.

He sat and eyed them, thinking not at all. His energies were expended in
action. He sat as a part of the ruins, and the moon turned his shadow
Westward from the South. Overhead, as she declined, long ripples of
silver cloud were imperceptibly stealing toward her. They were the van of
a tempest. He did not observe them or the leaves beginning to chatter.
When he again pursued his course with his face to the Rhine, a huge
mountain appeared to rise sheer over him, and he had it in his mind to
scale it. He got no nearer to the base of it for all his vigorous
outstepping. The ground began to dip; he lost sight of the sky. Then
heavy, thunder-drops streak his cheek, the leaves were singing, the earth
breathed, it was black before him, and behind. All at once the thunder
spoke. The mountain he had marked was bursting over him.

Up startled the whole forest in violet fire. He saw the country at the
foot of the hills to the bounding Rhine gleam, quiver, extinguished. Then
there were pauses; and the lightning seemed as the eye of heaven, and the
thunder as the tongue of heaven, each alternately addressing him; filling
him with awful rapture. Alone there--sole human creature among the
grandeurs and mysteries of storm--he felt the representative of his kind,
and his spirit rose, and marched, and exulted, let it be glory, let it be
ruin! Lower down the lightened abysses of air rolled the wrathful crash;
then white thrusts of light were darted from the sky, and great curving
ferns, seen steadfast in pallor a second, were supernaturally agitated,
and vanished. Then a shrill song roused in the leaves and the herbage.
Prolonged and louder it sounded, as deeper and heavier the deluge
pressed. A mighty force of water satisfied the desire of the earth. Even
in this, drenched as he was by the first outpouring, Richard had a savage
pleasure. Keeping in motion, he was scarcely conscious of the wet, and
the grateful breath of the weeds was refreshing. Suddenly he stopped
short, lifting a curious nostril. He fancied he smelt meadow-sweet. He
had never seen the flower in Rhineland--never thought of it; and it would
hardly be met with in a forest. He was sure he smelt it fresh in dews.
His little companion wagged a miserable wet tail some way in advance. He
went an slowly, thinking indistinctly. After two or three steps he
stooped and stretched out his hand to feel for the flower, having, he
knew not why, a strong wish to verify its growth there. Groping about,
his hand encountered something warm that started at his touch, and he,
with the instinct we have, seized it, and lifted it to look at it. The
creature was very small, evidently quite young. Richard's eyes, now
accustomed to the darkness, were able to discern it for what it was, a
tiny leveret, and ha supposed that the dog had probably frightened its
dam just before he found it. He put the little thing on one hand in his
breast, and stepped out rapidly as before.

The rain was now steady; from every tree a fountain poured. So cool and
easy had his mind become that he was speculating on what kind of shelter
the birds could find, and how the butterflies and moths saved their
coloured wings from washing. Folded close they might hang under a leaf,
he thought. Lovingly he looked into the dripping darkness of the coverts
on each side, as one of their children. He was next musing on a strange
sensation he experienced. It ran up one arm with an indescribable thrill,
but communicated nothing to his heart. It was purely physical, ceased for
a time, and recommenced, till he had it all through his blood,
wonderfully thrilling. He grew aware that the little thing he carried in
his breast was licking his hand there. The small rough tongue going over
and over the palm of his hand produced the strange sensation he felt. Now
that he knew the cause, the marvel ended; but now that he knew the cause,
his heart was touched and made more of it. The gentle scraping continued
without intermission as on he walked. What did it say to him? Human
tongue could not have said so much just then.

A pale grey light on the skirts of the flying tempest displayed the dawn.
Richard was walking hurriedly. The green drenched weeds lay all about in
his path, bent thick, and the forest drooped glimmeringly. Impelled as a
man who feels a revelation mounting obscurely to his brain, Richard was
passing one of those little forest-chapels, hung with votive wreaths,
where the peasant halts to kneel and pray. Cold, still, in the twilight
it stood, rain-drops pattering round it. He looked within, and saw the
Virgin holding her Child. He moved by. But not many steps had he gone ere
his strength went out of him, and he shuddered. What was it? He asked
not. He was in other hands. Vivid as lightning the Spirit of Life
illumined him. He felt in his heart the cry of his child, his darling's
touch. With shut eyes he saw them both. They drew him from the depths;
they led him a blind and tottering man. And as they led him he had a
sense of purification so sweet he shuddered again and again.

When he looked out from his trance on the breathing world, the small
birds hopped and chirped: warm fresh sunlight was over all the hills. He
was on the edge of the forest, entering a plain clothed with ripe corn
under a spacious morning sky.




CHAPTER XLIII

They heard at Raynham that Richard was coming. Lucy had the news first in
a letter from Ripton Thompson, who met him at Bonn. Ripton did not say
that he had employed his vacation holiday on purpose to use his efforts
to induce his dear friend to return to his wife; and finding Richard
already on his way, of course Ripton said nothing to him, but affected to
be travelling for his pleasure like any cockney. Richard also wrote to
her. In case she should have gone to the sea he directed her to send word
to his hotel that he might not lose an hour. His letter was sedate in
tone, very sweet to her. Assisted by the faithful female Berry, she was
conquering an Aphorist.

"Woman's reason is in the milk of her breasts," was one of his rough
notes, due to an observation of Lucy's maternal cares. Let us remember,
therefore, we men who have drunk of it largely there, that she has it.

Mrs. Berry zealously apprised him how early Master Richard's education
had commenced, and the great future historian he must consequently be.
This trait in Lucy was of itself sufficient to win Sir Austin.

"Here my plan with Richard was false," he reflected: "in presuming that
anything save blind fortuity would bring him such a mate as he should
have." He came to add: "And has got!"

He could admit now that instinct had so far beaten science; for as
Richard was coming, as all were to be happy, his wisdom embraced them all
paternally as the author of their happiness. Between him and Lucy a
tender intimacy grew.

"I told you she could talk, sir," said Adrian.

"She thinks!" said the baronet.

The delicate question how she was to treat her uncle, he settled
generously. Farmer Blaize should come up to Raynham when he would: Lucy
must visit him at least three times a week. He had Farmer Blaize and Mrs.
Berry to study, and really excellent Aphorisms sprang from the plain
human bases this natural couple presented.

"It will do us no harm," he thought, "some of the honest blood of the
soil in our veins." And he was content in musing on the parentage of the
little cradled boy. A common sight for those who had the entry to the
library was the baronet cherishing the hand of his daughter-in-law.

So Richard was crossing the sea, and hearts at Raynham were beating
quicker measures as the minutes progressed. That night he would be with
them. Sir Austin gave Lucy a longer, warmer salute when she came down to
breakfast in the morning. Mrs. Berry waxed thrice amorous. "It's your
second bridals, ye sweet livin' widow!" she said. "Thanks be the Lord!
it's the same man too! and a baby over the bed-post," she appended
seriously.

"Strange," Berry declared it to be, "strange I feel none o' this to my
Berry now. All my feelin's o' love seem t'ave gone into you two sweet
chicks."

In fact, the faithless male Berry complained of being treated badly, and
affected a superb jealousy of the baby; but the good dame told him that
if he suffered at all he suffered his due. Berry's position was decidedly
uncomfortable. It could not be concealed from the lower household that he
had a wife in the establishment, and for the complications this gave rise
to, his wife would not legitimately console him. Lucy did intercede, but
Mrs. Berry, was obdurate. She averred she would not give up the child
till he was weaned. "Then, perhaps," she said prospectively. "You see I
ain't so soft as you thought for."

"You're a very unkind, vindictive old woman," said Lucy.

"Belike I am," Mrs. Berry was proud to agree. We like a new character,
now and then. Berry had delayed too long.

Were it not notorious that the straightlaced prudish dare not listen to,
the natural chaste, certain things Mrs. Berry thought it advisable to
impart to the young wife with regard to Berry's infidelity, and the
charity women should have toward sinful men, might here be reproduced.
Enough that she thought proper to broach the matter, and cite her own
Christian sentiments, now that she was indifferent in some degree.

Oily calm is on the sea. At Raynham they look up at the sky and speculate
that Richard is approaching fairly speeded. He comes to throw himself on
his darling's mercy. Lucy irradiated over forest and sea, tempest and
peace--to her the hero comes humbly. Great is that day when we see our
folly! Ripton and he were the friends of old. Richard encouraged him to
talk of the two he could be eloquent on, and Ripton, whose secret vanity
was in his powers of speech, never tired of enumerating Lucy's virtues,
and the peculiar attributes of the baby.

"She did not say a word against me, Rip?"

"Against you, Richard! The moment she knew she was to be a mother, she
thought of nothing but her duty to the child. She's one who can't think
of herself."

"You've seen her at Raynham, Rip?"

"Yes, once. They asked me down. And your father's so fond of her--I'm
sure he thinks no woman like her, and he's right. She is so lovely, and
so good."

Richard was too full of blame of himself to blame his father: too British
to expose his emotions. Ripton divined how deep and changed they were by
his manner. He had cast aside the hero, and however Ripton had obeyed him
and looked up to him in the heroic time, he loved him tenfold now. He
told his friend how much Lucy's mere womanly sweetness and excellence had
done for him, and Richard contrasted his own profitless extravagance with
the patient beauty of his dear home angel. He was not one to take her on
the easy terms that offered. There was that to do which made his cheek
burn as he thought of it, but he was going to do it, even though it lost
her to him. Just to see her and kneel to her was joy sufficient to
sustain him, and warm his blood in the prospect. They marked the white
cliffs growing over the water. Nearer, the sun made them lustrous. Houses
and people seemed to welcome the wild youth to common sense, simplicity,
and home.

They were in town by mid-day. Richard had a momentary idea of not driving
to his hotel for letters. After a short debate he determined to go there.
The porter said he had two letters for Mr. Richard Feverel--one had been
waiting some time. He went to the box and fetched them. The first Richard
opened was from Lucy, and as he read it, Ripton observed the colour
deepen on his face, while a quivering smile played about his mouth. He
opened the other indifferently. It began without any form of address.
Richard's forehead darkened at the signature. This letter was in a
sloping feminine hand, and flourished with light strokes all over, like a
field of the bearded barley. Thus it ran:

"I know you are in a rage with me because I would not consent to ruin
you, you foolish fellow. What do you call it? Going to that unpleasant
place together. Thank you, my milliner is not ready yet, and I want to
make a good appearance when I do go. I suppose I shall have to some day.
Your health, Sir Richard. Now let me speak to you seriously. Go home to
your wife at once. But I know the sort of fellow you are, and I must be
plain with you. Did I ever say I loved you? You may hate me as much as
you please, but I will save you from being a fool.

"Now listen to me. You know my relations with Mount. That beast Brayder
offered to pay all my debts and set me afloat, if I would keep you in
town. I declare on my honour I had no idea why, and I did not agree to
it. But you were such a handsome fellow--I noticed you in the park before
I heard a word of you. But then you fought shy--you were just as tempting
as a girl. You stung me. Do you know what that is? I would make you care
for me, and we know how it ended, without any intention of mine, I swear.
I'd have cut off my hand rather than do you any harm, upon my honour.
Circumstances! Then I saw it was all up between us. Brayder came and
began to chaff about you. I dealt the animal a stroke on the face with my
riding-whip--I shut him up pretty quick. Do you think I would let a man
speak about you?--I was going to swear. You see I remember Dick's
lessons. O my God! I do feel unhappy.--Brayder offered me money. Go and
think I took it, if you like. What do I care what anybody thinks!
Something that black-guard said made me suspicious. I went down to the
Isle of Wight where Mount was, and your wife was just gone with an old
lady who came and took her away. I should so have liked to see her. You
said, you remember, she would take me as a sister, and treat me--I
laughed at it then. My God! how I could cry now, if water did any good to
a devil, as you politely call poor me. I called at your house and saw
your man-servant, who said Mount had just been there. In a minute it
struck me. I was sure Mount was after a woman, but it never struck me
that woman was your wife. Then I saw why they wanted me to keep you away.
I went to Brayder. You know how I hate him. I made love to the man to get
it out of him. Richard! my word of honour, they have planned to carry her
off, if Mount finds he cannot seduce her. Talk of devils! He's one; but
he is not so bad as Brayder. I cannot forgive a mean dog his villany.

"Now after this, I am quite sure you are too much of a man to stop away
from her another moment. I have no more to say. I suppose we shall not
see each other again, so good-bye, Dick! I fancy I hear you cursing me.
Why can't you feel like other men on the subject? But if you were like
the rest of them I should not have cared for you a farthing. I have not
worn lilac since I saw you last. I'll be buried in your colour, Dick.
That will not offend you--will it?

"You are not going to believe I took the money? If I thought you thought
that--it makes me feel like a devil only to fancy you think it.

"The first time you meet Brayder, cane him publicly.

"Adieu! Say it's because you don't like his face. I suppose devils must
not say Adieu. Here's plain old good-bye, then, between you and me.
Good-bye, dear Dick! You won't think that of me?

"May I eat dry bread to the day of my death if I took or ever will touch
a scrap of their money. BELLA."

Richard folded up the letter silently.

"Jump into the cab," he said to Ripton.

"Anything the matter, Richard?"

"No."

The driver received directions. Richard sat without speaking. His friend
knew that face. He asked whether there was bad news in the letter. For
answer, he had the lie circumstancial. He ventured to remark that they
were going the wrong way.

"It'd the right way," cried Richard, and his jaws were hard and square,
and his eyes looked heavy and full.

Ripton said no more, but thought.

The cabman pulled up at a Club. A gentleman, in whom Ripton recognized
the Hon. Peter Brayder, was just then swinging a leg over his horse, with
one foot in the stirrup. Hearing his name called, the Hon. Peter turned
about, and stretched an affable hand.

"Is Mountfalcon in town?" said Richard taking the horse's reins instead
of the gentlemanly hand. His voice and aspect were quite friendly.

"Mount?" Brayder replied, curiously watching the action; "yes. He's off
this evening."

"He is in town?" Richard released his horse. "I want to see him. Where is
he?"

The young man looked pleasant: that which might have aroused Brayder's
suspicions was an old affair in parasitical register by this time. "Want
to see him? What about?" he said carelessly, and gave the address.

"By the way," he sang out, "we thought of putting your name down,
Feverel." He indicated the lofty structure. "What do you say?"

Richard nodded back at him, crying, "Hurry." Brayder returned the nod,
and those who promenaded the district soon beheld his body in elegant
motion to the stepping of his well-earned horse.

"What do you want to see Lord Mountfalcon for, Richard?" said Ripton.

"I just want to see him," Richard replied.

Ripton was left in the cab at the door of my lord's residence. He had to
wait there a space of about ten minutes, when Richard returned with a
clearer visage, though somewhat heated. He stood outside the cab, and
Ripton was conscious of being examined by those strong grey eyes. As
clear as speech he understood them to say to him, "You won't do," but
which of the many things on earth he would not do for he was at a loss to
think.

"Go down to Raynham, Ripton. Say I shall be there tonight certainly.
Don't bother me with questions. Drive off at once. Or wait. Get another
cab. I'll take this."

Ripton was ejected, and found himself standing alone in the street. As he
was on the point of rushing after the galloping cab-horse to get a word
of elucidation, he heard some one speak behind him.

"You are Feverel's friend?"

Ripton had an eye for lords. An ambrosial footman, standing at the open
door of Lord Mountfalcon's house, and a gentleman standing on the
doorstep, told him that he was addressed by that nobleman. He was
requested to step into the house. When they were alone, Lord Mountfalcon,
slightly ruffled, said: "Feverel has insulted me grossly. I must meet
him, of course. It's a piece of infernal folly!--I suppose he is not
quite mad?"

Ripton's only definite answer was, a gasping iteration of "My lord."

My lord resumed: "I am perfectly guiltless of offending him, as far as I
know. In fact, I had a friendship for him. Is he liable to fits of this
sort of thing?"

Not yet at conversation-point, Ripton stammered: "Fits, my lord?"

"Ah!" went the other, eying Ripton in lordly cognizant style. "You know
nothing of this business, perhaps?"

Ripton said he did not.

"Have you any influence with him?"

"Not much, my lord. Only now and then--a little."

"You are not in the Army?"

The question was quite unnecessary. Ripton confessed to the law, and my
lord did not look surprised.

"I will not detain you," he said, distantly bowing.

Ripton gave him a commoner's obeisance; but getting to the door, the
sense of the matter enlightened him.

"It's a duel, my lord?"

"No help for it, if his friends don't shut him up in Bedlam between this
and to-morrow morning."

Of all horrible things a duel was the worst in Ripton's imagination. He
stood holding the handle of the door, revolving this last chapter of
calamity suddenly opened where happiness had promised.

"A duel! but he won't, my lord,--he mustn't fight, my lord."

"He must come on the ground," said my lord, positively.

Ripton ejaculated unintelligible stuff. Finally Lord Mountfalcon said: "I
went out of my way, sir, in speaking to you. I saw you from the window.
Your friend is mad. Deuced methodical, I admit, but mad. I have
particular reasons to wish not to injure the young man, and if an apology
is to be got out of him when we're on the ground, I'll take it, and we'll
stop the damned scandal, if possible. You understand? I'm the insulted
party, and I shall only require of him to use formal words of excuse to
come to an amicable settlement. Let him just say he regrets it. Now,
sir," the nobleman spoke with considerable earnestness, "should anything
happen--I have the honour to be known to Mrs. Feverel--and I beg you will
tell her. I very particularly desire you to let her know that I was not
to blame."

Mountfalcon rang the bell, and bowed him out. With this on his mind
Ripton hurried down to those who were waiting in joyful trust at Raynham.




CHAPTER XLIV

The watch consulted by Hippias alternately with his pulse, in occult
calculation hideous to mark, said half-past eleven on the midnight.
Adrian, wearing a composedly amused expression on his dimpled plump
face,--held slightly sideways, aloof from paper and pen,--sat writing at
the library table. Round the baronet's chair, in a semi-circle, were
Lucy, Lady Blandish, Mrs. Doria, and Ripton, that very ill bird at
Raynham. They were silent as those who question the flying minutes.
Ripton had said that Richard was sure to come; but the feminine eyes
reading him ever and anon, had gathered matter for disquietude, which
increased as time sped. Sir Austin persisted in his habitual air of
speculative repose.

Remote as he appeared from vulgar anxiety, he was the first to speak and
betray his state.

"Pray, put up that watch. Impatience serves nothing," he said,
half-turning hastily to his brother behind him.

Hippias relinquished his pulse and mildly groaned: "It's no nightmare,
this!"

His remark was unheard, and the bearing of it remained obscure. Adrian's
pen made a louder flourish on his manuscript; whether in commiseration or
infernal glee, none might say.

"What are you writing?" the baronet inquired testily of Adrian, after a
pause; twitched, it may be, by a sort of jealousy of the wise youth's
coolness.

"Do I disturb you, sir?" rejoined Adrian. "I am engaged on a portion of a
Proposal for uniting the Empires and Kingdoms of Europe under one
Paternal Head, on the model of the ever-to-be-admired and lamented Holy
Roman. This treats of the management of Youths and Maids, and of certain
magisterial functions connected therewith. 'It is decreed that these
officers be all and every men of science,' etc." And Adrian cheerily
drove his pen afresh.

Mrs. Doria took Lucy's hand, mutely addressing encouragement to her, and
Lucy brought as much of a smile as she could command to reply with.

"I fear we must give him up to-night," observed Lady Blandish.

"If he said he would come, he will come," Sir Austin interjected. Between
him and the lady there was something of a contest secretly going on. He
was conscious that nothing save perfect success would now hold this
self-emancipating mind. She had seen him through.

"He declared to me he would be certain to come," said Ripton; but he
could look at none of them as he said it, for he was growing aware that
Richard might have deceived him, and was feeling like a black conspirator
against their happiness. He determined to tell the baronet what he knew,
if Richard did not come by twelve.

"What is the time?" he asked Hippias in a modest voice.

"Time for me to be in bed," growled Hippias, as if everybody present had
been treating him badly.

Mrs. Berry came in to apprise Lucy that she was wanted above. She quietly
rose. Sir Austin kissed her on the forehead, saying: "You had better not
come down again, my child." She kept her eyes on him. "Oblige me by
retiring for the night," he added. Lucy shook their hands, and went out,
accompanied by Mrs. Doria.

"This agitation will be bad for the child," he said, speaking to himself
aloud.

Lady Blandish remarked: "I think she might just as well have returned.
She will not sleep."

"She will control herself for the child's sake."

"You ask too much of her."

"Of her, not," he emphasized.

It was twelve o'clock when Hippies shut his watch, and said with
vehemence: "I'm convinced my circulation gradually and steadily
decreases!"

"Going back to the pre-Harvey period!" murmured Adrian as he wrote.

Sir Austin and Lady Blandish knew well that any comment would introduce
them to the interior of his machinery, the eternal view of which was
sufficiently harrowing; so they maintained a discreet reserve. Taking it
for acquiescence in his deplorable condition, Hippies resumed
despairingly: "It's a fact. I've brought you to see that. No one can be
more moderate than I am, and yet I get worse. My system is organically
sound--I believe: I do every possible thing, and yet I get worse. Nature
never forgives! I'll go to bed."

The Dyspepsy departed unconsoled.

Sir Austin took up his brother's thought: "I suppose nothing short of a
miracle helps us when we have offended her."

"Nothing short of a quack satisfies us," said Adrian, applying wax to an
envelope of official dimensions.

Ripton sat accusing his soul of cowardice while they talked; haunted by
Lucy's last look at him. He got up his courage presently and went round
to Adrian, who, after a few whispered words, deliberately rose and
accompanied him out of the room, shrugging. When they had gone, Lady
Blandish said to the baronet: "He is not coming."

"To-morrow, then, if not tonight," he replied. "But I say he will come
to-night."

"You do really wish to see him united to his wife?"

The question made the baronet raise his brows with some displeasure.

"Can you ask me?"

"I mean," said, the ungenerous woman, "your System will require no
further sacrifices from either of them?"

When he did answer, it was to say: "I think her altogether a superior
person. I confess I should scarcely have hoped to find one like her."

"Admit that your science does not accomplish everything."

"No: it was presumptuous--beyond a certain point," said the baronet,
meaning deep things.

Lady Blandish eyed him. "Ah me!" she sighed, "if we would always be true
to our own wisdom!"

"You are very singular to-night, Emmeline." Sir Austin stopped his walk
in front of her.

In truth, was she not unjust? Here was an offending son freely forgiven.
Here was a young woman of humble birth, freely accepted into his family
and permitted to stand upon her qualities. Who would have done more--or
as much? This lady, for instance, had the case been hers, would have
fought it. All the people of position that he was acquainted with would
have fought it, and that without feeling it so peculiarly. But while the
baronet thought this, he did not think of the exceptional education his
son had received. He, took the common ground of fathers, forgetting his
System when it was absolutely on trial. False to his son it could not be
said that he had been false to his System he was. Others saw it plainly,
but he had to learn his lesson by and by.

Lady Blandish gave him her face; then stretched her hand to the table,
saying, "Well! well!" She fingered a half-opened parcel lying there, and
drew forth a little book she recognized. "Ha! what is this?" she said.

"Benson returned it this morning," he informed her. "The stupid fellow
took it away with him--by mischance, I am bound to believe."

It was nothing other than the old Note-book. Lady Blandish turned over
the leaves, and came upon the later jottings.

She read: "A maker of Proverbs--what is he but a narrow mind with the
mouthpiece of narrower?"

"I do not agree with that," she observed. He was in no humour for
argument.

"Was your humility feigned when you wrote it?"

He merely said: "Consider the sort of minds influenced by set sayings. A
proverb is the half-way-house to an Idea, I conceive; and the majority
rest there content: can the keeper of such a house be flattered by his
company?"

She felt her feminine intelligence swaying under him again. There must be
greatness in a man who could thus speak of his own special and admirable
aptitude.

Further she read, "Which is the coward among us?--He who sneers at the
failings of Humanity!"

"Oh! that is true! How much I admire that!" cried the dark-eyed dame as
she beamed intellectual raptures.

Another Aphorism seemed closely to apply to him: "There is no more
grievous sight, as there is no greater perversion, than a wise man at the
mercy of his feelings."

"He must have written it," she thought, "when he had himself for an
example--strange man that he is!"

Lady Blandish was still inclined to submission, though decidedly
insubordinate. She had once been fairly conquered: but if what she
reverenced as a great mind could conquer her, it must be a great man that
should hold her captive. The Autumn Primrose blooms for the loftiest
manhood; is a vindictive flower in lesser hands. Nevertheless Sir Austin
had only to be successful, and this lady's allegiance was his for ever.
The trial was at hand.

She said again: "He is not coming to-night," and the baronet, on whose
visage a contemplative pleased look had been rising for a minute past,
quietly added: "He is come."

Richard's voice was heard in the hall.

There was commotion all over the house at the return of the young heir.
Berry, seizing every possible occasion to approach his Bessy now that her
involuntary coldness had enhanced her value--"Such is men!" as the soft
woman reflected--Berry ascended to her and delivered the news in pompous
tones and wheedling gestures. "The best word you've spoke for many a
day," says she, and leaves him unfee'd, in an attitude, to hurry and pour
bliss into Lucy's ears.

"Lord be praised!" she entered the adjoining room exclaiming, "we're got
to be happy at last. They men have come to their senses. I could cry to
your Virgin and kiss your Cross, you sweet!"

"Hush!" Lucy admonished her, and crooned over the child on her knees. The
tiny open hands, full of sleep, clutched; the large blue eyes started
awake; and his mother, all trembling and palpitating, knowing, but
thirsting to hear it, covered him with her tresses, and tried to still
her frame, and rocked, and sang low, interdicting even a whisper from
bursting Mrs. Berry.

Richard had come. He was under his father's roof, in the old home that
had so soon grown foreign to him. He stood close to his wife and child.
He might embrace them both: and now the fulness of his anguish and the
madness of the thing he had done smote the young man: now first he tasted
hard earthly misery.

Had not God spoken to him in the tempest? Had not the finger of heaven
directed him homeward? And he had come: here he stood: congratulations
were thick in his ears: the cup of happiness was held to him, and he was
invited to drink of it. Which was the dream? his work for the morrow, or
this? But for a leaden load that he felt like a bullet in his breast, he
might have thought the morrow with death sitting on it was the dream.
Yes; he was awake. Now first the cloud of phantasms cleared away: he
beheld his real life, and the colours of true human joy: and on the
morrow perhaps he was to close his eyes on them. That leaden bullet
dispersed all unrealities.

They stood about him in the hall, his father, Lady Blandish, Mrs. Doria,
Adrian, Ripton; people who had known him long. They shook his hand: they
gave him greetings he had never before understood the worth of or the
meaning. Now that he did they mocked him. There was Mrs. Berry in the
background bobbing, there was Martin Berry bowing, there was Tom Bakewell
grinning. Somehow he loved the sight of these better.

"Ah, my old Penelope!" he said, breaking through the circle of his
relatives to go to her. "Tom! how are you?"

"Bless ye, my Mr, Richard," whimpered Mrs. Berry, and whispered, rosily,
"all's agreeable now. She's waiting up in bed for ye, like a new-born."

The person who betrayed most agitation was, Mrs. Doria. She held close to
him, and eagerly studied his face and every movement, as one accustomed
to masks. "You are pale, Richard?" He pleaded exhaustion. "What detained
you, dear?" "Business," he said. She drew him imperiously apart from the
others. "Richard! is it over?" He asked what she meant. "The dreadful
duel, Richard." He looked darkly. "Is it over? is it done, Richard?"
Getting no immediate answer, she continued--and such was her agitation
that the words were shaken by pieces from her mouth: "Don't pretend not
to understand me, Richard! Is it over? Are you going to die the death of
my child--Clare's death? Is not one in a family enough? Think of your
dear young wife--we love her so!--your child!--your father! Will you kill
us all?"

Mrs. Doria had chanced to overhear a trifle of Ripton's communication to
Adrian, and had built thereon with the dark forces of a stricken soul.

Wondering how this woman could have divined it, Richard calmly said:
"It's arranged--the matter you allude to."

"Indeed!--truly, dear?"

"Yes."

"Tell me"--but he broke away from her, saying: "You shall hear the
particulars to-morrow," and she, not alive to double meaning just then,
allowed him to leave her.

He had eaten nothing for twelve hours, and called for food, but he would
take only dry bread and claret, which was served on a tray in the
library. He said, without any show of feeling, that he must eat before he
saw the young hope of Raynham: so there he sat, breaking bread, and
eating great mouthfuls, and washing them down with wine, talking of what
they would. His father's studious mind felt itself years behind him, he
was so completely altered. He had the precision of speech, the bearing of
a man of thirty. Indeed he had all that the necessity for cloaking an
infinite misery gives. But let things be as they might, he was, there.
For one night in his life Sir Austin's perspective of the future was
bounded by the night.

"Will your go to your wife now?" he had asked and Richard had replied
with a strange indifference. The baronet thought it better that their
meeting should be private, and sent word for Lucy to wait upstairs. The
others perceived that father and son should now be left alone. Adrian
went up to him, and said: "I can no longer witness this painful sight, so
Good-night, Sir Famish! You may cheat yourself into the belief that
you've made a meal, but depend upon it your progeny--and it threatens to
be numerous--will cry aloud and rue the day. Nature never forgives! A
lost dinner can never be replaced! Good-night, my dear boy. And
here--oblige me by taking this," he handed Richard the enormous envelope
containing what he had written that evening. "Credentials!" he exclaimed
humorously, slapping Richard on the shoulder. Ripton heard also the words
"propagator--species," but had no idea of their import. The wise youth
looked: You see we've made matters all right for you here, and quitted
the room on that unusual gleam of earnestness.

Richard shook his hand, and Ripton's. Then Lady Blandish said her
good-night, praising Lucy, and promising to pray for their mutual
happiness. The two men who knew what was hanging over him, spoke together
outside. Ripton was for getting a positive assurance that the duel would
not be fought, but Adrian said: "Time enough tomorrow. He's safe enough
while he's here. I'll stop it to-morrow:" ending with banter of Ripton
and allusions to his adventures with Miss Random, which must, Adrian
said, have led him into many affairs of the sort. Certainly Richard was
there, and while he was there he must be safe. So thought Ripton, and
went to his bed. Mrs. Doria deliberated likewise, and likewise thought
him safe while he was there. For once in her life she thought it better
not to trust to her instinct, for fear of useless disturbance where peace
should be. So she said not a syllable of it to her brother. She only
looked more deeply into Richard's eyes, as she kissed him, praising Lucy.
"I have found a second daughter in her, dear. Oh! may you both be happy!"

They all praised Lucy, now. His father commenced the moment they were
alone. "Poor Helen! Your wife has been a great comfort to her, Richard. I
think Helen must have sunk without her. So lovely a young person,
possessing mental faculty, and a conscience for her duties, I have never
before met."

He wished to gratify his son by these eulogies of Lucy, and some hours
back he would have succeeded. Now it had the contrary effect.

"You compliment me on my choice, sir?"

Richard spoke sedately, but the irony was perceptible and he could speak
no other way, his bitterness was so intense.

"I think you very fortunate," said his father.

Sensitive to tone and manner as he was, his ebullition of paternal
feeling was frozen. Richard did not approach him. He leaned against the
chimney-piece, glancing at the floor, and lifting his eyes only when he
spoke. Fortunate! very fortunate! As he revolved his later history, and
remembered how clearly he had seen that his father must love Lucy if he
but knew her, and remembered his efforts to persuade her to come with
him, a sting of miserable rage blackened his brain. But could he blame
that gentle soul? Whom could he blame? Himself? Not utterly. His father?
Yes, and no. The blame was here, the blame was there: it was everywhere
and nowhere, and the young man cast it on the Fates, and looked angrily
at heaven, and grew reckless.

"Richard," said his father, coming close to him, "it is late to-night. I
do not wish Lucy to remain in expectation longer, or I should have
explained myself to you thoroughly, and I think--or at least hope--you
would have justified me. I had cause to believe that you had not only
violated my confidence, but grossly deceived me. It was not so, I now
know. I was mistaken. Much of our misunderstanding has resulted from that
mistake. But you were married--a boy: you knew nothing of the world,
little of yourself. To save you in after-life--for there is a period when
mature men and women who have married young are more impelled to
temptation than in youth,--though not so exposed to it,--to save you, I
say, I decreed that you should experience self-denial and learn something
of your fellows of both sexes, before settling into a state that must
have been otherwise precarious, however excellent the woman who is your
mate. My System with you would have been otherwise imperfect, and you
would have felt the effects of it. It is over now. You are a man. The
dangers to which your nature was open are, I trust, at an end. I wish you
to be happy, and I give you both my blessing, and pray God to conduct and
strengthen you both."

Sir Austin's mind was unconscious of not having spoken devoutly. True or
not, his words were idle to his son: his talk of dangers over, and
happiness, mockery.

Richard coldly took his father's extended hand.

"We will go to her," said the baronet. "I will leave you at her door."

Not moving: looking fixedly at his father with a hard face on which the
colour rushed, Richard said: "A husband who has been unfaithful to his
wife may go to her there, sir?"

It was horrible, it was cruel: Richard knew that. He wanted no advice on
such a matter, having fully resolved what to do. Yesterday he would have
listened to his father, and blamed himself alone, and done what was to be
done humbly before God and her: now in the recklessness of his misery he
had as little pity for any other soul as for his own. Sir Austin's brows
were deep drawn down.

"What did you say, Richard?"

Clearly his intelligence had taken it, but this--the worst he could
hear--this that he had dreaded once and doubted, and smoothed over, and
cast aside--could it be?

Richard said: "I told you all but the very words when we last parted.
What else do you think would have kept me from her?"

Angered at his callous aspect, his father cried: "What brings you to her
now?"

"That will be between us two," was the reply.

Sir Austin fell into his chair. Meditation was impossible. He spoke from
a wrathful heart: "You will not dare to take her without"--

"No, sir," Richard interrupted him, "I shall not. Have no fear."

"Then you did not love your wife?"

"Did I not?" A smile passed faintly over Richard's face.

"Did you care so much for this--this other person?"

"So much? If you ask me whether I had affection for her, I can say I had
none."

O base human nature! Then how? then why? A thousand questions rose in the
baronet's mind. Bessy Berry could have answered them every one.

"Poor child! poor child!" he apostrophized Lucy, pacing the room.
Thinking of her, knowing her deep love for his son--her true forgiving
heart--it seemed she should be spared this misery.

He proposed to Richard to spare her. Vast is the distinction between
women and men in this one sin, he said, and supported it with physical
and moral citations. His argument carried him so far, that to hear him
one would have imagined he thought the sin in men small indeed. His words
were idle.

"She must know it," said Richard, sternly. "I will go to her now, sir, if
you please."

Sir Austin detained him, expostulated, contradicted himself, confounded
his principles, made nonsense of all his theories. He could not induce
his son to waver in his resolve. Ultimately, their good-night being
interchanged, he understood that the happiness of Raynham depended on
Lucy's mercy. He had no fears of her sweet heart, but it was a strange
thing to have come to. On which should the accusation fall--on science,
or on human nature?

He remained in the library pondering over the question, at times
breathing contempt for his son, and again seized with unwonted suspicion
of his own wisdom: troubled, much to be pitied, even if he deserved that
blow from his son which had plunged him into wretchedness. Richard went
straight to Tom Bakewell, roused the heavy sleeper, and told him to have
his mare saddled and waiting at the park gates East within an hour. Tom's
nearest approach to a hero was to be a faithful slave to his master, and
in doing this he acted to his conception of that high and glorious
character. He got up and heroically dashed his head into cold water. "She
shall be ready, sir," he nodded.

"Tom! if you don't see me back here at Raynham, your money will go on
being paid to you."

"Rather see you than the money, Mr. Richard," said Tom.

"And you will always watch and see no harm comes to her, Tom."

"Mrs. Richard, sir?" Tom stared. "God bless me, Mr. Richard"--

"No questions. You'll do what I say."

"Ay, sir; that I will. Did'n Isle o' Wight."

The very name of the Island shocked Richard's blood; and he had to walk
up and down before he could knock at Lucy's door. That infamous
conspiracy to which he owed his degradation and misery scarce left him
the feelings of a man when he thought of it.

The soft beloved voice responded to his knock. He opened the door, and
stood before her. Lucy was half-way toward him. In the moment that passed
ere she was in his arms, he had time to observe the change in her. He had
left her a girl: he beheld a woman--a blooming woman: for pale at first,
no sooner did she see him than the colour was rich and deep on her face
and neck and bosom half shown through the loose dressing-robe, and the
sense of her exceeding beauty made his heart thump and his eyes swim.

"My darling!" each cried, and they clung together, and her mouth was
fastened on his.

They spoke no more. His soul was drowned in her kiss. Supporting her,
whose strength was gone, he, almost as weak as she, hung over her, and
clasped her closer, closer, till they were as one body, and in the
oblivion her lips put upon him he was free to the bliss of her embrace.
Heaven granted him that. He placed her in a chair and knelt at her feet
with both arms around her. Her bosom heaved; her eyes never quitted him:
their light as the light on a rolling wave. This young creature, commonly
so frank and straightforward, was broken with bashfulness in her
husband's arms--womanly bashfulness on the torrent of womanly love;
tenfold more seductive than the bashfulness of girlhood. Terrible tenfold
the loss of her seemed now, as distantly--far on the horizon of
memory--the fatal truth returned to him.

Lose her? lose this? He looked up as if to ask God to confirm it.

The same sweet blue eyes! the eyes that he had often seen in the dying
glories of evening; on him they dwelt, shifting, and fluttering, and
glittering, but constant: the light of them as the light on a rolling
wave.

And true to him! true, good, glorious, as the angels of heaven! And his
she was! a woman--his wife! The temptation to take her, and be dumb, was
all powerful: the wish to die against her bosom so strong as to be the
prayer of his vital forces. Again he strained her to him, but this time
it was as a robber grasps priceless treasure--with exultation and
defiance. One instant of this. Lucy, whose pure tenderness had now
surmounted the first wild passion of their meeting, bent back her head
from her surrendered body, and said almost voicelessly, her underlids
wistfully quivering: "Come and see him--baby;" and then in great hope of
the happiness she was going to give her husband, and share with him, and
in tremour and doubt of what his feelings would be, she blushed, and her
brows worked: she tried to throw off the strangeness of a year of
separation, misunderstanding, and uncertainty.

"Darling! come and see him. He is here." She spoke more clearly, though
no louder.

Richard had released her, and she took his hand, and he suffered himself
to be led to the other side of the bed. His heart began rapidly throbbing
at the sight of a little rosy-curtained cot covered with lace like milky
summer cloud.

It seemed to him he would lose his manhood if he looked on that child's
face.

"Stop!" he cried suddenly.

Lucy turned first to him, and then to her infant, fearing it should have
been disturbed.

"Lucy, come back."

"What is it, darling?" said she, in alarm at his voice and the grip he
had unwittingly given her hand.

O God! what an Ordeal was this! that to-morrow he must face death,
perhaps die and be torn from his darling--his wife and his child; and
that ere he went forth, ere he could dare to see his child and lean his
head reproachfully on his young wife's breast--for the last time, it
might be--he must stab her to the heart, shatter the image she held of
him.

"Lucy!" She saw him wrenched with agony, and her own face took the
whiteness of his--she bending forward to him, all her faculties strung to
hearing.

He held her two hands that she might look on him and not spare the
horrible wound he was going to lay open to her eyes.

"Lucy. Do you know why I came to you to-night?"

She moved her lips repeating his words.

"Lucy. Have you guessed why I did not come before?"

Her head shook widened eyes.

"Lucy. I did not come because I was not worthy of my wife! Do you
understand?"

"Darling," she faltered plaintively, and hung crouching under him, "what
have I done to make you angry with me?"

"O beloved!" cried he, the tears bursting out of his eyes. "O beloved!"
was all he could say, kissing her hands passionately.

She waited, reassured, but in terror.

"Lucy. I stayed away from you--I could not come to you, because... I
dared not come to you, my wife, my beloved! I could not come because I
was a coward: because--hear me--this was the reason: I have broken my
marriage oath."

Again her lips moved. She caught at a dim fleshless meaning in them. "But
you love me? Richard! My husband! you love me?"

"Yes. I have never loved, I never shall love, woman but you."

"Darling! Kiss me."

"Have you understood what I have told you?"

"Kiss me," she said.

He did not join lips. "I have come to you to-night to ask your
forgiveness."

Her answer was: "Kiss me."

"Can you forgive a man so base?"

"But you love me, Richard?"

"Yes: that I can say before God. I love you, and I have betrayed you, and
am unworthy of you--not worthy to touch your hand, to kneel at your feet,
to breathe the same air with you."

Her eyes shone brilliantly. "You love me! you love me, darling!" And as
one who has sailed through dark fears into daylight, she said: "My
husband! my darling! you will never leave me? We never shall be parted
again?"

He drew his breath painfully. To smooth her face growing rigid with fresh
fears at his silence, he met her mouth. That kiss in which she spoke what
her soul had to say, calmed her, and she smiled happily from it, and in
her manner reminded him of his first vision of her on the summer morning
in the field of the meadow-sweet. He held her to him, and thought then of
a holier picture: of Mother and Child: of the sweet wonders of life she
had made real to him.

Had he not absolved his conscience? At least the pangs to come made him
think so. He now followed her leading hand. Lucy whispered: "You mustn't
disturb him--mustn't touch him, dear!" and with dainty fingers drew off
the covering to the little shoulder. One arm of the child was out along
the pillow; the small hand open. His baby-mouth was pouted full; the dark
lashes of his eyes seemed to lie on his plump cheeks. Richard stooped
lower down to him, hungering for some movement as a sign that he lived.
Lucy whispered. "He sleeps like you, Richard--one arm under his head."
Great wonder, and the stir of a grasping tenderness was in Richard. He
breathed quick and soft, bending lower, till Lucy's curls, as she nestled
and bent with him, rolled on the crimson quilt of the cot. A smile went
up the plump cheeks: forthwith the bud of a mouth was in rapid motion.
The young mother whispered, blushing: "He's dreaming of me," and the
simple words did more than Richard's eyes to make him see what was. Then
Lucy began to hum and buzz sweet baby-language, and some of the tiny
fingers stirred, and he made as if to change his cosy position, but
reconsidered, and deferred it, with a peaceful little sigh. Lucy
whispered: "He is such a big fellow. Oh! when you see him awake he is so
like you, Richard."

He did not hear her immediately: it seemed a bit of heaven dropped there
in his likeness: the more human the fact of the child grew the more
heavenly it seemed. His son! his child! should he ever see him awake? At
the thought, he took the words that had been spoken, and started from the
dream he had been in. "Will he wake soon, Lucy?"

"Oh no! not yet, dear: not for hours. I would have kept him awake for
you, but he was so sleepy."

Richard stood back from the cot. He thought that if he saw the eyes of
his boy, and had him once on his heart, he never should have force to
leave him. Then he looked down on him, again struggled to tear himself
away. Two natures warred in his bosom, or it may have been the Magian
Conflict still going on. He had come to see his child once and to make
peace with his wife before it should be too late. Might he not stop with
them? Might he not relinquish that devilish pledge? Was not divine
happiness here offered to him?--If foolish Ripton had not delayed to tell
him of his interview with Mountfalcon all might have been well. But pride
said it was impossible. And then injury spoke. For why was he thus base
and spotted to the darling of his love? A mad pleasure in the prospect of
wreaking vengeance on the villain who had laid the trap for him, once
more blackened his brain. If he would stay he could not. So he resolved,
throwing the burden on Fate. The struggle was over, but oh, the pain!

Lucy beheld the tears streaming hot from his face on the child's cot. She
marvelled at such excess of emotion. But when his chest heaved, and the
extremity of mortal anguish appeared to have seized him, her heart sank,
and she tried to get him in her arms. He turned away from her and went to
the window. A half-moon was over the lake.

"Look!" he said, "do you remember our rowing there one night, and we saw
the shadow of the cypress? I wish I could have come early to-night that
we might have had another row, and I have heard you sing there!"

"Darling!" said she, "will it make you happier if I go with you now? I
will."

"No, Lucy. Lucy, you are brave!"

"Oh, no! that I'm not. I thought so once. I know I am not now."

"Yes! to have lived--the child on your heart--and never to have uttered a
complaint!--you are brave. O my Lucy! my wife! you that have made me man!
I called you a coward. I remember it. I was the coward--I the wretched
vain fool! Darling! I am going to leave you now. You are brave, and you
will bear it. Listen: in two days, or three, I may be back--back for
good, if you will accept me. Promise me to go to bed quietly. Kiss the
child for me, and tell him his father has seen him. He will learn to
speak soon. Will he soon speak, Lucy?"

Dreadful suspicion kept her speechless; she could only clutch one arm of
his with both her hands.

"Going?" she presently gasped.

"For two or three days. No more--I hope."

"To-night?"

"Yes. Now."

"Going now? my husband!" her faculties abandoned her.

"You will be brave, my Lucy!"

"Richard! my darling husband! Going? What is it takes you from me?" But
questioning no further, she fell on her knees, and cried piteously to him
to stay--not to leave them. Then she dragged him to the little sleeper,
and urged him to pray by his side, and he did, but rose abruptly from his
prayer when he had muttered a few broken words--she praying on with
tight-strung nerves, in the faith that what she said to the interceding
Mother above would be stronger than human hands on him. Nor could he go
while she knelt there.

And he wavered. He had not reckoned on her terrible suffering. She came
to him, quiet. "I knew you would remain." And taking his hand, innocently
fondling it: "Am I so changed from her he loved? You will not leave me,
dear?" But dread returned, and the words quavered as she spoke them.

He was almost vanquished by the loveliness of her womanhood. She drew his
hand to her heart, and strained it there under one breast. "Come: lie on
my heart," she murmured with a smile of holy sweetness.

He wavered more, and drooped to her, but summoning the powers of hell,
kissed her suddenly, cried the words of parting, and hurried to the door.
It was over in an instant. She cried out his name, clinging to him
wildly, and was adjured to be brave, for he would be dishonoured if he
did not go. Then she was shaken off.

Mrs. Berry was aroused by an unusual prolonged wailing of the child,
which showed that no one was comforting it, and failing to get any answer
to her applications for admittance, she made bold to enter. There she saw
Lucy, the child in her lap, sitting on the floor senseless:--she had
taken it from its sleep and tried to follow her husband with it as her
strongest appeal to him, and had fainted.

"Oh my! oh my!" Mrs. Berry moaned, "and I just now thinkin' they was so
happy!"

Warming and caressing the poor infant, she managed by degrees to revive
Lucy, and heard what had brought her to that situation.

"Go to his father," said Mrs. Berry. "Ta-te-tiddle-te-heighty-O! Go, my
love, and every horse in Raynham shall be out after 'm. This is what men
brings us to! Heighty-oighty-iddlety-Ah! Or you take blessed baby, and
I'll go."

The baronet himself knocked at the door. "What is this?" he said. "I
heard a noise and a step descend."

"It's Mr. Richard have gone, Sir Austin! have gone from his wife and
babe! Rum-te-um-te-iddledy--Oh, my goodness! what sorrow's come on us!"
and Mrs. Berry wept, and sang to baby, and baby cried vehemently, and
Lucy, sobbing, took him and danced him and sang to him with drawn lips
and tears dropping over him. And if the Scientific Humanist to the day of
his death forgets the sight of those two poor true women jigging on their
wretched hearts to calm the child, he must have very little of the human
in him.

There was no more sleep for Raynham that night.




CHAPTER XLV

"His ordeal is over. I have just come from his room and seen him bear the
worst that could be. Return at once--he has asked for you. I can hardly
write intelligibly, but I will tell you what we know.

"Two days after the dreadful night when he left us, his father heard from
Ralph Morton. Richard had fought a duel in France with Lord Mountfalcon,
and was lying wounded at a hamlet on the coast. His father started
immediately with his poor wife, and I followed in company with his aunt
and his child. The wound was not dangerous. He was shot in the side
somewhere, but the ball injured no vital part. We thought all would be
well. Oh! how sick I am of theories, and Systems, and the pretensions of
men! There was his son lying all but dead, and the man was still
unconvinced of the folly he had been guilty of. I could hardly bear the
sight of his composure. I shall hate the name of Science till the day I
die. Give me nothing but commonplace unpretending people!

"They were at a wretched French cabaret, smelling vilely, where we still
remain, and the people try as much as they can do to compensate for our
discomforts by their kindness. The French poor people are very
considerate where they see suffering. I will say that for them. The
doctors had not allowed his poor Lucy to go near him. She sat outside his
door, and none of us dared disturb her. That was a sight for Science. His
father and myself, and Mrs. Berry, were the only ones permitted to wait
on him, and whenever we came out, there she sat, not speaking a word--for
she had been told it would endanger his life--but she looked such awful
eagerness. She had the sort of eye I fancy mad persons have. I was sure
her reason was going. We did everything we could think of to comfort her.
A bed was made up for her and her meals were brought to her there. Of
course there was no getting her to eat. What do you suppose his alarm was
fixed on? He absolutely said to me--but I have not patience to repeat his
words. He thought her to blame for not commanding herself for the sake of
her maternal duties. He had absolutely an idea of insisting that she
should make an effort to suckle the child. I shall love that Mrs. Berry
to the end of my days. I really believe she has twice the sense of any of
us--Science and all. She asked him plainly if he wished to poison the
child, and then he gave way, but with a bad grace.

"Poor man! perhaps I am hard on him. I remember that you said Richard had
done wrong. Yes; well, that may be. But his father eclipsed his wrong in
a greater wrong--a crime, or quite as bad; for if he deceived himself in
the belief that he was acting righteously in separating husband and wife,
and exposing his son as he did, I can only say that there are some who
are worse than people who deliberately commit crimes. No doubt Science
will benefit by it. They kill little animals for the sake of Science.

"We have with us Doctor Bairam, and a French physician from Dieppe, a
very skilful man. It was he who told us where the real danger lay. We
thought all would be well. A week had passed, and no fever supervened. We
told Richard that his wife was coming to him, and he could bear to hear
it. I went to her and began to circumlocute, thinking she listened--she
had the same eager look. When I told her she might go in with me to see
her dear husband, her features did not change. M. Despres, who held her
pulse at the time, told me, in a whisper, it was cerebral fever--brain
fever coming on. We have talked of her since. I noticed that though she
did not seem to understand me, her bosom heaved, and she appeared to be
trying to repress it, and choke something. I am sure now, from what I
know of her character, that she--even in the approaches of delirium--was
preventing herself from crying out. Her last hold of reason was a thought
for Richard. It was against a creature like this that we plotted! I have
the comfort of knowing that I did my share in helping to destroy her. Had
she seen her husband a day or two before--but no! there was a new System
to interdict that! Or had she not so violently controlled her nature as
she did, I believe she might have been saved.

"He said once of a man, that his conscience was a coxcomb. Will you
believe that when he saw his son's wife--poor victim! lying delirious, he
could not even then see his error. You said he wished to take Providence
out of God's hands. His mad self-deceit would not leave him. I am
positive, that while he was standing over her, he was blaming her for not
having considered the child. Indeed he made a remark to me that it was
unfortunate 'disastrous,' I think he said--that the child should have to
be fed by hand. I dare say it is. All I pray is that this young child may
be saved from him. I cannot bear to see him look on it. He does not spare
himself bodily fatigue--but what is that? that is the vulgarest form of
love. I know what you will say. You will say I have lost all charity, and
I have. But I should not feel so, Austin, if I could be quite sure that
he is an altered man even now the blow has struck him. He is reserved and
simple in his speech, and his grief is evident, but I have doubts. He
heard her while she was senseless call him cruel and harsh, and cry that
she had suffered, and I saw then his mouth contract as if he had been
touched. Perhaps, when he thinks, his mind will be clearer, but what he
has done cannot be undone. I do not imagine he will abuse women any more.
The doctor called her a 'forte et belle jeune femme:' and he said she was
as noble a soul as ever God moulded clay upon. A noble soul 'forte et
belle!' She lies upstairs. If he can look on her and not see his sin, I
almost fear God will never enlighten him."

She died five days after she had been removed. The shock had utterly
deranged her. I was with her. She died very quietly, breathing her last
breath without pain--asking for no one--a death I should like to die.

"Her cries at one time were dreadfully loud. She screamed that she was
'drowning in fire,' and that her husband would not come to her to save
her. We deadened the sound as much as we could, but it was impossible to
prevent Richard from hearing. He knew her voice, and it produced an
effect like fever on him. Whenever she called he answered. You could not
hear them without weeping. Mrs. Berry sat with her, and I sat with him,
and his father moved from one to the other.

"But the trial for us came when she was gone. How to communicate it to
Richard--or whether to do so at all! His father consulted with us. We
were quite decided that it would be madness to breathe it while he was in
that state. I can admit now--as things have turned out--we were wrong.
His father left us--I believe he spent the time in prayer--and then
leaning on me, he went to Richard, and said in so many words, that his
Lucy was no more. I thought it must kill him. He listened, and smiled. I
never saw a smile so sweet and so sad. He said he had seen her die, as if
he had passed through his suffering a long time ago. He shut his eyes. I
could see by the motion of his eyeballs up that he was straining his
sight to some inner heaven.--I cannot go on.

"I think Richard is safe. Had we postponed the tidings, till he came to
his clear senses, it must have killed him. His father was right for once,
then. But if he has saved his son's body, he has given the death-blow to
his heart. Richard will never be what he promised.

"A letter found on his clothes tells us the origin of the quarrel. I have
had an interview with Lord M. this morning. I cannot say I think him
exactly to blame: Richard forced him to fight. At least I do not select
him the foremost for blame. He was deeply and sincerely affected by the
calamity he has caused. Alas! he was only an instrument. Your poor aunt
is utterly prostrate and talks strange things of her daughter's death.
She is only happy in drudging. Dr. Bairam says we must under any
circumstances keep her employed. Whilst she is doing something, she can
chat freely, but the moment her hands are not occupied she gives me an
idea that she is going into a fit.

"We expect the dear child's uncle to-day. Mr. Thompson is here. I have
taken him upstairs to look at her. That poor young man has a true heart.

"Come at once. You will not be in time to see her. She will lie at
Raynham. If you could you would see an angel. He sits by her side for
hours. I can give you no description of her beauty.

"You will not delay, I know, dear Austin, and I want you, for your
presence will make me more charitable than I find it possible to be. Have
you noticed the expression in the eyes of blind men? That is just how
Richard looks, as he lies there silent in his bed--striving to image her
on his brain."

THE END




     ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS

     A woman who has mastered sauces sits on the apex of civilization
     A style of affable omnipotence about the wise youth
     A maker of Proverbs--what is he but a narrow mind wit
     A young philosopher's an old fool!
     After five years of marriage, and twelve of friendship
     Although it blew hard when Caesar crossed the Rubicon
     Among boys there are laws of honour and chivalrous codes
     An edge to his smile that cuts much like a sneer
     And so Farewell my young Ambition! and with it farewell all true
     And to these instructions he gave an aim: "First be virtuous"
     As when nations are secretly preparing for war
     Behold the hero embarked in the redemption of an erring beauty
     Cold charity to all
     Come prepared to be not very well satisfied with anything
     Complacent languor of the wise youth
     Feeling, nothing beyond a lively interest in her well-being
     Further she read, "Which is the coward among us?"
     Gentleman who does so much 'cause he says so little
     Habit had legalized his union with her
     Hermits enamoured of wind and rain
     Hero embarked in the redemption of an erring beautiful woman
     Heroine, in common with the hero, has her ambition to be of use
     His equanimity was fictitious
     His fancy performed miraculous feats
     How many instruments cannot clever women play upon
     Huntress with few scruples and the game unguarded
     I rather like to hear a woman swear. It embellishes her!
     I beg of my husband, and all kind people who may have the care
     I ain't a speeder of matrimony
     I cannot get on with Gibbon
     In our House, my son, there is peculiar blood. We go to wreck!
     In Sir Austin's Note-book was written: "Between Simple Boyhood..."
     Intensely communicative, but inarticulate
     It was his ill luck to have strong appetites and a weak stomach
     It is no use trying to conceal anything from him
     It was now, as Sir Austin had written it down, The Magnetic Age
     January was watering and freezing old earth by turns
     Just bad inquirin' too close among men
     Laying of ghosts is a public duty
     Minutes taken up by the grey puffs from their mouths
     No! Gentlemen don't fling stones; leave that to the blackguards
     On the threshold of Puberty, there is one Unselfish Hour
     Opened a wider view of the world to him, and a colder
     Our most diligent pupil learns not so much as an earnest teacher
     Rogue on the tremble of detection
     Rumour for the nonce had a stronger spice of truth than usual
     Seed-Time passed thus smoothly, and adolescence came on
     Serene presumption
     She can make puddens and pies
     South-western Island has few attractions to other than invalids
     Take 'em somethin' like Providence--as they come
     Task of reclaiming a bad man is extremely seductive to good women
     The Pilgrim's Scrip remarks that: Young men take joy in nothing
     The world is wise in its way
     The danger of a little knowledge of things is disputable
     The born preacher we feel instinctively to be our foe
     There is for the mind but one grasp of happiness
     They believe that the angels have been busy about them
     This was a totally different case from the antecedent ones
     Those days of intellectual coxcombry
     Threats of prayer, however, that harp upon their sincerity
     To be passive in calamity is the province of no woman
     Troublesome appendages of success
     Unaccustomed to have his will thwarted
     Who rises from Prayer a better man, his prayer is answered
     Wise in not seeking to be too wise
     Woman will be the last thing civilized by Man
     Women are swift at coming to conclusions in these matters
     Yet, though Angels smile, shall not Devils laugh
     You've got no friend but your bed
     Young as when she looked upon the lovers in Paradise






SANDRA BELLONI


By George Meredith



CONTENTS

BOOK 1
I.        THE POLES PRELUDE
II.       THE EXPEDITION BY MOONLIGHT
III.      WILFRID'S DIPLOMACY
IV.       EMILIA'S FIRST TRIAL IN PUBLIC
V.        EMILIA PLAYS ON THE CORNET
VI.       EMILIA SUPPLIES THE KEY TO HERSELF AND CONTINUES HER
          PERFORMANCE ON THE CORNET
VII.      THREATS OF A CRISIS IN THE GOVERNMENT OF BROOKFIELD:
          AND OF THE VIRTUE RESIDENT IN A TAIL-COAT
VIII.     IN WHICH A BIG DRUM SPEEDS THE MARCH OF
          EMILIA'S HISTORY
IX.       THE RIVAL CLUBS
X.        THE LADIES OF BROOKFIELD AT SCHOOL

BOOK 2
XI.       IN WHICH WE SEE THE MAGNANIMITY THAT IS IN BEER.
XII.      SHOWING HOW SENTIMENT AND PASSION TAKE
          THE DISEASE OF LOVE
XIII.     CONTAINS A SHORT DISCOURSE ON PUPPETS
XIV.      THE BESWORTH QUESTION
XV.       WILFRID'S EXHIBITION OF TREACHERY
XVI.      HOW THE LADIES OF BROOKFIELD CAME TO THEIR RESOLVE
XVII.     IN THE WOODS

BOOK 3
XVIII.    RETURN OF THE SENTIMENTALIST INTO BONDAGE
XIX.      LIFE AT BROOKFIELD.
XX.       BY WILMING WEIR
XXI.      RETURN OF MR. PERICLES
XXII.     THE PITFALL OF SENTIMENT
XXIII.    WILFRID DIPLOMATIZES
XXIV.     EMILIA MAKES A MOVE
XXV.      A FARCE WITHIN A FARCE

BOOK 4
XXVI.     SUGGESTS THAT THE COMIC MASK HAS SOME KINSHIP WITH A SKULL
XXVII.    SMALL LIFE AT BROOKFIELD
XXVIII.   GEORGIANA FORD
XXIX.     FIRST SCOURGING OF THE FINE SHADES
XXX.      OF THE DOUBLE-MAN IN US, AND THE GREAT FIGHT
          WHEN THESE ARE FULL-GROWN
XXXI.     BESWORTH LAWN
XXXII.    THE SUPPER
XXXIII.   DEFEAT AND FLIGHT OF MRS. CHUMP

BOOK 5
XXXIV.    INDICATES THE DEGRADATION OF BROOKFIELD, TOGETHER
          WITH CERTAIN PROCEEDINGS OF THE YACHT
XXXV.     MRS. CHUMP'S EPISTLE
XXXVI.    ANOTHER PITFALL OF SENTIMENT
XXXVII.   EMILIA'S FLIGHT.
XXXVIII.  SHE CLINGS TO HER VOICE
XXXIX.    HER VOICE FAILS

BOOK 6
XL.       SHE TASTES DESPAIR
XLI.      SHE IS FOUND
XLII.     DEFECTION OF MR. PERICLES FROM THE BROOKFIELD CIRCLE
XLIII.    IN WHICH WE SEE WILFRID KINDLING
XLIV.     ON THE HIPPOGRIFF IN AIR: IN WHICH THE
          PHILOSOPHER HAS A SHORT SPELL.
XLV.      ON THE HIPPOGRIFF ON EARTH.
XLVI.     RAPE OF THE BLACK-BRIONY WREATH
XLVII.    THE CALL TO ACTION
XLVIII.   CONTAINS A FURTHER VIEW OF SENTIMENT
XLIX.     BETWEEN EMILIA AND GEORGIANA

BOOK 7
L.        EMILIA BEGINS TO FEEL MERTHYR'S POWER
LI.       A CHAPTER INTERRUPTED BY THE PHILOSOPHER
LII.      A FRESH DUETT BETWEEN WILFRID AND EMILIA
LIII.     ALDERMAN'S BOUQUET
LIIV.     THE EXPLOSION AT BROOKFIELD
LV.       THE TRAGEDY OF SENTIMENT
LVI.      AN ADVANCE AND A CHECK.
LVII.     CONTAINS A FURTHER ANATOMY OF WILFRID
LVIII.    FROST ON THE MAY NIGHT.
LVIX.     EMILIA'S GOOD-BYE





SANDRA BELLONI

[ORIGINALLY EMILIA IN ENGLAND]




CHAPTER I

We are to make acquaintance with some serious damsels, as this English
generation knows them, and at a season verging upon May. The ladies of
Brookfield, Arabella, Cornelia, and Adela Pole, daughters of a
flourishing City-of-London merchant, had been told of a singular thing:
that in the neighbouring fir-wood a voice was to be heard by night, so
wonderfully sweet and richly toned, that it required their strong sense
to correct strange imaginings concerning it. Adela was herself the chief
witness to its unearthly sweetness, and her testimony was confirmed by
Edward Buxley, whose ear had likewise taken in the notes, though not on
the same night, as the pair publicly proved by dates. Both declared that
the voice belonged to an opera-singer or a spirit. The ladies of
Brookfield, declining the alternative, perceived that this was a surprise
furnished for their amusement by the latest celebrity of their circle,
Mr. Pericles, their father's business ally and fellow-speculator; Mr.
Pericles, the Greek, the man who held millions of money as dust compared
to a human voice. Fortified by this exquisite supposition, their strong
sense at once dismissed with scorn the idea of anything unearthly,
however divine, being heard at night, in the nineteenth century, within
sixteen miles of London City. They agreed that Mr. Pericles had hired
some charming cantatrice to draw them into the woods and delightfully
bewilder them. It was to be expected of his princely nature, they said.
The Tinleys, of Bloxholme, worshipped him for his wealth; the ladies of
Brookfield assured their friends that the fact of his being a money-maker
was redeemed in their sight by his devotion to music. Music was now the
Art in the ascendant at Brookfield. The ladies (for it is as well to know
at once that they were not of that poor order of women who yield their
admiration to a thing for its abstract virtue only)--the ladies were
scaling society by the help of the Arts. To this laudable end sacrifices
were now made to Euterpe to assist them. As mere daughters of a merchant,
they were compelled to make their house not simply attractive, but
enticing; and, seeing that they liked music, it seemed a very agreeable
device. The Tinleys of Bloxholme still kept to dancing, and had
effectually driven away Mr. Pericles from their gatherings. For Mr.
Pericles said: "If that they will go 'so,' I will be amused." He
presented a top-like triangular appearance for one staggering second. The
Tinleys did not go `so' at all, and consequently they lost the satirical
man, and were called 'the ballet-dancers' by Adela which thorny scoff her
sisters permitted to pass about for a single day, and no more. The
Tinleys were their match at epithets, and any low contention of this kind
obscured for them the social summit they hoped to attain; the dream
whereof was their prime nourishment.

That the Tinleys really were their match, they acknowledged, upon the
admission of the despicable nature of the game. The Tinleys had winged a
dreadful shaft at them; not in itself to be dreaded, but that it struck a
weak point; it was a common shot that exploded a magazine; and for a time
it quite upset their social policy, causing them to act like simple young
ladies who feel things and resent them. The ladies of Brookfield had let
it be known that, in their privacy together, they were Pole, Polar, and
North Pole. Pole, Polar, and North Pole were designations of the three
shades of distance which they could convey in a bow: a form of salute
they cherished as peculiarly their own; being a method they had invented
to rebuke the intrusiveness of the outer world, and hold away all
strangers until approved worthy. Even friends had occasionally to submit
to it in a softened form. Arabella, the eldest, and Adela, the youngest,
alternated Pole and Polar; but North Pole was shared by Cornelia with
none. She was the fairest of the three; a nobly-built person; her eyes
not vacant of tenderness when she put off her armour. In her war-panoply
before unhappy strangers, she was a Britomart. They bowed to an iceberg,
which replied to them with the freezing indifference of the floating
colossus, when the Winter sun despatches a feeble greeting messenger-beam
from his miserable Arctic wallet. The simile must be accepted in its
might, for no lesser one will express the scornfulness toward men
displayed by this strikingly well-favoured, formal lady, whose heart of
hearts demanded for her as spouse, a lord, a philosopher, and a
Christian, in one: and he must be a member of Parliament. Hence her
isolated air.

Now, when the ladies of Brookfield heard that their Pole, Polar, and
North Pole, the splendid image of themselves, had been transformed by the
Tinleys, and defiled by them to Pole, Polony, and Maypole, they should
have laughed contemptuously; but the terrible nerve of ridicule quivered
in witness against them, and was not to be stilled. They could not
understand why so coarse a thing should affect them. It stuck in their
flesh. It gave them the idea that they saw their features hideous, but
real, in a magnifying mirror.

There was therefore a feud between the Tinleys and the Poles; and when
Mr. Pericles entirely gave up the former, the latter rewarded him by
spreading abroad every possible kind interpretation of his atrocious bad
manners. He was a Greek, of Parisian gilding, whose Parisian hat flew off
at a moment's notice, and whose savage snarl was heard at the slightest
vexation. His talk of renowned prime-donne by their Christian names, and
the way that he would catalogue emperors, statesmen, and noblemen known
to him, with familiar indifference, as things below the musical Art, gave
a distinguishing tone to Brookfield, from which his French accentuation
of our tongue did not detract.

Mr. Pericles grimaced bitterly at any claim to excellence being set up
for the mysterious voice in the woods. Tapping one forefinger on the
uplifted point of the other, he observed that to sing abroad in the night
air of an English Spring month was conclusive of imbecility; and that no
imbecile sang at all. Because, to sing, involved the highest
accomplishment of which the human spirit could boast. Did the ladies see?
he asked. They thought they saw that he carried on a deception admirably.
In return, they inquired whether he would come with them and hunt the
voice, saying that they would catch it for him. "I shall catch a cold for
myself," said Mr. Pericles, from the elevation of a shrug, feeling that
he was doomed to go forth. He acted reluctance so well that the ladies
affected a pretty imperiousness; and when at last he consented to join
the party, they thanked him with a nicely simulated warmth, believing
that they had pleased him thoroughly.

Their brother Wilfrid was at Brookfield. Six months earlier he had
returned from India, an invalided cornet of light cavalry, with a
reputation for military dash and the prospect of a medal. Then he was
their heroic brother he was now their guard. They love him tenderly, and
admired him when it was necessary; but they had exhausted their own
sensations concerning his deeds of arms, and fancied that he had served
their purpose. And besides, valour is not an intellectual quality, they
said. They were ladies so aspiring, these daughters of the merchant
Samuel Bolton Pole, that, if Napoleon had been their brother, their
imaginations would have overtopped him after his six months' inaction in
the Tuileries. They would by that time have made a stepping-stone of the
emperor. 'Mounting' was the title given to this proceeding. They went on
perpetually mounting. It is still a good way from the head of the tallest
of men to the stars; so they had their work before them; but, as they
observed, they were young. To be brief, they were very ambitious damsels,
aiming at they knew not exactly what, save that it was something so wide
that it had not a name, and so high in the air that no one could see it.
They knew assuredly that their circle did not please them. So, therefore,
they were constantly extending and refining it: extending it perhaps for
the purpose of refining it. Their susceptibilities demanded that they
should escape from a city circle. Having no mother, they ruled their
father's house and him, and were at least commanders of whatsoever forces
they could summon for the task.

It may be seen that they were sentimentalists. That is to say, they
supposed that they enjoyed exclusive possession of the Nice Feelings, and
exclusively comprehended the Fine Shades. Whereof more will be said; but
in the meantime it will explain their propensity to mount; it will
account for their irritation at the material obstructions surrounding
them; and possibly the philosopher will now have his eye on the source of
that extraordinary sense of superiority to mankind which was the crown of
their complacent brows. Eclipsed as they may be in the gross appreciation
of the world by other people, who excel in this and that accomplishment,
persons that nourish Nice Feelings and are intimate with the Fine Shades
carry their own test of intrinsic value.

Nor let the philosopher venture hastily to despise them as pipers to
dilettante life. Such persons come to us in the order of civilization. In
their way they help to civilize us. Sentimentalists are a perfectly
natural growth of a fat soil. Wealthy communities must engender them. If
with attentive minds we mark the origin of classes, we shall discern that
the Nice Feelings and the Fine Shades play a principal part in our human
development and social history. I dare not say that civilized man is to
be studied with the eye of a naturalist; but my vulgar meaning might
almost be twisted to convey: that our sentimentalists are a variety owing
their existence to a certain prolonged term of comfortable feeding. The
pig, it will be retorted, passes likewise through this training. He does.
But in him it is not combined with an indigestion of high German
romances. Here is so notable a difference, that he cannot possibly be
said to be of the family. And I maintain it against him, who have
nevertheless listened attentively to the eulogies pronounced by the
vendors of prize bacon.

After thus stating to you the vast pretensions of the ladies of
Brookfield, it would be unfair to sketch their portraits. Nothing but
comedy bordering on burlesque could issue from the contrast, though they
graced a drawing-room or a pew, and had properly elegant habits and taste
in dress, and were all fair to the sight. Moreover, Adela had not long
quitted school. Outwardly they were not unlike other young ladies with
wits alert. They were at the commencement of their labours on this night
of the expedition when they were fated to meet something greatly
confusing them.




CHAPTER II

Half of a rosy mounting full moon was on the verge of the East as the
ladies, with attendant cavaliers, passed, humming softly, through the
garden-gates. Arabella had, by right of birth, made claim to Mr.
Pericles: not without an unwontedly fretful remonstrance from Cornelia,
who said, "My dear, you must allow that I have some talent for drawing
men out."

And Arabella replied: "Certainly, dear, you have; and I think I have some
too."

The gentle altercation lasted half-an-hour, but they got no farther than
this. Mr. Pericles was either hopeless of protecting himself from such
shrewd assailants, or indifferent to their attacks, for all his defensive
measures were against the cold. He was muffled in a superbly mounted
bearskin, which came up so closely about his ears that Arabella had to
repeat to him all her questions, and as it were force a way for her voice
through the hide. This was provoking, since it not only stemmed the
natural flow of conversation, but prevented her imagination from
decorating the reminiscence of it subsequently (which was her profound
secret pleasure), besides letting in the outer world upon her. Take it as
an axiom, when you utter a sentimentalism, that more than one pair of
ears makes a cynical critic. A sentimentalism requires secresy. I can
enjoy it, and shall treat it respectfully if you will confide it to me
alone; but I and my friends must laugh at it outright.

"Does there not seem a soul in the moonlight?" for instance. Arabella,
after a rapturous glance at the rosy orb, put it to Mr. Pericles, in
subdued impressive tones. She had to repeat her phrase; Mr. Pericles then
echoing, with provoking monotony of tone, "Sol?"--whereupon "Soul!" was
reiterated, somewhat sharply: and Mr. Pericles, peering over the collar
of the bear, with half an eye, continued the sentence, in the manner of
one sent thereby farther from its meaning: "Ze moonlight?" Despairing and
exasperated, Arabella commenced afresh: "I said, there seems a soul in
it"; and Mr. Pericles assented bluntly: "In ze light!"--which sounded so
little satisfactory that Arabella explained, "I mean the aspect;" and
having said three times distinctly what she meant, in answer to a
terrific glare from the unsubmerged whites of the eyes of Mr. Pericles,
this was his comment, almost roared forth:

"Sol! you say so-whole--in ze moonlight--Luna? Hein? Ze aspect is of
Sol!--Yez."

And Mr. Pericles sank into his bear again, while Wilfrid Pole, who was
swinging his long cavalry legs to rearward, shouted; and Mr. Sumner, a
rising young barrister, walking beside Cornelia, smiled a smile of
extreme rigidity. Arabella was punished for claiming rights of birth. She
heard the murmuring course of the dialogue between Cornelia and Mr.
Sumner, sufficiently clear to tell her it was not fictitious and was well
sustained, while her heart was kept thirsting for the key to it. In
advance were Adela and Edward Buxley, who was only a rich alderman's only
son, but had the virtue of an extraordinary power of drawing caricatures,
and was therefore useful in exaggerating the features of disagreeable
people, and showing how odious they were: besides endearing pleasant ones
exhibiting how comic they could be. Gossips averred that before Mr. Pole
had been worried by his daughters into giving that mighty sum for
Brookfield, Arabella had accepted Edward as her suitor; but for some
reason or other he had apparently fallen from his high estate. To tell
the truth, Arabella conceived that he had simply obeyed her wishes, while
he knew he was naughtily following his own; and Adela, without
introspection at all, was making her virgin effort at the caricaturing of
our sex in his person: an art for which she promised well.

Out of the long black shadows of the solitary trees of the park, and
through low yellow moonlight, they passed suddenly into the muffed ways
of the wood. Mr. Pericles was ineffably provoking. He had come for
gallantry's sake, and was not to be rallied, and would echo every
question in a roar, and there was no drawing of the man out at all. He
knocked against branches, and tripped over stumps, and ejaculated with
energy; but though he gave no heed or help to his fair associate, she
thought not the worse of him, so heroic can women be toward any creature
that will permit himself to be clothed by a mystery. At times the party
hung still, fancying the voice aloft, and then, after listening to the
unrelieved stillness, they laughed, and trod the stiff dry ferns and soft
mosses once more. At last they came to a decided halt, when the
proposition to return caused Adela to come up to Mr. Pericles and say to
him, "Now, you must confess! You have prohibited her from singing
to-night so that we may continue to be mystified. I call this quite
shameful of you!"

And even as Mr. Pericles was protesting that he was the most mystified of
the company, his neck lengthened, and his head went round, and his ear
was turned to the sky, while he breathed an elaborate "Ah!" And sure
enough that was the voice of the woods, cleaving the night air, not
distant. A sleepy fire of early moonlight hung through the dusky
fir-branches. The voice had the woods to itself, and seemed to fill them
and soar over them, it was so full and rich, so light and sweet. And now,
to add to the marvel, they heard a harp accompaniment, the strings being
faintly touched, but with firm fingers. A woman's voice: on that could be
no dispute. Tell me, what opens heaven more flamingly to heart and mind,
than the voice of a woman, pouring clear accordant notes to the blue
night sky, that grows light blue to the moon? There was no flourish in
her singing. All the notes were firm, and rounded, and sovereignly
distinct. She seemed to have caught the ear of Night, and sang confident
of her charm. It was a grand old Italian air, requiring severity of tone
and power. Now into great mournful hollows the voice sank steadfastly.
One soft sweep of the strings succeeded a deep final note, and the
hearers breathed freely.

"Stradella!" said the Greek, folding his arms.

The ladies were too deeply impressed to pursue their play with him. Real
emotions at once set aside the semi-credence they had given to their own
suggestions.

"Hush! she will sing again," whispered Adela. "It is the most delicious
contralto." Murmurs of objection to the voice being characterized at all
by any technical word, or even for a human quality, were heard.

"Let me find zis woman!" cried the prose enthusiast Mr. Pericles,
imperiously, with his bearskin thrown back on his shoulders, and forth
they stepped, following him.

In the middle of the wood there was a sandy mound, rising half the height
of the lesser firs, bounded by a green-grown vallum, where once an old
woman, hopelessly a witch, had squatted, and defied the authorities to
make her budge: nor could they accomplish the task before her witch-soul
had taken wing in the form of a black night-bird, often to be heard
jarring above the spot. Lank dry weeds and nettles, and great lumps of
green and gray moss, now stood on the poor old creature's place of
habitation, and the moon, slanting through the fir-clumps, was scattered
on the blossoms of twisted orchard-trees, gone wild again. Amid this
desolation, a dwarfed pine, whose roots were partially bared as they
grasped the broken bank that was its perch, threw far out a cedar-like
hand. In the shadow of it sat the fair singer. A musing touch of her
harp-strings drew the intruders to the charmed circle, though they could
discern nothing save the glimmer of the instrument and one set of fingers
caressing it. How she viewed their rather impertinent advance toward her,
till they had ranged in a half-circle nearer and nearer, could not be
guessed. She did not seem abashed in any way, for, having preluded, she
threw herself into another song.

The charm was now more human, though scarcely less powerful. This was a
different song from the last: it was not the sculptured music of the old
school, but had the richness and fulness of passionate blood that marks
the modern Italian, where there is much dallying with beauty in the thick
of sweet anguish. Here, at a certain passage of the song, she gathered
herself up and pitched a nervous note, so shrewdly triumphing, that, as
her voice sank to rest, her hearers could not restrain a deep murmur of
admiration.

Then came an awkward moment. The ladies did not wish to go, and they were
not justified in stopping. They were anxious to speak, and they could not
choose the word to utter. Mr. Pericles relieved them by moving forward
and doffing his hat, at the same time begging excuse for the rudeness
they were guilty of.

The fair singer answered, with the quickness that showed a girl: "Oh,
stay; do stay, if I please you!" A singular form of speech, it was
thought by the ladies.

She added: "I feel that I sing better when I have people to listen to
me."

"You find it more sympathetic, do you not?" remarked Cornelia.

"I don't know," responded the unknown, with a very honest smile. "I like
it."

She was evidently uneducated. "A professional?" whispered Adela to
Arabella. She wanted little invitation to exhibit her skill, at all
events, for, at a word, the clear, bold, but finely nervous voice, was
pealing to a brisker measure, that would have been joyous but for one
fall it had, coming unexpectedly, without harshness, and winding up the
song in a ringing melancholy.

After a few bars had been sung, Mr. Pericles was seen tapping his
forehead perplexedly. The moment it ended, he cried out, in a tone of
vexed apology for strange ignorance: "But I know not it? It is
Italian--yes, I swear it is Italian! But--who then? It is superbe! But I
know not it!"

"It is mine," said the young person.

"Your music, miss?"

"I mean, I composed it."

"Permit me to say, Brava!"

The ladies instantly petitioned to have it sung to them again; and
whether or not they thought more of it, or less, now that the authorship
was known to them, they were louder in their applause, which seemed to
make the little person very happy.

"You are sure it pleases you?" she exclaimed.

They were very sure it pleased them. Somehow the ladies were growing
gracious toward her, from having previously felt too humble, it may be.
She was girlish in her manner, and not imposing in her figure. She would
be a sweet mystery to talk about, they thought: but she had ceased to be
quite the same mystery to them.

"I would go on singing to you," she said; "I could sing all night long:
but my people at the farm will not keep supper for me, when it's late,
and I shall have to go hungry to bed, if I wait."

"Have you far to go?" ventured Adela.

"Only to Wilson's farm; about ten minutes' walk through the wood," she
answered unhesitatingly.

Arabella wished to know whether she came frequently to this lovely spot.

"When it does not rain, every evening," was the reply.

"You feel that the place inspires you?" said Cornelia.

"I am obliged to come," she explained. "The good old dame at the farm is
ill, and she says that music all day is enough for her, and I must come
here, or I should get no chance of playing at all at night."

"But surely you feel an inspiration in the place, do you not?" Cornelia
persisted.

She looked at this lady as if she had got a hard word given her to crack,
and muttered: "I feel it quite warm here. And I do begin to love the
place."

The stately Cornelia fell back a step.

The moon was now a silver ball on the edge of the circle of grey blue
above the ring of firs, and by the light falling on the strange little
person, as she stood out of the shadow to muffle up her harp, it could be
seen that she was simply clad, and that her bonnet was not of the newest
fashion. The sisters remarked a boot-lace hanging loose. The peculiar
black lustre of her hair, and thickness of her long black eyebrows,
struck them likewise. Her harp being now comfortably mantled, Cornet
Wilfrid Pole, who had been watching her and balancing repeatedly on his
forward foot, made a stride, and "really could not allow her to carry it
herself," and begged her permission that he might assist her. "It's very
heavy, you know," he added.

"Too heavy for me," she said, favouring him with a thankful smile. "I
have some one who does that. Where is Jim?"

She called for Jim, and from the back of the sandy hillock, where he had
been reclining, a broad-shouldered rustic came lurching round to them.

"Now, take my harp, if you please, and be as careful as possible of
branches, and don't stumble." She uttered this as if she were giving Jim
his evening lesson: and then with a sudden cry she laughed out: "Oh! but
I haven't played you your tune, and you must have your tune!"

Forthwith she stript the harp half bare, and throwing a propitiatory
bright glance at her audience on the other side of her, she commenced
thrumming a kind of Giles Scroggins, native British, beer-begotten air,
while Jim smeared his mouth and grinned, as one who sees his love dragged
into public view, and is not the man to be ashamed of her, though he
hopes you will hardly put him to the trial.

"This is his favourite tune, that he taught me," she emphasized to the
company. "I play to him every night, for a finish; and then he takes care
not to knock my poor harp to pieces and tumble about."

The gentlemen were amused by the Giles Scroggins air, which she had
delivered with a sufficient sense of its lumping fun and leg-for-leg
jollity, and they laughed and applauded; but the ladies were silent after
the performance, until the moment came to thank her for the entertainment
she had afforded them: and then they broke into gentle smiles, and
trusted they might have the pleasure of hearing her another night.

"Oh! just as often and as much as you like," she said, and first held her
hand to Arabella, next to Cornelia, and then to Adela. She seemed to be
hesitating before the gentlemen, and when Wilfrid raised his hat, she was
put to some confusion, and bowed rather awkwardly, and retired.

"Good night, miss!" called Mr. Pericles.

"Good night, sir!" she answered from a little distance, and they could
see that she was there emboldened to drop a proper curtsey in
accompaniment.

Then the ladies stood together and talked of her, not with absolute
enthusiasm. For, "Was it not divine?" said Adela; and Cornelia asked her
if she meant the last piece; and, "Oh, gracious! not that!" Adela
exclaimed. And then it was discovered how their common observation had
fastened on the boot-lace; and this vagrant article became the key to
certain speculations on her condition and character.

"I wish I'd had a dozen bouquets, that's all!" cried Wilfrid. "she
deserved them."

"Has she sentiment for what she sings? or is it only faculty?" Cornelia
put it to Mr. Sumner.

That gentleman faintly defended the stranger for the intrusion of the
bumpkin tune. "She did it so well!" he said.

"I complain that she did it too well," uttered Cornelia, whose use of
emphasis customarily implied that the argument remained with her.

Talking in this manner, and leisurely marching homeward, they were
startled to hear Mr. Pericles, who had wrapped himself impenetrably in
the bear, burst from his cogitation suddenly to cry out, in his harshest
foreign accent: "Yeaz!" And thereupon he threw open the folds, and laid
out a forefinger, and delivered himself: "I am made my mind! I send her
abroad to ze Academie for one, two, tree year. She shall be instructed as
was not before. Zen a noise at La Scala. No--Paris! No--London! She shall
astonish London fairst.--Yez! if I take a theatre! Yez! if I buy a
newspaper! Yez! if I pay feefty-sossand pound!"

His singular outlandish vehemence, and the sweeping grandeur of a
determination that lightly assumed the corruptibility of our Press, sent
a smile circling among the ladies and gentlemen. The youth who had wished
to throw the fair unknown a dozen bouquets, caught himself frowning at
this brilliant prospect for her, which was to give him his opportunity.




CHAPTER III

The next morning there were many "tra-las" and "tum-te-turns" over the
family breakfast-table; a constant humming and crying, "I have it"; and
after two or three bars, baffled pauses and confusion of mind. Mr.
Pericles was almost abusive at the impotent efforts of the sisters to
revive in his memory that particular delicious melody, the composition of
the fair singer herself. At last he grew so impatient as to arrest their
opening notes, and even to interrupt their unmusical consultations, with
"No: it is no use; it is no use: no, no, I say!" But instantly he would
plunge his forehead into the palm of his hand, and rub it red, and work
his eyebrows frightfully, until tender humanity led the sisters to
resume. Adela's, "I'm sure it began low down--tum!" Cornelia's: "The
key-note, I am positive, was B flat--ta!" and Arabella's putting of these
two assertions together, and promise to combine them at the piano when
breakfast was at an end, though it was Sunday morning, were exasperating
to the exquisite lover of music. Mr. Pericles was really suffering
torments. Do you know what it is to pursue the sylph, and touch her
flying skirts, think you have caught her, and are sure of her--that she
is yours, the rapturous evanescent darling! when some well-meaning
earthly wretch interposes and trips you, and off she flies and leaves you
floundering? A lovely melody nearly grasped and lost in this fashion,
tries the temper. Apollo chasing Daphne could have been barely polite to
the wood-nymphs in his path, and Mr. Pericles was rude to the daughters
of his host. Smoothing his clean square chin and thick moustache hastily,
with outspread thumb and fingers, he implored them to spare his nerves.
Smiling rigidly, he trusted they would be merciful to a sensitive ear.
Mr. Pole--who, as an Englishman, could not understand anyone being so
serious in the pursuit of a tune--laughed, and asked questions, and
almost drove Mr. Pericles mad. On a sudden the Greek's sallow visage
lightened. "It is to you! it is to you!" he cried, stretching his finger
at Wilfrid. The young officer, having apparently waited till he had
finished with his knife and fork, was leaning his cheek on his fist,
looking at nobody, and quietly humming a part of the air. Mr. Pericles
complimented and thanked him.

"But you have ear for music extraordinaire!" he said.

Adela patted her brother fondly, remarking--"Yes, when his feelings are
concerned."

"Will you repeat zat?" asked the Greek. "'To-to-ri:' hein? I lose it.
'To-to-ru:' bah! I lose it; 'To-ri:--to--ru--ri ro:' it is no use: I lose
it."

Neither his persuasions, nor his sneer, "Because it is Sunday, perhaps!"
would induce Wilfrid to be guilty of another attempt. The ladies tried
sisterly cajoleries on him fruitlessly, until Mr. Pole, seeing the
desperation of his guest, said: "Why not have her up here, toon and all,
some week-day? Sunday birds won't suit us, you know. We've got a piano
for her that's good enough for the first of 'em, if money means
anything."

The ladies murmured meekly: "Yes, papa."

"I shall find her for you while you go to your charch," said Mr.
Pericles. And here Wilfrid was seized with a yawn, and rose, and asked
his eldest sister if she meant to attend the service that morning.

"Undoubtedly," she answered; and Mr. Pole took it up: "That's our
discipline, my boy. Must set an example: do our duty. All the house goes
to worship in the country."

"Why, in ze country?" queried Mr. Pericles.

"Because"--Cornelia came to the rescue of her sire; but her impetuosity
was either unsupported by a reason, or she stooped to fit one to the
comprehension of the interrogator: "Oh, because--do you know, we have
very select music at our church?"

"We have a highly-paid organist," added Arabella.

"Recently elected," said Adela.

"Ah! mon Dieu!" Mr. Pericles ejaculated. "Some music sound well at
afar--mellow, you say. I prefer your charch music mellow."

"Won't you come?" cried Wilfrid, with wonderful briskness.

"No. Mellow for me!"

The Greek's grinders flashed, and Wilfrid turned off from him sulkily. He
saw in fancy the robber-Greek prowling about Wilson's farm, setting
snares for the marvellous night-bird, and it was with more than his
customary inattention to his sisters' refined conversation that he formed
part of their male escort to the place of worship.

Mr. Pericles met the church-goers on their return in one of the green
bowery lanes leading up to Brookfield. Cold as he was to English scenes
and sentiments, his alien ideas were not unimpressed by the picture of
those daintily-clad young women demurely stepping homeward, while the air
held a revel of skylarks, and the scented hedgeways quickened with
sunshine.

"You have missed a treat!" Arabella greeted him.

"A sermon?" said he.

The ladies would not tell him, until his complacent cynicism at the
notion of his having missed a sermon, spurred them to reveal that the
organ had been handled in a masterly manner; and that the voluntary
played at the close of the service was most exquisite.

"Even papa was in raptures."

"Very good indeed," said Mr. Pole. "I'm no judge; but you might listen to
that sort of playing after dinner."

Mr. Pericles seemed to think that was scarcely a critical period, but he
merely grimaced, and inquired: "Did you see ze player?"

"Oh, no: they are hidden," Arabella explained to him, "behind a curtain."

"But, what!" shouted the impetuous Greek: "have you no curiosity? A
woman! And zen, you saw not her?"

"No," remarked Cornelia, in the same aggravating sing-song voice of utter
indifference: "we don't know whether it was not a man. Our usual organist
is a man, I believe."

The eyes of the Greek whitened savagely, and he relapsed into frigid
politeness.

Wilfrid was not present to point their apprehensions. He had loitered
behind; but when he joined them in the house subsequently, he was
cheerful, and had a look of triumph about him which made his sisters say,
"So, you have been with the Copleys:" and he allowed them to suppose it,
if they pleased; the Copleys being young ladies of position in the
neighbourhood, of much higher standing than the Tinleys, who, though very
wealthy, could not have given their brother such an air, the sisters
imagined.

At lunch, Wilfrid remarked carelessly: "By the way, I met that little
girl we saw last night."

"The singer! where?" asked his sisters, with one voice.

"Coming out of church."

"She goes to church, then!"

This exclamation showed the heathen they took her to be.

"Why, she played the organ," said Wilfrid.

"And how does she look by day? How does she dress?"

"Oh! very jolly little woman! Dresses quiet enough."

"She played the organ! It was she, then! An organist! Is there anything
approaching to gentility in her appearance?"

"I--really I'm no judge," said Wilfrid. "You had better ask Laura Tinley.
She was talking to her when I went up."

The sisters exchanged looks. Presently they stood together in
consultation. Then they spoke with their aunt, Mrs. Lupin, and went to
their papa. The rapacity of those Tinleys for anything extraordinary was
known to them, but they would not have conceived that their own
discovery, their own treasure, could have been caught up so quickly. If
the Tinleys got possession of her, the defection of Mr. Pericles might be
counted on, and the display of a phenomenon would be lost to them. They
decided to go down to Wilson's farm that very day, and forestall their
rivals by having her up to Brookfield. The idea of doing this had been in
a corner of their minds all the morning: it seemed now the most sensible
plan in the world. It was patronage, in its right sense. And they might
be of great service to her, by giving a proper elevation and tone to her
genius; while she might amuse them, and their guests, and be let off, in
fact, as a firework for the nonce. Among the queenly cases of women who
are designing to become the heads of a circle (if I may use the term), an
accurate admeasurement of reciprocal advantages can scarcely be expected
to rank; but the knowledge that an act, depending upon us for execution,
is capable of benefiting both sides, will make the proceeding appear so
unselfish, that its wisdom is overlooked as well as its motives. The
sisters felt they were the patronesses of the little obscure genius whom
they longed for to illumine their household, before they knew her name.
Cornet Wilfrid Pole must have chuckled mightily to see them depart on
their mission. These ladies, who managed everybody, had themselves been
very cleverly managed. It is doubtful whether the scheme to surprise and
delight Mr. Pericles would have actuated the step they took, but for the
dread of seeing the rapacious Tinleys snatch up their lawful prey. The
Tinleys were known to be quite capable of doing so. They had, on a
particular occasion, made transparent overtures to a celebrity belonging
to the Poles, whom they had first met at Brookfield: could never have
hoped to have seen had they not met him at Brookfield; and girls who
behaved in this way would do anything. The resolution was taken to steal
a march on them; nor did it seem at all odd to people naturally so
hospitable as the denizens of Brookfield, that the stranger of yesterday
should be the guest of to-day. Kindness of heart, combined with a great
scheme in the brain, easily put aside conventional rules.

"But we don't know her name," they said, when they had taken the advice
of the gentlemen on what they had already decided to do: all excepting
Mr. Pericles, for whom the surprise was in store.

"Belloni--Miss Belloni," said Wilfrid.

"Are you sure? How do you know--?"

"She told Laura Tinley."

Within five minutes of the receipt of this intelligence the ladies were
on their way to Wilson's farm.




CHAPTER IV

The circle which the ladies of Brookfield were designing to establish
just now, was of this receipt:--Celebrities, London residents, and County
notables, all in their severally due proportions, were to meet, mix, and
revolve: the Celebrities to shine; the Metropolitans to act as
satellites; the County ignoramuses to feel flattered in knowing that all
stood forth for their amusement: they being the butts of the quick-witted
Metropolitans, whom they despised, while the sons of renown were
encouraged to be conscious of their magnanimous superiority over both
sets, for whose entertainment they were ticketed.

This is a pudding indeed! And the contemplation of the skill and energy
required to get together and compound such a Brookfield Pudding,
well-nigh leads one to think the work that is done out of doors a very
inferior business, and, as it were, mere gathering of fuel for the fire
inside. It was known in the neighbourhood that the ladies were preparing
one; and moreover that they had a new kind of plum; in other words, that
they intended to exhibit a prodigy of genius, who would flow upon the
world from Brookfield. To announce her with the invitations, rejecting
the idea of a surprise in the assembly, had been necessary, because there
was no other way of securing Lady Gosstre, who led the society of the
district. The great lady gave her promise to attend: "though," as she
said to Arabella, "you must know I abominate musical parties, and think
them the most absurd of entertainments possible; but if you have anything
to show, that's another matter."

Two or three chosen friends were invited down beforehand to inspect the
strange girl, and say what they thought of her; for the ladies themselves
were perplexed. They had found her to be commonplace: a creature without
ideas and with a decided appetite. So when Tracy Runningbrook, who had
also been a plum in his day, and was still a poet, said that she was
exquisitely comic, they were induced to take the humorous view of the
inexplicable side in the character of Miss Belloni, and tried to laugh at
her eccentricities. Seeing that Mr. Pericles approved of her voice as a
singer, and Tracy Runningbrook let pass her behaviour as a girl, they
conceived that on the whole they were safe in sounding a trumpet loudly.
These gentlemen were connoisseurs, each in his walk.

Concerning her position and parentage, nothing was known. She had met
Adela's delicately-searching touches in that direction with a marked
reserve. It was impossible to ask her point-blank, after probing her with
a dozen suggestions, for the ingenuousness of an indifferent inquiry
could not then be assumed, so that Adela was constantly baked and felt
that she must some day be excessively 'fond with her,' which was
annoying. The girl lit up at any sign of affection. A kind look gave
Summer depths to her dark eyes. Otherwise she maintained a simple
discretion and walked in her own path, content to look quietly pleased on
everybody, as one who had plenty to think of and a voice in her ear.

Apparently she was not to be taught to understand 'limits': which must be
explained as a sort of magnetic submissiveness to the variations of Polar
caprice; so that she should move about with ease, be cheerful, friendly,
and, at a signal, affectionate; still not failing to recognize the
particular nooks where the family chalk had traced a line. As the day of
exhibition approached, Adela thought she would give her a lesson in
limits. She ventured to bestow a small caress on the girl, after a
compliment; thinking that the compliment would be a check: but the
compliment was passed, and the caress instantly replied to with two arms
and a tender mouth. At which, Adela took fright and was glad to slip
away.

At last the pudding flowed into the bag.

Emilia was posted by the ladies in a corner of the room. Receiving her
assurance that she was not hungry, they felt satisfied that she wanted
nothing. Wilfrid came up to her to console her for her loneliness, until
Mr. Pericles had stationed himself at the back of her chair, and then
Wilfrid nodded languidly and attended to his graver duties. Who would
have imagined that she had hurt him? But she certainly looked with
greater animation on Mr. Pericles; and when Tracy Runningbrook sat down
by her, a perfect little carol of chatter sprang up between them. These
two presented such a noticeable contrast, side by side, that the ladies
had to send a message to separate them. She was perhaps a little the
taller of the two; with smoothed hair that had the gloss of black briony
leaves, and eyes like burning brands in a cave; while Tracy's hair was
red as blown flame, with eyes of a grey-green hue, that may be seen
glistening over wet sunset. People, who knew him, asked: "Who is she?"
and it was not in the design of the ladies to have her noted just yet.

Lady Gosstre's exclamation on entering the room was presently heard.
"Well! and where's our extraordinary genius? Pray, let me see her
immediately."

Thereat Laura Tinley, with gross ill-breeding, rushed up to Arabella, who
was receiving her ladyship, and touching her arm, as if privileges were
permitted her, cried: "I'm dying to see her. Has she come?"

Arabella embraced the offensive girl in a hostess's smile, and talked
flowingly to the great lady.

Laura Tinley was punished by being requested to lead off with a favourite
song in a buzz. She acceded, quite aware of the honour intended, and sat
at the piano, taming as much as possible her pantomime of one that would
be audible. Lady Gosstre scanned the room, while Adela, following her
ladyship's eyeglass, named the guests.

"You get together a quaint set of men," said Lady Gosstre.

"Women!" was on Adela's tongue's tip. She had really thought well of her
men. Her heart sank.

"In the country!" she began.

"Yes, yes!" went my lady.

These were the lessons that made the ladies of Brookfield put a check
upon youth's tendency to feel delightful satisfaction with its immediate
work, and speedily conceive a discontented suspicion of anything
whatsoever that served them.

Two other sacrifices were offered at the piano after Laura Tinley. Poor
victims of ambition, they arranged their dresses, smiled at the leaves,
and deliberately gave utterance to the dreadful nonsense of the laureates
of our drawing-rooms. Mr. Pericles and Emilia exchanged scientific
glances during the performance. She was merciless to indifferent music.
Wilfrid saw the glances pass. So, now, when Emilia was beckoned to the
piano, she passed by Wilfrid, and had a cold look in return for beaming
eyes.

According to directions, Emilia sang a simple Neapolitan air. The singer
was unknown, and was generally taken for another sacrifice.

"Come; that's rather pretty," Lady Gosstre hailed the close.

"It is of ze people--such as zat," assented Mr. Pericles.

Adela heard my lady ask for the singer's name. She made her way to her
sisters. Adela was ordinarily the promoter, Cornelia the sifter, and
Arabella the director, of schemes in this management. The ladies had a
moment for counsel over a music-book, for Arabella was about to do duty
at the piano. During a pause, Mr. Pole lifting his white waistcoat with
the effort, sent a word abroad, loudly and heartily, regardless of its
guardian aspirate, like a bold-faced hoyden flying from her chaperon.
They had dreaded it. They loved their father, but declined to think his
grammar parental. Hushing together, they agreed that it had been a false
move to invite Lady Gosstre, who did not care a bit for music, until the
success of their Genius was assured by persons who did. To suppose that
she would recognize a Genius, failing a special introduction, was absurd.
The ladies could turn upon aristocracy too, when it suited them.

Arabella had now to go through a quartett. The fever of ill-luck had
seized the violin. He would not tune. Then his string broke; and while he
was arranging it the footman came up to Arabella. Misfortunes, we know,
are the most united family on earth. The news brought to her was that a
lady of the name of Mrs. Chump was below. Holding her features rigidly
bound, not to betray perturbation, Arabella confided the fact to
Cornelia, who, with a similar mental and muscular compression, said
instantly, "Manoeuvre her." Adela remarked, "If you tell her the company
is grand, she will come, and her Irish once heard here will destroy us.
The very name of Chump!"

Mrs. Chump was the wealthy Irish widow of an alderman, whose
unaccountable bad taste in going to Ireland for a wife, yet filled the
ladies with astonishment. She pretended to be in difficulties with her
lawyers; for which reason she strove to be perpetually in consultation
with her old flame and present trustee Mr. Pole. The ladies had fought
against her in London, and since their installation at Brookfield they
had announced to their father that she was not to be endured there. Mr.
Pole had plaintively attempted to dilate on the virtues of Martha Chump.
"In her place," said the ladies, and illustrated to him that amid a
nosegay of flowers there was no fit room for an exuberant vegetable. The
old man had sighed and seemed to surrender. One thing was certain: Mrs.
Chump had never been seen at Brookfield. "She never shall be, save by the
servants," said the ladies.

Emilia, not unmarked of Mr. Pericles, had gone over to Wilfrid once or
twice, to ask him if haply he disapproved of anything she had done. Mr.
Pericles shrugged, and went "Ah!" as who should say, "This must be
stopped." Adela now came to her and caught her hand, showering sweet
whispers on her, and bidding her go to her harp and do her best. "We love
you; we all love you!" was her parting instigation.

The quartett was abandoned. Arabella had departed with a firm countenance
to combat Mrs. Chump.

Emilia sat by her harp. The saloon was critically still; so still that
Adela fancied she heard a faint Irish protest from the parlour. Wilfrid
was perhaps the most critical auditor present: for he doubted whether she
could renew that singular charm of her singing in the pale lighted woods.
The first smooth contralto notes took him captive. He scarcely believed
that this could be the raw girl whom his sisters delicately pitied.

A murmur of plaudits, the low thunder of gathering acclamation, went
round. Lady Gosstre looked a satisfied, "This will do." Wilfrid saw
Emilia's eyes appeal hopefully to Mr. Pericles. The connoisseur shrugged.
A pain lodged visibly on her black eyebrows. She gripped her harp, and
her eyelids appeared to quiver as she took the notes. Again, and still
singing, she turned her head to him. The eyes of Mr. Pericles were white,
as if upraised to intercede for her with the Powers of Harmony. Her voice
grew unnerved. On a sudden she excited herself to pitch and give volume
to that note which had been the enchantment of the night in the woods. It
quavered. One might have thought her caught by the throat.

Emilia gazed at no one now. She rose, without a word or an apology,
keeping her eyes down.

"Fiasco!" cruelly cried Mr. Pericles.

That was better to her than the silly kindness of the people who deemed
it well to encourage her with applause. Emilia could not bear the
clapping of hands, and fled.




CHAPTER V

The night was warm under a slowly-floating moon. Full of compassion for
the poor girl, who had moved him if she had failed in winning the
assembly, Wilfrid stepped into the garden, where he expected to find her,
and to be the first to pet and console her. Threading the scented shrubs,
he came upon a turn in one of the alleys, from which point he had a view
of her figure, as she stood near a Portugal laurel on the lawn. Mr.
Pericles was by her side. Wilfrid's intention was to join them. A loud
sob from Emilia checked his foot.

"You are cruel," he heard her say.

"If it is good, I tell it you; if it is bad; abominable, I tell it you,
juste ze same," responded Mr. Pericles.

"The others did not think it very bad."

"Ah! bah!" Mr. Pericles cut her short.

Had they been talking of matters secret and too sweet, Wilfrid would have
retired, like a man of honour. As it was, he continued to listen. The
tears of his poor little friend, moreover, seemed to hold him there in
the hope that he might afford some help.

"Yes; I do not care for the others," she resumed. "You praised me the
night I first saw you."

"It is perhaps zat you can sing to z' moon," returned Mr. Pericles. "But,
what! a singer, she must sing in a house. To-night it is warm, to-morrow
it is cold. If you sing through a cold, what noise do we hear? It is a
nose, not a voice. It is a trompet."

Emilia, with a whimpering firmness, replied: "You said I am lazy. I am
not."

"Not lazy," Mr. Pericles assented.

"Do I care for praise from people who do not understand music? It is not
true. I only like to please them."

"Be a street-organ," Mr. Pericles retorted.

"I must like to see them pleased when I sing," said Emilia desperately.

"And you like ze clap of ze hands. Yez. It is quite natural. Yess. You
are a good child, it is clear. But, look. You are a voice uncultivated,
sauvage. You go wrong: I hear you: and dese claps of zese noodels send
you into squeaks and shrills, and false! false away you go. It is a
gallop ze wrong way."

Here Mr. Pericles attempted the most horrible reproduction of Emilia's
failure. She cried out as if she had been bitten.

"What am I to do?" she asked sadly.

"Not now," Mr. Pericles answered. "You live in London?--at where?"

"Must I tell you?"

"Certainly, you must tell me."

"But, I am not going there; I mean, not yet."

"You are going to sing to z' moon through z' nose. Yez. For how long?"

"These ladies have asked me to stay with them. They make me so happy.
When I leave them--then!"

Emilia sighed.

"And zen?" quoth Mr. Pericles.

"Then, while my money lasts, I shall stay in the country."

"How much money?"

"How much money have I?" Emilia frankly and accurately summed up the
condition of her treasury. "Four pounds and nineteen shillings."

"Hom! it is spent, and you go to your father again?"

"Yes."

"To ze old Belloni?"

"My father."

"No!" cried Mr. Pericles, upon Emilia's melancholy utterance. He bent to
her ear and rapidly spoke, in an undertone, what seemed to be a vivid
sketch of a new course of fortune for her. Emilia gave one joyful outcry;
and now Wilfrid retreated, questioning within himself whether he should
have remained so long. But, as he argued, if he was convinced that the
rascally Greek fellow meant mischief to her, was he not bound to employ
every stratagem to be her safeguard? The influence of Mr. Pericles
already exercised over her was immense and mysterious. Within ten minutes
she was singing triumphantly indoors. Wilfrid could hear that her voice
was firm and assured. She was singing the song of the woods. He found to
his surprise that his heart dropped under some burden, as if he had no
longer force to sustain it.

By-and-by some of the members of the company issued forth. Carriages were
heard on the gravel, and young men in couples, preparing to light the
ensign of happy release from the ladies (or of indemnification for their
absence, if you please), strolled about the grounds.

"Did you see that little passage between Laura Tinley and Bella Pole?"
said one, and forthwith mimicked them: "Laura commencing:-'We must have
her over to us.' 'I fear we have pre-engaged her.'--'Oh, but you, dear,
will do us the favour to come, too?' 'I fear, dear, our immediate
engagements will preclude the possibility.'--'Surely, dear Miss Pole, we
may hope that you have not abandoned us?'--'That, my dear Miss Tinley, is
out of the question.'--'May we not name a day?'--'If it depends upon us,
frankly, we cannot bid you do so.'"

The other joined him in laughter, adding: "'Frankly' 's capital! What
absurd creatures women are! How the deuce did you manage to remember it
all?"

"My sister was at my elbow. She repeated it, word for word."

"Pon my honour, women are wonderful creatures!"

The two young men continued their remarks, with a sense of perfect
consistency.

Lady Gosstre, as she was being conducted to her carriage, had pronounced
aloud that Emilia was decidedly worth hearing.

"She's better worth knowing," said Tracy Runningbrook. "I see you are all
bent on spoiling her. If you were to sit and talk with her, you would
perceive that she's meant for more than to make a machine of her throat.
What a throat it is! She has the most comical notion of things. I fancy
I'm looking at the budding of my own brain. She's a born artist, but I'm
afraid everybody's conspiring to ruin her."

"Surely," said Adela, "we shall not do that, if we encourage her in her
Art."

"He means another kind of art," said Lady Gosstre. "The term 'artist,'
applied to our sex, signifies 'Frenchwoman' with him. He does not allow
us to be anything but women. As artists then we are largely privileged, I
assure you."

"Are we placed under a professor to learn the art?" Adela inquired,
pleased with the subject under such high patronage.

"Each new experience is your accomplished professor," said Tracy. "One
I'll call Cleopatra a professor: she's but an illustrious example."

"Imp! you are corrupt." With which my lady tapped farewell on his
shoulder. Leaning from the carriage window, she said: "I suppose I shall
see you at Richford? Merthyr Powys is coming this week. And that reminds
me: he would be the man to appreciate your 'born artist.' Bring her to
me. We will have a dinner. I will despatch a formal invitation to-morrow.
The season's bad out of town for getting decent people to meet you. I
will do my best."

She bowed to Adela and Tracy. Mr. Pole, who had hovered around the
unfamiliar dialogue to attend the great lady to the door, here came in
for a recognition, and bowed obsequiously to the back of the carriage.

Arabella did not tell her sisters what weapons she had employed to effect
the rout of Mrs. Chump. She gravely remarked that the woman had consented
to go, and her sisters thanked her. They were mystified by Laura's
non-recognition of Emilia, and only suspected Wilfrid so faintly that
they were able to think they did not suspect him at all. On the whole,
the evening had been a success. It justified the ladies in repeating a
well-known Brookfield phrase: "We may be wrong in many things, but never
in our judgement of the merits of any given person." In the case of Tracy
Runningbrook, they had furnished a signal instance of their discernment.
Him they had met at the house of a friend of the Tinleys (a Colonel's
wife distantly connected with great houses). The Tinleys laughed at his
flaming head and him, but the ladies of Brookfield had ears and eyes for
a certain tone and style about him, before they learnt that he was of the
blood of dukes, and would be a famous poet. When this was mentioned,
after his departure, they had made him theirs, and the Tinleys had no
chance. Through Tracy, they achieved their introduction to Lady Gosstre.
And now they were to dine with her. They did not say that this was
through Emilia. In fact, they felt a little that they had this evening
been a sort of background to their prodigy: which was not in the design.
Having observed, "She sang deliciously," they dismissed her, and referred
to dresses, gaucheries of members of the company, pretensions here and
there, Lady Gosstre's walk, the way to shuffle men and women, how to
start themes for them to converse upon, and so forth. Not Juno and her
Court surveying our mortal requirements in divine independence of
fatigue, could have been more considerate for the shortcomings of
humanity. And while they were legislating this and that for others, they
still accepted hints for their own improvement, as those who have
Perfection in view may do. Lady Gosstre's carriage of her shoulders, and
general manner, were admitted to be worthy of study. "And did you notice
when Laura Tinley interrupted her conversation with Tracy Runningbrook,
how quietly she replied to the fact and nothing else, so that Laura had
not another word?"--"And did you observe her deference to papa, as
host?"--"And did you not see, on more than one occasion, with what
consummate ease she would turn a current of dialogue when it had gone far
enough?" They had all noticed, seen, and observed. They agreed that there
was a quality beyond art, beyond genius, beyond any special cleverness;
and that was, the great social quality of taking, as by nature, without
assumption, a queenly position in a circle, and making harmony of all the
instruments to be found in it. High praise of Lady Gosstre ensued. The
ladies of Brookfield allowed themselves to bow to her with the greater
humility, owing to the secret sense they nursed of overtopping her still
in that ineffable Something which they alone possessed: a casket little
people will be wise in not hurrying our Father Time to open for them, if
they would continue to enjoy the jewel they suppose it to contain.
Finally, these energetic young ladies said their prayers by the morning
twitter of the birds, and went to their beds, less from a desire for rest
than because custom demanded it.

Three days later Emilia was a resident in the house, receiving lessons in
demeanour from Cornelia, and in horsemanship from Wilfrid. She expressed
no gratitude for kindnesses or wonder at the change in her fortune, save
that pleasure sat like an inextinguishable light on her face. A splendid
new harp arrived one day, ticketed, "For Miss Emilia Belloni."

"He does not know I have a second Christian name," was her first remark,
after an examination of the instrument.

"'He?'" quoth Adela. "May it not have been a lady's gift?"

Emilia clearly thought not.

"And to whom do you ascribe it?"

"Who sent it to me? Mr. Pericles, of course."

She touched the strings immediately, and sighed.

"Are you discontented with the tone, child?" asked Adela.

"No. I--I'll guess what it cost!"

Surely the ladies had reason to think her commonplace!

She explained herself better to Wilfrid, when he returned to Brookfield
after a short absence. Showing the harp, "See what Mr. Pericles thinks me
worth!" she said.

"Not more than that?" was his gallant rejoinder. "Does it suit you?"

"Yes; in every way."

This was all she said about it.

In the morning after breakfast, she sat at harp or piano, and then ran
out to gather wild flowers and learn the names of trees and birds. On
almost all occasions Wilfrid was her companion. He laughed at the little
sisterly revelations the ladies confided concerning her too heartily for
them to have any fear that she was other than a toy to him. Few women are
aware with how much ease sentimental men can laugh outwardly at what is
internal torment. They had apprised him of their wish to know what her
origin was, and of her peculiar reserve on that topic: whereat he assured
them that she would have no secrets from him. His conduct of affairs was
so open that none could have supposed the gallant cornet entangled in a
maze of sentiment. For, veritably, this girl was the last sort of girl to
please his fancy; and he saw not a little of fair ladies: by virtue of
his heroic antecedents, he was himself well seen of them. The gallant
cornet adored delicacy and a gilded refinement. The female flower could
not be too exquisitely cultivated to satisfy him. And here he was,
running after a little unformed girl, who had no care to conceal the fact
that she was an animal, nor any notion of the necessity for doing so! He
had good reason to laugh when his sisters talked of her. It was not a
pleasant note which came from the gallant cornet then. But, in the
meadows, or kindly conducting Emilia's horse, he yielded pretty music.
Emilia wore Arabella's riding-habit, Adela's hat, and Cornelia's gloves.
Politic as the ladies of Brookfield were, they were full of natural
kindness; and Wilfrid, albeit a diplomatist, was not yet mature enough to
control and guide a very sentimental heart. There was an element of dim
imagination in all the family: and it was this that consciously elevated
them over the world in prospect, and made them unconsciously subject to
what I must call the spell of the poetic power.

Wilfrid in his soul wished that Emilia should date from the day she had
entered Brookfield. But at times it seemed to him that a knowledge of her
antecedents might relieve him from his ridiculous perplexity of feeling.
Besides though her voice struck emotion, she herself was
unimpressionable. "Cold by nature," he said; looking at the unkindled
fire. She shook hands like a boy. If her fingers were touched and
retained, they continued to be fingers for as long as you pleased.
Murmurs and whispers passed by her like the breeze. She appeared also to
have no enthusiasm for her Art, so that not even there could Wilfrid find
common ground. Italy, however, he discovered to be the subject that made
her light up. Of Italy he would speak frequently, and with much simulated
fervour.

"Mr. Pericles is going to take me there," said Emilia. "He told me to
keep it secret. I have no secrets from my friends. I am to learn in the
academy at Milan."

"Would you not rather let me take you?"

"Not quite." She shook her head. "No; because you do not understand music
as he does. And are you as rich? I cost a great deal of money even for
eating alone. But you will be glad when you hear me when I come back. Do
you hear that nightingale? It must be a nightingale."

She listened. "What things he makes us feel!"

Bending her head, she walked on silently. Wilfrid, he knew not why, had
got a sudden hunger for all the days of her life. He caught her hand and,
drawing her to a garden seat, said: "Come; now tell me all about yourself
before I knew you. Do you mind?"

"I'll tell you anything you want to hear," said Emilia.

He enjoined her to begin from the beginning.

"Everything about myself?" she asked.

"Everything. I have your permission to smoke?"

Emilia smiled. "I wish I had some Italian cigars to give you. My father
sometimes has plenty given to him."

Wilfrid did not contemplate his havannah with less favour.

"Now," said Emilia, taking a last sniff of the flowers before
surrendering her nostril to the invading smoke. She looked at the scene
fronting her under a blue sky with slow flocks of clouds: "How I like
this!" she exclaimed. "I almost forget that I long for Italy, here."

Beyond a plot of flowers, a gold-green meadow dipped to a ridge of gorse
bordered by dark firs and the tips of greenest larches.




CHAPTER VI

"My father is one of the most wonderful men in the whole world!"

Wilfrid lifted an eyelid.

"He is one of the first-violins at the Italian Opera!"

The gallant cornet's critical appreciation of this impressive
announcement was expressed in a spiral ebullition of smoke from his
mouth.

"He is such a proud man! And I don't wonder at that: he has reason to be
proud."

Again Wilfrid lifted an eyelid, and there is no knowing but that ideas of
a connection with foreign Counts, Cardinals, and Princes passed hopefully
through him.

"Would you believe that he is really the own nephew of Andronizetti!"

"Deuce he is!" said Wilfrid, in a mist. "Which one?"

"The composer!"

Wilfrid emitted more smoke.

"Who composed--how I love him!--that lovely "la, la, la, la," and the
"te-de, ta-da, te-dio," that pleases you, out of "Il Maladetto." And I am
descended from him! Let me hope I shall not be unworthy of him. You will
never tell it till people think as much of me, or nearly. My father says
I shall never be so great, because I am half English. It's not my fault.
My mother was English. But I feel that I am much more Italian than
English. How I long for Italy--like a thing underground! My father did
something against the Austrians, when he was a young man. Would not I
have done it? I am sure I would--I don't know what. Whenever I think of
Italy, night or day, pant-pant goes my heart. The name of Italy is my
nightingale: I feel that somebody lives that I love, and is ill-treated
shamefully, crying out to me for help. My father had to run away to save
his life. He was fifteen days lying in the rice-fields to escape from the
soldiers--which makes me hate a white coat. There was my father; and at
night he used to steal out to one of the villages, where was a good, true
woman--so they are, most, in Italy! She gave him food; maize-bread and
wine, sometimes meat; sometimes a bottle of good wine. When my father
thinks of it he cries, if there is gin smelling near him. At last my
father had to stop there day and night. Then that good woman's daughter
came to him to keep him from starving; she risked being stripped naked
and beaten with rods, to keep my father from starving. When my father
speaks of Sandra now, it makes my mother--she does not like it. I am
named after her: Emilia Alessandra Belloni. 'Sandra' is short for it. She
did not know why I was christened that, and will never call me anything
but Emilia, though my father says Sandra, always. My father never speaks
of that dear Sandra herself, except when he is tipsy. Once I used to wish
him to be tipsy; for then I used to sit at my piano while he talked, and
I made all his words go into music. One night I did it so well, my father
jumped right up from his chair, shouting "Italia!" and he caught his wig
off his head, and threw it into the fire, and rushed out into the street
quite bald, and people thought him mad.

"It was the beginning of all our misfortunes! My father was taken and
locked up in a place as a tipsy man. That he has never forgiven the
English for! It has made me and my mother miserable ever since. My mother
is sure it is all since that night. Do you know, I remember, though I was
so young, that I felt the music--oh! like a devil in my bosom? Perhaps it
was, and it passed out of me into him. Do you think it was?"

Wilfrid answered: "Well, no! I shouldn't think you had anything to do
with the devil." Indeed, he was beginning to think her one of the
smallest of frocked female essences.

"I lost my piano through it," she went on. "I could not practise. I was
the most miserable creature in all the world till I fell in love with my
harp. My father would not play to get money. He sat in his chair, and
only spoke to ask about meal-time, and we had no money for food, except
by selling everything we had. Then my piano went. So then I said to my
mother, I will advertize to give lessons, as other people do, and make
money for us all, myself. So we paid money for a brass-plate, and our
landlady's kind son put it up on the door for nothing, and we waited for
pupils to come. I used to pray to the Virgin that she would blessedly
send me pupils, for my poor mother's complaints were so shrill and out of
tune it's impossible to tell you what I suffered. But by-and-by my father
saw the brass-plate. He fell into one of his dreadful passions. We had to
buy him another wig. His passions were so expensive: my mother used to
say, "There goes our poor dinner out of the window!" But, well! he went
to get employment now. He can, always, when he pleases; for such a touch
on the violin as my father has, you never heard. You feel yourself from
top to toe, when my father plays. I feel as if I breathed music like air.
One day came news from Italy, all in the newspaper, of my father's
friends and old companions shot and murdered by the Austrians. He read it
in the evening, after we had a quiet day. I thought he did not mind it
much, for he read it out to us quite quietly; and then he made me sit on
his knee and read it out. I cried with rage, and he called to me,
'Sandra! Peace!' and began walking up and down the room, while my mother
got the bread and cheese and spread it on the table, for we were
beginning to be richer. I saw my father take out his violin. He put it on
the cloth and looked at it. Then he took it up, and laid his chin on it
like a man full of love, and drew the bow across just once. He whirled
away the bow, and knocked down our candle, and in the darkness I heard
something snap and break with a hollow sound. When I could see, he had
broken it, the neck from the body--the dear old violin! I could cry
still. I--I was too late to save it. I saw it broken, and the empty
belly, and the loose strings! It was murdering a spirit--that was! My
father sat in a corner one whole week, moping like such an old man! I was
nearly dead with my mother's voice. By-and-by we were all silent, for
there was nothing to eat. So I said to my mother, "I will earn money." My
mother cried. I proposed to take a lodging for myself, all by myself; go
there in the morning and return at night, and give lessons, and get money
for them. My landlady's good son gave me the brass-plate again. Emilia
Alessandra Belloni! I was glad to see my name. I got two pupils very
quickly one, an old lady, and one, a young one. The old lady--I mean, she
was not grey--wanted a gentleman to marry her, and the landlady told
me--I mean my pupil--it makes me laugh--asked him what he thought of her
voice: for I had been singing. I earned a great deal of money: two pounds
ten shillings a week. I could afford to pay for lessons myself, I
thought. What an expense! I had to pay ten shillings for one lesson! Some
have to pay twenty; but I would pay it to learn from the best
masters;--and I had to make my father and mother live on potatoes, and
myself too, of course. If you buy potatoes carefully, they are extremely
cheap things to live upon, and make you forget your hunger more than
anything else.

"I suppose," added Emilia, "you have never lived upon potatoes entirely?
Oh, no!"

Wilfrid gave a quiet negative.

"But I was pining to learn, and was obliged to keep them low. I could
pitch any notes, and I was clear but I was always ornamenting, and what I
want is to be an accurate singer. My music-master was a German--not an
Austrian--oh, no!--I'm sure he was not. At least, I don't think so, for I
liked him. He was harsh with me, but sometimes he did stretch his fingers
on my head, and turn it round, and say words that I pretended not to
think of, though they sent me home burning. I began to compose, and this
gentleman tore up the whole sheet in a rage, when I showed it him; but he
gave me a dinner, and left off charging me ten shillings--only seven, and
then five--and he gave me more time than he gave others. He also did
something which I don't know yet whether I can thank him for. He made me
know the music of the great German. I used to listen: I could not believe
such music could come from a German. He followed me about, telling me I
was his slave. For some time I could not sleep. I laughed at myself for
composing. He was not an Austrian: but when he was alive he lived in
Vienna, the capital of Austria. He ate Austrian bread, and why God gave
him such a soul of music I never can think!--Well, by-and-by my father
wanted to know what I did in the day, and why they never had anything but
potatoes for dinner. My mother came to me, and I told her to say, I took
walks. My father said I was an idle girl, and like my mother--who was a
slave to work. People are often unjust! So my father said he would watch
me. I had to cross the park to give a lesson to a lady who had a husband,
and she wanted to sing to him to keep him at home in the evening. I used
to pray he might not have much ear for music. One day a gentleman came
behind me in the park. He showed me a handkerchief, and asked me if it
was mine. I felt for my own and found it in my pocket. He was certain I
had dropped it. He looked in the corners for the name, I told him my
name--Emilia Alessandra Belloni. He found A.F.G. there. It was a
beautiful cambric handkerchief, white and smooth. I told him it must be a
gentleman's, as it was so large; but he said he had picked it up close by
me, and he could not take it, and I must; and I was obliged to keep it,
though I would much rather not. Near the end of the park he left me."

At this point Wilfrid roused up. "You met him the next day near the same
place?" he remarked.

She turned to him with astonishment on her features. "How did you know
that? How could you know?"

"Sort of thing that generally happens," said Wilfrid.

"Yes; he was there," Emilia slowly pursued, controlling her inclination
to question further. "He had forgotten about the handkerchief, for when I
saw him, I fancied he might have found the owner. We talked together. He
told me he was in the Army, and I spoke of my father's playing and my
singing. He was so fond of music that I promised him he should hear us
both. He used to examine my hand, and said they were sensitive fingers
for playing. I knew that. He had great hopes of me. He said he would give
me a box at the Opera, now and then. I was mad with joy; and so delighted
to have made a friend. I had never before made a rich friend. I sang to
him in the park. His eyes looked beautiful with pleasure. I know I
enchanted him."

"How old were you then?" inquired Wilfrid.

"Sixteen. I can sing better now, I know; but I had voice then, and he
felt that I had. I forgot where we were, till people stood round us, and
he hurried me away from them, and said I must sing to him in some quiet
place. I promised to, and he promised he would have dinner for me at
Richmond Hill, in the country, and he would bring friends to hear me."

"Go on," said Wilfrid, rather sharply.

She sighed. "I only saw him once after that. It was such a miserable day!
It rained. It was Saturday. I did not expect to find him in the rain; but
there he stood, exactly where he had given me the handkerchief. He smiled
kindly, as I came up. I dislike gloomy people! His face was always fresh
and nice. His moustache reminded me of Italy. I used to think of him
under a great warm sky, with olives and vine-trees and mulberries like my
father used to speak of. I could have flung my arms about his neck."

"Did you?" The cornet gave a strangled note.

"Oh, no!" said Emilia seriously. "But I told him how happy the thought of
going into the country made me, and that it was almost like going to
Italy. He told me he would take me to Italy, if I liked. I could have
knelt at his feet. Unfortunately his friends could not come. Still, I was
to go, and dine, and float on the water, plucking flowers. I determined
to fancy myself in Venice, which is the place my husband must take me to,
when I am married to him. I will give him my whole body and soul for his
love, when I am there!"

Here the cornet was capable of articulate music for a moment, but it
resolved itself into: "Well, well! Yes, go on!"

"I took his arm this time. It gave me my first timid feeling that I
remember, and he laughed at me, and drove it quite away, telling me his
name: Augustus Frederick what was it? Augustus Frederick--it began with G
something. O me! have I really forgotten? Christian names are always
easier to remember. A captain he was--a riding one; just like you. I
think you are all kind!"

"Extremely," muttered the ironical cornet. "A.F.G.;--those are the
initials on the handkerchief!"

"They are!" cried Emilia. "It must have been his own handkerchief!"

"You have achieved the discovery," quoth Wilfrid. "He dropped it there
overnight, and found it just as you were passing in the morning."

"That must be impossible," said Emilia, and dismissed the subject
forthwith, in a feminine power of resolve to be blind to it.

"I am afraid," she took up her narrative, "my father is sometimes really
almost mad. He does such things! I had walked under this gentleman's
umbrella to the bridge between the park and the gardens with the sheep,
and beautiful flowers in beds. In an instant my father came up right in
our faces. He caught hold of my left hand. I thought he wanted to shake
it, for he imitates English ways at times, even with us at home, and
shakes our hands when he comes in. But he swung me round. He stood
looking angrily at this gentleman, and cried 'Yes! yes!' to every word he
spoke. The gentleman bowed to me, and asked me to take his umbrella; but
I was afraid to; and my father came to me,--oh, Madonna, think of what he
did! I saw that his pockets were very big. He snatched out potatoes, and
began throwing them as hard as he could throw them at the gentleman, and
struck him with some of them. He threw nine large potatoes! I begged him
to think of our dinner; but he cried "Yes! it is our dinner we give to
your head, vagabond!" in his English. I could not help running up to the
gentleman to beg for his pardon. He told me not to cry, and put some
potatoes he had been picking up all into my hand. They were muddy, but he
wiped them first; and he said it was not the first time he had stood
fire, and then said good-bye; and I slipped the potatoes into my pocket
immediately, thankful that they were not wasted. My father pulled me away
roughly from the laughing and staring people on the bridge. But I knew
the potatoes were only bruised. Even three potatoes will prevent you from
starving. They were very fine ones, for I always took care to buy them
good. When I reached home--"

Wilfrid had risen, and was yawning with a desperate grimace. He bade her
continue, and pitched back heavily into his seat.

"When I reached home and could be alone with my mother, she told me my
father had been out watching me the day before, and that he had filled
his pockets that morning. She thought he was going to walk out in the
country and get people on the road to cook them for him. That is what he
has done when he was miserable,--to make himself quite miserable, I
think, for he loves streets best. Guess my surprise! My mother was making
my head ache with her complaints, when, as I drew out the potatoes to
show her we had some food, there was a purse at the bottom of my
pocket,--a beautiful green purse! O that kind gentleman! He must have put
it in my hand with the potatoes that my father flung at him! How I have
cried to think that I may never sing to him my best to please him! My
mother and I opened the purse eagerly. It had ten pounds in paper money,
and five sovereigns, and silver,--I think four shillings. We determined
to keep it a secret; and then we thought of the best way of spending it,
and decided not to spend it all, but to keep some for when we wanted it
dreadfully, and for a lesson or two for me now and then, and a
music-score, and perhaps a good violin for my father, and new strings for
him and me, and meat dinners now and then, and perhaps a day in the
country: for that was always one of my dreams as I watched the clouds
flying over London. They seemed to be always coming from happy places and
going to happy places, never stopping where I was! I cannot be sorrowful
long. You know that song of mine that you like so much--my own composing?
It was a song about that kind gentleman. I got words to suit it as well
as I could, from a penny paper, but they don't mean anything that I mean,
and they are only words."

She did not appear to hear the gallant cornet's denial that he cared
particularly for that song.

"What I meant was,--that gentleman speaks--I have fought for Italy; I am
an English hero and have fought for Italy, because of an Italian child;
but now I am wounded and a prisoner. When you shoot me, cruel Austrians,
I shall hear her voice and think of nothing else, so you cannot hurt me."

Emilia turned spitefully on herself at this close. "How I spoil it! My
words are always stupid, when I feel.--Well, now my mother and I were
quite peaceful, and my father was better fed. One night he brought home a
Jew gentleman, beautifully dressed, with diamonds all over him. He
sparkled like the Christmas cakes in pastry-cooks" windows. I sang to
him, and he made quite a noise about me. But the man made me so
uncomfortable, touching my shoulders, and I could not bear his hands,
even when he was praising me. I sang to him till the landlady made me
leave off, because of the other lodgers who wanted to sleep. He came
every evening; and then said I should sing at a concert. It turned out to
be a public-house, and my father would not let me go; but I was sorry;
for in public the man could not touch me as he did. It damped the voice!"

"I should like to know where that fellow lives," cried the cornet.

"I don't know, I'm sure," she said. "He lends money. Do you want any? I
heard your sisters say something, one day. You can always have all that I
have, you know."

A quick spirit of pity and honest kindness went through Wilfrid's veins
and threatened to play the woman with his eyes, for a moment. He took her
hand and pressed it. She put her lips to his fingers.

"Once," she continued, "when the Jew gentleman had left, I spoke to my
father of his way with me, and then my father took me on his knee, and
the things he told me of what that man felt for me made my mother come
and tear me away to bed. I was obliged to submit to the Jew gentleman
patting and touching me always. He used to crush my dreams afterwards! I
know my voice was going. My father was so eager for me to please him, I
did my best; but I felt dull, and used to sit and shake my head at my
harp, crying; or else I felt like an angry animal, and could have torn
the strings.

"Think how astonished I was when my mother came to me to say my father
had money in his pockets!--one pound, seventeen shillings, she counted:
and he had not been playing! Then he brought home a new violin, and he
said to me, 'I shall go; I shall play; I am Orphee, and dinners shall
rise!' I was glad, and kissed him; and he said, 'This is Sandra's gift to
me,' showing the violin. I only knew what that meant two days afterwards.
Is a girl not seventeen fit to be married?"

With this abrupt and singular question she had taken an indignant figure,
and her eyes were fiery: so that Wilfrid thought her much fitter than a
minute before.

"Married!" she exclaimed. "My mother told me about that. You do not
belong to yourself: you are tied down. You are a slave, a drudge; mustn't
dream, mustn't think! I hate it. By-and-by, I suppose it will happen. Not
yet! And yet that man offered to take me to Italy. It was the Jew
gentleman. He said I should make money, if he took me, and grow as rich
as princesses. He brought a friend to hear me, another Jew gentleman; and
he was delighted, and he met me near our door the very next morning, and
offered me a ring with blue stones, and he proposed to marry me also, and
take me to Italy, if I would give up his friend and choose him instead.
This man did not touch me, and, do you know, for some time I really
thought I almost, very nearly, might,--if it had not been for his face!
It was impossible to go to Italy--yes, to go to heaven! through that face
of his! That face of his was just like the pictures of dancing men with
animals' hairy legs and hoofs in an old thick poetry book belonging to my
mother. Just fancy a nose that seemed to be pecking at great fat red
lips! He met me and pressed me to go continually, till all of a sudden up
came the first Jew gentleman, and he cried out quite loud in the street
that he was being robbed by the other; and they stood and made a noise in
the street, and I ran away. But then I heard that my father had borrowed
money from the one who came first, and that his violin came from that
man; and my father told me the violin would be taken from him, and he
would have to go to prison, if I did not marry that man. I went and cried
in my mother's arms. I shall never forget her kindness; for though she
could never see anybody crying without crying herself, she did not, and
was quiet as a mouse, because she knew how her voice hurt me. There's a
large print-shop in one of the great streets of London, with coloured
views of Italy. I used to go there once, and stand there for I don't know
how long, looking at them, and trying to get those Jew gentlemen--"

"Call them Jews--they're not gentlemen," interposed Wilfrid.

"Jews," she obeyed the dictate, "out of my mind. When I saw the views of
Italy they danced and grinned up and down the pictures. Oh, horrible!
There was no singing for me then. My music died. At last that oldish lady
gave up her lessons, and said to me, 'You little rogue! you will do what
I do, some day;' for she was going to be married to that young man who
thought her voice so much improved; and she paid me three pounds, and
gave me one pound more, and some ribbons and gloves. I went at once to my
mother, and made her give me five pounds out of the gentleman's purse. I
took my harp and music-scores. I did not know where I was going, but only
that I could not stop. My mother cried: but she helped to pack my things.
If she disobeys me I act my father, and tower over her, and frown, and
make her mild. She was such a poor good slave to me that day! but I
trusted her no farther than the door. There I kissed her, full of love,
and reached the railway. They asked me where I was going, and named
places to me: I did not know one. I shut my eyes, and prayed to be
directed, and chose Hillford. In the train I was full of music in a
moment. There I met farmer Wilson, of the farm near us--where your
sisters found me; and he was kind, and asked me about myself; and I
mentioned lodgings, and that I longed for woods and meadows. Just as we
were getting out of the train, he said I was to come with him; and I did,
very gladly. Then I met you; and I am here. All because I prayed to be
directed--I do think that!"

Emilia clasped her hands, and looked pensively at the horizon sky, with a
face of calm gratefulness.

The cornet was on his legs. "So!" he said. "And you never saw anything
more of that fellow you kissed in the park?"

"Kissed?--that gentleman?" returned Emilia. "I have not kissed him. He
did not want it. Men kiss us when we are happy, and we kiss them when
they are unhappy."

Wilfrid was perhaps incompetent to test the truth of this profound
aphoristic remark, delivered with the simplicity of natural conviction.
The narrative had, to his thinking, quite released from him his temporary
subjection to this little lady's sway. All that he felt for her
personally now was pity. It speaks something for the strength of the
sentiment with which he had first conceived her, that it was not pelted
to death, and turned to infinite disgust, by her potatoes. For sentiment
is a dainty, delicate thing, incapable of bearing much: revengeful, too,
when it is outraged. Bruised and disfigured, it stood up still, and
fought against them. They were very fine ones, as Emilia said, and they
hit him hard. However, he pitied her, and that protected him like a
shield. He told his sisters a tale of his own concerning the strange
damsel, humorously enough to make them see that he enjoyed her presence
as that of no common oddity.




CHAPTER VII

While Emilia was giving Wilfrid her history in the garden, the ladies of
Brookfield were holding consultation over a matter which was well
calculated to perplex and irritate them excessively. Mr. Pole had
received a curious short epistle from Mrs. Chump, informing him of the
atrocious treatment she had met with at the hands of his daughter; and
instead of reviewing the orthography, incoherence, and deliberate
vulgarity of the said piece of writing with the contempt it deserved, he
had taken the unwonted course of telling Arabella that she had done a
thing she must necessarily repent of, or in any case make apology for. An
Eastern Queen, thus addressed by her Minister of the treasury, could not
have felt greater indignation. Arabella had never seen her father show
such perturbation of mind. He spoke violently and imperiously. The
apology was ordered to be despatched by that night's post, after having
been submitted to his inspection. Mr. Pole had uttered mysterious
phrases: "You don't know what you've been doing:--You think the ship'll
go on sailing without wind: You'll drive the horse till he drops," and
such like; together with mutterings. The words were of no import
whatsoever to the ladies. They were writings on the wall;
untranslateable. But, as when the earth quakes our noble edifices totter,
their Palace of the Fine Shades and the Nice Feelings groaned and
creaked, and for a moment they thought: "Where are we?" Very soon they
concluded, that the speech Arabella had heard was due to their darling
papa's defective education.

In the Council of Three, with reference to the letter of apology to Mrs.
Chump, Adela proposed, if it pleased Arabella, to fight the battle of the
Republic. She was young, and wished both to fight and to lead, as
Arabella knew. She was checked. "It must be left to me," said Arabella.

"Of course you resist, dear?" Cornelia carelessly questioned.

"Assuredly I do."

"Better humiliation! better anything! better marriage! than to submit in
such a case," cried Adela.

For, so united were the ladies of Brookfield, and so bent on their grand
hazy object, that they looked upon married life unfavourably: and they
had besides an idea that Wedlock, until 'late in life' (the age of
thirty, say), was the burial alive of woman intellectual.

Toward midday the ladies put on their garden hats and went into the
grounds together, for no particular purpose. Near the West copse they
beheld Mr. Pole with Wilfrid and Emilia talking to a strange gentleman.
Assuming a proper dignity, they advanced, when, to their horror, Emilia
ran up to them crying: "This is Mr. Purcell Barrett, the gentleman who
plays the organ at church. I met him in the woods before I knew you. I
played for him the other Sunday, and I want you to know him."

She had hold of Arabella's hand and was drawing her on. There was no
opportunity for retreat. Wilfrid looked as if he had already swallowed
the dose. Almost precipitated into the arms of the ladies, Mr. Barrett
bowed. He was a tolerably youthful man, as decently attired as old black
cloth could help him to be. A sharp inspection satisfied the ladies that
his hat and boots were inoffensive: whereupon they gave him the three
shades of distance, tempered so as not to wound his susceptible poverty.

The superlative Polar degree appeared to invigorate Mr. Barrett. He
devoted his remarks mainly to Cornelia, and cheerfully received her
frozen monosyllables in exchange. The ladies talked of Organs and Art,
Emilia and Opera. He knew this and that great organ, and all the operas;
but he amazed the ladies by talking as if he knew great people likewise.
This brought out Mr. Pole, who, since he had purchased Brookfield, had
been extinguished by them and had not once thoroughly enjoyed his money's
worth. A courtly poor man was a real pleasure to him.

Giving a semicircular sweep of his arm: "Here you see my little estate,
sir," he said. "You've seen plenty bigger in Germany, and England too. We
can't get more than this handful in our tight little island. Unless born
to it, of course. Well! we must be grateful that all our nobility don't
go to the dogs. We must preserve our great names. I speak against my own
interest."

He lifted Adela's chin on his forefinger. She kept her eyes demurely
downward, and then gazed at her sisters with gravity. These ladies took a
view of Mr. Barrett. His features wore an admirable expression of simple
interest. "Well, sir; suppose you dine with us to-day?" Mr. Pole bounced
out. "Neighbours should be neighbourly."

This abrupt invitation was decorously accepted.

"Plain dinner, you know. Nothing like what you get at the tables of those
Erzhogs, as you call 'em, over in Germany. Simple fare; sound wine! At
all events, it won't hurt you. You'll come?"

Mr. Barrett bowed, murmuring thanks. This was the very man Mr. Pole
wanted to have at his board occasionally: one who had known great people,
and would be thankful for a dinner. He could depreciate himself as a mere
wealthy British merchant imposingly before such a man. His daughters had
completely cut him off from his cronies; and the sense of restriction,
and compression, and that his own house was fast becoming alien territory
to him, made him pounce upon the gentlemanly organist. His daughters
wondered why he should, in the presence of this stranger, exaggerate his
peculiar style of speech. But the worthy merchant's consciousness of his
identity was vanishing under the iron social rule of the ladies. His
perishing individuality prompted the inexplicable invitation, and the
form of it.

After Mr. Barrett had departed, the ladies ventured to remonstrate with
their papa. He at once replied by asking whether the letter to Mrs. Chump
had been written; and hearing that it had not, he desired that Arabella
should go into the house and compose it straightway. The ladies coloured.
To Adela's astonishment, she found that Arabella had turned. Joining her,
she said, "Dearest, what a moment you have lost! We could have stood
firm, continually changing the theme from Chump to Barrett, Barrett to
Chump, till papa's head would have twirled. He would have begun to think
Mr. Barrett the Irish widow, and Mrs. Chump the organist."

Arabella rejoined: "Your wit misleads you, darling. I know what I am
about. I decline a wordy contest. To approach to a quarrel, or, say
dispute, with one's parent apropos of such a person, is something worse
than evil policy, don't you think?"

So strongly did the sisters admire this delicate way of masking a piece
of rank cowardice, that they forgave her. The craven feeling was common
to them all, which made it still more difficult to forgive her.

"Of course, we resist?" said Cornelia.

"Undoubtedly."

"We retire and retire," Adela remarked. "We waste the royal forces. But,
dear me, that makes us insurgents!"

She laughed, being slightly frivolous. Her elders had the proper
sentimental worship of youth and its supposed quality of innocence, and
caressed her.

At the ringing of the second dinner-bell, Mr. Pole ran to the foot of the
stairs and shouted for Arabella, who returned no answer, and was late in
her appearance at table. Grace concluded, Mr. Pole said, "Letter gone? I
wanted to see it, you know."

"It was as well not, papa," Arabella replied.

Mr. Pole shook his head seriously. The ladies were thankful for the
presence of Mr. Barrett. And lo! this man was in perfect evening uniform.
He looked as gentlemanly a visitor as one might wish to see. There was no
trace of the poor organist. Poverty seemed rather a gold-edge to his
tail-coat than a rebuke to it; just as, contrariwise, great wealth is, to
the imagination, really set off by a careless costume. One need not
explain how the mind acts in such cases: the fact, as I have put it, is
indisputable. And let the young men of our generation mark the present
chapter, that they may know the virtue residing in a tail-coat, and cling
to it, whether buffeted by the waves, or burnt out by the fire, of evil
angry fortune. His tail-coat safe, the youthful Briton is always ready
for any change in the mind of the moody Goddess. And it is an almost
certain thing that, presuming her to have a damsel of condition in view
for him as a compensation for the slaps he has received, he must lose
her, he cannot enter a mutual path with her, if he shall have failed to
retain this article of a black tail, his social passport. I mean of
course that he retain respect for the article in question. Respect for it
firmly seated in his mind, the tail may be said to be always handy. It is
fortune's uniform in Britain: the candlestick, if I may dare to say so,
to the candle; nor need any young islander despair of getting to himself
her best gifts, while he has her uniform at command, as glossy as may be.

The ladies of Brookfield were really stormed by Mr. Barrett's elegant
tail. When, the first glass of wine nodded over, Mr. Pole continued the
discourse of the morning, with allusions to French cooks, and his cook,
their sympathies were taken captive by Mr. Barrett's tact: the door to
their sympathies having been opened to him as it were by his attire. They
could not guess what necessity urged Mr. Pole to assert his locked-up
self so vehemently; but it certainly made the stranger shine with a
beautiful mild lustre. Their spirits partly succumbed to him by a process
too lengthened to explain here. Indeed, I dare do no more than hint at
these mysteries of feminine emotion. I beg you to believe that when we
are dealing with that wonder, the human heart female, the part played by
a tail-coat and a composed demeanour is not insignificant. No doubt the
ladies of Brookfield would have rebutted the idea of a tail-coat
influencing them in any way as monstrous. But why was it, when Mr. Pole
again harped on his cook, in almost similar words, that they were drawn
to meet the eyes of the stranger, on whom they printed one of the most
fabulously faint fleeting looks imaginable, with a proportionately big
meaning for him that might read it? It must have been that this uniform
of a tail had laid a basis of equality for the hour, otherwise they never
would have done so; nor would he have enjoyed the chance of showing them
that he could respond to the remotest mystic indications, with a muffled
adroitness equal to their own, and so encouraged them to commence a
language leading to intimacy with a rapidity that may well appear magical
to the uninitiated. In short, the man really had the language of the very
elect of polite society. If you are not versed in this alphabet of mute
intelligence, you are in the ranks with waiters and linen-drapers, and
are, as far as ladies are concerned, tail-coated to no purpose.

Mr. Pole's fresh allusion to his cook: "I hope you don't think I keep a
man! No; no; not in the country. Wouldn't do. Plays the deuce, you know.
My opinion is, Mrs. Mallow's as clever as any man-cook going. I'd back
her:" and Mr. Barrett's speech: "She is an excellent person!" delivered
briefly, with no obtrusion of weariness, confirmed the triumph of the
latter; a triumph all the greater, that he seemed unconscious of it. They
leaped at one bound to the conclusion that there was a romance attached
to him. Do not be startled. An attested tail-coat, clearly out of its
element, must contain a story: that story must be interesting; until its
secret is divulged, the subtle essence of it spreads an aureole around
the tail. The ladies declared, in their subsequent midnight conference,
that Mr. Barrett was fit for any society. They had visions of a great
family reduced; of a proud son choosing to earn his bread honourably and
humbly, by turning an exquisite taste to account. Many visions of him
they had, and were pleased.

Patronage of those beneath, much more than the courting of those above
them, delighted the ladies of Brookfield. They allowed Emilia to give Mr.
Barrett invitations, and he became a frequent visitor; always neat,
pathetically well-brushed, and a pleasanter pet than Emilia, because he
never shocked their niceties. He was an excellent talker, and was very
soon engaged in regular contests with the argumentative Cornelia. Their
political views were not always the same, as Cornelia sometimes had read
the paper before he arrived. Happily, on questions of religion, they
coincided. Theories of education occupied them mainly. In these contests
Mr. Barrett did not fail to acknowledge his errors, when convicted, and
his acknowledgment was hearty and ample. She had many clear triumphs.
Still, he could be positive; a very great charm in him. Women cannot
repose on a man who is not positive; nor have they much gratification in
confounding him. Wouldst thou, man, amorously inclining! attract to thee
superior women, be positive. Be stupidly positive, rather than dubious at
all. Face fearful questions with a vizor of brass. Array thyself in
dogmas. Show thy decisive judgement on the side of established power, or
thy enthusiasm in the rebel ranks, if it must be so; but be firm. Waver
not. If women could tolerate waverings and weakness, and did not rush to
the adoration of decision of mind, we should not behold them turning
contemptuously from philosophers in their agony, to find refuge in the
arms of smirking orthodoxy. I do not say that Mr. Barrett ventured to
play the intelligent Cornelia like a fish; but such a fish was best
secured by the method he adopted: that of giving her signal victory in
trifles, while on vital matters he held his own.

Very pleasant evenings now passed at Brookfield, which were not at all
disturbed by the wonder expressed from time to time by Mr. Pole, that he
had not heard from Martha, meaning Mrs. Chump. "You have Emilia," the
ladies said; this being equivalent to "She is one of that sort;" and Mr.
Pole understood it so, and fastened Emilia in one arm, with "Now, a kiss,
my dear, and then a toon." Emilia readily gave both. As often as he heard
instances of her want of ladylike training, he would say, "Keep her here;
we'll better her." Mr. Barrett assisted the ladies to see that there was
more in Emilia than even Mr. Pericles had perceived. Her story had become
partially known to them; and with two friendly dependents of the
household, one a gentleman and the other a genius, they felt that they
had really attained a certain eminence, which is a thing to be felt only
when we have something under our feet. Flying about with a desperate grip
on the extreme skirts of aristocracy, the ladies knew to be the elevation
of dependency, not true eminence; and though they admired the kite, they
by no means wished to form a part of its tail. They had brains. A circle
was what they wanted, and they had not to learn that this is to be found
or made only in the liberally-educated class, into the atmosphere of
which they pressed like dungeoned plants. The parasite completes the
animal, and a dependent assures us of our position. The ladies of
Brookfield, therefore, let Emilia cling to them, remarking, that it
seemed to be their papa's settled wish that she should reside among them
for a time. Consequently, if the indulgence had ever to be regretted,
they would not be to blame. In their hearts they were aware that it was
Emilia who had obtained for them their first invitation to Lady
Gosstre's. Gratitude was not a part of their policy, but when it assisted
a recognition of material facts they did not repress it. "And if," they
said, "we can succeed in polishing her and toning her, she may have
something to thank us for, in the event of her ultimately making a name."
That event being of course necessary for the development of so proper a
sentiment. Thus the rides with Wilfrid continued, and the sweet quiet
evenings when she sang.




CHAPTER VIII

The windows of Brookfield were thrown open to the air of May, and bees
wandered into the rooms, gold spots of sunshine danced along the floors.
The garden-walks were dazzling, and the ladies went from flower-bed to
flower-bed in broad garden hats that were, as an occasional light glance
flung at a window-pane assured Adela, becoming. Sunshine had burst on
them suddenly, and there was no hat to be found for Emilia, so Wilfrid
placed his gold-laced foraging-cap on her head, and the ladies, after a
moment's misgiving, allowed her to wear it, and turned to observe her now
and then. There was never pertness in Emilia's look, which on the
contrary was singularly large and calm when it reposed: perhaps her
dramatic instinct prompted her half-jaunty manner of leaning against the
sunny corner of the house where the Chinese honeysuckle climbed. She was
talking to Wilfrid. Her laughter seemed careless and easy, and in keeping
with the Southern litheness of her attitude.

"To suit the cap; it's all to suit the cap," said Adela, the keen of eye.
Yet, critical as was this lady, she acknowledged that it was no mere
acting effort to suit the cap.

The philosopher (I would keep him back if I could) bids us mark that the
crown and flower of the nervous system, the head, is necessarily
sensitive, and to that degree that whatsoever we place on it, does, for a
certain period, change and shape us. Of course the instant we call up the
forces of the brain, much of the impression departs but what remains is
powerful, and fine-nerved. Woman is especially subject to it. A girl may
put on her brother's boots, and they will not affect her spirit strongly;
but as soon as she puts on her brother's hat, she gives him a manly nod.
The same philosopher who fathers his dulness on me, asserts that the
modern vice or fastness ('Trotting on the Epicene Border,' he has it) is
bred by apparently harmless practices of this description. He offers to
turn the current of a Republican's brain, by resting a coronet on his
forehead for just five seconds.

Howsoever these things be, it was true that Emilia's feet presently
crossed, and she was soon to be seen with her right elbow doubled against
her head as she leaned to the wall, and the little left fist stuck at her
belt. And I maintain that she had no sense at all of acting Spanish
prince disguised as page. Nor had she an idea that she was making her
friend Wilfrid's heart perform to her lightest words and actions, like
any trained milk-white steed in a circus. Sunlight, as well as Wilfrid's
braided cap, had some magical influence on her. He assured her that she
looked a charming boy, and she said, "Do I?" just lifting her chin.

A gardener was shaving the lawn.

"Please, spare those daisies," cried Emilia. "Why do you cut away
daisies?"

The gardener objected that he really must make the lawn smooth. Emilia
called to Adela, who came, and hearing the case, said: "Now this is nice
of you. I like you to love daisies and wish to protect them. They
disfigure a lawn, you know." And Adela stooped, and picked one, and
called it a pet name, and dropped it.

She returned to her sisters in the conservatory, and meeting Mr. Barren
at the door, made the incident a topic. "You know how greatly our Emilia
rejoices us when she shows sentiment, and our thirst is to direct her to
appreciate Nature in its humility as well as its grandeur."

"One expects her to have all poetical feelings," said Mr. Barrett, while
they walked forth to the lawn sloping to the tufted park grass.

Cornelia said: "You have read Mr. Runningbrook's story?"

"Yes."

But the man had not brought it back, and her name was in it, written with
her own hand.

"Are you of my opinion in the matter?"

"In the matter of the style? I am and I am not. Your condemnation may be
correct in itself; but you say, 'He coins words'; and he certainly forces
the phrase here and there, I must admit. The point to be considered is,
whether friction demands a perfectly smooth surface. Undoubtedly a
scientific work does, and a philosophical treatise should. When we ask
for facts simply, we feel the intrusion of a style. Of fiction it is
part. In the one case the classical robe, in the other any mediaeval
phantasy of clothing."

"Yes; true;" said Cornelia, hesitating over her argument. "Well, I must
conclude that I am not imaginative."

"On the contrary, permit me to say that you are. But your imagination is
unpractised, and asks to be fed with a spoon. We English are more
imaginative than most nations."

"Then, why is it not manifested?"

"We are still fighting against the Puritan element, in literature as
elsewhere."

"Your old bugbear, Mr. Barrett!"

"And more than this: our language is not rich in subtleties for prose. A
writer who is not servile and has insight, must coin from his own mint.
In poetry we are rich enough; but in prose also we owe everything to the
licence our poets have taken in the teeth of critics. Shall I give you
examples? It is not necessary. Our simplest prose style is nearer to
poetry with us, for this reason, that the poets have made it. Read French
poetry. With the first couplet the sails are full, and you have left the
shores of prose far behind. Mr. Runningbrook coins words and risks
expressions because an imaginative Englishman, pen in hand, is the cadet
and vagabond of the family--an exploring adventurer; whereas to a
Frenchman it all comes inherited like a well filled purse. The audacity
of the French mind, and the French habit of quick social intercourse,
have made them nationally far richer in language. Let me add,
individually as much poorer. Read their stereotyped descriptions. They
all say the same things. They have one big Gallic trumpet. Wonderfully
eloquent: we feel that: but the person does not speak. And now, you will
be surprised to learn that, notwithstanding what I have said, I should
still side with Mr. Runningbrook's fair critic, rather than with him. The
reason is, that the necessity to write as he does is so great that a
strong barrier--a chevaux-de-frise of pen points--must be raised against
every newly minted word and hazardous coiner, or we shall be inundated.
If he can leap the barrier he and his goods must be admitted. So it has
been with our greatest, so it must be with the rest of them, or we shall
have a Transatlantic literature. By no means desirable, I think. Yet,
see: when a piece of Transatlantic slang happens to be tellingly
true--something coined from an absolute experience; from a fight with the
elements--we cannot resist it: it invades us. In the same way poetic
rashness of the right quality enriches the language. I would make it
prove its quality."

Cornelia walked on gravely. His excuse for dilating on the theme,
prompted her to say: "You give me new views": while all her reflections
sounded from the depths: "And yet, the man who talks thus is a hired
organ-player!"

This recurring thought, more than the cogency of the new views, kept her
from combating certain fallacies in them which had struck her.

"Why do you not write yourself, Mr. Barrett?"

"I have not the habit."

"The habit!"

"I have not heard the call."

"Should it not come from within?"

"And how are we to know it?"

"If it calls to you loudly!"

"Then I know it to be vanity."

"But the wish to make a name is not vanity."

"The wish to conceal a name may exist."

Cornelia took one of those little sly glances at his features which print
them on the brain. The melancholy of his words threw a somber hue about
him, and she began to think with mournfulness of those firm thin lips
fronting misfortune: those sunken blue eyes under its shadow.

They walked up to Mr. Pole, who was standing with Wilfrid and Emilia on
the lawn; giving ear to a noise in the distance.

A big drum sounded on the confines of the Brookfield estate. Soon it was
seen entering the precincts at one of the principal gates, followed by
trombone, and horn, and fife. In the rear trooped a regiment of
Sunday-garmented villagers, with a rambling tail of loose-minded boys and
girls. Blue and yellow ribands dangled from broad beaver hats, and there
were rosettes of the true-blue mingled with yellow at buttonholes; and
there was fun on the line of march. Jokes plumped deep into the ribs, and
were answered with intelligent vivacity in the shape of hearty thwacks,
delivered wherever a surface was favourable: a mode of repartee worthy of
general adoption, inasmuch as it can be passed on, and so with certainty
made to strike your neighbour as forcibly as yourself: of which felicity
of propagation verbal wit cannot always boast. In the line of procession,
the hat of a member of the corps shot sheer into the sky from the
compressed energy of his brain; for he and all his comrades vociferously
denied having cast it up, and no other solution was possible. This
mysterious incident may tell you that beer was thus early in the morning
abroad. In fact, it was the procession day of a provincial Club-feast or
celebration of the nuptials of Beef and Beer; whereof later you shall
behold the illustrious offspring.

All the Brookfield household were now upon the lawn, awaiting the attack.
Mr. Pole would have liked to impound the impouring host, drum and all,
for the audacity of the trespass, and then to have fed them liberally, as
a return for the compliment. Aware that he was being treated to the
honours of a great man of the neighbourhood, he determined to take it
cheerfully.

"Come; no laughing!" he said, directing a glance at the maids who were
ranged behind their mistresses. "'Hem! we must look pleased: we mustn't
mind their music, if they mean well."

Emilia, whose face was dismally screwed up at the nerve-searching
discord, said: "Why do they try to play anything but a drum?"

"In the country, in the country;" Mr. Pole emphasized. "We put up with
this kind of thing in the country. Different in town; but we--a--say
nothing in the country. We must encourage respect for the gentry, in the
country. One of the penalties of a country life. Not much harm in it. New
duties in the country."

He continued to speak to himself. In proportion as he grew aware of the
unnecessary nervous agitation into which the drum was throwing him, he
assumed an air of repose, and said to Wilfrid: "Read the paper to-day?"
and to Arabella, "Quiet family dinner, I suppose?"

"Yes, sir," he remarked to Mr. Barrett, as if resuming an old
conversation: "I dare say, you've seen better marching in foreign parts.
Right--left; right--left. Ha! ha! And not so bad, not so bad, I call it!
with their right--left; right--left. Ha! ha! You've seen better. No need
to tell me that. But, in England, we look to the meaning of things. We're
a practical people. What's more, we're volunteers. Volunteers in
everything. We can't make a regiment of ploughmen march like clock-work
in a minute; and we don't want to. But, give me the choice; I'll back a
body of volunteers any day."

"I would rather be backed by them, sir," said Mr. Barrett.

"Very good. I mean that. Honest intelligent industry backing rank and
wealth! That makes a nation strong. Look at England!"

Mr. Barrett observed him stand out largely, as if filled by the spirit of
the big drum.

That instrument now gave a final flourish and bang whereat Sound, as if
knocked on the head, died languishingly.

And behold, a spokesman was seen in relief upon a background of grins,
that were oddly intermixed with countenances of extraordinary solemnity.

The same commenced his propitiatory remarks by assuring the proprietor of
Brookfield that he, the spokesman, and every man present, knew they had
taken a liberty in coming upon Squire Pole's grounds without leave or
warning. They knew likewise that Squire Pole excused them.

Chorus of shouts from the divining brethren.

Right glad they were to have such a gentleman as Squire Pole among them:
and if nobody gave him a welcome last year, that was not the fault of the
Yellow-and-Blues. Eh, my boys?

Groans and cheers.

Right sure was spokesman that Squire Pole was the friend of the poor man,
and liked nothing better than to see him enjoy his holiday. As why
shouldn't he enjoy his holiday now and then, and have a bit of relaxation
as well as other men?

Acquiescent token on the part of the new dignitary, Squire Pole.

Spokesman was hereby encouraged to put it boldly, whether a man was not a
man all the world over.

"For a' that!" was sung out by some rare bookworm to rearward: but no
Scot being present, no frenzy followed the quotation.

It was announced that the Club had come to do homage to Squire Pole and
ladies: the Junction Club of Ipley and Hillford. What did Junction mean?
Junction meant Harmony. Harmonious they were, to be sure: so they joined
to good purpose.

Mr. Barrett sought Emilia's eyes smilingly, but she was intent on the
proceedings.

A cry of "Bundle o' sticks, Tom Breeks. Don't let slip 'bout bundle o'
sticks," pulled spokesman up short. He turned hurriedly to say, "All
right," and inflated his chest to do justice to the illustration of the
faggots of Aesop: but Mr. Tom Breeks had either taken in too much air, or
the ale that had hitherto successfully prompted him was antipathetic to
the nice delicacy of an apologue; for now his arm began to work and his
forehead had to be mopped, and he lashed the words "Union and Harmony"
right and left, until, coming on a sentence that sounded in his ears like
the close of his speech, he stared ahead, with a dim idea that he had
missed a point. "Bundle o' sticks," lustily shouted, revived his
apprehension; but the sole effect was to make him look on the ground and
lift his hat on the point of a perplexed finger. He could not conceive
how the bundle of sticks was to be brought in now; or what to say
concerning them. Union and Harmony:--what more could be said? Mr. Tom
Breeks tried a remonstrance with his backers. He declared to them that he
had finished, and had brought in the Bundle. They replied that they had
not heard it; that the Bundle was the foundation--sentiment of the Club;
the first toast, after the Crown; and that he must go on until the Bundle
had been brought in. Hereat, the unhappy man faced Squire Pole again. It
was too abject a position for an Englishman to endure. Tom Breeks cast
his hat to earth. "I'm dashed if I can bring in the bundle!"

There was no telling how conduct like this might have been received by
the Yellow-and-Blues if Mr. Barrett had not spoken. "You mean everything
when you say "Union," and you're quite right not to be tautological. You
can't give such a blow with your fingers as you can with your fists, can
you?"

Up went a score of fists. "We've the fists: we've the fists," was
shouted.

Cornelia, smiling on Mr. Barrett, asked him why he had confused the poor
people with the long word "tautological."

"I threw it as a bone," said he. "I think you will observe that they are
already quieter. They are reflecting on what it signifies, and will
by-and-by quarrel as to the spelling of it. At any rate it occupies
them."

Cornelia laughed inwardly, and marked with pain that his own humour gave
him no merriment.

At the subsiding of the echoes that coupled Squire Pole and the Junction
Club together, Squire Pole replied. He wished them well. He was glad to
see them, and sorry he had not ale enough on the premises to regale every
man of them. Clubs were great institutions. One fist was stronger than a
thousand fingers--"as my friend here said just now." Hereat the eyelids
of Cornelia shed another queenly smile on the happy originator of the
remark.

Squire Pole then descended to business. He named the amount of his
donation. At this practical sign of his support, heaven heard the
gratitude of the good fellows. The drum awoke from its torpor, and
summoned its brethren of the band to give their various versions of the
National Anthem.

"Can't they be stopped?" Emilia murmured, clenching her little hands.

The patriotic melody, delivered in sturdy democratic fashion, had to be
endured. It died hard, but did come to an end, piecemeal. Tom Breeks then
retired from the front, and became a unit once more. There were
flourishes that indicated a termination of the proceedings, when another
fellow was propelled in advance, and he, shuffling and ducking his head,
to the cries of "Out wi' it, Jim!" and, "Where's your stomach?" came
still further forward, and showed a most obsequious grin.

"Why, it's Jim!" exclaimed Emilia, on whom Jim's eyes were fastened.
Stepping nearer, she said, "Do you want to speak to me?"

Jim had this to say: which, divested of his petition for pardon on the
strength of his perfect knowledge that he took a liberty, was, that the
young lady had promised, while staying at Wilson's farm, that she would
sing to the Club-fellows on the night of their feast.

"I towl'd 'em they'd have a rare treat, miss," mumbled Jim, "and they're
all right mad for 't, that they be--bain't ye, boys?"

That they were! with not a few of the gesticulations of madness too.

Emilia said: "I promised I would sing to them. I remember it quite well.
Of course I will keep my promise."

A tumult of acclamation welcomed her words, and Jim looked immensely
delighted.

She was informed by several voices that they were the Yellow-and-Blues,
and not the Blues: that she must not go to the wrong set: and that their
booth was on Ipley Common: and that they, the Junction Club, only would
honour her rightly for the honour she was going to do them: all of which
Emilia said she would bear in mind.

Jim then retired hastily, having done something that stout morning ale
would alone have qualified him to perform. The drum, in the noble belief
that it was leading, announced the return march, and with three cheers
for Squire Pole, and a crowning one for the ladies, away trooped the
procession.




CHAPTER IX

Hardly had the last sound of the drum passed out of hearing, when the
elastic thunder of a fresh one claimed attention. The truth being, that
the Junction Club of Ipley and Hillford, whose colours were yellow and
blue, was a seceder from the old-established Hillford Club, on which it
had this day shamefully stolen a march by parading everywhere in the
place of it, and disputing not only its pasture-grounds but its identity.

There is no instrument the sound of which proclaims such a vast internal
satisfaction as the drum. I know not whether it be that the sense we have
of the corpulency of this instrument predisposes us to imagine it
supremely content: as when an alderman is heard snoring the world is
assured that it listens to the voice of its own exceeding gratulation. A
light heart in a fat body ravishes not only the world but the
philosopher. If monotonous, the one note of the drum is very correct.
Like the speaking of great Nature, what it means is implied by the
measure. When the drum beats to the measure of a common human pulsation
it has a conquering power: inspiring us neither to dance nor to trail the
members, but to march as life does, regularly, and in hearty good order,
and with a not exhaustive jollity. It is a sacred instrument.

Now the drum which is heard to play in this cheerful fashion, while at
the same time we know that discomfiture is cruelly harrying it: that its
inmost feelings are wounded, and that worse is in store for it, affects
the contemplative mind with an inexpressibly grotesque commiseration. Do
but listen to this one, which is the joint corporate voice of the men of
Hillford. Outgeneraled, plundered, turned to ridicule, it thumps with
unabated briskness. Here indeed might Sentimentalism shed a fertile tear!

Anticipating that it will eventually be hung up among our national
symbols, I proceed. The drum of Hillford entered the Brookfield grounds
as Ipley had done, and with a similar body of decorated Clubmen; sounding
along until it faced the astonished proprietor, who held up his hand and
requested to know the purpose of the visit. One sentence of explanation
sufficed.

"What!" cried Mr. Pole, "do you think you can milk a cow twice in ten
minutes?"

Several of the Hillford men acknowledged that it would be rather sharp
work.

Their case was stated: whereupon Mr. Pole told them that he had just been
'milked,' and regretted it, but requested them to see that he could not
possibly be equal to any second proceeding of the sort. On their turning
to consult together, he advised them to bear it with fortitude. "All
right, sir!" they said: and a voice from the ranks informed him that
their word was 'Jolly.' Then a signal was given, and these indomitable
fellows cheered the lord of Brookfield as lustily as if they had
accomplished the feat of milking him twice in an hour. Their lively
hurrahs set him blinking in extreme discomposure of spirit, and he was
fumbling at his pocket, when the drum a little precipitately thumped: the
ranks fell into order, and the departure was led by the tune of the 'King
of the Cannibal islands:' a tune that is certain to create a chorus on
the march. On this occasion, the line:--

     "Oh! didn't you know you were done, sir?"

became general at the winding up of the tune. Boys with their elders
frisked as they chimed it, casting an emphasis of infinite relish on the
declaration 'done'; as if they delighted in applying it to Mr. Pole,
though at their own expense.

Soon a verse grew up:--

     "We march'd and call'd on Mister Pole,
     Who hadn't a penny, upon his soul,
     For Ipley came and took the whole,
     And didn't you know you were done, sir!"

I need not point out to the sagacious that Hillford and not Mr. Pole had
been 'done;' but this was the genius of the men who transferred the
opprobrium to him. Nevertheless, though their manner of welcoming
misfortune was such, I, knowing that there was not a deadlier animal than
a 'done' Briton, have shudders for Ipley.

We relinquished the stream of an epic in turning away from these mighty
drums.

Mr. Pole stood questioning all who surrounded him: "What could I do? I
couldn't subscribe to both. They don't expect that of a lord, and I'm a
commoner. If these fellows quarrel and split, are we to suffer for it?
They can't agree, and want us to pay double fines. This is how they serve
us."

Mr. Barrett, rather at a loss to account for his excitement, said, that
it must be admitted they had borne the trick played upon them, with
remarkable good humour.

"Yes, but," Mr. Pole fumed, "I don't. They put me in the wrong, between
them. They make me uncomfortable. I've a good mind to withdraw my
subscription to those rascals who came first, and have nothing to do with
any of them. Then, you see, down I go for a niggardly fellow. That's the
reputation I get. Nothing of this in London! you make your money, pay
your rates, and nobody bothers a man."

"You should have done as our darling here did, papa," said Adela. "You
should have hinted something that might be construed a promise or not, as
we please to read it."

"If I promise I perform," returned Mr. Pole.

"Our Hillford people have cause for complaint," Mr. Barrett observed. And
to Emilia: "You will hardly favour one party more than another, will
you?"

"I am for that poor man Jim," said Emilia, "He carried my harp evening
after evening, and would not even take sixpence for the trouble."

"Are you really going to sing there?"

"Didn't you hear? I promised."

"To-night?"

"Yes; certainly."

"Do you know what it is you have promised?"

"To sing."

Adela glided to her sisters near at hand, and these ladies presently
hemmed Emilia in. They had a method of treating matters they did not
countenance, as if nature had never conceived them, and such were the
monstrous issue of diseased imaginations. It was hard for Emilia to hear
that what she designed to do was "utterly out of the question and not to
be for one moment thought of." She reiterated, with the same interpreting
stress, that she had given her promise.

"Do you know, I praised you for putting them off so cleverly," said Adela
in tones of gentle reproach that bewildered Emilia.

"Must we remind you, then, that you are bound by a previous promise?"
Cornelia made a counter-demonstration with the word. "Have you not
promised to dine with us at Lady Gosstre's to-night?"

"Oh, of course I shall keep that," replied Emilia. "I intend to. I will
sing there, and then I will go and sing to those poor people, who never
hear anything but dreadful music--not music at all, but something that
seems to tear your flesh!"

"Never mind our flesh," said Adela pettishly: melodiously remonstrating
the next instant: "I really thought you could not be in earnest."

"But," said Arabella, "can you find pleasure in wasting your voice and
really great capabilities on such people?"

Emilia caught her up--"This poor man? But he loves music: he really knows
the good from the bad. He never looks proud but when I sing to him."

The situation was one that Cornelia particularly enjoyed. Here was a low
form of intellect to be instructed as to the precise meaning of a word,
the nature of a pledge. "There can be no harm that I see, in your singing
to this man," she commenced. "You can bid him come to one of the
out-houses here, if you desire, and sing to him. In the evening, after
his labour, will be the fit time. But, as your friends, we cannot permit
you to demean yourself by going from our house to a public booth, where
vulgar men are smoking and drinking beer. I wonder you have the courage
to contemplate such an act! You have pledged your word. But if you had
pledged your word, child, to swing upon that tree, suspended by your
arms, for an hour, could you keep it? I think not; and to recognize an
impossibility economizes time and is one of the virtues of a clear
understanding. It is incompatible that you should dine with Lady Gosstre,
and then run away to a drinking booth. Society will never tolerate one
who is familiar with boors. If you are to succeed in life, as we, your
friends, can conscientiously say that we most earnestly hope and trust
you will do, you must be on good terms with Society. You must! You pledge
your word to a piece of folly. Emancipate yourself from it as quickly as
possible. Do you see? This is foolish: it, therefore, cannot be. Decide,
as a sensible creature."

At the close of this harangue, Cornelia, who had stooped slightly to
deliver it, regained her stately posture, beautified in Mr. Barrett's
sight by the flush which an unwonted exercise in speech had thrown upon
her cheeks.

Emilia stood blinking like one sensible of having been chidden in a
strange tongue.

"Does it offend you--my going?" she faltered.

"Offend!--our concern is entirely for you," observed Cornelia.

The explanation drew out a happy sparkle from Emilia's eyes. She seized
her hand, kissed it, and cried: "I do thank you. I know I promised, but
indeed I am quite pleased to go!"

Mr. Barrett swung hurriedly round and walked some paces away with his
head downward. The ladies remained in a tolerant attitude for a minute or
so, silent. They then wheeled with one accord, and Emilia was left to
herself.




CHAPTER X

Richford was an easy drive from Brookfield, through lanes of elm and
white hawthorn.

The ladies never acted so well as when they were in the presence of a
fact which they acknowledged, but did not recognize. Albeit constrained
to admit that this was the first occasion of their ever being on their
way to the dinner-table of a person of quality, they could refuse to look
the admission in the face. A peculiar lightness of heart beset them; for
brooding ambition is richer in that first realizing step it takes,
insignificant though it seem, than in any subsequent achievement. I fear
to say that the hearts of the ladies boiled, because visages so sedate,
and voices so monotonously indifferent, would witness decidedly against
me. The common avoidance of any allusion to Richford testified to the
direction of their thoughts; and the absence of a sign of exultation may
be accepted as a proof of the magnitude of that happiness of which they
might not exhibit a feature. The effort to repress it must have cost them
horrible pain. Adela, the youngest of the three, transferred her inward
joy to the cottage children, whose staring faces from garden porch and
gate flashed by the carriage windows. "How delighted they look!" she
exclaimed more than once, and informed her sisters that a country life
was surely the next thing to Paradise. "Those children do look so happy!"
Thus did the weak one cunningly relieve herself. Arabella occupied her
mind by giving Emilia leading hints for conduct in the great house. "On
the whole, though there is no harm in your praising particular dishes, as
you do at home, it is better in society to say nothing on those subjects
until your opinion is asked: and when you speak, it should be as one who
passes the subject by. Appreciate flavours, but no dwelling on them! The
degrees of an expression of approbation, naturally enough, vary with age.
Did my instinct prompt me to the discussion of these themes, I should be
allowed greater licence than you." And here Arabella was unable to resist
a little bit of the indulgence Adela had taken: "You are sure to pass a
most agreeable evening, and one that you will remember."

North Pole sat high above such petty consolation; seldom speaking, save
just to show that her ideas ranged at liberty, and could be spontaneously
sympathetic on selected topics.

Their ceremonious entrance to the state-room of Richford accomplished,
the ladies received the greeting of the affable hostess; quietly
perturbed, but not enough so to disorder their artistic contemplation of
her open actions, choice of phrase, and by-play. Without communication or
pre-arrangement, each knew that the other would not let slip the
opportunity, and, after the first five minutes of languid general
converse; they were mentally at work comparing notes with one another's
imaginary conversations, while they said "Yes," and "Indeed," and "I
think so," and appeared to belong to the world about them.

"Merthyr, I do you the honour to hand this young lady to your charge,"
said Lady Gosstre, putting on equal terms with Emilia a gentleman of
perhaps five-and-thirty years; who reminded her of Mr. Barrett, but was
unclouded by that look of firm sadness which characterized the poor
organist. Mr. Powys was a travelled Welsh squire, Lady Gosstre's best
talker, on whom, as Brookfield learnt to see, she could perfectly rely to
preserve the child from any little drawing-room sins or dinner-table
misadventures. This gentleman had made sacrifices for the cause of Italy,
in money, and, it was said, in blood. He knew the country and loved the
people. Brookfield remarked that there was just a foreign tinge in his
manner; and that his smile, though social to a degree unknown to the run
of English faces, did not give him all to you, and at a second glance
seemed plainly to say that he reserved much.

Adela fell to the lot of a hussar-captain: a celebrated beauty, not too
foolish. She thought it proper to punish him for his good looks till
propitiated by his good temper.

Nobody at Brookfield could remember afterwards who took Arabella down to
dinner; she declaring that she had forgotten. Her sisters, not unwilling
to see insignificance banished to annihilation, said that it must have
been nobody in person, and that he was a very useful guest when ladies
were engaged. Cornelia had a different lot. She leaned on the right arm
of the Member for Hillford, the statistical debate, Sir Twickenham Pryme,
who had twice before, as he ventured to remind her, enjoyed the honour of
conversing, if not of dining, with her. Nay, more, he revived their
topics. "And I have come round to your way of thinking as regards
hustings addresses," he said. "In nine cases out of ten--at least,
nineteen-twentieths of the House will furnish instances--one can only, as
you justly observed, appeal to the comprehension of the mob by pledging
oneself either to their appetites or passions, and it is better plainly
to state the case and put it to them in figures." Whether the Baronet
knew what he was saying is one matter: he knew what he meant.

Wilfrid was cavalier to Lady Charlotte Chillingworth, of Stornley, about
ten miles distant from Hillford; ninth daughter of a nobleman who passed
current as the Poor Marquis; he having been ruined when almost a boy in
Paris, by the late illustrious Lord Dartford. Her sisters had married
captains in the army and navy, lawyers, and parsons, impartially. Lady
Charlotte was nine-and-twenty years of age; with clear and telling
stone-blue eyes, firm but not unsweet lips, slightly hollowed cheeks, and
a jaw that certainly tended to be square. Her colour was healthy. Walking
or standing her figure was firmly poised. Her chief attraction was a
bell-toned laugh, fresh as a meadow spring. She had met Wilfrid once in
the hunting-field, so they soon had common ground to run on.

Mr. Powys made Emilia happy by talking to her of Italy, in the intervals
of table anecdotes.

"Why did you leave it?" she said.

"I found I had more shadows than the one allotted me by nature; and as I
was accustomed to a black one, and not half a dozen white, I was fairly
frightened out of the country."

"You mean, Austrians."

"I do."

"Do you hate them?"

"Not at all."

"Then, how can you love the Italians?"

"They themselves have taught me to do both; to love them and not to hate
their enemies. Your Italians are the least vindictive of all races of
men."

"Merthyr, Merthyr!" went Lady Gosstre; Lady Charlotte murmuring aloud:
"And in the third chapter of the Book of Paradox you will find these
words."

"We afford a practical example and forgive them, do we not?" Mr. Powys
smiled at Emilia.

She looked round her, and reddened a little.

"So long as you do not write that Christian word with the point of a
stiletto!" said Lady Charlotte.

"You are not mad about the Italians?" Wilfrid addressed her.

"Not mad about anything, I hope. If I am to choose, I prefer the
Austrians. A very gentlemanly set of men! At least, so I find them
always. Capital horsemen!"

"I will explain to you how it must be," said Mr. Powys to Emilia. "An
artistic people cannot hate long. Hotly for the time, but the oppression
gone, and even in the dream of its going, they are too human to be
revengeful."

"Do we understand such very deep things?" said Lady Gosstre, who was near
enough to hear clearly.

"Yes: for if I ask her whether she can hate when her mind is given to
music, she knows that she cannot. She can love."

"Yet I think I have heard some Italian operatic spitfires, and of some!"
said Lady Charlotte.

"What opinion do you pronounce in this controversy?" Cornelia made appeal
to Sir Twickenham.

"There are multitudes of cases," he began: and took up another end of his
statement: "It has been computed that five-and-twenty murders per month
to a population...to a population of ninety thousand souls, is a fair
reckoning in a Southern latitude."

"Then we must allow for the latitude?"

"I think so."

"And also for the space into which the ninety thousand souls are packed,"
quoth Tracy Runningbrook.

"Well! well!" went Sir Twickenham.

"The knife is the law to an Italian of the South," said Mr. Powys. "He
distrusts any other, because he never gets it. Where law is established,
or tolerably secure, the knife is not used. Duels are rare. There is too
much bonhomie for the point of honour."

"I should like to believe that all men are as just to their mistresses,"
Lady Charlotte sighed, mock-earnestly.

Presently Emilia touched the arm of Mr. Powys. She looked agitated. "I
want to be told the name of that gentleman." His eyes were led to rest on
the handsome hussar-captain.

"Do you know him?"

"But his name!"

"Do me the favour to look at me. Captain Gambier."

"It is!"

Captain Gambier's face was resolutely kept in profile to her.

"I hear a rumour," said Lady Gosstre to Arabella, "that you think of
bidding for the Besworth estate. Are you tired of Brookfield?"

"Not tired; but Brookfield is modern, and I confess that Besworth has won
my heart."

"I shall congratulate myself on having you nearer neighbours. Have you
many, or any rivals?"

"There is some talk of the Tinleys wishing to purchase it. I cannot see
why."

"What people are they?" asked Lady Charlotte. "Do they hunt?"

"Oh, dear, no! They are to society what Dissenters are to religion. I
can't describe them otherwise."

"They pass before me in that description," said Lady Gosstre.

"Besworth's an excellent centre for hunting," Lady Charlotte remarked to
Wilfrid. "I've always had an affection for that place. The house is on
gravel; the river has trout; there's a splendid sweep of grass for the
horses to exercise. I think there must be sixteen spare beds. At all
events, I know that number can be made up; so that if you're too poor to
live much in London, you can always have your set about you."

The eyes of the fair economist sparkled as she dwelt on these particular
advantages of Besworth.

Richford boasted a show of flowers that might tempt its guests to parade
the grounds on balmy evenings. Wilfrid kept by the side of Lady
Charlotte. She did not win his taste a bit. Had she been younger, less
decided in tone, and without a title, it is very possible that she would
have offended his native, secret, and dominating fastidiousness as much
as did Emilia. Then, what made him subject at all to her influence, as he
felt himself beginning to be? She supplied a deficiency in the youth. He
was growing and uncertain: she was set and decisive. In his soul he
adored the extreme refinement of woman; even up to the thin edge of
inanity (which neighbours what the philosopher could tell him if he
would, and would, if it were permitted to him). Nothing was too white,
too saintly, or too misty, for his conception of abstract woman. But the
practical wants of our nature guide us best. Conversation with Lady
Charlotte seemed to strengthen and ripen him. He blushed with pleasure
when she said: "I remember reading your name in the account of that last
cavalry charge on the Dewan. You slew a chief, I think. That was
creditable, for they are swordmen. Cavalry in Europe can't win much
honour--not individual honour, I mean. I suppose being part of a
victorious machine is exhilarating. I confess I should not think much of
wearing that sort of feather. It's right to do one's duty, comforting to
trample down opposition, and agreeable to shed blood, but when you have
matched yourself man to man, and beaten--why, then, I dub you knight."

Wilfrid bowed, half-laughing, in a luxurious abandonment to his
sensations. Possibly because of their rule over him then, the change in
him was so instant from flattered delight to vexed perplexity. Rounding
one of the rhododendron banks, just as he lifted his head from that
acknowledgment of the lady's commendation, he had sight of Emilia with
her hand in the hand of Captain Gambier. What could it mean? what right
had he to hold her hand? Even if he knew her, what right?

The words between Emilia and Captain Gambier were few.

"Why did I not look at you during dinner?" said he. "Was it not better to
wait till we could meet?"

"Then you will walk with me and talk to me all the evening?"

"No: but I will try and come down here next week and meet you again."

"Are you going to-night?"

"Yes."

"To-night? To-night before it strikes a quarter to ten, I am going to
leave here alone. If you would come with me! I want a companion. I know
they will not hurt me, but I don't like being alone. I have given my
promise to sing to some poor people. My friends say I must not go. I must
go. I can't break a promise to poor people. And you have never heard me
really sing my best. Come with me, and I will."

Captain Gambier required certain explanations. He saw that a companion
and protection would be needed by his curious little friend, and as she
was resolved not to break her word, he engaged to take her in the
carriage that was to drive him to the station.

"You make me give up an appointment in town," he said.

"Ah, but you will hear me sing," returned Emilia. "We will drive to
Brookfield and get my harp, and then to Ipley Common. I am to be sure you
will be ready with the carriage at just a quarter to ten?"

The Captain gave her his assurance, and they separated; he to seek out
Adela, she to wander about, the calmest of conspirators against the
serenity of a household.

Meeting Wilfrid and Lady Charlotte, Emilia was asked by him, who it was
she had quitted so abruptly.

"That is the gentleman I told you of. Now I know his name. It is Captain
Gambier."

She was allowed to pass on.

"What is this she says?" Lady Charlotte asked.

"It appears...something about a meeting somewhere accidentally, in the
park, in London, I think; I really don't know. She had forgotten his
name."

Lady Charlotte spurred him with an interrogative "Yes?"

"She wanted to remember his name. That's all. He was kind to her."

"But, after all," remonstrated Lady Charlotte, "that's only a
characteristic of young men, is it not? no special distinction. You are
all kind to girls, to women, to anything!"

Captain Gambier and Adela crossed their path. He spoke a passing word,
Lady Charlotte returned no answer, and was silent to her companion for
some minutes. Then she said, "If you feel any responsibility about this
little person, take my advice, and don't let her have appointments and
meetings. They're bad in any case, and for a girl who has no brother--has
she? no:--well then, you should make the best provision you can against
the cowardice of men. Most men are cowards."

Emilia sang in the drawing-room. Brookfield knew perfectly why she looked
indifferent to the plaudits, and was not dissatisfied at hearing Lady
Gosstre say that she was a little below the mark. The kindly lady brought
Emilia between herself and Mr. Powys, saying, "I don't intend to let you
be the star of the evening and outshine us all." After which,
conversation commenced, and Brookfield had reason to admire her
ladyship's practised play upon the social instrument, surely the grandest
of all, the chords being men and women. Consider what an accomplishment
this is!

Albeit Brookfield knew itself a student at Richford, Adela was of too
impatient a wit to refrain from little ventures toward independence, if
not rivalry. "What we do," she uttered distinctively once or twice. Among
other things she spoke of "our discovery," to attest her declaration
that, to wakeful eyes, neither Hillford nor any other place on earth was
dull. Cornelia flushed at hearing the name of Mr. Barrett pronounced
publicly by her sister.

"An organist an accomplished man!" Lady Gosstre repeated Adela's words.
"Well, I suppose it is possible, but it rather upsets one's notions, does
it not?"

"Yes, but agreeably," said Adela, with boldness; and related how he had
been introduced, and hinted that he was going to be patronized.

"The man cannot maintain himself on the income that sort of office brings
him," Lady Gosstre observed.

"Oh, no," said Adela. "I fancy he does it simply for some sort of
occupation. One cannot help imagining a disguise."

"Personally I confess to an objection to gentlemen in disguise," said
Lady Gosstre. "Barrett!--do you know the man?"

She addressed Mr. Powys.

"There used to be good quartett evenings given by the Barretts of
Bursey," he said. "Sir Justinian Barrett married a Miss Purcell, who
subsequently preferred the musical accomplishments of a foreign professor
of the Art."

"Purcell Barrett is his name," said Adela. "Our Emilia brought him to us.
Where is she? But, where can she be?"

Adela rose.

"She pressed my hand just now," said Lady Gosstre.

"She was here when Captain Gambler quitted the room," Arabella remarked.

"Good heaven!"

The exclamation came from Adela.

"Oh, Lady Gosstre! I fear to tell you what I think she has done."

The scene of the rival Clubs was hurriedly related, together with the
preposterous pledge given by Emilia, that she would sing at the Ipley
Booth: "Among those dreadful men!"

"They will treat her respectfully," said Mr. Powys.

"Worship her, I should imagine, Merthyr," said Lady Gosstre. "For all
that, she had better be away. Beer is not a respectful spirit."

"I trust you will pardon her," Arabella pleaded. "Everything that
explanations of the impropriety of such a thing could do, we have done.
We thought that at last we had convinced her. She is quite untamed."

Mr. Powys now asked where this place was that she had hurried to.

The unhappy ladies of Brookfield, quick as they were to read every sign
surrounding them, were for the moment too completely thrown off their
balance by Emilia's extraordinary exhibition of will, to see that no
reflex of her shameful and hideous proceeding had really fallen upon
them. Their exclamations were increasing, until Adela, who had been the
noisiest, suddenly adopted Lady Gosstre's tone. "If she has gone, I
suppose she must be simply fetched away."

"Do you see what has happened?" Lady Charlotte murmured to Wilfrid,
between a phrase.

He stumbled over a little piece of gallantry.

"Excellent! But, say those things in French.--Your dark-eyed maid has
eloped. She left the room five minutes after Captain Gambier."

Wilfrid sprang to his feet, looking eagerly to the corners of the room.

"Pardon me," he said, and moved up to Lady Gosstre. On the way he
questioned himself why his heart should be beating at such a pace.
Standing at her ladyship's feet, he could scarcely speak.

"Yes, Wilfrid; go after her," said Adela, divining his object.

"By all means go," added Lady Gosstre. "Now she is there, you may as well
let her keep her promise; and then hurry her home. They will saddle you a
horse down below, if you care to have one."

Wilfrid thanked her ladyship, and declined the horse. He was soon walking
rapidly under a rough sky in the direction of Ipley, with no firm thought
that he would find Emilia there.




CHAPTER XI

At half-past nine of the clock on the evening of this memorable day, a
body of five-and-twenty stout young fellows, prize-winners, wrestlers,
boxers, and topers, of the Hillford Club, set forth on a march to Ipley
Common.

Now, a foreigner, hearing of their destination and the provocation they
had endured, would have supposed that they were bent upon deeds of
vengeance; and it requires knowledge of our countrymen to take it as a
fact that the idea and aim of the expedition were simply to furnish the
offending Ipley boys a little music. Such were the idea and the aim.
Hillford had nothing to do with consequences: no more than our England is
responsible when she sails out among the empires and hemispheres, saying,
'buy' and 'sell,' and they clamour to be eaten up entire. Foreigners
pertinaciously misunderstand us. They have the barbarous habit of judging
by results. Let us know ourselves better. It is melancholy to contemplate
the intrigues, and vile designs, and vengeances of other nations; and
still more so, after we have written so many pages of intelligible
history, to see them attributed to us. Will it never be perceived that we
do not sow the thing that happens? The source of the flooding stream
which drinks up those rich acres of low flat land is not more innocent
than we. If, as does seem possible, we are in a sort of alliance with
Destiny, we have signed no compact, and accomplish our work as solidly
and merrily as a wood-hatchet in the hands of the woodman. This
arrangement to give Ipley a little music, was projected as a return for
the favours of the morning: nor have I in my time heard anything
comparable to it in charity of sentiment, when I consider the detestable
outrage Hillford suffered under.

The parading of the drum, the trombone, a horn, two whistles, and a fife,
in front of Hillford booth, caught the fancy of the Clubmen, who roared
out parting adjurations that the music was not to be spared; and that Tom
Breeks was a musical fellow, with a fine empty pate, if any one of the
instruments should fail perchance. They were to give Ipley plenty of
music: for Ipley wanted to be taught harmony. Harmony was Ipley's weak
point. "Gie 'em," said one jolly ruddy Hillford man, "gie 'em whack fol,
lol!" And he smacked himself, and set toward an invisible partner. Nor,
as recent renowned historians have proved, are observations of this
nature beneath the dignity of chronicle. They vindicate, as they
localize, the sincerity of Hillford.

Really, to be an islander full of ale, is to be the kindest creature on
or off two legs. For that very reason, it may be, his wrath at bad blood
is so easily aroused. In our hot moods we would desire things like unto
ourselves, and object violently to whatsoever is unlike. And also we
desire that the benefits we shed be appreciated. If Ipley understands
neither our music nor our intent, haply we must hold a performance on the
impenetrable sconce of Ipley.

At the hour named, the expedition, with many a promise that the music
should be sweet, departed hilariously: Will Burdock, the left-handed
cricketer and hard-hitter, being leader; with Peter Bartholomew, potboy,
John Girling, miller's man, and Ned Thewk, gardener's assistant, for
lieutenants. On the march, silence was proclaimed, and partially
enforced, after two fights against authority. Near the sign of King
William's Head, General Burdock called a halt, and betrayed irresolution
with reference to the route to be adopted; but as none of his troop could
at all share such a condition of mind in the neighbourhood of an inn, he
was permitted to debate peacefully with his lieutenants, while the rest
burst through the doors and hailed the landlord: a proceeding he was
quickly induced to imitate. Thus, when the tail shows strongest decision
of purpose, the head must follow.

An accurate oinometer, or method of determining what shall be the
condition of the spirit of man according to the degrees of wine or beer
in him, were surely of priceless service to us. For now must we, to be
certain of our sanity and dignity, abstain, which is to clip, impoverish,
imprison the soul: or else, taking wings of wine, we go aloft over capes,
and islands, and seas, but are even as balloons that cannot make for any
line, and are at the mercy of the winds--without a choice, save to come
down by virtue of a collapse. Could we say to ourselves, in the great
style, This is the point where desire to embrace humanity is merged in
vindictiveness toward individuals: where radiant sweet temper culminates
in tremendous wrath: where the treasures of anticipation, waxing riotous,
arouse the memory of wrongs: in plain words, could we know positively,
and from the hand of science, when we have had enough, we should stop.
There is not a doubt that we should stop. It is so true we should stop,
that, I am ready to say, ladies have no right to call us horrid names,
and complain of us, till they have helped us to some such trustworthy
scientific instrument as this which I have called for. In its absence, I
am persuaded that the true natural oinometer is the hat. Were the hat
always worn during potation; were ladies when they retire to place it on
our heads, or, better still, chaplets of flowers; then, like the wise
ancients, we should be able to tell to a nicety how far we had advanced
in our dithyramb to the theme of fuddle and muddle. Unhappily the hat
does not forewarn: it is simply indicative. I believe, nevertheless, that
science might set to work upon it forthwith, and found a system. When you
mark men drinking who wear their hats, and those hats are seen gradually
beginning to hang on the backs of their heads, as from pegs, in the
fashion of a fez, the bald projection of forehead looks jolly and frank:
distrust that sign: the may-fly of the soul is then about to be gobbled
up by the chub of the passions. A hat worn fez-fashion is a dangerous
hat. A hat on the brows shows a man who can take more, but thinks he will
go home instead, and does so, peaceably. That is his determination. He
may look like Macduff, but he is a lamb. The vinous reverses the
non-vinous passionate expression of the hat. If I am discredited, I
appeal to history, which tells us that the hats of the Hillford
five-and-twenty were all exceedingly hind-ward-set when the march was
resumed. It followed that Peter Bartholomew, potboy, made irritable
objections to that old joke which finished his name as though it were a
cat calling, and the offence being repeated, he dealt an impartial swing
of his stick at divers heads, and told them to take that, which they
assured him they had done by sending him flying into a hedge. Peter,
being reprimanded by his commanding officer, acknowledged a hot desire to
try his mettle, and the latter responsible person had to be restrained
from granting the wish he cherished by John Girling, whom he threw for
his trouble and as Burdock was the soundest hitter, numbers cried out
against Girling, revolting him with a sense of overwhelming injustice
that could be appeased only by his prostrating two stout lads and
squaring against a third, who came up from a cross-road. This one knocked
him down with the gentleness of a fist that knows how Beer should be
treated, and then sang out, in the voice of Wilfrid Pole: "Which is the
nearest way to Ipley, you fellows?"

"Come along with us, sir, and we'll show you," said Burdock.

"Are you going there?"

"Well, that's pretty clear."

"Hillford men, are you?"

"We've left the women behind."

"I'm in a hurry, so, good night."

"And so are we in a hurry, sir. But, you're a gentleman, and we want to
give them chaps at Ipley a little surprise, d'ye see, in the way of a
dollop o' music: and if you won't go givin' 'em warning, you may trot;
and that road'll take you."

"All right," said Wilfrid, now fairly divided between his jealousy of
Gambier and anxiety for Emilia.

Could her artist nature, of which he had heard perplexing talk, excuse
her and make her heart absolutely guiltless (what he called 'innocent'),
in trusting herself to any man's honour? I regret to say that the dainty
adorers of the sex are even thus grossly suspicious of all women when
their sentiment is ever so triflingly offended.

Lights on Ipley Common were seen from a rise of the hilly road. The moon
was climbing through drifts of torn black cloud. Hastening his pace, for
a double reason now, Wilfrid had the booth within hearing, listened a
moment; and then stood fast. His unconscious gasp of the words: "Thank
God; there she is!" might have betrayed him to another.

She was sitting near one end of the booth, singing as Wilfrid had never
yet heard her sing: her dark eyes flashing. Behind her stood Captain
Gambier, keeping guard with all the composure of a gentleman-usher at a
royal presentation. Along the tables, men and women were ranged facing
her; open-mouthed, some of them but for the most part wearing a
predetermined expression of applausive judgement, as who should say,
"Queer, but good." They gave Emilia their faces, which was all she
wanted! and silence, save for an intermingling soft snore, here and
there, the elfin trumpet of silence. To tell truth, certain heads had
bowed low to the majesty of beer, and were down on the table between
sprawling doubled arms. No essay on the power of beer could exhibit it
more convincingly than, the happy indifference with which they received
admonishing blows from quart-pots, salutes from hot pipe-bowls, pricks
from pipe-ends, on nose, and cheek, and pate; as if to vindicate for
their beloved beverage a right to rank with that old classic drink
wherewith the fairest of women vanquished human ills. The majority,
however, had been snatched out of this bliss by the intrusion of their
wives, who sat beside them like Consciences in petticoats; and it must be
said that Emilia was in favour with the married men, for one reason,
because she gave these broad-ribboned ladies a good excuse for
allowing their lords to stop where they were so comfortable,
a continually-extending five minutes longer.

Yet, though the words were foreign and the style of the song and the
singer were strange, many of the older fellows' eyes twinkled, and their
mouths pursed with a kind of half-protesting pleasure. All were reverent
to the compliment paid them by Emilia's presence. The general expression
was much like that seen when the popular ear is given to the national
anthem. Wilfrid hung at the opening of the booth, a cynical spectator.
For what on earth made her throw such energy, and glory of music, into a
song before fellows like these? He laughed dolorously, "she hasn't a
particle of any sense of ridicule," he said to himself. Forthwith her
voice took hold of him, and led him as heroes of old were led unwillingly
into enchanted woods. If she had been singing things holy, a hymn, a
hallelujah, in this company, it struck him that somehow it would have
seemed appropriate; not objectionable; at any rate, not ridiculous. Dr.
Watts would have put a girdle about her; but a song of romance sung in
this atmosphere of pipes and beer and boozy heads, chagrined Wilfrid in
proportion as the softer half of him began to succumb to the
deliciousness of her voice.

Emilia may have had some warning sense that admiration is only one
ingredient of homage, that to make it fast and true affection must be
won. Now, poor people, yokels, clods, cannot love what is
incomprehensible to them. An idol must have their attributes: a king must
show his face now and then: a song must appeal to their intelligence, to
subdue them quite. This, as we know, is not the case in the higher
circles. Emilia may have divined it: possibly from the very great respect
with which her finale was greeted. Vigorous as the "Brayvos" were, they
sounded abashed: they lacked abandonment. In fact, it was gratitude that
applauded, and not enthusiasm. "Hillford don't hear stuff like that, do
'em?" which was the main verbal encomium passed, may be taken
testificatorily as to this point.

"Dame! dame!" cried Emilia, finding her way quickly to one of the more
decently-bonneted women; "am I not glad to see you here! Did I please
you? And you, dear Farmer Wilson? I caught sight of you just as I was
finishing. I remember the song you like, and I want to sing it. I know
the tune, but the words! the words! what are the words? Humming won't
do."

"Ah, now!" quoth Farmer Wilson, pointing out the end of his pipe, "that's
what they'll swallow down; that's the song to make 'em kick. Sing that,
miss. Furrin songs 's all right enough; but 'Ale it is my tipple, and
England is my nation!' Let's have something plain and flat on the
surface, miss."

Dame Wilson jogged her husband's arm, to make him remember that talking
was his dangerous pastime, and sent abroad a petition for a song-book;
and after a space a very doggy-eared book, resembling a poodle of that
genus, was handed to her. Then uprose a shout for this song and that; but
Emilia fixed upon the one she had in view, and walked back to her harp,
with her head bent, perusing it attentively all the way. There, she gave
the book to Captain Gambier, and begged him to hold it open before her,
with a passing light of eyes likely to be rather disturbing to a jealous
spectator. The Captain seized the book without wincing, and displayed a
remarkable equanimity of countenance as he held it out, according to
direction. No sooner had Emilia struck a prelude of the well-known air,
than the interior of the booth was transfigured; legs began to move,
elbows jerked upward, fingers fillipped: the whole body of them were
ready to duck and bow, dance, and do her bidding she had fairly caught
their hearts. For, besides the pleasure they had in their own familiar
tune, it was wonderful to them that Emilia should know what they knew.
This was the marvel, this the inspiration. She smiled to see how true she
had struck, and seemed to swim on the pleasure she excited. Once, as her
voice dropped, she looked up at Captain Gambier, so very archly, with the
curving line of her bare throat, that Wilfrid was dragged down from his
cynical observatory, and made to feel as a common man among them all.

At the "thrum-thrum" on the harp-strings, which wound up the song,
frenzied shouts were raised for a repetition. Emilia was perfectly
willing to gratify them; Captain Gambier appeared to be remonstrating
with her, but she put up her joined hands, mock-petitioningly, and he
with great affability held out the book anew. Wilfrid was thinking of
moving to her to take her forcibly away when she recommenced.

At the same instant--but who, knowing that a house of glass is about to
be shattered, can refrain from admiring its glitter in the beams?--Ipley
crooned a ready accompaniment: the sleepers had been awakened: the women
and the men were alive, half-dancing, half-chorusing here a baby was
tossed, and there an old fellow's elbow worked mutely, expressive of the
rollicking gaiety within him: the whole length of the booth was in a
pleasing simmer, ready to overboil with shouts humane and cheerful, while
Emilia pitched her note and led; archly, and quite one with them all, and
yet in a way that critical Wilfrid could not object to, so plainly did
she sing to give happiness.

I cannot delay; but I request you, that are here privileged to soar aloft
with the Muse, to fix your minds upon one point in this flight. Let not
the heat and dust of the ensuing fray divert your attention from the
magnanimity of Beer. It will be vindicated in the end but be worthy of
your seat beside the Muse, who alone of us all can take one view of the
inevitable two that perplex mortal judgements.

For, if Ipley had jumped jovially up, and met the Hillford alarum with
laughter,--how then? Why, then I maintain that the magnanimity of Beer
would have blazed effulgent on the spot: there would have been louder
laughter and fraternal greetings. As it was, the fire on the altar of
Wisdom was again kindled by Folly, and the steps to the altar were broken
heads, after the antique fashion.

In dismay, Ipley started. The members of the Club stared. Emilia faltered
in horror.

A moment her voice swam stemming the execrable concert, but it was
overwhelmed. Wilfrid pressed forward to her. They could hear nothing but
the din. The booth raged like an insurgent menagerie. Outside it sounded
of brazen beasts, and beasts that whistled, beasts that boomed. A
whirlwind huddled them, and at last a cry, "We've got a visit from
Hillford," told a tale. At once the stoutest hearts pressed to the
opening. "My harp!" Emilia made her voice reach Wilfrid's ear. Unprovided
with weapons, Ipley parleyed. Hillford howled in reply. The trombone
brayed an interminable note, that would have driven to madness quiescent
cats by steaming kettles, and quick, like the springing pulse of battle,
the drum thumped and thumped. Blood could not hear it and keep from
boiling. The booth shook violently. Wilfrid and Gambier threw over
half-a-dozen chairs, forms, and tables, to make a barrier for the
protection of the women.

"Come," Wilfrid said to Emilia, "leave the harp, I will get you another.
Come."

"No, no," she cried in her nervous fright.

"For God's sake, come!" he reiterated, she, stamping her foot, as to
emphasize "No! no! no!"

"But I will buy you another harp;" he made audible to her through the
hubbub.

"This one!" she gasped with her hand on it. "What will he think if he
finds that I forsook it?"

Wilfrid knew her to allude to the unknown person who had given it to her.

"There--there," said he. "I sent it, and I can get you another. So, come.
Be good, and come."

"It was you!"

Emilia looked at him. She seemed to have no senses for the uproar about
her.

But now the outer barricade was broken through, and the rout pressed on
the second line. Tom Breeks, the orator, and Jim, transformed from a
lurching yokel to a lithe dog of battle, kept the retreat of Ipley,
challenging any two of Hillford to settle the dispute. Captain Gambier
attempted an authoritative parley, in the midst of which a Hillford man
made a long arm and struck Emilia's harp, till the strings jarred loose
and horrid. The noise would have been enough to irritate Wilfrid beyond
endurance. When he saw the fellow continuing to strike the harp-frame
while Emilia clutched it, in a feeble defence, against her bosom, he
caught a thick stick from a neighbouring hand and knocked that Hillford
man so clean to earth that Hillford murmured at the blow. Wilfrid then
joined the front array.

"Half-a-dozen hits like that a-piece, sir," nodded Tom Breeks.

"There goes another!" Jim shouted.

"Not quite, my lad," interposed Ned Thewk, though Peter Bartholomew was
reeling in confirmation.

His blow at Jim missed, but came sharply in the swing on Wilfrid's
cheek-bone.

Maddened at the immediate vision of that feature swollen, purple, even as
a plum with an assiduous fly on it, certifying to ripeness:--Says the
philosopher, "We are never up to the mark of any position, if we are in a
position beneath our own mark;" and it is true that no hero in conflict
should think of his face, but Wilfrid was all the while protesting
wrathfully against the folly of his having set foot in such a
place:--Maddened, I say, Wilfrid, a keen swordman, cleared a space. John
Girling fell to him: Ned Thewk fell to him, and the sconce of Will
Burdock rang.

"A rascally absurd business!" said Gambier, letting his stick do the part
of a damnatory verb on one of the enemy, while he added, "The drunken
vagabonds!"

All the Hillford party were now in the booth. Ipley, meantime, was not
sleeping. Farmer Wilson and a set of the Ipley men whom age had
sagaciously instructed to prefer stratagem to force, had slipped outside,
and were labouring as busily as their comrades within: stooping to the
tent-pegs, sending emissaries to the tent-poles.

"Drunk!" roared Will Burdock. "Did you happen to say 'drunk?'" And
looking all the while at Gambier, he, with infernal cunning, swung at
Wilfrid's fated cheekbone. The latter rushed furiously into the press of
them, and there was a charge from Ipley, and a lock, from which Wilfrid
extricated himself to hurry off Emilia. He perceived that bad blood was
boiling up.

"Forward!" cried Will Burdock, and Hillford in turn made a tide.

As they came on in numbers too great for Ipley to stand against, an
obscuration fell over all. The fight paused. Then a sensation as of some
fellows smoothing their polls and their cheeks, and leaning on their
shoulders with obtrusive affection, inspirited them to lash about
indiscriminately. Whoops and yells arose; then peals of laughter. Homage
to the cleverness of Ipley was paid in hurrahs, the moment Hillford
understood the stratagem by which its men of valour were lamed and
imprisoned. The truth was, that the booth was down on them, and they were
struggling entangled in an enormous bag of canvas.

Wilfrid drew Emilia from under the drooping folds of the tent. He was
allowed, on inspection of features, to pass. The men of Hillford were
captured one by one like wild geese, as with difficulty they emerged,
roaring, rolling with laughter, all.

Yea; to such an extent did they laugh that they can scarce be said to
have done less than make the joke of the foe their own. And this proves
the great and amazing magnanimity of Beer.




CHAPTER XII

A pillar of dim silver rain fronted the moon on the hills. Emilia walked
hurriedly, with her head bent, like a penitent: now and then peeping up
and breathing to the keen scent of the tender ferns. Wilfrid still
grasped her hand, and led her across the common, away from the rout.

When the uproar behind them had sunk, he said "You'll get your feet wet.
I'm sorry you should have to walk. How did you come here?"

She answered: "I forget."

"You must have come here in some conveyance. Did you walk?"

Again she answered: "I forget;" a little querulously; perhaps wilfully.

"Well!" he persisted: "You must have got your harp to this place by some
means or other?"

"Yes, my harp!" a sob checked her voice.

Wilfrid tried to soothe her. "Never mind the harp. It's easily replaced."

"Not that one!" she moaned.

"We will get you another."

"I shall never love any but that."

"Perhaps we may hear good news of it to-morrow."

"No; for I felt it die in my hands. The third blow was the one that
killed it. It's broken."

Wilfrid could not reproach her, and he had not any desire to preach. So,
as no idea of having done amiss in coming to the booth to sing illumined
her, and she yet knew that she was in some way guilty, she accused
herself of disregard for that dear harp while it was brilliant and
serviceable. "Now I remember what poor music I made of it! I touched it
with cold fingers. The sound was thin, as if it had no heart.
Tick-tick!--I fancy I touched it with a dead man's finger-nails."

She crossed her wrists tight at the clasp of her waist, and letting her
chin fall on her throat, shook her body fretfully, much as a pettish
little girl might do. Wilfrid grimaced. "Tick-tick" was not a pathetic
elegy in his ears.

"The only thing is, not to think about it," said he. "It's only an
instrument, after all."

"It's the second one I've seen killed like a living creature," replied
Emilia.

They walked on silently, till Wilfrid remarked, that he wondered where
Gambier was. She gave no heed to the name. The little quiet footing and
the bowed head by his side, moved him to entreat her not to be unhappy.
Her voice had another tone when she answered that she was not unhappy.

"No tears at all?" Wilfrid stooped to get a close view of her face. "I
thought I saw one. If it's about the harp, look!--you shall go into that
cottage where the light is, sit there, and wait for me, and I will bring
you what remains of it. I dare say we can have it mended."

Emilia lifted her eyes. "I am not crying for the harp. If you go back I
must go with you."

"That's out of the question. You must never be found in that sort of
place again."

"Let us leave the harp," she murmured. "You cannot go without me. Let me
sit here for a minute. Sit with me."

She pointed to a place beside herself on the fork of a dry log under
flowering hawthorn. A pale shadowy blue centre of light among the clouds
told where the moon was. Rain had ceased, and the refreshed earth smelt
all of flowers, as if each breeze going by held a nosegay to their
nostrils.

Wilfrid was sensible of a sudden marked change in her. His blood was
quicker than his brain in feeling it. Her voice now, even in common
speaking, had that vibrating richness which in her singing swept his
nerves.

"If you cry, there must be a cause, you know," he said, for the sake of
keeping the conversation in a safe channel.

"How brave you are!" was Emilia's sedate exclamation, in reply.

Her cheeks glowed, as if she had just uttered a great confession, but
while the colour mounted to her eyes, they kept their affectionate
intentness upon him without a quiver of the lids.

"Do you think me a coward?" she relieved him by asking sharply, like one
whom the thought had turned into a darker path. "I am not. I hung my head
while you were fighting, because, what could I do? I would not have left
you. Girls can only say, 'I will perish with him.'"

"But," Wilfrid tried to laugh, "there was no necessity for that sort of
devotion. What are you thinking of? It was half in good-humour, all
through. Part of their fun!"

Clearly Emilia's conception of the recent fray was unchangeable.

"And the place for girls is at home; that's certain," he added.

"I should always like to be where..." Her voice flowed on with singular
gravity to that stop.

Wilfrid's hand travelled mechanically to his pricking cheek-bone.

Was it possible that a love-scene was coming on as a pendant to that
monstrously ridiculous affair of half-an-hour back? To know that she had
sufficient sensibility was gratifying, and flattering that it aimed at
him. She was really a darling little woman: only too absurd! Had she been
on the point of saying that she would always like to be where he,
Wilfrid, was? An odd touch of curiosity, peculiar to the languid
emotions, made him ask her this: and to her soft "Yes," he continued
briskly, and in the style of condescending fellowship: "Of course we're
not going to part!"

"I wonder," said Emilia.

There she sat, evidently sounding right through the future with her young
brain, to hear what Destiny might have to say.

The 'I wonder' rang sweetly in his head. It was as delicate a way of
confessing, "I love you with all my soul," as could be imagined.
Extremely refined young ladies could hardly have improved upon it, saving
with the angelic shades of sentiment familiar to them.

Convinced that he had now heard enough for his vanity, Wilfrid returned
emphatically to the tone of the world's highroad.

"By the way," he said, "you mustn't have any exaggerated idea of this
night's work. Remember, also, I have to share the honours with Captain
Gambier."

"I did not see him," said Emilia.

"Are you not cold?" he asked, for a diversion, though he had one of her
hands.

She gave him the other.

He could not quit them abruptly: nor could he hold both without being
drawn to her.

"What is it you say?" Wilfrid whispered: "men kiss us when we are happy.
Is that right? and are you happy?"

She lifted a clear full face, to which he bent his mouth. Over the
flowering hawthorn the moon stood like a windblown white rose of the
heavens. The kiss was given and taken. Strange to tell, it was he who
drew away from it almost bashfully, and with new feelings.

Quite unaware that he played the feminine part, Wilfrid alluded to her
flight from Richford, with the instinct to sting his heart by a revival
of his jealous sensations previously experienced, and so taste the luxury
of present satisfaction.

"Why did you run away from me?" he said, semi-reproachfully.

"I promised."

"Would you not break a promise to stay with me?"

"Now I would!"

"You promised Captain Gambier?"

"No: those poor people."

"You are sorry that you went?"

No: she was happy.

"You have lost your harp by it," said Wilfrid.

"What do you think of me for not guessing--not knowing who sent it?" she
returned. "I feel guilty of something all those days that I touched it,
not thinking of you. Wicked, filthy little creature that I was! I despise
ungrateful girls."

"I detest anything that has to do with gratitude," Wilfrid appended,
"pray give me none. Why did you go away with Captain Gambier?"

"I was very fond of him," she replied unhesitatingly, but speaking as it
were with numbed lips. "I wanted to tell him, to thank him and hold his
hand. I told him of my promise. He spoke to me a moment in the garden,
you know. He said he was leaving to go to London early, and would wait
for me in the carriage: then we might talk. He did not wish to talk to me
in the garden."

"And you went with him in the carriage, and told him you were so
grateful?"

"Yes; but men do not like us to be grateful."

"So, he said he would do all sorts of things on condition that you were
not grateful?"

"He said--yes: I forget: I do forget! How can I tell what he said?"
Emilia added piteously. "I feel as if I had been emptied out of a sack!"

Wilfrid was pierced with laughter; and then the plainspoken simile gave
him a chilling sensation while he was rising to the jealous pitch.

"Did he talk about taking you to Italy? Put your head into the sack, and
think!"

"Yes," she answered blandly, an affirmative that caused him some
astonishment, for he had struck at once to the farthest end of his
suspicions.

"He feels as I do about the Italian Schools," said Emilia. "He wishes me
to owe my learning to him. He says it will make him happy, and I thought
so too." She threw in a "then."

Wilfrid looked moodily into the opposite hedge.

"Did he name the day for your going?" he asked presently, little
anticipating another "Yes": but it came: and her rather faltering manner
showed her to be conscious too that the word was getting to be a black
one to him.

"Did you say you would go?"

"I did."

Question and answer crossed like two rapiers.

Wilfrid jumped up.

"The smell of this tree's detestable," he said, glancing at the shadowing
hawthorn.

Emilia rose quietly, plucked a flower off the tree, and put it in her
bosom.

Their way was down a green lane and across long meadow-paths dim in the
moonlight. A nightingale was heard on this side and on that. Overhead
they had a great space of sky with broken cloud full of the glory of the
moon. The meadows dipped to a brook, slenderly spanned by a plank. Then
there was an ascent through a cornfield to a copse. Rounding this they
had sight of Brookfield. But while they were yet at the brook, Wilfrid
said, "When is it you're going to Italy?"

In return he had an eager look, so that he was half-ashamed to add, "With
Captain Gambier, I mean." He was suffering, and by being brutal he
expected to draw balm on himself; nor was he deceived.

Emilia just then gave him her hand to be led over, and answered, as she
neared him, "I am never to leave you."

"You never shall!" Wilfrid caught her in his arms, quite conquered by
her, proud of her. He reflected with a loving rapture that her manner at
that moment was equal to any lady's; and the phantom of her with her hand
out, and her frank look, and trustful footing, while she spoke those
words, kept on advancing to him all the way to Brookfield, at the same
time that the sober reality murmured at his elbow.

Love, with his accustomed cunning, managed thus to lift her out of the
mire and array her in his golden dress to idealize her, as we say.
Reconciled for the hour were the contesting instincts in the nature of
this youth the adoration of feminine refinement and the susceptibility to
sensuous impressions. But Emilia walked with a hero: the dream of all her
days! one, generous and gentle, as well as brave: who had fought for her,
had thought of her tenderly, was with her now, having raised her to his
level with a touch! How much might they not accomplish together: he with
sword, she with harp? Through shadowy alleys in the clouds, Emilia saw
the bright Italian plains opening out to her: the cities of marble, such
as her imagination had fashioned them, porticos of stately palaces, and
towers, and statues white among cypresses; and farther, minutely-radiant
in the vista as a shining star, Venice of the sea. Fancy made the flying
minutes hours. Now they marched with the regiments of Italy, under the
folds of her free banner; now she sang to the victorious army, waving the
banner over them; and now she floated in a gondola, and turning to him,
the dear home of her heart, yet pale with the bleeding of his wound for
Italy, said softly, in the tone that had power with him, "Only let me
please you!"

"When? Where? What with?" came the blunt response from England, with
electric speed, and Emilia fell from the clouds.

"I meant my singing; I thought of how I sang to you. Oh, happy time!" she
exclaimed, to cut through the mist of vision in her mind.

"To me? down at the booth?" muttered Wilfrid, perplexed.

"Oh, no! I mean, just now--" and languid with the burden of so full a
heart, she did not attempt to explain herself further, though he said,
invitingly, "I thought I heard you humming?"

Then he was seized with a desire to have the force of her spirit upon
him, for Brookfield was in view; and with the sight of Brookfield, the
natural fascination waxed a shade fainter, and he feared it might be
going. This (he was happily as ignorant as any other youth of the working
of his machinery) prompted him to bid her sing before they parted. Emilia
checked her steps at once to do as he desired. Her throat filled, but the
voice quavered down again, like a fainting creature sick unto death. She
made another effort and ended with a sorrowful look at his
narrowly-watching eyes.

"I can't," she said; and, in fear of his anger, took his hand to beg
forgiveness, while her eyelids drooped.

Wilfrid locked her fingers in a strong pressure, and walked on, silent as
a man who has faced one of the veiled mysteries of life. It struck a full
human blow on his heart, dragging him out of his sentimental pastures
precipitately. He felt her fainting voice to be the intensest love-cry
that could be uttered. The sound of it coursed through his blood,
striking a rare illumination of sparks in his not commonly brilliant
brain. In truth, that little episode showed an image of nature weak with
the burden of new love. I do not charge the young cavalry officer with
the power of perceiving images. He saw no more than that she could not
sing because of what was in her heart toward him; but such a physical
revelation was a divine love-confession, coming involuntarily from one
whose lips had not formed the name of love; and Wilfrid felt it so
deeply, that the exquisite flattery was almost lost, in a certain awed
sense of his being in the presence of an absolute fact: a thing real,
though it was much talked about, and visible, though it did not wear a
hat or a petticoat.

It searched him thoroughly enough to keep him from any further pledges in
that direction, propitious as the moment was, while the moon slipped over
banks of marble into fields of blue, and all the midnight promised
silence. They passed quickly through the laurel shrubs, and round the
lawn. Lights were in the sleepless ladies' bed-room windows.

"Do I love her?" thought Wilfrid, as he was about to pull at the bell,
and the thought that he should feel pain at being separated from her for
half-a-dozen hours, persuaded him that he did. The self-restraint which
withheld him from protesting that he did, confirmed it.

"To-morrow morning," he whispered.

"I shall be down by daylight," answered Emilia.

"You are in the shade--I cannot see you," said he.

The door opened as Emilia was moving out of the line of shadow.




CHAPTER XIII

On the morrow Wilfrid was gone. No one had seen him go. Emilia, while she
touched the keys of a muted piano softly in the morning quiet of the
house, had heard the front-door close. At that hour one attributes every
noise to the servants. She played on and waited patiently, till the
housemaid expelled her into the dewy air.

The report from his bedchamber, telling the ladies of his absence, added
that he had taken linen for a lengthened journey.

This curious retreat of my hero belongs to the order of things that are
done 'None know why;' a curtain which drops conveniently upon either the
bewilderment of the showman or the infirmities of the puppet.

I must own (though I need not be told what odium frowns on such a
pretension to excess of cleverness) that I do know why. I know why, and,
unfortunately for me, I have to tell what I know. If I do not tell, this
narrative is so constituted that there will be no moral to it.

One who studies man in puppets (in which purpose lies the chief value of
this amusing species), must think that we are degenerating rapidly. The
puppet hero, for instance, is a changed being. We know what he was; but
now he takes shelter in his wits. His organs affect his destiny. Careless
of the fact that the hero's achievement is to conquer nature, he seems
rather to boast of his subservience to her.

Still, up to this day, the fixture of a nose upon the puppet-hero's
frontispiece has not been attempted. Some one does it at last. When the
alternative came: "No nose to the hero, no moral to the tale;" could
there be hesitation?

And I would warn our sentimentalists to admit the nose among the features
proper to heroes, otherwise the race will become extinct. There is
already an amount of dropping of the curtain that is positively
wearisome, even to extremely refined persons, in order to save him from
apparent misconduct. He will have to go altogether, unless we boldly
figure him as other men. Manifestly the moment his career as a fairy
prince was at end, he was on the high road to a nose. The beneficent
Power that discriminated for him having vanished utterly, he was, like a
bankrupt gentleman, obliged to do all the work for himself. This is
nothing more than the tendency of the generations downward from the
ideal.

The springs that moved Wilfrid upon the present occasion were simple. We
will strip him of his heroic trappings for one fleeting instant, and show
them.

Jumping briskly from a restless bed, his first act was to address his
features to the looking-glass: and he saw surely the most glorious sight
for a hero of the knightly age that could possibly have been offered. The
battle of the previous night was written there in one eloquent big lump,
which would have passed him current as hero from end to end of the land
in the great days of old. These are the tea-table days. His preference
was for the visage of Wilfrid Pole, which he saw not. At the aspect of
the fearful mask, this young man stared, and then cursed; and then, by an
odd transition, he was reminded, as by the force of a sudden gust, that
Emilia's hair was redolent of pipe-smoke.

His remark was, "I can't be seen in this state." His thought (a dim
reminiscence of poetical readings): "Ambrosial locks indeed!" A sad
irony, which told that much gold-leaf had peeled away from her image in
his heart.

Wilfrid was a gallant fellow, with good stuff in him. But, he was young.
Ponder on that pregnant word, for you are about to see him grow. He was
less a coxcomb than shamefaced and sentimental; and one may have these
qualities, and be a coxcomb to boot, and yet be a gallant fellow. One may
also be a gallant fellow, and harsh, exacting, double-dealing, and I know
not what besides, in youth. The question asked by nature is, "Has he the
heart to take and keep an impression?" For, if he has, circumstances will
force him on and carve the figure of a brave man out of that mass of
contradictions. In return for such benefits, he pays forfeit commonly of
the dearest of the things prized by him in this terrestrial life.
Whereat, albeit created man by her, he reproaches nature, and the
sculptor, circumstance; forgetting that to make him man is their sole
duty, and that what betrayed him was the difficulty thrown in their way
by his quondam self--the pleasant boonfellow!

He forgets, in fact, that he was formerly led by his nose, and sacrificed
his deeper feeling to a low disgust.

When the youth is called upon to look up, he can adore devoutly and
ardently; but when it is his chance to look down on a fair head, he is,
if not worse, a sentimental despot.

Wilfrid was young, and under the dominion of his senses; which can be, if
the sentimentalists will believe me, as tyrannous and misleading when
super-refined as when ultra-bestial. He made a good stout effort to
resist the pipe-smoke. Emilia's voice, her growing beauty, her
simplicity, her peculiar charms of feature, were all conjured up to
combat the dismal images suggested by that fatal, dragging-down smell. It
was vain. Horrible pipe-smoke pervaded the memory of her. It seemed to
his offended dainty fancy that he could never dissociate her from
smoking-booths and abominably bad tobacco; and, let us add (for this was
part of the secret), that it never could dwell on her without the
companionship of a hideous disfigured countenance, claiming to be Wilfrid
Pole. He shuddered to think that he had virtually almost engaged himself
to this girl. Or, had he? Was his honour bound? Distance appeared to
answer the question favourably. There was safety in being distant from
her. She possessed an incomprehensible attractiveness. She was at once
powerful and pitiable: so that while he feared her, and was running from
her spell, he said, from time to time, "Poor little thing!" and deeply
hoped she would not be unhappy.

A showman once (a novice in his art, or ambitious beyond the mark), after
a successful exhibition of his dolls, handed them to the company, with
the observation, "satisfy yourselves, ladies and gentlemen." The latter,
having satisfied themselves that the capacity of the lower limbs was
extraordinary, returned them, disenchanted. That showman did ill. But I
am not imitating him. I do not wait till after the performance, when it
is too late to revive illusion. To avoid having to drop the curtain, I
choose to explain an act on which the story hinges, while it is
advancing: which is, in truth, an impulse of character. Instead of his
being more of a puppet, this hero is less wooden than he was. Certainly I
am much more in awe of him.




CHAPTER XIV

Mr. Pole was one of those men whose characters are read off at a glance.
He was neat, insignificant, and nervously cheerful; with the eyes of a
bird, that let you into no interior. His friends knew him thoroughly. His
daughters were never in doubt about him. At the period of the purchase of
Brookfield he had been excitable and feverish, but that was ascribed to
the projected change in his habits, and the stern necessity for an
occasional family intercommunication on the subject of money. He had a
remarkable shyness of this theme, and reversed its general treatment; for
he would pay, but would not talk of it. If it had to be discussed with
the ladies, he puffed, and blinked, and looked so much like a culprit
that, though they rather admired him for what seemed to them the germ of
a sense delicate above his condition, they would have said of any man
they had not known so perfectly, that he had painful reasons for wishing
to avoid it. Now that they spoke to him of Besworth, assuring him that
they were serious in their desire to change their residence, the fit of
shyness was manifested, first in outrageous praise of Brookfield, which
was speedily and inexplicably followed by a sort of implied assent to the
proposition to depart from it. For Besworth displayed numerous advantages
over Brookfield, and to contest one was to plunge headlong into the money
question. He ventured to ask his daughters what good they expected from
the change. They replied that it was simply this: that one might live
fifty years at Brookfield and not get such a circle as in two might be
established at Besworth. They were restricted. They had gathering
friends, and no means of bringing them together. And the beauty of the
site of Besworth made them enthusiastic.

"Well, but," said Mr. Pole: "what does it lead to? Is there nothing to
come after?"

He explained: "You're girls, you know. You won't always stop with me. You
may do just as well at Brookfield for yourselves, as over there."

The ladies blushed demurely.

"You forecast very kindly for us, papa," said Cornelia. "Our object is
entirely different."

"I wish I could see it," he returned.

"But, you do see, papa, you do see," interposed Adela, "that a select
life is preferable to that higgledy-piggledy city-square existence so
many poor creatures are condemned to!"

"Select!" said Mr. Pole, thinking that he had hit upon a weakness in
their argument; "how can it be select when you want to go to a place
where you may have a crowd about you?"

"Selection can only be made from a crowd," remarked Arabella, with
terrible placidity. "It is where we see few that we are at the mercy of
kind fortune for our acquaintances."

"Don't you see, papa, that the difference between the aristocracy and the
bourgeoisie is, that the former choose their sets, and the latter are
obliged to take what comes to them?" said Adela.

This was the first domestic discussion upon Besworth. The visit to
Richford had produced the usual effect on the ladies, who were now
looking to other heights from that level. The ladies said: "We have only
to press it with papa, and we shall quit this place." But at the second
discussion they found that they had not advanced. The only change was in
the emphasis that their father added to the interrogations already
uttered. "What does it lead to? What's to come after? I see your object.
But, am I to go into a new house for the sake of getting you out of it,
and then be left there alone? It's against your interests, too. Never
mind how. Leave that to a business man. If your brother had proposed
it...but he's too reasonable."

The ladies, upon this hint, wrote to Wilfrid to obtain his concurrence
and assistance. He laughed when he read the simple sentence: "We hope you
will not fancy that we have any peculiar personal interest in view;" and
replied to them that he was sure they had none: that he looked upon
Besworth with favour, "and I may inform you," he pursued, "that your
taste is heartily applauded by Lady Charlotte Chillingworth, she bids me
tell you." The letter was dated from Stornley, the estate of the marquis,
Lady Charlotte's father. Her ladyship's brother was a member of Wilfrid's
Club. "He calls Besworth the most habitable place in the county, and
promises to be there as many months out of the twelve as you like to have
him. I agree with him that Stornley can't hold a candle to it. There are
three residences in England that might be preferred to it, and, of those,
two are ducal."

The letter was a piece of that easy diplomacy which comes from habit. The
"of those, two are ducal," was masterly. It affected the imagination of
Brookfield. "Which two?" And could Besworth be brought to rival them?
Ultimately, it might be! The neighbourhood to London, too, gave it noble
advantages. Rapid relays of guests, and a metropolitan reputation for
country attractions, would distinguish Besworth above most English
houses. A house where all the chief celebrities might be encountered: a
house under suave feminine rule; a house, a home, to a chosen set, and a
refreshing fountain to a widening circle!

"We have a dispute," they wrote playfully to Wilfrid "a dispute we wish
you or Lady Charlotte to settle. I, Arabella, know nothing of trout. I,
Cornelia, know nothing of river-beds. I, Adela, know nothing of
engineering. But, we are persuaded, the latter, that the river running
for a mile through Besworth grounds may be deepened: we are persuaded,
the intermediate, that the attempt will damage the channel: we are
persuaded, the first, that all the fish will go."

In reply, Wilfrid appeared to have taken them in earnest. "I rode over
yesterday with Lady Charlotte," he said. "We think something might be
done, without at all endangering the fish or spoiling the channel. At all
events, the idea of making the mile of broad water serviceable for boats
is too good to give up in a hurry. How about the dining-hall? I told Lady
Charlotte you were sure to insist upon a balcony for musicians. She
laughed. You will like her when you know her."

Thus the ladies of Brookfield were led on to be more serious concerning
Besworth than they had thought of being, and began to feel that their
honour was pledged to purchase this surpassing family seat. In a
household where every want is supplied, and money as a topic utterly
banished, it is not surprising that they should have had imperial views.

Adela was Wilfrid's favoured correspondent. She described to him gaily
the struggle with their papa. "But, if you care for Besworth, you may
calculate on it.--Or is it only for our sakes, as I sometimes
think?--Besworth is won. Nothing but the cost of the place (to be
considered you know!) could withhold it from us; and of that papa has not
uttered a syllable, though he conjures up every possible objection to a
change of abode, and will not (perhaps, poor dear, cannot) see what we
intend doing in the world. Now, you know that rich men invariably make
the question of the cost their first and loudest outcry. I know that to
be the case. They call it their blood. Papa seems indifferent to this
part of the affair. He does not even allude to it. Still, we do not
progress. It is just possible that the Tinleys have an eye on beautiful
Besworth. Their own place is bad enough, but good enough for them. Give
them Besworth, and they will sit upon the neighbourhood. We shall be
invaded by everything that is mean and low, and a great chance will be
gone for us. I think I may say, for the county. The country? Our advice
is, that you write to papa one of your cleverest letters. We know,
darling, what you can do with the pen as well as the sword. Write word
that you have written."

Wilfrid's reply stated that he considered it unadviseable that he should
add his voice to the request, for the present.

The ladies submitted to this quietly until they heard from their father
one evening at dinner that he had seen Wilfrid in the city.

"He doesn't waste his time like some young people I know," said Mr. Pole,
with a wink.

"Papa; is it possible?" cried Adela.

"Everything's possible, my dear."

"Lady Charlotte?"

"There is a Lady Charlotte."

"Who would be Lady Charlotte still, whatever occurred!"

Mr. Pole laughed. "No, no. You get nothing out of me. All I say is, be
practical. The sun isn't always shining."

He appeared to be elated with some secret good news.

"Have you been over to Besworth, the last two or three days?" he asked.

The ladies smiled radiantly, acknowledging Wilfrid's wonderful persuasive
powers, in their hearts.

"No, papa; we have not been," said Adela. "We are always anxious to go,
as I think you know."

The merchant chirped over his glass. "Well, well! There's a way."

"Straight?"

"Over a gate; ha, ha!"

His gaiety would have been perplexing, but for the allusion to Lady
Charlotte.

The sisters, in their unfailing midnight consultation, persuaded one
another that Wilfrid had become engaged to that lady. They wrote
forthwith Fine Shades to him on the subject. His answer was Boeotian, and
all about Besworth. "Press it now," he said, "if you really want it. The
iron is hot. And above all things, let me beg you not to be inconsiderate
to the squire, when he and I are doing all we can for you. I mean, we are
bound to consider him, if there should happen to be anything he wishes us
to do."

What could the word 'inconsiderate' imply? The ladies were unable to
summon an idea to solve it. They were sure that no daughters could be
more perfectly considerate and ready to sacrifice everything to their
father. In the end, they deputed the volunteering Adela to sit with him
in the library, and put the question of Besworth decisively, in the name
of all. They, meantime, who had a contempt for sleep, waited aloft to
hold debate over the result of the interview.

An hour after midnight, Adela came to them, looking pale and uncertain:
her curls seeming to drip, and her blue eyes wandering about the room, as
if she had seen a thing that kept her in a quiver between belief and
doubt.

The two ladies drew near to her, expressing no verbal impatience, from
which the habit of government and great views naturally saved them, but
singularly curious.

Adela's first exclamation: "I wish I had not gone," alarmed them.

"Has any change come to papa?" breathed Arabella.

Cornelia smiled. "Do you not know him too well?"

An acute glance from Adela made her ask whether Besworth was to be
surrendered.

"Oh, no! my dear. We may have Besworth."

"Then, surely!"

"But, there are conditions?" said Arabella.

"Yes. Wilfrid's enigma is explained. Bella, that woman has seen papa."

"What woman?"

"Mrs. Chump."

"She has our permission to see him in town, if that is any consolation to
her."

"She has told him," continued Adela, "that no explanation, or whatever it
may be, was received by her."

"Certainly not, if it was not sent."

"Papa," and Adela's voice trembled, "papa will not think of
Besworth,--not a word of it!-until--until we consent to welcome that
woman here as our guest."

Cornelia was the first to break the silence that followed this astounding
intelligence. "Then," she said, "Besworth is not to be thought of. You
told him so?"

Adela's head drooped. "Oh!" she cried, "what shall we do? We shall be a
laughing-stock to the neighbourhood. The house will have to be locked up.
We shall live like hermits worried by a demon. Her brogue! Do you
remember it? It is not simply Irish. It's Irish steeped in brine. It's
pickled Irish!"

She feigned the bursting into tears of real vexation.

"You speak," said Cornelia contemptuously, "as if we had very humbly
bowed our heads to the infection."

"Papa making terms with us!" murmured Arabella.

"Pray, repeat his words."

Adela tossed her curls. "I will, as well as I can. I began by speaking of
Besworth cheerfully; saying, that if he really had no strong affection
for Brookfield, that would make him regret quitting it, we saw
innumerable advantages in the change of residence proposed.
Predilection,--not affection--that was what I said. He replied that
Besworth was a large place, and I pointed out that therein lay one of its
principal merits. I expected what would come. He alluded to the
possibility of our changing our condition. You know that idea haunts him.
I told him our opinion of the folly of the thing. I noticed that he grew
red in the face, and I said that of course marriage was a thing ordained,
but that we objected to being submerged in matrimony until we knew who
and what we were. I confess he did not make a bad reply, of its kind.
'You're like a youngster playing truant that he may gain knowledge.' What
do you think of it?"

"A smart piece of City-speech," was Arabella's remark: Cornelia placidly
observing, "Vulgarity never contains more than a minimum of the truth."

"I said," Adela went on, "Think as you will, papa, we know we are right."
He looked really angry. He said, that we have the absurdest ideas--you
tell me to repeat his words--of any girls that ever existed; and then he
put a question: listen: I give it without comment: 'I dare say, you all
object to widows marrying again.' I kept myself quiet. 'Marrying again,
papa! If they marry once they might as well marry a dozen times.' It was
the best way to irritate him. I did not intend it; that is all I can say.
He jumped from his chair, rubbed his hair, and almost ran up and down the
library floor, telling me that I prevaricated. 'You object to a widow
marrying at all--that's my question!' he cried out loud. Of course I
contained my voice all the more. 'Distinctly, papa.' When I had spoken, I
could scarcely help laughing. He went like a pony that is being broken
in, crying, I don't know how many times, 'Why? What's your reason?' You
may suppose, darlings, that I decline to enter upon explanation. If a
person is dense upon a matter of pure sentiment, there is no ground
between us: he has simply a sense wanting. 'What has all this to do with
Besworth?' I asked. 'A great deal more than you fancy,' was his answer.
He seemed to speak every word at me in capital letters. Then, as if a
little ashamed, he sat down, and reached out his hand to mine, and I saw
his eyes were moist. I drew my chair nearer to him. Now, whether I did
right or wrong in this, I do not know I leave it entirely to your
judgement. If you consider how I was placed, you will at all events
excuse me. What I did was--you know, the very farthest suspicion one has
of an extreme possibility one does not mind mentioning: I said 'Papa, if
it should so happen that money is the objection to Besworth, we will not
trouble you.' At this, I can only say that he behaved like an insane
person. He denounced me as wilfully insulting him that I might avoid one
subject."

"And what on earth can that be?" interposed Arabella.

"You may well ask. Could a genie have guessed that Mrs. Chump was at the
bottom of it all? The conclusion of the dreadful discussion is this, that
papa offers to take the purchase of Besworth into his consideration, if
we, as I said before, will receive Mrs. Chump as our honoured guest. I am
bound to say, poor dear old man, he spoke kindly, as he always does, and
kissed me, and offered to give me anything I might want. I came from him
stupefied. I have hardly got my senses about me yet."

The ladies caressed her, with grave looks; but neither of them showed a
perturbation of spirit like that which distressed Adela.

"Wilfrid's meaning is now explained," said Cornelia. "He is in league
with papa; or has given in his adhesion to papa's demands, at least. He
is another example of the constant tendency in men to be what they call
'practical' at the expense of honour and sincerity."

"I hope not," said Arabella. "In any case, that need not depress you so
seriously, darling."

She addressed Adela.

"Do you not see?" Adela cried, in response. "What! are you both blind to
the real significance of papa's words? I could not have believed it! Or
am I this time too acute? I pray to heaven it may be so!"

Both ladies desired her to be explicit; Arabella, eagerly; Cornelia with
distrust.

"The question of a widow marrying! What is this woman, whom papa wishes
to force on us as our guest? Why should he do that? Why should he evince
anxiety with regard to our opinion of the decency of widows contemplating
re-union? Remember previous words and hints when we lived in the city!"

"This at least you may spare us," said Cornelia, ruffling offended.

Adela smiled in tenderness for her beauty.

"But, it is important, if we are following a track, dear. Think over it."

"No!" cried Arabella. "It cannot be true. We might easily have guessed
this, if we ever dreamed of impossibilities."

"In such cases, when appearances lean in one direction, set principles in
the opposite balance," added Cornelia. "What Adela apprehends may seem to
impend, but we know that papa is incapable of doing it. To know that,
shuts the gates of suspicion. She has allowed herself to be troubled by a
ghastly nightmare."

Adela believed in her own judgement too completely not to be sure that
her sisters were, perhaps unknowingly, disguising a slowness of
perception they were ashamed of, by thus partially accusing her of
giddiness. She bit her lip.

"Very well; if you have no fears whatever, you need not abandon the idea
of Besworth."

"I abandon nothing," said Arabella. "If I have to make a choice, I take
that which is least objectionable. I am chagrined, most, at the idea that
Wilfrid has been treacherous."

"Practical," Cornelia suggested. "You are not speaking of one of our
sex."

Questions were then put to Adela, whether Mr. Pole had spoken in the
manner of one who was prompted: whether he hesitated as he spoke:
whether, in short, Wilfrid was seen behind his tongue. Adela resolved
that Wilfrid should have one protectress.

"You are entirely mistaken in ascribing treachery to him," she said. "It
is papa that is changed. You may suppose it to be without any reason, if
you please. I would tell you to study him for yourselves, only I am
convinced that these special private interviews are anything but good
policy, and are strictly to be avoided, unless of course, as in the
present instance, we have something directly to do."

Toward dawn the ladies had decreed that it was policy to be quite
passive, and provoke no word of Mrs. Chump by making any allusion to
Besworth, and by fencing with the mention of the place.

As they rarely failed to carry out any plan deliberately conceived by
them, Mr. Pole was astonished to find that Besworth was altogether
dropped. After certain scattered attempts to bring them upon Besworth, he
shrugged, and resigned himself, but without looking happy.

Indeed he looked so dismal that the ladies began to think he had a great
longing for Besworth. And yet he did not go there, or even praise it to
the discredit of Brookfield! They were perplexed.

"Let me ask you how it is," said Cornelia to Mr. Barrett, "that a person
whom we know--whose actions and motives are as plain to us as though
discerned through a glass, should at times produce a completer
mystification than any other creature? Or have you not observed it?"

"I have had better opportunities of observing it than most people," Mr.
Barren replied, with one of his saddest amused smiles. "I have come to
the conclusion that the person we know best is the one whom we never
understand."

"You answer me with a paradox."

"Is it not the natural attendant on an assumption?"

"What assumption?"

"That you know a person thoroughly."

"May we not?"

"Do you, when you acknowledge this 'complete mystification'?"

"Yes." Cornelia smiled when she had said it. "And no."

Mr. Barrett, with his eyes on her, laughed softly. "Which is paradox at
the fountain-head! But, when we say we know any one, we mean commonly
that we are accustomed to his ways and habits of mind; or, that we can
reckon on the predominant influence of his appetites. Sometimes we can
tell which impulse is likely to be the most active, and which principle
the least restraining. The only knowledge to be trusted is a grounded or
scientific study of the springs that move him, side by side with his
method of moving the springs. If you fail to do this, you have two
classes under your eyes: you have sane and madman: and it will seem to
you that the ranks of the latter are constantly being swollen in an
extraordinary manner. The customary impression, as we get older, is that
our friends are the maddest people in the world. You see, we have grown
accustomed to them; and now, if they bewilder us, our judgement, in
self-defence, is compelled to set them down lunatic."

Cornelia bowed her stately head with gentle approving laughter.

"They must go, or they despatch us thither," she said, while her fair
face dimpled into serenity. The remark was of a lower nature than an
intellectual discussion ordinarily drew from her: but could Mr. Barrett
have read in her heart, he might have seen that his words were beginning
to rob that organ of its native sobriety. So that when he spoke a cogent
phrase, she was silenced, and became aware of a strange exultation in her
blood that obscured grave thought. Cornelia attributed this display of
mental weakness altogether to Mr. Barrett's mental force. The
interposition of a fresh agency was undreamt of by the lady.

Meanwhile, it was evident that Mr. Pole was a victim to one of his fevers
of shyness. He would thrum on the table, frowning; and then, as he met
the look of one of the ladies, try to disguise the thought in his head
with a forced laugh. Occasionally, he would turn toward them, as if he
had just caught a lost idea that was peculiarly precious. The ladies
drawing up to attend to the communication, had a most trivial matter
imparted to them, and away he went. Several times he said to them "You
don't make friends, as you ought;" and their repudiation of the charge
made him repeat: "You don't make friends--home friends."

"The house can be as full as we care to have it, papa."

"Yes, acquaintances! All very well, but I mean friends--rich friends."

"We will think of it, papa," said Adela, "when we want money."

"It isn't that," he murmured.

Adela had written to Wilfrid a full account of her interview with her
father. Wilfrid's reply was laconic. "If you cannot stand a week of the
brogue, give up Besworth, by all means." He made no further allusion to
the place. They engaged an opera-box, for the purpose of holding a
consultation with him in town. He wrote evasively, but did not appear,
and the ladies, with Emilia between them, listened to every foot-fall by
the box-door, and were too much preoccupied to marvel that Emilia was
just as inattentive to the music as they were. When the curtain dropped
they noticed her dejection.

"What ails you?" they asked.

"Let us go out of London to-night," she whispered, and it was difficult
to persuade her that she would see Brookfield again.

"Remember," said Adela, "it is you that run away from us, not we from
you."

Soft chidings of this description were the only reproaches for her
naughty conduct. She seemed contrite very still and timid, since that
night of adventure. The ladies were glad to observe it, seeing that it
lent her an air of refinement, and proved her sensible to correction.

At last Mr. Pole broke the silence. He had returned from business,
humming and rubbing his hands, like one newly primed with a suggestion
that was the key of a knotty problem. Observant Adela said: "Have you
seen Wilfrid, papa?"

"Saw him in the morning," Mr. Pole replied carelessly.

Mr. Barrett was at the table.

"By the way, what do you think of our law of primogeniture?" Mr. Pole
addressed him.

He replied with the usual allusion to a basis of aristocracy.

"Well, it's the English system," said Mr. Pole. "That's always in its
favour at starting. I'm Englishman enough to think that. There ought to
be an entail of every decent bit of property, eh?"

It was observed that Mr. Barrett reddened as he said, "I certainly think
that a young man should not be subject to his father's caprice."

"Father's caprice! That isn't common. But, if you're founding a family,
you must entail."

"We agree, sir, from my point of view, and from yours."

"Knits the family bond, don't you think? I mean, makes the trunk of the
tree firm. It makes the girls poor, though!"

Mr. Barrett saw that he had some confused legal ideas in his head, and
that possibly there were personal considerations in the background; so he
let the subject pass.

When the guest had departed, Mr. Pole grew demonstrative in his paternal
caresses. He folded Adela in one arm, and framed her chin in his fingers:
marks of affection dear to her before she had outgrown them.

"So!" he said, "you've given up Besworth, have you?"

At the name, Arabella and Cornelia drew nearer to his chair.

"Given up Besworth, papa? It is not we who have given it up," said Adela.

"Yes, you have; and quite right too. You say, 'What's the use of it, for
that's a sort of thing that always goes to the son.'"

"You suppose, papa, that we indulge in ulterior calculations?" came from
Cornelia.

"Well, you see, my love!--no, I don't suppose it at all. But to buy a
place and split it up after two or three years--I dare say they wouldn't
insure me for more, that's nonsense. And it seems unfair to you, as you
must think--"

"Darling papa! we are not selfish!" it rejoiced Adela to exclaim.

His face expressed a transparent simple-mindedness that won the
confidence of the ladies and awakened their ideal of generosity.

"I know what you mean, papa," said Arabella. "But, we love Besworth; and
if we may enjoy the place for the time that we are all together, I shall
think it sufficient. I do not look beyond."

Her sisters echoed the sentiment, and sincerely. They were as little
sordid as creatures could be. If deeply questioned, it would have been
found that their notion of the position Providence had placed them in (in
other words, their father's unmentioned wealth), permitted them to be as
lavish as they pleased. Mr. Pole had endowed them with a temperament
similar to his own; and he had educated it. In feminine earth it
flourished wonderfully. Shy as himself, their shyness took other forms,
and developed with warm youth. Not only did it shut them up from others
(which is the first effect of this disease), but it tyrannized over them
internally: so that there were subjects they had no power to bring their
minds to consider. Money was in the list. The Besworth question, as at
present considered, involved the money question. All of them felt that;
father and children. It is not surprising, therefore, that they hurried
over it as speedily as they could, and by a most comical exhibition of
implied comprehension of meanings and motives.

"Of course, we're only in the opening stage of the business," said Mr.
Pole. "There's nothing decided, you know. Lots of things got to be
considered. You mean what you say, do you? Very well. And you want me to
think of it? So I will. And look, my dears, you know that--" (here his
voice grew husky, as was the case with it when touching a shy topic even
beneath the veil; but they were above suspicion) "you know that--a--that
we must all give way a little to the other, now and then. Nothing like
being kind."

"Pray, have no fear, papa dear!" rang the clear voice of Arabella.

"Well, then, you're all for Besworth, even though it isn't exactly for
your own interest? All right."

The ladies kissed him.

"We'll each stretch a point," he continued. "We shall get on better if we
do. Much! You're a little hard on people who're not up to the mark.
There's an end to that. Even your old father will like you better."

These last remarks were unintelligible to the withdrawing ladies.

On the morning that followed, Mr. Pole expressed a hope that his
daughters intended to give him a good dinner that day; and he winked
humorously and kindly by which they understood him to be addressing a
sort of propitiation to them for the respect he paid to his appetite.

"Papa," said Adela, "I myself will speak to Cook."

She added, with a smile thrown to her sisters, without looking at them,
"I dare say, she will know who I am."

Mr. Pole went down to his wine-cellar, and was there busy with bottles
till the carriage came for him. A bason was fetched that he might wash
off the dust and cobwebs in the passage. Having rubbed his hands briskly
with soap, he dipped his head likewise, in an oblivious fit, and then
turning round to the ladies, said, "What have I forgotten?" looking
woebegone with his dripping vacant face. "Oh, ah! I remember now;" and he
chuckled gladly.

He had just for one moment forgotten that he was acting, and a pang of
apprehension had caught him when the water covered his face, to the
effect that he must forfeit the natural artistic sequence of speech and
conduct which disguised him so perfectly. Away he drove, nodding and
waving his hand.

"Dear, simple, innocent old man!" was the pitiful thought in the bosoms
of the ladies; and if it was accompanied by the mute exclamation, "How
singular that we should descend from him!" it would not have been for the
first time.

They passed one of their delightful quiet days, in which they paved the
future with gold, and, if I may use so bold a figure, lifted parasols
against the great sun that was to shine on them. Now they listened to
Emilia, and now strolled in the garden; conversed on the social skill of
Lady Gosstre, who was nevertheless narrow in her range; and on the
capacities of mansions, on the secret of mixing people in society, and
what to do with the women! A terrible problem, this latter one. Not
terrible (to hostesses) at a mere rout or drum, or at a dance pure and
simple, but terrible when you want good talk to circulate for then they
are not, as a body, amused; and when they are not amused, you know, they
are not inclined to be harmless; and in this state they are vipers; and
where is society then? And yet you cannot do without them!--which is the
revolting mystery. I need not say that I am not responsible for these
critical remarks. Such tenderness to the sex comes only from its sisters.

So went a day rich in fair dreams to the ladies; and at the hour of their
father's return they walked across the parvenu park, in a state of
enthusiasm for Besworth, that threw some portion of its decorative light
on the, donor of Besworth. When his carriage was heard on the road, they
stood fast, and greeted his appearance with a display of
pocket-handkerchiefs in the breeze, a proceeding that should have
astonished him, being novel; but seemed not to do so, for it was
immediately responded to by the vigorous waving of a pair of
pocket-handkerchiefs from the carriage-window! The ladies smiled at this
piece of simplicity which prompted him to use both his hands, as if one
would not have been enough. Complacently they continued waving. Then
Adela looked at her sisters; Cornelia's hand dropped and Arabella, the
last to wave, was the first to exclaim: "That must be a woman's arm!"

The carriage stopped at the gate, and it was one in the dress of a woman
at least, and of the compass of a big woman, who descended by the aid of
Mr. Pole. Safely alighted, she waved her pocket-handkerchief afresh. The
ladies of Brookfield did not speak to one another; nor did they move
their eyes from the object approaching. A simultaneous furtive extinction
of three pocket-handkerchiefs might have been noticed. There was no
further sign given.




CHAPTER XV

A letter from Brookfield apprised Wilfrid that Mr. Pole had brought Mrs.
Chump to the place as a visitor, and that she was now in the house.
Formal as a circular, the idea of it appeared to be that the bare fact
would tell him enough and inspire him with proper designs. No reply being
sent, a second letter arrived, formal too, but pointing out his duty to
succour his afflicted family, and furnishing a few tragic particulars.
Thus he learnt, that while Mr. Pole was advancing toward the three
grouped ladies, on the day of Mrs. Chump's arrival, he called Arabella by
name, and Arabella went forward alone, and was engaged in conversation by
Mrs. Chump. Mr. Pole left them to make his way to Adela and Cornelia.
"Now, mind, I expect you to keep to your agreement," he said. Gradually
they were led on to perceive that this simple-minded man had understood
their recent talk of Besworth to signify a consent to the stipulation he
had previously mentioned to Adela. "Perfect simplicity is as deceiving as
the depth of cunning," Adela despairingly wrote, much to Wilfrid's
amusement.

A third letter followed. It was of another tenor, and ran thus, in
Adela's handwriting:

"My Darling Wilfrid,

"We have always known that some peculiar assistance would never be
wanting in our extremity--aid, or comfort, or whatever you please to call
it. At all events, something to show we are not neglected. That old
notion of ours must be true. I shall say nothing of our sufferings in the
house. They continue. Yesterday, papa came from town, looking important.
He had up some of his best wine for dinner. All through the service his
eyes were sparkling on Cornelia. I spare you a family picture, while
there is this huge blot on it. Naughty brother! But, listen! your place
is here, for many reasons, as you will be quick enough to see. After
dinner, papa took Cornelia into the library alone, and they were together
for ten minutes. She came out very pale. She had been proposed for by Sir
Twickenham Pryme, our Member for the borough. I have always been sure
that Cornelia was born for Parliament, and he will be lucky if he wins
her. We know not yet, of course, what her decision will be. The incident
is chiefly remarkable to us as a relief to what I need not recount to
you. But I wish to say one thing, dear Wilfrid. You are gazetted to a
lieutenancy, and we congratulate you: but what I have to say is
apparently much more trifling, and it is, that--will you take it to
heart?--it would do Arabella and myself infinite good if we saw a little
more of our brother, and just a little less of a very gentlemanly
organ-player phenomenon, who talks so exceedingly well. He is a very
pleasant man, and appreciates our ideas, and so forth; but it is our duty
to love our brother best, and think of him foremost, and we wish him to
come and remind us of our duty.

"At our Cornelia's request, with our concurrence, papa is silent in the
house as to the purport of the communication made by Sir T.P.

"By the way, are you at all conscious of a sound-like absurdity in a
Christian name of three syllables preceding a surname of one? Sir
Twickenham Pryme! Cornelia's pronunciation of the name first gave me the
feeling. The 'Twickenham' seems to perform a sort of educated monkey kind
of ridiculously decorous pirouette and entrechat before the 'Pryme.' I
think that Cornelia feels it also. You seem to fancy elastic limbs
bending to the measure of a solemn church-organ. Sir Timothy? But Sir
Timothy does not jump with the same grave agility as Sir Twickenham! If
she rejects him, it will be half attributable to this.

"My own brother! I expect no confidences, but a whisper warns me that you
have not been to Stornley twice without experiencing the truth of our old
discovery, that the Poles are magnetic? Why should we conceal it from
ourselves, if it be so? I think it a folly, and fraught with danger, for
people not to know their characteristics. If they attract, they should
keep in a circle where they will have no reason to revolt at, or say,
repent of what they attract. My argumentative sister does not coincide.
If she did, she would lose her argument.

"Adieu! Such is my dulness, I doubt whether I have made my meaning clear.

          "Your thrice affectionate

                    "Adela.

"P.S.--Lady Gosstre has just taken Emilia to Richford for a week. Papa
starts for Bidport to-morrow."

This short and rather blunt exercise in Fine Shades was read impatiently
by Wilfrid. "Why doesn't she write plain to the sense?" he asked, with
the usual injustice of men, who demand a statement of facts, forgetting
how few there are to feed the post; and that indication and suggestion
are the only language for the multitude of facts unborn and possible.
Twilight best shows to the eye what may be.

"I suppose I must go down there," he said to himself, keeping a
meditative watch on the postscript, as if it possessed the capability of
slipping away and deceiving him. "Does she mean that Cornelia sees too
much of this man Barrett? or, what does she mean?" And now he saw
meanings in the simple passages, and none at all in the intricate ones;
and the double-meanings were monsters that ate one another up till
nothing remained of them. In the end, however, he made a wrathful guess
and came to a resolution, which brought him to the door of the house next
day at noon. He took some pains in noting the exact spot where he had
last seen Emilia half in moonlight, and then dismissed her image
peremptorily. The house was apparently empty. Gainsford, the footman,
gave information that he thought the ladies were upstairs, but did not
volunteer to send a maid to them. He stood in deferential footman's
attitude, with the aspect of a dog who would laugh if he could, but being
a footman out of his natural element, cannot.

"Here's a specimen of the new plan of treating servants!" thought
Wilfrid, turning away. "To act a farce for their benefit! That fellow
will explode when he gets downstairs. I see how it is. This woman, Chump,
is making them behave like schoolgirls."

He conceived the idea sharply, and forthwith, without any preparation, he
was ready to treat these high-aspiring ladies like schoolgirls. Nor was
there a lack of justification; for when they came down to his shouts in
the passage, they hushed, and held a finger aloft, and looked altogether
so unlike what they aimed at being, that Wilfrid's sense of mastery
became almost contempt.

"I know perfectly what you have to tell me," he said. "Mrs. Chump is
here, you have quarrelled with her, and she has shut her door, and you
have shut yours. It's quite intelligible and full of dignity. I really
can't smother my voice in consequence."

He laughed with unnecessary abandonment. The sensitive young women wanted
no other schooling to recover themselves. In a moment they were seen
leaning back and contemplating him amusedly, as if he had been the comic
spectacle, and were laughing for a wager. There are few things so sour as
the swallowing of one's own forced laugh. Wilfrid got it down, and
commenced a lecture to fill the awkward pause. His sisters maintained the
opera-stall posture of languid attention, contesting his phrases simply
with their eyebrows, and smiling. He was no match for them while they
chose to be silent: and indeed if the business of life were conducted in
dumb show, women would beat men hollow. They posture admirably. In dumb
show they are equally good for attack and defence. But this is not the
case in speech. So, when Arabella explained that their hope was to see
Mrs. Chump go that day, owing to the rigorous exclusion of all amusement
and the outer world from the house, Wilfrid regained his superior footing
and made his lecture tell. In the middle of it, there rang a cry from the
doorway that astonished even him, it was so powerfully Irish.

"The lady you have called down is here," said Arabella's cold glance, in
answer to his.

They sat with folded hands while Wilfrid turned to Mrs. Chump, who
advanced, a shock of blue satin to the eye, crying, on a jump: "Is ut Mr.
Wilfrud?"

"It's I, ma'am." Wilfrid bowed, and the censorious ladies could not deny
that, his style was good, if his object was to be familiar. And if that
was his object, he was paid for it. A great thick kiss was planted on his
cheek, with the motto: "Harm to them that thinks ut."

Wilfrid bore the salute like a man who presumes that he is flattered.

"And it's you!" said Mrs. Chump. "I was just off. I'm packed, and
bonnutted, and ready for a start; becas, my dear, where there's none but
women, I don't think it natural to stop. You're splendud! How a little
fella like Pole could go and be father to such a mighty big son, with
your bit of moustache and your blue eyes! Are they blue or a bit of grey
in 'em?" Mrs. Chump peered closely. "They're kill'n', let their colour be
annyhow. And I that knew ye when ye were no bigger than my garter! Oh,
sir! don't talk of ut; I'll be thinkin', of my coffin. Ye're glad to see
me? Say, yes. Do!"

"Very glad," quoth Wilfrid.

"Upon your honour, now?"

"Upon my honour!"

"My dears" (Mrs. Chump turned to the ladies), "I'll stop; and just thank
your brother for't, though you can't help being garls."

Reduced once more to demonstrate like schoolgirls by this woman, the
ladies rose together, and were retiring, when Mrs. Chump swung round and
caught Arabella's hand. "See heer," she motioned to Wilfrid. Arabella
made a bitter effort to disengage herself. "See, now! It's jeal'sy of me,
Mr. Wilfrud, becas I'm a widde and just an abom'nation to garls, poor
darlin's! And twenty shindies per dime we've been havin', and me such a
placable body, if ye'll onnly let m' explode. I'm all powder, avery bit!
and might ha' been christened Saltpetre, if born a boy. She hasn't so
much as a shot to kill a goose, says Chump, poor fella! But he went,
annyway. I must kiss somebody when I talk of 'm. Mr. Wilfrud, I'll take
the girls, and entitle myself to you."

Arabella was the first victim. Her remonstrance was inarticulate.
Cornelia's "Madam!" was smothered. Adela behaved better, being more
consciously under Wilfrid's eye; she prepared her pocket-handkerchief,
received the salute, and deliberately effaced it.

"There!" said Mrs. Chump; "duty to begin with. And now for you, Mr.
Wilfrud."

The ladies escaped. Their misery could not be conveyed to the mind. The
woman was like a demon come among them. They felt chiefly degraded, not
by her vulgarity, but by their inability to cope with it, and by the
consequent sickening sense of animal inefficiency--the block that was put
to all imaginative delight in the golden hazy future they figured for
themselves, and which was their wine of life. An intellectual adversary
they could have combated; this huge brogue-burring engine quite
overwhelmed them. Wilfrid's worse than shameful behaviour was a common
rallying-point; and yet, so absolutely critical were they by nature,
their blame of him was held mentally in restraint by the superior ease of
his manner as contrasted with their own lamentably silly awkwardness.
Highly civilized natures do sometimes, and keen wits must always, feel
dissatisfied when they are not on the laughing side: their dread of
laughter is an instinctive respect for it.

Dinner brought them all together again. Wilfrid took his father's seat,
facing his Aunt Lupin, and increased the distress of his sisters by his
observance of every duty of a host to the dreadful intruder, whom he thus
established among them. He was incomprehensible. His visit to Stornley
had wrought in him a total change. He used to like being petted, and
would regard everything as right that his sisters did, before he went
there; and was a languid, long-legged, indifferent cavalier, representing
men to them: things made to be managed, snubbed, admired, but always
virtually subservient and in the background. Now, without perceptible
gradation, his superiority was suddenly manifest; so that, irritated and
apprehensive as they were, they could not, by the aid of any of their
intricate mental machinery, look down on him. They tried to; they tried
hard to think him despicable as well as treacherous. His style was too
good. When he informed Mrs. Chump that he had hired a yacht for the
season, and added, after enlarging on the merits of the vessel, "I am
under your orders," his sisters were as creatures cut in twain--one half
abominating his conduct, the other approving his style. The bow, the
smile, were perfect. The ladies had to make an effort to recover their
condemnatory judgement.

"Oh!" cried Mrs. Chump; "and if you've got a yacht, Mr. Wilfrud, won't ye
have a great parcel o' the arr'stocracy on board?"

"You may spy a title by the aid of a telescope," said Wilfrid.

"And I'm to come, I am?"

"Are you not elected captain?"

"Oh, if ye've got lords and real ladies on board, I'll come, be sure of
ut! I'll be as sick as a cat, I will. But, I'll come, if it's the rroon
of my stomach. I'd say to Chump, 'Oh, if ye'd only been born a lord, or
would just get yourself struck a knight on one o' your shoulders,--oh,
Chump!' I'd say, 'it wouldn't be necessary to be rememberin' always the
words of the cerr'mony about lovin' and honourin' and obeyin' of a little
whistle of a fella like you.' Poor lad! he couldn't stop for his luck!
Did ye ask me to take wine, Mr. Wilfrud? I'll be cryin', else, as a widde
should, ye know!"

Frequent administrations of wine arrested the tears of Mrs. Chump, until
it is possible that the fulness of many a checked flow caused her to
redden and talk slightly at random. At the first mention of their
father's name, the ladies went out from the room. It was foolish, for
they might have watched the effect of certain vinous innuendoes addressed
to Wilfrid's apprehensiveness; but they were weakened and humbled, and
everything they did was foolish. From the fact that they offended their
keen critical taste, moreover, they were targets to the shaft that wounds
more fatally than all. No ridicule knocks the strength out of us so
thoroughly as our own.

Whether or not he guessed their condition favourable for his plans,
Wilfrid did not give them time to call back their scattered powers. At
the hour of eleven he sent for Arabella to come to him in the library.
The council upstairs permitted Arabella to go, on the understanding that
she was prepared for hostilities, and ready to tear the mask from
Wilfrid's face.

He commenced, without a shadow of circumlocution, and in a matter-of-fact
way, as if all respect for the peculiar genius of the house of Pole had
vanished: "I sent for you to talk a word or two about this woman, who, I
see, troubles you a little. I'm sorry she's in the house."

"Indeed!" said Arabella.

"I'm sorry she's in the house, not for my sake, but for yours, since the
proximity does not seem to... I needn't explain. It comes of your eternal
consultations. You are the eldest. Why not act according to your
judgement, which is generally sound? You listen to Adela, young as she
is; or a look of Cornelia's leads you. The result is the sort of scene I
saw this afternoon. I confess it has changed my opinion of you; it has, I
grieve to say it. This woman is your father's guest; you can't hurt her
so much as you hurt him, if you misbehave to her. You can't openly object
to her and not cast a slur upon him. There is the whole case. He has
insisted, and you must submit. You should have fought the battle before
she came."

"She is here, owing to a miserable misconception," said Arabella.

"Ah! she is here, however. That is the essential, as your old governess
Madame Timpan would have said."

"Nor can a protest against coarseness be sweepingly interpreted as a
piece of unfilial behaviour," said Arabella.

"She is coarse," Wilfrid nodded his head. "There are some forms of
coarseness which dowagers would call it coarseness to notice.

"Not if you find it locked up in the house with you--not if you suffer
under a constant repulsion. Pray, do not use these phrases to me,
Wilfrid. An accusation of coarseness cannot touch us."

"No, certainly," assented Wilfrid. "And you have a right to protest. I
disapprove the form of your protest nothing more. A schoolgirl's...but
you complain of the use of comparisons."

"I complain, Wilfrid, of your want of sympathy."

"That for two or three weeks you must hear a brogue at your elbow? The
poor creature is not so bad; she is good-hearted. It's hard that you
should have to bear with her for that time and receive nothing better
than Besworth as your reward."

"Very; seeing that we endure the evil and decline the sop with it."

"How?"

"We have renounced Besworth."

"Have you! And did this renunciation make you all sit on the edge of your
chairs, this afternoon, as if Edward Buxley had arranged you? You give up
Besworth? I'm afraid it's too late."

"Oh, Wilfrid! can you be ignorant that something more is involved in the
purchase of Besworth?"

Arabella gazed at him with distressful eagerness, as one who believes in
the lingering of a vestige of candour.

"Do you mean that my father may wish to give this woman his name?" said
Wilfrid coolly. "You have sense enough to know that if you make his home
disagreeable, you are taking the right method to drive him into such a
course. Ha! I don't think it's to be feared, unless you pursue these
consultations. And let me say, for my part, we have gone too far about
Besworth, and can't recede."

"I have given out everywhere that the place is ours. I did so almost at
your instigation. Besworth was nothing to me till you cried it up. And
now I won't detain you. I know I can rely on your sense, if you will rely
on it. Good night, Bella."

As she was going a faint spark of courage revived Arabella's wits. Seeing
that she was now ready to speak, he opened the door wide, and she kissed
him and went forth, feeling driven.

But while Arabella was attempting to give a definite version of the
interview to her sisters, a message came requesting Adela to descend. The
ladies did not allow her to depart until two or three ingenuous
exclamations from her made them share her curiosity.

"Ah?" Wilfrid caught her hand as she came in. "No, I don't intend to let
it go. You may be a fine lady, but you're a rogue, you know, and a
charming one, as I hear a friend of mine has been saying. Shall I call
him out? Shall I fight him with pistols, or swords, and leave him
bleeding on the ground, because he thinks you a pretty rogue?"

Adela struggled against the blandishment of this old familiar style of
converse--part fun, part flattery--dismissed since the great idea had
governed Brookfield.

"Please tell me what you called me down for, dear?"

"To give you a lesson in sitting on chairs. 'Adela, or the Puritan
sister,' thus: you sit on the extremest edge, and your eyes peruse the
ceiling; and..."

"Oh! will you ever forget that perfectly ridiculous scene?" Adela cried
in anguish.

She was led by easy stages to talk of Besworth.

"Understand," said Wilfrid, "that I am indifferent about it. The idea
sprang from you--I mean from my pretty sister Adela, who is President of
the Council of Three. I hold that young woman responsible for all that
they do. Am I wrong? Oh, very well. You suggested Besworth, at all
events. And--if we quarrel, I shall cut off one of your curls."

"We never will quarrel, my darling," quoth Adela softly. "Unless--" she
added.

Wilfrid kissed her forehead.

"Unless what?"

"Well, then, you must tell me who it is that talks of me in that
objectionable manner; I do not like it."

"Shall I convey that intimation?"

"I choose to ask, simply that I may defend myself."

"I choose to keep him buried, then, simply to save his life."

Adela made a mouth, and Wilfrid went on: "By the way, I want you to know
Lady Charlotte; you will take to one another. She likes you,
already--says you want dash; but on that point there may be two
opinions."

"If dash," said Adela, quite beguiled, "--that is, dash!--what does it
mean? But, if Lady Charlotte means by dash--am I really wanting in it? I
should define it, the quality of being openly natural without vulgarity;
and surely...!"

"Then you two differ a little, and must meet and settle your dispute. You
don't differ about Besworth: or, didn't. I never saw a woman so much in
love with a place as she is."

"A place?" emphasized Adela.

"Don't be too arch. I comprehend. She won't take me minus Besworth, you
may be sure."

"Did you, Wilfrid!--but you did not--offer yourself as owner of
Besworth?"

Wilfrid kept his eyes slanting on the floor.

"Now I see why you should still wish it," continued Adela. "Perhaps you
don't know the reason which makes it impossible, or I would say--Bacchus!
it must be compassed. You remember your old schoolboy oath which you
taught me? We used to swear always, by Bacchus!"

Adela laughed and blushed, like one who petitions pardon for this her
utmost sin, that is not regretted as it should be.

"Mrs. Chump again, isn't it?" said Wilfrid. "Pole would be a preferable
name. If she has the ambition, it elevates her. And it would be rather
amusing to see the dear old boy in love."

Adela gave her under-lip a distressful bite.

"Why do you, Wilfrid--why treat such matters with levity?"

"Levity? I am the last to treat ninety thousand pounds with levity."

"Has she so much?" Adela glanced at him.

"She will be snapped up by some poor nobleman. If I take her down to the
yacht, one of Lady Charlotte's brothers or uncles will bite; to a
certainty."

"It would be an excellent idea to take her!" cried Adela.

"Excellent! and I'll do it, if you like."

"Could you bear the reflex of the woman?"

"Don't you know that I am not in the habit of sitting on the extreme
edge...?"

Adela started, breathing piteously: "Wilfrid, dear! you want something of
me--what is it?"

"Simply that you should behave civilly to your father's guest."

"I had a fear, dear; but I think too well of you to entertain it for a
moment. If civility is to win Besworth for you, there is my hand."

"Be civil--that's all," said Wilfrid, pressing the hand given. "These
consultations of yours and acting in concert--one tongue for three
women--are a sort of missish, unripe nonsense, that one sees only in
bourgeoise girls--eh? Give it up. Lady Charlotte hit on it at a glance."

"And I, my chameleon brother, will return her the compliment, some day,"
Adela said to herself, as she hurried back to her sisters, bearing a
message for Cornelia. This lady required strong persuasion. A word from
Adela: "He will think you have some good reason to deny him a private
interview," sent her straight to the stairs.

Wilfrid was walking up and down, with his arms folded and his brows bent.
Cornelia stood in the doorway.

"You desire to speak to me, Wilfrid? And in private?"

"I didn't wish to congratulate you publicly, that's all. I know it's
rather against your taste. We'll shut the door, and sit down, if you
don't mind. Yes, I congratulate you with all my heart," he said, placing
a chair for Cornelia.

"May I ask, wherefore?"

"You don't think marriage a matter for congratulation?"

"Sometimes: as the case may be."

"Well, it's not marriage yet. I congratulate you on your offer."

"I thank you."

"You accept it, of course."

"I reject it, certainly."

After this preliminary passage, Wilfrid remained silent long enough for
Cornelia to feel uneasy.

"I want you to congratulate me also," he recommenced. "We poor fellows
don't have offers, you know. To be frank, I think Lady Charlotte
Chillingworth will have me, if--She's awfully fond of Besworth, and I
need not tell you that as she has position in the world, I ought to show
something in return. When you wrote about Besworth, I knew it was as good
as decided. I told her so and--Well, I fancy there's that sort of
understanding between us. She will have me when... You know how the
poorer members of the aristocracy are situated. Her father's a peer, and
has a little influence. He might push me; but she is one of a large
family; she has nothing. I am certain you will not judge of her as common
people might. She does me a particular honour."

"Is she not much older than you, Wilfrid?" said Cornelia.

"Or, in other words," he added, "is she not a very mercenary person?"

"That, I did not even imply."

"Honestly, was it not in your head?"

"Now you put it so plainly, I do say, it strikes me disagreeably; I have
heard of nothing like it."

"Do you think it unreasonable that I should marry into a noble family?"

"That is, assuredly, not my meaning."

"Nevertheless, you are, on the whole, in favour of beggarly alliances."

"No, Wilfrid."

"Why do you reject this offer that has been made to you?"

Cornelia flushed and trembled; the traitorous feint had thrown her off
her guard. She said, faltering:

"Would you have me marry one I do not love?"

"Well, well!" He drew back. "You are going to do your best to stop the
purchase of Besworth?"

"No; I am quiescent."

"Though I tell you how deeply it concerns me!"

"Wilfrid, my own brother!" (Cornelia flung herself before him, catching
his hand,) "I wish you to be loved, first of all. Think of the horror of
a loveless marriage, however gilded! Does a woman make stipulations ere
she gives her hand? Does not love seek to give, to bestow? I wish you to
marry well, but chiefly that you should be loved."

Wilfrid pressed her head in both his hands.

"I never saw you look so handsome," he said. "You've got back your old
trick of blushing, too! Why do you tremble? By the way, you seem to have
been learning a great deal about that business, lately?"

"What business?"

"Love."

A river of blood overflowed her fair cheeks.

"How long has this been?" his voice came to her.

There was no escape. She was at his knees, and must look up, or confess
guilt.

"This?"

"Come, my dearest girl!" Wilfrid soothed her. "I can help you, and will,
if you'll take advice. I've always known your heart was generous and
tender, under that ice you wear so well. How long has this been going
on?"

"Wilfrid!"

"You want plain speech?"

She wanted that still less.

"We'll call it 'this,'" he said. "I have heard of it, guessed it, and now
see it. How far have you pledged yourself in 'this?'"

"How far?"

Wilfrid held silent. Finding that her echo was not accepted as an answer,
she moaned his name lovingly. It touched his heart, where a great
susceptibility to passion lay. As if the ghost of Emilia were about him,
he kissed his sister's hand, and could not go on with his cruel
interrogations.

His next question was dew of relief to her.

"Has your Emilia been quite happy, of late?"

"Oh, quite, dear! very. And sings with more fire."

"She's cheerful?"

"She does not romp. Her eyes are full and bright."

"She's satisfied with everything here?"

"How could she be otherwise?"

"Yes, yes! You weren't severe on her for that escapade--I mean, when she
ran away from Lady Gosstre's?"

"We scarcely alluded to the subject, or permitted her to."

"Or permitted her to!" Wilfrid echoed, with a grimace. "And she's
cheerful now?"

"Quite."

"I mean, she doesn't mope?"

"Why should she?"

Cornelia had been too hard-pressed to have suspicion the questions were
an immense relief.

Wilfrid mused gloomily. Cornelia spoke further of Emilia, and her delight
in the visits of Mr. Powys, who spent hours with her, like a man
fascinated. She flowed on, little aware that she was fast restoring to
Wilfrid all his judicial severity.

He said, at last: "I suppose there's no engagement existing?"

"Engagement?"

"You have not, what they call, plighted your troth to the man?"

Cornelia struggled for evasion. She recognized the fruitlessness of the
effort, and abandoning it stood up.

"I am engaged to no one."

"Well, I should hope not," said Wilfrid. "An engagement might be broken."

"Not by me."

"It might, is all that I say. A romantic sentiment is tougher. Now, I
have been straightforward with you: will you be with me? I shall not hurt
the man, or wound his feelings."

He paused; but it was to find that no admission of the truth, save what
oozed out in absence of speech, was to be expected. She seemed, after the
fashion of women, to have got accustomed to the new atmosphere into which
he had dragged her, without any conception of a forward movement.

"I see I must explain to you how we are situated," said Wilfrid. "We are
in a serious plight. You should be civil to this woman for several
reasons--for your father's sake and your own. She is very rich."

"Oh, Wilfrid!"

"Well, I find money well thought of everywhere."

"Has your late school been good for you?"

"This woman, I repeat, is rich, and we want money. Oh! not the ordinary
notion of wanting money, but the more we have the more power we have. Our
position depends on it."

"Yes, if we can be tempted to think so," flashed Cornelia.

"Our position depends on it. If you posture, and are poor, you provoke
ridicule: and to think of scorning money, is a piece of folly no girls of
condition are guilty of. Now, you know I am fond of you; so I'll tell you
this: you have a chance; don't miss it. Something unpleasant is
threatening; but you may escape it. It would be madness to throw such a
chance away, and it is your duty to take advantage of it. What is there
plainer? You are engaged to no one."

Cornelia came timidly close to him. "Pray, be explicit!"

"Well!--this offer."

"Yes; but what--there is something to escape from."

Wilfrid deliberately replied: "There is no doubt of the Pater's
intentions with regard to Mrs. Chump."

"He means...?"

"He means to marry her."

"And you, Wilfrid?"

"Well, of course, he cuts me out. There--there! forgive me: but what can
I do?"

"Do you conspire--Wilfrid, is it possible?--are you an accomplice in the
degradation of our house?"

Cornelia had regained her courage, perforce of wrath. Wilfrid's singular
grey eyes shot an odd look at her. He is to be excused for not perceiving
the grandeur of the structure menaced; for it was invisible to all the
world, though a real fabric.

"If Mrs. Chump were poor, I should think the Pater demented," he said.
"As it is--! well, as it is, there's grist to the mill, wind to the
organ. You must be aware" (and he leaned over to her with his most
suspicious gentleness of tone) "you are aware that all organs must be
fed; but you will make a terrible mistake if you suppose for a moment
that the human organ requires the same sort of feeding as the one in
Hillford Church."

"Good-night," said Cornelia, closing her lips, as if for good.

Wilfrid pressed her hand. As she was going, the springs of kindness in
his heart caused him to say "Forgive me, if I seemed rough."

"Yes, dear Wilfrid; even brutality, rather than your exultation over the
wreck of what was noble in you."

With which phrase Cornelia swept from the room.




CHAPTER XVI

"Seen Wilfrid?" was Mr. Pole's first cheery call to his daughters, on his
return. An answer on that head did not seem to be required by him, for he
went on: "Ah the boy's improved. That place over there, Stornley, does
him as much good as the Army did, as to setting him up, you know; common
sense, and a ready way of speaking and thinking. He sees a thing now.
Well, Martha, what do you,--eh? what's your opinion?"

Mrs. Chump was addressed. "Pole," she said, fanning her cheek with
vehement languor, "don't ask me! my heart's gone to the young fella."

In pursuance of a determination to which the ladies of Brookfield had
come, Adela, following her sprightly fancy, now gave the lead in
affability toward Mrs. Chump.

"Has the conqueror run away with it to bury it?" she laughed.

"Och! won't he know what it is to be a widde!" cried Mrs. Chump. "A
widde's heart takes aim and flies straight as a bullet; and the hearts o'
you garls, they're like whiffs o' tobacca, curlin' and wrigglin' and not
knowin' where they're goin'. Marry 'em, Pole! marry 'em!" Mrs. Chump
gesticulated, with two dangling hands. "They're nice garls; but, lord!
they naver see a man, and they're stuputly contented, and want to remain
garls; and, don't ye see, it was naver meant to be? Says I to Mr. Wilfrud
(and he agreed with me), ye might say, nice sour grapes, as well as nice
garls, if the creatures think o' stoppin' where they are, and what they
are. It's horrud; and, upon my honour, my heart aches for 'm!"

Mr. Pole threw an uneasy side-glance of inquisition at his daughters, to
mark how they bore this unaccustomed language, and haply intercede
between the unworthy woman and their judgement of her. But the ladies
merely smiled. Placidly triumphant in its endurance, the smile said: "We
decline even to feel such a martyrdom as this."

"Well, you know, Martha; I," he said, "I--no father could wish--eh? if
you could manage to persuade them not to be so fond of me. They must
think of their future, of course. They won't always have a home--a
father, a father, I mean. God grant they may never want!--eh? the dinner;
boh! let's in to dinner. Ma'am!"

He bowed an arm to Mrs. Chump, who took it, with a scared look at him:
"Why, if ye haven't got a tear in your eye, Pole?"

"Nonsense, nonsense," quoth he, bowing another arm to Adela.

"Papa, I'm not to be winked at," said she, accepting convoy; and there
was some laughter, all about nothing, as they went in to dinner.

The ladies were studiously forbearing in their treatment of Mrs. Chump.
Women are wonderfully quick scholars under ridicule, though it half-kills
them. Wilfrid's theory had impressed the superior grace of civility upon
their minds, and, now that they practised it, they were pleased with the
contrast they presented. Not the less were they maturing a serious
resolve. The suspicion that their father had secret vile designs in
relation to Mrs. Chump, they kept in the background. It was enough for
them that she was to be a visitor, and would thus destroy the great
circle they had projected. To accept her in the circle, they felt, was
out of the question. Wilfrid's plain-speaking broke up the air-bubble,
which they had so carefully blown, and in which they had embarked all
their young hopes. They had as much as given one another a pledge that
their home likewise should be broken up.

"Are you not almost too severe a student?" Mr. Barrett happened to say to
Cornelia, the day after Wilfrid had worried her.

"Do I show the signs?" she replied.

"By no means. But last night, was it not your light that was not
extinguished till morning?"

"We soon have morning now," said Cornelia; and her face was pale as the
first hour of the dawn. "Are you not a late foot-farer, I may ask in
return?"

"Mere restlessness. I have no appetite for study. I took the liberty to
cross the park from the wood, and saw you--at least I guessed it your
light, and then I met your brother."

"Yes? you met him?"

Mr. Barrett gestured an affirmative.

"And he--did he speak?"

"He nodded. He was in some haste."

"But, then, you did not go to bed at all that night? It is almost my turn
to be lecturer, if I might expect to be listened to."

"Do you not know--or am I constitutionally different from others?" Mr.
Barrett resumed: "I can't be alone in feeling that there are certain
times and periods when what I would like to call poisonous influences are
abroad, that touch my fate in the days to come. I know I am helpless. I
can only wander up and down."

"That sounds like a creed of fatalism."

"It is not a creed; it is a matter of nerves. A creed has its 'kismet.'
The nerves are wild horses."

"It is something to be fought against," said Cornelia admonishingly.

"Is it something to be distrusted?"

"I should say, yes."

"Then I was wrong?"

He stooped eagerly, in his temperate way, to catch sight of her answering
face. Cornelia's quick cheeks took fire. She fenced with a question of
two, and stood in a tremble, marvelling at his intuition. For possibly,
at that moment when he stood watching her window-light (ah, poor heart!)
she was half-pledging her word to her sisters (in a whirl of wrath at
Wilfrid, herself, and the world), that she would take the lead in
breaking up Brookfield.

An event occurred that hurried them on. They received a visit from their
mother's brother, John Pierson, a Colonel of Uhlans, in the
Imperial-Royal service. He had rarely been in communication with them;
his visit was unexpected. His leave of absence from his quarters in Italy
was not longer than a month, and he was on his way to Ireland, to settle
family business; but he called, as he said, to make acquaintance with his
nieces. The ladies soon discovered, in spite of his foreign-cut chin and
pronounced military habit of speech and bearing, that he was at heart
fervidly British. His age was about fifty: a man of great force of
shoulder and potent length of arm, courteous and well-bred in manner, he
was altogether what is called a model of a cavalry officer. Colonel
Pierson paid very little attention to his brother-in-law, but the ladies
were evidently much to his taste; and when he kissed Cornelia's hand, his
eyes grew soft, as at a recollection.

"You are what your mother once promised to be," he said. To her he gave
that mother's portrait, taking it solemnly from his breast-pocket, and
attentively contemplating it before it left his hands. The ladies pressed
him for a thousand details of their mama's youthful life; they found it a
strange consolation to talk of her and image her like Cornelia. The
foreign halo about the Colonel had an effect on them that was almost like
what nobility produces; and by degrees they heated their minds to
conceive that they were consenting to an outrage on that mother's memory,
in countenancing Mrs. Chump's transparent ambition to take her place, as
they did by staying in the house with the woman. The colonel's few
expressive glances at Mrs. Chump, and Mrs. Chump's behaviour before the
colonel, touched them with intense distaste for their present surly
aspect of life. Civilized little people are moved to fulfil their
destinies and to write their histories as much by distaste as by
appetite. This fresh sentimental emotion, which led them to glorify their
mother's image in their hearts, heightened and gave an acid edge to their
distaste for the think they saw. Nor was it wonderful that Cornelia, said
to be so like that mother, should think herself bound to accept the
office of taking the initiative in a practical protest against the
desecration of the name her mother had borne. At times, I see that
sentiment approaches too near the Holy of earthly Holies for us to laugh
at it; it has too much truth in it to be denounced--nay, if we are not
alert and quick of wit, we shall be deceived by it, and wonder in the
end, as the fool does, why heaven struck that final blow; concluding that
it was but another whimsy of the Gods. The ladies prayed to their mother.
They were indeed suffering vile torture. Ethereal eyes might pardon the
unconscious jugglery which made their hearts cry out to her that the step
they were about to take was to save her children from seeming to
acquiesce in a dishonour to her memory. Some such words Adela's tongue
did not shrink from; and as it is a common habit for us to give to the
objects we mentally address just as much brain as is wanted for the
occasion, she is not to be held singular.

Colonel Pierson promised to stay a week on his return from Ireland. "Will
that person be here?" he designated Mrs. Chump; who, among other things,
had reproached him for fighting with foreign steel and wearing any
uniform but the red.

The ladies and Colonel Pierson were soon of one mind in relation to Mrs.
Chump. Certain salient quiet remarks dropped by him were cherished after
his departure; they were half-willing to think that he had been directed
to come to them, bearer of a message from a heavenly world to urge them
to action. They had need of a spiritual exaltation, to relieve them from
the palpable depression caused by the weight of Mrs. Chump. They
encouraged one another with exclamations on the oddness of a visit from
their mother's brother, at such a time of tribulation, indecision, and
general darkness.

Mrs. Chump remained on the field. When Adela begged her papa to tell her
how long the lady was to stay, he replied: "Eh? By the way, I haven't
asked her;" and retreated from this almost too obvious piece of
simplicity, with, "I want you to know her: I want you to like her--want
you to get to understand her. Won't talk about her going just yet."

If they could have seen a limit to that wholesale slaughter of the Nice
Feelings, they might have summoned patience to avoid the desperate step
to immediate relief: but they saw none. Their father's quaint kindness
and Wilfrid's treachery had fixed her there, perhaps for good. The choice
was, to let London come and see them dragged through the mire by the
monstrous woman, or to seek new homes. London, they contended, could not
further be put off, and would come, especially now that the season was
dying. After all, their parting from one another was the bitterest thing
to bear, and as each seemed content to endure it for the good of all, and
as, properly considered, they did not bury their ambition by separating,
they said farewell to the young delicious dawn of it. By means of Fine
Shades it was understood that Brookfield was to be abandoned. Not one
direct word was uttered. There were expressions of regret that the
village children of Ipley would miss the supervizing eyes that had
watched over them--perchance! at any rate, would lose them. All went on
in the household as before, and would have continued so, but that they
had a chief among them. This was Adela Pole, who found her powers with
the occasion.

Adela thought decisively: "People never move unless they are pushed." And
when you have got them to move ever so little, then propel; but by no
means expect that a movement on their part means progression. Without
propulsion nothing results. Adela saw what Cornelia meant to do. It was
not to fly to Sir Twickenham, but to dismiss Mr. Barrett. Arabella
consented to write to Edward Buxley, but would not speak of old days, and
barely alluded to a misunderstanding; though if she loved one man, this
was he. Adela was disengaged. She had moreover to do penance, for a wrong
committed; and just as children will pinch themselves, pleased up to the
verge of unendurable pain, so do sentimentalists find a keen relish in
performing secret penance for self-accused offences. Thus they become
righteous to their own hearts, and evade, as they hope, the public
scourge. The wrong committed was (translated out of Fine Shades), that
she had made love to her sister's lover. In the original tongue--she had
innocently played with the sacred fire of a strange affection; a child in
the temple!--Our penitent child took a keen pinching pleasure in
dictating words for Arabella to employ toward Edward.

And then, recurring to her interview with Wilfrid, it struck her:
"Suppose that, after all, Money!..." Yes, Mammon has acted Hymen before
now. Nothing else explained Mrs. Chump; so she thought, in one clear
glimpse. Inveterate sentimental habit smeared the picture with two
exclamations--"Impossible!" and "Papa!" I desire it to be credited that
these simple interjections absolutely obscured her judgement. Little
people think either what they are made to think, or what they choose to
think; and the education of girls is to make them believe that facts are
their enemies-a naughty spying race, upon whom the dogs of Pudeur are to
be loosed, if they surprise them without note of warning. Adela silenced
her suspicion, easily enough; but this did not prevent her taking a
measure to satisfy it. Petting her papa one evening, she suddenly asked
him for ninety pounds.

"Ninety!" said Mr. Pole, taking a sharp breath. He was as composed as
possible.

"Is that too much, papa, darling?"

"Not if you want it--not if you want it, of course not."

"You seemed astonished."

"The sum! it's an odd sum for a girl to want. Ten, twenty, fifty--a
hundred; but you never hear of ninety, never! unless it's to pay a debt;
and I have all the bills, or your aunt has them."

"Well, papa, if it excites you, I will do without it. It is for a
charity, chiefly."

Mr. Pole fumbled in his pocket, muttering, "No money here--cheque-book in
town. I'll give it you," he said aloud, "to-morrow morning--morrow
morning, early."

"That will do, papa;" and Adela relieved him immediately by shooting far
away from the topic.

The ladies retired early to their hall of council in the bedchamber of
Arabella, and some time after midnight Cornelia went to her room; but she
could not sleep. She affected, in her restlessness, to think that her
spirits required an intellectual sedative, so she went down to the
library for a book; where she skimmed many--a fashion that may be
recommended, for assisting us to a sense of sovereign superiority to
authors, and also of serene contempt for all mental difficulties.
Fortified in this way, Cornelia took a Plutarch and an Encyclopaedia
under her arm, to return to her room. But one volume fell, and as she
stooped to recover it, her candle shared its fate. She had to find her
way back in the dark. On the landing of the stairs, she fancied that she
heard a step and a breath. The lady was of unshaken nerves. She moved on
steadily, her hand stretched out a little before her. What it touched was
long in travelling to her brain; but when her paralyzed heart beat again,
she knew that her hand clasped another hand. Her nervous horror calmed as
the feeling came to her of the palpable weakness of the hand.

"Who are you?" she asked. Some hoarse answer struck her ear. She asked
again, making her voice distincter. The hand now returned her pressure
with force. She could feel that the person, whoever it was, stood
collecting strength to speak. Then the words came--

"What do you mean by imitating that woman's brogue?"

"Papa!" said Cornelia.

"Why do you talk Irish in the dark? There, goodnight. I've just come up
from the library; my candle dropped. I shouldn't have been frightened,
but you talked with such a twang."

"But I have just come from the library myself," said Cornelia.

"I mean from the dining-room," her father corrected himself hastily. "I
can't sit in the library; shall have it altered--full of draughts. Don't
you think so, my dear? Good-night. What's this in your arm? Books! Ah,
you study! I can get a light for myself."

The dialogue was sustained in the hard-whispered tones prescribed by
darkness. Cornelia kissed her father's forehead, and they parted.

At breakfast in the morning it was the habit of all the ladies to
assemble, partly to countenance the decency of matin-prayers, and also to
give the head of the household their dutiful society till business called
him away. Adela, in earlier days, had maintained that early rising was
not fashionable; but she soon grasped the idea that a great rivalry with
Fashion, in minor matters (where the support of the satirist might be
counted on), was the proper policy of Brookfield. Mrs. Chump was given to
be extremely fashionable in her hours, and began her Brookfield career by
coming downstairs at ten and eleven o'clock, when she found a desolate
table, well stocked indeed, but without any of the exuberant smiles of
nourishment which a morning repast should wear.

"You are a Protestant, ma'am, are you not?" Adela mildly questioned,
after informing her that she missed family prayer by her late descent.
Mrs. Chump assured her that she was a firm Protestant, and liked to see
faces at the breakfast-table. The poor woman was reduced to submit to the
rigour of the hour, coming down flustered, and endeavouring to look
devout, while many uncertainties as to the condition of the hooks of her
attire distracted her mind and fingers. On one occasion, Gainsford, the
footman, had been seen with his eye on her; and while Mr. Pole read of
sacred things, at a pace composed of slow march and amble, this unhappy
man was heard struggling to keep under and extinguish a devil of
laughter, by which his human weakness was shaken: He retired from the
room with the speed of a voyager about to pay tribute on high seas. Mr.
Pole cast a pregnant look at the servants' row as he closed the book; but
the expression of his daughters' faces positively signified that no
remark was to be made, and he contained himself. Later, the ladies told
him that Gainsford had done no worse than any uneducated man would have
been guilty of doing. Mrs. Chump had, it appeared, a mother's feeling for
one flat curl on her rugged forehead, which was often fondly caressed by
her, for the sake of ascertaining its fixity. Doubts of the precision of
outline and general welfare of this curl, apparently, caused her to
straighten her back and furtively raise her head, with an easy upward
motion, as of a cork alighted in water, above the level of the
looking-glass on her left hand--an action she repeated, with a solemn
aspect, four times; at which point Gainsford gave way. The ladies
accorded him every extenuation for the offence. They themselves, but for
the heroism of exalted natures, must have succumbed to the gross
temptation. "It is difficult, dear papa, to bring one's mind to religious
thoughts in her company, even when she is quiescent," they said. Thus, by
the prettiest exercise of charity that can be conceived, they pleaded for
the man Gainsford, while they struck a blow at Mrs. Chump; and in
performing one of the virtues laid down by religion, proved their enemy
to be hostile to its influences.

Mrs. Chump was this morning very late. The office of morning reader was
new to Mr. Pole, who had undertaken it, when first Squire of Brookfield,
at the dictate of the ladies his daughters; so that, waiting with the
book before him and his audience expectant, he lacked composure, spoke
irritably in an under-breath of 'that woman,' and asked twice whether she
was coming or not. At last the clump of her feet was heard approaching.
Mr. Pole commenced reading the instant she opened the door. She stood
there, with a face like a petrified Irish outcry. An imploring sound of
"Pole! Pole!" issued from her. Then she caught up one hand to her mouth,
and rolled her head, in evident anguish at the necessitated silence. A
convulsion passed along the row of maids, two of whom dipped to their
aprons; but the ladies gazed with a sad consciousness of wicked glee at
the disgust she was exciting in the bosom of their father.

"Will you shut the door?" Mr. Pole sternly addressed Mrs. Chump, at the
conclusion of the first prayer.

"Pole! ye know that money ye gave me in notes? I must speak, Pole!"

"Shut the door."

Mrs. Chump let go the door-handle with a moan. The door was closed by
Gainsford, now one of the gravest of footmen. A chair was placed for her,
and she sat down, desperately watching the reader for the fall of his
voice. The period was singularly protracted. The ladies turned to one
another, to question with an eyelid why it was that extra allowance was
given that morning. Mr. Pole was in a third prayer, stumbling on and
picking himself up, apparently unaware that he had passed the limit. This
continued until the series of ejaculations which accompanied him waxed
hotter--little muffled shrieks of: "Oh!--Deer--Oh, Lard!--When will he
stop? Oh, mercy! Och! And me burrstin' to speak!--Oh! what'll I do? I
can't keep 't in!--Pole! ye're kill'n me--Oh, deer! I'll be sayin'
somethin' to vex the prophets presently. Pole!"

If it was a race that he ran with Mrs. Chump, Mr. Pole was beaten. He
came to a sudden stop.

Mrs. Chump had become too deeply absorbed in her impatience to notice the
change in his tone; and when he said, "Now then, to breakfast, quick!"
she was pursuing her lamentable interjections. At sight of the servants
trooping forth, she jumped up and ran to the door.

"Ye don't go.--Pole, they're all here. And I've been robbed, I have.
Avery note I had from ye, Pole, all gone. And my purse left behind, like
the skin of a thing. Lord forbid I accuse annybody; but when I get up, my
first rush is to feel in my pocket. And, ask 'em!--If ye didn't keep me
so poor, Pole, they'd know I'm a generous woman, but I cann't bear to be
robbed. And pinmoney 's for spendin;' annybody'll tell you that. And I
ask ye t' examine 'em, Pole; for last night I counted my notes, wantin'
change, and I thought of a salmon I bought on the banks of the Suir to
make a present to Chump, which was our onnly visit to Waterford together:
for he naver went t' Ireland before or after--dyin' as he did! and it's
not his ingrat'tude, with his talk of a Severrn salmon-to the deuce with
'm! that makes me soft-poor fella!--I didn't mean to the deuce;--but
since he's gone, his widde's just unfit to bargain for a salmon at all,
and averybody robs her, and she's kept poor, and hatud!--D'ye heer, Pole?
I've lost my money, my money! and I will speak, and ye shann't interrupt
me!"

During the delivery of this charge against the household, Mr. Pole had
several times waved to the servants to begone; but as they had always the
option to misunderstand authoritative gestures, they preferred remaining,
and possibly he perceived that they might claim to do so under
accusation.

"How can you bring this charge against the inmates of my house--eh? I
guarantee the honesty of all who serve me. Martha! you must be mad,
mad!--Money? why, you never have money; you waste it if you do."

"Not money, Pole? Oh! and why? Becas ye keep me low o' purpose, till I
cringe like a slut o' the scullery, and cry out for halfpence. But, oh!
that seventy-five pounds in notes!"

Mr. Pole shook his head, as one who deals with a gross delusion: "I
remember nothing about it."

"Not about--?" Mrs. Chump dropped her chin. "Ye don't remember the givin'
of me just that sum of seventy-five, in eight notes, Pole?"

"Eh? I daresay I have given you the amount, one time or other. Now, let's
be quiet about it."

"Yesterday mornin', Pole! And the night I go to bed I count my money,
and, says I, I'll not lock ut up, for I'll onnly be unlockin' again
to-morrow; and doin' a thing and undoin' ut's a sign of a brain that's
addled--like yours, Pole, if ye say ye didn't go to give me the notes."

Mr. Pole frowned at her sagaciously. "Must change your diet, Martha!"

"My dite? And what's my dite to do with my money?"

"Who went into Mrs. Chump's bedchamber this morning?" asked Mr. Pole
generally.

A pretty little housemaid replied, with an indignant flush, that she was
the person. Mrs. Chump acknowledged to being awake when the shutters were
opened, and agreed that it was not possible her pockets could have been
rifled then.

"So, you see, Martha, you're talking nonsense," said Mr. Pole. "Do you
know the numbers of those notes?"

"The numbers at the sides, ye mean, Pole?"

"Ay, the numbers at the sides, if you like; the 21593, and so on?"

"The 21593! Oh! I can't remember such a lot as that, if ever I leave off
repeatin' it."

"There! you see, you're not fit to have money in your possession, Martha.
Everybody who has bank-notes looks at the numbers. You have a trick of
fancying all sorts of sums in your pocket; and when you don't find them
there, of course they're lost! Now, let's have some breakfast."

Arabella told the maids to go out. Mr. Pole turned to the
breakfast-table, rubbing his hands. Seeing herself and her case
abandoned, Mrs. Chump gave a deplorable shout. "Ye're crool! and young
women that look on at a fellow-woman's mis'ry. Oh! how can ye do ut! But
soft hearts can be the hardest. And all my seventy-five gone, gone! and
no law out of annybody. And no frightenin' of 'em off from doin' the like
another time! Oh, I will, I will have my money!"

"Tush! Come to breakfast, Martha," said Mr. Pole. "You shall have money,
if you want it; you have only to ask. Now, will you promise to be quiet?
and I'll give you this money--the amount you've been dreaming about last
night. I'll fetch it. Now, let us have no scenes. Dry your eyes."

Mr. Pole went to his private room, and returned just as Mrs. Chump had
got upon a succession of quieter sobs with each one of which she
addressed a pathetic roll of her eyes to the utterly unsympathetic ladies
respectively.

"There, Martha; there's exactly the sum for you--free gift. Say thank
you, and eat a good breakfast to show your gratitude. Mind, you take this
money on condition that you let the servants know you made a mistake."

Mrs. Chump sighed heavily, crumpling the notes, that the crisp sweet
sound might solace her for the hard condition.

"And don't dream any more--not about money, I mean," said Mr: Pole.

"Oh! if I dream like that I'll be living double." Mrs. Chump put her hand
to the notes, and called him kind, and pitied him for being the loser.
The sight of a fresh sum in her possession intoxicated her. It was but
feebly that she regretted the loss to her Samuel Bolton Pole. "Your
memory's worth more than that!" she said as she filled her purse with the
notes. "Anyhow, now I can treat somebody," and she threw a wink of
promise at Adela. Adela's eyes took refuge with her papa, who leaned over
to her, and said: "You won't mind waiting till you see me again? She's
taken all I had." Adela nodded blankly, and the next moment, with an
angry glance toward Mrs. Chump, "Papa," said she, "if you wish to see
servants in the house on your return, you must yourself speak to them,
and tell them that we, their master and mistresses, do not regard them as
thieves." Out of this there came a quarrel as furious as the ladies would
permit it to be. For Mrs. Chump, though willing to condone the offence
for the sum she had received, stuck infamy upon the whole list of them.
"The Celtic nature," murmured Cornelia. And the ladies maintained that
their servants should be respected, at any cost. "You, ma'am," said
Arabella, with a clear look peculiar to her when vindictive--"you may
have a stain on your character, and you are not ruined by it. But these
poor creatures..."

"Ye dare to compar' me--!"

"Contrast you, ma'am."

"It's just as imp'dent."

"I say, our servants, ma'am..."

"Oh! to the deuce with your 'ma'am;' I hate the word. It's like fittin' a
cap on me. Ye want to make one a turbaned dow'ger, ye malicious young
woman!"

"Those are personages that are, I believe, accepted in society!"

So the contest raged, Mrs. Chump being run clean through the soul twenty
times, without touching the consciousness of that sensitive essence. Mr.
Pole appeared to take the part of his daughters, and by-and-by Mrs.
Chump, having failed to arouse Mrs. Lupin's involuntary laugh (which
always consoled her in such cases), huffed out of the room. Then Mr.
Pole, in an abruptly serious way, bashfully entreated the ladies to be
civil to Martha, who had the best heart in the world. It sounded as if he
were going to say more. After a pause, he added emphatically, "Do!" and
went. He was many days absent: nor did he speak to Adela of the money she
had asked for when he returned. Adela had not the courage to allude to
it.




CHAPTER XVII

Emilia sat in her old place under the dwarf pine. Mr. Powys had brought
her back to Brookfield, where she heard that Wilfrid had been seen; and
now her heart was in contest with an inexplicable puzzle: "He was here,
and did not come to me!" Since that night when they had walked home from
Ipley Green, she had not suffered a moment of longing. Her senses had
lain as under a charm, with heart at anchor and a mind free to work. No
one could have guessed that any human spell was on the girl. "Wherever he
is, he thinks of me. I find him everywhere. He is safe, for I pray for
him and have my arms about him. He will come." So she waited, as some
grey lake lies, full and smooth, awaiting the star below the twilight. If
she let her thoughts run on to the hour of their meeting, she had to shut
her eyes and press at her heart; but as yet she was not out of tune for
daily life, and she could imagine how that hour was to be strewn with new
songs and hushed surprises. And 'thus' he would look: and 'thus.' "My
hero!" breathed Emilia, shuddering a little. But now she was perplexed.
Now that he had come and gone, she began to hunger bitterly for the sight
of his face, and that which had hitherto nourished her grew a sickly
phantom of delight. She wondered how she had forced herself to be
patient, and what it was that she had found pleasure in.

None of the ladies were at home when Emilia returned. She went out to the
woods, and sat, shadowed by the long bent branch; watching mechanically
the slow rounding and yellowing of the beam of sunlight over the thick
floor of moss, up against the fir-stems. The chaffinch and the linnet
flitted off the grey orchard twigs, singing from new stations; and the
bee seemed to come questioning the silence of the woods and droning
disappointed away. The first excess of any sad feeling is half voluntary.
Emilia could not help smiling, when she lifted her head out of a musing
fit, to find that she had composed part of a minuet for the languid
dancing motes in the shaft of golden light at her feet. "Can I remember
it?" she thought, and forgot the incident with the effort.

Down at her right hand, bordering a water, stood a sallow, a dead tree,
channelled inside with the brown trail of a goat-moth. Looking in this
direction, she saw Cornelia advancing to the tree. When the lady had
reached it, she drew a little book from her bosom, kissed it, and dropped
it in the hollow. This done, she passed among the firs. Emilia had
perceived that she was agitated: and with that strange instinct of hearts
beginning to stir, which makes them divine at once where they will come
upon the secret of their own sensations, she ran down to the tree and
peered on tiptoe at the embedded volume. On a blank page stood pencilled:
"This is the last fruit of the tree. Come not to gather more." There was
no meaning for her in that sentimental chord but she must have got some
glimpse of a meaning; for now, as in an agony, her lips fashioned the
words: "If I forget his face I may as well die;" and she wandered on,
striving more and more vainly to call up his features. The--"Does he
think of me?" and--"What am I to him?"--such timorous little feather-play
of feminine emotion she knew nothing of: in her heart was the strong
flood of a passion.

She met Edward Buxley and Freshfield Sumner at a cross-path, on their way
to Brookfield; and then Adela joined the party, which soon embraced Mr.
Barrett, and subsequently Cornelia. All moved on in a humming leisure,
chattering by fits. Mr. Sumner was delicately prepared to encounter Mrs.
Chump, "whom," said Adela, "Edward himself finds it impossible to
caricature;" and she affected to laugh at the woman.

"Happy the pencil that can reproduce!" Mr. Barrett exclaimed; and,
meeting his smile, Cornelia said: "Do you know, my feeling is, and I
cannot at all account for it, that if she were a Catholic she would not
seem so gross?"

"Some of the poetry of that religion would descend upon her, possibly,"
returned Mr. Barrett.

"Do you mean," Freshfield said quickly, "that she would stand a fair
chance of being sainted?"

Out of this arose some polite fencing between the two. Freshfield might
have argued to advantage in a Court of law; but he was no match, on such
topics and before such an audience, for a refined sentimentalist. More
than once he betrayed a disposition to take refuge in his class (he being
son to one of the puisne Judges). Cornelia speedily punished him, and to
any correction from her he bowed his head.

Adela was this day gifted with an extraordinary insight. Emilia alone of
the party was as a blot to her; but the others she saw through, as if
they had been walking transparencies. She divined that Edward and
Freshfield had both come, in concert, upon amorous business--that it was
Freshfield's object to help Edward to a private interview with her, and,
in return, Edward was to perform the same service for him with Cornelia.
So that Mr. Barrett was shockingly in the way of both; and the perplexity
of these stupid fellows--who would insist upon wondering why the man
Barrett and the girl Emilia (musicians both: both as it were, vagrants)
did not walk together and talk of quavers and minims--was extremely
comic. Passing the withered tree, Mr. Barrett deserved thanks from
Freshfield, if he did not obtain them; for he lingered, surrendering his
place. And then Adela knew that the weight of Edward Buxley's
remonstrative wrath had fallen on silent Emilia, to whom she clung
fondly.

"I have had a letter," Edward murmured, in the voice that propitiates
secresy.

"A letter?" she cried loud; and off flew the man like a rabbit into his
hole, the mask of him remaining.

Emilia presently found Mr. Barrett at her elbow. His hand clasped the
book Cornelia had placed in the tree.

"It is hers," said Emilia.

He opened it and pointed to his initials. She looked in his face.

"Are you very ill?"

Adela turned round from Edward's neighbouring head. "Who is ill?"

Cornelia brought Freshfield to a stop: "Ill?"

Before them all, book in hand, Mr. Barrett had to give assurance that he
was hearty, and to appear to think that his words were accepted, in spite
of blanched jowl and reddened under-lid. Cornelia threw him one glance:
his eyes closed under it. Adela found it necessary to address some such
comforting exclamation as 'Goodness gracious!' to her observant spirit.

In the park-path, leading to the wood, Arabella was seen as they came out
the young branches that fringed the firs. She hurried up.

"I have been looking for you. Papa has arrived with Sir Twickenham Pryme,
who dines with us."

Adela unhesitatingly struck a blow.

"Lady Pryme, we make place for you."

And she crossed to Cornelia. Cornelia kept her eyes fixed on Adela's
mouth, as one looks at a place whence a venomous reptile has darted out.
Her eyelids shut, and she stood a white sculpture of pain, pitiable to
see. Emilia took her hand, encouraging the tightening fingers with a
responsive pressure. The group shuffled awkwardly together, though Adela
did her best. She was very angry with Mr. Barrett for wearing that
absurdly pale aspect. She was even angry with his miserable bankrupt face
for mounting a muscular edition of the smile Cornelia had shown. "His
feelings!" she cried internally; and the fact presented itself to her,
that feelings were a luxury utterly unfit for poor men, who were to be
accused of presumption for indulging in them.

"Now, I suppose you are happy?" she spoke low between Arabella and
Edward.

The effect of these words was to colour violently two pair of cheeks.
Arabella's behaviour did not quite satisfy the fair critic. Edward Buxley
was simply caught in a trap: He had the folly to imagine that by laughing
he released himself.

"Is not that the laugh of an engaged?" said Adela to Freshfield.

He replied: "That would have been my idea under other conditions," and
looked meaningly.

She met the look with: "There are harsh conditions in life, are there
not?" and left him sufficiently occupied by his own sensations.

"Mr. Barrett," she inquired (partly to assist the wretch out of his
compromising depression, and also that the question represented a real
matter of debate in her mind), "I want your opinion; will you give it me?
Apropos of slang, why does it sit well on some people? It certainly does
not vulgarize them. After all, in many cases, it is what they call 'racy
idiom.' Perhaps our delicacy is strained?"

Now, it was Mr. Barrett's established manner to speak in a deliberately
ready fashion upon the introduction of a new topic. Habit made him, on
this occasion, respond instantly; but the opening of the gates displayed
the confusion of ideas within and the rageing tumult.

He said: "In many cases. There are two sorts. If you could call it the
language of nature! which anything...I beg your pardon, Slang! Polite
society rightly excludes it, because..."

"Yes, yes," returned Adela; "but do we do rightly in submitting to the
absolute tyranny?--I mean, I think, originality flies from us in
consequence."

The pitiable mortal became a trifle more luminous: "The objection is to
the repetition of risked phrases. A happy audacity of expression may
pass. It is bad taste to repeat it, that is all. Then there is the slang
of heavy boorishness, and the slang of impatient wit..."

"Is there any fine distinction between the extremes?" said Cornelia, in
as clear a tone as she could summon.

"I think," observed Arabella, "that whatever shows staleness speedily is
self-condemned; and that is the case with slang."

"And yet it's to avoid some feeling of the sort that people employ it,"
was Adela's remark; and the discussion of this theme dropped lifelessly,
and they walked on as before.

Coming to a halt near the garden gate, Adela tapped Emilia's cheek,
addressing her: "How demure she has become!"

"Ah!" went Arabella, "does she know papa has had a letter from Mr.
Pericles, who wrote from Milan to say that he has made arrangements for
her to enter the Academy there, and will come to fetch her in a few
days?"

Emilia's wrists crossed below her neck, while she gave ear.

"To take me away?" she said.

The tragic attitude and outcry, with the mournful flash of her eyes,
might have told Emilia's tale.

Adela unwillingly shielded her by interpreting the scene. "See! she must
be a born actress. They always exaggerate in that style, so that you
would really think she had a mighty passion for Brookfield."

"Or in it," suggested Freshfield.

"Or in it!" she laughed assentingly.

Mr. Pole was perceived entering the garden, rubbing his hands a little
too obsequiously to some remark of the baronet's, as the critical ladies
imagined. Sir Twickenham's arm spread out in a sweep; Mr. Pole's head
nodded. After the ceremony of the salute, the ladies were informed of Sir
Twickenham's observation: Sir Twickenham Pryme, a statistical member of
Parliament, a well-preserved half-century in age, a gentleman in bearing,
passably grey-headed, his whiskers brushed out neatly, as if he knew them
individually and had the exact amount of them collectively at his
fingers' ends: Sir Twickenham had said of Mr. Pole's infant park that if
devoted to mangold-wurzel it would be productive and would pay: whereas
now it was not ornamental and was waste.

"Sir Twickenham calculates," said Mr. Pole, "that we should have a crop
of--eh?"

"The average?" Sir Twickenham asked, on the evident upward mounting of a
sum in his brain. And then, with a relaxing look upon Cornelia: "Perhaps
you might have fifteen, sixteen, perhaps for the first year; or, say--you
see, the exact acreage is unknown to me. Say roughly, ten thousand sacks
the first year."

"Of what?" inquired Cornelia.

"Mangold-wurzel," said the baronet.

She gazed about her. Mr. Barrett was gone.

"But, no doubt, you take no interest in such reckonings?" Sir Twickenham
added.

"On the contrary, I take every interest in practical details."

Practical men believe this when they hear it from the lips of
gentlewomen, and without philosophically analyzing the fact that it is
because the practical quality possesses simply the fascination of a form
of strength. Sir Twickenham pursued his details. Day closed on Brookfield
blankly. Nevertheless, the ladies felt that the situation was now
dignified by tragic feeling, and remembering keenly how they had been
degraded of late, they had a sad enjoyment of the situation.




CHAPTER XVIII

Meantime Wilfrid was leading a town-life and occasionally visiting
Stornley. He was certainly not in love with Lady Charlotte Chillingworth,
but he was in harness to that lady. In love we have some idea whither we
would go: in harness we are simply driven, and the destination may be
anywhere. To be reduced to this condition (which will happen now and then
in the case of very young men who are growing up to something, and is, if
a momentary shame to them, rather a sign of promise than not) the gentle
male need not be deeply fascinated. Lady Charlotte was not a fascinating
person. She did not lay herself out to attract. Had she done so, she
would have failed to catch Wilfrid, whose soul thirsted for poetical
refinement and filmy delicacies in a woman. What she had, and what he
knew that he wanted, and could only at intervals assume by acting as if
he possessed it, was a victorious aplomb, which gave her a sort of
gallant glory in his sight. He could act it well before his sisters, and
here and there a damsel; and coming fresh from Lady Charlotte's school,
he had recently done so with success, and had seen the ladies feel toward
him, as he felt under his instructress in the art. Some nature, however,
is required for every piece of art. Wilfrid knew that he had been brutal
in his representation of the part, and the retrospect of his conduct at
Brookfield did not satisfy his remorseless critical judgement. In
consequence, when he again saw Lady Charlotte, his admiration of that one
prized characteristic of hers paralyzed him. She looked, and moved, and
spoke, as if the earth were her own. She was a note of true music, and he
felt himself to be an indecisive chord; capable ultimately of a splendid
performance, it might be, but at present crying out to be played upon.
This is the condition of a man in harness, whom witlings may call what
they will. He is subjugated: not won. In this state of subjugation he
will joyfully sacrifice as much as a man in love. For, having no
consolatory sense of happiness, such as encircles and makes a nest for
lovers, he seeks to attain some stature, at least, by excesses of
apparent devotion. Lady Charlotte believed herself beloved at last. She
was about to strike thirty; and Rumour, stalking with a turban of cloud
on her head,--enough that this shocking old celestial dowager, from
condemnation had passed to pity of the dashing lady. Beloved at last!
After a while there is no question of our loving; but we thirst for love,
if we have not had it. The key of Lady Charlotte will come in the course
of events. She was at the doubtful hour of her life, a warm-hearted
woman, known to be so by few, generally consigned by devout-visaged
Scandal (for who save the devout will dare to sit in the chair of
judgement?) as a hopeless rebel against conventional laws; and worse than
that, far worse,--though what, is not said.

At Stornley the following letter from Emilia hit its mark:--

Dear Mr. Wilfrid,

"It is time for me to see you. Come when you have read this letter. I
cannot tell you how I am, because my heart feels beating in another body.
Pray come; come now. Come on a swift horse. The thought of you galloping
to me goes through me like a flame that hums. You will come, I know. It
is time. If I write foolishly, do forgive me. I can only make sure of the
spelling, and I cannot please you on paper, only when I see you."

The signature of 'Emilia Alessandra Belloni' was given with her wonted
proud flourish.

Wilfrid stared at the writing. "What! all this time she has been thinking
the same thing!" Her constancy did not swim before him in alluring
colours. He regarded it as a species of folly. Disgust had left him. The
pool of Memory would have had to be stirred to remind him of the
pipe-smoke in her hair. "You are sure to please me when you see me?" he
murmured. "You are very confident, young lady!" So much had her charm
faded. And then he thought kindly of her, and that a meeting would not be
good for her, and that she ought to go to Italy and follow her
profession. "If she grows famous," whispered coxcombry, "why then oneself
will take a little of the praises given to her." And that seemed
eminently satisfactory. Men think in this way when you have loved them,
ladies. All men? No; only the coxcombs; but it is to these that you give
your fresh affection. They are, as it were, the band of the regiment of
adorers, marching ahead, while we sober working soldiers follow to their
music. "If she grows famous, why then I can bear in mind that her heart
was once in my possession: and it may return to its old owner,
perchance." Wilfrid indulged in a pleasant little dream of her singing at
the Opera-house, and he, tied to a ferocious, detested wife, how softly
and luxuriously would he then be sighing for the old time! It was partly
good seed in his nature, and an apprehension of her force of soul, that
kept him from a thought of evil to her. Passion does not inspire dark
appetite. Dainty innocence does, I am told. Things are tested by the
emotions they provoke. Wilfrid knew that there was no trifling with
Emilia, so he put the letter by, commenting thus "she's right, she
doesn't spell badly." Behind, which, to those who have caught the springs
of his character, volumes may be seen.

He put the letter by. Two days later, at noon, the card of Captain
Gambier was brought to him in the billiard-room,--on it was written:
"Miss Belloni waits on horseback to see you." Wilfrid thought "Waits!"
and the impossibility of escape gave him a notion of her power.

"So, you are letting that go on," said Lady Charlotte, when she heard
that Emilia and the captain were in company.

"There is no fear for her whatever."

"There is always fear when a man gives every minute of his time to that
kind of business," retorted her ladyship.

Wilfrid smiled the smile of the knowing. Rivalry with Gambier (and
successful too!) did not make Emilia's admiration so tasteless. Some one
cries out: "But, what a weak creature is this young man!" I reply, he was
at a critical stage of his career. All of us are weak in the period of
growth, and are of small worth before the hour of trial. This fellow had
been fattening all his life on prosperity; the very best dish in the
world; but it does not prove us. It fattens and strengthens us, just as
the sun does. Adversity is the inspector of our constitutions; she simply
tries our muscle and powers of endurance, and should be a periodical
visitor. But, until she comes, no man is known. Wilfrid was not
absolutely engaged to Lady Charlotte (she had taken care of that), and
being free, and feeling his heart beat in more lively fashion, he turned
almost delightedly to the girl he could not escape from. As when the
wriggling eel that has been prodded by the countryman's fork, finds that
no amount of wriggling will release it, to it twists in a knot around the
imprisoning prong. This simile says more than I mean it to say, but those
who understand similes will know the measure due to them.

There sat Emilia on her horse. "Has Gambier been giving her lessons?"
thought Wilfrid. She sat up, well-balanced; and, as he approached, began
to lean gently forward to him. A greeting 'equal to any lady's,' there
was no doubt. This was the point Emilia had to attain, in his severe
contemplation. A born lady, on her assured level, stood a chance of
becoming a Goddess; but ladyship was Emilia's highest mark. Such is the
state of things to the sentimental fancy when girls are at a
disadvantage. She smiled, and held out both hands. He gave her one,
nodding kindly, but was too confused to be the light-hearted cavalier.
Lady Charlotte walked up to her horse's side, after receiving Captain
Gambier's salute, and said: "Come, catch hold of my hands and jump."

"No," replied Emilia; "I only came to see him."

"But you will see him, and me in the bargain, if you stay."

"I fancy she has given her word to return early," interposed Wilfrid.

"Then we'll ride back with her," said Lady Charlotte. "Give me five
minutes. I'll order a horse out for you."

She smiled, and considerately removed the captain, by despatching him to
the stables.

A quivering dimple of tenderness hung for a moment in Emilia's cheeks, as
she looked upon Wilfrid. Then she said falteringly, "I think they wish to
be as we do."

"Alone?" cried Wilfrid.

"Yes; that is why I brought him over. He will come anywhere with me."

"You must be mistaken."

"No; I know it."

"Did he tell you so?"

"No; Mr. Powys did."

"Told you that Lady Charlotte--"

"Yes. Not, is; but, was. And he used that word...there is no word like
it,...he said 'her lover'--Oh! mine!" Emilia lifted her arms. Her voice
from its deepest fall had risen to a cry.

Wilfrid caught her as she slipped from her saddle. His heart was in a
tumult; stirred both ways: stirred with wrath and with love. He clasped
her tightly.

"Am I?--am I?" he breathed.

"My lover!" Emilia murmured.

He was her slave again.

For, here was something absolutely his own. His own from the roots; from
the first growth of sensation. Something with the bloom on it: to which
no other finger could point and say: "There is my mark."

(And, ladies, if you will consent to be likened to a fruit, you must bear
with these observations, and really deserve the stigma. If you will smile
on men, because they adore you as vegetable products, take what ensues.)

Lady Charlotte did no more than double the time she had asked for. The
party were soon at a quiet canter up the lanes; but entering a broad
furzy common with bramble-plots and oak-shaws, the Amazon flew ahead.
Emilia's eyes were so taken with her, that she failed to observe a tiny
red-flowing runlet in the clay, with yellow-ridged banks almost baked to
brick. Over it she was borne, but at the expense of a shaking that caused
her to rely on her hold of the reins, ignorant of the notions of a horse
outstripped. Wilfrid looked to see that the jump had been accomplished,
and was satisfied. Gambier was pressing his hack to keep a respectable
second.

Lady Charlotte spun round suddenly, crying, "Catch the mare!" and
galloped back to Emilia, who was deposited on a bush of bramble.
Dismounting promptly, the lady said: "My child, you're not hurt?"

"Not a bit." Emilia blinked.

"Not frightened?"

"Not a bit," was half whispered.

"That's brave. Now jump on your feet. Tell me why you rode over to us
this morning. Quick. Don't hesitate."

"Because I want Wilfrid to see his sister Cornelia," came the answer,
with the required absence of indecision.

Emilia ran straightway to meet Wilfrid approaching; and as both her
hands, according to her fashion, were stretched out to him to assure him
of her safety and take his clasp, forgetful of the instincts derived from
riding-habits, her feet became entangled; she trod herself down, falling
plump forward and looking foolish--perhaps for the first time in her life
plainly feeling so.

"Up! little woman," said Lady Charlotte, supporting her elbow.

"Now, Sir Wilfrid, we part here; and don't spoil her courage, now she has
had a spill, by any 'assiduous attentions' and precautions. She's sure to
take as many as are needed. If Captain Gambler thinks I require an
escort, he may offer."

The captain, taken by surprise, bowed, and flowed in ardent commonplace.
Wilfrid did not look of a wholesome colour.

"Do you return?" he stammered; not without a certain aspect of righteous
reproach.

"Yes. You will ride over to us again, probably, in a day or two? Captain
Gambler will see me safe from the savage admirers that crowd this
country, if I interpreted him rightly."

Emilia was lifted to her seat. Lady Charlotte sprang unassisted to hers.
"Ta-ta!" she waved her fingers from her lips. The pairs then separated;
one couple turning into green lanes, the other dipping to blue hills.




CHAPTER XIX

Gossip of course was excited on the subject of the choice of a partner
made by the member for the county. Cornelia placed her sisters in one of
their most pleasing of difficulties. She had not as yet pledged her word.
It was supposed that she considered it due to herself to withhold her
word for a term. The rumour in the family was, that Sir Twickenham
appreciated her hesitation, and desired that he might be intimately known
before he was finally accepted. When the Tinleys called, they heard that
Cornelia's acceptance of the baronet was doubtful. The Copleys, on the
other hand, distinctly understood that she had decided in his favour.
Owing to the amiable dissension between the Copleys and the Tinleys, each
party called again; giving the ladies of Brookfield further opportunity
for studying one of the levels from which they had risen. Arabella did
almost all the fencing with Laura Tinley, contemptuously as a youth of
station returned from college will turn and foil an ill-conditioned
villager, whom formerly he has encountered on the green.

"Had they often met, previous to the...the proposal?" inquired Laura; and
laughed: "I was going to say 'popping.'"

"Pray do not check yourself, if a phrase appears to suit you," returned
Arabella.

"But it was in the neighbourhood, was it not?"

"They have met in the neighbourhood."

"At Richford?"

"Also at Richford."

"We thought it was sudden, dear; that's all."

"Why should it not be?"

"Perhaps the best things are, it is true."

"You congratulate us upon a benefit?"

"He is to be congratulated seriously. Naturally. When she decides, let me
know early, I do entreat you, because...well, I am of a different opinion
from some people, who talk of another attachment, or engagement, and I do
not believe in it, and have said so."

Rising to depart, Laura Tinley resumed: "Most singular! You are aware, of
course, that poor creature, our organist--I ought to say yours--who
looked (it was Mr. Sumner I heard say it--such a good thing!)" as if he
had been a gentleman in another world, and was the ghost of one in this:"
really one of the cleverest things! but he is clever!--Barrett's his
name: Barrett and some: musical name before it, like Handel. I mean one
that we are used to. Well, the man has totally and unexpectedly thrown up
his situation."

"His appointment," said Arabella. Permitting no surprise to be visible,
she paused: "Yes. I don't think we shall give our consent to her filling
the post."

Laura let it be seen that her adversary was here a sentence too quick for
her.

"Ah! you mean your little Miss Belloni?"

"Was it not of her you were thinking?"

"When?" asked Laura, shamefully bewildered.

"When you alluded to Mr. Barrett's vacant place."

"Not at the moment."

"I thought you must be pointing to her advancement."

"I confess it was not in my mind."

"In what consisted the singularity, then?"

"The singularity?"

"You prefaced your remarks with the exclamation, 'Singular!'"

Laura showed that Arabella had passed her guard. She hastened to
compliment her on her kindness to Emilia, and so sheathed her weapon for
the time, having just enjoyed a casual inspection of Mrs. Chump entering
the room, and heard the brogue an instant.

"Irish!" she whispered, smiling, with a sort of astonished discernment of
the nationality, and swept through the doorway: thus conveying forcibly
to Arabella her knowledge of what the ladies of Brookfield were enduring:
a fine Parthian shot.

That Cornelia should hold a notable county man, a baronet and owner of
great acres, in a state between acceptance and rejection, was considered
high policy by the ladies, whom the idea of it elevated; and they
encouraged her to pursue this course, without having a suspicion, shrewd
as they were, that it was followed for any other object than the honour
of the family. But Mr. Pole was in the utmost perplexity, and spoke of
baronets as things almost holy, to be kneeled to, prayed for. He was
profane. "I thought, papa," said Cornelia, "that women conferred the
favour when they gave their hands!"

It was a new light to the plain merchant. "How should you say if a Prince
came and asked for you?"

"Still that he asked a favour at my hands."

"Oh!" went Mr. Pole, in the voice of a man whose reason is outraged. The
placidity of Cornelia's reply was not without its effect on him,
nevertheless. He had always thought his girls extraordinary girls, and
born to be distinguished. "Perhaps she has a lord in view," he concluded:
it being his constant delusion to suppose that high towering female sense
has always a practical aim at a material thing. He was no judge of the
sex in its youth. "Just speak to her," he said to Wilfrid.

Wilfrid had heard from Emilia that there was a tragic background to this
outward placidity; tears on the pillow at night and long vigils. Emilia
had surprised her weeping, and though she obtained no confidences, the
soft mood was so strong in the stately lady, that she consented to weep
on while Emilia clasped her. Petitioning on her behalf to Wilfrid for
aid, Emilia had told him the scene; and he, with a man's stupidity,
alluded to it, not thinking what his knowledge of it revealed to a woman.

"Why do you vacillate, and keep us all in the dark as to what you mean?"
he began.

"I am not prepared," said Cornelia; the voice of humility issuing from a
monument.

"One of your oracular phrases! Are you prepared to be straightforward in
your dealings?"

"I am prepared for any sacrifice, Wilfrid."

"The marrying of a man in his position is a sacrifice!"

"I cannot leave papa."

"And why not?"

"He is ill. He does not speak of it, but he is ill. His actions are
strange. They are unaccountable."

"He has an old friend to reside in his house?"

"It is not that. I have noticed him. His mind...he requires watching."

"And how long is it since you made this discovery?"

"One sees clearer perhaps when one is not quite happy."

"Not happy! Then it's for him that you turn the night to tears?"

Cornelia closed her lips. She divined that her betrayer must be close in
his confidence. She went shortly after to Emilia, whose secret at once
stood out bare to a kindled suspicion. There was no fear that Cornelia
would put her finger on it accusingly, or speak of it directly. She had
the sentimentalist's profound respect for the name and notion of love.
She addressed Emilia vaguely, bidding her keep guard on her emotions, and
telling her there was one test of the truth of masculine protestations;
this, Will he marry you? The which, if you are poor, is a passably
infallible test. Emilia sucked this in thoughtfully. She heard that
lovers were false. Why, then of course they were not like her lover!
Cornelia finished what she deemed her duty, and departed, while Emilia
thought: "I wonder whether he could be false to me;" and she gave herself
shrewd half-delicious jarrings of pain, forcing herself to contemplate
the impossible thing.

She was in this state when Mrs. Chump came across her, and with a slight
pressure of a sovereign into her hand, said: "There, it's for you, little
Belloni! and I see ye've been thinkin' me one o' the scrape-hards and
close-fists. It's Pole who keeps me low, on purpose. And I'm a wretch if
I haven't my purse full, so you see I'm all in the dark in the house, and
don't know half so much as the sluts o' the kitchen. So, ye'll tell me,
little Belloni, is Arr'bella goin' to marry Mr. Annybody? And is Cornelia
goin' to marry Sir Tickleham? And whether Mr. Wilfrud's goin' to marry
Lady Charlotte Chill'nworth? Becas, my dear, there's Arr'bella, who's
sharp, she is, as a North-easter in January, (which Chump 'd cry out for,
for the sake of his ships, poor fella--he kneelin' by 's bedside in a
long nightgown and lookin' just twice what he was!) she has me like a
nail to my vary words, and shows me that nothin' can happen betas o' what
I've said. And Cornelia--if ye'll fancy a tall codfish on its tail: 'Mrs.
Chump, I beg ye'll not go to believe annything of me.' So I says to her,
'Cornelia! my dear! do ye think, now, it's true that Chump went and
marrud his cook, that ye treat me so? becas my father,' I tell her, 'he
dealt in porrk in a large way, and I was a fine woman, full of the
arr'stocracy, and Chump a little puffed-out bladder of a man.' So then
she says: 'Mrs. Chump, I listen to no gossup: listen you to no gossup.
'And Mr. Wilfrud, my dear, he sends me on the flat o' my back, laughin'.
And Ad'la she takes and turns me right about, so that I don't see the
thing I'm askin' after; and there's nobody but you, little Belloni, to
help me, and if ye do, ye shall know what the crumple of paper sounds
like."

Mrs. Chump gave a sugary suck with her tongue. Emilia returned the money
to her.

"Ye're foolush!" said Mrs. Chump. "A shut fist's good in fight and bad in
friendship. Do ye know that? Open your hand."

"Excuse me," persisted Emilia.

"Pooh! take the money, or I'll say ye're in a conspiracy to make me
blindman's-buff of the parrty. Take ut."

"I don't want it."

"Maybe, it's not enough?"

"I don't want any, ma'am."

"Ma'am, to the deuce with ye! I'll be callin' ye a forr'ner in a minute,
I will."

Emilia walked away from a volley of terrific threats.

For some reason, unfathomed by her, she wanted to be alone with Wilfrid
and put a question to him. No other, in sooth, than the infallible test.
Not, mind you, that she wished to be married. But something she had heard
(she had forgotten what it was) disturbed her, and that recent trifling
with pain, in her excess of happiness, laid her open to it. Her heart was
weaker, and fluttered, as if with a broken wing. She thought, "if I can
be near him to lean against him for one full hour!" it would make her
strong again. For, she found that if her heart was rising on a broad
breath, suddenly, for no reason that she knew, it seemed to stop in its
rise, break, and sink, like a wind-beaten billow. Once or twice, in a
quick fear, she thought: "What is this? Is this a malady coming before
death?" She walked out gloomily, thinking of the darkness of the world to
Wilfrid, if she should die. She plucked flowers, and then reproached
herself with plucking them. She tried to sing. "No, not till I have been
with him alone;" she said, chiding her voice to silence. A shadow crossed
her mind, as a Spring-mist dulls the glory of May. "Suppose all singing
has gone from me--will he love wretched me?"

By-and-by she met him in the house. "Come out of doors to-night," she
whispered.

Wilfrid's spirit of intrigue was never to be taken by surprise. "In the
wood, under the pine, at nine," he replied.

"Not there," said Emilia, seeing this place mournfully dark from
Cornelia's grief. "It is too still; say, where there's water falling. One
can't be unhappy by noisy water."

Wilfrid considered, and named Wilming Weir. "And there we'll sit and
you'll sing to me. I won't dine at home, so they won't susp-a-fancy
anything.--Soh! and you want very much to be with me, my bird? What am
I?" He bent his head.

"My lover."

He pressed her hand rapturously, half-doubting whether her pronunciation
of the word had not a rather too confident twang.

Was it not delightful, he asked her, that they should be thus one to the
other, and none know of it. She thought so too, and smiled happily,
promising secresy, at his request; for the sake of continuing so
felicitous a life.

"You, you know, have an appointment with Captain Gambier, and, I with
Lady Charlotte Chillingworth," said he. "How dare you make appointments
with a captain of hussars?" and he bent her knuckles fondlingly.

Emilia smiled as before. He left her with a distinct impression that she
did not comprehend that part of her lesson.

Wilfrid had just bled his father of a considerable sum of money; having
assured him that he was the accepted suitor of Lady Charlotte
Chillingworth, besides making himself pleasant in allusion to Mrs. Chump,
so far as to cast some imputation on his sisters' judgement for not
perceiving the virtues of the widow. The sum was improvidently large. Mr.
Pole did not hear aright when he heard it named. Even at the repetition,
he went: "Eh?" two or three times, vacantly. The amount was distinctly
nailed to his ear: whereupon he said, "Ah!--yes! you young fellows want
money: must have it, I suppose. Up from the bowels of the earth Up from
the--: you're sure they're not playing the fool with you, over there?"

Wilfrid understood the indication to Stornley. "I think you need have no
fear of that, sir." And so his father thought, after an examination of
the youth, who was of manly shape, and had a fresh, non-fatuous, air.

"Well, if that's all right..." sighed Mr. Pole. "Of course you'll always
know that money's money. I wish your sisters wouldn't lose their time, as
they do. Time's worth more than money. What sum?"

"I told you, sir, I wanted--there's the yacht, you know, and a lot of
tradesmen's bills, which you don't like to see standing:-about--perhaps I
had better name the round sum. Suppose you write down eight hundred. I
shan't want more for some months. If you fancy it too much..."

Mr. Pole had lifted his head. But he spoke nothing. His lips and brows
were rigid in apparent calculation. Wilfrid kept his position for a
minute or so; and then, a little piqued, he moved about. He had inherited
the antipathy to the discussion of the money question, and fretted to
find it unnecessarily prolonged.

"Shall I come to you on this business another time, sir?"

"No, God bless my soul!" cried his father; "are you going to keep this
hanging over me for ever? Eight hundred, you said." He mumbled: "salary
of a chief clerk of twenty years' standing. Eight: twice four:--there you
have it exactly."

"Will you send it me in a letter?" said Wilfrid, out of patience.

"I'll send it you in a letter," assented his father. Upon which Wilfrid
changed his mind. "I can take a chair, though. I can easily wait for it
now."

"Save trouble, if I send it. Eh?"

"Do you wish to see whether you can afford it, sir?"

"I wish to see you show more sense--with your confounded 'afford.' Have
you any idea of bankers' books?--bankers' accounts?" Mr. Pole fished his
cheque-book from a drawer and wrote Wilfrid's name and the sum, tore out
the leaf and tossed it to him. "There, I've written to-day. Don't present
it for a week." He rubbed his forehead hastily, touching here and there a
paper to put it scrupulously in a line with the others. Wilfrid left him,
and thought: "Kind old boy! Of course, he always means kindly, but I
think I see a glimpse of avarice as a sort of a sign of age coming on. I
hope he'll live long!"

Wilfrid was walking in the garden, imagining perhaps that he was
thinking, as the swarming sensations of little people help them to
imagine, when Cornelia ran hurriedly up to him and said: "Come with me to
papa. He's ill: I fear he is going to have a fit."

"I left him sound and well, just now," said Wilfrid. "This is your
mania."

"I found him gasping in his chair not two minutes after you quitted him.
Dearest, he is in a dangerous state!"

Wilfrid stept back to his father, and was saluted with a ready "Well?" as
he entered; but the mask had slipped from half of the old man's face, and
for the first time in his life Wilfrid perceived that he had become an
old man.

"Well, sir, you sent for me?" he said.

"Girls always try to persuade you you're ill--that's all," returned Mr.
Pole. His voice was subdued; but turning to Cornelia, he fired up: "It's
preposterous to tell a man who carries on a business like mine, you've
observed for a long while that he's queer!--There, my dear child, I know
that you mean well. I shall look all right the day you're married."

This allusion, and the sudden kindness, drew a storm of tears to
Cornelia's eyelids.

"Papa! if you will but tell me what it is!" she moaned.

A nervous frenzy seemed to take possession of him. He ordered her out of
the room.

She was gone, but his arm was still stretched out, and his expression of
irritated command did not subside.

Wilfrid took his arm and put it gently down on the chair, saying: "You're
not quite the thing to-day, sir."

"Are you a fool as well?" Mr. Pole retorted. "What do you know of, to
make me ill? I live a regular life. I eat and drink just as you all do;
and if I have a headache, I'm stunned with a whole family screaming as
hard as they can that I'm going to die. Damned hard! I say, sir, it's--"
He fell into a feebleness.

"A little glass of brandy, I think," Wilfrid suggested; and when Mr. Pole
had gathered his mind he assented, begging his son particularly to take
precautions to prevent any one from entering the room until he had tasted
the reviving liquor.




CHAPTER XX

A half-circle of high-banked greensward, studded with old park-trees,
hung round the roar of the water; distant enough from the white-twisting
fall to be mirrored on a smooth-heaved surface, while its out-pushing
brushwood below drooped under burdens of drowned reed-flags that caught
the foam. Keen scent of hay, crossing the dark air, met Emilia as she
entered the river-meadow. A little more, and she saw the white weir-piles
shining, and the grey roller just beginning to glisten to the moon.
Eastward on her left, behind a cedar, the moon had cast off a thick
cloud, and shone through the cedar-bars with a yellowish hazy softness,
making rosy gold of the first passion of the tide, which, writhing and
straining on through many lights, grew wide upon the wonderful velvet
darkness underlying the wooded banks. With the full force of a young soul
that leaps from beauty seen to unimagined beauty, Emilia stood and
watched the picture. Then she sat down, hushed, awaiting her lover.

Wilfrid, as it chanced, was ten minutes late. She did not hear his voice
till he had sunk on his knee by her side.

"What a reverie!" he said half jealously. "Isn't it lovely here?"

Emilia pressed his hand, but without turning her face to him, as her
habit was. He took it for shyness, and encouraged her with soft
exclamations and expansive tenderness.

"I wish I had not come here!" she murmured.

"Tell me why?" He folded his arm about her waist.

"Why did you let me wait?" said she.

Wilfrid drew out his watch; blamed the accident that had detained him,
and remarked that there were not many minutes to witness against him.

She appeared to throw off her moodiness. "You are here at last. Let me
hold your hand, and think, and be quite silent."

"You shall hold my hand, and think, and be quite silent, my own girl! if
you will tell me what's on your mind."

Emilia thought it enough to look in his face, smiling.

"Has any one annoyed you?" he cried out.

"No one."

"Then receive the command of your lord, that you kiss him."

"I will kiss him," said Emilia; and did so.

The salute might have appeased an imperious lord, but was not so
satisfactory to an exacting lover. He perceived, however, that, whether
as lover or as lord, he must wait for her now, owing to her having waited
for him: so, he sat by her, permitting his hand to be softly squeezed,
and trying to get at least in the track of her ideas, while her ear was
turned to the weir, and her eyes were on the glowing edges of the
cedar-tree.

Finally, on one of many deep breaths, she said: "It's over. Why were you
late? But, never mind now. Never let it be long again when I am expecting
you. It's then I feel so much at his mercy. I mean, if I am where I hear
falling water; sometimes thunder."

Wilfrid masked his complete mystification with a caressing smile; not
without a growing respect for the only person who could make him
experience the pangs of conscious silliness. You see, he was not a
coxcomb.

"That German!" Emilia enlightened him.

"Your old music-master?"

"I wish it, I wish it! I should soon be free from him. Don't you know
that dreadful man I told you about, who's like a black angel to me,
because there is no music like his? and he's a German! I told you how I
first dreamed about him, and then regularly every night, after talking
with my father about Italy and his black-yellow Tedeschi, this man came
over my pillow and made me call him Master, Master. And he is. He seems
as if he were the master of my soul, mocking me, making me worship him in
spite of my hate. I came here, thinking only of you. I heard the water
like a great symphony. I fell into dreaming of my music. That's when I am
at his mercy. There's no one like him. I must detest music to get free
from him. How can I? He is like the God of music."

Wilfrid now remembered certain of her allusions to this rival, who had
hitherto touched him very little. Perhaps it was partly the lovely scene
that lifted him to a spiritual jealousy, partly his susceptibility to a
sentimental exaggeration, and partly the mysterious new charm in Emilia's
manner, that was as a bordering lustre, showing how the full orb was
rising behind her.

"His name?" Wilfrid asked for.

Emilia's lips broke to the second letter of the alphabet; but she cut
short the word. "Why should you hear it? And now that you are here, you
drive him away. And the best is," she laughed, "I am sure you will not
remember any of his pieces. I wish I could not--not that it's the memory;
but he seems all round me, up in the air, and when the trees move all
together...you chase him away, my lover!"

It was like a break in music, the way that Emilia suddenly closed her
sentence; coming with a shock of flattering surprise upon Wilfrid.

Then she pursued: "My English lover! I am like Italy, in chains to that
German, and you...but no, no, no! It's not quite a likeness, for my
German is not a brute. I have seen his picture in shop-windows: the wind
seemed in his hair, and he seemed to hear with his eyes: his forehead
frowning so. Look at me, and see. So!"

Emilia pressed up the hair from her temples and bent her brows.

"It does not increase your beauty," said Wilfrid.

"There's the difference!" Emilia sighed mildly. "He sees angels, cherubs,
and fairies, and imps, and devils; or he hears them: they come before him
from far off, in music. They do to me, now and then. Only now and then,
when my head's on fire.--My lover!"

Wilfrid pressed his mouth to the sweet instrument. She took his kiss
fully, and gave her own frankly, in return. Then, sighing a very little,
she said: "Do not kiss me much."

"Why not?"

"No!"

"But, look at me."

"I will look at you. Only take my hand. See the moon is getting whiter.
The water there is like a pool of snakes, and then they struggle out, and
roll over and over, and stream on lengthwise. I can see their long flat
heads, and their eyes: almost their skins. No, my lover! do not kiss me.
I lose my peace."

Wilfrid was not willing to relinquish his advantage, and the tender deep
tone of the remonstrance was most musical and catching. What if he pulled
her to earth from that rival of his in her soul? She would then be wholly
his own. His lover's sentiment had grown rageingly jealous of the lordly
German. But Emilia said, "I have you on my heart more when I touch your
hand only, and think. If you kiss me, I go into a cloud, and lose your
face in my mind."

"Yes, yes;" replied Wilfrid, pleased to sustain the argument for the sake
of its fruitful promises. "But you must submit to be kissed, my darling.
You will have to."

She gazed inquiringly.

"When you are married, I mean."

"When will you marry me?" she said.

The heir-apparent of the house of Pole blinked probably at that moment
more foolishly than most mortal men have done. Taming his astonishment to
represent a smile, he remarked: "When? are you thinking about it
already?"

She answered, in a quiet voice that conveyed the fact forcibly, "Yes."

"But you're too young yet; and you're going to Italy, to learn in the
schools. You wouldn't take a husband there with you, would you? What
would the poor devil do?"

"But you are not too young," said she.

Wilfrid supposed not.

"Could you not go to my Italy with me?"

"Impossible! What! as a dangling husband?" Wilfrid laughed scornfully.

"They would love you too," she said. "They are such loving people. Oh,
come! Consent to come, my lover! I must learn. If I do not, you will
despise me. How can I bring anything to lay at your feet, my dear! my
dear! if I do not?"

"Impossible!" Wilfrid reiterated, as one who had found moorings in the
word.

"Then I will give up Italy!"

He had not previously acted hypocrite with this amazing girl.
Nevertheless, it became difficult not to do so. He could scarcely believe
that he had on a sudden, and by strange agency, slipped into an earnest
situation. Emilia's attitude and tone awakened him to see it. Her hands
were clenched straight down from the shoulders: all that she conceived
herself to be renouncing for his sake was expressed in her face.

"Would you, really?" he murmured.

"I will!"

"And be English altogether?"

"Be yours!"

"Mine?"

"Yes; from this time."

Now stirred his better nature: though not before had he sceptically
touched her lips and found them cold, as if the fire had been taken out
of them by what they had uttered. He felt that it was no animal love, but
the force of a soul drawn to him; and, forgetting the hypocritical
foundation he had laid, he said: "How proud I shall be of you!"

"I shall go with you to battle," returned Emilia.

"My little darling! You won't care to see those black fellows killed,
will you?"

Emilia shuddered. "No; poor things! Why do you hurt them? Kill wicked
people, tyrant white-coats! And we will not talk of killing now. Proud of
me? If I can make you!"

"You sigh so heavily!"

"Something makes me feel like a little beggar."

"When I tell you I love you?"

"Yes; but I only feel rich when I am giving; and I seem to have nothing
to give now:--now that I have lost Italy!"

"But you give me your love, don't you?"

"All of it. But I seem to give it to you in tatters it's like a beggar;
like a day without any sun."

"Do you think I shall have that idea when I hear you sing to me, and know
that this little leaping fountain of music here is mine?"

Dim rays of a thought led Emilia to remark, "Must not men keel to women?
I mean, if they are to love them for ever?"

Wilfrid smiled gallantly: "I will kneel to you, if it pleases you."

"Not now. You should have done so, once, I dreamed only once, just for a
moment, in Italy; when all were crying out to me that I had caught their
hearts. I fancied standing out like a bright thing in a dark crowd, and
then saying "I am his!" pointing to you, and folding my arms, waiting for
you to take me."

The lover's imagination fired at the picture, and immediately he told a
lover's lie; for the emotion excited by the thought of her glory coloured
deliciously that image of her abnegation of all to him. He said: "I would
rather have you as you are."

Emilia leaned to him more, and the pair fixed their eyes on the moon,
that had now topped the cedar, and was pure silver: silver on the grass,
on the leafage, on the waters. And in the West, facing it, was an arch of
twilight and tremulous rose; as if a spirit hung there over the shrouded
sun.

"At least," thought Wilfrid, "heaven, and the beauty of the world,
approve my choice." And he looked up, fancying that he had a courage
almost serene to meet his kindred with Emilia on his arm.

She felt his arm dreamily stressing its clasp about her, and said: "Now I
know you love me. And you shall take me as I am. I need not be so poor
after all. My dear! my dear! I cannot see beyond you."

"Is that your misery?" said he.

"My delight! my pleasure! One can live a life anywhere. And how can I
belong to Italy, if I am yours? Do you know, when we were silent just
now, I was thinking that water was the history of the world flowing out
before me, all mixed up of kings and queens, and warriors with armour,
and shouting armies; battles and numbers of mixed people; and great red
sunsets, with women kneeling under them. Do you know those long low
sunsets? I love them. They look like blood spilt for love. The noise of
the water, and the moist green smell, gave me hundreds of pictures that
seemed to hug me. I thought--what could stir music in me more than this?
and, am I not just as rich if I stay here with my lover, instead of
flying to strange countries, that I shall not care for now? So, you shall
take me as I am. I do not feel poor any longer."

With that she gave him both her hands.

"Yes," said Wilfrid.

As if struck by the ridicule of so feeble a note, falling upon her
passionate speech, he followed it up with the "yes!" of a man; adding:
"Whatever you are, you are my dear girl; my own love; mine!"

Having said it, he was screwed up to feel it as nearly as possible, such
virtue is there in uttered words.

Then he set about resolutely studying to appreciate her in the new
character she had assumed to him. It is barely to be supposed that he
should understand what in her love for him she sacrificed in giving up
Italy, as she phrased it. He had some little notion of the sacrifice;
but, as he did not demand any sacrifice of the sort, and as this involved
a question perplexing, irritating, absurd, he did not regard it very
favourably. As mistress of his fancy, her prospective musical triumphs
were the crown of gold hanging over her. As wife of his bosom, they were
not to be thought of. But the wife of his bosom must take her place by
virtue of some wondrous charm. What was it that Emilia could show, if not
music? Beautiful eyebrows: thick rare eyebrows, no doubt couched upon her
full eyes, they were a marvel: and her eyes were a marvel. She had a
sweet mouth, too, though the upper lip did not boast the aristocratic
conventional curve of adorable pride, or the under lip a pretty droop to
a petty rounded chin. Her face was like the aftersunset across a
rose-garden, with the wings of an eagle poised outspread on the light.
Some such coloured, vague, magnified impression Wilfrid took of her.
Still, it was not quite enough to make him scorn contempt, should it
whisper: nor even quite enough to combat successfully the image of
elegant dames in their chosen attitudes--the queenly moments when perhaps
they enter an assembly, or pour out tea with an exquisite exhibition of
arm, or recline upon a couch, commanding homage of the world of little
men. What else had this girl to count upon to make her exclusive? A
devoted heart; she had a loyal heart, and perfect frankness: a mind
impressible, intelligent, and fresh. She gave promise of fair
companionship at all seasons. She could put a spell upon him, moreover.
By that power of hers, never wilfully exercised, she came, in spite of
the effect left on him by her early awkwardnesses and 'animalities,'
nearer to his idea of superhuman nature than anything he knew of. But how
would she be regarded when the announcement of Mrs. Wilfrid Pole brought
scrutinizing eyes and gossiping mouths to bear on her?

It mattered nothing. He kissed her, and the vision of the critical world
faded to a blank. Whatever she was, he was her prime luminary, so he
determined to think that he cast light upon a precious, an unrivalled
land.

"You are my own, are you not, Emilia?"

"Yes; I am," she answered.

"That water seems to say 'for ever,'" he murmured; and Emilia's fingers
pressed upon his.

Of marriage there was no further word. Her heart was evidently quite at
ease; and that it should be so without chaining him to a date, was
Wilfrid's peculiar desire. He could pledge himself to eternity, but
shrank from being bound to eleven o'clock on the morrow morning.

So, now, the soft Summer hours flew like white doves from off the
mounting moon, and the lovers turned to go, all being still: even the
noise of the waters still to their ears, as life that is muffled in
sleep. They saw the cedar grey-edged under the moon: and Night, that
clung like a bat beneath its ancient open palms. The bordering sward
about the falls shone silvery. In its shadow was a swan. These scenes are
but beckoning hands to the hearts of lovers, waving them on to that Eden
which they claim: but when the hour has fled, they know it; and by the
palpitating light in it they know that it holds the best of them.




CHAPTER XXI

At this season Mr. Pericles reappeared. He had been, he said, through
"Paris, Turin, Milano, Veniss, and by Trieste over the Summering to
Vienna on a tour for a voice." And in no part of the Continent, his
vehement declaration assured the ladies, had he found a single one. It
was one universal croak--ahi! And Mr. Pericles could, affirm that
Purgatory would have no pains for him after the torments he had recently
endured. "Zey are frogs if zey are not geese," said Mr. Pericles. "I give
up. Opera is dead. Hein? for a time;" and he smiled almost graciously,
adding: "Where is she?" For Emilia was not present.

The ladies now perceived a greatness of mind in the Greek's devotion to
music, and in his non-mercenary travels to assist managers of Opera by
discovering genius. His scheme for Emilia fired them with delight. They
were about to lay down all the material arrangements at once, but Mrs.
Chump, who had heard that there was a new man in the house, now entered
the room, prepared to conquer him. As thus, after a short form of
introduction: "D'ye do, sir! and ye're Mr. Paricles. Oh! but ye're a
Sultan, they say. Not in morr'ls, sir. And vary pleasant to wander on the
Cont'nent with a lot o' lacqueys at your heels. It's what a bachelor can
do. But I ask ye, sir, is ut fair, ye think, to the poor garls that has
to stop at home?"

Hereat the ladies of Brookfield, thus miserably indicated, drew upon
their self-command that sprang from the high sense of martyrdom.

Mr. Pericles did not reply to Mrs. Chump at all. He turned to Adela,
saying aloud: "What is zis person?"

It might have pleased them to hear any slight put publicly on Mrs. Chump
in the first resistance to the woman, but in the present stage their
pride defended her. "Our friend," was the reply with which Arabella
rebuked his rudeness; and her sister approved her. "We can avoid showing
that we are weak in our own opinion, whatsoever degrades us," they had
said during a consultation. Simultaneously they felt that Mr. Pericles
being simply a millionaire and not In Society, being also a middle-class
foreigner (a Greek whose fathers ran with naked heels and long lank hair
on the shores of the Aegean), before such a man they might venture to
identify this their guest with themselves an undoubted duty, in any case,
but not always to be done; at least, not with grace and personal
satisfaction. Therefore, the "our friend" dispersed a common gratulatory
glow. Very small points, my masters; but how are coral-islands built?

Mrs. Chump fanned her cheek, in complete ignorance of the offence and
defence. Chump, deceased, in amorous mood, had praised her management of
the fan once, when breath was in him: "'Martha,' says he, winkin' a sort
of 'mavourneen' at me, ye know--'Martha! with a fan in your hand, if
ye're not a black-eyed beauty of a Spaniard, ye little devil of Seville!'
says he." This she had occasionally confided to the ladies. The marital
eulogy had touched her, and she was not a woman of coldly-flowing blood,
she had an excuse for the constant employment of the fan.

"And well, Mr. Paricles! have ye got nothin' to tell us about foreign
countesses and their slips? Because, we can listen, sir, garls or not.
Sure, if they understand ye, ye teach 'em nothin'; and if they don't
understand ye, where's the harm done? D'ye see, sir? It's clear in favour
of talkin'."

Mr. Pericles administered consolation to his moustache by twisting it
into long waxy points. "I do not know; I do not know," he put her away
with, from time to time. In the end Mrs. Chump leaned over to Arabella.
"Don't have 'm, my dear," she murmured.

"You mean--?" quoth Arabella.

"Here's the driest stick that aver stood without sap."

Arabella flushed when she took the implication that she was looking on
the man as a husband. Adela heard the remarks, and flushed likewise. Mrs.
Chump eyed them both. "It's for the money o' the man," she soliloquized
aloud, as her fashion was. Adela jumped up, and with an easy sprightly
posture of her fair, commonly studious person, and natural run of notes
"Oh!" she cried, "I begin to feel what it is to be like a live fish on
the fire, frying, frying, frying! and if he can keep his Christian
sentiments under this infliction, what a wonderful hero he must be! What
a hot day!"

She moved swiftly to the door, and flung it open. A sight met her eyes at
which she lost her self-possession. She started back, uttering a soft
cry.

"Ah! aha! oh!" went the bitter ironic drawl of Mr. Pericles, whose sharp
glance had caught the scene as well.

Emilia came forward with a face like sunset. Diplomacy, under the form of
Wilfrid Pole, kicked its heels behind, and said a word or two in a tone
of false cheerfulness.

"Oh! so!" Mr. Pericles frowned, while Emilia held her hand out to him.
"Yeas! You are quite well? H'm! You are burnt like a bean--hein? I shall
ask you what you have been doing, by and by."

Happily for decency, Mrs. Chump had not participated in the fact
presented by ocular demonstration. She turned about comfortably to greet
Wilfrid, uttering the inspired remark: "Ye look red from a sly kiss!"

"For one?" said he, sharpening his blunted wits on this dull instrument.

The ladies talked down their talk. Then Wilfrid and Mr. Pericles
interchanged quasi bows.

"Oh, if he doesn't show his upper teeth like an angry cat, or a leopard
I've seen!" cried Mrs. Chump in Adela's ear, designating Mr. Pericles.
"Does he know Mr. Wilfrud's in the British army, and a new lieuten't,
gazetted and all?"

Mr. Pericles certainly did not look pleasantly upon Wilfrid: Emilia
received his unconcealed wrath and spite.

"Go and sing a note!" he said.

"At the piano?" Emilia quietly asked.

"At piano, harp, what you will--it is ze voice I want."

Emilia pitched her note high from a full chest and with glad bright eyes,
which her fair critics thought just one degree brazen, after the
revelation in the doorway.

Mr. Pericles listened; wearing an aching expression, as if he were
sending one eye to look up into his brain for a judgement disputed in
that sovereign seat.

Still she held on, and then gave a tremulous, rich, contralto note.

"Oh! the human voice!" cried Adela, overcome by the transition of tones.

"Like going from the nightingale to the nightjar," said Arabella.

Mrs. Chump remarked: "Ye'll not find a more susceptible woman to musuc
than me."

Wilfrid looked away. Pride coursed through his veins in a torrent.

When the voice was still, Mr. Pericles remained in a pondering posture.

"You go to play fool with zat voice in Milano, you are flogged," he cried
terribly, shaking his forefinger.

Wilfrid faced round in wrath, but Mr. Pericles would not meet his
challenge, continuing: "You hear? you hear?--so!" and Mr. Pericles
brought the palms of his hands in collision.

"Marcy, man!" Mrs. Chump leaped from her chair; "d'ye mean that those
horrud forr'ners'll smack a full-grown young woman?--Don't go to 'm, my
dear. Now, take my 'dvice, little Belloni, and don't go. It isn't the
sting o' the smack, ye know--"

"Shall I sing anything to you?" Emilia addressed Mr. Pericles. The latter
shrugged to express indifference. Nevertheless she sang. She had never
sung better. Mr. Pericles clutched his chin in one hand, elbow on knee.
The ladies sighed to think of the loss of homage occasioned by the fact
of so few being present to hear her. Wilfrid knew himself the fountain of
it all, and stood fountain-like, in a shower of secret adulation: a
really happy fellow. This: that his beloved should be the centre of eyes,
and pronounced exquisite by general approbation, besides subjecting him
to a personal spell: this was what he wanted. It was mournful to think
that Circumstance had not at the same time created the girl of noble
birth, or with an instinct for spiritual elegance. But the world is
imperfect.

Presently he became aware that she was understood to be singing pointedly
to him: upon which he dismissed the council of his sensations, and began
to diplomatize cleverly. Leaning over to Adela, he whispered:

"Pericles wants her to go to Italy. My belief is, that she won't."

"And why?" returned Adela, archly reproachful.

"Well, we've been spoiling her a little, perhaps. I mean, we men, of
course. But, I really don't think that I'm chiefly to blame. You won't
allow Captain Gambier to be in fault, I know."

"Why not?" said Adela.

"Well, if you will, then he is the principal offender."

Adela acted disbelief; but, unprepared for her brother's perfectly
feminine audacity of dissimulation, she thought: "He can't be in earnest
about the girl," and was led to fancy that Gambier might, and to
determine to see whether it was so.

By this manoeuvre, Wilfrid prepared for himself a defender when the
charge was brought against him.

Mr. Pericles was thunderstruck on hearing Emilia refuse to go to Italy. A
scene of tragic denunciation on the one hand, and stubborn decision on
the other, ensued.

"I shall not mind zis" (he spoke of Love and the awakening of the female
heart) "not when you are trained. It is good, zen, and you have fire from
it. But, now! little fool, I say, it is too airly--too airly! How shall
you learn--eh? with your brain upon a man? And your voice, little fool, a
thing of caprice, zat comes and goes as he will, not you will. Hein? like
a barrel-organ, which he turns ze handle.--Mon Dieu! Why did I leave
her?" Mr. Pericles struck his brow with his wrist, clutching at the long
thin slice of hair that did greasy duty for the departed crop on his
poll. "Did I not know it was a woman? And so you are, what you say, in
lofe."

Emilia replied: "I have not said so," with exasperating coolness.

"You have your eye on a man. And I know him, zat man! When he is tired of
you--whiff, away you go, a puff of smoke! And you zat I should make a
Queen of Opera! A Queen? You shall have more rule zan twenty
Queens--forty! See" (Mr. Pericles made his hand go like an aspen-leaf
from his uplifted wrist); "So you shall set ze hearts of sossands! To
dream of you, to adore you! and flowers, flowers everywhere, on your
head, at your feet. You choose your lofer from ze world. A husband, if it
is your taste. Bose, if you please. Zen, I say, you shall, you shall lofe
a man. Let him tease and sting--ah! it will be magnifique: Aha! ze voice
will sharpen, go deep; yeas! to be a tale of blood. Lofe till you could
stab yourself:--Brava! But now? Little fool, I say!"

Emilia believed that she was verily forfeiting an empire. Her face wore a
soft look of delight. This renunciation of a splendid destiny for
Wilfrid's sake, seemed to make her worthier of him, and as Mr. Pericles
unrolled the list of her rejected treasures, her bosom heaved without a
regret.

"Ha!" Mr. Pericles flung away from her: "go and be a little gutter-girl!"

The musical connoisseur drew on his own disappointment alone for
eloquence. Had he been thinking of her, he might have touched cunningly
on her love for Italy. Music was the passion of the man; and a
millionaire's passion is something that can make a stir. He knew that in
Emilia he had discovered a pearl of song rarely to be found, and his
object was to polish and perfect her at all cost: perhaps, as a secondary
and far removed consideration, to point to her as a thing belonging to
him, for which Emperors might envy him. The thought of losing her drove
him into fits of rage. He took the ladies one by one, and treated them
each to a horrible scene of gesticulation and outraged English. H accused
their brother of conduct which they were obliged to throw (by a process
of their own) into the region of Fine Shades, before they dared venture
to comprehend him. Gross facts in relationship with the voice, this
grievous "machine, not man,"--as they said--stated to them, harshly,
impetuously. The ladies felt that he had bored their ears with hot iron
pins. Adela tried laughter as a defence from his suggestion against
Wilfrid, but had shortly afterwards to fly from the fearful anatomist.
She served her brother thoroughly in the Council of Three; so that Mr.
Pericles was led by them to trust that there had; been mere fooling in
his absence, and that the emotions he looked to as the triumphant reserve
in Emilia's bosom, to be aroused at some crisis when she was before the
world, slumbered still. She, on her part, contrasting her own burning
sensations with this quaint, innocent devotion to Art and passion for
music, felt in a manner guilty; and whenever he stormed with additional
violence, she became suppliant, and seemed to bend and have regrets. Mr.
Pericles would then say, with mollified irritability: "You will come to
Italy to-morrow?--Ze day after?--not at all?" The last was given with a
roar, for lack of her immediate response. Emilia would find a tear on her
eyelids at times. Surround herself as she might with her illusions, she
had no resting-place in Wilfrid's heart, and knew it. She knew it as the
young know that they are to die on a future day, without feeling the
sadness of it, but with a dimly prevalent idea that this life is
therefore incomplete. And again her blood, as with a wave of rich
emotion, washed out the blank spot. She thought: "What can he want but my
love?" And thus she satisfied her own hungry questioning by seeming to
supply an answer to his.

The ladies of Brookfield by no means encouraged Emilia to refuse the
generous offer of Mr. Pericles. They thought, too, that she might--might
she? Oh! certainly she might go to Italy under his protection. "Would you
let one of your blood?" asked Wilfrid brutally. With some cunning he led
them to admit that Emilia's parents should rightly be consulted in such a
case.

One day Mr. Pericles said to the ladies: "I shall give a fete: a party
monstre. In ze air: on grass. I beg you to invite friends of yours."

Before the excogitation of this splendid resolve, he had been observed to
wear for some period a conspiratorial aspect. When it was delivered, and
Arabella had undertaken the management of the "party monstre"--(which was
to be on Besworth Lawn, and, as it was not their own party, could be
conducted with a sort of quasi-contemptuous superiority to incongruous
gatherings)--this being settled, the forehead of Mr. Pericles cleared and
he ceased to persecute Emilia.

"I am not one that is wopped," he said significantly; nodding to his
English hearers, as if this piece of shrewd acquaintance with the
expressive mysteries of their language placed them upon equal terms.

It was really 'a providential thing' (as devout people phrase it) that
Laura Tinley and Mabel Copley should call shortly after this, and invite
the ladies to a proposed picnic of theirs on Besworth Lawn. On Besworth
Lawn, of all places! and they used the word 'picnic.'

"A word suggestive of gnawed drumstick and ginger-beer bottles." Adela
quoted some scapegoat of her acquaintance, as her way was when she wished
to be pungent without incurring the cold sisterly eye of reproof for a
vulgarism.

Both Laura and Mabel, when they heard of the mighty entertainment fixed
for Besworth Lawn by Mr. Pericles, looked down. They were invited, and
looked up. There was the usual amount of fencing with the combative
Laura, who gave ground at all points, and as she was separating, said (so
sweetly!) "Of course you have heard of the arrest of your--what does one
call him?--friend?--or a French word?"

"You mean?" quoth Arabella.

"That poor, neatly brushed, nice creature whom you patronized--who played
the organ!" she jerked to Arabella's dubious eyes.

"And he?" Arabella smiled, complacently.

"Then perhaps you may know that all is arranged for him?" said Laura,
interpreting by the look more than the word, after a habit of women.

"Indeed, to tell you the truth, I know nothing," said Arabella.

"Really?" Laura turned sharply to Cornelia, who met her eyes and did not
exhibit one weak dimple.

The story was, that Mr. Chips, the Bookseller of Hillford, objected to
the departure of Mr. Barrett, until Mr. Barrett had paid the bill of Mr.
Chips: and had signified his objection in the form of a writ. "When, if
you know anything of law," said Laura, "you will see why he remains. For,
a writ once served, you are a prisoner. That is, I believe, if it's above
twenty pounds. And Mr. Chips' bill against Mr. Barrett was, I have heard,
twenty-three pounds and odd shillings. Could anything be more
preposterous? And Mr. Chips deserves to lose his money!"

Ah! to soar out of such a set as this, of which Laura Tinley is a sample,
are not some trifling acts of inhumanity and practices in the art of
'cutting' permissible? So the ladies had often asked of the Unseen in
their onward course, if they did not pointedly put the question now.
Surely they had no desire to give pain, but the nature that endowed them
with a delicate taste, inspired them to defend it. They listened gravely
to Laura, who related that not only English books, but foreign (repeated
and emphasized), had been supplied by Mr. Chips to Mr. Barrett.

They were in the library, and Laura's eyes rested on certain yellow and
blue covers of books certainly not designed for the reading of Mr. Pole.

"I think you must be wrong as to Mr. Barrett's position," said Adela.

"No, dear; not at all," Laura was quick to reply. "Unless you know
anything. He has stated that he awaits money remittances. He has, in
fact, overrun the constable, and my brother Albert says, the constable is
very likely to overrun ham, in consequence. Only a joke! But an organist
with, at the highest computation--poor absurd thing!--fifty-five pounds
per annum: additional for singing lessons, it is true,--but an organist
with a bookseller's bill of twenty-three pounds! Consider!"

"Foreign books, too!" interjected Adela.

"Not so particularly improving to his morals, either!" added Laura.

"You are severe upon the greater part of the human race," said Arabella.

"So are the preachers, dear," returned Laura.

"The men of our religion justify you?" asked Arabella.

"Let me see;--where were we?" Laura retreated in an affected
mystification.

"You had reached the enlightened belief that books written by any but
English hands were necessarily destructive of men's innocence," said
Arabella; and her sisters thrilled at the neatness of the stroke, for the
moment, while they forgot the ignoble object it transfixed. Laura was
sufficiently foiled by it to be unable to return to the Chips-Barrett
theme. Throughout the interview Cornelia had maintained a triumphant
posture, superior to Arabella's skill in fencing, seeing that it exposed
no weak point of the defence by making an attack, and concealed
especially the confession implied by a relish for the conflict. Her
sisters considerately left her to recover herself, after this mighty
exercise of silence.




CHAPTER XXII

Cornelia sat with a clenched hand. "You are rich and he is poor," was the
keynote of her thoughts, repeated from minute to minute. "And it is gold
gives you the right in the world's eye to despise him!" she apostrophized
the vanished Laura, clothing gold with all the baseness of that person.
Now, when one really hates gold, one is at war with one's fellows. The
tide sets that way. There is no compromise: to hate it is to try to stem
the flood. It happens that this is one of the temptations of the
sentimentalist, who should reflect, but does not, that the fine feelers
by which the iniquities of gold are so keenly discerned, are a growth due
to it, nevertheless. Those 'fine feelers,' or antennae of the senses,
come of sweet ease; that is synonymous with gold in our island-latitude.
The sentimentalists are represented by them among the civilized species.
It is they that sensitively touch and reject, touch and select; whereby
the laws of the polite world are ultimately regulated, and civilization
continually advanced, sometimes ridiculously. The sentimentalists are
ahead of us, not by weight of brain, but through delicacy of nerve, and,
like all creatures in the front, they are open to be victims. I pray you
to observe again the shrinking life that afflicts the adventurous horns
of the snail, for example. Such are the sentimentalists to us--the fat
body of mankind. We owe them much, and though they scorn us, let us pity
them.

Especially when they are young they deserve pity, for they suffer
cruelly. I for my part prefer to see boys and girls led into the ways of
life by nature; but I admit that in many cases, in most cases, our good
mother has not (occupied as her hands must be) made them perfectly
presentable; by which fact I am warned to have tolerance for the finer
beings who labour under these excessive sensual subtleties. I perceive
their uses. And they are right good comedy; for which I may say that I
almost love them. Man is the laughing animal: and at the end of an
infinite search, the philosopher finds himself clinging to laughter as
the best of human fruit, purely human, and sane, and comforting. So let
us be cordially thankful to those who furnish matter for sound embracing
laughter.

Cornelia detested gold--entirely on general grounds and for abstract
reasons. Not a word of Mr. Barrett was shaped, even in fancy; but she
interjected to herself, with meditative eye and mouth: "The saints were
poor!" (the saints of whom he had read, translating from that old Latin
book) "St. Francis! how divine was his life!" and so forth, until the
figure of Mr. Penniless Barrett walked out in her imagination clad in
saintly garments, superior not only to his creditor, Mr. Chips, but to
all who bought or sold.

"I have been false," she said; implying the "to him." Seeing him on that
radiant height above her, she thought "How could I have fallen so!" It
was impossible for her mind to recover the delusion which had prompted
her signing herself to bondage--pledging her hand to a man she did not
love. Could it have been that she was guilty of the immense folly, simply
to escape from that piece of coarse earth, Mrs. Chump? Cornelia smiled
sadly, saying: "Oh, no! I should not have committed a wickedness for so
miserable an object." Despairing for a solution of the puzzle, she cried
out, "I was mad!", and with a gasp of horror saw herself madly signing
her name to perdition.

"I was mad!" is a comfortable cloak to our sins in the past. Mournful to
think that we have been bereft of reason; but the fit is over, and we are
not in Bedlam!

Cornelia next wrestled with the pride of Mr. Barrett. Why had he not come
to her once after reading the line pencilled in the book? Was it that he
would make her his debtor in everything? He could have reproached her
justly; why had he held aloof? She thirsted to be scourged by him, to
hang her head ashamed under his glance, and hug the bitter pain he dealt
her. Revolving how the worst man on earth would have behaved to a girl
partially in his power (hands had been permitted to be pressed, and the
gateways of the eyes had stood open: all but vows had been interchanged),
she came to regard Mr. Barrett as the best man on the earth. That she
alone saw it, did not depreciate the value of her knowledge. A goal
gloriously illumined blazed on her from the distance. "Too late!" she put
a curb on the hot courses in her brain, and they being checked, turned
all at once to tears and came in a flood. How indignant would the fair
sentimentalist have been at a whisper of her caring for the thing before
it was too late!

Cornelia now daily trod the red pathways under the firs, and really
imagined herself to be surprised, even vexed, when she met Mr. Barrett
there at last. Emilia was by his side, near a drooping birch. She
beckoned to Cornelia, whose North Pole armour was doing its best to keep
down a thumping heart.

"We are taking our last walk in the old wood," said, Mr. Barrett,
admirably collected. "That is, I must speak for myself."

"You leave early?" Cornelia felt her throat rattle hideously.

"In two days, I expect--I hope," said he.

"Why does he hope?" thought Cornelia, wounded, until a vision of the
detaining Chips struck her with pity and remorse.

She turned to Emilia. "Our dear child is also going to leave us."

"I?" cried Emilia, fierily out of languor.

"Does not your Italy claim you?"

"I am nothing to Italy any more. Have I not said so? I love England now."

Cornelia smiled complacently. "Let us hope your heart is capacious enough
to love both."

"Then your theory is" (Mr. Barrett addressed Cornelia in the winning old
style), "that the love of one thing enlarges the heart for another?"

"Should it not?" She admired his cruel self-possession pitiably, as she
contrasted her own husky tones with it.

Emilia looked from one to the other, fancying that they must have her
case somewhere in prospect, since none could be unconscious of the
vehement struggle going on in her bosom; but they went farther and
farther off from her comprehension, and seemed to speak of bloodless
matters. "And yet he is her lover," she thought. "When they meet they
talk across a river, and he knows she is going to another man, and does
not gripe her wrist and drag her away!" The sense that she had no kinship
with such flesh shut her mouth faster than Wilfrid's injunctions (which
were ordinarily conveyed in too subtle a manner for her to feel their
meaning enough to find them binding). Cornelia, for a mask to her
emotions, gave Emilia a gentle, albeit high-worded lecture on the
artist's duty toward Art, quoting favourite passages from Mr. Barrett's
favourite Art-critic. And her fashion of dropping her voice as she
declaimed the more dictatorial sentences (to imply, one might guess, by a
show of personal humility that she would have you to know her preaching
was vicarious; that she stood humbly in the pulpit, and was but a vessel
for the delivery of the burden of the oracle), all this was beautiful to
him who could see it. I cannot think it was wholesome for him; nor that
Cornelia was unaware of a naughty wish to glitter temporarily in the eyes
of the man who made her feel humble. The sorcery she sent through his
blood communicated itself to hers. When she had done, Emilia, convincedly
vanquished by big words, said, "I cannot talk," and turned heavily from
them without bestowing a smile upon either.

Cornelia believed that the girl would turn back as abruptly as she had
retreated; and it was not until Emilia was out of sight that she
remembered the impropriety of being alone with Mr. Barrett. The Pitfall
of Sentiment yawned visible, but this lady's strength had been too little
tried for her to lack absolute faith in it. So, out of deep silences, the
two leapt to speech and immediately subsided to the depths again: as on a
sultry summer's day fishes flash their tails in the sunlight and leave a
solitary circle widening on the water.

Then Cornelia knew what was coming. In set phrase, and as one who
performs a duty frigidly pleasant, he congratulated her on her rumored
union. One hand was in his buttoned coat; the other hung elegantly loose:
not a feature betrayed emotion. He might have spoken it in a ballroom. To
Cornelia, who exulted in self-compression, after the Roman method, it was
more dangerous than a tremulous tone.

"You know me too well to say this, Mr. Barrett."

The words would come. She preserved her steadfast air, when they had
escaped, to conceal her shame. Seeing thus much, he took it to mean that
it was a time for plain-speaking. To what end, he did not ask.

"You have not to be told that I desire your happiness above all earthly
things," he said: and the lady shrank back, and made an effort to recover
her footing. Had he not been so careful to obliterate any badge of the
Squire of low degree, at his elbows, cuffs, collar, kneecap, and
head-piece, she might have achieved it with better success. For cynicism
(the younger brother of sentiment and inheritor of the family property)
is always on the watch to deal fatal blows through such vital parts as
the hat or the H's, or indeed any sign of inferior estate. But Mr.
Barrett was armed at all points by a consummate education and a most
serviceable clothesbrush.

"You know how I love this neighbourhood!" said she.

"And I! above all that I have known!"

They left the pathway and walked on mosses--soft yellow beds, run over
with grey lichen, and plots of emerald in the midst.

"You will not fall off with your reading?" he recommenced.

She answered "Yes," meaning "No"; and corrected the error languidly,
thinking one of the weighty monosyllables as good as the other: for what
was reading to her now?

"It would be ten thousand pities if you were to do as so many women do,
when...when they make these great changes," he continued.

"Of what avail is the improvement of the mind?" she said, and followed
his stumble over the "when," and dropped on it.

"Of what avail! Is marriage to stop your intellectual growth?"

"Without sympathy," she faltered, and was shocked at what she said; but
it seemed a necessity.

"You must learn to conquer the need for it."

Alas! his admonition only made her feel the need more cravingly.

"Promise me one thing," he said. "You will not fall into the rut? Let me
keep the ideal you have given me. For the sake of heaven, do not cloud
for me the one bright image I hold! Let me know always that you are
growing, and that the pure, noble intelligence which distinguishes you
advances, and will not be subdued."

Cornelia smiled faintly. "You have judged me too generously, Mr.
Barrett."

"Too little so! might I tell you!" He stopped short, and she felt the
silence like a great wave sweeping over her.

They were nearing the lake, with the stump of the pollard-willow in
sight, and toward it they went.

"I shall take the consolation of knowing that I shall hear of you, some
day," she said, having recourse to a look of cheerfulness.

He knew her to allude to certain hopes of fame. "I am getting wiser, I
fear--too wise for ambition!"

"That is a fallacy, a sophism."

He pointed to the hollow tree. "Is there promise of fruit from that?"

"You...you are young, Mr. Barrett."

"And on a young, forehead it may be written, 'Come not to gather more.'"

Cornelia put her hand out: "Oh, Mr. Barrett! unsay it!" The nakedness of
her spirit stood forth in a stinging tear. "The words were cruel."

"But, if they live, and are?"

"I feel that you must misjudge me. When I wrote them...you cannot know!
The misery of our domestic life was so bitter! And yet, I have no excuse,
none! I can only ask for pity."

"And if you are wretched, must not I be? You pluck from me my last
support. This, I petitioned Providence to hear from you--that you would
be happy! I can have no comfort but in that."

"Happy!" Cornelia murmured the word musically, as if to suck an irony
from the sweetness of the sound. "Are we made for happiness?"

Mr. Barrett quoted the favourite sage, concluding: "But a brilliant home
and high social duties bring consolation. I do acknowledge that an
eminent station will not only be graced by you, but that you give the
impression of being born to occupy it. It is your destiny."

"A miserable destiny!"

It pleased Cornelia to become the wilful child who quarrels with its
tutor's teachings, upon this point.

Then Mr. Barrett said quickly: "Your heart is not in this union?"

"Can you ask? I have done my duty."

"Have you, indeed!"

His tone was severe in the deliberation of its accents.

Was it her duty to live an incomplete life? He gave her a definition of
personal duty, and shadowed out all her own ideas on the subject; seeming
thus to speak terrible, unanswerable truth.

As one who changes the theme, he said: "I have forborne to revert to
myself in our interviews; they were too divine for that. You will always
remember that I have forborne much."

"Yes!" She was willing at the instant to confess how much.

"And if I speak now, I shall not be misinterpreted?"

"You never would have been, by me."

"Cornelia!"

Though she knew what was behind the door, this flinging of it open with
her name startled the lady; and if he had faltered, it would not have
been well for him. But, plainly, he claimed the right to call her by her
Christian name. She admitted it; and thenceforward they were equals.

It was an odd story that he told of himself. She could not have repeated
it to make it comprehensible. She drank at every sentence, getting no
more from it than the gratification of her thirst. His father, at least,
was a man of title, a baronet. What was meant by estates not entailed?
What wild freak of fate put this noble young man in the power of an
eccentric parent, who now caressed him, now made him an outcast? She
heard of the sum that was his, coming from his dead mother to support him
just one hundred pounds annual! Was ever fate so mournful?

Practically, she understood that if Mr. Barrett would write to his
father, pledging himself to conform to his mysterious despotic will in
something, he would be pardoned and reinstated.

He concluded: "Hitherto I have preferred poverty. You have taught me at
what a cost! Is it too late?"

The fall of his voice, with the repetition of her name, seemed as if
awakening her, but not in a land of reason.

"Why...why!" she whispered.

"Beloved?"

"Why did you not tell me this before?"

"Do you upbraid me?"

"Oh, no! Oh, never!" she felt his hand taking hers gently. "My friend,"
she said, half in self-defence; and they, who had never kissed as lovers,
kissed under the plea of friendship.




CHAPTER XXIII

All Wilfrid's diplomacy was now brought into play to baffle Mr. Pericles,
inspire Emilia with the spirit of secresy, and carry on his engagement to
two women to their common satisfaction. Adela, whose penetration he
dreaded most, he had removed by a flattering invitation to Stornley; and
that Emilia might be occupied during his absences, and Mr. Pericles
thrown on a false scent, he persuaded Tracy Runningbrook to come to
Brookfield, and write libretti for Emilia's operas. The two would sit
down together for an hour, drawing wonderful precocious noses upon
juvenile visages, when Emilia would sigh and say: "I can't work!"--Tracy
adding, with resignation: "I never can!" At first Mr. Pericles dogged
them assiduously. After a little while he shrugged, remarking: "It is a
nonsense."

They were, however, perfectly serious about the production of an opera,
Tracy furnishing verse to Emilia's music. He wrote with extraordinary
rapidity, but clung to graphic phrases, that were not always supple
enough for nuptials with modulated notes. Then Emilia had to hit his
sense of humour by giving the words as they came in the run of the song.
"You make me crow, or I croak," she said.

"The woman follows the man, and music fits to verse," cried Tracy.
"Music's the vine, verse the tree."

Emilia meditated. "Not if they grow up together," she suggested, and
broke into a smile at his rapture of amusement; which was succeeded by a
dark perplexity, worthy of the present aspect of Mr. Pericles.

"That's what has upset us," he said. "We have been trying to 'grow up
together,' like first-cousins, and nature forbids the banns. To-morrow
you shall have half a libretto. And then, really, my child, you must
adapt yourself to the words."

"I will," Emilia promised; "only, not if they're like iron to the teeth."

"My belief is," said Tracy savagely, "that music's a fashion, and as
delusive a growth as Cobbett's potatoes, which will go back to the deadly
nightshade, just as music will go back to the tom-tom."

"What have you called out when I sang to you!" Emilia reproached him for
this irreverent nonsense.

"Oh! it was you and not the music," he returned half-cajolingly, while he
beat the tom-tom on air.

"Hark here!" cried Emilia. She recited a verse. "Doesn't that sound dead?
Now hark!" She sang the verse, and looked confidently for Tracy's verdict
at the close.

"What a girl that is!" He went about the house, raving of her to
everybody, with sundry Gallic interjections; until Mrs. Chump said:
"'Deed, sir, ye don't seem to have much idea of a woman's feelin's."

Tracy produced in a night two sketches of libretti for Emilia to choose
from--the Roman Clelia being one, and Camillus the other. Tracy praised
either impartially, and was indifferent between them, he told her. Clelia
offered the better theme for passionate song, but there was a winning
political object and rebuff to be given to Radicalism in Camillus. "Think
of Rome!" he said.

Emilia gave the vote for Camillus, beginning forthwith to hum, with
visions of a long roll of swarthy cavalry, headed by a clear-eyed young
chief, sunlight perching on his helm.

"Yes; but you don't think of the situations in Clelia, and what I can do
with her," snapped Tracy. "I see a song there that would light up all
London. Unfortunately, the sentiment's dead Radical. It wouldn't so much
matter if we were certain to do Camillus as well; because one would act
as a counterpoise to the other, you know. Well, follow your own fancy.
Camillus is strictly classical. I treat opera there as Alfieri conceived
tragedy. Clelia is modern style. Cast the die for Camillus, and let's
take horse. Only, we lose the love-business--exactly where I show my
strength. Clelia in the camp of the king: dactyllic chorus-accompaniment,
while she, in heavy voluptuous anapaests, confesses her love for the
enemy of her country. Remember, this is our romantic opera, where we do
what we like with History, and make up our minds for asses telling us to
go home and read our 'student's Rome.' Then that scene where she and the
king dance the dactyls, and the anapaests go to the chorus. Sublime!
Let's go into the woods and begin. We might give the first song or two
to-night. In composition, mind, always strike out your great scene, and
work from it--don't work up to it, or you've lost fire when you reach the
point. That's my method."

They ran into the woods, skipping like schoolboy and schoolgirl. On
hearing that Camillus would not be permitted to love other than his
ungrateful country, Emilia's conception of the Roman lord grew pale, and
a controversy ensued-she maintaining that a great hero must love a woman;
he declaring that a great hero might love a dozen, but that it was
beneath the dignity of this drama to allow of a rival to Rome in
Camillus's love.

"He will not do for music," said Emilia firmly, and was immoveable. In
despair, Tracy proposed attaching a lanky barbarian daughter to Brennus,
whose deeds of arms should provoke the admiration of the Roman.

"And so we relinquish Alfieri for Florian! There's a sentimental
burlesque at once!" the youth ejaculated, in gloom. "I chose this subject
entirely to give you Rome for a theme."

Emilia took his hand. "I do thank you. If Brennus has a daughter, why not
let her be half Roman?"

Tracy fired out: "she's a bony woman, with a brawny development; mammoth
haunches, strong of the skeleton; cheek-bones, flat-forward, as a fish 's
rotting on a beach; long scissor lips-nippers to any wretched rose of a
kiss! a pugilist's nose to the nostrils of a phoca; and eyes!--don't you
see them?--luminaries of pestilence; blotted yellow, like a tallow candle
shining through a horny lantern."

At this horrible forced-poetic portrait, Emilia cried in pain: "You hate
her suddenly!"

"I loathe the creature--pah!" went Tracy.

"Why do you make her so hideous?" Emilia complained. "I feel myself
hating her too. Look at me. Am I such a thing as that?"

"You!" Tracy was melted in a trice, and gave the motion of hugging, as a
commentary on his private opinion.

"Can you also be sure that Camillus can love nothing but his country?
Would one love stop the other?" she persisted, gazing with an air of
steady anxiety for the answer.

"There isn't a doubt about it," said Tracy.

Emilia caught her face in her hands, and exclaimed in a stifling voice:
"It's true! it's true!"

Tracy saw that her figure was shaken with sobs--unmistakeable, hard,
sorrowful convulsions.

"Confound historical facts that make her cry!" he murmured to himself, in
a fury at the Roman fables. "It's no use comforting her with Niebuhr now.
She's got a live Camillus in her brain, and there he'll stick." Tracy
began to mutter the emphatic D.; quite cognizant of her case, as he
supposed. This intensity of human emotion about a dry faggot of history
by no means surprised him; and he was as tender to the grief of his
darling little friend as if he had known the conflict that tore her in
two. Subsequently he related the incident, in a tone of tender delight,
to Wilfrid, whom it smote. "Am I a brute?" asked the latter of the
Intelligences in the seat of his consciousness, and they for the moment
gravely affirmed it. I have observed that when young men obtain this
mental confirmation of their suspicions, they wax less reluctant to act
as brutes than when the doubt restrained them.

He reasoned thus: "I can bring my mind to the idea of losing her, if it
must be so." (Hear, hear! from the unanimous internal Parliament.) "But I
can't make her miserable (cheers)--I can't go and break her heart" (loud
cheers, drowning a faint dissentient hum).--The scene, of which Tracy had
told him, gave Wilfrid a kind of dread of the girl. If that was her state
of feeling upon a distant subject, how would it be when he applied the
knife. Simply, impossible to use the knife at all! Wield it thou, O
Circumstance, babe-munching Chronos, whosoever thou art, that jarrest our
poor human music effectually from hour to hour!

Colonel Pierson paid his promised visit, on his way back to his quarters
at Verona. His stay was shortened by rumours of anticipated troubles in
Italy. One day at table he chanced to observe, speaking of the Milanese,
that they required another lesson, and that it would save the shedding of
blood if, annually, the chief men of the city took a flogging for the
community (senseless arrogance that sensible, and even kindly, men will
sometimes be tempted to utter, and prompted to act on, in that
deteriorating state of a perpetual repressive force).--Emilia looked at
him till she caught his eye: "I hope I shall never meet you there," she
said.

The colonel coloured, and drew his finger along each curve of his
moustache. The table was silent. Colonel Pierson was a gentleman, but a
false position and the irritating topic deprived him of proper
self-command.

"What would you do?" he said, not gallantly.

Emilia would have been glad to have been allowed to subside, but the tone
stung her.

"I could not do much; I am a woman," said she.

Whereto the colonel: "It's only the women who do anything over there."

"And that is why you flog them!"

The colonel, seeing himself surrounded by ladies, lost the right guidance
of his wits, at this point, reddened, and was saved by an Irish outcry of
horror from some unpleasant and possibly unmanly retort. "Mr. Paricles
said exactly the same. Oh, sir! do ye wear an officer's uniform to go
about behavin' in that shockin' way to poor helpless females?"

This was the first time Mrs. Chump had ever been found of service at the
Brookfield dining-table. Colonel Pierson joined the current smile, and
the matter passed.

He was affectionate with Wilfrid, and invited him to Verona, with the
assurance that his (the Austrian) school of cavalry was the best in the
world. "You beat us in pace and weight; but you can't skirmish, you can't
manage squadrons, and you know nothing of outpost duty," said the
colonel. Wilfrid promised to visit him some day: a fact he denied to
Emilia, when she charged him with it. Her brain seemed to be set on fire
by the presence of an Austrian officer. The miserable belief that she had
abandoned her country pressing on her remorsefully, she lost appetite,
briskness of eye, and the soft reddish-brown ripe blood-hue that made her
cheeks sweet to contemplate. She looked worn, small, wretched: her very
walk indicated self-contempt. Wilfrid was keen to see the change for
which others might have accused a temporary headache. Now that she
appeared under this blight, it seemed easier to give her up; and his
magnanimity being thus encouraged (I am not hard on him--remember the
constitution of love, in which a heart un-aroused is pure selfishness,
and a heart aroused heroic generosity; they being one heart to outer
life)--his magnanimity, I say, being under this favourable sun, he said
to himself that there should be an end of double-dealing; and, possibly
consoled by feeling a martyr, he persuaded himself to act the gentle
ruffian. To which end, he was again absent from Brookfield, for a space,
and bitterly missed.

Emilia, for the last two Sundays, had taken Mr. Barrett's place at the
organ. She was playing the prelude to one of the evening hymns, when the
lover, whose features she dreaded to be once more forgetting, appeared in
the curtained enclosure. A stoppage in the tune, and a prolonged squeal
of the instrument, gave the congregation below matter to speculate upon.
Wilfrid put up his finger and sat reverently down, while Emilia plunged
tremblingly at the note that was howling its life away. And as she
managed to swim into the stream of the sacred melody again, her head was
turned toward her lover under a new sensation; and the first words she
murmured were, "We have never been in church together, before."

"Not in the evening," he whispered, likewise impressed.

"No," said Emilia softly; flattered by his greater accuracy.

If Wilfrid could have been sure that he would be perfect master of that
sentimental crew known to him under the denomination of his feelings, the
place he selected for their parting interview might be held creditable to
this young officer's acknowledged strategical ability. It was a place
where any fervid appeals were impossible; where he could contemplate her,
listen to her, be near her, alone with her, having nothing to dread from
tears, supplications, or passion, as a consequence of the short
indulgence of his tenderness. But he had failed to reckon on the chances
that he himself might prove weak and be betrayed by the crew for whose
comfort he was always providing; and now, as she sat there, her face
being sideways to him, the flush of delight faint on her cheek, and her
eyelids half raised to the gilded pipes, while full and sonorous harmony
rolled out from her touch, it seemed the very chorus of the heavens that
she commanded, and a subtle misty glory descended upon her forehead,
which he was long in perceiving to be cast from a moisture on his
eyelids.

When the sermon commenced, Emilia quitted the organ and took his hand. In
very low whispers, they spoke:

"I have wanted to see you so!"

"You see me now, little woman."

"On Friday week next I am to go away."

"Nonsense! You shall not."

"Your sisters say, yes! Mr. Pericles has got my father's consent, they
say, to take me to Italy."

"Do you think of going?"

Emilia gazed at her nerveless hands lying in her lap.

"You shall not go!" he breathed imperiously in her ear.

"Then you will marry me quite soon?" And Emilia looked as if she would be
smiling April, at a word.

"My dear girl!" he had an air of caressing remonstrance.

"Because," she continued, "if my father finds me out, I must go
to Italy, or go to that life of torment in London--seeing those
Jew-people--horrible!--or others and the thought of it is like being
under the earth, tasting bitter gravel! I could almost bear it before you
kissed me, my lover! It would kill me now. Say! say! Tell me we shall be
together. I shudder all day and night, and feel frozen hands catching at
me. I faint--my heart falls deep down, in the dark...I think I know what
dying is now!"

She stopped on a tearless sob; and, at her fingers' ends, Wilfrid felt
the quivering of her frame.

"My darling!" he interjected. He wished to explain the situation to her,
as he then conceived it. But he had, in his calculation, failed also to
count on a peculiar nervous fretfulness, that the necessity to reiterate
an explanation in whispers must superinduce. So, when Emilia looked
vacant of the intelligence imparted to her, he began anew, and
emphatically; and ere he was half through it, Mr. Marter, from the pulpit
underneath, sent forth a significant reprimand to the conscience of a
particular culprit of his congregation, in the form of a solemn cough.
Emilia had to remain unenlightened, and she proceeded to build on her
previous assumption; doing the whispering easily and sweetly; in the
prettiest way from her tongue's tip, with her chin lifted up; and sending
the vowels on a prolonged hushed breath, that seemed to print them on the
hearing far more distinctly than a volume of sound. Wilfrid fell back on
monosyllables. He could not bring his mouth to utter flinty negatives, so
it appeared that he assented; and then his better nature abused him for
deluding her. He grew utterly ashamed of his aimless selfish
double-dealing. "Can it be?" he questioned his own mind, and listened
greedily to any mental confirmations of surpassing excellence in her,
that the world might possibly acknowledge. Having, with great zeal,
created a set of circumstances, he cursed them heartily, after the
fashion of little people. He grew resigned to abandon Lady Charlotte, and
to give his name to this subduing girl; but a comfortable quieting
sensation came over him, at the thought that his filial duty stood in the
way. His father, he knew, was anxious for him to marry into a noble
family--incomprehensibly anxious to have the affair settled; and, as two
or three scenes rose in his mind, Wilfrid perceived that the obstacle to
his present fancy was his father.

As clearly as he could, with the dread of the preacher's admonishing
cough before him, Wilfrid stated the case to Emilia; saying that he loved
her with his whole heart; but that the truth was, his father was not in a
condition of health to bear contradiction to his wishes, and would, he
was sure, be absolutely opposed to their union. He brought on himself
another reprimand from Mr. Marter, in seeking to propitiate Emilia's
reason to comprehend the position rightly; and could add little more to
the fact he had spoken, than that his father had other views, which it
would require time to combat.

Emilia listened attentively, replying with a flying glance to the squeeze
of his hand. He was astonished to see her so little disconcerted. But now
the gradual fall of Mr. Marter's voice gave them warning.

"My lover?" breathed Emilia, hurriedly and eagerly; questioning with eye
and tone.

"My darling!" returned Wilfrid.

She sat down to the organ with a smile. He was careful to retreat before
the conclusion of the service; somewhat chagrined by his success. That
smile of hers was inexplicable to him.




CHAPTER XXIV

Mr. Pole was closeted in his City counting-house with Mr. Pericles,
before a heap of papers and newly-opened foreign letters; to one of
which, bearing a Russian stamp, he referred fretfully at times, as if to
verify a monstrous fact. Any one could have seen that he was not in a
condition to transact business. His face was unnaturally patched with
colour, and his grey-tinged hair hung tumbled over his forehead like
waves blown by a changeing wind. Still, he maintained his habitual effort
to look collected, and defeat the scrutiny of the sallow-eyed fellow
opposite; who quietly glanced, now and then, from the nervous feet to the
nervous fingers, and nodded to himself a sardonic outlandish nod.

"Now, listen to me," said Mr. Pericles. "We shall not burst out about zis
Riga man. He is a villain,--very well. Say it. He is a villain,--say so.
And stop. Because" (and up went the Greek's forefinger), "we must not
have a scandal, in ze fairst place. We do not want pity, in ze second.
Saird, we must seem to trust him, in spite. I say, yeas! What is pity to
us of commerce? It is contempt. We trust him on, and we lose what he
pocket--a sossand. We burst on him, and we lose twenty, serty, forty; and
we lose reputation."

"I'd have every villain hanged," cried Mr. Pole. "The scoundrel! I'd hang
him with his own hemp. He talks of a factory burnt, and dares to joke
about tallow! and in a business letter! and when he is telling one of a
loss of money to that amount!"

"Not bad, ze joke," grinned Mr. Pericles. "It is a lesson of coolness. We
learn it. But mind! he say, 'possible loss.' It is not positif. Hein! ze
man is trying us. So! shall we burst out and make him desperate? We are
in his hand at Riga, you see?"

"I see this," said Mr. Pole, "that he's a confounded rascal, and I'll
know whether the law can't reach him."

"Ha! ze law!" Mr. Pericles sneered. "So you are, you. English. Always, ze
law! But, we are men--we are not machine. Law for a machine, not a man!
We punish him, perhaps. Well; he is punished. He is imprisoned--forty
monz. We pay for him a sossand pound a monz. He is flogged--forty lashes.
We pay for him a sossand pound a lash. You can afford zat? It is a luxury
like anozer. It is not for me."

"How long are we to trust the villain?" said Mr. Pole. "If we trust him
at all, mind! I don't say I do, or will."

"Ze money is locked up for a year, my friend. So soon we get it, so soon
he goes, from ze toe off." Mr. Pericles' shining toe's-tip performed an
agile circuit, and he smoothed his square clean jaw and venomous
moustache reflectively. "Not now," he resumed. "While he hold us in his
hand, we will not drive him to ze devil, or we go too, I believe, or part
of ze way. But now, we say, zat money is frozen in ze Nord. We will make
it in Australie, and in Greek waters. I have exposed to you my plan."

"Yes," said Mr. Pole, "and I've told you I've no pretensions to be a
capitalist. We have no less than three ventures out, already."

"It is like you English! When you have ze world to milk, you go to one
point and stick. It fails, and you fail. What is zat word?"--Mr. Pericles
tapped his brow--"pluck,--you want pluck. It is your decadence. Greek,
and Russian, and Yankee, all zey beat you. For, it is pluck. You make a
pin's head, not a pin. It is in brain and heart you do fail. You have
only your position,--an island, and ships, and some favour. You are no
match in pluck. We beat you. And we live for pleasure, while you groan
and sweat--mon Dieu! it is slavery."

Mr. Pericles twinkled his white eyes over the blinking merchant, and rose
from his chair, humming a bit of opera, and announcing, casually, that a
certain prima-donna had obtained a divorce from her husband.

"But," he added suddenly, "I say to you, if you cannot afford to
speculate, run away from it as ze fire. Run away from it, and hold up
your coat-tail. Jump ditches, and do not stop till you are safe
home--hein? you say 'cosy?' I hear my landlady. Run till you are safe
cosy. But if you are a man wis a head and a pocket, zen you know that
'speculate' means a dozen ventures. So, you come clear. Or, it is ruin.
It is ruin, I say: you have been playing."

"An Englishman," returned Mr. Pole, disgusted at the shrugs he had
witnessed--"an Englishman's as good as any of you. Look at us--look at
our history--look at our wealth. By Jingo! But we like plain-dealing and
common sense; and as to afford, what do you mean?"

"No, no," Mr. Pericles petitioned with uplifted hand; "my English is bad.
It is--ah! bad. You shall look it over--my plan. It will strike your
sense. Next week I go to Italy. I take ze little Belloni. You will manage
all. I have in you, my friend, perfec' confidence. An Englishman, he is
honest. An Englishman and a Greek conjoined, zey beat ze world! It is
true, ma foi. For zat, I seek you, and not a countryman. A
Frenchman?--oh, no! A German?--not a bit! A Russian?--never! A
Yankee?--save me! I am a Greek--I take an Englishman."

"Well, well, you must leave me to think it over," said Mr. Pole,
pleasantly smoothed down. "As to honesty, that's a matter of course with
us: that's the mere footing we go upon. We don't plume ourselves upon
what's general, here. There is, I regret to say, a difference between us
and other nations. I believe it's partly their religion. They swindle us,
and pay their priests for absolution with our money. If you're a
double-dyed sinner, you can easily get yourself whitewashed over there.
Confound them! When that fellow sent no remittance last month, I told you
I suspected him. Who was, the shrewdest then? As for pluck, I never
failed in that yet. But, I will see a thing clear. The man who speculates
blindfold, is a fowl who walks into market to be plucked. Between being
plucked, and having pluck, you'll see a distinction when you know the
language better; but you must make use of your head, or the chances are
you won't be much of a difference,--eh? I'll think over your scheme. I'm
not a man to hesitate, if the calculations are sound. I'll look at the
papers here."

"My friend, you will decide before zat I go to Italy." said Mr. Pericles,
and presently took his leave.

When he was gone, Mr. Pole turned his chair to the table, and made an
attempt to inspect one of the papers deliberately. Having untied it, he
retied it with care, put it aside, marked 'immediate,' and read the
letter from Riga anew. This he tore into shreds, with animadversions on
the quality of the rags that had produced it, and opened the important
paper once more. He got to the end of a sentence or two, when his fingers
moved about for the letter; and then his mind conceived a necessity for
turning to the directory, for which he rang the bell. The great red book
was brought into his room by a youthful clerk, who waited by, while his
master, unaware of his presence, tracked a name with his forefinger. It
stopped at Pole, Samuel Bolton; and a lurking smile was on the merchant's
face as he read the name: a smile of curious meaning, neither fresh nor
sad; the meditative smile of one who looks upon an afflicted creature
from whom he is aloof. After a lengthened contemplation of this name, he
said, with a sigh, "Poor Chump! I wonder whether he's here, too." A
search for the defunct proved that he was out of date. Mr. Pole thrust
his hand to the bell that he might behold poor Chump in an old directory
that would call up the blotted years.

"I am here, sir," said his clerk, who had been holding deferential watch
at a few steps from the table.

"What do you do here then, sir, all this time?"

"I waited, sir, because--"

"You waste and dawdle away twenty or thirty minutes, when you ought to be
doing your work. What do you mean?" Mr. Pole stood up and took an angry
stride.

The young man could scarcely believe his master was not stooping to jest
with him. He said: "For that matter, sir, it can't be a minute that I
have been wasting."

"I called you in half an hour ago," returned Mr. Pole, fumbling at his
watch-fob.

"It must have been somebody else, sir."

"Did you bring in this directory? Look at it! This?"

"This is the book that I brought in, sir."

"How long since?"

"I think, not a minute and a half, sir."

Mr. Pole gazed at him, and coughed slowly. "I could have sworn..." he
murmured, and commenced blinking.

"I suppose I must be a little queer," he pursued; and instantly his right
hand struck out, quivering. The young clerk grasped it, and drew him to a
chair.

"Tush," said his master, working his feverish fingers across his
forehead. "Want of food. I don't eat like you young fellows. Fetch me a
glass of wine and a biscuit. Good wine, mind. Port. Or, no; you can't
trust tavern Port:--brandy. Get it yourself, don't rely on the porter.
And bring it yourself, you understand the importance? What is your name?"

"Braintop," replied the youth, with the modesty of one whose name has
been too frequently subjected to puns.

"I think I never heard so singular a name in my life," Mr. Pole
ejaculated seriously. "Braintop! It'll always make me think of brandy.
What are you waiting for now?"

"I took the liberty of waiting before, to say that a lady wished to see
you, sir."

Mr. Pole started from his chair. "A foreign lady?"

"She may be foreign. She speaks English, sir, and her name, I think, was
foreign. I've forgotten it, I fear."

"It's the wife of that fellow from Riga!" cried the merchant. "Show her
in. Show her in, immediately. I suspected this. She's in London, I know.
I'm equal to her: show her in. When you fetch the Braintop and biscuit,
call me to the door. You understand."

The youth affected meekly to enjoy this fiery significance given to his
name, and said that he understood, without any doubt. He retired, and in
a few moments ushered in Emilia Belloni.

Mr. Pole was in the middle of the room, wearing a countenance of marked
severity, and watchful to maintain it in his opening bow; but when he
perceived his little Brookfield guest standing timidly in the doorway,
his eyebrows lifted, and his hands spread out; and "Well, to be sure!" he
cried; while Emilia hurried up to him. She had to assure him that
everything was right at home, and was next called upon to state what had
brought her to town; but his continued exclamation of "Bless my soul!"
reprieved her reply, and she sat in a chair panting quickly.

Mr. Pole spoke tenderly of refreshments; wine and cake, or biscuits.

"I cannot eat or drink," said Emilia.

"Why, what's come to you, my dear?" returned Mr. Pole in unaffected
wonder.

"I am not hungry."

"You generally are, at home, about this time--eh?"

Emilia sighed, and feigned the sad note to be a breath of fatigue.

"Well, and why are you here, my dear?" Mr. Pole was beginning to step to
the right and the left of her uneasily.

"I have come--" she paused, with a curious quick speculating look between
her eyes; "I have come to see you."

"See me, my dear? You saw me this morning."

"Yes; I wanted to see you alone."

Emilia was having the first conflict with her simplicity; out of which it
was not to issue clear, as in the foregone days. She was thinking of the
character of the man she spoke to, studying him, that she might win him
to succour the object she had in view. It was a quality going, and a
quality coming; nor will we, if you please, lament a law of growth.

"Why, you can see me alone, any day, my dear," said Mr. Pole; "for many a
day, I hope."

"You are more alone to me here. I cannot speak at Brookfield. Oh!"--and
Emilia had to still her heart's throbbing--"you do not want me to go to
Italy, do you?"

"Want you to go? Not a bit. There is some talk of it, isn't there? I
don't want you to go. Don't you want to go."

"No! no!" said Emilia, with decisive fervour.

"Don't want to go?"

"No: to stay! I want to stay!"

"Eh? to stay?"

"To stay with you! Never to leave England, at least! I want to give up
all that I may stay."

"All?" repeated Mr. Pole, evidently marvelling as to what that sounding
box might contain; and still more, perplexed to hear Emilia's
vehement--"Yes! all!" as if there were that in the mighty abnegation to
make a reasonable listener doubtful.

"No. I really don't want you to go," he said. "In fact," and the
merchant's hospitable nature was at war with something in his mind, "I
like you, my dear; I like to have you about me. You're cheerful; you're
agreeable; I like your smile; your voice, too. You're a very pleasant
companion. Only, you know, we may break up our house. If the girls get
married, I must live somewhere in lodgings, and I couldn't very well ask
you to cook for me."

"I can cook a little," Emilia smiled. "I went into the kitchen, till
Adela objected."

"Yes, but it wouldn't do, you know," pursued Mr. Pole, with the
seriousness of a man thrown out of his line of argument. "You can cook,
eh? Got an idea of it? I always said you were a useful little woman. Do
have a biscuit and some wine:--No? well, where was I?--That confounded
boy. Brainty-top, top! that's it Braintop. Was I talking of him, my dear?
Oh no! about your getting married. For if you can cook, why not? Get a
husband and then you won't got to Italy. You ought to get one. Some young
fellows don't look for money."

"I shall make money come, in time," said Emilia; in the leaping ardour of
whose eyes might be seen that what she had journeyed to speak was hot
within her. "I know I shall be worth having. I shall win a name, I
think--I do hope it!"

"Well, so Pericles says. He's got a great notion of you. Perhaps he means
it himself. He's rich. Rash, I admit. But, as the chances go, he's
tremendously rich. He may mean it."

"What?" asked Emilia.

"Marry you, you know."

"Ah, what a torture!"

In that heat of her feelings she realized the horror of the words to her,
with an intensity that made them seem to quiver like an arrow in her
breast.

"You don't like him?" said Mr. Pole.

"Not love him! not love him!"

"Yes, yes, but that comes after marriage. Often the case. Look here:
don't you go against your interests. You mustn't be flighty. If Pericles
speaks to you, have him. Clap your hands. Dozens of girls would, that I
know."

"But, oh!" interposed Emilia; "if he married me he would kiss me!"

Mr. Pole coughed and blinked. "Well!" he remarked, as one gravely
cogitating; and with the native delicacy of a Briton turned it off in a
playful, "So shall I now," adding, "though I ain't your husband."

He stooped his head. Emilia put her hands on his shoulders, and submitted
her face to him.

"There!" went Mr. Pole: "'pon my honour, it does me good:--better than
medicine! But you mustn't give that dose to everybody, my dear. You
don't, of course. All right, all right--I'm quite satisfied. I was only
thinking of you going to Italy, among those foreign rascals, who've no
more respect for a girl than they have for a monkey--their brother. A set
of swindlers! I took you for the wife of one when you came in, at first.
And now, business is business. Let's get it over. What have you come
about? Glad to see you--understand that."

Emilia lifted her eyes to his.

"You know I love you, sir."

"I'm sure you're a grateful little woman."

She rose: "Oh! how can I speak it!"

An idea that his daughters had possibly sent her to herald one of the
renowned physicians of London, concerning whom he was perpetually being
plagued by them, or to lead him to one, flashed through Mr. Pole. He was
not in a state to weigh the absolute value of such a suspicion, but it
seemed probable; it explained an extraordinary proceeding; and, having
conceived, his wrath took it up as a fact, and fought with it.

"Stop! If that's what you've come for, we'll bring matters to a crisis.
You fancy me ill, don't you, my dear?"

"You do not look well, sir."

Emilia's unhesitating reply confirmed his suspicion.

"I am well. I am, I say! And now, understand that, if that's your
business, I won't go to the fellow, and I won't see him here. They'll
make me out mad, next. He shall never have a guinea from me while I live.
No, nor when I die. Not a farthing! Sit down, my dear, and wait for the
biscuits. I wish to heaven they'd come. There's brandy coming, too.
Where's Braintop?"

He took out his handkerchief to wipe his forehead, and jerked it like a
bell-rope.

Emilia, in a singular bewilderment, sat eyeing a beam of sombre city
sunlight on the dusty carpet. She could only suppose that the offending
"he" was Wilfrid; but, why he should be so, she could not guess: and how
to plead for him, divided her mind.

"Don't blame him; be angry with me, if you are angry," she began softly.
"I know he thinks of you anxiously. I know he would do nothing to hurt
you. No one is so kind as he is. Would you deprive him of money, because
he offends you?"

"Deprive him of money," repeated Mr. Pole, with ungrudging accentuation.
"Well, I've heard about women, but I never knew one so anxious for a
doctor to get his fee as you are."

Emilia wonderingly fixed her sight on him an instant, and, quite
unillumined, resumed: "Blame me, sir. But, I know you will be too kind.
Oh! I love him. So, I must love you, and I would not give you pain. It is
true he loves me. You will not see him, because he loves me?"

"The doctor?" muttered Mr. Pole. "The doctor?" he almost bellowed; and
got sharp up from his chair, and looked at himself in the glass, blinking
rapidly; and then turned to inspect Emilia.

Emilia drew him to her side again.

"Go on," he said; and there became visible in his face a frightful effort
to comprehend her, and get to the sense of her words.

And why it was so frightful as to be tragic, you will know presently.

He thought of the arrival of Braintop, freighted with brandy, as the only
light in the mist, and breathing heavily from his nose, almost snorting
the air he took in from a widened mouth, he sat and tried to listen to
her words as well as for Braintop's feet.

Emilia was growing too conscious of her halting eloquence, as the
imminence of her happiness or misery hung balancing in doubtful scales
before her.

"Oh! he loves me, and I love him," she gasped, and wondered why words
should be failing her. "See us together, sir, and hear us. We will make
you well."

The exclamation "Good Lord!" groaned out in a tone as from the lower pits
of despair, cut her short.

Tearfully she murmured: "You will not see us, sir?"

"Together?" bawled the merchant.

"Yes, I mean together."

"If you're not mad, I am." And he jumped on his legs and walked to the
farther corner of the room. "Which of us is it?" His features twitched in
horribly comic fashion. "What do you mean? I can't understand a word. My
brain must have gone;" throwing his hand over his forehead. "I've feared
so for the last four months. Good God! a lunatic asylum! and the business
torn like a piece of old rag! I know that fellow at Riga's dancing like a
cannibal, and there--there 'll be articles in the papers.--Here, girl!
come up to the light. Come here, I say."

Emilia walked up to him.

"You don't look mad. I dare say everybody else understands you. Do they?"

The sad-flushed pallor of his face provoked Emilia to say: "You ought to
have the doctor here immediately. Let me bring him, sir."

A gleam as of a lantern through his oppressive mental fog calmed the
awful irritability of his nerves somewhat.

"You've got him outside?"

"No, sir."

The merchant's eagerness faded out. He put his hand to her shoulder, and
went along to a chair, sinking into it, and closing his eyelids. So they
remained, Emilia at his right hand. She watched him breathing with a weak
open mouth, and thought more of the doctor now than of Wilfrid.




CHAPTER XXV

Braintop's knock at the door had been unheeded for some minutes. At last
Emilia let him in. The brandy and biscuits were placed on a table, and
Emilia resumed her watch by Mr. Pole. She saw that his lips moved, after
a space, and putting her ear down, understood that he desired not to see
any one who might come for an interview with him: nor were the clerks to
be admitted. The latter direction was given in precise terms. Emilia
repeated the orders outside. On her return, the merchant's eyes were
open.

"My forehead feels damp," he said; "and I'm not hot at all. Just take
hold of my hands. They're like wet crumpets. I wonder what makes me so
stiff. A man mustn't sit at business too long at a time. Sure to make
people think he's ill. What was that about a doctor? I seem to remember.
I won't see one."

Emilia had filled a glass with brandy. She brought it nearer to his hand,
while he was speaking. At the touch of the glass, his fingers went round
it slowly, and he raised it to his mouth. The liquor revived him. He
breathed "ah!" several times, and grimaced, blinking, as if seeking to
arouse a proper brightness in his eyes. Then, he held out his empty glass
to her, and she filled it, and he sipped deliberately, saying: "I'm warm
inside. I keep on perspiring so cold. Can't make it out. Look at my
finger-ends, my dear. They're whitish, aren't they?"

Emilia took the hand he presented, and chafed it, and put it against her
bosom, half under one arm. The action appeared to give some warmth to his
heart, for he petted her, in return.

A third time he held out the glass, and remarked that this stuff was
better than medicine.

"You women!" he sneered, as at a reminiscence of their faith in drugs.

"My legs are weak, though!" He had risen and tested the fact. "Very
shaky. I wonder what makes 'em--I don't take much exercise." Pondering on
this problem, he pursued: "It's the stomach. I'm as empty as an
egg-shell. Odd, I've got no appetite. But, my spirits are up. I begin to
feel myself again. I'll eat by-and-by, my dear. And, I say; I'll tell you
what:--I'll take you to the theatre to-night. I want to laugh. A man's
all right when he's laughing. I wish it was Christmas. Don't you like to
see the old pantaloon tumbled over, my boy?--my girl, I mean. I did, when
I was a boy. My father took me. I went in the pit. I can smell oranges,
when I think of it. I remember, we supped on German sausage; or ham--one
or the other. Those were happy old days!"

He shook his head at them across the misty gulf.

"Perhaps there's a good farce going on now. If so, we'll go. Girls ought
to learn to laugh as well as boys. I'll ring for Braintop."

He rang the bell, and bade Emilia be careful to remind him that he wanted
Braintop's address; for Braintop was useful.

It appeared that there were farces at several of the theatres. Braintop
rattled them out, their plot and fun and the merits of the actors, with
delightful volubility, as one whose happy subject had been finally
discovered. He was forthwith commissioned to start immediately and take a
stage-box at one of the places of entertainment, where two great rivals
of the Doctor genus promised to laugh dull care out of the spirit of man
triumphantly, and at the description of whose drolleries any one with
faith might be half cured. The youth gave his address on paper to Emilia.

"Make haste, sir," said Mr. Pole. "And, stop. You shall go, yourself; go
to the pit, and have a supper, and I'll pay for it. When you've ordered
the box--do you know the Bedford Hotel? Go there, and see Mrs. Chickley,
and tell her I am coming to dine and sleep, and shall bring one of my
daughters. Dinner, sittingroom, and two bed-rooms, mind. And tell Mrs.
Chickley we've got no carpet-bag, and must come upon her wardrobe. All
clear to you? Dinner at half-past five going to theatre."

Braintop bowed comprehendingly.

"Now, that fellow goes off chirping," said Mr. Pole to Emilia. "It's just
the thing I used to wish to happen to me, when I was his age--my master
to call me in and say "There! go and be jolly." I dare say the rascal'll
order a champagne supper. Poor young chap! let his heart be merry. Ha!
ha! heigho!--Too much business is bad for man and boy. I feel better
already, if it weren't for my legs. My feet are so cold. Don't you think
I'm pretty talkative, my dear?"

"I am glad to hear you talk," said Emilia, striving to look less
perplexed than she felt.

He asked her slyly why she had come to London; and she begged that she
might speak of it by-and-by; whereat Mr. Pole declared that he intended
to laugh them all out of that nonsense. "And what did you say about being
in love with him? A doctor in good practice--but you needn't commence by
killing me if you do go and marry the fellow. Eh? what is it?"

Emilia was too much entangled herself to attempt to extricate him; and
apparently his wish to be enlightened passed away, for he was the next
instant searching among his papers for the letter from Riga. Not finding
it, he put on his hat.

"Must give up business to-day. Can't do business with a petticoat in the
room. I wish the Lord Mayor'd stop them all at Temple Bar. Now we'll go
out, and I'll show you a bit of the City."

He offered her his arm, and she noticed that in walking through the
office, he was erect, and the few words he spoke were delivered in the
peremptory elastic tone of a vigorous man.

"My girls," he said to her in an undertone, "never come here. Well! we
don't expect ladies, you know. Different spheres in this world. They mean
to be tip-top in society; and quite right too. My dear, I think we'll
ride. Do you mind being seen in a cab?"

He asked her hesitatingly: and when Emilia said, "Oh, no! let us ride,"
he seemed relieved. "I can't see the harm in a cab. Different tastes, in
this world. My girls--but, thank the Lord! they've got carriages."

For an hour the merchant and Emilia drove about the City. He showed her
all the great buildings, and dilated on the fabulous piles of wealth they
represented, taking evident pleasure in her exclamations of astonishment.

"Yes, yes; they may despise us City fellows. I say, 'Come and see":
that's all! Now, look up that court. Do you see three dusty windows on
the second floor? That man there could buy up any ten princes in
Europe--excepting one or two Austrians or Russians. He wears a coat just
like mine."

"Does he?" said Emilia, involuntarily examining the one by her side.

"We don't show our gold-linings, in the City, my dear."

"But, you are rich, too."

"Oh! I--as far as that goes. Don't talk about me. I'm--I'm still cold in
the feet. Now, look at that corner house. Three months ago that man was
one of our most respected City merchants. Now he's a bankrupt, and can't
show his head. It was all rotten. A medlar! He tampered with documents;
betrayed trusts. What do you think of him?"

"What was it he did?" asked Emilia.

Mr. Pole explained, and excused him; then he explained, and abused him.

"He hadn't a family, my dear. Where did the money go? He's called a
rascal now, poor devil! Business brings awful temptations. You think,
this'll save me! You catch hold of it and it snaps. That'll save me; but
you're too heavy, and the roots give way, and down you go lower and
lower. Lower and lower! The gates of hell must be very low down if one of
our bankrupts don't reach 'em." He spoke this in a deep underbreath.
"Let's get out of the City. There's no air. Look at that cloud. It's
about over Brookfield, I should say."

"Dear Brookfield!" echoed Emilia, feeling her heart fly forth to sing
like a skylark under the cloud.

"And they're not satisfied with it," murmured Mr: Pole, with a voice of
unwonted bitterness.

At the hotel, he was received very cordially by Mrs. Chickley, and Simon,
the old waiter.

"You look as young as ever, ma'am," Mr. Pole complimented her cheerfully,
while he stamped his feet on the floor, and put forward Emilia as one of
his girls; but immediately took the landlady aside, to tell her that she
was "merely a charge--a ward--something of that sort;" admitting, gladly
enough, that she was a very nice young lady. "She's a genius, ma'am, in
music:--going to do wonders. She's not one of them." And Mr. Pole
informed Mrs. Chickley that when they came to town, they usually slept in
one or other of the great squares. He, for his part, preferred old
quarters: comfort versus grandeur.

Simon had soon dressed the dinner-table. By the time dinner was ready,
Mr. Pole had sunk into such a condition of drowsiness, that it was hard
to make him see why he should be aroused, and when he sat down, fronting
Emilia, his eyes were glazed, and he complained that she was scarcely
visible.

"Some of your old yellow seal, Simon. That's what I want. I haven't got
better at home."

The contents of this old yellow seal formed the chief part of the
merchant's meal. Emilia was induced to drink two full glasses.

"Doesn't that make your feet warm, my dear?" said Mr. Pole.

"It makes me want to talk," Emilia confessed.

"Ah! we shall have some fun to-night. "To-the-rutte-ta-to!" If you could
only sing, "Begone dull care!" I like glees: good, honest, English, manly
singing for me! Nothing like glees and madrigals, to my mind. With chops
and baked potatoes, and a glass of good stout, they beat all other
music."

Emilia sang softly to him.

When she had finished, Mr. Pole applauded her mildly.

"Your music, my dear?"

"My music: Mr. Runningbrook's words. But only look. He will not change a
word, and some of the words are so curious, they make me lift my chin and
pout. It's all in my throat. I feel as if I had to do it on tiptoe. Mr.
Runningbrook wrote the song in ten minutes."

"He can afford to--comes of a family," said Mr. Pole, and struck up a bit
of "Celia's Arbour," which wandered into "The Soldier Tired," as he came
bendingly, both sets of fingers filliping, toward Emilia, with one of
those ancient glee--suspensions, "Taia--haia--haia--haia," etc., which
were meant for jolly fellows who could bear anything.

"Eh?" went Mr. Pole, to elicit approbation in return.

Emilia smoothed the wrinkles of her face, and smiled.

"There's nothing like Port," said Mr. Pole. "Get little Runningbrook to
write a song: "There's nothing like Port." You put the music. I'll sing
it."

"You will," cried Emilia.

"Yes, upon my honour! now my feet are warmer, I by Jingo! what's that?"
and again he wore that strange calculating look, as if he were being
internally sounded, and guessed at his probable depth. "What a twitch!
Something wrong with my stomach. But a fellow must be all right when his
spirits are up. We'll be off as quick as we can. Taia--haihaia--hum. If
the farce is bad, it's my last night of theatre-going."

The delight at being in a theatre kept Emilia dumb when she gazed on the
glittering lights. After an inspection of the house, Mr. Pole kindly
remarked: "You must marry and get out of this. This'd never do. All very
well in the boxes: but on the stage--oh, no! I shouldn't like you to be
there. If my girls don't approve of the doctor, they shall look out
somebody for you. I shouldn't like you to be painted, and rigged out; and
have to squall in this sort of place. Stage won't do for you. No, no!"

Emilia replied that she had given up the stage; and looked mournfully at
the drop-scene, as at a lost kingdom, scarcely repressing her tears.

The orchestra tuned and played a light overture. She followed up the
windings of the drop-scene valley, meeting her lover somewhere beneath
the castle-ruin, where the river narrowed and the trees intertwined. On
from dream to dream the music carried her, and dull fell the first words
of the farce. Mr. Pole said, "Now, then!" and began to chuckle. As the
farce proceeded, he grew more serious, repeating to Emilia, quite
anxiously: "I wonder whether that boy Braintop's enjoying it." Emilia
glanced among the sea of heads, and finally eliminated the head of
Braintop, who was respectfully devoting his gaze to the box she occupied.
When Mr. Pole had been assisted to discover him likewise, his attention
alternated between Braintop and the stage, and he expressed annoyance
from time to time at the extreme composure of Braintop's countenance.
"Why don't the fellow laugh? Does he think he's listening to a sermon?"
Poor Braintop, on his part, sat in mortal fear lest his admiration of
Emilia was perceived. Divided? between this alarming suspicion, and a
doubt that the hair on his forehead was not properly regulated, he became
uneasy and fitful in his deportment. His imagination plagued him with a
sense of guilt, which his master's watchfulness of him increased. He took
an opportunity to furtively to eye himself in a pocket-mirror, and was
subsequently haunted by an additional dread that Emilia might have
discovered the instrument; and set him down as a vain foolish dog. When
he saw her laugh he was sure of it. Instead of responding to Mr. Pole's
encouragement, he assumed a taciturn aspect worthy of a youthful
anchorite, and continued to be the spectator of a scene to which his soul
was dead.

"I believe that fellow's thinking of nothing but his supper," said Mr.
Pole.

"I dare say he dined early in the day," returned Emilia, remembering how
hungry she used to be in the evenings of the potatoe-days.

"Yes, but he might laugh, all the same." And Mr. Pole gave Emilia the
sound advice: "Mind you never marry a fellow who can't laugh."

Braintop saw Emilia smile. Then, in an instant, her face changed its
expression to one of wonder and alarm, and her hands clasped together
tightly. What on earth was the matter with her? His agitated fancy,
centred in himself, now decided that some manifestation of most shocking
absurdity had settled on his forehead, or his hair, for he was certain of
his neck-tie. Braintop had recourse to his pocket-mirror once more. It
afforded him a rapid interchange of glances with a face which he at all
events could distinguish from the mass, though we need not.

The youth was in the act of conveying the instrument to its retreat, when
conscience sent his eyes toward Emilia, who, to his horror, beckoned to
him, and touched Mr. Pole, entreating him to do the same. Mr. Pole
gesticulated imperiously, whereat Braintop rose, and requested his
neighbour to keep his seat for ten minutes, as he was going into that
particular box; and "If I don't come back in ten minutes, I shall stop
there," said Braintop, a little grandly, through the confusion of his
ideas, as he guessed at the possible reasons for the summons.

Emilia had seen her father in the orchestra. There he sat, under the
leader, sullenly fiddling the prelude to the second play, like a man
ashamed, and one of the beaten in this world. Flight had been her first
thought. She had cause to dread him. The more she lived and the dawning
knowledge of what it is to be a woman in the world grew with her, the
more she shrank from his guidance, and from reliance on him. Not that she
conceived him designedly base; but he outraged her now conscious
delicacy, and what she had to endure as a girl seemed unbearable to her
now. Besides, she felt a secret shuddering at nameless things, which made
her sick of the thought of returning to him and his Jew friends. But,
alas! he looked so miserable--a child of harmony among the sons of
discord! He kept his head down, fiddling like a machine. The old
potatoe-days became pathetically edged with dead light to Emilia. She
could not be cruel. "When I am safe," she laid stress on the word in her
mind, to awaken blessed images, "I will see him often, and make him
happy; but I will let him know that all is well with me now, and that I
love him always."

So she said to Mr. Pole, "I know one of those in the orchestra. May I
write a word to him on a piece of paper before we go? I wish to."

Mr. Pole reflected, and seeing her earnest in her desire to do this,
replied: "Well, yes; if you must--the girls are not here."

Emilia borrowed his pencil-case, and wrote:--

"Sandra is well, and always loves her caro papa, and is improving, and
will see him soon. Her heart is full of love for him and for her mama;
and if they leave their lodgings they are to leave word where they go.
Sandra never forgets Italy, and reads the papers. She has a copy of the
score of an unknown opera by our Andronizetti, and studies it, and
anatomy, English, French, and pure Italian, and can ride a horse. She has
made rich friends, who love her. It will not be long, and you will see
her."

The hasty scrawl concluded with numerous little caressing exclamations in
Italian diminutives. This done, Emilia thought: "But he will look up and
see me!" She resolved not to send it till they were about to quit the
theatre. Consequently, Braintop, on his arrival, was told to sit down.
"You don't look cheerful in the pit," said Mr. Pole. "You're above
it?--eh? You're all alike in that. None of you do what your dads did.
Up-up-up? You may get too high, eh?--Gallery?" and Mr. Pole winked
knowingly and laughed.

Braintop, thus elevated, tried his best to talk to Emilia, who sat half
fascinated with the fear of seeing her father lift his eyes and recognize
her suddenly. She sat boldly in the front, as before; not being a young
woman to hide her head where there was danger, and having perhaps a
certain amount of the fatalism which is often youth's philosophy in the
affairs of life. "If this is to be, can I avert it?"

Mr. Pole began to nod at the actors, heavily. He said to Emilia, "If
there is any fun going on, give me a nudge." Emilia kept her eyes on her
father in the orchestra, full of pity for his deplorable wig, in which
she read his later domestic history, and sad tales of the family dinners.

"Do you see one of those"--she pointed him out to Braintop; "he is next
to the leader, with his back to us. Are you sure? I want you to give him
this note before he goes; when we go. Will you do it? I shall always be
thankful to you."

Considering what Braintop was ready to do that he might be remembered for
a day and no more, the request was so very moderate as to be painful to
him.

"You will leave him when you have given it into his hand. You are not to
answer any questions," said Emilia.

With a reassuring glance at the musician's wig, Braintop bent his head.

"Do see," she pursued, "how differently he bows from the other men,
though it is only dance music. Oh, how his ears are torn by that
violoncello! He wants to shriek:--he bears it!"

She threw a piteous glance across the agitated instruments, and Braintop
was led to inquire: "Is he anything particular?"

"He can bring out notes that are more like honey--if you can fancy a
thread of honey drawn through your heart as if it would never end! He is
Italian."

Braintop modestly surveyed her hair and brows and cheeks, and taking the
print of her eyes on his brain to dream over, smelt at a relationship
with the wry black wig, which cast a halo about it.

The musicians laid down their instruments, and trooped out, one by one.
Emilia perceived a man brush against her father's elbow. Her father
flicked at his offended elbow with the opposite hand, and sat crumpled up
till all had passed him: then went out alone. That little action of
disgust showed her that he had not lost spirit, albeit condemned to serve
amongst an inferior race, promoters of discord.

Just as the third play was opening, some commotion was seen in the pit,
rising from near Braintop's vacated seat; and presently a thing that
shone flashing to the lights, came on from hand to hand, each hand
signalling subsequently toward Mr. Pole's box. It approached. Braintop's
eyes were in waiting on Emilia, who looked sadly at the empty orchestra.
A gentleman in the stalls, a head beneath her, bowed, and holding up a
singular article, gravely said that he had been requested to pass it. She
touched Mr. Pole's shoulder. "Eh? anything funny?" said he, and glanced
around. He was in time to see Braintop lean hurriedly over the box, and
snatch his pocket-mirror from the gentleman's hand. "Ha! ha!" he laughed,
as if a comic gleam had illumined him. A portion of the pit and stalls
laughed too. Emilia smiled merrily. "What was it?" said she; and
perceiving many faces beneath her red among handkerchiefs, she was eager
to see the thing that the unhappy Braintop had speedily secreted.

"Come, sir, let's see it!" quoth Mr. Pole, itching for a fresh laugh; and
in spite of Braintop's protest, and in defiance of his burning blush, he
compelled the wretched youth to draw it forth, and be manifestly
convicted of vanity.

A shout of laughter burst from Mr. Pole. "No wonder these young sparks
cut us all out. Lord, what cunning dogs they are! They ain't satisfied
with seeing themselves in their boots, but they--ha! ha! By George! We've
got the best fun in our box. I say, Braintop! you ought to have two, my
boy. Then you'd see how you looked behind. Ha-ha-hah! Never enjoyed an
evening so much in my life! A looking-glass for their pockets! ha!
ha!--hooh!"

Luckily the farce demanded laughter, or those parts of the pit which had
not known Braintop would have been indignant. Mr. Pole became more and
more possessed by the fun, as the contrast of Braintop's abject
humiliation with this glaring testimony to his conceit tickled him. He
laughed till he complained of hunger. Emilia, though she thought it
natural that Braintop should carry a pocket-mirror if he pleased, laughed
from sympathy; until Braintop, reduced to the verge of forbearance, stood
up and remarked that, to perform the mission entrusted to him, he must
depart immediately. Mr. Pole was loth to let him go, but finally
commending him to a good supper, he sighed, and declared himself a new
man.

"Oh! what a jolly laugh! The very thing I wanted! It's worth hundreds to
me. I was queer before: no doubt about that!"

Again the ebbing convulsion of laughter seized him. "I feel as clear as
day," he said; and immediately asked Emilia whether she thought he would
have strength to get down to the cab. She took his hand, trying to assist
him from the seat. He rose, and staggered an instant. "A sort of reddish
cloud," he murmured, feeling over his forehead. "Ha! I know what it is. I
want a chop. A chop and a song. But, I couldn't take you, and I like you
by me. Good little woman!" He patted Emilia's shoulder, preparatory to
leaning on it with considerable weight, and so descended to the cab,
chuckling ever and anon at the reminiscence of Braintop.

There was a disturbance in the street. A man with a foreign accent was
shouting by the door of a neighbouring public-house, that he would not
yield his hold of the collar of a struggling gentleman, till the villain
had surrendered his child, whom he scandalously concealed from her
parents. A scuffle ensued, and the foreign voice was heard again:

"Wat! wat you have de shame, you have de pluck, ah! to tell me you know
not where she is, and you bring me a letter? Ho!--you have de cheeks to
tell me!"

This highly effective pluralizing of their peculiar slang, brought a roar
of applause from the crowd of Britons.

"Only a street row," said Mr. Pole, to calm Emilia.

"Will he be hurt?" she cried.

"I see a couple of policemen handy," said Mr. Pole, and Emilia cowered
down and clung to his hand as they drove from the place.




CHAPTER XXVI

It was midnight. Mr. Pole had appeased his imagination with a chop, and
was trying to revive the memory of his old after-theatre night carouses
by listening to a song which Emilia sang to him, while he sipped at a
smoking mixture, and beat time on the table, rejoiced that he was warm
from head to foot at last.

"That's a pretty song, my dear," he said. "A very pretty song. It does
for an old fellow; and so did my supper: light and wholesome. I'm an old
fellow; I ought to know I've got a grown-up son and grown-up daughters. I
shall be a grandpa, soon, I dare say. It's not the thing for me to go
about hearing glees. I had an idea of it. I'm better here. All I want is
to see my children happy, married and settled, and comfortable!"

Emilia stole up to him, and dropped on one knee: "You love them?"

"I do. I love my girls and my boy. And my brandy-and-water, do you mean
to say, you rogue?"

"And me?" Emilia looked up at him beseechingly.

"Yes, and you. I do. I haven't known you long, my dear, but I shall be
glad to do what I can for you. You shall make my house your home as long
as you live; and if I say, make haste and get married, it's only just
this: girls ought to marry young, and not be in an uncertain position."

"Am I worth having?"

"To be sure you are! I should think so. You haven't got a penny; but,
then, you're not for spending one. And"--Mr. Pole nodded to right and
left like a man who silenced a host of invisible logicians, urging this
and that--"you're a pleasant companion, thrifty, pretty, musical: by
Jingo! what more do they want? They'll have their song and chop at home."

"Yes; but suppose it depends upon their fathers?"

"Well, if their fathers will be fools, my dear, I can't help 'em. We
needn't take 'em in a lump: how about the doctor? I'll see him to-morrow
morning, and hear what he has to say. Shall I?"

Mr. Pole winked shrewdly.

"You will not make my heart break?" Emilia's voice sounded one low chord
as she neared the thing she had to say.

"Bless her soul!" the old merchant patted her; "I'm not the sort of man
for that."

"Nor his?"

"His?" Mr. Pole's nerves became uneasy in a minute, at the scent of a
mystification. He dashed his handkerchief over his forehead, repeating:
"His? Break a man's heart! I? What's the meaning of that? For God's sake,
don't bother me!"

Emilia was still kneeling before him, eyeing him with a shadowed
steadfast air.

"I say his, because his heart is in mine. He has any pain that hurts me."

"He may be tremendously in love," observed Mr. Pole; "but he seems a
deuced soft sort of a doctor! What's his name?"

"I love Wilfrid."

The merchant appeared to be giving ear to her, long after the words had
been uttered, while there was silence in the room.

"Wilfrid? my son?" he cried with a start.

"He is my lover."

"Damned rascal!" Mr. Pole jumped from his chair. "Going and playing with
an unprotected girl. I can pardon a young man's folly, but this is
infamous. My dear child," he turned to Emilia, "if you've got any notion
about my son Wilfrid, you must root it up as quick as you can. If he's
been behaving like a villain, leave him to me. I detest, I hate, I
loathe, I would kick, a young man who deceives a girl. Even if he's my
son!--more's the reason!"

Mr. Pole was walking up and down the room, fuming as he spoke. Emilia
tried to hold his hand, as he was passing, but he said: "There, my child!
I'm very sorry for you, and I'm damned angry with him. Let me go."

"Can you, can you be angry with him for loving me?"

"Deceiving you," returned Mr. Pole; "that's what it is. And I tell you,
I'd rather fifty times the fellow had deceived me. Anything rather than
that he should take advantage of a girl."

"Wilfrid loves me and would die for me," said Emilia.

"Now, let me tell you the fact," Mr. Pole came to a halt, fronting her.
"My son Wilfrid Pole may be in love, as he says, here and there, but he
is engaged to be married to a lady of title. I have his word--his oath.
He got near a thousand pounds out of my pocket the other day on that
understanding. I don't speak about the money, but--now--it's a
lump--others would have made a nice row about it--but is he a liar? Is he
a seducing, idling, vagabond dog? Is he a contemptible scoundrel?"

"He is my lover," said Emilia.

She stood without changing a feature; as in a darkness, holding to the
one thing she was sure of. Then, with a sudden track of light in her
brain: "I know the mistake," she said. "Pardon him. He feared to offend
you, because you are his father, and he thought I might not quite please
you. For, he loves me. He has loved me from the first moment he saw me.
He cannot be engaged to another. I could bring him from any woman's side.
I have only to say to myself--he must come to me. For he loves me! It is
not a thing to doubt."

Mr. Pole turned and recommenced his pacing with hasty steps. All the
indications of a nervous tempest were on him. Interjecting half-formed
phrases, and now and then staring at Emilia, as at an incomprehensible
object, he worked at his hair till it lent him the look of one in horror
at an apparition.

"The fellow's going to marry Lady Charlotte Chillingworth, I tell you. He
has asked my permission. The infernal scamp! he knew it pleased me. He
bled me of a thousand pounds only the other day. I tell you, he's going
to marry Lady Charlotte Chillingworth."

Emilia received this statement with a most perplexing smile. She shook
her head. "He cannot."

"Cannot? I say he shall, and must, and in a couple of months, too!"

The gravely sceptical smile on Emilia's face changed to a blank pallor.

"Then, you make him, sir--you?"

"He'll be a beggar, if he don't."

"You will keep him without money?"

Mr. Pole felt that he gazed on strange deeps in that girl's face. Her
voice had the wire-like hum of a rising wind. There was no menace in her
eyes: the lashes of them drooped almost tenderly, and the lips were but
softly closed. The heaving of the bosom, though weighty, was regular: the
hands hung straight down, and were open. She looked harmless; but his
physical apprehensiveness was sharpened by his nervous condition, and he
read power in her: the capacity to concentrate all animal and mental
vigour into one feeling--this being the power of the soul.

So she stood, breathing quietly, steadily eyeing him.

"No, no;" went on Mr. Pole. "Come, come. We'll sit down, and see, and
talk--see what can be done. You know I always meant kindly by you."

"Oh, yes!" Emilia musically murmured, and it cost her nothing to smile
again.

"Now, tell me how this began." Mr. Pole settled himself comfortably to
listen, all irritation having apparently left him, under the influence of
the dominant nature. "You need not be ashamed to talk it over to me."

"I am not ashamed," Emilia led off, and told her tale simply, with here
and there one of her peculiar illustrations. She had not thought of love
till it came to life suddenly, she said; and then all the world looked
different. The relation of Wilfrid's bravery in fighting for her, varied
for a single instant the low monotony of her voice. At the close of the
confession, Mr. Pole wore an aspect of distress. This creature's utter
unlikeness to the girls he was accustomed to, corroborated his personal
view of the case, that Wilfrid certainly could not have been serious, and
that she was deluded. But he pitied her, for he had sufficient
imagination to prevent him from despising what he did not altogether
comprehend. So, to fortify the damsel, he gave her a lecture: first, on
young men--their selfish inconsiderateness, their weakness, the wanton
lives they led, their trick of lying for any sugar-plum, and how they
laughed at their dupes. Secondly, as to the conduct consequently to be
prescribed to girls, who were weaker, frailer, by disposition more
confiding, and who must believe nothing but what they heard their elders
say.

Emilia gave patient heed to the lecture.

"But I am safe," she remarked, when he had finished; "for my lover is not
as those young men are."

To speak at all, and arrange his ideas, was a vexation to the poor
merchant. He was here like an irritable traveller, who knocks at a gate,
which makes as if it opens, without letting him in. Emilia's naive
confidence he read as stupidity. It brought on a fresh access of the
nervous fever lurking in him, and he cried, jumping from his seat: "Well,
you can't have him, and there's an end. You must give up--confound! why!
do you expect to have everything you want at starting? There, my
child--but, upon my honour! a man loses his temper at having to talk for
an hour or so, and no result. You must go to bed; and--do you say your
prayers? Well! that's one way of getting out of it--pray that you may
forget all about what's not good for you. Why, you're almost like a young
man, when you set your mind on a thing. Bad! won't do! Say your prayers
regularly. And, please, pour me out a mouthful of brandy. My hand
trembles--I don't know what's the matter with it;--just like those rushes
on the Thames I used to see when out fishing. No wind, and yet there they
shake away. I wish it was daylight on the old river now! It's night, and
no mistake. I feel as if I had a fellow twirling a stick over my head.
The rascal's been at it for the last month. There, stop where you are, my
dear. Don't begin to dance!"

He pressed at his misty eyes, half under the impression that she was
taking a succession of dazzling leaps in air. Terror of an impending
blow, which he associated with Emilia's voice, made him entreat her to be
silent. After a space, he breathed a long breath of relief, saying: "No,
no; you're firm enough on your feet. I don't think I ever saw you dance.
My girls have given it up. What led me to think...but, let's to bed, and
say our prayers. I want a kiss."

Emilia kissed him on the forehead. The symptoms of illness were strange
to her, and passed unheeded. She was too full of her own burning passion
to take evidence from her sight. The sun of her world was threatened with
extinction. She felt herself already a wanderer in a land of tombs, where
none could say whether morning had come or gone. Intensely she looked her
misery in the face; and it was as a voice that said, "No sun: never sun
any more," to her. But a blue-hued moon slipped from among the clouds,
and hung in the black outstretched fingers of the tree of darkness,
fronting troubled waters. "This is thy light for ever! thou shalt live in
thy dream." So, as in a prison-house, did her soul now recall the
blissful hours by Wilming Weir. She sickened but an instant. The blood in
her veins was too strong a tide for her to crouch in that imagined
corpse-like universe which alternates with an irradiated Eden in the
brain of the passionate young.

"Why should I lose him!" The dry sob choked her.

She struggled with the emotion in her throat, and Mr. Pole, who had
previously dreaded supplication and appeals for pity, caressed her.
Instantly the flood poured out.

"You are not cruel. I knew it. I should have died, if you had come
between us. Oh, Wilfrid's father, I love you!--I have never had a very
angry word on my mouth. Think! think! if you had made me curse you. For,
I could! You would have stopped my life, and Wilfrid's. What would our
last thoughts have been? We could not have forgiven you. Take up dead
birds killed by frost. You cry: Cruel winter! murdering cold! But I knew
better. You are Wilfrid's father, whom I can kneel to. My lover's father!
my own father! my friend next to heaven! Oh! bless my love, for him. You
have only to know what my love for him is! The thought of losing him goes
like perishing cold through my bones;--my heart jerks, as if it had to
pull up my body from the grave every time it beats...."

"God in heaven!" cried the horrified merchant, on whose susceptible
nerves these images wrought with such a force that he absolutely had
dread of her. He gasped, and felt at his heart, and then at his pulse;
rubbed the moisture from his forehead, and throwing a fixedly wild look
on her eyes, he jumped up and left her kneeling.

His caress had implied mercy to Emilia: for she could not reconcile it
with the rejection of the petition of her soul. She was now a little
bewildered to see him trotting the room, frowning and blinking, and
feeling at one wrist, at momentary pauses, all his words being: "Let's be
quiet. Let's be good. Let's go to bed, and say our prayers;" mingled with
short ejaculations.

"I may say," she intercepted him, "I may tell my dear lover that you
bless us both, and that we are to live. Oh, speak! sir! let me hear you!"

"Let's go to bed," iterated Mr. Pole. "Come, candles! do light them. In
God's name! light candles. And let's be off and say our prayers."

"You consent, sir?"

"What's that your heart does?" Mr. Pole stopped to enquire; adding:
"There, don't tell me. You've played the devil with mine. Who'd ever have
made me believe that I should feel more at ease running up and down the
room, than seated in my arm-chair! Among the wonders of the world, that!"

Emilia put up her lips to kiss him, as he passed her. There was something
deliciously soothing and haven-like to him in the aspect of her calmness.

"Now, you'll be a good girl," said he, when he had taken her salute.

"And you," she rejoined, "will be happier!"

His voice dropped. "If you go on like this, you've done for me!"

But she could make no guess at any tragic meaning in his words. "My
father--let me call you so!"

"Will you see that you can't have him?" he stamped the syllables into her
ears: and, with a notion of there being a foreign element about her,
repeated:--"No!--not have him!--not yours!--somebody else's!"

This was clear enough.

"Only you can separate us," said Emilia, with a brow levelled intently.

"Well, and I--" Mr. Pole was pursuing in the gusty energy of his previous
explanation. His eyes met Emilia's, gravely widening. "I--I'm very
sorry," he broke down: "upon my soul, I am!"

The old man went to the mantel-piece and leaned his elbow before the
glass.

Emilia's bosom began to rise again.

She was startled to hear him laugh. A slight melancholy little burst; and
then a louder one, followed by a full-toned laughter that fell short and
showed the heart was not in it.

"That boy Braintop! What fun it was!" he said, looking all the while into
the glass. "Why can't we live in peace, and without bother! Is your
candle alight, my dear?"

Emilia now thought that he was practising evasion.

"I will light it," she said.

Mr. Pole gave a wearied sigh. His head being still turned to the glass,
he listened with a shrouded face for her movements: saying, "Good night;
good night; I'll light my own. There's a dear!"

A shouting was in his ears, which seemed to syllable distinctly: "If she
goes at once, I'm safe."

The sight of pain at all was intolerable to him; but he had a prophetic
physical warning now that to witness pain inflicted by himself would be
more than he could endure.

Emilia breathed a low, "Good night."

"Good night, my love--all right to-morrow!" he replied briskly; and
remorse touching his kind heart as the music of her 'good night'
penetrated to it by thrilling avenues, he added injudiciously: "Don't
fret. We'll see what we can do. Soon make matters comfortable."

"I love you, and I know you will not stab me," she answered.

"No; certainly not," said Mr. Pole, still keeping his back to her.

Struck with a sudden anticipating fear of having to go through this scene
on the morrow, he continued: "No misunderstands, mind! Wilfrid's done
with."

There was a silence. He trusted she might be gone. Turning round, he
faced her; the light of the candle throwing her pale visage into ghostly
relief.

"Where is sleep for you if you part us?"

Mr. Pole flung up his arms. "I insist upon your going to bed. Why
shouldn't I sleep? Child's folly!"

Though he spoke so, his brain was in strings to his timorous ticking
nerves; and he thought that it would be well to propitiate her and get
her to utter some words that would not haunt his pillow.

"My dear girl! it's not my doing. I like you. I wish you well and happy.
Very fond of you;--blame circumstances, not me." Then he murmured: "Are
black spots on the eyelids a bad sign? I see big flakes of soot falling
in a dark room."

Emilia's mated look fleeted. "You come between us, sir, because I have no
money?"

"I tell you it's the boy's only chance to make his hit now." Mr. Pole
stamped his foot angrily.

"And you make my Cornelia marry, though she loves another, as Wilfrid
loves me, and if they do not obey you they are to be beggars! Is it you
who can pray? Can you ever have good dreams? I saved my father from the
sin, by leaving him. He wished to sell me. But my poor father had no
money at all, and I can pardon him. Money was a bright thing to him: like
other things to us. Mr. Pole! What will any one say for you!"

The unhappy merchant had made vehement efforts to perplex his hearing,
that her words might be empty and not future dragons round his couch. He
was looking forward to a night of sleep as a cure for the evil sensations
besetting him--his only chance. The chance was going; and with the
knowledge that it was unjustly torn from him--this one gleam of clear
reason in his brain undimmed by the irritable storm which plucked him
down--he cried out, to clear himself:--

"They are beggars, both, and all, if they don't marry before two months
are out. I'm a beggar then. I'm ruined. I shan't have a penny. I'm in a
workhouse. They are in good homes. They are safe, and thank their old
father. Now, then; now. Shall I sleep?"

Emilia caught his staggering arm. The glazed light of his eyes went out.
He sank into a chair; white as if life had issued with the secret of his
life. Wonderful varying expressions had marked his features and the tones
of his voice, while he was uttering that sharp, succinct confession; so
that, strange as it sounded, every sentence fixed itself on her with
incontrovertible force, and the meaning of the whole flashed through her
mind. It struck her too awfully for speech. She held fast to his
nerveless hand, and kneeling before him, listened for his long reluctant
breathing.

The 'Shall I sleep?' seemed answered.




CHAPTER XXVII

For days after the foregoing scene, Brookfield was unconscious of what
had befallen it. Wilfrid was trying his yacht, the ladies were preparing
for the great pleasure-gathering on Besworth lawn, and shaping astute
designs to exclude the presence of Mrs. Chump, for which they partly
condemned themselves; but, as they said, "Only hear her!" The excitable
woman was swelling from conjecture to certainty on a continuous public
cry of, "'Pon my hon'r!--d'ye think little Belloni's gone and marrud
Pole?"

Emilia's supposed flight had deeply grieved the ladies, when alarm and
suspicion had subsided. Fear of some wretched male baseness on the part
of their brother was happily diverted by a letter, wherein he desired
them to come to him speedily. They attributed her conduct to dread of Mr.
Pericles. That fervid devotee of Euterpe received the tidings with an
obnoxious outburst, which made them seriously ask themselves
(individually and in secret) whether he was not a moneyed brute, and
nothing more. Nor could they satisfactorily answer the question. He
raved: "You let her go. Ha! what creatures you are--hein? But you find
not anozer in fifty years, I say; and here you stop, and forty hours pass
by, and not a sing in motion. What blood you have! It is water--not
blood. Such a voice, a verve, a style, an eye, a devil, zat girl! and all
drawn up and out before ze time by a man: she is spoilt!"

He exhibited an anguish that they were not able to commiserate. Certain
expressions falling from him led them to guess that he had set some plot
in motion, which Emilia's flight had arrested; but his tragic outcries
were all on the higher ground of the loss to Art. They were glad to see
him go from the house. Soon he returned to demand Wilfrid's address.
Arabella wrote it out for him with rebuking composure. Then he insisted
upon having Captain Gambier's, whom he described as "ce nonchalant
dandy."

"Him you will have a better opportunity of seeing by waiting here," said
Adela; and the captain came before Mr. Pericles had retreated. "Ce
nonchalant" was not quite true to his title, when he heard that Emilia
had flown. He did not say much, but iterated "Gone!" with an elegant
frown, adding, "She must come back, you know!" and was evidently more
than commonly puzzled and vexed, pursuing the strain in a way that
satisfied Mr. Pericles more thoroughly than Adela.

"She shall come back as soon as she has a collar," growled Mr. Pericles,
meaning captivity.

"If she'd only come back with her own maiden name," interjected Mrs.
Chump, "I'll give her a character; but, upon my hon'r--d'ye think ut
possible, now...?"

Arabella talked over her, and rescued her father's name.

The noisy sympathy and wild speculations of the Tinleys and Copleys had
to be endured. On the whole, the feeling toward Emilia was kind, and the
hope that she would come to no harm was fervently expressed by all the
ladies; frequently enough, also, to show the opinion that it might easily
happen. On such points Mrs. Chump never failed to bring the conversation
to a block. Supported as they were by Captain Gambier, Edward Buxley,
Freshfield Sumner, and more than once by Sir Twickenham (whom Freshfield,
launching angry shafts, now called the semi-betrothed, the statistical
cripple, and other strong things that show a developing genius for
street-cries and hustings--epithets in every member of the lists of the
great Rejected, or of the jilted who can affect to be philosophical),
notwithstanding these aids, the ladies of Brookfield were crushed by Mrs.
Chump. Her main offence was, that she revived for them so much of
themselves that they had buried. "Oh! the unutterably sordid City life!"
It hung about her like a smell of London smoke. As a mere animal, they
passed her by, and had almost come to a state of mind to pass her off. It
was the phantom, or rather the embodiment of their First Circle, that
they hated in the woman. She took heroes from the journals read by
servant-maids; she thought highly of the Court of Aldermen; she went on
public knees to the aristocracy; she was proud, in fact, of all City
appetites. What, though none saw the peculiar sting? They felt it; and
one virtue in possessing an 'ideal' is that, lodging in you as it does,
it insists upon the interior being furnished by your personal
satisfaction, and not by the blindness or stupidity of the outer world.
Thus, in one direction, an ideal precludes humbug. The ladies might
desire to cloak facts, but they had no pleasure in deception. They had
the feminine power of extinguishing things disagreeable, so long as
nature or the fates did them no violence. When these forces sent an
emissary to confound them, as was clearly the case with Mrs. Chump, they
fought. The dreadful creature insisted upon shows of maudlin affection
that could not be accorded to her, so that she existed in a condition of
preternatural sensitiveness. Among ladies pretending to dignity of life,
the horror of acrid complaints alternating with public offers of love
from a gross woman, may be pictured in the mind's eye. The absence of Mr.
Pole and Wilfrid, which caused Mrs. Chump to chafe at the restraint
imposed by the presence of males to whom she might not speak endearingly,
and deprived the ladies of proper counsel, and what good may be at times
in masculine authority, led to one fierce battle, wherein the great shot
was fired on both sides. Mrs. Chump was requested to leave the house: she
declined. Interrogated as to whether she remained as an enemy, knowing
herself to be so looked upon, she said that she remained to save them
from the dangers they invited. Those dangers she named, observing that
Mrs. Lupin, their aunt, might know them, but was as liable to be sent to
sleep by a fellow with a bag of jokes as a watchdog to be quieted by a
bone. The allusion here was to Mrs. Lupin's painful, partially
inexcusable, incurable sense of humour, especially when a gleam of it led
to the prohibited passages of life. The poor lady was afflicted so keenly
that, in instances where one of her sex and position in the social scale
is bound to perish rather than let even the shadow of a laugh appear, or
any sign of fleshly perception or sympathy peep out, she was seen to be
mutely, shockingly, penitentially convulsed: a degrading sight. And
albeit repeatedly remonstrated with, she, upon such occasions, invariably
turned imploring glances--a sort of frowning entreaty--to the ladies, or
to any of her sex present. "Did you not see that? Oh! can you resist it?"
she seemed to gasp, as she made those fruitless efforts to drag them to
her conscious level. "Sink thou, if thou wilt," was the phrase indicated
to her. She had once thought her propensity innocent enough, and
enjoyable. Her nieces had almost cured her, by sitting on her, until Mrs.
Chump came to make her worst than ever. It is to be feared that Mrs.
Chump was beginning to abuse her power over the little colourless lady.
We cannot, when we find ourselves possessed of the gift of sending a
creature into convulsions, avoid exercising it. Mrs. Lupin was one of the
victims of the modern feminine 'ideal.' She was in mind merely a woman;
devout and charitable, as her nieces admitted; but radically--what? They
did not like to think, or to say, what;--repugnant, seemed to be the
word. A woman who consented to perceive the double-meaning, who
acknowledged its suggestions of a violation of decency laughable, and who
could not restrain laughter, was, in their judgement, righteously a
victim. After signal efforts to lift her up, the verdict was that their
Aunt Lupin did no credit to her sex. If we conceive a timorous little
body of finely-strung nerves, inclined to be gay, and shrewdly
apprehensive, but depending for her opinion of herself upon those about
her, we shall see that Mrs. Lupin's life was one of sorrow and scourges
in the atmosphere of the 'ideal.' Never did nun of the cloister fight
such a fight with the flesh, as this poor little woman, that she might
not give offence to the Tribunal of the Nice Feelings which leads us to
ask, "Is sentimentalism in our modern days taking the place of
monasticism to mortify our poor humanity?" The sufferings of the Three of
Brookfield under Mrs. Chump was not comparable to Mrs. Lupin's. The good
little woman's soul withered at the self-contempt to which her nieces
helped her daily. Laughter, far from expanding her heart and invigorating
her frame, was a thing that she felt herself to be nourishing as a
traitor in her bosom: and the worst was, that it came upon her like a
reckless intoxication at times, possessing her as a devil might; and
justifying itself, too, and daring to say, "Am I not Nature?" Mrs. Lupin
shrank from the remembrance of those moments.

In another age, the scenes between Mrs. Lupin and Mrs. Chump, greatly
significant for humanity as they are, will be given without offence on
one side or martyrdom on the other. At present, and before our
sentimentalists are a concrete, it would be profitless rashness to depict
them. When the great shots were fired off (Mrs. Chump being requested to
depart, and refusing) Mrs. Lupin fluttered between the belligerents,
doing her best to be a medium for the restoration of peace. In repeating
Mrs. Chump's remarks, which were rendered purposely strong with Irish
spice by that woman, she choked; and when she conveyed to Mrs. Chump the
counter-remarks of the ladies, she provoked utterances that almost killed
her. A sadder life is not to be imagined. The perpetual irritation of a
desire to indulge in her mortal weakness, and listening to the sleepless
conscience that kept watch over it; her certainty that it would be better
for her to laugh right out, and yet her incapacity to contest the justice
of her nieces' rebuke; her struggle to resist Mrs. Chump, which ended in
a sensation of secret shameful liking for her--all these warring
influences within were seen in her behaviour.

"I have always said," observed Cornelia, "that she labours under a
disease." What is more, she had always told Mrs. Lupin as much, and her
sisters had echoed her. Three to one in such a case is a severe trial to
the reason of solitary one. And Mrs. Lupin's case was peculiar, inasmuch
as the more she yielded to Chump-temptation and eased her heart of its
load of laughter, the more her heart cried out against her and subscribed
to the scorn of her nieces. Mrs. Chump acted a demon's part; she thirsted
for Mrs. Lupin that she might worry her. Hitherto she had not known that
anything peculiar lodged in her tongue, and with no other person did she
think of using it to produce a desired effect; but now the scenes in
Brookfield became hideous to the ladies, and not wanting in their trials
to the facial muscles of the gentlemen. A significant sign of what the
ladies were enduring was, that they ceased to speak of it in their
consultations. It is a blank period in the career of young creatures when
a fretting wretchedness forces them out of their dreams to action; and it
is then that they will do things that, seen from the outside (i.e. in the
conduct of others), they would hold to be monstrous, all but impossible.
Or how could Cornelia persuade herself, as she certainly persuaded Sir
Twickenham and the world about her, that she had a contemplative pleasure
in his society? Arabella drew nearer to Edward Buxley, whom she had not
treated well, and who, as she might have guessed, had turned his thoughts
toward Adela; though clearly without encouragement. Adela indeed said
openly to her sisters, with a Gallic ejaculation, "Edward follows me, do
you know; and he has adopted a sort of Sicilian-vespers look whenever he
meets me with Captain Gambier. I could forgive him if he would draw out a
dagger and be quite theatrical; but, behold, we meet, and my bourgeois
grunts and stammers, and seems to beg us to believe that he means nothing
whatever by his behaviour. Can you convey to his City-intelligence that
he is just a trifle ill-bred?"

Now, Arabella had always seen Edward as a thing that was her own, which
accounts for the treatment to which, he had been subjected. A quick spur
of jealousy--a new sensation--was the origin of her leaning toward
Edward; and the plea of saving Adela from annoyance excused and covered
it. He, for his part, scarcely concealed his irritation, until a little
scented twisted note was put in his hand, which said, "You are as anxious
as I can be about our sweet lost Emilia! We believe ourselves to be on
her traces." This gave him wonderful comfort. It put Adela in a beautiful
fresh light as a devoted benefactress and delicious intriguante. He threw
off some of his most telling caricatures at this period. Adela had
divined that Captain Gambier suspected his cousin Merthyr Powys of
abstracting Emilia, that he might shield her from Mr. Pericles. The
Captain confessed it, calmly blushing, and that he was in communication
with Miss Georgiana Ford, Mr. Powys's half-sister; about whom Adela was
curious, until the Captain ejaculated, "A saint!"--whereat she was
satisfied, knowing by instinct that the preference is for sinners. Their
meetings usually referred to Emilia; and it was astonishing how willingly
the Captain would talk of her. Adela repeated to herself, "This is our
mask," and thus she made it the Captain's; for it must be said that the
conquering Captain had never felt so full of pity to any girl or woman to
whom he fancied he had done damage, as to Emilia. He enjoyed a most
thorough belief that she was growing up to perplex him with her love, and
he had not consequently attempted to precipitate the measure; but her
flight had prematurely perplexed him. In grave debate with the ends of
his moustache for a term, he concluded by accusing Merthyr Powys; and
with a little feeling of spite not unknown to masculine dignity, he wrote
to Merthyr's half-sister--"merely to inquire, being aware that whatever
he does you have been consulted on, and the friends of this Miss Belloni
are distressed by her absence."

The ladies of Brookfield were accustomed to their father's occasional
unpremeditated absences, and neither of them had felt an apprehension
which she could not dismiss, until one morning Mr. Powys sent up his card
to Arabella, requesting permission to speak with her alone.




CHAPTER XXVIII

Georgiana Ford would have had little claim among the fair saints to be
accepted by them as one of their order. Her reputation for coldness was
derived from the fact of her having stood a siege from Captain Gambier.
But she loved a creature of earth too well to put up a hand for saintly
honours. The passion of her life centred in devotion to her half-brother.
Those who had studied her said, perhaps with a touch of malignity, that
her religious instinct had its source in a desire to gain some place of
intercession for him. Merthyr had leaned upon it too often to doubt the
strength of it, whatever its purity might be. She, when barely more than
a child (a girl of sixteen), had followed him over the then luckless
Italian fields--sacrificing as much for a cause that she held to be
trivial, as he in the ardour of his half-fanatical worship. Her theory
was: "These Italians are in bondage, and since heaven permits it, there
has been guilt. By endurance they are strengthened, by suffering
chastened; so let them endure and suffer." She would cleave to this view
with many variations of pity. Merthyr's experience was tolerant to the
weaker vessel's young delight in power, which makes her sometimes, though
sweet and merciful by nature, enunciate Hebraic severities oracularly. He
smiled, and was never weary of pointing out practical refutations.
Whereat she said, "Will a thousand instances change the principle?" When
the brain, and especially the fine brain of a woman, first begins to act
for itself, the work is of heavy labour; she finds herself plunging
abroad on infinite seas, and runs speedily into the anchorage of dogmas,
obfuscatory saws, and what she calls principles. Here she is safe; but if
her thinking was not originally the mere action of lively blood upon that
battery of intelligence, she will by-and-by reflect that it is not well
for a live thing to be tied to a dead, and that long clinging to safety
confesses too much. Merthyr waited for Georgians patiently. On all other
points they were heart-in-heart. It was her pride to say that she loved
him with no sense of jealousy, and prayed that he might find a woman, in
plain words, worthy of him. This woman had not been found; she confessed
that she had never seen her.

Georgians received Captain Gambier's communication in Monmouth. Merthyr
had now and then written of a Miss Belloni; but he had seemed to refer to
a sort of child, and Georgians had looked on her as another Italian
pensioner. She was decisive. The moment she awoke to feel herself
brooding over the thought of this girl, she started to join Merthyr.
Solitude is pasturage for a suspicion. On her way she grew persuaded that
her object was bad, and stopped; until the thought came, 'If he is in a
dilemma, who shall help him save his sister?' And, with spiritually
streaming eyes at a vision of companionship broken (but whether by his
taking another adviser, or by Miss Belloni, she did not ask), Georgiana
continued her journey.

At the door of Lady Gosstre's town-house she hesitated, and said in her
mind, "What am I doing? and what earthliness has come into my love for
him?"

Or, turning to the cry, "Will he want me?" stung herself. Conscious that
there was some poison in her love, but clinging to it not less, she
entered the house, and was soon in Merthyr's arms.

"Why have you come up?" he asked.

"Were you thinking of coming to me quickly?" she murmured in reply.

He did not say yes, but that he had business in London. Nor did he say
what.

Georgiana let him go.

"How miserable is such a weakness! Is this my love?" she thought again.

Then she went to her bedroom, and knelt, and prayed her Saviour's pardon
for loving a human thing too well. But, if the rays of her mind were
dimmed, her heart beat too forcibly for this complacent self-deceit. "No;
not too well! I cannot love him too well. I am selfish. When I say that,
it is myself I am loving. To love him thrice as dearly as I do would
bring me nearer to God. Love I mean, not idolatry--another form of
selfishness."

She prayed to be guided out of the path of snares.

   "CAN YOU PRAY? CAN YOU PUT AWAY ALL PROPS OF SELF? THIS IS TRUE
   WORSHIP, UNTO WHATSOEVER POWER YOU KNEEL."

This passage out of a favourite book of sentences had virtue to help her
now in putting away the 'props of self.' It helped her for the time. She
could not foresee the contest that was commencing for her.

   "LOVE THAT SHRIEKS AT A MORTAL WOUND, AND BLEEDS HUMANLY, WHAT IS HE
   BUT A PAGAN GOD, WITH THE PASSIONS OF A PAGAN GOD?"

"Yes," thought Georgiana, meditating, "as different from the Christian
love as a brute from a man!"

She felt that the revolution of the idea of love in her mind (all that
consoled her) was becoming a temptation. Quick in her impulses, she
dismissed it. "I am like a girl!" she said scornfully. "Like a woman"
would not have flattered her. Like what did she strive to be? The picture
of another self was before her--a creature calmly strong, unruffled, and
a refuge to her beloved. It was a steady light through every wind that
blew, save when the heart narrowed; and then it waxed feeble, and the
life in her was hungry for she knew not what.

Georgiana's struggle was to make her great passion eat up all the others.
Sure of the intensity and thoroughness of her love for Merthyr, she would
forecast for herself tasks in his service impossible save to one
sensually dead and therefore spiritually sexless. "My love is pure," she
would say; as if that were the talisman which rendered it superhuman. She
was under the delusion that lovers' love was a reprehensible egoism. Her
heart had never had place for it; and thus her nature was unconsummated,
and the torment of a haunting insufficiency accompanied her sweetest
hours, ready to mislead her in all but very clearest actions.

She saw, or she divined, much of this struggle; but the vision of it was
fitful, not consecutive. It frightened and harassed without illuminating
her. Now, upon Merthyr's return, she was moved by it just enough to take
his hand and say:--

"We are the same?"

"What can change us?" he replied.

"Or who?" and as she smiled up to him, she was ashamed of her smile.

"Yes, who!" he interjected, by this time quite enlightened. All subtle
feelings are discerned by Welsh eyes when untroubled by any mental
agitation. Brother and sister were Welsh, and I may observe that there is
human nature and Welsh nature.

"Forgive me," she said; "I have been disturbed about you."

Perceiving that it would be well to save her from any spiritual twists
and turns that she might reach what she desired to know, he spoke out
fully: "I have not written to you about Miss Belloni lately. I think it
must be seven or eight days since I had a letter from her--you shall see
it--looking as if it had been written in the dark. She gave the address
of a London hotel. I went to her, and her story was that she had come to
town to get Mr. Pole's consent to her marriage with his son; and that
when she succeeded in making herself understood by him, the old man fell,
smitten with paralysis, crying out that he was ruined, and his children
beggars."

"Ah!" said Georgiana; "then this son is engaged to her?"

"She calls him her lover."

"Openly?"

"Have I not told you? 'naked and unashamed.'"

"Of course that has attracted my Merthyr!" Georgians drew to him
tenderly, breathing as one who has a burden off her heart.

"But why did she write to you?" the question started up.

For this reason: it appears that Mr. Pole showed such nervous irritation
at the idea of his family knowing the state he was in, that the doctor
attending him exacted a promise from her not to communicate with one of
them. She was alone, in great perplexity, and did what I had requested
her to do. She did me the honour to apply to me for any help it was in my
power to give.

Georgiana stood eyeing the ground sideways. "What is she like?"

"You shall see to-morrow, if you will come with me."

"Dark, or fair?"

Merthyr turned her face to the light, laughing softly. Georgiana
coloured, with dropped eyelids.

She raised her eyes under their load of shame. "I will come gladly," she
said.

"Early to-morrow, then," rejoined Merthyr.

On the morrow, as they were driving to the hotel, Georgians wanted to
know whether he called 'this Miss Belloni' by her Christian name--a
question so needless that her over-conscious heart drummed with gratitude
when she saw that he purposely spared her from one meaning look. In this
mutual knowledge, mutual help, in minute as in great things, as well as
in the recognition of a common nobility of mind, the love of the two was
fortified.

Emilia had not been left by Mr. Powys without the protection of a woman's
society in her singular position. Lady Charlotte's natural prompt
kindness required no spur from her friend that she should go and brace up
the spirits of a little woman, whom she pitied doubly for loving a man
who was deceiving her, and not loving one who was good for her. She went
frequently to Emilia, and sat with her in the sombre hotel drawing-room.
Still, frank as she was and blunt as she affected to be, she could not
bring her tongue to speak of Wilfrid. If she had fancied any sensitive
shuddering from the name and the subject to exist, she would have struck
boldly, being capable of cruelty and, where she was permitted to see a
weakness, rather fond of striking deep. A belief in the existence of
Emilia's courage touched her to compassion. One day, however, she said,
"What is it you take to in Merthyr Powys?" and this brought on plain
speaking.

Emilia could give no reason; and it is a peculiarity of people who ask
such questions that they think a want of directness in the answer
suspicious.

Lady Charlotte said gravely, "Come, come!"

"What do you mean?" asked Emilia. "I like so many things in him."

"You don't like one thing chiefly?"

"I like--what do I like?--his kindness."

"His kindness!" This was the sort of reply to make the lady implacable.
She seldom read others shrewdly, and could not know, that near her,
Emilia thought of Wilfrid in a way that made the vault of her brain seem
to echo with jarred chords. "His kindness! What a picture is the
'grateful girl!' I have seen rows of white-capped charity children giving
a bob and a sniffle as the parson went down the ranks promising buns.
Well! his kindness! You are right in appreciating as much as you can see.
I'll tell you why I like him;--because he is a gentleman. And you haven't
got an idea how rare that animal is. Dear me! Should I be plainer to you
if I called him a Christian gentleman? It's the cant of a detestable
school, my child. It means just this--but why should I disturb your
future faith in it? The professors mainly profess to be 'a comfort to
young women,' and I suppose you will meet your comfort, and worship them
with the 'growing mind;' and I must confess that they bait it rather
cunningly; nothing else would bite. They catch almost all the raw boys
who have anything in them. But for me, Merthyr himself would have been
caught long ago. There's no absolute harm in them, only that they're a
sentimental compromise. I deny their honesty; and if it's flatly proved,
I deny their intelligence. Well! this you can't understand."

"I have not understood you at all," said Emilia.

"No? It's the tongue that's the natural traitor to a woman, and takes
longer runs with every added year. I suppose you know that Mr. Powys
wishes to send you to Italy?"

"I do," said Emilia.

"When are you going?"

"I am not going?"

"Why?"

Emilia's bosom rose. She cried "Dear lady!" on the fall of it, and was
scarce audible--adding, "Do you love Wilfrid?"

"Well, you have brought me to the point quickly," Lady Charlotte
remarked. "I don't commonly beat the bush long myself. Love him! You
might as well ask me my age. The indiscretion would be equal, and the
result the same. Love! I have a proper fear of the word. When two play at
love they spoil the game. It's enough that he says he loves me."

Emilia looked relieved. "Poor lady!" she sighed.

"Poor!" Lady Charlotte echoed, with curious eyes fixed on the puzzle
beside her.

"Tell me you will not believe him," Emilia continued. "He is mine; I
shall never give him up. It is useless for you or any one else to love
him. I know what love is now. Stop while you can. I can be sorry for you,
but I will not let him go from me. He is my lover."

Emilia closed her lips abruptly. She produced more effect than was
visible. Lady Charlotte drew out a letter, saying, "Perhaps this will
satisfy you."

"Nothing!" cried Emilia, jumping to her feet.

"Read it--read it; and, for heaven's sake, ma fille sauvage, don't think
I'm here to fight for the man! He is not Orpheus; and our modern
education teaches us that it's we who are to be run after. Will you read
it?"

"No."

"Will you read it to please me?"

Emilia changed from a look of quiet opposition to gentleness of feature.
"Why will it please you if I read that he has flattered you? I never lie
about what I feel; I think men do." Her voice sank.

"You won't allow yourself to imagine, then, that he has spoken false to
you?"

"Tell me," retorted Emilia, "are you sure in your heart--as sure as it
beats each time--that he loves you? You are not."

"It seems that we are dignifying my gentleman remarkably," said Lady
Charlotte. "When two women fight for a man, that is almost a meal for his
vanity. Now, listen. I am not, as they phrase it, in love. I am an
experienced person--what is called a woman of the world. I should not
make a marriage unless I had come to the conclusion that I could help my
husband, or he me. Do me the favour to read this letter."

Emilia took it and opened it slowly. It was a letter in the tone of the
gallant paying homage with some fervour. Emilia searched every sentence
for the one word. That being absent, she handed back the letter, her eyes
lingering on the signature.

"Do you see what he says?" asked Lady Charlotte; "that I can be a right
hand to him, as I believe I can."

"He writes like a friend." Emilia uttered this as when we have a contrast
in the mind.

"You excuse him for writing to me in that style?"

"Yes; he may write to any woman like that."

"He has latitude! You really fancy that's the sort of letter a friend
would write?"

"That is how Mr. Powys would write to me," said Emilia. Lady Charlotte
laughed. "My unhappy Merthyr!"

"Only if I could be a great deal older," Emilia hastened to add; and Lady
Charlotte slightly frowned, but rubbed it out with a smile.

Rising, the lady said: "I have spoken to you upon equal terms; and
remember, very few women would have done what I have done. You are cared
for by Merthyr Powys, and that's enough. It would do you no harm to fix
your eyes upon him. You won't get him; but it would do you no harm. He
has a heart, as they call it; whatever it is, it's as strong as a cable.
He is a knight of the antique. He is specially guarded, however. Well, he
insists that you are his friend; so you are mine, and that is why I have
come to you and spoken to you. You will be silent about it, I need not
say. No one but yourself is aware that Lieutenant Pole does me the honour
to liken me to the good old gentleman who accompanied Telemachus in his
voyages, and chooses me from among the handmaidens of earth. On this head
you will promise to be silent."

Lady Charlotte held forth her hand. Emilia would not take it before she
had replied, "I knew this before you came," and then she pressed the
extended fingers.

Lady Charlotte drew her close. "Has Wilfrid taken you into his confidence
so far?"

Emilia explained that she had heard it from his father.

The lady's face lit up as from a sting of anger. "Very well--very well,"
she said; and, presently, "You are right when you speak of the power of
lying in men. Observe--Wilfrid told me that not one living creature knew
there was question of an engagement between us. What would you do in my
case?"

Emilia replied, "Forgive him; and I should think no more of it."

"Yes. It would be right; and, presuming him to have the vice, I could be
of immense service to him, if at least he does not lie habitually. But
this is a description of treachery, you know."

"Oh!" cried Emilia, "what kind of treachery is that, if he only will keep
his heart open for me to give all mine to it!"

She stood clutching her hands in the half-sobbing ecstasy which
signalises a spiritual exaltation built on disquiet. She had shown small
emotion hitherto. The sight of it was like the sight of a mighty hostile
power to Lady Charlotte--a power that moved her--that challenged, and
irritated, and subdued her. For she saw there something that she had not;
and being of a nature leaning to great-mindedness, though not of the
first rank, she could not meanly mask her own deficiency by despising it.
To do this is the secret evil by which souls of men and women stop their
growth.

Lady Charlotte decided now to say good-bye. Her parting was friendly--the
form of it consisting of a nod, an extension of the hand, and a kind word
or two.

When alone, Emilia wondered why she kept taking long breaths, and tried
to correct herself: but the heart laboured. Yet she seemed to have no
thought in her mind; she had no active sensation of pity or startled
self-love. She went to smooth Mr. Pole's pillow, as to a place of
forgetfulness. The querulous tyrannies of the invalid relieved her; but
the heavy lifting of her chest returned the moment she was alone. She
mentioned it to the doctor, who prescribed for liver, informing her that
the said organ conducted one of the most important functions of her
bodily system.

Emilia listened to the lecturer, and promised to take his medicine,
trusting to be perfectly quieted by the nauseous draught; but when Mr.
Powys came, she rushed up to him, and fell with a cry upon his breast,
murmuring broken words that Georgiana might fairly interpret as her
suspicions directed. Nor had she ever seen Merthyr look as he did when
their eyes next met.




CHAPTER XXIX

The card of Mr. Powys found Arabella alone in the house. Mrs. Lupin was
among village school-children; Mrs. Chump had gone to London to see
whether anything was known of Mr. Pole at his office, where she fell upon
the youth Braintop, and made him her own for the day. Adela was out in
the woods, contemplating nature; and Cornelia was supposed to be walking
whither her stately fancy drew her.

"Will you take long solitary walks unprotected?" she was asked.

"I have a parasol," she replied; and could hear, miles distant, the
domestic comments being made on her innocence; and the story it would
be--"She thinks of no possible danger but from the sun."

A little forcing of her innocence now was necessary as an opiate for her
conscience. She was doing what her conscience could only pardon on the
plea of her extreme innocence. The sisters, and the fashion at
Brookfield, permitted the assumption, and exaggerated it willingly. It
chanced, however, that Adela had reason to feel discontented. It was a
breach of implied contract, she thought, that Cornelia should, as she did
only yesterday, tell her that she had seen Edward Buxley in the woods,
and that she was of opinion that the air of the woods was bad for her.
Not to see would have been the sisterly obligation, in Adela's
idea--especially when seeing embraced things that no loving sister should
believe.

Bear in mind that we are sentimentalists. The eye is our servant, not our
master; and--so are the senses generally. We are not bound to accept more
than we choose from them. Thus we obtain delicacy; and thus, as you will
perceive, our civilization, by the aid of the sentimentalists, has
achieved an effective varnish. There, certainly, to the vulgar, mind a
tail is visible. The outrageous philosopher declares vehemently that no
beast of the field or the forest would own such a tail. (His meaning is,
that he discerns the sign of the animal slinking under the garb of the
stately polished creature. I have all the difficulty in the world to keep
him back and let me pursue my course.) These philosophers are a
bad-mannered body. Either in opposition, or in the support of them, I
maintain simply that the blinking sentimentalist helps to make
civilization what it is, and civilization has a great deal of merit.

"Did you not leave your parasol behind you at Ipley?" said Adela, as she
met Cornelia in the afternoon.

Cornelia coloured. Her pride supported her, and she violated fine shades
painfully in her response: "Mr. Barrett left me there. Is that your
meaning?"

Adela was too much shocked to note the courageousness of the reply.
"Well! if all we do is to come into broad daylight!" was her horrified
mental ejaculation.

The veil of life was about to be lifted for these ladies. They found
Arabella in her room, crying like an unchastened school-girl; and their
first idea was one of intense condemnation--fresh offences on the part of
Mrs. Chump being conjectured. Little by little Arabella sobbed out what
she had heard that day from Mr. Powys.

After the first stupor Adela proposed to go to her father instantly, and
then suggested that they should all go. She continued talking in random
suggestions, and with singular heat, as if she conceived that the
sensibility of her sisters required to be aroused. By moving and acting,
it seemed to her that the prospect of a vast misery might be expunged,
and that she might escape from showing any likeness to Arabella's
shamefully-discoloured face. It was impossible for her to realize grief
in her own bosom. She walked the room in a nervous tremour, shedding a
note of sympathy to one sister and to the other. At last Arabella got
fuller command of her voice. When she had related that her father's
positive wish, furthered by the doctor's special injunction to obey it
scrupulously, was that they were not to go to him in London, and not to
breathe a word of his illness, but to remain at Brookfield entertaining
friends, Adela stamped her foot, saying that it was more than human
nature could bear.

"If we go," said Arabella, "the London doctor assured Mr. Powys that he
would not answer for papa's life."

"But, good heavens! are we papa's enemies? And why may Mr. Powys see him
if we, his daughters, cannot? Tell me how Mr. Powys met him and knew of
it! Tell me--I am bewildered. I feel that we are cheated in some way. Oh!
tell me something clear."

Arabella said calmingly: "Emilia is with papa. She wrote to Mr. Powys.
Whether she did rightly or not we have not now to inquire. I believe that
she thought it right."

"Entertain friends!" interjected Adela. "But papa cannot possibly mean
that we are to go through--to--the fete on Besworth Lawn, Bella! It's in
two days from this dreadful day."

"Papa has mentioned it to Mr. Powys; he desires us not to postpone it.
We..." Arabella's voice broke piteously.

"Oh! but this is torture!" cried Adela, with a deplorable vision of the
looking-glass rising before her, as she felt the tears sting her eyelids.
"This cannot be! No father would...not loving us as dear papa does! To be
quiet! to sit and be gay! to flaunt at a fete! Oh, mercy! mercy! Tell
me--he left us quite well--no one could have guessed. I remember he
looked at me from the carriage window. Tell me--it must be some moral
shock--what do you attribute it to? Wilfrid cannot be the guilty one. We
have been only too compliant to papa's wishes about that woman. Tell me
what you think it can be!"

A voice said, "Money!"

Which of the sisters had spoken Adela did not know. It was bitter enough
that one could be brought to utter the thing, even if her ideas were so
base as to suspect it. The tears now came dancing over her under-lids
like triumphing imps. "Money!" echoed through her again and again.
Curiously, too, she had no occasion to ask how it was that money might be
supposed to have operated on her father's health. Unable to realize to
herself the image of her father lying ill and suffering, but just
sufficiently touched by what she could conceive of his situation, the
bare whisper of money came like a foul insult to overwhelm her in floods
of liquid self-love. She wept with that last anguish of a woman who is
compelled to weep, but is incapable of finding any enjoyment in her
tears. Cornelia and Arabella caught her hands; she was the youngest, and
had been their pet. It gratified them that Adela should show a deep and
keen feeling. Adela did not check herself from a demonstration that
enabled her to look broadly, as it were, on her own tenderness of heart.
Following many outbursts, she asked, "And the illness--what is it? not
its cause--itself!"

A voice said, "Paralysis!"

Adela's tears stopped. She gazed on both faces, trying with open mouth to
form the word.




CHAPTER XXX

Flying from port to port to effect an exchange of stewards (the endless
occupation of a yacht proprietor), Wilfrid had no tidings from
Brookfield. The night before the gathering on Besworth Lawn he went to
London and dined at his Club--a place where youths may drink largely of
the milk of this world's wisdom. Wilfrid's romantic sentiment was always
corrected by an hour at his Club. After dinner he strolled to a not
perfectly regulated theatre, in company with a brother officer; and when
they had done duty before the scenes for a space of time, they lounged
behind to disenchant themselves, in obedience to that precocious cynicism
which is the young man's extra-Luxury. The first figure that caught
Wilfrid's attention there was Mr. Pericles, in a white overcoat,
stretched along a sofa--his eyelids being down, though his eyes were
evidently vigilant beneath. A titter of ladies present told of some
recent interesting commotion.

"Only a row between that rich Greek fellow who gave the supper, and
Marion," a vivacious dame explained to Wilfrid. "She's in one of her
jealous fits; she'd be jealous if her poodle-dog went on its hind-legs to
anybody else."

"Poodle, by Jove!" said Wilfrid. "Pericles himself looks like an
elongated poodle shaved up to his moustache. Look at him. And he plays
the tyrant, does he?"

"Oh! she stands that. Some of those absurd women like it, I think. She's
fussing about another girl."

"You wouldn't?"

"What man's worth it?"

"But, would you?"

"It depends upon the 'him,' monsieur.

"Depends upon his being very handsome!"

"And good."

"And rich?"

"No!" the lady fired up. "There you don't know us."

The colloquy became almost tender, until she said, "Isn't this gassy, and
stifling? I confess I do like a carriage, and Richmond on a Sunday. And
then, with two daughters, you know! But what I complain of is her folly
in being in love, or something like it, with a rich fellow."

"Love the poor devil--manage the rich, you mean."

"Yes, of course; that makes them both happy."

"It's a method of being charitable to two."

A rather fleshy fairy now entered, and walked straight up to the
looking-glass to examine her paint--pronouncedly turning her back to the
sofa, where Mr. Pericles still lay at provoking full length. Her panting
was ominous of a further explosion.

"Innocent child!" in the mockery of a foreign accent, commenced it; while
Wilfrid thought how unjustly and coldly critically he had accused his
little Emilia of vulgarity, now that he had this feminine display of it
swarming about him.

"Innocent child, indeed! Be as deaf as you like, you shall hear. And
sofas are not made for men's dirty boots, in this country. I believe
they're all pigs abroad--the men; and the women--cats! Oh! don't open
your eyes--don't speak, pray. You're certain I must go when the bell
rings. You're waiting for that, you unmanly dog!"

"A pig," Mr. Pericles here ventured to remind her, murmuring as one in a
dream.

"A peeg!" she retorted mildly, somewhat mollified by her apparent
success. But Mr. Pericles had relapsed into his exasperating composure.
The breath of a deliberate and undeserved peacefulness continued to be
drawn in by his nostrils.

At the accustomed warning there was an ostentatious rustle of retiring
dresses; whereat Mr. Pericles chose to proclaim himself awake. The astute
fairy-fury immediately stepped before him.

"Now you can't go on pretending sleep. You shall hear, and everybody
shall hear. You know you're a villain! You're a wolf seeking..."

Mr. Pericles waved his hand, and she was caught by the wrist and told
that the scene awaited her.

"Let them wait!" she shouted, and, sharpening her cry as she was dragged
off, "Dare to take that girl to Italy! I know what that means, with you.
An Englishman might mean right--but you! You think you've been dealing
with a fool! Why, I can stop this in a minute, and I will. It's you're
the fool! Why, I know her father: he plays in the orchestra. I know her
name--Belloni!"

Up sprang the Greek like a galvanized corpse; while two violent jerks
from the man hauling her out rattled the laugh of triumph which burst
from her. At the same time Wilfrid strove forward, with the frown of one
still bent listening, and he and Pericles were face to face. The eyebrows
of the latter shot up in a lively arch. He made a motion toward the
ceremony of 'shake-hands;' but, perceiving no correspondent overture,
grinned, "It is warm--ha?"

"You feel the heat? Step outside a minute," said Wilfrid.

"Oh, no!" Mr. Pericles looked pleasantly sagacious. Ze draught--a cold."

"Will you come?" pursued Wilfrid.

"Many sanks!"

Wilfrid's hand was rising. At this juncture his brother officer slipped
out some languid words in his ear, indicative of his astonishment that he
should be championing a termagant, and horror at the idea of such a thing
being publicly imagined, tamed Wilfrid quickly. He recovered himself with
his usual cleverness. Seeing the signs of hostility vanish, Mr. Pericles
said, "You are on a search for your father? You have found him? Hom! I
should say a maladie of nerfs will come to him. A pin fall--he start! A
storm at night--he is out dancing among his ships of venture! Not a bid
of corage!--which is bad. If you shall find Mr. Pole for to-morrow on ze
lawn, vary glad."

With a smile compounded of sniffing dog and Parisian obsequiousness, Mr.
Pericles passed, thinking "He has not got her:" for such was his
deduction if he saw that a man could flush for a woman's name.

Wilfrid stood like a machine with a thousand wheels in revolt. Sensations
pricked at ideas, and immediately left them to account for their
existence as they best could. The ideas committed suicide without a
second's consideration. He felt the great gurgling sea in which they were
drowned heave and throb. Then came a fresh set, that poised better on the
slack-rope of his understanding. By degrees, a buried dread in his brain
threw off its shroud. The thought that there was something wrong with his
father stood clearly over him, to be swallowed at once in the less
tangible belief that a harm had come to Emilia--not was coming, but had
come. Passion thinks wilfully when it thinks at all. That night he lay in
a deep anguish, revolving the means by which he might help and protect
her. There seemed no way open, save by making her his own; and did he
belong to himself? What bound him to Lady Charlotte? She was not lovely
or loving. He had not even kissed her hand; yet she held him in a chain.

The two men composing most of us at the outset of actual life began their
deadly wrestle within him, both having become awakened. If they wait for
circumstance, that steady fire will fuse them into one, who is commonly a
person of some strength; but throttling is the custom between them, and
we are used to see men of murdered halves. These men have what they
fought for: they are unaware of any guilt that may be charged against
them, though they know that they do not embrace Life; and so it is that
we have vague discontent too universal. Change, O Lawgiver! the length of
our minority, and let it not end till this battle is thoroughly fought
out in approving daylight. The period of our duality should be one as
irresponsible in your eyes as that of our infancy. Is he we call a young
man an individual--who is a pair of alternately kicking scales? Is he
educated, when he dreams not that he is divided? He has drunk Latin like
a vital air, and can quote what he remembers of Homer; but how has he
been fortified for this tremendous conflict of opening manhood, which is
to our life here what is the landing of a soul to the life to come?

Meantime, it is a bad business when the double-man goes about kneeling at
the feet of more than one lady. Society (to give that institution its
due) permits him to seek partial invulnerability by dipping himself in a
dirty Styx, which corrects, as we hear said, the adolescent tendency to
folly. Wilfrid's sentiment had served him (well or ill as it may be), by
keeping him from a headlong plunge in the protecting river; and his folly
was unchastened. He did not even contemplate an escape from the net at
Emilia's expense. The idea came. The idea will come to a young man in
such a difficulty. "My mistress! My glorious stolen fruit! My dark angel
of love!" He deserves a little credit for seeing that Emilia never could
be his mistress, in the debased sense of the term. Union with her meant
life-long union, he knew. Ultimate mental subjection he may also have
seen in it, unconsciously. For, hazy thoughts of that nature may mix with
the belief that an alliance with her degrades us, in this curious
hotch-potch of emotions known to the world as youthful man. A wife
superior to her husband makes him ridiculous wilfully, if the wretch is
to be laughed at; but a mistress thus ill-matched cannot fail to cast the
absurdest light on her monstrous dwarf-custodian. Wilfrid had the
sagacity to perceive, and the keen apprehension of ridicule to shrink
from, the picture. Besides, he was beginning to love Emilia. His struggle
now was to pluck his passion from his heart; and such was already his
plight that he saw no other way of attempting it than by taking horse and
riding furiously in the direction of Besworth.




CHAPTER XXXI

"I am curious to see what you will make of this gathering. I can cook a
small company myself. It requires the powers of a giantess to mix a body
of people in the open air; and all that is said of commanders of armies
shall be said of you, if you succeed."

This was Lady Gosstre's encouragement to the fair presidents of the fete
on Besworth Lawn. There had been a time when they would have cried out
internally: "We will do it, fail who may." That fallow hour was over.
Their sole thought was to get through the day. A little feverish impulse
of rivalry with her great pattern may have moved Arabella; but the
pressure of grief and dread, and the contrast between her actions and
feelings, forcibly restrained a vain display. As a consequence, she did
her duty better, and won applause from the great lady's moveable court on
eminences of the ground.

"These girls are clever," she said to Lady Charlotte. "They don't bustle
too much. They don't make too distinct a difference of tone with the
different sets. I shall propose Miss Pole as secretary to our Pin and
Needle Relief Society."

"Do," was the reply. "There is also the Polish Dance Committee; and, if
she has any energy left, she might be treasurer to the Ladies' General
Revolution Ball."

"That is an association with which I am not acquainted," said Lady
Gosstre, directing her eye-glass on the field. "Here comes young Pole.
He's gallant, they tell me, and handsome: he studies us too obviously.
That's a mistake to be corrected, Charlotte. One doesn't like to see a
pair of eyes measuring us against a preconception quelconque. Now, there
is our Ionian Am...but you have corrected me, Merthyr:--host, if you
please. But, see! What is the man doing? Is he smitten with madness?"

Mr. Pericles had made a furious dash at the band in the centre of the
lawn, scattered their music, and knocked over the stands. When his
gesticulations had been observed for some moments, Freshfield Sumner
said: "He has the look of a plucked hen, who remembers that she once
clapped wings, and tries to recover the practice."

"Very good," said Lady Gosstre. She was not one who could be unkind to
the professional wit. "And the music-leaves go for feathers. What has the
band done to displease him? I thought the playing was good."

"The instruments appear to have received a dismissal," said Lady
Charlotte. "I suppose this is a clearing of the stage for coming alarums
and excursions. Behold! the 'female element' is agitated. There are--can
you reckon at this distance, Merthyr?--twelve, fourteen of my sex
entreating him in the best tragic fashion. Can he continue stern?"

"They seem to be as violent as the women who tore up Orpheus," said Lady
Gosstre.

Tracy Runningbrook shrieked, in a paroxysm, "Splendid!" from his couch on
the sward, and immediately ran off with the idea, bodily.

"Have I stumbled anywhere?" Lady Gosstre leaned to Mr. Powys.

He replied with a satiric sententiousness that told Lady Gosstre what she
wanted to know.

"This is the isolated case where a little knowledge is truly dangerous,"
said Lady Gosstre. "I prohibit girls from any allusion to the classics
until they have taken their degree and are warranted not to open the
wrong doors. On the whole, don't you think, Merthyr, it's better for
women to avoid that pool?"

"And accept what the noble creature chooses to bring to us in buckets,"
added Lady Charlotte. "What is your opinion, Georgey? I forget: Merthyr
has thought you worthy of instruction."

"Merthyr taught me in camp," said Georgians, looking at her brother--her
face showing peace and that confirmed calm delight habitual to it. "We
found that there are times in war when you can do nothing, and you are
feverish to be employed. Then, if you can bring your mind to study, you
are sure to learn quickly. I liked nothing better than Latin Grammar."

"Studying Latin Grammar to the tune of great guns must be a new
sensation," Freshfield Sumner observed.

"The pleasure is in getting rid of all sensation," said she. "I mean you
command it without at all crushing your excitement. You cannot feel a
fuller happiness than when you look back on those hours: at least, I
speak for myself."

"So," said Lady Gosstre, "Georgey did not waste her time after all,
Charlotte."

What the latter thought was: "She could not handle a sword or fire a
pistol. Would I have consented to be mere camp-baggage?" Yet no woman
admired Georgiana Ford so much. Disappointment vitiated many of Lady
Charlotte's first impulses; and not until strong antagonism had thrown
her upon her generosity could she do justice to the finer natures about
her. There was full life in her veins; and she was hearing the thirty
fatal bells that should be music to a woman, if melancholy music; and she
had not lived. Time, that sounded in her ears, as it kindled no past,
spoke of no future. She was in unceasing rivalry with all of her sex who
had a passion, or a fixed affection, or even an employment. A sense that
she was wronged by her fate haunted this lady. Rivalry on behalf of a man
she would have held mean--she would have plucked it from her bosom at
once. She was simply envious of those who in the face of death could say,
"I have lived." Pride, and the absence of any power of self-inspection,
kept her blind to her disease. No recollection gave her boy save of the
hours in the hunting-field. There she led gallantly; but it was not
because of leading that she exulted. There the quick blood struck on her
brain like wine, and she seemed for a time to have some one among the
crowns of life. An object--who cared how small?--was ahead: a poor old
fox trying to save his brush; and Charlotte would have it if the master
of cunning did not beat her. "It's my natural thirst for blood," she
said. She did not laugh as she thought now and then that the old red
brush dragging over grey dews toward a yellow yolk in the curdled
winter-morning sky, was the single thing that could make her heart throb.

Brookfield was supported in its trial by the discomfiture of the Tinleys.
These girls, with their brother, had evidently plotted to 'draw out' Mrs.
Chump. They had asked concerning her, severally; and hearing that she had
not returned from town, had each shown a blank face, or had been doubtful
of the next syllable. Of Wilfrid, Emilia, and Mr. Pole, question and
answer were interchanged. "Wilfrid will come in a few minutes. Miss
Belloni, you know, is preparing for Italy. Papa? Papa, I really do fear
will not be able to join us." Such was Brookfield's concerted form of
reply. The use of it, together with the gaiety of dancing blood, gave
Adela (who believed that she ought to be weeping, and could have wept
easily) strange twitches of what I would ask permission to call the
juvenile 'shrug-philosophy.' As thus: 'What creatures we are, but life is
so!' And again, 'Is not merriment dreadful when a duty!' She was as
miserable as she could be but not knowing that youth furnished a plea
available, the girl was ashamed of being cheerful at all. Edward Burley's
sketch of Mr. Pericles scattering his band, sent her into muffled screams
of laughter; for which she did internal penance so bitter that, for her
to be able to go on at all, the shrug-philosophy was positively
necessary; Mr. Pericles himself saw the sketch, and remarked critically,
"It is zat I have more hair:" following which, he tapped the signal for
an overture to commence, and at the first stroke took a run, with his
elbows clapping exactly as the shrewd hand of Edward had drawn him.

"See him--zat fellow," Mr. Pericles said to Laura Tinley, pointing to the
leader. "See him pose a maestro! zat leads zis tintamarre. He is a
hum-a-bug!"

Laura did the vocal caricaturing, when she had gathered plenty of matter
of this kind. Altogether, as host, Mr. Pericles accomplished his duty in
furnishing amusement.

Late in the afternoon, Sir Twickenham Pryme and Wilfrid arrived in
company. The baronet went straight to Cornelia. Wilfrid beckoned to
Adela, from whom he heard of his father's illness at the hotel in town,
and the conditions imposed on them. He nodded, said lightly, "Where's
Emilia?" and nodded again to the answer, "With papa," and then stopped as
he was walking off to one of the groups. "After all, it won't do for us
to listen to the whims of an invalid. I'm going back. You needn't say
you've seen me."

"We have the doctor's most imperative injunction, dearest," pleaded
Adela, deceived for a moment. "Papa's illness is mental chiefly. He is
able to rise and will be here very soon, if he is not in any way crossed.
For heaven's sake, command yourself as we have done--painfully indeed!
Besides, you have been seen."

"Has she--?" Wilfrid began; and toned an additional carelessness. "She
writes, of course?"

"No, not once; and we are angry with her. It looks like ingratitude, or
stupidity. She can write."

"People might say that we are not behaving well," returned Wilfrid,
repeating that he must go to town. But now Edward Burley camp running
with a message from the aristocratic heights, and thither Wilfrid walked
captive--saying in Adela's ear, "Don't be angry with her."

Adela thought, very justly, "I shall, if you've been making a fool of
her, naughty boy!"

Wilfrid saluted the ladies, and made his bow of introduction to Georgiana
Ford, at whom he looked twice, to confirm an impression that she was the
perfect contrast to Emilia; and for this reason he chose not to look at
her again. Lady Charlotte dropped him a quick recognition.

If Brookfield could have thrown the burden from its mind, the day was one
to feel a pride in. Three Circles were present, and Brookfield
denominated two that it had passed through, and patronized all--from Lady
Gosstre (aristocracy) to the Tinley set (lucre), and from these to the
representative Sumner girls (cultivated poverty). There were also
intellectual, scientific, and Art circles to deal with; music, pleasant
to hear, albeit condemned by Mr. Pericles; agreeable chatter, courtly
flirtation and homage, and no dread of the defection of the letter H from
their family.

"I feel more and more convinced," said Adela, meeting Arabella, "that we
can have really no cause for alarm; otherwise papa would not have been
cruel to his children." Arabella kindly reserved her opinion. "So let us
try and be happy," continued Adela, determining to be encouraged by
silence. With that she went on tiptoe gracefully and blew a kiss to her
sister's lips. Running to Captain Gambier, she said, "Do you really enjoy
this?"

"Charming," replied the ever-affable gentleman. "If I might only venture
to say what makes it so infinitely!"

Much to her immediate chagrin at missing a direct compliment, which would
have had to be parried, and might have led to 'vistas,' the too sprightly
young lady found herself running on: "It's as nice as sin, without the
knowledge that you are sinning."

"Oh! do you think that part of it disagreeable?" said the captain.

"I think the heat terrific:" she retrieved her ground.

"Coquet et coquette," muttered Lady Charlotte, observing them from a
distance; and wondered whether her sex might be strongly represented in
this encounter.

It was not in the best taste, nor was it perhaps good policy (if I may
quote the Tinley set), for the ladies of Brookfield to subscribe openly
to the right of certain people present to be exclusive. Arabella would
have answered: "Lady Gosstre and her party cannot associate with you to
your mutual pleasure and profit; and do you therefore blame her for not
attempting what would fail ludicrously?" With herself, as she was not
sorry to show, Lady Gosstre could associate. Cornelia had given up work
to become a part of the Court. Adela made flying excursions over the
lawn. Laura Tinley had the field below and Mr. Pericles to herself. That
anxious gentleman consulted his watch from time to time, as if he
expected the birth of an event.

Lady Gosstre grew presently aware that there was more acrimony in
Freshfield Sumner's replies to Sir Twickenham (whom he had seduced into a
political argument) than the professional wit need employ; and as Mr.
Powys's talk was getting so attractive that the Court had become crowded,
she gave a hint to Georgiana and Lady Charlotte, prompt lieutenants,
whose retirement broke the circle.

"I never shall understand how it was done," Adela said subsequently. It
is hoped that everybody sees the importance of understanding such points.

She happened to be standing alone when a messenger came up to her and
placed a letter in her hand, addressed to her sister Cornelia. Adela
walked slowly up to the heights. She knew Mr. Barrett's handwriting.
"Good heavens!"--her thought may be translated out of Fine Shades--"does
C. really in her heart feel so blind to our situation that she can go on
playing still?" When she reached the group it was to hear Mr. Powys
speaking of Mr. Barrett. Cornelia was very pale, and stood wretchedly in
contrast among the faces. Adela beckoned her to step aside. "Here is a
letter," she said: "there's no postmark. What has been the talk of that
man?"

"Do you mean of Mr. Barrett?" Cornelia replied:--"that his father was a
baronet, and a madman, who has just disinherited him."

"Just?" cried Adela. She thought of the title. Cornelia had passed on. A
bizarre story of Mr. Barrett's father was related to Adela by Sir
Twickenham. She grappled it with her sense, and so got nothing out of it.
"Disinherited him because he wrote to his father, who was dying, to say
that he had gained a livelihood by playing the organ! He had a hatred of
music? It's incomprehensible! You know, Sir Twickenham, the interest we
take in Mr. Barrett." The masked anguish of Cornelia's voice hung in her
ears. She felt that it was now possible Cornelia might throw over the
rich for the penniless baronet, and absolutely for an instant she thought
nakedly, "The former ought not to be lost to the family." Thick clouds
obscured the vision. Lady Gosstre had once told her that the point of Sir
Twickenham's private character was his susceptibility to ridicule. Her
ladyship had at the same time complimented his discernment in conjunction
with Cornelia. "Yes," Adela now thought; "but if my sister shows that she
is not so wise as she looks!" Cornelia's figure disappeared under the
foliage bordering Besworth Lawn.

As usual, Arabella had all the practical labour--a fact that was noticed
from the observant heights. "One sees mere de famille written on that
young woman," was the eulogy she won from Lady Gosstre. How much would
the great dame have marvelled to behold the ambition beneath the bustling
surface! Arabella was feverish, and Freshfield Sumner reported brilliant
things uttered by her. He became after a time her attendant, aide, and
occasional wit-foil. They had some sharp exchanges: and he could not but
reflect on the pleasure her keen zest of appreciation gave him compared
with Cornelia's grave smile, which had often kindled in him profane
doubts of the positive brightness, or rapidity of her intelligence.

"Besworth at sunset! What a glorious picture to have living before you
every day!" said Lady Charlotte to her companion.

Wilfrid flushed. She read his look; and said, when they were out of
hearing, "What a place for old people to sit here near the end of life!
The idea of it makes one almost forgive the necessity for getting
old--doesn't it? Tracy Runningbrook might make a poem about silver heads
and sunset--something, you know! Very easy cantering then--no hunting! I
suppose one wouldn't have even a desire to go fast--a sort of cock-horse,
just as we began with. The stables, let me tell you, are too near the
scullery. One is bound to devise measures for the protection of the
morals of the household."

While she was speaking, Wilfrid's thoughts ran: "My time has come to
strike for liberty."

This too she perceived, and was prepared for him.

He said: "Lady Charlotte, I feel that I must tell you...I fear that I
have been calculating rather more hopefully..." Here the pitfall of
sentiment yawned before him on a sudden. "I mean" (he struggled to avoid
it, but was at the brink in the next sentence) "--I mean, dear lady, that
I had hopes...Besworth pleased you... to offer you this..."

"With yourself?" she relieved him. A different manner in a protesting
male would have charmed her better. She excused him, knowing what stood
in his way.

"That I scarcely dared to hope," said Wilfrid, bewildered to see the
loose chain he had striven to cast off gather tightly round him.

"You do hope it?"

"I have."

"You have hoped that I..." (she was not insolent by nature, and corrected
the form) "--to marry me?"

"Yes, Lady Charlotte, I--I had that hope...if I could have offered this
place--Besworth. I find that my father will never buy it; I have
misunderstood him."

He fixed his eyes on her, expecting a cool, or an ironical, rejoinder to
end the colloquy;--after which, fair freedom! She answered, "We may do
very well without it."

Wilfrid was not equal to a start and the trick of rapturous astonishment.
He heard the words like the shooting of dungeon-bolts, thinking, "Oh,
heaven! if at the first I had only told the woman I do not love her!" But
that sentimental lead had ruined him. And, on second thoughts, how could
he have spoken thus to the point, when they had never previously dealt in
anything save sentimental implications? The folly was in his speaking at
all. The game was now in Lady Charlotte's hands.

Adela, in another part of the field, had released herself by a consummate
use of the same weapon Wilfrid had so clumsily handled. Her object was to
put an end to the absurd and compromising sighs of Edward Buxley; and she
did so with the amiable contempt of a pupil dismissing a first instructor
in an art "We saw from the beginning it could not be, Edward." The
enamoured caricaturist vainly protested that he had not seen it from the
beginning, and did not now. He recalled to her that she had said he was
'her first.' She admitted the truth, with eyes dwelling on him, until a
ringlet got displaced. Her first. To be that, sentimental man would
perish in the fires. To have been that will sometimes console him, even
when he has lived to see what a thing he was who caught the budding
fancy. The unhappy caricaturist groaned between triumph as a leader, and
anguish at the prospect of a possible host of successors. King in that
pure bosom, the thought would come--King of a mighty line, mayhap! And
sentimental man, awakened to this disastrous view of things, endures
shrewder pangs of rivalry in the contemplation of his usurping posterity
than if, as do they, he looked forward to a tricked, perfumed, pommaded
whipster, pirouetting like any Pierrot--the enviable image of the one who
realized her first dream, and to whom specially missioned angels first
opened the golden gates of her heart.

"I have learnt to see, Edward, that you do not honour me with a love you
have diverted from one worthier than I am;" and in answer to the question
whether, though having to abjure her love, she loved him: "No, no; it is
my Arabella I love. I love, I will love, no one but her"--with sundry
caressing ejaculations that spring a thirst for kisses, and a tender
'putting of the case,' now and then.

So much for Adela's part in the conflict. Edward was unaware that the
secret of her mastering him was, that she was now talking common-sense in
the tone of sentiment. He, on the contrary, talked sentiment in the tone
of common-sense. Of course he was beaten: and O, you young lovers, when
you hear the dear lips setting what you call the world's harsh language
to this music, know that an hour has struck for you! It is a fatal sound
to hear. Edward believed that his pleading had produced an effect when he
saw Miss Adela's bosom rise as with a weight on it. The burden of her
thoughts was--"How big and heavy Edward's eyes look when he is not
amusing!" To get rid of him she said, as with an impassioned coldness,
"Go." Her figure, repeating this under closed eyelids, was mysterious,
potent. When he exclaimed, "Then I will go," her eyelids lifted wide: she
shut them instantly, showing at the same time a slight tightening-in of
the upper lip. You beheld a creature tied to the stake of Duty.

But she was exceedingly youthful, and had not reckoned upon man's being a
live machine, possessing impulses of his own. A violent seizure of her
waist, and enough of kisses to make up the sum popularly known as a
'shower,' stopped her performance. She struggled, and muttered
passionately to be released. "We are seen," she hazarded. At the
repetition, Edward, accustomed to dread the warning, let her go and fled.
Turning hurriedly about, Adela found that she had spoken truth unawares,
and never wished so much that she had lied. Sir Twickenham Pryme came
forward to her, with his usual stiff courtly step.

"If you could have been a little--a little earlier," she murmured, with
an unflurried face, laying a trembling hand in his; and thus shielded
herself from a suspicion.

"Could I know that I was wanted?" He pressed her hand.

"I only know that I wish I had not left your side," said she--adding,
"Though you must have thought me what, if I were a man, you Members of
Parliament would call 'a bore,' for asking perpetual questions."

"Nay, an apposite interrogation is the guarantee of a proper interest in
the subject," said the baronet.

Cornelia was very soon reverted to.

"Her intellect is contemplative," said Adela, exhibiting marvellous
mental composure. "She would lose her unerring judgement in active life.
She cannot weigh things in her mind rapidly. She is safe if her course of
action is clear."

Sir Twickenham reserved his opinion of the truth of this. "I wonder
whether she can forgive those who offend or insult her, easily?"

A singular pleasure warmed Adela's veins. Her cheeks kindling, she
replied, giving him her full face. "No; if they are worthy of punishment.
But--" and now he watched a downcast profile--"one must have some
forgiveness for fools."

"Indeed, you speak like charity out of the windows of wisdom," said the
baronet.

"Do you not require in Parliament to be tolerant at times?" Adela
pursued.

Ho admitted it, and to her outcry of "Oh, that noble public life!" smiled
deprecatingly--"My dear young lady, if you only knew the burden it
brings!"

"It brings its burden," said Adela, correcting, with a most proper
instinct, another enthusiastic burst. "At the same time the honour is
above the load. Am I talking too romantically? You are at least
occupied."

"Nine-tenths of us to no very good purpose," the baronet appended.

She rejoined: "If it were but a fraction, the good done would survive."

"And be more honourable to do, perhaps," he ejaculated. "The consolation
should be great."

"And is somehow small," said she; and they laughed softly.

At this stage, Adela was 'an exceedingly interesting young person' in Sir
Twickenham's mental register. He tried her on politics and sociology. She
kept her ears open, and followed his lead carefully--venturing here and
there to indicate an opinion, and suggesting dissent in a pained
interrogation. Finally, "I confess," she said, "I understand much less
than I am willing to think; and so I console myself with the thought
that, after all, the drawing-room, and the...the kitchen?--well, an
educated 'female' must serve her term there, if she would be anything
better than a mere ornament, even in the highest walks of life--I mean
the household is our sphere. From that we mount to companionship--if we
can."

Amazement of Sir Twickenham, on finding his own thought printed, as it
were, on the air before him by these pretty lips!

The conversation progressed, until Adela, by chance, turned her eyes up a
cross pathway and perceived her sister Cornelia standing with Mr. Barrett
under a beech. The man certainly held one of her hands pressed to his
heart; and her attitude struck a doubt whether his other hand was
disengaged or her waist free. Adela walked nervously on without looking
at the baronet; she knew by his voice presently that his eyes had also
witnessed the sight. "Two in a day," she thought; "what will he imagine
us to be!" The baronet was thinking: "For your sister exposed, you
display more agitation than for yourself insulted."

Adela found Arabella in so fresh a mood that she was sure good news had
been heard. It proved that Mrs. Chump had sent a few lines in a letter
carried by Braintop, to this effect: "My dears all! I found your father
on his back in bed, and he discharged me out of the room; and the sight
of me put him on his legs, and you will soon see him. Be civil to Mr.
Braintop, who is a faithful young man, of great merit, and show your
gratitude to--Martha Chump."

Braintop confirmed the words of the letter: and then Adela said--"You
will do us the favour to stay and amuse yourself here. To-night there
will be a bed at Brookfield."

"What will he do?" Arabella whispered.

"Associate with the Tinleys," returned Adela.

In accordance with the sentiment here half concealed, Brookfield soon
showed that it had risen from the hour of depression when it had simply
done its duty. Arabella formed an opposition-Court to the one in which
she had studied; but Mr. Pericles defeated her by constantly sending to
her for advice concerning the economies of the feast. Nevertheless, she
exhibited good pretensions to social queendom, both personal and
practical; and if Freshfield Sumner, instead of his crisp waspish
comments on people and things, had seconded her by keeping up a
two-minutes' flow of talk from time to time, she might have thought that
Lady Gosstre was only luckier than herself--not better endowed.

Below, the Tinleys and their set surrounded Mr. Pericles--prompting him,
as was seen, to send up continual messages. One, to wit, "Is there to be
dancing to-night?" being answered, "Now, if you please," provoked
sarcastic cheering; and Laura ran up to say, "How kind of you! We
appreciate it. Continue to dispense blessings on poor mortals."

"By the way, though" (Freshfield took his line from the calm closed lips
of his mistress), "poor mortals are not in the habit of climbing Olympus
to ask favours."

"I perceived no barrier," quoth Laura.

"Audacity never does."

"Pray, how am I to be punished?"

Freshfield paused for a potent stroke. "Not like Semele. She saw the
God:--you never will!"

While Laura was hanging on the horrid edge between a false laugh and a
starting blush, Arabella said: "That visual excommunication has been
pronounced years ago, Freshfield."

"Ah! then he hasn't changed his name in heaven?" Laura touched her thus
for the familiar use of the gentle-man's Christian name.

"You must not imagine that very great changes are demanded of those who
can be admitted."

"I really find it hotter than below," said Laura, flying.

Arabella's sharp eyes discerned a movement in Lady Gosstre's circle; and
she at once went over to her, and entreated the great lady, who set her
off so well, not to go. The sunset fronted Besworth Lawn; the last light
of day was danced down to inspiriting music: and now Arabella sent word
for Besworth hall-doors and windows to be opened; and on the company
beginning to disperse, there beckoned promise of a brilliant
supper-table.

"Admirable!" said Lady Gosstre, and the encomium was general among the
crowd surrounding Arabella; for up to this point the feasting had been
delicate, and something like plain hunger prevailed. Indeed, Arabella had
heard remarks of a bad nature, which she traced to the Tinley set, and
bore with, to meet her present reward. Making light of her triumph, she
encouraged Freshfield to start a wit-contest, and took part in it
herself, with the gaiety of an unoccupied mind. Her sisters had aforetime
more than once challenged her supremacy, but they bowed to it now; and
Adela especially did when, after a ringing hit to Freshfield (which the
Tinleys might also take to their own bosoms), she said in an undertone,
"What is there between C. and--?" Surprised by this astonishing vigilance
and power of thinking below the surface while she performed above it,
Adela incautiously turned her face toward the meditative baronet, and was
humiliated by Arabella's mute indication of contempt for her coming
answer. This march across the lawn to the lighted windows of Besworth was
the culmination of Brookfield's joy, and the crown for which it had
striven; though for how short a term it was to be worn was little known.
Was it not a very queenly sphere of Fine Shades and Nice Feelings that
Brookfield had realized?

In Arabella's conscience lay a certain reproach of herself for permitting
the "vice of a lower circle" to cling to her--viz., she had still
betrayed a stupid hostility to the Tinleys: she had rejoiced to see them
incapable of mixing with any but their own set, and thus be stamped
publicly for what they were. She had struggled to repress it, and yet,
continually, her wits were in revolt against her judgement. Perhaps one
reason was that Albert Tinley had haunted her steps at an early part of
the day; and Albert--a sickening City young man, "full of insolence, and
half eyeglass," according to Freshfield--had once ventured to propose for
her.

The idea that the Tinleys strove to catch at her skirts made Arabella
spiteful. Up to the threshold of Besworth, Freshfield, Mr. Powys, Tracy,
and Arabella kept the wheel of a dazzling run of small-talk, throwing
intermittent sparks. Laura Tinley would press up, apparently to hear, but
in reality (as all who knew her could see) with the object of being a
rival representative of her sex in this illustrious rare encounter of
divine intelligences. "You are anxious to know?" said Arabella,
hesitatingly.

"To know, dear?" echoed Laura.

"There was, I presumed, something you did not hear." Arabella was half
ashamed of the rudeness to which her antagonism to Laura's vulgarity
forced her.

"Oh! I hear everything," Laura assured her.

"Indeed!" said Arabella. "By the way, who conducts you?" (Laura was on
Edward Burley's arm.) "Oh! will you go to"--such and such an end of the
table. "And if, Lady Gosstre, I may beg of you to do me the service to go
there also," was added aloud; and lower, but quite audibly, "Mr. Pericles
will have music, so there can be no talking." This, with the soupcon of a
demi-shrug; "You will not suffer much" being implied. Laura said to
herself, "I am not a fool." A moment after, Arabella was admitting in her
own mind, as well as Fine Shades could interpret it, that she was. On
entering the dining-hall, she beheld two figures seated at the point
whither Laura was led by her partner. These were Mrs. Chump and Mr. Pole,
with champagne glasses in their hands. Arabella was pushed on by the
inexorable crowd of hungry people behind.




CHAPTER XXXII

Despite the pouring in of the flood of guests about the tables, Mrs.
Chump and Mr. Pole sat apparently unconcerned in their places, and, as if
to show their absolute indifference to observation and opinion, went
through the ceremony of drinking to one another, upon which they nodded
and chuckled: a suspicious eye had the option of divining that they used
the shelter of the table cloth for an interchange of squeezes. This would
have been further strengthened by Mrs. Chump's arresting exclamation,
"Pole! Company!" Mr. Pole looked up. He recognized Lady Gosstre, and made
an attempt, in his usual brisk style, to salute her. Mrs. Champ drew him
back. "Nothin' but his legs, my lady," she whispered. "There's nothin'
sets 'm up like champagne, my dears!" she called out to the Three of
Brookfield.

Those ladies were now in the hall, gazing, as mildly as humanity would
allow, at their common destiny, thus startlingly displayed. There was no
doubt in the bosom of either one of them that exposure was to follow this
prelude. Mental resignation was not even demanded of them--merely
physical. They did not seek comfort in an interchange of glances, but
dropped their eyes, and masked their sight as they best could. Caesar
assassinated did a similar thing.

"My dears!" pursued Mrs. Chump, in Irish exaggerated by wine, "I've found
'm for ye! And if ye'd seen 'm this afternoon--the little peaky, shaky
fellow that he was! and a doctor, too, feelin' his pulse. 'Is ut slow,'
says I, 'doctor?' and draws a bottle of champagne. He could hardly stand
before his first glass. 'Pon my hon'r, my lady, ye naver saw s'ch a
change in a mortal bein.--Pole, didn't ye go 'ha, ha!' now, and seem to
be nut-cracking with your fingers? He did; and if ye aver saw an
astonished doctor! 'Why,' says I, 'doctor, ye think ut's maguc! Why,
where's the secret? drink with 'm, to be sure! And you go and do that, my
lord doctor, my dear Mr. Doctor! Do ut all round, and your patients 'll
bless your feet." Why, isn't cheerful society and champagne the vary best
of medicines, if onnly the blood 'll go of itself a little? The fault's
in his legs; he's all right at top!--if he'd smooth his hair a bit.

Checking her tongue, Mrs. Chump performed this service lightly for him,
in the midst of his muttered comments on her Irish.

The fact was manifest to the whole assembly, that they had indeed been
drinking champagne to some purpose.

Wilfrid stepped up to two of his sisters, warning them hurriedly not to
go to their father: Adela he arrested with a look, but she burst the
restraint to fulfil a child's duty. She ran up gracefully, and taking her
father's hand, murmured a caressing "Dear papa!"

"There--all right--quite right--quite well," Mr. Pole repeated. "Glad to
see you all: go away."

He tried to look kindly out of the nervous fit into which a word, in a
significant tone, from one of his daughters had instantly plunged him.
Mrs. Chump admonished her: "Will ye undo all that I've been doin' this
blessed day?"

"Glad you haven't missed the day altogether, sir," Wilfrid greeted his
father in an offhand way.

"Ah, my boy!" went the old man, returning him what was meant for a bluff
nod.

Lady Charlotte gave Wilfrid an open look. It meant: "If you can act like
that, and know as much as I know, you are worth more than I reckoned." He
talked evenly and simply, and appeared on the surface as composed as any
of the guests present. Nor was he visibly disturbed when Mrs. Chump,
catching his eye, addressed him aloud:--

"Ye'd have been more grateful to me to have brought little Belloni as
well now, I know, Mr. Wilfrid. But I was just obliged to leave her at the
hotel; for Pole can't endure her. He 'bomunates the sight of 'r. If ye
aver saw a dog burnt by the fire, Pole's second to 'm, if onnly ye speak
that garl's name."

The head of a strange musician, belonging to the band stationed outside,
was thrust through one of the window apertures. Mr. Pericles beckoned him
imperiously to retire, and perform. He objected, and an altercation in
bad English diverted the company. It was changed to Italian. "Mia
figlia," seized Wilfrid's ear. Mr. Pericles bellowed, "Allegro." Two
minutes after Braintop felt a touch on his shoulder; and Wilfrid,
speaking in a tone of friend to friend, begged him to go to town by the
last train and remove Miss Belloni to an hotel, which he named.
"Certainly," said Braintop; "but if I meet her father..?" Wilfrid
summoned champagne for him; whereupon Mrs. Chump cried out, "Ye're kind
to wait upon the young man, Mr. Wilfrid; and that Mr. Braintop's an
invalu'ble young man. And what do ye want with the hotel, when we've left
it, Mr. Paricles?"

The Greek raised his head from Mr. Pole, shrugging at her openly. He and
Wilfrid then measured eyes a moment. "Some champagne togezer?" said Mr.
Pericles. "With all my heart," was the reply; and their glasses were
filled, and they bowed, and drank. Wilfrid took his seat, drew forth his
pocket-book; and while talking affably to Lady Charlotte beside him, and
affecting once or twice to ponder over her remarks, or to meditate a
fitting answer, wrote on a slip of paper under the table:--

     "Mine! my angel! You will see me to-morrow.

                    "YOUR LOVER."

This, being inserted in an envelope, with zig-zag letters of address to
form Emilia's name, he contrived to pass to Braintop's hands, and resumed
his conversation with Lady Charlotte, who said, when there was nothing
left to discover, "But what is it you concoct down there?" "I!" cried
Wilfrid, lifting his hands, and so betraying himself after the fashion of
the very innocent. She despised any reading of acts not on the surface,
and nodded to the explanation he gave--to wit: "By the way, do you
mean--have you noticed my habit of touching my fingers' ends as I talk? I
count them backwards and forwards."

"Shows nervousness," said Lady Charlotte; "you are a boy!"

"Exceedingly a boy."

"Now I put a finger on his vanity," said she; and thought indeed that she
had played on him.

"Mr. Pole," (Lady Gosstre addressed that gentleman,) "I must hope that
you will leave this dining-hall as it is; there is nothing in the
neighbourhood to match it!"

"Delightful!" interposed Laura Tinley; "but is it settled?"

Mr. Pole leaned forward to her ladyship; and suddenly catching the sense
of her words, "Ah, why not?" he said, and reached his hand to some
champagne, which he raised to his mouth, but drank nothing of. Reflection
appeared to tell him that his safety lay in drinking, and he drained the
glass at a gulp. Mrs. Chump had it filled immediately, and explained to a
wondering neighbour, "It's that that keeps 'm on his legs."

"We shall envy you immensely," said Laura Tinley to Arabella; who
replied, "I assure you that no decision has been come to."

"Ah, you want to surprise us with cards on a sudden from Besworth!"

"That is not the surprise I have in store," returned Arabella sedately.

"Then you have a surprise? Do tell me."

"How true to her sex is the lady who seeks to turn 'what it is' into
'what it isn't!'" said Freshfield, trusty lieutenant.

"I think a little peeping makes surprises sweeter; I'm weak enough to
think that," Lady Charlotte threw in.

"That is so true!" exclaimed Laura.

"Well; and a secret shared is a fact uncommonly well aired--that is also
true. But, remember, you do not desire the surprise; you are a destroying
force to it;" and Freshfield bowed.

"Curiosity!" sighed some one, relieving Freshfield from a sense of the
guilt of heaviness.

"I am a Pandora," Laura smilingly said.

"To whom?" Tracy Runningbrook's shout was heard.

"With champagne in the heads of the men, and classics in the heads of the
women, we shall come; to something," remarked Lady Gosstre half to
herself and Georgiana near her.

An observer of Mr. Pole might have seen that he was fretting at a
restriction on his tongue. Occasionally he would sit forward erect in his
chair, shake his coat-collar, frown, and sound a preparatory 'hem; but it
ended in his rubbing his hair away on the back of his head. Mrs. Chump,
who was herself perceiving new virtues in champagne with every glass,
took the movements as indicative of a companion exploration of the
spiritual resources of this vintage. She no longer called for it, but
lifted a majestic finger (a Siddons or tenth-Muse finger, as Freshfield
named it) behind the row of heads; upon which champagne speedily bubbled
in the glasses. Laughter at the performance had fairly set in. Arabella
glanced nervously round for Mr. Pericles, who looked at his watch and
spread the fingers of one hand open thrice--an act that telegraphed
fifteen minutes. In fifteen minutes an opera troupe, with three famous
chiefs and a renowned prima-donna were to arrive. The fact was known
solely to Arabella and Mr. Pericles. It was the Surprise of the evening.
But within fifteen minutes, what might not happen, with heads going at
champagne-pace?

Arabella proposed to Freshfield to rise. "Don't the ladies go first?" the
wit turned sensualist stammered; and incurred that worse than frown, a
cold look of half-comprehension, which reduces indefinitely the
proportions of the object gazed at. There were probably a dozen very
young men in the room waiting to rise with their partners at a signal for
dancing; and these could not be calculated upon to take an initiative, or
follow one--as ladies, poor slaves! will do when the electric hostess
rustles. The men present were non-conductors. Arabella knew that she
could carry off the women, but such a proceeding would leave her father
at the mercy of the wine; and, moreover, the probability was that Mrs.
Chump would remain by him, and, sole in a company of males, explode her
sex with ridicule, Brookfield in the bargain. So Arabella, under a
prophetic sense of evil, waited; and this came of it. Mr. Pole patted
Mrs. Chump's hand publicly. In spite of the steady hum of small-talk--in
spite of Freshfield Sumner's circulation of a crisp anecdote--in spite of
Lady Gosstre's kind effort to stop him by engaging him in conversation,
Mr. Pole forced on for a speech. He said that he had not been the thing
lately. It might be his legs, as his dear friend Martha, on his right,
insisted; but he had felt it in his head, though as strong as any man
present.

"Harrk at 'm!" cried Mrs. Chump, letting her eyes roll fondly away from
him into her glass.

"Business, my lady!" Mr. Pole resumed. "Ah, you don't know what that is.
We've got to work hard to keep our heads up equal with you. We don't swim
with corks. And my old friend, Ralph Tinley--he sells iron, and has got a
mine. That's simple. But, my God, ma'am, when a man has his eye on the
Indian Ocean, and the Atlantic, and the Baltic, and the Black Sea, and
half-a-dozen colonies at once, he--you--"

"Well, it's a precious big eye he's got, Pole," Mrs. Chump came to his
relief.

"--he don't know whether he's a ruined dog, or a man to hold up his head
in any company."

"Oh, Lord, Pole, if ye're going to talk of beggary!" Mrs. Chump threw up
her hands. "My lady, I naver could abide the name of 't. I'm a kind
heart, ye know, but I can't bear a ragged friend. I hate 'm! He seems to
give me a pinch."

Having uttered this, it struck her that it was of a kind to convulse Mrs.
Lupin, for whose seizures she could never accurately account; and looking
round, she perceived, sure enough, that little forlorn body agitated,
with a handkerchief to her mouth.

"As to Besworth," Mr. Pole had continued, "I might buy twenty Besworths.
If--if the cut shows the right card. If--" Sweat started on his forehead,
and he lifted his eyebrows, blinking. "But none!" (he smote the table)
"none can say I haven't been a good father! I've educated my girls to
marry the best the land can show. I bought a house to marry them out of;
it was their own idea." He caught Arabella's eyes. "I thought so, at all
events; for why should I have paid the money if I hadn't thought so? when
then--yes, that sum..." (was he choking!) "saved me!--saved me!"

A piteous desperate outburst marked the last words, that seemed to
struggle from a tightened cord.

"Not that there's anything the matter," he resumed, with a very brisk
wink. "I'm quite sound: heart's sound, lungs sound, stomach regular. I
can see, and smell, and hear. Sense of touch is rather lumpy at times, I
know; but the doctor says it's nothing--nothing at all; and I should be
all right, if I didn't feel that I was always wearing a great leaden
hat."

"My gracious, Pole, if ye're not talkin' pos'tuv nonsense!" exclaimed
Mrs. Chump.

"Well, my dear Martha" (Mr. Pole turned to her argumentatively), "how do
you account for my legs? I feel it at top. I declare I've felt the edge
of the brim half a yard out. Now, my lady, a man in that state--sound and
strong as the youngest--but I mean a vexed man--worried man bothered man,
he doesn't want a woman to look after him;--I mean, he does--he does! And
why won't young girls--oh! they might, they might--see that? And when
she's no extra expense, but brings him--helps him to face--and no one has
said the world's a jolly world so often as I have. It's jolly!" He
groaned.

Lady Charlotte saw Wilfrid gazing at one spot on the table without a
change of countenance. She murmured to him, "What hits you hits me."

Mr. Pole had recommenced, on the evident instigation of Laura Tinley,
though Lady Gosstre and Freshfield Sumner had both sought to check the
current. In Chump's lifetime, it appeared, he (Mr. Pole) had thought of
Mrs. Chump with a respectful ardour; and albeit she was no longer what
she was when Chump brought her over, a blooming Irish girl--"her hair
exactly as now, the black curl half over the cheek, and a bright laugh,
and a white neck, fat round arms, and--"

A shout of "Oh, Pole! ye seem to be undressin' of me before them all,"
diverted the neighbours of the Beauty.

"Who would not like such praise?" Laura Tinley, to keep alive the
subject, laid herself open to Freshfield by a remark.

"At the same personal peril?" he inquired smoothly.

Mr. Pericles stood up, crying "Enfin!" as the doors were flung open, and
a great Signora of operatic fame entered the hall, supported on one side
by a charming gentleman (a tenore), who shared her fame and more with
her. In the rear were two working baritones; and behind them, outside,
Italian heads might be discerned.

The names of the Queen of Song and Prince of Singers flew round the room;
and Laura uttered words of real gratitude, for the delightful surprise,
to Arabella, as the latter turned from her welcome of them. "She is
exactly like Emilia--young," was uttered. The thought went with a pang
through Wilfrid's breast. When the Signora was asked if she would sup or
take champagne, and she replied that she would sup by-and-by, and drink
porter now, the likeness to Emilia was established among the Poles.

Meantime the unhappy Braintop received an indication that he must depart.
As he left the hall he brushed past the chief-clerk of his office, who
soon appeared bowing and elbowing among the guests. "What a substitute
for me!" thought Braintop bitterly; and in the belief that this old clerk
would certainly go back that night, and might undertake his commission,
he lingered near the band on the verge of the lawn. A touch at his elbow
startled him. In the half-light he discerned Emilia. "Don't say you have
seen me," were her first words. But when he gave her the letter, she drew
him aside, and read it by the aid of lighted matches held in Braintop's
hat drawing in her fervent breath to a "Yes! yes!" at the close, while
she pressed the letter to her throat. Presently the singing began in an
upper room, that had shortly before flashed with sudden light. Braintop
entreated Emilia to go in, and then rejoiced that she had refused. They
stood in a clear night-air, under a yellowing crescent, listening to the
voice of an imperial woman. Impressed as he was, Braintop had,
nevertheless, leisure to look out of his vinous mist and notice, with
some misgiving, a parading light at a certain distance--apparently the
light of cigarettes being freshly kindled. He was too much elated to feel
alarm: but "If her father were to catch me again," he thought. And with
Emilia on his arm!

Mr. Pole's chief-clerk had brought discomposing news. He was received by
an outburst of "No business, Payne; I won't have business!"

Turning to Mr. Pericles, the old clerk said: "I came rather for you, sir,
not expecting to find Mr. Pole." He was told by Mr. Pericles to speak
what he had to say: and then the guests, who had fallen slightly back,
heard a cavernous murmur; and some, whose eyes where on Mr. Pole,
observed a sharp conflict of white and red in his face.

"There, there, there, there!" went Mr. Pole. "'Hem, Pericles!" His
handkerchief was drawn out; and he became engaged, as it were, in wiping
a moisture from the palm of his hand. "Pericles, have you got pluck now?
Eh?"

Mr. Pericles had leaned down his ear for the whole of the news.

"Ten sossand," he said, smoothing his waistbands, and then inserting his
thumbs into the pits of his waistcoat. "Also a chance of forty. Let us
not lose time for ze music."

He walked away.

"I don't believe in that d---d coolness, ma'am," said Mr. Pole, wheeling
round on Freshfield Sumner. "It's put on. That wears a mask; he's one of
those confounded humbugs who wear a mask. Ten-forty! and all for a shrug;
it's not human. I tell you, he does that just out of a sort of jealousy
to rival me as an Englishman. Because I'm cool, he must be. Do you think
a mother doesn't feel the loss of her children?"

"I fear that I must grow petticoats before I can answer purely feminine
questions," said Freshfield.

"Of course--of course," assented Mr. Pole; "and a man feels like a mother
to his money. For the moment, he does--for the moment. What are those
fellows--Spartans--women who cut off their breasts--?"

Freshfield suggested, "Amazons."

"No; they were women," Mr. Pole corrected him; "and if anything hurt
them, they never cried out. That's what--ha!--our friend Pericles is
trying at. He's a fool. He won't sleep to-night. He'll lie till he gets
cold in the feet, and then tuck them up like a Dutch doll, and perspire
cold till his heart gives a bound, and he'll jump up and think his last
hour's come. Wind on the stomach, do ye call it? I say it's wearing a
mask!"

The bird's-eye of the little merchant shot decisive meaning.

Two young ladies had run from his neighbourhood, making as if to lift
hands to ears. The sight of them brought Mrs. Chump to his side. "Pole!
Pole!" she said, "is there annything wrong?"

"Wrong, Martha?" He bent to her, attempting Irish--"Arrah, now! and
mustn't all be right if you're here?"

She smote his cheek fondly. "Ye're not a bit of an Irish-man, ye deer
little fella."

"Come along and dance," cried he imperiously.

"A pretty spectacle--two fandangoes, when there's singing, ye silly!"
Mrs. Chump led him upstairs, chafing one of his hands, and remarking
loudly on the wonder it was to see his knees constantly 'give' as he
walked.

On the dark lawn, pressing Wilfrid's written words for fiery nourishment
to her heart, Emilia listened to the singing.

"Why do people make a noise, and not be satisfied to feel?" she said
angrily to Braintop, as a great clapping of hands followed a divine aria.
Her ideas on this point would have been different in the room.

By degrees a tender delirium took hold of her sense; and then a subtle
emotion--which was partly prompted by dim rivalry with the voice that
seemed to be speaking so richly to the man she loved--set her bosom
rising and falling. She translated it to herself thus: "What a joy it
will be to him to hear me now!" And in a pause she sang clear out--

     "Prima d'Italia amica;"

and hung on the last note, to be sure that she would be heard by him.

Braintop saw the cigarette dash into sparks on the grass. At the same
moment a snarl of critical vituperation told Emilia that she had offended
taste and her father. He shouted her name, and, striding up to her,
stumbled over Braintop, whom he caught with one hand, while the other
fell firmly on Emilia.

"'Amica--amica-a-a,'" he burlesqued her stress of the luckless note
--lowing it at her, and telling her in triumphant Italian that she was
found at last. Braintop, after a short struggle, and an effort at
speech, which was loosely shaken in his mouth, heard that he stood a
prisoner. "Eh! you have not lost your cheeks," insulted his better
acquaintance with English slang.

Alternately in this queer tongue and in Italian the pair of victims were
addressed.

Emilia knew her father's temper. He had a habit of dallying with an evil
passion till it boiled over and possessed him. Believing Braintop to be
in danger of harm, she beckoned to some of the faces crowding the
windows; but the movement was not seen, as none of the circumstances were
at all understood. Wilfrid, however, knew well who had sung those three
bars, concerning which the 'Prima donna' questioned Mr. Pericles, and
would not be put off by hearing that it was a startled jackdaw, or an
owl, and an ole nightingale. The Greek rubbed his hands. "Now to
recommence," he said; "and we shall not notice a jackdaw again." His eye
went sideways watchfully at Wilfrid. "You like zat piece of opera?"

"Immensely," said Wilfrid, half bowing to the Signora--to whom, as to
Majesty, Mr. Pericles introduced him, and fixed him.

"Now! To seats!"

Mr. Pericles' mandates was being obeyed, when a cry of "Wilfrid!" from
Emilia below, raised a flutter.

Mr. Pole had been dozing in his chair. He rose at the cry, looking hard,
with a mechanical jerk of the neck, at two or three successive faces, and
calling, "Somebody--somebody" to take his outstretched hand trembling in
a paroxysm of nervous terror.

Hearing his son's name again, but more faintly, he raised his voice for
Martha. "Don't let that girl come near me! I--I can't get on with foreign
girls!"

His eyes went among the curious faces surrounding him. "Wilfrid!" he
shouted. To the second summons, "Sir" was replied, in the silence.
Neither saw the other as they spoke.

"Are you going out to her, Wilfrid?"

"Someone called me, sir."

"He's got the cunning of hell," said Mr. Pole, baffled by his own
agitation.

"Oh! don't talk o' that place," moaned Mrs. Chump.

"Stop!" cried the old man. "Are you going? Stop! you shan't do mischief.
I mean--there--stop! Don't go. You're not to go. I say you're not to go
out."

Emphasis and gesticulations gave their weight to the plain words.

But rage at the upset of all sentiments and dignity that day made Wilfrid
reckless, and he now felt his love to be all he had. He heard his Emilia
being dragged away to misery--perhaps to be sold to shame. Maddened, he
was incapable of understanding his father's state, or caring for what the
world thought. His sisters gathered near him, but were voiceless.

"Is he gone?" Mr. Pole burst forward. "You're gone, sir? Wilfrid, have
you gone to that girl? I ask you whether...(there's one shot at my
heart," he added in a swift undertone to one of the heads near him, while
he caught at his breast with both hands). "Wilfrid, will you stay here?"

"For God's sake, go to him, Wilfrid," murmured Adela. "I can't."

"Because if you do--if you don't--I mean, if you go..." The old man
gasped at the undertone. "Now I have got it in my throat."

A quick physical fear caught hold of him. In a moment his voice changed
to entreaty. "I beg you won't go, my dear boy. Wilfrid, I tell you, don't
go. Because, you wouldn't act like a d--d--I'm not angry; but it is like
acting like a--Here's company, Wilfrid; come to me, my boy; do come here.
You mayn't ha--have your poor old father long, now he's got you u--up in
the world. I mean accidents, for I'm sound enough; only a little nervous
from brain--Is he gone?"

Wilfrid was then leaving the room.

Lady Gosstre had been speaking to Mr. Powys. She was about to say a word
to Lady Charlotte, when the latter walked to the doorway, and. In a
manner that smote his heart with a spasm of gratitude, said; "Don't heed
these people. He will bring on a fit if you don't stop. His nerves are
out, and the wine they have given him... Go to him: I will go to Emilia,
and do as much for her as you could."

Wilfrid reached his father in time to see him stagger back into the arms
of Mrs. Chump, whose supplication was for the female stimulant known as
'something.'




CHAPTER XXXIII

On reaching home that night, Arabella surprised herself thinking, in the
midst of her anguish: "Whatever is said of us, it cannot be said that
there is a house where the servants have been better cared for." And this
reflection continued to burn with an astounding brilliancy through all
the revolutions of a mind contemplating the dread of a fallen fortune,
the fact of a public exposure, and what was to her an ambition destroyed.
Adela had no such thoughts. "I have been walking on a plank," she gasped
from time to time, as she gave startled glances into the abyss of
poverty, and hurried to her bedchamber--a faint whisper of
self-condemnation in her ears at the 'I' being foremost. The sisters were
too proud to touch upon one another's misery in complaints, or to be
common by holding debate on it. They had not once let their eyes meet at
Besworth, as the Tinleys wonderingly noticed. They said good night to
their papa, who was well enough to reply, adding peremptorily,
"Downstairs at half-past eight,"--an intimation that he would be at the
break-fast table and read prayers as usual. Inexperienced in nervous
disease, they were now filled with the idea that he was possibly
acting--a notion that had never been kindled in them before; or,
otherwise, how came these rapid, almost instantaneous, recoveries?

Cornelia alone sounded near the keynote. Since the night that she had met
him in the passage, and the next morning when Mrs. Chump had raised the
hubbub about her loss, Cornelia's thoughts had been troubled by some
haunting spectral relationship with money. It had helped to make her
reckless in granting interviews to Purcell Barrett. "If we are poor, I am
free;" and that she might then give herself to whomever she pleased, was
her logical deduction. The exposure at Besworth, and the partial
confirmation of her suspicions, were not without their secret comfort to
her. In the carriage, coming home, Wilfrid had touched her hand by
chance, and pressed it with good heart. She went to the library,
imagining that if he wished to see her he would appear, and by exposing
his own weakness learn to excuse hers. She was right in her guess;
Wilfrid came. He came sauntering into the room with "Ah! you here?"
Cornelia consented to play into his hypocrisy. "Yes, I generally think
better here," she replied.

"And what has this pretty head got to do with thinking?"

"Not much, I suppose, my lord," she replied, affecting nobly to
acknowledge the weakness of the female creature.

Wilfrid kissed her with an unaccustomed fervour. This delicate mumming
was to his taste. It was yet more so when she spoke playfully to him of
his going soon to be a married man. He could answer to that in a smiling
negative, playing round the question, until she perceived that he really
desired to have his feeling for the odd dark girl who had recently shot
across their horizon touched, if only it were led to by the muffled ways
of innuendo.

As a dog, that cannot ask you verbally to scratch his head, but wishes
it, will again and again thrust his head into your hand, petitioning
mutely that affection may divine him, so:--but we deal with a
sentimentalist, and the simile is too gross to be exact. For no sooner
was Wilfrid's head scratched, than the operation stuck him as
humiliating; in other words, the moment he felt his sisters fingers in
the ticklish part, he flew to another theme, then returned, and so
backward and forward--mystifying her not slightly, and making her think,
"Then he has no heart." She by no means intended to encourage love for
Emilia, but she hoped for his sake, that the sentiment he had indulged
was sincere. By-and-by he said, that though he had no particular
affection for Lady Charlotte, he should probably marry her.

"Without loving her, Wilfrid? It is unfair to her; it is unfair to
yourself."

Wilfrid understood perfectly who it was for whom she pleaded thus
vehemently. He let her continue: and when she had dwelt on the horrors of
marriages without love, and the supreme duty of espousing one who has our
'heart's loyalty,' he said, "You may be right. A man must not play with a
girl. He must consider that he owes a duty to one who is more
dependent;"--implying that a woman s duty was distinct and different in
such a case.

Cornelia could not rise and plead for her sex. Had she pushed forth the
'woman,' she must have stood for her.

This is the game of Fine Shades and Nice Feelings, under whose empire you
see this family, and from which they are to emerge considerably shorn,
but purified--examples of One present passage of our civilization.

"At least, dear, if" (Cornelia desperately breathed the name) "--if
Emilia were forced to give her hand...loving...you...we should be right
in pitying her?"

The snare was almost too palpable. Wilfrid fell into it, from the simple
passion that the name inspired; and now his hand tightened. "Poor child!"
he moaned.

She praised his kind heart: "You cannot be unjust and harsh, I know that.
You could not see her--me--any of us miserable. Women feel, dear. Ah! I
need not tell you that. Their tears are not the witnesses. When they do
not weep, but the hot drops stream inwardly:--and, oh! Wilfrid, let this
never happen to me. I shall not disgrace you, because I intend to see you
happy with...with her, whoever she is; and I would leave you happy. But I
should not survive it. I can look on Death. A marriage without love is
dishonour."

Sentiment enjoys its splendid moods. Wilfrid having had the figure of his
beloved given to him under nuptial benediction, cloaked, even as he
wished it to be, could afford now to commiserate his sister, and he
admired her at the same time. "I'll take care you are not made a
sacrifice of when the event is fixed," he said--as if it had never been
in contemplation.

"Oh! I have not known happiness for years, till this hour," Cornelia
whispered to him bashfully; and set him wondering why she should be happy
when she had nothing but his sanction to reject a man.

On the other hand, her problem was to gain lost ground by letting him
know that, of the pair, it was not she who would marry beneath her
station. She tried it mentally in various ways. In the end she thought it
best to give him this positive assurance. "No," he rejoined, "a woman
never should." There was no admission of equality to be got out of him,
so she kissed him. Of their father's health a few words were said--of
Emilia nothing further. She saw that Wilfrid's mind was resolved upon
some part to play, but shrank from asking his confidence, lest facts
should be laid bare.

At the breakfast-table Mr. Pole was a little late. He wore some of his
false air of briskness on a hazy face, and read prayers--drawing breath
between each sentence and rubbing his forehead; but the work was done by
a man in ordinary health, if you chose to think so, as Mrs. Chump did.
She made favourable remarks on his appearance, begging the ladies to
corroborate her. They were silent.

"Now take a chop, Pole, and show your appetite," she said. "'A
Chump-chop, my love?' my little man used to invite me of a mornin'; and
that was the onnly joke he had, so it's worth rememberin'."

A chop was placed before Mr. Pole. He turned it in his plate, and
wonderingly called to mind that he had once enjoyed chops. At a loss to
account for the distressing change, he exclaimed to himself, "Chump! I
wish the woman wouldn't thrust her husband between one's teeth. An egg!"

The chop was displaced for an egg, which he tapped until Mrs. Chump cried
out, "Oh! if ye're not like a postman, Pole; and d'ye think ye've got a
letter for a chick inside there?"

This allusion scared Mr. Pole from the egg. He quitted the table,
muttering, "Business! business!" and went to the library.

When he was gone Mrs. Chump gave a cry to know where Braintop was, but,
forgetting him immediately, turned to the ladies and ejaculated,
"Broth'm. It's just brothin' he wants. Broth, I say, for anny man that
won't eat his chop or his egg. And, my dears, now, what do ye say to me
for bringing him home to ye? I expect to be thanked, I do; and then we'll
broth Pole together, till he's lusty as a prize-ox, and capers like a
monkey."

Wretched woman! that could not see the ruin she had inflicted--that could
not imagine how her bitter breath cut against those sensitive skins!
During a short pause little Mrs. Lupin trotted to the door, and shot
through it, in a paroxysm.

Then Wilfrid's voice was heard. He leaned against a corner of the window,
and spoke without directly looking at Mrs. Chump; so that she was some
time in getting to understand the preliminary, "Madam, you must leave
this house." But presently her chin dropped; and after feeble efforts to
interpose an exclamation, she sat quiet--overcome by the deliberate
gravity of his manner, and motioning despairingly with her head, to
relieve the swarm of unborn figure-less ideas suggested by his passing
speech. The ladies were ranged like tribunal shapes. It could not be said
of souls so afflicted that they felt pleasure in the scene; but to assist
in the administration of a rigorous justice is sweet to them that are
smarting. They scarcely approved his naked statement of things when he
came to Mrs. Chump's particular aspiration in the household--viz., to
take a station and the dignity of their name. The effect he produced
satisfied them that the measure was correct. Her back gave a sharp bend,
as if an eternal support had snapped. "Oh! ye hit hard," she moaned.

"I tell you kindly that we (who, you will acknowledge, must count for
something here) do not sanction any change that revolutionizes our
domestic relations," said Wilfrid; while Mrs. Chump heaved and rolled on
the swell of the big words like an overladen boat. "You have only to
understand so much, and this--that if we resist it, as we do, you, by
continuing to contemplate it, are provoking a contest which will probably
injure neither you nor me, but will be death to ham in his present
condition."

Mrs. Chump was heard to mumble that she alone knew the secret of
restoring him to health, and that he was rendered peaky and poky only by
people supposing him so.

"An astonishin' thing!" she burst out. "If I kiss 'm and say 'Poor Pole!'
he's poor Pole on the spot. And, if onnly I--"

But Wilfrid's stern voice flowed over her. "Listen, madam, and let this
be finished between us. You know well that when a man has children, he
may wish to call another woman wife--a woman not their mother; but the
main question is, will his children consent to let her take that place?
We are of one mind, and will allow no one--no one--to assume that
position. And now, there's an end. We'll talk like friends. I have only
spoken in that tone that you might clearly comprehend me on an important
point. I know you entertain a true regard for my father, and it is that
belief which makes me--"

"Friends!" cried Mrs. Chump, getting courage from the savour of cajolery
in these words. "Friends! Oh, ye fox! ye fox!"

And now commenced a curious duett. Wilfrid merely wished to terminate his
sentence; Mrs. Chump wantonly sought to prevent him. Each was burdened
with serious matter; but they might have struck hands here, had not this
petty accidental opposition interposed.

--"Makes me feel confident..." Wilfrid resumed.

"And Pole's promos, Mr. Wilfrud; ye're forgettin' that."

"Confident, ma'am."

"He was the firrst to be soft."

"I say, ma'am, for his sake--"

"An' it's for his sake. And weak as he is on 's legs, poor fells; which
marr'ge 'll cure, bein' a certain rem'dy."

"Mrs. Chump! I beg you to listen."

"Mr. Wilfrud! and I can see too, and it's three weeks and ye kissed
little Belloni in the passage, outside this vary door, and out in the
garden."

The blow was entirely unexpected, and took Wilfrid's breath, so that he
was not ready for his turn in this singular piece of harmony.

"Ye did!" Mrs. Chump rejoiced to behold how her chance spark kindled
flame in his cheeks. "It's pos'tuv ye did. And ye're the best blusher of
the two, my dear; and no shame to ye, though it is a garl's business.
That little Belloni takes to 't like milk; but you--"

Wilfrid strode up to her, saying imperiously, "I tell you to listen!"

She succumbed at once to a show of physical ascendency, murmuring, "It's
sure he was seen kissin' of her twice, and mayhap more; and hearty smacks
of the lips, too--likin' it."

The ladies rewarded Wilfrid for his service to their cause by absolutely
hearing nothing--a feat women can be capable of.

Wilfrid, however, was angered by the absurdity of the charge and the
scene, and also by the profane touch on Emilia's name.

"I must tell you, ma'am, that for my father's sake I must desire you to
quit this--you will see the advisability of quitting this house for a
time."

"Pole's promus! Pole's promus!" Mrs. Chump wailed again.

"Will you give me your assurance now that you will go, to be our guest
again subsequently?"

"In writin' and in words, Mr. Wilfrud!"

"Answer me, ma'am."

"I will, Mr. Wilfrud; and Mr. Braintop's a witness, knowin' the nature of
an oath. There naver was a more sacrud promus. Says Pole, 'Martha--'"

Wilfrid changed his tactics. Sitting down by her side, he said: "I am
sure you have an affection for my father."

"I'm the most lovin' woman, my dear! If it wasn't for my vartue I don't
know what'd become o' me. Ye could ask Chump, if he wasn't in his grave,
poor fella! I'll be cryin' like a squeezed orr'nge presently. What with
Chump and Pole, two's too many for a melanch'ly woman."

"You have an affection for my father I know, ma'am. Now, see! he's ill.
If you press him to do what we certainly resist, you endanger his life."

Mrs. Chump started back from the man who bewildered her brain without
stifling her sense of justice. She knew that there was another way of
putting the case, whereby she was not stuck in the criminal box; but the
knowledge groped about blindly, and finding herself there, Mrs. Chump
lost all idea of a counter-accusation, and resorted to wriggling and
cajolery. "Ah! ye look sweeter when ye're kissin' us, Mr. Wilfrud; and I
wonder where the little Belloni has got to!"

"Tell me, that there maybe no misunderstanding." Wilfrid again tried to
fix her.

"A rosy rosy fresh bit of a mouth she's got! and pouts ut!"

Wilfrid took her hand. "Answer me."

"'Deed, and I'm modust, Mr. Wilfrud."

"You do him the honour to be very fond of him. I am to believe that? Then
you must consent to leave us at the end of a week. You abandon any idea
of an impossible ceremony, and of us you make friends and not enemies."

At the concluding word, Mrs. Chump was no longer sustained by her
excursive fancy. She broke down, and wrung her hands, crying, "En'mies!
Pole's children my en'mies! Oh, Lord! that I should live to hear ut! and
Pole, that knew me a bride first blushin'!"

She wailed and wept so that the ladies exchanged compassionate looks, and
Arabella rose to press her hand and diminish her distress. Wilfrid saw
that his work would be undone in a moment, and waved her to her seat. The
action was perceived by Mrs. Chump.

"Oh, Mr. Wilfrud! my dear! and a soldier! and you that was my favourut!
If half my 'ffection for Pole wasn't the seein' of you so big and
handsome! And all my ideas to get ye marrud, avery one so snug in a
corner, with a neat little lawful ring on your fingers! And you that go
to keep me a lone woman, frightened of the darrk! I'm an awful coward,
that's the truth. And ye know that marr'ge is a holy thing! and it's such
a beaut'ful cer'mony! Oh, Mr. Wilfrud!--Lieuten't y' are! and I'd have
bought ye a captain, and made the hearts o' your sisters jump with
bonnuts and gowns and jools. Oh, Pole! Pole! why did you keep me so short
o' cash? It's been the roon of me! What did I care for your brooches and
your gifts? I wanted the good will of your daughters, sir--your son,
Pole!"

Mrs. Chump stopped her flow of tears. "Dear hearts!" she addressed her
silent judges, in mysterious guttural tones, "is it becas ye think
there's a bit of a fear of...?"

The ladies repressed a violent inclination to huddle together, like
cattle from the blowing East.

"I assure ye, 'taint poss'ble," pursued Mrs. Chump. "Why do I 'gree to
marry Pole? Just this, now. We sit chirpin' and chatterin' of times
that's gone, and live twice over, Pole and myself; and I'm used to 'm;
and I was soft to 'm when he was a merry buck, and you cradle lumber in
ideas, mind! for my vartue was always un'mpeach'ble. That's just the
reason. So, come, and let's all be friends, with money in our pockuts;
yell find me as much of a garl as army of ye. And, there! my weak time's
after my Porrt, my dears. So, now ye know when I can't be refusin' a
thing to ye. Are we friends?--say! are we?"

Even if the ladies had been disposed to pardon her vulgarity, they could
not by any effort summon a charitable sentiment toward one of their sex
who degraded it by a public petition for a husband. This was not to be
excused; and, moreover, they entertained the sentimentalist's abhorrence
of the second marriage of a woman; regarding the act as simply execrable;
being treason to the ideal of the sex--treason to Woman's purity--treason
to the mysterious sentiment which places Woman so high, that when a woman
slips there is no help for it but she must be smashed.

Seeing that each looked as implacable as the other, Mrs. Chump called
plaintively, "Arr'bella!"

The lady spoke:--

"We are willing to be your friends, Mrs. Chump, and we request that you
will consider us in that light. We simply do not consent to give you a
name...."

"But, we'll do without the name, my dear," interposed Mrs. Chump. "Ye'll
call me plain Martha, which is almost mother, and not a bit of 't.
There--Cornelia, my love! what do ye say?"

"I can only reiterate my sister's words, which demand no elucidation,"
replied Cornelia.

The forlorn woman turned her lap towards the youngest.

"Ad'la! ye sweet little cajoler! And don't use great cartwheels o' words
that leave a body crushed."

Adela was suffering from a tendency to levity, which she knew to be
unbefitting the occasion, and likely to defeat its significance. She
said: "I am sure, Mrs. Chump, we are very much attached to you as Mrs.
Chump; but after a certain period of life, marriage does make people
ridiculous, and, as much for your sake as our own, we would advise you to
discard a notion that cannot benefit anybody. Believe in our attachment;
and we shall see you here now and then, and correspond with you when you
are away. And..."

"Oh, ye puss! such an eel as y' are!" Mrs. Chump cried out. "What are ye
doin' but sugarin' the same dose, miss! Be qu't! It's a traitor that
makes what's nasty taste agree'ble. D'ye think my stomach's a fool? Ye
may wheedle the mouth, but not the stomach."

At this offence there fell a dead silence. Wilfrid gazed on them all
indifferently, waiting for the moment to strike a final blow.

When she had grasped the fact that Pity did not sit in the assembly, Mrs.
Chump rose.

"Oh! if I haven't been sitting among three owls and a raven," she
exclaimed. Then she fussed at her gown. "I wish ye good day, young ladus,
and mayhap ye'd like to be interduced to No. 2 yourselves, some fine
mornin'? Prov'dence can wait. There's a patient hen on the eggs of all of
ye! I wouldn't marry Pole now--not if he was to fall flat and howl for
me. Mr. Wilfrud, I wish ye good-bye. Ye've done your work. I'll be out of
this house in half-an-hour."

This was not quite what Wilfrid had meant to effect. He proposed to her
that she should come to the yacht, and indeed leave Brookfield to go on
board. But Mrs. Chump was in that frame of mind when, shamefully wounded
by others, we find our comfort in wilfully wounding ourselves. "No," she
said (betraying a meagre mollification at every offer), "I'll not stop. I
won't go to the yacht--unless I think better of ut. But I won't stop.
Ye've hurrt me, and I'll say good-bye. I hope ye'll none of ye be widows.
It's a crool thing. And when ye've got no children of your own, and feel,
all your inside risin' to another person's, and they hate ye--hate ye!
Oh! Oh!--There, Mr. Wilfrud, ye needn't touch me elbow. Oh, dear! look at
me in the glass! and my hair! Annybody'd swear I'd been drinkin'. I won't
let Pole look at me. That'd cure 'm. And he must let me have money,
because I don't care for 'cumulations. Not now, when there's no young--no
garls and a precious boy, who'd say, when I'm gone, 'Bless her' Oh! 'Poor
thing! Bless--' Oh! Augh!" A note of Sorrow's own was fetched; and the
next instant, with a figure of dignity, the afflicted woman observed:
"There's seven bottles of my Porrt, and there's eleven of champagne, and
some comut clar't I shall write where ut's to be sent. And, if you
please, look to the packing; for bits o' glass and a red stain's not like
your precious hope when you're undoin a hamper. And that's just myself
now, and I'm a broken woman; but naver mind, nobody!"

A very formal and stiff "Good-bye," succeeding a wheezy lamentation,
concluded the speech. Casting a look at the glass, Mrs. Chump retired,
with her fingers on the ornamental piece of hair.

The door having closed on her, Wilfrid said to his sisters: "I want one
of you to come with me to town immediately. Decide which will go."

His eyes questioned Cornelia. Hers were dropped.

"I have work to do," pleaded Adela.

"An appointment? You will break it."

"No, dear, not--"

"Not exactly an appointment. Then there's nothing to break. Put on your
bonnet."

Adela slipped from the room in a spirit of miserable obedience.

"I could not possibly leave papa," said Arabella, and Wilfrid nodded his
head. His sisters knew quite well what was his business in town, but they
felt that they were at his mercy, and dared not remonstrate. Cornelia
ventured to say, "I think she should not come back to us till papa is in
a better state."

"Perhaps not," replied Wilfrid, careless how much he betrayed by his
apprehension of the person indicated.

The two returned late that night, and were met by Arabella at the gate.

"Papa has been--don't be alarmed," she began. "He is better now. But when
he heard that she was not in the house, the blood left his hands and
feet. I have had to use a falsehood. I said, 'She left word that she was
coming back to-night or to-morrow.' Then he became simply angry. Who
could have believed that the sight of him so would ever have rejoiced
me!"

Adela, worn with fatigue, sobbed, "Oh! Oh!"

"By the way, Sir Twickenham called, and wished to see you," said Arabella
curiously.

"Oh! so weary!" the fair girl ejaculated, half-dreaming that she saw
herself as she threw back her head and gazed at stars and clouds. "We met
Captain Gambier in town." Here she pinched Arabella's arm.

The latter said, "Where?"

"In a miserable street, where he looked like a peacock in a quagmire."

Arabella entreated Wilfrid to be careful in his management of their
father. "Pray, do not thwart him. He has been anxious to know where you
have gone. He--he thinks you have conducted Mrs. Chump, and will bring
her back. I did not say it--I merely let him think so."

She added presently, "He has spoken of money."

"Yes?" went Adela, in a low breath.

"Cornelia imagines that--that we--he is perhaps in--in want of it.
Merchants are, sometimes."

"Did Sir Twickenham say he would call to-morrow?" asked Adela.

"He said that most probably he would."

Wilfrid had been silent. As he entered the house, Mr. Pole's bedroom-bell
rang, and word came that he was to go to his father. As soon as the
sisters were alone, Adela groaned: "We have been hunting that girl all
day in vile neighbourhoods. Wilfrid has not spoken more than a dozen
sentences. I have had to dine on buns and hideous soup. I am half-dead
with the smell of cabs. Oh! if ever I am poor it will kill me. That damp
hay and close musty life are too intolerable! Yes! You see I care for
what I eat. I seem to be growing an animal. And Wilfrid is going to drag
me over the same course to-morrow, if you don't prevent him. I would not
mind, only it is absolutely necessary that I should see Sir Twickenham."

She gave a reason why, which appeared to Arabella so cogent that she said
at once: "If Cornelia does not take your place I will."

The kiss of thanks given by Adela was accompanied by a request for tea.
Arabella regretted that she had sent the servants to bed.

"To bed!" cried her sister. "But they are the masters, not we! Really, if
life were a round of sensual pleasure, I think our servants might
congratulate themselves."

Arabella affected to show that they had their troubles; but her statement
made it clear that the servants of Brookfield were peculiarly favoured
servants, as it was their mistress's pride to make them. Eventually Adela
consented to drink some sparkling light wine; and being thirsty she drank
eagerly, and her tongue was loosed, insomuch that she talked of things as
one who had never been a blessed inhabitant of the kingdom of Fine
Shades. She spoke of 'Cornelia's chances;' of 'Wilfrid's headstrong
infatuation--or worse;' and of 'Papa's position,' remarking that she
could both laugh and cry.

Arabella, glad to see her refreshed, was pained by her rampant tone; and
when Adela, who had fallen into one of her reflective 'long-shot' moods,
chanced to say, "What a number of different beings there are in the
world!" her reply was, "I was just then thinking we are all less unlike
than we suppose."

"Oh, my goodness!" cried Adela. "What! am I at all--at all--in the
remotest degree--like that creature we have got rid of?"

The negative was not decisively enunciated or immediate; that is, it did
not come with the vehemence and volume that could alone have satisfied
Adela's expectation.

The "We are all of one family" was an offensive truism, of which Adela
might justly complain.

That night the ladies received their orders from Wilfrid--they were to
express no alarm before their father as to the state of his health, or to
treat him ostensibly as an invalid; they were to marvel publicly at Mrs.
Chump's continued absence, and a letter requesting her to return was to
be written. At the sign of an expostulation, Wilfrid smote them down by
saying that the old man's life hung on a thread, and it was for them to
cut it or not.




CHAPTER XXXIV

Lady Charlotte was too late for Emilia, when she went forth to her to
speak for Wilfrid. She found the youth Braintop resting heavily against a
tree, muttering to himself that he had no notion where he was, as an
excuse for his stationary posture, while the person he presumed he should
have detained was being borne away. Near him a scrap of paper lay on the
ground, struck out of darkness by long slips of light from the upper
windows. Thinking this might be something purposely dropped, she took
possession of it; but a glance subsequently showed her that the writing
was too fervid for a female hand. "Or does the girl write in that way?"
she thought. She soon decided that it was Wilfrid who had undone her work
in the line of thirsty love-speech. "How can a little fool read them and
not believe any lie that he may tell!" she cried to herself. She chose to
say contemptuously: "It's like a child proclaiming he is hungry." That it
was couched in bad taste she positively conceived--taking the paper up
again and again to correct her memory. The termination, "Your lover,"
appeared to her, if not laughable, revolting. She was uncertain in her
sentiments at this point.

Was it amusing? or simply execrable? Some charity for the unhappy
document Lady Charlotte found when she could say: "I suppose this is the
general run of the kind of again." "Was it?" she reflected; and drank at
the words again. "No," she came to think; "men don't commonly write as he
does, whoever wrote this." She had no doubt that it was Wilfrid. By fits
her wrath was directed against him. "It's villany," she said. But more
and more frequently a crouching abject longing to call the words her
own--to have them poured into her heart and brain--desire for the
intoxication of the naked speech of love usurped her spirit of pride,
until she read with envious tears, half loathing herself, but fascinated
and subdued: "Mine! my angel! You will see me to-morrow.--Your Lover."

Of jealousy she felt very little--her chief thought coming like a wave
over her: "Here is a man that can love!"

She was a woman of chaste blood, which spoke to her as shyly as a girl's,
now that it was in tumult: so indeed that, pressing her heart, she
thought youth to have come back, and feasted on the exultation we have
when, at an odd hour, we fancy we have cheated time. The sensation of
youth and strength seemed to set a seal of lawfulness and naturalness,
hitherto wanting, on her feeling for Wilfrid. "I can help him," she
thought. "I know where he fails, and what he can do. I can give him
position, and be worth as much as any woman can be to a man." Thus she
justified the direction taken by the new force in her.

Two days later Wilfrid received a letter from Lady Charlotte, saying that
she, with a chaperon, had started to join her brother at the
yacht-station, according to appointment. Amazed and utterly discomfited,
he looked about for an escape; but his father, whose plea of sickness had
kept him from pursuing Emilia, petulantly insisted that he should go down
to Lady Charlotte. Adela was ready to go. There were numbers either going
or now on the spot, and the net was around him. Cornelia held back,
declaring that her place was by her father's side. Fine Shades were still
too dominant at Brookfield for anyone to tell her why she stayed.

With anguish so deep that he could not act indifference, Wilfrid went on
his miserable expedition--first setting a watch over Mr. Pericles, the
which, in connection with the electric telegraph, was to enable him to
join that gentleman speedily, whithersoever he might journey. He was not
one to be deceived by the Greek's mask in running down daily to
Brookfield. A manoeuvre like that was poor; and besides, he had seen the
sallow eyes give a twinkle more than once.

Now, on the Besworth night, Georgiana Ford had studied her brother
Merthyr's face when Emilia's voice called for Wilfrid. Her heart was
touched; and, in the midst of some little invidious wonder at the power
of a girl to throw her attraction upon such a man, she thought, as she
hoped, that probably it was due to the girl's Italian blood. Merthyr was
not unwilling to speak of her, and say what he feared and desired for
Emilia's sake; and Georgiana read, by this mark of confidence, how
sincerely she was loved and trusted by him. "One never can have more than
half of a man's heart," she thought--adding, "It's our duty to deserve
that, nevertheless."

She was mystified. Say that Merthyr loved a girl, whom he certainly
distinguished with some visible affection, what sort of man must he be
that was preferred to Merthyr? And this set Georgiana at work thinking of
Wilfrid. "He has at times the air of a student. He is one who trusts his
own light too exclusively. Is he godless?" She concluded: "He is a
soldier, and an officer with brains--a good class:" Rare also.
Altogether, though Emilia did not elevate herself in this lady's mind by
choosing Wilfrid when she might have had Merthyr, the rivalry of the two
men helped to dignify the one of whom she thought least. Might she have
had Merthyr? Georgiana would not believe it--that is to say, she shut the
doors and shot the bolts, the knocking outside went on.

Her brother had told her the whole circumstances of Emilia's life and
position. When he said, "Do what you can for her," she knew that it was
not the common empty phrase. Young as she was, simple in habits, clear in
mind, open in all practices of daily life, she was no sooner brought into
an active course than astuteness and impetuosity combined wonderfully in
her. She did not tell Merthyr that she had done anything to discover
Emilia, and only betrayed that she was moving at all in a little
conversation they had about a meeting at the house of his friend Marini,
an Italian exile.

"Possibly Belloni goes there," said Merthyr. "I wonder whether Marini
knows anything of him. They have a meeting every other night."

Georgiana replied: "He went there and took his daughter the night after
we were at Besworth. He took her to be sworn in."

"Still that old folly of Marini's!" cried Merthyr, almost wrathfully. He
had some of the English objection to the mixing-up of women in political
matters.

Georgiana instantly addressed herself to it: "He thinks that the country
must be saved by its women as well as its men; and if they have not
brains and steadfast devotion, he concludes that the country will not be
saved. But he gives them their share of the work; and, dearest, has he
had reason to repent it?"

"No," Merthyr was forced to admit--taking shelter in his antipathy to the
administration of an oath to women. And consider that this is a girl!"

"The oaths of girls are sometimes more binding on them than the oaths of
women."

"True, it affects their imaginations vividly; but it seems childish. Does
she have to kiss a sword and a book?"

Merthyr made a gesture like a shrug, with a desponding grimace.

"You know," answered Georgiana, smiling, "that I was excused any formula,
by special exemption. I have no idea of what is done. Water, salt, white
thorns, and other Carbonaro mysteries may be in use or not: I think no
worse of the cause, whatever is done."

"I love the cause," said Merthyr. "I dislike this sort of conspiratorial
masque Marini and his Chief indulge in. I believe it sustains them, and
there's its only use."

"I," said Georgiana, "love the cause only from association with it; but
in my opinion Marini is right. He deals with young and fervent minds,
that require a ceremony to keep them fast--yes, dear, and women more than
others do. After that, they cease to have to rely upon themselves--a
reliance their good instinct teaches them is frail. There, now; have I
put my sex low enough?"

She slid her head against her brother's shoulder. If he had ever met a
man worthy of her, Merthyr would have sighed to feel that all her
precious love was his own.

"Is there any likelihood that Belloni will be there tonight?" he asked.

She shook her head. "He has not been there since. He went for that
purpose."

"Perhaps Marini is right, after all," said Merthyr, smiling.

Georgiana knew what he meant, and looked at him fondly.

"But I have never bound you to an oath," he resumed, in the same tone.

"I dare say you consider me a little different from most," said
Georgiana. She had as small reserve with her brother as vanity, and could
even tell him what she thought of her own worth without depreciating it
after the fashion of chartered hypocrites.

Mr. Powys wrote to Marini to procure him an interview with Belloni as
early as possible, and then he and Georgiana went down to Lady Charlotte.

Letters from Adela kept the Brookfield public informed of the doings on
board the yacht. Before leaving home, Wilfrid with Arabella's concurrence
certainly--at her instigation, as he thought--had led his father to
imagine, on tolerably good grounds, that Mrs. Chump had quitted
Brookfield to make purchases for her excursion on lively waters, and was
then awaiting him at the appointed station. One of the old man's
intermittent nervous fits had frightened them into the quasi-fabrication
of this little innocent tale. The doctor's words were that Mr. Pole was
to be crossed in nothing--"Not even if it should appear to be of imminent
necessity that I should see him, and he refuses." The man of science
stated that the malady originated in some long continued pressure of
secret apprehension. Both Wilfrid and Arabella conceived that persuasion
alone was wanted to send Mrs. Chump flying to the yacht; so they had less
compunction in saying, "She is there."

And here began a terrible trial for the children of Nine Shades. To save
a father they had to lie grievously--to continue the lie from day to
day--to turn it from a lie extensive and inappreciable to the lie minute
and absolute. Then, to get a particle of truth out of this monstrous lie,
they had to petition in utter humiliation the woman they had scorned,
that she would return among them and consider their house her own. No
answer came from Mrs. Chump; and as each day passed, the querulous
invalid, still painfully acting the man in health, had to be fed with
fresh lies; until at last, writing of one of the scenes in Brookfield,
Arabella put down the word in all its unblessed aboriginal bluntness, and
did not ask herself whether she shrank from it. "Lies!" she wrote. "What
has happened to Bella?" thought Adela, in pure wonder. Salt-air and
dazzling society kept all idea of penance from this vivacious young
person. It was queer that Sit Twickenham should be at the seaside,
instead of at Brookfield, wooing; but a man's physical condition should
be an excuse for any intermission of attentions. "Now that I know him
better," wrote Adela, "I think him the pink of chivalry; and of this I am
sure I can convince you, Bella, C. will be blessed indeed; for a delicate
nature in a man of the world is a treasure. He has a beautiful little
vessel of his own sailing beside us."

Arabella was critic enough to smile at this last. On the whole she was
passably content for the moment, in a severe fashion, save to feel
herself the dreadful lying engine and fruitlessly abject person that she
had become.

We imagine that when souls have had a fall, they immediately look up and
contrast their present with their preceding position. This does not
occur. The lower their fall, the less, generally, their despair, for
despair is a business of the Will, and when they come heavily upon their
humanity, they get something of the practical seriousness of nature. If
they fall very low, the shock and the sense that they are still on their
feet make them singularly earnest to set about the plain plan of
existence--getting air for their lungs and elbow-room. Contrast, that
mother of melancholy, comes when they are some way advanced upon the
upward scale. The Poles did not look up to their lost height, but merely
exerted their faculties to go forward; and great as their ambition had
been in them, now that it was suddenly blown to pieces, they did not sit
and weep, but strove in a stunned way to work ahead. The truth is, that
we rarely indulge in melancholy until we can take it as a luxury: little
people never do, and they, when we have not put them on their guard, are
humankind naked.

The yachting excursions were depicted vividly by Adela, and were
addressed as a sort of reproach to the lugubrious letters of her sister.
She said pointedly once: "Really, if we are to be miserable, I turn
Catholic and go into a convent." The strange thing was that Arabella
imagined her letters to be rather of a cheerful character. She related
the daily events at Brookfield:--the change in her father's soups, and
his remarks on them, and which he preferred; his fight with his medicine,
and declaration that he was as sound as any man on shore; the health of
the servants; Mr. Marter the curate's call with a Gregorian chant; doubts
of his orthodoxy; Cornelia's lonely walks and singular appetite; the
bills, and so forth--ending, "What is to be said further of her?"

In return, Adela's delight was to date each day from a different port, to
which, catching the wind, the party had sailed, and there slept. The
ladies were under the protecting wing of the Hon. Mrs. Bayruffle, a
smooth woman of the world. "You think she must have sinned in her time,
but are certain it will never be known," wrote Adela. "I do confess, kind
as she is, she does me much harm; for when she is near me I begin to
think that Society is everything. Her tact is prodigious; it is never
seen--only felt. I cannot describe her influence; yet it leads to
nothing. I cannot absolutely respect her; but I know I shall miss her
acutely when we part. What charm does she possess? I call her the Hon.
Mrs. Heathen--Captain G., the Hon. Mrs. Balm. I know you hate nicknames.
Be merciful to people yachting. What are we to do? I would look through a
telescope all day and calculate the number of gulls and gannets we see;
but I am not so old as Sir T., and that occupation could not absorb me. I
begin to understand Lady Charlotte and her liking for Mr. Powys better.
He is ready to play or be serious, as you please; but in either case
'Merthyr is never a buffoon nor a parson'--Lady C. remarked this morning;
and that describes him, if it were not for the detestable fling at the
clergy, which she never misses. It seems in her blood to think that all
priests are hypocrites. What a little boat to be in on a stormy sea,
Bella! She appears to have no concern about it. Whether she adores
Wilfrid or not I do not pretend to guess. She snubs him--a thing he would
bear from nobody but her. I do believe he feels flattered by it. He is
chiefly attentive to Miss Ford, whom I like and do not like, and like and
do not like--but do like. She is utterly cold, and has not an affection
on earth. Sir T.--I have not a dictionary--calls her a fair clictic, I
think. (Let even Cornelia read hard, or woe to her in their hours of
privacy!--his vocabulary grows distressingly rich the more you know him.
I am not uneducated, but he introduces me to words that seem monsters; I
must pretend to know them intimately.) Well, whether a clictic or
not--and pray, burn this letter, lest I should not have the word
correct--she has the air of a pale young princess above any creature I
have seen in the world. I know it has struck Wilfred also; my darling and
I are ever twins in sentiment. He converses with Miss Ford a great deal.
Lady C. is peculiarly civil to Captain G. We scud along, and are
becalmed. 'Having no will of our own, we have no knowledge of contrary
winds,' as Mr. Powys says.--The word is 'eclictic,' I find. I ventured on
it, and it was repeated; and I heard that I had missed a syllable. Ask C.
to look it out--I mean, to tell me they mining on a little slip of paper
in your next. I would buy a pocket-dictionary at one of the ports, but
you are never alone. "Aesthetic," we know. Mr. Barrett used to be of
service for this sort of thing. I admit I am inferior to Mrs. Bayruffle,
who, if men talk difficult words in her presence, holds her chin above
the conversation, and seems to shame them. I love to learn--I love the
humility of learning. And there is something divine in the idea of a
teacher. I listen to Sir T. on Parliament and parties, and chide myself
if my interest flags. His algebra-puzzles, or Euclid-puzzles in
figures--sometimes about sheep-boys and sheep, and hurdles or geese, oxen
or anything--are delicious: he quite masters the conversation with them.
I disagree with Mrs. Bayruffle when she complains that they are posts in
the way of speech. There is a use in all men; and though she is an
acknowledged tactician materially, she cannot see she has in Sir T. a
quality necessary to intellectual conversation, if she knew how to employ
it."

Remarks of this nature read very oddly to Arabella, insomuch that she
would question herself at times, in forced seriousness, whether she had
dreamed that an evil had befallen Brookfield, or whether Adela were
forgetting that it had, in a dream. One day she enclosed a letter from
her father to Mrs. Chump. Adela did not forge a reply; but she had the
audacity to give the words of a message from the woman (in which Mrs.
Chump was supposed to say that she could not write while she was being
tossed about.) "We must carry it on," Adela told her sister, with
horrible bluntness. The message savoured strongly of Mrs. Chump. It was
wickedly clever. Arabella resolved to put it by; but morning after
morning she saw her father's anxiety for the reply mounting to a pitch of
fever. She consulted with Cornelia, who said, "No; never do such a
thing!" and subsequently, with a fainter firmness, repeated the negative
monosyllable. Arabella, in her wretchedness, became endued with
remorseless discernment. "It means that Cornelia would never do it
herself," she thought; and, comforted haply by reflecting that for their
common good she could do it, she did it. She repeated an Irish message.
Her father calmed immediately, making her speak it over twice. He smiled,
and blinked his bird's-eyes pleasurably: "Ah! that's Martha," he said,
and fell into a state of comparative repose. For some hours a sensation
of bubbling hot-water remained about the sera of Arabella. Happily Mrs.
Chump in person did not write.

A correspondence now commenced between the fictitious Mrs. Chump on sea
and Mr. Pole, dyspeptic, in his armchair. Arabella took the doctor aside
to ask him, if in a hypothetical instance, it would really be dangerous
to thwart or irritate her father. She asked the curate if he deemed it
wicked to speak falsely to an invalid for the invalid's benefit. The
spiritual and bodily doctors agreed that occasion altered and necessity
justified certain acts. So far there was comfort. But the task of
assisting in this correspondence, and yet more, the contemplation of
Adela's growing delight in it (she would now use Irish words, vulgar
words, words expressive of physical facts; airing her natural wit in
Irish as if she had found a new weapon), became a bitter strain on
Arabella's mind, and she was compelled to make Cornelia take her share of
the burden. "But I cannot conceal--I cannot feign," said Cornelia.
Arabella looked at her, whom she knew to be feigning, thinking, "Must I
lose my high esteem of both my sisters?" Action alone saved her from
denuding herself of this garment."

"That night!" was now the allusion to the scene at Besworth. It stood for
all the misery they suffered; nor could they see that they had since made
any of their own.

A letter with the Dover postmark brought exciting news.

A debate had been held on board the yacht. Wilfrid and Lady Charlotte
gave their votes for the Devon coast. All were ready to be off, when Miss
Ford received a telegram from shore, and said, "No; it must be Dover."
Now, Mrs. Chump's villa was on the Devon coast. Lady Charlotte had talked
to Wilfrid about her, and in the simplest language had said that she must
be got on board. This was the reason of their deciding for Devon. But
Georgiana stood for Dover; thither Merthyr said that he must go, whether
be sailed or went on land. By a simultaneous reading of Georgiana's eyes,
both Wilfrid and Lady Charlotte saw what was meant by her decision.
Wilfrid at once affected to give way, half-protestingly. "And this,"
wrote Adela, "taught me that he was well pleased to abandon the West for
the East. Lady C. favoured him with a look such as I could not have
believed I should ever behold off the stage. There was a perfect dagger
in her eyes. She fought against Dover: do men feel such compliments as
these? They are the only true ones! She called the captain to witness
that the wind was not for Dover she called the mate: she was really
eloquent--yes, and handsome. I think Wilfrid thought so; or the reason
far the opposition to Dover impressed my brother. I like him to be made
to look foolish, for then he retrieves his character so
dashingly--always. His face was red, and he seemed undecided--was--until
one taunt (it must have been a taunt), roused him up. They exchanged
about six sentences--these two. I cannot remember them, unhappily; but
for neatness and irony, never was anything so delicious heard. They came
sharp as fencing-thrusts; and you could really believe, if you liked,
that they were merely stating grounds for diverse opinions. Of course we
sailed East, reaching Dover at ten; and the story is this--I knew Emilia
was in it:--Tracy Runningbrook had been stationed at Dover ten days by
Miss Ford, to intercept Emilia's father, if he should be found taking her
to the Continent by that route. He waited, and met them at last on the
Esplanade. He telegraphed to Miss Ford and a Signor Marini (we were wrong
in not adding illustrious exiles to our list), while he invited them to
dine, and detained them till the steamboat was starting; and Signor
Marini came down by rail in a great hurry, and would not let Emilia be
taken away. There was a quarrel; but, by some mysterious power that he
possesses, this Signor Marini actually prevented the father from taking
his child. Mysterious? But is anything more mysterious than Emilia's
influence? I cannot forget what she was ere we trained her; and when I
think that we seem to be all--all who come near her--connected with her
fortunes! Explain it if you can. I know it is not her singing; I know it
is not her looks. Captivations she does not deal in. Is it the magic of
indifference? No; for then some one whom you know and who longs to kiss
her bella Bella now would be dangerous! She is very little so, believe
me!

"Emilia is (am I chronicling a princess?)--she is in London with Signor
Marini; and Wilfrid has not seen her. Lady Charlotte managed to get the
first boat full, and pushed off as he was about to descend. I pitied his
poor trembling hand I went on shore in the second boat with him. We did
not find the others for an hour, when we heard that Emilia had gone with
Signor M. The next day, whom should we sea but Mr. Pericles. He (I have
never seen him so civil)--he shook Wilfrid by the hand almost like an
Englishman; and Wilfrid too, though he detests him, was civil to him, and
even laughed when he said: 'Here it is dull; ze Continent for a week. I
follow Philomela--ze nightingales.' I was just going to say, 'Well then,
you are running away from one.' Wilfrid pressed my fingers, and taught me
to be still; and I did not know why till I reflected. Poor Mr. Pericles,
seeing him friendly for the first time, rubbed his hands and it was most
painful to me to see him shake hands with Wilfrid again and again, till
he was on board the vessel chuckling. Wilfrid suddenly laughed with all
his might--a cruel laugh; and Mr. Pericles tried to be as loud, but
commenced coughing and tapping his chest, to explain that his intention
was good. Bella! the passion of love must be judged by the person who
inspires it; and I cannot even go so far as to feel pity for Wilfrid if
he has stooped to the humiliation of--there is another way of regarding
it, know. Let him be sincere and noble; but not his own victim. He
scarcely holds up his head. We are now for Devon. Tracy is with us; and
we never did a wiser thing than when we decided to patronize poets. If
kept in order--under--they are the aristocracy of light
conversationalists. Adieu! We speed for beautiful Devon. 'Me love to
Pole, and I'm just,' etc. That will do this time; next, she will speak
herself. That I should wish it! But the world is full of change, as I
begin to learn. What will ensue?"




CHAPTER XXXV

When Mrs. Chump had turned her back on Brookfield, the feelings of the
outcast woman were too deep for much distinctly acrimonious sensation
toward the ladies; but their letters soon lifted and revived her, until,
being in a proper condition of prickly wrath, she sat down to compose a
reply that should bury them under a mountain of shame. The point,
however, was to transfer this mountain from her bosom, which laboured
heavily beneath it, to their heads. Nothing could appear simpler. Here is
the mountain; the heads are yonder. Accordingly, she prepared to
commence. In a moment the difficulty yawned monstrous. For the mountain
she felt was not a mountain of shame; yet that was the character of
mountain she wished to cast. If she crushed them, her reputation as a
forgiving soul might suffer: she could not pardon without seeing them
abased. Thus shaken at starting, she found herself writing: "I know that
your father has been hearing tales told of me, or he would have written,
and he has not; so you shall never see me, not if you cried to me from
the next world--the hot part."

Perusing this, it was too tremendous. "Oh, that's awful!" she said,
getting her body a little away from the manuscript. "Ye couldn't curse
much louder."

A fresh trial found her again rounding the fact that Mr. Pole had not
written to her, and again flying into consequent angers. She had some dim
conception of the sculpture of an offended Goddess. "I look so," she said
before the glass "I'm above ye, and ye can't hurt me, and don't come
anigh me: but here's a cheque--and may ye be haunted in your dreams!--but
here's a cheque."

There was pain in her heart, for she had felt faith in Mr. Pole's
affection for her. "And he said," she cried out in her lonely room--"he
said, 'Martha, ye've onnly to come and be known to 'm, and then they'll
take to the ideea.' And wasn't I a patient creature! And it's Pole that's
turned--Pole!"

Varied with the frequent 'Oh!' and 'Augh!' these dramatic monologues
occupied her time while the yacht was sailing for her Devon bay.

At last the thought struck her that she would send for
Braintop--telegraphing that expenses would be paid, and that he must come
with a good quill. "It goes faster," she whispered, suggesting the
pent-up torrent, as it were, of blackest ink in her breast that there was
to pour forth. A very cunning postscript to the telegram brought Braintop
almost as quick to her as a return message. It was merely 'Little
Belloni.'

She had forgotten this piece of artifice: but when she saw him start at
the opening of the door, keeping a sheepish watch in that direction,
"By'n-by," she said, with a nod; and shortly afterward unfolded her
object in summoning him from his London labours: "A widde-woman ought to
get marrud, Mr. Braintop, if onnly to have a husband to write letters for
'rr. Now, that's a task! But sup to-night, and mind ye say yer prayers
before gettin' into bed; and no tryin' to flatter your Maker with your
knees cuddled up to your chin under the counterpane. I do 't myself
sometimes, and I know one prayer out of bed's worrth ten of 'm in. Then
I'll pray too; and mayhap we'll get permission and help to write our
letter to-morrow, though Sunday, as ye say."

On the morrow Braintop's spirits were low, he having perceived that the
'Little Belloni' postscript had been but an Irish chuckle and nudge in
his ribs, by way of sly insinuation or reminder. He looked out on the
sea, and sighed to be under certain white sails visible in the offing.
Mrs. Chump had received by the morning's post another letter from
Arabella, enclosing one for Wilfrid. A dim sense of approaching mastery,
and that she might soon be melted, combined with the continued silence of
Mr. Pole to make her feel yet more spiteful. She displayed no commendable
cunning when, to sharpen and fortify Braintop's wits, she plumped him at
breakfast with all things tempting to the appetite of man. "I'll help ye
to 'rr," she said from time to time, finding that no encouragement made
him potent in speech.

Fronting the sea a desk was laid open. On it were the quills faithfully
brought down by Braintop.

"Pole's own quills," she said, having fixed Braintop in this official
seat, while she took hers at a station half-commanding the young clerk's
face. The mighty breakfast had given Braintop intolerable desire to
stretch his limbs by the sounding shore, and enjoy life in semi-oblivion.
He cheered himself with the reflection that there was only one letter to
write, so he remarked politely that he was at his hostess's disposal.
Thereat Mrs. Chump questioned him closely whether Mr. Pole had spoken her
name aloud; and whether he did it somehow, now and then by accident, and
whether he had looked worse of late. Braintop answered the latter
question first, assuring her that Mr. Pole was improving.

"Then there's no marcy from me," said Mrs. Chump; and immediately
discharged an exclamatory narrative of her recent troubles, and the
breach between herself and Brookfield, at Braintop's ears. This done, she
told him that he was there to write the reply to the letters of the
ladies, in her name. "Begin," she said. "Ye've got head enough to guess
my feelin's. I'm invited, and I won't go--till I'm fetched. But don't say
that. That's their guess ye know. 'And I don't care for ye enough to be
angry at all, but it's pity I feel at a parcel of fine garls'--so on, Mr.
Braintop."

The perplexities of epistolary correspondence were assuming the like
proportions to the recruited secretary that they had worn to Mrs. Chump.
Steadily watching his countenance; she jogged him thus: "As if ye
couldn't help ut, ye know, ye begin. Jest like wakin' in the mornin'
after dancin' all night. Ye make the garls seem to hear me seemin' to
say--Oooo! I was so comfortable before your disturbin' me with your
horrud voices. Ye understand, Mr. Braintop? 'I'm in bed, and you're a
cold bath.' Begin like that, ye know. 'Here's clover, and you're
nettles.' D'ye see? Here from my glass o' good Porrt to your tumbler of
horrud acud vin'gar.' Bless the boy! he don't begin."

She stamped her foot. Braintop, in desperation, made a plunge at the
paper. Looking over his shoulder in a delighted eagerness, she suddenly
gave it a scornful push. "'Dear!'" she exclaimed. "You're dearin' them,
absurd young man I'm not the woman to I dear 'em--not at the starrt! I'm
indignant--I'm hurrt. I come round to the 'dear' by-and-by, after I have
whipped each of the proud sluts, and their brother Mr. Wilfrid, just as
if by accident. Ye'll promus to forget avery secret I tell ye; but our
way is always to pretend to believe the men can't help themselves. So the
men look like fools, ye sly laughin' fella! and the women horrud scheming
spiders. Now, away, with ye, and no dearin'."

The Sunday-bells sounded mockingly in Braintop's ears, appearing to ask
him how he liked his holiday; and the white sails on the horizon line
have seldom taunted prisoner more. He spread out another sheet of
notepaper and wrote "My," and there he stopped.

Mrs. Chump was again at his elbow. "But, they aren't 'my,' she
remonstrated, "when I've nothin' to do with 'm. And a 'my' has a 'dear'
to 't always. Ye're not awake, Mr. Braintop; try again."

"Shall I begin formally, 'Mrs. Chump presents her compliments,' ma'am?"
said Braintop stiffly.

"And I stick myself up on a post, and talk like a parrot, sir! Don't you
see, I'm familiar, and I'm woundud? Go along; try again."

Braintop's next effort was, "Ladies."

"But they don't behave to me like ladus; and it's against my conscience
to call 'em!" said Mrs. Chump, with resolution.

Braintop wrote down "Women," in the very irony of disgust.

"And avery one of 'em unmarred garls!" exclaimed Mrs. Chump, throwing up
her hands. "Mr. Braintop! Mr. Braintop! ye're next to an ejut!"

Braintop threw dawn the pen. "I really do not know what to say," he
remarked, rising in distress.

"I naver had such a desire to shake anny man in all my life," said Mrs.
Chump, dropping to her chair.

The posture of affairs was chimed to by the monotonous bell. After
listening to it for some minutes, Mrs. Chump was struck with a notion
that Braintop's sinfulness in working on a Sunday, or else the shortness
of the prayer he had put up to gain absolution, was the cause of his lack
of ready wit. Hearing that he had gloves, she told him to go to church,
listen devoutly, and return to luncheon. Braintop departed, with a
sensation of relief in the anticipation of a sermon, quite new to him.
When he next made his bow to his hostess, he was greeted by a pleasant
sparkle of refreshments. Mrs. Chump herself primed him with Sherry,
thinking in the cunning of her heart that it might haply help the
inspiration derived from his devotional exercise. After this, pen and
paper were again produced.

"Well, now, Mr. Braintop, and what have ye thought of?" said Mrs. Chump,
encouragingly.

Braintop thought rapidly over what he might possibly have been thinking
of; and having put a file of ideas into the past, said, with the air of a
man who delicately suggests a subtlety: "It has struck me, ma'am, that
perhaps 'Girls' might begin very well. To be sure 'Dear girls' is the
best, if you would consent to it."

"Take another glass of wine, Mr. Braintop," Mrs. Chump nodded. "Ye're
nearer to ut now. 'Garls' is what they are, at all events. But don't you
see, my dear your man, it isn't the real thing we want so much as a sort
of a proud beginnin', shorrt of slappin' their faces. Think of dinner.
Furrst soup; that prepares ye for what's comin'. Then fish, which is on
the road to meat, dye see?--we pepper 'em. Then joint, Mr. Braintop--out
we burrst: (Oh, and what ins'lent hussies ye've been to me, and yell
naver see annything of me but my back!) Then the sweets,--But I'm a
forgivin' woman, and a Christian in the bargain, ye ungrateful minxes;
and if ye really are sorrowful! And there, Mr. Braintop, ye've got it all
laid out as flat as a pancake."

Mrs. Chump gave the motion of a lightning scrawl of the pen. Braintop
looked at the paper, which now appeared to recede from his eyes, and
flourish like a descending kite. The nature of the task he had undertaken
became mountainous in his imagination, till at last he fixed his forehead
in his thumbs and fingers, and resolutely counted a number of meaningless
words one hundred times. As this was the attitude of a severe student,
Mrs. Chump remained in expectation. Aware of the fearful confidence he
had excited in her, Braintop fell upon a fresh hundred, with variations.

"The truth is, I think better in church," he said, disclosing at last as
ingenuous a face as he could assume. He scarcely ventured to hope for a
second dismissal.

To his joy, Mrs. Chump responded with a sigh: "There, go again; and the
Lord forgive ye for directin' your mind to temporal matters when ye're
there! It's none of my doin', remember that; and don't be tryin' to make
me a partic'pator in your wickudness."

"This is so difficult, ma'am, because you won't begin with Dear," he
observed snappishly, as he was retiring.

"Of coorse it's difficult if it bothers me," retorted Mrs. Chump, divided
between that view of the case and contempt of Braintop for being on her
own level.

"Do you see, we are not to say 'Dear' anything, or 'Ladies,' or--in
short, really, if you come to think, ma'am!"

"Is that a woman's business, Mr. Braintop?" said Mrs. Chump, as from a
height; and the youth retired in humiliation.

Braintop was not destitute of the ambition of his time of life, and
yearned to be what he believed himself--something better than a clerk. If
he had put forth no effort to compose Mrs. Chump's letter, he would not
have felt that he was the partner of her stupidity; but he had
thoughtlessly attempted the impossible thing, and now, contemplating his
utter failure, he was in so low a state of mind that he would have taken
pen and written himself down, with ordinary honesty, good-for-nothing. He
returned to his task, and found the dinner spread. Mrs. Chump gave him
champagne, and drank to him, requesting him to challenge her. "We won't
be beaten," she said; and at least they dined.

The 'we' smote Braintop's swelling vanity. It signified an alliance, and
that they were yoked to a common difficulty.

"Oh! let's finish it and have it over," he remarked, with a complacent
roll in his chair.

"Naver stop a good impulse," said Mrs. Chump, herself removing the lamp
to light him.

Braintop sat in the chair of torture, and wrote flowingly, while his
taskmistress looked over him, "Ladies of Brookfield." He read it out:
"Ladies of Brookfield."

"I'll be vary happy to represent ye at the forthcomin' 'lection," Mrs.
Chump gave a continuation in his tone.

"Why, won't that do, ma'am?" Braintop asked in wonderment.

"Cap'tal for a circular, Mr. Braintop. And ye'll allow me to say that I
don't think ye've been to church at all."

This accusation containing a partial truth (that is, true if it referred
to the afternoon, but not as to the morning), it was necessary for
Braintop's self-vindication that he should feel angry. The two were very
soon recriminating, much in the manner of boy and girl shut up on a sunny
afternoon; after which they, in like manner, made it up--the fact of both
having a habit of consulting the glass, and the accident of their doing
it at the same time, causing an encounter of glances there that could
hardly fail to be succeeded by some affability. For a last effort, Mrs.
Chump laid before Braintop a prospect of advancement in his office, if he
so contrived as to write a letter that should land her in Brookfield
among a scourged, repentant, and forgiven people. That he might
understand the position, she went far modestly to reveal her weakness for
Mr. Pole. She even consented to let 'Ladies' be the opening apostrophe,
provided the word 'Young' went before it: "They'll feel that sting," she
said. Braintop stipulated that she should not look till the letter was
done; and, observing his pen travelling the lines in quick succession,
Mrs. Chump became inspired by a great but uneasy hope. She was only to be
restrained from peeping, by Braintop's petulant "Pray, ma'am!" which sent
her bouncing back to her chair, with a face upon one occasion too solemn
for Braintop's gravity. He had written himself into excellent spirits;
and happening to look up as Mrs. Chump retreated from his shoulder, the
woman's comic reverence for his occupation--the prim movement of her lips
while she repeated mutely the words she supposed he might be
penning--touched him to laughter. At once Mrs. Chump seized on the paper.
"Young ladus," she read aloud, "yours of the 2nd, the 14th, and 21st
ulto. The 'ffection I bear to your onnly remaining parent."

Her enunciation waxed slower and significantly staccato toward a pause.
The composition might undoubtedly have issued from a merchant's office,
and would have done no discredit to the establishment. When the pause
came, Braintop, half for an opinion, and to encourage progress, said,
"Yes, ma'am;" and with "There, sir!" Mrs. Chump crumpled up the paper and
flung it at him. "And there, sir!" she tossed a pen. Hearing Braintop
mutter, "Lady-like behaviour," Mrs. Chump came out in a fiery bloom. "Ye
detestable young fella! Oh, ye young deceiver! Ye cann't do the work of a
man! Oh! and here's another woman dis'pointed, and when she thought she'd
got a man to write her letters!"

Braintop rose and retorted.

"Ye're false, Mr. Braintop--ye're offensuv, sir!" said Mrs. Chump; and
Braintop instantly retired upon an expressive bow. When he was out of the
room, Mrs. Chump appealed spitefully to an audience of chairs; but when
she heard the front-door shut with a report, she jumped up in terror,
crying incredulously, "Is the young man pos'tively one? Oh! and me alone
in a rage!--" the contemplated horrors of which position set her shouting
vociferously. "Mr. Braintop!" sounded over the stairs, and "Mr.
Braintop!" into the street. The maid brought Mrs. Chump her bonnet. Night
had fallen; and nothing but the greatest anxiety to recover Braintop
would have tempted her from her house. She made half-a-dozen steps, and
then stopped to mutter, "Oh! if ye'd onnly come, I'd forgive ye--indeed I
would!"

"Well, here I am," was instantaneously answered; her waist was clasped,
and her forehead was kissed.

The madness of Braintop's libertinism petrified her.

"Ye've taken such a liberty, sir 'deed ye've forgotten yourself!"

While she was speaking; she grew confused with the thought that Braintop
had mightily altered both his voice and shape. When on the doorstep he
said; "Come out of the darkness or, upon my honour, I shall behave
worse," she recognized Wilfrid, and understood by his yachting costume in
what manner he had come. He gave her no time to think of her dignity or
her wrath. "Lady Charlotte is with me. I sleep at the hotel; but you have
no objection to receive her, have you?" This set her mind upon her best
bedroom, her linen, and the fitness of her roof to receive a title. Then,
in a partial fit of gratitude for the honour, and immense thankfulness at
being spared the task of the letter, she fell on Wilfrid's shoulder,
beginning to sob--till he, in alarm at his absurd position, suggested
that Lady Charlotte awaited a welcome. Mrs. Chump immediately flew to her
drawing-room and rang bells, appearing presently with a lamp, which she
set on a garden-pillar. Together they stood by the lamp, a spectacle to
ocean: but no Lady Charlotte drew near.




CHAPTER, XXXVI

Though Mrs. Chump and Wilfrid, as they stood by the light of the lamp,
saw no one, they themselves were seen. Lady Charlotte had arranged to
give him a moment in advance to make his peace. She had settled it with
that air of practical sense which her title made graceful to him. "I will
follow; and I dare say I can complete what you leave unfinished," she
said. Her humorous sense of the aristocratic prestige was conveyed to him
in a very taking smile. He scarcely understood why she should have
planned so decisively to bring about a reconciliation between Mrs. Chump
and his family; still, as it now chimed perfectly with his own views and
wishes, he acquiesced in her scheme, giving her at the same time credit
for more than common wisdom.

While Lady Charlotte lingered on the beach, she became aware of a figure
that hung about her; as she was moving away, a voice of one she knew well
enough asked to be directed to the house inhabited by Mrs. Chump. The
lady was more startled than it pleased her to admit to herself.

"Don't you know me?" she said, bluntly.

"You!" went Emilia's voice.

"Why on earth are you here? What brings you here? Are you alone?"
returned the lady.

Emilia did not answer.

"What extraordinary expedition are you making? But, tell me one thing:
are you here of your own accord, or at somebody else's bidding?"

Impatient at the prospect of a continuation of silences, Lady Charlotte
added, "Come with me."

Emilia seemed to be refusing.

"The appointment was made at that house, I know," said the lady; "but if
you come with me, you will see him just as readily."

At this instant, the lamp was placed on the pillar, showing Wilfrid, in
his sailor's hat and overcoat, beside the fluttering Irishwoman.

"Come, I must speak to you first," said Lady Charlotte hurriedly,
thinking that she saw Emilia's hands stretch out. "Pray, don't go into
attitudes. There he is, as you perceive; and I don't use witchcraft. Come
with me; I will send for him. Haven't you learnt by this time that
there's nothing he detests so much as a public display of the kind you're
trying to provoke?"

Emilia half comprehended her.

"He changes when he's away from me," she said, low toneless voice.

"Less than I fancied," the lady thought.

Then she told Emilia that there was really no necessity for her to whine
and be miserable; she was among friends, and so forth. The simplicity of
her manner of speech found its way to Emilia's reason quicker than her
arguments; and, in the belief that Wilfrid was speaking to Mrs. Chump on
urgent private matters (she had great awe of the word 'business'), Emilia
suffered herself to be led away. She uttered twice a little exclamation,
as she looked back, that sounded exceedingly comical to Lady Charlotte's
ears. They were the repressions of a poignant outcry. "Doggies make that
noise," thought the lady, and succeeded in feeling contemptuous.

Wilfrid, when he found that Lady Charlotte was not coming, bestowed a
remark upon her sex, and went indoors for his letter. He considered it
politic not to read it there, Mrs. Chump having grown so friendly, and
even motherly, that she might desire, out of pure affection, to share the
contents. He put it by and talked gaily, till Mrs. Chump, partly to
account for the defection of the lady, observed that she knew they had a
quarrel. She was confirmed in this idea on a note being brought in to
him, over which, before opening it, he frowned and flushed. Aware of the
treachery of his countenance, he continued doing so after his eyes had
taken in the words, though there was no special ground furnished by them
for any such exhibition. Mrs. Chump immediately, with a gaze of mightiest
tribulation, burst out: "I'll help ye; 'pon my honour, I'll help ye. Oh!
the arr'stocracy! Oh, their pride! But if I say, my dear, when I die
(which it's so horrud to think of), you'll have a share, and the
biggest--this vary cottage, and a good parrt o' the Bank property--she'll
come down at that. And if ye marry a lady of title, I'll be 's good as my
word, I will."

Wilfrid pressed her fingers. "Can you ever believe that, I have called
you a 'simmering pot of Emerald broth'?"

"My dear! annything that's lots o' words, Ye may call me," returned Mrs.
Chump, "as long as it's no name. Ye won't call me a name, will ye? Lots
o' words--it's onnly as if ye peppered me, and I sneeze, and that's all;
but a name sticks to yer back like a bit o' pinned paper. Don't call me a
name," and she wriggled pathetically.

"Yes," said Wilfrid, "I shall call you Pole."

"Oh! ye sweetest of young fellas!"

Mrs. Chump threw out her arms. She was on the point of kissing him, but
he fenced with the open letter; and learning that she might read it, she
gave a cry of joy.

"Dear W.!" she begins; and it's twice dear from a lady of title. She's
just a multiplication-table for annything she says and touches. "Dear
W.!" and the shorter time a single you the better. I'll have my joke, Mr.
Wilfrud. "Dear W.!" Bless her heart now! I seem to like her next best to
the Queen already.--"I have another plan." Ye'd better keep to the old;
but it's two paths, I suppose, to one point.--"Another plan. Come to me
at the Dolphin, where I am alone." Oh, Lord! 'Alone,' with a line under
it, Mr. Wilfrud! But there--the arr'stocracy needn't matter a bit."

"It's a very singular proceeding not the less," said Wilfrid. "Why didn't
she go to the hotel where the others are, if she wouldn't come here?"

"But the arr'stocracy, Mr. Wilfrud! And alone--alone! d'ye see? which
couldn't be among the others; becas of sweet whisperin'. 'Alone,'" Mrs.
Chump read on; "'and to-morrow I'll pay my respects to what you call your
simmering pot of Emerald broth.' Oh ye hussy! I'd say, if ye weren't a
borrn lady. And signs ut all, 'Your faithful Charlotte.' Mr. Wilfrud, I'd
give five pounds for this letter if I didn't know ye wouldn't part with
it under fifty. And 'deed I am a simmerin' pot; for she'll be a relation,
my dear! Go to 'r. I'll have your bed ready for ye here at the end of an
hour; and to-morrrow perhaps, if Lady Charlotte can spare me, I'll
condescend to see Ad'la."

Wilfrid fanned her cheek with the note, and then dropped it on her neck
and left the room. He was soon hurrying on his way to the Dolphin: midway
he stopped. "There may be a bad shot in Bella's letter," he thought.
Shop-lights were ahead: a very luminous chemist sent a green ray into the
darkness. Wilfrid fixed himself under it. "Confoundedly appropriate for a
man reading that his wife has run away from him!" he muttered, and hard
quickly plunged into matter quite as absorbing. When he had finished it
he shivered. Thus it ran:

"My beloved brother,

"I bring myself to plain words. Happy those who can trifle with human
language! Papa has at last taken us into his confidence. He has not
spoken distinctly; he did us the credit to see that it was not necessary.
If in our abyss of grief we loss delicacy, what is left?--what!

"The step he desired to take, Which We Opposed, he has anticipated, And
Must Consummate.

"Oh, Wilfrid! you see it, do you not? You comprehend me I am surf! I
should have said 'had anticipated.' How to convey to you! (but it would
be unjust to him--to ourselves--were I to say emphatically what I have
not yet a right to think). What I have hinted above is, after all;
nothing but Cornelia's conjecture, I wish I could not say confirmed by
mine. We sat with Papa two hours before any idea of his meaning dawned
upon us. He first scolded us. We both saw from this that more was to
come.

"I hope there are not many in this world to whom the thought of honour
being tied to money ever appears possible. If it is so there is wide
suffering--deep, for it, must be silent. Cornelia suggests one comfort
for them that they will think less of poverty.

"Why was Brookfield ever bought? Our old peaceful City-life--the vacant
Sundays!--my ears are haunted by their bells for Evening Service. I said
'There they go, the dowdy population of heaven!' I remember it now. It
should be almost punishment enough to be certain that of all those people
going to church, there cannot be one more miserable than we who stood at
the old window ridiculing them. They at least do not feel that everything
they hope for in human life is dependent upon one human will--the will of
a mortal weather-vane! It is the case, and it must be conciliated. There
is no half-measure--no choice. Feel that nothing you have ever dreamed of
can be a disgrace if it is undergone to forestall what positively
impends, and act immediately. I shall expect to see you in three days.
She is to have the South-west bedroom (mine), for which she expressed a
preference. Prepare every mind for the ceremony:--an old man's
infatuation--money--we submit. It will take place in town. To have the
Tinleys in the church! But this is certainly my experience, that
misfortune makes me feel more and more superior to those whom I despise.
I have even asked myself--was I so once? And, Apropos of Laura! We hear
that their evenings are occupied in performing the scene at Besworth.
They are still as distant as ever from Richford. Let me add that Albert
Tinley requested my hand in marriage yesterday. I agree with Cornelia
that this is the first palpable sign that we have sunk. Consequent upon
the natural consequences came the interview with Papa.

"Dearest, dearest Wilfrid! can you, can I, can any one of us settle--that
is, involve another life in doubt while doubt exists? Papa insists; his
argument is, 'Now, now, and no delay.' I accuse nothing but his love.
Excessive love is perilous for principle!

"You have understood me, I know, and forgiven me for writing so nakedly.
I dare not reperuse it. You must satisfy him that Lady C. has fixed a
date. Adela is incomprehensible. One day she sees a friend in Lady C.,
and again it is an enemy. Papa's immediate state of health is not
alarming. Above all things, do not let the girl come near him. Papa will
send the cheque you required."

"When?" Wilfrid burst out upon Arabella's affectionate signature. "When
will he send it? He doesn't do me the honour to mention the time. And
this is his reply to a third application!"

The truth was that Wilfrid was in dire want of tangible cash simply to
provision his yacht. The light kindled in him by this unsatisfied need
made him keen to comprehend all that Arabella's attempt at plain writing
designed to unfold.

"Good God, my father's the woman's trustee!" shaped itself in Wilfrid's
brain.

And next: "If he marries her we may all be as poor as before." That is to
say, "Honour may be saved without ruin being averted."

His immediate pressing necessity struck like a pulse through all the
chords of dismal conjecture. His heart flying about for comfort, dropped
at Emilia's feet.

"Bella's right," he said, reverting to the green page in his hand; "we
can't involve others in our scrape, whatever it may be."

He ceased on the spot to be at war with himself, as he had been for many
a day; by which he was taught to imagine that he had achieved a mental
indifference to misfortune. This lightened his spirit considerably. "So
there's an end of that," he emphasized, as the resolve took form to tell
Lady Charlotte flatly that his father was ruined, and that the son,
therefore, renounced his particular hope and aspiration.

"She will say, in the most matter-of-fact way in the world, 'Oh, very
well, that quite alters the case,'" said Wilfrid aloud, with the smallest
infusion of bitterness. Then he murmured, "Poor old governor!" and
wondered whether Emilia would come to this place according to his desire.
Love, that had lain crushed in him for the few recent days, sprang up and
gave him the thought, "She may be here now;" but, his eyes not being
satiated instantly with a sight of her, the possibility of such happiness
faded out.

"Blessed little woman!" he cried openly, ashamed to translate in tenderer
terms the soft fresh blossom of love that his fancy conjured forth at the
recollection of her. He pictured to himself hopefully, moreover, that she
would be shy when they met. A contradictory vision of her eyes lifted
hungry for his first words, or the pressure of his arm displeased him
slightly. It occurred to him that they would be characterized as a
singular couple. To combat this he drew around him all the mysteries of
sentiment that had issued from her voice and her eyes. She had made Earth
lovely to him and heaven human. She--what a grief for ever that her
origin should be what it was! For this reason:--lovers must live like
ordinary people outwardly; and say, ye Fates, how had she been educated
to direct a gentlemen's household?

"I can't exist on potatoes," he pronounced humorously.

But when his thoughts began to dwell with fitting seriousness on the
woman-of-the-world tone to be expected from Lady Charlotte, he folded the
mental image of Emilia closely to his breast, and framed a misty idea of
a little lighted cottage wherein she sat singing to herself while he was
campaigning. "Two or three fellows--Lumley and Fredericks--shall see
her," he thought. The rest of his brother officers were not even to know
that he was married.

His yacht was lying in a strip of moonlight near Sir Twickenham's
companion yawl. He gave one glance at it as at a history finished, and
sent up his name to Lady Charlotte.

"Ah! you haven't brought the good old dame with you?" she said, rising to
meet him. "I thought it better not to see her to-night."

He acquiesced, mentioning the lateness of the hour, and adding, "You are
alone?"

She stared, and let fall "Certainly," and then laughed. "I had forgotten
your regard for the proprieties. I have just sent my maid for Georgiana;
she will sleep here. I preferred to come here, because those people at
the hotel tire me; and, besides, I said I should sleep at the villa, and
I never go back to people who don't expect me."

Wilfrid looked about the room perplexed, and almost suspicious because of
his unexplained perplexity. Her (as he deemed it--not much above the
level of Mrs. Chump in that respect) aristocratic indifference to opinion
and conventional social observances would have pleased him by daylight,
but it fretted him now.

Lady Charlotte's maid came in to say that Miss Ford would join her. The
maid was dismissed to her bed. "There's nothing to do there," said her
mistress, as she was moving to the folding-doors. The window facing
seaward was open. He went straight to it and closed it. Next, in an
apparent distraction, he went to the folding-doors. He was about to press
the handle, when Lady Charlotte's quiet remark, "My bedroom," brought him
back to his seat, crying pardon.

"Have you had news?" she inquired. "You thought that a letter might be
there. Bad, is it?"

"It is not good," he replied, briefly.

"I am sorry."

"That is--it tells me--" (Wilfrid disciplined his tongue) "that I--we
are--a lieutenant on half-pay may say that he is ruined, I suppose, when
his other supplies are cut off!..."

"I can excuse him for thinking it," said Lady Charlotte. She exhibited no
sign of eagerness for his statement of facts.

Her outward composure and a hard animation of countenance (which, having
ceased the talking within himself, he had now leisure to notice)
humiliated him. The sting helped him to progress.

"I may try to doubt it as much as I please, to avoid seeing what must
follow.... I may shut my eyes in the dark, but when the light stares me
in the face...I give you my word that I have not been justified even in
imagining such a catastrophe."

"The preamble is awful," said Lady Charlotte, rising from her recumbent
posture.

"Pardon me; I have no right to intrude my feelings. I learn to-day, for
the first time, that we are--are ruined."

She did not lift her eyebrows, or look fixedly; but without any change at
all, said, "Is there no doubt about it?"

"None whatever." This was given emphatically. Resentment at the perfect
realization of her anticipated worldly indifference lent him force.

"Ruined?" she said.

"Yes."

"You I'll be more so than you were a month ago. I mean, you tell me
nothing new, I have known it."

Amid the crush and hurry in his brain, caused by this strange
communication, pressed the necessity to vindicate his honour.

"I give you the word of a gentleman, Lady Charlotte, that I came to you
the first moment it has been made known to me. I never suspected it
before this day."

"Nothing would prompt me to disbelieve that." She reached him her hand.

"You have known it!" he broke from a short silence.

"Yes--never mind how. I could not allude to it. Of course I had to wait
till you took the initiative."

The impulse to think the best of what we are on the point of renouncing
is spontaneous. If at the same time this object shall exhibit itself in
altogether new, undreamt-of, glorious colours, others besides a
sentimentalist might waver, and be in some danger of clutching it a
little tenderly ere it is cast off.

"My duty was to tell you the very instant it came to my knowledge," he
said, fascinated in his heart by the display of greatness of mind which
he now half divined to be approaching, and wished to avoid.

"Well, I suppose that is a duty between friends?" said she.

"Between friends! Shall we still--always be friends?"

"I think I have said more than once that it won't be my fault if we are
not."

"Because, the greater and happier ambition to which I aspired..." This
was what he designed to say, sentimentally propelled, by way of graceful
exit, and what was almost printed on a scroll in his head for the tongue
to read off fluently. He stopped at 'the greater,' beginning to
stumble--to flounder; and fearing that he said less than was due as a
compliment to the occasion, he said more.

By no means a quick reader of character, Lady Charlotte nevertheless
perceived that the man who spoke in this fashion, after what she had
confessed, must be sentimentally, if not actually, playing double.

Thus she came to his assistance: "Are you begging permission to break our
engagement?"

"At least, whatever I do get I must beg for now!" He took refuge adroitly
in a foolish reply, and it served him. That he had in all probability
lost his chance by the method he had adopted, and by sentimentalizing at
the wrong moment, was becoming evident, notwithstanding. In a sort of
despair he attempted comfort by critically examining her features, and
trying to suit them to one or other of the numerous models of Love that a
young man carries about with him. Her eyes met his, and even as he was
deciding against her on almost every point, the force of their frankness
held his judgement in suspense.

"The world is rather harsh upon women in these cases," she said, turning
her head a lithe, with a conscious droop of the eyelids. "I will act as
if we had an equal burden between us. On my side, what you have to tell
me does not alter me. I have known it.... You see that I am just the same
to you. For your part, you are free, if you please. That is fair dealing,
is it not?"

The gentleman's mechanical assent provoked the lady's smile.

But Wilfrid was torn between a profound admiration of her and the galling
reflection that until she had named the engagement, none had virtually
existed which diplomacy, aided by time and accident, might not have
stopped.

"You must be aware that I am portionless," she continued. "I have--let me
name the sum--a thousand pounds. It is some credit to me that I have had
it five years and not spent it. Some men would think that a quality worth
double the amount. Well, you will make up your mind to my bringing you no
money;--I have a few jewels. En revanche, my habits are not expensive. I
like a horse, but I can do without one. I like a large house, and can
live in a small one. I like a French cook, and can dine comfortably off a
single dish. Society is very much to my taste; I shall indulge it when I
am whipped at home."

Wilfrid took her hand and pressed his lips to the fingers, keeping his
face ponderingly down. He was again so divided that the effort to find
himself absorbed all his thinking faculties.

At last he muttered: "A lieutenant's pay!"--expecting her to reply, "We
can wait," as girls do that find it pleasant to be adored by curates,
Then might follow a meditative pause--a short gaze at her, from which she
could have the option of reflecting that to wait is not the privilege of
those who have lived to acquire patience. The track he marked out was
clever in a poor way; perhaps it was not positively unkind to instigate
her to look at her age: but though he read character shrewdly, and knew
hers pretty accurately, he was himself too much of a straw at the moment
to be capable of leading-moves.

"We can make up our minds, without great difficulty, to regard the
lieutenant's pay as nothing at all," was Lady Charlotte's answer. "You
will enter the Diplomatic Service. My interest alone could do that. If we
are married, there would be plenty to see the necessity for pushing us. I
don't know whether you could keep the lieutenancy; you might. I should
not like you to quit the Army: an opening might come in it. There's the
Indian Staff--the Persian Mission: they like soldiers for those Eastern
posts. But we must take what we can get. We should, anyhow, live abroad,
where in the matter of money society is more sensible. We should be able
to choose our own, and advertize tea, brioche, and conversation in return
for the delicacies of the season."

"But you, Charlotte--you could never live that life!" Wilfrid broke in,
the contemplation of her plain sincerity diminishing him to himself. "It
would drag you down too horribly!"

"Remorse at giving tea in return for dinners and balls?"

"Ah! there are other things to consider."

She blushed unwontedly.

Something, lighted by the blush, struck him as very feminine and noble.

"Then I may flatter myself that you love me?" he whispered.

"Do you not see?" she rejoined. "My project is nothing but a whim--a
whim."

The divided man saw himself whole, if not happy in the ranks of
Diplomacy, with a resolute, frank, faithful woman (a lady of title)
loving him, to back him. Fortune shone ahead, and on the road he saw
where his deficiencies would be filled up by her. She was firm and
open--he irresolute and self-involved. Animal courage both possessed.
Their differences were so extreme that they met where they differed. It
struck him specially now that she would be like Day to his spirit in
continued intercourse. Young as he was he had wisdom to know the right
meaning of the word "helpmate." It was as if the head had dealt the heart
a blow, saying, "See here the lady thou art to serve." But the heart was
a surly rebel. Lady Charlotte was fully justified in retorting upon his
last question: "I think I also should ask, do you love me? It is not
absolutely imperative for the occasion or for the catastrophe, I merely
ask for what is called information."

And yet, despite her flippancy, which was partly designed to relieve his
embarrassment, her hand was moist and her eyes were singularly watchful.

"You who sneer at love!" He gave a musical murmur.

"Not at all. I think it a very useful part of the capital to begin the
married business upon."

"You unsay your own words."

"Not 'absolutely imperative,' I think I said, if I remember rightly."

"But I take the other view, Charlotte."

"You imagine that there must be a little bit of love."

"There should be no marriage without it."

"On both sides?"

"At least, if not on both sides, one should bring such a love."

"Enough for two! So, then, we are not to examine your basket?"

Touched by the pretty thing herein implied, he squeezed her hand.

"This is the answer?" said she.

"Can you doubt me?"

She rose from her seat. "Oh! if you talk in that style, I really am
tempted to say that I do. Are there men--women and women--men? My dear
Wilfrid, have we changed parts to-night?"

His quickness in retrieving a false position, outwardly, came to his aid.
He rose likewise, and, while perfecting the minor details of an easy
attitude against the mantelpiece, said: "I am so constituted, Charlotte,
that I can't talk of my feelings in a business tone; and I avoid that
subject unless... You spoke of a basket just now. Well, I confess I can't
bring mine into the market and bawl out that I have so many pounds'
weight of the required material. Would a man go to the market at all if
he had nothing to dispose of? In plain words--since my fault appears to
be, according to your reading, in the opposite direction--should I be
here if my sentiments could not reply eloquently to your question?"

This very common masterpiece of cunning from a man in a corner, which
suggests with so persuasive an air that he has ruled his actions up to
the very moment when he faces you, and had almost preconceived the
present occasion, rather won Lady Charlotte; or it seemed to, or the
scene had been too long for her vigilance.

"In the affirmative?" she whispered, coming nearer to him.

She knew that she had only to let her right shoulder slip under his left
arm, and he would very soon proclaim himself her lover as ardently as
might be wished. Why did she hesitate to touch the blood of the man? It
was her fate never to have her great heart read aright. Wilfrid could not
know that generosity rather than iciness restrained her from yielding
that one unknown kiss which would have given the final spring to passion
in his breast. He wanted the justification of his senses, and to run
headlong blindly. Had she nothing of a woman's instinct?

"In the affirmative!" was his serene reply.

"That means 'Yes.'" Her tone had become pleasantly soft.

"Yes, that means 'Yes,'" said he.

She shut her eyes, murmuring, "How happy are those who hear that they are
loved!" and opening them, all her face being red, "Say it!" she pleaded.
Her fingers fell upon his wrist. "I have this weakness, Wilfrid; I wish
to hear you say it."

The flush of her face, and tremour of her fingers, told of an unimagined
agitation hardly to be believed, though seen and felt. Yet, still some
sign, some shade of a repulsion in her figure, kept him as far from her
as any rigid rival might have stipulated for.

The interrogation to the attentive heavens was partially framed in his
mind, "How can I tell this woman I love her, without..." without putting
his arm about her waist, and demonstrating it satisfactorily to himself
as well as to her? In other words, not so framed, "How, without that
frenzy which shall make me forget whether it be so or not?"

He remained in his attitude, incapable of moving or speaking, but
fancying, that possibly he was again to catch a glimpse of the vanished
mountain nymph, sweet Liberty. Her woman's instinct warmed more and more,
until, if she did not quite apprehend his condition, she at least
understood that the pause was one preliminary to a man's feeling himself
a fool.

"Dear Wilfrid," she whispered, "you think you are doubted. I want to be
certain that you think you have met the right woman to help you, in me."

He passed through the loophole here indicated, and breathed.

"Yes, Charlotte, I am sure of that. If I could be only half as worthy!
You are full of courage and unselfishness, and, I could swear, faithful
as steel."

"Thank you--not dogs," she laughed. "I like steel. I hope to be a good
sword in your hand, my knight--or shield, or whatever purpose you put me
to."

She went on smiling, and seeming to draw closer to him and throw down
defences.

"After all, Wilfrid, the task of loving your good piece of steel won't be
less thoroughly accomplished because you find it difficult. Sir, I do not
admit any protestation. Handsome faces, musical voices, sly manners, and
methods that I choose not to employ, make the business easy to men."

"Who discover that the lady is not steel," said Wilfrid. "Need she, in
any case, wear so much there?"

He pointed, flittingly as it were, with his little finger to the slope of
her neck.

She turned her wrist, touching the spot: "Here? You have seen, then, that
it is something worn?"

There followed a delicious interplay of eyes. Who would have thought that
hers could be sweet and mean so much?

"It is something worn, then? And thrown aside for me only, Charlotte?"

"For him who loves me," she said.

"For me!"

"For him who loves me," she repeated.

"Then it is for me!"

She had moved back, showing a harder figure, or the "I love you, love
you!" would have sounded with force. It came, though not so vehemently as
might have been, to the appeal of a soft fixed look.

"Yes, I love you, Charlotte; you know that I do."

"You love me?"

"Yes."

"Say it."

"I love you! Dead, inanimate Charlotte, I love you!"

She threw out her hand as one would throw a bone to a dog.

"My living, breathing, noble Charlotte," he cried, a little bewitched, "I
love you with all my heart!"

It surprised him that her features should be gradually expressing less
delight.

"With all your heart?"

"Could I give you a part?"

"It is done, sometimes," she said, mock-sadly. Then, in her original
voice: "Good. I never credited that story of you and the girl Emilia. I
suppose what people say is a lie?"

Her eyes, in perfect accordance with the tone she had adopted, set a
quiet watch on him.

"Who says it?" he thundered, just as she anticipated.

"It's not true?"

"Not true!--how can it be true?"

"You never loved Emilia Belloni?--don't love her now?--do not love her
now? If you have ever said that you love Emilia Belloni, recant, and you
are forgiven; and then go, for I think I hear Georgiana below. Quick! I
am not acting. It's earnest. The word, if you please, as you are a
gentleman. Tell me, because I have heard tales. I have been perplexed
about you. I am sure you're a manly fellow, who would never have played
tricks with a girl you were bound to protect; but you might have--pardon
the slang--spooned,--who knows? You might have been in love with her
downright. No harm, even if a trifle foolish; but in the present case,
set my mind at rest. Quick! There are both my hands. Take them, press
them, and speak."

The two hands were taken, but his voice was not so much at command. No
image of Emilia rose in his mind to reproach him with the casting over of
his heart's dear mistress, but a blind struggle went on. It seemed that
he could do what he dared not utter. The folly of lips more loyal than
the spirit touched his lively perception; and as the hot inward struggle,
masked behind his softly-playing eyes, had reduced his personal
consciousness so that if he spoke from his feeling there was a chance of
his figuring feebly, he put on his ever-ready other self:--

"Categorically I reply: Have I loved Miss Emilia Belloni?--No. Do I?--No.
Do I love Charlotte Chillingworth?--Yes, ten thousand times! And now let
Britomart disarm."

He sought to get his reward by gentle muscular persuasion. Her arms alone
yielded: and he judged from the angle of the neck, ultra-sharp though it
was, that her averted face might be her form of exhibiting maidenly
reluctance, feminine modesty. Suddenly the fingers in his grasp twisted,
and not being at once released, she turned round to him.

"For God's sake, spare the girl!"

Emilia stood in the doorway.




CHAPTER XXXVII

A knock at Merthyr's chamber called him out while he sat writing to
Marini on the national business. He heard Georgiana's voice begging him
to come to her quickly. When he saw her face the stain of tears was
there.

"Anything the matter with Charlotte?" was his first question.

"No. But, come: I will tell you on the way. Do not look at me."

"No personal matter of any kind?"

"Oh, no! I can have none;" and she took his hand for a moment.

They passed into the dark windy street smelling of the sea.

"Emilia is here," said Georgiana. "I want you to persuade her--you will
have influence with her. Oh, Merthyr! my darling brother! I thank God I
love my brother with all my love! What a dreadful thing it is for a woman
to love a man:"

"I suppose it is, while she has nothing else to do," said Merthyr. "How
did she come?--why?"

"If you had seen Emilia to-night, you would have felt that the difference
is absolute." Georgiana dealt first with the general case, "she came, I
think, by some appointment."

"Also just as absolute between her and her sex," he rejoined, controlling
himself, not to be less cool. "What has happened?"

Georgiana pointed to the hotel whither their steps were bent. "That is
where Charlotte sleeps. Her going there was not a freak; she had an
object. She wished to cure Emilia of her love for Mr. Wilfrid Pole.
Emilia had come down to see him. Charlotte put her in an adjoining room
to hear him say--what I presume they do say when the fit is on them! Was
it not singular folly?"

It was a folly that Merthyr could not understand in his friend Charlotte.
He said so, and then he gave a kindly sad exclamation of Emilia's name.

"You do pity her still!" cried Georgiana, her heart leaping to hear it
expressed so simply.

"Why, what other feeling can I have?" said he unsuspiciously.

"No, dear Merthyr," she replied; and only by her tone he read the guilty
little rejoicing in her heart, marvelling at jealousy that could twist so
straight a stem as his sister's spirit. This had taught her, who knew
nothing of love, that a man loving does not pity in such a ease."

"I hope you will find her here:" Georgiana hurried her steps. "Say
anything to comfort her. I will have her with me, and try and teach her
what self-control means, and how it is to be won. If ever she can act on
the stage as she spoke to-night, she will be a great dramatic genius. She
was transformed. She uses strange forcible expressions that one does not
hear in every-day life. She crushed Charlotte as if she had taken her up
in one hand, and without any display at all: no gesture, or spasm. I
noticed, as they stood together, that there is such a contrast between
animal courage and imaginative fire."

"Charlotte could meet a great occasion, I should think," said Merthyr;
and, taking his sister by the elbow: "You speak as if you had observed
very coolly. Did Emilia leave you so cold? Did she seem to speak from
head, not from heart?"

"No; she moved me--poor child! Only, how humiliating to hear her beg for
love!--before us."

Merthyr smiled: "I thought it must be the woman's feeling that would
interfere to stop a natural emotion. Is it true--or did I not see that
certain eyes were red just now?"

"That was for him," said Georgiana, hastily. "I am sure that no man has
stood in such a position as he did. To see a man made publicly ashamed,
and bearing it. I have never had to endure so painful a sight."

"To stand between two women, claimed by both, like Solomon's babe! A man
might as well at once have Solomon's judgement put into execution upon
him. You wept for him! Do you know, Georgey, that charity of your sex,
which makes you cry at any 'affecting situation,' must have been designed
to compensate to us for the severities of Providence."

"No, Merthyr;" she arrested his raillery. "Do I ever cry? But I
thought--if it had been my brother! and almost at the thought I felt the
tears rush at my eyelids, as if the shame had been mine."

"The probability of its not being your brother seemed distant at the
moment," said Merthyr, with his half-melancholy smile. "Tell me--I can
conjure up the scene: but tell me whether you saw more passions than one
in her face?"

"Emilia's? No. Her face reminded me of the sombre--that dull glow of a
fire that you leave burning in the grate late on winter nights. Was that
natural? It struck me that her dramatic instinct was as much alive as her
passion."

"Had she been clumsy, would you not have been less suspicious of her? And
if she had only shown the accustomed northern retenue, and merely looked
all that she had to say 'preserved her dignity'--our womanly critic would
have been completely satisfied."

"But, Merthyr, to parade her feelings, and then to go on appealing!"

"On the principle that she ought to be ashamed of them, she was wrong."

"If you had heard her utter abandonment!"

"I can believe that she did not blush."

"It seems to me to belong to those excesses that prompt--that are in
themselves a species of suicide."

"Love is said to be the death of self."

"No; but I must use cant words, Merthyr; I do wish to see modesty. Yes, I
know I must be right."

"There is very little of it to be had in a tropical storm."

"You admit, then, that this sort of love is a storm that passes?"

"It passes, I hope."

"But where is your defence of her now?"

"Have I defended her? I need not try. A man has deceived her, and she
doesn't think it possible; and has said so, I presume. When she sees it,
she will be quieter than most. She will not reproach him subsequently.
Here is the hotel, and that must be Charlotte's room, if I may judge by
the lights. What pranks will she always be playing! We seem to have
brought new elements into the little town. Do you remember Bergamo the
rainy night the Austrian trooped out of Milan?--one light that was a
thousand in the twinkling of an eye!"

Having arrived, he ran hastily up to the room, expecting to find the
three; but Lady Charlotte was alone, sitting in her chair with knotted
arms. "Ah, Merthyr!" she said, "I'm sorry you should have been disturbed.
I perceive what Georgey's leaving the room meant. I suppose the hotel
people are used to yachting-parties." And then, not seeing any friendly
demonstration on his part, she folded her arms in another knot. Georgiana
asked where Emilia was. Lady Charlotte replied that Emilia had gone, and
then Wilfrid had followed her, one minute later, to get her into shelter
somewhere. Or put penknives out of her way. "I am rather fatigued with a
scene, Merthyr. I never had an idea before of what your Southern women
were. One plays decidedly second to them while the fit lasts. Of course,
you have a notion that I planned the whole of the absurd business. This
is the case:--I found the girl on the beach: she follows him everywhere,
which is bad for her reputation, because in this climate people suspect,
positive reasons for that kind of female devotedness. So, to put an end
to it--really for her own sake, quite as much as anything else--am I a
monster of insensibility, Merthyr?--I made her swear an oath: one must be
a point above wild animals to feel that to be binding, however! I made
her swear to listen and remain there silent till I opened the door to set
her at liberty. She consented--gave her word solemnly. I calculated that
she might faint, and fixed her in an arm-chair. Was that cruel? Merthyr,
you have called me Austrian more than once; but, upon my honour, I wanted
her to get over her delusion comfortably. I thought she would have kept
the oath, I confess; she looked up like a child when she was making it.
You have heard the rest from Georgey. I must say the situation was rather
hard on Wilfrid. If he blames me it will be excuseable, though what I did
plan was to save him from a situation somewhat worse. So now you know the
whole, Merthyr. Commence your lecture. Make me a martyr to the sorrows of
Italy once more."

Merthyr took her wrist, feeling the quick pulse, and dropped it. She was
effectually humbled by this direct method of dealing with her secret
heart. After some commonplace remarks had passed, she herself urged him
to send out men in search for Emilia. Before he went, she murmured a soft
"Forgive me." The pressure of her fingers was replied to, but the words
were not spoken.

"There," she cried to Georgiana, "I have offended the only man for whose
esteem I care one particle! Devote yourself to your friends!"

"How? 'devote yourself!'" murmured Georgiana, astonished.

"Do you think I should have got into this hobble if I hadn't wished to
serve some one else? You must have seen that Merthyr has a sentimental
sort of fondness--call it passion--for this girl. She's his Italy in the
flesh. Is there a more civilized man in the world than Merthyr? So he
becomes fascinated by a savage. We all play the game of opposites--or
like to, and no woman in his class will ever catch him. I couldn't have
believed that he was touched by a girl, but for two or three recent
indications. You must have noticed that he has given up reading others,
and he objected the other day to a responsible office which would have
thrown him into her neighbourhood alone. These are unmistakeable signs in
Merthyr, though he has never been in love, and doesn't understand his
case a bit. Tell me, do you think it impossible?"

Georgiana answered dryly, "You have fallen into a fresh mistake."

Exactly. Then let me rescue you from a similar fatality, Georgey. If your
eyes are bandaged now..."

"Are you going to be devoted to me also, Charlotte?"

"I believe I'm a miracle of devotion," said the lady, retiring into
indifferent topics upon that phrase. She had at any rate partially
covered the figure of ridicule presented to her feminine imagination by
the aspect of her fair self exposed in public contention with one of her
sex--and for a man. It was enough to make her pulse and her brain lively.
On second thoughts, too, it had struck her that she might be serving
Merthyr in disengaging Emilia; and undoubtedly she served Georgiana by
giving her a warning. Through this silliness went the current of a clear
mind, nevertheless. The lady's heart was justified in crying out: "What
would I not abandon for my friend in his need?" Meantime her battle in
her own behalf looked less pleasing by the light of new advantages. The
question recurred: "Shall I care to win at all?" She had to force the
idea of a violent love to excuse her proceedings. To get up any flame
whatsoever, an occasional blast of jealousy had to be called for.
Jealousy was a quality she could not admit as possible to her. So she
acted on herself by an agent she repudiated, and there was no help for
it. Had Wilfrid loved her the woman's heart was ready. It was ready with
a trembling tenderness, softer and deeper than a girl's. For Charlotte
would have felt: "With this love that I have craved for, you give me
life." And she would have thanked him for both, exultingly, to feel: "I
can repay you as no girl could do;" though she had none of the rage of
love to give; as it was, she thought conscientiously that she could help
him. She liked him: his peculiar suppleness of a growing mind, his
shrouded sensibility, in conjunction with his reputation for an evidently
quite reliable prompt courage, and the mask he wore, which was to her
transparent, pleased her and touched her fancy.

Nor was he so vain of his person as to make him seem like a boy to her.
He affected maturity. He could pass a mirror on his right or his left
without an abstracted look over either shoulder;--a poor example, but
worth something to a judge of young men. Indeed, had she chosen from a
crowd, the choice would have been one of his age. She was too set for an
older man; but a youth aspiring to be older than he was; whose faults she
saw and forgave; whose merits supplied two or three of her own
deficiencies; whom her station might help to elevate; to whom she might
come as a benefactress; feeling so while she accomplished her own
desire;--such a youth was everything to her, as she awoke to discover
after having played with him a season. If she lost him, what became of
her? Even if she had rejoiced in a mother to plot and play,--to bait and
snare for her, her time was slipping, and the choosers among her class
were wary. Her spirit, besides, was high and elective. It was gradually
stooping to nature, but would never have bowed to a fool, or, save under
protest, to one who gave all. On Wilfrid she had fixed her mind: so,
therefore, she bore the remembrance of the recent scene without much
fretting at her burdens;--the more, that Wilfrid had in no way shamed
her; and the more, that the heat of Emilia's love played round him and
illumined him. This borrowing of the passion of another is not uncommon.

At daybreak Mrs. Chump was abroad. She had sat up for Wilfrid almost
through the night. "Oh! the arr'stocracy!" she breathed exclamations, as
she swept along the esplanade. "I'll be killed and murdered if I tell a
word." Meeting Captain Gambier, she fell into a great agitation, and
explained it as an anxiety she entertained for Wilfrid; when, becoming
entangled in the mesh of questions, she told all she knew, and nearly as
much as she suspected: which fatal step to retrieve, she entreated his
secresy. Adela was now seen fluttering hastily up the walk, fresh as a
creature of the sea-wave. Before Mrs. Chump could summon her old wrath of
yesterday, she was kissed, and to the arch interrogation as to what she
had done with this young lady's brother, replied by telling the tale of
the night again. Mrs. Chump was ostentatiously caressed into a more
comfortable opinion of the world's morality, for the nonce. Invited by
them to breakfast at the hotel, she hurried back to her villa for a
flounced dress and a lace cap of some pretensions, while they paced the
shore.

"See what may be said!" Adela's countenance changed as she muttered it.
"Thought, would be enough," she added, shuddering.

"Yes; if one is off guard--careless," the captain assented, flowingly.

"Can one in earnest be other than careless? I shall walk on that line up
to the end. Who makes me deviate is my enemy!"

The playful little person balanced herself to make one foot follow the
other along a piece of washed grey rope on the shingle. Soon she had to
stretch out her hand for help, and the captain at full arm's length
conducted her to the final knot.

"Arrived safe!" she said, smiling.

"But not disengaged," he rejoined, in similar style.

"Please!" She doubled her elbow to give a little tug for her fingers.

"No." He pressed them tighter.

"Pray?"

"No."

"Must I speak to somebody else to get me released?"

"Would you?"

"Must I?"

"Thank heaven, he is not yet in existence!"

'Husband' being implied. Games of this sweet sort are warranted to carry
little people as far as they may go swifter than any other invention of
lively Satan.

The yachting party, including Mrs. Chump, were at the breakfast-table,
and that dumb guest had done all the blushing for Lady Charlotte, when
Wilfrid entered, neat, carefully brushed, and with ready answers, though
his face could put on no fresh colours. To Mrs. Chump he bent, passing,
and was pushed away and drawn back. "Your eyes!" she whispered.

"My--yeyes!" went Wilfrid, in schoolboy style; and she, who rarely
laughed, was struck by his humorous skill, saying to Sir Twickenham,
beside her: "He's as cunnin' as a lord!"

Sir Twickenham expressed his ignorance of lords having usurped priority
in that department. Frightened by his portentous parliamentary
phraseology, she remained tolerably demure till the sitting was over: now
sidling in her heart to the sins of the great, whom anon she angrily
reproached. Her principal idea was, that as the world was discovered to
be so wicked, they were all in a boat going to perdition, and it would be
as well to jump out immediately: but while so resolving, she hung upon
Lady Charlotte's looks and little speeches, altogether seduced by so
fresh and frank a sinner. If safe from temptation, here was the soul of a
woman in great danger of corruption.

"Among the aristocracy," thought Mrs. Chump, "it's just the male that
hangs his head, and the female struts and is sprightly." The contrast
between Lady Charlotte and Wilfrid (who when he ceased to set
outrageously, sat like a man stricken by a bolt), produced this
reflection: and in spite of her disastrous vision of the fate of the boat
they were in, Mrs. Chump owned to the intoxication of gliding
smoothly--gliding on the rapids.

The breakfast was coming to an end, when Braintop's name was sent in to
Mrs. Chump. She gave a cry of motherly compassion for Braintop, and began
to relate the little deficiencies of his temper, while, as it were,
simmering on her seat to go to him. Wilfrid sent out word for him to
appear, which he did, unluckily for himself, even as Mrs. Chump wound up
the public description of his character by remarking: "He's just the
opposite of a lord, now, in everything." Braintop stood bowing like the
most faithful confirmation of an opinion ever seen. He looked the victim
of fatigue, in the bargain. A light broke on Mrs. Chump.

"I'll never forgive myself, ye poor gentle heart, to throw pens and
pen-wipers at ye, that did your best, poor boy! What have ye been doin'?
and why didn't ye return, and not go hoppin' about about all night like a
young kangaroo, as they say they do? Have ye read the 'Arcana of Nature
and Science,' ma'am?"

The Hon. Mrs. Bayruffle, thus abruptly addressed, observed that she had
not, and was it an amusing book?

"Becas it'll open your mind," pursued Mrs. Chump; "and there, he's
eatin'! and when a man takes to eatin', ye'll never have any fear about
his abouts. And if ye read the 'Arcana of Nature and Science,' ma'am,
ye'll first feel that ye've gone half mad. For it contains averything in
the world; and ye'll read ut ten times all through, and not remember five
lines runnin'! Oh, it's a dreadful book: and that's the book to read to
your husband when he's got a fit o' the gout. He's got nothin' to do but
swallow knolludge then. Now, Mr. Braintop, don't stop, but tell me as ye
go on what ye did with yourself all night."

A slight hesitation in Braintop caused her to cross-examine him rigidly,
suggesting that he might not dare to tell, and he, exercising some
self-command, adopted narrative as the less ignominious form of
confession. No one save Mrs. Chump listened to him until he mentioned the
name Miss Belloni; and then it was curious to see the steadiness with
which certain eyes, feigning abstraction, fixed in his direction. He had
met Emilia on the outskirts of the town, and unable to persuade her to
take shelter anywhere, had walked on with her in dead silence through the
night, to the third station of the railway for London.

"Is this a mad person?" asked the Hon. Mrs. Bayruffle.

Adela shrugged. "A genius."

"Don't eat with the tips of your teeth, like a bird, Mr. Braintop, for no
company minds your eatin'," cried Mrs. Chump, angrily and encouragingly;
"and this little Belloni--my belief is that she came after you; and what
have ye done with her?"

It was queerly worried out of Braintop, who was trying his best all the
time to be obedient to Wilfrid's direct eye, that the two wanderers by
night had lost themselves in lanes, refreshed themselves with purloined
apples from the tree at dawn, obtained a draught of morning milk, with a
handful of damsons apiece, and that nothing would persuade Emilia to turn
back from the route to London. Braintop bit daintily at his toast,
unwilling to proceed under the discouraging expression of Wilfrid's face,
and the meditative silence of two or three others. The discovery was
forcibly extracted that Emilia had no money;--that all she had in her
possession was sevenpence and a thimble; and that he, Braintop, had but a
few shillings, which she would not accept.

"And what has become of her?" was asked.

Braintop stated that she had returned to London, and, blushing, confessed
that he had given her his return ticket.

Georgiana here interposed to save him from the awful encomiums of Mrs.
Chump, by desiring to know whether Emilia seemed unhappy or distressed.
Braintop's spirited reply, "Not at all," was corrected to: "She did not
cry;" and further modified: "That is, she called out sharply when I
whistled an opera tune."

Lady Charlotte put a stop to the subject by rising pointedly. Watch in
hand, she questioned the ladies as to their occupations, and told them
what time they had to dispose of. Then Baynes, captain of the yacht,
heard to be outside, was summoned in. He pronounced doubtfully about the
weather, but admitted that there was plenty of wind, and if the ladies
did not mind it a little fresh, he was sure he did not. Wind was
favourable for the island head-quarters of the yacht. "We'll see who gets
there first," she said to Wilfrid, and the company learnt that Wilfrid
was going to other head-quarters on special business, whereupon there
followed chatter and exclamations. Wilfrid quickly explained that his
father's condition called him away imperiously. To Adela and Mrs. Chump,
demanding peculiar personal explanations, he gave reassuring reasons
separately, aside. Mrs. Chump understood that this was merely his excuse
to get away, that he might see her safe to Brookfield. Adela only
required a look and a gesture. Merthyr and Georgiana likewise spoke
expected adieux, as did Sir Twickenham, who parted company in his own
little yawl. Lady Charlotte, with her head over a map, and one hand
arranging an eye-glass, hastily nodded them off, scarcely looking at
them. She allowed herself to be diverted from this study for an instant
by the unbefitting noise made by Adela for the loss of her brother; not
that she objected to the noise particularly (it was modulated and
delicate in tone), but that she could not understand it. Seeing Sir
Twickenham, however, in a leave-taking attitude, she uttered an easy
"Oh!" to herself, and diligently recommenced spying at ports and
harbours, and following the walnut thumb of Baynes on the map. All seemed
to be perfectly correct in the arrangements. To go to London was
Wilfrid's thought; and the rest were almost as much occupied with their
own ideas. Captain Gambier received their semi-ironical congratulations
and condolences incident to the man who is left alone in the charge of
sweet ladies; and the Hon. Mrs. Bayruffle remarked, that she supposed ten
hours not a long period of time, though her responsibility was onerous.

"Lady Gosstre is at the island," said Lady Charlotte, to show where it
might end, if she pleased. Within an hour the yacht was flying for the
island with a full Western breeze: and Mrs. Chump and Wilfrid were
speeding to Brookfield, as the latter permitted her to imagine. Braintop
realized the fruits of the sacrifice of his return ticket by facing Mrs.
Chump in the train. Merthyr had telegraphed to Marini to meet Emilia at
the station in London, and instructed Braintop to deliver a letter for
her at Marini's house. To Marini he wrote: "Let Giulia guard her as no
one but a woman can in such a case. By this time Giulia will know her
value. There is dangerous stuff in her now, and my anxiety is very great.
Have you seen what a nature it is? You have not alluded to her beyond
answers to instructions, but her character cannot have escaped you. I am
never mistaken in my estimates of Italian and Cymric blood. Singularly,
too, she is part Welsh on the mother's side, to judge by the name. Leave
her mind entirely free till it craves openly for some counteraction. Her
Italy and her music will not do. Let them be. My fear is that you have
seen too clearly what a daughter of Italy I have found for you. But
whatever you put up now to distract her, you sacrifice. My good Marini!
bear that in mind. It will be a disgust in her memory, and I wish her to
love her country and her Art when she recovers. So we treat the disease,
dear friend. Let your Italy have no sorrows for her ears till the storm
within is tranquil. I am with you speedily."

Marini's reply said: "Among all the things we have to thank our Merthyr
for, this treasure, if it is not the greatest he has given to us, makes
us grateful the most. We met her at the station. Ah! there was an elbow
when she gave her hand. She thought to be alone, and started, and hated,
till Giulia smothered her face. And there was dead fire in the eyes,
which is powder when you spring it. We go with her to her new lodging,
and the track is lost. This is your wish? It is pitching new camps to
avoid the enemy. But so! a man takes this disease and his common work at
once of a woman--she is all the disease, till it is extinct, or she! What
is this disease but a silly, a senseless waste? Giulia--woman that she
is!--will not call it so. See her eyes doze and her voice go a soft buzz
when she speaks it! As a dove of the woods! That it almost makes it sweet
to me! Yes, a daughter of Italy! So Giulia has been:--will be? I know
not! So will this your Emilia be in the time that comes to the young
people, she has this, as you say, malady very strong--ma, ogni male ha la
sua ricetta; I can say it of persons. Of nations to think my heart is as
an infidel--very heavy. Ah! till I turn to you--who revive to the
thought, as you were an army of deliverance. For you are Hope. You know
not Despair. You are Hope. And you love as myself a mother whose son you
are not! 'Oh!' is Giulia's cry, 'will our Italy reward him with a
daughter?'--the noblest that we have. Yes, for she would be Italian
always through you. We pray that you may not get old too soon, before she
grows for you and is found, only that you may know in her our love. See!
I am brought to talk this language. The woman is in me."

Merthyr said, as he read this, "I could wish no better." His feeling for
Emilia waxed toward a self-avowal as she advanced to womanhood; and the
last stage of it had struck among trembling strings in the inmost
chambers of his heart. That last stage of it--her passionate claiming of
Wilfrid before two women, one her rival--slept like a covered furnace
within him. "Can you remember none of her words?" he said more than once
to Georgiana, who replied: "I would try to give you an idea of what she
said, but I might as well try to paint lightning."

"'My lover'?" suggested Merthyr.

"Oh, yes; that she said."

"It sounded oddly to your ears?"

"Very, indeed."

"What more?"

"--did she say, do you mean?"

"Is my poor sister ashamed to repeat it?"

"I would repeat anything that would give you pleasure to hear."

"Sometimes pain, you know, is sweet."

Little by little, and with a contest at each step, Georgiana coasted the
conviction that her undivided reign was over. Then she judged Emilia by
human nature's hardest standard: the measure of the qualities brought as
usurper and successor. Unconsciously she placed herself in the seat of
one who had fulfilled all the great things demanded of a woman for
Merthyr, and it seemed to her that Emilia exercised some fatal
fascination, girl though she was, to hurl her from that happy
sovereignty.

But Emilia's worst crime before the arraigning lady was that Wilfrid had
cast her off. Female justice, therefore, said: "You must be unworthy of
my brother;" and female delicacy thought: "You have been soiled by a
previous history." She had pitied Wilfrid: now she held him partially
blameless: and while love was throbbing in many pulses all round her. The
man she had seen besieged by passionate love, touched her cold
imagination with a hue of fire, as Winter dawn lies on a frosty field.
She almost conceived what this other, not sisterly, love might be; though
not as its victim, by any means. She became, as she had never before
been, spiritually tormented and restless. The thought framed itself that
Charlotte and Wilfrid were not, by any law of selection, to match. What
mattered it? Simply that it in some way seemed to increase the merits of
one of the two. The task, moreover, of avoiding to tease her brother was
made easier to her by flying to this new refuge of mysterious reflection.
At times she poured back the whole flood of her heart upon Merthyr, and
then in alarm at the host of little passions that grew cravingly alive in
her, she turned her thoughts to Wilfrid again; and so, till they turned
wittingly to him. That this host of little passions will invariably
surround a false great one, she learnt by degrees, by having to quell
them and rise out of them. She knew that now she occasionally forced her
passion for Merthyr; but what nothing could teach her was, that she did
so to eject another's image. On the contrary, her confession would have
been: "Voluntarily I dwell upon that other, that my love for Merthyr may
avoid excess." To such a state of clearness much self-questioning brought
her: but her blood was as yet unwarmed; and that is a condition fostering
self-deception as much as when it rages.

Madame Marini wrote to ask whether Emilia might receive the visits of a
Sir Purcell Barrett, whom they had met, and whom Emilia called her
friend; adding: "The other gentleman has called at our old lodgings three
times. The last time our landlady says, he wept. Is it an Englishman,
really?"

Merthyr laughed at this, remarking: "Charlotte is not so vigilant, after
all."

"He wept." Georgiana thought and remembered the cold self-command that
his face had shown when Emilia claimed him, and his sole reply was, "I am
engaged to this lady," designating Lady Charlotte. Now, too, some of
Emilia's phrases took life in her memory. She studied them, thinking over
them, as if a voice of nature had spoken. Less and less it seemed to her
that a woman need feel shame to utter them. She interpreted this as her
growth of charity for a girl so violently stricken with love. "In such a
case, the more she says the more is she to be excused; for nothing but a
frenzy of passion could move her to speak so," thought Georgiana.
Accepting the words, and sanctioning the passion, the person of him who
had inspired it stood magnified in its light. She believed that if he had
played with the girl, he repented, and the idea of a man shedding tears
burnt to her heart.

Merthyr and Georgiana remained in Devonshire till a letter from Madame
Marini one morning told them that Emilia had disappeared.

"You delayed too long to go to her, Merthyr," said his sister,
astonishing him. "I understand why; but you may trust to time and scorn
chance too much. Let us go now and find her, if it is not too late."

Marini met them at the station in London, and they heard that Wilfrid had
discovered Marini's new abode, and had called there that morning. "I had
my eye on him. It was not a piece of love-play," said Marini: "and today
she should have seen my Chief, which would have cured her of sis
pestilence of a love, to give her sublime thoughts. Do you love her, Miss
Ford? Aha! it will be Christian names in Italy again."

"I like her very much," said Georgiana; "but I confess it mystifies me to
see you all so excited about her. It must be some attraction possessed by
her--what, I cannot say. I like her, certainly."

"Figlia mia! she is an element--she is fire!" said Marini. "My sought,
when our Mertyr brought her, was, it is Italy he sees in her face--her
voice--name--anysing! And a day passed, and I could not lose her for my
own sake, and felt a somesing, too! She is half man."

"A singular reason for an attraction." Georgiana smiled.

"She is not," Marini put out his fingers like claws to explain, while his
eyelashes met over his eyes--"she is not what man has made of your sex;
and she is brave of heart."

"Can you possibly tell what such a child can be?" questioned Georgiana,
almost irritably.

Marini did not reply to her.

"A face to find a home in!--eh, Mertyr?"

"Let's discover where that face has found a home," said Merthyr. "She is
a very plain and unpretending person, if people will not insist upon her
being more. This morbid admiration of heroines puts a trifle too much
weight upon their shoulders, does it not?"

Georgiana knew that to call Emilia 'child' was to wound the most
sensitive nerve in Merthyr's system, if he loved her, and she had
determined to try harshly whether he did. Nevertheless, though the
expression succeeded, and was designedly cruel, she could not forgive the
insincerity of his last speech; craving in truth for confidence as her
smallest claim on him now. So, at all the consultations, she acquiesced
in any scheme that was proposed; the advertizings and the use of
detectives; the communication with Emilia's mother and father; and the
callings at suburban concert-rooms. Sir Purcell Barrett frequently called
to assist in the discovery. At first he led them to suspect Mr. Pericles;
but a trusty Italian playing spy upon that gentleman soon cleared him,
and they were more in the dark than ever. It was only when at last
Georgiana heard Merthyr, the picture of polished self-possession, giving
way to a burst of disappointment in the room before them all: "Are we
sure that she lives?" he cried:--then Georgiana, looking at the firelight
over her joined fingers, said:--

"But, have you forgotten the serviceable brigade you have in your
organ-boys, Marini? If Emilia sees one, be sure she will speak to him."

"Have I not said she is a General?" Marini pointed at Georgiana with a
gleam of his dark eyes, and Merthyr squeezed his sister's hand, thanking
her; by which he gave her one whole night of remorse, because she had not
spoken earlier.




CHAPTER XXXVIII

"My voice! I have my voice!"

Emilia had cried it out to herself almost aloud, on the journey from
Devon to London. The landscape slipping under her eyes, with flashing
grey pools and light silver freshets, little glades, little copses,
farms, and meadows rounding away to spires of village churches under blue
hills, would not let her sink, heavy as was the spirit within her, and
dead to everything as she desired to be. Here, a great strange old oak
spread out its arms and seemed to hold the hurrying train a minute. When
gone by, Emilia thought of it as a friend, and that there, there, was the
shelter and thick darkness she had hoped she might be flying to. Or the
reach of a stream was seen, and in the middle of it one fair group of
clouds, showing distance beyond distance in colour. Emilia shut her
sight, and tried painfully to believe that there were no distances for
her. This was an easy task when the train stopped. It was surprising to
her then why the people moved. The whistle of the engine and rush of the
scenery set her imagination anew upon the horror of being motionless.

"My voice! I have my voice!" The exclamation recurred at intervals, as a
quick fear, that bubbled up from blind sensation, of her being utterly
abandoned, and a stray thing carrying no light, startled her. Darkness
she still had her desire for; but not to be dark in the darkness. She
looked back on the recent night as a lake of fire, through which she had
plunged; and of all the faculties about her, memory had suffered most, so
that it could recall no images of what had happened, but lay against its
black corner a shuddering bundle of nerves. The varying fields and woods
and waters offering themselves to her in the swiftness, were as wine
dashed to her lips, which could not be dead to it. The wish to be of some
worth began a painful quickening movement. At first she could have sobbed
with the keen anguish that instantaneously beset her. For--"If I am of
worth, who looks on me?" was her outcry, and the darkness she had
previously coveted fell with the strength of a mace on her forehead; but
the creature's heart struggled further, and by-and-by in despite of her
the pulses sprang a clear outlook on hope. It struck through her like the
first throb of a sword-cut. She tried to blind herself to it; the face of
hope was hateful.

This conflict of the baffled spirit of youth with its forceful flood of
being continued until it seemed that Emilia was lifted through the fiery
circles into daylight; her last cry being as her first: "I have my
voice!"

Of that which her voice was to achieve for her she never thought. She had
no thought of value, but only an eagerness to feel herself possessor of
something. Wilfrid had appeared to her to have taken all from her, until
the recollection of her voice made her breathe suddenly quick and deep,
as one recovering the taste of life.

Despair, I have said before, is a wilful business, common to corrupt
blood, and to weak woeful minds: native to the sentimentalist of the
better order. The only touch of it that came to Emilia was when she
attempted to penetrate to Wilfrid's reason for calling her down to Devon
that he might renounce and abandon her. She wanted a reason to make him
in harmony with his acts, and she could get none. This made the world
look black to her. But, "I have my voice!" she said, exhausted by the
passion of the night, tearless, and only sensible to pain when the keen
swift wind, and the flying squares of field and meadow prompted her
nature mysteriously to press for healthy action.

A man opposite to her ventured a remark: "We're going at a pretty good
pace now, miss."

She turned her eyes to him, and the sense of speed was reduced in her at
once, she could not comprehend how. Remembering presently that she had
not answered him, she said: "It is because you are going home, perhaps,
that you think it fast."

"No, miss," he replied, "I'm going to market. They can't put on steam too
stiff for me when I'm bound on business."

Emilia found it impossible to fathom the sensations of the man, and their
common desire for speed bewildered her more. She was relieved when the
train was lightened of him. Soon the skirts of red vapour were visible,
and when the guard took poor Braintop's return-ticket from her petulant
hand, all of the journey that she bore in mind was the sight of a
butcher-boy in blue, with a red cap, mounted on a white horse, who rode
gallantly along a broad highroad, and for whom she had struck out some
tune to suit the measure of his gallop.

She accepted her capture by the Marinis more calmly than Merthyr had been
led to suppose. The butcher-boy's gallop kept her senses in motion for
many hours, and that reckless equestrian embodied the idea of the
vivifying pace from which she had dropped. He went slower and slower. By
degrees the tune grew dull, and jarred; and then Emilia looked out on the
cold grey skies of our autumn, the rain and the fogs, and roaring London
filled her ears. So had ended a dream, she thought. She would stand at
the window listening to street-organs, whose hideous discord and
clippings and drawls did not madden her, and whose suggestion of a lovely
tune rolled out no golden land to her. That treasure of her voice, to
which no one in the house made allusion, became indeed a buried treasure.

In the South-western suburb where the Marinis lived, plots of foliage
were to be seen, and there were lanes not so black but that they showed
the hues of the season. These led to the parks and to noble gardens.
Emilia daily went out to keep the dying colours of the year in view, and
walked to get among the trees, where, with Madame attendant on her, she
sat counting the leaves as each one curved, and slid, and spun to earth,
or on a gust of air hosts went aloft; but it always ended in their coming
down; Emilia verified that fact repeatedly. However high they flew, the
ground awaited them. Madame entertained her with talk of Italy, and
Tuscan wine, and Lombard bread, and Turin chocolate. Marini never alluded
to his sufferings for the loss of these cruelly interdicted dainties,
never! But Madame knew how his exile affected him. And in England the
sums one paid for everything! "One fancies one pays for breath," said
Madame, shivering.

One day the ex-organist of Hillford Church passed before them. Emilia let
him go. The day following he passed again, but turned at the end of the
alley and simulated astonishment at the appearance of Emilia, as he
neared her. They shook hands and talked, while Madame zealously eyed any
chance person promenading the neighbourhood. She wrote for instructions
concerning this gentleman calling himself Sir Purcell Barrett, and
receiving them, she permitted Emilia to invite him to their house. "He is
an Englishman under a rope, ready for heaven," Madame described him to
her husband, who, though more at heart with Englishmen, could not but
admit that this one wore a look that appeared as a prognostication of
sadness.

Sir Purcell informed Emilia of his accession to title; and in reply to
her "Are you not glad?" smiled and said that a mockery could scarcely
make him glad; indicating nevertheless how feeble the note of poverty was
in his grand scale of sorrow. He came to the house and met them in the
gardens frequently. With some perversity he would analyze to herself
Emilia's spirit of hope, partly perhaps for the sake of probing to what
sort of thing it might be in its nature and defences; and, as against an
accomplished disputant she made but a poor battle, he injured what was
precious to her without himself gaining any good whatever.

"Why, what do you look forward to?" she said wondering, at the end of one
of their arguments, as he courteously termed this play of logical foils
with a baby.

"Death," answered the grave gentleman, striding on.

Emilia pitied him, thinking: "I might feel as he does, if I had not my
voice." Seeing that calamity very remote, she added: "I should!"

She knew of his position toward Cornelia: that is, she knew as much as he
did: for the want of a woman's heart over which to simmer his troubles
was urgent within him and Emilia's, though it lacked experience, was a
woman's regarding love. And moreover, she did not weep, but practically
suggested his favourable chances, which it was a sad satisfaction to him
to prove baseless, and to knock utterly over. The grief in which the soul
of a human creature is persistently seeking (since it cannot be thrown
off) to clothe itself comfortably, finds in tears an irritating
expression of sympathy. Hints of a brighter future are its nourishment.
Such embryos are not tenacious of existence, and when destroyed they are
succulent food for a space to the moody grief I am describing.

The melancholy gentleman did Emilia this good, that, never appearing to
imagine others to know misery save himself, he gave her full occupation
apart from the workings of her own mind. As to her case, he might have
offered the excuse that she really had nothing of the aspect of a
lovesick young lady, and was not a bit sea-green to view, or lamentable
in tone. He was sufficiently humane to have felt for anyone suffering,
and the proof of it is, that the only creature he saw under such an
influence he pitied so deplorably, as to make melancholy a habit with
him. He fretted her because he would do nothing, and this spectacle of a
lover beloved, but consenting to be mystified, consentingly
paralyzed:--of a lover beloved!--

"Does she love you?" said Emilia, beseechingly.

"If the truth is in her, she does," he returned.

"She has told you she loves you?--that she loves no one else?"

"Of this I am certain."

"Then, why are you downcast? my goodness! I would take her by the hand
'Woman; do you know yourself? you belong to me!'--I would say that; and
never let go her hand. That would decide everything. She must come to you
then, or you know what it is that means to separate you. My goodness! I
see it so plain!"

But he declined to look thus low, and stood pitifully smiling:--This
spectacle, together with some subtle spur from the talk of love, roused
Emilia from her lethargy. The warmth of a new desire struck around her
heart. The old belief in her power over Wilfrid joined to a distinct
admission that she had for the moment lost him; and she said, "Yes; now,
as I am now, he can abandon me:" but how if he should see her and hear
her in that hushed hour when she was to stand as a star before men?
Emilia flushed and trembled. She lived vividly though her far-projected
sensations, until truly pity for Wilfrid was active in her bosom, she
feeling how he would yearn for her. The vengeance seemed to her so keen
that pity could not fail to come. Thus, to her contemplation, their
positions became reversed: it was Wilfrid now who stood in the darkness,
unselected. Her fiery fancy, unchained from the despotic heart, illumined
her under the golden future.

"Come to us this evening, I will sing to you," she said, and the
'Englishman under a rope' bowed assentingly.

"Sad songs, if you like," she added.

"I have always thought sadness more musical than mirth," said he. "Surely
there is more grace in sadness!"

Poetry, sculpture, and songs, and all the Arts, were brought forward in
mournful array to demonstrate the truth of his theory.

When Emilia understood him, she cited dogs and cats, and birds, and all
things of nature that rejoiced and revelled, in support of the opposite
view.

"Nay, if animals are to be your illustration!" he protested. He had been
perhaps half under the delusion that he spoke with Cornelia, and with a
sense of infinite misery, he compressed the apt distinction that he had
in his mind; which was to show where humanity and simple nature drew a
line, and wherein humanity claimed the loftier seat.

"But such talk must be uttered to a soul," he phrased internally, and
Emilia was denied what belonged to Cornelia.

Hitherto Emilia had refused to sing, and Madame Marini, faithful to her
instructions, had never allowed her to be pressed to sing. Emilia would
brood over notes, thinking: "I can take that; and that; and dwell on such
and such a note for any length of time;" but she would not call up her
voice; she would not look at her treasure. It seemed more to her,
untouched; and went on doubling its worth, until doubtless her idea of
capacity greatly relieved her of the burden on her breast, and the
reflection that she held a charm for all, and held it from all, flattered
one who had been cruelly robbed.

On their way homeward, among the chrysanthemums in the long garden-walk,
they met Tracy Runningbrook, between whose shouts of delight and Emilia's
reserve there was so marked a contrast that one would have deemed Tracy
an offender in her sight. She had said to him entreatingly, "Do not
come," when he volunteered to call on the Marinis in the evening; and she
got away from him as quickly as she could, promising to be pleased if he
called the day following. Tracy flew leaping to one of the great houses
where he was tame cat. When Sir Purcell as they passed on spoke a
contemptuous word of his soft habits and idleness, Emilia said: "He is
one of my true friends."

"And why is he interdicted the visit this evening?"

"Because," she answered, and grew pale, "he--he does not care for music.
I wish I had not met him."

She recollected how Tracy's flaming head had sprung up before her--he who
had always prophesied that she would be famous for arts unknown to her,
and not for song just when she was having a vision of triumph and
caressing the idea of her imprisoned voice bursting its captivity, and
soaring into its old heavens.

"He does not care for music!" interjected Sir Purcell, with something
like a frown. "I have nothing in common with him. But that I might have
known. I can have nothing in common with a man who is not to be impressed
by music."

"I love him quite as well," said Emilia. "He is a quick friend. I am
always certain of him."

"And I imagine also that you are quits with your quick friend," added Sir
Purcell. "You do not care for verse, or he for voices!"

"Poetry?" said Emilia; "no, not much. It seems like talking on tiptoe;
like animals in cages, always going to one end and back again...."

"And making the same noise when they get at the end--like the bears!" Sir
Purcell slightly laughed. "You don't approve of the rhymes?"

"Yes, I like the rhymes; but when you use words--I mean, if you are in
earnest--how can you count and have stops, and--no, I do not care
anything for poetry."

Sir Purcell's opinion of Emilia, though he liked her, was, that if a
genius, she was an incomplete one; and his positive judgement (which I
set down in phrase that would have startled him) ranked both her and
Tracy as a pair of partial humbugs, entertaining enough. They were both
too real for him.

Haply at that moment the girl was intensely susceptible, for she chilled
by his side; and when he left her she begged Madame to walk fast. "I
wonder whether I have a cold!" she said.

Madame explained all the signs of it with tragic minuteness, deciding
that Emilia was free at present, and by miracle, from this English
scourge; but Emilia kept her hands at her mouth. Over the hornbeam hedge
of the lane that ran through the market-gardens, she could see a murky
sunset spreading its deep-coloured lines, that seemed to her really like
a great sorrowing over earth. It had never seemed so till now; and,
entering the house, the roar of vehicles in a neighbouring road sounded
like something implacable in the order of things among us, and clung
about her ears pitilessly. Running upstairs, she tried a scale of notes
that broke on a cough. "Did I cough purposely?" she asked herself; but
she had not the courage to try the notes again. While dressing she hummed
a passage, and sought stealthily to pass the barrier of her own
watchfulness by dwelling on a deep note, from which she was to rise
bursting with full bravura energy, and so forth on a tide of song. But
her breath failed. She stared into the glass and forced the note. A panic
caught at her heart when she heard the sound that issued. "Am I ill? I
must be hungry!" she exclaimed. "It is a cough! But I don't cough! What
is the matter with me?"

Under these auspices she forced her voice again, and subsequently
loosened her dress, complaining of the dressmaker's affection for
tightness. "Now," she said, having fallen upon an attempt at simple "do,
re, me, fa," and laughed at herself. Was it the laugh, that stopping her
at "si," made that "si" so husky, asthmatic, like the wheezing of a
crooked old witch? "I am unlucky, to-night," said Emilia. Or, rather, so
said her surface-self. The submerged self--self in the depths--rarely
speaks to the occasions, but lies under calamity quietly apprehending
all; willing that the talker overhead should deceive others, and herself
likewise, if possible. Emilia found her hands acting daintily and
critically in the attirement of her person; and then surprised herself
murmuring: "I forgot that Tracy won't be here to-night." By which she
betrayed that she had divined those arts she was to shine in, according
to Tracy; and betrayed that she had a terrible fear of a loss of all
else. It pained her now that Tracy should not be coming. "Can I send for
him?" she thought, as she looked winningly into the glass, trying to feel
what sort of a feeling it was to be in love with a face like that one
fronting her, so familiar in its aspects, so strange when scrutinized
studiously! She drew a chair, and laying her elbow on the toilet-table,
gazed hard, until the thought: "What face did Wilfrid see last?"
(meaning, "when he saw me last") drove her away.

Not only did she know herself now a face of many faces; but the life
within her likewise as a soul of many souls. The one Emilia, so
unquestioning, so sure, lay dead; and a dozen new spirits, with but a dim
likeness to her, were fighting for possession of her frame, now occupying
it alone, now in couples; and each casting grim reflections on the other.
Which is only a way of telling you that the great result of mortal
suffering--consciousness--had fully set in; to ripen; perhaps to debase;
at any rate, to prove her.

To be of worth was still her fixed idea--all that was clear in the
thickening mist. "I cannot be ugly," she said, and reproved herself for
simulating a childish tone. "Why do I talk in that way? I know I am not
ugly. But if a fire scorched my face? There is nothing that seems safe!"
The love of friends was suggested to her as something to rely on; and the
loving them. "But if I have nothing to give!" said Emilia, and opened
both her empty hands. She had diverted her mind from the pressure upon
it, by this colloquy with a looking-glass, and gave herself a great
rapture by running up notes to this theme:--

"No, no, no, no, no!--nothing! nothing!"

Clear, full, sonant notes; the notes of her true voice. She did not
attempt them a second time; nor, when Sir Purcell requested her to sing
in the course of the evening, did she comply. "The Signora thinks I have
a cold," she said. Madame Marini protested that she hoped not, she even
thought not, though none could avoid it at this season in this climate,
and she turned to Sir Purcell to petition for any receipts he might have
in his possession, specifics for warding off the frightful affliction of
households in England.

"I have now twenty," said Madame, and throwing up her eyes; "I have tried
all! oh! so many lozenge!"

Marini and Emilia laughed. While Sir Purcell was maintaining the fact of
his total ignorance of the subject against Madame's incredulity, Emilia
left the room. When she came back Madame was pressing her visitor to be
explicit with regard to a certain process of cure conducted by an
application of cold water. The Neapolitan gave several shudders as she
marked him attentively. "Water cold!" she murmured with the deepest
pathos, and dropped her face in her hands with narrowed shoulders. Emilia
held a letter over to Sir Purcell. He took it, first assuring himself
that Marini was in complicity with them. To Marini Emilia addressed a
Momus forefinger, and Marini shrugged, smiling. "Water cold!" ejaculated
Madame, showing her countenance again. "In winter! Luigi, they are mad!"
Marini poked the fire briskly, for his sensations entirely sided with his
wife.

The letter Sir Purcell held contained these words:

   "Be kind, and meet me to-morrow at ten in the morning, at that place
   where you first saw me sitting. I want you to take me to one who
   will help me. I cannot lose time any more. I must work. I have
   been dead for I cannot say how long. I know you will come.

                  "I am, for ever,
                    "Your thankful friend,

                         "Emilia."




CHAPTER XXXIX

The pride of punctuality brought Sir Purcell to that appointed seat in
the gardens about a minute in advance of Emilia. She came hurrying up to
him with three fingers over her lips. The morning was cold; frost edged
the flat brown chestnut and beech leaves lying about on rimy grass; so at
first he made no remark on her evident unwillingness to open her mouth,
but a feverish look of her eyes touched him with some kindly alarm for
her.

"You should not have come out, if you think you are in any danger," he
said.

"Not if we walk fast," she replied, in a visibly-controlled excitement.
"It will be over in an hour. This way."

She led the marvelling gentleman toward the row, and across it under the
big black elms, begging him to walk faster. To accommodate her, he
suggested, that if they had any distance to go, they might ride, and
after a short calculating hesitation, she consented, letting him know
that she would tell him on what expedition she was bound whilst they were
riding. The accompaniment of the wheels, however, necessitated a higher
pitch of her voice, which apparently caused her to suffer from a
contraction of the throat, for she remained silent, with a discouraged
aspect, her full brown eyes showing as in a sombre meditation beneath the
thick brows. The direction had been given to the City. On they went with
the torrent, and were presently engulfed in fog. The roar grew muffled,
phantoms poured along the pavement, yellow beamless lights were in the
shop-windows, all the vehicles went at a slow march.

"It looks as if Business were attending its own obsequies," said Sir
Purcell, whose spirits were enlivened by an atmosphere that confirmed his
impression of things.

Emilia cried twice: "Oh! what cruel weather!" Her eyelids blinked, either
with anger or in misery.

They were set down a little beyond the Bank, and when they turned from
the cabman, Sir Purcell was warm in his offer of his arm to her, for he
had seen her wistfully touching what money she had in her pocket, and
approved her natural good breeding in allowing it to pass unmentioned.

"Now," he said, "I must know what you want to do."

"A quiet place! there is no quiet place in this City," said Emilia
fretfully.

A gentleman passing took off his hat, saying, with City politeness,
"Pardon me: you are close to a quiet place. Through that door, and the
hall, you will find a garden, where you will hear London as if it sounded
fifty miles off."

He bowed and retired, and the two (Emilia thankful, Sir Purcell tending
to anger), following his indication, soon found themselves in a most
perfect retreat, the solitude of which they had the misfortune, however,
of destroying for another, and a scared, couple.

Here Emilia said: "I have determined to go to Italy at once. Mr. Pericles
has offered to pay for me. It's my father's wish. And--and I cannot wait
and feel like a beggar. I must go. I shall always love England--don't
fear that!"

Sir Purcell smiled at the simplicity of her pleading look.

"Now, I want to know where to find Mr. Pericles," she pursued. "And if
you will come to him with me! He is sure to be very angry--I thought you
might protect me from that. But when he hears that I am really going at
last--at once!--he can laugh sometimes! you will see him rub his hands."

"I must enquire where his chambers are to be found," said Sir Purcell.

"Oh! anybody in the City must know him, because he is so rich." Emilia
coughed. "This fog kills me. Pray make haste. Dear friend, I trouble you
very much, but I want to get away from this. I can hardly breathe. I
shall have no heart for my task, if I don't see him soon."

"Wait for me, then," said Sir Purcell; "you cannot wait in a better
place. And I must entreat you to be careful." He half alluded to the
adjustment of her shawl, and to anything else, as far as she might choose
to apprehend him. Her dexterity in tossing him the letter, unseen by
Madame Marini, might have frightened him and given him a dread, that
albeit woman, there was germ of wickedness in her.

This pained him acutely, for he never forgot that she had been the means
of his introduction to Cornelia, from whom he could not wholly dissociate
her: and the idea that any prospective shred of impurity hung about one
who had even looked on his beloved, was utter anguish to the keen
sentimentalist. "Be very careful," he would have repeated, but that he
had a warning sense of the ludicrous, and Emilia's large eyes when they
fixed calmly on a face were not of a flighty east She stood, too, with
the "dignity of sadness," as he was pleased to phrase it.

"She must be safe here," he said to himself. And yet, upon reflection, he
decided not to leave her, peremptorily informing her to that effect.
Emilia took his arm, and as they were passing through the hall of
entrance they met the same gentleman who had directed them to the spot of
quiet. Both she and Sir Purcell heard him say to a companion: "There she
is." A deep glow covered Emilia's face. "Do they know you?" asked Sir
Purcell. "No," she said: and then he turned, but the couple had gone on.

"That deserves chastisement," he muttered. Briefly telling her to wait,
he pursued them. Emilia was standing in the gateway, not at all
comprehending why she was alone. "Sandra Belloni!" struck her ear.
Looking forward she perceived a hand and a head gesticulating from a
cab-window. She sprang out into the street, and instantly the hand
clenched and the head glared savagely. It was Mr. Pericles himself, in
travelling costume.

"I am your fool?" he began, overbearing Emilia's most irritating "How are
you?" and "Are you quite well?

"I am your fool? hein? You send me to Paris! to Geneve! I go over Lago
Maggiore, and aha! it is your joke, meess! I juste return. Oh capital! At
Milano I wait--I enquire--till a letter from old Belloni, and I learn I
am your fool--of you all! Jomp in."

"A gentleman is coming," said Emilia, by no means intimidated, though the
forehead of Mr. Pericles looked portentous. "He was bringing me to you."

"Zen, jomp in!" cried Mr. Pericles.

Here Sir Purcell came up.

Emilia said softly: "Mr. Pericles."

There was the form of a bow of moderate recognition between them, but
other hats were off to Emilia. The two gentlemen who had offended Sir
Purcell had insisted, on learning the nature of their offence, that they
had a right to present their regrets to the lady in person, and beg an
excuse from her lips. Sir Purcell stood white with a futile effort at
self-control, as one of them, preluding "Pardon me," said: "I had the
misfortune to remark to my friend, as I passed you, 'There she is.' May
I, indeed, ask your pardon? My friend is an artist. I met him after I had
first seen you. He, at least, does not think foolish my recommendation to
him that he should look on you at all hazards. Let me petition you to
overlook the impertinence."

"I think, gentlemen, you have now made the most of the advantage my
folly, in supposing you would regret or apologize fittingly for an
impropriety, has given you," interposed Sir Purcell.

His new and superior tone (for he had previously lost his temper and
spoken with a silly vehemence) caused them to hesitate. One begged the
word of pardon from Emilia to cover his retreat. She gave it with an air
of thorough-bred repose, saying, "I willingly pardon you," and looking at
them no more, whereupon they vanished. Ten minutes later, Emilia and Sir
Purcell were in the chambers of Mr. Pericles.

The Greek had done nothing but grin obnoxiously to every word spoken on
the way, drawing his hand down across his jaw, to efface the hard pale
wrinkles, and eyeing Emilia's cavalier with his shrewdest suspicious
look.

"You will excuse,"--he pointed to the confusion of the room they were in,
and the heap of unopened letters,--"I am from ze Continent; I do not
expect ze pleasure. A seat?"

Mr. Pericles handed chairs to his visitors.

"It is a climate, is it not," he resumed.

Emilia said a word, and he snapped at her, immediately adding, "Hein? Ah!
so!" with a charming urbanity.

"How lucky that we should meet you," exclaimed Emilia. "We were just
coming to you--to find out, I mean, where you were, and call on you."

"Ough! do not tell me lies," said Mr. Pericles, clasping the hollow of
his cheeks between thumb and forefinger.

"Allow me to assure you that what Miss Belloni has said is perfectly
correct," Sir Purcell remarked.

Mr. Pericles gave a short bow. "It is ze same; I am much obliged."

"And you have just come from Italy?" said Emilia.

"Where you did me ze favour to send me, it is true. Sanks!"

"Oh, what a difference between Italy and this!" Emilia turned her face to
the mottled yellow windows.

"Many sanks," repeated Mr. Pericles, after which the three continued
silent for a time.

At last Emilia said, bluntly, "I have come to ask you to take me to
Italy."

Mr. Pericles made no sign, but Sir Purcell leaned forward to her with a
gaze of astonishment, almost of horror.

"Will you take me?" persisted Emilia.

Still the sullen Greek refused either to look at her or to answer.

"Because I am ready to go," she went on. "I want to go at once; to-day,
if you like. I am getting too old to waste an hour."

Mr. Pericles uncrossed his legs, ejaculating, "What a fog! Ah!" and that
was all. He rose, and went to a cupboard.

Sir Purcell murmured hurriedly in Emilia's ear, "Have you considered what
you've been saying?"

"Yes, yes. It is only a journey," Emilia replied, in a like tone.

"A journey!"

"My father wishes it."

"Your mother?"

"Hush! I intend to make him take the Madre with me."

She designated Mr. Pericles, who had poured into a small liqueur glass
some green Chartreuse, smelling strong of pines. His visitors declined to
eject the London fog by this aid of the mountain monks, and Mr. Pericles
warmed himself alone.

"You are wiz old Belloni," he called out.

"I am not staying with my father," said Emilia.

"Where?" Mr. Pericles shed a baleful glance on Sir Purcell.

"I am staying with Signor Marini."

"Servente!" Mr. Pericles ducked his head quite low, while his hand swept
the floor with an imaginary cap. Malice had lighted up his features, and
finding, after the first burst of sarcasm, that it was vain to indulge it
toward an absent person, he altered his style. "Look," he cried to
Emilia, "it is Marini stops you and old Belloni--a conspirator, aha! Is
it for an artist to conspire, and be carbonaro, and kiss books, and, mon
Dieu! bon! it is Marini plays me zis trick. I mark him. I mark him, I
say! He is paid by young Pole. I hold zat family in my hand, I say! So I
go to be met by you, and on I go to Italy. I get a letter at
Milano,--'Marini stop me at Dover,' signed 'Giuseppe Belloni.' Ze letter
have been spied into by ze Austrians. I am watched--I am dogged--I am
imprisoned--I am examined. 'You know zis Giuseppe Belloni?' 'Meine Herrn!
he was to come. I leave word at Paris for him, at Geneve, at Stresa, to
bring his daughter to ze Conservatoire, for which I pay. She has a
voice--or she had.'"

"Has!" exclaimed Emilia.

"Had!" Mr. Pericles repeated.

"She has!"

"Zen sing!" with which thunder of command, Mr. Pericles gave up his
vindictive narration of the points of his injuries sustained, and,
pitching into a chair, pressed his fingers to his temples, frowning
attention. His eyes were on the floor. Presently he glanced up, and saw
Emilia's chest rising quickly. No voice issued.

"It is to commence," cried Mr. Pericles. "Hein! now sing."

Emilia laid her hand under her throat. "Not now! Oh, not now! When you
have told me what those Austrians did to you. I want to hear; I am very
anxious to hear. And what they said of my father. How could he have come
to Milan without a passport? He had only a passport to Paris."

"And at Paris I leave instructions for ze procuration of a passport over
Lombardy. Am I not Antonio Pericles Agriolopoulos? Sing, I say!"

"Ah, but what voices you must have heard in Italy," said Emilia softly.
"I am afraid to sing after them. Si: I dare not."

She panted, little in keeping with the cajolery of her tones, but she had
got Mr. Pericles upon a theme serious to his mind.

"Not a voice! not one!" he cried, stamping his foot. "All is French. I go
twice wizin six monz, and if I go to a goose-yard I hear better. Oh, yes!
it is tune--"ta-ta-ta--ti-ti-ti--to!" and of ze heart--where is zat? Mon
Dieu! I despair. I see music go dead. Let me hear you, Sandra."

His enthusiasm had always affected Emilia, and painfully since her love
had given her a consciousness of infidelity to her Art, but now the
pathetic appeal to her took away her strength, and tears rose in her eyes
at the thought of his faith in her. His repetition of her name--the
'Sandra' being uttered with unwonted softness--plunged her into a fit of
weeping.

"Ah!" Mr. Pericles shouted. "See what she has come to!" and he walked two
or three paces off to turn upon her spitefully, "she will be vapeurs,
nerfs, I know not! when it wants a physique of a saint! Sandra Belloni,"
he added, gravely, "lift up ze head! Sing, 'Sempre al tuo santo nome.'"

Emilia checked her tears. His hand being raised to beat time, she could
not withstand the signal. "Sempre;"--there came two struggling notes, to
which another clung, shuddering like two creatures on the deeps.

She stopped; herself oddly calling out "Stop."

"Stop who, donc?" Mr. Pericles postured an indignant interrogation.

"I mean, I must stop," Emilia faltered. "It's the fog. I cannot sing in
this fog. It chokes me."

Apparently Mr. Pericles was about to say something frightfully savage,
which was restrained by the presence of Sir Purcell. He went to the door
in answer to a knock, while Emilia drew breath as calmly as she might;
her head moving a little backward with her breathing, in a sad mechanical
way painful to witness. Sir Purcell stretched his hand out to her, but
she did not take it. She was listening to voices at the door. Was it
really Mr. Pole who was there? Quite unaware of the effect the sight of
her would produce on him, Emilia rose and walked to the doorway. She
heard Mr. Pole abusing Mr. Pericles half banteringly for his absence
while business was urgent, saying that they must lay their heads together
and consult, otherwise--a significant indication appeared to close the
sentence.

"But if you've just come off your journey, and have got a lady in there,
we must postpone, I suppose. Say, this afternoon. I'll keep up to the
mark, if nothing happens...."

Emilia pushed the door from the hand of Mr. Pericles, and was advancing
toward the old man on the landing; but no sooner did the latter verify to
his startled understanding that he had seen her, than with an exclamation
of "All right! good-bye!" he began a rapid descent, of the stairs. A
distance below, he bade Mr. Pericles take care of her, and as an excuse
for his abrupt retreat, the word "busy" sounded up.

"Does my face frighten him?" Emilia thought. It made her look on herself
with a foreign eye. This is a dreadful but instructive piece of
contemplation; acting as if the rich warm blood of self should have
ceased to hug about us, and we stand forth to be dissected unresistingly.
All Emilia's vital strength now seemed to vanish. At the renewal of Mr.
Pericles' peremptory mandate for her to sing, she could neither appeal to
him, nor resist; but, raising her chest, she made her best effort, and
then covered her face. This was done less for concealment of her
shame-stricken features than to avoid sight of the stupefaction imprinted
upon Mr. Pericles.

"Again, zat A flat!" he called sternly.

She tried it.

"Again!"

Again she did her utmost to accomplish the task. If you have seen a girl
in a fit of sobs elevate her head, with hard-shut eyelids, while her
nostrils convulsively take in a long breath, as if for speech, but it is
expended in one quick vacant sigh, you know how Emilia looked. And it
requires a humane nature to pardon such an aspect in a person from whom
we have expected triumphing glances and strong thrilling tones.

"What is zis?" Mr. Pericles came nearer to her.

He would listen to no charges against the atmosphere. Commanding her to
give one simple run of notes, a contralto octave, he stood over her with
keenly watchful eyes. Sir Purcell bade him observe her distress.

"I am much obliged," Mr. Pericles bowed, "she is ruined. I have
suspected. Ha! But I ask for a note! One!"

This imperious signal drew her to another attempt. The deplorable sound
that came sent Emilia sinking down with a groan.

"Basta, basta! So, it is zis tale," said Mr. Pericles, after an
observation of her huddled shape. "Did I not say--"

His voice was so menacingly loud and harsh that Sir Purcell remarked:
"This is not the time to repeat it--pardon me--whatever you said."

"Ze fool--she play ze fool! Sir, I forget ze Christian--ah! Purcell!--I
say she play ze fool, and look at her! Why is it she comes to me now? A
dozen times I warn her. To Italy! to Italy! all is ready: you will have a
place at ze Conservatorio. No: she refuse. I say 'Go, and you are a
queen. You are a Prima at twenty, and Europe is beneas you.' No: she
refuse, and she is ruined. 'What,' I say, 'what zat dam silly smile
mean?' Oh, no! I am not lazy!' 'But you area fool!' 'Oh, no!' 'And what
are you, zen? And what shall you do?' Nussing! nussing! nussing! And,
dam! zere is an end."

Emilia had caught blindly at Sir Purcell's hand, by which she raised
herself, and then uncovering her face, looked furtively at the malign
furnace-white face of Mr. Pericles.

"It cannot have gone,"--she spoke, as if mentally balancing the
possibility.

"It has gone, I say; and you know why, Mademoiselle ze Fool!" Mr.
Pericles retorted.

"No, no; it can't be gone. Gone? voices never go!"

The reiteration of the "You know why," from Mr. Pericles, and all the
wretchedness of loss it suggested, robbed her of the little spark of
nervous fire by which she felt half-reviving in courage and confidence.

"Let me try once more," she appealed to him, in a frenzy.

Mr. Pericles, though fully believing in his heart that it might only be a
temporary deprivation of voice, affected to scout the notion of another
trial, but finally extended his forefinger: "Well, now; start! 'Sempre al
tuo Santo!' Commence: Sem--" and Mr. Pericles hummed the opening bar, not
as an unhopeful man would do. The next moment he was laughing horribly.
Emilia, to make sure of the thing she dreaded, forced the note, and would
not be denied. What voice there was in her came to the summons. It
issued, if I may so express it, ragged, as if it had torn through a
briar-hedge: then there was a whimper of tones, and the effect was like
the lamentation of a hardly-used urchin, lacking a certain music that
there is in his undoubted heartfelt earnestness. No single note poised
firmly for the instant, but swayed, trembling on its neighbour to right
and to left when pressed for articulate sound, it went into a ghastly
whisper. The laughter of Mr. Pericles was pleasing discord in comparison.




CHAPTER XL

Emilia stretched out her hand and said, "Good-bye." Seeing that the
hardened girl, with her dead eyelids, did not appear to feel herself at
his mercy, and also that Sir Purcell's forehead looked threatening, Mr.
Pericles stopped his sardonic noise. He went straight to the door, which
he opened with alacrity, and mimicking very wretchedly her words of
adieu, stood prepared to bow her out. She astonished him by passing
without another word. Before he could point a phrase bitter enough for
expression, Sir Purcell had likewise passed, and in going had given him a
quietly admonishing look.

"Zose Poles are beggars!" Mr. Pericles roared after them over the stairs,
and slammed his door for emphasis. Almost immediately there was a knock
at it. Mr. Pericles stood bent and cat-like as Sir Purcell reappeared.
The latter, avoiding all preliminaries, demanded of the Greek that he
should promise not to use the names of his friends publicly in such a
manner again.

"I require a promise for the future. An apology will be needless from
you."

"I shall not give it," said Mr. Pericles, with a sharp lift of his upper
lip.

"But you will give me the promise I have returned for."

In answer Mr. Pericles announced that he had spoken what was simply true:
that the prosperity of the Poles was fictitious: that he, or any
unfavourable chance, could ruin them: and that their friends might do
better to protect their interests than by menacing one who had them in
his power.

Sir Purcell merely reiterated his demand for the promise, which was
ultimately snarled to him; whereupon he retired, joy on his features.
For, Cornelia poor, she might be claimed by him fearlessly: that is to
say, without the fear of people whispering that the penniless baronet had
sued for gold, and without the fear of her father rejecting his suit. At
least he might, with this knowledge that he had gained, appoint to meet
her now! All the morning Sir Purcell had been combative, owing to that
subordinate or secondary post he occupied in a situation of some
excitement;--which combativeness is one method whereby men thus placed,
imagining that they are acting devotedly for their friends, contrive
still to assert themselves. He descended to the foot of the stairs, where
he had told Emilia to wait for him, full of kind feelings and ready
cheerful counsels; as thus: "Nothing that we possess belongs to us;--All
will come round rightly in the end; Be patient, look about for amusement,
and improve your mind." And more of this copper coinage of wisdom in the
way of proverbs. But Emilia was nowhere visible to receive the
administration of comfort. Outside the house the fog appeared to have
swallowed her. With some chagrin on her behalf (partly a sense of duty
unfulfilled) Sir Purcell made his way to the residence of the Marinis, to
report of her there, if she should not have arrived. The punishment he
inflicted on himself in keeping his hand an hour from that letter to be
written to Cornelia, was almost pleasing; and he was rewarded by it, for
the projected sentences grew mellow and rich, condensed and throbbed
eloquently. What wonder, that with such a mental occupation, he should
pass Emilia and not notice her? She let him go.

But when he was out of sight, all seemed gone. The dismally-lighted city
wore a look of Judgement terrible to see. Her brain was slave to her
senses: she fancied she had dropped into an underground kingdom, among a
mysterious people. The anguish through which action had just hurried her,
now fell with a conscious weight upon her heart. She stood a moment,
seeing her desolation stretch outwardly into endless labyrinths; and then
it narrowed and took hold of her as a force within: changing thus, almost
with each breathing of her body.

The fog had thickened. Up and down the groping city went muffled men, few
women. Emilia looked for one of her sex who might have a tender face.
Desire to be kissed and loved by a creature strange to her, and to lay
her head upon a woman's bosom, moved her to gaze around with a longing
once or twice; but no eyes met hers, and the fancy recurred vividly that
she was not in the world she had known. Otherwise, what had robbed her of
her voice? She played with her fancy for comfort, long after any real
vitality in it had oozed out. Her having strength to play at fancies
showed that a spark of hope was alive. In truth, firm of flesh as she
was, to believe that all worth had departed from her was impossible, and
when she reposed simply on her sensations, very little trouble beset her:
only when she looked abroad did the aspect of numerous indifferent faces,
and the harsh flowing of the world its own way, tell her she had lost her
power. Could it be lost? The prospect of her desolation grew so wide to
her that she shut her eyes, abandoning herself to feeling; and this by
degrees moved her to turn back and throw herself at the feet of Mr.
Pericles. For, if he said, "Wait, my child, and all will come round
well," she was prepared blindly to think so. The projection of the words
in her mind made her ready to weep: but as she neared the house of his
office the wish to hear him speak that, became passionate; she counted
all that depended on it, and discovered the size of the fabric she had
built on so thin a plank. After a while, her steps were mechanically
swift. Before she reached the chambers of Mr. Pericles she had walked,
she knew not why, once round the little quiet enclosed city-garden, and a
cold memory of those men who had looked at her face gave her some wonder,
to be quickly kindled into fuller comprehension.

Beholding Emilia once more, Mr. Pericles enjoyed a revival of his taste
for vengeance; but, unhappily for her, he found it languid, and when he
had rubbed his hands, stared, and by sundry sharp utterances brought her
to his feet, his satisfaction was less poignant than he had expected. As
a consequence, instead of speaking outrageously, according to his habit,
in wrath, he was now frigidly considerate, informing Emilia that it would
be good for her if she were dead, seeing that she was of no use whatever;
but, as she was alive, she had better go to her father and mother, and
learn knitting, or some such industrial employment. "Unless zat man for
whom you play fool!--" Mr. Pericles shrugged the rest of his meaning.

"But my voice may not be gone," urged Emilia. "I may sing to you
to-morrow--this evening. It must be the fog. Why do you think it lost? It
can't be--"

"Cracked!" cried Mr. Pericles.

"It is not! No; do not think it. I may stay here. Don't tell me to go
yet. The streets make me wish to die. And I feel I may, perhaps, sing
presently. Wait. Will you wait?"

A hideous imitation of her lamentable tones burst from Mr. Pericles.
"Cracked!" he cried again.

Emilia lifted her eyes, and looked at him steadily. She saw the idea grow
in the eyes fronting her that she had a pleasant face, and she at once
staked this little bit of newly-conceived worth on an immediate chance.
Remember; that she was as near despair as a creature constituted so
healthily could go. Speaking no longer in a girlish style, but with the
grave pleading manner of a woman, she begged Mr. Pericles to take her to
Italy, and have faith in the recovery of her voice. He, however, far from
being softened, as he grew aware of her sweetness of feature, waxed
violent and insulting.

"Take me," she said. "My voice will reward you. I feel that you can cure
it."

"For zat man! to go to him again!" Mr. Pericles sneered.

"I never shall do that." There sprang a glitter as of steel in Emilia's
eyes. "I will make myself yours for life, if you like. Take my hand, and
let me swear. I do not break my word. I will swear, that if I recover my
voice to become what you expected,--I will marry you whenever you ask me,
and then--"

More she was saying, but Mr. Pericles, sputtering a laugh of "Sanks!"
presented a postured supplication for silence.

"I am not a man who marries."

He plainly stated the relations that the woman whom he had distinguished
by the honours of selection must hold toward him.

Emilia's cheeks did not redden; but, without any notion of shame at the
words she listened to, she felt herself falling lower and lower the more
her spirit clung to Mr. Pericles: yet he alone was her visible
personification of hope, and she could not turn from him. If he cast her
off, it seemed to her that her voice was condemned. She stood there
still, and the cold-eyed Greek formed his opinion.

He was evidently undecided as regards his own course of proceeding, for
his chin was pressed by thumb and forefinger hard into his throat, while
his eyebrows were wrinkled up to their highest elevation. From this
attitude, expressive of the accurate balancing of the claims of an
internal debate, he emerged into the posture of a cock crowing, and
Emilia heard again his bitter mimicry of her miserable broken tones,
followed by Ha! dam! Basta! basta!"

"Sit here," cried Mr. Pericles. He had thrown himself into a chair, and
pointed to his knee.

Emilia remained where she was standing.

He caught at her hand, but she plucked that from him. Mr. Pericles rose,
sounding a cynical "Hein!"

"Don't touch me," said Emilia.

Nothing exasperates certain natures so much as the effort of the visibly
weak to intimidate them.

"I shall not touch you?" Mr. Pericles sneered. "Zen, why are you here?"

"I came to my friend," was Emilia's reply.

"Your friend! He is not ze friend of a couac-couac. Once, if you please:
but now" (Mr. Pericles shrugged), "now you are like ze rest of women. You
are game. Come to me."

He caught once more at her hand, which she lifted; then at her elbow.

"Will you touch me when I tell you not to?"

There was the soft line of an involuntary frown over her white face, and
as he held her arm from the doubled elbow, with her clenched hand aloft,
she appeared ready to strike a tragic blow.

Anger and every other sentiment vanished from Mr. Pericles in the
rapturous contemplation of her admirable artistic pose.

"Mon Dieu! and wiz a voice!" he exclaimed, dashing his fist in a delirium
of forgetfulness against the one plastered lock of hair on his shining
head. "Little fool! little dam fool!--zat might have been"--(Mr. Pericles
figured in air with his fingers to signify the exaltation she was to have
attained)--"Mon Dieu! and look at you! Did I not warn you? non a vero?
Did I not say 'Ruin, ruin, if you go so? For a man!--a voice! You will
not come to me? Zen, hear! you shall go to old Belloni. I do not want
you, my pretty dear. Woman is a trouble, a drug. You shall go to old
Belloni; and, crack! if ze voice will come back to a whip,--bravo, old
Belloni!"

Mr. Pericles turned to reach down his hat from a peg. At the same instant
Emilia quitted the room.

Dusk was deepening the yellow atmosphere, and the crowd was now steadily
flowing in one direction. The bereaved creature went with the stream,
glad to be surrounded and unseen, till it struck her, at last, that she
was moving homeward. She stopped with a pang of grief, turned, and met
all those people to whom the fireside was a beacon. For some time she
bore against the pressure, but her loneliness overwhelmed her. None
seemed to go her way. For a refuge, she turned into one of the city side
streets, where she was quite alone. Unhappily, the street was of no
length, and she soon came to the end of it. There was the choice of
retracing her steps, or entering a strange street; and while she
hesitated a troop of sheep went by, that made a piteous noise. She
followed them, thinking curiously of the something broken that appeared
to be in their throats. By-and-by, the thought flashed in her that they
were going to be slaughtered. She held her step, looking at them, but
without any tender movement of the heart. They came to a butcher's yard,
and went in.

When she had passed along a certain distance, a shiver seized her, and
her instinct pushed her toward the lighted shops, where there were
pictures. In one she saw the portrait of that Queen of Song whom she had
heard at Besworth. Two young men, glancing as they walked by arm in arm,
pronounced the name of the great enchantress, and hummed one of her
triumphant airs. The features expressed health, humour, power, every fine
animal faculty. Genius was on the forehead and the plastic mouth; the
forehead being well projected, fair, and very shapely, showing clear
balance, as well as capacity to grasp flame, and fling it. The line
reaching to a dimple from the upper lip was saved from scornfulness by
the lovely gleam, half-challenging, half-consoling, regal, roguish--what
you would--that sat between her dark eyelashes, like white sunlight on
the fringed smooth roll of water by a weir. Such a dimple, and such a
gleam of eyes, would have been keys to the face of a weakling, and it was
the more fascinating from the disregard of any minor charm notable upon
this grand visage, which could not suffer a betrayal. You saw, and there
was no effort to conceal, that the spirit animating it was intensely
human; but it was human of the highest chords of humanity, indifferent to
finesse and despising subtleties; gifted to speak, to inspire, and to
command all great emotions. In fact, it was the masque of a dramatic
artist in repose. Tempered by beauty, the robust frame showed that she
possessed a royal nature, and could, as a foremost qualification for Art,
feel harmoniously. She might have many of the littlenesses of which women
are accused; for Art she promised unspotted excellence; and, adorable as
she was by attraction of her sex, she was artist over all.

Emilia found herself on one of the bridges, thinking of this aspect.
Beneath her was the stealing river, with its red intervals, and the fog
had got a wider circle. She could not disengage that face from her mind.
It seemed to say to her, boldly, "I live because success is mine;" and to
hint, as with a paler voice, "Death the fruit of failure." Could she,
Emilia, ever be looked on again by her friends? The dread of it gave her
shudders. Then, death was certainly easy! But death took no form in her
imagination, as it does to one seeking it. She desired to forget and to
hide her intolerable losses; to have the impostor she felt herself to be
buried. As she walked along she held out her hands, murmuring, "Helpless!
useless!" It came upon her as a surprise that one like herself should be
allowed to live. "I don't want to," she said; and the neat moment, "I
wonder what a drowned woman is like?" She hurried back to the streets and
the shops. The shops failed now to give her distraction, for a stiff and
dripping image floated across all the windows, and she was glad to see
the shutters being closed; though, when the streets were dark, some
friendliness seemed to have gone. When the streets were quits dark, save
for the row of lamps, she walked fast, fearing she knew not what.

A little Italian boy sat doubled over his organ on a doorstep, while a
yet smaller girl at his elbow plied him with questions in English. Emilia
stopped before them, and the girl complained to her that the perverse
little foreigner would not answer. Two or three words in his native
tongue soon brought his face to view. Emilia sat down between them, and
listened to the prattle of two languages. The girl said that she never
had supper, which was also the case with the boy; so Emilia felt for her
purse, and sent the girl with sixpence in search of a shop that sold
cafes. The girl came back with her apron full. As they were all about to
eat, a policeman commanded them to quit the spot, informing them that he
knew both them and their dodges. Emilia stood up, and was taking her
little people away, when the policeman, having suddenly changed his
accurate opinion of her, said, "You're giving 'em some supper, miss? Oh,
they must sit down to their suppers, you know!" and walked away, not to
be a witness of this infraction of the law. So, they sat down and ate,
and the boy and girl tried to say intelligible things to one another, and
laughed. Emilia could not help joining in their laughter. The girl was
very anxious to know whether the boy was ever beaten, and hearing that he
was, she appeared better satisfied, remarking that she was also, but
curious still as to the different forms of chastisement they received.
This being partially explained, she wished to know whether he would be
beaten that night, Emilia interpreting. A grin, and a rapid whistle and
'cluck,' significant of the application of whips, told the state of his
expectations; at which the girl clapped her hands, adding, lamentably,
"So shall I, 'cause I am always." Emilia gathered them under each
shoulder, when, to her delight and half perplexity, they closed their
eyes, leaning against her.

The policeman passed, and for an hour endured this spectacle. At last he
felt compelled to explain to Emilia what were the sentiments of
gentlefolks with regard to their doorsteps, apart from the law of the
matter. He put it to her human nature whether she would like her
doorsteps to be blocked, so that no one could enter, and anyone emerging
stood a chance of being precipitated, nose foremost, upon the pavement.
Then, again, as gentle-folks had good experience of, the young ones in
London were twice as cunning as the old. Emilia pleaded for her sleeping
pair, that they might not be disturbed. Her voice gave the keeper of the
peace notions of her being one of the eccentric young ladies who are
occasionally 'missing,' and have advertizing friends. He uttered a stern
ahem! preliminary to assent; but the noise wakened the children, who
stared, and readily obeyed his gesture, which said, "Be off!" while his
words were those of remonstrance. Emilia accompanied them a little way.
Both promised eagerly that they would be at the same place the night
following and departed--the boy with laughing nods and waving of hands,
which the girl imitated. Emilia's feeling of security went with them. She
at once feigned a destination in the distance, and set forward to reach
it, but the continued exposure of this delusion made it difficult to
renew. She fell to counting the hours that were to elapse before she
would meet those children, saying to herself, that whatever she did she
must keep her engagement to be at the appointed steps. This restriction
set her darkly fancying that she wished for her end.

Remembering those men who had looked at her admiringly, "Am I worth
looking at?" she said; and it gave her some pleasure to think that she
had it still in her power to destroy a thing of value. She was savagely
ashamed of going to death empty-handed. By-and-by, great fatigue
stiffened her limbs, and she sat down from pure want of rest. The luxury
of rest and soothing languor kept hard thoughts away. She felt as if
floating, for a space. The fear of the streets left her. But when
necessity for rest had gone, she clung to the luxury still, and sitting
bent forward, with her hands about her knees, she began to brood over
tumbled images of a wrong done to her. She had two distinct visions of
herself, constantly alternating and acting like the temptation of two
devils. One represented her despicable in feature, and bade her die; the
other showed a fair face, feeling which to be her own, Emilia had fits of
intolerable rage. This vision prevailed; and this wicked side of her
humanity saved her. Active despair is a passion that must be superseded
by a passion. Passive despair comes later; it has nothing to do with
mental action, and is mainly a corruption or degradation of our blood.
The rage in Emilia was blind at first, but it rose like a hawk, and
singled its enemy. She fixed her mind to conceive the foolishness of
putting out a face that her rival might envy, and of destroying anything
that had value. The flattery of beauty came on her like a warm garment.
When she opened her eyes, seeing what she was and where, she almost
smiled at the silly picture that had given her comfort. Those men had
looked on her admiringly, it was true, but would Wilfrid have ceased to
love her if she had been beautiful? An extraordinary intuition of
Wilfrid's sentiment tormented her now. She saw herself in the light that
he would have seen her by, till she stood with the sensations of an
exposed criminal in the dark length of the street, and hurried down it,
back, as well as she could find her way, to the friendly policeman.

Her question on reaching him, "Are you married?" was prodigiously
astonishing, and he administered the rebuff of an affirmative with
severity. "Then," said Emilia, "when you go home, let me go with you to
your wife. Perhaps she will consent to take care of me for this night."
The policeman coughed mildly and replied, "It's plain you know nothing of
women--begging your pardon, miss,--for I can see you're a lady." Emilia
repeated her petition, and the policeman explained the nature of women.
Not to be baffled, Emilia said, "I think your wife must be a good woman."
Hereat the policeman laughed, arming "that the best of them knew what bad
suspicions was." Ultimately, he consented to take her to his wife, when
he was relieved, after the term of so many minutes. Emilia stood at a
distance, speculating on the possible choice he would make of a tune to
accompany his monotonous walk to and fro, and on the certainty of his
wearing any tune to nothing.

She was in a bed, sleeping heavily, a little before dawn.

The day that followed was her day of misery. The blow that had stunned
her had become as a loud intrusive pulse in her head. By this new
daylight she fathomed the depth, and reckoned the value, of her loss. And
her senses had no pleasure in the light, though there was sunshine. The
woman who was her hostess was kind, but full of her first surprise at the
strange visit, and too openly ready for any information the young lady
might be willing to give with regard to her condition, prospects, and
wishes. Emilia gave none. She took the woman's hand, asking permission to
remain under her protection. The woman by-and-by named a sum of money as
a sum for weekly payment, and Emilia transferred all to her that she had.
The policeman and his wife thought her, though reasonable, a trifle
insane. She sat at a window for hours watching a 'last man' of the fly
species walking up and plunging down a pane of glass. On this transparent
solitary field for the most objectless enterprise ever undertaken, he
buzzed angrily at times, as if he had another meaning in him, which was
being wilfully misinterpreted. Then he mounted again at his leisure, to
pitch backward as before. Emilia found herself thinking with great
seriousness that it was not wonderful for boys to be always teasing and
killing flies, whose thin necks and bobbing heads themselves suggested
the idea of decapitation. She said to her hostess: "I don't like flies.
They seem never to sing but when they are bothered." The woman replied:
"Ah, indeed?" very smoothly, and thought: "If you was to bust out now,
which of us two would be strongest?" Emilia grew distantly aware that the
policeman and his wife talked of her and watched her with combined
observation.

When it was night she went to keep her appointment. The girl was there,
but the boy came late. He said he had earned only a few pence that day,
and would be beaten. He spoke in a whimpering tone which caused the girl
to desire a translation of his words. Emilia told her how things were
with him, and the girl expressed a wish that she had an organ, as in that
case she would be sure to earn more than sixpence a day; such being the
amount that procured her nightly a comfortable reception in the arms of
her parents. "Do you like music?" said Emilia. The girl replied that she
liked organs; but, as if to avoid committing an injustice, cited parrots
as foremost in her affections. Holding them both to her breast, Emilia
thought that she would rescue them from this beating by giving them the
money they had to offer for kindness: but the restlessness of the
children suddenly made her a third party to the thought of cakes. She had
no money. Her heart bled for the poor little hungry, apprehensive
creatures. For a moment she half fancied she had her voice, and looked up
at the windows of the pitiless houses with a bold look; but there was a
speedy mockery of her thought "You shall listen: you shall open!" She
coughed hoarsely, and then fell into fits of crying. Her friend the
policeman came by and took her arm with a force that he meant to be
persuasive; so lifting her and handing her some steps beyond the limit of
his beat, with stern directions for her to proceed home immediately. She
obeyed. Next day she asked her hostess to lend her half-a-crown. The
woman snapped shortly in answer: "No; the less you have the better."
Emilia was obliged to abandon her little people.

She was to this extent the creature of mania: that she could not conceive
of a way being open by which she might return to her father and mother,
or any of her friends. It was to her not a matter for her will to decide
upon, but simply a black door shut that nothing could displace. When the
week, for which term of shelter she had paid, was ended, her hostess
spoke upon this point, saying, more to convince Emilia of the necessity
for seeking her friends than from any unkindness: "Me and my husband
can't go on keepin' you, you know, my dear, however well's our meaning."
Emilia drew the woman toward her with both her lands, softly shaking her
head. She left the house about noon.

It was now her belief that she had probably no more than another day to
live, for she was destitute of money. The thought relieved her from that
dreadful fear of the street, and she walked at her own pace, even after
dark. The rumble and the rattle of wheels; the cries and grinding noises;
the hum of motion and talk; all under the lingering smoky red of a London
Winter sunset, were not discord to her animated blood. Her unhunted
spirit made a music of them. It was not like the music of other days, nor
was the exultation it created at all like happiness: but she at least
forgot herself. Voices came in her ear, and hung unheard until long after
the speaker had passed. Hunger did not assail her. She was not beset by
an animal weakness; and having in her mind no image of death, and with
her ties to life cut away;--thus devoid of apprehension or regret, she
was what her quick blood made her, for the time. She recognized that, for
one near extinction, it was useless to love or to hate: so Wilfrid and
Lady Charlotte were spared. Emilia thought of them both with a sort of
equanimity; not that any clear thought filled her brain through that
delirious night. The intoxicating music raged there at one level
depression, never rising any scale, never undulating ever so little,
scarcely changing its barbarous monotony of notes. She had no power over
it. Her critical judgement would at another moment have shrieked at it.
She was moved by it as by a mechanical force.

The South-west wind blew, and the hours of the night were not evil to
outcasts. Emilia saw many lying about, getting rest where they might. She
hurried her eye pityingly over little children, but the devil that had
seized her sprang contempt for the others--older beggars, who appeared to
succumb to their fate when they should have lifted their heads up
bravely. On she passed from square to market, market to park; and
presently her mind shot an arrow of desire for morning, which was nothing
less than hunger beginning to stir. "When will the shops open?" She tried
to cheat herself by replying that she did not care when, but pangs of
torment became too rapid for the counterfeit. Her imagination raised the
roof from those great rich houses, and laid bare a brilliancy of
dish-covers; and if any sharp gust of air touched the nerve in her
nostril, it seemed instantaneously charged with the smell of old dinners.
"No," cried Emilia, "I dislike anything but plain food." She quickly gave
way, and admitted a craving for dainty morsels. "One lump of sugar!" she
subsequently sighed. But neither sugar nor meat approached her.

Her seat was under trees, between a man and a woman who slanted from her
with hidden chins. The chilly dry leaves began to waken, and the sky
showed its grey. Hunger had become as a leaden ball in Emilia's chest.
She could have eaten eagerly still, but she had no ravenous images of
food. Nevertheless, she determined to beg for bread at a baker's shop.
Coming into the empty streets again, the dread of exposing her solitary
wretchedness and the stains of night upon her, kept her back. When she
did venture near the baker's shop, her sensation of weariness, want of
washing, and general misery, made her feel a contrast to all other women
she saw, that robbed her of the necessary effrontery. She preferred to
hide her head.

The morning hours went in this conflict. She was between-whiles hungry
and desperate, or stricken with shame. Fatigue, bringing the imperious
necessity for rest, intervened as a relief. Emilia moaned at the weary
length of the light, but when dusk fell and she beheld flame in the
lamps, it seemed to be too sudden and she was alarmed. Passive despair
had set in. She felt sick, though not weak, and the thought of asking
help had gone.

A street urchin, of the true London species, in whom excess of woollen
comforter made up for any marked scantiness in the rest of his attire,
came trotting the pavement, pouring one of the favourite tunes of his
native metropolis through the tube of a penny-whistle, from which it did
not issue so disguised but that attentive ears might pronounce it the
royal march of the Cannibal Islands. A placarded post beside a lamp met
this musician's eye; and, still piping, he bent his knees and read the
notification. Emilia thought of the Hillford and Ipley clubmen, the big
drum, the speeches, the cheers, and all the wild strength that lay in her
that happy morning. She watched the boy piping as if he were reading from
a score, and her sense of humour was touched. "You foolish boy!" she said
to herself softly. But when, having evidently come to the last printed
line, the boy rose and pocketed his penny-whistle, Emilia was nearly
laughing. "That's because he cannot turn over the leaf," she said, and
stood by the post till long after the boy had disappeared. The slight
emotion of fun had restored to her some of her lost human sensations, and
she looked about for a place where to indulge them undisturbed. One of
the bridges was in sight She yearned for the solitude of the wharf beside
it, and hurried to the steps. To descend she had to pass a street-organ
and a small figure bent over it. "Sei buon' Italiano?" she said. The
answer was a surly "Si." Emilia cried convulsively "Addio!" Her brain had
become on a sudden vacant of a thought, and all she knew was that she
descended.




CHAPTER XLI

"Sei buon' Italiana?"

Across what chasm did the words come to her?

It seemed but a minutes and again many hours back, that she had asked
that question of a little fellow, who, if he had looked up and nodded
would have given her great joy, but who kept his face dark from her and
with a sullen "Si" extinguished her last feeling of a desire for
companionship with life.

"Si," she replied, quite as sullenly, and without looking up.

But when her hand was taken and other words were uttered, she that had
crouched there so long between death and life immovable, loving neither,
rose possessed of a passion for the darkness and the void, and struggling
bitterly with the detaining hand, crying for instant death. No strength
was in her to support the fury.

"Merthyr Powys is with you," said her friend, "and will never leave you."

"Will never take me up there?" Emilia pointed to the noisy level above
them.

"Listen, and I will tell you how I have found you," replied Merthyr.

"Don't force me to go up."

She spoke from the end of her breath. Merthyr feared that it was more
than misery, even madness, afflicting her. He sat on the wharf-bench
silent till she was reassured. But at his first words, the eager question
came: "You will not force me to go up there?"

"No; we can stay and talk here," said Merthyr. "And this is how I have
found you. Do you suppose you have been hidden from us all this time?
Perhaps you fancy you do not belong to your friends? Well, I spoke to all
of your 'children,' as you used to call them. Do you remember? The day
before yesterday two had seen you. You said to one, 'From Savoy or
Piedmont?' He said, 'From Savoy;' and you shook your head: 'Not looking
on Italy!' you said. This night I roused one of them, and he stretched
his finger down the steps, saying that you had gone down there. 'Sei
buon' Italiano?" you said. "And that is how I have found you. Sei buon'
Italiana?"

Emilia let her hand rest in Merthyr's, wondering to think that there
should be no absolute darkness for a creature to escape into while
living. A trembling came on her. "Let me look over at the water," she
said; and Merthyr, who trusted her even in that extremity, allowed her to
lean forward, and felt her grasp grow moist in his, till she turned back
with shudders, giving him both her hands. "A drowned woman looks so
dreadful!" Her speech was faint as she begged to be taken away from that
place. Merthyr put his hand to her arm-pit, sustaining her steps. As they
neared the level where men were, she looked behind her and realized the
black terrors she had just been blindly handling. Fright sped her limbs
for a second or two, and then her whole weight hung upon Merthyr. He held
her in both arms, thinking that she had swooned, but she murmured: "Have
you heard that my voice has gone?"

"If you have suffered, I do not wonder," he said.

"I am useless. My voice is dead."

"Useless to your friends? Tush, my little Emilia! Sandra mia! Don't you
know that while you love your friends that's all they want of you?"

"Oh!" she moaned; "the gas-lamp hurts me. What a noise there is!"

"We shall soon get away from the noise."

"No; I like it; but not the light. Oh, my feet!--why are you walking
still? What friends?"

"For instance, myself."

"You knew of my wandering about London! It makes me believe in heaven. I
can't bear to think of being unseen."

"This morning," said Merthyr, "I saw the policeman in whose house you
have been staying."

Emilia bowed her head to the mystery by which this friend was endowed to
be cognizant of her actions. "I feel that I have not seen the streets for
years. If it were not for you I should fall down.--Oh! do you understand
that my voice has quite gone?"

Merthyr perceived her anxiety to be that she might not betaken on
doubtful terms. "Your hand hasn't," he said, pressing it, and so
gratified her with a concrete image of something that she could still
bestow upon a friend. To this she clung while the noisy wheels bore her
through London, till her weak body failed to keep courage in her breast,
and she wept and came closer to Merthyr. He who supposed that her recent
despair and present tears were for the loss of her lover, gave happily
more comfort than he took. "When old gentlemen choose to interest
themselves about very young ladies," he called upon his humorous
philosophy to observe internally, as men do to forestall the possible
cynic external;--and the rest of the sentence was acted under his eyes by
the figures of three persons. But, there she was, lying within his arm,
rescued, the creature whom he had found filling his heart, when lost, and
whom he thought one of the most hopeful of the women of earth! He thanked
God for bare facts. She lay against him with her eyelids softly joined,
and as he felt the breathing of her body, he marvelled to think how
matter-of-fact they had both been on the brink of a tragedy, and how
naturally she had, as it were, argued herself up to the gates of death.
For want of what? "My sister may supply it," thought Merthyr.

"Oh! that river is like a great black snake with a sick eye, and will
come round me!" said Emilia, talking as from sleep; then started, with
fright in her face: "Oh! my hunger again!"

"Hunger!" said he, horrified.

"It comes worse than ever," she moaned. "I was half dead just now, and
didn't feel it. There's--there's no pain in death. But this--it's like
fire and frost! I feel being eaten up. Give me something."

Merthyr set his teeth and enveloped her in a tight hug that relieved her
from the sharper pangs; and so held her, the tears bursting through his
shut eyelids, till at the first hotel they reached he managed to get food
for her. She gave a little gasping cry when he put bread through the
window of the cab. Bit by bit he handed her the morsels. It was
impossible to procure broth. When they drove on, she did not complain of
suffering, but her chest rose and fell many times heavily. She threw him
out in the reading of her character, after a space, by excusing herself
for having eaten with such eagerness; and it was long before he learnt
what Wilfrid's tyrannous sentiment had done to this simple nature. He
understood better the fear she expressed of meeting Georgiana.
Nevertheless, she exhibited none on entering the house, and returned
Georgiana's embrace with what strength was left to her.




CHAPTER XLII

Up the centre aisle of Hillford Church, the Tinleys (late as usual) were
seen trooping for morning service in midwinter. There was a man in the
rear known to be a man by the sound of his boots and measure of his
stride, for the ladies of Brookfield, having rejected the absurd
pretensions of Albert Tinley, could not permit curiosity to encounter the
risk of meeting his gaze by turning their heads. So, with charitable
condescension they returned the slight church nod of prim Miss Tinley
passing, of the detestable Laura Tinley, of affected Rose Tinley (whose
complexion was that of a dust-bin), and of Madeline Tinley (too young for
a character beyond what the name bestowed), and then they arranged their
prayer-books, and apparently speculated as to the possible text that
morning to be given forth from the pulpit. But it seemed to them all that
an exceedingly bulky object had passed as guardian of the light-footed
damsels preceding him. Though none of the ladies had looked up as he
passed, they were conscious of a stature and a circumference which they
had deemed to be entirely beyond the reach of the Tinleys, and a scornful
notion of the Tinleys having hired a guardsman, made Arabella smile at
the stretch of her contempt, that could help her to conceive the ironic
possibility. Relieved on the suspicion that Albert was in attendance of
his sisters, they let their eyes fall calmly on the Tinley pew. Could two
men upon this earthly sphere possess such a bearskin? There towered the
shoulders of Mr. Pericles; his head looking diminished by the hugeous
collar. Arabella felt a seizure of her hand from Adela's side. She placed
her book open before her, and stared at the pulpit. From neither of the
three of Brookfield could Laura's observation extract a sign of the utter
astonishment she knew they must be experiencing; and had it not been for
the ingenuous broad whisper of Mrs. Chump, which sounded toward the verge
even of her conception of possibilities, the Tinleys would not have been
gratified by the first public display of the prize they had wrested from
the Poles.

"Mr. Paricles--oh!" went Mrs. Chump, and a great many pews were set in
commotion.

Forthwith she bent over Cornelia's lap, and Cornelia, surveying her
placidly, had to murmur, "By-and-by; by-and-by."

"But, did ye see 'm, my dear? and a forr'ner in a Protestant Church! And
such a forr'ner as he is, to be sure! And, ye know, ye said he'd naver
come with you, and it's them creatures ye don't like. Corrnelia!"

"The service commences," remarked that lady, standing up.

Many eyes were on Mr. Pericles, who occasionally inspected the cornices
and corbels and stained glass to right and left, or detected a young lady
staring at him, or anticipated her going to stare, and put her to
confusion by a sharp turn of his head, and then a sniff and smoothing
down of his moustache. But he did not once look at the Brookfield pew. By
hazard his eye ranged over it, and after the first performance of this
trick he would have found the ladies a match for him, even if he had
sought to challenge their eyes. They were constrained to admit that Laura
Tinley managed him cleverly. She made him hold a book and appear
respectably devout. She got him down in good time when seats were taken,
and up again, without much transparent persuasion. The first notes of the
organ were seen to agitate the bearskin. Laura had difficulty to induce
the man to rise for the hymn, and when he had listened to the intoning of
a verse, Mr. Pericles suddenly bent, as if he had snapped in two: nor
could Laura persuade him to rejoin the present posture of the
congregation. Then only did Laura, to cover her failure, turn the subdued
light of a merry smile upon the Brookfield pew.

The smile was noticed by Apprehension sitting in the corner of one eye,
and it was likewise known that Laura's chagrin at finding that she was
not being watched affected her visibly. At the termination of the sermon,
the ladies bowed their heads a short space, and placing Mrs. Chump in
front drove her out, so that her exclamations of wonderment, and
affectedly ostentatious gaspings of sympathy for Brookfield, were heard
by few. On they hurried, straight and fast to Brookfield. Mr. Pole was
talking to Tracy Runningbrook at the gate. The ladies cut short his
needless apology to the young man for not being found in church that day,
by asking questions of Tracy. The first related to their brother's
whereabouts; the second to Emilia's condition. Tracy had no time to
reply. Mrs. Chump had identified herself with Brookfield so warmly that
the defection of Mr. Pericles was a fine legitimate excitement to her. "I
hate 'm!" she cried. "I pos'tively hate the man! And he to go to church!
A pretty figure for an angel--he, now! But, my dears, we cann't let
annybody else have 'm. Shorrt of his bein' drowned or killed, we must
intrigue to keep the wretch to ourselves."

"Oh, dear!" said Adela impatiently.

"Well, and I didn't say to myself, ye little jealous thing!" retorted
Mrs. Chump.

"Indeed, ma'am, you are welcome to him."

"And indeed, miss, I don't want 'm. And, perhaps, ye were flirtin' all
the fun out of him on board the yacht, and got tired of 'm; and that's
why."

Adela said: "Thank you," with exasperating sedateness, which provoked an
intemperate outburst from Mrs. Chump. "Sunday! Sunday!" cried Mr. Pole.

"Ain't I the first to remember ut, Pole? And didn't I get up airly so as
to go to church and have my conscience qui't, and 'stead of that I come
out full of evil passions, all for the sake o' these ungrateful garls
that's always where ye cann't find 'em. Why, if they was to be married at
the altar, they'd stare and be 'ffendud if ye asked them if they was
thinking of their husbands, they would! 'Oh, dear, no! and ye're
mistaken, and we're thinkin' o' the coal-scuttle in the back
parlour,'--or somethin' about souls, if not coals. There's their answer.
What did ye do with Mr. Paricles on board the yacht? Aha!"

"What's this about Pericles?" said Mr. Pole.

"Oh, nothing, Papa," returned Adela.

"Nothing, do ye call ut!" said Mrs. Chump. "And, mayhap, good cause too.
Didn't ye tease 'm, now, on board the yacht? Now, did he go on board the
yacht at all?"

"I should think you ought to know that as well as Adela," said Mr. Pole.

Adela interposed, hurriedly: "All this, my dear Papa, is because Mr.
Pericles has thought proper to visit the Tinleys' pew. Who would complain
how or where he does it, so long as the duty is fulfilled?"

Mr. Pole stared, muttering: "The Tinleys!"

"She's botherin' of ye, Pole, the puss!" said Mrs. Chump, certain that
she had hit a weak point in that mention of the yacht. "Ask her what
sorrt of behaviour--"

"And he didn't speak to any of you?" said Mr. Pole.

"No, Papa."

"He looked the other way?"

"He did us that honour."

"Ask her, Pole, how she behaved to 'm on board the yacht," cried Mrs.
Chump. "Oh! there was flirtin', flirtin'! And go and see what the noble
poet says of tying up in sacks and plumpin' of poor bodies of women into
forty fathoms by them Turks and Greeks, all because of jeal'sy. So, they
make a woman in earnest there, the wretches, 'cause she cann't have onny
of her jokes. Didn't ye tease Mr. Paricles on board the yacht, Ad'la?
Now, was he there?"

"Martha! you're a fool!" said Mr. Pole, looking the victim of one of his
fits of agitation. "Who knows whether he was there better than you?
You'll be forgetting soon that we've ever dined together. I hate to see a
woman so absurd! There--never mind! Go in: take off bonnet
something--anything! only I can't bear folly! Eh, Mr. Runningbrook?"

"'Deed, Pole, and ye're mad." Mrs. Chump crossed her hands to reply with
full repose. "I'd like to know how I'm to know what I never said."

The scene was growing critical. Adela consulted the eyes of her sisters,
which plainly said that this was her peculiar scrape. Adela ended it by
going up to Mrs. Chump, taking her by the shoulders, and putting a kiss
upon her forehead. "Now you will see better," she said. "Don't you know
Mr. Pericles was not with us? As surely as he was with the Tinleys this
morning!"

"And a nice morning it is!" ejaculated Mr. Pole, trotting off hurriedly.

"Does Pole think--" Mrs. Chump murmured, with reference to her voyaging
on the yacht. The kiss had bewildered her sequent sensations.

"He does think, and will think, and must think," Adela prattled some
persuasive infantine nonsense: her soul all the while in revolt against
her sisters, who left her the work to do, and took the position of
spectators and critics, condemning an effort they had not courage to
attempt.

"By the way, I have to congratulate a friend of mine," said Tracy,
selecting Adela for an ironical bow.

"Then it is Captain Gambier," cried Mrs. Chump, as if a whole revelation
had burst on her. Adela blushed. "Oh! and what was that I heard?"
continued the aggravating woman.

Adela flashed her eyes round on her sisters. Even then they left her
without aid, their feeling being that she had debased the house by her
familiarity with this woman before Tracy.

"Stay! didn't ye both--" Mrs. Chump was saying.

"Yes?"--Adela passed by her--"only in your ears alone, you know!" At
which hint Mrs. Chump gleefully turned and followed her. A rumour was
prevalent of some misadventure to Adela and the captain on board the
yacht. Arabella saw her depart, thinking, "How singular is her propensity
to imitate me!" for the affirmative uttered in the tone of interrogation
was quite Arabella's own; as also occasionally the negative,--the
negative, however, suiting the musical indifference of the sound, and its
implied calm breast.

"As for Pericles," said Tracy, "you need not wonder that the fellow prays
in other pews than yours. By heaven! he may pray and pray: I'd send him
to Hades with an epigram in his heart!"

From Tracy the ladies learnt that Wilfrid had inflicted public
chastisement upon Mr. Pericles for saying a false thing of Emilia. He
danced the prettiest pas seal that was ever footed by debutant on the hot
iron plates of Purgatory. They dared not ask what it was that Mr.
Pericles had said, but Tracy was so vehement on the subject of his having
met his deserts, that they partly guessed it to bear some relation to
their sex's defencelessness, and they approved their brother's work.

Sir Twickenham and Captain Gambier dined at Brookfield that day. However
astonishing it might be to one who knew his character and triumphs, the
captain was a butterfly netted, and was on the highroad to an exhibition
of himself pinned, with his wings outspread. During the service of the
table Tracy relieved Adela from Mrs. Chump's inadvertencies and little
bits of feminine malice, but he could not help the captain, who blundered
like a schoolboy in her rough hands. It was noted that Sir Twickenham
reserved the tolerating smile he once had for her. Mr. Pole's nervous
fretfulness had increased. He complained in occasional underbreaths,
correcting himself immediately with a "No, no!" and blinking briskly.

But after dinner came the time when the painfullest scene was daily
enacted. Mrs. Chump drank Port freely. To drink it fondly, it was
necessary that she should have another rosy wineglass to nod to, and Mr.
Pole, whose taste for wine had been weakened, took this post as his duty.
The watchful, pinched features of the poor pale little man bloomed
unnaturally, and his unintelligible eyes sparkled as he emptied his
glass. His daughters knew that he drank, not for his pleasure, but for
their benefit; that he might sustain Martha Chump in the delusion that he
was a fitting bridegroom, and with her money save them from ruin. Each
evening, with remorse that blotted all perception of the tragic
comicality of the show, they saw him, in his false strength and his
anxiety concerning his pulse's play, act this part. The recurring words,
"Now, Martha, here's the Port," sent a cold wave through their blood.
They knew what the doctor remarked on the effect of that Port. "Ill!"
Mrs. Chump would cry, when she saw him wink after sipping; "you, Pole!
what do they say of ye, ye deer!" and she returned the wink, the ladies
looking on. Not to drink a proper quantum of Port, when Port was on the
table, was, in Mrs. Chump's eyes, mean for a man. Even Chump, she would
say, was master of his bottle, and thought nothing of it. "Who does?"
cried her present suitor, and the Port ebbed, and his cheeks grew
crimson.

This frightful rivalry with the ghost of Alderman Chump continued night
after night. The rapturous Martha was incapable of observing that if she
drank with a ghost in memory, in reality she drank with nothing better
than an animated puppet. The nights ended with Mr. Pole either sleeping
in his arm-chair (upon which occasions one daughter watched him and told
dreadful tales of his waking), or staggering to bed, debating on the
stairs between tea and brandy, complaining of a loss of sensation at his
knee-cap, or elbow, or else rubbing his head and laughing hysterically.
His bride was not at such moments observant. No wonder Wilfrid kept out
of the way, if he had not better occupation elsewhere. The ladies, in
their utter anguish, after inveighing against the baneful Port, had
begged their father to delay no more to marry the woman. "Why?" said Mr.
Pole, sharply; "what do you want me to marry her for?" They were obliged
to keep up the delusion, and said, "Because she seems suited to you as a
companion." That satisfied him. "Oh! we won't be in a hurry," he said,
and named a day within a month; and not liking their unready faces,
laughed, and dismissed the idea aloud, as if he had not earnestly been
entertaining it.

The ladies of Brookfield held no more their happy, energetic midnight
consultations. They had begun to crave for sleep and a snatch of
forgetfulness, the scourge being daily on their flesh: and they had now
no plans to discuss; they had no distant horizon of low vague lights that
used ever to be beyond their morrow. They kissed at the bedroom door of
one, and separated. Silence was their only protection to the Nice
Feelings, now that Fine Shades had become impossible. Adela had almost
made herself distinct from her sisters since the yachting expedition. She
had grown severely careful of the keys of her writing-desk, and would
sometimes slip the bolt of her bedroom door, and answer "Eh?" dubiously
in tone, when her sisters had knocked twice, and had said "Open" once.
The house of Brookfield showed those divisional rents which an admonitory
quaking of the earth will create. Neither sister was satisfied with the
other. Cornelia's treatment of Sir Twickenham was almost openly
condemned, but at the same time it seemed to Arabella that the baronet
was receiving more than the necessary amount of consolation from the
bride of Captain Gambier, and that yacht habits and moralities had been
recently imported to Brookfield. Adela, for her part, looked sadly on
Arabella, and longed to tell her, as she told Cornelia, that if she
continued to play Freshfield Sumner purposely against Edward Buxley, she
might lose both. Cornelia quietly measured accusations and judged
impartially; her mind being too full to bring any personal observations
to bear. She said, perhaps, less than she would have said, had she not
known that hourly her own Nice Feelings had to put up a petition for Fine
Shades: had she not known, indeed, that her conduct would soon demand
from her sisters an absolutely merciful interpretation. For she was now
simply attracting Sir Twickenham to Brookfield as a necessary medicine to
her Papa. Since Mrs. Chump's return, however, Mr. Pole had spoken
cheerfully of himself, and, by innuendo emphasized, had imparted that his
mercantile prospects were brighter. In fact, Cornelia half thought that
he must have been pretending bankruptcy to gain his end in getting the
consent of his daughters to receive the woman. She, and Adela likewise,
began to suspect that the parental transparency was a little mysterious,
and that there is, after all, more than we see in something that we see
through. They were now in danger of supposing that because the old man
had possibly deceived them to some extent, he had deceived them
altogether. But was not the after-dinner scene too horribly true? Were
not his hands moist and cold while the forehead was crimson? And could a
human creature feel at his own pulse, and look into vacancy with that
intense apprehensive look, and be but an actor? They could not think so.
But his conditions being dependent upon them, the ladies felt in their
hearts a spring of absolute rebellion when the call for fresh sacrifices
came. Though they did not grasp the image, they had a feeling that he was
nourished bit by bit by everything they held dear; and though they loved
him, and were generous, they had begun to ask, "What next?"

The ladies were at a dead-lock, and that the heart is the father of our
histories, I am led to think when I look abroad on families stagnant
because of so weak a motion of the heart. There are those who have none
at all; the mass of us are moved from the propulsion of the toes of the
Fates. But the ladies of Brookfield had hearts lively enough to get them
into scrapes. The getting out of them, or getting on at all, was left to
Providence. They were at a dead-lock, for Arabella, flattered as she was
by Freshfield Sumner's wooing, could not openly throw Edward over, whom
indeed she thought that she liked the better of the two, though his
letters had not so wide an intellectual range. Her father was irritably
anxious that she should close with Edward. Adela could not move: at
least, not openly. Cornelia might have taken an initiative; but
tenderness for her father's health had hitherto restrained her, and she
temporized with Sir Twickenham on the noblest of principles. She was, by
the devotion of her conduct, enabled to excuse herself so far that she
could even fish up an excuse in the shape of the effort she had made to
find him entertaining: as if the said effort should really be re-payment
enough to him for his assiduous and most futile suit. One deep grief sat
on Cornelia's mind. She had heard from Lady Gosstre that there was
something like madness in the Barrett family. She had consented to meet
Sir Purcell clandestinely (after debate on his claim to such a sacrifice
on her part), and if, on those occasions, her lover's tone was raised, it
gave her a tremour. And he had of late appeared to lose his noble calm;
he had spoken (it might almost be interpreted) as if he doubted her.
Once, when she had mentioned her care for her father, he had cried out
upon the name of father with violence, looking unlike himself.

His condemnation of the world, too, was not so Christian as it had been;
it betrayed what the vulgar would call spite, and was not all compassed
in his peculiar smooth shrug--expressive of a sort of border-land between
contempt and charity: which had made him wear in her sight all the
superiority which the former implies, with a considerable share of the
benign complacency of the latter. This had gone. He had been sarcastic
even to her; saying once, and harshly: "Have you a will?" Personally she
liked the poor organist better than the poor baronet, though he had less
merit. It was unpleasant in her present mood to be told "that we have
come into this life to fashion for ourselves souls;" and that "whosoever
cannot decide is a soulless wretch fit but to pass into vapour." He
appeared to have ceased to make his generous allowances for difficult
situations. A senseless notion struck Cornelia, that with the baronetcy
he had perhaps inherited some of the madness of his father.

The two were in a dramatic tangle of the Nice Feelings worth a glance as
we pass on. She wished to say to him, "You are unjust to my
perplexities;" and he to her, "You fail in your dilemma through
cowardice." Instead of uttering which, they chid themselves severally for
entertaining such coarse ideas of their idol. Doubtless they were silent
from consideration for one another: but I must add, out of extreme
tenderness for themselves likewise. There are people who can keep the
facts that front them absent from their contemplation by not framing them
in speech; and much benevolence of the passive order may be traced to a
disinclination to inflict pain upon oneself. "My duty to my father,"
being cited by Cornelia, Sir Purcell had to contend with it.

"True love excludes no natural duty," she said.

And he: "Love discerns unerringly what is and what is not duty."

"In the case of a father, can there be any doubt?" she asked, the answer
shining in her confident aspect.

"There are many things that fathers may demand of us!" he interjected
bitterly.

She had a fatal glimpse here of the false light in which his resentment
coloured the relations between fathers and children; and, deeming him
incapable of conducting this argument, she felt quite safe in her
opposition, up to a point where feeling stopped her.

"Devotedness to a father I must conceive to be a child's first duty," she
said.

Sir Purcell nodded: "Yes; a child's!"

"Does not history give the higher praise to children who sacrifice
themselves for their parents?" asked Cornelia.

And he replied: "So, you seek to be fortified in such matters by
history!"

Courteous sneers silenced her. Feeling told her she was in the wrong; but
the beauty of her sentiment was not to be contested, and therefore she
thought that she might distrust feeling: and she went against it
somewhat; at first very tentatively, for it caused pain. She marked a
line where the light of duty should not encroach on the light of our
human desires. "But love for a parent is not merely duty," thought
Cornelia. "It is also love;--and is it not the least selfish love?"

Step by step Sir Purcell watched the clouding of her mind with false
conceits, and knew it to be owing to the heart's want of vigour. Again
and again he was tempted to lay an irreverent hand on the veil his lady
walked in, and make her bare to herself. Partly in simple bitterness, he
refrained: but the chief reason was that he had no comfort in giving a
shock to his own state of deception. He would have had to open a dark
closet; to disentangle and bring to light what lay in an
undistinguishable heap; to disfigure her to herself, and share in her
changed eyesight; possibly to be, or seem, coarse: so he kept the door of
it locked, admitting sadly in his meditation that there was such a place,
and saying all the while: "If I were not poor!" He saw her running into
the shelter of egregious sophisms, till it became an effort to him to
preserve his reverence for her and the sex she represented. Finally he
imagined that he perceived an idea coming to growth in her, no other than
this: "That in duty to her father she might sacrifice herself, though
still loving him to whom she had given her heart; thus ennobling her love
for father and for lover." With a wicked ingenuity he tracked her forming
notions, encouraged them on, and provoked her enthusiasm by putting an
ironical question: "Whether the character of the soul was subdued and
shaped by the endurance and the destiny of the perishable?"

"Oh! no, no!" she exclaimed. "It cannot be, or what comfort should we
have?"

Few men knew better that when lovers' sentiments stray away from feeling,
they are to be suspected of a disloyalty. Yet he admired the tone she
took. He had got an 'ideal' of her which it was pleasanter to magnify
than to distort. An 'ideal' is so arbitrary, that if you only doubt of
its being perfection, it will vanish and never come again. Sir Purcell
refused to doubt. He blamed himself for having thought it possible to
doubt, and this, when all the time he knew.

Through endless labyrinths of delusion these two unhappy creatures might
be traced, were it profitable. Down what a vale of little intricate
follies should we be going, lighted by one ghastly conclusion! At times,
struggling from the midst of her sophisms, Cornelia prayed her lover
would claim her openly, and so nerve her to a pitch of energy that would
clinch the ruinous debate. Forgetting that she was an 'ideal'--the
accredited mistress of pure wisdom and of the power of deciding
rightly--she prayed to be dealt with as a thoughtless person, and one of
the herd of women. She felt that Sir Purcell threw too much on her. He
expected her to go calmly to her father, and to Sir Twickenham, and tell
them individually that her heart was engaged; then with a stately figure
to turn, quit the house, and lay her hand in his. He made no allowance
for the weakness of her sex, for the difficulties surrounding her, for
the consideration due to Sir Twickenham's pride, and to her father's
ill-health. She half-protested to herself that he expected from her the
mechanical correctness of a machine, and overlooked the fact that she was
human. It was a grave comment on her ambition to be an 'ideal.'

So let us leave them, till we come upon the ashy fruit of which this
blooming sentimentalism is the seed.

It was past midnight when Mrs. Chump rushed to Arabella's room, and her
knock was heard vociferous at the door. The ladies, who were at work upon
diaries and letters, allowed her to thump and wonder whether she had come
to the wrong door, for a certain period; after which, Arabella placidly
unbolted her chamber, and Adela presented herself in the passage to know
the meaning of the noise.

"Oh! ye poor darlin's, I've heard ut all, I have."

This commencement took the colour from their cheeks. Arabella invited her
inside, and sent Adela for Cornelia.

"Oh, and ye poor deers!" cried Mrs. Chump to Arabella, who remarked:
"Pray wait till my sisters come;" causing the woman to stare and observe:
"If ye're not as cold as the bottom of a pot that naver felt fire." She
repeated this to Cornelia and Adela as an accusation, and then burst on
"My heart's just breakin' for ye, and ye shall naver want bread, eh! and
roast beef, and my last bottle of Port ye'll share, though ye've no ideea
what a lot o' thoughts o' poor Chump's under that cork, and it'll be a
waste on you. Oh! and that monster of a Mr. Paricles that's got ye in his
power and's goin' to be the rroon of ye--shame to 'm! Your father's told
me; and, oh! my darlin' garls, don't think ut my fault. For,
Pole--Pole--"

Mrs. Chump was choked by her grief. The ladies, unbending to some
curiosity, eliminated from her gasps and sobs that Mr. Pole had, in the
solitude of his library below, accused her of causing the defection of
Mr. Pericles, and traced his possible ruin to it, confessing, that in the
way of business, he was at Mr. Pericles' mercy.

"And in such a passion with me!" Mrs. Chump wrung her hands. "What could
I do to Mr. Paricles? He isn't one o' the men that I can kiss; and Pole
shouldn't wish me. And Pole settin' down his rroon to me! What'll I do?
My dears! I do feel for ye, for I feel I'd feel myself such a beast,
without money, d'ye see? It's the most horrible thing in the world. It's
like no candle in the darrk. And I, ye know, I know I'd naver forgive
annybody that took my money; and what'll Pole think of me? For oh! ye may
call riches temptation, but poverty's punishment; and I heard a young
curate say that from the pulpit, and he was lean enough to know, poor
fella!"

Both Cornelia and Arabella breathed more freely when they had heard Mrs.
Chump's tale to an end. They knew perfectly well that she was blameless
for the defection of Mr. Pericles, and understood from her exclamatory
narrative that their father had reason to feel some grave alarm at the
Greek's absence from their house, and had possibly reasons of his own for
accusing Mrs. Chump, as he had done. The ladies administered consolation
to her, telling her that for their part they would never blame her; even
consenting to be kissed by her, hugged by her, playfully patted,
complimented, and again wept over. They little knew what a fervour of
secret devotion they created in Mrs. Chump's bosom by this astounding
magnanimity displayed to her, who laboured under the charge of being the
source of their ruin; nor could they guess that the little hypocrisy they
were practising would lead to any singular and pregnant resolution in the
mind of the woman, fraught with explosion to their house, and that quick
movement which they awaited.

Mrs. Chump, during the patient strain of a tender hug of Arabella, had
mutely resolved in a great heat of gratitude that she would go to Mr.
Pericles, and, since he was necessary to the well-being of Brookfield,
bring him back, if she had to bring him back in her arms.




CHAPTER XLIII

[Georgiana Ford to Wilfrid:]

"I have omitted replying to your first letter, not because of the nature
of its contents: nor do I write now in answer to your second because of
the permission you give me to lay it before my brother. I cannot think
that concealment is good, save for very base persons; and since you take
the initiative in writing very openly, I will do so likewise.

"It is true that Emilia is with me. Her voice is lost, and she has fallen
as low in spirit as one can fall and still give us hope of her recovery.
But that hope I have, and I am confident that you will not destroy it. In
the summer she goes with us to Italy. We have consulted one doctor, who
did not prescribe medicine for her. In the morning she reads with my
brother. She seems to forget whatever she reads: the occupation is
everything necessary just now. Our sharp Monmouth air provokes her to
walk briskly when she is out, and the exercise has once or twice given
colour to her cheeks. Yesterday being a day of clear frost, we drove to a
point from which we could mount the Buckstone, and here, my brother says,
the view appeared to give her something of her lost animation. It was a
look that I had never seen, and it soon went: but in the evening she
asked me whether I prayed before sleeping, and when she retired to her
bedroom, I remained there with her for a time.

"You will pardon me for refusing to let her know that you have written to
your relative in the Austrian service to obtain a commission for you.
But, on the other hand, I have thought it right to tell her incidentally
that you will be married in the Summer of this year. I can only say that
she listened quite calmly.

"I beg that you will not blame yourself so vehemently. By what you do,
her friends may learn to know that you regret the strange effect produced
by certain careless words, or conduct: but I cannot find that
self-accusation is ever good at all. In answer to your question, I may
add that she has repeated nothing of what she said when we were together
in Devon.

"Our chief desire (for, as we love her, we may be directed by our
instinct), in the attempt to restore her, is to make her understand that
she is anything but worthless. She has recently followed my brother's
lead, and spoken of herself, but with a touch of scorn. This morning,
while the clear frosty sky continues, we were to have started for an old
castle lying toward Wales; and I think the idea of a castle must have
struck her imagination, and forced some internal contrast on her mind. I
am repeating my brother's suggestion--she seemed more than usually
impressed with an idea that she was of no value to anybody. She asked why
she should go anywhere, and dropped into a chair, begging to be allowed
to stay in a darkened room. My brother has some strange intuition of her
state of mind. She has lost any power she may have had of grasping
abstract ideas. In what I conceived to be play, he told her that many
would buy her even now. She appeared to be speculating on this, and then
wished to know how much those persons would consider her to be worth, and
who they were. Nor did it raise a smile on her face to hear my brother
mention Jews, and name an absolute sum of money; but, on the contrary,
after evidently thinking over it, she rose up, and said that she was
ready to go. I write fully to you, telling you these things, that you may
see she is at any rate eager not to despair, and is learning, much as a
child might learn it, that it need not be.

"Believe me, that I will in every way help to dispossess your mind of the
remorse now weighing upon you, as far as it shall be within my power to
do so.

"Mr. Runningbrook has been invited by my brother to come and be her
companion. They have a strong affection for one another. He is a true
poet, full of reverence for a true woman."

[Wilfrid to Georgiana Ford:]

"I cannot thank you enough. When I think of her I am unmanned; and if I
let my thoughts fall back upon myself, I am such as you saw me that night
in Devon--helpless, and no very presentable figure. But you do not
picture her to me. I cannot imagine whether her face has changed; and,
pardon me, were I writing to you alone, I could have faith that the
delicate insight and angelic nature of a woman would not condemn my
desire to realize before my eyes the state she has fallen to. I see her
now under a black shroud. Have her features changed? I cannot remember
one--only at an interval her eyes. Does she look into the faces of people
as she used? Or does she stare carelessly away? Softly between the eyes,
is what I meant. I mean--but my reason for this particularity is very
simple. I would state it to you, and to no other. I cannot have peace
till she is restored; and my prayer is, that I may not haunt her to
defeat your labour. Does her face appear to show that I am quite absent
from her thoughts? Oh! you will understand me. You have seen me stand and
betray no suffering when a shot at my forehead would have been mercy. To
you I will dare to open my heart. I wish to be certain that I have not
injured her--that is all. Perhaps I am more guilty than you think: more
even than I can call to mind. If I may fudge by the punishment, my guilt
is immeasurable. Tell me--if you will but tell me that the sacrifice of
my life to her will restore her, it is hers. Write, and say this, and I
will come: Do not delay or spare me. Her dumb voice is like a ghost in my
ears. It cries to me that I have killed it. Be actuated by no charitable
considerations in refraining to write. Could a miniature of her be sent?
You will think the request strange; but I want to be sure she is not
haggard--not the hospital face I fancy now, which accuses me of murder.
Does she preserve the glorious freshness she used to wear? She had a
look--or did you see her before the change? I only want to know that she
is well."

[Tracy Runningbrook to Wilfrid:]

"You had my promise that I would write and give your conscience a
nightcap. I have a splendid one for you. Put it on without any
hesitation. I find her quite comfortable. Powys reads Italian with her in
the morning. His sister (who might be a woman if she liked, but has an
insane preference for celestial neutrality) does the moral inculcation.
The effect is comical. I should like you to see Cold Steel leading Tame
Fire about, and imagining the taming to be her work! You deserve well of
your generation. You just did enough to set this darling girl alight.
Knights and squires numberless will thank you. The idea of your
reproaching yourself is monstrous. Why, there's no one thanks you more
than she does. You stole her voice, which some may think a pity, but I
don't, seeing that I would rather have her in a salon than before the
footlights. Imagine my glory in her!--she has become half cat! She moves
softly, as if she loved everything she touched; making you throb to feel
the little ball of her foot. Her eyes look steadily, like green jewels
before the veil of an Egyptian temple. Positively, her eyes have grown
green--or greenish! They were darkish hazel formerly, and talked more of
milkmaids and chattering pastorals than a discerning master would have
wished. Take credit for the change; and at least I don't blame you for
the tender hollows under the eyes, sloping outward, just hinted... Love's
mark on her, so that men's hearts may faint to know that love is known to
her, and burn to read her history. When she is about to speak, the upper
lids droop a very little; or else the under lids quiver upward--I know
not which. Take further credit for her manner. She has now a manner of
her own. Some of her naturalness has gone, but she has skipped clean over
the 'young lady' stage; from raw girl she has really got as much of the
great manner as a woman can have who is not an ostensibly retired
dowager, or a matron on a pedestal shuffling the naked virtues and the
decorous vices together. She looks at you with an immense, marvellous
gravity, before she replies to you--enveloping you in a velvet light.
This, is fact, not fine stuff, my dear fellow. The light of her eyes does
absolutely cling about you. Adieu! You are a great master, and know
exactly when to make your bow and retire. A little more, and you would
have spoilt her. Now she is perfect."

[Wilfrid to Tracy Runningbrook:]

"I have just come across a review of your last book, and send it,
thinking you may wish to see it. I have put a query to one of the
passages, which I think misquoted: and there will be no necessity to call
your attention to the critic's English. You can afford to laugh at it,
but I confess it puts your friends in a rage. Here are a set of fellows
who arm themselves with whips and stand in the public thoroughfare to
make any man of real genius run the gauntlet down their ranks till he
comes out flayed at the other extremity! What constitutes their right to
be there?--By the way, I met Sir Purcell Barrett (the fellow who was at
Hillford), and he would like to write an article on you that should act
as a sort of rejoinder. You won't mind, of course--it's bread to him,
poor devil! I doubt whether I shall see you when you comeback, so write a
jolly lot of letters. Colonel Pierson, of the Austrian army, my uncle
(did you meet him at Brookfield?), advises me to sell out immediately. He
is getting me an Imperial commission--cavalry. I shall give up the
English service. And if they want my medal, they can have it, and I'll
begin again. I'm sick of everything except a cigar and a good volume of
poems. Here's to light one, and now for the other!

     "'Large eyes lit up by some imperial sin,'" etc.
     (Ten lines from Tracy's book are here copied neatly.)

[Tracy Runningbrook to Wilfrid:]

"Why the deuce do you write me such infernal trash about the opinions of
a villanous dog who can't even en a decent sentence? I've been damning
you for a white-livered Austrian up and down the house. Let the fellow
bark till he froths at the mouth, and scatters the virus of the beast
among his filthy friends. I am mad-dog proof. The lines you quote were
written in an awful hurry, coming up in the train from Richford one
morning. You have hit upon my worst with commendable sagacity. If it will
put money in Barren's pocket, let him write. I should prefer to have
nothing said. The chances are all in favour of his writing like a fool.
If you're going to be an Austrian, we may have a chance of shooting one
another some day, so here's my hand before you go and sell your soul; and
anything I can do in the meantime--command me."

[Georgiana Ford to Wilfrid:]

"I do not dare to charge you with a breach of your pledged word. Let me
tell you simply that Emilia has become aware of your project to enter the
Austrian service, and it has had the effect on her which I foresaw. She
could bear to hear of your marriage, but this is too much for her, and it
breaks my heart to see her. It is too cruel. She does not betray any
emotion, but I can see that every principle she had gained is gone, and
that her bosom holds the shadows of a real despair. I foresaw it, and
sought to guard her against it. That you, whom she had once called (to
me) her lover, should enlist himself as an enemy, of her country!--it
comes to her as a fact striking her brain dumb while she questions it,
and the poor body has nothing to do but to ache. Surely you could have no
object in doing this? I will not suspect it. Mr. Runningbrook is
acquainted with your plans, I believe; but he has no remembrance of
having mentioned this one to Emilia. He distinctly assures me that he has
not done so, and I trust him to speak truth. How can it have happened?
But here is the evil done. I see no remedy. I am not skilled in sketching
the portraits you desire of her, and yet, if you have ever wished her to
know this miserable thing, it would be as well that you should see the
different face that has come among us within twenty hours."

[Wilfrid to Georgiana Ford:]

"I will confine my reply to a simple denial of having caused this fatal
intelligence to reach her ears; for the truth of which, I pledge my
honour as a gentleman. A second's thought would have told me--indeed I at
once acquiesced in your view--that she should not know it. How it has
happened it is vain to attempt to guess. Can you suppose that I desired
her to hate me? Yet this is what the knowledge of the step I am taking
will make her do! If I could see--if I might see her for five minutes, I
should be able to explain everything, and, I sincerely think (painful as
it would be to me), give her something like peace. It is too late even to
wish to justify myself; but her I can persuade that she--Do you not see
that her mind is still unconvinced of my--I will call it baseness! Is
this the self-accusing you despise? A little of it must be heard. If I
may see her I will not fail to make her understand my position. She shall
see that it is I who am worthless--not she! You know the circumstances
under which I last beheld her--when I saw pang upon pang smiting her
breast from my silence! But now I may speak. Do not be prepossessed
against my proposal! It shall be only for five minutes--no more. Not that
it is my desire to come. In truth, it could not be. I have felt that I
alone can cure her--I who did the harm. Mark me: she will fret
secretly--, but dear and kindest lady, do not smile too critically at the
tone I adopt. I cannot tell how I am writing or what saying. Believe me
that I am deeply and constantly sensible of your generosity. In case you
hesitate, I beg you to consult Mr. Powys."

[Georgiana Ford to Wilfrid:]

"I had no occasion to consult my brother to be certain that an interview
between yourself and Emilia should not take place. There can be no
object, even if the five minutes of the meeting gave her happiness, why
the wound of the long parting should be again opened. She is wretched
enough now, though her tenderness for us conceals it as far as possible.
When some heavenly light shall have penetrated her, she will have a
chance of peace. The evil is not of a nature to be driven out by your
hands. If you are not going into the Austrian service, she shall know as
much immediately. Otherwise, be as dead to her as you may, and your
noblest feelings cannot be shown under any form but that."

[Wilfrid to Tracy Runningbrook:]

"Some fellows whom I know want you to write a prologue to a play they are
going to get up. It's about Shakespeare--at least, the proceeds go to
something of that sort. Do, like a good fellow, toss us off twenty lines.
Why don't you write? By the way, I hope there's no truth in a report that
has somehow reached me, that they have the news down in Monmouth of my
deserting to the black-yellow squadrons? Of course, such a thing as that
should have been kept from them. I hear, too, that your--I suppose I must
call her now your--pupil is falling into bad health. Think me as cold and
'British' as you like; but the thought of this does really affect me
painfully. Upon my honour, it does! 'And now he yawns!' you're saying.
You're wrong. We Army men feel just as you poets do, and for a longer
time, I think, though perhaps not so acutely. I send you the 'Venus'
cameo which you admired. Pray accept it from an old friend. I mayn't see
you again."

[Tracy Runningbrook to Wilfrid:] (enclosing lines)

"Here they are. It will require a man who knows something about metre to
speak them. Had Shakespeare's grandmother three Christian names? and did
she anticipate feminine posterity in her rank of life by saying
habitually, 'Drat it?' There is as yet no Society to pursue this
investigation, but it should be started. Enormous thanks for the Venus. I
wore it this morning at breakfast. Just as we were rising, I leaned
forward to her, and she jumped up with her eyes under my chin. 'Isn't she
a beauty?' I said. 'It was his,' she answered, changing eyes of eagle for
eyes of dove, and then put out the lights. I had half a mind to offer it,
on the spot. May I? That is to say, if the impulse seizes me I take
nobody's advice, and fair Venus certainly is not under my chin at this
moment. As to ill health, great mother Nature has given a house of iron
to this soul of fire. The windows may blaze, or the windows may be
extinguished, but the house stands firm. When you are lightning or
earthquake, you may have something to reproach yourself for; as it is, be
under no alarm. Do not put words in my mouth that I have not uttered.
'And now he yawns,' is what I shall say of you only when I am sure you
have just heard a good thing. You really are the best fellow of your set
that I have come across, and the only one pretending to brains. Your
modesty in estimating your value as a leader of Pandours will be pleasing
to them who like that modesty. Good-bye. This little Emilia is a marvel
of flying moods. Yesterday she went about as if she said, 'I've promised
Apollo not to speak till to-morrow.' To-day, she's in a feverish
gabble--or began the day with a burst of it; and now she's soft and
sensible. If you fancy a girl at her age being able to see, that it's a
woman's duty to herself and the world to be artistic--to perfect the
thing of beauty she is meant to be by nature!--and, seeing, too, that
Love is an instrument like any other thing, and that we must play on it
with considerate gentleness, and that tearing at it or dashing it to
earth, making it howl and quiver, is madness, and not love!--I assure you
she begins to see it! She does see it. She is going to wear a wreath of
black briony (preserved and set by Miss Ford, a person cunning in these
matters). She's going to the ball at Penarvon Castle, and will
look--supply your favourite slang word. A little more experience, and she
will have malice. She wants nothing but that to make her consummate.
Malice is the barb of beauty. She's just at present a trifle blunt. She
will knock over, but not transfix. I am anxious to watch the effect she
produces at Penarvon. Poor little woman! I paid a compliment to her eyes.
'I've got nothing else,' said she. Dine as well as you can while you are
in England. German cookery is an education for the sentiment of hogs. The
play of sour and sweet, and crowning of the whole with fat, shows a
people determined to go down in civilization, and try the business
backwards. Adieu, curst Croat! On the Wallachian border mayst thou gather
philosophy from meditation."




CHAPTER XLIV

Dexterously as Wilfrid has turned Tracy to his uses by means of the
foregoing correspondence, in doing so he had exposed himself to the
retributive poison administered by that cunning youth. And now the
Hippogriff seized him, and mounted with him into mid-air; not as when the
idle boy Ganymede was caught up to act as cup-bearer in celestial Courts,
but to plunge about on yielding vapours, with nothing near him save the
voice of his desire.

The Philosopher here peremptorily demands the pulpit. We are subject, he
says, to fantastic moods, and shall dry ready-minted phrases picture them
forth? As, for example, can the words 'delirium,' or 'frenzy,' convey an
image of Wilfrid's state, when his heart began to covet Emilia again, and
his sentiment not only interposed no obstacle, but trumpeted her charms
and fawned for her, and he thought her lost, remembered that she had been
his own, and was ready to do any madness to obtain her? 'Madness' is the
word that hits the mark, but it does not fully embrace the meaning. To be
in this state, says the Philosopher, is to be 'On The Hippogriff;' and to
this, as he explains, the persons who travel to Love by the road of
sentiment will come, if they have any stuff in them, and if the one who
kindles them is mighty. He distinguishes being on the Hippogriff from
being possessed by passion. Passion, he says, is noble strength on fire,
and points to Emilia as a representation of passion. She asks for what
she thinks she may have; she claims what she imagines to be her own. She
has no shame, and thus, believing in, she never violates, nature, and
offends no law, wild as she may seem. Passion does not turn on her and
rend her when it is thwarted. She was never carried out of the limit of
her own intelligent force, seeing that it directed her always, with the
simple mandate to seek that which belonged to her. She was perfectly
sane, and constantly just to herself, until the failure of her voice,
telling her that she was a beggar in the world, came as a second blow,
and partly scared her reason. Constantly just to herself, mind! This is
the quality of true passion. Those who make a noise, and are not thus
distinguishable, are on Hippogriff.

--By which it is clear to me that my fantastic Philosopher means to
indicate the lover mounted in this wise, as a creature bestriding an
extraneous power. "The sentimentalist," he says, "goes on accumulating
images and hiving sensations, till such time as (if the stuff be in him)
they assume a form of vitality, and hurry him headlong. This is not
passion, though it amazes men, and does the madder thing."

In fine, it is Hippogriff. And right loath am I to continue my
partnership with a fellow who will not see things on the surface, and is,
as a necessary consequence, blind to the fact that the public detest him.
I mean, this garrulous, super-subtle, so-called Philosopher, who first
set me upon the building of 'The Three Volumes,' it is true, but whose
stipulation that he should occupy so large a portion of them has made
them rock top-heavy, to the forfeit of their stability. He maintains that
a story should not always flow, or, at least, not to a given measure.
When we are knapsack on back, he says, we come to eminences where a
survey of our journey past and in advance is desireable, as is a distinct
pause in any business, here and there. He points proudly to the fact that
our people in this comedy move themselves,--are moved from their own
impulsion,--and that no arbitrary hand has posted them to bring about any
event and heap the catastrophe. In vain I tell him that he is meantime
making tatters of the puppets' golden robe illusion: that he is sucking
the blood of their warm humanity out of them. He promises that when
Emilia is in Italy he will retire altogether; for there is a field of
action, of battles and conspiracies, nerve and muscle, where life fights
for plain issues, and he can but sum results. Let us, he entreats, be
true to time and place. In our fat England, the gardener Time is playing
all sorts of delicate freaks in the lines and traceries of the flower of
life, and shall we not note them? If we are to understand our species,
and mark the progress of civilization at all, we must. Thus the
Philosopher. Our partner is our master, and I submit, hopefully looking
for release with my Emilia, in the day when Italy reddens the sky with
the banners of a land revived.

I hear Wilfrid singing out that he is aloft, burning to rush ahead, while
his beast capers in one spot, abominably ludicrous. This trick of
Hippogriff is peculiar, viz., that when he loses all faith in himself, he
sinks--in other words, goes to excesses of absurd humility to regain it.
Passion has likewise its panting intervals, but does nothing so
preposterous. The wreath of black briony, spoken of by Tracy as the crown
of Emilia's forehead, had begun to glow with a furnace-colour in
Wilfrid's fancy. It worked a Satanic distraction in him. The girl sat
before him swathed in a darkness, with the edges of the briony leaves
shining deadly--radiant above--young Hecate! The next instant he was
bleeding with pity for her, aching with remorse, and again stung to
intense jealousy of all who might behold her (amid a reserve of angry
sensations at her present happiness).

Why had she not made allowance for his miserable situation that night in
Devon? Why did she not comprehend his difficulties in relation to his
father's affairs? Why did she not know that he could not fail to love her
for ever?

Interrogations such as these were so many switches of the whip in the
flanks of Hippogriff.

Another peculiarity of the animal gifted with wings is, that around the
height he soars to he can see no barriers nor any of the fences raised by
men. And here again he differs from Passion, which may tug against common
sense but is never, in a great nature, divorced from it: In air on
Hippogriff, desires wax boundless, obstacles are hidden. It seemed
nothing to Wilfrid (after several tremendous descents of humility) that
he should hurry for Monmouth away, to gaze on Emilia under her fair,
infernal, bewitching wreath; nothing that he should put an arm round her;
nothing that he should forthwith carry her off, though he died for it.
Forming no design beyond that of setting his eyes on her, he turned the
head of Hippogriff due Westward.




CHAPTER XLV

Penarvon castle lay over the borders of Monmouthshire. Thither, on a
night of frosty moonlight, troops of carriages were hurrying with the
usual freightage for a country ball:--the squire who will not make
himself happy by seeing that his duty to the softer side of his family
must be performed during the comfortable hours when bachelors snooze in
arm-chairs, and his nobler dame who, not caring for Port or tobacco,
cheerfully accepts the order of things as bequeathed to her: the
everlastingly half-satisfied young man, who looks forward to the hour
when his cigar-light will shine; and the damsel thrice demure as a cover
for her eagerness. Within a certain distance of one of the carriages, a
man rode on horseback. The court of the castle was reached, and he turned
aside, lingering to see whether he could get a view of the lighted steps.
To effect his object, he dismounted and led his horse through the gates,
turning from gravel to sward, to keep in the dusk. A very agile
middle-aged gentleman was the first to appear under the portico-lamps,
and he gave his hand to a girl of fifteen, and then to a most portly lady
in a scarlet mantle. The carriage-door slammed and drove off, while a
groan issued from the silent spectator. "Good heavens! have I followed
these horrible people for five-and-twenty miles!" Carriage after carriage
rattled up to the steps, was disburdened of still more 'horrible people'
to him, and went the way of the others. "I shan't see her, after all," he
cried hoarsely, and mounting, said to the beast that bore him, "Now go
sharp."

Whether you recognize the rider of Hippogriff or not, this is he; and the
poor livery-stable screw stretched madly till wind failed, when he was
allowed to choose his pace. Wilfrid had come from London to have sight of
Emilia in the black-briony wreath: to see her, himself unseen, and go.
But he had not seen her; so he had the full excuse to continue the
adventure. He rode into a Welsh town, and engaged a fresh horse for the
night.

"She won't sing, at all events," thought Wilfrid, to comfort himself,
before the memory that she could not, in any case, touched springs of
weakness and pitying tenderness. From an eminence to which he walked
outside the town, Penarvon was plainly visible with all its lighted
windows.

"But I will pluck her from you!" he muttered, in a spasm of jealousy; the
image of himself as an outcast against the world that held her, striking
him with great force at that moment.

"I must give up the Austrian commission, if she takes me."

And be what? For he had sold out of the English service, and was to
receive the money in a couple of days. How long would the money support
him? It would not pay half his debts! What, then, did this pursuit of
Emilia mean? To blink this question, he had to give the spur to
Hippogriff. It meant (upon Hippogriff at a brisk gallop), that he
intended to live for her, die for her, if need be, and carve out of the
world all that she would require. Everything appears possible, on
Hippogriff, when he is going; but it is a bad business to put the spur on
so willing a beast. When he does not go of his own will;--when he sees
that there are obstructions, it is best to jump off his back. And we
should abandon him then, save that having once tasted what he can do for
us, we become enamoured of the habit of going keenly, and defying
obstacles. Thus do we begin to corrupt the uses of the gallant beast (for
he is a gallant beast, though not of the first order); we spoil his
instincts and train him to hurry us to perdition.

"If my sisters could see me now!" thought Wilfrid, half-smitten with a
distant notion of a singularity in his position there, the mark for a
frosty breeze, while his eyes kept undeviating watch over Penarvon.

After a time he went back to the inn, and got among coachmen and footmen,
all battling lustily against the frost with weapons scientifically
selected at the bar. They thronged the passages, and lunged hearty
punches at one another, drank and talked, and only noticed that a
gentleman was in their midst when he moved to get a light. One complained
that he had to drive into Monmouth that night, by a road that sent him
five miles out of his way, owing to a block--a great stone that had
fallen from the hill. "You can't ask 'em to get out and walk ten steps,"
he said; "or there! I'd lead the horses and just tip up the off wheels,
and round the place in a twinkle, pop 'm in again, and nobody hurt; but
you can't ask ladies to risk catchin' colds for the sake of the poor
horses."

Several coachmen spoke upon this, and the shame and marvel it was that
the stone had not been moved; and between them the name of Mr. Powys was
mentioned, with the remark that he would spare his beasts if he could.

"What's that block you're speaking of, just out of Monmouth?" enquired
Wilfrid; and it being described to him, together with the exact bearings
of the road and situation of the mass of stone, he at once repeated a
part of what he had heard in the form of the emphatic interrogation,
"What! there?" and flatly told the coachman that the stone had been
moved.

"It wasn't moved this morning, then, sir," said the latter.

"No; but a great deal can be done in a couple of hours," said Wilfrid.

"Did you see 'em at work, sir?"

"No; but I came that way, and the road was clear."

"The deuce it was!" ejaculated the coachman, willingly convinced.

"And that's the way I shall return," added Wilfrid.

He tossed some money on the bar to aid in warming the assemblage, and
received numerous salutes as he passed out. His heart was beating fast.
"I shall see her, in the teeth of my curst luck," he thought, picturing
to himself the blessed spot where the mass of stone would lie; and to
that point he galloped, concentrating all the light in his mind on this
maddest of chances, till it looked sound, and finally certain.

"It's certain, if that's not a hired coachman," he calculated. "If he is,
he won't risk his fee. If he isn't, he'll feel on the safe side anyhow.
At any rate, it's my only chance." And away he flew between glimmering
slopes of frost to where a white curtain of mist hung across the wooded
hills of the Wye.




CHAPTER XLVI

Emilia was in skilful hands, and against anything less powerful than a
lover mounted upon Hippogriff, might have been shielded. What is poison
to most girls, Merthyr prescribed for her as medicine. He nourished her
fainting spirit upon vanity. In silent astonishment Georgiana heard him
address speeches to her such as dowagers who have seen their day can
alone of womankind complacently swallow. He encouraged Tracy Runningbrook
to praise the face of which she had hitherto thought shyly. Jewels were
placed at her disposal, and dresses laid out cunningly suited to her
complexion. She had a maid to wait on her, who gabbled at the momentous
hours of robing and unrobing: "Oh, miss! of all the dark young ladies I
ever see!"--Emilia was the most bewitching. By-and-by, Emilia was led to
think of herself; but with a struggle and under protest. How could it be
possible that she was so very nice to the eye, and Wilfrid had abandoned
her? The healthy spin of young new blood turned the wheels of her brain,
and then she thought: "Perhaps I am really growing handsome?" The maid
said artfully of her hair: "If gentlemen could only see it down, miss!
It's the longest, and thickest, and blackest, I ever touched!" And so
saying, slid her fingers softly through it after the comb, and thrilled
the owner of that hair till soft thoughts made her bosom heave, and then
self-love began to be sensibly awakened, followed by self-pity, and some
further form of what we understand as consciousness. If partially a
degradation of her nature, this saved her mind from true despair when it
began to stir after the vital shock that had brought her to earth. "To
what purpose should I be fair?" was a question that did not yet come to
her; but it was sweet to see Merthyr's eyes gather pleasure from the
light of her own. Sweet, though nothing more than coldly sweet. She
compared herself to her father's old broken violin, that might be mended
to please the sight; but would never give the tones again. Sometimes, if
hope tormented her, she would strangle it by trying her voice: and such a
little piece of self-inflicted anguish speedily undid all Merthyr's work.
He was patient as one who tends a flower in the Spring. Georgiana
marvelled that the most sensitive and proud of men should be striving to
uproot an image from the heart of a simple girl, that he might place his
own there. His methods almost led her to think that his estimate of human
nature was falling low. Nevertheless, she was constrained to admit that
there was no diminution of his love for her, and it chastened her to
think so. "Would it be the same with me, if I--?" she half framed the
sentence, blushing remorsefully while she denied that anything could
change her great love for her brother. She had caught a glimpse of
Wilfrid's suppleness and selfishness. Contrasting him with Merthyr, she
was singularly smitten with shame, she knew not why.

The anticipation of the ball at Penarvon Castle had kindled very little
curiosity in Emilia's bosom. She seemed to herself a machine; "one of the
rest;" and looked more to see that she was still coveted by Merthyr's
eyes than at the glitter of the humming saloons. A touch of her old
gladness made her smile when Captain Gambier unexpectedly appeared and
walked across the dancers to sit beside her. She asked him why he had
come from London: to which he replied, with a most expressive gaze under
her eyelids, that he had come for one object. "To see me?" thought
Emilia, wondering, and reddening as she ceased to wonder. She had thought
as a child, and the neat instant felt as a woman. He finished Merthyr's
work for him. Emilia now thought: "Then I must be worth something." And
with "I am," she ended her meditation, glowing. He might have said that
she had all beauty ever showered upon woman: she would have been led to
believe him at that moment of her revival.

Now, Lady Charlotte had written to Georgiana, telling her that Captain
Gambier was soon to be expected in her neighbourhood, and adding that it
would be as well if she looked closely after her charge. When Georgiana
saw him go over to Emilia she did not remember this warning: but when she
perceived the sudden brilliancy and softness in Emilia's face after the
first words had fallen on her ears, she grew alarmed, knowing his
reputation, and executed some diversions, which separated them. The
captain made no effort to perplex her tactics, merely saying that he
should call in a day or two. Merthyr took to himself all the credit of
the visible bloom that had come upon Emilia, and pacing with her between
the dances, said: "Now you will come to Italy, I think."

She paused before answering, "Now?" and feverishly continued: "Yes; at
once. I will go. I have almost felt my voice again to-night."

"That's well. I shall write to Marini to-morrow. You will soon find your
voice if you will not fret for it. Touch Italy!"

"Yes; but you must be near me," said Emilia.

Georgiana heard this, and could not conceive other than that Emilia was
growing to be one of those cormorant creatures who feed alike on the
homage of noble and ignoble. She was critical, too, of that very assured
pose of Emilia's head and firm planting of her feet as the girl paraded
the room after the dances in which she could not join. Previous to this
evening, Georgiana had seen nothing of the sort in her; but, on the
contrary, a doubtful droop of the shoulders and an unwilling gaze, as of
a soul submerged in internal hesitations. "I earnestly trust that this is
a romantic folly of Merthyr's, and no more," thought Georgiana, who would
have had that view concerning his love for Italy likewise, if
recollection of her own share of adventure there had not softly
interposed.

Tracy, Georgiana, Merthyr, and Emilia were in the carriage, well muffled
up, with one window open to the white mist. Emilia was eager to thank her
friend, if only for the physical relief from weariness and sluggishness
which she was experiencing. She knew certainly that the dim light of a
recovering confidence in herself was owing, all, to him, and burned to
thank him. Once on the way their hands touched, and he felt a shy
pressure from her fingers as they parted. Presently the carriage stopped
abruptly, and listening they heard the coachman indulge his companion
outside with the remark that they were a couple of fools, and were now
regularly 'dished.'

"I don't see why that observation can't go on wheels," said Tracy.

Merthyr put out his head, and saw the obstruction of the mass of stone
across the road. He alighted, and together with the footman, examined the
place to see what the chance was of their getting the carriage past.
After a space of waiting, Georgiana clutched the wraps about her throat
and head, and impetuously followed her brother, as her habit had always
been. Emilia sat upright, saying, "I must go too." Tracy moaned a
petition to her to rest and be comfortable while the Gods were
propitious. He checked her with his arm, and tried to pacify her by
giving a description of the scene. The coachman remained on his seat.
Merthyr, Georgiana, and the footman were on the other side of the rock,
measuring the place to see whether, by a partial ascent of the sloping
rubble down which it had bowled, the carriage might be got along.

"Go; they have gone round; see whether we can give any help," said Emilia
to Tracy, who cried: "My goodness! what help can we give? This is an
express situation where the Fates always appear in person and move us on.
We're sure to be moved, if we show proper faith in them. This is my
attitude of invocation." He curled his legs up on the seat, resting his
head on an arm; but seeing Emilia preparing for a jump he started up, and
immediately preceded her. Emilia looked out after him. She perceived a
figure coming stealthily from the bank. It stopped, and again advanced,
and now ran swiftly down. She drew back her head as it approached the
open door of the carriage; but the next moment trembled forward, and was
caught with a cat-like clutch upon Wilfrid's breast.

"Emilia! my own for ever! I swore to die this night it I did not see
you!"

"You love me, Wilfrid? love me?"

"Come with me now!"

"Now?"

"Away! with me! your lover!"

"Then you love me!

"I love you! Come!"

"Now? I cannot move."

"I am out in the night without you."

"Oh, my lover! Oh, Wilfrid!"

"Come to me!"

"My feet are dead!"

"It's too late!"

A sturdy hulloa! sounding from the coachman made Merthyr's ears alive.
When he returned he found Emilia huddled up on the seat, alone, her face
in her hands, and the touch of her hands like fire. He had to entreat her
to descend, and in helping her to alight bore her whole weight, and
supported her in a sad wonder, while the horses were led across the
rubble, and the carriage was with difficulty, and some confusions, guided
to clear its wheels of the obstructing mass. Emilia persisted in saying
that nothing ailed her; and to the coachman, who could have told him
something, and was willing to have done so (notwithstanding a gold fee
for silence that stuck in his palm), Merthyr put no question.

As they were taking their seats in the carriage again, Georgiana said,
"Where is your wreath, Sandra?"

The black-briony wreath was no longer on her head.

"Then, it wasn't a dream!" gasped Emilia, feeling at her temples.

Georgiana at once fell into a scrutinizing coldness, and when Merthyr,
who fancied the wreath might have fallen as he was lifting Emilia from
the carriage, proposed to go and search the place for it, his sister laid
her fingers on his arm, remarking, "You will not find it, dear;" and
Emilia cried "Oh! no, no! it is not there;" and, with her hands pressed
hard against her bosom, sat fixed and silent.

Out of this mood she issued with looks of such tenderness that one who
watched her, speculating on her character as Merthyr did, could see that
in some mysterious way she had been, during the few minutes that
separated them, illumined upon the matter nearest her heart. Was it her
own strength, inspired by some sublime force, that had sprung up suddenly
to eject a worthless love? So he hoped in despite of whispering reason,
till Georgiana spoke to him.




CHAPTER XLVII

When the force of Wilfrid's embrace had died out from her body, Emilia
conceived wilfully that she had seen an apparition, so strange, sudden,
and wild had been his coming and going: but her whole body was a song to
her. "He is not false: he is true." So dimly, however, was the 'he' now
fashioned in her brain, and so like a thing of the air had he descended
on her, that she almost conceived the abstract idea, 'Love is true,' and
possibly, though her senses did not touch on it to shape it, she had the
reflection in her: "After all, power is mine to bring him to my side."
Almost it seemed to her that she had brought him from the grave. She sat
hugging herself in the carriage, hating to hear words, and seeing a ball
of fire away in the white mist. Georgiana looked at her no more; and when
Tracy remarked that he had fancied having seen a fellow running up the
bank, she said quietly, "Did you?"

"Robert must have seen him, too," added Merthyr, and so the interloper
was dismissed.

On reaching home, no sooner were they in the hall than Emilia called for
her bedroom candle in a thin, querulous voice that made Tracy shout with
laughter and love of her quaintness.

Emilia gave him her hand, and held up her mouth to kiss Georgiana, but no
cheek was bent forward for the salute. The girl passed from among them,
and then Merthyr said to his sister: "What is the matter?"

"Surely, Merthyr, you should not be at a loss," she answered, in a
somewhat unusual tone, that was half irony.

Merthyr studied her face. Alone with her, he said: "I could almost
suppose that she has seen this man."

Georgiana smiled sadly. "I have not seen him, dear; and she has not told
me so."

"You think it was so?"

"I can imagine it just possible."

"What! while we were out and had left her! He must be mad!"

"Not necessarily mad, unless to be without principle is to be mad."

"Mad, or graduating for a Spanish comedie d'intrigue," said Merthyr.
"What on earth can he mean by it? If he must see her, let him come here.
But to dog a carriage at midnight, and to prefer to act startling
surprises!--one can't help thinking that he delights in being a
stage-hero."

Georgiana's: "If he looks on her as a stage-heroine?" was unheeded, and
he pursued: "She must leave England at once," and stated certain
arrangements that were immediately to be made.

"You will not give up this task you have imposed on yourself?" she said.

"To do what?"

She could have answered: "To make this unsatisfactory creature love you;"
but her words were, "To civilize this little savage."

Merthyr was bright in a moment: "I don't give up till I see failure."

"Is it not possible, dear, to be dangerously blind?" urged Georgiana.

"Keep to the particular case," he returned; "and don't tempt me into your
woman's snare of a generalization. It's possible, of course, to be
one-ideaed and obstinate. But I have not yet seen your savage guilty of a
deceit. Her heart has been stirred, and her heart, as you may judge, has
force enough to be constant, though none can deny that it has been
roughly proved."

"For which you like her better?" said Georgiana, herself brightening.

"For which I like her better," he replied, and smiled, perfectly armed.

"Oh! is it because I am a woman that I do not understand this sort of
friendship?" cried Georgiana. "And from you, Merthyr, to a girl such as
she is! Me she satisfies less and less. You speak of force of heart, as
if it were manifested in an abandonment of personal will."

"No, my darling, but in the strong conception of a passion."

"Yes; if she had discriminated, and fixed upon a worthy object!"

"That," rejoined Merthyr, "is akin to the doctrine of justification by
success."

"You seek to foil me with sophisms," said Georgiana, warming. "A
woman--even a girl--should remember what is due to herself. You are
attracted by a passionate nature--I mean, men are."

"The general instance," assented Merthyr.

"Then, do you never reflect," pursued Georgiana, "on the composition and
the elements of that sort of nature? I have tried to think the best of
it. It seems to me still no, not contemptible at all--but selfishness is
the groundwork of it; a brilliant selfishness, I admit. I see that it
shows its best feature, but is it the nobler for that? I think, and I
must think, that excellence is a point to be reached only by
unselfishness, and that usefulness is the test of excellence."

"Before there has been any trial of her?" asked Merthyr. "Have you not
been a little too eager to put the test to her?"

Georgiana reluctantly consented to have her argument attached to a single
person. "She is not a child, Merthyr."

"Ay; but she should bethought one."

"I confess I am utterly at sea," Georgiana sighed. "Will you at least
allow that sordid selfishness does less mischief than this 'passion' you
admire so much?"

"I will allow that she may do herself more mischief than if she had the
opposite vice of avarice--anything you will, of that complexion."

"And why should she be regarded as a child?" asked Georgiana piteously.

"Because, if she has outnumbered the years of a child, she is no further
advanced than a child, owing to what she has to get rid of. She is
overburdened with sensations that set her head on fire. Her solid, firm,
and gentle heart keeps her balanced, so long as there is no one playing
on it. That a fool should be doing so, is scarcely her fault."

Georgiana murmured to herself, "He is not a fool." She said, "I do see a
certain truth in what you say, dear Merthyr. But I have been disappointed
in her. I have taken her among my poor. She listens to their tales,
without sympathy. I took her into a sick-room. She stood by a dying bed
like a statue. Her remark when we came into the air was, 'Death seems
easy, if it were not so stifling!' Herself always! herself the centre of
what she sees and feels! And again, she has no active desire to do good
to any mortal thing. A passive wish that everybody should be happy, I
know she has. Few have not. She would give money if she had it. But this
is among the mysteries of Providence to me, that one no indifferent to
others should be gifted with so inexplicable a power of attraction."

Merthyr put this case to her: "Suppose you saw any of the poor souls you
wait on lying sick with fever, would it be just to describe the character
of one so situated as fretful, ungrateful, of rambling tongue, poor in
health, and generally of loose condition of mind?"

"There, again, is that foreign doctrine which exults in the meanest
triumphs by getting the thesis granted that we are animal--only animals!"
Georgiana burst out. You argue that at this season and at that season she
is helpless. If she is a human creature, must she not have a mind to
cover those conditions?"

"And a mind," Merthyr took her up, "specially experienced, armed, and
alert to be a safeguard to her at the most critical period of her life!
Oh, yes! Whether she 'must' have it is one thing; but no one can content
the value of such a jewel to any young person."

Georgiana stood silenced; and knew later that she had been silenced by a
fallacy. For, is youth the most critical period of life? Neither brother
nor sister, however, were talking absolutely for the argument. Beneath
this dialogue, the current in her mind pressed to elicit some avowal of
his personal feeling for the girl, toward whom Georgiana's disposition
was kindlier than her words might lead one to think. He, on the other
hand, talked with the distinct object of disguising his feelings under a
tone of moderate friendship for Emilia, that was capable of excusing her.
A sensitive man of thirty odd years does not loudly proclaim his
appreciation of a girl under twenty: moreover, Merthyr wished to spare
his sister.

He thought of questioning Robert, the coachman, whether anyone had
visited the carriage during his five minutes' absence from it: but
Merthyr's peculiar Welsh delicacy kept him from doing that, hard as it
was to remain in doubt and endure the little poisoned shafts of a
suspicion.

In the morning there was a letter from Marini on the breakfast-table.
Merthyr glanced down the contents. His countenance flashed with a
marvellous light. "Where is she?" he said, looking keenly for Emilia.

Emilia came in from the garden.

"Now, my Sandra!" cried Merthyr, waving the letter to her; "can you pack
up, to start in an hour? There's work coming on for us, and I shall be a
boy again, and not the drumstick I am in this country. I have a letter
from Marini. All Lombardy is prepared to rise, and this time the business
will be done. Marini is off for Genoa. Under the orange-trees, my Sandra!
and looking on the bay, singing of Italy free!"

Emilia fell back a step, eyeing him with a grave expression of wonder, as
if she beheld another being from the one she had hitherto known. The calm
Englishman had given place to a volcanic spirit.

"Isn't that the sketch we made?" he resumed. "The plot's perfect. I
detest conspiracies, but we must use what weapons we can, and be Old
Mole, if they trample us in the earth. Once up, we have Turin to back us.
This I know. We shall have nothing but the Tedeschi to manage: and if
they beat us in cavalry, it's certain that they can't rely on their light
horse. The Magyars would break in a charge. We know that they will. As
for the rest:--

     'Soldati settentrionali,
     Come sarebbe Boemi a Croati,'

we are a match for them! Artillery we shall get. The Piedmontese are mad
for the signal. Come; sit and eat. The air seems dead down in this quiet
country; we're out of the stream. I must rush up to London to breathe and
then we won't lose a moment. We shall be in Italy in four days. Four
days, my Sandra! And Italy going to be free; Georgey, I'm fasting. And
you will see all your old friends. All? Good God! No!--not all! Their
blood shall nerve us. The Austrian thinks he wastes us by slaughter. With
every dead man he doubles the life of the living! Am I talking like a
foreigner, Sandra mia? My child, you don't eat! And I, who dreamed last
night that I looked out over Novara from the height of the Col di Colma,
and saw the plain under a red shadow from a huge eagle!"

Merthyr laughed, swinging round his arm. Emilia continued staring at him
as at a man transformed, while Georgiana asked: "May Marini's letter be
seen?" Her visage had become firm and set in proportion as her brother's
excitement increased.

"Eat, my Sandra! eat!" called Merthyr, who was himself eating with a
campaigning appetite.

Georgiana laid down the letter folded under Merthyr's fingers, keeping
her hand on it till he grew alive to her meaning, that it should be put
away.

"Marini is vague about artillery," she murmured.

"Vague!" echoed Merthyr. "Say prudent. If he said we could lay hands on
fifty pieces, then distrust him!"

"God grant that this be not another pit for further fruitless bloodshed!"
was the interjection standing in Georgiana's eyes, and then she dropped
them pensively, while Merthyr recounted the patient schemes that had led
to this hour, the unuttered anxieties and the bursting hopes.

Still Emilia kept her distressfully unenthusiastic looks turned from one
to the other, though her Italy was the theme. She did not eat, but had
dropped one hand flat on her plate, looking almost idiotic. She heard of
Italy as of a distant place, known to her in ancient years. Merthyr's
transformation, too, helped some form of illusion in her brain that she
was cut off from any kindred feeling with other people.

As soon as he had finished, Merthyr jumped up; and coming round to
Emilia, touched her shoulder affectionately, saying: "Now! There won't be
much packing to do. We shall be in London to-night in time for your
mother to pass the evening with you."

Emilia rose straightway, and her eyes fell vacantly on Georgiana for
help, as far as they could express anything.

Georgiana gave no response, save a look well nigh as vacant in the
interchange.

"But you haven't eaten at all!" said Merthyr.

Emilia shook her head. "No."

"Eat, my Sandra! to please me! You will need all your strength if you
would be a match for Georgey anywhere where there's action."

"Yes!" Emilia traversed his words with a sudden outcry. "Yes, I will go
to London. I am ready to go to London now."

It was clear that a new light had fallen on her intelligence.

Merthyr was satisfied to see her sit down to the table, and he at once
went out to issue directions for the first step in the new and momentous
expedition.

Emilia put the bread to her mouth, and crumbled it on a dry lip: but it
was evident to Georgiana, hostile witness as she was, that Emilia's mind
was gradually warming to what Merthyr had said, and that a picture was
passing before the girl. She perceived also a thing that no misery of her
own had yet drawn from Emilia. It was a tear that fell heavily on the
back of her hand. Soon the tears came in quick succession, while the girl
tried to eat, and bit at salted morsels. It was a strange sight for
Georgiana, this statuesque weeping, that got human bit by bit, till the
bosom heaved long sobs: and yet no turn of the head for sympathy; nothing
but passionless shedding of big tear-drops!

She went to the girl, and put her hand upon her; kissed her, and then
said: "We have no time to lose. My brother never delays when he has come
to a resolve."

Emilia tried to articulate: "I am ready."

"But you have not eaten!"

Emilia made a mechanical effort to eat.

"Remember," said Georgiana, "we have a long distance to go. You will want
your strength. You would not be a burden to him? Eat, while I get your
things ready." And Georgiana left her, secretly elated to feel that in
this expedition it was she, and she alone, who was Merthyr's mate. What
storm it was, and what conflict, agitated the girl and stupefied her, she
cared not to guess, now that she had the suitable designation, 'savage,'
confirmed in all her acts, to apply to her.

When Tracy Runningbrook came down at his ordinary hour of noon to
breakfast, he found a twisted note from Georgiana, telling him that
important matters had summoned Merthyr to London, and that they were all
to be seen at Lady Gosstre's town-house.

"I believe, by Jove! Powys manoeuvres to get her away from me," he
shouted, and sat down to his breakfast and his book with a comforted
mind. It was not Georgiana to whom he alluded; but the appearance of
Captain Gambier, and the pronounced discomposure visible in the handsome
face of the captain on his hearing of the departure, led Tracy to think
that Georgiana's was properly deplored by another, though that other was
said to be engaged.  'On revient toujours,' he hummed.




CHAPTER XLVIII

Three days passed as a running dream to Emilia. During that period she
might have been hurried off to Italy without uttering a remonstrance.
Merthyr's spirited talk of the country she called her own; of its heroic
youth banded to rise, and sworn to liberate it or die; of good historic
names borne by men, his comrades, in old campaigning adventures; and
stories and incidents of those past days--all given with his changed
face, and changed ringing voice, almost moved her to plunge forgetfully
into this new tumultuous stream while the picture of the beloved land,
lying shrouded beneath the perilous star it was about to follow grew in
her mind.

"Shall I go with the Army?" she asked Georgiana.

"No, my child; you will simply go to school," was the cold reply.

"To school!" Emilia throbbed, "while they are fighting!"

"To the Academy. My brother's first thought is to further your progress
in Art. When your artistic education is complete, you will choose your
own course."

"He knows, he knows that I have no voice!" Emilia struck her lap with
twisted fingers. "My voice is thick in my throat. If I am not to march
with him, I can't go; I will not go. I want to see the fight. You have.
Why should I keep away? Could I run up notes, even if I had any voice,
while he is in the cannon-smoke?"

"While he is in the cannon-smoke!" Georgiana revolved the line
thoughtfully. "You are aware that my brother looks forward to the
recovery of your voice," she said.

"My voice is like a dead serpent in my throat," rejoined Emilia. "My
voice! I have forgotten music. I lived for that, once; now I live for
nothing, only to take my chance everywhere with my friend. I want to
smell powder. My father says it is like salt, the taste of blood, and is
like wine when you smell it. I have heard him shout for it. I will go to
Italy, if I may go where my friend Merthyr goes; but nothing can keep me
shut up now. My head's a wilderness when I'm in houses. I can scarcely
bear to hear this London noise, without going out and walking till I
drop."

Coming to a knot in her meditation, Georgiana concluded that Emilia's
heart was warming to Merthyr. She was speedily doubtful again.

These two delicate Welsh natures, as exacting as they were delicate, were
little pleased with Emilia's silence concerning her intercourse with
Wilfrid. Merthyr, who had expressed in her defence what could be said for
her, was unwittingly cherishing what could be thought in her disfavour.
Neither of them hit on the true cause, which lay in Georgiana's coldness
to her. One little pressure of her hand, carelessly given, made Merthyr
better aware of the nature he was dealing with. He was telling her that a
further delay might keep them in London for a week; and that he had sent
for her mother to come to her.

"I must see my mother," she had said, excitedly. The extension of the
period named for quitting England made it more imminent m her imagination
than when it was a matter of hours. "I must see her."

"I have sent for her," said Merthyr, and then pressed Emilia's hand. But
she who, without having brooded on complaints of its absence, thirsted
for demonstrative kindness, clung to the hand, drawing it, doubled,
against her chin.

"That is not the reason," she said, raising her full eyes up at him over
the unrelinquished hand. "I love the poor Madre; let her come; but I have
no heart for her just now. I have seen Wilfrid."

She took a tighter hold of his fingers, as fearing he might shrink from
her. Merthyr hated mysteries, so he said, "I supposed it must have been
so--that night of our return from Penarvon?"

"Yes," she murmured, while she read his face for a shadow of a repulsion;
"and, my friend, I cannot go to Italy now!"

Merthyr immediately drew a seat beside her. He perceived that there would
be no access to her reason, even as he was on the point of addressing it.

"Then all my care and trouble are to be thrown away?" he said, taking the
short road to her feelings.

She put the hand that was disengaged softly on his shoulder. "No; not
thrown away. Let me be what Merthyr wishes me to be! That is my chief
prayer."

"Why, then, will you not do what Merthyr wishes you to do?"

Emilia's eyelids shut, while her face still fronted him.

"Oh! I will speak all out to you," she cried. "Merthyr, my friend, he
came to kiss me once, before I have only just understood it! He is going
to Austria. He came to touch me for the last time before his hand is red
with my blood. Stop him from going! I am ready to follow you:--I can hear
of his marrying that woman:--Oh! I cannot live and think of him in that
Austrian white coat. Poor thing!--my dear! my dear!" And she turned away
her head.

It is not unnatural that Merthyr hearing these soft epithets, should
disbelieve in the implied self-conquest of her preceding words. He had no
clue to make him guess that these were simply old exclamations of hers
brought to her lips by the sorrowful contrast in her mind.

"It will be better that you should see him," he said, with less of his
natural sincerity; so soon are we corrupted by any suspicion that our
egoism prompts.

"Here?" And she hung close to him, open-lipped, open-eyed, open-eared, as
if (Georgiana would think it, thought Merthyr) her savage senses had laid
the trap for this proposal, and now sprung up keen for their prey. "Here,
Merthyr? Yes! let me see him. You will! Let me see him, for he cannot
resist me. He tries. He thinks he does: but he cannot. I can stretch out
my finger--I can put it on the day when, if he has galloped one way he
will gallop another. Let him come."

She held up both her hands in petition, half dropping her eyelids, with a
shadowy beauty.

In Merthyr's present view, the idea of Wilfrid being in ranks opposed to
him was so little provocative of intense dissatisfaction, that it was out
of his power to believe that Emilia craved to see him simply to dissuade
the man from the obnoxious step. "Ah, well! See him; see him, if you
must," he said. "Arrange it with my sister."

He quitted the room, shrinking from the sound of her thanks, and still
more from the consciousness of his torment.

The business that detained him was to get money for Marini. Georgiana
placed her fortune at his disposal a second time. There was his own,
which he deemed it no excess of chivalry to fling into the gulf. The two
sat together, arranging what property should be sold, and how they would
share the sacrifice in common. Georgiana pressed him to dispose of a
little estate belonging to her, that money might immediately be raised.
They talked as they sat over the fire toward the dusk of the winter
evening.

"You would not have refused me once, Merthyr!"

"When you were a child, and I hardly better than a boy. Now it's
different. Let mine go first, Georgey. You may have a husband, who will
not look on these things as we do."

"How can I love a husband!" was all she said; and Merthyr took her in his
arms. His gaiety had gone.

"We can't go dancing into a pit of this sort," he sighed, partly to
baffle the scrutiny he apprehended in her silence. "The garrison at Milan
is doubled, and I hear they are marching troops through Tyrol. Some
alerte has been given, and probably some traitors exist. One wouldn't
like to be shot like a dog! You haven't forgotten poor Tarani? I heard
yesterday of the girl who calls herself his widow."

"They were betrothed, and she is!" exclaimed Georgiana.

"Well, there's a case of a man who had two loves--a woman and his
country; and both true to him!"

"And is he so singular, Merthyr?"

"No, my best! my sweetest! my heart's rest! no!"

They exchanged tender smiles.

"Tarani's bride--beloved! you can listen to such matters--she has
undertaken her task. Who imposed it? I confess I faint at the thought of
things so sad and shameful. But I dare not sit in judgement on a people
suffering as they are. Outrage upon outrage they have endured, and that
deadens--or rather makes their heroism unscrupulous. Tarani's bride is
one of the few fair girls of Italy. We have a lock of her hair. She shore
it close the morning her lover was shot, and wore the thin white
skull-cap you remember, until it was whispered to her that her beauty
must serve."

"I have the lock now in my desk," said Georgiana, beginning to tremble.
"Do you wish to look at it?"

"Yes; fetch it, my darling."

He sat eyeing the firelight till she returned, and then taking the long
golden lock in his handy he squeezed it, full of bitter memories and
sorrowfulness.

"Giulietta?" breathed his sister.

"I would put my life on the truth of that woman's love. Well!"

"Yes?"

"She abandons herself to the commandant of the citadel."

A low outcry burst from Georgiana. She fell at Merthyr's knees sobbing
violently. He let her sob. In the end she struggled to speak.

"Oh! can it be permitted? Oh! can we not save her? Oh, poor soul! my
sister! Is she blind to her lover in heaven?"

Georgiana's face was dyed with shame.

"We must put these things by," said Merthyr. "Go to Emilia presently, and
tell her--settle with her as you think fitting, how she shall see this
Wilfrid Pole. I have promised her she shall have her wish."

Coloured by the emotion she was burning from, these words smote Georgiana
with a mournful compassion for Merthyr.

He had risen, and by that she knew that nothing could be said to alter
his will.

A sentimental pair likewise, if you please; but these were
sentimentalists who served an active deity; and not that arbitrary
protection of a subtle selfishness which rules the fairer portion of our
fat England.




CHAPTER XLIX

"My brother tells me it is your wish to see Mr. Wilfrid Pole."

Emilia's "Yes" came faintly in answer to Georgiana's cold accents.

"Have you considered what you are doing in expressing such a desire?"

Another "Yes" was heard from under an uplifted head:--a culprit
affirmative, whereat the just take fire.

"Be honest, Emilia. Seek counsel and guidance to-night, as you have done
before with me, and profited, I think. If I write to bid him come, what
will it mean?"

"Nothing more," breathed Emilia.

"To him--for in his way he seems to care for you fitfully--it will
mean--stop! hear me. The words you speak will have no part of the
meaning, even if you restrain your tongue. To him it will imply that his
power over you is unaltered. I suppose that the task of making you
perceive the effect it really will have on you is hopeless."

"I have seen him, and I know," said Emilia, in a corresponding tone.

"You saw him that night of our return from Penarvon? Judge of him by
that. He would not spare you. To gratify I know not what wildness in his
nature, he did not hesitate to open your old wound. And to what purpose?
A freak of passion!"

"He could not help it. I told him he would come, and he came."

"This, possibly, you call love; do you not?"

Emilia was about to utter a plain affirmative, but it was checked. The
novelty of the idea of its not being love arrested her imagination.

"If he comes to you here," resumed Georgiana--

"He must come!" cried Emilia.

"My brother has sanctioned it, so his coming or not will rest with him.
If he comes, let me know the good that you think will result from an
interview? Ah! you have not weighed that question. Do so;--or you give no
heed to it? In any ease, try to look into your own breast. You were not
born to live unworthily. You can be, or will be, if you follow your
better star, self-denying and noble. Do you not love your country? Judge
of this love by that. Your love, if you have this power over him, is
merely a madness to him; and his--what has it done for you? If he comes,
and this begins again, there will be a similar if not the same destiny
for you."

Emilia panted in her reply. "No; it will not begin again." She threw out
both arms, shaking her head. "It cannot, I know. What am I now? It is
what I was that he loves. He will not know what I am till he sees me. And
I know that I have done things that he cannot forgive. You have forgiven
it, and Merthyr, because he is my friend; but I am sure Wilfrid will not.
He might pardon the poor 'me,' but not his Emilia! I shall have to tell
him what I did; so" (and she came closer to Georgiana) "there is some
pain for me in seeing him."

Georgiana was not proof against this simplicity of speech, backed by a
little dying dimple, which seemed a continuation of the plain sadness of
Emilia's tone.

She said, "My poor child!" almost fondly, and then Emilia looked in her
face, murmuring, "You sometimes doubt me."

"Not your truth, but the accuracy of your perceptions and your knowledge
of your real designs. You are certainly deceiving yourself at this
instant. In the first place, the relation of that madness--no, poor
child, not wickedness--but if you tell it to him, it is a wilful and
unnecessary self-abasement. If he is to be your husband, unburden your
heart at once. Otherwise, why? why? You are but working up a scene,
provoking needless excesses: you are storing misery in retrospect, or
wretchedness to be endured. Had you the habit of prayer! By degrees it
will give you the thirst for purity, and that makes you a fountain of
prayer, in whom these blind deceits cannot hide."

Georgiana paused emphatically; as when, by our unrolling out of our
ideas, we have more thoroughly convinced ourselves.

"You pray to heaven," said Emilia, and then faltered, and blushed. "I
must be loved!" she cried. "Will you not put your arms round me?"

Georgiana drew her to her bosom, bidding her continue. Emilia lay
whispering under her chin. "You pray, and you wish to be seen as you are,
do you not? You do. Well, if you knew what love is, you would see it is
the same. You wish him to see and know you: you wish to be sure that he
loves nothing but exactly you; it must be yourself. You are jealous of
his loving an idea of you that is not you. You think, 'He will wake up
and find his mistake;' or you think, 'That kiss was not intended for me;
not for me as I am.' Those are tortures!"

Her discipline had transformed her, when she could utter such sentiments
as these!

Feeling her shudder, and not knowing how imagination forestalls
experience in passionate blood, Georgiana said, "You speak like one who
has undergone them. But now at least you have thrown off the mask. You
love him still, this man! And with as little strength of will! Do you not
see impiety in the comparison you have made?"

"Oh! what I see is, that I wish I could say to him, 'Look on me, for I
need not be ashamed--I am like Miss Ford!'"

The young lady's cheeks took fire, and the clear path of speech becoming
confused in her head she said, "Miss Ford?"

"Georgiana," said Emilia, and feeling that her friend's cold manner had
melted; "Georgey! my beloved! my darling in Italy, where will we go! I
envy no woman but you who have seen my dear ones fight. You and I, and
Merthyr! Nothing but Austrian shot shall part us."

"And so we make up a pretty dream!" interjected Georgiana. "The Austrian
shot, I think, will be fired by one who is now in the Austrian service,
or who will soon be."

"Wilfrid?" Emilia called out. "No; that is what I am going to stop. Why
did I not tell you so at first? But I never know what I say or do when I
am with you, and everything seems chance. I want to see him to prevent
him from doing that. I can."

"Why should you?" asked Georgiana; and one to whom the faces of the two
had been displayed at that moment would have pronounced them a hostile
couple.

"Why should I prevent him?" Emilia doled out the question slowly, and
gave herself no further thought of replying to it.

Apparently Georgiana understood the significance of this odd silence: she
was perhaps touched by it. She said, "You feel that you have a power over
him. You wish to exercise it. Never mind wherefore. If you do--if you
try, and succeed--if, by the aid of this love presupposed to exist, you
win him to what you require of him--do you honestly think the love is
then immediately to be dropped?"

Emilia meditated. She caught up her voice hastily. "I think so. Yes. I
hope so. I mean it to be."

"With a noble lover, Emilia. Not with a selfish one. In showing him the
belief you have in your power over him, you betray that he has power over
you. And it is to no object. His family, his position, his prospects--all
tell you that he cannot marry you if he would. And he is, besides,
engaged--"

"Let her suffer!" Emilia's eyes flashed.

"Ah!" and Georgiana thought, "Have I come upon your nature at last?"

However it might be, Emilia was determined to show it.

"She took my lover from me, and I say, let her suffer! I would not hurt
her myself--I would not lay my finger on her: but she has eyes like blue
stones, and such a mouth!--I think the Austrian executioner has one like
it. If she suffers, and goes all dark as I did, she will show a better
face. Let her keep my lover. He is not mine, but he was; and she took him
from me. That woman cannot feed on him as I did. I know she has no hunger
for love. He will look at those blue bits of ice, and think of me. I told
him so. Did I not tell him that in Devon? I saw her eyelids move as fast
as I spoke. I think I look on Winter when I see her lips. Poor, wretched
Wilfrid!"

Emilia half-sobbed this exclamation out. "I don't wish to hurt either of
them," she added, with a smile of such abrupt opposition to her words
that Georgiana was in perplexity. A lady who has assumed the office of
lecturer, will, in such a frame of mind, lecture on, if merely to
vindicate to herself her own preconceptions. Georgiana laid her finger
severely upon Wilfrid's manifest faults; and, in fine, she spoke a great
deal of the common sense that the situation demanded. Nevertheless,
Emilia held to her scheme. But, in the meantime, Georgiana had seen more
clearly into the girl's heart; and she had been won, also, by a natural
gracefulness that she now perceived in her, and which led her to think,
"Is Merthyr again to show me that he never errs in his judgement?" An
unaccountable movement of tenderness to Emilia made her drop a few kisses
on her forehead. Emilia shut her eyes, waiting for more. Then she looked
up, and said, "Have you felt this love for me very long?" at which the
puny flame, scarce visible, sprang up, and warmed to a great heat.

"My own Emilia! Sandra! listen to me: promise me not to seek this
interview."

"Will you always love me as much?" Emilia bargained.

"Yes, yes; I never vary. It is my love for you that begs you."

Emilia fell into a chair and propped her head behind both hands, tapping
the floor briskly with her feet. Georgiana watched the conflict going on.
To decide it promptly, she said: "And not only shall I love you thrice as
well, but my brother Merthyr, whom you call your friend--he will--he
cannot love you better; but he will feel you to be worthy the best love
he can give. There is a heart, you simple girl! He loves you, and has
never shown any of the pain your conduct has given him. When I say he
loves you, I tell you his one weakness--the only one I have discovered.
And judge whether, he has shown want of self-control while you were dying
for another. Did he attempt to thwart you? No; to strengthen you; and
never once to turn your attention to himself. That is love. Now, think of
what anguish you have made him pass through: and think whether you have
ever witnessed an alteration of kindness in his face toward you. Even
now, when he had the hope that you were cured of your foolish fruitless
affection for a man who merely played with you, and cannot give up the
habit, even now he hides what he feels--"

So far Emilia let her speak without interruption; but gradually awakening
to the meaning of the words:--

"For me?" she cried.

"Yes; for you."

"The same sort of love as Wilfrid feels?"

"By no means the same sort; but the love of man for woman."

"And he saw me when I was that wretched heap? And he knows everything!
and loves me. He has never kissed me."

"Does that miserable test--?" Georgiana was asking.

"Pardon, pardon," said Emilia penitently; "I know that is almost nothing,
now. I am not a child. I spoke from a sudden feeling. For if he loves me,
how--! Oh, Merthyr! what a little creature I seem. I cannot understand
it. I lose a brother. And he was such a certainty to me. What did he
love--what did he love, that night he found me on the pier? I looked like
a creature picked off a mud-bank. I felt like a worm, and miserably
abandoned, I was a shameful sight. Oh! how can I look on Merthyr's face
again?"

In these interjections Georgiana did not observe the proper humility and
abject gratitude of a young person who had heard that she was selected by
a prince of the earth. A sort of 'Eastern handmaid' prostration, with
joined hands, and, above all things, a closed mouth, the lady desired.
She half regretted the revelation she had made; and to be sure at once
that she had reaped some practical good, she said: "I need scarce ask you
whether you have come to a right decision upon that other question."

"To see Wilfrid?" said Emilia. She appeared to pause musingly, and then
turned to Georgiana, showing happy features; "Yes: I shall see him. I
must see him. Let him know he is to come immediately."

"That is your decision."

"Yes."

"After what I have told you?"

"Oh, yes; yes! Write the letter."

Georgiana chid at an internal wrath that struggled to win her lips.
"Promise me simply that what I have told you of my brother, you will
consider yourself bound to keep secret. You will not speak of it to
others, nor to him."

Emilia gave the promise, but with the thought; "To him?--will not he
speak of it?"

"So, then, I am to write this letter?" said Georgiana.

"Do, do; at once!" Emilia put on her sweetest look to plead for it.

"Decidedly the wisest of men are fools in this matter," Georgiana's
reflection swam upon her anger.

"And dearest! my Georgey!" Emilia insisted on being blunt to the outward
indications to which she was commonly so sensitive and reflective; "my
Georgey! let me be alone this evening in my bedroom. The little Madre
comes, and--and I haven't the habit of being respectful to her. And, I
must be alone! Do not send up for me, whoever wishes it."

Georgiana could not stop her tongue: "Not if Mr. Wilfrid Pole--?"

"Oh, he! I will see him," said Emilia; and Georgiana went from her
straightway.




CHAPTER L

Emilia remained locked up with her mother all that evening. The good
little shrill woman, tender-eyed and slatternly, had to help try on
dresses, and run about for pins, and express her critical taste in
undertones, believing all the while that her daughter had given up music
to go mad with vanity. The reflection struck her, notwithstanding, that
it was a wiser thing for one of her sex to make friends among rich people
than to marry a foreign husband.

The girl looked a brilliant woman in a superb Venetian dress of purple
velvet, which she called 'the Branciani dress,' and once attired in it,
and the rich purges and swelling creases over the shoulders puffed out to
her satisfaction, and the run of yellow braid about it properly inspected
and flattened, she would not return to her more homely wear, though very
soon her mother began to whimper and say that she had lost her so long,
and now that she had found her it hardly seemed the same child. Emilia
would listen to no entreaties to put away her sumptuous robe. She
silenced her mother with a stamp of her foot, and then sighed: "Ah! Why
do I always feel such a tyrant with you?" kissing her.

"This dress," she said, and held up her mother's chin fondlingly between
her two hands, "this dress was designed by my friend Merthyr--that is,
Mr. Powys--from what he remembered of a dress worn by Countess Branciani,
of Venice. He had it made to give to me. It came from Paris. Countess
Branciani was one of his dearest friends. I feel that I am twice as much
his friend with this on me. Mother, it seems like a deep blush all over
me. I feel as if I looked out of a rose."

She spread her hands to express the flower magnified.

"Oh! what silly talk," said her mother: "it does turn your head, this
dress does!"

"I wish it would give me my voice, mother. My father has no hope. I wish
he would send me news to make me happy about him; or come and run his
finger up the strings for hours, as he used to. I have fancied I heard
him at times, and I had a longing to follow the notes, and felt sure of
my semi-tones. He won't see me! Mother! he would think something of me if
he saw me now!"

Her mother's lamentations reached that vocal pitch at last which Emilia
could not endure, and the little lady was despatched to her home under
charge of a servant.

Emilia feasted on the looking-glass when alone. Had Merthyr, in restoring
her to health, given her an overdose of the poison?

"Countess Branciani made the Austrian Governor her slave," she uttered,
planting one foot upon a stool to lend herself height. "He told her who
were suspected, and who would be imprisoned, and gave her all the State
secrets. Beauty can do more than music. I wonder whether Merthyr loved
her? He loves me!"

Emilia was smitten with a fear that he would speak of it when she next
saw him. "Oh! I hope he will be just the same as he has been," she
sighed; and with much melancholy shook her head at her fair reflection,
and began to undress. It had not struck her with surprise that two men
should be loving her, until, standing away from the purple folds, she
seemed to grow smaller and smaller, as a fire-log robbed of its flame,
and felt insufficient and weak. This was a new sensation. She depended no
more on her own vital sincerity. It was in her nature, doubtless, to
crave constantly for approval, but in the service of personal beauty
instead of divine Art, she found herself utterly unwound without it:
victim of a sense of most uncomfortable hollowness. She was glad to
extinguish the candle and be covered up dark in the circle of her warmth.
Then her young blood sang to her again.

An hour before breakfast every morning she read with Merthyr. Now, this
morning how was she to appear to him? There would be no reading, of
course. How could he think of teaching one to whom he trembled. Emilia
trusted that she might see no change in him, and, above all, that he
would not speak of his love for her. Nevertheless, she put on her robe of
conquest, having first rejected with distaste a plainer garb. She went
down the stairs slowly. Merthyr was in the library awaiting her. "You are
late," he said, eyeing the dress as a thing apart from her, and remarking
that it was hardly suited for morning wear. "Yellow, if you must have a
strong colour, and you wouldn't exhibit the schwartz-gelb of the Tedeschi
willingly. But now!"

This was the signal for the reading to commence.

"Wilfrid would not have been so cold to me," thought Emilia, turning the
leaves of Ariosto as a book of ashes. Not a word of love appeared to be
in his mind. This she did not regret; but she thirsted for the assuring
look. His eyes were quietly friendly. So friendly was he, that he blamed
her for inattention, and took her once to task about a melodious accent
in which she vulgarized the vowels. All the flattery of the Branciani
dress could not keep Emilia from her feeling of smallness. Was it
possible that he loved her? She watched him as eagerly as her shyness
would permit. Any shadow of a change was spied for. Getting no softness
from him, or superadded kindness, no shadow of a change in that
direction, she stumbled in her reading purposely, to draw down rebuke;
her construing was villanously bad. He told her so, and she replied: "I
don't like poetry." But seeing him exchange Ariosto for Roman History,
she murmured, "I like Dante." Merthyr plunged her remorselessly into the
second Punic war.

But there was worse to follow. She was informed that after breakfast she
would be called upon to repeat the principal facts she had been reading
of. Emilia groaned audibly.

"Take the book," said Merthyr.

"It's so heavy," she complained.

"Heavy?"

"I mean, to carry about."

"If you want to 'carry it about,' the boy shall follow you with it."

She understood that she was being laughed at. Languor, coupled with the
consciousness of ridicule, overwhelmed her.

"I feel I can't learn," she said.

"Feel, that you must," was replied to her.

"No; don't take any more trouble with me!"

"Yes; I expect you to distinguish Scipio from Cicero, and not make the
mistake of the other evening, when you were talking to Mrs. Cameron."

Emilia left him, abashed, to dread shrewdly their meeting within five
minutes at the breakfast-table; to dread eating under his eyes, with
doubts of the character of her acts generally. She was, indeed, his
humble scholar, though she seemed so full of weariness and revolt. He,
however, when alone, looked fixedly at the door through which she had
passed, and said, "She loves that man still. Similar ages, similar
tastes, I suppose! She is dressed to be ready for him. She can't learn:
she can do nothing. My work mayn't be lost, but it's lost for me."

Merthyr did not know that Georgiana had betrayed him, but in no case
would he have given Emilia the signs she expected: in the first place,
because he had self-command; and, secondly, because of those years he
counted in advance of her. So she had the full mystery of his loving her
to think over, without a spot of the weakness to fasten on.

Georgiana's first sight of Emilia in her Branciani dress shut her heart
against the girl with iron clasps. She took occasion to remark, "We need
not expect visitors so very early;" but the offender was impervious.
Breakfast finished, the reading with Merthyr recommenced, when Emilia,
having got over her surprise at the sameness of things this day,
acquitted herself better, and even declaimed the verses musically. Seeing
him look pleased, she spoke them out sonorously. Merthyr applauded. Upon
which Emilia said, with odd abruptness and solemnity, "Will he come
to-day?" It was beyond Merthyr's power of self-control to consent to be
taken into a consultation on this matter, and he attempted to put it
aside. "He may or he may not--probably to-morrow."

"No; to-day, in the afternoon," said Emilia, "be near me."

"I have engagements."

"Some word, say, that will seem to be you with me."

"Some flattery, or you won't remember it."

"Yes, I like flattery."

"Well, you look like Countess Branciani when, after thinking her husband
the basest of men, she discovered him to be the noblest."

Emilia blushed. "That's not easily forgotten! But she must have looked
braver, bolder, not so under a burden as I feel."

"The comparison was meant to suit the moment of your reciting."

"Yes," said Emilia, half-mournfully, "then 'myself' doesn't sit on my
shoulders: I don't even care what I am."

"That is what Art does for you."

"Only by fits and starts now. Once I never thought of myself."

There was a knock at the street-door, and she changed countenance.
Presently there came a gentle tap at their own door.

"It is that woman," said Emilia.

"I fancy it must be Lady Charlotte. You will not see her?"

Merthyr was anticipating a negative, but Emilia said, "Let her come in."

She gave her hand to the lady, and was the less concerned of the two.
Lady Charlotte turned away from her briskly.

"Georgey didn't say anything of you in her letter, Merthyr; I am going up
to her, but I wished to satisfy myself that you were in town, first:--to
save half-a-minute, you see I anticipate the philosophic manly sneer. Is
it really true that you are going to mix yourself up in this mad Italian
business again? Now that you're a man, my dear Merthyr, it seems almost
inexcuseable--for a sensible Englishman!"

Lady Charlotte laughed, giving him her hand at the same time.

"Don't you know I swore an oath?" Merthyr caught up her tone.

"Yes, but you never succeed. I complain that you never succeed. Of what
use on earth are all your efforts if you never succeed?"

Emilia's voice burst out:--

    "'Piacemi almen che i miei sospir sien quali
     Spera 'l Tevero e 'l Arno,
     E 'l Po,--'"

Merthyr continued the ode, acting a similar fervour:--

    "'Ben provvide Natura al nostro stato
     Quando dell' Alpi schermo
     Pose fra noi e la tedesca rabbis."

"We are merely bondsmen to the re-establishment of the provisions of
nature."

"And we know we shall succeed!" said Emilia, permitting her antagonism to
pass forth in irritable emphasis.

Lady Charlotte quickly left them, to run up to Georgiana. She was not
long in the house. Emilia hung near Merthyr all day, and she was near him
when the knock was heard which she could suppose to be Wilfrid's, as it
proved. Wilfrid was ushered in to Georgiana. Delicacy had prevented
Merthyr from taking special notice to Emilia of Lady Charlotte's visit,
and he treated Wilfrid's similarly, saying, "Georgey will send down
word."

"Only, don't leave me till she does," Emilia rejoined.

Her agitation laid her open to be misinterpreted. It was increased when
she saw him take a book and sit in the armchair between two lighted
candles, calmly careless of her. She did not actually define to herself
that he should feel jealously, but his indifference was one extreme which
provoked her instinct to imagine a necessity for the other. Word came
from Georgiana, and Emilia moved to the door. "Remember, we dine
half-an-hour earlier to-day, on account of the Cameron party," was all
that he uttered. Emilia made an effort to go. She felt herself as a ship
sailing into perilous waters, without compass. Why did he not speak
tenderly? Before Georgiana had revealed his love for her, she had been
strong to see Wilfrid. Now, the idea smote her softened heart that
Wilfrid's passion might engulf her if she had no word of sustainment from
Merthyr. She turned and flung herself at his feet, murmuring, "Say
something to me." Merthyr divined this emotion to be a sort of foresight
of remorse on her part: he clasped the interwoven fingers of her hands,
letting his eyes dwell upon hers. The marvel of their not wavering or
softening meaningly kept her speechless. She rose with a strength not her
own: not comforted, and no longer speculating. It was as if she had been
eyeing a golden door shut fast, that might some day open, but was in
itself precious to behold. She arose with deep humbleness, which awakened
new ideas of the nature of worth in her bosom. She felt herself so low
before this man who would not be played upon as an obsequious
instrument--who would not leap into ardour for her beauty! Before that
man upstairs how would she feel? The question did not come to her. She
entered the room where he was, without a blush. Her step was firm, and
her face expressed a quiet gladness. Georgiana stayed through the first
commonplaces: then they were alone.




CHAPTER LI

Commonplaces continued to be Wilfrid's refuge, for sentiment was surging
mightily within him. The commonplaces concerning father, sisters, health,
weather, sickened him when uttered, so much that for a time he was
unobservant of Emilia's ready exchange of them. To a compliment on her
appearance, she said: "You like this dress? I will tell you the history
of it. I call it the Branciani dress. Mr. Powys designed it for me. The
Countess Branciani was his friend. She used always to dress in this
colour; just in this style. She also was dark. And she imagined that her
husband favoured the Austrians. She believed he was an Austrian spy. It
was impossible for her not to hate him--"

"Her husband!" quoth Wilfrid. The unexpected richness that had come upon
her beauty and the coolness of her prattle at such an interview amazed
and mortified him.

"She supposed him to be an Austrian spy!"

"Still he was her husband!"

Emilia gave her features a moment's play, but she had not full command of
them, and the spark of scorn they emitted was very slight.

"Ah!" his tone had fallen into a depth, "how I thank you for the honour
you have done me in desiring to see me once before you leave England! I
know that I have not merited it."

More he said on this theme, blaming himself emphatically, until, startled
by the commonplaces he was uttering, he stopped short; and the stopping
was effective, if the speech was not. Where was the tongue of his
passion? He almost asked it of himself. Where was Hippogriff? He who had
burned to see her, he saw her now, fair as a vision, and yet in the
flesh! Why was he as good as tongue-tied in her presence when he had such
fires to pour forth?

(Presuming that he has not previously explained it, the philosopher here
observes that Hippogriff, the foal of Fiery Circumstance out of
Sentiment, must be subject to strong sentimental friction before he is
capable of a flight: his appetites must fast long in the very eye of
provocation ere he shall be eloquent. Let him, the Philosopher, repeat at
the same time that souls harmonious to Nature, of whom there are few, do
not mount this animal. Those who have true passion are not at the mercy
of Hippogriff--otherwise Sur-excited Sentiment. You will mark in them
constantly a reverence for the laws of their being, and a natural
obedience to common sense. They are subject to storm, as in everything
earthly, and they need no lesson of devotion; but they never move to an
object in a madness.)

Now this is good teaching: it is indeed my Philosopher's object--his
purpose--to work out this distinction; and all I wish is that it were
good for my market. What the Philosopher means, is to plant in the
reader's path a staring contrast between my pet Emilia and his puppet
Wilfrid. It would be very commendable and serviceable if a novel were
what he thinks it: but all attestation favours the critical dictum, that
a novel is to give us copious sugar and no cane. I, myself, as a reader,
consider concomitant cane an adulteration of the qualities of sugar. My
Philosopher's error is to deem the sugar, born of the cane, inseparable
from it. The which is naturally resented, and away flies my book back at
the heads of the librarians, hitting me behind them a far more grievous
blow.

Such is the construction of my story, however, that to entirely deny the
Philosopher the privilege he stipulated for when with his assistance I
conceived it, would render our performance unintelligible to that acute
and honourable minority which consents to be thwacked with aphorisms and
sentences and a fantastic delivery of the verities. While my Play goes
on, I must permit him to come forward occasionally. We are indeed in a
sort of partnership, and it is useless for me to tell him that he is not
popular and destroys my chance.




CHAPTER LII

"Don't blame yourself, my Wilfrid."

Emilia spoke thus, full of pity for him, and in her adorable, deep-fluted
tones, after the effective stop he had come to.

The 'my Wilfrid' made the owner of the name quiver with satisfaction. He
breathed: "You have forgiven me?"

"That I have. And there was indeed no blame. My voice has gone. Yes, but
I do not think it your fault."

"It was! it is!" groaned Wilfrid. "But, has your voice gone?" He leaned
nearer to her, drawing largely on the claim his incredulity had to
inspect her sweet features accurately. "You speak just as--more
deliciously than ever! I can't think you have lost it. Ah! forgive me!
forgive me!"

Emilia was about to put her hand over to him, but the prompt impulse was
checked by a simultaneous feminine warning within. She smiled, saying:
"'I forgive' seems such a strange thing for me to say;" and to convey any
further meaning that might comfort him, better than words could do, she
held on her smile. The smile was of the acceptedly feigned, conventional
character; a polished Surface: belonging to the passage of the discourse,
and not to the emotions. Wilfrid's swelling passion slipped on it.
Sensitively he discerned an ease in its formation and disappearance that
shot a first doubt through him, whether he really maintained his empire
in her heart. If he did not reign there, why had she sent for him? He
attributed the unheated smile to a defect in her manner, that was always
chargeable with something, as he remembered. He began systematically to
account for his acts: but the man was so constituted that as he laid them
out for pardon, he himself condemned them most; and looking back at his
weakness and double play, he broke through his phrases to cry without
premeditation: "Can you have loved me then?"

Emilia's cheeks tingled: "Don't speak of that night in Devon," she
replied.

"Ah!" sighed he. "I did not mean then. Then you must have hated me."

"No; for, what did I say? I said that you would come to me--nothing more.
I hated that woman. You? Oh, no!"

"You loved me, then?"

"Did I not offer to work for you, if you were poor? And--I can't remember
what I said. Please, do not speak of that night."

"Emilia! as a man of honour, I was bound--"

She lifted her hands: "Oh! be silent, and let that night die."

"I may speak of that night when you drove home from Penarvon Castle, and
a robber? You have forgotten him, perhaps! What did he steal? not what he
came for, but something dearer to him than anything he possesses. How can
I say--? Dear to me? If it were dipped in my heart's blood!--"

Emilia was far from being carried away by the recollection of the scene;
but remembering what her emotion had then been, she wondered at her
coolness now.

"I may speak of Wilming Weir?" he insinuated.

Her bosom rose softly and heavily. As if throwing off some cloak of
enchantment that clogged her spirit! "I was telling you of this dress,"
she said: "I mean, of Countess Branciani. She thought her husband was the
Austrian spy who had betrayed them, and she said, 'He is not worthy to
live.' Everybody knew that she had loved him. I have seen his portrait and
hers. I never saw faces that looked so fond of life. She had that Italian
beauty which is to any other like the difference between velvet and
silk."

"Oh! do I require to be told the difference?" Wilfrid's heart throbbed.

"She," pursued Emilia, "she loved him still, I believe, but her country
was her religion. There was known to be a great conspiracy, and no one
knew the leader of it. All true Italians trusted Countess Branciani,
though she visited the Austrian Governor's house--a General with some
name on the teeth. One night she said to him, 'You have a spy who betrays
you.' The General never suspected Countess Branciani. Women are devils of
cleverness sometimes.

"But he did suspect it must be her husband--thinking, I suppose, 'How
otherwise would she have known he was my spy?' He gave Count Branciani
secret work and high pay. Then he set a watch on him. Count Branciani was
to find out who was this unknown leader. He said to the Austrian
Governor, 'You shall know him in ten days.' This was repeated to Countess
Branciani, and she said to herself, 'My husband! you shall perish, though
I should have to stab you myself.'"

Emilia's sympathetic hand twitched. Wilfrid's seized it, but it proved no
soft melting prize. She begged to be allowed to continue. He entreated
her to. Thereat she pulled gently for her hand, and persisting, it was
grudgingly let go.

"One night Countess Branciani put the Austrians on her husband's track.
He knew that she was true to her country, and had no fear of her, whether
she touched the Black-yellow gold or not. But he did not confide any, of
his projects to her. And his reason was, that as she went to the
Governor's, she might accidentally, by a word or a sign, show that she
was an accomplice in the conspiracy. He wished to save her from a
suspicion. Brave Branciani!"

Emilia had a little shudder of excitement.

"Only," she added, "why will men always think women are so weak? The
Count worked with conspirators who were not dreaming they would do
anything, but were plotting to do it. The Countess belonged to the other
party--men who never thought they were strong enough to see their ideas
acting--I mean, not bold enough to take their chance. As if we die more
than one death, and the blood we spill for Italy is ever wasted! That
night the Austrian spy followed the Count to the meeting-house of the
conspirators. It was thought quite natural that the Count should go
there. But the spy, not having the password, crouched outside, and heard
from two that came out muttering, the next appointment for a meeting.
This was told to Countess Branciani, and in the meantime she heard from
the Austrian Governor that her husband had given in names of the
conspirators. She determined at once. 'Now may Christ and the Virgin help
me!'"

Emilia struck her knees, while tears started through her shut eyelids.
The exclamation must have been caught from her father, who liked not the
priests of his native land well enough to interfere between his English
wife and their child in such a matter as religious training.

"What happened?" said Wilfrid, vainly seeking for personal application in
this narrative.

"Listen!--Ah!" she fought with her tears, and said, as they rolled down
her face: "For a miserable thing one can not help, I find I must cry.
This is what she did. She told him she knew of the conspiracy, and asked
permission to join it, swearing that she was true to Italy. He said he
believed her.--Oh, heaven!--And for some time she had to beg and beg; but
to spare her he would not let her join. I cannot tell why--he gave her
the password for the neat meeting, and said that an old gold coin must be
shown. She must have coaxed it, though he was a strong man, who could
resist women. I suppose he felt that he had been unkind.--Were I Queen of
Italy he should stand for ever in a statue of gold!--The next appointed
night a spy entered among the conspirators, with the password and the
coin. Did I tell you the Countess had one child--a girl! She lives now,
and I am to know her. She is like her mother. That little girl was
playing down the stairs with her nurse when a band of Austrian soldiers
entered the hall underneath, and an officer, with his sword drawn, and
some men, came marching up in their stiff way--the machines! This officer
stooped to her, and before the nurse could stop her, made her say where
her father was. Those Austrians make children betray their parents! They
don't think how we grow up to detest them. Do I? Hate is not the word: it
burns so hot and steady with me. The Countess came out on the first
landing; she saw what was happening. When her husband was led out, she
asked permission to embrace him. The officer consented, but she had to
say to him, 'Move back,' and then, with her lips to her husband's cheek,
'Betray no more of them!' she whispered. Count Branciani started. Now he
understood what she had done, and why she had done it. 'Ask for the
charge that makes me a prisoner,' he said. Her husband's noble face gave
her a chill of alarm. The Austrian spoke. 'He is accused of being the
chief of the Sequin Club.' And then the Countess looked at her husband;
she sank at his feet. My heart breaks. Wilfrid! Wilfrid! You will not
wear that uniform? Say 'Never, never!' You will not go to the Austrian
army--Wilfrid? Would you be my enemy? Brutes, knee-deep in blood! with
bloody fingers! Ogres! Would you be one of them? To see me turn my head
shivering with loathing as you pass? This is why I sent for you, because
I loved you, to entreat you, Wilfrid, from my soul, not to blacken the
dear happy days when I knew you! Will you hear me? That woman is
changeing you--doing all this. Resist her! Think of me in this one thing!
Promise it, and I will go at once, and want no more. I will swear never
to trouble you. Oh, Wilfrid it's not so much our being enemies, but what
you become, I think of. If I say to myself, 'He also, who was once my
lover--Oh! paid murderer of my dear people!'"

Emilia threw up both hands to her eyes: but Wilfrid, all on fire with a
word, made one of her hands his own, repeating eagerly: "Once? once?"

"Once?" she echoed him.

"'Once my love?'" said he. "Not now?--does it mean, 'not now?' My
darling!--pardon me, I must say it. My beloved! you said: 'He who was
once my lover:'--you said that. What does it mean? Not that--not--? does
it mean, all's over? Why did you bring me here? You know I must love you
forever. Speak! 'Once?'"

"'Once?'" Emilia was breathing quick, but her voice was well contained:
"Yes, I said 'once.' You were then."

"Till that night in Devon?

"Let it be."

"But you love me still?"

"We won't speak of it."

"I see! You cannot forgive. Good heavens! I think I remember your saying
so once--Once! Yes, then: you said it then, during our 'Once;' when I
little thought you would be merciless to me--who loved you from the
first! the very first! I love you now! I wake up in the night, thinking I
hear your voice. You haunt me. Cruel! cold!--who guards you and watches
over you but the man you now hate? You sit there as if you could make
yourself stone when you pleased. Did I not chastise that man Pericles
publicly because he spoke a single lie of you? And by that act I have
made an enemy to our house who may crush us in ruin. Do I regret it? No.
I would do any madness, waste all my blood for you, die for you!"

Emilia's fingers received a final twist, and were dropped loose. She let
them hang, looking sadly downward. Melancholy is the most irritating
reply to passion, and Wilfrid's heart waged fierce at the sight of her,
grown beautiful!--grown elegant!--and to reject him! When, after a
silence which his pride would not suffer him to break, she spoke to ask
what Mr. Pericles had said of her, he was enraged, forgot himself, and
answered: "Something disgraceful."

Deep colour came on Emilia. "You struck him, Wilfrid?"

"It was a small punishment for his infamous lie, and, whatever might be
the consequences, I would do it again."

"Wilfrid, I have heard what he has said. Madame Marini has told me. I
wish you had not struck him. I cannot think of him apart from the days
when I had my voice. I cannot bear to think of your having hurt him. He
was not to blame. That is, he did not say: it was not untrue."

She took a breath to make this last statement, and continued with the
same peculiar implicity of distinctness, which a terrific thunder of
"What?" from Wilfrid did not overbear: "I was quite mad that day I went
to him. I think, in my despair I spoke things that may have led him to
fancy the truth of what he has said. On my honour, I do not know. And I
cannot remember what happened after for the week I wandered alone about
London. Mr. Powys found me on a wharf by the river at night."

A groan burst from Wilfrid. Emilia's instinct had divined the antidote
that this would be to the poison of revived love in him, and she felt
secure, though he had again taken her hand; but it was she who nursed a
mere sentiment now, while passion sprang in him, and she was not prepared
for the delirium with which he enveloped her. She listened to his raving
senselessly, beginning to think herself lost. Her tortured hands were
kissed; her eyes gazed into. He interpreted her stupefaction as
contrition, her silence as delicacy, her changeing of colour as flying
hues of shame: the partial coldness at their meeting he attributed to the
burden on her mind, and muttering in a magnanimous sublimity that he
forgave her, he claimed her mouth with force.

"Don't touch me!" cried Emilia, showing terror.

"Are you not mine?"

"You must not kiss me."

Wilfrid loosened her waist, and became in a minute outwardly most cool
and courteous.

"My successor may object. I am bound to consider him. Pardon me. Once!--"

The wretched insult and silly emphasis passed harmlessly from her: but a
word had led her thoughts to Merthyr's face, and what is meant by the
phrase 'keeping oneself pure,' stood clearly in Emilia's mind. She had
not winced; and therefore Wilfrid judged that his shot had missed because
there was no mark. With his eye upon her sideways, showing its circle
wide as a parrot's, he asked her one of those questions that lovers
sometimes permit between themselves. "Has another--?" It is here as it
was uttered. Eye-speech finished the sentence.

Rapidly a train of thought was started in Emilia, and she came to this
conclusion, aloud: "Then I love nobody!" For the had never kissed
Merthyr, or wished for his kiss.

"You do not?" said Wilfrid, after a silence. "You are generous in being
candid."

A pressure of intensest sorrow bowed his head. The real feeling in him
stole to Emilia like a subtle flame.

"Oh! what can I do for you?" she cried.

"Nothing, if you do not love me," he was replying mournfully, when, "Yes!
yes!" rushed to his lips; "marry me: marry me to-morrow. You have loved
me. 'I am never to leave you!' Can you forget the night when you said it?
Emilia! Marry me and you will love me again. You must. This man, whoever
he is--Ah! why am I such a brute! Come! be mine! Let me call you my own
darling! Emilia!--or say quietly 'you have nothing to hope for:' I shall
not reproach you, believe me."

He looked resigned. The abrupt transition had drawn her eyes to his. She
faltered: "I cannot be married." And then: "How could I guess that you
felt in this way?"

"Who told me that I should?" said he. "Your words have come true. You
predicted that I should fly from 'that woman,' as you called her, and
come to you. See! here it is exactly as you willed it. You--you are
changed. You throw your magic on me, and then you are satisfied, and turn
elsewhere."

Emilia's conscience smote her with a verification of this charge, and she
trembled, half-intoxicated for the moment, by the aspect of her power.
This filled her likewise with a dangerous pity for its victim; and now,
putting out both hands to him, her chin and shoulders raised
entreatingly, she begged the victim to spare her any word of marriage.

"But you go, you run away from me--I don't know where you are or what you
are doing," said Wilfrid. "And you leave me to that woman. She loves the
Austrians, as you know. There! I will ask nothing--only this: I will
promise, if I quit the Queen's service for good, not to wear the white
uniform--"

"Oh!" Emilia breathed inward deeply, scarce noticing the 'if' that
followed; nodding quick assent to the stipulation before she heard the
nature of it. It was, that she should continue in England.

"Your word," said Wilfrid; and she pledged it, and did not think she was
granting much in the prospect of what she gained.

"You will, then?" said he.

"Yes, I will."

"On your honour?"

These reiterated questions were simply pretexts for steps nearer to the
answering lips.

"And I may see you?" he went on.

"Yes."

"Wherever you are staying? And sometimes alone? Alone!--"

"Not if you do not know that I am to be respected," said Emilia, huddled
in the passionate fold of his arms. He released her instantly, and was
departing, wounded; but his heart counselled wiser proceedings.

"To know that you are in England, breathing the same air with me, near
me! is enough. Since we are to meet on those terms, let it be so. Let me
only see you till some lucky shot puts me out of your way."

This 'some lucky shot,' which is commonly pointed at themselves by the
sentimental lovers, with the object of hitting the very centre of the
hearts of obdurate damsels, glanced off Emilia's, which was beginning to
throb with a comprehension of all that was involved in the word she had
given.

"I have your promise?" he repeated: and she bent her head.

"Not," he resumed, taking jealousy to counsel, now that he had advanced a
step: "Not that I would detain you against your will! I can't expect to
make such a figure at the end of the piece as your Count Branciani--who,
by the way, served his friends oddly, however well he may have served his
country."

"His friends?" She frowned.

"Did he not betray the conspirators? He handed in names, now and then."

"Oh!" she cried, "you understand us no better than an Austrian. He handed
in names--yes he was obliged to lull suspicion. Two or three of the least
implicated volunteered to be betrayed by him; they went and confessed,
and put the Government on a wrong track. Count Branciani made a dish of
traitors--not true men--to satisfy the Austrian ogre. No one knew the
head of the plot till that night of the spy. Do you not see?--he weeded
the conspiracy!"

"Poor fellow!" Wilfrid answered, with a contracted mouth: "I pity him for
being cut off from his handsome wife."

"I pity her for having to live," said Emilia.

And so their duett dropped to a finish. He liked her phrase better than
his own, and being denied any privileges, and feeling stupefied by a
position which both enticed and stung him, he remarked that he presumed
he must not detain her any longer; whereupon she gave him her hand. He
clutched the ready hand reproachfully.

"Good-bye," said she.

"You are the first to say it," he complained.

"Will you write to that Austrian colonel, your cousin, to say 'Never!
never!' to-morrow, Wilfrid?"

"While you are in England, I shall stay, be sure of that."

She bade him give her love to all Brookfield.

"Once you had none to give but what I let you take back for the purpose!"
he said. "Farewell! I shall see the harp to-night. It stands in the old
place. I will not have it moved or touched till you--"

"Ah! how kind you were, Wilfrid!"

"And how lovely you are!"

There was no struggle to preserve the backs of her fingers from his lips,
and, as this time his phrase was not palpably obscured by the one it
countered, artistic sentiment permitted him to go.




CHAPTER LIII

A minute after his parting with Emilia, Wilfrid swung round in the street
and walked back at great strides. "What a fool I was not to see that she
was acting indifference!" he cried. "Let me have two seconds with her!"
But how that was to be contrived his diplomatic brain refused to say.
"And what a stiff, formal fellow I was all the time!" He considered that
he had not uttered a sentence in any way pointed to touch her heart. "She
must think I am still determined to marry that woman."

Wilfrid had taken his stand on the opposite side of the street, and
beheld a male figure in the dusk, that went up to the house and then
stood back scanning the windows. Wounded by his audacious irreverence
toward the walls behind which his beloved was sheltered, Wilfrid crossed
and stared at the intruder. It proved to be Braintop.

"How do you do, sir!--no! that can't be the house," stammered Braintop,
with a very earnest scrutiny.

"What house? what do you want?" enquired Wilfrid.

"Jenkinson," was the name that won the honour of rescuing Braintop from
this dilemma.

"No; it is Lady Gosstre's house: Miss Belloni is living there; and stop:
you know her. Just wait, and take in two or three words from me, and
notice particularly how she is looking, and the dress she wears. You can
say--say that Mrs. Chump sent you to enquire after Miss Belloni's
health."

Wilfrid tore a leaf from his pocket-book, and wrote:

"I can be free to-morrow. One word! I shall expect it, with your name in
full."

But even in the red heat of passion his born diplomacy withheld his own
signature. It was not difficult to override Braintop's scruples about
presenting himself, and Wilfrid paced a sentinel measure awaiting the
reply. "Free to-morrow," he repeated, with a glance at his watch under a
lamp: and thus he soliloquized: "What a time that fellow is! Yes, I can
be free to-morrow if I will. I wonder what the deuce Gambier had to do in
Monmouthshire. If he has been playing with my sister's reputation, he
shall have short shrift. That fellow Braintop sees her now--my little
Emilia! my bird! She won't have changed her dress till she has dined. If
she changes it before she goes out--by Jove, if she wears it to-night
before all those people, that'll mean 'Good-bye' to me: 'Addio, caro,' as
those olive women say, with their damned cold languor, when they have
given you up. She's not one of them! Good God! she came into the room
looking like a little Empress. I'll swear her hand trembled when I went,
though! My sisters shall see her in that dress. She must have a clever
lady's maid to have done that knot to her back hair. She's getting as
full of art as any of them--Oh! lovely little darling! And when she
smiles and holds out her hand! What is it--what is it about her? Her
upper lip isn't perfectly cut, there's some fault with her nose, but I
never saw such a mouth, or such a face. 'Free to-morrow?' Good God!
she'll think I mean I'm free to take a walk!"

At this view of the ghastly shortcoming of his letter as regards
distinctness, and the prosaic misinterpretation it was open to, Wilfrid
called his inventive wits to aid, and ran swiftly to the end of the
street. He had become--as like unto a lunatic as resemblance can approach
identity. Commanding the length of the pavement for an instant, to be
sure that no Braintop was in sight, he ran down a lateral street, but the
stationer's shop he was in search of beamed nowhere visible for him, and
he returned at the same pace to experience despair at the thought that he
might have missed Braintop issuing forth, for whom he scoured the
immediate neighbourhood, and overhauled not a few quiet gentlemen of all
ages. "An envelope!" That was the object of his desire, and for that he
wooed a damsel passing jauntily with a jug in her hand, first telling her
that he knew her name was Mary, at which singular piece of divination she
betrayed much natural astonishment. But a fine round silver coin and an
urgent request for an envelope, told her as plainly as a blank confession
that this was a lover. She informed him that she lived three streets off,
where there were shops. "Well, then," said Wilfrid, "bring me the
envelope here, and you'll have another opportunity of looking down the
area."

"Think of yourself," replied she, saucily; but proved a diligent
messenger. Then Wilfrid wrote on a fresh slip:

"When I said 'Free,' I meant free in heart and without a single chain to
keep me from you. From any moment that you please, I am free. This is
written in the dark."

He closed the envelope, and wrote Emilia's name and the address as black
as his pencil could achieve it, and with a smart double-knock he
deposited the missive in the box. From his station opposite he guessed
the instant when it was taken out, and from that judged when she would be
reading it. Or perhaps she would not read it till she was alone? "That
must be her bedroom," he said, looking for a light in one of the upper
windows; but the voice of a fellow who went by with: "I should keep that
to myself, if I was you," warned him to be more discreet.

"Well, here I am. I can't leave the street," quoth Wilfrid, to the stock
of philosophy at his disposal. He burned with rage to think of how he
might be exhibiting himself before Powys and his sister.

It was half-past nine when a carriage drove up to the door. Into this Mr.
Powys presently handed Georgiana and Emilia. Braintop followed the
ladies, and then the coachman received his instructions and drove away.
Forthwith Wilfrid started in pursuit. He calculated that if his wind held
till he could jump into a light cab, his legitimate prey Braintop might
be caught. For, "they can't be taking him to any party with them!" he
chose to think, and it was a fair calculation that they were simply
conducting Braintop part of his way home. The run was pretty swift.
Wilfrid's blood was fired by the pace, until, forgetting the traitor
Braintop, up rose Truth from the bottom of the well in him, and he felt
that his sole desire was to see Emilia once more--but once! that night.
Running hard, in the midst of obstacles, and with eye and mind fined on
one object, disasters befell him. He knocked apples off a stall, and
heard vehement hallooing behind: he came into collision with a gentleman
of middle age courting digestion as he walked from his trusty dinner at
home to his rubber at the Club: finally he rushed full tilt against a
pot-boy who was bringing all his pots broadside to the flow of the
street. "By Jove! is this what they drink?" he gasped, and dabbed with
his handkerchief at the beer-splashes, breathlessly hailing the
looked-for cab, and, with hot brow and straightened-out forefinger,
telling the driver to keep that carriage in sight. The pot-boy had to be
satisfied on his master's account, and then on his own, and away shot
Wilfrid, wet with beer from throat to knee--to his chief protesting
sense, nothing but an exhalation of beer! "Is this what they drink?" he
groaned, thinking lamentably of the tastes of the populace. All idea of
going near Emilia was now abandoned. An outward application of beer
quenched his frenzy. She seemed as an unattainable star seen from the
depths of foul pits. "Stop!" he cried from the window.

"Here we are, sir," said the cabman.

The carriage had drawn up, and a footman's alarum awakened one of the
houses. The wretched cabman had likewise drawn up right under the windows
of the carriage. Wilfrid could have pulled the trigger of a pistol at his
forehead that moment. He saw that Miss Ford had recognized him, and he at
once bowed elegantly. She dropped the window, and said, "You are in
evening dress, I think; we will take you in with us."

Wilfrid hoped eagerly he might be allowed to hand them to the door, and
made three skips across the mire. Emilia had her hands gathered away from
the chances of seizure. In wild rage he began protesting that he could
not possibly enter, when Georgiana said, "I wish to speak to you," and
put feminine pressure upon him. He was almost on the verge of the word
"beer," by way of despairing explanation, when the door closed behind
him.

"Permit me to say a word to your recent companion. He is my father's
clerk. I had to see him on urgent business; that is why I took this
liberty," he said, and retreated.

Braintop was still there, quietly posted, performing upon his head with a
pocket hair-brush.

Wilfrid put Braintop's back to the light, and said, "Is my shirt soiled?"

After a short inspection, Braintop pronounced that it was, "just a
little."

"Do you smell anything?" said Wilfrid, and hung with frightful suspense
on the verdict. "A fellow upset beer on me."

"It is beer!" sniffed Braintop.

"What on earth shall I do?" was the rejoinder; and Wilfrid tried to
remember whether he had felt any sacred joy in touching Emilia's dress as
they went up the steps to the door.

Braintop fumbled in the breast-pocket of his coat. "I happen to have," he
said, rather shamefacedly.

"What is it?"

"Mrs. Chump gave it to me to-day. She always makes me accept something: I
can't refuse. It's this:--the remains of some scent she insisted on my
taking, in a bottle."

Wilfrid plucked at the stopper with a reckless desperation, saturated his
handkerchief, and worked at his breast as if he were driving a lusty
dagger into it.

"What scent is it?" he asked hurriedly.

"Alderman's Bouquet, sir."

"Of all the detestable!---" Wilfrid had no time for more, owing to fresh
arrivals. He hastened in, with his smiling, wary face, half trusting that
there might after all be purification in Alderman's Bouquet, and
promising heaven due gratitude if Emilia's senses discerned not the curse
on him. In the hall a gust from the great opening contention between
Alderman's Bouquet and bad beer, stifled his sickly hope. Frantic, but
under perfect self-command outwardly, he glanced to right and left, for
the suggestion of a means of escape. They were seven steps up the stairs
before his wits prompted him to say to Georgiana, "I have just heard very
serious news from home. I fear--"

"What?--or, pardon me: does it call you away?" she asked, and Emilia gave
him a steady look.

"I fear I cannot remain here. Will you excuse me?"

His face spoke plainly now of mental torture repressed. Georgiana put her
hand out in full sympathy, and Emilia said, in her deep whisper, "Let me
hear to-morrow." Then they bowed. Wilfrid was in the street again.

"Thank God, I've seen her!" was his first thought, overhearing "What did
she think of me?" as he sighed with relief at his escape. For, lo! the
Branciani dress was not on her shoulders, and therefore he might imagine
what he pleased:--that she had arrayed herself so during the day to
delight his eyes; or that, he having seen her in it, she had determined
none others should. Though feeling utterly humiliated, he was yet happy.
Driving to the station, he perceived starlight overhead, and blessed it;
while his hand waved busily to conduct a current of fresh, oblivious air
to his nostrils. The quiet heavens seemed all crowding to look down on
the quiet circle of the firs, where Emilia's harp had first been heard by
him, and they took her music, charming his blood with imagined harmonies,
as he looked up to them. Thus all the way to Brookfield his fancy soared,
plucked at from below by Alderman's Bouquet.

The Philosopher, up to this point rigidly excluded, rushes forward to the
footlights to explain in a note, that Wilfrid, thus setting a perfume to
contend with a stench, instead of wasting for time, change of raiment,
and the broad lusty airs of heaven to blow him fresh again, symbolizes
the vice of Sentimentalism, and what it is always doing. Enough!




CHAPTER LIV

"Let me hear to-morrow." Wilfrid repeated Emilia's petition in the tone
she had used, and sent a delight through his veins even with that clumsy
effort of imitation. He walked from the railway to Brookfield through the
circle of firs, thinking of some serious tale of home to invent for her
ears to-morrow. Whatever it was, he was able to conclude it--"But all's
right now." He noticed that the dwarf pine, under whose spreading head
his darling sat when he saw her first, had been cut down. Its absence
gave him an ominous chill.

The first sight that saluted him as the door opened, was a pile of Mrs.
Chump's boxes: he listened, and her voice resounded from the library.
Gainsford's eye expressed a discretion significant that there had been an
explosion in the house.

"I sha'nt have to invent much," said Wilfrid to himself, bitterly.

There was a momentary appearance of Adela at the library-door; and over
her shoulder came an outcry from Mrs. Chump. Arabella then spoke: Mr.
Pole and Cornelia following with a word, to which Mrs. Chump responded
shrilly: "Ye shan't talk to 'm, none of ye, till I've had the bloom of
his ear, now!" A confused hubbub of English and Irish ensued. The ladies
drew their brother into the library.

Doubtless you have seen a favourite sketch of the imaginative youthful
artist, who delights to portray scenes on a raft amid the tossing waters,
where sweet and satiny ladies, in a pardonable abandonment to the
exigencies of the occasion, are exhibiting the full energy and activity
of creatures that existed before sentiment was born. The ladies of
Brookfield had almost as utterly cast off their garb of lofty reserve and
inscrutable superiority. They were begging Mrs. Chump to be, for pity's
sake, silent. They were arguing with the woman. They were
remonstrating--to such an extent as this, in reply to an infamous
outburst: "No, no: indeed, Mrs. Chump, indeed!" They rose, as she rose,
and stood about her, motioning a beseeching emphasis with their hands.
Not visible for one second was the intense indignation at their fate
which Wilfrid, spying keenly into them, perceived. This taught him that
the occasion was as grave as could be. In spite of the oily words his
father threw from time to time abruptly on the tumult, he guessed what
had happened.

Briefly, Mrs. Chump, aided by Braintop, her squire, had at last hunted
Mr. Pericles down, and the wrathful Greek had called her a beggar. With
devilish malice he had reproached her for speculating in such and such
Bonds, and sending ventures to this and that hemisphere, laughing
infernally as he watched her growing amazement. "Ye're jokin', Mr.
Paricles," she tried to say and think; but the very naming of poverty had
given her shivers. She told him how she had come to him because of Mr.
Pole's reproach, which accused her of causing the rupture. Mr. Pericles
twisted the waxy points of his moustache. "I shall advise you, go home,"
he said; "go to a lawyer: say, 'I will see my affairs, how zey stand.' Ze
man will find Pole is ruined. It may be--I do not know--Pole has left a
little of your money; yes, ma'am, it may be."

The end of the interview saw Mrs. Chump flying past Mr. Pericles to where
Braintop stood awaiting her with a meditative speculation on that
official promotion which in his attention to the lady he anticipated. It
need scarcely be remarked that he was astonished to receive a
scent-bottle on the spot, as the only reward his meritorious service was
probably destined ever to meet with. Breathless in her panic, Mrs. Chump
assured him she was a howling beggar, and the smell of a scent was like a
crool blow to her; above all, the smell of Alderman's Bouquet, which
Chump--"tell'n a lie, ye know, Mr. Braintop, said was after him. And I,
smell'n at 't over 'n Ireland--a raw garl I was--I just thought 'm a
prince, the little sly fella! And oh! I'm a beggar, I am!" With which,
she shouted in the street, and put Braintop to such confusion that he
hailed a cab recklessly, declaring to her she had no time to lose, if she
wished to catch the train. Mrs. Chump requested the cabman that as a man
possessed of a feeling heart for the interests of a helpless woman, he
would drive fast; and, at the station, disputed his charge on the ground
of the knowledge already imparted to him of her precarious financial
state. In this frame of mind she fell upon Brookfield, and there was
clamour in the house. Wilfrid arrived two hours after Mrs. Chump. For
that space the ladies had been saying over and over again empty words to
pacify her. The task now devolved on their brother. Mr. Pole, though he
had betrayed nothing under the excitement of the sudden shock, had lost
the proper control of his mask. Wilfrid commenced by fixedly listening to
Mrs. Chump until for the third time her breath had gone. Then, taking on
a smile, he said: "Perhaps you are aware that Mr. Pericles has a
particular reason for animosity tome. We've disagreed together, that's
all. I suppose it's the habit of those fellows to attack a whole family
where one member of it offends them." As soon as the meaning of this was
made clear to Mrs. Chump, she caught it to her bosom for comfort; and
finding it gave less than at the moment she required, she flung it away
altogether; and then moaned, a suppliant, for it once more. "The only
thing, if you are in a state of alarm about my father's affairs, is for
him to show you by his books that his house is firm," said Wilfrid, now
that he had so far helped to eject suspicion from her mind.

"Will Pole do ut?" ejaculated Mrs. Chump, half off her seat.

"Of course I will--of course! of course. Haven't I told you so?" said Mr.
Pole, blinking mightily from his armchair over the fire. "Sit down,
Martha."

"Oh! but how'll I understand ye, Pole?" she cried.

"I'll do my best to assist in explaining," Wilfrid condescended to say.

The ladies were touched when Mrs. Chump replied, with something of a
curtsey, "I'll thank ye vary much, sir." She added immediately, "Mr.
Wilfrud," as if correcting the 'sir,' for sounding cold.

It was so trustful and simple, that it threw alight on the woman under
which they had not yet beheld her. Compassion began to stir in their
bosoms, and with it an inexplicable sense of shame, which soon threw any
power of compassion into the background. They dared not ask themselves
whether it was true that their father had risked the poor thing's money
in some desperate stake. What hopeful force was left to them they devoted
to her property, and Adela determined to pray that night for its safe
preservation. The secret feeling in the hearts of the ladies was, that in
putting them on their trial with poverty, Celestial Powers would never at
the same time think it necessary to add disgrace. Consequently, and as a
defence against the darker dread, they now, for the first time, fully
believed that monetary ruin had befallen their father. They were civil to
Mrs. Chump, and forgiving toward her brogue, and her naked outcries of
complaint and suddenly--suggested panic; but their pity, save when some
odd turn in her conduct moved them, was reserved dutifully for their
father. His wretched sensations at the pouring of a storm of tears from
the exhausted creature, caused Arabella to rise and say to Mrs. Chump
kindly, "Now let me take you to bed."

But such a novel mark of tender civility caused the woman to exclaim:
"Oh, dear! if ye don't sound like wheedlin' to keep me blind."

Even this was borne with. "Come; it will do you good to rest," said
Arabella.

"And how'll I sleep?"

"By shutting my eye--'peeps,'--as I used to tell my old nurse," said
Adela; and Mrs. Chump, accustomed to an occasional (though not public)
bit of wheedling from her, was partially reassured.

"I'll sit with you till you do sleep," said Arabella.

"Suppose," Mrs. Chump moaned, "suppose I'm too poor aver to repay ye? If
I'm a bankrup'?--oh!"

Arabella smiled. "Whatever I may do is certainly not done for a
remuneration, and such a service as this, at least, you need not speak
of."

Mrs. Chump's evident surprise, and doubt of the honesty of the change in
her manner, caused Arabella very acutely to feel its dishonesty. She
looked at Cornelia with envy. The latter lady was leaning meditatively,
her arm on a side of her chair, like a pensive queen, with a ready, mild,
embracing look for the company. 'Posture' seemed always to triumph over
action.

Before quitting the room, Mrs. Chump asked Mr. Pole whether he would be
up early the next morning.

"Very early,--you beat me, if you can," said he, aware that the question
was put as a test to his sincerity.

"Oh, dear! Suppose it's onnly a false alarrm of the 'bomunable Mr.
Paricles--which annybody'd have listened to--ye know that!" said Mrs.
Chump, going forth.

She stopped in the doorway, and turned her head round, sniffing, in a
very pronounced way. "Oh, it's you," she flashed on Wilfrid; "it's you,
my dear, that smell so like poor Chump. Oh! if we're not rooned, won't we
dine together! Just give me a kiss, please. The smell of ye's
comfortin'."

Wilfrid bent his cheek forward, affecting to laugh, though the subject
was tragic to him.

"Oh! perhaps I'll sleep, and not look in the mornin' like that beastly
tallow, Mr. Paricles says I spent such a lot of money on,
speculator--whew, I hate ut!--and hemp too! Me!--Martha Chump! Do I want
to hang myself, and burn forty thousand pounds worth o' candles round my
corpse danglin' there? Now, there, now! Is that sense? And what'd Pole
want to buy me all that grease for? And where'd I keep ut, I'll ask ye?
And sure they wouldn't make me a bankrup' on such a pretence as that.
For, where's the Judge that's got the heart?"

Having apparently satisfied her reason with these interrogations, Mrs.
Chump departed, shaking her head at Wilfrid: "Ye smile so nice, ye do!"
by the way. Cornelia and Adela then rose, and Wilfrid was left alone with
his father.

It was natural that he should expect the moment for entire confidence
between them to have come. He crossed his legs, leaning over the
fireplace, and waited. The old man perceived him, and made certain
humming sounds, as of preparation. Wilfrid was half tempted to think he
wanted assistance, and signified attention; upon which Mr. Pole became
immediately absorbed in profound thought.

"Singular it is, you know," he said at last, with a candid air, "people
who know nothing about business have the oddest ideas--no common sense in
'em!"

After that he fell dead silent.

Wilfrid knew that it would be hard for him to speak. To encourage him, he
said: "You mean Mrs. Chump, sir?"

"Oh! silly woman--absurd! No, I mean all of you; every man Jack, as
Martha'd say. You seem to think--but, well! there! let's go to bed."

"To bed?" cried Wilfrid, frowning.

"Why, when it's two or three o'clock in the morning, what's an old fellow
to do? My feet are cold, and I'm queer in the back--can't talk! Light my
candle, young gentleman--my candle there, don't you see it? And you look
none of the freshest. A nap on your pillow'll do you no harm."

"I wanted to talk to you a little, sir," said Wilfrid, about as much
perplexed as he was irritated.

"Now, no talk of bankers' books to-night!" rejoined his father. "I can't
and won't. No cheques written 'tween night and morning. That's positive.
There! there's two fingers. Shall have three to-morrow morning--a pen in
'em, perhaps."

With which wretched pleasantry the little merchant nodded to his son, and
snatching up his candle, trotted to the door.

"By the way, give a look round my room upstairs, to see all right when
you're going to turn in yourself," he said, before disappearing.

The two fingers given him by his father to shake at parting, had told
Wilfrid more than the words. And yet how small were these troubles around
him compared with what he himself was suffering! He looked forward to the
bittersweet hour verging upon dawn, when he should be writing to Emilia
things to melt the vilest obduracy. The excitement which had greeted him
on his arrival at Brookfield was to be thanked for its having made him
partially forget his humiliation. He had, of course, sufficient rational
feeling to be chagrined by calamity, but his dominant passion sucked
sustaining juices from every passing event.

In obedience to his father's request, Wilfrid went presently into the old
man's bedroom, to see that all was right. The curtains of the bed were
drawn close, and the fire in the grate burnt steadily. Calm sleep seemed
to fill the chamber. Wilfrid was retiring, with a revived anger at his
father's want of natural confidence in him, or cowardly secresy. His name
was called, and he stopped short.

"Yes, sir?" he said.

"Door's shut?"

"Shut fast."

The voice, buried in curtains, came after a struggle.

"You've done this, Wilfrid. Now, don't answer:--I can't stand talk. And
you must undo it. Pericles can if he likes. That's enough for you to
know. He can. He won't see me. You know why. If he breaks with me--it's a
common case in any business--I'm... we're involved together." Then
followed a deep sigh. The usual crisp brisk way of his speaking was
resumed in hollow tones: "You must stop it. Now, don't answer. Go to
Pericles to-morrow. You must. Nothing wrong, if you go at once."

"But, Sir! Good heaven!" interposed Wilfrid, horrified by the thought of
the penance here indicated.

The bed shook violently.

"If not," was uttered with a sort of muted vehemence, "there's another
thing you can do. Go to the undertaker's, and order coffins for us all.
There--good night!"

The bed shook again. Wilfrid stood eyeing the mysterious hangings, as if
some dark oracle had spoken from behind them. In fear of irritating the
old man, and almost as much in fear of bringing on himself a revelation
of the frightful crisis that could only be averted by his apologizing
personally to the man he had struck, Wilfrid stole from the room.




CHAPTER LV

There is a man among our actors here who may not be known to you. It had
become the habit of Sir Purcell Barren's mind to behold himself as under
a peculiarly malign shadow. Very young men do the same, if they are much
afflicted: but this is because they are still boys enough to have the
natural sense to be ashamed of ill-luck, even when they lack courage to
struggle against it. The reproaching of Providence by a man of full
growth, comes to some extent from his meanness, and chiefly from his
pride. He remembers that the old Gods selected great heroes whom to
persecute, and it is his compensation for material losses to conceive
himself a distinguished mark for the Powers of air. One who wraps himself
in this delusion may have great qualities; he cannot be of a very
contemptible nature; and in this place we will discriminate more closely
than to call him fool. Had Sir Purcell sunk or bent under the thong that
pursued him, he might, after a little healthy moaning, have gone along as
others do. Who knows?--though a much persecuted man, he might have become
so degraded as to have looked forward with cheerfulness to his daily
dinner; still despising, if he pleased, the soul that would invent a
sauce. I mean to say, he would, like the larger body of our
sentimentalists, have acquiesced in our simple humanity, but without
sacrificing a scruple to its grossness, or going arm-in-arm with it by
any means. Sir Purcell, however, never sank, and never bent. He was
invariably erect before men, and he did not console himself with a murmur
in secret. He had lived much alone; eating alone; thinking alone. To
complain of a father is, to a delicate mind, a delicate matter, and Sir
Purcell was a gentleman to all about him. His chief affliction in his
youth, therefore, kept him dumb. A gentleman to all about him, he
unhappily forgot what was due to his own nature. Must we not speak under
pressure of a grief? Little people should know that they must: but then
the primary task is to teach them that they are little people. For, if
they repress the outcry of a constant irritation, and the complaint
against injustice, they lock up a feeding devil in their hearts, and they
must have vast strength to crush him there. Strength they must have to
kill him, and freshness of spirit to live without him, after he has once
entertained them with his most comforting discourses. Have you listened
to him, ever? He does this:--he plays to you your music (it is he who
first teaches thousands that they have any music at all, so guess what a
dear devil he is!); and when he has played this ravishing melody, he
falls to upon a burlesque contrast of hurdy-gurdy and bag-pipe squeal and
bellow and drone, which is meant for the music of the world. How far
sweeter was yours! This charming devil Sir Purcell had nursed from
childhood.

As a child, between a flighty mother and a father verging to insanity
from caprice, he had grown up with ideas of filial duty perplexed, and
with a fitful love for either, that was not attachment: a baffled natural
love, that in teaching us to brood on the hardness of our lot, lays the
foundation for a perniciously mystical self-love. He had waged
precociously philosophic, when still a junior. His father had kept him by
his side, giving him no profession beyond that of the obedient expectant
son and heir. His first allusion to the youth's dependency had provoked
their first breach, which had been widened by many an ostentatious
forgiveness on the one hand, and a dumbly-protesting submission on the
other. His mother died away from her husband's roof. The old man then
sought to obliterate her utterly. She left her boy a little money, and
the injunction of his father was, that he was never to touch it. He
inherited his taste for music from her, and his father vowed, that if
ever he laid hand upon a musical instrument again, he would be
disinherited. All these signs of a vehement spiteful antagonism to
reason, the young man might have treated more as his father's misfortune
than his own, if he could only have brought himself to acknowledge that
such a thing as madness stigmatized his family. But the sentimental mind
conceived it as 'monstrous impiety' to bring this accusation against a
parent who did not break windows, or grin to deformity. He behaved toward
him as to a reasonable person, and felt the rebellious rancour instead of
the pity. Thus sentiment came in the way of pity. By degrees, Sir Purcell
transferred all his father's madness to the Fates by whom he was
persecuted. There was evidently madness somewhere, as his shuddering
human nature told him. It did not offend his sentiment to charge this
upon the order of the universe.

Against such a wild-hitting madness, or concentrated ire of the superior
Powers, Sir Purcell stood up, taking blow upon blow. As organist of
Hillford Church, he brushed his garments, and put a polish on his
apparel, with an energetic humility that looked like unconquerable
patience; as though he had said: "While life is left in me, I will be
seen for what I am." We will vary it--"For what I think myself." In
reality, he fought no battle. He had been dead-beaten from his boyhood.
Like the old Spanish Governor, the walls of whose fortress had been
thrown down by an earthquake, and who painted streets to deceive the
enemy, he was rendered safe enough by his astuteness, except against a
traitor from within.

One who goes on doggedly enduring, doggedly doing his best, must subsist
on comfort of a kind that is likely to be black comfort. The mere piping
of the musical devil shall not suffice. In Sir Purcell's case, it had
long seemed a magnanimity to him that he should hold to a life so
vindictively scourged, and his comfort was that he had it at his own
disposal. To know so much, to suffer, and still to refrain, flattered his
pride. "The term of my misery is in my hand," he said, softened by the
reflection. It is our lowest philosophy.

But, when the heart of a man so fashioned is stirred to love a woman, it
has a new vital force, new health, and cannot play these solemn pranks.
The flesh, and all its fatality, claims him. When Sir Purcell became
acquainted with Cornelia, he found the very woman his heart desired, or
certainly a most admirable picture of her. It was, perhaps, still more to
the lady's credit, if she was only striving to be what he was learning to
worship. The beneficial change wrought in him, made him enamoured of
healthy thinking and doing. Had this, as a result of sharp mental
overhauling, sprung from himself, there would have been hope for him.
Unhappily, it was dependent on her who inspired it. He resolved that life
should be put on a fresh trial in her person; and expecting that
naturally to fail, of which he had always entertained a base conception,
he was perforce brought to endow her with unexampled virtues, in order to
keep any degree of confidence tolerably steadfast in his mind. The lady
accepted the decorations thus bestowed on her, with much grace and
willingness. She consented, little aware of her heroism, to shine forth
as an 'ideal;' and to this he wantonly pinned his faith. Alas! in our
world, where all things must move, it becomes, by-and-by, manifest that
an 'ideal,' or idol, which you will, has not been gifted with two legs.
What is, then, the duty of the worshipper? To make, as I should say, some
compromise between his superstitious reverence and his recognition of
facts. Cornelia, on her pedestal, could not prefer such a request
plainly; but it would have afforded her exceeding gratification, if the
man who adored her had quietly taken her up and fixed her in a fresh
post, of his own choosing entirely, in the new circles of changeing
events. Far from doing that, he appeared to be unaware that they went,
with the varying days, through circles, forming and reforming. He walked
rather as a man down a lengthened corridor, whose light to which he turns
is in one favourite corner, visible till he reaches the end. What
Cornelia was, in the first flaming of his imagination around her, she was
always, unaffected by circumstance, to remain. It was very hard. The
'ideal' did feel the want--if not of legs--of a certain tolerant
allowance for human laws on the part of her worshipper; but he was
remorselessly reverential, both by instinct and of necessity. Women are
never quite so mad in sentimentalism as men.

We have now looked into the hazy interior of their systems--our last
halt, I believe, and last examination of machinery, before Emilia quits
England.

About the time of the pairing of the birds, and subsequent to the
Brookfield explosion, Cornelia received a letter from her lover, bearing
the tone of a summons. She was to meet him by the decayed sallow--the
'fruitless tree,' as he termed it. Startled by this abruptness, her
difficulties made her take counsel of her dignity. "He knows that these
clandestine meetings degrade me. He is wanting in faith, to require
constant assurances. He will not understand my position!" She remembered
the day at Besworth, of which Adela (somewhat needlessly, perhaps) had
told her; that it had revealed two of the family, in situations
censurable before a gossiping world, however intrinsically blameless.
That day had been to the ladies a lesson of deference to opinion. It was
true that Cornelia had met her lover since, but she was then
unembarrassed. She had now to share in the duties of the
household--duties abnormal, hideous, incredible. Her incomprehensible
father was absent in town. Daily Wilfrid conducted Adela thither on
mysterious business, and then Mrs. Chump was left to Arabella and herself
in the lonely house. Numberless things had to be said for the quieting of
this creature, who every morning came downstairs with the exclamation
that she could no longer endure her state of uncertainty, and was "off to
a lawyer." It was useless to attempt the posture of a reply. Words, and
energetic words, the woman demanded, not expostulations--petitions that
she would be respectful to the house before the household. Yes,
occasionally (so gross was she!) she had to be fed with lies. Arabella
and Cornelia heard one another mouthing these dreadful things, with a
wretched feeling of contemptuous compassion. The trial was renewed daily,
and it was a task, almost a physical task, to hold the woman back from
London, till the hour of lunch came. If they kept her away from her
bonnet till then they were safe.

At this meal they had to drink champagne with her. Diplomatic Wilfrid had
issued the order, with the object, first, of dazzling her vision; and
secondly, to set the wheels of her brain in swift motion. The effect was
marvellous; and, had it not been for her determination never to drink
alone, the miserable ladies might have applauded it. Adela, on the rare
days when she was fortunate enough to reach Brookfield in time for
dinner, was surprised to hear her sisters exclaim, "Oh, the hatefulness
of that champagne!" She enjoyed it extremely. She, poor thing, had again
to go through a round of cabs and confectioners' shops in London. "If
they had said, 'Oh, the hatefulness of those buns and cold chickens!'"
she thought to herself. Not objecting to champagne at lunch with any
particular vehemence, she was the less unwilling to tell her sisters what
she had to do for Wilfrid daily.

"Three times a week I go to see Emilia at Lady Gosstre's town-house. Mr.
Powys has gone to Italy, and Miss Ford remains, looking, if I can read
her, such a temper. On the other days I am taken by Wilfrid to the
arcades, or we hire a brougham to drive round the park,--for nothing but
the chance of seeing that girl an instant. Don't tell me it's to meet
Lady Charlotte! That lovely and obliging person it is certainly not my
duty to undeceive. She's now at Stornley, and speaks of our affairs to
everybody, I dare say. Twice a week Wilfrid--oh! quite casually!--calls
on Miss Ford, and is gratified, I suppose; for this is the
picture:--There sits Emilia, one finger in her cheek, and the thumb under
her chin, and she keeps looking down so. Opposite is Miss Ford, doing
some work--making lint for patriots, probably. Then Wilfrid, addressing
commonplaces to her; and then Emilia's father--a personage, I assure you!
up against the window, with a violin. I feel a bitter edge on my teeth
still! What do you think he does to please his daughter for one while
hour! He draws his fingers--does nothing else; she won't let him; she
won't hear a tune-up the strings in the most horrible caterwaul, up and
down. It is really like a thousand lunatics questioning and answering,
and is enough to make you mad; but there that girl sits, listening.
Exactly in this attitude--so. She scarcely ever looks up. My brother
talks, and occasionally steals a glance that way. We passed one whole
hour as I have described. In the middle of it, I happened to look at
Wilfrid's face, while the violin was wailing down. I fancied I heard the
despair of one of those huge masks in a pantomime. I was almost choked."

When Adela had related thus much, she had to prevent downright revolt,
and spoil her own game, by stating that Wilfrid did not leave the house
for his special pleasure, and a word, as to the efforts he was making to
see Mr. Pericles, convinced the ladies that his situation was as pitiable
as their own.

Cornelia refused to obey her lover's mandate, and wrote briefly. She
would not condescend to allude to the unutterable wretchedness afflicting
her, but spoke of her duty to her father being foremost in her prayers
for strength. Sir Purcell interpreted this as indicating the beginning of
their alienation. He chided her gravely in an otherwise pleasant letter.
She was wrong to base her whole reply upon the little sentence of
reproach, but self-justification was necessary to her spirit. Indeed, an
involuntary comparison of her two suitors was forced on her, and, dry as
was Sir Twickenham's mind, she could not but acknowledge that he had
behaved with an extraordinary courtesy, amounting to chivalry, in his
suit. On two occasions he had declined to let her be pressed to decide.
He came to the house, and went, like an ordinary visitor. She was
indebted to him for that splendid luxury of indecision, which so few of
the maids of earth enjoy for a lengthened term. The rude shakings given
her by Sir Purcell, at a time when she needed all her power of dreaming,
to support the horror of accumulated facts, was almost resented. "He as
much as says he doubts me, when this is what I endure!" she cried to
herself, as Mrs. Chump ordered her champagne-glass to be filled, with
"Now, Cornelia, my dear; if it's bad luck we're in for, there's nothin'
cheats ut like champagne," and she had to put the (to her) nauseous
bubbles to her lips. Sir Purcell had not been told of her tribulations,
and he had not expressed any doubt of her truth; but sentimentalists can
read one another with peculiar accuracy through their bewitching gauzes.
She read his unwritten doubt, and therefore expected her unwritten misery
to be read.

So it is when you play at Life! When you will not go straight, you get
into this twisting maze. Now he wrote coldly, and she had to repress a
feeling of resentment at that also. She ascribed the changes of his tone
fundamentally to want of faith in her, and absolutely, during the
struggle she underwent, she by this means somehow strengthened her idea
of her own faithfulness. She would have phrased her projected line of
conduct thus: "I owe every appearance of assent to my poor father's
scheme, that will spare his health. I owe him everything, save the
positive sacrifice of my hand." In fact, she meant to do her duty to her
father up to the last moment, and then, on the extreme verge, to remember
her duty to her lover. But she could not write it down, and tell her
lover as much. She knew instinctively that, facing the eyes, it would not
look well. Perhaps, at another season, she would have acted and thought
with less folly; but the dull pain of her great uncertainty, and the
little stinging whips daily applied to her, exaggerated her tendency to
self-deception. "Who has ever had to bear so much?--what slave?" she
would exclaim, as a refuge from the edge of his veiled irony. For a slave
has, if not selection of what he will eat and drink, the option of
rejecting what is distasteful. Cornelia had not. She had to act a part
every day with Mrs. Chump, while all those she loved, and respected, and
clung to, were in the same conspiracy. The consolation of hating, or of
despising, her tormentress was denied. The thought that the poor helpless
creature had been possibly ruined by them, chastened Cornelia's
reflections mightily, and taught her to walk very humbly through the
duties of the day. Her powers of endurance were stretched to their
utmost. A sublime affliction would, as she felt bitterly, have enlarged
her soul. This sordid misery narrowed it. Why did not her lover, if his
love was passionate, himself cut the knot claim her, and put her to a
quick decision? She conceived that were he to bring on a supreme crisis,
her heart would declare itself. But he appeared to be wanting in that
form of courage. Does it become a beggar to act such valiant parts?
perhaps he was even then replying from his stuffy lodgings.

The Spring was putting out primroses,--the first handwriting of the
year,--as Sir Purcell wrote to er prettily. Deire for fresh air, and the
neighbourhood of his beloved, sent him on a journey down to Hillford.
Near the gates of the Hillford station, he passed Wilfrid and Adela,
hurrying to catch the up-train, and received no recognition. His face
scarcely changed colour, but the birds on a sudden seemed to pipe far
away from him. He asked himself, presently, what were those black
circular spots which flew chasing along the meadows and the lighted
walks. It was with an effort that he got the landscape close about his
eyes, and remembered familiar places. He walked all day, making
occupation by directing his steps to divers eminences that gave a view of
the Brookfield chimneys. After night-fall he found himself in the
firwood, approaching the 'fruitless tree.' He had leaned against it
musingly, for a time, when he heard voices, as of a couple confident in
their privacy.

The footman, Gainsford, was courting a maid of the Tinley's, and here,
being midway between the two houses, they met. He had to obtain pardon
for tardiness, by saying that dinner at Brookfield had been delayed for
the return of Mr. Pole. The damsel's questions showed her far advanced in
knowledge of affairs at Brookfield and may account for Laura Tinley's
gatherings of latest intelligence concerning those 'odd girls,' as she
impudently called the three.

"Oh! don't you listen!" was the comment pronounced on Gainsford's stock
of information. But, he told nothing signally new. She wished to hear
something new and striking, "because," she said, "when I unpin Miss Laura
at night, I'm as likely as not to get a silk dress that ain't been worn
more than half-a-dozen times--if I manage. When I told her that Mr.
Albert, her brother, had dined at your place last Thursday--demeaning of
himself, I do think--there!--I got a pair of silk stockings,--not letting
her see I knew what it was for, of coursed and about Mrs.
Dump,--Stump;--I can't recollect the woman's name; and her calling of
your master a bankrupt, right out, and wanting her money of him,--there!
if Miss Laura didn't give me a pair of lavender kid-gloves out of her
box!--and I wish you would leave my hands alone, when you know I
shouldn't be so silly as to wear them in the dark; and for you, indeed!"

But Gainsford persisted, upon which there was fooling. All this was too
childish for Sir Purcell to think it necessary to give warning of his
presence. They passed, and when they had gone a short way the damsel
cried, "Well, that is something," and stopped. "Married in a month!" she
exclaimed. "And you don't know which one?"

"No," returned Gainsford; "master said 'one of you' as they was at
dinner, just as I come into the room. He was in jolly spirits, and kept
going so: 'What's a month! champagne, Gainsford,' and you should have
sees Mrs.--not Stump, but Chump. She'll be tipsy to-night, and I shall
bust if I have to carry of her upstairs. Well, she is fun!--she don't
mind handin' you a five-shilling piece when she's done tender: but I have
nearly lost my place two or three time along of that woman. She'd split
logs with laughing:--no need of beetle and wedges! 'Och!' she sings out,
'by the piper!'--and Miss Cornelia sitting there--and, 'Arrah!'--bother
the woman's Irish," (thus Gainsford gave up the effort at imitation, with
a spirited Briton's mild contempt for what he could not do) "she pointed
out Miss Cornelia and said she was like the tinker's dog:--there's the
bone he wants himself, and the bone he don't want anybody else to have.
Aha! ain't it good?"

"Oh! the tinker's dog! won't I remember that!" said the damsel, "she
can't be such a fool."

"Well, I don't know," Gainsford meditated critically. "She is; and yet
she ain't, if you understand me. What I feel about her is--hang it! she
makes ye laugh."

Sir Purcell moved from the shadow of the tree as noiselessly as he could,
so that this enamoured couple might not be disturbed. He had already
heard more than he quite excused himself for hearing in such a manner,
and having decided not to arrest the man and make him relate exactly what
Mr. Pole had spoken that evening at the Brookfield dinner-table, he
hurried on his return to town.

It was not till he had sight of his poor home; the solitary company of
chairs; the sofa looking bony and comfortless as an old female house
drudge; the table with his desk on it; and, through folding-doors, his
cold and narrow bed; not till then did the fact of his great loss stand
before him, and accuse him of living. He seated himself methodically and
wrote to Cornelia. His fancy pictured her now as sharp to every turn of
language and fall of periods: and to satisfy his imagined, rigorous
critic, he wrote much in the style of a newspaper leading article. No one
would have thought that tragic meaning underlay those choice and sounding
phrases. On reperusing the composition, he rejected it, but only to
produce one of a similar cast. He could not get to nature in his tone. He
spoke aloud a little sentence now and then, that had the ring of a
despairing tenderness. Nothing of the sort inhabited his written words,
wherein a strained philosophy and ironic resignation went on stilts. "I
should desire to see you once before I take a step that some have not
considered more than commonly serious," came toward the conclusion; and
the idea was toyed with till he signed his name. "A plunge into the deep
is of little moment to one who has been stripped of all clothing. Is he
not a wretch who stands and shivers still?" This letter, ending with a
short and not imperious, or even urgent, request for an interview, on the
morrow by the 'fruitless tree,' he sealed for delivery into Cornelia's
hands some hours before the time appointed. He then wrote a clear
business letter to his lawyer, and one of studied ambiguity to a cousin
on his mother's side. His father's brother, Percival Barrett, to whom the
estates had gone, had offered him an annuity of five hundred pounds:
"though he had, as his nephew was aware, a large family." Sir Purcell had
replied: "Let me be the first to consider your family," rejecting the
benevolence. He now addressed his cousin, saying: "What would you think
of one who accepts such a gift?--of me, were you to hear that I had bowed
my head and extended my hand? Think this, if ever you hear of it: that I
have acceded for the sake of winning the highest prize humanity can
bestow: that I certainly would not have done it for aught less than the
highest." After that he went to his narrow bed. His determination was to
write to his uncle, swallowing bitter pride, and to live a pensioner, if
only Cornelia came to her tryst, "the last he would ask of her," as he
told her. Once face to face with his beloved, he had no doubt of his
power; and this feeling which he knew her to share, made her reluctance
to meet him more darkly suspicious.

As he lay in the little black room, he thought of how she would look when
a bride, and of the peerless beauty towering over any shades of
earthliness which she would present. His heated fancy conjured up every
device and charm of sacredness and adoring rapture about that white
veiled shape, until her march to the altar assumed the character of a
religious procession--a sight to awe mankind! And where, when she stood
before the minister in her saintly humility, grave and white, and
tall--where was the man whose heart was now racing for that goal at her
right hand? He felt at the troubled heart and touched two fingers on the
rib, mock-quietingly, and smiled. Then with great deliberation he rose,
lit a candle, unlocked a case of pocket-pistols, and loaded them: but a
second idea coming into his head, he drew the bullet out of one, and lay
down again with a luxurious speculation on the choice any hand might
possibly make of the life-sparing or death-giving of those two weapons.
In his neat half-slumber he was twice startled by a report of fire-arms
in a church, when a crowd of veiled women and masked men rushed to the
opening, and a woman throwing up the veil from her face knelt to a corpse
that she lifted without effort, and weeping, laid it in a grave, where it
rested and was at peace, though multitudes hurried over it, and new stars
came and went, and the winds were strange with new tongues. The sleeper
saw the morning upon that corpse when light struck his eyelids, and he
awoke like a man who knew no care.

His landlady's little female scrubber was working at the grate in his
sitting-room. He had endured many a struggle to prevent service of this
nature being done for him by one of the sex--at least, to prevent it
within his hearing and sight. He called to her to desist; but she replied
that she had her mistress's orders. Thereupon he maintained that the
grate did not want scrubbing. The girl took this to be a matter of
opinion, not a challenge to controversy, and continued her work in
silence. Irritated by the noise, but anxious not to seem harsh, he said:
"What on earth are you about, when there was no fire there yesterday?"

"There ain't no stuff for afire now, sir," said she.

"I tell you I did not light it."

"It's been and lit itself then," she mumbled.

"Do you mean to say you found the fire burnt out, when you entered the
room this morning?"

She answered that she had found it so, and lots of burnt paper lying
about.

The symbolism of this fire burnt out, that had warmed and cheered none,
oppressed his fancy, and he left the small maid-of-all-work to triumph
with black-lead and brushes.

She sang out, when she had done: "If you please, sir, missus have had a
hamper up from the country, and would you like a country aig, which is
quite fresh, and new lay. And missus say, she can't trust the bloaters
about here bein' Yarmouth, but there's a soft roe in one she've squeezed;
and am I to stop a water-cress woman, when the last one sold you them,
and all the leaves jellied behind 'em, so as no washin' could save you
from swallowin' some, missus say?"

Sir Purcell rolled over on his side. "Is this going to be my epitaph?" he
groaned; for he was not a man particular in his diet, or exacting in
choice of roes, or panting for freshness in an egg. He wondered what his
landlady could mean by sending up to him, that morning of all others, to
tempt his appetite after her fashion. "I thought I remembered eating
nothing but toast in this place;" he observed to himself. A grunting
answer had to be given to the little maid, "Toast as usual." She appeared
satisfied, but returned again, when he was in his bath, to ask whether he
had said "No toast to-day?"

"Toast till the day of my death--tell your mistress that!" he replied;
and partly from shame at his unaccountable vehemence, he paused in his
sponging, meditated, and chilled. An association of toast with spectral
things grew in his mind, when presently the girl's voice was heard:
"Please, sir, did say you'd have toast, or not, this morning?" It cost
him an effort to answer simply, "Yes."

That she should continue, "Not sir?" appeared like perversity. "No aig?"
was maddening.

"Well, no; never mind it this morning," said he.

"Not this morning," she repeated.

"Then it will not be till the day of your death, as you said," she is
thinking that, was the idea running in his brain, and he was half ready
to cry out "Stop," and renew his order for toast, that he might seem
consecutive. The childishness of the wish made him ask himself what it
mattered. "I said 'Not till the day;' so, none to-day would mean that I
have reached the day." Shivering with the wet on his pallid skin, he
thought this over.

His landlady had used her discretion, and there was toast on the table. A
beam of Spring's morning sunlight illuminated the toast-rack. He sat, and
ate, and munched the doubt whether "not till" included the final day, or
stopped short of it. By this the state of his brain may be conceived. A
longing for beauty, and a dark sense of an incapacity to thoroughly enjoy
it, tormented him. He sent for his landlady's canary, and the ready
shrill song of the bird persuaded him that much of the charm of music is
wilfully swelled by ourselves, and can be by ourselves withdrawn: that is
to say, the great chasm and spell of sweet sounds is assisted by the
force of our imaginations. What is that force?--the heat and torrent of
the blood. When that exists no more--to one without hope, for
instance--what is music or beauty? Intrinsically, they are next to
nothing. He argued it out so, and convinced himself of his own delusions,
till his hand, being in the sunlight, gave him a pleasant warmth. "That's
something we all love," he said, glancing at the blue sky above the
roofs. "But there's little enough of it in this climate," he thought,
with an eye upon the darker corners of his room. When he had eaten, he
sent word to his landlady to make up his week's bill. The week was not at
an end, and that good woman appeased before him, astonished, saying: "To
be sure, your habits is regular, but there's little items one I'll guess
at, and how make out a bill, Sir Purcy, and no items?"

He nodded his head.

"The country again?" she asked smilingly.

"I am going down there," he said.

"And beautiful at this time of the year, it is! though, for market
gardening, London beats any country I ever knew; and if you like creature
comforts, I always say, stop in London! And then the policemen! who
really are the greatest comfort of all to us poor women, and seem sent
from above especially to protect our weakness. I do assure you, Sir
Purcy, I feel it, and never knew a right-minded woman that did not. And
how on earth our grandmothers contrived to get about without them! But
there! people who lived before us do seem like the most uncomfortable!
When--my goodness! we come to think there was some lived before tea! Why,
as I say over almost every cup I drink, it ain't to be realized. It seems
almost wicked to say it, Sir Purcy; but it's my opinion there ain't a
Christian woman who's not made more of a Christian through her tea. And a
man who beats his wife my first question is, 'Do he take his tea
regular?' For, depend upon it, that man is not a tea-drinker at all."

He let her talk away, feeling oddly pleased by this mundane chatter, as
was she to pour forth her inmost sentiments to a baronet.

When she said: "Your fire shall be lighted to-night to welcome you," the
man looked up, and was going to request that the trouble might be spared,
but he nodded. His ghost saw the burning fire awaiting him. Or how if it
sparkled merrily, and he beheld it with his human eyes that night? His
beloved would then have touched him with her hand--yea, brought the dead
to life! He jumped to his feet, and dismissed the worthy dame. On both
sides of him, 'Yes,' and 'No,' seemed pressing like two hostile powers
that battled for his body. They shrieked in his ears, plucked at his
fingers. He heard them hushing deeply as he went to his pistol-case, and
drew forth one--he knew not which.




CHAPTER LVI

On a wild April morning, Emilia rose from her bed and called to mind a
day of the last year's Spring when she had watched the cloud streaming
up, and felt that it was the curtain of an unknown glory. But now it wore
the aspect of her life itself, with nothing hidden behind those stormy
folds, save peace. South-westward she gazed, eyeing eagerly the struggle
of twisting vapour; long flying edges of silver went by, and mounds of
faint crimson, and here and there a closing space of blue, swift as a
thought of home to a soldier in action. The heavens were like a
battle-field. Emilia shut her lips hard, to check an impulse of prayer
for Merthyr fighting in Italy: for he was in Italy, and she once more
among the Monmouth hills: he was in Italy fighting, and she chained here
to her miserable promise! Three days after she had given the promise to
Wilfrid, Merthyr left, shaking her hand like any common friend. Georgiana
remained, by his desire, to protect her. Emilia had written to Wilfrid
for release, but being no apt letter-writer, and hating the task, she was
soon involved by him in a complication of bewildering sentiments, some of
which she supposed she was bound to feel, while perhaps one or two she
did feel, at the summons. The effect was that she lost the true wording
of her blunt petition for release: she could no longer put it bluntly.
But her heart revolted the more, and gave her sharp eyes to see into his
selfishness. The purgatory of her days with Georgiana, when the latter
was kept back from her brother in his peril, spurred Emilia to renew her
appeal; but she found that all she said drew her into unexpected traps
and pitfalls. There was only one thing she could say plainly: "I want to
go." If she repeated this, Wilfrid was ready with citations from her
letters, wherein she had said 'this,' and 'that,' and many other phrases.
His epistolary power and skill in arguing his own case were creditable to
him. Affected as Emilia was by other sensations, she could not combat the
idea strenuously suggested by him, that he had reason to complain of her
behaviour. He admitted his special faults, but, by distinctly tracing
them to their origin, he complacently hinted the excuse for them.
Moreover, and with artistic ability, he painted such a sentimental halo
round the 'sacredness of her pledged word,' that Emilia could not resist
a superstitious notion about it, and about what the breaking of it would
imply. Georgiana had removed her down to Monmouth to be out of his way. A
constant flight of letters pursued them both, for Wilfrid was far too
clever to allow letters in his hand-writing to come for one alone of two
women shut up in a country-house together. He saw how the letterless one
would sit speculating shrewdly and spitefully; so he was careful to amuse
his mystified Dragon, while he drew nearer and nearer to his gold apple.
Another object was, that by getting Georgiana to consent to become in
part his confidante, he made it almost a point of honour for her to be
secret with Lady Charlotte.

At last a morning came with no Brookfield letter for either of them. The
letters stopped from that time. It was almost as if a great buzzing had
ceased in Emilia's ears, and she now heard her own sensations clearly. To
Georgiana's surprise, she manifested no apprehension or regret. "Or
else," the lady thought, "she wears a mask to me;" and certainly it was a
pale face that Emilia was beginning to wear. At last came April and its
wild morning. No little female hypocrisies passed between them when they
met; they shook hands at arm's length by the breakfast-table. Then Emilia
said: "I am ready to go to Italy: I will go at once."

Georgiana looked straight at her, thinking: "This is a fit of indignation
with Wilfrid." She answered: "Italy! I fancied you had forgotten there
was such a country."

"I don't forget my country and my friends," said Emilia,

"At least, I must ask the ground of so unexpected a resolution," was
rejoined.

"Do you remember what Merthyr wrote in his letter from Arona? How long it
takes to understand the meaning of some, words! He says that I should not
follow an impulse that is not the impulse of all my nature--myself
altogether. Yes! I know what that means now. And he tells me that my life
is worth more than to be bound to the pledge of a silly moment. It is!
He, Georgey, unkind that you are!--he does not distrust me; but always
advises and helps me: Merthyr waits for me. I cannot be instantly ready
for every meaning in the world. What I want to do, is to see Wilfrid: if
not, I will write to him. I will tell him that I intend to break my
promise."

A light of unaffected pride shone from the girl's face, as she threw down
this gauntlet to sentimentalism.

"And if he objects?" said Georgiana.

"If he objects, what can happen? If he objects by letter, I am gone. I
shall not write for permission. I shall write what my will is. If I see
him, and he objects, I can look into his eyes and say what I think right.
Why, I have lived like a frozen thing ever since I gave him my word. I
have felt at times like a snake hissing at my folly. I think I have felt
something like men when they swear."

Georgiana's features expressed a slight but perceptible disgust. Emilia
continued humbly: "Forgive me. I wish you to know how I hate the word I
gave that separates me from Merthyr in my Italy, and makes you dislike
your poor Emilia. You do. I have pardoned it, though it was twenty stabs
a day."

"But, why, if this promise was so hateful to you, did you not break it
before?" asked Georgiana.

"I had not the courage," Emilia stooped her head to confess; "and
besides," she added, curiously half-closing her eyelids, as one does to
look on a minute object, "I could not see through it before."

"If," suggested Georgiana, "you break your word, you release him from
his."

"No! if he cannot see the difference," cried Emilia, wildly, "then let
him keep away from me for ever, and he shall not have the name of friend!
Is there no difference--I wish you would let me cry out as they do in
Shakespeare, Georgey!" Emilia laughed to cover her vehemence. "I want
something more than our way of talking, to witness that there is such a
difference between us. Am I to live here till all my feelings are burnt
out, and my very soul is only a spark in a log of old wood? and to keep
him from murdering my countrymen, or flogging the women of Italy! God
knows what those Austrians would make him do. He changes. He would easily
become an Austrian. I have heard him once or twice, and if I had shut my
eyes, I might have declared an Austrian spoke. I wanted to keep him here,
but it is not right that I--I should be caged till I scarcely feel my
finger-ends, or know that I breathe sensibly as you and others do. I am
with Merthyr. That is what I intend to tell him."

She smiled softly up to Georgiana's cold eyes, to get a look of
forgiveness for her fiery speaking.

"So, then, you love my brother?" said Georgiana.

Emilia could have retorted, "Cruel that you are!" The pain of having an
unripe feeling plucked at without warning, was bitter; but she repressed
any exclamation, in her desire to maintain simple and unsensational
relations always with those surrounding her.

"He is my friend," she said. "I think of something better than that other
word. Oh, that I were a man, to call him my brother-in-arms! What's a
girl's love in return for his giving his money, his heart, and offering
his life every day for Italy?"

As soon as Georgiana could put faith in her intention to depart, she gave
her a friendly hand and embrace.

Two days later they were at Richford, with Lady Gosstre. The journals
were full of the Italian uprising. There had been a collision between the
Imperial and patriotic forces, near Brescia, from which the former had
retired in some confusion. Great things were expected of Piedmont, though
many, who had reason to know him, distrusted her king. All Lombardy
awaited the signal from Piedmont. Meanwhile blood was flowing.

In the excitement of her sudden rush from dead monotony to active life,
Emilia let some time pass before she wrote to Wilfrid. Her letter was in
her hand, when one was brought in to her from him. It ran thus:--

"I have just returned home, and what is this I hear? Are you utterly
faithless? Can I not rely on you to keep the word you have solemnly
pledged! Meet me at once. Name a place. I am surrounded by misery and
distraction. I will tell you all when we meet. I have trusted that you
were firm. Write instantly. I cannot ask you to come here. The house is
broken up. There is no putting to paper what has happened. My father lies
helpless. Everything rests on me. I thought that I could rely on you."

Emilia tore up her first letter, and replied:--

"Come here at once. Or, if you would wish to meet me elsewhere, it shall
be where you please: but immediately. If you have heard that I am going
to Italy, it is true. I break my promise. I shall hope to have your
forgiveness. My heart bleeds for my dear Cornelia, and I am eager to see
my sisters, and embrace them, and share their sorrow. If I must not come,
tell them I kiss them. Adieu!"

Wilfrid replied:--

"I will be by Richford Park gates to-morrow at a quarter to nine. You
speak of your heart. I suppose it is a habit. Be careful to put on a
cloak or thick shawl; we have touches of frost. If I cannot amuse you,
perhaps the nightingales will. Do you remember those of last year? I
wonder whether we shall hear the same?--we shall never hear the same."

This iteration, whether cunningly devised or not, had a charm for
Emilia's ear. She thought: "I had forgotten all about them." When she was
in her bedroom at night, she threw up her window. April was leaning close
upon May, and she had not to wait long before a dusky flutter of low
notes, appearing to issue from the great rhododendron bank across the
lawn, surprised her. She listened, and another little beginning was
heard, timorous, shy, and full of mystery for her. The moon hung over
branches, some that showed young buds, some still bare. Presently the
long, rich, single notes cut the air, and melted to their glad delicious
chuckle. The singer was answered from a farther bough, and again from
one. It grew to be a circle of melody round Emilia at the open window.
Was it the same as last year's? The last year's lay in her memory faint
and well-nigh unawakened. There was likewise a momentary sense of
unreality in this still piping peacefulness, while Merthyr stood in a
bloody-streaked field, fronting death. And yet the song was sweet. Emilia
clasped her arms, shut her eyes, and drank it in. Not to think at all, or
even to brood on her sensations, but to rest half animate and let those
divine sounds find a way through her blood, was medicine to her.

Next day there were numerous visits to the house. Emilia was reserved,
and might have been thought sad, but she welcomed Tracy Runningbrook
gladly, with "Oh! my old friend!" and a tender squeeze of his hand.

"True, if you like; hot, if you like; but I old?" cried Tracy.

"Yes, because I seem to have got to the other side of you; I mean, I know
you, and am always sure of you," said Emilia. "You don't care for music;
I don't care for poetry, but we're friends, and I am quite certain of
you, and think you 'old friend' always."

"And I," said Tracy, better up to the mark by this time, "I think of you,
you dear little woman, that I ought to be grateful to you, for, by
heaven! you give me, every time I see you, the greatest temptation to be
a fool and let me prove that I'm not. Altro! altro!"

"A fool!" said Emilia caressingly; showing that his smart insinuation had
slipped by her.

The tale of Brookfield was told over again by Tracy, and Emilia
shuddered, though Merthyr and her country held her heart and imagination
active and in suspense, from moment to moment. It helped mainly to
discolour the young world to her eyes. She was under the spell of an
excitement too keen and quick to be subdued, by the sombre terrors of a
tragedy enacted in a house that she had known. Brookfield was in the talk
of all who came to Richford. Emilia got the vision of the wretched family
seated in the library as usual, when upon midnight they were about to
part, and a knock came at the outer door, and two men entered the hall,
bearing a lifeless body with a red spot above the heart. She saw Cornelia
fall to it. She saw the pale-faced family that had given her shelter, and
moaned for lack of a way of helping them and comforting them. She
reproached herself for feeling her own full physical life so warmly,
while others whom she had loved were weeping. It was useless to resist
the tide of fresh vitality in her veins, and when her thoughts turned to
their main attraction, she was rejoicing at the great strength she felt
coming to her gradually. Her face was smooth and impassive: this new joy
of strength came on her like the flowing of a sea to a, land-locked
water. "Poor souls!" she sighed for her friends, while irrepressible
exultation filled her spirit.

That afternoon, in the midst of packing and preparations for the journey,
at all of which Lady Gosstre smiled with a complacent bewilderment, a
card, bearing the name of Miss Laura Tinley, was sent up to Emilia. She
had forgotten this person, and asked Lady Gosstre who it was. Arabella's
rival presented herself most winningly. For some time, Emilia listened to
her, with wonder that a tongue should be so glib on matters of no earthly
interest. At last, Laura said in an undertone: "I am the bearer of a
message from Mr. Pericles; do you walk at all in the garden?"

Emilia read her look, and rose. Her thoughts struck back on the creature
that she was when she had last seen Mr. Pericles, and again, by contrast,
on what she was now. Eager to hear of him, or rather to divine the
mystery in her bosom aroused by the unexpected mention of his name, she
was soon alone with Laura in the garden.

"Oh, those poor Poles!" Laura began.

"You were going to say something of Mr. Pericles," said Emilia.

"Yes, indeed, my dear; but, of course, you have heard all the details of
that dreadful night? It cannot be called a comfort to us that it enables
my brother Albert to come forward in the most disinterested--I might
venture to say, generous--manner, and prove the chivalry of his soul;
still, as things are, we are glad, after such misunderstandings, to prove
to that sorely-tried family who are their friends. I--you would little
think so from their treatment of me--I was at school with them. I knew
them before they became unintelligible, though they always had a turn for
it. To dress well, to be refined, to marry well--I understand all that
perfectly; but who could understand them? Not they themselves, I am
certain! And now penniless! and not only that, but lawyers! You know that
Mrs. Chump has commenced an action?--no? Oh, yes! but I shall have to
tell you the whole story."

"What is it?--they want money?" said Emilia.

"I will tell you. Our poor gentlemanly organist, whom you knew, was
really a baronet's son, and inherited the title."

Emilia interrupted her: "Oh, do let me hear about them!"

"Well, my dear, this unfortunate--I may call him 'lover,' for if a man
does not stamp the truth of his affection with a pistol, what other means
has he? And just a word as to romance. I have been sighing for it--no one
would think so--all my life. And who would have thought that these poor
Poles should have lived to convince me of the folly! Oh, delicious
humdrum!--there is nothing like it. But you are anxious, naturally. Poor
Sir Purcell Barren--he may or may not have been mad, but when he was
brought to the house at Brookfield--quite by chance--I mean, his
body--two labouring men found him by a tree--I don't know whether you
remembered a pollard-willow that stood all white and rotten by the water
in the fir-wood:--well, as I said, mad or not, no sooner did poor
Cornelia see him than she shrieked that she was the cause of his death.
He was laid in the hall--which I have so often trod! and there Cornelia
sat by his poor dead body, and accused Wilfrid and her father of every
unkindness. They say that the scene was terrible. Wilfrid--but I need not
tell you his character. He flutters from flower to flower, but he has
feeling Now comes the worst of all--in one sense; that is, looking on it
as people of the world; and being in the world, we must take a worldly
view occasionally. Mr. Pole--you remember how he behaved once at
Besworth: or, no; you were not there, but he used your name. His mania
was, as everybody could see, to marry his children grandly. I don't blame
him in any way. Still, he was not justified in living beyond his means to
that end, speculating rashly, and concealing his actual circumstances.
Well, Mr. Pericles and he were involved together; that is, Mr.
Pericles--"

"Is Mr. Pericles near us now?" said Emilia quickly.

"We will come to him," Laura resumed, with the complacency of one who saw
a goodly portion of the festival she was enjoying still before her. "I
was going to say, Mr. Pericles had poor Mr. Pole in his power; has him,
would be the correcter tense. And Wilfrid, as you may have heard, had
really grossly insulted him, even to the extent of maltreating him--a
poor foreigner--rich foreigner, if you like! but not capable of standing
against a strong young man in wrath. However, now there can be little
doubt that Wilfrid repents. He had been trying ever since to see Mr.
Pericles; and the very morning of that day, I believe, he saw him and
humbled himself to make an apology. This had put Mr. Pole in good
spirits, and in the evening--he and Mrs. Chump were very fond of their
wine after dinner--he was heard that very evening to name a day for his
union with her; for that had been quite understood, and he had asked his
daughters and got their consent. The sight of Sir Purcell's corpse, and
the cries of Cornelia, must have turned him childish. I cannot conceive a
situation so harrowing as that of those poor children hearing their
father declare himself an impostor! a beggar! a peculator! He cried, poor
unhappy man, real tears! The truth was that his nerves suddenly gave way.
For, just before--only just before, he was smiling and talking largely.
He wished to go on his knees to every one of them, and kept telling them
of his love--the servants all awake and listening! and more gossiping
servants than the Poles always, by the most extraordinary inadvertence,
managed to get, you never heard of! Nothing would stop him from
humiliating himself! No one paid any attention to Mrs. Chump until she
started from her chair. They say that some of the servants who were
crying outside, positively were compelled to laugh when they heard her
first outbursts. And poor Mr. Pole confessed that he had touched her
money. He could not tell her how much. Fancy such a scene, with a dead
man in the house! Imagination almost refuses to conjure it up! Not to
dwell on it too long--for, I have never endured such a shock as it has
given me--Mrs. Chump left the house, and the next thing received from her
was a lawyer's letter. Business men say she is not to blame: women may
cherish their own opinion. But, oh, Miss Belloni! is it not terrible? You
are pale."

Emilia behind what she felt for her friends, had a dim comprehension of
the meaning of their old disgust at Laura, during this narration. But,
hearing the word of pity, she did not stop to be critical. "Can you do
nothing for them?" she said abruptly.

The thought in Laura's shocked grey eyes was, "They have done little
enough for you," i.e., toward making you a lady. "Oh!" she cried; "I can
you teach me what to do? I must be extremely delicate, and calculate upon
what they would accept from me. For--so I hear--they used to--and
may still--nourish a--what I called--silly--though not in
unkindness--hostility to our family--me. And perhaps now natural
delicacy may render it difficult for them to..."

In short, to accept an alms from Laura Tinley; so said her pleading look
for an interpretation.

"You know Mr. Pericles," said Emilia, "he can do the mischief--can he
not? Stop him."

Laura laughed. "One might almost say that you do not know him, Miss
Belloni. What is my influence? I have neither a voice, nor can I play on
any instrument. I would--indeed I will--do my best my utmost; only, how
even to introduce the subject to him? Are not you the person? He speaks
of you constantly. He has consulted doctors with regard to your voice,
and the only excuse, dear Miss Belloni, for my visit to you to-day, is my
desire that any misunderstanding between you may be cleared. Because, I
have just heard--Miss Belloni will forgive me!--the origin of it; and
tidings coming that you were in the neighbourhood, I thought--hoped that
I might be the means of re-uniting two evidently destined to be of
essential service to one another. And really, life means that, does it
not?"

Emilia was becoming more critical of this tone the more she listened. She
declared, her immediate willingness to meet Mr. Pericles. With which, and
Emilia's assurance that she would write, and herself make the
appointment, Laura retired, in high glee at the prospect of winning the
gratitude of the inscrutable millionaire. It was true that the absence of
any rivalry for the possession of the man took much of his sweetness from
him. She seemed to be plucking him from the hands of the dead, and half
recognized that victory over uncontesting rivals claps the laurel-wreath
rather rudely upon our heads.

Emilia lost no time in running straight to Georgiana, who was busy at her
writing-desk. She related what she had just heard, ending breathlessly:
"Georgey! my dear! will you help them?"

"In what possible way can I do so?" said Georgiana. To-morrow night we
shall have left England."

"But to-day we are here." Emilia pressed a hand to her bosom: "my heart
feels hollow, and my friends cry out in it. I cannot let him suffer." She
looked into Georgiana's eyes. "Will you not help them?--they want money."

The lady reddened. "Is it not preposterous to suppose that I can offer
them assistance of such a kind?"

"Not you," returned Emilia, sighing; and in an under-breath, "me--will
you lend it to me? Merthyr would. I shall repay it. I cannot tell what
fills me with this delight, but I know I am able to repay any sum. Two
thousand pounds would help them. I think--I think my voice has come
back."

"Have you tried it?" said Georgiana, to produce a diversion from the
other topic.

"No; but believe me when I tell you, it must be. I scarcely feel the
floor; no misery touches me. I am only sorry for my friends, not down on
the ground with them. Believe me! And I have been studying all this
while. I have not lost an hour. I would accept a part, and step on the
boards within a week, and be certain to succeed. I am just as willing to
go to the Conservatorio and submit to discipline. Only, dear friend,
believe me, that I ask for money now, because I am sure I can repay it. I
want to send it immediately, and then, good-bye to England."

Georgiana closed her desk. She had been suspicious at first of another
sentiment in the background, but was now quite convinced of the
simplicity of Emilia's design. She said: "I will tell you exactly how I
am placed. I do not know, that under any circumstances, I could have
given into your hands so large a sum as this that you ask for. My brother
has a fortune; and I have also a little property. When I say my brother
has a fortune, he has the remains of one. All that has gone has been
devoted to relieve your countrymen, and further the interests he has
nearest at heart. What is left to him, I believe, he has now thrown into
the gulf. You have heard Lady Charlotte call him a fanatic."

Emilia's lip quivered.

"You must not blame her for that," Georgiana continued. "Lady Gosstre
thinks much the same. The world thinks with them. I love him, and prove
my love by trusting him, and wish to prove my love by aiding him, and
being always at hand to succour, as I should be now, but that I obeyed
his dearest wish in resting here to watch over you. I am his other self.
I have taught him to feel that; so that in his devotion to this cause he
may follow every impulse he has, and still there is his sister to fall
back on. My child! see what I have been doing. I have been calculating
here." Georgiana took a scroll from her desk, and laid it under Emilia's
eyes. "I have reckoned our expenses as far as Turin, and have only
consented to take Lady Gosstre's valet for courier, just to please her. I
know that he will make the cost double, and I feel like a miser about
money. If Merthyr is ruined, he will require every farthing that I have
for our common subsistence. Now do you understand? I can hardly put the
case more plainly. It is out of my power to do what you ask me to do."

Emilia sighed lightly, and seemed not much cast down by the refusal. She
perceived that it was necessarily positive, and like all minds framed to
resolve to action, there was an instantaneous change of the current of
her thoughts in another direction.

"Then, my darling, my one prayer!" she said. "Postpone our going for a
week. I will try to get help for them elsewhere."

Georgiana was pleased by Emilia's manner of taking the rebuff; but it
required an altercation before she consented to this postponement; she
nodded her head finally in anger.




CHAPTER LVII

By the park-gates that evening, Wilfrid received a letter from the hands
of Tracy Runningbrook. It said: "I am not able to see you now. When I
tell you that I will see you before I leave England, I insist upon your
believing me. I have no head for seeing anybody now. Emilia"--was the
simple signature, perused over and over again by this maddened lover,
under the flitting gate-lamp, after Tracy had left him. The coldness of
Emilia's name so briefly given, concentrated every fire in his heart.
What was it but miserable cowardice, he thought, that prevented him from
getting the peace poor Barrett had found? Intolerable anguish weakened
his limbs. He flung himself on a wayside bank, grovelling, to rise again
calm and quite ready for society, upon the proper application of the
clothes-brush. Indeed; he patted his shoulder and elbow to remove the
soil of his short contact with earth, and tried a cigar: but the first
taste of the smoke sickened his lips. Then he stood for a moment as a man
in a new world. This strange sensation of disgust with familiar
comforting habits, fixed him in perplexity, till a rushing of wild
thoughts and hopes from brain to heart, heart to brain, gave him insight,
and he perceived his state, and that for all he held to in our life he
was dependent upon another; which is virtually the curse of love.

"And he passed along the road," adds the Philosopher, "a weaker man, a
stronger lover. Not that love should diminish manliness or gains by so
doing; but travelling to love by the ways of Sentiment, attaining to the
passion bit by bit, does full surely take from us the strength of our
nature, as if (which is probable) at every step we paid fee to move
forward. Wilfrid had just enough of the coin to pay his footing. He was
verily fining himself down. You are tempted to ask what the value of him
will be by the time that he turns out pure metal? I reply, something
considerable, if by great sacrifice he gets to truth--gets to that
oneness of feeling which is the truthful impulse. At last, he will stand
high above them that have not suffered. The rejection of his cigar."

This wages too absurd. At the risk of breaking our partnership for ever,
I intervene. My Philosopher's meaning is plain, and, as usual, good; but
not even I, who have less reason to laugh at him than anybody, can
gravely accept the juxtaposition of suffering and cigars. And, moreover,
there is a little piece of action in store.

Wilfrid had walked half way to Brookfield, when the longing to look upon
the Richford chamber-windows stirred so hotly within him that he returned
to the gates. He saw Captain Gambier issuing on horseback from under the
lamp. The captain remarked that it was a fine night, and prepared to ride
off, but Wilfrid requested him to dismount, and his voice had the
unmistakeable ring in it by which a man knows that there must be no
trifling. The captain leaned forward to look at him before he obeyed the
summons, All self-control had abandoned Wilfrid in the rage he felt at
Gambier's having seen Emilia, and the jealous suspicion that she had
failed to keep her appointment for the like reason.

"Why do you come here?" he said, hoarsely.

"By Jove! that's an odd question," said the captain, at once taking his
ground.

"Am I to understand that you've been playing with my sister, as you do
with every other woman?"

Captain Gambier murmured quietly, "Every other woman?" and smoothed his
horse's neck. "They're not so easily played with, my dear fellow. You
speak like a youngster."

"I am the only protector of my sister's reputation," said Wilfrid, "and,
by heaven! if you have cast her over to be the common talk, you shall
meet me."

The captain turned to his horse, saying, "Oh! Well!" Being mounted, he
observed: "My dear Pole, you might have sung out all you had to say. Go
to your sister, and if she complains of my behaviour, I'll meet you. Oh,
yes! I'll meet you; I have no objection to excitement. You're in the
hands of an infernally clever woman, who does me the honour to wish to
see my blood on the carpet, I believe; but if this is her scheme, it's
not worthy of her ability. She began pretty well. She arranged the
preliminaries capitally. Why, look here," he relinquished his ordinary
drawl; "I'll tell you something, which you may put down in my favour or
not--just as you like. That woman did her best to compromise your sister
with me on board the yacht. I can't tell you how, and won't. Of course, I
wouldn't if I could; but I have sense enough to admire a very charming
person, and I did the only honourable thing in my power. It's your
sister, my good fellow, who gave me my dismissal. We had a little common
sense conversation--in which she shines. I envy the man that marries her,
but she denies me such luck. There! if you want to shoot me for my share
in that transaction, I'll give you your chance: and if you do, my dear
Pole, either you must be a tremendous fool, or that woman's ten times
cleverer than I thought. You know where to find me. Good night."

The captain gave heel to his horse, hearing no more.

Adela confirmed to Wilfrid what Gambier had spoken; and that it was she
who had given him his dismissal. She called him by his name, "Augustus,"
in a kindly tone, remarking, that Lady Charlotte had persecuted him
dreadfully. "Poor Augustus! his entire reputation for evil is owing to
her black paint-brush. There is no man so easily 'hooked,' as Mrs.
Bayruffle would say, as he, though he has but eight hundred a year:
barely enough to live on. It would have been cruel of me to keep him, for
if he is in love, it's with Emilia."

Wilfrid here took upon himself to reproach her for a certain negligence
of worldly interests. She laughed and blushed with humorous satisfaction;
and, on second thoughts, he changed his opinion, telling her that he
wished he could win his freedom as she had done.

"Wilfrid," she said suddenly, "will you persuade Cornelia not to wear
black?"

"Yes, if you wish it," he replied.

"You will, positively? Then listen, dear. I don't like the prospect of
your alliance with Lady Charlotte."

Wilfrid could not repress a despondent shrug.

"But you can get released," she cried; and ultimately counselled him:
"Mention the name of Lord Eltham before her once, when you are alone.
Watch the result. Only, don't be clumsy. But I need not tell you that."

For hours he cudgelled his brains to know why she desired Cornelia not to
wear black, and when the light broke in on him he laughed like a jolly
youth for an instant. The reason why was in a web so complicated, that,
to have divined what hung on Cornelia's wearing of black, showed a rare
sagacity and perception of character on the little lady's part. As
thus:--Sir Twickenham Pryme is the most sensitive of men to ridicule and
vulgar tattle: he has continued to visit the house, learning by degrees
to prefer me, but still too chivalrous to withdraw his claim to Cornelia,
notwithstanding that he has seen indications of her not too absolute
devotion towards him:--I have let him become aware that I have broken
with Captain Gambier (whose income is eight hundred a year merely), for
the sake of a higher attachment: now, since the catastrophe, he can with
ease make it appear to the world that I was his choice from the first,
seeing that Cornelia will assuredly make no manner of objection:--but, if
she, with foolish sentimental persistence, assumes the garb of sorrow,
then Sir Twickenham's ears will tingle; he will retire altogether; he
will not dare to place himself in a position which will lend a colour to
the gossip, that jilted by one sister, he flew for consolation to the
other; jilted, too, for the mere memory of a dead man! an additional
insult!

Exquisite intricacy! Wilfrid worked through all the intervolutions, and
nearly forgot his wretchedness in admiration of his sister's mental
endowments. He was the more willing to magnify them, inasmuch as he
thereby strengthened his hope that liberty would follow the speaking of
the talismanic name of Eltham to Lady Charlotte, alone. He had come to
look upon her as the real barrier between himself and Emilia.

"I think we have brains," he said softly, on his pillow, upon a review of
the beggared aspect of his family; and he went to sleep with a smile on
his face.




CHAPTER LVIII

A sharp breath of air had passed along the dews, and all the young green
of the fresh season shone in white jewels. The sky, set with very dim
distant stars, was in grey light round a small brilliant moon. Every
space of earth lifted clear to her; the woodland listened; and in the
bright silence the nightingales sang loud.

Emilia and Tracy Runningbrook were threading their way toward a lane over
which great oak branches intervolved; thence under larches all with
glittering sleeves, and among spiky brambles, with the purple leaf and
the crimson frosted. The frost on the edges of the brown-leaved bracken
gave a faint colour. Here and there, intense silver dazzled their eyes.
As they advanced amid the icy hush, so hard and instant was the ring of
the earth under them, their steps sounded as if expected.

"This night seems made for me!" said Emilia.

Tracy had no knowledge of the object of the expedition. He was her squire
simply; had pitched on a sudden into an enamoured condition, and walked
beside her, caring little whither he was led, so that she left him not.

They came upon a clearing in the wood where a tournament of knights might
have been held. Ranged on two sides were rows of larches, and forward,
fit to plume a dais, a clump of tall firs stood with a flowing silver fir
to right and left, and the white stems of the birch-tree shining from
among them. This fair woodland court had three broad oaks, as for
gateways; and the moon was above it. Moss and the frosted brown fern were
its flooring.

Emilia said eagerly, "This way," and ran under one of the oaks. She
turned to Tracy following: "There is no doubt of it." Her hand was lying
softly on her throat.

"Your voice?" Tracy divined her.

She nodded, but frowned lovingly at the shout he raised, and he
understood that there was haply some plot to be worked out. The open
space was quite luminous in the middle of those three deep walls of
shadow. Emilia enjoined him to rest where he was, and wait for her on
that spot like a faithful sentinel, whatsoever ensued. Coaxing his
promise, she entered the square of white light alone. Presently she stood
upon a low mound, so that her whole figure was distinct, while the moon
made her features visible.

Expectancy sharpened the stillness to Tracy's ears. A nightingale began
the charm. He was answered by another. Many were soon in song, till even
the pauses were sweet with them. Tracy had the thought that they were
calling for Emilia to commence; that it was nature preluding the divine
human voice, weaving her spell for it. He was seized by a thirst to hear
the adorable girl, who stood there patiently, with her face lifted soft
in moonlight. And then the blood thrilled along his veins, as if one more
than mortal had touched him. It seemed to him long before he knew that
Emilia's voice was in the air.

In such a place, at such a time, there is no wizardry like a woman's
voice. Emilia had gained in force and fulness. She sang with a stately
fervour, letting the notes flow from her breast, while both her arms hung
loose, and not a gesture escaped her. Tracy's fiery imagination set him
throbbing, as to the voice of the verified spirit of the place. He heard
nothing but Emilia, and scarce felt that it was she, or that tears were
on his eyelids, till her voice sank richly, deep into the bosom of the
woods. Then the stillness, like one folding up a precious jewel, seemed
to pant audibly.

"She's not alone!" This was human speech at his elbow, uttered in some
stupefied amazement. In an extremity of wrath, Tracy turned about to
curse the intruder, and discerned Wilfrid, eagerly bent forward on the
other side of the oak by which he leaned. Advancing toward Emilia, two
figures were seen. Mr. Pericles in his bearskin was easily to be
distinguished. His companion was Laura Tinley. The Greek moved at rapid
strides, and coming near upon Emilia, raised his hands as in exclamation.
At once he disencumbered his shoulders of the enormous wrapper, held it
aloft imperiously, and by main force extinguished Emilia. Laura's shrill
laugh resounded.

"Oh! beastly bathos!" Tracy groaned in his heart. "Here we are down in
Avernus in a twinkling!"

There was evidently quick talk going on among the three, after which
Emilia, heavily weighted, walked a little apart with Mr. Pericles, who
looked lean and lank beside her, and gesticulated in his wildest manner.
Tracy glanced about for Wilfrid. The latter was not visible, but,
stepping up the bank of sand and moss, appeared a lady in shawl and hat,
in whom he recognized Lady Charlotte. He went up to her and saluted.

"Ah! Tracy," she said. "I saw you leave the drawing room, and expected to
find you here. So, the little woman has got her voice again; but why on
earth couldn't she make the display at Richford? It's very pretty, and I
dare say you highly approve of this kind of romantic interlude, Signor
Poet, but it strikes me as being rather senseless."

"But, are you alone? What on earth brings you here?" asked Tracy.

"Oh!" the lady shrugged. "I've a guard to the rear. I told her I would
come. She said I should hear something to-night, if I did. I fancied
naturally the appointment had to do with her voice, and wished to please
her. It's only five minutes from the west-postern of the park. Is she
going to sing any more? There's company apparently. Shall we go and
declare ourselves?"

"I'm on duty, and can't," replied Tracy, and twisting his body in an
ecstasy, added: "Did you hear her?"

Lady Charlotte laughed softly. "You speak as if you had taken a hurt, my
dear boy. This sort of scene is dangerous to poets. But, I thought you
slighted music."

"I don't know whether I'm breathing yet," Tracy rejoined. She's a Goddess
to me from this moment. Not like music? Am I a dolt? She would raise me
from the dead, if she sang over me. Put me in a boat, and let her sing
on, and all may end! I could die into colour, hearing her! That's the
voice they hear in heaven."

"When they are good, I suppose," the irreverent lady appended. "What's
that?" And she held her head to listen.

Emilia's mortal tones were calling Wilfrid's name. The lady became grave,
as with keen eyes she watched the open space, and to a second call
Wilfrid presented himself in a leisurely way from under cover of the
trees; stepping into the square towards the three, as one equal to all
occasions, and specially prepared for this. He was observed to bow to Mr.
Pericles, and the two men extended hands, Laura Tinley standing decently
away from them.

Lady Charlotte could not contain her mystification. "What does it mean?"
she said. "Wilfrid was to be in town at the Ambassador's to-night! He
wrote to me at five o'clock from his Club! Is he insane? Has he lost
every sense of self-interest? He can't have made up his mind to miss his
opportunity, when all the introductions are there! Run, like a good
creature, Tracy, and see if that is Wilfrid, and come back and tell me;
but don't sag I am here."

"Desert my post?" Tracy hugged his arms tight together. "Not if I freeze
here!"

The doubt in Lady Charlotte's eyes was transient. She dropped her glass.
Visible adieux were being waved between Mr. Pericles and Laura Tinley on
the one hand, and Wilfrid and Emilia, on the other. After which, and at a
quick pace, manifestly shivering, Mr. Pericles drew Laura into the
shadows, and Emilia, clad in the immense bearskin, as with a trailing
black barbaric robe, walked toward the oaks. Wilfrid's head was stooped
to a level with Emilia's, into whose face he was looking obliviously,
while the hot words sprang from his lips. They neared the oak, and Emilia
slanted her direction, so as to avoid the neighbourhood of the tree.
Tracy felt a sudden grasp of his arm. It was momentary, coming
simultaneously with a burst of Wilfrid's voice.

"Do I know what I love, you ask? I love your footprints! Everything you
have touched is like fire to me. Emilia! Emilia!"

"Then," came the clear reply, "you do not love Lady Charlotte?"

"Love her!" he shouted scornfully, and subdued his voice to add: "she has
a good heart, and whatever scandal is talked of her and Lord Eltham, she
is a well-meaning friend. But, love her! You, you I love!"

"Theatrical business," Lady Charlotte murmured, and imagined she had
expected it when she promised Emilia she would step out into the night
air, as possibly she had.

The lady walked straight up to them.

"Well, little one!" she addressed Emilia; "I am glad you have recovered
your voice. You play the game of tit-for-tat remarkably well. We will now
sheath our battledores. There is my hand."

The unconquerable aplomb in Lady Charlotte, which Wilfrid always
artistically admired, and which always mastered him; the sight of her
pale face and courageous eyes; and her choice of the moment to come
forward and declare her presence;--all fell upon the furnace of Wilfrid's
heart like a quenching flood. In a stupefaction, he confessed to himself
that he could say actually nothing. He could hardly look up.

Emilia turned her eyes from the outstretched hand, to the lady's face.

"What will it mean?" she said.

"That we are quits, I presume; and that we bear no malice. At any rate,
that I relinquish the field. I like a hand that can deal a good stroke. I
conceived you to be a mere little romantic person, and correct my
mistake. You win the prize, you see."

"You would have made him an Austrian, and he is now safe from that. I win
nothing more," said Emilia.

When Tracy and Emilia stood alone, he cried out in a rapture of praise,
"Now I know what a power you have. You may bid me live or die."

The recent scene concerned chiefly the actors who had moved onward: it
had touched Emilia but lightly, and him not at all. But, while he
magnified the glory of her singing, the imperishable note she had sounded
this night, and the power and the triumph that would be hers, Emilia's
bosom began to heave, and she checked him with a storm of tears.
"Triumph! yes! what is this I have done? Oh, Merthyr, my, true hero! He
praises me and knows nothing of how false I have been to you. I am a
slave! I have sold myself--sold myself!" She dropped her face in her
hands, broken with grief. "He fights," she pursued; "he fights for my
country. I feel his blood--it seems to run from my body as it runs from
his. Not if he is dying--I dare not go to him if he is dying! I am in
chains. I have sworn it for money. See what a different man Merthyr is
from any on earth! Would he shoot himself for a woman? Would he grow
meaner the more he loved her? My hero! my hero! and Tracy, my friend!
what is my grief now? Merthyr is my hero, but I hear him--I hear him
speaking it into my ears with his own lips, that I do not love him. And
it is true. I never should have sold myself for three weary years away
from him, if I had loved him. I know it now it is done. I thought more of
my poor friends and Wilfrid, than of Merthyr, who bleeds for my country!
And he will not spurn me when we meet. Yes, if he lives, he will come to
me gentle as a ghost that has seen God!"

She abandoned herself to weeping. Tracy, in a tender reverence for one
who could speak such solemn matter spontaneously, supported her, and felt
her tears as a rain of flame on his heart.

The nightingales were mute. Not a sound was heard from bough or brake.




CHAPTER LIX

A wreck from the last Lombard revolt landed upon our shores in June. His
right arm was in a sling, and his Italian servant following him, kept
close by his side, with a ready hand, as if fearing that at any moment
the wounded gentleman's steps might fail. There was no public war going
on just then: for which reason he was eyed suspiciously by the rest of
the passengers making their way up the beach; who seemed to entertain an
impression that he had no business at such a moment to be crippled, and
might be put down as one of those foreign fools who stand out for a
trifle as targets to fools a little luckier than themselves. Here, within
our salt girdle, flourishes common sense. We cherish life; we abhor
bloodshed; we have no sympathy with your juvenile points of honour: we
are, in short, a civilized people; and seeing that Success has made us
what we are, we advise other nations to succeed, or be quiet. Of all of
which the gravely-smiling gentleman appeared well aware; for, with an eye
that courted none, and a perfectly calm face, he passed through the
crowd, only once availing himself of his brown-faced Beppo's
spontaneously depressed shoulder when a twinge of pain shooting from his
torn foot took his strength away. While he remained in sight, some
speculation as to his nationality continued: he had been heard to speak
nothing but Italian, and yet the flower of English cultivation was
signally manifest in his style and bearing. The purchase of that day's
journal, giving information that the Lombard revolt was fully, it was
thought finally, crushed out, and the insurgents scattered, hanged, or
shot, suggested to a young lady in a group melancholy with luggage, that
the wounded gentleman was one who had escaped from the Austrians.

"Only, he is English."

"If he is, he deserves what he's got."

A stout Briton delivered this sentence, and gave in addition a sermon on
meddling, short, emphatic, and not uncheerful apparently, if estimated by
the hearty laugh that closed it; though a lady remarked, "Oh, dear me!
You are very sweeping."

"By George! ma'am," cried the Briton, holding out his newspaper, "here's
a leader on the identical subject, with all my views in it! Yes! those
Italians are absurd: they never were a people: never agreed. Egad! the
only place they're fit for is the stage. Art! if you like. They know all
about colouring canvas, and sculpturing. I don't deny 'em their merits,
and I don't mind listening to their squalling, now and then: though, I'll
tell you what: have you ever noticed the calves of those singers?--I
mean, the men. Perhaps not--for they' ve got none. They're sticks, not
legs. Who can think much of fellows with such legs? Now, the next time
you go to the Italian Opera, notice 'em. Ha! ha!--well, that would sound
queer, told at secondhand; but, just look at their legs, ma'am, and ask
yourself whether there's much chance for a country that stands on legs
like those! Let them paint, and carve blocks, and sing. They're not fit
for much else, as far as I can see."

Thus, in the pride of his manliness, the male Briton. A shrill cry drew
the attention of this group once more to the person who had just kindly
furnished a topic. He had been met on his way by a lady unmistakeably
foreign in her appearance. "Marini!" was the word of the cry; and the
lady stood with her head bent and her hands stiffened rigidly.

"Lost her husband, I dare say!" the Briton murmured. "Perhaps he's one of
the 'hanged, or shot,' in the list here Hanged! shot! Ask those Austrians
to be merciful, and that's their reply. Why, good God! it's like the
grunt of a savage beast! Hanged! shot!--count how many for one day's
work! Ten at Verona; fifteen at Mantua; five--there, stop! If we enter
into another alliance with those infernal ruffians!--if they're not
branded in the face of Europe as inhuman butchers! if I--by George! if I
were an Italian I'd handle a musket myself, and think great guns the
finest music going. Mind, if there's a subscription for the widows of
these poor fellows, I put down my name; so shall my wife, so shall my
daughters, so we will all, down to the baby!"

Merthyr's name was shouted first on his return to England by Mrs. Chump.
He was waiting on the platform of the London station for the train to
take him to Richford, when, "Oh! Mr. Pow's, Mr. Pow's!" resounded, and
Mrs. Chump fluttered before him. She was on her way to Brookfield, she
said; and it was, she added, her firm belief that heaven had sent him to
her sad, not deeming "that poor creature, Mr. Braintop, there, sufficient
for the purpose. For what I've got to go through, among them at
Brookfield, Mr. Pow's, it's perf'ctly awful. Mr. Braintop," she turned to
the youth, "you may go now. And don't go takin' ship and sailin' for
Italy after the little Belloni, for ye haven't a chance--poor fella!
though he combs 's hair so careful, Mr. Pow's, and ye might almost laugh
and cry together to see how humble he is, and audacious too--all in a
lump. For, when little Belloni was in the ship, ye know, and she
thinkin', 'not one of my friends near to wave a handkerchief!' behold,
there's that boy Braintop just as by maguc, and he wavin' his best, which
is a cambric, and a present from myself, and precious wet that night, ye
might swear; for the quiet lovers, Mr. Pow's, they cry, they do,
buckutsful!"

"And is Miss Belloni gone?" said Merthyr, looking steadily for answer.

"To be sure, sir, she has; but have ye got a squeak of pain? Oh, dear! it
makes my blood creep to see a man who's been where there's been firing of
shots in a temper. Ye're vary pale, sir."

"She went--on what day?" asked Merthyr.

"Oh! I can't poss'bly tell ye that, Mr. Pow's, havin' affairs of my own
most urrgent. But, Mr. Paricles has got her at last. That's certain.
Gall'ns of tears has poor Mr. Braintop cried over it, bein' one of the
mew-in-a-corner sort of young men, ye know, what never win the garl, but
cry enough to float her and the lucky fella too, and off they go, and he
left on the shore."

Merthyr looked impatiently out of the window. His wounds throbbed and his
forehead was moist.

"With Mr. Pericles?" he queried, while Mrs. Chump was giving him the
reasons for the immediate visit to Brookfield.

"They're cap'tal friends again, ye know, Mr. Pow's, Mr. Paricles and
Pole; and Pole's quite set up, and yesterday mornin' sends me two
thousand pounds--not a penny less! and ye'll believe me, I was in a stiff
gape for five minutes when Mr. Braintop shows the money. What a
temptation for the young man! But Pole didn't know his love for little
Belloni."

"Has she no one with her?" Merthyr seized the opportunity of her name
being pronounced to get clear tidings of her, if possible.

"Oh, dear, yes, Mr. Paricles is with her," returned Mrs. Chump. "And, as
I was sayin', sir, two thousand pounds! I ran off to my lawyer; for,
it'll seem odd to ye, now, Mr. Pow's, that know my 'ffection for the
Poles, poor dears, I'd an action against 'em. 'Stop ut,' I cries out to
the man: if he'd been one o' them that wears a wig, I couldn't ha' spoken
so--'Stop ut,' I cries, not a bit afraid of 'm. I wouldn't let the man go
on, for all I want to know is, that I'm not rrooned. And now I've got
money, I must have friends; for when I hadn't, ye know, my friends seemed
against me, and now I have, it's the world that does, where'll I hide it?
Oh, dear! now I'm with you, I don't mind, though this brown-faced
forr'ner servant of yours, he gives me shivers. Can he understand
English?--becas I've got ut all in my pockut!"

Merthyr sighed wearily for release. At last the train slackened speed,
and the well-known fir-country appeared in sight. Mrs. Chump caught him
by the arm as he prepared to alight. "Oh! and are ye goin' to let me face
the Poles without anyone to lean on in that awful moment, and no one to
bear witness how kind I've spoken of 'em. Mr. Pow's! will ye prove that
you're a blessed angel, sir, and come, just for five minutes--which is a
short time to do a thing for a woman she'll never forget."

"Pray spare me, madam," Merthyr pleaded. "I have much to learn at
Richford."

"I cann't spare ye, sir," cried Mrs. Chump. "I cann't go before that
fam'ly quite alone. They're a tarr'ble fam'ly. Oh! I'll be goin' on my
knees to ye, Mr. Pow's. Weren't ye sent by heaven now? And you to run
away! And if you're woundud, won't I have a carr'ge from the station,
which'll be grander to go in, and impose on 'em, ye know. Pray, sir! I
entreat ye!"

The tears burst from her eyes, and her hot hand clung to his imploringly.

Merthyr was a witness of the return of Mrs. Chump to Brookfield. In that
erewhile abode of Fine Shades, the Nice Feelings had foundered. The
circle of a year, beginning so fairly for them, enfolded the ladies and
their first great scheme of life. Emilia had been a touchstone to this
family. They could not know it in their deep affliction, but in manger
they had much improved. Their welcome of Mrs. Chump was an admirable
seasoning of stateliness with kindness. Cornelia and Arabella took her
hand, listening with an incomparable soft smile to her first
protestations, which they quieted, and then led her to Mr. Pole; of whom
it may be said, that an accomplished coquette could not in his situation
have behaved with a finer skill; so that, albeit received back into the
house, Mrs. Chump had yet to discover what her footing there was to be,
and trembled like the meanest of culprits. Mr. Pole shook her hand
warmly, tenderly, almost tearfully, and said to the melted woman: "You're
right, Martha; it's much better for us to examine accounts in a friendly
way, than to have strangers and lawyers, and what not--people who can't
possibly know the whole history, don't you see--meddling and making a
scandal; and I'm much obliged to you for coming."

Vainly Mrs. Chump employed alternately innuendo and outcry to make him
perceive that her coming involved a softer business, and that to money,
she having it now, she gave not a thought. He assured her that in future
she must; that such was his express desire; that it was her duty to
herself and others. And while saying this, which seemed to indicate that
widowhood would be her state as far as he was concerned, he pressed her
hand with extreme sweetness, and his bird's-eyes twinkled obligingly. It
is to be feared that Mr. Pole had passed the age of improvement, save in
his peculiar art. After a time Nature stops, and says to us 'thou art now
what thou wilt be.'

Cornelia was in black from neck to foot. She joined the conversation as
the others did, and indeed more flowingly than Adela, whose visage was
soured. It was Cornelia to whom Merthyr explained his temporary
subjection to the piteous appeals of Mrs. Chump. She smiled humorously to
reassure him of her perfect comprehension of the apology for his visit,
and of his welcome: and they talked, argued a little, differed, until
the terrible thought that he talked, and even looked like some one else,
drew the blood from her lips, and robbed her pulses of their play. She
spoke of Emilia, saying plainly and humbly: "All we have is owing to
her." Arabella spoke of Emilia likewise, but with a shade of the foregone
tone of patronage. "She will always be our dear little sister." Adela
continued silent, as with ears awake for the opening of a door. Was it in
ever-thwarted anticipation of the coming of Sir Twickenham?

Merthyr's inquiry after Wilfrid produced a momentary hesitation on
Cornelia's Part--"He has gone to Verona. We have an uncle in the Austrian
service," she said; and Merthyr bowed.

What was this tale of Emilia, that grew more and more perplexing as he
heard it bit by bit? The explanation awaited him at Richford. There, when
Georgiana had clasped her brother in one last jealous embrace, she gave
him the following letter straightway, to save him, haply, from the false
shame of that eager demand for one, which she saw ready to leap to words
in his eyes. He read it, sitting in the Richford library alone, while the
great rhododendron bloomed outside, above the shaven sunny sward, looking
like a monstrous tropic bird alighted to brood an hour in full sunlight.

"My Friend!"

"I would say my Beloved! I will not write it, for it would be false. I
have read of the defeat. Why was a battle risked at that cruel place!
Here are we to be again for so many years before we can win God to be on
our side! And I--do you not know? we used to talk of it!--I never can
think it the Devil who has got the upper hand. What succeeds, I always
think should succeed--was meant to, because the sky looks clear over it.
This knocks a blow at my heart and keeps it silent and only just beating.
I feel that you are safe. That, I am thankful for. If you were not, God
would warn me, and not let me mock him with thanks when I pray. I pray
till my eyelids burn, on purpose to get a warning if there is any black
messenger to be sent to me. I do not believe it.

"For three years I am a prisoner. I go to the Conservatorio in Milan with
Mr. Pericles, and my poor little mother, who cries, asking me where she
will be among such a people, until I wonder she should be my mother. My
voice has returned. Oh, Merthyr! my dear, calm friend! to keep calling
you friend, and friend, puts me to sleep softly!--Yes, I have my voice. I
felt I had it, like some one in a room with us when we will not open our
eyes. There was misery everywhere, and yet I was glad. I kept it secret.
I began to feel myself above the world. I dreamed of what I would do for
everybody. I thought of you least! I tell you so, and take a scourge and
scourge myself, for it is true that in her new joy this miserable
creature that I am thought of you least. Now I have the punishment!

"My friend! the Poles were at the mercy of Mr. Pericles: Wilfrid had
struck him: Mr. Pericles was angry and full of mischief. Those dear
people had been kind to me, and I heard they were poor. I felt money in
my breast, in my throat, that only wanted coining. I went to Georgiana,
and oh! how truly she proved to me that she loves you better than I do.
She refused to part with money that you might soon want. I laid a scheme
for Mr. Pericles to hear me sing. He heard me, and my scheme succeeded.
If Italy knew as well as I, she would never let her voice be heard till
she is sure of it:--Yes! from foot to head, I knew it was impossible to
fail. If a country means to be free, the fire must run through it and
make it feel that certainty. Then--away the whitecoat! I sang, and the
man twisted, as if I had bent him in my hand. He rushed to me, and
offered me any terms I pleased, if for three years I would go to the
Conservatorio at Milan, and learn submissively. It is a little grief to
me that I think this man loves music more deeply than I do. In the two
things I love best, the love of others exceeds mine. I named a sum of
money--immense! and I desired that Mr. Pericles should assist Mr. Pole in
his business. He consented at once to everything. The next day he gave me
the money, and I signed my name and pledged my honour to an engagement.
My friends were relieved.

"It was then I began to think of you. I had not to study the matter long
to learn that I did not love you: and I will not trust my own feelings as
they come to me now. I judge myself by my acts, or, Merthyr! I should
sink to the ground like a dead body when I think of separation from you
for three years. But, what am I? I am a raw girl. I command nothing but
raw and flighty hearts of men. Are they worth anything? Let me study
three years, without any talk of hearts at all. It commenced too early,
and has left nothing to me but a dreadful knowledge of the weakness in
most people:--not in you!

"If I might call you my Beloved! and so chain myself to you, I think I
should have all your firmness and double my strength. I will not; for I
will not have what I do not deserve. I think of you reading this, till I
try to get to you; my heart is like a bird caught in the hands of a cruel
boy. By what I have done I know I do not love you. Must we half-despise a
man to love him? May no dear woman that I know ever marry the man she
first loves! My misery now is gladness, is like rain-drops on rising
wings, if I say to myself 'Free! free, Emilia!' I am bound for three
years, but I smile at such a bondage to my body. Evviva! my soul is free!
Three years of freedom, and no sounding of myself--three years of
growing, and studying; three years of idle heart!--Merthyr! I throb to
think that those three years--true man! my hero, I may call you!--those
three years may make me worthy of you. And if you have given all to
Italy, that a daughter of Italy should help to return it, seems, my
friend, so tenderly sweet--here is the first drop from my eyes!

"I would break what you call a Sentiment: I broke my word to Wilfrid. But
this sight of money has a meaning that I cannot conquer. I know you would
not wish me to for your own pleasure; and therefore I go. I hope to be
growing; I fly like a seed to Italy. Let me drill, and take sharp words,
and fret at trifles! I lift my face to that prospect as if I smelt new
air. I am changeing--I have no dreams of Italy, no longings, but go to
see her like a machine ready to do my work. Whoever speaks to me, I feel
that I look at them and know them. I see the faults of my country--Oh,
beloved Breseians! not yours, Florentines! nor yours, dear Venice! We
will be silent when they speak of the Milanese, till Italy can say to
them, 'That conduct is not Italian, my children.' I see the faults.
Nothing vexes me.

"Addio! My friend, we will speak English in dear England! Tell all that I
shall never forget England! My English Merthyr! the blood you have shed
is not for a woman. The blood that you have shed, laurels spring from it!
For a woman, the blood spilt is sickly and poor, and nourishes nothing. I
shudder at the thought of one we knew. He makes Love seem like a yellow
light over a plague-spotted city, like a painting I have seen. Goodbye to
the name of Love for three years! My engagement to Mr. Pericles is that I
am not to write, not to receive letters. To you I say now, trust me for
three years! Merthyr's answer is already in my bosom. Beloved!--let me
say it once--when the answer to any noble thing I might ask of you is in
my bosom instantly, is not that as much as marriage? But be under no
deception. See me as I am. Oh, good-bye! good-bye! Good-bye to you!
Good-bye to England!

          "I am,

        "Most humbly and affectionately,
          "Your friend,
        "And her daughter by the mother's side,

          "Emilia Alessandra Belloni."




     ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS

     A plunge into the deep is of little moment
     A marriage without love is dishonour
     Active despair is a passion that must be superseded
     Am I ill? I must be hungry!
     And, ladies, if you will consent to be likened to a fruit
     And he passed along the road, adds the Philosopher
     Bear in mind that we are sentimentalists--The eye is our servant
     Being heard at night, in the nineteenth century
     Beyond a plot of flowers, a gold-green meadow dipped to a ridge
     But love for a parent is not merely duty
     Depreciating it after the fashion of chartered hypocrites.
     Emilia alone of the party was as a blot to her
     Fine Shades were still too dominant at Brookfield
     Had Shakespeare's grandmother three Christian names?
     He thinks that the country must be saved by its women as well
     His alien ideas were not unimpressed by the picture
     Hushing together, they agreed that it had been a false move
     I had to cross the park to give a lesson
     I cannot delay; but I request you, that are here privileged
     I had to make my father and mother live on potatoes
     I detest anything that has to do with gratitude
     I know that your father has been hearing tales told of me
     I am not ashamed
     It was as if she had been eyeing a golden door shut fast
     Littlenesses of which women are accused
     Love that shrieks at a mortal wound, and bleeds humanly
     Love discerns unerringly what is and what is not duty
     Love the poor devil
     Love, with his accustomed cunning
     Man who beats his wife my first question is, 'Do he take his tea?'
     My mistress! My glorious stolen fruit! My dark angel of love
     My voice! I have my voice! Emilia had cried it out to herself
     My engagement to Mr. Pericles is that I am not to write
     No nose to the hero, no moral to the tale
     Nor can a protest against coarseness be sweepingly interpreted
     Oh! beastly bathos
     On a wild April morning
     Once my love? said he. Not now?--does it mean, not now?
     One of those men whose characters are read off at a glance
     Our partner is our master
     Passion does not inspire dark appetite--Dainty innocence does
     Passion, he says, is noble strength on fire
     Pleasure sat like an inextinguishable light on her face
     Poor mortals are not in the habit of climbing Olympus to ask
     Revived for them so much of themselves
     She was perhaps a little the taller of the two
     She had great awe of the word 'business'
     Silence was their only protection to the Nice Feelings
     So it is when you play at Life! When you will not go straight
     Solitude is pasturage for a suspicion
     The majority, however, had been snatched out of this bliss
     The circle which the ladies of Brookfield were designing
     The woman follows the man, and music fits to verse,
     The sentimentalists are represented by them among the civilized
     The dismally-lighted city wore a look of Judgement terrible to see
     The sentimentalist goes on accumulating images
     The gallant cornet adored delicacy and a gilded refinement
     The philosopher (I would keep him back if I could)
     Their way was down a green lane and across long meadow-paths
     They, meantime, who had a contempt for sleep
     They had all noticed, seen, and observed
     To know that you are in England, breathing the same air with me
     True love excludes no natural duty
     Victims of the modern feminine 'ideal'
     We have now looked into the hazy interior of their systems
     We are, in short, a civilized people
     What was this tale of Emilia, that grew more and more perplexing
     Wilfrid perceived that he had become an old man
     Women are wonderfully quick scholars under ridicule
     You have not to be told that I desire your happiness above all






RHODA FLEMING, complete

By George Meredith




CONTENTS

BOOK 1.
I.        THE KENTISH FAMILY
II.       QUEEN ANNE'S FARM
III.      SUGGESTS THE MIGHT OF THE MONEY DEMON
IV.       THE TEXT FROM SCRIPTURE
V.        THE SISTERS MEET
VI.       EDWARD AND ALGERNON
VII.      GREAT NEWS FROM DAHLIA
VIII.     INTRODUCES MRS. LOVELL
IX.       ROBERT INTERVENES
X.        DAHLIA IS NOT VISIBLE
XI.       AN INDICATIVE DUET IN A MINOR KEY

BOOK 2.
XII.      AT THE THEATRE.
XIII.     THE FARMER SPEAKS
XIV.      BETWEEN RHODA AND ROBERT
XI.       A VISIT TO WREXBY HALL
XII.      AT FAIRLY PARK
XVII.     A YEOMAN OF THE OLD BREED
XVIII.    AN ASSEMBLY AT THE PILOT INN
XIX.      ROBERT SMITTEN LOW
XX.       MRS. LOVELL SHOWS A TAME BRUTE

BOOK 3.
XXI.      GIVES A GLIMPSE OF WHAT POOR VILLANIES THE STORY CONTAINS
XXII.     EDWARD TAKES HIS COURSE
XXIII.    MAJOR PERCY WARING
XXIV.     WARBEACH VILLAGE CHURCH
XXV.      OF THE FEARFUL TEMPTATION WHICH CAME UPON ANTHONY HACKBUT, AND
          OF HIS MEETING WITH DAHLIA
XXVI.     IN THE PARK
XXVII.    CONTAINS A STUDY OF A FOOL IN TROUBLE
XXVIII.   EDWARD'S LETTER
XXIX.     FURTHERMORE OF THE FOOL

BOOK 4.
XXX.      THE EXPIATION
XXXI.     THE MELTING OF THE THOUSAND
XXXII.    LA QUESTION D'ARGENT
XXXIII.   EDWARD'S RETURN
XXXIV.    FATHER AND SON
XXXV.     THE NIGHT BEFORE
XXXVI.    EDWARD MEETS HIS MATCH
XXXVII.   EDWARD TRIES HIS ELOQUENCE
XXXVIII.  TOO LATE

BOOK 5.
XXXIX.    DAHLIA GOES HOME
XL.       A FREAK OF THE MONEY-DEMON, THAT MAY HAVE BEEN ANTICIPATED
XLI.      DAHLIA'S FRENZY
XLII.     ANTHONY IN A COLLAPSE
XLIII.    RHODA PLEDGES HER HAND
XLIV.     THE ENEMY APPEARS
XLV.      THE FARMER IS AWAKENED
XLVI.     WHEN THE NIGHT IS DARKEST
XLVII.    DAWN IS NEAR
XLVIII.   CONCLUSION




CHAPTER I

Remains of our good yeomanry blood will be found in Kent, developing
stiff, solid, unobtrusive men, and very personable women. The distinction
survives there between Kentish women and women of Kent, as a true
South-eastern dame will let you know, if it is her fortune to belong to
that favoured portion of the county where the great battle was fought, in
which the gentler sex performed manful work, but on what luckless heads
we hear not; and when garrulous tradition is discreet, the severe
historic Muse declines to hazard a guess. Saxon, one would presume, since
it is thought something to have broken them.

My plain story is of two Kentish damsels, and runs from a home of flowers
into regions where flowers are few and sickly, on to where the flowers
which breathe sweet breath have been proved in mortal fire.

Mrs. Fleming, of Queen Anne's Farm, was the wife of a yeoman-farmer of
the county. Both were of sound Kentish extraction, albeit varieties of
the breed. The farm had its name from a tradition, common to many other
farmhouses within a circuit of the metropolis, that the ante-Hanoverian
lady had used the place in her day as a nursery-hospital for the royal
little ones. It was a square three-storied building of red brick, much
beaten and stained by the weather, with an ivied side, up which the ivy
grew stoutly, topping the roof in triumphant lumps. The house could
hardly be termed picturesque. Its aspect had struck many eyes as being
very much that of a red-coat sentinel grenadier, battered with service,
and standing firmly enough, though not at ease. Surrounding it was a high
wall, built partly of flint and partly of brick, and ringed all over with
grey lichen and brown spots of bearded moss, that bore witness to the
touch of many winds and rains. Tufts of pale grass, and gilliflowers, and
travelling stone-crop, hung from the wall, and driblets of ivy ran
broadening to the outer ground. The royal Arms were said to have
surmounted the great iron gateway; but they had vanished, either with the
family, or at the indications of an approaching rust. Rust defiled its
bars; but, when you looked through them, the splendour of an unrivalled
garden gave vivid signs of youth, and of the taste of an orderly,
laborious, and cunning hand.

The garden was under Mrs. Fleming's charge. The joy of her love for it
was written on its lustrous beds, as poets write. She had the poetic
passion for flowers. Perhaps her taste may now seem questionable. She
cherished the old-fashioned delight in tulips; the house was reached on a
gravel-path between rows of tulips, rich with one natural blush, or
freaked by art. She liked a bulk of colour; and when the dahlia dawned
upon our gardens, she gave her heart to dahlias. By good desert, the
fervent woman gained a prize at a flower-show for one of her dahlias, and
`Dahlia' was the name uttered at the christening of her eldest daughter,
at which all Wrexby parish laughed as long as the joke could last. There
was laughter also when Mrs. Fleming's second daughter received the name
of 'Rhoda;' but it did not endure for so long a space, as it was known
that she had taken more to the solitary and reflective reading of her
Bible, and to thoughts upon flowers eternal. Country people are not
inclined to tolerate the display of a passion for anything. They find it
as intrusive and exasperating as is, in the midst of larger
congregations, what we call genius. For some years, Mrs. Fleming's
proceedings were simply a theme for gossips, and her vanity was openly
pardoned, until that delusively prosperous appearance which her labour
lent to the house, was worn through by the enforced confession of there
being poverty in the household. The ragged elbow was then projected in
the face of Wrexby in a manner to preclude it from a sober appreciation
of the fairness of the face.

Critically, moreover, her admission of great poppy-heads into her garden
was objected to. She would squander her care on poppies, and she had been
heard to say that, while she lived, her children should be fully fed. The
encouragement of flaunting weeds in a decent garden was indicative of a
moral twist that the expressed resolution to supply her table with
plentiful nourishment, no matter whence it came, or how provided,
sufficiently confirmed. The reason with which she was stated to have
fortified her stern resolve was of the irritating order, right in the
abstract, and utterly unprincipled in the application. She said, `Good
bread, and good beef, and enough of both, make good blood; and my
children shall be stout.' This is such a thing as maybe announced by
foreign princesses and rulers over serfs; but English Wrexby, in
cogitative mood, demanded an equivalent for its beef and divers economies
consumed by the hungry children of the authoritative woman. Practically
it was obedient, for it had got the habit of supplying her. Though
payment was long in arrear, the arrears were not treated as lost ones by
Mrs. Fleming, who, without knowing it, possessed one main secret for
mastering the custodians of credit. She had a considerate remembrance and
regard for the most distant of her debts, so that she seemed to be only
always a little late, and exceptionally wrongheaded in theory. Wrexby,
therefore, acquiesced in helping to build up her children to stoutness,
and but for the blindness of all people, save artists, poets, novelists,
to the grandeur of their own creations, the inhabitants of this Kentish
village might have had an enjoyable pride in the beauty and robust grace
of the young girls,--fair-haired, black-haired girls, a kindred contrast,
like fire and smoke, to look upon. In stature, in bearing, and in
expression, they were, if I may adopt the eloquent modern manner of
eulogy, strikingly above their class. They carried erect shoulders, like
creatures not ashamed of showing a merely animal pride, which is never
quite apart from the pride of developed beauty. They were as upright as
Oriental girls, whose heads are nobly poised from carrying the pitcher to
the well. Dark Rhoda might have passed for Rachel, and Dahlia called her
Rachel. They tossed one another their mutual compliments, drawn from the
chief book of their reading. Queen of Sheba was Dahlia's title. No master
of callisthenics could have set them up better than their mother's
receipt for making good blood, combined with a certain harmony of their
systems, had done; nor could a schoolmistress have taught them correcter
speaking. The characteristic of girls having a disposition to rise, is to
be cravingly mimetic; and they remembered, and crooned over, till by
degrees they adopted the phrases and manner of speech of highly
grammatical people, such as the rector and his lady, and of people in
story-books, especially of the courtly French fairy-books, wherein the
princes talk in periods as sweetly rounded as are their silken calves;
nothing less than angelically, so as to be a model to ordinary men.

The idea of love upon the lips of ordinary men, provoked Dahlia's irony;
and the youths of Wrexby and Fenhurst had no chance against her secret
Prince Florizels. Them she endowed with no pastoral qualities; on the
contrary, she conceived that such pure young gentlemen were only to be
seen, and perhaps met, in the great and mystic City of London. Naturally,
the girls dreamed of London. To educate themselves, they copied out whole
pages of a book called the `Field of Mars,' which was next to the family
Bible in size among the volumes of the farmer's small library. The deeds
of the heroes of this book, and the talk of the fairy princes, were
assimilated in their minds; and as they looked around them upon millers',
farmers', maltsters', and tradesmen's sons, the thought of what manner of
youth would propose to marry them became a precocious tribulation. Rhoda,
at the age of fifteen, was distracted by it, owing to her sister's habit
of masking her own dismal internal forebodings on the subject, under the
guise of a settled anxiety concerning her sad chance.

In dress, the wife of the rector of Wrexby was their model. There came
once to Squire Blancove's unoccupied pew a dazzling vision of a fair
lady. They heard that she was a cousin of his third wife, and a widow,
Mrs. Lovell by name. They looked at her all through the service, and the
lady certainly looked at them in return; nor could they, with any
distinctness, imagine why, but the look dwelt long in their hearts, and
often afterward, when Dahlia, upon taking her seat in church, shut her
eyes, according to custom, she strove to conjure up the image of herself,
as she had appeared to the beautiful woman in the dress of grey-shot
silk, with violet mantle and green bonnet, rose-trimmed; and the picture
she conceived was the one she knew herself by, for many ensuing years.

Mrs. Fleming fought her battle with a heart worthy of her countrywomen,
and with as much success as the burden of a despondent husband would
allow to her. William John Fleming was simply a poor farmer, for whom the
wheels of the world went too fast:--a big man, appearing to be difficult
to kill, though deeply smitten. His cheeks bloomed in spite of lines and
stains, and his large, quietly dilated, brown ox-eyes, that never gave
out a meaning, seldom showed as if they had taken one from what they saw.
Until his wife was lost to him, he believed that he had a mighty
grievance against her; but as he was not wordy, and was by nature kind,
it was her comfort to die and not to know it. This grievance was rooted
in the idea that she was ruinously extravagant. The sight of the
plentiful table was sore to him; the hungry mouths, though he grudged to
his offspring nothing that he could pay for, were an afflicting prospect.
"Plump 'em up, and make 'em dainty," he advanced in contravention of his
wife's talk of bread and beef.

But he did not complain. If it came to an argument, the farmer sidled
into a secure corner of prophecy, and bade his wife to see what would
come of having dainty children. He could not deny that bread and beef
made blood, and were cheaper than the port-wine which doctors were in the
habit of ordering for this and that delicate person in the neighbourhood;
so he was compelled to have recourse to secret discontent. The attention,
the time, and the trifles of money shed upon the flower garden, were
hardships easier to bear. He liked flowers, and he liked to hear the
praise of his wife's horticultural skill. The garden was a distinguishing
thing to the farm, and when on a Sunday he walked home from church among
full June roses, he felt the odour of them to be so like his imagined
sensations of prosperity, that the deception was worth its cost. Yet the
garden in its bloom revived a cruel blow. His wife had once wounded his
vanity. The massed vanity of a silent man, when it does take a wound,
desires a giant's vengeance; but as one can scarcely seek to enjoy that
monstrous gratification when one's wife is the offender, the farmer
escaped from his dilemma by going apart into a turnip-field, and
swearing, with his fist outstretched, never to forget it. His wife had
asked him, seeing that the garden flourished and the farm decayed, to
yield the labour of the farm to the garden; in fact, to turn nurseryman
under his wife's direction. The woman could not see that her garden
drained the farm already, distracted the farm, and most evidently
impoverished him. She could not understand, that in permitting her, while
he sweated fruitlessly, to give herself up to the occupation of a lady,
he had followed the promptings of his native kindness, and certainly not
of his native wisdom. That she should deem herself `best man' of the two,
and suggest his stamping his name to such an opinion before the world,
was an outrage.

Mrs. Fleming was failing in health. On that plea, with the solemnity
suited to the autumn of her allotted days, she persuaded her husband to
advertise for an assistant, who would pay a small sum of money to learn
sound farming, and hear arguments in favour of the Corn Laws. To please
her, he threw seven shillings away upon an advertisement, and laughed
when the advertisement was answered, remarking that he doubted much
whether good would come of dealings with strangers. A young man, calling
himself Robert Armstrong, underwent a presentation to the family. He paid
the stipulated sum, and was soon enrolled as one of them. He was of a
guardsman's height and a cricketer's suppleness, a drinker of water, and
apparently the victim of a dislike of his species; for he spoke of the
great night-lighted city with a horror that did not seem to be an
estimable point in him, as judged by a pair of damsels for whom the
mysterious metropolis flew with fiery fringes through dark space, in
their dreams.

In other respects, the stranger was well thought of, as being handsome
and sedate. He talked fondly of one friend that he had, an officer in the
army, which was considered pardonably vain. He did not reach to the ideal
of his sex which had been formed by the sisters; but Mrs. Fleming,
trusting to her divination of his sex's character, whispered a mother's
word about him to her husband a little while before her death.

It was her prayer to heaven that she might save a doctor's bill. She
died, without lingering illness, in her own beloved month of June; the
roses of her tending at the open window, and a soft breath floating up to
her from the garden. On the foregoing May-day, she had sat on the green
that fronted the iron gateway, when Dahlia and Rhoda dressed the children
of the village in garlands, and crowned the fairest little one queen of
May: a sight that revived in Mrs. Fleming's recollection the time of her
own eldest and fairest taking homage, shy in her white smock and light
thick curls. The gathering was large, and the day was of the old nature
of May, before tyrannous Eastwinds had captured it and spoiled its
consecration. The mill-stream of the neighbouring mill ran blue among the
broad green pastures; the air smelt of cream-bowls and wheaten loaves;
the firs on the beacon-ridge, far southward, over Fenhurst and Helm
villages, were transported nearer to see the show, and stood like friends
anxious to renew acquaintance. Dahlia and Rhoda taught the children to
perceive how they resembled bent old beggar-men. The two stone-pines in
the miller's grounds were likened by them to Adam and Eve turning away
from the blaze of Paradise; and the saying of one receptive child, that
they had nothing but hair on, made the illustration undying both to
Dahlia and Rhoda.

The magic of the weather brought numerous butterflies afield, and one
fiddler, to whose tuning the little women danced; others closer upon
womanhood would have danced likewise, if the sisters had taken partners;
but Dahlia was restrained by the sudden consciousness that she was under
the immediate observation of two manifestly London gentlemen, and she
declined to be led forth by Robert Armstrong. The intruders were youths
of good countenance, known to be the son and the nephew of Squire
Blancove of Wrexby Hall. They remained for some time watching the scene,
and destroyed Dahlia's single-mindedness. Like many days of gaiety, the
Gods consenting, this one had its human shadow. There appeared on the
borders of the festivity a young woman, the daughter of a Wrexby
cottager, who had left her home and but lately returned to it, with a
spotted name. No one addressed her, and she stood humbly apart. Dahlia,
seeing that every one moved away from her, whispering with satisfied
noddings, wished to draw her in among the groups. She mentioned the name
of Mary Burt to her father, supposing that so kind a man would not fail
to sanction her going up to the neglected young woman. To her surprise,
her father became violently enraged, and uttered a stern prohibition,
speaking a word that stained her cheeks. Rhoda was by her side, and she
wilfully, without asking leave, went straight over to Mary, and stood
with her under the shadow of the Adam and Eve, until the farmer sent a
messenger to say that he was about to enter the house. Her punishment for
the act of sinfulness was a week of severe silence; and the farmer would
have kept her to it longer, but for her mother's ominously growing
weakness. The sisters were strangely overclouded by this incident. They
could not fathom the meaning of their father's unkindness, coarseness,
and indignation. Why, and why? they asked one another, blankly. The
Scriptures were harsh in one part, but was the teaching to continue so
after the Atonement? By degrees they came to reflect, and not in a mild
spirit, that the kindest of men can be cruel, and will forget their
Christianity toward offending and repentant women.




CHAPTER II

Mrs. Fleming had a brother in London, who had run away from his Kentish
home when a small boy, and found refuge at a Bank. The position of
Anthony Hackbut in that celebrated establishment, and the degree of
influence exercised by him there, were things unknown; but he had stuck
to the Bank for a great number of years, and he had once confessed to his
sister that he was not a beggar. Upon these joint facts the farmer
speculated, deducing from them that a man in a London Bank, holding money
of his own, must have learnt the ways of turning it over--farming golden
ground, as it were; consequently, that amount must now have increased to
a very considerable sum. You ask, What amount? But one who sits brooding
upon a pair of facts for years, with the imperturbable gravity of
creation upon chaos, will be as successful in evoking the concrete from
the abstract. The farmer saw round figures among the possessions of the
family, and he assisted mentally in this money-turning of Anthony's,
counted his gains for him, disposed his risks, and eyed the pile of
visionary gold with an interest so remote, that he was almost correct in
calling it disinterested. The brothers-in-law had a mutual plea of
expense that kept them separate. When Anthony refused, on petition, to
advance one hundred pounds to the farmer, there was ill blood to divide
them. Queen Anne's Farm missed the flourishing point by one hundred
pounds exactly. With that addition to its exchequer, it would have made
head against its old enemy, Taxation, and started rejuvenescent. But the
Radicals were in power to legislate and crush agriculture, and "I've got
a miser for my brother-in-law," said the farmer. Alas! the hundred pounds
to back him, he could have sowed what he pleased, and when it pleased
him, partially defying the capricious clouds and their treasures, and
playing tunefully upon his land, his own land. Instead of which, and
while too keenly aware that the one hundred would have made excesses in
any direction tributary to his pocket, the poor man groaned at continuous
falls of moisture, and when rain was prayed for in church, he had to be
down on his knees, praying heartily with the rest of the congregation. It
was done, and bitter reproaches were cast upon Anthony for the enforced
necessity to do it.

On the occasion of his sister's death, Anthony informed his bereaved
brother-in-law that he could not come down to follow the hearse as a
mourner. "My place is one of great trust;" he said, "and I cannot be
spared." He offered, however, voluntarily to pay half the expenses of the
funeral, stating the limit of the cost. It is unfair to sound any man's
springs of action critically while he is being tried by a sorrow; and the
farmer's angry rejection of Anthony's offer of aid must pass. He remarked
in his letter of reply, that his wife's funeral should cost no less than
he chose to expend on it. He breathed indignant fumes against
"interferences." He desired Anthony to know that he also was "not a
beggar," and that he would not be treated as one. The letter showed a
solid yeoman's fist. Farmer Fleming told his chums, and the shopkeeper of
Wrexby, with whom he came into converse, that he would honour his dead
wife up to his last penny. Some month or so afterward it was generally
conjectured that he had kept his word.

Anthony's rejoinder was characterized by a marked humility. He expressed
contrition for the farmer's misunderstanding of his motives. His
fathomless conscience had plainly been reached. He wrote again, without
waiting for an answer, speaking of the Funds indeed, but only to
pronounce them worldly things, and hoping that they all might meet in
heaven, where brotherly love, as well as money, was ready made, and not
always in the next street. A hint occurred that it would be a
gratification to him to be invited down, whether he could come or no; for
holidays were expensive, and journeys by rail had to be thought over
before they were undertaken; and when you are away from your post, you
never knew who maybe supplanting you. He did not promise that he could
come, but frankly stated his susceptibility to the friendliness of an
invitation. The feeling indulged by Farmer Fleming in refusing to notice
Anthony's advance toward a reconciliation, was, on the whole, not
creditable to him. Spite is more often fattened than propitiated by
penitence. He may have thought besides (policy not being always a vacant
space in revengeful acts) that Anthony was capable of something stronger
and warmer, now that his humanity had been aroused. The speculation is
commonly perilous; but Farmer Fleming had the desperation of a man who
has run slightly into debt, and has heard the first din of dunning, which
to the unaccustomed imagination is fearful as bankruptcy (shorn of the
horror of the word). And, moreover, it was so wonderful to find Anthony
displaying humanity at all, that anything might be expected of him.
"Let's see what he will do," thought the farmer in an interval of his
wrath; and the wrath is very new which has none of these cool intervals.
The passions, do but watch them, are all more or less intermittent.

As it chanced, he acted sagaciously, for Anthony at last wrote to say
that his home in London was cheerless, and that he intended to move into
fresh and airier lodgings, where the presence of a discreet young
housekeeper, who might wish to see London, and make acquaintance with the
world, would be agreeable to him. His project was that one of his nieces
should fill this office, and he requested his brother-in-law to reflect
on it, and to think of him as of a friend of the family, now and in the
time to come. Anthony spoke of the seductions of London quite unctuously.
Who could imagine this to be the letter of an old crabbed miser? "Tell
her," he said, "there's fruit at stalls at every street-corner all the
year through--oysters and whelks, if she likes--winkles, lots of pictures
in shops--a sight of muslin and silks, and rides on omnibuses--bands of
all sorts, and now and then we can take a walk to see the military on
horseback, if she's for soldiers." Indeed, he joked quite comically in
speaking of the famous horse-guards--warriors who sit on their horses to
be looked at, and do not mind it, because they are trained so thoroughly.
"Horse-guards blue, and horse-guards red," he wrote--"the blue only want
boiling." There is reason to suppose that his disrespectful joke was not
original in him, but it displayed his character in a fresh light. Of
course, if either of the girls was to go, Dahlia was the person. The
farmer commenced his usual process of sitting upon the idea. That it
would be policy to attach one of the family to this chirping old miser,
he thought incontestable. On the other hand, he had a dread of London,
and Dahlia was surpassingly fair. He put the case to Robert, in
remembrance of what his wife had spoken, hoping that Robert would
amorously stop his painful efforts to think fast enough for the occasion.
Robert, however, had nothing to say, and seemed willing to let Dahlia
depart. The only opponents to the plan were Mrs. Sumfit, a kindly, humble
relative of the farmer's, widowed out of Sussex, very loving and fat; the
cook to the household, whose waist was dimly indicated by her
apron-string; and, to aid her outcries, the silently-protesting Master
Gammon, an old man with the cast of eye of an antediluvian lizard, the
slowest old man of his time--a sort of foreman of the farm before Robert
had come to take matters in hand, and thrust both him and his master into
the background. Master Gammon remarked emphatically, once and for all,
that "he never had much opinion of London." As he had never visited
London, his opinion was considered the less weighty, but, as he advanced
no further speech, the sins and backslidings of the metropolis were
strongly brought to mind by his condemnatory utterance. Policy and
Dahlia's entreaties at last prevailed with the farmer, and so the fair
girl went up to the great city.

After months of a division that was like the division of her living
veins, and when the comfort of letters was getting cold, Rhoda, having
previously pledged herself to secresy, though she could not guess why it
was commanded, received a miniature portrait of Dahlia, so beautiful that
her envy of London for holding her sister away from her, melted in
gratitude. She had permission to keep the portrait a week; it was
impossible to forbear from showing it to Mrs. Sumfit, who peeped in awe,
and that emotion subsiding, shed tears abundantly. Why it was to be kept
secret, they failed to inquire; the mystery was possibly not without its
delights to them. Tears were shed again when the portrait had to be
packed up and despatched. Rhoda lived on abashed by the adorable new
refinement of Dahlia's features, and her heart yearned to her uncle for
so caring to decorate the lovely face.

One day Rhoda was at her bed-room window, on the point of descending to
encounter the daily dumpling, which was the principal and the unvarying
item of the midday meal of the house, when she beheld a stranger trying
to turn the handle of the iron gate. Her heart thumped. She divined
correctly that it was her uncle. Dahlia had now been absent for very many
months, and Rhoda's growing fretfulness sprang the conviction in her mind
that something closer than letters must soon be coming. She ran
downstairs, and along the gravel-path. He was a little man, square-built,
and looking as if he had worn to toughness; with an evident Sunday suit
on: black, and black gloves, though the day was only antecedent to
Sunday.

"Let me help you, sir," she said, and her hands came in contact with his,
and were squeezed.

"How is my sister?" She had no longer any fear in asking.

"Now, you let me through, first," he replied, imitating an arbitrary
juvenile. "You're as tight locked in as if you was in dread of all the
thieves of London. You ain't afraid o' me, miss? I'm not the party
generally outside of a fortification; I ain't, I can assure you. I'm a
defence party, and a reg'lar lion when I've got the law backing me."

He spoke in a queer, wheezy voice, like a cracked flute, combined with
the effect of an ill-resined fiddle-bow.

"You are in the garden of Queen Anne's Farm," said Rhoda.

"And you're my pretty little niece, are you? 'the darkie lass,' as your
father says. 'Little,' says I; why, you needn't be ashamed to stand
beside a grenadier. Trust the country for growing fine gals."

"You are my uncle, then?" said Rhoda. "Tell me how my sister is. Is she
well? Is she quite happy?"

"Dahly?" returned old Anthony, slowly.

"Yes, yes; my sister!" Rhoda looked at him with distressful eagerness.

"Now, don't you be uneasy about your sister Dahly." Old Anthony, as he
spoke, fixed his small brown eyes on the girl, and seemed immediately to
have departed far away in speculation. A question recalled him.

"Is her health good?"

"Ay; stomach's good, head's good, lungs, brain, what not, all good. She's
a bit giddy, that's all."

"In her head?"

"Ay; and on her pins. Never you mind. You look a steady one, my dear. I
shall take to you, I think."

"But my sister--" Rhoda was saying, when the farmer came out, and sent a
greeting from the threshold,--

"Brother Tony!"

"Here he is, brother William John."

"Surely, and so he is, at last." The farmer walked up to him with his
hand out.

"And it ain't too late, I hope. Eh?"

"It's never too late--to mend," said the farmer.

"Eh? not my manners, eh?" Anthony struggled to keep up the ball; and in
this way they got over the confusion of the meeting after many years and
some differences.

"Made acquaintance with Rhoda, I see," said the farmer, as they turned to
go in.

"The 'darkie lass' you write of. She's like a coal nigh a candle. She
looks, as you'd say, 't' other side of her sister.' Yes, we've had a
talk."

"Just in time for dinner, brother Tony. We ain't got much to offer, but
what there is, is at your service. Step aside with me."

The farmer got Anthony out of hearing a moment, questioned, and was
answered: after which he looked less anxious, but a trifle perplexed, and
nodded his head as Anthony occasionally lifted his, to enforce certain
points in some halting explanation. You would have said that a debtor was
humbly putting his case in his creditor's ear, and could only now and
then summon courage to meet the censorious eyes. They went in to Mrs.
Sumfit's shout that the dumplings were out of the pot: old Anthony bowed
upon the announcement of his name, and all took seats. But it was not the
same sort of dinner-hour as that which the inhabitants of the house were
accustomed to; there was conversation.

The farmer asked Anthony by what conveyance he had come. Anthony shyly,
but not without evident self-approbation, related how, having come by the
train, he got into conversation with the driver of a fly at a station,
who advised him of a cart that would be passing near Wrexby. For
threepennyworth of beer, he had got a friendly introduction to the
carman, who took him within two miles of the farm for one shilling, a
distance of fifteen miles. That was pretty good!

"Home pork, brother Tony," said the farmer, approvingly.

"And home-made bread, too, brother William John," said Anthony, becoming
brisk.

"Ay, and the beer, such as it is." The farmer drank and sighed.

Anthony tried the beer, remarking, "That's good beer; it don't cost
much."

"It ain't adulterated. By what I read of your London beer, this stuff's
not so bad, if you bear in mind it's pure. Pure's my motto. 'Pure, though
poor!'"

"Up there, you pay for rank poison," said Anthony. "So, what do I do? I
drink water and thank 'em, that's wise."

"Saves stomach and purse." The farmer put a little stress on 'purse.'

"Yes, I calculate I save threepence a day in beer alone," said Anthony.

"Three times seven's twenty-one, ain't it?"

Mr. Fleming said this, and let out his elbow in a small perplexity, as
Anthony took him up: "And fifty-two times twenty-one?"

"Well, that's, that's--how much is that, Mas' Gammon?" the farmer asked
in a bellow.

Master Gammon was laboriously and steadily engaged in tightening himself
with dumpling. He relaxed his exertions sufficiently to take this new
burden on his brain, and immediately cast it off.

"Ah never thinks when I feeds--Ah was al'ays a bad hand at 'counts. Gi'es
it up."

"Why, you're like a horse that never was rode! Try again, old man," said
the farmer.

"If I drags a cart," Master Gammon replied, "that ain't no reason why I
should leap a gate."

The farmer felt that he was worsted as regarded the illustration, and
with a bit of the boy's fear of the pedagogue, he fought Anthony off by
still pressing the arithmetical problem upon Master Gammon; until the old
man, goaded to exasperation, rolled out thunderingly,--

"If I works fer ye, that ain't no reason why I should think fer ye,"
which caused him to be left in peace.

"Eh, Robert?" the farmer transferred the question; "Come! what is it?"

Robert begged a minute's delay, while Anthony watched him with hawk eyes.

"I tell you what it is--it's pounds," said Robert.

This tickled Anthony, who let him escape, crying: "Capital! Pounds it is
in your pocket, sir, and you hit that neatly, I will say. Let it be five.
You out with your five at interest, compound interest; soon comes another
five; treat it the same: in ten years--eh? and then you get into figures;
you swim in figures!"

"I should think you did!" said the farmer, winking slyly.

Anthony caught the smile, hesitated and looked shrewd, and then covered
his confusion by holding his plate to Mrs. Sumfit for a help. The
manifest evasion and mute declaration that dumpling said "mum" on that
head, gave the farmer a quiet glow.

"When you are ready to tell me all about my darlin', sir," Mrs. Sumfit
suggested, coaxingly.

"After dinner, mother--after dinner," said the farmer.

"And we're waitin', are we, till them dumplings is finished?" she
exclaimed, piteously, with a glance at Master Gammon's plate.

"After dinner we'll have a talk, mother."

Mrs. Sumfit feared from this delay that there was queer news to be told
of Dahlia's temper; but she longed for the narrative no whit the less,
and again cast a sad eye on the leisurely proceedings of Master Gammon.
The veteran was still calmly tightening. His fork was on end, with a vast
mouthful impaled on the prongs. Master Gammon, a thoughtful eater, was
always last at the meal, and a latent, deep-lying irritation at Mrs.
Sumfit for her fidgetiness, day after day, toward the finish of the dish,
added a relish to his engulfing of the monstrous morsel. He looked at her
steadily, like an ox of the fields, and consumed it, and then holding his
plate out, in a remorseless way, said, "You make 'em so good, marm."

Mrs. Sumfit, fretted as she was, was not impervious to the sound sense of
the remark, as well as to the compliment.

"I don't want to hurry you, Mas' Gammon," she said; "Lord knows, I like
to see you and everybody eat his full and be thankful; but, all about my
Dahly waitin',--I feel pricked wi' a pin all over, I do; and there's my
blessed in London," she answered, "and we knowin' nothin' of her, and one
close by to tell me! I never did feel what slow things dumplin's was,
afore now!"

The kettle simmered gently on the hob. Every other knife and fork was
silent; so was every tongue. Master Gammon ate and the kettle hummed.
Twice Mrs. Sumfit sounded a despairing, "Oh, deary me!" but it was
useless. No human power had ever yet driven Master Gammon to a
demonstration of haste or to any acceleration of the pace he had chosen
for himself. At last, she was not to be restrained from crying out,
almost tearfully,--

"When do you think you'll have done, Mas' Gammon?"

Thus pointedly addressed, Master Gammon laid down his knife and fork. He
half raised his ponderous, curtaining eyelids, and replied,--

"When I feels my buttons, marm."

After which he deliberately fell to work again.

Mrs. Sumfit dropped back in her chair as from a blow.

But even dumplings, though they resist so doggedly for a space, do
ultimately submit to the majestic march of Time, and move. Master Gammon
cleared his plate. There stood in the dish still half a dumpling. The
farmer and Rhoda, deeming that there had been a show of inhospitality,
pressed him to make away with this forlorn remainder.

The vindictive old man, who was as tight as dumpling and buttons could
make him, refused it in a drooping tone, and went forth, looking at none.
Mrs. Sumfit turned to all parties, and begged them to say what more, to
please Master Gammon, she could have done? When Anthony was ready to
speak of her Dahlia, she obtruded this question in utter dolefulness.
Robert was kindly asked by the farmer to take a pipe among them. Rhoda
put a chair for him, but he thanked them both, and said he could not
neglect some work to be done in the fields. She thought that he feared
pain from hearing Dahlia's name, and followed him with her eyes
commiseratingly.

"Does that young fellow attend to business?" said Anthony.

The farmer praised Robert as a rare hand, but one affected with bees in
his nightcap,--who had ideas of his own about farming, and was obstinate
with them; "pays you due respect, but's got a notion as how his way of
thinking's better 'n his seniors. It's the style now with all young
folks. Makes a butt of old Mas' Gammon; laughs at the old man. It ain't
respectful t' age, I say. Gammon don't understand nothing about new feeds
for sheep, and dam nonsense about growing such things as melons,
fiddle-faddle, for 'em. Robert's a beginner. What he knows, I taught the
young fellow. Then, my question is, where's his ideas come from, if
they're contrary to mine? If they're contrary to mine, they're contrary
to my teaching. Well, then, what are they worth? He can't see that. He's
a good one at work--I'll say so much for him."

Old Anthony gave Rhoda a pat on the shoulder.




CHAPTER III

"Pipes in the middle of the day's regular revelry," ejaculated Anthony,
whose way of holding the curved pipe-stem displayed a mind bent on
reckless enjoyment, and said as much as a label issuing from his mouth,
like a figure in a comic woodcut of the old style:--"that's," he pursued,
"that's if you haven't got to look up at the clock every two minutes, as
if the devil was after you. But, sitting here, you know, the afternoon's
a long evening; nobody's your master. You can on wi' your slippers, up
wi' your legs, talk, or go for'ard, counting, twicing, and
three-timesing; by George! I should take to drinking beer if I had my
afternoons to myself in the city, just for the sake of sitting and doing
sums in a tap-room; if it's a big tap-room, with pew sort o' places, and
dark red curtains, a fire, and a smell of sawdust; ale, and tobacco, and
a boy going by outside whistling a tune of the day. Somebody comes in.
'Ah, there's an idle old chap,' he says to himself, (meaning me), and
where, I should like to ask him, 'd his head be if he sat there dividing
two hundred and fifty thousand by forty-five and a half!"

The farmer nodded encouragingly. He thought it not improbable that a
short operation with these numbers would give the sum in Anthony's
possession, the exact calculation of his secret hoard, and he set to work
to stamp them on his brain, which rendered him absent in manner, while
Mrs. Sumfit mixed liquor with hot water, and pushed at his knee, doubling
in her enduring lips, and lengthening her eyes to aim a side-glance of
reprehension at Anthony's wandering loquacity.

Rhoda could bear it no more.

"Now let me hear of my sister, uncle," she said.

"I'll tell you what," Anthony responded, "she hasn't got such a pretty
sort of a sweet blackbirdy voice as you've got."

The girl blushed scarlet.

"Oh, she can mount them colours, too," said Anthony.

His way of speaking of Dahlia indicated that he and she had enough of one
another; but of the peculiar object of his extraordinary visit not even
the farmer had received a hint. Mrs. Sumfit ventured to think aloud that
his grog was not stiff enough, but he took a gulp under her eyes, and
smacked his lips after it in a most convincing manner.

"Ah! that stuff wouldn't do for me in London, half-holiday or no
half-holiday," said Anthony.

"Why not?" the farmer asked.

"I should be speculating--deep--couldn't hold myself in: Mexicans,
Peroovians, Venzeshoolians, Spaniards, at 'em I should go. I see bonds in
all sorts of colours, Spaniards in black and white, Peruvians--orange,
Mexicans--red as the British army. Well, it's just my whim. If I like
red, I go at red. I ain't a bit of reason. What's more, I never
speculate."

"Why, that's safest, brother Tony," said the farmer.

"And safe's my game--always was, always will be! Do you think"--Anthony
sucked his grog to the sugar-dregs, till the spoon settled on his
nose--"do you think I should hold the position I do hold, be trusted as I
am trusted? Ah! you don't know much about that. Should I have money
placed in my hands, do you think--and it's thousands at a time, gold, and
notes, and cheques--if I was a risky chap? I'm known to be thoroughly
respectable. Five and forty years I've been in Boyne's Bank, and thank
ye, ma'am, grog don't do no harm down here. And I will take another
glass. 'When the heart of a man!'--but I'm no singer."

Mrs. Sumfit simpered, "Hem; it's the heart of a woman, too: and she have
one, and it's dying to hear of her darlin' blessed in town, and of who
cuts her hair, and where she gets her gownds, and whose pills--"

The farmer interrupted her irritably.

"Divide a couple o' hundred thousand and more by forty-five and a half,"
he said. "Do wait, mother; all in good time. Forty-five and a-half,
brother Tony; that was your sum--ah!--you mentioned it some time
back--half of what? Is that half a fraction, as they call it? I haven't
forgot fractions, and logareems, and practice, and so on to algebrae,
where it always seems to me to blow hard, for, whizz goes my head in a
jiffy, as soon as I've mounted the ladder to look into that country. How
'bout that forty-five and a half, brother Tony, if you don't mind
condescending to explain?"

"Forty-five and a half?" muttered Anthony, mystified.

"Oh, never mind, you know, if you don't like to say, brother Tony." The
farmer touched him up with his pipe-stem.

"Five and a half," Anthony speculated. "That's a fraction you got hold
of, brother William John,--I remember the parson calling out those names
at your wedding: 'I, William John, take thee, Susan;' yes, that's a
fraction, but what's the good of it?"

"What I mean is, it ain't forty-five and half of forty-five. Half of one,
eh? That's identical with a fraction. One--a stroke--and two under it."

"You've got it correct," Anthony assented.

"How many thousand divide it by?"

"Divide what by, brother William John? I'm beat."

"Ah! out comes the keys: lockup everything; it's time!" the farmer
laughed, rather proud of his brother-in-law's perfect wakefulness after
two stiff tumblers. He saw that Anthony was determined with all due
friendly feeling to let no one know the sum in his possession.

"If it's four o'clock, it is time to lock up," said Anthony, "and bang to
go the doors, and there's the money for thieves to dream of--they can't
get a-nigh it, let them dream as they like. What's the hour, ma'am?"

"Not three, it ain't," returned Mrs. Sumfit; "and do be good creatures,
and begin about my Dahly, and where she got that Bumptious gownd, and the
bonnet with blue flowers lyin' by on the table: now, do!"

Rhoda coughed.

"And she wears lavender gloves like a lady," Mrs. Sumfit was continuing.

Rhoda stamped on her foot.

"Oh! cruel!" the comfortable old woman snapped in pain, as she applied
her hand to the inconsolable fat foot, and nursed it. "What's roused ye,
you tiger girl? I shan't be able to get about, I shan't, and then who's
to cook for ye all? For you're as ignorant as a raw kitchen wench, and
knows nothing."

"Come, Dody, you're careless," the farmer spoke chidingly through Mrs.
Sumfit's lamentations.

"She stops uncle Anthony when he's just ready, father," said Rhoda.

"Do you want to know?" Anthony set his small eyes on her: "do you want to
know, my dear?" He paused, fingering his glass, and went on: "I, Susan,
take thee, William John, and you've come of it. Says I to myself, when I
hung sheepish by your mother and by your father, my dear, says I to
myself, I ain't a marrying man: and if these two, says I, if any progeny
comes to 'em--to bless them, some people'd say, but I know what life is,
and what young ones are--if--where was I? Liquor makes you talk, brother
William John, but where's your ideas? Gone, like hard cash! What I meant
was, I felt I might some day come for'ard and help the issue of your
wife's weddin', and wasn't such a shady object among you, after all. My
pipe's out."

Rhoda stood up, and filled the pipe, and lit it in silence. She divined
that the old man must be allowed to run on in his own way, and for a long
time he rambled, gave a picture of the wedding, and of a robbery of
Boyne's Bank: the firm of Boyne, Burt, Hamble, and Company. At last, he
touched on Dahlia.

"What she wants, I can't make out," he said; "and what that good lady
there, or somebody, made mention of--how she manages to dress as she do!
I can understand a little goin' a great way, if you're clever in any way;
but I'm at my tea"--Anthony laid his hand out as to exhibit a picture. "I
ain't a complaining man, and be young, if you can, I say, and walk about
and look at shops; but, I'm at my tea: I come home rather tired there's
the tea-things, sure enough, and tea's made, and, maybe, there's a shrimp
or two; she attends to your creature comforts. When everything's locked
up and tight and right, I'm gay, and ask for a bit of society: well, I'm
at my tea: I hear her foot thumping up and down her bed-room overhead: I
know the meaning of that: I'd rather hear nothing: down she runs: I'm at
my tea, and in she bursts."--Here followed a dramatic account of Dahlia's
manner of provocation, which was closed by the extinction of his pipe.

The farmer, while his mind still hung about thousands of pounds and a
certain incomprehensible division of them to produce a distinct
intelligible total, and set before him the sum of Anthony's riches, could
see that his elder daughter was behaving flightily and neglecting the
true interests of the family, and he was chagrined. But Anthony, before
he entered the house, had assured him that Dahlia was well, and that
nothing was wrong with her. So he looked at Mrs. Sumfit, who now took
upon herself to plead for Dahlia: a young thing, and such a handsome
creature! and we were all young some time or other; and would heaven have
mercy on us, if we were hard upon the young, do you think? The motto of a
truly religious man said, try 'em again. And, maybe, people had been a
little hard upon Dahlia, and the girl was apt to take offence. In
conclusion, she appealed to Rhoda to speak up for her sister. Rhoda sat
in quiet reserve.

She was sure her sister must be justified in all she did but the picture
of the old man coming from his work every night to take his tea quite
alone made her sad. She found herself unable to speak, and as she did
not, Mrs. Sumfit had an acute twinge from her recently trodden foot, and
called her some bitter names; which was not an unusual case, for the kind
old woman could be querulous, and belonged to the list of those whose
hearts are as scales, so that they love not one person devotedly without
a corresponding spirit of opposition to another. Rhoda merely smiled.

By-and-by, the women left the two men alone.

Anthony turned and struck the farmer's knee.

"You've got a jewel in that gal, brother William John."

"Eh! she's a good enough lass. Not much of a manager, brother Tony. Too
much of a thinker, I reckon. She's got a temper of her own too. I'm a bit
hurt, brother Tony, about that other girl. She must leave London, if she
don't alter. It's flightiness; that's all. You mustn't think ill of poor
Dahly. She was always the pretty one, and when they know it, they act up
to it: she was her mother's favourite."

"Ah! poor Susan! an upright woman before the Lord."

"She was," said the farmer, bowing his head.

"And a good wife," Anthony interjected.

"None better--never a better; and I wish she was living to look after her
girls."

"I came through the churchyard, hard by," said Anthony; "and I read that
writing on her tombstone. It went like a choke in my throat. The first
person I saw next was her child, this young gal you call Rhoda; and,
thinks I to myself, you might ask me, I'd do anything for ye--that I
could, of course."

The farmer's eye had lit up, but became overshadowed by the
characteristic reservation.

"Nobody'd ask you to do more than you could," he remarked, rather coldly.

"It'll never be much," sighed Anthony.

"Well, the world's nothing, if you come to look at it close," the farmer
adopted a similar tone.

"What's money!" said Anthony.

The farmer immediately resumed his this-worldliness:

"Well, it's fine to go about asking us poor devils to answer ye that," he
said, and chuckled, conceiving that he had nailed Anthony down to a
partial confession of his ownership of some worldly goods.

"What do you call having money?" observed the latter, clearly in the
trap. "Fifty thousand?"

"Whew!" went the farmer, as at a big draught of powerful stuff.

"Ten thousand?"

Mr. Fleming took this second gulp almost contemptuously, but still
kindly.

"Come," quoth Anthony, "ten thousand's not so mean, you know. You're a
gentleman on ten thousand. So, on five. I'll tell ye, many a gentleman'd
be glad to own it. Lor' bless you! But, you know nothing of the world,
brother William John. Some of 'em haven't one--ain't so rich as you!"

"Or you, brother Tony?" The farmer made a grasp at his will-o'-the-wisp.

"Oh! me!" Anthony sniggered. "I'm a scraper of odds and ends. I pick up
things in the gutter. Mind you, those Jews ain't such fools, though a
curse is on 'em, to wander forth. They know the meaning of the
multiplication table. They can turn fractions into whole numbers. No; I'm
not to be compared to gentlemen. My property's my respectability. I said
that at the beginning, and I say it now. But, I'll tell you what, brother
William John, it's an emotion when you've got bags of thousands of pounds
in your arms."

Ordinarily, the farmer was a sensible man, as straight on the level of
dull intelligence as other men; but so credulous was he in regard to the
riches possessed by his wife's brother, that a very little tempted him to
childish exaggeration of the probable amount. Now that Anthony himself
furnished the incitement, he was quite lifted from the earth. He had,
besides, taken more of the strong mixture than he was ever accustomed to
take in the middle of the day; and as it seemed to him that Anthony was
really about to be seduced into a particular statement of the extent of
the property which formed his respectability (as Anthony had chosen to
put it), he got up a little game in his head by guessing how much the
amount might positively be, so that he could subsequently compare his
shrewd reckoning with the avowed fact. He tamed his wild ideas as much as
possible; thought over what his wife used to say of Anthony's saving ways
from boyhood, thought of the dark hints of the Funds, of many bold
strokes for money made by sagacious persons; of Anthony's close style of
living, and of the lives of celebrated misers; this done, he resolved to
make a sure guess, and therefore aimed below the mark.

Money, when the imagination deals with it thus, has no substantial
relation to mortal affairs. It is a tricksy thing, distending and
contracting as it dances in the mind, like sunlight on the ceiling cast
from a morning tea-cup, if a forced simile will aid the conception. The
farmer struck on thirty thousand and some odd hundred pounds--outlying
debts, or so, excluded--as what Anthony's will, in all likelihood, would
be sworn under: say, thirty thousand, or, safer, say, twenty thousand.
Bequeathed--how? To him and to his children. But to the children in
reversion after his decease? Or how? In any case, they might make capital
marriages; and the farm estate should go to whichever of the two young
husbands he liked the best. Farmer Fleming asked not for any life of ease
and splendour, though thirty thousand pounds was a fortune; or even
twenty thousand. Noblemen have stooped to marry heiresses owning no more
than that! The idea of their having done so actually shot across him, and
his heart sent up a warm spring of tenderness toward the patient, good,
grubbing old fellow, sitting beside him, who had lived and died to enrich
and elevate the family. At the same time, he could not refrain from
thinking that Anthony, broad-shouldered as he was, though bent, sound on
his legs, and well-coloured for a Londoner, would be accepted by any Life
Insurance office, at a moderate rate, considering his age. The farmer
thought of his own health, and it was with a pang that he fancied himself
being probed by the civil-speaking Life Insurance doctor (a gentleman who
seems to issue upon us applicants from out the muffled folding doors of
Hades; taps us on the chest, once, twice, and forthwith writes down our
fateful dates). Probably, Anthony would not have to pay a higher rate of
interest than he.

"Are you insured, brother Tony?" the question escaped him.

"No, I ain't, brother William John;" Anthony went on nodding like an
automaton set in motion. "There's two sides to that. I'm a long-lived
man. Long-lived men don't insure; that is, unless they're fools. That's
how the Offices thrive."

"Case of accident?" the farmer suggested.

"Oh! nothing happens to me," replied Anthony.

The farmer jumped on his legs, and yawned.

"Shall we take a turn in the garden, brother Tony?"

"With all my heart, brother William John."

The farmer had conscience to be ashamed of the fit of irritable vexation
which had seized on him; and it was not till Anthony being asked the date
of his birth, had declared himself twelve years his senior, that the
farmer felt his speculations to be justified. Anthony was nearly a
generation ahead. They walked about, and were seen from the windows
touching one another on the shoulder in a brotherly way. When they came
back to the women, and tea, the farmer's mind was cooler, and all his
reckonings had gone to mist. He was dejected over his tea.

"What is the matter, father?" said Rhoda.

"I'll tell you, my dear," Anthony replied for him. "He's envying me some
one I want to ask me that question when I'm at my tea in London."




CHAPTER IV

Mr. Fleming kept his forehead from his daughter's good-night kiss until
the room was cleared, after supper, and then embracing her very heartily,
he informed her that her uncle had offered to pay her expenses on a visit
to London, by which he contrived to hint that a golden path had opened to
his girl, and at the same time entreated her to think nothing of it; to
dismiss all expectations and dreams of impossible sums from her mind, and
simply to endeavour to please her uncle, who had a right to his own, and
a right to do what he liked with his own, though it were forty, fifty
times as much as he possessed--and what that might amount to no one knew.
In fact, as is the way with many experienced persons, in his attempt to
give advice to another, he was very impressive in lecturing himself, and
warned that other not to succumb to a temptation principally by
indicating the natural basis of the allurement. Happily for young and for
old, the intense insight of the young has much to distract or soften it.
Rhoda thanked her father, and chose to think that she had listened to
good and wise things.

"Your sister," he said--"but we won't speak of her. If I could part with
you, my lass, I'd rather she was the one to come back."

"Dahlia would be killed by our quiet life now," said Rhoda.

"Ay," the farmer mused. "If she'd got to pay six men every Saturday
night, she wouldn't complain o' the quiet. But, there--you neither of you
ever took to farming or to housekeeping; but any gentleman might be proud
to have one of you for a wife. I said so when you was girls. And if,
you've been dull, my dear, what's the good o' society? Tea-cakes mayn't
seem to cost money, nor a glass o' grog to neighbours; but once open the
door to that sort o' thing and your reckoning goes. And what I said to
your poor mother's true. I said: Our girls, they're mayhap not equals of
the Hollands, the Nashaws, the Perrets, and the others about here--no;
they're not equals, because the others are not equals o' them, maybe."

The yeoman's pride struggled out in this obscure way to vindicate his
unneighbourliness and the seclusion of his daughters from the society of
girls of their age and condition; nor was it hard for Rhoda to assure
him, as she earnestly did, that he had acted rightly.

Rhoda, assisted by Mrs. Sumfit, was late in the night looking up what
poor decorations she possessed wherewith to enter London, and be worthy
of her sister's embrace, so that she might not shock the lady Dahlia had
become.

"Depend you on it, my dear," said Mrs. Sumfit, "my Dahly's grown above
him. That's nettles to your uncle, my dear. He can't abide it. Don't you
see he can't? Some men's like that. Others 'd see you dressed like a
princess, and not be satisfied. They vary so, the teasin' creatures! But
one and all, whether they likes it or not, owns a woman's the better for
bein' dressed in the fashion. What do grieve me to my insidest heart, it
is your bonnet. What a bonnet that was lying beside her dear round arm in
the po'trait, and her finger up making a dimple in her cheek, as if she
was thinking of us in a sorrowful way. That's the arts o' being
lady-like--look sad-like. How could we get a bonnet for you?"

"My own must do," said Rhoda.

"Yes, and you to look like lady and servant-gal a-goin' out for an
airin'; and she to feel it! Pretty, that'd be!"

"She won't be ashamed of me," Rhoda faltered; and then hummed a little
tune, and said firmly--"It's no use my trying to look like what I'm not."

"No, truly;" Mrs. Sumfit assented. "But it's your bein' behind the
fashions what hurt me. As well you might be an old thing like me, for any
pleasant looks you'll git. Now, the country--you're like in a coalhole
for the matter o' that. While London, my dear, its pavement and gutter,
and omnibus traffic; and if you're not in the fashion, the little wicked
boys of the streets themselves 'll let you know it; they've got such eyes
for fashions, they have. And I don't want my Dahly's sister to be laughed
at, and called 'coal-scuttle,' as happened to me, my dear, believe it or
not--and shoved aside, and said to--'Who are you?' For she reely is
nice-looking. Your uncle Anthony and Mr. Robert agreed upon that."

Rhoda coloured, and said, after a time, "It would please me if people
didn't speak about my looks."

The looking-glass probably told her no more than that she was nice to the
eye, but a young man who sees anything should not see like a mirror, and
a girl's instinct whispers to her, that her image has not been taken to
heart when she is accurately and impartially described by him.

The key to Rhoda at this period was a desire to be made warm with praise
of her person. She beheld her face at times, and shivered. The face was
so strange with its dark thick eyebrows, and peculiarly straight-gazing
brown eyes; the level long red under-lip and curved upper; and the chin
and nose, so unlike Dahlia's, whose nose was, after a little dip from the
forehead, one soft line to its extremity, and whose chin seemed shaped to
a cup. Rhoda's outlines were harder. There was a suspicion of a
heavenward turn to her nose, and of squareness to her chin. Her face,
when studied, inspired in its owner's mind a doubt of her being even nice
to the eye, though she knew that in exercise, and when smitten by a
blush, brightness and colour aided her claims. She knew also that her
head was easily poised on her neck; and that her figure was reasonably
good; but all this was unconfirmed knowledge, quickly shadowed by the
doubt. As the sun is wanted to glorify the right features of a landscape,
this girl thirsted for a dose of golden flattery. She felt, without envy
of her sister, that Dahlia eclipsed her: and all she prayed for was that
she might not be quite so much in the background and obscure.

But great, powerful London--the new universe to her spirit--was opening
its arms to her. In her half sleep that night she heard the mighty
thunder of the city, crashing, tumults of disordered harmonies, and the
splendour of the lamp-lighted city appeared to hang up under a dark-blue
heaven, removed from earth, like a fresh planet to which she was being
beckoned.

At breakfast on the Sunday morning, her departure was necessarily spoken
of in public. Robert talked to her exactly as he had talked to Dahlia, on
the like occasion. He mentioned, as she remembered in one or two
instances, the names of the same streets, and professed a similar anxiety
as regarded driving her to the station and catching the train. "That's a
thing which makes a man feel his strength's nothing," he said. "You can't
stop it. I fancy I could stop a four-in-hand at full gallop. Mind, I only
fancy I could; but when you come to do with iron and steam, I feel like a
baby. You can't stop trains."

"You can trip 'em," said Anthony, a remark that called forth general
laughter, and increased the impression that he was a man of resources.

Rhoda was vexed by Robert's devotion to his strength. She was going, and
wished to go, but she wished to be regretted as well; and she looked at
him more. He, on the contrary, scarcely looked at her at all. He threw
verbal turnips, oats, oxen, poultry, and every possible melancholy
matter-of-fact thing, about the table, described the farm and his
fondness for it and the neighbourhood; said a farmer's life was best, and
gave Rhoda a week in which to be tired of London.

She sneered in her soul, thinking "how little he knows of the constancy
in the nature of women!" adding, "when they form attachments."

Anthony was shown at church, in spite of a feeble intimation he
expressed, that it would be agreeable to him to walk about in the March
sunshine, and see the grounds and the wild flowers, which never gave
trouble, nor cost a penny, and were always pretty, and worth twenty of
your artificial contrivances.

"Same as I say to Miss Dahly," he took occasion to remark; "but no!--no
good. I don't believe women hear ye, when you talk sense of that kind.
'Look,' says I, 'at a violet.' 'Look,' says she, 'at a rose.' Well, what
can ye say after that? She swears the rose looks best. You swear the
violet costs least. Then there you have a battle between what it costs
and how it looks."

Robert pronounced a conventional affirmative, when called on for it by a
look from Anthony. Whereupon Rhoda cried out,--

"Dahlia was right--she was right, uncle."

"She was right, my dear, if she was a ten-thousander. She wasn't right as
a farmer's daughter with poor expectations.--I'd say humble, if humble
she were. As a farmer's daughter, she should choose the violet side.
That's clear as day. One thing's good, I admit; she tells me she makes
her own bonnets, and they're as good as milliners', and that's a proud
matter to say of your own niece. And to buy dresses for herself, I
suppose, she's sat down and she made dresses for fine ladies. I've found
her at it. Save the money for the work, says I. What does she reply--she
always has a reply: 'Uncle, I know the value of money better. 'You mean,
you spend it,' I says to her. 'I buy more than it's worth,' says she. And
I'll tell you what, Mr. Robert Armstrong, as I find your name to be, sir;
if you beat women at talking, my lord! you're a clever chap."

Robert laughed. "I give in at the first mile."

"Don't think much of women--is that it, sir?"

"I'm glad to say I don't think of them at all."

"Do you think of one woman, now, Mr. Robert Armstrong?"

"I'd much rather think of two."

"And why, may I ask?"

"It's safer."

"Now, I don't exactly see that," said Anthony.

"You set one to tear the other," Robert explained.

"You're a Grand Turk Mogul in your reasonings of women, Mr. Robert
Armstrong. I hope as your morals are sound, sir?"

They were on the road to church, but Robert could not restrain a swinging
outburst.

He observed that he hoped likewise that his morals were sound.

"Because," said Anthony, "do you see, sir, two wives--"

"No, no; one wife," interposed Robert. "You said 'think about;' I'd
'think about' any number of women, if I was idle. But the woman you mean
to make your wife, you go to at once, and don't 'think about' her or the
question either."

"You make sure of her, do you, sir?"

"No: I try my luck; that is all."

"Suppose she won't have ye?"

"Then I wait for her."

"Suppose she gets married to somebody else?"

"Well, you know, I shouldn't cast eye on a woman who was a fool."

"Well, upon my--" Anthony checked his exclamation, returning to the
charge with, "Just suppose, for the sake of supposing--supposing she was
a fool, and gone and got married, and you thrown back'ard on one leg,
starin' at the other, stupified-like?"

"I don't mind supposing it," said Robert. "Say, she's a fool. Her being a
fool argues that I was one in making a fool's choice. So, she jilts me,
and I get a pistol, or I get a neat bit of rope, or I take a clean header
with a cannon-ball at my heels, or I go to the chemist's and ask for
stuff to poison rats,--anything a fool'd do under the circumstances, it
don't matter what."

Old Anthony waited for Rhoda to jump over a stile, and said to her,--

"He laughs at the whole lot of ye."

"Who?" she asked, with betraying cheeks.

"This Mr. Robert Armstrong of yours."

"Of mine, uncle!"

"He don't seem to care a snap o' the finger for any of ye."

"Then, none of us must care for him, uncle."

"Now, just the contrary. That always shows a young fellow who's attending
to his business. If he'd seen you boil potatoes, make dumplings, beds,
tea, all that, you'd have had a chance. He'd have marched up to ye before
you was off to London."

"Saying, 'You are the woman.'" Rhoda was too desperately tickled by the
idea to refrain from uttering it, though she was angry, and suffering
internal discontent. "Or else, 'You are the cook,'" she muttered, and
shut, with the word, steel bars across her heart, calling him, mentally,
names not justified by anything he had said or done--such as mercenary,
tyrannical, and such like.

Robert was attentive to her in church. Once she caught him with his eyes
on her face; but he betrayed no confusion, and looked away at the
clergyman. When the text was given out, he found the place in his Bible,
and handed it to her pointedly--"There shall be snares and traps unto
you;" a line from Joshua. She received the act as a polite pawing
civility; but when she was coming out of church, Robert saw that a blush
swept over her face, and wondered what thoughts could be rising within
her, unaware that girls catch certain meanings late, and suffer a fiery
torture when these meanings are clear to them. Rhoda called up the pride
of her womanhood that she might despise the man who had dared to distrust
her. She kept her poppy colour throughout the day, so sensitive was this
pride. But most she was angered, after reflection, by the doubts which
Robert appeared to cast on Dahlia, in setting his finger upon that
burning line of Scripture. It opened a whole black kingdom to her
imagination, and first touched her visionary life with shade. She was
sincere in her ignorance that the doubts were her own, but they lay deep
in unawakened recesses of the soul; it was by a natural action of her
reason that she transferred and forced them upon him who had chanced to
make them visible.




CHAPTER V

When young minds are set upon a distant object, they scarcely live for
anything about them. The drive to the station and the parting with
Robert, the journey to London, which had latterly seemed to her
secretly-distressed anticipation like a sunken city--a place of wonder
with the waters over it--all passed by smoothly; and then it became
necessary to call a cabman, for whom, as he did her the service to lift
her box, Rhoda felt a gracious respect, until a quarrel ensued between
him and her uncle concerning sixpence;--a poor sum, as she thought; but
representing, as Anthony impressed upon her understanding during the
conflict of hard words, a principle. Those who can persuade themselves
that they are fighting for a principle, fight strenuously, and maybe
reckoned upon to overmatch combatants on behalf of a miserable small
coin; so the cabman went away discomfited. He used such bad language that
Rhoda had no pity for him, and hearing her uncle style it "the London
tongue," she thought dispiritedly of Dahlia's having had to listen to it
through so long a season. Dahlia was not at home; but Mrs. Wicklow,
Anthony's landlady, undertook to make Rhoda comfortable, which operation
she began by praising dark young ladies over fair ones, at the same time
shaking Rhoda's arm that she might not fail to see a compliment was
intended. "This is our London way," she said. But Rhoda was most
disconcerted when she heard Mrs. Wicklow relate that her daughter and
Dahlia were out together, and say, that she had no doubt they had found
some pleasant and attentive gentleman for a companion, if they had not
gone purposely to meet one. Her thoughts of her sister were perplexed,
and London seemed a gigantic net around them both.

"Yes, that's the habit with the girls up here," said Anthony; "that's
what fine bonnets mean."

Rhoda dropped into a bitter depth of brooding. The savage nature of her
virgin pride was such that it gave her great suffering even to suppose
that a strange gentleman would dare to address her sister. She
half-fashioned the words on her lips that she had dreamed of a false
Zion, and was being righteously punished. By-and-by the landlady's
daughter returned home alone, saying, with a dreadful laugh, that Dahlia
had sent her for her Bible; but she would give no explanation of the
singular mission which had been entrusted to her, and she showed no
willingness to attempt to fulfil it, merely repeating, "Her Bible!" with
a vulgar exhibition of simulated scorn that caused Rhoda to shrink from
her, though she would gladly have poured out a multitude of questions in
the ear of one who had last been with her beloved. After a while, Mrs.
Wicklow looked at the clock, and instantly became overclouded with an
extreme gravity.

"Eleven! and she sent Mary Ann home for her Bible. This looks bad. I call
it hypocritical, the idea of mentioning the Bible. Now, if she had said
to Mary Ann, go and fetch any other book but a Bible!"

"It was mother's Bible," interposed Rhoda.

Mrs. Wicklow replied: "And I wish all young women to be as innocent as
you, my dear. You'll get you to bed. You're a dear, mild, sweet, good
young woman. I'm never deceived in character."

Vaunting her penetration, she accompanied Rhoda to Dahlia's chamber,
bidding her sleep speedily, or that when her sister came they would be
talking till the cock crowed hoarse.

"There's a poultry-yard close to us?" said Rhoda; feeling less at home
when she heard that there was not.

The night was quiet and clear. She leaned her head out of the window, and
heard the mellow Sunday evening roar of the city as of a sea at ebb. And
Dahlia was out on the sea. Rhoda thought of it as she looked at the row
of lamps, and listened to the noise remote, until the sight of stars was
pleasant as the faces of friends. "People are kind here," she reflected,
for her short experience of the landlady was good, and a young gentleman
who had hailed a cab for her at the station, had a nice voice. He was
fair. "I am dark," came a spontaneous reflection. She undressed, and half
dozing over her beating heart in bed, heard the street door open, and
leaped to think that her sister approached, jumping up in her bed to give
ear to the door and the stairs, that were conducting her joy to her: but
she quickly recomposed herself, and feigned sleep, for the delight of
revelling in her sister's first wonderment. The door was flung wide, and
Rhoda heard her name called by Dahlia's voice, and then there was a
delicious silence, and she felt that Dahlia was coming up to her on
tiptoe, and waited for her head to be stooped near, that she might fling
out her arms, and draw the dear head to her bosom. But Dahlia came only
to the bedside, without leaning over, and spoke of her looks, which held
the girl quiet.

"How she sleeps! It's a country sleep!" Dahlia murmured. "She's changed,
but it's all for the better. She's quite a woman; she's a perfect
brunette; and the nose I used to laugh at suits her face and those black,
thick eyebrows of hers; my pet! Oh, why is she here? What's meant by it?
I knew nothing of her coming. Is she sent on purpose?"

Rhoda did not stir. The tone of Dahlia's speaking, low and almost awful
to her, laid a flat hand on her, and kept her still.

"I came for my Bible," she heard Dahlia say. "I promised mother--oh, my
poor darling mother! And Dody lying in my bed! Who would have thought of
such things? Perhaps heaven does look after us and interfere. What will
become of me? Oh, you pretty innocent in your sleep! I lie for hours, and
can't sleep. She binds her hair in a knot on the pillow, just as she used
to in the old farm days!"

Rhoda knew that her sister was bending over her now, but she was almost
frigid, and could not move.

Dahlia went to the looking-glass. "How flushed I am!" she murmured. "No;
I'm pale, quite white. I've lost my strength. What can I do? How could I
take mother's Bible, and run from my pretty one, who expects me, and
dreams she'll wake with me beside her in the morning! I can't--I can't If
you love me, Edward, you won't wish it."

She fell into a chair, crying wildly, and muffling her sobs. Rhoda's
eyelids grew moist, but wonder and the cold anguish of senseless sympathy
held her still frost-bound. All at once she heard the window open. Some
one spoke in the street below; some one uttered Dahlia's name. A deep
bell swung a note of midnight.

"Go!" cried Dahlia.

The window was instantly shut.

The vibration of Dahlia's voice went through Rhoda like the heavy shaking
of the bell after it had struck, and the room seemed to spin and hum. It
was to her but another minute before her sister slid softly into the bed,
and they were locked together.




CHAPTER VI

Boyne's bank was of the order of those old and firmly fixed
establishments which have taken root with the fortunes of the
country--are honourable as England's name, solid as her prosperity, and
even as the flourishing green tree to shareholders: a granite house.
Boyne himself had been disembodied for more than a century: Burt and
Hamble were still of the flesh; but a greater than Burt or Hamble was
Blancove--the Sir William Blancove, Baronet, of city feasts and
charities, who, besides being a wealthy merchant, possessed of a very
acute head for banking, was a scholarly gentleman, worthy of riches. His
brother was Squire Blancove, of Wrexby; but between these two close
relatives there existed no stronger feeling than what was expressed by
open contempt of a mind dedicated to business on the one side, and quiet
contempt of a life devoted to indolence on the other. Nevertheless,
Squire Blancove, though everybody knew how deeply he despised his junior
for his city-gained title and commercial occupation, sent him his son
Algernon, to get the youth into sound discipline, if possible. This was
after the elastic Algernon had, on the paternal intimation of his
colonel, relinquished his cornetcy and military service. Sir William
received the hopeful young fellow much in the spirit with which he
listened to the tales of his brother's comments on his own line of
conduct; that is to say, as homage to his intellectual superiority. Mr.
Algernon was installed in the Bank, and sat down for a long career of
groaning at the desk, with more complacency than was expected from him.
Sir William forwarded excellent accounts to his brother of the behaviour
of the heir to his estates. It was his way of rebuking the squire, and in
return for it the squire, though somewhat comforted, despised his clerkly
son, and lived to learn how very unjustly he did so. Adolescents, who
have the taste for running into excesses, enjoy the breath of change as
another form of excitement: change is a sort of debauch to them. They
will delight infinitely in a simple country round of existence, in
propriety and church-going, in the sensation of feeling innocent. There
is little that does not enrapture them, if you tie them down to nothing,
and let them try all. Sir William was deceived by his nephew. He would
have taken him into his town-house; but his own son, Edward, who was
studying for the Law, had chambers in the Temple, and Algernon, receiving
an invitation from Edward, declared a gentle preference for the abode of
his cousin. His allowance from his father was properly contracted to keep
him from excesses, as the genius of his senior devised, and Sir William
saw no objection to the scheme, and made none. The two dined with him
about twice in the month.

Edward Blancove was three-and-twenty years old, a student by fits, and a
young man given to be moody. He had powers of gaiety far eclipsing
Algernon's, but he was not the same easy tripping sinner and flippant
soul. He was in that yeasty condition of his years when action and
reflection alternately usurp the mind; remorse succeeded dissipation, and
indulgences offered the soporific to remorse. The friends of the two
imagined that Algernon was, or would become, his evil genius. In reality,
Edward was the perilous companion. He was composed of better stuff.
Algernon was but an airy animal nature, the soul within him being an
effervescence lightly let loose. Edward had a fatally serious spirit, and
one of some strength. What he gave himself up to, he could believe to be
correct, in the teeth of an opposing world, until he tired of it, when he
sided as heartily with the world against his quondam self. Algernon might
mislead, or point his cousin's passions for a time; yet if they continued
their courses together, there was danger that Algernon would degenerate
into a reckless subordinate--a minister, a valet, and be tempted
unknowingly to do things in earnest, which is nothing less than perdition
to this sort of creature.

But the key to young men is the ambition, or, in the place of it, the
romantic sentiment nourished by them. Edward aspired to become
Attorney-General of these realms, not a judge, you observe; for a judge
is to the imagination of youthful minds a stationary being, venerable,
but not active; whereas, your Attorney-General is always in the fray, and
fights commonly on the winning side,--a point that renders his position
attractive to sagacious youth. Algernon had other views. Civilization had
tried him, and found him wanting; so he condemned it. Moreover, sitting
now all day at a desk, he was civilization's drudge. No wonder, then,
that his dream was of prairies, and primeval forests, and Australian
wilds. He believed in his heart that he would be a man new made over
there, and always looked forward to savage life as to a bath that would
cleanse him, so that it did not much matter his being unclean for the
present.

The young men had a fair cousin by marriage, a Mrs. Margaret Lovell, a
widow. At seventeen she had gone with her husband to India, where Harry
Lovell encountered the sword of a Sikh Sirdar, and tried the last of his
much-vaunted swordsmanship, which, with his skill at the pistols, had
served him better in two antecedent duels, for the vindication of his
lovely and terrible young wife. He perished on the field, critically
admiring the stroke to which he owed his death. A week after Harry's
burial his widow was asked in marriage by his colonel. Captains, and a
giddy subaltern likewise, disputed claims to possess her. She, however,
decided to arrest further bloodshed by quitting the regiment. She always
said that she left India to save her complexion; "and people don't know
how very candid I am," she added, for the colonel above-mentioned was
wealthy,--a man expectant of a title, and a good match, and she was
laughed at when she thus assigned trivial reasons for momentous
resolutions. It is a luxury to be candid; and perfect candour can do more
for us than a dark disguise.

Mrs. Lovell's complexion was worth saving from the ravages of an Indian
climate, and the persecution of claimants to her hand. She was golden and
white, like an autumnal birch-tree--yellow hair, with warm-toned streaks
in it, shading a fabulously fair skin. Then, too, she was tall, of a
nervous build, supple and proud in motion, a brilliant horsewoman, and a
most distinguished sitter in an easy drawing-room chair, which is, let me
impress upon you, no mean quality. After riding out for hours with a
sweet comrade, who has thrown the mantle of dignity half-way off her
shoulders, it is perplexing, and mixed strangely of humiliation and
ecstasy, to come upon her clouded majesty where she reclines as upon
rose-hued clouds, in a mystic circle of restriction (she who laughed at
your jokes, and capped them, two hours ago) a queen.

Between Margaret Lovell and Edward there was a misunderstanding, of which
no one knew the nature, for they spoke in public very respectfully one of
the other. It had been supposed that they were lovers once; but when
lovers quarrel, they snarl, they bite, they worry; their eyes are indeed
unveiled, and their mouths unmuzzled. Now Margaret said of Edward: "He is
sure to rise; he has such good principles." Edward said of Margaret: "She
only wants a husband who will keep her well in hand." These sentences
scarcely carried actual compliments when you knew the speakers; but
outraged lovers cannot talk in that style after they have broken apart.
It is possible that Margaret and Edward conveyed to one another as sharp
a sting as envenomed lovers attempt. Gossip had once betrothed them, but
was now at fault. The lady had a small jointure, and lived partly with
her uncle, Lord Elling, partly with Squire Blancove, her aunt's husband,
and a little by herself, which was when she counted money in her purse,
and chose to assert her independence. She had a name in the world. There
is a fate attached to some women, from Helen of Troy downward, that blood
is to be shed for them. One duel on behalf of a woman is a reputation to
her for life; two are notoriety. If she is very young, can they be
attributable to her? We charge them naturally to her overpowering beauty.
It happened that Mrs. Lovell was beautiful. Under the light of the two
duels her beauty shone as from an illumination of black flame. Boys
adored Mrs. Lovell. These are moths. But more, the birds of air, nay,
grave owls (who stand in this metaphor for whiskered experience)
thronged, dashing at the apparition of terrible splendour. Was it her
fault that she had a name in the world?

Mrs. Margaret Lovell's portrait hung in Edward's room. It was a
photograph exquisitely coloured, and was on the left of a dark Judith,
dark with a serenity of sternness. On the right hung another coloured
photograph of a young lady, also fair; and it was a point of taste to
choose between them. Do you like the hollowed lily's cheeks, or the plump
rose's? Do you like a thinnish fall of golden hair, or an abundant
cluster of nut-brown? Do you like your blonde with limpid blue eyes, or
prefer an endowment of sunny hazel? Finally, are you taken by an air of
artistic innocence winding serpentine about your heart's fibres; or is
blushing simplicity sweeter to you? Mrs. Lovell's eyebrows were the
faintly-marked trace of a perfect arch. The other young person's were
thickish, more level; a full brown colour. She looked as if she had not
yet attained to any sense of her being a professed beauty: but the fair
widow was clearly bent upon winning you, and had a shy, playful
intentness of aspect. Her pure white skin was flat on the bone; the lips
came forward in a soft curve, and, if they were not artistically stained,
were triumphantly fresh. Here, in any case, she beat her rival, whose
mouth had the plebeian beauty's fault of being too straight in a line,
and was not trained, apparently, to tricks of dainty pouting.

It was morning, and the cousins having sponged in pleasant cold water,
arranged themselves for exercise, and came out simultaneously into the
sitting-room, slippered, and in flannels. They nodded and went through
certain curt greetings, and then Algernon stepped to a cupboard and
tossed out the leather gloves. The room was large and they had a
tolerable space for the work, when the breakfast-table had been drawn a
little on one side. You saw at a glance which was the likelier man of the
two, when they stood opposed. Algernon's rounded features, full lips and
falling chin, were not a match, though he was quick on his feet, for the
wary, prompt eyes, set mouth, and hardness of Edward. Both had stout
muscle, but in Edward there was vigour of brain as well, which seemed to
knit and inform his shape without which, in fact, a man is as a ship
under no command. Both looked their best; as, when sparring, men always
do look.

"Now, then," said Algernon, squaring up to his cousin in good style,
"now's the time for that unwholesome old boy underneath to commence
groaning."

"Step as light as you can," replied Edward, meeting him with the pretty
motion of the gloves.

"I'll step as light as a French dancing-master. Let's go to Paris and
learn the savate, Ned. It must be a new sensation to stand on one leg and
knock a fellow's hat off with the other."

"Stick to your fists."

"Hang it! I wish your fists wouldn't stick to me so."

"You talk too much."

"Gad, I don't get puffy half so soon as you."

"I want country air."

"You said you were going out, old Ned."

"I changed my mind."

Saying which, Edward shut his teeth, and talked for two or three hot
minutes wholly with his fists. The room shook under Algernon's boundings
to right and left till a blow sent him back on the breakfast-table,
shattered a cup on the floor, and bespattered his close flannel shirt
with a funereal coffee-tinge.

"What the deuce I said to bring that on myself, I don't know," Algernon
remarked as he rose. "Anything connected with the country disagreeable to
you, Ned? Come! a bout of quiet scientific boxing, and none of these
beastly rushes, as if you were singling me out of a crowd of magsmen. Did
you go to church yesterday, Ned? Confound it, you're on me again, are
you?"

And Algernon went on spouting unintelligible talk under a torrent of
blows. He lost his temper and fought out at them; but as it speedily
became evident to him that the loss laid him open to punishment, he
prudently recovered it, sparred, danced about, and contrived to shake the
room in a manner that caused Edward to drop his arms, in consideration
for the distracted occupant of the chambers below. Algernon accepted the
truce, and made it peace by casting off one glove.

"There! that's a pleasant morning breather," he said, and sauntered to
the window to look at the river. "I always feel the want of it when I
don't get it. I could take a thrashing rather than not on with the gloves
to begin the day. Look at those boats! Fancy my having to go down to the
city. It makes me feel like my blood circulating the wrong way. My
father'll suffer some day, for keeping me at this low ebb of cash, by
jingo!"

He uttered this with a prophetic fierceness.

"I cannot even scrape together enough for entrance money to a Club. It's
sickening! I wonder whether I shall ever get used to banking work?
There's an old clerk in our office who says he should feel ill if he
missed a day. And the old porter beats him--bangs him to fits. I believe
he'd die off if he didn't see the house open to the minute. They say that
old boy's got a pretty niece; but he don't bring her to the office now.
Reward of merit!--Mr. Anthony Hackbut is going to receive ten pounds a
year extra. That's for his honesty. I wonder whether I could earn a
reputation for the sake of a prospect of ten extra pounds to my salary.
I've got a salary! hurrah! But if they keep me to my hundred and fifty
per annum, don't let them trust me every day with the bags, as they do
that old fellow. Some of the men say he's good to lend fifty pounds at a
pinch.--Are the chops coming, Ned?"

"The chops are coming," said Edward, who had thrown on a boating-coat and
plunged into a book, and spoke echoing.

"Here's little Peggy Lovell." Algernon faced this portrait. "It don't do
her justice. She's got more life, more change in her, more fire. She's
starting for town, I hear."

"She is starting for town," said Edward.

"How do you know that?" Algernon swung about to ask.

Edward looked round to him. "By the fact of your not having fished for a
holiday this week. How did you leave her yesterday, Algy? Quite well, I
hope."

The ingenuous face of the young gentleman crimsoned.

"Oh, she was well," he said. "Ha! I see there can be some attraction in
your dark women."

"You mean that Judith? Yes, she's a good diversion." Edward gave a
two-edged response. "What train did you come up by last night?"

"The last from Wrexby. That reminds me: I saw a young Judith just as I
got out. She wanted a cab. I called it for her. She belongs to old
Hackbut of the Bank--the old porter, you know. If it wasn't that there's
always something about dark women which makes me think they're going to
have a moustache, I should take to that girl's face."

Edward launched forth an invective against fair women.

"What have they done to you-what have they done?" said Algernon.

"My good fellow, they're nothing but colour. They've no conscience. If
they swear a thing to you one moment, they break it the next. They can't
help doing it. You don't ask a gilt weathercock to keep faith with
anything but the wind, do you? It's an ass that trusts a fair woman at
all, or has anything to do with the confounded set. Cleopatra was fair;
so was Delilah; so is the Devil's wife. Reach me that book of Reports."

"By jingo!" cried Algernon, "my stomach reports that if provision doesn't
soon approach----why don't you keep a French cook here, Ned? Let's give
up the women, and take to a French cook."

Edward yawned horribly. "All in good time. It's what we come to. It's
philosophy--your French cook! I wish I had it, or him. I'm afraid a
fellow can't anticipate his years--not so lucky!"

"By Jove! we shall have to be philosophers before we breakfast!" Algernon
exclaimed. "It's nine. I've to be tied to the stake at ten, chained and
muzzled--a leetle-a dawg! I wish I hadn't had to leave the service. It
was a vile conspiracy against me there, Ned. Hang all tradesmen! I sit on
a stool, and add up figures. I work harder than a nigger in the office.
That's my life: but I must feed. It's no use going to the office in a
rage."

"Will you try on the gloves again?" was Edward's mild suggestion.

Algernon thanked him, and replied that he knew him. Edward hit hard when
he was empty.

They now affected patience, as far as silence went to make up an element
of that sublime quality. The chops arriving, they disdained the mask.
Algernon fired his glove just over the waiter's head, and Edward put the
ease to the man's conscience; after which they sat and ate, talking
little. The difference between them was, that Edward knew the state of
Algernon's mind and what was working within it, while the latter stared
at a blank wall as regarded Edward's.

"Going out after breakfast, Ned?" said Algernon. "We'll walk to the city
together, if you like."

Edward fixed one of his intent looks upon his cousin. "You're not going
to the city to-day?"

"The deuce, I'm not!"

"You're going to dance attendance on Mrs. Lovell, whom it's your pleasure
to call Peggy, when you're some leagues out of her hearing."

Algernon failed to command his countenance. He glanced at one of the
portraits, and said, "Who is that girl up there? Tell us her name.
Talking of Mrs. Lovell, has she ever seen it?"

"If you'll put on your coat, my dear Algy, I will talk to you about Mrs.
Lovell." Edward kept his penetrative eyes on Algernon. "Listen to me:
you'll get into a mess there."

"If I must listen, Ned, I'll listen in my shirt-sleeves, with all respect
to the lady."

"Very well. The shirt-sleeves help the air of bravado. Now, you know that
I've what they call 'knelt at her feet.' She's handsome. Don't cry out.
She's dashing, and as near being a devil as any woman I ever met. Do you
know why we broke? I'll tell you. Plainly, because I refused to believe
that one of her men had insulted her. You understand what that means. I
declined to be a chief party in a scandal."

"Declined to fight the fellow?" interposed Algernon. "More shame to you!"

"I think you're a year younger than I am, Algy. You have the privilege of
speaking with that year's simplicity. Mrs. Lovell will play you as she
played me. I acknowledge her power, and I keep out of her way. I don't
bet; I don't care to waltz; I can't keep horses; so I don't lose much by
the privation to which I subject myself."

"I bet, I waltz, and I ride. So," said Algernon, "I should lose
tremendously."

"You will lose, mark my words."

"Is the lecture of my year's senior concluded?" said Algernon.

"Yes; I've done," Edward answered.

"Then I'll put on my coat, Ned, and I'll smoke in it. That'll give you
assurance I'm not going near Mrs. Lovell, if anything will."

"That gives me assurance that Mrs. Lovell tolerates in you what she
detests," said Edward, relentless in his insight; "and, consequently,
gives me assurance that she finds you of particular service to her at
present."

Algernon had a lighted match in his hand. He flung it into the fire. "I'm
hanged if I don't think you have the confounded vanity to suppose she
sets me as a spy upon you!"

A smile ran along Edward's lips. "I don't think you'd know it, if she
did."

"Oh, you're ten years older; you're twenty," bawled Algernon, in an
extremity of disgust. "Don't I know what game you're following up? Isn't
it clear as day you've got another woman in your eye?"

"It's as clear as day, my good Algy, that you see a portrait hanging in
my chambers, and you have heard Mrs. Lovell's opinion of the fact. So
much is perfectly clear. There's my hand. I don't blame you. She's a
clever woman, and like many of the sort, shrewd at guessing the worst.
Come, take my hand. I tell you, I don't blame you. I've been little dog
to her myself, and fetched and carried, and wagged my tail. It's charming
while it lasts. Will you shake it?"

"Your tail, man?" Algernon roared in pretended amazement.

Edward eased him back to friendliness by laughing. "No; my hand."

They shook hands.

"All right," said Algernon. "You mean well. It's very well for you to
preach virtue to a poor devil; you've got loose, or you're regularly in
love."

"Virtue! by heaven!" Edward cried; "I wish I were entitled to preach it
to any man on earth."

His face flushed. "There, good-bye, old fellow," he added.

"Go to the city. I'll dine with you to-night, if you like; come and dine
with me at my Club. I shall be disengaged."

Algernon mumbled a flexible assent to an appointment at Edward's Club,
dressed himself with care, borrowed a sovereign, for which he nodded his
acceptance, and left him.

Edward set his brain upon a book of law.

It may have been two hours after he had sat thus in his Cistercian
stillness, when a letter was delivered to him by one of the Inn porters.
Edward read the superscription, and asked the porter who it was that
brought it. Two young ladies, the porter said.

These were the contents:--

"I am not sure that you will ever forgive me. I cannot forgive myself
when I think of that one word I was obliged to speak to you in the cold
street, and nothing to explain why, and how much I love, you. Oh! how I
love you! I cry while I write. I cannot help it. I was a sop of tears all
night long, and oh! if you had seen my face in the morning. I am thankful
you did not. Mother's Bible brought me home. It must have been guidance,
for in my bed there lay my sister, and I could not leave her, I love her
so. I could not have got down stairs again after seeing her there; and I
had to say that cold word and shut the window on you. May I call you
Edward still? Oh, dear Edward, do make allowance for me. Write kindly to
me. Say you forgive me. I feel like a ghost to-day. My life seems quite
behind me somewhere, and I hardly feel anything I touch. I declare to
you, dearest one, I had no idea my sister was here. I was surprised when
I heard her name mentioned by my landlady, and looked on the bed;
suddenly my strength was gone, and it changed all that I was thinking. I
never knew before that women were so weak, but now I see they are, and I
only know I am at my Edward's mercy, and am stupid! Oh, so wretched and
stupid. I shall not touch food till I hear from you. Oh, if, you are
angry, write so; but do write. My suspense would make you pity me. I know
I deserve your anger. It was not that I do not trust you, Edward. My
mother in heaven sees my heart and that I trust, I trust my heart and
everything I am and have to you. I would almost wish and wait to see you
to-day in the Gardens, but my crying has made me such a streaked thing to
look at. If I had rubbed my face with a scrubbing-brush, I could not look
worse, and I cannot risk your seeing me. It would excuse you for hating
me. Do you? Does he hate her? She loves you. She would die for you, dear
Edward. Oh! I feel that if I was told to-day that I should die for you
to-morrow, it would be happiness. I am dying--yes, I am dying till I hear
from you.

             "Believe me,

          "Your tender, loving, broken-hearted,

                  "Dahlia."

   There was a postscript:--

   "May I still go to lessons?"

Edward finished the letter with a calmly perusing eye. He had winced
triflingly at one or two expressions contained in it; forcible, perhaps,
but not such as Mrs. Lovell smiling from the wall yonder would have used.

"The poor child threatens to eat no dinner, if I don't write to her," he
said; and replied in a kind and magnanimous spirit, concluding--"Go to
lessons, by all means."

Having accomplished this, he stood up, and by hazard fell to comparing
the rival portraits; a melancholy and a comic thing to do, as you will
find if you put two painted heads side by side, and set their merits
contesting, and reflect on the contest, and to what advantages, personal,
or of the artist's, the winner owes the victory. Dahlia had been
admirably dealt with by the artist; the charm of pure ingenuousness
without rusticity was visible in her face and figure. Hanging there on
the wall, she was a match for Mrs. Lovell.




CHAPTER VII

Rhoda returned home the heavier for a secret that she bore with her. All
through the first night of her sleeping in London, Dahlia's sobs, and
tender hugs, and self-reproaches, had penetrated her dreams, and when the
morning came she had scarcely to learn that Dahlia loved some one. The
confession was made; but his name was reserved. Dahlia spoke of him with
such sacredness of respect that she seemed lost in him, and like a
creature kissing his feet. With tears rolling down her cheeks, and with
moans of anguish, she spoke of the deliciousness of loving: of knowing
one to whom she abandoned her will and her destiny, until, seeing how
beautiful a bloom love threw upon the tearful worn face of her sister,
Rhoda was impressed by a mystical veneration for this man, and readily
believed him to be above all other men, if not superhuman: for she was of
an age and an imagination to conceive a spiritual pre-eminence over the
weakness of mortality. She thought that one who could so transform her
sister, touch her with awe, and give her gracefulness and humility, must
be what Dahlia said he was. She asked shyly for his Christian name; but
even so little Dahlia withheld. It was his wish that Dahlia should keep
silence concerning him.

"Have you sworn an oath?" said Rhoda, wonderingly.

"No, dear love," Dahlia replied; "he only mentioned what he desired."

Rhoda was ashamed of herself for thinking it strange, and she surrendered
her judgement to be stamped by the one who knew him well.

As regarded her uncle, Dahlia admitted that she had behaved forgetfully
and unkindly, and promised amendment. She talked of the Farm as of an old
ruin, with nothing but a thin shade of memory threading its walls, and
appeared to marvel vaguely that it stood yet. "Father shall not always
want money," she said. She was particular in prescribing books for Rhoda
to read; good authors, she emphasized, and named books of history, and
poets, and quoted their verses. "For my darling will some day have a dear
husband, and he must not look down on her." Rhoda shook her head, full
sure that she could never be brought to utter such musical words
naturally. "Yes, dearest, when you know what love is," said Dahlia, in an
underbreath.

Could Robert inspire her with the power? Rhoda looked upon that poor
homely young man half-curiously when she returned, and quite dismissed
the notion. Besides she had no feeling for herself. Her passion was fixed
upon her sister, whose record of emotions in the letters from London
placed her beyond dull days and nights. The letters struck many chords. A
less subservient reader would have set them down as variations of the
language of infatuation; but Rhoda was responsive to every word and
change of mood, from the, "I am unworthy, degraded, wretched," to "I am
blest above the angels." If one letter said, "We met yesterday," Rhoda's
heart beat on to the question, "Shall I see him again to-morrow?" And
will she see him?--has she seen him?--agitated her and absorbed her
thoughts.

So humbly did she follow her sister, without daring to forecast a
prospect for her, or dream of an issue, that when on a summer morning a
letter was brought in at the breakfast-table, marked "urgent and
private," she opened it, and the first line dazzled her eyes--the
surprise was a shock to her brain. She rose from her unfinished meal, and
walked out into the wide air, feeling as if she walked on thunder.

The letter ran thus:--

"My Own Innocent!--I am married. We leave England to-day. I must not love
you too much, for I have all my love to give to my Edward, my own now,
and I am his trustingly for ever. But he will let me give you some of
it--and Rhoda is never jealous. She shall have a great deal. Only I am
frightened when I think how immense my love is for him, so that
anything--everything he thinks right is right to me. I am not afraid to
think so. If I were to try, a cloud would come over me--it does, if only
I fancy for half a moment I am rash, and a straw. I cannot exist except
through him. So I must belong to him, and his will is my law. My prayer
at my bedside every night is that I may die for him. We used to think the
idea of death so terrible! Do you remember how we used to shudder
together at night when we thought of people lying in the grave? And now,
when I think that perhaps I may some day die for him, I feel like a
crying in my heart with joy.

"I have left a letter--sent it, I mean--enclosed to uncle for father. He
will see Edward by-and-by. Oh! may heaven spare him from any grief. Rhoda
will comfort him. Tell him how devoted I am. I am like drowned to
everybody but one.

"We are looking on the sea. In half an hour I shall have forgotten the
tread of English earth. I do not know that I breathe. All I know is a
fear that I am flying, and my strength will not continue. That is when I
am not touching his hand. There is France opposite. I shut my eyes and
see the whole country, but it is like what I feel for Edward--all in dark
moonlight. Oh! I trust him so! I bleed for him. I could make all my veins
bleed out at a sad thought about him. And from France to Switzerland and
Italy. The sea sparkles just as if it said 'Come to the sun;' and I am
going. Edward calls. Shall I be punished for so much happiness? I am too
happy, I am too happy.

"God bless my beloved at home! That is my chief prayer now. I shall think
of her when I am in the cathedrals.

"Oh, my Father in heaven! bless them all! bless Rhoda! forgive me!

"I can hear the steam of the steamer at the pier. Here is Edward. He says
I may send his love to you.

"Address:--

     "Mrs. Edward Ayrton,
        "Poste Restante,
          "Lausanne,
             "Switzerland.

"P.S.--Lausanne is where--but another time, and I will always tell you
the history of the places to instruct you, poor heart in dull England.
Adieu! Good-bye and God bless my innocent at home, my dear sister. I love
her. I never can forget her. The day is so lovely. It seems on purpose
for us. Be sure you write on thin paper to Lausanne. It is on a blue
lake; you see snow mountains, and now there is a bell ringing--kisses
from me! we start. I must sign.

             "Dahlia."

By the reading of this letter, Rhoda was caught vividly to the shore, and
saw her sister borne away in the boat to the strange countries; she
travelled with her, following her with gliding speed through a
multiplicity of shifting scenes, opal landscapes, full of fire and
dreams, and in all of them a great bell towered. "Oh, my sweet! my own
beauty!" she cried in Dahlia's language. Meeting Mrs. Sumfit, she called
her "Mother Dumpling," as Dahlia did of old, affectionately, and kissed
her, and ran on to Master Gammon, who was tramping leisurely on to the
oatfield lying on toward the millholms.

"My sister sends you her love," she said brightly to the old man. Master
Gammon responded with no remarkable flash of his eyes, and merely opened
his mouth and shut it, as when a duck divides its bill, but fails to emit
the customary quack.

"And to you, little pigs; and to you, Mulberry; and you, Dapple; and you,
and you, and you."

Rhoda nodded round to all the citizens of the farmyard; and so eased her
heart of its laughing bubbles. After which, she fell to a meditative walk
of demurer joy, and had a regret. It was simply that Dahlia's hurry in
signing the letter, had robbed her of the delight of seeing "Dahlia
Ayrton" written proudly out, with its wonderful signification of the
change in her life.

That was a trifling matter; yet Rhoda felt the letter was not complete in
the absence of the bridal name. She fancied Dahlia to have meant,
perhaps, that she was Dahlia to her as of old, and not a stranger.
"Dahlia ever; Dahlia nothing else for you," she heard her sister say. But
how delicious and mournful, how terrible and sweet with meaning would
"Dahlia Ayrton," the new name in the dear handwriting, have looked! "And
I have a brother-in-law," she thought, and her cheeks tingled. The banks
of fern and foxglove, and the green young oaks fringing the copse, grew
rich in colour, as she reflected that this beloved unknown husband of her
sister embraced her and her father as well; even the old bent beggarman
on the sandy ridge, though he had a starved frame and carried pitiless
faggots, stood illumined in a soft warmth. Rhoda could not go back to the
house.

It chanced that the farmer that morning had been smitten with the virtue
of his wife's opinion of Robert, and her parting recommendation
concerning him.

"Have you a mind to either one of my two girls?" he put the question
bluntly, finding himself alone with Robert.

Robert took a quick breath, and replied, "I have."

"Then make your choice," said the farmer, and tried to go about his
business, but hung near Robert in the fields till he had asked: "Which
one is it, my boy?"

Robert turned a blade of wheat in his mouth.

"I think I shall leave her to tell that," was his answer.

"Why, don't ye know which one you prefer to choose, man?" quoth Mr.
Fleming.

"I mayn't know whether she prefers to choose me," said Robert.

The farmer smiled.

"You never can exactly reckon about them; that's true."

He was led to think: "Dahlia's the lass;" seeing that Robert had not had
many opportunities of speaking with her.

"When my girls are wives, they'll do their work in the house," he
pursued. "They may have a little bit o' property in land, ye know, and
they may have a share in--in gold. That's not to be reckoned on. We're an
old family, Robert, and I suppose we've our pride somewhere down. Anyhow,
you can't look on my girls and not own they're superior girls. I've no
notion of forcing them to clean, and dish up, and do dairying, if it's
not to their turn. They're handy with th' needle. They dress conformably,
and do the millinery themselves. And I know they say their prayers of a
night. That I know, if that's a comfort to ye, and it should be, Robert.
For pray, and you can't go far wrong; and it's particularly good for
girls. I'll say no more."

At the dinner-table, Rhoda was not present. Mr. Fleming fidgeted, blamed
her and excused her, but as Robert appeared indifferent about her
absence, he was confirmed in his idea that Dahlia attracted his fancy.

They had finished dinner, and Master Gammon had risen, when a voice
immediately recognized as the voice of Anthony Hackbut was heard in the
front part of the house. Mr. Fleming went round to him with a dismayed
face.

"Lord!" said Mrs. Sumfit, "how I tremble!"

Robert, too, looked grave, and got away from the house. The dread of evil
news of Dahlia was common to them all; yet none had mentioned it, Robert
conceiving that it would be impertinence on his part to do so; the
farmer, that the policy of permitting Dahlia's continued residence in
London concealed the peril; while Mrs. Sumfit flatly defied the
threatening of a mischance to one so sweet and fair, and her favourite.
It is the insincerity of persons of their class; but one need not lay
stress on the wilfulness of uneducated minds. Robert walked across the
fields, walking like a man with an object in view. As he dropped into one
of the close lanes which led up to Wrexby Hall, he saw Rhoda standing
under an oak, her white morning-dress covered with sun-spots. His impulse
was to turn back, the problem, how to speak to her, not being settled
within him. But the next moment his blood chilled; for he had perceived,
though he had not felt simultaneously, that two gentlemen were standing
near her, addressing her. And it was likewise manifest that she listened
to them. These presently raised their hats and disappeared. Rhoda came on
toward Robert.

"You have forgotten your dinner," he said, with a queer sense of shame at
dragging in the mention of that meal.

"I have been too happy to eat," Rhoda replied.

Robert glanced up the lane, but she gave no heed to this indication, and
asked: "Has uncle come?"

"Did you expect him?"

"I thought he would come."

"What has made you happy?"

"You will hear from uncle."

"Shall I go and hear what those--"

Robert checked himself, but it would have been better had he spoken out.
Rhoda's face, from a light of interrogation, lowered its look to
contempt.

She did not affect the feminine simplicity which can so prettily
misunderstand and put by an implied accusation of that nature. Doubtless
her sharp instinct served her by telling her that her contempt would hurt
him shrewdly now. The foolishness of a man having much to say to a woman,
and not knowing how or where the beginning of it might be, was
perceptible about him. A shout from her father at the open garden-gate,
hurried on Rhoda to meet him. Old Anthony was at Mr. Fleming's elbow.

"You know it? You have her letter, father?" said Rhoda, gaily, beneath
the shadow of his forehead.

"And a Queen of the Egyptians is what you might have been," said Anthony,
with a speculating eye upon Rhoda's dark bright face.

Rhoda put out her hand to him, but kept her gaze on her father.

William Fleeting relaxed the knot of his brows and lifted the letter.

"Listen all! This is from a daughter to her father."

And he read, oddly accentuating the first syllables of the sentences:--

   Dear Father,--

   "My husband will bring me to see you when I return to dear England.
   I ought to have concealed nothing, I know. Try to forgive me. I
   hope you will. I shall always think of you. God bless you!

               "I am,
          "Ever with respect,
             "Your dearly loving Daughter,

                  "Dahlia."

"Dahlia Blank!" said the farmer, turning his look from face to face.

A deep fire of emotion was evidently agitating him, for the letter
rustled in his hand, and his voice was uneven. Of this, no sign was given
by his inexpressive features. The round brown eyes and the ruddy varnish
on his cheeks were a mask upon grief, if not also upon joy.

"Dahlia--what? What's her name?" he resumed. "Here--'my husband will
bring me to see you'--who's her husband? Has he got a name? And a blank
envelope to her uncle here, who's kept her in comfort for so long! And
this is all she writes to me! Will any one spell out the meaning of it?"

"Dahlia was in great haste, father," said Rhoda.

"Oh, ay, you!--you're the one, I know," returned the farmer. "It's sister
and sister, with you."

"But she was very, very hurried, father. I have a letter from her, and I
have only 'Dahlia' written at the end--no other name."

"And you suspect no harm of your sister."

"Father, how can I imagine any kind of harm?"

"That letter, my girl, sticks to my skull, as though it meant to say,
'You've not understood me yet.' I've read it a matter of twenty times,
and I'm no nearer to the truth of it. But, if she's lying, here in this
letter, what's she walking on? How long are we to wait for to hear? I
give you my word, Robert, I'm feeling for you as I am for myself. Or,
wasn't it that one? Is it this one?" He levelled his finger at Rhoda. "In
any case, Robert, you'll feel for me as a father. I'm shut in a dark room
with the candle blown out. I've heard of a sort of fear you have in that
dilemmer, lest you should lay your fingers on edges of sharp knives, and
if I think a step--if I go thinking a step, and feel my way, I do cut
myself, and I bleed, I do. Robert, just take and say, it wasn't that
one."

Such a statement would carry with it the confession that it was this one
for whom he cared this scornful one, this jilt, this brazen girl who
could make appointments with gentlemen, or suffer them to speak to her,
and subsequently look at him with innocence and with anger.

"Believe me, Mr. Fleming, I feel for you as much as a man can," he said,
uneasily, swaying half round as he spoke.

"Do you suspect anything bad?" The farmer repeated the question, like one
who only wanted a confirmation of his own suspicions to see the fact
built up. "Robert, does this look like the letter of a married woman? Is
it daughter-like--eh, man? Help another: I can't think for myself--she
ties my hands. Speak out."

Robert set his eyes on Rhoda. He would have given much to have been able
to utter, "I do." Her face was like an eager flower straining for light;
the very beauty of it swelled his jealous passion, and he flattered
himself with his incapacity to speak an abject lie to propitiate her.

"She says she is married. We're bound to accept what she says."

That was his answer.

"Is she married?" thundered the farmer. "Has she been and disgraced her
mother in her grave? What am I to think? She's my flesh and blood. Is
she--"

"Oh, hush, father!" Rhoda laid her hand on his arm. "What doubt can there
be of Dahlia? You have forgotten that she is always truthful. Come away.
It is shameful to stand here and listen to unmanly things."

She turned a face of ashes upon Robert.

"Come away, father. She is our own. She is my sister. A doubt of her is
an insult to us."

"But Robert don't doubt her--eh?" The farmer was already half distracted
from his suspicions. "Have you any real doubt about the girl, Robert?"

"I don't trust myself to doubt anybody," said Robert.

"You don't cast us off, my boy?"

"I'm a labourer on the farm," said Robert, and walked away.

"He's got reason to feel this more 'n the rest of us, poor lad! It's a
blow to him." With which the farmer struck his hand on Rhoda's shoulder.

"I wish he'd set his heart on a safer young woman."

Rhoda's shudder of revulsion was visible as she put her mouth up to kiss
her father's cheek.




CHAPTER VIII

That is Wrexby Hall, upon the hill between Fenhurst and Wrexby: the white
square mansion, with the lower drawing-room windows one full bow of glass
against the sunlight, and great single trees spotting the distant green
slopes. From Queen Anne's Farm you could read the hour by the stretching
of their shadows. Squire Blancove, who lived there, was an irascible,
gouty man, out of humour with his time, and beginning, alas for him! to
lose all true faith in his Port, though, to do him justice, he wrestled
hard with this great heresy. His friends perceived the decay in his
belief sooner than he did himself. He was sour in the evening as in the
morning. There was no chirp in him when the bottle went round. He had
never one hour of a humane mood to be reckoned on now. The day, indeed,
is sad when we see the skeleton of the mistress by whom we suffer, but
cannot abandon her. The squire drank, knowing that the issue would be the
terrific, curse-begetting twinge in his foot; but, as he said, he was a
man who stuck to his habits. It was over his Port that he had quarrelled
with his rector on the subject of hopeful Algernon, and the system he
adopted with that young man. This incident has something to do with
Rhoda's story, for it was the reason why Mrs. Lovell went to Wrexby
Church, the spirit of that lady leading her to follow her own impulses,
which were mostly in opposition. So, when perchance she visited the Hall,
she chose not to accompany the squire and his subservient guests to
Fenhurst, but made a point of going down to the unoccupied Wrexby pew.
She was a beauty, and therefore powerful; otherwise her act of
nonconformity would have produced bad blood between her and the squire.

It was enough to have done so in any case; for now, instead of sitting at
home comfortably, and reading off the week's chronicle of sport while he
nursed his leg, the unfortunate gentleman had to be up and away to
Fenhurst every Sunday morning, or who would have known that the old cause
of his general abstention from Sabbath services lay in the detestable
doctrine of Wrexby's rector?

Mrs. Lovell was now at the Hall, and it was Sunday morning after
breakfast. The lady stood like a rival head among the other guests,
listening, gloved and bonneted, to the bells of Wrexby, West of the
hills, and of Fenhurst, Northeast. The squire came in to them, groaning
over his boots, cross with his fragile wife, and in every mood for
satire, except to receive it.

"How difficult it is to be gouty and good!" murmured Mrs. Lovell to the
person next her.

"Well," said the squire, singling out his enemy, "you're going to that
fellow, I suppose, as usual--eh?"

"Not 'as usual,'" replied Mrs. Lovell, sweetly; "I wish it were!"

"Wish it were, do you?--you find him so entertaining? Has he got to
talking of the fashions?"

"He talks properly; I don't ask for more." Mrs. Lovell assumed an air of
meekness under persecution.

"I thought you were Low Church."

"Lowly of the Church, I trust you thought," she corrected him. "But, for
that matter, any discourse, plainly delivered, will suit me."

"His elocution's perfect," said the squire; "that is, before dinner."

"I have only to do with him before dinner, you know."

"Well, I've ordered a carriage out for you."

"That is very honourable and kind."

"It would be kinder if I contrived to keep you away from the fellow."

"Would it not be kinder to yourself," Mrs. Lovell swam forward to him in
all tenderness, taking his hands, and fixing the swimming blue of her
soft eyes upon him pathetically, "if you took your paper and your
slippers, and awaited our return?"

The squire felt the circulating smile about the room. He rebuked the
woman's audacity with a frown; "Tis my duty to set an example," he said,
his gouty foot and irritable temper now meeting in a common fire.

"Since you are setting an example," rejoined the exquisite widow, "I have
nothing more to say."

The squire looked what he dared not speak. A woman has half, a beauty has
all, the world with her when she is self-contained, and holds her place;
and it was evident that Mrs. Lovell was not one to abandon her
advantages.

He snapped round for a victim, trying his wife first. Then his eyes
rested upon Algernon.

"Well, here we are; which of us will you take?" he asked Mrs. Lovell in
blank irony.

"I have engaged my cavalier, who is waiting, and will be as devout as
possible." Mrs. Lovell gave Algernon a smile.

"I thought I hit upon the man," growled the squire. "You're going in to
Wrexby, sir! Oh, go, by all means, and I shan't be astonished at what
comes of it. Like teacher, like pupil!"

"There!" Mrs. Lovell gave Algernon another smile. "You have to bear the
sins of your rector, as well as your own. Can you support it?"

The flimsy fine dialogue was a little above Algernon's level in the
society of ladies; but he muttered, bowing, that he would endeavour to
support it, with Mrs. Lovell's help, and this did well enough; after
which, the slight strain on the intellects of the assemblage relaxed, and
ordinary topics were discussed. The carriages came round to the door;
gloves, parasols, and scent-bottles were securely grasped; whereupon the
squire, standing bare-headed on the steps, insisted upon seeing the party
of the opposition off first, and waited to hand Mrs. Lovell into her
carriage, an ironic gallantry accepted by the lady with serenity
befitting the sacred hour.

"Ah! my pencil, to mark the text for you, squire," she said, taking her
seat; and Algernon turned back at her bidding, to get a pencil; and she,
presenting a most harmonious aspect in the lovely landscape, reclined in
the carriage as if, like the sweet summer air, she too were quieted by
those holy bells, while the squire stood, fuming, bareheaded, and with
boiling blood, just within the bounds of decorum on the steps. She was
more than his match.

She was more than a match for most; and it was not a secret. Algernon
knew it as well as Edward, or any one. She was a terror to the soul of
the youth, and an attraction. Her smile was the richest flattery he could
feel; the richer, perhaps, from his feeling it to be a thing impossible
to fix. He had heard tales of her; he remembered Edward's warning; but he
was very humbly sitting with her now, and very happy.

"I'm in for it," he said to his fair companion; "no cheque for me next
quarter, and no chance of an increase. He'll tell me I've got a salary. A
salary! Good Lord! what a man comes to! I've done for myself with the
squire for a year."

"You must think whether you have compensation," said the lady, and he
received it in a cousinly squeeze of his hand.

He was about to raise the lank white hand to his lips.

"Ah!" she said, "there would be no compensation to me, if that were
seen;" and her dainty hand was withdrawn. "Now, tell me," she changed her
tone. "How do the loves prosper?"

Algernon begged her not to call them 'loves.' She nodded and smiled.

"Your artistic admirations," she observed. "I am to see her in church, am
I not? Only, my dear Algy, don't go too far. Rustic beauties are as
dangerous as Court Princesses. Where was it you saw her first?"

"At the Bank," said Algernon.

"Really! at the Bank! So your time there is not absolutely wasted. What
brought her to London, I wonder?"

"Well, she has an old uncle, a queer old fellow, and he's a sort of
porter--money porter--in the Bank, awfully honest, or he might half break
it some fine day, if he chose to cut and run. She's got a sister,
prettier than this girl, the fellows say; I've never seen her. I expect
I've seen a portrait of her, though."

"Ah!" Mrs. Lovell musically drew him on. "Was she dark, too?"

"No, she's fair. At least, she is in her portrait."

"Brown hair; hazel eyes?"

"Oh--oh! You guess, do you?"

"I guess nothing, though it seems profitable. That Yankee betting man
'guesses,' and what heaps of money he makes by it!"

"I wish I did," Algernon sighed. "All my guessing and reckoning goes
wrong. I'm safe for next Spring, that's one comfort. I shall make twenty
thousand next Spring."

"On Templemore?"

"That's the horse. I've got a little on Tenpenny Nail as well. But I'm
quite safe on Templemore; unless the Evil Principle comes into the
field."

"Is he so sure to be against you, if he does appear?" said Mrs. Lovell.

"Certain!" ejaculated Algernon, in honest indignation.

"Well, Algy, I don't like to have him on my side. Perhaps I will take a
share in your luck, to make it--? to make it?"--She played prettily as a
mistress teasing her lap-dog to jump for a morsel; adding: "Oh! Algy, you
are not a Frenchman. To make it divine, sir! you have missed your
chance."

"There's one chance I shouldn't like to miss," said the youth.

"Then, do not mention it," she counselled him. "And, seriously, I will
take a part of your risk. I fear I am lucky, which is ruinous. We will
settle that, by-and-by. Do you know, Algy, the most expensive position in
the world is a widow's."

"You needn't be one very long," growled he.

"I'm so wretchedly fastidious, don't you see? And it's best not to sigh
when we're talking of business, if you'll take me for a guide. So, the
old man brought this pretty rustic Miss Rhoda to the Bank?"

"Once," said Algernon. "Just as he did with her sister. He's proud of his
nieces; shows them and then hides them. The fellows at the Bank never saw
her again."

"Her name is--?"

"Dahlia."

"Ah, yes!--Dahlia. Extremely pretty. There are brown dahlias--dahlias of
all colours. And the portrait of this fair creature hangs up in your
chambers in town?"

"Don't call them my chambers," Algernon protested.

"Your cousin's, if you like. Probably Edward happened to be at the Bank
when fair Dahlia paid her visit. Once seems to have been enough for both
of you."

Algernon was unread in the hearts of women, and imagined that Edward's
defection from Mrs. Lovell's sway had deprived him of the lady's sympathy
and interest in his fortunes.

"Poor old Ned's in some scrape, I think," he said.

"Where is he?" the lady asked, languidly.

"Paris."

"Paris? How very odd! And out of the season, in this hot weather. It's
enough to lead me to dream that he has gone over--one cannot realize
why."

"Upon my honour!" Algernon thumped on his knee; "by jingo!" he adopted a
less compromising interjection; "Ned's fool enough. My idea is, he's gone
and got married."

Mrs. Lovell was lying back with the neglectful grace of incontestable
beauty; not a line to wrinkle her smooth soft features. For one sharp
instant her face was all edged and puckered, like the face of a fair
witch. She sat upright.

"Married! But how can that be when we none of us have heard a word of
it?"

"I daresay you haven't," said Algernon; "and not likely to. Ned's the
closest fellow of my acquaintance. He hasn't taken me into his
confidence, you maybe sure; he knows I'm too leaky. There's no bore like
a secret! I've come to my conclusion in this affair by putting together a
lot of little incidents and adding them up. First, I believe he was at
the Bank when that fair girl was seen there. Secondly, from the
description the fellows give of her, I should take her to be the original
of the portrait. Next, I know that Rhoda has a fair sister who has run
for it. And last, Rhoda has had a letter from her sister, to say she's
away to the Continent and is married. Ned's in Paris. Those are my facts,
and I give you my reckoning of them."

Mrs. Lovell gazed at Algernon for one long meditative moment.

"Impossible," she exclaimed. "Edward has more brains than heart." And now
the lady's face was scarlet. "How did this Rhoda, with her absurd name,
think of meeting you to tell you such stuff? Indeed, there's a simplicity
in some of these young women--" She said the remainder to herself.

"She's really very innocent and good," Algernon defended Rhoda. "she is.
There isn't a particle of nonsense in her. I first met her in town, as I
stated, at the Bank; just on the steps, and we remembered I had called a
cab for her a little before; and I met her again by accident yesterday."

"You are only a boy in their hands, my cousin Algy!" said Mrs. Lovell.

Algernon nodded with a self-defensive knowingness. "I fancy there's no
doubt her sister has written to her that she's married. It's certain she
has. She's a blunt sort of girl; not one to lie, not even for a sister or
a lover, unless she had previously made up her mind to it. In that case,
she wouldn't stick at much."

"But, do you know," said Mrs. Lovell--"do you know that Edward's father
would be worse than yours over such an act of folly? He would call it an
offence against common sense, and have no mercy for it. He would be
vindictive on principle. This story of yours cannot be true. Nothing
reconciles it."

"Oh, Sir Billy will be rusty; that stands to reason," Algernon assented.
"It mayn't be true. I hope it isn't. But Ned has a madness for fair
women. He'd do anything on earth for them. He loses his head entirely."

"That he may have been imprudent--" Mrs. Lovell thus blushingly hinted at
the lesser sin of his deceiving and ruining the girl.

"Oh, it needn't be true," said Algernon; and with meaning, "Who's to
blame if it is?"

Mrs. Lovell again reddened. She touched Algernon's fingers.

"His friends mustn't forsake him, in any case."

"By Jove! you are the right sort of woman," cried Algernon.

It was beyond his faculties to divine that her not forsaking of Edward
might haply come to mean something disastrous to him. The touch of Mrs.
Lovell's hand made him forget Rhoda in a twinkling. He detained it,
audaciously, even until she frowned with petulance and stamped her foot.

There was over her bosom a large cameo-brooch, representing a tomb under
a palm-tree, and the figure of a veiled woman with her head bowed upon
the tomb. This brooch was falling, when Algernon caught it. The pin tore
his finger, and in the energy of pain he dashed the brooch to her feet,
with immediate outcries of violent disgust at himself and exclamations
for pardon. He picked up the brooch. It was open. A strange, discoloured,
folded substance lay on the floor of the carriage. Mrs. Lovell gazed down
at it, and then at him, ghastly pale. He lifted it by one corner, and the
diminutive folded squares came out, revealing a strip of red-stained
handkerchief.

Mrs. Lovell grasped it, and thrust it out of sight.

She spoke as they approached the church-door: "Mention nothing of this to
a soul, or you forfeit my friendship for ever."

When they alighted, she was smiling in her old affable manner.




CHAPTER IX

Some consideration for Robert, after all, as being the man who loved her,
sufficed to give him rank as a more elevated kind of criminal in Rhoda's
sight, and exquisite torture of the highest form was administered to him.
Her faith in her sister was so sure that she could half pardon him for
the momentary harm he had done to Dahlia with her father; but, judging
him by the lofty standard of one who craved to be her husband, she could
not pardon his unmanly hesitation and manner of speech. The old and deep
grievance in her heart as to what men thought of women, and as to the
harshness of men, was stirred constantly by the remembrance of his
irresolute looks, and his not having dared to speak nobly for Dahlia,
even though he might have had, the knavery to think evil. As the case
stood, there was still mischief to counteract. Her father had willingly
swallowed a drug, but his suspicions only slumbered, and she could not
instil her own vivid hopefulness and trust into him. Letters from Dahlia
came regularly. The first, from Lausanne, favoured Rhoda's conception of
her as of a happy spirit resting at celestial stages of her ascent upward
through spheres of ecstacy. Dahlia could see the snow-mountains in a
flying glimpse; and again, peacefully seated, she could see the
snow-mountains reflected in clear blue waters from her window, which,
Rhoda thought, must be like heaven. On these inspired occasions, Robert
presented the form of a malignant serpent in her ideas. Then Dahlia made
excursions upon glaciers with her beloved, her helpmate, and had
slippings and tumblings--little earthly casualties which gave a charming
sense of reality to her otherwise miraculous flight. The Alps were
crossed: Italy was beheld. A profusion of "Oh's!" described Dahlia's
impressions of Italy; and "Oh! the heat!" showed her to be mortal,
notwithstanding the sublime exclamations. Como received the blissful
couple. Dahlia wrote from Como:--

   "Tell father that gentlemen in my Edward's position cannot always
   immediately proclaim their marriage to the world. There are
   reasons. I hope he has been very angry with me: then it will be
   soon over, and we shall be--but I cannot look back. I shall not
   look back till we reach Venice. At Venice, I know I shall see you
   all as clear as day; but I cannot even remember the features of my
   darling here."

Her Christian name was still her only signature.

The thin blue-and-pink paper, and the foreign postmarks--testifications
to Dahlia's journey not being a fictitious event, had a singular
deliciousness for the solitary girl at the Farm. At times, as she turned
them over, she was startled by the intoxication of her sentiments, for
the wild thought would come, that many, many whose passionate hearts she
could feel as her own, were ready to abandon principle and the bondage to
the hereafter, for such a long delicious gulp of divine life. Rhoda found
herself more than once brooding on the possible case that Dahlia had done
this thing.

The fit of languor came on her unawares, probing at her weakness, and
blinding her to the laws and duties of earth, until her conscious
womanhood checked it, and she sprang from the vision in a spasm of
terror, not knowing how far she had fallen.

After such personal experiences, she suffered great longings to be with
her sister, that the touch of her hand, the gaze of her eyes, the tone of
Dahlia's voice, might make her sure of her sister's safety.

Rhoda's devotions in church were frequently distracted by the occupants
of the Blancove pew. Mrs. Lovell had the habit of looking at her with an
extraordinary directness, an expressionless dissecting scrutiny, that was
bewildering and confusing to the country damsel. Algernon likewise
bestowed marked attention on her. Some curious hints had been thrown out
to her by this young gentleman on the day when he ventured to speak to
her in the lane, which led her to fancy distantly that he had some
acquaintance with Dahlia's husband, or that he had heard of Dahlia.

It was clear to Rhoda that Algernon sought another interview. He appeared
in the neighbourhood of the farm on Saturdays, and on Sundays he was
present in the church, sometimes with Mrs. Lovell, and sometimes without
a companion. His appearance sent her quick wits travelling through many
scales of possible conduct: and they struck one ringing note:--she
thought that by the aid of this gentleman a lesson might be given to
Robert's mean nature. It was part of Robert's punishment to see that she
was not unconscious of Algernon's admiration.

The first letter from Venice consisted of a series of interjections in
praise of the poetry of gondolas, varied by allusions to the sad smell of
the low tide water, and the amazing quality of the heat; and then Dahlia
wrote more composedly:--

"Titian the painter lived here, and painted ladies, who sat to him
without a bit of garment on, and indeed, my darling, I often think it was
more comfortable for the model than for the artist. Even modesty seems
too hot a covering for human creatures here. The sun strikes me down. I
am ceasing to have a complexion. It is pleasant to know that my Edward is
still proud of me. He has made acquaintance with some of the officers
here, and seems pleased at the compliments they pay me.

"They have nice manners, and white uniforms that fit them like a kid
glove. I am Edward's 'resplendent wife.' A colonel of one of the
regiments invited him to dinner (speaking English), 'with your
resplendent wife.' Edward has no mercy for errors of language, and he
would not take me. Ah! who knows how strange men are! Never think of
being happy unless you can always be blind. I see you all at home--Mother
Dumpling and all--as I thought I should when I was to come to Venice.

"Persuade--do persuade father that everything will be well. Some persons
are to be trusted. Make him feel it. I know that I am life itself to
Edward. He has lived as men do, and he can judge, and he knows that there
never was a wife who brought a heart to her husband like mine to him. He
wants to think, or he wants to smoke, and he leaves me; but, oh! when he
returns, he can scarcely believe that he has me, his joy is so great. He
looks like a glad thankful child, and he has the manliest of faces. It is
generally thoughtful; you might think it hard, at first sight.

"But you must be beautiful to please some men. You will laugh--I have
really got the habit of talking to my face and all myself in the glass.
Rhoda would think me cracked. And it is really true that I was never so
humble about my good looks. You used to spoil me at home--you and that
wicked old Mother Dumpling, and our own dear mother, Rhoda--oh! mother,
mother! I wish I had always thought of you looking down on me! You made
me so vain--much more vain than I let you see I was. There were times
when it is quite true I thought myself a princess. I am not worse-looking
now, but I suppose I desire to be so beautiful that nothing satisfies me.

"A spot on my neck gives me a dreadful fright. If my hair comes out much
when I comb it, it sets my heart beating; and it is a daily misery to me
that my hands are larger than they should be, belonging to Edward's
'resplendent wife.' I thank heaven that you and I always saw the
necessity of being careful of our fingernails. My feet are of moderate
size, though they are not French feet, as Edward says. No: I shall never
dance. He sent me to the dancing-master in London, but it was too late.
But I have been complimented on my walking, and that seems to please
Edward. He does not dance (or mind dancing) himself, only he does not
like me to miss one perfection. It is his love. Oh! if I have seemed to
let you suppose he does not love me as ever, do not think it. He is most
tender and true to me. Addio! I am signora, you are signorina.

"They have such pretty manners to us over here. Edward says they think
less of women: I say they think more. But I feel he must be right. Oh, my
dear, cold, loving, innocent sister! put out your arms; I shall feel them
round me, and kiss you, kiss you for ever!"

Onward from city to city, like a radiation of light from the old
farm-house, where so little of it was, Dahlia continued her journey; and
then, without a warning, with only a word to say that she neared Rome,
the letters ceased. A chord snapped in Rhoda's bosom. While she was
hearing from her sister almost weekly, her confidence was buoyed on a
summer sea. In the silence it fell upon a dread. She had no answer in her
mind for her father's unspoken dissatisfaction, and she had to conceal
her cruel anxiety. There was an interval of two months: a blank fell
charged with apprehension that was like the humming of a toneless wind
before storm; worse than the storm, for any human thing to bear.

Rhoda was unaware that Robert, who rarely looked at her, and never sought
to speak a word to her when by chance they met and were alone, studied
each change in her face, and read its signs. He was left to his own
interpretation of them, but the signs he knew accurately. He knew that
her pride had sunk, and that her heart was desolate. He believed that she
had discovered her sister's misery.

One day a letter arrived that gave her no joyful colouring, though it
sent colour to her cheeks. She opened it, evidently not knowing the
handwriting; her eyes ran down the lines hurriedly. After a time she went
upstairs for her bonnet.

At the stile leading into that lane where Robert had previously seen her,
she was stopped by him.

"No farther," was all that he said, and he was one who could have
interdicted men from advancing.

"Why may I not go by you?" said Rhoda, with a woman's affected
humbleness.

Robert joined his hands. "You go no farther, Miss Rhoda, unless you take
me with you."

"I shall not do that, Mr. Robert."

"Then you had better return home."

"Will you let me know what reasons you have for behaving in this manner
to me?"

"I'll let you know by-and-by," said Robert. "At present, You'll let the
stronger of the two have his way."

He had always been so meek and gentle and inoffensive, that her contempt
had enjoyed free play, and had never risen to anger; but violent anger
now surged against him, and she cried, "Do you dare to touch me?" trying
to force her passage by.

Robert caught her softly by the wrist. There stood at the same time a
full-statured strength of will in his eyes, under which her own fainted.

"Go back," he said; and she turned that he might not see her tears of
irritation and shame. He was treating her as a child; but it was to
herself alone that she could defend herself. She marvelled that when she
thought of an outspoken complaint against him, her conscience gave her no
support.

"Is there no freedom for a woman at all in this world?" Rhoda framed the
bitter question.

Rhoda went back as she had come. Algernon Blancove did the same. Between
them stood Robert, thinking, "Now I have made that girl hate me for
life."

It was in November that a letter, dated from London, reached the farm,
quickening Rhoda's blood anew. "I am alive," said Dahlia; and she said
little more, except that she was waiting to see her sister, and bade her
urgently to travel up alone. Her father consented to her doing so. After
a consultation with Robert, however, he determined to accompany her.

"She can't object to see me too," said the farmer; and Rhoda answered
"No." But her face was bronze to Robert when they took their departure.




CHAPTER X

Old Anthony was expecting them in London. It was now winter, and the
season for theatres; so, to show his brother-in-law the fun of a theatre
was one part of his projected hospitality, if Mr. Fleming should haply
take the hint that he must pay for himself.

Anthony had laid out money to welcome the farmer, and was shy and fidgety
as a girl who anticipates the visit of a promising youth, over his fat
goose for next day's dinner, and his shrimps for this day's tea, and his
red slice of strong cheese, called of Cheshire by the reckless
butter-man, for supper.

He knew that both Dahlia and Rhoda must have told the farmer that he was
not high up in Boyne's Bank, and it fretted him to think that the
mysterious respect entertained for his wealth by the farmer, which
delighted him with a novel emotion, might be dashed by what the farmer
would behold.

During his last visit to the farm, Anthony had talked of the Funds more
suggestively than usual. He had alluded to his own dealings in them, and
to what he would do and would not do under certain contingencies; thus
shadowing out, dimly luminous and immense, what he could do, if his
sagacity prompted the adventure. The farmer had listened through the
buzzing of his uncertain grief, only sighing for answer. "If ever you
come up to London, brother William John," said Anthony, "you mind you go
about arm-in-arm with me, or you'll be judging by appearances, and says
you, 'Lor', what a thousander fellow this is!' and 'What a millioner
fellow that is!' You'll be giving your millions and your thousands to the
wrong people, when they haven't got a penny. All London 'll be
topsy-turvy to you, unless you've got a guide, and he'll show you a
shabby-coated, head-in-the-gutter old man 'll buy up the lot. Everybody
that doesn't know him says--look at him! but they that knows him--hats
off, I can tell you. And talk about lords! We don't mind their coming
into the city, but they know the scent of cash. I've had a lord take off
his hat to me. It's a fact, I have."

In spite of the caution Anthony had impressed upon his country relative,
that he should not judge by appearances, he was nevertheless under an
apprehension that the farmer's opinion of him, and the luxurious, almost
voluptuous, enjoyment he had of it, were in peril. When he had purchased
the well-probed fat goose, the shrimps, and the cheese, he was only
half-satisfied. His ideas shot boldly at a bottle of wine, and he
employed a summer-lighted evening in going a round of wine-merchants'
placards, and looking out for the cheapest bottle he could buy. And he
would have bought one--he had sealing-wax of his own and could have
stamped it with the office-stamp of Boyne's Bank for that matter, to make
it as dignified and costly as the vaunted red seals and green seals of
the placards--he would have bought one, had he not, by one of his lucky
mental illuminations, recollected that it was within his power to procure
an order to taste wine at the Docks, where you may get as much wine as
you like out of big sixpenny glasses, and try cask after cask, walking
down gas-lit paths between the huge bellies of wine which groan to be
tapped and tried, that men may know them. The idea of paying two
shillings and sixpence for one miserable bottle vanished at the
richly-coloured prospect. "That'll show him something of what London is,"
thought Anthony; and a companion thought told him in addition that the
farmer, with a skinful of wine, would emerge into the open air imagining
no small things of the man who could gain admittance into those
marvellous caverns. "By George! it's like a boy's story-book," cried
Anthony, in his soul, and he chuckled over the vision of the farmer's
amazement--acted it with his arms extended, and his hat unseated, and
plunged into wheezy fits of laughter.

He met his guests at the station. Mr. Fleming was soberly attired in
what, to Anthony's London eye, was a curiosity costume; but the broad
brim of the hat, the square cut of the brown coat, and the leggings,
struck him as being very respectable, and worthy of a presentation at any
Bank in London.

"You stick to a leather purse, brother William John?" he inquired, with
an artistic sentiment for things in keeping.

"I do," said the farmer, feeling seriously at the button over it.

"All right; I shan't ask ye to show it in the street," Anthony rejoined,
and smote Rhoda's hand as it hung.

"Glad to see your old uncle--are ye?"

Rhoda replied quietly that she was, but had come with the principal
object of seeing her sister.

"There!" cried Anthony, "you never get a compliment out of this gal. She
gives ye the nut, and you're to crack it, and there maybe, or there
mayn't be, a kernel inside--she don't care."

"But there ain't much in it!" the farmer ejaculated, withdrawing his
fingers from the button they had been teasing for security since
Anthony's question about the purse.

"Not much--eh! brother William John?" Anthony threw up a puzzled look.
"Not much baggage--I see that--" he exclaimed; "and, Lord be thanked! no
trunks. Aha, my dear"--he turned to Rhoda--"you remember your lesson, do
ye? Now, mark me--I'll remember you for it. Do you know, my dear," he
said to Rhoda confidentially, "that sixpenn'orth of chaff which I made
the cabman pay for--there was the cream of it!--that was better than
Peruvian bark to my constitution. It was as good to me as a sniff of
sea-breeze and no excursion expenses. I'd like another, just to feel
young again, when I'd have backed myself to beat--cabmen? Ah! I've stood
up, when I was a young 'un, and shut up a Cheap Jack at a fair.
Circulation's the soul o' chaff. That's why I don't mind tackling
cabmen--they sit all day, and all they've got to say is 'rat-tat,' and
they've done. But I let the boys roar. I know what I was when a boy
myself. I've got devil in me--never you fear--but it's all on the side of
the law. Now, let's off, for the gentlemen are starin' at you, which
won't hurt ye, ye know, but makes me jealous."

Before the party moved away from the platform, a sharp tussle took place
between Anthony and the farmer as to the porterage of the bulky bag; but
it being only half-earnest, the farmer did not put out his strength, and
Anthony had his way.

"I rather astonished you, brother William John," he said, when they were
in the street.

The farmer admitted that he was stronger than he looked.

"Don't you judge by appearances, that's all," Anthony remarked, setting
down the bag to lay his finger on one side of his nose for
impressiveness.

"Now, there we leave London Bridge to the right, and we should away to
the left, and quiet parts." He seized the bag anew. "Just listen. That's
the roaring of cataracts of gold you hear, brother William John. It's a
good notion, ain't it? Hark!--I got that notion from one of your penny
papers. You can buy any amount for a penny, now-a-days--poetry up in a
corner, stories, tales o' temptation--one fellow cut his lucky with his
master's cash, dashed away to Australia, made millions, fit to be a lord,
and there he was! liable to the law! and everybody bowing their hats and
their heads off to him, and his knees knocking at the sight of a
policeman--a man of a red complexion, full habit of body, enjoyed his
dinner and his wine, and on account of his turning white so often, they
called him--'sealing-wax and Parchment' was one name; 'Carrots and
turnips' was another; 'Blumonge and something,' and so on. Fancy his
having to pay half his income in pensions to chaps who could have had him
out of his town or country mansion and popped into gaol in a jiffy. And
found out at last! Them tales set you thinking. Once I was an idle young
scaramouch. But you can buy every idea that's useful to you for a penny.
I tried the halfpenny journals. Cheapness ain't always profitable. The
moral is, Make your money, and you may buy all the rest."

Discoursing thus by the way, and resisting the farmer's occasional
efforts to relieve him of the bag, with the observation that appearances
were deceiving, and that he intended, please his Maker, to live and turn
over a little more interest yet, Anthony brought them to Mrs. Wicklow's
house. Mrs. Wicklow promised to put them into the track of the omnibuses
running toward Dahlia's abode in the Southwest, and Mary Ann Wicklow, who
had a burning desire in her bosom to behold even the outside shell of her
friend's new grandeur, undertook very disinterestedly to accompany them.
Anthony's strict injunction held them due at a lamp-post outside Boyne's
Bank, at half-past three o'clock in the afternoon.

"My love to Dahly," he said. "She was always a head and shoulders over my
size. Tell her, when she rolls by in her carriage, not to mind me. I got
my own notions of value. And if that Mr. Ayrton of hers 'll bank at
Boyne's, I'll behave to him like a customer. This here's the girl for my
money." He touched Rhoda's arm, and so disappeared.

The farmer chided her for her cold manner to her uncle, murmuring aside
to her: "You heard what he said." Rhoda was frozen with her heart's
expectation, and insensible to hints or reproof. The people who entered
the omnibus seemed to her stale phantoms bearing a likeness to every one
she had known, save to her beloved whom she was about to meet, after long
separation.

She marvelled pityingly at the sort of madness which kept the streets so
lively for no reasonable purpose. When she was on her feet again, she
felt for the first time, that she was nearing the sister for whom she
hungered, and the sensation beset her that she had landed in a foreign
country. Mary Ann Wicklow chattered all the while to the general ear. It
was her pride to be the discoverer of Dahlia's terrace.

"Not for worlds would she enter the house," she said, in a general tone;
she knowing better than to present herself where downright entreaty did
not invite her.

Rhoda left her to count the numbers along the terrace-walk, and stood out
in the road that her heart might select Dahlia's habitation from the
other hueless residences. She fixed upon one, but she was wrong, and her
heart sank. The fair Mary Ann fought her and beat her by means of a
careful reckoning, as she remarked,--

"I keep my eyes open; Number 15 is the corner house, the bow-window, to a
certainty."

Gardens were in front of the houses; or, to speak more correctly, strips
of garden walks. A cab was drawn up close by the shrub-covered iron gate
leading up to No. 15. Mary Ann hurried them on, declaring that they might
be too late even now at a couple of dozen paces distant, seeing that
London cabs, crawlers as they usually were, could, when required, and
paid for it, do their business like lightning. Her observation was
illustrated the moment after they had left her in the rear; for a
gentleman suddenly sprang across the pavement, jumped into a cab, and was
whirled away, with as much apparent magic to provincial eyes, as if a
pantomimic trick had been performed. Rhoda pressed forward a step in
advance of her father.

"It may have been her husband," she thought, and trembled. The curtains
up in the drawing-room were moved as by a hand; but where was Dahlia's
face? Dahlia knew that they were coming, and she was not on the look-out
for them!--a strange conflict of facts, over which Rhoda knitted her
black brows, so that she looked menacing to the maid opening the door,
whose "Oh, if you please, Miss," came in contact with "My sister--Mrs.--,
she expects me. I mean, Mrs.--" but no other name than "Dahlia" would fit
itself to Rhoda's mouth.

"Ayrton," said the maid, and recommenced, "Oh, if you please, Miss, and
you are the young lady, Mrs. Ayrton is very sorry, and have left word,
would you call again to-morrow, as she have made a pressing appointment,
and was sure you would excuse her, but her husband was very anxious for
her to go, and could not put it off, and was very sorry, but would you
call again to-morrow at twelve o'clock? and punctually she would be
here."

The maid smiled as one who had fairly accomplished the recital of her
lesson. Rhoda was stunned.

"Is Mrs. Ayrton at home?--Not at home?" she said.

"No: don't ye hear?" quoth the farmer, sternly.

"She had my letter--do you know?" Rhoda appealed to the maid.

"Oh, yes, Miss. A letter from the country."

"This morning?"

"Yes, Miss; this morning."

"And she has gone out? What time did she go out? When will she be in?"

Her father plucked at her dress. "Best not go making the young woman
repeat herself. She says, nobody's at home to ask us in. There's no more,
then, to trouble her for."

"At twelve o'clock to-morrow?" Rhoda faltered.

"Would you, if you please, call again at twelve o'clock to-morrow, and
punctually she would be here," said the maid.

The farmer hung his head and turned. Rhoda followed him from the garden.
She was immediately plied with queries and interjections of wonderment by
Miss Wicklow, and it was not until she said: "You saw him go out, didn't
you?--into the cab?" that Rhoda awakened to a meaning in her gabble.

Was it Dahlia's husband whom they had seen? And if so, why was Dahlia
away from her husband? She questioned in her heart, but not for an
answer, for she allowed no suspicions to live. The farmer led on with his
plodding country step, burdened shoulders, and ruddy-fowled, serious
face, not speaking to Rhoda, who had no desire to hear a word from him,
and let him be. Mary Ann steered him and called from behind the turnings
he was to take, while she speculated aloud to Rhoda upon the nature of
the business that had torn Dahlia from the house so inopportunely. At
last she announced that she knew what it was, but Rhoda failed to express
curiosity. Mary Ann was driven to whisper something about strange things
in the way of purchases. At that moment the farmer threw up his umbrella,
shouting for a cab, and Rhoda ran up to him,--

"Oh, father, why do we want to ride?"

"Yes, I tell ye!" said the farmer, chafing against his coat-collar.

"It is an expense, when we can walk, father."

"What do I care for th' expense? I shall ride." He roared again for a
cab, and one came that took them in; after which, the farmer, not being
spoken to, became gravely placid as before. They were put down at Boyne's
Bank. Anthony was on the look-out, and signalled them to stand away some
paces from the door. They were kept about a quarter of an hour waiting
between two tides of wayfarers, which hustled them one way and another,
when out, at last, came the old, broad, bent figure, with little
finicking steps, and hurried past them head foremost, his arms narrowed
across a bulgy breast. He stopped to make sure that they were following,
beckoned with his chin, and proceeded at a mighty rate. Marvellous was
his rounding of corners, his threading of obstructions, his skilful
diplomacy with passengers. Presently they lost sight of him, and stood
bewildered; but while they were deliberating they heard his voice. He was
above them, having issued from two swinging bright doors; and he laughed
and nodded, as he ran down the steps, and made signs, by which they were
to understand that he was relieved of a weight.

"I've done that twenty year of my life, brother William John," he said.
"Eh? Perhaps you didn't guess I was worth some thousands when I got away
from you just now? Let any chap try to stop me! They may just as well try
to stop a railway train. Steam's up, and I'm off."

He laughed and wiped his forehead. Slightly vexed at the small amount of
discoverable astonishment on the farmer's face, he continued,--

"You don't think much of it. Why, there ain't another man but myself
Boyne's Bank would trust. They've trusted me thirty year:--why shouldn't
they go on trusting me another thirty year? A good character, brother
William John, goes on compound-interesting, just like good coin. Didn't
you feel a sort of heat as I brushed by you--eh? That was a matter of
one-two-three-four" Anthony watched the farmer as his voice swelled up on
the heightening numbers: "five-six-six thousand pounds, brother William
John. People must think something of a man to trust him with that sum
pretty near every day of their lives, Sundays excepted--eh? don't you
think so?"

He dwelt upon the immense confidence reposed in him, and the terrible
temptation it would be to some men, and how they ought to thank their
stars that they were never thrown in the way of such a temptation, of
which he really thought nothing at all--nothing! until the farmer's
countenance was lightened of its air of oppression, for a puzzle was
dissolved in his brain. It was now manifest to him that Anthony was
trusted in this extraordinary manner because the heads and managers of
Boyne's Bank knew the old man to be possessed of a certain very
respectable sum: in all probability they held it in their coffers for
safety and credited him with the amount. Nay, more; it was fair to
imagine that the guileless old fellow, who conceived himself to be so
deep, had let them get it all into their hands without any suspicion of
their prominent object in doing so.

Mr. Fleming said, "Ah, yes, surely."

He almost looked shrewd as he smiled over Anthony's hat. The healthy
exercise of his wits relieved his apprehensive paternal heart; and when
he mentioned that Dahlia had not been at home when he called, he at the
same time sounded his hearer for excuses to be raised on her behalf,
himself clumsily suggesting one or two, as to show that he was willing to
swallow a very little for comfort.

"Oh, of course!" said Anthony, jeeringly. "Out? If you catch her in,
these next three or four days, you'll be lucky. Ah, brother William
John!"

The farmer, half frightened by Anthony's dolorous shake of his head,
exclaimed: "What's the matter, man?"

"How proud I should be if only you was in a way to bank at Boyne's!"

"Ah!" went the farmer in his turn, and he plunged his chin deep in his
neckerchief.

"Perhaps some of your family will, some day, brother William John."

"Happen, some of my family do, brother Anthony!"

"Will is what I said, brother William John; if good gals, and civil, and
marry decently--eh?" and he faced about to Rhoda who was walking with
Miss Wicklow. "What does she look so down about, my dear? Never be down.
I don't mind you telling your young man, whoever he is; and I'd like him
to be a strapping young six-footer I've got in my eye, who farms. What
does he farm with to make farming answer now-a-days? Why, he farms with
brains. You'll find that in my last week's Journal, brother William John,
and thinks I, as I conned it--the farmer ought to read that! You may tell
any young man you like, my dear, that your old uncle's fond of ye."

On their arrival home, Mrs. Wicklow met them with a letter in her hand.
It was for Rhoda from Dahlia, saying that Dahlia was grieved to the heart
to have missed her dear father and her darling sister. But her husband
had insisted upon her going out to make particular purchases, and do a
dozen things; and he was extremely sorry to have been obliged to take her
away, but she hoped to see her dear sister and her father very, very
soon. She wished she were her own mistress that she might run to them,
but men when they are husbands require so much waiting on that she could
never call five minutes her own. She would entreat them to call tomorrow,
only she would then be moving to her new lodgings. "But, oh! my dear, my
blessed Rhoda!" the letter concluded, "do keep fast in your heart that I
do love you so, and pray that we may meet soon, as I pray it every night
and all day long. Beg father to stop till we meet. Things will soon be
arranged. They must. Oh! oh, my Rhoda, love! how handsome you have grown.
It is very well to be fair for a time, but the brunettes have the
happiest lot. They last, and when we blonde ones cry or grow thin, oh!
what objects we become!"

There were some final affectionate words, but no further explanations.

The wrinkles again settled on the farmer's mild, uncomplaining forehead.

Rhoda said: "Let us wait, father."

When alone, she locked the letter against her heart, as to suck the
secret meaning out of it. Thinking over it was useless; except for this
one thought: how did her sister know she had grown very handsome? Perhaps
the housemaid had prattled.




CHAPTER XI

Dahlia, the perplexity to her sister's heart, lay stretched at full
length upon the sofa of a pleasantly furnished London drawing-room,
sobbing to herself, with her handkerchief across her eyes. She had cried
passion out, and sobbed now for comfort.

She lay in her rich silken dress like the wreck of a joyful creature,
while the large red Winter sun rounded to evening, and threw
deep-coloured beams against the wall above her head. They touched the
nut-brown hair to vivid threads of fire: but she lay faceless. Utter
languor and the dread of looking at her eyelids in the glass kept her
prostrate.

So, the darkness closed her about; the sickly gas-lamps of the street
showing her as a shrouded body.

A girl came in to spread the cloth for dinner, and went through her
duties with the stolidity of the London lodging-house maidservant, poking
a clogged fire to perdition, and repressing a songful spirit.

Dahlia knew well what was being done; she would have given much to have
saved her nostrils from the smell of dinner; it was a great immediate
evil to her sickened senses; but she had no energy to call out, nor will
of any kind. The odours floated to her, and passively she combated them.

At first she was nearly vanquished; the meat smelt so acrid, the potatoes
so sour; each afflicting vegetable asserted itself peculiarly; and the
bread, the salt even, on the wings of her morbid fancy, came steaming
about her, subtle, penetrating, thick, and hateful, like the pressure of
a cloud out of which disease is shot.

Such it seemed to her, till she could have shrieked; but only a few fresh
tears started down her cheeks, and she lay enduring it.

Dead silence and stillness hung over the dinner-service, when the outer
door below was opened, and a light foot sprang up the stairs.

There entered a young gentleman in evening dress, with a loose black
wrapper drooping from his shoulders.

He looked on the table, and then glancing at the sofa, said:

"Oh, there she is!" and went to the window and whistled.

After a minute of great patience, he turned his face back to the room
again, and commenced tapping his foot on the carpet.

"Well?" he said, finding these indications of exemplary self-command
unheeded. His voice was equally powerless to provoke a sign of animation.
He now displaced his hat, and said, "Dahlia!"

She did not move.

"I am here to very little purpose, then," he remarked.

A guttering fall of her bosom was perceptible.

"For heaven's sake, take away that handkerchief, my good child! Why have
you let your dinner get cold? Here," he lifted a cover; "here's
roast-beef. You like it--why don't you eat it? That's only a small piece
of the general inconsistency, I know. And why haven't they put champagne
on the table for you? You lose your spirits without it. If you took it
when these moody fits came on--but there's no advising a woman to do
anything for her own good. Dahlia, will you do me the favour to speak two
or three words with me before I go? I would have dined here, but I have a
man to meet me at the Club. Of what mortal service is it shamming the
insensible? You've produced the required effect, I am as uncomfortable as
I need be. Absolutely!

"Well," seeing that words were of no avail, he summed up expostulation
and reproach in this sigh of resigned philosophy: "I am going. Let me
see--I have my Temple keys?--yes! I am afraid that even when you are
inclined to be gracious and look at me, I shall not, be visible to you
for some days. I start for Lord Elling's to-morrow morning at five. I
meet my father there by appointment. I'm afraid we shall have to stay
over Christmas. Good-bye." He paused. "Good-bye, my dear."

Two or three steps nearer the door, he said, "By the way, do you want
anything? Money?--do you happen to want any money? I will send a blank
cheque tomorrow. I have sufficient for both of us. I shall tell the
landlady to order your Christmas dinner. How about wine? There is
champagne, I know, and bottled ale. Sherry? I'll drop a letter to my
wine-merchant; I think the sherry's running dry."

Her sense of hearing was now afflicted in as gross a manner as had been
her sense of smell. She could not have spoken, though her vitality had
pressed for speech. It would have astonished him to hear that his
solicitude concerning provender for her during his absence was not
esteemed a kindness; for surely it is a kindly thing to think of it; and
for whom but for one for whom he cared would he be counting the bottles
to be left at her disposal, insomuch that the paucity of the bottles of
sherry in the establishment distressed his mental faculties?

"Well, good-bye," he said, finally. The door closed.

Had Dahlia's misery been in any degree simulated, her eyes now, as well
as her ears, would have taken positive assurance of his departure. But
with the removal of her handkerchief, the loathsome sight of the
dinner-table would have saluted her, and it had already caused her
suffering enough. She chose to remain as she was, saying to herself, "I
am dead;" and softly revelling in that corpse-like sentiment. She
scarcely knew that the door had opened again.

"Dahlia!"

She heard her name pronounced, and more entreatingly, and closer to her.

"Dahlia, my poor girl!" Her hand was pressed. It gave her no shudders.

"I am dead," she mentally repeated, for the touch did not run up to her
heart and stir it.

"Dahlia, do be reasonable! I can't leave you like this. We shall be
separated for some time. And what a miserable fire you've got here! You
have agreed with me that we are acting for the best. It's very hard on me
I try what I can to make you comf--happy; and really, to see you leaving
your dinner to get cold! Your hands are like ice. The meat won't be
eatable. You know I'm not my own master. Come, Dahly, my darling!"

He gently put his hand to her chin, and then drew away the handkerchief.

Dahlia moaned at the exposure of her tear-stained face, she turned it
languidly to the wall.

"Are you ill, my dear?" he asked.

Men are so considerately practical! He begged urgently to be allowed to
send for a doctor.

But women, when they choose to be unhappy, will not accept of practical
consolations! She moaned a refusal to see the doctor.

Then what can I do for her? he naturally thought, and he naturally
uttered it.

"Say good-bye to me," he whispered. "And my pretty one will write to me.
I shall reply so punctually! I don't like to leave her at Christmas; and
she will give me a line of Italian, and a little French--mind her
accents, though!--and she needn't attempt any of the nasty
German--kshrra-kouzzra-kratz!--which her pretty lips can't do, and won't
do; but only French and Italian. Why, she learnt to speak Italian! 'La
dolcezza ancor dentro me suona.' Don't you remember, and made such fun of
it at first? 'Amo zoo;' 'no amo me?' my sweet!"

This was a specimen of the baby-lover talk, which is charming in its
season, and maybe pleasantly cajoling to a loving woman at all times,
save when she is in Dahlia's condition. It will serve even then, or she
will pass it forgivingly, as not the food she for a moment requires; but
it must be purely simple in its utterance, otherwise she detects the poor
chicanery, and resents the meanness of it. She resents it with
unutterable sickness of soul, for it is the language of what were to her
the holiest hours of her existence, which is thus hypocritically used to
blind and rock her in a cradle of deception. If corrupt, she maybe
brought to answer to it all the same, and she will do her part of the
play, and babble words, and fret and pout deliciously; and the old days
will seem to be revived, when both know they are dead; and she will
thereby gain any advantage she is seeking.

But Dahlia's sorrow was deep: her heart was sound. She did not even
perceive the opportunity offered to her for a wily performance. She felt
the hollowness of his speech, and no more; and she said, "Good-bye,
Edward."

He had been on one knee. Springing cheerfully to his feet, "Good-bye,
darling," he said. "But I must see her sit to table first. Such a
wretched dinner for her!" and he mumbled, "By Jove, I suppose I shan't
get any at all myself!" His watch confirmed it to him that any dinner
which had been provided for him at the Club would be spoilt.

"Never mind," he said aloud, and examined the roast-beef ruefully,
thinking that, doubtless, it being more than an hour behind the appointed
dinner-time at the Club, his guest must now be gone.

For a minute or so he gazed at the mournful spectacle. The potatoes
looked as if they had committed suicide in their own steam. There were
mashed turnips, with a glazed surface, like the bright bottom of a tin
pan. One block of bread was by the lonely plate. Neither hot nor cold,
the whole aspect of the dinner-table resisted and repelled the gaze, and
made no pretensions to allure it.

The thought of partaking of this repast endowed him with a critical
appreciation of its character, and a gush of charitable emotion for the
poor girl who had such miserable dishes awaiting her, arrested the
philosophic reproof which he could have administered to one that knew so
little how a dinner of any sort should be treated. He strode to the
windows, pulled down the blind he had previously raised, rang the bell,
and said,--

"Dahlia, there--I'm going to dine with you, my love. I've rung the bell
for more candles. The room shivers. That girl will see you, if you don't
take care. Where is the key of the cupboard? We must have some wine out.
The champagne, at all events, won't be flat."

He commenced humming the song of complacent resignation. Dahlia was still
inanimate, but as the door was about to open, she rose quickly and sat in
a tremble on the sofa, concealing her face.

An order was given for additional candles, coals, and wood. When the maid
had disappeared Dahlia got on her feet, and steadied herself by the wall,
tottering away to her chamber.

"Ah, poor thing!" ejaculated the young man, not without an idea that the
demonstration was unnecessary. For what is decidedly disagreeable is, in
a young man's calculation concerning women, not necessary at all,--quite
the reverse. Are not women the flowers which decorate sublunary life? It
is really irritating to discover them to be pieces of machinery, that for
want of proper oiling, creak, stick, threaten convulsions, and are tragic
and stir us the wrong way. However, champagne does them good: an
admirable wine--a sure specific for the sex!

He searched around for the keys to get at a bottle and uncork it
forthwith. The keys were on the mantelpiece a bad comment on Dahlia's
housekeeping qualities; but in the hurry of action let it pass. He
welcomed the candles gladly, and soon had all the cupboards in the room
royally open.

Bustle is instinctively adopted by the human race as the substitute of
comfort. He called for more lights, more plates, more knives and forks.
He sent for ice the maid observed that it was not to be had save at a
distant street: "Jump into a cab--champagne's nothing without ice, even
in Winter," he said, and rang for her as she was leaving the house, to
name a famous fishmonger who was sure to supply the ice.

The establishment soon understood that Mr. Ayrton intended dining within
those walls. Fresh potatoes were put on to boil. The landlady came up
herself to arouse the fire. The maid was for a quarter of an hour
hovering between the order to get ice and the execution of immediate
commands. One was that she should take a glass of champagne to Mrs.
Ayrton in her room. He drank off one himself. Mrs. Ayrton's glass being
brought back untouched, he drank that off likewise, and as he became more
exhilarated, was more considerate for her, to such a degree, that when
she appeared he seized her hands and only jestingly scolded her for her
contempt of sound medicine, declaring, in spite of her protestations,
that she was looking lovely, and so they sat down to their dinner, she
with an anguished glance at the looking-glass as she sank in her chair.

"It's not bad, after all," said he, drenching his tasteless mouthful of
half-cold meat with champagne. "The truth is, that Clubs spoil us. This
is Spartan fare. Come, drink with me, my dearest. One sip."

She was coaxed by degrees to empty a glass. She had a gentle heart, and
could not hold out long against a visible lively kindliness. It pleased
him that she should bow to him over fresh bubbles; and they went formally
through the ceremony, and she smiled. He joked and laughed and talked,
and she eyed him a faint sweetness. He perceived now that she required
nothing more than the restoration of her personal pride, and setting
bright eyes on her, hazarded a bold compliment.

Dahlia drooped like a yacht with idle sails struck by a sudden blast,
that dips them in the salt; but she raised her face with the full bloom
of a blush: and all was plain sailing afterward.

"Has my darling seen her sister?" he asked softly.

Dahlia answered, "No," in the same tone.

Both looked away.

"She won't leave town without seeing you?"

"I hope--I don't know. She--she has called at our last lodgings twice."

"Alone?"

"Yes; I think so."

Dahlia kept her head down, replying; and his observation of her wavered
uneasily.

"Why not write to her, then?"

"She will bring father."

The sob thickened in her throat; but, alas for him who had at first,
while she was on the sofa, affected to try all measures to revive her,
that I must declare him to know well how certain was his mastery over
her, when his manner was thoroughly kind. He had not much fear of her
relapsing at present.

"You can't see your father?"

"No."

"But, do. It's best."

"I can't."

"Why not?"

"Not--" she hesitated, and clasped her hands in her lap.

"Yes, yes; I know," said he; "but still! You could surely see him. You
rouse suspicions that need not exist. Try another glass, my dear."

"No more."

"Well; as I was saying, you force him to think--and there is no necessity
for it. He maybe as hard on this point as you say; but now and then a
little innocent deception maybe practised. We only require to gain time.
You place me in a very hard position. I have a father too. He has his own
idea of things. He's a proud man, as I've told you; tremendously
ambitious, and he wants to push me, not only at the bar, but in the money
market matrimonial. All these notions I have to contend against. Things
can't be done at once. If I give him a shock--well, we'll drop any
consideration of the consequences. Write to your sister to tell her to
bring your father. If they make particular inquiries--very unlikely I
think--but, if they do, put them at their ease."

She sighed.

"Why was my poor darling so upset, when I came in?" said he.

There was a difficulty in her speaking. He waited with much patient
twiddling of bread crumbs; and at last she said:

"My sister called twice at my--our old lodgings. The second time, she
burst into tears. The girl told me so."

"But women cry so often, and for almost anything, Dahlia."

"Rhoda cries with her hands closed hard, and her eyelids too."

"Well, that maybe her way."

"I have only seen her cry once, and that was when mother was dying, and
asked her to fetch a rose from the garden. I met her on the stairs. She
was like wood. She hates crying. She loves me so."

The sympathetic tears rolled down Dahlia's cheeks.

"So, you quite refuse to see your father?" he asked.

"Not yet!"

"Not yet," he repeated.

At the touch of scorn in his voice, she exclaimed:

"Oh, Edward! not yet, I cannot. I know I am weak. I can't meet him now.
If my Rhoda had come alone, as I hoped--! but he is with her. Don't blame
me, Edward. I can't explain. I only know that I really have not the power
to see him."

Edward nodded. "The sentiment some women put into things is
inexplicable," he said. "Your sister and father will return home. They
will have formed their ideas. You know how unjust they will be. Since,
however, the taste is for being a victim--eh?"

London lodging-house rooms in Winter when the blinds are down, and a
cheerless fire is in the grate, or when blinds are up and street-lamps
salute the inhabitants with uncordial rays, are not entertaining places
of residence for restless spirits. Edward paced about the room. He lit a
cigar and puffed at it fretfully.

"Will you come and try one of the theatres for an hour?" he asked.

She rose submissively, afraid to say that she thought she should look ill
in the staring lights; but he, with great quickness of perception,
rendered her task easier by naming the dress she was to wear, the jewels,
and the colour of the opera cloak. Thus prompted, Dahlia went to her
chamber, and passively attired herself, thankful to have been spared the
pathetic troubles of a selection of garments from her wardrobe. When she
came forth, Edward thought her marvellously beautiful.

Pity that she had no strength of character whatever, nor any pointed
liveliness of mind to match and wrestle with his own, and cheer the
domestic hearth! But she was certainly beautiful. Edward kissed her hand
in commendation. Though it was practically annoying that she should be
sad, the hue and spirit of sadness came home to her aspect. Sorrow
visited her tenderly falling eyelids like a sister.




CHAPTER XII

Edward's engagement at his Club had been with his unfortunate cousin
Algernon; who not only wanted a dinner but 'five pounds or so' (the hazy
margin which may extend illimitably, or miserably contract, at the
lender's pleasure, and the necessity for which shows the borrower to be
dancing on Fortune's tight-rope above the old abyss).

"Over claret," was to have been the time for the asking; and Algernon
waited dinnerless until the healthy-going minutes distended and swelled
monstrous and horrible as viper-bitten bodies, and the venerable Signior,
Time, became of unhealthy hue. For this was the first dinner which,
during the whole course of the young man's career, had ever been failing
to him. Reflect upon the mournful gap! He could scarcely believe in his
ill-luck. He suggested it to himself with an inane grin, as one of the
far-away freaks of circumstances that had struck him--and was it not
comical?

He waited from the hour of six till the hour of seven. He compared clocks
in the hall and the room. He changed the posture of his legs fifty times.
For a while he wrestled right gallantly with the apparent menace of the
Fates that he was to get no dinner at all that day; it seemed incredibly
derisive, for, as I must repeat, it had never happened to him by any
accident before. "You are born--you dine." Such appeared to him to be the
positive regulation of affairs, and a most proper one,--of the matters of
course following the birth of a young being.

By what frightful mischance, then, does he miss his dinner? By placing
the smallest confidence in the gentlemanly feeling of another man!
Algernon deduced this reply accurately from his own experience, and
whether it can be said by other "undined" mortals, does not matter in the
least. But we have nothing to do with the constitutionally luckless: the
calamitous history of a simple empty stomach is enough. Here the tragedy
is palpable. Indeed, too sadly so, and I dare apply but a flash of the
microscope to the rageing dilemmas of this animalcule. Five and twenty
minutes had signalled their departure from the hour of seven, when
Algernon pronounced his final verdict upon Edward's conduct by leaving
the Club. He returned to it a quarter of an hour later, and lingered on
in desperate mood till eight.

He had neither watch in his pocket, nor ring on his finger, nor
disposable stud in his shirt. The sum of twenty-one pence was in his
possession, and, I ask you, as he asked himself, how is a gentleman to
dine upon that? He laughed at the notion. The irony of Providence sent
him by a cook's shop, where the mingled steam of meats and puddings
rushed out upon the wayfarer like ambushed bandits, and seized him and
dragged him in, or sent him qualmish and humbled on his way.

Two little boys had flattened their noses to the whiteness of winkles
against the jealously misty windows. Algernon knew himself to be
accounted a generous fellow, and remembering his reputation, he, as to
hint at what Fortune might do in his case, tossed some coppers to the
urchins, who ducked to the pavement and slid before the counter, in a
flash, with never a "thank ye" or the thought of it.

Algernon was incapable of appreciating this childish faith in the
beneficence of the unseen Powers who feed us, which, I must say for him,
he had shared in a very similar manner only two hours ago. He laughed
scornfully: "The little beggars!" considering in his soul that of such is
humanity composed: as many a dinnerless man has said before, and will
again, to point the speech of fools. He continued strolling on, comparing
the cramped misty London aspect of things with his visionary free dream
of the glorious prairies, where his other life was: the forests, the
mountains, the endless expanses; the horses, the flocks, the slipshod
ease of language and attire; and the grog-shops. Aha! There could be no
mistake about him as a gentleman and a scholar out there! Nor would
Nature shut up her pocket and demand innumerable things of him, as
civilization did. This he thought in the vengefulness of his outraged
mind.

Not only had Algernon never failed to dine every day of his life: he had
no recollection of having ever dined without drinking wine. His
conception did not embrace the idea of a dinner lacking wine. Possibly he
had some embodied understanding that wine did not fall to the lot of
every fellow upon earth: he had heard of gullets unrefreshed even by
beer: but at any rate he himself was accustomed to better things, and he
did not choose to excavate facts from the mass of his knowledge in order
to reconcile himself to the miserable chop he saw for his dinner in the
distance--a spot of meat in the arctic circle of a plate, not shone upon
by any rosy-warming sun of a decanter!

But metaphorical language, though nothing other will convey the extremity
of his misery, or the form of his thoughts, must be put aside.

"Egad, and every friend I have is out of town!" he exclaimed, quite
willing to think it part of the plot.

He stuck his hands in his pockets, and felt vagabond-like and reckless.
The streets were revelling in their winter muck. The carriages rolling by
insulted him with their display of wealth.

He had democratic sentiments regarding them. Oh for a horse upon the
boundless plains! he sighed to his heart. He remembered bitterly how he
had that day ridden his stool at the bank, dreaming of his wilds, where
bailiff never ran, nor duns obscured the firmament.

And then there were theatres here--huge extravagant places! Algernon went
over to an entrance of one, to amuse his mind, cynically criticizing the
bill. A play was going forward within, that enjoyed great popular esteem,
"The Holly Berries." Seeing that the pit was crammed, Algernon made
application to learn the state of the boxes, but hearing that one box was
empty, he lost his interest in the performance.

As he was strolling forth, his attention was taken by a noise at the
pit-doors, which swung open, and out tumbled a tough little old man with
a younger one grasping his coat-collar, who proclaimed that he would
sicken him of pushing past him at the end of every act.

"You're precious fond of plays," sneered the junior.

"I'm fond of everything I pay for, young fellow," replied the shaken
senior; "and that's a bit of enjoyment you've got to learn--ain't it?"

"Well, don't you knock by me again, that's all," cried the choleric
youth.

"You don't think I'm likely to stop in your company, do you?"

"Whose expense have you been drinking at?"

"My country's, young fellow; and mind you don't soon feed at the table.
Let me go."

Algernon's hunger was appeased by the prospect of some excitement, and
seeing a vicious shake administered to the old man by the young one, he
cried, "Hands off!" and undertook policeman's duty; but as he was not in
blue, his authoritative mandate obtained no respect until he had
interposed his fist.

When he had done so, he recognized the porter at Boyne's Bank, whose
enemy retired upon the threat that there should be no more pushing past
him to get back to seats for the next act.

"I paid," said Anthony; "and you're a ticketer, and you ticketers sha'
n't stop me. I'm worth a thousand of you. Holloa, sir," he cried to
Algernon; "I didn't know you. I'm much obliged. These chaps get tickets
given 'm, and grow as cocky in a theatre as men who pay. He never had
such wine in him as I've got. That I'd swear. Ha! ha! I come out for an
airing after every act, and there's a whole pitfall of ticketers yelling
and tearing, and I chaff my way through and back clean as a red-hot
poker."

Anthony laughed, and rolled somewhat as he laughed.

"Come along, sir, into the street," he said, boring on to the pavement.
"It's after office hours. And, ha! ha! what do you think? There's old
farmer in there, afraid to move off his seat, and the girl with him,
sticking to him tight, and a good girl too. She thinks we've had too
much. We been to the Docks, wine-tasting: Port--Sherry: Sherry--Port!
and, ha! ha! 'what a lot of wine!' says farmer, never thinking how much
he's taking on board. 'I guessed it was night,' says farmer, as we got
into the air, and to see him go on blinking, and stumbling, and saying to
me, 'You stand wine, brother Tony!' I'm blest if I ain't bottled
laughter. So, says I, 'come and see "The Holly Berries," brother William
John; it's the best play in London, and a suitable winter piece.' 'Is
there a rascal hanged in the piece?' says he. 'Oh, yes!' I let him fancy
there was, and he--ha! ha! old farmer's sticking to his seat, solemn as a
judge, waiting for the gallows to come on the stage."

A thought quickened Algernon's spirit. It was a notorious secret among
the young gentlemen who assisted in maintaining the prosperity of Boyne's
Bank, that the old porter--the "Old Ant," as he was called--possessed
money, and had no objection to put out small sums for a certain interest.
Algernon mentioned casually that he had left his purse at home; and "by
the way," said he, "have you got a few sovereigns in your pocket?"

"What! and come through that crush, sir?" Anthony negatived the question
decisively with a reference to his general knowingness.

Algernon pressed him; saying at last, "Well, have you got one?"

"I don't think I've been such a fool," said Anthony, feeling slowly about
his person, and muttering as to the changes that might possibly have been
produced in him by the Docks.

"Confound it, I haven't dined!" exclaimed Algernon, to hasten his
proceedings; but at this, Anthony eyed him queerly. "What have you been
about then, sir?"

"Don't you see I'm in evening dress? I had an appointment to dine with a
friend. He didn't keep it. I find I've left my purse in my other
clothes."

"That's a bad habit, sir," was Anthony's comment. "You don't care much
for your purse."

"Much for my purse, be hanged!" interjected Algernon.

"You'd have felt it, or you'd have heard it, if there 'd been any weight
in it," Anthony remarked.

"How can you hear paper?"

"Oh, paper's another thing. You keep paper in your mind, don't you--eh?
Forget pound notes? Leave pound notes in a purse? And you Sir William's
nephew, sir, who'd let you bank with him and put down everything in a
book, so that you couldn't forget, or if you did, he'd remember for you;
and you might change your clothes as often as not, and no fear of your
losing a penny."

Algernon shrugged disgustedly, and was giving the old man up as a bad
business, when Anthony altered his manner. "Oh! well, sir, I don't mind
letting you have what I've got. I'm out for fun. Bother affairs!"

The sum of twenty shillings was handed to Algernon, after he had
submitted to the indignity of going into a public-house, and writing his
I.O.U. for twenty-three to Anthony Hackbut, which included interest.
Algernon remonstrated against so needless a formality; but Anthony put
the startling supposition to him, that he might die that night. He signed
the document, and was soon feeding and drinking his wine. This being
accomplished, he took some hasty puffs of tobacco, and returned to the
theatre, in the hope that the dark girl Rhoda was to be seen there; for
now that he had dined, Anthony's communication with regard to the farmer
and his daughter became his uppermost thought, and a young man's
uppermost thought is usually the propelling engine to his actions.

By good chance, and the aid of a fee, he obtained a front seat,
commanding an excellent side-view of the pit, which sat wrapt in
contemplation of a Christmas scene snow, ice, bare twigs, a desolate
house, and a woman shivering--one of man's victims.

It is a good public, that of Britain, and will bear anything, so long as
villany is punished, of which there was ripe promise in the oracular
utterances of a rolling, stout, stage-sailor, whose nose, to say nothing
of his frankness on the subject, proclaimed him his own worst enemy, and
whose joke, by dint of repetition, had almost become the joke of the
audience too; for whenever he appeared, there was agitation in pit and
gallery, which subsided only on his jovial thundering of the familiar
sentence; whereupon laughter ensued, and a quieting hum of satisfaction.

It was a play that had been favoured with a great run. Critics had once
objected to it, that it was made to subsist on scenery, a song, and a
stupid piece of cockneyism pretending to be a jest, that was really no
more than a form of slapping the public on the back. But the public likes
to have its back slapped, and critics, frozen by the Medusa-head of
Success, were soon taught manners. The office of critic is now, in fact,
virtually extinct; the taste for tickling and slapping is universal and
imperative; classic appeals to the intellect, and passions not purely
domestic, have grown obsolete. There are captains of the legions, but no
critics. The mass is lord.

And behold our friend the sailor of the boards, whose walk is even as two
meeting billows, appears upon the lonely moor, and salts that uninhabited
region with nautical interjections. Loose are his hose in one part, tight
in another, and he smacks them. It is cold; so let that be his excuse for
showing the bottom of his bottle to the glittering spheres. He takes
perhaps a sturdier pull at the liquor than becomes a manifest instrument
of Providence, whose services may be immediately required; but he informs
us that his ship was never known not to right itself when called upon.

He is alone in the world, he tells us likewise. If his one friend, the
uplifted flask, is his enemy, why then he feels bound to treat his enemy
as his friend. This, with a pathetic allusion to his interior economy,
which was applauded, and the remark "Ain't that Christian?" which was
just a trifle risky; so he secured pit and gallery at a stroke by a
surpassingly shrewd blow at the bishops of our Church, who are, it can
barely be contested, in foul esteem with the multitude--none can say
exactly, for what reason--and must submit to be occasionally offered up
as propitiatory sacrifices.

This good sailor was not always alone in the world. A sweet girl, whom he
describes as reaching to his kneecap, and pathetically believes still to
be of the same height, once called him brother Jack. To hear that name
again from her lips, and a particular song!--he attempts it ludicrously,
yet touchingly withal.

Hark! Is it an echo from a spirit in the frigid air?

The song trembled with a silver ring to the remotest corners of the
house.

At that moment the breathless hush of the audience was flurried by
hearing "Dahlia" called from the pit.

Algernon had been spying among the close-packed faces for a sight of
Rhoda. Rhoda was now standing up amid gathering hisses and outcries. Her
eyes were bent on a particular box, across which a curtain was hastily
being drawn. "My sister!" she sent out a voice of anguish, and remained
with clasped hands and twisted eyebrows, looking toward that one spot, as
if she would have flown to it. She was wedged in the mass, and could not
move.

The exclamation heard had belonged to brother Jack, on the stage, whose
burst of fraternal surprise and rapture fell flat after it, to the
disgust of numbers keenly awakened for the sentiment of this scene.

Roaring accusations that she was drunk; that she had just escaped from
Bedlam for an evening; that she should be gagged and turned headlong out,
surrounded her; but she stood like a sculptured figure, vital in her eyes
alone. The farmer put his arm about his girl's waist. The instant,
however, that Anthony's head uprose on the other side of her, the evil
reputation he had been gaining for himself all through the evening
produced a general clamour, over which the gallery played, miauling, and
yelping like dogs that are never to be divorced from a noise. Algernon
feared mischief. He quitted his seat, and ran out into the lobby.

Half-a-dozen steps, and he came in contact with some one, and they were
mutually drenched with water by the shock. It was his cousin Edward,
bearing a glass in his hand.

Algernon's wrath at the sight of this offender was stimulated by the cold
bath; but Edward cut him short.

"Go in there;" he pointed to a box-door. "A lady has fainted. Hold her up
till I come."

No time was allowed for explanation. Algernon passed into the box, and
was alone with an inanimate shape in blue bournous. The uproar in the
theatre raged; the whole pit was on its legs and shouting. He lifted the
pallid head over one arm, miserably helpless and perplexed, but his
anxiety concerning Rhoda's personal safety in that sea of strife prompted
him to draw back the curtain a little, and he stood exposed. Rhoda
perceived him. She motioned with both her hands in dumb supplication. In
a moment the curtain closed between them. Edward's sharp white face
cursed him mutely for his folly, while he turned and put the water to
Dahlia's lips, and touched her forehead with it.

"What's the matter?" whispered Algernon.

"We must get her out as quick as we can. This is the way with women!
Come! she's recovering." Edward nursed her sternly as he spoke.

"If she doesn't, pretty soon, we shall have the pit in upon us," said
Algernon. "Is she that girl's sister?"

"Don't ask damned questions."

Dahlia opened her eyes, staring placidly.

"Now you can stand up, my dear. Dahlia! all's well. Try," said Edward.

She sighed, murmuring, "What is the time?" and again, "What noise is it?"

Edward coughed in a vexed attempt at tenderness, using all his force to
be gentle with her as he brought her to her feet. The task was difficult
amid the threatening storm in the theatre, and cries of "Show the young
woman her sister!" for Rhoda had won a party in the humane public.

"Dahlia, in God's name give me your help!" Edward called in her ear.

The fair girl's eyelids blinked wretchedly in protestation of her
weakness. She had no will either way, and suffered herself to be led out
of the box, supported by the two young men.

"Run for a cab," said Edward; and Algernon went ahead.

He had one waiting for them as they came out. They placed Dahlia on a
seat with care, and Edward, jumping in, drew an arm tightly about her. "I
can't cry," she moaned.

The cab was driving off as a crowd of people burst from the pit-doors,
and Algernon heard the voice of Farmer Fleming, very hoarse. He had
discretion enough to retire.




CHAPTER XIII

Robert was to drive to the station to meet Rhoda and her father returning
from London, on a specified day. He was eager to be asking cheerful
questions of Dahlia's health and happiness, so that he might dispel the
absurd general belief that he had ever loved the girl, and was now
regretting her absence; but one look at Rhoda's face when she stepped
from the railway carriage kept him from uttering a word on that subject,
and the farmer's heavier droop and acceptance of a helping hand into the
cart, were signs of bad import.

Mr. Fleming made no show of grief, like one who nursed it. He took it to
all appearance as patiently as an old worn horse would do, although such
an outward submissiveness will not always indicate a placid spirit in
men. He talked at stale intervals of the weather and the state of the
ground along the line of rail down home, and pointed in contempt or
approval to a field here and there; but it was as one who no longer had
any professional interest in the tilling of the land.

Doubtless he was trained to have no understanding of a good to be derived
by his communicating what he felt and getting sympathy. Once, when he was
uncertain, and a secret pride in Dahlia's beauty and accomplishments had
whispered to him that her flight was possibly the opening of her road to
a higher fortune, he made a noise for comfort, believing in his heart
that she was still to be forgiven. He knew better now. By holding his
peace he locked out the sense of shame which speech would have stirred
within him.

"Got on pretty smooth with old Mas' Gammon?" he expressed his hope; and
Robert said, "Capitally. We shall make something out of the old man yet,
never fear."

Master Gammon was condemned to serve at the ready-set tea-table as a butt
for banter; otherwise it was apprehended well that Mrs. Sumfit would have
scorched the ears of all present, save the happy veteran of the furrows,
with repetitions of Dahlia's name, and wailings about her darling, of
whom no one spoke. They suffered from her in spite of every precaution.

"Well, then, if I'm not to hear anything dooring meals--as if I'd swallow
it and take it into my stomach!--I'll wait again for what ye've got to
tell," she said, and finished her cup at a gulp, smoothing her apron.

The farmer then lifted his head.

"Mother, if you've done, you'll oblige me by going to bed," he said. "We
want the kitchen."

"A-bed?" cried Mrs. Sumfit, with instantly ruffled lap.

"Upstairs, mother; when you've done--not before."

"Then bad's the noos! Something have happened, William. You 'm not going
to push me out? And my place is by the tea-pot, which I cling to,
rememberin' how I seen her curly head grow by inches up above the table
and the cups. Mas' Gammon," she appealed to the sturdy feeder, "five cups
is your number?"

Her hope was reduced to the prolonging of the service of tea, with Master
Gammon's kind assistance.

"Four, marm," said her inveterate antagonist, as he finished that amount,
and consequently put the spoon in his cup.

Mrs. Sumfit rolled in her chair.

"O Lord, Mas' Gammon! Five, I say; and never a cup less so long as here
you've been."

"Four, marm. I don't know," said Master Gammon, with a slow nod of his
head, "that ever I took five cups of tea at a stretch. Not runnin'."

"I do know, Mas' Gammon. And ought to: for don't I pour out to ye? It's
five you take, and please, your cup, if you'll hand it over."

"Four's my number, marm," Master Gammon reiterated resolutely. He sat
like a rock.

"If they was dumplins," moaned Mrs. Sumfit, "not four, no, nor five, 'd
do till enough you'd had, and here we might stick to our chairs, but
you'd go on and on; you know you would."

"That's eatin', marm;" Master Gammon condescended to explain the nature
of his habits. "I'm reg'lar in my drinkin'."

Mrs. Sumfit smote her hands together. "O Lord, Mas' Gammon, the
wearisomest old man I ever come across is you. More tea's in the pot, and
it ain't watery, and you won't be comfortable. May you get forgiveness
from above! is all I say, and I say no more. Mr. Robert, perhaps you'll
be so good as let me help you, sir? It's good tea; and my Dody," she
added, cajolingly, "my home girl 'll tell us what she saw. I'm pinched
and starved to hear."

"By-and-by, mother," interposed the farmer; "tomorrow." He spoke gently,
but frowned.

Both Rhoda and Robert perceived that they were peculiarly implicated in
the business which was to be discussed without Mrs. Sumfit's assistance.
Her father's manner forbade Rhoda from making any proposal for the relief
of the forlorn old woman.

"And me not to hear to-night about your play-going!" sighed Mrs. Sumfit.
"Oh, it's hard on me. I do call it cruel. And how my sweet was
dressed--like as for a Ball."

She saw the farmer move his foot impatiently.

"Then, if nobody drinks this remaining cup, I will," she pursued.

No voice save her own was heard till the cup was emptied, upon which
Master Gammon, according to his wont, departed for bed to avoid the
seduction of suppers, which he shunned as apoplectic, and Mrs. Sumfit
prepared, in a desolate way, to wash the tea-things, but the farmer,
saying that it could be done in the morning, went to the door and opened
it for her.

She fetched a great sigh and folded her hands resignedly. As she was
passing him to make her miserable enforced exit, the heavy severity of
his face afflicted her with a deep alarm; she fell on her knees,
crying,--

"Oh, William! it ain't for sake of hearin' talk; but you, that went to
see our Dahly, the blossom, 've come back streaky under the eyes, and you
make the house feel as if we neighboured Judgement Day. Down to tea you
set the first moment, and me alone with none of you, and my love for my
girl known well to you. And now to be marched off! How can I go a-bed and
sleep, and my heart jumps so? It ain't Christian to ask me to. I got a
heart, dear, I have. Do give a bit of comfort to it. Only a word of my
Dahly to me."

The farmer replied: "Mother, let's have no woman's nonsense. What we've
got to bear, let us bear. And you go on your knees to the Lord, and don't
be a heathen woman, I say. Get up. There's a Bible in your bedroom. Find
you out comfort in that."

"No, William, no!" she sobbed, still kneeling: "there ain't a dose o'
comfort there when poor souls is in the dark, and haven't got patience
for passages. And me and my Bible!--how can I read it, and not know my
ailing, and a'stract one good word, William? It'll seem only the devil's
shootin' black lightnings across the page, as poor blessed granny used to
say, and she believed witches could do it to you in her time, when they
was evil-minded. No! To-night I look on the binding of the Holy Book, and
I don't, and I won't, I sha' n't open it."

This violent end to her petition was wrought by the farmer grasping her
arm to bring her to her feet.

"Go to bed, mother."

"I shan't open it," she repeated, defiantly. "And it ain't," she gathered
up her comfortable fat person to assist the words "it ain't good--no, not
the best pious ones--I shall, and will say it! as is al'ays ready to
smack your face with the Bible."

"Now, don't ye be angry," said the farmer.

She softened instantly.

"William, dear, I got fifty-seven pounds sterling, and odd shillings, in
a Savings-bank, and that I meant to go to Dahly, and not to yond' dark
thing sitting there so sullen, and me in my misery; I'd give it to you
now for news of my darlin'. Yes, William; and my poor husband's cottage,
in Sussex--seventeen pound per annum. That, if you'll be goodness itself,
and let me hear a word."

"Take her upstairs," said the farmer to Rhoda, and Rhoda went by her and
took her hands, and by dint of pushing from behind and dragging in front,
Mrs. Sumfit, as near on a shriek as one so fat and sleek could be, was
ejected. The farmer and Robert heard her struggles and exclamations along
the passage, but her resistance subsided very suddenly.

"There's power in that girl," said the farmer, standing by the shut door.

Robert thought so, too. It affected his imagination, and his heart began
to beat sickeningly.

"Perhaps she promised to speak--what has happened, whatever that may be,"
he suggested.

"Not she; not she. She respects my wishes."

Robert did not ask what had happened.

Mr. Fleming remained by the door, and shut his mouth from a further word
till he heard Rhoda's returning footstep. He closed the door again behind
her, and went up to the square deal table, leaned his body forward on the
knuckles of his trembling fist, and said, "We're pretty well broken up,
as it is. I've lost my taste for life."

There he paused. Save by the shining of a wet forehead, his face betrayed
nothing of the anguish he suffered. He looked at neither of them, but
sent his gaze straight away under labouring brows to an arm of the
fireside chair, while his shoulders drooped on the wavering support of
his hard-shut hands. Rhoda's eyes, ox-like, as were her father's, smote
full upon Robert's, as in a pang of apprehension of what was about to be
uttered.

It was a quick blaze of light, wherein he saw that the girl's spirit was
not with him. He would have stopped the farmer at once, but he had not
the heart to do it, even had he felt in himself strength to attract an
intelligent response from that strange, grave, bovine fixity of look,
over which the human misery sat as a thing not yet taken into the dull
brain.

"My taste for life," the old man resumed, "that's gone. I didn't bargain
at set-out to go on fighting agen the world. It's too much for a man o'
my years. Here's the farm. Shall 't go to pieces?--I'm a farmer of thirty
year back--thirty year back, and more: I'm about no better'n a farm
labourer in our time, which is to-day. I don't cost much. I ask to be
fed, and to work for it, and to see my poor bit o' property safe, as
handed to me by my father. Not for myself, 't ain't; though perhaps
there's a bottom of pride there too, as in most things. Say it's for the
name. My father seems to demand of me out loud, 'What ha' ye done with
Queen Anne's Farm, William?' and there's a holler echo in my ears. Well;
God wasn't merciful to give me a son. He give me daughters."

Mr. Fleming bowed his head as to the very weapon of chastisement.

"Daughters!" He bent lower.

His hearers might have imagined his headless address to them to be also
without a distinct termination, for he seemed to have ended as abruptly
as he had begun; so long was the pause before, with a wearied lifting of
his body, he pursued, in a sterner voice:

"Don't let none interrupt me." His hand was raised as toward where Rhoda
stood, but he sent no look with it; the direction was wide of her.

The aspect of the blank blind hand motioning to the wall away from her,
smote an awe through her soul that kept her dumb, though his next words
were like thrusts of a dagger in her side.

"My first girl--she's brought disgrace on this house. She's got a mother
in heaven, and that mother's got to blush for her. My first girl's gone
to harlotry in London."

It was Scriptural severity of speech. Robert glanced quick with intense
commiseration at Rhoda. He saw her hands travel upward till they fixed in
at her temples with crossed fingers, making the pressure of an iron band
for her head, while her lips parted, and her teeth, and cheeks, and
eyeballs were all of one whiteness. Her tragic, even, in and out
breathing, where there was no fall of the breast, but the air was taken
and given, as it were the square blade of a sharp-edged sword, was
dreadful to see. She had the look of a risen corpse, recalling some one
of the bloody ends of life.

The farmer went on,--

"Bury her! Now you here know the worst. There's my second girl. She's got
no stain on her; if people 'll take her for what she is herself. She's
idle. But I believe the flesh on her bones she'd wear away for any one
that touched her heart. She's a temper. But she's clean both in body and
in spirit, as I believe, and say before my God. I--what I'd pray for is,
to see this girl safe. All I have shall go to her. That is, to the man
who will--won't be ashamed--marry her, I mean!"

The tide of his harshness failed him here, and he began to pick his
words, now feeble, now emphatic, but alike wanting in natural expression,
for he had reached a point of emotion upon the limits of his nature, and
he was now wilfully forcing for misery and humiliation right and left, in
part to show what a black star Providence had been over him.

"She'll be grateful. I shall be gone. What disgrace I bring to their
union, as father of the other one also, will, I'm bound to hope, be
buried with me in my grave; so that this girl's husband shan't have to
complain that her character and her working for him ain't enough to cover
any harm he's like to think o' the connexion. And he won't be troubled by
relationships after that.

"I used to think Pride a bad thing. I thank God we've all got it in our
blood--the Flemings. I thank God for that now, I do. We don't face again
them as we offend. Not, that is, with the hand out. We go. We're seen no
more. And she'll be seen no more. On that, rely.

"I want my girl here not to keep me in the fear of death. For I fear
death while she's not safe in somebody's hands--kind, if I can get him
for her. Somebody--young or old!"

The farmer lifted his head for the first time, and stared vacantly at
Robert.

"I'd marry her," he said, "if I was knowing myself dying now or to-morrow
morning, I'd marry her, rather than leave her alone--I'd marry her to
that old man, old Gammon."

The farmer pointed to the ceiling. His sombre seriousness cloaked and
carried even that suggestive indication to the possible bridegroom's age
and habits, and all things associated with him, through the gates of
ridicule; and there was no laughter, and no thought of it.

"It stands to reason for me to prefer a young man for her husband. He'll
farm the estate, and won't sell it; so that it goes to our blood, if not
to a Fleming. If, I mean, he's content to farm soberly, and not play Jack
o' Lantern tricks across his own acres. Right in one thing's right, I
grant; but don't argue right in all. It's right only in one thing. Young
men, when they've made a true hit or so, they're ready to think it's
themselves that's right."

This was of course a reminder of the old feud with Robert, and
sufficiently showed whom the farmer had in view for a husband to Rhoda,
if any doubt existed previously.

Having raised his eyes, his unwonted power of speech abandoned him, and
he concluded, wavering in look and in tone,--

"I'd half forgotten her uncle. I've reckoned his riches when I cared for
riches. I can't say th' amount; but, all--I've had his word for it--all
goes to this--God knows how much!--girl. And he don't hesitate to say
she's worth a young man's fancying. May be so. It depends upon ideas
mainly, that does. All goes to her. And this farm.--I wish ye
good-night."

He gave them no other sign, but walked in his oppressed way quietly to
the inner door, and forth, leaving the rest to them.




CHAPTER XIV

The two were together, and all preliminary difficulties had been cleared
for Robert to say what he had to say, in a manner to make the saying of
it well-nigh impossible. And yet silence might be misinterpreted by her.
He would have drawn her to his heart at one sign of tenderness. There
came none. The girl was frightfully torn with a great wound of shame. She
was the first to speak.

"Do you believe what father says of my sister?"

"That she--?" Robert swallowed the words. "No!" and he made a thunder
with his fist.

"No!" She drank up the word. "You do not? No! You know that Dahlia is
innocent?"

Rhoda was trembling with a look for the asseveration; her pale face eager
as a cry for life; but the answer did not come at once hotly as her
passion for it demanded. She grew rigid, murmuring faintly: "speak! Do
speak!"

His eyes fell away from hers. Sweet love would have wrought in him to
think as she thought, but she kept her heart closed from him, and he
stood sadly judicial, with a conscience of his own, that would not permit
him to declare Dahlia innocent, for he had long been imagining the
reverse.

Rhoda pressed her hands convulsively, moaning, "Oh!" down a short deep
breath.

"Tell me what has happened?" said Robert, made mad by that reproachful
agony of her voice. "I'm in the dark. I'm not equal to you all. If
Dahlia's sister wants one to stand up for her, and defend her, whatever
she has done or not done, ask me. Ask me, and I'll revenge her. Here am
I, and I know nothing, and you despise me because--don't think me rude or
unkind. This hand is yours, if you will. Come, Rhoda. Or, let me hear the
case, and I'll satisfy you as best I can. Feel for her? I feel for her as
you do. You don't want me to stand a liar to your question? How can I
speak?"

A woman's instinct at red heat pierces the partial disingenuousness which
Robert could only have avoided by declaring the doubts he entertained.
Rhoda desired simply to be supported by his conviction of her sister's
innocence, and she had scorn of one who would not chivalrously advance
upon the risks of right and wrong, and rank himself prime champion of a
woman belied, absent, and so helpless. Besides, there was but one virtue
possible in Rhoda's ideas, as regarded Dahlia: to oppose facts, if
necessary, and have her innocent perforce, and fight to the death them
that dared cast slander on the beloved head.

Her keen instinct served her so far.

His was alive when she refused to tell him what had taken place during
their visit to London.

She felt that a man would judge evil of the circumstances. Her father and
her uncle had done so: she felt that Robert would. Love for him would
have prompted her to confide in him absolutely. She was not softened by
love; there was no fire on her side to melt and make them run in one
stream, and they could not meet.

"Then, if you will not tell me," said Robert, "say what you think of your
father's proposal? He meant that I may ask you to be my wife. He used to
fancy I cared for your sister. That's false. I care for her--yes; as my
sister too; and here is my hand to do my utmost for her, but I love you,
and I've loved you for some time. I'd be proud to marry you and help on
with the old farm. You don't love me yet--which is a pretty hard thing
for me to see to be certain of. But I love you, and I trust you. I like
the stuff you're made of--and nice stuff I'm talking to a young woman,"
he added, wiping his forehead at the idea of the fair and flattering
addresses young women expect when they are being wooed.

As it was, Rhoda listened with savage contempt of his idle talk. Her
brain was beating at the mystery and misery wherein Dahlia lay engulfed.
She had no understanding for Robert's sentimentality, or her father's
requisition. Some answer had to be given, and she said,--

"I'm not likely to marry a man who supposes he has anything to pardon."

"I don't suppose it," cried Robert.

"You heard what father said."

"I heard what he said, but I don't think the same. What has Dahlia to do
with you?"

He was proceeding to rectify this unlucky sentence. All her covert
hostility burst out on it.

"My sister?--what has my sister to do with me?--you mean!--you mean--you
can only mean that we are to be separated and thought of as two people;
and we are one, and will be till we die. I feel my sister's hand in mine,
though she's away and lost. She is my darling for ever and ever. We're
one!"

A spasm of anguish checked the girl.

"I mean," Robert resumed steadily, "that her conduct, good or bad,
doesn't touch you. If it did, it'd be the same to me. I ask you to take
me for your husband. Just reflect on what your father said, Rhoda."

The horrible utterance her father's lips had been guilty of flashed
through her, filling her with mastering vindictiveness, now that she had
a victim.

"Yes! I'm to take a husband to remind me of what he said."

Robert eyed her sharpened mouth admiringly; her defence of her sister had
excited his esteem, wilfully though she rebutted his straightforward
earnestness and he had a feeling also for the easy turns of her neck, and
the confident poise of her figure.

"Ha! well!" he interjected, with his eyebrows queerly raised, so that she
could make nothing of his look. It seemed half maniacal, it was so ridged
with bright eagerness.

"By heaven! the task of taming you--that's the blessing I'd beg for in my
prayers! Though you were as wild as a cat of the woods, by heaven! I'd
rather have the taming of you than go about with a leash of quiet"--he
checked himself--"companions."

Such was the sudden roll of his tongue, that she was lost in the
astounding lead he had taken, and stared.

"You're the beauty to my taste, and devil is what I want in a woman! I
can make something out of a girl with a temper like yours. You don't know
me, Miss Rhoda. I'm what you reckon a good young man. Isn't that it?"

Robert drew up with a very hard smile.

"I would to God I were! Mind, I feel for you about your sister. I like
you the better for holding to her through thick and thin. But my
sheepishness has gone, and I tell you I'll have you whether you will or
no. I can help you and you can help me. I've lived here as if I had no
more fire in me than old Gammon snoring on his pillow up aloft; and who
kept me to it? Did you see I never touched liquor? What did you guess
from that?--that I was a mild sort of fellow? So I am: but I haven't got
that reputation in other parts. Your father 'd like me to marry you, and
I'm ready. Who kept me to work, so that I might learn to farm, and be a
man, and be able to take a wife? I came here--I'll tell you how. I was a
useless dog. I ran from home and served as a trooper. An old aunt of mine
left me a little money, which just woke me up and gave me a lift of what
conscience I had, and I bought myself out.

"I chanced to see your father's advertisement--came, looked at you all,
and liked you--brought my traps and settled among you, and lived like a
good young man. I like peace and orderliness, I find. I always thought I
did, when I was dancing like mad to hell. I know I do now, and you're the
girl to keep me to it. I've learnt that much by degrees. With any other,
I should have been playing the fool, and going my old ways, long ago. I
should have wrecked her, and drunk to forget. You're my match. By-and-by
you'll know, me yours! You never gave me, or anybody else that I've seen,
sly sidelooks.

"Come! I'll speak out now I'm at work. I thought you at some girl's games
in the Summer. You went out one day to meet a young gentleman. Offence or
no offence, I speak and you listen. You did go out. I was in love with
you then, too. I saw London had been doing its mischief. I was down about
it. I felt that he would make nothing of you, but I chose to take the
care of you, and you've hated me ever since.

"That Mr. Algernon Blancove's a rascal. Stop! You'll say as much as you
like presently. I give you a warning--the man's a rascal. I didn't play
spy on your acts, but your looks. I can read a face like yours, and it's
my home, my home!--by heaven, it is. Now, Rhoda, you know a little more
of me. Perhaps I'm more of a man than you thought. Marry another, if you
will; but I'm the man for you, and I know it, and you'll go wrong if you
don't too. Come! let your father sleep well. Give me your hand."

All through this surprising speech of Robert's, which was a revelation of
one who had been previously dark to her, she had steeled her spirit as
she felt herself being borne upon unexpected rapids, and she marvelled
when she found her hand in his.

Dismayed, as if caught in a trap, she said,--

"You know I've no love for you at all."

"None--no doubt," he answered.

The fit of verbal energy was expended, and he had become listless, though
he looked frankly at her and assumed the cheerfulness which was failing
within him.

"I wish to remain as I am," she faltered, surprised again by the equally
astonishing recurrence of humility, and more spiritually subdued by it.
"I've no heart for a change. Father will understand. I am safe."

She ended with a cry: "Oh! my dear, my own sister! I wish you were safe.
Get her here to me and I'll do what I can, if you're not hard on her.
She's so beautiful, she can't do wrong. My Dahlia's in some trouble. Mr.
Robert, you might really be her friend?"

"Drop the Mister," said Robert.

"Father will listen to you," she pleaded. "You won't leave us? Tell him
you know I am safe. But I haven't a feeling of any kind while my sister's
away. I will call you Robert, if you like." She reached her hand forth.

"That's right," he said, taking it with a show of heartiness: "that's a
beginning, I suppose."

She shrank a little in his sensitive touch, and he added: "Oh never fear.
I've spoken out, and don't do the thing too often. Now you know me,
that's enough. I trust you, so trust me. I'll talk to your father. I've
got a dad of my own, who isn't so easily managed. You and I, Rhoda--we're
about the right size for a couple. There--don't be frightened! I was only
thinking--I'll let go your hand in a minute. If Dahlia's to be found,
I'll find her. Thank you for that squeeze. You'd wake a dead man to life,
if you wanted to. To-morrow I set about the business. That's settled. Now
your hand's loose. Are you going to say good night? You must give me your
hand again for that. What a rough fellow I must seem to you! Different
from the man you thought I was? I'm just what you choose to make me,
Rhoda; remember that. By heaven! go at once, for you're an armful--"

She took a candle and started for the door.

"Aha! you can look fearful as a doe. Out! make haste!"

In her hurry at his speeding gestures, the candle dropped; she was going
to pick it up, but as he approached, she stood away frightened.

"One kiss, my girl," he said. "Don't keep me jealous as fire. One! and
I'm a plighted man. One!--or I shall swear you know what kisses are. Why
did you go out to meet that fellow? Do you think there's no danger in it?
Doesn't he go about boasting of it now, and saying--that girl! But kiss
me and I'll forget it; I'll forgive you. Kiss me only once, and I shall
be certain you don't care for him. That's the thought maddens me
outright. I can't bear it now I've seen you look soft. I'm stronger than
you, mind." He caught her by the waist.

"Yes," Rhoda gasped, "you are. You are only a brute."

"A brute's a lucky dog, then, for I've got you!"

"Will you touch me?"

"You're in my power."

"It's a miserable thing, Robert."

"Why don't you struggle, my girl? I shall kiss you in a minute."

"You're never my friend again."

"I'm not a gentleman, I suppose!"

"Never! after this."

"It isn't done. And first you're like a white rose, and next you're like
a red. Will you submit?"

"Oh! shame!" Rhoda uttered.

"Because I'm not a gentleman?"

"You are not."

"So, if I could make you a lady--eh? the lips 'd be ready in a trice. You
think of being made a lady--a lady!"

His arm relaxed in the clutch of her figure.

She got herself free, and said: "We saw Mr. Blancove at the theatre with
Dahlia."

It was her way of meeting his accusation that she had cherished an
ambitious feminine dream.

He, to hide a confusion that had come upon him, was righting the fallen
candle.

"Now I know you can be relied on; you can defend yourself," he said, and
handed it to her, lighted. "You keep your kisses for this or that young
gentleman. Quite right. You really can defend yourself. That's all I was
up to. So let us hear that you forgive me. The door's open. You won't be
bothered by me any more; and don't hate me overmuch."

"You might have learned to trust me without insulting me, Robert," she
said.

"Do you fancy I'd take such a world of trouble for a kiss of your lips,
sweet as they are?"

His blusterous beginning ended in a speculating glance at her mouth.

She saw it would be wise to accept him in his present mood, and go; and
with a gentle "Good night," that might sound like pardon, she passed
through the doorway.




CHAPTER XV

Next day, while Squire Blancove was superintending the laying down of
lines for a new carriage drive in his park, as he walked slowly up the
green slope he perceived Farmer Fleming, supported by a tall young man;
and when the pair were nearer, he had the gratification of noting
likewise that the worthy yeoman was very much bent, as with an acute
attack of his well-known chronic malady of a want of money.

The squire greatly coveted the freehold of Queen Anne's Farm. He had made
offers to purchase it till he was tired, and had gained for himself the
credit of being at the bottom of numerous hypothetical cabals to injure
and oust the farmer from his possession. But if Naboth came with his
vineyard in his hand, not even Wrexby's rector (his quarrel with whom
haunted every turn in his life) could quote Scripture against him for
taking it at a proper valuation.

The squire had employed his leisure time during service in church to
discover a text that might be used against him in the event of the
farmer's reduction to a state of distress, and his, the squire's, making
the most of it. On the contrary, according to his heathenish reading of
some of the patriarchal doings, there was more to be said in his favour
than not, if he increased his territorial property: nor could he,
throughout the Old Testament, hit on one sentence that looked like a
personal foe to his projects, likely to fit into the mouth of the rector
of Wrexby.

"Well, farmer," he said, with cheerful familiarity, "winter crops looking
well? There's a good show of green in the fields from my windows, as good
as that land of yours will allow in heavy seasons."

To this the farmer replied, "I've not heart or will to be round about,
squire. If you'll listen to me--here, or where you give command."

"Has it anything to do with pen and paper, Fleming? In that case you'd
better be in my study," said the squire.

"I don't know that it have. I don't know that it have." The farmer sought
Robert's face.

"Best where there's no chance of interruption," Robert counselled, and
lifted his hat to the squire.

"Eh? Well, you see I'm busy." The latter affected a particular
indifference, that in such cases, when well acted (as lords of money can
do--squires equally with usurers), may be valued at hundreds of pounds in
the pocket. "Can't you put it off? Come again to-morrow."

"To-morrow's a day too late," said the farmer, gravely. Whereto replying,
"Oh! well, come along in, then," the squire led the way.

"You're two to one, if it's a transaction," he said, nodding to Robert to
close the library door. "Take seats. Now then, what is it? And if I make
a face, just oblige me by thinking nothing about it, for my gout's
beginning to settle in the leg again, and shoots like an electric
telegraph from purgatory."

He wheezed and lowered himself into his arm-chair; but the farmer and
Robert remained standing, and the farmer spoke:--

"My words are going to be few, squire. I've got a fact to bring to your
knowledge, and a question to ask."

Surprise, exaggerated on his face by a pain he had anticipated, made the
squire glare hideously.

"Confound it, that's what they say to a prisoner in the box. Here's a
murder committed:--Are you the guilty person? Fact and question! Well,
out with 'em, both together."

"A father ain't responsible for the sins of his children," said the
farmer.

"Well, that's a fact," the squire emphasized. "I've always maintained it;
but, if you go to your church, farmer--small blame to you if you don't;
that fellow who preaches there--I forget his name--stands out for just
the other way. You are responsible, he swears. Pay your son's debts, and
don't groan over it:--He spent the money, and you're the chief debtor;
that's his teaching. Well: go on. What's your question?"

"A father's not to be held responsible for the sins of his children,
squire. My daughter's left me. She's away. I saw my daughter at the
theatre in London. She saw me, and saw her sister with me. She
disappeared. It's a hard thing for a man to be saying of his own flesh
and blood. She disappeared. She went, knowing her father's arms open to
her. She was in company with your son."

The squire was thrumming on the arm of his chair. He looked up vaguely,
as if waiting for the question to follow, but meeting the farmer's
settled eyes, he cried, irritably, "Well, what's that to me?"

"What's that to you, squire?"

"Are you going to make me out responsible for my son's conduct? My son's
a rascal--everybody knows that. I paid his debts once, and I've finished
with him. Don't come to me about the fellow. If there's a greater curse
than the gout, it's a son."

"My girl," said the farmer, "she's my flesh and blood, and I must find
her, and I'm here to ask you to make your son tell me where she's to be
found. Leave me to deal with that young man--leave you me! but I want my
girl."

"But I can't give her to you," roared the squire, afflicted by his two
great curses at once. "Why do you come to me? I'm not responsible for the
doings of the dog. I'm sorry for you, if that's what you want to know. Do
you mean to say that my son took her away from your house?"

"I don't do so, Mr. Blancove. I'm seeking for my daughter, and I see her
in company with your son."

"Very well, very well," said the squire; "that shows his habits; I can't
say more. But what has it got to do with me?"

The farmer looked helplessly at Robert.

"No, no," the squire sung out, "no interlopers, no interpreting here. I
listen to you. My son--your daughter. I understand that, so far. It's
between us two. You've got a daughter who's gone wrong somehow: I'm sorry
to hear it. I've got a son who never went right; and it's no comfort to
me, upon my word. If you were to see the bills and the letters I receive!
but I don't carry my grievances to my neighbours. I should think,
Fleming, you'd do best, if it's advice you're seeking, to keep it quiet.
Don't make a noise about it. Neighbours' gossip I find pretty well the
worst thing a man has to bear, who's unfortunate enough to own children."

The farmer bowed his head with that bitter humbleness which characterized
his reception of the dealings of Providence toward him.

"My neighbours 'll soon be none at all," he said. "Let 'em talk. I'm not
abusing you, Mr. Blancove. I'm a broken man: but I want my poor lost
girl, and, by God, responsible for your son or not, you must help me to
find her. She may be married, as she says. She mayn't be. But I must find
her."

The squire hastily seized a scrap of paper on the table and wrote on it.

"There!" he handed the paper to the farmer; "that's my son's address,
'Boyne's Bank, City, London.' Go to him there, and you'll find him
perched on a stool, and a good drubbing won't hurt him. You've my hearty
permission, I can assure you: you may say so. 'Boyne's Bank.' Anybody
will show you the place. He's a rascally clerk in the office, and
precious useful, I dare swear. Thrash him, if you think fit."

"Ay," said the farmer, "Boyne's Bank. I've been there already. He's
absent from work, on a visit down into Hampshire, one of the young
gentlemen informed me; Fairly Park was the name of the place: but I came
to you, Mr. Blancove; for you're his father."

"Well now, my good Fleming, I hope you think I'm properly punished for
that fact." The squire stood up with horrid contortions.

Robert stepped in advance of the farmer.

"Pardon me, sir," he said, though the squire met his voice with a
prodigious frown; "this would be an ugly business to talk about, as you
observe. It would hurt Mr. Fleming in these parts of the country, and he
would leave it, if he thought fit; but you can't separate your name from
your son's--begging you to excuse the liberty I take in mentioning
it--not in public: and your son has the misfortune to be well known in
one or two places where he was quartered when in the cavalry. That matter
of the jeweller--"

"Hulloa," the squire exclaimed, in a perturbation.

"Why, sir, I know all about it, because I was a trooper in the regiment
your son, Mr. Algernon Blancove, quitted: and his name, if I may take
leave to remark so, won't bear printing. How far he's guilty before Mr.
Fleming we can't tell as yet; but if Mr. Fleming holds him guilty of an
offence, your son 'll bear the consequences, and what's done will be done
thoroughly. Proper counsel will be taken, as needn't be said. Mr. Fleming
applied to you first, partly for your sake as well as his own. He can
find friends, both to advise and to aid him."

"You mean, sir," thundered the squire, "that he can find enemies of mine,
like that infernal fellow who goes by the title of Reverend, down below
there. That'll do, that will do; there's some extortion at the bottom of
this. You're putting on a screw."

"We're putting on a screw, sir," said Robert, coolly.

"Not a penny will you get by it."

Robert flushed with heat of blood.

"You don't wish you were a young man half so much as I do just now," he
remarked, and immediately they were in collision, for the squire made a
rush to the bell-rope, and Robert stopped him. "We're going," he said;
"we don't want man-servants to show us the way out. Now mark me, Mr.
Blancove, you've insulted an old man in his misery: you shall suffer for
it, and so shall your son, whom I know to be a rascal worthy of
transportation. You think Mr. Fleming came to you for money. Look at this
old man, whose only fault is that he's too full of kindness; he came to
you just for help to find his daughter, with whom your rascal of a son
was last seen, and you swear he's come to rob you of money. Don't you
know yourself a fattened cur, squire though you be, and called gentleman?
England's a good place, but you make England a hell to men of spirit. Sit
in your chair, and don't ever you, or any of you cross my path; and speak
a word to your servants before we're out of the house, and I stand in the
hall and give 'em your son's history, and make Wrexby stink in your
nostril, till you're glad enough to fly out of it. Now, Mr. Fleming,
there's no more to be done here; the game lies elsewhere."

Robert took the farmer by the arm, and was marching out of the enemy's
territory in good order, when the squire, who had presented many
changeing aspects of astonishment and rage, arrested them with a call. He
began to say that he spoke to Mr. Fleming, and not to the young ruffian
of a bully whom the farmer had brought there: and then asked in a very
reasonable manner what he could do--what measures he could adopt to aid
the farmer in finding his child. Robert hung modestly in the background
while the farmer laboured on with a few sentences to explain the case,
and finally the squire said, that his foot permitting (it was an almost
pathetic reference to the weakness of flesh), he would go down to Fairly
on the day following and have a personal interview with his son, and set
things right, as far as it lay in his power, though he was by no means
answerable for a young man's follies.

He was a little frightened by the farmer's having said that Dahlia,
according to her own declaration was married, and therefore himself the
more anxious to see Mr. Algernon, and hear the truth from his estimable
offspring, whom he again stigmatized as a curse terrible to him as his
gouty foot, but nevertheless just as little to be left to his own
devices. The farmer bowed to these observations; as also when the squire
counselled him, for his own sake, not to talk of his misfortune all over
the parish.

"I'm not a likely man for that, squire; but there's no telling where
gossips get their crumbs. It's about. It's about."

"About my son?" cried the squire.

"My daughter!"

"Oh, well, good-day," the squire resumed more cheerfully. "I'll go down
to Fairly, and you can't ask more than that."

When the farmer was out of the house and out of hearing, he rebuked
Robert for the inconsiderate rashness of his behaviour, and pointed out
how he, the farmer, by being patient and peaceful, had attained to the
object of his visit. Robert laughed without defending himself.

"I shouldn't ha' known ye," the farmer repeated frequently; "I shouldn't
ha' known ye, Robert."

"No, I'm a trifle changed, may be," Robert agreed. "I'm going to claim a
holiday of you. I've told Rhoda that if Dahlia's to be found, I'll find
her, and I can't do it by sticking here. Give me three weeks. The land's
asleep. Old Gammon can hardly turn a furrow the wrong way. There's
nothing to do, which is his busiest occupation, when he's not interrupted
at it."

"Mas' Gammon's a rare old man," said the farmer, emphatically.

"So I say. Else, how would you see so many farms flourishing!"

"Come, Robert: you hit th' old man hard; you should learn to forgive."

"So I do, and a telling blow's a man's best road to charity. I'd forgive
the squire and many another, if I had them within two feet of my fist."

"Do you forgive my girl Rhoda for putting of you off?"

Robert screwed in his cheek.

"Well, yes, I do," he said. "Only it makes me feel thirsty, that's all."

The farmer remembered this when they had entered the farm.

"Our beer's so poor, Robert," he made apology; "but Rhoda shall get you
some for you to try, if you like. Rhoda, Robert's solemn thirsty."

"Shall I?" said Rhoda, and she stood awaiting his bidding.

"I'm not a thirsty subject," replied Robert. "You know I've avoided drink
of any kind since I set foot on this floor. But when I drink," he pitched
his voice to a hard, sparkling heartiness, "I drink a lot, and the stuff
must be strong. I'm very much obliged to you, Miss Rhoda, for what you're
so kind as to offer to satisfy my thirst, and you can't give better, and
don't suppose that I'm complaining; but your father's right, it is rather
weak, and wouldn't break the tooth of my thirst if I drank at it till
Gammon left off thinking about his dinner."

With that he announced his approaching departure.

The farmer dropped into his fireside chair, dumb and spiritless. A shadow
was over the house, and the inhabitants moved about their domestic
occupations silent as things that feel the thunder-cloud. Before sunset
Robert was gone on his long walk to the station, and Rhoda felt a woman's
great envy of the liberty of a man, who has not, if it pleases him not,
to sit and eat grief among familiar images, in a home that furnishes its
altar-flame.




CHAPTER XVI

Fairly, Lord Elling's seat in Hampshire, lay over the Warbeach river; a
white mansion among great oaks, in view of the summer sails and winter
masts of the yachting squadron. The house was ruled, during the
congregation of the Christmas guests, by charming Mrs. Lovell, who
relieved the invalid Lady of the house of the many serious cares
attending the reception of visitors, and did it all with ease. Under her
sovereignty the place was delightful, and if it was by repute pleasanter
to young men than to any other class, it will be admitted that she
satisfied those who are loudest in giving tongue to praise.

Edward and Algernon journeyed down to Fairly together, after the
confidence which the astute young lawyer had been compelled to repose in
his cousin. Sir William Blancove was to be at Fairly, and it was at his
father's pointed request that Edward had accepted Mrs. Lovell's
invitation. Half in doubt as to the lady's disposition toward him, Edward
eased his heart with sneers at the soft, sanguinary graciousness they
were to expect, and racked mythology for spiteful comparisons; while
Algernon vehemently defended her with a battering fire of British
adjectives in superlative. He as much as hinted, under instigation, that
he was entitled to defend her; and his claim being by-and-by yawningly
allowed by Edward, and presuming that he now had Edward in his power and
need not fear him, he exhibited his weakness in the guise of a costly
gem, that he intended to present to Mrs. Lovell--an opal set in a cross
pendant from a necklace; a really fine opal, coquetting with the lights
of every gem that is known: it shot succinct red flashes, and green, and
yellow; the emerald, the amethyst, the topaz lived in it, and a remote
ruby; it was veined with lightning hues, and at times it slept in a milky
cloud, innocent of fire, quite maidenlike.

"That will suit her," was Edward's remark.

"I didn't want to get anything common," said Algernon, making the gem
play before his eyes.

"A pretty stone," said Edward.

"Do you think so?"

"Very pretty indeed."

"Harlequin pattern."

"To be presented to Columbine!"

"The Harlequin pattern is of the best sort, you know. Perhaps you like
the watery ones best? This is fresh from Russia. There's a set I've my
eye on. I shall complete it in time. I want Peggy Lovell to wear the
jolliest opals in the world. It's rather nice, isn't it?"

"It's a splendid opal," said Edward.

"She likes opals," said Algernon.

"She'll take your meaning at once," said Edward.

"How? I'll be hanged if I know what my meaning is, Ned."

"Don't you know the signification of your gift?"

"Not a bit."

"Oh! you'll be Oriental when you present it."

"The deuce I shall!"

"It means, 'You're the prettiest widow in the world.'"

"So she is. I'll be right there, old boy."

"And, 'You're a rank, right-down widow, and no mistake; you're everything
to everybody; not half so innocent as you look: you're green as jealousy,
red as murder, yellow as jaundice, and put on the whiteness of a virgin
when you ought to be blushing like a penitent.' In short, 'You have no
heart of your own, and you pretend to possess half a dozen: you're devoid
of one steady beam, and play tricks with every scale of colour: you're an
arrant widow, and that's what you are.' An eloquent gift, Algy."

"Gad, if it means all that, it'll be rather creditable to me," said
Algernon. "Do opals mean widows?"

"Of course," was the answer.

"Well, she is a widow, and I suppose she's going to remain one, for she's
had lots of offers. If I marry a girl I shall never like her half as much
as Peggy Lovell. She's done me up for every other woman living. She never
lets me feel a fool with her; and she has a way, by Jove, of looking at
me, and letting me know she's up to my thoughts and isn't angry. What's
the use of my thinking of her at all? She'd never go to the Colonies, and
live in a log but and make cheeses, while I tore about on horseback
gathering cattle."

"I don't think she would," observed Edward, emphatically; "I don't think
she would."

"And I shall never have money. Confound stingy parents! It's a question
whether I shall get Wrexby: there's no entail. I'm heir to the governor's
temper and his gout, I dare say. He'll do as he likes with the estate. I
call it beastly unfair."

Edward asked how much the opal had cost.

"Oh, nothing," said Algernon; "that is, I never pay for jewellery."

Edward was curious to know how he managed to obtain it.

"Why, you see," Algernon explained, "they, the jewellers--I've got two or
three in hand--the fellows are acquainted with my position, and they
speculate on my expectations. There is no harm in that if they like it. I
look at their trinkets, and say, 'I've no money;' and they say, 'Never
mind;' and I don't mind much. The understanding is, that I pay them when
I inherit."

"In gout and bad temper?"

"Gad, if I inherit nothing else, they'll have lots of that for
indemnification. It's a good system, Ned; it enables a young fellow like
me to get through the best years of his life--which I take to be his
youth--without that squalid poverty bothering him. You can make presents,
and wear a pin or a ring, if it takes your eye. You look well, and you
make yourself agreeable; and I see nothing to complain of in that."

"The jewellers, then, have established an institution to correct one of
the errors of Providence."

"Oh! put it in your long-winded way, if you like," said Algernon; "all I
know is, that I should often have wanted a five-pound note, if--that is,
if I hadn't happened to be dressed like a gentleman. With your prospects,
Ned, I should propose to charming Peggy tomorrow morning early. We
mustn't let her go out of the family. If I can't have her, I'd rather you
would."

"You forget the incumbrances on one side," said Edward, his face
darkening.

"Oh! that's all to be managed," Algernon rallied him. "Why, Ned, you'll
have twenty thousand a-year, if you have a penny; and you'll go into
Parliament, and give dinners, and a woman like Peggy Lovell 'd intrigue
for you like the deuce."

"A great deal too like," Edward muttered.

"As for that pretty girl," continued Algernon; but Edward peremptorily
stopped all speech regarding Dahlia. His desire was, while he made
holiday, to shut the past behind a brazen gate; which being communicated
sympathetically to his cousin, the latter chimed to it in boisterous
shouts of anticipated careless jollity at Fairly Park, crying out how
they would hunt and snap fingers at Jews, and all mortal sorrows, and
have a fortnight, or three weeks, perhaps a full month, of the finest
life possible to man, with good horses, good dinners, good wines, good
society, at command, and a queen of a woman to rule and order everything.
Edward affected a disdainful smile at the prospect; but was in reality
the weaker of the two in his thirst for it.

They arrived at Fairly in time to dress for dinner, and in the
drawing-room Mrs. Lovell sat to receive them. She looked up to Edward's
face an imperceptible half-second longer than the ordinary form of
welcome accords--one of the looks which are nothing at all when there is
no spiritual apprehension between young people, and are so much when
there is. To Algernon, who was gazing opals on her, she simply gave her
fingers. At her right hand, was Sir John Capes, her antique devotee; a
pure milky-white old gentleman, with sparkling fingers, who played Apollo
to his Daphne, and was out of breath. Lord Suckling, a boy with a
boisterous constitution, and a guardsman, had his place near her left
hand, as if ready to seize it at the first whisper of encouragement or
opportunity. A very little lady of seventeen, Miss Adeline Gosling,
trembling with shyness under a cover of demureness, fell to Edward's lot
to conduct down to dinner, where he neglected her disgracefully. His
father, Sir William, was present at the table, and Lord Elling, with whom
he was in repute as a talker and a wit. Quickened with his host's
renowned good wine (and the bare renown of a wine is inspiriting), Edward
pressed to be brilliant. He had an epigrammatic turn, and though his mind
was prosaic when it ran alone, he could appear inventive and fanciful
with the rub of other minds. Now, at a table where good talking is cared
for, the triumphs of the excelling tongue are not for a moment to be
despised, even by the huge appetite of the monster Vanity. For a year,
Edward had abjured this feast. Before the birds appeared and the
champagne had ceased to make its circle, he felt that he was now at home
again, and that the term of his wandering away from society was one of
folly. He felt the joy and vigour of a creature returned to his element.
Why had he ever quitted it? Already he looked back upon Dahlia from a
prodigious distance. He knew that there was something to be smoothed
over; something written in the book of facts which had to be smeared out,
and he seemed to do it, while he drank the babbling wine and heard
himself talk. Not one man at that table, as he reflected, would consider
the bond which held him in any serious degree binding. A lady is one
thing, and a girl of the class Dahlia had sprung from altogether another.
He could not help imagining the sort of appearance she would make there;
and the thought even was a momentary clog upon his tongue. How he used to
despise these people! Especially he had despised the young men as
brainless cowards in regard to their views of women and conduct toward
them. All that was changed. He fancied now that they, on the contrary,
would despise him, if only they could be aware of the lingering sense he
entertained of his being in bondage under a sacred obligation to a
farmer's daughter.

But he had one thing to discover, and that was, why Sir William had made
it a peculiar request that he should come to meet him here. Could the
desire possibly be to reconcile him with Mrs. Lovell? His common sense
rejected the idea at once: Sir William boasted of her wit and tact, and
admired her beauty, but Edward remembered his having responded tacitly to
his estimate of her character, and Sir William was not the man to court
the alliance of his son with a woman like Mrs. Lovell. He perceived that
his father and the fair widow frequently took counsel together. Edward
laughed at the notion that the grave senior had himself become
fascinated, but without utterly scouting it, until he found that the
little lady whom he had led to dinner the first day, was an heiress; and
from that, and other indications, he exactly divined the nature of his
father's provident wishes. But this revelation rendered Mrs. Lovell's
behaviour yet more extraordinary. Could it be credited that she was
abetting Sir William's schemes with all her woman's craft? "Has she,"
thought Edward, "become so indifferent to me as to care for my welfare?"
He determined to put her to the test. He made love to Adeline Gosling.
Nothing that he did disturbed the impenetrable complacency of Mrs.
Lovell. She threw them together as she shuffled the guests. She really
seemed to him quite indifferent enough to care for his welfare. It was a
point in the mysterious ways of women, or of widows, that Edward's
experience had not yet come across. All the parties immediately concerned
were apparently so desperately acquiescing in his suit, that he soon grew
uneasy. Mrs. Lovell not only shuffled him into places with the raw
heiress, but with the child's mother; of whom he spoke to Algernon as of
one too strongly breathing of matrimony to appease the cravings of an
eclectic mind.

"Make the path clear for me, then," said Algernon, "if you don't like the
girl. Pitch her tales about me. Say, I've got a lot in me, though I don't
let it out. The game's up between you and Peggy Lovell, that's clear. She
don't forgive you, my boy."

"Ass!" muttered Edward, seeing by the light of his perception, that he
was too thoroughly forgiven.

A principal charm of the life at Fairly to him was that there was no one
complaining. No one looked reproach at him. If a lady was pale and
reserved, she did not seem to accuse him, and to require coaxing. All
faces here were as light as the flying moment, and did not carry the
shadowy weariness of years, like that burdensome fair face in the London
lodging-house, to which the Fates had terribly attached themselves. So,
he was gay. He closed, as it were, a black volume, and opened a new and a
bright one. Young men easily fancy that they may do this, and that when
the black volume is shut the tide is stopped. Saying, "I was a fool,"
they believe they have put an end to the foolishness. What father teaches
them that a human act once set in motion flows on for ever to the great
account? Our deathlessness is in what we do, not in what we are.
Comfortable Youth thinks otherwise.

The days at a well-ordered country-house, where a divining lady rules,
speed to the measure of a waltz, in harmonious circles, dropping like
crystals into the gulfs of Time, and appearing to write nothing in his
book. Not a single hinge of existence is heard to creak. There is no
after-dinner bill. You are waited on, without being elbowed by the
humanity of your attendants. It is a civilized Arcadia. Only, do not
desire, that you may not envy. Accept humbly what rights of citizenship
are accorded to you upon entering. Discard the passions when you cross
the threshold. To breathe and to swallow merely, are the duties which
should prescribe your conduct; or, such is the swollen condition of the
animal in this enchanted region, that the spirit of man becomes
dangerously beset.

Edward breathed and swallowed, and never went beyond the prescription,
save by talking. No other junior could enter the library, without
encountering the scorn of his elders; so he enjoyed the privilege of
hearing all the scandal, and his natural cynicism was plentifully fed. It
was more of a school to him than he knew.

These veterans, in their arm-chairs, stripped the bloom from life, and
showed it to be bare bones: They took their wisdom for an experience of
the past: they were but giving their sensations in the present. Not to
perceive this, is Youth's, error when it hears old gentlemen talking at
their ease.

On the third morning of their stay at Fairly, Algernon came into Edward's
room with a letter in his hand.

"There! read that!" he said. "It isn't ill-luck; it's infernal
persecution! What, on earth!--why, I took a close cab to the station. You
saw me get out of it. I'll swear no creditor of mine knew I was leaving
London. My belief is that the fellows who give credit have spies about at
every railway terminus in the kingdom. They won't give me three days'
peace. It's enough to disgust any man with civilized life; on my soul, it
is!"

Edward glanced at the superscription of the letter. "Not posted," he
remarked.

"No; delivered by some confounded bailiff, who's been hounding me."

"Bailiffs don't generally deal in warnings."

"Will you read it!" Algernon shouted.

The letter ran thus:--

   "Mr. Algernon Blancove,--

   "The writer of this intends taking the first opportunity of meeting
   you, and gives you warning, you will have to answer his question
   with a Yes or a No; and speak from your conscience. The
   respectfulness of his behaviour to you as a gentleman will depend
   upon that."

Algernon followed his cousin's eye down to the last letter in the page.

"What do you think of it?" he asked eagerly.

Edward's broad thin-lined brows were drawn down in gloom. Mastering some
black meditation in his brain, he answered Algernon's yells for an
opinion,--

"I think--well, I think bailiffs have improved in their manners, and show
you they are determined to belong to the social march in an age of
universal progress. Nothing can be more comforting."

"But, suppose this fellow comes across me?"

"Don't know him."

"Suppose he insists on knowing me?"

"Don't know yourself."

"Yes; but hang it! if he catches hold of me?"

"Shake him off."

"Suppose he won't let go?"

"Cut him with your horsewhip."

"You think it's about a debt, then?"

"Intimidation, evidently."

"I shall announce to him that the great Edward Blancove is not to be
intimidated. You'll let me borrow your name, old Ned. I've stood by you
in my time. As for leaving Fairly, I tell you I can't. It's too
delightful to be near Peggy Lovell."

Edward smiled with a peculiar friendliness, and Algernon went off, very
well contented with his cousin.




CHAPTER XVII

Within a mile of Fairly Park lay the farm of another yeoman; but he was
of another character. The Hampshireman was a farmer of renown in his
profession; fifth of a family that had cultivated a small domain of one
hundred and seventy acres with sterling profit, and in a style to make
Sutton the model of a perfect farm throughout the country. Royal eyes had
inspected his pigs approvingly; Royal wits had taken hints from Jonathan
Eccles in matters agricultural; and it was his comforting joke that he
had taught his Prince good breeding. In return for the service, his
Prince had transformed a lusty Radical into a devoted Royalist. Framed on
the walls of his parlours were letters from his Prince, thanking him for
specimen seeds and worthy counsel: veritable autograph letters of the
highest value. The Prince had steamed up the salt river, upon which the
Sutton harvests were mirrored, and landed on a spot marked in honour of
the event by a broad grey stone; and from that day Jonathan Eccles stood
on a pinnacle of pride, enabling him to see horizons of despondency
hitherto unknown to him. For he had a son, and the son was a riotous
devil, a most wild young fellow, who had no taste for a farmer's life,
and openly declared his determination not to perpetuate the Sutton farm
in the hands of the Eccleses, by running off one day and entering the
ranks of the British army.

Those framed letters became melancholy objects for contemplation, when
Jonathan thought that no posterity of his would point them out gloryingly
in emulation. Man's aim is to culminate; but it is the saddest thing in
the world to feel that we have accomplished it. Mr. Eccles shrugged with
all the philosophy he could summon, and transferred his private
disappointment to his country, whose agricultural day was, he said,
doomed. "We shall be beaten by those Yankees." He gave Old England twenty
years of continued pre-eminence (due to the impetus of the present
generation of Englishmen), and then, said he, the Yankees will flood the
market. No more green pastures in Great Britain; no pretty clean-footed
animals; no yellow harvests; but huge chimney pots everywhere; black
earth under black vapour, and smoke-begrimed faces. In twenty years'
time, sooty England was to be a gigantic manufactory, until the Yankees
beat us out of that field as well; beyond which Jonathan Eccles did not
care to spread any distinct border of prophecy; merely thanking the Lord
that he should then be under grass. The decay of our glory was to be
edged with blood; Jonathan admitted that there would be stuff in the
fallen race to deliver a sturdy fight before they went to their doom.

For this prodigious curse, England had to thank young Robert, the erratic
son of Jonathan.

It was now two years since Robert had inherited a small legacy of money
from an aunt, and spent it in waste, as the farmer bitterly supposed. He
was looking at some immense seed-melons in his garden, lying about in
morning sunshine--a new feed for sheep, of his own invention,--when the
call of the wanderer saluted his ears, and he beheld his son Robert at
the gate.

"Here I am, sir," Robert sang out from the exterior.

"Stay there, then," was his welcome.

They were alike in their build and in their manner of speech. The accost
and the reply sounded like reports from the same pistol. The old man was
tall, broad-shouldered, and muscular--a grey edition of the son, upon
whose disorderly attire he cast a glance, while speaking, with settled
disgust. Robert's necktie streamed loose; his hair was uncombed; a
handkerchief dangled from his pocket. He had the look of the prodigal,
returned with impudence for his portion instead of repentance.

"I can't see how you are, sir, from this distance," said Robert, boldly
assuming his privilege to enter.

"Are you drunk?" Jonathan asked, as Robert marched up to him.

"Give me your hand, sir."

"Give me an answer first. Are you drunk?"

Robert tried to force the complacent aspect of a mind unabashed, but felt
that he made a stupid show before that clear-headed, virtuously-living
old, man of iron nerves. The alternative to flying into a passion, was
the looking like a fool.

"Come, father," he said, with a miserable snigger, like a yokel's smile;
"here I am at last. I don't say, kill the fatted calf, and take a lesson
from Scripture, but give me your hand. I've done no man harm but
myself--damned if I've done a mean thing anywhere! and there's no shame
to you in shaking your son's hand after a long absence."

Jonathan Eccles kept both hands firmly in his pockets.

"Are you drunk?" he repeated.

Robert controlled himself to answer, "I'm not."

"Well, then, just tell me when you were drunk last."

"This is a pleasant fatherly greeting!" Robert interjected.

"You get no good by fighting shy of a simple question, Mr. Bob," said
Jonathan.

Robert cried querulously, "I don't want to fight shy of a simple
question."

"Well, then; when were you drunk last? answer me that."

"Last night."

Jonathan drew his hand from his pocket to thump his leg.

"I'd have sworn it!"

All Robert's assurance had vanished in a minute, and he stood like a
convicted culprit before his father.

"You know, sir, I don't tell lies. I was drunk last night. I couldn't
help it."

"No more could the little boy."

"I was drunk last night. Say, I'm a beast."

"I shan't!" exclaimed Jonathan, making his voice sound as a defence to
this vile charge against the brutish character.

"Say, I'm worse than a beast, then," cried Robert, in exasperation. "Take
my word that it hasn't happened to me to be in that state for a year and
more. Last night I was mad. I can't give you any reasons. I thought I was
cured but I've trouble in my mind, and a tide swims you over the
shallows--so I felt. Come, sir--father, don't make me mad again."

"Where did you get the liquor?" inquired Jonathan.

"I drank at 'The Pilot.'"

"Ha! there's talk there of 'that damned old Eccles' for a month to
come--'the unnatural parent.' How long have you been down here?"

"Eight and twenty hours."

"Eight and twenty hours. When are you going?"

"I want lodging for a night."

"What else?"

"The loan of a horse that'll take a fence."

"Go on."

"And twenty pounds."

"Oh!" said Jonathan. "If farming came as easy to you as face, you'd be a
prime agriculturalist. Just what I thought! What's become of that money
your aunt Jane was fool enough to bequeath to you?"

"I've spent it."

"Are you a Deserter?"

For a moment Robert stood as if listening, and then white grew his face,
and he swayed and struck his hands together. His recent intoxication had
unmanned him.

"Go in--go in," said his father in some concern, though wrath was
predominant.

"Oh, make your mind quiet about me." Robert dropped his arms. "I'm
weakened somehow--damned weak, I am--I feel like a woman when my father
asks me if I've been guilty of villany. Desert? I wouldn't desert from
the hulks. Hear the worst, and this is the worst: I've got no money--I
don't owe a penny, but I haven't got one."

"And I won't give you one," Jonathan appended; and they stood facing one
another in silence.

A squeaky voice was heard from the other side of the garden hedge of
clipped yew.

"Hi! farmer, is that the missing young man?" and presently a neighbour,
by name John Sedgett, came trotting through the gate, and up the garden
path.

"I say," he remarked, "here's a rumpus. Here's a bobbery up at Fairly.
Oh! Bob Eccles! Bob Eccles! At it again!"

Mr. Sedgett shook his wallet of gossip with an enjoying chuckle. He was a
thin-faced creature, rheumy of eye, and drawing his breath as from a
well; the ferret of the village for all underlying scandal and tattle,
whose sole humanity was what he called pitifully 'a peakin' at his chest,
and who had retired from his business of grocer in the village upon the
fortune brought to him in the energy and capacity of a third wife to
conduct affairs, while he wandered up and down and knitted people
together--an estimable office in a land where your house is so grievously
your castle.

"What the devil have you got in you now?" Jonathan cried out to him.

Mr. Sedgett was seized by his complaint and demanded commiseration, but,
recovering, he chuckled again.

"Oh, Bob Eccles! Don't you never grow older? And the first day down among
us again, too. Why, Bob, as a military man, you ought to acknowledge your
superiors. Why, Stephen Bilton, the huntsman, says, Bob, you pulled the
young gentleman off his horse--you on foot, and him mounted. I'd ha'
given pounds to be there. And ladies present! Lord help us! I'm glad
you're returned, though. These melons of the farmer's, they're a
wonderful invention; people are speaking of 'em right and left, and says,
says they, Farmer Eccles, he's best farmer going--Hampshire ought to be
proud of him--he's worth two of any others: that they are fine ones! And
you're come back to keep 'em up, eh, Bob? Are ye, though, my man?"

"Well, here I am, Mr. Sedgett," said Robert, "and talking to my father."

"Oh! I wouldn't be here to interrupt ye for the world." Mr. Sedgett made
a show of retiring, but Jonathan insisted upon his disburdening himself
of his tale, saying: "Damn your raw beginnings, Sedgett! What's been up?
Nobody can hurt me."

"That they can't, neighbour; nor Bob neither, as far as stand up man to
man go. I give him three to one--Bob Eccles! He took 'em when a boy. He
may, you know, he may have the law agin him, and by George! if he
do--why, a man's no match for the law. No use bein' a hero to the law.
The law masters every man alive; and there's law in everything, neighbour
Eccles; eh, sir? Your friend, the Prince, owns to it, as much as you or
me. But, of course, you know what Bob's been doing. What I dropped in to
ask was, why did ye do it, Bob? Why pull the young gentleman off his
horse? I'd ha' given pounds to be there!"

"Pounds o' tallow candles don't amount to much," quoth Robert.

"That's awful bad brandy at 'The Pilot,'" said Mr. Sedgett, venomously.

"Were you drunk when you committed this assault?" Jonathan asked his son.

"I drank afterwards," Robert replied.

"'Pilot' brandy's poor consolation," remarked Mr. Sedgett.

Jonathan had half a mind to turn his son out of the gate, but the
presence of Sedgett advised him that his doings were naked to the world.

"You kicked up a shindy in the hunting-field--what about? Who mounted
ye?"

Robert remarked that he had been on foot.

"On foot--eh? on foot!" Jonathan speculated, unable to realize the image
of his son as a foot-man in the hunting-field, or to comprehend the
insolence of a pedestrian who should dare to attack a mounted huntsman.
"You were on foot? The devil you were on foot! Foot? And caught a man out
of his saddle?"

Jonathan gave up the puzzle. He laid out his fore finger decisively,--

"If it's an assault, mind, you stand damages. My land gives and my land
takes my money, and no drunken dog lives on the produce. A row in the
hunting-field's un-English, I call it."

"So it is, sir," said Robert.

"So it be, neighbour," said Mr. Sedgett.

Whereupon Robert took his arm, and holding the scraggy wretch forward,
commanded him to out with what he knew.

"Oh, I don't know no more than what I've told you." Mr. Sedgett twisted a
feeble remonstrance of his bones, that were chiefly his being, at the
gripe; "except that you got hold the horse by the bridle, and wouldn't
let him go, because the young gentleman wouldn't speak as a gentleman,
and--oh! don't squeeze so hard--"

"Out with it!" cried Robert.

"And you said, Steeve Bilton said, you said, 'Where is she?' you said,
and he swore, and you swore, and a lady rode up, and you pulled, and she
sang out, and off went the gentleman, and Steeve said she said, 'For
shame.'"

"And it was the truest word spoken that day!" Robert released him. "You
don't know much, Mr. Sedgett; but it's enough to make me explain the
cause to my father, and, with your leave, I'll do so."

Mr. Sedgett remarked: "By all means, do;" and rather preferred that his
wits should be accused of want of brightness, than that he should miss a
chance of hearing the rich history of the scandal and its origin.
Something stronger than a hint sent him off at a trot, hugging in his
elbows.

"The postman won't do his business quicker than Sedgett 'll tap this tale
upon every door in the parish," said Jonathan.

"I can only say I'm sorry, for your sake;" Robert was expressing his
contrition, when his father caught him up,--

"Who can hurt me?--my sake? Have I got the habits of a sot?--what you'd
call 'a beast!' but I know the ways o' beasts, and if you did too, you
wouldn't bring them in to bear your beastly sins. Who can hurt
me?--You've been quarrelling with this young gentleman about a woman--did
you damage him?"

"If knuckles could do it, I should have brained him, sir," said Robert.

"You struck him, and you got the best of it?"

"He got the worst of it any way, and will again."

"Then the devil take you for a fool! why did you go and drink I could
understand it if you got licked. Drown your memory, then, if that filthy
soaking's to your taste; but why, when you get the prize, we'll say, you
go off headlong into a manure pond?--There! except that you're a damned
idiot!" Jonathan struck the air, as to observe that it beat him, but for
the foregoing elucidation: thundering afresh, "Why did you go and drink?"

"I went, sir, I went--why did I go?" Robert slapped his hand despairingly
to his forehead. "What on earth did I go for?--because I'm at sea, I
suppose. Nobody cares for me. I'm at sea, and no rudder to steer me. I
suppose that's it. So, I drank. I thought it best to take spirits on
board. No; this was the reason--I remember: that lady, whoever she was,
said something that stung me. I held the fellow under her eyes, and shook
him, though she was begging me to let him off. Says she--but I've drunk
it clean out of my mind."

"There, go in and look at yourself in the glass," said Jonathan.

"Give me your hand first,"--Robert put his own out humbly.

"I'll be hanged if I do," said Jonathan firmly. "Bed and board you shall
have while I'm alive, and a glass to look at yourself in; but my hand's
for decent beasts. Move one way or t' other: take your choice."

Seeing Robert hesitate, he added, "I shall have a damned deal more
respect for you if you toddle." He waved his hand away from the premises.

"I'm sorry you've taken so to swearing of late, sir," said Robert.

"Two flints strike fire, my lad. When you keep distant, I'm quiet enough
in my talk to satisfy your aunt Anne."

"Look here, sir; I want to make use of you, so I'll go in."

"Of course you do," returned Jonathan, not a whit displeased by his son's
bluntness; "what else is a father good for? I let you know the limit, and
that's a brick wall; jump it, if you can. Don't fancy it's your aunt Jane
you're going in to meet."

Robert had never been a favourite with his aunt Anne, who was Jonathan's
housekeeper.

"No, poor old soul! and may God bless her in heaven!" he cried.

"For leaving you what you turned into a thundering lot of liquor to
consume--eh?"

"For doing all in her power to make a man of me; and she was close on
it--kind, good old darling, that she was! She got me with that money of
hers to the best footing I've been on yet--bless her heart, or her
memory, or whatever a poor devil on earth may bless an angel for! But
here I am."

The fever in Robert blazed out under a pressure of extinguishing tears.

"There, go along in," said Jonathan, who considered drunkenness to be the
main source of water in a man's eyes. "It's my belief you've been at it
already this morning."

Robert passed into the house in advance of his father, whom he quite
understood and appreciated. There was plenty of paternal love for him,
and a hearty smack of the hand, and the inheritance of the farm, when he
turned into the right way. Meantime Jonathan was ready to fulfil his
parental responsibility, by sheltering, feeding, and not publicly abusing
his offspring, of whose spirit he would have had a higher opinion if
Robert had preferred, since he must go to the deuce, to go without
troubling any of his relatives; as it was, Jonathan submitted to the
infliction gravely. Neither in speech nor in tone did he solicit from the
severe maiden, known as Aunt Anne, that snub for the wanderer whom he
introduced, which, when two are agreed upon the infamous character of a
third, through whom they are suffering, it is always agreeable to hear.
He said, "Here, Anne; here's Robert. He hasn't breakfasted."

"He likes his cold bath beforehand," said Robert, presenting his cheek to
the fleshless, semi-transparent woman.

Aunt Anne divided her lips to pronounce a crisp, subdued "Ow!" to
Jonathan after inspecting Robert; and she shuddered at sight of Robert,
and said "Ow!" repeatedly, by way of an interjectory token of
comprehension, to all that was uttered; but it was a horrified "No!" when
Robert's cheek pushed nearer.

"Then, see to getting some breakfast for him," said Jonathan. "You're not
anyway bound to kiss a drunken--"

"Dog's the word, sir," Robert helped him. "Dogs can afford it. I never
saw one in that state; so they don't lose character."

He spoke lightly, but dejection was in his attitude. When his aunt Anne
had left the room, he exclaimed,--

"By jingo! women make you feel it, by some way that they have. She's a
religious creature. She smells the devil in me."

"More like, the brandy," his father responded.

"Well! I'm on the road, I'm on the road!" Robert fetched a sigh.

"I didn't make the road," said his father.

"No, sir; you didn't. Work hard: sleep sound that's happiness. I've known
it for a year. You're the man I'd imitate, if I could. The devil came
first the brandy's secondary. I was quiet so long. I thought myself a
safe man."

He sat down and sent his hair distraught with an effort at smoothing it.

"Women brought the devil into the world first. It's women who raise the
devil in us, and why they--"

He thumped the table just as his aunt Anne was preparing to spread the
cloth.

"Don't be frightened, woman," said Jonathan, seeing her start fearfully
back. "You take too many cups of tea, morning and night--hang the stuff!"

"Never, never till now have you abused me, Jonathan," she whimpered,
severely.

"I don't tell you to love him; but wait on him. That's all. And I'll
about my business. Land and beasts--they answer to you."

Robert looked up.

"Land and beasts! They sound like blessed things. When next I go to
church, I shall know what old Adam felt. Go along, sir. I shall break
nothing in the house."

"You won't go, Jonathan?" begged the trembling spinster.

"Give him some of your tea, and strong, and as much of it as he can
take--he wants bringing down," was Jonathan's answer; and casting a
glance at one of the framed letters, he strode through the doorway, and
Aunt Anne was alone with the flushed face and hurried eyes of her nephew,
who was to her little better than a demon in the flesh. But there was a
Bible in the room.

An hour later, Robert was mounted and riding to the meet of hounds.




CHAPTER XVIII

A single night at the Pilot Inn had given life and vigour to Robert's old
reputation in Warbeach village, as the stoutest of drinkers and dear
rascals throughout a sailor-breeding district, where Dibdin was still
thundered in the ale-house, and manhood in a great degree measured by the
capacity to take liquor on board, as a ship takes ballast. There was a
profound affectation of deploring the sad fact that he drank as hard as
ever, among the men, and genuine pity expressed for him by the women of
Warbeach; but his fame was fresh again. As the Spring brings back its
flowers, Robert's presence revived his youthful deeds. There had not been
a boxer in the neighbourhood like Robert Eccles, nor such a champion in
all games, nor, when he set himself to it, such an invincible drinker. It
was he who thrashed the brute, Nic Sedgett, for stabbing with his
clasp-knife Harry Boulby, son of the landlady of the Pilot Inn; thrashed
him publicly, to the comfort of all Warbeach. He had rescued old Dame
Garble from her burning cottage, and made his father house the old
creature, and worked at farming, though he hated it, to pay for her
subsistence. He vindicated the honour of Warbeach by drinking a match
against a Yorkshire skipper till four o'clock in the morning, when it was
a gallant sight, my boys, to see Hampshire steadying the defeated
North-countryman on his astonished zigzag to his flattish-bottomed
billyboy, all in the cheery sunrise on the river--yo-ho! ahoy!

Glorious Robert had tried, first the sea, and then soldiering. Now let us
hope he'll settle to farming, and follow his rare old father's ways, and
be back among his own people for good. So chimed the younger ones, and
many of the elder.

Danish blood had settled round Warbeach. To be a really popular hero
anywhere in Britain, a lad must still, I fear, have something of a
Scandinavian gullet; and if, in addition to his being a powerful drinker,
he is pleasant in his cups, and can sing, and forgive, be freehanded, and
roll out the grand risky phrases of a fired brain, he stamps himself, in
the apprehension of his associates, a king.

Much of the stuff was required to deal King Robert of Warbeach the
capital stroke, and commonly he could hold on till a puff of cold air
from the outer door, like an admonitory messenger, reminded him that he
was, in the greatness of his soul, a king of swine; after which his way
of walking off, without a word to anybody, hoisting his whole stature,
while others were staggering, or roaring foul rhymes, or feeling
consciously mortal in their sensation of feverishness, became a theme for
admiration; ay, and he was fresh as an orchard apple in the morning!
there lay his commandership convincingly. What was proved overnight was
confirmed at dawn.

Mr. Robert had his contrast in Sedgett's son, Nicodemus Sedgett, whose
unlucky Christian name had assisted the wits of Warbeach in bestowing on
him a darkly-luminous relationship. Young Nic loved also to steep his
spirit in the bowl; but, in addition to his never paying for his luxury,
he drank as if in emulation of the colour of his reputed patron, and
neighbourhood to Nic Sedgett was not liked when that young man became
thoughtful over his glass.

The episode of his stabbing the landlady's son Harry clung to him
fatally. The wound was in the thigh, and nothing serious. Harry was up
and off to sea before Nic had ceased to show the marks of Robert's
vengeance upon him; but blood-shedding, even on a small scale, is so
detested by Englishmen, that Nic never got back to his right hue in the
eyes of Warbeach. None felt to him as to a countryman, and it may be
supposed that his face was seen no more in the house of gathering, the
Pilot Inn.

He rented one of the Fairly farms, known as the Three-Tree Farm,
subsisting there, men fancied, by the aid of his housekeeper's money. For
he was of those evil fellows who disconcert all righteous prophecy, and
it was vain for Mrs. Boulby and Warbeach village to declare that no good
could come to him, when Fortune manifestly kept him going.

He possessed the rogue's most serviceable art: in spite of a countenance
that was not attractive, this fellow could, as was proved by evidence,
make himself pleasing to women. "The truth of it is," said Mrs. Boulby,
at a loss for any other explanation, and with a woman's love of sharp
generalization, "it's because my sex is fools."

He had one day no money to pay his rent, and forthwith (using for the
purpose his last five shillings, it was said) advertized for a
housekeeper; and before Warbeach had done chuckling over his folly, an
agreeable woman of about thirty-five was making purchases in his name;
she made tea, and the evening brew for such friends as he could collect,
and apparently paid his rent for him, after a time; the distress was not
in the house three days. It seemed to Warbeach an erratic proceeding on
the part of Providence, that Nic should ever be helped to swim; but our
modern prophets have small patience, and summon Destiny to strike without
a preparation of her weapons or a warning to the victim.

More than Robert's old occasional vice was at the bottom of his
popularity, as I need not say. Let those who generalize upon ethnology
determine whether the ancient opposition of Saxon and Norman be at an
end; but it is certain, to my thinking, that when a hero of the people
can be got from the common popular stock, he is doubly dear. A gentleman,
however gallant and familiar, will hardly ever be as much beloved, until
he dies to inform a legend or a ballad: seeing that death only can remove
the peculiar distinctions and distances which the people feel to exist
between themselves and the gentleman-class, and which, not to credit them
with preternatural discernment, they are carefully taught to feel. Dead
Britons are all Britons, but live Britons are not quite brothers.

It was as the son of a yeoman, showing comprehensible accomplishments,
that Robert took his lead. He was a very brave, a sweet-hearted, and a
handsome young man, and he had very chivalrous views of life, that were
understood by a sufficient number under the influence of ale or brandy,
and by a few in default of that material aid; and they had a family pride
in him. The pride was mixed with fear, which threw over it a tender
light, like a mother's dream of her child. The people, I have said, are
not so lost in self-contempt as to undervalue their best men, but it must
be admitted that they rarely produce young fellows wearing the undeniable
chieftain's stamp, and the rarity of one like Robert lent a hue of
sadness to him in their thoughts.

Fortune, moreover, the favourer of Nic Sedgett, blew foul whichever the
way Robert set his sails. He would not look to his own advantage; and the
belief that man should set his little traps for the liberal hand of his
God, if he wishes to prosper, rather than strive to be merely honourable
in his Maker's eye, is almost as general among poor people as it is with
the moneyed classes, who survey them from their height.

When jolly Butcher Billing, who was one of the limited company which had
sat with Robert at the Pilot last night, reported that he had quitted the
army, he was hearkened to dolefully, and the feeling was universal that
glorious Robert had cut himself off from his pension and his hospital.

But when gossip Sedgett went his rounds, telling that Robert was down
among them again upon the darkest expedition their minds could conceive,
and rode out every morning for the purpose of encountering one of the
gentlemen up at Fairly, and had already pulled him off his horse and laid
him in the mud, calling him scoundrel and challenging him either to yield
his secret or to fight; and that he followed him, and was out after him
publicly, and matched himself against that gentleman, who had all the
other gentlemen, and the earl, and the law to back him, the little place
buzzed with wonder and alarm. Faint hearts declared that Robert was now
done for. All felt that he had gone miles beyond the mark. Those were the
misty days when fogs rolled up the salt river from the winter sea, and
the sun lived but an hour in the clotted sky, extinguished near the noon.

Robert was seen riding out, and the tramp of his horse was heard as he
returned homeward. He called no more at the Pilot. Darkness and mystery
enveloped him. There were nightly meetings under Mrs. Boulby's roof, in
the belief that he could not withstand her temptations; nor did she
imprudently discourage them; but the woman at last overcame the landlady
within her, and she wailed: "He won't come because of the drink. Oh! why
was I made to sell liquor, which he says sends him to the devil, poor
blessed boy? and I can't help begging him to take one little drop. I did,
the first night he was down, forgetting his ways; he looked so desperate,
he did, and it went on and went on, till he was primed, and me proud to
see him get out of his misery. And now he hates the thought of me."

In her despair she encouraged Sedgett to visit her bar and parlour, and
he became everywhere a most important man.

Farmer Eccles's habits of seclusion (his pride, some said), and more
especially the dreaded austere Aunt Anne, who ruled that household, kept
people distant from the Warbeach farm-house, all excepting Sedgett, who
related that every night on his return, she read a chapter from the Bible
to Robert, sitting up for him patiently to fulfil her duty; and that the
farmer's words to his son had been: "Rest here; eat and drink, and ride
my horse; but not a penny of my money do you have."

By the help of Steeve Bilton, the Fairly huntsman, Sedgett was enabled to
relate that there was a combination of the gentlemen against Robert,
whose behaviour none could absolutely approve, save the landlady and
jolly Butcher Billing, who stuck to him with a hearty blind faith.

"Did he ever," asked the latter, "did Bob Eccles ever conduct himself
disrespectful to his superiors? Wasn't he always found out at his wildest
for to be right--to a sensible man's way of thinking?--though not, I
grant ye, to his own interests--there's another tale." And Mr. Billing's
staunch adherence to the hero of the village was cried out to his credit
when Sedgett stated, on Stephen Bilton's authority, that Robert's errand
was the defence of a girl who had been wronged, and whose whereabout,
that she might be restored to her parents, was all he wanted to know.
This story passed from mouth to mouth, receiving much ornament in the
passage. The girl in question became a lady; for it is required of a mere
common girl that she should display remarkable character before she can
be accepted as the fitting companion of a popular hero. She became a
young lady of fortune, in love with Robert, and concealed by the artifice
of the offending gentleman whom Robert had challenged. Sedgett told this
for truth, being instigated to boldness of invention by pertinacious
inquiries, and the dignified sense which the whole story hung upon him.

Mrs. Boulby, who, as a towering woman, despised Sedgett's weak frame, had
been willing to listen till she perceived him to be but a man of fiction,
and then she gave him a flat contradiction, having no esteem for his
custom.

"Eh! but, Missis, I can tell you his name--the gentleman's name," said
Sedgett, placably. "He's a Mr. Algernon Blancove, and a cousin by
marriage, or something, of Mrs. Lovell."

"I reckon you're right about that, goodman," replied Mrs. Boulby, with
intuitive discernment of the true from the false, mingled with a desire
to show that she was under no obligation for the news. "All t' other's a
tale of your own, and you know it, and no more true than your rigmaroles
about my brandy, which is French; it is, as sure as my blood's British."

"Oh! Missis," quoth Sedgett, maliciously, "as to tales, you've got
witnesses enough it crassed chann'l. Aha! Don't bring 'em into the box.
Don't you bring 'em into ne'er a box."

"You mean to say, Mr. Sedgett, they won't swear?"

"No, Missis; they'll swear, fast and safe, if you teach 'em. Dashed if
they won't run the Pilot on a rock with their swearin'. It ain't a good
habit."

"Well, Mr. Sedgett, the next time you drink my brandy and find the
consequences bad, you let me hear of it."

"And what'll you do, Missis, may be?"

Listeners were by, and Mrs. Boulby cruelly retorted; "I won't send you
home to your wife;" which created a roar against this hen-pecked man.

"As to consequences, Missis, it's for your sake I'm looking at them,"
Sedgett said, when he had recovered from the blow.

"You say that to the Excise, Mr. Sedgett; it, belike, 'll make 'em
sorry."

"Brandy's your weak point, it appears, Missis."

"A little in you would stiffen your back, Mr. Sedgett."

"Poor Bob Eccles didn't want no stiffening when he come down first,"
Sedgett interjected.

At which, flushing enraged, Mrs. Boulby cried: "Mention him, indeed! And
him and you, and that son of your'n--the shame of your cheeks if people
say he's like his father. Is it your son, Nic Sedgett, thinks to inform
against me, as once he swore to, and to get his wage that he may step out
of a second bankruptcy? and he a farmer! You let him know that he isn't
feared by me, Sedgett, and there's one here to give him a second dose,
without waiting for him to use clasp-knives on harmless innocents."

"Pacify yourself, ma'am, pacify yourself," remarked Sedgett, hardened
against words abroad by his endurance of blows at home. "Bob Eccles, he's
got his hands full, and he, maybe, 'll reach the hulks before my Nic do,
yet. And how 'm I answerable for Nic, I ask you?"

"More luck to you not to be, I say; and either, Sedgett, you does woman's
work, gossipin' about like a cracked bell-clapper, or men's the biggest
gossips of all, which I believe; for there's no beating you at your work,
and one can't wish ill to you, knowing what you catch."

"In a friendly way, Missis,"--Sedgett fixed on the compliment to his
power of propagating news--"in a friendly way. You can't accuse me of
leavin' out the 'l' in your name, now, can you? I make that
observation,"--the venomous tattler screwed himself up to the widow
insinuatingly, as if her understanding could only be seized at close
quarters, "I make that observation, because poor Dick Boulby, your
lamented husband--eh! poor Dick! You see, Missis, it ain't the tough ones
last longest: he'd sing, 'I'm a Sea Booby,' to the song, 'I'm a green
Mermaid:' poor Dick! 'a-shinin' upon the sea-deeps.' He kept the liquor
from his head, but didn't mean it to stop down in his leg."

"Have you done, Mr. Sedgett?" said the widow, blandly.

"You ain't angry, Missis?"

"Not a bit, Mr. Sedgett; and if I knock you over with the flat o' my
hand, don't you think so."

Sedgett threw up the wizened skin of his forehead, and retreated from the
bar. At a safe distance, he called: "Bad news that about Bob Eccles
swallowing a blow yesterday!"

Mrs. Boulby faced him complacently till he retired, and then observed to
those of his sex surrounding her, "Don't 'woman-and-dog-and-walnut-tree'
me! Some of you men 'd be the better for a drubbing every day of your
lives. Sedgett yond' 'd be as big a villain as his son, only for what he
gets at home."

That was her way of replying to the Parthian arrow; but the barb was
poisoned. The village was at fever heat concerning Robert, and this
assertion that he had swallowed a blow, produced almost as great a
consternation as if a fleet of the enemy had been reported off Sandy
Point.

Mrs. Boulby went into her parlour and wrote a letter to Robert, which she
despatched by one of the loungers about the bar, who brought back news
that three of the gentlemen of Fairly were on horseback, talking to
Farmer Eccles at his garden gate. Affairs were waxing hot. The gentlemen
had only to threaten Farmer Eccles, to make him side with his son, right
or wrong. In the evening, Stephen Bilton, the huntsman, presented himself
at the door of the long parlour of the Pilot, and loud cheers were his
greeting from a full company.

"Gentlemen all," said Stephen, with dapper modesty; and acted as if no
excitement were current, and he had nothing to tell.

"Well, Steeve?" said one, to encourage him.

"How about Bob, to-day?" said another.

Before Stephen had spoken, it was clear to the apprehension of the whole
room that he did not share the popular view of Robert. He declined to
understand who was meant by "Bob." He played the questions off; and then
shrugged, with, "Oh, let's have a quiet evening."

It ended in his saying, "About Bob Eccles? There, that's summed up pretty
quick--he's mad."

"Mad!" shouted Warbeach.

"That's a lie," said Mrs. Boulby, from the doorway.

"Well, mum, I let a lady have her own opinion." Stephen nodded to her.
"There ain't a doubt as t' what the doctors 'd bring him in I ain't
speaking my ideas alone. It's written like the capital letters in a
newspaper. Lunatic's the word! And I'll take a glass of something warm,
Mrs. Boulby. We had a stiff run to-day."

"Where did ye kill, Steeve?" asked a dispirited voice.

"We didn't kill at all: he was one of those 'longshore dog-foxes,' and got
away home on the cliff." Stephen thumped his knee. "It's my belief the
smell o' sea gives 'em extra cunning."

"The beggar seems to have put ye out rether--eh, Steeve?"

So it was generally presumed: and yet the charge of madness was very
staggering; madness being, in the first place, indefensible, and
everybody's enemy when at large; and Robert's behaviour looked extremely
like it. It had already been as a black shadow haunting enthusiastic
minds in the village, and there fell a short silence, during which
Stephen made his preparations for filling and lighting a pipe.

"Come; how do you make out he's mad?"

Jolly Butcher Billing spoke; but with none of the irony of confidence.

"Oh!" Stephen merely clapped both elbows against his sides.

Several pairs of eyes were studying him. He glanced over them in turn,
and commenced leisurely the puff contemplative.

"Don't happen to have a grudge of e'er a kind against old Bob, Steeve?"

"Not I!"

Mrs. Boulby herself brought his glass to Stephen, and, retreating, left
the parlour-door open.

"What causes you for to think him mad, Steeve?"

A second "Oh!" as from the heights dominating argument, sounded from
Stephen's throat, half like a grunt. This time he condescended to add,--

"How do you know when a dog's gone mad? Well, Robert Eccles, he's gone in
like manner. If you don't judge a man by his actions, you've got no means
of reckoning. He comes and attacks gentlemen, and swears he'll go on
doing it."

"Well, and what does that prove?" said jolly Butcher Billing.

Mr. William Moody, boatbuilder, a liver-complexioned citizen, undertook
to reply.

"What does that prove? What does that prove when the midshipmite was
found with his head in the mixedpickle jar? It proved that his head was
lean, and t' other part was rounder."

The illustration appeared forcible, but not direct, and nothing more was
understood from it than that Moody, and two or three others who had been
struck by the image of the infatuated young naval officer, were going
over to the enemy. The stamp of madness upon Robert's acts certainly
saved perplexity, and was the easiest side of the argument. By this time
Stephen had finished his glass, and the effect was seen.

"Hang it!" he exclaimed, "I don't agree he deserves shooting. And he may
have had harm done to him. In that case, let him fight. And I say, too,
let the gentleman give him satisfaction."

"Hear! hear!" cried several.

"And if the gentleman refuse to give him satisfaction in a fair stand-up
fight, I say he ain't a gentleman, and deserves to be treated as such. My
objection's personal. I don't like any man who spoils sport, and ne'er a
rascally vulpeci' spoils sport as he do, since he's been down in our
parts again. I'll take another brimmer, Mrs. Boulby."

"To be sure you will, Stephen," said Mrs. Boulby, bending as in a curtsey
to the glass; and so soft with him that foolish fellows thought her cowed
by the accusation thrown at her favourite.

"There's two questions about they valpecies, Master Stephen," said Farmer
Wainsby, a farmer with a grievance, fixing his elbow on his knee for
serious utterance. "There's to ask, and t' ask again. Sport, I grant ye.
All in doo season. But," he performed a circle with his pipe stem, and
darted it as from the centre thereof toward Stephen's breast, with the
poser, "do we s'pport thieves at public expense for them to keep
thievin'--black, white, or brown--no matter, eh? Well, then, if the
public wunt bear it, dang me if I can see why individles shud bear it. It
ent no manner o' reason, net as I can see; let gentlemen have their
opinion, or let 'em not. Foxes be hanged!"

Much slow winking was interchanged. In a general sense, Farmer Wainsby's
remarks were held to be un-English, though he was pardoned for them as
one having peculiar interests at stake.

"Ay, ay! we know all about that," said Stephen, taking succour from the
eyes surrounding him.

"And so, may be, do we," said Wainsby.

"Fox-hunting 'll go on when your great-grandfather's your youngest son,
farmer; or t' other way."

"I reckon it'll be a stuffed fox your chil'ern 'll hunt, Mr. Steeve; more
straw in 'em than bow'ls."

"If the country," Stephen thumped the table, "were what you'd make of it,
hang me if my name 'd long be Englishman!"

"Hear, hear, Steeve!" was shouted in support of the Conservative
principle enunciated by him.

"What I say is, flesh and blood afore foxes!"

Thus did Farmer Wainsby likewise attempt a rallying-cry; but Stephen's
retort, "Ain't foxes flesh and blood?" convicted him of clumsiness, and,
buoyed on the uproar of cheers, Stephen pursued, "They are; to kill 'em
in cold blood's beast-murder, so it is. What do we do? We give 'em a fair
field--a fair field and no favour! We let 'em trust to the instincts
Nature, she's given 'em; and don't the old woman know best? If they cap,
get away, they win the day. All's open, and honest, and aboveboard. Kill
your rats and kill your rabbits, but leave foxes to your betters. Foxes
are gentlemen. You don't understand? Be hanged if they ain't! I like the
old fox, and I don't like to see him murdered and exterminated, but die
the death of a gentleman, at the hands of gentlemen--"

"And ladies," sneered the farmer.

All the room was with Stephen, and would have backed him uproariously,
had he not reached his sounding period without knowing it, and thus
allowed his opponent to slip in that abominable addition.

"Ay, and ladies," cried the huntsman, keen at recovery. "Why shouldn't
they? I hate a field without a woman in it; don't you? and you? and you?
And you, too, Mrs. Boulby? There you are, and the room looks better for
you--don't it, lads? Hurrah!"

The cheering was now aroused, and Stephen had his glass filled again in
triumph, while the farmer meditated thickly over the ruin of his argument
from that fatal effort at fortifying it by throwing a hint to the
discredit of the sex, as many another man has meditated before.

"Eh! poor old Bob!" Stephen sighed and sipped. "I can cry that with any
of you. It's worse for me to see than for you to hear of him. Wasn't I
always a friend of his, and said he was worthy to be a gentleman, many a
time? He's got the manners of a gentleman now; offs with his hat, if
there's a lady present, and such a neat way of speaking. But there,
acting's the thing, and his behaviour's beastly bad! You can't call it no
other. There's two Mr. Blancoves up at Fairly, relations of Mrs.
Lovell's--whom I'll take the liberty of calling My Beauty, and no offence
meant: and it's before her that Bob only yesterday rode up--one of the
gentlemen being Mr. Algernon, free of hand and a good seat in the saddle,
t' other's Mr. Edward; but Mr. Algernon, he's Robert Eccles's man--up
rides Bob, just as we was tying Mr. Reenard's brush to the pommel of the
lady's saddle, down in Ditley Marsh; and he bows to the lady. Says
he--but he's mad, stark mad!"

Stephen resumed his pipe amid a din of disappointment that made the walls
ring and the glasses leap.

"A little more sugar, Stephen?" said Mrs. Boulby, moving in lightly from
the doorway.

"Thank ye, mum; you're the best hostess that ever breathed."

"So she be; but how about Bob?" cried her guests--some asking whether he
carried a pistol or flourished a stick.

"Ne'er a blessed twig, to save his soul; and there's the madness written
on him;" Stephen roared as loud as any of them. "And me to see him riding
in the ring there, and knowing what the gentleman had sworn to do if he
came across the hunt; and feeling that he was in the wrong! I haven't got
a oath to swear how mad I was. Fancy yourselves in my place. I love old
Bob. I've drunk with him; I owe him obligations from since I was a boy
up'ard; I don't know a better than Bob in all England. And there he was:
and says to Mr. Algernon, 'You know what I'm come for.' I never did
behold a gentleman so pale--shot all over his cheeks as he was, and
pinkish under the eyes; if you've ever noticed a chap laid hands on by
detectives in plain clothes. Smack at Bob went Mr. Edward's whip."

"Mr. Algernon's," Stephen was corrected.

"Mr. Edward's, I tell ye--the cousin. And right across the face. My Lord!
it made my blood tingle."

A sound like the swish of a whip expressed the sentiments of that
assemblage at the Pilot.

"Bob swallowed it?"

"What else could he do, the fool? He had nothing to help him but his
hand. Says he, 'That's a poor way of trying to stop me. My business is
with this gentleman;' and Bob set his horse at Mr. Algernon, and Mrs.
Lovell rode across him with her hand raised; and just at that moment up
jogged the old gentleman, Squire Blancove, of Wrexby: and Robert Eccles
says to him, 'You might have saved your son something by keeping your
word.' It appears according to Bob, that the squire had promised to see
his son, and settle matters. All Mrs. Lovell could do was hardly enough
to hold back Mr. Edward from laying out at Bob. He was like a white
devil, and speaking calm and polite all the time. Says Bob, 'I'm willing
to take one when I've done with the other;' and the squire began talking
to his son, Mrs. Lovell to Mr. Edward, and the rest of the gentlemen all
round poor dear old Bob, rather bullying--like for my blood; till Bob
couldn't help being nettled, and cried out, 'Gentlemen, I hold him in my
power, and I'm silent so long as there's a chance of my getting him to
behave like a man with human feelings.' If they'd gone at him then, I
don't think I could have let him stand alone: an opinion's one thing, but
blood's another, and I'm distantly related to Bob; and a man who's always
thinking of the value of his place, he ain't worth it. But Mrs. Lovell,
she settled the case--a lady, Farmer Wainsby, with your leave. There's
the good of having a lady present on the field. That's due to a lady!"

"Happen she was at the bottom of it," the farmer returned Stephen's nod
grumpily.

"How did it end, Stephen, my lad?" said Butcher Billing, indicating a
"never mind him."

"It ended, my boy, it ended like my glass here--hot and strong stuff,
with sugar at the bottom. And I don't see this, so glad as I saw that, my
word of honour on it! Boys all!" Stephen drank the dregs.

Mrs. Boulby was still in attendance. The talk over the circumstances was
sweeter than the bare facts, and the replenished glass enabled Stephen to
add the picturesque bits of the affray, unspurred by a surrounding
eagerness of his listeners--too exciting for imaginative effort. In
particular, he dwelt on Robert's dropping the reins and riding with his
heels at Algernon, when Mrs. Lovell put her horse in his way, and the
pair of horses rose like waves at sea, and both riders showed their
horsemanship, and Robert an adroit courtesy, for which the lady thanked
him with a bow of her head.

"I got among the hounds, pretending to pacify them, and call 'em
together," said Stephen, "and I heard her say--just before all was over,
and he turned off--I heard her say: 'Trust this to me: I will meet you.'
I'll swear to them exact words, though there was more, and a 'where' in
the bargain, and that I didn't hear. Aha! by George! thinks I, old Bob,
you're a lucky beggar, and be hanged if I wouldn't go mad too for a
minute or so of short, sweet, private talk with a lovely young widow lady
as ever the sun did shine upon so boldly--oho!

     You've seen a yacht upon the sea,
     She dances and she dances, O!
     As fair is my wild maid to me...

Something about 'prances, O!' on her horse, you know, or you're a hem'd
fool if you don't. I never could sing; wish I could! It's the joy of
life! It's utterance! Hey for harmony!"

"Eh! brayvo! now you're a man, Steeve! and welcomer and welcomest;
yi--yi, O!" jolly Butcher Billing sang out sharp. "Life wants watering.
Here's a health to Robert Eccles, wheresoever and whatsoever! and ne'er a
man shall say of me I didn't stick by a friend like Bob. Cheers, my
lads!"

Robert's health was drunk in a thunder, and praises of the purity of the
brandy followed the grand roar. Mrs. Boulby received her compliments on
that head.

"'Pends upon the tide, Missis, don't it?" one remarked with a grin broad
enough to make the slyness written on it easy reading.

"Ah! first a flow and then a ebb," said another.

     "It's many a keg I plant i' the mud,
     Coastguardsman, come! and I'll have your blood!"

Instigation cried, "Cut along;" but the defiant smuggler was deficient in
memory, and like Steeve Bilton, was reduced to scatter his concluding
rhymes in prose, as "something about;" whereat jolly Butcher Billing, a
reader of song-books from a literary delight in their contents, scraped
his head, and then, as if he had touched a spring, carolled,--

     "In spite of all you Gov'ment pack,
     I'll land my kegs of the good Cognyac"--

"though," he took occasion to observe when the chorus and a sort of
cracker of irrelevant rhymes had ceased to explode; "I'm for none of them
games. Honesty!--there's the sugar o' my grog."

"Ay, but you like to be cock-sure of the stuff you drink, if e'er a man
did," said the boatbuilder, whose eye blazed yellow in this frothing
season of song and fun.

"Right so, Will Moody!" returned the jolly butcher: "which means--not
wrong this time!"

"Then, what's understood by your sticking prongs into your hostess here
concerning of her brandy? Here it is--which is enough, except for
discontented fellows."

"Eh, Missus?" the jolly butcher appealed to her, and pointed at Moody's
complexion for proof.

It was quite a fiction that kegs of the good cognac were sown at low
water, and reaped at high, near the river-gate of the old Pilot Inn
garden; but it was greatly to Mrs. Boulby's interest to encourage the
delusion which imaged her brandy thus arising straight from the very
source, without villanous contact with excisemen and corrupting dealers;
and as, perhaps, in her husband's time, the thing had happened, and still
did, at rare intervals, she complacently gathered the profitable fame of
her brandy being the best in the district.

"I'm sure I hope you're satisfied, Mr. Billing," she said.

The jolly butcher asked whether Will Moody was satisfied, and Mr. William
Moody declaring himself thoroughly satisfied, "then I'm satisfied too!"
said the jolly butcher; upon which the boatbuilder heightened the laugh
by saying he was not satisfied at all; and to escape from the execrations
of the majority, pleaded that it was because his glass was empty: thus
making his peace with them. Every glass in the room was filled again.

The young fellows now loosened tongue; and Dick Curtis, the promising
cricketer of Hampshire, cried, "Mr. Moody, my hearty! that's your fourth
glass, so don't quarrel with me, now!"

"You!" Moody fired up in a bilious frenzy, and called him a this and that
and t' other young vagabond; for which the company, feeling the ominous
truth contained in Dick Curtis's remark more than its impertinence, fined
Mr. Moody in a song. He gave the--

     "So many young Captains have walked o'er my pate,
     It's no wonder you see me quite bald, sir,"

with emphatic bitterness, and the company thanked him. Seeing him stand
up as to depart, however, a storm of contempt was hurled at him; some
said he was like old Sedgett, and was afraid of his wife; and some, that
he was like Nic Sedgett, and drank blue.

     "You're a bag of blue devils, oh dear! oh dear!"

sang Dick to the tune of "The Campbells are coming."

"I ask e'er a man present," Mr. Moody put out his fist, "is that to be
borne? Didn't you," he addressed Dick Curtis,--"didn't you sing into my
chorus--"

     'It's no wonder to hear how you squall'd, sir?'

"You did!"

"Don't he,"--Dick addressed the company, "make Mrs. Boulby's brandy look
ashamed of itself in his face? I ask e'er a gentleman present."

Accusation and retort were interchanged, in the course of which, Dick
called Mr. Moody Nic Sedgett's friend; and a sort of criminal inquiry was
held. It was proved that Moody had been seen with Nic Sedgett; and then
three or four began to say that Nic Sedgett was thick with some of the
gentlemen up at Fairly;--just like his luck! Stephen let it be known that
he could confirm this fact; he having seen Mr. Algernon Blancove stop Nic
on the road and talk to him.

"In that case," said Butcher Billing, "there's mischief in a state of
fermentation. Did ever anybody see Nic and the devil together?"

"I saw Nic and Mr. Moody together," said Dick Curtis. "Well, I'm only
stating a fact," he exclaimed, as Moody rose, apparently to commence an
engagement, for which the company quietly prepared, by putting chairs out
of his way: but the recreant took his advantage from the error, and got
away to the door, pursued.

"Here's an example of what we lose in having no President," sighed the
jolly butcher. "There never was a man built for the chair like Bob Eccles
I say! Our evening's broke up, and I, for one, 'd ha' made it morning.
Hark, outside; By Gearge! they're snowballing."

An adjournment to the front door brought them in view of a white and
silent earth under keen stars, and Dick Curtis and the bilious
boatbuilder, foot to foot, snowball in hand. A bout of the smart exercise
made Mr. Moody laugh again, and all parted merrily, delivering final
shots as they went their several ways.

"Thanks be to heaven for snowing," said Mrs. Boulby; "or when I should
have got to my bed, Goodness only can tell!" With which, she closed the
door upon the empty inn.




CHAPTER XIX

The night was warm with the new-fallen snow, though the stars sparkled
coldly. A fleet of South-westerly rainclouds had been met in mid-sky by a
sharp puff from due North, and the moisture had descended like a woven
shroud, covering all the land, the house-tops, and the trees.

Young Harry Boulby was at sea, and this still weather was just what a
mother's heart wished for him. The widow looked through her bed-room
window and listened, as if the absolute stillness must beget a sudden
cry. The thought of her boy made her heart revert to Robert. She was
thinking of Robert when the muffled sound of a horse at speed caused her
to look up the street, and she saw one coming--a horse without a rider.
The next minute he was out of sight.

Mrs. Boulby stood terrified. The silence of the night hanging everywhere
seemed to call on her for proof that she had beheld a real earthly
spectacle, and the dead thump of the hooves on the snow-floor in passing
struck a chill through her as being phantom-like. But she had seen a
saddle on the horse, and the stirrups flying, and the horse looked
affrighted. The scene was too earthly in its suggestion of a tale of
blood. What if the horse were Robert's? She tried to laugh at her womanly
fearfulness, and had almost to suppress a scream in doing so. There was
no help for it but to believe her brandy as good and efficacious as her
guests did, so she went downstairs and took a fortifying draught; after
which her blood travelled faster, and the event galloped swiftly into the
recesses of time, and she slept.

While the morning was still black, and the streets without a sign of
life, she was aroused by a dream of some one knocking at her grave-stone.
"Ah, that brandy!" she sighed. "This is what a poor woman has to pay for
custom!" Which we may interpret as the remorseful morning confession of a
guilt she had been the victim of over night. She knew that good brandy
did not give bad dreams, and was self-convicted. Strange were her
sensations when the knocking continued; and presently she heard a voice
in the naked street below call in a moan, "Mother!"

"My darling!" she answered, divided in her guess at its being Harry or
Robert.

A glance from the open window showed Robert leaning in the quaint old
porch, with his head bound by a handkerchief; but he had no strength to
reply to a question at that distance, and when she let him in he made two
steps and dropped forward on the floor.

Lying there, he plucked at her skirts. She was shouting for help, but
with her ready apprehension of the pride in his character, she knew what
was meant by his broken whisper before she put her ear to his lips, and
she was silent, miserable sight as was his feeble efforts to rise on an
elbow that would not straighten.

His head was streaming with blood, and the stain was on his neck and
chest. He had one helpless arm; his clothes were torn as from a fierce
struggle.

"I'm quite sensible," he kept repeating, lest she should relapse into
screams.

"Lord love you for your spirit!" exclaimed the widow, and there they
remained, he like a winged eagle, striving to raise himself from time to
time, and fighting with his desperate weakness. His face was to the
ground; after a while he was still. In alarm the widow stooped over him:
she feared that he had given up his last breath; but the candle-light
showed him shaken by a sob, as it seemed to her, though she could scarce
believe it of this manly fellow. Yet it proved true; she saw the very
tears. He was crying at his helplessness.

"Oh, my darling boy!" she burst out; "what have they done to ye? the
cowards they are! but do now have pity on a woman, and let me get some
creature to lift you to a bed, dear. And don't flap at me with your hand
like a bird that's shot. You're quite, quite sensible, I know; quite
sensible, dear; but for my sake, Robert, my Harry's good friend, only for
my sake, let yourself be a carried to a clean, nice bed, till I get Dr.
Bean to you. Do, do."

Her entreaties brought on a succession of the efforts to rise, and at
last, getting round on his back, and being assisted by the widow, he sat
up against the wall. The change of posture stupified him with a
dizziness. He tried to utter the old phrase, that he was sensible, but
his hand beat at his forehead before the words could be shaped.

"What pride is when it's a man!" the widow thought, as he recommenced the
grievous struggle to rise on his feet; now feeling them up to the knee
with a questioning hand, and pausing as if in a reflective wonder, and
then planting them for a spring that failed wretchedly; groaning and
leaning backward, lost in a fit of despair, and again beginning, patient
as an insect imprisoned in a circle.

The widow bore with his man's pride, until her nerves became afflicted by
the character of his movements, which, as her sensations conceived them,
were like those of a dry door jarring loose. She caught him in her arms:
"It's let my back break, but you shan't fret to death there, under my
eyes, proud or humble, poor dear," she said, and with a great pull she
got him upright. He fell across her shoulder with so stiff a groan that
for a moment she thought she had done him mortal injury.

"Good old mother," he said boyishly, to reassure her.

"Yes; and you'll behave to me like a son," she coaxed him.

They talked as by slow degrees the stairs were ascended.

"A crack o' the head, mother--a crack o' the head," said he.

"Was it the horse, my dear?"

"A crack o' the head, mother."

"What have they done to my boy Robert?"

"They've,"--he swung about humorously, weak as he was and throbbing with
pain--"they've let out some of your brandy, mother...got into my head."

"Who've done it, my dear?"

"They've done it, mother."

"Oh, take care o' that nail at your foot; and oh, that beam to your poor
poll--poor soul! he's been and hurt himself again. And did they do it to
him? and what was it for?" she resumed in soft cajolery.

"They did it, because--"

"Yes, my dear; the reason for it?"

"Because, mother, they had a turn that way."

"Thanks be to Above for leaving your cunning in you, my dear," said the
baffled woman, with sincere admiration. "And Lord be thanked, if you're
not hurt bad, that they haven't spoilt his handsome face," she added.

In the bedroom, he let her partially undress him, refusing all doctor's
aid, and commanding her to make no noise about him and then he lay down
and shut his eyes, for the pain was terrible--galloped him and threw him
with a shock--and galloped him and threw him again, whenever his thoughts
got free for a moment from the dizzy aching.

"My dear," she whispered, "I'm going to get a little brandy."

She hastened away upon this mission.

He was in the same posture when she returned with bottle and glass.

She poured out some, and made much of it as a specific, and of the great
things brandy would do; but he motioned his hand from it feebly, till she
reproached him tenderly as perverse and unkind.

"Now, my dearest boy, for my sake--only for my sake. Will you? Yes, you
will, my Robert!"

"No brandy, mother."

"Only one small thimbleful?"

"No more brandy for me!"

"See, dear, how seriously you take it, and all because you want the
comfort."

"No brandy," was all he could say.

She looked at the label on the bottle. Alas! she knew whence it came, and
what its quality. She could cheat herself about it when herself only was
concerned--but she wavered at the thought of forcing it upon Robert as
trusty medicine, though it had a pleasant taste, and was really, as she
conceived, good enough for customers.

She tried him faintly with arguments in its favour; but his resolution
was manifested by a deaf ear.

With a perfect faith in it she would, and she was conscious that she
could, have raised his head and poured it down his throat. The crucial
test of her love for Robert forbade the attempt. She burst into an
uncontrollable fit of crying.

"Halloa! mother," said Robert, opening his eyes to the sad candlelight
surrounding them.

"My darling boy! whom I do love so; and not to be able to help you! What
shall I do--what shall I do!"

With a start, he cried, "Where's the horse!"

"The horse?"

"The old dad 'll be asking for the horse to-morrow."

"I saw a horse, my dear, afore I turned to my prayers at my bedside,
coming down the street without his rider. He came like a rumble of
deafness in my ears. Oh, my boy, I thought, Is it Robert's
horse?--knowing you've got enemies, as there's no brave man has not got
'em--which is our only hope in the God of heaven!"

"Mother, punch my ribs."

He stretched himself flat for the operation, and shut his mouth.

"Hard, mother!--and quick!--I can't hold out long."

"Oh! Robert," moaned the petrified woman "strike you?"

"Straight in the ribs. Shut your fist and do it--quick."

My dear!--my boy!--I haven't the heart to do it!"

"Ah!" Robert's chest dropped in; but tightening his muscles again, he
said, "now do it--do it!"

"Oh! a poke at a poor fire puts it out, dear. And make a murderess of me,
you call mother! Oh! as I love the name, I'll obey you, Robert.
But!--there!"

"Harder, mother."

"There!--goodness forgive me!"

"Hard as you can--all's right."

"There!--and there!--oh!--mercy!"

"Press in at my stomach."

She nerved herself to do his bidding, and, following his orders, took his
head in her hands, and felt about it. The anguish of the touch wrung a
stifled scream from him, at which she screamed responsive. He laughed,
while twisting with the pain.

"You cruel boy, to laugh at your mother," she said, delighted by the
sound of safety in that sweet human laughter. "Hey! don't ye shake your
brain; it ought to lie quiet. And here's the spot of the wicked blow--and
him in love--as I know he is! What would she say if she saw him now? But
an old woman's the best nurse--ne'er a doubt of it."

She felt him heavy on her arm, and knew that he had fainted. Quelling her
first impulse to scream, she dropped him gently on the pillow, and rapped
to rouse up her maid.

The two soon produced a fire and hot water, bandages, vinegar in a basin,
and every crude appliance that could be thought of, the maid followed her
mistress's directions with a consoling awe, for Mrs. Boulby had told her
no more than that a man was hurt.

"I do hope, if it's anybody, it's that ther' Moody," said the maid.

"A pretty sort of a Christian you think yourself, I dare say," Mrs.
Boulby replied.

"Christian or not, one can't help longin' for a choice, mum. We ain't all
hands and knees."

"Better for you if you was," said the widow. "It's tongues, you're to
remember, you're not to be. Now come you up after me--and you'll not
utter a word. You'll stand behind the door to do what I tell you. You're
a soldier's daughter, Susan, and haven't a claim to be excitable."

"My mother was given to faints," Susan protested on behalf of her
possible weakness.

"You may peep." Thus Mrs. Boulby tossed a sop to her frail woman's
nature.

But for her having been appeased by the sagacious accordance of this
privilege, the maid would never have endured to hear Robert's voice in
agony, and to think that it was really Robert, the beloved of Warbeach,
who had come to harm. Her apprehensions not being so lively as her
mistress's, by reason of her love being smaller, she was more terrified
than comforted by Robert's jokes during the process of washing off the
blood, cutting the hair from the wound, bandaging and binding up the
head.

His levity seemed ghastly; and his refusal upon any persuasion to see a
doctor quite heathenish, and a sign of one foredoomed.

She believed that his arm was broken, and smarted with wrath at her
mistress for so easily taking his word to the contrary. More than all,
his abjuration of brandy now when it would do him good to take it, struck
her as an instance of that masculine insanity in the comprehension of
which all women must learn to fortify themselves. There was much
whispering in the room, inarticulate to her, before Mrs. Boulby came out;
enjoining a rigorous silence, and stating that the patient would drink
nothing but tea.

"He begged," she said half to herself, "to have the window blinds up in
the morning, if the sun wasn't strong, for him to look on our river
opening down to the ships."

"That looks as if he meant to live," Susan remarked.

"He!" cried the widow, "it's Robert Eccles. He'd stand on his last inch."

"Would he, now!" ejaculated Susan, marvelling at him, with no question as
to what footing that might be.

"Leastways," the widow hastened to add, "if he thought it was only devils
against him. I've heard him say, 'It's a fool that holds out against God,
and a coward as gives in to the devil;' and there's my Robert painted by
his own hand."

"But don't that bring him to this so often, Mum?" Susan ruefully
inquired, joining teapot and kettle.

"I do believe he's protected," said the widow.

With the first morning light Mrs. Boulby was down at Warbeach Farm, and
being directed to Farmer Eccles in the stables, she found the sturdy
yeoman himself engaged in grooming Robert's horse.

"Well, Missis," he said, nodding to her; "you win, you see. I thought you
would; I'd have sworn you would. Brandy's stronger than blood, with some
of our young fellows."

"If you please, Mr. Eccles," she replied, "Robert's sending of me was to
know if the horse was unhurt and safe."

"Won't his legs carry him yet, Missis?"

"His legs have been graciously spared, Mr. Eccles; it's his head."

"That's where the liquor flies, I'm told."

"Pray, Mr. Eccles, believe me when I declare he hasn't touched a drop of
anything but tea in my house this past night."

"I'm sorry for that; I'd rather have him go to you. If he takes it, let
him take it good; and I'm given to understand that you've a reputation
that way. Just tell him from me, he's at liberty to play the devil with
himself, but not with my beasts."

The farmer continued his labour.

"No, you ain't a hard man, surely," cried the widow. "Not when I say he
was sober, Mr. Eccles; and was thrown, and made insensible?"

"Never knew such a thing to happen to him, Missis, and, what's more, I
don't believe it. Mayhap you're come for his things: his Aunt Anne's
indoors, and she'll give 'em up, and gladly. And my compliments to
Robert, and the next time he fancies visiting Warbeach, he'd best forward
a letter to that effect."

Mrs. Boulby curtseyed humbly. "You think bad of me, sir, for keeping a
public; but I love your son as my own, and if I might presume to say so,
Mr. Eccles, you will be proud of him too before you die. I know no more
than you how he fell yesterday, but I do know he'd not been drinking, and
have got bitter bad enemies."

"And that's not astonishing, Missis."

"No, Mr. Eccles; and a man who's brave besides being good soon learns
that."

"Well spoken, Missis."

"Is Robert to hear he's denied his father's house?"

"I never said that, Mrs. Boulby. Here's my principle--My house is open to
my blood, so long as he don't bring downright disgrace on it, and then
any one may claim him that likes I won't give him money, because I know
of a better use for it; and he shan't ride my beasts, because he don't
know how to treat 'em. That's all."

"And so you keep within the line of your duty, sir," the widow summed his
speech.

"So I hope to," said the farmer.

"There's comfort in that," she replied.

"As much as there's needed," said he.

The widow curtseyed again. "It's not to trouble you, sir, I called.
Robert--thanks be to Above!--is not hurt serious, though severe."

"Where's he hurt?" the farmer asked rather hurriedly.

"In the head, it is."

"What have you come for?"

"First, his best hat."

"Bless my soul!" exclaimed the farmer. "Well, if that 'll mend his head
it's at his service, I'm sure."

Sick at his heartlessness, the widow scattered emphasis over her
concluding remarks. "First, his best hat, he wants; and his coat and
clean shirt; and they mend the looks of a man, Mr. Eccles; and it's to
look well is his object: for he's not one to make a moan of himself, and
doctors may starve before he'd go to any of them. And my begging prayer
to you is, that when you see your son, you'll not tell him I let you know
his head or any part of him was hurt. I wish you good morning, Mr.
Eccles."

"Good morning to you, Mrs. Boulby. You're a respectable woman."

"Not to be soaped," she murmured to herself in a heat.

The apparently medicinal articles of attire were obtained from Aunt Anne,
without a word of speech on the part of that pale spinster. The
deferential hostility between the two women acknowledged an intervening
chasm. Aunt Anne produced a bundle, and placed the hat on it, upon which
she had neatly pinned a tract, "The Drunkard's Awakening!" Mrs. Boulby
glanced her eye in wrath across this superscription, thinking to herself,
"Oh, you good people! how you make us long in our hearts for trouble with
you." She controlled the impulse, and mollified her spirit on her way
home by distributing stray leaves of the tract to the outlying heaps of
rubbish, and to one inquisitive pig, who was looking up from a
badly-smelling sty for what the heavens might send him.

She found Robert with his arm doubled over a basin, and Susan sponging
cold water on it.

"No bones broken, mother!" he sang out. "I'm sound; all right again. Six
hours have done it this time. Is it a thaw? You needn't tell me what the
old dad has been saying. I shall be ready to breakfast in half an hour."

"Lord, what a big arm it is!" exclaimed the widow. "And no wonder, or how
would you be a terror to men? You naughty boy, to think of stirring! Here
you'll lie."

"Ah, will I?" said Robert: and he gave a spring, and sat upright in the
bed, rather white with the effort, which seemed to affect his mind, for
he asked dubiously, "What do I look like, mother?"

She brought him the looking-glass, and Susan being dismissed, he examined
his features.

"Dear!" said the widow, sitting down on the bed; "it ain't much for me to
guess you've got an appointment."

"At twelve o'clock, mother."

"With her?" she uttered softly.

"It's with a lady, mother."

"And so many enemies prowling about, Robert, my dear! Don't tell me they
didn't fall upon you last night. I said nothing, but I'd swear it on the
Book. Do you think you can go?"

"Why, mother, I go by my feelings, and there's no need to think at all,
or God knows what I should think."

The widow shook her head. "Nothing 'll stop you, I suppose?"

"Nothing inside of me will, mother."

"Doesn't she but never mind. I've no right to ask, Robert; and if I have
curiosity, it's about last night, and why you should let villains escape.
But there's no accounting for a man's notions; only, this I say, and I do
say it, Nic Sedgett, he's at the bottom of any mischief brewed against
you down here. And last night Stephen Bilton, or somebody, declared that
Nic Sedgett had been seen up at Fairly."

"Selling eggs, mother. Why shouldn't he? We mustn't complain of his
getting an honest livelihood."

"He's black-blooded, Robert; and I never can understand why the Lord did
not make him a beast in face. I'm told that creature's found pleasing by
the girls."

"Ugh, mother, I'm not."

"She won't have you, Robert?"

He laughed. "We shall see to-day."

"You deceiving boy!" cried the widow; "and me not know it's Mrs. Lovell
you're going to meet! and would to heaven she'd see the worth of ye, for
it's a born lady you ought to marry."

"Just feel in my pockets, mother, and you won't be so ready with your
talk of my marrying. And now I'll get up. I feel as if my legs had to
learn over again how to bear me. The old dad, bless his heart! gave me
sound wind and limb to begin upon, so I'm not easily stumped, you see,
though I've been near on it once or twice in my life."

Mrs. Boulby murmured, "Ah! are you still going to be at war with those
gentlemen, Robert?"

He looked at her steadily, while a shrewd smile wrought over his face,
and then taking her hand, he said, "I'll tell you a little; you deserve
it, and won't tattle. My curse is, I'm ashamed to talk about my feelings;
but there's no shame in being fond of a girl, even if she refuses to have
anything to say to you, is there? No, there isn't. I went with my dear
old aunt's money to a farmer in Kent, and learnt farming; clear of the
army first, by--But I must stop that burst of swearing. Half the time
I've been away, I was there. The farmer's a good, sober, downhearted
man--a sort of beaten Englishman, who don't know it, tough, and always
backing. He has two daughters: one went to London, and came to harm, of a
kind. The other I'd prick this vein for and bleed to death, singing; and
she hates me! I wish she did. She thought me such a good young man! I
never drank; went to bed early, was up at work with the birds. Mr. Robert
Armstrong! That changeing of my name was like a lead cap on my head. I
was never myself with it, felt hang-dog--it was impossible a girl could
care for such a fellow as I was. Mother, just listen: she's dark as a
gipsy. She's the faithfullest, stoutest-hearted creature in the world.
She has black hair, large brown eyes; see her once! She's my mate. I
could say to her, 'Stand there; take guard of a thing;' and I could be
dead certain of her--she'd perish at her post. Is the door locked? Lock
the door; I won't be seen when I speak of her. Well, never mind whether
she's handsome or not. She isn't a lady; but she's my lady; she's the
woman I could be proud of. She sends me to the devil! I believe a woman
'd fall in love with her cheeks, they are so round and soft and kindly
coloured. Think me a fool; I am. And here am I, away from her, and I feel
that any day harm may come to her, and she 'll melt, and be as if the
devils of hell were mocking me. Who's to keep harm from her when I'm
away? What can I do but drink and forget? Only now, when I wake up from
it, I'm a crawling wretch at her feet. If I had her feet to kiss! I've
never kissed her--never! And no man has kissed her. Damn my head! here's
the ache coming on. That's my last oath, mother. I wish there was a Bible
handy, but I'll try and stick to it without. My God! when I think of her,
I fancy everything on earth hangs still and doubts what's to happen. I'm
like a wheel, and go on spinning. Feel my pulse now. Why is it I can't
stop it? But there she is, and I could crack up this old world to know
what's coming. I was mild as milk all those days I was near her. My
comfort is, she don't know me. And that's my curse too! If she did, she'd
know as clear as day I'm her mate, her match, the man for her. I am, by
heaven!--that's an oath permitted. To see the very soul I want, and to
miss her! I'm down here, mother; she loves her sister, and I must learn
where her sister's to be found. One of those gentlemen up at Fairly's the
guilty man. I don't say which; perhaps I don't know. But oh, what a lot
of lightnings I see in the back of my head!"

Robert fell back on the pillow. Mrs. Boulby wiped her eyes. Her feelings
were overwhelmed with mournful devotion to the passionate young man; and
she expressed them practically: "A rump-steak would never digest in his
poor stomach!"

He seemed to be of that opinion too, for when, after lying till eleven,
he rose and appeared at the breakfast-table, he ate nothing but crumbs of
dry bread. It was curious to see his precise attention to the neatness of
his hat and coat, and the nervous eye he cast upon the clock, while
brushing and accurately fixing these garments. The hat would not sit as
he was accustomed to have it, owing to the bruise on his head, and he
stood like a woman petulant with her milliner before the glass; now
pressing the hat down till the pain was insufferable, and again trying
whether it presented him acceptably in the enforced style of his wearing
it. He persisted in this, till Mrs. Boulby's exclamation of wonder
admonished him of the ideas received by other eyes than his own. When we
appear most incongruous, we are often exposing the key to our characters;
and how much his vanity, wounded by Rhoda, had to do with his proceedings
down at Warbeach, it were unfair to measure just yet, lest his finer
qualities be cast into shade, but to what degree it affected him will be
seen.

Mrs. Boulby's persuasions induced him to take a stout silver-topped
walking-stick of her husband's, a relic shaped from the wood of the Royal
George; leaning upon which rather more like a Naval pensioner than he
would have cared to know, he went forth to his appointment with the lady.




CHAPTER XX

The park-sward of Fairly, white with snow, rolled down in long sweeps to
the salt water: and under the last sloping oak of the park there was a
gorse-bushed lane, green in Summer, but now bearing cumbrous
blossom--like burdens of the crisp snow-fall. Mrs. Lovell sat on
horseback here, and alone, with her gauntleted hand at her waist,
charmingly habited in tone with the landscape. She expected a cavalier,
and did not perceive the approach of a pedestrian, but bowed quietly when
Robert lifted his hat.

"They say you are mad. You see, I trust myself to you."

"I wish I could thank you for your kindness, madam."

"Are you ill?"

"I had a fall last night, madam."

The lady patted her horse's neck.

"I haven't time to inquire about it. You understand that I cannot give
you more than a minute."

She glanced at her watch.

"Let us say five exactly. To begin: I can't affect to be ignorant of the
business which brings you down here. I won't pretend to lecture you about
the course you have taken; but, let me distinctly assure you, that the
gentleman you have chosen to attack in this extraordinary manner, has
done no wrong to you or to any one. It is, therefore, disgracefully
unjust to single him out. You know he cannot possibly fight you. I speak
plainly."

"Yes, madam," said Robert. "I'll answer plainly. He can't fight a man
like me. I know it. I bear him no ill-will. I believe he's innocent
enough in this matter, as far as acts go."

"That makes your behaviour to him worse!"

Robert looked up into her eyes.

"You are a lady. You won't be shocked at what I tell you."

"Yes, yes," said Mrs. Lovell, hastily: "I have learnt--I am aware of the
tale. Some one has been injured or, you think so. I don't accuse you of
madness, but, good heavens! what means have you been pursuing! Indeed,
sir, let your feelings be as deeply engaged as possible, you have gone
altogether the wrong way to work."

"Not if I have got your help by it, madam."

"Gallantly spoken."

She smiled with a simple grace. The next moment she consulted her watch.

"Time has gone faster than I anticipated. I must leave you. Let this be
our stipulation"

She lowered her voice.

"You shall have the address you require. I will undertake to see her
myself, when next I am in London. It will be soon. In return, sir, favour
me with your word of honour not to molest this gentleman any further.
Will you do that? You may trust me."

"I do, madam, with all my soul!" said Robert.

"That's sufficient. I ask no more. Good morning."

Her parting bow remained with him like a vision. Her voice was like the
tinkling of harp-strings about his ears. The colour of her riding-habit
this day, harmonious with the snow-faced earth, as well as the gentle
mission she had taken upon herself, strengthened his vivid fancy in
blessing her as something quite divine.

He thought for the first time in his life bitterly of the great fortune
which fell to gentlemen in meeting and holding equal converse with so
adorable a creature; and he thought of Rhoda as being harshly earthly;
repulsive in her coldness as that black belt of water contrasted against
the snow on the shores.

He walked some paces in the track of Mrs. Lovell's horse, till his doing
so seemed too presumptuous, though to turn the other way and retrace his
steps was downright hateful: and he stood apparently in profound
contemplation of a ship of war and the trees of the forest behind the
masts. Either the fatigue of standing, or emotion, caused his head to
throb, so that he heard nothing, not even men's laughter; but looking up
suddenly, he beheld, as in a picture, Mrs. Lovell with some gentlemen
walking their horses toward him. The lady gazed softly over his head,
letting her eyes drop a quiet recognition in passing; one or two of the
younger gentlemen stared mockingly.

Edward Blancove was by Mrs. Lovell's side. His eyes fixed upon Robert
with steady scrutiny, and Robert gave him a similar inspection, though
not knowing why. It was like a child's open look, and he was feeling
childish, as if his brain had ceased to act. One of the older gentlemen,
with a military aspect, squared his shoulders, and touching an end of his
moustache, said, half challengingly,--

"You are dismounted to-day?"

"I have only one horse," Robert simply replied.

Algernon Blancove came last. He neither spoke nor looked at his enemy,
but warily clutched his whip. All went by, riding into line some paces
distant; and again they laughed as they bent forward to the lady,
shouting.

"Odd, to have out the horses on a day like this," Robert thought, and
resumed his musing as before. The lady's track now led him homeward, for
he had no will of his own. Rounding the lane, he was surprised to see
Mrs. Boulby by the hedge. She bobbed like a beggar woman, with a rueful
face.

"My dear," she said, in apology for her presence, "I shouldn't ha'
interfered, if there was fair play. I'm Englishwoman enough for that. I'd
have stood by, as if you was a stranger. Gentlemen always give fair play
before a woman. That's why I come, lest this appointment should ha'
proved a pitfall to you. Now you'll come home, won't you; and forgive
me?"

"I'll come to the old Pilot now, mother," said Robert, pressing her hand.

"That's right; and ain't angry with me for following of you?"

"Follow your own game, mother."

"I did, Robert; and nice and vexed I am, if I'm correct in what I heard
say, as that lady and her folk passed, never heeding an old woman's ears.
They made a bet of you, dear, they did."

"I hope the lady won," said Robert, scarce hearing.

"And it was she who won, dear. She was to get you to meet her, and give
up, and be beaten like, as far as I could understand their chatter;
gentlefolks laugh so when they talk; and they can afford to laugh, for
they has the best of it. But I'm vexed; just as if I'd felt big and had
burst. I want you to be peaceful, of course I do; but I don't like my boy
made a bet of."

"Oh, tush, mother," said Robert impatiently.

"I heard 'em, my dear; and complimenting the lady they was, as they
passed me. If it vexes you my thinking it, I won't, dear; I reelly won't.
I see it lowers you, for there you are at your hat again. It is lowering,
to be made a bet of. I've that spirit, that if you was well and sound,
I'd rather have you fighting 'em. She's a pleasant enough lady to look
at, not a doubt; small-boned, and slim, and fair."

Robert asked which way they had gone.

"Back to the stables, my dear; I heard 'em say so, because one gentleman
said that the spectacle was over, and the lady had gained the day; and
the snow was balling in the horses' feet; and go they'd better, before my
lord saw them out. And another said, you were a wild man she'd tamed; and
they said, you ought to wear a collar, with Mrs. Lovell's, her name,
graved on it. But don't you be vexed; you may guess they're not my
Robert's friends. And, I do assure you, Robert, your hat's neat, if you'd
only let it be comfortable: such fidgeting worries the brim. You're best
in appearance--and I always said it--when stripped for boxing. Hats are
gentlemen's things, and becomes them like as if a title to their heads;
though you'd bear being Sir Robert, that you would; and for that matter,
your hat is agreeable to behold, and not like the run of our Sunday hats;
only you don't seem easy in it. Oh, oh! my tongue's a yard too long. It's
the poor head aching, and me to forget it. It's because you never will
act invalidy; and I remember how handsome you were one day in the field
behind our house, when you boxed a wager with Simon Billet, the waterman;
and you was made a bet of then, for my husband betted on you; and that's
what made me think of comparisons of you out of your hat and you in it."

Thus did Mrs. Boulby chatter along the way. There was an eminence a
little out of the road, overlooking the Fairly stables. Robert left her
and went to this point, from whence he beheld the horsemen with the
grooms at the horses' heads.

"Thank God, I've only been a fool for five minutes!" he summed up his
sensations at the sight. He shut his eyes, praying with all his might
never to meet Mrs. Lovell more. It was impossible for him to combat the
suggestion that she had befooled him; yet his chivalrous faith in women
led him to believe, that as she knew Dahlia's history, she would
certainly do her best for the poor girl, and keep her word to him. The
throbbing of his head stopped all further thought. It had become violent.
He tried to gather his ideas, but the effort was like that of a light
dreamer to catch the sequence of a dream, when blackness follows close
up, devouring all that is said and done. In despair, he thought with
kindness of Mrs. Boulby's brandy.

"Mother," he said, rejoining her, "I've got a notion brandy can't hurt a
man when he's in bed. I'll go to bed, and you shall brew me some; and
you'll let no one come nigh me; and if I talk light-headed, it's blank
paper and scribble, mind that."

The widow promised devoutly to obey all his directions; but he had begun
to talk light-headed before he was undressed. He called on the name of a
Major Waring, of whom Mrs. Boulby had heard him speak tenderly as a
gentleman not ashamed to be his friend; first reproaching him for not
being by, and then by the name of Percy, calling to him endearingly, and
reproaching himself for not having written to him.

"Two to one, and in the dark!" he kept moaning "and I one to twenty,
Percy, all in broad day. Was it fair, I ask?"

Robert's outcries became anything but "blank paper and scribble" to the
widow, when he mentioned Nic Sedgett's name, and said: "Look over his
right temple he's got my mark a second time."

Hanging by his bedside, Mrs. Boulby strung together, bit by bit, the
history of that base midnight attack, which had sent her glorious boy
bleeding to her. Nic Sedgett; she could understand, was the accomplice of
one of the Fairly gentlemen; but of which one, she could not discover,
and consequently set him down as Mr. Algernon Blancove.

By diligent inquiry, she heard that Algernon had been seen in company
with the infamous Nic, and likewise that the countenance of Nicodemus was
reduced to accept the consolation of a poultice, which was confirmation
sufficient. By nightfall Robert was in the doctor's hands, unconscious of
Mrs. Boulby's breach of agreement. His father and his aunt were informed
of his condition, and prepared, both of them, to bow their heads to the
close of an ungodly career. It was known over Warbeach, that Robert lay
in danger, and believed that he was dying.




CHAPTER XXI

Mrs. Boulby's ears had not deceived her; it had been a bet: and the day
would have gone disastrously with Robert, if Mrs. Lovell had not won her
bet. What was heroism to Warbeach, appeared very outrageous blackguardism
up at Fairly. It was there believed by the gentlemen, though rather
against evidence, that the man was a sturdy ruffian, and an infuriated
sot. The first suggestion was to drag him before the magistrates; but
against this Algernon protested, declaring his readiness to defend
himself, with so vehement a magnanimity, that it was clearly seen the man
had a claim on him. Lord Elling, however, when he was told of these
systematic assaults upon one of his guests, announced his resolve to
bring the law into operation. Algernon heard it as the knell to his
visit.

He was too happy, to go away willingly; and the great Jew City of London
was exceedingly hot for him at that period; but to stay and risk an
exposure of his extinct military career, was not possible. In his
despair, he took Mrs. Lovell entirely into his confidence; in doing
which, he only filled up the outlines of what she already knew concerning
Edward. He was too useful to the lady for her to afford to let him go. No
other youth called her "angel" for listening complacently to strange
stories of men and their dilemmas; no one fetched and carried for her
like Algernon; and she was a woman who cherished dog-like adoration, and
could not part with it. She had also the will to reward it.

At her intercession, Robert was spared an introduction to the
magistrates. She made light of his misdemeanours, assuring everybody that
so splendid a horseman deserved to be dealt with differently from other
offenders. The gentlemen who waited upon Farmer Eccles went in obedience
to her orders.

Then came the scene on Ditley Marsh, described to that assembly at the
Pilot, by Stephen Bilton, when she perceived that Robert was manageable
in silken trammels, and made a bet that she would show him tamed. She won
her bet, and saved the gentlemen from soiling their hands, for which they
had conceived a pressing necessity, and they thanked her, and paid their
money over to Algernon, whom she constituted her treasurer. She was
called "the man-tamer," gracefully acknowledging the compliment. Colonel
Barclay, the moustachioed horseman, who had spoken the few words to
Robert in passing, now remarked that there was an end of the military
profession.

"I surrender my sword," he said gallantly.

Another declared that ladies would now act in lieu of causing an appeal
to arms.

"Similia similibus, &c.," said Edward. "They can, apparently, cure what
they originate."

"Ah, the poor sex!" Mrs. Lovell sighed. "When we bring the millennium to
you, I believe you will still have a word against Eve."

The whole parade back to the stables was marked by pretty speeches.

"By Jove! but he ought to have gone down on his knees, like a horse when
you've tamed him," said Lord Suckling, the young guardsman.

"I would mark a distinction between a horse and a brave man, Lord
Suckling," said the lady; and such was Mrs. Lovell's dignity when an
allusion to Robert was forced on her, and her wit and ease were so
admirable, that none of those who rode with her thought of sitting in
judgement on her conduct. Women can make for themselves new spheres, new
laws, if they will assume their right to be eccentric as an
unquestionable thing, and always reserve a season for showing forth like
the conventional women of society.

The evening was Mrs. Lovell's time for this important re-establishment of
her position; and many a silly youth who had sailed pleasantly with her
all the day, was wrecked when he tried to carry on the topics where she
reigned the lady of the drawing-room. Moreover, not being eccentric from
vanity, but simply to accommodate what had once been her tastes, and were
now her necessities, she avoided slang, and all the insignia of
eccentricity.

Thus she mastered the secret of keeping the young men respectfully
enthusiastic; so that their irrepressible praises did not (as is usual
when these are in acclamation) drag her to their level; and the female
world, with which she was perfectly feminine, and as silkenly insipid
every evening of her life as was needed to restore her reputation,
admitted that she belonged to it, which is everything to an adventurous
spirit of that sex: indeed, the sole secure basis of operations.

You are aware that men's faith in a woman whom her sisters
discountenance, and partially repudiate, is uneasy, however deeply they
may be charmed. On the other hand, she maybe guilty of prodigious
oddities without much disturbing their reverence, while she is in the
feminine circle.

But what fatal breath was it coming from Mrs. Lovell that was always
inflaming men to mutual animosity? What encouragement had she given to
Algernon, that Lord Suckling should be jealous of him? And what to Lord
Suckling, that Algernon should loathe the sight of the young lord? And
why was each desirous of showing his manhood in combat before an eminent
peacemaker?

Edward laughed--"Ah-ha!" and rubbed his hands as at a special
confirmation of his prophecy, when Algernon came into his room and said,
"I shall fight that fellow Suckling. Hang me if I can stand his
impudence! I want to have a shot at a man of my own set, just to let
Peggy Lovell see! I know what she thinks."

"Just to let Mrs. Lovell see!" Edward echoed. "She has seen it lots of
times, my dear Algy. Come; this looks lively. I was sure she would soon
be sick of the water-gruel of peace."

"I tell you she's got nothing to do with it, Ned. Don't be confoundedly
unjust. She didn't tell me to go and seek him. How can she help his
whispering to her? And then she looks over at me, and I swear I'm not
going to be defended by a woman. She must fancy I haven't got the pluck
of a flea. I know what her idea of young fellows is. Why, she said to me,
when Suckling went off from her, the other day, 'These are our Guards.'
I shall fight him."

"Do," said Edward.

"Will you take a challenge?"

"I'm a lawyer, Mr. Mars."

"You won't take a challenge for a friend, when he's insulted?"

"I reply again, I am a lawyer. But this is what I'll do, if you like.
I'll go to Mrs. Lovely and inform her that it is your desire to gain her
esteem by fighting with pistols. That will accomplish the purpose you
seek. It will possibly disappoint her, for she will have to stop the
affair; but women are born to be disappointed--they want so much."

"I'll fight him some way or other," said Algernon, glowering; and then
his face became bright: "I say, didn't she manage that business
beautifully this morning? Not another woman in the world could have done
it."

"Oh, Una and the Lion! Mrs. Valentine and Orson! Did you bet with the
rest?" his cousin asked.

"I lost my tenner; but what's that!"

"There will be an additional five to hand over to the man Sedgett. What's
that!"

"No, hang it!" Algernon shouted.

"You've paid your ten for the shadow cheerfully. Pay your five for the
substance."

"Do you mean to say that Sedgett--" Algernon stared.

"Miracles, if you come to examine them, Algy, have generally had a
pathway prepared for them; and the miracle of the power of female
persuasion exhibited this morning was not quite independent of the
preliminary agency of a scoundrel."

"So that's why you didn't bet." Algernon signified the opening of his
intelligence with his eyelids, pronouncing "by jingos" and "by Joves," to
ease the sudden rush of ideas within him. "You might have let me into the
secret, Ned. I'd lose any number of tens to Peggy Lovell, but a fellow
don't like to be in the dark."

"Except, Algy, that when you carry light, you're a general illuminator.
Let the matter drop. Sedgett has saved you from annoyance. Take him his
five pounds."

"Annoyance be hanged, my good Ned!" Algernon was aroused to reply. "I
don't complain, and I've done my best to stand in front of you; and as
you've settled the fellow, I say nothing; but, between us two, who's the
guilty party, and who's the victim?"

"Didn't he tell you he had you in his power?"

"I don't remember that he did."

"Well, I heard him. The sturdy cur refused to be bribed, so there was
only one way of quieting him; and you see what a thrashing does for that
sort of beast. I, Algy, never abandon a friend; mark that. Take the five
pounds to Sedgett."

Algernon strode about the room. "First of all, you stick me up in a
theatre, so that I'm seen with a girl; and then you get behind me, and
let me be pelted," he began grumbling. "And ask a fellow for money, who
hasn't a farthing! I shan't literally have a farthing till that horse
'Templemore' runs; and then, by George! I'll pay my debts. Jews are awful
things!"

"How much do you require at present?" said Edward, provoking his appetite
for a loan.

"Oh, fifty--that is, just now. More like a thousand when I get to town.
And where it's to come from! but never mind. 'Pon my soul, I pity the fox
I run down here. I feel I'm exactly in his case in London. However, if I
can do you any service, Ned--"

Edward laughed. "You might have done me the service of not excusing
yourself to the squire when he came here, in such a way as to implicate
me."

"But I was so tremendously badgered, Ned."

"You had a sort of gratification in letting the squire crow over his
brother. And he did crow for a time."

"On my honour, Ned, as to crowing! he went away cursing at me. Peggy
Lovell managed it somehow for you. I was really awfully badgered."

"Yes; but you know what a man my father is. He hasn't the squire's
philosophy in those affairs."

"'Pon my soul, Mr. Ned, I never guessed it before; but I rather fancy you
got clear with Sir Billy the banker by washing in my basin--eh, did you?"

Edward looked straight at his cousin, saying, "You deserved worse than
that. You were treacherous. You proved you were not to be trusted; and
yet, you see, I trust you. Call it my folly. Of course (and I don't mind
telling you) I used my wits to turn the point of the attack. I may be
what they call unscrupulous when I'm surprised. I have to look to money
as well as you; and if my father thought it went in a--what he
considers--wrong direction, the source would be choked by paternal
morality. You betrayed me. Listen."

"I tell you, Ned, I merely said to my governor--"

"Listen to me. You betrayed me. I defended myself; that is, I've managed
so that I may still be of service to you. It was a near shave; but you
now see the value of having a character with one's father. Just open my
writing-desk there, and toss out the cheque-book. I confess I can't see
why you should have objected--but let that pass. How much do you want?
Fifty? Say forty-five, and five I'll give you to pay to Sedgett--making
fifty. Eighty before, and fifty--one hundred and thirty. Write that you
owe me that sum, on a piece of paper. I can't see why you should wish to
appear so uncommonly virtuous."

Algernon scribbled the written acknowledgment, which he despised himself
for giving, and the receiver for taking, but was always ready to give for
the money, and said, as he put the cheque in his purse: "It was this
infernal fellow completely upset me. If you were worried by a bull-dog,
by Jove, Ned, you'd lose your coolness. He bothered my head off. Ask me
now, and I'll do anything on earth for you. My back's broad. Sir Billy
can't think worse of me than he does. Do you want to break positively
with that pretty rival to Peggy L.? I've got a scheme to relieve you, my
poor old Ned, and make everybody happy. I'll lay the foundations of a
fresh and brilliant reputation for myself."

Algernon took a chair. Edward was fathoms deep in his book.

The former continued: "I'd touch on the money-question last, with any
other fellow than you; but you always know that money's the hinge, and
nothing else lifts a man out of a scrape. It costs a stiff pull on your
banker, and that reminds me, you couldn't go to Sir Billy for it; you'd
have to draw in advance, by degrees anyhow, look here:--There are lots of
young farmers who want to emigrate and want wives and money. I know one.
It's no use going into particulars, but it's worth thinking over. Life is
made up of mutual help, Ned. You can help another fellow better than
yourself. As for me, when I'm in a hobble, I give you my word of honour,
I'm just like a baby, and haven't an idea at my own disposal. The same
with others. You can't manage without somebody's assistance. What do you
say, old boy?"

Edward raised his head from his book. "Some views of life deduced from
your private experience?" he observed; and Algernon cursed at book-worms,
who would never take hints, and left him.

But when he was by himself, Edward pitched his book upon the floor and
sat reflecting. The sweat started on his forehead. He was compelled to
look into his black volume and study it. His desire was to act humanely
and generously; but the question inevitably recurred: "How can I utterly
dash my prospects in the world?" It would be impossible to bring Dahlia
to great houses; and he liked great houses and the charm of mixing among
delicately-bred women. On the other hand, lawyers have married beneath
them--married cooks, housemaids, governesses, and so forth. And what has
a lawyer to do with a dainty lady, who will constantly distract him with
finicking civilities and speculations in unprofitable regions? What he
does want is a woman amiable as a surface of parchment, serviceable as
his inkstand; one who will be like the wig in which he closes his
forensic term, disreputable from overwear, but suited to the purpose.

"Ah! if I meant to be nothing but a lawyer!" Edward stopped the flow of
this current in Dahlia's favour. His passion for her was silent. Was it
dead? It was certainly silent. Since Robert had come down to play his
wild game of persecution at Fairly, the simple idea of Dahlia had been
Edward's fever. He detested brute force, with a finely-witted man's full
loathing; and Dahlia's obnoxious champion had grown to be associated in
his mind with Dahlia. He swept them both from his recollection
abhorrently, for in his recollection he could not divorce them. He
pretended to suppose that Dahlia, whose only reproach to him was her
suffering, participated in the scheme to worry him. He could even forget
her beauty--forget all, save the unholy fetters binding him. She seemed
to imprison him in bare walls. He meditated on her character. She had no
strength. She was timid, comfort-loving, fond of luxury, credulous,
preposterously conventional; that is, desirous more than the ordinary run
of women of being hedged about and guarded by ceremonies--"mere
ceremonies," said Edward, forgetting the notion he entertained of women
not so protected. But it may be, that in playing the part of fool and
coward, we cease to be mindful of the absolute necessity for sheltering
the weak from that monstrous allied army, the cowards and the fools. He
admitted even to himself that he had deceived her, at the same time
denouncing her unheard-of capacity of belief, which had placed him in a
miserable hobble, and that was the truth.

Now, men confessing themselves in a miserable hobble, and knowing they
are guilty of the state of things lamented by them, intend to drown that
part of their nature which disturbs them by its outcry. The submission to
a tangle that could be cut through instantaneously by any exertion of a
noble will, convicts them. They had better not confide, even to their
secret hearts, that they are afflicted by their conscience and the
generosity of their sentiments, for it will be only to say that these
high qualities are on the failing side. Their inclination, under the
circumstances, is generally base, and no less a counsellor than
uncorrupted common sense, when they are in such a hobble, will sometimes
advise them to be base. But, in admitting the plea which common sense
puts forward on their behalf, we may fairly ask them to be masculine in
their baseness. Or, in other words, since they must be selfish, let them
be so without the poltroonery of selfishness. Edward's wish was to be
perfectly just, as far as he could be now--just to himself as well; for
how was he to prove of worth and aid to any one depending on him, if he
stood crippled? Just, also, to his family; to his possible posterity; and
just to Dahlia. His task was to reconcile the variety of justness due
upon all sides. The struggle, we will assume, was severe, for he thought
so; he thought of going to Dahlia and speaking the word of separation; of
going to her family and stating his offence, without personal
exculpation; thus masculine in baseness, he was in idea; but poltroonery
triumphed, the picture of himself facing his sin and its victims dismayed
him, and his struggle ended in his considering as to the fit employment
of one thousand pounds in his possession, the remainder of a small
legacy, hitherto much cherished.

A day later, Mrs. Lovell said to him: "Have you heard of that unfortunate
young man? I am told that he lies in great danger from a blow on the back
of his head. He looked ill when I saw him, and however mad he may be, I'm
sorry harm should have come to one who is really brave. Gentle means are
surely best. It is so with horses, it must be so with men. As to women, I
don't pretend to unriddle them."

"Gentle means are decidedly best," said Edward, perceiving that her
little dog Algy had carried news to her, and that she was setting herself
to fathom him. "You gave an eminent example of it yesterday. I was so
sure of the result that I didn't bet against you."

"Why not have backed me?"

The hard young legal face withstood the attack of her soft blue eyes, out
of which a thousand needles flew, seeking a weak point in the mask.

"The compliment was, to incite you to a superhuman effort."

"Then why not pay the compliment?"

"I never pay compliments to transparent merit; I do not hold candles to
lamps."

"True," said she.

"And as gentle means are so admirable, it would be as well to stop
incision and imbruing between those two boys."

"Which?" she asked innocently.

"Suckling and Algy."

"Is it possible? They are such boys."

"Exactly of the kind to do it. Don't you know?" and Edward explained
elaborately and cruelly the character of the boys who rushed into
conflicts. Colour deep as evening red confused her cheeks, and she said,
"We must stop them."

"Alas!" he shook his head; "if it's not too late."

"It never is too late."

"Perhaps not, when the embodiment of gentle means is so determined."

"Come; I believe they are in the billiard room now, and you shall see,"
she said.

The pair were found in the billiard room, even as a pair of terriers that
remember a bone. Mrs. Lovell proposed a game, and offered herself for
partner to Lord Suckling.

"Till total defeat do us part," the young nobleman acquiesced; and total
defeat befell them. During the play of the balls, Mrs. Lovell threw a
jealous intentness of observation upon all the strokes made by Algernon;
saying nothing, but just looking at him when he did a successful thing.
She winked at some quiet stately betting that went on between him and
Lord Suckling.

They were at first preternaturally polite and formal toward one another;
by degrees, the influence at work upon them was manifested in a thaw of
their stiff demeanour, and they fell into curt dialogues, which Mrs.
Lovell gave herself no concern to encourage too early.

Edward saw, and was astonished himself to feel that she had ceased to
breathe that fatal inciting breath, which made men vindictively emulous
of her favour, and mad to match themselves for a claim to the chief
smile. No perceptible change was displayed. She was Mrs. Lovell still;
vivacious and soft; flame-coloured, with the arrowy eyelashes; a pleasant
companion, who did not play the woman obtrusively among men, and show a
thirst for homage. All the difference appeared to be, that there was an
absence as of some evil spiritual emanation.

And here a thought crossed him--one of the memorable little evanescent
thoughts which sway us by our chance weakness; "Does she think me wanting
in physical courage?"

Now, though the difference between them had been owing to a scornful
remark that she had permitted herself to utter, on his refusal to accept
a quarrel with one of her numerous satellites, his knowledge of her
worship of brains, and his pride in his possession of the burdensome
weight, had quite precluded his guessing that she might haply suppose him
to be deficient in personal bravery. He was astounded by the reflection
that she had thus misjudged him. It was distracting; sober-thoughted as
he was by nature. He watched the fair simplicity of her new manner with a
jealous eye. Her management of the two youths was exquisite; but to him,
Edward, she had never condescended to show herself thus mediating and
amiable. Why? Clearly, because she conceived that he had no virile fire
in his composition. Did the detestable little devil think silly duelling
a display of valour? Did the fair seraph think him anything less than a
man?

How beautifully hung the yellow loop of her hair as she leaned over the
board! How gracious she was and like a Goddess with these boys, as he
called them! She rallied her partner, not letting him forget that he had
the honour of being her partner; while she appeared envious of Algernon's
skill, and talked to both and got them upon common topics, and laughed,
and was like a fair English flower of womanhood; nothing deadly.

"There, Algy; you have beaten us. I don't think I'll have Lord Suckling
for my partner any more," she said, putting up her wand, and pouting.

"You don't bear malice?" said Algernon, revived.

"There is my hand. Now you must play a game alone with Lord Suckling, and
beat him; mind you beat him, or it will redound to my discredit."

With which, she and Edward left them.

"Algy was a little crestfallen, and no wonder," she said. "He is soon set
up again. They will be good friends now."

"Isn't it odd, that they should be ready to risk their lives for
trifles?"

Thus Edward tempted her to discuss the subject which he had in his mind.

She felt intuitively the trap in his voice.

"Ah, yes," she replied; "it must be because they know their lives are not
precious."

So utterly at her mercy had he fallen, that her pronunciation of that
word "precious" carried a severe sting to him, and it was not spoken with
peculiar emphasis; on the contrary, she wished to indicate that she was
of his way of thinking, as regarded this decayed method of settling
disputes. He turned to leave her.

"You go to your Adeline, I presume," she said.

"Ah! that reminds me. I have never thanked you."

"For my good services? such as they are. Sir William will be very happy,
and it was for him, a little more than for you, that I went out of my way
to be a matchmaker."

"It was her character, of course, that struck you as being so eminently
suited to mine."

"Can I tell what is the character of a girl? She is mild and shy, and
extremely gentle. In all probability she has a passion for battles and
bloodshed. I judged from your father's point of view. She has money, and
you are to have money; and the union of money and money is supposed to be
a good thing. And besides, you are variable, and off to-morrow what you
are on to-day; is it not so? and heiresses are never jilted. Colonel
Barclay is only awaiting your retirement. Le roi est mort; vive le roi!
Heiresses may cry it like kingdoms."

"I thought," said Edward, meaningly, "the colonel had better taste."

"Do you not know that my friends are my friends because they are not
allowed to dream they will do anything else? If they are taken poorly, I
commend them to a sea-voyage--Africa, the North-West Passage, the source
of the Nile. Men with their vanity wounded may discover wonders! They
return friendly as before, whether they have done the Geographical
Society a service or not. That is, they generally do."

"Then I begin to fancy I must try those latitudes."

"Oh! you are my relative."

He scarcely knew that he had uttered "Margaret."

She replied to it frankly, "Yes, Cousin Ned. You have made the voyage,
you see, and have come back friends with me. The variability of opals!
Ah! Sir John, you join us in season. We were talking of opals. Is the
opal a gem that stands to represent women?"

Sir John Capes smoothed his knuckles with silken palms, and with
courteous antique grin, responded, "It is a gem I would never dare to
offer to a lady's acceptance."

"It is by repute unlucky; so you never can have done so.

"Exquisite!" exclaimed the veteran in smiles, "if what you deign to imply
were only true!"

They entered the drawing-room among the ladies.

Edward whispered in Mrs. Lovell's ear, "He is in need of the voyage."

"He is very near it," she answered in the same key, and swam into general
conversation.

Her cold wit, Satanic as the gleam of it struck through his mind, gave
him a throb of desire to gain possession of her, and crush her.




CHAPTER XXII

The writing of a letter to Dahlia had previously been attempted and
abandoned as a sickening task. Like an idle boy with his holiday
imposition, Edward shelved it among the nightmares, saying, "How can I
sit down and lie to her!" and thinking that silence would prepare her
bosom for the coming truth.

Silence is commonly the slow poison used by those who mean to murder
love. There is nothing violent about it; no shock is given; Hope is not
abruptly strangled, but merely dreams of evil, and fights with gradually
stifling shadows. When the last convulsions come they are not terrific;
the frame has been weakened for dissolution; love dies like natural
decay. It seems the kindest way of doing a cruel thing. But Dahlia wrote,
crying out her agony at the torture. Possibly your nervously organized
natures require a modification of the method.

Edward now found himself able to conduct a correspondence. He despatched
the following:--

   "My Dear Dahlia,--Of course I cannot expect you to be aware of the
   bewildering occupations of a country house, where a man has
   literally not five minutes' time to call his own; so I pass by your
   reproaches. My father has gone at last. He has manifested an
   extraordinary liking for my society, and I am to join him elsewhere
   --perhaps run over to Paris (your city)--but at present for a few
   days I am my own master, and the first thing I do is to attend to
   your demands: not to write 'two lines,' but to give you a good long
   letter.

   "What on earth makes you fancy me unwell? You know I am never
   unwell. And as to your nursing me--when has there ever been any
   need for it?

   "You must positively learn patience. I have been absent a week or
   so, and you talk of coming down here and haunting the house! Such
   ghosts as you meet with strange treatment when they go about
   unprotected, let me give you warning. You have my full permission
   to walk out in the Parks for exercise. I think you are bound to do
   it, for your health's sake.

   "Pray discontinue that talk about the alteration in your looks. You
   must learn that you are no longer a child. Cease to write like a
   child. If people stare at you, as you say, you are very well aware
   it is not because you are becoming plain. You do not mean it, I
   know; but there is a disingenuousness in remarks of this sort that
   is to me exceedingly distasteful. Avoid the shadow of hypocrisy.
   Women are subject to it--and it is quite innocent, no doubt. I
   won't lecture you.

   "My cousin Algernon is here with me. He has not spoken of your
   sister. Your fears in that direction are quite unnecessary. He is
   attached to a female cousin of ours, a very handsome person, witty,
   and highly sensible, who dresses as well as the lady you talk about
   having seen one day in Wrexby Church. Her lady's-maid is a
   Frenchwoman, which accounts for it. You have not forgotten the
   boulevards?

   "I wish you to go on with your lessons in French. Educate yourself,
   and you will rise superior to these distressing complaints. I
   recommend you to read the newspapers daily. Buy nice picture-books,
   if the papers are too matter-of-fact for you. By looking eternally
   inward, you teach yourself to fret, and the consequence is, or will
   be, that you wither. No constitution can stand it. All the ladies
   here take an interest in Parliamentary affairs. They can talk to
   men upon men's themes. It is impossible to explain to you how
   wearisome an everlasting nursery prattle becomes. The idea that men
   ought never to tire of it is founded on some queer belief that they
   are not mortal.

   "Parliament opens in February. My father wishes me to stand for
   Selborough. If he or some one will do the talking to the tradesmen,
   and provide the beer and the bribes, I have no objection. In that
   case my Law goes to the winds. I'm bound to make a show of
   obedience, for he has scarcely got over my summer's trip. He holds
   me a prisoner to him for heaven knows how long--it may be months.

   "As for the heiress whom he has here to make a match for me, he and
   I must have a pitched battle about her by and by. At present my
   purse insists upon my not offending him. When will old men
   understand young ones? I burn your letters, and beg you to follow
   the example. Old letters are the dreariest ghosts in the world, and
   you cannot keep more treacherous rubbish in your possession. A
   discovery would exactly ruin me.

   "Your purchase of a black-velvet bonnet with pink ribands, was very
   suitable. Or did you write 'blue' ribands? But your complexion can
   bear anything.

   "You talk of being annoyed when you walk out. Remember, that no
   woman who knows at all how to conduct herself need for one moment
   suffer annoyance.

   "What is the 'feeling' you speak of? I cannot conceive any
   'feeling' that should make you helpless when you consider that you
   are insulted. There are women who have natural dignity, and women
   who have none.

   "You ask the names of the gentlemen here:--Lord Carey, Lord Wippern
   (both leave to-morrow), Sir John Capes, Colonel Barclay, Lord
   Suckling. The ladies:--Mrs. Gosling, Miss Gosling, Lady Carey.
   Mrs. Anybody--to any extent.

   "They pluck hen's feathers all day and half the night. I see them
   out, and make my bow to the next batch of visitors, and then I don't
   know where I am.

   "Read poetry, if it makes up for my absence, as you say. Repeat it
   aloud, minding the pulsation of feet. Go to the theatre now and
   then, and take your landlady with you. If she's a cat, fit one of
   your dresses on the servant-girl, and take her. You only want a
   companion--a dummy will do. Take a box and sit behind the curtain,
   back to the audience.

   "I wrote to my wine-merchant to send Champagne and Sherry. I hope
   he did: the Champagne in pints and half-pints; if not, return them
   instantly. I know how Economy, sitting solitary, poor thing, would
   not dare to let the froth of a whole pint bottle fly out.

   "Be an obedient girl and please me.

          "Your stern tutor,

             "Edward the First."

He read this epistle twice over to satisfy himself that it was a warm
effusion, and not too tender; and it satisfied him. By a stretch of
imagination, he could feel that it represented him to her as in a higher
atmosphere, considerate for her, and not so intimate that she could deem
her spirit to be sharing it. Another dose of silence succeeded this
discreet administration of speech.

Dahlia replied with letter upon letter; blindly impassioned, and again
singularly cold; but with no reproaches. She was studying, she said. Her
head ached a little; only a little. She walked; she read poetry; she
begged him to pardon her for not drinking wine. She was glad that he
burnt her letters, which were so foolish that if she could have the
courage to look at them after they were written, they would never be
sent. He was slightly revolted by one exclamation: "How ambitious you
are!"

"Because I cannot sit down for life in a London lodging-house!" he
thought, and eyed her distantly as a poor good creature who had already
accepted her distinctive residence in another sphere than his. From such
a perception of her humanity, it was natural that his livelier sense of
it should diminish. He felt that he had awakened; and he shook her off.

And now he set to work to subdue Mrs. Lovell. His own subjugation was the
first fruit of his effort. It was quite unacknowledged by him: but when
two are at this game, the question arises--"Which can live without the
other?" and horrid pangs smote him to hear her telling musically of the
places she was journeying to, the men she would see, and the chances of
their meeting again before he was married to the heiress Adeline.

"I have yet to learn that I am engaged to her," he said. Mrs. Lovell gave
him a fixed look,--

"She has a half-brother."

He stepped away in a fury.

"Devil!" he muttered, absolutely muttered it, knowing that he fooled and
frowned like a stage-hero in stagey heroics. "You think to hound me into
this brutal stupidity of fighting, do you? Upon my honour," he added in
his natural manner, "I believe she does, though!"

But the look became his companion. It touched and called up great vanity
in his breast, and not till then could he placably confront the look. He
tried a course of reading. Every morning he was down in the library,
looking old in an arm-chair over his book; an intent abstracted figure.

Mrs. Lovell would enter and eye him carelessly; utter little commonplaces
and go forth. The silly words struck on his brain. The book seemed
hollow; sounded hollow as he shut it. This woman breathed of active
striving life. She was a spur to black energies; a plumed glory;
impulsive to chivalry. Everything she said and did held men in scales,
and approved or rejected them.

Intoxication followed this new conception of her. He lost altogether his
right judgement; even the cooler after-thoughts were lost. What sort of
man had Harry been, her first husband? A dashing soldier, a quarrelsome
duellist, a dull dog. But, dull to her? She, at least, was reverential to
the memory of him.

She lisped now and then of "my husband," very prettily, and with intense
provocation; and yet she worshipped brains. Evidently she thirsted for
that rare union of brains and bravery in a man, and would never surrender
till she had discovered it. Perhaps she fancied it did not exist. It
might be that she took Edward as the type of brains, and Harry of
bravery, and supposed that the two qualities were not to be had actually
in conjunction.

Her admiration of his (Edward's) wit, therefore, only strengthened the
idea she entertained of his deficiency in that other companion manly
virtue.

Edward must have been possessed, for he ground his teeth villanously in
supposing himself the victim of this outrageous suspicion. And how to
prove it false? How to prove it false in a civilized age, among
sober-living men and women, with whom the violent assertion of bravery
would certainly imperil his claim to brains? His head was like a stew-pan
over the fire, bubbling endlessly.

He railed at her to Algernon, and astonished the youth, who thought them
in a fair way to make an alliance. "Milk and capsicums," he called her,
and compared her to bloody mustard-haired Saxon Queens of history, and
was childishly spiteful. And Mrs. Lovell had it all reported to her, as
he was-quite aware.

"The woman seeking for an anomaly wants a master."

With this pompous aphorism, he finished his reading of the fair Enigma.

Words big in the mouth serve their turn when there is no way of
satisfying the intelligence.

To be her master, however, one must not begin by writhing as her slave.

The attempt to read an inscrutable woman allows her to dominate us too
commandingly. So the lordly mind takes her in a hard grasp, cracks the
shell, and drawing forth the kernel, says, "This was all the puzzle."

Doubtless it is the fate which women like Mrs. Lovell provoke. The truth
was, that she could read a character when it was under her eyes; but its
yesterday and to-morrow were a blank. She had no imaginative hold on
anything. For which reason she was always requiring tangible signs of
virtues that she esteemed.

The thirst for the shows of valour and wit was insane with her; but she
asked for nothing that she herself did not give in abundance, and with
beauty super-added. Her propensity to bet sprang of her passion for
combat; she was not greedy of money, or reckless in using it; but a
difference of opinion arising, her instinct forcibly prompted her to back
her own. If the stake was the risk of a lover's life, she was ready to
put down the stake, and would have marvelled contemptuously at the lover
complaining. "Sheep! sheep!" she thought of those who dared not fight,
and had a wavering tendency to affix the epithet to those who simply did
not fight.

Withal, Mrs. Lovell was a sensible person; clearheaded and shrewd;
logical, too, more than the run of her sex: I may say, profoundly
practical. So much so, that she systematically reserved the after-years
for enlightenment upon two or three doubts of herself, which struck her
in the calm of her spirit, from time to time.

"France," Edward called her, in one of their colloquies.

It was an illuminating title. She liked the French (though no one was
keener for the honour of her own country in opposition to them), she
liked their splendid boyishness, their unequalled devotion, their
merciless intellects; the oneness of the nation when the sword is bare
and pointing to chivalrous enterprise.

She liked their fine varnish of sentiment, which appears so much on the
surface that Englishmen suppose it to have nowhere any depth; as if the
outer coating must necessarily exhaust the stock, or as if what is at the
source of our being can never be made visible.

She had her imagination of them as of a streaming banner in the jaws of
storm, with snows among the cloud-rents and lightning in the
chasms:--which image may be accounted for by the fact that when a girl
she had in adoration kissed the feet of Napoleon, the giant of the later
ghosts of history.

It was a princely compliment. She received it curtseying, and disarmed
the intended irony. In reply, she called him "Great Britain." I regret to
say that he stood less proudly for his nation. Indeed, he flushed. He
remembered articles girding at the policy of peace at any price, and half
felt that Mrs. Lovell had meant to crown him with a Quaker's hat. His
title fell speedily into disuse; but, "Yes, France," and "No, France,"
continued, his effort being to fix the epithet to frivolous allusions,
from which her ingenuity rescued it honourably.

Had she ever been in love? He asked her the question. She stabbed him
with so straightforward an affirmative that he could not conceal the
wound.

"Have I not been married?" she said.

He began to experience the fretful craving to see the antecedents of the
torturing woman spread out before him. He conceived a passion for her
girlhood. He begged for portraits of her as a girl. She showed him the
portrait of Harry Lovell in a locket. He held the locket between his
fingers. Dead Harry was kept very warm. Could brains ever touch her
emotions as bravery had done?

"Where are the brains I boast of?" he groaned, in the midst of these
sensational extravagances.

The lull of action was soon to be disturbed. A letter was brought to him.

He opened it and read--

   "Mr. Edward Blancove,--When you rode by me under Fairly Park, I did
   not know you. I can give you a medical certificate that since then
   I have been in the doctor's hands. I know you now. I call upon you
   to meet me, with what weapons you like best, to prove that you are
   not a midnight assassin. The place shall be where you choose to
   appoint. If you decline I will make you publicly acknowledge what
   you have done. If you answer, that I am not a gentleman and you are
   one, I say that you have attacked me in the dark, when I was on
   horseback, and you are now my equal, if I like to think so. You
   will not talk about the law after that night. The man you employed
   I may punish or I may leave, though he struck the blow. But I will
   meet you. To-morrow, a friend of mine, who is a major in the army,
   will be down here, and will call on you from me; or on any friend of
   yours you are pleased to name. I will not let you escape. Whether
   I shall face a guilty man in you, God knows; but I know I have a
   right to call upon you to face me.

          "I am, Sir,
             "Yours truly,

               "Robert Eccles."

Edward's face grew signally white over the contents of this unprecedented
challenge. The letter had been brought in to him at the breakfast table.
"Read it, read it," said Mrs. Lovell, seeing him put it by; and he had
read it with her eyes on him.

The man seemed to him a man of claws, who clutched like a demon. Would
nothing quiet him? Edward thought of bribes for the sake of peace; but a
second glance at the letter assured his sagacious mind that bribes were
powerless in this man's case; neither bribes nor sticks were of service.
Departure from Fairly would avail as little: the tenacious devil would
follow him to London; and what was worse, as a hound from Dahlia's family
he was now on the right scent, and appeared to know that he was. How was
a scandal to be avoided? By leaving Fairly instantly for any place on
earth, he could not avoid leaving the man behind; and if the man saw Mrs.
Lovell again, her instincts as a woman of her class were not to be
trusted. As likely as not she would side with the ruffian; that is, she
would think he had been wronged--perhaps think that he ought to have been
met. There is the democratic virus secret in every woman; it was
predominant in Mrs. Lovell, according to Edward's observation of the
lady. The rights of individual manhood were, as he angrily perceived,
likely to be recognized by her spirit, if only they were stoutly
asserted; and that in defiance of station, of reason, of all the ideas
inculcated by education and society.

"I believe she'll expect me to fight him," he exclaimed. At least, he
knew she would despise him if he avoided the brutal challenge without
some show of dignity.

On rising from the table, he drew Algernon aside. It was an insufferable
thought that he was compelled to take his brainless cousin into his
confidence, even to the extent of soliciting his counsel, but there was
no help for it. In vain Edward asked himself why he had been such an
idiot as to stain his hands with the affair at all. He attributed it to
his regard for Algernon. Having commonly the sway of his passions, he was
in the habit of forgetting that he ever lost control of them; and the
fierce black mood, engendered by Robert's audacious persecution, had
passed from his memory, though it was now recalled in full force.

"See what a mess you drag a man into," he said.

Algernon read a line of the letter. "Oh, confound this infernal fellow!"
he shouted, in sickly wonderment; and snapped sharp, "drag you into the
mess? Upon my honour, your coolness, Ned, is the biggest part about you,
if it isn't the best."

Edward's grip fixed on him, for they were only just out of earshot of
Mrs. Lovell. They went upstairs, and Algernon read the letter through.

"'Midnight assassin,'" he repeated; "by Jove! how beastly that sounds.
It's a lie that you attacked him in the dark, Ned--eh?"

"I did not attack him at all," said Edward. "He behaved like a ruffian to
you, and deserved shooting like a mad dog."

"Did you, though," Algernon persisted in questioning, despite his
cousin's manifest shyness of the subject "did you really go out with that
man Sedgett, and stop this fellow on horseback? He speaks of a blow. You
didn't strike him, did you, Ned? I mean, not a hit, except in
self-defence?"

Edward bit his lip, and shot a level reflective side-look, peculiar to
him when meditating. He wished his cousin to propose that Mrs. Lovell
should see the letter. He felt that by consulting with her, he could
bring her to apprehend the common sense of the position, and be so far
responsible for what he might do, that she would not dare to let her
heart be rebellious toward him subsequently. If he himself went to her it
would look too much like pleading for her intercession. The subtle
directness of the woman's spirit had to be guarded against at every
point.

He replied to Algernon,--

"What I did was on your behalf. Oblige me by not interrogating me. I give
you my positive assurance that I encouraged no unmanly assault on him."

"That'll do, that'll do," said Algernon, eager not to hear more, lest
there should come an explanation of what he had heard. "Of course, then,
this fellow has no right--the devil's in him! If we could only make him
murder Sedgett and get hanged for it! He's got a friend who's a major in
the army? Oh, come, I say; this is pitching it too stiff. I shall insist
upon seeing his commission. Really, Ned, I can't advise. I'll stand by
you, that you may be sure of--stand by you; but what the deuce to say to
help you! Go before the magistrate.... Get Lord Elling to issue a warrant
to prevent a breach of the peace. No; that won't do. This quack of a
major in the army's to call to-morrow. I don't mind, if he shows his
credentials all clear, amusing him in any manner he likes. I can't see
the best scheme. Hang it, Ned, it's very hard upon me to ask me to do the
thinking. I always go to Peggy Lovell when I'm bothered. There--Mrs.
Lovell! Mistress Lovell! Madame! my Princess Lovell, if you want me to
pronounce respectable titles to her name. You're too proud to ask a woman
to help you, ain't you, Ned?"

"No," said Edward, mildly. "In some cases their wits are keen enough. One
doesn't like to drag her into such a business."

"Hm," went Algernon. "I don't think she's so innocent of it as you
fancy."

"She's very clever," said Edward.

"She's awfully clever!" cried Algernon. He paused to give room for more
praises of her, and then pursued:

"She's so kind. That's what you don't credit her for. I'll go and consult
her, if positively you don't mind. Trust her for keeping it quiet. Come,
Ned, she's sure to hit upon the right thing. May I go?"

"It's your affair, more than mine," said Edward.

"Have it so, if you like," returned the good-natured fellow. "It's worth
while consulting her, just to see how neatly she'll take it. Bless your
heart, she won't know a bit more than you want her to know. I'm off to
her now." He carried away the letter.

Edward's own practical judgement would have advised his instantly sending
a short reply to Robert, explaining that he was simply in conversation
with the man Sedgett, when Robert, the old enemy of the latter, rode by,
and, that while regretting Sedgett's proceedings, he could not be held
accountable for them. But it was useless to think of acting in accordance
with his reason. Mrs. Lovell was queen, and sat in reason's place. It was
absolutely necessary to conciliate her approbation of his conduct in this
dilemma, by submitting to the decided unpleasantness of talking with her
on a subject that fevered him, and of allowing her to suppose he required
the help of her sagacity. Such was the humiliation imposed upon him.
Further than this he had nothing to fear, for no woman could fail to be
overborne by the masculine force of his brain in an argument. The
humiliation was bad enough, and half tempted him to think that his old
dream of working as a hard student, with fair and gentle Dahlia
ministering to his comforts, and too happy to call herself his, was best.
Was it not, after one particular step had been taken, the manliest life
he could have shaped out? Or did he imagine it so at this moment, because
he was a coward, and because pride, and vanity, and ferocity alternately
had to screw him up to meet the consequences of his acts, instead of the
great heart?

If a coward, Dahlia was his home, his refuge, his sanctuary. Mrs. Lovell
was perdition and its scorching fires to a man with a taint of cowardice
in him.

Whatever he was, Edward's vanity would not permit him to acknowledge
himself that. Still, he did not call on his heart to play inspiriting
music. His ideas turned to subterfuge. His aim was to keep the good
opinion of Mrs. Lovell while he quieted Robert; and he entered
straightway upon that very perilous course, the attempt, for the sake of
winning her, to bewilder and deceive a woman's instincts.




CHAPTER XXIII

Over a fire in one of the upper sitting-rooms of the Pilot Inn, Robert
sat with his friend, the beloved friend of whom he used to speak to
Dahlia and Rhoda, too proudly not to seem betraying the weaker point of
pride. This friend had accepted the title from a private soldier of his
regiment; to be capable of doing which, a man must be both officer and
gentleman in a sterner and less liberal sense than is expressed by that
everlasting phrase in the mouth of the military parrot. Major Percy
Waring, the son of a clergyman, was a working soldier, a slayer, if you
will, from pure love of the profession of arms, and all the while the
sweetest and gentlest of men. I call him a working soldier in opposition
to the parading soldier, the, coxcomb in uniform, the hero by accident,
and the martial boys of wealth and station, who are of the army of
England. He studied war when the trumpet slumbered, and had no place but
in the field when it sounded. To him the honour of England was as a babe
in his arms: he hugged it like a mother. He knew the military history of
every regiment in the service. Disasters even of old date brought groans
from him. This enthusiastic face was singularly soft when the large dark
eyes were set musing. The cast of it being such, sometimes in speaking of
a happy play of artillery upon congregated masses, an odd effect was
produced. Ordinarily, the clear features were reflective almost to
sadness, in the absence of animation; but an exulting energy for action
would now and then light them up. Hilarity of spirit did not belong to
him. He was, nevertheless, a cheerful talker, as could be seen in the
glad ear given to him by Robert. Between them it was "Robert" and
"Percy." Robert had rescued him from drowning on the East Anglian shore,
and the friendship which ensued was one chief reason for Robert's
quitting the post of trooper and buying himself out. It was against
Percy's advice, who wanted to purchase a commission for him; but the
humbler man had the sturdy scruples of his rank regarding money, and his
romantic illusions being dispersed by an experience of the absolute
class-distinctions in the service, Robert; that he might prevent his
friend from violating them, made use of his aunt's legacy to obtain
release. Since that date they had not met; but their friendship was fast.
Percy had recently paid a visit to Queen Anne's Farm, where he had seen
Rhoda and heard of Robert's departure. Knowing Robert's birthplace, he
had come on to Warbeach, and had seen Jonathan Eccles, who referred him
to Mrs. Boulby, licenced seller of brandy, if he wished to enjoy an
interview with Robert Eccles.

"The old man sent up regularly every day to inquire how his son was
faring on the road to the next world," said Robert, laughing. "He's tough
old English oak. I'm just to him what I appear at the time. It's better
having him like that than one of your jerky fathers, who seem to belong
to the stage of a theatre. Everybody respects my old dad, and I can laugh
at what he thinks of me. I've only to let him know I've served an
apprenticeship in farming, and can make use of some of his ideas--sound!
every one of 'em; every one of 'em sound! And that I say of my own
father."

"Why don't you tell him?" Percy asked.

"I want to forget all about Kent and drown the county," said Robert. "And
I'm going to, as far as my memory's concerned."

Percy waited for some seconds. He comprehended perfectly this state of
wilfulness in an uneducated sensitive man.

"She has a steadfast look in her face, Robert. She doesn't look as if she
trifled. I've really never seen a finer, franker girl in my life, if
faces are to be trusted."

"It's t' other way. There's no trifling in her case. She's frank. She
fires at you point blank."

"You never mentioned her in your letters to me, Robert."

"No. I had a suspicion from the first I was going to be a fool about the
girl."

Percy struck his hand.

"You didn't do quite right."

"Do you say that?"

Robert silenced him with this question, for there was a woman in Percy's
antecedent history.

The subject being dismissed, they talked more freely. Robert related the
tale of Dahlia, and of his doings at Fairly.

"Oh! we agree," he said, noting a curious smile that Percy could not
smooth out of sight. "I know it was odd conduct. I do respect my
superiors; but, believe me or not, Percy, injury done to a girl makes me
mad, and I can't hold back; and she's the sister of the girl you saw. By
heaven! if it weren't for my head getting blind now when my blood boils,
I've the mind to walk straight up to the house and screw the secret out
of one of them. What I say is--Is there a God up aloft? Then, he sees
all, and society is vapour, and while I feel the spirit in me to do it, I
go straight at my aim."

"If, at the same time, there's no brandy in you," said Percy, "which
would stop your seeing clear or going straight."

The suggestion was a cruel shock. Robert nodded. "That's true. I suppose
it's my bad education that won't let me keep cool. I'm ashamed of myself
after it. I shout and thunder, and the end of it is, I go away and think
about the same of Robert Eccles that I've frightened other people into
thinking. Perhaps you'll think me to blame in this case? One of those Mr.
Blancoves--not the one you've heard of--struck me on the field before a
lady. I bore it. It was part of what I'd gone out to meet. I was riding
home late at night, and he stood at the corner of the lane, with an old
enemy of mine, and a sad cur that is! Sedgett's his name--Nic, the
Christian part of it. There'd just come a sharp snowfall from the north,
and the moonlight shot over the flying edge of the rear-cloud; and I saw
Sedgett with a stick in his hand; but the gentleman had no stick. I'll
give Mr. Edward Blancove credit for not meaning to be active in a
dastardly assault.

"But why was he in consultation with my enemy? And he let my enemy--by
the way, Percy, you dislike that sort of talk of 'my enemy,' I know. You
like it put plain and simple: but down in these old parts again, I catch
at old habits; and I'm always a worse man when I haven't seen you for a
time. Sedgett, say. Sedgett, as I passed, made a sweep at my horse's
knees, and took them a little over the fetlock. The beast reared. While I
was holding on he swung a blow at me, and took me here."

Robert touched his head. "I dropped like a horse-chestnut from the tree.
When I recovered, I was lying in the lane. I think I was there flat, face
to the ground, for half an hour, quite sensible, looking at the pretty
colour of my blood on the snow. The horse was gone. I just managed to
reel along to this place, where there's always a home for me. Now, will
you believe it possible? I went out next day: I saw Mr. Edward Blancove,
and I might have seen a baby and felt the same to it. I didn't know him a
bit. Yesterday morning your letter was sent up from Sutton farm. Somehow,
the moment I'd read it, I remembered his face. I sent him word there was
a matter to be settled between us. You think I was wrong?"

Major Waring had set a deliberately calculating eye on him.

"I want to hear more," he said.

"You think I have no claim to challenge a man in his position?"

"Answer me first, Robert. You think this Mr. Blancove helped, or
instigated this man Sedgett in his attack upon you?"

"I haven't a doubt that he did."

"It's not plain evidence."

"It's good circumstantial evidence."

"At any rate, you are perhaps justified in thinking him capable of this:
though the rule is, to believe nothing against a gentleman until it is
flatly proved--when we drum him out of the ranks. But, if you can fancy
it true, would you put yourself upon an equal footing with him?"

"I would," said Robert.

"Then you accept his code of morals."

"That's too shrewd for me: but men who preach against duelling, or any
kind of man-to-man in hot earnest, always fence in that way."

"I detest duelling," Major Waring remarked. "I don't like a system that
permits knaves and fools to exercise a claim to imperil the lives of
useful men. Let me observe, that I am not a preacher against it. I think
you know my opinions; and they are not quite those of the English
magistrate, and other mild persons who are wrathful at the practice upon
any pretence. Keep to the other discussion. You challenge a man--you
admit him your equal. But why do I argue with you? I know your mind as
well as my own. You have some other idea in the background."

"I feel that he's the guilty man," said Robert.

"You feel called upon to punish him."

"No. Wait: he will not fight; but I have him and I'll hold him. I feel
he's the man who has injured this girl, by every witness of facts that I
can bring together; and as for the other young fellow I led such a dog's
life down here, I could beg his pardon. This one's eye met mine. I saw it
wouldn't have stopped short of murder--opportunity given. Why? Because I
pressed on the right spring. I'm like a woman in seeing some things. He
shall repent. By--! Slap me on the face, Percy. I've taken to brandy and
to swearing. Damn the girl who made me forget good lessons! Bless her
heart, I mean. She saw you, did she? Did she colour when she heard your
name?"

"Very much," said Major Waring.

"Was dressed in--?"

"Black, with a crimson ribbon round the collar."

Robert waved the image from his eyes.

"I'm not going to dream of her. Peace, and babies, and farming, and pride
in myself with a woman by my side--there! You've seen her--all that's
gone. I might as well ask the East wind to blow West. Her face is set the
other way. Of course, the nature and value of a man is shown by how he
takes this sort of pain; and hark at me! I'm yelling. I thought
I was cured. I looked up into the eyes of a lady ten times
sweeter--when?--somewhen! I've lost dates. But here's the girl at me
again. She cuddles into me--slips her hand into my breast and tugs at
strings there. I can't help talking to you about her, now we've got over
the first step. I'll soon give it up.

"She wore a red ribbon? If it had been Spring, you'd have seen roses. Oh!
what a stanch heart that girl has. Where she sets it, mind! Her life
where that creature sets her heart! But, for me, not a penny of comfort!
Now for a whole week of her, day and night, in that black dress with the
coloured ribbon. On she goes: walking to church; sitting at table;
looking out of the window!

"Will you believe I thought those thick eyebrows of hers ugly once--a
tremendous long time ago. Yes; but what eyes she has under them! And if
she looks tender, one corner of her mouth goes quivering; and the eyes
are steady, so that it looks like some wonderful bit of mercy.

"I think of that true-hearted creature praying and longing for her
sister, and fearing there's shame--that's why she hates me. I wouldn't
say I was certain her sister had not fallen into a pit. I couldn't. I was
an idiot. I thought I wouldn't be a hypocrite. I might have said I
believed as she did. There she stood ready to be taken--ready to have
given herself to me, if I had only spoken a word! It was a moment of
heaven, and God the Father could not give it to me twice The chance has
gone.

"Oh! what a miserable mad dog I am to gabble on in this way.--Come in!
come in, mother."

Mrs. Boulby entered, with soft footsteps, bearing a letter.

"From the Park," she said, and commenced chiding Robert gently, to
establish her right to do it with solemnity.

"He will talk, sir. He's one o' them that either they talk or they hang
silent, and no middle way will they take; and the doctor's their foe, and
health they despise; and since this cruel blow, obstinacy do seem to have
been knocked like a nail into his head so fast, persuasion have not a
atom o' power over him."

"There must be talking when friends meet, ma'am," said Major Waring.

"Ah!" returned the widow, "if it wouldn't be all on one side."

"I've done now, mother," said Robert.

Mrs. Boulby retired, and Robert opened the letter.

It ran thus:--

   "Sir, I am glad you have done me the favour of addressing me
   temperately, so that I am permitted to clear myself of an unjust and
   most unpleasant imputation. I will, if you please, see you, or your
   friend; to whom perhaps I shall better be able to certify how
   unfounded is the charge you bring against me. I will call upon you
   at the Pilot Inn, where I hear that you are staying; or, if you
   prefer it, I will attend to any appointment you may choose to direct
   elsewhere. But it must be immediate, as the term of my residence in
   this neighbourhood is limited.

               "I am,
                  "Sir,
               "Yours obediently,

                    "Edward Blancove."

Major Waning read the lines with a critical attention.

"It seems fair and open," was his remark.

"Here," Robert struck his breast, "here's what answers him. What shall I
do? Shall I tell him to come?"

"Write to say that your friend will meet him at a stated place."

Robert saw his prey escaping. "I'm not to see him?"

"No. The decent is the right way in such cases. You must leave it to me.
This will be the proper method between gentlemen."

"It appears to my idea," said Robert, "that gentlemen are always,
somehow, stopped from taking the straight-ahead measure."

"You," Percy rejoined, "are like a civilian before a fortress. Either he
finds it so easy that he can walk into it, or he gives it up in despair
as unassailable. You have followed your own devices, and what have you
accomplished?"

"He will lie to you smoothly."

"Smoothly or not, if I discover that he has spoken falsely, he is
answerable to me."

"To me, Percy."

"No; to me. He can elude you; and will be acquitted by the general
verdict. But when he becomes answerable to me, his honour, in the
conventional, which is here the practical, sense, is at stake, and I have
him."

"I see that. Yes; he can refuse to fight me," Robert sighed. "Hey, Lord!
it's a heavy world when we come to methods. But will you, Percy, will you
put it to him at the end of your fist--'Did you deceive the girl, and do
you know where the girl now is?' Why, great heaven! we only ask to know
where she is. She may have been murdered. She's hidden from her family.
Let him confess, and let him go."

Major Waring shook his head. "You see like a woman perhaps, Robert. You
certainly talk like a woman. I will state your suspicions. When I have
done so, I am bound to accept his reply. If we discover it to have been
false, I have my remedy."

"Won't you perceive, that it isn't my object to punish him by and by, but
to tear the secret out of him on the spot--now--instantly," Robert cried.

"I perceive your object, and you have experienced some of the results of
your system. It's the primitive action of an appeal to the god of
combats, that is exploded in these days. You have no course but to take
his word."

"She said"--Robert struck his knee--"she said I should have the girl's
address. She said she would see her. She pledged that to me. I'm speaking
of the lady up at Fairly. Come! things get clearer. If she knows where
Dahlia is, who told her? This Mr. Algernon--not Edward Blancove--was seen
with Dahlia in a box at the Playhouse. He was there with Dahlia, yet I
don't think him the guilty man. There's a finger of light upon that
other."

"Who is this lady?" Major Waring asked, with lifted eyebrows.

"Mrs. Lovell."

At the name, Major Waring sat stricken.

"Lovell!" he repeated, under his breath. "Lovell! Was she ever in India?"

"I don't know, indeed."

"Is she a widow?"

"Ay; that I've heard."

"Describe her."

Robert entered upon the task with a dozen headlong exclamations, and very
justly concluded by saying that he could give no idea of her; but his
friend apparently had gleaned sufficient.

Major Waring's face was touched by a strange pallor, and his smile had
vanished. He ran his fingers through his hair, clutching it in a knot, as
he sat eyeing the red chasm in the fire, where the light of old days and
wild memories hangs as in a crumbling world.

Robert was aware of there being a sadness in Percy's life, and that he
had loved a woman and awakened from his passion. Her name was unknown to
him. In that matter, his natural delicacy and his deference to Percy had
always checked him from sounding the subject closely. He might be, as he
had said, keen as a woman where his own instincts were in action; but
they were ineffective in guessing at the cause for Percy's sudden
depression.

"She said--this lady, Mrs. Lovell, whoever she may be--she said you
should have the girl's address:--gave you that pledge of her word?" Percy
spoke, half meditating. "How did this happen? When did you see her?"

Robert related the incident of his meeting with her, and her effort to be
a peacemaker, but made no allusion to Mrs. Boulby's tale of the bet.

"A peacemaker!" Percy interjected. "She rides well?"

"Best horsewoman I ever saw in my life," was Robert's ready answer.

Major Waring brushed at his forehead, as in impatience of thought.

"You must write two letters: one to this Mrs. Lovell. Say, you are about
to leave the place, and remind her of her promise. It's incomprehensible;
but never mind. Write that first. Then to the man. Say that your
friend--by the way, this Mrs. Lovell has small hands, has she? I mean,
peculiarly small? Did you notice, or not? I may know her. Never mind.
Write to the man. Say--don't write down my name--say that I will meet
him." Percy spoke on as in a dream. "Appoint any place and hour.
To-morrow at ten, down by the river--the bridge. Write briefly. Thank him
for his offer to afford you explanations. Don't argue it with me any
more. Write both the letters straight off."

His back was to Robert as he uttered the injunction. Robert took pen and
paper, and did as he was bidden, with all the punctilious obedience of a
man who consents perforce to see a better scheme abandoned.

One effect of the equality existing between these two of diverse rank in
life and perfect delicacy of heart, was, that the moment Percy assumed
the lead, Robert never disputed it. Muttering simply that he was
incapable of writing except when he was in a passion, he managed to
produce what, in Percy's eyes, were satisfactory epistles, though Robert
had horrible misgivings in regard to his letter to Mrs. Lovell--the
wording of it, the cast of the sentences, even down to the character of
the handwriting. These missives were despatched immediately.

"You are sure she said that?" Major Waring inquired more than once during
the afternoon, and Robert assured him that Mrs. Lovell had given him her
word. He grew very positive, and put it on his honour that she had said
it.

"You may have heard incorrectly."

"I've got the words burning inside me," said Robert.

They walked together, before dark, to Sutton Farm, but Jonathan Eccles
was abroad in his fields, and their welcome was from Mistress Anne, whom
Major Waring had not power to melt; the moment he began speaking praise
of Robert, she closed her mouth tight and crossed her wrists meekly.

"I see," said Major Waring, as they left the farm, "your aunt is of the
godly who have no forgiveness."

"I'm afraid so," cried Robert. "Cold blood never will come to an
understanding with hot blood, and the old lady's is like frozen milk.
She's right in her way, I dare say. I don't blame her. Her piety's right
enough, take it as you find it."

Mrs. Boulby had a sagacious notion that gentlemen always dined well every
day of their lives, and claimed that much from Providence as their due.
She had exerted herself to spread a neat little repast for Major Waring,
and waited on the friends herself; grieving considerably to observe that
the major failed in his duty as a gentleman, as far as the relish of
eating was concerned.

"But," she said below at her bar, "he smokes the beautifullest--smelling
cigars, and drinks coffee made in his own way. He's very particular."
Which was reckoned to be in Major Waring's favour.

The hour was near midnight when she came into the room, bearing another
letter from the Park. She thumped it on the table, ruffling and making
that pretence at the controlling of her bosom which precedes a feminine
storm. Her indignation was caused by a communication delivered by Dick
Curtis, in the parlour underneath, to the effect that Nicodemus Sedgett
was not to be heard of in the neighbourhood.

Robert laughed at her, and called her Hebrew woman--eye-for-eye and
tooth-for-tooth woman.

"Leave real rascals to the Lord above, mother. He's safe to punish them.
They've stepped outside the chances. That's my idea. I wouldn't go out of
my way to kick them--not I! It's the half-and-half villains we've got to
dispose of. They're the mischief, old lady."

Percy, however, asked some questions about Sedgett, and seemed to think
his disappearance singular. He had been examining the handwriting of the
superscription to the letter. His face was flushed as he tossed it for
Robert to open. Mrs. Boulby dropped her departing curtsey, and Robert
read out, with odd pauses and puzzled emphasis:

   "Mrs. Lovell has received the letter which Mr. Robert Eccles has
   addressed to her, and regrets that a misconception should have
   arisen from anything that was uttered during their interview. The
   allusions are obscure, and Mrs. Lovell can only remark, that she is
   pained if she at all misled Mr. Eccles in what she either spoke or
   promised. She is not aware that she can be of any service to him.
   Should such an occasion present itself, Mr. Eccles may rest assured
   that she will not fail to avail herself of it, and do her utmost to
   redeem a pledge to which he has apparently attached a meaning she
   can in no way account for or comprehend."

When Robert had finished, "It's like a female lawyer," he said. "That
woman speaking, and that woman writing, they're two different
creatures--upon my soul, they are! Quick, sharp, to the point, when she
speaks; and read this! Can I venture to say of a lady, she's a liar?"

"Perhaps you had better not," said Major Waring, who took the letter in
his hand and seemed to study it. After which he transferred it to his
pocket.

"To-morrow? To-morrow's Sunday," he observed. "We will go to church
to-morrow." His eyes glittered.

"Why, I'm hardly in the mood," Robert protested. "I haven't had the habit
latterly."

"Keep up the habit," said Percy. "It's a good thing for men like you."

"But what sort of a fellow am I to be showing myself there among all the
people who've been talking about me--and the people up at Fairly!" Robert
burst out in horror of the prospect. "I shall be a sight among the
people. Percy, upon my honour, I don't think I well can. I'll read the
Bible at home if you like."

"No; you'll do penance," said Major Waring.

"Are you meaning it?"

"The penance will be ten times greater on my part, believe me."

Robert fancied him to be referring to some idea of mocking the
interposition of religion.

"Then we'll go to Upton Church," he said. "I don't mind it at Upton."

"I intend to go to the church attended by 'The Family,' as we say in our
parts; and you must come with me to Warbeach."

Clasping one hand across his forehead, Robert cried, "You couldn't ask me
to do a thing I hate so much. Go, and sit, and look sheepish, and sing
hymns with the people I've been badgering; and everybody seeing me! How
can it be anything to you like what it is to me?"

"You have only to take my word for it that it is, and far more," said
Major Waring, sinking his voice. "Come; it won't do you any harm to make
an appointment to meet your conscience now and then. You will never be
ruled by reason, and your feelings have to teach you what you learn. At
any rate, it's my request."

This terminated the colloquy upon that topic. Robert looked forward to a
penitential Sabbath-day.

"She is a widow still," thought Major Waring, as he stood alone in his
bed-room, and, drawing aside the curtains of his window, looked up at the
white moon.




CHAPTER XXIV

When the sun takes to shining in winter, and the Southwest to blowing,
the corners of the earth cannot hide from him--the mornings are like
halls full of light. Robert had spent his hopes upon a wet day that would
have kept the congregation sparse and the guests at Fairly absent from
public devotions.

He perceived at once that he was doomed to be under everybody's eyes when
he walked down the aisle, for everybody would attend the service on such
a morning as this.

Already he had met his conscience, in so far as that he shunned asking
Percy again what was the reason for their going to church, and he had not
the courage to petition to go in the afternoon instead of the morning.

The question, "Are you ashamed of yourself, then?" sang in his ears as a
retort ready made.

There was no help for it; so he set about assisting his ingenuity to make
the best appearance possible--brushing his hat and coat with
extraordinary care.

Percy got him to point out the spot designated for the meeting, and
telling him to wait in the Warbeach churchyard, or within sight of it,
strolled off in the direction of the river. His simple neatness and quiet
gentlemanly air abashed Robert, and lured him from his intense conception
of abstract right and wrong, which had hitherto encouraged and incited
him, so that he became more than ever crestfallen at the prospect of
meeting the eyes of the church people, and with the trembling
sensitiveness of a woman who weighs the merits of a lover when passion is
having one of its fatal pauses, he looked at himself, and compared
himself with the class of persons he had outraged, and tried to think
better of himself, and to justify himself, and sturdily reject
comparisons. They would not be beaten back. His enemies had never
suggested them, but they were forced on him by the aspect of his friend.

Any man who takes the law into his own hands, and chooses to stand
against what is conventionally deemed fitting:--against the world, as we
say, is open to these moods of degrading humility. Robert waited for the
sound of the bells with the emotions of a common culprit. Could he have
been driven to the church and deposited suddenly in his pew, his mind
would have been easier.

It was the walking there, the walking down the aisle, the sense of his
being the fellow who had matched himself against those well-attired
gentlemen, which entirely confused him. And not exactly for his own
sake--for Percy's partly. He sickened at the thought of being seen by
Major Waring's side. His best suit and his hat were good enough, as far
as they went, only he did not feel that he wore them--he could not divine
how it was--with a proper air, an air of signal comfort. In fact, the
graceful negligence of an English gentleman's manner had been
unexpectedly revealed to him; and it was strange, he reflected, that
Percy never appeared to observe how deficient he was, and could still
treat him as an equal, call him by his Christian name, and not object to
be seen with him in public.

Robert did not think at the same time that illness had impoverished his
blood. Your sensational beings must keep a strong and a good flow of
blood in their veins to be always on a level with the occasion which they
provoke. He remembered wonderingly that he had used to be easy in gait
and ready of wit when walking from Queen Anne's Farm to Wrexby village
church. Why was he a different creature now? He could not answer the
question.

Two or three of his Warbeach acquaintances passed him in the lanes. They
gave him good day, and spoke kindly, and with pleasant friendly looks.

Their impression when they left him was that he was growing proud.

The jolly butcher of Warbeach, who had a hearty affection for him,
insisted upon clapping his hand, and showing him to Mrs. Billing, and
showing their two young ones to Robert. With a kiss to the children, and
a nod, Robert let them pass.

Here and there, he was hailed by young fellows who wore their hats on one
side, and jaunty-fashioned coats--Sunday being their own bright day of
exhibition. He took no notice of the greetings.

He tried to feel an interest in the robins and twittering wrens, and
called to mind verses about little birds, and kept repeating them, behind
a face that chilled every friendly man who knew him.

Moody the boat-builder asked him, with a stare, if he was going to
church, and on Robert's replying that perhaps he was, said "I'm dashed!"
and it was especially discouraging to one in Robert's condition.

Further to inspirit him, he met Jonathan Eccles, who put the same
question to him, and getting the same answer, turned sharp round and
walked homeward.

Robert had a great feeling of relief when the bells were silent, and
sauntered with a superior composure round the holly and laurel bushes
concealing the church. Not once did he ponder on the meeting between
Major Waring and Mr. Edward Blancove, until he beheld the former standing
alone by the churchyard gate, and then he thought more of the empty
churchyard and the absence of carriages, proclaiming the dreadful
admonition that he must immediately consider as to the best way of
comporting himself before an observant and censorious congregation.

Major Waring remarked, "You are late."

"Have I kept you waiting?" said Robert.

"Not long. They are reading the lessons."

"Is it full inside?"

"I dare say it is."

"You have seen him, I suppose?"

"Oh yes; I have seen him."

Percy was short in his speech, and pale as Robert had never seen him
before. He requested hastily to be told the situation of Lord Elling's
pew.

"Don't you think of going into the gallery?" said Robert, but received no
answer, and with an inward moan of "Good God! they'll think I've come
here in a sort of repentance," he found himself walking down the aisle;
and presently, to his amazement, settled in front of the Fairly pew, and
with his eyes on Mrs. Lovell.

What was the matter with her? Was she ill? Robert forgot his own
tribulation in an instant. Her face was like marble, and as she stood
with the prayer-book in her hand, her head swayed over it: her lips made
a faint effort at smiling, and she sat quietly down, and was concealed.
Algernon and Sir John Capes were in the pew beside her, as well as Lady
Elling, who, with a backward-turned hand and disregarding countenance,
reached out her smelling-bottle.

"Is this because she fancies I know of her having made a bet of me?"
thought Robert, and it was not his vanity prompted the supposition,
though his vanity was awakened by it. "Or is she ashamed of her
falsehood?" he thought again, and forgave her at the sight of her sweet
pale face. The singing of the hymns made her evident suffering seem holy
as a martyr's. He scarce had the power to conduct himself reverently, so
intense was his longing to show her his sympathy.

"That is Mrs. Lovell--did you see her just now?" he whispered.

"Ah?" said Major Waring.

"I'm afraid she has fainted."

"Possibly."

But Mrs. Lovell had not fainted. She rose when the time for rising came
again, and fixing her eyes with a grave devotional collectedness upon the
vicar at his reading-desk, looked quite mistress of herself--but mistress
of herself only when she kept them so fixed. When they moved, it was as
if they had relinquished some pillar of support, and they wavered; livid
shades chased her face, like the rain-clouds on a grey lake-water. Some
one fronting her weighed on her eyelids. This was evident. Robert thought
her a miracle of beauty. She was in colour like days he had noted
thoughtfully: days with purple storm, and with golden horizon edges. She
had on a bonnet of black velvet, with a delicate array of white lace,
that was not suffered to disturb the contrast to her warm yellow hair.
Her little gloved hands were both holding the book; at times she perused
it, or, the oppression becoming unendurable, turned her gaze toward the
corner of the chancel, and thence once more to her book. Robert rejected
all idea of his being in any way the cause of her strange perturbation.
He cast a glance at his friend. He had begun to nourish a slight
suspicion; but it was too slight to bear up against Percy's
self-possession; for, as he understood the story, Percy had been the
sufferer, and the lady had escaped without a wound. How, then, if such
were the case, would she be showing emotion thus deep, while he stood
before her with perfect self-command?

Robert believed that if he might look upon that adorable face for many
days together, he could thrust Rhoda's from his memory. The sermon was
not long enough for him; and he was angry with Percy for rising before
there was any movement for departure in the Fairly pew. In the doorway of
the church Percy took his arm, and asked him to point out the family
tombstone. They stood by it, when Lady Elling and Mrs. Lovell came forth
and walked to the carriage, receiving respectful salutes from the people
of Warbeach.

"How lovely she is!" said Robert.

"Do you think her handsome?" said Major Waring.

"I can't understand such a creature dying." Robert stepped over an open
grave.

The expression of Percy's eyes was bitter.

"I should imagine she thinks it just as impossible."

The Warbeach villagers waited for Lady Elling's carriage to roll away,
and with a last glance at Robert, they too went off in gossiping groups.
Robert's penance was over, and he could not refrain from asking what good
his coming to church had done.

"I can't assist you," said Percy. "By the way, Mr. Blancove denies
everything. He thinks you mad. He promises, now that you have adopted
reasonable measures, to speak to his cousin, and help, as far as he can,
to discover the address you are in search of."

"That's all?" cried Robert.

"That is all."

"Then where am I a bit farther than when I began?"

"You are only at the head of another road, and a better one."

"Oh, why do I ever give up trusting to my right hand--" Robert muttered.

But the evening brought a note to him from Algernon Blancove. It
contained a dignified condemnation of Robert's previous insane behaviour,
and closed by giving Dahlia's address in London.

"How on earth was this brought about?" Robert now questioned.

"It's singular, is it not?" said Major blaring; "but if you want a dog to
follow you, you don't pull it by the collar; and if you want a potato
from the earth, you plant the potato before you begin digging. You are a
soldier by instinct, my good Robert: your first appeal is to force. I,
you see, am a civilian: I invariably try the milder methods. Do you start
for London tonight? I remain. I wish to look at the neighbourhood."

Robert postponed his journey to the morrow, partly in dread of his
approaching interview with Dahlia, but chiefly to continue a little
longer by the side of him whose gracious friendship gladdened his life.
They paid a second visit to Sutton Farm. Robert doggedly refused to let a
word be said to his father about his having taken to farming, and
Jonathan listened to all Major Waring said of his son like a man
deferential to the accomplishment of speaking, but too far off to hear
more than a chance word. He talked, in reply, quite cheerfully of the
weather and the state of the ground; observed that the soil was a
perpetual study, but he knew something of horses and dogs, and
Yorkshiremen were like Jews in the trouble they took to over-reach in a
bargain. "Walloping men is poor work, if you come to compare it with
walloping Nature," he said, and explained that, according to his opinion,
"to best a man at buying and selling was as wholesome an occupation as
frowzlin' along the gutters for parings and strays." He himself preferred
to go to the heart of things: "Nature makes you rich, if your object is
to do the same for her. Yorkshire fellows never think except of making
theirselves rich by fattening on your blood, like sheep-ticks." In fine,
Jonathan spoke sensibly, and abused Yorkshire, without hesitating to
confess that a certain Yorkshireman, against whom he had matched his wits
in a purchase of horseflesh, had given him a lively recollection of the
encounter.

Percy asked him what he thought of his country. "I'll tell you," said
Jonathan; "Englishmen's business is to go to war with the elements, and
so long as we fight them, we're in the right academy for learnin' how the
game goes. Our vulnerability commences when we think we'll sit down and
eat the fruits, and if I don't see signs o' that, set me mole-tunnelling.
Self-indulgence is the ruin of our time."

This was the closest remark he made to his relations with Robert, who
informed him that he was going to London on the following day. Jonathan
shook his hand heartily, without troubling himself about any inquiries.

"There's so much of that old man in me," said Robert, when Percy praised
him, on their return, "that I daren't call him a Prince of an old boy:
and never a spot of rancour in his soul. Have a claim on him--and there's
your seat at his table: take and offend him--there's your seat still. Eat
and drink, but you don't get near his heart. I'll surprise him some day.
He fancies he's past surprises."

"Well," said Percy, "you're younger than I am, and may think the future
belongs to you."

Early next morning they parted. Robert was in town by noon. He lost no
time in hurrying to the Western suburb. As he neared the house where he
was to believe Dahlia to be residing, he saw a man pass through the
leafless black shrubs by the iron gate; and when he came to the gate
himself the man was at the door. The door opened and closed on this man.
It was Nicodemus Sedgett, or Robert's eyes did him traitorous service. He
knocked at the door violently, and had to knock a second and a third
time. Dahlia was denied to him. He was told that Mrs. Ayrton had lived
there, but had left, and her present address was unknown. He asked to be
allowed to speak a word to the man who had just entered the house. No one
had entered for the last two hours, was the reply. Robert had an impulse
to rush by the stolid little female liar, but Percy's recent lesson to
him acted as a restraint; though, had it been a brawny woman or a lacquey
in his path, he would certainly have followed his natural counsel. He
turned away, lingering outside till it was dusk and the bruise on his
head gave great throbs, and then he footed desolately farther and farther
from the house. To combat with evil in his own country village had seemed
a simple thing enough, but it appeared a superhuman task in giant London.




CHAPTER XXV

It requires, happily, many years of an ordinary man's life to teach him
to believe in the exceeding variety and quantity of things money can buy:
yet, when ingenuous minds have fully comprehended the potent character of
the metal, they are likely enough to suppose that it will buy everything:
after which comes the groaning anxiety to possess it.

This stage of experience is a sublime development in the great souls of
misers. It is their awakening moment, and it is their first real sense of
a harvest being in their hands. They have begun under the influence of
the passion for hoarding, which is but a blind passion of the
finger-ends. The idea that they have got together, bit by bit, a power,
travels slowly up to their heavy brains. Once let it be grasped, however,
and they clutch a god. They feed on everybody's hunger for it. And, let
us confess, they have in that a mighty feast.

Anthony Hackbut was not a miser. He was merely a saving old man. His
vanity was, to be thought a miser, envied as a miser. He lived in daily
hearing of the sweet chink of gold, and loved the sound, but with a
poetical love, rather than with the sordid desire to amass gold pieces.
Though a saving old man, he had his comforts; and if they haunted him and
reproached him subsequently, for indulging wayward appetites for herrings
and whelks and other sea-dainties that render up no account to you when
they have disappeared, he put by copper and silver continually, weekly
and monthly, and was master of a sum.

He knew the breadth of this sum with accuracy, and what it would expand
to this day come a year, and probably this day come five years. He knew
it only too well. The sum took no grand leaps. It increased, but did not
seem to multiply. And he was breathing in the heart of the place, of all
places in the world, where money did multiply.

He was the possessor of twelve hundred pounds, solid, and in haven; that
is, the greater part in the Bank of England, and a portion in Boyne's
Bank. He had besides a few skirmishing securities, and some such bits of
paper as Algernon had given him in the public-house on that remarkable
night of his visit to the theatre.

These, when the borrowers were defaulters in their payments and pleaded
for an extension of time, inspired him with sentiments of grandeur that
the solid property could not impart. Nevertheless, the anti-poetical
tendency within him which warred with the poetical, and set him reducing
whatsoever he claimed to plain figures, made it but a fitful hour of
satisfaction.

He had only to fix his mind upon Farmer Fleming's conception of his
wealth, to feel the miserable smallness of what seemed legitimately his
own; and he felt it with so poignant an emotion that at times his fears
of death were excited by the knowledge of a dead man's impotence to
suggest hazy margins in the final exposure of his property. There it
would lie, dead as himself! contracted, coffined, contemptible!

What would the farmer think when he came to hear that his brother Tony's
estate was not able to buy up Queen Anne's Farm?--when, in point of fact,
he found that he had all along been the richer man of the two!

Anthony's comfort was in the unfaltering strength of his constitution. He
permitted his estimate of it to hint at the probability of his outlasting
his brother William John, to whom he wished no earthly ill, but only that
he should not live with a mitigated veneration for him. He was really
nourished by the farmer's gluttonous delight in his supposed piles of
wealth. Sometimes, for weeks, he had the gift of thinking himself one of
the Bank with which he had been so long connected; and afterward a
wretched reaction set in.

It was then that his touch upon Bank money began to intoxicate him
strangely. He had at times thousands hugged against his bosom, and his
heart swelled to the money-bags immense. He was a dispirited, but a
grateful creature, after he had delivered them up. The delirium came by
fits, as if a devil lurked to surprise him.

"With this money," said the demon, "you might speculate, and in two days
make ten times the amount."

To which Anthony answered: "My character's worth fifty times the amount."

Such was his reply, but he did not think it. He was honest, and his
honesty had become a habit; but the money was the only thing which acted
on his imagination; his character had attained to no sacred halo, and was
just worth his annual income and the respect of the law for his person.
The money fired his brain!

"Ah! if it was mine!" he sighed. "If I could call it mine for just forty
or fifty hours! But it ain't, and I can't."

He fought dogged battles with the tempter, and beat him off again and
again. One day he made a truce with him by saying that if ever the farmer
should be in town of an afternoon he would steal ten minutes or so, and
make an appointment with him somewhere and show him the money-bags
without a word: let him weigh and eye them: and then the plan was for
Anthony to talk of politics, while the farmer's mind was in a ferment.

With this arrangement the infernal Power appeared to be content, and
Anthony was temporarily relieved of his trouble. In other words, the
intermittent fever of a sort of harmless rascality was afflicting this
old creature. He never entertained the notion of running clear away with
the money entrusted to him.

Whither could an aged man fly? He thought of foreign places as of spots
that gave him a shivering sense of its being necessary for him to be born
again in nakedness and helplessness, if ever he was to see them and set
foot on them.

London was his home, and clothed him about warmly and honourably, and so
he said to the demon in their next colloquy.

Anthony had become guilty of the imprudence of admitting him to
conferences and arguing with him upon equal terms. They tell us, that
this is the imprudence of women under temptation; and perhaps Anthony was
pushed to the verge of the abyss from causes somewhat similar to those
which imperil them, and employed the same kind of efforts in his
resistance.

In consequence of this compromise, the demon by degrees took seat at his
breakfast-table, when Mrs. Wicklow, his landlady, could hear Anthony
talking in the tone of voice of one who was pushed to his sturdiest
arguments. She conceived that the old man's head was softening.

He was making one of his hurried rushes with the porterage of money on an
afternoon in Spring, when a young female plucked at his coat, and his
wrath at offenders against the law kindled in a minute into fury.

"Hands off, minx!" he cried. "You shall be given in charge. Where's a
policeman?"

"Uncle!" she said.

"You precious swindler in petticoats!" Anthony fumed.

But he had a queer recollection of her face, and when she repeated
piteously: "Uncle!" he peered at her features, saying,--

"No!" in wonderment, several times.

Her hair was cut like a boy's. She was in common garments, with a
close-shaped skull-cap and a black straw bonnet on her head; not gloved,
of ill complexion, and with deep dark lines slanting down from the
corners of her eyes. Yet the inspection convinced him that he beheld
Dahlia, his remembering the niece. He was amazed; but speedily priceless
trust in his arms, and the wickedness of the streets, he bade her follow
him. She did so with some difficulty, for he ran, and dodged, and treated
the world as his enemy, suddenly vanished, and appeared again breathing
freely.

"Why, my girl?" he said: "Why, Dahl--Mrs. What's-your-name? Why, who'd
have known you? Is that"--he got his eyes close to her hair; "is that the
ladies' fashion now? 'Cause, if it is, our young street scamps has only
got to buy bonnets, and--I say, you don't look the Pomp. Not as you used
to, Miss Ma'am, I mean--no, that you don't. Well, what's the news? How's
your husband?"

"Uncle," said Dahlia; "will you, please, let me speak to you somewhere?"

"Ain't we standing together?"

"Oh! pray, out of the crowd!"

"Come home with me, if my lodgings ain't too poor for you," said Anthony.

"Uncle, I can't. I have been unwell. I cannot walk far. Will you take me
to some quiet place?"

"Will you treat me to a cab?" Anthony sneered vehemently.

"I have left off riding, uncle."

"What! Hulloa!" Anthony sang out. "Cash is down in the mouth at home, is
it? Tell me that, now?"

Dahlia dropped her eyelids, and then entreated him once more to conduct
her to a quiet place where they might sit together, away from noise. She
was very earnest and very sad, not seeming to have much strength.

"Do you mind taking my arm?" said Anthony.

She leaned her hand on his arm, and he dived across the road with her,
among omnibuses and cabs, shouting to them through the roar,--

"We're the Independence on two legs, warranted sound, and no
competition;" and saying to Dahlia: "Lor' bless you! there's no retort in
'em, or I'd say something worth hearing. It's like poking lions in cages
with raw meat, afore you get a chaffing-match out o' them. Some of 'em
know me. They'd be good at it, those fellows. I've heard of good things
said by 'em. But there they sit, and they've got no circulation--ain't
ready, except at old women, or when they catch you in a mess, and getting
the worst of it. Let me tell you; you'll never get manly chaff out of big
bundles o' fellows with ne'er an atom o' circulation. The river's the
place for that. I've heard uncommon good things on the river--not of 'em,
but heard 'em. T' other's most part invention. And, they tell me,
horseback's a prime thing for chaff. Circulation, again. Sharp and
lively, I mean; not bawl, and answer over your back--most part impudence,
and nothing else--and then out of hearing. That sort o' chaff's cowardly.
Boys are stiff young parties--circulation--and I don't tackle them pretty
often, 'xcept when I'm going like a ball among nine-pins. It's all a
matter o' circulation. I say, my dear," Anthony addressed her seriously,
"you should never lay hold o' my arm when you see me going my pace of an
afternoon. I took you for a thief, and worse--I did. That I did. Had you
been waiting to see me?"

"A little," Dahlia replied, breathless.

"You have been ill?"

"A little," she said.

"You've written to the farm? O' course you have!"

"Oh! uncle, wait," moaned Dahlia.

"But, ha' you been sick, and not written home?"

"Wait; please, wait," she entreated him.

"I'll wait," said Anthony; "but that's no improvement to queerness; and
'queer''s your motto. Now we cross London Bridge. There's the Tower that
lived in times when no man was safe of keeping his own money, 'cause of
grasping kings--all claws and crown. I'm Republican as far as 'none o'
them'--goes. There's the ships. The sun rises behind 'em, and sets afore
'em, and you may fancy, if you like, there's always gold in their
rigging. Gals o' your sort think I say, come! tell me, if you are a
lady?"

"No, uncle, no!" Dahlia cried, and then drawing in her breath, added:
"not to you."

"Last time I crossed this bridge with a young woman hanging on my arm, it
was your sister; they say she called on you, and you wouldn't see her;
and a gal so good and a gal so true ain't to be got for a sister every
day in the year! What are you pulling me for?"

Dahlia said nothing, but clung to him with a drooping head, and so they
hurried along, until Anthony stopped in front of a shop displaying cups
and muffins at the window, and leprous-looking strips of bacon, and
sausages that had angled for appetites till they had become pallid sodden
things, like washed-out bait.

Into this shop he led her, and they took possession of a compartment, and
ordered tea and muffins.

The shop was empty.

"It's one of the expenses of relationship," Anthony sighed, after probing
Dahlia unsatisfactorily to see whether she intended to pay for both, or
at least for herself; and finding that she had no pride at all. "My
sister marries your father, and, in consequence--well! a muffin now and
then ain't so very much. We'll forget it, though it is a breach, mind, in
counting up afterwards, and two-pences every day's equal to a good big
cannonball in the castle-wall at the end of the year. Have you written
home?"

Dahlia's face showed the bright anguish of unshed tears.

"Uncle-oh! speak low. I have been near death. I have been ill for so long
a time. I have come to you to hear about them--my father and Rhoda. Tell
me what they are doing, and do they sleep and eat well, and are not in
trouble? I could not write. I was helpless. I could not hold a pen. Be
kind, dear uncle, and do not reproach me. Please, tell me that they have
not been sorrowful."

A keenness shot from Anthony's eyes. "Then, where's your husband?" he
asked.

She made a sad attempt at smiling. "He is abroad."

"How about his relations? Ain't there one among 'em to write for you when
you're ill?"

"He... Yes, he has relatives. I could not ask them. Oh! I am not strong,
uncle; if you will only leave following me so with questions; but tell
me, tell me what I want to know."

"Well, then, you tell me where your husband banks," returned Anthony.

"Indeed, I cannot say."

"Do you," Anthony stretched out alternative fingers, "do you get money
from him to make payments in gold, or, do you get it in paper?"

She stared as in terror of a pit-fall. "Paper," she said at a venture.

"Well, then, name your Bank."

There was no cunning in her eye as she answered: "I don't know any bank,
except the Bank of England."

"Why the deuce didn't you say so at once--eh?" cried Anthony. "He gives
you bank-notes. Nothing better in the world. And he a'n't been givin' you
many lately--is that it? What's his profession, or business?"

"He is...he is no profession."

"Then, what is he? Is he a gentleman?"

"Yes," she breathed plaintively.

"Your husband's a gentleman. Eh?--and lost his money?"

"Yes."

"How did he lose it?"

The poor victim of this pertinacious interrogatory now beat about within
herself for succour. "I must not say," she replied.

"You're going to try to keep a secret, are ye?" said Anthony; and she, in
her relief at the pause to her torment, said: "I am," with a little
infantile, withering half-smile.

"Well, you've been and kept yourself pretty secret," the old man pursued.
"I suppose your husband's proud? He's proud, ain't he? He's of a family,
I'll be bound. Is he of a family? How did he like your dressing up like a
mill'ner gal to come down in the City and see me?"

Dahlia's guile was not ready. "He didn't mind," she said.

"He didn't mind, didn't he? He don't mind your cutting of your hair
so?--didn't mind that?"

She shook her head. "No."

Anthony was down upon her like a hawk.

"Why, he's abroad!"

"Yes; I mean, he did not see me."

With which, in a minute, she was out of his grasp; but her heart beat
thick, her lips were dry, and her thoughts were in disorder.

"Then, he don't know you've been and got shaved, and a poll like a
turnip-head of a thief? That's something for him to learn, is it?"

The picture of her beauty gone, seared her eyes like heated brass. She
caught Anthony's arm with one firm hand to hold him silent, and with the
other hand covered her sight and let the fit of weeping pass.

When the tears had spent themselves, she relinquished her hold of the
astonished old man, who leaned over the table to her, and dominated by
the spirit of her touch, whispered, like one who had accepted a bond of
secresy: "Th' old farmer's well. So's Rhoda--my darkie lass. They've
taken on a bit. And then they took to religion for comfort. Th' old
farmer attends Methody meetin's, and quotes Scriptur' as if he was fixed
like a pump to the Book, and couldn't fetch a breath without quotin'.
Rhoda's oftenest along with your rector's wife down there, and does works
o' charity, sicknussin', readin'--old farmer does the preachin'. Old
mother Sumfit's fat as ever, and says her money's for you. Old Gammon
goes on eatin' of the dumplins. Hey! what a queer old ancient he is. He
seems to me to belong to a time afore ever money was. That Mr. Robert's
off...never been down there since he left, 'cause my darkie lass thought
herself too good for him. So she is!--too good for anybody. They're going
to leave the farm; sell, and come to London."

"Oh, no!" exclaimed Dahlia; "not going to leave the dear old farm, and
our lane, and the old oaks, leading up to the heath. Are they? Father
will miss it. Rhoda will mourn so. No place will ever be like that to
them. I love it better than any place on earth."

"That's queer," said Anthony. "Why do you refuse to go, or won't let your
husband take you down there; if you like the place that raving-like? But
'queer''s your motto. The truth is this--you just listen. Hear me--hush!
I won't speak in a bawl. You're a reasonable being, and you don't--that's
to say, you do understand, the old farmer feels it uncomfortable--"

"But I never helped him when I was there," said Dahlia, suddenly
shrinking in a perceptible tremble of acute divination. "I was no use. I
never helped him--not at all. I was no--no use!"

Anthony blinked his eyes, not knowing how it was that he had thus been
thrown out of his direct road. He began again, in his circumlocutory
delicacy: "Never mind; help or no help, what th' old farmer feels is--and
quite nat'ral. There's sensations as a father, and sensations as a man;
and what th' old farmer feels is--"

"But Rhoda has always been more to father than I have," Dahlia cried, now
stretching forward with desperate courage to confront her uncle, distract
his speech, and avert the saying of the horrible thing she dreaded.
"Rhoda was everything to him. Mother perhaps took to me--my mother!"

The line of her long underlie drawn sharp to check her tears, stopped her
speaking.

"All very well about Rhoda," said Anthony. "She's everything to me, too."

"Every--everybody loves her!" Dahlia took him up.

"Let 'em, so long as they don't do no harm to her," was Anthony's remark.
There was an idea in this that he had said, and the light of it led off
his fancy. It was some time before he returned to the attack.

"Neighbours gossip a good deal. O' course you know that."

"I never listen to them," said Dahlia, who now felt bare at any instant
for the stab she saw coming.

"No, not in London; but country's different, and a man hearing of his
child 'it's very odd!' and 'keepin' away like that!' and 'what's become
of her?' and that sort of thing, he gets upset."

Dahlia swallowed in her throat, as in perfect quietude of spirit, and
pretended to see no meaning for herself in Anthony's words.

But she said, inadvertently, "Dear father!" and it gave Anthony his
opening.

"There it is. No doubt you're fond of him. You're fond o' th' old farmer,
who's your father. Then, why not make a entry into the village, and show
'em? I loves my father, says you. I can or I can't bring my husband, you
seems to say; but I'm come to see my old father. Will you go down
to-morrow wi' me?"

"Oh!" Dahlia recoiled and abandoned all defence in a moan: "I can't--I
can't!"

"There," said Anthony, "you can't. You confess you can't; and there's
reason for what's in your father's mind. And he hearin' neighbours'
gossip, and it comes to him by a sort of extractin'--'Where's her
husband?' bein' the question; and 'She ain't got one,' the answer--it's
nat'ral for him to leave the place. I never can tell him how you went
off, or who's the man, lucky or not. You went off sudden, on a morning,
after kissin' me at breakfast; and no more Dahly visible. And he
suspects--he more'n suspects. Farm's up for sale. Th' old farmer thinks
it's unbrotherly of me not to go and buy, and I can't make him see I
don't understand land: it's about like changeing sovereigns for lumps o'
clay, in my notions; and that ain't my taste. Long and the short
is--people down there at Wrexby and all round say you ain't married. He
ain't got a answer for 'em; it's cruel to hear, and crueller to think:
he's got no answer, poor old farmer! and he's obliged to go inter exile.
Farm's up for sale."

Anthony thumped with his foot conclusively.

"Say I'm not married!" said Dahlia, and a bad colour flushed her
countenance. "They say--I'm not married. I am--I am. It's false. It's
cruel of father to listen to them--wicked people! base--base people! I am
married, uncle. Tell father so, and don't let him sell the farm. Tell
him, I said I was married. I am. I'm respected. I have only a little
trouble, and I'm sure others have too. We all have. Tell father not to
leave. It breaks my heart. Oh! uncle, tell him that from me."

Dahlia gathered her shawl close, and set an irresolute hand upon her
bonnet strings, that moved as if it had forgotten its purpose. She could
say no more. She could only watch her uncle's face, to mark the effect of
what she had said.

Anthony nodded at vacancy. His eyebrows were up, and did not descend from
their elevation. "You see, your father wants assurances; he wants facts.
They're easy to give, if give 'em you can. Ah, there's a weddin' ring on
your finger, sure enough. Plain gold--and, Lord! how bony your fingers
ha' got, Dahly. If you are a sinner, you're a bony one now, and that
don't seem so bad to me. I don't accuse you, my dear. Perhaps I'd like to
see your husband's banker's book. But what your father hears, is--You've
gone wrong."

Dahlia smiled in a consummate simulation of scorn.

"And your father thinks that's true."

She smiled with an equal simulation of saddest pity.

"And he says this: 'Proof,' he says, 'proof's what I want, that she's an
honest woman.' He asks for you to clear yourself. He says, 'It's hard for
an old man'--these are his words 'it's hard for an old man to hear his
daughter called...'"

Anthony smacked his hand tight on his open mouth.

He was guiltless of any intended cruelty, and Dahlia's first impulse when
she had got her breath, was to soothe him. She took his hand. "Dear
father! poor father! Dear, dear father!" she kept saying.

"Rhoda don't think it," Anthony assured her.

"No?" and Dahlia's bosom exulted up to higher pain.

"Rhoda declares you are married. To hear that gal fight for you--there's
ne'er a one in Wrexby dares so much as hint a word within a mile of her."

"My Rhoda! my sister!" Dahlia gasped, and the tears came pouring down her
face.

In vain Anthony lifted her tea-cup and the muffin-plate to her for
consolation. His hushings and soothings were louder than her weeping.
Incapable of resisting such a protest of innocence, he said, "And I don't
think it, neither."

She pressed his fingers, and begged him to pay the people of the shop: at
which sign of her being probably moneyless, Anthony could not help
mumbling, "Though I can't make out about your husband, and why he lets ye
be cropped--that he can't help, may be--but lets ye go about dressed like
a mill'ner gal, and not afford cabs. Is he very poor?"

She bowed her head.

"Poor?"

"He is very poor."

"Is he, or ain't he, a gentleman?"

Dahlia seemed torn by a new anguish.

"I see," said Anthony. "He goes and persuades you he is, and you've been
and found out he's nothin' o' the sort--eh? That'd be a way of accounting
for your queerness, more or less. Was it that fellow that Wicklow gal saw
ye with?"

Dahlia signified vehemently, "No."

"Then, I've guessed right; he turns out not to be a gentleman--eh, Dahly?
Go on noddin', if ye like. Never mind the shop people; we're
well-conducted, and that's all they care for. I say, Dahly, he ain't a
gentleman? You speak out or nod your head. You thought you'd caught a
gentleman and 'taint the case. Gentlemen ain't caught so easy. They all
of 'em goes to school, and that makes 'em knowin'. Come; he ain't a
gentleman?"

Dahlia's voice issued, from a terrible inward conflict, like a voice of
the tombs. "No," she said.

"Then, will you show him to me? Let me have a look at him."

Pushed from misery to misery, she struggled within herself again, and
again in the same hollow manner said, "Yes."

"You will?"

"Yes."

"Seein's believin'. If you'll show him to me, or me to him..."

"Oh! don't talk of it." Dahlia struck her fingers in a tight lock.

"I only want to set eye on him, my gal. Whereabouts does he live?"

"Down--down a great--very great way in the West."

Anthony stared.

She replied to the look: "In the West of London--a long way down."

"That's where he is?"

"Yes."

"I thought--hum!" went the old man suspiciously. When am I to see him?
Some day?"

"Yes; some day."

"Didn't I say, Sunday?"

"Next Sunday?"--Dahlia gave a muffled cry.

"Yes, next Sunday. Day after to-morrow. And I'll write off to-morrow, and
ease th' old farmer's heart, and Rhoda 'll be proud for you. She don't
care about gentleman--or no gentleman. More do th' old farmer. It's let
us, live and die respectable, and not disgrace father nor mother.
Old-fashioned's best-fashioned about them things, I think. Come, you
bring him--your husband--to me on Sunday, if you object to my callin' on
you. Make up your mind to."

"Not next Sunday--the Sunday after," Dahlia pleaded. "He is not here
now."

"Where is he?" Anthony asked.

"He's in the country."

Anthony pounced on her, as he had done previously.

"You said to me he was abroad."

"In the country--abroad. Not--not in the great cities. I could not make
known your wishes to him."

She gave this cool explanation with her eyelids fluttering timorously,
and rose as she uttered it, but with faint and ill-supporting limbs, for
during the past hour she had gone through the sharpest trial of her life,
and had decided for the course of her life. Anthony was witless thereof,
and was mystified by his incapability of perceiving where and how he had
been deluded; but he had eaten all the muffin on the plate, and her
rising proclaimed that she had no intention of making him call for
another; which was satisfactory. He drank off her cup of tea at a gulp.

The waitress named the sum he was to pay, and receiving a meditative look
in return for her air of expectancy after the amount had been laid on the
table, at once accelerated their passage from the shop by opening the
door.

"If ever I did give pennies, I'd give 'em to you," said Anthony, when he
was out of her hearing. "Women beat men in guessing at a man by his face.
Says she--you're honourable--you're legal--but prodigal ain't your
portion. That's what she says, without the words, unless she's a reader.
Now, then, Dahly, my lass, you take my arm. Buckle to. We'll to the West.
Don't th' old farmer pronounce like 'toe' the West? We'll 'toe' the West.
I can afford to laugh at them big houses up there.

"Where's the foundation, if one of them's sound? Why, in the City.

"I'll take you by our governor's house. You know--you know--don't ye,
Dahly, know we been suspecting his nephew? 'cause we saw him with you at
the theatre.

"I didn't suspect. I knew he found you there by chance, somehow. And I
noticed your dress there. No wonder your husband's poor. He wanted to
make you cut a figure as one of the handsomes, and that's as ruinous as
cabs--ha! ha!"

Anthony laughed, but did not reveal what had struck him.

"Sir William Blancove's house is a first-rater. I've been in it. He lives
in the library. All the other rooms--enter 'em, and if 'taint like a sort
of, a social sepulchre! Dashed if he can get his son to live with him;
though they're friends, and his son'll get all the money, and go into
Parliament, and cut a shine, never fear.

"By the way, I've seen Robert, too. He called on me at the Bank. Asked
after you.

"'Seen her?' says he.

"'No,' I says.

"'Ever see Mr. Edward Blancove here?' he says.

"I told him, I'd heard say, Mr. Edward was Continentalling. And then
Robert goes off. His opinion is you ain't in England; 'cause a policeman
he spoke to can't find you nowhere.

"'Come," says I, 'let's keep our detectives to catch thieves, and not go
distracting of 'em about a parcel o' women.'

"He's awfully down about Rhoda. She might do worse than take him. I don't
think he's got a ounce of a chance now Religion's set in, though he's the
mildest big 'un I ever come across. I forgot to haul him over about what
he 'd got to say about Mr. Edward. I did remark, I thought--ain't I
right?--Mr. Algernon's not the man?--eh? How come you in the theatre with
him?"

Dahlia spoke huskily. "He saw me. He had seen me at home. It was an
accident."

"Exactly how I put it to Robert. And he agreed with me. There's sense in
that young man. Your husband wouldn't let you come to us there--eh?
because he...why was that?"

Dahlia had it on her lips to say it "Because he was poorer than I
thought;" but in the intensity of her torment, the wretchedness of this
lie, revolted her. "Oh! for God's sake, uncle, give me peace about that."

The old man murmured: "Ay, ay;" and thought it natural that she should
shun an allusion to the circumstance.

They crossed one of the bridges, and Dahlia stopped and said: "Kiss me,
uncle."

"I ain't ashamed," said Anthony.

This being over, she insisted on his not accompanying her farther.

Anthony made her pledge her word of honour as a married woman, to bring
her husband to the identical spot where they stood at three o'clock in
the afternoon of Sunday week. She promised it.

"I'll write home to th' old farmer--a penny," said Anthony, showing that
he had considered the outlay and was prepared for it.

"And uncle," she stipulated in turn, "they are not to see me yet. Very
soon; but not yet. Be true to me, and come alone, or it will be your
fault--I shall not appear. Now, mind. And beg them not to leave the farm.
It will kill father. Can you not," she said, in the faded sweetness of
her speech, "could you not buy it, and let father be your tenant, uncle?
He would pay you regularly."

Anthony turned a rough shoulder on her.

"Good-bye, Dahly. You be a good girl, and all 'll go right. Old farmer
talks about praying. If he didn't make it look so dark to a chap, I'd be
ready to fancy something in that. You try it. You try, Dahly. Say a bit
of a prayer to-night."

"I pray every night," Dahlia answered.

Her look of meek despair was hauntingly sad with Anthony on his way home.

He tracked her sorrowfulness to the want of money; and another of his
terrific vague struggles with the money-demon set in.




CHAPTER XXVI

Sir William Blancove did business at his Bank till the hour of three in
the afternoon, when his carriage conveyed him to a mews near the park of
Fashion, where he mounted horse and obeyed the bidding of his doctor for
a space, by cantering in a pleasant, portly, cock-horsey style, up and
down the Row.

It was the day of the great race on Epsom Downs, and elderly gentlemen
pricked by the doctors were in the ascendant in all London congregations
on horseback.

Like Achilles (if the bilious Shade will permit the impudent comparison),
they dragged their enemy, Gout, at their horses' heels for a term, and
vengeance being accomplished went to their dinners and revived him.

Sir William was disturbed by his son's absence from England. A youth to
whom a baronetcy and wealth are to be bequeathed is an important
organism; and Sir William, though his faith reposed in his son, was
averse to his inexplicably prolonged residence in the French metropolis,
which, a school for many things, is not a school for the study of our
Parliamentary system, and still less for that connubial career Sir
William wished him to commence.

Edward's delightful cynical wit--the worldly man's profundity--and his
apt quotations of the wit of others, would have continued to exercise
their charm, if Sir William had not wanted to have him on the spot that
he might answer certain questions pertinaciously put by Mama Gosling on
behalf of her daughter.

"There is no engagement," Edward wrote; "let the maiden wait and discern
her choice: let her ripen;" and he quoted Horace up to a point.

Nor could his father help smiling and completing the lines. He laughed,
too, as he read the jog of a verse: "Were I to marry the Gosling, pray,
which would be the goose?"

He laughed, but with a shade of disappointment in the fancy that he
perceived a wearing away of the robust mental energy which had
characterized his son: and Sir William knew the danger of wit, and how
the sharp blade cuts the shoots of the sapling. He had thought that
Edward was veritable tough oak, and had hitherto encouraged his light
play with the weapon.

It became a question with him now, whether Wit and Ambition may dwell
together harmoniously in a young man: whether they will not give such
manifestation of their social habits as two robins shut in a cage will
do: of which pretty birds one will presently be discovered with a
slightly ruffled bosom amid the feathers of his defunct associate.

Thus painfully revolving matters of fact and feeling, Sir William
cantered, and, like a cropped billow blown against by the wind, drew up
in front of Mrs. Lovell, and entered into conversation with that lady,
for the fine needles of whose brain he had the perfect deference of an
experienced senior. She, however, did not give him comfort. She informed
him that something was wrong with Edward; she could not tell what. She
spoke of him languidly, as if his letters contained wearisome trifling.

"He strains to be Frenchy," she said. "It may be a good compliment for
them to receive: it's a bad one for him to pay."

"Alcibiades is not the best of models," murmured Sir William. "He doesn't
mention Miss Gosling."

"Oh dear, yes. I have a French acrostic on her name."

"An acrostic!"

A more contemptible form of mental exercise was not to be found,
according to Sir William's judgement.

"An acrostic!" he made it guttural. "Well!"

"He writes word that he hears Moliere every other night. That can't harm
him. His reading is principally Memoirs, which I think I have heard you
call 'The backstairs of history.' We are dull here, and I should not
imagine it to be a healthy place to dwell in, if the absence of friends
and the presence of sunshine conspire to dullness. Algy, of course, is
deep in accounts to-day?"

Sir William remarked that he had not seen the young man at the office,
and had not looked for him; but the mention of Algernon brought something
to his mind, and he said,--

"I hear he is continually sending messengers from the office to you
during the day. You rule him with a rod of iron. Make him discontinue
that practice. I hear that he despatched our old porter to you yesterday
with a letter marked 'urgent.'"

Mrs. Lovell laughed pleadingly for Algernon.

"No; he shall not do it again. It occurred yesterday, and on no other
occasion that I am aware of. He presumes that I am as excited as he is
himself about the race--"

The lady bowed to a passing cavalier; a smarting blush dyed her face.

"He bets, does he!" said Sir William. "A young man, whose income, at the
extreme limit, is two hundred pounds a year."

"May not the smallness of the amount in some degree account for the
betting?" she asked whimsically. "You know, I bet a little--just a
little. If I have but a small sum, I already regard it as a stake; I am
tempted to bid it fly."

"In his case, such conduct puts him on the high road to rascality," said
Sir William severely. "He is doing no good."

"Then the squire is answerable for such conduct, I think."

"You presume to say that he is so because he allows his son very little
money to squander? How many young men have to contain their expenses
within two hundred pounds a year!"

"Not sons of squires and nephews of baronets," said Mrs. Lovell. "Adieu!
I think I see a carrier-pigeon flying overhead, and, as you may suppose,
I am all anxiety."

Sir William nodded to her. He disliked certain of her ways; but they were
transparent bits of audacity and restlessness pertaining to a youthful
widow, full of natural dash; and she was so sweetly mistress of herself
in all she did, that he never supposed her to be needing caution against
excesses. Old gentlemen have their pets, and Mrs. Lovell was a pet of Sir
William's.

She was on the present occasion quite mistress of herself, though the
stake was large. She was mistress of herself when Lord Suckling, who had
driven from the Downs and brushed all save a spot of white dust out of
his baby moustache to make himself presentable, rode up to her to say
that the horse Templemore was beaten, and that his sagacity in always
betting against favourites would, in this last instance, transfer a "pot
of money" from alien pockets to his own.

"Algy Blancove's in for five hundred to me," he said; adding with energy,
"I hope you haven't lost? No, don't go and dash my jolly feeling by
saying you have. It was a fine heat; neck-and-neck past the Stand. Have
you?"

"A little," she confessed. "It's a failing of mine to like favourites.
I'm sorry for Algy."

"I'm afraid he's awfully hit."

"What makes you think so?"

"He took it so awfully cool."

"That may mean the reverse."

"It don't with him. But, Mrs. Lovell, do tell me you haven't lost. Not
much, is it? Because, I know there's no guessing, when you are
concerned."

The lady trifled with her bridle-rein.

"I really can't tell you yet. I may have lost. I haven't won. I'm not
cool-blooded enough to bet against favourites. Addio, son of Fortune! I'm
at the Opera to-night."

As she turned her horse from Lord Suckling, the cavalier who had saluted
her when she was with Sir William passed again. She made a signal to her
groom, and sent the man flying in pursuit of him, while she turned and
cantered. She was soon overtaken.

"Madam, you have done me the honour."

"I wish to know why it is your pleasure to avoid me, Major Waring?"

"In this place?"

"Wherever we may chance to meet."

"I must protest."

"Do not. The thing is evident."

They rode together silently.

Her face was toward the sunset. The light smote her yellow hair, and
struck out her grave and offended look, as in a picture.

"To be condemned without a hearing!" she said. "The most dastardly
criminal gets that. Is it imagined that I have no common feelings? Is it
manly to follow me with studied insult? I can bear the hatred of fools.
Contempt I have not deserved. Dead! I should be dead, if my conscience
had once reproached me. I am a mark for slander, and brave men should
beware of herding with despicable slanderers."

She spoke, gazing frontward all the while. The pace she maintained in no
degree impeded the concentrated passion of her utterance.

But it was a more difficult task for him, going at that pace, to make
explanations, and she was exquisitely fair to behold! The falling beams
touched her with a mellow sweetness that kindled bleeding memories.

"If I defend myself?" he said.

"No. All I ask is that you should Accuse me. Let me know what I have
done--done, that I have not been bitterly punished for? What is it? what
is it? Why do you inflict a torture on me whenever you see me? Not by
word, not by look. You are too subtle in your cruelty to give me anything
I can grasp. You know how you wound me. And I am alone."

"That is supposed to account for my behaviour?"

She turned her face to him. "Oh, Major blaring! say nothing unworthy of
yourself. That would be a new pain to me."

He bowed. In spite of a prepossessing anger, some little softness crept
through his heart.

"You may conceive that I have dropped my pride," she said. "That is the
case, or my pride is of a better sort."

"Madam, I fully hope and trust," said he.

"And believe," she added, twisting his words to the ironic tongue. "You
certainly must believe that my pride has sunk low. Did I ever speak to
you in this manner before?"

"Not in this manner, I can attest."

"Did I speak at all, when I was hurt?" She betrayed that he had planted a
fresh sting.

"If my recollection serves me," said he, "your self-command was
remarkable."

Mrs. Lovell slackened her pace.

"Your recollection serves you too well, Major Waring. I was a girl. You
judged the acts of a woman. I was a girl, and you chose to put your own
interpretation on whatever I did. You scourged me before the whole army.
Was not that enough? I mean, enough for you? For me, perhaps not, for I
have suffered since, and may have been set apart to suffer. I saw you in
that little church at Warbeach; I met you in the lanes; I met you on the
steamer; on the railway platform; at the review. Everywhere you kept up
the look of my judge. You! and I have been 'Margaret' to you. Major
Waring, how many a woman in my place would attribute your relentless
condemnation of her to injured vanity or vengeance? In those days I
trifled with everybody. I played with fire. I was ignorant of life. I was
true to my husband; and because I was true, and because I was ignorant, I
was plunged into tragedies I never suspected. This is to be what you call
a coquette. Stamping a name saves thinking. Could I read my husband's
temper? Would not a coquette have played her cards differently? There
never was need for me to push my husband to a contest. I never had the
power to restrain him. Now I am wiser; and now is too late; and now you
sit in judgement on me. Why? It is not fair; it is unkind."

Tears were in her voice, though not in her eyes.

Major Waring tried to study her with the coolness of a man who has learnt
to doubt the truth of women; but he had once yearned in a young man's
frenzy of love to take that delicate shape in his arms, and he was not
proof against the sedate sweet face and keen sad ring of the voice.

He spoke earnestly.

"You honour me by caring for my opinion. The past is buried. I have some
forgiveness to ask. Much, when I think of it--very much. I did you a
public wrong. From a man to a woman it was unpardonable. It is a blot on
my career. I beg you humbly to believe that I repent it."

The sun was flaming with great wings red among the vapours; and in the
recollection of the two, as they rode onward facing it, arose that day of
the forlorn charge of English horse in the Indian jungle, the thunder and
the dust, the fire and the dense knot of the struggle. And like a ghost
sweeping across her eyeballs, Mrs. Lovell beheld, part in his English
freshness, part ensanguined, the image of the gallant boy who had ridden
to perish at the spur of her mad whim. She forgot all present
surroundings.

"Percy!" she said.

"Madam?"

"Percy!"

"Margaret?"

"Oh, what an undying day, Percy!"

And then she was speechless.




CHAPTER XXVII

The Park had been empty, but the opera-house was full; and in the
brilliance of the lights and divine soaring of the music, the genius of
Champagne luncheons discussed the fate of the horse Templemore; some, as
a matter of remote history; some, as another delusion in horse-flesh the
greater number, however, with a determination to stand by the beaten
favourite, though he had fallen, and proclaim him the best of racers and
an animal foully mishandled on the course. There were whispers, and
hints, and assertions; now implicating the jockey, now the owner of
Templemore. The Manchester party, and the Yorkshire party, and their
diverse villanous tricks, came under review. Several offered to back
Templemore at double the money they had lost, against the winner. A
favourite on whom money has been staked, not only has friends, but in
adversity he is still believed in; nor could it well be otherwise, for
the money, no doubt, stands for faith, or it would never have been put up
to the risks of a forfeit.

Foremost and wildest among the excited young men who animated the stalls,
and rushed about the lobby, was Algernon. He was the genius of Champagne
luncheon incarnate. On him devolves, for a time, the movement of this
story, and we shall do well to contemplate him, though he may seem
possibly to be worthless. What is worthless, if it be well looked at?
Nay, the most worthless creatures are most serviceable for examination,
when the microscope is applied to them, as a simple study of human
mechanism. This youth is one of great Nature's tom-fools: an elegant
young gentleman outwardly, of the very large class who are simply the
engines of their appetites, and, to the philosophic eye, still run wild
in woods, as did the primitive nobleman that made a noise in the earlier
world.

Algernon had this day lost ten times more than he could hope to be in a
position to pay within ten years, at the least, if his father continued
to argue the matter against Providence, and live. He had lost, and might
speedily expect to be posted in all good betting circles as something not
pleasantly odoriferous for circles where there is no betting.
Nevertheless, the youth was surcharged with gaiety. The soul of mingled
chicken and wine illumined his cheeks and eyes. He laughed and joked
about the horse--his horse, as he called Templemore--and meeting Lord
Suckling, won five sovereigns of him by betting that the colours of one
of the beaten horses, Benloo, were distinguished by a chocolate bar. The
bet was referred to a dignified umpire, who, a Frenchman, drew his right
hand down an imperial tuft of hair dependent from his chin, and gave a
decision in Algernon's favour. Lord Suckling paid the money on the spot,
and Algernon pocketed it exulting. He had the idea that it was the first
start in his making head against the flood. The next instant he could
have pitched himself upon the floor and bellowed. For, a soul of chicken
and wine, lightly elated, is easily dashed; and if he had but said to
Lord Suckling that, it might as well be deferred, the thing would have
become a precedent, and his own debt might have been held back. He went
on saying, as he rushed forward alone: "Never mind, Suckling. Oh, hang
it! put it in your pocket;" and the imperative necessity for talking, and
fancying what was adverse to fact, enabled him to feel for a time as if
he had really acted according to the prompting of his wisdom. It amazed
him to see people sitting and listening. The more he tried it, the more
unendurable it became. Those sitters and loungers appeared like absurd
petrifactions to him. If he abstained from activity for ever so short a
term, he was tormented by a sense of emptiness; and, as he said to
himself, a man who has eaten a chicken, and part of a game-pie, and drunk
thereto Champagne all day, until the popping of the corks has become as
familiar as minute-guns, he can hardly be empty. It was peculiar. He
stood, just for the sake of investigating the circumstance--it was so
extraordinary. The music rose in a triumphant swell. And now he was sure
that he was not to be blamed for thinking this form of entertainment
detestable. How could people pretend to like it? "Upon my honour!" he
said aloud. The hypocritical nonsense of pretending to like opera-music
disgusted him.

"Where is it, Algy?" a friend of his and Suckling's asked, with a languid
laugh.

"Where's what?"

"Your honour."

"My honour? Do you doubt my honour?" Algernon stared defiantly at the
inoffensive little fellow.

"Not in the slightest. Very sorry to, seeing that I have you down in my
book."

"Latters? Ah, yes," said Algernon, musically, and letting his under-lip
hang that he might restrain the impulse to bite it. "Fifty, or a hundred,
is it? I lost my book on the Downs."

"Fifty; but wait till settling-day, my good fellow, and don't fiddle at
your pockets as if I'd been touching you up for the money. Come and sup
with me to-night."

Algernon muttered a queer reply in a good-tempered tone, and escaped him.

He was sobered by that naming of settling-day. He could now listen to the
music with attention, if not with satisfaction. As he did so, the head of
drowned memory rose slowly up through the wine-bubbles in his brain, and
he flung out a far thought for relief: "How, if I were to leave England
with that dark girl Rhoda at Wrexby, marry her like a man, and live a
wild ramping life in the colonies?" A curtain closed on the prospect, but
if memory was resolved that it would not be drowned, he had at any rate
dosed it with something fresh to occupy its digestion.

His opera-glass had been scouring the house for a sight of Mrs. Lovell,
and at last she appeared in Lord Elling's box.

"I can give you two minutes, Algy," she said, as he entered and found her
opportunely alone. "We have lost, I hear. No interjection, pray. Let it
be, fors l'honneur, with us. Come to me to-morrow. You have tossed
trinkets into my lap. They were marks of esteem, my cousin. Take them in
the same light back from me. Turn them into money, and pay what is most
pressing. Then go to Lord Suckling. He is a good boy, and won't distress
you; but you must speak openly to him at once. Perhaps he will help you.
I will do my best, though whether I can, I have yet to learn."

"Dear Mrs. Lovell!" Algernon burst out, and the corners of his mouth
played nervously.

He liked her kindness, and he was wroth at the projected return of his
gifts. A man's gifts are an exhibition of the royalty of his soul, and
they are the last things which should be mentioned to him as matters to
be blotted out when he is struggling against ruin. The lady had blunt
insight just then. She attributed his emotion to gratitude.

"The door may be opened at any minute," she warned him.

"It's not about myself," he said; "it's you. I believe I tempted you to
back the beastly horse. And he would have won--a fair race, and he would
have won easy. He was winning. He passed the stand a head ahead. He did
win. It's a scandal to the Turf. There's an end of racing in England.
It's up. They've done for themselves to-day. There's a gang. It's in the
hands of confederates."

"Think so, if it consoles you," said Mrs. Lovell, "don't mention your
thoughts, that is all."

"I do think so. Why should we submit to a robbery? It's a sold affair.
That Frenchman, Baron Vistocq, says we can't lift our heads after it."

"He conducts himself with decency, I hope."

"Why, he's won!"

"Imitate him."

Mrs. Lovell scanned the stalls.

"Always imitate the behaviour of the winners when you lose," she resumed.
"To speak of other things: I have had no letter of late from Edward. He
should be anxious to return. I went this morning to see that unhappy
girl. She consents."

"Poor creature," murmured Algernon; and added "Everybody wants money."

"She decides wisely; for it is the best she can do. She deserves pity,
for she has been basely used."

"Poor old Ned didn't mean," Algernon began pleading on his cousin's
behalf, when Mrs. Lovell's scornful eye checked the feeble attempt.

"I am a woman, and, in certain cases, I side with my sex."

"Wasn't it for you?"

"That he betrayed her? If that were so, I should be sitting in ashes."

Algernon's look plainly declared that he thought her a mystery.

The simplicity of his bewilderment made her smile.

"I think your colonies are the right place for you, Algy, if you can get
an appointment; which must be managed by-and-by. Call on me to-morrow, as
I said."

Algernon signified positively that he would not, and doggedly refused to
explain why.

"Then I will call on you," said Mrs. Lovell.

He was going to say something angrily, when Mrs. Lovell checked him:
"Hush! she is singing."

Algernon listened to the prima donna in loathing; he had so much to
inquire about, and so much to relate: such a desire to torment and be
comforted!

Before he could utter a word further, the door opened, and Major Waring
appeared, and he beheld Mrs. Lovell blush strangely. Soon after, Lord
Elling came in, and spoke the ordinary sentence or two concerning the
day's topic--the horse Templemore. Algernon quitted the box. His ears
were surcharged with sound entirely foreign to his emotions, and he
strolled out of the house and off to his dingy chambers, now tenanted by
himself alone, and there faced the sealed letters addressed to Edward,
which had, by order, not been forwarded. No less than six were in
Dahlia's handwriting. He had imagination sufficient to conceive the
lamentations they contained, and the reproach they were to his own
subserviency in not sending them. He looked at the postmarks. The last
one was dated two months back.

"How can she have cared a hang for Ned, if she's ready to go and marry a
yokel, for the sake of a home and respectability?" he thought, rather in
scorn; and, having established this contemptuous opinion of one of the
sex, he felt justified in despising all. "Just like women! They--no!
Peggy Lovell isn't. She's a trump card, and she's a coquette--can't help
being one. It's in the blood. I never saw her look so confoundedly lovely
as when that fellow came into the box. One up, one down. Ned's away, and
it's this fellow's turn. Why the deuce does she always think I'm a boy?
or else, she pretends to. But I must give my mind to business."

He drew forth the betting-book which his lively fancy had lost on the
Downs. Prompted by an afterthought, he went to the letter-box, saying,--

"Who knows? Wait till the day's ended before you curse your luck."

There was a foreign letter in it from Edward, addressed to him, and
another addressed to "Mr. Blancuv," that he tore open and read with
disgusted laughter. It was signed "N. Sedgett." Algernon read it twice
over, for the enjoyment of his critical detection of the vile grammar,
with many "Oh! by Joves!" and a concluding, "This is a curiosity!"

It was a countryman's letter, ill-spelt, involved, and of a character to
give Algernon a fine scholarly sense of superiority altogether novel.
Everybody abused Algernon for his abuse of common Queen's English in his
epistles: but here was a letter in comparison with which his own were
doctorial, and accordingly he fell upon it with an acrimonious rapture of
pedantry known to dull wits that have by extraordinary hazard pounced on
a duller.

"You're 'willing to forgeit and forgeive,' are you, you dog!" he
exclaimed, half dancing. "You'd forge anything, you rascal, if you could
disguise your hand--that, I don't doubt. You 'expeck the thousand pound
to be paid down the day of my marriage,' do you, you impudent ruffian!
'acording to agremint.' What a mercenary vagabond this is!"

Algernon reflected a minute. The money was to pass through his hands. He
compressed a desire to dispute with Sedgett that latter point about the
agreement, and opened Edward's letter.

It contained an order on a firm of attorneys to sell out so much Bank
Stock and pay over one thousand pounds to Mr. A. Blancove.

The beautiful concision of style in this document gave Algernon a feeling
of profound deference toward the law and its officers.

"Now, that's the way to Write!" he said.




CHAPTER XXVIII

Accompanying this pleasant, pregnant bit of paper, possessed of such
admirable literary excellence, were the following flimsy lines from
Edward's self, to Algernon incomprehensible.

As there is a man to be seen behind these lines in the dull unconscious
process of transformation from something very like a villain to something
by a few degrees more estimable, we may as well look at the letter in
full.

It begins with a neat display of consideration for the person addressed,
common to letters that are dictated by overpowering egoism:--

   "Dear Algy,--I hope you are working and attending regularly to
   office business. Look to that and to your health at present.
   Depend upon it, there is nothing like work. Fix your teeth in it.
   Work is medicine. A truism! Truisms, whether they lie in the
   depths of thought, or on the surface, are at any rate the pearls of
   experience.

   "I am coming home. Let me know the instant this affair is over. I
   can't tell why I wait here. I fall into lethargies. I write to no
   one but to you. Your supposition that I am one of the hangers-on of
   the coquette of her time, and that it is for her I am seeking to get
   free, is conceived with your usual discrimination. For Margaret
   Lovell? Do you imagine that I desire to be all my life kicking the
   beam, weighed in capricious scales, appraised to the direct nicety,
   petulantly taken up, probed for my weakest point, and then flung
   into the grate like a child's toy? That's the fate of the several
   asses who put on the long-eared Lovell-livery.

   "All women are the same. Know one, know all. Aware of this, and
   too wise to let us study them successfully, Nature pretty language
   this is for you, Algy! I can do nothing but write nonsense. I am
   sick of life. I feel choked. After a month, Paris is sweet
   biscuit.

   "I have sent you the order for the money. If it were two, or
   twenty, thousand pounds, it would be the same to me.

   "I swear to heaven that my lowest cynical ideas of women, and the
   loathing with which their simply animal vagaries inspires a
   thoughtful man, are distanced and made to seem a benevolent
   criticism, by the actualities of my experience. I say that you
   cannot put faith in a woman. Even now, I do not--it's against
   reason--I do not believe that she--this Dahlia--means to go through
   with it. She is trying me. I have told her that she was my wife.
   Her self-respect--everything that keeps a woman's head up--must have
   induced her to think so. Why, she is not a fool! How can she mean
   to give herself to an ignorant country donkey? She does not: mark
   me. For her, who is a really--I may say, the most refined nature I
   have ever met, to affect this, and think of deceiving me, does not
   do credit to her wits--and she is not without her share.

   "I did once mean that she should be honourably allied to me. It's
   comforting that the act is not the wife of the intention, or I
   should now be yoked to a mere thing of the seasons and the hours--a
   creature whose 'No' to-day is the 'Yes' of to-morrow. Women of this
   cast are sure to end comfortably for themselves, they are so
   obedient to the whips of Providence.

   "But I tell you candidly, Algy, I believe she's pushing me, that she
   may see how far I will let her go. I do not permit her to play at
   this game with me." The difficulty is in teaching women that we are
   not constituted as they are, and that we are wilfully earnest, while
   they, who never can be so save under compulsion, carry it on with
   us, expecting that at a certain crisis a curtain will drop, and we
   shall take a deep breath, join hands, and exclaim, 'What an exciting
   play!'--weeping luxuriously. The actualities of life must be
   branded on their backs--you can't get their brains to apprehend
   them.

   "Poor things! they need pity. I am ready to confess I did not keep
   my promise to her. I am very sorry she has been ill. Of course,
   having no brains--nothing but sensations wherewith to combat every
   new revolution of fortune, she can't but fall ill. But I think of
   her; and I wish to God I did not. She is going to enter her own
   sphere--though, mark me, it will turn out as I say, that, when it
   comes to the crisis, there will be shrieks and astonishment that the
   curtain doesn't fall and the whole resolve itself to what they call
   a dream in our language, a farce.

   "I am astonished that there should be no letters for me. I can
   understand her not writing at first; but apparently she cherishes
   rancour. It is not like her. I can't help thinking there must be
   one letter from her, and that you keep it back. I remember that I
   told you when I left England I desired to have no letter forwarded
   to me, but I have repeatedly asked you since if there was a letter,
   and it appears to me that you have shuffled in your answer. I
   merely wish to know if there is a letter; because I am at present
   out in my study of her character. It seems monstrous that she
   should never have written! Don't you view it in that light? To be
   ready to break with me, without one good-bye!--it's gratifying, but
   I am astonished; for so gentle and tender a creature, such as I knew
   her, never existed to compare with her. Ce qui est bien la preuve
   que je ne la connaissais pas! I thought I did, which was my error.
   I have a fatal habit of trusting to my observation less than to my
   divining wit; and La Rochefoucauld is right: 'on est quelquefois un
   sot avec de l'esprit; mais on ne Pest jamais avec du jugement.'
   Well! better be deceived in a character than doubt it.

   "This will soon be over. Then back to the dear old dusky chambers,
   with the pick and the axe in the mine of law, till I strike a gold
   vein, and follow it to the woolsack. I want peace. I begin to hate
   pleading. I hope to meet Death full-wigged. By my troth, I will
   look as grimly at him as he at me. Meantime, during a vacation, I
   will give you holiday (or better, in the February days, if I can
   spare time and Equity is dispensed without my aid), dine you, and
   put you in the whirl of Paris. You deserve a holiday. Nunc est
   bibendum! You shall sing it. Tell me what you think of her
   behaviour. You are a judge of women. I think I am developing
   nerves. In fact, work is what I need--a file to bite. And send me
   also the name of this man who has made the bargain--who is to be her
   husband. Give me a description of him. It is my duty to see that
   he has principle; at least we're bound to investigate his character,
   if it's really to go on. I wonder whether you will ever perceive
   the comedy of, life. I doubt whether a man is happier when he does
   perceive it. Perhaps the fact is, that he has by that time lost his
   power of laughter; except in the case of here and there a very
   tremendous philosopher.

   "I believe that we comic creatures suffer more than your tragic
   personages. We, do you see, are always looking to be happy and
   comfortable; but in a tragedy, the doomed wretches are
   liver-complexioned from the opening act. Their laughter is the owl:
   their broadest smile is twilight. All the menacing horrors of an
   eclipse are ours, for we have a sun over us; but they are born in
   shades, with the tuck of a curtain showing light, and little can be
   taken from them; so that they find scarce any terrors in the
   inevitable final stroke. No; the comedy is painfullest. You and I,
   Algy, old bachelors, will earn the right just to chuckle. We will
   take the point of view of science, be the stage carpenters, and let
   the actors move on and off. By this, we shall learn to take a
   certain pride in the machinery. To become stage carpenter, is to
   attain to the highest rank within the reach of intellectual man.
   But your own machinery must be sound, or you can't look after that
   of the theatre. Don't over-tax thy stomach, O youth!

   "And now, farewell, my worthy ass! You have been thinking me one
   through a fair half of this my letter, so I hasten to be in advance
   of you, by calling you one. You are one: I likewise am one. We are
   all one. The universal language is hee-haw, done in a grievous
   yawn.

                  "Yours,

                    "Edward B.

   "P.S.--Don't fail to send a letter by the next post; then, go and
   see her; write again exactly what she says, and let me know the
   man's name. You will not lose a minute. Also, don't waste ink in
   putting Mrs. Lovell's name to paper: I desire not to hear anything
   of the woman."

Algernon read this letter in a profound mystification, marvelling how it
could possibly be that Edward and Mrs. Lovell had quarrelled once more,
and without meeting.

They had parted, he knew or supposed that he knew, under an engagement to
arrange the preliminaries of an alliance, when Edward should return from
France; in other words, when Edward had thrown grave-dust on a naughty
portion of his past; severing an unwise connection. Such had certainly
been Edward's view of the matter. But Mrs. Lovell had never spoken to
Algernon on that subject. She had spoken willingly and in deep sympathy
of Dahlia. She had visited her, pitied her, comforted her; and Algernon
remembered that she had looked very keen and pinched about the mouth in
alluding to Dahlia; but how she and Edward had managed to arrive at
another misunderstanding was a prodigious puzzle to him; and why, if
their engagement had snapped, each consented to let Dahlia's marriage
(which was evidently distasteful to both) go on to the conclusion of the
ceremony, he could not comprehend. There were, however, so many things in
the world that he could not comprehend, and he had grown so accustomed,
after an effort to master a difficulty, to lean his head back upon downy
ignorance, that he treated this significant letter of Edward's like a
tough lesson, and quietly put it by, together with every recommendation
it contained. For all that was practical in it, it might just as well not
have been written.

The value of the letter lies in the exhibition it presents of a rather
mark-worthy young man, who has passed through the hands of a--(what I
must call her; and in doing so, I ask pardon of all the Jack Cades of
Letters, who, in the absence of a grammatical king and a government, sit
as lords upon the English tongue) a crucible woman. She may be
inexcusable herself; but you for you to be base, for you to be cowardly,
even to betray a weakness, though it be on her behalf,--though you can
plead that all you have done is for her, yea, was partly instigated by
her,--it will cause her to dismiss you with the inexorable contempt of
Nature, when she has tried one of her creatures and found him wanting.

Margaret Lovell was of this description: a woman fashioned to do both
harm and good, and more of harm than of good; but never to sanction a
scheme of evil or blink at it in alliance with another: a woman, in
contact with whom you were soon resolved to your component elements.
Separated from a certain fascination that there was for her in Edward's
acerb wit, she saw that he was doing a dastardly thing in cold blood. We
need not examine their correspondence. In a few weeks she had contrived
to put a chasm between them as lovers. Had he remained in England, boldly
facing his own evil actions, she would have been subjugated, for however
keenly she might pierce to the true character of a man, the show of an
unflinching courage dominated her; but his departure, leaving all the
brutality to be done for him behind his back, filled this woman with a
cutting spleen. It is sufficient for some men to know that they are seen
through, in order to turn away in loathing from her whom they have
desired; and when they do thus turn away, they not uncommonly turn with a
rush of old affection to those who have generously trusted them in the
days past, and blindly thought them estimable beings.

Algernon was by no means gifted to perceive whether this was the case
with his cousin in Paris.




CHAPTER XXIX

So long as the fool has his being in the world, he will be a part of
every history, nor can I keep him from his place in a narrative that is
made to revolve more or less upon its own wheels. Algernon went to bed,
completely forgetting Edward and his own misfortunes, under the influence
of the opiate of the order for one thousand pounds, to be delivered to
him upon application. The morning found him calmly cheerful, until a
little parcel was brought to his door, together with a note from Mrs.
Lovell, explaining that the parcel contained those jewels, his precious
gifts of what she had insultingly chosen to call "esteem" for her.

Algernon took it in his hand, and thought of flinging it through the
window; but as the window happened to be open, he checked the impulse,
and sent it with great force into a corner of the room: a perfectly
fool-like proceeding, for the fool is, after his fashion, prudent, and
will never, if he can help it, do himself thorough damage, that he may
learn by it and be wiser.

"I never stand insult," he uttered, self-approvingly, and felt manlier.
"No; not even from you, ma'am," he apostrophized Mrs. Lovell's portrait,
that had no rival now upon the wall, and that gave him a sharp fight for
the preservation of his anger, so bewitching she was to see. Her not
sending up word that she wished him to come to her rendered his battle
easier.

"It looks rather like a break between us," he said. "If so, you won't
find me so obedient to your caprices, Mrs. Margaret L.; though you are a
pretty woman, and know it. Smile away. I prefer a staunch, true sort of a
woman, after all. And the colonies it must be, I begin to suspect." This
set him conjuring before his eyes the image of Rhoda, until he cried,
"I'll be hanged if the girl doesn't haunt me!" and considered the matter
with some curiosity.

He was quickly away, and across the square of Lincoln's Inn Fields to the
attorney's firm, where apparently his coming was expected, and he was
told that the money would be placed in his hands on the following day. He
then communicated with Edward, in the brief Caesarian tongue of the
telegraph: "All right. Stay. Ceremony arranged." After which, he hailed a
skimming cab, and pronouncing the word "Epsom," sank back in it, and felt
in his breast-pocket for his cigar-case, without casting one glance of
interest at the deep fit of cogitation the cabman had been thrown into by
the suddenness of the order.

"Dash'd if it ain't the very thing I went and gone and dreamed last
night," said the cabman, as he made his dispositions to commence the
journey.

Certain boys advised him to whip it away as hard as he could, and he
would come in the winner.

"Where shall I grub, sir?" the cabman asked through the little door
above, to get some knowledge of the quality of his fare.

"Eat your 'grub' on the course," said Algernon.

"Ne'er a hamper to take up nowheres, is there, sir?"

"Do you like the sight of one?"

"Well, it ain't what I object to."

"Then go fast, my man, and you will soon see plenty."

"If you took to chaffin' a bit later in the day, it'd impart more
confidence to my bosom," said the cabman; but this he said to that bosom
alone.

"Ain't no particular colours you'd like me to wear, is there? I'll get a
rosette, if you like, sir, and enter in triumph. Gives ye something to
stand by. That's always my remark, founded on observation."

"Go to the deuce! Drive on," Algernon sang out. "Red, yellow, and green."

"Lobster, ale, and salad!" said the cabman, flicking his whip; "and good
colours too. Tenpenny Nail's the horse. He's the colours I stick to." And
off he drove, envied of London urchins, as mortals would have envied a
charioteer driving visibly for Olympus.

Algernon crossed his arms, with the frown of one looking all inward.

At school this youth had hated sums. All arithmetical difficulties had
confused and sickened him. But now he worked with indefatigable industry
on an imaginary slate; put his postulate, counted probabilities, allowed
for chances, added, deducted, multiplied, and unknowingly performed
algebraic feats, till his brows were stiff with frowning, and his brain
craved for stimulant.

This necessity sent his hand to his purse, for the calling of the cab had
not been a premeditated matter. He discovered therein some half-crowns
and a sixpence, the latter of which he tossed in contempt at some boys
who were cheering the vehicles on their gallant career.

There was something desperately amusing to him in the thought that he had
not even money enough to pay the cabman, or provide for a repast. He
rollicked in his present poverty. Yesterday he had run down with a party
of young guardsmen in a very royal manner; and yesterday he had lost.
To-day he journeyed to the course poorer than many of the beggars he
would find there; and by a natural deduction, to-day he was to win.

He whistled mad waltzes to the measure of the wheels. He believed that he
had a star. He pitched his half-crowns to the turnpike-men, and sought to
propitiate Fortune by displaying a signal indifference to small change;
in which method of courting her he was perfectly serious. He absolutely
rejected coppers. They "crossed his luck." Nor can we say that he is not
an authority on this point: the Goddess certainly does not deal in
coppers.

Anxious efforts at recollection perplexed him. He could not remember
whether he had "turned his money" on looking at the last new moon. When
had he seen the last new moon, and where? A cloud obscured it; he had
forgotten. He consoled himself by cursing superstition. Tenpenny Nail was
to gain the day in spite of fortune. Algernon said this, and entrenched
his fluttering spirit behind common sense, but he found it a cold corner.
The longing for Champagne stimulant increased in fervour. Arithmetic
languished.

As he was going up the hill, the wheels were still for a moment, and
hearing "Tenpenny Nail" shouted, he put forth his head, and asked what
the cry was, concerning that horse.

"Gone lame," was the answer.

It hit the centre of his nerves, without reaching his comprehension, and
all Englishmen being equal on Epsom Downs, his stare at the man who had
spoken, and his sickly colour, exposed him to pungent remarks.

"Hullos! here's another Ninepenny--a penny short!" and similar specimens
of Epsom wit, encouraged by the winks and retorts of his driver,
surrounded him; but it was empty clamour outside. A rage of emotions
drowned every idea in his head, and when he got one clear from the mass,
it took the form of a bitter sneer at Providence, for cutting off his
last chance of reforming his conduct and becoming good. What would he not
have accomplished, that was brilliant, and beautiful, and soothing, but
for this dead set against him!

It was clear that Providence cared "not a rap," whether he won or
lost--was good or bad. One might just as well be a heathen; why not?

He jumped out of the cab (tearing his coat in the acts minor evil, but
"all of a piece," as he said), and made his way to the Ring. The
bee-swarm was thick as ever on the golden bough. Algernon heard no
curses, and began to nourish hope again, as he advanced. He began to hope
wildly that this rumour about the horse was a falsity, for there was no
commotion, no one declaiming.

He pushed to enter the roaring circle, which the demand for an
entrance-fee warned him was a privilege, and he stammered, and forgot the
gentlemanly coolness commonly distinguishing him, under one of the acuter
twinges of his veteran complaint of impecuniosity. And then the cabman
made himself heard: a civil cabman, but without directions, and uncertain
of his dinner and his pay, tolerably hot, also, from threading a crowd
after a deaf gentleman. His half-injured look restored to Algernon his
self-possession.

"Ah! there you are:--scurry away and fetch my purse out of the bottom of
the cab. I've dropped it."

On this errand, the confiding cabman retired. Holding to a gentleman's
purse is even securer than holding to a gentleman.

While Algernon was working his forefinger in his waistcoat-pocket
reflectively, a man at his elbow said, with a show of familiar
deference,--

"If it's any convenience to you, sir," and showed the rim of a gold piece
'twixt finger and thumb.

"All right," Algernon replied readily, and felt that he was known, but
tried to keep his eyes from looking at the man's face; which was a vain
effort. He took the money, nodded curtly, and passed in.

Once through the barrier, he had no time to be ashamed. He was in the
atmosphere of challenges. He heard voices, and saw men whom not to
challenge, or try a result with, was to acknowledge oneself mean, and to
abandon the manliness of life. Algernon's betting-book was soon out and
in operation. While thus engaged, he beheld faces passing and repassing
that were the promise of luncheon and a loan; and so comfortable was the
assurance thereof to him, that he laid the thought of it aside, quite in
the background, and went on betting with an easy mind.

Small, senseless bets, they merely occupied him; and winning them was
really less satisfactory than losing, which, at all events, had the merit
of adding to the bulk of his accusation against the ruling Powers unseen.

Algernon was too savage for betting when the great race was run. He
refused both at taunts and cajoleries; but Lord Suckling coming by, said
"Name your horse," and, caught unawares, Algernon named Little John, one
of the ruck, at a hazard. Lord Suckling gave him fair odds, asking: "In
tens?--fifties?"

"Silver," shrugged Algernon, implacable toward Fortune; and the kindly
young nobleman nodded, and made allowance for his ill-temper and want of
spirit, knowing the stake he had laid on the favourite.

Little John startled the field by coming in first at a canter.

"Men have committed suicide for less than this" said Algernon within his
lips, and a modest expression of submission to fate settled on his
countenance. He stuck to the Ring till he was haggard with fatigue. His
whole nature cried out for Champagne, and now he burst away from that
devilish circle, looking about for Lord Suckling and a hamper. Food and a
frothing drink were all that he asked from Fortune. It seemed to him that
the concourse on the downs shifted in a restless way.

"What's doing, I wonder?" he thought aloud.

"Why, sir, the last race ain't generally fashionable," said his cabman,
appearing from behind his shoulder. "Don't you happen to be peckish,
sir?--'cause, luck or no luck, that's my case. I couldn't see, your
purse, nowheres."

"Confound you! how you hang about me! What do you want?" Algernon cried;
and answered his own question, by speeding the cabman to a booth with
what money remained to him, and appointing a place of meeting for the
return. After which he glanced round furtively to make sure that he was
not in view of the man who had lent him the sovereign. It became evident
that the Downs were flowing back to London.

He hurried along the lines of carriages, all getting into motion. The
ghastly conviction overtook him that he was left friendless, to starve.
Wherever he turned, he saw strangers and empty hampers, bottles, straw,
waste paper--the ruins of the feast: Fate's irony meantime besetting him
with beggars, who swallowed his imprecations as the earnest of coming
charity in such places.

At last, he was brought almost to sigh that he might see the man who had
lent him the sovereign, and his wish was hardly formed, when Nicodemus
Sedgett approached, waving a hat encircled by preposterous wooden
figures, a trifle less lightly attired than the ladies of the ballet, and
as bold in the matter of leg as the female fashion of the period.

Algernon eyed the lumpy-headed, heavy-browed rascal with what disgust he
had left in him, for one who came as an instrument of the Fates to help
him to some poor refreshment. Sedgett informed him that he had never had
such fun in his life.

"Just 'fore matrimony," he communicated in a dull whisper, "a fellow
ought to see a bit o' the world, I says--don't you, sir? and this has
been rare sport, that it has! Did ye find your purse, sir? Never mind
'bout that ther' pound. I'll lend you another, if ye like. How sh'll it
be? Say the word."

Algernon was meditating, apparently on a remote subject. He nodded
sharply.

"Yes. Call at my chambers to-morrow."

Another sovereign was transferred to him: but Sedgett would not be shaken
off.

"I just wanted t' have a bit of a talk with you," he spoke low.

"Hang it! I haven't eaten all day," snapped the irritable young
gentleman, fearful now of being seen in the rascal's company.

"You come along to the jolliest booth--I'll show it to you," said
Sedgett, and lifted one leg in dancing attitude. "Come along, sir: the
jolliest booth I ever was in, dang me if it ain't! Ale and music--them's
my darlings!" the wretch vented his slang. "And I must have a talk with
you. I'll stick to you. I'm social when I'm jolly, that I be: and I don't
know a chap on these here downs. Here's the pint: Is all square? Am I t'
have the cash in cash counted down, I asks? And is it to be before, or is
it to be after, the ceremony? There! bang out! say, yes or no."

Algernon sent him to perdition with infinite heartiness, but he was dry,
dispirited, and weak, and he walked on, Sedgett accompanying him. He
entered a booth, and partook of ale and ham, feeling that he was in the
dregs of calamity. Though the ale did some service in reviving, it did
not cheer him, and he had a fit of moral objection to Sedgett's
discourse.

Sedgett took his bluntness as a matter to be endured for the honour of
hob-a-nobbing with a gentleman. Several times he recurred to the theme
which he wanted, as he said, to have a talk upon.

He related how he had courted the young woman, "bashful-like," and had
been so; for she was a splendid young woman; not so handsome now, as she
used to be when he had seen her in the winter: but her illness had pulled
her down and made her humble: they had cut her hair during the fever,
which had taken her pride clean out of her; and when he had put the
question to her on the evening of last Sunday, she had gone into a sort
of faint, and he walked away with her affirmative locked up in his
breast-pocket, and was resolved always to treat her well--which he swore
to.

"Married, and got the money, and the lease o' my farm disposed of, I'm
off to Australia and leave old England behind me, and thank ye, mother,
thank ye! and we shan't meet again in a hurry. And what sort o' song I'm
to sing for 'England is my nation, ain't come across me yet. Australia's
such a precious big world; but that'll come easy in time. And there'll I
farm, and damn all you gentlemen, if you come anigh me."

The eyes of the fellow were fierce as he uttered this; they were rendered
fierce by a peculiar blackish flush that came on his brows and
cheek-bones; otherwise, the yellow about the little brown dot in the
centre of the eyeball had not changed; but the look was unmistakably
savage, animal, and bad. He closed the lids on them, and gave a sort of
churlish smile immediately afterward.

"Harmony's the game. You act fair, I act fair. I've kept to the
condition. She don't know anything of my whereabouts--res'dence, I mean;
and thinks I met you in her room for the first time. That's the truth,
Mr. Blancove. And thinks me a sheepish chap, and I'm that, when I'm along
wi' her. She can't make out how I come to call at her house and know her
first. Gives up guessing, I suppose, for she's quiet about it; and I
pitch her tales about Australia, and life out there. I've got her to
smile, once or twice. She'll turn her hand to making cheeses, never you
fear. Only, this I say. I must have the money. It's a thousand and a
bargain. No thousand, and no wife for me. Not that I don't stand by the
agreement. I'm solid."

Algernon had no power of encountering a human eye steadily, or he would
have shown the man with a look how repulsive he was to a gentleman. His
sensations grew remorseful, as if he were guilty of handing a victim to
the wretch.

But the woman followed her own inclination, did she not? There was no
compulsion: she accepted this man. And if she could do that, pity was
wasted on her!

So thought he: and so the world would think of the poor forlorn soul
striving to expiate her fault, that her father and sister might be at
peace, without shame.

Algernon signified to Sedgett that the agreement was fixed and
irrevocable on his part.

Sedgett gulped some ale.

"Hands on it," he said, and laid his huge hand open across the table.

This was too much.

"My word must satisfy you," said Algernon, rising.

"So it shall. So it do," returned Sedgett, rising with him. "Will you
give it in writing?"

"I won't."

"That's blunt. Will you come and have a look at a sparring-match in yond'
brown booth, sir?"

"I am going back to London."

"London and the theayter that's the fun, now, ain't it!" Sedgett laughed.

Algernon discerned his cabman and the conveyance ready, and beckoned him.

"Perhaps, sir," said Sedgett, "if I might make so bold--I don't want to
speak o' them sovereigns--but I've got to get back too, and cash is run
low. D' ye mind, sir? Are you kind-hearted?"

A constitutional habit of servility to his creditor when present before
him signalized Algernon. He detested the man, but his feebleness was
seized by the latter question, and he fancied he might, on the road to
London, convey to Sedgett's mind that it would be well to split that
thousand, as he had previously devised.

"Jump in," he said.

When Sedgett was seated, Algernon would have been glad to walk the
distance to London to escape from the unwholesome proximity. He took the
vacant place, in horror of it. The man had hitherto appeared respectful;
and in Dahlia's presence he had seemed a gentle big fellow with a
reverent, affectionate heart. Sedgett rallied him.

"You've had bad luck--that's wrote on your hatband. Now, if you was a
woman, I'd say, tak' and go and have a peroose o' your Bible. That's what
my young woman does; and by George! it's just like medicine to her--that
'tis! I've read out to her till I could ha' swallowed two quart o' beer
at a gulp--I was that mortal thirsty. It don't somehow seem to improve
men. It didn't do me no good. There was I, cursin' at the bother, down in
my boots, like, and she with her hands in a knot, staring the fire out o'
count'nance. They're weak, poor sort o' things."

The intolerable talk of the ruffian prompted Algernon to cry out, for
relief,--

"A scoundrel like you must be past any good to be got from reading his
Bible."

Sedgett turned his dull brown eyes on him, the thick and hateful flush of
evil blood informing them with detestable malignity.

"Come; you be civil, if you're going to be my companion," he said. "I
don't like bad words; they don't go down my windpipe. 'Scoundrel 's a
name I've got a retort for, and if it hadn't been you, and you a
gentleman, you'd have had it spanking hot from the end o' my fist.
Perhaps you don't know what sort of a arm I've got? Just you feel that
ther' muscle."

He doubled his arm, the knuckles of the fist toward Algernon's face.

"Down with it, you dog!" cried Algernon, crushing his hat as he started
up.

"It'll come on your nose, if I downs with it, my lord," said Sedgett.
"You've what they Londoners calls 'bonneted yourself.'"

He pulled Algernon by the coat-tail into his seat.

"Stop!" Algernon shouted to the cabman.

"Drive ahead!" roared Sedgett.

This signal of a dissension was heard along the main street of Epsom, and
re-awakened the flagging hilarity of the road.

Algernon shrieked his commands; Sedgett thundered his. They tussled, and
each having inflicted an unpleasant squeeze on the other, they came apart
by mutual consent, and exchanged half-length blows. Overhead, the
cabman--not merely a cabman, but an individual--flicked the flanks of his
horse, and cocked his eye and head in answer to gesticulations from
shop-doors and pavement.

"Let 'em fight it out, I'm impartial," he remarked; and having lifted his
little observing door, and given one glance, parrot-wise, below, he shut
away the troubled prospect of those mortals, and drove along benignly.

Epsom permitted it; but Ewell contained a sturdy citizen, who, smoking
his pipe under his eaves, contemplative of passers-by, saw strife rushing
on like a meteor. He raised the waxed end of his pipe, and with an
authoritative motion of his head at the same time, pointed out the case
to a man in a donkey-cart, who looked behind, saw pugnacity upon wheels,
and manoeuvred a docile and wonderfully pretty-stepping little donkey in
such a manner that the cabman was fain to pull up.

The combatants jumped into the road.

"That's right, gentlemen; I don't want to spile sport," said the donkey's
man. "O' course you ends your Epsom-day with spirit."

"There's sunset on their faces," said the cabman. "Would you try a
by-lane, gentlemen?"

But now the donkey's man had inspected the figures of the antagonistic
couple.

"Taint fair play," he said to Sedgett. "You leave that gentleman alone,
you, sir?"

The man with the pipe came up.

"No fighting," he observed. "We ain't going to have our roads disgraced.
It shan't be said Englishmen don't know how to enjoy themselves without
getting drunk and disorderly. You drop your fists."

The separation had to be accomplished by violence, for Algernon's blood
was up.

A crowd was not long in collecting, which caused a stoppage of vehicles
of every description.

A gentleman leaned from an open carriage to look at the fray critically,
and his companion stretching his neck to do likewise, "Sedgett!" burst
from his lips involuntarily.

The pair of original disputants (for there were many by this time) turned
their heads simultaneously toward the carriage.

"Will you come on?" Sedgett roared, but whether to Algernon, or to one of
the gentlemen, or one of the crowd, was indefinite. None responding, he
shook with ox-like wrath, pushed among shoulders, and plunged back to his
seat, making the cabman above bound and sway, and the cab-horse to start
and antic.

Greatly to the amazement of the spectators, the manifest gentleman (by
comparison) who had recently been at a pummelling match with him, and
bore the stains of it, hung his head, stepped on the cab, and suffered
himself to be driven away.

"Sort of a 'man-and-wife' quarrel," was the donkey's man's comment.
"There's something as corks 'em up, and something uncorks 'em; but what
that something is, I ain't, nor you ain't, man enough to inform the
company."

He rubbed his little donkey's nose affectionately.

"Any gentleman open to a bet I don't overtake that ere Hansom within
three miles o' Ewell?" he asked, as he took the rein.

But his little donkey's quality was famous in the neighbourhood.

"Come on, then," he said; "and show what you can do, without emilation,
Master Tom."

Away the little donkey trotted.




CHAPTER XXX

Those two in the open carriage, one of whom had called out Sedgett's
name, were Robert and Major Waring. When the cab had flown by, they fell
back into their seats, and smoked; the original stipulation for the day
having been that no harassing matter should be spoken of till nightfall.

True to this, Robert tried to think hard on the scene of his recent
enjoyment. Horses were to him what music is to a poet, and the glory of
the Races he had witnessed was still quick in heart, and partly
counteracted his astonishment at the sight of his old village enemy in
company with Algernon Blancove.

It was not astonishing at all to him that they should have quarrelled and
come to blows; for he knew Sedgett well, and the imperative necessity for
fighting him, if only to preserve a man's self-respect and the fair
division of peace, when once he had been allowed to get upon terms
sufficiently close to assert his black nature; but how had it come about?
How was it that a gentleman could consent to appear publicly with such a
fellow? He decided that it meant something, and something ominous--but
what? Whom could it affect? Was Algernon Blancove such a poor creature
that, feeling himself bound by certain dark dealings with Sedgett to keep
him quiet, he permitted the bullying dog to hang to his coat-tail? It
seemed improbable that any young gentleman should be so weak, but it
might be the case; and "if so," thought Robert, "and I let him know I
bear him no ill-will for setting Sedgett upon me, I may be doing him a
service."

He remembered with pain Algernon's glance of savage humiliation upward,
just before he turned to follow Sedgett into the cab; and considered that
he ought in kindness to see him and make him comfortable by apologizing,
as if he himself had no complaint to make.

He resolved to do it when the opportunity should come. Meantime, what on
earth brought them together?

"How white the hedges are!" he said.

"There's a good deal of dust," Major Waring replied.

"I wasn't aware that cabs came to the races."

"They do, you see."

Robert perceived that Percy meant to fool him if he attempted a breach of
the bond; but he longed so much for Percy's opinion of the strange
alliance between Sedgett and Algernon Blancove, that at any cost he was
compelled to say, "I can't get to the bottom of that."

"That squabble in the road?" said Percy. "We shall see two or three more
before we reach home."

"No. What's the meaning of a gentleman consorting with a blackguard?"
Robert persisted.

"One or the other has discovered an assimilation, I suppose," Percy gave
answer. "That's an odd remark on returning from Epsom. Those who jump
into the same pond generally come out the same colour."

Robert spoke low.

"Has it anything to do with the poor girl, do you think?"

"I told you I declined to think till we were home again. Confound it,
man, have you no idea of a holiday?"

Robert puffed his tobacco-smoke.

"Let's talk of Mrs. Lovell," he said.

"That's not a holiday for me," Percy murmured but Robert's mind was too
preoccupied to observe the tone, and he asked,--

"Is she to be trusted to keep her word faithfully this time?"

"Come," said Percy, "we haven't betted to-day. I'll bet you she will, if
you like. Will you bet against it?"

"I won't. I can't nibble at anything. Betting's like drinking."

"But you can take a glass of wine. This sort of bet is much the same.
However, don't; for you would lose."

"There," said Robert; "I've heard of being angry with women for
fickleness, changeableness, and all sorts of other things. She's a lady I
couldn't understand being downright angry with, and here's the reason--it
ain't a matter of reason at all--she fascinates me. I do, I declare,
clean forget Rhoda; I forget the girl, if only I see Mrs. Lovell at a
distance. How's that? I'm not a fool, with nonsensical fancies of any
kind. I know what loving a woman is; and a man in my position might be
ass enough to--all sorts of things. It isn't that; it's fascination. I'm
afraid of her. If she talks to me, I feel something like having gulped a
bottle of wine. Some women you have a respect for; some you like or you
love; some you despise: with her, I just feel I'm intoxicated."

Major Waring eyed him steadily. He said: "I'll unriddle it, if I can, to
your comprehension. She admires you for what you are, and she lets you
see it; I dare say she's not unwilling that you should see it. She has a
worship for bravery: it's a deadly passion with her."

Robert put up a protesting blush of modesty, as became him. "Then why, if
she does me the honour to think anything of me, does she turn against
me?"

"Ah! now you go deeper. She is giving you what assistance she can; at
present: be thankful, if you can be satisfied with her present doings.
Perhaps I'll answer the other question by-and-by. Now we enter London,
and our day is over. How did you like it?"

Robert's imagination rushed back to the downs.

"The race was glorious. I wish we could go at that pace in life; I should
have a certainty of winning. How miserably dull the streets look; and the
people creep along--they creep, and seem to like it. Horseback's my
element."

They drove up to Robert's lodgings, where, since the Winter, he had been
living austerely and recklessly; exiled by his sensitiveness from his two
homes, Warbeach and Wrexby; and seeking over London for Dahlia--a
pensioner on his friend's bounty; and therein had lain the degrading
misery to a man of his composition. Often had he thought of enlisting
again, and getting drafted to a foreign station. Nothing but the
consciousness that he was subsisting on money not his own would have kept
him from his vice. As it was, he had lived through the months between
Winter and Spring, like one threading his way through the tortuous
lengths of a cavern; never coming to the light, but coming upon absurd
mishaps in his effort to reach it. His adventures in London partook
somewhat of the character of those in Warbeach, minus the victim; for
whom two or three gentlemen in public thoroughfares had been taken. These
misdemeanours, in the face of civil society, Robert made no mention of in
his letters to Percy.

But there was light now, though at first it gave but a faint glimmer, in
a lady's coloured envelope, lying on the sitting-room table. Robert
opened it hurriedly, and read it; seized Dahlia's address, with a brain
on fire, and said:

"It's signed 'Margaret Lovell.' This time she calls me 'Dear Sir.'"

"She could hardly do less," Percy remarked.

"I know: but there is a change in her. There's a summer in her writing
now. She has kept her word, Percy. She's the dearest lady in the world. I
don't ask why she didn't help me before."

"You acknowledge the policy of mild measures," said Major Waring.

"She's the dearest lady in the world," Robert repeated. He checked his
enthusiasm. "Lord in heaven! what an evening I shall have."

The thought of his approaching interview with Dahlia kept him dumb.

As they were parting in the street, Major Waring said, "I will be here at
twelve. Let me tell you this, Robert: she is going to be married; say
nothing to dissuade her; it's the best she can do; take a manly view of
it. Good-bye."

Robert was but slightly affected by the intelligence. His thoughts were
on Dahlia as he had first seen her, when in her bloom, and the sister of
his darling; now miserable; a thing trampled to earth! With him, pity for
a victim soon became lost in rage at the author of the wrong, and as he
walked along he reflected contemptuously on his feeble efforts to avenge
her at Warbeach. She lived in a poor row of cottages, striking off from
one of the main South-western suburb roads, not very distant from his own
lodgings, at which he marvelled, as at a cruel irony. He could not
discern the numbers, and had to turn up several of the dusky little
strips of garden to read the numbers on the doors. A faint smell of lilac
recalled the country and old days, and some church bells began ringing.
The number of the house where he was to find Dahlia was seven. He was at
the door of the house next to it, when he heard voices in the garden
beside him.

A man said, "Then I have your answer?"

A woman said, "Yes; yes."

"You will not trust to my pledged honour?"

"Pardon me; not that. I will not live in disgrace."

"When I promise, on my soul, that the moment I am free I will set you
right before the world?"

"Oh! pardon me."

"You will?"

"No; no! I cannot."

"You choose to give yourself to an obscure dog, who'll ill-treat you, and
for whom you don't care a pin's-head; and why? that you may be fenced
from gossip, and nothing more. I thought you were a woman above that kind
of meanness. And this is a common countryman. How will you endure that
kind of life? You were made for elegance and happiness: you shall have
it. I met you before your illness, when you would not listen to me: I met
you after. I knew you at once. Am I changed? I swear to you I have
dreamed of you ever since, and love you. Be as faded as you like; be
hideous, if you like; but come with me. You know my name, and what I am.
Twice I have followed you, and found your name and address; twice I have
written to you, and made the same proposal. And you won't trust to my
honour? When I tell you I love you tenderly? When I give you my solemn
assurance that you shall not regret it? You have been deceived by one
man: why punish me? I know--I feel you are innocent and good. This is the
third time that you have permitted me to speak to you: let it be final.
Say you will trust yourself to me--trust in my honour. Say it shall be
to-morrow. Yes; say the word. To-morrow. My sweet creature--do!"

The man spoke earnestly, but a third person and extraneous hearer could
hardly avoid being struck by the bathetic conclusion. At least, in tone
it bordered on a fall; but the woman did not feel it so.

She replied: "You mean kindly to me, sir. I thank you indeed, for I am
very friendless. Oh! pardon me: I am quite--quite determined. Go--pray,
forget me."

This was Dahlia's voice.

Robert was unconscious of having previously suspected it. Heartily
ashamed of letting his ears be filled with secret talk, he went from the
garden and crossed the street.

He knew this to be one of the temptations of young women in London.

Shortly after, the man came through the iron gateway of the garden. He
passed under lamplight, and Robert perceived him to be a gentleman in
garb.

A light appeared in the windows of the house. Now that he had heard her
voice, the terrors of his interview were dispersed, and he had only plain
sadness to encounter. He knocked at the door quietly. There was a long
delay after he had sent in his name; but finally admission was given.

"If I had loved her!" groaned Robert, before he looked on her; but when
he did look on her, affectionate pity washed the selfish man out of him.
All these false sensations, peculiar to men, concerning the soiled purity
of woman, the lost innocence; the brand of shame upon her, which are
commonly the foul sentimentalism of such as can be too eager in the chase
of corruption when occasion suits, and are another side of pruriency, not
absolutely foreign to the best of us in our youth--all passed away from
him in Dahlia's presence.

The young man who can look on them we call fallen women with a noble eye,
is to my mind he that is most nobly begotten of the race, and likeliest
to be the sire of a noble line. Robert was less than he; but Dahlia's
aspect helped him to his rightful manliness. He saw that her worth
survived.

The creature's soul had put no gloss upon her sin. She had sinned, and
her suffering was manifest.

She had chosen to stand up and take the scourge of God; after which the
stones cast by men are not painful.

By this I mean that she had voluntarily stripped her spirit bare of
evasion, and seen herself for what she was; pleading no excuse. His
scourge is the Truth, and she had faced it.

Innumerable fanciful thoughts, few of them definite, beset the mind at
interviews such as these; but Robert was distinctly impressed by her
look. It was as that of one upon the yonder shore. Though they stood
close together, he had the thought of their being separate--a gulf
between.

The colourlessness of her features helped to it, and the odd little
close-fitting white linen cap which she wore to conceal the
stubborn-twisting clipped curls of her shorn head, made her unlike women
of our world. She was dressed in black up to the throat. Her eyes were
still luminously blue, and she let them dwell on Robert one gentle
instant, giving him her hand humbly.

"Dahlia!--my dear sister, I wish I could say; but the luck's against me,"
Robert began.

She sat, with her fingers locked together in her lap, gazing forward on
the floor, her head a little sideways bent.

"I believe," he went on--"I haven't heard, but I believe Rhoda is well."

"She and father are well, I know," said Dahlia.

Robert started: "Are you in communication with them?"

She shook her head. "At the end of some days I shall see them."

"And then perhaps you'll plead my cause, and make me thankful to you for
life, Dahlia?"

"Rhoda does not love you."

"That's the fact, if a young woman's to be trusted to know her own mind,
in the first place, and to speak it, in the second."

Dahlia, closed her lips. The long-lined underlip was no more very red.
Her heart knew that it was not to speak of himself that he had come; but
she was poor-witted, through weakness of her blood, and out of her own
immediate line of thought could think neither far nor deep. He
entertained her with talk of his notions of Rhoda, finishing:

"But at the end of a week you will see her, and I dare say she'll give
you her notions of me. Dahlia! how happy this'll make them. I do say
thank God! from my soul, for this."

She pressed her hands in her lap, trembling. "If you will, please, not
speak of it, Mr. Robert."

"Say only you do mean it, Dahlia. You mean to let them see you?"

She shivered out a "Yes."

"That's right. Because, a father and a sister--haven't they a claim?
Think a while. They've had a terrible time. And it's true that you've
consented to a husband, Dahlia? I'm glad, if it is; and he's good and
kind. Right soul-glad I am."

While he was speaking, her eyelids lifted and her eyes became fixed on
him in a stony light of terror, like a creature in anguish before her
executioner. Then again her eyelids dropped. She had not moved from her
still posture.

"You love him?" he asked, in some wonderment.

She gave no answer.

"Don't you care for him?"

There was no reply.

"Because, Dahlia, if you do not I know I have no right to fancy you do
not. How is it? Tell me. Marriage is an awful thing, where there's no
love. And this man, whoever he is--is he in good circumstances? I
wouldn't speak of him; but, you see, I must, as your friend--and I'm
that. Come: he loves you? Of course he does. He has said so. I believe
it. And he's a man you can honour and esteem? You wouldn't consent
without, I'm sure. What makes me anxious--I look on you as my sister,
whether Rhoda will have it so or not; I'm anxious because--I'm anxious it
should be over, for then Rhoda will be proud of the faith she had in you,
and it will lighten the old man's heart."

Once more the inexplicable frozen look struck over him from her opened
eyes, as if one of the minutes of Time had yawned to show him its deep,
mute, tragic abyss, and was extinguished.

"When does it take place, Dahlia?"

Her long underlip, white almost as the row of teeth it revealed, hung
loose.

"When?" he asked, leaning forward to hear, and the word was "Saturday,"
uttered with a feeble harshness, not like the gentle voice of Dahlia.

"This coming Saturday?"

"No."

"Saturday week?"

She fell into a visible trembling.

"You named the day?"

He pushed for an indication of cheerful consent to the act she was about
to commit, or of reluctance.

Possibly she saw this, for now she answered, "I did." The sound was deep
in her throat.

"Saturday week," said Robert. "I feel to the man as a brother, already.
Do you live--you'll live in the country?"

"Abroad."

"Not in Old England? I'm sorry for that. But--well! Things must be as
they're ordered. Heigho! I've got to learn it."

Dahlia smiled kindly.

"Rhoda will love you. She is firm when she loves."

"When she loves. Where's the consolation to me?"

"Do you think she loves me as much--as much"

"As much as ever? She loves her sister with all her heart--all, for I
haven't a bit of it."

"It is because," said Dahlia slowly, "it is because she thinks I am--"

Here the poor creature's bosom heaved piteously.

"What has she said of me? I wish her to have blamed me--it is less pain."

"Listen," said Robert. "She does not, and couldn't blame you, for it's a
sort of religion with her to believe no wrong of you. And the reason why
she hates me is, that I, knowing something more of the world, suspected,
and chose to let her know it--I said it, in fact--that you had been
deceived by a--But this isn't the time to abuse others. She would have
had me, if I had thought proper to think as she thinks, or play
hypocrite, and pretend to. I'll tell you openly, Dahlia; your father
thinks the worst. Ah! you look the ghost again. It's hard for you to
hear, but you give me a notion of having got strength to hear it. It's
your father's way to think the worst. Now, when you can show him your
husband, my dear, he'll lift his head. He's old English. He won't dream
of asking questions. He'll see a brave and honest young man who must love
you, or--he does love you, that's settled. Your father'll shake his hand,
and as for Rhoda, she'll triumph. The only person to speak out to, is the
man who marries you, and that you've done."

Robert looked the interrogation he did not utter.

"I have," said Dahlia.

"Good: if I may call him brother, some day, all the better for me. Now,
you won't leave England the day you're married."

"Soon. I pray that it may be soon."

"Yes; well, on that morning, I'll have your father and Rhoda at my
lodgings, not wide from here: if I'd only known it earlier!--and you and
your husband shall come there and join us. It'll be a happy meeting at
last."

Dahlia stopped her breathing.

"Will you see Rhoda?"

"I'll go to her to-morrow, if you like."

"If I might see her, just as I am leaving England! not before."

"That's not generous," said Robert.

"Isn't it?" she asked like a child.

"Fancy!--to see you she's been longing for, and the ship that takes you
off, perhaps everlastingly, as far as this world's concerned!"

"Mr. Robert, I do not wish to deceive my sister. Father need not be
distressed. Rhoda shall know. I will not be guilty of falsehoods any
more--no more! Will you go to her? Tell her--tell Rhoda what I am. Say I
have been ill. It will save her from a great shock."

She covered her eyes.

"I said in all my letters that my husband was a gentleman."

It was her first openly penitential utterance in his presence, and her
cheeks were faintly reddened. It may have been this motion of her blood
which aroused the sunken humanity within her; her heart leaped, and she
cried "I can see her as I am, I can. I thought it impossible. Oh! I can.
Will she come to me? My sister is a Christian and forgives. Oh! let me
see her. And go to her, dear Mr. Robert, and ask her--tell her all, and
ask her if I may be spared, and may work at something--anything, for my
livelihood near my sister. It is difficult for women to earn money, but I
think I can. I have done so since my illness. I have been in the hospital
with brain fever. He was lodging in the house with me before. He found me
at the hospital. When I came out, he walked with me to support me: I was
very weak. He read to me, and then asked me to marry him. He asked again.
I lay in bed one night, and with my eyes open, I saw the dangers of
women, and the trouble of my father and sister; and pits of wickedness. I
saw like places full of snakes. I had such a yearning for protection. I
gave him my word I would be his wife, if he was not ashamed of a wife
like me. I wished to look once in father's face. I had fancied that Rhoda
would spurn me, when she discovered my falsehood. She--sweet dear! would
she ever? Go to her. Say, I do not love any man. I am heart-dead. I have
no heart except for her. I cannot love a husband. He is good, and it is
kind: but, oh! let me be spared. His face!--"

She pressed her hands tight into the hollow of her eyes.

"No; it can't be meant. Am I very ungrateful? This does not seem to be
what God orders. Only if this must be! only if it must be! If my sister
cannot look on me without! He is good, and it is unselfish to take a
moneyless, disgraced creature: but, my misery!--If my sister will see me,
without my doing this!--Go to her, Mr. Robert. Say, Dahlia was false, and
repents, and has worked with her needle to subsist, and can, and will,
for her soul strives to be clean. Try to make her understand. If Rhoda
could love you, she would know. She is locked up--she is only ideas. My
sweet is so proud. I love her for her pride, if she will only let me
creep to her feet, kiss her feet. Dear Mr. Robert, help me! help me! I
will do anything she says. If she says I am to marry him, I will. Don't
mind my tears--they mean nothing now. Tell my dear, I will obey her. I
will not be false any more to her. I wish to be quite stripped. And Rhoda
may know me, and forgive me, if she can. And--Oh! if she thinks, for
father's sake, I ought, I will submit and speak the words; I will; I am
ready. I pray for mercy."

Robert sat with his fist at his temples, in a frowning meditation.

Had she declared her reluctance to take the step, in the first moments of
their interview, he might have been ready to support her: but a project
fairly launched becomes a reality in the brain--a thing once spoken of
attracts like a living creature, and does not die voluntarily. Robert now
beheld all that was in its favour, and saw nothing but flighty flimsy
objections to it. He was hardly moved by her unexpected outburst.

Besides, there was his own position in the case. Rhoda would smile on
him, if he brought Dahlia to her, and brought her happy in the world's
eye. It will act as a sort of signal for general happiness. But if he had
to go and explain matters base and mournful to her, there would be no
smile on her face, and not much gratitude in her breast. There would be
none for a time, certainly. Proximity to her faded sister made him
conceive her attainable, and thrice precious by contrast.

He fixed his gaze on Dahlia, and the perfect refinement of her simplicity
caused him to think that she might be aware of an inappropriateness in
the contemplated union.

"Is he a clumsy fellow? I mean, do you read straight off that he has no
pretension to any manners of a gentleman--nothing near it?"

To this question, put with hesitation by Robert, Dahlia made answer, "I
respect him."

She would not strengthen her prayer by drawing the man's portrait.
Speedily she forgot how the doing so would in any way have strengthened
her prayer. The excitement had left her brain dull. She did little more
than stare mildly, and absently bend her head, while Robert said that he
would go to Rhoda on the morrow, and speak seriously with her.

"But I think I can reckon her ideas will side with mine, that it is to
your interest, my dear, to make your feelings come round warm to a man
you can respect, and who offers you a clear path," he said.

Whereat Dahlia quietly blinked her eyes.

When he stood up, she rose likewise.

"Am I to take a kiss to Rhoda?" he said, and seeing her answer, bent his
forehead, to which she put her lips.

"And now I must think all night long about the method of transferring it.
Good-bye, Dahlia. You shall hear from your sister the morning after
to-morrow. Good-bye!"

He pressed her hand, and went to the door.

"There's nothing I can do for you, Dahlia?"

"Not anything."

"God bless you, my dear!"

Robert breathed with the pleasant sense of breathing, when he was again
in the street. Amazement, that what he had dreaded so much should be so
easily over, set him thinking, in his fashion, on the marvels of life,
and the naturalness in the aspect of all earthly things when you look at
them with your eyes.

But in the depths of his heart there was disquiet.

"It's the best she can do; she can do no better," he said; and said it
more frequently than it needed by a mind established in the conviction.
Gradually he began to feel that certain things seen with the eyes,
natural as they may then appear and little terrible, leave distinct,
solid, and grave impressions. Something of what our human tragedy may
show before high heaven possessed him. He saw it bare of any sentiment,
in the person of the girl Dahlia. He could neither put a halo of
imagination about her, nor could he conceive one degraded thought of the
creature. She stood a naked sorrow, haunting his brain.

And still he continued saying, "It's the best she can do: it's best for
all. She can do nothing better."

He said it, unaware that he said it in self-defence.

The pale nun-like ghostly face hung before him, stronger in outline the
farther time widened between him and that suffering flesh.




CHAPTER XXXI

The thousand pounds were in Algernon's hands at last. He had made his
escape from Boyne's Bank early in the afternoon, that he might obtain the
cheque and feel the money in his pocket before that day's sun was
extinguished. There was a note for five hundred; four notes for a hundred
severally; and two fifties. And all had come to him through the mere
writing down of his name as a recipient of the sum!

It was enough to make one in love with civilization. Money, when it is
once in your pocket, seems to have come there easily, even if you have
worked for it; but if you have done no labour whatever, and still find it
there, your sensations (supposing you to be a butterfly youth--the
typical child of a wealthy country) exult marvellously, and soar above
the conditions of earth.

He knew the very features of the notes. That gallant old Five Hundred,
who might have been a Thousand, but that he had nobly split himself into
centurions and skirmishers, stood in his imaginative contemplation like a
grand white-headed warrior, clean from the slaughter and in
court-ruffles--say, Blucher at the court of the Waterloo Regent. The
Hundreds were his Generals; the Fifties his captains; and each one was
possessed of unlimited power of splitting himself into serviceable
regiments, at the call of his lord, Algernon.

He scarcely liked to make the secret confession that it was the largest
sum he had ever as yet carried about; but, as it heightened his pleasure,
he did confess it for half an instant. Five Hundred in the bulk he had
never attained to. He felt it as a fortification against every mishap in
life.

To a young man commonly in difficulties with regard to the paying of his
cabman, and latterly the getting of his dinner, the sense of elevation
imparted by the sum was intoxicating. But, thinking too much of the Five
Hundred waxed dangerous for the fifties; it dwarfed them to such
insignificance that it made them lose their self-respect. So, Algernon,
pursuing excellent tactics, set his mind upon some stray shillings that
he had a remainder of five pounds borrowed from old Anthony, when he
endeavoured to obtain repayment of the one pound and interest dating from
the night at the theatre. Algernon had stopped his mouth on that point,
as well as concerning his acquaintance with Dahlia, by immediately
attempting to borrow further, whenever Anthony led the way for a word in
private. A one-pound creditor had no particular terrors for him, and he
manoeuvred the old man neatly, saying, as previously, "Really, I don't
know the young person you allude to: I happened to meet her, or some one
like her, casually," and dropping his voice, "I'm rather short--what do
you think? Could you?--a trifling accommodation?" from which Anthony
fled.

But on the day closing the Epsom week he beckoned Anthony secretly to
follow him out of the office, and volunteered to give news that he had
just heard of Dahlia.

"Oh," said Anthony, "I've seen her."

"I haven't," said Algernon, "upon my honour."

"Yes, I've seen her, sir, and sorry to hear her husband's fallen a bit
low." Anthony touched his pocket. "What they calls 'nip' tides, ain't
it?"

Algernon sprang a compliment under him, which sent the vain old fellow
up, whether he would or not, to the effect that Anthony's tides were not
subject to lunar influence.

"Now, Mr. Blancove, you must change them notions o' me. I don't say I
shouldn't be richer if I'd got what's owing to me."

"You'd have to be protected; you'd be Bullion on two legs," said
Algernon, always shrewd in detecting a weakness. "You'd have to go about
with sentries on each side, and sleep in an iron safe!"

The end of the interview was a visit to the public-house, and the
transferring of another legal instrument from Algernon to Anthony. The
latter departed moaning over his five pounds ten shillings in paper; the
former rejoicing at his five pounds in gold. That day was Saturday. On
Monday, only a few shillings of the five pounds remained; but they were
sufficient to command a cab, and, if modesty in dining was among the
prescriptions for the day, a dinner. Algernon was driven to the West.

He remembered when he had plunged in the midst of the fashionable
whirlpool, having felt reckless there formerly, but he had become
remarkably sedate when he stepped along the walks. A certain equipage, or
horse, was to his taste, and once he would have said: "That's the thing
for me;" being penniless. Now, on the contrary, he reckoned the possible
cost, grudgingly, saying "Eh?" to himself, and responding "No," faintly,
and then more positively, "Won't do."

He was by no means acting as one on a footing of equality with the people
he beholds. A man who is ready to wager a thousand pounds that no other
man present has that amount in his pocket, can hardly feel unequal to his
company.

Charming ladies on horseback cantered past. "Let them go," he thought.
Yesterday, the sight of one would have set him dreaming on grand
alliances. When you can afford to be a bachelor, the case is otherwise.
Presently, who should ride by but Mrs. Lovell! She was talking more
earnestly than was becoming, to that easy-mannered dark-eyed fellow; the
man who had made him savage by entering the opera-box.

"Poor old Ned!" said Algernon; "I must put him on his guard." But, even
the lifting of a finger--a hint on paper--would bring Edward over from
Paris, as he knew; and that was not in his scheme; so he only determined
to write to his cousin.

A flood of evening gold lay over the Western park.

"The glory of this place," Algernon said to himself, "is, that you're
sure of meeting none but gentlemen here;" and he contrasted it with Epsom
Downs.

A superstitious horror seized him when, casting his eyes ahead, he
perceived Sedgett among the tasteful groups--as discordant a figure as
could well be seen, and clumsily aware of it, for he could neither step
nor look like a man at ease. Algernon swung round and retraced his way;
but Sedgett had long sight.

"I'd heard of London"--Algernon soon had the hated voice in his
ears,--"and I've bin up to London b'fore; I came here to have a wink at
the fash'nables--hang me, if ever I see such a scrumptious lot. It's
worth a walk up and down for a hour or more. D' you come heer often,
sir?"

"Eh? Who are you? Oh!" said Algernon, half mad with rage. "Excuse me;"
and he walked faster.

"Fifty times over," Sedgett responded cheerfully. "I'd pace you for a
match up and down this place if you liked. Ain't the horses a spectacle?
I'd rather be heer than there at they Races. As for the ladies, I'll tell
you what: ladies or no ladies, give my young woman time for her hair to
grow; and her colour to come, by George! if she wouldn't shine against
e'er a one--smite me stone blind, if she wouldn't! So she shall!
Australia'll see. I owe you my thanks for interdoocin' me, and never fear
my not remembering."

Where there was a crowd, Algernon could elude his persecutor by threading
his way rapidly; but the open spaces condemned him to merciless exposure,
and he flew before eyes that his imagination exaggerated to a stretch of
supernatural astonishment. The tips of his fingers, the roots of his
hair, pricked with vexation, and still, manoeuvre as he might, Sedgett
followed him.

"Call at my chambers," he said sternly.

"You're never at home, sir."

"Call to-morrow morning, at ten."

"And see a great big black door, and kick at it till my toe comes through
my boot. Thank ye."

"I tell you, I won't have you annoying me in public; once for all."

"Why, sir; I thought we parted friends, last time. Didn't you shake my
hand, now, didn't you shake my hand, sir? I ask you, whether you shook my
hand, or whether you didn't? A plain answer. We had a bit of a scrimmage,
coming home. I admit we had; but shaking hands, means 'friends again we
are.' I know you're a gentleman, and a man like me shouldn't be so bold
as fur to strike his betters. Only, don't you see, sir, Full-o'-Beer's a
hasty chap, and up in a minute; and he's sorry for it after."

Algernon conceived a brilliant notion. Drawing five shillings from his
pocket, he held them over to Sedgett, and told him to drive down to his
chambers, and await his coming. Sedgett took the money; but it was five
shillings lost. He made no exhibition of receiving orders, and it was
impossible to address him imperiously without provoking observations of
an animated kind from the elegant groups parading and sitting.

Young Harry Latters caught Algernon's eye; never was youth more joyfully
greeted. Harry spoke of the Friday's race, and the defection of the horse
Tenpenny Nail. A man passed with a nod and "How d' ye do?" for which he
received in reply a cool stare.

"Who's that?" Algernon asked.

"The son of a high dignitary," said Harry.

"You cut him."

"I can do the thing, you see, when it's a public duty."

"What's the matter with him?"

"Merely a black-leg, a grec, a cheat, swindler, or whatever name you
like," said Harry. "We none of us nod to the professionals in this line;
and I won't exchange salutes with an amateur. I'm peculiar. He chose to
be absent on the right day last year; so from that date; I consider him
absent in toto; 'none of your rrrrr--m reckonings, let's have the
rrrrr--m toto;'--you remember Suckling's story of the Yankee fellow?
Bye-bye; shall see you the day after to-morrow. You dine with me and
Suckling at the club."

Latters was hailed by other friends. Algernon was forced to let him go.
He dipped under the iron rail, and crossed the row at a run; an
indecorous proceeding; he could not help it. The hope was that Sedgett
would not have the like audacity, or might be stopped, and Algernon's
reward for so just a calculation was, that on looking round, he found
himself free. He slipped with all haste out of the Park. Sedgett's
presence had the deadening power of the torpedo on the thousand pounds.

For the last quarter of an hour, Algernon had not felt a motion of it. A
cab, to make his escape certain, was suggested to his mind; and he would
have called a cab, had not the novel apparition of economy, which now
haunted him, suggested that he had recently tossed five shillings into
the gutter. A man might dine on four shillings and sixpence, enjoying a
modest half-pint of wine, and he possessed that sum. To pinch himself and
deserve well of Providence, he resolved not to drink wine, but beer, that
day. He named the beverage; a pint-bottle of ale; and laughed, as a royal
economist may, who punishes himself to please himself.

"Mighty jolly, ain't it, sir?" said Sedgett, at his elbow.

Algernon faced about, and swore an oath from his boots upward; so
vehement was his disgust, and all-pervading his amazement.

"I'll wallop you at that game," said Sedgett.

"You infernal scoundrel!"

"If you begin swearing," Sedgett warned him.

"What do you want with me?"

"I'll tell you, sir. I don't want to go to ne'er a cock-fight, nor
betting hole."

"Here, come up this street," said Algernon, leading the way into a dusky
defile from a main parade of fashion. "Now, what's your business,
confound you!"

"Well, sir, I ain't goin' to be confounded: that, I'll--I'll swear to.
The long and the short is, I must have some money 'fore the week's out."

"You won't have a penny from me."

"That's blunt, though it ain't in my pocket," said Sedgett, grinning. "I
say, sir, respectful as you like, I must. I've got to pay for
passengerin' over the sea, self and wife; and quick it must be. There's
things to buy on both sides. A small advance and you won't be bothered.
Say, fifty. Fifty, and you don't see me till Saturday, when, accordin' to
agreement, you hand to me the cash, outside the church door; and then we
parts to meet no more. Oh! let us be joyful--I'll sing."

Algernon's loathing of the coarseness and profanity of villany increased
almost to the depth of a sentiment as he listened to Sedgett.

"I do nothing of the sort," he said. "You shall not have a farthing. Be
off. If you follow me, I give you into custody of a policeman."

"You durst n't." Sedgett eyed him warily.

He could spy a physical weakness, by affinity of cowardice, as quickly as
Algernon a moral weakness, by the same sort of relationship to it.

"You don't dare," Sedgett pursued. "And why should you, sir? there's
ne'er a reason why. I'm civil. I asks for my own: no more 'n my own, it
ain't. I call the bargain good: why sh'd I want fur to break it? I want
the money bad. I'm sick o' this country. I'd like to be off in the first
ship that sails. Can't you let me have ten till to-morrow? then t' other
forty. I've got a mortal need for it, that I have. Come, it's no use your
walking at that rate; my legs are's good as yours."

Algernon had turned back to the great thoroughfare. He was afraid that
ten pounds must be forfeited to this worrying demon in the flesh, and
sought the countenance of his well-dressed fellows to encourage him in
resisting. He could think of no subterfuge; menace was clearly useless:
and yet the idea of changeing one of the notes and for so infamous a
creature, caused pangs that helped him further to endure his dogging feet
and filthy tongue. This continued until he saw a woman's hand waving from
a cab. Presuming that such a signal, objectionable as it was, must be
addressed to himself, he considered whether he should lift his hat, or
simply smile as a favoured, but not too deeply flattered, man. The cab
drew up, and the woman said, "Sedgett." She was a well-looking woman,
strongly coloured, brown-eyed, and hearty in appearance.

"What a brute you are, Sedgett, not to be at home when you brought me up
to London with all the boxes and bedding--my goodness! It's a Providence
I caught you in my eye, or I should have been driving down to the docks,
and seeing about the ship. You are a brute. Come in, at once."

"If you're up to calling names, I've got one or two for you," Sedgett
growled.

Algernon had heard enough. Sure that he had left Sedgett in hands not
likely to relinquish him, he passed on with elastic step. Wine was
greatly desired, after his torments. Where was credit to be had? True, he
looked contemptuously on the blooming land of credit now, but an entry to
it by one of the back doors would have been convenient, so that he might
be nourished and restored by a benevolent dinner, while he kept his
Thousand intact. However, he dismissed the contemplation of credit and
its transient charms. "I won't dine at all," he said.

A beggar woman stretched out her hand--he dropped a shilling in it.

"Hang me, if I shall be able to," was his next reflection; and with the
remaining three and sixpence, he crossed the threshold of a tobacconist's
shop and bought cigars, to save himself from excesses in charity. After
gravely reproaching the tobacconist for the growing costliness of cigars,
he came into the air, feeling extraordinarily empty. Of this he soon
understood the cause, and it amused him. Accustomed to the smell of
tobacco always when he came from his dinner, it seemed, as the fumes of
the shop took his nostril, that demands were being made within him by an
inquisitive spirit, and dissatisfaction expressed at the vacancy there.

"What's the use? I can't dine," he uttered argumentatively. "I'm not
going to change a note, and I won't dine. I've no Club. There's not a
fellow I can see who'll ask me to dine. I'll lounge along home. There is
some Sherry there."

But Algernon bore vividly in mind that he did not approve of that Sherry.

"I've heard of fellows frying sausages at home, and living on something
like two shillings a day," he remarked in meditation; and then it struck
him that Mrs. Lovell's parcel of returned jewels lay in one of his
drawers at home--that is, if the laundress had left the parcel untouched.

In an agony of alarm, he called a cab, and drove hotly to the Temple.
Finding the packet safe, he put a couple of rings and the necklace with
the opal in his waistcoat pocket. The cabman must be paid, of course; so
a jewel must be pawned. Which shall it be? diamond or opal? Change a
dozen times and let it be the trinket in the right hand--the opal; let it
be the opal. How much would the opal fetch? The pawnbroker can best
inform us upon that point. So he drove to the pawnbroker; one whom he
knew. The pawnbroker offered him five-and-twenty pounds on the security
of the opal.

"What on earth is it that people think disgraceful in your entering a
pawnbroker's shop?" Algernon asked himself when, taking his ticket and
the five-and-twenty pounds, he repelled the stare of a man behind a
neighbouring partition.

"There are not many of that sort in the kingdom," he said to the
pawnbroker, who was loftily fondling the unlucky opal.

"Well--h'm; perhaps there's not;" the pawnbroker was ready to admit it,
now that the arrangement had been settled.

"I shan't be able to let you keep it long."

"As quick back as you like, sir."

Algernon noticed as he turned away that the man behind the partition, who
had more the look of a dapper young shopman than of a needy petitioner
for loans or securities, stretched over the counter to look at the opal;
and he certainly heard his name pronounced. It enraged him; but policy
counselled a quiet behaviour in this place, and no quarrelling with his
pawnbroker. Besides, his whole nature cried out for dinner. He dined and
had his wine; as good, he ventured to assert, as any man could get for
the money; for he knew the hotels with the venerable cellars.

"I should have made a first-rate courier to a millionaire," he said, with
scornful candour, but without abusing the disposition of things which had
ordered his being a gentleman. Subsequently, from his having sat so long
over his wine without moving a leg, he indulged in the belief that he had
reflected profoundly; out of which depths he started, very much like a
man who has dozed, and felt a discomfort in his limbs and head.

"I must forget myself," he said. Nor was any grave mentor by, to assure
him that his tragic state was the issue of an evil digestion of his
dinner and wine. "I must forget myself. I'm under some doom. I see it
now. Nobody cares for me. I don't know what happiness is. I was born
under a bad star. My fate's written." Following his youthful wisdom, this
wounded hart dragged his slow limbs toward the halls of brandy and song.

One learns to have compassion for fools, by studying them: and the fool,
though Nature is wise, is next door to Nature. He is naked in his
simplicity; he can tell us much, and suggest more. My excuse for dwelling
upon him is, that he holds the link of my story. Where fools are
numerous, one of them must be prominent now and then in a veracious
narration. There comes an hour when the veil drops on him, he not being
always clean to the discreeter touch.

Algernon was late at the Bank next day, and not cheerful, though he
received his customary reprimand with submission. This day was after the
pattern of the day preceding, except that he did not visit the Park; the
night likewise.

On Wednesday morning, he arose with the conviction that England was no
place for him to dwell in. What if Rhoda were to accompany him to one of
the colonies? The idea had been gradually taking shape in his mind from
the moment that he had possessed the Thousand. Could she not make butter
and cheeses capitally, while he rode on horseback through space? She was
a strong girl, a loyal girl, and would be a grateful wife.

"I'll marry her," he said; and hesitated. "Yes, I'll marry her." But it
must be done immediately.

He resolved to run down to Wrexby, rejoice her with a declaration of
love, astound her with a proposal of marriage, bewilder her little brain
with hurrying adjectives, whisk her up to London, and in little more than
a week be sailing on the high seas, new born; nothing of civilization
about him, save a few last very first-rate cigars which he projected to
smoke on the poop of the vessel, and so dream of the world he left
behind.

He went down to the Bank in better spirits, and there wrote off a
straightforward demand of an interview, to Rhoda, hinting at the purpose
of it. While at his work, he thought of Harry Latters and Lord Suckling,
and the folly of his dining with men in his present position.
Settling-day, it or yesterday might be, but a colonist is not supposed to
know anything of those arrangements. One of his fellow-clerks reminded
him of a loan he had contracted, and showed him his name written under
obligatory initials. He paid it, ostentatiously drawing out one of his
fifties. Up came another, with a similar strip of paper. "You don't want
me to change this, do you?" said Algernon; and heard a tale of domestic
needs--and a grappling landlady. He groaned inwardly: "Odd that I must
pay for his landlady being a vixen!" The note was changed; the debt
liquidated. On the door-step, as he was going to lunch, old Anthony
waylaid him, and was almost noisily persistent in demanding his one pound
three and his five pound ten. Algernon paid the sums, ready to believe
that there was a suspicion abroad of his intention to become a colonist.

He employed the luncheon hour in a visit to a colonial shipping office,
and nearly ran straight upon Sedgett at the office-door. The woman who
had hailed him from the cab, was in Sedgett's company, but Sedgett saw no
one. His head hung and his sullen brows were drawn moodily. Algernon
escaped from observation. His first inquiry at the office was as to the
business of the preceding couple, and he was satisfied by hearing that
Sedgett wanted berths for himself and wife.

"Who's the woman, I wonder!" Algernon thought, and forgot her.

He obtained some particular information, and returning to the Bank, was
called before his uncle, who curtly reckoned up his merits in a
contemptuous rebuke, and confirmed him in his resolution to incur this
sort of thing no longer. In consequence, he promised Sir William that he
would amend his ways, and these were the first hopeful words that Sir
William had ever heard from him.

Algernon's design was to dress, that evening, in the uniform of society,
so that, in the event of his meeting Harry Latters, he might assure him
he was coming to his Club, and had been compelled to dine elsewhere with
his uncle, or anybody. When he reached the door of his chambers, a man
was standing there, who said,--

"Mr. Algernon Blancove?"

"Yes," Algernon prolonged an affirmative, to diminish the confidence it
might inspire, if possible.

"May I speak with you, sir?"

Algernon told him to follow in. The man was tall and large-featured, with
an immense blank expression of face.

"I've come from Mr. Samuels, sir," he said, deferentially.

Mr. Samuels was Algernon's chief jeweller.

"Oh," Algernon remarked. "Well, I don't want anything; and let me say, I
don't approve of this touting for custom. I thought Mr. Samuels was above
it."

The man bowed. "My business is not that, sir. Ahem! I dare say you
remember an opal you had from our house. It was set in a necklace."

"All right; I remember it, perfectly," said Algernon; cool, but not of
the collected colour.

"The cost of it was fifty-five pounds, sir."

"Was it? Well, I've forgotten."

"We find that it has been pawned for five-and-twenty."

"A little less than half," said Algernon. "Pawnbrokers are simply
cheats."

"They mayn't be worse than others," the man observed.

Algernon was exactly in the position where righteous anger is the proper
weapon, if not the sole resource. He flushed, but was not sure of his
opportunity for the explosion. The man read the flush.

"May I ask you, did you pawn it, sir? I'm obliged to ask the question."

"I?--I really don't--I don't choose to answer impudent questions. What do
you mean by coming here?"

"I may as well be open with you, sir, to prevent misunderstandings. One
of the young men was present when you pawned it. He saw the thing done."

"Suppose he did?"

"He would be a witness."

"Against me? I've dealt with Samuels for three-four years."

"Yes, sir; but you have never yet paid any account; and I believe I am
right in saying that this opal is not the first thing coming from our
house that has been pledged--I can't say you did it on the other
occasions."

"You had better not," rejoined Algernon.

He broke an unpleasant silence by asking, "What further?"

"My master has sent you his bill."

Algernon glanced at the prodigious figures.

"Five hun--!" he gasped, recoiling; and added, "Well, I can't pay it on
the spot."

"Let me tell you, you're liable to proceedings you'd better avoid, sir,
for the sake of your relations."

"You dare to threaten to expose me to my relatives?" Algernon said
haughtily, and immediately perceived that indignation at this point was a
clever stroke; for the man, while deprecating the idea of doing so,
showed his more established belief in the possible virtue of such a
threat.

"Not at all, sir; but you know that pledging things not paid for is
illegal, and subject to penalties. No tradesman likes it; they can't
allow it. I may as well let you know that Mr. Samuels--"

"There, stop!" cried Algernon, laughing, as he thought, heartily. "Mr.
Samuels is a very tolerable Jew; but he doesn't seem to understand
dealing with gentlemen. Pressure comes;" he waved his hand swimmingly;
"one wants money, and gets it how one can. Mr. Samuels shall not go to
bed thinking he has been defrauded. I will teach Mr. Samuels to think
better of us Gentiles. Write me a receipt."

"For what amount, sir?" said the man, briskly.

"For the value of the opal--that is to say, for the value put upon it by
Mr. Samuels. Con! hang! never mind. Write the receipt."

He cast a fluttering fifty and a fluttering five on the table, and pushed
paper to the man for a receipt.

The man reflected, and refused to take them.

"I don't think, sir," he said, "that less than two-thirds of the bill
will make Mr. Samuels easy. You see, this opal was in a necklace. It
wasn't like a ring you might have taken off your finger. It's a lady's
ornament; and soon after you obtain it from us; you make use of it by
turning it into cash. It's a case for a criminal prosecution, which, for
the sake of your relations, Mr. Samuels wouldn't willingly bring on. The
criminal box is no place for you, sir; but Mr. Samuels must have his own.
His mind is not easy. I shouldn't like, sir, to call a policeman."

"Hey!" shouted Algernon; "you'd have to get a warrant."

"It's out, sir."

Though inclined toward small villanies, he had not studied law, and
judging from his own affrighted sensations, and the man's impassive face,
Algernon supposed that warrants were as lightly granted as writs of
summons.

He tightened his muscles. In his time he had talked glibly of Perdition;
but this was hot experience. He and the man measured the force of their
eyes. Algernon let his chest fall.

"Do you mean?" he murmured.

"Why, sir, it's no use doing things by halves. When a tradesman says he
must have his money, he takes his precautions."

"Are you in Mr. Samuels' shop?"

"Not exactly, sir."

"You're a detective?"

"I have been in the service, sir."

"Ah! now I understand." Algernon raised his head with a strain at
haughtiness. "If Mr. Samuels had accompanied you, I would have discharged
the debt: It's only fair that I should insist upon having a receipt from
him personally, and for the whole amount."

With this, he drew forth his purse and displayed the notable Five
hundred.

His glow of victory was short. The impassive man likewise had something
to exhibit.

"I assure you, sir," he said, "Mr. Samuels does know how to deal with
gentlemen. If you will do me the honour, sir, to run up with me to Mr.
Samuels' shop? Or, very well, sir; to save you that annoyance here is his
receipt to the bill."

Algernon mechanically crumpled up his note.

"Samuels?" ejaculated the unhappy fellow. "Why, my mother dealt with
Samuels. My aunt dealt with Samuels. All my family have dealt with him
for years; and he talks of proceeding against me, because--upon my soul,
it's too absurd! Sending a policeman, too! I'll tell you what--the
exposure would damage Mister Samuels most materially. Of course, my
father would have to settle the matter; but Mister--Mister Samuels would
not recover so easily. He'd be glad to refund the five hundred--what is
it?--and twenty-five--why not, 'and sixpence three farthings?' I tell
you, I shall let my father pay. Mr. Samuels had better serve me with a
common writ. I tell you, I'm not going to denude myself of money
altogether. I haven't examined the bill. Leave it here. You can tear off
the receipt. Leave it here."

The man indulged in a slight demonstration of dissent.

"No, sir, that won't do."

"Half the bill," roared Algernon; "half the bill, I wouldn't mind
paying."

"About two-thirds, sir, is what Mr. Samuels asked for, and he'll stop,
and go on as before."

"He'll stop and he'll go on, will he? Mr. Samuels is amazingly like one
of his own watches," Algernon sneered vehemently. "Well," he pursued, in
fancied security, "I'll pay two-thirds."

"Three hundred, sir."

"Ay, three hundred. Tell him to send a receipt for the three hundred, and
he shall have it. As to my entering his shop again, that I shall have to
think over."

"That's what gentlemen in Mr. Samuels' position have to run risk of,
sir," said the man.

Algernon, more in astonishment than trepidation, observed him feeling at
his breast-pocket. The action resulted in an exhibition of a second bill,
with a legal receipt attached to it, for three hundred pounds.

"Mr. Samuels is anxious to accommodate you in every way, sir. It isn't
the full sum he wants; it's a portion. He thought you might prefer to
discharge a portion."

After this exhibition of foresight on the part of the jeweller, there was
no more fight in Algernon beyond a strenuous "Faugh!" of uttermost
disgust.

He examined the bill and receipt in the man's hand with great apparent
scrupulousness; not, in reality, seeing a clear syllable.

"Take it and change it," he threw his Five hundred down, but recovered it
from the enemy's grasp; and with a "one, two, three," banged his hundreds
on the table: for which he had the loathsome receipt handed to him.

"How," he asked, chokingly, "did Mr. Samuels know I could--I had money?"

"Why, sir, you see," the man, as one who throws off a mask, smiled
cordially, after buttoning up the notes; "credit 'd soon give up the
ghost, if it hadn't its own dodges,' as I may say. This is only a feeler
on Mr. Samuels' part. He heard of his things going to pledge. Halloa! he
sings out. And tradesmen are human, sir. Between us, I side with
gentlemen, in most cases. Hows'-ever, I'm, so to speak, in Mr. Samuels'
pay. A young gentleman in debt, give him a good fright, out comes his
money, if he's got any. Sending of a bill receipted's a good trying
touch. It's a compliment to him to suppose he can pay. Mr. Samuels, sir,
wouldn't go issuing a warrant: if he could, he wouldn't. You named a
warrant; that set me up to it. I shouldn't have dreamed of a gentleman
supposing it otherwise. Didn't you notice me show a wall of a face? I
shouldn't ha' dared to have tried that on an old hand--begging your
pardon; I mean a real--a scoundrel. The regular ones must see features:
we mustn't be too cunning with them, else they grow suspicious: they're
keen as animals; they are. Good afternoon to you, sir."

Algernon heard the door shut. He reeled into a chair, and muffling his
head in his two arms on the table, sobbed desperately; seeing himself
very distinctly reflected in one of the many facets of folly. Daylight
became undesireable to him. He went to bed.

A man who can, in such extremities of despair, go premeditatingly to his
pillow, obeys an animal instinct in pursuit of oblivion, that will
befriend his nerves. Algernon awoke in deep darkness, with a delicious
sensation of hunger. He jumped up. Six hundred and fifty pounds of the
money remained intact; and he was joyful. He struck a light to look at
his watch: the watch had stopped;--that was a bad sign. He could not
forget it. Why had his watch stopped? A chilling thought as to whether
predestination did not govern the world, allayed all tumult in his mind.
He dressed carefully, and soon heard a great City bell, with horrid gulfs
between the strokes, tell him that the hour was eleven toward midnight.
"Not late," he said.

"Who'd have thought it?" cried a voice on the landing of the stairs, as
he went forth.

It was Sedgett.

Algernon had one inclination to strangle, and another to mollify the
wretch.

"Why, sir, I've been lurking heer for your return from your larks. Never
guessed you was in."

"It's no use," Algernon began.

"Ay; but it is, though," said Sedgett, and forced his way into the room.
"Now, just listen. I've got a young woman I want to pack out o' the
country. I must do it, while I'm a--a bachelor boy. She must go, or we
shall be having shindies. You saw how she caught me out of a cab. She's
sure to be in the place where she ain't wanted. She goes to America. I've
got to pay her passage, and mine too. Here's the truth: she thinks I'm
off with her. She knows I'm bankrup' at home. So I am. All the more
reason for her thinking me her companion. I get her away by train to the
vessel, and on board, and there I give her the slip.

"Ship's steaming away by this time t'morrow night. I've paid for her--and
myself too, she thinks. Leave it to me. I'll manage all that neatly
enough. But heer's the truth: I'm stumped. I must, and I will have fifty;
I don't want to utter ne'er a threat. I want the money, and if you don't
give it, I break off; and you mind this, Mr. Blancove: you don't come off
s' easy, if I do break off, mind. I know all about your relations, and
by--! I'll let 'em know all about you. Why, you're as quiet heer, sir, as
if you was miles away, in a wood cottage, and ne'er a dog near."

So Algernon was thinking; and without a light, save the gas lamp in the
square, moreover.

They wrangled for an hour. When Algernon went forth a second time, he was
by fifty pounds poorer. He consoled himself by thinking that the money
had only anticipated its destination as arranged, and it became a partial
gratification to him to reflect that he had, at any rate, paid so much of
the sum, according to his bond in assuming possession of it.

And what were to be his proceedings? They were so manifestly in the hands
of fate, that he declined to be troubled on that head.

Next morning came the usual short impatient scrawl on thin blue paper
from Edward, scarce worthy of a passing thought. In a postscript, he
asked: "Are there, on your oath, no letters for me? If there are, send
them immediately--every one, bills as well. Don't fail. I must have
them."

Algernon was at last persuaded to pack up Dahlia's letters, saying: "I
suppose they can't do any harm now." The expense of the postage afflicted
him; but "women always cost a dozen to our one," he remarked. On his way
to the City, he had to decide whether he would go to the Bank, or take
the train leading to Wrexby. He chose the latter course, until, feeling
that he was about to embark in a serious undertaking, he said to himself,
"No! duty first;" and postponed the expedition for the day following.




CHAPTER XXXII

Squire Blancove, having business in town, called on his brother at the
Bank, asking whether Sir William was at home, with sarcastic emphasis on
the title, which smelt to him of commerce. Sir William invited him to
dine and sleep at his house that night.

"You will meet Mrs. Lovell, and a Major Waring, a friend of hers, who
knew her and her husband in India," said the baronet.

"The deuce I shall," said the squire, and accepted maliciously.

Where the squire dined, he drank, defying ladies and the new-fangled
subserviency to those flustering teabodies. This was understood; so, when
the Claret and Port had made a few rounds, Major Waring was permitted to
follow Mrs. Lovell, and the squire and his brother settled to
conversation; beginning upon gout. Sir William had recently had a touch
of the family complaint, and spoke of it in terms which gave the squire
some fraternal sentiment. From that, they fell to talking politics, and
differed. The breach was healed by a divergence to their sons. The squire
knew his own to be a scamp.

"You'll never do anything with him," he said.

"I don't think I shall," Sir William admitted.

"Didn't I tell you so?"

"You did. But, the point is, what will you do with him?"

"Send him to Jericho to ride wild jackasses. That's all he's fit for."

The superior complacency of Sir William's smile caught the squire's
attention.

"What do you mean to do with Ned?" he asked.

"I hope," was the answer, "to have him married before the year is out."

"To the widow?"

"The widow?" Sir William raised his eyebrows.

"Mrs. Lovell, I mean."

"What gives you that idea?"

"Why, Ned has made her an offer. Don't you know that?"

"I know nothing of the sort."

"And don't believe it? He has. He's only waiting now, over there in
Paris, to get comfortably out of a scrape--you remember what I told you
at Fairly--and then Mrs. Lovell's going to have him--as he thinks; but,
by George, it strikes me this major you've got here, knows how to follow
petticoats and get in his harvest in the enemy's absence."

"I think you're quite under a delusion, in both respects," observed Sir
William.

"What makes you think that?"

"I have Edward's word."

"He lies as naturally as an infant sucks."

"Pardon me; this is my son you are speaking of."

"And this is your Port I'm drinking; so I'll say no more."

The squire emptied his glass, and Sir William thrummed on the table.

"Now, my dog has got his name," the squire resumed. "I'm not ambitious
about him. You are, about yours; and you ought to know him. He spends or
he don't spend. It's not the question whether he gets into debt, but
whether he does mischief with what he spends. If Algy's a bad fish, Ned's
a bit of a serpent; damned clever, no doubt. I suppose, you wouldn't let
him marry old Fleming's daughter, now, if he wanted to?"

"Who is Fleming?" Sir William thundered out.

"Fleming's the father of the girl. I'm sorry for him. He sells his
farm-land which I've been looking at for years; so I profit by it; but I
don't like to see a man like that broken up. Algy, I said before, 's a
bad fish. Hang me, if I think he'd have behaved like Ned. If he had, I'd
have compelled him to marry her, and shipped them both off, clean out of
the country, to try their luck elsewhere.

"You're proud; I'm practical. I don't expect you to do the same. I'm up
in London now to raise money to buy the farm--Queen's Anne's Farm; it's
advertized for sale, I see. Fleeting won't sell it to me privately,
because my name's Blancove, and I'm the father of my son, and he fancies
Algy's the man. Why? he saw Algy at the theatre in London with this girl
of his;--we were all young fellows once!--and the rascal took Ned's
burden on his shoulders. So, I shall have to compete with other buyers,
and pay, I dare say, a couple of hundred extra for the property. Do you
believe what I tell you now?"

"Not a word of it," said Sir William blandly.

The squire seized the decanter and drank in a fury.

"I had it from Algy."

"That would all the less induce me to believe it."

"H'm!" the squire frowned. "Let me tell you--he's a dog--but it's a
damned hard thing to hear one's own flesh and blood abused. Look here:
there's a couple. One of them has made a fool of a girl. It can't be my
rascal--stop a minute--he isn't the man, because she'd have been sure to
have made a fool of him, that's certain. He's a soft-hearted dog. He'd
aim at a cock-sparrow, and be glad if he missed. There you have him. He
was one of your good boys. I used to tell his poor mother, 'When you
leave off thinking for him, he'll go to the first handy villain--and
that's the devil.' And he's done it. But, here's the difference. He goes
himself; he don't send another. I'll tell you what: if you don't know
about Mr. Ned's tricks, you ought. And you ought to make him marry the
girl, and be off to New Zealand, or any of the upside-down places, where
he might begin by farming, and soon, with his abilities, be cock o' the
walk. He would, perhaps, be sending us a letter to say that he preferred
to break away from the mother country and establish a republic. He's got
the same political opinions as you. Oh! he'll do well enough over here;
of course he will. He's the very fellow to do well. Knock at him, he's
hard as nails, and 'll stick anywhere. You wouldn't listen to me, when I
told you about this at Fairly, where some old sweetheart of the girl
mistook that poor devil of a scapegoat, Algy, for him, and went pegging
at him like a madman."

"No," said Sir William; "No, I would not. Nor do I now. At least," he
struck out his right hand deprecatingly, "I listen."

"Can you tell me what he was doing when he went to Italy?"

"He went partly at my suggestion."

"Turns you round his little finger! He went off with this girl: wanted to
educate her, or some nonsense of the sort. That was Mr. Ned's business.
Upon my soul, I'm sorry for old Fleming. I'm told he takes it to heart.
It's done him up. Now, if it should turn out to be Ned, would you let him
right the girl by marrying her? You wouldn't!"

"The principle of examining your hypothesis before you proceed to decide
by it, is probably unknown to you," Sir William observed, after bestowing
a considerate smile on his brother, who muffled himself up from the
chilling sententiousness, and drank.

Sir William, in the pride of superior intellect, had heard as good as
nothing of the charge against his son.

"Well," said the squire, "think as you like, act as you like; all's one
to me. You're satisfied; that's clear; and I'm some hundred of pounds out
of pocket. This major's paying court to the widow, is he?"

"I can't say that he is."

"It would be a good thing for her to get married."

"I should be glad."

"A good thing for her, I say."

"A good thing for him, let us hope."

"If he can pay her debts."

Sir William was silent, and sipped his wine.

"And if he can keep a tight hand on the reins. That's wanted," said the
squire.

The gentleman whose road to happiness was thus prescribed stood by Mrs.
Lovell's chair, in the drawing-room. He held a letter in his hand, for
which her own was pleadingly extended.

"I know you to be the soul of truth, Percy," she was saying.

"The question is not that; but whether you can bear the truth."

"Can I not? Who would live without it?"

"Pardon me; there's more. You say, you admire this friend of mine; no
doubt you do. Mind, I am going to give you the letter. I wish you simply
to ask yourself now, whether you are satisfied at my making a confidant
of a man in Robert Eccles's position, and think it natural and just--you
do?"

"Quite just," said Mrs. Lovell; "and natural? Yes, natural; though not
common. Eccentric; which only means, hors du commun; and can be natural.
It is natural. I was convinced he was a noble fellow, before I knew that
you had made a friend of him. I am sure of it now. And did he not save
your life, Percy?"

"I have warned you that you are partly the subject of the letter."

"Do you forget that I am a woman, and want it all the more impatiently?"

Major Waring suffered the letter to be snatched from his hand, and stood
like one who is submitting to a test, or watching the effect of a potent
drug.

"It is his second letter to you," Mrs. Lovell murmured. "I see; it is a
reply to yours."

She read a few lines, and glanced up, blushing. "Am I not made to bear
more than I deserve?"

"If you can do such mischief, without meaning any, to a man who is in
love with another woman--," said Percy.

"Yes," she nodded, "I perceive the deduction; but inferences are like
shadows on the wall--they are thrown from an object, and are monstrous
distortions of it. That is why you misjudge women. You infer one thing
from another, and are ruled by the inference."

He simply bowed. Edward would have answered her in a bright strain, and
led her on to say brilliant things, and then have shown her, as by a
sudden light, that she had lost herself, and reduced her to feel the
strength and safety of his hard intellect. That was the idea in her
brain. The next moment her heart ejected it.

"Petty, when I asked permission to look at this letter, I was not aware
how great a compliment it would be to me if I was permitted to see it. It
betrays your friend."

"It betrays something more," said he.

Mrs. Lovell cast down her eyes and read, without further comment.

These were the contents:--

   "My Dear Percy,--Now that I see her every day again, I am worse than
   ever; and I remember thinking once or twice that Mrs. L. had cured
   me. I am a sort of man who would jump to reach the top of a
   mountain. I understand how superior Mrs. L. is to every woman in
   the world I have seen; but Rhoda cures me on that head. Mrs. Lovell
   makes men mad and happy, and Rhoda makes them sensible and
   miserable. I have had the talk with Rhoda. It is all over. I have
   felt like being in a big room with one candle alight ever since.
   She has not looked at me, and does nothing but get by her father
   whenever she can, and takes his hand and holds it. I see where the
   blow has struck her: it has killed her pride; and Rhoda is almost
   all pride. I suppose she thinks our plan is the best. She has not
   said she does, and does not mention her sister. She is going to
   die, or she turns nun, or marries a gentleman. I shall never get
   her. She will not forgive me for bringing this news to her. I told
   you how she coloured, the first day I came; which has all gone now.
   She just opens her lips to me. You remember Corporal Thwaites--you
   caught his horse, when he had his foot near wrenched off, going
   through the gate--and his way of breathing through the under-row of
   his teeth--the poor creature was in such pain--that's just how she
   takes her breath. It makes her look sometimes like that woman's
   head with the snakes for her hair. This bothers me--how is it you
   and Mrs. Lovell manage to talk together of such things? Why, two
   men rather hang their heads a bit. My notion is, that women--
   ladies, in especial, ought never to hear of sad things of this sort.
   Of course, I mean, if they do, it cannot harm them. It only upsets
   me. Why are ladies less particular than girls in Rhoda's place?"

   ("Shame being a virtue," was Mrs. Lovell's running comment.)

   "She comes up to town with her father to-morrow. The farm is
   ruined. The poor old man had to ask me for a loan to pay the
   journey. Luckily, Rhoda has saved enough with her pennies and
   two-pences. Ever since I left the farm, it has been in the hands
   of an old donkey here, who has worked it his own way. What is in
   the ground will stop there, and may as well.

   "I leave off writing, I write such stuff; and if I go on
   writing to you, I shall be putting these things '--!--!--!' The way
   you write about Mrs. Lovell, convinces me you are not in my scrape,
   or else gentlemen are just as different from their inferiors as
   ladies are from theirs. That's the question. What is the meaning
   of your 'not being able to leave her for a day, for fear she should
   fall under other influences'? Then, I copy your words, you say,
   'She is all things to everybody, and cannot help it.' In that case,
   I would seize my opportunity and her waist, and tell her she was
   locked up from anybody else. Friendship with men--but I cannot
   understand friendship with women, and watching them to keep them
   right, which must mean that you do not think much of them."

Mrs. Lovell, at this point, raised her eyes abruptly from the letter and
returned it.

"You discuss me very freely with your friend," she said.

Percy drooped to her. "I warned you when you wished to read it."

"But, you see, you have bewildered him. It was scarcely wise to write
other than plain facts. Men of that class." She stopped.

"Of that class?" said he.

"Men of any class, then: you yourself: if any one wrote to you such
things, what would you think? It is very unfair. I have the honour of
seeing you daily, because you cannot trust me out of your sight? What is
there inexplicable about me? Do you wonder that I talk openly of women
who are betrayed, and do my best to help them?".

"On the contrary; you command my esteem," said Percy.

"But you think me a puppet?"

"Fond of them, perhaps?" his tone of voice queried in a manner that made
her smile.

"I hate them," she said, and her face expressed it.

"But you make them."

"How? You torment me."

"How can I explain the magic? Are you not making one of me now, where I
stand?"

"Then, sit."

"Or kneel?"

"Oh, Percy! do nothing ridiculous."

Inveterate insight was a characteristic of Major Waring; but he was not
the less in Mrs. Lovell's net. He knew it to be a charm that she
exercised almost unknowingly. She was simply a sweet instrument for those
who could play on it, and therein lay her mighty fascination. Robert's
blunt advice that he should seize the chance, take her and make her his
own, was powerful with him. He checked the particular appropriating
action suggested by Robert.

"I owe you an explanation," he said. "Margaret, my friend."

"You can think of me as a friend, Percy?"

"If I can call you my friend, what would I not call you besides? I did
you a great and shameful wrong when you were younger. Hush! you did not
deserve that. Judge of yourself as you will; but I know now what my
feelings were then. The sublime executioner was no more than a spiteful
man. You give me your pardon, do you not? Your hand?"

She had reached her hand to him, but withdrew it quickly.

"Not your hand, Margaret? But, you must give it to some one. You will be
ruined, if you do not."

She looked at him with full eyes. "You know it then?" she said slowly;
but the gaze diminished as he went on.

"I know, by what I know of you, that you of all women should owe a direct
allegiance. Come; I will assume privileges. Are you free?"

"Would you talk to me so, if you thought otherwise?" she asked.

"I think I would," said Percy. "A little depends upon the person. Are you
pledged at all to Mr. Edward Blancove?"

"Do you suppose me one to pledge myself?"

"He is doing a base thing."

"Then, Percy, let an assurance of my knowledge of that be my answer."

"You do not love the man?"

Despise him, say!"

"Is he aware of it?"

"If clear writing can make him."

"You have told him as much?"

"To his apprehension, certainly."

"Further, Margaret, I must speak:--did he act with your concurrence, or
knowledge of it at all, in acting as he has done?"

"Heavens! Percy, you question me like a husband."

"It is what I mean to be, if I may."

The frame of the fair lady quivered as from a blow, and then her eyes
rose tenderly.

"I thought you knew me. This is not possible."

"You will not be mine? Why is it not possible?"

"I think I could say, because I respect you too much."

"Because you find you have not the courage?"

"For what?"

"To confess that you were under bad influence, and were not the Margaret
I can make of you. Put that aside. If you remain as you are, think of the
snares. If you marry one you despise, look at the pit. Yes; you will be
mine! Half my love of my country and my profession is love of you.
Margaret is fire in my blood. I used to pray for opportunities, that
Margaret might hear of me. I knew that gallant actions touched her; I
would have fallen gladly; I was sure her heart would leap when she heard
of me. Let it beat against mine. Speak!"

"I will," said Mrs. Lovell, and she suppressed the throbs of her bosom.
Her voice was harsh and her face bloodless. "How much money have you,
Percy?"

This sudden sluicing of cold water on his heat of passion petrified him.

"Money," he said, with a strange frigid scrutiny of her features. As in
the flash of a mirror, he beheld her bony, worn, sordid, unacceptable.
But he was fain to admit it to be an eminently proper demand for
enlightenment.

He said deliberately, "I possess an income of five hundred a year,
extraneous, and in addition to my pay as major in Her Majesty's service."

Then he paused, and the silence was like a growing chasm between them.

She broke it by saying, "Have you any expectations?"

This was crueller still, though no longer astonishing. He complained in
his heart merely that her voice had become so unpleasant.

With emotionless precision, he replied, "At my mother's death--"

She interposed a soft exclamation.

"At my mother's death there will come to me by reversion, five or six
thousand pounds. When my father dies, he may possibly bequeath his
property to me. On that I cannot count."

Veritable tears were in her eyes. Was she affecting to weep
sympathetically in view of these remote contingencies?

"You will not pretend that you know me now, Percy," she said, trying to
smile; and she had recovered the natural feminine key of her voice. "I am
mercenary, you see; not a mercenary friend. So, keep me as a friend--say
you will be my friend."

"Nay, you had a right to know," he protested.

"It was disgraceful--horrible; but it was necessary for me to know."

"And now that you do know?"

"Now that I know, I have only to say--be as merciful in your idea of me
as you can."

She dropped her hand in his, and it was with a thrill of dismay that he
felt the rush of passion reanimating his frozen veins.

"Be mercenary, but be mine! I will give you something better to live for
than this absurd life of fashion. You reckon on what our expenditure will
be by that standard. It's comparative poverty; but--but you can have some
luxuries. You can have a carriage, a horse to ride. Active service may
come: I may rise. Give yourself to me, and you must love me, and regret
nothing."

"Nothing! I should regret nothing. I don't want carriages, or horses, or
luxuries. I could live with you on a subaltern's pay. I can't marry you,
Percy, and for the very reason which would make me wish to marry you."

"Charade?" said he; and the contempt of the utterance brought her head
close under his.

"Dearest friend, you have not to learn how to punish me."

The little reproach, added to the wound to his pride, required a healing
medicament; she put her lips to his fingers.

Assuredly the comedy would not have ended there, but it was stopped by an
intrusion of the squire, followed by Sir William, who, while the
squire--full of wine and vindictive humours--went on humming, "Ah!
h'm--m--m! Soh!" said in the doorway to some one behind him: "And if you
have lost your key, and Algernon is away, of what use is it to drive down
to the Temple for a bed? I make it an especial request that you sleep
here tonight. I wish it. I have to speak with you."

Mrs. Lovell was informed that the baronet had been addressing his son,
who was fresh from Paris, and not, in his own modest opinion, presentable
before a lady.




CHAPTER XXXIII

Once more Farmer Fleming and Rhoda prepared for their melancholy journey
up to London. A light cart was at the gateway, near which Robert stood
with the farmer, who, in his stiff brown overcoat, that reached to his
ankles, and broad country-hat, kept his posture of dumb expectation like
a stalled ox, and nodded to Robert's remarks on the care which the garden
had been receiving latterly, the many roses clean in bud, and the trim
blue and white and red garden beds. Every word was a blow to him; but he
took it, as well as Rhoda's apparent dilatoriness, among the things to be
submitted to by a man cut away by the roots from the home of his labour
and old associations. Above his bowed head there was a board proclaiming
that Queen Anne's Farm, and all belonging thereunto, was for sale. His
prospect in the vague wilderness of the future, was to seek for
acceptance as a common labourer on some kind gentleman's property. The
phrase "kind gentleman" was adopted by his deliberate irony of the fate
which cast him out. Robert was stamping fretfully for Rhoda to come. At
times, Mrs. Sumfit showed her head from the window of her bed-room,
crying, "D'rectly!" and disappearing.

The still aspect of the house on the shining May afternoon was otherwise
undisturbed. Besides Rhoda, Master Gammon was being waited for; on whom
would devolve the driving of the cart back from the station. Robert
heaped his vexed exclamations upon this old man. The farmer restrained
his voice in Master Gammon's defence, thinking of the comparison he could
make between him and Robert: for Master Gammon had never run away from
the farm and kept absent, leaving it to take care of itself. Gammon, slow
as he might be, was faithful, and it was not he who had made it necessary
for the farm to be sold. Gammon was obstinate, but it was not he who,
after taking a lead, and making the farm dependent on his lead, had
absconded with the brains and energy of the establishment. Such
reflections passed through the farmer's mind.

Rhoda and Mrs. Sumfit came together down the trim pathway; and Robert now
had a clear charge against Master Gammon. He recommended an immediate
departure.

"The horse 'll bring himself home quite as well and as fast as Gammon
will," he said.

"But for the shakin' and the joltin', which tells o' sovereigns and
silver," Mrs. Sumfit was observing to Rhoda, "you might carry the
box--and who would have guessed how stout it was, and me to hit it with a
poker and not break it, I couldn't, nor get a single one through the
slit;--the sight I was, with a poker in my hand! I do declare I felt
azactly like a housebreaker;--and no soul to notice what you carries.
Where you hear the gold, my dear, go so"--Mrs. Sumfit performed a
methodical "Ahem!" and noised the sole of her shoe on the gravel "so, and
folks 'll think it's a mistake they made."

"What's that?"--the farmer pointed at a projection under Rhoda's shawl.

"It is a present, father, for my sister," said Rhoda.

"What is it?" the farmer questioned again.

Mrs. Sumfit fawned before him penitently--"Ah! William, she's poor, and
she do want a little to spend, or she will be so nipped and like a
frost-bitten body, she will. And, perhaps, dear, haven't money in her
sight for next day's dinner, which is--oh, such a panic for a young wife!
for it ain't her hunger, dear William--her husband, she thinks of. And
her cookery at a stand-still! Thinks she, 'he will charge it on the
kitchen;' so unreasonable's men. Yes," she added, in answer to the rigid
dejection of his look, "I said true to you. I know I said, 'Not a penny
can I get, William,' when you asked me for loans; and how could I get it?
I can't get it now. See here, dear!"

She took the box from under Rhoda's shawl, and rattled it with a down
turn and an up turn.

"You didn't ask me, dear William, whether I had a money-box. I'd ha' told
you so at once, had ye but asked me. And had you said, 'Gi' me your
money-box,' it was yours, only for your asking. You do see, you can't get
any of it out. So, when you asked for money I was right to say, I'd got
none."

The farmer bore with her dreary rattling of the box in demonstration of
its retentive capacities. The mere force of the show stopped him from
retorting; but when, to excuse Master Gammon for his tardiness, she
related that he also had a money-box, and was in search of it, the farmer
threw up his head with the vigour of a young man, and thundered for
Master Gammon, by name, vehemently wrathful at the combined hypocrisy of
the pair. He called twice, and his face was purple and red as he turned
toward the cart, saying,--

"We'll go without the old man."

Mrs. Sumfit then intertwisted her fingers, and related how that she and
Master Gammon had one day, six years distant, talked on a lonely evening
over the mischances which befel poor people when they grew infirm, or met
with accident, and what "useless clays" they were; and yet they had their
feelings. It was a long and confidential talk on a summer evening; and,
at the end of it, Master Gammon walked into Wrexby, and paid a visit to
Mr. Hammond, the carpenter, who produced two strong saving-boxes
excellently manufactured by his own hand, without a lid to them, or lock
and key: so that there would be no getting at the contents until the
boxes were full, or a pressing occasion counselled the destruction of the
boxes. A constant subject of jest between Mrs. Sumfit and Master Gammon
was, as to which first of them would be overpowered by curiosity to know
the amount of their respective savings; and their confessions of mutual
weakness and futile endeavours to extract one piece of gold from the
hoard.

"And now, think it or not," said Mrs. Sumfit, "I got that power over him,
from doctorin' him, and cookin' for him, I persuaded him to help my poor
Dahly in my blessed's need. I'd like him to do it by halves, but he
can't."

Master Gammon appeared round a corner of the house, his box, draped by
his handkerchief, under his arm. The farmer and Robert knew, when he was
in sight, that gestures and shouts expressing extremities of the need for
haste, would fail to accelerate his steps, so they allowed him to come on
at his own equal pace, steady as Time, with the peculiar lopping bend of
knees which jerked the moveless trunk regularly upward, and the ancient
round eyes fixed contemplatively forward. There was an affectingness in
this view of the mechanical old man bearing his poor hoard to bestow it.

Robert said out, unawares, "He mustn't be let to part with h'old
pennies."

"No;" the farmer took him up; "nor I won't let him."

"Yes, father!" Rhoda intercepted his address to Master Gammon. "Yes,
father!" she hardened her accent. "It is for my sister. He does a good
thing. Let him do it."

"Mas' Gammon, what ha' ye got there?" the farmer sung out.

But Master Gammon knew that he was about his own business. He was a
difficult old man when he served the farmer; he was quite unmanageable in
his private affairs.

Without replying, he said to Mrs. Sumfit,--

"I'd gummed it."

The side of the box showed that it had been made adhesive, for the sake
of security, to another substance.

"That's what's caused ye to be so long, Mas' Gammon?"

The veteran of the fields responded with a grin, designed to show a
lively cunning.

"Deary me, Mas' Gammon, I'd give a fortnight's work to know how much
you'm saved, now, I would. And, there! Your comfort's in your heart. And
it shall be paid to you. I do pray heaven in mercy to forgive me," she
whimpered, "if ever knowin'ly I hasted you at a meal, or did deceive you
when you looked for the pickings of fresh-killed pig. But if you only
knew how--to cookit spoils the temper of a woman! I'd a aunt was cook in
a gentleman's fam'ly, and daily he dirtied his thirteen plates--never
more nor never less; and one day--was ever a woman punished so! her best
black silk dress she greased from the top to the bottom, and he sent down
nine clean plates, and no word vouchsafed of explanation. For
gentlefolks, they won't teach themselves how it do hang together with
cooks in a kitchen--"

"Jump up, Mas' Gammon," cried the farmer, wrathful at having been
deceived by two members of his household, who had sworn to him, both,
that they had no money, and had disregarded his necessity. Such being
human nature!

Mrs. Sumfit confided the termination of her story to Rhoda; or suggested
rather, at what distant point it might end; and then, giving Master
Gammon's box to her custody, with directions for Dahlia to take the boxes
to a carpenter's shop--not attempting the power of pokers upon them--and
count and make a mental note of the amount of the rival hoards, she sent
Dahlia all her messages of smirking reproof, and delighted love, and
hoped that they would soon meet and know happiness.

Rhoda, as usual, had no emotion to spare. She took possession of the
second box, and thus laden, suffered Robert to lift her into the cart.
They drove across the green, past the mill and its flashing waters, and
into the road, where the waving of Mrs. Sumfit's desolate handkerchief
was latest seen.

A horseman rode by, whom Rhoda recognized, and she blushed and had a
boding shiver. Robert marked him, and the blush as well.

It was Algernon, upon a livery-stable hack. His countenance expressed a
mighty disappointment.

The farmer saw no one. The ingratitude and treachery of Robert, and of
Mrs. Sumfit and Master Gammon, kept him brooding in sombre disgust of
life. He remarked that the cart jolted a good deal.

"If you goes in a cart, wi' company o' four, you expects to be jolted,"
said Master Gammon.

"You seem to like it," Robert observed to the latter.

"It don't disturb my in'ards," quoth the serenest of mankind.

"Gammon," the farmer addressed him from the front seat, without turning
his head: "you'll take and look about for a new place."

Master Gammon digested the recommendation in silence. On its being
repeated, with, "D' ye hear?" he replied that he heard well enough.

"Well, then, look about ye sharp, or maybe, you'll be out in the cold,"
said the farmer.

"Na," returned Master Gammon, "ah never frets till I'm pinched."

"I've given ye notice," said the farmer.

"No, you ha'n't," said Master Gammon.

"I give ye notice now."

"No, you don't."

"How d' ye mean?"

"Cause I don't take ne'er a notice."

"Then you'll be kicked out, old man."

"Hey! there y' have me," said Master Gammon. "I growed at the farm, and
you don't go and tell ne'er a tree t' walk."

Rhoda laid her fingers in the veteran's palm.

"You're a long-lived family, aren't you, Master Gammon?" said Robert,
eyeing Rhoda's action enviously.

Master Gammon bade him go to a certain churchyard in Sussex, and inspect
a particular tombstone, upon which the ages of his ancestry were written.
They were more like the ages of oaks than of men.

"It's the heart kills," said Robert.

"It's damned misfortune," murmured the farmer.

"It is the wickedness in the world," thought Rhoda.

"It's a poor stomach, I reckon," Master Gammon ruminated.

They took leave of him at the station, from which eminence it was a
notable thing to see him in the road beneath, making preparations for his
return, like a conqueror of the hours. Others might run, and stew, if
they liked: Master Gammon had chosen his pace, and was not of a mind to
change it for anybody or anything. It was his boast that he had never
ridden by railway: "nor ever means to, if I can help it," he would say.
He was very much in harmony with universal nature, if to be that is the
secret of human life.

Meantime, Algernon retraced his way to the station in profound chagrin:
arriving there just as the train was visible. He caught sight of the cart
with Master Gammon in it, and asked him whether all his people were going
up to London; but the reply was evidently a mile distant, and had not
started; so putting a sovereign in Master Gammon's hand, together with
the reins of his horse, Algernon bade the old man conduct the animal to
the White Bear Inn, and thus violently pushing him off the tramways of
his intelligence, left him stranded.

He had taken a first-class return-ticket, of course, being a gentleman.
In the desperate hope that he might jump into a carriage with Rhoda, he
entered one of the second-class compartments; a fact not only foreign to
his tastes and his habits, but somewhat disgraceful, as he thought. His
trust was, that the ignoble of this earth alone had beheld him: at any
rate, his ticket was first class, as the guard would instantly and
respectfully perceive, and if he had the discomforts, he had also some of
the consolations of virtue.

Once on his way, the hard seat and the contemptible society surrounding
him, assured his reflective spirit that he loved: otherwise, was it in
reason that he should endure these hardships? "I really love the girl,"
he said, fidgeting for cushions.

He was hot, and wanted the window up, to which his fellow-travellers
assented. Then, the atmosphere becoming loaded with offence to his morbid
sense of smell, he wanted the windows down; and again they assented. "By
Jove! I must love the girl," ejaculated Algernon inwardly, as cramp,
cold, and afflicted nostrils combined to astonish his physical
sensations. Nor was it displeasing to him to evince that he was
unaccustomed to bare boards.

"We're a rich country," said a man to his neighbour; "but, if you don't
pay for it, you must take your luck, and they'll make you as
uncomfortable as they can."

"Ay," said the other. "I've travelled on the Continent. The second-class
carriages there are fit for anybody to travel in. This is what comes of
the worship of money--the individual is not respected. Pounds alone!"

"These," thought Algernon, "are beastly democrats."

Their remarks had been sympathetic with his manifestations, which had
probably suggested them. He glowered out of the window in an exceedingly
foreign manner. A plainly dressed woman requested that the window should
be closed. One of the men immediately proceeded to close it. Algernon
stopped him.

"Pardon me, sir," said the man; "it's a lady wants it done;" and he did
it.

A lady! Algernon determined that these were the sort of people he should
hate for life. "Go among them and then see what they are," he addressed
an imaginary assembly of anti-democrats, as from a senatorial chair set
in the after days. Cramp, cold, ill-ordered smells, and eternal hatred of
his fellow-passengers, convinced him, in their aggregation, that he
surmounted not a little for love of Rhoda.

The train arrived in London at dusk. Algernon saw Rhoda step from a
carriage near the engine, assisted by Robert; and old Anthony was on the
platform to welcome her; and Anthony seized her bag, and the troop of
passengers moved away. It may be supposed that Algernon had angry
sensations at sight of Robert; and to a certain extent this was the case;
but he was a mercurial youth, and one who had satisfactorily proved
superior strength enjoyed a portion of his respect. Besides, if Robert
perchance should be courting Rhoda, he and Robert would enter into
another field of controversy; and Robert might be taught a lesson.

He followed the party on foot until they reached Anthony's
dwelling-place, noted the house, and sped to the Temple. There, he found
a telegraphic message from Edward, that had been awaiting him since the
morning.

"Stop It," were the sole words of the communication brief, and if one
preferred to think so, enigmatic.

"What on earth does he mean?" cried Algernon, and affected again and
again to see what Edward meant, without success. "Stop it?--stop
what?--Stop the train? Stop my watch? Stop the universe? Oh! this is rank
humbug." He flung the paper down, and fell to counting the money in his
possession. The more it dwindled, the more imperative it became that he
should depart from his country.

Behind the figures, he calculated that, in all probability, Rhoda would
visit her sister this night. "I can't stop that," he said: and hearing a
clock strike, "nor that" a knock sounded on the door; "nor that." The
reflection inspired him with fatalistic views.

Sedgett appeared, and was welcome. Algernon had to check the impulse of
his hand to stretch out to the fellow, so welcome was he: Sedgett stated
that everything stood ready for the morrow. He had accomplished all that
had to be done.

"And it's more than many'd reckon," he said, and rubbed his hands, and
laughed. "I was aboard ship in Liverpool this morning, that I was. That
ere young woman's woke up from her dream", (he lengthened the word
inexpressibly) "by this time, that she is. I had to pay for my passage,
though;" at which recollection he swore. "That's money gone. Never mind:
there's worse gone with it. Ain't it nasty--don't you think, sir--to get
tired of a young woman you've been keepin' company with, and have to be
her companion, whether you will, or whether you won't? She's sick enough
now. We travelled all night. I got her on board; got her to go to her
bed; and, says I, I'll arrange about the luggage. I packs myself down
into a boat, and saw the ship steam away a good'n. Hanged if I didn't
catch myself singin'. And haven't touched a drop o' drink, nor will, till
tomorrow's over. Don't you think 'Daehli's' a very pretty name, sir? I
run back to her as hard as rail 'd carry me. She's had a letter from her
sister, recommending o' her to marry me: 'a noble man,' she calls me--ha,
ha! that's good. 'And what do you think, my dear?' says I; and, bother
me, if I can screw either a compliment or a kiss out of her. She's got
fine lady airs of her own. But I'm fond of her, that I am. Well, sir, at
the church door, after the ceremony, you settle our business, honour
bright--that's it, en't it?"

Algernon nodded. Sedgett's talk always produced discomfort in his
ingenuous bosom.

"By the way, what politics are you?" he asked.

Sedgett replied, staring, that he was a Tory, and Algernon nodded again,
but with brows perturbed at the thought of this ruffian being of the same
political persuasion as himself.

"Eh?" cried Sedgett; "I don't want any of your hustings pledges, though.
You'll be at the door tomorrow, or I'll have a row--mind that. A
bargain's a bargain. I like the young woman, but I must have the money.
Why not hand it over now?"

"Not till the deed's done," said Algernon, very reasonably.

Sedgett studied his features, and as a result remarked: "You put me up to
this: I'll do it, and trust you so far, but if I'm played on, I throw the
young woman over and expose you out and out. But you mean honourable?"

"I do," Algernon said of his meaning.

Another knock sounded on the door. It proved to be a footman in Sir
William's livery, bearing a letter from Edward; an amplification of the
telegram:

   "Dear Algy, Stop it. I'm back, and have to see
   my father. I may be down about two, or three, or four,
   in the morning. No key; so, keep in. I want to see
   you. My whole life is changed. I must see her. Did
   you get my telegram? Answer, by messenger; I shall
   come to you the moment my father has finished his
   lecture.
               "Yours,
                  "E.B."

Algernon told Sedgett to wait while he dressed in evening uniform, and
gave him a cigar to smoke.

He wrote:--

   "Dear Ned, Stop what? Of course, I suppose there's only one thing,
   and how can I stop it? What for? You ridiculous old boy! What a
   changeable old fellow you are!--Off, to see what I can do. After
   eleven o'clock to-morrow, you'll feel comfortable.--If the Governor
   is sweet, speak a word for the Old Brown; and bring two dozen in a
   cab, if you can. There's no encouragement to keep at home in this
   place. Put that to him. I, in your place, could do it. Tell him
   it's a matter of markets. If I get better wine at hotels, I go to
   hotels, and I spend twice--ten times the money. And say, we intend
   to make the laundress cook our dinners in chambers, as a rule. Old
   B. an inducement.

                    "Yours aff.
                       "A.B."

This epistle he dispatched by the footman, and groaned to think that if,
perchance, the Old Brown Sherry should come, he would, in all
probability, barely drink more than half-a-dozen bottles of that prime
vintage. He and Sedgett, soon after, were driving down to Dahlia's poor
lodgings in the West. On the way, an idea struck him:

Would not Sedgett be a noisier claimant for the thousand than Edward? If
he obeyed Edward's direction and stopped the marriage, he could hand back
a goodly number of hundreds, and leave it to be supposed that he had
advanced the remainder to Sedgett. How to do it? Sedgett happened to say:
"If you won't hand the money now, I must have it when I've married her.
Swear you'll be in the vestry when we're signing. I know all about
marriages. You swear, or I tell you, if I find I'm cheated, I will throw
the young woman over slap."

Algernon nodded: "I shall be there," he said, and thought that he
certainly would not. The thought cleared an oppression in his head,
though it obscured the pretty prospect of a colonial but and horse, with
Rhoda cooking for him, far from cares. He did his best to resolve that he
would stop the business, if he could. But, if it is permitted to the fool
to create entanglements and set calamity in motion, to arrest its course
is the last thing the Gods allow of his doing.




CHAPTER XXXIV

In the shadowy library light, when there was dawn out of doors, Edward
sat with his father, and both were silent, for Edward had opened his
heart, and his father had breathed some of the dry stock of wisdom on it.
Many times Edward rose to go; and Sir William signalled with his finger
that he should stay: an impassive motion, not succeeded by speech. And,
in truth, the baronet was revolving such a problem as a long career of
profitable banking refreshed by classical exercitations does not help us
to solve. There sat the son of his trust and his pride, whose sound and
equal temperament, whose precocious worldly wit, whose precise and broad
intelligence, had been the visionary comfort of his paternal days to
come; and his son had told him, reiterating it in language special and
exact as that of a Chancery barrister unfolding his case to the presiding
judge, that he had deceived and wronged an under-bred girl of the humbler
classes; and that, after a term of absence from her, he had discovered
her to be a part of his existence, and designed "You would marry her?"
Sir William asked, though less forcibly than if he could have put on a
moral amazement.

"That is my intention, sir, with your permission," Edward replied firmly,
and his father understood that he had never known this young man, and
dealt virtually with a stranger in his son--as shrewd a blow as the
vanity which is in paternal nature may have to endure.

He could not fashion the words, "Cerritus fuit," though he thought the
thing in both tenses: Edward's wits had always been too clearly in order:
and of what avail was it to repeat great and honoured prudential maxims
to a hard-headed fellow, whose choice was to steer upon the rocks? He did
remark, in an undertone,--

"The 'misce stultitiam' seems to be a piece of advice you have adopted
too literally. I quote what you have observed of some one else."

"It is possible, sir," said Edward. "I was not particularly sparing when
I sat in the high seat. 'Non eadem est aetas, non mens." I now think
differently."

"I must take your present conduct as the fruit of your premature
sagacity, I suppose. By the same rule, your cousin Algernon may prove to
be some comfort to his father, in the end."

"Let us hope he will, sir. His father will not have deserved it so well
as mine."

"The time is morning," said Sir William, looking at his watch, and
bestowing, in the bitterness of his reflections, a hue of triumph on the
sleep of his brother upstairs. "You are your own master, Edward. I will
detain you no more."

Edward shook his limbs, rejoicing.

"You prepare for a life of hard work," Sir William resumed, not without
some instigation to sternness from this display of alacrity. "I counsel
you to try the Colonial Bar."

Edward read in the first sentence, that his income would be restricted;
and in the second, that his father's social sphere was no longer to be
his.

"Exactly, sir; I have entertained that notion myself," he said; and his
breast narrowed and his features grew sharp.

"And, if I may suggest such matters to you, I would advise you to see
very little company for some years to come."

"There, sir, you only anticipate my previously formed resolution. With a
knavery on my conscience, and a giddy-pated girl on my hands, and the
doors of the London world open to me, I should scarcely have been capable
of serious work. The precious metal, which is Knowledge, sir, is only to
be obtained by mining for it; and that excellent occupation necessarily
sends a man out of sight for a number of years. In the meantime, 'mea
virtute me involvo.'"

"You need not stop short," said his father, with a sardonic look for the
concluding lines.

"The continuation is becoming in the mouth of a hero; but humbler persons
must content themselves not to boast the patent fact, I think." Edward
warmed as he spoke. "I am ready to bear it. I dislike poverty; but, as I
say, I am ready to bear it. Come, sir; you did me the honour once to let
me talk to you as a friend, with the limits which I have never
consciously overstepped; let me explain myself plainly and simply."

Sir William signified, "Pray speak," from the arms of his chair! and
Edward, standing, went on: "After all, a woman's devotion is worth
having, when one is not asked for the small change every ten minutes. I
am aware of the philosophic truth, that we get nothing in life for which
we don't pay. The point is, to appreciate what we desire; and so we reach
a level that makes the payment less--" He laughed. Sir William could
hardly keep back the lines of an ironical smile from his lips.

"This," pursued the orator, "is not the language for the Colonial Bar. I
wish to show you that I shall understand the character of my vocation
there. No, sir; my deeper wish is that you may accept my view of the sole
course left to a man whose sense of honour is of accord with the
inclination of his heart, and not in hostility to his clearer judgement."

"Extremely forensic," said Sir William, not displeased by the promise of
the periods.

"Well, sir, I need not remark to you that rhetoric, though it should fail
to convey, does not extinguish, or imply the absence of emotion in the
speaker; but rather that his imagination is excited by his theme, and
that he addresses more presences than such as are visible. It is, like
the Roman mask, fashioned for large assemblages."

"By a parity of reasoning, then,"--Sir William was seduced into
colloquy,--"an eternal broad grin is not, in the instance of a dualogue,
good comedy."

"It may hide profound grief." Edward made his eyes flash. "I find I can
laugh; it would be difficult for me to smile. Sir, I pray that you will
listen to me seriously, though my language is not of a kind to make you
think me absolutely earnest in what I say, unless you know me."

"Which, I must protest, I certainly do not," interposed Sir William.

"I will do my best to instruct you, sir. Until recently, I have not known
myself. I met this girl. She trusted herself to me. You are aware that I
know a little of men and of women; and when I tell you that I respect her
now even more than I did at first--much more--so thoroughly, that I would
now put my honour in her hands, by the counsel of my experience, as she,
prompted by her instinct and her faith in me, confided hers to
mine,--perhaps, even if you persist in accusing me of rashness, you will
allow that she must be in the possession of singularly feminine and
estimable qualities. I deceived her. My object in doing so was to spare
you. Those consequences followed which can hardly fail to ensue, when, of
two living together, the woman is at a disadvantage, and eats her heart
without complaining. I could have borne a shrewish tongue better,
possibly because I could have answered it better. It is worse to see a
pale sad face with a smile of unalterable tenderness. The very sweetness
becomes repugnant."

"As little boys requiring much medicine have anticipated you by noting in
this world," observed Sir William.

"I thank you for the illustration." Edward bowed, but he smarted. "A man
so situated lives with the ghost of his conscience."

"A doubtful figure of speech," Sir William broke in. "I think you should
establish the personality before you attempt to give a feature to the
essence. But, continue."

Edward saw that by forfeiting simplicity, in order to catch his father's
peculiar cast of mind, he had left him cold and in doubt as to the
existence of the powerful impulse by which he was animated. It is a prime
error in the orator not to seize the emotions and subdue the humanity of
his hearers first. Edward perceived his mistake. He had, however, done
well in making a show of the unabated vigour of his wits. Contempt did
not dwell in the baronet's tone. On the contrary, they talked and fenced,
and tripped one another as of old; and, considering the breach he had
been compelled to explode between his father and himself, Edward
understood that this was a real gain.

He resumed: "All figures of speech must be inadequate--"

"Ah, pardon me," said Sir William, pertinaciously; "the figure I alluded
to was not inadequate. A soap-bubble is not inadequate."

"Plainly, sir, in God's name, hear me out," cried Edward. "She--what
shall I call her? my mistress, my sweetheart, if you like--let the name
be anything 'wife' it should have been, and shall be--I left her, and
have left her and have not looked on her for many months. I thought I was
tired of her--I was under odd influences--witchcraft, it seems. I could
believe in witchcraft now. Brutal selfishness is the phrase for my
conduct. I have found out my villany. I have not done a day's sensible
work, or had a single clear thought, since I parted from her. She has had
brain-fever. She has been in the hospital. She is now prostrate with
misery. While she suffered, I--I can't look back on myself. If I had to
plead before you for more than manly consideration, I could touch you. I
am my own master, and am ready to subsist by my own efforts; there is no
necessity for me to do more than say I abide by the choice I make, and my
own actions. In deciding to marry her, I do a good thing--I do a just
thing. I will prove to you that I have done a wise thing.

"Let me call to your recollection what you did me the honour to remark of
my letters from Italy. Those were written with her by my side. Every
other woman vexed me. This one alone gives me peace, and nerve to work.
If I did not desire to work, should I venture to run the chances of an
offence to you? Your girls of society are tasteless to me. And they don't
makes wives to working barristers. No, nor to working Members.

"They are very ornamental and excellent, and, as I think you would call
them, accomplished. All England would leap to arms to defend their
incontestible superiority to their mothers and their duties. I have not
the wish to stand opposed to my countrymen on any question, although I go
to other shores, and may be called upon to make capital out of
opposition. They are admirable young persons, no doubt. I do not offer
you a drab for your daughter-in-law, sir. If I rise, she will be equal to
my station. She has the manners of a lady; a lady, I say; not of the
modern young lady; with whom, I am happy to think, she does not come into
competition. She has not been sedulously trained to pull her way, when
she is to go into harness with a yokefellow.

"But I am laying myself open to the charge of feeling my position weak,
seeing that I abuse the contrary one. Think what you will of me, sir, you
will know that I have obeyed my best instinct and my soundest judgement
in this matter; I need not be taught, that if it is my destiny to leave
England I lose the association with him who must ever be my dearest
friend. And few young men can say as much of one standing in the relation
of father."

With this, Edward finished; not entirely to his satisfaction; for he had
spoken with too distinct a sincerity to please his own critical taste,
which had been educated to delight in acute antithesis and culminating
sentences--the grand Biscayan billows of rhetorical utterance, in
comparison wherewith his talk was like the little chopping waves of a
wind-blown lake. But he had, as he could see, produced an impression. His
father stood up.

"We shall be always friends; I hope," Sir William said. "As regards a
provision for you, suitable to your estate, that will be arranged. You
must have what comforts you have been taught to look to. At the same
time, I claim a personal freedom for my own actions."

"Certainly, sir," said Edward, not conceiving any new development in
these.

"You have an esteem for Mrs. Lovell, have you not?"

Edward flushed. "I should have a very perfect esteem for her, if--" he
laughed slightly--"you will think I want everybody to be married and in
the traces now; she will never be manageable till she is married."

"I am also of that opinion," said Sir William. "I will detain you no
longer. It is a quarter to five in the morning. You will sleep here, of
course."

"No, I must go to the Temple. By the way, Algy prefers a petition for
Sherry. He is beginning to discern good wine from bad, which may be a
hopeful augury."

"I will order Holmes to send some down to him when he has done a week's
real duty at the Bank."

"Sooner or later, then. Good morning, sir."

"Good morning." Sir William shook his son's hand.

A minute after, Edward had quitted the house. "That's over!" he said,
sniffing the morning air gratefully, and eyeing certain tinted wisps of
cloud that were in a line of the fresh blue sky.




CHAPTER XXXV

A shy and humble entreaty had been sent by Dahlia through Robert to
Rhoda, saying that she wished not to be seen until the ceremony was at an
end; but Rhoda had become mentally stern toward her sister, and as much
to uphold her in the cleansing step she was about to take, as in the
desire to have the dear lost head upon her bosom, she disregarded
Dahlia's foolish prayer, and found it was well that she had done so; for,
to her great amazement, Dahlia, worn, shorn, sickened, and reduced to be
a mark for the scorn of the cowardice which is in the world, through the
selfishness of a lying man, loved the man still, and wavered, or rather
shrank with a pitiful fleshly terror from the noble husband who would
wipe the spot of shame from her forehead.

When, after their long separation, the sisters met, Dahlia was mistress
of herself, and pronounced Rhoda's name softly, as she moved up to kiss
her. Rhoda could not speak. Oppressed by the strangeness of the white
face which had passed through fire, she gave a mute kiss and a single
groan, while Dahlia gently caressed her on the shoulder. The frail touch
of her hand was harder to bear than the dreary vision had been, and
seemed not so real as many a dream of it. Rhoda sat by her, overcome by
the awfulness of an actual sorrow, never imagined closely, though she had
conjured up vague pictures of Dahlia's face. She had imagined agony,
tears, despair, but not the spectral change, the burnt-out look. It was a
face like a crystal lamp in which the flame has died. The ghastly little
skull-cap showed forth its wanness rigidly. Rhoda wondered to hear her
talk simply of home and the old life. At each question, the then and the
now struck her spirit with a lightning flash of opposing scenes. But the
talk deepened. Dahlia's martyrdom was near, and their tongues were
hurried into plain converse of the hour, and then Dahlia faltered and
huddled herself up like a creature swept by the torrent; Rhoda learnt
that, instead of hate or loathing of the devilish man who had deceived
her, love survived. Upon Dahlia's lips it was compassion and forgiveness;
but Rhoda, in her contempt for the word, called it love. Dahlia submitted
gladly to the torture of interrogation; "Do you, can you care for him
still?" and sighed in shame and fear of her sister, not daring to say she
thought her harsh, not daring to plead for escape, as she had done with
Robert.

"Why is there no place for the unhappy, who do not wish to live, and
cannot die?" she moaned.

And Rhoda cruelly fixed her to the marriage, making it seem irrevocable,
and barring all the faint lights to the free outer world, by praise of
her--passionate praise of her--when she confessed, that half inanimate
after her recovery from the fever, and in the hope that she might thereby
show herself to her father, she had consented to devote her life to the
only creature who was then near her to be kind to her. Rhoda made her
relate how this man had seen her first, and how, by untiring diligence,
he had followed her up and found her. "He--he must love you," said Rhoda;
and in proportion as she grew more conscious of her sister's weakness,
and with every access of tenderness toward her, she felt that Dahlia must
be thought for very much as if she were a child.

Dahlia tried to float out some fretting words for mercy, on one or other
of her heavy breathings; but her brain was under lead. She had a thirst
for Rhoda's praise in her desolation; it was sweet, though the price of
it was her doing an abhorred thing. Abhorred? She did not realize the
consequences of the act, or strength would have come to her to wrestle
with the coil: a stir of her blood would have endued her with womanly
counsel and womanly frenzy; nor could Rhoda have opposed any real
vehemence of distaste to the union on Dahlia's part. But Dahlia's blood
was frozen, her brain was under lead. She clung to the poor delight in
her sister's praise, and shuddered and thirsted. She caught at the
minutes, and saw them slip from her. All the health of her thoughts went
to establish a sort of blind belief that God; having punished her enough,
would not permit a second great misery to befall her. She expected a
sudden intervention, even though at the altar. She argued to herself that
misery, which follows sin, cannot surely afflict us further when we are
penitent, and seek to do right: her thought being, that perchance if she
refrained from striving against the current, and if she suffered her body
to be borne along, God would be the more merciful. With the small cunning
of an enfeebled spirit, she put on a mute submissiveness, and deceived
herself by it sufficiently to let the minutes pass with a lessened horror
and alarm.

This was in the first quarter of the night. The dawn was wearing near.
Sedgett had been seen by Rhoda; a quiet interview; a few words on either
side, attention paid to them by neither. But the girl doated on his
ugliness; she took it for plain proof of his worthiness; proof too that
her sister must needs have seen the latter very distinctly, or else she
could not have submitted.

Dahlia looked at the window-blinds and at the candlelight. The little
which had been spoken between her and her sister in such a chasm of time,
gave a terrible swiftness to the hours. Half shrieking, she dropped her
head in Rhoda's lap. Rhoda, thinking that with this demonstration she
renounced the project finally, prepared to say what she had to say, and
to yield. But, as was natural after a paroxysm of weakness, Dahlia's
frenzy left no courage behind it.

Dahlia said, as she swept her brows, "I am still subject to nervous
attacks."

"They will soon leave you," said Rhoda, nursing her hand.

Dahlia contracted her lips. "Is father very unforgiving to women?"

"Poor father!" Rhoda interjected for answer, and Dahlia's frame was taken
with a convulsion.

"Where shall I see him to-morrow?" she asked; and, glancing from the
beamless candle to the window-blinds "Oh! it's day. Why didn't I sleep!
It's day! where am I to see him?"

"At Robert's lodgings. We all go there."

"We all go?--he goes?"

"Your husband will lead you there."

"My heaven! my heaven! I wish you had known what this is, a little--just
a little."

"I do know that it is a good and precious thing to do right," said Rhoda.

"If you had only had an affection, dear! Oh I how ungrateful I am to
you."

"It is only, darling, that I seem unkind to you," said Rhoda.

"You think I must do this? Must? Why?"

"Why?" Rhoda pressed her fingers. "Why, when you were ill, did you not
write to me, that I might have come to you?"

"I was ashamed," said Dahlia.

"You shall not be ashamed any more, my sister."

Dahlia seized the window-blind with her trembling finger-tips, and looked
out on the day. As if it had smitten her eyeballs, she covered her face,
giving dry sobs.

"Oh! I wish--I wish you had known what this is. Must I do it? His face!
Dear, I am very sorry to distress you. Must I do it? The doctor says I am
so strong that nothing will break in me, and that I must live, if I am
not killed. But, if I might only be a servant in father's house--I would
give all my love to a little bed of flowers."

"Father has no home now," said Rhoda.

"I know--I know. I am ready. I will submit, and then father will not be
ashamed to remain at the Farm. I am ready. Dear, I am ready. Rhoda, I am
ready. It is not much." She blew the candle out. "See. No one will do
that for me. We are not to live for ourselves. I have done wrong, and I
am going to be humble; yes, I am. I never was when I was happy, and that
proves I had no right to be happy. All I ask is for another night with
you. Why did we not lie down together and sleep? We can't sleep now--it's
day."

"Come and lie down with me for a few hours, my darling," said Rhoda.

While she was speaking, Dahlia drew the window-blind aside, to look out
once more upon the vacant, inexplicable daylight, and looked, and then
her head bent like the first thrust forward of a hawk's sighting quarry;
she spun round, her raised arms making a cramped, clapping motion.

"He is there."




CHAPTER XXXVI

At once Rhoda perceived that it was time for her to act. The name of him
who stood in the street below was written on her sister's face. She
started to her side, got possession of her hands, murmuring,--

"Come with me. You are to come with me. Don't speak. I know. I will go
down. Yes; you are to obey, and do what I tell you."

Dahlia's mouth opened, but like a child when it is warned not to cry, she
uttered a faint inward wailing, lost her ideas, and was passive in a
shuddering fit.

"What am I to do?" she said supplicatingly, as Rhoda led her to her
bedroom.

"Rest here. Be perfectly quiet. Trust everything to me. I am your
sister."

Leaving her under the spell of coldly-spoken words, Rhoda locked the door
on her. She was herself in great agitation, but nerved by deeper anger
there was no faltering in her movements. She went to the glass a minute,
as she tied her bonnet-strings under her chin, and pinned her shawl. A
night's vigil had not chased the bloom from her cheek, or the swimming
lustre from her dark eyes. Content that her aspect should be seemly, she
ran down the stairs, unfastened the bolts, and without hesitation closed
the door behind her. At the same instant, a gentleman crossed the road.
He asked whether Mrs. Ayrton lived in that house? Rhoda's vision danced
across his features, but she knew him unerringly to be the cruel enemy.

"My sister, Dahlia Fleming, lives there," she said.

"Then, you are Rhoda?"

"My name is Rhoda."

"Mine--I fear it will not give you pleasure to hear it--is Edward
Blancove. I returned late last night from abroad."

She walked to a distance, out of hearing and out of sight of the house,
and he silently followed. The streets were empty, save for the solitary
footing of an early workman going to his labour.

She stopped, and he said, "I hope your sister is well."

"She is quite well."

"Thank heaven for that! I heard of some illness."

"She has quite recovered."

"Did she--tell me the truth--did she get a letter that I sent two days
ago, to her? It was addressed to 'Miss Fleming, Wrexby, Kent, England.'
Did it reach her?"

"I have not seen it."

"I wrote," said Edward.

His scrutiny of her features was not reassuring to him. But he had a
side-thought, prompted by admiration of her perfect build of figure, her
succinct expression of countenance, and her equable manner of speech: to
the effect, that the true English yeomanry can breed consummate women.
Perhaps--who knows? even resolute human nature is the stronger for an
added knot--it approved the resolution he had formed, or stamped with a
justification the series of wild impulses, the remorse, and the returned
tenderness and manliness which had brought him to that spot.

"You know me, do you not?" he said.

"Yes," she answered shortly.

"I wish to see Dahlia."

"You cannot."

"Not immediately, of course. But when she has risen later in the morning.
If she has received my letter, she will, she must see me."

"No, not later; not at all," said Rhoda.

"Not at all? Why not?"

Rhoda controlled the surging of her blood for a vehement reply; saying
simply, "You will not see her."

"My child, I must."

"I am not a child, and I say what I mean."

"But why am I not to see her? Do you pretend that it is her wish not to
see me? You can't. I know her perfectly. She is gentleness itself."

"Yes; you know that," said Rhoda, with a level flash of her eyes, and
confronting him in a way so rarely distinguishing girls of her class,
that he began to wonder and to ache with an apprehension.

"She has not changed? Rhoda--for we used to talk of you so often! You
will think better of me, by-and-by.

"Naturally enough, you detest me at present. I have been a brute. I can't
explain it, and I don't excuse myself. I state the fact to you--her
sister. My desire is to make up for the past. Will you take a message to
her from me?"

"I will not."

"You are particularly positive."

Remarks touching herself Rhoda passed by.

"Why are you so decided?" he said more urgently. "I know I have deeply
offended and hurt you. I wish, and intend to repair the wrong to the
utmost of my power. Surely it's mere silly vindictiveness on your part to
seek to thwart me. Go to her; say I am here. At all events, let it be her
choice not to see me, if I am to be rejected at the door. She can't have
had my letter. Will you do that much?"

"She knows that you are here; she has seen you."

"Has seen me?" Edward drew in his breath sharply. "Well? and she sends
you out to me?"

Rhoda did not answer. She was strongly tempted to belie Dahlia's frame of
mind.

"She does send you to speak to me," Edward insisted.

"She knows that I have come."

"And you will not take one message in?"

"I will take no message from you."

"You hate me, do you not?"

Again she controlled the violent shock of her heart to give him hard
speech. He went on:--

"Whether you hate me or not is beside the matter. It lies between Dahlia
and me. I will see her. When I determine, I allow of no obstacles, not
even of wrong-headed girls. First, let me ask, is your father in London?"

Rhoda threw a masculine meaning into her eyes.

"Do not come before him, I advise you."

"If," said Edward, with almost womanly softness, "you could know what I
have passed through in the last eight-and-forty hours, you would
understand that I am equal to any meeting; though, to speak truth, I
would rather not see him until I have done what I mean to do. Will you be
persuaded? Do you suppose that I have ceased to love your sister?"

This, her execrated word, coming from his mouth, vanquished her
self-possession.

"Are you cold?" he said, seeing the ripple of a trembling run over her.

"I am not cold. I cannot remain here." Rhoda tightened her intertwisting
fingers across under her bosom. "Don't try to kill my sister outright.
She's the ghost of what she was. Be so good as to go. She will soon be
out of your reach. You will have to kill me first, if you get near her.
Never! you never shall. You have lied to her--brought disgrace on her poor
head. We poor people read our Bibles, and find nothing that excuses you.
You are not punished, because there is no young man in our family. Go."

Edward gazed at her for some time. "Well, I've deserved worse," he said,
not sorry, now that he saw an opponent in her, that she should waste her
concentrated antagonism in this fashion, and rejoiced by the testimony it
gave him that he was certainly not too late.

"You know, Rhoda, she loves me."

"If she does, let her pray to God on her knees."

"My good creature, be reasonable. Why am I here? To harm her? You take me
for a kind of monster. You look at me very much, let me say, like a
bristling cat. Here are the streets getting full of people, and you ought
not to be seen. Go to Dahlia. Tell her I am here. Tell her I am come to
claim her for good, and that her troubles are over. This is a moment to
use your reason. Will you do what I ask?"

"I would cut my tongue out, if it did you a service," said Rhoda.

"Citoyenne Corday," thought Edward, and observed: "Then I will dispense
with your assistance."

He moved in the direction of the house. Rhoda swiftly outstripped him.
They reached the gates together. She threw herself in the gateway. He
attempted to parley, but she was dumb to it.

"I allow nothing to stand between her and me," he said, and seized her
arm. She glanced hurriedly to right and left. At that moment Robert
appeared round a corner of the street. He made his voice heard, and,
coming up at double quick, caught Edward Blancove by the collar, swinging
him off. Rhoda, with a sign, tempered him to muteness, and the three eyed
one another.

"It's you," said Robert, and, understanding immediately the tactics
desired by Rhoda, requested Edward to move a step or two away in his
company.

Edward settled the disposition of his coat-collar, as a formula wherewith
to regain composure of mind, and passed along beside Robert, Rhoda
following.

"What does this mean?" said Robert sternly.

Edward's darker nature struggled for ascendancy within him. It was this
man's violence at Fairly which had sickened him, and irritated him
against Dahlia, and instigated him, as he remembered well, more than Mrs.
Lovell's witcheries, to the abhorrent scheme to be quit of her, and rid
of all botheration, at any cost.

"You're in some conspiracy to do her mischief, all of you," he cried.

"If you mean Dahlia Fleming," said Robert, "it'd be a base creature that
would think of doing harm to her now."

He had a man's perception that Edward would hardly have been found in
Dahlia's neighbourhood with evil intentions at this moment, though it was
a thing impossible to guess. Generous himself, he leaned to the more
generous view.

"I think your name is Eccles," said Edward. "Mr. Eccles, my position here
is a very sad one. But first, let me acknowledge that I have done you
personally a wrong. I am ready to bear the burden of your reproaches, or
what you will. All that I beg is, that you will do me the favour to grant
me five minutes in private. It is imperative."

Rhoda burst in--"No, Robert!" But Robert said, "It is a reasonable
request;" and, in spite of her angry eyes, he waved her back, and walked
apart with Edward.

She stood watching them, striving to divine their speech by their
gestures, and letting her savage mood interpret the possible utterances.
It went ill with Robert in her heart that he did not suddenly grapple and
trample the man, and so break away from him. She was outraged to see
Robert's listening posture. "Lies! lies!" she said to herself, "and he
doesn't know them to be lies." The window-blinds in Dahlia's sitting-room
continued undisturbed; but she feared the agency of the servant of the
house in helping to release her sister. Time was flowing to dangerous
strands. At last Robert turned back singly. Rhoda fortified her soul to
resist.

"He has fooled you," she murmured, inaudibly, before he spoke.

"Perhaps, Rhoda, we ought not to stand in his way. He wishes to do what a
man can do in his case. So he tells me, and I'm bound not to disbelieve
him. He says he repents--says the word; and gentlemen seem to mean it
when they use it. I respect the word, and them when they're up to that
word. He wrote to her that he could not marry her, and it did the
mischief, and may well be repented of; but he wishes to be forgiven and
make amends--well, such as he can. He's been abroad, and only received
Dahlia's letters within the last two or three days. He seems to love her,
and to be heartily wretched. Just hear me out; you'll decide; but pray,
pray don't be rash. He wishes to marry her; says he has spoken to his
father this very night; came straight over from France, after he had read
her letters. He says--and it seems fair--he only asks to see Dahlia for
two minutes. If she bids him go, he goes. He's not a friend of mine, as I
could prove to you; but I do think he ought to see her. He says he looks
on her as his wife; always meant her to be his wife, but things were
against him when he wrote that letter. Well, he says so; and it's true
that gentlemen are situated--they can't always, or think they can't,
behave quite like honest men. They've got a hundred things to consider
for our one. That's my experience, and I know something of the best among
'em. The question is about this poor young fellow who's to marry her
to-day. Mr. Blancove talks of giving him a handsome sum--a thousand
pounds--and making him comfortable--"

"There!" Rhoda exclaimed, with a lightning face. "You don't see what he
is, after that? Oh!--" She paused, revolted.

"Will you let me run off to the young man, wherever he's to be found, and
put the case to him--that is, from Dahlia? And you know she doesn't like
the marriage overmuch, Rhoda. Perhaps he may think differently when he
comes to hear of things. As to Mr. Blancove, men change and change when
they're young. I mean, gentlemen. We must learn to forgive. Either he's
as clever as the devil, or he's a man in earnest, and deserves pity. If
you'd heard him!"

"My poor sister!" sighed Rhoda. The mentioning of money to be paid had
sickened and weakened her, as with the very physical taste of
degradation.

Hearing the sigh, Robert thought she had become subdued. Then Rhoda said:
"We are bound to this young man who loves my sister--bound to him in
honour: and Dahlia must esteem him, to have consented. As for the
other..." She waved the thought of his claim on her sister aside with a
quick shake of her head. "I rely on you to do this:--I will speak to Mr.
Blancove myself. He shall not see her there." She indicated the house.
"Go to my sister; and lose no time in taking her to your lodgings. Father
will not arrive till twelve. Wait and comfort her till I come, and answer
no questions. Robert," she gave him her hand gently, and, looking
sweetly, "if you will do this!"

"If I will!" cried Robert, transported by the hopeful tenderness. The
servant girl of the house had just opened the front door, intent on
scrubbing, and he passed in. Rhoda walked on to Edward.




CHAPTER XXXVII

A profound belief in the efficacy of his eloquence, when he chose to
expend it, was one of the principal supports of Edward's sense of
mastery; a secret sense belonging to certain men in every station of
life, and which is the staff of many an otherwise impressible and
fluctuating intellect. With this gift, if he trifled, or slid downward in
any direction, he could right himself easily, as he satisfactorily
conceived. It is a gift that may now and then be the ruin of promising
youths, though as a rule they find it helpful enough. Edward had exerted
it upon his father, and upon Robert. Seeing Rhoda's approach, he thought
of it as a victorious swordsman thinks of his weapon, and aimed his
observation over her possible weak and strong points, studying her
curiously even when she was close up to him. With Robert, the
representative of force, to aid her, she could no longer be regarded in
the light of a despicable hindrance to his wishes. Though inclined
strongly to detest, he respected her. She had decision, and a worthy
bearing, and a marvellously blooming aspect, and a brain that worked
withal. When she spoke, desiring him to walk on by her side, he was
pleased by her voice, and recognition of the laws of propriety, and
thought it a thousand pities that she likewise should not become the wife
of a gentleman. By degrees, after tentative beginnings, he put his spell
upon her ears, for she was attentive, and walked with a demure forward
look upon the pavement; in reality taking small note of what things he
said, until he quoted, as against himself, sentences from Dahlia's
letters; and then she fixed her eyes on him, astonished that he should
thus heap condemnation on his own head. They were most pathetic scraps
quoted by him, showing the wrestle of love with a petrifying conviction
of its hopelessness, and with the stealing on of a malady of the blood.
They gave such a picture of Dahlia's reverent love for this man, her long
torture, her chastity of soul and simple innocence, and her gathering
delirium of anguish, as Rhoda had never taken at all distinctly to her
mind. She tried to look out on him from a mist of tears.

"How could you bear to read the letters?" she sobbed.

"Could any human being read them and not break his heart for her?" said
he.

"How could you bear to read them and leave her to perish!"

His voice deepened to an impressive hollow: "I read them for the first
time yesterday morning, in France, and I am here!"

It was undeniably, in its effect on Rhoda, a fine piece of pleading
artifice. It partially excused or accounted for his behaviour, while it
filled her with emotions which she felt to be his likewise, and therefore
she could not remain as an unsympathetic stranger by his side.

With this, he flung all artifice away. He told her the whole story,
saving the one black episode of it--the one incomprehensible act of a
desperate baseness that, blindly to get free, he had deliberately
permitted, blinked at, and had so been guilty of. He made a mental pause
as he was speaking, to consider in amazement how and by what agency he
had been reduced to shame his manhood, and he left it a marvel.
Otherwise, he in no degree exonerated himself. He dwelt sharply on his
vice of ambition, and scorned it as a misleading light. "Yet I have done
little since I have been without her!" And then, with a persuasive
sincerity, he assured her that he could neither study nor live apart from
Dahlia. "She is the dearest soul to me on earth; she is the purest woman.
I have lived with her, I have lived apart from her, and I cannot live
without her. I love her with a husband's love. Now, do you suppose I will
consent to be separated from her? I know that while her heart beats, it's
mine. Try to keep her from me--you kill her."

"She did not die," said Rhoda. It confounded his menaces.

"This time she might," he could not refrain from murmuring.

"Ah!" Rhoda drew off from him.

"But I say," cried he, "that I will see her."

"We say, that she shall do what is for her good."

"You have a project? Let me hear it. You are mad, if you have."

"It is not our doing, Mr. Blancove. It was--it was by her own choice. She
will not always be ashamed to look her father in the face. She dare not
see him before she is made worthy to see him. I believe her to have been
directed right."

"And what is her choice?"

"She has chosen for herself to marry a good and worthy man."

Edward called out, "Have you seen him--the man?"

Rhoda, thinking he wished to have the certainty of the stated fact
established, replied, "I have."

"A good and worthy man," muttered Edward. "Illness, weakness, misery,
have bewildered her senses. She thinks him a good and worthy man?"

"I think him so."

"And you have seen him?"

"I have."

"Why, what monstrous delusion is this? It can't be! My good creature,
you're oddly deceived, I imagine. What is the man's name? I can
understand that she has lost her will and distinct sight; but you are
clear-sighted, and can estimate. What is the man's name?"

"I can tell you," said Rhoda; "his name is Mr. Sedgett."

"Mister--!" Edward gave one hollow stave of laughter. "And you have seen
him, and think him--"

"I know he is not a gentleman," said Rhoda. "He has been deeply good to
my sister, and I thank him, and do respect him."

"Deeply!" Edward echoed. He was prompted to betray and confess himself:
courage failed.

They looked around simultaneously on hearing an advancing footstep.

The very man appeared--in holiday attire, flushed, smiling, and with a
nosegay of roses in his hand. He studied the art of pleasing women. His
eye struck on Edward, and his smile vanished. Rhoda gave him no word of
recognition. As he passed on, he was led to speculate from his having
seen Mr. Edward instead of Mr. Algernon, and from the look of the former,
that changes were in the air, possibly chicanery, and the proclaiming of
himself as neatly diddled by the pair whom, with another, he heartily
hoped to dupe.

After he had gone by, Edward and Rhoda changed looks. Both knew the
destination of that lovely nosegay. The common knowledge almost kindled
an illuminating spark in her brain; but she was left in the dark, and
thought him strangely divining, or only strange. For him, a horror
cramped his limbs. He felt that he had raised a devil in that abominable
smirking ruffian. It may not, perhaps, be said that he had distinctly
known Sedgett to be the man. He had certainly suspected the possibility
of his being the man. It is out of the power of most wilful and selfish
natures to imagine, so as to see accurately, the deeds they prompt or
permit to be done. They do not comprehend them until these black
realities stand up before their eyes.

Ejaculating "Great heaven!" Edward strode some steps away, and returned.

"It's folly, Rhoda!--the uttermost madness ever conceived! I do not
believe--I know that Dahlia would never consent--first, to marry any man
but myself; secondly, to marry a man who is not a perfect gentleman. Her
delicacy distinguishes her among women."

"Mr. Blancove, my sister is nearly dead, only that she is so strong. The
disgrace has overwhelmed her, it has. When she is married, she will thank
and honour him, and see nothing but his love and kindness. I will leave
you now."

"I am going to her," said Edward.

"Do not."

"There's an end of talking. I trust no one will come in my path. Where am
I?"

He looked up at the name of the street, and shot away from her. Rhoda
departed in another direction, firm, since she had seen Sedgett pass,
that his nobleness should not meet with an ill reward. She endowed him
with fair moral qualities, which she contrasted against Edward Blancove's
evil ones; and it was with a democratic fervour of contempt that she
dismissed the superior outward attractions of the gentleman.




CHAPTER XXXVIII

This neighbourhood was unknown to Edward, and, after plunging about in
one direction and another, he found that he had missed his way. Down
innumerable dusky streets of dwarfed houses, showing soiled silent
window-blinds, he hurried and chafed; at one moment in sharp joy that he
had got a resolution, and the next dismayed by the singular petty
impediments which were tripping him. "My dearest!" his heart cried to
Dahlia, "did I wrong you so? I will make all well. It was the work of a
fiend." Now he turned to right, now to left, and the minutes flew. They
flew; and in the gathering heat of his brain he magnified things until
the sacrifice of herself Dahlia was preparing for smote his imagination
as with a blaze of the upper light, and stood sublime before him in the
grandeur of old tragedy. "She has blinded her eyes, stifled her senses,
eaten her heart. Oh! my beloved! my wife! my poor girl! and all to be
free from shame in her father's sight!" Who could have believed that a
girl of Dahlia's class would at once have felt the shame so keenly, and
risen to such pure heights of heroism? The sacrifice flouted conception;
it mocked the steady morning. He refused to believe in it, but the short
throbs of his blood were wiser.

A whistling urchin became his guide. The little lad was carelessly giving
note to a popular opera tune, with happy disregard of concord. It chanced
that the tune was one which had taken Dahlia's ear, and, remembering it
and her pretty humming of it in the old days, Edward's wrestling unbelief
with the fatality of the hour sank, so entirely was he under the
sovereignty of his sensations. He gave the boy a big fee, desiring
superstitiously to feel that one human creature could bless the hour. The
house was in view. He knocked, and there came a strange murmur of some
denial. "She is here," he said, menacingly.

"She was taken away, sir, ten minutes gone, by a gentleman," the servant
tied to assure him.

The landlady of the house, coming up the kitchen stairs, confirmed the
statement. In pity for his torpid incredulity she begged him to examine
her house from top to bottom, and herself conducted him to Dahlia's room.

"That bed has not been slept in," said the lawyer, pointing his finger to
it.

"No, sir; poor thing! she didn't sleep last night. She's been wearying
for weeks; and last night her sister came, and they hadn't met for very
long. Two whole candles they burnt out, or near upon it."

"Where?--" Edward's articulation choked.

"Where they're gone to, sir? That I do not know. Of course she will come
back."

The landlady begged him to wait; but to sit and see the minutes--the
black emissaries of perdition--fly upon their business, was torture as
big as to endure the tearing off of his flesh till the skeleton stood
out. Up to this point he had blamed himself; now he accused the just
heavens. Yea! is not a sinner their lawful quarry? and do they not slip
the hounds with savage glee, and hunt him down from wrong to evil, from
evil to infamy, from infamy to death, from death to woe everlasting? And
is this their righteousness?--He caught at the rusty garden rails to
steady his feet.

Algernon was employed in the comfortable degustation of his breakfast,
meditating whether he should transfer a further slice of ham or of
Yorkshire pie to his plate, or else have done with feeding and light a
cigar, when Edward appeared before him.

"Do you know where that man lives?"

Algernon had a prompting to respond, "Now, really! what man?" But passion
stops the breath of fools. He answered, "Yes."

"Have you the thousand in your pocket?"

Algernon nodded with a sickly grin.

"Jump up! Go to him. Give it up to him! Say, that if he leaves London on
the instant, and lets you see him off--say, it shall be doubled. Stay,
I'll write the promise, and put my signature. Tell him he shall, on my
word of honour, have another--another thousand pounds--as soon as I can
possibly obtain it, if he holds his tongue, and goes with you; and see
that he goes. Don't talk to me on any other subject, or lose one minute."

Algernon got his limbs slackly together, trying to think of the
particular pocket in which he had left his cigar-case. Edward wrote a
line on a slip of note-paper, and signed his name beneath. With this and
an unsatisfied longing for tobacco Algernon departed, agreeing to meet
his cousin in the street where Dahlia dwelt.

"By Jove! two thousand! It's an expensive thing not to know your own
mind," he thought.

"How am I to get out of this scrape? That girl Rhoda doesn't care a
button for me. No colonies for me. I should feel like a convict if I went
alone. What on earth am I to do?"

It seemed preposterous to him that he should take a cab, when he had not
settled upon a scheme. The sight of a tobacconist's shop charmed one of
his more immediate difficulties to sleep. He was soon enabled to puff
consoling smoke.

"Ned's mad," he pursued his soliloquy. "He's a weather-cock. Do I ever
act as he does? And I'm the dog that gets the bad name. The idea of
giving this fellow two thousand--two thousand pounds! Why, he might live
like a gentleman."

And that when your friend proves himself to be distraught, the proper
friendly thing to do is to think for him, became eminently clear in
Algernon's mind.

"Of course, it's Ned's money. I'd give it if I had it, but I haven't; and
the fellow won't take a farthing less; I know him. However, it's my duty
to try."

He summoned a vehicle. It was a boast of his proud youth that never in
his life had he ridden in a close cab. Flinging his shoulders back, he
surveyed the world on foot. "Odd faces one sees," he meditated. "I
suppose they've got feelings, like the rest; but a fellow can't help
asking--what's the use of them? If I inherit all right, as I ought
to--why shouldn't I?--I'll squat down at old Wrexby, garden and farm, and
drink my Port. I hate London. The squire's not so far wrong, I fancy."

It struck him that his chance of inheriting was not so very obscure,
after all. Why had he ever considered it obscure? It was decidedly next
to certain, he being an only son. And the squire's health was bad!

While speculating in this wise he saw advancing, arm-in-arm, Lord
Suckling and Harry Latters. They looked at him, and evidently spoke
together, but gave neither nod, nor smile, nor a word, in answer to his
flying wave of the hand. Furious, and aghast at this signal of exclusion
from the world, just at the moment when he was returning to it almost
cheerfully in spirit, he stopped the cab, jumped out, and ran after the
pair.

"I suppose I must say Mr. Latters," Algernon commenced.

Harry deliberated a quiet second or two. "Well, according to our laws of
primogeniture, I don't come first, and therefore miss a better title," he
said.

"How are you?" Algernon nodded to Lord Suckling, who replied, "Very well,
I thank you."

Their legs were swinging forward concordantly. Algernon plucked out his
purse. "I have to beg you to excuse me," he said, hurriedly; "my cousin
Ned's in a mess, and I've been helping him as well as I
can--bothered--not an hour my own. Fifty, I think?" That amount he
tendered to Harry Latters, who took it most coolly.

"A thousand?" he queried of Lord Suckling.

"Divided by two," replied the young nobleman, and the Blucher of
bank-notes was proffered to him. He smiled queerly, hesitating to take
it.

"I was looking for you at all the Clubs last night," said Algernon.

Lord Suckling and Latters had been at theirs, playing whist till past
midnight; yet is money, even when paid over in this egregious public
manner by a nervous hand, such testimony to the sincerity of a man, that
they shouted a simultaneous invitation for him to breakfast with them, in
an hour, at the Club, or dine with them there that evening. Algernon
affected the nod of haste and acquiescence, and ran, lest they should
hear him groan. He told the cabman to drive Northward, instead of to the
South-west. The question of the thousand pounds had been decided for
him--"by fate," he chose to affirm. The consideration that one is pursued
by fate, will not fail to impart a sense of dignity even to the meanest.
"After all, if I stop in England," said he, "I can't afford to lose my
position in society; anything's better than that an unmitigated low
scoundrel like Sedgett should bag the game." Besides, is it not somewhat
sceptical to suppose that when Fate decides, she has not weighed the
scales, and decided for the best? Meantime, the whole energy of his
intellect was set reflecting on the sort of lie which Edward would, by
nature and the occasion, be disposed to swallow. He quitted the cab, and
walked in the Park, and au diable to him there! the fool has done his
work.

It was now half-past ten. Robert, with a most heavy heart, had
accomplished Rhoda's commands upon him. He had taken Dahlia to his
lodgings, whither, when free from Edward, Rhoda proceeded in a mood of
extreme sternness. She neither thanked Robert, nor smiled upon her
sister. Dahlia sent one quivering look up at her, and cowered lower in
her chair near the window.

"Father comes at twelve?" Rhoda said.

Robert replied: "He does."

After which a silence too irritating for masculine nerves filled the
room.

"You will find, I hope, everything here that you may want," said Robert.
"My landlady will attend to the bell. She is very civil."

"Thank you; we shall not want anything," said Rhoda. "There is my
sister's Bible at her lodgings."

Robert gladly offered to fetch it, and left them with a sense of relief
that was almost joy. He waited a minute in the doorway, to hear whether
Dahlia addressed him. He waited on the threshold of the house, that he
might be sure Dahlia did not call for his assistance. Her cry of appeal
would have fortified him to stand against Rhoda; but no cry was heard. He
kept expecting it, pausing for it, hoping it would come to solve his
intense perplexity. The prolonged stillness terrified him; for, away from
the sisters, he had power to read the anguish of Dahlia's heart, her
frozen incapacity, and the great and remorseless mastery which lay in
Rhoda's inexorable will.

A few doors down the street he met Major blaring, on his way to him.
"Here's five minutes' work going to be done, which we may all of us
regret till the day of our deaths," Robert said, and related what had
passed during the morning hours.

Percy approved Rhoda, saying, "She must rescue her sister at all hazards.
The case is too serious for her to listen to feelings, and regrets, and
objections. The world against one poor woman is unfair odds, Robert. I
come to tell you I leave England in a day or two. Will you join me?"

"How do I know what I shall or can do?" said Robert, mournfully: and they
parted.

Rhoda's unflickering determination to carry out, and to an end, this
tragic struggle of duty against inclination; on her own sole
responsibility forcing it on; acting like a Fate, in contempt of mere
emotions,--seemed barely real to his mind: each moment that he conceived
it vividly, he became more certain that she must break down. Was it in
her power to drag Dahlia to the steps of the altar? And would not her
heart melt when at last Dahlia did get her voice? "This marriage can
never take place!" he said, and was convinced of its being impossible. He
forgot that while he was wasting energy at Fairly, Rhoda had sat hiving
bitter strength in the loneliness of the Farm; with one vile epithet
clapping on her ears, and nothing but unavailing wounded love for her
absent unhappy sister to make music of her pulses.

He found his way to Dahlia's room; he put her Bible under his arm, and
looked about him sadly. Time stood at a few minutes past eleven. Flinging
himself into a chair, he thought of waiting in that place; but a crowd of
undefinable sensations immediately beset him. Seeing Edward Blancove in
the street below, he threw up the window compassionately, and Edward,
casting a glance to right and left, crossed the road. Robert went down to
him.

"I am waiting for my cousin." Edward had his watch in his hand. "I think
I am fast. Can you tell me the time exactly?"

"Why, I'm rather slow," said Robert, comparing time with his own watch.
"I make it four minutes past the hour."

"I am at fourteen," said Edward. "I fancy I must be fast."

"About ten minutes past, is the time, I think."

"So much as that!"

"It may be a minute or so less."

"I should like," said Edward, "to ascertain positively."

"There's a clock down in the kitchen here, I suppose," said Robert.
"Safer, there's a clock at the church, just in sight from here."

"Thank you; I will go and look at that."

Robert bethought himself suddenly that Edward had better not. "I can tell
you the time to a second," he said. "It's now twelve minutes past
eleven."

Edward held his watch balancing. "Twelve," he repeated; and, behind this
mask of common-place dialogue, they watched one another--warily, and
still with pity, on Robert's side.

"You can't place any reliance on watches," said Edward.

"None, I believe," Robert remarked.

"If you could see the sun every day in this climate!" Edward looked up.

"Ah, the sun's the best timepiece, when visible," Robert acquiesced.
"Backwoodsmen in America don't need watches."

"Unless it is to astonish the Indians with them."

"Ah! yes!" hummed Robert.

"Twelve--fifteen--it must be a quarter past. Or, a three quarters to the
next hour, as the Germans say."

"Odd!" Robert ejaculated. "Foreigners have the queerest ways in the
world. They mean no harm, but they make you laugh."

"They think the same of us, and perhaps do the laughing more loudly."

"Ah! let them," said Robert, not without contemptuous indignation, though
his mind was far from the talk.

The sweat was on Edward's forehead. "In a few minutes it will be
half-past--half-past eleven! I expect a friend; that makes me impatient.
Mr. Eccles"--Edward showed his singular, smallish, hard-cut and flashing
features, clear as if he had blown off a mist--"you are too much of a man
to bear malice. Where is Dahlia? Tell me at once. Some one seems to be
cruelly driving her. Has she lost her senses? She has:--or else she is
coerced in an inexplicable and shameful manner."

"Mr. Blancove," said Robert, "I bear you not a bit of malice--couldn't if
I would. I'm not sure I could have said guilty to the same sort of
things, in order to tell an enemy of mine I was sorry for what I had
done, and I respect you for your courage. Dahlia was taken from here by
me."

Edward nodded, as if briefly assenting, while his features sharpened.

"Why?" he asked.

"It was her sister's wish."

"Has she no will of her own?"

"Very little, I'm afraid, just now, sir."

"A remarkable sister! Are they of Puritan origin?"

"Not that I am aware of."

"And this father?"

"Mr. Blancove, he is one of those sort--he can't lift up his head if he
so much as suspects a reproach to his children."

Edward brooded. "I desire--as I told you, as I told her sister, as I told
my father last night--I desire to make her my wife. What can I do more?
Are they mad with some absurd country pride? Half-past eleven!--it will
be murder if they force her to it!  Where is she? To such a man as that!
Poor soul! I can hardly fear it, for I can't imagine it. Here--the time
is going. You know the man yourself."

"I know the man?" said Robert. "I've never set eyes on him--I've never
set eyes on him, and never liked to ask much about him. I had a sort of
feeling. Her sister says he is a good, and kind, honourable young fellow,
and he must be."

"Before it's too late," Edward muttered hurriedly--"you know him--his
name is Sedgett."

Robert hung swaying over him with a big voiceless chest.

"That Sedgett?" he breathed huskily, and his look was hard to meet.

Edward frowned, unable to raise his head.

"Lord in heaven! some one has something to answer for!" cried Robert.
"Come on; come to the church. That foul dog?--Or you, stay where you are.
I'll go. He to be Dahlia's husband!  They've seen him, and can't see what
he is!--cunning with women as that? How did they meet? Do you
know?--can't you guess?"

He flung a lightning at Edward and ran off. Bursting into the aisle, he
saw the minister closing the Book at the altar, and three persons moving
toward the vestry, of whom the last, and the one he discerned, was Rhoda.




CHAPTER XXXIX

Late into the afternoon, Farmer Fleming was occupying a chair in Robert's
lodgings, where he had sat since the hour of twelve, without a movement
of his limbs or of his mind, and alone. He showed no sign that he
expected the approach of any one. As mute and unremonstrant as a fallen
tree, nearly as insensible, his eyes half closed, and his hands lying
open, the great figure of the old man kept this attitude as of stiff
decay through long sunny hours, and the noise of the London suburb.
Although the wedding people were strangely late, it was unnoticed by him.
When the door opened and Rhoda stepped into the room, he was unaware that
he had been waiting, and only knew that the hours had somehow accumulated
to a heavy burden upon him.

"She is coming, father; Robert is bringing her up," Rhoda said.

"Let her come," he answered.

Robert's hold was tight under Dahlia's arm as they passed the doorway,
and then the farmer stood. Robert closed the door.

For some few painful moments the farmer could not speak, and his hand was
raised rejectingly. The return of human animation to his heart made him
look more sternly than he felt; but he had to rid himself of one terrible
question before he satisfied his gradual desire to take his daughter to
his breast. It came at last like a short roll of drums, the words were
heard,--

"Is she an honest woman?"

"She is," said Rhoda.

The farmer was looking on Robert.

Robert said it likewise in a murmur, but with steadfast look.

Bending his eyes now upon Dahlia, a mist of affection grew in them. He
threw up his head, and with a choking, infantine cry, uttered, "Come."

Robert placed her against her father's bosom.

He moved to the window beside Rhoda, and whispered, and she answered, and
they knew not what they said. The joint moans of father and daughter--the
unutterable communion of such a meeting--filled their ears. Grief held
aloof as much as joy. Neither joy nor grief were in those two hearts of
parent and child; but the senseless contentment of hard, of infinite hard
human craving.

The old man released her, and Rhoda undid her hands from him, and led the
pale Sacrifice to another room.

"Where's...?" Mr. Fleming asked.

Robert understood him.

"Her husband will not come."

It was interpreted by the farmer as her husband's pride. Or, may be, the
man who was her husband now had righted her at last, and then flung her
off in spite for what he had been made to do.

"I'm not being deceived, Robert?"

"No, sir; upon my soul!"

"I've got that here," the farmer struck his ribs.

Rhoda came back. "Sister is tired," she said. "Dahlia is going down home
with you, for...I hope, for a long stay."

"All the better, while home we've got. We mayn't lose time, my girl.
Gammon's on 's way to the station now. He'll wait. He'll wait till
midnight. You may always reckon on a slow man like Gammon for waitin'.
Robert comes too?"

"Father, we have business to do. Robert gives me his rooms here for a
little time; his landlady is a kind woman, and will take care of me. You
will trust me to Robert."

"I'll bring Rhoda down on Monday evening," Robert said to the farmer.
"You may trust me, Mr. Fleming."

"That I know. That I'm sure of. That's a certainty," said the farmer.
"I'd do it for good, if for good was in the girl's heart, Robert. There
seems," he hesitated; "eh, Robert, there seems a something upon us all.
There's a something to be done, is there? But if I've got my flesh and
blood, and none can spit on her, why should I be asking 'whats' and
'whys'? I bow my head; and God forgive me, if ever I complained. And you
will bring Rhoda to us on Monday?"

"Yes; and try and help to make the farm look up again, if Gammon'll do
the ordering about."

"Poor old Mas' Gammon! He's a rare old man. Is he changed by adversity,
Robert? Though he's awful secret, that old man! Do you consider a bit
Gammon's faithfulness, Robert!"

"Ay, he's above most men in that," Robert agreed.

"On with Dahlia's bonnet--sharp!" the farmer gave command. He felt, now
that he was growing accustomed to the common observation of things, that
the faces and voices around him were different from such as the day
brings in its usual course. "We're all as slow as Mas' Gammon, I reckon."

"Father," said Rhoda, "she is weak. She has been very unwell. Do not
trouble her with any questions. Do not let any questions be asked of her
at hone. Any talking fatigues; it may be dangerous to her."

The farmer stared. "Ay, and about her hair....I'm beginning to remember.
She wears a cap, and her hair's cut off like an oakum-picker's. That's
more gossip for neighbours!"

"Mad people! will they listen to truth?" Rhoda flamed out in her dark
fashion. "We speak truth, nothing but truth. She has had a brain fever.
That makes her very weak, and every one must be silent at home. Father,
stop the sale of the farm, for Robert will work it into order. He has
promised to be our friend, and Dahlia will get her health there, and be
near mother's grave."

The farmer replied, as from a far thought, "There's money in my pocket to
take down two."

He continued: "But there's not money there to feed our family a week on;
I leave it to the Lord. I sow; I dig, and I sow, and when bread fails to
us the land must go; and let it go, and no crying about it. I'm
astonishing easy at heart, though if I must sell, and do sell, I shan't
help thinking of my father, and his father, and the father before
him--mayhap, and in most likelihood, artfuller men 'n me--for what they
was born to they made to flourish. They'll cry in their graves. A man's
heart sticks to land, Robert; that you'll find, some day. I thought I
cared none but about land till that poor, weak, white thing put her arms
on my neck."

Rhoda had slipped away from them again.

The farmer stooped to Robert's ear. "Had a bit of a disagreement with her
husband, is it?"

Robert cleared his throat. "Ay, that's it," he said.

"Serious, at all?"

"One can't tell, you know."

"And not her fault--not my girl's fault, Robert?"

"No; I can swear to that."

"She's come to the right home, then. She'll be near her mother and me.
Let her pray at night, and she'll know she's always near her blessed
mother. Perhaps the women 'll want to take refreshment, if we may so far
make free with your hospitality; but it must be quick, Robert--or will
they? They can't eat, and I can't eat."

Soon afterward Mr. Fleming took his daughter Dahlia from the house and
out of London. The deeply-afflicted creature was, as the doctors had said
of her, too strong for the ordinary modes of killing. She could walk and
still support herself, though the ordeal she had gone through this day
was such as few women could have traversed. The terror to follow the deed
she had done was yet unseen by her; and for the hour she tasted, if not
peace, the pause to suffering which is given by an act accomplished.

Robert and Rhoda sat in different rooms till it was dusk. When she
appeared before him in the half light, the ravage of a past storm was
visible on her face. She sat down to make tea, and talked with singular
self command.

"Mr. Fleming mentioned the gossips down at Wrexby," said Robert: "are
they very bad down there?"

"Not worse than in other villages," said Rhoda. "They have not been
unkind. They have spoken about us, but not unkindly--I mean, not
spitefully."

"And you forgive them?"

"I do: they cannot hurt us now."

Robert was but striving to master some comprehension of her character.

"What are we to resolve, Rhoda?"

"I must get the money promised to this man."

"When he has flung off his wife at the church door?"

"He married my sister for the money. He said it. Oh! he said it. He shall
not say that we have deceived him. I told him he should have it. He
married her for money!"

"You should not have told him so, Rhoda."

"I did, and I will not let my word be broken."

"Pardon me if I ask you where you will get the money? It's a large sum."

"I will get it," Rhoda said firmly.

"By the sale of the farm?"

"No, not to hurt father."

"But this man's a scoundrel. I know him. I've known him for years. My
fear is that he will be coming to claim his wife. How was it I never
insisted on seeing the man before--! I did think of asking, but
fancied--a lot of things; that you didn't wish it and he was shy. Ah,
Lord! what miseries happen from our not looking straight at facts! We
can't deny she's his wife now."

"Not if we give him the money."

Rhoda spoke of "the money" as if she had taken heated metal into her
mouth.

"All the more likely," said Robert. "Let him rest. Had you your eyes on
him when he saw me in the vestry? For years that man has considered me
his deadly enemy, because I punished him once. What a scene! I'd have
given a limb, I'd have given my life, to have saved you from that scene,
Rhoda."

She replied: "If my sister could have been spared! I ought to know what
wickedness there is in the world. It's ignorance that leads to the
unhappiness of girls."

"Do you know that I'm a drunkard?"

"No."

"He called me something like it; and he said something like the truth.
There's the sting. Set me adrift, and I drink hard. He spoke a fact, and
I couldn't answer him."

"Yes, it's the truth that gives such pain," said Rhoda, shivering. "How
can girls know what men are? I could not guess that you had any fault.
This man was so respectful; he sat modestly in the room when I saw him
last night--last night, was it? I thought, 'he has been brought up with
sisters and a mother.' And he has been kind to my dear--and all we
thought love for her, was--shameful! shameful!"

She pressed her eyelids, continuing: "He shall have the money--he shall
have it. We will not be in debt to such a man. He has saved my sister
from one as bad--who offered it to be rid of her. Oh, men!--you heard
that?--and now pretends to love her. I think I dream. How could she ever
have looked happily on that hateful face?"

"He would be thought handsome," said Robert, marvelling how it was that
Rhoda could have looked on Sedgett for an instant without reading his
villanous nature. "I don't wish you to regret anything you have done or
you may do, Rhoda. But this is what made me cry out when I looked on that
man, and knew it was he who had come to be Dahlia's husband. He'll be
torture to her. The man's temper, his habits--but you may well say you
are ignorant of us men. Keep so. What I do with all my soul entreat of
you is--to get a hiding-place for your sister. Never let him take her
off. There's such a thing as hell upon earth. If she goes away with him
she'll know it. His black temper won't last. He will come for her, and
claim her."

"He shall have money." Rhoda said no more.

On a side-table in the room stood a remarkable pile, under cover of a
shawl. Robert lifted the shawl, and beheld the wooden boxes, one upon the
other, containing Master Gammon's and Mrs. Sumfit's rival savings, which
they had presented to Dahlia, in the belief that her husband was under a
cloud of monetary misfortune that had kept her proud heart from her old
friends. The farmer had brought the boxes and left them there, forgetting
them.

"I fancy," said Robert, "we might open these."

"It may be a little help," said Rhoda.

"A very little," Robert thought; but, to relieve the oppression of the
subject they had been discussing, he forthwith set about procuring tools,
with which he split first the box which proved to be Mrs. Sumfit's, for
it contained, amid six gold sovereigns and much silver and pence, a slip
of paper, whereon was inscribed, in a handwriting identified by Rhoda as
peculiar to the loving woman,--

     "And sweetest love to her ever dear."

Altogether the sum amounted to nine pounds, three shillings, and a
farthing.

"Now for Master Gammon--he's heavy," said Robert; and he made the savings
of that unpretentious veteran bare. Master Gammon had likewise written
his word. It was discovered on the blank space of a bit of newspaper, and
looked much as if a fat lobworm had plunged himself into a bowl of ink,
and in his literary delirium had twisted uneasily to the verge of the
paper. With difficulty they deciphered,--

          "Complemens."

Robert sang, "Bravo, Gammon!" and counted the hoard. All was in copper
coinage, Lycurgan and severe, and reached the sum of one pound, seventeen
shillings. There were a number of farthings of Queen Anne's reign, and
Robert supposed them to be of value. "So that, as yet, we can't say who's
the winner," he observed.

Rhoda was in tears.

"Be kind to him, please, when you see him," she whispered. The smaller
gift had touched her heart more tenderly.

"Kind to the old man!" Robert laughed gently, and tied the two hoards in
separate papers, which he stowed into one box, and fixed under string.
"This amount, put all in one, doesn't go far, Rhoda."

"No," said she: "I hope we may not need it." She broke out: "Dear, good,
humble friends! The poor are God's own people. Christ has said so. This
is good, this is blessed money!" Rhoda's cheeks flushed to their
orange-rounded swarthy red, and her dark eyes had the fervour of an
exalted earnestness. "They are my friends for ever. They save me from
impiety. They help me, as if God had answered my prayer. Poor pennies!
and the old man not knowing where his days may end! He gives all--he must
have true faith in Providence. May it come back to him multiplied a
thousand fold! While I have strength to work, the bread I earn shall be
shared with him. Old man, old man, I love you--how I love you! You drag
me out of deep ditches. Oh, good and dear old man, if God takes me first,
may I have some power to intercede for you, if you have ever sinned!
Everybody in the world is not wicked. There are some who go the ways
directed by the Bible. I owe you more than I can ever pay."

She sobbed, but told Robert it was not for sorrow. He, longing to catch
her in his arms, and punctilious not to overstep the duties of his post
of guardian, could merely sit by listening, and reflecting on her as a
strange Biblical girl, with Hebrew hardness of resolution, and Hebrew
exaltation of soul; beautiful, too, as the dark women of the East. He
admitted to himself that he never could have taken it on his conscience
to subdue a human creature's struggling will, as Rhoda had not hesitated
to do with Dahlia, and to command her actions, and accept all imminent
responsibilities; not quailing with any outcry, or abandonment of
strength, when the shock of that revelation in the vestry came violently
on her. Rhoda, seeing there that it was a brute, and not a man, into
whose hand she had perilously forced her sister's, stood steadying her
nerves to act promptly with advantage; less like a woman, Robert thought,
than a creature born for battle. And she appeared to be still undaunted,
full of her scheme, and could cry without fear of floods. Something of
the chivalrous restraint he put upon the motions of his heart, sprang
from the shadowy awe which overhung that impressible organ. This feeling
likewise led him to place a blind reliance on her sagacity and sense of
what was just, and what should be performed.

"You promised this money to him," he said, half thinking it incredible.

"On Monday," said Rhoda.

"You must get a promise from him in return."

She answered: "Why? when he could break it the instant he cared to, and a
promise would tempt him to it. He does not love her."

"No; he does not love her," said Robert, meditating whether he could
possibly convey an idea of the character of men to her innocent mind.

"He flung her off. Thank heaven for it! I should have been punished too
much--too much. He has saved her from the perils of temptation. He shall
be paid for it. To see her taken away by such a man! Ah!" She shuddered
as at sight of a hideous pit.

But Robert said: "I know him, Rhoda. That was his temper. It'll last just
four-and-twenty hours, and then we shall need all our strength and
cunning. My dear, it would be the death of Dahlia. You've seen the man as
he is. Take it for a warning. She belongs to him. That's the law, human
and divine."

"Not when he has flung her off, Robert?" Rhoda cried piteously.

"Let us take advantage of that. He did fling her off, spat at us all, and
showed the blackest hellish plot I ever in my life heard of. He's not the
worst sinner, scoundrel as he is. Poor girl! poor soul! a hard lot for
women in this world! Rhoda, I suppose I may breakfast with you in the
morning? I hear Major Waring's knock below. I want a man to talk to."

"Do come, Robert," Rhoda said, and gave him her hand. He strove to
comprehend why it was that her hand was merely a hand, and no more to him
just then; squeezed the cold fingers, and left her.




CHAPTER XI

So long as we do not know that we are performing any remarkable feat, we
may walk upon the narrowest of planks between precipices with perfect
security; but when we suffer our minds to eye the chasm underneath, we
begin to be in danger, and we are in very great fear of losing our equal
balance the moment we admit the insidious reflection that other men,
placed as we are, would probably topple headlong over. Anthony Hackbut,
of Boyne's Bank, had been giving himself up latterly to this fatal
comparison. The hour when gold was entrusted to his charge found him
feverish and irritable. He asked himself whether he was a mere machine to
transfer money from spot to spot, and he spurned at the pittance bestowed
upon honesty in this life. Where could Boyne's Bank discover again such
an honest man as he? And because he was honest he was poor! The
consideration that we alone are capable of doing the unparalleled thing
may sometimes inspire us with fortitude; but this will depend largely
upon the antecedent moral trials of a man. It is a temptation when we
look on what we accomplish at all in that light. The temptation being
inbred, is commonly a proof of internal corruption. "If I take a step,
suppose now, to the right, or to the left," Anthony had got into the
habit of saying, while he made his course, and after he had deposited his
charge he would wipe his moist forehead, in a state of wretched
exultation over his renowned trustworthiness.

He had done the thing for years. And what did the people in the streets
know about him? Formerly, he had used to regard the people in the
streets, and their opinions, with a voluptuous contempt; but he was no
longer wrapped in sweet calculations of his savings, and his chances, and
his connection with a mighty Bank. The virtue had gone out of him. Yet he
had not the slightest appetite for other men's money; no hunger, nor any
definite notion of enjoyment to be derived from money not his own.
Imagination misled the old man. There have been spotless reputations
gained in the service of virtue before now; and chaste and beautiful
persons have walked the narrow plank, envied and admired; and they have
ultimately tottered and all but fallen; or they have quite fallen, from
no worse an incitement than curiosity. Cold curiosity, as the directors
of our human constitution tell us, is, in the colder condition of our
blood, a betraying vice, leading to sin at a period when the fruits of
sin afford the smallest satisfaction. It is, in fact, our last probation,
and one of our latest delusions. If that is passed successfully, we may
really be pronounced as of some worth. Anthony wished to give a light
indulgence to his curiosity; say, by running away and over London Bridge
on one side, and back on the other, hugging the money. For two weeks, he
thought of this absurd performance as a comical and agreeable diversion.
How would he feel when going in the direction of the Surrey hills? And
how, when returning, and when there was a prospect of the Bank, where the
money was to be paid in, being shut? Supposing that he was a minute
behind his time, would the Bank-doors remain open, in expectation of him?
And if the money was not paid in, what would be thought? What would be
thought at Boyne's, if, the next day, he was late in making his
appearance?

"Holloa! Hackbut, how's this?"--"I'm a bit late, sir, morning."--"Late!
you were late yesterday evening, weren't you?"--"Why, sir, the way the
clerks at that Bank of Mortimer and Pennycuick's rush away from business
and close the doors after 'em, as if their day began at four p.m., and
business was botheration: it's a disgrace to the City o' London. And I
beg pardon for being late, but never sleeping a wink all night for fear
about this money, I am late this morning, I humbly confess. When I got to
the Bank, the doors were shut. Our clock's correct; that I know. My
belief, sir, is, the clerks at Mortimer and Pennycuick's put on the
time."--"Oh! we must have this inquired into."

Anthony dramatized the farcical scene which he imagined between himself
and Mr. Sequin, the head clerk at Boyne's, with immense relish; and
terminated it by establishing his reputation for honesty higher than ever
at the Bank, after which violent exercise of his fancy, the old man sank
into a dulness during several days. The farmer slept at his lodgings for
one night, and talked of money, and of selling his farm; and half hinted
that it would be a brotherly proceeding on Anthony's part to buy it, and
hold it, so as to keep it in the family. The farmer's deep belief in the
existence of his hoards always did Anthony peculiar mischief. Anthony
grew conscious of a giddiness, and all the next day he was scarcely fit
for his work. But the day following that he was calm and attentive. Two
bags of gold were placed in his hands, and he walked with caution down
the steps of the Bank, turned the corner, and went straight on to the
West, never once hesitating, or casting a thought behind upon Mortimer
and Pennycuick's. He had not, in truth, one that was loose to be cast.
All his thoughts were boiling in his head, obfuscating him with a
prodigious steam, through which he beheld the city surging, and the
streets curving like lines in water, and the people mixing and passing
into and out of one another in an astonishing manner--no face
distinguishable; the whole thick multitude appearing to be stirred like
glue in a gallipot. The only distinct thought which he had sprang from a
fear that the dishonest ruffians would try to steal his gold, and he
hugged it, and groaned to see that villany was abroad. Marvellous, too,
that the clocks on the churches, all the way along the Westward
thoroughfare, stuck at the hour when Banks are closed to business! It was
some time, or a pretence at some time, before the minute-hands surmounted
that difficulty. Having done so, they rushed ahead to the ensuing hour
with the mad precipitation of pantomimic machinery. The sight of them
presently standing on the hour, like a sentinel presenting arms, was
startling--laughable. Anthony could not have flipped with his fingers
fifty times in the interval; he was sure of it, "or not much more," he
said. So the City was shut to him behind iron bars.

Up in the West there is not so much to be dreaded from the rapacity of
men. You do not hear of such alarming burglaries there every day; every
hand is not at another's throat there, or in another's pocket; at least,
not until after nightfall; and when the dark should come on, Anthony had
determined to make for his own quarter with all speed. Darkness is
horrible in foreign places, but foreign places are not so accusing to you
by daylight.

The Park was vastly pleasant to the old man.

"Ah!" he sniffed, "country air," and betook himself to a seat.
"Extraordinary," he thought, "what little people they look on their
horses and in their carriages! That's the aristocracy, is it!" The
aristocracy appeared oddly diminutive to him. He sneered at the
aristocracy, but, beholding a policeman, became stolid of aspect. The
policeman was a connecting link with his City life, the true lord of his
fearful soul. Though the moneybags were under his arm, beneath his
buttoned coat, it required a deep pause before he understood what he had
done; and then the Park began to dance and curve like the streets, and
there was a singular curtseying between the heavens and the earth. He had
to hold his money-bags tight, to keep them from plunging into monstrous
gulfs. "I don't remember that I've taken a drink of any sort," he said,
"since I and the old farmer took our turn down in the Docks. How's this?"
He seemed to rock. He was near upon indulging in a fit of terror; but the
impolicy of it withheld him from any demonstration, save an involuntary
spasmodic ague. When this had passed, his eyesight and sensations grew
clearer, and he sat in a mental doze, looking at things with quiet animal
observation. His recollection of the state, after a lapse of minutes, was
pleasurable. The necessity for motion, however, set him on his feet, and
off he went, still Westward, out of the Park, and into streets. He
trotted at a good pace. Suddenly came a call of his name in his ear, and
he threw up one arm in self-defence.

"Uncle Anthony, don't you know me?"

"Eh? I do; to be sure I do," he answered, peering dimly upon Rhoda: "I'm
always meeting one of you."

"I've been down in the City, trying to find you all day, uncle. I meet
you--I might have missed! It is direction from heaven, for I prayed."

Anthony muttered, "I'm out for a holiday."

"This"--Rhoda pointed to a house--"is where I am lodging."

"Oh!" said Anthony; "and how's your family?"

Rhoda perceived that he was rather distraught. After great persuasion,
she got him to go upstairs with her.

"Only for two seconds," he stipulated. "I can't sit."

"You will have a cup of tea with me, uncle?"

"No; I don't think I'm equal to tea."

"Not with Rhoda?"

"It's a name in Scripture," said Anthony, and he drew nearer to her.
"You're comfortable and dark here, my dear. How did you come here? What's
happened? You won't surprise me."

"I'm only stopping for a day or two in London, uncle."

"Ah! a wicked place; that it is. No wickeder than other places, I'll be
bound. Well; I must be trotting. I can't sit, I tell you. You're as dark
here as a gaol."

"Let me ring for candles, uncle."

"No; I'm going."

She tried to touch him, to draw him to a chair. The agile old man bounded
away from her, and she had to pacify him submissively before he would
consent to be seated. The tea-service was brought, and Rhoda made tea,
and filled a cup for him. Anthony began to enjoy the repose of the room.
But it made the money-bags' alien to him, and serpents in his bosom.
Fretting--on his chair, he cried: "Well! well! what's to talk about? We
can't drink tea and not talk!"

Rhoda deliberated, and then said: "Uncle, I think you have always loved
me."

It seemed to him a merit that he should have loved her. He caught at the
idea.

"So I have, Rhoda, my dear; I have. I do."

"You do love me, dear uncle!"

"Now I come to think of it, Rhoda--my Dody, I don't think ever I've loved
anybody else. Never loved e'er a young woman in my life. As a young man."

"Tell me, uncle; are you not very rich?"

"No, I ain't; not 'very'; not at all."

"You must not tell untruths, uncle."

"I don't," said Anthony; only, too doggedly to instil conviction.

"I have always felt, uncle, that you love money too much. What is the
value of money, except to give comfort, and help you to be a blessing to
others in their trouble? Does not God lend it you for that purpose? It is
most true! And if you make a store of it, it will only be unhappiness to
yourself. Uncle, you love me. I am in great trouble for money."

Anthony made a long arm over the projection of his coat, and clasped it
securely; sullenly refusing to answer. "Dear uncle; hear me out. I come
to you, because I know you are rich. I was on my way to your lodgings
when we met; we were thrown together. You have more money than you know
what to do with. I am a beggar to you for money. I have never asked
before; I never shall ask again. Now I pray for your help. My life, and
the life dearer to me than any other, depend on you. Will you help me,
Uncle Anthony? Yes!"

"No!" Anthony shouted.

"Yes! yes!"

"Yes, if I can. No, if I can't. And 'can't' it is. So, it's 'No.'"

Rhoda's bosom sank, but only as a wave in the sea-like energy of her
spirit.

"Uncle, you must."

Anthony was restrained from jumping up and running away forthwith by the
peace which was in the room, and the dread of being solitary after he had
tasted of companionship.

"You have money, uncle. You are rich. You must help me. Don't you ever
think what it is to be an old man, and no one to love you and be grateful
to you? Why do you cross your arms so close?"

Anthony denied that he crossed his arms closely.

Rhoda pointed to his arms in evidence; and he snarled out: "There, now;
'cause I'm supposed to have saved a trifle, I ain't to sit as I like.
It's downright too bad! It's shocking!"

But, seeing that he did not uncross his arms, and remained bunched up
defiantly, Rhoda silently observed him. She felt that money was in the
room.

"Don't let it be a curse to you," she said. And her voice was hoarse with
agitation.

"What?" Anthony asked. "What's a curse?"

"That."

Did she know? Had she guessed? Her finger was laid in a line at the bags.
Had she smelt the gold?

"It will be a curse to you, uncle. Death is coming. What's money then?
Uncle, uncross your arms. You are afraid; you dare not. You carry it
about; you have no confidence anywhere. It eats your heart. Look at me. I
have nothing to conceal. Can you imitate me, and throw your hands
out--so? Why, uncle, will you let me be ashamed of you? You have the
money there.

"You cannot deny it. Me crying to you for help! What have we talked
together?--that we would sit in a country house, and I was to look to the
flower-beds, and always have dishes of green peas for you-plenty, in
June; and you were to let the village boys know what a tongue you have,
if they made a clatter of their sticks along the garden-rails; and you
were to drink your tea, looking on a green and the sunset. Uncle! Poor
old, good old soul! You mean kindly. You must be kind. A day will make it
too late. You have the money there. You get older and older every minute
with trying to refuse me. You know that I can make you happy. I have the
power, and I have the will. Help me, I say, in my great trouble. That
money is a burden. You are forced to carry it about, for fear. You look
guilty as you go running in the streets, because you fear everybody. Do
good with it. Let it be money with a blessing on it! It will save us from
horrid misery! from death! from torture and death! Think, uncle! look,
uncle! You with the money--me wanting it. I pray to heaven, and I meet
you, and you have it. Will you say that you refuse to give it, when I
see--when I show you, you are led to meet me and help me? Open;--put down
that arm."

Against this storm of mingled supplication and shadowy menace, Anthony
held out with all outward firmness until, when bidding him to put down
his arm, she touched the arm commandingly, and it fell paralyzed.

Rhoda's eyes were not beautiful as they fixed on the object of her quest.
In this they were of the character of her mission. She was dealing with
an evil thing, and had chosen to act according to her light, and by the
counsel of her combative and forceful temper. At each step new
difficulties had to be encountered by fresh contrivances; and money
now--money alone had become the specific for present use. There was a
limitation of her spiritual vision to aught save to money; and the money
being bared to her eyes, a frightful gleam of eagerness shot from them.
Her hands met Anthony's in a common grasp of the money-bags.

"It's not mine!" Anthony cried, in desperation.

"Whose money is it?" said Rhoda, and caught up her hands as from fire.

"My Lord!" Anthony moaned, "if you don't speak like a Court o' Justice.
Hear yourself!"

"Is the money yours, uncle?"

"It--is," and "isn't" hung in the balance.

"It is not?" Rhoda dressed the question for him in the terror of
contemptuous horror.

"It is. I--of course it is; how could it help being mine? My money? Yes.
What sort o' thing's that to ask--whether what I've got's mine or yours,
or somebody else's? Ha!"

"And you say you are not rich, uncle?"

A charming congratulatory smile was addressed to him, and a shake of the
head of tender reproach irresistible to his vanity.

"Rich! with a lot o' calls on me; everybody wantin' to borrow--I'm rich!
And now you coming to me! You women can't bring a guess to bear upon the
right nature o' money."

"Uncle, you will decide to help me, I know."

She said it with a staggering assurance of manner.

"How do you know?" cried Anthony.

"Why do you carry so much money about with you in bags, uncle?"

"Hear it, my dear." He simulated miser's joy.

"Ain't that music? Talk of operas! Hear that; don't it talk? don't it
chink? don't it sing?" He groaned "Oh, Lord!" and fell back.

This transition from a state of intensest rapture to the depths of pain
alarmed her.

"Nothing; it's nothing." Anthony anticipated her inquiries. "They bags is
so heavy."

"Then why do you carry them about?"

"Perhaps it's heart disease," said Anthony, and grinned, for he knew the
soundness of his health.

"You are very pale, uncle."

"Eh? you don't say that?"

"You are awfully white, dear uncle."

"I'll look in the glass," said Anthony. "No, I won't." He sank back in
his chair. "Rhoda, we're all sinners, ain't we? All--every man and woman
of us, and baby, too. That's a comfort; yes, it is a comfort. It's a
tremendous comfort--shuts mouths. I know what you're going to say--some
bigger sinners than others. If they're sorry for it, though, what then?
They can repent, can't they?"

"They must undo any harm they may have done. Sinners are not to repent
only in words, uncle."

"I've been feeling lately," he murmured.

Rhoda expected a miser's confession.

"I've been feeling, the last two or three days," he resumed.

"What, uncle?"

"Sort of taste of a tremendous nice lemon in my mouth, my dear, and liked
it, till all of a sudden I swallowed it whole--such a gulp! I felt it
just now. I'm all right."

"No, uncle," said Rhoda: "you are not all right: this money makes you
miserable. It does; I can see that it does. Now, put those bags in my
hands. For a minute, try; it will do you good. Attend to me; it will. Or,
let me have them. They are poison to you. You don't want them."

"I don't," cried Anthony. "Upon my soul, I don't. I don't want 'em. I'd
give--it is true, my dear, I don't want 'em. They're poison."

"They're poison to you," said Rhoda; "they're health, they're life to me.
I said, 'My uncle Anthony will help me. He is not--I know his heart--he
is not a miser.' Are you a miser, uncle?"

Her hand was on one of his bags. It was strenuously withheld: but while
she continued speaking, reiterating the word "miser," the hold relaxed.
She caught the heavy bag away, startled by its weight.

He perceived the effect produced on her, and cried; "Aha! and I've been
carrying two of 'em--two!"

Rhoda panted in her excitement.

"Now, give it up," said he. She returned it. He got it against his breast
joylessly, and then bade her to try the weight of the two. She did try
them, and Anthony doated on the wonder of her face.

"Uncle, see what riches do! You fear everybody--you think there is no
secure place--you have more? Do you carry about all your money?"

"No," he chuckled at her astonishment. "I've...Yes. I've got more of my
own." Her widened eyes intoxicated him. "More. I've saved. I've put by.
Say, I'm an old sinner. What'd th' old farmer say now? Do you love your
uncle Tony? 'Old Ant,' they call me down at--" "The Bank," he was on the
point of uttering; but the vision of the Bank lay terrific in his
recollection, and, summoned at last, would not be wiped away. The
unbearable picture swam blinking through accumulating clouds; remote and
minute as the chief scene of our infancy, but commanding him with the
present touch of a mighty arm thrown out. "I'm honest," he cried. "I
always have been honest. I'm known to be honest. I want no man's money.
I've got money of my own. I hate sin. I hate sinners. I'm an honest man.
Ask them, down at--Rhoda, my dear! I say, don't you hear me? Rhoda, you
think I've a turn for misering. It's a beastly mistake: poor savings, and
such a trouble to keep honest when you're poor; and I've done it for
years, spite o' temptation 't 'd send lots o' men to the hulks. Safe into
my hand, safe out o' my hands! Slip once, and there ain't mercy in men.
And you say, 'I had a whirl of my head, and went round, and didn't know
where I was for a minute, and forgot the place I'd to go to, and come
away to think in a quiet part.'..." He stopped abruptly in his ravings.
"You give me the money, Rhoda!"

She handed him the money-bags.

He seized them, and dashed them to the ground with the force of madness.
Kneeling, he drew out his penknife, and slit the sides of the bags, and
held them aloft, and let the gold pour out in torrents, insufferable to
the sight; and uttering laughter that clamoured fierily in her ears for
long minutes afterwards, the old man brandished the empty bags, and
sprang out of the room.

She sat dismayed in the centre of a heap of gold.




CHAPTER XLI

On the Monday evening, Master Gammon was at the station with the cart.
Robert and Rhoda were a train later, but the old man seemed to be unaware
of any delay, and mildly staring, received their apologies, and nodded.
They asked him more than once whether all was well at the Farm; to which
he replied that all was quite well, and that he was never otherwise.
About half-an-hour after, on the road, a gradual dumb chuckle overcame
his lower features. He flicked the horse dubitatively, and turned his
head, first to Robert, next to Rhoda; and then he chuckled aloud:

"The last o' they mel'ns rotted yest'day afternoon!"

"Did they?" said Robert. "You'll have to get fresh seed, that's all."

Master Gammon merely showed his spirit to be negative.

"You've been playing the fool with the sheep," Robert accused him.

It hit the old man in a very tender part.

"I play the fool wi' ne'er a sheep alive, Mr. Robert. Animals likes their
'customed food, and don't like no other. I never changes my food, nor'd
e'er a sheep, nor'd a cow, nor'd a bullock, if animals was masters. I'd
as lief give a sheep beer, as offer him, free-handed--of my own will,
that's to say--a mel'n. They rots."

Robert smiled, though he was angry. The delicious unvexed country-talk
soothed Rhoda, and she looked fondly on the old man, believing that he
could not talk on in his sedate way, if all were not well at home.

The hills of the beacon-ridge beyond her home, and the line of stunted
firs, which she had named "the old bent beggarmen," were visible in the
twilight. Her eyes flew thoughtfully far over them, with the feeling that
they had long known what would come to her and to those dear to her, and
the intense hope that they knew no more, inasmuch as they bounded her
sight.

"If the sheep thrive," she ventured to remark, so that the comforting old
themes might be kept up.

"That's the particular 'if!'" said Robert, signifying something that had
to be leaped over.

Master Gammon performed the feat with agility.

"Sheep never was heartier," he pronounced emphatically.

"Lots of applications for melon-seed, Gammon?"

To this the veteran's tardy answer was: "More fools 'n one about, I
reckon"; and Robert allowed him the victory implied by silence.

"And there's no news in Wrexby? none at all?" said Rhoda.

A direct question inevitably plunged Master Gammon so deep amid the
soundings of his reflectiveness, that it was the surest way of precluding
a response from him; but on this occasion his honest deliberation bore
fruit.

"Squire Blancove, he's dead."

The name caused Rhoda to shudder.

"Found dead in 's bed, Sat'day morning," Master Gammon added, and, warmed
upon the subject, went on: "He's that stiff, folks say, that stiff he is,
he'll have to get into a rounded coffin: he's just like half a hoop. He
was all of a heap, like. Had a fight with 's bolster, and got th' wust of
it. But, be 't the seizure, or be 't gout in 's belly, he's gone clean
dead. And he wunt buy th' Farm, nether. Shutters is all shut up at the
Hall. He'll go burying about Wednesday. Men that drinks don't keep."

Rhoda struck at her brain to think in what way this death could work and
show like a punishment of the heavens upon that one wrong-doer; but it
was not manifest as a flame of wrath, and she laid herself open to the
peace of the fields and the hedgeways stepping by. The farm-house came in
sight, and friendly old Adam and Eve turning from the moon. She heard the
sound of water. Every sign of peace was around the farm. The cows had
been milked long since; the geese were quiet. There was nothing but the
white board above the garden-gate to speak of the history lying in her
heart.

They found the farmer sitting alone, shading his forehead. Rhoda kissed
his cheeks and whispered for tidings of Dahlia.

"Go up to her," the farmer said.

Rhoda grew very chill. She went upstairs with apprehensive feet, and
recognizing Mrs. Sumfit outside the door of Dahlia's room, embraced her,
and heard her say that Dahlia had turned the key, and had been crying
from mornings to nights. "It can't last," Mrs. Sumfit sobbed: "lonesome
hysterics, they's death to come. She's falling into the trance. I'll go,
for the sight o' me shocks her."

Rhoda knocked, waited patiently till her persistent repetition of her
name gained her admission. She beheld her sister indeed, but not the
broken Dahlia from whom she had parted. Dahlia was hard to her caress,
and crying, "Has he come?" stood at bay, white-eyed, and looking like a
thing strung with wires.

"No, dearest; he will not trouble you. Have no fear."

"Are you full of deceit?" said Dahlia, stamping her foot.

"I hope not, my sister."

Dahlia let fall a long quivering breath. She went to her bed, upon which
her mother's Bible was lying, and taking it in her two hands, held it
under Rhoda's lips.

"Swear upon that?"

"What am I to swear to, dearest?"

"Swear that he is not in the house."

"He is not, my own sister; believe me. It is no deceit. He is not. He
will not trouble you. See; I kiss the Book, and swear to you, my beloved!
I speak truth. Come to me, dear." Rhoda put her arms up entreatingly, but
Dahlia stepped back.

"You are not deceitful? You are not cold? You are not inhuman? Inhuman!
You are not? You are not? Oh, my God! Look at her!"

The toneless voice was as bitter for Rhoda to hear as the accusations.
She replied, with a poor smile: "I am only not deceitful. Come, and see.
You will not be disturbed."

"What am I tied to?" Dahlia struggled feebly as against a weight of
chains. "Oh! what am I tied to? It's on me, tight like teeth. I can't
escape. I can't breathe for it. I was like a stone when he asked
me--marry him!--loved me! Some one preached--my duty! I am lost, I am
lost! Why? you girl!--why?--What did you do? Why did you take my hand
when I was asleep and hurry me so fast? What have I done to you? Why did
you push me along?--I couldn't see where. I heard the Church babble. For
you--inhuman! inhuman! What have I done to you? What have you to do with
punishing sin? It's not sin. Let me be sinful, then. I am. I am sinful.
Hear me. I love him; I love my lover, and," she screamed out, "he loves
me!"

Rhoda now thought her mad.

She looked once at the rigid figure of her transformed sister, and
sitting down, covered her eyes and wept.

To Dahlia, the tears were at first an acrid joy; but being weak, she fell
to the bed, and leaned against it, forgetting her frenzy for a time.

"You deceived me," she murmured; and again, "You deceived me." Rhoda did
not answer. In trying to understand why her sister should imagine it, she
began to know that she had in truth deceived Dahlia. The temptation to
drive a frail human creature to do the thing which was right, had led her
to speak falsely for a good purpose. Was it not righteously executed?
Away from the tragic figure in the room, she might have thought so, but
the horror in the eyes and voice of this awakened Sacrifice, struck away
the support of theoretic justification. Great pity for the poor enmeshed
life, helpless there, and in a woman's worst peril,--looking either to
madness, or to death, for an escape--drowned her reason in a heavy cloud
of tears. Long on toward the stroke of the hour, Dahlia heard her weep,
and she murmured on, "You deceived me;" but it was no more to reproach;
rather, it was an exculpation of her reproaches. "You did deceive me,
Rhoda." Rhoda half lifted her head; the slight tone of a change to
tenderness swelled the gulfs of pity, and she wept aloud. Dahlia
untwisted her feet, and staggered up to her, fell upon her shoulder, and
called her, "My love!--good sister!" For a great mute space they clung
together. Their lips met and they kissed convulsively. But when Dahlia
had close view of Rhoda's face, she drew back, saying in an
under-breath,--

"Don't cry. I see my misery when you cry."

Rhoda promised that she would check her tears, and they sat quietly, side
by side, hand in hand. Mrs. Sumfit, outside, had to be dismissed twice
with her fresh brews of supplicating tea and toast, and the cakes which,
when eaten warm with good country butter and a sprinkle of salt,
reanimate (as she did her utmost to assure the sisters through the closed
door) humanity's distressed spirit. At times their hands interchanged a
fervent pressure, their eyes were drawn to an equal gaze.

In the middle of the night Dahlia said: "I found a letter from Edward
when I came here."

"Written--Oh, base man that he is!" Rhoda could not control the impulse
to cry it out.

"Written before," said Dahlia, divining her at once. "I read it; did not
cry. I have no tears. Will you see it? It is very short-enough; it said
enough, and written before--" She crumpled her fingers in Rhoda's; Rhoda,
to please her, saying "Yes," she went to the pillow of the bed, and drew
the letter from underneath.

"I know every word," she said; "I should die if I repeated it. 'My wife
before heaven,' it begins. So, I was his wife. I must have broken his
heart--broken my husband's." Dahlia cast a fearful eye about her; her
eyelids fluttered as from a savage sudden blow. Hardening her mouth to
utter defiant spite: "My lover's," she cried. "He is. If he loves me and
I love him, he is my lover, my lover, my lover! Nothing shall stop me
from saying it--lover! and there is none to claim me but he. Oh,
loathsome! What a serpent it is I've got round me! And you tell me God
put it. Do you? Answer that; for I want to know, and I don't know where I
am. I am lost! I am lost! I want to get to my lover. Tell me, Rhoda, you
would curse me if I did. And listen to me. Let him open his arms to me, I
go; I follow him as far as my feet will bear me. I would go if it
lightened from heaven. If I saw up there the warning, 'You shall not!' I
would go. But, look on me!" she smote contempt upon her bosom. "He would
not call to such a thing as me. Me, now? My skin is like a toad's to him.
I've become like something in the dust. I could hiss like adders. I am
quite impenitent. I pray by my bedside, my head on my Bible, but I only
say, 'Yes, yes; that's done; that's deserved, if there's no mercy.' Oh,
if there is no mercy, that's deserved! I say so now. But this is what I
say, Rhoda (I see nothing but blackness when I pray), and I say, 'Permit
no worse!' I say, 'Permit no worse, or take the consequences.' He calls
me his wife. I am his wife. And if--" Dahlia fell to speechless panting;
her mouth was open; she made motion with her hands; horror, as of a
blasphemy struggling to her lips, kept her dumb, but the prompting
passion was indomitable.... "Read it," said her struggling voice; and
Rhoda bent over the letter, reading and losing thought of each sentence
as it passed. To Dahlia, the vital words were visible like evanescent
blue gravelights. She saw them rolling through her sister's mind; and
just upon the conclusion, she gave out, as in a chaunt: "And I who have
sinned against my innocent darling, will ask her to pray with me that our
future may be one, so that may make good to her what she has suffered,
and to the God whom we worship, the offence I have committed."

Rhoda looked up at the pale penetrating eyes.

"Read. Have you read to the last?" said Dahlia. "Speak it. Let me hear
you. He writes it.... Yes? you will not? 'Husband,' he says," and then
she took up the sentences of the letter backwards to the beginning,
pausing upon each one with a short moan, and smiting her bosom. "I found
it here, Rhoda. I found his letter here when I came.. I came a dead
thing, and it made me spring up alive. Oh, what bliss to be dead! I've
felt nothing...nothing, for months." She flung herself on the bed,
thrusting her handkerchief to her mouth to deaden the outcry. "I'm
punished. I'm punished, because I did not trust to my darling. No, not
for one year! Is it that since we parted? I am an impatient creature, and
he does not reproach me. I tormented my own, my love, my dear, and he
thought I--I was tired of our life together. No; he does not accuse me,"
Dahlia replied to her sister's unspoken feeling, with the shrewd
divination which is passion's breathing space. "He accuses himself. He
says it--utters it--speaks it 'I sold my beloved.' There is no guile in
him. Oh, be just to us, Rhoda! Dearest," she came to Rhoda's side, "you
did deceive me, did you not? You are a deceiver, my love?"

Rhoda trembled, and raising her eyelids, answered, "Yes."

"You saw him in the street that morning?"

Dahlia smiled a glittering tenderness too evidently deceitful in part,
but quite subduing.

"You saw him, my Rhoda, and he said he was true to me, and sorrowful; and
you told him, dear one, that I had no heart for him, and wished to go to
hell--did you not, good Rhoda? Forgive me; I mean 'good;' my true, good
Rhoda. Yes, you hate sin; it is dreadful; but you should never speak
falsely to sinners, for that does not teach them to repent. Mind you
never lie again. Look at me. I am chained, and I have no repentance in
me. See me. I am nearer it...the other--sin, I mean. If that man
comes...will he?"

"No--no!" Rhoda cried.

"If that man comes--"

"He will not come!"

"He cast me off at the church door, and said he had been cheated. Money!
Oh, Edward!"

Dahlia drooped her head.

"He will keep away. You are safe," said Rhoda.

"Because, if no help comes, I am lost--I am lost for ever!"

"But help will come. I mean peace will come. We will read; we will work
in the garden. You have lifted poor father up, my dear."

"Ah! that old man!" Dahlia sighed.

"He is our father."

"Yes, poor old man!" and Dahlia whispered: "I have no pity for him. If I
am dragged away, I'm afraid I shall curse him. He seems a stony old man.
I don't understand fathers. He would make me go away. He talks the
Scriptures when he is excited. I'm afraid he would shut my Bible for me.
Those old men know nothing of the hearts of women. Now, darling, go to
your room."

Rhoda begged earnestly for permission to stay with her, but Dahlia said:
"My nights are fevers. I can't have arms about me."

They shook hands when they separated, not kissing.




CHAPTER XLII

Three days passed quietly at the Farm, and each morning Dahlia came down
to breakfast, and sat with the family at their meals; pale, with the
mournful rim about her eyelids, but a patient figure. No questions were
asked. The house was guarded from visitors, and on the surface the home
was peaceful. On the Wednesday Squire Blancove was buried, when Master
Gammon, who seldom claimed a holiday or specified an enjoyment of which
he would desire to partake, asked leave to be spared for a couple of
hours, that he might attend the ceremonious interment of one to whom a
sort of vagrant human sentiment of clanship had made him look up, as to
the chief gentleman of the district, and therefore one having claims on
his respect. A burial had great interest for the old man.

"I'll be home for dinner; it'll gi'e me an appetite," Master Gammon said
solemnly, and he marched away in his serious Sunday hat and careful coat,
blither than usual.

After his departure, Mrs. Sumfit sat and discoursed on deaths and
burials, the certain end of all: at least, she corrected herself, the
deaths were. The burials were not so certain. Consequently, we might take
the burials, as they were a favour, to be a blessing, except in the event
of persons being buried alive. She tried to make her hearers understand
that the idea of this calamity had always seemed intolerable to her, and
told of numerous cases which, the coffin having been opened, showed by
the convulsed aspect of the corpse, or by spots of blood upon the shroud,
that the poor creature had wakened up forlorn, "and not a kick allowed to
him, my dears."

"It happens to women, too, does it not, mother?" said Dahlia.

"They're most subject to trances, my sweet. From always imitatin' they
imitates their deaths at last; and, oh!" Mrs. Sumfit was taken with
nervous chokings of alarm at the thought. "Alone--all dark! and hard wood
upon your chest, your elbows, your nose, your toes, and you under heaps
o' gravel! Not a breath for you, though you snap and catch for one--worse
than a fish on land."

"It's over very soon, mother," said Dahlia.

"The coldness of you young women! Yes; but it's the time--you feeling,
trying for air; it's the horrid 'Oh, dear me!' You set your mind on it!"

"I do," said Dahlia. "You see coffin-nails instead of stars. You'd give
the world to turn upon one side. You can't think. You can only hate those
who put you there. You see them taking tea, saying prayers, sleeping in
bed, putting on bonnets, walking to church, kneading dough, eating--all
at once, like the firing of a gun. They're in one world; you're in
another."

"Why, my goodness, one'd say she'd gone through it herself," ejaculated
Mrs. Sumfit, terrified.

Dahlia sent her eyes at Rhoda.

"I must go and see that poor man covered." Mrs. Sumfit succumbed to a fit
of resolution much under the pretence that it had long been forming.

"Well, and mother," said Dahlia, checking her, "promise me. Put a feather
on my mouth; put a glass to my face, before you let them carry me out.
Will you? Rhoda promises. I have asked her."

"Oh! the ideas of this girl!" Mrs. Sumfit burst out. "And looking so, as
she says it. My love, you didn't mean to die?"

Dahlia soothed her, and sent her off.

"I am buried alive!" she said. "I feel it all--the stifling! the hopeless
cramp! Let us go and garden. Rhoda, have you got laudanum in the house?"

Rhoda shook her head, too sick at heart to speak. They went into the
garden, which was Dahlia's healthfullest place. It seemed to her that her
dead mother talked to her there. That was not a figure of speech, when
she said she felt buried alive. She was in the state of sensational
delusion. There were times when she watched her own power of motion
curiously: curiously stretched out her hands, and touched things, and
moved them. The sight was convincing, but the shudder came again. In a
frame less robust the brain would have given way. It was the very
soundness of the brain which, when her blood was a simple tide of life in
her veins, and no vital force, had condemned her to see the wisdom and
the righteousness of the act of sacrifice committed by her, and had urged
her even up to the altar. Then the sudden throwing off of the mask by
that man to whom she had bound herself, and the reading of Edward's
letter of penitence and love, thwarted reason, but without blinding or
unsettling it. Passion grew dominant; yet against such deadly matters on
all sides had passion to strive, that, under a darkened sky, visibly
chained, bound down, and hopeless, she felt between-whiles veritably that
she was a living body buried. Her senses had become semi-lunatic.

She talked reasonably; and Rhoda, hearing her question and answer at
meal-times like a sane woman, was in doubt whether her sister wilfully
simulated a partial insanity when they were alone together. Now, in the
garden, Dahlia said: "All those flowers, my dear, have roots in mother
and me. She can't feel them, for her soul's in heaven. But mine is down
there. The pain is the trying to get your soul loose. It's the edge of a
knife that won't cut through. Do you know that?"

Rhoda said, as acquiescingly as she could, "Yes."

"Do you?" Dahlia whispered. "It's what they call the 'agony.' Only, to go
through it in the dark, when you are all alone! boarded round! you will
never know that. And there's an angel brings me one of mother's roses,
and I smell it. I see fields of snow; and it's warm there, and no labour
for breath. I see great beds of flowers; I pass them like a breeze. I'm
shot, and knock on the ground, and they bury me for dead again. Indeed,
dearest, it's true."

She meant, true as regarded her sensations. Rhoda could barely give a
smile for response; and Dahlia's intelligence being supernaturally
active, she read her sister's doubt, and cried out,--

"Then let me talk of him!"

It was the fiery sequence to her foregone speech, signifying that if her
passion had liberty to express itself, she could clear understandings.
But even a moment's free wing to passion renewed the blinding terror
within her. Rhoda steadied her along the walks, praying for the time to
come when her friends, the rector and his wife, might help in the task of
comforting this poor sister. Detestation of the idea of love made her
sympathy almost deficient, and when there was no active work to do in
aid, she was nearly valueless, knowing that she also stood guilty of a
wrong.

The day was very soft and still. The flowers gave light for light. They
heard through the noise of the mill-water the funeral bell sound. It sank
in Rhoda like the preaching of an end that was promise of a beginning,
and girdled a distancing land of trouble. The breeze that blew seemed
mercy. To live here in forgetfulness with Dahlia was the limit of her
desires. Perhaps, if Robert worked among them, she would gratefully give
him her hand. That is, if he said not a word of love.

Master Gammon and Mrs. Sumfit were punctual in their return near the
dinnerhour; and the business of releasing the dumplings and potatoes, and
spreading out the cold meat and lettuces, restrained for some period the
narrative of proceedings at the funeral. Chief among the incidents was,
that Mrs. Sumfit had really seen, and only wanted, by corroboration of
Master Gammon, to be sure she had positively seen, Anthony Hackbut on the
skirts of the funeral procession. Master Gammon, however, was no
supporter of conjecture. What he had thought he had thought; but that was
neither here nor there. He would swear to nothing that he had not
touched;--eyes deceived;--he was never a guesser. He left Mrs. Sumfit to
pledge herself in perturbation of spirit to an oath that her eyes had
seen Anthony Hackbut; and more, which was, that after the close of the
funeral service, the young squire had caught sight of Anthony crouching
in a corner of the churchyard, and had sent a man to him, and they had
disappeared together. Mrs. Sumfit was heartily laughed at and rallied
both by Robert and the farmer. "Tony at a funeral! and train expenses!"
the farmer interjected. "D'ye think, mother, Tony'd come to Wrexby
churchyard 'fore he come Queen Anne's Farm? And where's he now, mayhap?"

Mrs. Sumfit appealed in despair to Master Gammon, with entreaties, and a
ready dumpling.

"There, Mas' Gammon; and why you sh'd play at 'do believe' and at 'don't
believe,' after that awesome scene, the solem'est of life's, when you did
declare to me, sayin', it was a stride for boots out o' London this
morning. Your words, Mas' Gammon! and 'boots'-=it's true, if by that
alone! For, 'boots,' I says to myself--he thinks by 'boots,' there being
a cord'er in his family on the mother's side; which you yourself told to
me, as you did, Mas' Gammon, and now holds back, you did, like a bad
horse."

"Hey! does Gammon jib?" said the farmer, with the ghost of old laughter
twinkling in his eyes.

"He told me this tale," Mrs. Sumfit continued, daring her irresponsive
enemy to contradict her, with a threatening gaze. "He told me this tale,
he did; and my belief's, his game 's, he gets me into a corner--there to
be laughed at! Mas' Gammon, if you're not a sly old man, you said, you
did, he was drownded; your mother's brother's wife's brother; and he had
a brother, and what he was to you--that brother--" Mrs. Sumfit smote her
hands--"Oh, my goodness, my poor head! but you shan't slip away, Mas'
Gammon; no, try you ever so much. Drownded he was, and eight days in the
sea, which you told me over a warm mug of ale by the fire years back. And
I do believe them dumplings makes ye obstinate; for worse you get, and
that fond of 'em, I sh'll soon not have enough in our biggest pot. Yes,
you said he was eight days in the sea, and as for face, you said, poor
thing! he was like a rag of towel dipped in starch, was your own words,
and all his likeness wiped out; and Joe, the other brother, a
cord'er--bootmaker, you call 'em--looked down him, as he was stretched
out on the shore of the sea, all along, and didn't know him till he come
to the boots, and he says, 'It's Abner;' for there was his boots to know
him by. Now, will you deny, Mas' Gammon, you said, Mr. Hackbut's boots,
and a long stride it was for 'em from London? And I won't be laughed at
through arts of any sly old man!"

The circumstantial charge made no impression on Master Gammon, who was
heard to mumble, as from the inmost recesses of tight-packed dumpling;
but he left the vindication of his case to the farmer's laughter. The
mention of her uncle had started a growing agitation in Rhoda, to whom
the indication of his eccentric behaviour was a stronger confirmation of
his visit to the neighbourhood. And wherefore had he journeyed down? Had
he come to haunt her on account of the money he had poured into her lap?
Rhoda knew in a moment that she was near a great trial of her strength
and truth. She had more than once, I cannot tell you how distantly,
conceived that the money had been money upon which the mildest word for
"stolen" should be put to express the feeling she had got about it, after
she had parted with the bulk of it to the man Sedgett. Not "stolen," not
"appropriated," but money that had perhaps been entrusted, and of which
Anthony had forgotten the rightful ownership. This idea of hers had
burned with no intolerable fire; but, under a weight of all
discountenancing appearances, feeble though it was, it had distressed
her. The dealing with money, and the necessity for it, had given Rhoda a
better comprehension of its nature and value. She had taught herself to
think that her suspicion sprang from her uncle's wild demeanour, and the
scene of the gold pieces scattered on the floor, as if a heart had burst
at her feet.

No sooner did she hear that Anthony had been, by supposition, seen, than
the little light of secret dread flamed a panic through her veins. She
left the table before Master Gammon had finished, and went out of the
house to look about for her uncle. He was nowhere in the fields, nor in
the graveyard. She walked over the neighbourhood desolately, until her
quickened apprehension was extinguished, and she returned home relieved,
thinking it folly to have imagined her uncle was other than a man of
hoarded wealth, and that he was here. But, in the interval, she had
experienced emotions which warned her of a struggle to come. Who would be
friendly to her, and an arm of might? The thought of the storm she had
sown upon all sides made her tremble foolishly. When she placed her hand
in Robert's, she gave his fingers a confiding pressure, and all but
dropped her head upon his bosom, so sick she was with weakness. It would
have been a deceit toward him, and that restrained her; perhaps, yet
more, she was restrained by the gloomy prospect of having to reply to any
words of love, without an idea of what to say, and with a loathing of
caresses. She saw herself condemned to stand alone, and at a season when
she was not strengthened by pure self-support.

Rhoda had not surrendered the stern belief that she had done well by
forcing Dahlia's hand to the marriage, though it had resulted evilly. In
reflecting on it, she had still a feeling of the harsh joy peculiar to
those who have exercised command with a conscious righteousness upon
wilful, sinful, and erring spirits, and have thwarted the wrongdoer. She
could only admit that there was sadness in the issue; hitherto, at least,
nothing worse than sad disappointment. The man who was her sister's
husband could no longer complain that he had been the victim of an
imposition. She had bought his promise that he would leave the country,
and she had rescued the honour of the family by paying him. At what cost?
She asked herself that now, and then her self-support became uneven.
Could her uncle have parted with the great sum--have shed it upon her,
merely beneficently, and because he loved her? Was it possible that he
had the habit of carrying his own riches through the streets of London?
She had to silence all questions imperiously, recalling exactly her ideas
of him, and the value of money in the moment when money was an object of
hunger--when she had seized it like a wolf, and its value was quite
unknown, unguessed at.

Rhoda threw up her window before she slept, that she might breathe the
cool night air; and, as she leaned out, she heard steps moving away, and
knew them to be Robert's, in whom that pressure of her hand had cruelly
resuscitated his longing for her. She drew back, wondering at the
idleness of men--slaves while they want a woman's love, savages when they
have won it. She tried to pity him, but she had not an emotion to spare,
save perhaps one of dull exultation, that she, alone of women, was free
from that wretched mess called love; and upon it she slept.

It was between the breakfast and dinner hours, at the farm, next day,
when the young squire, accompanied by Anthony Hackbut, met farmer Fleming
in the lane bordering one of the outermost fields of wheat. Anthony gave
little more than a blunt nod to his relative, and slouched on, leaving
the farmer in amazement, while the young squire stopped him to speak with
him. Anthony made his way on to the house. Shortly after, he was seen
passing through the gates of the garden, accompanied by Rhoda. At the
dinner-hour, Robert was taken aside by the farmer. Neither Rhoda nor
Anthony presented themselves. They did not appear till nightfall. When
Anthony came into the room, he took no greetings and gave none. He sat
down on the first chair by the door, shaking his head, with vacant eyes.
Rhoda took off her bonnet, and sat as strangely silent. In vain Mrs.
Sumfit asked her; "Shall it be tea, dear, and a little cold meat?" The
two dumb figures were separately interrogated, but they had no answer.

"Come! brother Tony?" the farmer tried to rally him.

Dahlia was knitting some article of feminine gear. Robert stood by the
musk-pots at the window, looking at Rhoda fixedly. Of this gaze she
became conscious, and glanced from him to the clock.

"It's late," she said, rising.

"But you're empty, my dear. And to think o' going to bed without a
dinner, or your tea, and no supper! You'll never say prayers, if you do,"
said Mrs. Sumfit.

The remark engendered a notion in the farmer's head, that Anthony
promised to be particularly prayerless.

"You've been and spent a night at the young squire's, I hear, brother
Tony. All right and well. No complaints on my part, I do assure ye. If
you're mixed up with that family, I won't bring it in you're anyways
mixed up with this family; not so as to clash, do you see. Only, man, now
you are here, a word'd be civil, if you don't want a doctor."

"I was right," murmured Mrs. Sumfit. "At the funeral, he was; and Lord be
thanked! I thought my eyes was failin'. Mas' Gammon, you'd ha' lost no
character by sidin' wi' me."

"Here's Dahlia, too," said the farmer. "Brother Tony, don't you see her?
She's beginning to be recognizable, if her hair'd grow a bit faster.
She's...well, there she is."

A quavering, tiny voice, that came from Anthony, said: "How d' ye do--how
d' ye do;" sounding like the first effort of a fife. But Anthony did not
cast eye on Dahlia.

"Will you eat, man?--will you smoke a pipe?--won't you talk a word?--will
you go to bed?"

These several questions, coming between pauses, elicited nothing from the
staring oldman.

"Is there a matter wrong at the Bank?" the farmer called out, and Anthony
jumped in a heap.

"Eh?" persisted the farmer.

Rhoda interposed: "Uncle is tired; he is unwell. Tomorrow he will talk to
you."

"No, but is there anything wrong up there, though?" the farmer asked with
eager curiosity, and a fresh smile at the thought that those Banks and
city folk were mortal, and could upset, notwithstanding their crashing
wheels. "Brother Tony, you speak out; has anybody been and broke? Never
mind a blow, so long, o' course, as they haven't swallowed your money.
How is it? Why, I never saw such a sight as you. You come down from
London; you play hide and seek about your relation's house; and here,
when you do condescend to step in--eh? how is it? You ain't, I hope,
ruined, Tony, are ye?"

Rhoda stood over her uncle to conceal him.

"He shall not speak till he has had some rest. And yes, mother, he shall
have some warm tea upstairs in bed. Boil some water. Now, uncle, come
with me."

"Anybody broke?" Anthony rolled the words over, as Rhoda raised his arm.
"I'm asked such a lot, my dear, I ain't equal to it. You said here 'd be
a quiet place. I don't know about money. Try my pockets. Yes, mum, if you
was forty policemen, I'm empty; you'd find it. And no objection to nod to
prayers; but never was taught one of my own. Where am I going, my dear?"

"Upstairs with me, uncle."

Rhoda had succeeded in getting him on his feet.

The farmer tapped at his forehead, as a signification to the others that
Anthony had gone wrong in the head, which reminded him that he had
prophesied as much. He stiffened out his legs, and gave a manful spring,
crying, "Hulloa, brother Tony! why, man, eh? Look here. What, goin' to
bed? What, you, Tony? I say--I say--dear me!" And during these
exclamations intricate visions of tripping by means of gold wires danced
before him.

Rhoda hurried Anthony out.

After the door had shut, the farmer said: "That comes of it; sooner or
later, there it is! You give your heart to money--you insure in a ship,
and as much as say, here's a ship, and, blow and lighten, I defy you.
Whereas we day-by-day people, if it do blow and if it do lighten, and the
waves are avilanches, we've nothing to lose. Poor old Tony--a smash, to a
certainty. There's been a smash, and he's gone under the harrow. Any o'
you here might ha' heard me say, things can't last for ever. Ha'n't you,
now?"

The persons present meekly acquiesced in his prophetic spirit to this
extent. Mrs. Sumfit dolorously said, "Often, William dear," and accepted
the incontestable truth in deep humiliation of mind.

"Save," the farmer continued, "save and store, only don't put your heart
in the box."

"It's true, William;" Mrs. Sumfit acted clerk to the sermon.

Dahlia took her softly by the neck, and kissed her.

"Is it love for the old woman?" Mrs. Sumfit murmured fondly; and Dahlia
kissed her again.

The farmer had by this time rounded to the thought of how he personally
might be affected by Anthony's ill-luck, supposing; perchance, that
Anthony was suffering from something more than a sentimental attachment
to the Bank of his predilection: and such a reflection instantly diverted
his tendency to moralize.

"We shall hear to-morrow," he observed in conclusion; which, as it caused
a desire for the morrow to spring within his bosom, sent his eyes at
Master Gammon, who was half an hour behind his time for bed, and had
dropped asleep in his chair. This unusual display of public somnolence on
Master Gammon's part, together with the veteran's reputation for
slowness, made the farmer fret at him as being in some way an obstruction
to the lively progress of the hours.

"Hoy, Gammon!" he sang out, awakeningly to ordinary ears; but Master
Gammon was not one who took the ordinary plunge into the gulf of sleep,
and it was required to shake him and to bellow at him--to administer at
once earthquake and thunder--before his lizard eyelids would lift over
the great, old-world eyes; upon which, like a clayey monster refusing to
be informed with heavenly fire, he rolled to the right of his chair and
to the left, and pitched forward, and insisted upon being inanimate.
Brought at last to a condition of stale consciousness, he looked at his
master long, and uttered surprisingly "Farmer, there's queer things going
on in this house," and then relapsed to a combat with Mrs. Sumfit,
regarding the candle; she saying that it was not to be entrusted to him,
and he sullenly contending that it was.

"Here, we'll all go to bed," said the farmer. "What with one person
queer, and another person queer, I shall be in for a headache, if I take
to thinking. Gammon's a man sees in 's sleep what he misses awake. Did
you ever know," he addressed anybody, "such a thing as Tony Hackbut
coming into a relation's house, and sitting there, and not a word for any
of us? It's, I call it, dumbfoundering. And that's me: why didn't I go up
and shake his hand, you ask. Well, why not? If he don't know he's
welcome, without ceremony, he's no good. Why, I've got matters t' occupy
my mind, too, haven't I? Every man has, and some more'n others, let alone
crosses. There's something wrong with my brother-in-law, Tony, that's
settled. Odd that we country people, who bide, and take the Lord's
gifts--"  The farmer did not follow out this reflection, but raising his
arms, shepherd-wise, he puffed as if blowing the two women before him to
their beds, and then gave a shy look at Robert, and nodded good-night to
him. Robert nodded in reply. He knew the cause of the farmer's uncommon
blitheness. Algernon Blancove, the young squire, had proposed for Rhoda's
hand.




CHAPTER XLIII

Anthony had robbed the Bank. The young squire was aware of the fact, and
had offered to interpose for him, and to make good the money to the Bank,
upon one condition. So much, Rhoda had gathered from her uncle's babbling
interjections throughout the day. The farmer knew only of the young
squire's proposal, which had been made direct to him; and he had left it
to Robert to state the case to Rhoda, and plead for himself. She believed
fully, when she came downstairs into the room where Robert was awaiting
her, that she had but to speak and a mine would be sprung; and shrinking
from it, hoping for it, she entered, and tried to fasten her eyes upon
Robert distinctly, telling him the tale. Robert listened with a
calculating seriousness of manner that quieted her physical dread of his
passion. She finished; and he said "It will, perhaps, save your uncle:
I'm sure it will please your father."

She sat down, feeling that a warmth had gone, and that she was very bare.

"Must I consent, then?"

"If you can, I suppose."

Both being spirits formed for action, a perplexity found them weak as
babes. He, moreover, was stung to see her debating at all upon such a
question; and he was in despair before complicated events which gave
nothing for his hands and heart to do. Stiff endurance seemed to him to
be his lesson; and he made a show of having learnt it.

"Were you going out, Robert?"

"I usually make the rounds of the house, to be sure all's safe."

His walking about the garden at night was not, then, for the purpose of
looking at her window. Rhoda coloured in all her dark crimson with shame
for thinking that it had been so.

"I must decide to-morrow morning."

"They say, the pillow's the best counsellor."

A reply that presumed she would sleep appeared to her as bitterly
unfriendly.

"Did father wish it?"

"Not by what he spoke."

"You suppose he does wish it?"

"Where's the father who wouldn't? Of course, he wishes it. He's kind
enough, but you may be certain he wishes it."

"Oh! Dahlia, Dahlia!" Rhoda moaned, under a rush of new sensations,
unfilial, akin to those which her sister had distressed her by speaking
shamelessly out.

"Ah! poor soul!" added Robert.

"My darling must be brave: she must have great courage. Dahlia cannot be
a coward. I begin to see."

Rhoda threw up her face, and sat awhile as one who was reading old
matters by a fresh light.

"I can't think," she said, with a start. "Have I been dreadfully cruel?
Was I unsisterly? I have such a horror of some things--disgrace. And men
are so hard on women; and father--I felt for him. And I hated that base
man. It's his cousin and his name! I could almost fancy this trial is
brought round to me for punishment."

An ironic devil prompted Robert to say, "You can't let harm come to your
uncle."

The thing implied was the farthest in his idea of any woman's possible
duty.

"Are you of that opinion?" Rhoda questioned with her eyes, but uttered
nothing.

Now, he had spoken almost in the ironical tone. She should have noted
that. And how could a true-hearted girl suppose him capable of giving
such counsel to her whom he loved? It smote him with horror and anger;
but he was much too manly to betray these actual sentiments, and
continued to dissemble. You see, he had not forgiven her for her
indifference to him.

"You are no longer your own mistress," he said, meaning exactly the
reverse.

This--that she was bound in generosity to sacrifice herself--was what
Rhoda feared. There was no forceful passion in her bosom to burst through
the crowd of weak reasonings and vanities, to bid her be a woman, not a
puppet; and the passion in him, for which she craved, that she might be
taken up by it and whirled into forgetfulness, with a seal of betrothal
upon her lips, was absent so that she thought herself loved no more by
Robert. She was weary of thinking and acting on her own responsibility,
and would gladly have abandoned her will; yet her judgement, if she was
still to exercise it, told her that the step she was bidden to take was
one, the direct consequence and the fruit of her other resolute steps.
Pride whispered, "You could compel your sister to do that which she
abhorred;" and Pity pleaded for her poor old uncle Anthony. She looked
back in imagination at that scene with him in London, amazed at her
frenzy of power, and again, from that contemplation, amazed at her
present nervelessness.

"I am not fit to be my own mistress," she said.

"Then, the sooner you decide the better," observed Robert, and the room
became hot and narrow to him.

"Very little time is given me," she murmured. The sound was like a
whimper; exasperating to one who had witnessed her remorseless energy.

"I dare say you won't find the hardship so great," said he.

"Because," she looked up quickly, "I went out one day to meet him? Do you
mean that, Robert? I went to hear news of my sister. I had received no
letters from her. And he wrote to say that he could tell me about her. My
uncle took me once to the Bank. I saw him there first. He spoke of
Wrexby, and of my sister. It is pleasant to inexperienced girls to hear
themselves praised. Since the day when you told me to turn back I have
always respected you."

Her eyelids lowered softly.

Could she have humbled herself more? But she had, at the same time,
touched his old wound: and his rival then was the wooer now, rich, and a
gentleman. And this room, Robert thought as he looked about it, was the
room in which she had refused him, when he first asked her to be his.

"I think," he said, "I've never begged your pardon for the last occasion
of our being alone here together. I've had my arm round you. Don't be
frightened. That's my marriage, and there was my wife. And there's an end
of my likings and my misconduct. Forgive me for calling it to mind."

"No, no, Robert," Rhoda lifted her hands, and, startled by the impulse,
dropped them, saying: "What forgiveness? Was I ever angry with you?"

A look of tenderness accompanied the words, and grew into a dusky crimson
rose under his eyes.

"When you went into the wood, I saw you going: I knew it was for some
good object," he said, and flushed equally.

But, by the recurrence to that scene, he had checked her sensitive
developing emotion. She hung a moment in languor, and that oriental
warmth of colour ebbed away from her cheeks.

"You are very kind," said she.

Then he perceived in dimmest fashion that possibly a chance had come to
ripeness, withered, and fallen, within the late scoffing seconds of time.
Enraged at his blindness, and careful, lest he had wrongly guessed, not
to expose his regret (the man was a lover), he remarked, both truthfully
and hypocritically: "I've always thought you were born to be a lady."
(You had that ambition, young madam.)

She answered: "That's what I don't understand." (Your saying it, O my
friend!)

"You will soon take to your new duties."  (You have small objection to
them even now.)

"Yes, or my life won't be worth much." (Know, that you are driving me to
it.)

"And I wish you happiness, Rhoda."  (You are madly imperilling the
prospect thereof.)

To each of them the second meaning stood shadowy behind the utterances.
And further,--

"Thank you, Robert."  (I shall have to thank you for the issue.)

"Now it's time to part."  (Do you not see that there's a danger for me in
remaining?)

"Good night."  (Behold, I am submissive.)

"Good night, Rhoda."  (You were the first to give the signal of parting.)

"Good night."  (I am simply submissive.)

"Why not my name? Are you hurt with me?"

Rhoda choked. The indirectness of speech had been a shelter to her,
permitting her to hint at more than she dared clothe in words.

Again the delicious dusky rose glowed beneath his eyes.

But he had put his hand out to her, and she had not taken it.

"What have I done to offend you? I really don't know, Rhoda."

"Nothing."  The flower had closed.

He determined to believe that she was gladdened at heart by the prospect
of a fine marriage, and now began to discourse of Anthony's delinquency,
saying,--

"It was not money taken for money's sake: any one can see that. It was
half clear to me, when you told me about it, that the money was not his
to give, but I've got the habit of trusting you to be always correct."

"And I never am," said Rhoda, vexed at him and at herself.

"Women can't judge so well about money matters. Has your uncle no account
of his own at the Bank? He was thought to be a bit of a miser."

"What he is, or what he was, I can't guess. He has not been near the Bank
since that day; nor to his home. He has wandered down on his way here,
sleeping in cottages. His heart seems broken. I have still a great deal
of the money. I kept it, thinking it might be a protection for Dahlia.
Oh! my thoughts and what I have done! Of course, I imagined him to be
rich. A thousand pounds seemed a great deal to me, and very little for
one who was rich. If I had reflected at all, I must have seen that Uncle
Anthony would never have carried so much through the streets. I was like
a fiend for money. I must have been acting wrongly. Such a craving as
that is a sign of evil."

"What evil there is, you're going to mend, Rhoda."

"I sell myself, then."

"Hardly so bad as that. The money will come from you instead of from your
uncle."

Rhoda bent forward in her chair, with her elbows on her knees, like a man
brooding. Perhaps, it was right that the money should come from her. And
how could she have hoped to get the money by any other means? Here at
least was a positive escape from perplexity. It came at the right moment;
was it a help divine? What cowardice had been prompting her to evade it?
After all, could it be a dreadful step that she was required to take?

Her eyes met Robert's, and he said startlingly: "Just like a woman!"

"Why?" but she had caught the significance, and blushed with spite.

"He was the first to praise you."

"You are brutal to me, Robert."

"My name at last! You accused me of that sort of thing before, in this
room."

Rhoda stood up. "I will wish you good night."

"And now you take my hand."

"Good night," they uttered simultaneously; but Robert did not give up the
hand he had got in his own. His eyes grew sharp, and he squeezed the
fingers.

"I'm bound," she cried.

"Once!" Robert drew her nearer to him.

"Let me go."

"Once!" he reiterated. "Rhoda, as I've never kissed you--once!"

"No: don't anger me."

"No one has ever kissed you?"

"Never."

"Then, I--"  His force was compelling the straightened figure.

Had he said, "Be mine!" she might have softened to his embrace; but there
was no fire of divining love in her bosom to perceive her lover's
meaning. She read all his words as a placard on a board, and revolted
from the outrage of submitting her lips to one who was not to be her
husband. His jealousy demanded that gratification foremost. The "Be
mine!" was ready enough to follow.

"Let me go, Robert."

She was released. The cause for it was the opening of the door. Anthony
stood there.

A more astounding resemblance to the phantasm of a dream was never
presented. He was clad in a manner to show forth the condition of his
wits, in partial night and day attire: one of the farmer's nightcaps was
on his head, surmounted by his hat. A confused recollection of the
necessity for trousers, had made him draw on those garments sufficiently
to permit of the movement of his short legs, at which point their
subserviency to the uses ended. Wrinkled with incongruous clothing from
head to foot, and dazed by the light, he peered on them, like a mouse
magnified and petrified.

"Dearest uncle!" Rhoda went to him.

Anthony nodded, pointing to the door leading out of the house.

"I just want to go off--go off. Never you mind me. I'm only going off."

"You must go to your bed, uncle."

"Oh, Lord! no. I'm going off, my dear. I've had sleep enough for forty.
I--" he turned his mouth to Rhoda's ear, "I don't want t' see th' old
farmer."  And, as if he had given a conclusive reason for his departure,
he bored towards the door, repeating it, and bawling additionally, "in
the morning."

"You have seen him, uncle. You have seen him. It's over," said Rhoda.

Anthony whispered: "I don't want t' see th' old farmer."

"But, you have seen him, uncle."

"In the morning, my dear. Not in the morning. He'll be looking and
asking, 'Where away, brother Tony?' 'Where's your banker's book, brother
Tony?' 'How's money-market, brother Tony?' I can't see th' old farmer."

It was impossible to avoid smiling: his imitation of the farmer's country
style was exact.

She took his hands, and used every persuasion she could think of to
induce him to return to his bed; nor was he insensible to argument, or
superior to explanation.

"Th' old farmer thinks I've got millions, my dear. You can't satisfy him.
He... I don't want t' see him in the morning. He thinks I've got
millions. His mouth'll go down. I don't want... You don't want him to
look... And I can't count now; I can't count a bit. And every post I see
's a policeman. I ain't hiding. Let 'em take the old man. And he was a
faithful servant, till one day he got up on a regular whirly-go-round,
and ever since...such a little boy! I'm frightened o' you, Rhoda."

"I will do everything for you," said Rhoda, crying wretchedly.

"Because, the young squire says," Anthony made his voice mysterious.

"Yes, yes," Rhoda stopped him; "and I consent:" she gave a hurried
half-glance behind her. "Come, uncle. Oh! pity! don't let me think your
reason's gone. I can get you the money, but if you go foolish, I cannot
help you."

Her energy had returned to her with the sense of sacrifice. Anthony eyed
her tears. "We've sat on a bank and cried together, haven't we?" he said.
"And counted ants, we have. Shall we sit in the sun together to-morrow?
Say, we shall. Shall we? A good long day in the sun and nobody looking at
me 's my pleasure."

Rhoda gave him the assurance, and he turned and went upstairs with her,
docile at the prospect of hours to be passed in the sunlight.

Yet, when morning came, he had disappeared. Robert also was absent from
the breakfast-table. The farmer made no remarks, save that he reckoned
Master Gammon was right--in allusion to the veteran's somnolent
observation overnight; and strange things were acted before his eyes.

There came by the morning delivery of letters one addressed to "Miss
Fleming."  He beheld his daughters rise, put their hands out, and claim
it, in a breath; and they gazed upon one another like the two women
demanding the babe from the justice of the Wise King. The letter was
placed in Rhoda's hand; Dahlia laid hers on it. Their mouths were shut;
any one not looking at them would have been unaware that a supreme
conflict was going on in the room. It was a strenuous wrestle of their
eyeballs, like the "give way" of athletes pausing. But the delirious beat
down the constitutional strength. A hard bright smile ridged the hollow
of Dahlia's cheeks. Rhoda's dark eyes shut; she let go her hold, and
Dahlia thrust the letter in against her bosom, snatched it out again, and
dipped her face to roses in a jug, and kissing Mrs. Sumfit, ran from the
room for a single minute; after which she came back smiling with gravely
joyful eyes and showing a sedate readiness to eat and conclude the
morning meal.

What did this mean? The farmer could have made allowance for Rhoda's
behaving so, seeing that she notoriously possessed intellect; and he had
the habit of charging all freaks and vagaries of manner upon intellect.

But Dahlia was a soft creature, without this apology for extravagance,
and what right had she to letters addressed to "Miss Fleming?" The farmer
prepared to ask a question, and was further instigated to it by seeing
Mrs. Sumfit's eyes roll sympathetic under a burden of overpowering
curiosity and bewilderment. On the point of speaking, he remembered that
he had pledged his word to ask no questions; he feared to--that was the
secret; he had put his trust in Rhoda's assurance, and shrank from a
spoken suspicion. So, checking himself, he broke out upon Mrs. Sumfit:
"Now, then, mother!" which caused her to fluster guiltily, she having
likewise given her oath to be totally unquestioning, even as was Master
Gammon, whom she watched with a deep envy. Mrs. Sumfit excused the
anxious expression of her face by saying that she was thinking of her
dairy, whither, followed by the veteran, she retired.

Rhoda stood eyeing Dahlia, nerved to battle against the contents of that
letter, though in the first conflict she had been beaten. "Oh, this curse
of love!" she thought in her heart; and as Dahlia left the room, flushed,
stupefied, and conscienceless, Rhoda the more readily told her father the
determination which was the result of her interview with Robert.

No sooner had she done so, than a strange fluttering desire to look on
Robert awoke within her bosom. She left the house, believing that she
went abroad to seek her uncle, and walked up a small grass-knoll, a
little beyond the farm-yard, from which she could see green corn-tracts
and the pastures by the river, the river flowing oily under summer light,
and the slow-footed cows, with their heads bent to the herbage; far-away
sheep, and white hawthorn bushes, and deep hedge-ways bursting out of the
trimness of the earlier season; and a nightingale sang among the hazels
near by.

This scene of unthrobbing peacefulness was beheld by Rhoda with her first
conscious delight in it. She gazed round on the farm, under a quick new
impulse of affection for her old home. And whose hand was it that could
alone sustain the working of the farm, and had done so, without reward?
Her eyes travelled up to Wrexby Hall, perfectly barren of any feeling
that she was to enter the place, aware only that it was full of pain for
her. She accused herself, but could not accept the charge of her having
ever hoped for transforming events that should twist and throw the dear
old farm-life long back into the fields of memory. Nor could she
understand the reason of her continued coolness to Robert. Enough of
accurate reflection was given her to perceive that discontent with her
station was the original cause of her discontent now. What she had sown
she was reaping:--and wretchedly colourless are these harvests of our
dream! The sun has not shone on them. They may have a tragic blood-hue,
as with Dahlia's; but they will never have any warm, and fresh, and
nourishing sweetness--the juice which is in a single blade of grass.

A longing came upon Rhoda to go and handle butter. She wished to smell it
as Mrs. Sumfit drubbed and patted and flattened and rounded it in the
dairy; and she ran down the slope, meeting her father at the gate. He was
dressed in his brushed suit, going she knew whither, and when he asked if
she had seen her uncle, she gave for answer a plain negative, and longed
more keenly to be at work with her hands, and to smell the homely creamy
air under the dairy-shed.




CHAPTER XLIV

She watched her father as he went across the field and into the lane. Her
breathing was suppressed till he appeared in view at different points,
more and more distant, and then she sighed heavily, stopped her
breathing, and hoped her unshaped hope again. The last time he was in
sight, she found herself calling to him with a voice like that of a
burdened sleeper: her thought being, "How can you act so cruelly to
Robert!" He passed up Wrexby Heath, and over the black burnt patch where
the fire had caught the furzes on a dry Maynight, and sank on the side of
the Hall.

When we have looked upon a picture of still green life with a troubled
soul, and the blow falls on us, we accuse Nature of our own treachery to
her. Rhoda hurried from the dairy-door to shut herself up in her room and
darken the light surrounding her. She had turned the lock, and was about
systematically to pull down the blind, when the marvel of beholding
Dahlia stepping out of the garden made her for a moment less the creature
of her sickened senses. Dahlia was dressed for a walk, and she went very
fast. The same paralysis of motion afflicted Rhoda as when she was gazing
after her father; but her hand stretched out instinctively for her bonnet
when Dahlia had crossed the green and the mill-bridge, and was no more
visible. Rhoda drew her bonnet on, and caught her black silk mantle in
her hand, and without strength to throw it across her shoulders, dropped
before her bed, and uttered a strange prayer. "Let her die rather than go
back to disgrace, my God! my God!"

She tried to rise, and failed in the effort, and superstitiously renewed
her prayer. "Send death to her rather!"--and Rhoda's vision under her
shut eyes conjured up clouds and lightnings, and spheres in
conflagration.

There is nothing so indicative of fevered or of bad blood as the tendency
to counsel the Almighty how he shall deal with his creatures. The strain
of a long uncertainty, and the late feverish weeks had distempered the
fine blood of the girl, and her acts and words were becoming remoter
exponents of her character.

She bent her head in a blind doze that gave her strength to rise. As
swiftly as she could she went in the track of her sister.

That morning, Robert had likewise received a letter. It was from Major
Waring, and contained a bank-note, and a summons to London, as also an
enclosure from Mrs. Boulby of Warbeach; the nature of which was an
advertisement cut out of the county paper, notifying to one Robert Eccles
that his aunt Anne had died, and that there was a legacy for him, to be
paid over upon application. Robert crossed the fields, laughing madly at
the ironical fate which favoured him a little and a little, and never
enough, save just to keep him swimming.

The letter from Major Waring said:--

"I must see you immediately. Be quick and come. I begin to be of your
opinion--there are some things which we must take into our own hands and
deal summarily with."

"Ay!--ay!" Robert gave tongue in the clear morning air, scenting
excitement and eager for it as a hound.

More was written, which he read subsequently

   "I wrong," Percy's letter continued, "the best of women. She was
   driven to my door. There is, it seems, some hope that Dahlia will
   find herself free. At any rate, keep guard over her, and don't
   leave her. Mrs. Lovell has herself been moving to make discoveries
   down at Warbeach. Mr. Blancove has nearly quitted this sphere. She
   nursed him--I was jealous!--the word's out. Truth, courage, and
   suffering touch Margaret's heart.

                  "Yours,

                       "Percy."

Jumping over a bank, Robert came upon Anthony, who was unsteadily gazing
at a donkey that cropped the grass by a gate.

"Here you are," said Robert, and took his arm.

Anthony struggled, though he knew the grasp was friendly; but he was led
along: nor did Robert stop until they reached Greatham, five miles beyond
Wrexby, where he entered the principal inn and called for wine.

"You want spirit: you want life," said Robert.

Anthony knew that he wanted no wine, whatever his needs might be. Yet the
tender ecstacy of being paid for was irresistible, and he drank, saying,
"Just one glass, then."

Robert pledged him. They were in a private room, of which, having ordered
up three bottles of sherry, Robert locked the door. The devil was in him.
He compelled Anthony to drink an equal portion with himself, alternately
frightening and cajoling the old man.

"Drink, I tell you. You've robbed me, and you shall drink!"

"I haven't, I haven't," Anthony whined.

"Drink, and be silent. You've robbed me, and you shall drink! and by
heaven! if you resist, I'll hand you over to bluer imps than you've ever
dreamed of, old gentleman! You've robbed me, Mr. Hackbut. Drink! I tell
you."

Anthony wept into his glass.

"That's a trick I could never do," said Robert, eyeing the drip of the
trembling old tear pitilessly. "Your health, Mr. Hackbut. You've robbed
me of my sweetheart. Never mind. Life's but the pop of a gun. Some of us
flash in the pan, and they're the only ones that do no mischief. You're
not one of them, sir; so you must drink, and let me see you cheerful."

By degrees, the wine stirred Anthony's blood, and he chirped feebly, as
one who half remembered that he ought to be miserable. Robert listened to
his maundering account of his adventure with the Bank money, sternly
replenishing his glass. His attention was taken by the sight of Dahlia
stepping forth from a chemist's shop in the street nearly opposite to the
inn. "This is my medicine," said Robert; "and yours too," he addressed
Anthony.

The sun had passed its meridian when they went into the streets again.
Robert's head was high as a cock's, and Anthony leaned on his arm;
performing short half-circles headlong to the front, until the mighty arm
checked and uplifted him. They were soon in the fields leading to Wrexby.
Robert saw two female figures far ahead. A man was hastening to join
them. The women started and turned suddenly: one threw up her hands, and
darkened her face. It was in the pathway of a broad meadow, deep with
grass, wherein the red sorrel topped the yellow buttercup, like rust upon
the season's gold. Robert hastened on. He scarce at the moment knew the
man whose shoulder he seized, but he had recognised Dahlia and Rhoda, and
he found himself face to face with Sedgett.

"It's you!"

"Perhaps you'll keep your hands off; before you make sure, another time."

Robert said: "I really beg your pardon. Step aside with me."

"Not while I've a ha'p'orth o' brains in my noddle," replied Sedgett,
drawling an imitation of his enemy's courteous tone. "I've come for my
wife. I'm just down by train, and a bit out of my way, I reckon. I'm
come, and I'm in a hurry. She shall get home, and have on her
things--boxes packed, and we go."

Robert waved Dahlia and Rhoda to speed homeward. Anthony had fallen
against the roots of a banking elm, and surveyed the scene with
philosophic abstractedness. Rhoda moved, taking Dahlia's hand.

"Stop," cried Sedgett. "Do you people here think me a fool? Eccles, you
know me better 'n that. That young woman's my wife. I've come for her, I
tell ye."

"You've no claim on her," Rhoda burst forth weakly, and quivered, and
turned her eyes supplicatingly on Robert. Dahlia was a statue of icy
fright.

"You've thrown her off, man, and sold what rights you had," said Robert,
spying for the point of his person where he might grasp the wretch and
keep him off.

"That don't hold in law," Sedgett nodded. "A man may get in a passion,
when he finds he's been cheated, mayn't he?"

"I have your word of honour," said Rhoda; muttering, "Oh! devil come to
wrong us!"

"Then, you shouldn't ha' run ferreting down in my part o' the country.
You, or Eccles--I don't care who 'tis--you've been at my servants to get
at my secrets. Some of you have. You've declared war. You've been trying
to undermine me. That's a breach, I call it. Anyhow, I've come for my
wife. I'll have her."

"None of us, none of us; no one has been to your house," said Rhoda,
vehemently. "You live in Hampshire, sir, I think; I don't know any more.
I don't know where. I have not asked my sister. Oh! spare us, and go."

"No one has been down into your part of the country," said Robert, with
perfect mildness.

To which Sedgett answered bluffly, "There ye lie, Bob Eccles;" and he was
immediately felled by a tremendous blow. Robert strode over him, and
taking Dahlia by the elbow, walked three paces on, as to set her in
motion. "Off!" he cried to Rhoda, whose eyelids cowered under the blaze
of his face.

It was best that her sister should be away, and she turned and walked
swiftly, hurrying Dahlia, and touching her. "Oh! don't touch my arm,"
Dahlia said, quailing in the fall of her breath. They footed together,
speechless; taking the woman's quickest gliding step. At the last stile
of the fields, Rhoda saw that they were not followed. She stopped,
panting: her heart and eyes were so full of that flaming creature who was
her lover. Dahlia took from her bosom the letter she had won in the
morning, and held it open in both hands to read it. The pause was short.
Dahlia struck the letter into her bosom again, and her starved features
had some of the bloom of life. She kept her right hand in her pocket, and
Rhoda presently asked,--

"What have you there?"

"You are my enemy, dear, in some things," Dahlia replied, a muscular
shiver passing over her.

"I think," said Rhoda, "I could get a little money to send you away. Will
you go? I am full of grief for what I have done. God forgive me."

"Pray, don't speak so; don't let us talk," said Dahlia.

Scorched as she felt both in soul and body, a touch or a word was a wound
to her. Yet she was the first to resume: "I think I shall be saved. I
can't quite feel I am lost. I have not been so wicked as that."

Rhoda gave a loving answer, and again Dahlia shrank from the miserable
comfort of words.

As they came upon the green fronting the iron gateway, Rhoda perceived
that the board proclaiming the sale of Queen Anne's Farm had been
removed, and now she understood her father's readiness to go up to Wrexby
Hall. "He would sell me to save the farm."  She reproached herself for
the thought, but she could not be just; she had the image of her father
plodding relentlessly over the burnt heath to the Hall, as conceived by
her agonized sensations in the morning, too vividly to be just, though
still she knew that her own indecision was to blame.

Master Gammon met them in the garden.

Pointing aloft, over the gateway, "That's down," he remarked, and the
three green front teeth of his quiet grin were stamped on the
impressionable vision of the girls in such a way that they looked at one
another with a bare bitter smile. Once it would have been mirth.

"Tell father," Dahlia said, when they were at the back doorway, and her
eyes sparkled piteously, and she bit on her underlip. Rhoda tried to
detain her; but Dahlia repeated, "Tell father," and in strength and in
will had become more than a match for her sister.




CHAPTER XLV

Rhoda spoke to her father from the doorway, with her hand upon the lock
of the door.

At first he paid little attention to her, and, when he did so, began by
saying that he hoped she knew that she was bound to have the young
squire, and did not intend to be prankish and wilful; because the young
squire was eager to settle affairs, that he might be settled himself. "I
don't deny it's honour to us, and it's a comfort," said the farmer. "This
is the first morning I've thought easily in my chair for years. I'm sorry
about Robert, who's a twice unlucky 'un; but you aimed at something
higher, I suppose."

Rhoda was prompted to say a word in self-defence, but refrained, and
again she told Dahlia's story, wondering that her father showed no
excitement of any kind. On the contrary, there was the dimple of one of
his voiceless chuckles moving about the hollow of one cheek, indicating
some slow contemplative action that was not unpleasant within. He said:
"Ah! well, it's very sad;--that is, if 'tis so," and no more, for a time.

She discovered that he was referring to her uncle Anthony, concerning
whose fortunate position in the world, he was beginning to entertain some
doubts. "Or else," said the farmer, with a tap on his forehead, "he's
going here. It 'd be odd after all, if commercially, as he 'd call it,
his despised brother-in-law--and I say it in all kindness--should turn
out worth, not exactly millions, but worth a trifle."

The farmer nodded with an air of deprecating satisfaction.

Rhoda did not gain his ear until, as by an instinct, she perceived what
interest the story of her uncle and the money-bags would have for him.
She related it, and he was roused. Then, for the third time, she told him
of Dahlia.

Rhoda saw her father's chest grow large, while his eyes quickened with
light. He looked on her with quite a strange face. Wrath, and a revived
apprehension, and a fixed will were expressed in it, and as he catechized
her for each particular of the truth which had been concealed from him,
she felt a respectfulness that was new in her personal sensations toward
her father, but it was at the expense of her love.

When he had heard and comprehended all, he said, "Send the girl down to
me."

But Rhoda pleaded, "She is too worn, she is tottering. She cannot endure
a word on this; not even of kindness and help."

"Then, you," said the farmer, "you tell her she's got a duty's her first
duty now. Obedience to her husband! Do you hear? Then, let her hear it.
Obedience to her husband! And welcome's the man when he calls on me. He's
welcome. My doors are open to him. I thank him. I honour him. I bless his
name. It's to him I owe--You go up to her and say, her father owes it to
the young man who's married her that he can lift up his head. Go aloft.
Ay! for years I've been suspecting something of this. I tell ye, girl, I
don't understand about church doors and castin' of her off--he's come for
her, hasn't he? Then, he shall have her. I tell ye, I don't understand
about money: he's married her. Well, then, she's his wife; and how can he
bargain not to see her?"

"The base wretch!" cried Rhoda.

"Hasn't he married her?" the farmer retorted. "Hasn't he given the poor
creature a name? I'm not for abusing her, but him I do thank, and I say,
when he calls, here's my hand for him. Here, it's out and waiting for
him."

"Father, if you let me see it--" Rhoda checked the intemperate outburst.
"Father, this is a bad--a bad man. He is a very wicked man. We were all
deceived by him. Robert knows him. He has known him for years, and knows
that he is very wicked. This man married our Dahlia to get--" Rhoda
gasped, and could not speak it. "He flung her off with horrible words at
the church door. After this, how can he claim her? I paid him all he had
to expect with uncle's money, for his promise by his sacred oath never,
never to disturb or come near my sister. After that he can't, can't claim
her. If he does--"

"He's her husband," interrupted the farmer; "when he comes here, he's
welcome. I say he's welcome. My hand's out to him:--If it's alone that
he's saved the name of Fleming from disgrace! I thank him, and my
daughter belongs to him. Where is he now? You talk of a scuffle with
Robert. I do hope Robert will not forget his proper behaviour. Go you up
to your sister, and say from me--All's forgotten and forgiven; say, It's
all underfoot; but she must learn to be a good girl from this day. And,
if she's at the gate to welcome her husband, so much the better 'll her
father be pleased;--say that. I want to see the man. It'll gratify me to
feel her husband's flesh and blood. His being out of sight so long's been
a sore at my heart; and when I see him I'll welcome him, and so must all
in my house."

This was how William Fleming received the confession of his daughter's
unhappy plight.

Rhoda might have pleaded Dahlia's case better, but that she was too
shocked and outraged by the selfishness she saw in her father, and the
partial desire to scourge which she was too intuitively keen at the
moment not to perceive in the paternal forgiveness, and in the
stipulation of the forgiveness.

She went upstairs to Dahlia, simply stating that their father was aware
of all the circumstances.

Dahlia looked at her, but dared ask nothing.

So the day passed. Neither Robert nor Anthony appeared. The night came:
all doors were locked. The sisters that night slept together, feeling the
very pulses of the hours; yet neither of them absolutely hopelessly,
although in a great anguish.

Rhoda was dressed by daylight. The old familiar country about the house
lay still as if it knew no expectation. She observed Master Gammon
tramping forth afield, and presently heard her father's voice below. All
the machinery of the daily life got into motion; but it was evident that
Robert and Anthony continued to be absent. A thought struck her that
Robert had killed the man. It came with a flash of joy that was speedily
terror, and she fell to praying vehemently and vaguely. Dahlia lay
exhausted on the bed, but nigh the hour when letters were delivered, she
sat up, saying, "There is one for me; get it."

There was in truth a letter for her below, and it was in her father's
hand and open.

"Come out," said the farmer, as Rhoda entered to him. When they were in
the garden, he commanded her to read and tell him the meaning of it. The
letter was addressed to Dahlia Fleming.

"It's for my sister," Rhoda murmured, in anger, but more in fear.

She was sternly bidden to read, and she read,--

   Dahlia,--There is mercy for us. You are not lost to me.

                  "Edward."

After this, was appended in a feminine hand:--

   "There is really hope. A few hours will tell us. But keep firm.
   If he comes near you, keep from him. You are not his. Run, hide,
   go anywhere, if you have reason to think he is near. I dare not
   write what it is we expect. Yesterday I told you to hope; to-day I
   can say, believe that you will be saved. You are not lost.
   Everything depends on your firmness.

                  "Margaret L."

Rhoda lifted up her eyes.

The farmer seized the letter, and laid his finger on the first signature.

"Is that the christian name of my girl's seducer?"

He did not wait for an answer, but turned and went into the
breakfast-table, when he ordered a tray with breakfast for Dahlia to
betaken up to her bed-room; and that done, he himself turned the key of
the door, and secured her. Mute woe was on Mrs. Sumfit's face at all
these strange doings, but none heeded her, and she smothered her
lamentations. The farmer spoke nothing either of Robert or of Anthony. He
sat in his chair till the dinner hour, without book or pipe, without
occupation for eyes or hands; silent, but acute in his hearing.

The afternoon brought relief to Rhoda's apprehensions. A messenger ran up
to the farm bearing a pencilled note to her from Robert, which said that
he, in company with her uncle, was holding Sedgett at a distance by force
of arm, and that there was no fear. Rhoda kissed the words, hurrying away
to the fields for a few minutes to thank and bless and dream of him who
had said that there was no fear. She knew that Dahlia was unconscious of
her imprisonment, and had less compunction in counting the minutes of her
absence. The sun spread in yellow and fell in red before she thought of
returning, so sweet it had become to her to let her mind dwell with
Robert; and she was half a stranger to the mournfulness of the house when
she set her steps homeward. But when she lifted the latch of the gate, a
sensation, prompted by some unwitting self-accusal, struck her with
alarm. She passed into the room, and beheld her father, and Mrs. Sumfit,
who was sitting rolling, with her apron over her head.

The man Sedgett was between them.




CHAPTER XLVI

No sooner had Rhoda appeared than her father held up the key of Dahlia's
bed-room, and said, "Unlock your sister, and fetch her down to her
husband."

Mechanically Rhoda took the key.

"And leave our door open," he added.

She went up to Dahlia, sick with a sudden fright lest evil had come to
Robert, seeing that his enemy was here; but that was swept from her by
Dahlia's aspect.

"He is in the house," Dahlia said; and asked, "Was there no letter--no
letter; none, this morning?"

Rhoda clasped her in her arms, seeking to check the convulsions of her
trembling.

"No letter! no letter! none? not any? Oh! no letter for me!"

The strange varying tones of musical interjection and interrogation were
pitiful to hear.

"Did you look for a letter?" said Rhoda, despising herself for so
speaking.

"He is in the house! Where is my letter?"

"What was it you hoped? what was it you expected, darling?"

Dahlia moaned: "I don't know. I'm blind. I was told to hope. Yesterday I
had my letter, and it told me to hope. He is in the house!"

"Oh, my dear, my love!" cried Rhoda; "come down a minute. See him. It is
father's wish. Come only for a minute. Come, to gain time, if there is
hope."

"But there was no letter for me this morning, Rhoda. I can't hope. I am
lost. He is in the house!"

"Dearest, there was a letter," said Rhoda, doubting that she did well in
revealing it.

Dahlia put out her hands dumb for the letter.

"Father opened it, and read it, and keeps it," said Rhoda, clinging tight
to the stricken form.

"Then, he is against me? Oh, my letter!" Dahlia wrung her hands.

While they were speaking, their father's voice was heard below calling
for Dahlia to descend. He came thrice to the foot of the stairs, and
shouted for her.

The third time he uttered a threat that sprang an answer from her bosom
in shrieks.

Rhoda went out on the landing and said softly, "Come up to her, father."

After a little hesitation, he ascended the stairs.

"Why, girl, I only ask you to come down and see your husband," he
remarked with an attempt at kindliness of tone. "What's the harm, then?
Come and see him; that's all; come and see him."

Dahlia was shrinking out of her father's sight as he stood in the
doorway. "Say," she communicated to Rhoda, "say, I want my letter."

"Come!" William Fleming grew impatient.

"Let her have her letter, father," said Rhoda. "You have no right to
withhold it."

"That letter, my girl" (he touched Rhoda's shoulder as to satisfy her
that he was not angry), "that letter's where it ought to be. I've puzzled
out the meaning of it. That letter's in her husband's possession."

Dahlia, with her ears stretching for all that might be uttered, heard
this. Passing round the door, she fronted her father.

"My letter gone to him!" she cried. "Shameful old man! Can you look on
me? Father, could you give it? I'm a dead woman."

She smote her bosom, stumbling backward upon Rhoda's arm.

"You have been a wicked girl," the ordinarily unmoved old man retorted.
"Your husband has come for you, and you go with him. Know that, and let
me hear no threats. He's a modest-minded, quiet young man, and a farmer
like myself, and needn't be better than he is. Come you down to him at
once. I'll tell you: he comes to take you away, and his cart's at the
gate. To the gate you go with him. When next I see you--you visiting me
or I visiting you--I shall see a respected creature, and not what you
have been and want to be. You have racked the household with fear and
shame for years. Now come, and carry out what you've begun in the
contrary direction. You've got my word o' command, dead woman or live
woman. Rhoda, take one elbow of your sister. Your aunt's coming up to
pack her box. I say I'm determined, and no one stops me when I say that.
Come out, Dahlia, and let our parting be like between parent and child.
Here's the dark falling, and your husband's anxious to be away. He has
business, and 'll hardly get you to the station for the last train to
town. Hark at him below! He's naturally astonished, he is, and you're
trying his temper, as you'd try any man's. He wants to be off. Come, and
when next we meet I shall see you a happy wife."

He might as well have spoken to a corpse.

"Speak to her still, father," said Rhoda, as she drew a chair upon which
she leaned her sister's body, and ran down full of the power of hate and
loathing to confront Sedgett; but great as was that power within her, it
was overmatched by his brutal resolution to take his wife away. No
argument, no irony, no appeals, can long withstand the iteration of a
dogged phrase. "I've come for my wife," Sedgett said to all her
instances. His voice was waxing loud and insolent, and, as it sounded,
Mrs. Sumfit moaned and flapped her apron.

"Then, how could you have married him?"

They heard the farmer's roar of this unanswerable thing, aloft.

"Yes--how! how!" cried Rhoda below, utterly forgetting the part she had
played in the marriage.

"It's too late to hate a man when you've married him, my girl."

Sedgett went out to the foot of the stairs.

"Mr. Fleming--she's my wife. I'll teach her about hating and loving. I'll
behave well to her, I swear. I'm in the midst of enemies; but I say I do
love my wife, and I've come for her, and have her I will. Now, in two
minutes' time. Mr. Fleming, my cart's at the gate, and I've got business,
and she's my wife."

The farmer called for Mrs. Sumfit to come up and pack Dahlia's box, and
the forlorn woman made her way to the bedroom. All the house was silent.
Rhoda closed her sight, and she thought: "Does God totally abandon us?"

She let her father hear: "Father, you know that you are killing your
child."

"I hear ye, my lass," said he.

"She will die, father."

"I hear ye, I hear ye."

"She will die, father."

He stamped furiously, exclaiming: "Who's got the law of her better and
above a husband? Hear reason, and come and help and fetch down your
sister. She goes!"

"Father!" Rhoda cried, looking at her open hands, as if she marvelled to
see them helpless.

There was for a time that silence which reigns in a sickchamber when the
man of medicine takes the patient's wrist. And in the silence came a
blessed sound--the lifting of a latch. Rhoda saw Robert's face.

"So," said Robert, as she neared him, "you needn't tell me what's
happened. Here's the man, I see. He dodged me cleverly. The hound wants
practice; the fox is born with his cunning."

Few words were required to make him understand the position of things in
the house. Rhoda spoke out all without hesitation in Sedgett's hearing.

But the farmer respected Robert enough to come down to him and explain
his views of his duty and his daughter's duty. By the kitchen firelight
he and Robert and Sedgett read one another's countenances.

"He has a proper claim to take his wife, Robert," said the farmer. "He's
righted her before the world, and I thank him; and if he asks for her of
me he must have her, and he shall."

"All right, sir," replied Robert, "and I say too, shall, when I'm stiff
as log-wood."

"Oh! Robert, Robert!" Rhoda cried in great joy.

"Do you mean that you step 'twixt me and my own?" said Mr. Fleming.

"I won't let you nod at downright murder--that's all," said Robert.
"She--Dahlia, take the hand of that creature!"

"Why did she marry me?" thundered Sedgett.

"There's one o' the wonders!" Robert rejoined. "Except that you're an
amazingly clever hypocrite with women; and she was just half dead and had
no will of her own; and some one set you to hunt her down. I tell you,
Mr. Fleming, you might as well send your daughter to the hangman as put
her in this fellow's hands."

"She's his wife, man."

"May be," Robert assented.

"You, Robert Eccles!" said Sedgett hoarsely; "I've come for my wife--do
you hear?"

"You have, I dare say," returned Robert. "You dodged me cleverly, that
you did. I'd like to know how it was done. I see you've got a cart
outside and a boy at the horse's head. The horse steps well, does he? I'm
about three hours behind him, I reckon:--not too late, though!"

He let fall a great breath of weariness.

Rhoda went to the cupboard and drew forth a rarely touched bottle of
spirits, with which she filled a small glass, and handing the glass to
him, said, "Drink."  He smiled kindly and drank it off.

"The man's in your house, Mr. Fleming," he said.

"And he's my guest, and my daughter's husband, remember that," said the
farmer.

"And mean to wait not half a minute longer till I've taken her off--mark
that," Sedgett struck in. "Now, Mr. Fleming, you see you keep good your
word to me."

"I'll do no less," said the farmer. He went into the passage shouting for
Mrs. Sumfit to bring down the box.

"She begs," Mrs. Sumfit answered to him--"She begs, William, on'y a short
five minutes to pray by herself, which you will grant unto her, dear, you
will. Lord! what's come upon us?"

"Quick, and down with the box, then, mother," he rejoined.

The box was dragged out, and Dahlia's door was shut, that she might have
her last minutes alone.

Rhoda kissed her sister before leaving her alone: and so cold were
Dahlia's lips, so tight the clutch of her hands, that she said: "Dearest,
think of God:" and Dahlia replied: "I do."

"He will not forsake you," Rhoda said.

Dahlia nodded, with shut eyes, and Rhoda went forth.

"And now, Robert, you and I'll see who's master on these premises," said
the farmer. "Hear, all! I'm bounders under a sacred obligation to the
husband of my child, and the Lord's wrath on him who interferes and lifts
his hand against me when I perform my sacred duty as a father. Place
there! I'm going to open the door. Rhoda, see to your sister's bonnet and
things. Robert, stand out of my way. There's no refreshment of any sort
you'll accept of before starting, Mr. Sedgett?  None at all! That's no
fault of my hospitality. Stand out of my way, Robert."

He was obeyed. Robert looked at Rhoda, but had no reply for her gaze of
despair.

The farmer threw the door wide open.

There were people in the garden--strangers. His name was inquired for out
of the dusk. Then whisperings were heard passing among the ill-discerned
forms, and the farmer went out to them. Robert listened keenly, but the
touch of Rhoda's hand upon his own distracted his hearing. "Yet it must
be!" he said. "Why does she come here?"

Both he and Rhoda followed the farmer's steps, drawn forth by the
ever-credulous eagerness which arises from an interruption to excited
wretchedness. Near and nearer to the group, they heard a quaint old woman
exclaim: "Come here to you for a wife, when he has one of his own at
home; a poor thing he shipped off to America, thinking himself more
cunning than devils or angels: and she got put out at a port, owing to
stress of weather, to defeat the man's wickedness! Can't I prove it to
you, sir, he's a married man, which none of us in our village knew till
the poor tricked thing crawled back penniless to find him;--and there she
is now with such a story of his cunning to tell to anybody as will
listen; and why he kept it secret to get her pension paid him still on.
It's all such a tale for you to hear by-and-by."

Robert burst into a glorious laugh.

"Why, mother! Mrs. Boulby! haven't you got a word for me?"

"My blessedest Robert!" the good woman cried, as she rushed up to kiss
him. "Though it wasn't to see you I came exactly."  She whispered: "The
Major and the good gentleman--they're behind. I travelled down with them.
Dear,--you'd like to know:--Mrs. Lovell sent her little cunning groom
down to Warbeach just two weeks back to make inquiries about that
villain; and the groom left me her address, in case, my dear, when the
poor creature--his true wife--crawled home, and we knew of her at
Three-Tree Farm and knew her story. I wrote word at once, I did, to Mrs.
Lovell, and the sweet good lady sent down her groom to fetch me to you to
make things clear here. You shall understand them soon. It's Providence
at work. I do believe that now there's a chance o' punishing the wicked
ones."

The figure of Rhoda with two lights in her hand was seen in the porch,
and by the shadowy rays she beheld old Anthony leaning against the house,
and Major Waring with a gentleman beside him close upon the gate.

At the same time a sound of wheels was heard.

Robert rushed back into the great parlour-kitchen, and finding it empty,
stamped with vexation. His prey had escaped.

But there was no relapse to give spare thoughts to that pollution of the
house. It had passed. Major Waring was talking earnestly to Mr. Fleming,
who held his head low, stupefied, and aware only of the fact that it was
a gentleman imparting to him strange matters. By degrees all were beneath
the farmer's roof--all, save one, who stood with bowed head by the
threshold.

There is a sort of hero, and a sort of villain, to this story: they are
but instruments. Hero and villain are combined in the person of Edward,
who was now here to abase himself before the old man and the family he
had injured, and to kneel penitently at the feet of the woman who had
just reason to spurn him. He had sold her as a slave is sold; he had seen
her plunged into the blackest pit; yet was she miraculously kept pure for
him, and if she could give him her pardon, might still be his. The grief
for which he could ask no compassion had at least purified him to meet
her embrace. The great agony he had passed through of late had killed his
meaner pride. He stood there ready to come forward and ask forgiveness
from unfriendly faces, and beg that he might be in Dahlia's eyes
once--that he might see her once.

He had grown to love her with the fullest force of a selfish, though not
a common, nature. Or rather he had always loved her, and much of the
selfishness had fallen away from his love. It was not the highest form of
love, but the love was his highest development. He had heard that Dahlia,
lost to him, was free. Something like the mortal yearning to look upon
the dead risen to life, made it impossible for him to remain absent and
in doubt. He was ready to submit to every humiliation that he might see
the rescued features; he was willing to pay all his penalties. Believing,
too, that he was forgiven, he knew that Dahlia's heart would throb for
him to be near her, and he had come.

The miraculous agencies which had brought him and Major Waring and Mrs.
Boulby to the farm, that exalted woman was relating to Mrs. Sumfit in
another part of the house.

The farmer, and Percy, and Robert were in the family sitting-room, when,
after an interval, William Fleming said aloud, "Come in, sir," and Edward
stepped in among them.

Rhoda was above, seeking admittance to her sisters door, and she heard
her father utter that welcome. It froze her limbs, for still she hated
the evil-doer. Her hatred of him was a passion. She crouched over the
stairs, listening to a low and long-toned voice monotonously telling what
seemed to be one sole thing over and over, without variation, in the room
where the men were. Words were indistinguishable. Thrice, after calling
to Dahlia and getting no response, she listened again, and awe took her
soul at last, for, abhorred as he was by her, his power was felt: she
comprehended something of that earnestness which made the offender speak
of his wrongful deeds, and his shame, and his remorse, before his
fellow-men, straight out and calmly, like one who has been plunged up to
the middle in the fires of the abyss, and is thereafter insensible to
meaner pains. The voice ended. She was then aware that it had put a charm
upon her ears. The other voices following it sounded dull.

"Has he--can he have confessed in words all his wicked baseness?" she
thought, and in her soul the magnitude of his crime threw a gleam of
splendour on his courage, even at the bare thought that he might have
done this. Feeling that Dahlia was saved, and thenceforth at liberty to
despise him and torture him, Rhoda the more readily acknowledged that it
might be a true love for her sister animating him. From the height of a
possible vengeance it was perceptible.

She turned to her sister's door and knocked at it, calling to her, "Safe,
safe!" but there came no answer; and she was half glad, for she had a
fear that in the quick revulsion of her sister's feelings, mere earthly
love would act like heavenly charity, and Edward would find himself
forgiven only too instantly and heartily.

In the small musk-scented guest's parlour, Mrs. Boulby was giving Mrs.
Sumfit and poor old sleepy Anthony the account of the miraculous
discovery of Sedgett's wickedness, which had vindicated all one hoped for
from Above; as also the narration of the stabbing of her boy, and the
heroism and great-heartedness of Robert. Rhoda listened to her for a
space, and went to her sister's door again; but when she stood outside
the kitchen she found all voices silent within.

It was, in truth, not only very difficult for William Fleming to change
his view of the complexion of circumstances as rapidly as circumstances
themselves changed, but it was very bitter for him to look upon Edward,
and to see him in the place of Sedgett.

He had been struck dumb by the sudden revolution of affairs in his house;
and he had been deferentially convinced by Major Waring's tone that he
ought rightly to give his hearing to an unknown young gentleman against
whom anger was due. He had listened to Edward without one particle of
comprehension, except of the fact that his behaviour was extraordinary.
He understood that every admission made by Edward with such grave and
strange directness, would justly have condemned him to punishment which
the culprit's odd, and upright, and even-toned self-denunciation rendered
it impossible to think of inflicting. He knew likewise that a whole
history was being narrated to him, and that, although the other two
listeners manifestly did not approve it, they expected him to show some
tolerance to the speaker.

He said once, "Robert, do me the favour to look about outside for t'
other."  Robert answered him, that the man was far away by this time.

The farmer suggested that he might be waiting to say his word presently.

"Don't you know you've been dealing with a villain, sir?" cried Robert.
"Throw ever so little light upon one of that breed, and they skulk in a
hurry. Mr. Fleming, for the sake of your honour, don't mention him again.
What you're asked to do now, is to bury the thoughts of him."

"He righted my daughter when there was shame on her," the farmer replied.

That was the idea printed simply on his understanding.

For Edward to hear it was worse than a scourging with rods. He bore it,
telling the last vitality of his pride to sleep, and comforting himself
with the drowsy sensuous expectation that he was soon to press the hand
of his lost one, his beloved, who was in the house, breathing the same
air with him; was perhaps in the room above, perhaps sitting impatiently
with clasped fingers, waiting for the signal to unlock them and fling
them open. He could imagine the damp touch of very expectant fingers; the
dying look of life-drinking eyes; and, oh! the helplessness of her limbs
as she sat buoying a heart drowned in bliss.

It was unknown to him that the peril of her uttermost misery had been so
imminent, and the picture conjured of her in his mind was that of a
gentle but troubled face--a soul afflicted, yet hoping because it had
been told to hope, and half conscious that a rescue, almost divine in its
suddenness and unexpectedness, and its perfect clearing away of all
shadows, approached.

Manifestly, by the pallid cast of his visage, he had tasted shrewd and
wasting grief of late. Robert's heart melted as he beheld the change in
Edward.

"I believe, Mr. Blancove, I'm a little to blame," he said. "Perhaps when
I behaved so badly down at Fairly, you may have thought she sent me, and
it set your heart against her for a time. I can just understand how it
might."

Edward thought for a moment, and conscientiously accepted the suggestion;
for, standing under that roof, with her whom he loved near him, it was
absolutely out of his power for him to comprehend that his wish to break
from Dahlia, and the measures he had taken or consented to, had sprung
from his own unassisted temporary baseness.

Then Robert spoke to the farmer.

Rhoda could hear Robert's words. Her fear was that Dahlia might hear them
too, his pleading for Edward was so hearty. "Yet why should I always
think differently from Robert?" she asked herself, and with that excuse
for changeing, partially thawed.

She was very anxious for her father's reply; and it was late in coming.
She felt that he was unconvinced. But suddenly the door opened, and the
farmer called into the darkness,--

"Dahlia down here!"

Previously emotionless, an emotion was started in Rhoda's bosom by the
command, and it was gladness. She ran up and knocked, and found herself
crying out: "He is here--Edward."

But there came no answer.

"Edward is here. Come, come and see him."

Still not one faint reply.

"Dahlia! Dahlia!"

The call of Dahlia's name seemed to travel endlessly on. Rhoda knelt, and
putting her mouth to the door, said,--

"My darling, I know you will reply to me. I know you do not doubt me now.
Listen. You are to come down to happiness."

The silence grew heavier; and now a doubt came shrieking through her
soul.

"Father!" rang her outcry.

The father came; and then the lover came, and neither to father nor to
lover was there any word from Dahlia's voice.

She was found by the side of the bed, inanimate, and pale as a sister of
death.

But you who may have cared for her through her many tribulations, have no
fear for this gentle heart. It was near the worst; yet not the worst.




CHAPTER XLVII

Up to the black gates, but not beyond them. The dawn following such a
night will seem more like a daughter of the night than promise of day. It
is day that follows, notwithstanding: The sad fair girl survived, and her
flickering life was the sole light of the household; at times burying its
members in dusk, to shine on them again more like a prolonged farewell
than a gladsome restoration.

She was saved by what we call chance; for it had not been in her design
to save herself. The hand was firm to help her to the deadly draught. As
far as could be conjectured, she had drunk it between hurried readings
from her mother's Bible; the one true companion to which she had often
clung, always half-availingly. The Bible was found by her side, as if it
had fallen from the chair before which she knelt to read her last
quickening verses, and had fallen with her. One arm was about it; one
grasped the broken phial with its hideous label.

It was uncomplainingly registered among the few facts very distinctly
legible in Master Gammon's memory, that for three entire weeks he had no
dumplings for dinner at the farm; and although, upon a computation,
articles of that description, amounting probably to sixty-three (if there
is any need for our being precise), were due to him, and would
necessarily be for evermore due to him, seeing that it is beyond all
human and even spiritual agency to make good unto man the dinner he has
lost, Master Gammon uttered no word to show that he was sensible of a
slight, which was the only indication given by him of his knowledge of a
calamity having changed the order of things at the farm. On the day when
dumplings reappeared, he remarked, with a glance at the ceiling: "Goin'
on better--eh, marm?"

"Oh! Mas' Gammon," Mrs. Sumfit burst out; "if I was only certain you said
your prayers faithful every night!" The observation was apparently taken
by Master Gammon to express one of the mere emotions within her bosom,
for he did not reply to it.

She watched him feeding in his steady way, with the patient bent back,
and slowly chopping old grey jaws, and struck by a pathos in the sight,
exclaimed,--

"We've all been searched so, Mas' Gammon! I feel I know everything that's
in me. I'd say, I couldn't ha' given you dumplin's and tears; but think
of our wickedness, when I confess to you I did feel spiteful at you to
think that you were wiltin' to eat the dumplin's while all of us mourned
and rocked as in a quake, expecting the worst to befall; and that made me
refuse them to you. It was cruel of me, and well may you shake your head.
If I was only sure you said your prayers!"

The meaning in her aroused heart was, that if she could be sure Master
Gammon said his prayers, so as to be searched all through by them, as she
was herself, and to feel thereby, as she did, that he knew everything
that was within him, she would then, in admiration of his profound
equanimity, acknowledge him to be a superior Christian.

Naturally enough, Master Gammon allowed the interjection to pass,
regarding it as simply a vagrant action of the engine of speech; while
Mrs. Sumfit, with an interjector's consciousness of prodigious things
implied which were not in any degree comprehended, left his presence in
kindness, and with a shade less of the sense that he was a superior
Christian.

Nevertheless, the sight of Master Gammon was like a comforting medicine
to all who were in the house. He was Mrs. Sumfit's clock; he was balm and
blessedness in Rhoda's eyes; Anthony was jealous of him; the farmer held
to him as to a stake in the ground: even Robert, who rallied and
tormented, and was vexed by him, admitted that he stood some way between
an example and a warning, and was a study. The grand primaeval quality of
unchangeableness, as exhibited by this old man, affected them singularly
in their recovery from the storm and the wreck of the hours gone by; so
much so that they could not divest themselves of the idea that it was a
manifestation of power in Master Gammon to show forth undisturbed while
they were feeling their life shaken in them to the depths. I have never
had the opportunity of examining the idol-worshipping mind of a savage;
but it seems possible that the immutability of aspect of his little
wooden God may sometimes touch him with a similar astounded awe;--even
when, and indeed especially after, he has thrashed it. Had the old man
betrayed his mortality in a sign of curiosity to know why the hubbub of
trouble had arisen, and who was to blame, and what was the story, the
effect on them would have been diminished. He really seemed granite among
the turbulent waves. "Give me Gammon's life!" was Farmer Fleming's
prayerful interjection; seeing him come and go, sit at his meals, and
sleep and wake in season, all through those tragic hours of suspense,
without a question to anybody. Once or twice, when his eye fell upon the
doctor, Master Gammon appeared to meditate. He observed that the doctor
had never been called in to one of his family, and it was evident that he
did not understand the complication of things which rendered the doctor's
visit necessary.

"You'll never live so long as that old man," the farmer said to Robert.

"No; but when he goes, all of him's gone," Robert answered.

"But Gammon's got the wisdom to keep himself safe, Robert; there's no one
to blame for his wrinkles."

"Gammon's a sheepskin old Time writes his nothings on," said Robert.
"He's safe--safe enough. An old hulk doesn't very easily manage to
founder in the mud, and Gammon's been lying on the mud all his life."

"Let that be how 't will," returned the farmer; "I've had days o' mortal
envy of that old man."

"Well, it's whether you prefer being the fiddle or the fiddle-case,"
quoth Robert.

Of Anthony the farmer no longer had any envy. In him, though he was as
passive as Master Gammon, the farmer beheld merely a stupefied old man,
and not a steady machine. He knew that some queer misfortune had befallen
Anthony.

"He'll find I'm brotherly," said Mr. Fleming; but Anthony had darkened
his golden horizon for him, and was no longer an attractive object to his
vision.

Upon an Autumn afternoon; Dahlia, looking like a pale Spring flower, came
down among them. She told her sister that it was her wish to see Edward.
Rhoda had lost all power of will, even if she had desired to keep them
asunder. She mentioned Dahlia's wish to her father, who at once went for
his hat, and said: "Dress yourself neat, my lass." She knew what was
meant by that remark. Messages daily had been coming down from the Hall,
but the rule of a discerning lady was then established there, and Rhoda
had been spared a visit from either Edward or Algernon, though she knew
them to be at hand. During Dahlia's convalescence, the farmer had not
spoken to Rhoda of her engagement to the young squire. The great misery
intervening, seemed in her mind to have cancelled all earthly
engagements; and when he said that she must use care in her attire he
suddenly revived a dread within her bosom, as if he had plucked her to
the verge of a chasm.

But Mrs. Lovell's delicacy was still manifest: Edward came alone, and he
and Dahlia were left apart.

There was no need to ask for pardon from those gentle eyes. They joined
hands. She was wasted and very weak, but she did not tremble. Passion was
extinguished. He refrained from speaking of their union, feeling sure
that they were united. It required that he should see her to know fully
the sinner he had been. Wasted though she was, he was ready to make her
his own, if only for the sake of making amends to this dear fair soul,
whose picture of Saint was impressed on him, first as a response to the
world wondering at his sacrifice of himself, and next, by degrees, as an
absolute visible fleshly fact. She had come out of her martyrdom stamped
with the heavenly sign-mark.

"Those are the old trees I used to speak of," she said, pointing to the
two pines in the miller's grounds. "They always look like Adam and Eve
turning away."

"They do not make you unhappy to see them, Dahlia?"

"I hope to see them till I am gone."

Edward pressed her fingers. He thought that warmer hopes would soon flow
into her.

"The neighbours are kind?" he asked.

"Very kind. They, inquire after me daily."

His cheeks reddened; he had spoken at random, and he wondered that Dahlia
should feel it pleasurable to be inquired after, she who was so
sensitive.

"The clergyman sits with me every day, and knows my heart," she added.

"The clergyman is a comfort to women," said Edward.

Dahlia looked at him gently. The round of her thin eyelids dwelt on him.
She wished. She dared not speak her wish to one whose remembered mastery
in words forbade her poor speechlessness. But God would hear her prayers
for him.

Edward begged that he might come to her often, and she said,--

"Come."

He misinterpreted the readiness of the invitation.

When he had left her, he reflected on the absence of all endearing
epithets in her speech, and missed them. Having himself suffered, he
required them. For what had she wrestled so sharply with death, if not to
fall upon his bosom and be his in a great outpouring of gladness? In fact
he craved the immediate reward for his public acknowledgement of his
misdeeds. He walked in this neighbourhood known by what he had done, and
his desire was to take his wife away, never more to be seen there.
Following so deep a darkness, he wanted at least a cheerful dawn: not one
of a penitential grey--not a hooded dawn, as if the paths of life were to
be under cloistral arches. And he wanted a rose of womanhood in his hand
like that he had parted with, and to recover which he had endured every
earthly mortification, even to absolute abasement. The frail bent lily
seemed a stranger to him.

Can a man go farther than his nature? Never, when he takes passion on
board. By other means his nature may be enlarged and nerved, but passion
will find his weakness, and, while urging him on, will constantly betray
him at that point. Edward had three interviews with Dahlia; he wrote to
her as many times. There was but one answer for him; and when he ceased
to charge her with unforgivingness, he came to the strange conclusion
that beyond our calling of a woman a Saint for rhetorical purposes, and
esteeming her as one for pictorial, it is indeed possible, as he had
slightly discerned in this woman's presence, both to think her saintly
and to have the sentiments inspired by the overearthly in her person. Her
voice, her simple words of writing, her gentle resolve, all issuing of a
capacity to suffer evil, and pardon it, conveyed that character to a mind
not soft for receiving such impressions.




CHAPTER XLVIII

Major Waring came to Wrexby Hall at the close of the October month. He
came to plead his own cause with Mrs. Lovell; but she stopped him by
telling him that his friend Robert was in some danger of losing his love.

"She is a woman, Percy; I anticipate your observation. But, more than
that, she believes she is obliged to give her hand to my cousin, the
squire. It's an intricate story relating to money. She does not care for
Algy a bit, which is not a matter that greatly influences him. He has
served her in some mysterious way; by relieving an old uncle of hers.
Algy has got him the office of village postman for this district, I
believe; if it's that; but I think it should be more, to justify her. At
all events, she seems to consider that her hand is pledged. You know the
kind of girl your friend fancies. Besides, her father insists she is to
marry 'the squire,' which is certainly the most natural thing of all. So,
don't you think, dear Percy, you had better take your friend on the
Continent for some weeks? I never, I confess, exactly understood the
intimacy existing between you, but it must be sincere."

"Are you?" said Percy.

"Yes, perfectly; but always in a roundabout way. Why do you ask me in
this instance?"

"Because you could stop this silly business in a day."

"I know I could."

"Then, why do you not?"

"Because of a wish to be sincere. Percy, I have been that throughout, if
you could read me. I tried to deliver my cousin Edward from what I
thought was a wretched entanglement. His selfish falseness offended me,
and I let him know that I despised him. When I found that he was a man
who had courage, and some heart, he gained my friendship once more, and I
served him as far as I could--happily, as it chanced. I tell you all
this, because I don't care to forfeit your esteem, and heaven knows, I
may want it in the days to come. I believe I am the best friend in the
world--and bad anything else. No one perfectly pleases me, not even you:
you are too studious of character, and, like myself, exacting of
perfection in one or two points. But now hear what I have done, and
approve it if you think fit. I have flirted--abominable word!--I am
compelled to use the language of the Misses--yes, I have flirted with my
cousin Algy. I do it too well, I know--by nature! and I hate it. He has
this morning sent a letter down to the farm saying, that, as he believes
he has failed in securing Rhoda's affections, he renounces all
pretensions, etc., subject to her wishes, etc. The courting, I imagine,
can scarcely have been pleasant to him. My delightful manner with him
during the last fortnight has been infinitely pleasanter. So, your friend
Robert may be made happy by-and-by; that is to say, if his Rhoda is not
too like her sex."

"You're an enchantress," exclaimed Percy.

"Stop," said she, and drifted into seriousness. "Before you praise me you
must know more. Percy, that duel in India--"

He put out his hand to her.

"Yes, I forgive," she resumed. "You were cruel then. Remember that, and
try to be just now. The poor boy would go to his doom. I could have
arrested it. I partly caused it. I thought the honour of the army at
stake. I was to blame on that day, and I am to blame again, but I feel
that I am almost excuseable, if you are not too harsh a judge. No, I am
not; I am execrable; but forgive me."

Percy's face lighted up in horrified amazement as Margaret Lovell
unfastened the brooch at her neck and took out the dull-red handkerchief.

"It was the bond between us," she pursued, "that I was to return this to
you when I no longer remained my own mistress. Count me a miserably
heartless woman. I do my best. You brought this handkerchief to me dipped
in the blood of the poor boy who was slain. I have worn it. It was a
safeguard. Did you mean it to serve as such? Oh, Percy! I felt
continually that blood was on my bosom. I felt it fighting with me. It
has saved me from much. And now I return it to you."

He could barely articulate "Why?"

"Dear friend, by the reading of the bond you should know. I asked you
when I was leaving India, how long I was to keep it by me. You said,
'Till you marry.' Do not be vehement, Percy. This is a thing that could
not have been averted."

"Is it possible," Percy cried, "that you carried the play out so far as
to promise him to marry him?"

"Your forehead is thunder, Percy. I know that look."

"Margaret, I think I could bear to see our army suffer another defeat
rather than you should be contemptible."

"Your chastisement is not given in half measures, Percy."

"Speak on," said he; "there is more to come. You are engaged to marry
him?"

"I engaged that I would take the name of Blancove."

"If he would cease to persecute Rhoda Fleming!"

"The stipulation was exactly in those words."

"You mean to carry it out?"

"To be sincere? I do, Percy!

"You mean to marry Algernon Blancove?"

"I should be contemptible indeed if I did, Percy!

"You do not?"

"I do not."

"And you are sincere? By all the powers of earth and heaven, there's no
madness like dealing with an animated enigma! What is it you do mean?"

"As I said--to be sincere. But I was also bound to be of service to your
friend. It is easy to be sincere and passive."

Percy struck his brows. "Can you mean that Edward Blancove is the man?"

"Oh! no. Edward will never marry any one. I do him the justice to say
that his vice is not that of unfaithfulness. He had but one love, and her
heart is quite dead. There is no marriage for him--she refuses. You may
not understand the why of that, but women will. She would marry him if
she could bring herself to it;--the truth is, he killed her pride. Her
taste for life has gone. She is bent on her sister's marrying your
friend. She has no other thought of marriage, and never will have. I know
the state. It is not much unlike mine."

Waring fixed her eyes. "There is a man?"

"Yes," she answered bluntly.

"It is somebody, then, whose banker's account is, I hope, satisfactory."

"Yes, Percy;" she looked eagerly forward, as thanking him for releasing
her from a difficulty. "You still can use the whip, but I do not feel the
sting. I marry a banker's account. Do you bear in mind the day I sent
after you in the park? I had just heard that I was ruined. You know my
mania for betting. I heard it, and knew when I let my heart warm to you
that I could never marry you. That is one reason, perhaps, why I have
been an enigma. I am sincere in telling Algy I shall take the name of
Blancove. I marry the banker. Now take this old gift of yours."

Percy grasped the handkerchief, and quitted her presence forthwith,
feeling that he had swallowed a dose of the sex to serve him for a
lifetime. Yet he lived to reflect on her having decided practically,
perhaps wisely for all parties. Her debts expunged, she became an old
gentleman's demure young wife, a sweet hostess, and, as ever, a true
friend: something of a miracle to one who had inclined to make a heroine
of her while imagining himself to accurately estimate her deficiencies.
Honourably by this marriage the lady paid for such wild oats as she had
sown in youth.

There were joy-bells for Robert and Rhoda, but none for Dahlia and
Edward.

Dahlia lived seven years her sister's housemate, nurse of the growing
swarm. She had gone through fire, as few women have done in like manner,
to leave their hearts among the ashes; but with that human heart she left
regrets behind her. The soul of this young creature filled its place. It
shone in her eyes and in her work, a lamp to her little neighbourhood;
and not less a lamp of cheerful beams for one day being as another to
her. In truth, she sat above the clouds. When she died she relinquished
nothing. Others knew the loss. Between her and Robert there was deeper
community on one subject than she let Rhoda share. Almost her last words
to him, spoken calmly, but with the quaver of breath resembling sobs,
were: "Help poor girls."




ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS FOR THE ENTIRE RHODA FLEMING:

A fleet of South-westerly rainclouds had been met in mid-sky
All women are the same--Know one, know all
Ashamed of letting his ears be filled with secret talk
Borrower to be dancing on Fortune's tight-rope above the old abyss
But you must be beautiful to please some men
But the key to young men is the ambition, or, in the place of it.....
But great, powerful London--the new universe to her spirit
Can a man go farther than his nature?
Childish faith in the beneficence of the unseen Powers who feed us
Cold curiosity
Dahlia, the perplexity to her sister's heart, lay stretched....
Dead Britons are all Britons, but live Britons are not quite brothers
Developing stiff, solid, unobtrusive men, and very personable women
Exceeding variety and quantity of things money can buy
Found by the side of the bed, inanimate, and pale as a sister of death
Full-o'-Beer's a hasty chap
Gravely reproaching the tobacconist for the growing costliness of cigars
He had no recollection of having ever dined without drinking wine
He tried to gather his ideas, but the effort was like that of a light dreamer
He lies as naturally as an infant sucks
He will be a part of every history (the fool)
I haven't got the pluck of a flea
I never pay compliments to transparent merit
I would cut my tongue out, if it did you a service
Inferences are like shadows on the wall
It was her prayer to heaven that she might save a doctor's bill
Land and beasts! They sound like blessed things
Love dies like natural decay
Marriage is an awful thing, where there's no love
Mrs. Fleming, of Queen Anne's Farm, was the wife of a yeoman
My first girl--she's brought disgrace on this house
My plain story is of two Kentish damsels
One learns to have compassion for fools, by studying them
Pleasant companion, who did not play the woman obtrusively among men
Principle of examining your hypothesis before you proceed to decide by it
Rhoda will love you. She is firm when she loves
Silence is commonly the slow poison used by those who mean to murder love
Sinners are not to repent only in words
So long as we do not know that we are performing any remarkable feat
Sort of religion with her to believe no wrong of you
The unhappy, who do not wish to live, and cannot die
The kindest of men can be cruel
The idea of love upon the lips of ordinary men, provoked Dahlia's irony
The backstairs of history (Memoirs)
The woman seeking for an anomaly wants a master
Then, if you will not tell me
There were joy-bells for Robert and Rhoda, but none for Dahlia
To be a really popular hero anywhere in Britain (must be a drinker)
To be her master, however, one must not begin by writhing as her slave
Wait till the day's ended before you curse your luck
William John Fleming was simply a poor farmer
With this money, said the demon, you might speculate
Work is medicine
You who may have cared for her through her many tribulations, have no fear
You choose to give yourself to an obscure dog
You're a rank, right-down widow, and no mistake






EVAN HARRINGTON

By George Meredith




CONTENTS:

BOOK 1.
I.        ABOVE BUTTONS
II.       THE HERITAGE OR THE SOY
III.      THE DAUGHTERS OR THE SHEARS
IV.       ON BOARD THE JOCASTA
V.        THE FAMILY AND THE FUNERAL
VI.       MY GENTLEMAN ON THE ROAD
VII.      MOTHER AND SON

BOOK 2.
VIII.     INTRODUCES AN ECCENTRIC
IX.       THE COUNTESS IN LOW SOCIETY
X.        MY GENTLEMAN ON THE ROAD AGAIN
XI.       DOINGS AT AN INN
XII.      IN WHICH ALE IS SHOWN TO HAVE ONE QUALITY OF WINE
XIII.     THE MATCH OF FALLOWFIELD AGAINST BECKLEY

BOOK 3.
XIV.      THE COUNTESS DESCRIBES THE FIELD OF ACTION
XV.       A CAPTURE
XVI.      LEADS TO A SMALL SKIRMISH BETWEEN ROSE AND EVAN
XVII.     IN WHICH EVAN WRITES HIMSELF TAILOR
XVIII.    IN WHICH EVAN CALLS HIMSELF GENTLEMAN

BOOK 4.
XIX.      SECOND DESPATCH OF THE COUNTESS
XX.       BREAK-NECK LEAP
XXI.      TRIBULATIONS AND TACTICS OF THE COUNTESS
XXII.     IN WHICH THE DAUGHTERS OF THE GREAT MEL HAVE TO
          DIGEST HIM AT DINNER
XXIII.    TREATS OF A HANDKERCHIEF
XXIV.     THE COUNTESS MAKES HERSELF FELT
XXV.      IN WHICH THE STREAM FLOWS MUDDY AND CLEAR

BOOK 5.
XXVI.     MRS. MEL MAKES A BED FOR HERSELF AND FAMILY
XXVII.    EXHIBITS ROSE'S GENERALSHIP; EVAN'S PERFORMANCE ON THE SECOND
          FIDDLE; AND THE WRETCHEDNESS OF THE COUNTESS
XXVIII.   TOM COGGLESBY'S PROPOSITION
XXIX.     PRELUDE TO AN ENGAGEMENT
XXX.      THE BATTLE OF THE BULL-DOGS.  PART I.
XXXI.     THE BATTLE OF THE BULL-DOGS.  PART II.

BOOK 6.
XXXII.    IN WHICH EVAN'S LIGHT BEGINS TO TWINKLE AGAIN
XXXIII.   THE HERO TAKES HIS RANK IN THE ORCHESTRA
XXXIV.    A PAGAN SACRIFICE
XXXV.     ROSE WOUNDED
XXXVI.    BEFORE BREAKFAST
XXXVII.   THE RETREAT FROM BECKLEY
XXXVIII.  IN WHICH WE HAVE TO SEE IN THE DARK

BOOK 7.
XXXIX.    IN THE DOMAIN OF TAILORDOM
XL.       IN WHICH THE COUNTESS STILL SCENTS GAME
XLI.      REVEALS AN ABOMINABLE PLOT OF THE BROTHERS COGGLESBY
XLII.     JULIANA
XLIII.    ROSE
XLIV.     CONTAINS A WARNING TO ALL CONSPIRATORS
XLV.      IN WHICH THE SHOP BECOMES THE CENTRE OF ATTRACTION
XLVI.     A LOVER'S PARTING
XLVII.    A YEAR LATER THE COUNTESS DE SALDAR DE SANCORVO TO HER
          SISTER CAROLINE




CHAPTER I

ABOVE BUTTONS

Long after the hours when tradesmen are in the habit of commencing
business, the shutters of a certain shop in the town of
Lymport-on-the-Sea remained significantly closed, and it became known
that death had taken Mr. Melchisedec Harrington, and struck one off the
list of living tailors. The demise of a respectable member of this class
does not ordinarily create a profound sensation. He dies, and his equals
debate who is to be his successor: while the rest of them who have come
in contact with him, very probably hear nothing of his great launch and
final adieu till the winding up of cash-accounts; on which occasions we
may augur that he is not often blessed by one or other of the two great
parties who subdivide this universe. In the case of Mr. Melchisedec it
was otherwise. This had been a grand man, despite his calling, and in the
teeth of opprobrious epithets against his craft. To be both generally
blamed, and generally liked, evinces a peculiar construction of mortal.
Mr. Melchisedec, whom people in private called the great Mel, had been at
once the sad dog of Lymport, and the pride of the town. He was a tailor,
and he kept horses; he was a tailor, and he had gallant adventures; he
was a tailor, and he shook hands with his customers. Finally, he was a
tradesman, and he never was known to have sent in a bill. Such a
personage comes but once in a generation, and, when he goes, men miss the
man as well as their money.

That he was dead, there could be no doubt. Kilne, the publican opposite,
had seen Sally, one of the domestic servants, come out of the house in
the early morning and rush up the street to the doctor's, tossing her
hands; and she, not disinclined to dilute her grief, had, on her return,
related that her master was then at his last gasp, and had refused, in so
many words, to swallow the doctor.

'"I won't swallow the doctor!" he says, "I won't swallow the doctor!"'
Sally moaned. '"I never touched him," he says, "and I never will."'

Kilne angrily declared, that in his opinion, a man who rejected medicine
in extremity, ought to have it forced down his throat: and considering
that the invalid was pretty deeply in Kilne's debt, it naturally assumed
the form of a dishonest act on his part; but Sally scornfully dared any
one to lay hand on her master, even for his own good. 'For,' said she,
'he's got his eyes awake, though he do lie so helpless. He marks ye!'

'Ah! ah!' Kilne sniffed the air. Sally then rushed back to her duties.

'Now, there 's a man!' Kilne stuck his hands in his pockets and began his
meditation: which, however, was cut short by the approach of his
neighbour Barnes, the butcher, to whom he confided what he had heard, and
who ejaculated professionally, 'Obstinate as a pig!' As they stood
together they beheld Sally, a figure of telegraph, at one of the windows,
implying that all was just over.

'Amen!' said Barnes, as to a matter-of-fact affair.

Some minutes after, the two were joined by Grossby, the confectioner, who
listened to the news, and observed:

'Just like him! I'd have sworn he'd never take doctor's stuff'; and,
nodding at Kilne, 'liked his medicine best, eh?'

'Had a-hem!--good lot of it,' muttered Kilne, with a suddenly serious
brow.

'How does he stand on your books?' asked Barnes.

Kilne shouldered round, crying: 'Who the deuce is to know?'

'I don't,' Grossby sighed. 'In he comes with his "Good morning, Grossby,
fine day for the hunt, Grossby," and a ten-pound note. "Have the kindness
to put that down in my favour, Grossby." And just as I am going to say,
"Look here,--this won't do," he has me by the collar, and there's one of
the regiments going to give a supper party, which he's to order; or the
Admiral's wife wants the receipt for that pie; or in comes my wife, and
there's no talking of business then, though she may have been bothering
about his account all the night beforehand. Something or other! and so we
run on.'

'What I want to know,' said Barnes, the butcher, 'is where he got his
tenners from?'

Kilne shook a sagacious head: 'No knowing!'

'I suppose we shall get something out of the fire?' Barnes suggested.

'That depends!' answered the emphatic Kilne.

'But, you know, if the widow carries on the business,' said Grossby,
'there's no reason why we shouldn't get it all, eh?'

'There ain't two that can make clothes for nothing, and make a profit out
of it,' said Kilne.

'That young chap in Portugal,' added Barnes, 'he won't take to tailoring
when he comes home. D' ye think he will?'

Kilne muttered: 'Can't say!' and Grossby, a kindly creature in his way,
albeit a creditor, reverting to the first subject of their discourse,
ejaculated, 'But what a one he was!--eh?'

'Fine!--to look on,' Kilne assented.

'Well, he was like a Marquis,' said Barnes.

Here the three regarded each other, and laughed, though not loudly. They
instantly checked that unseemliness, and Kilne, as one who rises from the
depths of a calculation with the sum in his head, spoke quite in a
different voice:

'Well, what do you say, gentlemen? shall we adjourn? No use standing
here.'

By the invitation to adjourn, it was well understood by the committee
Kilne addressed, that they were invited to pass his threshold, and
partake of a morning draught. Barnes, the butcher, had no objection
whatever, and if Grossby, a man of milder make, entertained any, the
occasion and common interests to be discussed, advised him to waive them.
In single file these mourners entered the publican's house, where Kilne,
after summoning them from behind the bar, on the important question, what
it should be? and receiving, first, perfect acquiescence in his views as
to what it should be, and then feeble suggestions of the drink best
befitting that early hour and the speaker's particular constitution,
poured out a toothful to each, and one to himself.

'Here's to him, poor fellow!' said Kilne; and was deliberately echoed
twice.

'Now, it wasn't that,' Kilne pursued, pointing to the bottle in the midst
of a smacking of lips, 'that wasn't what got him into difficulties. It
was expensive luckshries. It was being above his condition. Horses!
What's a tradesman got to do with horses? Unless he's retired! Then he's
a gentleman, and can do as he likes. It's no use trying to be a gentleman
if you can't pay for it. It always ends bad. Why, there was he,
consorting with gentlefolks--gay as a lark! Who has to pay for it?'

Kilne's fellow-victims maintained a rather doleful tributary silence.

'I'm not saying anything against him now,' the publican further observed.
'It 's too late. And there! I'm sorry he's gone, for one. He was as kind
a hearted a man as ever breathed. And there! perhaps it was just as much
my fault; I couldn't say "No" to him,--dash me, if I could!'

Lymport was a prosperous town, and in prosperity the much-despised
British tradesman is not a harsh, he is really a well-disposed, easy
soul, and requires but management, manner, occasional instalments--just
to freshen the account--and a surety that he who debits is on the spot,
to be a right royal king of credit. Only the account must never drivel.
'Stare aut crescere' appears to be his feeling on that point, and the
departed Mr. Melchisedec undoubtedly understood him there; for the
running on of the account looked deplorable and extraordinary now that
Mr. Melchisedec was no longer in a position to run on with it, and it was
precisely his doing so which had prevented it from being brought to a
summary close long before. Both Barnes, the butcher; and Grossby, the
confectioner, confessed that they, too, found it hard ever to say 'No' to
him, and, speaking broadly, never could.

'Except once,'said Barnes, 'when he wanted me to let him have a ox to
roast whole out on the common, for the Battle of Waterloo. I stood out
against him on that. "No, no," says I, "I'll joint him for ye, Mr.
Harrington. You shall have him in joints, and eat him at home";-ha! ha!'

'Just like him!' said Grossby, with true enjoyment of the princely
disposition that had dictated the patriotic order.

'Oh!--there!' Kilne emphasized, pushing out his arm across the bar, as
much as to say, that in anything of such a kind, the great Mel never had
a rival.

'That "Marquis" affair changed him a bit,' said Barnes.

'Perhaps it did, for a time,' said Kilne. 'What's in the grain, you know.
He couldn't change. He would be a gentleman, and nothing 'd stop him.'

'And I shouldn't wonder but what that young chap out in Portugal 'll want
to be one, too; though he didn't bid fair to be so fine a man as his
father.'

'More of a scholar,' remarked Kilne. 'That I call his worst
fault--shilly-shallying about that young chap. I mean his.' Kilne
stretched a finger toward the dead man's house. 'First, the young chap's
to be sent into the Navy; then it's the Army; then he's to be a judge,
and sit on criminals; then he goes out to his sister in Portugal; and now
there's nothing but a tailor open to him, as I see, if we're to get our
money.'

'Ah! and he hasn't got too much spirit to work to pay his father's
debts,' added Barnes. 'There's a business there to make any man's
fortune-properly directed, I say. But, I suppose, like father like son,
he'll becoming the Marquis, too. He went to a gentleman's school, and
he's had foreign training. I don't know what to think about it. His
sisters over there--they were fine women.'

'Oh! a fine family, every one of 'em! and married well!' exclaimed the
publican.

'I never had the exact rights of that "Marquis" affair,' said Grossby;
and, remembering that he had previously laughed knowingly when it was
alluded to, pursued: 'Of course I heard of it at the time, but how did he
behave when he was blown upon?'

Barnes undertook to explain; but Kilne, who relished the narrative quite
as well, and was readier, said: 'Look here! I 'll tell you. I had it from
his own mouth one night when he wasn't--not quite himself. He was coming
down King William Street, where he stabled his horse, you know, and I met
him. He'd been dining out-somewhere out over Fallow field, I think it
was; and he sings out to me, "Ah! Kilne, my good fellow!" and I, wishing
to be equal with him, says, "A fine night, my lord!" and he draws himself
up--he smelt of good company--says he, "Kilne! I'm not a lord, as you
know, and you have no excuse for mistaking me for one, sir!" So I
pretended I had mistaken him, and then he tucked his arm under mine, and
said, "You're no worse than your betters, Kilne. They took me for one at
Squire Uplift's to-night, but a man who wishes to pass off for more than
he is, Kilne, and impose upon people," he says, "he's contemptible,
Kilne! contemptible!" So that, you know, set me thinking about "Bath" and
the "Marquis," and I couldn't help smiling to myself, and just let slip a
question whether he had enlightened them a bit. "Kilne," said he, "you're
an honest man, and a neighbour, and I'll tell you what happened. The
Squire," he says, "likes my company, and I like his table. Now the Squire
'd never do a dirty action, but the Squire's nephew, Mr. George Uplift,
he can't forget that I earn my money, and once or twice I have had to
correct him." And I'll wager Mel did it, too! Well, he goes on: "There
was Admiral Sir Jackson Racial and his lady, at dinner, Squire Falco of
Bursted, Lady Barrington, Admiral Combleman--our admiral, that was; 'Mr.
This and That', I forget their names--and other ladies and gentlemen
whose acquaintance I was not honoured with." You know his way of talking.
"And there was a goose on the table," he says; and, looking stern at me,
"Don't laugh yet!" says he, like thunder. "Well, he goes on: Mr. George
caught my eye across the table, and said, so as not to be heard by his
uncle, 'If that bird was rampant, you would see your own arms, Marquis.'"
And Mel replied, quietly for him to hear, 'And as that bird is couchant,
Mr. George, you had better look to your sauce.' Couchant means squatting,
you know. That's heraldry! Well, that wasn't bad sparring of Mel's. But,
bless you! he was never taken aback, and the gentlefolks was glad enough
to get him to sit down amongst 'em. So, says Mr. George, 'I know you're a
fire-eater, Marquis,' and his dander was up, for he began marquising Mel,
and doing the mock polite at such a rate, that, by-and-by, one of the
ladies who didn't know Mel called him 'my lord' and 'his lordship.'
"And," says Mel, "I merely bowed to her, and took no notice." So that
passed off: and there sits Mel telling his anecdotes, as grand as a king.
And, by and-by, young Mr. George, who hadn't forgiven Mel, and had been
pulling at the bottle pretty well, he sings out, "It 's Michaelmas! the
death of the goose! and I should like to drink the Marquis's health!" and
he drank it solemn. But, as far as I can make out, the women part of the
company was a little in the dark. So Mel waited till there was a sort of
a pause, and then speaks rather loud to the Admiral, "By the way, Sir
Jackson, may I ask you, has the title of Marquis anything to do with
tailoring?" Now Mel was a great favourite with the Admiral, and with his
lady, too, they say--and the Admiral played into his hands, you see, and,
says he, "I 'm not aware that it has, Mr. Harrington." And he begged for
to know why he asked the question--called him, "Mister," you understand.
So Mel said, and I can see him now, right out from his chest he spoke,
with his head up "When I was a younger man, I had the good taste to be
fond of good society, and the bad taste to wish to appear different from
what I was in it": that's Mel speaking; everybody was listening; so he
goes on: "I was in the habit of going to Bath in the season, and
consorting with the gentlemen I met there on terms of equality; and for
some reason that I am quite guiltless of," says Mel, "the hotel people
gave out that I was a Marquis in disguise; and, upon my honour, ladies
and gentlemen--I was young then, and a fool--I could not help imagining I
looked the thing. At all events, I took upon myself to act the part, and
with some success, and considerable gratification; for, in my opinion,"
says Mel, "no real Marquis ever enjoyed his title so much as I did. One
day I was in my shop--No. 193, Main Street, Lymport--and a gentleman came
in to order his outfit. I received his directions, when suddenly he
started back, stared at me, and exclaimed:

'My dear Marquis! I trust you will pardon me for having addressed you
with so much familiarity.' I recognized in him one of my Bath
acquaintances. That circumstance, ladies and gentlemen, has been a lesson
to me. Since that time I have never allowed a false impression with
regard to my position to exist. "I desire," says Mel, smiling, "to have
my exact measure taken everywhere; and if the Michaelmas bird is to be
associated with me, I am sure I have no objection; all I can say is, that
I cannot justify it by letters patent of nobility." That's how Mel put
it. Do you think they thought worse of him? I warrant you he came out of
it in flying colours. Gentlefolks like straight-forwardness in their
inferiors--that's what they do. Ah!' said Kilne, meditatively, 'I see him
now, walking across the street in the moonlight, after he 'd told me
that. A fine figure of a man! and there ain't many Marquises to match
him.'

To this Barnes and Grossby, not insensible to the merits of the recital
they had just given ear to, agreed. And with a common voice of praise in
the mouths of his creditors, the dead man's requiem was sounded.




CHAPTER II

THE HERITAGE OF THE SON

Toward evening, a carriage drove up to the door of the muted house, and
the card of Lady Racial, bearing a hurried line in pencil, was handed to
the widow.

It was when you looked upon her that you began to comprehend how great
was the personal splendour of the husband who could eclipse such a woman.
Mrs. Harrington was a tall and a stately dame. Dressed in the high waists
of the matrons of that period, with a light shawl drawn close over her
shoulders and bosom, she carried her head well; and her pale firm
features, with the cast of immediate affliction on them, had much
dignity: dignity of an unrelenting physical order, which need not express
any remarkable pride of spirit. The family gossips who, on both sides,
were vain of this rare couple, and would always descant on their beauty,
even when they had occasion to slander their characters, said, to
distinguish them, that Henrietta Maria had a Port, and Melchisedec a
Presence: and that the union of a Port and a Presence, and such a Port
and such a Presence, was so uncommon, that you might search England
through and you would not find another, not even in the highest ranks of
society. There lies some subtle distinction here; due to the minute
perceptions which compel the gossips of a family to coin phrases that
shall express the nicest shades of a domestic difference. By a Port, one
may understand them to indicate something unsympathetically impressive;
whereas a Presence would seem to be a thing that directs the most affable
appeal to our poor human weaknesses. His Majesty King George IV., for
instance, possessed a Port: Beau Brummel wielded a Presence. Many, it is
true, take a Presence to mean no more than a shirt-frill, and interpret a
Port as the art of walking erect. But this is to look upon language too
narrowly.

On a more intimate acquaintance with the couple, you acknowledge the,
aptness of the fine distinction. By birth Mrs. Harrington had claims to
rank as a gentlewoman. That is, her father was a lawyer of Lymport. The
lawyer, however, since we must descend the genealogical tree, was known
to have married his cook, who was the lady's mother. Now Mr. Melchisedec
was mysterious concerning his origin; and, in his cups, talked largely
and wisely of a great Welsh family, issuing from a line of princes; and
it is certain that he knew enough of their history to have instructed
them on particular points of it. He never could think that his wife had
done him any honour in espousing him; nor was she the woman to tell him
so. She had married him for love, rejecting various suitors, Squire
Uplift among them, in his favour. Subsequently she had committed the
profound connubial error of transferring her affections, or her thoughts,
from him to his business, which, indeed, was much in want of a mate; and
while he squandered the guineas, she patiently picked up the pence. They
had not lived unhappily. He was constantly courteous to her. But to see
the Port at that sordid work considerably ruffled the Presence--put, as
it were, the peculiar division between them; and to behave toward her as
the same woman who had attracted his youthful ardours was a task for his
magnificent mind, and may have ranked with him as an indemnity for his
general conduct, if his reflections ever stretched so far. The
townspeople of Lymport were correct in saying that his wife, and his wife
alone, had, as they termed it, kept him together. Nevertheless, now that
he was dead, and could no longer be kept together, they entirely forgot
their respect for her, in the outburst of their secret admiration for the
popular man. Such is the constitution of the inhabitants of this dear
Island of Britain, so falsely accused by the Great Napoleon of being a
nation of shopkeepers. Here let any one proclaim himself Above Buttons,
and act on the assumption, his fellows with one accord hoist him on their
heads, and bear him aloft, sweating, and groaning, and cursing, but proud
of him! And if he can contrive, or has any good wife at home to help him,
to die without going to the dogs, they are, one may say, unanimous in
crying out the same eulogistic funeral oration as that commenced by
Kilne, the publican, when he was interrupted by Barnes, the butcher,
'Now, there's a man!--'

Mrs. Harrington was sitting in her parlour with one of her married
nieces, Mrs. Fiske, and on reading Lady Racial's card she gave word for
her to be shown up into the drawing-room. It was customary among Mrs.
Harrington's female relatives, who one and all abused and adored the
great Mel, to attribute his shortcomings pointedly to the ladies; which
was as much as if their jealous generous hearts had said that he was
sinful, but that it was not his fault. Mrs. Fiske caught the card from
her aunt, read the superscription, and exclaimed: 'The idea! At least she
might have had the decency! She never set her foot in the house
before--and right enough too! What can she want now? I decidedly would
refuse to see her, aunt!'

The widow's reply was simply, 'Don't be a fool, Ann!'

Rising, she said: 'Here, take poor Jacko, and comfort him till I come
back.'

Jacko was a middle-sized South American monkey, and had been a pet of her
husband's. He was supposed to be mourning now with the rest of the
family. Mrs. Fiske received him on a shrinking lap, and had found time to
correct one of his indiscretions before she could sigh and say, in the
rear of her aunt's retreating figure, 'I certainly never would let
myself, down so'; but Mrs. Harrington took her own counsel, and Jacko was
of her persuasion, for he quickly released himself from Mrs. Fiske's
dispassionate embrace, and was slinging his body up the balusters after
his mistress.

'Mrs. Harrington,' said Lady Racial, very sweetly swimming to meet her as
she entered the room, 'I have intruded upon you, I fear, in venturing to
call upon you at such a time?'

The widow bowed to her, and begged her to be seated.

Lady Racial was an exquisitely silken dame, in whose face a winning smile
was cut, and she was still sufficiently youthful not to be accused of
wearing a flower too artificial.

'It was so sudden! so sad!' she continued. 'We esteemed him so much. I
thought you might be in need of sympathy, and hoped I might--Dear Mrs.
Harrington! can you bear to speak of it?'

'I can tell you anything you wish to hear, my lady,' the widow replied.
Lady Racial had expected to meet a woman much more like what she
conceived a tradesman's wife would be: and the grave reception of her
proffer of sympathy slightly confused her. She said:

'I should not have come, at least not so early, but Sir Jackson, my
husband, thought, and indeed I imagined--You have a son, Mrs. Harrington?
I think his name is--'

'Evan, my lady.'

'Evan. It was of him we have been speaking. I imagined that is, we
thought, Sir Jackson might--you will be writing to him, and will let him
know we will use our best efforts to assist him in obtaining some
position worthy of his--superior to--something that will secure him from
the harassing embarrassments of an uncongenial employment.'

The widow listened to this tender allusion to the shears without a smile
of gratitude. She replied: 'I hope my son will return in time to bury his
father, and he will thank you himself, my lady.'

'He has no taste for--a--for anything in the shape of trade, has he, Mrs.
Harrington?'

'I am afraid not, my lady.'

'Any position--a situation--that of a clerk even--would be so much better
for him!'

The widow remained impassive.

'And many young gentlemen I know, who are clerks, and are enabled to live
comfortably, and make a modest appearance in society; and your son, Mrs.
Harrington, he would find it surely an improvement upon--many would think
it a step for him.'

'I am bound to thank you for the interest you take in my son, my lady.'

'Does it not quite suit your views, Mrs. Harrington?' Lady Racial was
surprised at the widow's manner.

'If my son had only to think of himself, my lady.'

'Oh! but of course,'--the lady understood her now--'of course! You cannot
suppose, Mrs. Harrington, but that I should anticipate he would have you
to live with him, and behave to you in every way as a dutiful son,
surely?

'A clerk's income is not very large, my lady.'

'No; but enough, as I have said, and with the management you would bring,
Mrs. Harrington, to produce a modest, respectable maintenance. My respect
for your husband, Mrs. Harrington, makes me anxious to press my services
upon you.' Lady Racial could not avoid feeling hurt at the widow's want
of common gratitude.

'A clerk's income would not be more than L100 a year, my lady.'

'To begin with--no; certainly not more.' The lady was growing brief.

'If my son puts by the half of that yearly, he can hardly support himself
and his mother, my lady.'

'Half of that yearly, Mrs. Harrington?'

'He would have to do so, and be saddled till he dies, my lady.'

'I really cannot see why.'

Lady Racial had a notion of some excessive niggardly thrift in the widow,
which was arousing symptoms of disgust.

Mrs. Harrington quietly said: 'There are his father's debts to pay, my
lady.'

'His father's debts!'

'Under L5000, but above L4000, my lady.'

'Five thousand pounds! Mrs. Harrington!' The lady's delicately gloved
hand gently rose and fell. 'And this poor young man--'she pursued.

'My son will have to pay it, my lady.'

For a moment the lady had not a word to instance. Presently she remarked:
'But, Mrs. Harrington, he is surely under no legal obligation?'

'He is only under the obligation not to cast disrespect on his father's
memory, my lady; and to be honest, while he can.'

'But, Mrs. Harrington! surely! what can the poor young man do?'

'He will pay it, my lady.'

'But how, Mrs. Harrington?'

'There is his father's business, my lady.'

His father's business! Then must the young man become a tradesman in
order to show respect for his father? Preposterous! That was the lady's
natural inward exclamation. She said, rather shrewdly, for one who knew
nothing of such things: 'But a business which produces debts so enormous,
Mrs. Harrington!'

The widow replied: 'My son will have to conduct it in a different way. It
would be a very good business, conducted properly, my lady.'

'But if he has no taste for it, Mrs. Harrington? If he is altogether
superior to it?'

For the first time during the interview, the widow's inflexible
countenance was mildly moved, though not to any mild expression.

'My son will have not to consult his tastes,' she observed: and seeing
the lady, after a short silence, quit her seat, she rose likewise, and
touched the fingers of the hand held forth to her, bowing.

'You will pardon the interest I take in your son,' said Lady Racial. 'I
hope, indeed, that his relatives and friends will procure him the means
of satisfying the demands made upon him.'

'He would still have to pay them, my lady,' was the widow's answer.

'Poor young man! indeed I pity him!' sighed her visitor. 'You have
hitherto used no efforts to persuade him to take such a step,--Mrs.
Harrington?'

'I have written to Mr. Goren, who was my husband's fellow-apprentice in
London, my lady; and he is willing to instruct him in cutting, and
measuring, and keeping accounts.'

Certain words in this speech were obnoxious to the fine ear of Lady
Racial, and she relinquished the subject.

'Your husband, Mrs. Harrington--I should so much have wished!--he did not
pass away in--in pain!'

'He died very calmly, my lady.'

'It is so terrible, so disfiguring, sometimes. One dreads to see!--one
can hardly distinguish! I have known cases where death was dreadful! But
a peaceful death is very beautiful! There is nothing shocking to the
mind. It suggests heaven! It seems a fulfilment of our prayers!'

'Would your ladyship like to look upon him?' said the widow.

Lady Racial betrayed a sudden gleam at having her desire thus intuitively
fathomed.

'For one moment, Mrs. Harrington! We esteemed him so much! May I?'

The widow responded by opening the door, and leading her into the chamber
where the dead man lay.

At that period, when threats of invasion had formerly stirred up the
military fire of us Islanders, the great Mel, as if to show the great
Napoleon what character of being a British shopkeeper really was, had, by
remarkable favour, obtained a lieutenancy of militia dragoons: in the
uniform of which he had revelled, and perhaps, for the only time in his
life, felt that circumstances had suited him with a perfect fit. However
that may be, his solemn final commands to his wife, Henrietta Maria, on
whom he could count for absolute obedience in such matters, had been,
that as soon as the breath had left his body, he should be taken from his
bed, washed, perfumed, powdered, and in that uniform dressed and laid
out; with directions that he should be so buried at the expiration of
three days, that havoc in his features might be hidden from men. In this
array Lady Racial beheld him. The curtains of the bed were drawn aside.
The beams of evening fell soft through the blinds of the room, and cast a
subdued light on the figure of the vanquished warrior. The Presence, dumb
now for evermore, was sadly illumined for its last exhibition. But one
who looked closely might have seen that Time had somewhat spoiled that
perfect fit which had aforetime been his pride; and now that the lofty
spirit had departed, there had been extreme difficulty in persuading the
sullen excess of clay to conform to the dimensions of those garments. The
upper part of the chest alone would bear its buttons, and across one
portion of the lower limbs an ancient seam had started; recalling an
incident to them who had known him in his brief hour of glory. For one
night, as he was riding home from Fallow field, and just entering the
gates of the town, a mounted trooper spurred furiously past, and slashing
out at him, gashed his thigh. Mrs. Melchisedec found him lying at his
door in a not unwonted way; carried him up-stairs in her arms, as she had
done many a time before, and did not perceive his condition till she saw
the blood on her gown. The cowardly assailant was never discovered; but
Mel was both gallant and had, in his military career, the reputation of
being a martinet. Hence, divers causes were suspected. The wound failed
not to mend, the trousers were repaired: Peace about the same time was
made, and the affair passed over.

Looking on the fine head and face, Lady Racial saw nothing of this. She
had not looked long before she found covert employment for her
handkerchief. The widow standing beside her did not weep, or reply to her
whispered excuses at emotion; gazing down on his mortal length with a
sort of benignant friendliness; aloof, as one whose duties to that form
of flesh were well-nigh done. At the feet of his master, Jacko, the
monkey, had jumped up, and was there squatted, with his legs crossed,
very like a tailor! The imitative wretch had got a towel, and as often as
Lady Racial's handkerchief travelled to her eyes, Jacko's peery face was
hidden, and you saw his lithe skinny body doing grief's convulsions till,
tired of this amusement, he obtained possession of the warrior's helmet,
from a small round table on one side of the bed; a calque of the
barbarous military-Georgian form, with a huge knob of horse-hair
projecting over the peak; and under this, trying to adapt it to his
rogue's head, the tricksy image of Death extinguished himself.

All was very silent in the room. Then the widow quietly disengaged Jacko,
and taking him up, went to the door, and deposited him outside. During
her momentary absence, Lady Racial had time to touch the dead man's
forehead with her lips, unseen.




CHAPTER III

THE DAUGHTERS OF THE SHEARS

Three daughters and a son were left to the world by Mr. Melchisedec.
Love, well endowed, had already claimed to provide for the daughters:
first in the shape of a lean Marine subaltern, whose days of obscuration
had now passed, and who had come to be a major of that corps: secondly,
presenting his addresses as a brewer of distinction: thirdly, and for a
climax, as a Portuguese Count: no other than the Senor Silva Diaz, Conde
de Saldar: and this match did seem a far more resplendent one than that
of the two elder sisters with Major Strike and Mr. Andrew Cogglesby. But
the rays of neither fell visibly on Lymport. These escaped Eurydices
never reappeared, after being once fairly caught away from the gloomy
realms of Dis, otherwise Trade. All three persons of singular beauty, a
certain refinement, some Port, and some Presence, hereditarily combined,
they feared the clutch of that fell king, and performed the widest
possible circles around him. Not one of them ever approached the house of
her parents. They were dutiful and loving children, and wrote frequently;
but of course they had to consider their new position, and their
husbands, and their husbands' families, and the world, and what it would
say, if to it the dreaded rumour should penetrate! Lymport gossips, as
numerous as in other parts, declared that the foreign nobleman would rave
in an extraordinary manner, and do things after the outlandish fashion of
his country: for from him, there was no doubt, the shop had been most
successfully veiled, and he knew not of Pluto's close relationship to his
lovely spouse.

The marriages had happened in this way. Balls are given in country towns,
where the graces of tradesmen's daughters may be witnessed and admired at
leisure by other than tradesmen: by occasional country gentlemen of the
neighbourhood, with light minds: and also by small officers: subalterns
wishing to do tender execution upon man's fair enemy, and to find a
distraction for their legs. The classes of our social fabric have, here
and there, slight connecting links, and provincial public balls are one
of these. They are dangerous, for Cupid is no respecter of
class-prejudice; and if you are the son of a retired tea-merchant, or of
a village doctor, or of a half-pay captain, or of anything superior, and
visit one of them, you are as likely to receive his shot as any shopboy.
Even masquerading lords at such places, have been known to be slain
outright; and although Society allows to its highest and dearest to save
the honour of their families, and heal their anguish, by indecorous
compromise, you, if you are a trifle below that mark, must not expect it.
You must absolutely give yourself for what you hope to get. Dreadful as
it sounds to philosophic ears, you must marry. This, having danced with
Caroline Harrington, the gallant Lieutenant Strike determined to do. Nor,
when he became aware of her father's occupation, did he shrink from his
resolve. After a month's hard courtship, he married her straight out of
her father's house. That he may have all the credit due to him, it must
be admitted that he did not once compare, or possibly permit himself to
reflect on, the dissimilarity in their respective ranks, and the step he
had taken downward, till they were man and wife: and then not in any
great degree, before Fortune had given him his majority; an advance the
good soldier frankly told his wife he did not owe to her. If we may be
permitted to suppose the colonel of a regiment on friendly terms with one
of his corporals, we have an estimate of the domestic life of Major and
Mrs. Strike. Among the garrison males, his comrades, he passed for a
disgustingly jealous brute.

The ladies, in their pretty language, signalized him as a 'finick.'

Now, having achieved so capital a marriage, Caroline, worthy creature,
was anxious that her sisters should not be less happy, and would have
them to visit her, in spite of her husband's protests.

'There can be no danger,' she said, for she was in fresh quarters, far
from the nest of contagion. The lieutenant himself ungrudgingly declared
that, looking on the ladies, no one for an instant could suspect; and he
saw many young fellows ready to be as great fools as he had been another
voluntary confession he made to his wife; for the candour of which she
thanked him, and pointed out that it seemed to run in the family;
inasmuch as Mr. Andrew Cogglesby, his rich relative, had seen and had
proposed for Harriet. The lieutenant flatly said he would never allow it.
In fact he had hitherto concealed the non-presentable portion of his
folly very satisfactorily from all save the mess-room, and Mr. Andrew's
passion was a severe dilemma to him. It need scarcely be told that his
wife, fortified by the fervid brewer, defeated him utterly. What was
more, she induced him to be an accomplice in deception. For though the
lieutenant protested that he washed his hands of it, and that it was a
fraud and a snare, he certainly did not avow the condition of his wife's
parents to Mr. Andrew, but alluded to them in passing as 'the country
people.' He supposed 'the country people' must be asked, he said. The
brewer offered to go down to them. But the lieutenant drew an unpleasant
picture of the country people, and his wife became so grave at the
proposal, that Mr. Andrew said he wanted to marry the lady and not the
'country people,' and if she would have him, there he was. There he was,
behaving with a particular and sagacious kindness to the raw lieutenant
since Harriet's arrival. If the lieutenant sent her away, Mr. Andrew
would infallibly pursue her, and light on a discovery. Twice cursed by
Love, twice the victim of tailordom, our excellent Marine gave away
Harriet Harrington in marriage to Mr. Andrew Cogglesby.

Thus Joy clapped hands a second time, and Horror deepened its shadows.

From higher ground it was natural that the remaining sister should take a
bolder flight. Of the loves of the fair Louisa Harrington and the foreign
Count, and how she first encountered him in the brewer's saloons, and how
she, being a humorous person, laughed at his 'loaf' for her, and wore the
colours that pleased him, and kindled and soothed his jealousy, little is
known beyond the fact that she espoused the Count, under the auspices of
the affluent brewer, and engaged that her children should be brought up
in the faith of the Catholic Church: which Lymport gossips called, paying
the Devil for her pride.

The three sisters, gloriously rescued by their own charms, had now to
think of their one young brother. How to make him a gentleman! That was
their problem.

Preserve him from tailordom--from all contact with trade--they must;
otherwise they would be perpetually linked to the horrid thing they hoped
to outlive and bury. A cousin of Mr. Melchisedec's had risen to be an
Admiral and a knight for valiant action in the old war, when men could
rise. Him they besought to take charge of the youth, and make a
distinguished seaman of him. He courteously declined. They then attacked
the married Marine--Navy or Army being quite indifferent to them as long
as they could win for their brother the badge of one Service, 'When he is
a gentleman at once!' they said, like those who see the end of their
labours. Strike basely pretended to second them. It would have been
delightful to him, of course, to have the tailor's son messing at the
same table, and claiming him when he pleased with a familiar 'Ah,
brother!' and prating of their relationship everywhere. Strike had been a
fool: in revenge for it he laid out for himself a masterly career of
consequent wisdom. The brewer--uxorious Andrew Cogglesby--might and would
have bought the commission. Strike laughed at the idea of giving money
for what could be got for nothing. He told them to wait.

In the meantime Evan, a lad of seventeen, spent the hours not devoted to
his positive profession--that of gentleman--in the offices of the
brewery, toying with big books and balances, which he despised with the
combined zeal of the sucking soldier and emancipated tailor.

Two years passed in attendance on the astute brother-in-law, to whom
Fortune now beckoned to come to her and gather his laurels from the
pig-tails. About the same time the Countess sailed over from Lisbon on a
visit to her sister Harriet (in reality, it was whispered in the
Cogglesby saloons, on a diplomatic mission from the Court of Lisbon; but
that could not be made ostensible). The Countess narrowly examined Evan,
whose steady advance in his profession both her sisters praised.

'Yes,' said the Countess, in a languid alien accent. 'He has something of
his father's carriage--something. Something of his delivery--his
readiness.'

It was a remarkable thing that these ladies thought no man on earth like
their father, and always cited him as the example of a perfect gentleman,
and yet they buried him with one mind, and each mounted guard over his
sepulchre, to secure his ghost from an airing.

'He can walk, my dears, certainly, and talk--a little. Tete-a-tete, I do
not say. I should think there he would be--a stick! All you English are.
But what sort of a bow has he got, I ask you? How does he enter a room?
And, then his smile! his laugh! He laughs like a horse--absolutely!
There's no music in his smile. Oh! you should see a Portuguese nobleman
smile. O mio Deus! honeyed, my dears! But Evan has it not. None of you
English have. You go so.'

The Countess pressed a thumb and finger to the sides of her mouth, and
set her sisters laughing.

'I assure you, no better! not a bit! I faint in your society. I ask
myself--Where am I? Among what boors have I fallen? But Evan is no worse
than the rest of you; I acknowledge that. If he knew how to dress his
shoulders properly, and to direct his eyes--Oh! the eyes! you should see
how a Portuguese nobleman can use his eyes! Soul! my dears, soul! Can any
of you look the unutterable without being absurd! You look so.'

And the Countess hung her jaw under heavily vacuous orbits, something as
a sheep might yawn.

'But I acknowledge that Evan is no worse than the rest of you,' she
repeated. 'If he understood at all the management of his eyes and mouth!
But that's what he cannot possibly learn in England--not possibly! As for
your poor husband, Harriet! one really has to remember his excellent
qualities to forgive him, poor man! And that stiff bandbox of a man of
yours, Caroline!' addressing the wife of the Marine, 'he looks as if he
were all angles and sections, and were taken to pieces every night and
put together in the morning. He may be a good soldier--good anything you
will--but, Diacho! to be married to that! He is not civilized. None of
you English are. You have no place in the drawing-room. You are like so
many intrusive oxen--absolutely! One of your men trod on my toe the other
night, and what do you think the creature did? Jerks back, then the half
of him forward--I thought he was going to break in two--then grins, and
grunts, "Oh! 'm sure, beg pardon, 'm sure!" I don't know whether he
didn't say, MARM!'

The Countess lifted her hands, and fell away in laughing horror. When her
humour, or her feelings generally, were a little excited, she spoke her
vernacular as her sisters did, but immediately subsided into the
deliberate delicately-syllabled drawl.

'Now that happened to me once at one of our great Balls,' she pursued. 'I
had on one side of me the Duchesse Eugenia de Formosa de Fontandigua; on
the other sat the Countess de Pel, a widow. And we were talking of the
ices that evening. Eugenia, you must know, my dears, was in love with the
Count Belmarana. I was her sole confidante. The Countess de Pel--a
horrible creature! Oh! she was the Duchess's determined enemy-would have
stabbed her for Belmarana, one of the most beautiful men! Adored by every
woman! So we talked ices, Eugenic and myself, quite comfortably, and that
horrible De Pel had no idea in life! Eugenia had just said, "This ice
sickens me! I do not taste the flavour of the vanille." I answered, "It
is here! It must--it cannot but be here! You love the flavour of the
vanille?" With her exquisite smile, I see her now saying, "Too well! it
is necessary to me! I live on it!"--when up he came. In his eagerness,
his foot just effleured my robe. Oh! I never shall forget! In an instant
he was down on one knee it was so momentary that none saw it but we
three, and done with ineffable grace. "Pardon!" he said, in his sweet
Portuguese; "Pardon!" looking up--the handsomest man I ever beheld; and
when I think of that odious wretch the other night, with his "Oh! 'm
sure, beg pardon, 'm sure! 'pon my honour!" I could have kicked him--I
could, indeed!'

Here the Countess laughed out, but relapsed into:

'Alas! that Belmarana should have betrayed that beautiful trusting
creature to De Pel. Such scandal! a duel!--the Duke was wounded. For a
whole year Eugenia did not dare to appear at Court, but had to remain
immured in her country-house, where she heard that Belmarana had married
De Pel! It was for her money, of course. Rich as Croesus, and as wicked
as the black man below! as dear papa used to say. By the way, weren't we
talking of Evan? Ah,--yes!'

And so forth. The Countess was immensely admired, and though her sisters
said that she was 'foreignized' overmuch, they clung to her desperately.
She seemed so entirely to have eclipsed tailordom, or 'Demogorgon,' as
the Countess was pleased to call it. Who could suppose this
grand-mannered lady, with her coroneted anecdotes and delicious breeding,
the daughter of that thing? It was not possible to suppose it. It seemed
to defy the fact itself.

They congratulated her on her complete escape from Demogorgon. The
Countess smiled on them with a lovely sorrow.

'Safe from the whisper, my dears; the ceaseless dread? If you knew what I
have to endure! I sometimes envy you. 'Pon my honour, I sometimes wish I
had married a fishmonger! Silva, indeed, is a most excellent husband.
Polished! such polish as you know not of in England. He has a way--a
wriggle with his shoulders in company--I cannot describe it to you; so
slight! so elegant! and he is all that a woman could desire. But who
could be safe in any part of the earth, my dears, while papa will go
about so, and behave so extraordinarily? I was at dinner at your English
embassy a month ago, and there was Admiral Combleman, then on the station
off Lisbon, Sir Jackson Racial's friend, who was the Admiral at Lymport
formerly. I knew him at once, and thought, oh! what shall I do! My heart
was like a lump of lead. I would have given worlds that we might one of
us have smothered the other! I had to sit beside him--it always happens!
Thank heaven! he did not identify me. And then he told an anecdote of
Papa. It was the dreadful old "Bath" story. I thought I should have died.
I could not but fancy the Admiral suspected. Was it not natural? And what
do you think I had the audacity to do? I asked him coolly, whether the
Mr. Harrington he mentioned was not the son of Sir Abraham Harrington, of
Torquay,--the gentleman who lost his yacht in the Lisbon waters last
year? I brought it on myself. 'Gentleman, ma'am,--MA'AM!' says the horrid
old creature, laughing, 'gentleman! he's a ---- I cannot speak it: I choke!'
And then he began praising Papa. Diacho! what I suffered. But, you know,
I can keep my countenance, if I perish. I am a Harrington as much as any
of us!'

And the Countess looked superb in the pride with which she said she was
what she would have given her hand not to be. But few feelings are single
on this globe, and junction of sentiments need not imply unity in our
yeasty compositions.

'After it was over--my supplice,' continued the Countess, 'I was
questioned by all the ladies--I mean our ladies--not your English. They
wanted to know how I could be so civil to that intolerable man. I gained
a deal of credit, my dears. I laid it all on--Diplomacy.' The Countess
laughed bitterly. 'Diplomacy bears the burden of it all. I pretended that
Combleman could be useful to Silva! Oh! what hypocrites we all are, mio
Deus!'

The ladies listening could not gainsay this favourite claim of universal
brotherhood among the select who wear masks instead of faces.

With regard to Evan, the Countess had far outstripped her sisters in her
views. A gentleman she had discovered must have one of two things--a
title or money. He might have all the breeding in the world; he might be
as good as an angel; but without a title or money he was under eclipse
almost total. On a gentleman the sun must shine. Now, Evan had no title,
no money. The clouds were thick above the youth. To gain a title he would
have to scale aged mountains. There was one break in his firmament
through which the radiant luminary might be assisted to cast its beams on
him still young. That divine portal was matrimony. If he could but make a
rich marriage he would blaze transfigured; all would be well! And why
should not Evan marry an heiress, as well as another?

'I know a young creature who would exactly suit him,' said the Countess.
'She is related to the embassy, and is in Lisbon now. A charming
child--just sixteen! Dios! how the men rave about her! and she isn't a
beauty,--there's the wonder; and she is a little too gauche too English
in her habits and ways of thinking; likes to be admired, of course, but
doesn't know yet how to set about getting it. She rather scandalizes our
ladies, but when you know her!--She will have, they say, a hundred
'thousand pounds in her own right! Rose Jocelyn, the daughter of Sir
Franks, and that eccentric Lady Jocelyn. She is with her uncle, Melville,
the celebrated diplomate though, to tell you the truth, we turn him round
our fingers, and spin him as the boys used to do the cockchafers. I
cannot forget our old Fallow field school-life, you see, my dears. Well,
Rose Jocelyn would just suit Evan. She is just of an age to receive an
impression. And I would take care she did. Instance me a case where I
have failed?

'Or there is the Portuguese widow, the Rostral. She's thirty, certainly;
but she possesses millions! Estates all over the kingdom, and the
sweetest creature. But, no. Evan would be out of the way there,
certainly. But--our women are very nice: they have the dearest, sweetest
ways: but I would rather Evan did not marry one of them. And then there
's the religion!'

This was a sore of the Countess's own, and she dropped a tear in coming
across it.

'No, my dears, it shall be Rose Jocelyn!' she concluded: 'I will take
Evan over with me, and see that he has opportunities. It shall be Rose,
and then I can call her mine; for in verity I love the child.'

It is not my part to dispute the Countess's love for Miss Jocelyn; and I
have only to add that Evan, unaware of the soft training he was to
undergo, and the brilliant chance in store for him, offered no impediment
to the proposition that he should journey to Portugal with his sister
(whose subtlest flattery was to tell him that she should not be ashamed
to own him there); and ultimately, furnished with cash for the trip by
the remonstrating brewer, went.

So these Parcae, daughters of the shears, arranged and settled the young
man's fate. His task was to learn the management of his mouth, how to
dress his shoulders properly, and to direct his eyes--rare qualities in
man or woman, I assure you; the management of the mouth being especially
admirable, and correspondingly difficult. These achieved, he was to place
his battery in position, and win the heart and hand of an heiress.

Our comedy opens with his return from Portugal, in company with Miss
Rose, the heiress; the Honourable Melville Jocelyn, the diplomate; and
the Count and Countess de Saldar, refugees out of that explosive little
kingdom.




CHAPTER IV

ON BOARD THE JOCASTA

From the Tagus to the Thames the Government sloop-of-war, Jocasta, had
made a prosperous voyage, bearing that precious freight, a removed
diplomatist and his family; for whose uses let a sufficient vindication
be found in the exercise he affords our crews in the science of
seamanship. She entered our noble river somewhat early on a fine July
morning. Early as it was, two young people, who had nothing to do with
the trimming or guiding of the vessel, stood on deck, and watched the
double-shore, beginning to embrace them more and more closely as they
sailed onward. One, a young lady, very young in manner, wore a black felt
hat with a floating scarlet feather, and was clad about the shoulders in
a mantle of foreign style and pattern. The other you might have taken for
a wandering Don, were such an object ever known; so simply he assumed the
dusky sombrero and dangling cloak, of which one fold was flung across his
breast and drooped behind him. The line of an adolescent dark moustache
ran along his lip, and only at intervals could you see that his eyes were
blue and of the land he was nearing. For the youth was meditative, and
held his head much down. The young lady, on the contrary, permitted an
open inspection of her countenance, and seemed, for the moment at least,
to be neither caring nor thinking of what kind of judgement would be
passed on her. Her pretty nose was up, sniffing the still salt breeze
with vivacious delight.

'Oh!' she cried, clapping her hands, 'there goes a dear old English gull!
How I have wished to see him! I haven't seen one for two years and seven
months. When I 'm at home, I 'll leave my window open all night, just to
hear the rooks, when they wake in the morning. There goes another!'

She tossed up her nose again, exclaiming:

'I 'm sure I smell England nearer and nearer! I smell the fields, and the
cows in them. I'd have given anything to be a dairy-maid for half an
hour! I used to lie and pant in that stifling air among those stupid
people, and wonder why anybody ever left England. Aren't you glad to come
back?'

This time the fair speaker lent her eyes to the question, and shut her
lips; sweet, cold, chaste lips she had: a mouth that had not yet dreamed
of kisses, and most honest eyes.

The young man felt that they were not to be satisfied by his own, and
after seeking to fill them with a doleful look, which was immediately
succeeded by one of superhuman indifference, he answered:

'Yes! We shall soon have to part!' and commenced tapping with his foot
the cheerful martyr's march.

Speech that has to be hauled from the depths usually betrays the effort.
Listening an instant to catch the import of this cavernous gasp upon the
brink of sound, the girl said:

'Part? what do you mean?'

Apparently it required a yet vaster effort to pronounce an explanation.
The doleful look, the superhuman indifference, were repeated in due
order: sound, a little more distinct, uttered the words:

'We cannot be as we have been, in England!' and then the cheerful martyr
took a few steps farther.

'Why, you don't mean to say you're going to give me up, and not be
friends with me, because we've come back to England?' cried the girl in a
rapid breath, eyeing him seriously.

Most conscientiously he did not mean it! but he replied with the quietest
negative.

'No?' she mimicked him. 'Why do you say "No" like that? Why are you so
mysterious, Evan? Won't you promise me to come and stop with us for
weeks? Haven't you said we would ride, and hunt, and fish together, and
read books, and do all sorts of things?'

He replied with the quietest affirmative.

'Yes? What does "Yes!" mean?' She lifted her chest to shake out the
dead-alive monosyllable, as he had done. 'Why are you so singular this
morning, Evan? Have I offended you? You are so touchy!'

The slur on his reputation for sensitiveness induced the young man to
attempt being more explicit.

'I mean,' he said, hesitating; 'why, we must part. We shall not see each
other every day. Nothing more than that.' And away went the cheerful
martyr in sublimest mood.

'Oh! and that makes you, sorry?' A shade of archness was in her voice.

The girl waited as if to collect something in her mind, and was now a
patronizing woman.

'Why, you dear sentimental boy! You don't suppose we could see each other
every day for ever?'

It was perhaps the cruelest question that could have been addressed to
the sentimental boy from her mouth. But he was a cheerful martyr!

'You dear Don Doloroso!' she resumed. 'I declare if you are not just like
those young Portugals this morning; and over there you were such a dear
English fellow; and that's why I liked you so much! Do change! Do,
please, be lively, and yourself again. Or mind; I'll call you
Don Doloroso, and that shall be your name in England. See
there!--that's--that's? what's the name of that place? Hoy! Mr. Skerne!'
She hailed the boatswain, passing, 'Do tell me the name of that place.'

Mr. Skerne righted about to satisfy her minutely, and then coming up to
Evan, he touched his hat, and said:

'I mayn't have another opportunity--we shall be busy up there--of
thankin' you again, sir, for what you did for my poor drunken brother
Bill, and you may take my word I won't forget it, sir, if he does; and I
suppose he'll be drowning his memory just as he was near drowning
himself.'

Evan muttered something, grimaced civilly, and turned away. The girl's
observant brows were moved to a faintly critical frown, and nodding
intelligently to the boatswain's remark, that the young gentleman did not
seem quite himself, now that he was nearing home, she went up to Evan,
and said:

'I'm going to give you a lesson in manners, to be quits with you. Listen,
sir. Why did you turn away so ungraciously from Mr. Skerne, while he was
thanking you for having saved his brother's life? Now there's where
you're too English. Can't you bear to be thanked?'

'I don't want to be thanked because I can swim,' said Evan.

'But it is not that. Oh, how you trifle!' she cried. 'There's nothing
vexes me so much as that way you have. Wouldn't my eyes have sparkled if
anybody had come up to me to thank me for such a thing? I would let them
know how glad I was to have done such a thing! Doesn't it make them
happier, dear Evan?'

'My dear Miss Jocelyn!'

'What?'

The honest grey eyes fixed on him, narrowed their enlarged lids. She
gazed before her on the deck, saying:

'I'm sure I can't understand you. I suppose it's because I'm a girl, and
I never shall till I'm a woman. Heigho!'

A youth who is engaged in the occupation of eating his heart, cannot
shine to advantage, and is as much a burden to himself as he is an enigma
to others. Evan felt this; but he could do nothing and say nothing; so he
retired deeper into the folds of the Don, and remained picturesque and
scarcely pleasant.

They were relieved by a summons to breakfast from below.

She brightened and laughed. 'Now, what will you wager me, Evan, that the
Countess doesn't begin:

"Sweet child! how does she this morning? blooming?" when she kisses me?'

Her capital imitation of his sister's manner constrained him to join in
her laugh, and he said:

'I'll back against that, I get three fingers from your uncle, and
"Morrow, young sir!"'

Down they ran together, laughing; and, sure enough, the identical words
of the respective greetings were employed, which they had to enjoy with
all the discretion they could muster.

Rose went round the table to her little cousin Alec, aged seven, kissed
his reluctant cheek, and sat beside him, announcing a sea appetite and
great capabilities, while Evan silently broke bread. The Count de Saldar,
a diminutive tawny man, just a head and neck above the tablecloth, sat
sipping chocolate and fingering dry toast, which he would now and then
dip in jelly, and suck with placidity, in the intervals of a curt
exchange of French with the wife of the Hon. Melville, a ringleted
English lady, or of Portuguese with the Countess; who likewise sipped
chocolate and fingered dry toast, and was mournfully melodious. The Hon.
Melville, as became a tall islander, carved beef, and ate of it, like a
ruler of men. Beautiful to see was the compassionate sympathy of the
Countess's face when Rose offered her plate for a portion of the
world-subjugating viand, as who should say: 'Sweet child! thou knowest
not yet of sorrows, thou canst ballast thy stomach with beef!' In any
other than an heiress, she would probably have thought: 'This is indeed a
disgusting little animal, and most unfeminine conduct!'

Rose, unconscious of praise or blame, rivalled her uncle in enjoyment of
the fare, and talked of her delight in seeing England again, and anything
that belonged to her native land. Mrs. Melville perceived that it pained
the refugee Countess, and gave her the glance intelligible; but the
Countess never missed glances, or failed to interpret them. She said:

'Let her. I love to hear the sweet child's prattle.'

'It was fortunate' (she addressed the diplomatist) 'that we touched at
Southampton and procured fresh provision!'

'Very lucky for US!' said he, glaring shrewdly between a mouthful.

The Count heard the word 'Southampton,' and wished to know how it was
comprised. A passage of Portuguese ensued, and then the Countess said:

'Silva, you know, desired to relinquish the vessel at Southampton. He
does not comprehend the word "expense," but' (she shook a dumb Alas!) 'I
must think of that for him now!'

'Oh! always avoid expense,' said the Hon. Melville, accustomed to be paid
for by his country.

'At what time shall we arrive, may I ask, do you think?' the Countess
gently inquired.

The watch of a man who had his eye on Time was pulled out, and she was
told it might be two hours before dark. Another reckoning, keenly
balanced, informed the company that the day's papers could be expected on
board somewhere about three o'clock in the afternoon.

'And then,' said the Hon. Melville, nodding general gratulation, 'we
shall know how the world wags.'

How it had been wagging the Countess's straining eyes under closed
eyelids were eloquent of.

'Too late, I fear me, to wait upon Lord Livelyston to-night?' she
suggested.

'To-night?' The Hon. Melville gazed blank astonishment at the notion.
'Oh! certainly, too late tonight. A-hum! I think, madam, you had better
not be in too great a hurry to see him. Repose a little. Recover your
fatigue.'

'Oh!' exclaimed the Countess, with a beam of utter confidence in him, 'I
shall be too happy to place myself in your hands--believe me.'

This was scarcely more to the taste of the diplomatist. He put up his
mouth, and said, blandly:

'I fear--you know, madam, I must warn you beforehand--I, personally, am
but an insignificant unit over here, you know; I, personally, can't
guarantee much assistance to you--not positive. What I can do--of course,
very happy!' And he fell to again upon the beef.

'Not so very insignificant!' said the Countess, smiling, as at a softly
radiant conception of him.

'Have to bob and bow like the rest of them over here,' he added, proof
against the flattery.

'But that you will not forsake Silva, I am convinced,' said the Countess;
and, paying little heed to his brief 'Oh! what I can do,' continued: 'For
over here, in England, we are almost friendless. My relations--such as
are left of them--are not in high place.' She turned to Mrs. Melville,
and renewed the confession with a proud humility. 'Truly, I have not a
distant cousin in the Cabinet!'

Mrs. Melville met her sad smile, and returned it, as one who understood
its entire import.

'My brother-in-law-my sister, I think, you know--married a--a brewer! He
is rich; but, well! such was her taste! My brother-in-law is indeed in
Parliament, and he--'

'Very little use, seeing he votes with the opposite party,' the
diplomatist interrupted her.

'Ah! but he will not,' said the Countess, serenely. 'I can trust with
confidence that, if it is for Silva's interest, he will assuredly so
dispose of his influence as to suit the desiderations of his family, and
not in any way oppose his opinions to the powers that would willingly
stoop to serve us!'

It was impossible for the Hon. Melville to withhold a slight grimace at
his beef, when he heard this extremely alienized idea of the nature of a
member of the Parliament of Great Britain. He allowed her to enjoy her
delusion, as she pursued:

'No. So much we could offer in repayment. It is little! But this, in
verity, is a case. Silva's wrongs have only to be known in England, and I
am most assured that the English people will not permit it. In the days
of his prosperity, Silva was a friend to England, and England should
not--should not--forget it now. Had we money! But of that arm our enemies
have deprived us: and, I fear, without it we cannot hope to have the
justice of our cause pleaded in the English papers. Mr. Redner, you know,
the correspondent in Lisbon, is a sworn foe to Silva. And why but because
I would not procure him an invitation to Court! The man was so horridly
vulgar; his gloves were never clean; I had to hold a bouquet to my nose
when I talked to him. That, you say, was my fault! Truly so. But what
woman can be civil to a low-bred, pretentious, offensive man?'

Mrs. Melville, again appealed to, smiled perfect sympathy, and said, to
account for his character:

'Yes. He is the son of a small shopkeeper of some kind, in Southampton, I
hear.'

'A very good fellow in his way,' said her husband.

'Oh! I can't bear that class of people,' Rose exclaimed. 'I always keep
out of their way. You can always tell them.'

The Countess smiled considerate approbation of her exclusiveness and
discernment. So sweet a smile!

'You were on deck early, my dear?' she asked Evan, rather abruptly.

Master Alec answered for him: 'Yes, he was, and so was Rose. They made an
appointment, just as they used to do under the oranges.'

'Children!' the Countess smiled to Mrs. Melville.

'They always whisper when I'm by,' Alec appended.

'Children!' the Countess's sweetened visage entreated Mrs. Melville to
re-echo; but that lady thought it best for the moment to direct Rose to
look to her packing, now that she had done breakfast.

'And I will take a walk with my brother on deck,' said the Countess.
'Silva is too harassed for converse.'

The parties were thus divided. The silent Count was left to meditate on
his wrongs in the saloon; and the diplomatist, alone with his lady,
thought fit to say to her, shortly: 'Perhaps it would be as well to draw
away from these people a little. We 've done as much as we could for
them, in bringing them over here. They may be trying to compromise us.
That woman's absurd. She 's ashamed of the brewer, and yet she wants to
sell him--or wants us to buy him. Ha! I think she wants us to send a
couple of frigates, and threaten bombardment of the capital, if they
don't take her husband back, and receive him with honours.'

'Perhaps it would be as well,' said Mrs. Melville. 'Rose's invitation to
him goes for nothing.'

'Rose? inviting the Count? down to Hampshire?' The diplomatist's brows
were lifted.

'No, I mean the other,' said the diplomatist's wife.

'Oh! the young fellow! very good young fellow. Gentlemanly. No harm in
him.'

'Perhaps not,' said the diplomatist's wife.

'You don't suppose he expects us to keep him on, or provide for him over
here--eh?'

The diplomatist's wife informed him that such was not her thought, that
he did not understand, and that it did not matter; and as soon as the
Hon. Melville saw that she was brooding something essentially feminine,
and which had no relationship to the great game of public life, curiosity
was extinguished in him.

On deck the Countess paced with Evan, and was for a time pleasantly
diverted by the admiration she could, without looking, perceive that her
sorrow-subdued graces had aroused in the breast of a susceptible naval
lieutenant. At last she spoke:

'My dear! remember this. Your last word to Mr. Jocelyn will be: "I will
do myself the honour to call upon my benefactor early." To Rose you will
say: "Be assured, Miss Jocelyn 'Miss Jocelyn--' I shall not fail in
hastening to pay my respects to your family in Hampshire." You will
remember to do it, in the exact form I speak it.'

Evan laughed: 'What! call him benefactor to his face? I couldn't do it.'

'Ah! my child!'

'Besides, he isn't a benefactor at all. His private secretary died, and I
stepped in to fill the post, because nobody else was handy.'

'And tell me of her who pushed you forward, Evan?'

'My dear sister, I'm sure I'm not ungrateful.'

'No; but headstrong: opinionated. Now these people will endeavour--Oh! I
have seen it in a thousand little things--they wish to shake us off. Now,
if you will but do as I indicate! Put your faith in an older head, Evan.
It is your only chance of society in England. For your brother-in-law--I
ask you, what sort of people will you meet at the Cogglesbys? Now and
then a nobleman, very much out of his element. In short, you have fed
upon a diet which will make you to distinguish, and painfully to know the
difference! Indeed! Yes, you are looking about for Rose. It depends upon
your behaviour now, whether you are to see her at all in England. Do you
forget? You wished once to inform her of your origin. Think of her words
at the breakfast this morning!'

The Countess imagined she had produced an impression. Evan said: 'Yes,
and I should have liked to have told her this morning that I'm myself
nothing more than the son of a--'

'Stop! cried his sister, glancing about in horror. The admiring
lieutenant met her eye. Blandishingly she smiled on him: 'Most beautiful
weather for a welcome to dear England?' and passed with majesty.

'Boy!' she resumed, 'are you mad?'

'I hate being such a hypocrite, madam.'

'Then you do not love her, Evan?'

This may have been dubious logic, but it resulted from a clear sequence
of ideas in the lady's head. Evan did not contest it.

'And assuredly you will lose her, Evan. Think of my troubles! I have to
intrigue for Silva; I look to your future; I smile, Oh heaven! how do I
not smile when things are spoken that pierce my heart! This morning at
the breakfast!'

Evan took her hand, and patted it.

'What is your pity?' she sighed.

'If it had not been for you, my dear sister, I should never have held my
tongue.'

'You are not a Harrington! You are a Dawley!' she exclaimed, indignantly.

Evan received the accusation of possessing more of his mother's spirit
than his father's in silence.

'You would not have held your tongue,' she said, with fervid severity:
'and you would have betrayed yourself! and you would have said you were
that! and you in that costume! Why, goodness gracious! could you bear to
appear so ridiculous?'

The poor young man involuntarily surveyed his person. The pains of an
impostor seized him. The deplorable image of the Don making confession
became present to his mind. It was a clever stroke of this female
intriguer. She saw him redden grievously, and blink his eyes; and not
wishing to probe him so that he would feel intolerable disgust at his
imprisonment in the Don, she continued:

'But you have the sense to see your duties, Evan. You have an excellent
sense, in the main. No one would dream--to see you. You did not, I must
say, you did not make enough of your gallantry. A Portuguese who had
saved a man's life, Evan, would he have been so boorish? You behaved as
if it was a matter of course that you should go overboard after anybody,
in your clothes, on a dark night. So, then, the Jocelyns took it. I
barely heard one compliment to you. And Rose--what an effect it should
have had on her! But, owing to your manner, I do believe the girl thinks
it nothing but your ordinary business to go overboard after anybody, in
your clothes, on a dark night. 'Pon my honour, I believe she expects to
see you always dripping!' The Countess uttered a burst of hysterical
humour. 'So you miss your credit. That inebriated sailor should really
have been gold to you. Be not so young and thoughtless.'

The Countess then proceeded to tell him how foolishly he had let slip his
great opportunity. A Portuguese would have fixed the young lady long
before. By tender moonlight, in captivating language, beneath the
umbrageous orange-groves, a Portuguese would have accurately calculated
the effect of the perfume of the blossom on her sensitive nostrils, and
know the exact moment when to kneel, and declare his passion sonorously.

'Yes,' said Evan, 'one of them did. She told me.'

'She told you? And you--what did you do?'

'Laughed at him with her, to be sure.'

'Laughed at him! She told you, and you helped her to laugh at love! Have
you no perceptions? Why did she tell you?'

'Because she thought him such a fool, I suppose.'

'You never will know a woman,' said the Countess, with contempt.

Much of his worldly sister at a time was more than Evan could bear.
Accustomed to the symptoms of restiveness, she finished her discourse,
enjoyed a quiet parade up and down under the gaze of the lieutenant, and
could find leisure to note whether she at all struck the inferior seamen,
even while her mind was absorbed by the multiform troubles and anxieties
for which she took such innocent indemnification.

The appearance of the Hon. Melville Jocelyn on deck, and without his
wife, recalled her to business. It is a peculiarity of female
diplomatists that they fear none save their own sex. Men they regard as
their natural prey: in women they see rival hunters using their own
weapons. The Countess smiled a slowly-kindling smile up to him, set her
brother adrift, and delicately linked herself to Evan's benefactor.

'I have been thinking,' she said, 'knowing your kind and most considerate
attentions, that we may compromise you in England.'

He at once assured her he hoped not, he thought not at all.

'The idea is due to my brother,' she went on; 'for I--women know so
little!--and most guiltlessly should we have done so. My brother perhaps
does not think of us foremost; but his argument I can distinguish. I can
see, that were you openly to plead Silva's cause, you might bring
yourself into odium, Mr. Jocelyn; and heaven knows I would not that! May
I then ask, that in England we may be simply upon the same footing of
private friendship?'

The diplomatist looked into her uplifted visage, that had all the sugary
sparkles of a crystallized preserved fruit of the Portugal clime, and
observed, confidentially, that, with every willingness in the world to
serve her, he did think it would possibly be better, for a time, to be
upon that footing, apart from political considerations.

'I was very sure my brother would apprehend your views,' said the
Countess. 'He, poor boy! his career is closed. He must sink into a
different sphere. He will greatly miss the intercourse with you and your
sweet family.'

Further relieved, the diplomatist delivered a high opinion of the young
gentleman, his abilities, and his conduct, and trusted he should see him
frequently.

By an apparent sacrifice, the lady thus obtained what she wanted.

Near the hour speculated on by the diplomatist, the papers came on board,
and he, unaware how he had been manoeuvred for lack of a wife at his
elbow, was quickly engaged in appeasing the great British hunger for
news; second only to that for beef, it seems, and equally acceptable
salted when it cannot be had fresh.

Leaving the devotee of statecraft with his legs crossed, and his face
wearing the cognizant air of one whose head is above the waters of
events, to enjoy the mighty meal of fresh and salted at discretion, the
Countess dived below.

Meantime the Jocasta, as smoothly as before she was ignorant of how the
world wagged, slipped up the river with the tide; and the sun hung red
behind the forest of masts, burnishing a broad length of the serpentine
haven of the nations of the earth. A young Englishman returning home can
hardly look on this scene without some pride of kinship. Evan stood at
the fore part of the vessel. Rose, in quiet English attire, had escaped
from her aunt to join him, singing in his ears, to spur his senses:
'Isn't it beautiful? Isn't it beautiful? Dear old England!'

'What do you find so beautiful?' he asked.

'Oh, you dull fellow! Why the ships, and the houses, and the smoke, to be
sure.'

'The ships? Why, I thought you despised trade, mademoiselle?'

'And so I do. That is, not trade, but tradesmen. Of course, I mean
shopkeepers.'

'It's they who send the ships to and fro, and make the picture that
pleases you, nevertheless.'

'Do they?' said she, indifferently, and then with a sort of fervour, 'Why
do you always grow so cold to me whenever we get on this subject?'

'I cold?' Evan responded. The incessant fears of his diplomatic sister
had succeeded in making him painfully jealous of this subject. He turned
it off. 'Why, our feelings are just the same. Do you know what I was
thinking when you came up? I was thinking that I hoped I might never
disgrace the name of an Englishman.'

'Now, that's noble!' cried the girl. 'And I'm sure you never will. Of an
English gentleman, Evan. I like that better.'

'Would your rather be called a true English lady than a true English
woman, Rose?'

'Don't think I would, my dear,' she answered, pertly; 'but "gentleman"
always means more than "man" to me.'

'And what's a gentleman, mademoiselle?'

'Can't tell you, Don Doloroso. Something you are, sir,' she added,
surveying him.

Evan sucked the bitter and the sweet of her explanation. His sister in
her anxiety to put him on his guard, had not beguiled him to forget his
real state.

His sister, the diplomatist and his lady, the refugee Count, with ladies'
maids, servants, and luggage, were now on the main-deck, and Master Alec,
who was as good as a newspaper correspondent for private conversations,
put an end to the colloquy of the young people. They were all assembled
in a circle when the vessel came to her moorings. The diplomatist glutted
with news, and thirsting for confirmations; the Count dumb, courteous,
and quick-eyed; the honourable lady complacent in the consciousness of
boxes well packed; the Countess breathing mellifluous long-drawn adieux
that should provoke invitations. Evan and Rose regarded each other.

The boat to convey them on shore was being lowered, and they were
preparing to move forward. Just then the vessel was boarded by a
stranger.

'Is that one of the creatures of your Customs? I did imagine we were safe
from them,' exclaimed the Countess.

The diplomatist laughingly requested her to save herself anxiety on that
score, while under his wing. But she had drawn attention to the intruder,
who was seen addressing one of the midshipmen. He was a man in a long
brown coat and loose white neckcloth, spectacles on nose, which he wore
considerably below the bridge and peered over, as if their main use were
to sight his eye; a beaver hat, with broadish brim, on his head. A man of
no station, it was evident to the ladies at once, and they would have
taken no further notice of him had he not been seen stepping toward them
in the rear of the young midshipman.

The latter came to Evan, and said: 'A fellow of the name of Goren wants
you. Says there's something the matter at home.'

Evan advanced, and bowed stiffly.

Mr. Goren held out his hand. 'You don't remember me, young man? I cut out
your first suit for you when you were breeched, though! Yes-ah! Your poor
father wouldn't put his hand to it. Goren!'

Embarrassed, and not quite alive to the chapter of facts this name should
have opened to him, Evan bowed again.

'Goren!' continued the possessor of the name. He had a cracked voice,
that when he spoke a word of two syllables, commenced with a lugubrious
crow, and ended in what one might have taken for a curious question.

'It is a bad business brings me, young man. I 'm not the best messenger
for such tidings. It's a black suit, young man! It's your father!'

The diplomatist and his lady gradually edged back but Rose remained
beside the Countess, who breathed quick, and seemed to have lost her
self-command.

Thinking he was apprehended, Mr. Goren said: 'I 'm going down to-night to
take care of the shop. He 's to be buried in his old uniform. You had
better come with me by the night-coach, if you would see the last of him,
young man.'

Breaking an odd pause that had fallen, the Countess cried aloud,
suddenly:

'In his uniform!'

Mr. Goren felt his arm seized and his legs hurrying him some paces into
isolation. 'Thanks! thanks!' was murmured in his ear. 'Not a word more.
Evan cannot bear it. Oh! you are good to have come, and we are grateful.
My father! my father!'

She had to tighten her hand and wrist against her bosom to keep herself
up. She had to reckon in a glance how much Rose had heard, or divined.
She had to mark whether the Count had understood a syllable. She had to
whisper to Evan to hasten away with the horrible man.

She had to enliven his stunned senses, and calm her own. And with
mournful images of her father in her brain, the female Spartan had to
turn to Rose, and speculate on the girl's reflective brows, while she
said, as over a distant relative, sadly, but without distraction: 'A
death in the family!' and preserved herself from weeping her heart out,
that none might guess the thing who did not positively know it. Evan
touched the hand of Rose without meeting her eyes. He was soon cast off
in Mr. Goren's boat. Then the Countess murmured final adieux; twilight
under her lids, but yet a smile, stately, affectionate, almost genial.
Rose, her sweet Rose, she must kiss. She could have slapped Rose for
appearing so reserved and cold. She hugged Rose, as to hug oblivion of
the last few minutes into her. The girl leant her cheek, and bore the
embrace, looking on her with a kind of wonder.

Only when alone with the Count, in the brewer's carriage awaiting her on
shore, did the lady give a natural course to her grief; well knowing that
her Silva would attribute it to the darkness of their common exile. She
wept: but in the excess of her misery, two words of strangely opposite
signification, pronounced by Mr. Goren; two words that were at once
poison and antidote, sang in her brain; two words that painted her dead
father from head to foot, his nature and his fortune: these were the
Shop, and the Uniform.

Oh! what would she not have given to have-seen and bestowed on her
beloved father one last kiss! Oh! how she hoped that her inspired echo of
Uniform, on board the Jocasta, had drowned the memory, eclipsed the
meaning, of that fatal utterance of Shop!




CHAPTER V

THE FAMILY AND THE FUNERAL

It was the evening of the second day since the arrival of the black
letter in London from Lymport, and the wife of the brewer and the wife of
the Major sat dropping tears into one another's laps, in expectation of
their sister the Countess. Mr. Andrew Cogglesby had not yet returned from
his office. The gallant Major had gone forth to dine with General Sir
George Frebuter, the head of the Marines of his time. It would have been
difficult for the Major, he informed his wife, to send in an excuse to
the General for non-attendance, without entering into particulars; and
that he should tell the General he could not dine with him, because of
the sudden decease of a tailor, was, as he let his wife understand, and
requested her to perceive, quite out of the question. So he dressed
himself carefully, and though peremptory with his wife concerning his
linen, and requiring natural services from her in the button department,
and a casual expression of contentment as to his ultimate make-up, he
left her that day without any final injunctions to occupy her mind, and
she was at liberty to weep if she pleased, a privilege she did not enjoy
undisturbed when he was present; for the warrior hated that weakness, and
did not care to hide his contempt for it.

Of the three sisters, the wife of the Major was, oddly enough, the one
who was least inveterately solicitous of concealing the fact of her
parentage. Reticence, of course, she had to study with the rest; the
Major was a walking book of reticence and the observances; he professed,
also, in company with herself alone, to have had much trouble in drilling
her to mark and properly preserve them. She had no desire to speak of her
birthplace. But, for some reason or other, she did not share her hero's
rather petulant anxiety to keep the curtain nailed down on that part of
her life which preceded her entry into the ranks of the Royal Marines.
Some might have thought that those fair large blue eyes of hers wandered
now and then in pleasant unambitious walks behind the curtain, and toyed
with little flowers of palest memory. Utterly tasteless, totally wanting
in discernment, not to say gratitude, the Major could not presume her to
be; and yet his wits perceived that her answers and the conduct she
shaped in accordance with his repeated protests and long-reaching
apprehensions of what he called danger, betrayed acquiescent obedience
more than the connubial sympathy due to him. Danger on the field the
Major knew not of; he did not scruple to name the word in relation to his
wife. For, as he told her, should he, some day, as in the chapter of
accidents might occur, sally into the street a Knight Companion of the
Bath and become known to men as Sir Maxwell Strike, it would be decidedly
disagreeable for him to be blown upon by a wind from Lymport. Moreover
she was the mother of a son. The Major pointed out to her the duty she
owed her offspring. Certainly the protecting aegis of his rank and title
would be over the lad, but she might depend upon it any indiscretion of
hers would damage him in his future career, the Major assured her. Young
Maxwell must be considered.

For all this, the mother and wife, when the black letter found them in
the morning at breakfast, had burst into a fit of grief, and faltered
that she wept for a father. Mrs. Andrew, to whom the letter was
addressed, had simply held the letter to her in a trembling hand. The
Major compared their behaviour, with marked encomiums of Mrs. Andrew. Now
this lady and her husband were in obverse relative positions. The brewer
had no will but his Harriet's. His esteem for her combined the
constitutional feelings of an insignificantly-built little man for a
majestic woman, and those of a worthy soul for the wife of his bosom.
Possessing, or possessed by her, the good brewer was perfectly happy.
She, it might be thought, under these circumstances, would not have
minded much his hearing what he might hear. It happened, however, that
she was as jealous of the winds of Lymport as the Major himself; as
vigilant in debarring them from access to the brewery as now the Countess
could have been. We are not dissecting human nature suffice it,
therefore, from a mere glance at the surface, to say, that just as
moneyed men are careful of their coin, women who have all the advantages
in a conjunction, are miserly in keeping them, and shudder to think that
one thing remains hidden, which the world they move in might put down
pityingly in favour of their spouse, even though to the little man 'twere
naught. She assumed that a revelation would diminish her moral stature;
and certainly it would not increase that of her husband. So no good could
come of it. Besides, Andrew knew, his whole conduct was a tacit
admission, that she had condescended in giving him her hand. The features
of their union might not be changed altogether by a revelation, but it
would be a shock to her.

Consequently, Harriet tenderly rebuked Caroline, for her outcry at the
breakfast-table; and Caroline, the elder sister, who had not since
marriage grown in so free an air, excused herself humbly, and the two
were weeping when the Countess joined them and related what she had just
undergone.

Hearing of Caroline's misdemeanour, however, Louisa's eyes rolled aloft
in a paroxysm of tribulation. It was nothing to Caroline; it was
comparatively nothing to Harriet; but the Count knew not Louisa had a
father: believed that her parents had long ago been wiped out. And the
Count was by nature inquisitive: and if he once cherished a suspicion he
was restless; he was pointed in his inquiries: he was pertinacious in
following out a clue: there never would be peace with him! And then, as
they were secure in their privacy, Louisa cried aloud for her father, her
beloved father! Harriet wept silently. Caroline alone expressed regret
that she had not set eyes on him from the day she became a wife.

'How could we, dear?' the Countess pathetically asked, under drowning
lids.

'Papa did not wish it,' sobbed Mrs. Andrew.

'I never shall forgive myself!' said the wife of the Major, drying her
cheeks. Perhaps it was not herself whom she felt she never could forgive.

Ah! the man their father was! Incomparable Melchisedec! he might well be
called. So generous! so lordly! When the rain of tears would subside for
a moment, one would relate an anecdote or childish reminiscence of him,
and provoke a more violent outburst.

'Never, among the nobles of any land, never have I seen one like him!'
exclaimed the Countess, and immediately requested Harriet to tell her how
it would be possible to stop Andrew's tongue in Silva's presence.

'At present, you know, my dear, they may talk as much as they like--they
can't understand one another one bit.'

Mrs. Cogglesby comforted her by the assurance that Andrew had received an
intimation of her wish for silence everywhere and toward everybody; and
that he might be reckoned upon to respect it, without demanding a reason
for the restriction. In other days Caroline and Louisa had a little
looked down on Harriet's alliance with a dumpy man--a brewer--and had
always kind Christian compassion for him if his name were mentioned. They
seemed now, by their silence, to have a happier estimate of Andrew's
qualities.

While the three sisters sat mingling their sorrows and alarms, their
young brother was making his way to the house. As he knocked at the door
he heard his name pronounced behind him, and had no difficulty in
recognizing the worthy brewer.

'What, Van, my boy! how are you? Quite a foreigner! By George, what a
hat!'

Mr. Andrew bounced back two or three steps to regard the dusky sombrero.

'How do you do, sir?' said Evan.

'Sir to you!' Mr. Andrew briskly replied. 'Don't they teach you to give
your fist in Portugal, eh? I'll "sir" you. Wait till I'm Sir Andrew, and
then "sir" away. You do speak English still, Van, eh? Quite jolly, my
boy?'

Mr. Andrew rubbed his hands to express that state in himself. Suddenly he
stopped, blinked queerly at Evan, grew pensive, and said, 'Bless my soul!
I forgot.'

The door opened, Mr. Andrew took Evan's arm, murmured a 'hush!' and trod
gently along the passage to his library.

'We're safe here,' he said. 'There--there's something the matter
up-stairs. The women are upset about something. Harriet--' Mr. Andrew
hesitated, and branched off: 'You 've heard we 've got a new baby?'

Evan congratulated him; but another inquiry was in Mr. Andrew's aspect,
and Evan's calm, sad manner answered it.

'Yes,'--Mr. Andrew shook his head dolefully--'a splendid little chap! a
rare little chap! a we can't help these things, Van! They will happen.
Sit down, my boy.'

Mr. Andrew again interrogated Evan with his eyes.

'My father is dead,' said Evan.

'Yes!' Mr. Andrew nodded, and glanced quickly at the ceiling, as if to
make sure that none listened overhead. 'My parliamentary duties will soon
be over for the season,' he added, aloud; pursuing, in an under-breath:

'Going down to-night, Van?'

'He is to be buried to-morrow,' said Evan.

'Then, of course, you go. Yes: quite right. Love your father and mother!
always love your father and mother! Old Tom and I never knew ours. Tom's
quite well-same as ever. I'll,' he rang the bell, 'have my chop in here
with you. You must try and eat a bit, Van. Here we are, and there we go.
Old Tom's wandering for one of his weeks. You'll see him some day. He
ain't like me. No dinner to-day, I suppose, Charles?'

This was addressed to the footman. He announced:

'Dinner to-day at half-past six, as usual, sir,' bowed, and retired.

Mr. Andrew pored on the floor, and rubbed his hair back on his head. 'An
odd world!' was his remark.

Evan lifted up his face to sigh: 'I 'm almost sick of it!'

'Damn appearances!' cried Mr. Andrew, jumping on his legs.

The action cooled him.

'I 'm sorry I swore,' he said. 'Bad habit! The Major's here--you know
that?' and he assumed the Major's voice, and strutted in imitation of the
stalwart marine. 'Major--a--Strike! of the Royal Marines! returned from
China! covered with glory!--a hero, Van! We can't expect him to be much
of a mourner. And we shan't have him to dine with us to-day--that's
something.' He sank his voice: 'I hope the widow 'll bear it.'

'I hope to God my mother is well!' Evan groaned.

'That'll do,' said Mr. Andrew. 'Don't say any more.'

As he spoke, he clapped Evan kindly on the back.

A message was brought from the ladies, requiring Evan to wait on them. He
returned after some minutes.

'How do you think Harriet's looking?' asked Mr. Andrew. And, not waiting
for an answer, whispered,

'Are they going down to the funeral, my boy?'

Evan's brow was dark, as he replied: 'They are not decided.'

'Won't Harriet go?'

'She is not going--she thinks not.'

'And the Countess--Louisa's upstairs, eh?--will she go?'

'She cannot leave the Count--she thinks not.'

'Won't Caroline go? Caroline can go. She--he--I mean--Caroline can go?'

'The Major objects. She wishes to.'

Mr. Andrew struck out his arm, and uttered, 'the Major!'--a compromise
for a loud anathema. But the compromise was vain, for he sinned again in
an explosion against appearances.

'I'm a brewer, Van. Do you think I'm ashamed of it? Not while I brew good
beer, my boy!--not while I brew good beer! They don't think worse of me
in the House for it. It isn't ungentlemanly to brew good beer, Van. But
what's the use of talking?'

Mr. Andrew sat down, and murmured, 'Poor girl! poor girl!'

The allusion was to his wife; for presently he said: 'I can't see why
Harriet can't go. What's to prevent her?'

Evan gazed at him steadily. Death's levelling influence was in Evan's
mind. He was ready to say why, and fully.

Mr. Andrew arrested him with a sharp 'Never mind! Harriet does as she
likes. I'm accustomed to--hem! what she does is best, after all. She
doesn't interfere with my business, nor I with hers. Man and wife.'

Pausing a moment or so, Mr. Andrew intimated that they had better be
dressing for dinner. With his hand on the door, which he kept closed, he
said, in a businesslike way, 'You know, Van, as for me, I should be very
willing--only too happy--to go down and pay all the respect I could.' He
became confused, and shot his head from side to side, looking anywhere
but at Evan. 'Happy now and to-morrow, to do anything in my power, if
Harriet--follow the funeral--one of the family--anything I could do:
but--a--we 'd better be dressing for dinner.' And out the enigmatic
little man went.

Evan partly divined him then. But at dinner his behaviour was perplexing.
He was too cheerful. He pledged the Count. He would have the Portuguese
for this and that, and make Anglican efforts to repeat it, and laugh at
his failures. He would not see that there was a father dead. At a table
of actors, Mr. Andrew overdid his part, and was the worst. His wife could
not help thinking him a heartless little man.

The poor show had its term. The ladies fled to the boudoir sacred to
grief. Evan was whispered that he was to join them when he might, without
seeming mysterious to the Count. Before he reached them, they had talked
tearfully over the clothes he should wear at Lymport, agreeing that his
present foreign apparel, being black, would be suitable, and would serve
almost as disguise, to the inhabitants at large; and as Evan had no
English wear, and there was no time to procure any for him, that was
well. They arranged exactly how long he should stay at Lymport, whom he
should visit, the manner he should adopt toward the different
inhabitants. By all means he was to avoid the approach of the gentry. For
hours Evan, in a trance, half stupefied, had to listen to the Countess's
directions how he was to comport himself in Lymport.

'Show that you have descended among them, dear Van, but are not of them.
Our beautiful noble English poet expresses it so. You have come to pay
the last mortal duties, which they will respect, if they are not brutes,
and attempt no familiarities. Allow none: gently, but firmly. Imitate
Silva. You remember, at Dona Risbonda's ball? When he met the Comte de
Dartigues, and knew he was to be in disgrace with his Court on the
morrow? Oh! the exquisite shade of difference in Silva's behaviour
towards the Comte. So finely, delicately perceptible to the Comte, and
not a soul saw it but that wretched Frenchman! He came to me: "Madame,"
he said, "is a question permitted?" I replied, "As-many as you please, M.
le Comte, but no answers promised." He said: "May I ask if the Courier
has yet come in?"--"Nay, M. le Comte," I replied, "this is diplomacy.
Inquire of me, or better, give me an opinion on the new glace silk from
Paris."--"Madame," said he, bowing, "I hope Paris may send me aught so
good, or that I shall grace half so well." I smiled, "You shall not be
single in your hopes, M. le Comte. The gift would be base that you did
not embellish." He lifted his hands, French-fashion: "Madame, it is that
I have received the gift."--"Indeed! M. le Comte."--"Even now from the
Count de Saldar, your husband." I looked most innocently, "From my
husband, M. le Comte?"--"From him, Madame. A portrait. An Ambassador
without his coat! The portrait was a finished performance." I said: "And
may one beg the permission to inspect it?"--"Mais," said he, laughing:
"were it you alone, it would be a privilege to me." I had to check him.
"Believe me, M. le Comte, that when I look upon it, my praise of the
artist will be extinguished by my pity for the subject." He should have
stopped there; but you cannot have the last word with a Frenchman--not
even a woman. Fortunately the Queen just then made her entry into the
saloon, and his mot on the charity of our sex was lost. We bowed
mutually, and were separated.' (The Countess employed her handkerchief.)
'Yes, dear Van! that is how you should behave. Imply things. With dearest
Mama, of course, you are the dutiful son. Alas! you must stand for son
and daughters. Mama has so much sense! She will understand how sadly we
are placed. But in a week I will come to her for a day, and bring you
back.'

So much his sister Louisa. His sister Harriet offered him her house for a
home in London, thence to project his new career. His sister Caroline
sought a word with him in private, but only to weep bitterly in his arms,
and utter a faint moan of regret at marriages in general. He loved this
beautiful creature the best of his three sisters (partly, it may be,
because he despised her superior officer), and tried with a few smothered
words to induce her to accompany him: but she only shook her fair locks
and moaned afresh. Mr. Andrew, in the farewell squeeze of the hand at the
street-door, asked him if he wanted anything. He negatived the
requirement of anything whatever, with an air of careless decision,
though he was aware that his purse barely contained more than would take
him the distance, but the instincts of this amateur gentleman were very
fine and sensitive on questions of money. His family had never known him
beg for a shilling, or admit his necessity for a penny: nor could he be
made to accept money unless it was thrust into his pocket. Somehow his
sisters had forgotten this peculiarity of his. Harriet only remembered it
when too late.

'But I dare say Andrew has supplied him,' she said.

Andrew being interrogated, informed her what had passed between them.

'And you think a Harrington would confess he wanted money!' was her
scornful exclamation. 'Evan would walk--he would die rather. It was
treating him like a mendicant.'

Andrew had to shrink in his brewer's skin.

By some fatality all who were doomed to sit and listen to the Countess de
Saldar, were sure to be behindhand in an appointment.

When the young man arrived at the coach-office, he was politely informed
that the vehicle, in which a seat had been secured for him, was in close
alliance with time and tide, and being under the same rigid laws, could
not possibly have waited for him, albeit it had stretched a point to the
extent of a pair of minutes, at the urgent solicitation of a passenger.

'A gentleman who speaks so, sir,' said a volunteer mimic of the office,
crowing and questioning from his throat in Goren's manner. 'Yok! yok!
That was how he spoke, sir.'

Evan reddened, for it brought the scene on board the Jocasta vividly to
his mind. The heavier business obliterated it. He took counsel with the
clerks of the office, and eventually the volunteer mimic conducted him to
certain livery stables, where Evan, like one accustomed to command,
ordered a chariot to pursue the coach, received a touch of the hat for a
lordly fee, and was soon rolling out of London.




CHAPTER VI

MY GENTLEMAN ON THE ROAD

The postillion had every reason to believe that he carried a real
gentleman behind him; in other words, a purse long and liberal. He judged
by all the points he knew of: a firm voice, a brief commanding style, an
apparent indifference to expense, and the inexplicable minor
characteristics, such as polished boots, and a striking wristband, and so
forth, which will show a creature accustomed to step over the heads of
men. He had, therefore, no particular anxiety to part company, and jogged
easily on the white highway, beneath a moon that walked high and small
over marble clouds.

Evan reclined in the chariot, revolving his sensations. In another mood
he would have called, them thoughts, perhaps, and marvelled at their
immensity. The theme was Love and Death. One might have supposed, from
his occasional mutterings at the pace regulated by the postillion, that
he was burning with anxiety to catch the flying coach. He had forgotten
it: forgotten that he was giving chase to anything. A pair of wondering
feminine eyes pursued him, and made him fret for the miles to throw a
thicker veil between him and them. The serious level brows of Rose
haunted the poor youth; and reflecting whither he was tending, and to
what sight, he had shadowy touches of the holiness there is in death,
from which came a conflict between the imaged phantoms of his father and
of Rose, and he sided against his love with some bitterness. His sisters,
weeping for their father and holding aloof from his ashes, Evan swept
from his mind. He called up the man his father was: the kindliness, the
readiness, the gallant gaiety of the great Mel. Youths are fascinated by
the barbarian virtues; and to Evan, under present influences, his father
was a pattern of manhood. He asked himself: Was it infamous to earn one's
bread? and answered it very strongly in his father's favour. The great
Mel's creditors were not by to show him another feature of the case.

Hitherto, in passive obedience to the indoctrination of the Countess,
Evan had looked on tailors as the proscribed race of modern society. He
had pitied his father as a man superior to his fate; but despite the
fitfully honest promptings with Rose (tempting to him because of the
wondrous chivalry they argued, and at bottom false probably as the
hypocrisy they affected to combat), he had been by no means sorry that
the world saw not the spot on himself. Other sensations beset him now.
Since such a man was banned by the world, which was to be despised?

The clear result of Evan's solitary musing was to cast a sort of halo
over Tailordom. Death stood over the pale dead man, his father, and dared
the world to sneer at him. By a singular caprice of fancy, Evan had no
sooner grasped this image, than it was suggested that he might as well
inspect his purse, and see how much money he was master of.

Are you impatient with this young man? He has little character for the
moment. Most youths are like Pope's women; they have no character at all.
And indeed a character that does not wait for circumstances to shape it,
is of small worth in the race that must be run. To be set too early, is
to take the work out of the hands of the Sculptor who fashions men.
Happily a youth is always at school, and if he was shut up and without
mark two or three hours ago, he will have something to show you now: as I
have seen blooming seaflowers and other graduated organisms, when left
undisturbed to their own action. Where the Fates have designed that he
shall present his figure in a story, this is sure to happen.

To the postillion Evan was indebted for one of his first lessons.

About an hour after midnight pastoral stillness and the moon begat in the
postillion desire for a pipe. Daylight prohibits the dream of it to
mounted postillions. At night the question is more human, and allows
appeal. The moon smiles assentingly, and smokers know that she really
lends herself to the enjoyment of tobacco.

The postillion could remember gentlemen who did not object: who had even
given him cigars. Turning round to see if haply the present inmate of the
chariot might be smoking, he observed a head extended from the window.

'How far are we?' was inquired.

The postillion numbered the milestones passed.

'Do you see anything of the coach?'

'Can't say as I do, sir.'

He was commanded to stop. Evan jumped out.

'I don't think I'll take you any farther,' he said.

The postillion laughed to scorn the notion of his caring how far he went.
With a pipe in his mouth, he insinuatingly remarked, he could jog on all
night, and throw sleep to the dogs. Fresh horses at Hillford; fresh at
Fallow field: and the gentleman himself would reach Lymport fresh in the
morning.

'No, no; I won't take you any farther,' Evan repeated.

'But what do it matter, sir?' urged the postillion.

'I'd rather go on as I am. I--a--made no arrangement to take you the
whole way.'

'Oh!' cried the postillion, 'don't you go troublin' yourself about that,
sir. Master knows it 's touch-and-go about catchin' the coach. I'm all
right.'

So infatuated was the fellow in the belief that he was dealing with a
perfect gentleman--an easy pocket!

Now you would not suppose that one who presumes he has sufficient, would
find a difficulty in asking how much he has to pay. With an effort,
indifferently masked, Evan blurted:

'By the way, tell me--how much--what is the charge for the distance we've
come?'

There are gentlemen-screws: there are conscientious gentlemen. They
calculate, and remonstrating or not, they pay. The postillion would
rather have had to do with the gentleman royal, who is above base
computation; but he knew the humanity in the class he served, and with
his conception of Evan only partially dimmed, he remarked:

'Oh-h-h! that won't hurt you, sir. Jump along in,--settle that
by-and-by.'

But when my gentleman stood fast, and renewed the demand to know the
exact charge for the distance already traversed, the postillion
dismounted, glanced him over, and speculated with his fingers tipping up
his hat. Meantime Evan drew out his purse, a long one, certainly, but
limp. Out of this drowned-looking wretch the last spark of life was taken
by the sum the postillion ventured to name; and if paying your utmost
farthing without examination of the charge, and cheerfully stepping out
to walk fifty miles, penniless, constituted a postillion's gentleman,
Evan would have passed the test. The sight of poverty, however, provokes
familiar feelings in poor men, if you have not had occasion to show them
you possess particular qualities. The postillion's eye was more on the
purse than on the sum it surrendered.

'There,' said Evan, 'I shall walk. Good night.' And he flung his cloak to
step forward.

'Stop a bit, sir!' arrested him.

The postillion rallied up sideways, with an assumption of genial respect.
'I didn't calc'late myself in that there amount.'

Were these words, think you, of a character to strike a young man hard on
the breast, send the blood to his head, and set up in his heart a
derisive chorus? My gentleman could pay his money, and keep his footing
gallantly; but to be asked for a penny beyond what he possessed; to be
seen beggared, and to be claimed a debtor-aleck! Pride was the one
developed faculty of Evan's nature. The Fates who mould us, always work
from the main-spring. I will not say that the postillion stripped off the
mask for him, at that instant completely; but he gave him the first true
glimpse of his condition. From the vague sense of being an impostor, Evan
awoke to the clear fact that he was likewise a fool.

It was impossible for him to deny the man's claim, and he would not have
done it, if he could. Acceding tacitly, he squeezed the ends of his purse
in his pocket, and with a 'Let me see,' tried his waistcoat. Not too
impetuously; for he was careful of betraying the horrid emptiness till he
was certain that the powers who wait on gentlemen had utterly forsaken
him. They had not. He discovered a small coin, under ordinary
circumstances not contemptible; but he did not stay to reflect, and was
guilty of the error of offering it to the postillion.

The latter peered at it in the centre of his palm; gazed queerly in the
gentleman's face, and then lifting the spit of silver for the disdain of
his mistress, the moon, he drew a long breath of regret at the original
mistake he had committed, and said:

'That's what you're goin' to give me for my night's work?'

The powers who wait on gentlemen had only helped the pretending youth to
try him. A rejection of the demand would have been infinitely wiser and
better than this paltry compromise. The postillion would have fought it:
he would not have despised his fare.

How much it cost the poor pretender to reply, 'It 's the last farthing I
have, my man,' the postillion could not know.

'A scabby sixpence?' The postillion continued his question.

'You heard what I said,' Evan remarked.

The postillion drew another deep breath, and holding out the coin at
arm's length:

'Well, sir!' he observed, as one whom mental conflict has brought to the
philosophy of the case, 'now, was we to change places, I couldn't a' done
it! I couldn't a' done it!' he reiterated, pausing emphatically.

'Take it, sir!' he magnanimously resumed; 'take it! You rides when you
can, and you walks when you must. Lord forbid I should rob such a
gentleman as you!'

One who feels a death, is for the hour lifted above the satire of
postillions. A good genius prompted Evan to avoid the silly squabble that
might have ensued and made him ridiculous. He took the money, quietly
saying, 'Thank you.'

Not to lose his vantage, the postillion, though a little staggered by the
move, rejoined: 'Don't mention it.'

Evan then said: 'Good night, my man. I won't wish, for your sake, that we
changed places. You would have to walk fifty miles to be in time for your
father's funeral. Good night.'

'You are it to look at!' was the postillion's comment, seeing my
gentleman depart with great strides. He did not speak offensively;
rather, it seemed, to appease his conscience for the original mistake he
had committed, for subsequently came, 'My oath on it, I don't get took in
again by a squash hat in a hurry!'

Unaware of the ban he had, by a sixpenny stamp, put upon an unoffending
class, Evan went ahead, hearing the wheels of the chariot still dragging
the road in his rear. The postillion was in a dissatisfied state of mind.
He had asked and received more than his due. But in the matter of his
sweet self, he had been choused, as he termed it. And my gentleman had
baffled him, he could not quite tell how; but he had been got the better
of; his sarcasms had not stuck, and returned to rankle in the bosom of
their author. As a Jew, therefore, may eye an erewhile bondsman who has
paid the bill, but stands out against excess of interest on legal
grounds, the postillion regarded Evan, of whom he was now abreast, eager
for a controversy.

'Fine night,' said the postillion, to begin, and was answered by a short
assent. 'Lateish for a poor man to be out--don't you think sir, eh?'

'I ought to think so,' said Evan, mastering the shrewd unpleasantness he
felt in the colloquy forced on him.

'Oh, you! you're a gentleman!' the postillion ejaculated.

'You see I have no money.'

'Feel it, too, sir.'

'I am sorry you should be the victim.'

'Victim!' the postillion seized on an objectionable word. 'I ain't no
victim, unless you was up to a joke with me, sir, just now. Was that the
game?'

Evan informed him that he never played jokes with money, or on men.

'Cause it looks like it, sir, to go to offer a poor chap sixpence.' The
postillion laughed hollow from the end of his lungs. 'Sixpence for a
night's work! It is a joke, if you don't mean it for one. Why, do you
know, sir, I could go--there, I don't care where it is!--I could go
before any magistrate livin', and he'd make ye pay. It's a charge, as
custom is, and he'd make ye pay. Or p'rhaps you're a goin' on my
generosity, and 'll say, he gev back that sixpence! Well! I shouldn't a'
thought a gentleman'd make that his defence before a magistrate. But
there, my man! if it makes ye happy, keep it. But you take my advice,
sir. When you hires a chariot, see you've got the shiners. And don't you
go never again offerin' a sixpence to a poor man for a night's work. They
don't like it. It hurts their feelin's. Don't you forget that, sir. Lay
that up in your mind.'

Now the postillion having thus relieved himself, jeeringly asked
permission to smoke a pipe. To which Evan said, 'Pray, smoke, if it
pleases you.' And the postillion, hardly mollified, added, 'The baccy's
paid for,' and smoked.

As will sometimes happen, the feelings of the man who had spoken out and
behaved doubtfully, grew gentle and Christian, whereas those of the man
whose bearing under the trial had been irreproachable were much the
reverse. The postillion smoked--he was a lord on his horse; he beheld my
gentleman trudging in the dust. Awhile he enjoyed the contrast, dividing
his attention between the footfarer and moon. To have had the last word
is always a great thing; and to have given my gentleman a lecture,
because he shunned a dispute, also counts. And then there was the poor
young fellow trudging to his father's funeral! The postillion chose to
remember that now. In reality, he allowed, he had not very much to
complain of, and my gentleman's courteous avoidance of provocation (the
apparent fact that he, the postillion, had humbled him and got the better
of him, equally, it may be), acted on his fine English spirit. I should
not like to leave out the tobacco in this good change that was wrought in
him. However, he presently astonished Evan by pulling up his horses, and
crying that he was on his way to Hillford to bait, and saw no reason why
he should not take a lift that part of the road, at all events. Evan
thanked him briefly, but declined, and paced on with his head bent.

'It won't cost you nothing-not a sixpence!' the postillion sang out,
pursuing him. 'Come, sir! be a man! I ain't a hintin' at anything--jump
in.'

Evan again declined, and looked out for a side path to escape the fellow,
whose bounty was worse to him than his abuse, and whose mention of the
sixpence was unlucky.

'Dash it!' cried the postillion, 'you're going down to a funeral--I think
you said your father's, sir--you may as well try and get there
respectable--as far as I go. It's one to me whether you're in or out; the
horses won't feel it, and I do wish you'd take a lift and welcome. It's
because you're too much of a gentleman to be beholden to a poor man, I
suppose!'

Evan's young pride may have had a little of that base mixture in it, and
certainly he would have preferred that the invitation had not been made
to him; but he was capable of appreciating what the rejection of a piece
of friendliness involved, and as he saw that the man was sincere, he did
violence to himself, and said: 'Very well; then I'll jump in.'

The postillion was off his horse in a twinkling, and trotted his bandy
legs to undo the door, as to a gentleman who paid. This act of service
Evan valued.

'Suppose I were to ask you to take the sixpence now?' he said, turning
round, with one foot on the step.

'Well, sir,' the postillion sent his hat aside to answer. 'I don't want
it--I'd rather not have it; but there! I'll take it--dash the sixpence!
and we'll cry quits.'

Evan, surprised and pleased with him, dropped the bit of money in his
hand, saying: 'It will fill a pipe for you. While you 're smoking it,
think of me as in your debt. You're the only man I ever owed a penny to.'

The postillion put it in a side pocket apart, and observed: 'A sixpence
kindly meant is worth any crown-piece that's grudged--that it is! In you
jump, sir. It's a jolly night!'

Thus may one, not a conscious sage, play the right tune on this human
nature of ours: by forbearance, put it in the wrong; and then, by not
refusing the burden of an obligation, confer something better. The
instrument is simpler than we are taught to fancy. But it was doubtless
owing to a strong emotion in his soul, as well as to the stuff he was
made of, that the youth behaved as he did. We are now and then above our
own actions; seldom on a level with them. Evan, I dare say, was long in
learning to draw any gratification from the fact that he had achieved
without money the unparalleled conquest of a man. Perhaps he never knew
what immediate influence on his fortune this episode effected.

At Hillford they went their different ways. The postillion wished him
good speed, and Evan shook his hand. He did so rather abruptly, for the
postillion was fumbling at his pocket, and evidently rounding about a
proposal in his mind.

My gentleman has now the road to himself. Money is the clothing of a
gentleman: he may wear it well or ill. Some, you will mark, carry great
quantities of it gracefully: some, with a stinted supply, present a
decent appearance: very few, I imagine, will bear inspection, who are
absolutely stripped of it. All, save the shameless, are toiling to escape
that trial. My gentleman, treading the white highway across the solitary
heaths, that swell far and wide to the moon, is, by the postillion, who
has seen him, pronounced no sham. Nor do I think the opinion of any man
worthless, who has had the postillion's authority for speaking. But it
is, I am told, a finer test to embellish much gentleman-apparel, than to
walk with dignity totally unadorned. This simply tries the soundness of
our faculties: that tempts them in erratic directions. It is the
difference between active and passive excellence. As there is hardly any
situation, however, so interesting to reflect upon as that of a man
without a penny in his pocket, and a gizzard full of pride, we will leave
Mr. Evan Harrington to what fresh adventures may befall him, walking
toward the funeral plumes of the firs, under the soft midsummer flush,
westward, where his father lies.




CHAPTER VII

MOTHER AND SON

Rare as epic song is the man who is thorough in what he does. And happily
so; for in life he subjugates us, and he makes us bondsmen to his ashes.
It was in the order of things that the great Mel should be borne to his
final resting-place by a troop of creditors. You have seen (since the
occasion demands a pompous simile) clouds that all day cling about the
sun, and, in seeking to obscure him, are compelled to blaze in his livery
at fall of night they break from him illumined, hang mournfully above
him, and wear his natural glories long after he is gone. Thus, then,
these worthy fellows, faithful to him to the dust, fulfilled Mel's
triumphant passage amongst them, and closed his career.

To regale them when they returned, Mrs. Mel, whose mind was not intent on
greatness, was occupied in spreading meat and wine. Mrs. Fiske assisted
her, as well as she could, seeing that one hand was entirely engaged by
her handkerchief. She had already stumbled, and dropped a glass, which
had brought on her sharp condemnation from her aunt, who bade her sit
down, or go upstairs to have her cry out, and then return to be
serviceable.

'Oh! I can't help it!' sobbed Mrs. Fiske. 'That he should be carried
away, and none of his children to see him the last time! I can understand
Louisa--and Harriet, too, perhaps? But why could not Caroline? And that
they should be too fine ladies to let their brother come and bury his
father. Oh! it does seem----'

Mrs. Fiske fell into a chair, and surrendered to grief.

'Where is the cold tongue?' said Mrs. Mel to Sally, the maid, in a brief
under-voice.

'Please mum, Jacko----!'

'He must be whipped. You are a careless slut.'

'Please, I can't think of everybody and everything, and poor master----'

Sally plumped on a seat, and took sanctuary under her apron. Mrs. Mel
glanced at the pair, continuing her labour.

'Oh, aunt, aunt!' cried Mrs. Fiske, 'why didn't you put it off for
another day, to give Evan a chance?'

'Master 'd have kept another two days, he would!' whimpered Sally.

'Oh, aunt! to think!' cried Mrs. Fiske.

'And his coffin not bearin' of his spurs!' whimpered Sally.

Mrs. Mel interrupted them by commanding Sally to go to the drawing-room,
and ask a lady there, of the name of Mrs. Wishaw, whether she would like
to have some lunch sent up to her. Mrs. Fiske was requested to put towels
in Evan's bedroom.

'Yes, aunt, if you're not infatuated!' said Mrs. Fiske, as she prepared
to obey; while Sally, seeing that her public exhibition of sorrow and
sympathy could be indulged but an instant longer, unwound herself for a
violent paroxysm, blurting between stops:

'If he'd ony've gone to his last bed comfortable! . . . If he'd ony 've
been that decent as not for to go to his last bed with his clothes on!
. . . If he'd ony've had a comfortable sheet! . . . It makes a woman feel
cold to think of him full dressed there, as if he was goin' to be a
soldier on the Day o' Judgement!'

To let people speak was a maxim of Mrs. Mel's, and a wise one for any
form of society when emotions are very much on the surface. She continued
her arrangements quietly, and, having counted the number of plates and
glasses, and told off the guests on her fingers, she, sat down to await
them.

The first one who entered the room was her son.

'You have come,' said Mrs. Mel, flushing slightly, but otherwise
outwardly calm.

'You didn't suppose I should stay away from you, mother?'

Evan kissed her cheek.

'I knew you would not.'

Mrs. Mel examined him with those eyes of hers that compassed objects in a
single glance. She drew her finger on each side of her upper lip, and
half smiled, saying:

'That won't do here.'

'What?' asked Evan, and proceeded immediately to make inquiries about her
health, which she satisfied with a nod.

'You saw him lowered, Van?'

'Yes, mother.'

'Then go and wash yourself, for you are dirty, and then come and take
your place at the head of the table.'

'Must I sit here, mother?'

'Without a doubt--you must. You know your room. Quick!'

In this manner their first interview passed.

Mrs. Fiske rushed in to exclaim:

'So, you were right, aunt--he has come. I met him on the stairs. Oh! how
like dear uncle Mel he looks, in the militia, with that moustache. I just
remember him as a child; and, oh, what a gentleman he is!'

At the end of the sentence Mrs. Mel's face suddenly darkened: she said,
in a deep voice:

'Don't dare to talk that nonsense before him, Ann.'

Mrs. Fiske looked astonished.

'What have I done, aunt?'

'He shan't be ruined by a parcel of fools,' said Mrs. Mel. 'There, go!
Women have no place here.'

'How the wretches can force themselves to touch a morsel, after this
morning!' Mrs. Fiske exclaimed, glancing at the table.

'Men must eat,' said Mrs. Mel.

The mourners were heard gathering outside the door. Mrs. Fiske escaped
into the kitchen. Mrs. Mel admitted them into the parlour, bowing much
above the level of many of the heads that passed her.

Assembled were Messrs. Barnes, Kilne, and Grossby, whom we know; Mr.
Doubleday, the ironmonger; Mr. Joyce, the grocer; Mr. Perkins, commonly
called Lawyer Perkins; Mr. Welbeck, the pier-master of Lymport;
Bartholomew Fiske; Mr. Coxwell, a Fallow field maltster, brewer, and
farmer; creditors of various dimensions, all of them. Mr. Goren coming
last, behind his spectacles.

'My son will be with you directly, to preside,' said Mrs. Mel. 'Accept my
thanks for the respect you have shown my husband. I wish you good
morning.'

'Morning, ma'am,' answered several voices, and Mrs. Mel retired.

The mourners then set to work to relieve their hats of the appendages of
crape. An undertaker's man took possession of the long black cloaks. The
gloves were generally pocketed.

'That's my second black pair this year,' said Joyce.

'They'll last a time to come. I don't need to buy gloves while neighbours
pop off.'

'Undertakers' gloves seem to me as if they're made for mutton fists,'
remarked Welbeck; upon which Kilne nudged Barnes, the butcher, with a
sharp 'Aha!' and Barnes observed:

'Oh! I never wear 'em--they does for my boys on Sundays. I smoke a pipe
at home.'

The Fallow field farmer held his length of crape aloft and inquired:
'What shall do with this?'

'Oh, you keep it,' said one or two.

Coxwell rubbed his chin. 'Don't like to rob the widder.'

'What's left goes to the undertaker?' asked Grossby.

'To be sure,' said Barnes; and Kilne added: 'It's a job': Lawyer Perkins
ejaculating confidently, 'Perquisites of office, gentlemen; perquisites
of office!' which settled the dispute and appeased every conscience.

A survey of the table ensued. The mourners felt hunger, or else thirst;
but had not, it appeared, amalgamated the two appetites as yet. Thirst
was the predominant declaration; and Grossby, after an examination of the
decanters, unctuously deduced the fact, which he announced, that port and
sherry were present.

'Try the port,' said Kilne.

'Good?' Barnes inquired.

A very intelligent 'I ought to know,' with a reserve of regret at the
extension of his intimacy with the particular vintage under that roof,
was winked by Kilne.

Lawyer Perkins touched the arm of a mourner about to be experimental on
Kilne's port--

'I think we had better wait till young Mr. Harrington takes the table,
don't you see?'

'Yes,-ah!' croaked Goren. 'The head of the family, as the saying goes!'

'I suppose we shan't go into business to-day?' Joyce carelessly observed.

Lawyer Perkins answered:

'No. You can't expect it. Mr. Harrington has led me to anticipate that he
will appoint a day. Don't you see?'

'Oh! I see,' returned Joyce. 'I ain't in such a hurry. What's he doing?'

Doubleday, whose propensities were waggish, suggested 'shaving,' but half
ashamed of it, since the joke missed, fell to as if he were soaping his
face, and had some trouble to contract his jaw.

The delay in Evan's attendance on the guests of the house was caused by
the fact that Mrs. Mel had lain in wait for him descending, to warn him
that he must treat them with no supercilious civility, and to tell him
partly the reason why. On hearing the potential relations in which they
stood toward the estate of his father, Evan hastily and with the
assurance of a son of fortune, said they should be paid.

'That's what they would like to hear,' said Mrs. Mel. 'You may just
mention it when they're going to leave. Say you will fix a day to meet
them.'

'Every farthing!' pursued Evan, on whom the tidings were beginning to
operate. 'What! debts? my poor father!'

'And a thumping sum, Van. You will open your eyes wider.'

'But it shall be paid, mother,--it shall be paid. Debts? I hate them. I'd
slave night and day to pay them.'

Mrs. Mel spoke in a more positive tense: 'And so will I, Van. Now, go.'

It mattered little to her what sort of effect on his demeanour her
revelation produced, so long as the resolve she sought to bring him to
was nailed in his mind; and she was a woman to knock and knock again,
till it was firmly fixed there. With a strong purpose, and no plans,
there were few who could resist what, in her circle, she willed; not even
a youth who would gaily have marched to the scaffold rather than stand
behind a counter. A purpose wedded to plans may easily suffer shipwreck;
but an unfettered purpose that moulds circumstances as they arise,
masters us, and is terrible. Character melts to it, like metal in the
steady furnace. The projector of plots is but a miserable gambler and
votary of chances. Of a far higher quality is the will that can subdue
itself to wait, and lay no petty traps for opportunity. Poets may fable
of such a will, that it makes the very heavens conform to it; or, I may
add, what is almost equal thereto, one who would be a gentleman, to
consent to be a tailor. The only person who ever held in his course
against Mrs. Mel, was Mel,--her husband; but, with him, she was under the
physical fascination of her youth, and it never left her. In her heart
she barely blamed him. What he did, she took among other inevitable
matters.

The door closed upon Evan, and waiting at the foot, of the stairs a
minute to hear how he was received, Mrs. Mel went to the kitchen and
called the name of Dandy, which brought out an ill-built, low-browed,
small man, in a baggy suit of black, who hopped up to her with a surly
salute. Dandy was a bird Mrs. Mel had herself brought down, and she had
for him something of a sportsman's regard for his victim. Dandy was the
cleaner of boots and runner of errands in the household of Melchisedec,
having originally entered it on a dark night by the cellar. Mrs. Mel, on
that occasion, was sleeping in her dressing-gown, to be ready to give the
gallant night-hawk, her husband, the service he might require on his
return to the nest. Hearing a suspicious noise below, she rose, and
deliberately loaded a pair of horse-pistols, weapons Mel had worn in his
holsters in the heroic days gone; and with these she stepped downstairs
straight to the cellar, carrying a lantern at her girdle. She could not
only load, but present and fire. Dandy was foremost in stating that she
called him forth steadily, three times, before the pistol was discharged.
He admitted that he was frightened, and incapable of speech, at the
apparition of the tall, terrific woman. After the third time of asking he
had the ball lodged in his leg and fell. Mrs. Mel was in the habit of
bearing heavier weights than Dandy. She made no ado about lugging him to
a chamber, where, with her own hands (for this woman had some slight
knowledge of surgery, and was great in herbs and drugs) she dressed his
wound, and put him to bed; crying contempt (ever present in Dandy's
memory) at such a poor creature undertaking the work of housebreaker.
Taught that he really was a poor creature for the work, Dandy, his
nursing over, begged to be allowed to stop and wait on Mrs. Mel; and she
who had, like many strong natures, a share of pity for the objects she
despised, did not cast him out. A jerk in his gait, owing to the bit of
lead Mrs. Mel had dropped into him, and a little, perhaps, to her
self-satisfied essay in surgical science on his person, earned him the
name he went by.

When her neighbours remonstrated with her for housing a reprobate, Mrs.
Mel would say: 'Dandy is well-fed and well-physicked: there's no harm in
Dandy'; by which she may have meant that the food won his gratitude, and
the physic reduced his humours. She had observed human nature. At any
rate, Dandy was her creature; and the great Mel himself rallied her about
her squire.

'When were you drunk last?' was Mrs. Mel's address to Dandy, as he stood
waiting for orders.

He replied to it in an altogether injured way:

'There, now; you've been and called me away from my dinner to ask me
that. Why, when I had the last chance, to be sure.'

'And you were at dinner in your new black suit?'

'Well,' growled Dandy, 'I borrowed Sally's apron. Seems I can't please
ye.'

Mrs. Mel neither enjoined nor cared for outward forms of respect, where
she was sure of complete subserviency. If Dandy went beyond the limits,
she gave him an extra dose. Up to the limits he might talk as he pleased,
in accordance with Mrs. Mel's maxim, that it was a necessary relief to
all talking creatures.

'Now, take off your apron,' she said, 'and wash your hands, dirty pig,
and go and wait at table in there'; she pointed to the parlour-door:
'Come straight to me when everybody has left.'

'Well, there I am with the bottles again,' returned Dandy. 'It 's your
fault this time, mind! I'll come as straight as I can.'

Dandy turned away to perform her bidding, and Mrs. Mel ascended to the
drawing-room to sit with Mrs. Wishaw, who was, as she told all who chose
to hear, an old flame of Mel's, and was besides, what Mrs. Mel thought
more of, the wife of Mel's principal creditor, a wholesale dealer in
cloth, resident in London.

The conviviality of the mourners did not disturb the house. Still, men
who are not accustomed to see the colour of wine every day, will sit and
enjoy it, even upon solemn occasions, and the longer they sit the more
they forget the matter that has brought them together. Pleading their
wives and shops, however, they released Evan from his miserable office
late in the afternoon.

His mother came down to him,--and saying, 'I see how you did the
journey--you walked it,' told him to follow her.

'Yes, mother,' Evan yawned, 'I walked part of the way. I met a fellow in
a gig about ten miles out of Fallow field, and he gave me a lift to
Flatsham. I just reached Lymport in time, thank Heaven! I wouldn't have
missed that! By the way, I've satisfied these men.'

'Oh!' said Mrs. Mel.

'They wanted--one or two of them--what a penance it is to have to sit
among those people an hour!--they wanted to ask me about the business,
but I silenced them. I told them to meet me here this day week.'

Mrs. Mel again said 'Oh!' and, pushing into one of the upper rooms,
'Here's your bedroom, Van, just as you left it.'

'Ah, so it is,' muttered Evan, eyeing a print. 'The Douglas and the
Percy: "he took the dead man by the hand." What an age it seems since I
last saw that. There's Sir Hugh Montgomery on horseback--he hasn't moved.
Don't you remember my father calling it the Battle of Tit-for-Tat?
Gallant Percy! I know he wished he had lived in those days of knights and
battles.'

'It does not much signify whom one has to make clothes for,' observed
Mrs. Mel. Her son happily did not mark her.

'I think we neither of us were made for the days of pence and pounds,' he
continued. 'Now, mother, sit down, and talk to me about him. Did he
mention me? Did he give me his blessing? I hope he did not suffer. I'd
have given anything to press his hand,' and looking wistfully at the
Percy lifting the hand of Douglas dead, Evan's eyes filled with big
tears.

'He suffered very little,' returned Mrs. Mel, 'and his last words were
about you.'

'What were they?' Evan burst out.

'I will tell you another time. Now undress, and go to bed. When I talk to
you, Van, I want a cool head to listen. You do nothing but yawn
yard-measures.'

The mouth of the weary youth instinctively snapped short the abhorred
emblem.

'Here, I will help you, Van.'

In spite of his remonstrances and petitions for talk, she took off his
coat and waistcoat, contemptuously criticizing the cloth of foreign
tailors and their absurd cut.

'Have you heard from Louisa?' asked Evan.

'Yes, yes--about your sisters by-and-by. Now, be good, and go to bed.'

She still treated him like a boy, whom she was going to force to the
resolution of a man.

Dandy's sleeping-room was on the same floor as Evan's. Thither, when she
had quitted her son, she directed her steps. She had heard Dandy tumble
up-stairs the moment his duties were over, and knew what to expect when
the bottles had been in his way; for drink made Dandy savage, and a
terror to himself. It was her command to him that, when he happened to
come across liquor, he should immediately seek his bedroom and bolt the
door, and Dandy had got the habit of obeying her. On this occasion he was
vindictive against her, seeing that she had delivered him over to his
enemy with malice prepense. A good deal of knocking, and summoning of
Dandy by name, was required before she was admitted, and the sight of her
did not delight him, as he testified.

'I 'm drunk!' he bawled. 'Will that do for ye?'

Mrs. Mel stood with her two hands crossed above her apron-string, noting
his sullen lurking eye with the calm of a tamer of beasts.

'You go out of the room; I'm drunk!' Dandy repeated, and pitched forward
on the bed-post, in the middle of an oath.

She understood that it was pure kindness on Dandy's part to bid her go
and be out of his reach; and therefore, on his becoming so abusive as to
be menacing, she, without a shade of anger, and in the most unruffled
manner, administered to him the remedy she had reserved, in the shape of
a smart box on the ear, which sent him flat to the floor. He rose, after
two or three efforts, quite subdued.

'Now, Dandy, sit on the edge of the bed.'

Dandy sat on the extreme edge, and Mrs. Mel pursued:

'Now, Dandy, tell me what your master said at the table.'

'Talked at 'em like a lord, he did,' said Dandy, stupidly consoling the
boxed ear.

'What were his words?'

Dandy's peculiarity was, that he never remembered anything save when
drunk, and Mrs. Mel's dose had rather sobered him. By degrees, scratching
at his head haltingly, he gave the context.

"'Gentlemen, I hear for the first time, you've claims against my poor
father. Nobody shall ever say he died, and any man was the worse for it.
I'll meet you next week, and I'll bind myself by law. Here's Lawyer
Perkins. No; Mr. Perkins. I'll pay off every penny. Gentlemen, look upon
me as your debtor, and not my father."'

Delivering this with tolerable steadiness, Dandy asked, 'Will that do?'

'That will do,' said Mrs. Mel. 'I'll send you up some tea presently. Lie
down, Dandy.'

The house was dark and silent when Evan, refreshed by his rest, descended
to seek his mother. She was sitting alone in the parlour. With a
tenderness which Mrs. Mel permitted rather than encouraged, Evan put his
arm round her neck, and kissed her many times. One of the symptoms of
heavy sorrow, a longing for the signs of love, made Evan fondle his
mother, and bend over her yearningly. Mrs. Mel said once: 'Dear Van; good
boy!' and quietly sat through his caresses.

'Sitting up for me, mother?' he whispered.

'Yes, Van; we may as well have our talk out.'

'Ah!' he took a chair close by her side, 'tell me my father's last
words.'

'He said he hoped you would never be a tailor.'

Evan's forehead wrinkled up. 'There's not much fear of that, then!'

His mother turned her face on him, and examined him with a rigorous
placidity; all her features seeming to bear down on him. Evan did not
like the look.

'You object to trade, Van?'

'Yes, decidedly, mother-hate it; but that's not what I want to talk to
you about. Didn't my father speak of me much?'

'He desired that you should wear his militia sword, if you got a
commission.'

'I have rather given up hope of the Army,' said Evan.

Mrs. Mel requested him to tell her what a colonel's full pay amounted to;
and again, the number of years it required, on a rough calculation, to
attain that grade. In reply to his statement she observed: 'A tailor
might realize twice the sum in a quarter of the time.'

'What if he does-double, or treble?' cried Evan, impetuously; and to
avoid the theme, and cast off the bad impression it produced on him, he
rubbed his hands, and said: 'I want to talk to you about my prospects,
mother.'

'What are they?' Mrs. Mel inquired.

The severity of her mien and sceptical coldness of her speech caused him
to inspect them suddenly, as if she had lent him her eyes. He put them
by, till the gold should recover its natural shine, saying: 'By the way,
mother, I 've written the half of a History of Portugal.'

'Have you?' said Mrs. Mel. 'For Louisa?'

'No, mother, of course not: to sell it. Albuquerque! what a splendid
fellow he was!'

Informing him that he knew she abominated foreign names, she said: 'And
your prospects are, writing Histories of Portugal?'

'No, mother. I was going to tell you, I expect a Government appointment.
Mr. Jocelyn likes my work--I think he likes me. You know, I was his
private secretary for ten months.'

'You write a good hand,' his mother interposed.

'And I'm certain I was born for diplomacy.'

'For an easy chair, and an ink-dish before you, and lacqueys behind.
What's to be your income, Van?'

Evan carelessly remarked that he must wait and see.

'A very proper thing to do,' said Mrs. Mel; for now that she had fixed
him to some explanation of his prospects, she could condescend in her
stiff way to banter.

Slightly touched by it, Evan pursued, half laughing, as men do who wish
to propitiate common sense on behalf of what seems tolerably absurd: 'It
's not the immediate income, you know, mother: one thinks of one's
future. In the diplomatic service, as Louisa says, you come to be known
to Ministers gradually, I mean. That is, they hear of you; and if you
show you have some capacity--Louisa wants me to throw it up in time, and
stand for Parliament. Andrew, she thinks, would be glad to help me to his
seat. Once in Parliament, and known to Ministers, you--your career is
open to you.'

In justice to Mr. Evan Harrington, it must be said, he built up this
extraordinary card-castle to dazzle his mother's mind: he had lost his
right grasp of her character for the moment, because of an undefined
suspicion of something she intended, and which sent him himself to take
refuge in those flimsy structures; while the very altitude he reached
beguiled his imagination, and made him hope to impress hers.

Mrs. Mel dealt it one fillip. 'And in the meantime how are you to live,
and pay the creditors?'

Though Evan answered cheerfully, 'Oh, they will wait, and I can live on
anything,' he was nevertheless floundering on the ground amid the ruins
of the superb edifice; and his mother, upright and rigid, continuing,
'You can live on anything, and they will wait, and call your father a
rogue,' he started, grievously bitten by one of the serpents of earth.

'Good heaven, mother! what are you saying?'

'That they will call your father a rogue, and will have a right to,' said
the relentless woman.

'Not while I live!' Evan exclaimed.

'You may stop one mouth with your fist, but you won't stop a dozen, Van.'

Evan jumped up and walked the room.

'What am I to do?' he cried. 'I will pay everything. I will bind myself
to pay every farthing. What more can I possibly do?'

'Make the money,' said Mrs. Mel's deep voice.

Evan faced her: 'My dear mother, you are very unjust and inconsiderate. I
have been working and doing my best. I promise--what do the debts amount
to?'

'Something like L5000 in all, Van.'

'Very well.' Youth is not alarmed by the sound of big sums. 'Very well--I
will pay it.'

Evan looked as proud as if he had just clapped down the full amount on
the table.

'Out of the History of Portugal, half written, and the prospect of a
Government appointment?'

Mrs. Mel raised her eyelids to him.

'In time-in time, mother!'

'Mention your proposal to the creditors when you meet them this day
week,' she said.

Neither of them spoke for several minutes. Then Evan came close to her,
saying:

'What is it you want of me, mother?'

'I want nothing, Van--I can support myself.'

'But what would you have me do, mother?'

'Be honest; do your duty, and don't be a fool about it.'

'I will try,' he rejoined. 'You tell me to make the money. Where and how
can I make it? I am perfectly willing to work.'

'In this house,' said Mrs. Mel; and, as this was pretty clear speaking,
she stood up to lend her figure to it.

'Here?' faltered Evan. 'What! be a ----'

'Tailor!' The word did not sting her tongue.

'I? Oh, that's quite impossible!' said Evan. And visions of leprosy, and
Rose shrinking her skirts from contact with him, shadowed out and away in
his mind.

'Understand your choice!' Mrs. Mel imperiously spoke. 'What are brains
given you for? To be played the fool with by idiots and women? You have
L5000 to pay to save your father from being called a rogue. You can only
make the money in one way, which is open to you. This business might
produce a thousand pounds a-year and more. In seven or eight years you
may clear your father's name, and live better all the time than many of
your bankrupt gentlemen. You have told the creditors you will pay them.
Do you think they're gaping fools, to be satisfied by a History of
Portugal? If you refuse to take the business at once, they will sell me
up, and quite right too. Understand your choice. There's Mr. Goren has
promised to have you in London a couple of months, and teach you what he
can. He is a kind friend. Would any of your gentlemen acquaintance do the
like for you? Understand your choice. You will be a beggar--the son of a
rogue--or an honest man who has cleared his father's name!'

During this strenuously uttered allocution, Mrs. Mel, though her chest
heaved but faintly against her crossed hands, showed by the dilatation of
her eyes, and the light in them, that she felt her words. There is that
in the aspect of a fine frame breathing hard facts, which, to a youth who
has been tumbled headlong from his card-castles and airy fabrics, is
masterful, and like the pressure of a Fate. Evan drooped his head.

'Now,' said Mrs. Mel, 'you shall have some supper.'

Evan told her he could not eat.

'I insist upon your eating,' said Mrs. Mel; 'empty stomachs are foul
counsellors.'

'Mother! do you want to drive me mad?' cried Evan.

She looked at him to see whether the string she held him by would bear
the slight additional strain: decided not to press a small point.

'Then go to bed and sleep on it,' she said--sure of him--and gave her
cheek for his kiss, for she never performed the operation, but kept her
mouth, as she remarked, for food and speech, and not for slobbering
mummeries.

Evan returned to his solitary room. He sat on the bed and tried to think,
oppressed by horrible sensations of self-contempt, that caused whatever
he touched to sicken him.

There were the Douglas and the Percy on the wall. It was a happy and a
glorious time, was it not, when men lent each other blows that killed
outright; when to be brave and cherish noble feelings brought honour;
when strength of arm and steadiness of heart won fortune; when the fair
stars of earth--sweet women--wakened and warmed the love of squires of
low degree. This legacy of the dead man's hand! Evan would have paid it
with his blood; but to be in bondage all his days to it; through it to
lose all that was dear to him; to wear the length of a loathed
existence!--we should pardon a young man's wretchedness at the prospect,
for it was in a time before our joyful era of universal equality. Yet he
never cast a shade of blame upon his father.

The hours moved on, and he found himself staring at his small candle,
which struggled more and more faintly with the morning light, like his
own flickering ambition against the facts of life.




CHAPTER VIII

INTRODUCES AN ECCENTRIC

At the Aurora--one of those rare antiquated taverns, smelling of
comfortable time and solid English fare, that had sprung up in the great
coffee days, when taverns were clubs, and had since subsisted on the
attachment of steady bachelor Templars there had been dismay, and even
sorrow, for a month. The most constant patron of the establishment--an
old gentleman who had dined there for seven-and-twenty years, four days
in the week, off dishes dedicated to the particular days, and had grown
grey with the landlady, the cook, and the head-waiter--this old gentleman
had abruptly withheld his presence. Though his name, his residence, his
occupation, were things only to be speculated on at the Aurora, he was
very well known there, and as men are best to be known: that is to say,
by their habits. Some affection for him also was felt. The landlady
looked on him as a part of the house. The cook and the waiter were
accustomed to receive acceptable compliments from him monthly. His
precise words, his regular ancient jokes, his pint of Madeira and
after-pint of Port, his antique bow to the landlady, passing out and in,
his method of spreading his table-napkin on his lap and looking up at the
ceiling ere he fell to, and how he talked to himself during the repast,
and indulged in short chuckles, and the one look of perfect felicity that
played over his features when he had taken his first sip of Port--these
were matters it pained them at the Aurora to have to remember.

For three weeks the resolution not to regard him as of the past was
general. The Aurora was the old gentleman's home. Men do not play truant
from home at sixty years of age. He must, therefore, be seriously
indisposed. The kind heart of the landlady fretted to think he might have
no soul to nurse and care for him; but she kept his corner near the
fire-place vacant, and took care that his pint of Madeira was there. The
belief was gaining ground that he had gone, and that nothing but his
ghost would ever sit there again. Still the melancholy ceremony
continued: for the landlady was not without a secret hope, that in spite
of his reserve and the mystery surrounding him, he would have sent her a
last word. The cook and head-waiter, interrogated as to their dealings
with the old gentleman, testified solemnly to the fact of their having
performed their duty by him. They would not go against their interests so
much as to forget one of his ways, they said-taking oath, as it were, by
their lower nature, in order to be credited: an instinct men have of one
another. The landlady could not contradict them, for the old gentleman
had made no complaint; but then she called to memory that fifteen years
back, in such and such a year, Wednesday's, dish had been, by shameful
oversight, furnished him for Tuesday's, and he had eaten it quietly, but
refused his Port; which pathetic event had caused alarm and inquiry, when
the error was discovered, and apologized for, the old gentleman merely
saying, 'Don't let it happen again.' Next day he drank his Port, as
usual, and the wheels of the Aurora went smoothly. The landlady was thus
justified in averring that something had been done by somebody, albeit
unable to point to anything specific. Women, who are almost as deeply
bound to habit as old gentlemen, possess more of its spiritual element,
and are warned by dreams, omens, creepings of the flesh, unwonted chills,
suicide of china, and other shadowing signs, when a break is to be
anticipated, or, has occurred. The landlady of the Aurora tavern was
visited by none of these, and with that beautiful trust which habit
gives, and which boastful love or vainer earthly qualities would fail in
effecting, she ordered that the pint of Madeira should stand from six
o'clock in the evening till seven--a small monument of confidence in him
who was at one instant the 'poor old dear'; at another, the 'naughty old
gad-about'; further, the 'faithless old-good-for-nothing'; and again, the
'blessed pet' of the landlady's parlour, alternately and indiscriminately
apostrophized by herself, her sister, and daughter.

On the last day of the month a step was heard coming up the long alley
which led from the riotous scrambling street to the plentiful cheerful
heart of the Aurora. The landlady knew the step. She checked the natural
flutterings of her ribbons, toned down the strong simper that was on her
lips, rose, pushed aside her daughter, and, as the step approached,
curtsied composedly. Old Habit lifted his hat, and passed. With the same
touching confidence in the Aurora that the Aurora had in him, he went
straight to his corner, expressed no surprise at his welcome by the
Madeira, and thereby apparently indicated that his appearance should
enjoy a similar immunity.

As of old, he called 'Jonathan!' and was not to be disturbed till he did
so. Seeing that Jonathan smirked and twiddled his napkin, the old
gentleman added, 'Thursday!'

But Jonathan, a man, had not his mistress's keen intuition of the
deportment necessitated by the case, or was incapable of putting the
screw upon weak excited nature, for he continued to smirk, and was
remarking how glad he was, he was sure, and something he had dared to
think and almost to fear, when the old gentleman called to him, as if he
were at the other end of the room, 'Will you order Thursday, or not,
sir?' Whereat Jonathan flew, and two or three cosy diners glanced up from
their plates, or the paper, smiled, and pursued their capital occupation.

'Glad to see me!' the old gentleman muttered, querulously. 'Of course,
glad to see a customer! Why do you tell me that? Talk! tattle! might as
well have a woman to wait--just!'

He wiped his forehead largely with his handkerchief; as one whom Calamity
hunted a little too hard in summer weather.

'No tumbling-room for the wine, too!'

That was his next grievance. He changed the pint of Madeira from his left
side to his right, and went under his handkerchief again, feverishly. The
world was severe with this old gentleman.

'Ah! clock wrong now!'

He leaned back like a man who can no longer carry his burdens, informing
Jonathan, on his coming up to place the roll of bread and firm butter,
that he was forty seconds too fast, as if it were a capital offence, and
he deserved to step into Eternity for outstripping Time.

'But, I daresay, you don't understand the importance of a minute,' said
the old gentleman, bitterly. 'Not you, or any of you. Better if we had
run a little ahead of your minute, perhaps--and the rest of you! Do you
think you can cancel the mischief that's done in the world in that
minute, sir, by hurrying ahead like that? Tell me!'

Rather at a loss, Jonathan scanned the clock seriously, and observed that
it was not quite a minute too fast.

The old gentleman pulled out his watch. He grunted that a lying clock was
hateful to him; subsequently sinking into contemplation of his thumbs,--a
sign known to Jonathan as indicative of the old gentleman's system having
resolved, in spite of external outrages, to be fortified with calm to
meet the repast.

It is not fair to go behind an eccentric; but the fact was, this old
gentleman was slightly ashamed of his month's vagrancy and cruel conduct,
and cloaked his behaviour toward the Aurora, in all the charges he could
muster against it. He was very human, albeit an odd form of the race.

Happily for his digestion of Thursday, the cook, warned by Jonathan, kept
the old gentleman's time, not the Aurora's: and the dinner was correct;
the dinner was eaten in peace; he began to address his plate vigorously,
poured out his Madeira, and chuckled, as the familiar ideas engendered by
good wine were revived in him. Jonathan reported at the bar that the old
gentleman was all right again.

One would like here to pause, while our worthy ancient feeds, and indulge
in a short essay on Habit, to show what a sacred and admirable thing it
is that makes flimsy Time substantial, and consolidates his triple life.
It is proof that we have come to the end of dreams and Time's delusions,
and are determined to sit down at Life's feast and carve for ourselves.
Its day is the child of yesterday, and has a claim on to-morrow. Whereas
those who have no such plan of existence and sum of their wisdom to show,
the winds blow them as they list. Consider, then, mercifully the wrath of
him on whom carelessness or forgetfulness has brought a snap in the links
of Habit. You incline to scorn him because, his slippers misplaced, or
asparagus not on his table the first day of a particular Spring month, he
gazes blankly and sighs as one who saw the End. To you it may appear
small. You call to him to be a man. He is: but he is also an immortal,
and his confidence in unceasing orderly progression is rudely dashed.

But the old gentleman has finished his dinner and his Madeira, and says:
'Now, Jonathan, "thock" the Port!'--his joke when matters have gone well:
meant to express the sound of the uncorking, probably. The habit of
making good jokes is rare, as you know: old gentlemen have not yet
attained to it: nevertheless Jonathan enjoys this one, which has seen a
generation in and out, for he knows its purport to be, 'My heart is
open.'

And now is a great time with this old gentleman. He sips, and in his eyes
the world grows rosy, and he exchanges mute or monosyllable salutes here
and there. His habit is to avoid converse; but he will let a light remark
season meditation.

He says to Jonathan: 'The bill for the month.'

'Yes, sir,' Jonathan replies. 'Would you not prefer, sir, to have the
items added on to the month ensuing?'

'I asked you for the bill of the month,' said the old gentleman, with an
irritated voice and a twinkle in his eye.

Jonathan bowed; but his aspect betrayed perplexity, and that perplexity
was soon shared by the landlady for Jonathan said, he was convinced the
old gentleman intended to pay for sixteen days, and the landlady could
not bring her hand to charge him for more than two. Here was the dilemma
foreseen by the old gentleman, and it added vastly to the flavour of the
Port.

Pleasantly tickled, he sat gazing at his glass, and let the minutes fly.
He knew the part he would act in his little farce. If charged for the
whole month, he would peruse the bill deliberately, and perhaps cry out
'Hulloa?' and then snap at Jonathan for the interposition of a remark.
But if charged for two days, he would wish to be told whether they were
demented, those people outside, and scornfully return the bill to
Jonathan.

A slap on the shoulder, and a voice: 'Found you at last, Tom!' violently
shattered the excellent plot, and made the old gentleman start. He beheld
Mr. Andrew Cogglesby.

'Drinking Port, Tom?' said Mr. Andrew. 'I 'll join you': and he sat down
opposite to him, rubbing his hands and pushing back his hair.

Jonathan entering briskly with the bill, fell back a step, in alarm. The
old gentleman, whose inviolacy was thus rudely assailed, sat staring at
the intruder, his mouth compressed, and three fingers round his glass,
which it' was doubtful whether he was not going to hurl at him.

'Waiter!' Mr. Andrew carelessly hailed, 'a pint of this Port, if you
please.'

Jonathan sought the countenance of the old gentleman.

'Do you hear, sir?' cried the latter, turning his wrath on him. 'Another
pint!' He added: 'Take back the bill'; and away went Jonathan to relate
fresh marvels to his mistress.

Mr. Andrew then addressed the old gentleman in the most audacious manner.

'Astonished to see me here, Tom? Dare say you are. I knew you came
somewhere in this neighbourhood, and, as I wanted to speak to you very
particularly, and you wouldn't be visible till Monday, why, I spied into
two or three places, and here I am.'

You might see they were brothers. They had the same bushy eyebrows, the
same healthy colour in their cheeks, the same thick shoulders, and brisk
way of speaking, and clear, sharp, though kindly, eyes; only Tom was cast
in larger proportions than Andrew, and had gotten the grey furniture of
Time for his natural wear. Perhaps, too, a cross in early life had a
little twisted him, and set his mouth in a rueful bunch, out of which
occasionally came biting things. Mr. Andrew carried his head up, and eyed
every man living with the benevolence of a patriarch, dashed with the
impudence of a London sparrow. Tom had a nagging air, and a trifle of
acridity on his broad features. Still, any one at a glance could have
sworn they were brothers, and Jonathan unhesitatingly proclaimed it at
the Aurora bar.

Mr. Andrew's hands were working together, and at them, and at his face,
the old gentleman continued to look with a firmly interrogating air.

'Want to know what brings me, Tom? I'll tell you presently. Hot,--isn't
it?'

'What the deuce are you taking exercise for?' the old gentleman burst
out, and having unlocked his mouth, he began to puff and alter his
posture.

'There you are, thawed in a minute!' said Mr. Andrew. 'What's an
eccentric? a child grown grey. It isn't mine; I read it somewhere. Ah,
here's the Port! good, I'll warrant.'

Jonathan deferentially uncorked, excessive composure on his visage. He
arranged the table-cloth to a nicety, fixed the bottle with exactness,
and was only sent scudding by the old gentleman's muttering of:
'Eavesdropping pie!' followed by a short, 'Go!' and even then he must
delay to sweep off a particular crumb.

'Good it is!' said Mr. Andrew, rolling the flavour on his lips, as he put
down his glass. 'I follow you in Port, Tom. Elder brother!'

The old gentleman also drank, and was mollified enough to reply: 'Shan't
follow you in Parliament.'

'Haven't forgiven that yet, Tom?'

'No great harm done when you're silent.'

'Capital Port!' said Mr. Andrew, replenishing the glasses. 'I ought to
have inquired where they kept the best Port. I might have known you'd
stick by it. By the way, talking of Parliament, there's talk of a new
election for Fallow field. You have a vote there. Will you give it to
Jocelyn? There's talk of his standing.

'If he'll wear petticoats, I'll give him my vote.'

'There you go, Tom!'

'I hate masquerades. You're penny trumpets of the women. That tattle
comes from the bed-curtains. When a petticoat steps forward I give it my
vote, or else I button it up in my pocket.'

This was probably one of the longest speeches he had ever delivered at
the Aurora. There was extra Port in it. Jonathan, who from his place of
observation noted the length of time it occupied, though he was unable to
gather the context, glanced at Mr. Andrew with a sly satisfaction. Mr.
Andrew, laughing, signalled for another pint.

'So you've come here for my vote, have you?' said Mr. Tom.

'Why, no; not exactly that,' Mr. Andrew answered, blinking and passing it
by.

Jonathan brought the fresh pint, and Tom filled for himself, drank, and
said emphatically, and with a confounding voice:

'Your women have been setting you on me, sir!'

Andrew protested that he was entirely mistaken.

'You're the puppet of your women!'

'Well, Tom, not in this instance. Here's to the bachelors, and brother
Tom at their head!'

It seemed to be Andrew's object to help his companion to carry a certain
quantity of Port, as if he knew a virtue it had to subdue him, and to
have fixed on a particular measure that he should hold before he
addressed him specially. Arrived at this, he said:

'Look here, Tom. I know your ways. I shouldn't have bothered you here; I
never have before; but we couldn't very well talk it over in business
hours; and besides you're never at the Brewery till Monday, and the
matter's rather urgent.'

'Why don't you speak like that in Parliament?' the old man interposed.

'Because Parliament isn't my brother,' replied Mr. Andrew. 'You know,
Tom, you never quite took to my wife's family.'

'I'm not a match for fine ladies, Nan.'

'Well, Harriet would have taken to you, Tom, and will now, if you 'll let
her. Of course, it 's a pity if she 's ashamed of--hem! You found it out
about the Lymport people, Tom, and, you've kept the secret and respected
her feelings, and I thank you for it. Women are odd in those things, you
know. She mustn't imagine I 've heard a whisper. I believe it would kill
her.'

The old gentleman shook silently.

'Do you want me to travel over the kingdom, hawking her for the daughter
of a marquis?'

'Now, don't joke, Tom. I'm serious. Are you not a Radical at heart? Why
do you make such a set against the poor women? What do we spring from?'

'I take off my hat, Nan, when I see a cobbler's stall.'

'And I, Tom, don't care a rush who knows it. Homo--something; but we
never had much schooling. We 've thriven, and should help those we can.
We've got on in the world . . .'

'Wife come back from Lymport?' sneered Tom.

Andrew hurriedly, and with some confusion, explained that she had not
been able to go, on account of the child.

'Account of the child!' his brother repeated, working his chin
contemptuously. 'Sisters gone?'

'They're stopping with us,' said Andrew, reddening.

'So the tailor was left to the kites and the crows. Ah! hum!' and Tom
chuckled.

'You're angry with me, Tom, for coming here,' said Andrew. 'I see what it
is. Thought how it would be! You're offended, old Tom.'

'Come where you like,' returned Tom, 'the place is open. It's a fool that
hopes for peace anywhere. They sent a woman here to wait on me, this day
month.'

'That's a shame!' said Mr. Andrew, propitiatingly. 'Well, never mind,
Tom: the women are sometimes in the way.--Evan went down to bury his
father. He's there now. You wouldn't see him when he was at the Brewery,
Tom. He's--upon my honour! he's a good young fellow.'

'A fine young gentleman, I've no doubt, Nan.'

'A really good lad, Tom. No nonsense. I've come here to speak to you
about him.'

Mr. Andrew drew a letter from his pocket, pursuing: 'Just throw aside
your prejudices, and read this. It's a letter I had from him this
morning. But first I must tell you how the case stands.'

'Know more than you can tell me, Nan,' said Tom, turning over the flavour
of a gulp of his wine.

'Well, then, just let me repeat it. He has been capitally educated; he
has always been used to good society: well, we mustn't sneer at it: good
society's better than bad, you'll allow. He has refined tastes: well, you
wouldn't like to live among crossing-sweepers, Tom. He 's clever and
accomplished, can speak and write in three languages: I wish I had his
abilities. He has good manners: well, Tom, you know you like them as well
as anybody. And now--but read for yourself.'

'Yah!' went old Tom. 'The women have been playing the fool with him since
he was a baby. I read his rigmarole? No.'

Mr. Andrew shrugged his shoulders, and opened the letter, saying: 'Well,
listen'; and then he coughed, and rapidly skimmed the introductory part.
'Excuses himself for addressing me formally--poor boy! Circumstances have
altered his position towards the world found his father's affairs in a
bad state: only chance of paying off father's debts to undertake
management of business, and bind himself to so much a year. But there,
Tom, if you won't read it, you miss the poor young fellow's character. He
says that he has forgotten his station: fancied he was superior to trade,
but hates debt; and will not allow anybody to throw dirt at his father's
name, while he can work to clear it; and will sacrifice his pride. Come,
Tom, that's manly, isn't it? I call it touching, poor lad!'

Manly it may have been, but the touching part of it was a feature missed
in Mr. Andrew's hands. At any rate, it did not appear favourably to
impress Tom, whose chin had gathered its ominous puckers, as he inquired:

'What's the trade? he don't say.'

Andrew added, with a wave of the hand: 'Out of a sort of feeling for his
sisters--I like him for it. Now what I want to ask you, Tom, is, whether
we can't assist him in some way! Why couldn't we take him into our
office, and fix him there, eh? If he works well--we're both getting old,
and my brats are chicks--we might, by-and-by, give him a share.'

'Make a brewer of him? Ha! there'd be another mighty sacrifice for his
pride!'

'Come, come, Tom,' said Andrew, 'he's my wife's brother, and I'm yours;
and--there, you know what women are. They like to preserve appearances:
we ought to consider them.'

'Preserve appearances!' echoed Tom: 'ha! who'll do that for them better
than a tailor?'

Andrew was an impatient little man, fitter for a kind action than to
plead a cause. Jeering jarred on him; and from the moment his brother
began it, he was of small service to Evan. He flung back against the
partition of the compound, rattling it to the disturbance of many a quiet
digestion.

'Tom,' he cried, 'I believe you're a screw!'

'Never said I wasn't,' rejoined Tom, as he finished his glass. 'I 'm a
bachelor, and a person--you're married, and an object. I won't have the
tailor's family at my coat-tails.'

Do you mean to say, Tom, you don't like the young fellow? The Countess
says he's half engaged to an heiress; and he has a chance of
appointments--of course, nothing may come of them. But do you mean to
say, you don't like him for what he has done?'

Tom made his jaw disagreeably prominent. ''Fraid I'm guilty of that
crime.'

'And you that swear at people pretending to be above their station!'
exclaimed Andrew. 'I shall get in a passion. I can't stand this. Here,
waiter! what have I to pay?'

'Go,' cried the time-honoured guest of the Aurora to Jonathan advancing.

Andrew pressed the very roots of his hair back from his red forehead, and
sat upright and resolute, glancing at Tom. And now ensued a curious scene
of family blood. For no sooner did elderly Tom observe this bantam-like
demeanour of his brother, than he ruffled his feathers likewise, and
looked down on him, agitating his wig over a prodigious frown. Whereof
came the following sharp colloquy; Andrew beginning:

I 'll pay off the debts out of my own pocket.'

'You can make a greater fool of yourself, then?'

'He shan't be a tailor!'

'He shan't be a brewer!'

'I say he shall live like a gentleman!'

'I say he shall squat like a Turk!'

Bang went Andrew's hand on the table: 'I 've pledged my word, mind!'

Tom made a counter demonstration: 'And I'll have my way!'

'Hang it! I can be as eccentric as you,' said Andrew.

'And I as much a donkey as you, if I try hard,' said Tom.

Something of the cobbler's stall followed this; till waxing furious, Tom
sung out to Jonathan, hovering around them in watchful timidity, 'More
Port!' and the words immediately fell oily on the wrath of the brothers;
both commenced wiping their heads with their handkerchiefs the faces of
both emerged and met, with a half-laugh: and, severally determined to
keep to what they had spoken, there was a tacit accord between them to
drop the subject.

Like sunshine after smart rain, the Port shone on these brothers. Like a
voice from the pastures after the bellowing of the thunder, Andrew's
voice asked: 'Got rid of that twinge of the gout, Tom? Did you rub in
that ointment?' while Tom replied: 'Ay. How about that rheumatism of
yours? Have you tried that Indy oil?' receiving a like assurance.

The remainder of the Port ebbed in meditation and chance remarks. The bit
of storm had done them both good; and Tom especially--the cynical,
carping, grim old gentleman--was much improved by the nearer resemblance
of his manner to Andrew's.

Behind this unaffected fraternal concord, however, the fact that they
were pledged to a race in eccentricity, was present. They had been rivals
before; and anterior to the date of his marriage, Andrew had done odd
eclipsing things. But Andrew required prompting to it; he required to be
put upon his mettle. Whereas, it was more nature with Tom: nature and the
absence of a wife, gave him advantages over Andrew. Besides, he had his
character to maintain. He had said the word: and the first vanity of your
born eccentric is, that he shall be taken for infallible.

Presently Andrew ducked his head to mark the evening clouds flushing over
the court-yard of the Aurora.

'Time to be off, Tom,' he said: 'wife at home.'

'Ah!' Tom answered. 'Well, I haven't got to go to bed so early.'

'What an old rogue you are, Tom!' Andrew pushed his elbows forward on the
table amiably. 'Gad, we haven't drunk wine together since--by George!
we'll have another pint.'

'Many as you like,' said Tom.

Over the succeeding pint, Andrew, in whose veins the Port was merry,
favoured his brother with an imitation of Major Strike, and indicated his
dislike to that officer. Tom informed him that Major Strike was
speculating.

'The ass eats at my table, and treats me with contempt.'

'Just tell him that you're putting by the bones for him. He 'll want
'em.'

Then Andrew with another glance at the clouds, now violet on a grey sky,
said he must really be off. Upon which Tom observed: 'Don't come here
again.'

'You old rascal, Tom!' cried Andrew, swinging over the table: 'it's
quite jolly for us to be hob-a-nobbing together once more. 'Gad!--no, we
won't though! I promised--Harriet. Eh? What say, Tom?'

'Nother pint, Nan?'

Tom shook his head in a roguishly-cosy, irresistible way. Andrew, from a
shake of denial and resolve, fell into the same; and there sat the two
brothers--a jolly picture.

The hour was ten, when Andrew Cogglesby, comforted by Tom's remark, that
he, Tom, had a wig, and that he, Andrew, would have a wigging, left the
Aurora; and he left it singing a song. Tom Cogglesby still sat at his
table, holding before him Evan's letter, of which he had got possession;
and knocking it round and round with a stroke of the forefinger, to the
tune of, 'Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, 'pothecary, ploughboy, thief';
each profession being sounded as a corner presented itself to the point
of his nail. After indulging in this species of incantation for some
length of time, Tom Cogglesby read the letter from beginning to end, and
called peremptorily for pen, ink, and paper.




CHAPTER IX

THE COUNTESS IN LOW SOCIETY

By dint of stratagems worthy of a Court intrigue, the Countess de Saldar
contrived to traverse the streets of Lymport, and enter the house where
she was born, unsuspected and unseen, under cover of a profusion of lace
and veil and mantilla, which only her heroic resolve to keep her beauties
hidden from the profane townspeople could have rendered endurable beneath
the fervid summer sun. Dress in a foreign style she must, as without it
she lost that sense of superiority, which was the only comfort to her in
her tribulations. The period of her arrival was ten days subsequent to
the burial of her father. She had come in the coach, like any common
mortal, and the coachman, upon her request, had put her down at the
Governor's house, and the guard had knocked at the door, and the servant
had informed her that General Hucklebridge was not the governor of
Lymport, nor did Admiral Combleman then reside in the town; which
tidings, the coach then being out of sight, it did not disconcert the
Countess to hear; and she reached her mother, having, at least, cut off
communication with the object of conveyance.

The Countess kissed her mother, kissed Mrs. Fiske, and asked sharply for
Evan. Mrs. Fiske let her know that Evan was in the house.

'Where?' inquired the Countess. 'I have news of the utmost importance for
him. I must see him.'

'Where is he, aunt?' said Mrs. Fiske. 'In the shop, I think; I wonder he
did not see you passing, Louisa.'

The Countess went bolt down into a chair.

'Go to him, Jane,' said Mrs. Mel. 'Tell him Louisa is here, and don't
return.'

Mrs. Fiske departed, and the Countess smiled.

'Thank you, Mama! you know I never could bear that odious, vulgar little
woman. Oh, the heat! You talk of Portugal! And, oh! poor dear Papa! what
I have suffered!'

Flapping her laces for air, and wiping her eyes for sorrow, the Countess
poured a flood of sympathy into her mother's ears and then said:

'But you have made a great mistake, Mama, in allowing Evan to put his
foot into that place. He--beloved of an heiress! Why, if an enemy should
hear of it, it would ruin him--positively blast him--for ever. And that
she loves him I have proof positive. Yes; with all her frankness, the
little thing cannot conceal that from me now. She loves him! And I desire
you to guess, Mama, whether rivals will not abound? And what enemy so
much to be dreaded as a rival? And what revelation so awful as that he
has stood in a--in a--boutique?'

Mrs. Mel maintained her usual attitude for listening. It had occurred to
her that it might do no good to tell the grand lady, her daughter; of
Evan's resolution, so she simply said, 'It is discipline for him,' and
left her to speak a private word with the youth.

Timidly the Countess inspected the furniture of the apartment, taking
chills at the dingy articles she saw, in the midst of her heat. That she
should have sprung from this! The thought was painful; still she could
forgive Providence so much. But should it ever be known she had sprung
from this! Alas! she felt she never could pardon such a dire betrayal.
She had come in good spirits, but the mention of Evan's backsliding had
troubled her extremely, and though she did not say to herself, What was
the benefit resulting from her father's dying, if Evan would be so
base-minded? she thought the thing indefinitely, and was forming the
words on her mouth, One Harrington in a shop is equal to all! when Evan
appeared alone.

'Why, goodness gracious! where's your moustache?' cried the Countess.

'Gone the way of hair!' said Evan, coldly stooping to her forehead.

'Such a distinction!' the Countess continued, reproachfully. 'Why, mon
Dieu! one could hardly tell you; as you look now, from the very commonest
tradesman--if you were not rather handsome and something of a figure.
It's a disguise, Evan--do you know that?'

'And I 've parted with it--that 's all,' said Evan. 'No more disguises
for me!'

The Countess immediately took his arm, and walked with him to a window.
His face was certainly changed. Murmuring that the air of Lymport was bad
for him, and that he must leave it instantly, she bade him sit and attend
to what she was about to say.

While you have been here, degenerating, Evan, day by day--as you always
do out of my sight--degenerating! no less a word!--I have been slaving in
your interests. Yes; I have forced the Jocelyns socially to acknowledge
us. I have not slept; I have eaten bare morsels. Do abstinence and vigils
clear the wits? I know not! but indeed they have enabled me to do more in
a week than would suffice for a lifetime. Hark to me. I have discovered
Rose's secret. Si! It is so! Rose loves you. You blush; you blush like a
girl. She loves you, and you have let yourself be seen in a shop!
Contrast me the two things. Oh! in verity, dreadful as it is, one could
almost laugh. But the moment I lose sight of you, my instructions vanish
as quickly as that hair on your superior lip, which took such time to
perfect. Alas! you must grow it again immediately. Use any perfumer's
contrivance. Rowland! I have great faith in Rowland. Without him, I
believe, there would have been many bald women committing suicide! You
remember the bottle I gave to the Count de Villa Flor? "Countess," he
said to me, "you have saved this egg-shell from a crack by helping to
cover it"--for so he called his head--the top, you know, was beginning to
shine like an egg. And I do fear me he would have done it. Ah! you do not
conceive what the dread of baldness is! To a woman death--death is
preferable to baldness! Baldness is death! And a wig--a wig! Oh, horror!
total extinction is better than to rise again in a wig! But you are
young, and play with hair. But I was saying, I went to see the Jocelyns.
I was introduced to Sir Franks and his lady and the wealthy grandmother.
And I have an invitation for you, Evan--you unmannered boy, that you do
not bow! A gentle incline forward of the shoulders, and the eyes fixed
softly, your upper lids drooping triflingly, as if you thanked with
gentle sincerity, but were indifferent. Well, well, if you will not! An
invitation for you to spend part of the autumn at Beckley Court, the
ancestral domain, where there will be company the nobles of the land!
Consider that. You say it was bold in me to face them after that horrible
man committed us on board the vessel? A Harrington is anything but a
coward. I did go and because I am devoted to your interests. That very
morning, I saw announced in the paper, just beneath poor Andrew's hand,
as he held it up at the breakfast-table, reading it, I saw among the
deaths, Sir Abraham Harrington, of Torquay, Baronet, of quinsy! Twice
that good man has come to my rescue! Oh! I welcomed him as a piece of
Providence! I turned and said to Harriet, "I see they have put poor Papa
in the paper." Harriet was staggered. I took the paper from Andrew, and
pointed it to her. She has no readiness. She has had no foreign training.
She could not comprehend, and Andrew stood on tiptoe, and peeped. He has
a bad cough, and coughed himself black in the face. I attribute it to
excessive bad manners and his cold feelings. He left the room. I
reproached Harriet. But, oh! the singularity of the excellent fortune of
such an event at such a time! It showed that our Harrington-luck had not
forsaken us. I hurried to the Jocelyns instantly. Of course, it cleared
away any suspicions aroused in them by that horrible man on board the
vessel. And the tears I wept for Sir Abraham, Evan, in verity they were
tears of deep and sincere gratitude! What is your mouth knitting the
corners at? Are you laughing?'

Evan hastily composed his visage to the melancholy that was no
counterfeit in him just then.

'Yes,' continued the Countess, easily reassured, 'I shall ever feel a
debt to Sir Abraham Harrington, of Torquay. I dare say we are related to
him. At least he has done us more service than many a rich and titled
relative. No one supposes he would acknowledge poor Papa. I can forgive
him that, Evan!' The Countess pointed out her finger with mournful and
impressive majesty, 'As we look down on that monkey, people of rank and
consideration in society look on what poor dear Papa was.'

This was partly true, for Jacko sat on a chair, in his favourite
attitude, copied accurately from the workmen of the establishment at
their labour with needle and thread. Growing cognizant of the infamy of
his posture, the Countess begged Evan to drive him out of her sight, and
took a sniff at her smelling-bottle.

She went on: 'Now, dear Van, you would hear of your sweet Rose?'

'Not a word!' Evan hastily answered.

'Why, what does this indicate? Whims! Then you do love?'

'I tell you, Louisa, I don't want to hear a word of any of them,' said
Evan, with an angry gleam in his eyes. 'They are nothing to me, nor I to
them. I--my walk in life is not theirs.'

'Faint heart! faint heart!' the Countess lifted a proverbial forefinger.

'Thank heaven, I shall have the consolation of not going about, and
bowing and smirking like an impostor!' Evan exclaimed.

There was a wider intelligence in the Countess's arrested gaze than she
chose to fashion into speech.

'I knew,' she said, 'I knew how the air of this horrible Lymport would
act on you. But while I live, Evan, you shall not sink in the sludge.
You, with all the pains I have lavished on you! and with your
presence!--for you have a presence, so rare among young men in this
England! You, who have been to a Court, and interchanged bows with
duchesses, and I know not what besides--nay, I do not accuse you; but if
you had not been a mere boy, and an English boy-poor Eugenia herself
confessed to me that you had a look--a tender cleaving of the
underlids--that made her catch her hand to her heart sometimes: it
reminded her so acutely of false Belmarafa. Could you have had a greater
compliment than that? You shall not stop here another day!'

'True,' said Evan, 'for I'm going to London to-night.'

'Not to London,' the Countess returned, with a conquering glance, 'but to
Beckley Court-and with me.'

'To London, Louisa, with Mr. Goren.'

Again the Countess eyed him largely; but took, as it were, a side-path
from her broad thought, saying: 'Yes, fortunes are made in London, if you
would they should be rapid.'

She meditated. At that moment Dandy knocked at the door, and called
outside: 'Please, master, Mr. Goren says there's a gentleman in the
shop-wants to see you.'

'Very well,' replied Evan, moving. He was swung violently round.

The Countess had clutched him by the arm. A fearful expression was on her
face.

'Whither do you go?' she said.

'To the shop, Louisa.'

Too late to arrest the villanous word, she pulled at him. 'Are you quite
insane? Consent to be seen by a gentleman there? What has come to you?
You must be lunatic! Are we all to be utterly ruined--disgraced?'

'Is my mother to starve?' said Evan.

'Absurd rejoinder! No! You should have sold everything here before this.
She can live with Harriet--she--once out of this horrible element--she
would not show it. But, Evan, you are getting away from me: you are not
going?--speak!'

'I am going,' said Evan.

The Countess clung to him, exclaiming: 'Never, while I have the power to
detain you!' but as he was firm and strong, she had recourse to her
woman's aids, and burst into a storm of sobs on his shoulder--a scene of
which Mrs. Mel was, for some seconds, a composed spectator.

'What 's the matter now?' said Mrs. Mel.

Evan impatiently explained the case. Mrs. Mel desired her daughter to
avoid being ridiculous, and making two fools in her family; and at the
same time that she told Evan there was no occasion for him to go,
contrived, with a look, to make the advice a command. He, in that state
of mind when one takes bitter delight in doing an abhorred duty, was
hardly willing to be submissive; but the despair of the Countess reduced
him, and for her sake he consented to forego the sacrifice of his pride
which was now his sad, sole pleasure. Feeling him linger, the Countess
relaxed her grasp. Hers were tears that dried as soon as they had served
their end; and, to give him the full benefit of his conduct, she said: 'I
knew Evan would be persuaded by me.'

Evan pitifully pressed her hand, and sighed.

'Tea is on the table down-stairs,' said Mrs. Mel. 'I have cooked
something for you, Louisa. Do you sleep here to-night?'

'Can I tell you, Mama?' murmured the Countess. 'I am dependent on our
Evan.'

'Oh! well, we will eat first,' said Mrs. Mel, and they went to the table
below, the Countess begging her mother to drop titles in designating her
to the servants, which caused Mrs. Mel to say:

'There is but one. I do the cooking'; and the Countess, ever disposed to
flatter and be suave, even when stung by a fact or a phrase, added:

'And a beautiful cook you used to be, dear Mama!'

At the table, awaiting them, sat Mrs. Wishaw, Mrs. Fiske, and Mr. Goren,
who soon found themselves enveloped in the Countess's graciousness. Mr.
Goren would talk of trade, and compare Lymport business with London, and
the Countess, loftily interested in his remarks, drew him out to disgust
her brother. Mrs. Wishaw, in whom the Countess at once discovered a
frivolous pretentious woman of the moneyed trading class, she treated as
one who was alive to society, and surveyed matters from a station in the
world, leading her to think that she tolerated Mr. Goren, as a
lady-Christian of the highest rank should tolerate the insects that toil
for us. Mrs. Fiske was not so tractable, for Mrs. Fiske was hostile and
armed. Mrs. Fiske adored the great Mel, and she had never loved Louisa.
Hence, she scorned Louisa on account of her late behaviour toward her
dead parent. The Countess saw through her, and laboured to be friendly
with her, while she rendered her disagreeable in the eyes of Mrs. Wishaw,
and let Mrs. Wishaw perceive that sympathy was possible between them;
manoeuvring a trifle too delicate, perhaps, for the people present, but
sufficient to blind its keen-witted author to the something that was
being concealed from herself, of which something, nevertheless, her
senses apprehensively warned her: and they might have spoken to her wits,
but that mortals cannot, unaided, guess, or will not, unless struck in
the face by the fact, credit, what is to their minds the last horror.

'I came down in the coach, quite accidental, with this gentleman,' said
Mrs. Wishaw, fanning a cheek and nodding at Mr. Goren. 'I'm an old flame
of dear Mel's. I knew him when he was an apprentice in London. Now,
wasn't it odd? Your mother--I suppose I must call you "my lady"?'

The Countess breathed a tender 'Spare me,' with a smile that added,
'among friends!'

Mrs. Wishaw resumed: 'Your mother was an old flame of this gentleman's, I
found out. So there were two old flames, and I couldn't help thinking!
But I was so glad to have seen dear Mel once more:

'Ah!' sighed the Countess.

'He was always a martial-looking man, and laid out, he was quite
imposing. I declare, I cried so, as it reminded me of when I couldn't
have him, for he had nothing but his legs and arms--and I married Wishaw.
But it's a comfort to think I have been of some service to dear, dear
Mel! for Wishaw 's a man of accounts and payments; and I knew Mel had
cloth from him, and, the lady suggested bills delayed, with two or three
nods, 'you know! and I'll do my best for his son.'

'You are kind,' said the Countess, smiling internally at the vulgar
creature's misconception of Evan's requirements.

'Did he ever talk much about Mary Fence?' asked Mrs. Wishaw. '"Polly
Fence," he used to say, "sweet Polly Fence!"'

'Oh! I think so. Frequently,' observed the Countess.

Mrs. Fiske primmed her mouth. She had never heard the great Mel allude to
the name of Fence.

The Goren-croak was heard

'Painters have painted out "Melchisedec" this afternoon. Yes,--ah! In and
out-as the saying goes.'

Here was an opportunity to mortify the Countess.

Mrs. Fiske placidly remarked: 'Have we the other put up in its stead? It
's shorter.'

A twinge of weakness had made Evan request that the name of Evan
Harrington should not decorate the shopfront till he had turned his back
on it, for a time. Mrs. Mel crushed her venomous niece.

'What have you to do with such things? Shine in your own affairs first,
Ann, before you meddle with others.'

Relieved at hearing that 'Melchisedec' was painted out, and unsuspicious
of the announcement that should replace it, the Countess asked Mrs.
Wishaw if she thought Evan like her dear Papa.

'So like,' returned the lady, 'that I would not be alone with him yet,
for worlds. I should expect him to be making love to me: for, you know,
my dear--I must be familiar--Mel never could be alone with you, without!
It was his nature. I speak of him before marriage. But, if I can trust
myself with him, I shall take charge of Mr. Evan, and show him some
London society.'

'That is indeed kind,' said the Countess, glad of a thick veil for the
utterance of her contempt. 'Evan, though--I fear--will be rather engaged.
His friends, the Jocelyns of Beckley Court, will--I fear--hardly dispense
with him and Lady Splenders--you know her? the Marchioness of Splenders?
No?--by repute, at least: a most beautiful and most fascinating woman;
report of him alone has induced her to say that Evan must and shall form
a part of her autumnal gathering at Splenders Castle. And how he is to
get out of it, I cannot tell. But I am sure his multitudinous engagements
will not prevent his paying due court to Mistress Wishaw.'

As the Countess intended, Mistress Wishaw's vanity was reproved, and her
ambition excited: a pretty doublestroke, only possible to dexterous
players.

The lady rejoined that she hoped so, she was sure; and forthwith (because
she suddenly seemed to possess him more than his son), launched upon
Mel's incomparable personal attractions. This caused the Countess to
enlarge upon Evan's vast personal prospects. They talked across each
other a little, till the Countess remembered her breeding, allowed Mrs.
Wishaw to run to an end in hollow exclamations, and put a finish to the
undeclared controversy, by a traverse of speech, as if she were taking up
the most important subject of their late colloquy. 'But Evan is not in
his own hands--he is in the hands of a lovely young woman, I must tell
you. He belongs to her, and not to us. You have heard of Rose Jocelyn,
the celebrated heiress?'

'Engaged?' Mrs. Wishaw whispered aloud.

The Countess, an adept in the lie implied--practised by her, that she
might not subject herself to future punishment (in which she was so
devout a believer, that she condemned whole hosts to it)--deeply smiled.

'Really!' said Mrs. Wishaw, and was about to inquire why Evan, with
these brilliant expectations, could think of trade and tailoring, when
the young man, whose forehead had been growing black, jumped up, and
quitted them; thus breaking the harmony of the table; and as the Countess
had said enough, she turned the conversation to the always welcome theme
of low society. She broached death and corpses; and became extremely
interesting, and very sympathetic: the only difference between the
ghostly anecdotes she related, and those of the other ladies, being that
her ghosts were all of them titled, and walked mostly under the burden of
a coronet. For instance, there was the Portuguese Marquis de Col. He had
married a Spanish wife, whose end was mysterious. Undressing, on the
night of the anniversary of her death, and on the point of getting into
bed, he beheld the dead woman lying on her back before him. All night
long he had to sleep with this freezing phantom! Regularly, every fresh
anniversary, he had to endure the same penance, no matter where he might
be, or in what strange bed. On one occasion, when he took the live for
the dead, a curious thing occurred, which the Countess scrupled less to
relate than would men to hint at. Ghosts were the one childish enjoyment
Mrs. Mel allowed herself, and she listened to her daughter intently,
ready to cap any narrative; but Mrs. Fiske stopped the flood.

'You have improved on Peter Smithers, Louisa,' she said.

The Countess turned to her mildly.

'You are certainly thinking of Peter Smithers,' Mrs. Fiske continued,
bracing her shoulders. 'Surely, you remember poor Peter, Louisa? An old
flame of your own! He was going to kill himself, but married a Devonshire
woman, and they had disagreeables, and SHE died, and he was undressing,
and saw her there in the bed, and wouldn't get into it, and had the
mattress, and the curtains, and the counterpanes, and everything burnt.
He told us it himself. You must remember it, Louisa?'

The Countess remembered nothing of the sort. No doubt could exist of its
having been the Portuguese Marquis de Col, because he had confided to her
the whole affair, and indeed come to her, as his habit was, to ask her
what he could possibly do, under the circumstances. If Mrs. Fiske's
friend, who married the Devonshire person, had seen the same thing, the
coincidence was yet more extraordinary than the case. Mrs. Fiske said it
assuredly was, and glanced at her aunt, who, as the Countess now rose,
declaring she must speak to Evan, chid Mrs. Fiske, and wished her and
Peter Smithers at the bottom of the sea.

'No, no, Mama,' said the Countess, laughing, 'that would hardly be
proper,' and before Mrs. Fiske could reply, escaped to complain to Evan
of the vulgarity of those women.

She was not prepared for the burst of wrath with which Evan met her.
'Louisa,' said he, taking her wrist sternly, 'you have done a thing I
can't forgive. I find it hard to bear disgrace myself: I will not consent
to bring it upon others. Why did you dare to couple Miss Jocelyn's name
with mine?'

The Countess gave him out her arm's length. 'Speak on, Van,' she said,
admiring him with a bright gaze.

'Answer me, Louisa; and don't take me for a fool any more,' he pursued.
'You have coupled Miss Jocelyn's name with mine, in company, and I insist
now upon your giving me your promise to abstain from doing it anywhere,
before anybody.'

'If she saw you at this instant, Van,' returned the incorrigible
Countess, 'would she desire it, think you? Oh! I must make you angry
before her, I see that! You have your father's frown. You surpass him,
for your delivery is more correct, and equally fluent. And if a woman is
momentarily melted by softness in a man, she is for ever subdued by
boldness and bravery of mien.'

Evan dropped her hand. 'Miss Jocelyn has done me the honour to call me
her friend. That was in other days.' His lip quivered. 'I shall not see
Miss Jocelyn again. Yes; I would lay down my life for her; but that's
idle talk. No such chance will ever come to me. But I can save her from
being spoken of in alliance with me, and what I am, and I tell you,
Louisa, I will not have it.' Saying which, and while he looked harshly at
her, wounded pride bled through his eyes.

She was touched. 'Sit down, dear; I must explain to you, and make you
happy against your will,' she said, in another voice, and an English
accent. 'The mischief is done, Van. If you do not want Rose Jocelyn to
love you, you must undo it in your own way. I am not easily deceived. On
the morning I went to her house in town, she took me aside, and spoke to
me. Not a confession in words. The blood in her cheeks, when I mentioned
you, did that for her. Everything about you she must know--how you bore
your grief, and all. And not in her usual free manner, but timidly, as if
she feared a surprise, or feared to be wakened to the secret in her bosom
she half suspects--"Tell him!" she said, "I hope he will not forget me."'

The Countess was interrupted by a great sob; for the picture of frank
Rose Jocelyn changed, and soft, and, as it were, shadowed under a veil of
bashful regard for him, so filled the young man with sorrowful
tenderness, that he trembled, and was as a child.

Marking the impression she had produced on him, and having worn off that
which he had produced on her, the Countess resumed the art in her style
of speech, easier to her than nature.

'So the sweetest of Roses may be yours, dear Van; and you have her in a
gold setting, to wear on your heart. Are you not enviable? I will
not--no, I will not tell you she is perfect. I must fashion the sweet
young creature. Though I am very ready to admit that she is much improved
by this--shall I call it, desired consummation?'

Evan could listen no more. Such a struggle was rising in his breast: the
effort to quench what the Countess had so shrewdly kindled; passionate
desire to look on Rose but for one lightning flash: desire to look on
her, and muffled sense of shame twin-born with it: wild love and leaden
misery mixed: dead hopelessness and vivid hope. Up to the neck in
Purgatory, but his soul saturated with visions of Bliss! The fair orb of
Love was all that was wanted to complete his planetary state, and aloft
it sprang, showing many faint, fair tracts to him, and piling huge
darknesses.

As if in search of something, he suddenly went from the room.

'I have intoxicated the poor boy,' said the Countess, and consulted an
attitude by the evening light in a mirror. Approving the result, she rang
for her mother, and sat with her till dark; telling her she could not and
would not leave her dear Mama that night. At the supper-table Evan did
not appear, and Mr. Goren, after taking counsel of Mrs. Mel, dispersed
the news that Evan was off to London. On the road again, with a purse
just as ill-furnished, and in his breast the light that sometimes leads
gentlemen, as well as ladies, astray.




CHAPTER X

MY GENTLEMAN ON THE ROAD AGAIN

Near a milestone, under the moonlight, crouched the figure of a woman,
huddled with her head against her knees, and careless hair falling to the
summer's dust. Evan came upon this sight within a few miles of
Fallowfield. At first he was rather startled, for he had inherited
superstitious emotions from his mother, and the road was lone, the moon
full. He went up to her and spoke a gentle word, which provoked no reply.
He ventured to put his hand on her shoulder, continuing softly to address
her. She was flesh and blood. Evan stooped his head to catch a whisper
from her mouth, but nothing save a heavier fall of the breath she took,
as of one painfully waking, was heard.

A misery beyond our own is a wholesome picture for youth, and though we
may not for the moment compare the deep with the lower deep, we, if we
have a heart for outer sorrows, can forget ourselves in it. Evan had just
been accusing the heavens of conspiracy to disgrace him. Those patient
heavens had listened, as is their wont. They had viewed and had not been
disordered by his mental frenzies. It is certainly hard that they do not
come down to us, and condescend to tell us what they mean, and be
dumb-foundered by the perspicuity of our arguments the argument, for
instance, that they have not fashioned us for the science of the shears,
and do yet impel us to wield them. Nevertheless, they to whom mortal life
has ceased to be a long matter perceive that our appeals for conviction
are answered, now and then very closely upon the call. When we have cast
off the scales of hope and fancy, and surrender our claims on mad chance,
it is given us to see that some plan is working out: that the heavens,
icy as they are to the pangs of our blood, have been throughout speaking
to our souls; and, according to the strength there existing, we learn to
comprehend them. But their language is an element of Time, whom primarily
we have to know.

Evan Harrington was young. He wished not to clothe the generation. What
was to the remainder of the exiled sons of Adam simply the brand of
expulsion from Paradise, was to him hell. In his agony, anything less
than an angel, soft-voiced in his path, would not have satisfied the poor
boy, and here was this wretched outcast, and instead of being relieved,
he was to act the reliever!

Striving to rouse the desolate creature, he shook her slightly. She now
raised her head with a slow, gradual motion, like that of a wax-work,
showing a white young face, tearless,-dreadfully drawn at the lips. After
gazing at him, she turned her head mechanically to her shoulder, as to
ask him why he touched her. He withdrew his hand, saying:

'Why are you here? Pardon me; I want, if possible, to help you.'

A light sprang in her eyes. She jumped from the stone, and ran forward a
step or two, with a gasp:

'Oh, my God! I want to go and drown myself.'

Evan lingered behind her till he saw her body sway, and in a fit of
trembling she half fell on his outstretched arm. He led her to the stone,
not knowing what on earth to do with her. There was no sign of a house
near; they were quite solitary; to all his questions she gave an
unintelligible moan. He had not the heart to leave her, so, taking a
sharp seat on a heap of flints, thus possibly furnishing future
occupation for one of his craftsmen, he waited, and amused himself by
marking out diagrams with his stick in the thick dust.

His thoughts were far away, when he heard, faintly uttered:

'Why do you stop here?'

'To help you.'

'Please don't. Let me be. I can't be helped.'

'My good creature,' said Evan, 'it 's quite impossible that I should
leave you in this state. Tell me where you were going when your illness
seized you?'

'I was going,' she commenced vacantly, 'to the sea--the water,' she
added, with a shivering lip.

The foolish youth asked her if she could be cold on such a night.

'No, I'm not cold,' she replied, drawing closer over her lap the ends of
a shawl which would in that period have been thought rather gaudy for her
station.

'You were going to Lymport?'

'Yes,--Lymport's nearest, I think.'

'And why were you out travelling at this hour?'

She dropped her head, and began rocking to right and left.

While they talked the noise of waggon-wheels was heard approaching. Evan
went into the middle of the road, and beheld a covered waggon, and a
fellow whom he advanced to meet, plodding a little to the rear of the
horses. He proved kindly. He was a farmer's man, he said, and was at that
moment employed in removing the furniture of the farmer's son, who had
failed as a corn-chandler in Lymport, to Hillford, which he expected to
reach about morn. He answered Evan's request that he would afford the
young woman conveyance as far as Fallowfield:

'Tak' her in? That I will.

'She won't hurt the harses,' he pursued, pointing his whip at the
vehicle: 'there's my mate, Gearge Stoakes, he's in there, snorin' his
turn. Can't you hear 'n asnorin' thraugh the wheels? I can; I've been
laughin'! He do snore that loud-Gearge do!'

Proceeding to inform Evan how George Stokes had snored in that
characteristic manner from boyhood, ever since he and George had slept in
a hayloft together; and how he, kept wakeful and driven to distraction by
George Stokes' nose, had been occasionally compelled, in sheer
self-defence, madly to start up and hold that pertinacious alarum in
tight compression between thumb and forefinger; and how George Stokes,
thus severely handled, had burst his hold with a tremendous snort, as big
as a bull, and had invariably uttered the exclamation, 'Hulloa!--same to
you, my lad!' and rolled over to snore as fresh as ever;--all this with
singular rustic comparisons, racy of the soil, and in raw Hampshire
dialect, the waggoner came to a halt opposite the stone, and, while Evan
strode to assist the girl, addressed himself to the great task of
arousing the sturdy sleeper and quieting his trumpet, heard by all ears
now that the accompaniment of the wheels was at an end.

George, violently awakened, complained that it was before his time, to
which he was true; and was for going off again with exalted contentment,
though his heels had been tugged, and were dangling some length out of
the machine; but his comrade, with a determined blow of the lungs, gave
another valiant pull, and George Stokes was on his legs, marvelling at
the world and man. Evan had less difficulty with the girl. She rose to
meet him, put up her arms for him to clasp her waist, whispering sharply
in an inward breath: 'What are you going to do with me?' and indifferent
to his verbal response, trustingly yielded her limbs to his guidance. He
could see blood on her bitten underlip; as, with the help of the
waggoner, he lifted her on the mattress, backed by a portly bundle, which
the sagacity of Mr. Stokes had selected for his couch.

The waggoner cracked his whip, laughing at George Stokes, who yawned and
settled into a composed ploughswing, without asking questions; apparently
resolved to finish his nap on his legs.

'Warn't he like that Myzepper chap, I see at the circus, bound athert
gray mare!' chuckled the waggoner. 'So he 'd 'a gone on, had ye 'a let
'n. No wulves waddn't wake Gearge till he 'd slept it out. Then he 'd
say, "marnin'!" to 'm. Are ye 'wake now, Gearge?'

The admirable sleeper preferred to be a quiet butt, and the waggoner
leisurely exhausted the fun that was to be had out of him; returning to
it with a persistency that evinced more concentration than variety in his
mind. At last Evan said: 'Your pace is rather slow. They'll be shut up in
Fallowfield. I 'll go on ahead. You'll find me at one of the inns-the
Green Dragon.'

In return for this speech, the waggoner favoured him with a stare,
followed by the exclamation:

'Oh, no! dang that!'

'Why, what's the matter?' quoth Evan.

'You en't goin' to be off, for to leave me and Gearge in the lurch there,
with that ther' young woman, in that ther' pickle!' returned the
waggoner.

Evan made an appeal to his reason, but finding that impregnable, he
pulled out his scanty purse to guarantee his sincerity with an offer of
pledgemoney. The waggoner waved it aside. He wanted no money, he said.

'Look heer,' he went on; 'if you're for a start, I tells ye plain, I
chucks that ther' young woman int' the road.'

Evan bade him not to be a brute.

'Nark and crop!' the waggoner doggedly ejaculated.

Very much surprised that a fellow who appeared sound at heart, should
threaten to behave so basely, Evan asked an explanation: upon which the
waggoner demanded to know what he had eyes for: and as this query failed
to enlighten the youth, he let him understand that he was a man of family
experience, and that it was easy to tell at a glance that the complaint
the young woman laboured under was one common to the daughters of Eve. He
added that, should an emergency arise, he, though a family man, would be
useless: that he always vacated the premises while those incidental
scenes were being enacted at home; and that for him and George Stokes to
be left alone with the young woman, why they would be of no more service
to her than a couple of babies newborn themselves. He, for his part, he
assured Evan, should take to his heels, and relinquish waggon, and
horses, and all; while George probably would stand and gape; and the end
of it would be, they would all be had up for murder. He diverged from the
alarming prospect, by a renewal of the foregoing alternative to the
gentleman who had constituted himself the young woman's protector. If he
parted company with them, they would immediately part company with the
young woman, whose condition was evident.

'Why, couldn't you tall that?' said the waggoner, as Evan, tingling at
the ears, remained silent.

'I know nothing of such things,' he answered, hastily, like one hurt.

I have to repeat the statement, that he was a youth, and a modest one. He
felt unaccountably, unreasonably, but horridly, ashamed. The thought of
his actual position swamped the sickening disgust at tailordom. Worse,
then, might happen to us in this extraordinary world! There was something
more abhorrent than sitting with one's legs crossed, publicly stitching,
and scoffed at! He called vehemently to the waggoner to whip the horses,
and hurry ahead into Fallowfield; but that worthy, whatever might be his
dire alarms, had a regular pace, that was conscious of no spur: the reply
of 'All right!' satisfied him at least; and Evan's chaste sighs for the
appearance of an assistant petticoat round a turn of the road, were
offered up duly, to the measure of the waggoner's steps.

Suddenly the waggoner came to a halt, and said 'Blest if that Gearge
bain't a snorin' on his pins!'

Evan lingered by him with some curiosity, while the waggoner thumped his
thigh to, 'Yes he be! no he bain't!' several times, in eager hesitation.

'It's a fellow calling from the downs,' said Evan.

'Ay, so!' responded the waggoner. 'Dang'd if I didn't think 'twere that
Gearge of our'n. Hark awhile.'

At a repetition of the call, the waggoner stopped his team. After a few
minutes, a man appeared panting on the bank above them, down which he ran
precipitately, knocked against Evan, apologized with the little breath
that remained to him, and then held his hand as to entreat a hearing.
Evan thought him half-mad; the waggoner was about to imagine him the
victim of a midnight assault. He undeceived them by requesting, in rather
flowery terms, conveyance on the road and rest for his limbs. It being
explained to him that the waggon was already occupied, he comforted
himself aloud with the reflection that it was something to be on the road
again for one who had been belated, lost, and wandering over the downs
for the last six hours.

'Walcome to git in, when young woman gits out,' said the waggoner. 'I'll
gi' ye my sleep on t' Hillford.'

'Thanks, worthy friend,' returned the new comer. 'The state of the case
is this--I'm happy to take from humankind whatsoever I can get. If this
gentleman will accept of my company, and my legs hold out, all will yet
be well.'

Though he did not wear a petticoat, Evan was not sorry to have him. Next
to the interposition of the Gods, we pray for human fellowship when we
are in a mess. So he mumbled politely, dropped with him a little to the
rear, and they all stepped out to the crack of the waggoner's whip.

'Rather a slow pace,' said Evan, feeling bound to converse.

'Six hours on the downs makes it extremely suitable to me,' rejoined the
stranger,

'You lost your way?'

'I did, sir. Yes; one does not court those desolate regions wittingly. I
am for life and society. The embraces of Diana do not agree with my
constitution. If classics there be who differ from me, I beg them to take
six hours on the downs alone with the moon, and the last prospect of
bread and cheese, and a chaste bed, seemingly utterly extinguished. I am
cured of my romance. Of course, when I say bread and cheese, I speak
figuratively. Food is implied.'

Evan stole a glance at his companion.

'Besides,' the other continued, with an inflexion of grandeur, 'for a man
accustomed to his hunters, it is, you will confess, unpleasant--I speak'
hypothetically--to be reduced to his legs to that extent that it strikes
him shrewdly he will run them into stumps.'

The stranger laughed.

The fair lady of the night illumined his face, like one who recognized a
subject. Evan thought he knew the voice. A curious struggle therein
between native facetiousness and an attempt at dignity, appeared to Evan
not unfamiliar; and the egregious failure of ambition and triumph of the
instinct, helped him to join, the stranger in his mirth.

'Jack Raikes?' he said: 'surely?'

'The man!' it was answered to him. 'But you? and near our old
school--Viscount Harrington? These marvels occur, you see--we meet again
by night.'

Evan, with little gratification at the meeting, fell into their former
comradeship; tickled by a recollection of his old schoolfellow's
India-rubber mind.

Mr. Raikes stood about a head under him. He had extremely mobile
features; thick, flexible eyebrows; a loose, voluble mouth; a ridiculous
figure on a dandified foot. He represented to you one who was rehearsing
a part he wished to act before the world, and was not aware that he took
the world into his confidence.

How he had come there his elastic tongue explained in tropes and puns and
lines of dramatic verse. His patrimony spent, he at once believed himself
an actor, and he was hissed off the stage of a provincial theatre.

'Ruined, the last ignominy endured, I fled from the gay vistas of the
Bench--for they live who would thither lead me! and determined, the day
before the yesterday--what think'st thou? why to go boldly, and offer
myself as Adlatus to blessed old Cudford! Yes! a little Latin is all that
remains to me, and I resolved, like the man I am, to turn, hic, hac, hoc,
into bread and cheese, and beer: Impute nought foreign to me, in the
matter of pride.'

'Usher in our old school--poor old Jack!' exclaimed Evan.

'Lieutenant in the Cudford Academy!' the latter rejoined. 'I walked the
distance from London. I had my interview with the respected principal. He
gave me of mutton nearest the bone, which, they say, is sweetest; and on
sweet things you should not regale in excess. Endymion watched the sheep
that bred that mutton! He gave me the thin beer of our boyhood, that I
might the more soberly state my mission. That beer, my friend, was brewed
by one who wished to form a study for pantomimic masks. He listened with
the gravity which is all his own to the recital of my career; he
pleasantly compared me to Phaethon, congratulated the river Thames at my
not setting it on fire in my rapid descent, and extended to me the three
fingers of affectionate farewell. "You an usher, a rearer of youth, Mr.
Raikes? Oh, no! Oh, no!" That was all I could get out of him. 'Gad! he
might have seen that I didn't joke with the mutton-bone. If I winced at
the beer it was imperceptible. Now a man who can do that is what I call a
man in earnest.'

'You've just come from Cudford?' said Evan.

'Short is the tale, though long the way, friend Harrington. From Bodley
is ten miles to Beckley. I walked them. From Beckley is fifteen miles to
Fallowfield. Them I was traversing, when, lo! near sweet eventide a fair
horsewoman riding with her groom at her horse's heels. "Lady," says I,
addressing her, as much out of the style of the needy as possible, "will
you condescend to direct me to Fallowfield?"--"Are you going to the
match?" says she. I answered boldly that I was. "Beckley's in," says she,
"and you'll be in time to see them out, if you cut across the downs
there." I lifted my hat--a desperate measure, for the brim won't bear
much--but honour to women though we perish. She bowed: I cut across the
downs. In fine, Harrington, old boy, I've been wandering among those
downs for the last seven or eight hours. I was on the point of turning my
back on the road for the twentieth time, I believe when I heard your
welcome vehicular music, and hailed you; and I ask you, isn't it luck for
a fellow who hasn't got a penny in his pocket, and is as hungry as five
hundred hunters, to drop on an old friend like this?'

Evan answered with the question:

'Where was it you said you met the young lady?'

'In the first place, O Amadis! I never said she was young. You're on the
scent, I see.'

Nursing the fresh image of his darling in his heart's recesses, Evan, as
they entered Fallowfield, laid the state of his purse before Jack, and
earned anew the epithet of Amadis, when it came to be told that the
occupant of the waggon was likewise one of its pensioners.

Sleep had long held its reign in Fallowfield. Nevertheless, Mr. Raikes,
though blind windows alone looked on him, and nought foreign was to be
imputed to him in the matter of pride, had become exceedingly solicitous
concerning his presentation to the inhabitants of that quiet little
country town; and while Evan and--the waggoner consulted the former with
regard to the chances of procuring beds and supper, the latter as to his
prospect of beer and a comfortable riddance of the feminine burden
weighing on them all--Mr. Raikes was engaged in persuading his hat to
assume something of the gentlemanly polish of its youth, and might have
been observed now and then furtively catching up a leg to be dusted. Ere
the wheels of the waggon stopped he had gained that ease of mind which
the knowledge that you have done all a man may do and circumstances
warrant, establishes. Capacities conscious of their limits may repose
even proudly when they reach them; and, if Mr. Raikes had not quite the
air of one come out of a bandbox, he at least proved to the discerning
intelligence that he knew what sort of manner befitted that happy
occasion, and was enabled by the pains he had taken to glance with a
challenge at the sign of the hostelry, under which they were now ranked,
and from which, though the hour was late, and Fallowfield a singularly
somnolent little town, there issued signs of life approaching to
festivity.




CHAPTER XI

DOINGS AT AN INN

What every traveller sighs to find, was palatably furnished by the Green
Dragon of Fallowfield--a famous inn, and a constellation for wandering
coachmen. There pleasant smiles seasoned plenty, and the bill was gilded
in a manner unknown to our days. Whoso drank of the ale of the Green
Dragon kept in his memory a place apart for it. The secret, that to give
a warm welcome is the breath of life to an inn, was one the Green Dragon
boasted, even then, not to share with many Red Lions, or Cocks of the
Morning, or Kings' Heads, or other fabulous monsters; and as if to show
that when you are in the right track you are sure to be seconded, there
was a friend of the Green Dragon, who, on a particular night of the year,
caused its renown to enlarge to the dimensions of a miracle. But that,
for the moment, is my secret.

Evan and Jack were met in the passage by a chambermaid. Before either of
them could speak, she had turned and fled, with the words:

'More coming!' which, with the addition of 'My goodness me!' were echoed
by the hostess in her recess. Hurried directions seemed to be consequent,
and then the hostess sallied out, and said, with a curtsey:

'Please to step in, gentlemen. This is the room, tonight.'

Evan lifted his hat; and bowing, requested to know whether they could
have a supper and beds.

'Beds, Sir!' cried the hostess. 'What am I to do for beds! Yes, beds
indeed you may have, but bed-rooms--if you ask for them, it really is
more than I can supply you with. I have given up my own. I sleep with my
maid Jane to-night.'

'Anything will do for us, madam,' replied Evan, renewing his foreign
courtesy. 'But there is a poor young woman outside.'

'Another!' The hostess instantly smiled down her inhospitable outcry.

'She,' said Evan, 'must have a room to herself. She is ill.'

'Must is must, sir,' returned the gracious hostess. 'But I really haven't
the means.'

'You have bed-rooms, madam?'

'Every one of them engaged, sir.'

'By ladies, madam?'

'Lord forbid, Sir!' she exclaimed with the honest energy of a woman who
knew her sex.

Evan bade Jack go and assist the waggoner to bring in the girl. Jack, who
had been all the time pulling at his wristbands, and settling his
coat-collar by the dim reflection of a window of the bar, departed,
after, on his own authority, assuring the hostess that fever was not the
young woman's malady, as she protested against admitting fever into her
house, seeing that she had to consider her guests.

'We're open to all the world to-night, except fever,' said the hostess.
'Yes,' she rejoined to Evan's order that the waggoner and his mate should
be supplied with ale, 'they shall have as much as they can drink,' which
is not a speech usual at inns, when one man gives an order for others,
but Evan passed it by, and politely begged to be shown in to one of the
gentlemen who had engaged bedrooms.

'Oh! if you can persuade any of them, sir, I'm sure I've nothing to say,'
observed the hostess. 'Pray, don't ask me to stand by and back it, that's
all.'

Had Evan been familiar with the Green Dragon, he would have noticed that
the landlady, its presiding genius, was stiffer than usual; the rosy
smile was more constrained, as if a great host had to be embraced, and
were trying it to the utmost stretch. There was, however, no asperity
about her, and when she had led him to the door he was to enter to prefer
his suit, and she had asked whether the young woman was quite common, and
he had replied that he had picked her up on the road, and that she was
certainly poor, the hostess said:

'I 'm sure you're a very good gentleman, sir, and if I could spare your
asking at all, I would.'

With that she went back to encounter Mr. Raikes and his charge, and prime
the waggoner and his mate.

A noise of laughter and talk was stilled gradually, as Evan made his bow
into a spacious room, wherein, as the tops of pines are seen swimming on
the morning mist, about a couple of dozen guests of divers conditions sat
partially revealed through wavy clouds of tobacco-smoke. By their
postures, which Evan's appearance by no means disconcerted, you read in a
glance men who had been at ease for so many hours that they had no
troubles in the world save the two ultimate perplexities of the British
Sybarite, whose bed of roses is harassed by the pair of problems: first,
what to do with his legs; secondly, how to imbibe liquor with the
slightest possible derangement of those members subordinate to his upper
structure. Of old the Sybarite complained. Not so our self-helpful
islanders. Since they could not, now that work was done and jollity the
game, take off their legs, they got away from them as far as they might,
in fashions original or imitative: some by thrusting them out at full
length; some by cramping them under their chairs: while some, taking
refuge in a mental effort, forgot them, a process to be recommended if it
did not involve occasional pangs of consciousness to the legs of their
neighbours. We see in our cousins West of the great water, who are said
to exaggerate our peculiarities, beings labouring under the same
difficulty, and intent on its solution. As to the second problem: that of
drinking without discomposure to the subservient limbs: the company
present worked out this republican principle ingeniously, but in a manner
beneath the attention of the Muse. Let Clio record that mugs and glasses,
tobacco and pipes, were strewn upon the table. But if the guests had
arrived at that stage when to reach the arm, or arrange the person, for a
sip of good stuff, causes moral debates, and presents to the mind
impediments equal to what would be raised in active men by the prospect
of a great excursion, it is not to be wondered at that the presence of a
stranger produced no immediate commotion. Two or three heads were half
turned; such as faced him imperceptibly lifted their eyelids.

'Good evening, sir,' said one who sat as chairman, with a decisive nod.

'Good night, ain't it?' a jolly-looking old fellow queried of the
speaker, in an under-voice.

'Gad, you don't expect me to be wishing the gentleman good-bye, do you?'
retorted the former.

'Ha! ha! No, to be sure,' answered the old boy; and the remark was
variously uttered, that 'Good night,' by a caprice of our language, did
sound like it.

'Good evening's "How d' ye do?"--"How are ye?" Good night's "Be off, and
be blowed to you,"' observed an interpreter with a positive mind; and
another, whose intelligence was not so clear, but whose perceptions had
seized the point, exclaimed: 'I never says it when I hails a chap; but,
dash my buttons, if I mightn't 'a done, one day or another! Queer!'

The chairman, warmed by his joke, added, with a sharp wink: 'Ay; it would
be queer, if you hailed "Good night" in the middle of the day!' and this
among a company soaked in ripe ale, could not fail to run the electric
circle, and persuaded several to change their positions; in the rumble of
which, Evan's reply, if he had made any, was lost. Few, however, were
there who could think of him, and ponder on that glimpse of fun, at the
same time; and he would have been passed over, had not the chairman said:
'Take a seat, sir; make yourself comfortable.'

'Before I have that pleasure,' replied Evan, 'I--'

'I see where 'tis,' burst out the old boy who had previously superinduced
a diversion: 'he's going to ax if he can't have a bed!'

A roar of laughter, and 'Don't you remember this day last year?' followed
the cunning guess. For awhile explication was impossible; and Evan
coloured, and smiled, and waited for them.

'I was going to ask--'

'Said so!' shouted the old boy, gleefully.

'--one of the gentlemen who has engaged a bed-room to do me the extreme
favour to step aside with me, and allow me a moment's speech with him.'

Long faces were drawn, and odd stares were directed toward him, in reply.

'I see where 'tis'; the old boy thumped his knee. 'Ain't it now? Speak
up, sir! There's a lady in the case?'

'I may tell you thus much,' answered Evan, 'that it is an unfortunate
young woman, very ill, who needs rest and quiet.'

'Didn't I say so?' shouted the old boy.

But this time, though his jolly red jowl turned all round to demand a
confirmation, it was not generally considered that he had divined so
correctly. Between a lady and an unfortunate young woman, there seemed to
be a strong distinction, in the minds of the company.

The chairman was the most affected by the communication. His bushy
eyebrows frowned at Evan, and he began tugging at the brass buttons of
his coat, like one preparing to arm for a conflict.

'Speak out, sir, if you please,' he said. 'Above board--no asides--no
taking advantages. You want me to give up my bed-room for the use of your
young woman, sir?'

Evan replied quietly: 'She is a stranger to me; and if you could see her,
sir, and know her situation, I think she would move your pity.'

'I don't doubt it, sir--I don't doubt it,' returned the chairman. 'They
all move our pity. That's how they get over us. She has diddled you, and
she would diddle me, and diddle us all-diddle the devil, I dare say, when
her time comes. I don't doubt it, sir.'

To confront a vehement old gentleman, sitting as president in an assembly
of satellites, requires command of countenance, and Evan was not
browbeaten: he held him, and the whole room, from where he stood, under a
serene and serious eye, for his feelings were too deeply stirred on
behalf of the girl to let him think of himself. That question of hers,
'What are you going to do with me?' implying such helplessness and trust,
was still sharp on his nerves.

'Gentlemen,' he said, 'I humbly beg your pardon for disturbing you as I
do.'

But with a sudden idea that a general address on behalf of a particular
demand must necessarily fail, he let his eyes rest on one there, whose
face was neither stupid nor repellent, and who, though he did not look
up, had an attentive, thoughtful cast about the mouth.

'May I entreat a word apart with you, sir?'

Evan was not mistaken in the index he had perused. The gentleman seemed
to feel that he was selected from the company, and slightly raising his
head, carelessly replied: 'My bed is entirely at your disposal,' resuming
his contemplative pose.

On the point of thanking him, Evan advanced a step, when up started the
irascible chairman.

'I don't permit it! I won't allow it!' And before Evan could ask his
reasons, he had rung the bell, muttering: 'They follow us to our inns,
now, the baggages! They must harry us at our inns! We can't have peace
and quiet at our inns!--'

In a state of combustion, he cried out to the waiter:

'Here, Mark, this gentleman has brought in a dirty wench: pack her up to
my bed-room, and lock her in lock her in, and bring down the key.'

Agreeably deceived in the old gentleman's intentions, Evan could not
refrain from joining the murmured hilarity created by the conclusion of
his order. The latter glared at him, and added: 'Now, sir, you've done
your worst. Sit down, and be merry.'

Replying that he had a friend outside, and would not fail to accept the
invitation, Evan retired. He was met by the hostess with the reproachful
declaration on her lips, that she was a widow woman, wise in appearances,
and that he had brought into her house that night work she did not
expect, or bargain for. Rather (since I must speak truth of my gentleman)
to silence her on the subject, and save his ears, than to propitiate her
favour towards the girl, Evan drew out his constitutionally lean purse,
and dropped it in her hand, praying her to put every expense incurred to
his charge. She exclaimed:

'If Dr. Pillie has his full sleep this night, I shall be astonished'; and
Evan hastily led Jack into the passage to impart to him, that the extent
of his resources was reduced to the smallest of sums in shillings.

'I can beat my friend at that reckoning,' said Mr. Raikes; and they
entered the room.

Eyes were on him. This had ever the effect of causing him to swell to
monstrous proportions in the histrionic line. Asking the waiter
carelessly for some light supper dish, he suggested the various French,
with 'not that?' and the affable naming of another. 'Nor that? Dear me,
we shall have to sup on chops, I believe!'

Evan saw the chairman scrutinizing Raikes, much as he himself might have
done, and he said: 'Bread and cheese for me.'

Raikes exclaimed: 'Really? Well, my lord, you lead, and your taste is
mine!'

A second waiter scudded past, and stopped before the chairman to say: 'If
you please, sir, the gentlemen upstairs send their compliments, and will
be happy to accept.'

'Ha!' was the answer. 'Thought better of it, have they! Lay for three
more, then. Five more, I guess.' He glanced at the pair of intruders.

Among a portion of the guests there had been a return to common talk, and
one had observed that he could not get that 'Good Evening,' and 'Good
Night,' out of his head which had caused a friend to explain the meaning
of these terms of salutation to him: while another, of a philosophic
turn, pursued the theme: 'You see, when we meets, we makes a night of it.
So, when we parts, it's Good Night--natural! ain't it?' A proposition
assented to, and considerably dilated on; but whether he was laughing at
that, or what had aroused the fit, the chairman did not say.

Gentle chuckles had succeeded his laughter by the time the bread and
cheese appeared.

In the rear of the provision came three young gentlemen, of whom the
foremost lumped in, singing to one behind him, 'And you shall have little
Rosey!'

They were clad in cricketing costume, and exhibited the health and
manners of youthful Englishmen of station. Frolicsome young bulls
bursting on an assemblage of sheep, they might be compared to. The
chairman welcomed them a trifle snubbingly. The colour mounted to the
cheeks of Mr. Raikes as he made incision in the cheese, under their eyes,
knitting his brows fearfully, as if at hard work.

The chairman entreated Evan to desist from the cheese; and, pulling out
his watch, thundered: 'Time!'

The company generally jumped on their legs; and, in the midst of a hum of
talk and laughter, he informed Evan and Jack, that he invited them
cordially to a supper up-stairs, and would be pleased if they would
partake of it, and in a great rage if they would not.

Raikes was for condescending to accept.

Evan sprang up and cried: 'Gladly, sir,' and gladly would he have cast
his cockney schoolmate to the winds, in the presence of these young
cricketers; for he had a prognostication.

The door was open, and the company of jolly yeomen, tradesmen, farmers,
and the like, had become intent on observing all the ceremonies of
precedence: not one would broaden his back on the other; and there was
bowing, and scraping, and grimacing, till Farmer Broadmead was hailed
aloud, and the old boy stepped forth, and was summarily pushed through:
the chairman calling from the rear, 'Hulloa! no names to-night!' to which
was answered lustily: 'All right, Mr. Tom!' and the speaker was reproved
with, 'There you go! at it again!' and out and up they hustled.

The chairman said quietly to Evan, as they were ascending the stairs: 'We
don't have names to-night; may as well drop titles.' Which presented no
peculiar meaning to Evan's mind, and he smiled the usual smile.

To Raikes, at the door of the supper-room, the chairman repeated the
same; and with extreme affability and alacrity of abnegation, the other
rejoined, 'Oh, certainly!'

No wonder that he rubbed his hands with more delight than aristocrats and
people with gentlemanly connections are in the habit of betraying at the
prospect of refection, for the release from bread and cheese was rendered
overpoweringly glorious, in his eyes, by the bountiful contrast exhibited
on the board before him.




CHAPTER XII

IN WHICH ALE IS SHOWN TO HAVE ONE QUALITY OF WINE

To proclaim that yon ribs of beef and yonder ruddy Britons have met, is
to furnish matter for an hour's comfortable meditation.

Digest the fact. Here the Fates have put their seal to something Nature
clearly devised. It was intended; and it has come to pass. A thing has
come to pass which we feel to be right! The machinery of the world, then,
is not entirely dislocated: there is harmony, on one point, among the
mysterious powers who have to do with us.

Apart from its eloquent and consoling philosophy, the picture is
pleasant. You see two rows of shoulders resolutely set for action: heads
in divers degrees of proximity to their plates: eyes variously twinkling,
or hypocritically composed: chaps in vigorous exercise. Now leans a
fellow right back with his whole face to the firmament: Ale is his
adoration. He sighs not till he sees the end of the mug. Now from one a
laugh is sprung; but, as if too early tapped, he turns off the cock, and
primes himself anew. Occupied by their own requirements, these Britons
allow that their neighbours have rights: no cursing at waste of time is
heard when plates have to be passed: disagreeable, it is still duty.
Field-Marshal Duty, the Briton's chief star, shines here. If one usurps
more than his allowance of elbow-room, bring your charge against them
that fashioned him: work away to arrive at some compass yourself.

Now the mustard ceases to travel, and the salt: the guests have leisure
to contemplate their achievements. Laughs are more prolonged, and come
from the depths.

Now Ale, which is to Beef what Eve was to Adam, threatens to take
possession of the field. Happy they who, following Nature's direction,
admitted not bright ale into their Paradise till their manhood was
strengthened with beef. Some, impatient, had thirsted; had satisfied
their thirst; and the ale, the light though lovely spirit, with nothing
to hold it down, had mounted to their heads; just as Eve will do when
Adam is not mature: just as she did--Alas!

Now, the ruins of the feast being removed, and a clear course left for
the flow of ale, Farmer Broadmead, facing the chairman, rises. He stands
in an attitude of midway. He speaks:

'Gentlemen! 'Taint fust time you and I be met here, to salbrate this here
occasion. I say, not fust time, not by many a time, 'taint. Well,
gentlemen, I ain't much of a speaker, gentlemen, as you know. Howsever,
here I be. No denyin' that. I'm on my legs. This here's a strange enough
world, and a man 's a gentleman, I say, we ought for to be glad when we
got 'm. You know: I'm coming to it shortly. I ain't much of a speaker,
and if you wants somethin' new, you must ax elsewhere: but what I say
is--Bang it! here's good health and long life to Mr. Tom, up there!'

'No names!' shouts the chairman, in the midst of a tremendous clatter.

Farmer Broadmead moderately disengages his breadth from the seat. He
humbly axes pardon, which is accorded him with a blunt nod.

Ale (to Beef what Eve was to Adam) circulates beneath a dazzling foam,
fair as the first woman.

Mr. Tom (for the breach of the rules in mentioning whose name on a night
when identities are merged, we offer sincere apologies every other
minute), Mr. Tom is toasted. His parents, who selected that day sixty
years ago, for his bow to be made to the world, are alluded to with
encomiums, and float down to posterity on floods of liquid amber.

But to see all the subtle merits that now begin to bud out from Mr. Tom,
the chairman and giver of the feast; and also rightly to appreciate the
speeches, we require to be enormously charged with Ale. Mr. Raikes did
his best to keep his head above the surface of the rapid flood. He
conceived the chairman in brilliant colours, and probably owing to the
energy called for by his brain, the legs of the young man failed him
twice, as he tried them. Attention was demanded. Mr. Raikes addressed the
meeting.

The three young gentlemen-cricketers had hitherto behaved with a certain
propriety. It did not offend Mr. Raikes to see them conduct themselves as
if they were at a play, and the rest of the company paid actors. He had
likewise taken a position, and had been the first to laugh aloud at a
particular slip of grammar; while his shrugs at the aspirates transposed
and the pronunciation prevalent, had almost established a free-masonry
between him and one of the three young gentlemen-cricketers-a fair-haired
youth, with a handsome, reckless face, who leaned on the table,
humorously eyeing the several speakers, and exchanging by-words and
laughs with his friends on each side of him.

But Mr. Raikes had the disadvantage of having come to the table empty in
stomach--thirsty exceedingly; and, I repeat, that as, without experience,
you are the victim of divinely given Eve, so, with no foundation to
receive it upon, are you the victim of good sound Ale. He very soon lost
his head. He would otherwise have seen that he must produce a
wonderfully-telling speech if he was to keep the position he had taken,
and had better not attempt one. The three young cricketers were hostile
from the beginning. All of them leant forward, calling attention loudly
laughing for the fun to come.

'Gentlemen!' he said: and said it twice. The gap was wide, and he said,
'Gentlemen!' again.

This commencement of a speech proves that you have made the plunge, but
not that you can swim. At a repetition of 'Gentlemen!' expectancy
resolved into cynicism.

'Gie'n a help,' sang out a son of the plough to a neighbour of the
orator.

'Hang it!' murmured another, 'we ain't such gentlemen as that comes to.'

Mr. Raikes was politely requested to 'tune his pipe.'

With a gloomy curiosity as to the results of Jack's adventurous
undertaking, and a touch of anger at the three whose bearing throughout
had displeased him, Evan regarded his friend. He, too, had drunk, and
upon emptiness. Bright ale had mounted to his brain. A hero should be
held as sacred as the Grand Llama: so let no more be said than that he
drank still, nor marked the replenishing of his glass.

Raikes cleared his throat for a final assault: he had got an image, and
was dashing off; but, unhappily, as if to make the start seem fair, he
was guilty of his reiteration, 'Gentlemen.'

Everybody knew that it was a real start this time, and indeed he had made
an advance, and had run straight through half a sentence. It was
therefore manifestly unfair, inimical, contemptuous, overbearing, and
base, for one of the three young cricketers at this period to fling back
weariedly and exclaim: 'By the Lord; too many gentlemen here!'

Evan heard him across the table. Lacking the key of the speaker's
previous conduct, the words might have passed. As it was, they, to the
ale-invaded head of a young hero, feeling himself the world's equal, and
condemned nevertheless to bear through life the insignia of Tailordom,
not unnaturally struck with peculiar offence. There was arrogance, too,
in the young man who had interposed. He was long in the body, and, when
he was not refreshing his sight by a careless contemplation of his
finger-nails, looked down on his company at table, as one may do who
comes from loftier studies. He had what is popularly known as the nose of
our aristocracy: a nose that much culture of the external graces, and
affectation of suavity, are required to soften. Thereto were joined thin
lips and arched brows. Birth it was possible he could boast, hardly
brains. He sat to the right of the fair-haired youth, who, with his
remaining comrade, a quiet smiling fellow, appeared to be better liked by
the guests, and had been hailed once or twice, under correction of the
chairman, as Mr. Harry. The three had distinguished one there by a few
friendly passages; and this was he who had offered his bed to Evan for
the service of the girl. The recognition they extended to him did not
affect him deeply. He was called Drummond, and had his place near the
chairmen, whose humours he seemed to relish.

The ears of Mr. Raikes were less keen at the moment than Evan's, but his
openness to ridicule was that of a man on his legs solus, amid a company
sitting, and his sense of the same--when he saw himself the victim of
it--acute. His face was rather comic, and, under the shadow of
embarrassment, twitching and working for ideas--might excuse a want of
steadiness and absolute gravity in the countenances of others.

The chairman's neighbour, Drummond, whispered him 'Laxley will get up a
row with that fellow.'

'It 's young Jocelyn egging him on,' said the chairman.

'Um!' added Drummond: 'it's the friend of that talkative rascal that 's
dangerous, if it comes to anything.'

Mr. Raikes perceived that his host desired him to conclude. So, lifting
his voice and swinging his arm, he ended: 'Allow me to propose to you the
Fly in Amber. In other words, our excellent host embalmed in brilliant
ale! Drink him! and so let him live in our memories for ever!'

He sat down very well contented with himself, very little comprehended,
and applauded loudly.

'The Flyin' Number!' echoed Farmer Broadmead, confidently and with
clamour; adding to a friend, when both had drunk the toast to the dregs,
'But what number that be, or how many 'tis of 'em, dishes me! But that 's
ne'ther here nor there.'

The chairman and host of the evening stood up to reply, welcomed by
thunders--'There ye be, Mr. Tom! glad I lives to see ye!' and 'No
names!' and 'Long life to him!'

This having subsided, the chairman spoke, first nodding. 'You don't want
many words, and if you do, you won't get 'em from me.'

Cries of 'Got something better!' took up the blunt address.

'You've been true to it, most of you. I like men not to forget a custom.'

'Good reason so to be,' and 'A jolly good custom,' replied to both
sentences.

'As to the beef, I hope you didn't find it tough: as to the ale--I know
all about THAT!'

'Aha! good!' rang the verdict.

'All I can say is, that this day next year it will be on the table, and I
hope that every one of you will meet Tom--will meet me here punctually.
I'm not a Parliament man, so that 'll do.'

The chairman's breach of his own rules drowned the termination of his
speech in an uproar.

Re-seating himself, he lifted his glass, and proposed: 'The
Antediluvians!'

Farmer Broadmead echoed: 'The Antediloovians!' appending, as a private
sentiment, 'And dam rum chaps they were!'

The Antediluvians, undoubtedly the toast of the evening, were
enthusiastically drunk, and in an ale of treble brew.

When they had quite gone down, Mr. Raikes ventured to ask for the reason
of their receiving such honour from a posterity they had so little to do
with. He put the question mildly, but was impetuously snapped at by the
chairman.

'You respect men for their luck, sir, don't you? Don't be a hypocrite,
and say you don't--you do. Very well: so do I. That's why I drink "The
Antediluvians"!'

'Our worthy host here' (Drummond, gravely smiling, undertook to elucidate
the case) 'has a theory that the constitutions of the Postdiluvians have
been deranged, and their lives shortened, by the miasmas of the Deluge. I
believe he carries it so far as to say that Noah, in the light of a
progenitor, is inferior to Adam, owing to the shaking he had to endure in
the ark, and which he conceives to have damaged the patriarch and the
nervous systems of his sons. It's a theory, you know.'

'They lived close on a thousand years, hale, hearty--and no water!' said
the chairman.

'Well!' exclaimed one, some way down the table, a young farmer, red as a
cock's comb: 'no fools they, eh, master? Where there's ale, would you
drink water, my hearty?' and back he leaned to enjoy the tribute to his
wit; a wit not remarkable, but nevertheless sufficient in the noise it
created to excite the envy of Mr. Raikes, who, inveterately silly when
not engaged in a contest, now began to play on the names of the sons of
Noah.

The chairman lanced a keen light at him from beneath his bushy eyebrows.

Before long he had again to call two parties to order. To Raikes, Laxley
was a puppy: to Laxley, Mr. Raikes was a snob. The antagonism was
natural: ale did but put the match to the magazine. But previous to an
explosion, Laxley, who had observed Evan's disgust at Jack's exhibition
of himself, and had been led to think, by his conduct and clothes in
conjunction, that Evan was his own equal; a gentleman condescending to
the society of a low-born acquaintance;--had sought with sundry
propitiations, intelligent glances, light shrugs, and such like, to
divide Evan from Jack. He did this, doubtless, because he partly
sympathized with Evan, and to assure him that he took a separate view of
him. Probably Evan was already offended, or he held to Jack, as a comrade
should, or else it was that Tailordom and the pride of his accepted
humiliation bellowed in his ears, every fresh minute: 'Nothing assume!' I
incline to think that the more ale he drank the fiercer rebel he grew
against conventional ideas of rank, and those class-barriers which we
scorn so vehemently when we find ourselves kicking at them. Whatsoever
the reason that prompted him, he did not respond to Laxley's advances;
and Laxley, disregarding him, dealt with Raikes alone.

In a tone plainly directed at him, he said: 'Well, Harry, tired of this?
The agriculturals are good fun, but I can't stand much of the small
cockney. A blackguard who tries to make jokes out of the Scriptures ought
to be kicked!'

Harry rejoined, with wet lips: 'Wopping stuff, this ale! Who's that you
want to kick?'

'Somebody who objects to his bray, I suppose,' Mr. Raikes struck in,
across the table, negligently thrusting out his elbow to support his
head.

'Did you allude to me, sir?' Laxley inquired.

'I alluded to a donkey, sir.' Raikes lifted his eyelids to the same level
as Laxley's: 'a passing remark on that interesting animal.'

His friend Harry now came into the ring to try a fall.

'Are you an usher in a school?' he asked, meaning by his looks what men
of science in fisticuffs call business.

Mr. Raikes started in amazement. He recovered as quickly.

'No, sir, not quite; but I have no doubt I should be able to instruct you
upon a point or two.'

'Good manners, for instance?' remarked the third young cricketer, without
disturbing his habitual smile.

'Or what comes from not observing them,' said Evan, unwilling to have
Jack over-matched.

'Perhaps you'll give me a lesson now?' Harry indicated a readiness to
rise for either of them.

At this juncture the chairman interposed.

'Harmony, my lads!--harmony to-night.'

Farmer Broadmead, imagining it to be the signal for a song, returned:

'All right, Mr.--- Mr. Chair! but we an't got pipes in yet. Pipes before
harmony, you know, to-night.'

The pipes were summoned forthwith. System appeared to regulate the
proceedings of this particular night at the Green Dragon. The pipes
charged, and those of the guests who smoked, well fixed behind them,
celestial Harmony was invoked through the slowly curling clouds. In
Britain the Goddess is coy. She demands pressure to appear, and great
gulps of ale. Vastly does she swell the chests of her island children,
but with the modesty of a maid at the commencement. Precedence again
disturbed the minds of the company. At last the red-faced young farmer
led off with 'The Rose and the Thorn.' In that day Chloe still lived; nor
were the amorous transports of Strephon quenched. Mountainous
inflation--mouse-like issue characterized the young farmer's first verse.
Encouraged by manifest approbation he now told Chloe that he 'by Heaven!
never would plant in that bosom a thorn,' with such a volume of sound as
did indeed show how a lover's oath should be uttered in the ear of a
British damsel to subdue her.

'Good!' cried Mr. Raikes, anxious to be convivial.

Subsiding into impertinence, he asked Laxley, 'Could you tip us a
Strephonade, sir? Rejoiced to listen to you, I'm sure! Promise you my
applause beforehand.'

Harry replied hotly: 'Will you step out of the room with me a minute?'

'Have you a confession to make?' quoth Jack, unmoved. 'Have you planted a
thorn in the feminine flower-garden? Make a clean breast of it at the
table. Confess openly and be absolved.'

While Evan spoke a word of angry reproof to Raikes, Harry had to be
restrained by his two friends. The rest of the company looked on with
curiosity; the mouth of the chairman was bunched. Drummond had his eyes
on Evan, who was gazing steadily at the three. Suddenly 'The fellow isn't
a gentleman!' struck the attention of Mr. Raikes with alarming force.

Raikes--and it may be because he knew he could do more than Evan in this
respect--vociferated: 'I'm the son of a gentleman!'

Drummond, from the head of the table, saw that a diversion was
imperative. He leaned forward, and with a look of great interest said:

'Are you? Pray, never disgrace your origin, then.'

'If the choice were offered me, I think I would rather have known his
father,' said the smiling fellow, yawning, and rocking on his chair.

'You would, possibly, have been exceedingly intimate--with his right
foot,' said Raikes.

The other merely remarked: 'Oh! that is the language of the son of a
gentleman.'

The tumult of irony, abuse, and retort, went on despite the efforts of
Drummond and the chairman. It was odd; for at Farmer Broadmead's end of
the table, friendship had grown maudlin: two were seen in a drowsy
embrace, with crossed pipes; and others were vowing deep amity, and
offering to fight the man that might desire it.

'Are ye a friend? or are ye a foe?' was heard repeatedly, and
consequences to the career of the respondent, on his choice of
affirmatives to either of these two interrogations, emphatically
detailed.

It was likewise asked, in reference to the row at the gentlemen's end:
'Why doan' they stand up and have 't out?'

'They talks, they speechifies--why doan' they fight for 't, and then be
friendly?'

'Where's the yarmony, Mr. Chair, I axes--so please ye?' sang out Farmer
Broadmead.

'Ay, ay! Silence!' the chairman called.

Mr. Raikes begged permission to pronounce his excuses, but lapsed into a
lamentation for the squandering of property bequeathed to him by his
respected uncle, and for which--as far as he was intelligible--he
persisted in calling the three offensive young cricketers opposite to
account.

Before he could desist, Harmony, no longer coy, burst on the assembly
from three different sources. 'A Man who is given to Liquor,' soared
aloft with 'The Maid of sweet Seventeen,' who participated in the
adventures of 'Young Molly and the Kicking Cow'; while the guests
selected the chorus of the song that first demanded it.

Evan probably thought that Harmony was herself only when she came single,
or he was wearied of his fellows, and wished to gaze a moment on the
skies whose arms were over and around his young beloved. He went to the
window and threw it up, and feasted his sight on the moon standing on the
downs. He could have wept at the bitter ignominy that severed him from
Rose. And again he gathered his pride as a cloak, and defied the world,
and gloried in the sacrifice that degraded him. The beauty of the night
touched him, and mixed these feelings with mournfulness. He quite forgot
the bellow and clatter behind. The beauty of the night, and heaven knows
what treacherous hope in the depths of his soul, coloured existence
warmly.

He was roused from his reverie by an altercation unmistakeably fierce.

Raikes had been touched on a tender point. In reply to a bantering remark
of his, Laxley had hummed over bits of his oration, amid the chuckles of
his comrades. Unfortunately at a loss for a biting retort, Raikes was
reduced to that plain confession of a lack of wit; he offered combat.

'I 'll tell you what,' said Laxley, 'I never soil my hands with a
blackguard; and a fellow who tries to make fun of Scripture, in my
opinion is one. A blackguard--do you hear? But, if you'll give me
satisfactory proofs that you really are what I have some difficulty in
believing the son of a gentleman--I 'll meet you when and where you
please.'

'Fight him, anyhow,' said Harry. 'I 'll take him myself after we finish
the match to-morrow.'

Laxley rejoined that Mr. Raikes must be left to him.

'Then I'll take the other,' said Harry. 'Where is he?'

Evan walked round to his place.

'I am here,' he answered, 'and at your service.'

'Will you fight?' cried Harry.

There was a disdainful smile on Evan's mouth, as he replied: 'I must
first enlighten you. I have no pretensions to your blue blood, or yellow.
If, sir, you will deign to challenge a man who is not the son of a
gentleman, and consider the expression of his thorough contempt for your
conduct sufficient to enable you to overlook that fact, you may dispose
of me. My friend here has, it seems, reason to be proud of his
connections. That you may not subsequently bring the charge against me of
having led you to "soil your hands"--as your friend there terms it--I,
with all the willingness in the world to chastise you or him for your
impertinence, must first give you a fair chance of escape, by telling you
that my father was a tailor.'

The countenance of Mr. Raikes at the conclusion of this speech was a
painful picture. He knocked the table passionately, exclaiming:

'Who'd have thought it?'

Yet he had known it. But he could not have thought it possible for a man
to own it publicly.

Indeed, Evan could not have mentioned it, but for hot fury and the ale.
It was the ale in him expelling truth; and certainly, to look at him,
none would have thought it.

'That will do,' said Laxley, lacking the magnanimity to despise the
advantage given him, 'you have chosen the very best means of saving your
skins.'

'We 'll come to you when our supply of clothes runs short,' added Harry.
'A snip!'

'Pardon me!' said Evan, with his eyes slightly widening, 'but if you
come to me, I shall no longer give you a choice of behaviour. I wish you
good-night, gentlemen. I shall be in this house, and am to be found here,
till ten o'clock to-morrow morning. Sir,' he addressed the chairman, 'I
must apologize to you for this interruption to your kindness, for which I
thank you very sincerely. It 's "good-night," now, sir,' he pursued,
bowing, and holding out his hand, with a smile.

The chairman grasped it: 'You're a hot-headed young fool, sir: you're an
ill-tempered ferocious young ass. Can't you see another young donkey
without joining company in kicks-eh? Sit down, and don't dare to spoil
the fun any more. You a tailor! Who'll believe it? You're a nobleman in
disguise. Didn't your friend say so?--ha! ha! Sit down.' He pulled out
his watch, and proclaiming that he was born into this world at the hour
about to strike, called for a bumper all round.

While such of the company as had yet legs and eyes unvanquished by the
potency of the ale, stood up to drink and cheer, Mark, the waiter,
scurried into the room, and, to the immense stupefaction of the chairman,
and amusement of his guests, spread the news of the immediate birth of a
little stranger on the premises, who was declared by Dr. Pillie to be a
lusty boy, and for whom the kindly landlady solicited good luck to be
drunk.




CHAPTER XIII

THE MATCH OF FALLOW FIELD AGAINST BECKLEY

The dramatic proportions to which ale will exalt the sentiments within
us, and our delivery of them, are apt to dwindle and shrink even below
the natural elevation when we look back on them from the hither shore of
the river of sleep--in other words, wake in the morning: and it was with
no very self-satisfied emotions that Evan, dressing by the full light of
day, reviewed his share in the events of the preceding night. Why, since
he had accepted his fate, should he pretend to judge the conduct of
people his superiors in rank? And where was the necessity for him to
thrust the fact of his being that abhorred social pariah down the throats
of an assembly of worthy good fellows? The answer was, that he had not
accepted his fate: that he considered himself as good a gentleman as any
man living, and was in absolute hostility with the prejudices of society.
That was the state of the case: but the evaporation of ale in his brain
caused him to view his actions from the humble extreme of that delightful
liquor, of which the spirit had flown and the corpse remained.

Having revived his system with soda-water, and finding no sign of his
antagonist below, Mr. Raikes, to disperse the sceptical dimples on his
friend's face, alluded during breakfast to a determination he had formed
to go forth and show on the cricket-field.

'For, you know,' he observed, 'they can't have any objection to fight
one.'

Evan, slightly colouring, answered: 'Why, you said up-stairs, you thought
fighting duels disgraceful folly.'

'So it is, so it is; everybody knows that,' returned Jack; 'but what can
a gentleman do?'

'Be a disgraceful fool, I suppose,' said Evan: and Raikes went on with
his breakfast, as if to be such occasionally was the distinguished fate
of a gentleman, of which others, not so happy in their birth, might well
be envious.

He could not help betraying that he bore in mind the main incidents of
the festival over-night; for when he had inquired who it might be that
had reduced his friend to wear mourning, and heard that it was his father
(spoken by Evan with a quiet sigh), Mr. Raikes tapped an egg, and his
flexible brows exhibited a whole Bar of contending arguments within. More
than for the love of pleasure, he had spent his money to be taken for a
gentleman. He naturally thought highly of the position, having bought it.
But Raikes appreciated a capital fellow, and felt warmly to Evan, who,
moreover, was feeding him.

If not born a gentleman, this Harrington had the look of one, and was
pleasing in female eyes, as the landlady, now present, bore witness,
wishing them good morning, and hoping they had slept well. She handed to
Evan his purse, telling him she had taken it last night, thinking it
safer for the time being in her pocket; and that the chairman of the
feast paid for all in the Green Dragon up to twelve that day, he having
been born between the hours, and liking to make certain: and that every
year he did the same; and was a seemingly rough old gentleman, but as
soft-hearted as a chicken. His name must positively not be inquired, she
said; to be thankful to him was to depart, asking no questions.

'And with a dart in the bosom from those eyes--those eyes!' cried Jack,
shaking his head at the landlady's resistless charms.

'I hope you was not one of the gentlemen who came and disturbed us last
night, Sir?' she turned on him sharply.

Jack dallied with the imputation, but denied his guilt.

'No; it wasn't your voice,' continued the landlady. 'A parcel of young
puppies calling themselves gentlemen! I know him. It's that young Mr.
Laxley: and he the nephew of a Bishop, and one of the Honourables! and
then the poor gals get the blame. I call it a shame, I do. There's that
poor young creature up-stairs-somebody's victim she is: and nobody's to
suffer but herself, the little fool!'

'Yes,' said Raikes. 'Ah! we regret these things in after life!' and he
looked as if he had many gentlemanly burdens of the kind on his
conscience.

'It 's a wonder, to my mind,' remarked the landlady, when she had
placidly surveyed Mr. Raikes, 'how young gals can let some of you
men-folk mislead 'em.'

She turned from him huffily, and addressed Evan:

'The old gentleman is gone, sir. He slept on a chair, breakfasted, and
was off before eight. He left word, as the child was born on his
birthright, he'd provide for it, and pay the mother's bill, unless you
claimed the right. I'm afraid he suspected--what I never, never-no! but
by what I've seen of you--never will believe. For you, I'd say, must be a
gentleman, whatever your company. She asks one favour of you, sir:--for
you to go and let her speak to you once before you go away for good.
She's asleep now, and mustn't be disturbed. Will you do it, by-and-by?
Please to comfort the poor creature, sir.'

Evan consented. I am afraid also it was the landlady's flattering speech
made him, without reckoning his means, add that the young mother and her
child must be considered under his care, and their expenses charged to
him. The landlady was obliged to think him a wealthy as well as a noble
youth, and admiringly curtsied.

Mr. John Raikes and Mr. Evan Harrington then strolled into the air, and
through a long courtyard, with brewhouse and dairy on each side, and a
pleasant smell of baking bread, and dogs winking in the sun, cats at the
corners of doors, satisfied with life, and turkeys parading, and fowls,
strutting cocks, that overset the dignity of Mr. Raikes by awakening his
imitative propensities. Certain white-capped women, who were washing in a
tub, laughed, and one observed: 'He's for all the world like the little
bantam cock stickin' 'self up in a crow against the Spaniar'.' And this,
and the landlady's marked deference to Evan, induced Mr. Raikes
contemptuously to glance at our national blindness to the true diamond,
and worship of the mere plumes in which a person is dressed.

They passed a pretty flower-garden, and entering a smooth-shorn meadow,
beheld the downs beautifully clear under sunlight and slowly-sailing
images of cloud. At the foot of the downs, on a plain of grass, stood a
white booth topped by a flag, which signalled that on that spot Fallow
field and Beckley were contending.

'A singular old gentleman! A very singular old gentleman, that!' Raikes
observed, following an idea that had been occupying him. 'We did wrong to
miss him. We ought to have waylaid him in the morning. Never miss a
chance, Harrington.'

'What chance?' Evan inquired.

'Those old gentlemen are very odd,' Jack pursued, 'very strange. He
wouldn't have judged me by my attire. Admetus' flocks I guard, yet am a
God! Dress is nothing to those old cocks. He's an eccentric. I know it; I
can see it. He 's a corrective of Cudford, who is abhorrent to my soul.
To give you an instance, now, of what those old boys will do--I remember
my father taking me, when I was quite a youngster, to a tavern he
frequented, and we met one night just such an old fellow as this; and the
waiter told us afterwards that he noticed me particularly. He thought me
a very remarkable boy--predicted great things. For some reason or other
my father never took me there again. I remember our having a Welsh
rarebit there for supper, and when the waiter last night mentioned a
rarebit, 'gad he started up before me. I gave chase into my early youth.
However, my father never took me to meet the old fellow again. I believe
it lost me a fortune.'

Evan's thoughts were leaping to the cricket-field, or he would have
condoled with Mr. Raikes for a loss that evidently afflicted him still.

Now, it must be told that the lady's-maid of Mrs. Andrew Cogglesby,
borrowed temporarily by the Countess de Saldar for service at Beckley
Court, had slept in charge of the Countess's boxes at the Green Dragon:
the Countess having told her, with the candour of high-born dames to
their attendants, that it would save expense; and that, besides, Admiral
Combleman, whom she was going to see, or Sir Perkins Ripley (her father's
old friend), whom she should visit if Admiral Combleman was not at his
mansion-both were likely to have full houses, and she could not take them
by storm. An arrangement which left her upwards of twelve hours' liberty,
seemed highly proper to Maria Conning, this lady's-maid, a very demure
young person. She was at her bed-room window, as Evan passed up the
courtyard of the inn, and recognized him immediately. 'Can it be him they
mean that's the low tradesman?' was Maria's mysterious exclamation. She
examined the pair, and added: 'Oh, no. It must be the tall one they
mistook for the small one. But Mr. Harrington ought not to demean himself
by keeping company with such, and my lady should know of it.'

My lady, alighting from the Lymport coach, did know of it, within a few
minutes after Evan had quitted the Green Dragon, and turned pale, as
high-born dames naturally do when they hear of a relative's disregard of
the company he keeps.

'A tailor, my lady!' said scornful Maria; and the Countess jumped and
complained of a pin.

'How did you hear of this, Conning?' she presently asked with composure.

'Oh, my lady, he was tipsy last night, and kept swearing out loud he was
a gentleman.'

'Tipsy!' the Countess murmured in terror. She had heard of inaccessible
truths brought to light by the magic wand of alcohol. Was Evan
intoxicated, and his dreadful secret unlocked last night?

'And who may have told you of this, Conning?' she asked.

Maria plunged into one of the boxes, and was understood to say that
nobody in particular had told her, but that among other flying matters it
had come to her ears.

'My brother is Charity itself,' sighed the Countess. 'He welcomes high or
low.'

'Yes, but, my lady, a, tailor!' Maria repeated, and the Countess,
agreeing with her scorn as she did, could have killed her. At least she
would have liked to run a bodkin into her, and make her scream. In her
position she could not always be Charity itself: nor is this the required
character for a high-born dame: so she rarely affected it.

'Order a fly: discover the direction Mr. Harrington has taken; spare me
further remarks,' she said; and Maria humbly flitted from her presence.

When she was gone, the Countess covered her face with her hands. 'Even
this creature would despise us!' she exclaimed.

The young lady encountered by Mr. Raikes on the road to Fallow field, was
wrong in saying that Beckley would be seen out before the shades of
evening caught up the ball. Not one, but two men of Beckley--the last
two--carried out their bats, cheered handsomely by both parties. The
wickets pitched in the morning, they carried them in again, and plaudits
renewed proved that their fame had not slumbered. To stand before a
field, thoroughly aware that every successful stroke you make is adding
to the hoards of applause in store for you is a joy to your friends, an
exasperation to your foes; I call this an exciting situation, and one as
proud as a man may desire. Then, again, the two last men of an eleven are
twins: they hold one life between them; so that he who dies extinguishes
the other. Your faculties are stirred to their depths. You become engaged
in the noblest of rivalries: in defending your own, you fight for your
comrade's existence. You are assured that the dread of shame, if not
emulation, is making him equally wary and alert.

Behold, then, the two bold men of Beckley fighting to preserve one life.
Under the shadow of the downs they stand, beneath a glorious day, and
before a gallant company. For there are ladies in carriages here, there
are cavaliers; good county names may be pointed out. The sons of
first-rate families are in the two elevens, mingled with the yeomen and
whoever can best do the business. Fallow field and Beckley, without
regard to rank, have drawn upon their muscle and science. One of the bold
men of Beckley at the wickets is Nick Frim, son of the gamekeeper at
Beckley Court; the other is young Tom Copping, son of Squire Copping, of
Dox Hall, in the parish of Beckley. Last year, you must know, Fallow
field beat. That is why Nick Frim, a renowned out-hitter, good to finish
a score brilliantly with a pair of threes, has taken to blocking, and Mr.
Tom cuts with caution, though he loves to steal his runs, and is usually
dismissed by his remarkable cunning.

The field was ringing at a stroke of Nick Frim's, who had lashed out in
his old familiar style at last, and the heavens heard of it, when Evan
came into the circle of spectators. Nick and Tom were stretching from
post to post, might and main. A splendid four was scored. The field took
breath with the heroes; and presume not to doubt that heroes they are. It
is good to win glory for your country; it is also good to win glory for
your village. A Member of Parliament, Sir George Lowton, notes this
emphatically, from the statesman's eminence, to a group of gentlemen on
horseback round a carriage wherein a couple of fair ladies reclined.

'They didn't shout more at the news of the Battle of Waterloo. Now this
is our peculiarity, this absence of extreme centralization. It must be
encouraged. Local jealousies, local rivalries, local triumphs--these are
the strength of the kingdom.'

'If you mean to say that cricket's a ----' the old squire speaking
(Squire Uplift of Fallow field) remembered the saving presences, and
coughed--'good thing, I'm one with ye, Sir George. Encouraged, egad! They
don't want much of that here. Give some of your lean London straws a
strip o' clean grass and a bit o' liberty, and you'll do 'em a service.'

'What a beautiful hit!' exclaimed one of the ladies, languidly watching
the ascent of the ball.

'Beautiful, d' ye call it?' muttered the squire.

The ball, indeed, was dropping straight into the hands of the
long-hit-off. Instantly a thunder rolled. But it was Beckley that took
the joyful treble--Fallow field the deeply--cursing bass. The
long-hit-off, he who never was known to miss a catch-butter-fingered
beast!--he has let the ball slip through his fingers.

Are there Gods in the air? Fred Linnington, the unfortunate of Fallow
field, with a whole year of unhappy recollection haunting him in
prospect, ere he can retrieve his character--Fred, if he does not accuse
the powers of the sky, protests that he cannot understand it, which means
the same.

Fallow field's defeat--should such be the result of the contest--he knows
now will be laid at his door. Five men who have bowled at the indomitable
Beckleyans think the same. Albeit they are Britons, it abashes them. They
are not the men they were. Their bowling is as the bowling of babies; and
see! Nick, who gave the catch, and pretends he did it out of
commiseration for Fallow field, the ball has flown from his bat sheer
over the booth. If they don't add six to the score, it will be the fault
of their legs. But no: they rest content with a fiver and cherish their
wind.

Yet more they mean to do, Success does not turn the heads of these
Britons, as it would of your frivolous foreigners.

And now small boys (who represent the Press here) spread out from the
marking-booth, announcing foremost, and in larger type, as it were, quite
in Press style, their opinion--which is, that Fallow field will get a
jolly good hiding; and vociferating that Beckley is seventy-nine ahead,
and that Nick Frim, the favourite of the field, has scored fifty-one to
his own cheek. The boys are boys of both villages: but they are British
boys--they adore prowess. The Fallow field boys wish that Nick Frim would
come and live on their side; the boys of Beckley rejoice in possessing
him. Nick is the wicketkeeper of the Beckley eleven; long-limbed, wiry,
keen of eye. His fault as a batsman is, that he will be a slashing
hitter. He is too sensible of the joys of a grand spanking hit. A short
life and a merry one, has hitherto been his motto.

But there were reasons for Nick's rare display of skill. That woman may
have the credit due to her (and, as there never was a contest of which
she did not sit at the springs, so is she the source of all superhuman
efforts exhibited by men), be it told that Polly Wheedle is on the field;
Polly, one of the upper housemaids of Beckley Court; Polly, eagerly
courted by Fred Linnington, humbly desired by Nick Frim--a pert and
blooming maiden--who, while her suitors combat hotly for an undivided
smile, improves her holiday by instilling similar unselfish aspirations
into the breasts of others.

Between his enjoyment of society and the melancholy it engendered in his
mind by reflecting on him the age and decrepitude of his hat, Mr. John
Raikes was doubtful of his happiness for some time. But as his taste for
happiness was sharp, he, with a great instinct amounting almost to genius
in its pursuit, resolved to extinguish his suspicion by acting the
perfectly happy man. To do this, it was necessary that he should have
listeners: Evan was not enough, and was besides unsympathetic; he had not
responded to Jack's cordial assurances of his friendship 'in spite of
anything,' uttered before they came into the field.

Heat and lustre were now poured from the sky, on whose soft blue a fleet
of clouds sailed heavily. Nick Frim was very wonderful, no doubt. He
deserved that the Gods should recline on those gold-edged cushions above,
and lean over to observe him. Nevertheless, the ladies were beginning to
ask when Nick Frim would be out. The small boys alone preserved their
enthusiasm for Nick. As usual, the men took a middle position. Theirs was
the pleasure of critics, which, being founded on the judgement, lasts
long, and is without disappointment at the close. It was sufficient that
the ladies should lend the inspiration of their bonnets to this fine
match. Their presence on the field is another beautiful instance of the
generous yielding of the sex simply to grace our amusement, and their
acute perception of the part they have to play.

Mr. Raikes was rather shy of them at first. But his acting rarely failing
to deceive himself, he began to feel himself the perfectly happy man he
impersonated, and where there were ladies he went, and talked of days
when he had creditably handled a bat, and of a renown in the annals of
Cricket cut short by mysterious calamity. The foolish fellow did not know
that they care not a straw for cricketing fame. His gaiety presently
forsook him as quickly as it had come. Instead of remonstrating at Evan's
restlessness, it was he who now dragged Evan from spot to spot. He spoke
low and nervously.

'We're watched!'

There was indeed a man lurking near and moving as they moved, with a
speculative air. Writs were out against Raikes. He slipped from his
friend, saying:

'Never mind me. That old amphitryon's birthday hangs on till the
meridian; you understand. His table invites. He is not unlikely to enjoy
my conversation. What mayn't that lead to? Seek me there.'

Evan strolled on, relieved by the voluntary departure of the weariful
funny friend he would not shake off, but could not well link with.

A long success is better when seen at a distance of time, and Nick Frim
was beginning to suffer from the monotony of his luck. Fallow field could
do nothing with him. He no longer blocked. He lashed out at every ball,
and far flew every ball that was bowled. The critics saw, in this return
to his old practices, promise of Nick's approaching extinction. The
ladies were growing hot and weary. The little boys gasped on the grass,
but like cunning circulators of excitement, spread a report to keep it
up, that Nick, on going to his wickets the previous day, had sworn an
oath that he would not lay down his bat till he had scored a hundred.

So they had still matter to agitate their youthful breasts, and Nick's
gradual building up of tens, and prophecies and speculations as to his
chances of completing the hundred, were still vehemently confided to the
field, amid a general mopping of faces.

Evan did become aware that a man was following him. The man had not the
look of a dreaded official. His countenance was sun-burnt and open, and
he was dressed in a countryman's holiday suit. When Evan met his eyes,
they showed perplexity. Evan felt he was being examined from head to
heel, but by one unaccustomed to his part, and without the courage to
decide what he ought consequently to do while a doubt remained, though
his inspection was verging towards a certainty in his mind.

At last, somewhat annoyed that the man should continue to dog him
wherever he moved, he turned on him and asked him what he wanted?

'Be you a Muster Eav'n Harrington, Esquire?' the man drawled out in the
rustic music of inquiry.

'That is my name,' said Evan.

'Ay,' returned the man, 'it's somebody lookin' like a lord, and has a
small friend wi' shockin' old hat, and I see ye come out o' the Green
Drag'n this mornin'--I don't reck'n there's e'er a mistaak, but I likes
to make cock sure. Be you been to Poortigal, sir?'

'Yes,' answered Evan, 'I have been to Poortigal.'

'What's the name o' the capital o' Portugal, sir?' The man looked
immensely shrewd, and nodding his consent at the laughing reply, added:

'And there you was born, sir? You'll excuse my boldness, but I only does
what's necessary.'

Evan said he was not born there.

'No, not born there. That's good. Now, sir, did you happen to be born
anywheres within smell o' salt water?'

'Yes,' answered Evan, 'I was born by the sea.'

'Not far beyond fifty mile from Fall'field here, sir?'

'Something less.'

'All right. Now I'm cock sure,' said the man. 'Now, if you'll have the
kindness just to oblige me by--'he sped the words and the instrument
jointly at Evan, takin' that there letter, I'll say good-bye, sir, and my
work's done for the day.'

Saying which, he left Evan with the letter in his hands. Evan turned it
over curiously. It was addressed to 'Evan Harrington, Esquire, T---- of
Lymport.'

A voice paralyzed his fingers: the clear ringing voice of a young
horsewoman, accompanied by a little maid on a pony, who galloped up to
the carriage upon which Squire Uplift, Sir George Lowton, Hamilton
Jocelyn, and other cavaliers, were in attendance.

'Here I am at last, and Beckley's in still! How d' ye do, Lady Racial?
How d' ye do, Sir George. How d' ye do, everybody. Your servant, Squire!
We shall beat you. Harry says we shall soon be a hundred a-head of you.
Fancy those boys! they would sleep at Fallow field last night. How I wish
you had made a bet with me, Squire.'

'Well, my lass, it's not too late,' said the Squire, detaining her hand.

'Oh, but it wouldn't be fair now. And I'm not going to be kissed on the
field, if you please, Squire. Here, Dorry will do instead. Dorry! come
and be kissed by the Squire.'

It was Rose, living and glowing; Rose, who was the brilliant young
Amazon, smoothing the neck of a mettlesome gray cob. Evan's heart bounded
up to her, but his limbs were motionless.

The Squire caught her smaller companion in his arms, and sounded a kiss
upon both her cheeks; then settled her in the saddle, and she went to
answer some questions of the ladies. She had the same lively eyes as
Rose; quick saucy lips, red, and open for prattle. Rolls of auburn hair
fell down her back, for being a child she was allowed privileges. To talk
as her thoughts came, as well as to wear her hair as it grew, was a
special privilege of this young person, on horseback or elsewhere.

'Now, I know what you want to ask me, Aunt Shorne. Isn't it about my
Papa? He's not come, and he won't be able to come for a week.--Glad to be
with Cousin Rosey? I should think I am! She's the nicest girl I ever
could suppose. She isn't a bit spoiled by Portugal; only browned; and she
doesn't care for that; no more do I. I rather like the sun when it
doesn't freckle you. I can't bear freckles, and I don't believe in milk
for them. People who have them are such a figure. Drummond Forth has
them, but he's a man, and it doesn't matter for a man to have freckles.
How's my uncle Mel? Oh, he's quite well. I mean he has the gout in one of
his fingers, and it's swollen so, it's just like a great fat fir cone! He
can't write a bit, and rests his hand on a table. He wants to have me
made to write with my left hand as well as my right. As if I was ever
going to have the gout in one of my fingers!'

Sir George Lowton observed to Hamilton Jocelyn, that Melville must take
to his tongue now.

'I fancy he will,' said Hamilton. 'My father won't give up his nominee;
so I fancy he'll try Fallow field. Of course, we go in for the
agricultural interest; but there's a cantankerous old ruffian down
here--a brewer, or something--he's got half the votes at his bidding. We
shall see.'

'Dorothy, my dear child, are you not tired?' said Lady Racial. 'You are
very hot.'

'Yes, that's because Rose would tear along the road to get here in time,
after we had left those tiresome Copping people, where she had to make a
call. "What a slow little beast your pony is, Dorry!"--she said that at
least twenty times.'

'Oh, you naughty puss!' cried Rose. 'Wasn't it, "Rosey, Rosey, I'm sure
we shall be too late, and shan't see a thing: do come along as hard as
you can"?'

'I 'm sure it was not,' Miss Dorothy retorted, with the large eyes of
innocence. 'You said you wanted to see Nick Frim keeping the wicket, and
Ferdinand Laxley bowl. And, oh! you know something you said about
Drummond Forth.'

'Now, shall I tell upon you?' said Rose.

'No, don't!' hastily replied the little woman, blushing. And the
cavaliers laughed out, and the ladies smiled, and Dorothy added: 'It
isn't much, after all.'

'Then, come; let's have it, or I shall be jealous,' said the Squire.

'Shall I tell?' Rose asked slily.

'It 's unfair to betray one of your sex, Rose,' remarked the
sweetly-smiling lady.

'Yes, Lady Racial--mayn't a woman have secrets?' Dorothy put it with
great natural earnestness, and they all laughed aloud. 'But I know a
secret of Rosey's,' continued Miss Dorothy, 'and if she tells upon me, I
shall tell upon her.'

'They're out!' cried Rose, pointing her whip at the wickets. 'Good night
to Beckley! Tom Copping 's run out.'

Questions as to how it was done passed from mouth to mouth. Questions as
to whether it was fair sprang from Tom's friends, and that a doubt
existed was certain: the whole field was seen converging toward the two
umpires.

Farmer Broadmead for Fallow field, Master Nat Hodges for Beckley.

It really is a mercy there's some change in the game,' said Mrs. Shorne,
waving her parasol. 'It 's a charming game, but it wants variety a
little. When do you return, Rose?'

'Not for some time,' said Rose, primly. 'I like variety very well, but I
don't seek it by running away the moment I've come.'

'No, but, my dear,' Mrs. Shorne negligently fanned her face, 'you will
have to come with us, I fear, when we go. Your uncle accompanies us. I
really think the Squire will, too; and Mr. Forth is no chaperon. Even you
understand that.'

'Oh, I can get an old man--don't be afraid, said Rose. 'Or must I have
and old woman, aunt?'

The lady raised her eyelids slowly on Rose, and thought: 'If you were
soundly whipped, my little madam, what a good thing it would be for you.'
And that good thing Mrs. Shorne was willing to do for Rose. She turned
aside, and received the salute of an unmistakable curate on foot.

'Ah, Mr. Parsley, you lend your countenance to the game, then?'

The curate observed that sound Churchmen unanimously supported the game.

'Bravo!' cried Rose. 'How I like to hear you talk like that, Mr. Parsley.
I didn't think you had so much sense. You and I will have a game
together--single wicket. We must play for something--what shall it be?'

'Oh--for nothing,' the curate vacuously remarked.

'That's for love, you rogue!' exclaimed the Squire. 'Come, come, none o'
that, sir--ha! ha!'

'Oh, very well; we'll play for love,' said Rose.

'And I'll hold the stakes, my dear--eh?'

'You dear old naughty Squire!--what do you mean?'

Rose laughed. But she had all the men surrounding her, and Mrs. Shorne
talked of departing.

Why did not Evan bravely march away? Why, he asked himself, had he come
on this cricket-field to be made thus miserable? What right had such as
he to look on Rose? Consider, however, the young man's excuses. He could
not possibly imagine that a damsel who rode one day to a match, would
return on the following day to see it finished: or absolutely know that
unseen damsel to be Rose Jocelyn. And if he waited, it was only to hear
her sweet voice once again, and go for ever. As far as he could fathom
his hopes, they were that Rose would not see him: but the hopes of youth
are deep.

Just then a toddling small rustic stopped in front of Evan, and set up a
howl for his 'fayther.' Evan lifted him high to look over people's heads,
and discover his wandering parent. The urchin, when he had settled to his
novel position, surveyed the field, and shouting, 'Fayther, fayther!
here I bes on top of a gentleman!' made lusty signs, which attracted not
his father alone. Rose sang out, 'Who can lend me a penny?' Instantly the
curate and the squire had a race in their pockets. The curate was first,
but Rose favoured the squire, took his money with a nod and a smile, and
rode at the little lad, to whom she was saying: 'Here, bonny boy, this
will buy you--'

She stopped and coloured.

'Evan!'

The child descended rapidly to the ground.

A bow and a few murmured words replied to her.

'Isn't this just like you, my dear Evan? Shouldn't I know that whenever I
met you, you would be doing something kind? How did you come here? You
were on your way to Beckley!'

'To London,' said Evan.

'To London! and not coming over to see me--us?'

Here the little fellow's father intervened to claim his offspring, and
thank the lady and the gentleman: and, with his penny firmly grasped, he
who had brought the lady and the gentleman together, was borne off a
wealthy human creature.

Before much further could be said between them, the Countess de Saldar
drove up.

'My dearest Rose!' and 'My dear Countess!' and 'Not Louisa, then?' and,
'I am very glad to see you!' without attempting the endearing
'Louisa'--passed.

The Countess de Saldar then admitted the presence of her brother.

'Think!' said Rose. 'He talks of going on straight from here to London.'

'That pretty pout will alone suffice to make him deviate, then,' said the
Countess, with her sweetest open slyness. 'I am now on the point of
accepting your most kind invitation. Our foreign habits allow us to visit
thus early! He will come with me.'

Evan tried to look firm, and speak as he was trying to look. Rose fell to
entreaty, and from entreaty rose to command; and in both was utterly
fascinating to the poor youth. Luxuriously--while he hesitated and dwelt
on this and that faint objection--his spirit drank the delicious changes
of her face. To have her face before him but one day seemed so rich a
boon to deny himself, that he was beginning to wonder at his constancy in
refusal; and now that she spoke to him so pressingly, devoting her
guileless eyes to him alone, he forgot a certain envious feeling that had
possessed him while she was rattling among the other males--a doubt
whether she ever cast a thought on Mr. Evan Harrington.

'Yes; he will come,' cried Rose; 'and he shall ride home with me and my
friend Drummond; and he shall have my groom's horse, if he doesn't mind.
Bob can ride home in the cart with Polly, my maid; and he'll like that,
because Polly's always good fun--when they're not in love with her. Then,
of course, she torments them.'

'Naturally,' said the Countess.

Mr. Evan Harrington's final objection, based on his not having clothes,
and so forth, was met by his foreseeing sister.

'I have your portmanteau packed, in with me, my dear brother; Conning has
her feet on it. I divined that I should overtake you.'

Evan felt he was in the toils. After a struggle or two he yielded; and,
having yielded, did it with grace. In a moment, and with a power of
self-compression equal to that of the adept Countess, he threw off his
moodiness as easily as if it had been his Spanish mantle, and assumed a
gaiety that made the Countess's eyes beam rapturously upon him, and was
pleasing to Rose, apart from the lead in admiration the Countess had
given her--not for the first time. We mortals, the best of us, may be
silly sheep in our likes and dislikes: where there is no premeditated or
instinctive antagonism, we can be led into warm acknowledgement of merits
we have not sounded. This the Countess de Saldar knew right well.

Rose now intimated her wish to perform the ceremony of introduction
between her aunt and uncle present, and the visitors to Beckley Court.
The Countess smiled, and in the few paces that separated the two groups,
whispered to her brother: 'Miss Jocelyn, my dear.'

The eye-glasses of the Beckley group were dropped with one accord. The
ceremony was gone through. The softly-shadowed differences of a grand
manner addressed to ladies, and to males, were exquisitely accomplished
by the Countess de Saldar.

'Harrington? Harrington?' her quick ear caught on the mouth of Squire
Uplift, scanning Evan.

Her accent was very foreign, as she said aloud: 'We are entirely
strangers to your game--your creecket. My brother and myself are scarcely
English. Nothing save diplomacy are we adepts in!'

'You must be excessively dangerous, madam,' said Sir George, hat in air.

'Even in that, I fear, we are babes and sucklings, and might take many a
lesson from you. Will you instruct me in your creecket? What are they
doing now? It seems very unintelligible--indistinct--is it not?'

Inasmuch as Farmer Broadmead and Master Nat Hodges were surrounded by a
clamorous mob, shouting both sides of the case, as if the loudest and
longest-winded were sure to wrest a favourable judgement from those two
infallible authorities on the laws of cricket, the noble game was
certainly in a state of indistinctness.

The squire came forward to explain, piteously entreated not to expect too
much from a woman's inapprehensive wits, which he plainly promised (under
eyes that had melted harder men) he would not. His forbearance and
bucolic gallantry were needed, for he had the Countess's radiant full
visage alone. Her senses were dancing in her right ear, which had heard
the name of Lady Racial pronounced, and a voice respond to it from the
carriage.

Into what a pit had she suddenly plunged! You ask why she did not drive
away as fast as the horses would carry her, and fly the veiled head of
Demogorgon obscuring valley and hill and the shining firmament, and
threatening to glare destruction on her? You do not know an intriguer.
She relinquishes the joys of life for the joys of intrigue. This is her
element. The Countess did feel that the heavens were hard on her. She
resolved none the less to fight her way to her object; for where so much
had conspired to favour her--the decease of the generous Sir Abraham
Harrington, of Torquay, and the invitation to Beckley Court--could she
believe the heavens in league against her? Did she not nightly pray to
them, in all humbleness of body, for the safe issue of her cherished
schemes? And in this, how unlike she was to the rest of mankind! She
thought so; she relied on her devout observances; they gave her sweet
confidence, and the sense of being specially shielded even when specially
menaced. Moreover, tell a woman to put back, when she is once clearly
launched! Timid as she may be, her light bark bounds to meet the tempest.
I speak of women who do launch: they are not numerous, but, to the wise,
the minorities are the representatives.

'Indeed, it is an intricate game!' said the Countess, at the conclusion
of the squire's explanation, and leaned over to Mrs. Shorne to ask her if
she thoroughly understood it.

'Yes, I suppose I do,' was the reply; 'it--rather than the amusement they
find in it.' This lady had recovered Mr. Parsley from Rose, but had only
succeeded in making the curate unhappy, without satisfying herself.

The Countess gave her the shrug of secret sympathy.

'We must not say so,' she observed aloud--most artlessly, and fixed the
squire with a bewitching smile, under which her heart beat thickly. As
her eyes travelled from Mrs. Shorne to the squire, she had marked Lady
Racial looking singularly at Evan, who was mounting the horse of Bob the
groom.

'Fine young fellow, that,' said the squire to Lady Racial, as Evan rode
off with Rose.

'An extremely handsome, well-bred young man,' she answered. Her eyes met
the Countess's, and the Countess, after resting on their surface with an
ephemeral pause, murmured: 'I must not praise my brother,' and smiled a
smile which was meant to mean: 'I think with you, and thank you, and love
you for admiring him.'

Had Lady Racial joined the smile and spoken with animation afterwards,
the Countess would have shuddered and had chills of dread. As it was, she
was passably content. Lady Racial slightly dimpled her cheek, for
courtesy's sake, and then looked gravely on the ground. This was no
promise; it was even an indication (as the Countess read her), of
something beyond suspicion in the lady's mind; but it was a sign of
delicacy, and a sign that her feelings had been touched, from which a
truce might be reckoned on, and no betrayal feared.

She heard it said that the match was for honour and glory. A match of two
days' duration under a broiling sun, all for honour and glory! Was it not
enough to make her despise the games of men? For something better she
played. Her game was for one hundred thousand pounds, the happiness of
her brother, and the concealment of a horror. To win a game like that was
worth the trouble. Whether she would have continued her efforts, had she
known that the name of Evan Harrington was then blazing on a shop-front
in Lymport, I cannot tell. The possessor of the name was in love, and did
not reflect.

Smiling adieu to the ladies, bowing to the gentlemen, and apprehending
all the homage they would pour out to her condescending beauty when she
had left them, the Countess's graceful hand gave the signal for Beckley.

She stopped the coachman ere the wheels had rolled off the muffling turf,
to enjoy one glimpse of Evan and Rose riding together, with the little
maid on her pony in the rear. How suitable they seemed! how happy! She
had brought them together after many difficulties--might it not be? It
was surely a thing to be hoped for!

Rose, galloping freshly, was saying to Evan: 'Why did you cut off your
moustache?'

He, neck and neck with her, replied: 'You complained of it in Portugal.'

And she: 'Portugal's old times now to me--and I always love old times.
I'm sorry! And, oh, Evan! did you really do it for me?'

And really, just then, flying through the air, close to the darling of
his heart, he had not the courage to spoil that delicious question, but
dallying with the lie, he looked in her eyes lingeringly.

This picture the Countess contemplated. Close to her carriage two young
gentlemen-cricketers were strolling, while Fallow field gained breath to
decide which men to send in first to the wickets.

One of these stood suddenly on tiptoe, and pointing to the pair on
horseback, cried, with the vivacity of astonishment:

'Look there! do you see that? What the deuce is little Rosey doing with
the tailor-fellow?'

The Countess, though her cheeks were blanched, gazed calmly in
Demogorgon's face, took a mental impression of the speaker, and again
signalled for Beckley.




CHAPTER XIV

THE COUNTESS DESCRIBES THE FIELD OF ACTION

Now, to clear up a point or two: You may think the Comic Muse is
straining human nature rather toughly in making the Countess de Saldar
rush open-eyed into the jaws of Demogorgon, dreadful to her. She has seen
her brother pointed out unmistakeably as the tailor-fellow. There is yet
time to cast him off or fly with him. Is it her extraordinary heroism
impelling her onward, or infatuated rashness? or is it her mere animal
love of conflict?

The Countess de Saldar, like other adventurers, has her star. They who
possess nothing on earth, have a right to claim a portion of the heavens.
In resolute hands, much may be done with a star. As it has empires in its
gift, so may it have heiresses. The Countess's star had not blinked
balefully at her. That was one reason why she went straight on to
Beckley.

Again: the Countess was a born general. With her star above, with certain
advantages secured, with battalions of lies disciplined and zealous, and
with one clear prize in view, besides other undeveloped benefits dimly
shadowing forth, the Countess threw herself headlong into the enemy's
country.

But, that you may not think too highly of this lady, I must add that the
trivial reason was the exciting cause--as in many great enterprises. This
was nothing more than the simple desire to be located, if but for a day
or two, on the footing of her present rank, in the English country-house
of an offshoot of our aristocracy. She who had moved in the first society
of a foreign capital--who had married a Count, a minister of his
sovereign, had enjoyed delicious high-bred badinage with refulgent
ambassadors, could boast the friendship of duchesses, and had been the
amiable receptacle of their pardonable follies; she who, moreover,
heartily despised things English:--this lady experienced thrills of proud
pleasure at the prospect of being welcomed at a third-rate English
mansion. But then, that mansion was Beckley Court. We return to our first
ambitions, as to our first loves not that they are dearer to us,--quit
that delusion: our ripened loves and mature ambitions are probably
closest to our hearts, as they deserve to be--but we return to them
because our youth has a hold on us which it asserts whenever a
disappointment knocks us down. Our old loves (with the bad natures I know
in them) are always lurking to avenge themselves on the new by tempting
us to a little retrograde infidelity. A schoolgirl in Fallow field, the
tailor's daughter, had sighed for the bliss of Beckley Court. Beckley
Court was her Elysium ere the ardent feminine brain conceived a loftier
summit. Fallen from that attained eminence, she sighed anew for Beckley
Court. Nor was this mere spiritual longing; it had its material side. At
Beckley Court she could feel her foreign rank. Moving with our nobility
as an equal, she could feel that the short dazzling glitter of her career
was not illusory, and had left her something solid; not coin of the realm
exactly, but yet gold. She could not feel this in the Cogglesby saloons,
among pitiable bourgeoises--middle-class people daily soiled by the touch
of tradesmen. They dragged her down. Their very homage was a mockery.

Let the Countess have due credit for still allowing Evan to visit Beckley
Court to follow up his chance. If Demogorgon betrayed her there, the
Count was her protector: a woman rises to her husband. But a man is what
he is, and must stand upon that. She was positive Evan had committed
himself in some manner. As it did not suit her to think so, she at once
encouraged an imaginary conversation, in which she took the argument that
it was quite impossible Evan could have been so mad, and others instanced
his youth, his wrongheaded perversity, his ungenerous disregard for his
devoted sister, and his known weakness: she replying, that undoubtedly
they were right so far: but that he could not have said he himself was
that horrible thing, because he was nothing of the sort: which faith in
Evan's stedfast adherence to facts, ultimately silenced the phantom
opposition, and gained the day.

With admiration let us behold the Countess de Saldar alighting on the
gravel sweep of Beckley Court, the footman and butler of the enemy bowing
obsequious welcome to the most potent visitor Beckley Court has ever yet
embraced.

The despatches of a general being usually acknowledged to be the safest
sources from which the historian of a campaign can draw, I proceed to set
forth a letter of the Countess de Saldar, forwarded to her sister,
Harriet Cogglesby, three mornings after her arrival at Beckley Court; and
which, if it should prove false in a few particulars, does nevertheless
let us into the state of the Countess's mind, and gives the result of
that general's first inspection of the field of action. The Countess's
epistolary English does small credit to her Fallow field education; but
it is feminine, and flows more than her ordinary speech. Besides, leaders
of men have always notoriously been above the honours of grammar.
'MY DEAREST HARRIET,

'Your note awaited me. No sooner my name announced, than servitors in
yellow livery, with powder and buckles started before me, and bowing one
presented it on a salver. A venerable butler--most impressive! led the
way. In future, my dear, let it be de Saldar de Sancorvo. That is our
title by rights, and it may as well be so in England. English Countess is
certainly best. Always put the de. But let us be systematic, as my poor
Silva says. He would be in the way here, and had better not come till I
see something he can do. Silva has great reliance upon me. The farther he
is from Lymport, my dear!--and imagine me, Harriet, driving through
Fallow field to Beckley Court! I gave one peep at Dubbins's, as I passed.
The school still goes on. I saw three little girls skipping, and the old
swing-pole. SEMINARY FOR YOUNG LADIES as bright as ever! I should have
liked to have kissed the children and given them bonbons and a holiday.

'How sparing you English are of your crests and arms! I fully expected to
see the Jocelyns' over my bed; but no--four posts totally without
ornament! Sleep, indeed, must be the result of dire fatigue in such a
bed. The Jocelyn crest is a hawk in jesses. The Elburne arms are, Or,
three falcons on a field, vert. How heraldry reminds me of poor Papa! the
evenings we used to spend with him, when he stayed at home, studying it
so diligently under his directions! We never shall again! Sir Franks
Jocelyn is the third son of Lord Elburne, made a Baronet for his
patriotic support of the Ministry in a time of great trouble. The people
are sometimes grateful, my dear. Lord Elburne is the fourteenth of his
line--originally simple country squires. They talk of the Roses, but we
need not go so very far back as that. I do not quite understand why a
Lord's son should condescend to a Baronetcy. Precedence of some sort for
his lady, I suppose. I have yet to learn whether she ranks by his birth,
or his present title. If so, a young Baronetcy cannot possibly be a gain.
One thing is certain. She cares very little about it. She is most
eccentric. But remember what I have told you. It will be serviceable when
you are speaking of the family.

'The dinner-hour, six. It would no doubt be full seven in Town. I am
convinced you are half-an-hour too early. I had the post of honour to the
right of Sir Franks. Evan to the right of Lady Jocelyn. Most fortunately
he was in the best of spirits--quite brilliant. I saw the eyes of that
sweet Rose glisten. On the other side of me sat my pet diplomatist, and I
gave him one or two political secrets which astonished him. Of course, my
dear, I was wheedled out of them. His contempt for our weak intellects is
ineffable. But a woman must now and then ingratiate herself at the
expense of her sex. This is perfectly legitimate. Tory policy at the
table. The Opposition, as Andrew says, not represented. So to show that
we were human beings, we differed among ourselves, and it soon became
clear to me that Lady Jocelyn is the rankest of Radicals. My secret
suspicion is, that she is a person of no birth whatever, wherever her
money came from. A fine woman--yes; still to be admired, I suppose, by
some kind of men; but totally wanting in the essentially feminine
attractions.

'There was no party, so to say. I will describe the people present,
beginning with the insignifacants.

'First, Mr. Parsley, the curate of Beckley. He eats everything at table,
and agrees with everything. A most excellent orthodox young clergyman.
Except that he was nearly choked by a fish-bone, and could not quite
conceal his distress--and really Rose should have repressed her desire to
laugh till the time for our retirement--he made no sensation. I saw her
eyes watering, and she is not clever in turning it off. In that nobody
ever equalled dear Papa. I attribute the attack almost entirely to the
tightness of the white neck-cloths the young clergymen of the Established
Church wear. But, my dear, I have lived too long away from them to wish
for an instant the slightest change in anything they think, say, or do.
The mere sight of this young man was most refreshing to my spirit. He may
be the shepherd of a flock, this poor Mr. Parsley, but he is a sheep to
one young person.

'Mr. Drummond Forth. A great favourite of Lady Jocelyn's; an old friend.
He went with them to the East. Nothing improper. She is too cold for
that. He is fair, with regular features, very self-possessed, and
ready--your English notions of gentlemanly. But none of your men treat a
woman as a woman. We are either angels, or good fellows, or heaven knows
what that is bad. No exquisite delicacy, no insinuating softness, mixed
with respect, none of that hovering over the border, as Papa used to say,
none of that happy indefiniteness of manner which seems to declare "I
would love you if I might," or "I do, but I dare not tell," even when
engaged in the most trivial attentions--handing a footstool, remarking on
the soup, etc. You none of you know how to meet a woman's smile, or to
engage her eyes without boldness--to slide off them, as it were,
gracefully. Evan alone can look between the eyelids of a woman. I have
had to correct him, for to me he quite exposes the state of his heart
towards dearest Rose. She listens to Mr. Forth with evident esteem. In
Portugal we do not understand young ladies having male friends.

'Hamilton Jocelyn--all politics. The stiff Englishman. Not a shade of
manners. He invited me to drink wine. Before I had finished my bow his
glass was empty--the man was telling an anecdote of Lord Livelyston! You
may be sure, my dear, I did not say I had seen his lordship.

'Seymour Jocelyn, Colonel of Hussars. He did nothing but sigh for the
cold weather, and hunting. All I envied him was his moustache for Evan.
Will you believe that the ridiculous boy has shaved!

'Then there is Melville, my dear diplomatist; and here is another
instance of our Harrington luck. He has the gout in his right hand; he
can only just hold knife and fork, and is interdicted Port-wine and
penmanship. The dinner was not concluded before I had arranged that Evan
should resume (gratuitously, you know) his post of secretary to him. So
here is Evan fixed at Beckley Court as long as Melville stays. Talking of
him, I am horrified suddenly. They call him the great Mel! 'Sir Franks is
most estimable, I am sure, as a man, and redolent of excellent
qualities--a beautiful disposition, very handsome. He has just as much
and no more of the English polish one ordinarily meets. When he has given
me soup or fish, bowed to me over wine, and asked a conventional
question, he has done with me. I should imagine his opinions to be
extremely good, for they are not a multitude.

'Then his lady-but I have not grappled with her yet. Now for the women,
for I quite class her with the opposite sex.

'You must know that before I retired for the night, I induced Conning to
think she had a bad head-ache, and Rose lent me her lady's-maid--they
call the creature Polly. A terrible talker. She would tell all about the
family. Rose has been speaking of Evan. It would have looked better had
she been quiet--but then she is so English!'

Here the Countess breaks off to say, that from where she is writing, she
can see Rose and Evan walking out to the cypress avenue, and that no eyes
are on them; great praise being given to the absence of suspicion in the
Jocelyn nature.

The communication is resumed the night of the same day.

'Two days at Beckley Court are over, and that strange sensation I had of
being an intruder escaped from Dubbins's, and expecting every instant the
old schoolmistress to call for me, and expose me, and take me to the dark
room, is quite vanished, and I feel quite at home, quite happy. Evan is
behaving well. Quite the young nobleman. With the women I had no fear of
him; he is really admirable with the men--easy, and talks of sport and
politics, and makes the proper use of Portugal. He has quite won the
heart of his sister. Heaven smiles on us, dearest Harriet!

'We must be favoured, my dear, for Evan is very
troublesome--distressingly inconsiderate! I left him for a day-remaining
to comfort poor Mama--and on the road he picked up an object he had known
at school, and this creature, in shameful garments, is seen in the field
where Rose and Evan are riding--in a dreadful hat--Rose might well laugh
at it!--he is seen running away from an old apple woman, whose fruit he
had consumed without means to liquidate; but, of course, he rushes bolt
up to Evan before all his grand company, and claims acquaintance, and
Evan was base enough to acknowledge him! He disengaged himself so far
well by tossing his purse to the wretch, but if he knows not how to--cut,
I assure him it will be his ruin. Resolutely he must cast the dust off
his shoes, or he will be dragged down to their level. By the way, as to
hands and feet, comparing him with the Jocelyn men, he has every mark of
better blood. Not a question about it. As Papa would say--We have
Nature's proof.

'Looking out on a beautiful lawn, and the moon, and all sorts of trees, I
must now tell you about the ladies here.

'Conning undid me to-night. While Conning remains unattached, Conning is
likely to be serviceable. If Evan, would only give her a crumb, she would
be his most faithful dog. I fear he cannot be induced, and Conning will
be snapped up by somebody else. You know how susceptible she is behind
her primness--she will be of no use on earth, and I shall find excuse to
send her back immediately. After all, her appearance here was all that
was wanted.

'Mrs. Melville and her dreadful juvenile are here, as you may
imagine--the complete Englishwoman. I smile on her, but I could laugh. To
see the crow's-feet under her eyes on her white skin, and those ringlets,
is really too ridiculous. Then there is a Miss Carrington, Lady Jocelyn's
cousin, aged thirty-two--if she has not tampered with the register of her
birth. I should think her equal to it. Between dark and fair. Always in
love with some man, Conning tells me she hears. Rose's maid, Polly,
hinted the same. She has a little money.

'But my sympathies have been excited by a little cripple--a niece of Lady
Jocelyn's and the favourite grand-daughter of the rich old Mrs.
Bonner--also here--Juliana Bonner. Her age must be twenty. You would take
her for ten. In spite of her immense expectations, the Jocelyns hate her.
They can hardly be civil to her. It is the poor child's temper. She has
already begun to watch dear Evan--certainly the handsomest of the men
here as yet, though I grant you, they are well-grown men, these Jocelyns,
for an untravelled Englishwoman. I fear, dear Harriet, we have been
dreadfully deceived about Rose. The poor child has not, in her own right,
much more than a tenth part of what we supposed, I fear. It was that Mrs.
Melville. I have had occasion to notice her quiet boasts here. She said
this morning, "when Mel is in the Ministry"--he is not yet in Parliament!
I feel quite angry with the woman, and she is not so cordial as she might
be. I have her profile very frequently while I am conversing with her.

'With Grandmama Bonner I am excellent good friends,--venerable silver
hair, high caps, etc. More of this most interesting Juliana Bonner
by-and-by. It is clear to me that Rose's fortune is calculated upon the
dear invalid's death! Is not that harrowing? It shocks me to think of it.

'Then there is Mrs. Shorne. She is a Jocelyn--and such a history! She
married a wealthy manufacturer--bartered her blood for his money, and he
failed, and here she resides, a bankrupt widow, petitioning any man that
may be willing for his love AND a decent home. AND--I say in charity.

'Mrs. Shorne comes here to-morrow. She is at present with--guess, my
dear!--with Lady Racial. Do not be alarmed. I have met Lady Racial. She
heard Evan's name, and by that and the likeness I saw she knew at once,
and I saw a truce in her eyes. She gave me a tacit assurance of it--she
was engaged to dine here yesterday, and put it off--probably to grant us
time for composure. If she comes I do not fear her. Besides, has she not
reasons? Providence may have designed her for a staunch ally--I will not
say, confederate.

'Would that Providence had fixed this beautiful mansion five hundred
miles from L-----, though it were in a desolate region! And that reminds
me of the Madre. She is in health. She always will be overbearingly
robust till the day we are bereft of her. There was some secret in the
house when I was there, which I did not trouble to penetrate. That little
Jane F----was there--not improved.

'Pray, be firm about Torquay. Estates mortgaged, but hopes of saving a
remnant of the property. Third son! Don't commit yourself there. We dare
not baronetize him. You need not speak it--imply. More can be done that
way.

'And remember, dear Harriet, that you must manage Andrew so that we may
positively promise his vote to the Ministry on all questions when
Parliament next assembles. I understood from Lord Livelyston, that
Andrew's vote would be thought much of. A most amusing nobleman! He
pledged himself to nothing! But we are above such a thing as a commercial
transaction. He must countenance Silva. Women, my dear, have sent out
armies--why not fleets? Do not spare me your utmost aid in my extremity,
my dearest sister.

'As for Strike, I refuse to speak of him. He is insufferable and next to
useless. How can one talk with any confidence of relationship with a
Major of Marines? When I reflect on what he is, and his conduct to
Caroline, I have inscrutable longings to slap his face. Tell dear Carry
her husband's friend--the chairman or something of that wonderful company
of Strike's--you know--the Duke of Belfield is coming here. He is a
blood-relation of the Elburnes, therefore of the Jocelyns. It will not
matter at all. Breweries, I find, are quite in esteem in your England. It
was highly commendable in his Grace to visit you. Did he come to see the
Major of Marines? Caroline is certainly the loveliest woman I ever
beheld, and I forgive her now the pangs of jealousy she used to make me
feel.

'Andrew, I hope, has received the most kind invitations of the Jocelyns.
He must come. Melville must talk with him about the votes of his
abominable brother in Fallow field. We must elect Melville and have the
family indebted to us. But pray be careful that Andrew speaks not a word
to his odious brother about our location here. It would set him dead
against these hospitable Jocelyns. It will perhaps be as well, dear
Harriet, if you do not accompany Andrew. You would not be able to account
for him quite thoroughly. Do as you like--I do but advise, and you know I
may be trusted--for our sakes, dear one! I am working for Carry to come
with Andrew. Beautiful women always welcome. A prodigy!--if they wish to
astonish the Duke. Adieu! Heaven bless your babes!'

The night passes, and the Countess pursues:

'Awakened by your fresh note from a dream of Evan on horseback, and a
multitude hailing him Count Jocelyn for Fallow field! A morning dream.
They might desire that he should change his name; but "Count" is
preposterous, though it may conceal something.

'You say Andrew will come, and talk of his bringing Caroline. Anything to
give our poor darling a respite from her brute. You deserve great credit
for your managing of that dear little good-natured piece of obstinate
man. I will at once see to prepare dear Caroline's welcome, and trust her
stay may be prolonged in the interest of common humanity. They have her
story here already.

'Conning has come in, and says that young Mr. Harry Jocelyn will be here
this morning from Fallow field, where he has been cricketing. The family
have not spoken of him in my hearing. He is not, I think, in good odour
at home--a scapegrace. Rose's maid, Polly, quite flew out when I happened
to mention him, and broke one of my laces. These English maids are
domesticated savage animals.

'My chocolate is sent up, exquisitely concocted, in plate of the purest
quality--lovely little silver cups! I have already quite set the fashion
for the ladies to have chocolate in bed. The men, I hear, complain that
there is no lady at the breakfast-table. They have Miss Carrington to
superintend. I read, in the subdued satisfaction of her eyes (completely
without colour), how much she thanks me and the institution of chocolate
in bed. Poor Miss Carrington is no match for her opportunities. One may
give them to her without dread.

'It is ten on the Sabbath morn. The sweet churchbells are ringing. It
seems like a dream. There is nothing but the religion attaches me to
England; but that--is not that everything? How I used to sigh on Sundays
to hear them in Portugal!

'I have an idea of instituting toilette-receptions. They will not please
Miss Carrington so well.

'Now to the peaceful village church, and divine worship. Adieu, my dear.
I kiss my fingers to Silva. Make no effort to amuse him. He is always
occupied. Bread!--he asks no more. Adieu! Carry will be invited with your
little man .... You unhappily unable .... She, the sister I pine to see,
to show her worthy of my praises. Expectation and excitement! Adieu!'

Filled with pleasing emotions at the thought of the service in the quiet
village church, and worshipping in the principal pew, under the blazonry
of the Jocelyn arms, the Countess sealed her letter and addressed it, and
then examined the name of Cogglesby; which plebeian name, it struck her,
would not sound well to the menials of Beckley Court. While she was
deliberating what to do to conceal it, she heard, through her open
window, the voices of some young men laughing. She beheld her brother
pass these young men, and bow to them. She beheld them stare at him
without at all returning his salute, and then one of them--the same who
had filled her ears with venom at Fallow field--turned to the others and
laughed outrageously, crying--

'By Jove! this comes it strong. Fancy the snipocracy here--eh?'

What the others said the Countess did not wait to hear. She put on her
bonnet hastily, tried the effect of a peculiar smile in the mirror, and
lightly ran down-stairs.




CHAPTER XV

A CAPTURE

The three youths were standing in the portico when the Countess appeared
among them. She singled out him who was specially obnoxious to her, and
sweetly inquired the direction to the village post. With the renowned
gallantry of his nation, he offered to accompany her, but presently, with
a different exhibition of the same, proposed that they should spare
themselves the trouble by dropping the letter she held prominently, in
the bag.

'Thanks,' murmured the Countess, 'I will go.' Upon which his eager air
subsided, and he fell into an awkward silent march at her side, looking
so like the victim he was to be, that the Countess could have emulated
his power of laughter.

'And you are Mr. Harry Jocelyn, the very famous cricketer?'

He answered, glancing back at his friends, that he was, but did not know
about the 'famous.'

'Oh! but I saw you--I saw you hit the ball most beautifully, and dearly
wished my brother had an equal ability. Brought up in the Court of
Portugal, he is barely English. There they have no manly sports. You saw
him pass you?'

'Him! Who?' asked Harry.

'My brother, on the lawn, this moment. Your sweet sister's friend. Your
uncle Melville's secretary.'

'What's his name?' said Harry, in blunt perplexity.

The Countess repeated his name, which in her pronunciation was
'Hawington,' adding, 'That was my brother. I am his sister. Have you
heard of the Countess de Saldar?'

'Countess!' muttered Harry. 'Dash it! here's a mistake.'

She continued, with elegant fan-like motion of her gloved fingers: 'They
say there is a likeness between us. The dear Queen of Portugal often
remarked it, and in her it was a compliment to me, for she thought my
brother a model! You I should have known from your extreme resemblance to
your lovely young sister.'

Coarse food, but then Harry was a youthful Englishman; and the Countess
dieted the vanity according to the nationality. With good wine to wash it
down, one can swallow anything. The Countess lent him her eyes for that
purpose; eyes that had a liquid glow under the dove--like drooping lids.
It was a principle of hers, pampering our poor sex with swinish solids or
the lightest ambrosia, never to let the accompanying cordial be other
than of the finest quality. She knew that clowns, even more than
aristocrats, are flattered by the inebriation of delicate celestial
liquors.

'Now,' she said, after Harry had gulped as much of the dose as she chose
to administer direct from the founts, 'you must accord me the favour to
tell me all about yourself, for I have heard much of you, Mr. Harry
Jocelyn, and you have excited my woman's interest. Of me you know
nothing.'

'Haven't I?' cried Harry, speaking to the pitch of his new warmth. 'My
uncle Melville goes on about you tremendously--makes his wife as jealous
as fire. How could I tell that was your brother?'

'Your uncle has deigned to allude to me?' said the Countess,
meditatively. 'But not of him--of you, Mr. Harry! What does he say?'

'Says you're so clever you ought to be a man.'

'Ah! generous!' exclaimed the Countess. 'The idea, I think, is novel to
him. Is it not?'

'Well, I believe, from what I hear, he didn't back you for much over in
Lisbon,' said veracious Harry.

'I fear he is deceived in me now. I fear I am but a woman--I am not to be
"backed." But you are not talking of yourself.'

'Oh! never mind me,' was Harry's modest answer.

'But I do. Try to imagine me as clever as a man, and talk to me of your
doings. Indeed I will endeavour to comprehend you.'

Thus humble, the Countess bade him give her his arm. He stuck it out with
abrupt eagerness.

'Not against my cheek.' She laughed forgivingly. 'And you need not start
back half-a-mile,' she pursued with plain humour: 'and please do not look
irresolute and awkward--It is not necessary,' she added. 'There!'; and
she settled her fingers on him, 'I am glad I can find one or two things
to instruct you in. Begin. You are a great cricketer. What else?'

Ay! what else? Harry might well say he had no wish to talk of himself. He
did not know even how to give his arm to a lady! The first flattery and
the subsequent chiding clashed in his elated soul, and caused him to deem
himself one of the blest suddenly overhauled by an inspecting angel and
found wanting: or, in his own more accurate style of reflection, 'What a
rattling fine woman this is, and what a deuce of a fool she must think
me!'

The Countess leaned on his arm with dainty languor.

'You walk well,' she said.

Harry's backbone straightened immediately.

'No, no; I do not want you to be a drill-sergeant. Can you not be told
you are perfect without seeking to improve, vain boy? You can cricket,
and you can walk, and will very soon learn how to give your arm to a
lady. I have hopes of you. Of your friends, from whom I have ruthlessly
dragged you, I have not much. Am I personally offensive to them, Mr.
Harry? I saw them let my brother pass without returning his bow, and they
in no way acknowledged my presence as I passed. Are they gentlemen?'

'Yes,' said Harry, stupefied by the question. 'One 's Ferdinand Laxley,
Lord Laxley's son, heir to the title; the other's William Harvey, son of
the Chief Justice--both friends of mine.'

'But not of your manners,' interposed the Countess. 'I have not so much
compunction as I ought to have in divorcing you from your associates for
a few minutes. I think I shall make a scholar of you in one or two
essentials. You do want polish. Have I not a right to take you in hand? I
have defended you already.'

'Me?' cried Harry.

'None other than Mr. Harry Jocelyn. Will he vouchsafe to me his pardon?
It has been whispered in my ears that his ambition is to be the Don Juan
of a country district, and I have said for him, that however grovelling
his undirected tastes, he is too truly noble to plume himself upon the
reputation they have procured him. Why did I defend you? Women, you know,
do not shrink from Don Juans--even provincial Don Juans--as they should,
perhaps, for their own sakes! You are all of you dangerous, if a woman is
not strictly on her guard. But you will respect your champion, will you
not?'

Harry was about to reply with wonderful briskness. He stopped, and
murmured boorishly that he was sure he was very much obliged.

Command of countenance the Countess possessed in common with her sex.
Those faces on which we make them depend entirely, women can entirely
control. Keenly sensible to humour as the Countess was, her face sidled
up to his immovably sweet. Harry looked, and looked away, and looked
again. The poor fellow was so profoundly aware of his foolishness that he
even doubted whether he was admired.

The Countess trifled with his English nature; quietly watched him bob
between tugging humility and airy conceit, and went on:

'Yes! I will trust you, and that is saying very much, for what protection
is a brother? I am alone here--defenceless!'

Men, of course, grow virtuously zealous in an instant on behalf of the
lovely dame who tells them bewitchingly, she is alone and defenceless,
with pitiful dimples round the dewy mouth that entreats their
guardianship and mercy!

The provincial Don Juan found words--a sign of clearer sensations within.
He said:

'Upon my honour, I'd look after you better than fifty brothers!'

The Countess eyed him softly, and then allowed herself the luxury of a
laugh.

'No, no! it is not the sheep, it is the wolf I fear.'

And she went through a bit of the concluding portion of the drama of
Little Red Riding Hood very prettily, and tickled him so that he became
somewhat less afraid of her.

'Are you truly so bad as report would have you to be, Mr. Harry?' she
asked, not at all in the voice of a censor.

'Pray don't think me--a--anything you wouldn't have me,' the youth
stumbled into an apt response.

'We shall see,' said the Countess, and varied her admiration for the
noble creature beside her with gentle ejaculations on the beauty of the
deer that ranged the park of Beckley Court, the grand old oaks and
beeches, the clumps of flowering laurel, and the rich air swarming
Summer.

She swept out her arm. 'And this most magnificent estate will be yours?
How happy will she be who is led hither to reside by you, Mr. Harry!'

'Mine? No; there's the bother,' he answered, with unfeigned chagrin.
'Beckley isn't Elburne property, you know. It belongs to old Mrs. Bonner,
Rose's grandmama.'

'Oh!' interjected the Countess, indifferently.

'I shall never get it--no chance,' Harry pursued. 'Lost my luck with the
old lady long ago.' He waxed excited on a subject that drew him from his
shamefacedness. 'It goes to Juley Bonner, or to Rosey; it's a toss-up
which. If I'd stuck up to Juley, I might have had a pretty fair chance.
They wanted me to, that's why I scout the premises. But fancy Juley
Bonner!'

'You couldn't, upon your honour!' rhymed the Countess. (And Harry let
loose a delighted 'Ha! ha!' as at a fine stroke of wit.) 'Are we
enamoured of a beautiful maiden, Senor Harry?'

'Not a bit,' he assured her eagerly. 'I don't know any girl. I don't care
for 'em. I don't, really.'

The Countess impressively declared to him that he must be guided by her;
and that she might the better act his monitress, she desired to hear the
pedigree of the estate, and the exact relations in which it at present
stood toward the Elburne family.

Glad of any theme he could speak on, Harry informed her that Beckley
Court was bought by his grandfather Bonner from the proceeds of a
successful oil speculation.

'So we ain't much on that side,' he said.

'Oil!' was the Countess's weary exclamation. 'I imagined Beckley Court to
be your ancestral mansion. Oil!'

Harry deprecatingly remarked that oil was money.

'Yes,' she replied; 'but you are not one to mix oil with your Elburne
blood. Let me see--oil! That, I conceive, is grocery. So, you are grocers
on one side!'

'Oh, come! hang it!' cried Harry, turning red.

'Am I leaning on the grocer's side, or on the lord's?'

Harry felt dreadfully taken down. 'One ranks with one's father,' he said.

'Yes,' observed the Countess; 'but you should ever be careful not to
expose the grocer. When I beheld my brother bow to you, and that your
only return was to stare at him in that singular way, I was not aware of
this, and could not account for it.'

I declare I'm very sorry,' said Harry, with a nettled air. 'Do just let
me tell you how it happened. We were at an inn, where there was an odd
old fellow gave a supper; and there was your brother, and another
fellow--as thorough an upstart as I ever met, and infernally impudent. He
got drinking, and wanted to fight us. Now I see it! Your brother, to save
his friend's bones, said he was a tailor! Of course no gentleman could
fight a tailor; and it blew over with my saying we'd order our clothes of
him.'

'Said he was a--!' exclaimed the Countess, gazing blankly.

'I don't wonder at your feeling annoyed,' returned Harry. 'I saw him with
Rosey next day, and began to smell a rat then, but Laxley won't give up
the tailor. He's as proud as Lucifer. He wanted to order a suit of your
brother to-day; but I said--not while he's in the house, however he came
here.'

The Countess had partially recovered. They were now in the village
street, and Harry pointed out the post-office.

'Your divination with regard to my brother's most eccentric behaviour was
doubtless correct,' she said. 'He wished to succour his wretched
companion. Anywhere--it matters not to him what!--he allies himself with
miserable mortals. He is the modern Samaritan. You should thank him for
saving you an encounter with some low creature.'

Swaying the letter to and fro, she pursued archly: 'I can read your
thoughts. You are dying to know to whom this dear letter is addressed!'

Instantly Harry, whose eyes had previously been quite empty of
expression, glanced at the letter wistfully.

Shall I tell you?'

'Yes, do.'

'It's to somebody I love.'

'Are you in love then?' was his disconcerted rejoinder.

'Am I not married?'

'Yes; but every woman that's married isn't in love with her husband, you
know.'

'Oh! Don Juan of the provinces!' she cried, holding the seal of the
letter before him in playful reproof. 'Fie!'

'Come! who is it?' Harry burst out.

'I am not, surely, obliged to confess my correspondence to you?
Remember!' she laughed lightly. 'He already assumes the airs of a lord
and master! You are rapid, Mr. Harry.'

'Won't you really tell me?' he pleaded.

She put a corner of the letter in the box. 'Must I?'

All was done with the archest elegance: the bewildering condescension of
a Goddess to a boor.

'I don't say you must, you know: but I should like to see it,' returned
Harry.

'There!' She showed him a glimpse of 'Mrs.,' cleverly concealing plebeian
'Cogglesby,' and the letter slid into darkness. 'Are you satisfied?'

'Yes,' said Harry, wondering why he felt a relief at the sight of 'Mrs.'
written on a letter by a lady he had only known half an hour.

'And now,' said she, 'I shall demand a boon of you, Mr. Harry. Will it be
accorded?'

She was hurriedly told that she might count upon him for whatever she
chose to ask; and after much trifling and many exaggerations of the boon
in question, he heard that she had selected him as her cavalier for the
day, and that he was to consent to accompany her to the village church.

'Is it so great a request, the desire that you should sit beside a
solitary lady for so short a space?' she asked, noting his rueful visage.

Harry assured her he would be very happy, but hinted at the bother of
having to sit and listen to that fool of a Parsley: again assuring her,
and with real earnestness, which the lady now affected to doubt, that he
would be extremely happy.

'You know, I haven't been there for ages,' he explained.

'I hear it!' she sighed, aware of the credit his escort would bring her
in Beckley, and especially with Harry's grandmama Bonner.

They went together to the village church. The Countess took care to be
late, so that all eyes beheld her stately march up the aisle, with her
captive beside her.

Nor was her captive less happy than he professed he would be. Charming
comic side-play, at the expense of Mr. Parsley, she mingled with
exceeding devoutness, and a serious attention to Mr. Parsley's discourse.
In her heart this lady really thought her confessed daily sins forgiven
her by the recovery of the lost sheep to Mr. Parsley's fold. The results
of this small passage of arms were, that Evan's disclosure at Fallow
field was annulled in the mind of Harry Jocelyn, and the latter gentleman
became the happy slave of the Countess de Saldar.




CHAPTER XVI

LEADS TO A SMALL SKIRMISH BETWEEN ROSE AND EVAN

Lady Jocelyn belonged properly to that order which the Sultans and the
Roxalanas of earth combine to exclude from their little games, under the
designation of blues, or strong-minded women: a kind, if genuine, the
least dangerous and staunchest of the sex, as poor fellows learn when the
flippant and the frail fair have made mummies of them. She had the
frankness of her daughter, the same direct eyes and firm step: a face
without shadows, though no longer bright with youth. It may be charged to
her as one of the errors of her strong mind, that she believed friendship
practicable between men and women, young or old. She knew the world
pretty well, and was not amazed by extraordinary accidents; but as she
herself continued to be an example of her faith: we must presume it
natural that her delusion should cling to her. She welcomed Evan as her
daughter's friend, walked half-way across the room to meet him on his
introduction to her, and with the simple words, 'I have heard of you,'
let him see that he stood upon his merits in her house. The young man's
spirit caught something of hers even in their first interview, and at
once mounted to that level. Unconsciously he felt that she took, and
would take him, for what he was, and he rose to his worth in the society
she presided over. A youth like Evan could not perceive, that in loving
this lady's daughter, and accepting the place she offered him, he was
guilty of a breach of confidence; or reflect, that her entire absence of
suspicion imposed upon him a corresponding honesty toward her. He fell
into a blindness. Without dreaming for a moment that she designed to
encourage his passion for Rose, he yet beheld himself in the light she
had cast on him; and, received as her daughter's friend, it seemed to him
not so utterly monstrous that he might be her daughter's lover. A
haughty, a grand, or a too familiar manner, would have kept his eyes
clearer on his true condition. Lady Jocelyn spoke to his secret nature,
and eclipsed in his mind the outward aspects with which it was warring.
To her he was a gallant young man, a fit companion for Rose, and when she
and Sir Franks said, and showed him, that they were glad to know him, his
heart swam in a flood of happiness they little suspected.

This was another of the many forms of intoxication to which circumstances
subjected the poor lover. In Fallow field, among impertinent young men,
Evan's pride proclaimed him a tailor. At Beckley Court, acted on by one
genuine soul, he forgot it, and felt elate in his manhood. The shades of
Tailordom dispersed like fog before the full South-west breeze. When I
say he forgot it, the fact was present enough to him, but it became an
outward fact: he had ceased to feel it within him. It was not a portion
of his being, hard as Mrs. Mel had struck to fix it. Consequently, though
he was in a far worse plight than when he parted with Rose on board the
Jocasta, he felt much less of an impostor now. This may have been partly
because he had endured his struggle with the Demogorgon the Countess
painted to him in such frightful colours, and found him human after all;
but it was mainly owing to the hearty welcome Lady Jocelyn had extended
to him as the friend of Rose.

Loving Rose, he nevertheless allowed his love no tender liberties. The
eyes of a lover are not his own; but his hands and lips are, till such
time as they are claimed. The sun must smile on us with peculiar warmth
to woo us forth utterly-pluck our hearts out. Rose smiled on many. She
smiled on Drummond Forth, Ferdinand Laxley, William Harvey, and her
brother Harry; and she had the same eyes for all ages. Once, previous to
the arrival of the latter three, there was a change in her look, or Evan
fancied it. They were going to ride out together, and Evan, coming to his
horse on the gravel walk, saw her talking with Drummond Forth. He
mounted, awaiting her, and either from a slight twinge of jealousy, or to
mark her dainty tread with her riding-habit drawn above her heels, he
could not help turning his head occasionally. She listened to Drummond
with attention, but presently broke from him, crying: 'It's an absurdity.
Speak to them yourself--I shall not.'

On the ride that day, she began prattling of this and that with the
careless glee that became her well, and then sank into a reverie.
Between-whiles her eyes had raised tumults in Evan's breast by dropping
on him in a sort of questioning way, as if she wished him to speak, or
wished to fathom something she would rather have unspoken. Ere they had
finished their ride, she tossed off what burden may have been on her mind
as lightly as a stray lock from her shoulders. He thought that the
singular look recurred. It charmed him too much for him to speculate on
it.

The Countess's opportune ally, the gout, which had reduced the Hon.
Melville Jocelyn's right hand to a state of uselessness, served her with
her brother equally: for, having volunteered his services to the
invalided diplomatist, it excused his stay at Beckley Court to himself,
and was a mask to his intimacy with Rose, besides earning him the thanks
of the family. Harry Jocelyn, released from the wing of the Countess,
came straight to him, and in a rough kind of way begged Evan to overlook
his rudeness.

'You took us all in at Fallow field, except Drummond,' he said. 'Drummond
would have it you were joking. I see it now. And you're a confoundedly
clever fellow into the bargain, or you wouldn't be quill-driving for
Uncle Mel. Don't be uppish about it--will you?'

'You have nothing to fear on that point,' said Evan. With which promise
the peace was signed between them. Drummond and William Harvey were
cordial, and just laughed over the incident. Laxley, however, held aloof.
His retention of ideas once formed befitted his rank and station. Some
trifling qualms attended Evan's labours with the diplomatist; but these
were merely occasioned by the iteration of a particular phrase. Mr.
Goren, an enthusiastic tailor, had now and then thrown out to Evan
stirring hints of an invention he claimed: the discovery of a Balance in
Breeches: apparently the philosopher's stone of the tailor craft, a
secret that should ensure harmony of outline to the person and an
indubitable accommodation to the most difficult legs.

Since Adam's expulsion, it seemed, the tailors of this wilderness had
been in search of it. But like the doctors of this wilderness, their
science knew no specific: like the Babylonian workmen smitten with
confusion of tongues, they had but one word in common, and that word was
'cut.' Mr. Goren contended that to cut was not the key of the science:
but to find a Balance was. An artistic admirer of the frame of man, Mr.
Goren was not wanting in veneration for the individual who had arisen to
do it justice. He spoke of his Balance with supreme self-appreciation.
Nor less so the Honourable Melville, who professed to have discovered the
Balance of Power, at home and abroad. It was a capital Balance, but
inferior to Mr. Goren's. The latter gentleman guaranteed a Balance with
motion: whereas one step not only upset the Honourable Melville's, but
shattered the limbs of Europe. Let us admit, that it is easier to fit a
man's legs than to compress expansive empires.

Evan enjoyed the doctoring of kingdoms quite as well as the diplomatist.
It suited the latent grandeur of soul inherited by him from the great
Mel. He liked to prop Austria and arrest the Czar, and keep a watchful
eye on France; but the Honourable Melville's deep-mouthed phrase conjured
up to him a pair of colossal legs imperiously demanding their Balance
likewise. At first the image scared him. In time he was enabled to smile
it into phantom vagueness. The diplomatist diplomatically informed him,
it might happen that the labours he had undertaken might be neither more
nor less than education for a profession he might have to follow. Out of
this, an ardent imagination, with the Countess de Saldar for an
interpreter, might construe a promise of some sort. Evan soon had high
hopes. What though his name blazed on a shop-front? The sun might yet
illumine him to honour!

Where a young man is getting into delicate relations with a young woman,
the more of his sex the better--they serve as a blind; and the Countess
hailed fresh arrivals warmly. There was Sir John Loring, Dorothy's
father, who had married the eldest of the daughters of Lord Elburne. A
widower, handsome, and a flirt, he capitulated to the Countess instantly,
and was played off against the provincial Don Juan, who had reached that
point with her when youths of his description make bashful confidences of
their successes, and receive delicious chidings for their
naughtiness--rebukes which give immeasurable rebounds. Then came Mr.
Gordon Graine, with his daughter, Miss Jenny Graine, an early friend of
Rose's, and numerous others. For the present, Miss Isabella Current need
only be chronicled among the visitors--a sprightly maid fifty years old,
without a wrinkle to show for it--the Aunt Bel of fifty houses where
there were young women and little boys. Aunt Bel had quick wit and
capital anecdotes, and tripped them out aptly on a sparkling tongue with
exquisite instinct for climax and when to strike for a laugh. No sooner
had she entered the hall than she announced the proximate arrival of the
Duke of Belfield at her heels, and it was known that his Grace was as
sure to follow as her little dog, who was far better paid for his
devotion.

The dinners at Beckley Court had hitherto been rather languid to those
who were not intriguing or mixing young love with the repast. Miss
Current was an admirable neutral, sent, as the Countess fervently
believed, by Providence. Till now the Countess had drawn upon her own
resources to amuse the company, and she had been obliged to restrain
herself from doing it with that unctuous feeling for rank which warmed
her Portuguese sketches in low society and among her sisters. She retired
before Miss Current and formed audience, glad of a relief to her
inventive labour. While Miss Current and her ephemerals lightly skimmed
the surface of human life, the Countess worked in the depths. Vanities,
passions, prejudices beneath the surface, gave her full employment. How
naturally poor Juliana Bonner was moved to mistake Evan's compassion for
a stronger sentiment! The Countess eagerly assisted Providence to shuffle
the company into their proper places. Harry Jocelyn was moodily happy,
but good; greatly improved in the eyes of his grandmama Bonner, who
attributed the change to the Countess, and partly forgave her the sinful
consent to the conditions of her love-match with the foreign Count, which
his penitent wife had privately confessed to that strict Churchwoman.

'Thank Heaven that you have no children,' Mrs. Bonner had said; and the
Countess humbly replied:

'It is indeed my remorseful consolation!'

'Who knows that it is not your punishment?' added Mrs. Bonner; the
Countess weeping.

She went and attended morning prayers in Mrs. Bonner's apartments, alone
with the old lady. 'To make up for lost time in Catholic Portugal!' she
explained it to the household.

On the morning after Miss Current had come to shape the party, most of
the inmates of Beckley Court being at breakfast, Rose gave a lead to the
conversation.

'Aunt Bel! I want to ask you something. We've been making bets about you.
Now, answer honestly, we're all friends. Why did you refuse all your
offers?'

'Quite simple, child,' replied the unabashed ex-beauty.

'A matter of taste. I liked twenty shillings better than a sovereign.'

Rose looked puzzled, but the men laughed, and Rose exclaimed:

'Now I see! How stupid I am! You mean, you may have friends when you are
not married. Well, I think that's the wisest, after all. You don't lose
them, do you? Pray, Mr. Evan, are you thinking Aunt Bel might still alter
her mind for somebody, if she knew his value?'

'I was presuming to hope there might be a place vacant among the twenty,'
said Evan, slightly bowing to both. 'Am I pardoned?'

'I like you!' returned Aunt Bel, nodding at him. 'Where do you come from?
A young man who'll let himself go for small coin's a jewel worth
knowing.'

'Where do I come from?' drawled Laxley, who had been tapping an egg with
a dreary expression.

'Aunt Bel spoke to Mr. Harrington,' said Rose, pettishly.

'Asked him where he came from,' Laxley continued his drawl. 'He didn't
answer, so I thought it polite for another of the twenty to strike in.'

'I must thank you expressly,' said Evan, and achieved a cordial bow.

Rose gave Evan one of her bright looks, and then called the attention of
Ferdinand Laxley to the fact that he had lost a particular bet made among
them.

'What bet?' asked Laxley. 'About the profession?'

A stream of colour shot over Rose's face. Her eyes flew nervously from
Laxley to Evan, and then to Drummond. Laxley appeared pleased as a man
who has made a witty sally: Evan was outwardly calm, while Drummond
replied to the mute appeal of Rose, by saying:

'Yes; we've all lost. But who could hit it? The lady admits no sovereign
in our sex.'

'So you've been betting about me?' said Aunt Bel. 'I 'll settle the
dispute. Let him who guessed "Latin" pocket the stakes, and, if I guess
him, let him hand them over to me.'

'Excellent!' cried Rose. 'One did guess "Latin," Aunt Bel! Now, tell us
which one it was.'

'Not you, my dear. You guessed "temper."'

'No! you dreadful Aunt Bel!'

'Let me see,' said Aunt Bel, seriously. 'A young man would not marry a
woman with Latin, but would not guess it the impediment. Gentlemen
moderately aged are mad enough to slip their heads under any yoke, but
see the obstruction. It was a man of forty guessed "Latin." I request the
Hon. Hamilton Everard Jocelyn to confirm it.'

Amid laughter and exclamations Hamilton confessed himself the man who had
guessed Latin to be the cause of Miss Current's remaining an old maid;
Rose, crying:

'You really are too clever, Aunt Bel!'

A divergence to other themes ensued, and then Miss Jenny Graine said:
'Isn't Juley learning Latin? I should like to join her while I'm here.'

'And so should I,' responded Rose. 'My friend Evan is teaching her during
the intervals of his arduous diplomatic labours. Will you take us into
your class, Evan?'

'Don't be silly, girls,' interposed Aunt Bel. 'Do you want to graduate
for my state with your eyes open?'

Evan objected his poor qualifications as a tutor, and Aunt Bel remarked,
that if Juley learnt Latin at all, she should have regular instruction.

'I am quite satisfied,' said Juley, quietly.

'Of course you are,' Rose snubbed her cousin. 'So would anybody be. But
Mama really was talking of a tutor for Juley, if she could find one.
There's a school at Bodley; but that's too far for one of the men to come
over.'

A school at Bodley! thought Evan, and his probationary years at the
Cudford Establishment rose before him; and therewith, for the first time
since his residence at Beckley, the figure of John Raikes.

'There's a friend of mine,' he said, aloud, 'I think if Lady Jocelyn does
wish Miss Bonner to learn Latin thoroughly, he would do very well for the
groundwork and would be glad of the employment. He is very poor'

'If he's poor, and a friend of yours, Evan, we'll have him,' said Rose:
'we'll ride and fetch him.'

'Yes,' added Miss Carrington, 'that must be quite sufficient
qualification.'

Juliana was not gazing gratefully at Evan for his proposal.

Rose asked the name of Evan's friend. 'His name is Raikes,' answered
Evan. 'I don't know where he is now. He may be at Fallow field. If Lady
Jocelyn pleases, I will ride over to-day and see.'

'My dear Evan!' cried Rose, 'you don't mean that absurd figure we saw on
the cricket-field?' She burst out laughing. 'Oh! what fun it will be! Let
us have him here by all means.'

'I shall not bring him to be laughed at,' said Evan.

'I will remember he is your friend,' Rose returned demurely; and again
laughed, as she related to Jenny Graine the comic appearance Mr. Raikes
had presented.

Laxley waited for a pause, and then said: 'I have met this Mr. Raikes. As
a friend of the family, I should protest against his admission here in
any office whatever into the upper part of the house, at least. He is not
a gentleman.'

We don't want teachers to be gentlemen,' observed Rose.

'This fellow is the reverse,' Laxley pronounced, and desired Harry to
confirm it; but Harry took a gulp of coffee.

'Oblige me by recollecting that I have called him a friend of mine,' said
Evan.

Rose murmured to him: 'Pray forgive me! I forgot.' Laxley hummed
something about 'taste.' Aunt Bel led from the theme by a lively
anecdote.

After breakfast the party broke into knots, and canvassed Laxley's
behaviour to Evan, which was generally condemned. Rose met the young men
strolling on the lawn; and, with her usual bluntness, accused Laxley of
wishing to insult her friend.

'I speak to him--do I not?' said Laxley. 'What would you have more? I
admit the obligation of speaking to him when I meet him in your house.
Out of it--that 's another matter.'

'But what is the cause for your conduct to him, Ferdinand?'

'By Jove!' cried Harry, 'I wonder he puts up with it I wouldn't. I'd
have a shot with you, my boy.'

'Extremely honoured,' said Laxley. 'But neither you nor I care to fight
tailors.'

'Tailors!' exclaimed Rose. There was a sharp twitch in her body, as if
she had been stung or struck.

'Look here, Rose,' said Laxley; 'I meet him, he insults me, and to get
out of the consequences tells me he's the son of a tailor, and a tailor
himself; knowing that it ties my hands. Very well, he puts himself hors
de combat to save his bones. Let him unsay it, and choose whether he 'll
apologize or not, and I'll treat him accordingly. At present I'm not
bound to do more than respect the house I find he has somehow got
admission to.'

'It's clear it was that other fellow,' said Harry, casting a side-glance
up at the Countess's window.

Rose looked straight at Laxley, and abruptly turned on her heel.

In the afternoon, Lady Jocelyn sent a message to Evan that she wished to
see him. Rose was with her mother. Lady Jocelyn had only to say, that if
he thought his friend a suitable tutor for Miss Bonner, they would be
happy to give him the office at Beckley Court. Glad to befriend poor
Jack, Evan gave the needful assurances, and was requested to go and fetch
him forthwith. When he left the room, Rose marched out silently beside
him.

'Will you ride over with me, Rose?' he said, though scarcely anxious that
she should see Mr. Raikes immediately.

The singular sharpness of her refusal astonished him none the less.

'Thank you, no; I would rather not.'

A lover is ever ready to suspect that water has been thrown on the fire
that burns for him in the bosom of his darling. Sudden as the change was,
it was very decided. His sensitive ears were pained by the absence of his
Christian name, which her lips had lavishly made sweet to him. He stopped
in his walk.

'You spoke of riding to Fallow field. Is it possible you don't want me to
bring my friend here? There's time to prevent it.'

Judged by the Countess de Saldar, the behaviour of this well-born English
maid was anything but well-bred. She absolutely shrugged her shoulders
and marched a-head of him into the conservatory, where she began smelling
at flowers and plucking off sere leaves.

In such cases a young man always follows; as her womanly instinct must
have told her, for she expressed no surprise when she heard his voice two
minutes after.

'Rose! what have I done?'

'Nothing at all,' she said, sweeping her eyes over his a moment, and
resting them on the plants.

'I must have uttered something that has displeased you.'

'No.'

Brief negatives are not re-assuring to a lover's uneasy mind.

'I beg you--Be frank with me, Rose!'

A flame of the vanished fire shone in her face, but subsided, and she
shook her head darkly.

'Have you any objection to my friend?'

Her fingers grew petulant with an orange leaf. Eyeing a spot on it, she
said, hesitatingly:

'Any friend of yours I am sure I should like to help. But--but I wish you
wouldn't associate with that--that kind of friend. It gives people all
sorts of suspicions.'

Evan drew a sharp breath.

The voices of Master Alec and Miss Dorothy were heard shouting on the
lawn. Alec gave Dorothy the slip and approached the conservatory on
tip-toe, holding his hand out behind him to enjoin silence and secrecy.
The pair could witness the scene through the glass before Evan spoke.

'What suspicions?' he asked.

Rose looked up, as if the harshness of his tone pleased her.

'Do you like red roses best, or white?' was her answer, moving to a
couple of trees in pots.

'Can't make up your mind?' she continued, and plucked both a white and
red rose, saying: 'There! choose your colour by-and-by,' and ask Juley to
sew the one you choose in your button-hole.'

She laid the roses in his hand, and walked away. She must have known that
there was a burden of speech on his tongue. She saw him move to follow
her, but this time she did not linger, and it may be inferred that she
wished to hear no more.




CHAPTER XVII

IN WHICH EVAN WRITES HIMSELF TAILOR

The only philosophic method of discovering what a young woman means, and
what is in her mind, is that zigzag process of inquiry conducted by
following her actions, for she can tell you nothing, and if she does not
want to know a particular matter, it must be a strong beam from the
central system of facts that shall penetrate her. Clearly there was a
disturbance in the bosom of Rose Jocelyn, and one might fancy that
amiable mirror as being wilfully ruffled to confuse a thing it was asked
by the heavens to reflect: a good fight fought by all young people at a
certain period, and now and then by an old fool or two. The young it
seasons and strengthens; the old it happily kills off; and thus, what is,
is made to work harmoniously with what we would have be.

After quitting Evan, Rose hied to her friend Jenny Graine, and in the
midst of sweet millinery talk, darted the odd question, whether baronets
or knights ever were tradesmen: to which Scottish Jenny, entirely putting
aside the shades of beatified aldermen and the illustrious list of mayors
that have welcomed royalty, replied that it was a thing quite impossible.
Rose then wished to know if tailors were thought worse of than other
tradesmen. Jenny, premising that she was no authority, stated she
imagined she had heard that they were.

'Why?' said Rose, no doubt because she was desirous of seeing justice
dealt to that class. But Jenny's bosom was a smooth reflector of facts
alone.

Rose pondered, and said with compressed eagerness, 'Jenny, do you think
you could ever bring yourself to consent to care at all for anybody ever
talked of as belonging to them? Tell me.'

Now Jenny had come to Beckley Court to meet William Harvey: she was
therefore sufficiently soft to think she could care for him whatever his
origin were, and composed in the knowledge that no natal stigma was upon
him to try the strength of her affection. Designing to generalize, as
women do (and seem tempted to do most when they are secretly speaking
from their own emotions), she said, shyly moving her shoulders, with a
forefinger laying down the principle:

'You know, my dear, if one esteemed such a person very very much, and
were quite sure, without any doubt, that he liked you in return--that is,
completely liked you, and was quite devoted, and made no concealment--I
mean, if he was very superior, and like other men--you know what I
mean--and had none of the cringing ways some of them have--I mean;
supposing him gay and handsome, taking--'

'Just like William,' Rose cut her short; and we may guess her to have had
some one in her head for her to conceive that Jenny must be speaking of
any one in particular.

A young lady who can have male friends, as well as friends of her own
sex, is not usually pressing and secret in her confidences, possibly
because such a young lady is not always nursing baby-passions, and does
not require her sex's coddling and posseting to keep them alive. With
Rose love will be full grown when it is once avowed, and will know where
to go to be nourished.

'Merely an idea I had,' she said to Jenny, who betrayed her mental
pre-occupation by putting the question for the questions last.

Her Uncle Melville next received a visit from the restless young woman.
To him she spoke not a word of the inferior classes, but as a special
favourite of the diplomatist's, begged a gift of him for her proximate
birthday. Pushed to explain what it was, she said, 'It's something I want
you to do for a friend of mine, Uncle Mel.'

The diplomatist instanced a few of the modest requests little maids
prefer to people they presume to have power to grant.

'No, it's nothing nonsensical,' said Rose; 'I want you to get my friend
Evan an appointment. You can if you like, you know, Uncle Mel, and it's a
shame to make him lose his time when he's young and does his work so
well--that you can't deny! Now, please, be positive, Uncle Mel. You know
I hate--I have no faith in your 'nous verrons'. Say you will, and at
once.'

The diplomatist pretended to have his weather-eye awakened.

'You seem very anxious about feathering the young fellow's nest, Rosey?'

'There,' cried Rose, with the maiden's mature experience of us, 'isn't
that just like men? They never can believe you can be entirely
disinterested!'

'Hulloa!' the diplomatist sung out, 'I didn't say anything, Rosey.'

She reddened at her hastiness, but retrieved it by saying:

'No, but you listen to your wife; you know you do, Uncle Mel; and now
there's Aunt Shorne and the other women, who make you think just what
they like about me, because they hate Mama.'

'Don't use strong words, my dear.'

'But it's abominable!' cried Rose. 'They asked Mama yesterday what Evan's
being here meant? Why, of course, he's your secretary, and my friend, and
Mama very properly stopped them, and so will I! As for me, I intend to
stay at Beckley, I can tell you, dear old boy.' Uncle Mel had a soft arm
round his neck, and was being fondled. 'And I 'm not going to be bred up
to go into a harem, you may be sure.'

The diplomatist whistled, 'You talk your mother with a vengeance, Rosey.'

'And she's the only sensible woman I know,' said Rose. 'Now promise
me--in earnest. Don't let them mislead you, for you know you're quite a
child, out of your politics, and I shall take you in hand myself. Why,
now, think, Uncle Mel! wouldn't any girl, as silly as they make me out,
hold her tongue--not talk of him, as I do; and because I really do feel
for him as a friend. See the difference between me and Juley!'

It was a sad sign if Rose was growing a bit of a hypocrite, but this
instance of Juliana's different manner of showing her feelings toward
Evan would have quieted suspicion in shrewder men, for Juliana watched
Evan's shadow, and it was thought by two or three at Beckley Court, that
Evan would be conferring a benefit on all by carrying off the
romantically-inclined but little presentable young lady.

The diplomatist, with a placid 'Well, well!' ultimately promised to do
his best for Rose's friend, and then Rose said, 'Now I leave you to the
Countess,' and went and sat with her mother and Drummond Forth. The
latter was strange in his conduct to Evan. While blaming Laxley's
unmannered behaviour, he seemed to think Laxley had grounds for it, and
treated Evan with a sort of cynical deference that had, for the last
couple of days, exasperated Rose.

'Mama, you must speak to Ferdinand,' she burst upon the conversation,
'Drummond is afraid to--he can stand by and see my friend insulted.
Ferdinand is insufferable with his pride--he's jealous of everybody who
has manners, and Drummond approves him, and I will not bear it.'

Lady Jocelyn hated household worries, and quietly remarked that the young
men must fight it out together.

'No, but it's your duty to interfere, Mama,' said Rose; 'and I know you
will when I tell you that Ferdinand declares my friend Evan is a
tradesman--beneath his notice. Why, it insults me!'

Lady Jocelyn looked out from a lofty window on such veritable squabbles
of boys and girls as Rose revealed.

'Can't you help them to run on smoothly while they're here?' she said to
Drummond, and he related the scene at the Green Dragon.

'I think I heard he was the son of Sir Something Harrington, Devonshire
people,' said Lady Jocelyn.

'Yes, he is,' cried Rose, 'or closely related. I'm sure I understood the
Countess that it was so. She brought the paper with the death in it to us
in London, and shed tears over it.'

'She showed it in the paper, and shed tears over it?' said Drummond,
repressing an inclination to laugh. 'Was her father's title given in
full?'

'Sir Abraham Harrington, replied Rose. 'I think she said father, if the
word wasn't too common-place for her.'

'You can ask old Tom when he comes, if you are anxious to know,' said
Drummond to her ladyship. 'His brother married one of the sisters. By the
way, he's coming, too. He ought to clear up the mystery.'

'Now you're sneering, Drummond,' said Rose: 'for you know there 's no
mystery to clear up.'

Drummond and Lady Jocelyn began talking of old Tom Cogglesby, whom, it
appeared, the former knew intimately, and the latter had known.

'The Cogglesbys are sons of a cobbler, Rose,' said Lady Jocelyn. 'You
must try and be civil to them.'

'Of course I shall, Mama,' Rose answered seriously.

'And help the poor Countess to bear their presence as well as possible,'
said Drummond. 'The Harringtons have had to mourn a dreadful mesalliance.
Pity the Countess!'

'Oh! the Countess! the Countess!' exclaimed Rose to Drummond's pathetic
shake of the head. She and Drummond were fully agreed about the Countess;
Drummond mimicking the lady: 'In verity, she is most mellifluous!' while
Rose sugared her lips and leaned gracefully forward with 'De Saldar, let
me petition you--since we must endure our title--since it is not to be
your Louisa?' and her eyes sought the ceiling, and her hand slowly melted
into her drapery, as the Countess was wont to effect it.

Lady Jocelyn laughed, but said: 'You're too hard upon the Countess. The
female euphuist is not to be met with every day. It's a different kind
from the Precieuse. She is not a Precieuse. She has made a capital
selection of her vocabulary from Johnson, and does not work it badly, if
we may judge by Harry and Melville. Euphuism--[affectation D.W.]--in
"woman" is the popular ideal of a Duchess. She has it by nature, or she
has studied it: and if so, you must respect her abilities.'

'Yes--Harry!' said Rose, who was angry at a loss of influence over her
rough brother, 'any one could manage Harry! and Uncle Mel 's a goose. You
should see what a "female euphuist" Dorry is getting. She says in the
Countess's hearing: "Rose! I should in verity wish to play, if it were
pleasing to my sweet cousin?" I'm ready to die with laughing. I don't do
it, Mama.'

The Countess, thus being discussed, was closeted with old Mrs. Bonner:
not idle. Like Hannibal in Italy, she had crossed her Alps in attaining
Beckley Court, and here in the enemy's country the wary general found
herself under the necessity of throwing up entrenchments to fly to in
case of defeat. Sir Abraham Harrington of Torquay, who had helped her to
cross the Alps, became a formidable barrier against her return.

Meantime Evan was riding over to Fallow field, and as he rode under black
visions between the hedgeways crowned with their hop-garlands, a
fragrance of roses saluted his nostril, and he called to mind the red and
the white the peerless representative of the two had given him, and which
he had thrust sullenly in his breast-pocket and he drew them out to look
at them reproachfully and sigh farewell to all the roses of life, when in
company with them he found in his hand the forgotten letter delivered to
him on the cricket-field the day of the memorable match. He smelt at the
roses, and turned the letter this way and that. His name was correctly
worded on the outside. With an odd reluctance to open it, he kept
trifling over the flowers, and then broke the broad seal, and these are
the words that met his eyes:

'Mr. EVAN HARRINGTON.

'You have made up your mind to be a tailor, instead of a Tomnoddy. You're
right. Not too many men in the world--plenty of nincompoops.

'Don't be made a weathercock of by a parcel of women. I want to find a
man worth something. If you go on with it, you shall end by riding in
your carriage, and cutting it as fine as any of them. I 'll take care
your belly is not punished while you're about it.

'From the time your name is over your shop, I give you L300 per annum.

'Or stop. There's nine of you. They shall have L40. per annum apiece, 9
times 40, eh? That's better than L300., if you know how to reckon. Don't
you wish it was ninety-nine tailors to a man! I could do that too, and it
would not break me; so don't be a proud young ass, or I 'll throw my
money to the geese. Lots of them in the world. How many geese to a
tailor?

'Go on for five years, and I double it.

'Give it up, and I give you up.

'No question about me. The first tailor can be paid his L40 in advance,
by applying at the offices of Messrs. Grist, Gray's Inn Square, Gray's
Inn. Let him say he is tailor No. 1, and show this letter, signed Agreed,
with your name in full at bottom. This will do--money will be paid--no
questions one side or other. So on--the whole nine. The end of the year
they can give a dinner to their acquaintance. Send in bill to Messrs.
Grist.

'The advice to you to take the cash according to terms mentioned is
advice of
'A FRIEND.

'P.S. You shall have your wine. Consult among yourselves, and carry it by
majority what wine it's to be. Five carries it. Dozen and half per
tailor, per annum--that's the limit.'

It was certainly a very hot day. The pores of his skin were prickling,
and his face was fiery; and yet he increased his pace, and broke into a
wild gallop for a mile or so; then suddenly turned his horse's head back
for Beckley. The secret of which evolution was, that he had caught the
idea of a plotted insult of Laxley's in the letter, for when the blood is
up we are drawn the way the tide sets strongest, and Evan was prepared to
swear that Laxley had written the letter, because he was burning to
chastise the man who had injured him with Rose.

Sure that he was about to confirm his suspicion, he read it again, gazed
upon Beckley Court in the sultry light, and turned for Fallow field once
more, devising to consult Mr. John Raikes on the subject.

The letter had a smack of crabbed age hardly counterfeit. The savour of
an old eccentric's sour generosity was there. Evan fell into bitter
laughter at the idea of Rose glancing over his shoulder and asking him
what nine of him to a man meant. He heard her clear voice pursuing him.
He could not get away from the mocking sound of Rose beseeching him to
instruct her on that point. How if the letter were genuine? He began to
abhor the sight and touch of the paper, for it struck division cold as
death between him and his darling. He saw now the immeasurable hopes his
residence at Beckley had lured him to. Rose had slightly awakened him:
this letter was blank day to his soul. He saw the squalid shop, the good,
stern, barren-spirited mother, the changeless drudgery, the existence
which seemed indeed no better than what the ninth of a man was fit for.
The influence of his mother came on him once more. Dared he reject the
gift if true? No spark of gratitude could he feel, but chained, dragged
at the heels of his fate, he submitted to think it true; resolving the
next moment that it was a fabrication and a trap: but he flung away the
roses.

As idle as a painted cavalier upon a painted drop-scene, the figure of
Mr. John Raikes was to be observed leaning with crossed legs against a
shady pillar of the Green Dragon; eyeing alternately, with an
indifference he did not care to conceal, the assiduous pecking in the
dust of some cocks and hens that had strayed from the yard of the inn,
and the sleepy blinking in the sun of an old dog at his feet: nor did
Evan's appearance discompose the sad sedateness of his demeanour.

'Yes; I am here still,' he answered Evan's greeting, with a flaccid
gesture. 'Don't excite me too much. A little at a time. I can't bear it!'

'How now? What is it now, Jack?' said Evan.

Mr. Raikes pointed at the dog. 'I've made a bet with myself he won't wag
his tail within the next ten minutes. I beg of you, Harrington, to remain
silent for both our sakes.'

Evan was induced to look at the dog, and the dog looked at him, and
gently moved his tail.

'I 've lost!' cried Raikes, in languid anguish. 'He 's getting excited.
He'll go mad. We're not accustomed to this in Fallow field.'

Evan dismounted, and was going to tell him the news he had for him, when
his attention was distracted by the sight of Rose's maid, Polly Wheedle,
splendidly bonneted, who slipped past them into the inn, after repulsing
Jack's careless attempt to caress her chin; which caused him to tell Evan
that he could not get on without the society of intellectual women.

Evan called a boy to hold the horse.

'Have you seen her before, Jack?'

Jack replied: 'Once. Your pensioner up-stairs she comes to visit. I do
suspect there kinship is betwixt them. Ay! one might swear them sisters.
She's a relief to the monotony of the petrified street--the old man with
the brown-gaitered legs and the doubled-up old woman with the crutch. I
heard the London horn this morning.'

Evan thrust the letter in his hands, telling him to read and form an
opinion on it, and went in the track of Miss Wheedle.

Mr. Raikes resumed his station against the pillar, and held the letter
out on a level with his thigh. Acting (as it was his nature to do off the
stage), he had not exaggerated his profound melancholy. Of a light soil
and with a tropical temperament, he had exhausted all lively recollection
of his brilliant career, and, in the short time since Evan had parted
with him, sunk abjectly down into the belief that he was fixed in Fallow
field for life. His spirit pitied for agitation and events. The horn of
the London coach had sounded distant metropolitan glories in the ears of
the exile in rustic parts.

Sighing heavily, Raikes opened the letter, in simple obedience to the
wishes of his friend; for he would have preferred to stand contemplating
his own state of hopeless stagnation. The sceptical expression he put on
when he had read the letter through must not deceive us. John Raikes had
dreamed of a beneficent eccentric old gentleman for many years: one
against whom, haply, he had bumped in a crowded thoroughfare, and had
with cordial politeness begged pardon of; had then picked up his
walking-stick; restored it, venturing a witty remark; retired,
accidentally dropping his card-case; subsequently, to his astonishment
and gratification, receiving a pregnant missive from that old gentleman's
lawyer. Or it so happened that Mr. Raikes met the old gentleman at a
tavern, and, by the exercise of a signal dexterity, relieved him from a
bone in his throat, and reluctantly imparted his address on issuing from
the said tavern. Or perhaps it was a lonely highway where the old
gentleman walked, and John Raikes had his name in the papers for a deed
of heroism, nor was man ungrateful. Since he had eaten up his uncle, this
old gentleman of his dreams walked in town and country-only, and alas!
Mr. Raikes could never encounter him in the flesh. The muscles of his
face, therefore, are no index to the real feelings of the youth when he
had thoroughly mastered the contents of the letter, and reflected that
the dream of his luck--his angelic old gentleman--had gone and wantonly
bestowed himself upon Evan Harrington, instead of the expectant and far
worthier John Raikes. Worthier inasmuch as he gave him credence for
existing long ere he knew of him and beheld him manifest.

Raikes retreated to the vacant parlour of the Green Dragon, and there
Evan found him staring at the unfolded letter, his head between his
cramped fists, with a contraction of his mouth. Evan was troubled by what
he had seen up-stairs, and did not speak till Jack looked up and said,
'Oh, there you are.'

'Well, what do you think, Jack?'

'Yes--it's all right,' Raikes rejoined in most matter-of-course tone, and
then he stepped to the window, and puffed a very deep breath indeed, and
glanced from the straight line of the street to the heavens, with whom,
injured as he was, he felt more at home now that he knew them capable of
miracles.

'Is it a bad joke played upon me?' said Evan.

Raikes upset a chair. 'It's quite childish. You're made a gentleman for
life, and you ask if it's a joke played upon you! It's maddening!
There--there goes my hat!'

With a vehement kick, Mr. Raikes despatched his ancient head-gear to the
other end of the room, saying that he must have some wine, and would; and
disdainful was his look at Evan, when the latter attempted to reason him
into economy. He ordered the wine; drank a glass, which coloured a new
mood in him; and affecting a practical manner, said:

'I confess I have been a little hurt with you, Harrington. You left me
stranded on the desert isle. I thought myself abandoned. I thought I
should never see anything but the lengthening of an endless bill on my
landlady's face--my sole planet. I was resigned till I heard my friend
"to-lool!" this morning. He kindled recollection. But, this is a tidy
Port, and that was a delectable sort of young lady that you were riding
with when we parted last! She laughs like the true metal. I suppose you
know it 's the identical damsel I met the day before, and owe it to for
my run on the downs--I 've a compliment ready made for her.'

'You think that letter written in good faith?' said Evan.

'Look here.' Mr. Raikes put on a calmness. 'You got up the other night,
and said you were a tailor--a devotee of the cabbage and the goose. Why
the notion didn't strike me is extraordinary--I ought to have known my
man. However, the old gentleman who gave the supper--he's evidently one
of your beastly rich old ruffianly republicans--spent part of his time in
America, I dare say. Put two and two together.'

But as Harrington desired plain, prose, Mr. Raikes tamed his imagination
to deliver it. He pointed distinctly at the old gentleman who gave the
supper as the writer of the letter. Evan, in return, confided to him his
history and present position, and Mr. Raikes, without cooling to his
fortunate friend, became a trifle patronizing.

'You said your father--I think I remember at old Cudford's--was a cavalry
officer, a bold dragoon?'

'I did,' replied Evan. 'I told a lie.'

'We knew it; but we feared your prowess, Harrington.'

Then they talked over the singular letter uninterruptedly, and Evan, weak
among his perplexities of position and sentiment: wanting money for the
girl up-stairs, for this distasteful comrade's bill at the Green Dragon,
and for his own immediate requirements, and with the bee buzzing of Rose
in his ears: 'She despises you,' consented in a desperation ultimately to
sign his name to it, and despatch Jack forthwith to Messrs. Grist.

'You'll find it's an imposition,' he said, beginning less to think it so,
now that his name was put to the hated monstrous thing; which also now
fell to pricking at curiosity. For he was in the early steps of his
career, and if his lady, holding to pride, despised him--as, he was
tortured into the hypocrisy of confessing, she justly might, why, then,
unless he was the sport of a farceur, here seemed a gilding of the path
of duty: he could be serviceable to friends. His claim on fair young
Rose's love had grown in the short while so prodigiously asinine that it
was a minor matter to constitute himself an old eccentric's puppet.

'No more an imposition than it's 50 of Virgil,' quoth the rejected usher.

'It smells of a plot,' said Evan.

'It 's the best joke that will be made in my time,' said Mr. Raikes,
rubbing his hands.

'And now listen to your luck,' said Evan; 'I wish mine were like it!' and
Jack heard of Lady Jocelyn's offer. He heard also that the young lady he
was to instruct was an heiress, and immediately inspected his garments,
and showed the sacred necessity there was for him to refit in London,
under the hands of scientific tailors. Evan wrote him an introduction to
Mr. Goren, counted out the contents of his purse (which Jack had reduced
in his study of the pastoral game of skittles, he confessed), and
calculated in a niggardly way, how far it would go to supply the fellow's
wants; sighing, as he did it, to think of Jack installed at Beckley
Court, while Jack, comparing his luck with Evan's, had discovered it to
be dismally inferior.

'Oh, confound those bellows you keep blowing!' he exclaimed. 'I wish to
be decently polite, Harrington, but you annoy me. Excuse me, pray, but
the most unexampled case of a lucky beggar that ever was known--and to
hear him panting and ready to whimper!--it's outrageous. You've only to
put up your name, and there you are--an independent gentleman! By Jove!
this isn't such a dull world. John Raikes! thou livest in times. I feel
warm in the sun of your prosperity, Harrington. Now listen to me.
Propound thou no inquiries anywhere about the old fellow who gave the
supper. Humour his whim--he won't have it. All Fallow field is paid to
keep him secret; I know it for a fact. I plied my rustic friends every
night. "Eat you yer victuals, and drink yer beer, and none o' yer pryin's
and peerin's among we!" That's my rebuff from Farmer Broadmead. And that
old boy knows more than he will tell. I saw his cunning old eye on-cock.
Be silent, Harrington. Let discretion be the seal of thy luck.'

'You can reckon on my silence,' said Evan. 'I believe in no such folly.
Men don't do these things.'

'Ha!' went Mr. Raikes contemptuously.

Of the two he was the foolisher fellow; but quacks have cured
incomprehensible maladies, and foolish fellows have an instinct for
eccentric actions.

Telling Jack to finish the wine, Evan rose to go.

'Did you order the horse to be fed?'

'Did I order the feeding of the horse?' said Jack, rising and yawning.
'No, I forgot him. Who can think of horses now?'

'Poor brute!' muttered Evan, and went out to see to him.

The ostler had required no instructions to give the horse a feed of corn.
Evan mounted, and rode out of the yard to where Jack was standing,
bare-headed, in his old posture against the pillar, of which the shade
had rounded, and the evening sun shone full on him over a black cloud. He
now looked calmly gay.

'I 'm laughing at the agricultural Broadmead!' he said: "'None o' yer
pryin's and peerin's!" He thought my powers of amusing prodigious. "Dang
'un, he do maak a chap laugh!" Well, Harrington, that sort of homage
isn't much, I admit.'

Raikes pursued: 'There's something in a pastoral life, after all.'

'Pastoral!' muttered Evan. 'I was speaking of you at Beckley, and hope
when you're there you won't make me regret my introduction of you. Keep
your mind on old Cudford's mutton-bone.'

'I perfectly understood you,' said Jack. 'I 'm Presumed to be in luck.
Ingratitude is not my fault--I'm afraid ambition is!'

'Console yourself with it or what you can get till we meet--here or in
London. But the Dragon shall be the address for both of us,' Evan said,
and nodded, trotting off.




CHAPTER XVIII

IN WHICH EVAN CALLS HIMSELF GENTLEMAN

The young cavalier perused that letter again in memory. Genuine, or a
joke of the enemy, it spoke wakening facts to him. He leapt from the
spell Rose had encircled him with. Strange that he should have rushed
into his dream with eyes open! But he was fully awake now. He would speak
his last farewell to her, and so end the earthly happiness he paid for in
deep humiliation, and depart into that gray cold mist where his duty lay.
It is thus that young men occasionally design to burst from the circle of
the passions, and think that they have done it, when indeed they are but
making the circle more swiftly. Here was Evan mouthing his farewell to
Rose, using phrases so profoundly humble, that a listener would have
taken them for bitter irony. He said adieu to her,--pronouncing it with a
pathos to melt scornful princesses. He tried to be honest, and was as
much so as his disease permitted.

The black cloud had swallowed the sun; and turning off to the short cut
across the downs, Evan soon rode between the wind and the storm. He could
see the heavy burden breasting the beacon-point, round which curled
leaden arms, and a low internal growl saluted him advancing. The horse
laid back his ears. A last gust from the opposing quarter shook the
furzes and the clumps of long pale grass, and straight fell columns of
rattling white rain, and in a minute he was closed in by a hissing ring.
Men thus pelted abandon without protest the hope of retaining a dry
particle of clothing on their persons. Completely drenched, the track
lost, everything in dense gloom beyond the white enclosure that moved
with him, Evan flung the reins to the horse, and curiously watched him
footing on; for physical discomfort balanced his mental perturbation, and
he who had just been chafing was now quite calm.

Was that a shepherd crouched under the thorn? The place betokened a
shepherd, but it really looked like a bundle of the opposite sex; and it
proved to be a woman gathered up with her gown over her head. Apparently,
Mr. Evan Harrington was destined for these encounters. The thunder rolled
as he stopped by her side and called out to her. She heard him, for she
made a movement, but without sufficiently disengaging her head of its
covering to show him a part of her face.

Bellowing against the thunder, Evan bade her throw back her garment, and
stand and give him up her arms, that he might lift her on the horse
behind him.

There came a muffled answer, on a big sob, as it seemed. And as if heaven
paused to hear, the storm was mute.

Could he have heard correctly? The words he fancied he had heard sobbed
were:

'Best bonnet.'

The elements hereupon crashed deep and long from end to end, like a table
of Titans passing a jest.

Rain-drops, hard as hail, were spattering a pool on her head. Evan
stooped his shoulder, seized the soaked garment, and pulled it back,
revealing the features of Polly Wheedle, and the splendid bonnet in
ruins--all limp and stained.

Polly blinked at him penitentially.

'Oh, Mr. Harrington; oh, ain't I punished!' she whimpered.

In truth, the maid resembled a well-watered poppy.

Evan told her to stand up close to the horse, and Polly stood up close,
looking like a creature that expected a whipping. She was suffering, poor
thing, from that abject sense of the lack of a circumference, which takes
the pride out of women more than anything. Note, that in all material
fashions, as in all moral observances, women demand a circumference, and
enlarge it more and more as civilization advances. Respect the mighty
instinct, however mysterious it seem.

'Oh, Mr. Harrington, don't laugh at me,' said Polly.

Evan assured her that he was seriously examining her bonnet.

'It 's the bonnet of a draggletail,' said Polly, giving up her arms, and
biting her under-lip for the lift.

With some display of strength, Evan got the lean creature up behind him,
and Polly settled there, and squeezed him tightly with her arms, excusing
the liberty she took.

They mounted the beacon, and rode along the ridge whence the West became
visible, and a washed edge of red over Beckley Church spire and the woods
of Beckley Court.

'And what have you been doing to be punished? What brought you here?'
said Evan.

'Somebody drove me to Fallow field to see my poor sister Susan,' returned
Polly, half crying.

'Well, did he bring you here and leave you?

'No: he wasn't true to his appointment the moment I wanted to go back;
and I, to pay him out, I determined I'd walk it where he shouldn't
overtake me, and on came the storm . . . And my gown spoilt, and such a
bonnet!'

'Who was the somebody?'

'He's a Mr. Nicholas Frim, sir.'

'Mr. Nicholas Frim will be very unhappy, I should think.'

'Yes, that's one comfort,' said Polly ruefully, drying her eyes.

Closely surrounding a young man as a young woman must be when both are on
the same horse, they, as a rule, talk confidentially together in a very
short time. His 'Are you cold?' when Polly shivered, and her 'Oh, no; not
very,' and a slight screwing of her body up to him, as she spoke, to
assure him and herself of it, soon made them intimate.

'I think Mr. Nicholas Frim mustn't see us riding into Beckley,' said
Evan.

'Oh, my gracious! Ought I to get down, sir?' Polly made no move, however.

'Is he jealous?'

'Only when I make him, he is.'

'That's very naughty of you.'

'Yes, I know it is--all the Wheedles are. Mother says, we never go right
till we 've once got in a pickle.'

'You ought to go right from this hour,' said Evan.

'It's 'dizenzy--[?? D.W.]--does it,' said Polly. 'And then we're ashamed
to show it. My poor Susan went to stay with her aunt at Bodley, and then
at our cousin's at Hillford, and then she was off to Lymport to drown her
poor self, I do believe, when you met her. And all because we can't bear
to be seen when we 're in any of our pickles. I wish you wouldn't look at
me, Mr. Harrington.'

'You look very pretty.'

'It 's quite impossible I can now,' said Polly, with a wretched effort to
spread open her collar. 'I can see myself a fright, like my Miss Rose
did, making a face in the looking-glass when I was undressing her last
night. But, do you know, I would much rather Nicholas saw us than
somebody!

'Who's that?'

'Miss Bonner. She'd never forgive me.'

'Is she so strict?'

'She only uses servants for spies,' said Polly. 'And since my Miss Rose
come--though I'm up a step--I'm still a servant, and Miss Bonner 'd be in
a fury to see my--though I'm sure we're quite respectable, Mr.
Harrington--my having hold of you as I'm obliged to, and can't help
myself. But she'd say I ought to tumble off rather than touch her engaged
with a little finger.'

'Her engaged?' cried Evan.

'Ain't you, sir?' quoth Polly. 'I understand you were going to be, from
my lady, the Countess. We all think so at Beckley. Why, look how Miss
Bonner looks at you, and she's sure to have plenty of money.'

This was Polly's innocent way of bringing out a word about her own young
mistress.

Evan controlled any denial of his pretensions to the hand of Miss Bonner.
He said: 'Is it your mistress's habit to make faces in the
looking-glass?'

'I'll tell you how it happened,' said Polly. 'But I'm afraid I'm in your
way, sir. Shall I get off now?'

'Not by any means,' said Evan. 'Make your arm tighter.'

'Will that do?' asked Polly.

Evan looked round and met her appealing face, over which the damp locks
of hair straggled. The maid was fair: it was fortunate that he was
thinking of the mistress.

'Speak on,' said Evan, but Polly put the question whether her face did
not want washing, and so earnestly that he had to regard it again, and
compromised the case by saying that it wanted kissing by Nicholas Frim,
which set Polly's lips in a pout.

'I 'm sure it wants kissing by nobody,' she said, adding with a spasm of
passion: 'Oh! I know the colours of my bonnet are all smeared over it,
and I'm a dreadful fright.'

Evan failed to adopt the proper measures to make Miss Wheedle's mind easy
with regard to her appearance, and she commenced her story rather
languidly.

'My Miss Rose--what was it I was going to tell? Oh!--my Miss Rose. You
must know, Mr. Harrington, she's very fond of managing; I can see that,
though I haven't known her long before she gave up short frocks; and she
said to Mr. Laxley, who's going to marry her some day, "She didn't like
my lady, the Countess, taking Mr. Harry to herself like that." I can't
a-bear to speak his name, but I suppose he's not a bit more selfish than
the rest of men. So Mr. Laxley said--just like the jealousy of men--they
needn't talk of women! I'm sure nobody can tell what we have to put up
with. We mustn't look out of this eye, or out of the other, but they're
up and--oh, dear me! there's such a to-do as never was known--all for
nothing!'

'My good girl!' said Evan, recalling her to the subject-matter with all
the patience he could command.

'Where was I?' Polly travelled meditatively back. 'I do feel a little
cold.'

'Come closer,' said Evan. 'Take this handkerchief--it 's the only dry
thing I have--cover your chest with it.'

'The shoulders feel wettest,' Polly replied, 'and they can't be helped.
I'll tie it round my neck, if you'll stop, sir. There, now I'm warmer.'

To show how concisely women can narrate when they feel warmer, Polly
started off:

'So, you know, Mr. Harrington, Mr. Laxley said--he said to Miss Rose,
"You have taken her brother, and she has taken yours." And Miss Rose
said, "That was her own business, and nobody else's." And Mr. Laxley
said, "He was glad she thought it a fair exchange." I heard it all! And
then Miss Rose said--for she can be in a passion about some things"--What
do you mean, Ferdinand," was her words, "I insist upon your speaking
out." Miss Rose always will call gentlemen by their Christian names when
she likes them; that's always a sign with her. And he wouldn't tell her.
And Miss Rose got awful angry, and she's clever, is my Miss Rose, for
what does she do, Mr. Harrington, but begins praising you up so that she
knew it must make him mad, only because men can't abide praise of another
man when it's a woman that says it--meaning, young lady; for my Miss Rose
has my respect, however familiar she lets herself be to us that she
likes. The others may go and drown themselves. Are you took ill, sir?'

'No,' said Evan, 'I was only breathing.'

'The doctors say it's bad to take such long breaths,' remarked artless
Polly. 'Perhaps my arms are pressing you?'

It 's the best thing they can do,' murmured Evan, dejectedly.

'What, sir?'

'Go and drown themselves.'

Polly screwed her lips, as if she had a pin between them, and continued:
'Miss Rose was quite sensible when she praised you as her friend; she
meant it--every word; and then sudden what does Mr. Laxley do, but say
you was something else besides friend--worse or better; and she was
silent, which made him savage, I could hear by his voice. And he said,
Mr. Harrington, "You meant it if she did not." "No," says she, "I know
better; he's as honest as the day." Out he flew and said such things: he
said, Mr. Harrington, you wasn't fit to be Miss Rose's friend, even. Then
she said, she heard he had told lies about you to her Mama, and her
aunts; but her Mama, my lady, laughed at him, and she at her aunts. Then
he said you--oh, abominable of him!'

'What did he say?' asked Evan, waking up.

'Why, if I were to tell my Miss Rose some things of him,' Polly went on,
'she'd never so much as speak to him another instant.'

'What did he say?' Evan repeated.

'I hate him!' cried Polly. 'It's Mr. Laxley that misleads Mr. Harry, who
has got his good nature, and means no more harm than he can help. Oh, I
didn't hear what he said of you, sir. Only I know it was abominable,
because Miss Rose was so vexed, and you were her dearest friend.'

'Well, and about the looking-glass?'

'That was at night, Mr. Harrington, when I was undressing of her. Miss
Rose has a beautiful figure, and no need of lacing. But I'd better get
down now.'

'For heaven's sake, stay where you are.'

'I tell her she stands as if she'd been drilled for a soldier,' Polly
quietly continued. 'You're squeezing my arm with your elbow, Mr.
Harrington. It didn't hurt me. So when I had her nearly undressed, we
were talking about this and that, and you amongst 'em--and I, you know,
rather like you, sir, if you'll not think me too bold--she started off by
asking me what was the nickname people gave to tailors. It was one of her
whims. I told her they were called snips--I'm off!'

Polly gave a shriek. The horse had reared as if violently stung.

'Go on,' said Evan. 'Hold hard, and go on.'

'Snips--Oh! and I told her they were called snips. It is a word that
seems to make you hate the idea. I shouldn't like to hear my intended
called snip. Oh, he's going to gallop!'

And off in a gallop Polly was borne.

'Well,' said Evan, 'well?'

'I can't, Mr. Harrington; I have to press you so,' cried Polly; 'and I'm
bounced so--I shall bite my tongue.'

After a sharp stretch, the horse fell to a canter, and then trotted
slowly, and allowed Polly to finish.

'So Miss Rose was standing sideways to the glass, and she turned her
neck, and just as I'd said "snip," I saw her saying it in the glass; and
you never saw anything so funny. It was enough to make anybody laugh; but
Miss Rose, she seemed as if she couldn't forget how ugly it had made her
look. She covered her face with her hands, and she shuddered! It is a
word-snip! that makes you seem to despise yourself.'

Beckley was now in sight from the edge of the downs, lying in its foliage
dark under the grey sky backed by motionless mounds of vapour. Miss
Wheedle to her great surprise was suddenly though safely dropped; and on
her return to the ground the damsel instantly 'knew her place,' and
curtseyed becoming gratitude for his kindness; but he was off in a fiery
gallop, the gall of Demogorgon in his soul.

What 's that the leaves of the proud old trees of Beckley Court hiss as
he sweeps beneath them? What has suddenly cut him short? Is he diminished
in stature? Are the lackeys sneering? The storm that has passed has
marvellously chilled the air.

His sister, the Countess, once explained to him what Demogorgon was, in
the sensation it entailed. 'You are skinned alive!' said the Countess.
Evan was skinned alive. Fly, wretched young man! Summon your pride, and
fly! Fly, noble youth, for whom storms specially travel to tell you that
your mistress makes faces in the looking-glass! Fly where human lips and
noses are not scornfully distorted, and get thee a new skin, and grow and
attain to thy natural height in a more genial sphere! You, ladies and
gentlemen, who may have had a matter to conceal, and find that it is
oozing out: you, whose skeleton is seen stalking beside you, you know
what it is to be breathed upon: you, too, are skinned alive: but this
miserable youth is not only flayed, he is doomed calmly to contemplate
the hideous image of himself burning on the face of her he loves; making
beauty ghastly. In vain--for he is two hours behind the dinner-bell--Mr.
Burley, the butler, bows and offers him viands and wine. How can he eat,
with the phantom of Rose there, covering her head, shuddering, loathing
him? But he must appear in company: he has a coat, if he has not a skin.
Let him button it, and march boldly. Our comedies are frequently youth's
tragedies. We will smile reservedly as we mark Mr. Evan Harrington step
into the midst of the fair society of the drawing-room. Rose is at the
piano. Near her reclines the Countess de Saldar, fanning the languors
from her cheeks, with a word for the diplomatist on one side, a whisper
for Sir John Loring on the other, and a very quiet pair of eyes for
everybody. Providence, she is sure, is keeping watch to shield her
sensitive cuticle; and she is besides exquisitely happy, albeit outwardly
composed: for, in the room sits his Grace the Duke of Belfield, newly
arrived. He is talking to her sister, Mrs. Strike, masked by Miss
Current. The wife of the Major has come this afternoon, and Andrew
Cogglesby, who brought her, chats with Lady Jocelyn like an old
acquaintance.

Evan shakes the hands of his relatives. Who shall turn over the leaves of
the fair singer's music-book? The young men are in the billiard-room:
Drummond is engaged in converse with a lovely person with Giorgione hair,
which the Countess intensely admires, and asks the diplomatist whether he
can see a soupcon of red in it. The diplomatist's taste is for dark
beauties: the Countess is dark.

Evan must do duty by Rose. And now occurred a phenomenon in him. Instead
of shunning her, as he had rejoiced in doing after the Jocasta scene, ere
she had wounded him, he had a curious desire to compare her with the
phantom that had dispossessed her in his fancy. Unconsciously when he saw
her, he transferred the shame that devoured him, from him to her, and
gazed coldly at the face that could twist to that despicable contortion.

He was in love, and subtle love will not be shamed and smothered. Love
sits, we must remember, mostly in two hearts at the same time, and the
one that is first stirred by any of the passions to wakefulness, may know
more of the other than its owner. Why had Rose covered her head and
shuddered? Would the girl feel that for a friend? If his pride suffered,
love was not so downcast; but to avenge him for the cold she had cast on
him, it could be critical, and Evan made his bearing to her a blank.

This somehow favoured him with Rose. Sheep's eyes are a dainty dish for
little maids, and we know how largely they indulge in it; but when they
are just a bit doubtful of the quality of the sheep, let the good animal
shut his lids forthwith, for a time. Had she not been a little unkind to
him in the morning? She had since tried to help him, and that had
appeased her conscience, for in truth he was a good young man. Those very
words she mentally pronounced, while he was thinking, 'Would she feel it
for a friend?' We dare but guess at the puzzle young women present now
and then, but I should say that Evan was nearer the mark, and that the
'good young man' was a sop she threw to that within her which wanted
quieting, and was thereby passably quieted. Perhaps the good young man is
offended? Let us assure him of our disinterested graciousness.

'Is your friend coming?' she asked, and to his reply said, 'I'm glad';
and pitched upon a new song-one that, by hazard, did not demand his
attentions, and he surveyed the company to find a vacant seat with a
neighbour. Juley Bonner was curled up on the sofa, looking like a damsel
who has lost the third volume of an exciting novel, and is divining the
climax. He chose to avoid Miss Bonner. Drummond was leaving the side of
the Giorgione lady. Evan passed leisurely, and Drummond said 'You know
Mrs. Evremonde? Let me introduce you.'

He was soon in conversation with the glorious-haired dame.

'Excellently done, my brother!' thinks the Countess de Saldar.

Rose sees the matter coolly. What is it to her? But she had finished with
song. Jenny takes her place at the piano; and, as Rose does not care for
instrumental music, she naturally talks and laughs with Drummond, and
Jenny does not altogether like it, even though she is not playing to the
ear of William Harvey, for whom billiards have such attractions; but, at
the close of the performance, Rose is quiet enough, and the Countess
observes her sitting, alone, pulling the petals of a flower in her lap,
on which her eyes are fixed. Is the doe wounded? The damsel of the
disinterested graciousness is assuredly restless. She starts up and goes
out upon the balcony to breathe the night-air, mayhap regard the moon,
and no one follows her.

Had Rose been guiltless of offence, Evan might have left Beckley Court
the next day, to cherish his outraged self-love. Love of woman is
strongly distinguished from pure egoism when it has got a wound: for it
will not go into a corner complaining, it will fight its duel on the
field or die. Did the young lady know his origin, and scorn him? He
resolved to stay and teach her that the presumption she had imputed to
him was her own mistake. And from this Evan graduated naturally enough
the finer stages of self-deception downward.

A lover must have his delusions, just as a man must have a skin. But here
was another singular change in Evan. After his ale-prompted speech in
Fallow field, he was nerved to face the truth in the eyes of all save
Rose. Now that the truth had enmeshed his beloved, he turned to battle
with it; he was prepared to deny it at any moment; his burnt flesh was as
sensitive as the Countess's.

Let Rose accuse him, and he would say, 'This is true, Miss Jocelyn--what
then?' and behold Rose confused and dumb! Let not another dare suspect
it. For the fire that had scorched him was in some sort healing, though
horribly painful; but contact with the general air was not to be
endured--was death! This, I believe, is common in cases of injury by
fire. So it befell that Evan, meeting Rose the next morning was playfully
asked by her what choice he had made between the white and the red; and
he, dropping on her the shallow eyes of a conventional smile, replied,
that unable to decide and form a choice, he had thrown both away; at
which Miss Jocelyn gave him a look in the centre of his brows, let her
head slightly droop, and walked off.

'She can look serious as well as grimace,' was all that Evan allowed
himself to think, and he strolled out on the lawn with the careless
serenity of lovers when they fancy themselves heart-free.

Rose, whipping the piano in the drawing-room, could see him go to sit by
Mrs. Evremonde, till they were joined by Drummond, when he left her and
walked with Harry, and apparently shadowed the young gentleman's
unreflective face; after which Harry was drawn away by the appearance of
that dark star, the Countess de Saldar, whom Rose was beginning to
detest. Jenny glided by William Harvey's side, far off. Rose, the young
Queen of Friendship, was left deserted on her music-stool for a throne,
and when she ceased to hammer the notes she was insulted by a voice that
cried from below:

'Go on, Rose, it's nice in the sun to hear you,' causing her to close her
performances and the instrument vigorously.

Rose was much behind her age: she could not tell what was the matter with
her. In these little torments young people have to pass through they gain
a rapid maturity. Let a girl talk with her own heart an hour, and she is
almost a woman. Rose came down-stairs dressed for riding. Laxley was
doing her the service of smoking one of her rose-trees. Evan stood
disengaged, prepared for her summons. She did not notice him, but
beckoned to Laxley drooping over a bud, while the curled smoke floated
from his lips.

'The very gracefullest of chimney-pots-is he not?' says the Countess to
Harry, whose immense guffaw fails not to apprise Laxley that something
has been said of him, for in his dim state of consciousness absence of
the power of retort is the prominent feature, and when he has the
suspicion of malicious tongues at their work, all he can do is silently
to resent it. Probably this explains his conduct to Evan. Some youths
have an acute memory for things that have shut their mouths.

The Countess observed to Harry that his dear friend Mr. Laxley appeared,
by the cast of his face, to be biting a sour apple.

'Grapes, you mean?' laughed Harry. 'Never mind! she'll bite at him when
he comes in for the title.'

'Anything crude will do,' rejoined the Countess. 'Why are you not
courting Mrs. Evremonde, naughty Don?'

'Oh! she's occupied--castle's in possession. Besides--!' and Harry tried
hard to look sly.

'Come and tell me about her,' said the Countess.

Rose, Laxley, and Evan were standing close together.

'You really are going alone, Rose?' said Laxley.

'Didn't I say so?--unless you wish to join us?' She turned upon Evan.

'I am at your disposal,' said Evan.

Rose nodded briefly.

'I think I'll smoke the trees,' said Laxley, perceptibly huffing.

'You won't come, Ferdinand?'

'I only offered to fill up the gap. One does as well as another.'

Rose flicked her whip, and then declared she would not ride at all, and,
gathering up her skirts, hurried back to the house.

As Laxley turned away, Evan stood before him.

The unhappy fellow was precipitated by the devil of his false position.

'I think one of us two must quit the field; if I go I will wait for you,'
he said.

'Oh; I understand,' said Laxley. 'But if it 's what I suppose you to
mean, I must decline.'

'I beg to know your grounds.'

'You have tied my hands.'

'You would escape under cover of superior station?'

'Escape! You have only to unsay--tell me you have a right to demand it.'

The battle of the sophist victorious within him was done in a flash, as
Evan measured his qualities beside this young man's, and without a sense
of lying, said: 'I have.'

He spoke firmly. He looked the thing he called himself now. The Countess,
too, was a dazzling shield to her brother. The beautiful Mrs. Strike was
a completer vindicator of him; though he had queer associates, and talked
oddly of his family that night in Fallow field.

'Very well, sir: I admit you manage to annoy me,' said Laxley. 'I can
give you a lesson as well as another, if you want it.'

Presently the two youths were seen bowing in the stiff curt style of
those cavaliers who defer a passage of temper for an appointed
settlement. Harry rushed off to them with a shout, and they separated;
Laxley speaking a word to Drummond, Evan--most judiciously, the Countess
thought--joining his fair sister Caroline, whom the Duke held in
converse.

Drummond returned laughing to the side of Mrs. Evremonde, nearing whom,
the Countess, while one ear was being filled by Harry's eulogy of her
brother's recent handling of Laxley, and while her intense gratification
at the success of her patient management of her most difficult subject
made her smiles no mask, heard, 'Is it not impossible to suppose such a
thing?' A hush ensued--the Countess passed.

In the afternoon, the Jocelyns, William Harvey, and Drummond met together
to consult about arranging the dispute; and deputations went to Laxley
and to Evan. The former demanded an apology for certain expressions that
day; and an equivalent to an admission that Mr. Harrington had said, in
Fallow field, that he was not a gentleman, in order to escape the
consequences. All the Jocelyns laughed at his tenacity, and 'gentleman'
began to be bandied about in ridicule of the arrogant lean-headed
adolescent. Evan was placable enough, but dogged; he declined to make any
admission, though within himself he admitted that his antagonist was not
in the position of an impostor; which he for one honest word among them
would be exposed as being, and which a simple exercise of resolution to
fly the place would save him from being further.

Lady Jocelyn enjoyed the fun, and still more the serious way in which her
relatives regarded it.

'This comes of Rose having friends, Emily,' said Mrs. Shorne.

There would have been a dispute to arrange between Lady Jocelyn and Mrs.
Shorne, had not her ladyship been so firmly established in her phlegmatic
philosophy. She said: 'Quelle enfantillage! I dare say Rose was at the
bottom of it: she can settle it best. Defer the encounter between the
boys until they see they are in the form of donkeys. They will; and then
they'll run on together, as long as their goddess permits.'

'Indeed, Emily,' said Mrs. Shorne, 'I desire you, by all possible means,
to keep the occurrence secret from Rose. She ought not to hear of it.'

'No; I dare say she ought not,' returned Lady Jocelyn; 'but I wager you
she does. You can teach her to pretend not to, if you like. Ecce signum.'

Her ladyship pointed through the library window at Rose, who was walking
with Laxley, and showing him her pearly teeth in return for one of his
jokes: an exchange so manifestly unfair, that Lady Jocelyn's womanhood,
indifferent as she was, could not but feel that Rose had an object in
view; which was true, for she was flattering Laxley into a consent to
meet Evan half way.

The ladies murmured and hummed of these proceedings, and of Rose's
familiarity with Mr. Harrington; and the Countess in trepidation took
Evan to herself, and spoke to him seriously; a thing she had not done
since her residence in Beckley. She let him see that he must be on a
friendly footing with everybody in the house, or go which latter
alternative Evan told her he had decided on. 'Yes,' said the Countess,
'and then you give people full warrant to say it was jealousy drove you
hence; and you do but extinguish yourself to implicate dear Rose. In
love, Evan, when you run away, you don't live to fight another day.'

She was commanded not to speak of love.

'Whatever it may be, my dear,' said the Countess, 'Mr. Laxley has used
you ill. It may be that you put yourself at his feet'; and his sister
looked at him, sighing a great sigh. She had, with violence, stayed her
mouth concerning what she knew of the Fallow field business, dreading to
alarm his sensitiveness; but she could not avoid giving him a little
slap. It was only to make him remember by the smart that he must always
suffer when he would not be guided by her.

Evan professed to the Jocelyns that he was willing to apologize to Laxley
for certain expressions; determining to leave the house when he had done
it. The Countess heard and nodded. The young men, sounded on both sides,
were accordingly lured to the billiard-room, and pushed together: and
when he had succeeded in thrusting the idea of Rose from the dispute, it
did seem such folly to Evan's common sense, that he spoke with pleasant
bonhommie about it. That done, he entered into his acted part, and
towered in his conceit considerably above these aristocratic boors, who
were speechless and graceless, but tigers for their privileges and
advantages.

It will not be thought that the Countess intended to permit her brother's
departure. To have toiled, and yet more, to have lied and fretted her
conscience, for nothing, was as little her principle, as to quit the
field of action till she is forcibly driven from it is that of any woman.

'Going, my dear,' she said coolly. 'To-morrow? Oh! very well. You are the
judge. And this creature--the insolvent to the apple-woman, who is
coming, whom you would push here--will expose us, without a soul to guide
his conduct, for I shall not remain. And Carry will not remain.
Carry---!' The Countess gave a semisob. 'Carry must return to her
brute--' meaning the gallant Marine, her possessor.

And the Countess, knowing that Evan loved his sister Caroline,
incidentally related to him an episode in the domestic life of Major and
Mrs. Strike.

'Greatly redounding to the credit of the noble martinet for the
discipline he upholds,' the Countess said, smiling at the stunned youth.

'I would advise you to give her time to recover from one bruise,' she
added. 'You will do as it pleases you.'

Evan was sent rushing from the Countess to Caroline, with whom the
Countess was content to leave him.

The young man was daintily managed. Caroline asked him to stay, as she
did not see him often, and (she brought it in at the close) her home was
not very happy. She did not entreat him, but looking resigned, her lovely
face conjured up the Major to Evan, and he thought, 'Can I drive her back
to her tyrant?' For so he juggled with himself to have but another day in
the sunshine of Rose.

Andrew, too, threw out genial hints about the Brewery. Old Tom intended
to retire, he said, and then they would see what they would see! He
silenced every word about Lymport; called him a brewer already, and made
absurd jokes, that were serviceable stuff nevertheless to the Countess,
who deplored to this one and to that the chance existing that Evan might,
by the urgent solicitations of his brother-in-law, give up diplomacy and
its honours for a brewery and lucre!

Of course Evan knew that he was managed. The memoirs of a managed man
have yet to be written; but if he be sincere he will tell you that he
knew it all the time. He longed for the sugar-plum; he knew it was
naughty to take it: he dared not for fear of the devil, and he shut his
eyes while somebody else popped it into his mouth, and assumed his
responsibility. Being man-driven or chicaned, is different from being
managed. Being managed implies being led the way this other person thinks
you should go: altogether for your own benefit, mind: you are to see with
her eyes, that you may not disappoint your own appetites: which does not
hurt the flesh, certainly; but does damage the conscience; and from the
moment you have once succumbed, that function ceases to perform its
office of moral strainer so well.

After all, was he not happier when he wrote himself tailor, than when he
declared himself gentleman?

So he now imagined, till Rose, wishing him 'Good night' on the balcony,
and abandoning her hand with a steady sweet voice and gaze, said: 'How
generous of you to forgive my friend, dear Evan!' And the ravishing
little glimpse of womanly softness in her, set his heart beating. If he
thought at all, it was that he would have sacrificed body and soul for
her.




CHAPTER XIX

SECOND DESPATCH OF THE COUNTESS

We do not advance very far in this second despatch, and it will be found
chiefly serviceable for the indications it affords of our General's skill
in mining, and addiction to that branch of military science. For the
moment I must beg that a little indulgence be granted to her.

'Purely business. Great haste. Something has happened. An event? I know
not; but events may flow from it.

'A lady is here who has run away from the conjugal abode, and Lady
Jocelyn shelters her, and is hospitable to another, who is more concerned
in this lady's sad fate than he should be. This may be morals, my dear:
but please do not talk of Portugal now. A fine-ish woman with a great
deal of hair worn as if her maid had given it one comb straight down and
then rolled it up in a hurry round one finger. Malice would say carrots.
It is called gold. Mr. Forth is in a glass house, and is wrong to cast
his sneers at perfectly inoffensive people.

'Perfectly impossible we can remain at Beckley Court together--if not
dangerous. Any means that Providence may designate, I would employ. It
will be like exorcising a demon. Always excuseable. I only ask a little
more time for stupid Evan. He might have little Bonner now. I should not
object; but her family is not so good.

'Now, do attend. At once obtain a copy of Strike's Company people. You
understand--prospectuses. Tell me instantly if the Captain Evremonde in
it is Captain Lawson Evremonde. Pump Strike. Excuse vulgar words. Whether
he is not Lord Laxley's half-brother. Strike shall be of use to us.
Whether he is not mad. Captain E----'s address. Oh! when I think of
Strike--brute! and poor beautiful uncomplaining Carry and her shoulder!
But let us indeed most fervently hope that his Grace may be balm to it.
We must not pray for vengeance. It is sinful. Providence will inflict
that. Always know that Providence is quite sure to. It comforts
exceedingly.

'Oh, that Strike were altogether in the past tense! No knowing what the
Duke might do--a widower and completely subjugated. It makes my bosom
bound. The man tempts me to the wickedest Frenchy ideas. There!

We progress with dear venerable Mrs. Bonner. Truly pious--interested in
your Louisa. She dreads that my husband will try to convert me to his
creed. I can but weep and say--never!

'I need not say I have my circle. To hear this ridiculous boy Harry
Jocelyn grunt under my nose when he has led me unsuspectingly away from
company--Harriet! dearest! He thinks it a sigh! But there is no time for
laughing.

'My maxim in any house is--never to despise the good opinion of the
nonentities. They are the majority. I think they all look up to me. But
then of course you must fix that by seducing the stars. My diplomatist
praises my abilities--Sir John Loring my style--the rest follow and I do
not withhold my smiles, and they are happy, and I should be but that for
ungrateful Evan's sake I sacrificed my peace by binding myself to a
dreadful sort of half-story. I know I did not quite say it. It seems as
if Sir A.'s ghost were going to haunt me. And then I have the most
dreadful fears that what I have done has disturbed him in the other
world. Can it be so? It is not money or estates we took at all, dearest!
And these excellent young curates--I almost wish it was Protestant to
speak a word behind a board to them and imbibe comfort. For after all it
is nothing: and a word even from this poor thin mopy Mr. Parsley might be
relief to a poor soul in trouble. Catholics tell you that what you do in
a good cause is redeemable if not exactly right. And you know the
Catholic is the oldest Religion of the two. I would listen to the Pope,
staunch Protestant as I am, in preference to King Henry the Eighth.
Though, as a woman, I bear him no rancour, for his wives were--fools,
point blank. No man was ever so manageable. My diplomatist is getting
liker and liker to him every day. Leaner, of course, and does not
habitually straddle. Whiskers and morals, I mean. We must be silent
before our prudish sister. Not a prude? We talk diplomacy, dearest. He
complains of the exclusiveness of the port of Oporto, and would have
strict alliance between Portugal and England, with mutual privileges. I
wish the alliance, and think it better to maintain the exclusiveness.
Very trifling; but what is life!

'Adieu. One word to leave you laughing. Imagine her situation! This
stupid Miss Carrington has offended me. She has tried to pump Conning,
who, I do not doubt, gave her as much truth as I chose she should have in
her well. But the quandary of the wretched creature! She takes Conning
into her confidence--a horrible malady just covered by high-neck dress!
Skin! and impossible that she can tell her engaged--who is--guess--Mr.
George Up------! Her name is Louisa Carrington. There was a Louisa
Harrington once. Similarity of names perhaps. Of course I could not let
her come to the house; and of course Miss C. is in a state of wonderment
and bad passions, I fear. I went straight to Lady Racial, my dear. There
was nothing else for it but to go and speak. She is truly a noble
woman--serves us in every way. As she should!--much affected by sight of
Evan, and keeps aloof from Beckley Court. The finger of Providence is in
all. Adieu! but do pray think of Miss Carrington! It was foolish of her
to offend me. Drives and walks-the Duke attentive. Description of him
when I embrace you. I give amiable Sir Franks Portuguese dishes. Ah, my
dear, if we had none but men to contend against, and only women for our
tools! But this is asking for the world, and nothing less.

'Open again,' she pursues. 'Dear Carry just come in. There are fairies, I
think, where there are dukes! Where could it have come from? Could any
human being have sent messengers post to London, ordered, and had it
despatched here within this short time? You shall not be mystified! I do
not think I even hinted; but the afternoon walk I had with his Grace, on
the first day of his arrival, I did shadow it very delicately how much it
was to be feared our poor Carry could not, that she dared not, betray her
liege lord in an evening dress. Nothing more, upon my veracity! And Carry
has this moment received the most beautiful green box, containing two of
the most heavenly old lace shawls that you ever beheld. We divine it is
to hide poor Carry's matrimonial blue mark! We know nothing. Will you
imagine Carry is for not accepting it! Priority of birth does not imply
superior wits, dear--no allusion to you. I have undertaken all. Arch
looks, but nothing pointed. His Grace will understand the exquisite
expression of feminine gratitude. It is so sweet to deal with true
nobility. Carry has only to look as she always does. One sees Strike
sitting on her. Her very pliability has rescued her from being utterly
squashed long ere this! The man makes one vulgar. It would have been not
the slightest use asking me to be a Christian had I wedded Strike. But
think of the fairy presents! It has determined me not to be expelled by
Mr. Forth--quite. Tell Silva he is not forgotten. But, my dear, between
us alone, men are so selfish, that it is too evident they do not care for
private conversations to turn upon a lady's husband: not to be risked,
only now and then.

'I hear that the young ladies and the young gentlemen have been out
riding a race. The poor little Bonner girl cannot ride, and she says to
Carry that Rose wishes to break our brother's neck. The child hardly
wishes that, but she is feelingless. If Evan could care for Miss Bonner,
he might have B. C.! Oh, it is not so very long a shot, my dear. I am on
the spot, remember. Old Mrs. Bonner is a most just-minded spirit. Juliana
is a cripple, and her grandmother wishes to be sure that when she departs
to her Lord the poor cripple may not be chased from this home of hers.
Rose cannot calculate--Harry is in disgrace--there is really no knowing.
This is how I have reckoned; L10,000 extra to Rose; perhaps L1000 or
nothing to H.; all the rest of ready-money--a large sum--no use
guessing--to Lady Jocelyn; and B. C. to little Bonner--it is worth
L40,000 Then she sells, or stops--permanent resident. It might be so
soon, for I can see worthy Mrs. Bonner to be breaking visibly. But young
men will not see with wiser eyes than their own. Here is Evan risking his
neck for an indifferent--there's some word for "not soft." In short, Rose
is the cold-blooded novice, as I have always said, the most selfish of
the creatures on two legs.

'Adieu! Would you have dreamed that Major Nightmare's gallantry to his
wife would have called forth a gallantry so truly touching and delicate?
Can you not see Providence there? Out of Evil--the Catholics again!

'Address. If Lord Lax---'s half-brother. If wrong in noddle. This I know
you will attend to scrupulously. Ridiculous words are sometimes the most
expressive. Once more, may Heaven bless you all! I thought of you in
church last Sunday.

'I may tell you this: young Mr. Laxley is here. He--but it was Evan's
utter madness was the cause, and I have not ventured a word to him. He
compelled Evan to assert his rank, and Mr. Forth's face has been one
concentrated sneer since THEN. He must know the origin of the Cogglesbys,
or something. Now you will understand the importance. I cannot be more
explicit. Only--the man must go.

'P.S. I have just ascertained that Lady Jocelyn is quite familiar with
Andrew's origin!! She must think my poor Harriet an eccentric woman. Of
course I have not pretended to rank here, merely gentry. It is gentry in
reality, for had poor Papa been legitimized, he would have been a
nobleman. You know that; and between the two we may certainly claim
gentry. I twiddle your little good Andrew to assert it for us twenty
times a day. Of all the dear little manageable men! It does you infinite
credit that you respect him as you do. What would have become of me I do
not know.

'P.S. I said two shawls--a black and a white. The black not so
costly--very well. And so delicate of him to think of the mourning! But
the white, my dear, must be family--must! Old English point. Exquisitely
chaste. So different from that Brussels poor Andrew surprised you with. I
know it cost money, but this is a question of taste. The Duke reconciles
me to England and all my troubles! He is more like poor Papa than any one
of the men I have yet seen. The perfect gentleman! I do praise myself for
managing an invitation to our Carry. She has been a triumph.'

Admire the concluding stroke. The Countess calls this letter a purely
business communication. Commercial men might hardly think so; but perhaps
ladies will perceive it. She rambles concentrically, if I may so expound
her. Full of luxurious enjoyment of her position, her mind is active, and
you see her at one moment marking a plot, the next, with a light
exclamation, appeasing her conscience, proud that she has one; again she
calls up rival forms of faith, that she may show the Protestant its
little shortcomings, and that it is slightly in debt to her (like
Providence) for her constancy, notwithstanding. The Protestant you see,
does not confess, and she has to absolve herself, and must be doing it
internally while she is directing outer matters. Hence her slap at King
Henry VIII. In fact, there is much more business in this letter than I
dare to indicate; but as it is both impertinent and unpopular to dive for
any length of time beneath the surface (especially when there are few
pearls to show for it), we will discontinue our examination.

The Countess, when she had dropped the letter in the bag, returned to her
chamber, and deputed Dorothy Loring, whom she met on the stairs, to run
and request Rose to lend her her album to beguile the afternoon with; and
Dorothy dances to Rose, saying, 'The Countess de Lispy-Lispy would be
delighted to look at your album all the afternoon.'

'Oh what a woman that is!' says Rose. 'Countess de Lazy-Lazy, I think.'

The Countess, had she been listening, would have cared little for
accusations on that head. Idlesse was fashionable: exquisite languors
were a sign of breeding; and she always had an idea that she looked more
interesting at dinner after reclining on a couch the whole of the
afternoon. The great Mel and his mate had given her robust health, and
she was able to play the high-born invalid without damage to her
constitution. Anything amused her; Rose's album even, and the
compositions of W. H., E. H., D. F., and F. L. The initials F. L. were
diminutive, and not unlike her own hand, she thought. They were appended
to a piece of facetiousness that would not have disgraced the abilities
of Mr. John Raikes; but we know that very stiff young gentlemen betray
monkey-minds when sweet young ladies compel them to disport. On the
whole, it was not a lazy afternoon that the Countess passed, and it was
not against her wish that others should think it was.




CHAPTER XX

BREAK-NECK LEAP

The August sun was in mid-sky, when a troop of ladies and cavaliers
issued from the gates of Beckley Court, and winding through the
hopgardens, emerged on the cultivated slopes bordering the downs.
Foremost, on her grey cob, was Rose, having on her right her uncle
Seymour, and on her left Ferdinand Laxley. Behind came Mrs. Evremonde,
flanked by Drummond and Evan. Then followed Jenny Graine, supported by
Harry and William Harvey. In the rear came an open carriage, in which
Miss Carrington and the Countess de Saldar were borne, attended by Lady
Jocelyn and Andrew Cogglesby on horseback. The expedition had for its
object the selection of a run of ground for an amateur steeple-chase: the
idea of which had sprung from Laxley's boasts of his horsemanship: and
Rose, quick as fire, had backed herself, and Drummond and Evan, to beat
him. The mention of the latter was quite enough for Laxley.

'If he follows me, let him take care of his neck,' said that youth.

'Why, Ferdinand, he can beat you in anything!' exclaimed Rose,
imprudently.

But the truth was, she was now more restless than ever. She was not
distant with Evan, but she had a feverish manner, and seemed to thirst to
make him show his qualities, and excel, and shine. Billiards, or jumping,
or classical acquirements, it mattered not--Evan must come first. He had
crossed the foils with Laxley, and disarmed him; for Mel his father had
seen him trained for a military career. Rose made a noise about the
encounter, and Laxley was eager for his opportunity, which he saw in the
proposed mad gallop.

Now Mr. George Uplift, who usually rode in buckskins whether he was after
the fox or fresh air, was out on this particular morning; and it happened
that, as the cavalcade wound beneath the down, Mr. George trotted along
the ridge. He was a fat-faced, rotund young squire--a bully where he
might be, and an obedient creature enough where he must be--good-humoured
when not interfered with; fond of the table, and brimful of all the jokes
of the county, the accent of which just seasoned his speech. He had
somehow plunged into a sort of half-engagement with Miss Carrington. At
his age, and to ladies of Miss Carrington's age, men unhappily do not
plunge head-foremost, or Miss Carrington would have had him long before.
But he was at least in for it half a leg; and a desperate maiden, on the
criminal side of thirty, may make much of that. Previous to the visit of
the Countess de Saldar, Mr. George had been in the habit of trotting over
to Beckley three or four times a week. Miss Carrington had a little
money: Mr. George was heir to his uncle. Miss Carrington was lean and
blue-eyed.

Mr. George was black-eyed and obese. By everybody, except Mr. George, the
match was made: but that exception goes for little in the country, where
half the population are talked into marriage, and gossips entirely devote
themselves to continuing the species. Mr. George was certain that he had
not been fighting shy of the fair Carrington of late, nor had he been
unfaithful. He had only been in an extraordinary state of occupation.
Messages for Lady Racial had to be delivered, and he had become her
cavalier and escort suddenly. The young squire was bewildered; but as he
was only one leg in love--if the sentiment may be thus spoken of
figuratively--his vanity in his present office kept him from remorse or
uneasiness.

He rode at an easy pace within sight of the home of his treasure, and his
back turned to it. Presently there rose a cry from below. Mr. George
looked about. The party of horsemen hallooed: Mr. George yoicked. Rose
set her horse to gallop up; Seymour Jocelyn cried 'fox,' and gave the
view; hearing which Mr. George shouted, and seemed inclined to surrender;
but the fun seized him, and, standing up in his stirrups, he gathered his
coat-tails in a bunch, and waggled them with a jolly laugh, which was
taken up below, and the clamp of hoofs resounded on the turf as Mr.
George led off, after once more, with a jocose twist in his seat, showing
them the brush mockingly. Away went fox, and a mad chase began. Seymour
acted as master of the hunt. Rose, Evan, Drummond, and Mrs. Evremonde and
Dorothy, skirted to the right, all laughing, and full of excitement.
Harry bellowed the direction from above. The ladies in the carriage, with
Lady Jocelyn and Andrew, watched them till they flowed one and all over
the shoulder of the down.

'And who may the poor hunted animal be?' inquired the Countess.

'George Uplift,' said Lady Jocelyn, pulling out her watch. 'I give him
twenty minutes.'

'Providence speed him!' breathed the Countess, with secret fervour.

'Oh, he hasn't a chance,' said Lady Jocelyn. 'The squire keeps wretched
beasts.'

'Is there not an attraction that will account for his hasty capture?'
said the Countess, looking tenderly at Miss Carrington, who sat a little
straighter, and the Countess, hating manifestations of stiff-backedness,
could not forbear adding: 'I am at war with my sympathies, which should
be with the poor brute flying from his persecutors.'

She was in a bitter state of trepidation, or she would have thought twice
before she touched a nerve of the enamoured lady, as she knew she did in
calling her swain a poor brute, and did again by pertinaciously pursuing:

'Does he then shun his captivity?'

'Touching a nerve' is one of those unforgivable small offences which, in
our civilized state, produce the social vendettas and dramas that, with
savage nations, spring from the spilling of blood. Instead of an eye for
an eye, a tooth for a tooth, we demand a nerve for a nerve. 'Thou hast
touched me where I am tender thee, too, will I touch.'

Miss Carrington had been alarmed and hurt at the strange evasion of Mr.
George; nor could she see the fun of his mimicry of the fox and his
flight away from instead of into her neighbourhood. She had also, or she
now thought it, remarked that when Mr. George had been spoken of
casually, the Countess had not looked a natural look. Perhaps it was her
present inflamed fancy. At any rate the Countess was offensive now. She
was positively vulgar, in consequence, to the mind of Miss Carrington,
and Miss Carrington was drawn to think of a certain thing Ferdinand
Laxley had said he had heard from the mouth of this lady's brother when
ale was in him. Alas! how one seed of a piece of folly will lurk and
sprout to confound us; though, like the cock in the eastern tale, we peck
up zealously all but that one!

The carriage rolled over the turf, attended by Andrew, and Lady Jocelyn,
and the hunt was seen; Mr. George some forty paces a-head; Seymour
gaining on him, Rose next.

'Who's that breasting Rose?' said Lady Jocelyn, lifting her glass.

'My brother-in-law, Harrington,' returned Andrew.

'He doesn't ride badly,' said Lady Jocelyn. 'A little too military. He
must have been set up in England.'

'Oh, Evan can do anything,' said Andrew enthusiastically. 'His father was
a capital horseman, and taught him fencing, riding, and every
accomplishment. You won't find such a young fellow, my lady--'

'The brother like him at all?' asked Lady Jocelyn, still eyeing the
chase.

'Brother? He hasn't got a brother,' said Andrew.

Lady Jocelyn continued: 'I mean the present baronet.'

She was occupied with her glass, and did not observe the flush that took
hold of Andrew's ingenuous cheeks, and his hurried glance at and off the
quiet eye of the Countess. Miss Carrington did observe it.

Mr. Andrew dashed his face under the palm of his hand, and murmured:

'Oh-yes! His brother-in-law isn't much like him--ha! ha!'

And then the poor little man rubbed his hands, unconscious of the
indignant pity for his wretched abilities in the gaze of the Countess;
and he must have been exposed--there was a fear that the ghost of Sir
Abraham would have darkened this day, for Miss Carrington was about to
speak, when Lady Jocelyn cried: 'There's a purl! Somebody's down.'

The Countess was unaware of the nature of a purl, but she could have
sworn it to be a piece of Providence.

'Just by old Nat Hodges' farm, on Squire Copping's ground,' cried Andrew,
much relieved by the particular individual's misfortune. 'Dear me, my
lady! how old Tom and I used to jump the brook there, to be sure! and
when you were no bigger than little Miss Loring--do you remember old Tom?
We're all fools one time in our lives!'

'Who can it be?' said Lady Jocelyn, spying at the discomfited horseman.
'I'm afraid it's poor Ferdinand.'

They drove on to an eminence from which the plain was entirely laid open.

'I hope my brother will enjoy his ride this day,' sighed the Countess.
'It will be his limit of enjoyment for a lengthened period!'

She perceived that Mr. George's capture was inevitable, and her heart
sank; for she was sure he would recognize her, and at the moment she
misdoubted her powers. She dreamed of flight.

'You're not going to leave us?' said Lady Jocelyn. 'My dear Countess,
what will the future member do without you? We have your promise to stay
till the election is over.'

'Thanks for your extreme kind courtesy, Lady Jocelyn,' murmured the
Countess: 'but my husband--the Count.'

'The favour is yours,' returned her ladyship. 'And if the Count cannot
come, you at least are at liberty?'

'You are most kind,' said the Countess.

'Andrew and his wife I should not dare to separate for more than a week,'
said Lady Jocelyn. 'He is the great British husband. The proprietor! "My
wife" is his unanswerable excuse.'

'Yes,' Andrew replied cheerily. 'I don't like division between man and
wife, I must say.'

The Countess dared no longer instance the Count, her husband. She was
heard to murmur that citizen feelings were not hers:

'You suggested Fallow field to Melville, did you not?' asked Lady
Jocelyn.

'It was the merest suggestion,' said the Countess, smiling.

'Then you must really stay to see us through it,' said her ladyship.
'Where are they now? They must be making straight for break-neck fence.
They'll have him there. George hasn't pluck for that.'

'Hasn't what?'

It was the Countess who requested to know the name of this other piece of
Providence Mr. George Uplift was deficient in.

'Pluck-go,' said her ladyship hastily, and telling the coachman to drive
to a certain spot, trotted on with Andrew, saying to him: 'I'm afraid we
are thought vulgar by the Countess.'

Andrew considered it best to reassure her gravely.

'The young man, her brother, is well-bred,' said Lady Jocelyn, and Andrew
was very ready to praise Evan.

Lady Jocelyn, herself in slimmer days a spirited horsewoman, had
correctly estimated Mr. George's pluck. He was captured by Harry and Evan
close on the leap, in the act of shaking his head at it; and many who
inspected the leap would have deemed it a sign that wisdom weighted the
head that would shake long at it; for it consisted of a post and rails,
with a double ditch.

Seymour Jocelyn, Mrs. Evremonde, Drummond, Jenny Graine, and William
Harvey, rode with Mr. George in quest of the carriage, and the captive
was duly delivered over.

'But where's the brush?' said Lady Jocelyn, laughing, and introducing him
to the Countess, who dropped her head, and with it her veil.

'Oh! they leave that on for my next run,' said Mr. George, bowing
civilly.

'You are going to run again?'

Miss Carrington severely asked this question; and Mr. George protested.

'Secure him, Louisa,' said Lady Jocelyn. 'See here: what's the matter
with poor Dorothy?'

Dorothy came slowly trotting up to them along the green lane, and thus
expressed her grief, between sobs:

'Isn't it a shame? Rose is such a tyrant. They're going to ride a race
and a jump down in the field, and it's break-neck leap, and Rose won't
allow me to stop and see it, though she knows I'm just as fond of Evan as
she is; and if he's killed I declare it will be her fault; and it's all
for her stupid, dirty old pocket handkerchief!'

'Break-neck fence!' said Lady Jocelyn; 'that's rather mad.'

'Do let's go and see it, darling Aunty Joey,' pleaded the little maid.
Lady Jocelyn rode on, saying to herself: 'That girl has a great deal of
devil in her.' The lady's thoughts were of Rose.

'Black Lymport'd take the leap,' said Mr. George, following her with the
rest of the troop. 'Who's that fellow on him?'

'His name's Harrington,' quoth Drummond.

'Oh, Harrington!' Mr. George responded; but immediately
laughed--'Harrington? 'Gad, if he takes the leap it'll be odd--another of
the name. That's where old Mel had his spill.'

'Who?' Drummond inquired.

'Old Mel Harrington--the Lymport wonder. Old Marquis Mel,' said Mr.
George. 'Haven't ye heard of him?'

'What! the gorgeous tailor!' exclaimed Lady Jocelyn. 'How I regret never
meeting that magnificent snob! that efflorescence of sublime imposture!
I've seen the Regent; but one's life doesn't seem complete without having
seen his twin-brother. You must give us warning when you have him down at
Croftlands again, Mr. George.'

'Gad, he'll have to come a long distance--poor old Mel!' said Mr. George;
and was going on, when Seymour Jocelyn stroked his moustache to cry,
'Look! Rosey 's starting 'em, by Jove!'

The leap, which did not appear formidable from where they stood, was four
fields distant from the point where Rose, with a handkerchief in her
hand, was at that moment giving the signal to Laxley and Evan.

Miss Carrington and the Countess begged Lady Jocelyn to order a shout to
be raised to arrest them, but her ladyship marked her good sense by
saying: 'Let them go, now they're about it'; for she saw that to make a
fuss now matters had proceeded so far, was to be uncivil to the
inevitable.

The start was given, and off they flew. Harry Jocelyn, behind them, was
evidently caught by the demon, and clapped spurs to his horse to have his
fling as well, for the fun of the thing; but Rose, farther down the
field, rode from her post straight across him, to the imminent peril of a
mutual overset; and the party on the height could see Harry fuming, and
Rose coolly looking him down, and letting him understand what her will
was; and her mother, and Drummond, and Seymour who beheld this, had a
common sentiment of admiration for the gallant girl. But away went the
rivals. Black Lymport was the favourite, though none of the men thought
he would be put at the fence. The excitement became contagious. The
Countess threw up her veil. Lady Jocelyn, and Seymour, and Drummond,
galloped down the lane, and Mr. George was for accompanying them, till
the line of Miss Carrington's back gave him her unmistakeable opinion of
such a course of conduct, and he had to dally and fret by her side.
Andrew's arm was tightly grasped by the Countess. The rivals were
crossing the second field, Laxley a little a-head.

'He 's holding in the black mare--that fellow!' said Mr. George. 'Gad, it
looks like going at the fence. Fancy Harrington!'

They were now in the fourth field, a smooth shorn meadow. Laxley was two
clear lengths in advance, but seemed riding, as Mr. George remarked, more
for pace than to take the jump. The ladies kept plying random queries and
suggestions: the Countess wishing to know whether they could not be
stopped by a countryman before they encountered any danger. In the midst
of their chatter, Mr. George rose in his stirrups, crying:

'Bravo, the black mare!'

'Has he done it?' said Andrew, wiping his poll.

'He? No, the mare!' shouted Mr. George, and bolted off, no longer to be
restrained.

The Countess, doubly relieved, threw herself back in the carriage, and
Andrew drew a breath, saying: 'Evan has beat him--I saw that! The other's
horse swerved right round.'

'I fear,' said Mrs. Evremonde, 'Mr. Harrington has had a fall. Don't be
alarmed--it may not be much.'

'A fall!' exclaimed the Countess, equally divided between alarms of
sisterly affection and a keen sense of the romance of the thing.

Miss Carrington ordered the carriage to be driven round. They had not
gone far when they were met by Harry Jocelyn riding in hot haste, and he
bellowed to the coachman to drive as hard as he could, and stop opposite
Brook's farm.

The scene on the other side of the fence would have been a sweet one to
the central figure in it had his eyes then been open. Surrounded by Lady
Jocelyn, Drummond, Seymour, and the rest, Evan's dust-stained body was
stretched along the road, and his head was lying in the lap of Rose, who,
pale, heedless of anything spoken by those around her, and with her lips
set and her eyes turning wildly from one to the other, held a gory
handkerchief to his temple with one hand, and with the other felt for the
motion of his heart.

But heroes don't die, you know.




CHAPTER XXI

TRIBULATIONS AND TACTICS OF THE COUNTESS

'You have murdered my brother, Rose Jocelyn!'

'Don't say so now.'

Such was the interchange between the two that loved the senseless youth,
as he was being lifted into the carriage.

Lady Jocelyn sat upright in her saddle, giving directions about what was
to be done with Evan and the mare, impartially.

'Stunned, and a good deal shaken, I suppose; Lymport's knees are terribly
cut,' she said to Drummond, who merely nodded. And Seymour remarked,
'Fifty guineas knocked off her value!' One added, 'Nothing worse, I
should think'; and another, 'A little damage inside, perhaps.' Difficult
to say whether they spoke of Evan or the brute.

No violent outcries; no reproaches cast on the cold-blooded coquette; no
exclamations on the heroism of her brother! They could absolutely spare a
thought for the animal! And Evan had risked his life for this, and might
die unpitied. The Countess diversified her grief with a deadly bitterness
against the heartless Jocelyns.

Oh, if Evan dies! will it punish Rose sufficiently?

Andrew expressed emotion, but not of a kind the Countess liked a relative
to be seen exhibiting; for in emotion worthy Andrew betrayed to her his
origin offensively.

'Go away and puke, if you must,' she said, clipping poor Andrew's word
about his 'dear boy.' She could not help speaking in that way--he was so
vulgar. A word of sympathy from Lady Jocelyn might have saved her from
the sourness into which her many conflicting passions were resolving; and
might also have saved her ladyship from the rancour she had sown in the
daughter of the great Mel by her selection of epithets to characterize
him.

Will it punish Rose at all, if Evan dies?

Rose saw that she was looked at. How could the Countess tell that Rose
envied her the joy of holding Evan in the carriage there? Rose, to judge
by her face, was as calm as glass. Not so well seen through, however.
Mrs. Evremonde rode beside her, whose fingers she caught, and twined her
own with them tightly once for a fleeting instant. Mrs. Evremonde wanted
no further confession of her state.

Then Rose said to her mother, 'Mama, may I ride to have the doctor
ready?'

Ordinarily, Rose would have clapped heel to horse the moment the thought
came. She waited for the permission, and flew off at a gallop, waving
back Laxley, who was for joining her.

'Franks will be a little rusty about the mare,' the Countess heard Lady
Jocelyn say; and Harry just then stooped his head to the carriage, and
said, in his blunt fashion, 'After all, it won't show much.'

'We are not cattle!' exclaimed the frenzied Countess, within her bosom.
Alas! it was almost a democratic outcry they made her guilty of; but she
was driven past patience. And as a further provocation, Evan would open
his eyes. She laid her handkerchief over them with loving delicacy,
remembering in a flash that her own face had been all the while exposed
to Mr. George Uplift; and then the terrors of his presence at Beckley
Court came upon her, and the fact that she had not for the last ten
minutes been the serene Countess de Saldar; and she quite hated Andrew,
for vulgarity in others evoked vulgarity in her, which was the reason why
she ranked vulgarity as the chief of the deadly sins. Her countenance for
Harry and all the others save poor Andrew was soon the placid
heaven-confiding sister's again; not before Lady Jocelyn had found cause
to observe to Drummond:

'Your Countess doesn't ruffle well.'

But a lady who is at war with two or three of the facts of Providence,
and yet will have Providence for her ally, can hardly ruffle well. Do not
imagine that the Countess's love for her brother was hollow. She was
assured when she came up to the spot where he fell, that there was no
danger; he had but dislocated his shoulder, and bruised his head a
little. Hearing this, she rose out of her clamorous heart, and seized the
opportunity for a small burst of melodrama. Unhappily, Lady Jocelyn, who
gave the tone to the rest, was a Spartan in matters of this sort; and as
she would have seen those dearest to her bear the luck of the field, she
could see others. When the call for active help reached her, you beheld a
different woman.

The demonstrativeness the Countess thirsted for was afforded her by Juley
Bonner, and in a measure by her sister Caroline, who loved Evan
passionately. The latter was in riding attire, about to mount to ride and
meet them, accompanied by the Duke. Caroline had hastily tied up her
hair; a rich golden brown lump of it hung round her cheek; her limpid
eyes and anxiously-nerved brows impressed the Countess wonderfully as she
ran down the steps and bent her fine well-filled bust forward to ask the
first hurried question.

The Countess patted her shoulder. 'Safe, dear,' she said aloud, as one
who would not make much of it. And in a whisper, 'You look superb.'

I must charge it to Caroline's beauty under the ducal radiance, that a
stream of sweet feelings entering into the Countess made her forget to
tell her sister that George Uplift was by. Caroline had not been abroad,
and her skin was not olive-hued; she was a beauty, and a majestic figure,
little altered since the day when the wooden marine marched her out of
Lymport.

The Countess stepped from the carriage to go and cherish Juliana's
petulant distress; for that unhealthy little body was stamping with
impatience to have the story told to her, to burst into fits of pathos;
and while Seymour and Harry assisted Evan to descend, trying to laugh off
the pain he endured, Caroline stood by, soothing him with words and
tender looks.

Lady Jocelyn passed him, and took his hand, saying, 'Not killed this
time!'

'At your ladyship's service to-morrow,' he replied, and his hand was
kindly squeezed.

'My darling Evan, you will not ride again?' Caroline cried, kissing him
on the steps; and the Duke watched the operation, and the Countess
observed the Duke.

That Providence should select her sweetest moments to deal her wounds,
was cruel; but the Countess just then distinctly heard Mr. George Uplift
ask Miss Carrington.

'Is that lady a Harrington?'

'You perceive a likeness?' was the answer.

Mr. George went 'Whew!--tit-tit-tit!' with the profound expression of a
very slow mind.

The scene was quickly over. There was barely an hour for the ladies to
dress for dinner. Leaving Evan in the doctor's hand, and telling Caroline
to dress in her room, the Countess met Rose, and gratified her
vindictiveness, while she furthered her projects, by saying:

'Not till my brother is quite convalescent will it be adviseable that you
should visit him. I am compelled to think of him entirely now. In his
present state he is not fit to be, played with.'

Rose, stedfastly eyeing her, seemed to swallow down something in her
throat, and said:

'I will obey you, Countess. I hoped you would allow me to nurse him.'

'Quiet above all things, Rose Jocelyn!' returned the Countess, with the
suavity of a governess, who must be civil in her sourness. 'If you would
not complete this morning's achievement--stay away.'

The Countess declined to see that Rose's lip quivered. She saw an
unpleasantness in the bottom of her eyes; and now that her brother's
decease was not even remotely to be apprehended, she herself determined
to punish the cold, unimpressionable coquette of a girl. Before returning
to Caroline, she had five minutes' conversation with. Juliana, which
fully determined her to continue the campaign at Beckley Court, commence
decisive movements, and not to retreat, though fifty George Uplofts
menaced her. Consequently, having dismissed Conning on a message to Harry
Jocelyn, to ask him for a list of the names of the new people they were
to meet that day at dinner, she said to Caroline:

'My dear, I think it will be incumbent on us to depart very quickly.'

Much to the Countess's chagrin and astonishment, Caroline replied:

'I shall hardly be sorry.'

'Not sorry? Why, what now, dear one? Is it true, then, that a flagellated
female kisses the rod? Are you so eager for a repetition of Strike?'

Caroline, with some hesitation, related to her more than the Countess had
ventured to petition for in her prayers.

'Oh! how exceedingly generous!' the latter exclaimed. How very refreshing
to think that there are nobles in your England as romantic, as courteous,
as delicate as our own foreign ones! But his Grace is quite an
exceptional nobleman. Are you not touched, dearest Carry?'

Caroline pensively glanced at the reflection of her beautiful arm in the
glass, and sighed, pushing back the hair from her temples.

'But, for mercy's sake!' resumed the Countess, in alarm at the sigh, 'do
not be too--too touched. Do, pray, preserve your wits. You weep!
Caroline, Caroline! O my goodness; it is just five-and-twenty minutes to
the first dinner-bell, and you are crying! For God's sake, think of your
face! Are you going to be a Gorgon? And you show the marks twice as long
as any other, you fair women. Squinnying like this! Caroline, for your
Louisa's sake, do not!'

Hissing which, half angrily and half with entreaty, the Countess dropped
on her knees. Caroline's fit of tears subsided. The eldest of the
sisters, she was the kindest, the fairest, the weakest.

'Not,' said the blandishing Countess, when Caroline's face was clearer,
'not that my best of Carrys does not look delicious in her shower. Cry,
with your hair down, and you would subdue any male creature on two legs.
And that reminds me of that most audacious Marquis de Remilla. He saw a
dirty drab of a fruit-girl crying in Lisbon streets one day, as he was
riding in the carriage of the Duchesse de Col da Rosta, and her husband
and duena, and he had a letter for her--the Duchesse. They loved! How
deliver the letter? "Save me!" he cried to the Duchesse, catching her
hand, and pressing his heart, as if very sick. The Duchesse felt the
paper--turned her hand over on her knee, and he withdrew his. What does
my Carry think was the excuse he tendered the Duke? This--and this gives
you some idea of the wonderful audacity of those dear Portuguese--that
he--he must precipitate himself and marry any woman he saw weep, and be
her slave for the term of his natural life, unless another woman's hand
at the same moment restrained him! There!' and the Countess's eyes shone
brightly.

'How excessively imbecile!' Caroline remarked, hitherto a passive
listener to these Lusitanian contes.

It was the first sign she had yet given of her late intercourse with a
positive Duke, and the Countess felt it, and drew back. No more anecdotes
for Caroline, to whom she quietly said:

'You are very English, dear!'

'But now, the Duke--his Grace,' she went on, 'how did he inaugurate?'

'I spoke to him of Evan's position. God forgive me!--I said that was the
cause of my looks being sad.'

'You could have thought of nothing better,' interposed the Countess.
'Yes?'

'He said, if he might clear them he should be happy!

'In exquisite language, Carry, of course.'

'No; just as others talk.'

'Hum!' went the Countess, and issued again brightly from a cloud of
reflection, with the remark: 'It was to seem business-like--the
commerciality of the English mind. To the point--I know. Well, you
perceive, my sweetest, that Evan's interests are in your hands. You dare
not quit the field. In one week, I fondly trust, he will be secure. What
more did his Grace say? May we not be the repository of such delicious
secresies?'

Caroline gave tremulous indications about the lips, and the Countess
jumped to the bell and rang it, for they were too near dinner for the
trace of a single tear to be permitted. The bell and the appearance of
Conning effectually checked the flood.

While speaking to her sister, the Countess had hesitated to mention
George Uplift's name, hoping that, as he had no dinner-suit, he would not
stop to dinner that day, and would fall to the charge of Lady Racial once
more. Conning, however, brought in a sheet of paper on which the names of
the guests were written out by Harry, a daily piece of service he
performed for the captivating dame, and George Uplift's name was in the
list.

'We will do the rest, Conning-retire,' she said, and then folding
Caroline in her arms, murmured, the moment they were alone, 'Will my
Carry dress her hair plain to-day, for the love of her Louisa?'

'Goodness! what a request!' exclaimed Caroline, throwing back her head to
see if her Louisa could be serious.

'Most inexplicable--is it not? Will she do it?'

'Flat, dear? It makes a fright of me.'

'Possibly. May I beg it?'

'But why, dearest, why? If I only knew why!'

'For the love of your Louy.'

'Plain along the temples?'

'And a knot behind.'

'And a band along the forehead?'

'Gems, if they meet your favour.'

'But my cheek-bones, Louisa?'

'They are not too prominent, Carry.'

'Curls relieve them.'

'The change will relieve the curls, dear one.'

Caroline looked in the glass, at the Countess, as polished a reflector,
and fell into a chair. Her hair was accustomed to roll across her
shoulders in heavy curls. The Duke would find a change of the sort
singular. She should not at all know herself with her hair done
differently: and for a lovely woman to be transformed to a fright is hard
to bear in solitude, or in imagination.

'Really!' she petitioned.

'Really--yes, or no?' added the Countess.

'So unaccountable a whim!' Caroline looked in the glass dolefully, and
pulled up her thick locks from one cheek, letting them fall on the
instant.

'She will?' breathed the Countess.

'I really cannot,' said Caroline, with vehemence.

The Countess burst into laughter, replying: 'My poor child! it is not my
whim--it is your obligation. George Uplift dines here to-day. Now do you
divine it? Disguise is imperative for you.'

Mrs. Strike, gazing in her sister's face, answered slowly, 'George? But
how will you meet him?' she hurriedly asked.

'I have met him,' rejoined the Countess, boldly. 'I defy him to know me.
I brazen him! You with your hair in my style are equally safe. You see
there is no choice. Pooh! contemptible puppy!'

'But I never,'--Caroline was going to say she never could face him. 'I
will not dine. I will nurse Evan.'

'You have faced him, my dear,' said the Countess, 'and you are to change
your head-dress simply to throw him off his scent.'

As she spoke the Countess tripped about, nodding her head like a girl.
Triumph in the sense of her power over all she came in contact with,
rather elated the lady.

Do you see why she worked her sister in this roundabout fashion? She
would not tell her George Uplift was in the house till she was sure he
intended to stay, for fear of frightening her. When the necessity became
apparent, she put it under the pretext of a whim in order to see how far
Caroline, whose weak compliance she could count on, and whose reticence
concerning the Duke annoyed her, would submit to it to please her sister;
and if she rebelled positively, why to be sure it was the Duke she
dreaded to shock: and, therefore, the Duke had a peculiar hold on her:
and, therefore, the Countess might reckon that she would do more than she
pleased to confess to remain with the Duke, and was manageable in that
quarter. All this she learnt without asking. I need not add, that
Caroline sighingly did her bidding.

'We must all be victims in our turn, Carry,' said the Countess. 'Evan's
prospects--it may be, Silva's restoration--depend upon your hair being
dressed plain to-day. Reflect on that!'

Poor Caroline obeyed; but she was capable of reflecting only that her
face was unnaturally lean and strange to her.

The sisters tended and arranged one another, taking care to push their
mourning a month or two ahead and the Countess animadverted on the vulgar
mind of Lady Jocelyn, who would allow a 'gentleman to sit down at a
gentlewoman's table, in full company, in pronounced undress': and
Caroline, utterly miserable, would pretend that she wore a mask and kept
grimacing as they do who are not accustomed to paint on the cheeks, till
the Countess checked her by telling her she should ask her for that
before the Duke.

After a visit to Evan, the sisters sailed together into the drawing-room.

'Uniformity is sometimes a gain,' murmured the Countess, as they were
parting in the middle of the room. She saw that their fine figures, and
profiles, and resemblance in contrast, produced an effect. The Duke wore
one of those calmly intent looks by which men show they are aware of
change in the heavens they study, and are too devout worshippers to
presume to disapprove. Mr. George was standing by Miss Carrington, and he
also watched Mrs. Strike. To bewilder him yet more the Countess persisted
in fixing her eyes upon his heterodox apparel, and Mr. George became
conscious and uneasy. Miss Carrington had to address her question to him
twice before he heard. Melville Jocelyn, Sir John Loring, Sir Franks, and
Hamilton surrounded the Countess, and told her what they had decided on
with regard to the election during the day; for Melville was warm in his
assertion that they would not talk to the Countess five minutes without
getting a hint worth having.

'Call to us that man who is habited like a groom,' said the Countess,
indicating Mr. George. 'I presume he is in his right place up here?'

'Whew--take care, Countess--our best man. He's good for a dozen,' said
Hamilton.

Mr. George was brought over and introduced to the Countess de Saldar.

'So the oldest Tory in the county is a fox?' she said, in allusion to the
hunt. Never did Caroline Strike admire her sister's fearful genius more
than at that moment.

Mr. George ducked and rolled his hand over his chin, with 'ah-um!' and
the like, ended by a dry laugh.

'Are you our supporter, Mr. Uplift?'

'Tory interest, ma--um--my lady.'

'And are you staunch and may be trusted?'

''Pon my honour, I think I have that reputation.'

'And you would not betray us if we give you any secrets? Say "'Pon my
honour," again. You launch it out so courageously.'

The men laughed, though they could not see what the Countess was driving
at. She had for two minutes spoken as she spoke when a girl, and
George--entirely off his guard and unsuspicious--looked unenlightened. If
he knew, there were hints enough for him in her words.

If he remained blind, they might pass as air. The appearance of the
butler cut short his protestation as to his powers of secresy.

The Countess dismissed him.

'You will be taken into our confidence when we require you.' And she
resumed her foreign air in a most elaborate and overwhelming bow.

She was now perfectly satisfied that she was safe from Mr. George, and,
as she thoroughly detested the youthful squire, she chose to propagate a
laugh at him by saying with the utmost languor and clearness of voice, as
they descended the stairs:

'After all, a very clever fox may be a very dull dog--don't you think?'

Gentlemen in front of her, and behind, heard it, and at Mr. George's
expense her reputation rose.

Thus the genius of this born general prompted her to adopt the principle
in tactics--boldly to strike when you are in the dark as to your enemy's
movements.




CHAPTER XXII

IN WHICH THE DAUGHTERS OF THE GREAT MEL HAVE TO DIGEST HIM AT DINNER

You must know, if you would form an estimate of the Countess's heroic
impudence, that a rumour was current in Lymport that the fair and
well-developed Louisa Harrington, in her sixteenth year, did advisedly,
and with the intention of rendering the term indefinite, entrust her
guileless person to Mr. George Uplift's honourable charge. The rumour,
unflavoured by absolute malignity, was such; and it went on to say, that
the sublime Mel, alive to the honour of his family, followed the
fugitives with a pistol, and with a horsewhip, that he might chastise the
offender according to the degree of his offence. It was certain that he
had not used the pistol: it was said that he had used the whip. The
details of the interview between Mel and Mr. George were numerous, but at
the same time various. Some declared that he put a pistol to Mr. George's
ear, and under pressure of that persuader got him into the presence of a
clergyman, when he turned sulky; and when the pistol was again produced,
the ceremony would have been performed, had not the outraged Church cried
out for help. Some vowed that Mr. George had referred all questions
implying a difference between himself and Mel to their mutual fists for
decision. At any rate, Mr. George turned up in Fallow field subsequently;
the fair Louisa, unhurt and with a quiet mind, in Lymport; and this
amount of truth the rumours can be reduced to--that Louisa and Mr. George
had been acquainted. Rumour and gossip know how to build: they always
have some solid foundation, however small. Upwards of twelve years had
run since Louisa went to the wife of the brewer--a period quite long
enough for Mr. George to forget any one in; and she was altogether a
different creature; and, as it was true that Mr. George was a dull one,
she was, after the test she had put him to, justified in hoping that
Mel's progeny might pass unchallenged anywhere out of Lymport. So, with
Mr. George facing her at table, the Countess sat down, determined to eat
and be happy.

A man with the education and tastes of a young country squire is not
likely to know much of the character of women; and of the marvellous
power they have of throwing a veil of oblivion between themselves and
what they don't want to remember, few men know much. Mr. George had
thought, when he saw Mrs. Strike leaning to Evan, and heard she was a
Harrington, that she was rather like the Lymport family; but the
reappearance of Mrs. Strike, the attention of the Duke of Belfield to
her, and the splendid tactics of the Countess, which had extinguished
every thought in the thought of himself, drove Lymport out of his mind.

There were some dinner guests at the table-people of Fallow field,
Beckley, and Bodley. The Countess had the diplomatist on one side, the
Duke on the other. Caroline was under the charge of Sir Franks. The
Countess, almost revelling in her position opposite Mr. George, was
ambitious to lead the conversation, and commenced, smiling at Melville:

'We are to be spared politics to-day? I think politics and cookery do not
assimilate.'

'I'm afraid you won't teach the true Briton to agree with you,' said
Melville, shaking his head over the sums involved by this British
propensity.

'No,' said Seymour. 'Election dinners are a part of the Constitution':
and Andrew laughed: 'They make Radicals pay as well as Tories, so it's
pretty square.'

The topic was taken up, flagged, fell, and was taken up again. And then
Harry Jocelyn said:

'I say, have you worked the flags yet? The great Mel must have his
flags.'

The flags were in the hands of ladies, and ladies would look to the
rosettes, he was told.

Then a lady of the name of Barrington laughed lightly, and said:

'Only, pray, my dear Harry, don't call your uncle the "Great Mel" at the
election.'

'Oh! very well,' quoth Harry: 'why not?'

'You 'll get him laughed at--that 's all.'

'Oh! well, then, I won't,' said Harry, whose wits were attracted by the
Countess's visage.

Mrs. Barrington turned to Seymour, her neighbour, and resumed:

'He really would be laughed at. There was a tailor--he was called the
Great Mel--and he tried to stand for Fallow field once. I believe he had
the support of Squire Uplift--George's uncle--and others. They must have
done it for fun! Of course he did not get so far as the hustings; but I
believe he had flags, and principles, and all sorts of things worked
ready. He certainly canvassed.'

'A tailor--canvassed--for Parliament?' remarked an old Dowager, the
mother of Squire Copping. 'My what are we coming to next?'

'He deserved to get in,' quoth Aunt Bel: 'After having his principles
worked ready, to eject the man was infamous.'

Amazed at the mine she had sprung, the Countess sat through it, lamenting
the misery of owning a notorious father. Happily Evan was absent, on his
peaceful blessed bed!

Bowing over wine with the Duke, she tried another theme, while still,
like a pertinacious cracker, the Great Mel kept banging up and down the
table.

'We are to have a feast in the open air, I hear. What you call pic-nic.'

The Duke believed there was a project of the sort.

'How exquisitely they do those things in Portugal! I suppose there would
be no scandal in my telling something now. At least we are out of
Court-jurisdiction.'

'Scandal of the Court!' exclaimed his Grace, in mock horror.

'The option is yours to listen. The Queen, when young, was sweetly
pretty; a divine complexion; and a habit of smiling on everybody. I
presume that the young Habral, son of the first magistrate of Lisbon, was
also smiled on. Most innocently, I would swear! But it operated on the
wretched youth! He spent all his fortune in the purchase and decoration
of a fairy villa, bordering on the Val das Rosas, where the Court enjoyed
its rustic festivities, and one day a storm! all the ladies hurried their
young mistress to the house where the young Habral had been awaiting her
for ages. None so polished as he! Musicians started up, the floors were
ready, and torches beneath them!--there was a feast of exquisite wines
and viands sparkling. Quite enchantment. The girl-Queen was in ecstasies.
She deigned a dance with the young Habral, and then all sat down to
supper; and in the middle of it came the cry of Fire! The Queen shrieked;
the flames were seen all around; and if the arms of the young Habral were
opened to save her, or perish, could she cast a thought on Royalty, and
refuse? The Queen was saved the villa was burnt; the young Habral was
ruined, but, if I know a Portuguese, he was happy till he died, and well
remunerated! For he had held a Queen to his heart! So that was a
pic-nic!'

The Duke slightly inclined his head.

'Vrai Portughez derrendo,' he said. 'They tell a similar story in Spain,
of one of the Queens--I forget her name. The difference between us and
your Peninsular cavaliers is, that we would do as much for uncrowned
ladies.'

'Ah! your Grace!' The Countess swam in the pleasure of a nobleman's
compliment.

'What's the story?' interposed Aunt Bel.

An outline of it was given her. Thank heaven, the table was now rid of
the Great Mel. For how could he have any, the remotest relation with
Queens and Peninsular pic-nics? You shall hear.

Lady Jocelyn happened to catch a word or two of the story.

'Why,' said she, 'that's English! Franks, you remember the ballet
divertissement they improvised at the Bodley race-ball, when the
magnificent footman fired a curtain and caught up Lady Racial, and
carried her--'

'Heaven knows where!' cried Sir Franks. 'I remember it perfectly. It was
said that the magnificent footman did it on purpose to have that
pleasure.'

'Ay, of course,' Hamilton took him up. 'They talked of prosecuting the
magnificent footman.'

'Ay,' followed Seymour, 'and nobody could tell where the magnificent
footman bolted. He vanished into thin air.'

'Ay, of course,' Melville struck in; 'and the magic enveloped the lady
for some time.'

At this point Mr. George Uplift gave a horse-laugh. He jerked in his seat
excitedly.

'Bodley race-ball!' he cried; and looking at Lady Jocelyn: 'Was your
ladyship there, then? Why--ha! ha! why, you have seen the Great Mel,
then! That tremendous footman was old Mel himself!'

Lady Jocelyn struck both her hands on the table, and rested her large
grey eyes, full of humorous surprise, on Mr. George.

There was a pause, and then the ladies and gentlemen laughed.

'Yes,' Mr. George went on, 'that was old Mel. I'll swear to him.'

'And that's how it began?' murmured Lady Jocelyn.

Mr. George nodded at his plate discreetly.

'Well,' said Lady Jocelyn, leaning back, and lifting her face upward in
the discursive fulness of her fancy, 'I feel I am not robbed. 'Il y a des
miracles, et j'en ai vu'. One's life seems more perfect when one has seen
what nature can do. The fellow was stupendous! I conceive him present.
Who'll fire a house for me? Is it my deficiency of attraction, or a total
dearth of gallant snobs?'

The Countess was drowned. The muscles of her smiles were horribly stiff
and painful. Caroline was getting pale. Could it be accident that thus
resuscitated Mel, their father, and would not let the dead man die? Was
not malice at the bottom of it? The Countess, though she hated Mr. George
infinitely, was clear-headed enough to see that Providence alone was
trying her. No glances were exchanged between him and Laxley, or
Drummond.

Again Mel returned to his peace, and again he had to come forth.

'Who was this singular man you were speaking about just now?' Mrs.
Evremonde asked.

Lady Jocelyn answered her: 'The light of his age. The embodied protest
against our social prejudice. Combine--say, Mirabeau and Alcibiades, and
the result is the Lymport Tailor:--he measures your husband in the
morning: in the evening he makes love to you, through a series of
pantomimic transformations. He was a colossal Adonis, and I'm sorry he's
dead!'

'But did the man get into society?' said Mrs. Evremonde. 'How did he
manage that?'

'Yes, indeed! and what sort of a society!' the dowager Copping
interjected. 'None but bachelor-tables, I can assure you. Oh! I remember
him. They talked of fetching him to Dox Hall. I said, No, thank you, Tom;
this isn't your Vauxhall.'

'A sharp retort,' said Lady Jocelyn, 'a most conclusive rhyme; but you're
mistaken. Many families were glad to see him, I hear. And he only
consented to be treated like a footman when he dressed like one. The
fellow had some capital points. He fought two or three duels, and behaved
like a man. Franks wouldn't have him here, or I would have received him.
I hear that, as a conteur, he was inimitable. In short, he was a robust
Brummel, and the Regent of low life.'

This should have been Mel's final epitaph.

Unhappily, Mrs. Melville would remark, in her mincing manner, that the
idea of the admission of a tailor into society seemed very unnatural; and
Aunt Bel confessed that her experience did not comprehend it.

'As to that,' said Lady Jocelyn, 'phenomena are unnatural. The rules of
society are lightened by the exceptions. What I like in this Mel is, that
though he was a snob, and an impostor, he could still make himself
respected by his betters. He was honest, so far; he acknowledged his
tastes, which were those of Franks, Melville, Seymour, and George--the
tastes of a gentleman. I prefer him infinitely to your cowardly democrat,
who barks for what he can't get, and is generally beastly. In fact, I'm
not sure that I haven't a secret passion for the great tailor.'

'After all, old Mel wasn't so bad,' Mr. George Uplift chimed in.

'Granted a tailor--you didn't see a bit of it at table. I've known him
taken for a lord. And when he once got hold of you, you couldn't give him
up. The squire met him first in the coach, one winter. He took him for a
Russian nobleman--didn't find out what he was for a month or so. Says
Mel, "Yes, I make clothes. You find the notion unpleasant; guess how
disagreeable it is to me." The old squire laughed, and was glad to have
him at Croftlands as often as he chose to come. Old Mel and I used to
spar sometimes; but he's gone, and I should like to shake his fist
again.'

Then Mr. George told the 'Bath' story, and episodes in Mel's career as
Marquis; and while he held the ear of the table, Rose, who had not spoken
a word, and had scarcely eaten a morsel during dinner, studied the
sisters with serious eyes. Only when she turned them from the Countess to
Mrs. Strike, they were softened by a shadowy drooping of the eyelids, as
if for some reason she deeply pitied that lady.

Next to Rose sat Drummond, with a face expressive of cynical enjoyment.
He devoted uncommon attention to the Countess, whom he usually shunned
and overlooked. He invited her to exchange bows over wine, in the fashion
of that day, and the Countess went through the performance with finished
grace and ease. Poor Andrew had all the time been brushing back his hair,
and making strange deprecatory sounds in his throat, like a man who felt
bound to assure everybody at table he was perfectly happy and
comfortable.

'Material enough for a Sartoriad,' said Drummond to Lady Jocelyn.

'Excellent. Pray write it forthwith, Drummond', replied her ladyship; and
as they exchanged talk unintelligible to the Countess, this lady observed
to the Duke:

'It is a relief to have buried that subject.'

The Duke smiled, raising an eyebrow; but the persecuted Countess
perceived she had been much too hasty when Drummond added,

'I'll make a journey to Lymport in a day or two, and master his history.'

'Do,' said her ladyship; and flourishing her hand, '"I sing the Prince of
Snobs!"'

'Oh, if it's about old Mel, I 'll sing you material enough,' said Mr.
George. 'There! you talk of it's being unnatural, his dining out at
respectable tables. Why, I believe--upon my honour, I believe it's a
fact--he's supped and thrown dice with the Regent.'

Lady Jocelyn clapped her hands. 'A noble culmination, Drummond! The man's
an Epic!'

'Well, I think old Mel was equal to it,' Mr. George pursued. 'He gave me
pretty broad hints; and this is how it was, if it really happened, you
know. Old Mel had a friend; some say he was more. Well, that was a
fellow, a great gambler. I dare say you 've heard of him--Burley
Bennet--him that won Ryelands Park of one of the royal dukes--died worth
upwards of L100,000; and old Mel swore he ought to have had it, and would
if he hadn't somehow offended him. He left the money to Admiral
Harrington, and he was a relation of Mel's.'

'But are we then utterly mixed up with tailors?' exclaimed Mrs.
Barrington.

'Well, those are the facts,' said Mr. George.

The wine made the young squire talkative. It is my belief that his
suspicions were not awake at that moment, and that, like any other young
country squire, having got a subject he could talk on, he did not care to
discontinue it. The Countess was past the effort to attempt to stop him.
She had work enough to keep her smile in the right place.

Every dinner may be said to have its special topic, just as every age has
its marked reputation. They are put up twice or thrice, and have to
contend with minor lights, and to swallow them, and then they command the
tongues of men and flow uninterruptedly. So it was with the great Mel
upon this occasion. Curiosity was aroused about him. Aunt Bel agreed with
Lady Jocelyn that she would have liked to know the mighty tailor. Mrs.
Shorne but very imperceptibly protested against the notion, and from one
to another it ran. His Grace of Belfield expressed positive approval of
Mel as one of the old school.

'Si ce n'est pas le gentilhomme, au moins, c'est le gentilhomme manque,'
said Lady Jocelyn. 'He is to be regretted, Duke. You are right. The stuff
was in him, but the Fates were unkind. I stretch out my hand to the
pauvre diable.'

'I think one learns more from the mock magnifico than from anything
else,' observed his Grace.

'When the lion saw the donkey in his own royal skin, said Aunt Bel, 'add
the rhyme at your discretion--he was a wiser lion, that's all.'

'And the ape that strives to copy one--he's an animal of judgement,' said
Lady Jocelyn. 'We will be tolerant to the tailor, and the Countess must
not set us down as a nation of shopkeepers: philosophically tolerant.'

The Countess started, and ran a little broken 'Oh!' affably out of her
throat, dipped her lips to her tablenapkin, and resumed her smile.

'Yes,' pursued her ladyship; 'old Mel stamps the age gone by. The gallant
adventurer tied to his shop! Alternate footman and marquis, out of
intermediate tailor! Isn't there something fine in his buffoon imitation
of the real thing? I feel already that old Mel belongs to me. Where is
the great man buried? Where have they, set the funeral brass that holds
his mighty ashes?'

Lady Jocelyn's humour was fully entered into by the men. The women smiled
vacantly, and had a common thought that it was ill-bred of her to hold
forth in that way at table, and unfeminine of any woman to speak
continuously anywhere.

'Oh, come!' cried Mr. George, who saw his own subject snapped away from
him by sheer cleverness; 'old Mel wasn't only a buffoon, my lady, you
know. Old Mel had his qualities. He was as much a "no-nonsense" fellow,
in his way, as a magistrate, or a minister.'

'Or a king, or a constable,' Aunt Bel helped his illustration.

'Or a prince, a poll-parrot, a Perigord-pie,' added Drummond, whose
gravity did not prevent Mr. George from seeing that he was laughed at.

'Well, then, now, listen to this,' said Mr. George, leaning his two hands
on the table resolutely. Dessert was laid, and, with a full glass beside
him, and a pear to peel, he determined to be heard.

The Countess's eyes went mentally up to the vindictive heavens. She stole
a glance at Caroline, and was alarmed at her excessive pallor. Providence
had rescued Evan from this!

'Now, I know this to be true,' Mr. George began. 'When old Mel was alive,
he and I had plenty of sparring, and that--but he's dead, and I'll do him
justice. I spoke of Burley Bennet just now. Now, my lady, old Burley was,
I think, Mel's half-brother, and he came, I know, somewhere out of Drury
Lane-one of the courts near the theatre--I don't know much of London.
However, old Mel wouldn't have that. Nothing less than being born in St.
James's Square would content old Mel, and he must have a Marquis for his
father. I needn't be more particular. Before ladies--ahem! But Burley was
the shrewd hand of the two. Oh-h-h! such a card! He knew the way to get
into company without false pretences. Well, I told you, he had lots more
than L100,000--some said two--and he gave up Ryelands; never asked for
it, though he won it. Consequence was, he commanded the services of
somebody pretty high. And it was he got Admiral Harrington made a
captain, posted, commodore, admiral, and K.C.B., all in seven years! In
the Army it 'd have been half the time, for the H.R.H. was stronger in
that department. Now, I know old Burley promised Mel to leave him his
money, and called the Admiral an ungrateful dog. He didn't give Mel much
at a time--now and then a twenty-pounder or so--I saw the cheques. And
old Mel expected the money, and looked over his daughters like a
turkey-cock. Nobody good enough for them. Whacking handsome gals--three!
used to be called the Three Graces of Lymport. And one day Burley comes
and visits Mel, and sees the girls. And he puts his finger on the eldest,
I can tell you. She was a spanker! She was the handsomest gal, I think,
ever I saw. For the mother's a fine woman, and what with the mother, and
what with old Mel--'

'We won't enter into the mysteries of origin,' quoth Lady Jocelyn.

'Exactly, my lady. Oh, your servant, of course. Before ladies. A Burley
Bennet, I said. Long and short was, he wanted to take her up to London.
Says old Mel: "London 's a sad place."--"Place to make money," says
Burley. "That's not work for a young gal," says Mel. Long and short was,
Burley wanted to take her, and Mel wouldn't let her go.' Mr. George
lowered his tone, and mumbled, 'Don't know how to explain it very well
before ladies. What Burley wanted was--it wasn't quite honourable, you
know, though there was a good deal of spangles on it, and whether a real
H.R.H., or a Marquis, or a Viscount, I can't say, but--the offer was
tempting to a tradesman. "No," says Mel; like a chap planting his
flagstaff and sticking to it. I believe that to get her to go with him,
Burley offered to make a will on the spot, and to leave every farthing of
his money and property--upon my soul, I believe it to be true--to Mel and
his family, if he'd let the gal go. "No," says Mel. I like the old bird!
And Burley got in a rage, and said he'd leave every farthing to the
sailor. Says Mel: "I'm a poor tradesman; but I have and I always will
have the feelings of a gentleman, and they're more to me than hard cash,
and the honour of my daughter, sir, is dearer to me than my blood. Out of
the house!" cries Mel. And away old Burley went, and left every penny to
the sailor, Admiral Harrington, who never noticed 'em an inch. Now,
there!'

All had listened to Mr. George attentively, and he had slurred the
apologetic passages, and emphasized the propitiatory 'before ladies' in a
way to make himself well understood a generation back.

'Bravo, old Mel!' rang the voice of Lady Jocelyn, and a murmur ensued, in
the midst of which Rose stood up and hurried round the table to Mrs.
Strike, who was seen to rise from her chair; and as she did so, the
ill-arranged locks fell from their unnatural restraint down over her
shoulders; one great curl half forward to the bosom, and one behind her
right ear. Her eyes were wide, her whole face, neck, and fingers, white
as marble. The faintest tremor of a frown on her brows, and her shut
lips, marked the continuation of some internal struggle, as if with her
last conscious force she kept down a flood of tears and a wild outcry
which it was death to hold. Sir Franks felt his arm touched, and looked
up, and caught her, as Rose approached. The Duke and other gentlemen went
to his aid, and as the beautiful woman was borne out white and still as a
corpse, the Countess had this dagger plunged in her heart from the mouth
of Mr. George, addressing Miss Carrington:

'I swear I didn't do it on purpose. She 's Carry Harrington, old Mel's
daughter, as sure as she 's flesh and blood!'




CHAPTER XXIII

TREATS OF A HANDKERCHIEF

Running through Beckley Park, clear from the chalk, a little stream gave
light and freshness to its pasturage. Near where it entered, a
bathing-house of white marble had been built, under which the water
flowed, and the dive could be taken to a paved depth, and you swam out
over a pebbly bottom into sun-light, screened by the thick-weeded banks,
loose-strife and willow-herb, and mint, nodding over you, and in the
later season long-plumed yellow grasses. Here at sunrise the young men
washed their limbs, and here since her return home English Rose loved to
walk by night. She had often spoken of the little happy stream to Evan in
Portugal, and when he came to Beckley Court, she arranged that he should
sleep in a bed-room overlooking it. The view was sweet and pleasant to
him, for all the babbling of the water was of Rose, and winding in and
out, to East, to North, it wound to embowered hopes in the lover's mind,
to tender dreams; and often at dawn, when dressing, his restless heart
embarked on it, and sailed into havens, the phantom joys of which
coloured his life for him all the day. But most he loved to look across
it when the light fell. The palest solitary gleam along its course spoke
to him rich promise. The faint blue beam of a star chained all his
longings, charmed his sorrows to sleep. Rose like a fairy had breathed
her spirit here, and it was a delight to the silly luxurious youth to lie
down, and fix some image of a flower bending to the stream on his brain,
and in the cradle of fancies that grew round it, slide down the tide of
sleep.

From the image of a flower bending to the stream, like his own soul to
the bosom of Rose, Evan built sweet fables. It was she that exalted him,
that led him through glittering chapters of adventure. In his dream of
deeds achieved for her sake, you may be sure the young man behaved
worthily, though he was modest when she praised him, and his limbs
trembled when the land whispered of his great reward to come. The longer
he stayed at Beckley the more he lived in this world within world, and if
now and then the harsh outer life smote him, a look or a word from Rose
encompassed him again, and he became sensible only of a distant pain.

At first his hope sprang wildly to possess her, to believe, that after he
had done deeds that would have sent ordinary men in the condition of
shattered hulks to the hospital, she might be his. Then blow upon blow
was struck, and he prayed to be near her till he died: no more. Then she,
herself, struck him to the ground, and sitting in his chamber, sick and
weary, on the evening of his mishap, Evan's sole desire was to obtain the
handkerchief he had risked his neck for. To have that, and hold it to his
heart, and feel it as a part of her, seemed much.

Over a length of the stream the red round harvest-moon was rising, and
the weakened youth was this evening at the mercy of the charm that
encircled him. The water curved, and dimpled, and flowed flat, and the
whole body of it rushed into the spaces of sad splendour. The clustered
trees stood like temples of darkness; their shadows lengthened
supernaturally; and a pale gloom crept between them on the sward. He had
been thinking for some time that Rose would knock at his door, and give
him her voice, at least; but she did not come; and when he had gazed out
on the stream till his eyes ached, he felt that he must go and walk by
it. Those little flashes of the hurrying tide spoke to him of a secret
rapture and of a joy-seeking impulse; the pouring onward of all the blood
of life to one illumined heart, mournful from excess of love.

Pardon me, I beg. Enamoured young men have these notions. Ordinarily Evan
had sufficient common sense and was as prosaic as mankind could wish him;
but he has had a terrible fall in the morning, and a young woman rages in
his brain. Better, indeed, and 'more manly,' were he to strike and raise
huge bosses on his forehead, groan, and so have done with it. We must let
him go his own way.

At the door he was met by the Countess. She came into the room without a
word or a kiss, and when she did speak, the total absence of any euphuism
gave token of repressed excitement yet more than her angry eyes and eager
step. Evan had grown accustomed to her moods, and if one moment she was
the halcyon, and another the petrel, it no longer disturbed him, seeing
that he was a stranger to the influences by which she was affected. The
Countess rated him severely for not seeking repose and inviting sympathy.
She told him that the Jocelyns had one and all combined in an infamous
plot to destroy the race of Harrington, and that Caroline had already
succumbed to their assaults; that the Jocelyns would repent it, and
sooner than they thought for; and that the only friend the Harringtons
had in the house was Miss Bonner, whom Providence would liberally reward.

Then the Countess changed to a dramatic posture, and whispered aloud,
'Hush: she is here. She is so anxious. Be generous, my brother, and let
her see you!'

'She?' said Evan, faintly. 'May she come, Louisa?' He hoped for Rose.

'I have consented to mask it,' returned the Countess. 'Oh, what do I not
sacrifice for you!'

She turned from him, and to Evan's chagrin introduced Juliana Bonner.

'Five minutes, remember!' said the Countess. 'I must not hear of more.'
And then Evan found himself alone with Miss Bonner, and very uneasy. This
young lady had restless brilliant eyes, and a contraction about the
forehead which gave one the idea of a creature suffering perpetual
headache. She said nothing, and when their eyes met she dropped hers in a
manner that made silence too expressive. Feeling which, Evan began:

'May I tell you that I think it is I who ought to be nursing you, not you
me?'

Miss Bonner replied by lifting her eyes and dropping them as before,
murmuring subsequently, 'Would you do so?'

'Most certainly, if you did me the honour to select me.'

The fingers of the young lady commenced twisting and intertwining on her
lap. Suddenly she laughed:

'It would not do at all. You won't be dismissed from your present service
till you 're unfit for any other.'

'What do you mean?' said Evan, thinking more of the unmusical laugh than
of the words.

He received no explanation, and the irksome silence caused him to look
through the window, as an escape for his mind, at least. The waters
streamed on endlessly into the golden arms awaiting them. The low moon
burnt through the foliage. In the distance, over a reach of the flood,
one tall aspen shook against the lighted sky.

'Are you in pain?' Miss Bonner asked, and broke his reverie.

'No; I am going away, and perhaps I sigh involuntarily.'

'You like these grounds?'

'I have never been so happy in any place.'

'With those cruel young men about you?'

Evan now laughed. 'We don't call young men cruel, Miss Bonner.'

'But were they not? To take advantage of what Rose told them--it was
base!'

She had said more than she intended, possibly, for she coloured under his
inquiring look, and added: 'I wish I could say the same as you of
Beckley. Do you know, I am called Rose's thorn?'

'Not by Miss Jocelyn herself, certainly!'

'How eager you are to defend her. But am I not--tell me--do I not look
like a thorn in company with her?'

'There is but the difference that ill health would make.'

'Ill health? Oh, yes! And Rose is so much better born.'

'To that, I am sure, she does not give a thought.'

'Not Rose? Oh!'

An exclamation, properly lengthened, convinces the feelings more
satisfactorily than much logic. Though Evan claimed only the
hand-kerchief he had won, his heart sank at the sound. Miss Bonner
watched him, and springing forward, said sharply:

'May I tell you something?'

'You may tell me what you please.'

'Then, whether I offend you or not, you had better leave this.'

'I am going,' said Evan. 'I am only waiting to introduce your tutor to
you.'

She kept her eyes on him, and in her voice as well there was a depth, as
she returned:

'Mr. Laxley, Mr. Forth, and Harry, are going to Lymport to-morrow.'

Evan was looking at a figure, whose shadow was thrown towards the house
from the margin of the stream.

He stood up, and taking the hand of Miss Bonner, said:

'I thank you. I may, perhaps, start with them. At any rate, you have done
me a great service, which I shall not forget.'

The figure by the stream he knew to be that of Rose. He released Miss
Bonner's trembling moist hand, and as he continued standing, she moved to
the door, after once following the line of his eyes into the moonlight.

Outside the door a noise was audible. Andrew had come to sit with his
dear boy, and the Countess had met and engaged and driven him to the
other end of the passage, where he hung remonstrating with her.

'Why, Van,' he said, as Evan came up to him, 'I thought you were in a
profound sleep. Louisa said--'

'Silly Andrew!' interposed the Countess, 'do you not observe he is
sleep-walking now?' and she left them with a light laugh to go to
Juliana, whom she found in tears. The Countess was quite aware of the
efficacy of a little bit of burlesque lying to cover her retreat from any
petty exposure.

Evan soon got free from Andrew. He was under the dim stars, walking to
the great fire in the East. The cool air refreshed him. He was simply
going to ask for his own, before he went, and had no cause to fear what
would be thought by any one. A handkerchief! A man might fairly win that,
and carry it out of a very noble family, without having to blush for
himself.

I cannot say whether he inherited his feeling for rank from Mel, his
father, or that the Countess had succeeded in instilling it, but Evan
never took Republican ground in opposition to those who insulted him, and
never lashed his 'manhood' to assert itself, nor compared the fineness of
his instincts with the behaviour of titled gentlemen. Rather he seemed to
admit the distinction between his birth and that of a gentleman,
admitting it to his own soul, as it were, and struggled simply as men
struggle against a destiny. The news Miss Bonner had given him sufficed
to break a spell which could not have endured another week; and Andrew,
besides, had told him of Caroline's illness. He walked to meet Rose,
honestly intending to ask for his own, and wish her good-bye.

Rose saw him approach, and knew him in the distance. She was sitting on a
lower branch of the aspen, that shot out almost from the root, and
stretched over the intervolving rays of light on the tremulous water. She
could not move to meet him. She was not the Rose whom we have hitherto
known. Love may spring in the bosom of a young girl, like Helper in the
evening sky, a grey speck in a field of grey, and not be seen or known,
till surely as the circle advances the faint planet gathers fire, and,
coming nearer earth, dilates, and will and must be seen and known. When
Evan lay like a dead man on the ground, Rose turned upon herself as the
author of his death, and then she felt this presence within her, and her
heart all day had talked to her of it, and was throbbing now, and would
not be quieted. She could only lift her eyes and give him her hand; she
could not speak. She thought him cold, and he was; cold enough to think
that she and her cousin were not unlike in their manner, though not deep
enough to reflect that it was from the same cause.

She was the first to find her wits: but not before she spoke did she
feel, and start to feel, how long had been the silence, and that her hand
was still in his.

'Why did you come out, Evan? It was not right.'

'I came to speak to you. I shall leave early to-morrow, and may not see
you alone.'

'You are going----?'

She checked her voice, and left the thrill of it wavering in him.

'Yes, Rose, I am going; I should have gone before.'

'Evan!' she grasped his hand, and then timidly retained it. 'You have not
forgiven me? I see now. I did not think of any risk to you. I only wanted
you to beat. I wanted you to be first and best. If you knew how I thank
God for saving you! What my punishment would have been!'

Till her eyes were full she kept them on him, too deep in emotion to be
conscious of it.

He could gaze on her tears coldly.

'I should be happy to take the leap any day for the prize you offered. I
have come for that.'

'For what, Evan?' But while she was speaking the colour mounted in her
cheeks, and she went on rapidly:

'Did you think it unkind of me not to come to nurse you. I must tell you,
to defend myself. It was the Countess, Evan. She is offended with
me--very justly, I dare say. She would not let me come. What could I do?
I had no claim to come.'

Rose was not aware of the import of her speech. Evan, though he felt more
in it, and had some secret nerves set tingling and dancing, was not to be
moved from his demand.

'Do you intend to withhold it, Rose?'

'Withhold what, Evan? Anything that you wish for is yours.'

'The handkerchief. Is not that mine?'

Rose faltered a word. Why did he ask for it? Because he asked for nothing
else, and wanted no other thing save that.

Why did she hesitate? Because it was so poor a gift, and so unworthy of
him.

And why did he insist? Because in honour she was bound to surrender it.

And why did she hesitate still? Let her answer.

'Oh, Evan! I would give you anything but that; and if you are going away,
I should beg so much to keep it.'

He must have been in a singular state not to see her heart in the
refusal, as was she not to see his in the request. But Love is blindest
just when the bandage is being removed from his forehead.

'Then you will not give it me, Rose? Do you think I shall go about
boasting "This is Miss Jocelyn's handkerchief, and I, poor as I am, have
won it"?'

The taunt struck aslant in Rose's breast with a peculiar sting. She stood
up.

'I will give it you, Evan.'

Turning from him she drew it forth, and handed it to him hurriedly. It
was warm. It was stained with his blood. He guessed where it had been
nestling, and, now, as if by revelation, he saw that large sole star in
the bosom of his darling, and was blinded by it and lost his senses.

'Rose! beloved!'

Like the flower of his nightly phantasy bending over the stream, he
looked and saw in her sweet face the living wonders that encircled his
image; she murmuring: 'No, you must hate me.'

'I love you, Rose, and dare to say it--and it 's unpardonable. Can you
forgive me?'

She raised her face to him.

'Forgive you for loving me?' she said.

Holy to them grew the stillness: the ripple suffused in golden moonlight:
the dark edges of the leaves against superlative brightness. Not a chirp
was heard, nor anything save the cool and endless carol of the happy
waters, whose voices are the spirits of silence. Nature seemed consenting
that their hands should be joined, their eyes intermingling. And when
Evan, with a lover's craving, wished her lips to say what her eyes said
so well, Rose drew his fingers up, and, with an arch smile and a blush,
kissed them. The simple act set his heart thumping, and from the look of
love, she saw an expression of pain pass through him. Her fealty--her
guileless, fearless truth--which the kissing of his hand brought vividly
before him, conjured its contrast as well in this that was hidden from
her, or but half suspected. Did she know--know and love him still? He
thought it might be: but that fell dead on her asking:

'Shall I speak to Mama to-night?'

A load of lead crushed him.

'Rose!' he said; but could get no farther.

Innocently, or with well-masked design, Rose branched off into little
sweet words about his bruised shoulder, touching it softly, as if she
knew the virtue that was in her touch, and accusing her selfish self as
she caressed it:

'Dearest Evan! you must have been sure I thought no one like you. Why did
you not tell me before? I can hardly believe it now! Do you know,' she
hurried on, 'they think me cold and heartless,--am I? I must be, to have
made you run such risk; but yet I'm sure I could not have survived you.'

Dropping her voice, Rose quoted Ruth. As Evan listened, the words were
like food from heaven poured into his spirit.

'To-morrow,' he kept saying to himself, 'to-morrow I will tell her all.
Let her think well of me a few short hours.'

But the passing minutes locked them closer; each had a new link--in a
word, or a speechless breath, or a touch: and to break the marriage of
their eyes there must be infinite baseness on one side, or on the other
disloyalty to love.

The moon was a silver ball, high up through the aspen-leaves. Evan kissed
the hand of Rose, and led her back to the house. He had appeased his
conscience by restraining his wild desire to kiss her lips.

In the hall they parted. Rose whispered, 'Till death!' giving him her
hands.




CHAPTER XXIV

THE COUNTESS MAKES HERSELF FELT

There is a peculiar reptile whose stroke is said to deprive men of
motion. On the day after the great Mel had stalked the dinner-table of
Beckley Court, several of the guests were sensible of the effect of this
creature's mysterious touch, without knowing what it was that paralyzed
them. Drummond Forth had fully planned to go to Lymport. He had special
reasons for making investigations with regard to the great Mel. Harry,
who was fond of Drummond, offered to accompany him, and Laxley, for the
sake of a diversion, fell into the scheme. Mr. George Uplift was also to
be of the party, and promised them fun. But when the time came to start,
not one could be induced to move: Laxley was pressingly engaged by Rose:
Harry showed the rope the Countess held him by; Mr. George made a
singular face, and seriously advised Drummond to give up the project.

'Don't rub that woman the wrong way,' he said, in a private colloquy they
had. 'By Jingo, she's a Tartar. She was as a gal, and she isn't changed,
Lou Harrington. Fancy now: she knew me, and she faced me out, and made me
think her a stranger! Gad, I'm glad I didn't speak to the others. Lord's
sake, keep it quiet. Don't rouse that woman, now, if you want to keep a
whole skin.'

Drummond laughed at his extreme earnestness in cautioning him, and
appeared to enjoy his dread of the Countess. Mr. George would not tell
how he had been induced to change his mind. He repeated his advice with a
very emphatic shrug of the shoulder.

'You seem afraid of her,' said Drummond.

'I am. I ain't ashamed to confess it. She's a regular viper, my boy!'
said Mr. George. 'She and I once were pretty thick--least said soonest
mended, you know. I offended her. Wasn't quite up to her mark--a tailor's
daughter, you know. Gad, if she didn't set an Irish Dragoon Captain on
me!--I went about in danger of my life. The fellow began to twist his
damned black moustaches the moment he clapped eyes on me--bullied me
till, upon my soul, I was almost ready to fight him! Oh, she was a little
tripping Tartar of a bantam hen then. She's grown since she's been
countessed, and does it peacocky. Now, I give you fair warning, you know.
She's more than any man's match.'

'I dare say I shall think the same when she has beaten me,' quoth cynical
Drummond, and immediately went and gave orders for his horse to be
saddled, thinking that he would tread on the head of the viper.

But shortly before the hour of his departure, Mrs. Evremonde summoned him
to her, and showed him a slip of paper, on which was written, in an
uncouth small hand:

'Madam: a friend warns you that your husband is coming here. Deep
interest in your welfare is the cause of an anonymous communication. The
writer wishes only to warn you in time.'

Mrs. Evremonde told Drummond that she had received it from one of the
servants when leaving the breakfast-room. Beyond the fact that a man on
horseback had handed it to a little boy, who had delivered it over to the
footman, Drummond could learn nothing. Of course, all thought of the
journey to Lymport was abandoned. If but to excogitate a motive for the
origin of the document, Drummond was forced to remain; and now he had it,
and now he lost it again; and as he was wandering about in his maze, the
Countess met him with a 'Good morning, Mr., Forth. Have I impeded your
expedition by taking my friend Mr. Harry to cavalier me to-day?'

Drummond smilingly assured her that she had not in any way disarranged
his projects, and passed with so absorbed a brow that the Countess could
afford to turn her head and inspect him, without fear that he would
surprise her in the act. Knocking the pearly edge of her fan on her
teeth, she eyed him under her joined black lashes, and deliberately read
his thoughts in the mere shape of his back and shoulders. She read him
through and through, and was unconscious of the effective attitude she
stood in for the space of two full minutes, and even then it required one
of our unhappy sex to recall her. This was Harry Jocelyn.

'My friend,' she said to him, with a melancholy smile, 'my one friend
here!'

Harry went through the form of kissing her hand, which he had been
taught, and practised cunningly as the first step of the ladder.

'I say, you looked so handsome, standing as you did just now,' he
remarked; and she could see how far beneath her that effective attitude
had precipitated the youth.

'Ah!' she sighed, walking on, with the step of majesty in exile.

'What the deuce is the matter with everybody to-day?' cried Harry. 'I 'm
hanged if I can make it out. There's the Carrington, as you call her, I
met her with such a pair of eyes, and old George looking as if he'd been
licked, at her heels; and there's Drummond and his lady fair moping about
the lawn, and my mother positively getting excited--there's a miracle!
and Juley 's sharpening her nails for somebody, and if Ferdinand don't
look out, your brother 'll be walking off with Rosey--that 's my
opinion.'

'Indeed,' said the Countess. 'You really think so?'

'Well, they come it pretty strong together.'

'And what constitutes the "come it strong," Mr. Harry?'

'Hold of hands; you know,' the young gentleman indicated.

'Alas, then! must not we be more discreet?'

'Oh! but it's different. With young people one knows what that means.'

'Deus!' exclaimed the Countess, tossing her head weariedly, and Harry
perceived his slip, and down he went again.

What wonder that a youth in such training should consent to fetch and
carry, to listen and relate, to play the spy and know no more of his
office than that it gave him astonishing thrills of satisfaction, and now
and then a secret sweet reward?

The Countess had sealed Miss Carrington's mouth by one of her most
dexterous strokes. On leaving the dinner-table over-night, and seeing
that Caroline's attack would preclude their instant retreat, the gallant
Countess turned at bay. A word aside to Mr. George Uplift, and then the
Countess took a chair by Miss Carrington. She did all the conversation,
and supplied all the smiles to it, and when a lady has to do that she is
justified in striking, and striking hard, for to abandon the pretence of
sweetness is a gross insult from one woman to another.

The Countess then led circuitously, but with all the ease in the world,
to the story of a Portuguese lady, of a marvellous beauty, and who was
deeply enamoured of the Chevalier Miguel de Rasadio, and engaged to be
married to him: but, alas for her! in the insolence of her happiness she
wantonly made an enemy in the person of a most unoffending lady, and she
repented it. While sketching the admirable Chevalier, the Countess drew a
telling portrait of Mr. George Uplift, and gratified her humour and her
wrath at once by strong truth to nature in the description and animated
encomiums on the individual. The Portuguese lady, too, a little resembled
Miss Carrington, in spite of her marvellous beauty. And it was odd that
Miss Carrington should give a sudden start and a horrified glance at the
Countess just when the Countess was pathetically relating the proceeding
taken by the revengeful lady on the beautiful betrothed of the Chevalier
Miguel de Rasadio: which proceeding was nothing other than to bring to
the Chevalier's knowledge that his beauty had a defect concealed by her
apparel, and that the specks in his fruit were not one, or two, but, Oh!
And the dreadful sequel to the story the Countess could not tell:
preferring ingeniously to throw a tragic veil over it. Miss Carrington
went early to bed that night.

The courage that mounteth with occasion was eminently the attribute of
the Countess de Saldar. After that dreadful dinner she (since the
weaknesses of great generals should not be altogether ignored), did pray
for flight and total obscurity, but Caroline could not be left in her
hysteric state, and now that she really perceived that Evan was
progressing and on the point of sealing his chance, the devoted lady
resolved to hold her ground. Besides, there was the pic-nic. The Countess
had one dress she had not yet appeared in, and it was for the picnic she
kept it. That small motives are at the bottom of many illustrious actions
is a modern discovery; but I shall not adopt the modern principle of
magnifying the small motive till it overshadows my noble heroine. I
remember that the small motive is only to be seen by being borne into the
range of my vision by a powerful microscope; and if I do more than
see--if I carry on my reflections by the aid of the glass, I arrive at
conclusions that must be false. Men who dwarf human nature do this. The
gods are juster. The Countess, though she wished to remain for the
pic-nic, and felt warm in anticipation of the homage to her new dress,
was still a gallant general and a devoted sister, and if she said to
herself, 'Come what may, I will stay for that pic-nic, and they shall not
brow-beat me out of it,' it is that trifling pleasures are noisiest about
the heart of human nature: not that they govern us absolutely. There is
mob-rule in minds as in communities, but the Countess had her appetites
in excellent drill. This pic-nic surrendered, represented to her defeat
in all its ignominy. The largest longest-headed of schemes ask
occasionally for something substantial and immediate. So the Countess
stipulated with Providence for the pic-nic. It was a point to be passed:
'Thorough flood, thorough fire.'

In vain poor Andrew Cogglesby, to whom the dinner had been torture, and
who was beginning to see the position they stood in at Beckley, begged to
be allowed to take them away, or to go alone. The Countess laughed him
into submission. As a consequence of her audacious spirits she grew more
charming and more natural, and the humour that she possessed, but which,
like her other faculties, was usually subordinate to her plans, gave
spontaneous bursts throughout the day, and delighted her courtiers. Nor
did the men at all dislike the difference of her manner with them, and
with the ladies. I may observe that a woman who shows a marked depression
in the presence of her own sex will be thought very superior by ours;
that is, supposing she is clever and agreeable. Manhood distinguishes
what flatters it. A lady approaches. 'We must be proper,' says the
Countess, and her hearty laugh dies with suddenness and is succeeded by
the maturest gravity. And the Countess can look a profound merriment with
perfect sedateness when there appears to be an equivoque in company.
Finely secret are her glances, as if under every eye-lash there lurked
the shade of a meaning. What she meant was not so clear. All this was
going on, and Lady Jocelyn was simply amused, and sat as at a play.

'She seems to have stepped out of a book of French memoirs,' said her
ladyship. 'La vie galante et devote--voila la Comtesse.'

In contradistinction to the other ladies, she did not detest the Countess
because she could not like her.

'Where 's the harm in her?' she asked. 'She doesn't damage the men, that
I can see. And a person you can laugh at and with, is inexhaustible.'

'And how long is she to stay here?' Mrs. Shorne inquired. Mrs. Melville
remarking: 'Her visit appears to be inexhaustible.'

'I suppose she'll stay till the Election business is over,' said Lady
Jocelyn.

The Countess had just driven with Melville to Fallow field in Caroline's
black lace shawl.

'Upwards of four weeks longer!' Mrs. Melville interjected.

Lady Jocelyn chuckled.

Miss Carrington was present. She had been formerly sharp in her
condemnation of the Countess--her affectedness, her euphuism, and her
vulgarity. Now she did not say a word, though she might have done it with
impunity.

'I suppose, Emily, you see what Rose is about?' said Mrs. Melville. 'I
should not have thought it adviseable to have that young man here,
myself. I think I let you know that.'

'One young man's as good as another,' responded her ladyship. 'I 've my
doubts of the one that's much better. I fancy Rose is as good a judge by
this time as you or I.'

Mrs. Melville made an effort or two to open Lady Jocelyn's eyes, and then
relapsed into the confident serenity inspired by evil prognostications.

'But there really does seem some infatuation about these people!'
exclaimed Mrs. Shorne, turning to Miss Current. 'Can you understand it?
The Duke, my dear! Things seem to be going on in the house, that
really--and so openly.'

'That's one virtue,' said Miss Current, with her imperturbable metallic
voice, and face like a cold clear northern sky. 'Things done in secret
throw on the outsiders the onus of raising a scandal.'

'You don't believe, then?' suggested Mrs. Shorne.

Miss Current replied: 'I always wait for a thing to happen first.'

'But haven't you seen, my dear?'

'I never see anything, my dear.'

'Then you must be blind, my dear.'

'On the contrary, that 's how I keep my sight, my dear.'

'I don't understand you,' said Mrs. Shorne.

'It's a part of the science of optics, and requires study,' said Miss
Current.

Neither with the worldly nor the unworldly woman could the ladies do
anything. But they were soon to have their triumph.

A delicious morning had followed the lovely night. The stream flowed
under Evan's eyes, like something in a lower sphere, now. His passion
took him up, as if a genie had lifted him into mid-air, and showed him
the world on a palm of a hand; and yet, as he dressed by the window,
little chinks in the garden wall, and nectarines under their shiny
leaves, and the white walks of the garden, were stamped on his hot brain
accurately and lastingly. Ruth upon the lips of Rose: that voice of
living constancy made music to him everywhere. 'Thy God shall be my God.'
He had heard it all through the night. He had not yet broken the tender
charm sufficiently to think that he must tell her the sacrifice she would
have to make. When partly he did, the first excuse he clutched at was,
that he had not even kissed her on the forehead. Surely he had been
splendidly chivalrous? Just as surely he would have brought on himself
the scorn of the chivalrous or of the commonly balanced if he had been
otherwise. The grandeur of this or of any of his proceedings, then, was
forfeited, as it must needs be when we are in the false position: we can
have no glory though martyred. The youth felt it, even to the seeing of
why it was; and he resolved, in justice to the dear girl, that he would
break loose from his fetters, as we call our weakness. Behold, Rose met
him descending the stairs, and, taking his hand, sang, unabashed, by the
tell-tale colour coming over her face, a stave of a little Portuguese air
that they had both been fond of in Portugal; and he, listening to it, and
looking in her eyes, saw that his feelings in--the old time had been
hers. Instantly the old time gave him its breath, the present drew back.

Rose, now that she had given her heart out, had no idea of concealment.
She would have denied nothing to her aunts: she was ready to confide it
to her mother. Was she not proud of the man she loved? When Evan's hand
touched hers she retained it, and smiled up at him frankly, as it were to
make him glad in her gladness. If before others his eyes brought the
blood to her cheeks, she would perhaps drop her eye-lids an instant, and
then glance quickly level again to reassure him. And who would have
thought that this boisterous, boyish creature had such depths of eye!
Cold, did they call her? Let others think her cold. The tender knowledge
of her--the throbbing secret they held in common sang at his heart. Rose
made no confidante, but she attempted no mystery. Evan should have risen
to the height of the noble girl. But the dearer and sweeter her bearing
became, the more conscious he was of the dead weight he was dragging: in
truth her behaviour stamped his false position to hard print the more he
admired her for it, and he had shrinkings from the feminine part it
imposed on him to play.




CHAPTER XXV

IN WHICH THE STREAM FLOWS MUDDY AND CLEAR

An Irish retriever-pup of the Shannon breed, Pat by name, was undergoing
tuition on the sward close by the kennels, Rose's hunting-whip being
passed through his collar to restrain erratic propensities. The
particular point of instruction which now made poor Pat hang out his
tongue, and agitate his crisp brown curls, was the performance of the
'down-charge'; a ceremony demanding implicit obedience from the animal in
the midst of volatile gambadoes, and a simulation of profound repose when
his desire to be up and bounding was mighty. Pat's Irish eyes were
watching Rose, as he lay with his head couched between his forepaws in
the required attitude. He had but half learnt his lesson; and something
in his half-humorous, half-melancholy look talked to Rose more eloquently
than her friend Ferdinand at her elbow. Laxley was her assistant
dog-breaker. Rose would not abandon her friends because she had accepted
a lover. On the contrary, Rose was very kind to Ferdinand, and perhaps
felt bound to be so to-day. To-day, also, her face was lighted; a
readiness to colour, and an expression of deeper knowledge, which she now
had, made the girl dangerous to friends. This was not Rose's fault but
there is no doubt among the faculty that love is a contagious disease,
and we ought not to come within miles of the creatures in whom it lodges.

Pat's tail kept hinting to his mistress that a change would afford him
satisfaction. After a time she withdrew her wistful gaze from him, and
listened entirely to Ferdinand: and it struck her that he spoke
particularly well to-day, though she did not see so much in his eyes as
in Pat's. The subject concerned his departure, and he asked Rose if she
should be sorry. Rose, to make him sure of it, threw a music into her
voice dangerous to friends. For she had given heart and soul to Evan, and
had a sense, therefore, of being irredeemably in debt to her old
associates, and wished to be doubly kind to them.

Pat took advantage of the diversion to stand up quietly and have a shake.
He then began to kiss his mistress's hand, to show that all was right on
both sides; and followed this with a playful pretence at a bite, that
there might be no subsequent misunderstanding, and then a bark and a
whine. As no attention was paid to this amount of plain-speaking, Pat
made a bolt. He got no farther than the length of the whip, and all he
gained was to bring on himself the terrible word of drill once more. But
Pat had tasted liberty. Irish rebellion against constituted authority was
exhibited. Pat would not: his ears tossed over his head, and he jumped to
right and left, and looked the raggedest rapparee that ever his ancestry
trotted after. Rose laughed at his fruitless efforts to get free; but
Ferdinand meditatively appeared to catch a sentiment in them.

'Down-charge, Sir, will you? Ah, Pat! Pat! You'll have to obey me, my
boy. Now, down-charge!'

While Rose addressed the language of reason to Pat, Ferdinand slipped in
a soft word or two. Presently she saw him on one knee.

'Pat won't, and I will,' said he.

'But Pat shall, and you had better not,' said she. 'Besides, my dear
Ferdinand,' she added, laughing, 'you don't know how to do it.'

'Do you want me to prostrate on all fours, Rose?'

'No. I hope not. Do get up, Ferdinand. You'll be seen from the windows.'

Instead of quitting his posture, he caught her hand, and scared her with
a declaration.

'Of all men, you to be on your knees! and to me, Ferdinand!' she cried,
in discomfort.

'Why shouldn't I, Rose?' was this youth's answer.

He had got the idea that foreign cavalier manners would take with her;
but it was not so easy to make his speech correspond with his posture,
and he lost his opportunity, which was pretty. However, he spoke plain
English. The interview ended by Rose releasing Pat from drill, and
running off in a hurry. Where was Evan? She must have his consent to
speak to her mother, and prevent a recurrence of these silly scenes.

Evan was with Caroline, his sister.

It was contrary to the double injunction of the Countess that Caroline
should receive Evan during her absence, or that he should disturb the
dear invalid with a visit. These two were not unlike both in organization
and character, and they had not sat together long before they found each
other out. Now, to further Evan's love-suit, the Countess had induced
Caroline to continue yet awhile in the Purgatory Beckley Court had become
to her; but Evan, in speaking of Rose, expressed a determination to leave
her, and Caroline caught at it.

'Can you?--will you? Oh, dear Van! have you the courage? I--look at
me--you know the home I go to, and--and I think of it here as a place to
be happy in. What have our marriages done for us? Better that we had
married simple stupid men who earn their bread, and would not have been
ashamed of us! And, my dearest, it is not only that. None can tell what
our temptations are. Louisa has strength, but I feel I have none; and
though, dear, for your true interest, I would indeed sacrifice myself--I
would, Van! I would!--it is not good for you to stay,--I know it is not.
For you have Papa's sense of honour--and oh! if you should learn to
despise me, my dear brother!'

She kissed him; her nerves were agitated by strong mental excitement. He
attributed it to her recent attack of illness, but could not help asking,
while he caressed her:

'What's that? Despise you?'

It may have been that Caroline felt then, that to speak of something was
to forfeit something. A light glimmered across the dewy blue of her
beautiful eyes. Desire to breathe it to him, and have his loving aid: the
fear of forfeiting it, evil as it was to her, and at the bottom of all,
that doubt we choose to encourage of the harm in a pleasant sin
unaccomplished; these might be read in the rich dim gleam that swept like
sunlight over sea-water between breaks of clouds.

'Dear Van! do you love her so much?'

Caroline knew too well that she was shutting her own theme with iron
clasps when she once touched on Evan's.

Love her? Love Rose? It became an endless carol with Evan. Caroline
sighed for him from her heart.

'You know--you understand me; don't you?' he said, after a breathless
excursion of his fancy.

'I believe you love her, dear. I think I have never loved any one but my
one brother.'

His love for Rose he could pour out to Caroline; when it came to Rose's
love for him his blood thickened, and his tongue felt guilty. He must
speak to her, he said,--tell her all.

'Yes, tell her all,' echoed Caroline. 'Do, do tell her. Trust a woman
utterly if she loves you, dear. Go to her instantly.'

'Could you bear it?' said Evan. He began to think it was for the sake of
his sisters that he had hesitated.

'Bear it? bear anything rather than perpetual imposture. What have I not
borne? Tell her, and then, if she is cold to you, let us go. Let us go. I
shall be glad to. Ah, Van! I love you so.' Caroline's voice deepened. 'I
love you so, my dear. You won't let your new love drive me out? Shall you
always love me?'

Of that she might be sure, whatever happened.

'Should you love me, Van, if evil befel me?'

Thrice as well, he swore to her.

'But if I--if I, Van Oh! my life is intolerable! Supposing I should ever
disgrace you in any way, and not turn out all you fancied me. I am very
weak and unhappy.'

Evan kissed her confidently, with a warm smile. He said a few words of
the great faith he had in her: words that were bitter comfort to
Caroline. This brother, who might save her, to him she dared not speak.
Did she wish to be saved? She only knew that to wound Evan's sense of
honour and the high and chivalrous veneration for her sex and pride in
himself and those of his blood, would be wicked and unpardonable, and
that no earthly pleasure could drown it. Thinking this, with her hands
joined in pale dejection, Caroline sat silent, and Evan left her to lay
bare his heart to Rose. On his way to find Rose he was stopped by the
announcement of the arrival of Mr. Raikes, who thrust a bundle of notes
into his hand, and after speaking loudly of 'his curricle,' retired on
important business, as he said, with a mysterious air. 'I 'm beaten in
many things, but not in the article Luck,' he remarked; 'you will hear of
me, though hardly as a tutor in this academy.'

Scanning the bundle of notes, without a reflection beyond the thought
that money was in his hand; and wondering at the apparition of the
curricle, Evan was joined by Harry Jocelyn, and Harry linked his arm in
Evan's and plunged with extraordinary spontaneity and candour into the
state of his money affairs. What the deuce he was to do for money he did
not know. From the impressive manner in which he put it, it appeared to
be one of Nature's great problems that the whole human race were bound to
set their heads together to solve. A hundred pounds--Harry wanted no
more, and he could not get it. His uncles? they were as poor as rats; and
all the spare money they could club was going for Mel's Election
expenses. A hundred and fifty was what Harry really wanted; but he could
do with a hundred. Ferdinand, who had plenty, would not even lend him
fifty. Ferdinand had dared to hint at a debt already unsettled, and he
called himself a gentleman!

'You wouldn't speak of money-matters now, would you, Harrington?'

'I dislike the subject, I confess,' said Evan.

'And so do I' Harry jumped at the perfect similarity between them. 'You
can't think how it bothers one to have to talk about it. You and I are
tremendously alike.'

Evan might naturally suppose that a subject Harry detested, he would not
continue, but for a whole hour Harry turned it over and over with grim
glances at Jewry.

'You see,' he wound up, 'I'm in a fix. I want to help that poor girl, and
one or two things--'

'It 's for that you want it?' cried Evan, brightening to him. 'Accept it
from me.'

It is a thing familiar to the experience of money-borrowers, that your
'last chance' is the man who is to accommodate you; but we are always
astonished, nevertheless; and Harry was, when notes to the amount of the
largest sum named by him were placed in his hand by one whom he looked
upon as the last to lend.

'What a trump you are, Harrington!' was all he could say; and then he was
for hurrying Evan into the house, to find pen and paper, and write down a
memorandum of the loan: but Evan insisted upon sparing him the trouble,
though Harry, with the admirable scruples of an inveterate borrower,
begged hard to be allowed to bind himself legally to repay the money.

''Pon my soul, Harrington, you make me remember I once doubted whether
you were one of us--rather your own fault, you know!' said Harry. 'Bury
that, won't you?'

''Till your doubts recur,' Evan observed; and Harry burst out, 'Gad, if
you weren't such a melancholy beggar, you'd be the jolliest fellow I
know! There, go after Rosey. Dashed if I don't think you're ahead of
Ferdinand, long chalks. Your style does for girls. I like women.'

With a chuckle and a wink, Harry swung-off. Evan had now to reflect that
he had just thrown away part of the price of his bondage to Tailordom;
the mention of Rose filled his mind. Where was she? Both were seeking one
another. Rose was in the cypress walk. He saw the star-like figure up the
length of it, between the swelling tall dark pillars, and was hurrying to
her, resolute not to let one minute of deception blacken further the soul
that loved so true a soul. She saw him, and stood smiling, when the
Countess issued, shadow-like, from a side path, and declared that she
must claim her brother for a few instants. Would her sweet Rose pardon
her? Rose bowed coolly. The hearts of the lovers were chilled, not that
they perceived any malice in the Countess, but their keen instincts felt
an evil fate.

The Countess had but to tell Evan that she had met the insolvent in
apples, and recognized him under his change of fortune, and had no doubt
that at least he would amuse the company. Then she asked her brother the
superfluous question, whether he loved her, which Evan answered
satisfactorily enough, as he thought; but practical ladies require
proofs.

'Quick,' said Evan, seeing Rose vanish, 'what do you want? I'll do
anything.'

'Anything? Ah, but this will be disagreeable to you.'

'Name it at once. I promise beforehand.'

The Countess wanted Evan to ask Andrew to be the very best brother-in-law
in the world, and win, unknown to himself, her cheerful thanks, by
lending Evan to lend to her the sum of one hundred pounds, as she was in
absolute distress for money.

'Really, Louisa, this is a thing you might ask him yourself,' Evan
remonstrated.

'It would not become me to do so, dear,' said the Countess, demurely; and
inasmuch as she had already drawn on Andrew in her own person pretty
largely, her views of propriety were correct in this instance.

Evan had to consent before he could be released. He ran to the end of the
walk through the portal, into the park. Rose was not to be seen. She had
gone in to dress for dinner. The opportunity might recur, but would his
courage come with it? His courage had sunk on a sudden; or it may have
been that it was worst for this young man to ask for a loan of money,
than to tell his beloved that he was basely born, vile, and unworthy, and
had snared her into loving him; for when he and Andrew were together,
money was not alluded to. Andrew, however, betrayed remarkable
discomposure. He said plainly that he wanted to leave Beckley Court, and
wondered why he didn't leave, and whether he was on his head or his feet,
and how he had been such a fool as to come.

'Do you mean that for me?' said sensitive Evan.

'Oh, you! You're a young buck,' returned Andrew, evasively. 'We
common-place business men-we 're out of our element; and there's poor
Carry can't sit down to their dinners without an upset. I thank God I'm a
Radical, Van; one man's the same as another to me, how he's born, as long
as he's honest and agreeable. But a chap like that George Uplift to look
down on anybody! 'Gad, I've a good mind to bring in a Bill for the
Abolition of the Squirearchy.'

Ultimately, Andrew somehow contrived to stick a hint or two about the
terrible dinner in Evan's quivering flesh. He did it as delicately as
possible, half begging pardon, and perspiring profusely. Evan grasped his
hand, and thanked him. Caroline's illness was now explained to him.

'I'll take Caroline with me to-morrow,' he said. 'Louisa wishes to
stay--there 's a pic-nic. Will you look to her, and bring her with you?'

'My dear Van,' replied Andrew, 'stop with Louisa? Now, in confidence,
it's as bad as a couple of wives; no disrespect to my excellent good
Harry at home; but Louisa--I don't know how it is--but Louisa, you lose
your head, you're in a whirl, you're an automaton, a teetotum! I haven't
a notion of what I've been doing or saying since I came here. My belief
is, I 've been lying right and left. I shall be found out to a certainty:
Oh! if she's made her mind up for the pic-nic, somebody must stop. I can
only tell you, Van, it's one perpetual vapour-bath to me. There 'll be
room for two in my trousers when I get back. I shall have to get the
tailor to take them in a full half.'

Here occurred an opening for one of those acrid pleasantries which
console us when there is horrid warfare within.

'You must give me the work,' said Evan, partly pleased with his hated
self for being able to jest on the subject, as a piece of preliminary
self-conquest.

'Aha!' went Andrew, as if the joke were too good to be dwelt on; 'Hem';
and by way of diverting from it cleverly and naturally, he remarked that
the weather was fine. This made Evan allude to his letter written from
Lymport, upon which Andrew said: 'tush! pish! humbug! nonsense! won't
hear a word. Don't know anything about it. Van, you're going to be a
brewer. I say you are. You're afraid you can't? I tell you, sir, I've got
a bet on it. You're not going to make me lose, are you--eh? I have, and a
stiff bet, too. You must and shall, so there's an end. Only we can't make
arrangements just yet, my boy. Old Tom--very good old fellow--but, you
know--must get old Tom out of the way, first. Now go and dress for
dinner. And Lord preserve us from the Great Mel to-day!' Andrew mumbled
as he turned away.

Evan could not reach his chamber without being waylaid by the Countess.
Had he remembered the sister who sacrificed so much for him? 'There,
there!' cried Evan, and her hand closed on the delicious golden whispers
of bank-notes. And, 'Oh, generous Andrew! dear good Evan!' were the
exclamations of the gratified lady.

There remained nearly another hundred. Evan laid out the notes, and eyed
them while dressing. They seemed to say to him, 'We have you now.' He was
clutched by a beneficent or a most malignant magician. The former seemed
due to him, considering the cloud on his fortunes. This enigma might
mean, that by submitting to a temporary humiliation, for a trial of
him--in fact, by his acknowledgement of the fact, loathed though it
was,--he won a secret overlooker's esteem, gained a powerful ally. Here
was the proof, he held the proof. He had read Arabian Tales and could
believe in marvels; especially could he believe in the friendliness of a
magical thing that astounded without hurting him.

He, sat down in his room at night and wrote a fairly manful letter to
Rose; and it is to be said of the wretch he then saw himself, that he
pardoned her for turning from so vile a pretender. He heard a step in the
passage. It was Polly Wheedle. Polly had put her young mistress to bed,
and was retiring to her own slumbers. He made her take the letter and
promise to deliver it immediately. Would not to-morrow morning do, she
asked, as Miss Rose was very sleepy. He seemed to hesitate--he was
picturing how Rose looked when very sleepy. Why should he surrender this
darling? And subtler question--why should he make her unhappy? Why
disturb her at all in her sweet sleep?

'Well,' said Evan. 'To-morrow will do.--No, take it to-night, for God's
sake!' he cried, as one who bursts the spell of an opiate. 'Go at once.'
The temptation had almost overcome him.

Polly thought his proceedings queer. And what could the letter contain? A
declaration, of course. She walked slowly along the passage, meditating
on love, and remotely on its slave, Mr. Nicholas Frim. Nicholas had never
written her a letter; but she was determined that he should, some day.
She wondered what love-letters were like? Like valentines without the
Cupids. Practical valentines, one might say. Not vapoury and wild, but
hot and to the point. Delightful things! No harm in peeping at a
love-letter, if you do it with the eye of a friend.

Polly spelt just a word when a door opened at her elbow. She dropped her
candle and curtsied to the Countess's voice. The Countess desired her to
enter, and all in a tremble Polly crept in. Her air of guilt made the
Countess thrill. She had merely called her in to extract daily gossip.
The corner of the letter sticking up under Polly's neck attracted her
strangely, and beginning with the familiar, 'Well, child,' she talked of
things interesting to Polly, and then exhibited the pic-nic dress. It was
a lovely half-mourning; airy sorrows, gauzy griefs, you might imagine to
constitute the wearer. White delicately striped, exquisitely trimmed, and
of a stuff to make the feminine mouth water!

Could Polly refuse to try it on, when the flattering proposal met her
ears? Blushing, shame-faced, adoring the lady who made her look adorable,
Polly tried it on, and the Countess complimented her, and made a doll of
her, and turned her this way and that way, and intoxicated her.

'A rich husband, Polly, child! and you are a lady ready made.'

Infamous poison to poor Polly; but as the thunder destroys small insects,
exalted schemers are to be excused for riding down their few thousands.
Moreover, the Countess really looked upon domestics as being only
half-souls.

Dressed in her own attire again, Polly felt in her pockets, and at her
bosom, and sang out: 'Oh, my--Oh, where! Oh!'

The letter was lost. The letter could not be found. The Countess grew
extremely fatigued, and had to dismiss Polly, in spite of her eager
petitions to be allowed to search under the carpets and inside the bed.

In the morning came Evan's great trial. There stood Rose. She turned to
him, and her eyes were happy and unclouded.

'You are not changed?' he said.

'Changed? what could change me?'

The God of true hearts bless her! He could hardly believe it.

'You are the Rose I knew yesterday?'

'Yes, Evan. But you--you look as if you had not slept.'

'You will not leave me this morning, before I go, Rose? Oh, my darling!
this that you do for me is the work of an angel-nothing less! I have been
a coward. And my beloved! to feel vile is agony to me--it makes me feel
unworthy of the hand I press. Now all is clear between us. I go: I am
forgiven.'

Rose repeated his last words, and then added hurriedly:

'All is clear between us? Shall I speak to Mama this morning? Dear Evan!
it will be right that I should.'

For the moment he could not understand why, but supposing a scrupulous
honesty in her, said: 'Yes, tell Lady Jocelyn all.'

'And then, Evan, you will never need to go.'

They separated. The deep-toned sentence sang in Evan's heart. Rose and
her mother were of one stamp. And Rose might speak for her mother. To
take the hands of such a pair and be lifted out of the slough, he thought
no shame: and all through the hours of the morning the image of two
angels stooping to touch a leper, pressed on his brain like a reality,
and went divinely through his blood.

Toward mid-day Rose beckoned to him, and led him out across the lawn into
the park, and along the borders of the stream.

'Evan,' she said, 'shall I really speak to Mama?'

'You have not yet?' he answered.

'No. I have been with Juliana and with Drummond. Look at this, Evan.' She
showed a small black speck in the palm of her hand, which turned out, on
your viewing it closely, to be a brand of the letter L. 'Mama did that
when I was a little girl, because I told lies. I never could distinguish
between truth and falsehood; and Mama set that mark on me, and I have
never told a lie since. She forgives anything but that. She will be our
friend; she will never forsake us, Evan, if we do not deceive her. Oh,
Evan! it never is of any use. But deceive her, and she cannot forgive
you. It is not in her nature.'

Evan paused before he replied: 'You have only to tell her what I have
told you. You know everything.'

Rose gave him a flying look of pain: 'Everything, Evan? What do I know?'

'Ah, Rose! do you compel me to repeat it?'

Bewildered, Rose thought: 'Have I slept and forgotten it?'

He saw the persistent grieved interrogation of her eyebrows.

'Well!' she sighed resignedly: 'I am yours; you know that, Evan.'

But he was a lover, and quarrelled with her sigh.

'It may well make you sad now, Rose.'

'Sad? no, that does not make me sad. No; but my hands are tied. I cannot
defend you or justify myself; and induce Mama to stand by us. Oh, Evan!
you love me! why can you not open your heart to me entirely, and trust
me?'

'More?' cried Evan: 'Can I trust you more?' He spoke of the letter: Rose
caught his hand.

'I never had it, Evan. You wrote it last night? and all was written in
it? I never saw it--but I know all.'

Their eyes fronted. The gates of Rose's were wide open, and he saw no
hurtful beasts or lurking snakes in the happy garden within, but Love,
like a fixed star.

'Then you know why I must leave, Rose.'

'Leave? Leave me? On the contrary, you must stay by me, and support me.
Why, Evan, we have to fight a battle.'

Much as he worshipped her, this intrepid directness of soul startled
him-almost humbled him. And her eyes shone with a firm cheerful light, as
she exclaimed: 'It makes me so happy to think you were the first to
mention this. You meant to be, and that's the same thing. I heard it this
morning: you wrote it last night. It's you I love, Evan. Your birth, and
what you were obliged to do--that's nothing. Of course I'm sorry for it,
dear. But I'm more sorry for the pain I must have sometimes put you to.
It happened through my mother's father being a merchant; and that side of
the family the men and women are quite sordid and unendurable; and that's
how it came that I spoke of disliking tradesmen. I little thought I
should ever love one sprung from that class.'

She turned to him tenderly.

'And in spite of what my birth is, you love me, Rose?'

'There's no spite in it, Evan. I do.'

Hard for him, while his heart was melting to caress her, the thought that
he had snared this bird of heaven in a net! Rose gave him no time for
reflection, or the moony imagining of their raptures lovers love to dwell
upon.

'You gave the letter to Polly, of course?'

'Yes.'

'Oh, naughty Polly! I must punish you,' Rose apostrophized her. 'You
might have divided us for ever. Well, we shall have to fight a battle,
you understand that. Will you stand by me?'

Would he not risk his soul for her?

'Very well, Evan. Then--but don't be sensitive. Oh, how sensitive you
are! I see it all now. This is what we shall have to do. We shall have to
speak to Mama to-day--this morning. Drummond has told me he is going to
speak to her, and we must be first. That 's decided. I begged a couple of
hours. You must not be offended with Drummond. He does it out of pure
affection for us, and I can see he's right--or, at least, not quite
wrong. He ought, I think, to know that he cannot change me. Very well, we
shall win Mama by what we do. My mother has ten times my wits, and yet I
manage her like a feather. I have only to be honest and straightforward.
Then Mama will gain over Papa. Papa, of course, won't like it. He's quiet
and easy, but he likes blood, but he also likes peace better; and I think
he loves Rosey--as well as somebody--almost? Look, dear, there is our
seat where we--where you would rob me of my handkerchief. I can't talk
any more.'

Rose had suddenly fallen from her prattle, soft and short-breathed.

'Then, dear,' she went on, 'we shall have to fight the family. Aunt
Shorne will be terrible. My poor uncles! I pity them. But they will come
round. They always have thought what I did was right, and why should they
change their minds now? I shall tell them that at their time of life a
change of any kind is very unwise and bad for them. Then there is
Grandmama Bonner. She can hurt us really, if she pleases. Oh, my dear
Evan! if you had only been a curate! Why isn't your name Parsley? Then my
Grandmama the Countess of Elburne. Well, we have a Countess on our side,
haven't we? And that reminds me, Evan, if we're to be happy and succeed,
you must promise one thing: you will not tell the Countess, your sister.
Don't confide this to her. Will you promise?'

Evan assured her he was not in the habit of pouring secrets into any
bosom, the Countess's as little as another's.

'Very well, then, Evan, it's unpleasant while it lasts, but we shall gain
the day. Uncle Melville will give you an appointment, and then?'

'Yes, Rose,' he said, 'I will do this, though I don't think you can know
what I shall have to endure-not in confessing what I am, but in feeling
that I have brought you to my level.'

'Does it not raise me?' she cried.

He shook his head.

'But in reality, Evan--apart from mere appearances--in reality it does!
it does!'

'Men will not think so, Rose, nor can I. Oh, my Rose! how different you
make me. Up to this hour I have been so weak! torn two ways! You give me
double strength.'

Then these lovers talked of distant days--compared their feelings on this
and that occasion with mutual wonder and delight. Then the old hours
lived anew. And--did you really think that, Evan? And--Oh, Rose! was that
your dream? And the meaning of that by-gone look: was it what they
fancied? And such and such a tone of voice; would it bear the wished
interpretation? Thus does Love avenge himself on the unsatisfactory Past
and call out its essence.

Could Evan do less than adore her? She knew all, and she loved him! Since
he was too shy to allude more than once to his letter, it was natural
that he should not ask her how she came to know, and how much the 'all'
that she knew comprised. In his letter he had told all; the condition of
his parents, and his own. Honestly, now, what with his dazzled state of
mind, his deep inward happiness, and love's endless delusions, he
abstained from touching the subject further. Honestly, therefore, as far
as a lover can be honest.

So they toyed, and then Rose, setting her fingers loose, whispered: 'Are
you ready?' And Evan nodded; and Rose, to make him think light of the
matter in hand, laughed: 'Pluck not quite up yet?'

'Quite, my Rose!' said Evan, and they walked to the house, not quite
knowing what they were going to do.

On the steps they met Drummond with Mrs. Evremonde. Little imagining how
heart and heart the two had grown, and that Evan would understand him,
Drummond called to Rose playfully: 'Time's up.'

'Is it?' Rose answered, and to Mrs. Evremonde

'Give Drummond a walk. Poor Drummond is going silly.'

Evan looked into his eyes calmly as he passed.

'Where are you going, Rose?' said Mrs. Evremonde.

'Going to give my maid Polly a whipping for losing a letter she ought to
have delivered to me last night,' said Rose, in a loud voice, looking at
Drummond. 'And then going to Mama. Pleasure first--duty after. Isn't that
the proverb, Drummond?'

She kissed her fingers rather scornfully to her old friend.




CHAPTER XXVI

MRS. MEL MAKES A BED FOR HERSELF AND FAMILY

The last person thought of by her children at this period was Mrs. Mel:
nor had she been thinking much of them till a letter from Mr. Goren
arrived one day, which caused her to pass them seriously in review.
Always an early bird, and with maxims of her own on the subject of rising
and getting the worm, she was standing in a small perch in the corner of
the shop, dictating accounts to Mrs. Fiske, who was copying hurriedly,
that she might earn sweet intervals for gossip, when Dandy limped up and
delivered the letter. Mrs. Fiske worked hard while her aunt was occupied
in reading it, for a great deal of fresh talk follows the advent of the
post, and may be reckoned on. Without looking up, however, she could tell
presently that the letter had been read through. Such being the case, and
no conversation coming of it, her curiosity was violent. Her aunt's face,
too, was an index of something extraordinary. That inflexible woman,
instead of alluding to the letter in any way, folded it up, and renewed
her dictation. It became a contest between them which should show her
human nature first. Mrs. Mel had to repress what she knew; Mrs. Fiske to
control the passion for intelligence. The close neighbourhood of one
anxious to receive, and one capable of giving, waxed too much for both.

'I think, Anne, you are stupid this morning,' said Mrs. Mel.

'Well, I am, aunt,' said Mrs. Fiske, pretending not to see which was the
first to unbend, 'I don't know what it is. The figures seem all dazzled
like. I shall really be glad when Evan comes to take his proper place.'

'Ah!' went Mrs. Mel, and Mrs. Fiske heard her muttering. Then she cried
out: 'Are Harriet and Caroline as great liars as Louisa?'

Mrs. Fiske grimaced. 'That would be difficult, would it not, aunt?'

'And I have been telling everybody that my son is in town learning his
business, when he's idling at a country house, and trying to play his
father over again! Upon my word, what with liars and fools, if you go to
sleep a minute you have a month's work on your back.'

'What is it, aunt?' Mrs. Fiske feebly inquired.

'A gentleman, I suppose! He wouldn't take an order if it was offered.
Upon my word, when tailors think of winning heiresses it's time we went
back to Adam and Eve.'

'Do you mean Evan, aunt?' interposed Mrs. Fiske, who probably did not see
the turns in her aunt's mind.

'There--read for yourself,' said Mrs. Mel, and left her with the letter.

Mrs. Fiske read that Mr. Goren had been astonished at Evan's
non-appearance, and at his total silence; which he did not consider
altogether gentlemanly behaviour, and certainly not such as his father
would have practised. Mr. Goren regretted his absence the more as he
would have found him useful in a remarkable invention he was about to
patent, being a peculiar red cross upon shirts--a fortune to the
patentee; but as Mr. Goren had no natural heirs of his body, he did not
care for that. What affected him painfully was the news of Evan's doings
at a noble house, Beckley Court, to wit, where, according to the report
of a rich young gentleman friend, Mr. Raikes (for whose custom Mr. Goren
was bound to thank Evan), the youth who should have been learning the
science of Tailoring, had actually passed himself off as a lord, or the
son of one, or something of the kind, and had got engaged to a wealthy
heiress, and would, no doubt, marry her if not found out. Where the
chances of detection were so numerous, Mr. Goren saw much to condemn in
the idea of such a marriage. But 'like father like son,' said Mr. Goren.
He thanked the Lord that an honest tradesman was not looked down upon in
this country; and, in fact, gave Mrs. Mel a few quiet digs to waken her
remorse in having missed the man that he was.

When Mrs. Fiske met her aunt again she returned her the letter, and
simply remarked: 'Louisa.'

Mrs. Mel nodded. She understood the implication.

The General who had schemed so successfully to gain Evan time at Beckley
Court in his own despite and against a hundred obstructions, had now
another enemy in the field, and one who, if she could not undo her work,
could punish her. By the afternoon coach, Mrs. Mel, accompanied by Dandy
her squire, was journeying to Fallow field, bent upon things. The
faithful squire was kept by her side rather as a security for others than
for, his particular services. Dandy's arms were crossed, and his
countenance was gloomy. He had been promised a holiday that afternoon to
give his mistress, Sally, Kilne's cook, an airing, and Dandy knew in his
soul that Sally, when she once made up her mind to an excursion, would
go, and would not go alone, and that her very force of will endangered
her constancy. He had begged humbly to be allowed to stay, but Mrs. Mel
could not trust him. She ought to have told him so, perhaps. Explanations
were not approved of by this well-intended despot, and however beneficial
her resolves might turn out for all parties, it was natural that in the
interim the children of her rule should revolt, and Dandy, picturing his
Sally flaunting on the arm of some accursed low marine, haply, kicked
against Mrs. Mel's sovereignty, though all that he did was to shoot out
his fist from time to time, and grunt through his set teeth: 'Iron!' to
express the character of her awful rule.

Mrs. Mel alighted at the Dolphin, the landlady of which was a Mrs.
Hawkshaw, a rival of Mrs. Sockley of the Green Dragon. She was welcomed
by Mrs. Hawkshaw with considerable respect. The great Mel had sometimes
slept at the Dolphin.

'Ah, that black!' she sighed, indicating Mrs. Mel's dress and the story
it told.

'I can't give you his room, my dear Mrs. Harrington, wishing I could! I'm
sorry to say it's occupied, for all I ought to be glad, I dare say, for
he's an old gentleman who does you a good turn, if you study him. But
there! I'd rather have had poor dear Mr. Harrington in my best bed than
old or young--Princes or nobodies, I would--he was that grand and
pleasant.'

Mrs. Mel had her tea in Mrs. Hawkshaw's parlour, and was entertained
about her husband up to the hour of supper, when a short step and a
querulous voice were heard in the passage, and an old gentleman appeared
before them.

'Who's to carry up my trunk, ma'am? No man here?'

Mrs. Hawkshaw bustled out and tried to lay her hand on a man. Failing to
find the growth spontaneous, she returned and begged the old gentleman to
wait a few moments and the trunk would be sent up.

'Parcel o' women!' was his reply. 'Regularly bedevilled. Gets worse and
worse. I 'll carry it up myself.'

With a wheezy effort he persuaded the trunk to stand on one end, and then
looked at it. The exertion made him hot, which may account for the rage
he burst into when Mrs. Hawkshaw began flutteringly to apologize.

'You're sure, ma'am, sure--what are you sure of? I'll tell you what I am
sure of--eh? This keeping clear of men's a damned pretence. You don't
impose upon me. Don't believe in your pothouse nunneries--not a bit. Just
like you! when you are virtuous it's deuced inconvenient. Let one of the
maids try? No. Don't believe in 'em.'

Having thus relieved his spleen the old gentleman addressed himself to
further efforts and waxed hotter. He managed to tilt the trunk over, and
thus gained a length, and by this method of progression arrived at the
foot of the stairs, where he halted, and wiped his face, blowing lustily.

Mrs. Mel had been watching him with calm scorn all the while. She saw him
attempt most ridiculously to impel the trunk upwards by a similar
process, and thought it time to interfere.

'Don't you see you must either take it on your shoulders, or have a
help?'

The old gentleman sprang up from his peculiarly tight posture to blaze
round at her. He had the words well-peppered on his mouth, but somehow he
stopped, and was subsequently content to growl: 'Where 's the help in a
parcel of petticoats?'

Mrs. Mel did not consider it necessary to give him an answer. She went up
two or three steps, and took hold of one handle of the trunk, saying:
'There; I think it can be managed this way,' and she pointed for him to
seize the other end with his hand.

He was now in that unpleasant state of prickly heat when testy old
gentlemen could commit slaughter with ecstasy. Had it been the maid
holding a candle who had dared to advise, he would have overturned her
undoubtedly, and established a fresh instance of the impertinence, the
uselessness and weakness of women. Mrs. Mel topped him by half a head,
and in addition stood three steps above him; towering like a giantess.
The extreme gravity of her large face dispersed all idea of an assault.
The old gentleman showed signs of being horribly injured: nevertheless,
he put his hand to the trunk; it was lifted, and the procession ascended
the stairs in silence.

The landlady waited for Mrs. Mel to return, and then said:

'Really, Mrs. Harrington, you are clever. That lifting that trunk's as
good as a lock and bolt on him. You've as good as made him a Dolphin--him
that was one o' the oldest Green Dragons in Fallifield. My thanks to you
most sincere.'

Mrs. Mel sent out to hear where Dandy had got to after which, she said:
'Who is the man?'

'I told you, Mrs. Harrington--the oldest Green Dragon. His name, you
mean? Do you know, if I was to breathe it out, I believe he'd jump out of
the window. He 'd be off, that you might swear to. Oh, such a whimsical!
not ill-meaning--quite the contrary. Study his whims, and you'll never
want. There's Mrs. Sockley--she 's took ill. He won't go there--that 's
how I've caught him, my dear--but he pays her medicine, and she looks to
him the same. He hate a sick house: but he pity a sick woman. Now, if I
can only please him, I can always look on him as half a Dolphin, to say
the least; and perhaps to-morrow I'll tell you who he is, and what, but
not to-night; for there's his supper to get over, and that, they say, can
be as bad as the busting of one of his own vats. Awful!'

'What does he eat?' said Mrs. Mel.

'A pair o' chops. That seem simple, now, don't it? And yet they chops
make my heart go pitty-pat.'

'The commonest things are the worst done,' said Mrs. Mel.

'It ain't that; but they must be done his particular way, do you see,
Mrs. Harrington. Laid close on the fire, he say, so as to keep in the
juice. But he ups and bounces in a minute at a speck o' black. So, one
thing or the other, there you are: no blacks, no juices, I say.'

'Toast the chops,' said Mrs. Mel.

The landlady of the Dolphin accepted this new idea with much
enlightenment, but ruefully declared that she was afraid to go against
his precise instructions. Mrs. Mel then folded her hands, and sat in
quiet reserve. She was one of those numerous women who always know
themselves to be right. She was also one of those very few whom
Providence favours by confounding dissentients. She was positive the
chops would be ill-cooked: but what could she do? She was not in command
here; so she waited serenely for the certain disasters to enthrone her.
Not that the matter of the chops occupied her mind particularly: nor
could she dream that the pair in question were destined to form a part of
her history, and divert the channel of her fortunes. Her thoughts were
about her own immediate work; and when the landlady rushed in with the
chops under a cover, and said: 'Look at 'em, dear Mrs. Harrington!' she
had forgotten that she was again to be proved right by the turn of
events.

'Oh, the chops!' she responded. 'Send them while they are hot.'

'Send 'em! Why you don't think I'd have risked their cooling? I have sent
'em; and what do he do but send 'em travelling back, and here they be;
and what objections his is I might study till I was blind, and I
shouldn't see 'em.'

'No; I suppose not,' said Mrs. Mel. 'He won't eat 'em?'

'Won't eat anything: but his bed-room candle immediately. And whether his
sheets are aired. And Mary says he sniffed at the chops; and that gal
really did expect he 'd fling them at her. I told you what he was. Oh,
dear!'

The bell was heard ringing in the midst of the landlady's lamentations.

'Go to him yourself,' said Mrs. Mel. 'No Christian man should go to sleep
without his supper.'

'Ah! but he ain't a common Christian,' returned Mrs. Hawkshaw.

The old gentleman was in a hurry to know when his bed-room candle was
coming up, or whether they intended to give him one at all that night; if
not, let them say so, as he liked plain-speaking. The moment Mrs.
Hawkshaw touched upon the chops, he stopped her mouth.

'Go about your business, ma'am. You can't cook 'em. I never expected you
could: I was a fool to try you. It requires at least ten years'
instruction before a man can get a woman to cook his chop as he likes
it.'

'But what was your complaint, sir?' said Mrs. Hawkshaw, imploringly.

'That's right!' and he rubbed his hands, and brightened his eyes
savagely. 'That's the way. Opportunity for gossip! Thing's well
done--down it goes: you know that. You can't have a word over it--eh?
Thing's done fit to toss on a dungheap, aha! Then there's a cackle! My
belief is, you do it on purpose. Can't be such rank idiots. You do it on
purpose. All done for gossip!'

'Oh, sir, no!' The landlady half curtsied.

'Oh, ma'am, yes!' The old gentleman bobbed his head.

'No, indeed, sir!' The landlady shook hers.

'Damn it, ma'am, I swear you do.'

Symptoms of wrath here accompanied the declaration; and, with a sigh and
a very bitter feeling, Mrs. Hawkshaw allowed him to have the last word.
Apparently this--which I must beg to call the lady's morsel--comforted
his irascible system somewhat; for he remained in a state of composure
eight minutes by the clock. And mark how little things hang together.
Another word from the landlady, precipitating a retort from him, and a
gesture or muttering from her; and from him a snapping outburst, and from
her a sign that she held out still; in fact, had she chosen to battle for
that last word, as in other cases she might have done, then would he have
exploded, gone to bed in the dark, and insisted upon sleeping: the
consequence of which would have been to change this history. Now while
Mrs. Hawkshaw was upstairs, Mrs. Mel called the servant, who took her to
the kitchen, where she saw a prime loin of mutton; off which she cut two
chops with a cunning hand: and these she toasted at a gradual distance,
putting a plate beneath them, and a tin behind, and hanging the chops so
that they would turn without having to be pierced. The bell rang twice
before she could say the chops were ready. The first time, the maid had
to tell the old gentleman she was taking up his water. Her next excuse
was, that she had dropped her candle. The chops ready--who was to take
them?

'Really, Mrs. Harrington, you are so clever, you ought, if I might be so
bold as say so; you ought to end it yourself,' said the landlady. 'I
can't ask him to eat them: he was all but on the busting point when I
left him.'

'And that there candle did for him quite,' said Mary, the maid.

'I'm afraid it's chops cooked for nothing,' added the landlady.

Mrs. Mel saw them endangered. The maid held back: the landlady feared.

'We can but try,' she said.

'Oh! I wish, mum, you'd face him, 'stead o' me,' said Mary; 'I do dread
that old bear's den.'

'Here, I will go,' said Mrs. Mel. 'Has he got his ale? Better draw it
fresh, if he drinks any.'

And upstairs she marched, the landlady remaining below to listen for the
commencement of the disturbance. An utterance of something certainly
followed Mrs. Mel's entrance into the old bear's den. Then silence. Then
what might have been question and answer. Then--was Mrs. Mel assaulted?
and which was knocked down? It really was a chair being moved to the
table. The door opened.

'Yes, ma'am; do what you like,' the landlady heard. Mrs. Mel descended,
saying: 'Send him up some fresh ale.'

'And you have made him sit down obedient to those chops?' cried the
landlady. 'Well might poor dear Mr. Harrington--pleasant man as he
was!--say, as he used to say, "There's lovely women in the world, Mrs.
Hawkshaw," he'd say, "and there's Duchesses," he'd say, "and there's they
that can sing, and can dance, and some," he says, "that can cook." But
he'd look sly as he'd stoop his head and shake it. "Roll 'em into one,"
he says, "and not any of your grand ladies can match my wife at home."

And, indeed, Mrs. Harrington, he told me he thought so many a time in the
great company he frequented.'

Perfect peace reigning above, Mrs. Hawkshaw and Mrs. Mel sat down to
supper below; and Mrs. Hawkshaw talked much of the great one gone. His
relict did not care to converse about the dead, save in their practical
aspect as ghosts; but she listened, and that passed the time. By-and-by,
the old gentleman rang, and sent a civil message to know if the landlady
had ship's rum in the house.

'Dear! here's another trouble,' cried the poor woman. 'No--none!'

'Say, yes,' said Mrs. Mel, and called Dandy, and charged him to run down
the street to the square, and ask for the house of Mr. Coxwell, the
maltster, and beg of him, in her name, a bottle of his ship's rum.

'And don't you tumble down and break the bottle, Dandy. Accidents with
spirit-bottles are not excused.'

Dandy went on the errand, after an energetic grunt.

In due time he returned with the bottle, whole and sound, and Mr.
Coxwell's compliments. Mrs. Mel examined the cork to see that no process
of suction had been attempted, and then said:

'Carry it up to him, Dandy. Let him see there's a man in the house
besides himself.'

'Why, my dear,' the landlady turned to her, 'it seems natural to you to
be mistress where you go. I don't at all mind, for ain't it my profit?
But you do take us off our legs.'

Then the landlady, warmed by gratitude, told her that the old gentleman
was the great London brewer, who brewed there with his brother, and
brewed for himself five miles out of Fallow field, half of which and a
good part of the neighbourhood he owned, and his name was Mr. Tom
Cogglesby.

'Oh!' said Mrs. Mel. 'And his brother is Mr. Andrew.'

'That 's it,' said the landlady. 'And because he took it into his head to
go and to choose for himself, and be married, no getting his brother, Mr.
Tom, to speak to him. Why not, indeed? If there's to be no marrying, the
sooner we lay down and give up, the better, I think. But that 's his way.
He do hate us women, Mrs. Harrington. I have heard he was crossed. Some
say it was the lady of Beckley Court, who was a Beauty, when he was only
a poor cobbler's son.'

Mrs. Mel breathed nothing of her relationship to Mr. Tom, but continued
from time to time to express solicitude about Dandy. They heard the door
open, and old Tom laughing in a capital good temper, and then Dandy came
down, evidently full of ship's rum.

'He's pumped me!' said Dandy, nodding heavily at his mistress.

Mrs. Mel took him up to his bed-room, and locked the door. On her way
back she passed old Tom's chamber, and his chuckles were audible to her.

'They finished the rum,' said Mrs. Hawkshaw.

'I shall rate him for that to-morrow,' said Mrs. Mel. 'Giving that poor
beast liquor!'

'Rate Mr. Tom! Oh! Mrs. Harrington! Why, he'll snap your head off for a
word.'

Mrs. Mel replied that her head would require a great deal of snapping to
come off.

During this conversation they had both heard a singular intermittent
noise above. Mrs. Hawkshaw was the first to ask:

'What can it be? More trouble with him? He's in his bed-room now.'

'Mad with drink, like Dandy, perhaps,' said Mrs. Mel.

'Hark!' cried the landlady. 'Oh!'

It seemed that Old Tom was bouncing about in an extraordinary manner. Now
came a pause, as if he had sworn to take his rest: now the room shook and
the windows rattled.

'One 'd think, really, his bed was a frying-pan, and him a live fish in
it,' said the landlady. 'Oh--there, again! My goodness! have he got a
flea?'

The thought was alarming. Mrs. Mel joined in:

'Or a ------'

'Don't! don't, my dear!' she was cut short. 'Oh! one o' them little
things 'd be ruin to me. To think o' that! Hark at him! It must be. And
what's to do? I 've sent the maids to bed. We haven't a man. If I was to
go and knock at his door, and ask?'

'Better try and get him to be quiet somehow.'

'Ah! I dare say I shall make him fire out fifty times worse.'

Mrs. Hawkshaw stipulated that Mrs. Mel should stand by her, and the two
women went up-stairs and stood at Old Tom's door. There they could hear
him fuming and muttering imprecations, and anon there was an interval of
silence, and then the room was shaken, and the cursings recommenced.

'It must be a fight he 's having with a flea,' said the landlady. 'Oh!
pray heaven, it is a flea. For a flea, my dear-gentlemen may bring that
theirselves; but a b-----, that's a stationary, and born of a bed. Don't
you hear? The other thing 'd give him a minute's rest; but a flea's
hop-hop-off and on. And he sound like an old gentleman worried by a flea.
What are you doing?'

Mrs. Mel had knocked at the door. The landlady waited breathlessly for
the result. It appeared to have quieted Old Tom.

'What's the matter?' said Mrs. Mel, severely.

The landlady implored her to speak him fair, and reflect on the desperate
things he might attempt.

'What's the matter? Can anything be done for you?'

Mr. Tom Cogglesby's reply comprised an insinuation so infamous regarding
women when they have a solitary man in their power, that it cannot be
placed on record.

'Is anything the matter with your bed?'

'Anything? Yes; anything is the matter, ma'am. Hope twenty live geese
inside it's enough-eh? Bed, do you call it? It's the rack! It's
damnation! Bed? Ha!'

After delivering this, he was heard stamping up and down the room.

'My very best bed!' whispered the landlady. 'Would it please you, sir, to
change--I can give you another?'

'I'm not a man of experiments, ma'am-'specially in strange houses.'

'So very, very sorry!'

'What the deuce!' Old Tom came close to the door. 'You whimpering! You
put a man in a beast of a bed--you drive him half mad--and then begin to
blubber! Go away.'

'I am so sorry, sir!'

'If you don't go away, ma'am, I shall think your intentions are
improper.'

'Oh, my goodness!' cried poor Mrs. Hawkshaw. 'What can one do with him?'
Mrs. Mel put Mrs. Hawkshaw behind her.

'Are you dressed?' she called out.

In this way Mrs. Mel tackled Old Tom. He was told that should he consent
to cover himself decently, she would come into his room and make his bed
comfortable. And in a voice that dispersed armies of innuendoes, she bade
him take his choice, either to rest quiet or do her bidding. Had Old Tom
found his master at last, and in one of the hated sex? Breathlessly Mrs.
Hawkshaw waited his answer, and she was an astonished woman when it came.

'Very well, ma'am. Wait a couple of minutes. Do as you like.'

On their admission to the interior of the chamber, Old Tom was exhibited
in his daily garb, sufficiently subdued to be civil and explain the cause
of his discomfort. Lumps in his bed: he was bruised by them. He supposed
he couldn't ask women to judge for themselves--they'd be shrieking--but
he could assure them he was blue all down his back. Mrs. Mel and Mrs.
Hawkshaw turned the bed about, and punched it, and rolled it.

'Ha!' went Old Tom, 'what's the good of that? That's just how I found it.
Moment I got into bed geese began to put up their backs.'

Mrs. Mel seldom indulged in a joke, and then only when it had a
proverbial cast. On the present occasion, the truth struck her forcibly,
and she said:

'One fool makes many, and so, no doubt, does one goose.'

Accompanied by a smile the words would have seemed impudent; but spoken
as a plain fact, and with a grave face, it set Old Tom blinking like a
small boy ten minutes after the whip.

'Now,' she pursued, speaking to him as to an old child, 'look here. This
is how you manage. Knead down in the middle of the bed. Then jump into
the hollow. Lie there, and you needn't wake till morning.'

Old Tom came to the side of the bed. He had prepared himself for a
wretched night, an uproar, and eternal complaints against the house, its
inhabitants, and its foundations; but a woman stood there who as much as
told him that digging his fist into the flock and jumping into the
hole--into that hole under his, eyes--was all that was wanted! that he
had been making a noise for nothing, and because he had not the wit to
hit on a simple contrivance! Then, too, his jest about the geese--this
woman had put a stop to that! He inspected the hollow cynically. A man
might instruct him on a point or two: Old Tom was not going to admit that
a woman could.

'Oh, very well; thank you, ma'am; that's your idea. I'll try it. Good
night.'

'Good night,' returned Mrs. Mel. 'Don't forget to jump into the middle.'

'Head foremost, ma'am?'

'As you weigh,' said Mrs. Mel, and Old Tom trumped his lips, silenced if
not beaten. Beaten, one might almost say, for nothing more was heard of
him that night.

He presented himself to Mrs. Mel after breakfast next morning.

'Slept well, ma'am.'

'Oh! then you did as I directed you,' said Mrs. Mel.

'Those chops, too, very good. I got through 'em.'

'Eating, like scratching, only wants a beginning,' said Mrs. Mel.

'Ha! you've got your word, then, as well as everybody else. Where's your
Dandy this morning, ma'am?'

'Locked up. You ought to be ashamed to give that poor beast liquor. He
won't get fresh air to-day.'

'Ha! May I ask you where you're going to-day, ma'am?'

'I am going to Beckley.'

'So am I, ma'am. What d' ye say, if we join company. Care for
insinuations?'

'I want a conveyance of some sort,' returned Mrs. Mel.

'Object to a donkey, ma'am?'

'Not if he's strong and will go.'

'Good,' said Old Tom; and while he spoke a donkey-cart stopped in front
of the Dolphin, and a well-dressed man touched his hat.

'Get out of that damned bad habit, will you?' growled Old Tom. What do
you mean by wearing out the brim o' your hat in that way? Help this woman
in.'

Mrs. Mel helped herself to a part of the seat.

'We are too much for the donkey,' she said.

'Ha, that's right. What I have, ma'am, is good. I can't pretend to
horses, but my donkey's the best. Are you going to cry about him?'

'No. When he's tired I shall either walk or harness you,' said Mrs. Mel.

This was spoken half-way down the High Street of Fallow field. Old Tom
looked full in her face, and bawled out:

'Deuce take it. Are you a woman?'

'I have borne three girls and one boy,' said Mrs. Mel.

'What sort of a husband?'

'He is dead.'

'Ha! that's an opening, but 'tain't an answer. I'm off to Beckley on a
marriage business. I 'm the son of a cobbler, so I go in a donkey-cart.
No damned pretences for me. I'm going to marry off a young tailor to a
gal he's been playing the lord to. If she cares for him she'll take him:
if not, they're all the luckier, both of 'em.'

'What's the tailor's name?' said Mrs. Mel.

'You are a woman,' returned Old Tom. 'Now, come, ma'am, don't you feel
ashamed of being in a donkeycart?'

'I 'm ashamed of men, sometimes,' said Mrs. Mel; 'never of animals.'

''Shamed o' me, perhaps.'

'I don't know you.'

'Ha! well! I'm a man with no pretences. Do you like 'em? How have you
brought up your three girls and one boy? No pretences--eh?'

Mrs. Mel did not answer, and Old Tom jogged the reins and chuckled, and
asked his donkey if he wanted to be a racer.

'Should you take me for a gentleman, ma'am?'

'I dare say you are, sir, at heart. Not from your manner of speech.'

'I mean appearances, ma'am.'

'I judge by the disposition.'

'You do, ma'am? Then, deuce take it, if you are a woman, you 're -----'
Old Tom had no time to conclude.

A great noise of wheels, and a horn blown, caused them both to turn their
heads, and they beheld a curricle descending upon them vehemently, and a
fashionably attired young gentleman straining with all his might at the
reins. The next instant they were rolling on the bank. About twenty yards
ahead the curricle was halted and turned about to see the extent of the
mischief done.

'Pardon, a thousand times, my worthy couple,' cried the sonorous Mr.
Raikes. 'What we have seen we swear not to divulge. Franco and Fred--your
pledge!'

'We swear!' exclaimed this couple.

But suddenly the cheeks of Mr. John Raikes flushed. He alighted from the
box, and rushing up to Old Tom, was shouting, 'My bene--'

'Do you want my toe on your plate?' Old Tom stopped him with.

The mysterious words completely changed the aspect of Mr. John Raikes. He
bowed obsequiously and made his friend Franco step down and assist in the
task of reestablishing the donkey, who fortunately had received no
damage.




CHAPTER XXVII

EXHIBITS ROSE'S GENERALSHIP; EVAN'S PERFORMANCE ON THE SECOND FIDDLE; AND
THE WRETCHEDNESS OF THE COUNTESS

We left Rose and Evan on their way to Lady Jocelyn. At the library-door
Rose turned to him, and with her chin archly lifted sideways, said:

'I know what you feel; you feel foolish.'

Now the sense of honour, and of the necessity of acting the part it
imposes on him, may be very strong in a young man; but certainly, as a
rule, the sense of ridicule is more poignant, and Evan was suffering
horrid pangs. We none of us like to play second fiddle. To play second
fiddle to a young woman is an abomination to us all. But to have to
perform upon that instrument to the darling of our hearts--would we not
rather die? nay, almost rather end the duet precipitately and with
violence. Evan, when he passed Drummond into the house, and quietly
returned his gaze, endured the first shock of this strange feeling. There
could be no doubt that he was playing second fiddle to Rose. And what was
he about to do? Oh, horror! to stand like a criminal, and say, or worse,
have said for him, things to tip the ears with fire! To tell the young
lady's mother that he had won her daughter's love, and meant--what did he
mean? He knew not. Alas! he was second fiddle; he could only mean what
she meant. Evan loved Rose deeply and completely, but noble manhood was
strong in him. You may sneer at us, if you please, ladies. We have been
educated in a theory, that when you lead off with the bow, the order of
Nature is reversed, and it is no wonder therefore, that, having stript us
of one attribute, our fine feathers moult, and the majestic cock-like
march which distinguishes us degenerates. You unsex us, if I may dare to
say so. Ceasing to be men, what are we? If we are to please you rightly,
always allow us to play First.

Poor Evan did feel foolish. Whether Rose saw it in his walk, or had a
loving feminine intuition of it, and was aware of the golden rule I have
just laid down, we need not inquire. She hit the fact, and he could only
stammer, and bid her open the door.

'No,' she said, after a slight hesitation, 'it will be better that I
should speak to Mama alone, I see. Walk out on the lawn, dear, and wait
for me. And if you meet Drummond, don't be angry with him. Drummond is
very fond of me, and of course I shall teach him to be fond of you. He
only thinks . . . what is not true, because he does not know you. I do
thoroughly, and there, you see, I give you my hand.'

Evan drew the dear hand humbly to his lips. Rose then nodded meaningly,
and let her eyes dwell on him, and went in to her mother to open the
battle.

Could it be that a flame had sprung up in those grey eyes latterly? Once
they were like morning before sunrise. How soft and' warm and tenderly
transparent they could now be! Assuredly she loved him. And he, beloved
by the noblest girl ever fashioned, why should he hang his head, and
shrink at the thought of human faces, like a wretch doomed to the
pillory? He visioned her last glance, and lightning emotions of pride and
happiness flashed through his veins. The generous, brave heart! Yes, with
her hand in his, he could stand at bay--meet any fate. Evan accepted Rose
because he believed in her love, and judged it by the strength of his
own; her sacrifice of her position he accepted, because in his soul he
knew he should have done no less. He mounted to the level of her
nobleness, and losing nothing of the beauty of what she did, it was not
so strange to him.

Still there was the baleful reflection that he was second fiddle to his
beloved. No harmony came of it in his mind. How could he take an
initiative? He walked forth on the lawn, where a group had gathered under
the shade of a maple, consisting of Drummond Forth, Mrs. Evremonde, Mrs.
Shorne, Mr. George Uplift, Seymour Jocelyn, and Ferdinand Laxley. A
little apart Juliana Bonner was walking with Miss Carrington. Juliana,
when she saw him, left her companion, and passing him swiftly, said,
'Follow me presently into the conservatory.'

Evan strolled near the group, and bowed to Mrs. Shorne, whom he had not
seen that morning.

The lady's acknowledgement of his salute was constrained, and but a shade
on the side of recognition. They were silent till he was out of earshot.
He noticed that his second approach produced the same effect. In the
conservatory Juliana was awaiting him.

'It is not to give you roses I called you here, Mr. Harrington,' she
said.

'Not if I beg one?' he responded.

'Ah! but you do not want them from . . . It depends on the person.'

'Pluck this,' said Evan, pointing to a white rose.

She put her fingers to the stem.

What folly!' she cried, and turned from it.

'Are you afraid that I shall compromise you?' asked Evan.

'You care for me too little for that.'

'My dear Miss Bonner!'

'How long did you know Rose before you called her by her Christian name?'

Evan really could not remember, and was beginning to wonder what he had
been called there for. The little lady had feverish eyes and fingers, and
seemed to be burning to speak, but afraid.

'I thought you had gone,' she dropped her voice, 'without wishing me
good-bye.'

'I certainly should not do that, Miss Bonner.'

'Formal!' she exclaimed, half to herself. 'Miss Bonner thanks you. Do you
think I wish you to stay? No friend of yours would wish it. You do not
know the selfishness--brutal!--of these people of birth, as they call
it.'

'I have met with nothing but kindness here,' said Evan.

'Then go while you can feel that,' she answered; 'for it cannot last
another hour. Here is the rose.' She broke it from the stem and handed it
to him. 'You may wear that, and they are not so likely to call you an
adventurer, and names of that sort. I am hardly considered a lady by
them.'

An adventurer! The full meaning of the phrase struck Evan's senses when
he was alone. Miss Bonner knew something of his condition, evidently.
Perhaps it was generally known, and perhaps it was thought that he had
come to win Rose for his worldly advantage! The idea was overwhelmingly
new to him. Up started self-love in arms. He would renounce her.

It is no insignificant contest when love has to crush self-love utterly.
At moments it can be done. Love has divine moments. There are times also
when Love draws part of his being from self-love, and can find no support
without it.

But how could he renounce her, when she came forth to him,--smiling,
speaking freshly and lightly, and with the colour on her cheeks which
showed that she had done her part? How could he retract a step?

'I have told Mama, Evan. That's over. She heard it first from me.'

'And she?'

'Dear Evan, if you are going to be sensitive, I'll run away. You that
fear no danger, and are the bravest man I ever knew! I think you are
really trembling. She will speak to Papa, and then--and then, I suppose,
they will both ask you whether you intend to give me up, or no. I'm
afraid you'll do the former.'

'Your mother--Lady Jocelyn listened to you, Rose? You told her all?'

'Every bit.'

'And what does she think of me?'

'Thinks you very handsome and astonishing, and me very idiotic and
natural, and that there is a great deal of bother in the world, and that
my noble relatives will lay the blame of it on her. No, dear, not all
that; but she talked very sensibly to me, and kindly. You know she is
called a philosopher: nobody knows how deep-hearted she is, though. My
mother is true as steel. I can't separate the kindness from the sense, or
I would tell you all she said. When I say kindness, I don't mean any "Oh,
my child," and tears, and kisses, and maundering, you know. You mustn't
mind her thinking me a little fool. You want to know what she thinks of
you. She said nothing to hurt you, Evan, and we have gained ground so
far, and now we'll go and face our enemies. Uncle Mel expects to hear
about your appointment, in a day or two, and----'

'Oh, Rose!' Evan burst out.

'What is it?'

'Why must I owe everything to you?'

'Why, dear? Why, because, if you do, it's very much better than your
owing it to anybody else. Proud again?'

Not proud: only second fiddle.

'You know, dear Evan, when two people love, there is no such thing as
owing between them.'

'Rose, I have been thinking. It is not too late. I love you, God knows! I
did in Portugal: I do now--more and more. But Oh, my bright angel!' he
ended the sentence in his breast.

'Well? but--what?'

Evan sounded down the meaning of his 'but.' Stripped of the usual
heroics, it was, 'what will be thought of me?' not a small matter to any
of us. He caught a distant glimpse of the little bit of bare selfishness,
and shrank from it.

'Too late,' cried Rose. 'The battle has commenced now, and, Mr.
Harrington, I will lean on your arm, and be led to my dear friends
yonder. Do they think that I am going to put on a mask to please them?
Not for anybody! What they are to know they may as well know at once.'

She looked in Evan's face.

'Do you hesitate?'

He felt the contrast between his own and hers; between the niggard spirit
of the beggarly receiver, and the high bloom of the exalted giver.
Nevertheless, he loved her too well not to share much of her nature, and
wedding it suddenly, he said:

'Rose; tell me, now. If you were to see the place where I was born, could
you love me still?'

'Yes, Evan.'

'If you were to hear me spoken of with contempt--'

'Who dares?' cried Rose. 'Never to me!'

'Contempt of what I spring from, Rose. Names used . . . Names are used
. . .'

'Tush!--names!' said Rose, reddening. 'How cowardly that is! Have you
finished? Oh, faint heart! I suppose I'm not a fair lady, or you wouldn't
have won me. Now, come. Remember, Evan, I conceal nothing; and if
anything makes you wretched here, do think how I love you.'

In his own firm belief he had said everything to arrest her in her
course, and been silenced by transcendent logic. She thought the same.

Rose made up to the conclave under the maple.

The voices hushed as they approached.

'Capital weather,' said Rose. 'Does Harry come back from London
to-morrow--does anybody know?'

'Not aware,' Laxley was heard to reply.

'I want to speak a word to you, Rose,' said Mrs. Shorne.

'With the greatest pleasure, my dear aunt': and Rose walked after her.

'My dear Rose,' Mrs. Shorne commenced, 'your conduct requires that I
should really talk to you most seriously. You are probably not aware of
what you are doing: Nobody likes ease and natural familiarity more than I
do. I am persuaded it is nothing but your innocence. You are young to the
world's ways, and perhaps a little too headstrong, and vain.'

'Conceited and wilful,' added Rose.

'If you like the words better. But I must say--I do not wish to trouble
your father--you know he cannot bear worry--but I must say, that if you
do not listen to me, he must be spoken to.'

'Why not Mama?'

'I should naturally select my brother first. No doubt you understand me.'

'Any distant allusion to Mr. Harrington?'

'Pertness will not avail you, Rose.'

'So you want me to do secretly what I am doing openly?'

'You must and shall remember you are a Jocelyn, Rose.'

'Only half, my dear aunt!'

'And by birth a lady, Rose.'

'And I ought to look under my eyes, and blush, and shrink, whenever I
come near a gentleman, aunt!'

'Ah! my dear. No doubt you will do what is most telling. Since you have
spoken of this Mr. Harrington, I must inform you that I have it on
certain authority from two or three sources, that he is the son of a
small shopkeeper at Lymport.'

Mrs. Shorne watched the effect she had produced.

'Indeed, aunt?' cried Rose. 'And do you know this to be true?'

'So when you talk of gentlemen, Rose, please be careful whom you
include.'

'I mustn't include poor Mr. Harrington? Then my Grandpapa Bonner is out
of the list, and such numbers of good worthy men?'

Mrs. Shorne understood the hit at the defunct manufacturer. She said:
'You must most distinctly give me your promise, while this young
adventurer remains here--I think it will not be long--not to be
compromising yourself further, as you now do. Or--indeed I must--I shall
let your parents perceive that such conduct is ruin to a young girl in
your position, and certainly you will be sent to Elburne House for the
winter.'

Rose lifted her hands, crying: 'Ye Gods!--as Harry says. But I'm very
much obliged to you, my dear aunt. Concerning Mr. Harrington, wonderfully
obliged. Son of a small-----! Is it a t-t-tailor, aunt?'

'It is--I have heard.'

'And that is much worse. Cloth is viler than cotton! And don't they call
these creatures sn-snips? Some word of that sort?'

'It makes little difference what they are called.'

'Well, aunt, I sincerely thank you. As this subject seems to interest
you, go and see Mama, now. She can tell you a great deal more: and, if
you want her authority, come back to me.'

Rose then left her aunt in a state of extreme indignation. It was a
clever move to send Mrs. Shorne to Lady Jocelyn. They were antagonistic,
and, rational as Lady Jocelyn was, and with her passions under control,
she was unlikely to side with Mrs. Shorne.

Now Rose had fought against herself, and had, as she thought, conquered.
In Portugal Evan's half insinuations had given her small suspicions,
which the scene on board the Jocasta had half confirmed: and since she
came to communicate with her own mind, she bore the attack of all that
rose against him, bit by bit. She had not been too blind to see the
unpleasantness of the fresh facts revealed to her. They did not change
her; on the contrary, drew her to him faster--and she thought she had
completely conquered whatever could rise against him. But when Juliana
Bonner told her that day that Evan was not only the son of the thing, but
the thing himself, and that his name could be seen any day in Lymport,
and that he had come from the shop to Beckley, poor Rosey had a sick
feeling that almost sank her. For a moment she looked back wildly to the
doors of retreat. Her eyes had to feed on Evan, she had to taste some of
the luxury of love, before she could gain composure, and then her
arrogance towards those she called her enemies did not quite return.

'In that letter you told me all--all--all, Evan?'

'Yes, all-religiously.'

'Oh, why did I miss it!'

'Would it give you pleasure?'

She feared to speak, being tender as a mother to his sensitiveness. The
expressive action of her eyebrows sufficed. She could not bear
concealment, or doubt, or a shadow of dishonesty; and he, gaining force
of soul to join with hers, took her hands and related the contents of the
letter fully. She was pale when he had finished. It was some time before
she was able to get free from the trammels of prejudice, but when she
did, she did without reserve, saying: 'Evan, there is no man who would
have done so much.' These little exaltations and generosities bind lovers
tightly. He accepted the credit she gave him, and at that we need not
wonder. It helped him further to accept herself, otherwise could he--his
name known to be on a shop-front--have aspired to her still? But, as an
unexampled man, princely in soul, as he felt, why, he might kneel to Rose
Jocelyn. So they listened to one another, and blinded the world by
putting bandages on their eyes, after the fashion of little boys and
girls.

Meantime the fair being who had brought these two from the ends of the
social scale into this happy tangle, the beneficent Countess, was
wretched. When you are in the enemy's country you are dependent on the
activity and zeal of your spies and scouts, and the best of these--Polly
Wheedle, to wit--had proved defective, recalcitrant even. And because a
letter had been lost in her room! as the Countess exclaimed to herself,
though Polly gave her no reasons. The Countess had, therefore, to rely
chiefly upon personal observation, upon her intuitions, upon her
sensations in the proximity of the people to whom she was opposed; and
from these she gathered that she was, to use the word which seemed
fitting to her, betrayed. Still to be sweet, still to smile and to
amuse,--still to give her zealous attention to the business of the
diplomatist's Election, still to go through her church-services devoutly,
required heroism; she was equal to it, for she had remarkable courage;
but it was hard to feel no longer at one with Providence. Had not
Providence suggested Sir Abraham to her? killed him off at the right
moment in aid of her? And now Providence had turned, and the assistance
she had formerly received from that Power, and given thanks for so
profusely, was the cause of her terror. It was absolutely as if she had
been borrowing from a Jew, and were called upon to pay fifty-fold
interest.

'Evan!' she writes in a gasp to Harriet. 'We must pack up and depart.
Abandon everything. He has disgraced us all, and ruined himself.
Impossible that we can stay for the pic-nic. We are known, dear. Think of
my position one day in this house! Particulars when I embrace you. I dare
not trust a letter here. If Evan had confided in me! He is impenetrable.
He will be low all his life, and I refuse any more to sully myself in
attempting to lift him. For Silva's sake I must positively break the
connection. Heaven knows what I have done for this boy, and will support
me in the feeling that I have done enough. My conscience at least is
safe.'

Like many illustrious Generals, the Countess had, for the hour, lost
heart. We find her, however, the next day, writing:

'Oh! Harriet! what trials for sisterly affection! Can I possibly--weather
the gale, as the old L---- sailors used to say? It is dreadful. I fear I
am by duty bound to stop on. Little Bonner thinks Evan quite a duke's
son, has been speaking to her Grandmama, and to-day, this morning, the
venerable old lady quite as much as gave me to understand that an union
between our brother and her son's child would sweetly gratify her, and
help her to go to her rest in peace. Can I chase that spark of comfort
from one so truly pious? Dearest Juliana! I have anticipated Evan's
feeling for her, and so she thinks his conduct cold. Indeed, I told her,
point blank, he loved her. That, you know, is different from saying,
dying of love, which would have been an untruth. But, Evan, of course! No
getting him! Should Juliana ever reproach me, I can assure the child that
any man is in love with any woman--which is really the case. It is, you
dear humdrum! what the dictionary calls "nascent." I never liked the
word, but it stands for a fact.'

The Countess here exhibits the weakness of a self-educated intelligence.
She does not comprehend the joys of scholarship in her employment of
Latinisms. It will be pardoned to her by those who perceive the profound
piece of feminine discernment which precedes it.

'I do think I shall now have courage to stay out the pic-nic,' she
continues. 'I really do not think all is known. Very little can be known,
or I am sure I could not feel as I do. It would burn me up. George Up---
does not dare; and his most beautiful lady-love had far better not. Mr.
Forth may repent his whispers. But, Oh! what Evan may do! Rose is almost
detestable. Manners, my dear? Totally deficient!

'An ally has just come. Evan's good fortune is most miraculous. His low
friend turns out to be a young Fortunatus; very original, sparkling, and
in my hands to be made much of. I do think he will--for he is most
zealous--he will counteract that hateful Mr. Forth, who may soon have
work enough. Mr. Raikes (Evan's friend) met a mad captain in Fallow
field! Dear Mr. Raikes is ready to say anything; not from love of
falsehood, but because he is ready to think it. He has confessed to me
that Evan told him! Louisa de Saldar has changed his opinion, and much
impressed this eccentric young gentleman. Do you know any young girl who
wants a fortune, and would be grateful?

'Dearest! I have decided on the pic-nic. Let your conscience be clear,
and Providence cannot be against you. So I feel. Mr. Parsley spoke very
beautifully to that purpose last Sunday in the morning service. A little
too much through his nose, perhaps; but the poor young man's nose is a
great organ, and we will not cast it in his teeth more than nature has
done. I said so to my diplomatist, who was amused. If you are sparklingly
vulgar with the English, you are aristocratic. Oh! what principle we
women require in the thorny walk of life. I can show you a letter when we
meet that will astonish humdrum. Not so diplomatic as the writer thought!
Mrs. Melville (sweet woman!) must continue to practise civility; for a
woman who is a wife, my dear, in verity she lives in a glass house, and
let her fling no stones. "Let him who is without sin." How beautiful that
Christian sentiment! I hope I shall be pardoned, but it always seems to
me that what we have to endure is infinitely worse than any other
suffering, for you find no comfort for the children of T----s in
Scripture, nor any defence of their dreadful position. Robbers, thieves,
Magdalens! but, no! the unfortunate offspring of that class are not even
mentioned: at least, in my most diligent perusal of the Scriptures, I
never lighted upon any remote allusion; and we know the Jews did wear
clothing. Outcasts, verily! And Evan could go, and write--but I have no
patience with him. He is the blind tool of his mother, and anybody's
puppet.'

The letter concludes, with horrid emphasis:

'The Madre in Beckley! Has sent for Evan from a low public-house! I have
intercepted the messenger. Evan closeted with Sir Franks. Andrew's
horrible old brother with Lady Jocelyn. The whole house, from garret to
kitchen, full of whispers!'

A prayer to Providence closes the communication.




CHAPTER XXVIII

TOM COGGLESEY'S PROPOSITION

The appearance of a curricle and a donkey-cart within the gates of
Beckley Court, produced a sensation among the men of the lower halls, and
a couple of them rushed out, with the left calf considerably in advance,
to defend the house from violation. Toward the curricle they directed
what should have been a bow, but was a nod. Their joint attention was
then given to the donkey-cart, in which old Tom Cogglesby sat alone,
bunchy in figure, bunched in face, his shrewd grey eyes twinkling under
the bush of his eyebrows.

'Oy, sir--you! my man!' exclaimed the tallest of the pair, resolutely.
'This won't do. Don't you know driving this sort of conveyance slap along
the gravel 'ere, up to the pillars, 's unparliamentary? Can't be allowed.
Now, right about!'

This address, accompanied by a commanding elevation of the dexter hand,
seemed to excite Mr. Raikes far more than Old Tom. He alighted from his
perch in haste, and was running up to the stalwart figure, crying,
'Fellow!' when, as you tell a dog to lie down, Old Tom called out, 'Be
quiet, Sir!' and Raikes halted with prompt military obedience.

The sight of the curricle acting satellite to the donkey-cart staggered
the two footmen.

'Are you lords?' sang out Old Tom.

A burst of laughter from the friends of Mr. Raikes, in the curricle,
helped to make the powdered gentlemen aware of a sarcasm, and one with no
little dignity replied that they were not lords.

'Oh! Then come and hold my donkey.'

Great irresolution was displayed at the injunction, but having consulted
the face of Mr. Raikes, one fellow, evidently half overcome by what was
put upon him, with the steps of Adam into exile, descended to the gravel,
and laid his hand on the donkey's head.

'Hold hard!' cried Old Tom. 'Whisper in his ear. He'll know your
language.'

'May I have the felicity of assisting you to terra firma?' interposed Mr.
Raikes, with the bow of deferential familiarity.

'Done that once too often,' returned Old Tom, jumping out. 'There. What's
the fee? There's a crown for you that ain't afraid of a live donkey; and
there 's a sixpenny bit for you that are--to keep up your courage; and
when he's dead you shall have his skin--to shave by.'

'Excellent!' shouted Raikes.

'Thomas!' he addressed a footman, 'hand in my card. Mr. John Feversham
Raikes.'

'And tell my lady, Tom Cogglesby's come,' added the owner of that name.

We will follow Tom Cogglesby, as he chooses to be called.

Lady Jocelyn rose on his entering the library, and walking up to him,
encountered him with a kindly full face.

'So I see you at last, Tom?' she said, without releasing his hand; and
Old Tom mounted patches of red in his wrinkled cheeks, and blinked, and
betrayed a singular antiquated bashfulness, which ended, after a mumble
of 'Yes, there he was, and he hoped her ladyship was well,' by his
seeking refuge in a chair, where he sat hard, and fixed his attention on
the leg of a table.

'Well, Tom, do you find much change in me?' she was woman enough to
continue.

He was obliged to look up.

'Can't say I do, my lady.'

'Don't you see the grey hairs, Tom?'

'Better than a wig,' rejoined he.

Was it true that her ladyship had behaved rather ill to Old Tom in her
youth? Excellent women have been naughty girls, and young Beauties will
have their train. It is also very possible that Old Tom had presumed upon
trifles, and found it difficult to forgive her his own folly.

'Preferable to a wig? Well, I would rather see you with your natural
thatch. You're bent, too. You look as if you had kept away from Beckley a
little too long.'

'Told you, my lady, I should come when your daughter was marriageable.'

'Oho! that's it? I thought it was the Election!

'Election be ------ hem!--beg pardon, my lady.'

'Swear, Tom, if it relieves you. I think it bad to check an oath or a
sneeze.'

'I 'm come to see you on business, my lady, or I shouldn't have troubled
you.'

'Malice?'

'You 'll see I don't bear any, my lady.'

'Ah! if you had only sworn roundly twenty-five years ago, what a much
younger man you would have been! and a brave capital old friend whom I
should not have missed all that time.'

'Come!' cried Old Tom, varying his eyes rapidly between her ladyship's
face and the floor, 'you acknowledge I had reason to.'

'Mais, cela va sans dire.'

'Cobblers' sons ain't scholars, my lady.'

'And are not all in the habit of throwing their fathers in our teeth, I
hope!'

Old Tom wriggled in his chair. 'Well, my lady, I'm not going to make a
fool of myself at my time o' life. Needn't be alarmed now. You've got the
bell-rope handy and a husband on the premises.'

Lady Jocelyn smiled, stood up, and went to him. 'I like an honest fist,'
she said, taking his. 'We 're not going to be doubtful friends, and we
won't snap and snarl. That's for people who're independent of wigs, Tom.
I find, for my part, that a little grey on the top of any head cools the
temper amazingly. I used to be rather hot once.'

'You could be peppery, my lady.'

'Now I'm cool, Tom, and so must you be; or, if you fight, it must be in
my cause, as you did when you thrashed that saucy young carter. Do you
remember?'

'If you'll sit ye down, my lady, I'll just tell you what I'm come for,'
said Old Tom, who plainly showed that he did remember, and was alarmingly
softened by her ladyship's retention of the incident.

Lady Jocelyn returned to her place.

'You've got a marriageable daughter, my lady?'

'I suppose we may call her so,' said Lady Jocelyn, with a composed glance
at the ceiling.

''Gaged to be married to any young chap?'

'You must put the question to her, Tom.'

'Ha! I don't want to see her.'

At this Lady Jocelyn looked slightly relieved. Old Tom continued.

'Happen to have got a little money--not so much as many a lord's got, I
dare say; such as 'tis, there 'tis. Young fellow I know wants a wife, and
he shall have best part of it. Will that suit ye, my lady?'

Lady Jocelyn folded her hands. 'Certainly; I've no objection. What it has
to do with me I can't perceive.'

'Ahem!' went Old Tom. 'It won't hurt your daughter to be married now,
will it?'

'Oh! my daughter is the destined bride of your "young fellow,"' said Lady
Jocelyn. 'Is that how it's to be?'

'She'--Old Tom cleared his throat 'she won't marry a lord, my lady; but
she--'hem--if she don't mind that--'ll have a deuced sight more hard cash
than many lord's son 'd give her, and a young fellow for a husband, sound
in wind and limb, good bone and muscle, speaks grammar and two or three
languages, and--'

'Stop!' cried Lady Jocelyn. 'I hope this is not a prize young man? If he
belongs, at his age, to the unco quid, I refuse to take him for a
son-in-law, and I think Rose will, too.'

Old Tom burst out vehemently: 'He's a damned good young fellow, though he
isn't a lord.'

'Well,' said Lady Jocelyn, 'I 've no doubt you're in earnest, Tom. It 's
curious, for this morning Rose has come to me and given me the first
chapter of a botheration, which she declares is to end in the common rash
experiment. What is your "young fellow's" name? Who is he? What is he?'

'Won't take my guarantee, my lady?'

'Rose--if she marries--must have a name, you know?'

Old Tom hit his knee. 'Then there's a pill for ye to swallow, for he
ain't the son of a lord.'

'That's swallowed, Tom. What is he?'

'He's the son of a tradesman, then, my lady.' And Old Tom watched her to
note the effect he had produced.

'More 's the pity,' was all she remarked.

'And he 'll have his thousand a year to start with; and he's a tailor, my
lady.'

Her ladyship opened her eyes.

'Harrington's his name, my lady. Don't know whether you ever heard of
it.'

Lady Jocelyn flung herself back in her chair. 'The queerest thing I ever
met!' said she.

'Thousand a year to start with,' Old Tom went on, 'and if she marries--I
mean if he marries her, I'll settle a thousand per ann. on the first
baby-boy or gal.'

'Hum! Is this gross collusion, Mr. Tom?' Lady Jocelyn inquired.

'What does that mean?'

'Have you spoken of this before to any one?'

'I haven't, my lady. Decided on it this morning. Hem! you got a son, too.
He's fond of a young gal, or he ought to be. I'll settle him when I've
settled the daughter.'

'Harry is strongly attached to a dozen, I believe,' said his mother.
'Well, Tom, we'll think of it. I may as well tell you: Rose has just been
here to inform me that this Mr. Harrington has turned her head, and that
she has given her troth, and all that sort of thing. I believe such was
not to be laid to my charge in my day.'

'You were open enough, my lady,' said Old Tom. 'She's fond of the young
fellow? She'll have a pill to swallow! poor young woman!'

Old Tom visibly chuckled. Lady Jocelyn had a momentary temptation to lead
him out, but she did not like the subject well enough to play with it.

'Apparently Rose has swallowed it,' she said.

'Goose, shears, cabbage, and all!' muttered Old Tom. 'Got a stomach!--she
knows he's a tailor, then? The young fellow told her? He hasn't been
playing the lord to her?'

'As far as he's concerned, I think he has been tolerably honest, Tom, for
a man and a lover.'

'And told her he was born and bound a tailor?'

'Rose certainly heard it from him.'

Slapping his knee, Old Tom cried: 'Bravo!' For though one part of his
nature was disappointed, and the best part of his plot disarranged, he
liked Evan's proceeding and felt warm at what seemed to him Rose's scorn
of rank.

'She must be a good gal, my lady. She couldn't have got it from t' other
side. Got it from you. Not that you--'

'No,' said Lady Jocelyn, apprehending him. 'I'm afraid I have no
Republican virtues. I 'm afraid I should have rejected the pill. Don't be
angry with me,' for Old Tom looked sour again; 'I like birth and
position, and worldly advantages, and, notwithstanding Rose's pledge of
the instrument she calls her heart, and in spite of your offer, I shall,
I tell you honestly, counsel her to have nothing to do with--'

'Anything less than lords,' Old Tom struck in. 'Very well. Are you going
to lock her up, my lady?'

'No. Nor shall I whip her with rods.'

'Leave her free to her choice?'

'She will have my advice. That I shall give her. And I shall take care
that before she makes a step she shall know exactly what it leads to. Her
father, of course, will exercise his judgement.' (Lady Jocelyn said this
to uphold the honour of Sir Franks, knowing at the same time perfectly
well that he would be wheedled by Rose.) 'I confess I like this Mr.
Harrington. But it's a great misfortune for him to have had a notorious
father. A tailor should certainly avoid fame, and this young man will
have to carry his father on his back. He 'll never throw the great Mel
off.'

Tom Cogglesby listened, and was really astonished at her ladyship's calm
reception of his proposal.

'Shameful of him! shameful!' he muttered perversely: for it would have
made him desolate to have had to change his opinion of her ladyship after
cherishing it, and consoling himself with it, five-and-twenty years.
Fearing the approach of softness, he prepared to take his leave.

'Now--your servant, my lady. I stick to my word, mind: and if your people
here are willing, I--I 've got a candidate up for Fall'field--I'll knock
him down, and you shall sneak in your Tory. Servant, my lady.'

Old Tom rose to go. Lady Jocelyn took his hand cordially, though she
could not help smiling at the humility of the cobbler's son in his manner
of speaking of the Tory candidate.

'Won't you stop with us a few days?'

'I 'd rather not, I thank ye.'

'Won't you see Rose?'

'I won't. Not till she's married.'

'Well, Tom, we're friends now?'

'Not aware I've ever done you any harm, my lady.'

'Look me in the face.'

The trial was hard for him. Though she had been five-and-twenty years a
wife, she was still very handsome: but he was not going to be melted, and
when the perverse old fellow obeyed her, it was with an aspect of
resolute disgust that would have made any other woman indignant. Lady
Jocelyn laughed.

'Why, Tom, your brother Andrew's here, and makes himself comfortable with
us. We rode by Brook's farm the other day. Do you remember Copping's
pond--how we dragged it that night? What days we had!'

Old Tom tugged once or twice at his imprisoned fist, while these youthful
frolics of his too stupid self and the wild and beautiful Miss Bonner
were being recalled.

'I remember!' he said savagely, and reaching the door hurled out: 'And I
remember the Bull-dogs, too! servant, my lady.' With which he effected a
retreat, to avoid a ringing laugh he heard in his ears.

Lady Jocelyn had not laughed. She had done no more than look and smile
kindly on the old boy. It was at the Bull-dogs, a fall of water on the
borders of the park, that Tom Cogglesby, then a hearty young man, had
been guilty of his folly: had mistaken her frank friendliness for a
return of his passion, and his stubborn vanity still attributed her
rejection of his suit to the fact of his descent from a cobbler, or, as
he put it, to her infernal worship of rank.

'Poor old Tom!' said her ladyship, when alone. 'He 's rough at the rind,
but sound at the core.' She had no idea of the long revenge Old Tom
cherished, and had just shaped into a plot to be equal with her for the
Bull-dogs.




CHAPTER XXIX

PRELUDE TO AN ENGAGEMENT

Money was a strong point with the Elburne brood. The Jocelyns very
properly respected blood; but being, as Harry, their youngest
representative, termed them, poor as rats, they were justified in
considering it a marketable stuff; and when they married they married for
money. The Hon. Miss Jocelyn had espoused a manufacturer, who failed in
his contract, and deserved his death. The diplomatist, Melville, had not
stepped aside from the family traditions in his alliance with Miss Black,
the daughter of a bold bankrupt, educated in affluence; and if he touched
nothing but L5000 and some very pretty ringlets, that was not his fault.
Sir Franks, too, mixed his pure stream with gold. As yet, however, the
gold had done little more than shine on him; and, belonging to
expectancy, it might be thought unsubstantial. Beckley Court was in the
hands of Mrs. Bonner, who, with the highest sense of duty toward her only
living child, was the last to appreciate Lady Jocelyn's entire absence of
demonstrative affection, and severely reprobated her daughter's
philosophic handling of certain serious subjects. Sir Franks, no doubt,
came better off than the others; her ladyship brought him twenty thousand
pounds, and Harry had ten in the past tense, and Rose ten in the future;
but living, as he had done, a score of years anticipating the demise of
an incurable invalid, he, though an excellent husband and father, could
scarcely be taught to imagine that the Jocelyn object of his bargain was
attained. He had the semblance of wealth, without the personal glow which
absolute possession brings. It was his habit to call himself a poor man,
and it was his dream that Rose should marry a rich one. Harry was
hopeless. He had been his Grandmother's pet up to the years of
adolescence: he was getting too old for any prospect of a military career
he had no turn for diplomacy, no taste for any of the walks open to blood
and birth, and was in headlong disgrace with the fountain of goodness at
Beckley Court, where he was still kept in the tacit understanding that,
should Juliana inherit the place, he must be at hand to marry her
instantly, after the fashion of the Jocelyns. They were an injured
family; for what they gave was good, and the commercial world had not
behaved honourably to them. Now, Ferdinand Laxley was just the match for
Rose. Born to a title and fine estate, he was evidently fond of her, and
there had been a gentle hope in the bosom of Sir Franks that the family
fatality would cease, and that Rose would marry both money and blood.

From this happy delusion poor Sir Franks was awakened to hear that his
daughter had plighted herself to the son of a tradesman: that, as the
climax to their evil fate, she who had some blood and some money of her
own--the only Jocelyn who had ever united the two--was desirous of
wasting herself on one who had neither. The idea was so utterly opposed
to the principles Sir Franks had been trained in, that his intellect
could not grasp it. He listened to his sister, Mrs. Shorne: he listened
to his wife; he agreed with all they said, though what they said was
widely diverse: he consented to see and speak to Evan, and he did so, and
was much the most distressed. For Sir Franks liked many things in life,
and hated one thing alone--which was 'bother.' A smooth world was his
delight. Rose knew this, and her instruction to Evan was: 'You cannot
give me up--you will go, but you cannot give me up while I am faithful to
you: tell him that.' She knew that to impress this fact at once on the
mind of Sir Franks would be a great gain; for in his detestation of
bother he would soon grow reconciled to things monstrous: and hearing the
same on both sides, the matter would assume an inevitable shape to him.
Mr. Second Fiddle had no difficulty in declaring the eternity of his
sentiments; but he toned them with a despair Rose did not contemplate,
and added also his readiness to repair, in any way possible, the evil
done. He spoke of his birth and position. Sir Franks, with a gentlemanly
delicacy natural to all lovers of a smooth world, begged him to see the
main and the insurmountable objection. Birth was to be desired, of
course, and position, and so forth: but without money how can two young
people marry? Evan's heart melted at this generous way of putting it. He
said he saw it, he had no hope: he would go and be forgotten: and begged
that for any annoyance his visit might have caused Sir Franks and Lady
Jocelyn, they would pardon him. Sir Franks shook him by the hand, and the
interview ended in a dialogue on the condition of the knees of Black
Lymport, and on horseflesh in Portugal and Spain.

Following Evan, Rose went to her father and gave him a good hour's
excitement, after which the worthy gentleman hurried for consolation to
Lady Jocelyn, whom he found reading a book of French memoirs, in her
usual attitude, with her feet stretched out and her head thrown back, as
in a distant survey of the lively people screening her from a troubled
world. Her ladyship read him a piquant story, and Sir Franks capped it
with another from memory; whereupon her ladyship held him wrong in one
turn of the story, and Sir Franks rose to get the volume to verify, and
while he was turning over the leaves, Lady Jocelyn told him incidentally
of old Tom Cogglesby's visit and proposal. Sir Franks found the passage,
and that her ladyship was right, which it did not move her countenance to
hear.

'Ah!' said he, finding it no use to pretend there was no bother in the
world, 'here's a pretty pickle! Rose says she will have that fellow.'

'Hum!' replied her ladyship. 'And if she keeps her mind a couple of
years, it will be a wonder.'

'Very bad for her this sort of thing--talked about,' muttered Sir Franks.
'Ferdinand was just the man.'

'Well, yes; I suppose it's her mistake to think brains an absolute
requisite,' said Lady Jocelyn, opening her book again, and scanning down
a column.

Sir Franks, being imitative, adopted a similar refuge, and the talk
between them was varied by quotations and choice bits from the authors
they had recourse to. Both leaned back in their chairs, and spoke with
their eyes on their books.

'Julia's going to write to her mother,' said he.

'Very filial and proper,' said she.

'There'll be a horrible hubbub, you know, Emily.'

'Most probably. I shall get the blame; 'cela se concoit'.'

'Young Harrington goes the day after to-morrow. Thought it better not to
pack him off in a hurry.'

'And just before the pic-nic; no, certainly. I suppose it would look
odd.'

'How are we to get rid of the Countess?'

'Eh? This Bautru is amusing, Franks; but he's nothing to Vandy. 'Homme
incomparable!' On the whole I find Menage rather dull. The Countess? what
an accomplished liar that woman is! She seems to have stepped out of
Tallemant's Gallery. Concerning the Countess, I suppose you had better
apply to Melville.'

'Where the deuce did this young Harrington get his breeding from?'

'He comes of a notable sire.'

'Yes, but there's no sign of the snob in him.'

'And I exonerate him from the charge of "adventuring" after Rose. George
Uplift tells me--I had him in just now--that the mother is a woman of
mark and strong principle. She has probably corrected the too luxuriant
nature of Mel in her offspring. That is to say in this one. 'Pour les
autres, je ne dis pas'. Well, the young man will go; and if Rose chooses
to become a monument of constancy, we can do nothing. I shall give my
advice; but as she has not deceived me, and she is a reasonable being, I
shan't interfere. Putting the case at the worst, they will not want
money. I have no doubt Tom Cogglesby means what he says, and will do it.
So there we will leave the matter till we hear from Elburne House.'

Sir Franks groaned at the thought.

'How much does he offer to settle on them?' he asked.

'A thousand a year on the marriage, and the same amount to the first
child. I daresay the end would be that they would get all.'

Sir Franks nodded, and remained with one eye-brow pitiably elevated above
the level of the other.

'Anything but a tailor!' he exclaimed presently, half to himself.

'There is a prejudice against that craft,' her ladyship acquiesced.
'Beranger--let me see--your favourite Frenchman, Franks, wasn't it his
father?--no, his grandfather. "Mon pauvre et humble grand-pyre," I think,
was a tailor. Hum! the degrees of the thing, I confess, don't affect me.
One trade I imagine to be no worse than another.'

'Ferdinand's allowance is about a thousand,' said Sir Franks,
meditatively.

'And won't be a farthing more till he comes to the title,' added her
ladyship.

'Well,' resumed Sir Franks, 'it's a horrible bother!'

His wife philosophically agreed with him, and the subject was dropped.

Lady Jocelyn felt with her husband, more than she chose to let him know,
and Sir Franks could have burst into anathemas against fate and
circumstances, more than his love of a smooth world permitted. He,
however, was subdued by her calmness; and she, with ten times the weight
of brain, was manoeuvred by the wonderful dash of General Rose Jocelyn.
For her ladyship, thinking, 'I shall get the blame of all this,' rather
sided insensibly with the offenders against those who condemned them
jointly; and seeing that Rose had been scrupulously honest and
straightforward in a very delicate matter, this lady was so constituted
that she could not but applaud her daughter in her heart. A worldly woman
would have acted, if she had not thought, differently; but her ladyship
was not a worldly woman.

Evan's bearing and character had, during his residence at Beckley Court,
become so thoroughly accepted as those of a gentleman, and one of their
own rank, that, after an allusion to the origin of his breeding, not a
word more was said by either of them on that topic. Besides, Rose had
dignified him by her decided conduct.

By the time poor Sir Franks had read himself into tranquillity, Mrs.
Shorne, who knew him well, and was determined that he should not enter
upon his usual negociations with an unpleasantness: that is to say, to
forget it, joined them in the library, bringing with her Sir John Loring
and Hamilton Jocelyn. Her first measure was to compel Sir Franks to put
down his book. Lady Jocelyn subsequently had to do the same.

'Well, what have you done, Franks?' said Mrs. Shorne.

'Done?' answered the poor gentleman. 'What is there to be done? I've
spoken to young Harrington.'

'Spoken to him! He deserves horsewhipping! Have you not told him to quit
the house instantly?'

Lady Jocelyn came to her husband's aid: 'It wouldn't do, I think, to kick
him out. In the first place, he hasn't deserved it.'

'Not deserved it, Emily!--the commonest, low, vile, adventuring
tradesman!'

'In the second place,' pursued her ladyship, 'it's not adviseable to do
anything that will make Rose enter into the young woman's sublimities. It
's better not to let a lunatic see that you think him stark mad, and the
same holds with young women afflicted with the love-mania. The sound of
sense, even if they can't understand it, flatters them so as to keep them
within bounds. Otherwise you drive them into excesses best avoided.'

'Really, Emily,' said Mrs. Shorne, 'you speak almost, one would say, as
an advocate of such unions.'

'You must know perfectly well that I entirely condemn them,' replied her
ladyship, who had once, and once only, delivered her opinion of the
nuptials of Mr. and Mrs. Shorne.

In self-defence, and to show the total difference between the cases, Mrs.
Shorne interjected: 'An utterly penniless young adventurer!'

'Oh, no; there's money,' remarked Sir Franks.

'Money is there?' quoth Hamilton, respectfully.

'And there's wit,' added Sir John, 'if he has half his sister's talent.'

'Astonishing woman!' Hamilton chimed in; adding, with a shrug, 'But,
egad!'

'Well, we don't want him to resemble his sister,' said Lady Jocelyn. 'I
acknowledge she's amusing.'

'Amusing, Emily!' Mrs. Shorne never encountered her sister-in-law's
calmness without indignation. 'I could not rest in the house with such a
person, knowing her what she is. A vile adventuress, as I firmly believe.
What does she do all day with your mother? Depend upon it, you will
repent her visit in more ways than one.'

'A prophecy?' asked Lady Jocelyn, smiling.

On the grounds of common sense, on the grounds of propriety, and
consideration of what was due to themselves, all agreed to condemn the
notion of Rose casting herself away on Evan. Lady Jocelyn agreed with
Mrs. Shorne; Sir Franks with his brother, and Sir John. But as to what
they were to do, they were divided. Lady Jocelyn said she should not
prevent Rose from writing to Evan, if she had the wish to do so.

'Folly must come out,' said her ladyship. 'It's a combustible material. I
won't have her health injured. She shall go into the world more. She will
be presented at Court, and if it's necessary to give her a dose or two to
counteract her vanity, I don't object. This will wear off, or, 'si c'est
veritablement une grande passion, eh bien' we must take what Providence
sends us.'

'And which we might have prevented if we had condescended to listen to
the plainest worldly wisdom,' added Mrs. Shorne.

'Yes,' said Lady Jocelyn, equably, 'you know, you and I, Julia, argue
from two distinct points. Girls may be shut up, as you propose. I don't
think nature intended to have them the obverse of men. I 'm sure their
mothers never designed that they should run away with footmen,
riding-masters, chance curates, as they occasionally do, and wouldn't if
they had points of comparison. My opinion is that Prospero was just saved
by the Prince of Naples being wrecked on his island, from a shocking
mis-alliance between his daughter and the son of Sycorax. I see it
clearly. Poetry conceals the extreme probability, but from what I know of
my sex, I should have no hesitation in turning prophet also, as to that.'

What could Mrs. Shorne do with a mother who talked in this manner? Mrs.
Melville, when she arrived to take part in the conference, which
gradually swelled to a family one, was equally unable to make Lady
Jocelyn perceive that her plan of bringing up Rose was, in the present
result of it, other than unlucky.

Now the two Generals--Rose Jocelyn and the Countess de Saldar--had
brought matters to this pass; and from the two tactical extremes: the
former by openness and dash; the latter by subtlety, and her own
interpretations of the means extended to her by Providence. I will not be
so bold as to state which of the two I think right. Good and evil work
together in this world. If the Countess had not woven the tangle, and
gained Evan time, Rose would never have seen his blood,--never have had
her spirit hurried out of all shows and forms and habits of thought, up
to the gates of existence, as it were, where she took him simply as God
created him and her, and clave to him. Again, had Rose been secret, when
this turn in her nature came, she would have forfeited the strange power
she received from it, and which endowed her with decision to say what was
in her heart, and stamp it lastingly there. The two Generals were quite
antagonistic, but no two, in perfect ignorance of one another's
proceedings, ever worked so harmoniously toward the main result. The
Countess was the skilful engineer: Rose the General of cavalry. And it
did really seem that, with Tom Cogglesby and his thousands in reserve,
the victory was about to be gained. The male Jocelyns, an easy race,
decided that, if the worst came to the worst, and Rose proved a wonder,
there was money, which was something.

But social prejudice was about to claim its champion. Hitherto there had
been no General on the opposite side. Love, aided by the Countess, had
engaged an inert mass. The champion was discovered in the person of the
provincial Don Juan, Mr. Harry Jocelyn. Harry had gone on a mysterious
business of his own to London. He returned with a green box under his
arm, which, five minutes after his arrival, was entrusted to Conning, in
company with a genial present for herself, of a kind not perhaps so fit
for exhibition; at least they both thought so, for it was given in the
shades. Harry then went to pay his respects to his mother, who received
him with her customary ironical tolerance. His father, to whom he was an
incarnation of bother, likewise nodded to him and gave him a finger. Duty
done, Harry looked round him for pleasure, and observed nothing but glum
faces. Even the face of John Raikes was, heavy. He had been hovering
about the Duke and Miss Current for an hour, hoping the Countess would
come and give him a promised introduction. The Countess stirred not from
above, and Jack drifted from group to group on the lawn, and grew
conscious that wherever he went he brought silence with him. His
isolation made him humble, and when Harry shook his hand, and said he
remembered Fallow field and the fun there, Mr. Raikes thanked him.

Harry made his way to join his friend Ferdinand, and furnished him with
the latest London news not likely to appear in the papers. Laxley was
distant and unamused. From the fact, too, that Harry was known to be the
Countess's slave, his presence produced the same effect in the different
circles about the grounds, as did that of John Raikes. Harry began to
yawn and wish very ardently for his sweet lady. She, however, had too
fine an instinct to descend.

An hour before dinner, Juliana sent him a message that she desired to see
him.

'Jove! I hope that girl's not going to be blowing hot again,' sighed the
conqueror.

He had nothing to fear from Juliana. The moment they were alone she asked
him, 'Have you heard of it?'

Harry shook his head and shrugged.

'They haven't told you? Rose has engaged herself to Mr. Harrington, a
tradesman, a tailor!'

'Pooh! have you got hold of that story?' said Harry. 'But I'm sorry for
old Ferdy. He was fond of Rosey. Here's another bother!'

'You don't believe me, Harry?'

Harry was mentally debating whether, in this new posture of affairs, his
friend Ferdinand would press his claim for certain moneys lent.

'Oh, I believe you,' he said. 'Harrington has the knack with you women.
Why, you made eyes at him. It was a toss-up between you and Rosey once.'

Juliana let this accusation pass.

'He is a tradesman. He has a shop in Lymport, I tell you, Harry, and his
name on it. And he came here on purpose to catch Rose. And now he has
caught her, he tells her. And his mother is now at one of the village
inns, waiting to see him. Go to Mr. George Uplift; he knows the family.
Yes, the Countess has turned your head, of course; but she has schemed,
and schemed, and told such stories--God forgive her!'

The girl had to veil her eyes in a spasm of angry weeping.

'Oh, come! Juley!' murmured her killing cousin. Harry boasted an
extraordinary weakness at the sight of feminine tears. 'I say! Juley! you
know if you begin crying I'm done for, and it isn't fair.'

He dropped his arm on her waist to console her, and generously declared
to her that he always had been, very fond of her. These scenes were not
foreign to the youth. Her fits of crying, from which she would burst in a
frenzy of contempt at him, had made Harry say stronger things; and the
assurances of profound affection uttered in a most languid voice will
sting the hearts of women.

Harry still went on with his declarations, heating them rapidly, so as to
bring on himself the usual outburst and check. She was longer in coming
to it this time, and he had a horrid fear, that instead of dismissing him
fiercely, and so annulling his words, the strange little person was going
to be soft and hold him to them. There were her tears, however, which she
could not stop.

'Well, then, Juley, look. I do, upon my honour, yes--there, don't cry any
more--I do love you.'

Harry held his breath in awful suspense. Juliana quietly disengaged her
waist, and looking at him, said, 'Poor Harry! You need not lie any more
to please me.'

Such was Harry's astonishment, that he exclaimed,

'It isn't a lie! I say, I do love you.' And for an instant he thought and
hoped that he did love her.

'Well, then, Harry, I don't love you,' said Juliana; which revealed to
our friend that he had been mistaken in his own emotions. Nevertheless,
his vanity was hurt when he saw she was sincere, and he listened to her,
a moody being. This may account for his excessive wrath at Evan
Harrington after Juliana had given him proofs of the truth of what she
said.

But the Countess was Harrington's sister! The image of the Countess swam
before him. Was it possible? Harry went about asking everybody he met.
The initiated were discreet; those who had the whispers were open. A bare
truth is not so convincing as one that discretion confirms. Harry found
the detestable news perfectly true.

'Stop it by all means if you can,' said his father.

'Yes, try a fall with Rose,' said his mother.

'And I must sit down to dinner to-day with a confounded fellow, the son
of a tailor, who's had the impudence to make love to my sister!' cried
Harry. 'I'm determined to kick him out of the house!--half.'

'To what is the modification of your determination due?' Lady Jocelyn
inquired, probably suspecting the sweet and gracious person who divided
Harry's mind.

Her ladyship treated her children as she did mankind generally, from her
intellectual eminence. Harry was compelled to fly from her cruel shafts.
He found comfort with his Aunt Shorne, and she as much as told Harry that
he was the head of the house, and must take up the matter summarily. It
was expected of him. Now was the time for him to show his manhood.

Harry could think of but one way to do that.

'Yes, and if I do--all up with the old lady,' he said, and had to explain
that his Grandmama Bonner would never leave a penny to a fellow who had
fought a duel.

'A duel!' said Mrs. Shorne. 'No, there are other ways. Insist upon his
renouncing her. And Rose--treat her with a high hand, as becomes you.
Your mother is incorrigible, and as for your father, one knows him of
old. This devolves upon you. Our family honour is in your hands, Harry.'

Considering Harry's reputation, the family honour must have got low:
Harry, of course, was not disposed to think so. He discovered a great
deal of unused pride within him, for which he had hitherto not found an
agreeable vent. He vowed to his aunt that he would not suffer the
disgrace, and while still that blandishing olive-hued visage swam before
his eyes, he pledged his word to Mrs. Shorne that he would come to an
understanding with Harrington that night.

'Quietly,' said she. 'No scandal, pray.'

'Oh, never mind how I do it,' returned Harry, manfully. 'How am I to do
it, then?' he added, suddenly remembering his debt to Evan.

Mrs. Shorne instructed him how to do it quietly, and without fear of
scandal. The miserable champion replied that it was very well for her to
tell him to say this and that, but--and she thought him demented--he
must, previous to addressing Harrington in those terms, have money.

'Money!' echoed the lady. 'Money!'

'Yes, money!' he iterated doggedly, and she learnt that he had borrowed a
sum of Harrington, and the amount of the sum.

It was a disastrous plight, for Mrs. Shorne was penniless.

She cited Ferdinand Laxley as a likely lender.

'Oh, I'm deep with him already,' said Harry, in apparent dejection.

'How dreadful are these everlasting borrowings of yours!' exclaimed his
aunt, unaware of a trifling incongruity in her sentiments. 'You must
speak to him without--pay him by-and-by. We must scrape the money
together. I will write to your grandfather.'

'Yes; speak to him! How can I when I owe him? I can't tell a fellow he's
a blackguard when I owe him, and I can't speak any other way. I ain't a
diplomatist. Dashed if I know what to do!'

'Juliana,' murmured his aunt.

'Can't ask her, you know.'

Mrs. Shorne combated the one prominent reason for the objection: but
there were two. Harry believed that he had exhausted Juliana's treasury.
Reproaching him further for his wastefulness, Mrs. Shorne promised him
the money should be got, by hook or by crook, next day.

'And you will speak to this Mr. Harrington to-night, Harry? No allusion
to the loan till you return it. Appeal to his sense of honour.'

The dinner-bell assembled the inmates of the house. Evan was not among
them. He had gone, as the Countess said aloud, on a diplomatic mission to
Fallow field, with Andrew Cogglesby. The truth being that he had finally
taken Andrew into his confidence concerning the letter, the annuity, and
the bond. Upon which occasion Andrew had burst into a laugh, and said he
could lay his hand on the writer of the letter.

'Trust Old Tom for plots, Van! He'll blow you up in a twinkling, the
cunning old dog! He pretends to be hard--he 's as soft as I am, if it
wasn't for his crotchets. We'll hand him back the cash, and that's ended.
And--eh? what a dear girl she is! Not that I'm astonished. My Harry might
have married a lord--sit at top of any table in the land! And you're as
good as any man.

That's my opinion. But I say she's a wonderful girl to see it.'

Chattering thus, Andrew drove with the dear boy into Fallow field. Evan
was still in his dream. To him the generous love and valiant openness of
Rose, though they were matched in his own bosom, seemed scarcely human.
Almost as noble to him were the gentlemanly plainspeaking of Sir Franks
and Lady Jocelyn's kind commonsense. But the more he esteemed them, the
more unbounded and miraculous appeared the prospect of his calling their
daughter by the sacred name, and kneeling with her at their feet. Did the
dear heavens have that in store for him? The horizon edges were dimly
lighted.

Harry looked about under his eye-lids for Evan, trying at the same time
to compose himself for the martyrdom he had to endure in sitting at table
with the presumptuous fellow. The Countess signalled him to come within
the presence. As he was crossing the room, Rose entered, and moved to
meet him, with: 'Ah, Harry! back again! Glad to see you.'

Harry gave her a blunt nod, to which she was inattentive.

'What!' whispered the Countess, after he pressed the tips of her fingers.
'Have you brought back the grocer?'

Now this was hard to stand. Harry could forgive her her birth, and pass
it utterly by if she chose to fall in love with him; but to hear the
grocer mentioned, when he knew of the tailor, was a little too much, and
what Harry felt his ingenuous countenance was accustomed to exhibit. The
Countess saw it. She turned her head from him to the diplomatist, and he
had to remain like a sentinel at her feet. He did not want to be thanked
for the green box: still he thought she might have favoured him with one
of her much-embracing smiles:

In the evening, after wine, when he was warm, and had almost forgotten
the insult to his family and himself, the Countess snubbed him. It was
unwise on her part, but she had the ghastly thought that facts were
oozing out, and were already half known. She was therefore sensitive
tenfold to appearances; savage if one failed to keep up her lie to her,
and was guilty of a shadow of difference of behaviour. The pic-nic over,
our General would evacuate Beckley Court, and shake the dust off her
shoes, and leave the harvest of what she had sown to Providence. Till
then, respect, and the honours of war! So the Countess snubbed him, and
he being full of wine, fell into the hands of Juliana, who had witnessed
the little scene.

'She has made a fool of others as well as of you,' said Juliana.

'How has she?' he inquired.

'Never mind. Do you want to make her humble and crouch to you?'

'I want to see Harrington,' said Harry.

'He will not return to-night from Fallow field. He has gone there to get
Mr. Andrew Cogglesby's brother to do something for him. You won't have
such another chance of humbling them both--both! I told you his mother is
at an inn here. The Countess has sent Mr. Harrington to Fallow field to
be out of the way, and she has told her mother all sorts of falsehoods.'

'How do you know all that?' quoth Harry. 'By Jove, Juley! talk about
plotters! No keeping anything from you, ever!'

'Never mind. The mother is here. She must be a vulgar woman. Oh! if you
could manage, Harry, to get this woman to come--you could do it so
easily! while they are at the pie-nic tomorrow. It would have the best
effect on Rose. She would then understand! And the Countess!'

'I could send the old woman a message!' cried Harry, rushing into the
scheme, inspired by Juliana's fiery eyes. 'Send her a sort of message to
say where we all were.'

'Let her know that her son is here, in some way,' Juley resumed.

'And, egad! what an explosion!' pursued Harry. 'But, suppose--'

'No one shall know, if you leave it to me-if you do just as I tell you,
Harry. You won't be treated as you were this evening after that, if you
bring down her pride. And, Harry, I hear you want money--I can give you
some.'

'You're a perfect trump, Juley!' exclaimed her enthusiastic cousin.

'But, no; I can't take it. I must kiss you, though.'

He put a kiss upon her cheek. Once his kisses had left a red waxen stamp;
she was callous to these compliments now.

'Will you do what I advise you to-morrow?' she asked.

After a slight hesitation, during which the olive-hued visage flitted
faintly in the distances of his brain, Harry said:

'It 'll do Rose good, and make Harrington cut. Yes! I declare I will.'

Then they parted. Juliana went to her bed-room, and flung herself upon
the bed hysterically. As the tears came thick and fast, she jumped up to
lock the door, for this outrageous habit of crying had made her
contemptible in the eyes of Lady Jocelyn, and an object of pity to Rose.
Some excellent and noble natures cannot tolerate disease, and are
mystified by its ebullitions. It was very sad to see the slight thin
frame grasped by those wan hands to contain the violence of the frenzy
that possessed her! the pale, hapless face rigid above the torment in her
bosom! She had prayed to be loved like other girls, and her readiness to
give her heart in return had made her a by-word in the house. She went to
the window and leaned out on the casement, looking towards Fallowfield
over the downs, weeping bitterly, with a hard shut mouth. One brilliant
star hung above the ridge, and danced on her tears.

'Will he forgive me?' she murmured. 'Oh, my God! I wish we were dead
together!'

Her weeping ceased, and she closed the window, and undressed as far away
from the mirror as she could get; but its force was too much for her, and
drew her to it. Some undefined hope had sprung in her suddenly. With
nervous slow steps she approached the glass, and first brushing back the
masses of black hair from her brow, looked as for some new revelation.
Long and anxiously she perused her features: the wide bony forehead; the
eyes deep-set and rounded with the scarlet of recent tears, the thin
nose-sharp as the dead; the weak irritable mouth and sunken cheeks. She
gazed like a spirit disconnected from what she saw. Presently a sort of
forlorn negative was indicated by the motion of her head.

'I can pardon him,' she said, and sighed. 'How could he love such a
face!'




CHAPTER XXX

THE BATTLE OF THE BULL-DOGS. PART I

At the South-western extremity of the park, with a view extending over
wide meadows and troubled mill waters, yellow barn-roofs and weather-gray
old farm-walls, two grassy mounds threw their slopes to the margin of the
stream. Here the bull-dogs held revel. The hollow between the slopes was
crowned by a bending birch, which rose three-stemmed from the root, and
hung a noiseless green shower over the basin of green it shadowed.
Beneath it the interminable growl sounded pleasantly; softly shot the
sparkle of the twisting water, and you might dream things half-fulfilled.
Knots of fern were about, but the tops of the mounds were firm grass,
evidently well rolled, and with an eye to airy feet. Olympus one eminence
was called, Parnassus the other. Olympus a little overlooked Parnassus,
but Parnassus was broader and altogether better adapted for the games of
the Muses. Round the edges of both there was a well-trimmed bush of
laurel, obscuring only the feet of the dancers from the observing gods.
For on Olympus the elders reclined. Great efforts had occasionally been
made to dispossess and unseat them, and their security depended mainly on
a hump in the middle of the mound which defied the dance.

Watteau-like groups were already couched in the shade. There were ladies
of all sorts: town-bred and country-bred: farmers' daughters and
daughters of peers: for this pic-nic, as Lady Jocelyn, disgusting the
Countess, would call it, was in reality a 'fete champetre', given
annually, to which the fair offspring of the superior tenants were
invited the brothers and fathers coming to fetch them in the evening. It
struck the eye of the Countess de Saldar that Olympus would be a fitting
throne for her, and a point whence her shafts might fly without fear of a
return. Like another illustrious General at Salamanca, she directed a
detachment to take possession of the height. Courtly Sir John Loring ran
up at once, and gave the diplomatist an opportunity to thank her
flatteringly for gaining them two minutes to themselves. Sir John waved
his handkerchief in triumph, welcoming them under an awning where carpets
and cushions were spread, and whence the Countess could eye the field.
She was dressed ravishingly; slightly in a foreign style, the bodice
being peaked at the waist, as was then the Portuguese persuasion. The
neck, too, was deliciously veiled with fine lace--and thoroughly veiled,
for it was a feature the Countess did not care to expose to the vulgar
daylight. Off her gentle shoulders, as it were some fringe of cloud blown
by the breeze this sweet lady opened her bosom to, curled a lovely black
lace scarf: not Caroline's. If she laughed, the tinge of mourning lent
her laughter new charms. If she sighed, the exuberant array of her
apparel bade the spectator be of good cheer. Was she witty, men
surrendered reason and adored her. Only when she entered the majestic
mood, and assumed the languors of greatness, and recited musky anecdotes
of her intimacy with it, only then did mankind, as represented at Beckley
Court, open an internal eye and reflect that it was wonderful in a
tailor's daughter. And she felt that mankind did so reflect. Her
instincts did not deceive her. She knew not how much was known; in the
depths of her heart she kept low the fear that possibly all might be
known; and succeeding in this, she said to herself that probably nothing
was known after all. George Uplift, Miss Carrington, and Rose, were the
three she abhorred. Partly to be out of their way, and to be out of the
way of chance shots (for she had heard names of people coming that
reminded her of Dubbins's, where, in past days, there had been on one
awful occasion a terrific discovery made), the Countess selected Olympus
for her station. It was her last day, and she determined to be happy.
Doubtless, she was making a retreat, but have not illustrious Generals
snatched victory from their pursuers? Fair, then, sweet, and full of
grace, the Countess moved. As the restless shifting of colours to her
motions was the constant interchange of her semisorrowful manner and
ready archness. Sir John almost capered to please her, and the
diplomatist in talking to her forgot his diplomacy and the craft of his
tongue.

It was the last day also of Caroline and the Duke. The Countess clung to
Caroline and the Duke more than to Evan and Rose. She could see the first
couple walking under an avenue of limes, and near them that young man or
monkey, Raikes, as if in ambush. Twice they passed him, and twice he
doffed his hat and did homage.

'A most singular creature!' exclaimed the Countess. 'It is my constant
marvel where my brother discovered such a curiosity. Do notice him.'

'That man? Raikes?' said the diplomatist. 'Do you know he is our rival?
Harry wanted an excuse for another bottle last night, and proposed the
"Member" for Fallowfield. Up got this Mr. Raikes and returned thanks.'

'Yes?' the Countess negligently interjected in a way she had caught from
Lady Jocelyn.

'Cogglesby's nominee, apparently.'

'I know it all,' said the Countess. 'We need have no apprehension. He is
docile. My brother-in-law's brother, you see, is most eccentric. We can
manage him best through this Mr. Raikes, for a personal application would
be ruin. He quite detests our family, and indeed all the aristocracy.'

Melville's mouth pursed, and he looked very grave.

Sir John remarked: 'He seems like a monkey just turned into a man.'

'And doubtful about the tail,' added the Countess.

The image was tolerably correct, but other causes were at the bottom of
the air worn by John Raikes. The Countess had obtained an invitation for
him, with instructions that he should come early, and he had followed
them so implicitly that the curricle was flinging dust on the hedges
between Fallow field and Beckley but an hour or two after the chariot of
Apollo had mounted the heavens, and Mr. Raikes presented himself at the
breakfast table. Fortunately for him the Countess was there. After the
repast she introduced him to the Duke: and he bowed to the Duke, and the
Duke bowed to him: and now, to instance the peculiar justness in the mind
of Mr. Raikes, he, though he worshipped a coronet and would gladly have
recalled the feudal times to a corrupt land, could not help thinking that
his bow had beaten the Duke's and was better. He would rather not have
thought so, for it upset his preconceptions and threatened a revolution
in his ideas. For this reason he followed the Duke, and tried, if
possible, to correct, or at least chasten the impressions he had of
possessing a glaring advantage over the nobleman. The Duke's second
notice of him was hardly a nod. 'Well!' Mr. Raikes reflected, 'if this is
your Duke, why, egad! for figure and style my friend Harrington beats him
hollow.' And Raikes thought he knew who could conduct a conversation with
superior dignity and neatness. The torchlight of a delusion was
extinguished in him, but he did not wander long in that gloomy cavernous
darkness of the disenchanted, as many of us do, and as Evan had done,
when after a week at Beckley Court he began to examine of what stuff his
brilliant father, the great Mel, was composed. On the contrary, as the
light of the Duke dwindled, Raikes gained in lustre. 'In fact,' he said,
'there's nothing but the title wanting.' He was by this time on a level
with the Duke in his elastic mind.

Olympus had been held in possession by the Countess about half an hour,
when Lady Jocelyn mounted it, quite unconscious that she was scaling a
fortified point. The Countess herself fired off the first gun at her.

'It has been so extremely delightful up alone here, Lady Jocelyn: to look
at everybody below! I hope many will not intrude on us!'

'None but the dowagers who have breath to get up,' replied her ladyship,
panting. 'By the way, Countess, you hardly belong to us yet. You dance?'

'Indeed, I do not.'

'Oh, then you are in your right place. A dowager is a woman who doesn't
dance: and her male attendant is--what is he? We will call him a fogy.'

Lady Jocelyn directed a smile at Melville and Sir John, who both
protested that it was an honour to be the Countess's fogy.

Rose now joined them, with Laxley morally dragged in her wake.

'Another dowager and fogy!' cried the Countess, musically. 'Do you not
dance, my child?'

'Not till the music strikes up,' rejoined Rose. 'I suppose we shall have
to eat first.'

'That is the Hamlet of the pic-nic play, I believe,' said her mother.

'Of course you dance, don't you, Countess?' Rose inquired, for the sake
of amiable conversation.

The Countess's head signified: 'Oh, no! quite out of the question': she
held up a little bit of her mournful draperies, adding: 'Besides, you,
dear child, know your company, and can select; I do not, and cannot do
so. I understand we have a most varied assembly!'

Rose shut her eyes, and then looked at her mother. Lady Jocelyn's face
was undisturbed; but while her eyes were still upon the Countess, she
drew her head gently back, imperceptibly. If anything, she was admiring
the lady; but Rose could be no placid philosophic spectator of what was
to her a horrible assumption and hypocrisy. For the sake of him she
loved, she had swallowed a nauseous cup bravely. The Countess was too
much for her. She felt sick to think of being allied to this person. She
had a shuddering desire to run into the ranks of the world, and hide her
head from multitudinous hootings. With a pang of envy she saw her friend
Jenny walking by the side of William Harvey, happy, untried, unoffending:
full of hope, and without any bitter draughts to swallow!

Aunt Bel now came tripping up gaily.

'Take the alternative, 'douairiere or demoiselle'?' cried Lady Jocelyn.
'We must have a sharp distinction, or Olympus will be mobbed.'

'Entre les deux, s'il vous plait,' responded Aunt Bel. 'Rose, hurry down,
and leaven the mass. I see ten girls in a bunch. It's shocking.
Ferdinand, pray disperse yourself. Why is it, Emily, that we are always
in excess at pic-nics? Is man dying out?'

'From what I can see,' remarked Lady Jocelyn, 'Harry will be lost to his
species unless some one quickly relieves him. He's already half eaten up
by the Conley girls. Countess, isn't it your duty to rescue him?'

The Countess bowed, and murmured to Sir John:

'A dismissal!'

'I fear my fascinations, Lady Jocelyn, may not compete with those fresh
young persons.'

'Ha! ha! "fresh young persons,"' laughed Sir John for the ladies in
question were romping boisterously with Mr. Harry.

The Countess inquired for the names and condition of the ladies, and was
told that they sprang from Farmer Conley, a well-to-do son of the soil,
who farmed about a couple of thousand acres between Fallow field and
Beckley, and bore a good reputation at the county bank.

'But I do think,' observed the Countess, 'it must indeed be pernicious
for any youth to associate with that class of woman. A deterioration of
manners!'

Rose looked at her mother again. She thought 'Those girls would scorn to
marry a tradesman's son!'

The feeling grew in Rose that the Countess lowered and degraded her. Her
mother's calm contemplation of the lady was more distressing than if she
had expressed the contempt Rose was certain, according to her young
ideas, Lady Jocelyn must hold.

Now the Countess had been considering that she would like to have a word
or two with Mr. Harry, and kissing her fingers to the occupants of
Olympus, and fixing her fancy on the diverse thoughts of the ladies and
gentlemen, deduced from a rapturous or critical contemplation of her
figure from behind, she descended the slope.

Was it going to be a happy day? The well-imagined opinions of the
gentleman on her attire and style, made her lean to the affirmative; but
Rose's demure behaviour, and something--something would come across her
hopes. She had, as she now said to herself, stopped for the pic-nic,
mainly to give Caroline a last opportunity of binding the Duke to visit
the Cogglesby saloons in London. Let Caroline cleverly contrive this, as
she might, without any compromise, and the stay at Beckley Court would be
a great gain. Yes, Caroline was still with the Duke; they were talking
earnestly. The Countess breathed a short appeal to Providence that
Caroline might not prove a fool. Overnight she had said to Caroline: 'Do
not be so English. Can one not enjoy friendship with a nobleman without
wounding one's conscience or breaking with the world? My dear, the Duke
visiting you, you cow that infamous Strike of yours. He will be utterly
obsequious! I am not telling you to pass the line. The contrary. But we
continentals have our grievous reputation because we dare to meet as
intellectual beings, and defy the imputation that ladies and gentlemen
are no better than animals.'

It sounded very lofty to Caroline, who, accepting its sincerity, replied:

'I cannot do things by halves. I cannot live a life of deceit. A life of
misery--not deceit.'

Whereupon, pitying her poor English nature, the Countess gave her advice,
and this advice she now implored her familiars to instruct or compel
Caroline to follow.

The Countess's garment was plucked at. She beheld little Dorothy Loring
glancing up at her with the roguish timidity of her years.

'May I come with you?' asked the little maid, and went off into a
prattle: 'I spent that five shillings--I bought a shilling's worth of
sweet stuff, and nine penn'orth of twine, and a shilling for small wax
candles to light in my room when I'm going to bed, because I like plenty
of light by the looking-glass always, and they do make the room so hot!
My Jane declared she almost fainted, but I burnt them out! Then I only
had very little left for a horse to mount my doll on; and I wasn't going
to get a screw, so I went to Papa, and he gave me five shillings. And,
oh, do you know, Rose can't bear me to be with you. Jealousy, I suppose,
for you're very agreeable. And, do you know, your Mama is coming to-day?
I've got a Papa and no Mama, and you've got a Mama and no Papa. Isn't it
funny? But I don't think so much of it, as you 're grown up. Oh, I'm
quite sure she is coming, because I heard Harry telling Juley she was,
and Juley said it would be so gratifying to you.'

A bribe and a message relieved the Countess of Dorothy's attendance on
her.

What did this mean? Were people so base as to be guilty of hideous plots
in this house? Her mother coming! The Countess's blood turned deadly
chill. Had it been her father she would not have feared, but her mother
was so vilely plain of speech; she never opened her mouth save to deliver
facts: which was to the Countess the sign of atrocious vulgarity.

But her mother had written to say she would wait for Evan in Fallow
field! The Countess grasped at straws. Did Dorothy hear that? And if
Harry and Juliana spoke of her mother, what did that mean? That she was
hunted, and must stand at bay!

'Oh, Papa! Papa! why did you marry a Dawley?' she exclaimed, plunging to
what was, in her idea, the root of the evil.

She had no time for outcries and lamentations. It dawned on her that this
was to be a day of battle. Where was Harry? Still in the midst of the
Conley throng, apparently pooh-poohing something, to judge by the twist
of his mouth.

The Countess delicately signed for him to approach her. The extreme
delicacy of the signal was at least an excuse for Harry to perceive
nothing. It was renewed, and Harry burst into a fit of laughter at some
fun of one of the Conley girls. The Countess passed on, and met Juliana
pacing by herself near the lower gates of the park. She wished only to
see how Juliana behaved. The girl looked perfectly trustful, as much so
as when the Countess was pouring in her ears the tales of Evan's growing
but bashful affection for her.

'He will soon be here,' whispered the Countess. 'Has he told you he will
come by this entrance?'

'No,' replied Juliana.

'You do not look well, sweet child.'

'I was thinking that you did not, Countess?'

'Oh, indeed, yes! With reason, alas! All our visitors have by this time
arrived, I presume?'

'They come all day.'

The Countess hastened away from one who, when roused, could be almost as
clever as herself, and again stood in meditation near the joyful Harry.
This time she did not signal so discreetly. Harry could not but see it,
and the Conley girls accused him of cruelty to the beautiful dame, which
novel idea stung Harry with delight, and he held out to indulge in it a
little longer. His back was half turned, and as he talked noisily, he
could not observe the serene and resolute march of the Countess toward
him. The youth gaped when he found his arm taken prisoner by the
insertion of a small deliciously-gloved and perfumed hand through it. 'I
must claim you for a few moments,' said the Countess, and took the
startled Conley girls one and all in her beautiful smile of excuse.

'Why do you compromise me thus, sir?'

These astounding words were spoken out of the hearing of the Conley
girls.

'Compromise you!' muttered Harry.

Masterly was the skill with which the Countess contrived to speak angrily
and as an injured woman, while she wore an indifferent social
countenance.

'I repeat, compromise me. No, Mr. Harry Jocelyn, you are not the
jackanapes you try to make people think you: you understand me.'

The Countess might accuse him, but Harry never had the ambition to make
people think him that: his natural tendency was the reverse: and he
objected to the application of the word jackanapes to himself, and was
ready to contest the fact of people having that opinion at all. However,
all he did was to repeat: 'Compromise!'

'Is not open unkindness to me compromising me?'

'How?' asked Harry.

'Would you dare to do it to a strange lady? Would you have the impudence
to attempt it with any woman here but me? No, I am innocent; it is my
consolation; I have resisted you, but you by this cowardly behaviour
place me--and my reputation, which is more--at your mercy. Noble
behaviour, Mr. Harry Jocelyn! I shall remember my young English
gentleman.'

The view was totally new to Harry.

'I really had no idea of compromising you,' he said. 'Upon my honour, I
can't see how I did it now!'

'Oblige me by walking less in the neighbourhood of those fat-faced
glaring farm-girls,' the Countess spoke under her breath; 'and don't look
as if you were being whipped. The art of it is evident--you are but
carrying on the game.--Listen. If you permit yourself to exhibit an
unkindness to me, you show to any man who is a judge, and to every woman,
that there has been something between us. You know my innocence--yes! but
you must punish me for having resisted you thus long.'

Harry swore he never had such an idea, and was much too much of a man and
a gentleman to behave in that way.--And yet it seemed wonderfully clever!
And here was the Countess saying:

'Take your reward, Mr. Harry Jocelyn. You have succeeded; I am your
humble slave. I come to you and sue for peace. To save my reputation I
endanger myself. This is generous of you.'

'Am I such a clever fellow?' thought the young gentleman. 'Deuced lucky
with women': he knew that: still a fellow must be wonderfully,
miraculously, clever to be able to twist and spin about such a woman as
this in that way. He did not object to conceive that he was the fellow to
do it. Besides, here was the Countess de Saldar-worth five hundred of the
Conley girls--almost at his feet!

Mollified, he said: 'Now, didn't you begin it?'

'Evasion!' was the answer. 'It would be such pleasure to you so see a
proud woman weep! And if yesterday, persecuted as I am, with dreadful
falsehoods abroad respecting me and mine, if yesterday I did seem cold to
your great merits, is it generous of you to take this revenge?'

Harry began to scent the double meaning in her words. She gave him no
time to grow cool over it. She leaned, half abandoned, on his arm. Arts
feminine and irresistible encompassed him. It was a fatal mistake of
Juliana's to enlist Harry Jocelyn against the Countess de Saldar. He
engaged, still without any direct allusion to the real business, to move
heaven and earth to undo all that he had done, and the Countess implied
an engagement to do--what? more than she intended to fulfil.

Ten minutes later she was alone with Caroline.

'Tie yourself to the Duke at the dinner,' she said, in the forcible
phrase she could use when necessary. 'Don't let them scheme to separate
you. Never mind looks--do it!'

Caroline, however, had her reasons for desiring to maintain appearances.
The Countess dashed at her hesitation.

'There is a plot to humiliate us in the most abominable way. The whole
family have sworn to make us blush publicly. Publicly blush! They have
written to Mama to come and speak out. Now will you attend to me,
Caroline? You do not credit such atrocity? I know it to be true.'

'I never can believe that Rose would do such a thing,' said Caroline.' We
can hardly have to endure more than has befallen us already.'

Her speech was pensive, as of one who had matter of her own to ponder
over. A swift illumination burst in the Countess's mind.

'No? Have you, dear, darling Carry? not that I intend that you should!
but to-day the Duke would be such ineffable support to us. May I deem you
have not been too cruel to-day? You dear silly English creature, "Duck,"
I used to call you when I was your little Louy. All is not yet lost, but
I will save you from the ignominy if I can. I will!'

Caroline denied nothing--confirmed nothing, just as the Countess had
stated nothing. Yet they understood one another perfectly. Women have a
subtler language than ours: the veil pertains to them morally as bodily,
and they see clearer through it.

The Countess had no time to lose. Wrath was in her heart. She did not
lend all her thoughts to self-defence.

Without phrasing a word, or absolutely shaping a thought in her head, she
slanted across the sun to Mr. Raikes, who had taken refreshment, and in
obedience to his instinct, notwithstanding his enormous pretensions, had
commenced a few preliminary antics.

'Dear Mr. Raikes!' she said, drawing him aside, 'not before dinner!'

'I really can't contain the exuberant flow!' returned that gentleman. 'My
animal spirits always get the better of me,' he added confidentially.

'Suppose you devote your animal spirits to my service for half an hour.'

'Yours, Countess, from the 'os frontis' to the chine!' was the exuberant
rejoinder.

The Countess made a wry mouth.

'Your curricle is in Beckley?'

'Behold!' said Jack. 'Two juveniles, not half so blest as I, do from the
seat regard the festive scene o'er yon park palings. They are there, even
Franko and Fred. I 'm afraid I promised to get them in at a later period
of the day. Which sadly sore my conscience doth disturb! But what is to
be done about the curricle, my Countess?'

'Mr. Raikes,' said the Countess, smiling on him fixedly, 'you are
amusing; but in addressing me, you must be precise, and above all things
accurate. I am not your Countess!'

He bowed profoundly. 'Oh, that I might say my Queen!'

The Countess replied: 'A conviction of your lunacy would prevent my
taking offence, though I might wish you enclosed and guarded.'

Without any further exclamations, Raikes acknowledged a superior.

'And, now, attend to me,' said the Countess. 'Listen:

You go yourself, or send your friends instantly to Fallow field. Bring
with you that girl and her child. Stop: there is such a person. Tell her
she is to be spoken to about the prospects of the poor infant. I leave
that to your inventive genius. Evan wishes her here. Bring her, and
should you see the mad captain who behaves so oddly, favour him with a
ride. He says he dreams his wife is here, and he will not reveal his
name! Suppose it should be my own beloved husband! I am quite anxious.'

The Countess saw him go up to the palings and hold a communication with
his friends Franko and Fred. One took the whip, and after mutual
flourishes, drove away.

'Now!' mused the Countess, 'if Captain Evremonde should come!' It would
break up the pic-nic. Alas! the Countess had surrendered her humble hopes
of a day's pleasure. But if her mother came as well, what a diversion
that would be! If her mother came before the Captain, his arrival would
cover the retreat; if the Captain preceded her, she would not be noticed.
Suppose her mother refrained from coming? In that case it was a pity, but
the Jocelyns had brought it on themselves.

This mapping out of consequences followed the Countess's deeds, and did
not inspire them. Her passions sharpened her instincts, which produced
her actions. The reflections ensued: as in nature, the consequences were
all seen subsequently! Observe the difference between your male and
female Generals.

On reflection, too, the Countess praised herself for having done all that
could be done. She might have written to her mother: but her absence
would have been remarked: her messenger might have been overhauled and,
lastly, Mrs. Mel--'Gorgon of a mother!' the Countess cried out: for Mrs.
Mel was like a Fate to her. She could remember only two occasions in her
whole life when she had been able to manage her mother, and then by lying
in such a way as to distress her conscience severely.

'If Mama has conceived this idea of coming, nothing will impede her. My
prayers will infuriate her!' said the Countess, and she was sure that she
had acted both rightly and with wisdom.

She put on her armour of smiles: she plunged into the thick of the enemy.
Since they would not allow her to taste human happiness--she had asked
but for the pic-nic! a small truce! since they denied her that, rather
than let them triumph by seeing her wretched, she took into her bosom the
joy of demons. She lured Mr. George Uplift away from Miss Carrington, and
spoke to him strange hints of matrimonial disappointments, looking from
time to time at that apprehensive lady, doating on her terrors. And Mr.
George seconded her by his clouded face, for he was ashamed not to show
that he did not know Louisa Harrington in the Countess de Saldar, and had
not the courage to declare that he did. The Countess spoke familiarly,
but without any hint of an ancient acquaintance between them. 'What a
post her husband's got!' thought Mr. George, not envying the Count. He
was wrong: she was an admirable ally. All over the field the Countess
went, watching for her mother, praying that if she did come, Providence
might prevent her from coming while they were at dinner. How clearly Mrs.
Shorne and Mrs. Melville saw her vulgarity now! By the new light of
knowledge, how certain they were that they had seen her ungentle training
in a dozen little instances.

'She is not well-bred, 'cela se voit',' said Lady Jocelyn.

'Bred! it's the stage! How could such a person be bred?' said Mrs.
Shorne.

Accept in the Countess the heroine who is combating class-prejudices, and
surely she is pre-eminently noteworthy. True, she fights only for her
family, and is virtually the champion of the opposing institution
misplaced. That does not matter: the Fates may have done it purposely: by
conquering she establishes a principle. A Duke adores her sister, the
daughter of the house her brother, and for herself she has many
protestations in honour of her charms: nor are they empty ones. She can
confound Mrs. Melville, if she pleases to, by exposing an adorer to lose
a friend. Issuing out of Tailordom, she, a Countess, has done all this;
and it were enough to make her glow, did not little evils, and angers,
and spites, and alarms so frightfully beset her.

The sun of the pic-nic system is dinner. Hence philosophers may deduce
that the pic-nic is a British invention. There is no doubt that we do not
shine at the pic-nic until we reflect the face of dinner. To this, then,
all who were not lovers began seriously to look forward, and the advance
of an excellent county band, specially hired to play during the
entertainment, gave many of the guests quite a new taste for sweet music;
and indeed we all enjoy a thing infinitely more when we see its meaning.

About this time Evan entered the lower park-gates with Andrew. The first
object he encountered was John Raikes in a state of great depression. He
explained his case:

'Just look at my frill! Now, upon my honour, you know, I'm good-tempered;
I pass their bucolic habits, but this is beyond bearing. I was near the
palings there, and a fellow calls out, "Hi! will you help the lady over?"
Holloa! thinks I, an adventure! However, I advised him to take her round
to the gates. The beast burst out laughing. "Now, then," says he, and I
heard a scrambling at the pales, and up came the head of a dog. "Oh! the
dog first," says I. "Catch by the ears," says he. I did so. "Pull," says
he. "'Gad, pull indeed!", The beast gave a spring and came slap on my
chest, with his dirty wet muzzle on my neck! I felt instantly it was the
death of my frill, but gallant as you know me, I still asked for the
lady. "If you will please, or an it meet your favour, to extend your hand
to me!" I confess I did think it rather odd, the idea of a lady coming in
that way over the palings! but my curst love of adventure always blinds
me. It always misleads my better sense, Harrington. Well, instead of a
lady, I see a fellow--he may have been a lineal descendant of Cedric the
Saxon. "Where's the lady?" says I. "Lady?" says he, and stares, and then
laughs: "Lady! why," he jumps over, and points at his beast of a dog,
"don't you know a bitch when you see one?" I was in the most ferocious
rage! If he hadn't been a big burly bully, down he'd have gone. "Why
didn't you say what it was?" I roared. "Why," says he, "the word isn't
considered polite!" I gave him a cut there. I said, "I rejoice to be
positively assured that you uphold the laws and forms of civilization,
sir." My belief is he didn't feel it.'

'The thrust sinned in its shrewdness,' remarked Evan, ending a laugh.

'Hem!' went Mr. Raikes, more contentedly: 'after all, what are
appearances to the man of wit and intellect? Dress, and women will
approve you: but I assure you they much prefer the man of wit in his
slouched hat and stockings down. I was introduced to the Duke this
morning. It is a curious thing that the seduction of a Duchess has always
been one of my dreams.'

At this Andrew Cogglesby fell into a fit of laughter.

'Your servant,' said Mr. Raikes, turning to him. And then he muttered
'Extraordinary likeness! Good Heavens! Powers!'

From a state of depression, Mr. Raikes--changed into one of bewilderment.
Evan paid no attention to him, and answered none of his hasty undertoned
questions. Just then, as they were on the skirts of the company, the band
struck up a lively tune, and quite unconsciously, the legs of Raikes,
affected, it may be, by supernatural reminiscences, loosely hornpiped. It
was but a moment: he remembered himself the next: but in that fatal
moment eyes were on him. He never recovered his dignity in Beckley Court:
he was fatally mercurial.

'What is the joke against this poor fellow?' asked Evan of Andrew.

'Never mind, Van. You'll roar. Old Tom again. We 'll see by-and-by, after
the champagne. He--this young Raikes-ha! ha!--but I can't tell you.' And
Andrew went away to Drummond, to whom he was more communicative. Then he
went to Melville, and one or two others, and the eyes of many became
concentrated on Raikes, and it was observed as a singular sign that he
was constantly facing about, and flushing the fiercest red. Once he made
an effort to get hold of Evan's arm and drag him away, as one who had an
urgent confession to be delivered of, but Evan was talking to Lady
Jocelyn, and other ladies, and quietly disengaged his arm without even
turning to notice the face of his friend. Then the dinner was announced,
and men saw the dinner. The Countess went to shake her brother's hand,
and with a very gratulatory visage, said through her half-shut teeth.

'If Mama appears, rise up and go away with her, before she has time to
speak a word.' An instant after Evan found himself seated between Mrs.
Evremonde and one of the Conley girls. The dinner had commenced. The
first half of the Battle of the Bull-dogs was as peaceful as any ordinary
pic-nic, and promised to the general company as calm a conclusion.




CHAPTER XXXI

THE BATTLE OF THE BULL-DOGS. PART II.

If it be a distinct point of wisdom to hug the hour that is, then does
dinner amount to a highly intellectual invitation to man, for it
furnishes the occasion; and Britons are the wisest of their race, for
more than all others they take advantage of it. In this Nature is
undoubtedly our guide, seeing that he who, while feasting his body allows
to his soul a thought for the morrow, is in his digestion curst, and
becomes a house of evil humours. Now, though the epicure may complain of
the cold meats, a dazzling table, a buzzing company, blue sky, and a band
of music, are incentives to the forgetfulness of troubles past and
imminent, and produce a concentration of the faculties. They may not
exactly prove that peace is established between yourself and those who
object to your carving of the world, but they testify to an armistice.

Aided by these observations, you will understand how it was that the
Countess de Saldar, afflicted and menaced, was inspired, on taking her
seat, to give so graceful and stately a sweep to her dress that she was
enabled to conceive woman and man alike to be secretly overcome by it.
You will not refuse to credit the fact that Mr. Raikes threw care to the
dogs, heavy as was that mysterious lump suddenly precipitated on his
bosom; and you will think it not impossible that even the springers of
the mine about to explode should lose their subterranean countenances. A
generous abandonment to one idea prevailed. As for Evan, the first glass
of champagne rushed into reckless nuptials with the music in his head,
bringing Rose, warm almost as life, on his heart. Sublime are the visions
of lovers! He knew he must leave her on the morrow; he feared he might
never behold her again; and yet he tasted bliss, for it seemed within the
contemplation of the Gods that he should dance with his darling before
dark-haply waltz with her! Oh, heaven! he shuts his eyes, blinded. The
band wheels off meltingly in a tune all cadences, and twirls, and risings
and sinkings, and passionate outbursts trippingly consoled. Ah! how sweet
to waltz through life with the right partner. And what a singular thing
it is to look back on the day when we thought something like it! Never
mind: there may be spheres where it is so managed--doubtless the planets
have their Hanwell and Bedlam.

I confess that the hand here writing is not insensible to the effects of
that first glass of champagne. The poetry of our Countess's achievements
waxes rich in manifold colours: I see her by the light of her own pleas
to Providence. I doubt almost if the hand be mine which dared to make a
hero play second fiddle, and to his beloved. I have placed a bushel over
his light, certainly. Poor boy! it was enough that he should have
tailordom on his shoulders: I ought to have allowed him to conquer
Nature, and so come out of his eclipse. This shall be said of him: that
he can play second fiddle without looking foolish, which, for my part, I
call a greater triumph than if he were performing the heroics we are more
accustomed to. He has steady eyes, can gaze at the right level into the
eyes of others, and commands a tongue which is neither struck dumb nor
set in a flutter by any startling question. The best instances to be
given that he does not lack merit are that the Jocelyns, whom he has
offended by his birth, cannot change their treatment of him, and that the
hostile women, whatever they may say, do not think Rose utterly insane.
At any rate, Rose is satisfied, and her self-love makes her a keen
critic. The moment Evan appeared, the sickness produced in her by the
Countess passed, and she was ready to brave her situation. With no mock
humility she permitted Mrs. Shorne to place her in a seat where glances
could not be interchanged. She was quite composed, calmly prepared for
conversation with any one. Indeed, her behaviour since the hour of
general explanation had been so perfectly well-contained, that Mrs.
Melville said to Lady Jocelyn:

'I am only thinking of the damage to her. It will pass over--this fancy.
You can see she is not serious. It is mere spirit of opposition. She eats
and drinks just like other girls. You can see that the fancy has not
taken such very strong hold of her.'

'I can't agree with you,' replied her ladyship. 'I would rather have her
sit and sigh by the hour, and loathe roast beef. That would look nearer a
cure.'

'She has the notions of a silly country girl,' said Mrs. Shorne.

'Exactly,' Lady Jocelyn replied. 'A season in London will give her
balance.'

So the guests were tolerably happy, or at least, with scarce an
exception, open to the influences of champagne and music. Perhaps Juliana
was the wretchedest creature present. She was about to smite on both
cheeks him she loved, as well as the woman she despised and had been
foiled by. Still she had the consolation that Rose, seeing the vulgar
mother, might turn from Evan: a poor distant hope, meagre and shapeless
like herself. Her most anxious thoughts concerned the means of getting
money to lockup Harry's tongue. She could bear to meet the Countess's
wrath, but not Evan's offended look. Hark to that Countess!

'Why do you denominate this a pic-nic, Lady Jocelyn? It is in verity a
fete!'

'I suppose we ought to lie down 'A la Grecque' to come within the term,'
was the reply. 'On the whole, I prefer plain English for such matters.'

'But this is assuredly too sumptuous for a pic-nic, Lady Jocelyn. From
what I can remember, pic-nic implies contribution from all the guests. It
is true I left England a child!'

Mr. George Uplift could not withhold a sharp grimace: The Countess had
throttled the inward monitor that tells us when we are lying, so
grievously had she practised the habit in the service of her family.

'Yes,' said Mrs. Melville, 'I have heard of that fashion, and very stupid
it is.'

'Extremely vulgar,' murmured Miss Carrington.

'Possibly,' Lady Jocelyn observed; 'but good fun. I have been to
pic-nics, in my day. I invariably took cold pie and claret. I clashed
with half-a-dozen, but all the harm we did was to upset the dictum that
there can be too much of a good thing. I know for certain that the
bottles were left empty.'

'And this woman,' thought the Countess, 'this woman, with a soul so
essentially vulgar, claims rank above me!' The reflection generated
contempt of English society, in the first place, and then a passionate
desire for self-assertion.

She was startled by a direct attack which aroused her momentarily lulled
energies.

A lady, quite a stranger, a dry simpering lady, caught the Countess's
benevolent passing gaze, and leaning forward, said: 'I hope her ladyship
bears her affliction as well as can be expected?'

In military parlance, the Countess was taken in flank. Another would have
asked--What ladyship? To whom do you allude, may I beg to inquire? The
Countess knew better. Rapid as light it shot through her that the relict
of Sir Abraham was meant, and this she divined because she was aware that
devilish malignity was watching to trip her.

A little conversation happening to buzz at the instant, the Countess
merely turned her chin to an angle, agitated her brows very gently, and
crowned the performance with a mournful smile. All that a woman must feel
at the demise of so precious a thing as a husband, was therein eloquently
expressed: and at the same time, if explanations ensued, there were
numerous ladyships in the world, whom the Countess did not mind
afflicting, should she be hard pressed.

'I knew him so well!' resumed the horrid woman, addressing anybody. 'It
was so sad! so unexpected! but he was so subject to affection of the
throat. And I was so sorry I could not get down to him in time. I had not
seen him since his marriage, when I was a girl!--and to meet one of his
children!--But, my dear, in quinsey, I have heard that there is nothing
on earth like a good hearty laugh.'

Mr. Raikes hearing this, sucked down the flavour of a glass of champagne,
and with a look of fierce jollity, interposed, as if specially charged by
Providence to make plain to the persecuted Countess his mission and
business there: 'Then our vocation is at last revealed to us!
Quinsey-doctor! I remember when a boy, wandering over the paternal
mansion, and envying the life of a tinker, which my mother did not think
a good omen in me. But the traps of a Quinsey-doctor are even lighter.
Say twenty good jokes, and two or three of a practical kind. A man most
enviable!'

'It appears,' he remarked aloud to one of the Conley girls, 'that quinsey
is needed before a joke is properly appreciated.'

'I like fun,' said she, but had not apparently discovered it.

What did that odious woman mean by perpetually talking about Sir Abraham?
The Countess intercepted a glance between her and the hated Juliana. She
felt it was a malignant conspiracy: still the vacuous vulgar air of the
woman told her that most probably she was but an instrument, not a
confederate, and was only trying to push herself into acquaintance with
the great: a proceeding scorned and abominated by the Countess, who
longed to punish her for her insolent presumption. The bitterness of her
situation stung her tenfold when she considered that she dared not.

Meantime the champagne became as regular in its flow as the Bull-dogs,
and the monotonous bass of these latter sounded through the music, like
life behind the murmur of pleasure, if you will. The Countess had a not
unfeminine weakness for champagne, and old Mr. Bonner's cellar was well
and choicely stocked. But was this enjoyment to the Countess?--this
dreary station in the background! 'May I emerge?' she as much as implored
Providence.

The petition was infinitely tender. She thought she might, or it may be
that nature was strong, and she could not restrain herself.

Taking wine with Sir John, she said:

'This bowing! Do you know how amusing it is deemed by us Portuguese? Why
not embrace? as the dear Queen used to say to me.'

'I am decidedly of Her Majesty's opinion,' observed Sir John, with
emphasis, and the Countess drew back into a mingled laugh and blush.

Her fiendish persecutor gave two or three nods. 'And you know the Queen!'
she said.

She had to repeat the remark: whereupon the Countess murmured,
'Intimately.'

'Ah, we have lost a staunch old Tory in Sir Abraham,' said the lady,
performing lamentation.

What did it mean? Could design lodge in that empty-looking head with its
crisp curls, button nose, and diminishing simper? Was this pic-nic to be
made as terrible to the Countess by her putative father as the dinner had
been by the great Mel? The deep, hard, level look of Juliana met the
Countess's smile from time to time, and like flimsy light horse before a
solid array of infantry, the Countess fell back, only to be worried
afresh by her perfectly unwitting tormentor.

'His last days?--without pain? Oh, I hope so!' came after a lapse of
general talk.

'Aren't we getting a little funereal, Mrs. Perkins?' Lady Jocelyn asked,
and then rallied her neighbours.

Miss Carrington looked at her vexedly, for the fiendish Perkins was
checked, and the Countess in alarm, about to commit herself, was a
pleasant sight to Miss Carrington.

'The worst of these indiscriminate meetings is that there is no
conversation,' whispered the Countess, thanking Providence for the
relief.

Just then she saw Juliana bend her brows at another person. This was
George Uplift, who shook his head, and indicated a shrewd-eyed, thin,
middle-aged man, of a lawyer-like cast; and then Juliana nodded, and
George Uplift touched his arm, and glanced hurriedly behind for
champagne. The Countess's eyes dwelt on the timid young squire most
affectionately. You never saw a fortress more unprepared for dread
assault.

'Hem!' was heard, terrific. But the proper pause had evidently not yet
come, and now to prevent it the Countess strained her energies and tasked
her genius intensely. Have you an idea of the difficulty of keeping up
the ball among a host of ill-assorted, stupid country people, who have no
open topics, and can talk of nothing continuously but scandal of their
neighbours, and who, moreover, feel they are not up to the people they
are mixing with? Darting upon Seymour Jocelyn, the Countess asked
touchingly for news of the partridges. It was like the unlocking of a
machine. Seymour was not blythe in his reply, but he was loud and
forcible; and when he came to the statistics--oh, then you would have
admired the Countess!--for comparisons ensued, braces were enumerated,
numbers given were contested, and the shooting of this one jeered at, and
another's sure mark respectfully admitted. And how lay the coveys? And
what about the damage done by last winter's floods? And was there good
hope of the pheasants? Outside this latter the Countess hovered. Twice
the awful 'Hem!' was heard. She fought on. She kept them at it. If it
flagged she wished to know this or that, and finally thought that,
really, she should like herself to try one shot. The women had previously
been left behind. This brought in the women. Lady Jocelyn proposed a
female expedition for the morrow.

'I believe I used to be something of a shot, formerly,' she said.

'You peppered old Tom once, my lady,' remarked Andrew, and her ladyship
laughed, and that foolish Andrew told the story, and the Countess, to
revive her subject, had to say: 'May I be enrolled to shoot?' though she
detested and shrank from fire-arms.

'Here are two!' said the hearty presiding dame. 'Ladies, apply
immediately to have your names put down.'

The possibility of an expedition of ladies now struck Seymour vividly,
and said he: 'I 'll be secretary'; and began applying to the ladies for
permission to put down their names. Many declined, with brevity,
muttering, either aloud or to themselves, 'unwomanly'; varied by
'unladylike': some confessed cowardice; some a horror of the noise close
to their ears; and there was the plea of nerves. But the names of
half-a-dozen ladies were collected, and then followed much laughter, and
musical hubbub, and delicate banter. So the ladies and gentlemen fell one
and all into the partridge pit dug for them by the Countess: and that
horrible 'Hem!' equal in force and terror to the roar of artillery
preceding the charge of ten thousand dragoons, was silenced--the pit
appeared impassable. Did the Countess crow over her advantage? Mark her:
the lady's face is entirely given up to partridges. 'English sports are
so much envied abroad,' she says: but what she dreads is a reflection,
for that leads off from the point. A portion of her mind she keeps to
combat them in Lady Jocelyn and others who have the tendency: the rest
she divides between internal-prayers for succour, and casting about for
another popular subject to follow partridges. Now, mere talent, as
critics say when they are lighting candles round a genius, mere talent
would have hit upon pheasants as the natural sequitur, and then diverged
to sports--a great theme, for it ensures a chorus of sneers at
foreigners, and so on probably to a discussion of birds and beasts best
adapted to enrapture the palate of man. Stories may succeed, but they are
doubtful, and not to be trusted, coming after cookery. After an exciting
subject which has made the general tongue to wag, and just enough heated
the brain to cause it to cry out for spiced food--then start your story:
taking care that it be mild; for one too marvellous stops the tide, the
sense of climax being strongly implanted in all bosoms. So the Countess
told an anecdote--one of Mel's. Mr. George Uplift was quite familiar with
it, and knew of one passage that would have abashed him to relate 'before
ladies.' The sylph-like ease with which the Countess floated over this
foul abysm was miraculous. Mr. George screwed his eye-lids queerly, and
closed his jaws with a report, completely beaten. The anecdote was of the
character of an apologue, and pertained to game. This was, as it
happened, a misfortune; for Mr. Raikes had felt himself left behind by
the subject; and the stuff that was in this young man being naturally
ebullient, he lay by to trip it, and take a lead. His remarks brought on
him a shrewd cut from the Countess, which made matters worse; for a pun
may also breed puns, as doth an anecdote. The Countess's stroke was so
neat and perfect that it was something for the gentlemen to think over;
and to punish her for giving way to her cleverness and to petty vexation,
'Hem!' sounded once more, and then: 'May I ask you if the present Baronet
is in England?'

Now Lady Jocelyn perceived that some attack was directed against her
guest. She allowed the Countess to answer:

'The eldest was drowned in the Lisbon waters'

And then said: 'But who is it that persists in serving up the funeral
baked meats to us?'

Mrs. Shorne spoke for her neighbour: 'Mr. Farnley's cousin was the
steward of Sir Abraham Harrington's estates.'

The Countess held up her head boldly. There is a courageous exaltation of
the nerves known to heroes and great generals in action when they feel
sure that resources within themselves will spring up to the emergency,
and that over simple mortals success is positive.

'I had a great respect for Sir Abraham,' Mr. Farnley explained, 'very
great. I heard that this lady' (bowing to the Countess) 'was his
daughter.'

Lady Jocelyn's face wore an angry look, and Mrs. Shorne gave her the
shade of a shrug and an expression implying, 'I didn't!'

Evan was talking to Miss Jenny Graine at the moment rather earnestly.
With a rapid glance at him, to see that his ears were closed, the
Countess breathed:

'Not the elder branch!--Cadet!'

The sort of noisy silence produced by half-a-dozen people respirating
deeply and moving in their seats was heard. The Countess watched Mr.
Farnley's mystified look, and whispered to Sir John: 'Est-ce qu'il
comprenne le Francais, lui?'

It was the final feather-like touch to her triumph. She saw safety and a
clear escape, and much joyful gain, and the pleasure of relating her
sufferings in days to come. This vista was before her when, harsh as an
execution bell, telling her that she had vanquished man, but that
Providence opposed her, 'Mrs. Melchisedec Harrington!' was announced to
Lady Jocelyn.

Perfect stillness reigned immediately, as if the pic-nic had heard its
doom.

'Oh! I will go to her,' said her ladyship, whose first thought was to
spare the family. 'Andrew, come and give me your arm.'

But when she rose Mrs. Mel was no more than the length of an arm from her
elbow.

In the midst of the horrible anguish she was enduring, the Countess could
not help criticizing her mother's curtsey to Lady Jocelyn. Fine, but a
shade too humble. Still it was fine; all might not yet be lost.

'Mama!' she softly exclaimed, and thanked heaven that she had not denied
her parent.

Mrs. Mel did not notice her or any of her children. There was in her
bosom a terrible determination to cast a devil out of the one she best
loved. For this purpose, heedless of all pain to be given, or of
impropriety, she had come to speak publicly, and disgrace and humiliate,
that she might save him from the devils that had ruined his father.

'My lady,' said the terrible woman, thanking her in reply to an
invitation that she should be seated, 'I have come for my son. I hear he
has been playing the lord in your house, my lady. I humbly thank your
ladyship for your kindness to him, but he is nothing more than a tailor's
son, and is bound a tailor himself that his father may be called an
honest man. I am come to take him away.'

Mrs. Mel seemed to speak without much effort, though the pale flush of
her cheeks showed that she felt what she was doing. Juliana was pale as
death, watching Rose. Intensely bright with the gem-like light of her
gallant spirit, Rose's eyes fixed on Evan. He met them. The words of Ruth
passed through his heart. But the Countess, who had given Rose to Evan,
and the Duke to Caroline, where was her supporter? The Duke was
entertaining Caroline with no less dexterity, and Rose's eyes said to
Evan: 'Feel no shame that I do not feel!' but the Countess stood alone.
It is ever thus with genius! to quote the numerous illustrious authors
who have written of it.

What mattered it now that in the dead hush Lady Jocelyn should assure her
mother that she had been misinformed, and that Mrs. Mel was presently
quieted, and made to sit with others before the fruits and wines? All
eyes were hateful--the very thought of Providence confused her brain.
Almost reduced to imbecility, the Countess imagined, as a reality, that
Sir Abraham had borne with her till her public announcement of
relationship, and that then the outraged ghost would no longer be
restrained, and had struck this blow.

The crushed pic-nic tried to get a little air, and made attempts at
conversation. Mrs. Mel sat upon the company with the weight of all
tailordom.

And now a messenger came for Harry. Everybody was so zealously employed
in the struggle to appear comfortable under Mrs. Mel, that his departure
was hardly observed. The general feeling for Evan and his sisters, by
their superiors in rank, was one of kindly pity. Laxley, however, did not
behave well. He put up his glass and scrutinized Mrs. Mel, and then
examined Evan, and Rose thought that in his interchange of glances with
any one there was a lurking revival of the scene gone by. She signalled
with her eyebrows for Drummond to correct him, but Drummond had another
occupation. Andrew made the diversion. He whispered to his neighbour, and
the whisper went round, and the laugh; and Mr. Raikes grew extremely
uneasy in his seat, and betrayed an extraordinary alarm. But he also was
soon relieved. A messenger had come from Harry to Mrs. Evremonde, bearing
a slip of paper. This the lady glanced at, and handed it to Drummond. A
straggling pencil had traced these words:

'Just running by S.W. gates--saw the Captain coming in--couldn't stop to
stop him--tremendous hurry--important. Harry J.'

Drummond sent the paper to Lady Jocelyn. After her perusal of it a scout
was despatched to the summit of Olympus, and his report proclaimed the
advance in the direction of the Bull-dogs of a smart little figure of a
man in white hat and white trousers, who kept flicking his legs with a
cane.

Mrs. Evremonde rose and conferred with her ladyship an instant, and then
Drummond took her arm quietly, and passed round Olympus to the East, and
Lady Jocelyn broke up the sitting.

Juliana saw Rose go up to Evan, and make him introduce her to his mother.
She turned lividly white, and went to a corner of the park by herself,
and cried bitterly.

Lady Jocelyn, Sir Franks, and Sir John, remained by the tables, but
before the guests were out of ear-shot, the individual signalled from
Olympus presented himself.

'There are times when one can't see what else to do but to lie,' said her
ladyship to Sir Franks, 'and when we do lie the only way is to lie
intrepidly.'

Turning from her perplexed husband, she exclaimed:

'Ah! Lawson?'

Captain Evremonde lifted his hat, declining an intimacy.

'Where is my wife, madam?'

'Have you just come from the Arctic Regions?'

'I have come for my wife, madam!'

His unsettled grey eyes wandered restlessly on Lady Jocelyn's face. The
Countess standing near the Duke, felt some pity for the wife of that
cropped-headed, tight-skinned lunatic at large, but deeper was the
Countess's pity for Lady Jocelyn, in thinking of the account she would
have to render on the Day of Judgement, when she heard her ladyship
reply--

'Evelyn is not here.'

Captain Evremonde bowed profoundly, trailing his broad white hat along
the sward.

'Do me the favour to read this, madam,' he said, and handed a letter to
her.

Lady Jocelyn raised her brows as she gathered the contents of the letter.

'Ferdinand's handwriting!' she exclaimed.

'I accuse no one, madam,--I make no accusation. I have every respect for
you, madam,--you have my esteem. I am sorry to intrude, madam, an
intrusion is regretted. My wife runs away from her bed, madam, and I have
the law, madam, the law is with the husband. No force!' He lashed his
cane sharply against his white legs. 'The law, madam. No brute force!'
His cane made a furious whirl, cracking again on his legs, as he
reiterated, 'The law!'

'Does the law advise you to strike at a tangent all over the country in
search for her?' inquired Lady Jocelyn.

Captain Evremonde became ten times more voluble and excited.

Mrs. Mel was heard by the Countess to say: 'Her ladyship does not know
how to treat madmen.'

Nor did Sir Franks and Sir John. They began expostulating with him.

'A madman gets madder when you talk reason to him,' said Mrs. Mel.

And now the Countess stepped forward to Lady Jocelyn, and hoped she would
not be thought impertinent in offering her opinion as to how this frantic
person should be treated. The case indeed looked urgent. Many gentlemen
considered themselves bound to approach and be ready in case of need.
Presently the Countess passed between Sir Franks and Sir John, and with
her hand put up, as if she feared the furious cane, said:

'You will not strike me?'

'Strike a lady, madam?' The cane and hat were simultaneously lowered.

'Lady Jocelyn permits me to fetch for you a gentleman of the law. Or will
you accompany me to him?'

In a moment, Captain Evremonde's manners were subdued and civilized, and
in perfectly sane speech he thanked the Countess and offered her his arm.
The Countess smilingly waved back Sir John, who motioned to attend on
her, and away she went with the Captain, with all the glow of a woman who
feels that she is heaping coals of fire on the heads of her enemies.

Was she not admired now?

'Upon my honour,' said Lady Jocelyn, 'they are a remarkable family,'
meaning the Harringtons.

What farther she thought she did not say, but she was a woman who looked
to natural gifts more than the gifts of accidents; and Evan's chance
stood high with her then. So the battle of the Bull-dogs was fought, and
cruelly as the Countess had been assailed and wounded, she gained a
victory; yea, though Demogorgon, aided by the vindictive ghost of Sir
Abraham, took tangible shape in the ranks opposed to her. True, Lady
Jocelyn, forgetting her own recent intrepidity, condemned her as a liar;
but the fruits of the Countess's victory were plentiful. Drummond Forth,
fearful perhaps of exciting unjust suspicions in the mind of Captain
Evremonde, disappeared altogether. Harry was in a mess which threw him
almost upon Evan's mercy, as will be related. And, lastly, Ferdinand
Laxley, that insufferable young aristocrat, was thus spoken to by Lady
Jocelyn.

'This 'letter addressed to Lawson, telling him that his wife is here, is
in your handwriting, Ferdinand. I don't say you wrote it--I don't think
you could have written it. But, to tell you the truth, I have an
unpleasant impression about it, and I think we had better shake hands and
not see each other for some time.'

Laxley, after one denial of his guilt, disdained to repeat it. He met her
ladyship's hand haughtily, and, bowing to Sir Franks, turned on his heel.

So, then, in glorious complete victory, the battle of the Bull-dogs
ended!

Of the close of the pic-nic more remains to be told.

For the present I pause, in observance of those rules which demand that
after an exhibition of consummate deeds, time be given to the spectator
to digest what has passed before him.




CHAPTER XXXII

IN WHICH EVANS LIGHT BEGINS TO TWINKLE AGAIN

The dowagers were now firmly planted on Olympus. Along the grass lay the
warm strong colours of the evening sun, reddening the pine-stems and
yellowing the idle aspen-leaves. For a moment it had hung in doubt
whether the pic-nic could survive the two rude shocks it had received.
Happily the youthful element was large, and when the band, refreshed by
chicken and sherry, threw off half-a-dozen bars of one of those
irresistible waltzes that first catch the ear, and then curl round the
heart, till on a sudden they invade and will have the legs, a rush up
Parnassus was seen, and there were shouts and laughter and commotion, as
over other great fields of battle the corn will wave gaily and mark the
reestablishment of nature's reign.

How fair the sight! Approach the twirling couples. They talk as they
whirl. 'Fancy the run-away tailor!' is the male's remark, and he expects
to be admired for it, and is.

'That make-up Countess--his sister, you know--didn't you see her? she
turned green,' says Creation's second effort, almost occupying the place
of a rib.

'Isn't there a run-away wife, too?'

'Now, you mustn't be naughty!'

They laugh and flatter one another. The power to give and take flattery
to any amount is the rare treasure of youth.

Undoubtedly they are a poetical picture; but some poetical pictures talk
dreary prose; so we will retire.

Now, while the dancers carried on their business, and distance lent them
enchantment, Rose stood by Juliana, near an alder which hid them from the
rest.

'I don't accuse you,' she was saying; 'but who could have done this but
you? Ah, Juley! you will never get what you want if you plot for it. I
thought once you cared for Evan. If he had loved you, would I not have
done all that I could for you both? I pardon you with all my heart.'

'Keep your pardon!' was the angry answer. 'I have done more for you,
Rose. He is an adventurer, and I have tried to open your eyes and make
you respect your family. You may accuse me of what you like, I have my
conscience.'

'And the friendship of the Countess,' added Rose.

Juliana's figure shook as if she had been stung.

'Go and be happy--don't stay here and taunt me,' she said, with a ghastly
look. 'I suppose he can lie like his sister, and has told you all sorts
of tales.'

'Not a word--not a word!' cried Rose. 'Do you think my lover could tell a
lie?'

The superb assumption of the girl, and the true portrait of Evan's
character which it flashed upon Juliana, were to the latter such intense
pain, that she turned like one on the rack, exclaiming:

'You think so much of him? You are so proud of him? Then, yes! I love him
too, ugly, beastly as I am to look at! Oh, I know what you think! I loved
him from the first, and I knew all about him, and spared him pain. I did
not wait for him to fall from a horse. I watched every chance of his
being exposed. I let them imagine he cared for me. Drummond would have
told what he knew long before--only he knew there would not be much harm
in a tradesman's son marrying me. And I have played into your hands, and
now you taunt me!'

Rose remembered her fretful unkindness to Evan on the subject of his
birth, when her feelings toward him were less warm. Dwelling on that
alone, she put her arms round Juliana's stiffening figure, and said: 'I
dare say I am much more selfish than you. Forgive me, dear.'

Staring at her, Juliana replied, 'Now you are acting.'

'No,' said Rose, with a little effort to fondle her; 'I only feel that I
love you better for loving him.'

Generous as her words sounded, and were, Juliana intuitively struck to
the root of them, which was comfortless. For how calm in its fortune, how
strong in its love, must Rose's heart be, when she could speak in this
unwonted way!

'Go, and leave me, pray,' she said.

Rose kissed her burning cheek. 'I will do as you wish, dear. Try and know
me better, and be sister Juley as you used to be. I know I am
thoughtless, and horribly vain and disagreeable sometimes. Do forgive me.
I will love you truly.'

Half melting, Juliana pressed her hand.

'We are friends?' said Rose. 'Good-bye'; and her countenance lighted, and
she moved away, so changed by her happiness! Juliana was jealous of a
love strong as she deemed her own to overcome obstacles. She called to
her: 'Rose! Rose, you will not take advantage of what I have told you,
and repeat it to any one?'

Instantly Rose turned with a glance of full contempt over her shoulder.

'To whom?' she asked.

'To any one.'

'To him? He would not love me long if I did!'

Juliana burst into fresh tears, but Rose walked into the sunbeams and the
circle of the music.

Mounting Olympus, she inquired whether Ferdinand was within hail, as they
were pledged to dance the first dance together. A few hints were given,
and then Rose learnt that Ferdinand had been dismissed.

'And where is he?' she cried with her accustomed impetuosity. 'Mama!--of
course you did not accuse him--but, Mama! could you possibly let him go
with the suspicion that you thought him guilty of writing an anonymous
letter?'

'Not at all,' Lady Jocelyn replied. 'Only the handwriting was so
extremely like, and he was the only person who knew the address and the
circumstances, and who could have a motive--though I don't quite see what
it is--I thought it as well to part for a time.'

'But that's sophistry!' said Rose. 'You accuse or you exonerate. Nobody
can be half guilty. If you do not hold him innocent you are unjust!' Lady
Jocelyn rejoined: 'Yes? It's singular what a stock of axioms young people
have handy for their occasions.'

Rose loudly announced that she would right this matter.

'I can't think where Rose gets her passion for hot water,' said her
mother, as Rose ran down the ledge.

Two or three young gentlemen tried to engage her for a dance. She gave
them plenty of promises, and hurried on till she met Evan, and, almost
out of breath, told him the shameful injustice that had been done to her
friend.

'Mama is such an Epicurean! I really think she is worse than Papa. This
disgraceful letter looks like Ferdinand's writing, and she tells him so;
and, Evan! will you believe that instead of being certain it's impossible
any gentleman could do such a thing, she tells Ferdinand she shall feel
more comfortable if she doesn't see him for some time? Poor Ferdinand! He
has had so much to bear!'

Too sure of his darling to be envious now of any man she pitied, Evan
said, 'I would forfeit my hand on his innocence!'

'And so would I,' echoed Rose. 'Come to him with me, dear. Or no,' she
added, with a little womanly discretion, 'perhaps it would not be so
well--you're not very much cast down by what happened at dinner?'

'My darling! I think of you.'

'Of me, dear? Concealment is never of any service. What there is to be
known people may as well know at once. They'll gossip for a month, and
then forget it. Your mother is dreadfully outspoken, certainly; but she
has better manners than many ladies--I mean people in a position: you
understand me? But suppose, dear, this had happened, and I had said
nothing to Mama, and then we had to confess? Ah, you'll find I'm wiser
than you imagine, Mr. Evan.'

'Haven't I submitted to somebody's lead?'

'Yes, but with a sort of "under protest." I saw it by the mouth. Not
quite natural. You have been moody ever since--just a little. I suppose
it's our manly pride. But I'm losing time. Will you promise me not to
brood over that occurrence? Think of me. Think everything of me. I am
yours; and, dearest, if I love you, need you care what anybody else
thinks? We will soon change their opinion.'

'I care so little,' said Evan, somewhat untruthfully, 'that till you
return I shall go and sit with my mother.'

'Oh, she has gone. She made her dear old antiquated curtsey to Mama and
the company. "If my son has not been guilty of deception, I will leave
him to your good pleasure, my lady." That's what she said. Mama likes
her, I know. But I wish she didn't mouth her words so precisely: it
reminds me of--' the Countess, Rose checked herself from saying.
'Good-bye. Thank heaven! the worst has happened. Do you know what I
should do if I were you, and felt at all distressed? I should keep
repeating,' Rose looked archly and deeply up under his eyelids, "'I am
the son of a tradesman, and Rose loves me," over and over, and then, if
you feel ashamed, what is it of?'

She nodded adieu, laughing at her own idea of her great worth; an idea
very firmly fixed in her fair bosom, notwithstanding. Mrs. Melville said
of her, 'I used to think she had pride.' Lady Jocelyn answered, 'So she
has. The misfortune is that it has taken the wrong turning.'

Evan watched the figure that was to him as that of an angel--no less! She
spoke so frankly to them as she passed: or here and there went on with a
light laugh. It seemed an act of graciousness that she should open her
mouth to one! And, indeed, by virtue of a pride which raised her to the
level of what she thought it well to do, Rose was veritably on higher
ground than any present. She no longer envied her friend Jenny, who,
emerging from the shades, allured by the waltz, dislinked herself from
William's arm, and whispered exclamations of sorrow at the scene created
by Mr. Harrington's mother. Rose patted her hand, and said: 'Thank you,
Jenny dear but don't be sorry. I'm glad. It prevents a number of private
explanations.'

'Still, dear!' Jenny suggested.

'Oh! of course, I should like to lay my whip across the shoulders of the
person who arranged the conspiracy,' said Rose. 'And afterwards I don't
mind returning thanks to him, or her, or them.'

William cried out, 'I 'm always on your side, Rose.'

'And I'll be Jenny's bridesmaid,' rejoined Rose, stepping blithely away
from them.

Evan debated whither to turn when Rose was lost to his eyes. He had no
heart for dancing. Presently a servant approached, and said that Mr.
Harry particularly desired to see him. From Harry's looks at table, Evan
judged that the interview was not likely to be amicable. He asked the
direction he was to take, and setting out with long strides, came in
sight of Raikes, who walked in gloom, and was evidently labouring under
one of his mountains of melancholy. He affected to be quite out of the
world; but finding that Evan took the hint in his usual prosy manner, was
reduced to call after him, and finally to run and catch him.

'Haven't you one single spark of curiosity?' he began.

'What about?' said Evan.

'Why, about my amazing luck! You haven't asked a question. A matter of
course.'

Evan complimented him by asking a question: saying that Jack's luck
certainly was wonderful.

'Wonderful, you call it,' said Jack, witheringly. 'And what's more
wonderful is, that I'd give up all for quiet quarters in the Green
Dragon. I knew I was prophetic. I knew I should regret that peaceful
hostelry. Diocletian, if you like. I beg you to listen. I can't walk so
fast without danger.'

'Well, speak out, man. What's the matter with you?' cried Evan,
impatiently.

Jack shook his head: 'I see a total absence of sympathy,' he remarked. 'I
can't.'

'Then stand out of the way.'

Jack let him pass, exclaiming, with cold irony, 'I will pay homage to a
loftier Nine!'

Mr. Raikes could not in his soul imagine that Evan was really so little
inquisitive concerning a business of such importance as the trouble that
possessed him. He watched his friend striding off, incredulously, and
then commenced running in pursuit.

'Harrington, I give in; I surrender; you reduce me to prose. Thy nine
have conquered my nine!--pardon me, old fellow. I'm immensely upset. This
is the first day in my life that I ever felt what indigestion is. Egad,
I've got something to derange the best digestion going!

'Look here, Harrington. What happened to you today, I declare I think
nothing of. You owe me your assistance, you do, indeed; for if it hadn't
been for the fearful fascinations of your sister--that divine Countess--I
should have been engaged to somebody by this time, and profited by the
opportunity held out to me, and which is now gone. I 'm disgraced. I 'm
known. And the worst of it is, I must face people. I daren't turn tail.
Did you ever hear of such a dilemma?'

'Ay,' quoth Evan, 'what is it?'

Raikes turned pale. 'Then you haven't heard of it?' 'Not a word.'

'Then it's all for me to tell. I called on Messrs. Grist. I dined at the
Aurora afterwards. Depend upon it, Harrington, we're led by a star. I
mean, fellows with anything in them are. I recognized our Fallow field
host, and thinking to draw him out, I told our mutual histories. Next day
I went to these Messrs. Grist. They proposed the membership for Fallow
field, five hundred a year, and the loan of a curricle, on condition. It
's singular, Harrington; before anybody knew of the condition I didn't
care about it a bit. It seemed to me childish. Who would think of minding
wearing a tin plate? But now!--the sufferings of Orestes--what are they
to mine? He wasn't tied to his Furies. They did hover a little above him;
but as for me, I'm scorched; and I mustn't say where: my mouth is locked;
the social laws which forbid the employment of obsolete words arrest my
exclamations of despair. What do you advise?'

Evan stared a moment at the wretched object, whose dream of meeting a
beneficent old gentleman had brought him to be the sport of a cynical
farceur. He had shivers on his own account, seeing something of himself
magnified, and he loathed the fellow, only to feel more acutely what a
stigma may be.

'It 's a case I can't advise in,' he said, as gently as he could. 'I
should be off the grounds in a hurry.'

'And then I'm where I was before I met the horrid old brute!' Raikes
moaned.

'I told him over a pint of port-and noble stuff is that Aurora port!--I
told him--I amused him till he was on the point of bursting--I told him I
was such a gentleman as the world hadn't seen--minus money. So he
determined to launch me. He said I should lead the life of such a
gentleman as the world had not yet seen--on that simple condition, which
appeared to me childish, a senile whim; rather an indulgence of his.'

Evan listened to the tribulations of his friend as he would to those of a
doll--the sport of some experimental child. By this time he knew
something of old Tom Cogglesby, and was not astonished that he should
have chosen John Raikes to play one of his farces on. Jack turned off
abruptly the moment he saw they were nearing human figures, but soon
returned to Evan's side, as if for protection.

'Hoy! Harrington!' shouted Harry, beckoning to him. 'Come, make haste!
I'm in a deuce of a mess.'

The two Wheedles--Susan and Polly--were standing in front of him, and
after his call to Evan, he turned to continue some exhortation or appeal
to the common sense of women, largely indulged in by young men when the
mischief is done.

'Harrington, do speak to her. She looks upon you as a sort of parson. I
can't make her believe I didn't send for her. Of course, she knows I 'm
fond of her. My dear fellow,' he whispered, 'I shall be ruined if my
grandmother hears of it. Get her away, please. Promise anything.'

Evan took her hand and asked for the child.

'Quite well, sir,' faltered Susan.

'You should not have come here.'

Susan stared, and commenced whimpering: 'Didn't you wish it, sir?'

'Oh, she's always thinking of being made a lady of,' cried Polly. 'As if
Mr. Harry was going to do that. It wants a gentleman to do that.'

'The carriage came for me, sir, in the afternoon,' said Susan,
plaintively, 'with your compliments, and would I come. I thought--'

'What carriage?' asked Evan.

Raikes, who was ogling Polly, interposed grandly, 'Mine!'

'And you sent in my name for this girl to come here?' Evan turned
wrathfully on him.

'My dear Harrington, when you hit you knock down. The wise require but
one dose of experience. The Countess wished it, and I did dispatch.'

'The Countess!' Harry exclaimed; 'Jove! do you mean to say that the
Countess--'

'De Saldar,' added Jack. 'In Britain none were worthy found.'

Harry gave a long whistle.

'Leave at once,' said Evan to Susan. 'Whatever you may want send to me
for. And when you think you can meet your parents, I will take you to
them. Remember that is what you must do.'

'Make her give up that stupidness of hers, about being made a lady of,
Mr. Harrington,' said the inveterate Polly.

Susan here fell a-weeping.

'I would go, sir,' she said. 'I 'm sure I would obey you: but I can't. I
can't go back to the inn. They 're beginning to talk about me,
because--because I can't--can't pay them, and I'm ashamed.'

Evan looked at Harry.

'I forgot,' the latter mumbled, but his face was crimson. He put his
hands in his pockets. 'Do you happen to have a note or so?' he asked.

Evan took him aside and gave him what he had; and this amount, without
inspection or reserve, Harry offered to Susan. She dashed his hand
impetuously from her sight.

'There, give it to me,' said Polly. 'Oh, Mr. Harry! what a young man you
are!'

Whether from the rebuff, or the reproach, or old feelings reviving, Harry
was moved to go forward, and lay his hand on Susan's shoulder and mutter
something in her ear that softened her.

Polly thrust the notes into her bosom, and with a toss of her nose, as
who should say, 'Here 's nonsense they 're at again,' tapped Susan on the
other shoulder, and said imperiously: 'Come, Miss!'

Hurrying out a dozen sentences in one, Harry ended by suddenly kissing
Susan's cheek, and then Polly bore her away; and Harry, with great
solemnity, said to Evan:

''Pon my honour, I think I ought to! I declare I think I love that girl.
What's one's family? Why shouldn't you button to the one that just suits
you? That girl, when she's dressed, and in good trim, by Jove! nobody 'd
know her from a born lady. And as for grammar, I'd soon teach her that.'

Harry began to whistle: a sign in him that he was thinking his hardest.

'I confess to being considerably impressed by the maid Wheedle,' said
Raikes.

'Would you throw yourself away on her?' Evan inquired.

Apparently forgetting how he stood, Mr. Raikes replied:

'You ask, perhaps, a little too much of me. One owes consideration to
one's position. In the world's eyes a matrimonial slip outweighs a
peccadillo. No. To much the maid might wheedle me, but to Hymen! She's
decidedly fresh and pert--the most delicious little fat lips and cocky
nose; but cease we to dwell on her, or of us two, to! one will be
undone.'

Harry burst into a laugh: 'Is this the T.P. for Fallow field?'

'M.P. I think you mean,' quoth Raikes, serenely; but a curious glance
being directed on him, and pursuing him pertinaciously, it was as if the
pediment of the lofty monument he topped were smitten with violence. He
stammered an excuse, and retreated somewhat as it is the fashion to do
from the presence of royalty, followed by Harry's roar of laughter, in
which Evan cruelly joined.

'Gracious powers!' exclaimed the victim of ambition, 'I'm laughed at by
the son of a tailor!' and he edged once more into the shade of trees.

It was a strange sight for Harry's relatives to see him arm-in-arm with
the man he should have been kicking, challenging, denouncing, or whatever
the code prescribes: to see him talking to this young man earnestly,
clinging to him affectionately, and when he separated from him, heartily
wringing his hand. Well might they think that there was something
extraordinary in these Harringtons. Convicted of Tailordom, these
Harringtons appeared to shine with double lustre. How was it? They were
at a loss to say. They certainly could say that the Countess was
egregiously affected and vulgar; but who could be altogether complacent
and sincere that had to fight so hard a fight? In this struggle with
society I see one of the instances where success is entirely to be
honoured and remains a proof of merit. For however boldly antagonism may
storm the ranks of society, it will certainly be repelled, whereas
affinity cannot be resisted; and they who, against obstacles of birth,
claim and keep their position among the educated and refined, have that
affinity. It is, on the whole, rare, so that society is not often
invaded. I think it will have to front Jack Cade again before another Old
Mel and his progeny shall appear. You refuse to believe in Old Mel? You
know not nature's cunning.

Mrs. Shorne, Mrs. Melville, Miss Carrington, and many of the guests who
observed Evan moving from place to place, after the exposure, as they
called it, were amazed at his audacity. There seemed such a quietly
superb air about him. He would not look out of his element; and this,
knowing what they knew, was his offence. He deserved some commendation
for still holding up his head, but it was love and Rose who kept the
fires of his heart alive.

The sun had sunk. The figures on the summit of Parnassus were seen
bobbing in happy placidity against the twilight sky. The sun had sunk,
and many of Mr. Raikes' best things were unspoken. Wandering about in his
gloom, he heard a feminine voice:

'Yes, I will trust you.'

'You will not repent it,' was answered.

Recognizing the Duke, Mr. Raikes cleared his throat.

'A-hem, your Grace! This is how the days should pass. I think we should
diurnally station a good London band on high, and play his Majesty to
bed--the sun. My opinion is, it would improve the crops. I'm not, as yet,
a landed proprietor--'

The Duke stepped aside with him, and Raikes addressed no one for the next
twenty minutes. When he next came forth Parnassus was half deserted. It
was known that old Mrs. Bonner had been taken with a dangerous attack,
and under this third blow the pic-nic succumbed. Simultaneously with the
messenger that brought the news to Lady Jocelyn, one approached Evan, and
informed him that the Countess de Saldar urgently entreated him to come
to the house without delay. He also wished to speak a few words to her,
and stepped forward briskly. He had no prophetic intimations of the
change this interview would bring upon him.




CHAPTER XXXIII

THE HERO TAKES HIS RANK IN THE ORCHESTRA

The Countess was not in her dressing-room when Evan presented himself.
She was in attendance on Mrs. Bonner, Conning said; and the primness of
Conning was a thing to have been noticed by any one save a dreamy youth
in love. Conning remained in the room, keeping distinctly aloof. Her
duties absorbed her, but a presiding thought mechanically jerked back her
head from time to time: being the mute form of, 'Well, I never!' in
Conning's rank of life and intellectual capacity. Evan remained quite
still in a chair, and Conning was certainly a number of paces beyond
suspicion, when the Countess appeared, and hurling at the maid one of
those feminine looks which contain huge quartos of meaning, vented the
cold query:

'Pray, why did you not come to me, as you were commanded?'

'I was not aware, my lady,' Conning drew up to reply, and performed with
her eyes a lofty rejection of the volume cast at her, and a threat of
several for offensive operations, if need were.

The Countess spoke nearer to what she was implying 'You know I object to
this: it is not the first time.'

'Would your ladyship please to say what your ladyship means?'

In return for this insolent challenge to throw off the mask, the Countess
felt justified in punishing her by being explicit. 'Your irregularities
are not of yesterday,' she said, kindly making use of a word of double
signification still.

'Thank you, my lady.' Conning accepted the word in its blackest meaning.
'I am obliged to you. If your ladyship is to be believed, my character is
not worth much. But I can make distinctions, my lady.'

Something very like an altercation was continued in a sharp, brief
undertone; and then Evan, waking up to the affairs of the hour, heard
Conning say:

'I shall not ask your ladyship to give me a character.'

The Countess answering with pathos: 'It would, indeed, be to give you
one.'

He was astonished that the Countess should burst into tears when Conning
had departed, and yet more so that his effort to console her should bring
a bolt of wrath upon himself.

'Now, Evan, now see what you have done for us-do, and rejoice at it. The
very menials insult us. You heard what that creature said? She can make
distinctions. Oh! I could beat her. They know it: all the servants know
it: I can see it in their faces. I feel it when I pass them. The insolent
wretches treat us as impostors; and this Conning--to defy me! Oh! it
comes of my devotion to you. I am properly chastized. I passed Rose's
maid on the stairs, and her reverence was barely perceptible.'

Evan murmured that he was very sorry, adding, foolishly: 'Do you really
care, Louisa, for what servants think and say?'

The Countess sighed deeply: 'Oh! you are too thickskinned! Your mother
from top to toe! It is too dreadful! What have I done to deserve it? Oh,
Evan, Evan!'

Her head dropped in her lap. There was something ludicrous to Evan in
this excess of grief on account of such a business; but he was
tender-hearted and wrought upon to declare that, whether or not he was to
blame for his mother's intrusion that afternoon, he was ready to do what
he could to make up to the Countess for her sufferings: whereat the
Countess sighed again: asked him what he possibly could do, and doubted
his willingness to accede to the most trifling request.

'No; I do in verity believe that were I to desire you to do aught for
your own good alone, you would demur, Van.'

He assured her that she was mistaken.

'We shall see,' she said.

'And if once or twice, I have run counter to you, Louisa--'

'Abominable language!' cried the Countess, stopping her ears like a
child. 'Do not excruciate me so. You laugh! My goodness! what will you
come to!'

Evan checked his smile, and, taking her hand, said:

'I must tell you; that, on the whole, I see nothing to regret in what has
happened to-day. You may notice a change in the manners of the servants
and some of the country squiresses, but I find none in the bearing of the
real ladies, the true gentlemen, to me.'

'Because the change is too fine for you to perceive it,' interposed the
Countess.

'Rose, then, and her mother, and her father!' Evan cried impetuously.

'As for Lady Jocelyn!' the Countess shrugged:

'And Sir Franks!' her head shook: 'and Rose, Rose is, simply self-willed;
a "she will" or "she won't" sort of little person. No criterion!
Henceforth the world is against us. We have to struggle with it: it does
not rank us of it!'

'Your feeling on the point is so exaggerated, my dear Louisa', said Evan,
'one can't bring reason to your ears. The tattle we shall hear we shall
outlive. I care extremely for the good opinion of men, but I prefer my
own; and I do not lose it because my father was in trade.'

'And your own name, Evan Harrington, is on a shop,' the Countess struck
in, and watched him severely from under her brow, glad to mark that he
could still blush.

'Oh, heaven!' she wailed to increase the effect, 'on a shop! a brother of
mine!'

'Yes, Louisa. It may not last . . . I did it--is it not better that a son
should blush, than cast dishonour on his father's memory?'

'Ridiculous boy-notion!'

'Rose has pardoned it, Louisa--cannot you? I find that the naturally
vulgar and narrow-headed people, and cowards who never forego mean
advantages, are those only who would condemn me and my conduct in that.'

'And you have joy in your fraction of the world left to you!' exclaimed
his female-elder.

Changeing her manner to a winning softness, she said:

'Let me also belong to the very small party! You have been really
romantic, and most generous and noble; only the shop smells! But, never
mind, promise me you will not enter it.'

'I hope not,' said Evan.

'You do hope that you will not officiate? Oh, Evan the eternal
contemplation of gentlemen's legs! think of that! Think of yourself
sculptured in that attitude!' Innumerable little prickles and stings shot
over Evan's skin.

'There--there, Louisa!' he said, impatiently; 'spare your ridicule. We go
to London to-morrow, and when there I expect to hear that I have an
appointment, and that this engagement is over.' He rose and walked up and
down the room.

'I shall not be prepared to go to-morrow,' remarked the Countess, drawing
her figure up stiffly.

'Oh! well, if you can stay, Andrew will take charge of you, I dare say.'

'No, my dear, Andrew will not--a nonentity cannot--you must.'

'Impossible, Louisa,' said Evan, as one who imagines he is uttering a
thing of little consequence. 'I promised Rose.'

'You promised Rose that you would abdicate and retire? Sweet, loving
girl!'

Evan made no answer.

'You will stay with me, Evan.'

'I really can't,' he said in his previous careless tone.

'Come and sit down,' cried the Countess, imperiously.

'The first trifle is refused. It does not astonish me. I will honour you
now by talking seriously to you. I have treated you hitherto as a child.
Or, no--' she stopped her mouth; 'it is enough if I tell you, dear, that
poor Mrs. Bonner is dying, and that she desires my attendance on her to
refresh her spirit with readings on the Prophecies, and Scriptural
converse. No other soul in the house can so soothe her.'

'Then, stay,' said Evan.

'Unprotected in the midst of enemies! Truly!'

'I think, Louisa, if you can call Lady Jocelyn an enemy, you must read
the Scriptures by a false light.'

'The woman is an utter heathen!' interjected the Countess. 'An infidel
can be no friend. She is therefore the reverse. Her opinions embitter her
mother's last days. But now you will consent to remain with me, dear
Van!'

An implacable negative responded to the urgent appeal of her eyes.

'By the way,' he said, for a diversion, 'did you know of a girl stopping
at an inn in Fallow field?'

'Know a barmaid?' the Countess's eyes and mouth were wide at the
question.

'Did you send Raikes for her to-day?'

'Did Mr. Raikes--ah, Evan! that creature reminds me, you have no sense of
contrast. For a Brazilian ape--he resembles, if he is not truly one--what
contrast is he to an English gentleman! His proximity and
acquaintance--rich as he may be--disfigure you. Study contrast!'

Evan had to remind her that she had not answered him: whereat she
exclaimed: 'One would really think you had never been abroad. Have you
not evaded me, rather?'

The Countess commenced fanning her languid brows, and then pursued: 'Now,
my dear brother, I may conclude that you will acquiesce in my moderate
wishes. You remain. My venerable friend cannot last three days. She is
on the brink of a better world! I will confide to you that it is of the
utmost importance we should be here, on the spot, until the sad
termination! That is what I summoned you for. You are now at liberty.
Ta-ta, as soon as you please.'

She had baffled his little cross-examination with regard to Raikes, but
on the other point he was firm. She would listen to nothing: she affected
that her mandate had gone forth, and must be obeyed; tapped with her
foot, fanned deliberately, and was a consummate queen, till he turned the
handle of the door, when her complexion deadened, she started up,
trembling, and tripping towards him, caught him by the arm, and said:
'Stop! After all that I have sacrificed for you! As well try to raise the
dead as a Dawley from the dust he grovels in! Why did I consent to visit
this place? It was for you. I came, I heard that you had disgraced
yourself in drunkenness at Fallow field, and I toiled to eclipse that,
and I did. Young Jocelyn thought you were what you are I could spit the
word at you! and I dazzled him to give you time to win this minx, who
will spin you like a top if you get her. That Mr. Forth knew it as well,
and that vile young Laxley. They are gone! Why are they gone? Because
they thwarted me--they crossed your interests--I said they should go.
George Uplift is going to-day. The house is left to us; and I believe
firmly that Mrs. Bonner's will contains a memento of the effect of our
frequent religious conversations. So you would leave now? I suspect
nobody, but we are all human, and Wills would not have been tampered with
for the first time. Besides, and the Countess's imagination warmed till
she addressed her brother as a confederate, 'we shall then see to whom
Beckley Court is bequeathed. Either way it may be yours. Yours! and you
suffer their plots to drive you forth. Do you not perceive that Mama was
brought here to-day on purpose to shame us and cast us out? We are
surrounded by conspiracies, but if our faith is pure who can hurt us? If
I had not that consolation--would that you had it, too!--would it be
endurable to me to see those menials whispering and showing their forced
respect? As it is, I am fortified to forgive them. I breathe another
atmosphere. Oh, Evan! you did not attend to Mr. Parsley's beautiful last
sermon. The Church should have been your vocation.'

From vehemence the Countess had subsided to a mournful gentleness. She
had been too excited to notice any changes in her brother's face during
her speech, and when he turned from the door, and still eyeing her
fixedly, led her to a chair, she fancied from his silence that she had
subdued and convinced him. A delicious sense of her power, succeeded by a
weary reflection that she had constantly to employ it, occupied her mind,
and when presently she looked up from the shade of her hand, it was to
agitate her head pitifully at her brother.

'All this you have done for me, Louisa,' he said.

'Yes, Evan,--all!' she fell into his tone.

'And you are the cause of Laxley's going? Did you know anything of that
anonymous letter?'

He was squeezing her hand-with grateful affection, as she was deluded to
imagine.

'Perhaps, dear,--a little,' her conceit prompted her to admit.

'Did you write it?'

He gazed intently into her eyes, and as the question shot like a javelin,
she tried ineffectually to disengage her fingers; her delusion waned; she
took fright, but it was too late; he had struck the truth out of her
before she could speak. Her spirit writhed like a snake in his hold.
Innumerable things she was ready to say, and strove to; the words would
not form on her lips.

'I will be answered, Louisa.'

The stern manner he had assumed gave her no hope of eluding him. With an
inward gasp, and a sensation of nakedness altogether new to her, dismal,
and alarming, she felt that she could not lie. Like a creature forsaken
of her staunchest friend, she could have flung herself to the floor. The
next instant her natural courage restored her. She jumped up and stood at
bay.

'Yes. I did.'

And now he was weak, and she was strong, and used her strength.

'I wrote it to save you. Yes. Call on your Creator, and be my judge, if
you dare. Never, never will you meet a soul more utterly devoted to you,
Evan. This Mr. Forth, this Laxley, I said, should go, because they were
resolved to ruin you, and make you base. They are gone. The
responsibility I take on myself. Nightly--during the remainder of my
days--I will pray for pardon.'

He raised his head to ask sombrely: 'Is your handwriting like Laxley's?'

'It seems so,' she answered, with a pitiful sneer for one who could
arrest her exaltation to inquire about minutiae. 'Right or wrong, it is
done, and if you choose to be my judge, think whether your own conscience
is clear. Why did you come here? Why did you stay? You have your free
will,--do you deny that? Oh, I will take the entire blame, but you must
not be a hypocrite, Van. You know you were aware. We had no confidences.
I was obliged to treat you like a child; but for you to pretend to
suppose that roses grow in your path--oh, that is paltry! You are a
hypocrite or an imbecile, if that is your course.'

Was he not something of the former? The luxurious mist in which he had
been living, dispersed before his sister's bitter words, and, as she
designed he should, he felt himself her accomplice. But, again, reason
struggled to enlighten him; for surely he would never have done a thing
so disproportionate to the end to be gamed! It was the unconnected action
of his brain that thus advised him. No thoroughly-fashioned,
clear-spirited man conceives wickedness impossible to him: but wickedness
so largely mixed with folly, the best of us may reject as not among our
temptations. Evan, since his love had dawned, had begun to talk with his
own nature, and though he knew not yet how much it would stretch or
contract, he knew that he was weak and could not perform moral wonders
without severe struggles. The cynic may add, if he likes--or without
potent liquors.

Could he be his sister's judge? It is dangerous for young men to be too
good. They are so sweeping in their condemnations, so sublime in their
conceptions of excellence, and the most finished Puritan cannot out-do
their demands upon frail humanity. Evan's momentary self-examination
saved him from this, and he told the Countess, with a sort of cold
compassion, that he himself dared not blame her.

His tone was distinctly wanting in admiration of her, but she was
somewhat over-wrought, and leaned her shoulder against him, and became
immediately his affectionate, only too-zealous, sister; dearly to be
loved, to be forgiven, to be prized: and on condition of inserting a
special petition for pardon in her orisons, to live with a calm
conscience, and to be allowed to have her own way with him during the
rest of her days.

It was a happy union--a picture that the Countess was lured to admire in
the glass.

Sad that so small a murmur should destroy it for ever!

'What?' cried the Countess, bursting from his arm.

'Go?' she emphasized with the hardness of determined unbelief, as if
plucking the words, one by one, out of her reluctant ears. 'Go to Lady
Jocelyn, and tell her I wrote the letter?'

'You can do no less, I fear,' said Evan, eyeing the floor and breathing a
deep breath.

'Then I did hear you correctly? Oh, you must be mad-idiotic! There, pray
go away, Evan. Come in the morning. You are too much for my nerves.'

Evan rose, putting out his hand as if to take hers and plead with her.
She rejected the first motion, and repeated her desire for him to leave
her; saying, cheerfully--

'Good night, dear; I dare say we shan't meet till the morning.'

'You can't let this injustice continue a single night, Louisa?' said he.

She was deep in the business of arrangeing a portion of her attire.

'Go-go; please,' she responded.

Lingering, he said: 'If I go, it will be straight to Lady Jocelyn.'

She stamped angrily.

'Only go!' and then she found him gone, and she stooped lower to the
glass, to mark if the recent agitation were observable under her eyes.
There, looking at herself, her heart dropped heavily in her bosom. She
ran to the door and hurried swiftly after Evan, pulling him back
speechlessly.

'Where are you going, Evan?'

'To Lady Jocelyn.'

The unhappy victim of her devotion stood panting.

'If you go, I--I take poison!' It was for him now to be struck; but he
was suffering too strong an anguish to be susceptible to mock tragedy.
The Countess paused to study him. She began to fear her brother. 'I
will!' she reiterated wildly, without moving him at all. And the quiet
inflexibility of his face forbade the ultimate hope which lies in giving
men a dose of hysterics when they are obstinate. She tried by taunts and
angry vituperations to make him look fierce, if but an instant, to
precipitate her into an exhibition she was so well prepared for.

'Evan! what! after all my love, my confidence in you--I need not have
told you--to expose us! Brother? would you? Oh!'

'I will not let this last another hour,' said Evan, firmly, at the same
time seeking to caress her. She spurned his fruitless affection, feeling,
nevertheless, how cruel was her fate; for, with any other save a brother,
she had arts at her disposal to melt the manliest resolutions. The glass
showed her that her face was pathetically pale; the tones of her voice
were rich and harrowing. What did they avail with a brother? 'Promise
me,' she cried eagerly, 'promise me to stop here--on this spot-till I
return.'

The promise was extracted. The Countess went to fetch Caroline. Evan did
not count the minutes. One thought was mounting in his brain-the scorn of
Rose. He felt that he had lost her. Lost her when he had just won her! He
felt it, without realizing it. The first blows of an immense grief are
dull, and strike the heart through wool, as it were. The belief of the
young in their sorrow has to be flogged into them, on the good old
educational principle. Could he do less than this he was about to do?
Rose had wedded her noble nature to him, and it was as much her spirit as
his own that urged him thus to forfeit her, to be worthy of her by
assuming unworthiness.

There he sat neither conning over his determination nor the cause for it,
revolving Rose's words about Laxley, and nothing else. The words were so
sweet and so bitter; every now and then the heavy smiting on his heart
set it quivering and leaping, as the whip starts a jaded horse.

Meantime the Countess was participating in a witty conversation in the
drawing-room with Sir John and the Duke, Miss Current, and others; and it
was not till after she had displayed many graces, and, as one or two
ladies presumed to consider, marked effrontery, that she rose and drew
Caroline away with her. Returning to her dressing-room, she found that
Evan had faithfully kept his engagement; he was on the exact spot where
she had left him.

Caroline came to him swiftly, and put her hand to his forehead that she
might the better peruse his features, saying, in her mellow caressing
voice: 'What is this, dear Van, that you will do? Why do you look so
wretched?'

'Has not Louisa told you?'

'She has told me something, dear, but I don't know what it is. That you
are going to expose us? What further exposure do we need? I'm sure, Van,
my pride--what I had--is gone. I have none left!'

Evan kissed her brows warmly. An explanation, full of the Countess's
passionate outcries of justification, necessity, and innocence in higher
than fleshly eyes, was given, and then the three were silent.

'But, Van,' Caroline commenced, deprecatingly, 'my darling! of what
use--now! Whether right or wrong, why should you, why should you, when
the thing is done, dear?--think!'

'And you, too, would let another suffer under an unjust accusation?' said
Evan.

'But, dearest, it is surely your duty to think of your family first. Have
we not been afflicted enough? Why should you lay us under this fresh
burden?'

'Because it 's better to bear all now than a life of remorse,' answered
Evan.

'But this Mr. Laxley--I cannot pity him; he has behaved so insolently to
you throughout! Let him suffer.'

'Lady Jocelyn,' said Evan, 'has been unintentionally unjust to him, and
after her kindness--apart from the right or wrong--I will not--I can't
allow her to continue so.'

'After her kindness!' echoed the Countess, who had been fuming at
Caroline's weak expostulations. 'Kindness! Have I not done ten times for
these Jocelyns what they have done for us? O mio Deus! why, I have
bestowed on them the membership for Fallow field: I have saved her from
being a convicted liar this very day. Worse! for what would have been
talked of the morals of the house, supposing the scandal. Oh! indeed I
was tempted to bring that horrid mad Captain into the house face to face
with his flighty doll of a wife, as I, perhaps, should have done, acting
by the dictates of my conscience. I lied for Lady Jocelyn, and handed the
man to a lawyer, who withdrew him. And this they owe to me! Kindness?
They have given us bed and board, as the people say. I have repaid them
for that.'

'Pray be silent, Louisa,' said Evan, getting up hastily, for the sick
sensation Rose had experienced came over him. His sister's plots, her
untruth, her coarseness, clung to him and seemed part of his blood. He
now had a personal desire to cut himself loose from the wretched
entanglement revealed to him, whatever it cost.

'Are you really, truly going?' Caroline exclaimed, for he was near the
door.

'At a quarter to twelve at night!' sneered the Countess, still imagining
that he, like herself, must be partly acting.

'But, Van, is it--dearest, think! is it manly for a brother to go and
tell of his sister? And how would it look?'

Evan smiled. 'Is it that that makes you unhappy? Louisa's name will not
be mentioned--be sure of that.'

Caroline was stooping forward to him. Her figure straightened: 'Good
Heaven, Evan! you are not going to take it on yourself? Rose!--she will
hate you.'

'God help me!' he cried internally.

'Oh, Evan, darling! consider, reflect!' She fell on her knees, catching
his hand. 'It is worse for us that you should suffer, dearest! Think of
the dreadful meanness and baseness of what you will have to acknowledge.'

'Yes!' sighed the youth, and his eyes, in his extreme pain, turned to the
Countess reproachfully.

'Think, dear,' Caroline hurried on, 'he gains nothing for whom you do
this--you lose all. It is not your deed. You will have to speak an
untruth. Your ideas are wrong--wrong, I know they are. You will have to
lie. But if you are silent, the little, little blame that may attach to
us will pass away, and we shall be happy in seeing our brother happy.'

'You are talking to Evan as if he had religion,' said the Countess, with
steady sedateness. And at that moment, from the sublimity of his pagan
virtue, the young man groaned for some pure certain light to guide him:
the question whether he was about to do right made him weak. He took
Caroline's head between his two hands, and kissed her mouth. The act
brought Rose to his senses insufferably, and she--his Goddess of truth
and his sole guiding light-spurred him afresh.

'My family's dishonour is mine, Caroline. Say nothing more--don't think
of me. I go to Lady Jocelyn tonight. To-morrow we leave, and there's the
end. Louisa, if you have any new schemes for my welfare, I beg you to
renounce them.'

'Gratitude I never expected from a Dawley!' the Countess retorted.

'Oh, Louisa! he is going!' cried Caroline; 'kneel to him with me: stop
him: Rose loves him, and he is going to make her hate him.'

'You can't talk reason to one who's mad,' said the Countess, more like
the Dawley she sprang from than it would have pleased her to know.

'My darling! My own Evan! it will kill me,' Caroline exclaimed, and
passionately imploring him, she looked so hopelessly beautiful, that Evan
was agitated, and caressed her, while he said, softly: 'Where our honour
is not involved I would submit to your smallest wish.'

'It involves my life--my destiny!' murmured Caroline.

Could he have known the double meaning in her words, and what a saving
this sacrifice of his was to accomplish, he would not have turned to do
it feeling abandoned of heaven and earth.

The Countess stood rigidly as he went forth. Caroline was on her knees,
sobbing.




CHAPTER XXXIV

A PAGAN SACRIFICE

Three steps from the Countess's chamber door, the knot of Evan's
resolution began to slacken. The clear light of his simple duty grew
cloudy and complex. His pride would not let him think that he was
shrinking, but cried out in him, 'Will you be believed?' and whispered
that few would believe him guilty of such an act. Yet, while something
said that full surely Lady Jocelyn would not, a vague dread that Rose
might, threw him back on the luxury of her love and faith in him. He
found himself hoping that his statement would be laughed at. Then why
make it?

No: that was too blind a hope. Many would take him at his word; all--all
save Lady Jocelyn! Rose the first! Because he stood so high with her now
he feared the fall. Ah, dazzling pinnacle! our darlings shoot us up on a
wondrous juggler's pole, and we talk familiarly to the stars, and are so
much above everybody, and try to walk like creatures with two legs,
forgetting that we have but a pin's point to stand on up there. Probably
the absence of natural motion inspires the prophecy that we must
ultimately come down: our unused legs wax morbidly restless. Evan thought
it good that Rose should lift her head to look at him; nevertheless, he
knew that Rose would turn from him the moment he descended from his
superior station. Nature is wise in her young children, though they wot
not of it, and are always trying to rush away from her. They escape their
wits sooner than their instincts.

But was not Rose involved in him, and part of him? Had he not sworn never
to renounce her? What was this but a betrayal?

Go on, young man: fight your fight. The little imps pluck at you: the big
giant assails you: the seductions of the soft-mouthed siren are not
wanting. Slacken the knot an instant, and they will all have play. And
the worst is, that you may be wrong, and they may be right! For is it,
can it be proper for you to stain the silvery whiteness of your skin by
plunging headlong into yonder pitch-bath? Consider the defilement!
Contemplate your hideous aspect on issuing from that black baptism!

As to the honour of your family, Mr. Evan Harrington, pray, of what sort
of metal consists the honour of a tailor's family?

One little impertinent imp ventured upon that question on his own
account. The clever beast was torn back and strangled instantaneously by
his experienced elders, but not before Evan's pride had answered him.
Exalted by Love, he could dread to abase himself and strip off his
glittering garments; lowered by the world, he fell back upon his innate
worth.

Yes, he was called on to prove it; he was on his way to prove it.
Surrendering his dearest and his best, casting aside his dreams, his
desires, his aspirations, for this stern duty, he at least would know
that he made himself doubly worthy of her who abandoned him, and the
world would scorn him by reason of his absolute merit. Coming to this
point, the knot of his resolve tightened again; he hugged it with the
furious zeal of a martyr.

Religion, the lack of which in him the Countess deplored, would have
guided him and silenced the internal strife. But do not despise a virtue
purely Pagan. The young who can act readily up to the Christian light are
happier, doubtless: but they are led, they are passive: I think they do
not make such capital Christians subsequently. They are never in such
danger, we know; but some in the flock are more than sheep. The heathen
ideal it is not so very easy to attain, and those who mount from it to
the Christian have, in my humble thought, a firmer footing.

So Evan fought his hard fight from the top of the stairs to the bottom. A
Pagan, which means our poor unsupported flesh, is never certain of his
victory. Now you will see him kneeling to his Gods, and anon drubbing
them; or he makes them fight for him, and is complacent at the issue.
Evan had ceased to pick his knot with one hand and pull it with the
other: but not finding Lady Jocelyn below, and hearing that she had
retired for the night, he mounted the stairs, and the strife recommenced
from the bottom to the top. Strange to say, he was almost unaware of any
struggle going on within him. The suggestion of the foolish little imp
alone was loud in the heart of his consciousness; the rest hung more in
his nerves than in his brain. He thought: 'Well, I will speak it out to
her in the morning'; and thought so sincerely, while an ominous sigh of
relief at the reprieve rose from his over-burdened bosom.

Hardly had the weary deep breath taken flight, when the figure of Lady
Jocelyn was seen advancing along the corridor, with a lamp in her hand.
She trod heavily, in a kind of march, as her habit was; her large
fully-open grey eyes looking straight ahead. She would have passed him,
and he would have let her pass, but seeing the unusual pallor on her
face, his love for this lady moved him to step forward and express a hope
that she had no present cause for sorrow.

Hearing her mother's name, Lady Jocelyn was about to return a
conventional answer. Recognizing Evan, she said:

'Ah! Mr. Harrington! Yes, I fear it's as bad as it can be. She can
scarcely outlive the night.'

Again he stood alone: his chance was gone. How could he speak to her in
her affliction? Her calm sedate visage had the beauty of its youth, when
lighted by the animation that attends meetings or farewells. In her bow
to Evan, he beheld a lovely kindness more unique, if less precious, than
anything he had ever seen on the face of Rose. Half exultingly, he
reflected that no opportunity would be allowed him now to teach that
noble head and truest of human hearts to turn from him: the clear-eyed
morrow would come: the days of the future would be bright as other days!

Wrapped in the comfort of his cowardice, he started to see Lady Jocelyn
advancing to him again.

'Mr. Harrington,' she said, 'Rose tells me you leave us early in the
morning. I may as well shake your hand now. We part very good friends. I
shall always be glad to hear of you.'

Evan pressed her hand, and bowed. 'I thank you, madam,' was all he could
answer.

'It will be better if you don't write to Rose.'

Her tone was rather that of a request than an injunction.

'I have no right to do so, my lady.'

'She considers that you have: I wish her to have, a fair trial.'

His voice quavered. The philosophic lady thought it time to leave him.

'So good-bye. I can trust you without extracting a promise. If you ever
have need of a friend, you know you are at liberty to write to me.'

'You are tired, my lady?' He put this question more to dally with what he
ought to be saying.

'Tolerably. Your sister, the Countess, relieves me in the night. I fancy
my mother finds her the better nurse of the two.'

Lady Jocelyn's face lighted in its gracious pleasant way, as she just
inclined her head: but the mention of the Countess and her attendance on
Mrs. Bonner had nerved Evan: the contrast of her hypocrisy and vile
scheming with this most open, noble nature, acted like a new force within
him. He begged Lady Jocelyn's permission to speak with her in private.
Marking his fervid appearance, she looked at him seriously.

'Is it really important?'

'I cannot rest, madam, till it is spoken.'

'I mean, it doesn't pertain to the delirium? We may sleep upon that.'

He divined her sufficiently to answer: 'It concerns a piece of injustice
done by you, madam, and which I can help you to set right.'

Lady Jocelyn stared somewhat. 'Follow me into my dressing-room,' she
said, and led the way.

Escape was no longer possible. He was on the march to execution, and into
the darkness of his brain danced John Raikes, with his grotesque
tribulations. It was the harsh savour of reality that conjured up this
flighty being, who probably never felt a sorrow or a duty. The farce Jack
lived was all that Evan's tragic bitterness could revolve, and seemed to
be the only light in his mind. You might have seen a smile on his mouth
when he was ready to ask for a bolt from heaven to crush him.

'Now,' said her ladyship, and he found that the four walls enclosed them,
'what have I been doing?'

She did not bid him be seated. Her brevity influenced him to speak to the
point.

'You have dismissed Mr. Laxley, my lady: he is innocent.'

'How do you know that?'

'Because,'--a whirl of sensations beset the wretched youth, 'because I am
guilty.'

His words had run ahead of his wits; and in answer to Lady Jocelyn's
singular exclamation he could but simply repeat them.

Her head drew back; her face was slightly raised; she looked, as he had
seen her sometimes look at the Countess, with a sort of speculative
amazement.

'And why do you come to tell me?'

'For the reason that I cannot allow you to be unjust, madam.'

'What on earth was your motive?'

Evan stood silent, flinching from her frank eyes.

'Well, well, well!' Her ladyship dropped into a chair, and thumped her
knees.

There was lawyer's blood in Lady Jocelyn's veins she had the judicial
mind. A confession was to her a confession. She tracked actions up to a
motive; but one who came voluntarily to confess needed no sifting. She
had the habit of treating things spoken as facts.

'You absolutely wrote that letter to Mrs. Evremonde's husband!'

Evan bowed, to avoid hearing his own lie.

'You discovered his address and wrote to him, and imitated Mr. Laxley's
handwriting, to effect the purpose you may have had?'

Her credulity did require his confirmation of it, and he repeated: 'It
is my deed.'

'Hum! And you sent that premonitory slip of paper to her?'

'To Mrs. Evremonde?'

'Somebody else was the author of that, perhaps?'

'It is all on me.'

'In that case, Mr. Harrington, I can only say that it's quite right you
should quit this house to-morrow morning.'

Her ladyship commenced rocking in her chair, and then added: 'May I ask,
have you madness in your family? No? Because when one can't discern a
motive, it's natural to ascribe certain acts to madness. Had Mrs.
Evremonde offended you? or Ferdinand--but one only hears of such
practices towards fortunate rivals, and now you have come to undo what
you did! I must admit, that taking the monstrousness of the act and the
inconsequence of your proceedings together, the whole affair becomes more
incomprehensible to me than it was before. Would it be unpleasant to you
to favour me with explanations?'

She saw the pain her question gave him, and, passing it, said:

'Of course you need not be told that Rose must hear of this?'

'Yes,' said Evan, 'she must hear it.'

'You know what that 's equivalent to? But, if you like, I will not speak
to her till you, have left us.'

'Instantly,' cried Evan. 'Now-to-night! I would not have her live a
minute in a false estimate of me.'

Had Lady Jocelyn's intellect been as penetrating as it was masculine, she
would have taken him and turned him inside out in a very short time; for
one who would bear to see his love look coldly on him rather than endure
a minute's false estimate of his character, and who could yet stoop to
concoct a vile plot, must either be mad or simulating the baseness for
some reason or other. She perceived no motive for the latter, and she
held him to be sound in the head, and what was spoken from the mouth she
accepted. Perhaps, also, she saw in the complication thus offered an
escape for Rose, and was the less inclined to elucidate it herself. But
if her intellect was baffled, her heart was unerring. A man proved guilty
of writing an anonymous letter would not have been allowed to stand long
in her room. She would have shown him to the door of the house speedily;
and Evan was aware in his soul that he had not fallen materially in her
esteem. He had puzzled and confused her, and partly because she had the
feeling that this young man was entirely trustworthy, and because she
never relied on her feelings, she let his own words condemn him, and did
not personally discard him. In fact, she was a veritable philosopher. She
permitted her fellows to move the world on as they would, and had no
other passions in the contemplation of the show than a cultured audience
will usually exhibit.

'Strange,--most strange! I thought I was getting old!' she said, and eyed
the culprit as judges generally are not wont to do. 'It will be a shock
to Rose. I must tell you that I can't regret it. I would not have
employed force with her, but I should have given her as strong a taste of
the world as it was in my power to give. Girls get their reason from
society. But, come! if you think you can make your case out better to
her, you shall speak to her first yourself.'

'No, my lady,' said Evan, softly.

'You would rather not?'

'I could not.'

'But, I suppose, she'll want to speak to you when she knows it.'

'I can take death from her hands, but I cannot slay myself.'

The language was natural to his condition, though the note was pitched
high. Lady Jocelyn hummed till the sound of it was over, and an idea
striking her, she said:

'Ah, by the way, have you any tremendous moral notions?'

'I don't think I have, madam.'

'People act on that mania sometimes, I believe. Do you think it an
outrage on decency for a wife to run away from a mad husband whom they
won't shut up, and take shelter with a friend? Is that the cause? Mr.
Forth is an old friend of mine. I would trust my daughter with him in a
desert, and stake my hand on his honour.'

'Oh, Lady Jocelyn!' cried Evan. 'Would to God you might ever have said
that of me! Madam, I love you. I shall never see you again. I shall never
meet one to treat me so generously. I leave you, blackened in
character--you cannot think of me without contempt. I can never hope that
this will change. But, for your kindness let me thank you.'

And as speech is poor where emotion is extreme--and he knew his own to be
especially so--he took her hand with petitioning eyes, and dropping on
one knee, reverentially kissed it.

Lady Jocelyn was human enough to like to be appreciated. She was a
veteran Pagan, and may have had the instinct that a peculiar virtue in
this young one was the spring of his conduct. She stood up and said:
'Don't forget that you have a friend here.'

The poor youth had to turn his head from her.

'You wish that I should tell Rose what you have told me at once, Mr.
Harrington?'

'Yes, my lady; I beg that you will do so.'

'Well!'

And the queer look Lady Jocelyn had been wearing dimpled into absolute
wonder. A stranger to Love's cunning, she marvelled why he should desire
to witness the scorn Rose would feel for him.

'If she's not asleep, then, she shall hear it now,' said her ladyship.
'You understand that it will be mentioned to no other person.'

'Except to Mr. Laxley, madam, to whom I shall offer the satisfaction he
may require. But I will undertake that.'

'Just as you think proper on that matter,' remarked her philosophical
ladyship, who held that man was a fighting animal, and must not have his
nature repressed.

She lighted him part of the way, and then turned off to Rose's chamber.

Would Rose believe it of him? Love combated his dismal foreboding.
Strangely, too, now that he had plunged into his pitch-bath, the guilt
seemed to cling to him, and instead of hoping serenely, or fearing
steadily, his spirit fell in a kind of abject supplication to Rose, and
blindly trusted that she would still love even if she believed him base.
In his weakness he fell so low as to pray that she might love that
crawling reptile who could creep into a house and shrink from no vileness
to win her.




CHAPTER XXXV

ROSE WOUNDED

The light of morning was yet cold along the passages of the house when
Polly Wheedle, hurrying to her young mistress, met her loosely dressed
and with a troubled face.

'What 's the matter, Polly? I was coming to you.'

'O, Miss Rose! and I was coming to you. Miss Bonner's gone back to her
convulsions again. She's had them all night. Her hair won't last till
thirty, if she keeps on giving way to temper, as I tell her: and I know
that from a barber.'

'Tush, you stupid Polly! Does she want to see me?'

'You needn't suspect that, Miss. But you quiet her best, and I thought
I'd come to you. But, gracious!'

Rose pushed past her without vouchsafing any answer to the look in her
face, and turned off to Juliana's chamber, where she was neither welcomed
nor repelled. Juliana said she was perfectly well, and that Polly was
foolishly officious: whereupon Rose ordered Polly out of the room, and
said to Juliana, kindly: 'You have not slept, dear, and I have not
either. I am so unhappy.'

Whether Rose intended by this communication to make Juliana eagerly
attentive, and to distract her from her own affair, cannot be said, but
something of the effect was produced.

'You care for him, too,' cried Rose, impetuously. 'Tell me, Juley: do you
think him capable of any base action? Do you think he would do what any
gentleman would be ashamed to own? Tell me.'

Juliana looked at Rose intently, but did not reply.

Rose jumped up from the bed. 'You hesitate, Juley? What? Could you think
so?'

Young women after a common game are shrewd. Juliana may have seen that
Rose was not steady on the plank she walked, and required support.

'I don't know,' she said, turning her cheek to her pillow.

'What an answer!' Rose exclaimed. 'Have you no opinion? What did you say
yesterday? It's silent as the grave with me: but if you do care for him,
you must think one thing or the other.'

'I suppose not, then--no,' said Juliana.

Repeating the languid words bitterly, Rose continued:

'What is it to love without having faith in him you love? You make my
mind easier.'

Juliana caught the implied taunt, and said, fretfully:

'I'm ill. You're so passionate. You don't tell me what it is. How can I
answer you?'

'Never mind,' said Rose, moving to the door, wondering why she had spoken
at all: but when Juliana sprang forward, and caught her by the dress to
stop her, and with a most unwonted outburst of affection, begged of her
to tell her all, the wound in Rose's breast began to bleed, and she was
glad to speak.

'Juley, do you-can you believe that he wrote that letter which poor
Ferdinand was--accused of writing?'

Juliana appeared to muse, and then responded: 'Why should he do such a
thing?'

'O my goodness, what a girl!' Rose interjected.

'Well, then, to please you, Rose, of course I think he is too
honourable.'

'You do think so, Juley? But if he himself confessed it--what then? You
would not believe him, would you?'

'Oh, then I can't say. Why should he condemn himself?'

'But you would know--you would know that he was a man to suffer death
rather than be guilty of the smallest baseness. His birth--what is that!'
Rose filliped her fingers: 'But his acts--what he is himself you would be
sure of, would you not? Dear Juley! Oh, for heaven's sake, speak out
plainly to me.'

A wily look had crept over Juliana's features.

'Certainly,' she said, in a tone that belied it, and drawing Rose to her
bosom, the groan she heard there was passing sweet to her.

'He has confessed it to Mama,' sobbed Rose. 'Why did he not come to me
first? He has confessed it--the abominable thing has come out of his own
mouth. He went to her last night . . .'

Juliana patted her shoulders regularly as they heaved. When words were
intelligible between them, Juliana said:

'At least, dear, you must admit that he has redeemed it.'

'Redeemed it? Could he do less?' Rose dried her eyes vehemently, as if
the tears shamed her. 'A man who could have let another suffer for his
crime--I could never have lifted my head again. I think I would have cut
off this hand that plighted itself to him! As it is, I hardly dare look
at myself. But you don't think it, dear? You know it to be false! false!
false!'

'Why should Mr. Harrington confess it?' said Juliana.

'Oh, don't speak his name!' cried Rose.

Her cousin smiled. 'So many strange things happen,' she said, and sighed.

'Don't sigh: I shall think you believe it!' cried Rose. An appearance of
constrained repose was assumed. Rose glanced up, studied for an instant,
and breathlessly uttered: 'You do, you do believe it, Juley?'

For answer, Juliana hugged her with much warmth, and recommenced the
patting.

'I dare say it's a mistake,' she remarked. 'He may have been jealous of
Ferdinand. You know I have not seen the letter. I have only heard of it.
In love, they say, you ought to excuse . . . And the want of religious
education! His sister . . .'

Rose interrupted her with a sharp shudder. Might it not be possible that
one who had the same blood as the Countess would stoop to a momentary
vileness.

How changed was Rose from the haughty damsel of yesterday!

'Do you think my lover could tell a lie?' 'He--would not love me long if
I did!'

These phrases arose and rang in Juliana's ears while she pursued the task
of comforting the broken spirit that now lay prone on the bed, and now
impetuously paced the room. Rose had come thinking the moment Juliana's
name was mentioned, that here was the one to fortify her faith in Evan:
one who, because she loved, could not doubt him. She moaned in a terror
of distrust, loathing her cousin: not asking herself why she needed
support. And indeed she was too young for much clear self-questioning,
and her blood was flowing too quickly for her brain to perceive more than
one thing at a time.

'Does your mother believe it?' said Juliana, evading a direct assault.

'Mama? She never doubts what you speak,' answered Rose, disconsolately.

'She does?'

'Yes.'

Whereat Juliana looked most grave, and Rose felt that it was hard to
breathe.

She had grown very cold and calm, and Juliana had to be expansive
unprovoked.

'Believe nothing, dear, till you hear it from his own lips. If he can
look in your face and say that he did it . . . well, then! But of course
he cannot. It must be some wonderful piece of generosity to his rival.'

'So I thought, Juley! so I thought,' cried Rose, at the new light, and
Juliana smiled contemptuously, and the light flickered and died, and all
was darker than before in the bosom of Rose. She had borne so much that
this new drop was poison.

'Of course it must be that, if it is anything,' Juliana pursued. 'You
were made to be happy, Rose. And consider, if it is true, people of very
low birth, till they have lived long with other people, and if they have
no religion, are so very likely to do things. You do not judge them as
you do real gentlemen, and one must not be too harsh--I only wish to
prepare you for the worst.'

A dim form of that very idea had passed through Rose, giving her small
comfort.

'Let him tell you with his own lips that what he has told your mother is
true, and then, and not till then, believe him,' Juliana concluded, and
they kissed kindly, and separated. Rose had suddenly lost her firm step,
but no sooner was Juliana alone than she left the bed, and addressed her
visage to the glass with brightening eyes, as one who saw the glimmer of
young hope therein.

'She love him! Not if he told me so ten thousand times would I believe
it! and before he has said a syllable she doubts him. Asking me in that
frantic way! as if I couldn't see that she wanted me to help her to her
faith in him, as she calls it. Not name his name? Mr. Harrington! I may
call him Evan: some day!'

Half-uttered, half-mused, the unconscious exclamations issued from her,
and for many a weary day since she had dreamed of love, and studied that
which is said to attract the creature, she had not been so glowingly
elated or looked so much farther in the glass than its pale reflection.




CHAPTER XXXVI

BEFORE BREAKFAST

Cold through the night the dark-fringed stream had whispered under Evan's
eyes, and the night breeze voiced 'Fool, fool!' to him, not without a
distant echo in his heart. By symbols and sensations he knew that Rose
was lost to him. There was no moon: the water seemed aimless, passing on
carelessly to oblivion. Now and then, the trees stirred and talked, or a
noise was heard from the pastures. He had slain the life that lived in
them, and the great glory they were to bring forth, and the end to which
all things moved. Had less than the loss of Rose been involved, the young
man might have found himself looking out on a world beneath notice, and
have been sighing for one more worthy of his clouded excellence but the
immense misery present to him in the contemplation of Rose's sad
restrained contempt, saved him from the silly elation which is the last,
and generally successful, struggle of human nature in those who can so
far master it to commit a sacrifice. The loss of that brave high young
soul-Rose, who had lifted him out of the mire with her own white hands:
Rose, the image of all that he worshipped: Rose, so closely wedded to him
that to be cut away from her was to fall like pallid clay from the
soaring spirit: surely he was stunned and senseless when he went to utter
the words to her mother! Now that he was awake, and could feel his
self-inflicted pain, he marvelled at his rashness and foolishness, as
perhaps numerous mangled warriors have done for a time, when the
battle-field was cool, and they were weak, and the uproar of their jarred
nerves has beset them, lying uncherished.

By degrees he grew aware of a little consolatory touch, like the point of
a needle, in his consciousness. Laxley would certainly insult him! In
that case he would not refuse to fight him. The darkness broke and
revealed this happy prospect, and Evan held to it an hour, and could
hardly reject it when better thoughts conquered. For would it not be
sweet to make the strength of his arm respected? He took a stick, and ran
his eye musingly along the length, trifling with it grimly. The great Mel
had been his son's instructor in the chivalrous science of fence, and a
maitre d'armes in Portugal had given him polish. In Mel's time duels with
swords had been occasionally fought, and Evan looked on the sword as the
weapon of combat. Face to face with his adversary--what then were birth
or position? Action!--action! he sighed for it, as I have done since I
came to know that his history must be morally developed. A glow of bitter
pleasure exalted him when, after hot passages, and parryings and thrusts,
he had disarmed Ferdinand Laxley, and bestowing on him his life, said:
'Accept this worthy gift of the son of a tailor!' and he wiped his sword,
haply bound up his wrist, and stalked off the ground, the vindicator of
man's natural dignity. And then he turned upon himself with laughter,
discovering a most wholesome power, barely to be suspected in him yet;
but of all the children of glittering Mel and his solid mate, Evan was
the best mixed compound of his parents.

He put the stick back in its corner and eyed his wrist, as if he had
really just gone through the pretty scene he had just laughed at. It was
nigh upon reality, for it suggested the employment of a handkerchief, and
he went to a place and drew forth one that had the stain of his blood on
it, and the name of Rose at one end. The beloved name was half-blotted by
the dull-red mark, and at that sight a strange tenderness took hold of
Evan. His passions became dead and of old date. This, then, would be his
for ever! Love, for whom earth had been too small, crept exultingly into
a nut-shell. He clasped the treasure on his breast, and saw a life beyond
his parting with her.

Strengthened thus, he wrote by the morning light to Laxley. The letter
was brief, and said simply that the act of which Laxley had been accused,
Evan Harrington was responsible for. The latter expressed regret that
Laxley should have fallen under a false charge, and, at the same time,
indicated that if Laxley considered himself personally aggrieved, the
writer was at his disposal.

A messenger had now to be found to convey it to the village-inn. Footmen
were stirring about the house, and one meeting Evan close by his door,
observed with demure grin, that he could not find the gentleman's
nether-garments. The gentleman, it appeared, was Mr. John Raikes, who
according to report, had been furnished with a bed at the house, because
of a discovery, made at a late period over-night, that farther the
gentleman could not go. Evan found him sleeping soundly. How much the
poor youth wanted a friend! Fortune had given him instead a born buffoon;
and it is perhaps the greatest evil of a position like Evan's, that, with
cultured feelings, you are likely to meet with none to know you. Society
does not mix well in money-pecking spheres. Here, however, was John
Raikes, and Evan had to make the best of him.

'Eh?' yawned Jack, awakened; 'I was dreaming I was Napoleon Bonaparte's
right-hand man.'

'I want you to be mine for half-an-hour,' said Evan.

Without replying, the distinguished officer jumped out of bed at a bound,
mounted a chair, and peered on tip-toe over the top, from which, with a
glance of self-congratulation, he pulled the missing piece of apparel,
sighed dejectedly as he descended, while he exclaimed:

'Safe! but no distinction can compensate a man for this state of
intolerable suspicion of everybody. I assure you, Harrington, I wouldn't
be Napoleon himself--and I have always been his peculiar admirer--to live
and be afraid of my valet! I believe it will develop cancer sooner or
later in me. I feel singular pains already. Last night, after crowning
champagne with ale, which produced a sort of French Revolution in my
interior--by the way, that must have made me dream of Napoleon last
night, with my lower members in revolt against my head, I had to sit and
cogitate for hours on a hiding-place for these-call them what you will.
Depend upon it, Harrington, this world is no such funny affair as we
fancy.'

'Then it is true, that you could let a man play pranks on you,' said
Evan. 'I took it for one of your jokes.'

'Just as I can't believe that you're a tailor,' returned Jack. 'It 's not
a bit more extraordinary.'

'But, Jack, if you cause yourself to be contemptible----'

'Contemptible!' cried Jack. 'This is not the tone I like. Contemptible!
why it's my eccentricity among my equals. If I dread the profane vulgar,
that only proves that I'm above them. Odi, etc. Besides, Achilles had his
weak point, and egad, it was when he faced about! By Jingo! I wish I'd
had that idea yesterday. I should have behaved better.'

Evan could see that the creature was beginning to rely desperately on his
humour.

'Come,' he said, 'be a man to-day. Throw off your motley. When I met you
that night so oddly, you had been acting like a worthy fellow, trying to
earn your bread in the best way you could--'

'And precisely because I met you, of all men, I've been going round and
round ever since,' said Jack. 'A clown or pantaloon would have given me
balance. Say no more. You couldn't help it. We met because we were the
two extremes.'

Sighing, 'What a jolly old inn!' Raikes rolled himself over in the
sheets, and gave two or three snug jolts indicative of his determination
to be comfortable while he could.

'Do you intend to carry on this folly, Jack?'

'Say, sacrifice,' was the answer. 'I feel it as much as you possibly
could, Mr. Harrington. Hear the facts,' Jack turned round again. 'Why did
I consent to this absurdity? Because of my ambition. That old fellow,
whom I took to be a clerk of Messrs. Grist, said: "You want to cut a
figure in the world--you're armed now." A sort of Fortunatus's joke. It
was his way of launching me. But did he think I intended this for more
than a lift? I his puppet? He, sir, was my tool! Well, I came. All my
efforts were strained to shorten the period of penance. I had the best
linen, and put on captivating manners. I should undoubtedly have won some
girl of station, and cast off my engagement like an old suit, but just
mark!--now mark how Fortune tricks us! After the pic-nic yesterday, the
domestics of the house came to clear away, and the band being there, I
stopped them and bade them tune up, and at the same time seizing the maid
Wheedle, away we flew. We danced, we whirled, we twirled. Ale upon this!
My head was lost. "Why don't it last for ever?" says I. "I wish it did,"
says she. The naivete enraptured me. "Oooo!" I cried, hugging her, and
then, you know, there was no course open to a man of honour but to offer
marriage and make a lady of her. I proposed: she accepted me, and here I
am, eternally tied to this accurst insignia, if I'm to keep my promise!
Isn't that a sacrifice, friend H.? There's no course open to me. The poor
girl is madly in love. She called me a "rattle!" As a gentleman, I cannot
recede.'

Evan got up and burst into damnable laughter at this burlesque of
himself. Telling the fellow the service he required, and receiving a
groaning assurance that the letter should, without loss of time, be
delivered in proper style, the egoist, as Jack heartily thought him, fell
behind his; knitted brows, and, after musing abstractedly, went forth to
light upon his fate.

But a dread of meeting had seized both Rose and Evan. She had exhausted
her first sincerity of unbelief in her interview with Juliana: and he had
begun to consider what he could say to her. More than the three words 'I
did it,' would not be possible; and if she made him repeat them, facing
her truthful eyes, would he be man enough to strike her bared heart
twice? And, ah! the sullen brute he must seem, standing before her dumb,
hearing her sigh, seeing her wretched effort not to show how unwillingly
her kind spirit despised him. The reason for the act--she would ask for
that! Rose would not be so philosophic as her mother. She would grasp at
every chance to excuse the deed. He cried out against his scheming sister
in an agony, and while he did so, encountered Miss Carrington and Miss.
Bonner in deep converse. Juliana pinched her arm, whereupon Miss
Carrington said: 'You look merry this morning, Mr. Harrington': for he
was unawares smiling at the image of himself in the mirror of John
Raikes. That smile, transformed to a chuckling grimace, travelled to Rose
before they met.

Why did she not come to him?

A soft voice at his elbow made his blood stop. It was Caroline. She
kissed him, answering his greeting: 'Is it good morning?'

'Certainly,' said he. 'By the way, don't forget that the coach leaves
early.'

'My darling Evan! you make me so happy. For it was really a mistaken
sense of honour. For what can at all excuse a falsehood, you know, Evan!'

Caroline took his arm, and led him into the sun, watching his face at
times. Presently she said: 'I want just to be assured that you thought
more wisely than when you left us last night.'

'More wisely?' Evan turned to her with a playful smile.

'My dear brother! you did not do what you said you would do?'

'Have you ever known me not to do what I said I would do?'

'Evan! Good heaven! you did it? Then how can you remain here an instant?
Oh, no, no!--say no, darling!'

'Where is Louisa?' he inquired.

'She is in her room. She will never appear at breakfast, if she knows
this.'

'Perhaps more solitude would do her good,' said Evan.

'Remember, if this should prove true, think how you punish her!'

On that point Evan had his own opinion.

'Well, I shall never have to punish you in this way, my love, he said
fondly, and Caroline dropped her eyelids.

'Don't think that I am blaming her,' he added, trying to feel as honestly
as he spoke. 'I was mad to come here. I see it all now. Let us keep to
our place. We are all the same before God till we disgrace ourselves.'
Possibly with that sense of shame which some young people have who are
not professors of sounding sentences, or affected by missionary zeal,
when they venture to breathe the holy name, Evan blushed, and walked on
humbly silent. Caroline murmured: 'Yes, yes! oh, brother!' and her figure
drew to him as if for protection. Pale, she looked up.

'Shall you always love me, Evan?'

'Whom else have I to love?'

'But always--always? Under any circumstances?'

'More and more, dear. I always have, and shall. I look to you now. I have
no home but in your heart now.'

She was agitated, and he spoke warmly to calm her.

The throb of deep emotion rang in her rich voice. 'I will live any life
to be worthy of your love, Evan,' and she wept.

To him they were words and tears without a history.

Nothing further passed between them. Caroline went to the Countess: Evan
waited for Rose. The sun was getting high. The face of the stream glowed
like metal. Why did she not come? She believed him guilty from the mouth
of another? If so, there was something less for him to lose. And now the
sacrifice he had made did whisper a tale of mortal magnificence in his
ears: feelings that were not his noblest stood up exalted. He waited till
the warm meadow-breath floating past told that the day had settled into
heat, and then he waited no more, but quietly walked into the house with
the strength of one who has conquered more than human scorn.




CHAPTER XXXVII

THE RETREAT FROM BECKLEY

Never would the Countess believe that brother of hers, idiot as by nature
he might be, and heir to unnumbered epithets, would so far forget what
she had done for him, as to drag her through the mud for nothing: and so
she told Caroline again and again, vehemently.

It was about ten minutes before the time for descending to the
breakfast-table. She was dressed, and sat before the glass, smoothing her
hair, and applying the contents of a pot of cold cream to her forehead
between-whiles. With perfect sincerity she repeated that she could not
believe it. She had only trusted Evan once since their visit to Beckley;
and that this once he should, when treated as a man, turn traitor to
their common interests, and prove himself an utter baby, was a piece of
nonsense her great intelligence indignantly rejected.

'Then, if true,' she answered Caroline's assurances finally, 'if true, he
is not his father's son!'

By which it may be seen that she had indeed taken refuge in the Castle of
Negation against the whole army of facts.

'He is acting, Carry. He is acting the ideas of his ridiculous empty
noddle!'

'No,' said Caroline, mournfully, 'he is not. I have never known Evan to
lie.'

'Then you must forget the whipping he once had from his mother--little
dolt! little selfish pig! He obtains his reputation entirely from his
abominable selfishness, and then stands tall, and asks us to admire him.
He bursts with vanity. But if you lend your credence to it, Carry, how,
in the name of goodness, are you to appear at the breakfast?

'I was going to ask you whether you would come,' said Caroline, coldly.

'If I can get my hair to lie flat by any means at all, of course!'
returned the Countess. 'This dreadful horrid country pomade! Why did we
not bring a larger stock of the Andalugian Regenerator? Upon my honour,
my dear, you use a most enormous quantity; I must really tell you that.'

Conning here entered to say that Mr. Evan had given orders for the boxes
to be packed and everything got ready to depart by half-past eleven
o'clock, when the fly would call for them and convey them to Fallow field
in time to meet the coach for London.

The Countess turned her head round to Caroline like an astonished
automaton.

'Given orders!' she interjected.

'I have very little to get ready,' remarked Caroline.

'Be so good as to wait outside the door one instant,' said the Countess
to Conning, with particular urbanity.

Conning heard a great deal of vigorous whispering within, and when
summoned to re-appear, a note was handed to her to convey to Mr.
Harrington immediately. He was on the lawn; read it, and wrote back three
hasty lines in pencil.

'Louisa. You have my commands to quit this house, at the hour named, this
day. You will go with me. E. H.'

Conning was again requested to wait outside the Countess's door. She was
the bearer of another note. Evan read it likewise; tore it up, and said
that there was no answer.

The Castle of Negation held out no longer. Ruthless battalions poured
over the walls, blew up the Countess's propriety, made frightful ravages
in her complexion. Down fell her hair.

'You cannot possibly go to breakfast,' said Caroline.

'I must! I must!' cried the Countess. 'Why, my dear, if he has done
it-wretched creature! don't you perceive that, by withholding our
presences, we become implicated with him?' And the Countess, from a burst
of frenzy, put this practical question so shrewdly, that Caroline's wits
succumbed to her.

'But he has not done it; he is acting!' she pursued, restraining her
precious tears for higher purposes, as only true heroines can. 'Thinks to
frighten me into submission!'

'Do you not think Evan is right in wishing us to leave, after--after--'
Caroline humbly suggested.

'Say, before my venerable friend has departed this life,' the Countess
took her up. 'No, I do not. If he is a fool, I am not. No, Carry: I do
not jump into ditches for nothing. I will have something tangible for all
that I have endured. We are now tailors in this place, remember. If that
stigma is affixed to us, let us at least be remunerated for it. Come.'

Caroline's own hard struggle demanded all her strength yet she appeared
to hesitate. 'You will surely not disobey Evan, Louisa?'

'Disobey?' The Countess amazedly dislocated the syllables. 'Why, the boy
will be telling you next that he will not permit the Duke to visit you!
Just your English order of mind, that cannot--brutes!--conceive of
friendship between high-born men and beautiful women. Beautiful as you
truly are, Carry, five years more will tell on you. But perhaps my
dearest is in a hurry to return to her Maxwell? At least he thwacks
well!'

Caroline's arm was taken. The Countess loved an occasional rhyme when a
point was to be made, and went off nodding and tripping till the time for
stateliness arrived, near the breakfast-room door. She indeed was acting.
At the bottom of her heart there was a dismal rage of passions: hatred of
those who would or might look tailor in her face: terrors concerning the
possible re-visitation of the vengeful Sir Abraham: dread of Evan and the
efforts to despise him: the shocks of many conflicting elements. Above it
all her countenance was calmly, sadly sweet: even as you may behold some
majestic lighthouse glimmering over the tumult of a midnight sea.

An unusual assemblage honoured the breakfast that morning. The news of
Mrs. Bonner's health was more favourable. How delighted was the Countess
to hear that! Mrs. Bonner was the only firm ground she stood on there,
and after receiving and giving gentle salutes, she talked of Mrs. Bonner,
and her night-watch by the sick bed, in a spirit of doleful hope. This
passed off the moments till she could settle herself to study faces.
Decidedly, every lady present looked glum, with the single exception of
Miss Current. Evan was by Lady Jocelyn's side. Her ladyship spoke to him;
but the Countess observed that no one else did. To herself, however, the
gentlemen were as attentive as ever. Evan sat three chairs distant from
her.

If the traitor expected his sister to share in his disgrace, by noticing
him, he was in error. On the contrary, the Countess joined the conspiracy
to exclude him, and would stop a mild laugh if perchance he looked up.
Presently Rose entered. She said 'Good morning' to one or two, and glided
into a seat.

That Evan was under Lady Jocelyn's protection soon became generally
apparent, and also that her ladyship was angry: an exhibition so rare
with her that it was the more remarked. Rose could see that she was a
culprit in her mother's eyes. She glanced from Evan to her. Lady
Jocelyn's mouth shut hard. The girl's senses then perceived the something
that was afloat at the table; she thought with a pang of horror: 'Has
Juliana told?' Juliana smiled on her; but the aspect of Mrs. Shorne, and
of Miss Carrington, spoke for their knowledge of that which must
henceforth be the perpetual reproof to her headstrong youth.

'At what hour do you leave us?' said Lady Jocelyn to Evan.

'When I leave the table, my lady. The fly will call for my sisters at
half-past eleven.'

'There is no necessity for you to start in advance?'

'I am going over to see my mother.'

Rose burned to speak to him now. Oh! why had she delayed! Why had she
swerved from her good rule of open, instant explanations? But Evan's
heart was stern to his love. Not only had she, by not coming, shown her
doubt of him,--she had betrayed him!

Between the Countess, Melville, Sir John, and the Duke, an animated
dialogue was going on, over which Miss Current played like a lively iris.
They could not part with the Countess. Melville said he should be left
stranded, and numerous pretty things were uttered by other gentlemen: by
the women not a word. Glancing from certain of them lingeringly to her
admirers, the Countess smiled her thanks, and then Andrew, pressed to
remain, said he was willing and happy, and so forth; and it seemed that
her admirers had prevailed over her reluctance, for the Countess ended
her little protests with a vanquished bow. Then there was a gradual
rising from table. Evan pressed Lady Jocelyn's hand, and turning from her
bent his head to Sir Franks, who, without offering an exchange of
cordialities, said, at arm's length: 'Good-bye, sir.' Melville also gave
him that greeting stiffly. Harry was perceived to rush to the other end
of the room, in quest of a fly apparently. Poor Caroline's heart ached
for her brother, to see him standing there in the shadow of many faces.
But he was not left to stand alone. Andrew quitted the circle of Sir
John, Seymour Jocelyn, Mr. George Uplift, and others, and linked his arm
to Evan's. Rose had gone. While Evan looked for her despairingly to say
his last word and hear her voice once more, Sir Franks said to his wife:

'See that Rose keeps up-stairs.'

'I want to speak to her,' was her ladyship's answer, and she moved to the
door.

Evan made way for her, bowing.

'You will be ready at half-past eleven, Louisa,' he said, with calm
distinctness, and passed from that purgatory.

Now honest Andrew attributed the treatment Evan met with to the exposure
of yesterday. He was frantic with democratic disgust.

'Why the devil don't they serve me like that; eh? 'Cause I got a few
coppers! There, Van! I'm a man of peace; but if you'll call any man of
'em out I'll stand your second--'pon my soul, I will. They must be
cowards, so there isn't much to fear. Confound the fellows, I tell 'em
every day I'm the son of a cobbler, and egad, they grow civiller. What do
they mean? Are cobblers ranked over tailors?'

'Perhaps that's it,' said Evan.

'Hang your gentlemen!' Andrew cried.

'Let us have breakfast first,' uttered a melancholy voice near them in
the passage.

'Jack!' said Evan. 'Where have you been?'

'I didn't know the breakfast-room,' Jack returned, 'and the fact is, my
spirits are so down, I couldn't muster up courage to ask one of the
footmen. I delivered your letter. Nothing hostile took place. I bowed
fiercely to let him know what he might expect. That generally stops it.
You see, I talk prose. I shall never talk anything else!'

Andrew recommenced his jests of yesterday with Jack. The latter bore them
patiently, as one who had endured worse.

'She has rejected me!' he whispered to Evan. 'Talk of the ingratitude of
women! Ten minutes ago I met her. She perked her eyebrows at me!--tried
to run away. "Miss Wheedle": I said. "If you please, I 'd rather not,"
says she. To cut it short, the sacrifice I made to her was the cause.
It's all over the house. She gave the most excruciating hint. Those
low-born females are so horribly indelicate. I stood confounded.
Commending his new humour, Evan persuaded him to breakfast immediately,
and hunger being one of Jack's solitary incitements to a sensible course
of conduct, the disconsolate gentleman followed its dictates. 'Go with
him, Andrew,' said Evan. 'He is here as my friend, and may be made
uncomfortable.'

'Yes, yes,--ha! ha! I'll follow the poor chap,' said Andrew. 'But what is
it all about? Louisa won't go, you know. Has the girl given you up
because she saw your mother, Van? I thought it was all right. Why the
deuce are you running away?'

'Because I've just seen that I ought never to have come, I suppose,' Evan
replied, controlling the wretched heaving of his chest.

'But Louisa won't go, Van.'

'Understand, my dear Andrew, that I know it to be quite imperative. Be
ready yourself with Caroline. Louisa will then make her choice. Pray help
me in this. We must not stay a minute more than is necessary in this
house.'

'It's an awful duty,' breathed Andrew, after a pause. 'I see nothing but
hot water at home. Why--but it's no use asking questions. My love to your
mother. I say, Van,--now isn't Lady Jocelyn a trump?'

'God bless her!' said Evan. And the moisture in Andrew's eyes affected
his own.

'She's the staunchest piece of woman-goods I ever--I know a hundred cases
of her!'

'I know one, and that 's enough,' said Evan.

Not a sign of Rose! Can Love die without its dear farewell on which it
feeds, away from the light, dying by bits? In Evan's heart Love seemed to
die, and all the pangs of a death were there as he trod along the gravel
and stepped beneath the gates of Beckley Court.

Meantime the gallant Countess was not in any way disposed to retreat on
account of Evan's defection. The behaviour toward him at the
breakfast-table proved to her that he had absolutely committed his
egregious folly, and as no General can have concert with a fool, she cut
him off from her affections resolutely. Her manifest disdain at his last
speech, said as much to everybody present. Besides, the lady was in her
element here, and compulsion is required to make us relinquish our
element. Lady Jocelyn certainly had not expressly begged of her to
remain: the Countess told Melville so, who said that if she required such
an invitation she should have it, but that a guest to whom they were so
much indebted, was bound to spare them these formalities.

'What am I to do?'

The Countess turned piteously to the diplomatist's wife.

She answered, retiringly: 'Indeed I cannot say.'

Upon this, the Countess accepted Melville's arm, and had some thoughts of
punishing the woman.

They were seen parading the lawn. Mr. George Uplift chuckled singularly.

'Just the old style,' he remarked, but corrected the inadvertence with a
'hem!' committing himself more shamefully the instant after. 'I'll wager
she has the old Dip. down on his knee before she cuts.'

'Bet can't be taken,' observed Sir John Loring. 'It requires a spy.'

Harry, however, had heard the remark, and because he wished to speak to
her, let us hope, and reproach her for certain things when she chose to
be disengaged, he likewise sallied out, being forlorn as a youth whose
sweet vanity is much hurt.

The Duke had paired off with Mrs. Strike. The lawn was fair in sunlight
where they walked. The air was rich with harvest smells, and the scent of
autumnal roses. Caroline was by nature luxurious and soft. The thought of
that drilled figure to which she was returning in bondage, may have
thrown into bright relief the polished and gracious nobleman who walked
by her side, shadowing forth the chances of a splendid freedom. Two
lovely tears fell from her eyes. The Duke watched them quietly.

'Do you know, they make me jealous?' he said.

Caroline answered him with a faint smile.

'Reassure me, my dear lady; you are not going with your brother this
morning?'

'Your Grace, I have no choice!'

'May I speak to you as your warmest friend? From what I hear, it appears
to be right that your brother should not stay. To the best of my ability
I will provide for him: but I sincerely desire to disconnect you from
those who are unworthy of you. Have you not promised to trust in me?
Pray, let me be your guide.'

Caroline replied to the heart of his words: 'I dare not.'

'What has changed you?'

'I am not changed, but awakened,' said Caroline.

The Duke paced on in silence.

'Pardon me if I comprehend nothing of such a change,' he resumed. 'I
asked you to sacrifice much; all that I could give in return I offered.
Is it the world you fear?'

'What is the world to such as I am?'

'Can you consider it a duty to deliver yourself bound to that man again?'

'Heaven pardon me, my lord, I think of that too little!'

The Duke's next question: 'Then what can it be?' stood in his eyes.

'Oh!' Caroline's touch quivered on his arm, 'Do not suppose me frivolous,
ungrateful, or--or cowardly. For myself you have offered more happiness
than I could have hoped for. To be allied to one so generous, I could
bear anything. Yesterday you had my word: give it me back to-day!'

Very curiously the Duke gazed on her, for there was evidence of internal
torture across her forehead.

'I may at least beg to know the cause for this request?'

She quelled some throbbing in her bosom. 'Yes.'

He waited, and she said: 'There is one--if I offended him, I could not
live. If now I followed my wishes, he would lose his faith in the last
creature that loves him. He is unhappy. I could bear what is called
disgrace, my lord--I shudder to say it--I could sin against heaven; but I
dare not do what would make him despise me.'

She was trembling violently; yet the nobleman, in his surprise, could not
forbear from asking who this person might be, whose influence on her
righteous actions was so strong.

'It is my brother, my lord,' she said.

Still more astonished, 'Your brother!' the Duke exclaimed. 'My dearest
lady, I would not wound you; but is not this a delusion? We are so placed
that we must speak plainly. Your brother I have reason to feel sure is
quite unworthy of you.'

'Unworthy? My brother Evan? Oh! he is noble, he is the best of men!'

'And how, between yesterday and to-day, has he changed you?'

'It is that yesterday I did not know him, and to-day I do.'

Her brother, a common tradesman, a man guilty of forgery and the utmost
baseness--all but kicked out of the house! The Duke was too delicate to
press her further. Moreover, Caroline had emphasized the 'yesterday' and
'to-day,' showing that the interval which had darkened Evan to everybody
else, had illumined him to her. He employed some courtly eloquence,
better unrecorded; but if her firm resolution perplexed him, it threw a
strange halo round the youth from whom it sprang.

The hour was now eleven, and the Countess thought it full time to retire
to her entrenchment in Mrs. Bonner's chamber. She had great things still
to do: vast designs were in her hand awaiting the sanction of Providence.
Alas! that little idle promenade was soon to be repented. She had joined
her sister, thinking it safer to have her upstairs till they were quit of
Evan. The Duke and the diplomatist loitering in the rear, these two fair
women sailed across the lawn, conscious, doubtless, over all their
sorrows and schemes, of the freight of beauty they carried.

What meant that gathering on the steps? It was fortuitous, like
everything destined to confound us. There stood Lady Jocelyn with Andrew,
fretting his pate. Harry leant against a pillar, Miss Carrington, Mrs.
Shorne, and Mrs. Melville, supported by Mr. George Uplift, held
watchfully by. Juliana, with Master Alec and Miss Dorothy, were in the
background.

Why did our General see herself cut off from her stronghold, as by a
hostile band? She saw it by that sombre light in Juliana's eyes, which
had shown its ominous gleam whenever disasters were on the point of
unfolding.

Turning to Caroline, she said: 'Is there a back way?'

Too late! Andrew called.

'Come along, Louisa, Just time, and no more. Carry, are you packed?'

This in reality was the first note of the retreat from Beckley; and
having blown it, the hideous little trumpeter burst into scarlet
perspirations, mumbling to Lady Jocelyn: 'Now, my lady, mind you stand by
me.'

The Countess walked straight up to him.

'Dear Andrew! this sun is too powerful for you. I beg you, withdraw into
the shade of the house.'

She was about to help him with all her gentleness.

'Yes, yes. All right, Louisa rejoined Andrew. 'Come, go and pack. The fly
'll be here, you know--too late for the coach, if you don't mind, my
lass. Ain't you packed yet?'

The horrible fascination of vulgarity impelled the wretched lady to
answer: 'Are we herrings?' And then she laughed, but without any
accompaniment.

'I am now going to dear Mrs. Bonner,' she said, with a tender glance at
Lady Jocelyn.

'My mother is sleeping,' her ladyship remarked.

'Come, Carry, my darling!' cried Andrew.

Caroline looked at her sister. The Countess divined Andrew's shameful
trap.

'I was under an engagement to go and canvass this afternoon,' she said.

'Why, my dear Louisa, we've settled that in here this morning,' said
Andrew. 'Old Tom only stuck up a puppet to play with. We've knocked him
over, and march in victorious--eh, my lady?'

'Oh!' exclaimed the Countess, 'if Mr. Raikes shall indeed have listened
to my inducements!'

'Deuce a bit of inducements!' returned Andrew. 'The fellow's ashamed of
himself-ha! ha! Now then, Louisa.'

While they talked, Juliana had loosed Dorothy and Alec, and these imps
were seen rehearsing a remarkable play, in which the damsel held forth a
hand and the cavalier advanced and kissed it with a loud smack, being at
the same time reproached for his lack of grace.

'You are so English!' cried Dorothy, with perfect languor, and a
malicious twitter passed between two or three. Mr. George spluttered
indiscreetly.

The Countess observed the performance. Not to convert the retreat into a
total rout, she, with that dark flush which was her manner of blushing,
took formal leave of Lady Jocelyn, who, in return, simply said:
'Good-bye, Countess.' Mrs. Strike's hand she kindly shook.

The few digs and slaps and thrusts at gloomy Harry and prim Miss
Carrington and boorish Mr. George, wherewith the Countess, torn with
wrath, thought it necessary to cover her retreat, need not be told. She
struck the weak alone: Juliana she respected. Masterly tactics, for they
showed her power, gratified her vengeance, and left her unassailed. On
the road she had Andrew to tear to pieces. O delicious operation! And O
shameful brother to reduce her to such joys! And, O Providence! may a
poor desperate soul, betrayed through her devotion, unremunerated for her
humiliation and absolute hard work, accuse thee? The Countess would have
liked to. She felt it to be the instigation of the devil, and decided to
remain on the safe side still.

Happily for Evan, she was not ready with her packing by half-past eleven.
It was near twelve when he, pacing in front of the inn, observed Polly
Wheedle, followed some yards in the rear by John Raikes, advancing
towards him. Now Polly had been somewhat delayed by Jack's persecutions,
and Evan declining to attend to the masked speech of her mission, which
directed him to go at once down a certain lane in the neighbourhood of
the park, some minutes were lost.

'Why, Mr. Harrington,' said Polly, 'it's Miss Rose: she's had leave from
her Ma. Can you stop away, when it's quite proper?'

Evan hesitated. Before he could conquer the dark spirit, lo, Rose
appeared, walking up the village street. Polly and her adorer fell back.

Timidly, unlike herself, Rose neared him.

'I have offended you, Evan. You would not come to me: I have come to
you.'

'I am glad to be able to say good-bye to you, Rose,' was his pretty
response.

Could she have touched his hand then, the blood of these lovers rushing
to one channel must have made all clear. At least he could hardly have
struck her true heart with his miserable lie. But that chance was lost
they were in the street, where passions have no play.

'Tell me, Evan,--it is not true.'

He, refining on his misery, thought, She would not ask it if she trusted
me: and answered her: 'You have heard it from your mother, Rose.'

'But I will not believe it from any lips but yours, Evan. Oh, speak,
speak!'

It pleased him to think: How could one who loved me believe it even then?

He said: 'It can scarcely do good to make me repeat it, Rose.'

And then, seeing her dear bosom heave quickly, he was tempted to fall on
his knees to her with a wild outcry of love. The chance was lost. The
inexorable street forbade it.

There they stood in silence, gasping at the barrier that divided them.

Suddenly a noise was heard. 'Stop! stop!' cried the voice of John Raikes.
'When a lady and gentleman are talking together, sir, do you lean your
long ears over them--ha?'

Looking round, Evan beheld Laxley a step behind, and Jack rushing up to
him, seizing his collar, and instantly undergoing ignominious prostration
for his heroic defence of the privacy of lovers.

'Stand aside'; said Laxley, imperiously. 'Rosey so you've come for me.
Take my arm. You are under my protection.'

Another forlorn 'Is it true?' Rose cast toward Evan with her eyes. He
wavered under them.

'Did you receive my letter?' he demanded of Laxley.

'I decline to hold converse with you,' said Laxley, drawing Rose's hand
on his arm.

'You will meet me to-day or to-morrow?'

'I am in the habit of selecting my own company.'

Rose disengaged her hand. Evan grasped it. No word of farewell was
uttered. Her mouth moved, but her eyes were hard shut, and nothing save
her hand's strenuous pressure, equalling his own, told that their parting
had been spoken, the link violently snapped.

Mr. John Raikes had been picked up and pulled away by Polly. She now
rushed to Evan: 'Good-bye, and God bless you, dear Mr. Harrington. I'll
find means of letting you know how she is. And he shan't have her, mind!'

Rose was walking by Laxley's side, but not leaning on his arm. Evan
blessed her for this. Ere she was out of sight the fly rolled down the
street. She did not heed it, did not once turn her head. Ah, bitter
unkindness!

When Love is hurt, it is self-love that requires the opiate. Conning gave
it him in the form of a note in a handwriting not known to him. It said:

     'I do not believe it, and nothing will ever make me.
                    'JULIANA.'

Evan could not forget these words. They coloured his farewell to Beckley:
the dear old downs, the hopgardens, the long grey farms walled with
clipped yew, the home of his lost love! He thought of them through weary
nights when the ghostly image with the hard shut eyelids and the
quivering lips would rise and sway irresolutely in air till a shape out
of the darkness extinguished it. Pride is the God of Pagans. Juliana had
honoured his God. The spirit of Juliana seemed to pass into the body of
Rose, and suffer for him as that ghostly image visibly suffered.




CHAPTER XXXVIII

IN WHICH WE HAVE TO SEE IN THE DARK

So ends the fourth act of our comedy.

After all her heroism and extraordinary efforts, after, as she feared,
offending Providence--after facing Tailordom--the Countess was rolled
away in a dingy fly unrewarded even by a penny, for what she had gone
through. For she possessed eminently the practical nature of her sex; and
though she would have scorned, and would have declined to handle coin so
base, its absence was upbraidingly mentioned in her spiritual outcries.
Not a penny!

Nor was there, as in the miseries of retreat she affected indifferently
to imagine, a Duke fished out of the ruins of her enterprise, to wash the
mud off her garments and edge them with radiance. Caroline, it became
clear to her, had been infected by Evan's folly. Caroline, she
subsequently learnt, had likewise been a fool. Instead of marvelling at
the genius that had done so much in spite of the pair of fools that were
the right and left wing of her battle array, the simple-minded lady wept.
She wanted success, not genius. Admiration she was ever ready to forfeit
for success.

Nor did she say to the tailors of earth: 'Weep, for I sought to
emancipate you from opprobrium by making one of you a gentleman; I fought
for a great principle and have failed.' Heroic to the end, she herself
shed all the tears; took all the sorrow.

Where was consolation? Would any Protestant clergyman administer comfort
to her? Could he? might he do so? He might listen, and quote texts; but
he would demand the harsh rude English for everything; and the Countess's
confessional thoughts were all innuendoish, aerial; too delicate to live
in our shameless tongue. Confession by implication, and absolution; she
could know this to be what she wished for, and yet not think it. She
could see a haven of peace in that picture of the little brown box with
the sleekly reverend figure bending his ear to the kneeling Beauty
outside, thrice ravishing as she half-lifts the veil of her sins and her
visage!--yet she started alarmed to hear it whispered that the fair
penitent was the Countess de Saldar; urgently she prayed that no
disgraceful brother might ever drive her to that!

Never let it be a Catholic priest!--she almost fashioned her petition
into words. Who was to save her? Alas! alas! in her dire distress--in her
sense of miserable pennilessness, she clung to Mr. John Raikes, of the
curricle, the mysteriously rich young gentleman; and on that picture,
with Andrew roguishly contemplating it, and Evan, with feelings regarding
his sister that he liked not to own, the curtain commiseratingly drops.

As in the course of a stream you come upon certain dips, where, but here
and there, a sparkle or a gloom of the full flowing water is caught
through deepening foliage, so the history that concerns us wanders out of
day for a time, and we must violate the post and open written leaves to
mark the turn it takes.

First we have a letter from Mr. Goren to Mrs. Mel, to inform her that her
son has arrived and paid his respects to his future instructor in the
branch of science practised by Mr. Goren.

'He has arrived at last,' says the worthy tradesman. 'His appearance in
the shop will be highly gentlemanly, and when he looks a little more
pleasing, and grows fond of it, nothing will be left to be desired. The
ladies, his sisters, have not thought proper to call. I had hopes of the
custom of Mr. Andrew Cogglesby. Of course you wish him to learn tailoring
thoroughly?'

Mrs. Mel writes back, thanking Mr. Goren, and saying that 'she had shown
the letter to inquiring creditors, and that she does wish her son to
learn his business from the root. This produces a second letter from Mr.
Goren, which imparts to her that at the root of the tree, of tailoring
the novitiate must sit no less than six hours a day with his legs crossed
and doubled under him, cheerfully plying needle and thread; and that,
without this probation, to undergo which the son resolutely objects, all
hope of his climbing to the top of the lofty tree, and viewing mankind
from an eminence, must be surrendered.

'If you do not insist, my dear Mrs. Harrington, I tell you candidly, your
son may have a shop, but he will be no tailor.'

Mrs. Mel understands her son and his state of mind well enough not to
insist, and is resigned to the melancholy consequence.

Then Mr. Goren discovers an extraordinary resemblance between Evan and
his father: remarking merely that the youth is not the gentleman his
father was in a shop, while he admits, that had it been conjoined to
business habits, he should have envied his departed friend.

He has soon something fresh to tell; and it is that young Mr. Harrington
is treating him cavalierly. That he should penetrate the idea or
appreciate the merits of Mr. Goren's Balance was hardly to be expected at
present: the world did not, and Mr. Goren blamed no young man for his
ignorance. Still a proper attendance was requisite. Mr. Goren thought it
very singular that young Mr. Harrington should demand all the hours of
the day for his own purposes, up to half-past four. He found it difficult
to speak to him as a master, and begged that Mrs. Harrington would, as a
mother.

The reply of Mrs. Mel is dashed with a trifle of cajolery. She has heard
from her son, and seeing that her son takes all that time from his right
studies, to earn money wherewith to pay debts of which Mr. Goren is
cognizant, she trusts that their oldest friend will overlook it.

Mr. Goren rejoins that he considers that he need not have been excluded
from young Mr. Harrington's confidence. Moreover, it is a grief to him
that the young gentleman should refrain from accepting any of his
suggestions as to the propriety of requesting some, at least, of his rich
and titled acquaintance to confer on him the favour of their patronage.
'Which they would not repent,' adds Mr. Goren, 'and might learn to be
very much obliged to him for, in return for kindnesses extended to him.'

Notwithstanding all my efforts, you see, the poor boy is thrust into the
shop. There he is, without a doubt. He sleeps under Mr. Goren's roof: he
(since one cannot be too positive in citing the punishment of such a
Pagan) stands behind a counter: he (and, oh! choke, young loves, that
have hovered around him! shrink from him in natural horror, gentle
ladies!) handles the shears. It is not my fault. He would be a Pagan. If
you can think him human enough still to care to know how he feels it, I
must tell you that he feels it hardly-at all. After a big blow, a very
little one scarcely counts. What are outward forms and social ignominies
to him whose heart has been struck to the dust? His Gods have fought for
him, and there he is! He deserves no pity.

But he does not ask it of you, the callous Pagan! Despise him, if you
please, and rank with the Countess, who despises him most heartily.
Dipping further into the secrets of the post, we discover a brisk
correspondence between Juliana Bonner and Mrs. Strike.

'A thousand thanks to you, my dear Miss Bonner,' writes the latter lady.
'The unaffected interest you take in my brother touches me deeply. I know
him to be worthy of your good opinion. Yes, I will open my heart to you,
dearest Juliana; and it shall, as you wish, be quite secret between us.
Not to a soul!

'He is quite alone. My sisters Harriet and Louisa will not see him, and I
can only do so by stealth. His odd other little friend sometimes drives
me out on Sundays, to a place where I meet him; and the Duke of Belfield
kindly lends me his carriage. Oh, that we might never part! I am only
happy with him!

'Ah, do not doubt him, Juliana, for anything he does! You say, that now
the Duke has obtained for him the Secretaryship to my husband's Company,
he should not thing, and you do not understand why. I will tell you. Our
poor father died in debt, and Evan receives money which enables him by
degrees to liquidate these debts, on condition that he consents to be
what I dislike as much as you can. He bears it; you can have no idea of
his pride! He is too proud to own to himself that it debases him--too
proud to complain. It is a tangle--a net that drags him down to it but
whatever he is outwardly, he is the noblest human being in the world to
me, and but for him, oh, what should I be? Let me beg you to forgive it,
if you can. My darling has no friends. Is his temper as sweet as ever? I
can answer that. Yes, only he is silent, and looks--when you look into
his eyes--colder, as men look when they will not bear much from other
men.

'He has not mentioned her name. I am sure she has not written.

'Pity him, and pray for him.'

Juliana then makes a communication, which draws forth the following:--

'Mistress of all the Beckley property-dearest, dearest Juliana! Oh! how
sincerely I congratulate you! The black on the letter alarmed me so, I
could hardly open it, my fingers trembled so; for I esteem you all at
Beckley; but when I had opened and read it, I was recompensed. You say
you are sorry for Rose. But surely what your Grandmama has done is quite
right. It is just, in every sense. But why am I not to tell Evan? I am
certain it would make him very happy, and happiness of any kind he needs
so much! I will obey you, of course, but I cannot see why. Do you know,
my dear child, you are extremely mysterious, and puzzle me. Evan takes a
pleasure in speaking of you. You and Lady Jocelyn are his great themes.
Why is he to be kept ignorant of your good fortune? The spitting of blood
is bad. You must winter in a warm climate. I do think that London is far
better for you in the late Autumn than Hampshire. May I ask my sister
Harriet to invite you to reside with her for some weeks? Nothing, I know,
would give her greater pleasure.'

Juliana answers this--

'If you love me--I sometimes hope that you do--but the feeling of being
loved is so strange to me that I can only believe it at times--but,
Caroline--there, I have mustered up courage to call you by your Christian
name at last--Oh, dear Caroline! if you do love me, do not tell Mr.
Harrington. I go on my knees to you to beg you not to tell him a word. I
have no reasons indeed not any; but I implore you again never even to
hint that I am anything but the person he knew at Beckley.

'Rose has gone to Elburne House, where Ferdinand, her friend, is to meet
her. She rides and sings the same, and keeps all her colour.

'She may not, as you imagine, have much sensibility. Perhaps not enough.
I am afraid that Rose is turning into a very worldly woman!

'As to what you kindly say about inviting me to London, I should like it,
and I am my own mistress. Do you know, I think I am older than your
brother! I am twenty-three. Pray, when you write, tell me if he is older
than that. But should I not be a dreadful burden to you? Sometimes I have
to keep to my chamber whole days and days. When that happens now, I think
of you entirely. See how I open my heart to you. You say that you do to
me. I wish I could really think it.'

A postscript begs Caroline 'not to forget about the ages.'

In this fashion the two ladies open their hearts, and contrive to read
one another perfectly in their mutual hypocrisies.

Some letters bearing the signatures of Mr. John Raikes, and Miss Polly
Wheedle, likewise pass. Polly inquires for detailed accounts of the
health and doings of Mr. Harrington. Jack replies with full particulars
of her own proceedings, and mild corrections of her grammar. It is to be
noted that Polly grows much humbler to him on paper, which being
instantly perceived by the mercurial one, his caressing condescension to
her is very beautiful. She is taunted with Mr. Nicholas Frim, and
answers, after the lapse of a week, that the aforesaid can be nothing to
her, as he 'went in a passion to church last Sunday and got married.' It
appears that they had quarrelled, 'because I danced with you that night.'
To this Mr. Raikes rejoins in a style that would be signified by 'ahem!'
in language, and an arrangement of the shirt collar before the
looking-glass, in action.




CHAPTER XXXIX

IN THE DOMAIN OF TAILORDOM

There was peace in Mr. Goren's shop. Badgered Ministers, bankrupt
merchants, diplomatists with a headache--any of our modern grandees under
difficulties, might have envied that peace over which Mr. Goren presided:
and he was an enviable man. He loved his craft, he believed that he had
not succeeded the millions of antecedent tailors in vain; and, excepting
that trifling coquetry with shirt-fronts, viz., the red crosses, which a
shrewd rival had very soon eclipsed by representing nymphs triangularly
posed, he devoted himself to his business from morning to night; as rigid
in demanding respect from those beneath him, as he was profuse in
lavishing it on his patrons. His public boast was, that he owed no man a
farthing; his secret comfort, that he possessed two thousand pounds in
the Funds. But Mr. Goren did not stop here. Behind these external
characteristics he nursed a passion. Evan was astonished and pleased to
find in him an enthusiastic fern-collector. Not that Mr. Harrington
shared the passion, but the sight of these brown roots spread out,
ticketed, on the stained paper, after supper, when the shutters were up
and the house defended from the hostile outer world; the old man poring
over them, and naming this and that spot where, during his solitary
Saturday afternoon and Sunday excursions, he had lighted on the rare
samples exhibited this contrast of the quiet evening with the sordid day
humanized Mr. Goren to him. He began to see a spirit in the rigid
tradesman not so utterly dissimilar to his own, and he fancied that he,
too, had a taste for ferns. Round Beckley how they abounded!

He told Mr. Goren so, and Mr. Goren said:

'Some day we'll jog down there together, as the saying goes.'

Mr. Goren spoke of it as an ordinary event, likely to happen in the days
to come: not as an incident the mere mention of which, as being probable,
stopped the breath and made the pulses leap.

For now Evan's education taught him to feel that he was at his lowest
degree. Never now could Rose stoop to him. He carried the shop on his
back. She saw the brand of it on his forehead. Well! and what was Rose to
him, beyond a blissful memory, a star that he had once touched? Self-love
kept him strong by day, but in the darkness of night came his misery;
wakening from tender dreams, he would find his heart sinking under a
horrible pressure, and then the fair fresh face of Rose swam over him;
the hours of Beckley were revived; with intolerable anguish he saw that
she was blameless--that he alone was to blame. Yet worse was it when his
closed eyelids refused to conjure up the sorrowful lovely nightmare, and
he lay like one in a trance, entombed-wretched Pagan! feeling all that
had been blindly; when the Past lay beside him like a corpse that he had
slain.

These nightly torments helped him to brave what the morning brought.
Insensibly also, as Time hardened his sufferings, Evan asked himself what
the shame of his position consisted in. He grew stiff-necked. His Pagan
virtues stood up one by one to support him. Andrew, courageously evading
the interdict that forbade him to visit Evan, would meet him by
appointment at City taverns, and flatly offered him a place in the
Brewery. Evan declined it, on the pretext that, having received Old Tom's
money for the year, he must at least work out that term according to the
conditions. Andrew fumed and sneered at Tailordom. Evan said that there
was peace in Mr. Goren's shop. His sharp senses discerned in Andrew's
sneer a certain sincerity, and he revolted against it. Mr John Raikes,
too, burlesqued Society so well, that he had the satisfaction of laughing
at his enemy occasionally. The latter gentleman was still a pensioner,
flying about town with the Countess de Saldar, in deadly fear lest that
fascinating lady should discover the seat of his fortune; happy,
notwithstanding. In the mirror of Evan's little world, he beheld the
great one from which he was banished.

Now the dusk of a winter's afternoon was closing over London, when a
carriage drew up in front of Mr. Goren's shop, out of which, to Mr.
Goren's chagrin, a lady stepped, with her veil down. The lady entered,
and said that she wished to speak to Mr. Harrington. Mr. Goren made way
for her to his pupil; and was amazed to see her fall into his arms, and
hardly gratified to hear her say: 'Pardon me, darling, for coming to you
in this place.'

Evan asked permission to occupy the parlour.

'My place,' said Mr. Goren, with humble severity, over his spectacles,
'is very poor. Such as it is, it is at the lady's service.'

Alone with her, Evan was about to ease his own feelings by remarking to
the effect that Mr. Goren was human like the rest of us, but Caroline
cried, with unwonted vivacity:

'Yes, yes, I know; but I thought only of you. I have such news for you!
You will and must pardon my coming--that's my first thought, sensitive
darling that you are!' She kissed him fondly. 'Juliana Bonner is in town,
staying with us!'

'Is that your news?' asked Evan, pressing her against his breast.

'No, dear love--but still! You have no idea what her fortune--Mrs. Bonner
has died and left her--but I mustn't tell you. Oh, my darling! how she
admires you! She--she could recompense you; if you would! We will put
that by, for the present. Dear! the Duke has begged you, through me, to
accept--I think it 's to be a sort of bailiff to his estates--I don't
know rightly. It's a very honourable post, that gentlemen take: and the
income you are to have, Evan, will be near a thousand a year. Now, what
do I deserve for my news?'

She put up her mouth for another kiss, out of breath.

'True?' looked Evan's eyes.

'True!' she said, smiling, and feasting on his bewilderment.

After the bubbling in his brain had a little subsided, Evan breathed as a
man on whom fresh air is blown. Were not these tidings of release? His
ridiculous pride must nevertheless inquire whether Caroline had been
begging this for him.

'No, dear--indeed!' Caroline asserted with more than natural vehemence.
'It's something that you yourself have done that has pleased him. I don't
know what. Only he says, he believes you are a man to be trusted with the
keys of anything--and so you are. You are to call on him to-morrow. Will
you?'

While Evan was replying, her face became white. She had heard the Major's
voice in the shop. His military step advanced, and Caroline, exclaiming,
'Don't let me see him!' bustled to a door. Evan nodded, and she slipped
through. The next moment he was facing the stiff marine.

'Well, young man,' the Major commenced, and, seating himself, added, 'be
seated. I want to talk to you seriously, sir. You didn't think fit to
wait till I had done with the Directors today. You're devilishly out in
your discipline, whatever you are at two and two. I suppose there's no
fear of being intruded on here? None of your acquaintances likely to be
introducing themselves to me?'

'There is not one that I would introduce to you,' said Evan.

The Major nodded a brief recognition of the compliment, and then,
throwing his back against the chair, fired out: 'Come, sir, is this your
doing?'

In military phrase, Evan now changed front. His first thought had been
that the Major had come for his wife. He perceived that he himself was
the special object of his visitation.

'I must ask you what you allude to,' he answered.

'You are not at your office, but you will speak to me as if there was
some distinction between us,' said the Major. 'My having married your
sister does not reduce me to the ranks, I hope.'

The Major drummed his knuckles on the table, after this impressive
delivery.

'Hem!' he resumed. 'Now, sir, understand, before you speak a word, that I
can see through any number of infernal lies. I see that you're prepared
for prevarication. By George! it shall come out of you, if I get it by
main force. The Duke compelled me to give you that appointment in my
Company. Now, sir, did you, or did you not, go to him and deliberately
state to him that you believed the affairs of the Company to be in a bad
condition--infamously handled, likely to involve his honour as a
gentleman? I ask you, sir, did you do this, or did you not do it?'

Evan waited till the sharp rattle of the Major's close had quieted.

'If I am to answer the wording of your statement, I may say that I did
not.'

'Very good; very good; that will do. Are you aware that the Duke has sent
in his resignation as a Director of our Company?'

'I hear of it first from you.'

'Confound your familiarity!' cried the irritable officer, rising. 'Am I
always to be told that I married your sister? Address me, sir, as becomes
your duty.'

Evan heard the words 'beggarly tailor' mumbled 'out of the gutters,' and
'cursed connection.' He stood in the attitude of attention, while the
Major continued:

'Now, young man, listen to these facts. You came to me this day last
week, and complained that you did not comprehend some of our transactions
and affairs. I explained them to your damned stupidity. You went away.
Three days after that, you had an interview with the Duke. Stop, sir!
What the devil do you mean by daring to speak while I am speaking? You
saw the Duke, I say. Now, what took place at that interview?'

The Major tried to tower over Evan powerfully, as he put this query. They
were of a common height, and to do so, he had to rise on his toes, so
that the effect was but momentary.

'I think I am not bound to reply,' said Evan.

'Very well, sir; that will do.' The Major's fingers were evidently
itching for an absent rattan. 'Confess it or not, you are dismissed from
your post. Do you hear? You are kicked in the street. A beggarly tailor
you were born, and a beggarly tailor you will die.'

'I must beg you to stop, now,' said Evan. 'I told you that I was not
bound to reply: but I will. If you will sit down, Major Strike, you shall
hear what you wish to know.'

This being presently complied with, though not before a glare of the
Major's eyes had shown his doubt whether it might not be construed into
insolence, Evan pursued:

'I came to you and informed you that I could not reconcile the
cash-accounts of the Company, and that certain of the later proceedings
appeared to me to jeopardize its prosperity. Your explanations did not
satisfy me. I admit that you enjoined me to be silent. But the Duke, as a
Director, had as strong a right to claim me as his servant, and when he
questioned me as to the position of the Company, I told him what I
thought, just as I had told you.'

'You told him we were jobbers and swindlers, sir!'

'The Duke inquired of me whether I would, under the circumstances, while
proceedings were going on which I did not approve of, take the
responsibility of allowing my name to remain--'

'Ha! ha! ha!' the Major burst out. This was too good a joke. The name of
a miserable young tailor!' Go on, sir, go on!' He swallowed his laughter
like oil on his rage.

'I have said sufficient.'

Jumping up, the Major swore by the Lord, that he had said sufficient.

'Now, look you here, young man.' He squared his finger before Evan,
eyeing him under a hard frown, 'You have been playing your game again, as
you did down at that place in Hampshire. I heard of it--deserved to be
shot, by heaven! You think you have got hold of the Duke, and you throw
me over. You imagine, I dare say, that I will allow my wife to be talked
about to further your interests--you self-seeking young dog! As long as
he lent the Company his name, I permitted a great many things. Do you
think me a blind idiot, sir? But now she must learn to be satisfied with
people who 've got no titles, or carriages, and who can't give hundred
guinea compliments. You're all of a piece-a set of . . .'

The Major paused, for half a word was on his mouth which had drawn
lightning to Evan's eyes.

Not to be baffled, he added: 'But look you, sir. I may be ruined. I dare
say the Company will go to the dogs--every ass will follow a Duke. But,
mark, this goes on no more. I will be no woman's tally. Mind, sir, I take
excellent care that you don't traffic in your sister!'

The Major delivered this culminating remark with a well-timed deflection
of his forefinger, and slightly turned aside when he had done.

You might have seen Evan's figure rocking, as he stood with his eyes
steadily levelled on his sister's husband.

The Major, who, whatever he was, was physically no coward, did not fail
to interpret the look, and challenge it.

Evan walked to the door, opened it, and said, between his teeth, 'You
must go at once.'

'Eh, sir, eh? what's this?' exclaimed the warrior but the door was open,
Mr. Goren was in the shop; the scandal of an assault in such a house, and
the consequent possibility of his matrimonial alliance becoming bruited
in the newspapers, held his arm after it had given an involuntary jerk.
He marched through with becoming dignity, and marched out into the
street; and if necks unelastic and heads erect may be taken as the sign
of a proud soul and of nobility of mind, my artist has the Major for his
model.

Evan displayed no such a presence. He returned to the little parlour,
shut and locked the door to the shop, and forgetting that one was near,
sat down, covered his eyes, and gave way to a fit of tearless sobbing.
With one foot in the room Caroline hung watching him. A pain that she had
never known wrung her nerves. His whole manhood seemed to be shaken, as
if by regular pulsations of intensest misery. She stood in awe of the
sight till her limbs failed her, and then staggering to him she fell on
her knees, clasping his, passionately kissing them.




CHAPTER XL.

IN WHICH THE COUNTESS STILL SCENTS GAME

Mr. Raikes and his friend Frank Remand, surnamed Franko, to suit the
requirements of metre, in which they habitually conversed, were walking
arm-in-arm along the drive in Society's Park on a fine frosty Sunday
afternoon of midwinter. The quips and jokes of Franko were lively, and he
looked into the carriages passing, as if he knew that a cheerful
countenance is not without charms for their inmates. Raikes' face, on the
contrary, was barren and bleak. Being of that nature that when a pun was
made he must perforce outstrip it, he fell into Franko's humour from time
to time, but albeit aware that what he uttered was good, and by
comparison transcendent, he refused to enjoy it. Nor when Franko started
from his arm to declaim a passage, did he do other than make limp efforts
to unite himself to Franko again. A further sign of immense depression in
him was that instead of the creative, it was the critical faculty he
exercised, and rather than reply to Franko in his form of speech, he
scanned occasional lines and objected to particular phrases. He had
clearly exchanged the sanguine for the bilious temperament, and was fast
stranding on the rocky shores of prose. Franko bore this very well, for
he, like Raikes in happier days, claimed all the glances of lovely woman
as his own, and on his right there flowed a stream of Beauties. At last
he was compelled to observe: 'This change is sudden: wherefore so
downcast? With tigrine claw thou mangiest my speech, thy cheeks are like
December's pippin, and thy tongue most sour!'

'Then of it make a farce!' said Raikes, for the making of farces was
Franko's profession. 'Wherefore so downcast! What a line! There! let's
walk on. Let us the left foot forward stout advance. I care not for the
herd.'

''Tis love!' cried Franko.

'Ay, an' it be!' Jack gloomily returned.

'For ever cruel is the sweet Saldar?'

Raikes winced at this name.

'A truce to banter, Franko!' he said sternly: but the subject was opened,
and the wound.

'Love!' he pursued, mildly groaning. 'Suppose you adored a fascinating
woman, and she knew--positively knew--your manly weakness, and you saw
her smiling upon everybody, and she told you to be happy, and egad, when
you came to reflect, you found that after three months' suit you were
nothing better than her errand-boy? A thing to boast of, is it not,
quotha?'

'Love's yellow-fever, jealousy, methinks,' Franko commenced in reply; but
Raikes spat at the emphasized word.

'Jealousy!--who's jealous of clergymen and that crew? Not I, by Pluto! I
carried five messages to one fellow with a coat-tail straight to his
heels, last week. She thought I should drive my curricle--I couldn't
afford an omnibus! I had to run. When I returned to her I was dirty. She
made remarks!'

'Thy sufferings are severe--but such is woman!' said Franko. 'Gad, it's a
good idea, though.' He took out a note-book and pencilled down a point or
two. Raikes watched the process sardonically.

'My tragedy is, then, thy farce!' he exclaimed. 'Well, be it so! I
believe I shall come to song-writing again myself shortly-beneath the
shield of Catnach I'll a nation's ballads frame. I've spent my income in
four months, and now I 'm living on my curricle. I underlet it. It 's
like trade--it 's as bad as poor old Harrington, by Jove! But that isn't
the worst, Franko!' Jack dropped his voice: 'I believe I'm furiously
loved by a poor country wench.'

'Morals!' was Franko's most encouraging reproof.

'Oh, I don't think I've even kissed her,' rejoined Raikes, who doubted
because his imagination was vivid. 'It 's my intellect that dazzles her.
I 've got letters--she calls me clever. By Jove! since I gave up driving
I've had thoughts of rushing down to her and making her mine in spite of
home, family, fortune, friends, name, position--everything! I have,
indeed.'

Franko looked naturally astonished at this amount of self-sacrifice. 'The
Countess?' he shrewdly suggested.

       'I'd rather be my Polly's prince,
        Than yon great lady's errand-boy!'

Raikes burst into song.

He stretched out his hand, as if to discard all the great ladies who were
passing. By the strangest misfortune ever known, the direction taken by
his fingers was toward a carriage wherein, beautifully smiling opposite
an elaborately reverend gentleman of middle age, the Countess de Saldar
was sitting. This great lady is not to be blamed for deeming that her
errand-boy was pointing her out vulgarly on a public promenade. Ineffable
disdain curled off her sweet olive visage. She turned her head.

'I 'll go down to that girl to-night,' said Raikes, with compressed
passion. And then he hurried Franko along to the bridge, where, behold,
the Countess alighted with the gentleman, and walked beside him into the
gardens.

'Follow her,' said Raikes, in agitation. 'Do you see her? by yon
long-tailed raven's side? Follow her, Franko! See if he kisses her
hand-anything! and meet me here in half an hour. I'll have evidence!'

Franko did not altogether like the office, but Raikes' dinners, singular
luck, and superiority in the encounter of puns, gave him the upper hand
with his friend, and so Franko went.

Turning away from the last glimpse of his Countess, Raikes crossed the
bridge, and had not strolled far beneath the bare branches of one of the
long green walks, when he perceived a gentleman with two ladies leaning
on him.

'Now, there,' moralized this youth; 'now, what do you say to that? Do you
call that fair? He can't be happy, and it's not in nature for them to be
satisfied. And yet, if I went up and attempted to please them all by
taking one away, the probabilities are that he would knock me down. Such
is life! We won't be made comfortable!'

Nevertheless, he passed them with indifference, for it was merely the
principle he objected to; and, indeed, he was so wrapped in his own
conceptions, that his name had to be called behind him twice before he
recognized Evan Harrington, Mrs. Strike, and Miss Bonner. The arrangement
he had previously thought good, was then spontaneously adopted. Mrs.
Strike reposed her fair hand upon his arm, and Juliana, with a timid
glance of pleasure, walked ahead in Evan's charge. Close neighbourhood
between the couples was not kept. The genius of Mr. Raikes was wasted in
manoeuvres to lead his beautiful companion into places where he could be
seen with her, and envied. It was, perhaps, more flattering that she
should betray a marked disposition to prefer solitude in his society. But
this idea illumined him only near the moment of parting. Then he saw it;
then he groaned in soul, and besought Evan to have one more promenade,
saying, with characteristic cleverness in the masking of his real
thoughts: 'It gives us an appetite, you know.'

In Evan's face and Juliana's there was not much sign that any protraction
of their walk together would aid this beneficent process of nature. He
took her hand gently, and when he quitted it, it dropped.

'The Rose, the Rose of Beckley Court!' Raikes sang aloud. 'Why, this is a
day of meetings. Behold John Thomas in the rear-a tower of plush and
powder! Shall I rush-shall I pluck her from the aged stem?'

On the gravel-walk above them Rose passed with her aristocratic
grandmother, muffled in furs. She marched deliberately, looking coldly
before her. Evan's face was white, and Juliana, whose eyes were fixed on
him, shuddered.

'I'm chilled,' she murmured to Caroline. 'Let us go.' Caroline eyed Evan
with a meaning sadness.

'We will hurry to our carriage,' she said.

They were seen to make a little circuit so as not to approach Rose; after
whom, thoughtless of his cruelty, Evan bent his steps slowly, halting
when she reached her carriage. He believed--rather, he knew that she had
seen him. There was a consciousness in the composed outlines of her face
as she passed: the indifference was too perfect. Let her hate him if she
pleased. It recompensed him that the air she wore should make her
appearance more womanly; and that black dress and crape-bonnet, in some
way, touched him to mournful thoughts of her that helped a partial
forgetfulness of wounded self.

Rose had driven off. He was looking at the same spot, where Caroline's
hand waved from her carriage. Juliana was not seen. Caroline requested
her to nod to him once, but she would not. She leaned back hiding her
eyes, and moving a petulant shoulder at Caroline's hand.

'Has he offended you, my child?'

Juliana answered harshly:

'No-no.'

The wheels rolled on, and Caroline tried other subjects, knowing possibly
that they would lead Juliana back to this of her own accord.

'You saw how she treated him?' the latter presently said, without moving
her hand from before her eyes.

'Yes, dear. He forgives her, and will forget it.'

'Oh!' she clenched her long thin hand, 'I pray that I may not die before
I have made her repent it. She shall!'

Juliana looked glitteringly in Caroline's face, and then fell a-weeping,
and suffered herself to be folded and caressed. The storm was long
subsiding.

'Dearest! you are better now?' said Caroline.

She whispered: 'Yes.'

'My brother has only to know you, dear--'

'Hush! That's past.' Juliana stopped her; and, on a deep breath that
threatened to break to sobs, she added in a sweeter voice than was common
to her, 'Ah, why--why did you tell him about the Beckley property?'

Caroline vainly strove to deny that she had told him. Juliana's head
shook mournfully at her; and now Caroline knew what Juliana meant when
she begged so earnestly that Evan should be kept ignorant of her change
of fortune.

Some days after this the cold struck Juliana's chest, and she sickened.
The three sisters held a sitting to consider what it was best to do with
her. Caroline proposed to take her to Beckley without delay. Harriet was
of opinion that the least they could do was to write to her relatives and
make them instantly aware of her condition.

But the Countess said 'No,' to both. Her argument was, that Juliana being
independent, they were by no means bound to 'bundle' her, in her state,
back to a place where she had been so shamefully maltreated: that here
she would live, while there she would certainly die: that absence of
excitement was her medicine, and that here she had it. Mrs. Andrew,
feeling herself responsible as the young lady's hostess, did not
acquiesce in the Countess's views till she had consulted Juliana; and
then apologies for giving trouble were breathed on the one hand;
sympathy, condolences, and professions of esteem, on the other. Juliana
said, she was but slightly ill, would soon recover. Entreated not to
leave them before she was thoroughly re-established, and to consent to be
looked on as one of the family, she sighed, and said it was the utmost
she could hope. Of course the ladies took this compliment to themselves,
but Evan began to wax in importance. The Countess thought it nearly time
to acknowledge him, and supported the idea by a citation of the doctrine,
that to forgive is Christian. It happened, however, that Harriet, who had
less art and more will than her sisters, was inflexible. She, living in a
society but a few steps above Tailordom, however magnificent in
expenditure and resources, abhorred it solemnly. From motives of
prudence, as well as personal disgust, she continued firm in declining to
receive her brother. She would not relent when the Countess pointed out a
dim, a dazzling prospect, growing out of Evan's proximity to the heiress
of Beckley Court; she was not to be moved when Caroline suggested that
the specific for the frail invalid was Evan's presence. As to this,
Juliana was sufficiently open, though, as she conceived, her art was
extreme.

'Do you know why I stay to vex and trouble you?' she asked Caroline.
'Well, then, it is that I may see your brother united to you all: and
then I shall go, happy.'

The pretext served also to make him the subject of many conversations.
Twice a week a bunch of the best flowers that could be got were sorted
and arranged by her, and sent namelessly to brighten Evan's chamber.

'I may do such a thing as this, you know, without incurring blame,' she
said.

The sight of a love so humble in its strength and affluence, sent
Caroline to Evan on a fruitless errand. What availed it, that accused of
giving lead to his pride in refusing the heiress, Evan should declare
that he did not love her? He did not, Caroline admitted as possible, but
he might. He might learn to love her, and therefore he was wrong in
wounding her heart. She related flattering anecdotes. She drew tearful
pictures of Juliana's love for him: and noticing how he seemed to prize
his bouquet of flowers, said:

'Do you love them for themselves, or the hand that sent them?'

Evan blushed, for it had been a struggle for him to receive them, as he
thought, from Rose in secret. The flowers lost their value; the song that
had arisen out of them, 'Thou livest in my memory,' ceased. But they came
still. How many degrees from love gratitude may be, I have not reckoned.
I rather fear it lies on the opposite shore. From a youth to a girl, it
may yet be very tender; the more so, because their ages commonly exclude
such a sentiment, and nature seems willing to make a transition stage of
it. Evan wrote to Juliana. Incidentally he expressed a wish to see her.
Juliana was under doctor's interdict: but she was not to be prevented
from going when Evan wished her to go. They met in the park, as before,
and he talked to her five minutes through the carriage window.

'Was it worth the risk, my poor child?' said Caroline, pityingly.

Juliana cried: 'Oh! I would give anything to live!'

A man might have thought that she made no direct answer.

'Don't you think I am patient? Don't you think I am very patient?'she
asked Caroline, winningly, on their way home.

Caroline could scarcely forbear from smiling at the feverish anxiety she
showed for a reply that should confirm her words and hopes.

'So we must all be!'she said, tend that common-place remark caused
Juliana to exclaim: 'Prisoners have lived in a dungeon, on bread and
water, for years!'

Whereat Caroline kissed her so tenderly that Juliana tried to look
surprised, and failing, her thin lips quivered; she breathed a soft
'hush,' and fell on Caroline's bosom.

She was transparent enough in one thing; but the flame which burned
within her did not light her through.

Others, on other matters, were quite as transparent to her.

Caroline never knew that she had as much as told her the moral suicide
Evan had committed at Beckley; so cunningly had she been probed at
intervals with little casual questions; random interjections, that one
who loved him could not fail to meet; petty doubts requiring
elucidations. And the Countess, kind as her sentiments had grown toward
the afflicted creature, was compelled to proclaim her densely stupid in
material affairs. For the Countess had an itch of the simplest feminine
curiosity to know whether the dear child had any notion of accomplishing
a certain holy duty of the perishable on this earth, who might possess
worldly goods; and no hints--not even plain speaking, would do. Juliana
did not understand her at all.

The Countess exhibited a mourning-ring on her finger, Mrs. Bonner's
bequest to her.

'How fervent is my gratitude to my excellent departed friend for this! A
legacy, however trifling, embalms our dear lost ones in the memory!'

It was of no avail. Juliana continued densely stupid. Was she not worse?
The Countess could not, 'in decency,' as she observed, reveal to her who
had prompted Mrs. Bonner so to bequeath the Beckley estates as to 'ensure
sweet Juliana's future'; but ought not Juliana to divine it?--Juliana at
least had hints sufficient.

Cold Spring winds were now blowing. Juliana had resided no less than two
months with the Cogglesbys. She was entreated still to remain, and she
did. From Lady Jocelyn she heard not a word of remonstrance; but from
Miss Carrington and Mrs. Shorne she received admonishing letters.
Finally, Mr. Harry Jocelyn presented himself. In London, and without any
of that needful subsistence which a young gentleman feels the want of in
London more than elsewhere, Harry began to have thoughts of his own,
without any instigation from his aunts, about devoting himself to
business. So he sent his card up to his cousin, and was graciously met in
the drawing-room by the Countess, who ruffled him and smoothed him, and
would possibly have distracted his soul from business had his
circumstances been less straitened. Juliana was declared to be too unwell
to see him that day. He called a second time, and enjoyed a similar
greeting. His third visit procured him an audience alone with Juliana,
when, at once, despite the warnings of his aunts, the frank fellow
plunged, 'medias res'. Mrs. Bonner had left him totally dependent on his
parents and his chances.

'A desperate state of things, isn't it, Juley? I think I shall go for a
soldier--common, you know.'

Instead of shrieking out against such a debasement of his worth and
gentility, as was to be expected, Juliana said:

'That's what Mr. Harrington thought of doing.'

'He! If he'd had the pluck he would.'

'His duty forbade it, and he did not.'

'Duty! a confounded tailor! What fools we were to have him at Beckley!'

'Has the Countess been unkind to you Harry?'

'I haven't seen her to-day, and don't want to. It's my little dear old
Juley I came for.'

'Dear Harry!' she thanked him with eyes and hands. 'Come often, won't
you?'

'Why, ain't you coming back to us, Juley?'

'Not yet. They are very kind to me here. How is Rose?'

'Oh, quite jolly. She and Ferdinand are thick again. Balls every night.
She dances like the deuce. They want me to go; but I ain't the sort of
figure for those places, and besides, I shan't dance till I can lead you
out.'

A spur of laughter at Harry's generous nod brought on Juliana's cough.
Harry watched her little body shaken and her reddened eyes. Some real
emotion--perhaps the fear which healthy young people experience at the
sight of deadly disease--made Harry touch her arm with the softness of a
child's touch.

'Don't be alarmed, Harry,' she said. 'It's nothing--only Winter. I'm
determined to get well.'

'That's right,' quoth he, recovering. 'I know you've got pluck, or you
wouldn't have stood that operation.'

'Let me see: when was that?' she asked slyly.

Harry coloured, for it related to a time when he had not behaved prettily
to her.

'There, Juley, that 's all forgotten. I was a fool-a scoundrel, if you
like. I 'm sorry for it now.'

'Do you want money, Harry?'

'Oh, money!'

'Have you repaid Mr. Harrington yet?'

'There--no, I haven't. Bother it! that fellow's name's always on your
tongue. I'll tell you what, Juley--but it's no use. He's a low, vulgar
adventurer.'

'Dear Harry,' said Juliana, softly; 'don't bring your aunts with you when
you come to see me.'

'Well, then I'll tell you, Juley. It's enough that he's a beastly
tailor.'

'Quite enough,' she responded; 'and he is neither a fool nor a
scoundrel.'

Harry's memory for his own speech was not quick. When Juliana's calm
glance at him called it up, he jumped from his chair, crying: 'Upon my
honour, I'll tell you what, Juley! If I had money to pay him to-morrow,
I'd insult him on the spot.'

Juliana meditated, and said: 'Then all your friends must wish you to
continue poor.'

This girl had once been on her knees to him. She had looked up to him
with admiring love, and he had given her a crumb or so occasionally,
thinking her something of a fool, and more of a pest; but now he could
not say a word to her without being baffled in an elderly-sisterly tone
exasperating him so far that he positively wished to marry her, and
coming to the point, offered himself with downright sincerity, and was
rejected. Harry left in a passion. Juliana confided the secret to
Caroline, who suggested interested motives, which Juliana would not hear
of.

'Ah,' said the Countess, when Caroline mentioned the case to her, 'of
course the poor thing cherishes her first offer. She would believe a
curate to be disinterested! But mind that Evan has due warning when she
is to meet him. Mind that he is dressed becomingly.'

Caroline asked why.

'Because, my dear, she is enamoured of his person. These little unhealthy
creatures are always attracted by the person. She thinks it to be Evan's
qualities. I know better: it is his person. Beckley Court may be lost by
a shabby coat!'

The Countess had recovered from certain spiritual languors into which she
had fallen after her retreat. Ultimate victory hung still in the balance.
Oh! if Evan would only marry this little sufferer, who was so sure to die
within a year! or, if she lived (for marriage has often been as a
resurrection to some poor female invalids), there was Beckley Court, a
splendid basis for future achievements. Reflecting in this fashion, the
Countess pardoned her brother. Glowing hopes hung fresh lamps in her
charitable breast. She stepped across the threshold of Tailordom, won Mr.
Goren's heart by her condescension, and worked Evan into a sorrowful mood
concerning the invalid. Was not Juliana his only active friend? In
return, he said things which only required a little colouring to be very
acceptable to her.

The game waxed exciting again. The enemy (the Jocelyn party) was alert,
but powerless. The three sisters were almost wrought to perform a
sacrifice far exceeding Evan's. They nearly decided to summon him to the
house: but the matter being broached at table one evening, Major Strike
objected to it so angrily that they abandoned it, with the satisfactory
conclusion that if they did wrong it was the Major's fault.

Meantime Juliana had much on her conscience. She knew Evan to be
innocent, and she allowed Rose to think him guilty. Could she bring her
heart to join them? That was not in her power: but desiring to be lulled
by a compromise, she devoted herself to make his relatives receive him;
and on days of bitter winds she would drive out to meet him, answering
all expostulations with--'I should not go if he were here.'

The game waxed hot. It became a question whether Evan should be admitted
to the house in spite of the Major. Juliana now made an extraordinary
move. Having the Count with her in the carriage one day, she stopped in
front of Mr. Goren's shop, and Evan had to come out. The Count returned
home extremely mystified. Once more the unhappy Countess was obliged to
draw bills on the fabulous; and as she had recommenced the system, which
was not without its fascinations to her, Juliana, who had touched the
spring, had the full benefit of it. The Countess had deceived her
before--what of that? She spoke things sweet to hear. Who could be false
that gave her heart food on which it lived?

One night Juliana returned from her drive alarmingly ill. She was watched
through the night by Caroline and the Countess alternately. In the
morning the sisters met.

'She has consented to let us send for a doctor,' said Caroline.

'Her chief desire seems to be a lawyer,' said the Countess.

'Yes, but the doctor must be sent for first.'

'Yes, indeed! But it behoves us to previse that the doctor does not kill
her before the lawyer comes.'

Caroline looked at Louisa, and said: 'Are you ignorant?'

'No--what?' cried the Countess eagerly.

'Evan has written to tell Lady Jocelyn the state of her health, and--'

'And that naturally has aggravated her malady!' The Countess cramped her
long fingers. 'The child heard it from him yesterday! Oh, I could swear
at that brother!'

She dropped into a chair and sat rigid and square-jawed, a sculpture of
unutterable rage.

In the afternoon Lady Jocelyn arrived. The doctor was there--the lawyer
had gone. Without a word of protest Juliana accompanied her ladyship to
Beckley Court. Here was a blow!

But Andrew was preparing one more mighty still. What if the Cogglesby
Brewery proved a basis most unsound? Where must they fall then? Alas! on
that point whence they sprang. If not to Perdition--Tailordom!




CHAPTER XLI

REVEALS AN ABOMINABLE PLOT OF THE BROTHERS COGGLESBY

A lively April day, with strong gusts from the Southwest, and long
sweeping clouds, saluted the morning coach from London to Lymport.
Thither Tailordom triumphant was bearing its victim at a rattling pace,
to settle him, and seal him for ever out of the ranks of gentlemen:
Society, meantime, howling exclusion to him in the background: 'Out of
our halls, degraded youth: The smiles of turbaned matrons: the sighs of
delicate maids; genial wit, educated talk, refined scandal, vice in
harness, dinners sentineled by stately plush: these, the flavour of life,
are not for you, though you stole a taste of them, wretched impostor! Pay
for it with years of remorse!'

The coach went rushing against the glorious high wind. It stirred his
blood, freshened his cheeks, gave a bright tone of zest to his eyes, as
he cast them on the young green country. Not banished from the breath of
heaven, or from self-respect, or from the appetite for the rewards that
are to follow duties done! Not banished from the help that is always
reached to us when we have fairly taken the right road: and that for him
is the road to Lymport. Let the kingdom of Gilt Gingerbread howl as it
will! We are no longer children, but men: men who have bitten hard at
experience, and know the value of a tooth: who have had our hearts
bruised, and cover them with armour: who live not to feed, but look to
food that we may live! What matters it that yonder high-spiced kingdom
should excommunicate such as we are? We have rubbed off the gilt, and
have assumed the command of our stomachs. We are men from this day!

Now, you would have thought Evan's companions, right and left of him,
were the wretches under sentence, to judge from appearances. In contrast
with his look of insolent pleasure, Andrew, the moment an eye was on him,
exhibited the cleverest impersonation of the dumps ever seen: while Mr.
Raikes was from head to foot nothing better than a moan made visible.
Nevertheless, they both agreed to rally Evan, and bid him be of good
cheer.

'Don't be down, Van; don't be down, my boy,' said Andrew, rubbing his
hands gloomily.

'I? do I look it?' Evan answered, laughing.

'Capital acting!' exclaimed Raikes. 'Try and keep it up.'

'Well, I hope you're acting too,' said Evan.

Raikes let his chest fall like a collapsing bellows.

At the end of five minutes, he remarked: 'I've been sitting on it the
whole morning! There's violent inflammation, I'm persuaded. Another hour,
and I jump slap from the summit of the coach!'

Evan turned to Andrew.

'Do you think he'll be let off?'

'Mr. Raikes? Can't say. You see, Van, it depends upon how Old Tom has
taken his bad luck. Ahem! Perhaps he'll be all the stricter; and as a man
of honour, Mr. Raikes, you see, can't very well--'

'By Jove! I wish I wasn't a man of honour!' Raikes interposed, heavily.

'You see, Van, Old Tom's circumstances'--Andrew ducked, to smother a sort
of laughter--'are now such that he'd be glad of the money to let him off,
no doubt; but Mr. Raikes has spent it, I can't lend it, and you haven't
got it, and there we all are. At the end of the year he's free, and
he--ha! ha! I'm not a bit the merrier for laughing, I can tell you.'

Catching another glimpse of Evan's serious face, Andrew fell into louder
laughter; checking it with doleful solemnity.

Up hill and down hill, and past little homesteads shining with yellow
crocuses; across wide brown heaths, whose outlines raised in Evan's mind
the night of his funeral walk, and tossed up old feelings dead as the
whirling dust. At last Raikes called out:

'The towers of Fallow field; heigho!'

And Andrew said:

'Now then, Van: if Old Tom's anywhere, he's here. You get down at the
Dragon, and don't you talk to me, but let me go in. It'll be just the
hour he dines in the country. Isn't it a shame of him to make me face
every man of the creditors--eh?'

Evan gave Andrew's hand an affectionate squeeze, at which Andrew had to
gulp down something--reciprocal emotion, doubtless.

'Hark,' said Raikes, as the horn of the guard was heard. 'Once that sound
used to set me caracoling before an abject multitude. I did wonders. All
London looked on me! It had more effect on me than champagne. Now I hear
it--the whole charm has vanished! I can't see a single old castle. Would
you have thought it possible that a small circular bit of tin on a man's
person could produce such changes in him?'

'You are a donkey to wear it,' said Evan.

'I pledged my word as a gentleman, and thought it small, for the money!'
said Raikes. 'This is the first coach I ever travelled on, without making
the old whip burst with laughing. I'm not myself. I'm haunted. I'm
somebody else.'

The three passengers having descended, a controversy commenced between
Evan and Andrew as to which should pay. Evan had his money out; Andrew
dashed it behind him; Evan remonstrated.

'Well, you mustn't pay for us two, Andrew. I would have let you do it
once, but--'

'Stuff!' cried Andrew. 'I ain't paying--it 's the creditors of the
estate, my boy!'

Evan looked so ingenuously surprised and hurt at his lack of principle,
that Andrew chucked a sixpence at a small boy, saying,

'If you don't let me have my own way, Van, I 'll shy my purse after it.
What do you mean, sir, by treating me like a beggar?'

'Our friend Harrington can't humour us,' quoth Raikes. 'For myself, I
candidly confess I prefer being paid for'; and he leaned contentedly
against one of the posts of the inn till the filthy dispute was arranged
to the satisfaction of the ignobler mind. There Andrew left them, and
went to Mrs. Sockley, who, recovered from her illness, smiled her usual
placid welcome to a guest.

'You know me, ma'am?'

'Oh, yes! The London Mr. Cogglesby!'

'Now, ma'am, look here. I've come for my brother. Don't be alarmed. No
danger as yet. But, mind! if you attempt to conceal him from his lawful
brother, I'll summon here the myrmidons of the law.'

Mrs. Sockley showed a serious face.

'You know his habits, Mr. Cogglesby; and one doesn't go against any one
of his whimsies, or there's consequences: but the house is open to you,
sir. I don't wish to hide him.'

Andrew accepted this intelligent evasion of Tom Cogglesby's orders as
sufficient, and immediately proceeded upstairs. A door shut on the first
landing. Andrew went to this door and knocked. No answer. He tried to
open it, but found that he had been forestalled. After threatening to
talk business through the key-hole, the door was unlocked, and Old Tom
appeared.

'So! now you're dogging me into the country. Be off; make an appointment.
Saturday's my holiday. You know that.'

Andrew pushed through the doorway, and, by way of an emphatic reply and a
silencing one, delivered a punch slap into Old Tom's belt.

'Confound you, Nan!' said Old Tom, grimacing, but friendly, as if his
sympathies had been irresistibly assailed.

'It 's done, Tom! I've done it. Won my bet, now,' Andrew exclaimed. 'The
women-poor creatures! What a state they're in. I pity 'em.'

Old Tom pursed his lips, and eyed his brother incredulously, but with
curious eagerness.

'Oh, Lord! what a face I've had to wear!' Andrew continued, and while he
sank into a chair and rubbed his handkerchief over his crisp hair, Old
Tom let loose a convinced and exulting, 'ha! ha!'

'Yes, you may laugh. I've had all the bother,' said Andrew.

'Serve ye right--marrying such cattle,' Old Tom snapped at him.

'They believe we're bankrupt--owe fifty thousand clear, Tom!'

'Ha! ha!'

'Brewery stock and household furniture to be sold by general auction,
Friday week.'

'Ha! ha!'

'Not a place for any of us to poke our heads into. I talked about
"pitiless storms" to my poor Harry--no shelter to be had unless we go
down to Lymport, and stop with their brother in shop!'

Old Tom did enjoy this. He took a great gulp of air for a tremendous
burst of laughter, and when this was expended and reflection came, his
features screwed, as if the acidest of flavours had ravished his palate.

'Bravo, Nan! Didn't think you were man enough. Ha! ha! Nan--I say--eh?
how did ye get on behind the curtains?'

The tale, to guess by Andrew's face, appeared to be too strongly infused
with pathos for revelation.

'Will they go, Nan, eh? d' ye think they 'll go?'

'Where else can they go, Tom? They must go there, or on the parish, you
know.'

'They'll all troop down to the young tailor--eh?'

'They can't sleep in the parks, Tom.'

'No. They can't get into Buckingham Palace, neither--'cept as housemaids.
'Gad, they're howling like cats, I'd swear--nuisance to the
neighbourhood--ha! ha!'

Old Tom's cruel laughter made Andrew feel for the unhappy ladies. He
stuck his forehead, and leaned forward, saying: 'I don't know--'pon my
honour, I don't know--can't think we've--quite done right to punish 'em
so.'

This acted like cold water on Old Tom's delight. He pitched it back in
the shape of a doubt of what Andrew had told him. Whereupon Andrew defied
him to face three miserable women on the verge of hysterics; and Old Tom,
beginning to chuckle again, rejoined that it would bring them to their
senses, and emancipate him.

'You may laugh, Mr. Tom,' said Andrew; 'but if poor Harry should find me
out, deuce a bit more home for me.'

Old Tom looked at him keenly, and rapped the table. 'Swear you did it,
Nan.'

'You promise you'll keep the secret,' said Andrew.

'Never make promises.'

'Then there's a pretty life for me! I did it for that poor dear boy. You
were only up to one of your jokes--I see that. Confound you, Old Tom,
you've been making a fool of me.'

The flattering charge was not rejected by Old Tom, who now had his
brother to laugh at as well. Andrew affected to be indignant and
desperate.

'If you'd had a heart, Tom, you'd have saved the poor fellow without any
bother at all. What do you think? When I told him of our smash--ha! ha!
it isn't such a bad joke-well, I went to him, hanging my head, and he
offered to arrange our affairs--that is--'

'Damned meddlesome young dog!' cried Old Tom, quite in a rage.

'There--you're up in a twinkling,' said Andrew. 'Don't you see he
believed it, you stupid Old Tom? Lord! to hear him say how sorry he was,
and to see how glad he looked at the chance of serving us!'

'Serving us!' Tom sneered.

'Ha!' went Andrew. 'Yes. There. You're a deuced deal prouder than fifty
peers. You're an upside-down old despot!'

No sharper retort rising to Old Tom's lips, he permitted his brother's
abuse of him to pass, declaring that bandying words was not his business,
he not being a Parliament man.

'How about the Major, Nan? He coming down, too?'

'Major!' cried Andrew. 'Lucky if he keeps his commission. Coming down?
No. He's off to the Continent.'

'Find plenty of scamps there to keep him company,' added Tom. 'So he's
broke--eh? ha! ha!'

'Tom,' said Andrew, seriously, 'I'll tell you all about it, if you 'll
swear not to split on me, because it would really upset poor Harry so.
She 'd think me such a beastly hypocrite, I couldn't face her
afterwards.'

'Lose what pluck you have--eh?' Tom jerked out his hand, and bade his
brother continue.

Compelled to trust in him without a promise, Andrew said: 'Well, then,
after we'd arranged it, I went back to Harry, and begged her to have poor
Van at the house told her what I hoped you'd do for him about getting him
into the Brewery. She's very kind, Tom, 'pon my honour she is. She was
willing, only--'

'Only--eh?'

'Well, she was so afraid it'd hurt her sisters to see him there.'

Old Tom saw he was in for excellent fun, and wouldn't spoil it for the
world.

'Yes, Nan?'

'So I went to Caroline. She was easy enough; and she went to the
Countess.'

'Well, and she--?'

'She was willing, too, till Lady Jocelyn came and took Miss Bonner home
to Beckley, and because Evan had written to my lady to fetch her, the
Countess--she was angry. That was all. Because of that, you know. But yet
she agreed. But when Miss Bonner had gone, it turned out that the Major
was the obstacle. They were all willing enough to have Evan there, but
the Major refused. I didn't hear him. I wasn't going to ask him. I mayn't
be a match for three women, but man to man, eh, Tom? You'd back me there?
So Harry said the Major 'd make Caroline miserable, if his wishes were
disrespected. By George, I wish I'd know, then. Don't you think it odd,
Tom, now? There's a Duke of Belfield the fellow had hooked into his
Company; and--through Evan I heard--the Duke had his name struck off.
After that, the Major swore at the Duke once or twice, and said Caroline
wasn't to go out with him. Suddenly, he insists that she shall go. Days
the poor thing kept crying! One day, he makes her go. She hasn't the
spirit of my Harry or the Countess. By good luck, Van, who was hunting
ferns for some friends of his, met them on Sunday in Richmond Park, and
Van took her away from the Duke. But, Tom, think of Van seeing a fellow
watching her wherever she went, and hearing the Duke's coachman tell that
fellow he had orders to drive his master and a lady hard on to the sea
that night. I don't believe it--it wasn't Caroline! But what do you think
of our finding out that beast of a spy to be in the Major's pay? We did.
Van put a constable on his track; we found him out, and he confessed it.
A fact, Tom! That decided me. If it was only to get rid of a brute, I
determined I 'd do it, and I did. Strike came to me to get my name for a
bill that night. 'Gad, he looked blanker than his bill when he heard of
us two bankrupt. I showed him one or two documents I'd got ready. Says
he: "Never mind; it'll only be a couple of hundred more in the schedule."
Stop, Tom! he's got some of our blood. I don't think he meant it. He is
hard pushed. Well, I gave him a twentier, and he was off the next night.
You 'll soon see all about the Company in the papers.'

At the conclusion of Andrew's recital, Old Tom thrummed and looked on the
floor under a heavy frown. His mouth worked dubiously, and, from moment
to moment, he plucked at his waistcoat and pulled it down, throwing back
his head and glaring.

'I 've knocked that fellow over once,' he said. 'Wish he hadn't got up
again.'

Andrew nodded.

'One good thing, Nan. He never boasted of our connection. Much obliged to
him.'

'Yes,' said Andrew, who was gladly watching Old Tom's change of mood with
a quiescent aspect.

'Um!--must keep it quiet from his poor old mother.'

Andrew again affirmatived his senior's remarks. That his treatment of Old
Tom was sound, he presently had proof of. The latter stood up, and after
sniffing in an injured way for about a minute, launched out his right
leg, and vociferated that he would like to have it in his power to kick
all the villains out of the world: a modest demand Andrew at once chimed
in with; adding that, were such a faculty extended to him, he would not
object to lose the leg that could benefit mankind so infinitely, and
consented to its following them. Then, Old Tom, who was of a practical
turn, meditated, swung his foot, and gave one grim kick at the imaginary
bundle of villains, discharged them headlong straight into space. Andrew,
naturally imitative, and seeing that he had now to kick them flying,
attempted to excel Old Tom in the vigour of his delivery. No wonder that
the efforts of both were heating: they were engaged in the task of
ridding the globe of the larger half of its inhabitants. Tom perceived
Andrew's useless emulation, and with a sound translated by 'yack,' sent
his leg out a long way. Not to be outdone, Andrew immediately, with a
still louder 'yack,' committed himself to an effort so violent that the
alternative between his leg coming off, or his being taken off his leg,
was propounded by nature, and decided by the laws of gravity in a trice.
Joyful grunts were emitted by Old Tom at the sight of Andrew prostrate,
rubbing his pate. But Mrs. Sockley, to whom the noise of Andrew's fall
had suggested awful fears of a fratricidal conflict upstairs, hurried
forthwith to announce to them that the sovereign remedy for human ills,
the promoter of concord, the healer of feuds, the central point of man's
destiny in the flesh--Dinner, was awaiting them.

To the dinner they marched.

Of this great festival be it simply told that the supply was copious and
of good quality--much too good and copious for a bankrupt host: that Evan
and Mr. John Raikes were formally introduced to Old Tom before the repast
commenced, and welcomed some three minutes after he had decided the
flavour of his first glass; that Mr. Raikes in due time preferred his
petition for release from a dreadful engagement, and furnished vast
amusement to the company under Old Tom's hand, until, by chance, he
quoted a scrap of Latin, at which the brothers Cogglesby, who would have
faced peers and princes without being disconcerted, or performing mental
genuflexions, shut their mouths and looked injured, unhappy, and in the
presence of a superior: Mr. Raikes not being the man to spare them.
Moreover, a surprise was afforded to Evan. Andrew stated to Old Tom that
the hospitality of Main Street, Lymport,--was open to him. Strange to
say, Old Tom accepted it on the spot, observing, 'You're master of the
house--can do what you like, if you 're man enough,' and adding that he
thanked him, and would come in a day or two. The case of Mr. Raikes was
still left uncertain, for as the bottle circulated, he exhibited such a
faculty for apt, but to the brothers, totally incomprehensible quotation,
that they fled from him without leaving him time to remember what special
calamity was on his mind, or whether this earth was other than an abode
conceived in great jollity for his life-long entertainment.




CHAPTER XLII

JULIANA

The sick night-light burned steadily in Juliana's chamber. On a couch,
beside her bed, Caroline lay sleeping, tired with a long watch. Two
sentences had been passed on Juliana: one on her heart: one on her body:
'Thou art not loved'; and, 'Thou must die.' The frail passion of her
struggle against her destiny was over with her. Quiet as that quiet which
Nature was taking her to, her body reposed. Calm as the solitary
night-light before her open eyes, her spirit was wasting away. 'If I am
not loved, then let me die!' In such a sense she bowed to her fate.

At an hour like this, watching the round of light on the ceiling, with
its narrowing inner rings, a sufferer from whom pain has fled looks back
to the shores she is leaving, and would be well with them who walk there.
It is false to imagine that schemers and workers in the dark are
destitute of the saving gift of conscience. They have it, and it is
perhaps made livelier in them than with easy people; and therefore, they
are imperatively spurred to hoodwink it. Hence, their self-delusion is
deep and endures. They march to their object, and gaining or losing it,
the voice that calls to them is the voice of a blind creature, whom any
answer, provided that the answer is ready, will silence. And at an hour
like this, when finally they snatch their minute of sight on the
threshold of black night, their souls may compare with yonder shining
circle on the ceiling, which, as the light below gasps for air,
contracts, and extends but to mingle with the darkness. They would be
nobler, better, boundlessly good to all;--to those who have injured them
to those whom they have injured. Alas! for any definite deed the limit of
their circle is immoveable, and they must act within it. The trick they
have played themselves imprisons them. Beyond it, they cease to be.

Lying in this utter stillness, Juliana thought of Rose; of her beloved by
Evan. The fever that had left her blood, had left it stagnant, and her
thoughts were quite emotionless. She looked faintly on a far picture. She
saw Rose blooming with pleasures in Elburne House, sliding as a boat
borne by the river's tide to sea, away from her living joy. The breast of
Rose was lucid to her, and in that hour of insight she had clear
knowledge of her cousin's heart; how it scoffed at its base love, and
unwittingly betrayed the power on her still, by clinging to the world and
what it would give her to fill the void; how externally the lake was
untroubled, and a mirror to the passing day; and how within there pressed
a flood against an iron dam. Evan, too, she saw. The Countess was right
in her judgement of Juliana's love. Juliana looked very little to his
qualities. She loved him when she thought him guilty, which made her
conceive that her love was of a diviner cast than Rose was capable of.
Guilt did not spoil his beauty to her; his gentleness and glowing manhood
were unchanged; and when she knew him as he was, the revelation of his
high nature simply confirmed her impression of his physical perfections.
She had done him a wrong; at her death news would come to him, and it
might be that he would bless her name. Because she sighed no longer for
those dear lips and strong arms to close about her tremulous frame, it
seemed to her that she had quite surrendered him. Generous to Evan, she
would be just to Rose. Beneath her pillow she found pencil and paper, and
with difficulty, scarce seeing her letters in the brown light, she began
to trace lines of farewell to Rose. Her conscience dictated to her thus,
'Tell Rose that she was too ready to accept his guilt; and that in this
as in all things, she acted with the precipitation of her character. Tell
her that you always trusted, and that now you know him innocent. Give her
the proofs you have. Show that he did it to shield his intriguing sister.
Tell her that you write this only to make her just to him. End with a
prayer that Rose may be happy.'

Ere Juliana had finished one sentence, she resigned the pencil. Was it
not much, even at the gates of death, to be the instrument to send Rose
into his arms? The picture swayed before her, helping her weakness. She
found herself dreaming that he had kissed her once. Dorothy, she
remembered, had danced up to her one day, to relate what the maids of the
house said of the gentleman--(at whom, it is known, they look with the
licence of cats toward kings); and Dorothy's fresh careless mouth had
told how one observant maid, amorously minded, proclaimed of Evan, to a
companion of her sex, that, 'he was the only gentleman who gave you an
idea of how he would look when he was kissing you.' Juliana cherished
that vision likewise. Young ladies are not supposed to do so, if menial
maids are; but Juliana did cherish it, and it possessed her fancy. Bear
in your recollection that she was not a healthy person. Diseased little
heroines may be made attractive, and are now popular; but strip off the
cleverly woven robe which is fashioned to cover them, and you will find
them in certain matters bearing a resemblance to menial maids.

While the thoughts of his kiss lasted, she could do nothing; but lay with
her two hands out on the bed, and her eyelids closed. Then waking, she
took the pencil again. It would not move: her bloodless fingers fell from
it.

'If they do not meet, and he never marries, I may claim him in the next
world,' she mused.

But conscience continued uneasy. She turned her wrist and trailed a
letter from beneath the pillow. It was from Mrs. Shorne. Juliana knew the
contents. She raised it unopened as high as her faltering hands
permitted, and read like one whose shut eyes read syllables of fire on
the darkness.

'Rose has at last definitely engaged herself to Ferdinand, you will be
glad to hear, and we may now treat her as a woman.'

Having absorbed these words, Juliana's hand found strength to write, with
little difficulty, what she had to say to Rose. She conceived it to be
neither sublime nor generous: not even good; merely her peculiar duty.
When it was done, she gave a long, low sigh of relief.

Caroline whispered, 'Dearest child, are you awake?'

'Yes,' she answered.

'Sorrowful, dear?'

'Very quiet.'

Caroline reached her hand over to her, and felt the paper. 'What is
this?'

'My good-bye to Rose. I want it folded now.'

Caroline slipped from the couch to fulfil her wish. She enclosed the
pencilled scrap of paper, sealed it, and asked, 'Is that right?'

'Now unlock my desk,' Juliana uttered, feebly. 'Put it beside a letter
addressed to a law-gentleman. Post both the morning I am gone.'

Caroline promised to obey, and coming to Juliana to mark her looks,
observed a faint pleased smile dying away, and had her hand gently
squeezed. Juliana's conscience had preceded her contentedly to its last
sleep; and she, beneath that round of light on the ceiling, drew on her
counted breaths in peace till dawn.




CHAPTER XLIII

ROSE

Have you seen a young audacious spirit smitten to the earth? It is a
singular study; and, in the case of young women, a trap for inexperienced
men. Rose, who had commanded and managed every one surrounding her since
infancy, how humble had she now become!--how much more womanly in
appearance, and more child-like at heart! She was as wax in Lady
Elburne's hands. A hint of that veiled episode, the Beckley campaign,
made Rose pliant, as if she had woven for herself a rod of scorpions. The
high ground she had taken; the perfect trust in one; the scorn of any
judgement, save her own; these had vanished from her. Rose, the tameless
heroine who had once put her mother's philosophy in action, was the
easiest filly that turbaned matron ever yet drove into the straight road
of the world. It even surprised Lady Jocelyn to see how wonderfully she
had been broken in by her grandmother. Her ladyship wrote to Drummond to
tell him of it, and Drummond congratulated her, saying, however: 'Changes
of this sort don't come of conviction. Wait till you see her at home. I
think they have been sticking pins into the sore part.'

Drummond knew Rose well. In reality there was no change in her. She was
only a suppliant to be spared from ridicule: spared from the application
of the scourge she had woven for herself.

And, ah! to one who deigned to think warmly still of such a disgraced
silly creature, with what gratitude she turned! He might well suppose
love alone could pour that profusion of jewels at his feet.

Ferdinand, now Lord Laxley, understood the merits of his finger-nails
better than the nature of young women; but he is not to be blamed for
presuming that Rose had learnt to adore him. Else why did she like his
company so much? He was not mistaken in thinking she looked up to him.
She seemed to beg to be taken into his noble serenity. In truth she
sighed to feel as he did, above everybody!--she that had fallen so low!
Above everybody!--born above them, and therefore superior by grace
divine! To this Rose Jocelyn had come--she envied the mind of Ferdinand.

He, you may be sure, was quite prepared to accept her homage. Rose he had
always known to be just the girl for him; spirited, fresh, and with fine
teeth; and once tied to you safe to be staunch. They walked together,
rode together, danced together. Her soft humility touched him to
eloquence. Say she was a little hypocrite, if you like, when the blood
came to her cheeks under his eyes. Say she was a heartless minx for
allowing it to be bruited that she and Ferdinand were betrothed. I can
but tell you that her blushes were blushes of gratitude to one who could
devote his time to such a disgraced silly creature, and that she, in her
abject state, felt a secret pleasure in the protection Ferdinand's name
appeared to extend over her, and was hardly willing to lose it.

So far Lady Elburne's tact and discipline had been highly successful. One
morning, in May, Ferdinand, strolling with Rose down the garden made a
positive appeal to her common sense and friendly feeling; by which she
understood that he wanted her consent to his marriage with her.

Rose answered:

'Who would have me?'

Ferdinand spoke pretty well, and ultimately got possession of her hand.
She let him keep it, thinking him noble for forgetting that another had
pressed it before him.

Some minutes later the letters were delivered. One of them contained
Juliana's dark-winged missive.

'Poor, poor Juley!' said Rose, dropping her head, after reading all that
was on the crumpled leaf with an inflexible face. And then, talking on,
long low sighs lifted her bosom at intervals. She gazed from time to time
with a wistful conciliatory air on Ferdinand. Rushing to her chamber, the
first cry her soul framed was:

'He did not kiss me!'

The young have a superstitious sense of something incontestably true in
the final protestations of the dead. Evan guiltless! she could not quite
take the meaning this revelation involved. That which had been dead was
beginning to move within her; but blindly: and now it stirred and
troubled; now sank. Guiltless all she had thought him! Oh! she knew she
could not have been deceived. But why, why had he hidden his sacrifice
from her?

'It is better for us both, of course,' said Rose, speaking the world's
wisdom, parrot-like, and bursting into tears the next minute. Guiltless,
and gloriously guiltless! but nothing--nothing to her!

She tried to blame him. It would not do. She tried to think of that
grovelling loathsome position painted to her by Lady Elburne's graphic
hand. Evan dispersed the gloomy shades like sunshine. Then in a sort of
terror she rejoiced to think she was partially engaged to Ferdinand, and
found herself crying again with exultation, that he had not kissed her:
for a kiss on her mouth was to Rose a pledge and a bond.

The struggle searched her through: bared her weakness, probed her
strength; and she, seeing herself, suffered grievously in her self-love.
Am I such a coward, inconstant, cold? she asked. Confirmatory answers
coming, flung her back under the shield of Ferdinand if for a moment her
soul stood up armed and defiant, it was Evan's hand she took.

To whom do I belong? was another terrible question. In her ideas, if Evan
was not chargeable with that baseness which had sundered them he might
claim her yet, if he would. If he did, what then? Must she go to him?

Impossible: she was in chains. Besides, what a din of laughter there
would be to see her led away by him. Twisting her joined hands: weeping
for her cousin, as she thought, Rose passed hours of torment over
Juliana's legacy to her.

'Why did I doubt him?' she cried, jealous that any soul should have known
and trusted him better. Jealous and I am afraid that the kindling of that
one feature of love relighted the fire of her passion thus fervidly. To
be outstripped in generosity was hateful to her. Rose, naturally, could
not reflect that a young creature like herself, fighting against the
world, as we call it, has all her faculties at the utmost stretch, and is
often betrayed by failing nature when the will is still valiant.

And here she sat-in chains! 'Yes! I am fit only to be the wife of an idle
brainless man, with money and a title,' she said, in extreme
self-contempt. She caught a glimpse of her whole life in the horrid tomb
of his embrace, and questions whether she could yield her hand to
him--whether it was right in the eyes of heaven, rushed impetuously to
console her, and defied anything in the shape of satisfactory
affirmations. Nevertheless, the end of the struggle was, that she felt
that she was bound to Ferdinand.

'But this I will do,' said Rose, standing with heat-bright eyes and
deep-coloured cheeks before the glass. 'I will clear his character at
Beckley. I will help him. I will be his friend. I will wipe out the
injustice I did him.' And this bride-elect of a lord absolutely added
that she was unworthy to be the wife of a tailor!

'He! how unequalled he is! There is nothing he fears except shame. Oh!
how sad it will be for him to find no woman in his class to understand
him and be his helpmate!'

Over, this sad subject, of which we must presume her to be accurately
cognizant, Rose brooded heavily. By mid-day she gave her Grandmother
notice that she was going home to Juliana's funeral.

'Well, Rose, if you think it necessary to join the ceremony,' said Lady
Elburne. 'Beckley is bad quarters for you, as you have learnt. There was
never much love between you cousins.'

'No, and I don't pretend to it,' Rose answered. 'I am sorry poor Juley's
gone.'

'She's better gone for many reasons--she appears to have been a little
venomous toad,' said Lady Elburne; and Rose, thinking of a snakelike
death-bite working through her blood, rejoined: 'Yes, she isn't to be
pitied she 's better off than most people.'

So it was arranged that Rose should go. Ferdinand and her aunt, Mrs.
Shorne, accompanied her. Mrs. Shorne gave them their opportunities,
albeit they were all stowed together in a carriage, and Ferdinand seemed
willing to profit by them; but Rose's hand was dead, and she sat by her
future lord forming the vow on her lips that they should never be touched
by him.

Arrived at Beckley, she, to her great delight, found Caroline there,
waiting for the funeral. In a few minutes she got her alone, and after
kisses, looked penetratingly into her lovely eyes, shook her head, and
said: 'Why were you false to me?'

'False?' echoed Caroline.

'You knew him. You knew why he did that. Why did you not save me?'

Caroline fell upon her neck, asking pardon. She spared her the recital of
facts further than the broad avowal. Evan's present condition she plainly
stated: and Rose, when the bitter pangs had ceased, made oath to her soul
she would rescue him from it.

In addition to the task of clearing Evan's character, and rescuing him,
Rose now conceived that her engagement to Ferdinand must stand ice-bound
till Evan had given her back her troth. How could she obtain it from him?
How could she take anything from one so noble and so poor! Happily there
was no hurry; though before any bond was ratified, she decided
conscientiously that it must be done.

You see that like a lithe snake she turns on herself, and must be tracked
in and out. Not being a girl to solve the problem with tears, or outright
perfidy, she had to ease her heart to the great shock little by
little--sincere as far as she knew: as far as one who loves may be. The
day of the funeral came and went. The Jocelyns were of their mother's
opinion: that for many reasons Juliana was better out of the way. Mrs.
Bonner's bequest had been a severe blow to Sir Franks. However, all was
now well. The estate naturally lapsed to Lady Jocelyn. No one in the
house dreamed of a will, signed with Juliana's name, attested, under due
legal forms, being in existence. None of the members of the family
imagined that at Beckley Court they were then residing on somebody else's
ground.

Want of hospitable sentiments was not the cause that led to an intimation
from Sir Franks to his wife, that Mrs. Strike must not be pressed to
remain, and that Rose must not be permitted to have her own way in this.
Knowing very well that Mrs. Shorne spoke through her husband's mouth,
Lady Jocelyn still acquiesced, and Rose, who had pressed Caroline
publicly to stay, had to be silent when the latter renewed her faint
objections; so Caroline said she would leave on the morrow morning.

Juliana, with her fretfulness, her hand bounties, her petty egoisms, and
sudden far-leaping generosities, and all the contradictory impulses of
her malady, had now departed utterly. The joys of a landed proprietor
mounted into the head of Sir Franks. He was up early the next morning,
and he and Harry walked over a good bit of the ground before breakfast.
Sir Franks meditated making it entail, and favoured Harry with a lecture
on the duty of his shaping the course of his conduct at once after the
model of the landed gentry generally.

'And you may think yourself lucky to come into that catalogue--the son of
a younger son!' said Sir Franks, tapping Mr. Harry's shoulder. Harry also
began to enjoy the look and smell of land. At the breakfast, which,
though early, was well attended, Harry spoke of the adviseability of
felling timber here, planting there, and so forth, after the model his
father held up. Sir Franks nodded approval of his interest in the estate,
but reserved his opinion on matters of detail.

'All I beg of you is,' said Lady Jocelyn, 'that you won't let us have
turnips within the circuit of a mile'; which was obligingly promised.

The morning letters were delivered and opened with the customary
calmness.

'Letter from old George,' Harry sings out, and buzzes over a few lines.
'Halloa!--Hum!' He was going to make a communication, but catching sight
of Caroline, tossed the letter over to Ferdinand, who read it and tossed
it back with the comment of a careless face.

'Read it, Rosey?' says Harry, smiling bluntly.

Rather to his surprise, Rose took the letter. Study her eyes if you wish
to gauge the potency of one strong dose of ridicule on an ingenuous young
heart. She read that Mr. George Uplift had met 'our friend Mr. Snip'
riding, by moonlight, on the road to Beckley. That great orbed night of
their deep tender love flashed luminously through her frame, storming at
the base epithet by which her lover was mentioned, flooding grandly over
the ignominies cast on him by the world. She met the world, as it were,
in a death-grapple; she matched the living heroic youth she felt him to
be, with that dead wooden image of him which it thrust before her. Her
heart stood up singing like a craven who sees the tide of victory setting
toward him. But this passed beneath her eyelids. When her eyes were
lifted, Ferdinand could have discovered nothing in them to complain of,
had his suspicions been light to raise: nor could Mrs. Shorne perceive
that there was the opening for a shrewd bodkin-thrust. Rose had got a
mask at last: her colour, voice, expression, were perfectly at command.
She knew it to be a cowardice to wear any mask: but she had been burnt,
horribly burnt: how much so you may guess from the supple dissimulation
of such a bold clear-visaged girl. She conquered the sneers of the world
in her soul: but her sensitive skin was yet alive to the pangs of the
scorching it had been subjected to when weak, helpless, and betrayed by
Evan, she stood with no philosophic parent to cry fair play for her,
among the skilful torturers of Elburne House.

Sir Franks had risen and walked to the window.

'News?' said Lady Jocelyn, wheeling round in her chair.

The one eyebrow up of the easy-going baronet signified trouble of mind.
He finished his third perusal of a letter that appeared to be written in
a remarkably plain legal hand, and looking as men do when their
intelligences are just equal to the comprehension or expression of an
oath, handed the letter to his wife, and observed that he should be found
in the library. Nevertheless he waited first to mark its effect on Lady
Jocelyn. At one part of the document her forehead wrinkled slightly.

'Doesn't sound like a joke!' he said.

She answered:

'No.'

Sir Franks, apparently quite satisfied by her ready response, turned on
his heel and left the room quickly.

An hour afterward it was rumoured and confirmed that Juliana Bonner had
willed all the worldly property she held in her own right, comprising
Beckley Court, to Mr. Evan Harrington, of Lymport, tailor. An abstract of
the will was forwarded. The lawyer went on to say, that he had conformed
to the desire of the testatrix in communicating the existence of the
aforesaid will six days subsequent to her death, being the day after her
funeral.

There had been railing and jeering at the Countess de Saldar, the clever
outwitted exposed adventuress, at Elburne House and Beckley Court. What
did the crowing cleverer aristocrats think of her now?

On Rose the blow fell bitterly. Was Evan also a foul schemer? Was he of a
piece with his intriguing sister? His close kinship with the Countess had
led her to think baseness possible to him when it was confessed by his
own mouth once. She heard black names cast at him and the whole of the
great Mel's brood, and incapable of quite disbelieving them merited,
unable to challenge and rebut them, she dropped into her recent state of
self-contempt: into her lately-instilled doubt whether it really was in
Nature's power, unaided by family-portraits, coats-of-arms, ball-room
practice, and at least one small phial of Essence of Society, to make a
Gentleman.




CHAPTER XLIV

CONTAINS A WARNING TO ALL CONSPIRATORS

This, if you have done me the favour to read it aright, has been a
chronicle of desperate heroism on the part of almost all the principal
personages represented. But not the Countess de Saldar, scaling the
embattled fortress of Society; nor Rose, tossing its keys to her lover
from the shining turret-tops; nor Evan, keeping bright the lamp of
self-respect in his bosom against South wind and East; none excel friend
Andrew Cogglesby, who, having fallen into Old Tom's plot to humiliate his
wife and her sisters, simply for Evan's sake, and without any distinct
notion of the terror, confusion, and universal upset he was bringing on
his home, could yet, after a scared contemplation of the scene when he
returned from his expedition to Fallow field, continue to wear his rueful
mask; and persevere in treacherously outraging his lofty wife.

He did it to vindicate the ties of blood against accidents of position.
Was he justified? I am sufficiently wise to ask my own sex alone.

On the other side, be it said (since in our modern days every hero must
have his weak heel), that now he had gone this distance it was difficult
to recede. It would be no laughing matter to tell his solemn Harriet that
he had been playing her a little practical joke. His temptations to give
it up were incessant and most agitating; but if to advance seemed
terrific, there was, in stopping short, an awfulness so overwhelming that
Andrew abandoned himself to the current, his real dismay adding to his
acting powers.

The worst was, that the joke was no longer his: it was Old Tom's. He
discovered that he was in Old Tom's hands completely. Andrew had thought
that he would just frighten the women a bit, get them down to Lymport for
a week or so, and then announce that matters were not so bad with the
Brewery as he had feared; concluding the farce with a few domestic
fireworks. Conceive his dismay when he entered the house, to find there a
man in possession.

Andrew flew into such a rage that he committed an assault on the man. So
ungovernable was his passion, that for some minutes Harriet's measured
voice summoned him from over the banisters above, quite in vain. The
miserable Englishman refused to be taught that his house had ceased to be
his castle. It was something beyond a joke, this! The intruder, perfectly
docile, seeing that by accurate calculation every shake he got involved a
bottle of wine for him, and ultimate compensation probably to the amount
of a couple of sovereigns, allowed himself to be lugged up stairs, in
default of summary ejection on the point of Andrew's toe into the street.
There he was faced to the lady of the house, who apologized to him, and
requested her husband to state what had made him guilty of this indecent
behaviour. The man showed his papers. They were quite in order. 'At the
suit of Messrs. Grist.'

'My own lawyers!' cried Andrew, smacking his forehead; and Old Tom's
devilry flashed on him at once. He sank into a chair.

'Why did you bring this person up here?' said Harriet, like a speaking
statue.

'My dear!' Andrew answered, and spread out his hand, and waggled his
head; 'My--please!--I--I don't know. We all want exercise.'

The man laughed, which was kindly of him, but offensive to Mrs.
Cogglesby, who gave Andrew a glance which was full payment for his
imbecile pleasantry, and promised more.

With a hospitable inquiry as to the condition of his appetite, and a
request that he would be pleased to satisfy it to the full, the man was
dismissed: whereat, as one delivered of noxious presences, the Countess
rustled into sight. Not noticing Andrew, she lisped to Harriet:
'Misfortunes are sometimes no curses! I bless the catarrh that has
confined Silva to his chamber, and saved him from a bestial exhibition.'

The two ladies then swept from the room, and left Andrew to perspire at
leisure.

Fresh tribulations awaited him when he sat down to dinner. Andrew liked
his dinner to be comfortable, good, and in plenty. This may not seem
strange. The fact is stated that I may win for him the warm sympathies of
the body of his countrymen. He was greeted by a piece of cold boiled neck
of mutton and a solitary dish of steaming potatoes. The blank expanse of
table-cloth returned his desolate stare.

'Why, what's the meaning of this?' Andrew brutally exclaimed, as he
thumped the table.

The Countess gave a start, and rolled a look as of piteous supplication
to spare a lady's nerves, addressed to a ferocious brigand. Harriet
answered: 'It means that I will have no butcher's bills.'

'Butcher's bills! butcher's bills!' echoed Andrew; 'why, you must have
butcher's bills; why, confound! why, you'll have a bill for this, won't
you, Harry? eh? of course!'

'There will be no more bills dating from yesterday,' said his wife.

'What! this is paid for, then?'

'Yes, Mr. Cogglesby; and so will all household expenses be, while my
pocket-money lasts.'

Resting his eyes full on Harriet a minute, Andrew dropped them on the
savourless white-rimmed chop, which looked as lonely in his plate as its
parent dish on the table. The poor dear creature's pocket-money had paid
for it! The thought, mingling with a rush of emotion, made his ideas
spin. His imagination surged deliriously. He fancied himself at the
Zoological Gardens, exchanging pathetic glances with a melancholy
marmoset. Wonderfully like one the chop looked! There was no use in his
trying to eat it. He seemed to be fixing his teeth in solid tears. He
choked. Twice he took up knife and fork, put them down again, and
plucking forth his handkerchief, blew a tremendous trumpet, that sent the
Countess's eyes rolling to the ceiling, as if heaven were her sole refuge
from such vulgarity.

'Damn that Old Tom!' he shouted at last, and pitched back in his chair.

'Mr. Cogglesby!' and 'In the presence of ladies!' were the admonishing
interjections of the sisters, at whom the little man frowned in turns.

'Do you wish us to quit the room, sir?' inquired his wife.

'God bless your soul, you little darling!' he apostrophized that stately
person. 'Here, come along with me, Harry. A wife's a wife, I say--hang
it! Just outside the room--just a second! or up in a corner will do.'

Mrs. Cogglesby was amazed to see him jump up and run round to her. She
was prepared to defend her neck from his caress, and refused to go: but
the words, 'Something particular to tell you,' awakened her curiosity,
which urged her to compliance. She rose and went with him to the door.

'Well, sir; what is it?'

No doubt he was acting under a momentary weakness he was about to betray
the plot and take his chance of forgiveness; but her towering port, her
commanding aspect, restored his courage. (There may be a contrary view of
the case.) He enclosed her briskly in a connubial hug, and remarked with
mad ecstasy: 'What a duck you are, Harry! What a likeness between you and
your mother.'

Mrs. Cogglesby disengaged herself imperiously. Had he called her aside
for this gratuitous insult? Contrite, he saw his dreadful error.

'Harry! I declare!' was all he was allowed to say. Mrs. Cogglesby marched
back to her chair, and recommenced the repast in majestic silence.

Andrew sighed; he attempted to do the same. He stuck his fork in the
blanched whiskerage of his marmoset, and exclaimed: 'I can't!'

He was unnoticed.

'You do not object to plain diet?' said Harriet to Louisa.

'Oh, no, in verity!' murmured the Countess. 'However plain it be! Absence
of appetite, dearest. You are aware I partook of luncheon at mid-day with
the Honourable and Reverend Mr. Duffian. You must not look condemnation
at your Louy for that. Luncheon is not conversion!'

Harriet observed that this might be true; but still, to her mind, it was
a mistake to be too intimate with dangerous people. 'And besides,' she
added, 'Mr. Duffian is no longer "the Reverend." We deprive all renegades
of their spiritual titles. His worldly ones let him keep.'

Her superb disdain nettled the Countess.

'Dear Harriet!' she said, with less languor, 'You are utterly and totally
and entirely mistaken. I tell you so positively. Renegade! The
application of such a word to such a man! Oh! and it is false, Harriet
quite! Renegade means one who has gone over to the Turks, my dear. I am
almost certain I saw it in Johnson's Dictionary, or an: improvement upon
Johnson, by a more learned author. But there is the fact, if Harriet can
only bring her--shall I say stiff-necked prejudices to envisage it?'

Harriet granted her sister permission to apply the phrases she stood in
need of, without impeaching her intimacy with the most learned among
lexicographers.

'And is there no such thing as being too severe?' the Countess resumed.
'What our enemies call unchristian!'

'Mr. Duffian has no cause to complain of us,' said Harriet.

'Nor does he do so, dearest. Calumny may assail him; you may utterly
denude him--'

'Adam!' interposed Andrew, distractedly listening. He did not disturb the
Countess's flow.

'You may vilify and victimize Mr. Duffian, and strip him of the honours
of his birth, but, like the Martyrs, he will still continue the perfect
nobleman. Stoned, I assure you that Mr. Duffian would preserve his
breeding. In character he is exquisite; a polish to defy misfortune.'

'I suppose his table is good?' said Harriet, almost ruffled by the
Countess's lecture.

'Plate,' was remarked in the cold tone of supreme indifference.

'Hem! good wines?' Andrew asked, waking up a little and not wishing to be
excluded altogether.

'All is of the very best,' the Countess pursued her eulogy, not looking
at him.

'Don't you think you could--eh, Harry?--manage a pint for me, my dear?'
Andrew humbly petitioned. 'This cold water--ha! ha! my stomach don't like
cold bathing.'

His wretched joke rebounded from the impenetrable armour of the ladies.

'The wine-cellar is locked,' said his wife. 'I have sealed up the key
till an inventory can be taken by some agent of the creditors.'

'What creditors?' roared Andrew.

'You can have some of the servants' beer,' Mrs. Cogglesby appended.

Andrew studied her face to see whether she really was not hoisting him
with his own petard. Perceiving that she was sincerely acting according
to her sense of principle, he fumed, and departed to his privacy, unable
to stand it any longer.

Then like a kite the Countess pounced upon his character. Would the
Honourable and Reverend Mr. Duflian decline to participate in the sparest
provender? Would he be guilty of the discourtesy of leaving table without
a bow or an apology, even if reduced to extremest poverty? No, indeed!
which showed that, under all circumstances, a gentleman was a gentleman.
And, oh! how she pitied her poor Harriet--eternally tied to a most vulgar
little man, without the gilding of wealth.

'And a fool in his business to boot, dear!'

'These comparisons do no good,' said Harriet. 'Andrew at least is not a
renegade, and never shall be while I live. I will do my duty by him,
however poor we are. And now, Louisa, putting my husband out of the
question, what are your intentions? I don't understand bankruptcy, but I
imagine they can do nothing to wife and children. My little ones must
have a roof over their heads; and, besides, there is little Maxwell. You
decline to go down to Lymport, of course.'

'Decline!' cried the Countess, melodiously; 'and do not you?'

'As far as I am concerned--yes. But I am not to think of myself.'

The Countess meditated, and said: 'Dear Mr. Duflian has offered me
his hospitality. Renegades are not absolutely inhuman. They may be
generous. I have no moral doubt that Mr. Duflian would, upon my
representation--dare I venture?'

'Sleep in his house! break bread with him!' exclaimed Harriet. 'What do
you think I am made of? I would perish--go to the workhouse, rather!'

'I see you trooping there,' said the Countess, intent on the vision.

'And have you accepted his invitation for yourself, Louisa?'

The Countess was never to be daunted by threatening aspects. She gave her
affirmative with calmness and a deliberate smile.

'You are going to live with him?'

'Live with him! What expressions! My husband accompanies me.'

Harriet drew up.

'I know nothing, Louisa, that could give me more pain.'

The Countess patted Harriet's knee. 'It succeeds to bankruptcy,
assuredly. But would you have me drag Silva to the--the shop, Harriet,
love? Alternatives!'

Mrs. Andrew got up and rang the bell to have the remains of their dinner
removed. When this was done, she said,

'Louisa, I don't know whether I am justified: you told me to-day I might
keep my jewels, trinkets, and lace, and such like. To me, I know they do
not belong now: but I will dispose of them to procure you an asylum
somewhere--they will fetch, I should think, L400,--to prevent your going
to Mr. Duffian.'

No exhibition of great-mindedness which the Countess could perceive, ever
found her below it.

'Never, love, never!' she said.

'Then, will you go to Evan?'

'Evan? I hate him!' The olive-hued visage was dark. It brightened as she
added, 'At least as much as my religious sentiments permit me to. A boy
who has thwarted me at every turn!--disgraced us! Indeed, I find it
difficult to pardon you the supposition of such a possibility as your own
consent to look on him ever again, Harriet.'

'You have no children,' said Mrs. Andrew.

The Countess mournfully admitted it.

'There lies your danger with Mr. Duffian, Louisa!'

'What! do you doubt my virtue?' asked the Countess.

'Pish! I fear something different. You understand me. Mr. Duflian's moral
reputation is none of the best, perhaps.'

'That was before he renegaded,' said the Countess.

Harriet bluntly rejoined: 'You will leave that house a Roman Catholic.'

'Now you have spoken,' said the Countess, pluming. 'Now let me explain
myself. My dear, I have fought worldly battles too long and too
earnestly. I am rightly punished. I do but quote Herbert Duffian's own
words: he is no flatterer though you say he has such soft fingers. I am
now engaged in a spiritual contest. He is very wealthy! I have resolved
to rescue back to our Church what can benefit the flock of which we form
a portion, so exceedingly!'

At this revelation of the Countess's spiritual contest, Mrs. Andrew shook
a worldly head.

'You have no chance with men there, Louisa.'

'My Harriet complains of female weakness!'

'Yes. We are strong in our own element, Louisa. Don't be tempted out of
it.'

Sublime, the Countess rose:

'Element! am I to be confined to one? What but spiritual solaces could
assist me to live, after the degradations I have had heaped on me? I
renounce the world. I turn my sight to realms where caste is unknown. I
feel no shame there of being a tailor's daughter. You see, I can bring my
tongue to name the thing in its actuality. Once, that member would have
blistered. Confess to me that, in spite of your children, you are tempted
to howl at the idea of Lymport--'

The Countess paused, and like a lady about to fire off a gun, appeared to
tighten her nerves, crying out rapidly:

'Shop! Shears! Geese! Cabbage! Snip! Nine to a man!'

Even as the silence after explosions of cannon, that which reigned in the
room was deep and dreadful.

'See,' the Countess continued, 'you are horrified you shudder. I name all
our titles, and if I wish to be red in my cheeks, I must rouge. It is, in
verity, as if my senseless clay were pelted, as we heard of Evan at his
first Lymport boys' school. You remember when he told us the story? He
lisped a trifle then. "I'm the thon of a thnip." Oh! it was hell-fire to
us, then; but now, what do I feel? Why, I avowed it to Herbert Duffian
openly, and he said, that the misfortune of dear Papa's birth did not the
less enable him to proclaim himself in conduct a nobleman's offspring--'

'Which he never was.' Harriet broke the rhapsody in a monotonous low
tone: the Countess was not compelled to hear:

'--and that a large outfitter--one of the very largest, was in reality a
merchant, whose daughters have often wedded nobles of the land, and
become ancestresses! Now, Harriet, do you see what a truly religious mind
can do for us in the way of comfort? Oh! I bow in gratitude to Herbert
Duffian. I will not rest till I have led him back to our fold, recovered
from his error. He was our own preacher and pastor. He quitted us from
conviction. He shall return to us from conviction.'

The Countess quoted texts, which I respect, and will not repeat. She
descanted further on spiritualism, and on the balm that it was to tailors
and their offspring; to all outcasts from Society.

Overpowered by her, Harriet thus summed up her opinions: 'You were always
self-willed, Louisa.'

'Say, full of sacrifice, if you would be just,' added the Countess; 'and
the victim of basest ingratitude.'

'Well, you are in a dangerous path, Louisa.'

Harriet had the last word, which usually the Countess was not disposed to
accord; but now she knew herself strengthened to do so, and was content
to smile pityingly on her sister.

Full upon them in this frame of mind, arrived Caroline's great news from
Beckley.

It was then that the Countess's conduct proved a memorable refutation of
cynical philosophy: she rejoiced in the good fortune of him who had
offended her! Though he was not crushed and annihilated (as he deserved
to be) by the wrong he had done, the great-hearted woman pardoned him!

Her first remark was: 'Let him thank me for it or not, I will lose no
moment in hastening to load him with my congratulations.'

Pleasantly she joked Andrew, and defended him from Harriet now.

'So we are not all bankrupts, you see, dear brother-in-law.'

Andrew had become so demoralized by his own plot, that in every turn of
events he scented a similar piece of human ingenuity. Harriet was angry
with his disbelief, or say, the grudging credit he gave to the glorious
news. Notwithstanding her calmness, the thoughts of Lymport had sickened
her soul, and it was only for the sake of her children, and from a sense
of the dishonesty of spending a farthing of the money belonging, as she
conceived, to the creditors, that she had consented to go.

'I see your motive, Mr. Cogglesby,' she observed. 'Your measures are
disconcerted. I will remain here till my brother gives me shelter.'

'Oh, that'll do, my love; that's all I want,' said Andrew, sincerely.

'Both of you, fools!' the Countess interjected. 'Know you Evan so little?
He will receive us anywhere: his arms are open to his kindred: but to his
heart the road is through humiliation, and it is to his heart we seek
admittance.'

'What do you mean?' Harriet inquired.

'Just this,' the Countess answered in bold English and her eyes were
lively, her figure elastic: 'We must all of us go down to the old shop
and shake his hand there--every man Jack of us!--I'm only quoting the
sailors, Harriet--and that's the way to win him.'

She snapped her fingers, laughing. Harriet stared at her, and so did
Andrew, though for a different reason. She seemed to be transformed.
Seeing him inclined to gape, she ran up to him, caught up his chin
between her ten fingers, and kissed him on both cheeks, saying:

'You needn't come, if you're too proud, you know, little man!'

And to Harriet's look of disgust, the cause for which she divined with
her native rapidity, she said: 'What does it matter? They will talk, but
they can't look down on us now. Why, this is my doing!'

She came tripping to her tall sister, to ask plaintively 'Mayn't I be
glad?' and bobbed a curtsey.

Harriet desired Andrew to leave them. Flushed and indignant she then
faced the Countess.

'So unnecessary!' she began. 'What can excuse your indiscretion, Louisa?'

The Countess smiled to hear her talking to her younger sister once more.
She shrugged.

'Oh, if you will keep up the fiction, do. Andrew knows--he isn't an
idiot--and to him we can make light of it now. What does anybody's birth
matter, who's well off!'

It was impossible for Harriet to take that view. The shop, if not the
thing, might still have been concealed from her husband, she thought.

'It mattered to me when I was well off,' she said, sternly.

'Yes; and to me when I was; but we've had a fall and a lesson since that,
my dear. Half the aristocracy of England spring from shops!--Shall I
measure you?'

Harriet never felt such a desire to inflict a slap upon mortal cheek. She
marched away from her in a tiff. On the other hand, Andrew was half
fascinated by the Countess's sudden re-assumption of girlhood, and
returned--silly fellow! to have another look at her. She had ceased, on
reflection, to be altogether so vivacious: her stronger second nature had
somewhat resumed its empire: still she was fresh, and could at times be
roguishly affectionate and she patted him, and petted him, and made much
of him; slightly railed at him for his uxoriousness and domestic
subjection, and proffered him her fingers to try the taste of. The truth
must be told: Mr. Duflian not being handy, she in her renewed earthly
happiness wanted to see her charms in a woman's natural mirror: namely,
the face of man: if of man on his knees, all the better and though a
little man is not much of a man, and a sister's husband is, or should be,
hardly one at all, still some sort of a reflector he must be. Two or
three jests adapted to Andrew's palate achieved his momentary
captivation.

He said: 'Gad, I never kissed you in my life, Louy.'

And she, with a flavour of delicate Irish brogue, 'Why don't ye catch
opportunity by the tail, then?'

Perfect innocence, I assure you, on both sides.

But mark how stupidity betrays. Andrew failed to understand her, and act
on the hint immediately. Had he done so, the affair would have been over
without a witness. As it happened, delay permitted Harriet to assist at
the ceremony.

'It wasn't your mouth, Louy,' said Andrew.

'Oh, my mouth!--that I keep for, my chosen,' was answered.

'Gad, you make a fellow almost wish--' Andrew's fingers worked over his
poll, and then the spectre of righteous wrath flashed on him--naughty
little man that he was! He knew himself naughty, for it was the only time
since his marriage that he had ever been sorry to see his wife. This is a
comedy, and I must not preach lessons of life here: but I am obliged to
remark that the husband must be proof, the sister-in-law perfect, where
arrangements exist that keep them under one roof. She may be so like his
wife! Or, from the knowledge she has of his circumstances, she may talk
to him almost as his wife. He may forget that she is not his wife! And
then again, the small beginnings, which are in reality the mighty
barriers, are so easily slid over. But what is the use of telling this to
a pure generation? My constant error is in supposing that I write for the
wicked people who begat us.

Note, however, the difference between the woman and the man! Shame
confessed Andrew's naughtiness; he sniggered pitiably: whereas the
Countess jumped up, and pointing at him, asked her sister what she
thought of that. Her next sentence, coolly delivered, related to some
millinery matter. If this was not innocence, what is?

Nevertheless, I must here state that the scene related, innocent as it
was, and, as one would naturally imagine, of puny consequence, if any,
did no less a thing than, subsequently, to precipitate the Protestant
Countess de Saldar into the bosom of the Roman Catholic Church. A little
bit of play!

It seems barely just. But if, as I have heard, a lady has trod on a
pebble and broken her nose, tremendous results like these warn us to be
careful how we walk. As for play, it was never intended that we should
play with flesh and blood.

And, oh, be charitable, matrons of Britain! See here, Andrew Cogglesby,
who loved his wife as his very soul, and who almost disliked her sister;
in ten minutes the latter had set his head spinning! The whole of the day
he went about the house meditating frantically on the possibility of his
Harriet demanding a divorce.

She was not the sort of woman to do that. But one thing she resolved to
do; and it was, to go to Lymport with Louisa, and having once got her out
of her dwelling-place, never to allow her to enter it, wherever it might
be, in the light of a resident again. Whether anything but the menace of
a participation in her conjugal possessions could have despatched her to
that hateful place, I doubt. She went: she would not let Andrew be out of
her sight. Growing haughtier toward him at every step, she advanced to
the strange old shop. EVAN HARRINGTON over the door! There the Countess,
having meantime returned to her state of womanhood, shared her shudders.
They entered, and passed in to Mrs. Mel, leaving their footman,
apparently, in the rear. Evan was not visible. A man in the shop, with a
yard measure negligently adorning his shoulders, said that Mr. Harrington
was in the habit of quitting the shop at five.

'Deuced good habit, too,' said Andrew.

'Why, sir,' observed another, stepping forward, 'as you truly say--yes.
But--ah! Mr. Andrew Cogglesby? Pleasure of meeting you once in Fallow
field! Remember Mr. Perkins?--the lawyer, not the maltster. Will you do
me the favour to step out with me?'

Andrew followed him into the street.

'Are you aware of our young friend's good fortune?' said Lawyer Perkins.
'Yes. Ah! Well!--Would you believe that any sane person in his condition,
now--nonsense apart--could bring his mind wilfully to continue a beggar?
No. Um! Well; Mr. Cogglesby, I may tell you that I hold here in my hands
a document by which Mr. Evan Harrington transfers the whole of the
property bequeathed to him to Lady Jocelyn, and that I have his orders to
execute it instantly, and deliver it over to her ladyship, after the will
is settled, probate, and so forth: I presume there will be an arrangement
about his father's debts. Now what do you think of that?'

'Think, sir,--think!' cried Andrew, cocking his head at him like an
indignant bird, 'I think he's a damned young idiot to do so, and you're a
confounded old rascal to help him.'

Leaving Mr. Perkins to digest his judgement, which he had solicited,
Andrew bounced back into the shop.




CHAPTER XLV

IN WHICH THE SHOP BECOMES THE CENTRE OF ATTRACTION

Under the first lustre of a May-night, Evan was galloping over the
moon-shadowed downs toward Beckley. At the ridge commanding the woods,
the park, and the stream, his horse stopped, as if from habit, snorted,
and puffed its sides, while he gazed steadily across the long lighted
vale. Soon he began to wind down the glaring chalk-track, and reached
grass levels. Here he broke into a round pace, till, gaining the first
straggling cottages of the village, he knocked the head of his whip
against the garden-gate of one, and a man came out, who saluted him, and
held the reins.

'Animal does work, sir,' said the man.

Evan gave directions for it to be looked to, and went on to the doorway,
where he was met by a young woman. She uttered a respectful greeting, and
begged him to enter.

The door closed, he flung himself into a chair, and said:

'Well, Susan, how is the child?'

'Oh! he's always well, Mr. Harrington; he don't know the tricks o'
trouble yet.'

'Will Polly be here soon?'

'At a quarter after nine, she said, sir.'

Evan bade her sit down. After examining her features quietly, he said:

'I 'm glad to see you here, Susan. You don't regret that you followed my
advice?'

'No, sir; now it's over, I don't. Mother's kind enough, and father
doesn't mention anything. She's a-bed with bile--father's out.'

'But what? There's something on your mind.'

'I shall cry, if I begin, Mr. Harrington.'

'See how far you can get without.'

'Oh! Sir, then,' said Susan, on a sharp rise of her bosom, 'it ain't my
fault. I wouldn't cause trouble to Mr. Harry, or any friend of yours;
but, sir, father have got hold of his letters to me, and he says, there
's a promise in 'em--least, one of 'em; and it's as good as law, he
says--he heard it in a public-house; and he's gone over to Fall'field to
a law-gentleman there.' Susan was compelled to give way to some sobs. 'It
ain't for me--father does it, sir,' she pleaded. 'I tried to stop him,
knowing how it'd vex you, Mr. Harrington; but he's heady about points,
though a quiet man ordinary; and he says he don't expect--and I know now
no gentleman 'd marry such as me--I ain't such a stupid gaper at words as
I used to be; but father says it's for the child's sake, and he does it
to have him provided for. Please, don't ye be angry with me, sir.'

Susan's half-controlled spasms here got the better of her.

While Evan was awaiting the return of her calmer senses, the latch was
lifted, and Polly appeared.

'At it again!' was her sneering comment, after a short survey of her
apron-screened sister; and then she bobbed to Evan.

'It's whimper, whimper, and squeak, squeak, half their lives with some
girls. After that they go wondering they can't see to thread a needle!
The neighbours, I suppose. I should like to lift the top off some o'
their houses. I hope I haven't kept you, sir.'

'No, Polly,' said Evan; 'but you must be charitable, or I shall think you
want a lesson yourself. Mr. Raikes tells me you want to see me. What is
it? You seem to be correspondents.'

Polly replied: 'Oh, no, Mr. Harrington: only accidental ones--when
something particular's to be said. And he dances-like on the paper, so
that you can't help laughing. Isn't he a very eccentric gentleman, sir?'

'Very,' said Evan. 'I 've no time to lose, Polly.'

'Here, you must go,' the latter called to her sister. 'Now pack at once,
Sue. Do rout out, and do leave off thinking you've got a candle at your
eyes, for Goodness' sake!'

Susan was too well accustomed to Polly's usage to complain. She murmured
a gentle 'Good night, sir,' and retired. Whereupon Polly exclaimed:
'Bless her poor dear soft heart! It 's us hard ones that get on best in
the world. I'm treated better than her, Mr. Harrington, and I know I
ain't worth half of her. It goes nigh to make one religious, only to see
how exactly like Scripture is the way Beckley treats her, whose only sin
is her being so soft as to believe in a man! Oh, dear! Mr. Harrington! I
wish I had good news for you.'

In spite of all his self-control, Evan breathed quickly and looked
eagerly.

'Speak it out, Polly.'

'Oh, dear! I must, I suppose,' Polly answered. 'Mr. Laxley's become a
lord now, Mr. Harrington.'

Evan tasted in his soul the sweets of contrast. 'Well?'

'And my Miss Rose--she--'

'What?'

Moved by the keen hunger of his eyes, Polly hesitated. Her face betrayed
a sudden change of mind.

'Wants to see you, sir,' she said, resolutely.

'To see me?'

Evan stood up, so pale that Polly was frightened.

'Where is she? Where can I meet her?'

'Please don't take it so, Mr. Harrington.'

Evan commanded her to tell him what her mistress had said.

Now up to this point Polly had spoken truth. She was positive her
mistress did want to see him. Polly, also, with a maiden's tender guile,
desired to bring them together for once, though it were for the last
time, and for no good on earth. She had been about to confide to him her
young mistress's position toward Lord Laxley, when his sharp
interrogation stopped her. Shrinking from absolute invention, she
remarked that of course she could not exactly remember Miss Rose's words;
which seemed indeed too much to expect of her.

'She will see me to-night?' said Evan.

'I don't know about to-night,' Polly replied.

'Go to her instantly. Tell her I am ready. I will be at the West
park-gates. This is why you wrote, Polly? Why did you lose time? Don't
delay, my good girl! Come!'

Evan had opened the door. He would not allow Polly an instant for
expostulation; but drew her out, saying, 'You will attend to the gates
yourself. Or come and tell me the day, if she appoints another.'

Polly made a final effort to escape from the pit she was being pushed
into.

'Mr. Harrington! it wasn't to tell you this I wrote.

Miss Rose is engaged, sir.'

'I understand,' said Evan, hoarsely, scarcely feeling it, as is the case
with men who are shot through the heart.

Ten minutes later he was on horseback by the Fallow field gates, with the
tidings shrieking through his frame. The night was still, and stiller in
the pauses of the nightingales. He sat there, neither thinking of them
nor reproached in his manhood for the tears that rolled down his cheeks.
Presently his horse's ears pricked, and the animal gave a low neigh.
Evan's eyes fixed harder on the length of gravel leading to the house.
There was no sign, no figure. Out from the smooth grass of the lane a
couple of horsemen issued, and came straight to the gates. He heard
nothing till one spoke. It was a familiar voice.

'By Jove, Ferdy, here is the fellow, and we've been all the way to
Lymport!'

Evan started from his trance.

'It 's you, Harrington?'

'Yes, Harry.'

'Sir!' exclaimed that youth, evidently flushed with wine, 'what the devil
do you mean by addressing me by my Christian name?'

Laxley pushed his horse's head in front of Harry. In a manner apparently
somewhat improved by his new dignity, he said: 'We have ridden to Lymport
to speak to you, sir. Favour me by moving a little ahead of the lodge.'

Evan bowed, and moved beside him a short way down the lane, Harry
following.

'The purport of my visit, sir,' Laxley began, 'was to make known to you
that Miss Jocelyn has done me the honour to accept me as her husband. I
learn from her that during the term of your residence in the house, you
contrived to extract from her a promise to which she attaches certain
scruples. She pleases to consider herself bound to you till you release
her. My object is to demand that you will do so immediately.'

There was no reply.

'Should you refuse to make this reparation for the harm you have done to
her and her family,' Laxley pursued, 'I must let you know that there are
means of compelling you to it, and that those means will be employed.'

Harry, fuming at these postured sentences, burst out:

'What do you talk to the fellow in that way for? A fellow who makes a
fool of my cousin, and then wants to get us to buy off my sister! What's
he spying after here? The place is ours till we troop. I tell you there's
only one way of dealing with him, and if you don't do it, I will.'

Laxley pulled his reins with a jerk that brought him to the rear.

'Miss Jocelyn has commissioned you to make this demand on me in her
name?' said Evan.

'I make it in my own right,' returned--Laxley. 'I demand a prompt reply.'

'My lord, you shall have it. Miss Jocelyn is not bound to me by any
engagement. Should she entertain scruples which I may have it in my power
to obliterate, I shall not hesitate to do so--but only to her. What has
passed between us I hold sacred.'

'Hark at that!' shouted Harry. 'The damned tradesman means money! You
ass, Ferdinand! What did we go to Lymport for? Not to bandy words. Here!
I've got my own quarrel with you, Harrington. You've been setting that
girl's father on me. Can you deny that?'

It was enough for Harry that Evan did not deny it. The calm disdain which
he read on Evan's face acted on his fury, and digging his heels into his
horse's flanks he rushed full at him and dealt him a sharp flick with his
whip. Evan's beast reared.

'Accept my conditions, sir, or afford me satisfaction,' cried Laxley.

'You do me great honour, my lord; but I have told you I cannot,' said
Evan, curbing his horse.

At that moment Rose came among them. Evan raised his hat, as did Laxley.
Harry, a little behind the others, performed a laborious mock salute, and
then ordered her back to the house. A quick altercation ensued; the end
being that Harry managed to give his sister the context of the previous
conversation.

'Now go back, Rose,' said Laxley. 'I have particular business with Mr.
Harrington.'

'I came to see him,' said Rose, in a clear voice.

Laxley reddened angrily.

'Then tell him at once you want to be rid of him,' her brother called to
her.

Rose looked at Evan. Could he not see that she had no word in her soul
for him of that kind? Yes: but love is not always to be touched to
tenderness even at the sight of love.

'Rose,' he said, 'I hear from Lord Laxley, that you fancy yourself not at
liberty; and that you require me to disengage you.'

He paused. Did he expect her to say there that she wished nothing of the
sort? Her stedfast eyes spoke as much: but misery is wanton, and will
pull all down to it. Even Harry was checked by his tone, and Laxley sat
silent. The fact that something more than a tailor was speaking seemed to
impress them.

'Since I have to say it, Rose, I hold you in no way bound to me. The
presumption is forced upon me. May you have all the happiness I pray God
to give you.

Gentlemen, good night!'

He bowed and was gone. How keenly she could have retorted on that false
prayer for her happiness! Her limbs were nerveless, her tongue
speechless. He had thrown her off--there was no barrier now between
herself and Ferdinand. Why did Ferdinand speak to her with that air of
gentle authority, bidding her return to the house? She was incapable of
seeing, what the young lord acutely felt, that he had stooped very much
in helping to bring about such a scene. She had no idea of having trifled
with him and her own heart, when she talked feebly of her bondage to
another, as one who would be warmer to him were she free. Swiftly she
compared the two that loved her, and shivered as if she had been tossed
to the embrace of a block of ice.

'You are cold, Rose,' said Laxley, bending to lay his hand on her
shoulder.

'Pray, never touch me,' she answered, and walked on hastily to the house.

Entering it, she remembered that Evan had dwelt there. A sense of
desolation came over her. She turned to Ferdinand remorsefully, saying:
'Dear Ferdinand!' and allowed herself to be touched and taken close to
him. When she reached her bed-room, she had time to reflect that he had
kissed her on the lips, and then she fell down and shed such tears as had
never been drawn from her before.

Next day she rose with an undivided mind. Belonging henceforth to
Ferdinand, it was necessary that she should invest him immediately with
transcendent qualities. The absence of character in him rendered this
easy. What she had done for Evan, she did for him. But now, as if the
Fates had been lying in watch to entrap her and chain her, that they
might have her at their mercy, her dreams of Evan's high nature--hitherto
dreams only--were to be realized. With the purposeless waywardness of her
sex, Pony Wheedle, while dressing her young mistress, and though quite
aware that the parting had been spoken, must needs relate her sister's
story and Evan's share in it. Rose praised him like one forever aloof
from him. Nay, she could secretly congratulate herself on not being
deceived. Upon that came a letter from Caroline:

'Do not misjudge my brother. He knew Juliana's love for him and rejected
it. You will soon have proofs of his disinterestedness. Then do not
forget that he works to support us all. I write this with no hope save to
make you just to him. That is the utmost he will ever anticipate.'

It gave no beating of the heart to Rose to hear good of Evan now: but an
increased serenity of confidence in the accuracy of her judgement of
persons.

The arrival of Lawyer Perkins supplied the key to Caroline's
communication. No one was less astonished than Rose at the news that Evan
renounced the estate. She smiled at Harry's contrite stupefaction, and
her father's incapacity of belief in conduct so singular, caused her to
lift her head and look down on her parent.

'Shows he knows nothing of the world, poor young fellow!' said Sir
Franks.

'Nothing more clearly,' observed Lady Jocelyn. 'I presume I shall cease
to be blamed for having had him here?'

'Upon my honour, he must have the soul of a gentleman!' said the baronet.
'There's nothing he can expect in return, you know!'

'One would think, Papa, you had always been dealing with tradesmen!'
remarked Rose, to whom her father now accorded the treatment due to a
sensible girl.

Laxley was present at the family consultation. What was his opinion? Rose
manifested a slight anxiety to hear it.

'What those sort of fellows do never surprises me,' he said, with a
semi-yawn.

Rose felt fire on her cheeks.

'It's only what the young man is bound to do,' said Mrs. Shorne.

'His duty, aunt? I hope we may all do it!' Rose interjected.

'Championing him again?'

Rose quietly turned her face, too sure of her cold appreciation of him to
retort. But yesterday night a word from him might have made her his; and
here she sat advocating the nobility of his nature with the zeal of a
barrister in full swing of practice. Remember, however, that a kiss
separates them: and how many millions of leagues that counts for in love,
in a pure girl's thought, I leave you to guess.

Now, in what way was Evan to be thanked? how was he to be treated? Sir
Franks proposed to go down to him in person, accompanied by Harry. Lady
Jocelyn acquiesced. But Rose said to her mother:

'Will not you wound his sensitiveness by going to him there?'

'Possibly,' said her ladyship. 'Shall we write and ask him to come to
us?'

'No, Mama. Could we ask him to make a journey to receive our thanks?'

'Not till we have solid ones to offer, perhaps.'

'He will not let us help him, Mama, unless we have all given him our
hands.'

'Probably not. There's always a fund of nonsense in those who are capable
of great things, I observe. It shall be a family expedition, if you
like.'

'What!' exclaimed Mrs. Shorne. 'Do you mean that you intend to allow Rose
to make one of the party? Franks! is that your idea?'

Sir Franks looked at his wife.

'What harm?' Lady Jocelyn asked; for Rose's absence of conscious guile in
appealing to her reason had subjugated that great faculty.

'Simply a sense of propriety, Emily,' said Mrs. Shorne, with a glance at
Ferdinand.

'You have no objection, I suppose!' Lady Jocelyn addressed him.

'Ferdinand will join us,' said Rose.

'Thank you, Rose, I'd rather not,' he replied. 'I thought we had done
with the fellow for good last night.'

'Last night?' quoth Lady Jocelyn.

No one spoke. The interrogation was renewed. Was it Rose's swift instinct
which directed her the shortest way to gain her point? or that she was
glad to announce that her degrading engagement was at an end? She said:

'Ferdinand and Mr. Harrington came to an understanding last night, in my
presence.'

That, strange as it struck on their ears, appeared to be quite sufficient
to all, albeit the necessity for it was not so very clear. The carriage
was ordered forthwith; Lady Jocelyn went to dress; Rose drew Ferdinand
away into the garden. Then, with all her powers, she entreated him to
join her.

'Thank you, Rose,' he said; 'I have no taste for the genus.'

'For my sake, I beg it, Ferdinand.'

'It's really too much to ask of me, Rose.'

'If you care for me, you will.'

''Pon my honour, quite impossible!'

'You refuse, Ferdinand?'

'My London tailor 'd find me out, and never forgive me.'

This pleasantry stopped her soft looks. Why she wished him to be with
her, she could not have said. For a thousand reasons: which implies no
distinct one something prophetically pressing in her blood.




CHAPTER XLVI

A LOVERS' PARTING

Now, to suppose oneself the fashioner of such a chain of events as this
which brought the whole of the Harrington family in tender unity together
once more, would have elated an ordinary mind. But to the Countess de
Saldar, it was simply an occasion for reflecting that she had
misunderstood--and could most sincerely forgive--Providence. She admitted
to herself that it was not entirely her work; for she never would have
had their place of meeting to be the Shop. Seeing, however, that her end
was gained, she was entitled to the credit of it, and could pardon the
means adopted. Her brother lord of Beckley Court, and all of them
assembled in the old 193, Main Street, Lymport! What matter for proud
humility! Providence had answered her numerous petitions, but in its own
way. Stipulating that she must swallow this pill, Providence consented to
serve her. She swallowed it with her wonted courage. In half an hour
subsequent to her arrival at Lymport, she laid siege to the heart of Old
Tom Cogglesby, whom she found installed in the parlour, comfortably
sipping at a tumbler of rum-and-water. Old Tom was astonished to meet
such an agreeable unpretentious woman, who talked of tailors and lords
with equal ease, appeared to comprehend a man's habits instinctively, and
could amuse him while she ministered to them.

'Can you cook, ma'am?' asked Old Tom.

'All but that,' said the Countess, with a smile of sweet meaning.

'Ha! then you won't suit me as well as your mother.'

'Take care you do not excite my emulation,' she returned, graciously,
albeit disgusted at his tone.

To Harriet, Old Tom had merely nodded. There he sat, in the arm-chair,
sucking the liquor, with the glimpse of a sour chuckle on his cheeks. Now
and then, during the evening, he rubbed his hands sharply, but spoke
little. The unbending Harriet did not conceal her disdain of him. When he
ventured to allude to the bankruptcy, she cut him short.

'Pray, excuse me--I am unacquainted with affairs of business--I cannot
even understand my husband.'

'Lord bless my soul!' Old Tom exclaimed, rolling his eyes.

Caroline had informed her sisters up-stairs that their mother was
ignorant of Evan's change of fortune, and that Evan desired her to
continue so for the present. Caroline appeared to be pained by the
subject, and was glad when Louisa sounded his mysterious behaviour by
saying:

'Evan has a native love of concealment--he must be humoured.'

At the supper, Mr. Raikes made his bow. He was modest and reserved. It
was known that this young gentleman acted as shopman there. With a
tenderness for his position worthy of all respect, the Countess spared
his feelings by totally ignoring his presence; whereat he, unaccustomed
to such great-minded treatment, retired to bed, a hater of his kind.
Harriet and Caroline went next. The Countess said she would wait up for
Evan, but hearing that his hours of return were about the chimes of
matins, she cried exultingly: 'Darling Papa all over!' and departed
likewise. Mrs. Mel, when she had mixed Old Tom's third glass, wished the
brothers good night, and they were left to exchange what sentiments they
thought proper for the occasion. The Countess had certainly, disappointed
Old Tom's farce, in a measure; and he expressed himself puzzled by her.
'You ain't the only one,' said his brother. Andrew, with some effort,
held his tongue concerning the news of Evan--his fortune and his folly,
till he could talk to the youth in person.

All took their seats at the early breakfast next morning.

'Has Evan not come--home yet?' was the Countess's first question.

Mrs. Mel replied, 'No.'

'Do you know where he has gone, dear Mama?'

'He chooses his own way.'

'And you fear that it leads somewhere?' added the Countess.

'I fear that it leads to knocking up the horse he rides.'

'The horse, Mama! He is out on a horse all night! But don't you see, dear
old pet! his morals, at least, are safe on horseback.'

'The horse has to be paid for, Louisa,' said her mother, sternly; and
then, for she had a lesson to read to the guests of her son, 'Ready money
doesn't come by joking. What will the creditors think? If he intends to
be honest in earnest, he must give up four-feet mouths.'

'Fourteen-feet, ma'am, you mean,' said Old Tom, counting the heads at
table.

'Bravo, Mama!' cried the Countess, and as she was sitting near her
mother, she must show how prettily she kissed, by pouting out her playful
lips to her parent. 'Do be economical always! And mind! for the sake of
the wretched animals, I will intercede for you to be his inspector of
stables.'

This, with a glance of intelligence at her sisters.

'Well, Mr. Raikes,' said Andrew, 'you keep good hours, at all
events--eh?'

'Up with the lark,' said Old Tom. 'Ha! 'fraid he won't be so early when
he gets rid of his present habits--eh?'

'Nec dierum numerum, ut nos, sed noctium computant,' said Mr. Raikes, and
both the brothers sniffed like dogs that have put their noses to a hot
coal, and the Countess, who was less insensible to the aristocracy of the
dead languages than are women generally, gave him the recognition that is
occasionally afforded the family tutor.

About the hour of ten Evan arrived. He was subjected to the hottest
embrace he had ever yet received from his sister Louisa.

'Darling!' she called him before them all. 'Oh! how I suffer for this
ignominy I see you compelled for a moment to endure. But it is but for a
moment. They must vacate; and you will soon be out of this horrid hole.'

'Where he just said he was glad to give us a welcome,' muttered Old Tom.

Evan heard him, and laughed. The Countess laughed too.

'No, we will not be impatient. We are poor insignificant people!' she
said; and turning to her mother, added: 'And yet I doubt not you think
the smallest of our landed gentry equal to great continental seigneurs. I
do not say the contrary.'

'You will fill Evan's head with nonsense till you make him knock up a
horse a week, and never go to his natural bed,' said Mrs. Mel, angrily.
'Look at him! Is a face like that fit for business?'

'Certainly, certainly not!' said the Countess.

'Well, Mother, the horse is dismissed,--you won't have to complain any
more,' said Evan, touching her hand. 'Another history commences from
to-day.'

The Countess watched him admiringly. Such powers of acting she could not
have ascribed to him.

'Another history, indeed!' she said. 'By the way, Van, love! was it out
of Glamorganshire--were we Tudors, according to Papa? or only Powys
chieftains? It's of no moment, but it helps one in conversation.'

'Not half so much as good ale, though!' was Old Tom's comment.

The Countess did not perceive its fitness, till Evan burst into a laugh,
and then she said:

'Oh! we shall never be ashamed of the Brewery. Do not fear that, Mr.
Cogglesby.'

Old Tom saw his farce reviving, and encouraged the Countess to patronize
him. She did so to an extent that called on her Mrs. Mel's reprobation,
which was so cutting and pertinent, that Harriet was compelled to defend
her sister, remarking that perhaps her mother would soon learn that
Louisa was justified in not permitting herself and family to be classed
too low. At this Andrew, coming from a private interview with Evan, threw
up his hands and eyes as one who foretold astonishment but counselled
humility. What with the effort of those who knew a little to imply a
great deal; of those who knew all to betray nothing; and of those who
were kept in ignorance to strain a fact out of the conflicting innuendos
the general mystification waxed apace, and was at its height, when a name
struck on Evan's ear that went through his blood like a touch of the
torpedo.

He had been called into the parlour to assist at a consultation over the
Brewery affairs. Raikes opened the door, and announced, 'Sir Franks and
Lady Jocelyn.'

Them he could meet, though it was hard for his pride to pardon their
visit to him there. But when his eyes discerned Rose behind them, the
passions of his lower nature stood up armed. What could she have come for
but to humiliate, or play with him?

A very few words enabled the Countess to guess the cause for this visit.
Of course, it was to beg time! But they thanked Evan. For something
generous, no doubt.

Sir Franks took him aside, and returning remarked to his wife that she
perhaps would have greater influence with him. All this while Rose sat
talking to Mrs. Andrew Cogglesby, Mrs. Strike, and Evan's mother. She saw
by his face the offence she had committed, and acted on by one of her
impulses, said: 'Mama, I think if I were to speak to Mr. Harrington--'

Ere her mother could make light of the suggestion, Old Tom had jumped up,
and bowed out his arm.

'Allow me to conduct ye to the drawing room, upstairs, young lady. He'll
follow, safe enough!'

Rose had not stipulated for that. Nevertheless, seeing no cloud on her
mother's face, or her father's, she gave Old Tom her hand, and awaited a
movement from Evan. It was too late to object to it on either side. Old
Tom had caught the tide at the right instant. Much as if a grim old genie
had planted them together, the lovers found themselves alone.

'Evan, you forgive me?' she began, looking up at him timidly.

'With all my heart, Rose,' he answered, with great cheerfulness.

'No. I know your heart better. Oh, Evan! you must be sure that we respect
you too much to wound you. We came to thank you for your generosity. Do
you refuse to accept anything from us? How can we take this that you
thrust on us, unless in some way--'

'Say no more,' he interposed. 'You see me here. You know me as I am,
now.'

'Yes, yes!' the tears stood in her eyes. 'Why did I come, you would ask?
That is what you cannot forgive! I see now how useless it was. Evan! why
did you betray me?'

'Betray you, Rose?'

'You said that you loved me once.'

She was weeping, and all his spirit melted, and his love cried out: 'I
said "till death," and till death it will be, Rose.'

'Then why, why did you betray me, Evan? I know it all. But if you
blackened yourself to me, was it not because you loved something better
than me? And now you think me false! Which of us two has been false? It
's silly to talk of these things now too late! But be just. I wish that
we may be friends. Can we, unless you bend a little?'

The tears streamed down her cheeks, and in her lovely humility he saw the
baseness of that pride of his which had hitherto held him up.

'Now that you are in this house where I was born and am to live, can you
regret what has come between us, Rose?'

Her lips quivered in pain.

'Can I do anything else but regret it all my life, Evan?'

How was it possible for him to keep his strength?

'Rose!' he spoke with a passion that made her shrink, 'are you bound to
this man?' and to the drooping of her eyes, 'No. Impossible, for you do
not love him. Break it. Break the engagement you cannot fulfil. Break it
and belong to me. It sounds ill for me to say that in such a place. But
Rose, I will leave it. I will accept any assistance that your
father--that any man will give me. Beloved--noble girl! I see my
falseness to you, though I little thought it at the time--fool that I
was! Be my help, my guide-as the soul of my body! Be mine!'

'Oh, Evan!' she clasped her hands in terror at the change in him, that
was hurrying her she knew not whither, and trembling, held them
supplicatingly.

'Yes, Rose: you have taught me what love can be. You cannot marry that
man.'

'But, my honour, Evan! No. I do not love him; for I can love but one. He
has my pledge. Can I break it?'

The stress on the question choked him, just as his heart sprang to her.

'Can you face the world with me, Rose?'

'Oh, Evan! is there an escape for me? Think Decide!--No--no! there is
not. My mother, I know, looks on it so. Why did she trust me to be with
you here, but that she thinks me engaged to him, and has such faith in
me? Oh, help me!--be my guide. Think whether you would trust me
hereafter! I should despise myself.'

Not if you marry him!' said Evan, bitterly. And then thinking as men will
think when they look on the figure of a fair girl marching serenely to a
sacrifice, the horrors of which they insist that she ought to know:
half-hating her for her calmness--adoring her for her innocence: he said:
'It rests with you, Rose. The world will approve you, and if your
conscience does, why--farewell, and may heaven be your help.'

She murmured, 'Farewell.'

Did she expect more to be said by him? What did she want or hope for now?
And yet a light of hunger grew in her eyes, brighter and brighter, as it
were on a wave of yearning.

'Take my hand once,' she faltered.

Her hand and her whole shape he took, and she with closed eyes let him
strain her to his breast.

Their swoon was broken by the opening of the door, where Old Tom
Cogglesby and Lady Jocelyn appeared.

'Gad! he seems to have got his recompense--eh, my lady?' cried Old Tom.
However satisfactorily they might have explained the case, it certainly
did seem so.

Lady Jocelyn looked not absolutely displeased. Old Tom was chuckling at
her elbow. The two principal actors remained dumb.

'I suppose, if we leave young people to settle a thing, this is how they
do it,' her ladyship remarked.

'Gad, and they do it well!' cried Old Tom.

Rose, with a deep blush on her cheeks, stepped from Evan to her mother.
Not in effrontery, but earnestly, and as the only way of escaping from
the position, she said: 'I have succeeded, Mama. He will take what I
offer.'

'And what's that, now?' Old Tom inquired.

Rose turned to Evan. He bent and kissed her hand.

'Call it "recompense" for the nonce,' said Lady Jocelyn. 'Do you still
hold to your original proposition, Tom?'

'Every penny, my lady. I like the young fellow, and she's a jolly little
lass--if she means it:--she's a woman.'

'True,' said Lady Jocelyn. 'Considering that fact, you will oblige me by
keeping the matter quiet.'

'Does she want to try whether the tailor's a gentleman still, my
lady-eh?'

'No. I fancy she will have to see whether a certain nobleman may be one.'

The Countess now joined them. Sir Franks had informed her of her
brother's last fine performance. After a short, uneasy pause, she said,
glancing at Evan:--

'You know his romantic nature. I can assure you he was sincere; and even
if you could not accept, at least--'

'But we have accepted, Countess,' said Rose.

'The estate!'

'The estate, Countess. And what is more, to increase the effect of his
generosity, he has consented to take a recompense.'

'Indeed!' exclaimed the Countess, directing a stony look at her brother.

'May I presume to ask what recompense?'

Rose shook her head. 'Such a very poor one, Countess! He has no idea of
relative value.'

The Countess's great mind was just then running hot on estates, and
thousands, or she would not have played goose to them, you may be sure.
She believed that Evan had been wheedled by Rose into the acceptance of a
small sum of money, in return for his egregious gift.

With an internal groan, the outward aspect of which she had vast
difficulty in masking, she said: 'You are right--he has no head. Easily
cajoled!'

Old Tom sat down in a chair, and laughed outright. Lady Jocelyn, in pity
for the poor lady, who always amused her, thought it time to put an end
to the scene.

'I hope your brother will come to us in about a week,' she said. 'May I
expect the favour of your company as well?'

The Countess felt her dignity to be far superior as she responded: 'Lady
Jocelyn, when next I enjoy the gratification of a visit to your
hospitable mansion, I must know that I am not at a disadvantage. I cannot
consent to be twice pulled down to my brother's level.'

Evan's heart was too full of its dim young happiness to speak, or care
for words. The cold elegance of the Countess's curtsey to Lady Jocelyn:
her ladyship's kindly pressure of his hand: Rose's stedfast look into his
eyes: Old Tom's smothered exclamation that he was not such a fool as he
seemed: all passed dream-like, and when he was left to the fury of the
Countess, he did not ask her to spare him, nor did he defend himself. She
bade adieu to him and their mutual relationship that very day. But her
star had not forsaken her yet. Chancing to peep into the shop, to intrust
a commission to Mr. John Raikes, who was there doing penance for his
career as a gentleman, she heard Old Tom and Andrew laughing, utterly
unlike bankrupts.

'Who 'd have thought the women such fools! and the Countess, too!'

This was Andrew's voice. He chuckled as one emancipated. The Countess had
a short interview with him (before she took her departure to join her
husband, under the roof of the Honourable Herbert Duffian), and Andrew
chuckled no more.




CHAPTER XLVII

A YEAR LATER, THE COUNTESS DE SALDAR DE SANCORVO TO HER SISTER CAROLINE

                       'Rome.
'Let the post-mark be my reply to your letter received through the
Consulate, and most courteously delivered with the Consul's compliments.
We shall yet have an ambassador at Rome--mark your Louisa's words. Yes,
dearest! I am here, body and spirit! I have at last found a haven, a
refuge, and let those who condemn me compare the peace of their spirits
with mine. You think that you have quite conquered the dreadfulness of
our origin. My love, I smile at you! I know it to be impossible for the
Protestant heresy to offer a shade of consolation. Earthly-born, it
rather encourages earthly distinctions. It is the sweet sovereign
Pontiff alone who gathers all in his arms, not excepting tailors. Here,
if they could know it, is their blessed comfort!

'Thank Harriet for her message. She need say nothing. By refusing me her
hospitality, when she must have known that the house was as free of
creditors as any foreigner under the rank of Count is of soap, she drove
me to Mr. Duflian. Oh! how I rejoice at her exceeding unkindness! How
warmly I forgive her the unsisterly--to say the least--vindictiveness of
her unaccountable conduct! Her sufferings will one day be terrible. Good
little Andrew supplies her place to me. Why do you refuse his easily
afforded bounty? No one need know of it. I tell you candidly, I take
double, and the small good punch of a body is only too delighted. But
then, I can be discreet.

'Oh! the gentlemanliness of these infinitely maligned Jesuits! They
remind me immensely of Sir Charles Grandison, and those frontispiece
pictures to the novels we read when girls--I mean in manners and the
ideas they impose--not in dress or length of leg, of course. The same
winning softness; the same irresistible ascendancy over the female mind!
They require virtue for two, I assure you, and so I told Silva, who
laughed.

'But the charms of confession, my dear! I will talk of Evan first. I have
totally forgiven him. Attache to the Naples embassy, sounds tol-lol. In
such a position I can rejoice to see him, for it permits me to
acknowledge him. I am not sure that, spiritually, Rose will be his most
fitting helpmate. However, it is done, and I did it, and there is no more
to be said. The behaviour of Lord Laxley in refusing to surrender a young
lady who declared that her heart was with another, exceeds all I could
have supposed. One of the noble peers among his ancestors must have been
a pig! Oh! the Roman nobility! Grace, refinement, intrigue, perfect
comprehension of your ideas, wishes--the meanest trifles! Here you have
every worldly charm, and all crowned by Religion! This is my true
delight. I feel at last that whatsoever I do, I cannot go far wrong while
I am within hail of my gentle priest. I never could feel so before.

'The idea of Mr. Parsley proposing for the beautiful widow Strike! It was
indecent to do so so soon--widowed under such circumstances! But I dare
say he was as disinterested as a Protestant curate ever can be. Beauty is
a good dowry to bring a poor, lean, worldly curate of your Church, and he
knows that. Your bishops and arches are quite susceptible to beautiful
petitioners, and we know here how your livings and benefices are
dispensed. What do you intend to do? Come to me; come to the bosom of the
old and the only true Church, and I engage to marry you to a Roman prince
the very next morning or two. That is, if you have no ideas about
prosecuting a certain enterprise which I should not abandon. In that
case, stay. As Duchess of B., Mr. Duffian says you would be cordially
welcome to his Holiness, who may see women. That absurd report is all
nonsense. We do not kiss his toe, certainly, but we have privileges
equally enviable. Herbert is all charm. I confess he is a little
wearisome with his old ruins, and his Dante, the poet. He is quite of my
opinion, that Evan will never wash out the trade stain on him until he
comes over to the Church of Rome. I adjure you, Caroline, to lay this
clearly before our dear brother. In fact, while he continues a
Protestant, to me he is a tailor. But here Rose is the impediment. I know
her to be just one of those little dogged minds that are incapable of
receiving new impressions. Was it not evident in the way she stuck to
Evan after I had once brought them together? I am not at all astonished
that Mr. Raikes should have married her maid. It is a case of natural
selection. But it is amusing to think of him carrying on the old business
in 193, and with credit! I suppose his parents are to be pitied; but what
better is the creature fit for? Mama displeases me in consenting to act
as housekeeper to old Grumpus. I do not object to the fact, for it is
prospective; but she should have insisted on another place of resort than
Fallow field. I do not agree with you in thinking her right in refusing a
second marriage. Her age does not shelter her from scandal in your
Protestant communities.

'I am every day expecting Harry Jocelyn to turn up.

He was rightly sent away, for to think of the folly Evan put into his
empty head! No; he shall have another wife, and Protestantism shall be
his forsaken mistress!

'See how your Louy has given up the world and its vanities! You expected
me to creep up to you contrite and whimpering? On the contrary, I never
felt prouder. And I am not going to live a lazy life, I can assure you.
The Church hath need of me! If only for the peace it hath given me on one
point, I am eternally bound to serve it.

'Postscript: I am persuaded of this; that it is utterly impossible for a
man to be a true gentleman who is not of the true Church. What it is I
cannot say; but it is as a convert that I appreciate my husband. Love is
made to me, dear, for Catholics are human. The other day it was a
question whether a lady or a gentleman should be compromised. It required
the grossest fib. The gentleman did not hesitate. And why? His priest was
handy. Fancy Lord Laxley in such a case. I shudder. This shows that your
religion precludes any possibility of the being the real gentleman, and
whatever Evan may think of himself, or Rose think of him, I KNOW THE
THING.'




     ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS

     A woman rises to her husband. But a man is what he is
     A share of pity for the objects she despised
     A sixpence kindly meant is worth any crown-piece that's grudged
     A youth who is engaged in the occupation of eating his heart
     A man who rejected medicine in extremity
     A lover must have his delusions, just as a man must have a skin
     A madman gets madder when you talk reason to him
     A man to be trusted with the keys of anything
     Abject sense of the lack of a circumference
     Accustomed to be paid for by his country
     Adept in the lie implied
     Admirable scruples of an inveterate borrower
     After a big blow, a very little one scarcely counts
     Ah! how sweet to waltz through life with the right partner
     Amiable mirror as being wilfully ruffled to confuse
     An obedient creature enough where he must be
     And not any of your grand ladies can match my wife at home
     Any man is in love with any woman
     Because you loved something better than me
     Because men can't abide praise of another man
     Because he stood so high with her now he feared the fall
     Believed in her love, and judged it by the strength of his own
     Bitten hard at experience, and know the value of a tooth
     Bound to assure everybody at table he was perfectly happy
     Brief negatives are not re-assuring to a lover's uneasy mind
     British hunger for news; second only to that for beef
     Brotherhood among the select who wear masks instead of faces
     But a woman must now and then ingratiate herself
     By forbearance, put it in the wrong
     Can you not be told you are perfect without seeking to improve
     Cheerful martyr
     Command of countenance the Countess possessed
     Commencement of a speech proves that you have made the plunge
     Common voice of praise in the mouths of his creditors
     Confident serenity inspired by evil prognostications
     Damsel who has lost the third volume of an exciting novel
     Eating, like scratching, only wants a beginning
     Embarrassments of an uncongenial employment
     Empty stomachs are foul counsellors
     Enamoured young men have these notions
     English maids are domesticated savage animals
     Equally acceptable salted when it cannot be had fresh
     Every woman that's married isn't in love with her husband
     Eyes of a lover are not his own; but his hands and lips are
     Far higher quality is the will that can subdue itself to wait
     Feel no shame that I do not feel!
     Feel they are not up to the people they are mixing with
     Few feelings are single on this globe
     Forty seconds too fast, as if it were a capital offence
     Found it difficult to forgive her his own folly
     Friend he would not shake off, but could not well link with
     From head to foot nothing better than a moan made visible
     Gentlefolks like straight-forwardness in their inferiors
     Glimpse of her whole life in the horrid tomb of his embrace
     Good nature, and means no more harm than he can help
     Good and evil work together in this world
     Gossip always has some solid foundation, however small
     Graduated naturally enough the finer stages of self-deception
     Gratuitous insult
     Habit, what a sacred and admirable thing it is
     Hated one thing alone--which was 'bother'
     Have her profile very frequently while I am conversing with her
     He has been tolerably honest, Tom, for a man and a lover
     He grunted that a lying clock was hateful to him
     He was in love, and subtle love will not be shamed and smothered
     He kept saying to himself, 'to-morrow I will tell'
     He had his character to maintain
     He squandered the guineas, she patiently picked up the pence
     His wife alone, had, as they termed it, kept him together
     Hope which lies in giving men a dose of hysterics
     How many degrees from love gratitude may be
     I 'm a bachelor, and a person--you're married, and an object
     I cannot live a life of deceit. A life of misery--not deceit
     I take off my hat, Nan, when I see a cobbler's stall
     I always wait for a thing to happen first
     I never see anything, my dear
     I did, replied Evan. 'I told a lie.'
     I'll come as straight as I can
     If we are to please you rightly, always allow us to play First
     If I love you, need you care what anybody else thinks
     In truth she sighed to feel as he did, above everybody
     Incapable of putting the screw upon weak excited nature
     Informed him that he never played jokes with money, or on men
     Is he jealous? 'Only when I make him, he is.'
     It 's us hard ones that get on best in the world
     It is better for us both, of course
     It was in a time before our joyful era of universal equality
     It is no insignificant contest when love has to crush self-love
     It's no use trying to be a gentleman if you can't pay for it
     It's a fool that hopes for peace anywhere
     Lay no petty traps for opportunity
     Listened to one another, and blinded the world
     Looked as proud as if he had just clapped down the full amount
     Love is a contagious disease
     Make no effort to amuse him. He is always occupied
     Man without a penny in his pocket, and a gizzard full of pride
     Married a wealthy manufacturer--bartered her blood for his money
     Maxims of her own on the subject of rising and getting the worm
     Men they regard as their natural prey
     Men do not play truant from home at sixty years of age
     Most youths are like Pope's women; they have no character
     My belief is, you do it on purpose. Can't be such rank idiots
     Never intended that we should play with flesh and blood
     Never to despise the good opinion of the nonentities
     No great harm done when you're silent
     No conversation coming of it, her curiosity was violent
     Notoriously been above the honours of grammar
     Occasional instalments--just to freshen the account
     Oh! I can't bear that class of people
     One fool makes many, and so, no doubt, does one goose
     One seed of a piece of folly will lurk and sprout to confound us
     Our comedies are frequently youth's tragedies
     Partake of a morning draught
     Patronizing woman
     Play second fiddle without looking foolish
     Pride is the God of Pagans
     Propitiate common sense on behalf of what seems tolerably absurd
     Rare as epic song is the man who is thorough in what he does
     Read one another perfectly in their mutual hypocrisies
     Rebukes which give immeasurable rebounds
     Recalling her to the subject-matter with all the patience
     Refuge in the Castle of Negation against the whole army of facts
     Remarked that the young men must fight it out together
     Requiring natural services from her in the button department
     Rose was much behind her age
     Rose! what have I done? 'Nothing at all,' she said
     Said she was what she would have given her hand not to be
     Says you're so clever you ought to be a man
     Second fiddle; he could only mean what she meant
     Secrets throw on the outsiders the onus of raising a scandal
     Sense, even if they can't understand it, flatters them so
     She did not detest the Countess because she could not like her
     She was unworthy to be the wife of a tailor
     She, not disinclined to dilute her grief
     She believed friendship practicable between men and women
     She was at liberty to weep if she pleased
     Sincere as far as she knew: as far as one who loves may be
     Small beginnings, which are in reality the mighty barriers
     Speech is poor where emotion is extreme
     Speech that has to be hauled from the depths usually betrays
     Spiritualism, and on the balm that it was
     Such a man was banned by the world, which was to be despised?
     Taking oath, as it were, by their lower nature
     Tears that dried as soon as they had served their end
     Tenderness which Mrs. Mel permitted rather than encouraged
     That plain confession of a lack of wit; he offered combat
     That beautiful trust which habit gives
     The ass eats at my table, and treats me with contempt
     The Countess dieted the vanity according to the nationality
     The letter had a smack of crabbed age hardly counterfeit
     The commonest things are the worst done
     The thrust sinned in its shrewdness
     The power to give and take flattery to any amount
     The grey furniture of Time for his natural wear
     Those numerous women who always know themselves to be right
     Thus does Love avenge himself on the unsatisfactory Past
     To be both generally blamed, and generally liked
     To let people speak was a maxim of Mrs. Mel's, and a wise one
     Took care to be late, so that all eyes beheld her
     Touching a nerve
     Toyed with little flowers of palest memory
     Tradesman, and he never was known to have sent in a bill
     Tried to be honest, and was as much so as his disease permitted
     True enjoyment of the princely disposition
     Two people love, there is no such thing as owing between them
     Unfeminine of any woman to speak continuously anywhere
     Virtuously zealous in an instant on behalf of the lovely dame
     Vulgarity in others evoked vulgarity in her
     Waited serenely for the certain disasters to enthrone her
     We deprive all renegades of their spiritual titles
     What a stock of axioms young people have handy
     What will be thought of me? not a small matter to any of us
     What he did, she took among other inevitable matters
     What's an eccentric? a child grown grey!
     When testy old gentlemen could commit slaughter with ecstasy
     When you run away, you don't live to fight another day
     When Love is hurt, it is self-love that requires the opiate
     Whose bounty was worse to him than his abuse
     Why, he'll snap your head off for a word
     With good wine to wash it down, one can swallow anything
     With a proud humility
     Wrapped in the comfort of his cowardice
     You do want polish
     You talk your mother with a vengeance
     You accuse or you exonerate--Nobody can be half guilty
     You rides when you can, and you walks when you must
     You're the puppet of your women!
     Youth is not alarmed by the sound of big sums






VITTORIA


By George Meredith



CONTENTS:

BOOK 1.
I.        UP MONTE MOTTERONE
II.       ON THE HEIGHTS
III.      SIGNORINA VITTORIA
IV.       AMMIANI'S INTERCESSION
V.        THE SPY
VI.       THE WARNING
VII.      BARTO RIZZO
VIII.     THE LETTER

BOOK 2.
IX.       IN VERONA
X.        THE POPE'S MOUTH
XI.       LAURA PIAVENI
XII.      THE BRONZE BUTTERFLY
XIII.     THE PLOT OF THE SIGNOR ANTONIO

BOOK 3.
XIV.      AT THE MAESTRO'S DOOR
XV.       AMMIANI THROUGH THE MIDNIGHT
XVI.      COUNTESS AMMIANI
XVII.     IN THE PIAZZA D'ARMI
XVIII.    THE NIGHT OF THE FIFTEENTH
XIX.      THE PRIMA DONNA

BOOK 4.
XX.       THE OPERA OF CAMILLA
XXI.      THE THIRD ACT
XXII.     WILFRID COMES FORWARD
XXIII.    FIRST HOURS OF THE FLIGHT
XXIV.     ADVENTURES OF VITTORIA AND ANGELO
XXV.      ACROSS THE MOUNTAINS

BOOK 5.
XXVI.     THE DUEL IN THE PASS
XXVII.    A NEW ORDEAL
XXVIII.   THE ESCAPE OF ANGELO

BOOK 6.
XXIX.     EPISODES OF THE REVOLT AND THE WAR--THE TOBACCO RIOTS
          --RINALDO GUIDASCARPI
XXX.      EPISODES OF THE REVOLT AND THE WAR--THE FIVE DAYS OF
MILAN
XXXI.     EPISODES OF THE REVOLT AND THE WAR--VITTORIA DISOBEYS HER LOVER
XXXII.    EPISODES OF THE REVOLT AND THE WAR--THE TREACHERY OF
          PERICLES-THE WRITE UMBRELLA--THE DEATH OF RINALDO GUIDASCARPI

BOOK 7.
XXXIII.   EPISODES OF THE REVOLT AND THE WAR--COUNT KARL LENKENSTEIN--
          THE STORY OF THE GUIDASCARPI--THE VICTORY OF THE VOLUNTEERS
XXXIV.    EPISODES OF THE REVOLT AND THE WAR--THE DEEDS OF BARTO RIZZO--
          THE MEETING AT ROVEREDO
XXXV.     CLOSE OF THE LOMBARD CAMPAIGN--VITTORIA'S PERPLEXITY
XXXVI.    A FRESH ENTANGLEMENT
XXXVII.   ON LAGO MAGGIORE
XXXVIII.  VIOLETTA D'ISORELLA
XXXIX.    ANNA OF LENKENSTEIN

BOOK 8.
XL.       THROUGH THE WINTER
XLI.      THE INTERVIEW
XLII.     THE SHADOW OF CONSPIRACY
XLIII.    THE LAST MEETING IN MILAN
XLIV.     THE WIFE AND THE HUSBAND
XLV.      SHOWS MANY PATHS CONVERGING TO THE END
XLVI.     THE LAST
          EPILOGUE




CHAPTER I

From Monte Motterone you survey the Lombard plain. It is a towering dome
of green among a hundred pinnacles of grey and rust-red crags. At dawn
the summit of the mountain has an eagle eye for the far Venetian boundary
and the barrier of the Apennines; but with sunrise come the mists. The
vast brown level is seen narrowing in; the Ticino and the Sesia waters,
nearest, quiver on the air like sleepy lakes; the plain is engulphed up
to the high ridges of the distant Southern mountain range, which lie
stretched to a faint cloud-like line, in shape like a solitary monster of
old seas crossing the Deluge. Long arms of vapour stretch across the
urn-like valleys, and gradually thickening and swelling upward, enwrap
the scored bodies of the ashen-faced peaks and the pastures of the green
mountain, till the heights become islands over a forgotten earth. Bells
of herds down the hidden run of the sweet grasses, and a continuous
leaping of its rivulets, give the Motterone a voice of youth and
homeliness amid that stern company of Titan-heads, for whom the hawk and
the vulture cry. The storm has beaten at them until they have got the
aspect of the storm. They take colour from sunlight, and are joyless in
colour as in shade. When the lower world is under pushing steam, they
wear the look of the revolted sons of Time, fast chained before scornful
heaven in an iron peace. Day at last brings vigorous fire; arrows of
light pierce the mist-wreaths, the dancing draperies, the floors of
vapour; and the mountain of piled pasturages is seen with its foot on the
shore of Lago Maggiore. Down an extreme gulf the full sunlight, as if
darting on a jewel in the deeps, seizes the blue-green lake with its
isles. The villages along the darkly-wooded borders of the lake show
white as clustered swans; here and there a tented boat is visible,
shooting from terraces of vines, or hanging on its shadow. Monte Boscero
is unveiled; the semicircle of the Piedmontese and the Swiss peaks,
covering Lake Orta, behind, on along the Ticinese and the Grisons,
leftward toward and beyond the Lugano hills, stand bare in black and grey
and rust-red and purple. You behold a burnished realm of mountain and
plain beneath the royal sun of Italy. In the foreground it shines hard as
the lines of an irradiated Cellini shield. Farther away, over middle
ranges that are soft and clear, it melts, confusing the waters with hot
rays, and the forests with darkness, to where, wavering in and out of
view like flying wings, and shadowed like wings of archangels with rose
and with orange and with violet, silverwhite Alps are seen. You might
take them for mystical streaming torches on the border-ground between
vision and fancy. They lean as in a great flight forward upon Lombardy.

The curtain of an early autumnal morning was everywhere lifted around the
Motterone, save for one milky strip of cloud that lay lizard-like across
the throat of Monte Boscero facing it, when a party of five footfarers,
who had met from different points of ascent some way below, and were
climbing the mountain together, stood upon the cropped herbage of the
second plateau, and stopped to eye the landscape; possibly also to get
their breath. They were Italians. Two were fair-haired muscular men,
bronzed by the sun and roughly bearded, bearing the stamp of breed of one
or other of the hill-cities under the Alps. A third looked a sturdy
soldier, squareset and hard of feature, for whom beauties of scenery had
few awakening charms. The remaining couple were an old man and a youth,
upon whose shoulder the veteran leaned, and with a whimsical turn of head
and eye, indicative of some playful cast of mind, poured out his remarks
upon the objects in sight, and chuckled to himself, like one who has
learnt the necessity to appreciate his own humour if he is disposed to
indulge it. He was carelessly wrapped about in long loose woollen stuff,
but the youth was dressed like a Milanese cavalier of the first quality,
and was evidently one who would have been at home in the fashionable
Corso. His face was of the sweetest virile Italian beauty. The head was
long, like a hawk's, not too lean, and not sharply ridged from a
rapacious beak, but enough to show characteristics of eagerness and
promptitude. His eyes were darkest blue, the eyebrows and long disjoining
eyelashes being very dark over them, which made their colour precious.
The nose was straight and forward from the brows; a fluent black
moustache ran with the curve of the upper lip, and lost its line upon a
smooth olive cheek. The upper lip was firmly supported by the under, and
the chin stood freely out from a fine neck and throat.

After a space an Austrian war-steamer was discerned puffing out of the
harbour of Laveno.

"That will do," said the old man. "Carlo, thou son of Paolo, we will
stump upward once more. Tell me, hulloa, sir! are the best peaches doomed
to entertain vile, domiciliary, parasitical insects? I ask you, does
nature exhibit motherly regard, or none, for the regions of the
picturesque? None, I say. It is an arbitrary distinction of our day. To
complain of the intrusion of that black-yellow flag and foul smoke-line
on the lake underneath us is preposterous, since, as you behold, the
heavens make no protestation. Let us up. There is comfort in exercise,
even for an ancient creature such as I am. This mountain is my brother,
and flatters me not--I am old."

"Take my arm, dear Agostino," said the youth.

"Never, my lad, until I need it. On, ahead of me, goat! chamois! and
teach me how the thing used to be done in my time. Old legs must be the
pupils of young ones mark that piece of humility, and listen with
respectfulness to an old head by-and-by."

It was the autumn antecedent to that memorable Spring of the great
Italian uprising, when, though for a tragic issue, the people of Italy
first felt and acted as a nation, and Charles Albert, called the Sword of
Italy, aspired, without comprehension of the passion of patriotism by
which it was animated, to lead it quietly into the fold of his
Piedmontese kingship.

There is not an easier or a pleasanter height to climb than the
Motterone, if, in Italian heat, you can endure the disappointment of
seeing the summit, as you ascend, constantly flit away to a farther
station. It seems to throw its head back, like a laughing senior when
children struggle up for kissings. The party of five had come through the
vines from Stresa and from Baveno. The mountain was strange to them, and
they had already reckoned twice on having the topmost eminence in view,
when reaching it they found themselves on a fresh plateau, traversed by
wild water-courses, and browsed by Alpine herds; and again the green dome
was distant. They came to the highest chalet, where a hearty wiry young
fellow, busily employed in making cheese, invited them to the enjoyment
of shade and fresh milk. "For the sake of these adolescents, who lose
much and require much, let it be so," said Agostino gravely, and not
without some belief that he consented to rest on behalf of his
companions. They allowed the young mountaineer to close the door, and sat
about his fire like sagacious men. When cooled and refreshed, Agostino
gave the signal for departure, and returned thanks for hospitality. Money
was not offered and not expected. As they were going forth the
mountaineer accompanied them to the step on the threshold, and with a
mysterious eagerness in his eyes, addressed Agostino.

"Signore, is it true?--the king marches?"

"Who is the king, my friend?" returned Agostino. "If he marches out of
his dominions, the king confers a blessing on his people perchance."

"Our king, signore!" The mountaineer waved his finger as from Novara
toward Milan.

Agostino seemed to awaken swiftly from his disguise of an absolute
gravity. A red light stood in his eyeballs, as if upon a fiery answer.
The intemperate fit subsided. Smoothing dawn his mottled grey beard with
quieting hands, he took refuge in his habitual sententious irony.

"My friend, I am not a hare in front of the king, nor am I a ram in the
rear of him: I fly him not, neither do I propel him. So, therefore, I
cannot predict the movements of the king. Will the wind blow from the
north to-morrow, think you?"

The mountaineer sent a quick gaze up the air, as to descry signs.

"Who knows?" Agostino continued, though not playing into the smiles of
his companions; "the wind will blow straight thither where there is a
vacuum; and all that we can state of the king is, that there is a
positive vacuum here. It would be difficult to predict the king's
movements save by such weighty indications."

He laid two fingers hard against the rib which shields the heart. It had
become apparently necessary for the speaker to relieve a mind surcharged
with bile at the mention of the king; for, having done, he rebuked with
an amazed frown the indiscretion of Carlo, who had shouted, "The
Carbonaro king!"

"Carlo, my son, I will lean on your arm. On your mouth were better,"
Agostino added, under his voice, as they moved on.

"Oh, but," Carlo remonstrated, "let us trust somebody. Milan has made me
sick of late. I like the look of that fellow."

"You allow yourself, my Carlo, an immense indulgence in permitting
yourself to like the look of anything. Now, listen--Viva Carlo Alberto!"

The old man rang out the loyal salutation spiritedly, and awoke a prompt
response from the mountaineer, who sounded his voice wide in the keen
upper air.

"There's the heart of that fellow!" said Agostino. "He has but one
idea--his king! If you confound it, he takes you for an enemy. These free
mountain breezes intoxicate you. You would embrace the king himself if
you met him here."

"I swear I would never be guilty of the bad joke of crying a 'Viva' to
him anywhere upon earth," Carlo replied. "I offend you," he said quickly.

The old man was smiling.

"Agostino Balderini is too notoriously a bad joker to be offended by the
comments of the perfectly sensible, boy of mine! My limbs were stiff, and
the first three steps from a place of rest reminded me acutely of the
king's five years of hospitality. He has saved me from all fatigue so
long, that the necessity to exercise these old joints of mine touched me
with a grateful sense of his royal bounty. I had from him a chair, a bed,
and a table: shelter from sun and from all silly chatter. Now I want a
chair or a bed. I should like to sit at a table; the sun burns me; my
ears are afflicted. I cry 'Viva!' to him that I may be in harmony with
the coming chorus of Italy, which I prophetically hear. That young
fellow, in whom you confide so much, speaks for his country. We poor
units must not be discordant. No! Individual opinion, my Carlo, is
discord when there is a general delirium. The tide arriving, let us make
the best of the tide. My voice is wisdom. We shall have to follow this
king!"

"Shall we!" uttered one behind them gruffly. "When I see this king
swallow one ounce of Austrian lead, I shall not be sorry to follow him!"

"Right, my dear Ugo," said Agostino, turning round to him; "and I will
then compose his hymn of praise. He has swallowed enough of Austrian
bread. He took an Austrian wife to his bed. Who knows? he may some day
declare a preference for Austrian lead. But we shall have to follow him,
or stay at home drivelling."

Agostino raised his eyes, that were glazed with the great heat of his
frame.

"Oh, that, like our Dante, I had lived in the days when souls were
damned! Then would I uplift another shout, believe me! As things go now,
we must allow the traitor to hope for his own future, and we simply
shrug. We cannot plant him neck-deep for everlasting in a burning marl,
and hear him howling. We have no weapons in these times--none! Our curses
come back to roost. This is one of the serious facts of the century, and
controls violent language. What! are you all gathered about me? Oracles
must be moving, too. There's no rest even for them, when they have got a
mountain to scale."

A cry, "He is there!" and "Do you see him?" burst from the throats of men
surrounding Agostino.

Looking up to the mountain's top, they had perceived the figure of one
who stood with folded arms, sufficiently near for the person of an
expected friend to be descried. They waved their hats, and Carlo shot
ahead. The others trod after him more deliberately, but in glad
excitement, speculating on the time which this sixth member of the party,
who were engaged to assemble at a certain hour of the morning upon yonder
height, had taken to reach the spot from Omegna, or Orta, or Pella, and
rejoicing that his health should be so stout in despite of his wasting
labours under city smoke.

"Yes, health!" said Agostino. "Is it health, do you think? It's the heart
of the man! and a heart with a mill-stone about it--a heart to breed a
country from! There stands the man who has faith in Italy, though she has
been lying like a corpse for centuries. God bless him! He has no other
comfort. Viva l'Italia!"

The exclamation went up, and was acknowledged by him on the eminence
overhanging them; but at a repetition of it his hand smote the air
sideways. They understood the motion, and were silent; while he, until
Carlo breathed his name in his hearing, eyed the great scene stedfastly,
with the absorbing simple passion of one who has endured long exile, and
finds his clustered visions of it confronting the strange, beloved,
visible life:--the lake in the arms of giant mountains: the far-spreading
hazy plain; the hanging forests; the pointed crags; the gleam of the
distant rose-shadowed snows that stretch for ever like an airy host,
mystically clad, and baffling the eye as with the motions of a flight
toward the underlying purple land.




CHAPTER II

He was a man of middle stature, thin, and even frail, as he stood defined
against the sky; with the complexion of the student, and the student's
aspect. The attentive droop of his shoulders and head, the straining of
the buttoned coat across his chest, the air as of one who waited and
listened, which distinguished his figure, detracted from the promise of
other than contemplative energy, until his eyes were fairly seen and
felt. That is, until the observer became aware that those soft and large
dark meditative eyes had taken hold of him. In them lay no abstracted
student's languor, no reflex burning of a solitary lamp; but a quiet
grappling force engaged the penetrating look. Gazing upon them, you were
drawn in suddenly among the thousand whirring wheels of a capacious and a
vigorous mind, that was both reasoning and prompt, keen of intellect,
acting throughout all its machinery, and having all under full command:
an orbed mind, supplying its own philosophy, and arriving at the
sword-stroke by logical steps,--a mind much less supple than a soldier's;
anything but the mind of a Hamlet. The eyes were dark as the forest's
border is dark; not as night is dark. Under favourable lights their
colour was seen to be a deep rich brown, like the chestnut, or more like
the hazeledged sunset brown which lies upon our western rivers in the
winter floods, when night begins to shadow them.

The side-view of his face was an expression of classic beauty rarely now
to be beheld, either in classic lands or elsewhere. It was severe; the
tender serenity of the full bow of the eyes relieved it. In profile they
showed little of their intellectual quality, but what some might have
thought a playful luminousness, and some a quick pulse of feeling. The
chin was firm; on it, and on the upper lip, there was a clipped growth of
black hair. The whole visage widened upward from the chin, though not
very markedly before it reached the broad-lying brows. The temples were
strongly indented by the swelling of the forehead above them: and on both
sides of the head there ran a pregnant ridge, such as will sometimes lift
men a deplorable half inch above the earth we tread. If this man was a
problem to others, he was none to himself; and when others called him an
idealist, he accepted the title, reading himself, notwithstanding, as one
who was less flighty than many philosophers and professedly practical
teachers of his generation. He saw far, and he grasped ends beyond
obstacles: he was nourished by sovereign principles; he despised material
present interests; and, as I have said, he was less supple than a
soldier. If the title of idealist belonged to him, we will not
immediately decide that it was opprobrious. The idealized conception of
stern truths played about his head certainly for those who knew and who
loved it. Such a man, perceiving a devout end to be reached, might prove
less scrupulous in his course, possibly, and less remorseful, than
revolutionary Generals. His smile was quite unclouded, and came softly as
a curve in water. It seemed to flow with, and to pass in and out of, his
thoughts, to be a part of his emotion and his meaning when it shone
transiently full. For as he had an orbed mind, so had he an orbed nature.
The passions were absolutely in harmony with the intelligence. He had the
English manner; a remarkable simplicity contrasting with the
demonstrative outcries and gesticulations of his friends when they joined
him on the height. Calling them each by name, he received their caresses
and took their hands; after which he touched the old man's shoulder.

"Agostino, this has breathed you?"

"It has; it has, my dear and best one!" Agostino replied. "But here is a
good market-place for air. Down below we have to scramble for it in the
mire. The spies are stifling down below. I don't know my own shadow. I
begin to think that I am important. Footing up a mountain corrects the
notion somewhat. Yonder, I believe, I see the Grisons, where Freedom
sits. And there's the Monte della Disgrazia. Carlo Alberto should be on
the top of it, but he is invisible. I do not see that Unfortunate."

"No," said Carlo Ammiani, who chimed to his humour more readily than the
rest, and affected to inspect the Grisons' peak through a diminutive
opera-glass. "No, he is not there."

"Perhaps, my son, he is like a squirrel, and is careful to run up t'other
side of the stem. For he is on that mountain; no doubt of it can exist
even in the Boeotian mind of one of his subjects; myself, for example. It
will be an effulgent fact when he gains the summit."

The others meantime had thrown themselves on the grass at the feet of
their manifestly acknowledged leader, and looked up for Agostino to
explode the last of his train of conceits. He became aware that the
moment for serious talk had arrived, and bent his body, groaning loudly,
and uttering imprecations against him whom he accused of being the
promoter of its excruciating stiffness, until the ground relieved him of
its weight. Carlo continued standing, while his eyes examined restlessly
the slopes just surmounted by them, and occasionally the deep descent
over the green-glowing Orta Lake. It was still early morning. The heat
was tempered by a cool breeze that came with scents of thyme. They had no
sight of human creature anywhere, but companionship of Alps and birds of
upper air; and though not one of them seasoned the converse with an
exclamation of joy and of blessings upon a place of free speech and
safety, the thought was in their hunted bosoms, delicious as a woodland
rivulet that sings only to the leaves overshadowing it.

They were men who had sworn to set a nation free,--free from the
foreigner, to begin with.

(He who tells this tale is not a partisan; he would deal equally toward
all. Of strong devotion, of stout nobility, of unswerving faith and
self-sacrifice, he must approve; and when these qualities are displayed
in a contest of forces, the wisdom of means employed, or of ultimate
views entertained, may be questioned and condemned; but the men
themselves may not be.)

These men had sworn their oath, knowing the meaning of it, and the nature
of the Fury against whom men who stand voluntarily pledged to any great
resolve must thenceforward match themselves. Many of the original
brotherhood had fallen, on the battle-field, on the glacis, or in the
dungeon. All present, save the youthfuller Carlo, had suffered.
Imprisonment and exile marked the Chief. Ugo Corte, of Bergamo, had seen
his family swept away by the executioner and pecuniary penalties. Thick
scars of wounds covered the body and disfigured the face of Giulio
Bandinelli. Agostino had crawled but half-a-year previously out of his
Piedmontese cell, and Marco Sana, the Brescian, had in such a place
tasted of veritable torture. But if the calamity of a great oath was upon
them, they had now in their faithful prosecution of it the support which
it gives. They were unwearied; they had one object; the mortal anguish
they had gone through had left them no sense for regrets. Life had become
the field of an endless engagement to them; and as in battle one sees
beloved comrades struck down, and casts but a glance at their prostrate
forms, they heard the mention of a name, perchance, and with a word or a
sign told what was to be said of a passionate glorious heart at rest,
thanks to Austrian or vassal-Sardinian mercy.

So they lay there and discussed their plans.

"From what quarter do you apprehend the surprise?" Ugo Corte glanced up
from the maps and papers spread along the grass to question Carlo
ironically, while the latter appeared to be keeping rigid watch over the
safety of the position. Carlo puffed the smoke of a cigarette rapidly,
and Agostino replied for him:--"From the quarter where the best donkeys
are to be had."

It was supposed that Agostino had resumed the habit usually laid aside by
him for the discussion of serious matters, and had condescended to father
a coarse joke; but his eyes showed no spark of their well-known twinkling
solicitation for laughter, and Carlo spoke in answer gravely:--"From
Baveno it will be."

"From Baveno! They might as well think to surprise hawks from Baveno.
Keep watch, dear Ammiani; a good start in a race is a kick from the
Gods."

With that, Corte turned to the point of his finger on the map. He
conceived it possible that Carlo Ammiani, a Milanese, had reason to
anticipate the approach of people by whom he, or they, might not wish to
be seen. Had he studied Carlo's face he would have been reassured. The
brows of the youth were open, and his eyes eager with expectation, that
showed the flying forward of the mind, and nothing of knotted distrust or
wary watchfulness. Now and then he would move to the other side of the
mountain, and look over upon Orta; or with the opera-glass clasped in one
hand beneath an arm, he stopped in his sentinel-march, frowning
reflectively at a word put to him, as if debating within upon all the
bearings of it; but the only answer that came was a sharp assent, given
after the manner of one who dealt conscientiously in definite
affirmatives; and again the glass was in requisition. Marco Sana was a
fighting soldier, who stated what he knew, listened, and took his orders.
Giulio Bandinelli was also little better than the lieutenant in an
enterprise. Corte, on the other hand, had the conspirator's head,--a head
like a walnut, bulging above the ears,--and the man was of a sallying
temper. He lay there putting bit by bit of his plot before the Chief for
his approval, with a careful construction, that upon the expression of
any doubt of its working smoothly in the streets of Milan, caused him to
shout a defensive, "But Carlo says yes!"

This uniform character of Ammiani's replies, and the smile of Agostino on
hearing them, had begun to strike the attention of the soldierly Marco
Sana. He ran his hand across his shorn head, and puffed his burnt red
mole-spotted cheeks, with a sidelong stare at the abstracted youth, "Said
yes!" he remarked. "He might say no, for a diversion. He has yeses enough
in his pay to earn a Cardinal's hat. 'Is Milan preparing to rise?'
'Yes.'--'Is she ready for the work?' 'Yes.'--'Is the garrison on its
guard?' 'Yes.'--'Have you seen Barto Rizzo?' 'Yes.'--'Have the people got
the last batch of arms?' 'Yes.'--And 'Yes,' the secret is well kept;
'Yes,' Barto Rizzo is steadily getting them together. We may rely on him:
Carlo is his intimate friend: Yes, Yes:--There's a regiment of them at
your service, and you may shuffle them as you will. This is the help we
get from Milan: a specimen of what we may expect!"

Sana had puffed himself hot, and now blew for coolness.

"You are,"--Agostino addressed him,--"philosophically totally wrong, my
Marco. Those affirmatives are fat worms for the catching of fish. They
are the real pretty fruit of the Hesperides. Personally, you or I may be
irritated by them: but I'm not sure they don't please us. Were Carlo a
woman, of course he should learn to say no;--as he will now if I ask him,
Is she in sight? I won't do it, you know; but as a man and a diplomatist,
it strikes me that he can't say yes too often."

"Answer me, Count Ammiani, and do me the favour to attend to these
trifles for the space of two minutes," said Corte. "Have you seen Barto
Rizzo? Is he acting for Medole?"

"As mole, as reindeer, and as bloody northern Raven!" ejaculated
Agostino: "perhaps to be jackal, by-and-by. But I do not care to abuse
our Barto Rizzo, who is a prodigy of nature, and has, luckily for
himself, embraced a good cause, for he is certain to be hanged if he is
not shot. He has the prophetic owl's face. I have always a fancy of his
hooting his own death-scrip. I wrong our Barto:--Medole would be the
jackal, if it lay between the two."

Carlo Ammiani had corrected Corte's manner to him by a complacent
readiness to give him distinct replies. He then turned and set off at
full speed down the mountain.

"She is sighted at last," Agostino murmured, and added rapidly some
spirited words under his breath to the Chief, whose chin was resting on
his doubled hand.

Corte, Marco, and Giulio were full of denunciations against Milan and the
Milanese, who had sent a boy to their councils. It was Brescia and
Bergamo speaking in their jealousy, but Carlo's behaviour was odd, and
called for reproof. He had come as the deputy of Milan to meet the Chief,
and he had not spoken a serious word on the great business of the hour,
though the plot had been unfolded, the numbers sworn to, and Brescia, and
Bergamo, and Cremona, and Venice had spoken upon all points through their
emissaries, the two latter cities being represented by Sana and Corte.

"We've had enough of this lad," said Corte. "His laundress is following
him with a change of linen, I suppose, or it's a scent-bottle. He's an
admirable representative of the Lombard metropolis!" Corte drawled out
the words in prodigious mimicry. "If Milan has nothing better to send
than such a fellow, we'll finish without her, and shame the beast that
she is. She has been always a treacherous beast!"

"Poor Milan!" sighed the Chief; "she lies under the beak of the vulture,
and has twice been devoured; but she has a soul: she proves it. Ammiani,
too, will prove his value. I have no doubt of him. As to boys, or even
girls, you know my faith is in the young. Through them Italy lives. What
power can teach devotion to the old?"

"I thank you, signore," Agostino gesticulated.

"But, tell me, when did you learn it, my friend?"

In answer, Agostino lifted his hand a little boy's height from the earth.

The old man then said: "I am afraid, my dear Corte, you must accept the
fellowship of a girl as well as of a boy upon this occasion. See! our
Carlo! You recognize that dancing speck below there?--he has joined
himself--the poor lad wishes he could, I dare swear!--to another bigger
speck, which is verily a lady: who has joined herself to a donkey--a
common habit of the sex, I am told; but I know them not. That lady,
signor Ugo, is the signorina Vittoria. You stare? But, I tell you, the
game cannot go on without her; and that is why I have permitted you to
knock the ball about at your own pleasure for these forty minutes."

Corte drew his under-lip on his reddish stubble moustache. "Are we to
have women in a conference?" he asked from eye to eye.

"Keep to the number, Ugo; and moreover, she is not a woman, but a noble
virgin. I discern a distinction, though you may not. The Vestal's fire
burns straight."

"Who is she?"

"It rejoices me that she should be so little known. All the greater the
illumination when her light shines out! The signorina Vittoria is a
cantatrice who is about to appear upon the boards."

"Ah! that completes it." Corte rose to his feet with an air of
desperation. "We require to be refreshed with quavers and crescendos and
trillets! Who ever knew a singer that cared an inch of flesh for her
country? Money, flowers, flattery, vivas! but, money! money! and Austrian
as good as Italian. I've seen the accursed wenches bow gratefully for
Austrian bouquets:--bow? ay, and more; and when the Austrian came to them
red with our blood. I spit upon their polluted cheeks! They get us an ill
name wherever they go. These singers have no country. One--I knew
her--betrayed Filippo Mastalone, and sang the night of the day he was
shot. I heard the white demon myself. I could have taken her long neck
till she twisted like a serpent and hissed. May heaven forgive me for not
levelling a pistol at her head! If God, my friends, had put the thought
into my brain that night!"

A flush had deadened Corte's face to the hue of nightshade.

"You thunder in a clear atmosphere, my Ugo," returned the old man, as he
fell back calmly at full length.

"And who is this signorina Vittoria?" cried Corte.

"A cantatrice who is about to appear upon the boards, as I have already
remarked: of La Scala, let me add, if you hold it necessary."

"And what does she do here?"

"Her object in coming, my friend? Her object in coming is, first, to make
her reverence to one who happens to be among us this day; and secondly,
but principally, to submit a proposition to him and to us."

"What's her age?" Corte sneered.

"According to what calendar would you have it reckoned? Wisdom would say
sixty: Father Chronos might divide that by three, and would get scarce a
month in addition, hungry as he is for her, and all of us! But Minerva's
handmaiden has no age. And now, dear Ugo, you have your opportunity to
denounce her as a convicted screecher by night. Do so."

Corte turned his face to the Chief, and they spoke together for some
minutes: after which, having had names of noble devoted women, dead and
living, cited to him, in answer to brutal bellowings against that sex,
and hearing of the damsel under debate as one who was expected and was
welcome, he flung himself upon the ground again, inviting calamity by
premature resignation. Giulio Bandinelli stretched his hand for Carlo's
glass, and spied the approach of the signorina.

"Dark," he said.

"A jewel of that complexion," added Agostino, by way of comment.

"She has scorching eyes."

"She may do mischief; she may do mischief; let it be only on the right
Side!"

"She looks fat."

"She sits doubled up and forward, don't you see, to relieve the poor
donkey. You, my Giulio, would call a swan fat if the neck were not always
on the stretch."

"By Bacchus! what a throat she has!"

"And well interjected, Giulio! It runs down like wine, like wine, to the
little ebbing and flowing wave! Away with the glass, my boy! You must
trust to all that's best about you to spy what's within. She makes me
young--young!"

Agostino waved his hand in the form of a salute to her on the last short
ascent. She acknowledged it gracefully; and talking at intervals to Carlo
Ammiani, who footed briskly by her side, she drew by degrees among the
eyes fixed on her, some of which were not gentle; but hers were for the
Chief, at whose feet, when dismounted by Ammiani's solicitous aid, she
would have knelt, had he not seized her by her elbows, and put his lips
to her cheek.

"The signorina Vittoria, gentlemen," said Agostino.




CHAPTER III

The old man had introduced her with much of the pride of a father
displaying some noble child of his for the first time to admiring
friends.

"She is one of us," he pursued; "a daughter of Italy! My daughter also;
is it not so?"

He turned to her as for a confirmation. The signorina pressed his
fingers. She was a little intimidated, and for the moment seemed shy and
girlish. The shade of her broad straw hat partly concealed her vivid
features.

"Now, gentlemen, if you please, the number is complete, and we may
proceed to business," said Agostino, formally but as he conducted the
signorina to place her at the feet of the Chief, she beckoned to her
servant, who was holding the animal she had ridden. He came up to her,
and presented himself in something of a military posture of attention to
her commands. These were that he should take the poor brute to water, and
then lead him back to Baveno, and do duty in waiting upon her mother. The
first injunction was received in a decidedly acquiescent manner. On
hearing the second, which directed his abandonment of his post of
immediate watchfulness over her safety, the man flatly objected with a
"Signorina, no."

He was a handsome bright-eyed fellow, with a soldier's frame and a smile
as broad and beaming as laughter, indicating much of that mixture of
acuteness, and simplicity which is a characteristic of the South, and
means no more than that the extreme vivacity of the blood exceeds at
times that of the brain.

A curious frown of half-amused astonishment hung on the signorina's face.

"When I tell you to go, Beppo!"

At once the man threw out his fingers, accompanied by an amazingly
voluble delivery of his reasons for this revolt against her authority.
Among other things, he spoke of an oath sworn by him to a foreign
gentleman, his patron,--for whom, and for whomsoever he loved, he was
ready to pour forth his heart's blood,--to the effect that he would never
quit her side when she left the roof of her house.

"You see, Beppo," she remonstrated, "I am among friends."

Beppo gave a sweeping bow, but remained firm where he stood. Ammiani cast
a sharp hard look at the man.

"Do you hear the signorina's orders?"

"I hear them, signore."

"Will you obey them?"

She interposed. "He must not hear quick words. Beppo is only showing his
love for his master and for me. But you are wrong in this case, my Beppo.
You shall give me your protection when I require it; and now, you are
sensible, and must understand that it is not wanted. I tell you to go."

Beppo read the eyes of his young mistress.

"Signorina,"--he stooped forward mysteriously,--"signorina, that fellow
is in Baveno. I saw him this morning."

"Good, good. And now go, my friend."

"The signor Agostino," he remarked loudly, to attract the old man; "the
signor Agostino may think proper to advise you."

"The signor Agostino will laugh at nothing that you say to-day, Beppo.
You will obey me. Go at once," she repeated, seeing him on tiptoe to gain
Agostino's attention.

Beppo knew by her eyes that her ears were locked against him; and, though
she spoke softly, there was an imperiousness in her voice not to be
disregarded. He showed plainly by the lost rigidity of his attitude that
he was beaten and perplexed. Further expostulations being disregarded, he
turned his head to look at the poor panting beast under his charge, and
went slowly up to him: they walked off together, a crest-fallen pair.

"You have gained the victory, signorina," said Ugo Corte.

She replied, smiling, "My poor Beppo! it's not difficult to get the best
of those who love us."

"Ha!" cried Agostino; "here is one of their secrets, Carlo. Take heed of
it, my boy. We shall have queens when kings are fossils, mark me!"

Ammiani muttered a courtly phrase, whereat Corte yawned in very grim
fashion.

The signorina had dropped to the grass, at a short step from the Chief,
to whom her face was now seriously given. In Ammiani's sight she looked a
dark Madonna, with the sun shining bright gold through the edges of the
summer hat, thrown back from her head. The full and steady contemplative
eyes had taken their fixed expression, after a vanishing affectionate
gaze of an instant cast upon Agostino. Attentive as they were, light
played in them like water. The countenance was vivid in repose. She
leaned slightly forward, clasping the wrist of one hand about her knee,
and the sole of one little foot showed from under her dress.

Deliberately, but with no attempt at dramatic impressiveness, the Chief
began to speak. He touched upon the condition of Italy, and the new lilt
animating her young men and women. "I have heard many good men jeer," he
said, "at our taking women to our counsel, accepting their help, and
putting a great stake upon their devotion. You have read history, and you
know what women can accomplish. They may be trained, equally as we are,
to venerate the abstract idea of country, and be a sacrifice to it.
Without their aid, and the fire of a fresh life being kindled in their
bosoms, no country that has lain like ours in the death-trance can
revive. In the death-trance, I say, for Italy does not die!"

"True," said other voices.

"We have this belief in the eternal life of our country, and the belief
is the life itself. But let no strong man among us despise the help of
women. I have seen our cause lie desperate, and those who despaired of it
were not women. Women kept the flame alive. They worship in the temple of
the cause."

Ammiani's eyes dwelt fervidly upon the signorina. Her look, which was
fastened upon the Chief, expressed a mind that listened to strange matter
concerning her very little. But when the plans for the rising of the
Bergamascs and Brescians, the Venetians, the Bolognese, the Milanese, all
the principal Northern cities, were recited, with a practical emphasis
thrown upon numbers, upon the readiness of the organized bands, the
dispositions of the leaders, and the amount of resistance to be expected
at the various points indicated for the outbreak, her hands disjoined,
and she stretched her fingers to the grass, supporting herself so, while
her extended chin and animated features told how eagerly her spirit drank
at positive springs, and thirsted for assurance of the coming storm.

"It is decided that Milan gives the signal," said the Chief; and a light,
like the reflection of a beacon-fire upon the night, flashed over her.

He was pursuing, when Ugo Corte smote the air with his nervous fingers,
crying out passionately, "Bunglers! are we again to wait for them, and
hear that fifteen patriots have stabbed a Croat corporal, and wrestled
hotly with a lieutenant of the guard? I say they are bunglers. They never
mean the thing. Fifteen! There were just three Milanese among the last
lot--the pick of the city; and the rest were made up of Trentini, and our
lads from Bergamo and Brescia; and the order from the Council was, 'Go
and do the business!' which means, 'Go and earn your ounce of Austrian
lead.' They went, and we gave fifteen true men for one poor devil of a
curst tight blue-leg. They can play the game on if we give them odds like
that. Milan burns bad powder, and goes off like a drugged pistol. It's a
nest of bunglers, and may it be razed! We could do without it, and well!
If it were a family failing, should not I too be trusting them? My
brother was one of the fifteen who marched out as targets to try the
skill of those hell-plumed Tyrolese: and they did it thoroughly--shot him
straight here." Corte struck his chest. "He gave a jump and a cry. Was it
a viva for Milan? They swear that it was, and they can't translate from a
living mouth, much more from a dead one; but I know my Niccolo better. I
have kissed his lips a thousand times, and I know the poor boy meant,
'Scorn and eternal distrust of such peddling conspirators as these!' I
can deal with traitors, but these flash-in-the-pan plotters--these
shaking, jelly-bodied patriots!--trust to them again? Rather draw lots
for another fifteen to bare their breasts and bandage their eyes, and
march out in the grey morning, while the stupid Croat corporal goes on
smoking his lumpy pipe! We shall hear that Milan is moving; we shall
rise; we shall be hot at it; and the news will come that Milan has merely
yawned and turned over to sleep on the other side. Twice she has done
this trick, and the garrison there has sent five regiments to finish
us--teach us to sleep soundly likewise! I say, let it be Bergamo; or be
it Brescia, if you like; or Venice: she is ready. You trust to Milan, and
you are fore-doomed. I would swear it with this hand in the flames. She
give the signal? Shut your eyes, cross your hands flat on your breasts:
you are dead men if you move. She lead the way? Spin on your heels, and
you have followed her!"

Corte had spoken in a thick difficult voice, that seemed to require the
aid of his vehement gestures to pour out as it did like a water-pipe in a
hurricane of rain. He ceased, red almost to blackness, and knotted his
arms, that were big as the cable of a vessel. Not a murmur followed his
speech. The word was, given to the Chief, and he resumed:--"You have a
personal feeling in this case, Ugo. You have not heard me. I came through
Paris. A rocket will soon shoot up from Paris that will be a signal for
Christendom. The keen French wit is sick of its compromise-king. All
Europe is in convulsions in a few months: to-morrow it may be. The
elements are in the hearts of the people, and nothing will contain them.
We have sown them to reap them. The sowing asks for persistency; but the
reaping demands skill and absolute truthfulness. We have now one of those
occasions coming which are the flowers to be plucked by resolute and
worthy hands: they are the tests of our sincerity. This time now rapidly
approaching will try us all, and we must be ready for it. If we have
believed in it, we stand prepared. If we have conceived our plan of
action in purity of heart, we shall be guided to discern the means which
may serve us. You will know speedily what it is that has prompted you to
move. If passion blindfolds you, if you are foiled by a prejudice, I also
shall know. My friend, the nursing of a single antipathy is a presumption
that your motive force is personal--whether the thirst for vengeance or
some internal union of a hundred indistinct little fits of egoism. I have
seen brave and even noble men fail at the ordeal of such an hour: not
fail in courage, not fail in the strength of their desire; that was the
misery for them! They failed because midway they lost the vision to
select the right instruments put in our way by heaven. That vision
belongs solely to such as have clean and disciplined hearts. The hope in
the bosom of a man whose fixed star is Humanity becomes a part of his
blood, and is extinguished when his blood flows no more. To conquer him,
the principle of life must be conquered. And he, my friend, will use all,
because he serves all. I need not touch on Milan."

The signorina drew in her breath quickly, as if in this abrupt close she
had a revelation of the Chief's whole meaning, and was startled by the
sudden unveiling of his mastery. Her hands hung loose; her figure was
tremulous. A murmur from Corte jarred within her like a furious discord,
but he had not offended by refusing to disclaim his error, and had simply
said in a gruff acquiescent way, "Proceed." Her sensations of surprise at
the singular triumph of the Chief made her look curiously into the faces
of the other men; but the pronouncing of her name engaged her attention.

"Your first night is the night of the fifteenth of next month?"

"It is, signore," she replied, abashed to find herself speaking with him
who had so moved her.

"There is no likelihood of a postponement?"

"I am certain, signore, that I shall be ready."

"There are no squabbles of any serious kind among the singers?"

A soft dimple played for a moment on her lips. "I have heard something."

"Among the women?"

"Yes, and the men."

"But the men do not concern you?"

"No, signore. Except that the women twist them."

Agostino chuckled audibly. The Chief resumed:

"You believe, notwithstanding, that all will go well? The opera will be
acted; and you will appear in it?"

"Yes, signore. I know one who has determined on it, and can do it."

"Good. The opera is Camilla?"

She was answering with an affirmative, when Agostino broke in,--"Camilla!
And honour to whom honour is due! Let Caesar claim the writing of the
libretto, if it be Caesar's! It has passed the censorship, signed
Agostino Balderini--a disaffected person out of Piedmont, rendered tame
and fangless by a rigorous imprisonment. The sources of the tale, O ye
grave Signori Tedeschi? The sources are partly to be traced to a neat
little French vaudeville, very sparkling--Camille, or the Husband
Asserted; and again to a certain Chronicle that may be mediaeval, may be
modern, and is just, as the great Shakespeare would say, 'as you like
it.'"

Agostino recited some mock verses, burlesquing the ordinary libretti, and
provoked loud laughter from Carlo Ammiani, who was familiar enough with
the run of their nonsense.

"Camilla is the bride of Camillo. I give to her all the brains, which is
a modern idea, quite! He does all the mischief, which is possibly
mediaeval. They have both an enemy, which is mediaeval and modern. None
of them know exactly what they are about; so there you have the modern,
the mediaeval, and the antique, all in one. Finally, my friends, Camilla
is something for you to digest at leisure. The censorship swallowed it at
a gulp. Never was bait so handsomely taken! At present I have the joy of
playing my fish. On the night of the fifteenth I land him. Camilla has a
mother. Do you see? That mother is reported, is generally conceived, as
dead. Do you see further? Camilla's first song treats of a dream she has
had of that mother. Our signorina shall not be troubled to favour you
with a taste of it, or, by Bacchus and his Indian nymphs, I should
speedily behold you jumping like peas in a pan, like trout on a bank! The
earth would be hot under you, verily! As I was remarking, or meant to be,
Camilla and her husband disagree, having agreed to. 'Tis a plot to
deceive Count Orso--aha? You are acquainted with Count Orso! He is
Camilla's antenuptial guardian. Now you warm to it! In that condition I
leave you. Perhaps my child here will give you a taste of her voice. The
poetry does much upon reflection, but it has to ripen within you--a
matter of time. Wed this voice to the poetry, and it finds passage 'twixt
your ribs, as on the point of a driven blade. Do I cry the sweetness and
the coolness of my melons? Not I! Try them."

The signorina put her hand out for the scroll he was unfolding, and cast
her eyes along bars of music, while Agostino called a "Silenzio tutti!"
She sang one verse, and stopped for breath.

Between her dismayed breathings she said to the Chief:--"Believe me,
signore, I can be trusted to sing when the time comes."

"Sing on, my blackbird--my viola!" said Agostino. "We all trust you. Look
at Colonel Corte, and take him for Count Orso. Take me for pretty
Camillo. Take Marco for Michiela; Giulio for Leonardo; Carlo for Cupid.
Take the Chief for the audience. Take him for a frivolous public. Ah, my
Pippo!" (Agostino laughed aside to him). "Let us lead off with a lighter
piece; a trifle-tra-la-la! and then let the frisky piccolo be drowned in
deep organ notes, as on some occasions in history the people overrun
certain puling characters. But that, I confess, is an illustration
altogether out of place, and I'll simply jot it down in my notebook."

Agostino had talked on to let her gain confidence. When he was silent she
sang from memory. It was a song of flourishes: one of those be-flowered
arias in which the notes flicker and leap like young flames. Others might
have sung it; and though it spoke favourably of her aptitude and musical
education, and was of a quality to enrapture easy, merely critical
audiences, it won no applause from these men. The effect produced by it
was exhibited in the placid tolerance shown by the uplifting of Ugo
Corte's eyebrows, which said, "Well, here's a voice, certainly." His
subsequent look added, "Is this what we have come hither to hear?"

Vittoria saw the look. "Am I on my trial before you?" she thought; and
the thought nerved her throat. She sang in strong and grave contralto
tones, at first with shut eyes. The sense of hostility left her, and
left her soul free, and she raised them. The song was of Camilla dying.
She pardons the treacherous hand, commending her memory and the strength
of her faith to her husband:--

     "Beloved, I am quickly out of sight:
     I pray that you will love more than my dust.

     Were death defeat, much weeping would be right;
     'Tis victory when it leaves surviving trust.
     You will not find me save when you forget
     Earth's feebleness, and come to faith, my friend,
     For all Humanity doth owe a debt
     To all Humanity, until the end."

Agostino glanced at the Chief to see whether his ear had caught note of
his own language.

The melancholy severity of that song of death changed to a song of
prophetic triumph. The signorina stood up. Camilla has thrown off the
mask, and has sung the name "Italia!" At the recurrence of it the men
rose likewise.

     "Italia, Italia, shall be free!"

Vittoria gave the inspiration of a dying voice: the conquest of death by
an eternal truth seemed to radiate from her. Voice and features were as
one expression of a rapture of belief built upon pathetic trustfulness.

     "Italia, Italia shall be free!"

She seized the hearts of those hard and serious men as a wind takes the
strong oak-trees, and rocks them on their knotted roots, and leaves them
with the song of soaring among their branches. Italy shone about her; the
lake, the plains, the peaks, and the shouldering flushed snowridges.
Carlo Ammiani breathed as one who draws in fire. Grizzled Agostino
glittered with suppressed emotion, like a frosted thorn-bush in the
sunlight. Ugo Corte had his thick brows down, as a man who is reading
iron matter. The Chief alone showed no sign beyond a half lifting of the
hand, and a most luminous fixed observation of the fair young woman, from
whom power was an emanation, free of effort. The gaze was sad in its
thoughtfulness, such as our feelings translate of the light of evening.

She ceased, and he said, "You sing on the night of the fifteenth?"

"I do, signore."

"It is your first appearance?"

She bent her head.

"And you will be prepared on that night to sing this song?"

"Yes, signore."

"Save in the event of your being forbidden?"

"Unless you shall forbid me, I will sing it, signore."

"Should they imprison you?--"

"If they shoot me I shall be satisfied to know that I have sung a song
that cannot be forgotten."

The Chief took her hand in a gentle grasp.

"Such as you will help to give our Italy freedom. You hold the sacred
flame, and know you hold it in trust."

"Friends,"--he turned to his companions,--"you have heard what will be
the signal for Milan."




CHAPTER IV

It was a surprise to all of them, save to Agostino Balderini, who passed
his inspecting glance from face to face, marking the effect of the
announcement. Corte gazed at her heavily, but not altogether
disapprovingly. Giulio Bandinelli and Marco Sana, though evidently
astonished, and to some extent incredulous, listened like the perfectly
trusty lieutenants in an enterprise which they were. But Carlo Ammiani
stood horror-stricken. The blood had left his handsome young olive-hued
face, and his eyes were on the signorina, large with amazement, from
which they deepened to piteousness of entreaty.

"Signorina!--you! Can it be true? Do you know?--do you mean it?"

"What, signor Carlo?"

"This; will you venture to do such a thing?"

"Oh, will I venture? What can you think of me? It is my own request."

"But, signorina, in mercy, listen and consider."

Carlo turned impetuously to the Chief. "The signorina can't know the
danger she is running. She will be seized on the boards, and shut up
between four walls before a man of us will be ready,--or more than one,"
he added softly. "The house is sure to be packed for a first night; and
the Polizia have a suspicion of her. She has been off her guard in the
Conservatorio; she has talked of a country called Italy; she has been
indiscreet;--pardon, pardon, signorina! but it is true that she has
spoken out from her noble heart. And this opera! Are they fools?--they
must see through it. It will never,--it can't possibly be reckoned on to
appear. I knew that the signorina was heart and soul with us; but who
could guess that her object was to sacrifice herself in the front
rank,--to lead a forlorn hope! I tell you it's like a Pagan rite. You are
positively slaying a victim. I beg you all to look at the case calmly!"

A burst of laughter checked him; for his seniors by many years could not
hear such veteran's counsel from a hurried boy without being shrewdly
touched by the humour of it, while one or two threw a particular irony
into their tones.

"When we do slay a victim, we will come to you as our augur, my Carlo,"
said Agostino.

Corte was less gentle. As a Milanese and a mere youth Ammiani was
antipathetic to Corte, who closed his laughter with a windy rattle of his
lips, and a "pish!" of some emphasis.

Carlo was quick to give him a challenging frown.

"What is it?" Corte bent his head back, as if inquiringly.

"It's I who claim that question by right," said Carlo.

"You are a boy."

"I have studied war."

"In books."

"With brains, Colonel Corte."

"War is a matter of blows, my little lad."

"Let me inform you, signor Colonel, that war is not a game between bulls,
to be played with the horns of the head."

"You are prepared to instruct me?" The fiery Bergamasc lifted his
eyebrows.

"Nay, nay!" said Agostino. "Between us two first;" and he grasped Carlo's
arm, saying in an underbreath, "Your last retort was too long-winded. In
these conflicts you must be quick, sharp as a rifle-crack that hits echo
on the breast-bone and makes her cry out. I correct a student in the art
of war." Then aloud: "My opera, young man!--well, it's my libretto, and
you know we writers always say 'my opera' when we have put the pegs for
the voice; you are certainly aware that we do. How dare you to make
calumnious observations upon my opera? Is it not the ripe and admirable
fruit of five years of confinement? Are not the lines sharp, the stanzas
solid? and the stuff, is it not good? Is not the subject simple, pure
from offence to sensitive authority, constitutionally harmless? Reply!"

"It's transparent to any but asses," said Carlo.

"But if it has passed the censorship? You are guilty, my boy, of
bestowing upon those highly disciplined gentlemen who govern your famous
city--what title? I trust a prophetic one, since that it comes from an
animal whose custom is to turn its back before it delivers a blow, and
is, they remark, fonder of encountering dead lions than live ones. Still,
it is you who are indiscreet,--eminently so, I must add, if you will look
lofty. If my opera has passed the censorship! eh, what have you to say?"

Carlo endured this banter till the end of it came.

"And you--you encourage her!" he cried wrathfully. "You know what the
danger is for her, if they once lay hands on her. They will have her in
Verona in four-and-twenty hours; through the gates of the Adige in a
couple of days, and at Spielberg, or some other of their infernal dens of
groans, within a week. Where is the chance of a rescue then? They
torture, too, they torture! It's a woman; and insult will be one mode of
torturing her. They can use rods--"

The excited Southern youth was about to cover his face, but caught back
his hands, clenching them.

"All this," said Agostino, "is an evasion, manifestly, of the question
concerning my opera, on which you have thought proper to cast a slur. The
phrase, 'transparent to any but asses,' may not be absolutely
objectionable, for transparency is, as the critics rightly insist,
meritorious in a composition. And, according to the other view, if we
desire our clever opponents to see nothing in something, it is notably
skilful to let them see through it. You perceive, my Carlo. Transparency,
then, deserves favourable comment. So, I do not complain of your phrase,
but I had the unfortunate privilege of hearing it uttered. The method of
delivery scarcely conveyed a compliment. Will you apologize?"

Carlo burst from him with a vehement question to the Chief: "Is it
decided?"

"It is, my friend," was the reply.

"Decided! She is doomed! Signorina! what can you know of this frightful
risk? You are going to the slaughter. You will be seized before the first
verse is out of your lips, and once in their clutches, you will never
breathe free air again. It's madness!--ah, forgive me!--yes, madness! For
you shut your eyes; you rush into the trap blindfolded. And that is how
you serve our Italy! She sees you an instant, and you are caught
away;--and you who might serve her, if you would, do you think you can
move dungeon walls?"

"Perhaps, if I have been once seen, I shall not be forgotten," said the
signorina smoothly, and then cast her eyes down, as if she felt the
burden of a little possible accusation of vanity in this remark. She
raised them with fire.

"No; never!" exclaimed Carlo. "But, now you are ours. And--surely it is
not quite decided?"

He had spoken imploringly to the Chief. "Not irrevocably?" he added.

"Irrevocably!"

"Then she is lost!"

"For shame, Carlo Ammiani;" said old Agostino, casting his sententious
humours aside. "Do you not hear? It is decided! Do you wish to rob her of
her courage, and see her tremble? It's her scheme and mine: a case where
an old head approves a young one. The Chief says Yes! and you bellow
still! Is it a Milanese trick? Be silent."

"Be silent!" echoed Carlo. "Do you remember the beast Marschatska's bet?"
The allusion was to a black incident concerning a young Italian ballet
girl who had been carried off by an Austrian officer, under the pretext
of her complicity in one of the antecedent conspiracies.

"He rendered payment for it," said Agostino.

"He perished; yes! as we shake dust to the winds; but she!--it's
terrible! You place women in the front ranks--girls! What can defenceless
creatures do? Would you let the van-regiment in battle be the one without
weapons? It's slaughter. She's like a lamb to them. You hold up your
jewel to the enemy, and cry, 'Come and take it.' Think of the insults!
think of the rough hands, and foul mouths! She will be seized on the
boards--"

"Not if you keep your tongue from wagging," interposed Ugo Corte, fevered
by this unseasonable exhibition of what was to him manifestly a lover's
frenzied selfishness. He moved off, indifferent to Carlo's retort. Marco
Sana and Giulio Bandinelli were already talking aside with the Chief.

"Signor Carlo, not a hand shall touch me," said the signorina. "And I am
not a lamb, though it is good of you to think me one. I passed through
the streets of Milan in the last rising. I was unharmed. You must have
some confidence in me."

"Signorina, there's the danger," rejoined Carlo. "You trust to your good
angels once, twice--the third time they fail you! What are you among a
host of armed savages? You would be tossed like weed on the sea. In pity,
do not look so scornfully! No, there is no unjust meaning in it; but you
despise me for seeing danger. Can nothing persuade you? And, besides," he
addressed the Chief, who alone betrayed no signs of weariness; "listen, I
beg of you. Milan wants no more than a signal. She does not require to be
excited. I came charged with several proposals for giving the alarm.
Attend, you others! The night of the Fifteenth comes; it is passing like
an ordinary night. At twelve a fire-balloon is seen in the sky. Listen,
in the name of saints and devils!"

But even the Chief was observed to show signs of amusement, and the
gravity of the rest forsook them altogether at the display of this
profound and original conspiratorial notion.

"Excellent! excellent! my Carlo," said old Agostino, cheerfully. "You
have thought. You must have thought, or whence such a conception? But,
you really mistake. It is not the garrison whom we desire to put on their
guard. By no means. We are not in the Imperial pay. Probably your balloon
is to burst in due time, and, wind permitting, disperse printed papers
all over the city?"

"What if it is?" cried Carlo fiercely.

"Exactly. I have divined your idea. You have thought, or, to correct the
tense, are thinking, which is more hopeful, though it may chance not to
seem so meritorious. But, if yours are the ideas of full-blown jackets,
bear in mind that our enemies are coated and breeched. It may be
creditable to you that your cunning is not the cunning of the serpent; to
us it would be more valuable if it were. Continue."

"Oh! there are a thousand ways." Carlo controlled himself with a sharp
screw of all his muscles. "I simply wish to save the signorina from an
annoyance."

"Very mildly put," Agostino murmured assentingly.

"In our Journal," said Carlo, holding out the palm of one hand to dot the
forefinger of the other across it, by way of personal illustration--"in
our Journal we might arrange for certain letters to recur at distinct
intervals in Roman capitals, which might spell out, 'This Night AT
Twelve,' or 'At Once.'"

"Quite as ingenious, but on the present occasion erring on the side of
intricacy. Aha! you want to increase the sale of your Journal, do you, my
boy? The rogue!"

With which, and a light slap over Carlo's shoulder, Agostino left him.

The aspect of his own futile proposals stared the young man in the face
too forcibly for him to nurse the spark of resentment which was struck
out in the turmoil of his bosom. He veered, as if to follow Agostino, and
remained midway, his chest heaving, and his eyelids shut.

"Signor Carlo, I have not thanked you." He heard Vittoria speak. "I know
that a woman should never attempt to do men's work. The Chief will tell
you that we must all serve now, and all do our best. If we fail, and they
put me to great indignity, I promise you that I will not live. I would
give this up to be done by anyone else who could do it better. It is in
my hands, and my friends must encourage me."

"Ah, signorina!" the young man sighed bitterly. The knowledge that he had
already betrayed himself in the presence of others too far, and the sob
in his throat labouring to escape, kept him still.

A warning call from Ugo Corte drew their attention. Close by the chalet
where the first climbers of the mountain had refreshed themselves, Beppo
was seen struggling to secure the arms of a man in a high-crowned green
Swiss hat, who was apparently disposed to give the signorina's faithful
servant some trouble. After gazing a minute at this singular contention,
she cried--"It's the same who follows me everywhere!"

"And you will not believe you are suspected," murmured Carlo in her ear.

"A spy?" Sana queried, showing keen joy at the prospect of scotching such
a reptile on the lonely height. Corte went up to the Chief. They spoke
briefly together, making use of notes and tracings on paper. The Chief
then said "Adieu" to the signorina. It was explained to the rest by Corte
that he had a meeting to attend near Pella about noon, and must be in
Fobello before midnight. Thence his way would be to Genoa.

"So, you are resolved to give another trial to our crowned ex-Carbonaro,"
said Agostino.

"Without leaving him an initiative this time!" and the Chief embraced the
old man. "You know me upon that point. I cannot trust him. I do not. But,
if we make such a tide in Lombardy that his army must be drawn into it,
is such an army to be refused? First, the tide, my friend! See to that."

"The king is our instrument!" cried Carlo Ammiani, brightening.

"Yes, if we were particularly well skilled in the use of that kind of
instrument," Agostino muttered.

He stood apart while the Chief said a few words to Carlo, which made the
blood play vividly across the visage of the youth. Carlo tried humbly to
expostulate once or twice. In the end his head was bowed, and he
signified a dumb acquiescence.

"Once more, good-bye." The Chief addressed the signorina in English.

She replied in the same tongue, "Good-bye," tremulously; and passion
mounting on it, added--"Oh! when shall I see you again?"

"When Rome is purified to be a fit place for such as you."

In another minute he was hidden on the slope of the mountain lying toward
Orta.




CHAPTER V

Beppo had effected a firm capture of his man some way down the slope. But
it was a case of check that entirely precluded his own free movements.
They hung together intertwisted in the characters of specious pacificator
and appealing citizen, both breathless.

"There! you want to hand me up neatly; I know your vanity, my Beppo; and
you don't even know my name," said the prisoner.

"I know your ferret of a face well enough," said Beppo. "You dog the
signorina. Come up, and don't give trouble."

"Am I not a sheep? You worry me. Let me go."

"You're a wriggling eel."

"Catch me fast by the tail then, and don't hold me by the middle."

"You want frightening, my pretty fellow!"

"If that's true, my Beppo, somebody made a mistake in sending you to do
it. Stop a moment. You're blown. I think you gulp down your minestra too
hot; you drink beer."

"You dog the signorina! I swore to scotch you at last."

"I left Milan for the purpose--don't you see? Act fairly, my Beppo, and
let us go up to the signorina together decently."

"Ay, ay, my little reptile! You'll find no Austrians here. Cry out to
them to come to you from Baveno. If the Motterone grew just one tree!
Saints! one would serve."

"Why don't you--fool that you are, my Beppo!--pray to the saints earlier?
Trees don't grow from heaven."

"You'll be going there soon, and you'll know better about it."

"Thanks to the Virgin, then, we shall part at some time or other!"

The struggles between them continued sharply during this exchange of
intellectual shots; but hearing Ugo Corte's voice, the prisoner's
confident audacity forsook him, and he drew a long tight face like the
mask of an admonitory exclamation addressed to himself from within.

"Stand up straight!" the soldier's command was uttered.

Even Beppo was amazed to see that the man had lost the power to obey or
to speak.

Corte grasped him under the arm-pit. With the force of his huge fist he
swung him round and stretched him out at arm's length, all collar and
shanks. The man hung like a mole from the twig. Yet, while Beppo poured
out the tale of his iniquities, his eyes gave the turn of a twinkle,
showing that he could have answered one whom he did not fear. The charge
brought against him was, that for the last six months he had been
untiringly spying on the signorina.

Corte stamped his loose feet to earth, shook him and told him to walk
aloft. The flexible voluble fellow had evidently become miserably
disconcerted. He walked in trepidation, speechless, and when interrogated
on the height his eyes flew across the angry visages with dismal
uncertainty. Agostino perceived that he had undoubtedly not expected to
come among them, and forthwith began to excite Giulio and Marco to the
worst suspicions, in order to indulge his royal poetic soul with a study
of a timorous wretch pushed to anticipations of extremity.

"The execution of a spy," he preluded, "is the signal for the ringing of
joy-bells on this earth; not only because he is one of a pestiferous
excess, in point of numbers, but that he is no true son of earth. He
escaped out of hell's doors on a windy day, and all that we do is to puff
out a bad light, and send him back. Look at this fellow in whom
conscience is operating so that he appears like a corked volcano! You can
see that he takes Austrian money; his skin has got to be the exact colour
of Munz. He has the greenish-yellow eyes of those elective,
thrice-abhorred vampyres who feed on patriot-blood. He is condemned
without trial by his villainous countenance, like an ungrammatical preface
to a book. His tongue refuses to confess, but nature is
stronger:--observe his knees. Now this is guilt. It is execrable guilt.
He is a nasty object. Nature has in her wisdom shortened his stature to
indicate that it is left to us to shorten the growth of his offending
years. Now, you dangling soul! answer me:--what name hailed you when on
earth?"

The fan, with no clearly serviceable tongue, articulated, "Luigi."

"Luigi! the name Christian and distinctive. The name historic:-Luigi
Porco?"

"Luigi Saracco, signore."

"Saracco: Saracco: very possibly a strip of the posterity of cut-throat
Moors. To judge by your face, a Moor undoubtedly: glib, slippery! with a
body that slides and a soul that jumps. Taken altogether, more serpent
than eagle. I misdoubt that little quick cornering eye of yours. Do you
ever remember to have blushed?"

"No, signore," said Luigi.

"You spy upon the signorina, do you?"

"You have Beppo's word for that," interposed Marco Sana, growling.

"And you are found spying on the mountain this particular day! Luigi
Saracco, you are a fellow of a tremendous composition. A goose walking
into a den of foxes is alone to be compared to you,--if ever such goose
was! How many of us did you count, now, when you were, say, a quarter of
a mile below?"

Marco interposed again: "He has already seen enough up here to make a
rope of florins."

"The fellow's eye takes likenesses," said Giulio.

Agostino's question was repeated by Corte, and so sternly that Luigi,
beholding kindness upon no other face save Vittoria's, watched her, and
muttering "Six," blinked his keen black eyes piteously to get her sign of
assent to his hesitated naming of that number. Her mouth and the turn of
her head were expressive to him, and he cried "Seven."

"So; first six, and next seven," said Corte.

"Six, I meant, without the signorina," Luigi explained.

"You saw six of us without the signorina! You see we are six here,
including the signorina. Where is the seventh?"

Luigi tried to penetrate Vittoria's eyes for a proper response; but she
understood the grave necessity for getting the full extent of his
observations out of him, and she looked as remorseless as the men. He
feigned stupidity and sullenness, rage and cunning, in quick succession.

"Who was the seventh?" said Carlo.

"Was it the king?" Luigi asked.

This was by just a little too clever; and its cleverness, being seen,
magnified the intended evasion so as to make it appear to them that Luigi
knew well the name of the seventh.

Marco thumped a hand on his shoulder, shouting--"Here; speak out! You saw
seven of us. Where has the seventh one gone?"

Luigi's wits made a dash at honesty. "Down Orta, signore."

"And down Orta, I think, you will go; deeper down than you may like."

Corte now requested Vittoria to stand aside. He motioned to her with his
hand to stand farther, and still farther off; and finally told Carlo to
escort her to Baveno. She now began to think that the man Luigi was in
some perceptible danger, nor did Ammiani disperse the idea.

"If he is a spy, and if he has seen the Chief, we shall have to detain
him for at least four-and-twenty hours," he said, "or do worse."

"But, Signor Carlo,"--Vittoria made appeal to his humanity,--"do they
mean, if they decide that he is guilty, to hurt him?"

"Tell me, signorina, what punishment do you imagine a spy deserves?"

"To be called one!"

Carlo smiled at her lofty method of dealing with the animal.

"Then you presume him to have a conscience?"

"I am sure, Signor Carlo, that I could make him loathe to be called a
spy."

They were slowly pacing from the group, and were on the edge of the
descent, when the signorina's name was shrieked by Luigi. The man came
running to her for protection, Beppo and the rest at his heels. She
allowed him to grasp her hand.

"After all, he is my spy; he does belong to me," she said, still speaking
on to Carlo. "I must beg your permission, Colonel Corte and Signor Marco,
to try an experiment. The Signor Carlo will not believe that a spy can be
ashamed of his name.--Luigi!"

"Signorina!"--he shook his body over her hand with a most plaintive
utterance.

"You are my countryman, Luigi?"

"Yes, signorina."

"You are an Italian?"

"Certainly, signorina!"

"A spy!"

Vittoria had not always to lift her voice in music for it to sway the
hearts of men. She spoke the word very simply in a mellow soft tone.
Luigi's blood shot purple. He thrust his fists against his ears.

"See, Signor Carlo," she said; "I was right. Luigi, you will be a spy no
more?"

Carlo Ammiani happened to be rolling a cigarette-paper. She put out her
fingers for it, and then reached it to Luigi, who accepted it with
singular contortions of his frame, declaring that he would confess
everything to her. "Yes, signorina, it is true; I am a spy on you. I know
the houses you visit. I know you eat too much chocolate for your voice. I
know you are the friend of the Signora Laura, the widow of Giacomo
Piaveni, shot--shot on Annunciation Day. The Virgin bless him! I know the
turning of every street from your house near the Duomo to the signora's.
You go nowhere else, except to the maestro's. And it's something to spy
upon you. But think of your Beppo who spies upon me! And your little
mother, the lady most excellent, is down in Baveno, and she is always
near you when you make an expedition. Signorina, I know you would not pay
your Beppo for spying upon me. Why does he do it? I do not sing 'Italia,
Italia shall be free!' I have heard you when I was under the maestro's
windows; and once you sang it to the Signor Agostino Balderini.
Indeed, signorina, I am a sort of guardian of your voice. It is not gold
of the Tedeschi I get from the Signor Antonio Pericles."

At the mention of this name, Agostino and Vittoria laughed out.

"You are in the pay of the Signor Antonio-Pericles," said Agostino.
"Without being in our pay, you have done us the service to come up here
among us! Bravo! In return for your disinterestedness, we kick you down,
either upon Baveno or upon Stresa, or across the lake, if you prefer
it.--The man is harmless. He is hired by a particular worshipper of the
signorina's voice, who affects to have first discovered it when she was
in England, and is a connoisseur, a millionaire, a Greek, a rich
scoundrel, with one indubitable passion, for which I praise him. We will
let his paid eavesdropper depart, I think. He is harmless."

Neither Ugo nor Marco was disposed to allow any description of spy to
escape unscotched. Vittoria saw that Luigi's looks were against him, and
whispered: "Why do you show such cunning eyes, Luigi?"

He replied: "Signorina, take me out of their hearing, and I will tell you
everything."

She walked aside. He seemed immediately to be inspired with confidence,
and stretched his fingers in the form of a grasshopper, at which sight
they cried: "He knows Barto Rizzo--this rascal!" They plied him with
signs and countersigns, and speedily let him go. There ensued a sharp
snapping of altercation between Luigi and Beppo. Vittoria had to order
Beppo to stand back.

"It is a poor dog, not of a good breed, signorina," Luigi said, casting a
tolerant glance over his shoulder. "Faithful, but a poor nose. Ah! you
gave me this cigarette. Not the Virgin could have touched my marrow as
you did. That's to be remembered by-and-by. Now, you are going to sing on
the night of the fifteenth of September. Change that night. The Signor
Antonio-Pericles watches you, and he is a friend of the Government, and
the Government is snoring for you to think it asleep. The Signor
Antonio-Pericles pacifies the Tedeschi, but he will know all that you are
doing, and how easy it will be, and how simple, for you to let me know
what you think he ought to know, and just enough to keep him comfortable!
So we work like a machine, signorina. Only, not through that Beppo, for
he is vain of his legs, and his looks, and his service, and because he
has carried a gun and heard it go off. Yes; I am a spy. But I am honest.
I, too, have visited England. One can be honest and a spy. Signorina, I
have two arms, but only one heart. If you will be gracious and consider!
Say, here are two hands. One hand does this thing, one hand does that
thing, and that thing wipes out this thing. It amounts to clear
reasoning! Here are two eyes. Were they meant to see nothing but one
side! Here is a tongue with a line down the middle almost to the tip of
it--which is for service. That Beppo couldn't deal double, if he would;
for he is imperfectly designed--a mere dog's pattern! But, only one
heart, signorina--mind that. I will never forget the cigarette. I shall
smoke it before I leave the mountain, and think--oh!"

Having illustrated the philosophy of his system, Luigi continued: "I am
going to tell you everything. Pray, do not look on Beppo! This is
important. The Signor Antonio-Pericles sent me to spy on you, because he
expects some people to come up the mountain, and you know them; and one
is an Austrian officer, and he is an Englishman by birth, and he is
coming to meet some English friends who enter Italy from Switzerland over
the Moro, and easily up here on mules or donkeys from Pella. The Signor
Antonio-Pericles has gold ears for everything that concerns the
signorina. 'A patriot is she!' he says; and he is jealous of your English
friends. He thinks they will distract you from your studies; and
perhaps"--Luigi nodded sagaciously before he permitted himself to
say--"perhaps he is jealous in another way. I have heard him speak like a
sonnet of the signorina's beauty. The Signor Antonio-Pericles thinks that
you have come here to-day to meet them. When he heard that you were going
to leave Milan for Baveno, he was mad, and with two fists up, against all
English persons. The Englishman who is an Austrian officer is quartered
at Verona, and the Signor Antonio Pericles said that the Englishman should
not meet you yet, if he could help it."

Victoria stood brooding. "Who can it be,--who is an Englishman, and an
Austrian officer, and knows me?"

"Signorina, I don't know names. Behold, that Beppo is approaching like
the snow! What I entreat is, that the signorina will wait a little for
the English party, if they come, so that I may have something to tell my
patron. To invent upon nothing is most unpleasant, and the Signor Antonio
can soon perceive whether one swims with corks. Signorina, I can dance on
one rope--I am a man. I am not a midge--I cannot dance upon nothing."

The days of Vittoria's youth had been passed in England. It was not
unknown to her that old English friends were on the way to Italy; the
recollection of a quiet and a buried time put a veil across her features.
She was perplexed by the mention of the Austrian officer by Luigi, as one
may be who divines the truth too surely, but will not accept it for its
loathsomeness. There were Englishmen in the army of Austria. Could one of
them be this one whom she had cared for when she was a girl? It seemed
hatefully cruel to him to believe it. She spoke to Agostino, begging him
to remain with her on the height awhile to see whether the Signor
Antonio-Pericles was right; to see whether Luigi was a truth-teller; to
see whether these English persons were really coming. "Because," she
said, "if they do come, it will at once dissolve any suspicions you may
have of this Luigi. And I always long so much to know if the Signor
Antonio is correct. I have never yet known him to be wrong."

"And you want to see these English," said Agostino. He frowned.

"Only to hear them. They shall not recognize me. I have now another name;
and I am changed. My hat is enough to hide me. Let me hear them talk a
little. You and the Signor Carlo will stay with me, and when they come,
if they do come, I will remain no longer than just sufficient to make
sure. I would refuse to know any of them before the night of the
fifteenth; I want my strength too much. I shall have to hear a misery
from them; I know it, I feel it; it turns my blood. But let me hear their
voices! England is half my country, though I am so willing to forget her
and give all my life to Italy. Stay with me, dear friend, my best father!
humour me, for you know that I am always charming when I am humoured."

Agostino pressed his finger on a dimple in her cheeks. "You can afford to
make such a confession as that to a greybeard. The day is your own. Bear
in mind that you are so situated that it will be prudent for you to have
no fresh relations, either with foreigners or others, until your work is
done,--in which, my dear child, may God bless you!"

"I pray to him with all my might," Vittoria said in reply.

After a consultation with Agostino, Ugo Corte and Marco and Giulio bade
their adieux to her. The task of keeping Luigi from their clutches was
difficult; but Agostino helped her in that also. To assure them, after
his fashion, of the harmlessness of Luigi, he seconded him in a contest
of wit against Beppo, and the little fellow, now that he had shaken off
his fears, displayed a quickness of retort and a liveliness "unknown to
professional spies and impossible to the race," said Agostino; "so
absolutely is the mind of man blunted by Austrian gold. We know that for
a fact. Beppo is no match for him. Beppo is sententious; ponderously
illustrative; he can't turn; he is long-winded; he, I am afraid, my
Carlo, studies the journals. He has got your journalistic style, wherein
words of six syllables form the relief to words of eight, and hardly one
dares to stand by itself. They are like huge boulders across a brook. The
meaning, do you, see, would run of itself, but you give us these
impedimenting big stones to help us over it, while we profess to
understand you by implication. For my part, I own, that to me, your
parliamentary, illegitimate academic, modern crocodile phraseology, which
is formidable in the jaws, impenetrable on the back, can't circumvent a
corner, and is enabled to enter a common understanding solely by having a
special highway prepared for it,--in short, the writing in your journals
is too much for me. Beppo here is an example that the style is useless
for controversy. This Luigi baffles him at every step."

"Some," rejoined Carlo, "say that Beppo has had the virtue to make you
his study."

Agostino threw himself on his back and closed his eyes. "That, then, is
more than you have done, signor Tuquoque. Look on the Bernina yonder, and
fancy you behold a rout of phantom Goths; a sleepy rout, new risen, with
the blood of old battles on their shroud-shirts, and a North-east wind
blowing them upon our fat land. Or take a turn at the other side toward
Orta, and look out for another invasion, by no means so picturesque, but
preferable. Tourists! Do you hear them?"

Carlo Ammiani had descried the advanced troop of a procession of
gravely-heated climbers ladies upon donkeys, and pedestrian guards
stalking beside them, with courier, and lacqueys, and baskets of
provisions, all bearing the stamp of pilgrims from the great Western
Island.




CHAPTER VI

A mountain ascended by these children of the forcible Isle, is a mountain
to be captured, and colonized, and absolutely occupied for a term; so
that Vittoria soon found herself and her small body of adherents
observed, and even exclaimed against, as a sort of intruding aborigines,
whose presence entirely dispelled the sense of romantic dominion which a
mighty eminence should give, and which Britons expect when they have
expended a portion of their energies. The exclamations were not
complimentary; nevertheless, Vittoria listened with pleased ears, as one
listens by a brookside near an old home, hearing a music of memory rather
than common words. They talked of heat, of appetite, of chill, of thirst,
of the splendour of the prospect, of the anticipations of good hotel
accommodation below, of the sadness superinduced by the reflection that
in these days people were found everywhere, and poetry was thwarted;
again of heat, again of thirst, of beauty, and of chill. There was the
enunciation of matronly advice; there was the outcry of girlish
insubordination; there were sighings for English ale, and namings of the
visible ranges of peaks, and indicatings of geographical fingers to show
where Switzerland and Piedmont met, and Austria held her grasp on
Lombardy; and "to this point we go to-night; yonder to-morrow; farther
the next day," was uttered, soberly or with excitement, as befitted the
age of the speaker.

Among these tourists there was one very fair English lady, with long
auburn curls of the traditionally English pattern, and the science of
Paris displayed in her bonnet and dress; which, if not as graceful as
severe admirers of the antique in statuary or of the mediaeval in drapery
demand, pleads prettily to be thought so, and commonly succeeds in its
object, when assisted by an artistic feminine manner. Vittoria heard her
answer to the name of Mrs. Sedley. She had once known her as a Miss Adela
Pole. Amidst the cluster of assiduous gentlemen surrounding this lady it
was difficult for Vittoria's stolen glances to discern her husband; and
the moment she did discern him she became as indifferent to him as was
his young wife, by every manifestation of her sentiments. Mrs. Sedley
informed her lord that it was not expected of him to care, or to pretend
to care, for such scenes as the Motterone exhibited; and having dismissed
him to the shade of an umbrella near the provision baskets, she took her
station within a few steps of Vittoria, and allowed her attendant
gentlemen to talk while she remained plunged in a meditative rapture at
the prospect. The talk indicated a settled scheme for certain members of
the party to reach Milan from the Como road. Mrs. Sedley was asked if she
expected her brother to join her here or in Milan.

"Here, if a man's promises mean anything," she replied languidly.

She was told that some one waved a handkerchief to them from below.

"Is he alone?" she said; and directing an operaglass upon the slope of
the mountain, pursued, as in a dreamy disregard of circumstances: "That
is Captain Gambier. My brother Wilfrid has not kept his appointment.
Perhaps he could not get leave from the General; perhaps he is married;
he is engaged to an Austrian Countess, I have heard. Captain Gambier did
me the favour to go round to a place called Stresa to meet him. He has
undertaken the journey for nothing. It is the way with all journeys
though this" (the lady had softly reverted to her rapture) "this is too
exquisite! Nature at least does not deceive."

Vittoria listened to a bubbling of meaningless chatter, until Captain
Gambier had joined Mrs. Sedley; and at him, for she had known him
likewise, she could not forbear looking up. He was speaking to Mrs.
Sedley, but caught the look, and bent his head for a clearer view of the
features under the broad straw hat. Mrs. Sedley commanded him imperiously
to say on.

"Have you no letter from Wilfrid? Has the mountain tired you? Has Wilfrid
failed to send his sister one word? Surely Mr. Pericles will have made
known our exact route to him? And his uncle, General Pierson, could--I am
certain he did--exert his influence to procure him leave for a single
week to meet the dearest member of his family."

Captain Gambier gathered his wits to give serviceable response to the
kindled lady, and letting his eyes fall from time to time on the broad
straw hat, made answer--"Lieutenant Pierson, or, in other words, Wilfrid
Pole--"

The lady stamped her foot and flushed.

"You know, Augustus, I detest that name."

"Pardon me a thousandfold. I had forgotten."

"What has happened to you?"

Captain Gambier accused the heat.

"I found a letter from Wilfrid at the hotel. He is apparently kept on
constant service between Milan, and Verona, and Venice. His quarters are
at Verona. He informs me that he is to be married in the Spring; that is,
if all continues quiet; married in the Spring. He seems to fancy that
there may be disturbances; not of a serious kind, of course. He will meet
you in Milan. He has never been permitted to remain at Milan longer than
a couple of days at a stretch. Pericles has told him that she is in
Florence. Pericles has told me that Miss Belloni has removed to
Florence."

"Say it a third time," the lady indulgently remarked.

"I do not believe that she has gone."

"I dare say not."

"She has changed her name, you know."

"Oh, dear, yes; she has done something fantastic, naturally! For my part,
I should have thought her own good enough."

"Emilia Alessandra Belloni is good enough, certainly," said Captain
Gambier.

The shading straw rim had shaken once during the colloquy. It was now a
fixed defence.

"What is her new name?" Mrs. Sedley inquired.

"That I cannot tell. Wilfrid merely mentions that he has not seen her."

"I," said Mrs. Sedley, "when I reach Milan, shall not trust to Mr.
Pericles, but shall write to the Conservatorio; for if she is going to be
a great cantatrice,really, it will be agreeable to renew acquaintance
with her. Nor will it do any mischief to Wilfrid, now that he is engaged.
Are you very deeply attached to straw hats? They are sweet in a
landscape."

Mrs. Sedley threw him a challenge from her blue eyes; but his reply to it
was that of an unskilled youth, who reads a lady by the letters of her
speech:--"One minute. I will be with you instantly. I want to have a look
down on the lake. I suppose this is one of the most splendid views in
Italy. Half a minute!"

Captain Gambier smiled brilliantly; and the lady, perceiving that
polished shield, checked the shot of indignation on her astonished
features, and laid it by. But the astonishment lingered there, like the
lines of a slackened bow. She beheld her ideal of an English gentleman
place himself before these recumbent foreign people, and turn to talk
across them, with a pertinacious pursuit of the face under the bent straw
hat. Nor was it singular to her that one of them at last should rise and
protest against the continuation of the impertinence.

Carlo Ammiani, in fact, had opened matters with a scrupulously-courteous
bow.

"Monsieur is perhaps unaware that he obscures the outlook?"

"Totally, monsieur," said Captain Gambier, and stood fast.

"Will monsieur do me the favour to take three steps either to the right
or to the left?"

"Pardon, monsieur, but the request is put almost in the form of an
order."

"Simply if it should prove inefficacious in the form of a request."

"What, may I ask, monsieur, is your immediate object?"

"To entreat you to behave with civility."

"I am at a loss, monsieur, to perceive any offence."

"Permit me to say, it is lamentable you do not know when you insult a
lady."

"I have insulted a lady?" Captain Gambier looked profoundly incredulous.
"Oh! then you will not take exception to my assuming the privilege to
apologize to her in person?"

Ammiani arrested him as he was about to pass.

"Stay, monsieur; you determine to be impudent, I perceive; you shall not
be obtrusive."

Vittoria had tremblingly taken old Agostino's hand, and had risen to her
feet. Still keeping her face hidden, she walked down the slope, followed
at an interval by her servant, and curiously watched by the English
officer, who said to himself, "Well, I suppose I was mistaken," and
consequently discovered that he was in a hobble.

A short duologue in their best stilted French ensued between him and
Ammiani. It was pitched too high in a foreign tongue for Captain Gambier
to descend from it, as he would fain have done, to ask the lady's name.
They exchanged cards and formal salutes, and parted.

The dignified altercation had been witnessed by the main body of the
tourists. Captain Gambier told them that he had merely interchanged
amicable commonplaces with the Frenchman,--"or Italian," he added
carelessly, reading the card in his hand. "I thought she might be
somebody whom we knew," he said to Mrs. Sedley.

"Not the shadow of a likeness to her," the lady returned.

She had another opinion when later a scrap of paper bearing one pencilled
line on it was handed round. A damsel of the party had picked it up near
the spot where, as she remarked, "the foreigners had been sitting." It
said:--

     "Let none who look for safety go to Milan."




CHAPTER VII

A week following the day of meetings on the Motterone, Luigi the spy was
in Milan, making his way across the Piazza de' Mercanti. He entered a
narrow court, one of those which were anciently built upon the Oriental
principle of giving shade at the small cost of excluding common air. It
was dusky noon there through the hours of light, and thrice night when
darkness fell. The atmosphere, during the sun's short passage overhead,
hung with a glittering heaviness, like the twinkling iron-dust in a
subterranean smithy. On the lower window of one of the houses there was a
board, telling men that Barto Rizzo made and mended shoes, and requesting
people who wished to see him to make much noise at the door, for he was
hard of hearing. It speedily became known in the court that a visitor
desired to see Barto Rizzo. The noise produced by Luigi was like that of
a fanatical beater of the tomtom; he knocked and banged and danced
against the door, crying out for his passing amusement an adaptation of a
popular ballad:--"Oh, Barto, Barto! my boot is sadly worn: The toe is
seen that should be veiled from sight. The toe that should be veiled like
an Eastern maid: like a sultan's daughter: Shocking! shocking! One of a
company of ten that were living a secluded life in chaste privacy! Oh,
Barto, Barto! must I charge it to thy despicable leather or to my
incessant pilgrimages? One fair toe! I fear presently the corruption of
the remaining nine: Then, alas! what do I go on? How shall I come to a
perfumed end, who walk on ten indecent toes? Well may the delicate
gentlemen sneer at me and scorn me: As for the angelic Lady who deigns to
look so low, I may say of her that her graciousness clothes what she
looks at: To her the foot, the leg, the back: To her the very soul is
bared: But she is a rarity upon earth. Oh, Barto, Barto, she is rarest in
Milan! I might run a day's length and not find her. If, O Barto, as my
boot hints to me, I am about to be stripped of my last covering, I must
hurry to the inconvenient little chamber of my mother, who cannot refuse
to acknowledge me as of this pattern: Barto, O shoemaker! thou son of
artifice and right-hand-man of necessity, preserve me in the fashion of
the time: Cobble me neatly: A dozen wax threads and I am
remade:--Excellent! I thank you! Now I can plant my foot bravely: Oh,
Barto, my shoemaker! between ourselves, it is unpleasant in these refined
days to be likened at all to that preposterous Adam!"

The omission of the apostrophes to Barto left it one of the ironical,
veiled Republican, semi-socialistic ballads of the time, which were sung
about the streets for the sharpness and pith of the couplets, and not
from a perception of the double edge down the length of them.

As Luigi was coming to the terminating line, the door opened. A very
handsome sullen young woman, of the dark, thick-browed Lombard type,
asked what was wanted; at the same time the deep voice of a man;
conjecturally rising from a lower floor, called, and a lock was rattled.
The woman told Luigi to enter. He sent a glance behind him; he had
evidently been drained of his sprightliness in a second; he moved in with
the slackness of limb of a gibbeted figure. The door shut; the woman led
him downstairs. He could not have danced or sung a song now for great
pay. The smell of mouldiness became so depressing to him that the smell
of leather struck his nostrils refreshingly. He thought: "Oh, Virgin!
it's dark enough to make one believe in every single thing they tell us
about the saints." Up in the light of day Luigi had a turn for careless
thinking on these holy subjects.

Barto Rizzo stood before him in a square of cellarage that was furnished
with implements of his craft, too dark for a clear discernment of
features.

"So, here you are!" was the greeting Luigi received.

It was a tremendous voice, that seemed to issue from a vast cavity. "Lead
the gentleman to my sitting-room," said Barto. Luigi felt the wind of a
handkerchief, and guessed that his eyes were about to be bandaged by the
woman behind him. He petitioned to be spared it, on the plea, firstly,
that it expressed want of confidence; secondly, that it took him in the
stomach. The handkerchief was tight across his eyes while he was
speaking. His hand was touched by the woman, and he commenced timidly an
ascent of stairs. It continued so that he would have sworn he was a
shorter time going up the Motterone; then down, and along a passage;
lower down, deep into corpse-climate; up again, up another enormous
mountain; and once more down, as among rats and beetles, and down, as
among faceless horrors, and down, where all things seemed prostrate and
with a taste of brass. It was the poor fellow's nervous imagination,
preternaturally excited. When the handkerchief was caught away, his jaw
was shuddering, his eyes were sickly; he looked as if impaled on the
prongs of fright. It required just half a minute to reanimate this
mercurial creature, when he found himself under the light of two lamps,
and Barto Rizzo fronting him, in a place so like the square of cellarage
which he had been led to with unbandaged eyes, that it relieved his dread
by touching his humour. He cried, "Have I made the journey of the Signor
Capofinale, who visited the other end of the world by standing on his
head?"

Barto Rizzo rolled out a burly laugh.

"Sit," he said. "You're a poor sweating body, and must needs have a dry
tongue. Will you drink?"

"Dry!" quoth Luigi. "Holy San Carlo is a mash in a wine-press compared
with me."

Barto Rizzo handed him a liquor, which he drank, and after gave thanks to
Providence. Barto raised his hand.

"We're too low down here for that kind of machinery," he said. "They say
that Providence is on the side of the Austrians. Now then, what have you
to communicate to me? This time I let you come to my house trust at all,
trust entirely. I think that's the proverb. You are admitted: speak like
a guest."

Luigi's preference happened to be for categorical interrogations. Never
having an idea of spontaneously telling the whole truth, the sense that
he was undertaking a narrative gave him such emotions as a bad swimmer
upon deep seas may have; while, on the other hand, his being subjected to
a series of questions seemed at least to leave him with one leg on shore,
for then he could lie discreetly, and according to the finger-posts, and
only when necessary, and he could recover himself if he made a false
step. His ingenious mind reasoned these images out to his own
satisfaction. He requested, therefore, that his host would let him hear
what he desired to know.

Barto Rizzo's forefinger was pressed from an angle into one temple. His
head inclined to meet it: so that it was like the support to a broad
blunt pillar. The cropped head was flat as an owl's; the chest of immense
breadth; the bulgy knees and big hands were those of a dwarf athlete.
Strong colour, lying full on him from the neck to the forehead, made the
big veins purple and the eyes fierier than the movements of his mind
would have indicated. He was simply studying the character of his man.
Luigi feared him; he was troubled chiefly because he was unaware of what
Barto Rizzo wanted to know, and could not consequently tell what to bring
to the market. The simplicity of the questions put to him was
bewildering: he fell into the trap. Barto's eyes began to get terribly
oblique. Jingling money in his pocket, he said:--"You saw Colonel Corte
on the Motterone: you saw the Signor Agostino Balderini: good men, both!
Also young Count Ammiani: I served his father, the General, and jogged
the lad on my knee. You saw the Signorina Vittoria. The English people
came, and you heard them talk, but did not understand. You came home and
told all this to the Signor Antonio, your employer number one. You have
told the same to me, your employer number two. There's your pay."

Barto summed up thus the information he had received, and handed Luigi
six gold pieces. The latter, springing with boyish thankfulness and pride
at the easy earning of them, threw in a few additional facts, as, that he
had been taken for a spy by the conspirators, and had heard one of the
Englishmen mention the Signorina Vittoria's English name. Barto Rizzo
lifted his eyebrows queerly. "We'll go through another interrogatory in
an hour," he said; "stop here till I return."

Luigi was always too full of his own cunning to suspect the same in
another, until he was left alone to reflect on a scene; when it became
overwhelmingly transparent. "But, what could I say more than I did say?"
he asked himself, as he stared at the one lamp Barto had left. Finding
the door unfastened, he took the lamp and lighted himself out, and along
a cavernous passage ending in a blank wall, against which his heart
knocked and fell, for his sensation was immediately the terror of
imprisonment and helplessness. Mad with alarm, he tried every spot for an
aperture. Then he sat down on his haunches; he remembered hearing word of
Barto Rizzo's rack:--certain methods peculiar to Barto Rizzo, by which he
screwed matters out of his agents, and terrified them into fidelity. His
personal dealings with Barto were of recent date; but Luigi knew him by
repute: he knew that the shoemaking business was a mask. Barto had been a
soldier, a schoolmaster: twice an exile; a conspirator since the day when
the Austrians had the two fine Apples of Pomona, Lombardy and Venice,
given them as fruits of peace. Luigi remembered how he had snapped his
fingers at the name of Barto Rizzo. There was no despising him now. He
could only arrive at a peaceful contemplation of Barto Rizzo's character
by determining to tell all, and (since that seemed little) more than he
knew. He got back to the leather-smelling chamber, which was either the
same or purposely rendered exactly similar to the one he had first been
led to.

At the end of a leaden hour Barto Rizzo returned.

"Now, to recommence," he said. "Drink before you speak, if your tongue is
dry."

Luigi thrust aside the mention of liquor. It seemed to him that by doing
so he propitiated that ill-conceived divinity called Virtue, who lived in
the open air, and desired men to drink water. Barto Rizzo evidently
understood the kind of man he was schooling to his service.

"Did that Austrian officer, who is an Englishman, acquainted with the
Signor Antonio-Pericles, meet the lady, his sister, on the Motterone?"

Luigi answered promptly, "Yes."

"Did the Signorina Vittoria speak to the lady?"

"No."

"Not a word?"

"No."

"Not one communication to her?"

"No: she sat under her straw hat."

"She concealed her face?"

"She sat like a naughty angry girl."

"Did she speak to the officer?"

"Not she!"

"Did she see him?"

"Of course she did! As if a woman's eyes couldn't see through
straw-plait!"

Barto paused, calculatingly, eye on victim.

"The Signorina Vittoria," he resumed, "has engaged to sing on the night
of the Fifteenth; has she?"

A twitching of Luigi's muscles showed that he apprehended a necessary
straining of his invention on another tack.

"On the night of the Fifteenth, Signor Barto Rizzo? That's the night of
her first appearance. Oh, yes!"

"To sing a particular song?"

"Lots of them! ay-aie!"

Barto took him by the shoulder and pressed him into his seat till he
howled, saying, "Now, there's a slate and a pencil. Expect me at the end
of two hours, this time. Next time it will be four: then eight, then
sixteen. Find out how many hours that will be at the sixteenth
examination."

Luigi flew at the torturer and stuck at the length of his straightened
arm, where he wriggled, refusing to listen to the explanation of Barto's
system; which was that, in cases where every fresh examination taught him
more, they were continued, after regularly-lengthening intervals, that
might extend from the sowing of seed to the ripening of grain. "When
all's delivered," said Barto, "then we begin to correct discrepancies. I
expect," he added, "you and I will have done before a week's out."

"A week!" Luigi shouted. "Here's my stomach already leaping like a fish
at the smell of this hole. You brute bear! it's a smell of bones. It
turns my inside with a spoon. May the devil seize you when you're
sleeping! You shan't go: I'll tell you everything--everything. I can't
tell you anything more than I have told you. She gave me a
cigarette--there! Now you know:--gave me a cigarette; a cigarette. I
smoked it--there! Your faithful servant!"

"She gave you a cigarette, and you smoked it; ha!" said Barto Rizzo, who
appeared to see something to weigh even in that small fact. "The English
lady gave you the cigarette?"

Luigi nodded: "Yes;" pertinacious in deception. "Yes," he repeated; "the
English lady. That was the person. What's the use of your skewering me
with your eyes!"

"I perceive that you have never travelled, my Luigi," said Barto. "I am
afraid we shall not part so early as I had supposed. I double the dose,
and return to you in four hours' time."

Luigi threw himself flat on the ground, shrieking that he was ready to
tell everything--anything. Not even the apparent desperation of his
circumstances could teach him that a promise to tell the truth was a more
direct way of speaking. Indeed, the hitting of the truth would have
seemed to him a sort of artful archery, the burden of which should
devolve upon the questioner, whom he supplied with the relation of
"everything and anything."

All through a night Luigi's lesson continued. In the morning he was still
breaking out in small and purposeless lies; but Barto Rizzo had
accomplished his two objects: that of squeezing him, and that of
subjecting his imagination. Luigi confessed (owing to a singular recovery
of his memory) the gift of the cigarette as coming from the Signorina
Vittoria. What did it matter if she did give him a cigarette?

"You adore her for it?" said Barto.

"May the Virgin sweep the floor of heaven into her lap!" interjected
Luigi. "She is a good patriot."

"Are you one?" Barto asked.

"Certainly I am."

"Then I shall have to suspect you, for the good of your country."

Luigi could not see the deduction. He was incapable of guessing that it
might apply forcibly to Vittoria, who had undertaken a grave, perilous,
and imminent work. Nothing but the spontaneous desire to elude the
pursuit of a questioner had at first instigated his baffling of Barto
Rizzo, until, fearing the dark square man himself, he feared him dimly
for Vittoria's sake; he could not have said why. She was a good patriot:
wherefore the reason for wishing to know more of her? Barto Rizzo had
compelled him at last to furnish a narrative of the events of that day on
the Motterone, and, finding himself at sea, Luigi struck out boldly and
swam as well as he could. Barto disentangled one succinct thread of
incidents: Vittoria had been commissioned by the Chief to sing on the
night of the Fifteenth; she had subsequently, without speaking to any of
the English party, or revealing her features "keeping them beautifully
hidden," Luigi said, with unaccountable enthusiasm--written a warning to
them that they were to avoid Milan. The paper on which the warning had
been written was found by the English when he was the only Italian on the
height, lying thereto observe and note things in the service of Barto
Rizzo. The writing was English, but when one of the English ladies--"who
wore her hair like a planed shred of wood; like a torn vine; like a kite
with two tails; like Luxury at the Banquet, ready to tumble over marble
shoulders" (an illustration drawn probably from Luigi's study of some
allegorical picture,--he was at a loss to describe the foreign female
head-dress)--when this lady had read the writing, she exclaimed that it
was the hand of "her Emilia!" and soon after she addressed Luigi in
English, then in French, then in "barricade Italian" (by which phrase
Luigi meant that the Italian words were there, but did not present their
proper smooth footing for his understanding), and strove to obtain
information from him concerning the signorina, and also concerning the
chances that Milan would be an agitated city. Luigi assured her that
Milan was the peacefullest of cities--a pure babe. He admitted his
acquaintance with the Signorina Vittoria Campa, and denied her being "any
longer" the Emilia Alessandra Belloni of the English lady. The latter had
partly retained him in her service, having given him directions to call
at her hotel in Milan, and help her to communicate with her old friend.
"I present myself to her to-morrow, Friday," said Luigi.

"That's to-day," said Barto.

Luigi clapped his hand to his cheek, crying wofully, "You've drawn,
beastly gaoler! a night out of my life like an old jaw-tooth."

"There's day two or three fathoms above us," said Barto; "and hot coffee
is coming down."

"I believe I've been stewing in a pot while the moon looked so cool."
Luigi groaned, and touched up along the sleeves of his arms: that which
he fancied he instantaneously felt.

The coffee was brought by the heavy-browed young woman. Before she
quitted the place Barto desired her to cast her eyes on Luigi, and say
whether she thought she should know him again. She scarcely glanced, and
gave answer with a shrug of the shoulders as she retired. Luigi at the
time was drinking. He rose; he was about to speak, but yawned instead.
The woman's carelessly-dropped upper eyelids seemed to him to be reading
him through a dozen of his contortions and disguises, and checked the
idea of liberty which he associated with getting to the daylight.

"But it is worth the money!" shouted Barto Rizzo, with a splendid
divination of his thought. "You skulker! are you not paid and fattened to
do business which you've only to remember, and it'll honey your legs in
purgatory? You're the shooting-dog of that Greek, and you nose about the
bushes for his birds, and who cares if any fellow, just for exercise,
shoots a dagger a yard from his wrist and sticks you in the back? You
serve me, and there's pay for you; brothers, doctors, nurses, friends,--a
tight blanket if you fall from a housetop! and masses for your soul when
your hour strikes. The treacherous cur lies rotting in a ditch! Do you
conceive that when I employ you I am in your power? Your intelligence
will open gradually. Do you know that here in this house I can conceal
fifty men, and leave the door open to the Croats to find them? I tell you
now--you are free; go forth. You go alone; no one touches you; ten years
hence a skeleton is found with an English letter on its ribs--"

"Oh, stop! signor Barto, and be a blessed man," interposed Luigi,
doubling and wriggling in a posture that appeared as if he were shaking
negatives from the elbows of his crossed arms. "Stop. How did you know of
a letter? I forgot--I have seen the English lady at her hotel. I was
carrying the signorina's answer, when I thought 'Barto Rizzo calls me,'
and I came like a lamb. And what does it matter? She is a good patriot;
you are a good patriot; here it is. Consider my reputation, do; and be
careful with the wax."

Barto drew a long breath. The mention of the English letter had been a
shot in the dark. The result corroborated his devotional belief in the
unerringness of his own powerful intuition. He had guessed the case, or
hardly even guessed it--merely stated it, to horrify Luigi. The letter
was placed in his hands, and he sat as strongly thrilled by emotion,
under the mask of his hard face, as a lover hearing music. "I read
English," he remarked.

After he had drawn the seal three or four times slowly over the lamp, the
green wax bubbled and unsnapped. Vittoria had written the following
lines in reply to her old English friend:--

   "Forgive me, and do not ask to see me until we have passed the
   fifteenth of the month. You will see me that night at La Scala. I
   wish to embrace you, but I am miserable to think of your being in
   Milan. I cannot yet tell you where my residence is. I have not met
   your brother. If he writes to me it will make me happy, but I
   refuse to see him. I will explain to him why. Let him not try to
   see me. Let him send by this messenger. I hope he will contrive to
   be out of Milan all this month. Pray let me influence you to go for
   a time. I write coldly; I am tired, and forget my English. I do
   not forget my friends. I have you close against my heart. If it
   were prudent, and it involved me alone, I would come to you without
   a moment's loss of time. Do know that I am not changed, and am your
   affectionate

                    "Emilia."

When Barto Rizzo had finished reading, he went from the chamber and blew
his voice into what Luigi supposed to be a hollow tube.

"This letter," he said, coming back, "is a repetition of the Signorina
Vittoria's warning to her friends on the Motterone. The English lady's
brother, who is in the Austrian service, was there, you say?"

Luigi considered that, having lately been believed in, he could not
afford to look untruthful, and replied with a sprightly "Assuredly."

"He was there, and he read the writing on the paper?"

"Assuredly: right out loud, between puff-puff of his cigar."

"His name is Lieutenant Pierson. Did not Antonio-Pericles tell you his
name? He will write to her: you will be the bearer of his letter to the
signorina. I must see her reply. She is a good patriot; so am I; so are
you. Good patriots must be prudent. I tell you, I must see her reply to
this Lieutenant Pierson." Barto stuck his thumb and finger astride
Luigi's shoulder and began rocking him gently, with a horrible meditative
expression. "You will have to accomplish this, my Luigi. All fair excuses
will be made, if you fail generally. This you must do. Keep upright while
I am speaking to you! The excuses will be made; but I, not you, must make
them: bear that in mind. Is there any person whom you, my Luigi, like
best in the world?"

It was a winning question, and though Luigi was not the dupe of its
insinuating gentleness, he answered, "The little girl who carries flowers
every morning to the caffe La Scala."

"Ah! the little girl who carries flowers every morning to the caffe La
Scala. Now, my Luigi, you may fail me, and I may pardon you. Listen
attentively: if you are false; if you are guilty of one piece of
treachery:--do you see? You can't help slipping, but you can help
jumping. Restrain yourself from jumping, that's all. If you are guilty of
treachery, hurry at once, straight off, to the little girl who carries
flowers every morning to the caffe La Scala. Go to her, take her by the
two cheeks, kiss her, say to her 'addio, addio,' for, by the thunder of
heaven! you will never see her more."

Luigi was rocked forward and back, while Barto spoke in level tones, till
the voice dropped into its vast hollow, when Barto held him fast a
moment, and hurled him away by the simple lifting of his hand.

The woman appeared and bound Luigi's eyes. Barto did not utter another
word. On his journey back to daylight, Luigi comforted himself by
muttering oaths that he would never again enter into this trap. As soon
as his eyes were unbandaged, he laughed, and sang, and tossed a
compliment from his finger-tips to the savage-browed beauty; pretended
that he had got an armful, and that his heart was touched by the ecstasy;
and sang again: "Oh, Barto, Barto! my boot is sadly worn. The toe is
seen," etc., half-way down the stanzas. Without his knowing it, and
before he had quitted the court, he had sunk into songless gloom,
brooding on the scenes of the night. However free he might be in body,
his imagination was captive to Barto Rizzo. He was no luckier than a
bird, for whom the cage is open that it may feel the more keenly with its
little taste of liberty that it is tied by the leg.




CHAPTER VIII

The importance of the matters extracted from Luigi does not lie on the
surface; it will have to be seen through Barto Rizzo's mind. This man
regarded himself as the mainspring of the conspiracy; specially its
guardian, its wakeful Argus. He had conspired sleeplessly for thirty
years; so long, that having no ideal reserve in his nature, conspiracy
had become his professional occupation,--the wheel which it was his
business to roll. He was above jealousy; he was above vanity. No one
outstripping him cast a bad colour on him; nor did he object to bow to
another as his superior. But he was prepared to suspect every one of
insincerity and of faithlessness; and, being the master of the machinery
of the plots, he was ready, upon a whispered justification, to despise
the orders of his leader, and act by his own light in blunt disobedience.
For it was his belief that while others speculated he knew all. He knew
where the plots had failed; he knew the man who had bent and doubled. In
the patriotic cause, perfect arrangements are crowned with perfect
success, unless there is an imperfection of the instruments; for the
cause is blessed by all superior agencies. Such was his governing idea.
His arrangements had always been perfect; hence the deduction was a
denunciation of some one particular person. He pointed out the traitor
here, the traitor there; and in one or two cases he did so with a
mildness that made those fret at their beards vaguely who understood his
character. Barto Rizzo was, it was said, born in a village near Forli, in
the dominions of the Pope; according to the rumour, he was the child of a
veiled woman and a cowled paternity. If not an offender against
Government, he was at least a wanderer early in life. None could accuse
him of personal ambition. He boasted that he had served as a common
soldier with the Italian contingent furnished by Eugene to the Moscow
campaign; he showed scars of old wounds: brown spots, and blue spots, and
twisted twine of white skin, dotting the wrist, the neck, the calf, the
ankle, and looking up from them, he slapped them proudly. Nor had he
personal animosities of any kind. One sharp scar, which he called his
shoulder knot, he owed to the knife of a friend, by name Sarpo, who had
things ready to betray him, and struck him, in anticipation of that
tremendous moment of surprise and wrath when the awakened victim
frequently is nerved with devil's strength; but, striking, like a novice,
on the bone, the stilet stuck there; and Barto coolly got him to point
the outlet of escape, and walked off, carrying the blade where the
terrified assassin had planted it. This Sarpo had become a tradesman in
Milan--a bookseller and small printer; and he was unmolested. Barto said
of him, that he was as bad as a few odd persons thought himself to be,
and had in him the making of a great traitor; but, that as Sarpo hated
him and had sought to be rid of him for private reasons only, it was a
pity to waste on such a fellow steel that should serve the Cause. "While
I live," said Barto, "my enemies have a tolerably active conscience."

The absence of personal animosity in him was not due to magnanimity. He
doubted the patriotism of all booksellers. He had been twice betrayed by
women. He never attempted to be revenged on them; but he doubted the
patriotism of all women. "Use them; keep eye on them," he said. In Venice
he had conspired when he was living there as the clerk of a notary; in
Bologna subsequently while earning his bread as a petty schoolmaster. His
evasions, both of Papal sbirri and the Austrian polizia, furnished
instances of astonishing audacity that made his name a byword for mastery
in the hour of peril. His residence in Milan now, after seven years of
exile in England and Switzerland, was an act of pointed defiance,
incomprehensible to his own party, and only to be explained by the
prevalent belief that the authorities feared to provoke a collision with
the people by laying hands on him. They had only once made a visitation
to his house, and appeared to be satisfied at not finding him. At that
period Austria was simulating benevolence in her Lombardic provinces,
with the half degree of persuasive earnestness which makes a Government
lax in its vigilance, and leaves it simply open to the charge of
effeteness. There were contradictory rumours as to whether his house had
ever been visited by the polizia; but it was a legible fact that his name
was on the window, and it was understood that he was not without elusive
contrivances in the event of the authorities declaring war against him.

Of the nature of these contrivances Luigi had just learnt something. He
had heard Barto Rizzo called 'The Miner' and 'The Great Cat,' and he now
comprehended a little of the quality of his employer. He had entered a
very different service from that of the Signor Antonio-Pericles, who paid
him for nothing more than to keep eye on Vittoria, and recount her goings
in and out; for what absolute object he was unaware, but that it was not
for a political one he was certain. "Cursed be the day when the lust of
gold made me open my hand to Barto Rizzo!" he thought; and could only
reflect that life is short and gold is sweet, and that he was in the
claws of the Great Cat. He had met Barto in a wine-shop. He cursed the
habit which led him to call at that shop; the thirst which tempted him to
drink: the ear which had been seduced to listen. Yet as all his expenses
had been paid in advance, and his reward at the instant of his
application for it; and as the signorina and Barto were both good
patriots, and he, Luigi, was a good patriot, what harm could be done to
her? Both she and Barto had stamped their different impressions on his
waxen nature. He reconciled his service to them separately by the
exclamation that they were both good patriots.

The plot for the rising in Milan city was two months old. It comprised
some of the nobles of the city, and enjoyed the good wishes of the
greater part of them, whose payment of fifty to sixty per cent to the
Government on the revenue of their estates was sufficient reason for a
desire to change masters, positively though they might detest
Republicanism, and dread the shadow of anarchy. These looked hopefully to
Charles Albert. Their motive was to rise, or to countenance a rising, and
summon the ambitious Sardinian monarch with such assurances of devotion,
that a Piedmontese army would be at the gates when the banner of Austria
was in the dust. Among the most active members of the prospectively
insurgent aristocracy of Milan was Count Medole, a young nobleman of vast
wealth and possessed of a reliance on his powers of mind that induced him
to take a prominent part in the opening deliberations, and speedily
necessitated his hire of the friendly offices of one who could supply him
with facts, with suggestions, with counsel, with fortitude, with
everything to strengthen his pretensions to the leadership, excepting
money. He discovered his man in Barto Rizzo, who quitted the ranks of the
republican section to serve him, and wield a tool for his own party. By
the help of Agostino Balderini, Carlo Ammiani, and others, the
aristocratic and the republican sections of the conspiracy were brought
near enough together to permit of a common action between them, though
the maintaining of such harmony demanded an extreme and tireless delicacy
of management. The presence of the Chief, whom we have seen on the
Motterone, was claimed by other cities of Italy. Unto him solely did
Barto Rizzo yield thorough adhesion. He being absent from Milan, Barto
undertook to represent him and carry out his views. How far he was
entitled to do so may be guessed when it is stated that, on the ground of
his general contempt for women, he objected to the proposition that
Vittoria should give the signal. The proposition was Agostino's. Count
Medole, Barto, and Agostino discussed it secretly: Barto held resolutely
against it, until Agostino thrust a sly-handed letter into his fingers
and let him know that previous to any consultation on the subject he had
gained the consent of his Chief. Barto then fell silent. He despatched
his new spy, Luigi, to the Motterone, more for the purpose of giving him
a schooling on the expedition, and on his return from it, and so getting
hand and brain and soul service out of him. He expected no such a report
of Vittoria's indiscretion as Luigi had spiced with his one foolish lie.
That she should tell the relatives of an Austrian officer that Milan was
soon to be a dangerous place for them;--and that she should write it on
paper and leave it for the officer to read,--left her, according to
Barto's reading of her, open to the alternative charges of imbecility or
of treachery. Her letter to the English lady, the Austrian officer's
sister, was an exaggeration of the offence, but lent it more the look of
heedless folly. The point was to obtain sight of her letter to the
Austrian officer himself. Barto was baffled during a course of anxious
days that led closely up to the fifteenth. She had written no letter.
Lieutenant Pierson, the officer in question, had ridden into the city
once from Verona, and had called upon Antonio-Pericles to extract her
address from him; the Greek had denied that she was in Milan. Luigi could
tell no more. He described the officer's personal appearance, by saying
that he was a recognizable Englishman in Austrian dragoon uniform;--white
tunic, white helmet, brown moustache;--ay! and eh! and oh! and ah! coming
frequently from his mouth; that he stood square while speaking, and
seemed to like his own smile; an extraordinary touch of portraiture, or
else a scoff at insular self-satisfaction; at any rate, it commended
itself to the memory. Barto dismissed him, telling him to be daily in
attendance on the English lady.

Barto Rizzo's respect for the Chief was at war with his intense
conviction that a blow should be struck at Vittoria even upon the narrow
information which he possessed. Twice betrayed, his dreams and haunting
thoughts cried "Shall a woman betray you thrice?" In his imagination he
stood identified with Italy: the betrayal of one meant that of both.
Falling into a deep reflection, Barto counted over his hours of
conspiracy: he counted the Chief's; comparing the two sets of figures he
discovered, that as he had suspected, he was the elder in the patriotic
work therefore, if he bowed his head to the Chief, it was a voluntary
act, a form of respect, and not the surrendering of his judgement. He was
on the spot: the Chief was absent. Barto reasoned that the Chief could
have had no experience of women, seeing that he was ready to trust in
them. "Do I trust to my pigeon, my sling-stone?" he said jovially to the
thickbrowed, splendidly ruddy young woman, who was his wife; "do I trust
her? Not half a morsel of her!" This young woman, a peasant woman of
remarkable personal attractions, served him with the fidelity of a
fascinated animal, and the dumbness of a wooden vessel. She could have
hanged him, had it pleased her. She had all his secrets: but it was not
vain speaking on Barto Rizzo's part; he was master of her will; and on
the occasions when he showed that he did not trust her, he was careful at
the same time to shock and subdue her senses. Her report of Vittoria was,
that she went to the house of the Signora, Laura Piaveni, widow of the
latest heroic son of Milan, and to that of the maestro Rocco Ricci; to no
other. It was also Luigi's report.

"She's true enough," the woman said, evidently permitting herself to
entertain an opinion; a sign that she required fresh schooling.

"So are you," said Barto, and eyed her in a way that made her ask, "Now,
what's for me to do?"

He thought awhile.

"You will see the colonel. Tell him to come in corporal's uniform. What's
the little wretch twisting her body for? Shan't I embrace her presently
if she's obedient? Send to the polizia. You believe your husband is in
the city, and will visit you in disguise at the corporal's hour. They
seize him. They also examine the house up to the point where we seal it.
Your object is to learn whether the Austrians are moving men upon Milan.
If they are-I learn something. When the house has been examined, our
court here will have rest for a good month ahead; and it suits me not to
be disturbed. Do this, and we will have a red-wine evening in the house,
shut up alone, my snake! my pepper-flower!"

It happened that Luigi was entering the court to keep an appointment with
Barto when he saw a handful of the polizia burst into the house and drag
out a soldier, who was in the uniform, as he guessed it to be, of the
Prohaska regiment. The soldier struggled and offered money to them. Luigi
could not help shouting, "You fools! don't you see he's an officer?" Two
of them took their captive aside. The rest made a search through the
house. While they were doing so Luigi saw Barto Rizzo's face at the
windows of the house opposite. He clamoured at the door, but Barto was
denied to him there. When the polizia had gone from the court, he was
admitted and allowed to look into every room. Not finding him, he said,
"Barto Rizzo does not keep his appointments, then!" The same words were
repeated in his ear when he had left the court, and was in the street
running parallel with it. "Barto Rizzo does not keep his appointments,
then!" It was Barto who smacked him on the back, and spoke out his own
name with brown-faced laughter in the bustling street. Luigi was so
impressed by his cunning and his recklessness that he at once told him
more than he wished to tell:--The Austrian officer was with his sister,
and had written to the signorina, and Luigi had delivered the letter; but
the signorina was at the maestro's, Rocco Ricci's, and there was no
answer: the officer was leaving for Verona in the morning. After telling
so much, Luigi drew back, feeling that he had given Barto his full
measure and owed to the signorina what remained.

Barto probably read nothing of the mind of his spy, but understood that
it was a moment for distrust of him. Vittoria and her mother lodged at
the house of one Zotti, a confectioner, dwelling between the Duomo and La
Scala. Luigi, at Barto's bidding, left word with Zotti that he would call
for the signorina's answer to a certain letter about sunrise. "I promised
my Rosellina, my poppyheaded sipper, a red-wine evening, or I would hold
this fellow under my eye till the light comes," thought Barto
misgivingly, and let him go. Luigi slouched about the English lady's
hotel. At nightfall her brother came forth. Luigi directed him to be in
the square of the Duomo by sunrise, and slipped from his hold; the
officer ran after him some distance. "She can't say I was false to her
now," said Luigi, dancing with nervous ecstasy. At sunrise Barto Rizzo
was standing under the shadow of the Duomo. Luigi passed him and went to
Zotti's house, where the letter was placed in his hand, and the door shut
in his face. Barto rushed to him, but Luigi, with a vixenish countenance,
standing like a humped cat, hissed, "Would you destroy my reputation and
have it seen that I deliver up letters, under the noses of the writers,
to the wrong persons?--ha! pestilence!" He ran, Barto following him. They
were crossed by the officer on horseback, who challenged Luigi to give up
the letter, which was very plainly being thrust from his hand into his
breast. The officer found it no difficult matter to catch him and pluck
the letter from him; he opened it, reading it on the jog of the saddle as
he cantered off. Luigi turned in a terror of expostulation to ward
Barto's wrath. Barto looked at him hard, while he noted the matter down
on the tablet of an ivory book. All he said was, "I have that letter!"
stamping the assertion with an oath. Half-an-hour later Luigi saw Barto
in the saddle, tight-legged about a rusty beast, evidently bound for the
South-eastern gate, his brows set like a black wind. "Blessings on his
going!" thought Luigi, and sang one of his street-songs:--"O lemons,
lemons, what a taste you leave in the mouth! I desire you, I love you,
but when I suck you, I'm all caught up in a bundle and turn to water,
like a wry-faced fountain. Why not be satisfied by a sniff at the
blossoms? There's gratification. Why did you grow up from the precious
little sweet chuck that you were, Marietta? Lemons, O lemons! such a
thing as a decent appetite is not known after sucking at you."

His natural horror of a resolute man, more than fear (of which he had no
recollection in the sunny Piazza), made him shiver and gave his tongue an
acid taste at the prospect of ever meeting Barto Rizzo again. There was
the prospect also that he might never meet him again.




CHAPTER IX

IN VERONA

The lieutenant read these lines, as he clattered through the quiet
streets toward the Porta Tosa:

'DEAR FRIEND,--I am glad that you remind me of our old affection, for it
assures me that yours is not dead. I cannot consent to see you yet. I
would rather that we should not meet.

'I thought I would sign my name here, and say, "God bless you, Wilfrid;
go!"

'Oh! why have you done this thing! I must write on. It seems like my past
life laughing at me, that my old friend should have come here in Italy,
to wear the detestable uniform. How can we be friends when we must act as
enemies? We shall soon be in arms, one against the other. I pity you, for
you have chosen a falling side; and when you are beaten back, you can
have no pride in your country, as we Italians have; no delight, no love.
They will call you a mercenary soldier. I remember that I used to have
the fear of your joining our enemies, when we were in England, but it
seemed too much for my reason.

'You are with a band of butchers. If I could see you and tell you the
story of Giacomo Piaveni, and some other things, I believe you would
break your sword instantly.

'There is time. Come to Milan on the fifteenth. You will see me then. I
appear at La Scala. Promise me, if you hear me, that you will do exactly
what I make you feel it right to do. Ah, you will not, though thousands
will! But step aside to me, when the curtain falls, and remain--oh, dear
friend! I write in honour to you; we have sworn to free the city and the
country--remain among us: break your sword, tear off your uniform; we are
so strong that we are irresistible. I know what a hero you can be on the
field: then, why not in the true cause? I do not understand that you
should waste your bravery under that ugly flag, bloody and past
forgiveness.

'I shall be glad to have news of you all, and of England. The bearer of
this is a trusty messenger, and will continue to call at the hotel. A. is
offended that I do not allow my messenger to give my address; but I must
not only be hidden, I must have peace, and forget you all until I have
done my task. Addio. We have both changed names. I am the same. Can I
think that you are? Addio, dear friend.

                 'VITTORIA.'


Lieutenant Pierson read again and again the letter of her whom he had
loved in England, to get new lights from it, as lovers do when they have
lost the power to take single impressions. He was the bearer of a verbal
despatch from the commandant in Milan to the Marshal in Verona. At that
period great favour was shown to Englishmen in the Austrian service, and
the lieutenant's uncle being a General of distinction, he had a sort of
semi-attachment to the Marshal's staff, and was hurried to and fro, for
the purpose of keeping him out of duelling scrapes, as many of his
friendlier comrades surmised. The right to the distinction of exercising
staff-duties is, of course, only to be gained by stout competitorship in
the Austrian service; but favour may do something for a young man even in
that rigorous school of Arms. He had to turn to Brescia on his way, and
calculated that if luck should put good horses under him, he would enter
Verona gates about sunset. Meantime; there was Vittoria's letter to
occupy him as he went.

We will leave him to his bronzing ride through the mulberries and the
grapes, and the white and yellow and arid hues of the September plain,
and make acquaintance with some of his comrades of that proud army which
Vittoria thought would stand feebly against the pouring tide of Italian
patriotism.

The fairest of the cities of the plain had long been a nest of foreign
soldiery. The life of its beauty was not more visible then than now.
Within the walls there are glimpses of it, that belong rather to the
haunting spirit than to the life. Military science has made a mailed
giant of Verona, and a silent one, save upon occasion. Its face grins of
war, like a skeleton of death; the salient image of the skull and
congregating worms was one that Italian lyrists applied naturally to
Verona.

The old Field-Marshal and chief commander of the Austrian forces in
Lombardy, prompted by the counsels of his sagacious adlatus, the chief of
the staff, was engaged at that period in adding some of those ugly round
walls and flanking bastions to Verona, upon which, when Austria was
thrown back by the first outburst of the insurrection and the advance of
the Piedmontese, she was enabled to plant a sturdy hind-foot, daring her
foes as from a rock of defence.

A group of officers, of the cavalry, with a few infantry uniforms
skirting them, were sitting in the pleasant cooling evening air, fanned
by the fresh springing breeze, outside one of the Piazza Bra caffes,
close upon the shadow of the great Verona amphitheatre. They were smoking
their attenuated long straw cigars, sipping iced lemonade or coffee, and
talking the common talk of the garrison officers, with perhaps that
additional savour of a robust immorality which a Viennese social
education may give. The rounded ball of the brilliant September moon hung
still aloft, lighting a fathomless sky as well as the fair earth. It
threw solid blackness from the old savage walls almost to a junction with
their indolent outstretched feet. Itinerant street music twittered along
the Piazza; officers walked arm-in-arm; now in moonlight bright as day,
now in a shadow black as night: distant figures twinkled with the
alternation. The light lay like a blade's sharp edge around the massive
circle. Of Italians of a superior rank, Verona sent none to this resort.
Even the melon-seller stopped beneath the arch ending the Stradone Porta
Nuova, as if he had reached a marked limit of his popular customers.

This isolation of the rulers of Lombardy had commenced in Milan, but,
owing to particular causes, was not positively defined there as it was in
Verona. War was already rageing between the Veronese ladies and the
officers of Austria. According to the Gallic Terpsichorean code, a lady
who permits herself to make election of her partners and to reject
applicants to the honour of her hand in the dance, when that hand is
disengaged, has no just ground of complaint if a glove should smite her
cheek. The Austrians had to endure this sort of rejection in Ballrooms.
On the promenade their features were forgotten. They bowed to statues.
Now, the officers of Austria who do not belong to a Croat regiment, or to
one drawn from any point of the extreme East of the empire, are commonly
gentlemanly men; and though they can be vindictive after much irritation,
they may claim at least as good a reputation for forbearance in a
conquered country as our officers in India. They are not ill-humoured,
and they are not peevishly arrogant, except upon provocation. The conduct
of the tender Italian dames was vexatious. It was exasperating to these
knights of the slumbering sword to hear their native waltzes sounding of
exquisite Vienna, while their legs stretched in melancholy inactivity on
the Piazza pavement, and their arms encircled no ductile waists. They
tried to despise it more than they disliked it, called their female foes
Amazons, and their male by a less complimentary title, and so waited for
the patriotic epidemic to pass.

A certain Captain Weisspriess, of the regiment named after a sagacious
monarch whose crown was the sole flourishing blossom of diplomacy,
particularly distinguished himself by insisting that a lady should
remember him in public places. He was famous for skill with his weapons.
He waltzed admirably; erect as under his Field-Marshal's eye. In the
language of his brother officers, he was successful; that is, even as God
Mars when Bellona does not rage. Captain Weisspriess (Johann Nepomuk,
Freiherr von Scheppenhausen) resembled in appearance one in the Imperial
Royal service, a gambling General of Division, for whom Fame had not yet
blown her blast. Rumour declared that they might be relatives; a
little-scrupulous society did not hesitate to mention how. The captain's
moustache was straw-coloured; he wore it beyond the regulation length and
caressed it infinitely. Surmounted by a pair of hot eyes, wavering in
their direction, this grand moustache was a feature to be forgotten with
difficulty, and Weisspriess was doubtless correct in asserting that his
face had endured a slight equal to a buffet. He stood high and
square-shouldered; the flame of the moustache streamed on either side his
face in a splendid curve; his vigilant head was loftily posted to detect
what he chose to construe as insult, or gather the smiles of approbation,
to which, owing to the unerring judgement of the sex, he was more
accustomed. Handsome or not, he enjoyed the privileges of masculine
beauty.

This captain of a renown to come pretended that a superb Venetian lady of
the Branciani family was bound to make response in public to his private
signals, and publicly to reply to his salutations. He refused to be as a
particle in space floating airily before her invincible aspect. Meeting
her one evening, ere sweet Italy had exiled herself from the Piazza, he
bowed, and stepping to the front of her, bowed pointedly. She crossed her
arms and gazed over him. He called up a thing to her recollection in
resonant speech. Shameful lie, or shameful truth, it was uttered in the
hearing of many of his brother officers, of three Italian ladies, and of
an Italian gentleman, Count Broncini, attending them. The lady listened
calmly. Count Broncini smote him on the face. That evening the lady's
brother arrived from Venice, and claimed his right to defend her. Captain
Weisspriess ran him through the body, and attached a sinister label to
his corpse. This he did not so much from brutality; the man felt that
henceforth while he held his life he was at war with every Italian
gentleman of mettle. Count Broncini was his next victim. There, for a
time, the slaughtering business of the captain stopped. His brother
officers of the better kind would not have excused him at another season,
but the avenger of their irritation and fine vindicator of the merits of
Austrian steel, had a welcome truly warm, when at the termination of his
second duel he strode into mess, or what serves for an Austrian
regimental mess.

It ensued naturally that there was everywhere in Verona a sharp division
between the Italians of all classes and their conquerors. The great
green-rinded melons were never wheeled into the neighbourhood of the
whitecoats. Damsels were no longer coquettish under the military glance,
but hurried by in couples; and there was much scowling mixed with
derisive servility, throughout the city, hard to be endured without that
hostile state of the spirit which is the military mind's refuge in such
cases. Itinerant musicians, and none but this fry, continued to be
attentive to the dispensers of soldi.

The Austrian army prides itself upon being a brotherhood. Discipline is
very strict, but all commissioned officers, when off duty, are as free in
their intercourse as big boys. The General accepts a cigar from the
lieutenant, and in return lifts his glass to him. The General takes an
interest in his lieutenant's love-affairs: nor is the latter shy when he
feels it his duty modestly to compliment his superior officer upon a
recent conquest. There is really good fellowship both among the officers
and in the ranks, and it is systematically encouraged.

The army of Austria was in those days the Austrian Empire. Outside the
army the empire was a jealous congery of intriguing disaffected
nationalities. The same policy which played the various States against
one another in order to reduce all to subserviency to the central Head,
erected a privileged force wherein the sentiment of union was fostered
till it became a nationality of the sword. Nothing more fatal can be done
for a country; but for an army it is a simple measure of wisdom. Where
the password is MARCH, and not DEVELOP, a body of men, to be a
serviceable instrument, must consent to act as one. Hannibal is the
historic example of what a General can accomplish with tribes who are
thus, enrolled in a new citizenship; and (as far as we know of him and
his fortunes) he appears to be an example of the necessity of the fusing
fire of action to congregated aliens in arms. When Austria was fighting
year after year, and being worsted in campaign after campaign, she lost
foot by foot, but she held together soundly; and more than the baptism,
the atmosphere of strife has always been required to give her a healthy
vitality as a centralized empire. She knew it; this (apart from the
famous promptitude of the Hapsburgs) was one secret of her dauntless
readiness to fight. War did the work of a smithy for the iron and steel
holding her together; and but that war costs money, she would have been
an empire distinguished by aggressiveness. The next best medicinal thing
to war is the military occupation of insurgent provinces. The soldiery
soon feel where their home is, and feel the pride of atomies in unitive
power, when they are sneered at, hooted, pelted, stabbed upon a gross
misinterpretation of the slightest of moral offences, shamefully abused
for doing their duty with a considerate sense of it, and too accurately
divided from the inhabitants of the land they hold. In Italy, the German,
the Czech, the Magyar, the Croft, even in general instances the Italian,
clung to the standard for safety, for pay, for glory, and all became
pre-eminently Austrian soldiers; little besides.

It was against a power thus bound in iron hoops, that Italy, dismembered,
and jealous, and corrupt, with an organization promoted by passion
chiefly, was preparing to rise. In the end, a country true to itself and
determined to claim God's gift to brave men will overmatch a mere army,
however solid its force. But an inspired energy of faith is demanded of
it. The intervening chapters will show pitiable weakness, and such a
schooling of disaster as makes men, looking on the surface of things,
deem the struggle folly. As well, they might say, let yonder scuffling
vagabonds up any of the Veronese side-streets fall upon the patrol
marching like one man, and hope to overcome them! In Vienna there was
often despair: but it never existed in the Austrian camp. Vienna was
frequently double-dealing and time-serving her force in arms was like a
trained man feeling his muscle. Thus, when the Government thought of
temporizing, they issued orders to Generals whose one idea was to strike
the blow of a mallet.

At this period there was no suspicion of any grand revolt being in
process of development. The abounding dissatisfaction was treated as
nothing more than the Italian disease showing symptoms here and there,
and Vienna counselled measures mildly repressive,--'conciliating,' it was
her pleasure to call them. Her recent commands with respect to turbulent
Venice were the subject of criticism among the circle outside the Piazza
Gaffe. An enforced inactivity of the military legs will quicken the
military wits, it would appear, for some of the younger officers spoke
hotly as to their notion of the method of ruling Venezia. One had bidden
his Herr General to 'look here,' while he stretched forth his hand and
declared that Italians were like women, and wanted--yes, wanted--(their
instinct called for it) a beating, a real beating; as the emphatic would
say in our vernacular, a thundering thrashing, once a month:-'Or so,' the
General added acquiescingly. A thundering thrashing, once a month or so,
to these unruly Italians, because they are like women! It was a youth who
spoke, but none doubted his acquaintance with women, or cared to suggest
that his education in that department of knowledge was an insufficient
guarantee for his fitness to govern Venezia. Two young dragoon officers
had approached during the fervid allocution, and after the salute to
their superior, caught up chairs and stamped them down, thereupon calling
for the loan of anybody's cigar-case. Where it is that an Austrian
officer ordinarily keeps this instrument so necessary to his comfort, and
obnoxious, one would suppose, to the rigid correctness of his shapely
costume, we cannot easily guess. None can tell even where he stows away
his pocket-handkerchief, or haply his purse. However, these things appear
on demand. Several elongated cigar-cases were thrust forward, and then it
was seen that the attire of the gallant youngsters was in disorder.

'Did you hunt her to earth?' they were asked.

The reply trenched on philosophy; and consisted in an inquiry as to who
cared for the whole basketful--of the like description of damsels, being
implied. Immoderate and uproarious laughter burst around them. Both
seemed to have been clawed impartially. Their tightfitting coats bulged
at the breast or opened at the waist, as though buttons were lacking, and
the whiteness of that garment cried aloud for the purification of
pipeclay. Questions flew. The damsel who had been pursued was known as a
pretty girl, the daughter of a blacksmith, and no prolonged resistance
was expected from one of her class. But, as it came out, she had said, a
week past, 'I shall be stabbed if I am seen talking to you'; and
therefore the odd matter was, not that she had, in tripping down the
Piazza with her rogue-eyed cousin from Milan, looked away and declined
all invitation to moderate her pace and to converse, but that, after
doubling down and about lonely streets, the length of which she ran as
swiftly as her feet would carry her, at a corner of the Via Colomba she
allowed herself to be caught--wilfully, beyond a doubt, seeing that she
was not a bit breathed--allowed one quick taste of her lips, and then
shrieked as naturally as a netted bird, and brought a hustling crowd just
at that particular point to her rescue: not less than fifty, and all men.
'Not a woman among them!' the excited young officer repeated.

A veteran in similar affairs could see that he had the wish to remain
undisturbed in his bewilderment at the damsel's conduct. Profound belief
in her partiality for him perplexed his recent experience rather
agreeably. Indeed, it was at this epoch an article of faith with the
Austrian military that nothing save terror of their males kept sweet
Italian women from the expression of their preference for the
broad-shouldered, thick-limbed, yellow-haired warriors--the contrast to
themselves which is supposed greatly to inspirit genial Cupid in the
selection from his quiver.

'What became of her? Did you let her go?' came pestering remarks, too
absurd for replies if they had not been so persistent.

'Let her go? In the devil's name, how was I to keep my hold of her in a
crowd of fifty of the fellows, all mowing, and hustling, and
elbowing--every rascal stinking right under my nose like the pit?'

''Hem!' went the General present. 'As long as you did not draw!
Unsheathe, a minute.'

He motioned for a sight of their naked swords.

The couple of young officers flushed.

'Herr General! Pardon!' they remonstrated.

'No, no. I know how boys talk; I've been one myself. Tutt! You tell the
truth, of course; but the business is for me to know in what! how far!
Your swords, gentlemen.'

'But, General!'

'Well? I merely wish to examine the blades.'

'Do you doubt our words?'

'Hark at them! Words? Are you lawyers? A soldier deals in acts. I don't
want to know your words, but your deeds, my gallant lads. I want to look
at the blades of your swords, my children. What was the last order? That
on no account were we to provoke, or, if possibly to be avoided, accept a
collision, etc., etc. The soldier in peace is a citizen, etc. No sword on
any account, or for any excuse, to be drawn, etc. You all heard it? So,
good! I receive your denial, my children. In addition, I merely desire to
satisfy curiosity. Did the guard clear a way for you?'

The answer was affirmative.

'Your swords!'

One of them drew, and proffered the handle.

The other clasped the haft angrily, and with a resolute smack on it,
settled it in the scabbard.

'Am I a prisoner, General?'

'Not at all!'

'Then I decline to surrender my sword.'

Another General officer happened to be sauntering by. Applauding with his
hands, and choosing the Italian language as the best form of speech for
the enunciation of ironical superlatives, he said:

'Eccellentemente! most admirable! of a distinguished loftiness of moral
grandeur: "Then I decline," etc.: you are aware that you are quoting? "as
the drummerboy said to Napoleon." I think you forgot to add that? It is
the same young soldier who utters these immense things, which we can
hardly get out of our mouths. So the little fellow towers! His moral
greatness is as noisy as his drum. What's wrong?'

'General Pierson, nothing's wrong,' was replied by several voices; and
some explained that Lieutenant Jenna had been called upon by General
Schoneck to show his sword, and had refused.

The heroic defender of his sword shouted to the officer with whom General
Pierson had been conversing: 'Here! Weisspriess!'

'What is it, my dear fellow? Speak, my good Jenna!'

The explanation was given, and full sympathy elicited from Captain
Weisspriess, while the two Generals likewise whispered and nodded.

'Did you draw?' the captain inquired, yawning. 'You needn't say it in
quite so many words, if you did. I shall be asked by the General
presently; and owing to that duel pending 'twixt you and his nephew, of
which he is aware, he may put a bad interpretation on your pepperiness.'

'The devil fetch his nephew!' returned the furious Lieutenant Jenna. 'He
comes back to-night from Milan, and if he doesn't fight me to-morrow, I
post him a coward. Well, about that business! My good Weisspriess, the
fellows had got into a thick crowd all round, and had begun to knead me.
Do you understand me? I felt their knuckles.'

'Ah, good, good!' said the captain. 'Then, you didn't draw, of course.
What officer of the Imperial service would, under similar circumstances!
That is my reply to the Emperor, if ever I am questioned. To draw would
be to show that an Austrian officer relies on his good sword in the thick
of his enemies; against which, as you know, my Jenna, the Government have
issued an express injunction button. Did you sell it dear?'

'A fellow parted with his ear for it.'

Lieutenant Jenna illustrated a particular cut from a turn of his wrist.

'That oughtn't to make a noise?' he queried somewhat anxiously.

'It won't hear one any longer, at all events,' said Captain Weisspriess;
and the two officers entered into the significance of the remark with
enjoyment.

Meantime General Pierson had concluded an apparently humorous dialogue
with his brother General, and the later, now addressing Lieutenant Jenna,
said: 'Since you prefer surrendering your person rather than your
sword--it is good! Report yourself at the door of my room to-night, at
ten. I suspect that you have been blazing your steel, sir. They say, 'tis
as ready to flash out as your temper.'

Several voices interposed: 'General! what if he did draw!'

'Silence. You have read the recent order. Orlando may have his Durindarda
bare; but you may not. Grasp that fact. The Government wish to make
Christians of you, my children. One cheek being smitten, what should you
do?'

'Shall I show you, General?' cried a quick little subaltern.

'The order, my children, as received a fortnight since from our old Wien,
commands you to offer the other cheek to the smiter.'

'So that a proper balance may be restored to both sides of the face,'
General Pierson appended.

'And mark me,' he resumed. 'There may be doubts about the policy of
anything, though I shouldn't counsel you to cherish them: but there's no
mortal doubt about the punishment for this thing.' The General spoke
sternly; and then relaxing the severity of his tone, he said, 'The desire
of the Government is to make an army of Christians.'

'And a precious way of doing it!' interjected two or three of the younger
officers. They perfectly understood how hateful the Viennese domination
was to their chiefs, and that they would meet sympathy and tolerance for
any extreme of irony, provided that they showed a disposition to be
subordinate. For the bureaucratic order, whatever it was, had to be
obeyed. The army might, and of course did, know best: nevertheless it was
bound to be nothing better than a machine in the hands of the dull
closeted men in Vienna, who judged of difficulties and plans of action
from a calculation of numbers, or from foreign journals--from heaven
knows what!

General Schoneck and General Pierson walked away laughing, and the
younger officers were left to themselves. Half-a-dozen of them interlaced
arms, striding up toward the Porta Nuova, near which, at the corner of
the Via Trinita, they had the pleasant excitement of beholding a
riderless horse suddenly in mid gallop sink on its knees and roll over. A
crowd came pouring after it, and from the midst the voice of a comrade
hailed them. 'It's Pierson,' cried Lieutenant Jenna. The officers drew
their swords, and hailed the guard from the gates. Lieutenant Pierson
dropped in among their shoulders, dead from want of breath. They held him
up, and finding him sound, thumped his back. The blade of his sword was
red. He coughed with their thumpings, and sang out to them to cease; the
idle mob which had been at his heels drew back before the guard could
come up with them. Lieutenant Pierson gave no explanation except that he
had been attacked near Juliet's tomb on his way to General Schoneck's
quarters. Fellows had stabbed his horse, and brought him to the ground,
and torn the coat off his back. He complained in bitter mutterings of the
loss of a letter therein, during the first candid moments of his anger:
and, as he was known to be engaged to the Countess Lena von Lenkenstein,
it was conjectured by his comrades that this lady might have had
something to do with the ravishment of the letter. Great laughter
surrounded him, and he looked from man to man. Allowance is naturally
made for the irascibility of a brother officer coming tattered out of the
hands of enemies, or Lieutenant Jenna would have construed his eye's
challenge on the spot. As it was, he cried out, 'The letter! the letter!
Charge, for the honour of the army, and rescue the letter!' Others echoed
him: 'The letter! the letter! the English letter!' A foreigner in an army
can have as much provocation as he pleases; if he is anything of a
favourite with his superiors, his fellows will task his forbearance.
Wilfrid Pierson glanced at the blade of his sword, and slowly sheathed
it. 'Lieutenant Jenna is a good actor before a mob,' he said. 'Gentlemen,
I rely upon you to make no noise about that letter; it is a private
matter. In an hour or so, if any officer shall choose to question me
concerning it, I will answer him.'

The last remnants of the mob had withdrawn. The officer in command at the
gates threw a cloak over Wilfrid's shoulders; and taking the arm of a
friend Wilfrid hurried to barracks, and was quickly in a position to
report himself to his General, whose first remark, 'Has the dead horse
been removed?' robbed him of his usual readiness to equivocate. 'When you
are the bearer of a verbal despatch, come straight to quarters, if you
have to come like a fig-tree on the north side of the wall in Winter,'
said General Schoneck, who was joined presently by General Pierson.

'What 's this I hear of some letter you have been barking about all over
the city?' the latter asked, after returning his nephew's on-duty salute.

Wilfrid replied that it was a letter of his sister's treating of family
matters.

The two Generals, who were close friends, discussed the attack to which
he had been subjected. Wilfrid had to recount it with circumstance: how,
as he was nearing General Schoneck's quarters at a military trot, six men
headed by a leader had dashed out on him from a narrow side-street,
unhorsed him after a struggle, rifled the saddlebags, and torn the coat
from his back, and had taken the mark of his sword, while a gathering
crowd looked on, hooting. His horse had fled, and he confessed that he
had followed his horse. General Schoneck spoke the name of Countess Lena
suggestively. 'Not a bit,' returned General Pierson; 'the fellow courts
her too hotly. The scoundrels here want a bombardment; that 's where it
lies. A dose of iron pills will make Verona a healthy place. She must
have it.'

General Schoneck said, 'I hope not,' and laughed at the heat of Irish
blood. He led Wilfrid in to the Marshal, after which Wilfrid was free to
seek Lieutenant Jenna, who had gained the right to a similar freedom by
pledging his honour not to fight within a stipulated term of days. The
next morning Wilfrid was roused by an orderly coming from his uncle, who
placed in his hands a copy of Vittoria's letter: at the end of it his
uncle had written, 'Rather astonishing. Done pretty well; but by a
foreigner. "Affection" spelt with one "f." An Italian: you will see the
letters are emphatic at "ugly flag"; also "bloody and past forgiveness"
very large; the copyist had a dash of the feelings of a commentator, and
did his (or her) best to add an oath to it. Who the deuce, sir, is this
opera girl calling herself Vittoria? I have a lecture for you. German
women don't forgive diversions during courtship; and if you let this
Countess Lena slip, your chance has gone. I compliment you on your power
of lying; but you must learn to show your right face to me, or the very
handsome feature, your nose, and that useful box, your skull, will come
to grief. The whole business is a mystery. The letter (copy) was directed
to you, brought to me, and opened in a fit of abstraction, necessary to
commanding uncles who are trying to push the fortunes of young noodles
pretending to be related to them. Go to Countess Lena. Count Paul is with
her, from Bologna. Speak to her, and observe her and him. He knows
English--has been attached to the embassy in London; but, pooh! the
hand's Italian. I confess myself puzzled. We shall possibly have to act
on the intimation of the fifteenth, and profess to be wiser than others.
Something is brewing for business. See Countess Lena boldly, and then
come and breakfast with me.'

Wilfrid read the miserable copy of Vittoria's letter, utterly unable to
resolve anything in his mind, except that he would know among a thousand
the leader of those men who had attacked him, and who bore the mark of
his sword.




CHAPTER X

THE POPE'S MOUTH

Barto Rizzo had done what he had sworn to do. He had not found it
difficult to outstrip the lieutenant (who had to visit Brescia on his
way) and reach the gates of Verona in advance of him, where he obtained
entrance among a body of grape-gatherers and others descending from the
hills to meet a press of labour in the autumnal plains. With them he
hoped to issue forth unchallenged on the following morning; but Wilfrid's
sword had made lusty play; and, as in the case when the order has been
given that a man shall be spared in life and limb, Barto and his
fellow-assailants suffered by their effort to hold him simply half a
minute powerless. He received a shrewd cut across the head, and lay for a
couple of hours senseless in the wine-shop of one Battista--one of the
many all over Lombardy who had pledged their allegiance to the Great Cat,
thinking him scarcely vulnerable. He read the letter, dizzy with pain,
and with the frankness proper to inflated spirits after loss of blood, he
owned to himself that it was not worth much as a prize. It was worth the
attempt to get possession of it, for anything is worth what it
costs, if it be only as a schooling in resolution, energy, and
devotedness:--regrets are the sole admission of a fruitless business;
they show the bad tree;--so, according to his principle of action, he
deliberated; but he was compelled to admit that Vittoria's letter was
little else than a repetition of her want of discretion when she was on
the Motterone. He admitted it, wrathfully: his efforts to convict this
woman telling him she deserved some punishment; and his suspicions being
unsatisfied, he resolved to keep them hungry upon her, and return to
Milan at once. As to the letter itself, he purposed, since the harm in it
was accomplished, to send it back honourably to the lieutenant, till
finding it blood-stained, he declined to furnish the gratification of
such a sight to any Austrian sword. For that reason, he copied it, while
Battista's wife held double bandages tight round his head: believing that
the letter stood transcribed in a precisely similar hand, he forwarded it
to Lieutenant Pierson, and then sank and swooned. Two days he lay
incapable and let his thoughts dance as they would. Information was
brought to him that the gates were strictly watched, and that troops were
starting for Milan. This was in the dull hour antecedent to the dawn.
'She is a traitress!' he exclaimed, and leaping from his bed, as with a
brain striking fire, screamed, 'Traitress! traitress!' Battista and his
wife had to fling themselves on him and gag him, guessing him as mad. He
spoke pompously and theatrically; called himself the Eye of Italy, and
said that he must be in Milan, or Milan would perish, because of the
traitress: all with a great sullen air of composure and an odd distension
of the eyelids. When they released him, he smiled and thanked them,
though they knew, that had he chosen, he could have thrown off a dozen of
them, such was his strength. The woman went down on her knees to him to
get his consent that she should dress and bandage his head afresh. The
sound of the regimental bugles drew him from the house, rather than any
immediate settled scheme to watch at the gates.

Artillery and infantry were in motion before sunrise, from various points
of the city, bearing toward the Palio and Zeno gates, and the people
turned out to see them, for it was a march that looked like the beginning
of things. The soldiers had green twigs in their hats, and kissed their
hands good-humouredly to the gazing crowd, shouting bits of verses:

'I'm off! I'm off! Farewell, Mariandl! if I come back a sergeant-major or
a Field-Marshal, don't turn up your nose at me: Swear you will be
faithful all the while; because, when a woman swears, it's a comfort,
somehow: Farewell! Squeeze the cow's udders: I shall be thirsty enough:
You pretty wriggler! don't you know, the first cup of wine and the last,
I shall float your name on it? Luck to the lads we leave behind!
Farewell, Mariandl!'

The kindly fellows waved their hands and would take no rebuff. The
soldiery of Austria are kindlier than most, until their blood is up. A
Tyrolese regiment passed, singing splendidly in chorus. Songs of
sentiment prevailed, but the traditions of a soldier's experience of the
sex have informed his ballads with strange touches of irony, that help
him to his (so to say) philosophy, which is recklessness. The Tyroler's
'Katchen' here, was a saturnine Giulia, who gave him no response, either
of eye or lip.

'Little mother, little sister, little sweetheart, 'ade! ade!' My little
sweetheart, your meadow is half-way up the mountain; it's such a green
spot on the eyeballs of a roving boy! and the chapel just above it, I
shall see it as I've seen it a thousand times; and the cloud hangs near
it, and moves to the door and enters, for it is an angel, not a cloud; a
white angel gone in to pray for Katerlein and me: Little mother, little
sister, little sweetheart, 'ade! ade!' Keep single, Katerlein, as long as
you can: as long as you can hold out, keep single: 'ade!''

Fifteen hundred men and six guns were counted as they marched on to one
gate.

Barto Rizzo, with Battista and his wife on each side of him, were among
the spectators. The black cock's feathers of the Tyrolese were still
fluttering up the Corso, when the woman said, 'I 've known the tail of a
regiment get through the gates without having to show paper.'

Battista thereupon asked Barto whether he would try that chance. The
answer was a vacuous shake of the head, accompanied by an expression of
unutterable mournfulness. 'There's no other way,' pursued Battista,
'unless you jump into the Adige, and swim down half-a-mile under water;
and cats hate water--eh, my comico?'

He conceived that the sword-cut had rendered Barto imbecile, and pulled
his hat down his forehead, and patted his shoulder, and bade him have
cheer, patronizingly: but women do not so lightly lose their impression
of a notable man. His wife checked him. Barto had shut his eyes, and hung
swaying between them, as in drowsiness or drunkenness. Like his body, his
faith was swaying within him. He felt it borne upon the reeling brain,
and clung to it desperately, calling upon chance to aid him; for he was
weak, incapable of a physical or mental contest, and this part of his
settled creed that human beings alone failed the patriotic cause as
instruments, while circumstances constantly befriended it--was shocked by
present events. The image of Vittoria, the traitress, floated over the
soldiery marching on Milan through her treachery. Never had an Austrian
force seemed to him so terrible. He had to yield the internal fight, and
let his faith sink and be blackened, in order that his mind might rest
supine, according to his remembered system; for the inspiration which
points to the right course does not come during mental strife, but after
it, when faith summons its agencies undisturbed--if only men will have
the faith, and will teach themselves to know that the inspiration must
come, and will counsel them justly. This was a part of Barto Rizzo's
sustaining creed; nor did he lose his grasp of it in the torment and the
darkness of his condition.

He heard English voices. A carriage had stopped almost in front of him. A
General officer was hat in hand, talking to a lady, who called him uncle,
and said that she had been obliged to decide to quit Verona on account of
her husband, to whom the excessive heat was unendurable. Her husband, in
the same breath, protested that the heat killed him. He adorned the
statement with all kinds of domestic and subterranean imagery, and
laughed faintly, saying that after the fifteenth--on which night his wife
insisted upon going to the Opera at Milan to hear a new singer and old
friend--he should try a week at the Baths of Bormio, and only drop from
the mountains when a proper temperature reigned, he being something of an
invalid.

'And, uncle, will you be in Milan on the fifteenth?' said the lady; 'and
Wilfrid, too?'

'Wilfrid will reach Milan as soon as you do, and I shall undoubtedly be
there on the fifteenth,' said the General.

'I cannot possibly express to you how beautiful I think your army looks,'
said the lady.

'Fine men, General Pierson, very fine men. I never saw such
marching--equal to our Guards,' her husband remarked.

The lady named her Milanese hotel as the General waved his plumes,
nodded, and rode off.

Before the carriage had started, Barto Rizzo dashed up to it; and 'Dear
good English lady,' he addressed her, 'I am the brother of Luigi, who
carries letters for you in Milan--little Luigi!--and I have a mother
dying in Milan; and here I am in Verona, ill, and can't get to her, poor
soul! Will you allow me that I may sit up behind as quiet as a mouse, and
be near one of the lovely English ladies who are so kind to unfortunate
persons, and never deaf to the name of charity? It's my mother who is
dying, poor soul!'

The lady consulted her husband's face, which presented the total blank of
one who refused to be responsible for an opinion hostile to the claims of
charity, while it was impossible for him to fall in with foreign habits
of familiarity, and accede to extraordinary petitions. Barto sprang up.
'I shall be your courier, dear lady,' he said, and commenced his
professional career in her service by shouting to the vetturino to drive
on. Wilfrid met them as he was trotting down from the Porta del Palio,
and to him his sister confided her new trouble in having a strange man
attached to her, who might be anything. 'We don't know the man,' said her
husband; and Adela pleaded for him: 'Don't speak to him harshly, pray,
Wilfrid; he says he has a mother dying in Milan.' Barto kept his head
down on his arms and groaned; Adela gave a doleful little grimace. 'Oh,
take the poor beggar,' said Wilfrid; and sang out to him in Italian: 'Who
are you--what are you, my fine fellow?' Barto groaned louder, and replied
in Swiss-French from a smothering depth: 'A poor man, and the gracious
lady's servant till we reach Milan.'

'I can't wait,' said Wilfrid; 'I start in half-an-hour. It's all right;
you must take him now you've got him, or else pitch him out--one of the
two. If things go on quietly we shall have the Autumn manoeuvres in a
week, and then you may see something of the army.' He rode away. Barto
passed the gates as one of the licenced English family.

Milan was more strictly guarded than when he had quitted it. He had
anticipated that it would be so, and tamed his spirit to submit to the
slow stages of the carriage, spent a fiery night in Brescia, and entered
the city of action on the noon of the fourteenth. Safe within the walls,
he thanked the English lady, assuring her that her charitable deed would
be remembered aloft. He then turned his steps in the direction of the
Revolutionary post-office. This place was nothing other than a blank
abutment of a corner house that had long been undergoing repair, and had
a great bank of brick and mortar rubbish at its base. A stationary
melonseller and some black fig and vegetable stalls occupied the
triangular space fronting it. The removal of a square piece of cement
showed a recess, where, chiefly during the night, letters and
proclamation papers were deposited, for the accredited postman to
disperse them. Hither, as one would go to a caffe for the news, Barto
Rizzo came in the broad glare of noon, and flinging himself down like a
tired man under the strip of shade, worked with a hand behind him, and
drew out several folded scraps, of which one was addressed to him by his
initials. He opened it and read:

'Your house is watched.

'A corporal of the P . . . ka regiment was seen leaving it this morning
in time for the second bugle.

'Reply:--where to meet.

'Spies are doubled, troops coming.

'The numbers in Verona; who heads them.

'Look to your wife.

'Letters are called for every third hour.'

Barto sneered indolently at this fresh evidence of the small amount of
intelligence which he could ever learn from others. He threw his eyes all
round the vacant space while pencilling in reply:--'V. waits for M., but
in a box' (that is, Verona for Milan). 'We take the key to her.

'I have no wife, but a little pupil.

'A Lieutenant Pierson, of the dragoons; Czech white coats, helmets
without plumes; an Englishman, nephew of General Pierson: speaks crippled
Italian; returns from V. to-day. Keep eye on him;--what house, what
hour.'

Meditating awhile, Barto wrote out Vittoria's name and enclosed it in a
thick black ring.

Beneath it he wrote

'The same on all the play-bills.

'The Fifteenth is cancelled.

'We meet the day after.

'At the house of Count M. to-night.'

He secreted this missive, and wrote Vittoria's name on numbers of slips
to divers addresses, heading them, 'From the Pope's Mouth,' such being
the title of the Revolutionary postoffice, to whatsoever spot it might in
prudence shift. The title was entirely complimentary to his Holiness.
Tangible freedom, as well as airy blessings, were at that time
anticipated, and not without warrant, from the mouth of the successor of
St. Peter. From the Pope's Mouth the clear voice of Italian liberty was
to issue. This sentiment of the period was a natural and a joyful one,
and endowed the popular ebullition with a sense of unity and a stamp of
righteousness that the abstract idea of liberty could not assure to it
before martyrdom. After suffering, after walking in the shades of death
and despair, men of worth and of valour cease to take high personages as
representative objects of worship, even when these (as the good Pope was
then doing) benevolently bless the nation and bid it to have great hope,
with a voice of authority. But, for an extended popular movement a great
name is like a consecrated banner. Proclamations from the Pope's Mouth
exacted reverence, and Barto Rizzo, who despised the Pope (because he was
Pope, doubtless), did not hesitate to make use of him by virtue of his
office.

Barto lay against the heap of rubbish, waiting for the approach of his
trained lad, Checco, a lanky simpleton, cunning as a pure idiot, who was
doing postman's duty, when a kick, delivered by that youth behind, sent
him bounding round with rage, like a fish in air. The marketplace
resounded with a clapping of hands; for it was here that Checco came
daily to eat figs, and it was known that the 'povero,' the dear
half-witted creature, would not tolerate an intruder in the place where
he stretched his limbs to peel and suck in the gummy morsels twice or
thrice a day. Barto seized and shook him. Checco knocked off his hat; the
bandage about the wound broke and dropped, and Barto put his hand to his
forehead, murmuring: 'What 's come to me that I lose my temper with a
boy--an animal?'

The excitement all over the triangular space was hushed by an imperious
guttural shout that scattered the groups. Two Austrian officers, followed
by military servants, rode side by side. Dust had whitened their
mustachios, and the heat had laid a brown-red varnish on their faces. Way
was made for them, while Barto stood smoothing his forehead and staring
at Checco.

'I see the very man!' cried one of the officers quickly. 'Weisspriess,
there's the rascal who headed the attack on me in Verona the other day.
It's the same!

'Himmel!' returned his companion, scrutinizing the sword-cut, 'if that's
your work on his head, you did it right well, my Pierson! He is very
neatly scored indeed. A clean stroke, manifestly!'

'But here when I left Milan! at Verona when I entered the North-west gate
there; and the first man I see as I come back is this very brute. He dogs
me everywhere! By the way, there may be two of them.'

Lieutenant Pierson leaned over his horse's neck, and looked narrowly at
the man Barto Rizzo. He himself was eyed as in retort, and with yet
greater intentness. At first Barto's hand was sweeping the air within a
finger's length of his forehead, like one who fought a giddiness for
steady sight. The mist upon his brain dispersing under the gaze of his
enemy, his eyeballs fixed, and he became a curious picture of passive
malice, his eyes seeming to say: 'It is enough for me to know your
features, and I know them.' Such a look from a civilian is exasperating:
it was scarcely to be endured from an Italian of the plebs.

'You appear to me to want more,' said the lieutenant audibly to himself;
and he repeated words to the same effect to his companion, in bad German.

'Eh? You would promote him to another epaulette?' laughed Captain
Weisspriess. 'Come off. Orders are direct against it. And we're in
Milan--not like being in Verona! And my good fellow! remember your bet;
the dozen of iced Rudesheimer. I want to drink my share, and dream I'm
quartered in Mainz--the only place for an Austrian when he quits Vienna.
Come.'

'No; but if this is the villain who attacked me, and tore my coat from my
back,' cried Wilfrid, screwing in his saddle.

'And took your letter took your letter; a particular letter; we have
heard of it,' said Weisspriess.

The lieutenant exclaimed that he should overhaul and examine the man, and
see whether he thought fit to give him into custody. Weisspriess laid
hand on his bridle.

'Take my advice, and don't provoke a disturbance in the streets. The
truth is, you Englishmen and Irishmen get us a bad name among these
natives. If this is the man who unhorsed you and maltreated you, and
committed the rape of the letter, I'm afraid you won't get satisfaction
out of him, to judge by his look. I'm really afraid not. Try it if you
like. In any case, if you halt, I am compelled to quit your society,
which is sometimes infinitely diverting. Let me remind you that you bear
despatches. The other day they were verbal ones; you are now carrying
paper.'

'Are you anxious to teach me my duty, Captain Weisspriess?'

'If you don't know it. I said I would "remind you." I can also teach you,
if you need it.'

'And I can pay you for the instruction, whenever you are disposed to
receive payment.'

'Settle your outstanding claims, my good Pierson!'

'When I have fought Jenna?'

'Oh! you're a Prussian--a Prussian!' Captain Weisspriess laughed. 'A
Prussian, I mean, in your gross way of blurting out everything. I've
marched and messed with Prussians--with oxen.'

'I am, as you are aware, an Englishman, Captain Weisspriess. I am due to
Lieutenant Jenna for the present. After that you or any one may command
me.'

'As you please,' said Weisspriess, drawing out one stream of his
moustache. 'In the meantime, thank me for luring you away from the
chances of a street row.'

Barto Rizzo was left behind, and they rode on to the Duomo. Glancing up
at its pinnacles, Weisspriess said:

'How splendidly Flatschmann's jagers would pick them off from there, now,
if the dogs were giving trouble in this part of the city!'

They entered upon a professional discussion of the ways and means of
dealing with a revolutionary movement in the streets of a city like
Milan, and passed on to the Piazza La Scala. Weisspriess stopped before
the Play-bills. 'To-morrow's the fifteenth of the month,' he said. 'Shall
I tell you a secret, Pierson? I am to have a private peep at the new
prima donna this night. They say she's charming, and very pert. "I do not
interchange letters with Germans." Benlomik sent her a neat little note
to the conservatorio--he hadn't seen her only heard of her, and that was
our patriotic reply. She wants taming. I believe I am called upon for
that duty. At least, my friend Antonio-Pericles, who occasionally assists
me with supplies, hints as much to me. You're an engaged man, or, upon my
honour, I wouldn't trust you; but between ourselves, this Greek--and he's
quite right--is trying to get her away from the set of snuffy vagabonds
who are prompting her for mischief, and don't know how to treat her.'

While he was speaking Barto Rizzo pushed roughly between them, and with a
black brush painted the circle about Vittoria's name.

'Do you see that?' said Weisspriess.

'I see,' Wilfrid retorted, 'that you are ready to meddle with the
reputation of any woman who is likely to be talked about. Don't do it in
my presence.'

It was natural for Captain Weisspriess to express astonishment at this
outburst, and the accompanying quiver of Wilfrid's lip.

'Austrian military etiquette, Lieutenant Pierson,' he said, 'precludes
the suspicion that the officers of the Imperial army are subject to
dissension in public. We conduct these affairs upon a different
principle. But I'll tell you what. That fellow's behaviour may be
construed as a more than common stretch of incivility. I'll do you a
service. I'll arrest him, and then you can hear tidings of your precious
letter. We'll have his confession published.'

Weisspriess drew his sword, and commanded the troopers in attendance to
lay hands on Barto; but the troopers called, and the officer found that
they were surrounded. Weisspriess shrugged dismally. 'The brute must go,
I suppose,' he said. The situation was one of those which were every now
and then occurring in the Lombard towns and cities, when a chance
provocation created a riot that became a revolt or not, according to the
timidity of the ruling powers or the readiness of the disaffected. The
extent and evident regulation of the crowd operated as a warning to the
Imperial officers. Weisspriess sheathed his sword and shouted, 'Way,
there!' Way was made for him; but Wilfrid lingered to scrutinize the man
who, for an unaccountable reason, appeared to be his peculiar enemy.
Barto carelessly threaded the crowd, and Wilfrid, finding it useless to
get out after him, cried, 'Who is he? Tell me the name of that man?' The
question drew a great burst of laughter around him, and exclamations of
'Englishman! Englishman!' He turned where there was a clear way left for
him in the track of his brother officer.

Comments on the petty disturbance had been all the while passing at the
Caffe La Scala, where sat Agostino Balderini, with, Count Medole and
others, who, if the order for their arrest had been issued, were as safe
in that place as in their own homes. Their policy, indeed, was to show
themselves openly abroad. Agostino was enjoying the smoke of paper
cigarettes, with all prudent regard for the well-being of an inflammable
beard. Perceiving Wilfrid going by, he said, 'An Englishman! I continue
to hope much from his countrymen. I have no right to do so, only they
insist on it. They have promised, and more than once, to sail a fleet to
our assistance across the plains of Lombardy, and I believe they
will--probably in the watery epoch which is to follow Metternich. Behold
my Carlo approaching. The heart of that lad doth so boil the brain of
him, he can scarcely keep the lid on. What is it now? Speak, my son.'

Carlo Ammiani had to communicate that he had just seen a black circle to
Vittoria's name on two public playbills. His endeavour to ape a
deliberate gravity while he told the tale, roused Agostino's humouristic
ire.

'Round her name?' said Agostino.

'Yes; in every bill.'

'Meaning that she is suspected!'

'Meaning any damnable thing you like.'

'It's a device of the enemy.'

Agostino, glad of the pretext to recur to his habitual luxurious irony,
threw himself back, repeating 'It 's a device of the enemy. Calculate, my
son, that the enemy invariably knows all you intend to do: determine
simply to astonish him with what you do. Intentions have lungs, Carlo,
and depend on the circumambient air, which, if not designedly
treacherous, is communicative. Deeds, I need not remark, are a different
body. It has for many generations been our Italian error to imagine a
positive blood relationship--not to say maternity itself--existing
between intentions and deeds. Nothing of the sort! There is only the
intention of a link to unite them. You perceive? It's much to be famous
for fine intentions, so we won't complain. Indeed, it's not our business
to complain, but Posterity's; for fine intentions are really rich
possessions, but they don't leave grand legacies; that is all. They mean
to possess the future: they are only the voluptuous sons of the present.
It's my belief, Carlino, from observation, apprehension, and other gifts
of my senses, that our paternal government is not unacquainted with our
intention to sing a song in a certain opera. And it may have learnt our
clumsy method of enclosing names publicly, at the bidding of a
non-appointed prosecutor, so to, isolate or extinguish them. Who can say?
Oh, ay! Yes! the machinery that can so easily be made rickety is to
blame; we admit that; but if you will have a conspiracy like a Geneva
watch, you must expect any slight interference with the laws that govern
it to upset the mechanism altogether. Ah-a! look yonder, but not hastily,
my Carlo. Checco is nearing us, and he knows that he has fellows after
him. And if I guess right, he has a burden to deliver to one of us.'

Checco came along at his usual pace, and it was quite evident that he
fancied himself under espionage. On two sides of the square a suspicious
figure threaded its way in the line of shade not far behind him. Checco
passed the cafe looking at nothing but the huge hands he rubbed over and
over. The manifest agents of the polizia were nearing when Checco ran
back, and began mouthing as in retort at something that had been spoken
from the cafe as he shot by. He made a gabbling appeal on either side,
and addressed the pair of apparent mouchards, in what, if intelligible,
should have been the language of earnest entreaty. At the first word
which the caffe was guilty of uttering, a fit of exasperation seized him,
and the exciteable creature plucked at his hat and sent it whirling
across the open-air tables right through the doorway. Then, with a whine,
he begged his followers to get his hat back for him. They complied.

'We only called "Illustrissimo!"' said Agostino, as one of the men
returned from the interior of the caffe hat in hand.

'The Signori should have known better--it is an idiot,' the man replied.
He was a novice: in daring to rebuke he betrayed his office.

Checco snatched his hat from his attentive friend grinning, and was away
in a flash. Thereupon the caffe laughed, and laughed with an abashing
vehemence that disconcerted the spies. They wavered in their choice of
following Checco or not; one went a step forward, one pulled back; the
loiterer hurried to rejoin his comrade, who was now for a retrograde
movement, and standing together they swayed like two imperfectly jolly
fellows, or ballet bandits, each plucking at the other, until at last the
maddening laughter made them break, reciprocate cat-like hisses of abuse,
and escape as they best could--lamentable figures.

'It says well for Milan that the Tedeschi can scrape up nothing better
from the gutters than rascals the like of those for their service,' quoth
Agostino. 'Eh, Signor Conte?'

'That enclosure about La Vittoria's name on the bills is correct,' said
the person addressed, in a low tone. He turned and indicated one who
followed from the interior of the caffe.

'If Barto is to be trusted she is not safe,' the latter remarked. He
produced a paper that had been secreted in Checco's hat. Under the date
and the superscription of the Pope's Mouth, 'LA VITTORIA' stood out in
the ominous heavily-pencilled ring: the initials of Barto Rizzo were in a
corner. Agostino began smoothing his beard.

'He has discovered that she is not trustworthy,' said Count Medole, a
young man of a premature gravity and partial baldness, who spoke
habitually with a forefinger pressed flat on his long pointed chin.

'Do you mean to tell me, Count Medole, that you attach importance to a
communication of this sort?' said Carlo, forcing an amazement to conceal
his anger.

'I do, Count Ammiani,' returned the patrician conspirator.

'You really listen to a man you despise?'

'I do not despise him, my friend.'

'You cannot surely tell us that you allow such a man, on his sole
authority, to blacken the character of the signorina?'

'I believe that he has not.'

'Believe? trust him? Then we are all in his hands. What can you mean?
Come to the signorina herself instantly. Agostino, you now conduct Count
Medole to her, and save him from the shame of subscribing to the
monstrous calumny. I beg you to go with our Agostino, Count Medole. It is
time for you--I honour you for the part you have taken; but it is time to
act according to your own better judgement.'

Count Medole bowed.

'The filthy rat!' cried Ammiani, panting to let out his wrath.

'A serviceable dog,' Agostino remarked correctingly. 'Keep true to the
form of animal, Carlo. He has done good service in his time.'

'You listen to the man?' Carlo said, now thoroughly amazed.

'An indiscretion is possible to woman, my lad. She may have been
indiscreet in some way I am compelled to admit the existence of
possibilities.'

'Of all men, you, Agostino! You call her daughter, and profess to love
her.'

'You forget,' said Agostino sharply. 'The question concerns the country,
not the girl.' He added in an underbreath, 'I think you are professing
that you love her a little too strongly, and scarce give her much help as
an advocate. The matter must be looked into. If Barto shall be found to
have acted without just grounds, I am certain that Count Medole'--he
turned suavely to the nobleman--'will withdraw confidence from him; and
that will be equivalent to a rope's-end for Barto. We shall see him
to-night at your house?'

'He will be there,' Medole said.

'But the harm's done; the mischief's done! And what's to follow if you
shall choose to consider this vile idiot justified?' asked Ammiani.

'She sings, and there is no rising,' said Medole.

'She is detached from the patriotic battery, for the moment: it will be
better for her not to sing at all,' said Agostino. 'In fact, Barto has
merely given us warning that--and things look like it--the Fifteenth is
likely to be an Austrian feast-day. Your arm, my son. We will join you
to-night, my dear Count. Now, Carlo, I was observing, it appears to me
that the Austrians are not going to be surprised by us, and it affords me
exquisite comfort. Fellows prepared are never more than prepared for one
day and another day; and they are sure to be in a state of lax
preparation after a first and second disappointment. On the contrary,
fellows surprised'--Agostino had recovered his old smile again--'fellows
surprised may be expected to make use of the inspirations pertaining to
genius. Don't you see?'

'Oh, cruel! I am sick of you all!' Carlo exclaimed. 'Look at her; think
of her, with her pure dream of Italy and her noble devotion. And you
permit a doubt to be cast on her!'

'Now, is it not true that you have an idea of the country not being
worthy of her?' said Agostino, slyly. 'The Chief, I fancy, did not take
certain facts into his calculation when he pleaded that the conspiratrix
was the sum and completion of the conspirator. You will come to Medole's
to-night, Carlo. You need not be too sweet to him, but beware of
explosiveness. I, a Republican, am nevertheless a practical exponent of
the sacrifices necessary to unity. I accept the local leadership of
Medole--on whom I can never look without thinking of an unfeathered pie;
and I submit to be assisted by the man Barto Rizzo. Do thou likewise, my
son. Let your enamoured sensations follow that duty, and with a breezy
space between. A conspiracy is an epitome of humanity, with a boiling
power beneath it. You're no more than a bit of mechanism--happy if it
goes at all!'

Agostino said that he would pay a visit to Vittoria in the evening.
Ammiani had determined to hunt out Barto Rizzo and the heads of the Clubs
before he saw her. It was a relief to him to behold in the Piazza the
Englishman who had exchanged cards with him on the Motterone. Captain
Gambier advanced upon a ceremonious bow, saying frankly, in a more
colloquial French than he had employed at their first interview, that he
had to apologize for his conduct, and to request monsieur's excuse. 'If,'
he pursued, 'that lady is the person whom I knew formerly in England as
Mademoiselle Belloni, and is now known as Mademoiselle Vittoria Campa,
may I beg you to inform her that, according to what I have heard, she is
likely to be in some danger to-morrow?' What the exact nature of the
danger was, Captain Gambier could not say.

Ammiani replied: 'She is in need of all her friends,' and took the
pressure of the Englishman's hand, who would fair have asked more but for
the stately courtesy of the Italian's withdrawing salute. Ammiani could
no longer doubt that Vittoria's implication in the conspiracy was known.




CHAPTER XI

LAURA PIAVENI

After dark on the same day antecedent to the outbreak, Vittoria, with her
faithful Beppo at her heels, left her mother to run and pass one
comforting hour in the society of the Signora Laura Piaveni and her
children.

There were two daughters of a parasitical Italian nobleman, of whom one
had married the patriot Giacomo Piaveni, and one an Austrian diplomatist,
the Commendatore Graf von Lenkenstein. Count Serabiglione was
traditionally parasitical. His ancestors all had moved in Courts. The
children of the House had illustrious sponsors. The House itself was a
symbolical sunflower constantly turning toward Royalty. Great excuses are
to be made for this, the last male descendant, whose father in his youth
had been an Imperial page, and who had been nursed in the conception that
Italy (or at least Lombardy) was a natural fief of Austria, allied by
instinct and by interest to the holders of the Alps. Count Serabiglione
mixed little with his countrymen,--the statement might be inversed,--but
when, perchance, he was among them, he talked willingly of the Tedeschi,
and voluntarily declared them to be gross, obstinate, offensive-bears, in
short. At such times he would intimate in any cordial ear that the
serpent was probably a match for the bear in a game of skill, and that
the wisdom of the serpent was shown in his selection of the bear as his
master, since, by the ordination of circumstances, master he must have.
The count would speak pityingly of the poor depraved intellects which
admitted the possibility of a coming Kingdom of Italy united: the
lunatics who preached of it he considered a sort of self-elected targets
for appointed files of Tyrolese jagers. But he was vindictive against him
whom he called the professional doctrinaire, and he had vile names for
the man. Acknowledging that Italy mourned her present woes, he charged
this man with the crime of originating them:--and why? what was his
object? He was, the count declared in answer, a born intriguer, a lover
of blood, mad for the smell of it!--an Old Man of the Mountain; a sheaf
of assassins; and more--the curse of Italy! There should be extradition
treaties all over the world to bring this arch-conspirator to justice.
The door of his conscience had been knocked at by a thousand bleeding
ghosts, and nothing had opened to them. What was Italy in his eyes? A
chess-board; and Italians were the chessmen to this cold player with live
flesh. England nourished the wretch, that she might undermine the peace
of the Continent.

Count Serabiglione would work himself up in the climax of denunciation,
and then look abroad frankly as one whose spirit had been relieved. He
hated bad men; and it was besides necessary for him to denounce somebody,
and get relief of some kind. Italians edged away from him. He was
beginning to feel that he had no country. The detested title 'Young
Italy' hurried him into fits of wrath. 'I am,' he said, 'one of the Old
Italians, if a distinction is to be made.' He assured his listeners that
he was for his commune, his district, and aired his old-Italian
prejudices delightedly; clapping his hands to the quarrels of Milan and
Brescia; Florence and Siena--haply the feuds of villages--and the common
North-Italian jealousy of the chief city. He had numerous capital tales
to tell of village feuds, their date and origin, the stupid effort to
heal them, and the wider consequent split; saying, 'We have, all
Italians, the tenacity, the unforgiveness, the fervent blood of pure
Hebrews; and a little more gaiety, perhaps; together with a love of fair
things. We can outlive ten races of conquerors.'

In this fashion he philosophized, or forced a kind of philosophy. But he
had married his daughter to an Austrian, which was what his countrymen
could not overlook, and they made him feel it. Little by little, half
acquiescing, half protesting, and gradually denationalized, the count was
edged out of Italian society, save of the parasitical class, which he
very much despised. He was not a happy man. Success at the Imperial Court
might have comforted him; but a remorseless sensitiveness of his nature
tripped his steps.

Bitter laughter rang throughout Lombardy when, in spite of his efforts to
save his daughter's husband, Giacomo Piaveni suffered death. No harder
blow had ever befallen the count: it was as good as a public proclamation
that he possessed small influence. To have bent the knee was not
afflicting to this nobleman's conscience: but it was an anguish to think
of having bent the knee for nothing.

Giacomo Piaveni was a noble Italian of the young blood, son of a General
loved by Eugene. In him the loss of Italy was deplorable. He perished by
treachery at the age of twenty-three years. So splendid was this youth in
appearance, of so sweet a manner with women, and altogether so-gentle and
gallant, that it was a widowhood for women to have known him: and at his
death the hearts of two women who had loved him in rivalry became bound
by a sacred tie of friendship. He, though not of distinguished birth, had
the choice of an almost royal alliance in the first blush of his manhood.
He refused his chance, pleading in excuse to Count Serabiglione, that he
was in love with that nobleman's daughter, Laura; which it flattered the
count to hear, but he had ever after a contempt for the young man's
discretion, and was observed to shrug, with the smooth sorrowfulness of
one who has been a prophet, on the day when Giacomo was shot. The larger
estates of the Piaveni family, then in Giacomo's hands, were in a famous
cheese-making district, producing a delicious cheese:--'white as
lambkins!' the count would ejaculate most dolefully; and in a rapture of
admiration, 'You would say, a marble quarry when you cut into it.' The
theme was afflicting, for all the estates of Giacomo were for the time
forfeit, and the pleasant agitation produced among his senses by the
mention of the cheese reminded him at the same instant that he had to
support a widow with two children. The Signora Piaveni lived in Milan,
and the count her father visited her twice during the summer months, and
wrote to her from his fitful Winter residences in various capital cities,
to report progress in the settled scheme for the recovery of Giacomo's
property, as well for his widow as for the heirs of his body. 'It is a
duty,' Count Serabiglione said emphatically. 'My daughter can entertain
no proposal until her children are duly established; or would she, who is
young and lovely and archly capricious, continue to decline the very best
offers of the Milanese nobility, and live on one flat in an old quarter
of the city, instead of in a bright and handsome street, musical with
equipages, and full of the shows of life?'

In conjunction with certain friends of the signora, the count worked
diligently for the immediate restitution of the estates. He was ably
seconded by the young princess of Schyll-Weilingen,--by marriage countess
of Fohrendorf, duchess of Graatli, in central Germany, by which title she
passed,--an Austrian princess; she who had loved Giacomo, and would have
given all for him, and who now loved his widow. The extreme and painful
difficulty was that the Signora Piaveni made no concealment of her
abhorrence of the House of Austria, and hatred of Austrian rule in Italy.
The spirit of her dead husband had come to her from the grave, and warmed
a frame previously indifferent to anything save his personal merits. It
had been covertly communicated to her that if she performed due
submission to the authorities, and lived for six months in good legal,
that is to say, nonpatriotic odour, she might hope to have the estates.
The duchess had obtained this mercy for her, and it was much; for
Giacomo's scheme of revolt had been conceived with a subtlety of genius,
and contrived on a scale sufficient to incense any despotic lord of such
a glorious milch-cow as Lombardy. Unhappily the signora was more inspired
by the remembrance of her husband than by consideration for her children.
She received disaffected persons: she subscribed her money ostentatiously
for notoriously patriotic purposes; and she who, in her father's Como
villa, had been a shy speechless girl, nothing more than beautiful, had
become celebrated for her public letters, and the ardour of declamation
against the foreigner which characterized her style. In the face of such
facts, the estates continued to be withheld from her governance. Austria
could do that: she could wreak her spite against the woman, but she
respected her own law even in a conquered land: the estates were not
confiscated, and not absolutely sequestrated; and, indeed, money coming
from them had been sent to her for the education of her children. It lay
in unopened official envelopes, piled one upon another, quarterly
remittances, horrible as blood of slaughter in her sight. Count
Serabiglione made a point of counting the packets always within the first
five minutes of a visit to his daughter. He said nothing, but was careful
to see to the proper working of the lock of the cupboard where the
precious deposits were kept, and sometimes in forgetfulness he carried
off the key. When his daughter reclaimed it, she observed, 'Pray believe
me quite as anxious as yourself to preserve these documents.' And the
count answered, 'They represent the estates, and are of legal value,
though the amount is small. They represent your protest, and the
admission of your claim. They are priceless.'

In some degree, also, they compensated him for the expense he was put to
in providing for his daughter's subsistence and that of her children. For
there, at all events, visible before his eyes, was the value of the
money, if not the money expended. He remonstrated with Laura for leaving
it more than necessarily exposed. She replied,

'My people know what that money means!' implying, of course, that no one
in her house would consequently touch it. Yet it was reserved for the
count to find it gone.

The discovery was made by the astounded nobleman on the day preceding
Vittoria's appearance at La Scala. His daughter being absent, he had
visited the cupboard merely to satisfy an habitual curiosity. The
cupboard was open, and had evidently been ransacked. He rang up the
domestics, and would have charged them all with having done violence to
the key, but that on reflection he considered this to be a way of binding
faggots together, and he resolved to take them one by one, like the
threading Jesuit that he was, and so get a Judas. Laura's return saved
him from much exercise of his peculiar skill. She, with a cool 'Ebbene!'
asked him how long he had expected the money to remain there. Upon which,
enraged, he accused her of devoting the money to the accursed patriotic
cause. And here they came to a curious open division.

'Be content, my father,' she said; 'the money is my husband's, and is
expended on his behalf.'

'You waste it among the people who were the cause of his ruin!' her
father retorted.

'You presume me to have returned it to the Government, possibly?'

'I charge you with tossing it to your so-called patriots.'

'Sir, if I have done that, I have done well.'

'Hear her!' cried the count to the attentive ceiling; and addressing her
with an ironical 'madame,' he begged permission to inquire of her whether
haply she might be the person in the pay of Revolutionists who was about
to appear at La Scala, under the name of the Signorina Vittoria. 'For you
are getting dramatic in your pose, my Laura,' he added, familiarizing the
colder tone of his irony. 'You are beginning to stand easily in attitudes
of defiance to your own father.'

'That I may practise how to provoke a paternal Government, you mean,' she
rejoined, and was quite a match for him in dialectics.

The count chanced to allude further to the Signorina Vittoria.

'Do you know much of that lady?' she asked.

'As much as is known,' said he.

They looked at one another; the count thinking, 'I gave to this girl an
excess of brains, in my folly!'

Compelled to drop his eyes, and vexed by the tacit defeat, he pursued,
'You expect great things from her?'

'Great,' said his daughter.

'Well, well,' he murmured acquiescingly, while sounding within himself
for the part to play. 'Well-yes! she may do what you expect.'

'There is not the slightest doubt of her capacity,' said his daughter, in
a tone of such perfect conviction that the count was immediately and
irresistibly tempted to play the part of sagacious, kindly, tolerant but
foreseeing father; and in this becoming character he exposed the risks
her party ran in trusting anything of weight to a woman. Not that he
decried women. Out of their sphere he did not trust them, and he simply
objected to them when out of their sphere: the last four words being
uttered staccato.

'But we trust her to do what she has undertaken to do,' said Laura.

The count brightened prodigiously from his suspicion to a certainty; and
as he was still smiling at the egregious trap his clever but unskilled
daughter had fallen into, he found himself listening incredulously to her
plain additional sentence:--'She has easy command of three octaves.'

By which the allusion was transformed from politics to Art. Had Laura
reserved this cunning turn a little further, yielding to the natural
temptation to increase the shock of the antithetical battery, she would
have betrayed herself: but it came at the right moment: the count gave up
his arms. He told her that this Signorina Vittoria was suspected. 'Whom
will they not suspect!' interjected Laura. He assured her that if a
conspiracy had ripened it must fail. She was to believe that he abhorred
the part of a spy or informer, but he was bound, since she was reckless,
to watch over his daughter; and also bound, that he might be of service
to her, to earn by service to others as much power as he could reasonably
hope to obtain. Laura signified that he argued excellently well. In a fit
of unjustified doubt of her sincerity, he complained, with a querulous
snap:

'You have your own ideas; you have your own ideas. You think me this and
that. A man must be employed.'

'And this is to account for your occupation?' she remarked.

'Employed, I say!' the count reiterated fretfully. He was unmasking to no
purpose, and felt himself as on a slope, having given his adversary
vantage.

'So that there is no choice for you, do you mean?'

The count set up a staggering affirmative, but knocked it over with its
natural enemy as soon as his daughter had said, 'Not being for Italy, you
must necessarily be against her:--I admit that to be the position!'

'No!' he cried; 'no: there is no question of "for" or "against," as you
are aware. "Italy, and not Revolution": that is my motto.'

'Or, in other words, "The impossible,"' said Laura. 'A perfect motto!'

Again the count looked at her, with the remorseful thought: 'I certainly
gave you too much brains.'

He smiled: 'If you could only believe it not impossible!'

'Do you really imagine that "Italy without Revolution" does not mean
"Austria"?' she inquired.

She had discovered how much he, and therefore his party, suspected, and
now she had reasons for wishing him away. Not daring to show symptoms of
restlessness, she offered him the chance of recovering himself on the
crutches of an explanation. He accepted the assistance, praising his wits
for their sprightly divination, and went through a long-winded statement
of his views for the welfare of Italy, quoting his favourite Berni
frequently, and forcing the occasion for that jolly poet. Laura gave
quiet attention to all, and when he was exhausted at the close, said
meditatively, 'Yes. Well; you are older. It may seem to you that I shall
think as you do when I have had a similar, or the same, length of
experience.'

This provoking reply caused her father to jump up from his chair and spin
round for his hat. She rose to speed him forth.

'It may seem to me!' he kept muttering. 'It may seem to me that when a
daughter gets married--addio! she is nothing but her husband.'

'Ay! ay! if it might be so!' the signora wailed out.

The count hated tears, considering them a clog to all useful machinery.
He was departing, when through the open window a noise of scuffling in
the street below arrested him.

'Has it commenced?' he said, starting.

'What?' asked the signora, coolly; and made him pause.

'But-but-but!' he answered, and had the grace to spare her ears. The
thought in him was: 'But that I had some faith in my wife, and don't
admire the devil sufficiently, I would accuse him point-blank, for, by
Bacchus! you are as clever as he.'

It is a point in the education of parents that they should learn to
apprehend humbly the compliment of being outwitted by their own
offspring.

Count Serabiglione leaned out of the window and saw that his horses were
safe and the coachman handy. There were two separate engagements going on
between angry twisting couples.

'Is there a habitable town in Italy?' the count exclaimed frenziedly.
First he called to his coachman to drive away, next to wait as if nailed
to the spot. He cursed the revolutionary spirit as the mother of vices.
While he was gazing at the fray, the door behind him opened, as he knew
by the rush of cool air which struck his temples. He fancied that his
daughter was hurrying off in obedience to a signal, and turned upon her
just as Laura was motioning to a female figure in the doorway to retire.

'Who is this?' said the count.

A veil was over the strange lady's head. She was excited, and breathed
quickly. The count brought forward a chair to her, and put on his best
court manner. Laura caressed her, whispering, ere she replied: 'The
Signorina Vittoria Romana!--Biancolla!--Benarriva!' and numerous other
names of inventive endearment. But the count was too sharp to be thrown
off the scent. 'Aha!' he said, 'do I see her one evening before the term
appointed?' and bowed profoundly. 'The Signorina Vittoria!'

She threw up her veil.

'Success is certain,' he remarked and applauded, holding one hand as a
snuff-box for the fingers of the other to tap on.

'Signor Conte, you--must not praise me before you have heard me.'

'To have seen you!'

'The voice has a wider dominion, Signor Conte.'

'The fame of the signorina's beauty will soon be far wider. Was Venus a
cantatrice?'

She blushed, being unable to continue this sort of Mayfly-shooting
dialogue, but her first charming readiness had affected the proficient
social gentleman very pleasantly, and with fascinated eyes he hummed and
buzzed about her like a moth at a lamp. Suddenly his head dived:
'Nothing, nothing, signorina,' he said, brushing delicately at her dress;
'I thought it might be paint.' He smiled to reassure her, and then he
dived again, murmuring: 'It must be something sticking to the dress.
Pardon me.' With that he went to the bell. 'I will ring up my daughter's
maid. Or Laura--where is Laura?'

The Signora Piaveni had walked to the window. This antiquated fussiness
of the dilettante little nobleman was sickening to her.

'Probably you expect to discover a revolutionary symbol in the lines of
the signorina's dress,' she said.

'A revolutionary symbol!--my dear! my dear!' The count reproved his
daughter. 'Is not our signorina a pure artist, accomplishing easily three
octaves? aha! Three!' and he rubbed his hands. 'But, three good octaves!'
he addressed Vittoria seriously and admonishingly. 'It is a
fortune-millions! It is precisely the very grandest heritage! It is an
army!'

'I trust that it may be!' said Vittoria, with so deep and earnest a ring
of her voice that the count himself, malicious as his ejaculations had
been, was astonished. At that instant Laura cried from the window: 'These
horses will go mad.'

The exclamation had the desired effect.

'Eh?--pardon me, signorina,' said the count, moving half-way to the
window, and then askant for his hat. The clatter of the horses' hoofs
sent him dashing through the doorway, at which place his daughter stood
with his hat extended. He thanked and blessed her for the kindly
attention, and in terror lest the signorina should think evil of him as
'one of the generation of the hasty,' he said, 'Were it anything but
horses! anything but horses! one's horses!--ha!' The audible hoofs called
him off. He kissed the tips of his fingers, and tripped out.

The signora stepped rapidly to the window, and leaning there, cried a
word to the coachman, who signalled perfect comprehension, and
immediately the count's horses were on their hind-legs, chafing and
pulling to right and left, and the street was tumultuous with them. She
flung down the window, seized Vittoria's cheeks in her two hands, and
pressed the head upon her bosom. 'He will not disturb us again,' she
said, in quite a new tone, sliding her hands from the cheeks to the
shoulders and along the arms to the fingers'-ends, which they clutched
lovingly. 'He is of the old school, friend of my heart! and besides, he
has but two pairs of horses, and one he keeps in Vienna. We live in the
hope that our masters will pay us better! Tell me! you are in good
health? All is well with you? Will they have to put paint on her soft
cheeks to-morrow? Little, if they hold the colour as full as now? My
Sandra! amica! should I have been jealous if Giacomo had known you? On my
soul, I cannot guess! But, you love what he loved. He seems to live for
me when they are talking of Italy, and you send your eyes forward as if
you saw the country free. God help me! how I have been containing myself
for the last hour and a half!'

The signora dropped in a seat and laughed a languid laugh.

'The little ones? I will ring for them. Assunta shall bring them down in
their night-gowns if they are undressed; and we will muffle the windows,
for my little man will be wanting his song; and did you not promise him
the great one which is to raise Italy-his mother, from the dead? Do you
remember our little fellow's eyes as he tried to see the picture? I fear
I force him too much, and there's no need-not a bit.'

The time was exciting, and the signora spoke excitedly. Messing and
Reggio were in arms. South Italy had given the open signal. It was near
upon the hour of the unmasking of the great Lombard conspiracy, and
Vittoria, standing there, was the beacon-light of it. Her presence filled
Laura with transports of exultation; and shy of displaying it, and of the
theme itself, she let her tongue run on, and satisfied herself by
smoothing the hand of the brave girl on her chin, and plucking with
little loving tugs at her skirts. In doing this she suddenly gave a cry,
as if stung.

'You carry pins,' she said. And inspecting the skirts more closely, 'You
have a careless maid in that creature Giacinta; she lets paper stick to
your dress. What is this?'

Vittoria turned her head, and gathered up her dress to see.

'Pinned with the butterfly!' Laura spoke under her breath.

Vittoria asked what it meant.

'Nothing--nothing,' said her friend, and rose, pulling her eagerly toward
the lamp.

A small bronze butterfly secured a square piece of paper with clipped
corners to her dress. Two words were written on it:--

             'SEI SOSPETTA.'




CHAPTER XII

THE BRONZE BUTTERFLY

The two women were facing one another in a painful silence when Carlo
Ammiani was announced to them. He entered with a rapid stride, and struck
his hands together gladly at sight of Vittoria.

Laura met his salutation by lifting the accusing butterfly attached to
Vittoria's dress.

'Yes; I expected it,' he said, breathing quick from recent exertion.
'They are kind--they give her a personal warning. Sometimes the dagger
heads the butterfly. I have seen the mark on the Play-bills affixed to
the signorina's name.'

'What does it mean?' said Laura, speaking huskily, with her head bent
over the bronze insect. 'What can it mean?' she asked again, and looked
up to meet a covert answer.

'Unpin it.' Vittoria raised her arms as if she felt the thing to be
enveloping her.

The signora loosened the pin from its hold; but dreading lest she thereby
sacrificed some possible clue to the mystery, she hesitated in her
action, and sent an intolerable shiver of spite through Vittoria's frame,
at whom she gazed in a cold and cruel way, saying, 'Don't tremble.' And
again, 'Is it the doing of that 'garritrice magrezza,' whom you call 'la
Lazzeruola?' Speak. Can you trace it to her hand? Who put the plague-mark
upon you?'

Vittoria looked steadily away from her.

'It means just this,' Carlo interposed; 'there! now it 's off; and,
signorina, I entreat you to think nothing of it,--it means that any one
who takes a chief part in the game we play, shall and must provoke all
fools, knaves, and idiots to think and do their worst. They can't imagine
a pure devotion. Yes, I see--"Sei sospetta." They would write their 'Sei
sospetta' upon St. Catherine in the Wheel. Put it out of your mind. Pass
it.'

'But they suspect her; and why do they suspect her?' Laura questioned
vehemently. 'I ask, is it a Conservatorio rival, or the brand of one of
the Clubs? She has no answer.'

'Observe.' Carlo laid the paper under her eyes.

Three angles were clipped, the fourth was doubled under. He turned it
back and disclosed the initials B. R. 'This also is the work of our
man-devil, as I thought. I begin to think that we shall be eternally
thwarted, until we first clear our Italy of its vermin. Here is a weazel,
a snake, a tiger, in one. They call him the Great Cat. He fancies himself
a patriot,--he is only a conspirator. I denounce him, but he gets the
faith of people, our Agostino among them, I believe. The energy of this
wretch is terrific. He has the vigour of a fasting saint. Myself--I
declare it to you, signora, with shame, I know what it is to fear this
man. He has Satanic blood, and the worst is, that the Chief trusts him.'

'Then, so do I,' said Laura.

'And I,' Vittoria echoed her.

A sudden squeeze beset her fingers. 'And I trust you,' Laura said to her.
'But there has been some indiscretion. My child, wait: give no heed to
me, and have no feelings. Carlo, my friend--my husband's
boy--brother-in-arms! let her teach you to be generous. She must have
been indiscreet. Has she friends among the Austrians? I have one, and it
is known, and I am not suspected. But, has she? What have you said or
done that might cause them to suspect you? Speak, Sandra mia.'

It was difficult for Vittoria to speak upon the theme, which made her
appear as a criminal replying to a charge. At last she said, 'English: I
have no foreign friends but English. I remember nothing that I have
done.--Yes, I have said I thought I might tremble if I was led out to be
shot.'

'Pish! tush!' Laura checked her. 'They flog women, they do not shoot
them. They shoot men.'

'That is our better fortune,' said Ammiani.

'But, Sandra, my sister,' Laura persisted now, in melodious coaxing
tones. 'Can you not help us to guess? I am troubled: I am stung. It is
for your sake I feel it so. Can't you imagine who did it, for instance?'

'No, signora, I cannot,' Vittoria replied.

'You can't guess?'

I cannot help you.'

'You will not!' said the irritable woman. 'Have you noticed no one
passing near you?'

'A woman brushed by me as I entered this street. I remember no one else.
And my Beppo seized a man who was spying on me, as he said. That is all I
can remember.'

Vittoria turned her face to Ammiani.

'Barto Rizzo has lived in England,' he remarked, half to himself. 'Did
you come across a man called Barto Rizzo there, signorina? I suspect him
to be the author of this.'

At the name of Barto Rizzo, Laura's eyes widened, awakening a memory in
Ammiani; and her face had a spectral wanness.

'I must go to my chamber,' she said. 'Talk of it together. I will be with
you soon.'

She left them.

Ammiani bent over to Vittoria's ear. 'It was this man who sent the
warning to Giacomo, the signora's husband, which he despised, and which
would have saved him.

It is the only good thing I know of Barto Rizzo. Pardon her.'

'I do,' said the girl, now weeping.

'She has evidently a rooted superstitious faith in these revolutionary
sign-marks. They are contagious to her. She loves you, and believes in
you, and will kneel to you for forgiveness by-and-by. Her misery is a
disease. She thinks now, "If my husband had given heed to the warning!"

'Yes, I see how her heart works,' said Vittoria. 'You knew her husband,
Signor Carlo?'

'I knew him. I served under him. He was the brother of my love. I shall
have no other.'

Vittoria placed her hand for Ammiani to take it. He joined his own to the
fevered touch. The heart of the young man swelled most ungovernably, but
the perils of the morrow were imaged by him, circling her as with a
tragic flame, and he had no word for his passion.

The door opened, when a noble little boy bounded into the room; followed
by a little girl in pink and white, like a streamer in the steps of her
brother. With shouts, and with arms thrown forward, they flung themselves
upon Vittoria, the boy claiming all her lap, and the girl struggling for
a share of the kingdom. Vittoria kissed them, crying, 'No, no, no, Messer
Jack, this is a republic, and not an empire, and you are to have no
rights of "first come"; and Amalia sits on one knee, and you on one knee,
and you sit face to face, and take hands, and swear to be satisfied.'

'Then I desire not to be called an English Christian name, and you will
call me Giacomo,' said the boy.

Vittoria sang, in mountain-notes, 'Giacomo!--Giacomo--Giac-giac-giac . .
como!'

The children listened, glistening up at her, and in conjunction jumped
and shouted for more.

'More?' said Vittoria; 'but is the Signor Carlo no friend of ours? and
does he wear a magic ring that makes him invisible?'

'Let the German girl go to him,' said Giacomo, and strained his throat to
reach at kisses.

'I am not a German girl,' little Amalia protested, refusing to go to
Carlo Ammiani under that stigma, though a delightful haven of open arms
and knees, and filliping fingers, invited her.

'She is not a German girl, O Signor Giacomo,' said Vittoria, in the
theatrical manner.

'She has a German name.'

'It's not a German name!' the little girl shrieked.

Giacomo set Amalia to a miauling tune.

'So, you hate the Duchess of Graatli!' said Vittoria. 'Very well. I shall
remember.'

The boy declared that he did not hate his mother's friend and sister's
godmother: he rather liked her, he really liked her, he loved her; but he
loathed the name 'Amalia,' and could not understand why the duchess would
be a German. He concluded by miauling 'Amalia' in the triumph of
contempt.

'Cat, begone!' said Vittoria, promptly setting him down on his feet, and
little Amalia at the same time perceiving that practical sympathy only
required a ring at the bell for it to come out, straightway pulled the
wires within herself, and emitted a doleful wail that gave her sole
possession of Vittoria's bosom, where she was allowed to bring her tears
to an end very comfortingly. Giacomo meanwhile, his body bent in an arch,
plucked at Carlo Ammiani's wrists with savagely playful tugs, and took a
stout boy's lesson in the art of despising what he coveted. He had only
to ask for pardon. Finding it necessary, he came shyly up to Vittoria,
who put Amalia in his way, kissing whom, he was himself tenderly kissed.

'But girls should not cry!' Vittoria reproved the little woman.

'Why do you cry?' asked Amalia simply.

'See! she has been crying.' Giacomo appropriated the discovery, perforce
of loudness, after the fashion of his sex.

'Why does our Vittoria cry?' both the children clamoured.

'Because your mother is such a cruel sister to her,' said Laura, passing
up to them from the doorway. She drew Vittoria's head against her breast,
looked into her eyes, and sat down among them. Vittoria sang one
low-toned soft song, like the voice of evening, before they were
dismissed to their beds. She could not obey Giacomo's demand for a
martial air, and had to plead that she was tired.

When the children had gone, it was as if a truce had ended. The signora
and Ammiani fell to a brisk counterchange of questions relating to the
mysterious suspicion which had fallen upon Vittoria. Despite Laura's love
for her, she betrayed her invincible feeling that there must be some
grounds for special or temporary distrust.

'The lives that hang on it knock at me here,' she said, touching under
her throat with fingers set like falling arrows.

But Ammiani, who moved in the centre of conspiracies, met at their
councils, and knew their heads, and frequently combated their schemes,
was not possessed by the same profound idea of their potential command of
hidden facts and sovereign wisdom. He said, 'We trust too much to one
man. We are compelled to trust him, but we trust too much to him. I mean
this man, this devil, Barto Rizzo. Signora, signora, he must be spoken
of. He has dislocated the plot. He is the fanatic of the revolution, and
we are trusting him as if he had full sway of reason. What is the
consequence? The Chief is absent he is now, as I believe, in Genoa. All
the plan for the rising is accurate; the instruments are ready, and we
are paralyzed. I have been to three houses to-night, and where, two hours
previously, there was union and concert, all are irresolute and divided.
I have hurried off a messenger to the Chief. Until we hear from him,
nothing can be done. I left Ugo Corte storming against us Milanese,
threatening, as usual, to work without us, and have a Bergamasc and
Brescian Republic of his own. Count Medole is for a week's postponement.
Agostino smiles and chuckles, and talks his poetisms.'

'Until you hear from the Chief, nothing is to be done?' Laura said
passionately. 'Are we to remain in suspense? Impossible! I cannot bear
it. We have plenty of arms in the city. Oh, that we had cannon! I worship
cannon! They are the Gods of battle! But if we surprise the citadel;--one
true shock of alarm makes a mob of an army. I have heard my husband say
so. Let there be no delay. That is my word.'

'But, signora, do you see that all concert about the signal is lost?'

'My friend, I see something'; Laura nodded a significant half-meaning at
him. 'And perhaps it will be as well. Go at once. See that another signal
is decided upon. Oh! because we are ready--ready. Inaction now is
uttermost anguish--kills the heart. What number of the white butchers
have we in the city to-night?'

'They are marching in at every gate. I saw a regiment of Hungarians
coming up the Borgo della Stella. Two fresh squadrons of Uhlans in the
Corso Francesco. In the Piazza d'Armi artillery is encamped.'

'The better for Brescia, for Bergamo, for Padua, for Venice!' exclaimed
Laura. 'There is a limit to their power. We Milanese can match them. For
days and days I have had a dream lying in my bosom that Milan was soon to
breathe. Go, my brother; go to Barto Rizzo; gather him and Count Medole,
Agostino, and Colonel Corte--to whom I kiss my fingers--gather them
together, and squeeze their brains for the one spark of divine fire in
this darkness which must exist where there are so many thorough men bent
upon a sacred enterprise. And, Carlo,'--Laura checked her nervous voice,
'don't think I am declaiming to you from one of my "Midnight Lamps."'
(She spoke of the title of her pamphlets to the Italian people.) 'You
feel among us women very much as Agostino and Colonel Corte feel when the
boy Carlo airs his impetuosities in their presence. Yes, my fervour makes
a philosopher of you. That is human nature. Pity me, pardon me, and do my
bidding.'

The comparison of Ammiani's present sentiments to those of the elders of
the conspiracy, when his mouth was open in their midst, was severe and
masterful, for the young man rose instantly without a thought in his
head.

He remarked: 'I will tell them that the signorina does not give the
signal.'

'Tell them that the name she has chosen shall be Vittoria still; but say,
that she feels a shadow of suspicion to be an injunction upon her at such
a crisis, and she will serve silently and humbly until she is rightly
known, and her time comes. She is willing to appear before them, and
submit to interrogation. She knows her innocence, and knowing that they
work for the good of the country, she, if it is their will, is content to
be blotted out of all participation:--all! She abjures all for the common
welfare. Say that. And say, to-morrow night the rising must be. Oh!
to-morrow night! It is my husband to me.'

Laura Piaveni crossed her arms upon her bosom.

Ammiani was moving from them with a downward face, when a bell-note of
Vittoria's voice arrested him.

'Stay, Signor Carlo; I shall sing to-morrow night.'

The widow heard her through that thick emotion which had just closed her'
speech with its symbolical sensuous rapture. Divining opposition
fiercely, like a creature thwarted when athirst for the wells, she gave
her a terrible look, and then said cajolingly, as far as absence of
sweetness could make the tones pleasant, 'Yes, you will sing, but you
will not sing that song.'

'It is that song which I intend to sing, signora.'

'When it is interdicted?'

'There is only one whose interdict I can acknowledge.'

'You will dare to sing in defiance of me?'

'I dare nothing when I simply do my duty.'

Ammiani went up to the window, and leaned there, eyeing the lights
leading down to the crowding Piazza. He wished that he were among the
crowd, and might not hear those sharp stinging utterances coming from
Laura, and Vittoria's unwavering replies, less frequent, but firmer, and
gravely solid. Laura spent her energy in taunts, but Vittoria spoke only
of her resolve, and to the point. It was, as his military instincts
framed the simile, like the venomous crackling of skirmishing rifles
before a fortress, that answered slowly with its volume of sound and
sweeping shot. He had the vision of himself pleading to secure her
safety, and in her hearing, on the Motterone, where she had seemed so
simple a damsel, albeit nobly enthusiastic: too fair, too gentle to be
stationed in any corner of the conflict at hand. Partly abased by the
remembrance of his brainless intercessions then, and of the laughter
which had greeted them, and which the signora had recently recalled, it
was nevertheless not all in self-abasement (as the momentary recognition
of a splendid character is commonly with men) that he perceived the
stature of Vittoria's soul. Remembering also what the Chief had spoken of
women, Ammiani thought 'Perhaps he has known one such as she.' The
passion of the young man's heart magnified her image. He did not wonder
to see the signora acknowledge herself worsted in the conflict.

'She talks like the edge of a sword,' cried Laura, desperately, and
dropped into a chair. 'Take her home, and convince her, if you can, on
the way, Carlo. I go to the Duchess of Graatli to-night. She has a
reception. Take this girl home. She says she will sing: she obeys the
Chief, and none but the Chief. We will not suppose that it is her desire
to shine. She is suspected; she is accused; she is branded; there is no
general faith in her; yet she will hold the torch to-morrow night:--and
what ensues? Some will move, some turn back, some run headlong over to
treachery, some hang irresolute all are for the shambles! The blood is on
her head.'

'I will excuse myself to you another time,' said Vittoria. 'I love you,
Signora Laura.'

'You do, you do, or you would not think of excusing yourself to me,' said
Laura. 'But now, go. You have cut me in two. Carlo Ammiani may succeed
where I have failed, and I have used every weapon; enough to make a mean
creature hate me for life and kiss me with transports. Do your best,
Carlo, and let it be your utmost.'

It remained for Ammiani to assure her that their views were different.

'The signorina persists in her determination to carry out the programme
indicated by the Chief, and refuses to be diverted from her path by the
false suspicions of subordinates.' He employed a sententious phraseology
instinctively, as men do when they are nervous, as well as when they
justify the cynic's definition of the uses of speech. 'The signorina is,
in my opinion, right. If she draws back, she publicly accepts the blot
upon her name. I speak against my own feelings and my wishes.'

'Sandra, do you hear?' exclaimed Laura. 'This is a friend's
interpretation of your inconsiderate wilfulness.'

Vittoria was content to reply, 'The Signor Carlo judges of me
differently.'

'Go, then, and be fortified by him in this headstrong folly.' Laura
motioned her hand, and laid it on her face.

Vittoria knelt and enclosed her with her arms, kissing her knees.

'Beppo waits for me at the house-door,' she said; but Carlo chose not to
hear of this shadow-like Beppo.

'You have nothing to say for her save that she clears her name by giving
the signal,' Laura burst out on his temperate 'Addio,' and started to her
feet. 'Well, let it be so. Fruitless blood again! A 'rivederla' to you
both. To-night I am in the enemy's camp. They play with open cards.
Amalia tells me all she knows by what she disguises. I may learn
something. Come to me to-morrow. My Sandra, I will kiss you. These
shudderings of mine have no meaning.'

The signora embraced her, and took Ammiani's salute upon her fingers.

'Sour fingers!' he said. She leaned her cheek to him, whispering, 'I
could easily be persuaded to betray you.'

He answered, 'I must have some merit in not betraying myself.'

'At each elbow!' she laughed. 'You show the thumps of an electric battery
at each elbow, and expect your Goddess of lightnings not to see that she
moves you. Go. You have not sided with me, and I am right, and I am a
woman. By the way, Sandra mia, I would beg the loan of your Beppo for two
hours or less.'

Vittoria placed Beppo at her disposal.

'And you run home to bed,' continued Laura. 'Reason comes to you
obstinate people when you are left alone for a time in the dark.'

She hardly listened to Vittoria's statement that the chief singers in the
new opera were engaged to attend a meeting at eleven at night at the
house of the maestro Rocco Ricci.




CHAPTER XIII

THE PLOT OF THE SIGNOR ANTONIO

There was no concealment as to Laura's object in making request for the
services of Beppo. She herself knew it to be obvious that she intended to
probe and cross-examine the man, and in her wilfulness she chose to be
obtuse to opinion. She did not even blush to lean a secret ear above the
stairs that she might judge, by the tones of Vittoria's voice upon her
giving Beppo the order to wait, whether she was at the same time
conveying a hint for guardedness. But Vittoria said not a word: it was
Ammiani who gave the order. 'I am despicable in distrusting her for a
single second,' said Laura. That did not the less encourage her to
question Beppo rigorously forthwith; and as she was not to be deceived by
an Italian's affectation of simplicity, she let him answer two or three
times like a plain fool, and then abruptly accused him of standing
prepared with these answers. Beppo, within his own bosom, immediately
ascribed to his sagacious instinct the mere spirit of opposition and
dislike to serve any one save his own young mistress which had caused him
to irritate the signora and be on his guard. He proffered a candid
admission of the truth of the charge; adding, that he stood likewise
prepared with an unlimited number of statements. 'Questions, illustrious
signora, invariably put me on the defensive, and seem to cry for a return
thrust; and this I account for by the fact that my mother--the blessed
little woman now among the Saints!--was questioned, brows and heels, by a
ferruginously--faced old judge at the momentous period when she carried
me. So that, a question--and I show point; but ask me for a statement,
and, ah, signora!' Beppo delivered a sweep of the arm, as to indicate the
spontaneous flow of his tongue.

'I think,' said Laura, 'you have been a soldier, and a serving-man.'

'And a scene-shifter, most noble signora, at La Scala.'

'You accompanied the Signor Mertyrio to England when he was wounded?'

'I did.'

'And there you beheld the Signorina Vittoria, who was then bearing the
name of Emilia Belloni?'

'Which name she changed on her arrival in Italy, illustrious signora, for
that of Vittoria Campa--"sull' campo dells gloria"--ah! ah!--her own name
being an attraction to the blow-flies in her own country. All this is
true.'

'It should be a comfort to you! The Signor Mertyrio . . .'

Beppo writhed his person at the continuance of the questionings, and
obtaining a pause, he rushed into his statement: 'The Signor Mertyrio was
well, and on the point of visiting Italy, and quitting the wave-embraced
island of fog, of beer, of moist winds, and much money, and much
kindness, where great hearts grew. The signorina corresponded with him,
and with him only.'

'You know that, and will swear to it?' Laura exclaimed.

Beppo thereby receiving the cue he had commenced beating for, swore to
its truth profoundly, and straightway directed his statement to prove
that his mistress had not been politically (or amorously, if the
suspicion aimed at her in those softer regions) indiscreet or blameable
in any of her actions. The signorina, he said, never went out from her
abode without the companionship of her meritorious mother and his own
most humble attendance. He, Beppo, had a master and a mistress, the
Signor Mertyrio and the Signorina Vittoria. She saw no foreigners:
though--a curious thing!--he had seen her when the English language was
talked in her neighbourhood; and she had a love for that language: it
made her face play in smiles like an infant's after it has had suck and
is full;--the sort of look you perceive when one is dreaming and hears
music. She did not speak to foreigners. She did not care to go to foreign
cities, but loved Milan, and lived in it free and happy as an earwig in a
ripe apricot. The circumvallation of Milan gave her elbow-room enough,
owing to the absence of forts all round--'which knock one's funny-bone in
Verona, signora.' Beppo presented a pure smile upon a simple bow for
acceptance. 'The air of Milan,' he went on, with less confidence under
Laura's steady gaze, and therefore more forcing of his candour--'the
sweet air of Milan gave her a deep chestful, so that she could hold her
note as long as five lengths of a fiddle-bow:--by the body of Sant'
Ambrogio, it was true!' Beppo stretched out his arm, and chopped his hand
edgeways five testificatory times on the shoulder-ridge. 'Ay, a hawk
might fly from St. Luke's head (on the Duomo) to the stone on San Primo
over Como, while the signorina held on her note! You listened, you
gasped--you thought of a poet in his dungeon, and suddenly, behold, his
chains are struck off!--you thought of a gold-shelled tortoise making his
pilgrimage to a beatific shrine!--you thought--you knew not what you
thought!'

Here Beppo sank into a short silence of ecstasy, and wakening from it, as
with an ardent liveliness: 'The signora has heard her sing? How to
describe it! Tomorrow night will be a feast for Milan.'

'You think that the dilettanti of Milan will have a delight to-morrow
night?' said Laura; but seeing that the man's keen ear had caught note of
the ironic reptile under the flower, and unwilling to lose further time,
she interdicted his reply.

'Beppo, my good friend, you are a complete Italian--you waste your
cleverness. You will gratify me by remembering that I am your
countrywoman. I have already done you a similar favour by allowing you to
air your utmost ingenuity. The reflection that it has been to no purpose
will neither scare you nor instruct you. Of that I am quite assured. I
speak solely to suit the present occasion. Now, don't seek to elude me.
If you are a snake with friends as well as enemies, you are nothing but a
snake. I ask you--you are not compelled to answer, but I forbid you to
lie--has your mistress seen, or conversed and had correspondence with any
one receiving the Tedeschi's gold, man or woman? Can any one, man or
woman, call her a traitress?'

'Not twice!' thundered Beppo, with a furrowed red forehead.

There was a noble look about the fellow as he stood with stiff legs in a
posture, frowning--theatrical, but noble also; partly the look of a
Figaro defending his honour in extremity, yet much like a statue of a
French Marshal of the Empire.

'That will do,' said Laura, rising. She was about to leave him, when the
Duchess of Graatli's chasseur was ushered in, bearing a missive from
Amalia, her friend. She opened it and read:--

   'BEST BELOVED,--Am I soon to be reminded bitterly that there is a
   river of steel between my heart and me?

   'Fail not in coming to-night. Your new Bulbul is in danger. The
   silly thing must have been reading Roman history. Say not no! It
   intoxicates you all. I watch over her for my Laura's sake: a
   thousand kisses I shower on you, dark delicious soul that you are!
   Are you not my pine-grove leading to the evening star? Come, that
   we may consult how to spirit her away during her season of peril.
   Gulfs do not close over little female madcaps, my Laura; so we must
   not let her take the leap. Enter the salle when you arrive: pass
   down it once and return upon your steps; then to my boudoir. My
   maid Aennchen will conduct you. Addio. Tell this messenger that
   you come. Laura mine, I am for ever thy

                         'AMALIA.'

Laura signalled to the chasseur that her answer was affirmative. As he
was retiring, his black-plumed hat struck against Beppo, who thrust him
aside and gave the hat a dexterous kick, all the while keeping a decorous
front toward the signora. She stood meditating. The enraged chasseur
mumbled a word or two for Beppo's ear, in execrable Italian, and went.
Beppo then commenced bowing half toward the doorway, and tried to shoot
through, out of sight and away, in a final droop of excessive servility,
but the signora stopped him, telling him to consider himself her servant
until the morning; at which he manifested a surprising readiness,
indicative of nothing short of personal devotion, and remained for two
minutes after she had quitted the room. So much time having elapsed, he
ran bounding down the stairs and found the hall-door locked, and that he
was a prisoner during the signora's pleasure. The discovery that he was
mastered by superior cunning, instead of disconcerting, quieted him
wonderfully; so he put by the resources of his ingenuity for the next
opportunity, and returned stealthily to his starting-point, where the
signora found him awaiting her with composure. The man was in mortal
terror lest he might be held guilty of a trust betrayed, in leaving his
mistress for an hour, even in obedience to her command, at this crisis:
but it was not in his nature to state the case openly to the signora,
whom he knew to be his mistress's friend, or to think of practising other
than shrewd evasion to accomplish his duty and satisfy his conscience.

Laura said, without smiling, 'The street-door opens with a key,' and she
placed the key in his hand, also her fan to carry. Once out of the house,
she was sure that he would not forsake his immediate charge of the fan:
she walked on, heavily veiled, confident of his following. The Duchess of
Graatli's house neighboured the Corso Francesco; numerous carriages were
disburdening their freights of fair guests, and now and then an Austrian
officer in full uniform ran up the steps, glittering under the lamps. 'I
go in among them,' thought Laura. It rejoiced her that she had come on
foot. Forgetting Beppo, and her black fan, as no Italian woman would have
done but she who paced in an acute quivering of the anguish of hopeless
remembrances and hopeless thirst of vengeance, she suffered herself to be
conducted in the midst of the guests, and shuddered like one who has
taken a fever-chill as she fulfilled the duchess's directions; she passed
down the length of the saloon, through a light of visages that were not
human to her sensations.

Meantime Beppo, oppressed by his custody of the fan, and expecting that
most serviceable lady's instrument to be sent for at any minute, stood
among a strange body of semi-feudal retainers below, where he was soon
singled out by the duchess's chasseur, a Styrian, who, masking his fury
under jest, in the South-German manner, endeavoured to lead him up to an
altercation. But Beppo was much too supple to be entrapped. He apologized
for any possible offences that he might have committed, assuring the
chasseur that he considered one hat as good as another, and some hats
better than others: in proof of extreme cordiality, he accepted the task
of repeating the chasseur's name, which was 'Jacob Baumwalder
Feckelwitz,' a tolerable mouthful for an Italian; and it was with
remarkable delicacy that Beppo contrived to take upon himself the whole
ridicule of his vile pronunciation of the unwieldy name. Jacob Baumwalder
Feckelwitz offered him beer to refresh him after the effort. While Beppo
was drinking, he seized the fan. 'Good; good; a thousand thanks,' said
Beppo, relinquishing it; 'convey it aloft, I beseech you.' He displayed
such alacrity and lightness of limb at getting rid of it, that Jacob
thrust it between the buttons of his shirtfront, returning it to his
possession by that aperture. Beppo's head sank. A handful of black lace
and cedarwood chained him to the spot! He entreated the men in livery to
take the fan upstairs and deliver it to the Signora Laura Piaveni; but
they, being advised by Jacob, refused. 'Go yourself,' said Jacob,
laughing, and little prepared to see the victim, on whom he thought that
for another hour at least he had got his great paw firmly, take him at
his word. Beppo sprang into the hall and up the stairs. The duchess's
maid, ivory-faced Aennchen, was flying past him. She saw a very taking
dark countenance making eyes at her, leaned her ear shyly, and pretending
to understand all that was said by the rapid foreign tongue, acted from
the suggestion of the sole thing which she did understand. Beppo had
mentioned the name of the Signora Piaveni. 'This way,' she indicated with
her finger, supposing that of course he wanted to see the signora very
urgently.

Beppo tried hard to get her to carry the fan; but she lifted her fingers
in a perfect Susannah horror of it, though still bidding him to follow.
Naturally she did not go fast through the dark passages, where the game
of the fan was once more played out, and with accompaniments. The
accompaniments she objected to no further than a fish is agitated in
escaping from the hook; but 'Nein, nein!' in her own language, and 'No,
no!' in his, burst from her lips whenever he attempted to transfer the
fan to her keeping. 'These white women are most wonderful!' thought
Beppo, ready to stagger between perplexity and impatience.

'There; in there!' said Aennchen, pointing to a light that came through
the folds of a curtain. Beppo kissed her fingers as they tugged
unreluctantly in his clutch, and knew by a little pause that the case was
hopeful for higher privileges. What to do? He had not an instant to
spare; yet he dared not offend a woman's vanity. He gave an ecstatic
pressure of her hand upon his breastbone, to let her be sure she was
adored, albeit not embraced. After this act of prudence he went toward
the curtain, while the fair Austrian soubrette flew on her previous
errand.

It was enough that Beppo found himself in a dark antechamber for him to
be instantly scrupulous in his footing and breathing. As he touched the
curtain, a door opened on the other side of the interior, and a tender
gabble of fresh feminine voices broke the stillness and ran on like a
brook coming from leaps to a level, and again leaping and making noise of
joy. The Duchess of Graatli had clasped the Signora Laura's two hands and
drawn her to an ottoman, and between kissings and warmer claspings, was
questioning of the little ones, Giacomo and her goddaughter Amalia.

'When, when did I see you last?' she exclaimed. 'Oh! not since we met
that morning to lay our immortelles upon his tomb. My soul's sister! kiss
me, remembering it. I saw you in the gateway--it seemed to me, as in a
vision, that we had both had one warning to come for him, and knock, and
the door would be opened, and our beloved would come forth! That was many
days back. It is to me like a day locked up forever in a casket of pearl.
Was it not an unstained morning, my own! If I weep, it is with pleasure.
But,' she added with precipitation, 'weeping of any kind will not do for
these eyelids of mine.' And drawing forth a tiny gold-framed
pocket-mirror she perceived convincingly that it would not do.

'They will think it is for the absence of my husband,' she said, as only
a woman can say it who deplores nothing so little as that.

'When does he return from Vienna?' Laura inquired in the fallen voice of
her thoughtfulness.

'I receive two couriers a week; I know not any more, my Laura. I believe
he is pushing some connubial complaint against me at the Court. We have
been married seventeen months. I submitted to the marriage because I
could get no proper freedom without, and now I am expected to abstain
from the very thing I sacrificed myself to get! Can he hear that in
Vienna?' She snapped her fingers. 'If not, let him come and behold it in
Milan. Besides, he is harmless. The Archduchess is all ears for the very
man of whom he is jealous. This is my reply: You told me to marry: I
obeyed. My heart 's in the earth, and I must have distractions. My
present distraction is De Pyrmont, a good Catholic and a good Austrian
soldier, though a Frenchman. I grieve to say--it's horrible--that it
sometimes tickles me when I reflect that De Pyrmont is keen with the
sword. But remember, Laura, it was not until after our marriage my
husband told me he could have saved Giacomo by the lifting of a finger.
Away with the man!--if it amuses me to punish him, I do so.'

The duchess kissed Laura's cheek, and continued:--'Now to the point where
we stand enemies! I am for Austria, you are for Italy. Good. But I am
always for Laura. So, there's a river between us and a bridge across it.
My darling, do you know that we are much too strong for you, if you mean
anything serious tomorrow night?'

'Are you?' Laura said calmly.

'I know, you see, that something is meant to happen to-morrow night.'

Laura said, 'Do you?'

'We have positive evidence of it. More than that: Your Vittoria--but do
you care to have her warned? She will certainly find herself in a pitfall
if she insists on carrying out her design. Tell me, do you care to have
her warned and shielded? A year of fortress-life is not agreeable, is not
beneficial for the voice. Speak, my Laura.'

Laura looked up in the face of her friend mildly with her large dark
eyes, replying, 'Do you think of sending Major de Pyrmont to her to warn
her?'

'Are you not wicked?' cried the duchess, feeling that she blushed, and
that Laura had thrown her off the straight road of her interrogation.
'But, play cards with open hands, my darling, to-night. Look:--She is in
danger. I know it; so do you. She will be imprisoned perhaps before she
steps on the boards--who knows? Now, I--are not my very dreams all sworn
in a regiment to serve my Laura?--I have a scheme. Truth, it is hardly
mine. It belongs to the Greek, the Signor Antonio Pericles Agriolopoulos.
It is simply'--the duchess dropped her voice out of Beppo's hearing--'a
scheme to rescue her: speed her away to my chateau near Meran in Tyrol.'
'Tyrol' was heard by Beppo. In his frenzy at the loss of the context he
indulged in a yawn, and a grimace, and a dance of disgust all in one;
which lost him the next sentence likewise. 'There we purpose keeping her
till all is quiet and her revolutionary fever has passed. Have you heard
of this Signor Antonio? He could buy up the kingdom of Greece, all Tyrol,
half Lombardy. The man has a passion for your Vittoria; for her voice
solely, I believe. He is considered, no doubt truly, a great connoisseur.
He could have a passion for nothing else, or alas!' (the duchess shook
her head with doleful drollery) 'would he insist on written securities
and mortgages of my private property when he lends me money? How
different the world is from the romances, my Laura! But for De Pyrmont, I
might fancy my smile was really incapable of ransoming an empire; I mean
an emperor. Speak; the man is waiting to come; shall I summon him?'

Laura gave an acquiescent nod.

By this time Beppo had taken root to the floor. 'I am in the best place
after all,' he said, thinking of the duties of his service. He was
perfectly well acquainted with the features of the Signor Antonio. He
knew that Luigi was the Signor Antonio's spy upon Vittoria, and that no
personal harm was intended toward his mistress; but Beppo's heart was in
the revolt of which Vittoria was to give the signal; so, without a touch
of animosity, determined to thwart him, Beppo waited to hear the Signor
Antonio's scheme.

The Greek was introduced by Aennchen. She glanced at the signora's lap,
and seeing her still without her fan, her eye shot slyly up with her
shining temple, inspecting the narrow opening in the curtain furtively. A
short hush of preluding ceremonies passed.

Presently Beppo heard them speaking; he was aghast to find that he had no
comprehension of what they were uttering. 'Oh, accursed French dialect!'
he groaned; discovering the talk to be in that tongue. The Signor Antonio
warmed rapidly from the frigid politeness of his introductory manner. A
consummate acquaintance with French was required to understand him. He
held out the fingers of one hand in regimental order, and with the
others, which alternately screwed his moustache from its constitutional
droop over the corners of his mouth, he touched the uplifted digits one
by one, buzzing over them: flashing his white eyes, and shrugging in a
way sufficient to madden a surreptitious listener who was aware that a
wealth of meaning escaped him and mocked at him. At times the Signor
Antonio pitched a note compounded half of cursing, half of crying, it
seemed: both pathetic and objurgative, as if he whimpered anathemas and
had inexpressible bitter things in his mind. But there was a remedy! He
displayed the specific on a third finger. It was there. This being done
(number three on the fingers), matters might still be well. So much his
electric French and gesticulations plainly asserted. Beppo strained all
his attention for names, in despair at the riddle of the signs. Names
were pillars of light in the dark unintelligible waste. The signora put a
question. It was replied to with the name of the Maestro Rocco Ricci.
Following that, the Signor Antonio accompanied his voluble delivery with
pantomimic action which seemed to indicate the shutting of a door and an
instantaneous galloping of horses--a flight into air, any-whither. He
whipped the visionary steeds with enthusiastic glee, and appeared to be
off skyward like a mad poet, when the signora again put a question, and
at once he struck his hand flat across his mouth, and sat postured to
answer what she pleased with a glare of polite vexation. She spoke; he
echoed her, and the duchess took up the same phrase. Beppo was assisted
by the triangular recurrence of the words and their partial relationship
to Italian to interpret them: 'This night.' Then the signora questioned
further. The Greek replied: 'Mademoiselle Irma di Karski.'

'La Lazzeruola,' she said.

The Signor Antonio flashed a bit of sarcastic mimicry, as if acquiescing
in the justice of the opprobrious term from the high point of view: but
mademoiselle might pass, she was good enough for the public.

Beppo heard and saw no more. A tug from behind recalled him to his
situation. He put out his arms and gathered Aennchen all dark in them:
and first kissing her so heartily as to set her trembling on the verge of
a betrayal, before she could collect her wits he struck the fan down the
pretty hollow of her back, between her shoulder-blades, and bounded away.
It was not his intention to rush into the embrace of Jacob Baumwalder
Feckelwitz, but that perambulating chasseur received him in a
semi-darkness where all were shadows, and exclaimed, 'Aennchen!' Beppo
gave an endearing tenderness to the few words of German known to him:
'Gottschaf-donner-dummer!' and slipped from the hold of the astonished
Jacob, sheer under his arm-pit. He was soon in the street, excited he
knew not by what, or for what object. He shuffled the names he remembered
to have just heard--'Rocco Ricci, and 'la Lazzeruola.' Why did the name
of la Lazzeruola come in advance of la Vittoria? And what was the thing
meant by 'this night,' which all three had uttered as in an
agreement?--ay! and the Tyrol! The Tyrol--this night-Rocco Ricci la
Lazzeruola!

Beppo's legs were carrying him toward the house of the Maestro Rocco
Ricci ere he had arrived at any mental decision upon these imminent
mysteries.




CHAPTER XIV

AT THE MAESTRO'S DOOR

The house of the Maestro Rocco Ricci turned off the Borgo della Stella.
Carlo Ammiani conducted Vittoria to the maestro's door. They conversed
very little on the way.

'You are a good swordsman?' she asked him abruptly.

'I have as much skill as belongs to a perfect intimacy with the weapon,'
he answered.

'Your father was a soldier, Signor Carlo.'

'He was a General officer in what he believed to be the army of Italy. We
used to fence together every day for two hours.'

'I love the fathers who do that,' said Vittoria.

After such speaking Ammiani was not capable of the attempt to preach
peace and safety to her. He postponed it to the next minute and the next.

Vittoria's spirit was in one of those angry knots which are half of the
intellect, half of the will, and are much under the domination of one or
other of the passions in the ascendant. She was resolved to go forward;
she felt justified in going forward; but the divine afflatus of
enthusiasm buoyed her no longer, and she required the support of all that
accuracy of insight and that senseless stubbornness which there might be
in her nature. The feeling that it was she to whom it was given to lift
the torch and plant the standard of Italy, had swept her as through the
strings of a harp. Laura, and the horrible little bronze butterfly, and
the 'Sei sospetta,' now made her duty seem dry and miserably fleshless,
imaging itself to her as if a skeleton had been told to arise and
walk:--say, the thing obeys, and fills a ghastly distension of men's
eyelids for a space, and again lies down, and men get their breath: but
who is the rosier for it? where is the glory of it? what is the good?
This Milan, and Verona, Padua, Vicenza, Brescia, Venice, Florence, the
whole Venetian, Tuscan, and Lombardic lands, down to far Sicily, and that
Rome which always lay under the crown of a dead sunset in her idea--they
too might rise; but she thought of them as skeletons likewise. Even the
shadowy vision of Italy Free had no bloom on it, and stood fronting the
blown trumpets of resurrection Lazarus-like.

At these moments young hearts, though full of sap and fire, cannot do
common nursing labour for the little suckling sentiments and hopes, the
dreams, the languors and the energies hanging about them for nourishment.
Vittoria's horizon was within five feet of her. She saw neither splendid
earth nor ancient heaven; nothing save a breach to be stepped over in
defiance of foes and (what was harder to brave) of friends. Some wayward
activity of old associations set her humming a quaint English tune, by
which she was brought to her consciousness.

'Dear friend,' she said, becoming aware that there might be a more
troubled depth in Ammiani's absence of speech than in her own.

'Yes?' said he, quickly, as for a sentence to follow. None came, and he
continued, 'The Signora Laura is also your friend.'

She rejoined coldly, 'I am not thinking of her.'

Vittoria had tried to utter what might be a word of comfort for him, and
she found she had not a thought or an emotion. Here she differed from
Laura, who, if the mood to heal a favourite's little sore at any season
came upon her, would shower out lively tendernesses and all cajoleries
possible to the tongue of woman. Yet the irritation of action narrowed
Laura more than it did Vittoria; fevered her and distracted her
sympathies. Being herself a plaything at the time, she could easily play
a part for others. Vittoria had not grown, probably never would grow, to
be so plastic off the stage. She was stringing her hand to strike a blow
as men strike, and women when they do that cannot be quite feminine.

'How dull the streets are,' she remarked.

'They are, just now,' said Ammiani, thinking of them on the night to come
convulsed with strife, and of her, tossed perhaps like a weed along the
torrent of bloody deluge waters. Her step was so firm, her face so
assured, that he could not fancy she realized any prospect of the sort,
and it filled him with pity and a wretched quailing.

If I speak now I shall be talking like a coward, he said to himself: and
he was happily too prudent to talk to her in that strain. So he said
nothing of peace and safety. She was almost at liberty to believe that he
approved the wisdom of her resolution. At the maestro's door she thanked
him for his escort, and begged for it further within an hour. 'And do
bring me some chocolate.' She struck her teeth together champing in a
pretty hunger for it. 'I have no chocolate in my pocket, and I hardly
know myself.'

'What will your Signor Antonio say?'

Vittoria filliped her fingers. 'His rule is over, and he is my slave: I
am not his. I will not eat much; but some some I must have.'

Ammiani laughed and promised to obtain it. 'That is, if there's any to be
had.'

'Break open doors to get it for me,' she said, stamping with fun to
inspirit him.

No sooner was she standing alone, than her elbow was gently plucked at on
the other side: a voice was sibilating: 'S-s-signorina.' She allowed
herself to be drawn out of the light of the open doorway, having no
suspicion and no fear. 'Signorina, here is chocolate.' She beheld two
hands in cup-shape, surcharged with packets of Turin chocolate.

'Lugi, it is you?'

The Motterone spy screwed his eyelids to an expression of the shrewdest
secresy.

'Hist! signorina. Take some. You shall have all, but wait:--by-and-by.
Aha! you look at my eyes as you did on the Monterone, because one of them
takes the shoulder-view; but, the truth is, my father was a
contrabandist, and had his eye in his ear when the frontier guard sent a
bullet through his back, cotton-bags and cutleries, and all! I inherit
from him, and have been wry-eyed ever since. How does that touch a man's
honesty, signorina? Not at all. Don't even suspect that you won't
appreciate Luigi by-and-by. So, you won't ask me a word, signorina, but
up you go to the maestro:--signorina, I swear I am your faithful
servant--up to the maestro, and down first. Come down first not
last:--first. Let the other one come down after you; and you come down
first. Leave her behind, la Lazzeruola; and here, 'Luigi displayed a
black veil, the common head-dress of the Milanese women, and twisted his
fingers round and round on his forehead to personate the horns of the
veil; 'take it, signorina; you know how to wear it. Luigi and the saints
watch over you.' Vittoria found herself left in possession of the veil
and a packet of chocolate.

'If I am watched over by the saints and Luigi,' she thought, and bit at
the chocolate.

When the door had closed upon her, Luigi resumed his station near it,
warily casting his glances along the house-fronts, and moving his springy
little legs like a heath-cock alert. They carried him sharp to an
opposite corner of the street at a noise of some one running exposed to
all eyes right down the middle of the road, straight to the house: in
which foolish person he discerned Beppo, all of whose proceedings Luigi
observed and commented on from the safe obscurity under eaves and
starlight, while Beppo was in the light of the lamps. 'You thunder at the
door, my Beppo. You are a fire-balloon: you are going to burn yourself up
with what you carry. You think you can do something, because you read
books and frequent the talking theatres--fourteen syllables to a word.
Mother of heaven! will you never learn anything from natural
intelligence? There you are, in at the door. And now you will disturb the
signorina, and you will do nothing but make la Lazzeruola's ears lively.
Bounce! you are up the stairs. Bounce! you are on the landing. Thrum! you
drum at the door, and they are singing; they don't hear you. And now
you're meek as a mouse. That's it--if you don't hit the mark when you go
like a bullet, you 're stupid as lead. And they call you a clever fellow!
Luigi's day is to come. When all have paid him all round, they will
acknowledge Luigi's worth. You are honest enough, my Beppo; but you might
as well be a countryman. You are the signorina's servant, but I know the
turnings, said the rat to the cavaliere weazel.'

In a few minutes Beppo stepped from the house, and flung himself with his
back against the lintel of the doorway.

'That looks like determination to stop on guard,' said Luigi.

He knew the exact feeling expressed by it, when one has come violently on
an errand and has done no good.

'A flea, my feathery lad, will set you flying again.'

As it was imperative in Luigi's schemes that Beppo should be set flying
again, he slipped away stealthily, and sped fast into the neighbouring
Corso, where a light English closed carriage, drawn by a pair of the
island horses, moved at a slow pace. Two men were on the driver's seat,
one of whom Luigi hailed to come down then he laid a strip of paper on
his knee, and after thumping on the side of his nose to get a notion of
English-Italian, he wrote with a pencil, dancing upon one leg all the
while for a balance:--

   'Come, Beppo, daughter sake, now, at once, immediate,
   Beppo, signor.'

'That's to the very extremity how the little signora Inglese would
write,' said Luigi; yet cogitating profoundly in a dubitative twinkle of
a second as to whether it might not be the English habit to wind up a
hasty missive with an expediting oath. He had heard the oath of emphasis
in that island: but he decided to let it go as it stood. The man he had
summoned was directed to take it straightway and deliver it to one who
would be found at the house-door of the Maestro Rocco Ricci.

'Thus, like a drunken sentinel,' said Luigi, folding his arms, crossing
his legs, and leaning back. 'Forward, Matteo, my cherub.'

'All goes right?' the coachman addressed Luigi.

'As honey, as butter, as a mulberry leaf with a score of worms on it! The
wine and the bread and the cream-cheeses are inside, my dainty one, are
they? She must not starve, nor must I. Are our hampers fastened out side?
Good. We shall be among the Germans in a day and a night. I 've got the
route, and I pronounce the name of the chateau very perfectly--"Schloss
Sonnenberg." Do that if you can.'

The unpractised Italian coachman declined to attempt it. He and Luigi
compared time by their watches. In three-quarters of an hour he was to be
within hail of the maestro's house. Thither Luigi quietly returned.

Beppo's place there was vacant.

'That's better than a draught of Asti,' said Luigi.

The lighted windows of the maestro's house, and the piano striking
corrective notes, assured him that the special rehearsal was still going
on; and as he might now calculate on two or three minutes to spare, he
threw back his coat-collar, lifted his head, and distended his chest,
apparently to chime in with the singing, but simply to listen to it. For
him, it was imperative that he should act the thing, in order to
apprehend and appreciate it.

A hurried footing told of the approach of one whom he expected.

'Luigi!'

'Here, padrone.'

'You have the chocolate?'

'Signor Antonio, I have deposited it in the carriage.'

'She is in up there?'

'I beheld her entering.'

'Good; that is fixed fact.' The Signor Antonio drove at his moustache
right and left. 'I give you, see, Italian money and German money: German
money in paper; and a paper written out by me to explain the value of the
German paper-money. Silence, engine that you are, and not a man! I am
preventive of stupidity, I am? Do I not know that, hein? Am I in need of
the acclamation of you, my friend? On to the Chateau Sonnenberg:--drive
on, drive on, and one who stops you, you drive over him: the gendarmes in
white will peruse this paper, if there is any question, and will pass you
and the cage, bowing; you hear? It is a pass; the military pass you when
you show this paper. My good friend, Captain Weisspriess, on the staff of
General Pierson, gives it, signed, and it is effectual. But you lose not
the paper: put it away with the paper-money, quite safe. For yourself,
this is half your pay--I give you napoleons; ten. Count. And now--once at
the Chateau Sonnenberg, I repeat, you leave her in charge of two persons,
one a woman, at the gate, and then back--frrrrr..'

Antonio-Pericles smacked on the flat of his hand, and sounded a rapid
course of wheels.

'Back, and drop not a crumb upon the road. You have your map. It is,
after Roveredo, straight up the Adige, by Bolzano . . . say "Botzen."'

'"Botz,"' said Luigi, submissively.

'"Botz"--"Botz"--ass! fool! double idiot! "Botzon!"' Antonio-Pericles
corrected him furiously, exclaiming to the sovereign skies, 'Though I pay
for brains, can I get them! No. But make a fiasco, Luigi, and not a
second ten for you, my friend: and away, out of my sight, show yourself
no more!'

Luigi humbly said that he was not the instrument of a fiasco.

Half spurning him, Antonio-Pericles snarled an end both to his advices
and his prophetic disgust of the miserable tools furnished unto masterly
minds upon this earth. He paced forward and back, murmuring in French,
'Mon Dieu! was there ever such a folly as in the head of this girl? It is
her occasion:--Shall I be a Star? Shall I be a Cinder? It is tomorrow
night her moment of Birth! No; she prefers to be extinguished. For what?
For this thing she calls her country. It is infamous. Yes, vile little
cheat! But, do you know Antonio-Pericles? Not yet. I will nourish you, I
will imprison you: I will have you tortured by love, by the very devil of
love, by the red-hot pincers of love, till you scream a music, and die
to melt him with your voice, and kick your country to the gutter, and
know your Italy for a birthplace and a cradle of Song, and no more, and
enough! Bah!'

Having thus delivered himself of the effervescence of his internal
agitation, he turned sharply round upon Luigi, with a military stamp of
the foot and shout of the man's name.

'It is love she wants,' Antonio-Pericles resumed his savage soliloquy.
'She wants to be kindled on fire. Too much Government of brain; not
sufficient Insurrection of heart! There it is. There it lies. But, little
fool! you shall find people with arms and shots and cannon running all up
and down your body, firing and crying out "Victory for Love!" till you
are beaten, till you gasp "Love! love! love!" and then comes a
beatific--oh! a heaven and a hell to your voice. I will pay,' the excited
connoisseur pursued more deliberately: 'I will pay half my fortune to
bring this about. I am fortified, for I know such a voice was sent to be
sublime.' He exclaimed in an ecstasy: 'It opens the skies!' and
immediately appended: 'It is destined to suffocate the theatres!'

Pausing as before a splendid vision: 'Money--let it go like dust! I have
an object. Sandra Belloni--you stupid Vittoria Campa!--I have millions
and the whole Austrian Government to back me, and you to be wilful,
little rebel! I could laugh. It is only Love you want. Your voice is now
in a marble chamber. I will put it in a palace of cedarwood. This Ammiani
I let visit you in the hope that he would touch you.

Bah! he is a patriot--not a man! He cannot make you wince and pine, and
be cold and be hot, and--Bah! I give a chance to some one else who is not
a patriot. He has done mischief with the inflammable little Anna von
Lenkenstein--I know it. Your proper lovers, you women, are the broad, the
business lovers, and Weisspriess is your man.'

Antonio-Pericles glanced up at the maestro's windows. 'Hark! it is her
voice,' he said, and drew up his clenched fists with rage, as if pumping.
'Cold as ice! Not a flaw. She is a lantern with no light in it--crystal,
if you like. Hark now at Irma, the stork-neck. Aie! what a long way it is
from your throat to your head, Mademoiselle Irma! You were reared upon
lemons. The split hair of your mural crown is not thinner than that voice
of yours. It is a mockery to hear you; but you are good enough for the
people, my dear, and you do work, running up and down that ladder of
wires between your throat and your head;--you work, it is true, you puss!
sleek as a puss, bony as a puss, musical as a puss. But you are good
enough for the people. Hola!'

This exclamation was addressed to a cavalier who was dismounting from his
horse about fifty yards down the street, and who, giving the reins to a
mounted servant, advanced to meet the Signor Antonio.

'It is you, Herr Captain von Weisspriess!'

'When he makes an appointment you see him, as a rule, my dear Pericles,'
returned the captain.

'You are out of uniform--good. We will go up. Remember, you are a
connoisseur, from Bonn--from Berlin--from Leipsic: not of the K.K. army!
Abjure it, or you make no way with this mad thing. You shall see her and
hear her, and judge if she is worth your visit to Schloss Sonnenberg and
a short siege. Good: we go aloft. You bow to the maestro respectfully
twice, as in duty; then a third time, as from a whisper of your soul.
Vanitas, vanitatis! You speak of the 'UT de poitrine.' You remark:
"Albrechtsberger has said---," and you slap your head and stop. They
think, "He is polite, and will not quote a German authority to us": and
they think, "He will not continue his quotation; in truth, he scornfully
considers it superfluous to talk of counterpoint to us poor Italians."
Your Christian name is Johann?--you are Herr Johannes. Look at her well.
I shall not expose you longer than ten minutes to their observation.
Frown meditative; the elbow propped and two fingers in the left cheek;
and walk into the room with a stoop: touch a note of the piano, leaning
your ear to it as in detection of five-fifteenths of a shade of discord.
Frown in trouble as of a tooth. So, when you smile, it is immense praise
to them, and easy for you.'

The names of the Signor Antonio-Pericles and Herr Johannes were taken up
to the maestro.

Tormented with curiosity, Luigi saw them enter the house. The face and
the martial or sanguinary reputation of Captain Weisspriess were not
unknown to him. 'What has he to do with this affair?' thought Luigi, and
sauntered down to the captain's servant, who accepted a cigar from him,
but was rendered incorruptible by ignorance of his language. He observed
that the horses were fresh, and were furnished with saddle-bags as for an
expedition. What expedition? To serve as escort to the carriage?--a
nonsensical idea. But the discovery that an idea is nonsensical is not a
satisfactory solution of a difficulty. Luigi squatted on his haunches
beside the doorstep, a little under one of the lower windows of Rocco
Ricci's house. Earlier than he expected, the captain and Signor Antonio
came out; and as soon as the door had closed behind them, the captain
exclaimed, 'I give you my hand on it, my brave Pericles. You have done me
many services, but this is finest of all. She's superb. She's a nice
little wild woman to tame. I shall go to the Sonnenberg immediately. I
have only to tell General Pierson that his nephew is to be prevented from
playing the fool, and I get leave at once, if there's no active work.'

'His nephew, Lieutenant Pierson, or Pole--hein?' interposed the Greek.

'That 's the man. He 's on the Marshal's staff. He 's engaged to the
Countess Lena von Lenkenstein. She has fire enough, my Pericles.'

'The Countess Anna, you say?' The Greek stretched forward his ear, and
was never so near getting it vigorously cuffed.

'Deafness is an unpardonable offence, my dear Pericles.'

Antonio-Pericles sniffed, and assented, 'It is the stupidity of the ear.'

'I said, the Countess Lena.'

'Von Lenkenstein; but I choose to be further deaf.'

'To the devil, sir. Do you pretend to be angry?' cried Weisspriess.

'The devil, sir, with your recommendation, is too black for me to visit
him,' Antonio-Pericles rejoined.

'By heaven, Pericles, for less than what you allow yourself to say, I've
sent men to him howling!'

They faced one another, pulling at their moustachios. Weisspriess
laughed.

'You're not a fighting man, Pericles.'

The Greek nodded affably. 'One is in my way, I have him put out of my
way. It is easiest.'

'Ah! easiest, is it?' Captain Weisspriess 'frowned meditative' over this
remarkable statement of a system. 'Well, it certainly saves trouble.
Besides, my good Pericles, none but an ass would quarrel with you. I was
observing that General Pierson wants his nephew to marry the Countess
Lena immediately; and if, as you tell me, this girl Belloni, who is
called la Vittoria--the precious little woman!--has such power over him,
it's quite as well, from the General's point of view, that she should be
out of the way at Sonnenberg. I have my footing at the Duchess of
Graath's. I believe she hopes that I shall some day challenge and kill
her husband; and as I am supposed to have saved Major de Pyrmont's life,
I am also an object of present gratitude. Do you imagine that your little
brown-eyed Belloni scented one of her enemies in me?'

'I know nothing of imagination,' the Signor Antonio observed frigidly.

'Till we meet!' Captain Weisspriess kissed his fingers, half as up toward
the windows, and half to the Greek. 'Save me from having to teach love to
your Irma!'

He ran to join his servant.

Luigi had heard much of the conversation, as well as the last sentence.

'It shall be to la Irma if it is to anybody,' Luigi muttered.

'Let Weisspriess--he will not awake love in her--let him kindle hate, it
will do,' said the Signor Antonio. 'She has seen him, and if he meets her
on the route to Meran, she will think it her fascination.'

Looking at his watch and at the lighted windows, he repeated his special
injunctions to Luigi. 'It is near the time. I go to sleep. I am getting
old: I grow nervous. Ten-twenty in addition, you shall have, if all is
done right. Your weekly pay runs on. Twenty--you shall have thirty!
Thirty napoleons additional!'

Ten fingers were flashed thrice.

Luigi gave a jump. 'Padrone, they are mine.'

'Animal, that shake your belly-bag and brain-box, stand!' cried the
Greek, who desired to see Luigi standing firm that he might inspire
himself with confidence in his integrity. When Luigi's posture had
satisfied him, he turned and went off at great strides.

'He does pay,' Luigi reflected, seeing that immense virtue in his patron.
'Yes, he pays; but what is he about? It is this question for me--"Do I
serve my hand? or, Do I serve my heart?" My hand takes the money, and it
is not German money. My heart gives the affection, and the signorina has
my heart. She reached me that cigarette on the Motterone like the
Madonna: it is never to be forgotten! I serve my heart! Now, Beppo, you
may come; come quick for her. I see the carriage, and there are three
stout fellows in it who could trip and muzzle you at a signal from me
before you could count the letters of your father's baptismal name. Oh!
but if the signorina disobeys me and comes out last!--the Signor Antonio
will ask the maestro, who will say, "Yes, la Vittoria was here with me
last of the two"; and I lose my ten, my twenty, my thirty napoleons.'

Luigi's chest expanded largely with a melancholy draught of air.

The carriage meantime had become visible at the head of the street, where
it remained within hearing of a whistle. One of the Milanese hired
vehicles drove up to the maestro's door shortly after, and Luigi cursed
it. His worst fears for the future of the thirty napoleons were
confirmed; the door opened and the Maestro Rocco Ricci, bareheaded and in
his black silk dressing-gown, led out Irma di Karski, by some called
rival to la Vittoria; a tall Slavic damsel, whose laughter was not soft
and smooth, whose cheeks were bright, and whose eyes were deep in the
head and dull. But she had vivacity both of lips and shoulders. The
shoulders were bony; the lips were sharp and red, like winter-berries in
the morning-time. Freshness was not absent from her aspect. The critical
objection was that it seemed a plastered freshness and not true bloom; or
rather it was a savage and a hard, not a sweet freshness. Hence perhaps
the name which distinguished her la Lazzeruola (crab apple). It was a
freshness that did not invite the bite; sour to Italian taste.

She was apparently in vast delight. 'There will be a perfect inundation
to-morrow night from Prague and Vienna to see me even in so miserable a
part as Michiella,' she said. 'Here I am supposed to be a beginner; I am
no debutante there.'

'I can believe it, I can believe it,' responded Rocco, bowing for her
speedy departure.

'You are not satisfied with my singing of Michiella's score! Now, tell
me, kind, good, harsh old master! you think that Miss Vittoria would sing
it better. So do I. And I can sing another part better. You do not know
my capacities.'

'I am sure there is nothing you would not attempt,' said Rocco, bowing
resignedly.

'There never was question of my courage.'

'Yes, but courage, courage! away with your courage!' Rocco was spurred by
his personal grievances against her in a manner to make him forget his
desire to be rid of her. 'Your courage sets you flying at once at every
fioritura and bravura passage, to subdue, not to learn: not to
accomplish, but to conquer it. And the ability, let me say, is not in
proportion to the courage, which is probably too great to be easily
equalled; but you have the opportunity to make your part celebrated
to-morrow night, if, as you tell me, the house is to be packed with
Viennese, and, signorina, you let your hair down.'

The hair of Irma di Karski was of singular beauty, and so dear to her
that the allusion to the triumphant feature of her person passed off
Rocco's irony in sugar.

'Addio! I shall astonish you before many hours have gone by,' she said;
and this time they bowed together, and the maestro tripped back
hurriedly, and shut his door.

Luigi's astonishment eclipsed his chagrin when he beheld the lady step
from her place, bidding the driver move away as if he carried a freight,
and indicating a position for him at the end of the street, with an
imperative sway and deflection of her hand. Luigi heard the clear thin
sound of a key dropped to her from one of the upper windows. She was
quick to seize it; the door opened stealthily to her, and she passed out
of sight without casting a look behind. 'That's a woman going to discover
a secret, if she can,' remarked the observer; meaning that he considered
the sex bad Generals, save when they have occasion to preserve themselves
secret; then they look behind them carefully enough. The situation was
one of stringent torment to a professional and natural spy. Luigi lost
count of minutes in his irritation at the mystery, which he took as a
personal offence. Some suspicion or wariness existed in the lighted room,
for the maestro threw up a window, and inspected the street to right and
left. Apparently satisfied he withdrew his head, and the window was
closed.

In a little while Vittoria's voice rose audible out of the stillness,
though she restrained its volume.

Its effect upon Luigi was to make him protest to her, whimpering with
pathos as if she heard and must be melted: 'Signorina! signorina, most
dear! for charity's sake! I am one of you; I am a patriot. Every man to
his trade, but my heart is all with you.' And so on, louder by fits, in a
running murmur, like one having his conscience ransacked, from which he
was diverted by a side-thought of Irma di Karski, la Lazzeruola,
listening, taking poison in at her ears; for Luigi had no hesitation in
ascribing her behaviour to jealousy. 'Does not that note drive through
your bosom, excellent lady? I can fancy the tremble going all down your
legs. You are poisoned with honey. How you hate it! If you only had a
dagger!'

Vittoria sang but for a short space. Simultaneously with the cessation of
her song Ammiani reached the door, but had scarcely taken his stand there
when, catching sight of Luigi, he crossed the street, and recognizing
him, questioned him sternly as to his business opposite the maestro's
house. Luigi pointed to a female figure emerging. 'See! take her home,'
he said. Ammiani released him and crossed back hurriedly, when, smiting
his forehead, Luigi cried in despair, 'Thirty napoleons and my
professional reputation lost!' He blew a whistle; the carriage dashed
down from the head of the street. While Ammiani was following the
swiftly-stepping figure in wonderment (knowing it could not be Vittoria,
yet supposing it must be, without any clear aim of his wits), the
carriage drew up a little in advance of her; three men--men of bulk and
sinew jumped from it; one threw himself upon Ammiani, the others grasped
the affrighted lady, tightening a veil over her face, and the
carriage-door shut sharp upon her. Ammiani's assailant then fell away:
Luigi flung himself on the box and shouted, 'The signorina is behind
you!' And Ammiani beheld Vittoria standing in alarm, too joyful to know
that it was she. In the spasm of joy he kissed her hands. Before they
could intercommunicate intelligibly the carriage was out of their sight,
going at a gallop along the eastern strada of the circumvallation of the
city.




CHAPTER XV

AMMIANI THROUGH THE MIDNIGHT

Ammiani hurried Vittoria out of the street to make safety sure. 'Home,'
she said, ashamed of her excitement, and not daring to speak more words,
lest the heart in her throat should betray itself. He saw what the fright
had done for her. Perhaps also he guessed that she was trying to conceal
her fancied cowardice from him. 'I have kissed her hands,' he thought,
and the memory of it was a song of tenderness in his blood by the way.

Vittoria's dwelling-place was near the Duomo, in a narrow thoroughfare
leading from the Duomo to the Piazza of La Scala, where a confectioner of
local fame conferred upon the happier members of the population most
piquant bocconi and tartlets, and offered by placard to give an emotion
to the nobility, the literati, and the epicures of Milan, and to all
foreigners, if the aforesaid would adventure upon a trial of his art.
Meanwhile he let lodgings. It was in the house of this famous
confectioner Zotti that Vittoria and her mother had lived after leaving
England for Italy. As Vittoria came under the fretted shadow of the
cathedral, she perceived her mother standing with Zotti at the
house-door, though the night was far advanced. She laughed, and walked
less hurriedly. Ammiani now asked her if she had been alarmed. 'Not
alarmed,' she said, 'but a little more nervous than I thought I should
be.'

He was spared from putting any further question by her telling him that
Luigi, the Motterone spy, had in all probability done her a service in
turning one or other f the machinations of the Signor Antonio. 'My
madman,' she called this latter. 'He has got his Irma instead of me. We
shall have to supply her place tomorrow; she is travelling rapidly, and
on my behalf! I think, Signor Carlo, you would do well by going to the
maestro when you leave me, and telling him that Irma has been caught into
the skies. Say, "Jealous that earth should possess such overpowering
loveliness," or "Attracted in spite of themselves by that combination of
genius and beauty which is found united nowhere but in Irma, the spirits
of heaven determined to rob earth of her Lazzeruola." Only tell it to him
seriously, for my dear Rocco will have to work with one of the singers
all day, and I ought to be at hand by them to help her, if I dared stir
out. What do you think?'

Ammiani pronounced his opinion that it would be perilous for her to go
abroad.

'I shall in truth, I fear, have a difficulty in getting to La Scala
unseen,' she said; 'except that we are cunning people in our house. We
not only practise singing and invent wonderful confectionery, but we do
conjuring tricks. We profess to be able to deceive anybody whom we
please.'

'Do the dupes enlist in a regiment?' said Ammiani, with an intonation
that professed his readiness to serve as a recruit. His humour striking
with hers, they smiled together in the bright fashion of young people who
can lose themselves in a ray of fancy at any season.

Vittoria heard her mother's wailful voice. 'Twenty gnats in one,' she
said.

Ammiani whispered quickly to know whether she had decided for the morrow.
She nodded, and ran up to her mother, who cried:

'At this hour! And Beppo has been here after you, and he told me I wrote
for him, in Italian, when not a word can I put to paper: I wouldn't!--and
you are threatened by dreadful dangers, he declares. His behaviour was
mad; they are all mad over in this country, I believe. I have put the
last stitch to your dress. There is a letter or two upstairs for you.
Always letters!'

'My dear good Zotti,' Vittoria turned to the artist in condiments, 'you
must insist upon my mother going to bed at her proper time when I am
out.'

'Signorina,' rejoined Zotti, a fat little round-headed man, with
vivacious starting brown eyes, 'I have only to tell her to do a thing--I
pull a dog by the collar; be it said with reverence.'

'However, I am very glad to see you both such good friends.'

'Yes, signorina, we are good friends till we quarrel again. I regret to
observe to you that the respectable lady is incurably suspicious. Of
me--Zotti! Mother of heaven!'

'It is you that are suspicious of me, sir,' retorted madame. 'Of me, of
all persons! It's "tell me this, tell me that," all day with you; and
because I can't answer, you are angry.'

'Behold! the signora speaks English; we have quarrelled again,' said
Zotti.

'My mother thinks him a perfect web of plots,' Vittoria explained the
case between them, laughing, to Ammiani; 'and Zotti is persuaded that she
is an inveterate schemer. They are both entirely innocent, only they are
both excessively timid. Out of that it grows.'

The pair dramatized her outline on the instant:

'"Did I not see him speak to an English lady, and he will not tell me a
word about it, though she's my own countrywoman?"'

'"Is it not true that she received two letters this afternoon, and still
does she pretend to be ignorant of what is going on?"'

'Happily,' said Vittoria, 'my mother is not a widow, or these quarrels
might some day end in a fearful reconciliation.'

'My child,' her mother whimpered, 'you know what these autumn nights are
in this country; as sure as you live, Emilia, you will catch cold, and
then you're like a shop with shutters up for the dead.'

At the same time Zotti whispered: 'Signorina, I have kept the minestra
hot for your supper; come in, come in. And, little things, little dainty
bits!--do you live in Zotti's house for nothing? Sweetest delicacies that
make the tongue run a stream!--just notions of a taste--the palate smacks
and forgets; the soul seizes and remembers!'

'Oh, such seductions!' Vittoria exclaimed.

'It is,' Zotti pursued his idea, with fingers picturesquely twirling in a
spider-like distension; 'it is like the damned, and they have but a crumb
of a chance of Paradise, and down swoops St. Peter and has them in the
gates fast! You are worthy of all that a man can do for you, signorina.
Let him study, let him work, let him invent,--you are worthy of all.'

'I hope I am not too hungry to discriminate! Zotti I see Monte Rosa.'

'Signorina, you are pleased to say so when you are famishing. It is
because--' the enthusiastic confectioner looked deep and oblique, as one
who combined a remarkable subtlety of insight with profound reflection;
'it is because the lighter you get the higher you mount; up like an eagle
of the peaks! But we'll give that hungry fellow a fall. A dish of hot
minestra shoots him dead. Then, a tart of pistachios and chocolate and
cream--and my head to him who shall reveal to me the flavouring!'

'When I wake in the morning, I shall have lived a month or two in Arabia,
Zotti. Tell me no more; I will come in,' said Vittoria.

'Then, signorina, a little crisp filbert--biscuit--a composition! You
crack it, and a surprise! And then, and then my dish; Zotti's dish, that
is not yet christened. Signorina, let Italy rise first; the great
inventor of the dish winked and nodded temperately. 'Let her rise. A
battle or a treaty will do. I have two or three original conceptions,
compositions, that only wait for some brilliant feat of arms, or a
diplomatic triumph, and I send them forth baptized.'

Vittoria threw large eyes upon Ammiani, and set the underlids humorously
quivering. She kissed her fingers: 'Addio; a rivederla.' He bowed
formally: he was startled to find the golden thread of their
companionship cut with such cruel abruptness. But it was cut; the door
had closed on her. The moment it had closed she passed into his
imagination. By what charm had she allayed the fever of his anxiety? Her
naturalness had perforce given him assurance that peace must surround one
in whom it shone so steadily, and smiling at the thought of Zotti's
repast and her twinkle of subdued humour, he walked away comforted;
which, for a lover in the season of peril means exalted, as in a sudden
conflagration of the dry stock of his intelligence. 'She must have some
great faith in her heart,' he thought, no longer attributing his
exclusion from it to a lover's rivalry, which will show that more than
imagination was on fire within him. For when the soul of a youth can be
heated above common heat, the vices of passion shrivel up and aid the
purer flame. It was well for Ammiani that he did perceive (dimly though
it was perceived) the force of idealistic inspiration by which Vittoria
was supported. He saw it at this one moment, and it struck a light to
light him in many subsequent perplexities; it was something he had never
seen before. He had read Tuscan poetry to her in old Agostino's rooms; he
had spoken of secret preparations for the revolt; he had declaimed upon
Italy,--the poetry was good though the declamation may have been
bad,--but she had always been singularly irresponsive, with a practical
turn for ciphers. A quick reckoning, a sharp display of figures in
Italy's cause, kindled her cheeks and took her breath. Ammiani now
understood that there lay an unspoken depth in her, distinct from her
visible nature.

He had first an interview with Rocco Ricci, whom he prepared to replace
Irma.

His way was then to the office of his Journal, where he expected to be
greeted by two members of the Polizia, who would desire him to march
before the central bureau, and exhibit proofs of articles and the items
of news for inspection, for correction haply, and possibly for approval.
There is a partial delight in the contemplated submission to an act of
servitude for the last time. Ammiani stepped in with combative gaiety,
but his stiff glance encountered no enemy. This astonished him. He turned
back into the street and meditated. The Pope's Mouth might, he thought,
hold the key to the riddle. It is not always most comfortable for a
conspirator to find himself unsuspected: he reads the blank
significantly. It looked ill that the authorities should allow anything
whatsoever to be printed on such a morrow: especially ill, if they were
on the alert. The neighbourhood by the Pope's Mouth was desolate under
dark starlight. Ammiani got his fingers into the opening behind the
rubbish of brick, and tore them on six teeth of a saw that had been fixed
therein. Those teeth were as voluble to him as loud tongues. The Mouth
was empty of any shred of paper. They meant that the enemy was ready to
bite, and that the conspiracy had ceased to be active. He perceived that
a stripped ivy-twig, with the leaves scattered around it, stretched at
his feet. That was another and corroborative sign, clearer to him than
printed capitals. The reading of it declared that the Revolt had
collapsed. He wound and unwound his handkerchief about his fingers
mechanically: great curses were in his throat. 'I would start for South
America at dawn, but for her!' he said. The country of Bolivar still had
its attractions for Italian youth. For a certain space Ammiani's soul was
black with passion. He was the son of that fiery Paolo Ammiani who had
cast his glove at Eugene's feet, and bade the viceroy deliver it to his
French master. (The General was preparing to break his sword on his knee
when Eugene rushed up to him and kissed him.) Carlo was of this blood.
Englishmen will hardly forgive him for having tears in his eyes, but
Italians follow the Greek classical prescription for the emotions, while
we take example by the Roman. There is no sneer due from us. He sobbed.
It seemed that a country was lost.

Ammiani had moved away slowly: he was accidentally the witness of a
curious scene. There came into the irregular triangle, and walking up to
where the fruitstalls stood by day, a woman and a man. The man was an
Austrian soldier. It was an Italian woman by his side. The sight of the
couple was just then like an incestuous horror to Ammiani. She led the
soldier straight up to the Mouth, directing his hand to it, and, what was
far more wonderful, directing it so that he drew forth a packet of papers
from where Ammiani had found none. Ammiani could see the light of them in
his hand. The Austrian snatched an embrace and ran. Ammiani was moving
over to her to seize and denounce the traitress, when he beheld another
figure like an apparition by her side; but this one was not a whitecoat.
Had it risen from the earth? It was earthy, for a cloud of dust was about
it, and the woman gave a stifled scream. 'Barto! Barto!' she cried,
pressing upon her eyelids. A strong husky laugh came from him. He tapped
her shoulder heartily, and his 'Ha! ha!' rang in the night air.

'You never trust me,' she whimpered from shaken nerves.

He called her, 'Brave little woman! rare girl!'

'But you never trust me!'

'Do I not lay traps to praise you?'

'You make a woman try to deceive you.' If she could! If only she could!'

Ammiani was up with them.

'You are Barto Rizzo,' he spoke, half leaning over the man in his
impetuosity.

Barto stole a defensive rearward step. The thin light of dawn had in a
moment divided the extreme starry darkness, and Ammiani, who knew his
face, had not to ask a second time. It was scored by a recent sword-cut.
He glanced at the woman: saw that she was handsome. It was enough; he
knew she must be Barto's wife, and, if not more cunning than Barto, his
accomplice, his instrument, his slave.

'Five minutes ago I would have sworn you were a traitress he said to her.

She was expressionless, as if she had heard nothing; which fact,
considering that she was very handsome, seemed remarkable to the young
man. Youth will not believe that stupidity and beauty can go together.

'She is the favourite pupil of Bartolommeo Rizzo, Signor Carlo Ammiani,'
quoth Barto, having quite regained his composure. 'She is my pretty
puppet-patriot. I am not in the habit of exhibiting her; but since you
see her, there she is.'

Barto had fallen into the Southern habit of assuming ease in
quasi-rhetorical sentences, but with wary eyes over them. The peculiar,
contracting, owl-like twinkle defied Ammiani's efforts to penetrate his
look; so he took counsel of his anger, and spoke bluntly.

'She does your work?'

'Much of it, Signor Carlo: as the bullet does the work of the rifle.'

'Beast! was it your wife who pinned the butterfly to the Signorina
Vittoria's dress?'

'Signor Carlo Ammiani, you are the son of Paolo, the General: you call me
beast? I have dandled you in my arms, my little lad, while the bands
played "There's yet a heart in Italy!" Do you remember it?' Barto sang
out half-a-dozen bars. 'You call me beast? I'm the one man in Milan who
can sing you that.'

'Beast or man, devil or whatever you are!' cried Ammiani, feeling
nevertheless oddly unnerved, 'you have committed a shameful offence: you,
or the woman, your wife, who serves you, as I see. You have thwarted the
best of plots; you have dared to act in defiance of your Chief--'

'Eyes to him!' Barto interposed, touching over his eyeballs.

'And you have thrown your accursed stupid suspicions on the Signorina
Vittoria. You are a mad fool. If I had the power, I would order you to be
shot at five this morning; and that 's the last rising of the light you
should behold. Why did you do it? Don't turn your hellish eyes in upon
one another, but answer at once! Why did you do it?'

'The Signorina Vittoria,' returned Barto--his articulation came forth
serpent-like--'she is not a spy, you think. She has been in England: I
have been in England. She writes; I can read. She is a thing of whims.
Shall she hold the goblet of Italy in her hand till it overflows? She
writes love-letters to an English whitecoat. I have read them. Who bids
her write? Her whim! She warns her friends not to enter Milan. She--whose
puppet is she? Not yours; not mine. She is the puppet of an English
Austrian!'

Barto drew back, for Ammiani was advancing.

'What is it you mean?' he cried.

'I mean,' said Ammiani, still moving on him, 'I mean to drag you first
before Count Medole, and next before the signorina; and you shall abjure
your slander in her presence. After that I shall deal with you. Mark me!
I have you: I am swifter on foot, and I am stronger. Come quietly.'

Barto smiled in grim contempt.

'Keep your foot fast on that stone, you're a prisoner,' he replied, and
seeing Ammiani coming, 'Net him, my sling-stone! my serpent!' he
signalled to his wife, who threw herself right round Ammiani in a
tortuous twist hard as wire-rope. Stung with irritation, and a sense of
disgrace and ridicule and pitifulness in one, Ammiani, after a struggle,
ceased the attempt to disentwine her arms, and dragged her clinging to
him. He was much struck by hearing her count deliberately, in her
desperation, numbers from somewhere about twenty to one hundred. One
hundred was evidently the number she had to complete, for when she had
reached it she threw her arms apart. Barto was out of sight. Ammiani
waved her on to follow in his steps: he was sick of her presence, and had
the sensations of a shame-faced boy whom a girl has kissed. She went
without uttering a word.

The dawn had now traversed the length of the streets, and thrown open the
wide spaces of the city. Ammiani found himself singing, 'There's yet a
heart in Italy!' but it was hardly the song of his own heart. He slept
that night on a chair in the private room of his office, preferring not
to go to his mother's house. 'There 's yet a heart in Italy!' was on his
lips when he awoke with scattered sensations, all of which collected in
revulsion against the song. 'There's a very poor heart in Italy!' he
said, while getting his person into decent order; 'it's like the bell in
the lunatic's tower between Venice and the Lido: it beats now and then
for meals: hangs like a carrion-lump in the vulture's beak meanwhile!'

These and some other similar sentiments, and a heat about the brows
whenever he set them frowning over what Barto had communicated concerning
an English Austrian, assured Ammiani that he had no proper command of
himself: or was, as the doctors would have told him, bilious. It seemed
to him that he must have dreamed of meeting the dark and subtle Barto
Rizzo overnight; on realizing that fact he could not realize how the man
had escaped him, except that when he thought over it, he breathed deep
and shook his shoulders. The mind will, as you may know, sometimes refuse
to work when the sensations are shameful and astonished. He despatched a
messenger with a 'good morrow' to his mother, and then went to a
fencing-saloon that was fitted up in the house of Count Medole, where,
among two or three, there was the ordinary shrugging talk of the collapse
of the projected outbreak, bitter to hear. Luciano Romara came in, and
Ammiani challenged him to small-sword and broadsword. Both being ireful
to boiling point, and mad to strike at something, they attacked one
another furiously, though they were dear friends, and the helmet-wires
and the padding rattled and smoked to the thumps. For half an hour they
held on to it, when, their blood being up, they flashed upon the men
present, including the count, crying shame to them for letting a woman
alone be faithful to her task that night. The blood forsook Count
Medole's cheeks, leaving its dead hue, as when blotting-paper is laid on
running-ink. He deliberately took a pair of foils, and offering the
handle of one to Ammiani, broke the button off the end of his own, and
stood to face an adversary. Ammiani followed the example: a streak of
crimson was on his shirt-sleeve, and his eyes had got their hard black
look, as of the flint-stone, before Romara in amazement discovered the
couple to be at it in all purity of intention, on the sharp edge of the
abyss. He knocked up their weapons and stood between them, puffing his
cigarette leisurely.

'I fine you both,' he said.

He touched Ammiani's sword-arm, nodded with satisfaction to find that
there was no hurt, and cried, 'You have an Austrian out on the ground by
this time tomorrow morning. So, according to the decree!'

'Captain Weisspriess is in the city,' was remarked.

'There are a dozen on the list,' said little Pietro Cardi, drawing out a
paper.

'If you are to be doing nothing else to-morrow morning,' added Leone
Rufo, 'we may as well march out the whole dozen.'

These two were boys under twenty.

'Shall it be the first hit for Captain Weisspriess?' Count Medole said
this while handing a fresh and fairly-buttoned foil to Ammiani.

Romara laughed: 'You will require to fence the round of Milan city, my
dear count, to win a claim to Captain Weisspriess. In the first place, I
yield him to no man who does not show himself a better man than I. It's
the point upon which I don't pay compliments.'

Count Medole bowed.

'But, if you want occupation,' added Luciano, closing his speech with a
merely interrogative tone.

'I scarcely want that, as those who know me will tell you,' said Medole,
so humbly, that those who knew him felt that he had risen to his high
seat of intellectual contempt. He could indulge himself, having shown his
courage.

'Certainly not; if you are devising means of subsistence for the widows
and orphans of the men who will straggle out to be slaughtered to-night,'
said Luciano; 'you have occupation in that case.'

'I will do my best to provide for them,'--the count persisted in his air
of humility, 'though it is a question with some whether idiots should
live.' He paused effectively, and sucked in a soft smile of
self-approbation at the stroke. Then he pursued: 'We meet the day after
to-morrow. The Pope's Mouth is closed. We meet here at nine in the
morning. The next day at eleven at Farugino's, the barber's, in Monza.
The day following at Camerlata, at eleven likewise. Those who attend will
be made aware of the dispositions for the week, and the day we shall name
for the rising. It is known to you all, that without affixing a stigma on
our new prima-donna, we exclude her from any share in this business. All
the Heads have been warned that we yield this night to the Austrians.
Gentlemen, I cannot be more explicit. I wish that I could please you
better.'

'Oh, by all means,' said Pietro Cardi: 'but patience is the pestilence; I
shall roam in quest of adventure. Another quiet week is a tremendous
trial.'

He crossed foils with Leone Rufo, but finding no stop to the drawn
'swish' of the steel, he examined the end of his weapon with a
lengthening visage, for it was buttonless. Ammiani burst into laughter at
the spontaneous boyishness in the faces of the pair of ambitious lads.
They both offered him one of the rapiers upon equal terms. Count Medole's
example of intemperate vanity was spoiling them.

'You know my opinion,' Ammiani said to the count. 'I told you last night,
and I tell you again to-day, that Barto Rizzo is guilty of gross
misconduct, and that you must plead the same to a sort of excuseable
treason. Count Medole, you cannot wind and unwind a conspiracy like a
watch. Who is the head of this one? It is the man Barto Rizzo. He took
proceedings before he got you to sanction them. You may be the vessel,
but he commands, or at least, he steers it.'

The count waited undemonstratively until Ammiani had come to an end. 'You
speak, my good Ammiani, with an energy that does you credit,' he said,
'considering that it is not in your own interest, but another person's.
Remember, I can bear to have such a word as treason ascribed to my acts.'

Fresh visitors, more or less mixed, in the conspiracy, and generally
willing to leave the management of it to Count Medole, now entered the
saloon. These were Count Rasati, Angelo Dovili, a Piedmontese General, a
Tuscan duke, and one or two aristocratic notabilities and historic
nobodies. They were hostile to the Chief whom Luciano and Carlo revered
and obeyed. The former lit a cigarette, and saying to his friend, 'Do you
breakfast with your mother? I will come too,' slipped his hand on
Ammiani's arm; they walked out indolently together, with the smallest
shade of an appearance of tolerating scorn for those whom they left
behind.

'Medole has money and rank and influence, and a kind of I-don't-know-what
womanishness, that makes him push like a needle for the lead, and he will
have the lead and when he has got the lead, there 's the last chapter of
him,' said Luciano. 'His point of ambition is the perch of the
weather-cock. Why did he set upon you, my Carlo? I saw the big V running
up your forehead when you faced him. If you had finished him no great
harm would have been done.'

'I saw him for a short time last night, and spoke to him in my father's
style,' said Carlo. 'The reason was, that he defended Barto Rizzo for
putting the ring about the Signorina Vittoria's name, and causing the
black butterfly to be pinned to her dress.'

Luciano's brows stood up.

'If she sings to-night, depend upon it there will be a disturbance,' he
said. 'There may be a rising in spite of Medole and such poor sparks,
who're afraid to drop on powder, and twirl and dance till the wind blows
them out. And mind, the chance rising is commonly the luckiest. If I get
a command I march to the Alps. We must have the passes of the Tyrol. It
seems to me that whoever holds the Alps must ride the Lombard mare. You
spring booted and spurred into the saddle from the Alps.'

Carlo was hurt by his friend's indifference to the base injury done to
Vittoria.

'I have told Medole that she will sing to-night in spite of him,' he was
saying, with the intention of bringing round some reproach upon Luciano
for his want of noble sympathy, when the crash of an Austrian regimental
band was heard coming up the Corso. It stirred him to love his friend
with all his warmth. 'At any rate, for my sake, Luciano, you will respect
and uphold her.'

'Yes, while she's true,' said Luciano, unsatisfactorily. The regiment, in
review uniform, followed by two pieces of artillery, passed by. Then came
a squadron of hussars and one of Uhlans, and another foot regiment, more
artillery, fresh cavalry.

'Carlo, if three generations of us pour out our blood to fertilize
Italian ground, it's not too much to pay to chase those drilled curs.'
Luciano spoke in vehement undertone.

'We 'll breakfast and have a look at them in the Piazza d'Armi, and show
that we Milanese are impressed with a proper idea of their power,' said
Carlo, brightening as he felt the correction of his morbid lover's anger
in Luciano's reaching view of their duties as Italian citizens. The heat
and whirl of the hour struck his head, for to-morrow they might be
wrestling with that living engine which had marched past, and surely all
the hate he could muster should be turned upon the outer enemy. He gained
his mother's residence with clearer feelings.




CHAPTER XVI

COUNTESS AMMIANI

Countess Ammiani was a Venetian lady of a famous House, the name of which
is as a trumpet sounding from the inner pages of the Republic. Her face
was like a leaf torn from an antique volume; the hereditary features told
the story of her days. The face was sallow and fireless; life had faded
like a painted cloth upon the imperishable moulding. She had neither fire
in her eyes nor colour on her skin. The thin close multitudinous wrinkles
ran up accurately ruled from the chin to the forehead's centre, and
touched faintly once or twice beyond, as you observe the ocean ripples
run in threads confused to smoothness within a space of the grey horizon
sky. But the chin was firm, the mouth and nose were firm, the forehead
sat calmly above these shows of decay. It was a most noble face; a
fortress face; strong and massive, and honourable in ruin, though
stripped of every flower.

This lady in her girlhood had been the one lamb of the family dedicated
to heaven. Paolo, the General, her lover, had wrenched her from that fate
to share with him a life of turbulent sorrows till she should behold the
blood upon his grave. She, like Laura Fiaveni, had bent her head above a
slaughtered husband, but, unlike Laura, Marcellina Ammiani had not buried
her heart with him. Her heart and all her energies had been his while he
lived; from the visage of death it turned to her son. She had accepted
the passion for Italy from Paolo; she shared it with Carlo. Italian girls
of that period had as little passion of their own as flowers kept out of
sunlight have hues. She had given her son to her country with that
intensely apprehensive foresight of a mother's love which runs quick as
Eastern light from the fervour of the devotion to the remote realization
of the hour of the sacrifice, seeing both in one. Other forms of love,
devotion in other bosoms, may be deluded, but hers will not be. She sees
the sunset in the breast of the springing dawn. Often her son Carlo stood
a ghost in her sight. With this haunting prophetic vision, it was only a
mother, who was at the same time a supremely noble woman, that could feel
all human to him notwithstanding. Her heart beat thick and fast when
Carlo and Luciano entered the morning-room where she sat, and stopped to
salute her in turn.

'Well?' she said without betraying anxiety or playing at carelessness.

Carlo answered, 'Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die. I think
that's the language of peaceful men.'

'You are to be peaceful men to-morrow, my Carlo?'

'The thing is in Count Medole's hands,' said Luciano; 'and he is
constitutionally of our Agostino's opinion that we are bound to wait till
the Gods kick us into action; and, as Agostino says, Medole has raised
himself upon our shoulders so as to be the more susceptible to their
wishes when they blow a gale.'

He informed her of the momentary thwarting of the conspiracy, and won
Carlo's gratitude by not speaking of the suspicion which had fallen on
Vittoria.

'Medole,' he said, 'has the principal conduct of the business in Milan,
as you know, countess. Our Chief cannot be everywhere at once; so Medole
undertakes to decide for him here in old Milan. He decided yesterday
afternoon to put off our holiday for what he calls a week. Checco, the
idiot, in whom he confides, gave me the paper signifying the fact at four
o'clock. There was no appeal; for we can get no place of general meeting
under Medole's prudent management. He fears our being swallowed in a body
if we all meet.'

The news sent her heart sinking in short throbs down to a delicious rest;
but Countess Ammiani disdained to be servile to the pleasure, even as she
had strengthened herself to endure the shocks of pain. It was a conquered
heart that she and every Venetian and Lombard mother had to carry; one
that played its tune according to its nature, shaping no action, sporting
no mask. If you know what is meant by that phrase, a conquered heart, you
will at least respect them whom you call weak women for having gone
through the harshest schooling which this world can show example of. In
such mothers Italy revived. The pangs and the martyrdom were theirs.
Fathers could march to the field or to the grey glacis with their boys;
there was no intoxication of hot blood to cheer those who sat at home
watching the rise and fall of trembling scales which said life or death
for their dearest. Their least shadowy hope could be but a shrouded
contentment in prospect; a shrouded submission in feeling. What bloom of
hope was there when Austria stood like an iron wall, and their own ones
dashing against it were as little feeble waves that left a red mark and
no more? But, duty to their country had become their religion; sacrifice
they accepted as their portion; when the last stern evil befell them they
clad themselves in a veil and walked upon an earth they had passed from
for all purposes save service of hands. Italy revived in these mothers.
Their torture was that of the re-animation of her frame from the
death-trance.

Carlo and Luciano fell hungrily upon dishes of herb-flavoured cutlets,
and Neapolitan maccaroni, green figs, green and red slices of melon,
chocolate, and a dry red Florentine wine. The countess let them eat, and
then gave her son a letter that been delivered at her door an hour back
by the confectioner Zotti. It proved to be an enclosure of a letter
addressed to Vittoria by the Chief. Genoa was its superscription. From
that place it was forwarded by running relays of volunteer messengers.
There were points of Italy which the Chief could reach four-and-twenty
hours in advance of the Government with all its aids and machinery.
Vittoria had simply put her initials at the foot of the letter. Carlo
read it eagerly and cast it aside. It dealt in ideas and abstract
phraseology; he could get nothing of it between his impatient teeth; he
was reduced to a blank wonder at the reason for her sending it on to him.
It said indeed--and so far it seemed to have a meaning for her:

'No backward step. We can bear to fall; we cannot afford to draw back.'

And again:

'Remember that these uprisings are the manifested pulsations of the heart
of your country, so that none shall say she is a corpse, and knowing that
she lives, none shall say that she deserves not freedom. It is the
protest of her immortal being against her impious violator.'

Evidently the Chief had heard nothing of the counterstroke of Barto
Rizzo, and of Count Medole's miserable weakness: but how, thought Carlo,
how can a mind like Vittoria's find matter to suit her in such sentences?
He asked himself the question, forgetting that a little time gone by,
while he was aloof from the tumult and dreaming of it, this airy cloudy
language and every symbolism, had been strong sustaining food, a vital
atmosphere, to him. He did not for the moment (though by degrees he
recovered his last night's conception of her) understand that among the
noble order of women there is, when they plunge into strife, a craving
for idealistic truths, which men are apt, under the heat and hurry of
their energies, to put aside as stars that are meant merely for shining.

His mother perused the letter--holding it out at arm's length--and laid
it by; Luciano likewise. Countess Ammiani was an aristocrat: the tone and
style of the writing were distasteful to her. She allowed her son's
judgement of the writer to stand for her own, feeling that she could
surrender little prejudices in favour of one who appeared to hate the
Austrians so mortally. On the other hand, she defended Count Medole. Her
soul shrank at the thought of the revolution being yielded up to
theorists and men calling themselves men of the people--a class of men to
whom Paolo her soldier-husband's aversion had always been formidably
pronounced. It was an old and a wearisome task for Carlo to explain to
her that the times were changed and the necessities of the hour different
since the day when his father conspired and fought for freedom. Yet he
could not gainsay her when she urged that the nobles should be elected to
lead, if they consented to lead; for if they did not lead, were they not
excluded from the movement?

'I fancy you have defined their patriotism,' said Carlo.

'Nay, my son; but you are one of them.'

'Indeed, my dearest mother, that is not what they will tell you.'

'Because you have chosen to throw yourself into the opposite ranks.'

'You perceive that you divide our camp, madame my mother. For me there is
no natural opposition of ranks. What are we? We are slaves: all are
slaves. While I am a slave, shall I boast that I am of noble birth?
"Proud of a coronet with gems of paste!" some one writes. Save me from
that sort of pride! I am content to take my patent of nobility for good
conduct in the revolution. Then I will be count, or marquis, or duke; I
am not a Republican pure blood;--but not till then. And in the
meantime--'

'Carlo is composing for his newspaper,' the countess said to Luciano.

'Those are the leaders who can lead,' the latter replied. 'Give the men
who are born to it the first chance. Old Agostino is right--the people
owe them their vantage ground. But when they have been tried and they
have failed, decapitate them. Medole looks upon revolution as a
description of conjuring trick. He shuffles cards and arranges them for a
solemn performance, but he refuses to cut them if you look too serious or
I look too eager; for that gives him a suspicion that you know what is
going to turn up; and his object is above all things to produce a
surprise.'

'You are both of you unjust to Count Medole,' said the countess. 'He
imperils more than all of you.'

'Magnificent estates, it is true; but of head or of heart not quite so
much as some of us,' said Luciano, stroking his thick black pendent
moustache and chin-tuft. 'Ah, pardon me; yes! he does imperil a finer
cock's comb.

'When he sinks, and his vanity is cut in two, Medole will bleed so as to
flood his Lombard flats. It will be worse than death to him.'

Carlo said: 'Do you know what our Agostino says of Count Medole?'

'Oh, for ever Agostino with you young men!' the countess exclaimed. 'I
believe he laughs at you.'

'To be sure he does: he laughs at all. But, what he says of Count Medole
holds the truth of the thing, and may make you easier concerning the
count's estates. He says that Medole is vaccine matter which the
Austrians apply to this generation of Italians to spare us the terrible
disease. They will or they won't deal gently with Medole, by-and-by; but
for the present he will be handled tenderly. He is useful. I wish I could
say that we thought so too. And now,' Carlo stooped to her and took her
hand, 'shall we see you at La Scala to-night?'

The countess, with her hands lying in his, replied: 'I have received an
intimation from the authorities that my box is wanted.'

'So you claim your right to occupy it!'

'That is my very humble protest for personal liberty.'

'Good: I shall be there, and shall much enjoy an introduction to the
gentleman who disputes it with you. Besides, mother, if the Signorina
Vittoria sings . . .'

Countess Ammiani's gaze fixed upon her son with a level steadiness. His
voice threatened to be unequal. All the pleading force of his eyes was
thrown into it, as he said: 'She will sing: and she gives the signal;
that is certain. We may have to rescue her. If I can place her under your
charge, I shall feel that she is safe, and is really protected.'

The countess looked at Luciano before she answered:

'Yes, Carlo, whatever I can do. But you know I have not a scrap of
influence.'

'Let her lie on your bosom, my mother.'

'Is this to be another Violetta?'

'Her name is Vittoria,' said Carlo, colouring deeply. A certain Violetta
had been his boy's passion.

Further distracting Austrian band-music was going by. This time it was a
regiment of Italians in the white and blue uniform. Carlo and Luciano
leaned over the balcony, smoking, and scanned the marching of their
fellow-countrymen in the livery of servitude.

'They don't step badly,' said one; and the other, with a smile of
melancholy derision, said, 'We are all brothers!'

Following the Italians came a regiment of Hungarian grenadiers, tall,
swam-faced, and particularly light-limbed men, looking brilliant in the
clean tight military array of Austria. Then a squadron of blue hussars,
and Croat regiment; after which, in the midst of Czech dragoons and
German Uhlans and blue Magyar light horsemen, with General officers and
aides about him, the veteran Austrian Field-Marshal rode, his easy hand
and erect figure and good-humoured smile belying both his age and his
reputation among Italians. Artillery, and some bravely-clad horse of the
Eastern frontier, possibly Serb, wound up the procession. It gleamed down
the length of the Corso in a blinding sunlight; brass helmets and hussar
feathers, white and violet surcoats, green plumes, maroon capes, bright
steel scabbards, bayonet-points,--as gallant a show as some
portentously-magnified summer field, flowing with the wind, might be; and
over all the banner of Austria--the black double-headed eagle ramping on
a yellow ground. This was the flower of iron meaning on such a field.

The two young men held their peace. Countess Ammiani had pushed her chair
back into a dark corner of the room, and was sitting there when they
looked back, like a sombre figure of black marble.




CHAPTER XVII

IN THE PIAZZA D'ARMI

Carlo and Luciano followed the regiments to the Piazza d'Armi, drawn
after them by that irresistible attraction to youths who have as yet had
no shroud of grief woven for them--desire to observe the aspect of a
brilliant foe.

The Piazza d'Armi was the field of Mars of Milan, and an Austrian review
of arms there used to be a tropical pageant. The place was too narrow for
broad manoeuvres, or for much more than to furnish an inspection of all
arms to the General, and a display (with its meaning) to the populace. An
unusually large concourse of spectators lined the square, like a black
border to a vast bed of flowers, nodding now this way, now that. Carlo
and Luciano passed among the groups, presenting the perfectly smooth
faces of young men of fashion, according to the universal aristocratic
pattern handed down to querulous mortals from Olympus--the secret of
which is to show a triumphant inaction of the heart and the brain, that
are rendered positively subservient to elegance of limb. They knew the
chances were in favour of their being arrested at any instant. None of
the higher members of the Milanese aristocracy were visible; the people
looked sullen. Carlo was attracted by the tall figure of the Signor
Antonio-Pericles, whom he beheld in converse with the commandant of the
citadel, out in the square, among chatting and laughing General officers.
At Carlo's elbow there came a burst of English tongues; he heard
Vittoria's English name spoken with animation. 'Admire those faces,' he
said to Luciano, but the latter was interchanging quiet recognitions
among various heads of the crowd; a language of the eyelids and the
eyebrows. When he did look round he admired the fair island faces with an
Italian's ardour: 'Their women are splendid!' and he no longer pushed
upon Carlo's arm to make way ahead. In the English group were two
sunny-haired girls and a blue-eyed lady with the famous English curls,
full, and rounding richly. This lady talked of her brother, and pointed
him out as he rode down the line in the Marshal's staff. The young
officer indicated presently broke away and galloped up to her, bending
over his horse's neck to join the conversation. Emilia Belloni's name was
mentioned. He stared, and appeared to insist upon a contrary statement.

Carlo scrutinized his features. While doing so he was accosted, and
beheld his former adversary of the Motter--one, with whom he had
yesterday shaken hands in the Piazza of La Scala. The ceremony was
cordially renewed. Luciano unlinked his arm from Carlo and left him.

'It appears that you are mistaken with reference to Mademoiselle
Belloni,' said Captain Gambier. 'We hear on positive authority that she
will not appear at La Scala to-night. It's a disappointment; though, from
what you did me the honour to hint to me, I cannot allow myself to regret
it.'

Carlo had a passionate inward prompting to trust this Englishman with the
secret. It was a weakness that he checked. When one really takes to
foreigners, there is a peculiar impulse (I speak of the people who are
accessible to impulse) to make brothers of them. He bowed, and said, 'She
does not appear?'

'She has in fact quitted Milan. Not willingly. I would have stopped the
business if I had known anything of it; but she is better out of the way,
and will be carefully looked after, where she is. By this time she is in
the Tyrol.'

'And where?' asked Carlo, with friendly interest.

'At a schloss near Meran. Or she will be there in a very few hours. I
feared--I may inform you that we were very good friends in England--I
feared that when she once came to Italy she would get into political
scrapes. I dare say you agree with me that women have nothing to do with
politics. Observe: you see the lady who is speaking to the Austrian
officer?--he is her brother. Like Mademoiselle Belloni he has adopted a
fresh name; it's the name of his uncle, a General Pierson in the Austrian
service. I knew him in England: he has been in our service. Mademoiselle
Belloni lived with his sisters for some years two or three. As you may
suppose, they are all anxious to see her. Shall I introduce you? They
will be glad to know one of her Italian friends.'

Carlo hesitated; he longed to hear those ladies talk of Vittoria. 'Do
they speak French?'

'Oh, dear, yes. That is, as we luckless English people speak it. Perhaps
you will more easily pardon their seminary Italian. See there,' Captain
Gambier pointed at some trotting squadrons; 'these Austrians have
certainly a matchless cavalry. The artillery seems good. The infantry are
fine men--very fine men. They have a "woodeny" movement; but that's in
the nature of the case: tremendous discipline alone gives homogeneity to
all those nationalities. Somehow they get beaten. I doubt whether
anything will beat their cavalry.'

'They are useless in street-fighting,' said Carlo.

'Oh, street-fighting!' Captain Gambier vented a soldier's disgust at the
notion. 'They're not in Paris. Will you step forward?'

Just then the tall Greek approached the party of English. The
introduction was delayed.

He was addressed by the fair lady, in the island tongue, as 'Mr.
Pericles.' She thanked him for his extreme condescension in deigning to
notice them. But whatever his condescension had been, it did not extend
to an admitted acquaintance with the poor speech of the land of fogs. An
exhibition of aching deafness was presented to her so resolutely, that at
last she faltered, 'What! have you forgotten English, Mr. Pericles? You
spoke it the other day.'

'It is ze language of necessity--of commerce,' he replied.

'But, surely, Mr. Pericles, you dare not presume to tell me you choose to
be ignorant of it whenever you please?'

'I do not take grits into ze teeth, madame; no more.' 'But you speak it
perfectly.'

'Perfect it may be, for ze transactions of commerce. I wish to keep my
teez.'

'Alas!' said the lady, compelled, 'I must endeavour to swim in French.'

'At your service, madame,' quoth the Greek, with an immediate doubling of
the length of his body.

Carlo heard little more than he knew; but the confirmation of what we
know will sometimes instigate us like fresh intelligence, and the lover's
heart was quick to apprehend far more than he knew in one direction. He
divined instantaneously that the English-Austrian spoken of by Barto
Rizzo was the officer sitting on horseback within half-a-dozen yards of
him. The certainty of the thought cramped his muscles. For the rest, it
became clear to him that the attempt of the millionaire connoisseur to
carry off Vittoria had received the tacit sanction of the Austrian
authorities; for reasons quite explicable, Mr. Pericles, as the English
lady called him, distinctly hinted it, while affirming with vehement
self-laudation that his scheme had succeeded for the vindication of Art.

'The opera you will hear zis night,' he said, 'will be hissed. You will
hear a chorus of screech-owls to each song of that poor Irma, whom the
Italian people call "crabapple." Well; she pleases German ears, and if
they can support her, it is well. But la Vittoria--your Belloni--you will
not hear; and why? She has been false to her Art, false! She has become a
little devil in politics. It is a Guy Fawkes femelle! She has been guilty
of the immense crime of ingratitude. She is dismissed to study, to
penitence, and to the society of her old friends, if they will visit
her.'

'Of course we will,' said the English lady; 'either before or after our
visit to Venice--delicious Venice!'

'Which you have not seen--hein?' Mr. Pericles snarled; 'and have not
smelt. There is no music in Venice! But you have nothing but street
tinkle-tinkle! A place to live in! mon Dieu!'

The lady smiled. 'My husband insists upon trying the baths of Bormio, and
then we are to go over a pass for him to try the grape-cure at Meran. If
I can get him to promise me one whole year in Italy, our visit to Venice
may be deferred. Our doctor, monsieur, indicates our route. If my brother
can get leave of absence, we shall go to Bormio and to Meran with him. He
is naturally astonished that Emilia refused to see him; and she refused
to see us too! She wrote a letter, dated from the Conservatorio to him,
he had it in his saddlebag, and was robbed of it and other precious
documents, when the wretched, odious people set upon him in Verona-poor
boy! She said in the letter that she would see him in a few days after
the fifteenth, which is to-day!

'Ah! a few days after the fifteenth, which is to-day,' Mr. Pericles
repeated. 'I saw you but the day before yesterday, madame, or I could
have brought you together.

She is now away-off--out of sight--the perfule! Ah false that she is;
speak not of her. You remember her in England. There it was trouble,
trouble; but here, we are a pot on a fire with her; speak not of her. She
has used me ill, madame. I am sick.'

His violent gesticulation drooped. In a temporary abandonment to chagrin,
he wiped the moisture from his forehead, unwilling or heedless of the
mild ironical mouthing of the ladies, and looked about; for Carlo had
made a movement to retire,--he had heard enough for discomfort.

'Ah! my dear Ammiani, the youngest editor in Europe! how goes it with
you?' the Greek called out with revived affability.

Captain Gambier perceived that it was time to present his Italian
acquaintance to the ladies by name, as a friend of Mademoiselle Belloni.

'My most dear Ammiani,' Antonio-Pericles resumed; he barely attempted to
conceal his acrid delight in casting a mysterious shadow of coming
vexation over the youth; 'I am afraid you will not like the opera
Camilla, or perhaps it is the Camilla you will not like. But, shoulder
arms, march!' (a foot regiment in motion suggested the form of the
recommendation) 'what is not for to-day may be for to-morrow. Let us
wait. I think, my Ammiani, you are to have a lemon and not an orange.
Never mind. Let us wait.'

Carlo got his forehead into a show of smoothness, and said, 'Suppose, my
dear Signor Antonio, the prophet of dark things were to say to himself,
"Let us wait?"'

'Hein-it is deep.' Antonio-Pericles affected to sound the sentence, eye
upon earth, as a sparrow spies worm or crumb. 'Permit me,' he added
rapidly; an idea had struck him from his malicious reserve stores,--'Here
is Lieutenant Pierson, of the staff of the Field-Marshal of Austria,
unattached, an old friend of Mademoiselle Emilia Belloni,--permit
me,--here is Count Ammiani, of the Lombardia Milanese journal, a new
friend of the Signorina Vittoria Campa-Mademoiselle Belloni the Signorina
Campa--it is the same person, messieurs; permit me to introduce you.'

Antonio-Pericles waved his arm between the two young men.

Their plain perplexity caused him to dash his fingers down each side of
his moustachios in tugs of enjoyment.

For Lieutenant Pierson, who displayed a certain readiness to bow, had
caught a sight of the repellent stare on Ammiani's face; a still and flat
look, not aggressive, yet anything but inviting; like a shield.

Nevertheless, the lieutenant's head produced a stiff nod. Carlo's did not
respond; but he lifted his hat and bowed humbly in retirement to the
ladies.

Captain Gambier stepped aside with him.

'Inform Lieutenant Pierson, I beg you,' said Ammiani, 'that I am at his
orders, if he should consider that I have insulted him.'

'By all means,' said Gambier; 'only, you know, it's impossible for me to
guess what is the matter; and I don't think he knows.'

Luciano happened to be coming near. Carlo went up to him, and stood
talking for half a minute. He then returned to Captain Gambier, and said,
'I put myself in the hands of a man of honour. You are aware that Italian
gentlemen are not on terms with Austrian officers. If I am seen
exchanging salutes with any one of them, I offend my countrymen; and they
have enough to bear already.'

Perceiving that there was more in the background, Gambier simply bowed.
He had heard of Italian gentlemen incurring the suspicion of their
fellows by merely being seen in proximity to an Austrian officer.

As they were parting, Carlo said to him, with a very direct meaning in
his eyes, 'Go to the opera tonight.'

'Yes, I suppose so,' the Englishman answered, and digested the look and
the recommendation subsequently.

Lieutenant Pierson had ridden off. The war-machine was in motion from end
to end: the field of flowers was a streaming flood; regiment by regiment,
the crash of bands went by. Outwardly the Italians conducted themselves
with the air of ordinary heedless citizens, in whose bosoms the music set
no hell-broth boiling. Patrician and plebeian, they were chiefly boys;
though here and there a middle-aged workman cast a look of intelligence
upon Carlo and Luciano, when these two passed along the crowd. A gloom of
hoarded hatred was visible in the mass of faces, ready to spring fierily.

Arms were in the city. With hatred to prompt the blow, with arms to
strike, so much dishonour to avenge, we need not wonder that these youths
beheld the bit of liberty in prospect magnified by their mighty
obfuscating ardour, like a lantern in a fog. Reason did not act. They
were in such a state when just to say 'Italia! Italia!' gave them nerve
to match an athlete. So, the parading of Austria, the towering athlete,
failed of its complete lesson of intimidation, and only ruffled the
surface of insurgent hearts. It seemed, and it was, an insult to the
trodden people, who read it as a lesson for cravens: their instinct
commonly hits the bell. They felt that a secure supremacy would not have
paraded itself: so they divined indistinctly that there was weakness
somewhere in the councils of the enemy. When the show had vanished, their
spirits hung pausing, like the hollow air emptied of big sound, and
reacted. Austria had gained little more by her display than the
conscientious satisfaction of the pedagogue who lifts the rod to advise
intending juvenile culprits how richly it can be merited and how poor
will be their future grounds of complaint.

But before Austria herself had been taught a lesson she conceived that
she had but one man and his feeble instruments, and occasional frenzies,
opposed to her, him whom we saw on the Motterone, which was ceasing to be
true; though it was true that the whole popular movement flowed from that
one man. She observed travelling sparks in the embers of Italy, and
crushed them under her heel, without reflecting that a vital heat must be
gathering where the spots of fire run with such a swiftness. It was her
belief that if she could seize that one man, whom many of the younger
nobles and all the people acknowledged as their Chief--for he stood then
without a rival in his task--she would have the neck of conspiracy in her
angry grasp. Had she caught him, the conspiracy for Italian freedom would
not have crowed for many long seasons; the torch would have been ready,
but not the magazine. He prepared it; it was he who preached to the
Italians that opportunity is a mocking devil when we look for it to be
revealed; or, in other words, wait for chance; as it is God's angel when
it is created within us, the ripe fruit of virtue and devotion. He cried
out to Italians to wait for no inspiration but their own; that they
should never subdue their minds to follow any alien example; nor let a
foreign city of fire be their beacon. Watching over his Italy; her wrist
in his meditative clasp year by year; he stood like a mystic leech by the
couch of a fair and hopeless frame, pledged to revive it by the inspired
assurance, shared by none, that life had not forsaken it. A body given
over to death and vultures-he stood by it in the desert. Is it a marvel
to you that when the carrion-wings swooped low, and the claws fixed, and
the beak plucked and savoured its morsel, he raised his arm, and urged
the half-resuscitated frame to some vindicating show of existence? Arise!
he said, even in what appeared most fatal hours of darkness. The slack
limbs moved; the body rose and fell. The cost of the effort was the
breaking out of innumerable wounds, old and new; the gain was the display
of the miracle that Italy lived. She tasted her own blood, and herself
knew that she lived.

Then she felt her chains. The time was coming for her to prove, by the
virtues within her, that she was worthy to live, when others of her sons,
subtle and adept, intricate as serpents, bold, unquestioning as
well-bestridden steeds, should grapple and play deep for her in the game
of worldly strife. Now--at this hour of which I speak--when Austrians
marched like a merry flame down Milan streets, and Italians stood like
the burnt-out cinders of the fire-grate, Italy's faint wrist was still in
the clutch of her grave leech, who counted the beating of her pulse
between long pauses, that would have made another think life to be
heaving its last, not beginning.

The Piazza d'Armi was empty of its glittering show.




CHAPTER XVIII

THE NIGHT OF THE FIFTEENTH

We quit the Piazza d'Armi. Rumour had its home in Milan. On their way to
the caffe La Scala, Luciano and Carlo (who held together, determined to
be taken together if the arrest should come) heard it said that the Chief
was in Milan. A man passed by and uttered it, going. They stopped a
second man, who was known to them, and he confirmed the rumour. Glad as
sunlight once more, they hurried to Count Medole forgivingly. The count's
servant assured them that his master had left the city for Monza. 'Is
Medole a coward?' cried Luciano, almost in the servant's hearing. The
fleeing of so important a man looked vile, now that they were sharpened
by new eagerness. Forthwith they were off to Agostino, believing that he
would know the truth. They found him in bed. 'Well, and what?' said
Agostino, replying to their laughter. 'I am old; too old to stride across
a day and night, like you giants of youth. I take my rest when I can, for
I must have it.'

'But, you know, O conscript father,' said Carlo, willing to fall a little
into his mood, 'you know that nothing will be done to-night.'

'Do I know so much?' Agostino murmured at full length.

'Do you know that the Chief is in the city?' said Luciano.

'A man who is lying in bed knows this,' returned Agostino, 'that he knows
less than those who are up, though what he does know he perhaps digests
better. 'Tis you who are the fountains, my boys, while I am the pool into
which you play. Say on.'

They spoke of the rumour. He smiled at it. They saw at once that the
rumour was false, for the Chief trusted Agostino.

'Proceed to Barto, the mole,' he said, 'Barto the miner; he is the father
of daylight in the city: of the daylight of knowledge, you understand,
for which men must dig deep. Proceed to him;--if you can find him.'

But Carlo brought flame into Agostino's eyes.

'The accursed beast! he has pinned the black butterfly to the signorina's
dress.'

Agostino rose on his elbow. He gazed at them. 'We are followers of a
blind mole,' he uttered with an inner voices while still gazing
wrathfully, and then burst out in grief, '"Patria o mea creatrix, patria
o mea genetrix!"'

'The signorina takes none of his warnings, nor do we. She escaped a plot
last night, and to-night she sings.'

'She must not,' said Agostino imperiously.

'She does.'

'I must stop that.' Agostino jumped out of bed.

The young men beset him with entreaties to leave the option to her.

'Fools!' he cried, plunging a rageing leg into his garments. 'Here, Iris!
Mercury! fly to Jupiter and say we are all old men and boys in Italy, and
are ready to accept a few middleaged mortals as Gods, if they will come
and help us. Young fools! Do you know that when you conspire you are in
harness, and yoke-fellows, every one?'

'Yoked to that Barto Rizzo!'

'Yes; and the worse horse of the two. Listen, you pair of Nuremberg
puppet-heads! If the Chief were here, I would lie still in my bed. Medole
has stopped the outbreak. Right or wrong, he moves a mass; we are
subordinates--particles. The Chief can't be everywhere. Milan is too hot
for him. Two men are here, concealed--Rinaldo and Angelo Guidascarpi. The
rumour springs from that. They have slain Count Paul Lenkenstein, and
rushed to old Milan for work, with the blood on their swords. Oh, the
tragedy!--when I have time to write it. Let me now go to my girl, to my
daughter! The blood of the Lenkenstein must rust on the steel. Angelo
slew him: Rinaldo gave him the cross to kiss. You shall have the whole
story by-and-by; but this will be a lesson to Germans not to court our
Italian damsels. Lift not that curtain, you Pannonian burglars! Much do
we pardon; but bow and viol meet not, save that they be of one wood;
especially not when signor bow is from yonderside the Rhoetian Alps, and
donzella Viol is a growth of warm Lombardy. Witness to it, Angelo and
Rinaldo Guidascarpi! bravo! You boys there--you stand like two Tyrolese
salad-spoons! I say that my girl, my daughter, shall never help to fire
blank shot. I sent my paternal commands to her yesterday evening. Does
the wanton disobey her father and look up to a pair of rocket-headed
rascals like you? Apes! if she sings that song to-night, the ear of Italy
will be deaf to her for ever after. There's no engine to stir to-night;
all the locks are on it; she will send half-a-dozen milkings like you to
perdition, and there will be a circle of black blood about her name in
the traditions of the insurrection--do you hear? Have I cherished her for
that purpose? to have her dedicated to a brawl!'

Agostino fumed up and down the room in a confusion of apparel, savouring
his epithets and imaginative peeps while he stormed, to get a relish out
of something, as beseems the poetic temperament. The youths were silenced
by him; Carlo gladly.

'Troop!' said the old man, affecting to contrast his attire with theirs;
'two graces and a satyr never yet went together, and we'll not frighten
the classic Government of Milan. I go out alone. No, Signor Luciano, I am
not sworn to Count Medole. I see your sneer contain it. Ah! what a thing
is hurry to a mind like mine. It tears up the trees by the roots, floods
the land, darkens utterly my poor quiet universe. I was composing a
pastoral when you came in. Observe what you have done with my "Lovely Age
of Gold!"'

Agostino's transfigurement from lymphatic poet to fiery man of action,
lasted till his breath was short, when the necessity for taking a deep
draught of air induced him to fall back upon his idle irony. 'Heads, you
illustrious young gentlemen!--heads, not legs and arms, move a
conspiracy. Now, you--think what you will of it--are only legs and arms
in this business. And if you are insubordinate, you present the shocking
fabular spirit of the members of the body in revolt; which is not the
revolt we desire to see. I go to my daughter immediately, and we shall
all have a fat sleep for a week, while the Tedeschi hunt and stew and
exhaust their naughty suspicions. Do you know that the Pope's Mouth is
closed? We made it tell a big lie before it shut tight on its teeth--a
bad omen, I admit; but the idea was rapturously neat. Barto, the
sinner--be sure I throttle him for putting that blot on my swan; only,
not yet, not yet: he's a blind mole, a mad patriot; but, as I say, our
beast Barto drew an Austrian to the Mouth last night, and led the dog to
take a letter out of it, detailing the whole plot of tonight, and how men
will be stationed at the vicolo here, ready to burst out on the Corso,
and at the vicolo there, and elsewhere, all over the city, carrying fire
and sword; a systematic map of the plot. It was addressed to Count
Serabiglione--my boys! my boys! what do you think of it? Bravo! though
Barto is a deadly beast if he--'Agostino paused. 'Yes, he went too far!
too far!'

'Has he only gone too far, do you say?'

Carlo spoke sternly. His elder was provoked enough by his deadness of
enthusiasm, and that the boy should dare to stalk on a bare egoistical
lover's sentiment to be critical of him, Agostino, struck him as
monstrous. With the treachery of controlled rage, Agostino drew near him,
and whispered some sentences in his ear.

Agostino then called him his good Spartan boy for keeping brave
countenance. 'Wait till you comprehend women philosophically. All's
trouble with them till then. At La Scala tonight, my sons! We have
rehearsed the fiasco; the Tedeschi perform it. Off with you, that I may
go out alone!'

He seemed to think it an indubitable matter that he would find Vittoria
and bend her will.

Agostino had betrayed his weakness to the young men, who read him with
the keen eyes of a particular disapprobation. He delighted in the dark
web of intrigue, and believed himself to be no ordinary weaver of that
sunless work. It captured his imagination, filling his pride with a
mounting gas. Thus he had become allied to Medole on the one hand, and to
Barto Rizzo on the other. The young men read him shrewdly, but speaking
was useless.

Before Carlo parted from Luciano, he told him the burden of the whisper,
which had confirmed what he had heard on the Piazzi d'Armi. It was this:
Barto Rizzo, aware that Lieutenant Pierson was the bearer of despatches
from the Archduke in Milan to the marshal, then in Verona, had followed,
and by extraordinary effort reached Verona in advance; had there tricked
and waylaid him, and obtained, instead of despatches, a letter of recent
date, addressed to him by Vittoria, which compromised the insurrectionary
project.

'If that's the case, my Carlo!' said his friend, and shrugged, and spoke
in a very worldly fashion of the fair sex.

Carlo shook him off. For the rest of the day he was alone, shut up with
his journalistic pen. The pen traversed seas and continents like an old
hack to whom his master has thrown the reins. Apart from the desperate
perturbation of his soul, he thought of the Guidascarpi, whom he knew,
and was allied to, and of the Lenkensteins, whom he knew likewise, or had
known in the days when Giacomo Piaveni lived, and Bianca von Lenkenstein,
Laura's sister, visited among the people of her country. Countess Anna
and Countess Lena von Lenkenstein were the German beauties of Milan,
lively little women, and sweet. Between himself and Countess Lena there
had been tender dealings about the age when sweetmeats have lost their
attraction, and the charm has to be supplied. She was rich, passionate
for Austria, romantic concerning Italy, a vixen in temper, but with a
pearly light about her temples that kept her picture in his memory. And
besides, during those days when women are bountiful to us as Goddesses,
give they never so little, she had deigned to fondle hands with him; had
set the universe rocking with a visible heave of her bosom; jingled all
the keys of mystery; and had once (as to embalm herself in his
recollection), once had surrendered her lips to him. Countess Lena would
have espoused Ammiani, believing in her power to make an Austrian out of
such Italian material. The Piaveni revolt had stopped that and all their
intercourse by the division of the White Hand, as it was called;
otherwise, the hand of the corpse. Ammiani had known also Count Paul von
Lenkenstein. To his mind, death did not mean much, however pleasant life
might be: his father and his friend had gone to it gaily; and he himself
stood ready for the summons: but the contemplation of a domestic judicial
execution, which the Guidascarpi seemed to have done upon Count Paul,
affrighted him, and put an end to his temporary capacity for labour. He
felt as if a spent shot were striking on his ribs; it was the unknown
sensation of fear. Changeing, it became pity. 'Horrible deaths these
Austrians die!' he said.

For a while he regarded their lot as the hardest. A shaft of sunlight
like blazing brass warned him that the day dropped. He sent to his
mother's stables, and rode at a gallop round Milan, dining alone in one
of the common hotel gardens, where he was a stranger. A man may have good
nerve to face the scene which he is certain will be enacted, who shrinks
from an hour that is suspended in doubt. He was aware of the pallor and
chill of his looks, and it was no marvel to him when two sbirri in mufti,
foreign to Milan, set their eyes on him as they passed by to a vacant
table on the farther side of the pattering gold-fish pool, where he sat.
He divined that they might be in pursuit of the Guidascarpi, and alive to
read a troubled visage. 'Yet neither Rinaldo nor Angelo would look as I
do now,' he thought, perceiving that these men were judging by such
signs, and had their ideas. Democrat as he imagined himself to be, he
despised with a nobleman's contempt creatures who were so dead to the
character of men of birth as to suppose that they were pale and
remorseful after dealing a righteous blow, and that they trembled!
Ammiani looked at his hand: no force of his will could arrest its palsy.
The Guidascarpi were sons of Bologna. The stupidity of Italian sbirri is
proverbial, or a Milanese cavalier would have been astonished to conceive
himself mistaken for a Bolognese. He beckoned to the waiter, and said,
'Tell me what place has bred those two fellows on the other side of the
fountain.' After a side-glance of scrutiny, the reply was, 'Neapolitans.'
The waiter was ready to make an additional remark, but Ammiani nodded and
communed with a toothpick. He was sure that those Neapolitans were
recruits of the Bolognese Polizia; on the track of the Guidascarpi,
possibly. As he was not unlike Angelo Guidascarpi in figure, he became
uneasy lest they should blunder 'twixt him and La Scala; and the notion
of any human power stopping him short of that destination, made Ammiani's
hand perfectly firm. He drew on his gloves, and named the place whither
he was going, aloud. 'Excellency,' said the waiter, while taking up and
pretending to reckon the money for the bill: 'they have asked me whether
there are two Counts Ammiani in Milan.' Carlo's eyebrows started. 'Can
they be after me?' he thought, and said: 'Certainly; there is twice
anything in this world, and Milan is the epitome of it.'

Acting a part gave him Agostino's catching manner of speech. The waiter,
who knew him now, took this for an order to say 'Yes.' He had evidently a
respect for Ammiani's name: Carlo supposed that he was one of Milan's
fighting men. A sort of answer leading to 'Yes' by a circuit and the
assistance of the hearer, was conveyed to the, sbirri. They were true
Neapolitans quick to suspect, irresolute upon their suspicions. He was
soon aware that they were not to be feared more than are the general race
of bunglers, whom the Gods sometimes strangely favour. They perplexed
him: for why were they after him? and what had made them ask whether he
had a brother? He was followed, but not molested, on his way to La Scala.

Ammiani's heart was in full play as he looked at the curtain of the
stage. The Night of the Fifteenth had come. For the first few moments his
strong excitement fronting the curtain, amid a great host of hearts
thumping and quivering up in the smaller measures like his own, together
with the predisposing belief that this was to be a night of events,
stopped his consciousness that all had been thwarted; that there was
nothing but plot, plot, counterplot and tangle, disunion, silly subtlety,
jealousy, vanity, a direful congregation of antagonistic elements;
threads all loose, tongues wagging, pressure here, pressure there, like
an uncertain rage in the entrails of the undirected earth, and no master
hand on the spot to fuse and point the intense distracted forces.

The curtain, therefore, hung like any common opera-screen; big only with
the fate of the new prima donna. He was robbed even of the certainty that
Vittoria would appear. From the blank aspect of the curtain he turned to
the house, which was crowding fast, and was not like listless Milan about
to criticize an untried voice. The commonly empty boxes of the
aristocracy were full of occupants, and for a wonder the white uniforms
were not in excess, though they were to be seen. The first person whom
Ammiani met was Agostino, who spoke gruffly. Vittoria had been invisible
to him. Neither the maestro, nor the impresario, nor the waiting-woman
had heard of her. Uncertainty was behind the curtain, as well as in
front; but in front it was the uncertainty which is tipped with
expectation, hushing the usual noisy chatter, and setting a daylight of
eyes forward. Ammiani spied about the house, and caught sight of Laura
Piaveni with Colonel Corte by her side. The Lenkensteins were in the
Archduke's box. Antonio-Pericles, and the English lady and Captain
Gambier, were next to them. The appearance of a white uniform in his
mother's box over the stage caused Ammiani to shut up his glass. He was
making his way thither for the purpose of commencing the hostilities of
the night, when Countess Ammiani entered the lobby, and took her son's
arm with a grave face and a trembling touch.




CHAPTER XIX

THE PRIMA DONNA

'Whover is in my box is my guest,' said the countess, adding a convulsive
imperative pressure on Carlo's arm, to aid the meaning of her deep
underbreath. She was a woman who rarely exacted obedience, and she was
spontaneously obeyed. No questions could be put, no explanations given in
the crash, and they threaded on amid numerous greetings in a place where
Milanese society had habitually ceased to gather, and found itself now in
assembly with unconcealed sensations of strangeness. A card lay on the
table of the countess's private retiring-room: it bore the name of
General Pierson. She threw off her black lace scarf. 'Angelo Guidascarpi
is in Milan,' she said. 'He has killed one of the Lenkensteins, sword to
sword. He came to me an hour after you left; the sbirri were on his
track; he passed for my son. He is now under the charge of Barto Rizzo,
disguised; probably in this house. His brother is in the city. Keep the
cowl on your head as long as possible; if these hounds see and identify
you, there will be mischief.' She said no more, satisfied that she was
understood, but opening the door of the box, passed in, and returned a
stately acknowledgement of the salutations of two military officers.
Carlo likewise bent his head to them; it was like bending his knee, for
in the younger of the two intruders he recognized Lieutenant Pierson. The
countess accepted a vacated seat; the cavity of her ear accepted the
General's apologies. He informed her that he deeply regretted the
intrusion; he was under orders to be present at the opera, and to be as
near the stage as possible, the countess's box being designated. Her face
had the unalterable composure of a painted head upon an old canvas. The
General persisted in tendering excuses. She replied, 'It is best, when
one is too weak to resist, to submit to an outrage quietly.' General
Pierson at once took the position assigned to him; it was not an
agreeable one. Between Carlo and the lieutenant no attempt at
conversation was made.

The General addressed his nephew in English. 'Did you see the girl behind
the scenes, Wilfrid?'

The answer was 'No.'

'Pericles has her fast shut up in the Tyrol: the best habitat for her if
she objects to a whipping. Did you see Irma?'

'No; she has disappeared too.'

'Then I suppose we must make up our minds to an opera without head or
tail. As Pat said of the sack of potatoes, "'twould be a mighty fine
beast if it had them."'

The officers had taken refuge in their opera-glasses, and spoke while
gazing round the house.

'If neither this girl nor Irma is going to appear, there is no positive
necessity for my presence here,' said the General, reduced to excuse
himself to himself. 'I'll sit through the first scene and then beat a
retreat. I might be off at once; the affair looks harmless enough only,
you know, when there's nothing to see, you must report that you have seen
it, or your superiors are not satisfied.'

The lieutenant was less able to cover the irksomeness of his situation
with easy talk. His glance rested on Countess Len a von Lenkenstein, a
quick motion of whose hand made him say that he should go over to her.

'Very well,' said the General; 'be careful that you give no hint of this
horrible business. They will hear of it when they get home: time enough!'

Lieutenant Pierson touched at his sister's box on the way. She was very
excited, asked innumerable things,--whether there was danger? whether he
had a whole regiment at hand to protect peaceable persons? 'Otherwise,'
she said, 'I shall not be able to keep that man (her husband) in Italy
another week. He refused to stir out to-night, though we know that
nothing can happen. Your prima donna celestissima is out of harm's way.'

'Oh, she is safe,--ze minx'; cried Antonio-Pericles, laughing and
saluting the Duchess of Graatli, who presented herself at the front of
her box. Major de Pyrmont was behind her, and it delighted the Greek to
point them out to the English lady, with a simple intimation of the
character of their relationship, at which her curls shook sadly.

'Pardon, madame,' said Pericles. 'In Italy, a husband away, ze friend
takes title: it is no more.'

'It is very disgraceful,' she said.

'Ze morales, madame, suit ze sun.'

Captain Gambier left the box with Wilfrid, expressing in one sentence his
desire to fling Pericles over to the pit, and in another his belief that
an English friend, named Merthyr Powys, was in the house.

'He won't be in the city four-and-twenty hours,' said Wilfrid.

'Well; you'll keep your tongue silent.'

'By heavens! Gambier, if you knew the insults we have to submit to! The
temper of angels couldn't stand it. I'm sorry enough for these fellows,
with their confounded country, but it's desperate work to be civil to
them; upon my honour, it is! I wish they would stand up and let us have
it over. We have to bear more from the women than the men.'

'I leave you to cool,' said Gambier.

The delayed absence of the maestro from his post at the head of the
orchestra, where the musicians sat awaiting him, seemed to confirm a
rumour that was now circling among the audience, warning all to prepare
for a disappointment. His baton was brought in and laid on the book of
the new overture. When at last he was seen bearing onward through the
music-stands, a low murmur ran round. Rocco paid no heed to it. His
demeanour produced such satisfaction in the breast of Antonio-Pericles
that he rose, and was guilty of the barbarism of clapping his hands.
Meeting Ammiani in the lobby, he said, 'Come, my good friend, you shall
help me to pull Irma through to-night. She is vinegar--we will mix her
with oil. It is only for to-night, to save that poor Rocco's opera.'

'Irma!' said Ammiani; 'she is by this time in Tyrol. Your Irma will have
some difficulty in showing herself here within sixty hours.'

'How!' cried Pericles, amazed, and plucking after Carlo to stop him. 'I
bet you--'

'How much?'

'I bet you a thousand florins you do not see la Vittoria to-night.'

'Good. I bet you a thousand florins you do not see Irma.'

'No Vittoria, I say!'

'And I say, no Lazzeruola!'

Agostino, who was pacing the lobby, sent Pericles distraught with the
same tale of the rape of Irma. He rushed to Signora Piaveni's box and
heard it repeated. There he beheld, sitting in the background, an old
English acquaintance, with whom Captain Gambier was conversing.

'My dear Powys, you have come all the way from England to see your
favourite's first night. You will be shocked, sir. She has neglected her
Art. She is exiled, banished, sent away to study and to compose her
mind.'

'I think you are mistaken,' said Laura. 'You will see her almost
immediately.'

'Signora, pardon me; do I not know best?'

'You may have contrived badly.'

Pericles blinked and gnawed his moustache as if it were food for
patience.

'I would wager a milliard of francs,' he muttered. With absolute pathos
he related to Mr. Powys the aberrations of the divinely-gifted voice, the
wreck which Vittoria strove to become, and from which he alone was
striving to rescue her. He used abundant illustrations, coarse and
quaint, and was half hysterical; flashing a white fist and thumping the
long projection of his knee with a wolfish aspect. His grotesque
sincerity was little short of the shedding of tears.

'And your sister, my dear Powys?' he asked, as one returning to the
consideration of shadows.

'My sister accompanies me, but not to the opera.'

'For another campaign--hein?'

'To winter in Italy, at all events.'

Carlo Ammiani entered and embraced Merthyr Powys warmly. The Englishman
was at home among Italians: Pericles, feeling that he was not so, and
regarding them all as a community of fever-patients without hospital,
retired. To his mind it was the vilest treason, the grossest selfishness,
to conspire or to wink at the sacrifice of a voice like Vittoria's to
such a temporal matter as this, which they called patriotism. He looked
on it as one might look on the Hindoo drama of a Suttee. He saw in it
just that stupid action of a whole body of fanatics combined to
precipitate the devotion of a precious thing to extinction. And worse;
for life was common, and women and Hindoo widows were common; but a
Vittorian voice was but one in a generation--in a cycle of years. The
religious belief of the connoisseur extended to the devout conception
that her voice was a spiritual endowment, the casting of which priceless
jewel into the bloody ditch of patriots was far more tragic and
lamentable than any disastrous concourse of dedicated lives. He shook the
lobby with his tread, thinking of the great night this might have been
but for Vittoria's madness. The overture was coming to an end. By
tightening his arms across his chest he gained some outward composure,
and fixed his eyes upon the stage.

While sitting with Laura Piaveni and Merthyr Powys, Ammiani saw the
apparition of Captain Weisspriess in his mother's box. He forgot her
injunction, and hurried to her side, leaving the doors open. His passion
of anger spurned her admonishing grasp of his arm, and with his glove he
smote the Austrian officer on the face. Weisspriess plucked his sword
out; the house rose; there was a moment like that of a wild beast's show
of teeth. It passed: Captain Weisspriess withdrew in obedience to General
Pierson's command. The latter wrote on a slip of paper that two pieces of
artillery should be placed in position, and a squad of men about the
doors: he handed it out to Weisspriess.

'I hope,' the General said to Carlo, 'we shall be able to arrange things
for you without the interposition of the authorities.'

Carlo rejoined, 'General, he has the blood of our family on his hands. I
am ready.'

The General bowed. He glanced at the countess for a sign of maternal
weakness, saw none, and understood that a duel was down in the morrow's
bill of entertainments, as well as a riot possibly before dawn. The house
had revealed its temper in that short outburst, as a quivering of quick
lightning-flame betrays the forehead of the storm.

Countess Ammiani bade her son make fast the outer door. Her sedate
energies could barely control her agitation. In helping Angelo
Guidascarpi to evade the law, she had imperilled her son and herself.
Many of the Bolognese sbirri were in pursuit of Angelo. Some knew his
person; some did not; but if those two before whom she had identified
Angelo as being her son Carlo chanced now to be in the house, and to have
seen him, and heard his name, the risks were great and various.

'Do you know that handsome young Count Ammiani?' Countess Lena said to
Wilfrid. 'Perhaps you do not think him handsome? He was for a short time
a play-fellow of mine. He is more passionate than I am, and that does not
say a little; I warn you! Look how excited he is. No wonder. He
is--everybody knows it--he is la Vittoria's lover.'

Countess Lena uttered that sentence in Italian. The soft tongue sent it
like a coiling serpent through Wilfrid's veins. In English or in German
it would not have possessed the deadly meaning.

She may have done it purposely, for she and her sister Countess Anna
studied his face. The lifting of the curtain drew all eyes to the stage.

Rocco Ricci's baton struck for the opening of one of his spirited
choruses; a chorus of villagers, who sing to the burden that Happiness,
the aim of all humanity, has promised to visit the earth this day, that
she may witness the union of the noble lovers, Camillo and Camilla. Then
a shepherd sings a verse, with his hand stretched out to the impending
castle. There lives Count Orso: will he permit their festivities to pass
undisturbed? The puling voice is crushed by the chorus, which protests
that the heavens are above Count Orso. But another villager tells of
Orso's power, and hints at his misdeeds. The chorus rises in reply,
warning all that Count Orso has ears wherever three are congregated; the
villagers break apart and eye one another distrustfully, reuniting to the
song of Happiness before they disperse. Camillo enters solus. Montini, as
Camillo, enjoyed a warm reception; but as he advanced to deliver his
canzone, it was seen that he and Rocco interchanged glances of desperate
resignation. Camillo has had love passages with Michiella, Count Orso's
daughter, and does not hesitate to declare that he dreads her. The orphan
Camilla, who has been reared in yonder castle with her, as her sister, is
in danger during all these last minutes which still retain her from his
arms.

'If I should never see her--I who, like a poor ghost upon the shores of
the dead river, have been flattered with the thought that she would fall
upon my breast like a ray of the light of Elysium--if I should never see
her more!' The famous tenore threw his whole force into that outcry of
projected despair, and the house was moved by it: there were many in the
house who shared his apprehension of a foul mischance.

Thenceforward the opera and the Italian audience were as one. All that
was uttered had a meaning, and was sympathetically translated. Camilla
they perceived to be a grave burlesque with a core to it. The
quick-witted Italians caught up the interpretation in a flash. 'Count
Orso' Austria; 'Michiella' is Austria's spirit of intrigue; 'Camillo' is
indolent Italy, amorous Italy, Italy aimless; 'Camilla' is YOUNG ITALY!

Their eagerness for sight of Vittoria was now red-hot, and when Camillo
exclaimed 'She comes!' many rose from their seats.

A scrap of paper was handed to Antonio-Pericles from Captain Weisspriess,
saying briefly that he had found Irma in the carriage instead of the
little 'v,' thanked him for the joke, and had brought her back. Pericles
was therefore not surprised when Irma, as Michiella, came on, breathless,
and looking in an excitement of anger; he knew that he had been tricked.

Between Camillo and Michiella a scene of some vivacity
ensued--reproaches, threats of calamity, offers of returning endearment
upon her part; a display of courtly scorn upon his. Irma made her voice
claw at her quondam lover very finely; it was a voice with claws, that
entered the hearing sharp-edged, and left it plucking at its repose. She
was applauded relishingly when, after vainly wooing him, she turned aside
and said--

       'What change is this in one who like a reed
        Bent to my twisting hands? Does he recoil?
        Is this the hound whom I have used to feed
        With sops of vinegar and sops of oil?'

Michiella's further communications to the audience make it known that she
has allowed the progress toward the ceremonies of espousal between
Camillo and Camilla, in order, at the last moment, to show her power over
the youth and to plunge the detested Camilla into shame and wretchedness.

Camillo retires: Count Orso appears. There is a duet between father and
daughter: she confesses her passion for Camillo, and entreats her father
to stop the ceremony; and here the justice of the feelings of Italians,
even in their heat of blood, was noteworthy. Count Orso says that he
would willingly gratify his daughter, as it would gratify himself, but
that he must respect the law. 'The law is of your own making,' says
Michiella. 'Then, the more must I respect it,' Count Orso replies.

The audience gave Austria credit for that much in a short murmur.

Michiella's aside, 'Till anger seizes him I wait!' created laughter; it
came in contrast with an extraordinary pomposity of self-satisfaction
exhibited by Count Orso--the flower-faced, tun-bellied basso, Lebruno. It
was irresistible. He stood swollen out like a morning cock. To make it
further telling, he took off his yellow bonnet with a black-gloved hand,
and thumped the significant colours prominently on his immense chest--an
idea, not of Agostino's, but Lebruno's own; and Agostino cursed with
fury. Both he and Rocco knew that their joint labour would probably have
only one night's display of existence in the Austrian dominions, but they
grudged to Lebruno the chief merit of despatching it to the Shades.

The villagers are heard approaching. 'My father!' cries Michiella,
distractedly; 'the hour is near: it will be death to your daughter!
Imprison Camillo: I can bring twenty witnesses to prove that he has sworn
you are illegally the lord of this country. You will rue the marriage. Do
as you once did. Be bold in time. The arrow-head is on the string-cut the
string!'

'As I once did?' replies Orso with frown terrific, like a black crest. He
turns broadly and receives the chorus of countrymen in paternal
fashion--an admirably acted bit of grave burlesque.

By this time the German portion of the audience had, by one or other of
the senses, dimly divined that the opera was a shadow of something
concealed--thanks to the buffo-basso Lebruno. Doubtless they would have
seen this before, but that the Austrian censorship had seemed so absolute
a safeguard.

'My children! all are my children in this my gladsome realm!' Count Orso
says, and marches forth, after receiving the compliment of a choric song
in honour of his paternal government. Michiella follows him.

Then came the deep suspension of breath. For, as upon the midnight you
count bell-note after bell-note of the toiling hour, and know not in the
darkness whether there shall be one beyond it, so that you hang over an
abysm until Twelve is sounded, audience and actors gazed with equal
expectation at the path winding round from the castle, waiting for the
voice of the new prima donna.

'Mia madre!' It issued tremblingly faint. None could say who was to
appear.

Rocco Ricci struck twice with his baton, flung a radiant glance across
his shoulders for all friends, and there was joy in the house. Vittoria
stood before them.




CHAPTER XX

THE OPERA OF CAMILLA

She was dressed like a noble damsel from the hands of Titian. An Italian
audience cannot but be critical in their first glance at a prima donna,
for they are asked to do homage to a queen who is to be taken on her
merits: all that they have heard and have been taught to expect of her is
compared swiftly with the observation of her appearance and her manner.
She is crucially examined to discover defects. There is no boisterous
loyalty at the outset. And as it was now evident that Vittoria had chosen
to impersonate a significant character, her indications of method were
jealously watched for a sign of inequality, either in her, motion, or the
force of her eyes. So silent a reception might have seemed cruel in any
other case; though in all cases the candidate for laurels must, in common
with the criminal, go through the ordeal of justification. Men do not
heartily bow their heads until they have subjected the aspirant to some
personal contest, and find themselves overmatched. The senses, ready to
become so slavish in adulation and delight, are at the beginning more
exacting than the judgement, more imperious than the will. A figure in
amber and pale blue silk was seen, such as the great Venetian might have
sketched from his windows on a day when the Doge went forth to wed the
Adriatic a superb Italian head, with dark banded hair-braid, and dark
strong eyes under unabashed soft eyelids! She moved as, after long gazing
at a painting of a fair woman, we may have the vision of her moving from
the frame. It was an animated picture of ideal Italia. The sea of heads
right up to the highest walls fronted her glistening, and she was mute as
moonrise. A virgin who loosens a dove from her bosom does it with no
greater effort than Vittoria gave out her voice. The white bird flutters
rapidly; it circles and takes its flight. The voice seemed to be as
little the singer's own.

The theme was as follows:--Camilla has dreamed overnight that her lost
mother came to her bedside to bless her nuptials. Her mother was folded
in a black shroud, looking formless as death, like very death, save that
death sheds no tears. She wept, without change of voice, or mortal
shuddering, like one whose nature weeps: 'And with the forth-flowing of
her tears the knowledge of her features was revealed to me.' Behold the
Adige, the Mincio, Tiber, and the Po!--such great rivers were the tears
pouring from her eyes. She threw apart the shroud: her breasts and her
limbs were smooth and firm as those of an immortal Goddess: but breasts
and limbs showed the cruel handwriting of base men upon the body of a
martyred saint. The blood from those deep gashes sprang out at intervals,
mingling with her tears. She said:

'My child! were I a Goddess, my wounds would heal. Were I a Saint, I
should be in Paradise. I am no Goddess, and no Saint: yet I cannot die.
My wounds flow and my tears. My tears flow because of no fleshly anguish:
I pardon my enemies. My blood flows from my body, my tears from my soul.
They flow to wash out my shame. I have to expiate my soul's shame by my
body's shame. Oh! how shall I tell you what it is to walk among my
children unknown of them, though each day I bear the sun abroad like my
beating heart; each night the moon, like a heart with no blood in it. Sun
and moon they see, but not me! They know not their mother. I cry to God.
The answer of our God is this:--"Give to thy children one by one to drink
of thy mingled tears and blood:--then, if there is virtue in them, they
shall revive, thou shaft revive. If virtue is not in them, they and thou
shall continue prostrate, and the ox shall walk over you." From heaven's
high altar, O Camilla, my child, this silver sacramental cup was reached
to me. Gather my tears in it, fill it with my blood, and drink.'

The song had been massive in monotones, almost Gregorian in its severity
up to this point.

'I took the cup. I looked my mother in the face. I filled the cup from
the flowing of her tears, the flowing of her blood; and I drank!'

Vittoria sent this last phrase ringing out forcefully. From the
inveterate contralto of the interview, she rose to pure soprano in
describing her own action. 'And I drank,' was given on a descent of the
voice: the last note was in the minor key--it held the ear as if more
must follow: like a wail after a triumph of resolve. It was a masterpiece
of audacious dramatic musical genius addressed with sagacious cunning and
courage to the sympathizing audience present. The supposed incompleteness
kept them listening; the intentness sent that last falling (as it were,
broken) note travelling awakeningly through their minds. It is the effect
of the minor key to stir the hearts of men with this particular
suggestiveness. The house rose, Italians--and Germans together. Genius,
music, and enthusiasm break the line of nationalities. A rain of nosegays
fell about Vittoria; evvivas, bravas, shouts--all the outcries of
delirious men surrounded her. Men and women, even among the hardened
chorus, shook together and sobbed. 'Agostino!' and 'Rocco!' were called;
'Vittoria!' 'Vittoria!' above all, with increasing thunder, like a storm
rushing down a valley, striking in broad volume from rock to rock,
humming remote, and bursting up again in the face of the vale. Her name
was sung over and over--'Vittoria! Vittoria!' as if the mouths were
enamoured of it.

'Evviva la Vittoria a d' Italia!' was sung out from the body of the
house.

An echo replied--'"Italia a il premio della VITTORIA!"' a well-known
saying gloriously adapted, gloriously rescued from disgrace.

But the object and source of the tremendous frenzy stood like one frozen
by the revelation of the magic the secret of which she has studiously
mastered. A nosegay, the last of the tributary shower, discharged from a
distance, fell at her feet. She gave it unconsciously preference over the
rest, and picked it up. A little paper was fixed in the centre. She
opened it with a mechanical hand, thinking there might be patriotic
orders enclosed for her. It was a cheque for one thousand guineas, drawn
upon an English banker by the hand of Antonio-Pericles Agriolopoulos;
freshly drawn; the ink was only half dried, showing signs of the dictates
of a furious impulse. This dash of solid prose, and its convincing proof
that her Art had been successful, restored Vittoria's composure, though
not her early statuesque simplicity. Rocco gave an inquiring look to see
if she would repeat the song. She shook her head resolutely. Her opening
of the paper in the bouquet had quieted the general ebullition, and the
expression of her wish being seen, the chorus was permitted to usurp her
place. Agostino paced up and down the lobby, fearful that he had been
guilty of leading her to anticlimax.

He met Antonio-Pericles, and told him so; adding (for now the mask had
been seen through, and was useless any further) that he had not had the
heart to put back that vision of Camilla's mother to a later scene, lest
an interruption should come which would altogether preclude its being
heard. Pericles affected disdain of any success which Vittoria had yet
achieved. 'Wait for Act the Third,' he said; but his irritable
anxiousness to hold intercourse with every one, patriot or critic,
German, English, or Italian, betrayed what agitation of exultation
coursed in his veins. 'Aha!' was his commencement of a greeting; 'was
Antonio-Pericles wrong when he told you that he had a prima donna for you
to amaze all Christendom, and whose notes were safe and firm as the
footing of the angels up and down Jacob's ladder, my friends? Aha!'

'Do you see that your uncle is signalling to you?' Countess Lena said to
Wilfrid. He answered like a man in a mist, and looked neither at her nor
at the General, who, in default of his obedience to gestures, came
good-humouredly to the box, bringing Captain Weisspriess with him.

'We 're assisting at a pretty show,' he said.

'I am in love with her voice,' said Countess Anna.

'Ay; if it were only a matter of voices, countess.'

'I think that these good people require a trouncing,' said Captain
Weisspriess.

'Lieutenant Pierson is not of your opinion,' Countess Anna remarked.
Hearing his own name, Wilfrid turned to them with a weariness well acted,
but insufficiently to a jealous observation, for his eyes were quick
under the carelessly-dropped eyelids, and ranged keenly over the stage
while they were affecting to assist his fluent tongue.

Countess Lena levelled her opera-glass at Carlo Ammiani, and then placed
the glass in her sister's hand. Wilfrid drank deep of bitterness. 'That
is Vittoria's lover,' he thought; 'the lover of the Emilia who once loved
me!'

General Pierson may have noticed this by-play: he said to his nephew in
the brief military tone: 'Go out; see that the whole regiment is handy
about the house; station a dozen men, with a serjeant, at each of the
backdoors, and remain below. I very much mistake, or we shall have to
make a capture of this little woman to-night.'

'How on earth,' he resumed, while Wilfrid rose savagely and went out with
his stiffest bow, 'this opera was permitted to appear, I can't guess! A
child could see through it. The stupidity of our civil authorities passes
my understanding--it's a miracle! We have stringent orders not to take
any initiative, or I would stop the Fraulein Camilla from uttering
another note.'

'If you did that, I should be angry with you, General,' said Countess
Anna.

'And I also think the Government cannot do wrong,' Countess Lena joined
in.

The General contented himself by saying: 'Well, we shall see.'

Countess Lena talked to Captain Weisspriess in an undertone, referring to
what she called his dispute with Carlo Ammiani. The captain was extremely
playful in rejoinders.

'You iron man!' she exclaimed.

'Man of steel would be the better phrase,' her sister whispered.

'It will be an assassination, if it happens.'

'No officer can bear with an open insult, Lena.'

'I shall not sit and see harm done to my old playmate, Anna.'

'Beware of betraying yourself for one who detests you.'

A grand duo between Montini and Vittoria silenced all converse. Camilla
tells Camillo of her dream. He pledges his oath to discover her mother,
if alive; if dead, to avenge her. Camilla says she believes her mother is
in the dungeons of Count Orso's castle. The duo tasked Vittoria's
execution of florid passages; it gave evidence of her sound artistic
powers.

'I was a fool,' thought Antonio-Pericles; 'I flung my bouquet with the
herd. I was a fool! I lost my head!'

He tapped angrily at the little ink-flask in his coat-pocket. The first
act, after scenes between false Camillo and Michiella, ends with the
marriage of Camillo and Camilla;--a quatuor composed of Montini,
Vittoria, Irma, and Lebruno. Michiella is in despair; Count Orso is
profoundly sonorous with paternity and devotion to the law. He has
restored to Camilla a portion of her mother's sequestrated estates. A
portion of the remainder will be handed over to her when he has had
experience of her husband's good behaviour. The rest he considers legally
his own by right of (Treaties), and by right of possession and documents
his sword. Yonder castle he must keep. It is the key of all his other
territories. Without it, his position will be insecure. (Allusion to the
Austrian argument that the plains of Lombardy are the strategic defensive
lines of the Alps.)

Agostino, pursued by his terror of anticlimax, ran from the sight of
Vittoria when she was called, after the fall of the curtain. He made his
way to Rocco Ricci (who had given his bow to the public from his perch),
and found the maestro drinking Asti to counteract his natural excitement.
Rocco told Agostino, that up to the last moment, neither he nor any soul
behind the scenes knew Vittoria would be able to appear, except that she
had sent a note to him with a pledge to be in readiness for the call.
Irma had come flying in late, enraged, and in disorder, praying to take
Camilla's part; but Montini refused to act with the seconda donna as
prima donna. They had commenced the opera in uncertainty whether it could
go on beyond the situation where Camilla presents herself. 'I was
prepared to throw up my baton,' said Rocco, 'and publicly to charge the
Government with the rape of our prima donna. Irma I was ready to replace.
I could have filled that gap.' He spoke of Vittoria's triumph. Agostino's
face darkened. 'Ha!' said he, 'provided we don't fall flat, like your
Asti with the cork out. I should have preferred an enthusiasm a trifle
more progressive. The notion of travelling backwards is upon me forcibly,
after that tempest of acclamation.'

'Or do you think that you have put your best poetry in the first Act?'
Rocco suggested with malice.

'Not a bit of it!' Agostino repudiated the idea very angrily, and puffed
and puffed. Yet he said, 'I should not be lamenting if the opera were
stopped at once.'

'No!' cried Rocco; 'let us have our one night. I bargain for that. Medole
has played us false, but we go on. We are victims already, my Agostino.'

'But I do stipulate,' said Agostino, 'that my jewel is not to melt
herself in the cup to-night. I must see her. As it is, she is inevitably
down in the list for a week's or a month's incarceration.'

Antonio-Pericles had this, in his case, singular piece of delicacy, that
he refrained from the attempt to see Vittoria immediately after he had
flung his magnificent bouquet of treasure at her feet. In his
intoxication with the success which he had foreseen and cradled to its
apogee, he was now reckless of any consequences. He felt ready to take
patriotic Italy in his arms, provided that it would succeed as Vittoria
had done, and on the spot. Her singing of the severe phrases of the
opening chant, or hymn, had turned the man, and for a time had put a new
heart in him. The consolation was his also, that he had rewarded it the
most splendidly--as it were, in golden italics of praise; so that her
forgiveness of his disinterested endeavour to transplant her was certain,
and perhaps her future implicit obedience or allegiance bought. Meeting
General Pierson, the latter rallied him.

'Why, my fine Pericles, your scheme to get this girl out of the way was
capitally concerted. My only fear is that on another occasion the
Government will take another view of it and you.'

Pericles shrugged. 'The Gods, my dear General, decree. I did my best to
lay a case before them; that is all.'

'Ah, well! I am of opinion you will not lay many other cases before the
Gods who rule in Milan.'

'I have helped them to a good opera.'

'Are you aware that this opera consists entirely of political allusions?'

General Pierson spoke offensively, as the urbane Austrian military
permitted themselves to do upon occasion when addressing the conquered or
civilians.

'To me,' returned Pericles, 'an opera--it is music. I know no more.'

'You are responsible for it,' said the General, harshly. 'It was taken
upon trust from you.'

'Brutal Austrians!' Pericles murmured. 'And you do not think much of her
voice, General?'

'Pretty fair, sir.'

'What wonder she does not care to open her throat to these swine!'
thought the changed Greek.

Vittoria's door was shut to Agostino. No voice within gave answer. He
tried the lock of the door, and departed. She sat in a stupor. It was
harder for her to make a second appearance than it was to make the first,
when the shameful suspicion cruelly attached to her had helped to balance
her steps with rebellious pride; and more, the great collected wave of
her ambitious years of girlhood had cast her forward to the spot, as in a
last effort for consummation. Now that she had won the public voice
(love, her heart called it) her eyes looked inward; she meditated upon
what she had to do, and coughed nervously. She frightened herself with
her coughing, and shivered at the prospect of again going forward in the
great nakedness of stagelights and thirsting eyes. And, moreover, she was
not strengthened by the character of the music and the poetry of the
second Act:--a knowledge of its somewhat inferior quality may possibly
have been at the root of Agostino's dread of an anticlimax. The seconda
donna had the chief part in it--notably an aria (Rocco had given it to
her in compassion) that suited Irma's pure shrieks and the tragic
skeleton she could be. Vittoria knew how low she was sinking when she
found her soul in the shallows of a sort of jealousy of Irma. For a
little space she lost all intimacy with herself; she looked at her face
in the glass and swallowed water, thinking that she had strained a dream
and confused her brain with it. The silence of her solitary room coming
upon the blaze of light the colour and clamour of the house, and the
strange remembrance of the recent impersonation of an ideal character,
smote her with the sense of her having fallen from a mighty eminence, and
that she lay in the dust. All those incense-breathing flowers heaped on
her table seemed poisonous, and reproached her as a delusion. She sat
crouching alone till her tirewomen called; horrible talkative things! her
own familiar maid Giacinta being the worst to bear with.

Now, Michiella, by making love to Leonardo, Camillo's associate,
discovers that Camillo is conspiring against her father. She utters to
Leonardo very pleasant promises indeed, if he will betray his friend.
Leonardo, a wavering baritono, complains that love should ask for any
return save in the coin of the empire of love. He is seduced, and invokes
a malediction upon his head should he accomplish what he has sworn to
perform. Camilla reposes perfect confidence in this wretch, and brings
her more doubtful husband to be of her mind.

Camillo and Camilla agree to wear the mask of a dissipated couple. They
throw their mansion open; dicing, betting, intriguing, revellings,
maskings, commence. Michiella is courted ardently by Camillo; Camilla
trifles with Leonardo and with Count Orso alternately. Jealous again of
Camilla, Michiella warns and threatens Leonardo; but she becomes
Camillo's dupe, partly from returning love, partly from desire for
vengeance on her rival. Camilla persuades Orso to discard Michiella. The
infatuated count waxes as the personification of portentous burlesque; he
is having everything his own way. The acting throughout--owing to the
real gravity of the vast basso Lebruno's burlesque, and Vittoria's
archness--was that of high comedy with a lurid background. Vittoria
showed an enchanting spirit of humour. She sang one bewitching barcarole
that set the house in rocking motion. There was such melancholy in her
heart that she cast herself into all the flippancy with abandonment. The
Act was weak in too distinctly revealing the finger of the poetic
political squib at a point here and there. The temptation to do it of an
Agostino, who had no other outlet, had been irresistible, and he sat
moaning over his artistic depravity, now that it stared him in the face.
Applause scarcely consoled him, and it was with humiliation of mind that
he acknowledged his debt to the music and the singers, and how little
they owed to him.

Now Camillo is pleased to receive the ardent passion of his wife, and the
masking suits his taste, but it is the vice of his character that he
cannot act to any degree subordinately in concert; he insists upon
positive headship!--(allusion to an Italian weakness for sovereignties;
it passed unobserved, and chuckled bitterly over his excess of subtlety).
Camillo cannot leave the scheming to her. He pursues Michiella to subdue
her with blandishments. Reproaches cease upon her part. There is a duo
between them. They exchange the silver keys, which express absolute
intimacy, and give mutual freedom of access. Camillo can now secrete his
followers in the castle; Michiella can enter Camilla's blue-room, and
ravage her caskets for treasonable correspondence. Artfully she bids him
reflect on what she is forfeiting for him; and so helps him to put aside
the thought of that which he also may be imperilling.

Irma's shrill crescendos and octave-leaps, assisted by her peculiar
attitudes of strangulation, came out well in this scene. The murmurs
concerning the sour privileges to be granted by a Lazzeruola were
inaudible. But there has been a witness to the stipulation. The
ever-shifting baritono, from behind a pillar, has joined in with an aside
phrase here and there. Leonardo discovers that his fealty to Camilla is
reviving. He determines to watch over her. Camillo now tosses a perfumed
handkerchief under his nose, and inhales the coxcombical incense of the
idea that he will do all without Camilla's aid, to surprise her; thereby
teaching her to know him to be somewhat a hero. She has played her part
so thoroughly that he can choose to fancy her a giddy person; he remarks
upon the frequent instances of girls who in their girlhood were wild
dreamers becoming after marriage wild wives. His followers assemble, that
he may take advantage of the exchanged key of silver. He is moved to seek
one embrace of Camilla before the conflict:--she is beautiful! There was
never such beauty as hers! He goes to her in the fittest preparation for
the pangs of jealousy. But he has not been foremost in practising the
uses of silver keys. Michiella, having first arranged with her father to
be before Camillo's doors at a certain hour with men-at-arms, is in
Camilla's private chamber, with her hand upon a pregnant box of ebony
wood, when she is startled by a noise, and slips into concealment.
Leonardo bursts through the casement window. Camilla then appears.
Leonardo stretches the tips of his fingers out to her; on his knees
confesses his guilt and warns her. Camillo comes in. Thrusting herself
before him, Michiella points to the stricken couple 'See! it is to show
you this that I am here.' Behold occasion for a grand quatuor!

While confessing his guilt to Camilla, Leonardo has excused it by an
emphatic delineation of Michiella's magic sway over him. (Leonardo, in
fact, is your small modern Italian Machiavelli, overmatched in cunning,
for the reason that he is always at a last moment the victim of his poor
bit of heart or honesty: he is devoid of the inspiration of great
patriotic aims.) If Michiella (Austrian intrigue) has any love, it is for
such a tool. She cannot afford to lose him. She pleads for him; and, as
Camilla is silent on his account, the cynical magnanimity of Camillo is
predisposed to spare a fangless snake. Michiella withdraws him from the
naked sword to the back of the stage. The terrible repudiation scene
ensues, in which Camillo casts off his wife. If it was a puzzle to one
Italian half of the audience, the other comprehended it perfectly, and
with rapture. It was thus that YOUNG ITALY had too often been treated by
the compromising, merely discontented, dallying aristocracy. Camilla
cries to him, 'Have faith in me! have faith in me! have faith in me!'
That is the sole answer to his accusations, his threats of eternal
loathing, and generally blustering sublimities. She cannot defend
herself; she only knows her innocence. He is inexorable, being the guilty
one of the two. Turning from him with crossed arms, Camilla sings:

'Mother! it is my fate that I should know Thy miseries, and in thy
footprints go. Grief treads the starry places of the earth: In thy long
track I feel who gave me birth. I am alone; a wife without a lord; My
home is with the stranger--home abhorr'd!--But that I trust to meet thy
spirit there. Mother of Sorrows! joy thou canst not share: So let me
wander in among the tombs, Among the cypresses and the withered blooms.
Thy soul is with dead suns: there let me be; A silent thing that shares
thy veil with thee.'

The wonderful viol-like trembling of the contralto tones thrilled through
the house. It was the highest homage to Vittoria that no longer any
shouts arose nothing but a prolonged murmur, as when one tells another a
tale of deep emotion, and all exclamations, all ulterior thoughts, all
gathered tenderness of sensibility, are reserved for the close, are seen
heaping for the close, like waters above a dam. The flattery of beholding
a great assembly of human creatures bound glittering in wizard
subservience to the voice of one soul, belongs to the artist, and is the
cantatrice's glory, pre-eminent over whatever poor glory this world
gives. She felt it, but she felt it as something apart. Within her was
the struggle of Italy calling to Italy: Italy's shame, her sadness, her
tortures, her quenchless hope, and the view of Freedom. It sent her blood
about her body in rebellious volumes. Once it completely strangled her
notes. She dropped the ball of her chin in her throat; paused without
ceremony; and recovered herself. Vittoria had too severe an artistic
instinct to court reality; and as much as she could she from that moment
corrected the underlinings of Agostino's libretto.

On the other hand, Irma fell into all his traps, and painted her Austrian
heart with a prodigal waste of colour and frank energy:

          'Now Leonardo is my tool:
          Camilla is my slave:
          And she I hate goes forth to cool
          Her rage beyond the wave.
                  Joy! joy!
     Paid am I in full coin for my caressing;
     I take, but give nought, ere the priestly blessing.'

A subtle distinction. She insists upon her reverence for the priestly
(papistical) blessing, while she confides her determination to have it
dispensed with in Camilla's case. Irma's known sympathies with the
Austrian uniform seasoned the ludicrousness of many of the double-edged
verses which she sang or declaimed in recitative. The irony of applauding
her vehemently was irresistible.

Camilla is charged with conspiracy, and proved guilty by her own
admission.

The Act ends with the entry of Count Orso and his force; conspirators
overawed; Camilla repudiated; Count Orso imperially just; Leonardo
chagrined; Camillo pardoned; Michiella triumphant. Camillo sacrifices his
wife for safety. He holds her estates; and therefore Count Orso, whose
respect for law causes him to have a keen eye for matrimonial alliances,
is now paternally willing, and even anxious to bestow Michiella upon him
when the Pontifical divorce can be obtained; so that the long-coveted
fruitful acres may be in the family. The chorus sings a song of praise to
Hymen, the 'builder of great Houses.' Camilla goes forth into exile. The
word was not spoken, but the mention of 'bread of strangers, strange
faces, cold climes,' said sufficient.

'It is a question whether we ought to sit still and see a firebrand
flashed in our faces,' General Pierson remarked as the curtain fell. He
was talking to Major de Pyrmont outside the Duchess of Graatli's box. Two
General officers joined them, and presently Count Serabiglione, with his
courtly semi-ironical smile, on whom they straightway turned their backs.
The insult was happily unseen, and the count caressed his shaven chin and
smiled himself onward. The point for the officers to decide was, whether
they dared offend an enthusiastic house--the fiery core of the population
of Milan--by putting a stop to the opera before worse should come.

Their own views were entirely military; but they were paralyzed by the
recent pseudo-liberalistic despatches from Vienna; and agreed, with some
malice in their shrugs, that the odium might as well be left on the
shoulders of the bureau which had examined the libretto. In fact, they
saw that there would be rank peril in attempting to arrest the course of
things within the walls of the house.

'The temper this people is changeing oddly,' said General Pierson. Major
de Pyrmont listened awhile to what they had to say, and returned to the
duchess. Amalia wrote these lines to Laura:--'If she sings that song she
is to be seized on the wings of the stage. I order my carriage to be in
readiness to take her whither she should have gone last night. Do you
contrive only her escape from the house. Georges de P. will aid you. I
adore the naughty rebel!'

Major de Pyrmont delivered the missive at Laura's box. He went down to
the duchess's chasseur, and gave him certain commands and money for a
journey. Looking about, he beheld Wilfrid, who implored him to take his
place for two minutes. De Pyrmont laughed. 'She is superb, my friend.
Come up with me. I am going behind the scenes. The unfortunate impresario
is a ruined man; let us both condole with him. It is possible that he has
children, and children like bread.'

Wilfrid was linking his arm to De Pyrmont's, when, with a vivid
recollection of old times, he glanced at his uniform with Vittoria's
eyes. 'She would spit at me!' he muttered, and dropped behind.

Up in her room Vittoria held council with Rocco, Agostino, and the
impresario, Salvolo, who was partly their dupe. Salvolo had laid a
freshly-written injunction from General Pierson before her, bidding him
to exclude the chief solo parts from the Third Act, and to bring it
speedily to a termination. His case was, that he had been ready to
forfeit much if a rising followed; but that simply to beard the
authorities was madness. He stated his case by no means as a pleader,
although the impression made on him by the prima donna's success caused
his urgency to be civil.

'Strike out what you please,' said Vittoria.

Agostino smote her with a forefinger. 'Rogue! you deserve an imperial
crown. You have been educated for monarchy. You are ready enough to
dispense with what you don't care for, and what is not your own.'

Much of the time was lost by Agostino's dispute with Salvolo. They
haggled and wrangled laughingly over this and that printed aria, but it
was a deplorable deception of the unhappy man; and with Vittoria's
stronger resolve to sing the incendiary song, the more necessary it was
for her to have her soul clear of deceit. She said, 'Signor Salvolo, you
have been very kind to me, and I would do nothing to hurt your interests.
I suppose you must suffer for being an Italian, like the rest of us. The
song I mean to sing is not written or printed. What is in the book cannot
harm you, for the censorship has passed it; and surely I alone am
responsible for singing what is not in the book--I and the maestro. He
supports me. We have both taken precautions' (she smiled) 'to secure our
property. If you are despoiled, we will share with you. And believe, oh!
in God's name, believe that you will not suffer to no purpose!'

Salvolo started from her in a horror of amazement. He declared that he
had been miserably deceived and entrapped. He threatened to send the
company to their homes forthwith. 'Dare to!' said Agostino; and to judge
by the temper of the house, it was only too certain, that if he did so,
La Scala would be a wrecked tenement in the eye of morning. But Agostino
backed his entreaty to her to abjure that song; Rocco gave way, and half
shyly requested her to think of prudence. She remembered Laura, and
Carlo, and her poor little frightened foreign mother. Her intense ideal
conception of her duty sank and danced within her brain as the pilot-star
dances on the bows of a tossing vessel. All were against her, as the
tempest is against the ship. Even light above (by which I would image
that which she could appeal to pleading in behalf of the wisdom of her
obstinate will) was dyed black in the sweeping obscuration; she failed to
recollect a sentence that was to be said to vindicate her settled course.
Her sole idea was her holding her country by an unseen thread, and of the
everlasting welfare of Italy being jeopardized if she relaxed her hold.
Simple obstinacy of will sustained her.

You mariners batten down the hatchways when the heavens are dark and seas
are angry. Vittoria, with the same faith in her instinct, shut the
avenues to her senses--would see nothing, hear nothing. The impresario's
figure of despair touched her later. Giacinta drove him forth in the act
of smiting his forehead with both hands. She did the same for Agostino
and Rocco, who were not demonstrative.

They knew that by this time the agents of the Government were in all
probability ransacking their rooms, and confiscating their goods.

'Is your piano hired?' quoth the former.

'No,' said the latter, 'are your slippers?'

They went their separate ways, laughing.




CHAPTER XXI

THE THIRD ACT

The libretto of the Third Act was steeped in the sentiment of Young
Italy. I wish that I could pipe to your mind's hearing any notion of the
fine music of Rocco Ricci, and touch you to feel the revelations which
were in this new voice. Rocco and Vittoria gave the verses a life that
cannot belong to them now; yet, as they contain much of the vital spirit
of the revolt, they may assist you to some idea of the faith animating
its heads, and may serve to justify this history.

Rocco's music in the opera of Camilla had been sprung from a fresh
Italian well; neither the elegiac-melodious, nor the sensuous-lyrical,
nor the joyous buffo; it was severe as an old masterpiece, with veins of
buoyant liveliness threading it, and with sufficient distinctness of
melody to enrapture those who like to suck the sugarplums of sound. He
would indeed have favoured the public with more sweet things, but
Vittoria, for whom the opera was composed, and who had been at his elbow,
was young, and stern in her devotion to an ideal of classical music that
should elevate and never stoop to seduce or to flatter thoughtless
hearers. Her taste had directed as her voice had inspired the opera. Her
voice belonged to the order of the simply great voices, and was a royal
voice among them. Pure without attenuation, passionate without
contortion, when once heard it exacted absolute confidence. On this night
her theme and her impersonation were adventitious introductions, but
there were passages when her artistic pre-eminence and the sovereign
fulness and fire of her singing struck a note of grateful remembered
delight. This is what the great voice does for us. It rarely astonishes
our ears. It illumines our souls, as you see the lightning make the
unintelligible craving darkness leap into long mountain ridges, and
twisting vales, and spires of cities, and inner recesses of light within
light, rose-like, toward a central core of violet heat.

At the rising of the curtain the knights of the plains, Rudolfo,
Romualdo, Arnoldo, and others, who were conspiring to overthrow Count
Orso at the time when Camillo's folly ruined all, assemble to deplore
Camilla's banishment, and show, bereft of her, their helplessness and
indecision. They utter contempt of Camillo, who is this day to be
Pontifically divorced from his wife to espouse the detested Michiella.
His taste is not admired.

They pass off. Camillo appears. He is, as he knows, little better than a
pensioner in Count Orso's household. He holds his lands on sufferance.
His faculties are paralyzed. He is on the first smooth shoulder-slope of
the cataract. He knows that not only was his jealousy of his wife
groundless, but it was forced by a spleenful pride. What is there to do?
Nothing, save resignedly to prepare for his divorce from the conspiratrix
Camilla and espousals with Michiella. The cup is bitter, and his song is
mournful. He does the rarest thing a man will do in such a
predicament--he acknowledges that he is going to get his deserts. The
faithfulness and purity of Camilla have struck his inner consciousness.
He knows not where she may be. He has secretly sent messengers in all
directions to seek her, and recover her, and obtain her pardon: in vain.
It is as well, perhaps, that he should never see her more. Accursed, he
has cast off his sweetest friend. The craven heart could never beat in
unison with hers.

'She is in the darkness: I am in the light. I am a blot upon the light;
she is light in the darkness.'

Montini poured this out with so fine a sentiment that the impatience of
the house for sight of its heroine was quieted. But Irma and Lebruno came
forward barely under tolerance.

'We might as well be thumping a tambourine,' said Lebruno, during a
caress. Irma bit her underlip with mortification. Their notes fell flat
as bullets against a wall.

This circumstance aroused the ire of Antonio-Pericles against the
libretto and revolutionists. 'I perceive,' he said, grinning savagely,
'it has come to be a concert, not an opera; it is a musical harangue in
the marketplace. Illusion goes: it is politics here!'

Carlo Ammiani was sitting with his mother and Luciano breathlessly
awaiting the entrance of Vittoria. The inner box-door was rudely shaken:
beneath it a slip of paper had been thrust. He read a warning to him to
quit the house instantly. Luciano and his mother both counselled his
departure. The detestable initials 'B. R.,' and the one word 'Sbirri,'
revealed who had warned, and what was the danger. His friend's advice and
the commands of his mother failed to move him. 'When I have seen her
safe; not before,' he said.

Countess Ammiani addressed Luciano: 'This is a young man's love for a
woman.'

'The woman is worth it,' Luciano replied.

'No woman is worth the sacrifice of a mother and of a relative.'

'Dearest countess,' said Luciano, 'look at the pit; it's a cauldron. We
shall get him out presently, have no fear: there will soon be hubbub
enough to let Lucifer escape unseen. If nothing is done to-night, he and
I will be off to the Lago di Garda to-morrow morning, and fish and shoot,
and talk with Catullus.'

The countess gazed on her son with sorrowful sternness. His eyes had
taken that bright glazed look which is an indication of frozen brain and
turbulent heart--madness that sane men enamoured can be struck by. She
knew there was no appeal to it.

A very dull continuous sound, like that of an angry swarm, or more like a
rapid mufed thrumming of wires, was heard. The audience had caught view
of a brown-coated soldier at one of the wings. The curious Croat had
merely gratified a desire to have a glance at the semicircle of crowded
heads; he withdrew his own, but not before he had awakened the wild beast
in the throng. Yet a little while and the roar of the beasts would have
burst out. It was thought that Vittoria had been seized or interdicted
from appearing. Conspirators--the knights of the plains--meet: Rudolfos,
Romualdos, Arnoldos, and others,--so that you know Camilla is not idle.
She comes on in the great scene which closes the opera.

It is the banqueting hall of the castle. The Pontifical divorce is spread
upon the table. Courtly friends, guards, and a choric bridal company,
form a circle.

'I have obtained it,' says Count Orso: 'but at a cost.'

Leonardo, wavering eternally, lets us know that it is weighted with a
proviso: IF Camilla shall not present herself within a certain term, this
being the last day of it. Camillo comes forward. Too late, he has
perceived his faults and weakness. He has cast his beloved from his arms
to clasp them on despair. The choric bridal company gives intervening
strophes. Cavaliers enter. 'Look at them well,' says Leonardo. They are
the knights of the plains. 'They have come to mock me,' Camillo exclaims,
and avoids them.

Leonardo, Michiella, and Camillo now sing a trio that is tricuspidato, or
a three-pointed manner of declaring their divergent sentiments in
harmony. The fast-gathering cavaliers lend masculine character to the
choric refrains at every interval. Leonardo plucks Michiella entreatingly
by the arm. She spurns him. He has served her; she needs him no more; but
she will recommend him in other quarters, and bids him to seek them. 'I
will give thee a collar for thy neck, marked "Faithful." It is the utmost
I can do for thy species.' Leonardo thinks that he is insulted, but there
is a vestige of doubt in him still. 'She is so fair! she dissembles so
magnificently ever!' She has previously told him that she is acting a
part, as Camilla did. Irma had shed all her hair from a golden circlet
about her temples, barbarian-wise. Some Hunnish grandeur pertained to her
appearance, and partly excused the infatuated wretch who shivered at her
disdain and exulted over her beauty and artfulness.

In the midst of the chorus there is one veiled figure and one voice
distinguishable. This voice outlives the rest at every strophe, and
contrives to add a supplemental antiphonic phrase that recalls in turn
the favourite melodies of the opera. Camillo hears it, but takes it as a
delusion of impassioned memory and a mere theme for the recurring
melodious utterance of his regrets. Michiella hears it. She chimes with
the third notes of Camillo's solo to inform us of her suspicions that
they have a serpent among them. Leonardo hears it. The trio is formed.
Count Orso, without hearing it, makes a quatuor by inviting the bridal
couple to go through the necessary formalities. The chorus changes its
measure to one of hymeneals. The unknown voice closes it ominously with
three bars in the minor key. Michiella stalks close around the rank
singers like an enraged daughter of Attila. Stopping in front of the
veiled figure, she says: 'Why is it thou wearest the black veil at my
nuptials?'

'Because my time of mourning is not yet ended.'

'Thou standest the shadow in my happiness.'

'The bright sun will have its shadow.'

'I desire that all rejoice this day.'

'My hour of rejoicing approaches.'

'Wilt thou unveil?'

'Dost thou ask to look the storm in the face?'

'Wilt thou unveil?'

'Art thou hungry for the lightning?'

'I bid thee unveil, woman!'

Michiella's ringing shriek of command produces no response.

'It is she!' cries Michiella, from a contracted bosom; smiting it with
clenched hands.

'Swift to the signatures. O rival! what bitterness hast thou come hither
to taste.'

Camilla sings aside: 'If yet my husband loves me and is true.'

Count Orso exclaims: 'Let trumpets sound for the commencement of the
festivities. The lord of his country may slumber while his people dance
and drink!'

Trumpets flourish. Witnesses are called about the table. Camillo, pen in
hand, prepares for the supreme act. Leonardo at one wing watches the
eagerness of Michiella. The chorus chants to a muted measure of suspense,
while Camillo dips pen in ink.

'She is away from me: she scorns me: she is lost to me. Life without
honour is the life of swine. Union without love is the yoke of savage
beasts. O me miserable! Can the heavens themselves plumb the depth of my
degradation?'

Count Orso permits a half-tone of paternal severity to point his kindly
hint that time is passing. When he was young, he says, in the broad and
benevolently frisky manner, he would have signed ere the eye of the
maiden twinkled her affirmative, or the goose had shed its quill.

Camillo still trifles. Then he dashes the pen to earth.

'Never! I have but one wife. Our marriage is irrevocable. The dishonoured
man is the everlasting outcast. What are earthly possessions to me, if
within myself shame faces me? Let all go. Though I have lost Camilla, I
will be worthy of her. Not a pen no pen; it is the sword that I must
write with. Strike, O count! I am here: I stand alone. By the edge of
this sword, I swear that never deed of mine shall rob Camilla of her
heritage; though I die the death, she shall not weep for a craven!'

The multitude break away from Camilla--veiled no more, but radiant; fresh
as a star that issues through corrupting vapours, and with her voice at a
starry pitch in its clear ascendency:

       'Tear up the insufferable scroll!--
        O thou, my lover and my soul!
        It is the Sword that reunites;
        The Pen that our perdition writes.'

She is folded in her husband's arms.

Michiella fronts them, horrid of aspect:--
       'Accurst divorced one! dost thou dare
        To lie in shameless fondness there?
        Abandoned! on thy lying brow
        Thy name shall be imprinted now.'

Camilla parts from her husband's embrace:

       'My name is one I do not fear;
        'Tis one that thou wouldst shrink to hear.
        Go, cool thy penitential fires,
        Thou creature, foul with base desires!'

          CAMILLO (facing Count Orso).

       'The choice is thine!'

          COUNT ORSO (draws).

       'The choice is made!'

          CHORUS (narrowing its circle).

       'Familiar is that naked blade.
        Of others, of himself, the fate
        How swift 'tis Provocation's mate!'

          MICHIELLA (torn with jealous rage).

       'Yea; I could smite her on the face.
        Father, first read the thing's disgrace.
        I grudge them, honourable death.
        Put poison in their latest breath!'

          ORSO (his left arm extended).

       'You twain are sundered: hear with awe
        The judgement of the Source of Law.'

          CAMILLA (smiling confidently).

       'Not such, when I was at the Source,
        It said to me;--but take thy course.'

          ORSO (astounded).

       'Thither thy steps were bent?'

          MICHIELLA (spurning verbal controversy).

                  'She feigns!
        A thousand swords are in my veins.
        Friends! soldiers I strike them down, the pair!'

          CAMILLO (on guard, clasping his wife).

       ''Tis well! I cry, to all we share.
        Yea, life or death, 'tis well! 'tis well!'

          MICHIELLA (stamps her foot).

        'My heart 's a vessel tossed on hell!'

          LEONARDO (aside).

        'Not in glad nuptials ends the day.'

          ORSO (to Camilla).

        'What is thy purpose with us?--say!'

          CAMILLA (lowly).
       'Unto my Father I have crossed
        For tidings of my Mother lost.'

          ORSO.
        'Thy mother dead!'

          CAMILLA.
                  'She lives!'

          MICHIELLA.
                  'Thou liest!
        The tablets of the tomb defiest!
        The Fates denounce, the Furies chase
        The wretch who lies in Reason's face.'

          CAMILLA.
       'Fly, then; for we are match'd to try
        Which is the idiot, thou or I'

          MICHIELLA.
        Graceless Camilla!'

          ORSO
               'Senseless girl!
        I cherished thee a precious pearl,
        And almost owned thee child of mine.'

          CAMILLA.
       'Thou kept'st me like a gem, to shine,
        Careless that I of blood am made;
        No longer be the end delay'd.
        'Tis time to prove I have a heart--
        Forth from these walls of mine depart!
        The ghosts within them are disturb'd
        Go forth, and let thy wrath be curb'd,
        For I am strong: Camillo's truth
        Has arm'd the visions of our youth.
        Our union by the Head Supreme
        Is blest: our severance was the dream.
        We who have drunk of blood and tears,
        Knew nothing of a mortal's fears.
        Life is as Death until the strife
        In our just cause makes Death as Life.'

          ORSO
        ''Tis madness?'

          LEONARDO.
             'Is it madness?'

          CAMILLA.
                         'Men!
        'Tis Reason, but beyond your ken.
        There lives a light that none can view
        Whose thoughts are brutish:--seen by few,
        The few have therefore light divine
        Their visions are God's legions!--sign,
        I give you; for we stand alone,
        And you are frozen to the bone.
        Your palsied hands refuse their swords.
        A sharper edge is in my words,
        A deadlier wound is in my cry.
        Yea, tho' you slay us, do we die?
        In forcing us to bear the worst,
        You made of us Immortals first.
        Away! and trouble not my sight.'

   Chorus of Cavaliers: RUDOLFO, ROMUALDO, ARNOLDO, and others.

       'She moves us with an angel's might.
        What if his host outnumber ours!
        'Tis heaven that gives victorious powers.'

   [They draw their steel. ORSO, simulating gratitude for their
   devotion to him, addresses them as to pacify their friendly ardour.]

          MICHIELLA to LEONARDO (supplicating).
       'Ever my friend I shall I appeal
        In vain to see thy flashing steel?'

          LEONARDO (finally resolved).
       'Traitress! pray, rather, it may rest,
        Or its first home will be thy breast.'

          Chorus of Bridal Company.
       'The flowers from bright Aurora's head
        We pluck'd to strew a happy bed,
        Shall they be dipp'd in blood ere night?
        Woe to the nuptials! woe the sight!'

Rudolfo, Romualdo, Arnoldo, and the others, advance toward Camillo.
Michiella calls to them encouragingly that it were well for the deed to
be done by their hands. They bid Camillo to direct their lifted swords
upon his enemies. Leonardo joins them. Count Orso, after a burst of
upbraidings, accepts Camillo's offer of peace, and gives his bond to quit
the castle. Michiella, gazing savagely at Camilla, entreats her for an
utterance of her triumphant scorn. She assures Camilla that she knows her
feelings accurately.

'Now you think that I am overwhelmed; that I shall have a restless night,
and lie, after all my crying's over, with my hair spread out on my
pillow, on either side my face, like green moss of a withered waterfall:
you think you will bestow a little serpent of a gift from my stolen
treasures to comfort me. You will comfort me with a lock of Camillo's
hair, that I may have it on my breast to-night, and dream, and wail, and
writhe, and curse the air I breathe, and clasp the abominable emptiness
like a thousand Camillos. Speak!'

The dagger is seen gleaming up Michiella's wrist; she steps on in a bony
triangle, faced for mischief: a savage Hunnish woman, with the hair of a
Goddess--the figure of a cat taking to its forepaws. Close upon Camilla
she towers in her whole height, and crying thrice, swift as the assassin
trebles his blow, 'Speak,' to Camilla, who is fronting her mildly, she
raises her arm, and the stilet flashes into Camilla's bosom.

        'Die then, and outrage me no more.'

Camilla staggers to her husband. Camillo receives her falling. Michiella,
seized by Leonardo, presents a stiffened shape of vengeance with fierce
white eyes and dagger aloft. There are many shouts, and there is silence.

          CAMILLA, supported by CAMILLO.
       'If this is death, it is not hard to bear.
        Your handkerchief drinks up my blood so fast
        It seems to love it. Threads of my own hair
        Are woven in it. 'Tis the one I cast
        That midnight from my window, when you stood
        Alone, and heaven seemed to love you so!
        I did not think to wet it with my blood
        When next I tossed it to my love below.'

          CAMILLO (cherishing her).
       'Camilla, pity! say you will not die.
        Your voice is like a soul lost in the sky.'

          CAMILLA.

       'I know not if my soul has flown; I know
        My body is a weight I cannot raise:
        My voice between them issues, and
        I go Upon a journey of uncounted days.
        Forgetfulness is like a closing sea;
        But you are very bright above me still.
        My life I give as it was given to me
        I enter on a darkness wide and chill.'

          CAMILLO.
       'O noble heart! a million fires consume
        The hateful hand that sends you to your doom.'

          CAMILLA.
       'There is an end to joy: there is no end
        To striving; therefore ever let us strive
        In purity that shall the toil befriend,
        And keep our poor mortality alive.
        I hang upon the boundaries like light
        Along the hills when downward goes the day
        I feel the silent creeping up of night.
        For you, my husband, lies a flaming way.'

          CAMILLO.
       'I lose your eyes: I lose your voice: 'tis faint.
        Ah, Christ! see the fallen eyelids of a saint.'

          CAMILLA.
       'Our life is but a little holding, lent
        To do a mighty labour: we are one
        With heaven and the stars when it is spent
        To serve God's aim: else die we with the sun.'

She sinks. Camillo droops his head above her.

The house was hushed as at a veritable death-scene. It was more like a
cathedral service than an operatic pageant. Agostino had done his best to
put the heart of the creed of his Chief into these last verses. Rocco's
music floated them in solemn measures, and Vittoria had been careful to
articulate throughout the sacred monotony so that their full meaning
should be taken.

In the printed book of the libretto a chorus of cavaliers, followed by
one harmless verse of Camilla's adieux to them, and to her husband and
life, concluded the opera.

'Let her stop at that--it's enough!--and she shall be untouched,' said
General Pierson to Antonio-Pericles.

'I have information, as you know, that an extremely impudent song is
coming.'

The General saw Wilfrid hanging about the lobby, in flagrant disobedience
to orders. Rebuking his nephew with a frown, he commanded the lieutenant
to make his way round to the stage and see that the curtain was dropped
according to the printed book.

'Off, mon Dieu! off!' Pericles speeded him; adding in English, 'Shall she
taste prison-damp, zat voice is killed.'

The chorus of cavaliers was a lamentation: the keynote being despair:
ordinary libretto verses.

Camilla's eyes unclose. She struggles to be lifted, and, raised on
Camillo's arm, she sings as if with the last pulsation of her voice,
softly resonant in its rich contralto. She pardons Michiella. She tells
Count Orso that when he has extinguished his appetite for dominion, he
will enjoy an unknown pleasure in the friendship of his neighbours.
Repeating that her mother lives, and will some day kneel by her
daughter's grave--not mournfully, but in beatitude--she utters her adieu
to all.

At the moment of her doing so, Montini whispered in Vittoria's ear. She
looked up and beheld the downward curl of the curtain. There was
confusion at the wings: Croats were visible to the audience. Carlo
Ammiani and Luciano Romara jumped on the stage; a dozen of the noble
youths of Milan streamed across the boards to either wing, and caught the
curtain descending. The whole house had risen insurgent with cries of
'Vittoria.' The curtain-ropes were in the hands of the Croats, but Carlo,
Luciano, and their fellows held the curtain aloft at arm's length at each
side of her. She was seen, and she sang, and the house listened.

The Italians present, one and all, rose up reverently and murmured the
refrain. Many of the aristocracy would, doubtless, have preferred that
this public declaration of the plain enigma should not have rung forth to
carry them on the popular current; and some might have sympathized with
the insane grin which distorted the features of Antonio-Pericles, when he
beheld illusion wantonly destroyed, and the opera reduced to be a mere
vehicle for a fulmination of politics. But the general enthusiasm was
too tremendous to permit of individual protestations. To sit, when the
nation was standing, was to be a German. Nor, indeed, was there an
Italian in the house who would willingly have consented to see Vittoria
silenced, now that she had chosen to defy the Tedeschi from the boards of
La Scala. The fascination of her voice extended even over the German
division of the audience. They, with the Italians, said: 'Hear her!
hear her!' The curtain was agitated at the wings, but in the centre it
was kept above Vittoria's head by the uplifted arms of the twelve young
men:--

       'I cannot count the years,
        That you will drink, like me,
        The cup of blood and tears,
        Ere she to you appears:--
        Italia, Italia shall be free!'

So the great name was out, and its enemies had heard it.

       'You dedicate your lives
        To her, and you will be
        The food on which she thrives,
        Till her great day arrives
        Italia, Italia shall be free!

       'She asks you but for faith!
        Your faith in her takes she
        As draughts of heaven's breath,
        Amid defeat and death:--
        Italia, Italia shall be free!'

The prima donna was not acting exhaustion when sinking lower in Montini's
arms. Her bosom rose and sank quickly, and she gave the terminating
verse:--

       'I enter the black boat
        Upon the wide grey sea,
        Where all her set suns float;
        Thence hear my voice remote
        Italia, Italia shall be free!'

The curtain dropped.




CHAPTER XXII

WILFRID COMES FORWARD

An order for the immediate arrest of Vittoria was brought round to the
stage at the fall of the curtain by Captain Weisspriess, and delivered by
him on the stage to the officer commanding, a pothered lieutenant of
Croats, whose first proceeding was dictated by the military instinct to
get his men in line, and who was utterly devoid of any subsequent idea.
The thunder of the house on the other side of the curtain was enough to
disconcert a youngster such as he was; nor have the subalterns of Croat
regiments a very signal reputation for efficiency in the Austrian
Service. Vittoria stood among her supporters apart; pale, and 'only very
thirsty,' as she told the enthusiastic youths who pressed near her, and
implored her to have no fear. Carlo was on her right hand; Luciano on her
left. They kept her from going off to her room. Montini was despatched to
fetch her maid Giacinta with cloak and hood for her mistress. The young
lieutenant of Croats drew his sword, but hesitated. Weisspriess, Wilfrid,
and Major de Pyrmont were at one wing, between the Italian gentlemen and
the soldiery. The operatic company had fallen into the background, or
stood crowding the side places of exit. Vittoria's name was being shouted
with that angry, sea-like, horrid monotony of iteration which is more
suggestive of menacing impatience and the positive will of the people,
than varied, sharp, imperative calls. The people had got the lion in
their throats. One shriek from her would bring them, like a torrent, on
the boards, as the officers well knew; and every second's delay in
executing the orders of the General added to the difficulty of their
position. The lieutenant of Croats strode up to Weisspriess and Wilfrid,
who were discussing a plan of action vehemently; while, amid hubbub and
argument, De Pyrmont studied Vittoria's features through his opera-glass,
with an admirable simple languor.

Wilfrid turned back to him, and De Pyrmont, without altering the level of
his glass, said, 'She's as cool as a lemon-ice. That girl will be a
mother of heroes. To have volcanic fire and the mastery of her nerves at
the same time, is something prodigious. She is magnificent. Take a peep
at her. I suspect that the rascal at her right is seizing his occasion to
plant a trifle or so in her memory--the animal! It's just the moment, and
he knows it.'

De Pyrmont looked at Wilfrid's face.

'Have I hit you anywhere accidentally?' he asked, for the face had grown
dead-white.

'Be my friend, for heaven's sake!' was the choking answer. 'Save her! Get
her away! She is an old acquaintance of mine--of mine, in England. Do;
or I shall have to break my sword.'

'You know her? and you don't go over to her?' said De Pyrmont.

'I--yes, she knows me.'

'Then, why not present yourself?'

'Get her away. Talk Weisspriess down. He is for seizing her at all
hazards. It 's madness to provoke a conflict. Just listen to the house! I
may be broken, but save her I will. De Pyrmont, on my honour, I will
stand by you for ever if you will help me to get her away.'

'To suggest my need in the hour of your own is not a bad notion,' said
the cool Frenchman. 'What plan have you?'

Wilfrid struck his forehead miserably.

'Stop Lieutenant Zettlisch. Don't let him go up to her. Don't--'

De Pyrmont beheld in astonishment that a speechlessness such as affects
condemned wretches in the supreme last minutes of existence had come upon
the Englishman.

'I'm afraid yours is a bad case,' he said; 'and the worst of it is, it's
just the case women have no compassion for. Here comes a parlementaire
from the opposite camp. Let's hear him.'

It was Luciano Romara. He stood before them to request that the curtain
should be raised. The officers debated together, and deemed it prudent to
yield consent.

Luciano stipulated further that the soldiers were to be withdrawn.

'On one wing, or on both wings?' said Captain Weisspriess, twinkling eyes
oblique.

'Out of the house,' said Luciano.

The officers laughed.

'You must confess,' said De Pyrmont, affably, 'that though the drum does
issue command to the horse, it scarcely thinks of doing so after a rent
in the skin has shown its emptiness. Can you suppose that we are likely
to run when we see you empty-handed? These things are matters of
calculation.'

'It is for you to calculate correctly,' said Luciano.

As he spoke, a first surge of the exasperated house broke upon the stage
and smote the curtain, which burst into white zigzags, as it were a
breast stricken with panic.

Giacinta came running in to her mistress, and cloaked and hooded her
hurriedly.

Enamoured; impassioned, Ammiani murmured in Vittoria's ear: 'My own
soul!'

She replied: 'My lover!'

So their first love-speech was interchanged with Italian simplicity, and
made a divine circle about them in the storm.

Luciano returned to his party to inform them that they held the key of
the emergency.

'Stick fast,' he said. 'None of you move. Whoever takes the first step
takes the false step; I see that.'

'We have no arms, Luciano.'

'We have the people behind us.'

There was a fiercer tempest in the body of the house, and, on a sudden,
silence. Men who had invaded the stage joined the Italian guard
surrounding Vittoria, telling that the lights had been extinguished; and
then came the muffled uproar of universal confusion. Some were for
handing her down into the orchestra, and getting her out through the
general vomitorium, but Carlo and Luciano held her firmly by them. The
theatre was a rageing darkness; and there was barely a light on the
stage. 'Santa Maria!' cried Giacinta, 'how dreadful that steel does look
in the dark! I wish our sweet boys would cry louder.' Her mistress,
almost laughing, bade her keep close, and be still. 'Oh! this must be
like being at sea,' the poor creature whined, stopping her ears and
shutting her eyes. Vittoria was in a thick gathering of her defenders;
she could just hear that a parley was going on between Luciano and the
Austrians. Luciano made his way back to her. 'Quick!' he said; 'nothing
cows a mob like darkness. One of these officers tells me he knows you,
and gives his word of honour--he's an Englishman--to conduct you out:
come.'

Vittoria placed her hands in Carlo's one instant. Luciano cleared a space
for them. She heard a low English voice.

'You do not recognize me? There is no time to lose. You had another name
once, and I have had the honour to call you by it.'

'Are you an Austrian?' she exclaimed, and Carlo felt that she was
shrinking back.

'I am the Wilfrid Pole whom you knew. You are entrusted to my charge; I
have sworn to conduct you to the doors in safety, whatever it may cost
me.'

Vittoria looked at him mournfully. Her eyes filled with tears. 'The night
is spoiled for me!' she murmured.

'Emilia!'

'That is not my name.'

'I know you by no other. Have mercy on me. I would do anything in the
world to serve you.'

Major de Pyrmont came up to him and touched his arm. He said briefly: 'We
shall have a collision, to a certainty, unless the people hear from one
of her set that she is out of the house.'

Wilfrid requested her to confide her hand to him.

'My hand is engaged,' she said.

Bowing ceremoniously, Wilfrid passed on, and Vittoria, with Carlo and
Luciano and her maid Giacinta, followed between files of bayonets through
the dusky passages, and downstairs into the night air.

Vittoria spoke in Carlo's ear: 'I have been unkind to him. I had a great
affection for him in England.'

'Thank him; thank him,' said Carlo.

She quitted her lover's side and went up to Wilfrid with a shyly extended
hand. A carriage was drawn up by the kerbstone; the doors of it were
open. She had barely made a word intelligible; when Major de Pyrmont
pointed to some officers approaching. 'Get her out of the way while
there's time,' he said in French to Luciano. 'This is her carriage.
Swiftly, gentlemen, or she's lost.'

Giacinta read his meaning by signs, and caught her mistress by the
sleeve, using force. She and Major de Pyrmont placed Vittoria,
bewildered, in the carriage; De Pyrmont shut the door, and signalled to
the coachman. Vittoria thrust her head out for a last look at her lover,
and beheld him with the arms of dark-clothed men upon him. La Scala was
pouring forth its occupants in struggling roaring shoals from every door.
Her outcry returned to her deadened in the rapid rolling of the carriage
across the lighted Piazza. Giacinta had to hold her down with all her
might. Great clamour was for one moment heard by them, and then a rushing
voicelessness. Giacinta screamed to the coachman till she was exhausted.
Vittoria sank shuddering on the lap of her maid, hiding her face that she
might plunge out of recollection.

The lightnings shot across her brain, but wrote no legible thing; the
scenes of the opera lost their outlines as in a white heat of fire. She
tried to weep, and vainly asked her heart for tears, that this dry
dreadful blind misery of mere sensation might be washed out of her, and
leave her mind clear to grapple with evil; and then, as the lurid breaks
come in a storm-driven night sky, she had the picture of her lover in the
hands of enemies, and of Wilfrid in the white uniform; the torment of her
living passion, the mockery of her passion by-gone. Recollection, when it
came back, overwhelmed her; she swayed from recollection to oblivion, and
was like a caged wild thing. Giacinta had to be as a mother with her. The
poor trembling girl, who had begun to perceive that the carriage was
bearing them to some unknown destination, tore open the bands of her
corset and drew her mistress's head against the full warmth of her bosom,
rocked her, and moaned over her, mixing comfort and lamentation in one
offering, and so contrived to draw the tears out from her, a storm of
tears; not fitfully hysterical, but tears that poured a black veil over
the eyeballs, and fell steadily streaming. Once subdued by the weakness,
Vittoria's nature melted; she shook piteously with weeping; she
remembered Laura's words, and thought of what she had done, in terror and
remorse, and tried to ask if the people would be fighting now, but could
not. Laura seemed to stand before her like a Fury stretching her finger
at the dear brave men whom she had hurled upon the bayonets and the guns.
It was an unendurable anguish. Giacinta was compelled to let her cry, and
had to reflect upon their present situation unaided. They had passed the
city gates. Voices on the coachman's box had given German pass-words. She
would have screamed then had not the carriage seemed to her a sanctuary
from such creatures as foreign soldiers, whitecoats; so she cowered on.
They were in the starry open country, on the high-road between the
vine-hung mulberry trees. She held the precious head of her mistress,
praying the Saints that strength would soon come to her to talk of their
plight, or chatter a little comfortingly at least; and but for the
singular sweetness which it shot thrilling to her woman's heart, she
would have been fretted when Vittoria, after one long-drawn wavering sob,
turned her lips to the bared warm breast, and put a little kiss upon it,
and slept.




CHAPTER XXIII

FIRST HOURS OF THE FLIGHT

Vittoria slept on like an outworn child, while Giacinta nodded over her,
and started, and wondered what embowelled mountain they might be passing
through, so cold was the air and thick the darkness; and wondered more at
the old face of dawn, which appeared to know nothing of her agitation.
But morning was better than night, and she ceased counting over her sins
forward and backward; adding comments on them, excusing some and
admitting the turpitude of others, with 'Oh! I was naughty, padre mio! I
was naughty--she huddled them all into one of memory's spare sacks, and
tied the neck of it, that they should keep safe for her father-confessor.
At such times, after a tumult of the blood, women have tender delight in
one another's beauty. Giacinta doted on the marble cheek, upturned on her
lap, with the black unbound locks slipping across it; the braid of the
coronal of hair loosening; the chance flitting movement of the pearly
little dimple that lay at the edge of the bow of the joined lips, like
the cradling hollow of a dream. At whiles it would twitch; yet the dear
eyelids continued sealed.

Looking at shut eyelids when you love the eyes beneath, is more or less a
teazing mystery that draws down your mouth to kiss them. Their lashes
seem to answer you in some way with infantine provocation; and fine
eyelashes upon a face bent sideways, suggest a kind of internal smiling.
Giacinta looked till she could bear it no longer; she kissed the cheek,
and crooned over it, gladdened by a sense of jealous possession when she
thought of the adored thing her mistress had been overnight. One of her
hugs awoke Vittoria, who said, 'Shut my window, mother,' and slept again
fast. Giacinta saw that they were nearer to the mountains.
Mountain-shadows were thrown out, and long lank shadows of cypresses that
climbed up reddish-yellow undulations, told of the sun coming. The sun
threw a blaze of light into the carriage. He shone like a good friend,
and helped Giacinta think, as she had already been disposed to imagine,
that the machinery by which they had been caught out of Milan was
amicable magic after all, and not to be screamed at. The sound medicine
of sleep and sunlight was restoring livelier colour to her mistress.
Giacinta hushed her now, but Vittoria's eyes opened, and settled on her,
full of repose.

'What are you thinking about?' she asked.

'Signorina, my own, I was thinking whether those people I see on the
hill-sides are as fond of coffee as I am.'

Vittoria sat up and tumbled questions out headlong, pressing her eyes and
gathering her senses; she shook with a few convulsions, but shed no
tears. It was rather the discomfort of their position than any vestige of
alarm which prompted Giacinta to project her head and interrogate the
coachman and chasseur. She drew back, saying, 'Holy Virgin! they are
Germans. We are to stop in half-an-hour.' With that she put her hands to
use in arranging and smoothing Vittoria's hair and dress--the dress of
Camilla--of which triumphant heroine Vittoria felt herself an odd little
ghost now. She changed her seat that she might look back on Milan. A
letter was spied fastened with a pin to one of the cushions. She opened
it, and read in pencil writing:

'Go quietly. You have done all that you could do for good or for ill. The
carriage will take you to a safe place, where you will soon see your
friends and hear the news. Wait till you reach Meran. You will see a
friend from England. Avoid the lion's jaw a second time. Here you
compromise everybody. Submit, or your friends will take you for a mad
girl. Be satisfied. It is an Austrian who rescues you. Think yourself no
longer appointed to put match to powder. Drown yourself if a second
frenzy comes. I feel I could still love your body if the obstinate soul
were out of it. You know who it is that writes. I might sign "Michiella"
to this: I have a sympathy with her anger at the provoking Camilla.
Addio! From La Scala.'

The lines read as if Laura were uttering them. Wrapping her cloak across
the silken opera garb, Vittoria leaned back passively until the carriage
stopped at a village inn, where Giacinta made speedy arrangements to
satisfy as far as possible her mistress's queer predilection for bathing
her whole person daily in cold water. The household service of the inn
recovered from the effort to assist her sufficiently to produce hot
coffee and sweet bread, and new green-streaked stracchino, the cheese of
the district, which was the morning meal of the fugitives. Giacinta, who
had never been so thirsty in her life, became intemperately refreshed,
and was seized by the fatal desire to do something: to do what she could
not tell; but chancing to see that her mistress had silken slippers on
her feet, she protested loudly that stouter foot-gear should be obtained
for her, and ran out to circulate inquiries concerning a shoemaker who
might have a pair of country overshoes for sale. She returned to say that
the coachman and his comrade, the German chasseur, were drinking and
watering their horses, and were not going to start until after a rest of
two hours, and that she proposed to walk to a small Bergamasc town within
a couple of miles of the village, where the shoes could be obtained, and
perhaps a stuff to replace the silken dress. Receiving consent, Giacinta
whispered, 'A man outside wishes to speak to you, signorina. Don't be
frightened. He pounced on me at the end of the village, and had as little
breath to speak as a boy in love. He was behind us all last night on the
carriage. He mentioned you by name. He is quite commonly dressed, but
he's a gallant gentleman, and exactly like our Signor Carlo. My dearest
lady, he'll be company for you while I am absent. May I beckon him to
come into the room?'

Vittoria supposed at once that this was a smoothing of the way for the
entrance of her lover and her joy. She stood up, letting all her strength
go that he might the more justly take her and cherish her. But it was not
Carlo who entered. So dead fell her broken hope that her face was
repellent with the effort she made to support herself. He said, 'I
address the Signorina Vittoria. I am a relative of Countess Ammiani. My
name is Angelo Guidascarpi. Last night I was evading the sbirri in this
disguise by the private door of La Scala, from which I expected Carlo to
come forth. I saw him seized in mistake for me. I jumped up on the empty
box-seat behind your carriage. Before we entered the village I let myself
down. If I am seen and recognized, I am lost, and great evil will befall
Countess Ammiani and her son; but if they are unable to confront Carlo
and me, my escape ensures his safety!

'What can I do?' said Vittoria.

He replied, 'Shall I answer you by telling you what I have done?'

'You need not, signore!

'Enough that I want to keep a sword fresh for my country. I am at your
mercy, signorina; and I am without anxiety. I heard the chasseur saying
at the door of La Scala that he had the night-pass for the city gates and
orders for the Tyrol. Once in Tyrol I leap into Switzerland. I should
have remained in Milan, but nothing will be done there yet, and quiet
cities are not homes for me.'

Vittoria began to admit the existence of his likeness to her lover,
though it seemed to her a guilty weakness that she should see it.

'Will nothing be done in Milan?' was her first eager question.

'Nothing, signorina, or I should be there, and safe!'

'What, signore, do you require me to help you in?'

'Say that I am your servant.'

'And take you with me?'

'Such is my petition.'

'Is the case very urgent?'

'Hardly more, as regards myself, than a sword lost to Italy if I am
discovered. But, signorina, from what Countess Ammiani has told me, I
believe that you will some day be my relative likewise. Therefore I
appeal not only to a charitable lady, but to one of my own family.'

Vittoria reddened. 'All that I can do I will do.'

Angelo had to assure her that Carlo's release was certain the moment his
identity was established. She breathed gladly, saying, 'I wonder at it
all very much. I do not know where they are carrying me, but I think I am
in friendly hands. I owe you a duty. You will permit me to call you Beppo
till our journey ends.'

They were attracted to the windows by a noise of a horseman drawing rein
under it, whose imperious shout for the innkeeper betrayed the soldier's
habit of exacting prompt obedience from civilians, though there was no
military character in his attire. The innkeeper and his wife came out to
the summons, and then both made way for the chasseur in attendance on
Vittoria. With this man the cavalier conversed.

'Have you had food?' said Vittoria. 'I have some money that will serve
for both of us three days. Go, and eat and drink. Pay for us both.'

She gave him her purse. He received it with a grave servitorial bow, and
retired.

Soon after the chasseur brought up a message. Herr Johannes requested
that he might have the honour of presenting his homage to her: it was
imperative that he should see her. She nodded. Her first glance at Herr
Johannes assured her of his being one of the officers whom she had seen
on the stage last night, and she prepared to act her part. Herr Johannes
desired her to recall to mind his introduction to her by the Signor
Antonio-Pericles at the house of the maestro Rocco Ricci. 'It is true;
pardon me,' said Vittoria.

He informed her that she had surpassed herself at the opera; so much so
that he and many other Germans had been completely conquered by her.
Hearing, he said, that she was to be pursued, he took horse and galloped
all night on the road toward Schloss Sonnenberg, whither, as it had been
whispered to him, she was flying, in order to counsel her to lie 'perdu'
for a short space, and subsequently to conduct her to the schloss of the
amiable duchess. Vittoria thanked him, but stated humbly that she
preferred to travel alone. He declared that it was impossible: that she
was precious to the world of Art, and must on no account be allowed to
run into peril. Vittoria tried to assert her will; she found it unstrung.
She thought besides that this disguised officer, with the ill-looking
eyes running into one, might easily, since he had heard her, be a devotee
of her voice; and it flattered her yet more to imagine him as a capture
from the enemy--a vanquished subservient Austrian. She had seen him come
on horseback; he had evidently followed her; and he knew what she now
understood must be her destination.

Moreover, Laura had underlined 'it is an Austrian who rescues you.' This
man perchance was the Austrian. His precise manner of speech demanded an
extreme repugnance, if it was to be resisted; Vittoria's reliance upon
her own natural fortitude was much too secure for her to encourage the
physical revulsions which certain hard faces of men create in the hearts
of young women.

'Was all quiet in Milan?' she asked.

'Quiet as a pillow,' he said.

'And will continue to be?'

'Not a doubt of it.'

'Why is there not a doubt of it, signore?'

'You beat us Germans on one field. On the other you have no chance. But
you must lose no time. The Croats are on your track. I have ordered out
the carriage.'

The mention of the Croats struck her fugitive senses with a panic.

'I must wait for my maid,' she said, attempting to deliberate.

'Ha! you have a maid: of course you have! Where is your maid?'

'She ought to have returned by this time. If not, she is on the road.'

'On the road? Good; we will pick up the maid on the road. We have not a
minute to spare. Lady, I am your obsequious servant. Hasten out, I beg of
you. I was taught at my school that minutes are not to be wasted. Those
Croats have been drinking and what not on the way, or they would have
been here before this. You can't rely on Italian innkeepers to conceal
you.'

'Signore, are you a man of honour?'

'Illustrious lady, I am.'

She listened simply to the response without giving heed to the
prodigality of gesture. The necessity for flight now that Milan was
announced as lying quiet, had become her sole thought. Angelo was
standing by the carriage.

'What man is this?' said Herr Johannes, frowning.

'He is my servant,' said Vittoria.

'My dear good lady, you told me your servant was a maid. This will never
do. We can't have him.'

'Excuse me, signore, I never travel without him.'

'Travel! This is not a case of travelling, but running; and when you run,
if you are in earnest about it, you must fling away your baggage and
arms.'

Herr Johannes tossed out his moustache to right and left, and stamped his
foot. He insisted that the man should be left behind.

'Off, sir! back to Milan, or elsewhere,' he cried.

'Beppo, mount on the box,' said Vittoria.

Her command was instantly obeyed. Herr Johannes looked her in the face.
'You are very decided, my dear lady.' He seemed to have lost his own
decision, but handing Vittoria in, he drew a long cigar from his
breastpocket, lit it, and mounted beside the coachman. The chasseur had
disappeared.

Vittoria entreated that a general look-out should be kept for Giacinta.
The road was straight up an ascent, and she had no fear that her maid
would not be seen. Presently there was a view of the violet domes of a
city. 'Is it Bergamo?--is it Brescia?' she longed to ask, thinking of her
Bergamasc and Brescian friends, and of those two places famous for the
bravery of their sons: one being especially dear to her, as the
birthplace of a genius of melody, whose blood was in her veins. 'Did he
look on these mulberry trees?--did he look on these green-grassed
valleys?--did he hear these falling waters?' she asked herself, and
closed her spirit with reverential thoughts of him and with his music.
She saw sadly that they were turning from the city. A little ball of
paper was shot into her lap. She opened it and read: 'An officer of the
cavalry.--Beppo.' She put her hand out of the window to signify that she
was awake to the situation. Her anxiety, however, began to fret. No sight
of Giacinta was to be had in any direction. Her mistress commenced
chiding the absent garrulous creature, and did so until she pitied her,
when she accused herself of cowardice, for she was incapable of calling
out to the coachman to stop. The rapid motion subdued such energy as
remained to her, and she willingly allowed her hurried feelings to rest
on the faces of rocks impending over long ravines, and of perched old
castles and white villas and sub-Alpine herds. She burst from the
fascination as from a dream, but only to fall into it again, reproaching
her weakness, and saying, 'What a thing am I!' When she did make her
voice heard by Herr Johannes and the coachman, she was nervous and
ashamed, and met the equivocating pacification of the reply with an
assent half-way, though she was far from comprehending the consolation
she supposed that it was meant to convey. She put out her hand to
communicate with Beppo. Another ball of pencilled writing answered to it.
She read: 'Keep watch on this Austrian. Your maid is two hours in the
rear. Refuse to be separated from me. My life is at your
service.--Beppo.'

Vittoria made her final effort to get a resolve of some sort; ending it
with a compassionate exclamation over poor Giacinta. The girl could soon
find her way back to Milan. On the other hand, the farther from Milan,
the less the danger to Carlo's relative, in whom she now perceived a
stronger likeness to her lover. She sank back in the carriage and closed
her eyes. Though she smiled at the vanity of forcing sleep in this way,
sleep came. Her healthy frame seized its natural medicine to rebuild her
after the fever of recent days.

She slept till the rocks were purple, and rose-purple mists were in the
valleys. The stopping of the carriage aroused her. They were at the
threshold of a large wayside hostelry, fronting a slope of forest and a
plunging brook. Whitecoats in all attitudes leaned about the door; she
beheld the inner court full of them. Herr Johannes was ready to hand her
to the ground. He said: 'You have nothing to fear. These fellows are on
the march to Cremona. Perhaps it will be better if you are served up in
your chamber. You will be called early in the morning.'

She thanked him, and felt grateful. 'Beppo, look to yourself,' she said,
and ran to her retirement.

'I fancy that 's about all that you are fit for,' Herr Johannes remarked,
with his eyes on the impersonator of Beppo, who bore the scrutiny
carelessly, and after seeing that Vittoria had left nothing on the
carriage-seats, directed his steps to the kitchen, as became his
functions. Herr Johannes beckoned to a Tyrolese maid-servant, of whom
Beppo had asked his way. She gave her name as Katchen.

'Katchen, Katchen, my sweet chuck,' said Herr Johannes, 'here are ten
florins for you, in silver, if you will get me the handkerchief of that
man: you have just stretched your finger out for him.'

According to the common Austrian reckoning of them, Herr Johannes had
adopted the right method for ensuring the devotion of the maidens of
Tyrol. She responded with an amazed gulp of her mouth and a grimace of
acquiescence. Ten florins in silver shortened the migratory term of the
mountain girl by full three months. Herr Johannes asked her the hour when
the officers in command had supper, and deferred his own meal till that
time. Katchen set about earning her money. With any common Beppo it would
have been easy enough--simple barter for a harmless kiss. But this Beppo
appeared inaccessible; he was so courtly and so reserved; nor is a maiden
of Tyrol a particularly skilled seductress. The supper of the officers
was smoking on the table when Herr Johannes presented himself among them,
and very soon the inn was shaken with an uproar of greeting. Katchen
found Beppo listening at the door of the salle. She clapped her hands
upon him to drag him away.

'What right have you to be leaning your head there?' she said, and
threatened to make his proceedings known. Beppo had no jewel to give,
little money to spare. He had just heard Herr Johannes welcomed among the
officers by a name that half paralyzed him. 'You shall have anything you
ask of me if you will find me out in a couple of hours,' he said. Katchen
nodded truce for that period, and saw her home in the Oberinnthal still
nearer--twelve mountain goats and a cow her undisputed property. She
found him out, though he had strayed through the court of the inn, and
down a hanging garden to the borders of a torrent that drenched the air
and sounded awfully in the dark ravine below. He embraced her very
mildly. 'One scream and you go,' he said; she felt the saving hold of her
feet plucked from her, with all the sinking horror, and bit her under
lip, as if keeping in the scream with bare stitches. When he released her
she was perfectly mastered. 'You do play tricks,' she said, and quaked.

'I play no tricks. Tell me at what hour these soldiers march.'

'At two in the morning.'

'Don't be afraid, silly child: you're safe if you obey me. At what time
has our carriage been ordered?'

'At four.'

'Now swear to do this:--rouse my mistress at a quarter past two: bring
her down to me.'

'Yes, yes,' said Kitchen, eagerly: 'give me your handkerchief, and she
will follow me. I do swear; that I do; by big St. Christopher! who's
painted on the walls of our house at home.'

Beppo handed her sweet silver, which played a lively tune for her
temporarily--vanished cow and goats. Peering at her features in the
starlight, he let her take the handkerchief from his pocket.

'Oh! what have you got in there?' she said.

He laid his finger across her mouth, bidding her return to the house.

'Dear heaven!' Katchen went in murmuring; 'would I have gone out to that
soft-looking young man if I had known he was a devil.'

Angelo Guidascarpi was aware that an officer without responsibility never
sleeps faster than when his brothers-in-arms have to be obedient to the
reveillee. At two in the morning the bugle rang out: many lighted cigars
were flashing among the dark passages of the inn; the whitecoats were
disposed in marching order; hot coffee was hastily swallowed; the last
stragglers from the stables, the outhouses, the court, and the straw beds
under roofs of rock, had gathered to the main body. The march set
forward. A pair of officers sent a shout up to the drowsy windows, 'Good
luck to you, Weisspriess!' Angelo descended from the concealment of the
opposite trees, where he had stationed himself to watch the departure.
The inn was like a sleeper who has turned over. He made Katchen bring him
bread and slices of meat and a flask of wine, which things found a place
in his pockets: and paying for his mistress and himself, he awaited
Vittoria's foot on the stairs. When Vittoria came she asked no questions,
but said to Katchen, 'You may kiss me'; and Kitchen began crying; she
believed that they were lovers daring everything for love.

'You have a clear start of an hour and a half. Leave the high-road then,
and turn left through the forest and ask for Bormio. If you reach Tyrol,
and come to Silz, tell people that you know Katchen Giesslinger, and they
will be kind to you.'

So saying, she let them out into the black-eyed starlight.




CHAPTER XXIV

ADVENTURES OF VITTORIA AND ANGELO

Nothing was distinguishable for the flying couple save the high-road
winding under rock and forest, and here and there a coursing water in the
depths of the ravines, that showed like a vein in black marble. They
walked swiftly, keeping brisk ears for sound of hoof or foot behind them.
Angelo promised her that she should rest after the morning light had
come; but she assured him that she could bear fatigue, and her firm
cheerfulness lent his heart vigour. At times they were hooded with the
darkness, which came on them as if, as benighted children fancy, their
faces were about to meet the shaggy breast of the forest. Rising up to
lighter air, they had sight of distant twinklings: it might be city, or
autumn weed, or fires of the woodmen, or beacon fires: they glimmered
like eyelets to the mystery of the vast unseen land. Innumerable brooks
went talking to the night: torrents in seasons of rain, childish voices
now, with endless involutions of a song of three notes and a sort of
unnoted clanging chorus, as if a little one sang and would sing on
through the thumping of a tambourine and bells. Vittoria had these
fancies: Angelo had none. He walked like a hunted man whose life is at
stake.

'If we reach a village soon we may get some conveyance,' he said.

'I would rather walk than drive,' said Vittoria; 'it keeps me from
thinking!

'There is the dawn, signorina!

Vittoria frightened him by taking a seat upon a bench of rock; while it
was still dark about them, she drew off Camilla's silken shoes and
stockings, and stood on bare feet.

'You fancied I was tired,' she said. 'No, I am thrifty; and I want to
save as much of my finery as I can. I can go very well on naked feet.
These shoes are no protection; they would be worn out in half-a-day, and
spoilt for decent wearing in another hour.'

The sight of fair feet upon hard earth troubled Angelo; he excused
himself for calling her out to endure hardship; but she said, 'I trust
you entirely.' She looked up at the first thin wave of colour while
walking.

'You do not know me,' said he.

'You are the Countess Ammiani's nephew.'

'I have, as I had the honour to tell you yesterday, the blood of your
lover in my veins.'

'Do not speak of him now, I pray,' said Vittoria; 'I want my strength!

'Signorina, the man we have left behind us is his enemy;--mine. I would
rather see you dead than alive in his hands. Do you fear death?'

'Sometimes; when I am half awake,' she confessed. 'I dislike thinking of
it.'

He asked her curiously: 'Have you never seen it?'

'Death?' said she, and changed a shudder to a smile; 'I died last night.'

Angelo smiled with her. 'I saw you die!

'It seems a hundred years ago.'

'Or half-a-dozen minutes. The heart counts everything'

'Was I very much liked by the people, Signor Angelo?'

'They love you.'

'I have done them no good.'

'Every possible good. And now, mine is the duty to protect you.'

'And yesterday we were strangers! Signor Angelo, you spoke of sbirri.
There is no rising in Bologna. Why are they after you? You look too
gentle to give them cause.'

'Do I look gentle? But what I carry is no burden. Who that saw you last
night would know you for Camilla? You will hear of my deeds, and judge.
We shall soon have men upon the road; you must be hidden. See, there:
there are our colours in the sky. Austria cannot wipe them out. Since I
was a boy I have always slept in a bed facing East, to keep that truth
before my eyes. Black and yellow drop to the earth: green, white, and red
mount to heaven. If more of my countrymen saw these meanings!--but they
are learning to. My tutor called them Germanisms. If so, I have stolen a
jewel from my enemy.'

Vittoria mentioned the Chief.

'Yes,' said Angelo; 'he has taught us to read God's handwriting. I revere
him. It's odd; I always fancy I hear his voice from a dungeon, and seeing
him looking at one light. He has a fault: he does not comprehend the
feelings of a nobleman. Do you think he has made a convert of our Carlo
in that? Never! High blood is ineradicable.'

'I am not of high blood,' said Vittoria.

'Countess Ammiani overlooks it. And besides, low blood may be elevated
without the intervention of a miracle. You have a noble heart, signorina.
It may be the will of God that you should perpetuate our race. All of us
save Carlo Ammiani seem to be falling.'

Vittoria bent her head, distressed by a broad beam of sunlight. The
country undulating to the plain lay under them, the great Alps above, and
much covert on all sides. They entered a forest pathway, following chance
for safety. The dark leafage and low green roofing tasted sweeter to
their senses than clear air and sky. Dark woods are home to fugitives,
and here there was soft footing, a surrounding gentleness,--grass, and
moss with dead leaves peacefully flat on it. The birds were not timorous,
and when a lizard or a snake slipped away from her feet, it was amusing
to Vittoria and did not hurt her tenderness to see that they were feared.
Threading on beneath the trees, they wound by a valley's incline, where
tumbled stones blocked the course of a green water, and filled the lonely
place with one onward voice. When the sun stood over the valley they sat
beneath a chestnut tree in a semicircle of orange rock to eat the food
which Angelo had procured at the inn. He poured out wine for her in the
hollow of a stone, deep as an egg-shell, whereat she sipped, smiling at
simple contrivances; but no smile crossed the face of Angelo. He ate and
drank to sustain his strength, as a weapon is sharpened; and having done,
he gathered up what was left, and lay at her feet with his eyes fixed
upon an old grey stone. She, too, sat brooding. The endless babble and
noise of the water had hardened the sense of its being a life in that
solitude. The floating of a hawk overhead scarce had the character of an
animated thing. Angelo turned round to look at her, and looking upward as
he lay, his sight was smitten by spots of blood upon one of her torn
white feet, that was but half-nestled in the folds of her dress. Bending
his head down, like a bird beaking at prey, he kissed the foot
passionately. Vittoria's eyelids ran up; a chord seemed to snap within
her ears: she stole the shamed foot into concealment, and throbbed, but
not fearfully, for Angelo's forehead was on the earth. Clumps of grass,
and sharp flint-dust stuck between his fists, which were thrust out stiff
on either side of him. She heard him groan heavily. When he raised his
face, it was white as madness. Her womanly nature did not shrink from
caressing it with a touch of soothing hands.

She chanced to say, 'I am your sister.'

'No, by God! you are not my sister,' cried the young man. 'She died
without a stain of blood; a lily from head to foot, and went into the
vault so. Our mother will see that. She will kiss the girl in heaven and
see that.' He rose, crying louder: 'Are there echoes here?' But his voice
beat against the rocks undoubted.

She saw that a frenzy had seized him. He looked with eyes drained of
human objects; standing square, with stiff half-dropped arms, and an
intense melody of wretchedness in his voice.

'Rinaldo, Rinaldo!' he shouted: 'Clelia!--no answer from man or ghost.
She is dead. We two said to her die! and she died. Therefore she is
silent, for the dead have not a word. Oh! Milan, Milan! accursed
betraying city! I should have found my work in you if you had kept faith.
Now here am I, talking to the strangled throat of this place, and can get
no answer. Where am I? The world is hollow: the miserable shell! They
lied. Battle and slaughter they promised me, and enemies like ripe maize
for the reaping-hook. I would have had them in thick to my hands. I would
have washed my hands at night, and eaten and drunk and slept, and sung
again to work in the morning. They promised me a sword and a sea to
plunge it in, and our mother Italy to bless me. I would have toiled: I
would have done good in my life. I would have bathed my soul in our
colours. I would have had our flag about my body for a winding-sheet, and
the fighting angels of God to unroll me. Now here am I, and my own pale
mother trying at every turn to get in front of me. Have her away! It's a
ghost, I know. She will be touching the strength out of me. She is not
the mother I love and I serve. Go: cherish your daughter, you dead
woman!'

Angelo reeled. 'A spot of blood has sent me mad,' he said, and caught for
a darkness to cross his sight, and fell and lay flat.

Vittoria looked around her; her courage was needed in that long silence.

She adopted his language: 'Our mother Italy is waiting for us. We must
travel on, and not be weary. Angelo, my friend, lend me your help over
these stones.'

He rose quietly. She laid her elbow on his hand; thus supported she left
a place that seemed to shudder. All the heavy day they walked almost
silently; she not daring to probe his anguish with a question; and he
calm and vacant as the hour following thunder. But, of her safety by his
side she had no longer a doubt. She let him gather weeds and grasses, and
bind them across her feet, and perform friendly services, sure that
nothing earthly could cause such a mental tempest to recur. The
considerate observation which at all seasons belongs to true courage told
her that it was not madness afflicting Angelo.

Near nightfall they came upon a forester's hut, where they were welcomed
by an old man and a little girl, who gave them milk and black bread, and
straw to rest on. Angelo slept in the outer air. When Vittoria awoke she
had the fancy that she had taken one long dive downward in a well; and on
touching the bottom found her head above the surface. While her surprise
was wearing off, she beheld the woodman's little girl at her feet holding
up one end of her cloak, and peeping underneath, overcome by amazement at
the flashing richness of the dress of the heroine Camilla. Entering into
the state of her mind spontaneously, Vittoria sought to induce the child
to kiss her; but quite vainly. The child's reverence for the dress
allowed her only to be within reach of the hem of it, so as to delight
her curiosity. Vittoria smiled when, as she sat up, the child fell back
against the wall; and as she rose to her feet, the child scampered from
the room. 'My poor Camilla! you can charm somebody, yet,' she said,
limping; her visage like a broken water with the pain of her feet. 'If
the bell rings for Camilla now, what sort of an entry will she make?'
Vittoria treated her physical weakness and ailments with this spirit of
humour. 'They may say that Michiella has bewitched you, my Camilla. I
think your voice would sound as if it were dragging its feet after it
just as a stork flies. O my Camilla! don't I wish I could do the same,
and be ungraceful and at ease! A moan is married to every note of your
treble, my Camilla, like December and May. Keep me from shrieking!'

The pangs shooting from her feet were scarce bearable, but the repression
of them helped her to meet Angelo with a freer mind than, after the
interval of separation, she would have had. The old woodman was cooking a
queer composition of flour and milk sprinkled with salt for them. Angelo
cut a stout cloth to encase each of her feet, and bound them in it. He
was more cheerful than she had ever seen him, and now first spoke of
their destination. His design was to conduct her near to Bormio, there to
engage a couple of men in her service who would accompany her to Meran,
by the Val di Sole, while he crossed the Stelvio alone, and turning
leftward in the Tyrolese valley, tried the passage into Switzerland.

Bormio, if, when they quitted the forest, a conveyance could be obtained,
was no more than a short day's distance, according to the old woodman's
directions. Vittoria induced the little girl to sit upon her knee, and
sang to her, but greatly unspirited the charm of her dress. The sun was
rising as they bade adieu to the hut.

About mid-day they quitted the shelter of forest trees and stood on
broken ground, without a path to guide them. Vittoria did her best to
laugh at her mishaps in walking, and compared herself to a Capuchin
pilgrim; but she was unused to going bareheaded and shoeless, and though
she held on bravely, the strong beams of the sun and the stony ways
warped her strength. She had to check fancies drawn from Arabian tales,
concerning the help sometimes given by genii of the air and enchanted
birds, that were so incessant and vivid that she found herself sulking at
the loneliness and helplessness of the visible sky, and feared that her
brain was losing its hold of things. Angelo led her to a half-shaded
hollow, where they finished the remainder of yesterday's meat and wine.
She set her eyes upon a gold-green lizard by a stone and slept.

'The quantity of sleep I require is unmeasured,' she said, a minute
afterwards, according to her reckoning of time, and expected to see the
lizard still by the stone. Angelo was near her; the sky was full of
colours, and the earth of shadows.

'Another day gone!' she exclaimed in wonderment, thinking that the days
of human creatures had grown to be as rapid and (save toward the one end)
as meaningless as the gaspings of a fish on dry land. He told her that he
had explored the country as far as he had dared to stray from her. He had
seen no habitation along the heights. The vale was too distant for
strangers to reach it before nightfall. 'We can make a little way on,'
said Vittoria, and the trouble of walking began again. He entreated her
more than once to have no fear. 'What can I fear?' she asked. His voice
sank penitently: 'You can rely on me fully when there is anything to do
for you.'

'I am sure of that,' she replied, knowing his allusion to be to his
frenzy of yesterday. In truth, no woman could have had a gentler
companion.

On the topmost ridge of the heights, looking over an interminable gulf of
darkness they saw the lights of the vale. 'A bird might find his perch
there, but I think there is no chance for us,' said Vittoria. 'The moment
we move forward to them the lights will fly back. It is their way of
behaving.'

Angelo glanced round desperately. Farther on along the ridge his eye
caught sight of a low smouldering fire. When he reached it he had a great
disappointment. A fire in the darkness gives hopes that men will be at
hand. Here there was not any human society. The fire crouched on its
ashes. It was on a little circular eminence of mossed rock; black sticks,
and brushwood, and dry fern, and split logs, pitchy to the touch, lay
about; in the centre of them the fire coiled sullenly among its ashes,
with a long eye like a serpent's.

'Could you sleep here?' said Angelo.

'Anywhere!' Vittoria sighed with droll dolefulness.

'I can promise to keep you warm, signorina.'

'I will not ask for more till to-morrow, my friend.'

She laid herself down sideways, curling up her feet, with her cheek on
the palm of her hand.

Angelo knelt and coaxed the fire, whose appetite, like that which is said
to be ours, was fed by eating, for after the red jaws had taken
half-a-dozen sticks, it sang out for more, and sent up flame leaping
after flame and thick smoke. Vittoria watched the scene through a thin
division of her eyelids; the fire, the black abyss of country, the stars,
and the sentinel figure. She dozed on the edge of sleep, unable to yield
herself to it wholly. She believed that she was dreaming when by-and-by
many voices filled her ears. The fire was sounding like an angry sea, and
the voices were like the shore, more intelligible, but confused in
shriller clamour. She was awakened by Angelo, who knelt on one knee and
took her outlying hand; then she saw that men surrounded them, some of
whom were hurling the lighted logs about, some trampling down the outer
rim of flames. They looked devilish to a first awakening glance. He told
her that the men were friendly; they were good Italians. This had been
the beacon arranged for the night of the Fifteenth, when no run of
signals was seen from Milan; and yesterday afternoon it had been in
mockery partially consumed. 'We have aroused the country, signorina, and
brought these poor fellows out of their beds. They supposed that Milan
must be up and at work. I have explained everything to them.'

Vittoria had rather to receive their excuses than to proffer her own.
They were mostly youths dressed like the better class of peasantry. They
laughed at the incident, stating how glad they would have been to behold
the heights all across the lakes ablaze and promising action for the
morrow. One square-shouldered fellow raised her lightly from the ground.
She felt herself to be a creature for whom circumstance was busily
plotting, so that it was useless to exert her mind in thought. The long
procession sank down the darkness, leaving the low red fire to die out
behind them.

Next morning she awoke in a warm bed, possessed by odd images of flames
that stood up like crowing cocks, and cowered like hens above the brood.
She was in the house of one of their new friends, and she could hear
Angelo talking in the adjoining room. A conveyance was ready to take her
on to Bormio. A woman came to her to tell her this, appearing to have a
dull desire to get her gone. She was a draggled woman, with a face of
slothful anguish, like one of the inner spectres of a guilty man. She
said that her husband was willing to drive the lady to Bormio for a sum
that was to be paid at once into his wife's hand; and little enough it
was which poor persons could ever look for from your patriots and
disturbers who seduced orderly men from their labour, and made widows and
ruined households. This was a new Italian language to Vittoria, and when
the woman went on giving instances of households ruined by a husband's
vile infatuation about his country, she did not attempt to defend the
reckless lord, but dressed quickly that she might leave the house as soon
as she could. Her stock of money barely satisfied the woman's demand. The
woman seized it, and secreted it in her girdle. When they had passed into
the sitting-room, her husband, who was sitting conversing with Angelo,
stretched out his hand and knocked the girdle.

'That's our trick,' he said. 'I guessed so. Fund up, our little Maria of
the dirty fingers'-ends! We accept no money from true patriots. Grub in
other ground, my dear!'

The woman stretched her throat awry, and set up a howl like a dog; but
her claws came out when he seized her.

'Would you disgrace me, old fowl?'

'Lorenzo, may you rot like a pumpkin!'

The connubial reciprocities were sharp until the money lay on the table,
when the woman began whining so miserably that Vittoria's sensitive
nerves danced on her face, and at her authoritative interposition,
Lorenzo very reluctantly permitted his wife to take what he chose to
reckon a fair portion of the money, and also of his contempt. She seemed
to be licking the money up, she bent over it so greedily.

'Poor wretch!' he observed; 'she was born on a hired bed.'

Vittoria felt that the recollection of this woman would haunt her. It was
inconceivable to her that a handsome young man like Lorenzo should ever
have wedded the unsweet creature, who was like a crawling image of decay;
but he, as if to account for his taste, said that they had been of a
common age once, when he married her; now she had grown old. He repeated
that she 'was born on a hired bed.' They saw nothing further of her.

Vittoria's desire was to get to Meran speedily, that she might see her
friends, and have tidings of her lover and the city. Those baffled
beacon-flames on the heights had become an irritating indicative vision:
she thirsted for the history. Lorenzo offered to conduct her over the
Tonale Pass into the Val di Sole, or up the Val Furva, by the pass of the
Corno dei Tre Signori, into the Val del Monte to Pejo, thence by Cles, or
by Bolzano, to Meran. But she required shoeing and refitting; and for
other reasons also, she determined to go on to Bormio. She supposed that
Angelo had little money, and that in a place such as Bormio sounded to
her ears she might possibly obtain the change for the great money-order
which the triumph of her singing had won from Antonio-Pericles. In spite
of Angelo's appeals to her to hurry on to the end of her journey without
tempting chance by a single pause, she resolved to go to Bormio. Lorenzo
privately assured her that there were bankers in Bormio. Many bankers, he
said, came there from Milan, and that fact she thought sufficient for her
purpose. The wanderers parted regretfully. A little chapel, on a hillock
off the road, shaded by chestnuts, was pointed out to Lorenzo where to
bring a letter for Angelo. Vittoria begged Angelo to wait till he heard
from her; and then, with mutual wavings of hands, she was driven out of
his sight.




CHAPTER XXV

ACROSS THE MOUNTAINS

After parting from Vittoria, Angelo made his way to an inn, where he ate
and drank like a man of the fields, and slept with the power of one from
noon till after morning. The innkeeper came up to his room, and, finding
him awake, asked him if he was disposed to take a second holiday in bed.
Angelo jumped up; as he did so, his stiletto slipped from under his
pillow and flashed.

'That's a pretty bit of steel,' said the innkeeper, but could not get a
word out of him. It was plain to Angelo that this fellow had suspicions.
Angelo had been careful to tie up his clothes in a bundle; there was
nothing for the innkeeper to see, save a young man in bed, who had a
terrible weapon near his hand, and a look in his eyes of wary indolence
that counselled prudent dealings. He went out, and returned a second and
a third time, talking more and more confusedly and fretfully; but as he
was again going to leave, 'No, no,' said Angelo, determined to give him a
lesson, 'I have taken a liking to your company. Here, come here; I will
show you a trick. I learnt it from the Servians when I was three feet
high. Look; I lie quite still, you observe. Try to get on the other side
of that door and the point of this blade shall scratch you through it.'

Angelo laid the blue stilet up his wrist, and slightly curled his arm.
'Try,' he repeated, but the innkeeper had stopped short in his movement
to the door. 'Well, then, stay where you are,' said Angelo, 'and look;
I'll be as good as my word. There's the point I shall strike.' With that
he gave the peculiar Servian jerk of the muscles, from the wrist up to
the arm, and the blade quivered on the mark. The innkeeper fell back in
admiring horror. 'Now fetch it to me,' said Angelo, putting both hands
carelessly under his head. The innkeeper tugged at the blade.
'Illustrious signore, I am afraid of breaking it,' he almost whimpered;
'it seems alive, does it not?'

'Like a hawk on a small bird,' said Angelo; 'that's the beauty of those
blades. They kill, and put you to as little pain as a shot; and it 's
better than a shot in your breast--there's something to show for it. Send
up your wife or your daughter to take orders about my breakfast. It 's
the breakfast of five mountaineers; and don't "Illustrious signore" me,
sir, either in my hearing or out of it. Leave the knife sticking.'

The innkeeper sidled out with a dumb salute. 'I can count on his
discretion for a couple of hours,' Angelo said to himself. He knew the
effect of an exhibition of physical dexterity and strength upon a coward.
The landlord's daughter came and received his orders for breakfast.
Angelo inquired whether they had been visited by Germans of late. The
girl told him that a German chasseur with a couple of soldiers had called
them up last night.

'Wouldn't it have been a pity if they had dragged me out and shot me?'
said Angelo.

'But they were after a lady,' she explained; 'they have gone on to
Bormio, and expect to catch her there or in the mountains.'

'Better there than in the mountains, my dear; don't you think so?'

The girl said that she would not like to meet those fellows among the
mountains.

'Suppose you were among the mountains, and those fellows came up with
you; wouldn't you clap your hands to see me jumping down right in front
of you all?' said Angelo.

'Yes, I should,' she admitted. 'What is one man, though!'

'Something, if he feeds like five. Quick! I must eat. Have you a lover?'

'Yes.'

'Fancy you are waiting on him.'

'He's only a middling lover, signore. He lives at Cles, over Val Pejo, in
Val di Non, a long way, and courts me twice a year, when he comes over to
do carpentering. He cuts very pretty Madonnas. He is a German.'

'Ha! you kneel to the Madonna, and give your lips to a German? Go.'

'But I don't like him much, signore; it's my father who wishes me to have
him; he can make money.'

Angelo motioned to her to be gone, saying to himself, 'That father of
hers would betray the Saints for a handful of florins.'

He dressed, and wrenched his knife from the door. Hearing the clatter of
a horse at the porch, he stopped as he was descending the stairs. A
German voice said, 'Sure enough, my jolly landlord, she's there, in
Worms--your Bormio. Found her at the big hotel: spoke not a syllable;
stole away, stole away. One chopin of wine! I'm off on four legs to the
captain. Those lads who are after her by Roveredo and Trent have bad
noses. "Poor nose--empty belly." Says the captain, "I stick at the point
of the cross-roads." Says I, "Herr Captain, I'm back to you first of the
lot." My business is to find the runaway lady-pretty Fraulein! pretty
Fraulein! lai-ai! There's money on her servant, too; he's a disguised
Excellency--a handsome boy; but he has cut himself loose, and he go hang.
Two birds for the pride of the thing; one for satisfaction--I 'm
satisfied. I've killed chamois in my time. Jacob, I am; Baumwalder, I am;
Feckelwitz, likewise; and the very devil for following a track. Ach! the
wine is good. You know the song?

       "He who drinks wine, he may cry with a will,
        Fortune is mine, may she stick to me still."

I give it you in German--the language of song! my own, my native
'lai-ai-lai-ai-la-la-lai-ai-i-ie!'

          "While stars still sit
          On mountain tops,
          I take my gun,
          Kiss little one
             On mother's breast.
               Ai-iu-e!

          "My pipe is lit,
          I climb the slopes,
          I meet the dawn
          A little one
             On mother's breast.
             Ai-aie: ta-ta-tai: iu-iu-iu-e!"

Another chopin, my jolly landlord. What's that you're mumbling? About the
servant of my runaway young lady? He go hang! What----?'

Angelo struck his foot heavily on the stairs; the innkeeper coughed and
ran back, bowing to his guest. The chasseur cried, 'I 'll drink farther
on-wine between gaps!' A coin chinked on the steps in accompaniment to
the chasseur's departing gallop. 'Beast of a Tedesco,' the landlord
exclaimed as he picked up the money; 'they do the reckoning--not we. If I
had served him with the worth of this, I should have had the bottle at my
head. What a country ours is! We're ridden over, ridden over!' Angelo
compelled the landlord to sit with him while he ate like five
mountaineers. He left mere bones on the table. 'It's wonderful,' said the
innkeeper; 'you can't know what fear is.'

'I think I don't,' Angelo replied; 'you do; cowards have to serve every
party in turn. Up, and follow at my heels till I dismiss you. You know
the pass into the Val Pejo and the Val di Sole.' The innkeeper stood
entrenched behind a sturdy negative. Angelo eased him to submission by
telling him that he only wanted the way to be pointed out. 'Bring
tobacco; you're going to have an idle day,' said Angelo: 'I pay you when
we separate.' He was deaf to entreaties and refusals, and began to look
mad about the eyes; his poor coward plied him with expostulations,
offered his wife, his daughter, half the village, for the service: he had
to follow, but would take no cigars. Angelo made his daughter fetch bread
and cigars, and put a handful in his pocket, upon which, after two hours
of inactivity at the foot of the little chapel, where Angelo waited for
the coming of Vittoria's messenger, the innkeeper was glad to close his
fist. About noon Lorenzo came, and at once acted a play of eyes for
Angelo to perceive his distrust of the man and a multitude of bad things
about him he was reluctant, notwithstanding Angelo's ready nod, to bring
out a letter; and frowned again, for emphasis to the expressive comedy.
The letter said:

'I have fallen upon English friends. They lend me money. Fly to Lugano by
the help of these notes: I inclose them, and will not ask pardon for it.
The Valtellina is dangerous; the Stelvio we know to be watched. Retrace
your way, and then try the Engadine. I should stop on a breaking bridge
if I thought my companion, my Carlo's cousin, was near capture. I am well
taken care of: one of my dearest friends, a captain in the English army,
bears me company across. I have a maid from one of the villages, a
willing girl. We ride up to the mountains; to-morrow we cross the pass;
there is a glacier. Val di Non sounds Italian, but I am going into the
enemy's land. You see I am well guarded. My immediate anxiety concerns
you; for what will our Carlo ask of me? Lose not one moment. Away, and do
not detain Lorenzo. He has orders to meet us up high in the mountain this
evening. He is the best of servants but I always meet the best
everywhere--that is, in Italy. Leaving it, I grieve. No news from Milan,
except of great confusion there. I judge by the quiet of my sleep that we
have come to no harm there.

             'Your faithfullest

                       'VITTORIA.'

Lorenzo and the innkeeper had arrived at an altercation before Angelo
finished reading. Angelo checked it, and told Lorenzo to make speed: he
sent no message.

'My humanity,' Angelo then addressed his craven associate, 'counsels me
that it's better to drag you some distance on than to kill you. You 're a
man of intelligence, and you know why I have to consider the matter. I
give you guide's pay up to the glacier, and ten florins buon'mano. Would
you rather earn it with the blood of a countryman? I can't let that
tongue of yours be on the high-road of running Tedeschi: you know it.

'Illustrious signore, obedience oils necessity,' quoth the innkeeper. 'If
we had but a few more of my cigars!'

'Step on,' said Angelo sternly.

They walked till dark and they were in keen air. A hut full of recent
grass-cuttings, on the border of a sloping wood, sheltered them. The
innkeeper moaned for food at night and in the morning, and Angelo tossed
him pieces of bread. Beyond the wood they came upon bare crag and
commenced a sharper ascent, reached the height, and roused an eagle. The
great bird went up with a sharp yelp, hanging over them with knotted
claws. Its shadow stretched across sweeps of fresh snow. The innkeeper
sent a mocking yelp after the eagle.

'Up here, one forgets one is a father--what's more, a husband,' he said,
striking a finger on the side of his nose.

'And a cur, a traitor, carrion,' said Angelo.

'Ah, signore, one might know you were a noble. You can't understand our
troubles, who carry a house on our heads, and have to fill mouths agape.'

'Speak when you have better to say,' Angelo replied.

'Padrone, one would really like to have your good opinion; and I'm lean
as a wolf for a morsel of flesh. I could part with my buon'mano for a
sight of red meat--oh! red meat dripping.'

'If,' cried Angelo, bringing his eyebrows down black on the man, 'if I
knew that you had ever in your life betrayed one of us look below; there
you should lie to be pecked and gnawed at.'

'Ah, Jacopo Cruchi, what an end for you when you are full of good
meanings!' the innkeeper moaned. 'I see your ribs, my poor soul!'

Angelo quitted him. The tremendous excitement of the Alpine solitudes was
like a stringent wine to his surcharged spirit. He was one to whom life
and death had become as the yes and no of ordinary men: not more than a
turning to the right or to the left. It surprised him that this fellow,
knowing his own cowardice and his conscience, should consent to live, and
care to eat to live.

When he returned to his companion, he found the fellow drinking from the
flask of an Austrian soldier. Another whitecoat was lying near. They
pressed Angelo to drink, and began to play lubberly pranks. One clapped
hands, while another rammed the flask at the reluctant mouth, till Angelo
tripped him and made him a subject for derision; whereupon they were all
good friends. Musket on shoulder, the soldiers descended, blowing at
their finger-nails and puffing at their tobacco--lauter kaiserlicher
(rank Imperial), as with a sad enforcement of resignation they had, while
lighting, characterized the universally detested Government issue of the
leaf.

'They are after her,' said Jacopo, and he shot out his thumb and twisted
an eyelid. His looks became insolent, and he added: 'I let them go on;
but now, for my part, I must tell you, my worthy gentleman, I've had
enough of it. You go your way, I go mine. Pay me, and we part. With the
utmost reverence, I quit you. Climbing mountains at my time of life is
out of all reason. If you want companions, I 'll signal to that pair of
Tedeschi; they're within hail. Would you like it? Say the word, if you
would--hey!'

Angelo smiled at the visible effect of the liquor.

'Barto Rizzo would be the man to take you in hand,' he remarked.

The innkeeper flung his head back to ejaculate, and murmured, 'Barto
Rizzo! defend me from him! Why, he levies contribution upon us in the
Valtellina for the good of Milan; and if we don't pay, we're all of us
down in a black book. Disobey, and it's worse than swearing you won't pay
taxes to the legitimate--perdition to it!--Government. Do you know Barto
Rizzo, padrone? You don't know him, I hope? I'm sure you wouldn't know
such a fellow.'

'I am his favourite pupil,' said Angelo.

'I'd have sworn it,' groaned the innkeeper, and cursed the day and hour
when Angelo crossed his threshold. That done, he begged permission to be
allowed to return, crying with tears of entreaty for mercy: 'Barto
Rizzo's pupils are always out upon bloody business!' Angelo told him that
he had now an opportunity of earning the approval of Barto Rizzo, and
then said, 'On,' and they went in the track of the two whitecoats; the
innkeeper murmuring all the while that he wanted the approval of Barto
Rizzo as little as his enmity; he wanted neither frost nor fire. The
glacier being traversed, they skirted a young stream, and arrived at an
inn, where they found the soldiers regaling. Jacopo was informed by them
that the lady whom they were pursuing had not passed. They pushed their
wine for Angelo to drink: he declined, saying that he had sworn not to
drink before he had shot the chamois with the white cross on his back.

'Come: we're two to one,' they said, 'and drink you shall this time!'

'Two to two,' returned Angelo: 'here is my Jacopo, and if he doesn't
count for one, I won't call him father-in-law, and the fellow living at
Cles may have his daughter without fighting for her.'

'Right so,' said one of the soldiers, 'and you don't speak bad German
already.'

'Haven't I served in the ranks?' said Angelo, giving a bugle-call of the
reveille of the cavalry.

He got on with them so well that they related the object of their
expedition, which was, to catch a runaway young rebel lady and hold her
fast down at Cles for the great captain--'unser tuchtiger Hauptmann.'

'Hadn't she a servant, a sort of rascal?' Angelo inquired.

'Right so; she had: but the doe's the buck in this chase.'

Angelo tossed them cigars. The valley was like a tumbled mountain, thick
with crags and eminences, through which the river worked strenuously,
sinuous in foam, hurrying at the turns. Angelo watched all the ways from
a distant height till set of sun. He saw another couple of soldiers meet
those two at the inn, and then one pair went up toward the vale-head. It
seemed as if Vittoria had disconcerted them by having chosen another
route.

'Padrone,' said Jacopo to him abruptly, when they descended to find a
resting-place, 'you are, I speak humbly, so like the devil that I must
enter into a stipulation with you, before I continue in your company, and
take the worst at once. This is going to be the second night of my
sleeping away from my wife: I merely mention it. I pinch her, and she
beats me, and we are equal. But if you think of making me fight, I tell
you I won't. If there was a furnace behind me, I should fall into it
rather than run against a bayonet. I 've heard say that the nerves are in
the front part of us, and that's where I feel the shock. Now we're on a
plain footing. Say that I'm not to fight. I'll be your servant till you
release me, but say I 'm not to fight; padrone, say that.'

'I can't say that: I'll say I won't make you fight,' Angelo pacified him
by replying. From this moment Jacopo followed him less like a graceless
dog pulled by his chain. In fact, with the sense of prospective security,
he tasted a luxurious amazement in being moved about by a superior will,
wafted from his inn, and paid for witnessing strange incidents. Angelo
took care that he was fed well at the place where they slept, but himself
ate nothing. Early after dawn they mounted the heights above the road. It
was about noon that Angelo discerned a party coming from the pass on
foot, consisting of two women and three men. They rested an hour at the
village where he had slept overnight; the muskets were a quarter of a
mile to the rear of them. When they started afresh, one of the muskets
was discharged, and while the echoes were rolling away, a reply to it
sounded in the front. Angelo, from his post of observation, could see
that Vittoria and her party were marching between two guards, and that
she herself must have perceived both the front and rearward couple. Yet
she and her party held on their course at an even pace. For a time he
kept them clearly in view; but it was tough work along the slopes of
crag: presently Jacopo slipped and went down. 'Ah, padrone,' he said:
'I'm done for; leave me.'

'Not though I should have to haul you on my back,' replied Angelo. 'If I
do leave you, I must cut out your tongue.'

'Rather than that, I'd go on a sprained ankle,' said Jacopo, and he
strove manfully to conquer pain; limping and exclaiming, 'Oh, my little
village! Oh, my little inn! When can a man say that he has finished
running about the world! The moment he sits, in comes the devil.'

Angelo was obliged to lead him down to the open way, upon which they made
slow progress.

'The noble gentleman might let me return--he might trust me now,' Jacopo
whimpered.

'The devil trusts nobody,' said Angelo.

'Ah, padrone! there's a crucifix. Let me kneel by that.'

Angelo indulged him. Jacopo knelt by the wayside and prayed for an easy
ankle and a snoring pillow and no wakeners. After this he was refreshed.
The sun sank; the darkness spread around; the air grew icy. 'Does the
Blessed Virgin ever consider what patriots have to endure?' Jacopo
muttered to himself, and aroused a rare laugh from Angelo, who seized him
under the arm, half-lifting him on. At the inn where they rested, he
bathed and bandaged the foot.

'I can't help feeling a kindness to you for it,' said Jacopo.

'I can't afford to leave you behind,' Angelo accounted for his attention.

'Padrone, we've been understanding one another all along by our thumbs.
It's that old inn of mine--the taxes! we have to sell our souls to pay
the taxes. There's the tongue of the thing. I wouldn't betray you; I
wouldn't.'

'I'll try you,' said Angelo, and put him to proof next day, when the
soldiers stopped them as they were driving in a cart, and Jacopo swore to
them that Angelo was his intended son-in-law.

There was evidently an unusual activity among the gendarmerie of the
lower valley, the Val di Non; for Jacopo had to repeat his fable more
than once, and Angelo thought it prudent not to make inquiries about
travellers. In this valley they were again in summer heat. Summer
splendours robed the broken ground. The Val di Non lies toward the sun,
banked by the Val di Sole, like the southern lizard under a stone.
Chestnut forest and shoulder over shoulder of vineyard, and meadows of
marvellous emerald, with here and there central partly-wooded crags,
peaked with castle-ruins, and ancestral castles that are still warm
homes, and villages dropped among them, and a river bounding and rushing
eagerly through the rich enclosure, form the scene, beneath that Italian
sun which turns everything to gold. There is a fair breadth to the vale:
it enjoys a great oval of sky: the falls of shade are dispersed, dot the
hollow range, and are not at noontide a broad curtain passing over from
right to left. The sun reigns and also governs in the Val di Non.

'The, grape has his full benefit here, padrone,' said Jacopo.

But the place was too populous, and too much subjected to the general
eye, to please Angelo. At Cles they were compelled to bear an inspection,
and a little comedy occurred. Jacopo, after exhibiting Angelo as his
son-in-law, seeing doubts on the soldiers' faces, mentioned the name of
the German suitor for his daughter's hand--the carpenter, Johann
Spellmann, to whose workshop he requested to be taken. Johann, being one
of the odd Germans in the valley, was well known: he was carving wood
astride a stool, and stopped his whistling to listen to the soldiers, who
took the first word out of Jacopo's mouth, and were convinced, by
Johann's droop of the chin, that the tale had some truth in it; and more
when Johann yelled at the Valtelline innkeeper to know why, then, he had
come to him, if he was prepared to play him false. One of the soldiers
said bluntly, that as Angelo's appearance answered to the portrait of a
man for whom they were on the lookout, they would, if their countryman
liked, take him and give him a dose of marching and imprisonment.

'Ach! that won't make my little Rosetta love me better,' cried Johann,
who commenced taking up a string of reproaches against women, and pitched
his carving-blade and tools abroad in the wood-dust.

'Well, now, it 's queer you don't want to fight this lad,' said Jacopo;
'he's come to square it with you that way, if you think best.'

Johann spared a remark between his vehement imprecations against the sex
to say that he was ready to fight; but his idea of vengeance was directed
upon the abstract conception of a faithless womankind. Angelo, by reason
of his detestation of Germans, temporarily threw himself into the part he
was playing to the extent of despising him. Johann admitted to Jacopo
that intervals of six months' duration in a courtship were wide jumps for
Love to take.

'Yes; amor! amor!' he exclaimed with extreme dejection; 'I could wait.
Well! since you've brought the young man, we'll have it out.'

He stepped before Angelo with bare fists. Jacopo had to interpose. The
soldiers backed Johann, who now said to Angelo, 'Since you've come for
it, we'll have it out.'

Jacopo had great difficulty in bringing him to see that it was a matter
to talk over. Johann swore he would not talk about it, and was ready to
fight a dozen Italians, man up man down.

'Bare-fisted?' screamed Jacopo.

'Hey! the old way! Give him knuckles, and break his back, my boy!' cried
the soldiers; 'none of their steel this side of the mountain.'

Johann waited for Angelo to lift his hands; and to instigate his
reluctant adversary, thumped his chest; but Angelo did not move. The
soldiers roared.

'If she has you, she shall have a dolly,' said Johann, now heated with
the prospect of presenting that sort of husband to his little Rosetta. At
this juncture Jacopo threw himself between them.

'It shall be a real fight,' he said; 'my daughter can't make up her mind,
and she shall have the best man. Leave me to arrange it all fairly; and
you come here in a couple of hours, my children,' he addressed the
soldiers, who unwillingly quitted the scene where there was a certainty
of fun, on the assurance of there being a livelier scene to come.

When they had turned their heels on the shop, Jacopo made a face at
Johann; Johann swung round upon Angelo, and met a smile. Then followed
explanations.

'What's that you say? She's true--she's true?' exclaimed the astounded
lover.

'True enough, but a girl at an inn wants hotter courting,' said Jacopo.
'His Excellency here is after his own sweetheart.'

Johann huzzaed, hugged at Angelo's hands, and gave a lusty filial tap to
Jacopo on the shoulder. Bread and grapes and Tyrolese wine were placed
for them, and Johann's mother soon produced a salad, eggs, and fowl; and
then and there declared her willingness to receive Rosetta into the
household, 'if she would swear at the outset never to have 'heimweh'
(home-longing); as people--men and women, both--always did when they took
a new home across a mountain.'

'She won't--will she?' Johann inquired with a dubious sparkle.

'Not she,' said Jacopo.

After the meal he drew Johann aside. They returned to Angelo, and Johann
beckoned him to leave the house by a back way, leading up a slope of
garden into high vine-poles. He said that he had seen a party pass out of
Cles from the inn early, in a light car, on for Meran. The gendarmerie
were busy on the road: a mounted officer had dashed up to the inn an hour
later, and had followed them: it was the talk of the village.

'Padrone, you dismiss me now,' said Jacopo.

'I pay you, but don't dismiss you,' said Angelo, and handed him a
bank-note.

'I stick to you, padrone, till you do dismiss me,' Jacopo sighed.

Johann offered to conduct them as far as the Monte Pallade pass, and they
started, avoiding the high road, which was enviably broad and solid.
Within view of a village under climbing woods, they discerned an open
car, flanked by bayonets, returning to Cles. Angelo rushed ahead of them
down the declivity, and stood full in the road to meet the procession. A
girl sat in the car, who hung her head, weeping; Lorenzo was beside her;
an Englishman on foot gave employment to a pair of soldiers to get him
along. As they came near at marching pace, Lorenzo yawned and raised his
hand to his cheek, keeping the thumb pointed behind him. Including the
girl, there were four prisoners: Vittoria was absent. The Englishman, as
he was being propelled forward, addressed Angelo in French, asking him
whether he could bear to see an unoffending foreigner treated with wanton
violation of law. The soldiers bellowed at their captive, and Angelo sent
a stupid shrug after him. They rounded a bend of the road. Angelo
tightened the buckle at his waist.

'Now I trust you,' he said to Jacopo. 'Follow the length of five miles
over the pass: if you don't see me then, you have your liberty, tongue
and all.'

With that he doubled his arms and set forth at a steady run, leaving his
companions to speculate on his powers of endurance. They did so
complacently enough, until Jacopo backed him for a distance and Johann
betted against him, when behold them at intervals taking a sharp trot to
keep him in view.




CHAPTER XXVI

THE DUEL IN THE PASS

Meanwhile Captain Weisspriess had not been idle. Standing at a blunt
angle of the ways converging upon Vittoria's presumed destination, he had
roused up the gendarmerie along the routes to Meran by Trent on one side,
and Bormio on the other; and he soon came to the conclusion that she had
rejected the valley of the Adige for the Valtelline, whence he supposed
that she would be tempted either to cross the Stelvio or one of the
passes into Southernmost Tyrol. He was led to think that she would
certainly bear upon Switzerland, by a course of reasoning connected with
Angelo Guidascarpi, who, fleeing under the cross of blood, might be
calculated on to push for the mountains of the Republic; and he might
judging by the hazards--conduct the lady thither, to enjoy the fruits of
crime and love in security. The captain, when he had discovered Angelo's
crest and name on the betraying handkerchief, had no doubts concerning
the nature of their intimacy, and he was spurred by a new and thrice
eager desire to capture the couple--the criminal for the purposes of
justice, and the other because he had pledged his notable reputation in
the chase of her. The conscience of this man's vanity was extremely
active. He had engaged to conquer the stubborn girl, and he thought it
possible that he might take a mistress from the patriot ranks, with a
loud ha! ha! at revolutionists, and some triumph over his comrades. And
besides, he was the favourite of Countess Anna of Lenkenstein, who yet
refused to bring her estates to him; she dared to trifle; she also was a
woman who required rude lessons. Weisspriess, a poor soldier bearing the
heritage of lusty appetites, had an eye on his fortune, and served
neither Mars alone nor Venus. Countess Anna was to be among that company
assembled at the Castle of Sonnenberg in Meran; and if, while introducing
Vittoria there with a discreet and exciting reserve, he at the same time
handed over the assassin of Count Paul, a fine harvest of praise and
various pleasant forms of female passion were to be looked for--a rich
vista of a month's intrigue; at the end of it possibly his wealthy lady,
thoroughly tamed, for a wife, and redoubled triumph over his comrades.
Without these successes, what availed the fame of the keenest swordsman
in the Austrian army?--The feast as well as the plumes of vanity offered
rewards for the able exercise of his wits.

He remained at the sub-Alpine inn until his servant Wilhelm (for whom he
had despatched the duchess's chasseur, then in attendance on Vittoria)
arrived from Milan, bringing his uniform. The chasseur was directed on
the Bormio line, with orders that he should cause the arrest of Vittoria
only in the case of her being on the extreme limit of the Swiss frontier.
Keeping his communications alert, Weisspriess bore that way to meet him.
Fortune smiled on his strategy. Jacob Baumwalder Feckelwitz--full of
wine, and discharging hurrahs along the road--met him on the bridge over
the roaring Oglio, just out of Edolo, and gave him news of the fugitives.
'Both of them were at the big hotel in Bormio,' said Jacob; 'and I set up
a report that the Stelvio was watched; and so it is.' He added that he
thought they were going to separate; he had heard something to that
effect; he believed that the young lady was bent upon crossing one of the
passes to Meran. Last night it had devolved on him to kiss away the tears
of the young lady's maid, a Valtelline peasant-girl, who deplored the
idea of an expedition over the mountains, and had, with the usual
cat-like tendencies of these Italian minxes, torn his cheek in return for
his assiduities. Jacob displayed the pretty scratch obtained in the Herr
Captain's service, and got his money for having sighted Vittoria and seen
double. Weisspriess decided in his mind that Angelo had now separated
from her (or rather, she from him) for safety. He thought it very
probable that she would likewise fly to Switzerland. Yet, knowing that
there was the attraction of many friends for her at Meran, he conceived
that he should act more prudently by throwing himself on that line, and
he sped Jacob Baumwalder along the Valtelline by Val Viola, up to Ponte
in the Engadine, with orders to seize her if he could see her, and have
her conveyed to Cles, in Tyrol. Vittoria being only by the gentlest
interpretation of her conduct not under interdict, an unscrupulous
Imperial officer might in those military times venture to employ the
gendarmerie for his own purposes, if he could but give a plausible colour
of devotion to the Imperial interests.

The chasseur sped lamentingly back, and Weisspriess, taking a guide from
the skirting hamlet above Edolo, quitted the Val Camonica, climbed the
Tonale, and reached Vermiglio in the branch valley of that name,
scientifically observing the features of the country as he went. At
Vermiglio he encountered a brother officer of one of his former
regiments, a fat major on a tour of inspection, who happened to be a week
behind news of the army, and detained him on the pretext of helping him
on his car--a mockery that drove Weisspriess to the perpetual reply, 'You
are my superior officer,' which reduced the major to ask him whether he
had been degraded a step. As usual, Weisspriess was pushed to assert his
haughtiness, backed by the shadow of his sword. 'I am a man with a
family,' said the major, modestly. 'Then I shall call you my superior
officer while they allow you to remain so,' returned Weisspriess, who
scorned a married soldier.

'I aspired to the Staff once myself,' said the major. 'Unfortunately, I
grew in girth--the wrong way for ambition. I digest, I assimilate with a
fatal ease. Stout men are doomed to the obscurer paths. You may quote
Napoleon as a contrary instance. I maintain positively that his day was
over, his sun was eclipsed, when his valet had to loosen the buckles of
his waistcoat and breech. Now, what do you say?'

'I say,' Weisspriess replied, 'that if there's a further depreciation of
the paper currency, we shall none of us have much chance of digesting or
assimilating either--if I know at all what those processes mean.'

'Our good Lombard cow is not half squeezed enough,' observed the major,
confidentially in tone. 'When she makes a noise--quick! the pail at her
udders and work away; that's my advice. What's the verse?--our
Zwitterwitz's, I mean; the Viennese poet:--

       "Her milk is good-the Lombard cow;
        Let her be noisy when she pleases
        But if she kicks the pail, I vow,
        We'll make her used to sharper squeezes:
        We'll write her mighty deeds in CHEESES:
        (That is, if she yields milk enow)."

'Capital! capital!' the major applauded his quotation, and went on to
speak of 'that Zwitterwitz' as having served in a border regiment, after
creating certain Court scandal, and of his carrying off a Wallach lady
from her lord and selling her to a Turk, and turning Turk himself and
keeping a harem. Five years later he reappeared in Vienna with a volume
of what he called 'Black Eagle Poems,' and regained possession of his
barony. 'So far, so good,' said the major; 'but when he applied for his
old commission in the army--that was rather too cool.'

Weisspriess muttered intelligibly, 'I've heard the remark, that you can't
listen to a man five minutes without getting something out of him.'

'I don't know; it may be,' said the major, imagining that Weisspriess
demanded some stronger flavours of gossip in his talk. 'There's no stir
in these valleys. They arrested, somewhere close on Trent yesterday
afternoon, a fellow calling himself Beppo, the servant of an Italian
woman--a dancer, I fancy. They're on the lookout for her too, I'm told;
though what sort of capers she can be cutting in Tyrol, I can't even
guess.'

The major's car was journeying leisurely toward Cles. 'Whip that brute!'
Weisspriess sang out to the driver, and begging the major's pardon,
requested to know whither he was bound. The major informed him that he
hoped to sup in Trent. 'Good heaven! not at this pace,' Weisspriess
shouted. But the pace was barely accelerated, and he concealed his
reasons for invoking speed. They were late in arriving at Trent, where
Weisspriess cast eye on the imprisoned wretch, who declared piteously
that he was the trusted and innocent servant of the Signorina Vittoria,
and had been visiting all the castles of Meran in search of her. The
captain's man Wilhelm had been the one to pounce on poor Beppo while the
latter was wandering disconsolately. Leaving him to howl, Weisspriess
procured the loan of a horse from a colonel of cavalry at the Buon
Consiglio barracks, and mounted an hour before dawn, followed by Wilhelm.
He reached Cles in time to learn that Vittoria and her party had passed
through it a little in advance of him. Breakfasting there, he enjoyed the
first truly calm cigar of many days. Gendarmes whom he had met near the
place came in at his heels. They said that the party would positively be
arrested, or not allowed to cross the Monte Pallade. The passes to Meran
and Botzen, and the road to Trent, were strictly guarded. Weisspriess
hurried them forward with particular orders that they should take into
custody the whole of the party, excepting the lady; her, if arrested with
the others, they were to release: her maid and the three men were to be
marched back to Cles, and there kept fast.

The game was now his own: he surveyed its pretty intricate moves as on a
map. The character of Herr Johannes he entirely discarded: an Imperial
officer in his uniform, sword in belt, could scarcely continue that meek
performance. 'But I may admire music, and entreat her to give me a
particular note, if she has it,' said the captain, hanging in
contemplation over a coming scene, like a quivering hawk about to close
its wings. His heart beat thick; which astonished him: hitherto it had
never made that sort of movement.

From Cles he despatched a letter to the fair chatelaine at Meran, telling
her that by dainty and skilful management of the paces, he was bringing
on the intractable heroine of the Fifteenth, and was to be expected in
about two or three days. The letter was entrusted to Wilhelm, who took
the borrowed horse back to Trent.

Weisspriess was on the mule-track a mile above the last village ascending
to the pass, when he observed the party of prisoners, and climbed up into
covert. As they went by he discerned but one person in female garments;
the necessity to crouch for obscurity prevented him from examining them
separately. He counted three men and beheld one of them between
gendarmes. 'That must be my villain,' he said.

It was clear that Vittoria had chosen to go forward alone. The captain
praised her spirit, and now pushed ahead with hunter's strides. He passed
an inn, closed and tenantless: behind him lay the Val di Non; in front
the darker valley of the Adige: where was the prey? A storm of rage set
in upon him with the fear that he had been befooled. He lit a cigar, to
assume ease of aspect, whatever the circumstances might be, and gain some
inward serenity by the outer reflection of it--not altogether without
success. 'My lady must be a doughty walker,' he thought; 'at this rate
she will be in the Ultenthal before sunset.' A wooded height ranged on
his left as he descended rapidly. Coming to a roll of grass dotted with
grey rock, he climbed it, and mounting one of the boulders, beheld at a
distance of half-a-dozen stone-throws downward, the figure of a woman
holding her hand cup-shape to a wayside fall of water. The path by which
she was going rounded the height he stood on. He sprang over the rocks,
catching up his clattering steel scabbard; and plunging through tinted
leafage and green underwood, steadied his heels on a sloping bank, and
came down on the path with stones and earth and brambles, in time to
appear as a seated pedestrian when Vittoria turned the bend of the
mountain way.

Gracefully withdrawing the cigar from his mouth, and touching his breast
with turned-in fingers, he accosted her with a comical operatic effort at
her high notes

                      'Italia!'

She gathered her arms on her bosom and looked swiftly round: then at the
apparition of her enemy.

It is but an ironical form of respect that you offer to the prey you have
been hotly chasing and have caught. Weisspriess conceived that he had
good reasons for addressing her in the tone best suited to his character:
he spoke with a ridiculous mincing suavity:

'My pretty sweet! are you not tired? We have not seen one another for
days! Can you have forgotten the enthusiastic Herr Johannes? You have
been in pleasant company, no doubt; but I have been all--all alone. Think
of that! What an exceedingly fortunate chance this is! I was smoking
dolefully, and imagining anything but such a rapture.--No, no,
mademoiselle, be mannerly.' The captain blocked her passage. 'You must
not leave me while I am speaking. A good governess would have taught you
that in the nursery. I am afraid you had an inattentive governess, who
did not impress upon you the duty of recognizing friends when you meet
them! Ha! you were educated in England, I have heard. Shake hands. It is
our custom--I think a better one--to kiss on the right cheek and the
left, but we will shake hands.'

'In God's name, sir, let me go on,' Vittoria could just gather voice to
utter.

'But,' cried the delighted captain, 'you address me in the tones of a
basso profundo! It is absurd. Do you suppose that I am to be deceived by
your artifice?--rogue that you are! Don't I know you are a woman? a
sweet, an ecstatic, a darling little woman!'

He laughed. She shivered to hear the solitary echoes. There was sunlight
on the farthest Adige walls, but damp shade already filled the
East-facing hollows.

'I beg you very earnestly, to let me go on,' said Vittoria.

'With equal earnestness, I beg you to let me accompany you,' he replied.
'I mean no offence, mademoiselle; but I have sworn that I and no one but
I shall conduct you to the Castle of Sonnenberg, where you will meet the
Lenkenstein ladies, with whom I have the honour to be acquainted. You
see, you have nothing to fear if you play no foolish pranks, like a
kicking filly in the pasture.'

'If it is your pleasure,' she said gravely; but he obtruded the bow of an
arm. She drew back. Her first blank despair at sight of the trap she had
fallen into, was clearing before her natural high courage.

'My little lady! my precious prima donna! do you refuse the most trifling
aid from me? It's because I'm a German.'

'There are many noble gentlemen who are Germans,' said Vittoria.

'It 's because I'm a German; I know it is. But, don't you see, Germany
invades Italy, and keeps hold of her? Providence decrees it so--ask the
priests! You are a delicious Italian damsel, and you will take the arm of
a German.'

Vittoria raised her face. 'Do you mean that I am your prisoner?'

'You did not look braver at La Scala'; the captain bowed to her.

'Ah, I forgot,' said she; 'you saw me there. If, signore, you will do me
the favour to conduct me to the nearest inn, I will sing to you.'

'It is precisely my desire, signorina.

You are not married to that man Guidascarpi, I presume? No, no: you are
merely his . . . friend. May I have the felicity of hearing you call me
your friend? Why, you tremble! are you afraid of me?'

'To tell the truth, you talk too much to please me,' said Vittoria.

The captain praised her frankness, and he liked it. The trembling of her
frame still fascinated his eyes, but her courage and the absence of all
womanly play and cowering about her manner impressed him seriously. He
stood looking at her, biting his moustache, and trying to provoke her to
smile.

'Conduct you to the nearest inn; yes,' he said, as if musing. 'To the
nearest inn, where you will sing to me; sing to me. It is not an
objectionable scheme. The inns will not be choice: but the society will
be exquisite. Say first, I am your sworn cavalier?'

'It does not become me to say that,' she replied, feigning a demure
sincerity, on the verge of her patience.

'You allow me to say it?'

She gave him a look of fire and passed him; whereat, following her, he
clapped hands, and affected to regard the movement as part of an operatic
scena. 'It is now time to draw your dagger,' he said. 'You have one, I'm
certain.'

'Anything but touch me!' cried Vittoria, turning on him. 'I know that I
am safe. You shall teaze me, if it amuses you.'

'Am I not, now, the object of your detestation?'

'You are near being so.'

'You see! You put on no disguise; why should I?'

This remark struck her with force.

'My temper is foolish,' she said softly. 'I have always been used to
kindness.'

He vowed that she had no comprehension of kindness; otherwise would she
continue defiant of him? She denied that she was defiant: upon which he
accused the hand in her bosom of clutching a dagger. She cast the dagger
at his feet. It was nobly done, and he was not insensible to the courage
and inspiration of the act; for it checked a little example of a trial of
strength that he had thought of exhibiting to an armed damsel.

'Shall I pick it up for you?' he said.

'You will oblige me,' was her answer; but she could not control a
convulsion of her underlip that her defensive instinct told her was best
hidden.

'Of course, you know you are safe,' he repeated her previous words, while
examining the silver handle of the dagger. 'Safe? certainly! Here is C.
A. to V. . . . A. neatly engraved: a gift; so that the young gentleman
may be sure the young lady will defend herself from lions and tigers and
wild boars, if ever she goes through forests and over mountain passes. I
will not obtrude my curiosity, but who is V . . . . A. ?'

The dagger was Carlo's gift to her; the engraver, by singular
misadventure, had put a capital letter for the concluding letter of her
name instead of little a; she remembered the blush on Carlo's face when
she had drawn his attention to the error, and her own blush when she had
guessed its meaning.

'It spells my name,' she said.

'Your assumed name of Vittoria. And who is C. A.?'

'Those are the initials of Count Carlo Ammiani.'

'Another lover?'

'He is my sole lover. He is my betrothed. Oh, good God!' she threw her
eyes up to heaven; 'how long am I to endure the torture of this man in my
pathway? Go, sir, or let me go on. You are intolerable. It 's the spirit
of a tiger. I have no fear of you.'

'Nay, nay,' said Weisspriess, 'I asked the question because I am under an
obligation to run Count Carlo Ammiani through the body, and felt at once
that I should regret the necessity. As to your not fearing me, really,
far from wishing to hurt you--'

Vittoria had caught sight of a white face framed in the autumnal forest
above her head. So keen was the glad expression of her face, that
Weisspriess looked up.

'Come, Angelo, come to me;' she said confidently.

Weisspriess plucked his sword out, and called to him imperiously to
descend.

Beckoned downward by white hand and flashing blade, Angelo steadied his
feet and hands among drooping chestnut boughs, and bounded to Vittoria's
side.

'Now march on,' Weisspriess waved his sword; 'you are my prisoners.'

'You,' retorted Angelo; 'I know you; you are a man marked out for one of
us. I bid you turn back, if you care for your body's safety.'

'Angelo Guidascarpi, I also know you. Assassin! you double murderer! Defy
me, and I slay you in the sight of your paramour.'

'Captain Weisspriess, what you have spoken merits death. I implore of my
Maker that I may not have to kill you.'

'Fool! you are unarmed.'

Angelo took his stilet in his fist.

'I have warned you, Captain Weisspriess. Here I stand. I dare you to
advance.'

'You pronounce my name abominably,' said the captain, dropping his
sword's point. 'If you think of resisting me, let us have no women
looking on.' He waved his left hand at Vittoria.

Angelo urged her to go. 'Step on for our Carlo's sake.' But it was asking
too much of her.

'Can you fight this man?' she asked.

'I can fight him and kill him.'

'I will not step on,' she said. 'Must you fight him?'

'There is no choice.' Vittoria walked to a distance at once.

Angelo directed the captain's eyes to where, lower in the pass, there was
a level plot of meadow.

Weisspriess nodded. 'The odds are in my favour, so you shall choose the
ground.'

All three went silently to the meadow.

It was a circle of green on a projecting shoulder of the mountain,
bounded by woods that sank toward the now shadowy South-flowing Adige
vale, whose Western heights were gathering red colour above a
strongly-marked brown line. Vittoria stood at the border of the wood,
leaving the two men to their work. She knew when speech was useless.

Captain Weisspriess paced behind Angelo until the latter stopped short,
saying, 'Here!'

'Wherever you please,' Weisspriess responded. 'The ground is of more
importance to you than to me.'

They faced mutually; one felt the point of his stilet, the other the
temper of his sword.

'Killing you, Angelo Guidascarpi, is the killing of a dog. But there are
such things as mad dogs. This is not a duel. It is a righteous execution,
since you force me to it: I shall deserve your thanks for saving you from
the hangman. I think you have heard that I can use my weapon. There's
death on this point for you. Make your peace with your Maker.'

Weisspriess spoke sternly. He delayed the lifting of his sword that the
bloody soul might pray.

Angelo said, 'You are a good soldier: you are a bad priest. Come on.'

A nod of magnanimous resignation to the duties of his office was the
captain's signal of readiness. He knew exactly the method of fighting
which Angelo must adopt, and he saw that his adversary was supple, and
sinewy, and very keen of eye. But, what can well compensate for even one
additional inch of steel? A superior weapon wielded by a trained wrist in
perfect coolness means victory, by every reasonable reckoning. In the
present instance, it meant nothing other than an execution, as he had
said. His contemplation of his own actual share in the performance was
nevertheless unpleasant; and it was but half willingly that he
straightened out his sword and then doubled his arm. He lessened the odds
in his favour considerably by his too accurate estimation of them. He was
also a little unmanned by the thought that a woman was to see him using
his advantage; but she stood firm in her distant corner, refusing to be
waved out of sight. Weisspriess had again to assure himself that it was
not a duel, but the enforced execution of a criminal who would not
surrender, and who was in his way. Fronting a creature that would vainly
assail him, and temporarily escape impalement by bounding and springing,
dodging and backing, now here now there, like a dangling bob-cherry, his
military gorge rose with a sickness of disgust. He had to remember as
vividly as he could realize it, that this man's life was forfeited, and
that the slaughter of him was a worthy service to Countess Anna; also,
that there were present reasons for desiring to be quit of him. He gave
Angelo two thrusts, and bled him. The skill which warded off the more
vicious one aroused his admiration.

'Pardon my blundering,' he said; 'I have never engaged a saltimbanque
before.'

They recommenced. Weisspriess began to weigh the sagacity of his
opponent's choice of open ground, where he could lengthen the discourse
of steel by retreating and retreating, and swinging easily to right or to
left. In the narrow track the sword would have transfixed him after a
single feint. He was amused. Much of the cat was in his combative nature.
An idea of disabling or dismembering Angelo, and forwarding him to Meran,
caused him to trifle further with the edge of the blade. Angelo took a
cut, and turned it on his arm; free of the deadly point, he rushed in and
delivered a stab; but Weisspriess saved his breast. Quick, they resumed
their former positions.

'I am really so unused to this game!' said Weisspriess, apologetically.

He was pale: his unsteady breathing, and a deflection of his dripping
sword-wrist, belied his coolness. Angelo plunged full on him, dropped,
and again reached his right arm; they hung, getting blood for blood, with
blazing interpenetrating eyes; a ghastly work of dark hands at half lock
thrusting, and savage eyes reading the fiery pages of the book of hell.
At last the Austrian got loose from the lock and hurled him off.

'That bout was hotter,' he remarked; and kept his sword-point out on the
whole length of the arm: he would have scorned another for so miserable a
form either of attack or defence.

Vittoria beheld Angelo circling round the point, which met him
everywhere; like the minute hand of a clock about to sound his hour, she
thought.

He let fall both his arms, as if beaten, which brought on the attack: by
sheer evasion he got away from the sword's lunge, and essayed a second
trial of the bite of steel at close quarters; but the Austrian backed and
kept him to the point, darting short alluring thrusts, thinking to tempt
him on, or to wind him, and then to have him. Weisspriess was chilled by
a more curious revulsion from this sort of engagement than he at first
experienced. He had become nervously incapable of those proper niceties
of sword-play which, without any indecent hacking or maiming, should have
stretched Angelo, neatly slain, on the mat of green, before he had a
chance. Even now the sight of the man was distressing to an honourable
duellist. Angelo was scored with blood-marks. Feeling that he dared not
offer another chance to a fellow so desperately close-dealing,
Weisspriess thrust fiercely, but delayed his fatal stroke. Angelo stooped
and pulled up a handful of grass and soft earth in his left hand.

'We have been longer about it than I expected,' said Weisspriess.

Angelo tightened his fingers about the stringy grasstuft; he stood like a
dreamer, leaning over to the sword; suddenly he sprang on it, received
the point right in his side, sprang on it again, and seized it in his
hand, and tossed it up, and threw it square out in time to burst within
guard and strike his stilet below the Austrian's collar-bone. The blade
took a glut of blood, as when the wolf tears quick at dripping flesh. It
was at a moment when Weisspriess was courteously bantering him with the
question whether he was ready, meaning that the affirmative should open
the gates of death to him.

The stilet struck thrice. Weisspriess tottered, and hung his jaw like a
man at a spectre: amazement was on his features.

'Remember Broncini and young Branciani!'

Angelo spoke no other words throughout the combat.

Weisspriess threw himself forward on a feeble lunge of his sword, and let
the point sink in the ground, as a palsied cripple supports his frame,
swayed, and called to Angelo to come on, and try another stroke,
another--one more! He fell in a lump: his look of amazement was
surmounted by a strong frown.

His enemy was hanging above him panting out of wide nostrils, like a
hunter's horse above the long-tongued quarry, when Vittoria came to them.

She reached her strength to the wounded man to turn his face to heaven.

He moaned, 'Finish me'; and, as he lay with his back to earth,
'Good-evening to the old army!'

A vision of leaping tumbrils, and long marching columns about to deploy,
passed before his eyelids: he thought he had fallen on the battle-field,
and heard a drum beat furiously in the back of his head; and on streamed
the cavalry, wonderfully caught away to such a distance that the figures
were all diminutive, and the regimental colours swam in smoke, and the
enemy danced a plume here and there out of the sea, while his mother and
a forgotten Viennese girl gazed at him with exactly the same unfamiliar
countenance, and refused to hear that they were unintelligible in the
roaring of guns and floods and hurrahs, and the thumping of the
tremendous big drum behind his head--'somewhere in the middle of the
earth': he tried to explain the locality of that terrible drumming noise
to them, and Vittoria conceived him to be delirious; but he knew that he
was sensible; he knew her and Angelo and the mountain-pass, and that he
had a cigar-case in his pocket worked in embroidery of crimson, blue, and
gold, by the hands of Countess Anna. He said distinctly that he desired
the cigar-case to be delivered to Countess Anna at the Castle of
Sonnenberg, and rejoiced on being assured that his wish was comprehended
and should be fulfilled; but the marvel was, that his mother should still
refuse to give him wine, and suppose him to be a boy: and when he was so
thirsty and dry-lipped that though Mina was bending over him, just fresh
from Mariazell, he had not the heart to kiss her or lift an arm to
her!--His horse was off with him-whither?--He was going down with a
company of infantry in the Gulf of Venice: cards were in his hands,
visible, though he could not feel them, and as the vessel settled for the
black plunge, the cards flushed all honours, and his mother shook her
head at him: he sank, and heard Mina sighing all the length of the water
to the bottom, which grated and gave him two horrid shocks of pain: and
he cried for a doctor, and admitted that his horse had managed to throw
him; but wine was the cure, brandy was the cure, or water, water! Water
was sprinkled on his forehead and put to his lips.

He thanked Vittoria by name, and imagined himself that General, serving
under old Wurmser, of whom the tale is told that being shot and lying
grievously wounded on the harsh Rivoli ground, he obtained the help of a
French officer in as bad case as himself, to moisten his black tongue and
write a short testamentary document with his blood, and for a way of
returning thanks to the Frenchman, he put down among others, the name of
his friendly enemy's widow; whereupon both resigned their hearts to
death; but the Austrian survived to find the sad widow and espouse her.

His mutterings were full of gratitude, showing a vividly transient
impression to what was about him, that vanished in a narrow-headed flight
through clouds into lands of memory. It pained him, he said, that he
could not offer her marriage; but he requested that when his chin was
shaved his moustache should be brushed up out of the way of the clippers,
for he and all his family were conspicuous for the immense amount of life
which they had in them, and his father had lain six-and-thirty hours
bleeding on the field of Wagram, and had yet survived to beget a race as
hearty as himself:--'Old Austria! thou grand old Austria!'

The smile was proud, though faint, which accompanied the apostrophe,
addressed either to his country or to his father's personification of it;
it was inexpressibly pathetic to Vittoria, who understood his
'Oesterreich,' and saw the weak and helpless bleeding man, with his
eyeballs working under the lids, and the palms of his hands stretched out
open-weak as a corpse, but conquering death.

The arrival of Jacopo and Johann furnished help to carry him onward to
the nearest place of shelter. Angelo would not quit her side until he had
given money and directions to both the trembling fellows, together with
his name, that they might declare the author of the deed at once if
questioned. He then bowed to Vittoria slightly and fled. They did not
speak.

The last sunbeams burned full crimson on the heights of the Adige
mountains as Vittoria followed the two pale men who bore the wounded
officer between them at a slow pace for the nearest village in the
descent of the pass.

Angelo watched them out of sight. The far-off red rocks spun round his
eyeballs; the meadow was a whirling thread of green; the brown earth
heaved up to him. He felt that he was diving, and had the thought that
there was but water enough to moisten his red hands when his senses left
him.




CHAPTER XXVII

A NEW ORDEAL

The old city of Meran faces Southward to the yellow hills of Italy,
across a broad vale, between two mountain-walls and torrent-waters. With
one hand it takes the bounding green Passeyr, and with the other the
brown-rolling Adige, and plunges them together in roaring foam under the
shadow of the Western wall. It stands on the spur of a lower central
eminence crowned by a grey castle, and the sun has it from every aspect.
The shape of a swan in water may describe its position, for the
Vintschgau and the stony Passeyrthal make a strong curve on two sides as
they descend upon it with their rivers, and the bosom of the city
projects, while the head appears bending gracefully backward. Many
castles are in view of it; the loud and tameless Passeyr girdles it with
an emerald cincture; there is a sea of arched vineyard foliage at his
feet.

Vittoria reached the Castle of Sonnenberg about noon, and found empty
courts and open doors. She sat in the hall like a supplicant, disregarded
by the German domestics, who beheld a travel-stained humble-faced young
Italian woman, and supposed that their duty was done in permitting her to
rest; but the duchess's maid Aennchen happening to come by, questioned
her in moderately intelligible Italian, and hearing her name gave a cry,
and said that all the company were out hunting, shooting, and riding, in
the vale below or the mountain above. "Ah, dearest lady, what a fright we
have all been in about you! Signora Piaveni has not slept a wink, and the
English gentleman has made great excursions every day to find you. This
morning the soldier Wilhelm arrived with news that his master was
bringing you on."

Vittoria heard that Laura and her sister and the duchess had gone down to
Meran. Countess Lena von Lenkenstein was riding to see her betrothed
shoot on a neighbouring estate. Countess Anna had disappeared early, none
knew where. Both these ladies, and their sister-in-law, were in mourning
for the terrible death of their brother, Count Paul Aennchen repeated
what she knew of the tale concerning him.

The desire to see Laura first, and be embraced and counselled by her, and
lie awhile in her arms to get a breath of home, made Vittoria refuse to
go up to her chamber, and notwithstanding Aennchen's persuasions, she
left the castle, and went out and sat in the shaded cart-track. On the
winding ascent she saw a lady in a black riding habit, leading her horse
and talking to a soldier, who seemed to be receiving orders from her, and
presently saluted and turned his steps downward. The lady came on, and
passed her without a glance. After entering the courtyard, where she left
her horse, she reappeared, and stood hesitating, but came up to Vittoria
and said bluntly, in Italian:

"Are you the signorina Campa, or Belloni, who is expected here?"

The Austrian character and colouring of her features told Vittoria that
this must be the Countess Anna or her sister.

"I think I have been expected," she replied.

"You come alone?"

"I am alone."

"I am Countess Anna von Lenkenstein; one of the guests of the castle."

"My message is to the Countess Anna."

"You have a message?"

Vittoria lifted the embroidered cigar-case. Countess Anna snatched it
from her hand.

"What does this mean? Is it insolence? Have the kindness, if you please,
not to address me in enigmas. Do you"--Anna was deadly pale as she turned
the cigarcase from side to side--"do you imagine that I smoke, 'par
hasard?'" She tried to laugh off her intemperate manner of speech; the
laugh broke at sight of a blood-mark on one corner of the case; she
started and said earnestly, "I beg you to let me hear what the meaning of
this may be?"

"He lies in the Ultenthal, wounded; and his wish was that I should
deliver it to you." Vittoria spoke as gently as the harsh tidings would
allow.

"Wounded? My God! my God!" Anna cried in her own language. "Wounded?-in
the breast, then! He carried it in his breast. Wounded by what? by what?"

"I can tell you no more."

"Wounded by whom?"

"It was an honourable duel."

"Are you afraid to tell me he has been assassinated?"

"It was an honourable duel."

"None could match him with the sword."

"His enemy had nothing but a dagger."

"Who was his enemy?"

"It is no secret, but I must leave him to say."

"You were a witness of the fight?"

"I saw it all."

"The man was one of your party!

"Ah!" exclaimed Vittoria, "lose no time with me, Countess Anna, go to him
at once, for though he lived when I left him, he was bleeding; I cannot
say that he was not dying, and he has not a friend near."

Anna murmured like one overborne by calamity. "My brother struck down one
day--he the next!" She covered her face a moment, and unclosed it to
explain that she wept for her brother, who had been murdered, stabbed in
Bologna.

"Was it Count Ammiani who did this?" she asked passionately.

Vittoria shook her head; she was divining a dreadful thing in relation to
the death of Count Paul.

"It was not?" said Anna. "They had a misunderstanding, I know. But you
tell me the man fought with a dagger. It could not be Count Ammiani. The
dagger is an assassin's weapon, and there are men of honour in Italy
still."

She called to a servant in the castle-yard, and sent him down with orders
to stop the soldier Wilhelm.

"We heard this morning that you were coming, and we thought it curious,"
she observed; and called again for her horse to be saddled. "How far is
this place where he is lying? I have no knowledge of the Ultenthal. Has
he a doctor attending him? When was he wounded? It is but common humanity
to see that he is attended by an efficient doctor. My nerves are unstrung
by the recent blow to our family; that is why--Oh, my father! my holy
father!" she turned to a grey priest's head that was rising up the
ascent, "I thank God for you! Lena is away riding; she weeps constantly
when she is within four walls. Come in and give me tears, if you can; I
am half mad for the want of them. Tears first; teach me patience after."

The old priest fanned his face with his curled hat, and raised one hand
as he uttered a gentle chiding in reproof of curbless human sorrow. Anna
said to Vittoria, coldly, "I thank you for your message:" she walked into
the castle by his side, and said to him there: "The woman you saw outside
has a guilty conscience. You will spend your time more profitably with
her than with me. I am past all religious duties at this moment. You
know, father, that I can open my heart. Probe this Italian woman; search
her through and through. I believe her to be blood-stained and
abominable. She hates us. She has sworn an oath against us. She is
malignant."

It was not long before Anna issued forth and rode down to the vale. The
priest beckoned to Vittoria from the gates. He really supposed her to
have come to him with a burdened spirit.

"My daughter," he addressed her. The chapter on human error was opened:"
We are all of one family--all of us erring children--all of us bound to
abnegate hatred: by love alone are we saved. Behold the Image of
Love--the Virgin and Child. Alas! and has it been visible to man these
more than eighteen hundred years, and humankind are still blind to it?
Are their ways the ways of comfort and blessedness? Their ways are the
ways of blood; paths to eternal misery among howling fiends. Why have
they not chosen the sweet ways of peace, which are strewn with flowers,
which flow with milk?"--The priest spread his hand open for Vittoria's,
which she gave to his keeping, and he enclosed it softly, smoothing it
with his palms, and retaining it as a worldly oyster between spiritual
shells. "Why, my daughter, why, but because we do not bow to that Image
daily, nightly, hourly, momently! We do not worship it that its seed may
be sown in us. We do not cling to it, that in return it may cling to us."

He spoke with that sensuous resource of rich feeling which the
contemplation of the Image does inspire. And Vittoria was not led
reluctantly into the oratory of the castle to pray with him; but she
refused to confess. Thereupon followed a soft discussion that was as near
being acerb as nails are near velvet paws.

Vittoria perceived his drift, and also the dear good heart of the old
man, who meant no harm to her, and believed that he was making use of his
professional weapons for her ultimate good. The inquisitions and the
kindness went musically together; she responded to the kindness, but
rebutted the inquisitions; at which he permitted a shade of discontent to
traverse his features, and asked her with immense tenderness whether she
had not much on her mind; she expressing melodious gratitude for his
endeavours to give her comfort. He could not forbear directing an
admonishment to her stubborn spirit, and was obliged, for the sake of
impressiveness, to speak it harshly; until he saw, that without sweetness
of manner and unction of speech, he left her untouched; so he was driven
back to the form of address better suited to his nature and habits; the
end of which was that both were cooing.

Vittoria was ashamed to tell herself how much she liked him and his
ghostly brethren, whose preaching was always of peace, while the world
was full of lurid hatred, strife, and division. She begged the baffled
old man to keep her hand in his. He talked in Latinized Italian, and only
appeared to miss the exact meaning of her replies when his examination of
the state of her soul was resumed. They sat in the soft colour of the
consecrated place like two who were shut away from earth. Often he
thought that her tears were about to start and bring her low; for she
sighed heavily; at the mere indication of the displacement of her hand,
she looked at him eagerly, as if entreating him not to let it drop.

"You are a German, father?" she said.

"I am of German birth, my daughter."

"That makes it better. Remain beside me. The silence is sweet music."

The silence was broken at intervals by his murmur of a call for patience!
patience!

This strange scene concluded with the entry of the duchess, who retired
partly as soon as she saw them. Vittoria smiled to the old man, and left
him: the duchess gave her a hushed welcome, and took her place. Vittoria
was soon in Laura's arms, where, after a storm of grief, she related the
events of the journey following her flight from Milan. Laura interrupted
her but once to exclaim, "Angelo Guidascarpi!" Vittoria then heard from
her briefly that Milan was quiet, Carlo Ammiani in prison. It had been
for tidings of her lover that she had hastened over the mountains to
Meran. She craved for all that could be told of him, but Laura repeated,
as in a stupefaction, "Angelo Guidascarpi!" She answered Vittoria's
question by saying, "You could not have had so fatal a companion."

"I could not have had so devoted a protector."

"There is such a thing as an evil star. We are all under it at present,
to some degree; but he has been under it from his birth. My Sandra, my
beloved, I think I have pardoned you, if I ever pardon anyone! I doubt
it; but it is certain that I love you. You have seen Countess Anna, or I
would have told you to rest and get over your fatigue. The Lenkensteins
are here--my poor sister among them. You must show yourself. I was
provident enough to call at your mother's for a box of your clothes
before I ran out of wretched Milan."

Further, the signora stated that Carlo might have to remain in prison.
She made no attempt to give dark or fair colour to the misery of the
situation; telling Vittoria to lie on her bed and sleep, if sleep could
be persuaded to visit her, she went out to consult with the duchess.
Vittoria lay like a dead body on the bed, counting the throbs of her
heart. It helped her to fall into a state of insensibility. When she
awoke, the room was dark; she felt that some one had put a silken cushion
across her limbs. The noise of a storm traversing the vale rang through
the castle, and in the desolation of her soul, that stealthy act of
kindness wrought in her till she almost fashioned a vow upon her lips
that she would leave the world to toss its wrecks, and dedicate her life
to God.

For, O heaven! of what avail is human effort? She thought of the Chief,
whose life was stainless, but who stood proscribed because his aim was
too high to be attained within compass of a mortal's years. His error
seemed that he had ever aimed at all. He seemed less wise than the old
priest of the oratory. She could not disentangle him from her own
profound humiliation and sense of fallen power. Her lover's imprisonment
accused her of some monstrous culpability, which she felt unrepentingly,
not as we feel a truth, but as we submit to a terrible force of pressure.

The morning light made her realize Carlo's fate, to whom it would
penetrate through a hideous barred loophole--a defaced and dreadful beam.
She asked herself why she had fled from Milan. It must have been some
cowardly instinct that had prompted her to fly. "Coward, coward! thing of
vanity! you, a mere woman!" she cried out, and succeeded in despising
herself sufficiently to think it possible that she had deserved to
forfeit her lover's esteem.

It was still early when the duchess's maid came to her, bringing word
that her mistress would be glad to visit her. From the duchess Vittoria
heard of the charge against Angelo. Respecting Captain Weisspriess,
Amalia said that she had perceived his object in wishing to bring the
great cantatrice to the castle; and that it was a well-devised audacious
scheme to subdue Countess Anna:--"We Austrians also can be jealous. The
difference between us is, that it makes us tender, and you Italians
savage." She asked pointedly for an affirmative, that Vittoria was glad
to reply with, when she said: "Captain Weisspriess was perfectly
respectful to you?" She spoke comforting words of Carlo Ammiani, whom she
hoped to see released as soon as the excitement had subsided. The chief
comfort she gave was by saying that he had been originally arrested in
mistake for his cousin Angelo.

"I will confide what is now my difficulty here frankly to you," said the
duchess. "The Lenkensteins are my guests; I thought it better to bring
them here. Angelo Guidascarpi has slain their brother--a base deed! It
does not affect you in my eyes; you can understand that in theirs it
does. Your being present--Laura has told me everything--at the duel, or
fight, between that young man and Captain Weisspriess, will make you
appear as his accomplice--at least, to Anna it will; she is the most
unreasoning, the most implacable of women. She returned from the
Ultenthal last night, and goes there this morning, which is a sign that
Captain Weisspriess lives. I should be sorry if we lost so good an
officer. As she is going to take Father Bernardus with her, it is
possible that the wound is serious. Do you know you have mystified the
worthy man exceedingly? What tempted you to inform him that your
conscience was heavily burdened, at the same time that you refused to
confess?"

"Surely he has been deluded about me," said Vittoria.

"I do but tell you his state of mind in regard to you," the duchess
pursued. "Under all the circumstances, this is what I have to ask: you
are my Laura's guest, therefore the guest of my heart. There is another
one here, an Englishman, a Mr. Powys; and also Lieutenant Pierson, whom,
naughty rebel that you are, you have been the means of bringing into
disgrace; naturally you would wish to see them: but my request is, that
you should keep to these rooms for two or three days: the Lenkensteins
will then be gone. They can hardly reproach me for retaining an invalid.
If you go down among them, it will be a cruel meeting."

Vittoria thankfully consented to the arrangement. They agreed to act in
accordance with it.

The signora was a late riser. The duchess had come on a second visit to
Vittoria when Laura joined them, and hearing of the arrangement, spurned
the notion of playing craven before the Lenkensteins, who, she said,
might think as it pleased them to think, but were never to suppose that
there was any fear of confronting them. "And now, at this very moment,
when they have their triumph, and are laughing over Viennese squibs at
her, she has an idea of hiding her head--she hangs out the white flag! It
can't be. We go or we stay; but if we stay, the truth is that we are too
poor to allow our enemies to think poorly of us. You, Amalia, are
victorious, and you may snap your fingers at opinion. It is a luxury we
cannot afford. Besides, I wish her to see my sister and make acquaintance
with the Austrianized-Italian--such a wonder as is nowhere to be seen out
of the Serabiglione and in the Lenkenstein family. Marriage is, indeed, a
tremendous transformation. Bianca was once declared to be very like me."

The brow-beaten duchess replied to the outburst that she had considered
it right to propose the scheme for Vittoria's seclusion on account of the
Guidascarpi.

"Even if that were a good reason, there are better on the other side,"
said Laura; adding, with many little backward tosses of the head, "That
story has to be related in full before I denounce Angelo and Rinaldo."

"It cannot be denied that they are assassins," returned the duchess.

"It cannot be denied that they have killed one man or more. For you,
Justice drops from the bough: we have to climb and risk our necks for it.
Angelo stood to defend my darling here. Shall she be ashamed of him?"

"You will never persuade me to tolerate assassination," said the duchess
colouring.

"Never, never; I shall never persuade you; never persuade--never attempt
to persuade any foreigner that we can be driven to extremes where their
laws do not apply to us--are not good for us--goad a subjected people
till their madness is pardonable. Nor shall I dream of persuading you
that Angelo did right in defending her from that man."

"I maintain that there are laws applicable to all human creatures," said
the duchess. "You astonish me when you speak compassionately of such a
criminal."

"No; not of such a criminal, of such an unfortunate youth, and my
countryman, when every hand is turned against him, and all tongues are
reviling him. But let Angelo pass; I pray to heaven he may escape. All
who are worth anything in our country are strained in every fibre, and
it's my trick to be half in love with anyone of them when he is
persecuted. I fancy he is worth more than the others, and is simply
luckless. You must make allowances for us, Amalia--pity captive Judah!"

"I think, my Laura, you will never be satisfied till I have ceased to be
Babylonian," said the duchess, smiling and fondling Vittoria, to whom she
said, "Am I not a complaisant German?"

Vittoria replied gently, "If they were like you!"

"Yes, if they were like the duchess," said Laura, "nothing would be left
for us then but to hate ourselves. Fortunately, we deal with brutes."

She was quite pitiless in prompting Vittoria to hasten down, and
marvelled at the evident reluctance in doing this slight duty, of one
whose courage she had recently seen rise so high. Vittoria was equally
amazed by her want of sympathy, which was positive coldness, and her
disregard for the sentiments of her hostess. She dressed hesitatingly,
responding with forlorn eyes to Laura's imperious "Come." When at last
she was ready to descend, Laura took her dawn, full of battle. The
duchess had gone in advance to keep the peace.

The ladies of the Lenkenstein family were standing at one window of the
morning room conversing. Apart from them, Merthyr Powys and Wilfrid were
examining one of the cumbrous antique arms ranged along the wall. The
former of these old English friends stepped up to Vittoria quickly and
kissed her forehead. Wilfrid hung behind him; he made a poor show of
indifference, stammered English and reddened; remembering that he was
under observation he recovered wonderfully, and asked, like a patron,
"How is the voice?" which would have been foolish enough to Vittoria's
more attentive hearing. She thanked him for the service he had rendered
her at La Scala. Countess Lena, who looked hard at both, saw nothing to
waken one jealous throb.

"Bianca, you expressed a wish to give a salute to my eldest daughter,"
said Laura.

The Countess of Lenkenstein turned her head. "Have I done so?"

"It is my duty to introduce her," interposed the duchess, and conducted
the ceremony with a show of its embracing these ladies, neither one of
whom changed her cold gaze.

Careful that no pause should follow, she commenced chatting to the ladies
and gentlemen alternately, keeping Vittoria under her peculiar charge.
Merthyr alone seconded her efforts to weave the web of converse, which is
an armistice if not a treaty on these occasions.

"Have you any fresh caricatures from Vienna?" Laura continued to address
her sister.

"None have reached me," said the neutral countess.

"Have they finished laughing?"

"I cannot tell."

"At any rate, we sing still," Laura smiled to Vittoria. "You shall hear
us after breakfast. I regret excessively that you were not in Milan on
the Fifteenth. We will make amends to you as much as possible. You shall
hear us after breakfast. You will sing to please my sister, Sandra mia,
will you not?"

Vittoria shook her head. Like those who have become passive, she read
faces--the duchess's imploring looks thrown from time to time to the
Lenkenstein ladies, Wilfrid's oppressed forehead, the resolute neutrality
of the countess--and she was not only incapable of seconding Laura's
aggressive war, but shrank from the involvement and sickened at the
indelicacy. Anna's eyes were fixed on her and filled her with dread lest
she should be resolving to demand a private interview.

"You refuse to sing?" said Laura; and under her breath, "When I bid you
not, you insist!"

"Can she possibly sing before she grows accustomed to the air of the
place?" said the duchess.

Merthyr gravely prescribed a week's diet on grapes antecedent to the
issuing of a note. "Have you never heard what a sustained grape-diet will
do for the bullfinches?"

"Never," exclaimed the duchess. "Is that the secret of their German
education?"

"Apparently, for we cannot raise them to the same pitch of perfection in
England."

"I will try it upon mine. Every morning they shall have two big bunches."

"Fresh plucked, and with the first sunlight on them. Be careful of the
rules."

Wilfrid remarked, "To make them exhibit the results, you withdraw the
benefit suddenly, of course?"

"We imitate the general run of Fortune's gifts as much as we can," said
Merthyr.

"That is the training for little shrill parrots: we have none in Italy,"
Laura sighed, mock dolefully; "I fear the system would fail among us."

"It certainly would not build Como villas," said Lena.

Laura cast sharp eyes on her pretty face.

"It is adapted for caged voices that are required to chirrup to tickle
the ears of boors."

Anna said to the duchess: "I hope your little birds are all well this
morning."

"Come to them presently with me and let our ears be tickled," the duchess
laughed in answer; and the spiked dialogue broke, not to revive.

The duchess had observed the constant direction of Anna's eyes upon
Vittoria during the repast, and looked an interrogation at Anna, who
replied to it firmly. "I must be present," the duchess whispered. She
drew Vittoria away by the hand, telling Merthyr Powys that it was unkind
to him, but that he should be permitted to claim his fair friend from
noon to the dinner-bell.

Laura and Bianca were discussing the same subject as the one for which
Anna desired an interview with Vittoria. It was to know the conditions
and cause of the duel between Angelo Guidascarpi and Captain Weisspriess,
and whither Angelo had fled. "In other words, you cry for vengeance under
the name of justice," Laura phrased it, and put up a prayer for Angelo's
escape.

The countess rebuked her. "It is men like Angelo who are a scandal to
Italy."

"Proclaimed so; but by what title are they judged?" Laura retorted. "I
have heard that his duel with Count Paul was fair, and that the grounds
for it were just. Deplore it; but to condemn an Italian gentleman without
hearing his personal vindication, is infamous; nay, it is Austrian. I
know next to nothing of the story. Countess Ammiani has assured me that
the brothers have a clear defence--not from your Vienna point of view:
Italy and Vienna are different sides of the shield."

Vittoria spoke most humbly before Anna; her sole irritating remark was,
that even if she were aware of the direction of Angelo's flight, she
would not betray him.

The duchess did her utmost to induce her to see that he was a criminal,
outlawed from common charity. "These Italians are really like the Jews,"
she said to Anna; "they appear to me to hold together by a bond of race:
you cannot get them to understand that any act can be infamous when one
of their blood is guilty of it."

Anna thought gloomily: "Then, why do you ally yourself to them?"

The duchess, with Anna, Lena, and Wilfrid, drove to the Ultenthal.
Vittoria and Merthyr had a long afternoon of companionship. She had been
shyer in meeting him than in meeting Wilfrid, whom she had once loved.
The tie between herself and Wilfrid was broken; but Merthyr had remained
true to his passionless affection, which ennobled him to her so that her
heart fluttered, though she was heavily depressed. He relieved her by
letting her perceive that Carlo Ammiani's merits were not unknown to him.
Merthyr smiled at Carlo for abjuring his patrician birth. He said: "Count
Ammiani will be cured in time of those little roughnesses of his adopted
Republicanism. You must help to cure him. Women are never so foolish as
men in these things."

When Merthyr had spoken thus, she felt that she might dare to press his
hand. Sharing friendship with this steadfast nature and brotherly
gentleman; who was in the ripe manhood of his years; who loved Italy and
never despaired; who gave great affection, and took uncomplainingly the
possible return for it;--seemed like entering on a great plain open to
boundless heaven. She thought that friendship was sweeter than love.
Merthyr soon left the castle to meet his sister at Coire. Laura and
Vittoria drove some distance up the Vintschgau, on the way to the
Engadine, with him. He affected not to be downcast by the failure of the
last attempt at a rising in Milan. "Keep true to your Art; and don't let
it be subservient to anything," he said, and his final injunction to her
was that she should get a German master and practise rigidly.

Vittoria could only look at Laura in reply.

"He is for us, but not of us," said Laura, as she kissed her fingers to
him.

"If he had told me to weep and pray," Vittoria murmured, "I think I
should by-and-by lift up my head."

"By-and-by! By-and-by I think I see a convent for me," said Laura.

Their faces drooped.

Vittoria cried: "Ah! did he mean that my singing at La Scala was below
the mark?"

At this, Laura's laughter came out in a volume. "And that excellent
Father Bernardus thinks he is gaining a convert!" she said.

Vittoria's depression was real, though her strong vitality appeared to
mock it. Letters from Milan, enclosed to the duchess, spoke of Carlo
Ammiani's imprisonment as a matter that might be indefinitely prolonged.
His mother had been subjected to an examination; she had not hesitated to
confess that she had received her nephew in her house, but it could not
be established against her that it was not Carlo whom she had passed off
to the sbirri as her son. Countess Ammiani wrote to Laura, telling her
she scarcely hoped that Carlo would obtain his liberty save upon the
arrest of Angelo:--"Therefore, what I most desire, I dare not pray for!"
That line of intense tragic grief haunted Vittoria like a veiled head
thrusting itself across the sunlight. Countess Ammiani added that she
must give her son what news she could gather;--"Concerning you," said
Laura, interpreting the sentence: "Bitter days do this good, they make a
proud woman abjure the traditions of her caste." A guarded answer was
addressed, according to the countess's directions, to Sarpo the
bookseller, in Milan. For purposes of such a nature, Barto Rizzo turned
the uneasy craven to account.

It happened that one of the maids at Sonnenberg was about to marry a
peasant, of Meran, part proprietor of a vineyard, and the nuptials were
to be celebrated at the castle. Among those who thronged the courtyard on
the afternoon of the ceremony, Vittoria beheld her faithful Beppo, who
related the story of his pursuit of her, and the perfidy of Luigi;--a
story so lengthy, that his voluble tongue running at full speed could
barely give the outlines of it. He informed her, likewise, that he had
been sent for, while lying in Trent, by Captain Weisspriess, whom he had
seen at an inn of the Ultenthal, weak but improving. Beppo was the
captain's propitiatory offering to Vittoria. Meanwhile the ladies sat on
a terrace, overlooking the court, where a stout fellow in broad green
braces and blue breeches lay half across a wooden table, thrumming a
zither, which set the groups in motion. The zither is a melancholy little
instrument; in range of expression it is to the harp what the winchat is
to the thrush; or to the violin, what that bird is to the nightingale;
yet few instruments are so exciting: here and there along these mountain
valleys you may hear a Tyrolese maid set her voice to its plaintive thin
tones; but when the strings are swept madly there is mad dancing; it
catches at the nerves. "Andreas! Andreas!" the dancers shouted to
encourage the player. Some danced with vine-poles; partners broke and
wandered at will, taking fresh partners, and occasionally huddling in
confusion, when the poles were levelled and tilted at them, and they
dispersed. Beppo, dancing mightily to recover the use of his legs, met
his acquaintance Jacob Baumwalder Feckelwitz, and the pair devoted
themselves to a rivalry of capers; jump, stamp, shuffle, leg aloft, arms
in air, yell and shriek: all took hands around them and streamed,
tramping the measure, and the vine-poles guarded the ring. Then Andreas
raised the song: "Our Lady is gracious," and immediately the whole
assemblage were singing praise to the Lady of the castle. Following
which, wine being brought to Andreas, he drank to his lady, to his lady's
guests, to the bride, to the, bridegroom, to everybody. He was now ready
to improvize, and dashed thumb and finger on the zither, tossing up his
face, swarthy-flushed: "There was a steinbock with a beard." Half-a-dozen
voices repeated it, as to proclaim the theme.

Alas! a beard indeed, for there is no end to this animal. I know him;"
said the duchess dolefully.

       "There was a steinbock with a beard;
        Of no gun was he afeard
        Piff-paff left of him: piff-paff right of him
        Piff-paff everywhere, where you get a sight of him."

The steinbock led through the whole course of a mountaineer's emotions
and experiences, with piff-paff continually left of him and right of him
and nothing hitting him. The mountaineer is perplexed; an able man, a
dead shot, who must undo the puzzle or lose faith in his skill, is a
tremendous pursuer, and the mountaineer follows the steinbock ever. A
'sennderin' at a 'sennhutchen' tells him that she admitted the steinbock
last night, and her curled hair frizzled under the steinbock's eyes. The
case is only too clear: my goodness! the steinbock is the-- "Der Teu .
. . !" said Andreas, with a comic stop of horror, the rhyme falling
cleverly to "ai." Henceforth the mountaineer becomes transformed into a
champion of humanity, hunting the wicked bearded steinbock in all
corners; especially through the cabinet of those dark men who decree the
taxes detested in Tyrol.

The song had as yet but fairly commenced, when a break in the 'piff-paff'
chorus warned Andreas that he was losing influence, women and men were
handing on a paper and bending their heads over it; their responses
hushed altogether, or were ludicrously inefficient.

"I really believe the poor brute has come to a Christian finish--this
Ahasuerus of steinbocks!" said the duchess.

The transition to silence was so extraordinary and abrupt, that she
called to her chasseur to know the meaning of it. Feckelwitz fetched the
paper and handed it up. It exhibited a cross done in blood under the word
'Meran,' and bearing that day's date. One glance at it told Laura what it
meant. The bride in the court below was shedding tears: the bridegroom
was lighting his pipe and consoling her; women were chattering, men
shrugging. Some said they had seen an old grey-haired hag (hexe) stand at
the gates and fling down a piece of paper. A little boy whose imagination
was alive with the tale of the steinbock, declared that her face was
awful, and that she had only the, use of one foot. A man patted him on
the shoulder, and gave him a gulp of wine, saying with his shrewdest air:
"One may laugh at the devil once too often, though!" and that sentiment
was echoed; the women suggested in addition the possibility of the bride
Lisa having something on her conscience, seeing that she had lived in a
castle two years and more. The potential persuasions of Father Bernardus
were required to get the bride to go away to her husband's roof that
evening: when she did make her departure, the superstitious peasantry
were not a merry party that followed at her heels.

At the break-up of the festivities Wilfrid received an intimation that
his sister had arrived in Meran from Bormio. He went down to see her, and
returned at a late hour. The ladies had gone to rest. He wrote a few
underlined words, entreating Vittoria to grant an immediate interview in
the library of the castle. The missive was entrusted to Aennchen.
Vittoria came in alarm.

"My sister is perfectly well," said Wilfrid. "She has heard that Captain
Gambier has been arrested in the mountains; she had some fears concerning
you, which I quieted. What I have to tell you, does not relate to her.
The man Angelo Guidascarpi is in Meran. I wish you to let the signora
know that if he is not carried out of the city before sunset to-morrow, I
must positively inform the superior officer of the district of his
presence there."

This was their first private interview. Vittoria (for she knew him) had
acceded to it, much fearing that it would lead to her having to put on
her sex's armour. To collect her wits, she asked tremblingly how Wilfrid
had chanced to see Angelo. An old Italian woman, he said, had accosted
him at the foot of the mountain, and hearing that he was truly an
Englishman--"I am out of my uniform," Wilfrid remarked with intentional
bitterness--had conducted him to the house of an Italian in the city,
where Angelo Guidascarpi was lying.

"Ill?" said Vittoria.

"Just recovering. After that duel, or whatever it may be called with
Weisspriess, he lay all night out on the mountains. He managed to get the
help of a couple of fellows, who led him at dusk into Meran, saw an
Italian name over a shop, and--I will say for them that the rascals hold
together. There he is, at all events."

"Would you denounce a sick man, Wilfrid?"

"I certainly cannot forget my duty upon every point"

"You are changed!"

"Changed! Am I the only one who is changed?"

"He must have supposed that it would be Merthyr. I remember speaking of
Merthyr to him as our unchangeable friend. I told him Merthyr would be
here."

"Instead of Merthyr, he had the misfortune to see your changeable friend,
if you will have it so."

"But how can it be your duty to denounce him, Wilfrid. You have quitted
that army."

"Have I? I have forfeited my rank, perhaps."

"And Angelo is not guilty of a military offence."

"He has slain one of a family that I am bound to respect."

"Certainly, certainly," said Vittoria hurriedly.

Her forehead showed distress of mind; she wanted Laura's counsel.

"Wilfrid, do you know the whole story?"

"I know that he inveigled Count Paul to his house and slew him; either he
or his brother, or both."

"I have been with him for days, Wilfrid. I believe that he would do no
dishonourable thing. He is related----".

"He is the cousin of Count Ammiani."

"Ah! would you plunge us in misery?"

"How?"

"Count Ammiani is my lover."

She uttered it unblushingly, and with tender eyes fixed on him.

"Your lover!" he exclaimed, with vile emphasis.

"He will be my husband," she murmured, while the mounting hot colour
burned at her temples.

"Changed--who is changed?" he said, in a vehement underneath. "For that
reason I am to be false to her who does me the honour to care for me!"

"I would not have you false to her in thought or deed."

"You ask me to spare this man on account of his relationship to your
lover, and though he has murdered the brother of the lady whom I esteem.
What on earth is the meaning of the petition? Really, you amaze me."

"I appeal to your generosity, Wilfrid, I am Emilia."

"Are you?"

She gave him her hand. He took it, and felt at once the limit of all that
he might claim. Dropping the hand, he said:

"Will nothing less than my ruin satisfy you? Since that night at La
Scala, I am in disgrace with my uncle; I expect at any moment to hear
that I am cashiered from the army, if not a prisoner. What is it that you
ask of me now? To conspire with you in shielding the man who has done a
mortal injury to the family of which I am almost one. Your reason must
perceive that you ask too much. I would willingly assist you in sparing
the feelings of Count Ammiani; and, believe me, gratitude is the last
thing I require to stimulate my services. You ask too much; you must see
that you ask too much."

"I do," said Vittoria. "Good-night, Wilfrid."

He was startled to find her going, and lost his equable voice in trying
to detain her. She sought relief in Laura's bosom, to whom she
recapitulated the interview.

"Is it possible," Laura said, looking at her intently, "that you do not
recognize the folly of telling this Lieutenant Pierson that you were
pleading to him on behalf of your lover? Could anything be so monstrous,
when one can see that he is malleable to the twist of your little finger?
Are you only half a woman, that you have no consciousness of your power?
Probably you can allow yourself--enviable privilege!--to suppose that he
called you down at this late hour simply to inform you that he is
compelled to do something which will cause you unhappiness! I repeat, it
is an enviable privilege. Now, when the real occasion has come for you to
serve us, you have not a single weapon--except these tears, which you are
wasting on my lap. Be sure that if he denounces Angelo, Angelo's life
cries out against you. You have but to quicken your brain to save him.
Did he expose his life for you or not? I knew that he was in Meran," the
signora continued sadly. "The paper which frightened the silly peasants,
revealed to me that he was there, needing help. I told you Angelo was
under an evil star. I thought my day to-morrow would be a day of
scheming. The task has become easy, if you will."

"Be merciful; the task is dreadful," said Vittoria.

"The task is simple. You have an instrument ready to your hands. You can
do just what you like with him--make an Italian of him; make him renounce
his engagement to this pert little Lena of Lenkenstein, break his sword,
play Arlecchino, do what you please. He is not required for any
outrageous performance. A week, and Angelo will have recovered his
strength; you likewise may resume the statuesque demeanour which you have
been exhibiting here. For the space of one week you are asked for some
natural exercise of your wits and compliancy. Hitherto what have you
accomplished, pray?" Laura struck spitefully at Vittoria's degraded
estimation of her worth as measured by events. "You have done
nothing--worse than nothing. It gives me horrors to find it necessary to
entreat you to look your duty in the face and do it, that even three or
four Italian hearts--Carlo among them--may thank you. Not Carlo, you
say?" (Vittoria had sobbed, "No, not Carlo.") "How little you know men!
How little do you think how the obligations of the hour should affect a
creature deserving life! Do you fancy that Carlo wishes you to be for
ever reading the line of a copy-book and shaping your conduct by it? Our
Italian girls do this; he despises them. Listen to me; do not I know what
is meant by the truth of love? I pass through fire, and keep constant to
it; but you have some vile Romance of Chivalry in your head; a modern
sculptor's figure, 'MEDITATION;' that is the sort of bride you would give
him in the stirring days of Italy. Do you think it is only a statue that
can be true? Perceive--will you not--that this Lieutenant Pierson is your
enemy. He tells you as much; surely the challenge is fair? Defeat him as
you best can. Angelo shall not be abandoned."

"O me! it is unendurable; you are merciless," said Vittoria, shuddering.

She saw the vile figure of herself aping smirks and tender meanings to
her old lover. It was a picture that she dared not let her mind rest on:
how then could she personate it? All through her life she had been frank;
as a young woman, she was clear of soul; she felt that her, simplicity
was already soiled by the bare comprehension of the abominable course
indicated by Laura. Degradation seemed to have been a thing up to this
moment only dreamed of; but now that it was demanded of her to play
coquette and trick her womanhood with false allurements, she knew the
sentiment of utter ruin; she was ashamed. No word is more lightly spoken
than shame. Vittoria's early devotion to her Art, and subsequently to her
Italy, had carried her through the term when she would otherwise have
showed the natural mild attack of the disease. It came on her now in a
rush, penetrating every chamber of her heart, overwhelming her; she could
see no distinction between being ever so little false and altogether
despicable. She had loathings of her body and her life. With grovelling
difficulty of speech she endeavoured to convey the sense of her
repugnance to Laura, who leaned her ear, wondering at such bluntness of
wit in a woman, and said, "Are you quite deficient in the craft of your
sex, child? You can, and you will, guard yourself ten times better when
your aim is simply to subject him." But this was not reason to a spirit
writhing in the serpent-coil of fiery blushes.

Vittoria said, "I shall pity him so."

She meant she would pity Wilfrid in deluding him. It was a taint of the
hypocrisy which comes with shame.

The signora retorted: "I can't follow the action of your mind a bit."

Pity being a form of tenderness, Laura supposed that she would
intuitively hate the man who compelled her to do what she abhorred.

They spent the greater portion of the night in this debate.




CHAPTER XXVIII

THE ESCAPE OF ANGELO

Vittoria knew better than Laura that the task was easy; she had but to
override her aversion to the show of trifling with a dead passion; and
when she thought of Angelo lying helpless in the swarm of enemies, and
that Wilfrid could consent to use his tragic advantage to force her to
silly love-play, his selfishness wrought its reflection, so that she
became sufficiently unjust to forget her marvellous personal influence
over him. Even her tenacious sentiment concerning his white uniform was
clouded. She very soon ceased to be shamefaced in her own fancy. At dawn
she stood at her window looking across the valley of Meran, and felt the
whole scene in a song of her heart, with the faintest recollection of her
having passed through a tempest overnight. The warm Southern glow of the
enfoliaged valley recalled her living Italy, and Italy her voice. She
grew wakefully glad: it was her nature, not her mind, that had twisted in
the convulsions of last night's horror of shame. The chirp of healthy
blood in full-flowing veins dispersed it; and as a tropical atmosphere is
cleared by the hurricane, she lost her depression and went down among her
enemies possessed by an inner delight, that was again of her nature, not
of her mind. She took her gladness for a happy sign that she had power to
rise buoyant above circumstances; and though aware that she was getting
to see things in harsh outlines, she was unconscious of her haggard
imagination.

The Lenkensteins had projected to escape the blandishments of Vienna by
residing during the winter in Venice, where Wilfrid and his sister were
to be the guests of the countess:--a pleasant prospect that was dashed
out by an official visit from Colonel Zofel of the Meran garrison,
through whom it was known that Lieutenant Pierson, while enjoying his
full liberty to investigate the charms of the neighbourhood, might not
extend his excursions beyond a pedestrian day's limit;--he was, in fact,
under surveillance. The colonel formally exacted his word of honour that
he would not attempt to pass the bounds, and explained to the duchess
that the injunction was favourable to the lieutenant, as implying that he
must be ready at any moment to receive the order to join his regiment.
Wilfrid bowed with a proper soldierly submission. Respecting the criminal
whom his men were pursuing, Colonel Zofel said that he was sparing no
efforts to come on his traces; he supposed, from what he had heard in the
Ultenthal, that Guidascarpi was on his back somewhere within a short
range of Meran. Vittoria strained her ears to the colonel's German; she
fancied his communication to be that he suspected Angelo's presence in
Meran.

The official part of his visit being terminated, the colonel addressed
some questions to the duchess concerning the night of the famous
Fifteenth at La Scala. He was an amateur, and spoke with enthusiasm of
the reports of the new prima donna. The duchess perceived that he was
asking for an introduction to the heroine of the night, and graciously
said that perhaps that very prima donna would make amends, to him for his
absence on the occasion. Vittoria checked a movement of revolt in her
frame. She cast an involuntary look at Wilfrid. "Now it begins," she
thought, and went to the piano: she had previously refused to sing.
Wilfrid had to bend his head over his betrothed and listen to her
whisperings. He did so, carelessly swaying his hand to the measure of the
aria, with an increasing bitter comparison of the two voices. Lena
persisted in talking; she was indignant at his abandonment of the journey
to Venice; she reproached him as feeble, inconsiderate, indifferent. Then
for an instant she would pause to hear the voice, and renew her assault.
"We ought to be thankful that she is not singing a song of death and
destruction to us! The archduchess is coming to Venice. If you are
presented to her and please her, and get the writs of naturalization
prepared, you will be one of us completely, and your fortune is made. If
you stay here--why should you stay? It is nothing but your uncle's
caprice. I am too angry to care for music. If you stay, you will earn my
contempt. I will not be buried another week in such a place. I am tired
of weeping. We all go to Venice: Captain Weisspriess follows us. We are
to have endless Balls, an opera, a Court there--with whom am I to dance,
pray, when I am out of mourning? Am I to sit and govern my feet under a
chair, and gaze like an imbecile nun? It is too preposterous. I am
betrothed to you; I wish, I wish to behave like a betrothed. The
archduchess herself will laugh to see me chained to a chair. I shall have
to reply a thousand times to 'Where is he?' What can I answer? 'Wouldn't
come,' will be the only true reply."

During this tirade, Vittoria was singing one of her old songs, well known
to Wilfrid, which brought the vision of a foaming weir, and moonlight
between the branches of a great cedar-tree, and the lost love of his
heart sitting by his side in the noising stillness. He was sure that she
could be singing it for no one but for him. The leap taken by his spirit
from this time to that, was shorter than from the past back to the
present.

"You do not applaud," said Lena, when the song had ceased.

He murmured: "I never do, in drawing-rooms."

"A cantatrice expects it everywhere; these creatures live on it."

"I'll tell her, if you like, what we thought of it, when I take her down
to my sister, presently."

"Are you not to take me down?"

"The etiquette is to hand her up to you."

"No, no!" Lena insisted, in abhorrence of etiquette; but Wilfrid said
pointedly that his sister's feelings must be spared. "Her husband is an
animal: he is a millionaire city-of-London merchant; conceive him! He has
drunk himself gouty on Port wine, and here he is for the grape-cure."

"Ah! in that England of yours, women marry for wealth," said Lena.

"Yes, in your Austria they have a better motive" he interpreted her
sentiment.

"Say, in our Austria."

"In our Austria, certainly."

"And with our holy religion?"

"It is not yet mine."

"It will be?" She put the question eagerly.

Wilfrid hesitated, and by his adept hesitation succeeded in throwing her
off the jealous scent.

"Say that it will be, my Wilfrid!"

"You must give me time"

"This subject always makes you cold."

"My own Lena!"

"Can I be, if we are doomed to be parted when we die?"

There is small space for compunction in a man's heart when he is in
Wilfrid's state, burning with the revival of what seemed to him a
superhuman attachment. He had no design to break his acknowledged bondage
to Countess Lena, and answered her tender speech almost as tenderly.

It never occurred to him, as he was walking down to Meran with Vittoria,
that she could suppose him to be bartering to help rescue the life of a
wretched man in return for soft confidential looks of entreaty; nor did
he reflect, that when cast on him, they might mean no more than the wish
to move him for a charitable purpose. The completeness of her fascination
was shown by his reading her entirely by his own emotions, so that a
lowly-uttered word, or a wavering unwilling glance, made him think that
she was subdued by the charm of the old days.

"Is it here?" she said, stopping under the first Italian name she saw in
the arcade of shops.

"How on earth have you guessed it?" he asked, astonished.

She told him to wait at the end of the arcade, and passed in. When she
joined him again, she was downcast. They went straight to Adela's hotel,
where the one thing which gave her animation was the hearing that Mr.
Sedley had met an English doctor there, and had placed himself in his
hands. Adela dressed splendidly for her presentation to the duchess.
Having done so, she noticed Vittoria's depressed countenance and
difficult breathing. She commanded her to see the doctor. Vittoria
consented, and made use of him. She could tell Laura confidently at night
that Wilfrid would not betray Angelo, though she had not spoken one
direct word to him on the subject.

Wilfrid was peculiarly adept in the idle game he played. One who is
intent upon an evil end is open to expose his plan. But he had none in
view; he lived for the luxurious sensation of being near the woman who
fascinated him, and who was now positively abashed when by his side.
Adela suggested to him faintly--she believed it was her spontaneous
idea--that he might be making his countess jealous. He assured her that
the fancy sprang from scenes which she remembered, and that she could
have no idea of the pride of a highborn Austrian girl, who was incapable
of conceiving jealousy of a person below her class. Adela replied that it
was not his manner so much as Emilia's which might arouse the suspicion;
but she immediately affected to appreciate the sentiments of a highborn
Austrian girl toward a cantatrice, whose gifts we regard simply as an
aristocratic entertainment. Wilfrid induced his sister to relate
Vittoria's early history to Countess Lena; and himself almost wondered,
when he heard it in bare words, at that haunting vision of the glory of
Vittoria at La Scala--where, as he remembered, he would have run against
destruction to cling to her lips. Adela was at first alarmed by the
concentrated wrathfulness which she discovered in the bosom of Countess
Anna, who, as their intimacy waxed, spoke of the intruding opera siren in
terms hardly proper even to married women; but it seemed right, as being
possibly aristocratic. Lena was much more tolerant. "I have just the same
enthusiasm for soldiers that my Wilfrid has for singers," she said; and
it afforded Adela exquisite pleasure to hear her tell how that she had
originally heard of the 'eccentric young Englishman,' General Pierson's
nephew, as a Lustspiel--a comedy; and of his feats on horseback, and his
duels, and his--"he was very wicked over here, you know;" Lena laughed.
She assumed the privileges of her four-and-twenty years and her rank. Her
marriage was to take place in the Spring. She announced it with the
simplicity of an independent woman of the world, adding, "That is, if my
Wilfrid will oblige me by not plunging into further disgrace with the
General."

"No; you will not marry a man who is under a cloud," Anna subjoined.

"Certainly not a soldier," said Lena. "What it was exactly that he did at
La Scala, I don't know, and don't care to know, but he was then ignorant
that she had touched the hand of that Guidascarpi. I decide by this--he
was valiant; he defied everybody: therefore I forgive him. He is not in
disgrace with me. I will reinstate him."

"You have your own way of being romantic," said Anna. "A soldier who
forgets his duty is in my opinion only a brave fool."

"It seems to me that a great many gallant officers are fond of fine
voices," Lena retorted.

"No doubt it is a fashion among them," said Anna.

Adela recoiled with astonishment when she began to see the light in which
the sisters regarded Vittoria; and she was loyal enough to hint and
protest on her friend's behalf. The sisters called her a very good soul.
"It may not be in England as over here," said Anna. "We have to submit to
these little social scourges."

Lena whispered to Adela, "An angry woman will think the worst. I have no
doubt of my Wilfrid. If I had!--"

Her eyes flashed. Fire was not wanting in her.

The difficulties which tasked the amiable duchess to preserve an outward
show of peace among the antagonistic elements she gathered together were
increased by the arrival at the castle of Count Lenkenstein, Bianca's
husband, and head of the family, from Bologna. He was a tall and courtly
man, who had one face for his friends and another for the reverse party;
which is to say, that his manners could be bad. Count Lenkenstein was
accompanied by Count Serabiglione, who brought Laura's children with
their Roman nurse, Assunta. Laura kissed her little ones, and sent them
out of her sight. Vittoria found her home in their play and prattle. She
needed a refuge, for Count Lenkenstein was singularly brutal in his
bearing toward her. He let her know that he had come to Meran to
superintend the hunt for the assassin, Angelo Guidascarpi. He attempted
to exact her promise in precise speech that she would be on the spot to
testify against Angelo when that foul villain should be caught. He
objected openly to Laura's children going about with her. Bitter talk on
every starting subject was exchanged across the duchess's table. She
herself was in disgrace on Laura's account, and had to practise an
overflowing sweetness, with no one to second her efforts. The two
noblemen spoke in accord on the bubble revolution. The strong hand--ay,
the strong hand! The strong hand disposes of vermin. Laura listened to
them, pallid with silent torture. "Since the rascals have taken to
assassination, we know that we have them at the dregs," said Count
Lenkenstein. "A cord round the throats of a few scores of them, and the
country will learn the virtue of docility."

Laura whispered to her sister: "Have you espoused a hangman?"

Such dropping of deadly shells in a quiet society went near to scattering
it violently; but the union was necessitous. Count Lenkenstein desired to
confront Vittoria with Angelo; Laura would not quit her side, and Amalia
would not expel her friend. Count Lenkenstein complained roughly of
Laura's conduct; nor did Laura escape her father's reproof. "Sir, you are
privileged to say what you will to me," she responded, with the humility
which exasperated him.

"Yes, you bend, you bend, that you may be stiff-necked when it suits
you," he snapped her short.

"Surely that is the text of the sermon you preach to our Italy!"

"A little more, as you are running on now, madame, and our Italy will be
froth on the lips. You see, she is ruined."

"Chi lo fa, lo sa," hummed Laura; "but I would avoid quoting you as that
authority."

"After your last miserable fiasco, my dear!"

"It was another of our school exercises. We had not been good boys and
girls. We had learnt our lesson imperfectly. We have received our
punishment, and we mean to do better next time."

"Behave seasonably, fittingly; be less of a wasp; school your tongue."

"Bianca is a pattern to me, I am aware," said Laura.

"She is a good wife."

"I am a poor widow."

"She is a good daughter."

"I am a wicked rebel."

"And you are scheming at something now," said the little nobleman,
sagacious so far; but he was too eager to read the verification of the
tentative remark in her face, and she perceived that it was a guess
founded on her show of spirit.

"Scheming to contain my temper, which is much tried," she said. "But I
suppose it supports me. I can always keep up against hostility."

"You provoke it; you provoke it."

"My instinct, then, divines my medicine."

"Exactly, my dear; your personal instinct. That instigates you all. And
none are so easily conciliated as these Austrians. Conciliate them, and
you have them." Count Serabiglione diverged into a repetition of his
theory of the policy and mission of superior intelligences, as regarded
his system for dealing with the Austrians.

Nurse Assunta's jealousy was worked upon to separate the children from
Vittoria. They ran down with her no more to meet the vast bowls of grapes
in the morning and feather their hats with vine leaves. Deprived of her
darlings, the loneliness of her days made her look to Wilfrid for
commiseration. Father Bernardus was too continually exhortative, and
fenced too much to "hit the eyeball of her conscience," as he phrased it,
to afford her repose. Wilfrid could tell himself that he had already done
much for her; for if what he had done were known, his career, social and
military, was ended. This idea being accompanied by a sense of security
delighted him; he was accustomed to inquire of Angelo's condition, and
praise the British doctor who was attending him gratuitously. "I wish I
could get him out of the way," he said, and frowned as in a mental
struggle. Vittoria heard him repeat his "I wish!" It heightened greatly
her conception of the sacrifice he would be making on her behalf and
charity's. She spoke with a reverential tenderness, such as it was hard
to suppose a woman capable of addressing to other than the man who moved
her soul. The words she uttered were pure thanks; it was the tone which
sent them winged and shaking seed. She had spoken partly to prompt his
activity, but her self-respect had been sustained by his avoidance of the
dreaded old themes, and that grateful feeling made her voice musically
rich.

"I dare not go to him, but the doctor tells me the fever has left him,
Wilfrid; his wounds are healing; but he is bandaged from head to foot.
The sword pierced his side twice, and his arms and hands are cut
horribly. He cannot yet walk. If he is discovered he is lost. Count
Lenkenstein has declared that he will stay at the castle till he has him
his prisoner. The soldiers are all round us. They know that Angelo is in
the ring. They have traced him all over from the Valtellina to this
Ultenthal, and only cannot guess where he is in the lion's jaw. I rise in
the morning, thinking, 'Is this to be the black day?' He is sure to be
caught."

"If I could hit on a plan," said Wilfrid, figuring as though he had a
diorama of impossible schemes revolving before his eyes.

"I could believe in the actual whispering of an angel if you did. It was
to guard me that Angelo put himself in peril."

"Then," said Wilfrid, "I am his debtor. I owe him as much as my life is
worth."

"Think, think," she urged; and promised affection, devotion, veneration,
vague things, that were too like his own sentiments to prompt him
pointedly. Yet he so pledged himself to her by word, and prepared his own
mind to conceive the act of service, that (as he did not reflect)
circumstance might at any moment plunge him into a gulf. Conduct of this
sort is a challenge sure to be answered.

One morning Vittoria was gladdened by a letter from Rocco Ricci, who had
fled to Turin. He told her that the king had promised to give her a warm
welcome in his capital, where her name was famous. She consulted with
Laura, and they resolved to go as soon as Angelo could stand on his feet.
Turin was cold--Italy, but it was Italy; and from Turin the Italian army
was to flow, like the Mincio from the Garda lake. "And there, too, is a
stage," Vittoria thought, in a suddenly revived thirst for the stage and
a field for work. She determined to run down to Meran and see Angelo.
Laura walked a little way with her, till Wilfrid, alert for these
occasions, joined them. On the commencement of the zig-zag below, there
were soldiers, the sight of whom was not confusing. Military messengers
frequently came up to the castle where Count Lenkenstein, assisted by
Count Serabiglione, examined their depositions, the Italian in the manner
of a winding lawyer, the German of a gruff judge. Half-way down the
zig-zag Vittoria cast a preconcerted signal back to Laura. The soldiers
had a pair of prisoners between their ranks; Vittoria recognized the men
who had carried Captain Weisspriess from the ground where the duel was
fought. A quick divination told her that they held Angelo's life on their
tongues. They must have found him in the mountain-pass while hurrying to
their homes, and it was they who had led him to Meran. On the Passeyr
bridge, she turned and said to Wilfrid, "Help me now. Send instantly the
doctor in a carriage to the place where he is lying."

Wilfrid was intent on her flushed beauty and the half-compressed quiver
of her lip.

She quitted him and hurried to Angelo. Her joy broke out in a cry of
thankfulness at sight of Angelo; he had risen from his bed; he could
stand, and he smiled.

"That Jacopo is just now the nearest link to me," he said, when she
related her having seen the two men guarded by soldiers; he felt
helpless, and spoke in resignation. She followed his eye about the room
till it rested on the stilet. This she handed to him. "If they think of
having me alive!" he said softly. The Italian and his wife who had given
him shelter and nursed him came in, and approved his going, though they
did not complain of what they might chance to have incurred. He offered
them his purse, and they took it. Minutes of grievous expectation went
by; Vittoria could endure them no longer; she ran out to the hotel, near
which, in the shade of a poplar, Wilfrid was smoking quietly. He informed
her that his sister and the doctor had driven out to meet Captain
Gambier; his brother-in-law was alone upstairs. Her look of amazement
touched him more shrewdly than scorn, and he said, "What on earth can I
do?"

"Order out a carriage. Send your brother-in-law in it. If you tell him
'for your health,' he will go."

"On my honour, I don't know where those three words would not send him,"
said Wilfrid; but he did not move, and was for protesting that he really
could not guess what was the matter, and the ground for all this urgency.

Vittoria compelled her angry lips to speak out her suspicions explicitly,
whereupon he glanced at the sun-glare in a meditation, occasionally
blinking his eyes. She thought, "Oh, heaven! can he be waiting for me to
coax him?" It was the truth, though it would have been strange to him to
have heard it. She grew sure that it was the truth; never had she
despised living creature so utterly as when she murmured, "My best
friend! my brother! my noble Wilfrid! my old beloved! help me now,
without loss of a minute."

It caused his breath to come and go unevenly.

"Repeat that--once, only once," he said.

She looked at him with the sorrowful earnestness which, as its meaning
was shut from him, was so sweet.

"You will repeat it by-and-by?--another time? Trust me to do my utmost.
Old beloved! What is the meaning of 'old beloved'? One word in
explanation. If it means anything, I would die for you! Emilia, do you
hear?--die for you! To me you are nothing old or by-gone, whatever I may
be to you. To me--yes, I will order the carriage you are the
Emilia--listen! listen! Ah! you have shut your ears against me. I am
bound in all seeming, but I--you drive me mad; you know your power. Speak
one word, that I may feel--that I may be convinced . . , or not a single
word; I will obey you without. I have said that you command my life."

In a block of carriages on the bridge, Vittoria perceived a lifted hand.
It was Laura's; Beppo was in attendance on her. Laura drove up and said:
"You guessed right; where is he?" The communications between them were
more indicated than spoken. Beppo had heard Jacopo confess to his having
conducted a wounded Italian gentleman into Meran. "That means that the
houses will be searched within an hour," said Laura; "my brother-in-law
Bear is radiant." She mimicked the Lenkenstein physiognomy spontaneously
in the run of her speech. "If Angelo can help himself ever so little, he
has a fair start." A look was cast on Wilfrid; Vittoria nodded--Wilfrid
was entrapped.

"Englishmen we can trust," said Laura, and requested him to step into her
carriage. He glanced round the open space. Beppo did the same, and beheld
the chasseur Jacob Baumwalder Feckelwitz crossing the bridge on foot, but
he said nothing. Wilfrid was on the step of the carriage, for what
positive object neither he nor the others knew, when his sister and the
doctor joined them. Captain Gambier was still missing.

"He would have done anything for us," Vittoria said in Wilfrid's hearing.

"Tell us what plan you have," the latter replied fretfully.

She whispered: "Persuade Adela to make her husband drive out. The doctor
will go too, and Beppo. They shall take Angelo. Our carriage will follow
empty, and bring Mr. Sedley back."

Wilfrid cast his eyes up in the air, at the monstrous impudence of the
project. "A storm is coming on," he suggested, to divert her reading of
his grimace; but she was speaking to the doctor, who readily answered her
aloud: "If you are certain of what you say." The remark incited Wilfrid
to be no subordinate in devotion; handing Adela from the carriage, while
the doctor ran up to Mr. Sedley, he drew her away. Laura and Vittoria
watched the motion of their eyes and lips.

"Will he tell her the purpose?" said Laura.

Vittoria smiled nervously: "He is fibbing."

Marking the energy expended by Wilfrid in this art, the wiser woman said:
"Be on your guard the next two minutes he gets you alone."

"You see his devotion."

"Does he see his compensation? But he must help us at any hazard."

Adela broke away from her brother twice, and each time he fixed her to
the spot more imperiously. At last she ran into the hotel; she was
crying. "A bad economy of tears," said Laura, commenting on the dumb
scene, to soothe her savage impatience. "In another twenty minutes we
shall have the city gates locked."

They heard a window thrown up; Mr. Sedley's head came out, and peered at
the sky. Wilfrid said to Vittoria: "I can do nothing beyond what I have
done, I fear."

She thought it was a petition for thanks, but Laura knew better; she
said: "I see Count Lenkenstein on his way to the barracks."

Wilfrid bowed: "I may be able to serve you in that quarter."

He retired: whereupon Laura inquired how her friend could reasonably
suppose that a man would ever endure being thanked in public.

"I shall never understand and never care to understand them," said
Vittoria.

"It is a knowledge that is forced on us, my dear. May heaven make the
minds of our enemies stupid for the next five hours!--Apropos of what I
was saying, women and men are in two hostile camps. We have a sort of
general armistice and everlasting strife of individuals--Ah!" she clapped
hands on her knees, "here comes your doctor; I could fancy I see a
pointed light on his head. Men of science, my Sandra, are always the
humanest."

The chill air of wind preceding thunder was driving round the head of the
vale, and Mr. Sedley, wrapped in furs, and feebly remonstrating with his
medical adviser, stepped into his carriage. The doctor followed him,
giving a grave recognition of Vittoria's gaze. Both gentlemen raised
their hats to the ladies, who alighted as soon as they had gone in the
direction of the Vintschgau road.

"One has only to furnish you with money, my Beppo," said Vittoria,
complimenting his quick apprehensiveness. "Buy bread and cakes at one of
the shops, and buy wine. You will find me where you can, when you have
seen him safe. I have no idea of where my home will be. Perhaps England."

"Italy, Italy! faint heart," said Laura.

Furnished with money, Beppo rolled away gaily.

The doubt was in Laura whether an Englishman's wits were to be relied on
in such an emergency; but she admitted that the doctor had looked full
enough of serious meaning, and that the Englishman named Merthyr Powys
was keen and ready. They sat a long half-hour, that thumped itself out
like an alarm-bell, under the poplars, by the clamouring Passeyr,
watching the roll and spring of the waters, and the radiant foam, while
band-music played to a great company of visitors, and sounds of thunder
drew near. Over the mountains above the Adige, the leaden fingers of an
advance of the thunder-cloud pushed slowly, and on a sudden a mighty gale
sat heaped blank on the mountain-top and blew. Down went the heads of the
poplars, the river staggered in its leap, the vale was shuddering grey.
It was like the transformation in a fairy tale; Beauty had taken her old
cloak about her, and bent to calamity. The poplars streamed their length
sideways, and in the pauses of the strenuous wind nodded and dashed
wildly and white over the dead black water, that waxed in foam and
hissed, showing its teeth like a beast enraged. Laura and Vittoria joined
hands and struggled for shelter. The tent of a travelling circus from the
South, newly-pitched on a grassplot near the river, was caught up and
whirled in the air and flung in the face of a marching guard of soldiery,
whom it swathed and bore sheer to earth, while on them and around them a
line of poplars fell flat, the wind whistling over them. Laura directed
Vittoria's eyes to the sight. "See," she said, and her face was set hard
with cold and excitement, so that she looked a witch in the uproar;
"would you not say the devil is loose now Angelo is abroad?" Thunder and
lightning possessed the vale, and then a vertical rain. At the first
gleam of sunlight, Laura and Vittoria walked up to the Laubengasse--the
street of the arcades, where they made purchases of numerous needless
articles, not daring to enter the Italian's shop. A woman at a fruitstall
opposite to it told them that no carriage could have driven up there.
During their great perplexity, mud and rain-stained soldiers, the same
whom they had seen borne to earth by the flying curtain, marched before
the shop; the shop and the house were searched; the Italian and his old
liming wife were carried away.

"Tell me now, that storm was not Angelo's friend!" Laura muttered.

"Can he have escaped?" said Vittoria.

"He is 'on horseback.'" Laura quoted the Italian proverb to signify that
he had flown; how, she could not say, and none could inform her. The joy
of their hearts rose in one fountain.

"I shall feel better blood in my body from this moment," Laura said; and
Vittoria, "Oh! we can be strong, if we only resolve."

"You want to sing?"

"I do."

"I shall find pleasure in your voice now."

"The wicked voice!"

"Yes, the very wicked voice! But I shall be glad to hear it. You can sing
to-night, and drown those Lenkensteins."

"If my Carlo could hear me!"

"Ah!" sighed the signora, musing. "He is in prison now. I remember him,
the dearest little lad, fencing with my husband for exercise after they
had been writing all day. When Giacomo was imprisoned, Carlo sat outside
the prison walls till it was time for him to enter; his chin and upper
lip were smooth as a girl's. Giacomo said to him, 'May you always have
the power of going out, or not have a wife waiting for you.' Here they
come." (She spoke of tears.) "It's because I am joyful. The channel for
them has grown so dry that they prick and sting. Oh, Sandra! it would be
pleasant to me if we might both be buried for seven days, and have one
long howl of weakness together. A little bite of satisfaction makes me so
tired. I believe there's something very bad for us in our always being at
war, and never, never gaining ground. Just one spark of triumph
intoxicates us. Look at all those people pouring out again. They are the
children of fair weather. I hope the state of their health does not
trouble them too much. Vienna sends consumptive patients here. If you
regard them attentively, you will observe that they have an anxious air.
Their constitutions are not sound; they fear they may die."

Laura's irony was unforced; it was no more than a subtle discord
naturally struck from the scene by a soul in contrast with it.

They beheld the riding forth of troopers and a knot of officers hotly
conversing together. At another point the duchess and the Lenkenstein
ladies, Count Lenkenstein, Count Serabiglione, and Wilfrid paced up and
down, waiting for music. Laura left the public places and crossed an
upper bridge over the Passeyr, near the castle, by which route she
skirted vines and dropped over sloping meadows to some shaded boulders
where the Passeyr found a sandy bay, and leaped in transparent green, and
whitened and swung twisting in a long smooth body down a narrow chasm,
and noised below. The thundering torrent stilled their sensations: and
the water, making battle against great blocks of porphyry and granite,
caught their thoughts. So strong was the impression of it on Vittoria's
mind, that for hours after, every image she conceived seemed proper to
the inrush and outpour; the elbowing, the tossing, the foaming, the burst
on stones, and silvery bubbles under and silvery canopy above, the
chattering and huzzaing; all working on to the one-toned fall beneath the
rainbow on the castle-rock.

Next day, the chasseur Jacob Baumwalder Feckelwitz deposed in full
company at Sonnenberg, that, obeying Count Serabiglione's instructions,
he had gone down to the city, and had there seen Lieutenant Pierson with
the ladies in front of the hotel; he had followed the English carriage,
which took up a man who was standing ready on crutches at the corner of
the Laubengasse, and drove rapidly out of the North-western gate, leading
to Schlanders and Mals and the Engadine. He had witnessed the transfer of
the crippled man from one carriage to another, and had raised shouts and
given hue and cry, but the intervention of the storm had stopped his
pursuit.

He was proceeding to say what his suppositions were. Count Lenkenstein
lifted his finger for Wilfrid to follow him out of the room. Count
Serabiglione went at their heels. Then Count Lenkenstein sent for his
wife, whom Anna and Lena accompanied.

"How many persons are you going to ruin in the course of your crusade, my
dear?" the duchess said to Laura.

"Dearest, I am penitent when I succeed," said Laura.

"If that young man has been assisting you, he is irretrievably ruined."

"I am truly sorry for him."

"As for me, the lectures I shall get in Vienna are terrible to think of.
This is the consequence of being the friend of both parties, and a
peace-maker."

Count Serabiglione returned alone from the scene at the examination,
rubbing his hands and nodding affably to his daughter. He maliciously
declined to gratify the monster of feminine curiosity in the lump, and
doled out the scene piecemeal. He might state, he observed, that it was
he who had lured Beppo to listen at the door during the examination of
the prisoners; and who had then planted a spy on him--following the
dictation of precepts exceedingly old. "We are generally beaten, duchess;
I admit it; and yet we generally contrive to show the brain. As I say,
wed brains to brute force!--but my Laura prefers to bring about a contest
instead of an union, so that somebody is certain to be struck, and"--the
count spread out his arms and bowed his head--"deserves the blow." He
informed them that Count Lenkenstein had ordered Lieutenant Pierson down
to Meran, and that the lieutenant might expect to be cashiered within
five days. "What does it matter?" he addressed Vittoria. "It is but a
shuffling of victims; Lieutenant Pierson in the place of Guidascarpi! I
do not object."

Count Lenkenstein withdrew his wife and sisters from Sonnenberg
instantly. He sent an angry message of adieu to the duchess, informing
her that he alone was responsible for the behaviour of the ladies of his
family. The poor duchess wept. "This means that I shall be summoned to
Vienna for a scolding, and have to meet my husband," she said to Laura,
who permitted herself to be fondled, and barely veiled her exultation in
her apology for the mischief she had done. An hour after the departure of
the Lenkensteins, the castle was again officially visited by Colonel
Zofel. Vittoria and Laura received an order to quit the district of Meran
before sunset. The two firebrands dropped no tears. "I really am sorry
for others when I succeed," said Laura, trying to look sad upon her
friend.

"No; the heart is eaten out of you both by excitement," said the duchess.

Her tender parting, "Love me," in the ear of Vittoria, melted one heart
of the two.

Count Serabiglione continued to be buoyed up by his own and his
daughter's recent display of a superior intellectual dexterity until the
carriage was at the door and Laura presented her cheek to him. He said,
"You will know me a wise man when I am off the table." His gesticulations
expressed "Ruin, headlong ruin!" He asked her how she could expect him to
be for ever repairing her follies. He was going to Vienna; how could he
dare to mention her name there? Not even in a trifle would she consent to
be subordinate to authority. Laura checked her replies--the surrendering,
of a noble Italian life to the Austrians was such a trifle! She begged
only that a poor wanderer might depart with a father's blessing. The
count refused to give it; he waved her off in a fury of reproof; and so
got smoothly over the fatal moment when money, or the promise of money,
is commonly extracted from parental sources, as Laura explained his odd
behaviour to her companion. The carriage-door being closed, he regained
his courtly composure; his fury was displaced by a chiding finger, which
he presently kissed. Father. Bernardus was on the steps beside the
duchess, and his blessing had not been withheld from Vittoria, though he
half confessed to her that she was a mystery in his mind, and would
always be one.

"He can understand robust hostility," Laura said, when Vittoria recalled
the look of his benevolent forehead and drooping eyelids; "but robust
ductility does astonish him. He has not meddled with me; yet I am the one
of the two who would be fair prey for an enterprising spiritual father,
as the destined roan of heaven will find out some day."

She bent and smote her lap. "How little they know us, my darling! They
take fever for strength, and calmness for submission. Here is the world
before us, and I feel that such a man, were he to pounce on me now, might
snap me up and lock me in a praying-box with small difficulty. And I am
the inveterate rebel! What is it nourishes you and keeps you always
aiming straight when you are alone? Once in Turin, I shall feel that I am
myself. Out of Italy I have a terrible craving for peace. It seems here
as if I must lean down to him, my beloved, who has left me."

Vittoria was in alarm lest Wilfrid should accost her while she drove from
gate to gate of the city. They passed under the archway of the gate
leading up to Schloss Tyrol, and along the road bordered by vines. An old
peasant woman stopped them with the signal of a letter in her hand. "Here
it is," said Laura, and Vittoria could not help smiling at her shrewd
anticipation of it.

"May I follow?"

Nothing more than that was written.

But the bearer of the missive had been provided with a lead pencil to
obtain the immediate reply.

"An admirable piece of foresight!" Laura's honest exclamation burst
forth.

Vittoria had to look in Laura's face before she could gather her will to
do the cruel thing which was least cruel. She wrote firmly:--"Never
follow me."




CHAPTER XXIX

EPISODES OF THE REVOLT AND THE WAR--THE TOBACCO-RIOTS--RINALDO
GUIDASCARPI

Anna von Lenkenstein was one who could wait for vengeance. Lena punished
on the spot, and punished herself most. She broke off her engagement with
Wilfrid, while at the same time she caused a secret message to be
conveyed to him, telling him that the prolongation of his residence in
Meran would restore him to his position in the army.

Wilfrid remained at Meran till the last days of December.

It was winter in Milan, turning to the new year--the year of flames for
continental Europe. A young man with a military stride, but out of
uniform, had stepped from a travelling carriage and entered a cigar-shop.
Upon calling for cigars, he was surprised to observe the woman who was
serving there keep her arms under her apron. She cast a look into the
street, where a crowd of boys and one or two lean men had gathered about
the door. After some delay, she entreated her customer to let her pluck
his cloak halfway over the counter; at the same time she thrust a
cigar-box under that concealment, together with a printed song in the
Milanese dialect. He lifted the paper to read it, and found it tough as
Russ. She translated some of the more salient couplets. Tobacco had
become a dead business, she said, now that the popular edict had gone
forth against 'smoking gold into the pockets of the Tedeschi.' None
smoked except officers and Englishmen.

"I am an Englishman," he said.

"And not an officer?" she asked; but he gave no answer. "Englishmen are
rare in winter, and don't like being mobbed," said the woman.

Nodding to her urgent petition, he deferred the lighting of his cigar.
The vetturino requested him to jump up quickly, and a howl of "No smoking
in Milan--fuori!--down with tobacco-smokers!" beset the carriage. He
tossed half-a-dozen cigars on the pavement derisively. They were
scrambled for, as when a pack of wolves are diverted by a garment dropped
from the flying sledge, but the unluckier hands came after his heels in
fuller howl. He noticed the singular appearance of the streets. Bands of
the scum of the population hung at various points: from time to time a
shout was raised at a distance, "Abasso il zigarro!" and "Away with the
cigar!" went an organized file-firing of cries along the open place.
Several gentlemen were mobbed, and compelled to fling the cigars from
their teeth. He saw the polizta in twos and threes taking counsel and
shrugging, evidently too anxious to avoid a collision. Austrian soldiers
and subalterns alone smoked freely; they puffed the harder when the yells
and hootings and whistlings thickened at their heels. Sometimes they
walked on at their own pace; or, when the noise swelled to a crisis,
turned and stood fast, making an exhibition of curling smoke, as a mute
form of contempt. Then commenced hustlings and a tremendous uproar;
sabres were drawn, the whitecoats planted themselves back to back. Milan
was clearly in a condition of raging disease. The soldiery not only
accepted the challenge of the mob, but assumed the offensive. Here and
there they were seen crossing the street to puff obnoxiously in the faces
of people. Numerous subalterns were abroad, lively for strife, and bright
with the signal of their readiness. An icy wind blew down from the Alps,
whitening the housetops and the ways, but every street, torso, and piazza
was dense with loungers, as on a summer evening; the clamour of a
skirmish anywhere attracted streams of disciplined rioters on all sides;
it was the holiday of rascals.

Our traveller had ordered his vetturino to drive slowly to his hotel,
that he might take the features of this novel scene. He soon showed his
view of the case by putting an unlighted cigar in his mouth. The
vetturino noted that his conveyance acted as a kindling-match to awaken
cries in quiet quarters, looked round, and grinned savagely at the sight
of the cigar.

"Drop it, or I drop you," he said; and hearing the command to drive on,
pulled up short.

They were in a narrow way leading to the Piazza de' Mercanti. While the
altercation was going on between them, a great push of men emerged from
one of the close courts some dozen paces ahead of the horse, bearing
forth a single young officer in their midst.

"Signore, would you like to be the froth of a boiling of that sort?" The
vetturino seized the image at once to strike home his instance of the
danger of outraging the will of the people.

Our traveller immediately unlocked a case that lay on the seat in front
of him, and drew out a steel scabbard, from which he plucked the sword,
and straightway leaped to the ground. The officer's cigar had been dashed
from his mouth: he stood at bay, sword in hand, meeting a rush with a
desperate stroke. The assistance of a second sword got him clear of the
fray. Both hastened forward as the crush melted with the hiss of a
withdrawing wave. They interchanged exclamations: "Is it you, Jenna!"

"In the devil's name, Pierson, have you come to keep your appointment in
mid-winter?"

"Come on: I'll stick beside you."

"On, then!"

They glanced behind them, heeding little the tail of ruffians whom they
had silenced.

"We shall have plenty of fighting soon, so we'll smoke a cordial cigar
together," said Lieutenant Jenna, and at once struck a light and blazed
defiance to Milan afresh--an example that was necessarily followed by his
comrade. "What has happened to you, Pierson? Of course, I knew you were
ready for our bit of play--though you'll hear what I said of you. How the
deuce could you think of running off with that opera girl, and getting a
fellow in the mountains to stab our merry old Weisspriess, just because
you fancied he was going to slip a word or so over the back of his hand
in Countess Lena's ear? No wonder she's shy of you now."

"So, that's the tale afloat," said Wilfrid. "Come to my hotel and dine
with me. I suppose that cur has driven my luggage there."

Jenna informed him that officers had to muster in barracks every evening.

"Come and see your old comrades; they'll like you better in bad
luck--there's the comfort of it: hang the human nature! She's a good old
brute, if you don't drive her hard. Our regiment left Verona in November.
There we had tolerable cookery; come and take the best we can give you."

But this invitation Wilfrid had to decline.

"Why?" said Jenna.

He replied: "I've stuck at Meran three months. I did it, in obedience to
what I understood from Colonel Zofel to be the General's orders. When I
was as perfectly dry as a baked Egyptian, I determined to believe that I
was not only in disgrace, but dismissed the service. I posted to Botzen
and Riva, on to Milan; and here I am. The least I can do is to show
myself here."

"Very well, then, come and show yourself at our table," said Jenna.
"Listen: we'll make a furious row after supper, and get hauled in by the
collar before the General. You can swear you have never been absent from
duty: swear the General never gave you forcible furlough. I'll swear it;
all our fellows will swear it. The General will say, 'Oh! a very big
lie's equal to a truth; big brother to a fact, or something; as he always
does, you know. Face it out. We can't spare a good stout sword in these
times. On with me, my Pierson."

"I would," said Wilfrid, doubtfully.

A douse of water from a window extinguished their cigars.

Lieutenant Jenna wiped his face deliberately, and lighting another cigar,
remarked--"This is the fifth poor devil who has come to an untimely end
within an hour. It is brisk work. Now, I'll swear I'll smoke this one
out."

The cigar was scattered in sparks from his lips by a hat skilfully flung.
He picked it up miry and cleaned it, observing that his honour was
pledged to this fellow. The hat he trampled into a muddy lump. Wilfrid
found it impossible to ape his coolness. He swung about for an adversary.
Jenna pulled him on.

"A salute from a window," he said. "We can't storm the houses. The
time'll come for it--and then, you cats!"

Wilfrid inquired how long this state of things had been going on. Jenna
replied that they appeared to be in the middle of it;--nearly a week.
Another week, and their, day would arrive; and then!

"Have you heard anything of a Count Ammiani here?" said Wilfrid.

"Oh! he's one of the lot, I believe. We have him fast, as we'll have the
bundle of them. Keep eye on those dogs behind us, and manoeuvre your
cigar. The plan is, to give half-a-dozen bright puffs, and then keep it
in your fist; and when you see an Italian head, volcano him like fury.
Yes, I've heard of that Ammiani. The scoundrels, made an attempt to get
him out of prison--I fancy he's in the city prison--last Friday night. I
don't know exactly where he is; but it's pretty fair reckoning to say
that he'll enjoy a large slice of the next year in the charming solitude
of Spielberg, if Milan is restless. Is he a friend of yours?"

"Not by any means," said Wilfrid.

"Mio prigione!" Jenna mouthed with ineffable contemptuousness; "he'll
have time to write his memoirs, as, one of the dogs did. I remember my
mother crying over, the book. I read it? Not I! I never read books. My
father said--the stout old colonel--'Prison seems to make these Italians
take an interest in themselves.' 'Oh!' says my mother, 'why can't they be
at peace with us?' 'That's exactly the question,' says my father, 'we're
always putting to them.' And so I say. Why can't they let us smoke our
cigars in peace?"

Jenna finished by assaulting a herd of faces with smoke.

"Pig of a German!" was shouted; and "Porco, porco," was sung in a scale
of voices. Jenna received a blinding slap across the eyes. He staggered
back; Wilfrid slashed his sword in defence of him. He struck a man down.
"Blood! blood!" cried the gathering mob, and gave space, but hedged the
couple thickly. Windows were thrown up; forth came a rain of household
projectiles. The cry of "Blood! blood!" was repeated by numbers pouring
on them from the issues to right and left. It is a terrible cry in a
city. In a city of the South it rouses the wild beast in men to madness.
Jenna smoked triumphantly and blew great clouds, with an eye aloft for
the stools, basins, chairs, and water descending. They were in the middle
of one of the close streets of old Milan. The man felled by Wilfrid was
raised on strong arms, that his bleeding head might be seen of all, and a
dreadful hum went round. A fire of missiles, stones, balls of wax, lumps
of dirt, sticks of broken chairs, began to play. Wilfrid had a sudden
gleam of the face of his Verona assailant. He and Jenna called "Follow
me," in one breath, and drove forward with sword-points, which they
dashed at the foremost; by dint of swift semicirclings of the edges they
got through, but a mighty voice of command thundered; the rearward
portion of the mob swung rapidly to the front, presenting a scattered
second barrier; Jenna tripped on a fallen body, lost his cigar, and swore
that he must find it. A dagger struck his sword-arm. He staggered and
flourished his blade in the air, calling "On!" without stirring. "This
infernal cigar!" he said; and to the mob, "What mongrel of you took my
cigar?" Stones thumped on his breast; the barrier-line ahead grew denser.
"I'll go at them first; you're bleeding," said Wilfrid. They were
refreshed by the sound of German cheering, as in approach. Jenna uplifted
a crow of the regimental hurrah of the charge; it was answered; on they
went and got through the second fence, saw their comrades, and were
running to meet them, when a weighted ball hit Wilfrid on the back of the
head. He fell, as he believed, on a cushion of down, and saw thousands of
saints dancing with lamps along cathedral aisles.

The next time he opened his eyes he fancied he had dropped into the
vaults of the cathedral. His sensation of sinking was so vivid that he
feared lest he should be going still further below. There was a lamp in
the chamber, and a young man sat reading by the light of the lamp. Vision
danced fantastically on Wilfrid's brain. He saw that he rocked as in a
ship, yet there was no noise of the sea; nothing save the remote thunder
haunting empty ears at strain for sound. He looked again; the young man
was gone, the lamp was flickering. Then he became conscious of a strong
ray on his eyelids; he beheld his enemy gazing down on him and swooned.
It was with joy, that when his wits returned, he found himself looking on
the young man by the lamp. "That other face was a dream," he thought, and
studied the aspect of the young man with the unwearied attentiveness of
partial stupor, that can note accurately, but cannot deduce from its
noting, and is inveterate in patience because it is unideaed. Memory
wakened first.

"Guidascarpi!" he said to himself.

The name was uttered half aloud. The young man started and closed his
book.

"You know me?" he asked.

"You are Guidascarpi?"

"I am."

"Guidascarpi, I think I helped to save your life in Meran."

The young man stooped over him. "You speak of my brother Angelo. I am
Rinaldo. My debt to you is the same, if you have served him."

"Is he safe?"

"He is in Lugano."

"The signorina Vittoria?"

"In Turin."

"Where am I?"

The reply came from another mouth than Rinaldo's.

"You are in the poor lodging of the shoemaker, whose shoes, if you had
thought fit to wear them, would have conducted you anywhere but to this
place."

"Who are you?" Wilfrid moaned.

"You ask who I am. I am the Eye of Italy. I am the Cat who sees in the
dark." Barto Rizzo raised the lamp and stood at his feet. "Look straight.
You know me, I think."

Wilfrid sighed, "Yes, I know you; do your worst."

His head throbbed with the hearing of a heavy laugh, as if a hammer had
knocked it. What ensued he knew not; he was left to his rest. He lay
there many days and nights, that were marked by no change of light; the
lamp burned unwearyingly. Rinaldo and a woman tended him. The sign of his
reviving strength was shown by a complaint he launched at the earthy
smell of the place.

"It is like death," said Rinaldo, coming to his side. "I am used to it,
and familiar with death too," he added in a musical undertone.

"Are you also a prisoner here?" Wilfrid questioned him.

"I am."

"The brute does not kill, then?"

"No; he saves. I owe my life to him. He has rescued yours."

"Mine?" said Wilfrid.

"You would have been torn to pieces in the streets but for Barto Rizzo."

The streets were the world above to Wilfrid; he was eager to hear of the
doings in them. Rinaldo told him that the tobacco-war raged still; the
soldiery had recently received orders to smoke abroad, and street battles
were hourly occurring. "They call this government!" he interjected.

He was a soft-voiced youth; slim and tall and dark, like Angelo, but with
a more studious forehead. The book he was constantly reading was a book
of chemistry. He entertained Wilfrid with very strange talk. He spoke of
the stars and of a destiny. He cited certain minor events of his life to
show the ground of his present belief in there being a written destiny
for each individual man. "Angelo and I know it well. It was revealed to
us when we were boys. It has been certified to us up to this moment. Mark
what I tell you," he pursued in a devout sincerity of manner that baffled
remonstrance, "my days end with this new year. His end with the year
following. Our house is dead."

Wilfrid pressed his hand. "Have you not been too long underground?"

"That is the conviction I am coming to. But when I go out to breathe the
air of heaven, I go to my fate. Should I hesitate? We Italians of this
period are children of thunder and live the life of a flash. The worms
may creep on: the men must die. Out of us springs a better world. Romara,
Ammiani, Mercadesco, Montesini, Rufo, Cardi, whether they see it or not,
will sweep forward to it. To some of them, one additional day of breath
is precious. Not so for Angelo and me. We are unbeloved. We have neither
mother nor sister, nor betrothed. What is an existence that can fly to no
human arms? I have been too long underground, because, while I continue
to hide, I am as a drawn sword between two lovers."

The previous mention of Ammiani's name, together with the knowledge he
had of Ammiani's relationship to the Guidascarpi, pointed an instant
identification of these lovers to Wilfrid.

He asked feverishly who they were, and looked his best simplicity, as one
who was always interested by stories of lovers.

The voice of Barto Rizzo, singing "Vittoria!" stopped Rinaldo's reply:
but Wilfrid read it in his smile at that word. He was too weak to
restrain his anguish, and flung on the couch and sobbed. Rinaldo supposed
that he was in fear of Barto, and encouraged him to meet the man
confidently. A lusty "Viva l'Italia! Vittoria!" heralded Barto's
entrance. "My boy! my noblest! we have beaten them the cravens! Tell me
now--have I served an apprenticeship to the devil for nothing? We have
struck the cigars out of their mouths and the monopoly-money out of their
pockets. They have surrendered. The Imperial order prohibits soldiers
from smoking in the streets of Milan, and so throughout Lombardy! Soon we
will have the prisons empty, by our own order. Trouble yourself no more
about Ammiani. He shall come out to the sound of trumpets. I hear them!
Hither, my Rosellina, my plump melon; up with your red lips, and buss me
a Napoleon salute--ha! ha!"

Barto's wife went into his huge arm, and submissively lifted her face. He
kissed her like a barbaric king, laughing as from wine.

Wilfrid smothered his head from his incarnate thunder. He was unnoticed
by Barto. Presently a silence told him that he was left to himself. An
idea possessed him that the triumph of the Italians meant the release of
Ammiani, and his release the loss of Vittoria for ever. Since her
graceless return of his devotion to her in Meran, something like a
passion--arising from the sole spring by which he could be excited to
conceive a passion--had filled his heart. He was one of those who delight
to dally with gentleness and faith, as with things that are their
heritage; but the mere suspicion of coquettry and indifference plunged
him into a fury of jealous wrathfulness, and tossed so desireable an
image of beauty before him that his mad thirst to embrace it seemed love.
By our manner of loving we are known. He thought it no meanness to escape
and cause a warning to be conveyed to the Government that there was
another attempt brewing for the rescue of Count Ammiani. Acting forthwith
on the hot impulse, he seized the lamp. The door was unlocked. Luckier
than Luigi had been, he found a ladder outside, and a square opening
through which he crawled; continuing to ascend along close passages and
up narrow flights of stairs, that appeared to him to be fashioned to
avoid the rooms of the house. At last he pushed a door, and found himself
in an armoury, among stands of muskets, swords, bayonets,
cartouche-boxes, and, most singular of all, though he observed them last,
small brass pieces of cannon, shining with polish. Shot was piled in
pyramids beneath their mouths. He examined the guns admiringly. There
were rows of daggers along shelves; some in sheath, others bare; one that
had been hastily wiped showed a smear of ropy blood. He stood debating
whether he should seize a sword for his protection. In the act of trying
its temper on the floor, the sword-hilt was knocked from his hand, and he
felt a coil of arms around him. He was in the imprisoning embrace of
Barto Rizzo's wife. His first, and perhaps natural, impression accused
her of a violent display of an eccentric passion for his manly charms;
and the tighter she locked him, the more reasonably was he held to
suppose it; but as, while stamping on the floor, she offered nothing to
his eyes save the yellow poll of her neck, and hung neither panting nor
speaking, he became undeceived. His struggles were preposterous; his
lively sense of ridicule speedily stopped them. He remained passive, from
time to time desperately adjuring his living prison to let him loose, or
to conduct him whither he had come; but the inexorable coil kept
fast--how long there was no guessing--till he could have roared out tears
of rage, and that is extremity for an Englishman. Rinaldo arrived in his
aid; but the woman still clung to him. He was freed only by the voice of
Barto Rizzo, who marched him back. Rinaldo subsequently told him that his
discovery of the armoury necessitated his confinement.

"Necessitates it!" cried Wilfrid. "Is this your Italian gratitude?"

The other answered: "My friend, you risked your fortune for my brother;
but this is a case that concerns our country."

He deemed these words to be an unquestionable justification, for he said
no more. After this they ceased to converse.

Each lay down on his strip of couch-matting; rose and ate, and passed the
dreadful untamed hours; nor would Wilfrid ask whether it was day or
night. We belong to time so utterly, that when we get no note of time, it
wears the shrouded head of death for us already. Rinaldo could quit the
place as he pleased; he knew the hours; and Wilfrid supposed that it must
be hatred that kept him from voluntarily divulging that blessed piece of
knowledge. He had to encourage a retorting spirit of hatred in order to
mask his intense craving. By an assiduous calculation of seconds and
minutes, he was enabled to judge that the lamp burned a space of six
hours before it required replenishing. Barto Rizzo's wife trimmed it
regularly, but the accursed woman came at all seasons. She brought their
meals irregularly, and she would never open her lips: she was like a
guardian of the tombs. Wilfrid abandoned his dream of the variation of
night and day, and with that the sense of life deadened, as the lamp did
toward the sixth hour. Thenceforward his existence fed on the movements
of his companion, the workings of whose mind he began to read with a
marvellous insight. He knew once, long in advance of the act or an
indication of it, that Rinaldo was bent on prayer. Rinaldo had slightly
closed his eyelids during the perusal of his book; he had taken a pencil
and traced lines on it from memory, and dotted points here and there; he
had left the room, and returned to resume his study. Then, after closing
the book softly, he had taken up the mark he was accustomed to place in
the last page of his reading, and tossed it away. Wilfrid was prepared to
clap hands when he should see the hated fellow drop on his knees; but
when that sight verified his calculation, he huddled himself exultingly
in his couch-cloth:--it was like a confirming clamour to him that he was
yet wholly alive. He watched the anguish of the prayer, and was rewarded
for the strain of his faculties by sleep. Barto Rizzo's rough voice
awakened him. Barto had evidently just communicated dismal tidings to
Rinaldo, who left the vault with him, and was absent long enough to make
Wilfrid forget his hatred in an irresistible desire to catch him by the
arm and look in his face.

"Ah! you have not forsaken me," the greeting leaped out.

"Not now," said Rinaldo.

"Do you think of going?"

"I will speak to you presently, my friend."

"Hound!" cried Wilfrid, and turned his face to the wall.

Until he slept, he heard the rapid travelling of a pen; on his awakening,
the pen vexed him like a chirping cricket that tells us that cock-crow is
long distant when we are moaning for the dawn. Great drops of sweat were
on Rinaldo's forehead. He wrote as one who poured forth a history without
pause. Barto's wife came to the lamp and beckoned him out, bearing the
lamp away. There was now for the first time darkness in this vault.
Wilfrid called Rinaldo by name, and heard nothing but the fear of the
place, which seemed to rise bristling at his voice and shrink from it. He
called till dread of his voice held him dumb. "I am, then, a coward," he
thought. Nor could he by-and-by repress a start of terror on hearing
Rinaldo speak out of the darkness. With screams for the lamp, and cries
that he was suffering slow murder, he underwent a paroxysm in the effort
to conceal his abject horror. Rinaldo sat by his side patiently. At last,
he said: "We are both of us prisoners on equal terms now." That was
quieting intelligence to Wilfrid, who asked eagerly: "What hour is it?"

It was eleven of the forenoon. Wilfrid strove to dissociate his
recollection of clear daylight from the pressure of the hideous
featureless time surrounding him. He asked: "What week?" It was the first
week in March. Wilfrid could not keep from sobbing aloud. In the early
period of such a captivity, imagination, deprived of all other food,
conjures phantasms for the employment of the brain; but there is still
some consciousness within the torpid intellect wakeful to laugh at them
as they fly, though they have held us at their mercy. The face of time
had been imaged like the withering mask of a corpse to him. He had felt,
nevertheless, that things had gone on as we trust them to do at the
closing of our eyelids: he had preserved a mystical remote faith in the
steady running of the world above, and hugged it as his most precious
treasure. A thunder was rolled in his ears when he heard of the flight of
two months at one bound. Two big months! He would have guessed, at
farthest, two weeks. "I have been two months in one shirt? Impossible!"
he exclaimed. His serious idea (he cherished it for the support of his
reason) was, that the world above had played a mad prank since he had
been shuffled off its stage.

"It can't be March," he said. "Is there sunlight overhead?"

"It is a true Milanese March," Rinaldo replied.

"Why am I kept a prisoner?"

"I cannot say. There must be some idea of making use of you."

"Have you arms?"

"I have none."

"You know where they're to be had."

"I know, but I would not take them if I could. They, my friend, are for a
better cause."

"A thousand curses on your country!" cried Wilfrid. "Give me air; give me
freedom, I am stifled; I am eaten up with dirt; I am half dead. Are we
never to have the lamp again?"

"Hear me speak," Rinaldo stopped his ravings. "I will tell you what my
position is. A second attempt has been made to help Count Ammiani's
escape; it has failed. He is detained a prisoner by the Government under
the pretence that he is implicated in the slaying of an Austrian noble by
the hands of two brothers, one of whom slew him justly--not as a dog is
slain, but according to every honourable stipulation of the code. I was
the witness of the deed. It is for me that my cousin, Count Ammiani,
droops in prison when he should be with his bride. Let me speak on, I
pray you. I have said that I stand between two lovers. I can release him,
I know well, by giving myself up to the Government. Unless I do so
instantly, he will be removed from Milan to one of their fortresses in
the interior, and there he may cry to the walls and iron-bars for his
trial. They are aware that he is dear to Milan, and these two miserable
attempts have furnished them with their excuse. Barto Rizzo bids me wait.
I have waited: I can wait no longer. The lamp is withheld from me to stop
my writing to my brother, that I may warn him of my design, but the
letter is written; the messenger is on his way to Lugano. I do not state
my intentions before I have taken measures to accomplish them. I am as
much Barto Rizzo's prisoner now as you are."

The plague of darkness and thirst for daylight prevented Wilfrid from
having any other sentiment than gladness that a companion equally
unfortunate with himself was here, and equally desirous to go forth. When
Barto's wife brought their meal, and the lamp to light them eating it,
Rinaldo handed her pen, ink, pencil, paper, all the material of
correspondence; upon which, as one who had received a stipulated
exchange, she let the lamp remain. While the new and thrice-dear rays
were illumining her dark-coloured solid beauty, I know not what touch of
man-like envy or hurt vanity led Wilfrid to observe that the woman's eyes
dwelt with a singular fulness and softness on Rinaldo. It was fulness and
softness void of fire, a true ox-eyed gaze, but human in the fall of the
eyelids; almost such as an early poet of the brush gave to the Virgin
carrying her Child, to become an everlasting reduplicated image of a
mother's strong beneficence of love. He called Rinaldo's attention to it
when the woman had gone. Rinaldo understood his meaning at once.

"It will have to be so, I fear," he said; "I have thought of it. But if I
lead her to disobey Barto, there is little hope for the poor soul." He
rose up straight, like one who would utter grace for meat. "Must we, O my
God, give a sacrifice at every step?"

With that he resumed his seat stiffly, and bent and murmured to himself.
Wilfrid had at one time of his life imagined that he was marked by a
peculiar distinction from the common herd; but contact with this young
man taught him to feel his fellowship to the world at large, and to
rejoice at it, though it partially humbled him.

They had no further visit from Barto Rizzo. The woman tended them in the
same unswerving silence, and at whiles that adorable maternity of aspect.
Wilfrid was touched by commiseration for her. He was too bitterly fretful
on account of clean linen and the liberty which fluttered the prospect of
it, to think much upon what her fate might be: perhaps a beating, perhaps
the knife. But the vileness of wearing one shirt two months and more had
hardened his heart; and though he was considerate enough not to prompt
his companion very impatiently, he submitted desperate futile schemes to
him, and suggested--"To-night?--tomorrow?--the next day?" Rinaldo did not
heed him. He lay on his couch like one who bleeds inwardly, thinking of
the complacent faithfulness of that poor creature's face. Barto Rizzo had
sworn to him that there should be a rising in Milan before the month was
out; but he had lost all confidence in Milanese risings. Ammiani would be
removed, if he delayed; and he knew that the moment his letter reached
Lugano, Angelo would start for Milan and claim to surrender in his stead.
The woman came, and went forth, and Rinaldo did not look at her until his
resolve was firm.

He said to Wilfrid in her presence, "Swear that you will reveal nothing
of this house."

Wilfrid spiritedly pronounced his gladdest oath.

"It is dark in the streets," Rinaldo addressed the woman. "Lead us out,
for the hour has come when I must go."

She clutched her hands below her bosom to stop its great heaving, and
stood as one smitten by the sudden hearing of her sentence. The sight was
pitiful, for her face scarcely changed; the anguish was expressionless.
Rinaldo pointed sternly to the door.

"Stay," Wilfrid interposed. "That wretch may be in the house, and will
kill her."

"She is not thinking of herself," said Rinaldo.

"But, stay," Wilfrid repeated. The woman's way of taking breath shocked
and enfeebled him.

Rinaldo threw the door open.

"Must you? must you?" her voice broke.

"Waste no words."

"You have not seen a priest?"

"I go to him."

"You die."

"What is death to me? Be dumb, that I may think well of you till my last
moment."

"What is death tome? Be dumb!"

She had spoken with her eyes fixed on his couch. It was the figure of one
upon the scaffold, knitting her frame to hold up a strangled heart.

"What is death to me? Be dumb!" she echoed him many times on the rise and
fall of her breathing, and turned to get him in her eyes. "Be dumb! be
dumb!" She threw her arms wide out, and pressed his temples and kissed
him.

The scene was like hot iron to Wilfrid's senses. When he heard her coolly
asking him for his handkerchief to blind him, he had forgotten the
purpose, and gave it mechanically. Nothing was uttered throughout the
long mountings and descent of stairs. They passed across one corridor
where the walls told of a humming assemblage of men within. A current of
keen air was the first salute Wilfrid received from the world above; his
handkerchief was loosened; he stood foolish as a blind man, weak as a
hospital patient, on the steps leading into a small square of visible
darkness, and heard the door shut behind him. Rinaldo led him from the
court to the street.

"Farewell," he said. "Get some housing instantly; avoid exposure to the
air. I leave you."

Wilfrid spent his tongue in a fruitless and meaningless remonstrance.
"And you?" he had the grace to ask.

"I go straight to find a priest. Farewell."

So they parted.




CHAPTER XXX

EPISODES OF THE REVOLT AND THE WAR
THE FIVE DAYS OF MILAN

The same hand which brought Rinaldo's letter to his brother delivered a
message from Barto Rizzo, bidding Angelo to start at once and head a
stout dozen or so of gallant Swiss. The letter and the message appeared
to be grievous contradictions: one was evidently a note of despair, while
the other sang like a trumpet. But both were of a character to draw him
swiftly on to Milan. He sent word to his Lugano friends, naming a village
among the mountains between Como and Varese, that they might join him
there if they pleased.

Toward nightfall, on the nineteenth of the month, he stood with a small
band of Ticinese and Italian fighting lads two miles distant from the
city. There was a momentary break in long hours of rain; the air was full
of inexplicable sounds, that floated over them like a toning of
multitudes wailing and singing fitfully behind a swaying screen. They
bent their heads. At intervals a sovereign stamp on the pulsation of the
uproar said, distinct as a voice in the ear--Cannon. "Milan's alive!"
Angelo cried, and they streamed forward under the hurry of stars and
scud, till thumping guns and pattering musket-shots, the long big boom of
surgent hosts, and the muffled voluming and crash of storm-bells,
proclaimed that the insurrection was hot. A rout of peasants bearing
immense ladders met them, and they joined with cheers, and rushed to the
walls. As yet no gate was in the possession of the people. The walls
showed bayonet-points: a thin edge of steel encircled a pit of fire.
Angelo resolved to break through at once. The peasants hesitated, but his
own men were of one mind to follow, and, planting his ladder in the
ditch, he rushed up foremost. The ladder was full short; he called out in
German to a soldier to reach his hand down, and the butt-end of a musket
was dropped, which he grasped, and by this aid sprang to the parapet, and
was seized. "Stop," he said, "there's a fellow below with my brandy-flask
and portmanteau." The soldiers were Italians; they laughed, and hauled
away at man after man of the mounting troop, calling alternately
"brandy-flask!--portmanteau!" as each one raised a head above the
parapet. "The signor has a good supply of spirits and baggage," they
remarked. He gave them money for porterage, saying, "You see, the gates
are held by that infernal people, and a quiet traveller must come over
the walls. Viva l'Italia! who follows me?" He carried away three of those
present. The remainder swore that they and their comrades would be on his
side on the morrow. Guided by the new accession to his force, Angelo
gained the streets. All shots had ceased; the streets were lighted with
torches and hand-lamps; barricades were up everywhere, like a convulsion
of the earth. Tired of receiving challenges and mounting the endless
piles of stones, he sat down at the head of the Corso di Porta Nuova,
and took refreshments from the hands of ladies. The house-doors were all
open. The ladies came forth bearing wine and minestra, meat and bread, on
trays; and quiet eating and drinking, and fortifying of the barricades,
went on. Men were rubbing their arms and trying rusty gun-locks. Few of
them had not seen Barto Rizzo that day; but Angelo could get no tidings
of his brother. He slept on a door-step, dreaming that he was blown about
among the angels of heaven and hell by a glorious tempest. Near morning
an officer of volunteers came to inspect the barricade defences. Angelo
knew him by sight; it was Luciano Romara. He explained the position of
the opposing forces. The Marshal, he said, was clearly no street-fighter.
Estimating the army under his orders in Milan at from ten to eleven
thousand men of all arms, it was impossible for him to guard the gates
and then walls, and at the same time fight the city. Nor could he
provision his troops. Yesterday the troops had made one: charge and done
mischief, but they had immediately retired. "And if they take to
cannonading us to-day, we shall know what that means," Romara concluded.
Angelo wanted to join him. "No, stay here," said Romara. "I think you are
a man who won't give ground." He had not seen either Rinaldo or Ammiani,
but spoke of both as certain to be rescued.

Rain and cannon filled the weary space of that day. Some of the
barricades fronting the city gates had been battered down by nightfall;
they were restored within an hour. Their defenders entered the houses
right and left during the cannonade, waiting to meet the charge; but the
Austrians held off. "They have no plan," Romara said on his second visit
of inspection; "they are waiting on Fortune, and starve meanwhile. We can
beat them at that business."

Romara took Angelo and his Swiss away with him. The interior of the city
was abandoned by the Imperialists, who held two or three of the principal
buildings and the square of the Duomo. Clouds were driving thick across
the cold-gleaming sky when the storm-bells burst out with the wild
Jubilee-music of insurrection--a carol, a jangle of all discord, savage
as flame. Every church of the city lent its iron tongue to the peal; and
now they joined and now rolled apart, now joined again and clanged like
souls shrieking across the black gulfs of an earthquake; they swam aloft
with mournful delirium, tumbled together, were scattered in spray,
dissolved, renewed, died, as a last worn wave casts itself on an unfooted
shore, and rang again as through rent doorways, became a clamorous host,
an iron body, a pressure as of a down-drawn firmament, and once more a
hollow vast, as if the abysses of the Circles were sounded through and
through. To the Milanese it was an intoxication; it was the howling of
madness to the Austrians--a torment and a terror: they could neither
sing, nor laugh, nor talk under it. Where they stood in the city, the
troops could barely hear their officers' call of command. No sooner had
the bells broken out than the length of every street and Corso flashed
with the tri-coloured flag; musket-muzzles peeped from the windows; men
with great squares of pavement lined the roofs. Romara mounted a stiff
barricade and beheld a scattered regiment running the gauntlet of storms
of shot and missiles, in full retreat upon the citadel. On they came,
officers in front for the charge, as usual with the Austrians; fire on
both flanks, a furious mob at their heels, and the barricade before them.
They rushed at Romara, and were hurled back, and stood in a riddled lump.
Suddenly Romara knocked up the rifles of the couching Swiss; he yelled to
the houses to stop firing. "Surrender your prisoners,--you shall pass,"
he called. He had seen one dear head in the knot of the soldiery. No
answer was given. Romara, with Angelo and his Swiss and the ranks of the
barricade, poured over and pierced the streaming mass, steel for steel.

"Ammiani! Ammiani!" Romara cried; a roar from the other side, "Barto!
Barto! the Great Cat!" met the cry. The Austrians struck up a cheer under
the iron derision of the bells; it was ludicrous, it was as if a door had
slammed on their mouths, ringing tremendous echoes in a vaulted roof.
They stood sweeping fire in two oblong lines; a show of military array
was preserved like a tattered robe, till Romara drove at their centre and
left the retreat clear across the barricade. Then the whitecoats were
seen flowing over, the motley surging hosts from the city in
pursuit--foam of a storm-torrent hurled forward by the black tumult of
precipitous waters. Angelo fell on his brother's neck; Romara clasped
Carlo Ammiani. These two were being marched from the prison to the
citadel when Barto Rizzo, who had prepared to storm the building,
assailed the troops. To him mainly they were indebted for their rescue.

Even in that ecstasy of meeting, the young men smiled at the
preternatural transport on his features as he bounded by them, mad for
slaughter, and mounting a small brass gun on the barricade, sent the
charges of shot into the rear of the enemy. He kissed the black lip of
his little thunderer in, a rapture of passion; called it his wife, his
naked wife; the best of mistresses, who spoke only when he charged her to
speak; raved that she was fair, and liked hugging; that she was true, and
the handsomest daughter of Italy; that she would be the mother of big
ones--none better than herself, though they were mountains of sulphur big
enough to make one gulp of an army.

His wife in the flesh stood at his feet with a hand-grenade and a rifle,
daggers and pistols in her belt. Her face was black with powder-smoke as
the muzzle of the gun. She looked at Rinaldo once, and Rinaldo at her;
both dropped their eyes, for their joy at seeing one another alive was
mighty.

Dead Austrians were gathered in a heap. Dead and wounded Milanese were
taken into the houses. Wine was brought forth by ladies and household
women. An old crutched beggar, who had performed a deed of singular
intrepidity in himself kindling a fire at the door of one of the
principal buildings besieged by the people, and who showed perforated
rags with a comical ejaculation of thanks to the Austrians for knowing
how to hit a scarecrow and make a beggar holy, was the object of
particular attention. Barto seated him on his gun, saying that his
mistress and beauty was honoured; ladies were proud in waiting on the
fine frowzy old man. It chanced during that morning that Wilfrid Pierson
had attached himself to Lieutenant Jenna's regiment as a volunteer. He
had no arms, nothing but a huge white umbrella, under which he walked dry
in the heavy rain, and passed through the fire like an impassive
spectator of queer events. Angelo's Swiss had captured them, and the mob
were maltreating them because they declined to shout for this valorous
ancient beggarman. "No doubt he's a capital fellow," said Jenna; "but
'Viva Scottocorni' is not my language;" and the spirited little subaltern
repeated his "Excuse me," with very good temper, while one knocked off
his shako, another tugged at his coat-skirts. Wilfrid sang out to the
Guidascarpi, and the brothers sprang to him and set them free; but the
mob, like any other wild beast gorged with blood, wanted play, and urged
Barto to insist that these victims should shout the viva in exaltation of
their hero.

"Is there a finer voice than mine?" said Barto, and he roared the 'viva'
like a melodious bull. Yet Wilfrid saw that he had been recognized. In
the hour of triumph Barto Rizzo had no lust for petty vengeance. The
magnanimous devil plumped his gorge contentedly on victory. His ardour
blazed from his swarthy crimson features like a blown fire, when scouts
came running down with word that all about the Porta Camosina, Madonna
del Carmine, and the Gardens, the Austrians were reaping the white flag
of the inhabitants of that district. Thitherward his cry of "Down with
the Tedeschi!" led the boiling tide. Rinaldo drew Wilfrid and Jenna to an
open doorway, counselling the latter to strip the gold from his coat and
speak his Italian in monosyllables. A woman of the house gave her promise
to shelter and to pass them forward. Romara, Ammiani, and the
Guidascarpi, went straight to the Casa Gonfalonieri, where they hoped to
see stray members of the Council of War, and hear a correction of certain
unpleasant rumours concerning the dealings of the Provisional Government
with Charles Albert.

The first crack of a division between the patriot force and the
aristocracy commenced this day; the day following it was a breach.

A little before dusk the bells of the city ceased their hammering, and
when they ceased, all noises of men and musketry seemed childish. The
woman who had promised to lead Wilfrid and Jenna to the citadel, feared
no longer either for herself or them, and passed them on up the Corso
Francesco past the Contrada del Monte. Jenna pointed out the Duchess of
Graatli's house, saying, "By the way, the Lenkensteins are here; they
left Venice last week. Of course you know, or don't you?--and there they
must stop, I suppose." Wilfrid nodded an immediate good-bye to him, and
crossed to the house-door. His eccentric fashion of acting had given him
fame in the army, but Jenna stormed at it now, and begged him to come on
and present himself to General Schoneck, if not to General Pierson.
Wilfrid refused even to look behind him. In fact, it was a part of the
gallant fellow's coxcombry (or nationality) to play the Englishman. He
remained fixed by the housedoor till midnight, when a body of men in the
garb of citizens, volubly and violently Italian in their talk, struck
thrice at the door. Wilfrid perceived Count Lenkenstein among them. The
ladies Bianca, Anna, and Lena issued mantled and hooded between the
lights of two barricade watchfires. Wilfrid stepped after them. They had
the password, for the barricades were crossed. The captain of the
head-barricade in the Corso demurred, requiring a counter-sign.
Straightway he was cut down. He blew an alarm-call, when up sprang a
hundred torches. The band of Germans dashed at the barricade as at the
tusks of a boar. They were picked men, most of them officers, but a
scanty number in the thick of an armed populace. Wilfrid saw the lighted
passage into the great house, and thither, throwing out his arms, he bore
the affrighted group of ladies, as a careful shepherd might do. Returning
to Count Lenkenstein's side, "Where are they?" the count said, in mortal
dread. "Safe," Wilfrid replied. The count frowned at him inquisitively.
"Cut your way through, and on!" he cried to three or four who hung near
him; and these went to the slaughter.

"Why do you stand by me, sir?" said the count. Interior barricades were
pouring their combatants to the spot; Count Lenkenstein was plunged upon
the door-steps. Wilfrid gained half-a-minute's parley by shouting in his
foreign accent, "Would you hurt an Englishman?" Some one took him by the
arm, and helping to raise the count, hurried them both into the house.

"You must make excuses for popular fury in times like these," the
stranger observed.

The Austrian nobleman asked him stiffly for his name. The name of Count
Ammiani was given. "I think you know it," Carlo added.

"You escaped from your lawful imprisonment this day, did you not?--you
and your cousin, the assassin. I talk of law! I might as justly talk of
honour. Who lives here?" Carlo contained himself to answer, "The present
occupant is, I believe, if I have hit the house I was seeking, the
Countess d'Isorella."

"My family were placed here, sir?" Count Lenkenstein inquired of Wilfrid.
But Wilfrid's attention was frozen by the sight of Vittoria's lover. A
wifely call of "Adalbert" from above quieted the count's anxiety.

"Countess d'Isorella," he said. "I know that woman. She belongs to the
secret cabinet of Carlo Alberto--a woman with three edges. Did she not
visit you in prison two weeks ago? I speak to you, Count Ammiani. She
applied to the Archduke and the Marshal for permission to visit you. It
was accorded. To the devil with our days of benignity! She was from
Turin. The shuffle has made her my hostess for the nonce. I will go to
her. You, sir," the count turned to Wilfrid--"you will stay below. Are
you in the pay of the insurgents?"

Wilfrid, the weakest of human beings where women were involved with him,
did one of the hardest things which can task a young man's fortitude: he
looked his superior in the face, and neither blenched, nor frowned, nor
spoke.

Ammiani spoke for him. "There is no pay given in our ranks."

"The licence to rob is supposed to be an equivalent," said the count.

Countess d'Isorella herself came downstairs, with profuse apologies for
the absence of all her male domestics, and many delicate dimples about
her mouth in uttering them. Her look at Ammiani struck Wilfrid as having
a peculiar burden either of meaning or of passion in it. The count
grimaced angrily when he heard that his sister Lena was not yet able to
bear the fatigue of a walk to the citadel. "I fear you must all be my
guests, for an hour at least," said the countess.

Wilfrid was left pacing the hall. He thought he had never beheld so
splendid a person, or one so subjugatingly gracious. Her speech and
manner poured oil on the uncivil Austrian nobleman. What perchance had
stricken Lena?

He guessed; and guessed it rightly. A folded scrap of paper signed by the
Countess of Lenkenstein was brought to him.

It said:--"Are you making common cause with the rebels? Reply. One asks
who should be told."

He wrote:--"I am an outcast of the army. I fight as a volunteer with the
K. K. troops. Could I abandon them in their peril?"

The touch of sentiment he appended for Lena's comfort. He was too
strongly impressed by the new vision of beauty in the house for his
imagination to be flushed by the romantic posture of his devotion to a
trailing flag.

No other message was delivered. Ammiani presently descended and obtained
a guard from the barricade; word was sent on to the barricades in advance
toward the citadel. Wilfrid stood aside as Count Lenkenstein led the
ladies to the door, bearing Lena on his arm. She passed her lover veiled.
The count said, "You follow." He used the menial second person plural of
German, and repeated it peremptorily.

"I follow no civilian," said Wilfrid.

"Remember, sir, that if you are seen with arms in your hands, and are not
in the ranks, you run the chances of being hanged."

Lena broke loose from her brother; in spite of Anna's sharp remonstrance
and the count's vexed stamp of the foot, she implored her lover:--"Come
with us; pardon us; protect me--me! You shall not be treated harshly.
They shall not Oh! be near me. I have been ill; I shrink from danger. Be
near me!"

Such humble pleading permitted Wilfrid's sore spirit to succumb with the
requisite show of chivalrous dignity. He bowed, and gravely opened his
enormous umbrella, which he held up over the heads of the ladies, while
Ammiani led the way. All was quiet near the citadel. A fog of plashing
rain hung in red gloom about the many watchfires of the insurgents, but
the Austrian head-quarters lay sombre and still. Close at the gates,
Ammiani saluted the ladies. Wilfrid did the same, and heard Lena's call
to him unmoved.

"May I dare to hint to you that it would be better for you to join your
party?" said Ammiani.

Wilfrid walked on. After appearing to weigh the matter, he answered, "The
umbrella will be of no further service to them to-night."

Ammiani laughed, and begged to be forgiven; but he could have done
nothing more flattering.

Sore at all points, tricked and ruined, irascible under the sense of his
injuries, hating everybody and not honouring himself, Wilfrid was fast
growing to be an eccentric by profession. To appear cool and careless was
the great effort of his mind.

"We were introduced one day in the Piazza d'Armi," said Ammiani. "I would
have found means to convey my apologies to you for my behaviour on that
occasion, but I have been at the mercy of my enemies. Lieutenant Pierson,
will you pardon me? I have learnt how dear you and your family should be
to me. Pray, accept my excuses and my counsel. The Countess Lena was my
friend when I was a boy. She is in deep distress."

"I thank you, Count Ammiani, for your extremely disinterested advice,"
said Wilfrid; but the Italian was not cut to the quick by his irony; and
he added: "I have hoisted, you perceive, the white umbrella instead of
wearing the white coat. It is almost as good as an hotel in these times;
it gives as much shelter and nearly as much provision, and, I may say,
better attendance. Good-night. You will be at it again about daylight, I
suppose?"

"Possibly a little before," said Ammiani, cooled by the false ring of
this kind of speech.

"It's useless to expect that your infernal bells will not burst out like
all the lunatics on earth?"

"Quite useless, I fear. Good-night."

Ammiani charged one of the men at an outer barricade to follow the white
umbrella and pass it on.

He returned to the Countess d'Isorella, who was awaiting him, and alone.

This glorious head had aroused his first boyish passion. Scandal was busy
concerning the two, when Violetta d'Asola, the youthfullest widow in
Lombardy and the loveliest woman, gave her hand to Count d'Isorella, who
took it without question of the boy Ammiani. Carlo's mother assisted in
that arrangement; a maternal plot, for which he could thank her only
after he had seen Vittoria, and then had heard the buzz of whispers at
Violetta's name. Countess d'Isorella proved her friendship to have
survived the old passion, by travelling expressly from Turin to obtain
leave to visit him in prison. It was a marvellous face to look upon
between prison walls. Rescued while the soldiers were marching him to the
citadel that day, he was called by pure duty to pay his respects to the
countess as soon as he had heard from his mother that she was in the
city. Nor was his mother sorry that he should go. She had patiently
submitted to the fact of his betrothal to Vittoria, which was his
safeguard in similar perils; and she rather hoped for Violetta to wean
him from his extreme republicanism. By arguments? By influence, perhaps.
Carlo's republicanism was preternatural in her sight, and she presumed
that Violetta would talk to him discreetly and persuasively of the noble
designs of the king.

Violetta d'Isorella received him with a gracious lifting of her fingers
to his lips; congratulating him on his escape, and on the good fortune of
the day. She laughed at the Lenkensteins and the singular Englishman; sat
down to a little supper-tray, and pouted humorously as she asked him to
feed on confects and wine; the huge appetites of the insurgents had
devoured all her meat and bread.

"Why are you here?" he said.

She did well in replying boldly, "For the king."

"Would you tell another that it is for the king?"

"Would I speak to another as I speak to you?"

Ammiani inclined his head.

They spoke of the prospects of the insurrection, of the expected outbreak
in Venice, the eruption of Paris and Vienna, and the new life of Italy;
touching on Carlo Alberto to explode the truce in a laughing dissension.
At last she said seriously, "I am a born Venetian, you know; I am not
Piedmontese. Let me be sure that the king betrays the country, and I will
prefer many heads to one. Excuse me if I am more womanly just at present.
The king has sent his accredited messenger Tartini to the Provisional
Government, requesting it to accept his authority. Why not? why not? on
both sides. Count Medole gives his adhesion to the king, but you have a
Council of War that rejects the king's overtures--a revolt within a
revolt.

"It is deplorable. You must have an army. The Piedmontese once over the
Ticino, how can you act in opposition to it? You must learn to take a
master. The king is only, or he appears, tricksy because you compel him
to wind and counterplot. I swear to you, Italy is his foremost thought.
The Star of Italy sits on the Cross of Savoy."

Ammiani kept his eyelids modestly down. "Ten thousand to plead for him,
such as you!" he said. "But there is only one!"

"If you had been headstrong once upon a time, and I had been weak, you
see, my Carlo, you would have been a domestic tyrant, I a rebel. You will
not admit the existence of a virtue in an opposite opinion. Wise was your
mother when she said 'No' to a wilful boy!"

Violetta lit her cigarette and puffed the smoke lightly.

"I told you in that horrid dungeon, my Carlo Amaranto--I call you by the
old name--the old name is sweet!--I told you that your Vittoria is
enamoured of the king. She blushes like a battle-flag for the king. I
have heard her 'Viva il Re!' It was musical."

"So I should have thought."

"Ay, but my amaranto-innamorato, does it not foretell strife? Would you
ever--ever take a heart with a king's head stamped on it into your arms?"

"Give me the chance!"

He was guilty of this ardent piece of innocence though Violetta had
pitched her voice in the key significant of a secret thing belonging to
two memories that had not always flowed dividedly.

"Like a common coin?" she resumed.

"A heart with a king's head stamped on it like a common coin."

He recollected the sentence. He had once, during the heat of his grief
for Giacomo Piaveni, cast it in her teeth.

Violetta repeated it, as to herself, tonelessly; a method of making an
old unkindness strike back on its author with effect.

"Did we part good friends? I forget," she broke the silence.

"We meet, and we will be the best of friends," said Ammiani.

"Tell your mother I am not three years older than her son,--I am thirty.
Who will make me young again? Tell her, my Carlo, that the genius for
intrigue, of which she accuses me, develops at a surprising rate. As
regards my beauty," the countess put a tooth of pearl on her soft under
lip.

Ammiani assured her that he would find words of his own for her beauty.

"I hear the eulogy, I know the sonnet," said Violetta, smiling, and
described the points of a brunette: the thick black banded hair, the full
brown eyes, the plastic brows couching over them;--it was Vittoria's
face: Violetta was a flower of colour, fair, with but one shade of dark
tinting on her brown eye-brows and eye-lashes, as you may see a strip of
night-cloud cross the forehead of morning. She was yellow-haired, almost
purple-eyed, so rich was the blue of the pupils. Vittoria could be sallow
in despondency; but this Violetta never failed in plumpness and
freshness. The pencil which had given her aspect the one touch of
discord, endowed it with a subtle harmony, like mystery; and Ammiani
remembered his having stood once on the Lido of Venice, and eyed the dawn
across the Adriatic, and dreamed that Violetta was born of the loveliness
and held in her bosom the hopes of morning. He dreamed of it now, feeling
the smooth roll of a torrent.

A cry of "Arms!" rang down the length of the Corso.

He started to his feet thankfully.

"Take me to your mother," she said. "I loathe to hear firing and be
alone."

Ammiani threw up the window. There was a stir of lamps and torches below,
and the low sky hung red. Violetta stood quickly thick-shod and hooded.

"Your mother will admit my companionship, Carlo?"

"She desires to thank you."

"She has no longer any fear of me?"

"You will find her of one mind with you."

"Concerning the king!"

"I would say, on most subjects."

"But that you do not know my mind! You are modest. Confess that you are
thinking the hour you have passed with me has been wasted."

"I am, now I hear the call to arms."

"If I had all the while entertained you with talk of your Vittoria! It
would not have been wasted then, my amaranto. It is not wasted for me. If
a shot should strike you--"

"Tell her I died loving her with all my soul!" cried Ammiani.

Violetta's frame quivered as if he had smitten her.

They left the house. Countess Ammiani's door was the length of a
barricade distant: it swung open to them, like all the other house-doors
which were, or wished to be esteemed, true to the cause, and hospitable
toward patriots.

"Remember, when you need a refuge, my villa is on Lago Maggiore,"
Violetta said, and kissed her finger-tips to him.

An hour after, by the light of this unlucky little speech, he thought of
her as a shameless coquette. "When I need a refuge? Is not Milan in
arms?--Italy alive? She considers it all a passing epidemic; or, perhaps,
she is to plead for me to the king!"

That set him thinking moodily over the things she had uttered of
Vittoria's strange and sudden devotion to the king.

Rainy dawn and the tongues of the churches ushered in the last day of
street fighting. Ammiani found Romara and Colonel Corte at the head of
strong bodies of volunteers, well-armed, ready to march for the Porta
'rosa. All three went straight to the house where the Provisional
Government sat, and sword in hand denounced Count Medole as a traitor who
sold his country to the king. Corte dragged him to the window to hear the
shouts for the Republic. Medole wrote their names down one by one, and
said, "Shall I leave the date vacant?" They put themselves at the head of
their men, and marched in the ringing of the bells. The bells were their
sacro-military music. Barto Rizzo was off to make a spring at the Porta
Ticinese. Students, peasants, noble youths of the best blood, old men and
young women, stood ranged in the drenching rain, eager to face death for
freedom. At mid-day the bells were answered by cannon and the blunt snap
of musketry volleys; dull, savage responses, as of a wounded great beast
giving short howls and snarls by the interminable over-roaring of a
cataract. Messengers from the gates came running to the quiet centre of
the city, where cool men discoursed and plotted. Great news, big lies,
were shouted:--Carlo Alberto thundered in the plains; the Austrians were
everywhere retiring; the Marshal was a prisoner; the flag of surrender
was on the citadel! These things were for the ears of thirsty women,
diplomatists, and cripples.

Countess Ammiani and Countess d'Isorella sat together throughout the
agitation of the day.

The life prayed for by one seemed a wisp of straw flung on this humming
furnace.

Countess Ammiani was too well used to defeat to believe readily in
victory, and had shrouded her head in resignation too long to hope for
what she craved. Her hands were joined softly in her lap. Her visage had
the same unmoved expression when she conversed with Violetta as when she
listened to the ravings of the Corso.

Darkness came, and the bells ceased not rolling by her open windows: the
clouds were like mists of conflagration.

She would not have the windows closed. The noise of the city had become
familiar and akin to the image of her boy. She sat there cloaked.

Her heart went like a time-piece to the two interrogations to heaven:
"Alive?--or dead?"

The voice of Luciano Romara was that of an angel's answering. He entered
the room neat and trim as a cavalier dressed for social evening duty,
saying with his fine tact, "We are all well;" and after talking like a
gazette of the Porta Tosa taken by the volunteers, Barto Rizzo's
occupation of the gate opening on the Ticino, and the bursting of the
Porta Camosina by the freebands of the plains, he handed a letter to
Countess Ammiani.

"Carlo is on the march to Bergamo and Brescia, with Corte, Sana, and
about fifty of our men," he said.

"And is wounded--where?" asked Violetta.

"Slightly in the hand--you see, he can march," Romara said, laughing at
her promptness to suspect a subterfuge, until he thought, "Now, what does
this mean, madam?"

A lamp was brought to Countess Ammiani. She read:

   "MY MOTHER!

   "Cotton-wool on the left fore-finger. They deigned to give me no
   other memorial of my first fight. I am not worthy of papa's two
   bullets. I march with Corte and Sana to Brescia. We keep the
   passes of the Tyrol. Luciano heads five hundred up to the hills
   to-morrow or next day. He must have all our money. Then go from
   door to door and beg subscriptions. Yes, my Chief! it is to be
   like God, and deserving of his gifts to lay down all pride, all
   wealth. This night send to my betrothed in Turin. She must be with
   no one but my mother. It is my command. Tell her so. I hold
   imperatively to it.

   "I breathe the best air of life. Luciano is a fine leader in
   action, calm as in a ball-room. What did I feel? I will talk of it
   with you by-and-by;--my father whispered in my ears; I felt him at
   my right hand. He said, 'I died for this day.' I feel now that I
   must have seen him. This is imagination. We may say that anything
   is imagination. I certainly heard his voice. Be of good heart, my
   mother, for I can swear that the General wakes up when I strike
   Austrian steel. He loved Brescia; so I go there. God preserve my
   mother! The eyes of heaven are wide enough to see us both.
   Vittoria by your side, remember! It is my will.

                       "CARLO."

Countess Ammiani closed her eyes over the letter, as in a dead sleep. "He
is more his father than himself, and so suddenly!" she said. She was
tearless. Violetta helped her to her bed-room under the pretext of a
desire to hear the contents of the letter.

That night, which ended the five days of battle in Milan, while fires
were raging at many gates, bells were rolling over the roof-tops, the
army of Austria coiled along the North-eastern walls of the city, through
rain and thick obscurity, and wove its way like a vast worm into the
outer land.




CHAPTER XXXI

EPISODES OF THE REVOLT AND THE WAR
VITTORIA DISOBEYS HER LOVER

Countess d'Isorella's peculiar mission to Milan was over with the victory
of the city. She undertook personally to deliver Carlo's injunction to
Vittoria on her way to the king. Countess Ammiani deemed it sufficient
that her son's wishes should be repeated verbally; and as there appeared
to be no better messenger than one who was bound for Turin and knew
Vittoria's place of residence, she entrusted the duty to Violetta.

The much which hangs on little was then set in motion:

Violetta was crossing the Ticino when she met a Milanese nobleman who had
received cold greeting from the king, and was returning to Milan with
word that the Piedmontese declaration of war against Austria had been
signed. She went back to Milan, saw and heard, and gathered a burden for
the royal ears. This was a woman, tender only to the recollection of past
days, who used her beauty and her arts as weapons for influence. She
liked kings because she saw neither master nor dupe in a republic; she
liked her early lover because she could see nothing but a victim in any
new one. She was fond of Carlo, as greatly occupied minds may be attached
to an old garden where they have aforetime sown fair seed. Jealousy of a
rival in love that was disconnected with political business and her large
expenditure, had never yet disturbed the lady's nerves.

At Turin she found Vittoria singing at the opera, and winning marked
applause from the royal box. She thought sincerely that to tear a prima
donna from her glory would be very much like dismissing a successful
General to his home and gabbling family. A most eminent personage agreed
with her. Vittoria was carelessly informed that Count Ammiani had gone to
Brescia, and having regard for her safety, desired her to go to Milan to
be under the protection of his mother, and that Countess Ammiani was
willing to receive her.

Now, with her mother, and her maid Giacinta, and Beppo gathered about
her, for three weeks Vittoria had been in full operatic career, working,
winning fame, believing that she was winning influence, and establishing
a treasury. The presence of her lover in Milan would have called her to
the noble city; but he being at Brescia, she asked herself why she should
abstain from labours which contributed materially to the strength of the
revolution and made her helpful. It was doubtful whether Countess Ammiani
would permit her to sing at La Scala; or whether the city could support
an opera in the throes of war. And Vittoria was sending money to Milan.
The stipend paid to her by the impresario, the jewels, the big
bouquets--all flowed into the treasury of the insurrection.
Antonio-Pericles advanced her a large sum on the day when the news of the
Milanese uprising reached Turin: the conditions of the loan had simply
been that she should continue her engagement to sing in Turin. He was
perfectly slavish to her, and might be trusted to advance more. Since the
great night at La Scala, she had been often depressed by a secret feeling
that there was divorce between her love of her country and devotion to
her Art. Now that both passions were in union, both active, each aiding
the fire of the other, she lived a consummate life. She could not have
abandoned her path instantly though Carlo had spoken his command to her
in person. Such were her first spontaneous seasonings, and Laura Piaveni
seconded them; saying, "Money, money!, we must be Jews for money. We
women are not allowed to fight, but we can manage to contribute our lire
and soldi; we can forge the sinews of war."

Vittoria wrote respectfully to Countess Ammiani stating why she declined
to leave Turin. The letter was poorly worded. While writing it she had
been taken by a sentiment of guilt and of isolation in presuming to
disobey her lover. "I am glad he will not see it," she remarked to Laura,
who looked rapidly across the lines, and said nothing. Praise of the king
was in the last sentence. Laura's eyes lingered on it half-a-minute.

"Has he not drawn his sword? He is going to march," said Vittoria.

"Oh, yes," Laura replied coolly; "but you put that to please Countess
Ammiani."

Vittoria confessed she had not written it purposely to defend the king.
"What harm?" she asked.

"None. Only this playing with shades allows men to call us hypocrites."

The observation angered Vittoria. She had seen the king of late; she had
breathed Turin incense and its atmosphere; much that could be pleaded on
the king's behalf she had listened to with the sympathetic pity which can
be woman's best judgement, and is the sentiment of reason. She had also
brooded over the king's character, and had thought that if the Chief
could have her opportunities for studying this little impressible, yet
strangely impulsive royal nature, his severe condemnation of him would be
tempered. In fact, she was doing what makes a woman excessively tender
and opinionated; she was petting her idea of the misunderstood one: she
was thinking that she divined the king's character by mystical intuition;
I will dare to say, maternally apprehended it. And it was a character
strangely open to feminine perceptions, while to masculine comprehension
it remained a dead blank, done either in black or in white.

Vittoria insisted on praising the king to Laura.

"With all my heart," Laura said, "so long as he is true to Italy."

"How, then, am I hypocritical?"

"My Sandra, you are certainly perverse. You admitted that you did
something for the sake of pleasing Countess Ammiani."

"I did. But to be hypocritical one must be false."

"Oh!" went Laura.

"And I write to Carlo. He does not care for the king; therefore it is
needless for me to name the king to him; and I shall not."

Laura said, "Very well." She saw a little deeper than the perversity,
though she did not see the springs. In Vittoria's letter to her lover,
she made no allusion to the Sword of Italy.

Countess Ammiani forwarded both letters on to Brescia.

When Carlo had finished reading them, he heard all Brescia clamouring
indignantly at the king for having disarmed volunteers on Lago Maggiore
and elsewhere in his dominions. Milan was sending word by every post of
the overbearing arrogance of the Piedmontese officers and officials, who
claimed a prostrate submission from a city fresh with the ardour of the
glory it had won for itself, and that would fain have welcomed them as
brothers. Romara and others wrote of downright visible betrayal. It was a
time of passions;--great readiness for generosity, equal promptitude for
undiscriminating hatred. Carlo read Vittoria's praise of the king with
insufferable anguish. "You--you part of me, can write like this!" he
struck the paper vehemently. The fury of action transformed the gentle
youth. Countess Ammiani would not have forwarded the letter addressed to
herself had she dreamed the mischief it might do. Carlo saw
double-dealing in the absence of any mention of the king in his own
letter.

   "Quit Turin at once," he dashed hasty lines to Vittoria; "and no
   'Viva il Re' till we know what he may merit. Old delusions are
   pardonable; but you must now look abroad with your eyes. Your words
   should be the echoes of my soul. Your acts are mine. For the sake
   of the country, do nothing to fill me with shame. The king is a
   traitor. I remember things said of him by Agostino; I subscribe to
   them every one. Were you like any other Italian girl, you might cry
   for him--who would care! But you are Vittoria. Fly to my mother's
   arms, and there rest. The king betrays us. Is a stronger word
   necessary? I am writing too harshly to you;--and here are the lines
   of your beloved letter throbbing round me while I write; but till
   the last shot is fired I try to be iron, and would hold your hand
   and not kiss it--not be mad to fall between your arms--not wish for
   you--not think of you as a woman, as my beloved, as my Vittoria; I
   hope and pray not, if I thought there was an ace of work left to do
   for the country. Or if one could say that you cherished a shred of
   loyalty for him who betrays it. Great heaven! am I to imagine that
   royal flatteries--My hand is not my own! You shall see all that
   it writes. I will seem to you no better than I am. I do not tell
   you to be a Republican, but an Italian. If I had room for myself in
   my prayers--oh! one half-instant to look on you, though with chains
   on my limbs. The sky and the solid ground break up when I think of
   you. I fancy I am still in prison. Angelo was music to me for two
   whole days (without a morning to the first and a night to the
   second). He will be here to-morrow and talk of you again. I long
   for him more than for battle--almost long for you more than for
   victory for our Italy.

   "This is Brescia, which my father said he loved better than his
   wife.

   "General Paolo Ammiani is buried here. I was at his tombstone this
   morning. I wish you had known him.

   "You remember, we talked of his fencing with me daily. 'I love the
   fathers who do that.' You said it. He will love you. Death is the
   shadow--not life. I went to his tomb. It was more to think of
   Brescia than of him. Ashes are only ashes; tombs are poor places.
   My soul is the power.

   "If I saw the Monte Viso this morning, I saw right over your head
   when you were sleeping.

   "Farewell to journalism--I hope, for ever. I jump at shaking off
   the journalistic phraseology Agostino laughs at. Yet I was right in
   printing my 'young nonsense.' I did, hold the truth, and that was
   felt, though my vehicle for delivering it was rubbish.

   "In two days Corte promises to sing his song, 'Avanti.' I am at his
   left hand. Venice, the passes of the Adige, the Adda, the Oglio are
   ours. The room is locked; we have only to exterminate the reptiles
   inside it. Romara, D'Arci, Carnischi march to hold the doors.
   Corte will push lower; and if I can get him to enter the plains and
   join the main army I shall rejoice."

The letter concluded with a postscript that half an Italian regiment,
with white coats swinging on their bayonet-points, had just come in.

It reached Vittoria at a critical moment.

Two days previously, she and Laura Piaveni had talked with the king. It
was an unexpected honour. Countess, d'Isorella conducted them to the
palace. The lean-headed sovereign sat booted and spurred, his sword
across his knees; he spoke with a peculiar sad hopefulness of the
prospects of the campaign, making it clear that he was risking more than
anyone risked, for his stake was a crown. The few words he uttered of
Italy had a golden ring in them; Vittoria knew not why they had it. He
condemned the Republican spirit of Milan more regretfully than severely.
The Republicans were, he said, impracticable. Beyond the desire for
change, they knew not what they wanted. He did not state that he should
avoid Milan in his march. On the contrary, he seemed to indicate that he
was about to present himself to the people of Milan. "To act against the
enemy successfully, we must act as one, under one head, with one aim." He
said this, adding that no heart in Italy had yearned more than his own
for the signal to march for the Mincio and the Adige.

Vittoria determined to put him to one test. She summoned her boldness to
crave grace for Agostino Balderini to return to Piedmont. The petition
was immediately granted. Alluding to the libretto of Camilla, the king
complimented Vittoria for her high courage on the night of the Fifteenth
of the foregoing year. "We in Turin were prepared, though we had only
then the pleasure of hearing of you," he said.

"I strove to do my best to help. I wish to serve our cause now," she
replied, feeling an inexplicable new sweetness running in her blood.

He asked her if she did not know that she had the power to move
multitudes.

"Sire, singing appears so poor a thing in time of war."

He remarked that wine was good for soldiers, singing better, such a voice
as hers best of all.

For hours after the interview, Vittoria struggled with her deep blushes.
She heard the drums of the regiments, the clatter of horses, the
bugle-call of assembly, as so many confirmatory notes that it was a royal
hero who was going forth.

"He stakes a crown," she said to Laura.

"Tusk! it tumbles off his head if he refuses to venture something," was
Laura's response.

Vittoria reproached her for injustice.

"No," Laura said; "he is like a young man for whom his mother has made a
match. And he would be very much in love with his bride if he were quite
certain of winning her, or rather, if she would come a little more than
halfway to meet him. Some young men are so composed. Genoa and Turin say,
'Go and try.' Milan and Venice say, 'Come and have faith in us.' My
opinion is that he is quite as much propelled as attracted."

"This is shameful," said Vittoria.

"No; for I am quite willing to suspend my judgement. I pray that fortune
may bless his arms. I do think that the stir of a campaign, and a certain
amount of success will make him in earnest."

"Can you look on his face and not see pure enthusiasm?"

"I see every feminine quality in it, my dear."

"What can it be that he is wanting in?"

"Masculine ambition."

"I am not defending him," said Vittoria hastily.

"Not at all; and I am not attacking him. I can excuse his dread of
Republicanism. I can fancy that there is reason for him just now to fear
Republicanism worse than Austria. Paris and Milan are two grisly phantoms
before him. These red spectres are born of earthquake, and are more given
to shaking thrones than are hostile cannonshot. Earthquakes are
dreadfuller than common maladies to all of us. Fortune may help him, but
he has not the look of one who commands her. The face is not aquiline.
There's a light over him like the ray of a sickly star."

"For that reason!" Vittoria burst out.

"Oh, for that reason we pity men, assuredly, my Sandra, but not kings.
Luckless kings are not generous men, and ungenerous men are mischievous
kings."

"But if you find him chivalrous and devoted; if he proves his noble
intentions, why not support him?"

"Dandle a puppet, by all means," said Laura.

Her intellect, not her heart, was harsh to the king; and her heart was
not mistress of her intellect in this respect, because she beheld riding
forth at the head of Italy one whose spirit was too much after the
pattern of her supple, springing, cowering, impressionable sex,
alternately ardent and abject, chivalrous and treacherous, and not to be
confided in firmly when standing at the head of a great cause.

Aware that she was reading him very strictly by the letters of his past
deeds, which were not plain history to Vittoria, she declared that she
did not countenance suspicion in dealing with the king, and that it would
be a delight to her to hear of his gallant bearing on the battle-field.
"Or to witness it, my Sandra, if that were possible;--we two! For, should
he prove to be no General, he has the courage of his family."

Vittoria took fire at this. "What hinders our following the army?"

"The less baggage the better, my dear."

"But the king said that my singing--I have no right to think it myself."
Vittoria concluded her sentence with a comical intention of humility.

"It was a pretty compliment," said Laura. "You replied that singing is a
poor thing in time of war, and I agree with you. We might serve as
hospital nurses."

"Why do we not determine?"

"We are only considering possibilities."

"Consider the impossibility of our remaining quiet."

"Fire that goes to flame is a waste of heat, my Sandra."

The signora, however, was not so discreet as her speech. On all sides
there was uproar and movement. High-born Italian ladies were offering
their hands for any serviceable work. Laura and Vittoria were not alone
in the desire which was growing to be resolution to share the hardships
of the soldiers, to cherish and encourage them, and by seeing, to have
the supreme joy of feeling the blows struck at the common enemy.

The opera closed when the king marched. Carlo Ammiani's letter was handed
to Vittoria at the fall of the curtain on the last night.

Three paths were open to her: either that she should obey her lover, or
earn an immense sum of money from Antonio-Pericles by accepting an
immediate engagement in London, or go to the war. To sit in submissive
obedience seemed unreasonable; to fly from Italy impossible. Yet the
latter alternative appealed strongly to her sense of duty, and as it
thereby threw her lover's commands into the background, she left it to
her heart to struggle with Carlo, and thought over the two final
propositions. The idea of being apart from Italy while the living country
streamed forth to battle struck her inflamed spirit like the shock of a
pause in martial music. Laura pretended to take no part in Vittoria's
decision, but when it was reached, she showed her a travelling-carriage
stocked with lint and linen, wine in jars, chocolate, cases of brandy,
tea, coffee, needles, thread, twine, scissors, knives; saying, as she
displayed them, "there, my dear, all my money has gone in that equipment,
so you must pay on the road."

"This doesn't leave me a choice, then," said Victoria, joining her
humour.

"Ah, but think over it," Laura suggested.

"No! not think at all," cried Vittoria.

"You do not fear Carlo's anger?"

"If I think, I am weak as water. Let us go."

Countess d'Isorella wrote to Carlo: "Your Vittoria is away after the king
to Pavia. They tell me she stood up in her carriage on the Ponte del
Po-'Viva il Re d'Italia!' waving the cross of Savoy. As I have previously
assured you, no woman is Republican. The demonstration was a mistake.
Public characters should not let their personal preferences betrumpeted:
a diplomatic truism:--but I must add, least of all a cantatrice for a
king. The famous Greek amateur--the prop of failing finances--is after
her to arrest her for breach of engagement. You wished to discover an
independent mind in a woman, my Carlo; did you not? One would suppose her
your wife--or widow. She looked a superb thing the last night she sang.
She is not, in my opinion, wanting in height. If, behind all that
innocence and candour, she has any trained artfulness, she will beat us
all. Heaven bless your arms!"

The demonstration mentioned by the countess had not occurred.

Vittoria's letter to her lover missed him. She wrote from Pavia, after
she had taken her decisive step.

Carlo Ammiani went into the business of the war with the belief that his
betrothed had despised his prayer to her.

He was under Colonel Corte, operating on the sub-Alpine range of hills
along the line of the Chiese South-eastward. Here the volunteers, formed
of the best blood of Milan, the gay and brave young men, after marching
in the pride of their strength to hold the Alpine passes and bar Austria
from Italy while the fight went on below, were struck by a sudden
paralysis. They hung aloft there like an arm cleft from the body.
Weapons, clothes, provisions, money, the implements of war, were withheld
from them. The Piedmontese officers despatched to watch their proceedings
laughed at them like exasperating senior scholars examining the
accomplishments of a lower form. It was manifest that Count Medole and
the Government of Milan worked everywhere to conquer the people for the
king before the king had done a stroke to conquer the Austrians for the
people; while, in order to reduce them to the condition of Piedmontese
soldiery, the flame of their patriotic enthusiasm was systematically
damped, and instead of apprentices in war, who possessed at any rate the
elementary stuff of soldiers, miserable dummies were drafted into the
royal service. The Tuscans and the Romans had good reason to complain on
behalf of their princes, as had the Venetians and the Lombards for the
cause of their Republic. Neither Tuscans, Romans, Venetians, nor Lombards
were offering up their lives simply to obtain a change of rulers; though
all Italy was ready to bow in allegiance to a king of proved kingly
quality. Early in the campaign the cry of treason was muttered, and on
all sides such became the temper of the Alpine volunteers, that Angelo
and Rinaldo Guidascarpi were forced to join their cousin under Corte, by
the dispersion of their band, amounting to something more than eighteen
hundred fighting lads, whom a Piedmontese superior officer summoned
peremptorily to shout for the king. They thundered as one voice for the
Italian Republic, and instantly broke up and disbanded. This was the
folly of the young: Carlo Ammiani confessed that it was no better; but he
knew that a breath of generous confidence from the self-appointed
champion of the national cause would have subdued his impatience at
royalty and given heart and cheer to his sickening comrades. He began to
frown angrily when he thought of Vittoria. "Where is she now?--where
now?" he asked himself in the season of his most violent wrath at the
king. Her conduct grew inseparable in his mind from the king's deeds. The
sufferings, the fierce irony, the very deaths of the men surrounding him
in aims, rose up in accusation against the woman he loved.




CHAPTER XXXI

EPISODES OF THE REVOLT AND THE WAR

THE TREACHERY OF PERICLES--THE WHITE UMBRELLA--THE DEATH OF RINALDO
GUIDASCARPI

The king crossed the Mincio. The Marshal, threatened on his left flank,
drew in his line from the farther Veronese heights upon a narrowed battle
front before Verona. Here they manoeuvred, and the opening successes fell
to the king. Holding Peschiera begirt, with one sharp passage of arms he
cleared the right bank of the Adige and stood on the semicircle of hills,
master of the main artery into Tyrol.

The village of Pastrengo has given its name to the day. It was a day of
intense heat coming after heavy rains. The arid soil steamed; the white
powder-smoke curled in long horizontal columns across the hazy ring of
the fight. Seen from a distance it was like a huge downy ball, kicked
this way and that between the cypresses by invisible giants. A pair of
eager-eyed women gazing on a battle-field for the first time could but
ask themselves in bewilderment whether the fate of countries were verily
settled in such a fashion. Far in the rear, Vittoria and Laura heard the
cannon-shots; a sullen dull sound, as of a mallet striking upon rotten
timber. They drove at speed. The great thumps became varied by musketry
volleys, that were like blocks of rockboulder tumbled in the roll of a
mountain torrent. These, then, were the voices of Italy and Austria
speaking the devilish tongue of the final alternative. Cannon, rockets,
musketry, and now the run of drums, now the ring of bugles, now the tramp
of horses, and the field was like a landslip. A joyful bright black
death-wine seemed to pour from the bugles all about. The women strained
their senses to hear and see; they could realize nothing of a reality so
absolute; their feelings were shattered, and crowded over them in
patches;--horror, glory, panic, hope, shifted lights within their bosoms.
The fascination and repulsion of the image of Force divided them. They
feared; they were prostrate; they sprang in praise. The image of Force
was god and devil to their souls. They strove to understand why the field
was marked with blocks of men who made a plume of vapour here, and
hurried thither. The action of their intellects resolved to a blank
marvel at seeing an imminent thing--an interrogation to almighty heaven
treated with method, not with fury streaming forward. Cleave the opposing
ranks! Cry to God for fire? Cut them through! They had come to see the
Song of Deborah performed before their eyes, and they witnessed only a
battle. Blocks of infantry gathered densely, thinned to a line, wheeled
in column, marched: blocks of cavalry changed posts: artillery bellowed
from one spot and quickly selected another. Infantry advanced in the wake
of tiny smokepuffs, halted, advanced again, rattled files of shots,
became struck into knots, faced half about as from a blow of the back of
a hand, retired orderly. Cavalry curved like a flickering scimetar in
their rear; artillery plodded to its further station. Innumerable tiny
smoke-puffs then preceded a fresh advance of infantry. The enemy were on
the hills and looked mightier, for they were revealed among red flashes
of their guns, and stood partly visible above clouds of hostile smoke and
through clouds of their own, which grasped viscously by the skirts of the
hills. Yet it seemed a strife of insects, until, one by one, soldiers who
had gone into yonder white pit for the bloody kiss of death, and had got
it on their faces, were borne by Vittoria and Laura knelt in this horrid
stream of mortal anguish to give succour from their stores in the
carriage. Their natural emotions were distraught. They welcomed the sight
of suffering thankfully, for the poor blotted faces were so glad at sight
of them. Torture was their key to the reading of the battle. They gazed
on the field no longer, but let the roaring wave of combat wash up to
them what it would.

The hill behind Pastrengo was twice stormed. When the bluecoats first
fell back, a fine charge of Piedmontese horse cleared the slopes for a
second effort, and they went up and on, driving the enemy from hill to
hill. The Adige was crossed by the Austrians under cover of Tyrolese
rifleshots.

Then, with Beppo at their heels, bearing water, wine, and brandy, the
women walked in the paths of carnage, and saw the many faces of death.
Laura whispered strangely, "How light-hearted they look!" The wounded
called their comforters sweet names. Some smoked and some sang, some
groaned; all were quick to drink. Their jokes at the dead were universal.
They twisted their bodies painfully to stick a cigar between dead lips,
and besprinkle them with the last drops of liquor in their cups, laughing
a benediction. These scenes put grievous chains on Vittoria's spirit, but
Laura evidently was not the heavier for them. Glorious Verona shone under
the sunset as their own to come; Peschiera, on the blue lake, was in the
hollow of their hands. "Prizes worth any quantity of blood," said Laura.
Vittoria confessed that she had seen enough of blood, and her aspect
provoked Laura to utter, "For God's sake, think of something
miserable;--cry, if you can!"

Vittoria's underlip dropped sickly with the question, "Why?"

Laura stated the physical necessity with Italian naivete.

"If I can," said Vittoria, and blinked to get a tear; but laughter helped
as well to relieve her, and it came on their return to the carriage. They
found the spy Luigi sitting beside the driver. He informed them that
Antonio-Pericles had been in the track of the army ever since their
flight from Turin; daily hurrying off with whip of horses at the sound of
cannon-shot, and gradually stealing back to the extreme rear. This day he
had flown from Oliosi to Cavriani, and was, perhaps, retracing his way
already as before, on fearful toe-tips. Luigi acted the caution of one
who stepped blindfolded across hot iron plates. Vittoria, without a spark
of interest, asked why the Signor Antonio should be following the army.

"Why, it's to find you, signorina."

Luigi's comical emphasis conjured up in a jumbled picture the devotion,
the fury, the zeal, the terror of Antonio-Pericles--a mixture of
demoniacal energy and ludicrous trepidation. She imagined his long
figure, fantastical as a shadow, off at huge strides, and back, with eyes
sliding swiftly to the temples, and his odd serpent's head raised to peer
across the plains and occasionally to exclaim to the reasonable heavens
in anger at men and loathing of her. She laughed ungovernably. Luigi
exclaimed that, albeit in disgrace with the signor Antonio, he had been
sent for to serve him afresh, and had now been sent forward to entreat
the gracious signorina to grant her sincerest friend and adorer an
interview. She laughed at Pericles, but in truth she almost loved the man
for his worship of her Art, and representation of her dear peaceful
practice of it.

The interview between them took place at Oliosi. There, also, she met
Georgiana Ford, the half-sister of Merthyr Powys, who told her that
Merthyr and Augustus Gambier were in the ranks of a volunteer contingent
in the king's army, and might have been present at Pastrengo. Georgiana
held aloof from battle-fields, her business being simply to serve as
Merthyr's nurse in case of wounds, or to see the last of him in case of
death. She appeared to have no enthusiasm. She seconded strongly the
vehement persuasions addressed by Pericles to Vittoria. Her disapproval
of the presence of her sex on fields of battle was precise. Pericles had
followed the army to give Vittoria one last chance, he said, and drag her
away from this sick country, as he called it, pointing at the dusty land
from the windows of the inn. On first seeing her he gasped like one who
has recovered a lost thing. To Laura he was a fool; but Vittoria enjoyed
his wildest outbursts, and her half-sincere humility encouraged him to
think that he had captured her at last. He enlarged on the perils
surrounding her voice in dusty bellowing Lombardy, and on the ardour of
his friendship in exposing himself to perils as tremendous, that he might
rescue her. While speaking he pricked a lively ear for the noise of guns,
hearing a gun in everything, and jumping to the window with horrid
imprecations. His carriage was horsed at the doors below. Let the horses
die, he said, let the coachman have sun-stroke. Let hundreds perish, if
Vittoria would only start in an hour-in two--to-night--to-morrow.

"Because, do you see,"--he turned to Laura and Georgiana, submitting to
the vexatious necessity of seeming reasonable to these creatures,--"she
is a casket for one pearl. It is only one, but it is ONE, mon Dieu! and
inscrutable heaven, mesdames, has made the holder of it mad. Her voice
has but a sole skin; it is not like a body; it bleeds to death at a
scratch. A spot on the pearl, and it is perished--pfoof! Ah, cruel thing!
impious, I say. I have watched, I have reared her. Speak to me of
mothers! I have cherished her for her splendid destiny--to see it go
down, heels up, among quarrels of boobies! Yes; we have war in Italy.
Fight! Fight in this beautiful climate that you may be dominated by a
blue coat, not by a white coat. We are an intelligent race; we are a
civilized people; we will fight for that. What has a voice of the very
heavens to do with your fighting? I heard it first in England, in a
firwood, in a month of Spring, at night-time, fifteen miles and a quarter
from the city of London--oh, city of peace! Sandra you will come there. I
give you thousands additional to the sum stipulated. You have no rival.
Sandra Belloni! no rival, I say"--he invoked her in English, "and you
hear--you, to be a draggle-tail vivandiere wiz a brandy-bottle at your
hips and a reputation going like ze brandy. Ah! pardon, mesdames; but did
mankind ever see a frenzy like this girl's? Speak, Sandra. I could cry it
like Michiella to Camilla--Speak!"

Vittoria compelled him to despatch his horses to stables. He had relays
of horses at war-prices between Castiglione and Pavia, and a retinue of
servants; nor did he hesitate to inform the ladies that, before
entrusting his person to the hazards of war, he had taken care to be
provided with safe-conduct passes for both armies, as befitted a prudent
man of peace--"or sense; it is one, mesdames."

Notwithstanding his terror at the guns, and disgust at the soldiery and
the bad fare at the inn, Vittoria's presence kept him lingering in this
wretched place, though he cried continually, "I shall have
heart-disease." He believed at first that he should subdue her; then it
became his intention to carry her off.

It was to see Merthyr that she remained. Merthyr came there the day after
the engagement at Santa Lucia. They had not met since the days at Meran.
He was bronzed, and keen with strife, and looked young, but spoke not
over-hopefully. He scolded her for wishing to taste battle, and compared
her to a bad swimmer on deep shores. Pericles bounded with delight to
hear him, and said he had not supposed there was so much sense in Powys.
Merthyr confessed that the Austrians had as good as beaten them at Santa
Lucia. The tactical combinations of the Piedmontese were wretched. He was
enamoured of the gallantly of the Duke of Savoy, who had saved the right
wing of the army from rout while covering the backward movement. Why
there had been any fight at all at Santa Lucia, where nothing was to be
gained, much to be lost, he was incapable of telling; but attributed it
to an antique chivalry on the part of the king, that had prompted the
hero to a trial of strength, a bout of blood-letting.

"You do think he is a hero?" said Vittoria.

"He is; and he will march to Venice."

"And open the opera at Venice," Pericles sneered. "Powys, mon cher, cure
her of this beastly dream. It is a scandal to you to want a woman's help.
You were defeated at Santa Lucia. I say bravo to anything that brings you
to reason. Bravo! You hear me."

The engagement at Santa Lucia was designed by the king to serve as an
instigating signal for the Veronese to rise in revolt; and this was the
secret of Charles Albert's stultifying manoeuvres between Peschiera and
Mantua. Instead of matching his military skill against the wary old
Marshal's, he was offering incentives to conspiracy. Distrusting the
revolution, which was a force behind him, he placed such reliance on its
efforts in his front as to make it the pivot of his actions.

"The volunteers North-east of Vicenza are doing the real work for us, I
believe," said Merthyr; and it seemed so then, as it might have been
indeed, had they not been left almost entirely to themselves to do it.

These tidings of a fight lost set Laura and Vittoria quivering with
nervous irritation. They had been on the field of Pastrengo, and it was
won. They had been absent from Santa Lucia. What was the deduction? Not
such as reason would have made for them; but they were at the mercy of
the currents of the blood. "Let us go on," said Laura. Merthyr refused to
convoy them. Pericles drove with him an hour on the road, and returned in
glee, to find Vittoria and Laura seated in their carriage, and Luigi
scuffling with Beppo.

"Padrone, see how I assist you," cried Luigi.

Upon this Beppo instantly made a swan's neck of his body and trumpeted:
"A sally from the fortress for forage."

"Whip! whip!" Pericles shouted to his coachman, and the two carriages
parted company at the top of their speed.

Pericles fell a victim to a regiment of bersaglieri that wanted horses,
and unceremoniously stopped his pair and took possession of them on the
route for Peschiera. He was left in a stranded carriage between a dusty
ditch and a mulberry bough. Vittoria and Laura were not much luckier.
They were met by a band of deserters, who made no claim upon the horses,
but stood for drink, and having therewith fortified their fine opinion of
themselves, petitioned for money. A kiss was their next demand. Money and
good humour saved the women from indignity. The band of rascals went off
with a 'Viva l'Italia.' Such scum is upon every popular rising, as
Vittoria had to learn. Days of rain and an incomprehensible inactivity of
the royal army kept her at a miserable inn, where the walls were bare,
the cock had crowed his last. The guns of Peschiera seemed to roam over
the plain like an echo unwillingly aroused that seeks a hollow for its
further sleep. Laura sat pondering for hours, harsh in manner, as if she
hated her. "I think," she said once, "that women are those persons who
have done evil in another world:" The "why?" from Vittoria was uttered
simply to awaken friendly talk, but Laura relapsed into her gloom. A
village priest, a sleek gentle creature, who shook his head to earth when
he hoped, and filled his nostrils with snuff when he desponded, gave them
occasional companionship under the title of consolation. He wished the
Austrians to be beaten, remarking, however, that they were good
Catholics, most fervent Catholics. As the Lord decided, so it would end!
"Oh, delicious creed!" Laura broke out: "Oh, dear and sweet doctrine!
that results and developments in a world where there is more evil than
good are approved by heaven." She twisted the mild man in supple steel of
her irony so tenderly that Vittoria marvelled to hear her speak of him in
abhorrence when they quitted the village. "Not to be born a woman, and
voluntarily to be a woman!" ejaculated Laura. "How many, how many are we
to deduct from the male population of Italy? Cross in hand, he should be
at the head of our arms, not whimpering in a corner for white bread.
Wretch! he makes the marrow in my bones rage at him. He chronicled pig
that squeaked."

"Why had she been so gentle with him?"

"Because, my dear, when I loathe a thing I never care to exhaust my
detestation before I can strike it," said the true Italian.

They were on the field of Goito; it was won. It was won against odds. At
Pastrengo they witnessed an encounter; this was a battle. Vittoria
perceived that there was the difference between a symphony and a lyric
song. The blessedness of the sensation that death can be light and easy
dispossessed her of the meaner compassion, half made up of cowardice,
which she had been nearly borne down by on the field of Pastrengo. At an
angle on a height off the left wing of the royal army the face of the
battle was plain to her: the movements of the troops were clear as
strokes on a slate. Laura flung her life into her eyes, and knelt and
watched, without summing one sole thing from what her senses received.

Vittoria said, "We are too far away to understand it."

"No," said Laura, "we are too far away to feel it."

The savage soul of the woman was robbed of its share of tragic emotion by
having to hold so far aloof. Flashes of guns were but flashes of guns up
there where she knelt. She thirsted to read the things written by them;
thirsted for their mystic terrors, somewhat as souls of great prophets
have craved for the full revelation of those fitful underlights which
inspired their mouths.

Charles Albert's star was at its highest when the Piedmontese drums beat
for an advance of the whole line at Goito.

Laura stood up, white as furnace-fire. "Women can do some good by
praying," she said. She believed that she had been praying. That was her
part in the victory.

Rain fell as from the forehead of thunder. From black eve to black dawn
the women were among dead and dying men, where the lanterns trailed a
slow flame across faces that took the light and let it go. They returned
to their carriage exhausted. The ways were almost impassable for
carriage-wheels. While they were toiling on and exchanging their drenched
clothes, Vittoria heard Merthyr's voice speaking to Beppo on the box. He
was saying that Captain Gambier lay badly wounded; brandy was wanted for
him. She flung a cloak over Laura, and handed out the flask with a naked
arm. It was not till she saw him again that she remembered or even felt
that he had kissed the arm. A spot of sweet fire burned on it just where
the soft fulness of a woman's arm slopes to the bend. He chid her for
being on the field and rejoiced in a breath, for the carriage and its
contents helped to rescue his wounded brother in arms from probable
death. Gambier, wounded in thigh and ankle by rifle-shot, was placed in
the carriage. His clothes were saturated with the soil of Goito; but
wounded and wet, he smiled gaily, and talked sweet boyish English.
Merthyr gave the driver directions to wind along up the Mincio.
"Georgiana will be at the nearest village--she has an instinct for
battle-fields, or keeps spies in her pay," he said.

"Tell her I am safe. We march to cut them (the enemy) off from Verona, and
I can't leave. The game is in our hands. We shall give you Venice."

Georgiana was found at the nearest village. Gambier's wounds had been
dressed by an army-surgeon. She looked at the dressing, and said that it
would do for six hours. This singular person had fully qualified herself
to attend on a soldier-brother. She had studied medicine for that
purpose, and she had served as nurse in a London hospital. Her nerves
were completely under control. She could sit in attendance by a sick-bed
for hours, hearing distant cannon, and the brawl of soldiery and
vagabonds in the street, without a change of countenance. Her dress was
plain black from throat to heel, with a skull cap of white, like a
Moravian sister. Vittoria reverenced her; but Georgiana's manner in
return was cold aversion, so much more scornful than disdain that it
offended Laura, who promptly put her finger on the blot in the fair
character with the word 'Jealousy;' but a single word is too broad a mark
to be exactly true. "She is a perfect example of your English," Laura
said. "Brave, good, devoted, admirable--ice at the heart. The judge of
others, of course. I always respected her; I never liked her; and I
should be afraid of a comparison with her. Her management of the
household of this inn is extraordinary."

Georgiana condescended to advise Vittoria once more not to dangle after
armies.

"I wish to wait here to assist you in nursing our friend," said Vittoria.

Georgiana replied that her strength was unlikely to fail.

After two days of incessant rain, sunshine blazed over 'the watery
Mantuan flats. Laura drove with Beppo to see whether the army was in
motion, for they were distracted by rumours. Vittoria clung to her
wounded friend, whose pleasure was the hearing her speak. She expected
Laura's return by set of sun. After dark a messenger came to her, saying
that the signora had sent a carriage to fetch her to Valeggio. Her
immediate supposition was that Merthyr might have fallen. She found Luigi
at the carriage-door, and listened to his mysterious directions and
remarks that not a minute must be lost, without suspicion. He said that
the signora was in great trouble, very anxious to see the signorina
instantly; there was but a distance of five miles to traverse.

She thought it strange that the carriage should be so luxuriously fitted
with lights and silken pillows, but her ideas were all of Merthyr, until
she by chance discovered a packet marked I chocolate, which told her at
once that she was entrapped by Antonio-Pericles. Luigi would not answer
her cry to him. After some fruitless tremblings of wrath, she lay back
relieved by the feeling that Merthyr was safe, come what might come to
herself. Things could lend to nothing but an altercation with Pericles,
and for this scene she prepared her mind. The carriage stopped while she
was dozing. Too proud to supplicate in the darkness, she left it to the
horses to bear her on, reserving her energies for the morning's
interview, and saying, "The farther he takes me the angrier I shall be."
She dreamed of her anger while asleep, but awakened so frequently during
the night that morning was at her eyelids before they divided. To her
amazement, she saw the carriage surrounded by Austrian troopers. Pericles
was spreading cigars among them, and addressing them affably. The
carriage was on a good road, between irrigated flats, that flashed a
lively green and bright steel blue for miles away. She drew down the
blinds to cry at leisure; her wings were clipped, and she lost heart.
Pericles came round to her when the carriage had drawn up at an inn. He
was egregiously polite, but modestly kept back any expressions of
triumph. A body of Austrians, cavalry and infantry, were breaking camp.
Pericles accorded her an hour of rest. She perceived that he was
anticipating an outbreak of the anger she had nursed overnight, and
baffled him so far by keeping dumb. Luigi was sent up to her to announce
the expiration of her hour of grace.

"Ah, Luigi!" she said. "Signorina, only wait, and see how Luigi can serve
two," he whispered, writhing under the reproachfulness of her eyes. At
the carriage-door she asked Pericles whither he was taking her. "Not to
Turin, not to London, Sandra Belloni!" he replied; "not to a place where
you are wet all night long, to wheeze for ever after it. Go in." She
entered the carriage quickly, to escape from staring officers, whose
laughter rang in her ears and humbled her bitterly; she felt herself
bringing dishonour on her lover. The carriage continued in the track of
the Austrians. Pericles was audibly careful to avoid the border
regiments. He showered cigars as he passed; now and then he exhibited a
paper; and on one occasion he brought a General officer to the
carriage-door, opened it and pointed in. A white-helmeted dragoon rode on
each side of the carriage for the remainder of the day. The delight of
the supposition that these Austrians were retreating before the
invincible arms of King Carlo Alberto kept her cheerful; but she heard no
guns in the rear. A blocking of artillery and waggons compelled a halt,
and then Pericles came and faced her. He looked profoundly ashamed of
himself, ready as he was for an animated defence of his proceedings.

"Where are you taking me, sir?" she said in English.

"Sandra, will you be a good child? It is anywhere you please, if you will
promise--"

"I will promise nothing."

"Zen, I lock you up in Verona." In Verona!"

"Sandra, will you promise to me?"

"I will promise nothing."

"Zen I lock you up in Verona. It is settled. No more of it. I come to
say, we shall not reach a village. I am sorry. We have soldiers for a
guard. You draw out a board and lodge in your carriage as in a bed.
Biscuits, potted meats, prunes, bon-bona, chocolate, wine--you shall find
all at your right hand and your left. I am desolate in offending you.
Sandra, if you will promise--"

"I will promise--this is what I will promise," said Vittoria.

Pericles thrust his ear forward, and withdrew it as if it had been
slapped.

She promised to run from him at the first opportunity, to despise him
ever after, and never to sing again in his hearing. With the darkness
Luigi appeared to light her lamp; he mouthed perpetually, "To-morrow,
to-morrow." The watch-fires of Austrians encamped in the fields encircled
her; and moving up and down, the cigar of Antonio-Pericles was visible.
He had not eaten or drunk, and he was out there sleepless; he walked
conquering his fears in the thick of war troubles: all for her sake. She
watched critically to see whether the cigar-light was puffed in
fretfulness. It burned steadily; and the thought of Pericles supporting
patience quite overcame her. In a fit of humour that was almost tears,
she called to him and begged him to take a place in the carriage and have
food. "If it is your pleasure," he said; and threw off his cloak. The
wine comforted him. Thereupon he commenced a series of strange
gesticulations, and ended by blinking at the window, saying, "No, no; it
is impossible to explain. I have no voice; I am not, gifted. It is," he
tapped at his chest, "it is here. It is, imprisoned in me."

"What?" said Vittoria, to encourage him.

"It can never be explained, my child. Am I not respectful to you? Am I
not worshipful to you? But, no! it can never be explained. Some do call
me mad. I know it; I am laughed at. Oh! do I not know zat? Perfectly
well. My ancestors adored Goddesses. I discover ze voice of a Goddess: I
adore it. So you call me mad; it is to me what you call me--juste ze
same. I am possessed wiz passion for her voice. So it will be till I go
to ashes. It is to me ze one zsing divine in a pig, a porpoise world. It
is to me--I talk! It is unutterable--impossible to tell."

"But I understand it; I know you must feel it," said Vittoria.

"But you hate me, Sandra. You hate your Pericles."

"No, I do not; you are my good friend, my good Pericles."

"I am your good Pericles? So you obey me?"

"In what?"

"You come to London?"

"I shall not."

"You come to Turin?"

"I cannot promise."

"To Milan?"

"No; not yet."

"Ungrateful little beast! minx! temptress! You seduce me into your
carriage to feed me, to fill me, for to coax me," cried Pericles.

"Am I the person to have abuse poured on me?" Vittoria rejoined, and she
frowned. "Might I not have called you a wretched whimsical money-machine,
without the comprehension of a human feeling? You are doing me a great
wrong--to win my submission, as I see, and it half amuses me; but the
pretence of an attempt to carry me off from my friends is an offence that
I should take certain care to punish in another. I do not give you any
promise, because the first promise of all--the promise to keep one--is
not in my power. Shut your eyes and sleep where you are, and in the
morning think better of your conduct!"

"Of my conduct, mademoiselle!" Pericles retained this sentence in his
head till the conclusion of her animated speech,--"of my conduct I judge
better zan to accept of such a privilege as you graciously offer to me;"
and he retired with a sour grin, very much subdued by her unexpected
capacity for expression. The bugles of the Austrians were soon ringing.
There was a trifle of a romantic flavour in the notes which Vittoria
tried not to feel; the smart iteration of them all about her rubbed it
off, but she was reduced to repeat them, and take them in various keys.
This was her theme for the day.

They were in the midst of mulberries, out of sight of the army; green
mulberries, and the green and the bronze young vine-leaf. It was a
delicious day, but she began to fear that she was approaching Verona, and
that Pericles was acting seriously. The bronze young vine-leaf seemed to
her like some warrior's face, as it would look when beaten by weather,
burned by the sun. They came now to inns which had been visited by both
armies. Luigi established communication with the innkeepers before the
latter had stated the names of villages to Pericles, who stood map in
hand, believing himself at last to be no more conscious of his position
than an atom in a whirl of dust. Vittoria still refused to give him any
promise, and finally, on a solitary stretch of the road, he appealed to
her mercy. She was the mistress of the carriage, he said; he had never
meant to imprison her in Verona; his behaviour was simply dictated by his
adoration--alas! This was true or not true, but it was certain that the
ways were confounded to them. Luigi, despatched to reconnoitre from a
neighbouring eminence, reported a Piedmontese encampment far ahead, and a
walking tent that was coming on their route. The walking tent was an
enormous white umbrella. Pericles advanced to meet it; after an
interchange of opening formalities, he turned about and clapped hands.
The umbrella was folded. Vittoria recognized the last man she would then
have thought of meeting; he seemed to have jumped out of an ambush from
Meran in Tyrol:--it was Wilfrid. Their greeting was disturbed by the
rushing up of half-a-dozen troopers. The men claimed him as an Austrian
spy. With difficulty Vittoria obtained leave to drive him on to their
commanding officer. It appeared that the white umbrella was notorious for
having been seen on previous occasions threading the Piedmontese lines
into and out of Peschiera. These very troopers swore to it; but they
could not swear to Wilfrid, and white umbrellas were not absolutely
uncommon. Vittoria declared that Wilfrid was an old English friend;
Pericles vowed that Wilfrid was one of their party. The prisoner was
clearly an Englishman. As it chanced, the officer before whom Wilfrid was
taken had heard Vittoria sing on the great night at La Scala. "Signorina,
your word should pass the Austrian Field-Marshal himself," he said, and
merely requested Wilfrid to state on his word of honour that he was not
in the Austrian service, to which Wilfrid unhesitatingly replied, "I am
not."

Permission was then accorded to him to proceed in the carriage.

Vittoria held her hand to Wilfrid. He took the fingers and bowed over
them.

He was perfectly self-possessed, and cool even under her eyes. Like a
pedlar he carried a pack on his back, which was his life; for his
business was a combination of scout and spy.

"You have saved me from a ditch to-day," he said; "every fellow has some
sort of love for his life, and I must thank you for the odd luck of your
coming by. I knew you were on this ground somewhere. If the rascals had
searched me, I should not have come off so well. I did not speak falsely
to that officer; I am not in the Austrian service. I am a volunteer spy.
I am an unpaid soldier. I am the dog of the army--fetching and carrying
for a smile and a pat on the head. I am ruined, and I am working my way
up as best I can. My uncle disowns me. It is to General Schoneck that I
owe this chance of re-establishing myself. I followed the army out of
Milan. I was at Melegnano, at Pastrengo, at Santa Lucia. If I get nothing
for it, the Lenkensteins at least shall not say that I abandoned the flag
in adversity. I am bound for Rivoli. The fortress (Peschiera) has just
surrendered. The Marshal is stealing round to make a dash on Vicenza." So
far he spoke like one apart from her, but a flush crossed his forehead.
"I have not followed you. I have obeyed your brief directions. I saw this
carriage yesterday in the ranks of our troops. I saw Pericles. I guessed
who might be inside it. I let it pass me. Could I do more?"

"Not if you wanted to punish me," said Vittoria.

She was afflicted by his refraining from reproaches in his sunken state.

Their talk bordered the old life which they had known, like a rivulet,
coming to falls where it threatens to be e, torrent and a flood; like
flame bubbling the wax of a seal. She was surprised to find herself
expecting tenderness from him: and, startled by the languor in her veins,
she conceived a contempt for her sex and her own weak nature. To mask
that, an excessive outward coldness was assumed. "You can serve as a spy,
Wilfrid!"

The answer was ready: "Having twice served as a traitor, I need not be
particular. It is what my uncle and the Lenkensteins call me. I do my
best to work my way up again. Despise me for it, if you please."

On the contrary, she had never respected him so much. She got herself
into opposition to him by provoking him to speak with pride of his army;
but the opposition was artificial, and she called to Carlo Ammiani in
heart. "I will leave these places, cover up my head, and crouch till the
struggle is decided."

The difficulty was now to be happily rid of Wilfrid by leaving him in
safety. Piedmontese horse scoured the neighbourhood, and any mischance
that might befall him she traced to her hand. She dreaded at every
instant to hear him speak of his love for her; yet how sweet it would
have been to hear it,--to hear him speak of passionate love; to shape it
in deep music; to hear one crave for what she gave to another! "I am
sinking: I am growing degraded," she thought. But there was no other way
for her to quicken her imagination of her distant and offended lover. The
sights on the plains were strange contrasts to these conflicting inner
emotions: she seemed to be living in two divided worlds.

Pericles declared anew that she was mistress of the carriage. She issued
orders: "The nearest point to Rivoli, and then to Brescia."

Pericles broke into shouts. "She has arrived at her reason! Hurrah for
Brescia! I beheld you," he confessed to Wilfrid,--"it was on ze right of
Mincio, my friend. I did not know you were so true for Art, or what a
hand I would have reached to you! Excuse me now. Let us whip on. I am
your banker. I shall desire you not to be shot or sabred. You are
deserving of an effigy on a theatral grand stair-case!" His gratitude
could no further express itself. In joy he whipped the horses on. Fools
might be fighting--he was the conqueror. From Brescia, one leap took him
in fancy to London. He composed mentally a letter to be forwarded
immediately to a London manager, directing him to cause the appearance of
articles in the journals on the grand new prima donna, whose singing had
awakened the people of Italy.

Another day brought them in view of the Lago di Garda. The flag of
Sardinia hung from the walls of Peschiera. And now Vittoria saw the
Pastrengo hills--dear hills, that drove her wretched languor out of her,
and made her soul and body one again. The horses were going at a gallop.
Shots were heard. To the left of them, somewhat in the rear, on higher
ground, there was an encounter of a body of Austrians and Italians:
Tyrolese riflemen and the volunteers. Pericles was raving. He refused to
draw the reins till they had reached the village, where one of the horses
dropped. From the windows of the inn, fronting a clear space, Vittoria
beheld a guard of Austrians surrounding two or more prisoners. A woman
sat near them with her head buried in her lap. Presently an officer left
the door of the inn and spoke to the soldiers. "That is Count Karl von
Lenkenstein," Wilfrid said in a whisper. Pericles had been speaking with
Count Karl and came up to the room, saying, "We are to observe something;
but we are safe; it is only fortune of war." Wilfrid immediately went out
to report himself. He was seen giving his papers, after which Count Karl
waved his finger back to the inn, and he returned. Vittoria sprang to her
feet at the words he uttered. Rinaldo Guidascarpi was one of the
prisoners. The others Wilfrid professed not to know. The woman was the
wife of Barto Rizzo.

In the great red of sunset the Tyrolese riflemen and a body of Italians
in Austrian fatigue uniform marched into the village. These formed in the
space before the inn. It seemed as if Count Karl were declaiming an
indictment. A voice answered, "I am the man." It was clear and straight
as a voice that goes up in the night. Then a procession walked some paces
on. The woman followed. She fell prostrate at the feet of Count Karl. He
listened to her and nodded. Rinaldo Guidascarpi stood alone with bandaged
eyes. The woman advanced to him; she put her mouth on his ear; there she
hung.

Vittoria heard a single shot. Rinaldo Guidascarpi lay stretched upon the
ground and the woman stood over him.




CHAPTER XXXIII

EPISODES OF THE REVOLT AND THE WAR

COUNT KARL LENKENSTEIN--THE STORY OF THE GUIDASCARPI--THE VICTORY OF THE
VOLUNTEERS

The smoke of a pistol-shot thinned away while there was yet silence.

"It is a saving of six charges of Austrian ammunition," said Pericles.

Vittoria stared at the scene, losing faith in her eyesight. She could in
fact see no distinct thing beyond what appeared as an illuminated copper
medallion, held at a great distance from her, with a dead man and a
towering female figure stamped on it.

The events following were like a rush of water on her senses. There was
fighting up the street of the village, and a struggle in the space where
Rinaldo had fallen; successive yellowish shots under the rising
moonlight, cries from Italian lips, quick words of command from German in
Italian, and one sturdy bull's roar of a voice that called across the
tumult to the Austro-Italian soldiery, "Venite fratelli!--come, brothers,
come under our banner!" She heard "Rinaldo!" called.

This was a second attack of the volunteers for the rescue of their
captured comrades. They fought more desperately than on the hill outside
the village: they fought with steel. Shot enfiladed them; yet they bore
forward in a scattered body up to that spot where Rinaldo lay, shouting
for him. There they turned,--they fled.

Then there was a perfect stillness, succeeding the strife as quickly,
Vittoria thought, as a breath yielded succeeds a breath taken.

She accused the heavens of injustice.

Pericles, prostrate on the floor, moaned that he was wounded. She said,
"Bleed to death!"

"It is my soul, it is my soul is wounded for you, Sandra."

"Dreadful craven man!" she muttered.

"When my soul is shaking for your safety, Sandra Belloni!" Pericles
turned his ear up. "For myself--not; it is for you, for you."

Assured of the cessation of arms by delicious silence he jumped to his
feet.

"Ah! brutes to fight. It is 'immonde;' it is unnatural!"

He tapped his finger on the walls for marks of shot, and discovered a
shot-hole in the wood-work, that had passed an arm's length above her
head, into which he thrust his finger in an intense speculative
meditation, shifting eyes from it to her, and throwing them aloft.

He was summoned to the presence of Count Karl, with whom he found Captain
Weisspriess, Wilfrid, and officers of jagers and the Italian battalion.
Barto Rizzo's wife was in a corner of the room. Weisspriess met him with
a very civil greeting, and introduced him to Count Karl, who begged him
to thank Vittoria for the aid she had afforded to General Schoneck's
emissary in crossing the Piedmontese lines. He spoke in Italian. He
agreed to conduct Pericles to a point on the route of his march, where
Pericles and his precious prima donna--"our very good friend," he said,
jovially--could escape the risk of unpleasant mishaps, and arrive at
Trent and cities of peace by easy stages. He was marching for the
neighbourhood of Vicenza.

A little before dawn Vittoria came down to the carriage. Count Karl stood
at the door to hand her in. He was young and handsome, with a soft
flowing blonde moustache and pleasant eyes, a contrast to his brother
Count Lenkenstein. He repeated his thanks to her, which Pericles had not
delivered; he informed her that she was by no means a prisoner, and was
simply under the guardianship of friends--"though perhaps, signorina, you
will not esteem this gentleman to be one of your friends." He pointed to
Weisspriess. The officer bowed, but kept aloof. Vittoria perceived a
singular change in him: he had become pale and sedate. "Poor fellow! he
has had his dose," Count Karl said. "He is, I beg to assure you, one of
your most vehement admirers."

A piece of her property that flushed her with recollections, yet made her
grateful, was presently handed to her, though not in her old enemy's
presence, by a soldier. It was the silver-hilted dagger, Carlo's precious
gift, of which Weisspriess had taken possession in the mountain-pass over
the vale of Meran, when he fought the duel with Angelo. Whether intended
as a peace-offering, or as a simple restitution, it helped Vittoria to
believe that Weisspriess was no longer the man he had been.

The march was ready, but Barto Rizzo's wife refused to move a foot. The
officers consulted. She, was brought before them. The soldiers swore with
jesting oaths that she had been carefully searched for weapons, and only
wanted a whipping. "She must have it," said Weisspriess. Vittoria
entreated that she might have a place beside her in the carriage. "It is
more than I would have asked of you; but if you are not afraid of her,"
said Count Karl, with an apologetic shrug.

Her heart beat fast when she found herself alone with the terrible woman.

Till then she had never seen a tragic face. Compared with this tawny
colourlessness, this evil brow, this shut mouth, Laura, even on the
battle-field, looked harmless. It was like the face of a dead savage. The
eyeballs were full on Vittoria, as if they dashed at an obstacle, not
embraced an image. In proportion as they seemed to widen about her,
Vittoria shrank. The whole woman was blood to her gaze.

When she was capable of speaking, she said entreatingly:

"I knew his brother."

Not a sign of life was given in reply.

Companionship with this ghost of broad daylight made the flattering
Tyrolese feathers at both windows a welcome sight.

Precautions had been taken to bind the woman's arms. Vittoria offered to
loosen the cords, but she dared not touch her without a mark of assent.

"I know Angelo Guidascarpi, Rinaldo's brother," she spoke again.

The woman's nostrils bent inward, as when the breath we draw is keen as a
sword to the heart. Vittoria was compelled to look away from her.

At the mid-day halt Count Karl deigned to justify to her his intended
execution of Rinaldo--the accomplice in the slaying of his brother Count
Paula. He was evidently eager to obtain her good opinion of the Austrian
military. "But for this miserable spirit of hatred against us," he said,
"I should have espoused an Italian lady;" and he asked, "Why not? For
that matter, in all but blood we Lenkensteins are half Italian, except
when Italy menaces the empire. Can you blame us for then drawing the
sword in earnest?"

He proffered his version of the death of Count Paul. She kept her own
silent in her bosom.

Clelia Guidascarpi, according to his statement, had first been slain by
her brothers. Vittoria believed that Clelia had voluntarily submitted to
death and died by her own hand. She was betrothed to an Italian nobleman
of Bologna, the friend of the brothers. They had arranged the marriage;
she accepted the betrothal. "She loved my brother, poor thing!" said
Count Karl. "She concealed it, and naturally. How could she take a couple
of wolves into her confidence? If she had told the pair of ruffians that
she was plighted to an Austrian, they would have quieted her at an
earlier period. A woman! a girl--signorina! The intolerable cowardice
amazes me. It amazes me that you or anyone can uphold the character of
such brutes. And when she was dead they lured my brother to the house and
slew him; fell upon him with daggers, stretched him at the foot of her
coffin, and then--what then?--ran! ran for their lives. One has gone to
his account. We shall come across the other. He is among that volunteer
party which attacked us yesterday. The body was carried off by them; it
is sufficient testimony that Angelo Guidascarpi is in the neighbourhood.
I should be hunting him now but that I am under orders to march
South-east."

The story, as Vittoria knew it, had a different, though yet a dreadful,
colour.

"I could have hanged Rinaldo," Count Karl said further. "I suppose the
rascals feared I should use my right, and that is why they sent their mad
baggage of a woman to spare any damage to the family pride. If I had been
a man to enjoy vengeance, the rope would have swung for him. In spite of
provocation, I shall simply shoot the other; I pledge my word to it. They
shall be paid in coin. I demand no interest."

Weisspriess prudently avoided her. Wilfrid held aloof. She sat in garden
shade till the bugle sounded. Tyrolese and Italian soldiers were gibing
at her haggard companion when she entered the carriage. Fronting this
dumb creature once more, Vittoria thought of the story of the brothers.
She felt herself reading it from the very page. The woman looked that
evil star incarnate which Laura said they were born under.

This is in brief the story of the Guidascarpi.

They were the offspring of a Bolognese noble house, neither wealthy nor
poor. In her early womanhood, Clelia was left to the care of her
brothers. She declined the guardianship of Countess Ammiani because of
her love for them; and the three, with their passion of hatred to the
Austrians inherited from father and mother, schemed in concert to throw
off the Austrian yoke. Clelia had soft features of no great mark; by her
colouring she was beautiful, being dark along the eyebrows, with dark
eyes, and a surpassing richness of Venetian hair. Bologna and Venice were
married in her aspect. Her brothers conceived her to possess such force
of mind that they held no secrets from her. They did not know that the
heart of their sister was struggling with an image of Power when she
uttered hatred of it. She was in truth a woman of a soft heart, with a
most impressionable imagination.

There were many suitors for the hand of Clelia Guidascarpi, though her
dowry was not the portion of a fat estate. Her old nurse counselled the
brothers that they should consent to her taking a husband. They fulfilled
this duty as one that must be done, and she became sorrowfully the
betrothed of a nobleman of Bologna; from which hour she had no
cheerfulness. The brothers quitted Bologna for Venice, where there was
the bed of a conspiracy. On their return they were shaken by rumours of
their sister's misconduct. An Austrian name was allied to hers in busy
mouths. A lady, their distant relative, whose fame was light, had
withdrawn her from the silent house, and made display of her. Since she
had seen more than an Italian girl should see, the brothers proposed to
the nobleman her betrothed to break the treaty; but he was of a mind to
hurry on the marriage, and recollecting now that she was but a woman, the
brothers fixed a day for her espousals, tenderly, without reproach. She
had the choice of taking the vows or surrendering her hand. Her old nurse
prayed for the day of her espousals to come with a quicker step.

One night she surprised Count Paul Lenkenstein at Clelia's window.
Rinaldo was in the garden below. He moved to the shadow of a cypress, and
was seen moving by the old nurse. The lover took the single kiss he had
come for, was led through the chamber, and passed unchallenged into the
street. Clelia sat between locked doors and darkened windows, feeling
colder to the brothers she had been reared with than to all other men
upon the earth. They sent for her after a lapse of hours. Her old nurse
was kneeling at their feet. Rinaldo asked for the name of her lover. She
answered with it. Angelo said, "It will be better for you to die: but if
you cannot do so easy a thing as that, prepare widow's garments." They
forced her to write three words to Count Paul, calling him to her window
at midnight. Rinaldo fetched a priest: Angelo laid out two swords. An
hour before the midnight, Clelia's old nurse raised the house with her
cries. Clelia was stretched dead in her chamber. The brothers kissed her
in turn, and sat, one at her head, one at her feet. At midnight her lover
stood among them. He was gravely saluted, and bidden to look upon the
dead body. Angelo said to him, "Had she lived you should have wedded her
hand. She is gone of her own free choice, and one of us follows her."
With the sweat of anguish on his forehead, Count Paul drew sword. The
window was barred; six male domestics of the household held high lights
in the chamber; the priest knelt beside one corpse, awaiting the other.

Vittoria's imagination could not go beyond that scene, but she looked out
on the brother of the slain youth with great pity, and with a strange
curiosity. The example given by Clelia of the possible love of an Italian
girl for the white uniform, set her thinking whether so monstrous a fact
could ever be doubled in this world. "Could it happen to me?" she asked
herself, and smiled, as she half-fashioned the words on her lips, "It is
a pretty uniform."

Her reverie was broken by a hiss of "Traitress!" from the woman opposite.

She coloured guiltily, tried to speak, and sat trembling. A divination of
intense hatred had perhaps read the thought within her breast: or it was
a mere outburst of hate. The woman's face was like the wearing away of
smoke from a spot whence shot has issued. Vittoria walked for the
remainder of the day. That fearful companion oppressed her. She felt that
one who followed armies should be cast in such a frame, and now desired
with all her heart to render full obedience to Carlo, and abide in
Brescia, or even in Milan--a city she thought of shyly.

The march was hurried to the slopes of the Vicentino, for enemies were
thick in this district. Pericles refused to quit the soldiers, though
Count Karl used persuasion. The young nobleman said to Vittoria, "Be on
your guard when you meet my sister Anna. I tell you, we can be as
revengeful as any of you: but you will exonerate me. I do my duty; I seek
to do no more."

At an inn that they reached toward evening she saw the innkeeper shoot a
little ball of paper at an Italian corporal, who put his foot on it and
picked it up. The soldier subsequently passed through the ranks of his
comrades, gathering winks and grins. They were to have rested at the inn,
but Count Karl was warned by scouts, which was sufficient to make
Pericles cling to him in avoidance of the volunteers, of whom mainly he
was in terror. He looked ague-stricken. He would not listen to her, or to
reason in any shape. "I am on the sea--shall I trust a boat? I stick to a
ship," he said. The soldiers marched till midnight. It was arranged that
the carriage should strike off for Schio at dawn. The soldiers bivouacked
on the slope of one of the low undulations falling to the Vicentino
plain. Vittoria spread her cloak, and lay under bare sky, not suffering
the woman to be ejected from the carriage. Hitherto Luigi had avoided
her. Under pretence of doubling Count Karl's cloak as a pillow for her
head, he whispered, "If the signorina hears shots let her lie on the
ground flat as a sheet." The peacefulness surrounding her precluded
alarm. There was brilliant moonlight, and the host of stars, all dim; and
first they beckoned her up to come away from trouble, and then, through
long gazing, she had the fancy that they bent and swam about her, making
her feel that she lay in the hollows of a warm hushed sea. She wished for
her lover.

Men and officers were lying at a stone's-throw distant. The Tyrolese had
lit a fire for cooking purposes, by which four of them stood, and,
lifting hands, sang one of their mountain songs, that seemed to her to
spring like clear water into air, and fall wavering as a feather falls,
or the light about a stone in water. It lulled her to a half-sleep,
during which she fancied hearing a broad imitation of a cat's-call from
the mountains, that was answered out of the camp, and a talk of officers
arose in connection with the response, and subsided. The carriage was in
the shadows of the fire. In a little while Luigi and the driver began
putting the horses to, and she saw Count Karl and Weisspriess go up to
Luigi, who declared loudly that it was time. The woman inside was
aroused. Weisspriess helped to drag her out. Luigi kept making much
noise, and apologized for it by saying that he desired to awaken his
master, who was stretched in a secure circle among the Tyrolese.
Presently Vittoria beheld the woman's arms thrown out free; the next
minute they were around the body of Weisspriess, and a shrewd cry issued
from Count Karl. Shots rang from the outposts; the Tyrolese sprang to
arms; "Sandra!" was shouted by Pericles; and once more she heard the
'Venite fratelli!' of the bull's voice, and a stream of volunteers dashed
at the Tyrolese with sword and dagger and bayonet. The Austro-Italians
stood in a crescent line--the ominous form of incipient military
insubordination. Their officers stormed at them, and called for Count
Karl and for Weisspriess. The latter replied like a man stifling, but
Count Karl's voice was silent.

"Weisspriess! here, to me!" the captain sang out in Italian.

"Ammiani! here, to me!" was replied.

Vittoria struck her hands together in electrical gladness at her lover's
voice and name. It rang most cheerfully. Her home was in the conflict
where her lover fought, and she muttered with ecstasy, "We have met! we
have met!" The sound of the keen steel, so exciting to dream of,
paralyzed her nerves in a way that powder, more terrible for a woman's
imagination, would not have done, and she could only feebly advance. It
was a spacious moonlight, but the moonlight appeared to have got of a
brassy hue to her eyes, though the sparkle of the steel was white; and
she felt too, and wondered at it, that the cries and the noise went to
her throat, as if threatening to choke her. Very soon she found herself
standing there, watching for the issue of the strife, almost as dead as a
weight in scales, incapable of clear vision.

Matched against the Tyrolese alone, the volunteers had an equal fight in
point of numbers, and the advantage of possessing a leader; for Count
Karl was down, and Weisspriess was still entangled in the woman's arms.
When at last Wilfrid got him free, the unsupported Tyrolese were giving
ground before Carlo Ammiani and his followers. These fought with stern
fury, keeping close up to their enemy, rarely shouting. They presented
something like the line of a classic bow, with its arrow-head; while the
Tyrolese were huddled in groups, and clubbed at them, and fell back for
space, and ultimately crashed upon their betraying brothers in arms,
swinging rifles and flying. The Austro-Italians rang out a Viva for
Italy, and let them fly: they were swept from the scene.

Vittoria heard her lover addressing his followers. Then he and Angelo
stood over Count Karl, whom she had forgotten. Angelo ran up to her, but
gave place the moment Carlo came; and Carlo drew her by the hand swiftly
to an obscure bend of the rolling ground, and stuck his sword in the
earth, and there put his arms round her and held her fast.

"Obey me now," were his first words.

"Yes," she answered.

He was harsh of eye and tongue, not like the gentle youth she had been
torn from at the door of La Scala.

"Return; make your way to Brescia. My mother is in Brescia. Milan is
hateful. I throw myself into Vicenza. Can I trust you to obey?"

"Carlo, what evil have you heard of me?"

"I listen to no tales."

"Let me follow you to Vicenza and be your handmaid, my beloved."

"Say that you obey."

"I have said it."

He seemed to shut her in his heart, so closely was she enfolded.

"Since La Scala," she murmured; and he bent his lips to her ear,
whispering, "Not one thought of another woman! and never till I die."

"And I only of you, Carlo, and for you, my lover, my lover!"

"You love me absolutely?"

"I belong to you."

"I could be a coward and pray for life to live to hear you say it."

"I feel I breathe another life when you are away from me."

"You belong to me; you are my own?"

"You take my voice, beloved."

"And when I claim you, I am to have you?"

"Am I not in your hands?"

"The very instant I make my claim you will say yes?"

"I shall not have strength for more than to nod."

Carlo shuddered at the delicious image of her weakness.

"My Sandra! Vittoria, my soul! my bride!"

"O my Carlo! Do you go to Vicenza? And did you know I was among these
people?"

"You will hear everything from little Leone Rufo, who is wounded and
accompanies you to Brescia. Speak of nothing. Speak my name, and look at
me. I deserve two minutes of blessedness."

"Ah! my dearest, if I am sweet to you, you might have many!"

"No; they begin to hum a reproach at me already, for I must be marching.
Vicenza will soon bubble on a fire, I suspect. Comfort my mother; she
wants a young heart at her elbow. If she is alone, she feeds on every
rumour; other women scatter in emotions what poisons her. And when my
bride is with her, I am between them."

"Yes, Carlo, I will go," said Vittoria, seeing her duty at last through
tenderness.

Carlo sprang from her side to meet Angelo, with whom he exchanged some
quick words. The bugle was sounding, and Barto Rizzo audible. Luigi came
to, her, ruefully announcing that the volunteers had sacked the carriage
behaved worse than the Austrians; and that his padrone, the signor
Antonio-Pericles, was off like a gossamer. Angelo induced her to remain
on the spot where she stood till the carriage was seen on the Schio road,
when he led her to it, saying that Carlo had serious work to do. Count
Karl Lenkenstein was lying in the carriage, supported by Wilfrid and by
young Leone Rufo, who sat laughing, with one eye under a cross-bandage
and an arm slung in a handkerchief. Vittoria desired to wait that she
might see her lover once more; but Angelo entreated her that she should
depart, too earnestly to leave her in doubt of there being good reason
for it and for her lover's absence. He pointed to Wilfrid: "Barto Rizzo
captured this man; Carlo has released him. Take him with you to attend on
his superior officer." She drew Angelo's observation to the first morning
colours over the peaks. He looked up, and she knew that he remembered
that morning of their flight from the inn. Perhaps he then had the image
of his brother in his mind, for the colours seemed to be plucking at his
heart, and he said, "I have lost him."

"God help you, my friend!" said Vittoria, her throat choking.

Angelo pointed at the insensible nobleman: "These live. I do not grudge
him his breath or his chances; but why should these men take so much
killing? Weisspriess has risen, as though I struck the blow of a babe.
But we one shot does for us! Nevertheless, signorina," Angelo smiled
firmly, "I complain of nothing while we march forward."

He kissed his hand to her, and turned back to his troop. The carriage was
soon under the shadows of the mountains.




CHAPTER XXXIV

EPISODES OF THE REVOLT AND THE WAR
THE DEEDS OF BARTO RIZZO--THE MEETING AT ROVEREDO

At Schio there was no medical attendance to be obtained for Count Karl,
and he begged so piteously to be taken on to Roveredo, that, on his
promising to give Leone Rufo a pass, Vittoria decided to work her way
round to Brescia by the Alpine route. She supposed Pericles to have gone
off among the Tyrolese, and wished in her heart that Wilfrid had gone
likewise, for he continued to wear that look of sad stupefaction which
was the harshest reproach to her. Leone was unconquerably gay in spite of
his wounds. He narrated the doings of the volunteers, with proud eulogies
of Carlo Ammiani's gallant leadership; but the devices of Barto Rizzo
appeared to have struck his imagination most. "He is positively a cat--a
great cat," Leone said. "He can run a day; he can fast a week; he can
climb a house; he can drop from a crag; and he never lets go his hold. If
he says a thing to his wife, she goes true as a bullet to the mark. The
two make a complete piece of artillery. We are all for Barto, though our
captain Carlo is often enraged with him. But there's no getting on
without him. We have found that."

Rinaldo and Angelo Guidascarpi and Barto Rizzo had done many daring
feats. They had first, heading about a couple of dozen out of a force of
sixty, endeavoured to surprise the fortress Rocca d'Anfo in Lake Idro--an
insane enterprise that touched on success, and would have been an
achievement had all the men who followed them been made of the same
desperate stuff. Beaten off, they escaped up the Val di Ledro, and
secretly entered Trent, where they hoped to spread revolt, but the
Austrian commandant knew what a quantity of dry wood was in the city, and
stamped his heel on sparks. A revolt was prepared notwithstanding the
proclamation of imprisonment and death. Barto undertook to lead a troop
against the Buon Consiglio barracks, while Angelo and Rinaldo cleared the
ramparts. It chanced, whether from treachery or extra-vigilance was
unknown, that the troops paid domiciliary visits an hour before the
intended outbreak, and the three were left to accomplish their task
alone. They remained in the city several days, hunted from house to
house, and finally they were brought to bay at night on the roof of a
palace where the Lenkenstein ladies were residing. Barto took his dagger
between his teeth and dropped to the balcony of Lena's chamber. The
brothers soon after found the rooftrap opened to them, and Lena and Anna
conducted them to the postern-door. There Angelo asked whom they had to
thank. The terrified ladies gave their name; upon hearing which, Rinaldo
turned and said that he would pay for a charitable deed to the extent of
his power, and would not meanly allow them to befriend persons who were
to continue strangers to them. He gave the name of Guidascarpi, and
relieved his brother, as well as himself, of a load of obligation, for
the ladies raised wild screams on the instant. In falling from the walls
to the road, Rinaldo hurt his foot. Barto lifted him on his back, and
journeyed with him so till at the appointed place he met his wife, who
dressed the foot, and led them out of the line of pursuit, herself
bending under the beloved load. Her adoration of Rinaldo was deep as a
mother's, pure as a virgin's, fiery as a saint's. Leone Rufo dwelt on it
the more fervidly from seeing Vittoria's expression of astonishment. The
woman led them to a cave in the rocks, where she had stored provision and
sat two days expecting the signal from Trent. They saw numerous bands of
soldiers set out along the valleys--merry men whom it was Barto's
pleasure to beguile by shouts, as a relief for his parched weariness upon
the baking rock. Accident made it an indiscretion. A glass was levelled
at them by a mounted officer, and they had quickly to be moving. Angelo
knew the voice of Weisspriess in the word of command to the soldiers, and
the call to him to surrender. Weisspriess followed them across the
mountain track, keeping at their heels, though they doubled and adopted
all possible contrivances to shake him off. He was joined by Count Karl
Lenkenstein on the day when Carlo Ammiani encountered them, with the rear
of Colonel Corte's band marching for Vicenza. In the collision between
the Austrians and the volunteers, Rinaldo was taken fighting upon his
knee-cap. Leone cursed the disabled foot which had carried the hero in
action, to cast him at the mercy of his enemies; but recollection of that
sight of Rinaldo fighting far ahead and alone, half-down-like a scuttled
ship, stood like a flower in the lad's memory. The volunteers devoted
themselves to liberate or avenge him. It was then that Barto Rizzo sent
his wife upon her mission. Leone assured Vittoria that Angelo was aware
of its nature, and approved it--hoped that the same might be done for
himself. He shook his head when she asked if Count Ammiani approved it
likewise.

"Signorina, Count Ammiani has a grudge against Barto, though he can't
help making use of him. Our captain Carlo is too much of a mere soldier.
He would have allowed Rinaldo to be strung up, and Barto does not owe him
obedience in those things."

"But why did this Barto Rizzo employ a woman's hand?"

"The woman was capable. No man could have got permission to move freely
among the rascal Austrians, even in the character of a deserter. She did,
and she saved him from the shame of execution. And besides, it was her
punishment. You are astonished? Barto Rizzo punishes royally. He never
forgives, and he never persecutes; he waits for his opportunity. That
woman disobeyed him once--once only; but once was enough. It occurred in
Milan, I believe. She released an Austrian, or did something--I don't
know the story exactly--and Barto said to her, 'Now you can wash out your
crime and send your boy to heaven unspotted, with one blow.' I saw her
set out to do it. She was all teeth and eyes, like a frightened horse;
she walked like a Muse in a garden."

Vittoria discovered that her presence among the Austrians had been known
to Carlo. Leone alluded slightly to Barto Rizzo's confirmed suspicion of
her, saying that it was his weakness to be suspicious of women. The
volunteers, however, were all in her favour, and had jeered at Barto on
his declaring that she might, in proof of her willingness to serve the
cause, have used her voice for the purpose of subjugating the wavering
Austro-Italians, who wanted as much coaxing as women. Count Karl had been
struck to earth by Barto Rizzo. "Not with his boasted neatness, I
imagine," Leone said. In fact, the dagger had grazed an ivory portrait of
a fair Italian head wreathed with violets in Count Karl's breast.

Vittoria recognized the features of Violetta d'Isorella as the original
of the portrait.

They arrived at Roveredo late in the evening. The wounded man again
entreated Vittoria to remain by him till a messenger should bring one of
his sisters from Trent. "See," she said to Leone, "how I give grounds for
suspicion of me; I nurse an enemy."

"Here is a case where Barto is distinctly to blame," the lad replied.
"The poor fellow must want nursing, for he can't smoke."

Anna von Lenkenstein came from Trent to her brother's summons. Vittoria
was by his bedside, and the sufferer had fallen asleep with his head upon
her arm. Anna looked upon this scene with more hateful amazement than her
dull eyelids could express. She beckoned imperiously for her to come
away, but Vittoria would not allow him to be disturbed, and Anna sat and
faced her. The sleep was long. The eyes of the two women met from time to
time, and Vittoria thought that Barto Rizzo's wife, though more terrible,
was pleasanter to behold, and less brutal, than Anna. The moment her
brother stirred, Anna repeated her imperious gesture, murmuring, "Away!
out of my sight!" With great delicacy of touch she drew the arm from the
pillow and thrust it back, and then motioning in an undisguised horror,
said, "Go." Vittoria rose to go.

"Is it my Lena?" came from Karl's faint lips.

"It is your Anna."

"I should have known," he moaned.

Vittoria left them.

Some hours later, Countess Lena appeared, bringing a Trentino doctor. She
said when she beheld Vittoria, "Are you our evil genius, then?" Vittoria
felt that she must necessarily wear that aspect to them.

Still greater was Lena's amazement when she looked on Wilfrid. She passed
him without a sign.

Vittoria had to submit to an interview with both sisters before her
departure. Apart from her distress on their behalf, they had always
seemed as very weak, flippant young women to her, and she could have
smiled in her heart when Anna pointed to a day of retribution in the
future.

"I shall not seek to have you assassinated," Anna said; "do not suppose
that I mean the knife or the pistol. But your day will come, and I can
wait for it. You murdered my brother Paul: you have tried to murder my
brother Karl. I wish you to leave this place convinced of one thing:--you
shall be repaid for it."

There was no direct allusion either to Weisspriess or to Wilfrid.

Lena spoke of the army. "You think our cause is ruined because we have
insurrection on all sides of us: you do not know our army. We can fight
the Hungarians with one hand, and you Italians with the other--with a
little finger. On what spot have we given way? We have to weep, it is
true; but tears do not testify to defeat; and already I am inclined to
pity those fools who have taken part against us. Some have experienced
the fruits of their folly."

This was the nearest approach to a hint at Wilfrid's misconduct.

Lena handed Leone's pass to Vittoria, and drawing out a little pocket
almanac, said, "You proceed to Milan, I presume. I do not love your
society; mademoiselle Belloni or Campa: yet I do not mind making an
appointment--the doctor says a month will set my brother on his feet
again,--I will make an appointment to meet you in Milan or Como, or
anywhere in your present territories, during the month of August. That
affords time for a short siege and two pitched battles."

She appeared to be expecting a retort.

Vittoria replied, "I could beg one thing on my knees of you, Countess
Lena."

"And that is--?" Lena threw her head up superbly.

"Pardon my old friend the service he did me through friendship."

The sisters interchanged looks. Lena flushed angrily.

Anna said, "The person to whom you allude is here."

"He is attending on your brother."

"Did he help this last assassin to escape, perchance?"

Vittoria sickened at the cruel irony, and felt that she had perhaps done
ill in beginning to plead for Wilfrid.

"He is here; let him speak for himself: but listen to him, Countess
Lena."

"A dishonourable man had better be dumb," interposed Anna.

"Ah! it is I who have offended you."

"Is that his excuse?"

Vittoria kept her eyes on the fiercer sister, who now declined to speak.

"I will not excuse my own deeds; perhaps I cannot. We Italians are in a
hurricane; I cannot reflect. It may be that I do not act more thinkingly
than a wild beast."

"You have spoken it," Anna exclaimed.

"Countess Lena, he fights in your ranks as a common soldier. He
encounters more than a common soldier's risks."

"The man is brave,--we knew that," said Anna.

"He is more than brave, he is devoted. He fights against us, without hope
of reward from you. Have I utterly ruined him?"

"I imagine that you may regard it as a fact that you have utterly ruined
him," said Anna, moving to break up the parting interview. Lena turned to
follow her.

"Ladies, if it is I who have hardened your hearts, I am more guilty than
I thought." Vittoria said no more. She knew that she had been speaking
badly, or ineffectually, by a haunting flatness of sound, as of an
unstrung instrument, in her ears: she was herself unstrung and
dispirited, while the recollection of Anna's voice was like a sombre
conquering monotony on a low chord, with which she felt insufficient to
compete.

Leone was waiting in the carriage to drive to the ferry across the Adige.
There was news in Roveredo of the king's advance upon Rivoli; and Leone
sat trying to lift and straighten out his wounded arm, with grimaces of
laughter at the pain of the effort, which resolutely refused to
acknowledge him to be an able combatant. At the carriage-door Wilfrid
bowed once over Vittoria's hand.

"You see that," Anna remarked to her sister.

"I should have despised him if he had acted indifference," replied Lena.

She would have suspected him--that was what her heart meant; the artful
show of indifference had deceived her once. The anger within her drew its
springs much more fully from his refusal to respond to her affection,
when she had in a fit of feminine weakness abased herself before him on
the night of the Milanese revolt, than from the recollection of their
days together in Meran. She had nothing of her sister's unforgivingness.
And she was besides keenly curious to discover the nature of the charm
Vittoria threw on him, and not on him solely. Vittoria left Wilfrid to
better chances than she supposed. "Continue fighting with your army," she
said, when they parted. The deeper shade which traversed his features
told her that, if she pleased, her sway might still be active; but she
had no emotion to spare for sentimental regrets. She asked herself
whether a woman who has cast her lot in scenes of strife does not lose
much of her womanhood and something of her truth; and while her
imagination remained depressed, her answer was sad. In that mood she
pitied Wilfrid with a reckless sense of her inability to repay him for
the harm she had done him. The tragedies written in fresh blood all about
her, together with that ever-present image of the fate of Italy hanging
in the balance, drew her away from personal reflections. She felt as one
in a war-chariot, who has not time to cast more than a glance on the
fallen. At the place where the ferry is, she was rejoiced by hearing
positive news of the proximity of the Royal army. There were none to tell
her that Charles Albert had here made his worst move by leaving Vicenza
to the operations of the enemy, that he might become master of a point
worthless when Vicenza fell into the enemy's hands. The old Austrian
Field-Marshal had eluded him at Mantua on that very night when Vittoria
had seen his troops in motion. The daring Austrian flank-march on
Vicenza, behind the fortresses of the Quadrilateral, was the capital
stroke of the campaign. But the presence of a Piedmontese vanguard at
Rivoli flushed the Adige with confidence, and Vittoria went on her way
sharing the people's delight. She reached Brescia to hear that Vicenza
had fallen. The city was like a landscape smitten black by the
thunder-cloud. Vittoria found Countess Ammiani at her husband's tomb,
stiff, colourless, lifeless as a monument attached to the tomb.




CHAPTER XXXV

CLOSE OF THE LOMBARD CAMPAIGN--VITTORIA'S PERPLEXITY

The fall of Vicenza turned a tide that had overflowed its barriers with
force enough to roll it to the Adriatic. From that day it was as if a
violent wind blew East over Lombardy; flood and wind breaking here and
there a tree, bowing everything before them. City, fortress, and
battle-field resisted as the eddy whirls. Venice kept her brave colours
streaming aloft in a mighty grasp despite the storm, but between Venice
and Milan there was this unutterable devastation,--so sudden a change, so
complete a reversal of the shield, that the Lombards were at first
incredulous even in their agony, and set their faces against it as at a
monstrous eclipse, as though the heavens were taking false oath of its
being night when it was day. From Vicenza and Rivoli, to Sommacampagna,
and across Monte Godio to Custozza, to Volta on the right of the Mincio,
up to the gates of Milan, the line of fire travelled, with a fantastic
overbearing swiftness that, upon the map, looks like the zig-zag elbowing
of a field-rocket. Vicenza fell on the 11th of June; the Austrians
entered Milan on the 6th of August. Within that short time the Lombards
were struck to the dust.

Countess Ammiani quitted Brescia for Bergamo before the worst had
happened; when nothing but the king's retreat upon the Lombard capital,
after the good fight at Volta, was known. According to the king's
proclamation the Piedmontese army was to defend Milan, and hope was not
dead. Vittoria succeeded in repressing all useless signs of grief in the
presence of the venerable lady, who herself showed none, but simply
recommended her accepted daughter to pray daily. "I can neither confess
nor pray," Vittoria said to the priest, a comfortable, irritable
ecclesiastic, long attached to the family, and little able to deal with
this rebel before Providence, that would not let her swollen spirit be
bled. Yet she admitted to him that the countess possessed resources which
she could find nowhere; and she saw the full beauty of such inimitable
grave endurance. Vittoria's foolish trick of thinking for herself made
her believe, nevertheless, that the countess suffered more than she
betrayed, was less consoled than her spiritual comforter imagined. She
continued obstinate and unrepentant, saying, "If my punishment is to
come, it will at least bring experience with it, and I shall know why I
am punished. The misery now is that I do not know, and do not see, the
justice of the sentence."

Countess Ammiani thought better of her case than the priest did; or she
was more indulgent, or half indifferent. This girl was Carlo's choice;--a
strange choice, but the times were strange, and the girl was robust. The
channels of her own and her husband's house were drying on all sides; the
house wanted resuscitating. There was promise that the girl would bear
children of strong blood. Countess Ammiani would not for one moment have
allowed the spiritual welfare of the children to hang in dubitation,
awaiting their experience of life; but a certain satisfaction was shown
in her faint smile when her confessor lamented over Vittoria's proud
stony state of moral revolt. She said to her accepted daughter, "I shall
expect you to be prepared to espouse my son as soon as I have him by my
side;" nor did Vittoria's silent bowing of her face assure her that
strict obedience was implied. Precise words--"I will," and "I will not
fail"--were exacted. The countess showed some emotion after Vittoria had
spoken. "Now, may God end this war quickly, if it is to go against us,"
she exclaimed, trembling in her chair visibly a half-minute, with dropped
eyelids and lips moving.

Carlo had sent word that he would join his mother as early as he was
disengaged from active service, and meantime requested her to proceed to
a villa on Lago Maggiore. Vittoria obtained permission from the countess
to order the route of the carriage through Milan, where she wished to
take up her mother and her maid Giacinta. For other reasons she would
have avoided the city. The thought of entering it was painful with the
shrewdest pain. Dante's profoundly human line seemed branded on the
forehead of Milan.

The morning was dark when they drove through the streets of Bergamo.
Passing one of the open places, Vittoria beheld a great concourse of
volunteer youth and citizens, all of them listening to the voice of one
who stood a few steps above them holding a banner. She gave an outcry of
bitter joy. It was the Chief. On one side of him was Agostino, in the
midst of memorable heads that were unknown to her. The countess refused
to stay, though Vittoria strained her hands together in extreme entreaty
that she might for a few moments hear what the others were hearing. "I
speak for my son, and I forbid it," Countess Ammiani said. Vittoria fell
back and closed her eyes to cherish the vision. All those faces raised to
the one speaker under the dark sky were beautiful. He had breathed some
new glory of hope in them, making them shine beneath the overcast
heavens, as when the sun breaks from an evening cloud and flushes the
stems of a company of pine-trees.

Along the road to Milan she kept imagining his utterance until her heart
rose with music. A delicious stream of music, thin as poor tears, passed
through her frame, like a life reviving. She reached Milan in a mood to
bear the idea of temporary defeat. Music had forsaken her so long that
celestial reassurance seemed to return with it.

Her mother was at Zotti's, very querulous, but determined not to leave
the house and the few people she knew. She had, as she told her daughter,
fretted so much on her account that she hardly knew whether she was glad
to see her. Tea, of course, she had given up all thoughts of; but now
coffee was rising, and the boasted sweet bread of Lombardy was something
to look at! She trusted that Emilia would soon think of singing no more,
and letting people rest: she might sing when she wanted money. A letter
recently received from Mr. Pericles said that Italy was her child's ruin,
and she hoped Emilia was ready to do as he advised, and hurry to England,
where singing did not upset people, and people lived like real
Christians, not----Vittoria flapped her hand, and would not hear of the
unchristian crimes of the South. As regarded the expected defence of
Milan, the little woman said, that if it brought on a bombardment, she
would call it unpardonable wickedness, and only hoped that her daughter
would repent.

Zotti stood by, interpreting the English to himself by tones. "The
amiable donnina is not of our persuasion," he observed. "She remains
dissatisfied with patriotic Milan. I have exhibited to her my dabs of
bread through all the processes of making and baking. It is in vain. She
rejects analogy. She is wilful as a principessina: 'Tis so! 'tis not so!
'tis my will! be silent, thou! Signora, I have been treated in that way
by your excellent mother."

"Zotti has not been paid for three weeks, and he certainly has not
mentioned it or looked it, I will say, Emilia."

"Zotti has had something to think of during the last three weeks," said
Vittoria, touching him kindly on the arm.

The confectioner lifted his fingers and his big brown eyes after them,
expressive of the unutterable thoughts. He informed her that he had laid
in a stock of flour, in the expectation that Carlo Alberto would defend
the city: The Milanese were ready to aid him, though some, as Zotti
confessed, had ceased to effervesce; and a great number who were
perfectly ready to fight regarded his tardy appeal to Italian patriotism
very coldly. Zotti set out in person to discover Giacinta. The girl could
hardly fetch her breath when she saw her mistress. She was in Laura's
service, and said that Laura had brought a wounded Englishman from the
field of Custozza. Vittoria hurried to Laura, with whom she found
Merthyr, blue-white as a corpse, having been shot through the body. His
sister was in one of the Lombard hamlets, unaware of his fall; Beppo had
been sent to her.

They noticed one another's embrowned complexions, but embraced silently.
"Twice widowed!" Laura said when they sat together. Laura hushed all
speaking of the war or allusion to a single incident of the miserable
campaign, beyond the bare recital of Vittoria's adventures; yet when
Vicenza by chance was mentioned, she burst out: "They are not cities,
they are living shrieks. They have been made impious for ever. Burn them
to ashes, that they may not breathe foul upon heaven!" She had clung to
the skirts of the army as far as the field of Custozza. "He," she said,
pointing to the room where Merthyr lay,--"he groans less than the others
I have nursed. Generally, when they looked at me, they appeared obliged
to recollect that it was not I who had hurt them. Poor souls! some ended
in great torment. 'I think of them as the happiest; for pain is a cloak
that wraps you about, and I remember one middle-aged man who died softly
at Custozza, and said, 'Beaten!' To take that thought as your travelling
companion into the gulf, must be worse than dying of agony; at least, I
think so."

Vittoria was too well used to Laura's way of meeting disaster to expect
from her other than this ironical fortitude, in which the fortitude
leaned so much upon the irony. What really astonished her was the
conception Laura had taken of the might of Austria. Laura did not
directly speak of it, but shadowed it in allusive hints, much as if she
had in her mind the image of an iron roller going over a field of
flowers--hateful, imminent, irresistible. She felt as a leaf that has
been flying before the gale.

Merthyr's wound was severe: Vittoria could not leave him. Her resolution
to stay in Milan brought her into collision with Countess Ammiani, when
the countess reminded her of her promise, sedately informing her that she
was no longer her own mistress, and had a primary duty to fulfil. She
offered to wait three days, or until the safety of the wounded man was
medically certified to. It was incomprehensible to her that Vittoria
should reject her terms; and though it was true that she would not have
listened to a reason, she was indignant at not hearing one given in
mitigation of the offence. She set out alone on her journey, deeply hurt.
The reason was a feminine sentiment, and Vittoria was naturally unable to
speak it. She shrank with pathetic horror from the thought of Merthyr's
rising from his couch to find her a married woman, and desired most
earnestly that her marriage should be witnessed by him. Young women will
know how to reconcile the opposition of the sentiment. Had Merthyr been
only slightly wounded, and sound enough to seem to be able to bear a
bitter shock, she would not have allowed her personal feelings to cause
chagrin to the noble lady. The sight of her dear steadfast friend
prostrate in the cause of Italy, and who, if he lived to rise again,
might not have his natural strength to bear the thought of her loss with
his old brave firmness, made it impossible for her to act decisively in
one direct line of conduct.

Countess Ammiani wrote brief letters from Luino and Pallanza on Lago
Maggiore. She said that Carlo was in the Como mountains; he would expect
to find his bride, and would accuse his mother; "but his mother will be
spared those reproaches," she added, "if the last shot fired kills, as it
generally does, the bravest and the dearest."

"If it should!"--the thought rose on a quick breath in Vittoria's bosom,
and the sentiment which held her away dispersed like a feeble smoke, and
showed her another view of her features. She wept with longing for love
and dependence. She was sick of personal freedom, tired of the exercise
of her will, only too eager to give herself to her beloved. The
blessedness of marriage, of peace and dependence, came on her imagination
like a soft breeze from a hidden garden, like sleep. But this very
longing created the resistance to it in the depths of her soul. 'There
was a light as of reviving life, or of pain comforted, when it was she
who was sitting by Merthyr's side, and when at times she saw the hopeless
effort of his hand to reach to hers, or during the long still hours she
laid her head on his pillow, and knew that he breathed gratefully. The
sweetness of helping him, and of making his breathing pleasant to him,
closed much of the world which lay beyond her windows to her thoughts,
and surprised her with an unknown emotion, so strange to her that when it
first swept up her veins she had the fancy of her having been touched by
a supernatural hand, and heard a flying accord of instruments. She was
praying before she knew what prayer was. A crucifix hung over Merthyr's
head. She had looked on it many times, and looked on it still, without
seeing more than the old sorrow. In the night it was dim. She found
herself trying to read the features of the thorn-crowned Head in the
solitary night. She and it were alone with a life that was faint above
the engulphing darkness. She prayed for the life, and trembled, and shed
tears, and would have checked them; they seemed to be bearing away her
little remaining strength. The tears streamed. No answer was given to her
question, "Why do I weep?" She wept when Merthyr had passed the danger,
as she had wept when the hours went by, with shrouded visages; and though
she felt the difference m the springs of her tears, she thought them but
a simple form of weakness showing shade and light.

These tears were a vanward wave of the sea to follow; the rising of her
voice to heaven was no more than a twitter of the earliest dawn before
the coming of her soul's outcry.

"I have had a weeping fit," she thought, and resolved to remember it
tenderly, as being associated with her friend's recovery, and a singular
masterful power absolutely to look on the Austrians marching up the
streets of Milan, and not to feel the surging hatred, or the nerveless
despair, which she had supposed must be her alternatives.

It is a mean image to say that the entry of the Austrians into the
reconquered city was like a river of oil permeating a lake of vinegar,
but it presents the fact in every sense. They demanded nothing more than
submission, and placed a gentle foot upon the fallen enemy; and wherever
they appeared they were isolated. The deepest wrath of the city was,
nevertheless, not directed against them, but against Carlo Alberto, who
had pledged his honour to defend it, and had forsaken it. Vittoria
committed a public indiscretion on the day when the king left Milan to
its fate: word whereof was conveyed to Carlo Ammiani, and he wrote to
her.

"It is right that I should tell you what I have heard," the letter said.
"I have heard that my bride drove up to the crowned traitor, after he had
unmasked himself, and when he was quitting the Greppi palace, and that
she kissed his hand before the people--poor bleeding people of Milan!
This is what I hear in the Val d'Intelvi:--that she despised the misery
and just anger of the people, and, by virtue of her name and mine,
obtained a way for him. How can she have acted so as to give a colour to
this infamous scandal? True or false, it does not affect my love for her.
Still, my dearest, what shall I say? You keep me divided in two halves.
My heart is out of me; and if I had a will, I think I should be harsh
with you. You are absent from my mother at a time when we are about to
strike another blow. Go to her. It is kindness; it is charity: I do not
say duty. I remember that I did write harshly to you from Brescia. Then
our march was so clear in view that a little thing ruffled me. Was it a
little thing? But to applaud the Traitor now! To uphold him who has spilt
our blood only to hand the country over to the old gaolers! He lent us
his army like a Jew, for huge interest. Can you not read him? If not,
cease, I implore you, to think at all for yourself.

"Is this a lover's letter? I know that my beloved will see the love in
it. To me your acts are fair and good as the chronicle of a saint. I find
you creating suspicion--almost justifying it in others, and putting your
name in the mouth of a madman who denounces you. I shall not speak more
of him. Remember that my faith in you is unchangeable, and I pray you to
have the same in me.

"I sent you a greeting from the Chief. He marched in the ranks from
Bergamo. I saw him on the line of march strip off his coat to shelter a
young lad from the heavy rain. He is not discouraged; none are who have
been near him.

"Angelo is here, and so is our Agostino; and I assure you he loads and
fires a carbine much more deliberately than he composes a sonnet. I am
afraid that your adored Antonio-Pericles fared badly among our fellows,
but I could gather no particulars.

"Oh! the bright two minutes when I held you right in my heart. That spot
on the Vicentino is alone unclouded. If I live I will have that bit of
ground. I will make a temple of it. I could reach it blindfolded."

A townsman of Milan brought this letter to Vittoria. She despatched Luigi
with her reply, which met the charge in a straightforward affirmative.

"I was driving to Zotti's by the Greppi palace, when I saw the king come
forth, and the people hooted him. I stood up, and petitioned to kiss his
hand. The people knew me. They did not hoot any more for some time.

"So that you have heard the truth, and you must judge me by it. I cannot
even add that I am sorry, though I strive to wish that I had not been
present. I might wish it really, if I did not feel it to be a cowardly
wish.

"Oh, my Carlo! my lover! my husband! you would not have me go against my
nature? I have seen the king upon the battle-field. He has deigned to
speak to me of Italy and our freedom. I have seen him facing our enemy;
and to see him hooted by the people, and in misfortune and with sad
eyes!--he looked sad and nothing else--and besides, I am sure I know the
king. I mean that I understand him. I am half ashamed to write so boldly,
even to you. I say to myself you should know me, at least; and if I am
guilty of a piece of vanity, you should know that also. Carlo Alberto is
quite unlike other men. He worships success as, much; but they are not,
as he is, so much bettered by adversity. Indeed I do not believe that he
has exact intentions of any sort, or ever had the intention to betray us,
or has done so in reality, that is, meaningly, of his own will. Count
Medole and his party did, as you know, offer Lombardy to him; and Venice
gave herself--brave, noble Venice! Oh! if we two were there--Venice has
England's sea-spirit. But, did we not flatter the king? And ask yourself,
my Carlo, could a king move in such an enterprise as a common person?
Ought we not to be in union with Sardinia? How can we be if we reject her
king? Is it not the only positive army that, we can look to--I mean
regular army? Should we not; make some excuses for one who is not in our
position?

"I feel that I push my questions like waves that fall and cannot get
beyond--they crave so for answers agreeing to them. This should make me
doubt myself, perhaps; but they crowd again, and seem so conclusive until
I have written them down. I am unworthy to struggle with your intellect;
but I say to myself, how unworthy of you I should be if I did not use my
own, such as it is! The poor king; had to conclude an armistice to save
his little kingdom. Perhaps we ought to think of that sternly. My heart
is; filled with pity.

"It cannot but be right that you should know the worst; of me. I call you
my husband, and tremble to be permitted to lean my head on your bosom for
hours, my sweet lover! And yet my cowardice, if I had let the king go by
without a reverential greeting from me, in his adversity, would have
rendered me insufferable to myself. You are hearing me, and I am
compelled to say, that rather than behave so basely I would forfeit your
love, and be widowed till death should offer us for God to join us. Does
your face change to me?

"Dearest, and I say it when the thought of you sets me almost swooning. I
find my hands clasped, and I am muttering I know not what, and I am
blushing. The ground seems to rock; I can barely breathe; my heart is
like a bird caught in the hands of a cruel boy: it will not rest. I fear
everything. I hear a whisper, 'Delay not an instant!' and it is like a
furnace; 'Hasten to him! Speed!' and I seem to totter forward and drop--I
think I have lost you--I am like one dead.

"I remain here to nurse our dear friend Merthyr. For that reason I am
absent from your mother. It is her desire that we should be married.

"Soon, soon, my own soul!

"I seem to be hanging on a tree for you, swayed by such a teazing wind.

"Oh, soon! or I feel that I shall hate any vestige of will that I have in
this head of mine. Not in the heart--it is not there!

"And sometimes I am burning to sing. The voice leaps to my lips; it is
quite like a thing that lives apart--my prisoner.

"It is true, Laura is here with Merthyr.

"Could you come at once?--not here, but to Pallanza? We shall both make
our mother happy. This she wishes, this she lives for, this consoles
her--and oh, this gives me peace! Yes, Merthyr is recovering! I can leave
him without the dread I had; and Laura confesses to the feminine
sentiment, if her funny jealousy of a rival nurse is really simply
feminine. She will be glad of our resolve, I am sure. And then you will
order all my actions; and I shall be certain that they are such as I
would proudly call mine; and I shall be shut away from the world. Yes;
let it be so! Addio. I reserve all sweet names for you. Addio. In
Pallanza:--no not Pallanza--Paradise!

"Hush! and do not smile at me:--it was not my will, I discover, but my
want of will, that distracted me.

"See my last signature of--not Vittoria; for I may sign that again and
still be Emilia Alessandra Ammiani.

                    "SANDRA BELLONI"

The letter was sealed; Luigi bore it away, and a brief letter to Countess
Ammiani, in Pallanza, as well.

Vittoria was relieved of her anxiety concerning Merthyr by the arrival of
Georgiana, who had been compelled to make her way round by Piacenza and
Turin, where she had left Gambier, with Beppo in attendance on him.
Georgiana at once assumed all the duties of head-nurse, and the more
resolutely because of her brother's evident moral weakness in sighing for
the hand of a fickle girl to smooth his pillow. "When he is stronger you
can sit beside him a little," she said to Vittoria, who surrendered her
post without a struggle, and rarely saw him, though Laura told her that
his frequent exclamation was her name, accompanied by a soft look at his
sister--"which would have stirred my heart like poor old Milan last
March," Laura added, with a lift of her shoulders.

Georgiana's icy manner appeared infinitely strange to Vittoria when she
heard from Merthyr that his sister had become engaged to Captain Gambier.

"Nothing softens these women," said Laura, putting Georgiana in a class.

"I wish you could try the effect of your winning Merthyr," Vittoria
suggested.

"I remember that when I went to my husband, I likewise wanted every woman
of my acquaintance to be married." Laura sighed deeply. "What is this
poor withered body of mine now? It feels like an old volcano, cindery,
with fire somewhere:--a charming bride! My dear, if I live till my
children make me a grandmother, I shall look on the love of men and women
as a toy that I have played with. A new husband? I must be dragged
through the Circles of Dante before I can conceive it, and then I should
loathe the stranger."

News came that the volunteers were crushed. It was time for Vittoria to
start for Pallanza, and she thought of her leave-taking; a final
leave-taking, in one sense, to the friends who had cared too much for
her. Laura delicately drew Georgiana aside in the sick-room, which she
would not quit, and alluded to the necessity for Vittoria's departure
without stating exactly wherefore: but Georgiana was a Welshwoman. Partly
to show her accurate power of guessing, and chiefly that she might
reprove Laura's insulting whisper, which outraged and irritated her as
much as if "Oh! your poor brother!" had been exclaimed, she made display
of Merthyr's manly coldness by saying aloud, "You mean, that she is going
to her marriage." Laura turned her face to Merthyr. He had striven to
rise on his elbow, and had dropped flat in his helplessness. Big tears
were rolling down his cheeks. His articulation failed him, beyond a
reiterated "No, no," pitiful to hear, and he broke into childish sobs.
Georgiana hurried Laura from the room. By-and-by the doctor was promptly
summoned, and it was Georgiana herself, miserably humbled, who obtained
Vittoria's sworn consent to keep the life in Merthyr by lingering yet
awhile.

Meantime Luigi brought a letter from Pallanza in Carlo's handwriting.
This was the burden of it:

"I am here, and you are absent. Hasten!"




CHAPTER XXXVI

A FRESH ENTANGLEMENT

The Lenkenstein ladies returned to Milan proudly in the path of the army
which they had followed along the city walls on the black March midnight.
The ladies of the Austrian aristocracy generally had to be exiles from
Vienna, and were glad to flock together even in an alien city. Anna and
Lena were aware of Vittoria's residence in Milan, through the interchange
of visits between the Countess of Lenkenstein and her sister Signora
Piaveni. They heard also of Vittoria's prospective and approaching
marriage to Count Ammiani. The Duchess of Graatli, who had forborne a
visit to her unhappy friends, lest her Austrian face should wound their
sensitiveness, was in company with the Lenkensteins one day, when Irma di
Karski called on them. Irma had come from Lago Maggiore, where she had
left her patron, as she was pleased to term Antonio-Pericles. She was
full of chatter of that most worthy man's deplorable experiences of
Vittoria's behaviour to him during the war, and of many things besides.
According to her account, Vittoria had enticed him from place to place
with promises that the next day, and the next day, and the day after, she
would be ready to keep her engagement to go to London, and at last she
had given him the slip and left him to be plucked like a pullet by a
horde of volunteer banditti, out of whose hands Antonio-Pericles-"one of
our richest millionaires in Europe, certainly our richest amateur," said
Irma--escaped in fit outward condition for the garden of Eden.

Count Karl was lying on the sofa, and went into endless invalid's
laughter at the picture presented by Irma of the 'wild man' wanderings of
poor infatuated Pericles, which was exaggerated, though not
intentionally, for Irma repeated the words and gestures of Pericles in
the recital of his tribulations. Being of a somewhat similar physical
organization, she did it very laughably. Irma declared that Pericles was
cured of his infatuation. He had got to Turin, intending to quit Italy
for ever, when--"he met me," said Irma modestly.

"And heard that the war was at an end," Count Karl added.

"And he has taken the superb Villa Ricciardi, on Lago Maggiore, where he
will have a troupe of singers, and perform operas, in which I believe I
may possibly act as prima donna. The truth is, I would do anything to
prevent him from leaving the country."

But Irma had more to say; with "I bear no malice," she commenced it. The
story she had heard was that Count Ammiani, after plighting himself to a
certain signorina, known as Vittoria Campa, had received tidings that she
was one of those persons who bring discredit on Irma's profession.
"Gifted by nature, I can acknowledge," said Irma; "but devoured by
vanity--a perfect slave to the appetite for praise; ready to forfeit
anything for flattery! Poor signor Antonio-Pericles!--he knows her." And
now Count Ammiani, persuaded to reason by his mother, had given her up.
There was nothing more positive, for Irma had seen him in the society of
Countess Violetta d'Isorella.

Anna and Lena glanced at their brother Karl.

"I should not allude to what is not notorious," Irma pursued. "They are
always together. My dear Antonio-Pericles is most amusing in his
expressions of delight at it. For my part, though she served me an evil
turn once,--you will hardly believe, ladies, that in her jealousy of me
she was guilty of the most shameful machinations to get me out of the way
on the night of the first performance of Camilla,--but, for my part, I
bear no malice. The creature is an inveterate rebel, and I dislike her
for that, I do confess."

"The signorina Vittoria Campa is my particular and very dear friend,"
said the duchess.

"She is not the less an inveterate rebel," said Anna.

Count Karl gave a long-drawn sigh. "Alas, that she should have brought
discredit on Fraulein di Karski's profession!"

The duchess hurried straightway to Laura, with whom was Count
Serabiglione, reviewing the present posture of affairs from the
condescending altitudes of one that has foretold it. Laura and Amalia
embraced and went apart. During their absence Vittoria came down to the
count and listened to a familiar illustration of his theory of the
relations which should exist between Italy and Austria, derived from the
friendship of those two women.

"What I wish you to see, signorina, is that such an alliance is possible;
and, if we supply the brains, as we do, is by no means likely to be
degrading. These bears are absolutely on their knees to us for good
fellowship. You have influence, you have amazing wit, you have
unparalleled beauty, and, let me say it with the utmost sadness, you have
now had experience. Why will you not recognize facts? Italian unity! I
have exposed the fatuity--who listens? Italian freedom! I do not attempt
to reason with my daughter. She is pricked by an envenomed fly of Satan.
Yet, behold her and the duchess! It is the very union I preach; and I am,
I declare to you, signorina, in great danger. I feel it, but I persist. I
am in danger" (Count Serabiglione bowed his head low) "of the
transcendent sin of scorn of my species."

The little nobleman swayed deploringly in his chair. "Nothing is so
perilous for a soul's salvation as that. The one sane among madmen! The
one whose reason is left to him among thousands who have forsaken it! I
beg you to realize the idea. The Emperor, as I am given to understand, is
about to make public admission of my services. I shall be all the more
hated. Yet it is a considerable gain. I do not deny that I esteem it as a
promotion for my services. I shall not be the first martyr in this world,
signorina."

Count Serabiglione produced a martyr's smile.

"The profits of my expected posts will be," he was saying, with a
reckoning eye cast upward into his cranium for accuracy, when Laura
returned, and Vittoria ran out to the duchess. Amalia repeated Irma's
tattle. A curious little twitching of the brows at Violetta d'Isorella's
name marked the reception of it.

"She is most lovely," Vittoria said.

"And absolutely reckless."

"She is an old friend of Count Ammiani's."

"And you have an old friend here. But the old friend of a young woman--I
need not say further than that it is different."

The duchess used the privilege of her affection, and urged Vittoria not
to trifle with her lover's impatience.

Admitted to the chamber where Merthyr lay, she was enabled to make
allowance for her irresolution. The face of the wounded man was like a
lake-water taking light from Vittoria's presence.

"This may go on for weeks," she said to Laura.

Three days later, Vittoria received an order from the Government to quit
the city within a prescribed number of hours, and her brain was racked to
discover why Laura appeared so little indignant at the barbarous act of
despotism. Laura undertook to break the bad news to Merthyr. The parting
was as quiet and cheerful as, in the opposite degree, Vittoria had
thought it would be melancholy and regretful. "What a Government!"
Merthyr said, and told her to let him hear of any changes. "All changes
that please my friends please me."

Vittoria kissed his forehead with one grateful murmur of farewell to the
bravest heart she had ever known. The going to her happiness seemed more
like going to something fatal until she reached the Lago Maggiore. There
she saw September beauty, and felt as if the splendour encircling her
were her bridal decoration. But no bridegroom stood to greet her on the
terrace-steps between the potted orange and citron-trees. Countess
Ammiani extended kind hands to her at arms' length.

"You have come," she said. "I hope that it is not too late."

Vittoria was a week without sight of her lover: nor did Countess Ammiani
attempt to explain her words, or speak of other than common daily things.
In body and soul Vittoria had taken a chill. The silent blame resting on
her in this house called up her pride, so that she would not ask any
questions; and when Carlo came, she wanted warmth to melt her. Their
meeting was that of two passionless creatures. Carlo kissed her loyally,
and courteously inquired after her health and the health of friends in
Milan, and then he rallied his mother. Agostino had arrived with him, and
the old man, being in one of his soft moods, unvexed by his conceits,
Vittoria had some comfort from him of a dull kind. She heard Carlo
telling his mother that he must go in the morning. Agostino replied to
her quick look at him, "I stay;" and it seemed like a little saved from
the wreck, for she knew that she could speak to Agostino as she could not
to the countess. When his mother prepared to retire, Carlo walked over to
his bride, and repeated rapidly and brightly his inquiries after friends
in Milan. She, with a pure response to his natural-unnatural manner,
spoke of Merthyr Powys chiefly: to which he said several times, "Dear
fellow!" and added, "I shall always love Englishmen for his sake."

This gave her one throb. "I could not leave him, Carlo."

"Certainly not, certainly not," said Carlo. "I should have been happy to
wait on him myself. I was busy; I am still. I dare say you have guessed
that I have a new journal in my head: the Pallanza Iris is to be the name
of it;--to be printed in three colours, to advocate three principles, in
three styles. The Legitimists, the Moderates, and the Republicans are to
proclaim themselves in its columns in prose, poetry, and hotch-potch.
Once an editor, always an editor. The authorities suspect that something
of the sort is about to be planted, so I can only make occasional visits
here:--therefore, as you will believe,"--Carlo let his voice fall--"I
have good reason to hate them still. They may cease to persecute me
soon."

He insisted upon lighting his mother to her room. Vittoria and Agostino
sat talking of the Chief and the minor events of the war--of Luciano,
Marco, Giulio, and Ugo Corte--till the conviction fastened on them that
Carlo would not return, when Agostino stood up and said, yawning wearily,
"I'll talk further to you, my child, tomorrow."

She begged that it might be now.

"No; to-morrow," said he.

"Now, now!" she reiterated, and brought down a reproof from his
fore-finger.

"The poetic definition of 'now' is that it is a small boat, my daughter,
in which the female heart is constantly pushing out to sea and sinking.
'To-morrow' is an island in the deeps, where grain grows. When I land you
there, I will talk to you."

She knew that he went to join Carlo after he had quitted her.

Agostino was true to his promise next day. He brought her nearer to what
she had to face, though he did not help her vision much. Carlo had gone
before sunrise.

They sat on the terrace above the lake, screened from the sunlight by
thick myrtle bushes. Agostino smoked his loosely-rolled cigarettes, and
Vittoria sipped chocolate and looked upward to the summit of Motterone,
with many thoughts and images in her mind.

He commenced by giving her a love-message from Carlo. "Hold fast to it
that he means it: conduct is never a straight index where the heart's
involved," said the chuckling old man; "or it is not in times like ours.
You have been in the wrong, and your having a good excuse will not help
you before the deciding fates. Woman that you are! did you not think that
because we were beaten we were going to rest for a very long while, and
that your Carlo of yesterday was going to be your Carlo of to-day?"

Vittoria tacitly confessed to it.

"Ay," he pursued, "when you wrote to him in the Val d'Intelvi, you
supposed you had only to say, 'I am ready,' which was then the case. You
made your summer and left the fruits to hang, and now you are astounded
that seasons pass and fruits drop. You should have come to this place, if
but for a pair of days, and so have fixed one matter in the chapter. This
is how the chapter has run on. I see I talk to a stunned head; you are
thinking that Carlo's love for you can't have changed: and it has not,
but occasion has gone and times have changed. Now listen. The countess
desired the marriage. Carlo could not go to you in Milan with the sword
in his hand. Therefore you had to come to him. He waited for you, perhaps
for his own preposterous lover's sake as much as to make his mother's
heart easy. If she loses him she loses everything, unless he leaves a
wife to her care and the hope that her House will not be extinct, which
is possibly not much more the weakness of old aristocracy than of human
nature.

"Meantime, his brothers in arms had broken up and entered Piedmont, and
he remained waiting for you still. You are thinking that he had not
waited a month. But if four months finished Lombardy, less than one month
is quite sufficient to do the same for us little beings. He met the
Countess d'Isorella here. You have to thank her for seeing him at all, so
don't wrinkle your forehead yet. Luciano Romara is drilling his men in
Piedmont; Angelo Guidascarpi has gone there. Carlo was considering it his
duty to join Luciano, when he met this lady, and she has apparently
succeeded in altering his plans. Luciano and his band will go to Rome.
Carlo fancies that another blow will be struck for Lombardy. This lady
should know; the point is, whether she can be trusted. She persists in
declaring that Carlo's duty is to remain, and--I cannot tell how, for I
am as a child among women--she has persuaded him of her sincerity. Favour
me now with your clearest understanding, and deliver it from feminine
sensations of any description for just two minutes."

Agostino threw away the end of a cigarette and looked for firmness in
Vittoria's eyes.

"This Countess d'Isorella is opposed to Carlo's marriage at present. She
says that she is betraying the king's secrets, and has no reliance on a
woman. As a woman you will pardon her, for it is the language of your
sex. You are also denounced by Barto Rizzo, a madman--he went mad as
fire, and had to be chained at Varese. In some way or other Countess
d'Isorella got possession of him; she has managed to subdue him. A
sword-cut he received once in Verona has undoubtedly affected his brain,
or caused it to be affected under strong excitement. He is at her villa,
and she says--perhaps with some truth--that Carlo would in several ways
lose his influence by his immediate marriage with you. The reason must
have weight; otherwise he would fulfil his mother's principal request,
and be at the bidding of his own desire. There; I hope I have spoken
plainly."

Agostino puffed a sigh of relief at the conclusion of his task.

Vittoria had been too strenuously engaged in defending the steadiness of
her own eyes to notice the shadow of an assumption of frankness in his.

She said that she understood.

She got away to her room like an insect carrying a load thrice its own
size. All that she could really gather from Agostino's words was, that
she felt herself rocking in a tower, and that Violetta d'Isorella was
beautiful. She had striven hard to listen to him with her wits alone, and
her sensations subsequently revenged themselves in this fashion. The
tower rocked and struck a bell that she discovered to be her betraying
voice uttering cries of pain. She was for hours incapable of meeting
Agostino again. His delicate intuition took the harshness off the
meeting. He led her even to examine her state of mind, and to discern the
fancies from the feelings by which she was agitated. He said shrewdly and
bluntly, "You can master pain, but not doubt. If you show a sign of
unhappiness, remember that I shall know you doubt both what I have told
you, and Carlo as well."

Vittoria fenced: "But is there such a thing as happiness?"

"I should imagine so," said Agostino, touching her cheek, "and
slipperiness likewise. There's patience at any rate; only you must dig
for it. You arrive at nothing, but the eternal digging constitutes the
object gained. I recollect when I was a raw lad, full of ambition, in
love, and without a franc in my pockets, one night in Paris, I found
myself looking up at a street lamp; there was a moth in it. He couldn't
get out, so he had very little to trouble his conscience. I think he was
near happiness: he ought to have been happy. My luck was not so good, or
you wouldn't see me still alive, my dear."

Vittoria sighed for a plainer speaker.




CHAPTER XXXVII

ON LAGO MAGGIORE

Carlo's hours were passed chiefly across the lake, in the Piedmontese
valleys. When at Pallanza he was restless, and he shunned the two or
three minutes of privacy with his betrothed which the rigorous Italian
laws besetting courtship might have allowed him to take. He had
perpetually the look of a man starting from wine. It was evident that he
and Countess d'Isorella continued to hold close communication, for she
came regularly to the villa to meet him. On these occasions Countess
Ammiani accorded her one ceremonious interview, and straightway locked
herself in her room. Violetta's grace of ease and vivacity soared too
high to be subject to any hostile judgement of her character. She seemed
to rely entirely on the force of her beauty, and to care little for those
who did not acknowledge it. She accepted public compliments quite
royally, nor was Agostino backward in offering them. "And you have a
voice, you know," he sometimes said aside to Vittoria; but she had
forgotten how easily she could swallow great praise of her voice; she had
almost forgotten her voice. Her delight was to hang her head above
inverted mountains in the lake, and dream that she was just something
better than the poorest of human creatures. She could not avoid putting
her mind in competition with this brilliant woman's, and feeling
eclipsed; and her weakness became pitiable. But Countess d'Isorella
mentioned once that Pericles was at the Villa Ricciardi, projecting
magnificent operatic entertainments. The reviving of a passion to sing
possessed Vittoria like a thirst for freedom, and instantly confused all
the reflected images within her, as the fury of a sudden wind from the
high Alps scourges the glassy surface of the lake. She begged Countess
Ammiani's permission that she might propose to Pericles to sing in his
private operatic company, in any part, at the shortest notice.

"You wish to leave me?" said the countess, and resolutely conceived it.

Speaking to her son on this subject, she thought it necessary to make
some excuse for a singer's instinct, who really did not live save on the
stage. It amused Carlo; he knew when his mother was really angry with
persons she tried to shield from the anger of others; and her not seeing
the wrong on his side in his behaviour to his betrothed was laughable.
Nevertheless she had divined the case more correctly than he: the lover
was hurt. After what he had endured, he supposed, with all his
forgiveness, that he had an illimitable claim upon his bride's patience.
He told his another to speak to her openly.

"Why not you, my Carlo?" said the countess.

"Because, mother, if I speak to her, I shall end by throwing out my arms
and calling for the priest."

"I would clap hands to that."

"We will see; it may be soon or late, but it can't be now."

"How much am I to tell her, Carlo?"

"Enough to keep her from fretting."

The countess then asked herself how much she knew. Her habit of receiving
her son's word and will as supreme kept her ignorant of anything beyond
the outline of his plans; and being told to speak openly of them to
another, she discovered that her acquiescing imagination supplied the
chief part of her knowledge. She was ashamed also to have it thought,
even by Carlo, that she had not gathered every detail of his occupation,
so that she could not argue against him, and had to submit to see her
dearest wishes lightly swept aside.

"I beg you to tell me what you think of Countess d'Isorella; not the
afterthought," she said to Vittoria.

"She is beautiful, dear Countess Ammiani."

"Call me mother now and then. Yes; she is beautiful. She has a bad name."

"Envy must have given it, I think."

"Of course she provokes envy. But I say that her name is bad, as envy
could not make it. She is a woman who goes on missions, and carries a
husband into society like a passport. You have only thought of her
beauty?"

"I can see nothing else," said Vittoria, whose torture at the sight of
the beauty was appeased by her disingenuous pleading on its behalf.

"In my time Beauty was a sinner," the countess resumed. "My confessor has
filled my ears with warnings that it is a net to the soul, a weapon for
devils. May the saints of Paradise make bare the beauty of this woman.
She has persuaded Carlo that she is serving the country. You have let him
lie here alone in a fruitless bed, silly girl. He stayed for you while
his comrades called him to Vercelli, where they are assembled. The man
whom he salutes as his Chief gave him word to go there. They are bound
for Rome. Ah me! Rome is a great name, but Lombardy is Carlo's natal
home, and Lombardy bleeds. You were absent--how long you were absent! If
you could know the heaviness of those days of his waiting for you. And it
was I who kept him here! I must have omitted a prayer, for he would have
been at Vercelli now with Luciano and Emilio, and you might have gone to
him; but he met this woman, who has convinced him that Piedmont will make
a Winter march, and that his marriage must be delayed." The countess
raised her face and drooped her hands from the wrists, exclaiming, "If I
have lately omitted one prayer, enlighten me, blessed heaven! I am blind;
I cannot see for my son; I am quite blind. I do not love the woman;
therefore I doubt myself. You, my daughter, tell me your thought of her,
tell me what you think. Young eyes observe; young heads are sometimes
shrewd in guessing."

Vittoria said, after a pause, "I will believe her to be true, if she
supports the king." It was hardly truthful speaking on her part.

"How can Carlo have been persuaded!" the countess sighed.

"By me?" Victoria asked herself, and for a moment she was exulting.

She spoke from that emotion when it had ceased to animate her.

"Carlo was angry with the king. He echoed Agostino, but Agostino does not
sting as he did, and Carlo cannot avoid seeing what the king has
sacrificed. Perhaps the Countess d'Isorella has shown him promises of
fresh aid in the king's handwriting. Suffering has made Carlo Alberto one
with the Republicans, if he had other ambitions once. And Carlo dedicates
his blood to Lombardy: he does rightly. Dear countess--my mother! I have
made him wait for me; I will be patient in waiting for him. I know that
Countess d'Isorella is intimate with the king. There is a man named Barto
Rizzo, who thinks me a guilty traitress, and she is making use of this
man. That must be her reason for prohibiting the marriage. She cannot be
false if she is capable of uniting extreme revolutionary agents and the
king in one plot, I think; I do not know." Vittoria concluded her perfect
expression of confidence with this atoning doubtfulness.

Countess Ammiani obtained her consent that she would not quit her side.

After Violetta had gone, Carlo, though he shunned secret interviews,
addressed his betrothed as one who was not strange to his occupation and
the trial his heart was undergoing. She could not doubt that she was
beloved, in spite of the colourlessness and tonelessness of a love that
appealed to her intellect. He showed her a letter he had received from
Laura, laughing at its abuse of Countess d'Isorella, and the sarcasms
levelled at himself.

In this letter Laura said that she was engaged in something besides
nursing.

Carlo pointed his finger to the sentence, and remarked, "I must have your
promise--a word from you is enough--that you will not meddle with any
intrigue."

Vittoria gave the promise, half trusting it to bring the lost bloom of
their love to him; but he received it as a plain matter of necessity.
Certain of his love, she wondered painfully that it should continue so
barren of music.

"Why am I to pledge myself that I will be useless?" she asked. "You mean,
my Carlo, that I am to sit still, and watch, and wait."

He answered, "I will tell you this much: I can be struck vitally through
you. In the game I am playing, I am able to defend myself. If you enter
it, distraction begins. Stay with my mother."

"Am I to know nothing?"

"Everything--in good time."

"I might--might I not help you, my Carlo?"

"Yes; and nobly too. And I show you the way."

Agostino and Carlo made an expedition to Turin. Before he went, Carlo
took her in his arms.

"Is it coming?" she said, shutting her eyelids like a child expecting the
report of firearms.

He pressed his lips to the closed eyes. "Not yet; but are you growing
timid?"

His voice seemed to reprove her.

She could have told him that keeping her in the dark among unknown
terrors ruined her courage; but the minutes were too precious, his touch
too sweet. In eyes and hands he had become her lover again. The blissful
minutes rolled away like waves that keep the sunshine out at sea.

Her solitude in the villa was beguiled by the arrival of the score of an
operatic scena, entitled "HAGAR," by Rocco Ricci, which she fancied that
either Carlo or her dear old master had sent, and she devoured it. She
thought it written expressly for her. With HAGAR she communed during the
long hours, and sang herself on to the verge of an imagined desert beyond
the mountain-shadowed lake and the last view of her beloved Motterone.
Hagar's face of tears in the Brerawas known to her; and Hagar in her
'Addio' gave the living voice to that dumb one. Vittoria revelled in the
delicious vocal misery. She expanded with the sorrow of poor Hagar, whose
tears refreshed her, and parted her from her recent narrowing
self-consciousness. The great green mountain fronted her like a living
presence. Motterone supplied the place of the robust and venerable
patriarch, whom she reproached, and worshipped, but with a fathomless
burdensome sense of cruel injustice, deeper than the tears or the voice
which spoke of it: a feeling of subjected love that was like a mother's
giving suck to a detested child. Countess Ammiani saw the abrupt
alteration of her step and look with a dim surprise. "What do you conceal
from me?" she asked, and supplied the answer by charitably attributing it
to news that the signora Piaveni was coming.

When Laura came, the countess thanked her, saying, "I am a wretched
companion for this boiling head."

Laura soon proved to her that she had been the best, for after very few
hours Vittoria was looking like the Hagar on the canvas.

A woman such as Violetta d'Isorella was of the sort from which Laura
shrank with all her feminine power of loathing; but she spoke of her with
some effort at personal tolerance until she heard of Violetta's
stipulation for the deferring of Carlo's marriage, and contrived to guess
that Carlo was reserved and unfamiliar with his betrothed. Then she cried
out, "Fool that he is! Is it ever possible to come to the end of the
folly of men? She has inflamed his vanity. She met him when you were
holding him waiting, and no doubt she commenced with lamentations over
the country, followed by a sigh, a fixed look, a cheerful air, and the
assurance to him that she knew it--uttered as if through the keyhole of
the royal cabinet--she knew that Sardinia would break the Salasco
armistice in a mouth:--if only, if the king could be sure of support from
the youth of Lombardy."

"Do you suspect the unhappy king?" Vittoria interposed.

"Grasp your colours tight," said Laura, nodding sarcastic approbation of
such fidelity, and smiling slightly. "There has been no mention of the
king. Countess d'Isorella is a spy and a tool of the Jesuits, taking pay
from all parties--Austria as well, I would swear. Their object is to
paralyze the march on Rome, and she has won Carlo for them. I am told
that Barto Rizzo is another of her conquests. Thus she has a madman and a
fool, and what may not be done with a madman and a fool? However, I have
set a watch on her. She must have inflamed Carlo's vanity. He has it,
just as they all have. There's trickery: I would rather behold the boy
charging at the head of a column than putting faith in this base
creature. She must have simulated well," Laura went on talking to
herself.

"What trickery?" said Vittoria.

"He was in love with the woman when he was a lad," Laura replied, and
pertinently to Vittoria's feelings. This threw the moist shade across her
features.

Beppo in Turin and Luigi on the lake were the watch set on Countess
d'Isorella; they were useless except to fortify Laura's suspicions. The
Duchess of Graatli wrote mere gossip from Milan. She mentioned that Anna
of Lenkenstein had visited with her the tomb of her brother Count Paul at
Bologna, and had returned in double mourning; and that Madame
Sedley--"the sister of our poor ruined Pierson"--had obtained grace, for
herself at least, from Anna, by casting herself at Anna's feet,--and that
they were now friends.

Vittoria felt ashamed of Adela.

When Carlo returned, the signora attacked him boldly with all her
weapons; reproached him; said, "Would my husband have treated me in such
a manner?" Carlo twisted his moustache and stroked his young beard for
patience. They passed from room to balcony and terrace, and Laura brought
him back into company without cessation of her fire of questions and
sarcasms, saying, "No, no; we will speak of these things publicly." She
appealed alternately to Agostino, Vittoria, and Countess Ammiani for
support, and as she certainly spoke sense, Carlo was reduced to gloom and
silence. Laura then paused. "Surely you have punished your bride enough?"
she said; and more softly, "Brother of my Giacomo! you are under an evil
spell."

Carlo started up in anger. Bending to Vittoria, he offered her his hand
to lead her out, They went together.

"A good sign," said the countess.

"A bad sign!" Laura sighed. "If he had taken me out for explanation! But
tell me, my Agostino, are you the woman's dupe?"

"I have been," Agostino admitted frankly.

"You did really put faith in her?"

"She condescends to be so excessively charming."

"You could not advance a better reason."

"It is one of our best; perhaps our very best, where your sex is
concerned, signora."

"You are her dupe no more?"

"No more. Oh, dear no!"

"You understand her now, do you?"

"For the very reason, signora, that I have been her dupe. That is, I am
beginning to understand her. I am not yet in possession of the key."

"Not yet in possession!" said Laura contemptuously; "but, never mind. Now
for Carlo."

"Now for Carlo. He declares that he never has been deceived by her."

"He is perilously vain," sighed the signora.

"Seriously"--Agostino drew out the length of his beard--"I do not suppose
that he has been--boys, you know, are so acute. He fancies he can make
her of service, and he shows some skill."

"The skill of a fish to get into the net!"

"My dearest signora, you do not allow for the times. I
remember"--Agostino peered upward through his eyelashes in a way that he
had--"I remember seeing in a meadow a gossamer running away with a
spider-thread. It was against all calculation. But, observe: there were
exterior agencies at work: a stout wind blew. The ordinary reckoning is
based on calms. Without the operation of disturbing elements, the
spider-thread would have gently detained the gossamer."

"Is that meant for my son?" Countess Ammiani asked slowly, with
incredulous emphasis.

Agostino and Laura, laughing in their hearts at the mother's mysterious
veneration for Carlo, had to explain that 'gossamer' was a poetic,
generic term, to embrace the lighter qualities of masculine youth.

A woman's figure passed swiftly by the window, which led Laura to suppose
that the couple outside had parted. She ran forth, calling to one of
them, but they came hand in hand, declaring that they had seen neither
woman nor man. "And I am happy," Vittoria whispered. She looked happy,
pale though she was.

"It is only my dreadful longing for rest which makes me pale," she said
to Laura, when they were alone. "Carlo has proved to me that he is wiser
than I am."

"A proof that you love Carlo, perhaps," Laura rejoined.

"Dearest, he speaks more gently of the king."

"It may be cunning, or it may be carelessness."

"Will nothing satisfy you, wilful sceptic? He is quite alive to the
Countess d'Isorella's character. He told me how she dazzled him once."

"Not how she has entangled him now?"

"It is not true. He told me what I should like to dream over without
talking any more to anybody. Ah, what a delight! to have known him, as
you did, when he was a boy. Can one who knew him then mean harm to him? I
am not capable of imagining it. No; he will not abandon poor broken
Lombardy, and he is right; and it is my duty to sit and wait. No shadow
shall come between us. He has said it, and I have said it. We have but
one thing to fear, which is contemptible to fear; so I am at peace."

"Love-sick," was Laura's mental comment. Yet when Carlo explained his
position to her next day, she was milder in her condemnation of him, and
even admitted that a man must be guided by such brains as he possesses.
He had conceived that his mother had a right to claim one month from him
at the close of the war; he said this reddening. Laura nodded. He
confessed that he was irritated when he met the Countess d'Isorella, with
whom, to his astonishment, he found Barto Rizzo. She had picked him up,
weak from a paroxysm, on the high-road to Milan. "And she tamed the
brute," said Carlo, in admiration of her ability; "she saw that he was
plot-mad, and she set him at work on a stupendous plot; agents running
nowhere, and scribblings concentring in her work-basket. You smile at me,
as if I were a similar patient, signora. But I am my own agent. I have
personally seen all my men in Turin and elsewhere. Violetta has not one
grain of love for her country; but she can be made to serve it. As for
me, I have gone too far to think of turning aside and drilling with
Luciano. He may yet be diverted from Rome, to strike another blow for
Lombardy. The Chief, I know, has some religious sentiment about Rome. So
might I have; it is the Head of Italy. Let us raise the body first. And
we have been beaten here. Great Gods! we will have another fight for it
on the same spot, and quickly. Besides, I cannot face Luciano and tell
him why I was away from him in the dark hour. How can I tell him that I
was lingering to bear a bride to the altar? while he and the rest--poor
fellows! Hard enough to have to mention it to you, signora!"

She understood his boyish sense of shame. Making smooth allowances for a
feeling natural to his youth and the circumstances, she said, "I am your
sister, for you were my husband's brother in arms, Carlo. We two speak
heart to heart: I sometimes fancy you have that voice: you hurt me with
it more than you know; gladden me too! My Carlo, I wish to hear why
Countess d'Isorella objects to your marriage."

"She does not object."

"An answer that begins by quibbling is not propitious. She opposes it."

"For this reason: you have not forgotten the bronze butterfly?"

"I see more clearly," said Laura, with a start.

"There appears to be no cure for the brute's mad suspicion of her," Carlo
pursued: "and he is powerful among the Milanese. If my darling takes my
name, he can damage much of my influence, and--you know what there is to
be dreaded from a fanatic."

Laura nodded, as if in full agreement with him, and said, after
meditating a minute, "What sort of a lover is this!"

She added a little laugh to the singular interjection.

"Yes, I have also thought of a secret marriage," said Carlo, stung by her
penetrating instinct so that he was enabled to read the meaning in her
mind.

"The best way, when you are afflicted by a dilemma of such a character,
my Carlo," the signora looked at him, "is to take a chess-table and make
your moves on it. 'King--my duty;' 'Queen--my passion;' 'Bishop--my
social obligation;' 'Knight--my what-you-will and my round-the-corner
wishes.' Then, if you find that queen may be gratified without
endangering king, and so forth, why, you may follow your inclinations;
and if not, not. My Carlo, you are either enviably cool, or you are an
enviable hypocrite."

"The matter is not quite so easily settled as that," said Carlo.

On the whole, though against her preconception, Laura thought him an
honest lover, and not the player of a double game. She saw that Vittoria
should have been with him in the critical hour of defeat, when his
passions were down, and heaven knows what weakness of our common manhood,
that was partly pride, partly love-craving, made his nature waxen to
every impression; a season, as Laura knew, when the mistress of a loyal
lover should not withhold herself from him. A nature tender like Carlo's,
and he bearing an enamoured heart, could not, as Luciano Romara had done,
pass instantly from defeat to drill. And vain as Carlo was (the vanity
being most intricate and subtle, like a nervous fluid), he was very open
to the belief that he could diplomatize as well as fight, and lead a
movement yet better than follow it. Even so the signora tried to read his
case.

They were all, excepting Countess Ammiani ("who will never, I fear, do me
this honour," Violetta wrote, and the countess said, "Never," and quoted
a proverb), about to pass three or four days at the villa of Countess
d'Isorella. Before they set out, Vittoria received a portentous envelope
containing a long scroll, that was headed "YOUR CRIMES," and detailing a
lest of her offences against the country, from the revelation of the plot
in her first letter to Wilfrid, to services rendered to the enemy during
the war, up to the departure of Charles Albert out of forsaken Milan.

"B. R." was the undisguised signature at the end of the scroll.

Things of this description restored her old war-spirit to Vittoria. She
handed the scroll to Laura; Laura, in great alarm, passed it on to Carlo.
He sent for Angelo Guidascarpi in haste, for Carlo read it as an
ante-dated justificatory document to some mischievous design, and he
desired that hands as sure as his own, and yet more vigilant eyes, should
keep watch over his betrothed.




CHAPTER XXXVIII

VIOLETTA D'ISORELLA

The villa inhabited by Countess d'Isorella was on the water's edge,
within clear view of the projecting Villa Ricciardi, in that
darkly-wooded region of the lake which leads up to the Italian-Swiss
canton.

Violetta received here an envoy from Anna of Lenkenstein, direct out of
Milan: an English lady, calling herself Mrs. Sedley, and a particular
friend of Countess Anna. At the first glance Violetta saw that her
visitor had the pretension to match her arts against her own; so, to
sound her thoroughly, she offered her the hospitalities of the villa for
a day or more. The invitation was accepted. Much to Violetta's
astonishment, the lady betrayed no anxiety to state the exact terms of
her mission: she appeared, on the contrary, to have an unbounded
satisfaction in the society of her hostess, and prattled of herself and
Antonio-Pericles, and her old affection for Vittoria, with the wiliest
simplicity, only requiring to be assured at times that she spoke
intelligible Italian and exquisite French. Violetta supposed her to feel
that she commanded the situation. Patient study of this woman revealed to
Violetta the amazing fact that she was dealing with a born bourgeoise,
who, not devoid of petty acuteness, was unaffectedly enjoying her noble
small-talk, and the prospect of a footing in Italian high society.
Violetta smiled at the comedy she had been playing in, scarcely
reproaching herself for not having imagined it. She proceeded to the
point of business without further delay.

Adela Sedley had nothing but a verbal message to deliver. The Countess
Anna of Lenkenstein offered, on her word of honour as a noblewoman, to
make over the quarter of her estate and patrimony to the Countess
d'Isorella, if the latter should succeed in thwarting--something.

Forced to speak plainly, Adela confessed she thought she knew the nature
of that something.

To preclude its being named, Violetta then diverged from the subject.

"We will go round to your friend the signor Antonio-Pericles at Villa
Ricciardi," she said. "You will see that he treats me familiarly, but he
is not a lover of mine. I suspect your 'something' has something to do
with the Jesuits."

Adela Sedley replied to the penultimate sentence: "It would not surprise
me, indeed, to hear of any number of adorers."

"I have the usual retinue, possibly," said Violetta.

"Dear countess, I could be one of them myself!" Adela burst out with
tentative boldness.

"Then, kiss me."

And behold, they interchanged that unsweet feminine performance.

Adela's lips were unlocked by it.

"How many would envy me, dear Countess d'Isorella!"

She really conceived that she was driving into Violetta's heart by the
great high-road of feminine vanity. Violetta permitted her to think as
she liked.

"Your countrywomen, madame, do not make large allowances for beauty, I
hear."

"None at all. But they are so stiff! so frigid! I know one, a Miss Ford,
now in Italy, who would not let me have a male friend, and a character,
in conjunction."

"You are acquainted with Count Karl Lenkenstein?"

Adela blushingly acknowledged it.

"The whisper goes that I was once admired by him," said Violetta.

"And by Count Ammiani."

"By count? by milord? by prince? by king?"

"By all who have good taste."

"Was it jealousy, then, that made Countess Anna hate me?"

"She could not--or she cannot now."

"Because I have not taken possession of her brother."

"I could not--may I say it?--I could not understand his infatuation until
Countess Anna showed me the portrait of Italy's most beautiful living
woman. She told me to look at the last of the Borgia family."

Violetta laughed out clear music. "And now you see her?"

"She said that it had saved her brother's life. It has a star and a
scratch on the left cheek from a dagger. He wore it on his heart, and an
assassin struck him there: a true romance. Countess Anna said to me that
it had saved one brother, and that it should help to avenge the other.
She has not spoken to me of Jesuits."

"Nothing at all of the Jesuits?" said Violetta carelessly. "Perhaps she
wishes to use my endeavours to get the Salaseo armistice prolonged, and
tempts me, knowing I am a prodigal. Austria is victorious, you know, but
she wants peace. Is that the case? I do not press you to answer."

Adela replied hesitatingly: "Are you aware, countess, whether there is
any truth in the report that Countess Lena has a passion for Count
Ammiani?"

"Ah, then," said Violetta, "Countess Lena's sister would naturally wish
to prevent his contemplated marriage! We may have read the riddle at
last. Are you discreet? If you are, you will let it be known that I had
the honour of becoming intimate with you in Turin--say, at the Court. We
shall meet frequently there during winter, I trust, if you care to make a
comparison of the Italian with the Austrian and the English nobility."

An eloquent "Oh!" escaped from Adela's bosom. She had certainly not
expected to win her way with this estimable Italian titled lady thus
rapidly. Violetta had managed her so well that she was no longer sure
whether she did know the exact nature of her mission, the words of which
she had faithfully transmitted as having been alone confided to her. It
was with chagrin that she saw Pericles put his fore-finger on a salient
dimple of the countess's cheek when he welcomed them. He puffed and blew
like one working simultaneously at bugle and big drum on hearing an
allusion to Victoria. The mention of the name of that abominable
traitress was interdicted at Villa Ricciardi, he said; she had dragged
him at two armies' tails to find his right senses at last: Pericles was
cured of his passion for her at last. He had been mad, but he was
cured--and so forth, in the old strain. His preparations for a private
operatic performance diverted him from these fierce incriminations, and
he tripped busily from spot to spot, conducting the ladies over the
tumbled lower floors of the spacious villa, and calling their admiration
on the desolation of the scene. Then they went up to the maestro's room.
Pericles became deeply considerate for the master's privacy. "He is my
slave; the man has ruined himself for la Vittoria; but I respect the
impersonation of art," he said under his breath to the ladies as they
stood at the door; "hark!" The piano was touched, and the voice of Irma
di Karski broke out in a shrill crescendo. Rocco Ricci within gave tongue
to the vehement damnatory dance of Pericles outside. Rocco struck his
piano again encouragingly for a second attempt, but Irma was sobbing. She
was heard to say: "This is the fifteenth time you have pulled me down in
one morning. You hate me; you do; you hate me." Rocco ran his fingers
across the keys, and again struck the octave for Irma. Pericles wiped his
forehead, when, impenitent and unteachable, she took the notes in the
manner of a cock. He thumped at the door violently and entered.

"Excellent! horrid! brava! abominable! beautiful! My Irma, you have
reached the skies. You ascend like a firework, and crown yourself at the
top. No more to-day; but descend at your leisure, my dear, and we will
try to mount again by-and-by, and not so fast, if you please. Ha! your
voice is a racehorse. You will learn to ride him with temper and
judgement, and you will go. Not so, my Rocco? Irma, you want repose, my
dear. One thing I guarantee to you--you will please the public. It is a
minor thing that you should please me."

Countess d'Isorella led Irma away, and had to bear with many fits of
weeping, and to assent to the force of all the charges of vindictive
conspiracy and inveterate malice with which the jealous creature assailed
Vittoria's name. The countess then claimed her ear for half-a-minute.

"Have you had any news of Countess Anna lately?"

Irma had not; she admitted it despondently. "There is such a vile
conspiracy against me in Italy--and Italy is a poor singer's fame--that I
should be tempted to do anything. And I detest la Vittoria. She has such
a hold on this Antonio-Pericles, I don't see how I can hurt her, unless I
meet her and fly at her throat."

"You naturally detest her," said the countess. "Repeat Countess Anna's
proposal to you."

"It was insulting--she offered me money."

"That you should persuade me to assist you in preventing la Vittoria's
marriage to Count Ammiani?"

"Dear lady, you know I did not try to persuade you."

"You knew that you would not succeed, my Irma. But Count Ammiani will not
marry her; so you will have a right to claim some reward. I do not think
that la Vittoria is quite idle. Look out for yourself, my child. If you
take to plotting, remember it is a game of two."

"If she thwarts me in one single step, I will let loose that madman on
her," said Irma, trembling.

"You mean the signor Antonio-Pericles?"

"No; I mean that furious man I saw at your villa, dear countess."

"Ah! Barto Rizzo. A very furious man. He bellowed when he heard her name,
I remember. You must not do it. But, for Count Ammiani's sake, I desire
to see his marriage postponed, at least."

"Where is she?" Irma inquired.

The countess shrugged. "Even though I knew, I could not prudently tell
you in your present excited state."

She went to Pericles for a loan of money. Pericles remarked that there
was not much of it in Turin. "But, countess, you whirl the gold-pieces
like dust from your wheels; and a spy, my good soul, a lovely secret
emissary, she will be getting underpaid if she allows herself to want
money. There is your beauty; it is ripe, but it is fresh, and it is
extraordinary. Yes; there is your beauty." Before she could obtain a
promise of the money, Violetta had to submit to be stripped to her
character, which was hard; but on the other hand, Pericles exacted no
interest on his money, and it was not often that he exacted a return of
it in coin. Under these circumstances, ladies in need of money can find
it in their hearts to pardon mere brutality of phrase. Pericles promised
to send it to the countess on one condition; which condition he
cancelled, saying dejectedly, "I do not care to know where she is. I will
not know."

"She has the score of Hagar, wherever she is," said Violetta, "and when
she hears that you have done the scene without her aid, you will have
stuck a dagger in her bosom."

"Not," Pericles cried in despair, "not if she should hear Irma's Hagar!
To the desert with Irma. It is the place for a crab-apple. Bravo,
Abraham! you were wise."

Pericles added that Montini was hourly expected, and that there was to be
a rehearsal in the evening.

When she had driven home, Violetta found Barto Rizzo's accusatory paper
laid on her writing-desk. She gathered the contents in a careless glance,
and walked into the garden alone, to look for Carlo.

He was leaning on the balustrade of the terrace, near the water-gate,
looking into the deep clear lake-water. Violetta placed herself beside
him without a greeting.

"You are watching fish for coolness, my Carlo?"

"Yes," he said, and did not turn to her face.

"You were very angry when you arrived?"

She waited for his reply.

"Why do you not speak, Carlino?"

"I am watching fish for coolness," he said.

"Meantime," said Violetta, "I am scorched."

He looked up, and led her to an arch of shade, where he sat quite silent.

"Can anything be more vexing than this?" she was reduced to exclaim.

"Ah!" said he, "you would like the catalogue to be written out for you in
a big bold hand, possibly, with a terrific initials at the end of the
page."

"Carlo, you have done worse than that. When I saw you first here, what
crimes did you not accuse me of? what names did you not scatter on my
head? and what things did I not, confess to? I bore the unkindness, for
you were beaten, and you wanted a victim. And, my dear friend,
considering that I am after all a woman, my forbearance has subsequently
been still greater."

"How?" he asked. Her half-pathetic candour melted him.

"You must, have a lively memory for the uses of forgetfulness, Carlo,
When you had scourged me well, you thought it proper to raise me up and
give me comfort. I was wicked for serving the king, and therefore the
country, as a spy; but I was to persevere, and cancel my iniquities by
betraying those whom I served to you. That was your instructive precept.
Have I done it or not? Answer, too have I done it for any payment beyond
your approbation? I persuaded you to hope for Lombardy, and without any
vaunting of my own patriotism. You have seen and spoken to the men I
directed you to visit. If their heads master yours, I shall be reprobated
for it, I know surely; but I am confident as yet that you can match them.
In another month I expect to see the king over the Ticino once more, and
Carlo in Brescia with his comrades. You try to penetrate my eyes. That's
foolish; I can make them glass. Read me by what I say and what I do. I do
not entreat you to trust me; I merely beg that you will trust your own
judgement of me by what I have helped you to do hitherto. You and I, my
dear boy, have had some trifling together. Admit that another woman would
have refused to surrender you as I did when your unruly Vittoria was at
last induced to come to you from Milan. Or, another woman would have had
her revenge on discovering that she had been a puppet of soft eyes and a
lover's quarrel with his mistress. Instead of which, I let you go. I am
opposed to the marriage, it's true; and you know why."

Carlo had listened to Violetta, measuring the false and the true in this
recapitulation of her conduct with cool accuracy until she alluded to
their personal relations. Thereat his brows darkened.

"We had I some trifling together," he said, musingly.

"Is it going to be denied in these sweeter days?" Violetta reddened.

"The phrase is elastic. Suppose my bride were to hear it?"

"It was addressed to your ears, Carlo."

"It cuts two ways. Will you tell me when it was that I last had the
happiness of saluting you, lip to lip?"

"In Brescia--before I had espoused an imbecile--two nights before my
marriage--near the fountain of the Greek girl with a pitcher."

Pride and anger nerved the reply. It was uttered in a rapid low breath.
Coming altogether unexpectedly, it created an intense momentary revulsion
of his feelings by conjuring up his boyish love in a scene more living
than the sunlight.

He lifted her hand to his mouth. He was Italian enough, though a lover,
to feel that she deserved more. She had reddened deliciously, and
therewith hung a dewy rosy moisture on her underlids. Raising her eyes,
she looked like a cut orange to a thirsty lip. He kissed her, saying,
"Pardon."

"Keep it secret, you mean?" she retorted. "Yes, I pardon that wish of
yours. I can pardon much to my beauty."

She stood up as majestically as she had spoken.

"You know, my Violetta, that I am madly in love."

"I have learnt it."

"You know it:--what else would . . ? If I were not lost in love, could I
see you as I do and let Brescia be the final chapter?"

Violetta sighed. "I should have preferred its being so rather than this
superfluous additional line to announce an end, like a foolish staff on
the edge of a cliff. You thought that you were saluting a leper, or a
saint?"

"Neither. If ever we can talk together again, as we have done," Carlo
said gloomily, "I will tell you what I think of myself."

"No, but Richelieu might have behaved . . . . Ah! perhaps not quite in
the same way," she corrected her flowing apology for him. "But then, he
was a Frenchman. He could be flighty without losing his head. Dear
Italian Carlo! Yes, in the teeth of Barto Rizzo, and for the sake of the
country, marry her at once. It will be the best thing for you; really the
best. You want to know from me the whereabout of Barto Rizzo. He may be
in the mountain over Stresa, or in Milan. He also has thrown off my yoke,
such as it was! I do assure you, Carlo, I have no command over him: but,
mind, I half doat on the wretch. No man made me desperately in love with
myself before he saw me, when I stopped his raving in the middle of the
road with one look of my face. There was foam on his beard and round his
eyes; the poor wretch took out his handkerchief, and he sobbed. I don't
know how many luckless creatures he had killed on his way; but when I
took him into my carriage--king, emperor, orator on stilts, minister of
police not one has flattered me as he did, by just gazing at me. Beauty
can do as much as music, my Carlo."

Carlo thanked heaven that Violetta had no passion in her nature. She had
none: merely a leaning toward evil, a light sense of shame, a desire for
money, and in her heart a contempt for the principles she did not
possess, but which, apart from the intervention of other influences,
could occasionally sway her actions. Friendship, or rather the shadowy
recovery of a past attachment that had been more than friendship,
inclined her now and then to serve a master who failed distinctly to
represent her interests; and when she met Carlo after the close of the
war, she had really set to work in hearty kindliness to rescue him from
what she termed "shipwreck with that disastrous Republican crew." He had
obtained greater ascendency over her than she liked; yet she would have
forgiven it, as well as her consequent slight deviation from direct
allegiance to her masters in various cities, but for Carlo's commanding
personal coolness. She who had tamed a madman by her beauty, was
outraged, and not unnaturally, by the indifference of a former lover.

Later in the day, Laura and Vittoria, with Agostino, reached the villa;
and Adela put her lips to Vittoria's ear, whispering: "Naughty! when are
you to lose your liberty to turn men's heads?" and then she heaved a sigh
with Wilfrid's name. She had formed the acquaintance of Countess
d'Isorella in Turin, she said, and satisfactorily repeated her lesson,
but with a blush. She was little more than a shade to Vittoria, who
wondered what she had to live for. After the early evening dinner, when
sunlight and the colours of the sun were beyond the western mountains,
they pushed out on the lake. A moon was overhead, seeming to drop lower
on them as she filled with light.

Agostino and Vittoria fell upon their theme of discord, as usual--the
King of Sardinia.

"We near the vesper hour, my daughter," said Agostino; "you would provoke
me to argumentation in heaven itself. I am for peace. I remember looking
down on two cats with arched backs in the solitary arena of the Verona
amphitheatre. We men, my Carlo, will not, in the decay of time, so
conduct ourselves."

Vittoria looked on Laura and thought of the cannon-sounding hours, whose
echoes rolled over their slaughtered hope. The sun fell, the moon shone,
and the sun would rise again, but Italy lay face to earth. They had seen
her together before the enemy. That recollection was a joy that stood,
though the winds beat at it, and the torrents. She loved her friend's
worn eyelids and softly-shut mouth; the after-glow of battle seemed on
them; the silence of the field of carnage under heaven;--and the patient
turning of Laura's eyes this way and that to speakers upon common things,
covered the despair of her heart as with a soldier's cloak.

Laura met the tender study of Vittoria's look, and smiled.

They neared the Villa Ricciardi, and heard singing. The villa was lighted
profusely, so that it made a little mock-sunset on the lake.

"Irma!" said Vittoria, astonished at the ring of a well-known voice that
shot up in firework fashion, as Pericles had said of it. Incredulous, she
listened till she was sure; and then glanced hurried questions at all
eyes. Violetta laughed, saying, "You have the score of Rocco Ricci's
Hagar."

The boat drew under the blazing windows, and half guessing, half hearing,
Vittoria understood that Pericles was giving an entertainment here, and
had abjured her. She was not insensible to the slight. This feeling,
joined to her long unsatisfied craving to sing, led her to be intolerant
of Irma's style, and visibly vexed her.

Violetta whispered: "He declares that your voice is cracked: show him!
Burst out with the 'Addio' of Hagar. May she not, Carlo? Don't you permit
the poor soul to sing? She cannot contain herself."

Carlo, Adela, Agostino, and Violetta prompted her, and, catching a pause
in the villa, she sang the opening notes of Hagar's 'Addio' with her old
glorious fulness of tone and perfect utterance.

The first who called her name was Rocco Ricci, but Pericles was the first
to rush out and hang over the boat. "Witch! traitress! infernal ghost!
heart of ice!" and in English "humbug!" and in French "coquin!":--these
were a few of the titles he poured on her. Rocco Ricci and Montini kissed
hands to her, begging her to come to them. She was very willing
outwardly, and in her heart most eager; but Carlo bade the rowers push
off. Then it was pitiful to hear the shout of abject supplication from
Pericles. He implored Count Ammiani's pardon, Vittoria's pardon, for
telling her what she was; and as the boat drew farther away, he offered
her sums of money to enter the villa and sing the score of Hagar. He
offered to bear the blame of her bad behaviour to him, said he would
forget it and stamp it out; that he would pay for the provisioning of a
regiment of volunteers for a whole month; that he would present her
marriage trousseau to her--yes, and let her marry. "Sandra! my dear! my
dear!" he cried, and stretched over the parapet speechless, like a puppet
slain.

So strongly did she comprehend the sincerity of his passion for her voice
that she could or would see nothing extravagant in this demonstration,
which excited unrestrained laughter in every key from her companions in
the boat. When the boat was about a hundred yards from the shore, and in
full moonlight, she sang the great "Addio" of Hagar. At the close of it,
she had to feel for her lover's hand blindly. No one spoke, either at the
Villa Ricciardi, or about her. Her voice possessed the mountain-shadowed
lake.

The rowers pulled lustily home through chill air.

Luigi and Beppo were at the villa, both charged with news from Milan.
Beppo claiming the right to speak first, which Luigi granted with a
magnificent sweep of his hand, related that Captain Weisspriess, of the
garrison, had wounded Count Medole in a duel severely. He brought a
letter to Vittoria from Merthyr, in which Merthyr urged her to prevent
Count Ammiani's visiting Milan for any purpose whatever, and said that he
was coming to be present at, her marriage. She was reading this while
Luigi delivered his burden; which was, that in a subsequent duel, the
slaughtering captain had killed little Leone Rufo, the gay and gallant
boy, Carlo's comrade, and her friend.

Luigi laughed scornfully at his rival, and had edged away--out of sight
before he could be asked who had sent him. Beppo ignominiously confessed
that he had not heard of this second duel. At midnight he was on
horseback, bound for Milan, with a challenge to the captain from Carlo,
who had a jealous fear that Luciano at Vercelli might have outstripped
him. Carlo requested the captain to guarantee him an hour's immunity in
the city on a stated day, or to name any spot on the borders of Piedmont
for the meeting. The challenge was sent with Countess Ammiani's
approbation and Laura's. Vittoria submitted.

That done, Carlo gave up his heart to his bride. A fight in prospect was
the hope of wholesome work after his late indecision and double play.
They laughed at themselves, accused hotly, and humbly excused themselves,
praying for mutual pardon.

She had behaved badly in disobeying his mandate from Brescia.

Yes, but had he not been over-imperious?

True; still she should have remembered her promise in the Vicentino.

She did indeed; but how could she quit her wounded friend Merthyr?

Perhaps not: then, why had she sent word to him from Milan that she would
be at Pallanza?

This question knocked at a sealed chamber. She was silent, and Carlo had
to brood over something as well. He gave her hints of his foolish pique,
his wrath and bitter baffled desire for her when, coming to Pallanza, he
came to an empty house. But he could not help her to see, for he did not
himself feel, that he had been spurred by silly passions, pique, and
wrath, to plunge instantly into new political intrigue; and that some of
his worst faults had become mixed up with his devotion to his country.
Had he taken Violetta for an ally in all purity of heart? The kiss he had
laid on the woman's sweet lips had shaken his absolute belief in that. He
tried to set his brain travelling backward, in order to contemplate
accurately the point of his original weakness. It being almost too severe
a task for any young head, Carlo deemed it sufficient that he should
say--and this he felt--that he was unworthy of his beloved.

Could Vittoria listen to such stuff? She might have kissed him to stop
the flow of it, but kissings were rare between them; so rare, that when
they had put mouth to mouth, a little quivering spire of flame, dim at
the base, stood to mark the spot in their memories. She moved her hand,
as to throw aside such talk. Unfretful in blood, chaste and keen, she at
least knew the foolishness of the common form of lovers' trifling when
there is a burning love to keep under, and Carlo saw that she did, and
adored her for this highest proof of the passion of her love.

"In three days you will be mine, if I do not hear from Milan? within
five, if I do?" he said.

Vittoria gave him the whole beauty of her face a divine minute, and bowed
it assenting. Carlo then led her to his mother, before whom he embraced
her for the comfort of his mother's heart. They decided that there should
be no whisper of the marriage until the couple were one. Vittoria
obtained the countess's permission to write for Merthyr to attend her at
the altar. She had seen Weisspriess fall in combat, and she had perfect
faith in her lover's right hand.




CHAPTER XXXIX

ANNA OF LENKENSTEIN

Captain Weisspriess replied to Carlo Ammiani promptly, naming Camerlata
by Como, as the place where he would meet him.

He stated at the end of some temperate formal lines, that he had given
Count Ammiani the preference over half-a-dozen competitors for the honour
of measuring swords with him; but that his adversary must not expect him
to be always ready to instruct the young gentlemen of the
Lombardo-Venetian province in the arts of fence; and therefore he begged
to observe, that his encounter with Count Ammiani would be the last
occasion upon which he should hold himself bound to accept a challenge
from Count Ammiani's countrymen.

It was quite possible, the captain said, drawing a familiar illustration
from the gaming-table, to break the stoutest Bank in the world by a
perpetual multiplication of your bets, and he was modest enough to
remember that he was but one man against some thousands, to contend with
all of whom would be exhausting.

Consequently the captain desired Count Ammiani to proclaim to his
countrymen that the series of challenges must terminate; and he requested
him to advertize the same in a Milanese, a Turin, and a Neapolitan
journal.

"I am not a butcher," he concluded. "The task you inflict upon me is
scarcely bearable. Call it by what name you will, it is having ten shots
to one, which was generally considered an equivalent to murder. My sword
is due to you, Count Ammiani; and, as I know you to be an honourable
nobleman, I would rather you were fighting in Venice, though your cause
is hopeless, than standing up to match yourself against me. Let me add,
that I deeply respect the lady who is engaged to be united to you, and
would not willingly cross steel either with her lover or her husband. I
shall be at Camerlata at the time appointed. If I do not find you there,
I shall understand that you have done me the honour to take my humble
advice, and have gone where your courage may at least appear to have done
better service. I shall sheathe my sword and say no more about it."

All of this, save the concluding paragraph, was written under the eyes of
Countess Anna of Lenkenstein.

He carried it to his quarters, where he appended the as he deemed
it--conciliatory passage: after which he handed it to Beppo, in a square
of the barracks, with a buon'mano that Beppo received bowing, and tossed
to an old decorated regimental dog of many wounds and a veteran's
gravity. For this offence a Styrian grenadier seized him by the
shoulders, lifting him off his feet and swinging him easily, while the
dog arose from his contemplation of the coin and swayed an expectant
tail. The Styrian had dashed Beppo to earth before Weisspriess could
interpose, and the dog had got him by the throat. In the struggle Beppo
tore off the dog's medal for distinguished conduct on the field of
battle. He restored it as soon as he was free, and won unanimous plaudits
from officers and soldiers for his kindly thoughtfulness and the pretty
manner with which he dropped on one knee, and assuaged the growls, and
attached the medal to the old dog's neck. Weisspriess walked away. Beppo
then challenged his Styrian to fight. The case was laid before a couple
of sergeants, who shook their heads on hearing his condition to be that
of a serving-man, the Styrian was ready to waive considerations of
superiority; but the "judge" pronounced their veto. A soldier in the
Imperial Royal service, though he was merely a private in the ranks,
could not accept a challenge from civilians below the rank of notary,
secretary, hotel- or inn- keeper, and suchlike: servants and tradesmen he
must seek to punish in some other way; and they also had their appeal to
his commanding officer. So went the decision of the military tribunal,
until the Styrian, having contrived to make Beppo understand, by the
agency of a single Italian verb, that he wanted a blow, Beppo spun about
and delivered a stinging smack on the Styrian's cheek; which altered the
view of the case, for, under peculiar circumstances--supposing that he
did not choose to cut him down--a soldier might condescend to challenge
his civilian inferiors: "in our regiment," said the sergeants, meaning
that they had relaxed the stringency of their laws.

Beppo met his Styrian outside the city walls, and laid him flat. He
declined to fight a second; but it was represented to him, by the aid of
an interpreter, that the officers of the garrison were subjected to
successive challenges, and that the first trial of his skill might have
been nothing finer than luck; and besides, his adversary had a right to
call a champion. "We all do it," the soldiers assured him. "Now your
blood's up you're ready for a dozen of us;" which was less true of a
constitution that was quicker in expending its heat. He stood out against
a young fellow almost as limber as himself, much taller, and longer in
the reach, by whom he was quickly disabled with cuts on thigh and head.
Seeing this easy victory over him, the soldiers, previously quite civil,
cursed him for having got the better of their fallen comrade, and went
off discussing how be had done the trick, leaving him to lie there. A
peasant carried him to a small suburban inn, where he remained several
days oppressed horribly by a sense that he had forgotten something. When
he recollected what it was, he entrusted the captain's letter to his
landlady;--a good woman, but she chanced to have a scamp of a husband,
who snatched it from her and took it to his market. Beppo supposed the
letter to be on its Way to Pallauza, when it was in General Schoneck's
official desk; and soon after the breath of a scandalous rumour began to
circulate.

Captain Weisspriess had gone down to Camerlata, accompanied by a Colonel
Volpo, of an Austro-Italian regiment, and by Lieutenant Jenna. At
Camerlata a spectacled officer, Major Nagen, joined them. Weisspriess was
the less pleased with his company on hearing that he had come to witness
the meeting, in obedience to an express command of a person who was
interested in it. Jenna was the captain's friend: Volpo was seconding him
for the purpose of getting Count Ammiani to listen to reason from the
mouth of a countryman. There could be no doubt in the captain's mind that
this Major Nagen was Countess Anna's spy as well as his rival, and he
tried to be rid of him; but in addition to the shortness of sight which
was Nagen's plea for pushing his thin transparent nose into every corner,
he enjoyed at will an intermittent deafness, and could hear anything
without knowing of it. Brother officers said of Major Nagen that he was
occasionally equally senseless in the nose, which had been tweaked
without disturbing the repose of his features. He waited half-an-hour on
the ground after the appointed time, and then hurried to Milan.
Weisspriess waited an hour. Satisfied that Count Ammiani was not coming,
he exacted from Volpo and from Jenna their word of honour as Austrian
officers that they would forbear-to cast any slur on the courage of his
adversary, and would be so discreet on the subject as to imply that the
duel was a drawn affair. They pledged themselves accordingly. "There's
Nagen, it's true," said Weisspriess, as a man will say and feel that he
has done his best to prevent a thing inevitable.

Milan, and some of the journals of Milan, soon had Carlo Ammiani's name
up for challenging Weisspriess and failing to keep his appointment. It
grew to be discussed as a tremendous event. The captain received fifteen
challenges within two days; among these a second one from Luciano Romara,
whom he was beginning to have a strong desire to encounter. He repressed
it, as quondam drunkards fight off the whisper of their lips for liquor.
"No more blood," was his constant inward cry. He wanted peace; but as he
also wanted Countess Anna of Lenkenstein and her estates, it may possibly
be remarked of him that what he wanted he did not want to pay for.

At this period Wilfrid had resumed the Austrian uniform as a common
soldier in the ranks of the Kinsky regiment. General Schoneck had
obtained the privilege for him from the Marshal, General Pierson refusing
to lift a finger on his behalf. Nevertheless the uncle was not sorry to
hear the tale of his nephew's exploits during the campaign, or of the
eccentric intrepidity of the white umbrella; and both to please him, and
to intercede for Wilfrid, the tatter's old comrades recited his deeds as
a part of the treasured familiar history of the army in its late arduous
struggle.

General Pierson was chiefly anxious to know whether Countess Lena would
be willing to give her hand to Wilfrid in the event of his restoration to
his antecedent position in the army. He found her extremely excited about
Carlo Ammiani, her old playmate, and once her dear friend. She would not
speak of Wilfrid at all. To appease the chivalrous little woman, General
Pierson hinted that his nephew, being under the protection of General
Schoneck, might get some intelligence from that officer. Lena pretended
to reject the notion of her coming into communication with Wilfrid for
any earthly purpose. She said to herself, however, that her object was
pre-eminently unselfish; and as the General pointedly refused to serve
her in a matter that concerned an Italian nobleman, she sent directions
to Wilfrid to go before General Schoeneck the moment he was off duty, and
ask his assistance, in her name, to elucidate the mystery of Count
Ammiani's behaviour. The answer was a transmission of Captain
Weisspriess's letter to Carlo. Lena caused the fact of this letter having
missed its way to be circulated in the journals, and then she carried it
triumphantly to her sister, saying:

"There! I knew these reports were abase calumny."

"Reports, to what effect?" said Anna.

"That Carlo Ammiani had slunk from a combat with your duellist."

"Oh! I knew that myself," Anna remarked.

"You were the loudest in proclaiming it."

"Because I intend to ruin him."

"Carlo Ammiani? What has he done to you?"

Anna's eyes had fallen on the additional lines of the letter which she
had not dictated. She frowned and exclaimed:

"What is this? Does the man play me false? Read those lines, Lena, and
tell me, does the man mean to fight in earnest who can dare to write
them? He advises Ammiani to go to Venice. It's treason, if it is not
cowardice. And see here--he has the audacity to say that he deeply
respects the lady Ammiani is going to marry. Is Ammiani going to marry
her? I think not."

Anna dashed the letter to the floor.

"But I will make use of what's within my reach," she said, picking it up.

"Carlo Ammiani will marry her, I presume," said Lena.

"Not before he has met Captain Weisspriess, who, by the way, has obtained
his majority. And, Lena, my dear, write to inform him that we wish to
offer him our congratulations. He will be a General officer in good
time."

"Perhaps you forget that Count Ammiani is a perfect swordsman, Anna."

"Weisspriess remembers it for me, perhaps;--is that your idea, Lena?"

"He might do so profitably. You have thrown him on two swords."

"Merely to provoke the third. He is invincible. If he were not, where
would his use be?"

"Oh, how I loathe revenge!" cried Lena.

"You cannot love!" her sister retorted. "That woman calling herself
Vittoria Campa shall suffer. She has injured and defied me. How was it
that she behaved to us at Meran? She is mixed up with assassins; she is
insolent--a dark-minded slut; and she catches stupid men. My brother, my
country, and this weak Weisspriess, as I saw him lying in the Ultenthal,
cry out against her. I have no sleep. I am not revengeful. Say it, say
it, all of you! but I am not. I am not unforgiving. I worship justice,
and a black deed haunts me. Let the wicked be contrite and washed in
tears, and I think I can pardon them. But I will have them on their
knees. I hate that woman Vittoria more than I hate Angelo Guidascarpi.
Look, Lena. If both were begging for life to me, I would send him to the
gallows and her to her bedchamber; and all because I worship justice, and
believe it to be the weapon of the good and pious. You have a baby's
heart; so has Karl. He declines to second Weisspriess; he will have
nothing to do with duelling; he would behold his sisters mocked in the
streets and pass on. He talks of Paul's death like a priest. Priests are
worthy men; a great resource! Give me a priests lap when I need it. Shall
I be condemned to go to the priest and leave that woman singing? If I
did, I might well say the world's a snare, a sham, a pitfall, a horror!
It's what I don't think in any degree. It's what you think, though. Yes,
whenever you are vexed you think it. So do the priests, and so do all who
will not exert themselves to chastise. I, on the contrary, know that the
world is not made up of nonsense. Write to Weisspriess immediately; I
must have him here in an hour."

Weisspriess, on visiting the ladies to receive their congratulations, was
unprepared for the sight of his letter to Carlo Ammiani, which Anna
thrust before him after he had saluted her, bidding him read it aloud. He
perused it in silence. He was beginning to be afraid of his mistress.

"I called you Austria once, for you were always ready," Anna said, and
withdrew from him, that the sung of her words might take effect.

"God knows, I have endeavoured to earn the title in my humble way,"
Weisspriess appealed to Lena.

"Yes, Major Weisspriess, you have," she said. "Be Austria still, and
forbear toward these people as much as you can. To beat them is enough,
in my mind. I am rejoiced that you have not met Count Ammiani, for if you
had, two friends of mine, equally dear and equally skilful, would have
held their lives at one another's mercy."

"Equally!" said Weisspriess, and pulled out the length of his moustache.

"Equally courageous," Lena corrected herself. "I never distrusted Count
Ammiani's courage, nor could distrust yours."

"Equally dear!" Weisspriess tried to direct a concentrated gaze on her.

Lena evaded an answer by speaking of the rumour of Count Ammiani's
marriage.

Weisspriess was thinking with all the sagacious penetration of the
military mind, that perhaps this sister was trying to tell him that she
would be willing to usurp the piece of the other in his affections; and
if so, why should she not?

"I may cherish the idea that I am dear to you, Countess Lena?"

"When you are formally betrothed to my sister, you will know you are very
dear to me, Major Weisspriess."

"But," said he, perceiving his error, "how many persons am I to call out
before she will consent to a formal betrothal?"

Lena was half smiling at the little tentative bit of sentiment she had so
easily turned aside. Her advice to him was to refuse to fight, seeing
that he had done sufficient for glory and his good name.

He mentioned Major Nagen as a rival.

Upon this she said: "Hear me one minute. I was in my sister's bed-room on
the first night when she knew of your lying wounded in the Ultenthal. She
told you just now that she called you Austria. She adores our Austria in
you. The thought that you had been vanquished seemed like our Austria
vanquished, and she is so strong for Austria that it is really out of her
power to fancy you as defeated without suspecting foul play. So when she
makes you fight, she thinks you safe. Many are to go down because you
have gone down. Do you not see? And now, Major Weisspriess, I need not
expose my sister to you any more, I hope, or depreciate Major Nagen for
your satisfaction."

Weisspriess had no other interview with Anna for several days. She
shunned him openly. Her carriage moved off when he advanced to meet her
at the parade, or review of arms; and she did not scruple to speak in
public with Major Nagen, in the manner of those who have begun to speak
together in private. The offender received his punishment gracefully, as
men will who have been taught that it flatters them. He refused every
challenge. From Carlo Ammiani there came not a word.

It would have been a deadly lull to any fiery temperament engaged in
plotting to destroy a victim, but Anna had the patience of hatred--that
absolute malignity which can measure its exultation rather by the
gathering of its power to harm than by striking. She could lay it aside,
or sink it to the bottom of her emotions, at will, when circumstances
appeared against it. And she could do this without fretful regrets,
without looking to the future. The spirit of her hatred extracted its own
nourishment from things, like an organized creature. When foiled she
became passive, and she enjoyed--forced herself compliantly to enjoy--her
redoubled energy of hatred voluptuously, if ever a turn in events made
wreck of her scheming. She hated Vittoria for many reasons, all of them
vague within her bosom because the source of them was indefinite and lay
in the fact of her having come into collision with an opposing nature,
whose rivalry was no visible rivalry, whose triumph was an ignorance of
scorn--a woman who attracted all men, who scattered injuries with
insolent artlessness, who never appealed to forgiveness, and was a
low-born woman daring to be proud. By repute Anna was implacable, but she
had, and knew she had, the capacity for magnanimity of a certain kind;
and her knowledge of the existence of this unsuspected fund within her
justified in some degree her reckless efforts to pull her enemy down on
her knees. It seemed doubly right that she should force Vittoria to
penitence, as being good for the woman, and an end that exonerated her
own private sins committed to effect it.

Yet she did not look clearly forward to the day of Vittoria's imploring
for mercy. She had too many vexations to endure: she was an insufficient
schemer, and was too frequently thwarted to enjoy that ulterior prospect.
Her only servile instruments were Major Nagen, and Irma, who came to her
from the Villa Ricciardi, hot to do her rival any deadly injury; but
though willing to attempt much, these were apparently able to perform
little more than the menial work of vengeance. Major Nagen wrote in the
name of Weisspriess to Count Ammiani, appointing a second meeting at
Como, and stating that he would be at the villa of the Duchess of Graatli
there. Weisspriess was unsuspectingly taken down to the place by Anna and
Lena. There was a gathering of such guests as the duchess alone among her
countrywomen could assemble, under the patronage of the conciliatory
Government, and the duchess projected to give a series of brilliant
entertainments in the saloons of the Union, as she named her house-roof.
Count Serabiglione arrived, as did numerous Moderates and priest-party
men, Milanese garrison officers and others. Laura Piaveni travelled with
Countess d'Isorella and the happy Adela Sedley, from Lago Maggiore.

Laura came, as she cruelly told her friend, for the purpose of making
Victoria's excuses to the duchess. "Why can she not come herself?" Amalia
persisted in asking, and began to be afflicted with womanly curiosity.
Laura would do nothing but shrug and smile, and repeat her message. A
little after sunset, when the saloons were lighted, Weisspriess, sitting
by his Countess Anna's side, had a slip of paper placed in his hands by
one of the domestics. He quitted his post frowning with astonishment, and
muttered once, "My appointment!" Laura noticed that Anna's heavy eyelids
lifted to shoot an expressive glance at Violetta d'Isorella. She said:
"Can that have been anything hostile, do you suppose?" and glanced slyly
at her friend.

"No, no," said Amalia; "the misunderstanding is explained, and Major
Weisspriess is just as ready as Count Ammiani to listen to reason.
Besides, Count Ammiani is not so unfriendly but that if he came so near
he would come up to me, surely."

Laura brought Amalia's observation to bear upon Anna and Violetta by
turning pointedly from one to the other as she said: "As for reason,
perhaps you have chosen the word. If Count Ammiani attended an
appointment this time, he would be unreasonable."

A startled "Why?"--leaped from Anna's lips. She reddened at her impulsive
clumsiness.

Laura raised her shoulders slightly: "Do you not know?" The expression of
her face reproved Violetta, as for remissness in transmitting secret
intelligence. "You can answer why, countess," she addressed the latter,
eager to exercise her native love of conflict with this
doubtfully-faithful countrywoman;--the Austrian could feel that she had
beaten her on the essential point, and afford to give her any number of
dialectical victories.

"I really cannot answer why," Violetta said; "unless Count Ammiani is, as
I venture to hope, better employed."

"But the answer is charming and perfect," said Laura.

"Enigmatical answers are declared to be so when they come from us women,"
the duchess remarked; "but then, I fancy, women must not be the hearers,
or they will confess that they are just as much bewildered and irritated
as I am. Do speak out, my dearest. How is he better employed?"

Laura passed her eyes around the group of ladies. "If any hero of yours
had won the woman he loves, he would be right in thinking it folly to be
bound by the invitation to fight, or feast, or what you will, within a
space of three months or so; do you not agree with me?"

The different emotions on many visages made the scene curious.

"Count Ammiani has married her!" exclaimed the duchess.

"My old friend Carlo is really married!" said Lena.

Anna stared at Violetta.

The duchess, recovering from her wonder, confirmed the news by saying
that she now knew why M. Powys had left Milan in haste, three or four
days previously, as she was aware that the bride had always wished him to
be present at the ceremony of her marriage.

"Signora, may I ask you, were you present?" Violetta addressed Laura.

"I will answer most honestly that I was not," said Laura.

"The marriage was a secret one; perhaps?"

"Even for friends, you see."

"Necessarily, no doubt," Lena said, with an idea of easing her sister's
stupefaction by a sarcasm foreign to her sentiments.

Adela Sedley, later in exactly comprehending what had been spoken,
glanced about for some one who would not be unsympathetic to her
exclamation, and suddenly beheld her brother entering the room with
Weisspriess. "Wilfrid! Wilfrid! do you know she is married?"

"So they tell me," Wilfrid replied, while making his bow to the duchess.
He was much broken in appearance, but wore his usual collected manner.
Who had told him of the marriage? A person downstairs, he said; not Count
Ammiani; not signor Balderini; no one whom he saw present, no one whom he
knew.

"A very mysterious person," said the duchess.

"Then it's true after all," cried Laura. "I did but guess it." She
assured Violetta that she had only guessed it.

"Does Major Weisspriess know it to be true?" The question came from Anna.

Weisspriess coolly verified it, on the faith of a common servant's
communication.

The ladies could see that some fresh piece of mystery lay between him and
Wilfrid.

"With whom have you had an interview, and what have you heard?" asked
Lena, vexed by Wilfrid's pallid cheeks.

Both men stammered and protested, out of conceit, and were as foolish as
men are when pushed to play at mutual concealment.

The duchess's chasseur, Jacob Baumwalder Feckelwitz, stepped up to his
mistress and whispered discreetly. She gazed straight at Laura. After
hesitation she shook her head, and the chasseur retired. Amalia then came
to the rescue of the unhappy military wits that were standing a
cross-fire of sturdy interrogation.

"Do you not perceive what it is?" she said to Anna. "Major Weisspriess
meets Private Pierson at the door of my house, and forgets that he is
well-born and my guest. I may be revolutionary, but I declare that in
plain clothes Private Pierson is the equal of Major Weisspriess. If
bravery made men equals, who would be Herr Pierson's superior? Ire has
done me the honour, at a sacrifice of his pride, I am sure, to come here
and meet his sister, and rejoice me with his society. Major Weisspriess,
if I understand the case correctly, you are greatly to blame."

"I beg to assert," Weisspriess was saying as the duchess turned her
shoulder on him.

"There is really no foundation," Wilfrid began, with similar simplicity.

"What will sharpen the wits of these soldiers!" the duchess murmured
dolefully to Laura.

"But Major Weisspriess was called out of his room by a message--was that
from Private Pierson?" said Anna.

"Assuredly; I should presume so," the duchess answered for them.

"Ay; undoubtedly," Weisspriess supported her.

"Then," Laura smiled encouragement to Wilfrid, "you know nothing of Count
Ammiani's marriage after all?"

Wilfrid launched his reply on a sharp repression of his breath, "Nothing
whatever."

"And the common servant's communication was not made to you?" Anna
interrogated Weisspriess.

"I simply followed in the track of Pierson," said that officer, masking
his retreat from the position with a duck of his head and a smile, tooth
on lip.

"How could you ever suppose, child, that a common servant would be sent
to deliver such tidings? and to Major Weisspriess!" the duchess
interposed.

This broke up the Court of inquiry.

Weisspriess shortly after took his leave, on the plea that he wished to
prove his friendliness by accompanying Private Pierson, who had to be on
duty early next day in Milan. Amalia had seen him breaking from Anna in
extreme irritation, and he had only to pledge his word that he was really
bound for Milan to satisfy her. "I believe you to be at heart humane,"
she said meaningly.

"Duchess, you may be sure that I would not kill an enemy save on the
point of my sword," he answered her.

"You are a gallant man," said Amalia, and pride was in her face as she
looked on him.

She willingly consented to Wilfrid's sudden departure, as it was evident
that some shot had hit him hard.

On turning to Laura, the duchess beheld an aspect of such shrewd disgust
that she was provoked to exclaim: "What on earth is the matter now?"

Laura would favour her with no explanation until they were alone in the
duchess's boudoir, when she said that to call Weisspriess a gallant man
was an instance of unblushing adulation of brutal strength: "Gallant for
slaying a boy? Gallant because he has force of wrist?"

"Yes; gallant;--an honour to his countrymen: and an example to some of
yours," Amalia rejoined.

"See," cried Laura, "to what a degeneracy your excess of national
sentiment reduces you!"

While she was flowing on, the duchess leaned a hand across her shoulder,
and smiling kindly, said she would not allow her to utter words that she
would have to eat. "You saw my chasseur step up to me this evening, my
Laura? Well, not to torment you, he wished to sound an alarm cry after
Angelo Guidascarpi. I believe my conjecture is correct, that Angelo
Guidascarpi was seen by Major Weisspriess below, and allowed to pass
free. Have you no remark to make?"

"None," said Laura.

"You cannot admit that he behaved like a gallant man?" Laura sighed
deeply. "Perhaps it was well for you to encourage him!"

The mystery of Angelo's interview with Weisspriess was cleared the next
night, when in the midst of a ball-room's din, Aennchen, Amalia's
favourite maid, brought a letter to Laura from Countess Ammiani. These
were the contents:

"DEAREST SIGNORA,

"You now learn a new and blessed thing. God make the marriage fruitful! I
have daughter as well as son. Our Carlo still hesitated, for hearing of
the disgraceful rumours in Milan, he fancied a duty lay there for him to
do. Another menace came to my daughter from the madman Barto Rizzo. God
can use madmen to bring about the heavenly designs. We decided that
Carlo's name should cover her. My son was like a man who has awakened up.
M. Powys was our good genius. He told her that he had promised you to
bring it about. He, and Angelo, and myself, were the witnesses. So much
before heaven! I crossed the lake with them to Stress. I was her
tirewoman, with Giacinta, to whom I will give a husband for the tears of
joy she dropped upon the bed. Blessed be it! I placed my daughter in my
Carlo's arms. Both kissed their mother at parting.

"This is something fixed. I had great fears during the war. You do not
yet know what it is to have a sonless son in peril. Terror and remorse
haunted me for having sent the last Ammiani out to those fields,
unattached to posterity.

"An envelope from Milan arrived on the morning of his nuptials. It was
intercepted by me. The German made a second appointment at Como. Angelo
undertook to assist me in saving my son's honour. So my Carlo had nothing
to disturb his day. Pray with me, Laura Piaveni, that the day and the
night of it may prove fresh springs of a river that shall pass our name
through the happier mornings of Italy! I commend you to God, my dear, and
am your friend,

                  "MARCCELLINA, COUNTESS AMMIANI.

"P.S. Countess Alessandra will be my daughter's name."

The letter was read and re-read before the sweeter burden it contained
would allow Laura to understand that Countess Ammiani had violated a seal
and kept a second hostile appointment hidden from her son.

"Amalia, you detest me," she said, when they had left the guests for a
short space, and the duchess had perused the letter, "but acknowledge
Angelo Guidascarpi's devotion. He came here in the midst of you Germans,
at the risk of his life, to offer battle for his cousin."

The duchess, however, had much more to say for the magnanimity of Major
Weisspriess, who, if he saw him, had spared him; she compelled Laura to
confess that Weisspriess must have behaved with some nobleness, which
Laura did, humming and I 'brumming,' and hinting at the experience he had
gained of Angelo's skill. Her naughtiness provoked first, and then
affected Amalia; in this mood the duchess had the habit of putting on a
grand air of pitying sadness. Laura knew it well, and never could make
head against it. She wavered, as a stray floating thing detached from an
eddy whirls and passes on the flood. Close on Amalia's bosom she sobbed
out: "Yes; you Austrians have good qualities some: many! but you choose
to think us mean because we can't readily admit them when we are under
your heels. Just see me; what a crumb feeds me! I am crying with delight
at a marriage!"

The duchess clasped her fondly.

"It's not often one gets you so humble, my Laura."

"I am crying with delight at a marriage! Amalia, look at me: you would
suppose it a mighty triumph. A marriage! two little lovers lying cheek to
cheek! and me blessing heaven for its goodness! and there may be dead men
unburied still on the accursed Custozza hill-top!"

Amalia let her weep. The soft affection which the duchess bore to her was
informed with a slight touch of envy of a complexion that could be torn
with tears one minute, and the next be fit to show in public. No other
thing made her regard her friend as a southern--that is, a foreign-woman.

"Be patient," Laura said.

"Cry; you need not be restrained," said Amalia.

"You sighed."

"No!"

"A sort of sigh. My fit's over. Carlo's marriage is too surprising and
delicious. I shall be laughing presently. I hinted at his marriage--I
thought it among the list of possible things, no more--to see if that
crystal pool, called Violetta d'Isorella, could be discoloured by
stirring. Did you watch her face? I don't know what she wanted with
Carlo, for she's cold as poison--a female trifler; one of those women
whom I, and I have a chaste body, despise as worse than wantons; but she
certainly did not want him to be married. It seems like a victory--though
we're beaten. You have beaten us, my dear!"

"My darling! it is your husband kisses you," said Amalia, kissing Laura's
forehead from a full heart.




CHAPTER XL

THROUGH THE WINTER

Weisspriess and Wilfrid made their way toward Milan together, silently
smoking, after one attempt at conversation, which touched on Vittoria's
marriage; but when they reached Monza the officer slapped his degraded
brother in arms upon the shoulder, and asked him whether he had any
inclination to crave permission to serve in Hungary. For his own part,
Weisspriess said that he should quit Italy at once; he had here to skewer
the poor devils, one or two weekly, or to play the mightily generous; in
short, to do things unsoldierly; and he was desirous of getting away from
the country. General Schoneck was at Monza, and might arrange the matter
for them both. Promotion was to be looked for in Hungary; the application
would please the General; one battle would restore the lieutenant's star
to Wilfrid's collar. Wilfrid, who had been offended by his companion's
previous brooding silence, nodded briefly, and they stopped at Monza,
where they saw General Schoneck in the morning, and Wilfrid being by
extraordinary favour in civilian's dress during his leave of absence,
they were jointly invited to the General's table at noon, though not to
meet any other officer. General Schoneck agreed with Weisspriess that
Hungary would be a better field for Wilfrid; said he would do his utmost
to serve them in the manner they wished, and dismissed them after the
second cigar. They strolled about the city, glad for reasons of their own
to be out of Milan as long as the leave permitted. At night, when they
were passing a palace in one of the dark streets, a feather, accompanied
by a sharp sibilation from above, dropped on Wilfrid's face. Weisspriess
held the feather up, and judged by its length that it was an eagle's, and
therefore belonging to the Hungarian Hussar regiment stationed in Milan.
"The bird's aloft," he remarked. His voice aroused a noise of feet that
was instantly still. He sent a glance at the doorways, where he thought
he discerned men. Fetching a whistle in with his breath, he unsheathed
his sword, and seeing that Wilfrid had no weapon, he pushed him to a gate
of the palace-court that had just cautiously turned a hinge. Wilfrid
found his hand taken by a woman's hand inside. The gate closed behind
him. He was led up to an apartment where, by the light of a darkly-veiled
lamp, he beheld a young Hungarian officer and a lady clinging to his
neck, praying him not to go forth. Her Italian speech revealed how
matters stood in this house. The officer accosted Wilfrid: "But you are
not one of us!" He repeated it to the lady: "You see, the man is not one
of us!"

She assured him that she had seen the uniform when she dropped the
feather, and wept protesting it.

"Louis, Louis! why did you come to-night! why did I make you come! You
will be slain. I had my warning, but I was mad."

The officer hushed her with a quick squeeze of her inter-twisted fingers.

"Are you the man to take a sword and be at my back, sir?" he said; and
resumed in a manner less contemptuous toward the civil costume: "I
request it for the sole purpose of quieting this lady's fears."

Wilfrid explained who and what he was. On hearing that he was General
Pierson's nephew the officer laughed cheerfully, and lifted the veil from
the lamp, by which Wilfrid knew him to be Colonel Prince Radocky, a most
gallant and the handsomest cavalier in the Imperial service. Radocky
laughed again when he was told of Weisspriess keeping guard below.

"Aha! we are three, and can fight like a pyramid."

He flourished his hand above the lady's head, and called for a sword. The
lady affected to search for one while he stalked up and down in the
jaunty fashion of a Magyar horseman; but the sword was not to be
discovered without his assistance, and he was led away in search of it.
The moment he was alone Wilfrid burst into tears. He could bear anything
better than the sight of fondling lovers. When they rejoined him, Radocky
had evidently yielded some point; he stammered and worked his underlip on
his moustache. The lady undertook to speak for him. Happily for her, she
said, Wilfrid would not compromise her; and taking her lover's hand, she
added with Italian mixture of wit and grace: "Happily for me, too, he
does. The house is surrounded by enemies; it is a reign of terror for
women. I am dead, if they slay him; but if they recognize him, I am
lost."

Wilfrid readily leaped to her conclusion. He offered his opera-hat and
civil mantle to Radocky, who departed in them, leaving his military cloak
in exchange. During breathless seconds the lady hung kneeling at the
window. When the gate opened there was a noise as of feet preparing to
rush; Weisspriess uttered an astonished cry, but addressed Radocky as "my
Pierson!" lustily and frequently; and was heard putting a number of
meaningless questions, laughing and rallying Pierson till the two passed
out of hearing unmolested. The lady then kissed a Cross passionately, and
shivered Wilfrid's manhood by asking him whether he knew what love was.
She went on:

"Never, never love a married woman! It's a past practice. Never! Thrust a
spike in the palm of your hands drink scalding oil, rather than do that."

"The Prince Radocky is now safe," Wilfrid said.

"Yes, he is safe; and he is there, and I am here: and I cannot follow
him; and when will he come to me?"

The tones were lamentable. She struck her forehead, after she had mutely
thrust her hand to right and left to show the space separating her from
her lover.

Her voice changed when she accepted Wilfrid's adieux, to whose fate in
the deadly street she appeared quite indifferent, though she gave him one
or two prudent directions, and expressed a hope that she might be of
service to him.

He was set upon as soon as he emerged from the gateway; the cavalry cloak
was torn from his back, and but for the chance circumstance of his
swearing in English, he would have come to harm. A chill went through his
blood on hearing one of his assailants speak the name of Barto Rizzo. The
English oath stopped an arm that flashed a dagger half its length.
Wilfrid obeyed a command to declare his name, his country, and his rank.
"It's not the prince! it's not the Hungarian!" went many whispers; and he
was drawn away by a man who requested him to deliver his reasons for
entering the palace, and who appeared satisfied by Wilfrid's ready
mixture of invention and fact. But the cloak! Wilfrid stated boldly that
the cloak was taken by him from the Duchess of Graatli's at Como; that he
had seen a tall Hussar officer slip it off his shoulders; that he had
wanted a cloak, and had appropriated it. He had entered the gate of the
palace because of a woman's hand that plucked at the skirts of this very
cloak.

"I saw you enter," said the man; "do that no more. We will not have the
blood of Italy contaminated--do you hear? While that half-Austrian Medole
is tip-toeing 'twixt Milan and Turin, we watch over his honour, to set an
example to our women and your officers. You have outwitted us to-night.
Off with you!"

Wilfrid was twirled and pushed through the crowd till he got free of
them. He understood very well that they were magnanimous rascals who
could let an accomplice go, though they would have driven steel into the
principal.

Nothing came of this adventure for some time. Wilfrid's reflections
(apart from the horrible hard truth of Vittoria's marriage, against which
he dashed his heart perpetually, almost asking for anguish) had leisure
to examine the singularity of his feeling a commencement of pride in the
clasping of his musket;--he who on the first day of his degradation had
planned schemes to stick the bayonet-point between his breast-bones: he
thought as well of the queer woman's way in Countess Medole's adjuration
to him that he should never love a married woman;--in her speaking, as it
seemed, on his behalf, when it was but an outcry of her own acute wound.
Did he love a married woman? He wanted to see one married woman for the
last time; to throw a frightful look on her; to be sublime in scorn of
her; perhaps to love her all the better for the cruel pain, in the
expectation of being consoled. While doing duty as a military machine,
these were the pictures in his mind; and so well did his routine drudgery
enable him to bear them, that when he heard from General Schoneck that
the term of his degradation was to continue in Italy, and from his sister
that General Pierson refused to speak of him or hear of him until he had
regained his gold shoulder-strap, he revolted her with an ejaculation of
gladness, and swore brutally that he desired to have no advancement;
nothing but sleep and drill; and, he added conscientiously, Havannah
cigars. "He has grown to be like a common soldier," Adela said to herself
with an amazed contemplation of the family tie. Still, she worked on his
behalf, having, as every woman has, too strong an instinct as to what is
natural to us to believe completely in any eccentric assertion. She
carried the tale of his grief and trials and his romantic devotion to the
Imperial flag, daily to Countess Lena; persisting, though she could not
win a responsive look from Lena's face.

One day on the review-ground, Wilfrid beheld Prince Radocky bending from
his saddle in conversation with Weisspriess. The prince galloped up to
General Pierson, and stretched his hand to where Wilfrid was posted as
marker to a wheeling column, kept the hand stretched out, and spoke
furiously, and followed the General till he was ordered to head his
regiment. Wilfrid began to hug his musket less desperately. Little
presents--feminine he knew by the perfumes floating round them,--gloves
and cigars, fine handkerchiefs, and silks for wear, came to his barracks.
He pretended to accuse his sister of sending them. She in honest delight
accused Lena. Lena then accused herself of not having done so.

It was winter: Vittoria had been seen in Milan. Both Lena and Wilfrid
spontaneously guessed her to be the guilty one. He made a funeral pyre of
the gifts and gave his sister the ashes, supposing that she had guessed
with the same spirited intuition. It suited Adela to relate this lover's
performance to Lena. "He did well!" Lena said, and kissed Adela for the
first time. Adela was the bearer of friendly messages to the poor private
in the ranks. From her and from little Jenna, Wilfrid heard that he was
unforgotten by Countess Lena, and new hopes mingled with gratitude caused
him to regard his situation seriously. He confessed to his sister that
the filthy fellows, his comrades, were all but too much for him, and
asked her to kiss him, that he might feel he was not one of them. But he
would not send a message in reply to Lena. "That is also well!" Lena
said. Her brother Karl was a favourite with General Pierson. She proposed
that Adela and herself should go to Count Karl, and urge him to use his
influence with the General. This, however, Adela was disinclined to do;
she could not apparently say why. When Lena went to him, she was
astonished to hear that he knew every stage of her advance up to the
point of pardoning her erratic lover; and even knew as much as that
Wilfrid's dejected countenance on the night when Vittoria's marriage was
published in the saloon of the duchess on Lake Como, had given her fresh
offence. He told her that many powerful advocates were doing their best
for the down-fallen officer, who, if he were shot, or killed, would still
be gazetted an officer. "A nice comfort!" said Lena, and there was a
rallying exchange of banter between them, out of which she drew the
curious discovery that Karl had one of his strong admirations for the
English lady. "Surely!" she said to herself; "I thought they were all so
cold." And cold enough the English lady seemed when Lena led to the
theme. "Do I admire your brother, Countess Lena? Oh! yes;--in his uniform
exceedingly."

Milan was now full. Wilfrid had heard from Adela that Count Ammiani and
his bride were in the city and were strictly watched. Why did not
conspirators like these two take advantage of the amnesty? Why were they
not in Rome? Their Chief was in Rome; their friends were in Rome. Why
were they here? A report, coming from Countess d'Isorella, said that they
had quarrelled with their friends, and were living for love alone. As she
visited the Lenkensteins--high Austrians--some believed her; and as Count
Ammiani and his bride had visited the Duchess of Graatli, it was thought
possible. Adela had refused to see Vittoria; she did not even know the
house where Count Ammiani dwelt; so Wilfrid was reduced to find it for
himself. Every hour when off duty the miserable sentimentalist wandered
in that direction, nursing the pangs of a delicious tragedy of emotions;
he was like a drunkard going to his draught. As soon as he had reached
the head of the Corso, he wheeled and marched away from it with a lofty
head, internally grinning at his abject folly, and marvelling at the
stiff figure of an Austrian common soldier which flashed by the windows
as he passed. He who can unite prudence and madness, sagacity and
stupidity, is the true buffoon; nor, vindictive as were his sensations,
was Wilfrid unaware of the contrast of Vittoria's soul to his own, that
was now made up of antics. He could not endure the tones of cathedral
music; but he had at times to kneel and listen to it, and be overcome.

On a night in the month of February, a servant out of livery addressed
him at the barrack-gates, requesting him to go at once to a certain
hotel, where his sister was staying. He went, and found there, not his
sister, but Countess Medole. She smiled at his confusion. Both she and
the prince, she said, had spared no effort to get him reinstated in his
rank; but his uncle continually opposed the endeavours of all his friends
to serve him. This interview was dictated by the prince's wish, so that
he might know them to be a not ungrateful couple. Wilfrid's embarrassment
in standing before a lady in private soldier's uniform, enabled him with
very peculiar dignity to declare that his present degradation, from the
General's point of view, was a just punishment, and he did not crave to
have it abated. She remarked that it must end soon. He made a dim
allusion to the littleness of humanity. She laughed. "It's the language
of an unfortunate lover," she said, and straightway, in some
undistinguished sentence, brought the name of Countess Alessandra Ammiani
tingling to his ears. She feared that she could not be of service to him
there; "at least, not just yet," the lady astonished him by remarking. "I
might help you to see her. If you take my advice you will wait patiently.
You know us well enough to understand what patience will do. She is
supposed to have married for love. Whether she did or not, you must allow
a young married woman two years' grace."

The effect of speech like this, and more in a similar strain of frank
corruptness, was to cleanse Wilfrid's mind, and nerve his heart, and he
denied that he had any desire to meet the Countess Ammiani, unless he
could perform a service that would be agreeable to her.

The lady shrugged. "Well, that is one way. She has enemies, of course."

Wilfrid begged for their names.

"Who are they not?" she replied. "Chiefly women, it is true."

He begged most earnestly for their names; he would have pleaded
eloquently, but dreaded that the intonation of one in his low garb might
be taken for a whine; yet he ventured to say that if the countess did
imagine herself indebted to him in a small degree, the mention of two or
three of the names of Countess Alessandra Ammiani's enemies would satisfy
him.

"Countess Lena von Lenkenstein, Countess Violetta d'Isorella, signorina
Irma di Karski."

She spoke the names out like a sum that she was paying down in gold
pieces, and immediately rang the bell for her servant and carriage, as if
she had now acquitted her debt. Wilfrid bowed himself forth. A resolution
of the best kind, quite unconnected with his interests or his love, urged
him on straight to the house of the Lenkensteins, where he sent up his
name to Countess Lena. After a delay of many minutes, Count Lenkenstein
accompanied by General Pierson came down, both evidently affecting not to
see him. The General barely acknowledged his salute.

"Hey! Kinsky!" the count turned in the doorway to address him by the
title of his regiment; "here; show me the house inhabited by the Countess
d'Isorella during the revolt."

Wilfrid followed them to the end of the street, pointing his finger to
the house, and saluted.

"An Englishman did me the favour--from pure eccentricity, of course--to
save my life on that exact spot, General," said the count. "Your
countrymen usually take the other side; therefore I mention it."

As Wilfrid was directing his steps to barracks (the little stir to his
pride superinduced by these remarks having demoralized him), Count
Lenkenstein shouted: "Are you off duty?" Wilfrid had nearly replied that
he was, but just mastered himself in time. "No, indeed!" said the count,
"when you have sent up your name to a lady." This time General Pierson
put two fingers formally to his cap, and smiled grimly at the private's
rigid figure of attention. If Wilfrid's form of pride had consented to
let him take delight in the fact, he would have seen at once that
prosperity was ready to shine on him. He nursed the vexations much too
tenderly to give prosperity a welcome; and even when along with Lena, and
convinced of her attachment, and glad of it, he persisted in driving at
the subject which had brought him to her house; so that the veil of
opening commonplaces, pleasant to a couple in their position, was plucked
aside. His business was to ask her why she was the enemy of Countess
Alessandra Ammiani, and to entreat her that she should not seek to harm
that lady. He put it in a set speech. Lena felt that it ought to have
come last, not in advance of their reconciliation. "I will answer you,"
she said. "I am not the Countess Alessandra Ammiani's enemy."

He asked her: "Could you be her friend?"

"Does a woman who has a husband want a friend?"

"I could reply, countess, in the case of a man who has a bride."

By dint of a sweet suggestion here and there, love-making crossed the
topic. It appeared that General Pierson had finally been attacked, on the
question of his resistance to every endeavour to restore Wilfrid to his
rank, by Count Lenkenstein, and had barely spoken the words--that if
Wilfrid came to Countess Lena of his own free-will, unprompted, to beg
her forgiveness, he would help to reinstate him, when Wilfrid's name was
brought up by the chasseur. All had laughed, "Even I," Lena confessed. And
then the couple had a pleasant petitish wrangle;--he was requested to
avow that he had came solely, or principally, to beg forgiveness of her,
who had such heaps to forgive. No; on his honour, he had come for the
purpose previously stated, and on the spur of his hearing that she was
Countess Alessandra Ammiani's deadly enemy. "Could you believe that I
was?" said Lena; "why should I be?" and he coloured like a lad, which
sign of an ingenuousness supposed to belong to her set, made Lena bold to
take the upper hand. She frankly accused herself of jealousy, though she
did not say of whom. She almost admitted that when the time for
reflection came, she should rejoice at his having sought her to plead for
his friend rather than for her forgiveness. In the end, but with a
drooping pause of her bright swift look at Wilfrid, she promised to
assist him in defeating any machinations against Vittoria's happiness,
and to keep him informed of Countess d'Isorella's movements. Wilfrid
noticed the withdrawing fire of the look. "By heaven! she doubts me
still," he ejaculated inwardly.

These half-comic little people have their place in the history of higher
natures and darker destinies. Wilfrid met Pericles, from whom he heard
that Vittoria, with her husband's consent, had pledged herself to sing
publicly. "It is for ze Lombard widows," Pericles apologized on her
behalf; "but, do you see, I only want a beginning. She thaerst for ze
stage; and it is, after marriage, a good sign. Oh! you shall hear, my
friend; marriage have done her no hurt--ze contrary! You shall hear
Hymen--Cupids--not a cold machine; it is an organ alaif! She has privily
sung to her Pericles, and ser, and if I wake not very late on Judgement.
Day, I shall zen hear--but why should I talk poetry to you, to make you
laugh? I have a divin' passion for zat woman. Do I not give her to a
husband, and say, Be happy! onnly sing! Be kissed! be hugged! onnly give
Pericles your voice. By Saint Alexandre! it is to say to ze heavens, Move
on your way, so long as you drop rain on us r--you smile--you look kind."

Pericles accompanied him into a caffe, the picture of an enamoured happy
man. He waived aside contemptuously all mention of Vittoria's having
enemies. She had them when, as a virgin, she had no sense. As a woman,
she had none, for she now had sense. Had she not brought her husband to
be sensible, so that they moved together in Milanese society, instead of
stupidly fighting at Rome? so that what he could not take to himself--the
marvellous voice--he let bless the multitude! "She is the Beethoven of
singers," Pericles concluded. Wilfrid thought so on the night when she
sang to succour the Lombard widows. It was at a concert, richly thronged;
ostentatiously thronged with Austrian uniforms. He fancied that he could
not bear to look on her. He left the house thinking that to hear her and
see her and feel that she was one upon the earth, made life less of a
burden.

This evening was rendered remarkable by a man's calling out, "You are a
traitress!" while Vittoria stood before the seats. She became pale, and
her eyelids closed. No thinness was subsequently heard in her voice. The
man was caught as he strove to burst through the crowd at the
entrance-door, and proved to be a petty bookseller of Milan, by name
Sarpo, known as an orderly citizen. When taken he was inflamed with
liquor. Next day the man was handed from the civil to the military
authorities, he having confessed to the existence of a plot in the city.
Pericles came fuming to Wilfrid's quarters. Wilfrid gathered from him
that Sarpo's general confession had been retracted: it was too foolish to
snare the credulity of Austrian officials. Sarpo stated that he had
fabricated the story of a plot, in order to escape the persecutions of a
terrible man, and find safety in prison lodgings vender Government. The
short confinement for a civic offence was not his idea of safety; he
desired to be sheltered by Austrian soldiers and a fortress, and said
that his torments were insupportable while Barto Rizzo was at large. This
infamous Republican had latterly been living in his house, eating his
bread, and threatening death to him unless he obeyed every command. Sarpo
had undertaken his last mission for the purpose of supplying his lack of
resolution to release himself from his horrible servitude by any other
means; not from personal animosity toward the Countess Alessandra
Ammiani, known as la Vittoria. When seized, fear had urged him to escape.
Such was his second story. The points seemed irreconcilable to those who
were not in the habit of taking human nature into their calculations of a
possible course of conduct; even Wilfrid, though he was aware that Barto
Rizzo hated Vittoria inveterately, imagined Sarpo's first lie to have
necessarily fathered a second. But the second story was true: and the
something like lover's wrath with which the outrage to Vittoria fired
Pericles, prompted him to act on it as truth. He told Wilfrid that he
should summon Barto Rizzo to his presence. As the Government was unable
to exhibit so much power, Wilfrid looked sarcastic; whereupon Pericles
threw up his chin crying: "Oh! you shall know my resources. Now, my
friend, one bit of paper, and a messenger, and zen home to my house, to
Tokay and cigarettes, and wait to see." He remarked after pencilling a
few lines, "Countess d'Isorella is her enemy? hein!"

"Why, you wouldn't listen to me when I told you," said Wilfrid.

"No," Pericles replied while writing and humming over his pencil; "my ear
is a pelican-pouch, my friend; it--and Irma is her enemy also?--it takes
and keeps, but does not swallow till it wants. I shall hear you, and I
shall hear my Sandra Vittoria, and I shall not know you have spoken, when
by-and-by I tinkle, tinkle, a bell of my brain, and your word walks
in,--'quite well?'--'very well! '--sit down'--'if it is ze same to you, I
prefer to stand'--'good; zen I examine you.' My motto:--'Time opens ze
gates: my system: 'it is your doctor of regiment's system when your
twelve, fifteen, forty recruits strip to him:--'Ah! you, my man, have
varicose vein: no soldier in our regiment, you!' So on. Perhaps I am not
intelligible; but, hear zis. I speak not often of my money; but I say--it
is in your ear--a man of millions, he is a king!" The Greek jumped up and
folded a couple of notes. "I will not have her disturbed. Let her sing
now and awhile to Pericles and his public: and to ze Londoners, wiz your
permission, Count Ammiani, one saison. I ask no more, and I am satisfied,
and I endow your oldest child, signor Conte--it is said! For its mama was
a good girl, a brave girl; she troubled Pericles, because he is an
intellect; but he forgives when he sees sincerity--rare zing! Sincerity
and genius: it may be zey are as man and wife in a bosom. He forgives; it
is not onnly voice he craves, but a soul, and Sandra, your countess, she
has a soul--I am not a Turk. I say, it is a woman in whom a girl I did
see a soul! A woman when she is married, she is part of ze man; but a
soul, it is for ever alone, apart, confounded wiz nobody! For it I
followed Sandra, your countess. It was a sublime devotion of a dog. Her
voice tsrilled, her soul possessed me, Your countess is my Sandra still.
I shall be pleased if child-bearing trouble her not more zan a very
little; but, enfin! she is married, and you and I, my friend Wilfrid, we
must accept ze decree, and say, no harm to her out of ze way of nature,
by Saint Nicolas! or any what saint you choose for your invocation. Come
along. And speed my letters by one of your militaires at once off. Are
Pericles' millions gold of bad mint? If so, he is an incapable. He
presumes it is not so. Come along; we will drink to her in essence of
Tokay. You shall witness two scenes. Away!"

Wilfrid was barely to be roused from his fit of brooding into which
Pericles had thrown him. He sent the letters, and begged to be left to
sleep. The image of Vittoria seen through this man's mind was new, and
brought a new round of torments. "The devil take you," he cried when
Pericles plucked at his arm, "I've sent the letters; isn't that enough?"
He was bitterly jealous of the Greek's philosophic review of the
conditions of Vittoria's marriage; for when he had come away from the
concert, not a thought of her being a wife had clouded his resignation to
the fact. He went with Pericles, nevertheless, and was compelled to
acknowledge the kindling powers of the essence of Tokay. "Where do you
get this stuff?" he asked several times. Pericles chattered of England,
and Hagar's 'Addio,' and 'Camilla.' What cabinet operas would he not
give! What entertainments! Could an emperor offer such festivities to his
subjects? Was a Field Review equal to Vittoria's voice? He stung
Wilfrid's ears by insisting on the mellowed depth, the soft human warmth,
which marriage had lent to the voice. At a late hour his valet announced
Countess d'Isorella. "Did I not say so?" cried Pericles, and corrected
himself: "No, I did not say so; it was a surprise to you, my friend. You
shall see; you shall hear. Now you shall see what a friend Pericles can
be when a person satisfy him." He pushed Wilfrid into his dressing-room,
and immediately received the countess with an outburst of brutal
invectives--pulling her up and down the ranked regiment of her misdeeds,
as it were. She tried dignity, tried anger, she affected amazement, she
petitioned for the heads of his accusations, and, as nothing stopped him,
she turned to go. Pericles laughed when she had left the room. Irma di
Karski was announced the next minute, and Countess d'Isorella re-appeared
beside her. Irma had a similar greeting. "I am lost," she exclaimed.
"Yes, you are lost," said Pericles; "a word from me, and the back of the
public is humped at you--ha! contessa, you touched Mdlle. Irma's hand?
She is to be on her guard, and never to think she is lost till down she
goes? You are a more experienced woman! I tell you I will have no
nonsense. I am Countess Alessandra Ammiani's friend. You two, you women,
are her enemies. I will ruin you both. You would prevent her singing in
public places--you, Countess d'Isorella, because you do not forgive her
marriage to Count Ammiani; you, Irma, to spite her for her voice. You
would hiss her out of hearing, you two miserable creatures. Not another
soldo for you! Not one! and to-morrow, countess, I will see my lawyer.
Irma, begone, and shriek to your wardrobe! Countess d'Isorella, I have
the extreme honour."

Wilfrid marvelled to hear this titled and lovely woman speaking almost in
tones of humility in reply to such outrageous insolence. She craved a
private interview. Irma was temporarily expelled, and then Violetta
stooped to ask what the Greek's reason for his behaviour could be. She
admitted that it was in his power to ruin her, as far as money went.
"Perhaps a little farther," said Pericles; "say two steps. If one is on a
precipice, two steps count for something." But, what had she done?
Pericles refused to declare it. This set her guessing with a charming
naivete. Pericles called Irma back to assist her in the task, and quitted
them that they might consult together and hit upon the right thing. His
object was to send his valet for Luigi Saracco. He had seen that no truth
could be extracted from these women, save forcibly. Unaware that he had
gone out, Wilfrid listened long enough to hear Irma say, between sobs:
"Oh! I shall throw myself upon his mercy. Oh, Countess d'Isorella, why
did you lead me to think of vengeance! I am lost! He knows everything.
Oh, what is it to me whether she lives with her husband! Let them go on
plotting. I am not the Government. I am sure I don't much dislike her.
Yes, I hate her, but why should I hurt myself? She will wear those jewels
on her forehead; she will wear that necklace with the big amethysts, and
pretend she's humble because she doesn't carry earrings, when her ears
have never been pierced! I am lost! Yes, you may say, lookup! I am only a
poor singer, and he can ruin me. Oh! Countess d'Isorella, oh! what a
fearful punishment. If Countess Anna should betray Count Ammiani
to-night, nothing, nothing, will save me. I will confess. Let us both be
beforehand with her--or you, it does not matter for a noble lady."

"Hush!" said Violetta. "What dreadful fool is this I sit with? You may
have done what you think of doing already."

She walked to the staircase door, and to that of the suite. An honourable
sentiment, conjoined to the knowledge that he had heard sufficient,
induced Wilfrid to pass on into the sleeping apartment a moment or so
before Violetta took this precaution. The potent liquor of Pericles had
deprived him of consecutive ideas; he sat nursing a thunder in his head,
imagining it to be profound thought, till Pericles flung the door open.
Violetta and Irma had departed. "Behold! I have it; ze address of your
rogue Barto Rizzo," said Pericles, in the manner of one whose triumph is
absolutely due to his own shrewdness. "Are two women a match for me? Now,
my friend, you shall see. Barto Rizzo is too clever for zis government,
which cannot catch him. I catch him, and I teach him he may touch
politics--it is not for him to touch Art. What! to hound men to interrupt
her while she sings in public places? What next! But I knew my Countess
d'Isorella could help me, and so I sent for her to confront Irma, and
dare to say she knew not Barto's dwelling--and why? I will tell you a
secret. A long-flattered woman, my friend, she has had, you will think,
enough of it; no! she is like avarice. If it is worship of swine, she
cannot refuse it. Barto Rizzo worships her; so it is a deduction--she
knows his abode--I act upon that, and I arrive at my end. I now send him
to ze devil."

Barto Rizzo, after having evaded the polizia of the city during a three
months' steady chase, was effectually captured on the doorstep of
Vittoria's house in the Corso Francesco, by gendarmes whom Pericles had
set on his track. A day later Vittoria was stabbed at about the same
hour, on the same spot. A woman dealt the blow. Vittoria was returning
from an afternoon drive with Laura Piaveni and the children. She saw a
woman seated on the steps as beggarwomen sit, face in lap. Anxious to
shield her from the lacquey, she sent the two little ones up to her with
small bits of money. But, as the woman would not lift her head, she and
Laura prepared to pass her, Laura coming last. The blow, like all such
unexpected incidents, had the effect of lightning on those present; the
woman might have escaped, but after she had struck she sat down impassive
as a cat by the hearth, with a round-eyed stare.

The news that Vittoria had been assassinated traversed the city. Carlo
was in Turin, Merthyr in Rome. Pericles was one of the first who reached
the house; he was coming out when Wilfrid and the Duchess of Graatli
drove up; and he accused the Countess d'Isorella flatly of having
instigated the murder. He was frantic. They supposed that she must have
succumbed to the wound. The duchess sent for Laura. There was a press of
carriages and soft-humming people in the street; many women and men
sobbing. Wilfrid had to wait an hour for the duchess, who brought comfort
when she came. Her first words were reassuring. "Ah!" she said, "did I
not do well to make you drive here with me instead of with Lena? Those
eyes of yours would be unpardonable to her. Yes, indeed; though a corpse
were lying in this house; but Countess Alessandra is safe. I have seen
her. I have held her hand."

Wilfrid kissed the duchess's hand passionately.

What she had said of Lena was true: Lena could only be generous upon the
after-thought; and when the duchess drove Wilfrid back to her, he had to
submit to hear scorn: and indignation against all Italians, who were
denounced as cut-throats, and worse and worse and worse, males and
females alike. This way grounded on her sympathy for Vittoria. But
Wilfrid now felt toward the Italians through his remembrance of that
devoted soul's love of them, and with one direct look he bade his
betrothed good-bye, and they parted.

It was in the early days of March that Merthyr, then among the
Republicans of Rome, heard from Laura Piaveni. Two letters reached him,
one telling of the attempted assassination, and a second explaining
circumstances connected with it. The first summoned him to Milan; the
other left it to his option to make the journey. He started, carrying
kind messages from the Chief to Vittoria, and from Luciano Ramara the
offer of a renewal of old friendship to Count Ammiani. His political
object was to persuade the Lombard youth to turn their whole strength
upon Rome. The desire of his heart was again to see her, who had been so
nearly lost to all eyes for ever.

Laura's first letter stated brief facts. "She was stabbed this afternoon,
at half-past two, on the steps of her house, by a woman called the wife
of Barto Rizzo. She caught her hands up under her throat when she saw the
dagger. Her right arm was penetrated just above the wrist, and
half-an-inch in the left breast, close to the centre bone. She behaved
firmly. The assassin only struck once. No visible danger; but you should
come, if you have no serious work."

"Happily," ran the subsequent letter, of two days' later date, "the
assassin was a woman, and one effort exhausts a woman; she struck only
once, and became idiotic. Sandra has no fever. She had her wits
ready--where were mine?--when she received the wound. While I had her in
my arms, she gave orders that the woman should be driven out of the city
in her carriage. The Greek, her mad musical adorer, accuses Countess
d'Isorella. Carlo has seen this person--returns convinced of her
innocence. That is not an accepted proof; but we have one. It seems that
Rizzo (Sandra was secret about it and about one or two other things) sent
to her commanding her to appoint an hour detestable style! I can see it
now; I fear these conspiracies no longer:--she did appoint an hour; and
was awaiting him when the gendarmes sprang on the man at her door.

He had evaded them several weeks, so we are to fancy that his wife
charged Countess Alessandra with the betrayal. This appears a reasonable
and simple way of accounting for the deed. So I only partly give credit
to it. But it may be true.

"The wound has not produced a shock to her system--very, very
fortunately. On the whole, a better thing could not have happened. Should
I be more explicit? Yes, to you; for you are not of those who see too
much in what is barely said. The wound, then, my dear good friend, has
healed another wound, of which I knew nothing. Bergamasc and Brescian
friends of her husband's, have imagined that she interrupted or diverted
his studies. He also discovered that she had an opinion of her own, and
sometimes he consulted it; but alas! they are lovers, and he knew not
when love listened, or she when love spoke; and there was grave business
to be done meanwhile. Can you kindly allow that the case was open to a
little confusion? I know that you will. He had to hear many violent
reproaches from his fellow-students. These have ceased. I send this
letter on the chance of the first being lost on the road; and it will
supplement the first pleasantly to you in any event. She lies here in the
room where I write, propped on high pillows, the right arm bound up, and
says: 'Tell Merthyr I prayed to be in Rome with my husband, and him, and
the Chief. Tell him I love my friend. Tell him I think he deserves to be
in Rome. Tell him--' Enter Countess Ammiani to reprove her for
endangering the hopes of the house by fatiguing herself. Sandra sends a
blush at me, and I smile, and the countess kisses her. I send you a
literal transcript of one short scene, so that you may feel at home with
us.

"There is a place called Venice, and there is a place called Rome, and
both places are pretty places and famous places; and there is a thing
called the fashion; and these pretty places and famous places set the
fashion: and there is a place called Milan, and a place called Bergamo,
and a place called Brescia, and they all want to follow the fashion, for
they are giddy-pated baggages. What is the fashion, mama? The fashion, my
dear, is &c. &c. &c.:--Extract of lecture to my little daughter, Amalia,
who says she forgets you; but Giacomo sends his manly love. Oh, good God!
should I have blood in my lips when I kissed him, if I knew that he was
old enough to go out with a sword in his hand a week hence? I seem every
day to be growing more and more all mother. This month in front of us is
full of thunder. Addio!"

When Merthyr stood in sight of Milan an army was issuing from the gates.




CHAPTER XLI

THE INTERVIEW

Merthyr saw Laura first. He thought that Vittoria must be lying on her
couch: but Laura simply figured her arm in a sling, and signified, more
than said, that Vittoria was well and taking the air. She then begged
hungrily for news of Rome, and again of Rome, and sat with her hands
clasped in her lap to listen. She mentioned Venice in a short breath of
praise, as if her spirit could not repose there. Rome, its hospitals, its
municipal arrangements, the names of the triumvirs, the prospects of the
city, the edicts, the aspects of the streets, the popularity of the
Government, the number of volunteers ranked under the magical
Republic--of these things Merthyr talked, at her continual instigation,
till, stopping abruptly, he asked her if she wished to divert him from
any painful subject. "No, no!" she cried, "it's only that I want to feel
an anchor. We are all adrift. Sandra is in perfect health. Our bodies,
dear Merthyr, are enjoying the perfection of comfort. Nothing is done
here except to keep us from boiling over."

"Why does not Count Ammiani come to Rome?" said Merthyr.

"Why are we not all in Rome? Yes, why! why! We should make a carnival of
our own if we were."

"She would have escaped that horrible knife," Merthyr sighed.

"Yes, she would have escaped that horrible knife. But see the difference
between Milan and Rome, my friend! It was a blessed knife here. It has
given her husband back to her; it has destroyed the intrigues against
her. It seems to have been sent--I was kneeling in the cathedral this
morning, and had the very image crossing my eyes--from the saints of
heaven to cut the black knot. Perhaps it may be the means of sending us
to Rome."

Laura paused, and, looking at him, said, "It is so utterly impossible for
us women to comprehend love without folly in a man; the trait by which we
recognize it! Merthyr, you dear Englishman, you shall know everything. Do
we not think a tisane a weak washy drink, when we are strong? But we
learn, when we lie with our chins up, and our ten toes like stopped
organ-pipes--as Sandra says--we learn then that it means fresh health and
activity, and is better than rivers of your fiery wines. You love her, do
you not?"

The question came with great simplicity.

"If I can give a proof of it, I am ready to answer," said Merthyr, in
some surprise.

"Your whole life is the proof of it. The women of your country are
intolerable to me, Merthyr: but I do see the worth of the men. Sandra has
taught me. She can think of you, talk of you, kiss the vision of you, and
still be a faithful woman in our bondage of flesh; and to us you know
what a bondage it is: How can that be? I should have asked, if I had not
seen it. Dearest, she loves her husband, and she loves you. She has two
husbands, and she turns to the husband of her spirit when that, or any,
dagger strikes her bosom. Carlo has an unripe mind. They have been
married but a little more than four months; and he reveres her and loves
her." . . . . Laura's voice dragged. "Multiply the months by thousands,
we shall not make those two lives one. It is the curse of man's education
in Italy? He can see that she has wits and courage. He will not consent
to make use of them. You know her: she is not one to talk of these
things. She, who has both heart and judgement--she is merely a little
boat tied to a big ship. Such is their marriage. She cannot influence
him. She is not allowed to advise him. And she is the one who should lead
the way. And--if she did, we should now be within sight of the City."

Laura took his hand. She found it moist, though his face was calm and his
chest heaved regularly. An impish form of the pity women feel for us at
times moved her to say, "Your skin is as bronzed as it was last year.
Sandra spoke of it. She compared it to a young vine-leaf. I wonder
whether girls have really an admonition of what is good for them while
they are going their ways like destined machines?"

"Almost all men are of flesh and blood," said Merthyr softly.

"I spoke of girls."

"I speak of men."

"Blunt--witted that I am! Of course you did. But do not imagine that she
is not happy with her husband. They are united firmly."

"The better for her, and him, and me," said Merthyr.

Laura twisted an end of her scarf with fretful fingers. "Carlo Albert has
crossed the Ticino?"

"Is about to do so," Merthyr rejoined.

"Will Rome hold on if he is defeated?"

"Rome has nothing to fear on that side."

"But you do not speak hopefully of Rome."

"I suppose I am thinking of other matters."

"You confess it!"

The random conversation wearied him. His foot tapped the floor.

"Why do you say that?" he asked.

"Verily, for no other reason than that I have a wicked curiosity, and
that you come from Rome," said Laura, now perfectly frank, and believing
that she had explained her enigmatical talk, if she had not furnished an
excuse for it. Merthyr came from the City which was now encircled by an
irradiating halo in her imagination, and a fit of spontaneous
inexplicable feminine tenderness being upon her at the moment of their
meeting, she found herself on a sudden prompted to touch and probe and
brood voluptuously over an unfortunate lover's feelings, supposing that
they existed. For the glory of Rome was on him, and she was at the same
time angry with Carlo Ammiani. It was the form of passion her dedicated
widowhood could still be subject to in its youth; the sole one. By this
chance Merthyr learnt what nothing else would have told him.

Her tale of the attempted assassination was related with palpable
indifference. She stated the facts. "The woman seemed to gasp while she
had her hand up; she struck with no force; and she has since been
inanimate, I hear. The doctor says that a spasm of the heart seized her
when she was about to strike. It has been shaken--I am not sure that he
does not say displaced, or unseated--by some one of her black tempers.
She shot Rinaldo Guidascarpi dead. Perhaps it was that. I am informed
that she worshipped the poor boy, and has been like a trapped she-wolf
since she did it. In some way she associated our darling with Rinaldo's
death, like the brute she is. The ostensible ground for her futile bit of
devilishness was that she fancied Sandra to have betrayed Barto Rizzo,
her husband, into the hands of the polizia. He wrote to the Countess
Alessandra--such a letter!--a curiosity!--he must see her and
cross-examine her to satisfy himself that she was a true patriot, &c. You
know the style: we neither of us like it. Sandra was waiting to receive
him when they pounced on him by the door. Next day the woman struck at
her. Decidedly a handsome woman. She is the exact contrast to the
Countess Violetta in face, in everything. Heart-disease will certainly
never affect that pretty spy! But, mark," pursued Laura, warming, "when
Carlo arrived, tears, penitence, heaps of self-accusations: he had been
unkind to her even on Lake Orta, where they passed their golden month; he
had neglected her at Turin; he had spoken angry words in Milan; in fact,
he had misused his treasure, and begged pardon;--'If you please, my poor
bleeding angel, I am sorry. But do not, I entreat, distract me with
petitions of any sort, though I will perform anything earthly to satisfy
you. Be a good little boat in the wake of the big ship. I will look over
at you, and chirrup now and then to you, my dearest, when I am not
engaged in piloting extraordinary.'--Very well; I do not mean to sneer at
the unhappy boy, Merthyr; I love him; he was my husband's brother in
arms; the sweetest lad ever seen. He is in the season of faults. He must
command; he must be a chief; he fancies he can intrigue poor thing! It
will pass. And so will the hour to be forward to Rome. But I call your
attention to this: when he heard of the dagger--I have it from Colonel
Corte, who was with him at the time in Turin--he cried out Violetta
d'Isorella's name. Why? After he had buried his head an hour on Sandra's
pillow, he went straight to Countess d'Isorella, and was absent till
night. The woman is hideous to me. No; don't conceive that I think her
Sandra's rival. She is too jealous. She has him in some web. If she has
not ruined him, she will. She was under my eyes the night she heard of
his marriage: I saw how she will look at seventy! Here is Carlo at the
head of a plot she has prepared for him; and he has Angelo Guidascarpi,
and Ugo Corte, Marco Sana, Giulio Bandinelli, and about fifty others.
They have all been kept away from Rome by that detestable ----- you
object to hear bad names cast on women, Merthyr. Hear Agostino! The poor
old man comes daily to this house to persuade Carlo to lead his band to
Rome. It is so clearly Rome--Rome, where all his comrades are; where the
chief stand must be made by the side of Italy's Chief. Worst sign of all,
it has been hinted semi-officially to Carlo that he may upon application
be permitted to re-issue his journal. Does not that show that the
Government wishes to blindfold him, and keep him here, and knows his
plans?"

Laura started up as the door opened, and Vittoria appeared leaning upon
Carlo's arm. Countess Ammiani, Countess d'Isorella, and Pericles were
behind them. Laura's children followed.

When Merthyr rose, Vittoria was smiling in Carlo's face at something that
had been spoken. She was pale, and her arm was in a sling, but there was
no appearance of her being unnerved. Merthyr waited for her recognition
of him. She turned her eyes from Carlo slowly. The soft dull smile in
them died out as it were with a throb, and then her head drooped on one
shoulder, and she sank to the floor.




CHAPTER XLII

THE SHADOW ON CONSPIRACY

Merthyr left the house at Laura's whispered suggestion. He was agitated
beyond control, for Vittoria had fallen with her eyes fixed on him; and
at times the picture of his beloved, her husband, and Countess Ammiani,
and the children bending over her still body, swam before him like a dark
altar-piece floating in incense, so lost was he to the reality of that
scene. He did not hear Beppo, his old servant, at his heels. After a
while he walked calmly, and Beppo came up beside him. Merthyr shook his
hand.

"Ah, signor Mertyrio! ah, padrone!" said Beppo.

Merthyr directed his observation to a regiment of Austrians marching down
the Corso Venezia to the Ticinese gate.

"Yes, they are ready enough for us," Beppo remarked. "Perhaps Carlo
Alberto will beat them this time. If he does, viva to him! If they beat
him, down goes another Venetian pyramid. The Countess Alessandra--"
Beppo's speech failed.

"What of your mistress?" said Merthyr.

"When she dies, my dear master, there's no one for me but the Madonna to
serve."

"Why should she die, silly fellow?"

"Because she never cries."

Merthyr was on the point of saying, "Why should she cry?" His heart was
too full, and he shrank from inquisitive shadows of the thing known to
him.

"Sit down at this caffe with me," he said. It's fine weather for March.
The troops will camp comfortably. Those Hungarians never require tents.
Did you see much sacking of villages last year?"

"Padrone, the Imperial command is always to spare the villages."

"That's humane."

"Padrone, yes; if policy is humanity."

"It's humanity not carried quite as far as we should wish it."

Beppo shrugged and said: "It won't leave much upon the conscience if we
kill them."

"Do you expect a rising?" said Merthyr.

"If the Ticino overflows, it will flood Milan," was the answer.

"And your occupation now is to watch the height of the water?"

"My occupation, padrone? I am not on the watch-tower." Beppo winked,
adding: "I have my occupation." He threw off the effort or pretence to be
discreet. "Master of my soul! this is my occupation. I drink coffee, but
I do not smoke, because I have to kiss a pretty girl, who means to object
to the smell of the smoke. Via! I know her! At five she draws me into the
house."

"Are you relating your amours to me, rascal?" Merthyr interposed.

"Padrone, at five precisely she draws me into the house. She is a German
girl. Pardon me if I make no war on women. Her name is Aennchen, which
one is able to say if one grimaces;--why not? It makes her laugh; and
German girls are amiable when one can make them laugh. 'Tis so that they
begin to melt. Behold the difference of races! I must kiss her to melt
her, and then have a quarrel. I could have it after the first, or the
fiftieth with an Italian girl; but my task will be excessively difficult
with a German girl, if I am compelled to allow myself to favour her with
one happy solicitation for a kiss, to commence with. We shall see. It is,
as my abstention from tobacco declares, an anticipated catastrophe."

"Long-worded, long-winded, obscure, affirmatizing by negatives,
confessing by implication!--where's the beginning and end of you, and
what's your meaning?" said Merthyr, who talked to him as one may talk to
an Italian servant.

"The contessa, my mistress, has enemies. Padrone, I devote myself to her
service."

"By making love to a lady's maid?"

"Padrone, a rat is not born to find his way up the grand staircase. She
has enemies. One of them was the sublime Barto Rizzo--admirable--though I
must hate him. He said to his wife: 'If a thing happens to me, stab to
the heart the Countess Alessandra Ammiani.'"

"Inform me how you know that?" said Merthyr.

Beppo pointed to his head, and Merthyr smiled. To imagine, invent, and
believe, were spontaneous with Beppo when has practical sagacity was not
on the stretch. He glanced at the caffe clock.

"Padrone, at eleven to-night shall I see you here? At eleven I shall come
like a charged cannon. I have business. I have seen my mistress's blood!
I will tell you: this German girl lets me know that some one detests my
mistress. Who? I am off to discover. But who is the damned creature? I
must coo and kiss, while my toes are dancing on hot plates, to find her
out. Who is she? If she were half Milan . . ."

His hands waved in outline the remainder of the speech, and he rose, but
sat again. He had caught sight of the spy, Luigi Saracco, addressing the
signor Antonio-Pericles in his carriage. Pericles drove on. The horses
presently turned, and he saluted Merthyr.

"She has but one friend in Milan: it is myself," was his introductory
remark. "My poor child! my dear Powys, she is the best--'I cannot sing to
you to-day, dear Pericles'--she said that after she had opened her eyes;
after the first mist, you know. She is the best child upon earth. I could
wish she were a devil, my Powys. Such a voice should be in an iron body.
But she has immense health. The doctor, who is also mine, feels her
pulse. He assures me it goes as Time himself, and Time, my friend, you
know, has the intention of going a great way. She is good: she is too
good. She makes a baby of Pericles, to whom what is woman? Have I not the
sex in my pocket? Her husband, he is a fool, ser." Pericles broke
thundering into a sentence of English, fell in love with it, and resumed
in the same tongue: "I--it is I zat am her guard, her safety. Her
husband--oh! she must marry a young man, little donkey zat she is! We
accept it as a destiny, my Powys. And he plays false to her. Good; I do
not object. But, imagine in your own mind, my Powys--instead of passion,
of rage, of tempest, she is frozen wiz a repose. Do you, hein? sink it
will come out,"--Pericles eyed Merthyr with a subtle smile askew,--"I
have sot so;--it will come out when she is one day in a terrible scene
. . . Mon Dieu! it was a terrible scene for me when I looked on ze clout
zat washed ze blood of ze terrible assassination. So goes out a voice,
possibly! Divine, you say? We are a machine. Now, you behold, she has
faints. It may happen at my concert where she sings to-morrow night. You
saw me in my carriage speaking to a man. He is my spy--my dog wiz a nose.
I have set him upon a woman. If zat woman has a plot for to-morrow night
to spoil my concert, she shall not know where she shall wake to-morrow
morning after. Ha! here is military music--twenty sossand doors jam on
horrid hinge; and right, left, right, left, to it, confound! like dolls
all wiz one face. Look at your soldiers, Powys. Put zem on a stage, and
you see all background people--a bawling chorus. It shows to you how
superior it is--a stage to life! Hark to such music! I cannot stand it; I
am driven away; I am violent; I rage."

Pericles howled the name of his place of residence, with an offer of
lodgings in it, and was carried off writhing his body as he passed a fine
military marching band.

The figure of old Agostino Balderini stood in front of Merthyr. They
exchanged greetings. At the mention of Rome, Agostino frowned
impatiently. He spoke of Vittoria in two or three short exclamations, and
was about to speak of Carlo, but checked his tongue. "Judge for yourself.
Come, and see, and approve, if you can. Will you come? There's a meeting;
there's to be a resolution. Question--Shall we second the King of
Sardinia, Piedmont, and Savoy? If so, let us set this pumpkin, called
Milan, on its legs. I shall be an attentive listener like you, my friend.
I speak no more."

Merthyr went with him to the house of a carpenter, where in one of the
uppermost chambers communicating with the roof, Ugo Corte, Marco Sana,
Giulio Bandinelli, and others, sat waiting for the arrival of Carlo
Ammiani; when he came Carlo had to bear with the looks of mastiffs for
being late. He shook Merthyr's hand hurriedly, and as soon as the door
was fastened, began to speak. His first sentence brought a grunt of
derision from Ugo Corte. It declared that there was no hope of a rising
in Milan. Carlo swung round upon the Bergamasc. "Observe our leader,"
Agostino whispered to Merthyr; "it would be kindness to give him a duel."
More than one tumult of outcries had to be stilled before Merthyr
gathered any notion of the designs of the persons present. Bergamasc
sneered at Brescian, and both united in contempt of the Milanese, who,
having a burden on their minds, appealed at once to their individual
willingness to use the sword in vindication of Milan against its
traducers. By a great effort, Carlo got some self-mastery. He admitted,
colouring horribly, that Brescia and Bergamo were ready, and Milan was
not; therefore those noble cities (he read excerpts from letters showing
their readiness) were to take the lead, and thither on the morrow-night
he would go, let the tidings from the king's army be what they might.

Merthyr quitted the place rather impressed by his eloquence, but
unfavourably by his feverish look. Countess d'Isorella had been referred
to as one who served the cause ably and faithfully. In alluding to her,
Carlo bit his lip; he did not proceed until surrounding murmurs of
satisfaction encouraged him to continue a sort of formal eulogy of the
lady, which proved to be a defence against foregone charges, for Corte
retracted an accusation, and said that he had no fault to find with the
countess. A proposal to join the enterprise was put to Merthyr, but his
engagement with the Chief in Rome saved him from hearing much of the
marvellous facilities of the plot. "I should have wished to see you
to-night," Carlo said as they were parting. Merthyr named his hotel.
Carlo nodded. "My wife is still slightly feeble," he said.

"I regret it," Merthyr rejoined.

"She is not ill."

"No, it cannot be want of courage," Merthyr spoke at random.

"Yes, that's true," said Carlo, as vacantly. "You will see her while I am
travelling."

"I hope to find the Countess Alessandra well enough to receive me."

"Always; always," said Carlo, wishing apparently to say more. Merthyr
waited an instant, but Carlo broke into a conventional smile of adieu.

"While he is travelling," Merthyr repeated to Agostino, who had stood by
during the brief dialogue, and led the way to the Corso.

"He did not say how far!" was the old man's ejaculation.

"But, good heaven! if you think he's on an unfortunate errand, why don't
you stop him, advise him?" Merthyr broke out.

"Advise him! stop him! my friend. I would advise him, if I had the
patience of angels; stop him, if I had the power of Lucifer. Did you not
see that he shunned speaking to me? I have been such a perpetual dish of
vinegar under his nose for the last month, that the poor fellow sniffs
when I draw near. He must go his way. He leads a torrent that must sweep
him on. Corte, Sana, and the rest would be in Rome now, but for him. So
should I. Your Agostino, however, is not of Bergamo, or of Brescia; he is
not a madman; simply a poor rheumatic Piedmontese, who discerns the point
where a united Italy may fix its standard. I would start for Rome
to-morrow, if I could leave her--my soul's child!" Agostino raised his
hand: "I do love the woman, Countess Alessandra Ammiani. I say, she is a
peerless woman. Is she not?"

"There is none like her," said Merthyr.

"A peerless woman, recognized and sacrificed! I cannot leave her. If the
Government here would lay hands on Carlo and do their worst at once, I
would be off. They are too wary. I believe that they are luring him to
his ruin. I can give no proofs, but I judge by the best evidence. What
avails my telling him? I lose my temper the moment I begin to speak. A
curst witch beguiles the handsome idiot--poor darling lad that he is! She
has him--can I tell you how? She has got him--got him fast!--The nature
of the chains are doubtless innocent, if those which a woman throws round
us be ever distinguishable. He loves his wife--he is not a monster."

"He appears desperately feverish," said Merthyr.

"Did you not notice it? Yes, like a man pushed by his destiny out of the
path. He is ashamed to hesitate; he cannot turn back. Ahead of him he
sees a gulf. That army of Carlo Alberto may do something under its Pole.
Prophecy is too easy. I say no more. We may have Lombardy open; and if
so, my poor boy's vanity will be crowned: he will only have the king and
his army against him then."

Discoursing in this wise, they reached the caffe where Beppo had
appointed to meet his old master, and sat amid here and there a
whitecoat, and many nods and whispers over such news as the privileged
journals and the official gazette afforded.

Beppo's destination was to the Duchess of Graatli's palace. Nearing it,
he perceived Luigi endeavouring to gain a passage beside the burly form
of Jacob Baumwalder Feckelwitz, who presently seized him and hurled him
into the road. As Beppo was sidling up the courtway, Jacob sprang back;
Luigi made a rush; Jacob caught them both, but they wriggled out of his
clutch, and Luigi, being the fearfuller, ran the farthest. While he was
out of hearing, Beppo told Jacob to keep watch upon Luigi, as the bearer
of an amorous letter from a signor of quality to Aennchen, the which he
himself desired to obtain sight of; "for the wench has caused me three
sleepless nights," he confessed frankly. Jacob affected not to
understand. Luigi and Beppo now leaned against the wall on either side of
him and baited him till he shook with rage.

"He is the lord of the duchess, his mistress--what a lucky fellow!" said
Luigi. "When he's dog at the gates no one can approach her. When he
isn't, you can fancy what!"--"He's only a mechanical contrivance; he's
not a man," said Beppo. "He's the principal flea-catcher of the palace,"
said Luigi--"here he is all day, and at night the devil knows where he
hunts."--Luigi hopped in a half-circle round the exacerbated Jacob, and
finally provoked an assault that gave an opening to Beppo. They all ran
in, Luigi last. Jacob chased Beppo up the stairs, lost him, and
remembered what he had said of the letter borne by Luigi, for whom he
determined to lie in waiting. "Better two in there than one," he thought.
The two courted his Aennchen openly; but Luigi, as the bearer of an
amorous letter from the signor of quality, who could be no other than
signor Antonio-Pericles, was the one to be intercepted. Like other
jealous lovers, Jacob wanted to read Aennchen's answer, to be cured of
his fatal passion for the maiden, and on this he set the entire force of
his mind.

Running up by different staircases, Beppo and Luigi came upon Aennchen
nearly at the same time. She turned a cold face on Beppo, and requested
Luigi to follow her. Astonished to see him in such favour, Beppo was
ready to provoke the quarrel before the kiss when she returned; but she
said that she had obeyed her mistress's orders, and was obeying the
duchess in refusing to speak of them, or of anything relating to them.
She had promised him an interview in that little room leading into the
duchess's boudoir. He pressed her to conduct him. "Ah; then it's not for
me you come," she said. Beppo had calculated that the kiss would open his
way to the room, and the quarrel disembarrass him of his pretty companion
when there. "You have come to listen to conversation again," said
Aennchen. "Ach! the fool a woman is to think that you Italians have any
idea except self-interest when you, when you . . . talk nonsense to us.
Go away, if you please. Good-evening." She dropped a curtsey with a surly
coquetry, charming of its kind. Beppo protested that the room was dear to
him because there first he had known for one blissful half-second the
sweetness of her mouth.

"Who told you that persons who don't like your mistress are going to talk
in there?" said Aennchen.

"You," said Beppo.

Aennchen drew up in triumph: "And now will you pretend that you didn't
come up here to go in there to listen to what they say?"

Beppo clapped hands at her cleverness in trapping him. "Hush," said all
her limbs and features, belying the previous formal "good-evening." He
refused to be silent, thinking it a way of getting to the little
antechamber. "Then, I tell you, downstairs you go," said Aennchen
stiffly.

"Is it decided?" Beppo asked. "Then, good-evening. You detestable German
girls can't love. One step--a smile: another step--a kiss. You
tit-for-tat minx! Have you no notion of the sacredness of the sentiments
which inspires me to petition that the place for our interview should be
there where I tasted ecstatic joy for the space of a flash of lightning?
I will go; but it is there that I will go, and I will await you there,
signorina Aennchen. Yes, laugh at me! laugh at me!"

"No; really, I don't laugh at you, signor Beppo," said Aennchen,
protesting in denial of what she was doing. "This way."

"No, it's that way," said Beppo.

"It's through here." She opened a door. "The duchess has a reception
to-night, and you can't go round. Ach! you would not betray me?"

"Not if it were the duchess herself," said Beppo; "he would refuse to
satisfy man's natural vanity, in such a case."

Eager to advance to the little antechamber, he allowed Aennchen to wait
behind him. He heard the door shut and a lock turn, and he was in the
dark, and alone, left to take counsel of his fingers' ends.

"She was born to it," Beppo remarked, to extenuate his outwitted cunning,
when he found each door of the room fast against him.

On the following night Vittoria was to sing at a concert in the Duchess
of Graatli's great saloon, and the duchess had humoured Pericles by
consenting to his preposterous request that his spy should have an
opportunity of hearing Countess d'Isorella and Irma di Karski in private
conversation together, to discover whether there was any plot of any sort
to vex the evening's entertainment; as the jealous spite of those two
women, Pericles said, was equal to any devilry on earth. It happened that
Countess d'Isorella did not come. Luigi, in despair,--was the hearer of a
quick question and answer dialogue, in the obscure German tongue, between
Anna von Lenkenstein and Irma di Karski; but a happy peep between the
hanging curtains gave him sight of a letter passing from Anna's hands to
Irma's. Anna quitted her. Irma, was looking at the superscription of the
letter, an the act of passing in her steps, when Luigi tore the curtains
apart, and sprang on her arm like a cat. Before her shrieks could bring
succour, Luigi was bounding across the court with the letter in his
possession. A dreadful hug awaited him; his pockets were ransacked, and
he was pitched aching into the street. Jacob Baumwalder Feckelwitz went
straightway under a gas-lamp, where he read the address of the letter to
Countess d'Isorella. He doubted; he had a half-desire to tear the letter
open. But a rumour of the attack upon Irma had spread among the domestics
and Jacob prudently went up to his mistress. The duchess was sitting with
Laura. She received the letter, eyed: it all over, and held it to a
candle.

Laura's head was bent in dark meditation. The sudden increase of light
aroused her, and she asked, "What is that?"

"A letter from Countess Anna to Countess d'Isorella," said the duchess.

"Burnt!" Laura screamed.

"It's only fair," the duchess remarked.

"From her to that woman! It may be priceless. Stop! Let me see what
remains. Amalia! are you mad? Oh! you false friend. I would have
sacrificed my right hand to see it."

"Try and love me still," said the duchess, letting her take one unburnt
corner, and crumble the black tissuey fragments to smut in her hands.

There was no writing; the unburnt corner of the letter was a blank.

Laura fooled the wretched ashes between her palms. "Good-night," she
said. "Your face will be of this colour to me, my dear, for long."

"I cannot behave disgracefully, even to keep your love, my beloved," said
the duchess.

"You cannot betray a German, you mean," Laura retorted. "You could let a
spy into the house."

"That was a childish matter--merely to satisfy a whim."

"I say you could let a spy into the house. Who is to know where the
scruples of you women begin? I would have given my jewels, my head, my
husband's sword, for a sight of that letter. I swear that it concerns us.
Yes, us. You are a false friend. Fish-blooded creature! may it be a year
before I look on you again. Hide among your miserable set!"

"Judge me when you are cooler, dearest," said the duchess, seeking to
detain the impetuous sister of her affection by the sweeping skirts; but
Laura spurned her touch, and went from her.

Irma drove to Countess d'Isorella's. Violetta was abed, and lay fair and
placid as a Titian Venus, while Irma sputtered out her tale, with
intermittent sobs. She rose upon her elbow, and planting it in her
pillow, took half-a-dozen puffs of a cigarette, and then requested Irma
to ring for her maid. "Do nothing till you see me again," she said; "and
take my advice: always get to bed before midnight, or you'll have
unmanageable wrinkles in a couple of years. If you had been in bed at a
prudent hour to-night, this scandal would not have occurred."

"How can I be in bed? How could I help it?" moaned Irma, replying to the
abstract rule, and the perplexing illustration of its force.

Violetta dismissed her. "After all, my wish is to save my poor Amaranto,"
she mused. "I am only doing now what I should have been doing in the
daylight; and if I can't stop him, the Government must; and they will.
Whatever the letter contained, I can anticipate it. He knows my
profession and my necessities. I must have money. Why not from the rich
German woman whom he jilted?"

She attributed Anna's apparent passion of revenge to a secret passion of
unrequited love. What else was implied by her willingness to part with
land and money for the key to his machinations?

Violetta would have understood a revenge directed against Angelo
Guidascarpi, as the slayer of Anna's brother. But of him Anna had only
inquired once, and carelessly, whether he was in Milan. Anna's mystical
semi-patriotism--prompted by her hatred of Vittoria, hatred of Carlo as
Angelo's cousin and protector, hatred of the Italy which held the three,
who never took the name Tedesco on their tongues without loathing--was
perfectly hidden from this shrewd head.

Some extra patrols were in the streets. As she stepped into the carriage,
a man rushed up, speaking hoarsely and inarticulately, and jumped in
beside her. She had discerned Barto Rizzo in time to give directions to
her footman, before she was addressed by a body of gendarmes in pursuit,
whom she mystified by entreating them to enter her house and search it
through, if they supposed that any evil-doer had taken advantage of the
open door. They informed her that a man had escaped from the civil
prison. "Poor creature!" said the countess, with womanly pity; "but you
must see that he is not in my house. How could three of you let one
escape?" She drove off laughing at their vehement assertion that he would
not have escaped from them. Barto Rizzo made her conduct him to Countess
Ammiani's gates.

Violetta was frightened by his eyes when she tried to persuade him in her
best coaxing manner to avoid Count Ammiani. In fact she apprehended that
he would be very much in her way. She had no time for chagrin at her loss
of power over him, though she was sensible of vexation. Barto folded his
arms and sat with his head in his chest, silent, till they reached the'
gates, when he said in French, "Madame, I am a nameless person in your
train. Gabble!" he added, when the countess advised him not to enter; nor
would he allow her to precede him by more than one step. Violetta sent up
her name. The man had shaken her nerves. "At least, remember that your
appearance should be decent," she said, catching sight of blood on his
hands, and torn garments. "I expect, madame," he replied, "I shall not
have time to wash before I am laid out. My time is short. I want tobacco.
The washing can be done by-and-by, but not the smoking."

They were ushered up to the reception-room, where Countess Ammiani,
Vittoria, and Carlo sat, awaiting the visitor whose unexpected name, cast
in their midst at so troubled a season, had clothed her with some of the
midnight's terrors.




CHAPTER XLIII

THE LAST MEETING IN MILAN

Barto Rizzo had silence about him without having to ask for it, when he
followed Violetta into Countess Ammiani's saloon of reception. Carlo was
leaning over his mother's chair, holding Vittoria's wrist across it, and
so enclosing her, while both young faces were raised to the bowed
forehead of the countess. They stood up. Violetta broke through the
formal superlatives of an Italian greeting. "Speak to me alone," she
murmured for Carlo's ear and glancing at Barto: "Here is a madman; a mild
one, I trust." She contrived to show that she was not responsible for his
intrusion. Countess Ammiani gathered Vittoria in her arms; Carlo stepped
a pace before them. Terror was on the venerable lady's face, wrath on her
son's. As he fronted Barto, he motioned a finger to the curtain hangings,
and Violetta, quick at reading signs, found his bare sword there. "But
you will not want it," she remarked, handing the hilt to him, and softly
eyeing the impression of her warm touch on the steel as it passed.

"Carlo, thou son of Paolo! Countess Marcellina, wife of a true patriot!
stand aside, both of you. It is between the Countess Alessandra and
myself," so the man commenced, with his usual pomp of interjection.
"Swords and big eyes,--are they things to stop me?" Barto laughed
scornfully. He had spoken in the full roll of his voice, and the sword
was hard back for the thrust.

Vittoria disengaged herself from the countess. "Speak to me," she said,
dismayed by the look of what seemed an exaltation of madness in Barto's
visage, but firm as far as the trembling of her limbs would let her be.

He dropped to her feet and kissed them.

"Emilia Alessandra Belloni! Vittoria! Countess Alessandra Ammiani! pity
me. Hear this:--I hated you as the devil is hated. Yesterday I woke up in
prison to hear that I must adore you. God of all the pits of punishment!
was there ever one like this? I had to change heads."

It was the language of a distorted mind, and lamentable to hear when a
sob shattered his voice.

"Am I mad?" he asked piteously, clasping his temples.

"You are as we are, if you weep," said Vittoria, to sooth him.

"Then I have been mad!" he cried, starting. "I knew you a wicked
virgin--signora contessa, confess to me, marriage has changed you. Has it
not changed you? In the name of the Father of the Saints, help me out of
it:--my brain reels backwards. You were false, but marriage--It acts in
this way with you women; yes, that we know--you were married, and you
said, 'Now let us be faithful.' Did you not say that? I am forgiving,
though none think it. You have only to confess. If you will not,--oh!" He
smote his face, groaning.

Carlo spoke a stern word in an undertone; counselling him to be gone.

"If you will not--what was she to do?" Barto cut the question to
interrogate his strayed wits. "Look at me, Countess Alessandra. I was in
the prison. I heard that my Rosellina had a tight heart. She cried for
her master, poor heathen, and I sprang out of the walls to her.
There--there--she lay like a breathing board; a woman with a body like a
coffin half alive; not an eye to show; nothing but a body and a whisper.
She perished righteously, for she disobeyed. She acted without my orders:
she dared to think! She will be damned, for she would have vengeance
before she went. She glorified you over me--over Barto Rizzo. Oh! she
shocked my soul. But she is dead, and I am her slave. Every word was of
you. Take another head, Barto Rizzo your old one was mad: she said that
to my soul. She died blessing you above me. I saw the last bit of life go
up from her mouth blessing you. It's heard by this time in heaven, and
it's written. Then I have had two years of madness. If she is right, I
was wrong; I was a devil of hell. I know there's an eye given to dying
creatures, and she looked with it, and she said, the soul of Rinaldo
Guidascarpi, her angel, was glorifying you; and she thanked the sticking
of her heart, when she tried to stab you, poor fool!"

Carlo interrupted: "Now go; you have said enough."

"No, let him speak," said Vittoria. She supposed that Barto was going to
say that he had not given the order for her assassination. "You do not
wish me dead, signore?"

"Nothing that is not standing in my way, signora contessa," said Barto;
and his features blazed with a smile of happy self-justification. "I have
killed a sentinel this night: Providence placed him there. I wish for no
death, but I punish, and--ah! the cursed sight of the woman who calls me
mad for two years. She thrusts a bar of iron in an engine at work, and
says, Work on! work on! Were you not a traitress? Countess Alessandra,
were you not once a traitress? Oh! confess it; save my head. Reflect,
dear lady! it's cruel to make a man of a saintly sincerity look back--I
count the months--seventeen months! to look back seventeen months, and
see that his tongue was a clapper,--his will, his eyes, his ears, all
about him, everything, stirred like a pot on the fire. I traced you. I
saw your treachery. I said--I, I am her Day of Judgement. She shall look
on me and perish, struck down by her own treachery. Were my senses false
to me? I had lived in virtuous fidelity to my principles. None can accuse
me. Why were my senses false, if my principles were true? I said you were
a traitress. I saw it from the first. I had the divine contempt for
women. My distrust of a woman was the eye of this brain, and I
said--Follow her, dog her, find her out! I proved her false; but her
devilish cunning deceived every other man in the world. Oh! let me
bellow, for it's me she proves the mass of corruption! Tomorrow I die,
and if I am mad now, what sort of a curse is that?

"Now to-morrow is an hour--a laugh! But if I've not been shot from a true
bow--if I've been a sham for two years--if my name, and nature, bones,
brains, were all false things hunting a shadow, Countess Alessandra, see
the misery of Barto Rizzo! Look at those two years, and say that I had my
head. Answer me, as you love your husband: are you heart and soul with
him in the fresh fight for Lombardy?" He said this with a look
penetrating and malignant, and then by a sudden flash pitifully
entreating.

Carlo feared to provoke, revolted from the thought of slaying him. "Yes,
yes," he interposed, "my wife is heart and soul in it. Go."

Barto looked from him to her with the eyes of a dog that awaits an order.

Victoria gathered her strength, and said: "I am not."

"It is her answer!" Barto roared, and from deep dejection his whole
countenance radiated. "She says it--she might give the lie to a saint! I
was never mad. I saw the spot, and put my finger on it, and not a madman
can do that. My two years are my own. Mad now, for, see!

"I worship the creature. She is not heart and soul in it. She is not in it
at all. She is a little woman, a lovely thing, a toy, a cantatrice. Joy
to the big heart of Barto Rizzo! I am for Brescia!"

He flung his arm like a banner, and ran out.

Carlo laid his sword on a table. Vittoria's head was on his mother's
bosom.

The hour was too full of imminent grief for either of the three to regard
this scene as other than a gross intrusion ended.

"Why did you deny my words?" Carlo said coldly.

"I could not lie to make him wretched," she replied in a low murmur.

"Do you know what that 'I am for Brescia' means? He goes to stir the city
before a soul is ready."

"I warned you that I should speak the truth of myself to-night, dearest."

"You should discern between speaking truth to a madman, and to a man."

Vittoria did not lift her eyes, and Carlo beckoned to Violetta, with whom
he left the room.

"He is angry," Countess Ammiani murmured. "My child, you cannot deal with
men in a fever unless you learn to dissemble; and there is exemption for
doing it, both in plain sense, and in our religion. If I could arrest
him, I would speak boldly. It is, alas! vain to dream of that; and it is
therefore an unkindness to cause him irritation. Carlo has given way to
you by allowing you to be here when his friends assemble. He knows your
intention to speak. He has done more than would have been permitted by my
husband to me, though I too was well-beloved."

Vittoria continued silent that her head might be cherished where it lay.
She was roused from a stupor by hearing new voices. Laura's lips came
pressing to her cheek. Colonel Corte, Agostino, Marco Sana, and Angelo
Guidascarpi, saluted her. Angelo she kissed.

"That lady should be abed and asleep," Corte was heard to say.

The remark passed without notice. Angelo talked apart with Vittoria. He
had seen the dying of the woman whose hand had been checked in the act of
striking by the very passion of animal hatred which raised it. He spoke
of her affectionately, attesting to the fact that Barto Rizzo had not
prompted her guilt. Vittoria moaned at a short outline that he gave of
the last minutes between those two, in which her name was dreadfully and
fatally, incomprehensibly prominent.

All were waiting impatiently for Carlo's return.

When he appeared he informed his mother that the Countess d'Isorella
would remain in the house that night, and his mother passed out to her
abhorred guest, who, for the time at least, could not be doing further
mischief.

It was a meeting for the final disposition of things before the outbreak.
Carlo had begun to speak when Corte drew his attention to the fact that
ladies were present, at which Carlo put out his hand as if introducing
them, and went on speaking.

"Your wife is here," said Corte.

"My wife and signora Piaveni," Carlo rejoined. "I have consented to my
wife's particular wish to be present."

"The signora Piaveni's opinions are known: your wife's are not."

"Countess Alessandra shares mine," said Laura, rather tremulously.

Countess Ammiani at the same time returned and took Vittoria's hand and
pressed it with force. Carlo looked at them both.

"I have to ask your excuses, gentlemen. My wife, my mother, and signora
Piaveni, have served the cause we worship sufficiently to claim a
right--I am sorry to use such phrases; you understand my meaning. Permit
them to remain. I have to tell you that Barto Rizzo has been here: he has
started for Brescia. I should have had to kill him to stop him--a measure
that I did not undertake."

"Being your duty!" remarked Corte.

Agostino corrected him with a sarcasm.

"I cannot allow the presence of ladies to exclude a comment on manifest
indifference," said Corte. "Pass on to the details, if you have any."

"The details are these," Carlo resumed, too proud to show a shade of
self-command; "my cousin Angelo leaves Milan before morning. You, Colonel
Corte, will be in Bergamo at noon to-morrow. Marco and Angelo will await
my coming in Brescia, where we shall find Giulio and the rest. I join
them at five on the following afternoon, and my arrival signals the
revolt. We have decided that the news from the king's army is good."

A perceptible shudder in Vittoria's frame at this concluding sentence
caught Corte's eye.

"Are you dissatisfied with that arrangement?" he addressed her boldly.

"I am, Colonel Corte," she replied. So simple was the answering tone of
her voice that Corte had not a word.

"It is my husband who is going," Vittoria spoke on steadily; "him I am
prepared to sacrifice, as I am myself. If he thinks it right to throw
himself into Brescia, nothing is left for me but to thank him for having
done me the honour to consult me. His will is firm. I trust to God that
he is wise. I look on him now as one of many brave men whose lives belong
to Italy, and if they all are misdirected and perish, we have no more; we
are lost. The king is on the Ticino; the Chief is in Rome. I desire to
entreat you to take counsel before you act in anticipation of the king's
fortune. I see that it is a crushed life in Lombardy. In Rome there is
one who can lead and govern. He has suffered and is calm. He calls to you
to strengthen his hands. My prayer to you is to take counsel. I know the
hour is late; but it is not too late for wisdom. Forgive me if I am not
speaking humbly. Brescia is but Brescia; Rome is Italy. I have understood
little of my country until these last days, though I have both talked and
sung of her glories. I know that a deep duty binds you to Bergamo and to
Brescia--poor Milan we must not think of. You are not personally pledged
to Rome: yet Rome may have the greatest claims on you. The heart of our
country is beginning to beat there. Colonel Corte! signor Marco! my
Agostino! my cousin Angelo! it is not a woman asking for the safety of
her husband, but one of the blood of Italy who begs to offer you her
voice, without seeking to disturb your judgement."

She ceased.

"Without seeking to disturb their judgement!" cried Laura. "Why not, when
the judgement is in error?"

To Laura's fiery temperament Vittoria's speech had been feebleness. She
was insensible to that which the men felt conveyed to them by the absence
of emotion in the language of a woman so sorrowfully placed. "Wait," she
said, "wait for the news from Carlo Alberto, if you determine to play at
swords and guns in narrow streets." She spoke long and vehemently, using
irony, coarse and fine, with the eloquence which was her gift. In
conclusion she apostrophized Colonel Corte as one who had loved him might
have done. He was indeed that figure of indomitable strength to which her
spirit, exhausted by intensity of passion, clung more than to any other
on earth, though she did not love him, scarcely liked him.

Corte asked her curiously--for she had surprised and vexed his softer
side--why she distinguished him with such remarkable phrases only to
declare her contempt for him.

"It's the flag whipping the flag-pole," murmured Agostino; and he now
spoke briefly in support of the expedition to Rome; or at least in favour
of delay until the King of Sardinia had gained a battle. While he was
speaking, Merthyr entered the room, and behind him a messenger who
brought word that Bergamo had risen.

The men drew hurriedly together, and Countess Ammiani, Vittoria and Laura
stood ready to leave them.

"You will give me, five minutes?" Vittoria whispered to her husband, and
he nodded.

"Merthyr," she said, passing him, "can I have your word that you will not
go from me?"

Merthyr gave her his word after he had looked on her face.

"Send to me every two hours, that I may know you are near," she added;
"do not fear waking me. Or, no, dear friend; why should I have any
concealment from you? Be not a moment absent, if you would not have me
fall to the ground a second time: follow me."

Even as he hesitated, for he had urgent stuff to communicate to Carlo, he
could see a dreadful whiteness rising on her face, darkening the circles
of her eyes.

"It's life or death, my dearest, and I am bound to live," she said. Her
voice sprang up from tears.

Merthyr turned and tried in vain to get a hearing among the excited,
voluble men. They shook his hand, patted his shoulder, and counselled him
to leave them. He obtained Carlo's promise that he would not quit the
house without granting him an interview; after which he passed out to
Vittoria, where Countess Ammiani and Laura sat weeping by the door.




CHAPTER XLIV

THE WIFE AND THE HUSBAND

When they were alone Merthyr said: "I cannot give many minutes, not much
time. I have to speak to your husband."

She answered: "Give me many minutes--much time. All other speaking is
vain here."

"It concerns his safety."

"It will not save him."

"But I have evidence that he is betrayed. His plans are known; a trap is
set for him. If he moves, he walks into a pit."

"You would talk reason, Merthyr," Vittoria sighed. "Talk it to me. I can
listen; I thirst for it. I beat at the bars of a cage all day. When I saw
you this afternoon, I looked on another life. It was too sudden, and I
swooned. That was my only show of weakness. Since then you are the only
strength I feel."

"Have they all become Barto Rizzos?" Merthyr exclaimed.

"Beloved, I will open my mind to you," said Vittoria. "I am cowardly, and
I thought I had such courage! Tonight a poor mad creature has been here,
who has oppressed me, I cannot say how long, with real fear--that I only
understand now that I know the little ground I had for it. I am even
pleased that one like Barto Rizzo should see me in a better light. I find
the thought smiling in my heart when every other thing is utterly dark
there. You have heard that Carlo goes to Brescia. When I was married, I
lost sight of Italy, and everything but happiness. I suffer as I deserve
for it now. I could have turned my husband from this black path; I
preferred to dream and sing. I would not see--it was my pride that would
not let me see his error. My cowardice would not let me wound him with a
single suggestion. You say that he is betrayed. Then he is betrayed by
the woman who has never been unintelligible to me. We were in Turin
surrounded by intrigues, and there I thanked her so much for leaving me
the days with my husband by Lake Orta that I did not seek to open his
eyes to her. We came to Milan, and here I have been thanking her for the
happy days in Turin. Carlo is no longer to blame if he will not listen to
me. I have helped to teach him that I am no better than any of these
Italian women whom he despises. I spoke to him as his wife should do, at
last. He feigned to think me jealous, and I too remember the words of the
reproach, as if they had a meaning. Ah, my friend! I would say of nothing
that it is impossible, except this task of recovering lost ground with
one who is young. Experience of trouble has made me older than he. When
he accused me of jealousy, I could mention Countess d'Isorella's name no
more. I confess to that. Yet I knew my husband feigned. I knew that he
could not conceive the idea of jealousy existing in me, as little as I
could imagine unfaithfulness in him. But my lips would not take her name!
Wretched cowardice cannot go farther. I spoke of Rome. As often as I
spoke, that name was enough to shake me off: he had but to utter it, and
I became dumb. He did it to obtain peace; for no other cause. So, by
degrees, I have learnt the fatal truth. He has trusted her, for she is
very skilful; distrusting her, for she is treacherous. He has, therefore,
believed excessively in his ability to make use of her, and to counteract
her baseness. I saw his error from the first; and I went on dreaming and
singing; and now this night has come!"

Vittoria shadowed her eyes.

"I will go to him at once," said Merthyr.

"Yes; I am relieved. Go, dear friend," she sobbed; "you have given me
tears, as I hoped. You will not turn him; had it been possible, could I
have kept you from him so long? I know that you will not turn him from
his purpose, for I know what a weight it is that presses him forward in
that path. Do not imagine our love to be broken. He will convince you
that it is not. He has the nature of an angel. He permitted me to speak
before these men to-night--feeble thing that I am! It was a last effort.
I might as well have tried to push a rock."

She rose at a noise of voices in the hall below.

"They are going, Merthyr. See him now. There may be help in heaven; if
one could think it! If help were given to this country--if help were only
visible! The want of it makes us all without faith."

"Hush! you may hear good news from Carlo Alberto in a few hours," said
Merthyr.

"Ask Laura; she has witnessed how he can be shattered," Vittoria replied
bitterly.

Merthyr pressed her fingers. He was met by Carlo on the stairs.

"Quick!" Carlo said; "I have scarce a minute to spare. I have my adieux
to make, and the tears have set in already. First, a request: you will
promise to remain beside my wife; she will want more than her own
strength."

Such a request, coming from an Italian husband, was so great a proof of
the noble character of his love and his knowledge of the woman he loved,
that Merthyr took him in his arms and kissed him.

"Get it over quickly, dear good fellow," Carlo murmured; "you have
something to tell me. Whatever it is, it's air; but I'll listen."

They passed into a vacant room. "You know you are betrayed," Merthyr
began.

"Not exactly that," said Carlo, humming carelessly.

"Positively and absolutely. The Countess d'Isorella has sold your
secrets."

"I commend her to the profit she has made by it."

"Do you play with your life?"

Carlo was about to answer in the tone he had assumed for the interview.
He checked the laugh on his lips.

"She must have some regard for my life, such as it's worth, since, to
tell you the truth, she is in the house now, and came here to give me
fair warning."

"Then, you trust her."

"I? Not a single woman in the world!--that is, for a conspiracy."

It was an utterly fatuous piece of speech. Merthyr allowed it to slip,
and studied him to see where he was vulnerable.

"She is in the house, you say. Will you cause her to come before me?"

"Curiously," said Carlo, "I kept her for some purpose of the sort. Will
I? and have a scandal now? Oh! no. Let her sleep."

Whether he spoke from noble-mindedness or indifference, Merthyr could not
guess.

"I have a message from your friend Luciano. He sends you his love, in
case he should be shot the first, and says that when Lombardy is free he
hopes you will not forget old comrades who are in Rome."

"Forget him! I would to God I could sit and talk of him for hours.
Luciano! Luciano! He has no wife."

Carlo spoke on hoarsely. "Tell me what authority you have for charging
Countess d'Isorella with . . . with whatever it may be."

"A conversation between Countess Anna of Lenkenstein and a Major Nagen,
in the Duchess of Graatli's house, was overheard by our Beppo. They spoke
German. The rascal had a German sweetheart with him. She imprisoned him
for some trespass, and had come stealing in to rescue him, when those two
entered the room. Countess Anna detailed to Nagen the course of your
recent plotting. She named the hour this morning when you are to start
for Brescia. She stated what force you have, what arms you expect; she
named you all."

"Nagen--Nagen," Carlo repeated; "the man's unknown to me."

"It's sufficient that he is an Austrian officer."

"Quite. She hates me, and she has reason, for she's aware that I mean to
fight her lover, and choose my time. The blood of my friends is on that
man's head."

"I will finish what I have to say," pursued Merthyr. "When Beppo had
related as much as he could make out from his sweetheart's translation, I
went straight to the duchess. She is an Austrian, and a good and
reasonable woman. She informed me that a letter addressed by Countess
Anna to Countess d'Isorella fell into her hands this night. She burnt it
unopened. I leave it to you to consider whether you have been betrayed
and who has betrayed you. The secret was bought. Beppo himself caught the
words, 'from a mercenary Italian.' The duchess tells me that Countess
Anna is in the habit of alluding to Countess d'Isorella in those terms."

Carlo stretched his arms like a man who cannot hide the yawning fit.

"I promised my wife five minutes, though we have had the worst of the
parting over. Perhaps you will wait for me; I may have a word to say."

He was absent for little more than the space named. When he returned, he
was careful to hide his face. He locked the door, and leading Merthyr to
an inner room, laid his watch on the table, and said: "Now, friend, you
will see that I have nothing to shrink from, for I am going to do
execution upon myself, and before him whom I would, above all other men,
have think well of me. My wife supposes that I am pledged to this
Brescian business because I am insanely patriotic. If I might join
Luciano tomorrow I would shout like a boy. I would be content to serve as
the lowest in the ranks, if I might be with you all under the Chief. Rome
crowns him, and Brescia is my bloody ditch, and it is deserved! When I
was a little younger--I am a boy still, no doubt--I had the honour to be
distinguished by a handsome woman; and when I grew a little older, I
discovered by chance that she had wit. The lady is the Countess Violetta
d'Isorella. It is a grief to me to know that she is sordid: it hurts my
vanity the more. Perhaps: you begin to perceive that vanity governs me.
The signora Laura has not expressed her opinion on this subject with any
reserve, but to Violetta belongs the merit of having seen it without
waiting for the signs. First--it is a small matter, but you are
English--let me assure you that my wife has had no rival. I have taunted
her with jealousy when I knew that it was neither in her nature to feel
it, nor in mine to give reason for it. No man who has a spark of his
Maker in him could be unfaithful to such a woman. When Lombardy was
crushed, we were in the dust. I fancy we none of us knew how miserably we
had fallen--we, as men. The purest--I dare say, the bravest--marched to
Rome. God bless my Luciano there! But I, sir, I, my friend, I, Merthyr, I
said proudly that I would not abandon a beaten country: and I was admired
for my devotion. The dear old poet, Agostino, praised me. It stopped his
epigrams--during a certain time, at least. Colonel Corte admired me.
Marco Sana, Giulio Bandinelli admired me. Vast numbers admired me. I need
not add that I admired myself. I plunged into intrigues with princes, and
priests, and republicans. A clever woman was at my elbow. In the midst of
all this, my marriage: I had seven weeks of peace; and then I saw what I
was. You feel that you are tired, when you want to go another way and you
feel that you have been mad when you want to undo your work. But I could
not break the chains I had wrought, for I was a chief of followers. The
men had come from exile, or they had refused to join the Roman
enterprise:--they, in fact, had bound themselves to me; and that means, I
was irrevocably bound to them. I had an insult to wipe out: I refrained
from doing it, sincerely, I may tell you, on the ground that this admired
life of mine was precious. I will heap no more clumsy irony on it: I can
pity it. Do you see now how I stand? I know that I cannot rely on the
king's luck or on the skill of his generals, or on the power of his army,
or on the spirit in Lombardy: neither on men nor on angels. But I cannot
draw back. I have set going a machine that's merciless. From the day it
began working, every moment has added to its force. Do not judge me by
your English eyes: other lands, other habits; other habits, other
thoughts. And besides, if honour said nothing, simple humanity would
preserve me from leaving my band to perish like a flock of sheep."

He uttered this with a profound conviction of his quality as leader, that
escaped the lurid play of self-inspection which characterized what he had
previously spoken, and served singularly in bearing witness to the truth
of his charge against himself.

"Useless!" he said, waving his hand at anticipated remonstrances. "Look
with the eyes of my country; not with your own, my friend. I am disgraced
if I do not go out. My friends are disgraced if I do not head them in.
Brescia--sacrificed!--murdered!--how can I say what? Can I live under
disgrace or remorse? The king stakes on his army; I on the king. Whether
he fights and wins, or fights and loses, I go out. I have promised my
men--promised them success, I believe!--God forgive me! Did you ever see
a fated man before? None had plotted against me. I have woven my own web,
and that's the fatal thing. I have a wife, the sweetest woman of her
time. Goodnight to her! our parting is over."

He glanced at his watch. "Perhaps she will be at the door below. Her
heart beats like mine just now. You wish to say that you think me
betrayed, and therefore I may draw back? Did you not hear that Bergamo
has risen? The Brescians are up too by this time. Gallant Brescians! they
never belie the proverb in their honour; and to die among them would be
sweet if I had all my manhood about me. You would have me making a scene
with Violetta."

"Set the woman face to face with me!" cried Merthyr, sighting a gleam of
hope.

Carlo smiled. "Can she bear my burden though she be ten times guilty? Let
her sleep. I have her here harmless for the night. The Brescians are
up:--that's an hour that has struck, and there's no calling it to move a
step in the rear. Brescia under the big Eastern hill which throws a cloak
on it at sunrise! Brescia is always the eagle that looks over Lombardy!
And Bergamo! you know the terraces of Bergamo. Aren't they like a morning
sky? Dying there is not death; it's flying into the dawn. You Romans envy
us. Come, confess it; you envy us. You have no Alps, no crimson hills,
nothing but old walls to look on while you fight. Farewell, Merthyr
Powys. I hear my servant's foot outside. My horse is awaiting me saddled,
a mile from the city. Perhaps I shall see my wife again at the door
below, or in heaven. Addio! Kiss Luciano for me. Tell him that I knew
myself as well as he did, before the end came. Enrico, Emilio, and the
others--tell them I love them. I doubt if there will ever be but a ghost
of me to fight beside them in Rome. And there's no honour, Merthyr, in a
ghost's fighting, because he's shotproof; so I won't say what the valiant
disembodied 'I' may do by-and-by."

He held his hands out, with the light soft smile of one who asks
forgiveness for flippant speech, and concluded firmly: "I have talked
enough, and you are the man of sense I thought you; for to give me advice
is childish when no power on earth could make me follow it. Addio! Kiss
me."

They embraced. Merthyr said no more than that he would place messengers
on the road to Brescia to carry news of the king's army. His voice was
thick, and when Carlo laughed at him, his sensations strangely reversed
their situations.

There were two cloaked figures at different points in the descent of the
stairs. These rose severally at Carlo's approach, took him to their
bosoms, and kissed him in silence. They were his mother and Laura. A
third crouched by the door of the courtyard, which was his wife.

Merthyr kept aloof until the heavy door rolled a long dull sound.
Vittoria's head was shawled over. She stood where her husband had left
her, groping for him with one hand, that closed tremblingly hard on
Merthyr when he touched it. Not a word was uttered in the house.




CHAPTER XLV

SHOWS MANY PATHS CONVERGING TO THE END

Until daylight Merthyr sat by himself, trying to realize the progressive
steps of the destiny which seemed like a visible hand upon Count Ammiani,
that he might know it to be nothing else than Carlo's work. He sat in
darkness in the room where Carlo had spoken, thinking of him as living
and dead. The brilliant life in Carlo protested against a possible fatal
tendency in his acts so irrevocable as to plunge him to destruction when
his head was clear, his blood cool, and a choice lay open to him. That
brilliant young life, that fine face, the tones of Carlo's voice, swept
about Merthyr, accusing him of stupid fatalism. Grief stopped his answer
to the charge; but in his wise mind he knew Carlo to have surveyed things
justly; and that the Fates are within us. Those which are the forces of
the outer world are as shadows to the power we have created within us. He
felt this because it was his gathered wisdom. Human compassion, and love
for the unhappy youth, crushed it in his heart, and he marvelled how he
could have been paralyzed when he had a chance of interceding. Can a man
stay a torrent? But a noble and fair young life in peril will not allow
our philosophy to liken it to things of nature. The downward course of a
fall that takes many waters till it rushes irresistibly is not the course
of any life. Yet it is true that our destiny is of our own weaving.
Carlo's involvements cast him into extreme peril, almost certain death,
unless he abjured his honour, dearer than a life made precious by love.
Merthyr saw that it was not vanity, but honour; for Carlo stood pledged
to lead a forlorn enterprise, the ripeness of his own scheming. In the
imminent hour Carlo had recognized his position as Merthyr with the
wisdom of years looked on it. That was what had paralyzed the older man,
though he could not subsequently trace the cause. Thinking of the beauty
of the youth, husband of the woman who was to his soul utterly an angel,
Merthyr sat in the anguish of self-accusation, believing that some
remonstrance, some inspired word, might have turned him, and half
dreading to sound his own heart, as if an evil knowledge of his nature
haunted it.

He rose up at last with a cry. The door opened, and Giacinta, Vittoria's
maid, appeared, bearing a lamp. She had been sitting outside, waiting to
hear him stir before she intruded. He touched her cheek kindly, and
thought that one could do little better than die, if need were, in the
service of such a people. She said that her mistress was kneeling. She
wished to make coffee for him, and Merthyr let her do it, knowing the
comfort there is to a woman in the ministering occupation of her hands.
It was soon daylight. Beppo had not come back to the house.

"No one has left the house?" Merthyr asked.

"Not since--" she answered convulsively.

"The Countess d'Isorella is here?"

"Yes, signore."

"Asleep?" he put the question mournfully, in remembrance of Carlo's "Let
her sleep!"

"Yes, signore; like the first night after confession."

"She resides, I think, in the Corso Venezia. When she awakens, let her
know that I request to have the honour of conducting her."

"Yes, signore. Her carriage is still at the gates. The countess's horses
are accustomed to stand."

Merthyr knew this for a hint against his leaving, as well as against the
lady's character.

"Let your mistress be assured that I shall on no account be long absent
at any time."

"Signore, I shall do so," said Giacinta.

She brought him word soon after, that Countess d'Isorella was stirring.
Merthyr met Violetta on the stairs.

"Can it be true?" she accosted him first.

"Count Ammiani has left for Brescia," he replied.

"In spite of my warning?"

Merthyr gave space for her to pass into the room. She appeared undecided,
saying that she had a dismal apprehension of her not having dismissed her
coachman overnight.

"In spite of my warning," she murmured again, "he has really gone? Surely
I cannot have slept more than three hours."

"It was Count Ammiani's wish that you should enjoy your full sleep
undisturbed in his house," said Merthyr, "As regards your warning to him,
he has left Milan perfectly convinced of the gravity of a warning that
comes from you."

Violetta shrugged lightly. "Then all we have to do is to pray for the
success of Carlo Alberto."

"Oh! pardon me, countess," Merthyr rejoined, "prayers may be useful, but
you at least have something to do besides."

His eyes caught hers firmly as they were letting a wild look of
interrogation fall on him, and he continued with perfect courtesy, "You
will accompany me to see Countess Anna of Lenkenstein. You have great
influence, madame. It is not Count Ammiani's request; for, as I informed
you, it was his wish that you should enjoy your repose. The request is
mine, because his life is dear to me. Nagen, I think, is the name of the
Austrian officer who has started for Brescia."

She had in self-defence to express surprise while he spoke, which
compelled her to meet his mastering sight and submit to a struggle of
vision sufficient to show him that he had hit a sort of guilty
consciousness. Otherwise she was not discomposed, and with marvellous
sagacity she accepted the forbearance he assumed, not affecting innocence
to challenge it, as silly criminals always do when they are exposed, but
answering quite in the tone of innocence, and so throwing the burden by
an appearance of mutual consent on some unnamed third person.

"Certainly; let us go to Countess Anna of Lenkenstein, if you think fit.
I have to rely on your judgement. I quite abjure my own. If I have to
plead for anything, I am going before a woman, remember."

"I do not forget it," said Merthyr.

"The expedition to Brescia may be unfortunate," she resumed hurriedly; "I
wish it had not been undertaken. At any rate, it rescues Count Ammiani
from an expedition to Rome, and his slavish devotion to that
priest-hating man whom he calls, or called, his Chief. At Brescia he is
not outraging the head of our religion. That is a gain."

"A gain for him in the next world?" said Merthyr. "I believe that
Countess Anna of Lenkenstein is also a fervent Catholic; is she not?"

"I trust so."

"On behalf of her peace of mind, I trust so, too. In that case, she also
must be a sound sleeper."

"We shall have to awaken her. What excuse--what am I to say to her?"

"I beg you to wait for the occasion, Countess d'Isorella. The words will
come."

Violetta bit her lip. She had consented to this extraordinary step in an
amazement. As she contemplated it now, it seemed worse than a partial
confession and an appeal to his generosity. She broke out in pity for her
horses, in dread of her coachman, declaring that it was impossible for
her to give him the order to drive her anywhere but home.

"With your permission, countess, I will undertake to give him the order,"
said Merthyr.

"But have you no compassion, signor Powys? and you are an Englishman! I
thought that Englishmen were excessively compassionate with horses."

"They have been known to kill them in the service of their friends,
nevertheless."

"Well!"--Violetta had recourse to the expression of her shoulders--"and I
am really to see Countess Anna?"

"In my presence."

"Oh! that cannot be. Pardon me; it is impossible. She will decline the
scene. I say it with the utmost sincerity: I know that she will refuse."

"Then, countess," Merthyr's face grew hard, "if I am not to be in your
company to prompt you, allow me to instruct you beforehand."

Violetta looked at him eagerly, as one looks for tidings, with an
involuntary beseeching quiver of the strained eyelids.

"No irony!" she said, fearing horribly that he was about to throw off the
mask of irony.

This desperate effort of her wits at the crisis succeeded.

Merthyr, not knowing what design he had, hopeless of any definite end in
tormenting the woman, and never having it in his mind merely to punish,
was diverted by the exclamation to speak ironically. "You can tell
Countess Anna that it is only her temporal sovereign who is attacked, and
that therefore--" he could not continue.

"Some affection?" he murmured, in intense grief.

His manly forbearance touched her whose moral wit was too blunt to
apprehend the contempt in it.

"Much affection--much!" Violetta exclaimed. "I have a deep affection for
Count Ammiani; an old friendship. Believe me! believe me! I came here
last night to save him. Anything on earth that I can do, I will do--on my
honour; and do not smile at that--I have never pledged it without
fulfilling the oath. I will not sleep while I can aid in preserving him.
He shall know that I am not the base person he has conceived me to be.
You, signor Powys, are not a man to paint all women black that are a
little less than celestial--are you? I am told it is a trick with your,
countrymen; and they have a poet who knew us! I entreat you to confide in
me. I am at present quite unaware that Count Ammiani runs particular--I
mean personal danger. He is in danger, of course; everyone can see it.
But, on my honour--and never in my life have I spoken so earnestly, my
friends would hardly recognize me--I declare to you on my faith as a
Christian lady, I am ignorant of any plot against him. I can take a Cross
and kiss it, like a peasant, and swear to you by the Madonna that I know
nothing of it."

She corrected her ardour, half-exulting in finding herself carried so far
and so swimmingly on a tide of truth, half wondering whether the
flowering beauty of her face in excitement had struck his sensibility. He
was cold and speculative.

"Ah!" she said, "if I were to ask my compatriots to put faith in a
woman's pure friendship for a man, I should know the answer; but you,
signor Powys, who have shown us that a man is capable of the purest
friendship for a woman, should believe me."

He led her down to the gates, where her coachman sat muffled in a
three-quarter sleep. The word was given to drive to her own house;
rejoiced by which she called his attention deploringly to the condition
of her horses, requesting him to say whether he could imagine them the
best English, and confessing with regret, that she killed three sets a
year--loved them well, notwithstanding. Merthyr saw enough of her to feel
that she was one of the weak creatures who are strong through our greater
weakness; and, either by intuition or quick wit, too lively and too
subtle to be caught by simple suspicion. She even divined that reflection
might tell him she had evaded him by an artifice--a piece of gross
cajolery; and said, laughing: "Concerning friendship, I could offer it to
a boy, like Carlo Ammiani; not to you, signor Powys. I know that I must
check a youth, and I am on my guard. I should be eternally tormented to
discover whether your armour was proof."

"I dare say that a lady who had those torments would soon be able to make
them mine," said Merthyr.

"You could not pay a fairer compliment to some one else," she remarked.
In truth, the candid personal avowal seemed to her to hold up Vittoria's
sacred honour in a crystal, and the more she thought of it, the more she
respected him, for his shrewd intelligence, if not for his sincerity; but
on the whole she fancied him a loyal friend, not solely a clever maker of
phrases; and she was pleased with herself for thinking such a matter
possible, in spite of her education.

"I do most solemnly hope that you may not have to sustain Countess
Alessandra under any affliction whatsoever," she said at parting.

Violetta had escaped an exposure--a rank and naked accusation of her
character and deeds. She feared nothing but that, being quite indifferent
to opinion; a woman who would not have thought it preternaturally sad to
have to walk as a penitent in the streets, with the provision of a very
thick veil to cover her. She had escaped, but the moment she felt herself
free, she was surprised by a sharp twinge of remorse. She summoned her
maid to undress her, and smelt her favourite perfume, and lay in her bed,
to complete her period of rest, closing her eyes there with a child's
faith in pillows. Flying lights and blood-blotches rushed within a span
of her forehead. She met this symptom promptly with a medical receipt;
yet she had no sleep; nor would coffee give her sleep. She shrank from
opium as deleterious to the constitution, and her mind settled on music
as the remedy.

Some time after her craving for it had commenced, an Austrian foot
regiment, marching to the drum, passed under her windows. The fife is a
merry instrument; fife and drum colour the images of battle gaily; but
the dull ringing Austrian step-drum, beating unaccompanied, strikes the
mind with the real nature of battles, as the salt smell of powder strikes
it, and more in horror, more as a child's imagination realizes bloodshed,
where the scene is a rolling heaven, black and red on all sides, with
pitiable men moving up to the mouth of butchery, the insufferable
flashes, the dark illumination of red, red of black, like a vision of the
shadows Life and Death in a shadow-fight over the dear men still living.
Sensitive minds may be excited by a small stimulant to see such pictures.
This regimental drum is like a song of the flat-headed savage in man. It
has no rise or fall, but leads to the bloody business with an unvarying
note, and a savage's dance in the middle of the rhythm. Violetta listened
to it until her heart quickened with alarm lest she should be going to
have a fever. She thought of Carlo Ammiani, and of the name of Nagen; she
had seen him at the Lenkensteins. Her instant supposition was that Anna
had perhaps paid heavily for the secret of Carlo's movements an purpose
to place Major Nagen on the Brescian high-road to capture him. Capture
meant a long imprisonment, if not execution. Partly for the sake of
getting peace of mind--for she was shocked by her temporary inability to
command repose--but with some hope of convincing Carlo that she strove to
be of use to him, she sent for the spy Luigi, and at a cost of two
hundred and twenty Austrian florins, obtained his promise upon oath to
follow Count Ammiani into Brescia, if necessary, and deliver to him a
letter she had written, wherein Nagen's name was mentioned, and Carlo was
advised to avoid personal risks; the letter hinted that he might have
incurred a private enmity, and he had better keep among his friends. She
knew the writing of this letter to be the foolishest thing she had ever
done. Two hundred and twenty florins--the man originally stipulated to
have three hundred--was a large sum to pay for postage. However,
sacrifices must now and then be made for friendship, and for sleep. When
she had paid half the money, her mind was relieved, and she had the
slumber which preserves beauty. Luigi was to be paid the other half on
his return. "He may never return," she thought, while graciously
dismissing him. The deduction by mental arithmetic of the two hundred and
twenty, or the one hundred and ten florins, from the large amount
Countess Anna was bound to pay her in turn, annoyed her, though she knew
it was a trifle. For this lady, Milan, Turin, and Paris sighed deeply.

When he had left Violetta at her house in the Corso, Merthyr walked
briskly for exercise, knowing that he would have need of his health and
strength. He wanted a sight of Alps to wash out the image of the woman
from his mind, and passed the old Marshal's habitation fronting the
Gardens, wishing that he stood in the field against the fine old warrior,
for whom he had a liking. Near the walls he discovered Beppo sitting
pensively with his head between his two fists. Beppo had not seen Count
Ammiani, but he had seen Barto Rizzo, and pointing to the walls, said
that Barto had dropped down there. He had met him hurrying in the Corso
Francesco. Barto took him to the house of Sarpo, the bookseller, who
possessed a small printing-press. Beppo described vividly, with his usual
vivacity of illustration, the stupefaction of the man at the apparition
of his tormentor, whom he thought fast in prison; and how Barto had
compelled him to print a proclamation to the Piedmontese, Lombards, and
Venetians, setting forth that a battle had been fought South of the
Ticino, and that Carlo Alberto was advancing on Milan, signed with the
name of the Piedmontese Pole in command of the king's army. A second,
framed as an order of the day, spoke of victory and the planting of the
green, white and red banner on the Adige, and forward to the Isonzo.

"I can hear nothing of Carlo Alberto's victory," Beppo said; "no one has
heard of it. Barto told us how the battle was fought, and the name of the
young lieutenant who discovered the enemy's flank march, and got the
artillery down on him, and pounded him so that--signore, it's amazing!
I'm ready to cry, and laugh, and howl!--fifteen thousand men capitulated
in a heap!"

"Don't you know you've been listening to a madman?" said Merthyr,
irritated, and thoroughly angered to see Beppo's opposition to that view.

"Signore, Barto described the whole battle. It began at five o'clock in
the morning."

"When it was dark!"

"Yes; when it was dark. He said so. And we sent up rockets, and caught
the enemy coming on, and the cavalry of Alessandria fell upon two
batteries of field guns and carried them off, and Colonel Romboni was
shot in his back, and cries he, 'Best give up the ghost if you're hit in
the rear. Evviva l'Italia!'"

"A Piedmontese colonel, you fool! he would have shouted 'Viva Carlo
Alberto!'" said Merthyr, now critically disgusted with the tale, and
refusing to hear more. Two hours later, he despatched Beppo to Carlo in
Brescia, warning him that for some insane purpose these two proclamations
had been printed by Barto Rizzo, and that they were false.

It was early on the morning of a second day, before sunrise, when
Vittoria sent for Merthyr to conduct her to the cathedral. "There has
been a battle," she said. Her lips hardly joined to frame the syllables
in speech. Merthyr refrained from asking where she had heard of the
battle. As soon as the Duomo doors were open, he led her in and left her
standing shrinking under the great vault with her neck fearfully drawn on
her shoulders, as one sees birds under thunder. He thought that she was
losing courage. Choosing to go out on the steps rather than look on her,
he was struck by the sight of two horsemen, who proved to be Austrian
officers, rattling at racing speed past the Duomo up the Corso. The sight
of them made it seem possible that a battle had been fought. As soon as
he was free, Merthyr went to the Duchess of Graatli, from whom he had the
news of Novara. The officers he had seen were Prince Radocky and
Lieutenant Wilfrid Pierson, the old Marshal's emissaries of victory. They
had made a bet on the bloody field about reaching Milan first, and the
duchess affected to be full of the humour of this bet in order to conceal
her exultation. The Lenkensteins called on her; the Countess of
Lenkenstein, Anna, and Lena; and they were less considerate, and drew
their joy openly from the source of his misery--a dreadful house for
Merthyr to remain in; but he hoped to see Wilfrid, having heard the
duchess rally Lena concerning the deeds of the white umbrella, which,
Lena said, was pierced with balls, and had been preserved for her. "The
dear foolish fellow insisted on marching right into the midst of the
enemy with his absurd white umbrella; and wherever there was danger the
men were seen following it. Prince Radocky told me the whole army was
laughing. How he escaped death was a miracle!" She spoke unaffectedly of
her admiration for the owner, and as Wilfrid came in she gave him
brilliant eyes. He shook Merthyr's hand without looking at him. The
ladies would talk of nothing but the battle, so he went up to Merthyr,
and under pretext of an eager desire for English news, drew him away.

"Her husband was not there? not at Novara, I mean?" he said.

"He's at Brescia," said Merthyr.

"Well, thank goodness he didn't stand in those ranks!"

Wilfrid murmured, puffing thoughtfully over the picture they presented to
his memory.

Merthyr then tried to hint to him that he had a sort of dull suspicion of
Carlo's being in personal danger, but of what kind he could not say. He
mentioned Weisspriess by name; and Nagen; and Countess Anna. Wilfrid
said, "I'll find out if there's anything, only don't be fancying it. The
man's in a bad hole at Brescia. Weisspriess, I believe, is at Verona.
He's an honourable fellow. The utmost he would do would be to demand a
duel; and I'm sure he's heartily sick of that work. Besides, he and
Countess Anna have quarrelled. Meet me;--by the way, you and I mustn't be
seen meeting, I suppose. The duchess is neutral ground. Come here
to-night. And don't talk of me, but say that a friend asks how she is,
and hopes--the best things you can say for me. I must go up to their
confounded chatter again. Tell her there's no fear, none whatever. You
all hate us, naturally; but you know that Austrian officers are
gentlemen. Don't speak my name to her just yet. Unless, of course, she
should happen to allude to me, which is unlikely. I had a dismal idea
that her husband was at Novara."

The tender-hearted duchess sent a message to Vittoria, bidding her not to
forget that she had promised her at Meran to 'love her always.'

"And tell her," she said to Merthyr, "that I do not think I shall have my
rooms open for the concert to-morrow night. I prefer to let
Antonio-Pericles go mad. She will not surely consider that she is bound
by her promise to him? He drags poor Irma from place to place to make
sure the miserable child is not plotting to destroy his concert, as that
man Sarpo did. Irma is half dead, and hasn't the courage to offend him.
She declares she depends upon him for her English reputation. She has
already caught a violent cold, and her sneezing is frightful. I have
never seen so abject a creature. I have no compassion at the sight of
her."

That night Merthyr heard from Wilfrid that a plot against Carlo Ammiani
did exist. He repeated things he had heard pass between Countess
d'Isorella and Irma in the chamber of Pericles before the late battle.
Modestly confessing that he was 'for some reasons' in high favour with
Countess Lena, he added that after a long struggle he had brought her to
confess that her sister had sworn to have Countess Alessandra Ammiani
begging at her feet.

By mutual consent they went to consult the duchess. She repelled the
notion of Austrian women conspiring. "An Austrian noble lady--do you
think it possible that she would act secretly to serve a private hatred?
Surely I may ask you, for my sake, to think better of us?"

Merthyr showed her an opening to his ground by suggesting that Anna's
antipathy to Victoria might spring more from a patriotic than a private
source.

"Oh! I will certainly make inquiries, if only to save Anna's reputation
with her enemies," the duchess answered rather proudly.

It would have been a Novara to Pericles if Vittoria had refused to sing.
He held the pecuniarily-embarrassed duchess sufficiently in his power to
command a concert at her house; his argument to those who pressed him to
spare Vittoria in a season of grief running seriously, with visible
contempt of their intellects, thus: "A great voice is an ocean. You
cannot drain it with forty dozen opera-hats. It is something found--an
addition to the wealth of this life. Shall we not enjoy what we find? You
do not wear out a picture by looking at it; likewise you do not wear out
a voice by listening to it. A bird has wings;--here is a voice. Why were
they given? I should say, to go into the air. Ah; but not if grandmother
is ill. What is a grandmother to the wings and the voice? If to sing
would kill,--yes, then let the puny thing be silent! But Sandra Belloni
has a soul that has not a husband--except her Art. Her body is husbanded;
but her soul is above her body. You would treat it as below. Art is her
soul's husband! Besides, I have her promise. She is a girl who will go up
to a loaded gun's muzzle if she gives her word. And besides, her husband
may be shot to-morrow. So, all she sings now is clear gain."

Vittoria sent word to him that she would sing.

In the meantime a change had come upon Countess Anna. Weisspriess, her
hero, appeared at her brother's house, fresh from the field of Novara,
whither he had hurried from Verona on a bare pretext, that was a breach
of military discipline requiring friendly interposition in high quarters.
Unable to obtain an audience with Count Lenkenstein, he remained in the
hall, hoping for things which he affected to care nothing for; and so it
chanced that he saw Lena, who was mindful that her sister had suffered
much from passive jealousy when Wilfrid returned from the glorious field,
and led him to Anna, that she also might rejoice in a hero. Weisspriess
did not refrain from declaring on the way that he would rather charge
against a battery. Some time after, Anna lay in Lena's arms, sobbing out
one of the wildest confessions ever made by woman:--she adored
Weisspriess; she hated Nagen; but was miserably bound to the man she
hated. "Oh! now I know what love is." She repeated this with transparent
enjoyment of the opposing sensations by whose shock the knowledge was
revealed to her.

"How can you be bound to Major Nagan?" asked Lena.

"Oh! why? except that I have been possessed by devils."

Anna moaned. "Living among these Italians has distempered my blood." She
exclaimed that she was lost.

"In what way can you be lost?" said Lena.

"I have squandered more than half that I possess. I am almost a beggar. I
am no longer the wealthy Countess Anna. I am much poorer than anyone of
us."

"But Major Weisspriess is a man of honour, and if he loves you--"

"Yes; he loves me! he loves me! or would he come to me after I have sent
him against a dozen swords? But he is poor; he must, must marry a wealthy
woman. I used to hate him because I thought he had his eye on money. I
love him for it now. He deserves wealth; he is a matchless hero. He is
more than the first swordsman of our army; he is a knightly man. Oh my
soul Johann!" She very soon fell to raving. Lena was implored by her to
give her hand to Weisspriess in reward for his heroism--"For you are
rich," Anna said; "you will not have to go to him feeling that you have
made him face death a dozen times for your sake, and that you thank him
and reward him by being a whimpering beggar in his arms. Do, dearest!
Will you? Will you, to please me, marry Johann? He is not unworthy of
you." And more of this hysterical hypocrisy, which brought on fits of
weeping. "I have lived among these savages till I have ceased to be
human--forgotten everything but my religion," she said. "I wanted
Weisspriess to show them that they dared not stand up against a man of
us, and to tame the snarling curs. He did. He is brave. He did as much as
a man could do, but I was unappeasable. They seem to have bitten me till
I had a devouring hunger to humiliate them. Lena, will you believe that I
have no hate for Carlo Ammiani or the woman he has married? None! and
yet, what have I done!" Anna smote her forehead. "They are nothing but
little dots on a field for me. I don't care whether they live or die.
It's like a thing done in sleep."

"I want to know what you have done," said Lena caressingly.

"You at least will try to reward our truest hero, and make up to him for
your sister's unkindness, will you not?" Anna replied with a cajolery
wonderfully like a sincere expression of her wishes. "He will be a good
husband.. He has proved it by having been so faithful a--a lover. So you
may be sure of him. And when he is yours, do not let him fight again,
Lena, for I have a sickening presentiment that his next duel is his
last."

"Tell me," Lena entreated her, "pray tell me what horrible thing you have
done to prevent your marrying him."

"With their pride and their laughter," Anna made answer; "the fools! were
they to sting us perpetually and not suffer for it? That woman, the
Countess Alessandra, as she's now called--have you forgotten that she
helped our Paul's assassin to escape? was she not eternally plotting
against Austria? And I say that I love Austria. I love my country; I plot
for my country. She and her husband plot, and I plot to thwart them. I
have ruined myself in doing it. Oh, my heart! why has it commenced
beating again? Why did Weisspriess come here? He offended me. He refused
to do my orders, and left me empty-handed, and if he suffers too," Anna
relieved a hard look with a smile of melancholy, "I hope he will not; I
cannot say more."

"And I'm to console him if he does?" said Lena.

"At least, I shall be out of the way," said Anna. "I have still money
enough to make me welcome in a convent."

"I am to marry him?" Lena persisted, and half induced Anna to act a
feeble part, composed of sobs and kisses and full confession of her
plight. Anna broke from her in time to leave what she had stated of
herself vague and self-justificatory, so that she kept her pride, and
could forgive, as she was ready to do even so far as to ask forgiveness
in turn, when with her awakened enamoured heart she heard Vittoria sing
at the concert of Pericles. Countess Alessandra's divine gift, which she
would not withhold, though in a misery of apprehension; her grave eyes,
which none could accuse of coldness, though they showed no emotion; her
simple noble manner that seemed to lift her up among the forces
threatening her; these expressions of a superior soul moved Anna under
the influence of the incomparable voice to pass over envious contrasts,
and feel the voice and the nature were one in that bosom. Could it be the
same as the accursed woman who had stood before her at Meran? She could
hardly frame the question, but she had the thought sufficiently firmly to
save her dignity; she was affected by very strong emotion when Vittoria's
singing ended, and nothing but the revival of the recollection of her old
contempt preserved her from an impetuous desire to take the singer by the
hand and have all clear between them; for they were now of equal rank to
tolerating eyes. "But she has no religious warmth!" Anna reflected with a
glow of satisfaction. The concert was broken up by Laura Piaveni. She
said out loud that the presence of Major Weisspriess was intolerable to
the Countess Alessandra. It happened that Weisspriess entered the room
while Laura sat studying the effect produced by her countrywoman's voice
on the thick eyelids of Austrian Anna; and Laura, seeing their enemy
ready to weep in acknowledgment of their power, scorned the power which
could never win freedom, and broke up the sitting, citing the offence of
the presence of Weisspriess for a pretext. The incident threw Anna back
upon her old vindictiveness. It caused an unpleasant commotion in the
duchess's saloon. Count Serabiglione was present, and ran round to
Weisspriess, apologizing for his daughter's behaviour. "Do you think I
can't deal with your women as well as your men, you ass?" said
Weisspriess, enraged by the scandal of the scene. He was overheard by
Count Karl Lenkenstein, who took him to task sharply for his rough
speech; but Anna supported her lover, and they joined hands publicly.
Anna went home prostrated with despair. "What conscience is in me that I
should wish one of my Kaiser's officers killed?" she cried enigmatically
to Lena. "But I must have freedom. Oh! to be free. I am chained to my
enemy, and God blesses that woman. He makes her weep, but he blesses her,
for her body is free, and mine,--the thought of mine sets flames creeping
up my limbs as if I were tied to the stake. Losing a husband you
love--what is that to taking a husband you hate?" Still Lena could get no
plain confession from her, for Anna clung to self-justification, and felt
it abandoning her, and her soul fluttering in a black gulf when she
opened her month to disburden herself.

There came tidings of the bombardment of Brescia one of the historic
deeds of infamy. Many officers of the Imperial army perceived the shame
which it cast upon their colours, even in those intemperate hours, and
Karl Lenkenstein assumed the liberty of private friendship to go
complaining to the old Marshal, who was too true a soldier to condemn a
soldier in action, however strong his disapproval of proceedings. The
liberty assumed by Karl was excessive; he spoke out in the midst of
General officers as if his views were shared by them and the Marshal; and
his error was soon corrected; one after another reproached him, until the
Marshal, pitying his condition, sent him into his writing-closet, where
he lectured the youth on military discipline. It chanced that there
followed between them a question upon what the General in command at
Brescia would do with his prisoners; and hearing that they were subject
to the rigours of a court-martial, and if adjudged guilty, would
forthwith summarily be shot, Karl ventured to ask grace for Vittoria's
husband. He succeeded finally in obtaining his kind old Chief's promise
that Count Ammiani should be tried in Milan, and as the bearer of a paper
to that effect, he called on his sisters to get them or Wilfrid to convey
word to Vittoria of her husband's probable safety. He found Anna in a
swoon, and Lena and the duchess bending over her. The duchess's chasseur
Jacob Baumwalder Feckelwitz had been returning from Moran, when on the
Brescian high-road he met the spy Luigi, and acting promptly under the
idea that Luigi was always a pestilential conductor of detestable
correspondence, he attacked him, overthrew him, and ransacked him, and
bore the fruit of his sagacious exertions to his mistress in Milan; it
was Violetta d'Isorella's letter to Carlo Ammiani. "I have read it," the
duchess said; "contrary to any habits when letters are not addressed to
me. I bring it open to your sister Anna. She catches sight of one or two
names and falls down in the state in which you see her."

"Leave her to me," said Karl.

He succeeded in extracting from Anna hints of the fact that she had paid
a large sum of her own money to Countess d'Isorella for secrets connected
with the Bergamasc and Brescian rising. "We were under a mutual oath to
be silent, but if one has broken it the other cannot; so I confess it to
you, dearest good brother. I did this for my country at my personal
sacrifice."

Karl believed that he had a sister magnificent in soul. She was glad to
have deluded him, but she could not endure his praises, which painted to
her imagination all that she might have been if she had not dashed her
patriotism with the low cravings of vengeance, making herself like some
abhorrent mediaeval grotesque, composed of eagle and reptile. She was
most eager in entreating him to save Count Ammiani's life. Carlo, she
said, was their enemy, but he had been their friend, and she declared
with singular earnestness that she should never again sleep or hold up
her head, if he were slain or captured.

"My Anna is justified by me in everything she has done," Karl said to the
duchess.

"In that case," the duchess replied, "I have only to differ with her to
feel your sword's point at my breast."

"I should certainly challenge the man who doubted her," said Karl.

The duchess laughed with a scornful melancholy.

On the steps of the door where his horse stood saddled, he met Wilfrid,
and from this promised brother-in-law received matter for the challenge.
Wilfrid excitedly accused Anna of the guilt of a conspiracy to cause the
destruction of Count Ammiani. In the heat of his admiration for his
sister, Karl struck him on the cheek with his glove, and called him a
name by which he had passed during the days of his disgrace, signifying
one who plays with two parties. Lena's maid heard them arrange to meet
within an hour, and she having been a witness of the altercation, ran to
her mistress in advance of Wilfrid, and so worked on Lena's terrors on
behalf of her betrothed and her brother, that Lena, dropped at Anna's
feet telling her all that she had gathered and guessed in verification of
Wilfrid's charge, and imploring her to confess the truth. Anna, though
she saw her concealment pierced, could not voluntarily forego her
brother's expressed admiration of her, and clung to the tatters of
secresy. After a brief horrid hesitation, she chose to face Wilfrid. This
interview began with lively recriminations, and was resulting in
nothing--for Anna refused to be shaken by his statement that the Countess
d'Isorella had betrayed her, and perceived that she was listening to
suspicions only--when, to give his accusation force, Wilfrid said that
Brescia had surrendered and that Count Ammiani had escaped.

"And I thank God for it!" Anna exclaimed, and with straight frowning eyes
demanded the refutation of her sincerity.

"Count Ammiani and his men have five hours' grace ahead of Major Nagen
and half a regiment," said Wilfrid.

At this she gasped; she had risen her breath to deny or defy, and hung on
the top of it without a voice.

"Tell us--say, but do say--confess that you know Nagen to be a name of
mischief," Lena prayed her.

"I will say anything to prevent my brother from running into danger," Anna
rejoined.

"She is most foully accused by one whom we permitted to aspire to be of
our own family," said Karl.

"Yet you, Karl, have always been the first to declare her revengeful,"
Lena turned to him.

"Help, Karl, help me," said Anna.

"Yes!" cried her sister; "there you stand, and ask for help, meanest of
women! Do you think these men are not in earnest? Karl is to help you,
and you will not speak a word to save him from a grave before night, or
me from a lover all of blood."

"Am I to be the sacrifice?" said Anna.

"Whatever you call it, Wilfrid has spoken truth of you, and to none but
members of our family; and he had a right to say it, and you are bound
now to acknowledge it."

"I acknowledge that I love and serve my country, Lena."

"Not with a pure heart: you can't forgive. Insult or a wrong makes a
madwoman of you. Confess, Anna! You know well that you can't kneel to a
priest's ear, for you've stopped your conscience. You have pledged
yourself to misery to satisfy a spite, and you have not the courage to
ask for--" Lena broke her speech like one whose wits have been kindled.
"Yes, Karl," she resumed; "Anna begged you to help her. You will. Take
her aside and save her from being miserable forever. You do mean to fight
my Wilfrid?"

"I am certainly determined to bring him to repentance leaving him the
option of the way," said Karl.

Lena took her sullen sister by the arm.

"Anna, will you let these two men go--to slaughter? Look at them; they
are both our brothers. One is dearer than a brother to me, and, oh God! I
have known what it is to half-lose him. You to lose a lover and have to
go bound by a wretched oath to be the wife of a detestable short-sighted
husband! Oh, what an abominable folly!"

This epithet, 'short-sighted,' curiously forced in by Lena, was like a
shock of the very image of Nagen's needle features thrust against Anna's
eyes; the spasm of revulsion in her frame was too quick for her habitual
self-control.

At that juncture Weisspriess opened the door, and Anna's eyes met his.

"You don't spare me," she murmured to Lena.

Her voice trembled, and Wilfrid bent his head near her, pressing her
hand, and said, "Not only I, but Countess Alessandra Ammiani exonerates
you from blame. As she loves her country, you love yours. My words to
Karl were an exaggeration of what I know and think. Only tell me
this;--if Nagen captures Count Ammiani, how is he likely to deal with
him?"

"How can I inform you?" Anna replied coldly; but she reflected in a fire
of terror. She had given Nagen the prompting of a hundred angry
exclamations in the days of her fever of hatred; she had nevertheless
forgotten their parting words; that is, she had forgotten her mood when
he started for Brescia, and the nature of the last instructions she had
given him. Revolting from the thought of execution being done upon Count
Ammiani, as one quickly springing out of fever dreams, all her white face
went into hard little lines, like the withered snow which wears away in
frost. "Yes," she said; and again, "Yes," to something Weisspriess
whispered in her ear, she knew not clearly what. Weisspriess told Wilfrid
that he would wait below. As he quitted the room, the duchess entered,
and went up to Anna. "My good soul," she said, "you have, I trust,
listened to Major Weisspriess. Oh, Anna! you wanted revenge. Now take it,
as becomes a high-born woman; and let your enemy come to your feet, and
don't spurn her when she is there. Must I inform you that I have been to
Countess d'Isorella myself with a man who can compel her to speak? But
Anna von Lenkenstein is not base like that Italian. Let them think of you
as they will, I believe you to have a great heart. I am sure you will not
allow personal sentiment to sully your devotion to our country. Show them
that our Austrian faces can be bright; and meet her whom you call your
enemy; you cannot fly. You must see her, or you betray yourself. The poor
creature's husband is in danger of capture or death."

While the duchess's stern under-breath ran on hurriedly, convincing Anna
that she had, with no further warning, to fall back upon her uttermost
strength--the name of Countess Alessandra Ammiani was called at the door.
Instinctively the others left a path between Vittoria and Anna. It was
one of the moments when the adoption of a decisive course says more in
vindication of conduct than long speeches. Anna felt that she was on her
trial. For the first time since she had looked on this woman she noticed
the soft splendour of Vittoria's eyes, and the harmony of her whole
figure; nor was the black dress of protesting Italian mourning any longer
offensive in her sight, but on a sudden pitiful, for Anna thought: "It
may at this very hour be for her husband, and she not knowing it." And
with that she had a vision under her eyelids of Nagen like a shadowy
devil in pursuit of men flying, and striking herself and Vittoria worse
than dead in one blow levelled at Carlo Ammiani. A sense of supernatural
horror chilled her blood when she considered again, facing her enemy,
that their mutual happiness was by her own act involved in the fate of
one life. She stepped farther than the half-way to greet her visitor,
whose hands she took. Before a word was uttered between them, she turned
to her brother, and with a clear voice said:

"Karl, the Countess Alessandra's husband, our old, friend Carlo Ammiani,
may need succour in his flight. Try to cross it; or better, get among
those who are pursuing him; and don't delay one minute. You understand
me."

Count Karl bowed his head, bitterly humbled.

Anna's eyes seemed to interrogate Vittoria, "Can I do, more?" but her own
heart answered her.

Inveterate when following up her passion for vengeance, she was fanatical
in responding to the suggestions of remorse.

"Stay; I will despatch Major Weisspriess in my own name," she said. "He
is a trusty messenger, and he knows those mountains. Whoever is the
officer broken for aiding Count Ammiani's escape, he shall be rewarded by
me to the best of my ability. Countess Alessandra, I have anticipated
your petition; I hope you may not have to reproach me. Remember that my
country was in pieces when you and I declared war. You will not suffer
without my suffering tenfold. Perhaps some day you will do me the favour
to sing to me, when there is no chance of interruption. At present it is
cruel to detain you."

Vittoria said simply: "I thank you, Countess Anna."

She was led out by Count Karl to where Merthyr awaited her. All wondered
at the briefness of a scene that had unexpectedly brought the crisis to
many emotions and passions, as the broken waters of the sea beat together
and make here or there the wave which is topmost. Anna's grand initiative
hung in their memories like the throbbing of a pulse, so hotly their
sensations swarmed about it, and so intensely it embraced and led what
all were desiring. The duchess kissed Anna, saying:

"That is a noble heart to which you have become reconciled. Though you
should never be friends, as I am with one of them, you will esteem her.
Do not suppose her to be cold. She is the mother of an unborn little one,
and for that little one's sake she follows out every duty; she checks
every passion in her bosom. She will spare no sacrifice to save her
husband, but she has brought her mind to look at the worst, for fear that
a shock should destroy her motherly guard."

"Really, duchess," Anna replied, "these are things for married women to
hear;" and she provoked some contempt of her conventional delicacy, at
the same time that in her imagination the image of Vittoria struggling to
preserve this burden of motherhood against a tragic mischance, completely
humiliated and overwhelmed her, as if nature had also come to add to her
mortifications.

"I am ready to confess everything I have done, and to be known for what I
am," she said.

"Confess no more than is necessary, but do everything you can; that's
wisest," returned the duchess.

"Ah; you mean that you have nothing to learn." Anna shuddered.

"I mean that you are likely to run into the other extreme of disfavouring
yourself just now, my child. And," continued the duchess, "you have
behaved so splendidly that I won't think ill of you."

Before the day darkened, Wilfrid obtained, through Prince Radocky's
influence, an order addressed to Major Nagen for the surrender of
prisoners into his hands. He and Count Karl started for the Val Camonica
on the chance of intercepting the pursuit. These were not much wiser than
their guesses and their apprehensions made them; but Weisspriess started
on the like errand after an interview with Anna, and he had drawn
sufficient intelligence out of sobs, and broken sentences, and torture of
her spirit, to understand that if Count Ammiani fell alive or dead into
Nagen's hands, Nagen by Anna's scrupulous oath, had a claim on her person
and her fortune: and he knew Nagen to be a gambler. As he was now by
promotion of service Nagen's superior officer, and a near relative of the
Brescian commandant, who would be induced to justify his steps, his
object was to reach and arbitrarily place himself over Nagen, as if upon
a special mission, and to get the lead of the expedition. For that
purpose he struck somewhat higher above the Swiss borders than Karl and
Wilfrid, and gained a district in the mountains above the vale, perfectly
familiar to him. Obeying directions forwarded to her by Wilfrid, Vittoria
left Milan for the Val Camonica no later than the evening; Laura was with
her in the carriage; Merthyr took horse after them as soon as he had
succeeded in persuading Countess Ammiani to pardon her daughter's last
act of wilfulness, and believe that, during the agitation of unnumbered
doubts, she ran less peril in the wilds where her husband fled, than in
her home.

"I will trust to her idolatrously, as you do," Countess Ammiani said;
"and perhaps she has already proved to me that I may."

Merthyr saw Agostino while riding out of Milan, and was seen by him; but
the old man walked onward, looking moodily on the stones, and merely
waved his hand behind.




CHAPTER XLVI

THE LAST

There is hard winter overhead in the mountains when Italian Spring walks
the mountain-sides with flowers, and hangs deep valley-walls with flowers
half fruit; the sources of the rivers above are set about with fangs of
ice, while the full flat stream runs to a rose of sunlight. High among
the mists and snows were the fugitives of Brescia, and those who for love
or pity struggled to save them wandered through the blooming vales,
sometimes hearing that they had crossed the frontier into freedom, and as
often that they were scattered low in death and captivity. Austria here,
Switzerland yonder, and but one depth between to bound across and win
calm breathing. But mountain might call to mountain, peak shine to peak;
a girdle of steel drove the hunted men back to frosty heights and clouds,
the shifting bosom of snows and lightnings. They saw nothing of hands
stretched out to succour. They saw a sun that did not warm them, a home
of exile inaccessible, crags like an earth gone to skeleton in hungry
air; and below, the land of their birth, beautiful, and sown everywhere
for them with torture and captivity, or death, the sweetest. Fifteen men
numbered the escape from Brescia. They fought their way twice through
passes of the mountains, and might easily, in their first dash Northward
from the South-facing hills, have crossed to the Valtelline and Engadine,
but that in their insanity of anguish they meditated another blow, and
were readier to march into the plains with the tricolour than to follow
any course of flight. When the sun was no longer in their blood they
thought of reason and of rest; they voted the expedition to Switzerland,
that so they should get round to Rome, and descended from the crags of
the Tonale, under which they were drawn to an ambush, suffering three of
their party killed, and each man bloody with wounds. The mountain
befriended them, and gave them safety, as truth is given by a bitter
friend. Among icy crags and mists, where the touch of life grows dull as
the nail of a fore-finger, the features of the mountain were stamped on
them, and with hunger they lost pride, and with solitude laughter; with
endless fleeing they lost the aim of flight; some became desperate, a few
craven. Companionship was broken before they parted in three bodies,
commanded severally by Colonel Corte, Carlo Ammiani, and Barto Rizzo.
Corte reached the plains, masked by the devotion of Carlo's band, who
lured the soldiery to a point and drew a chase, while Corte passed the
line and pushed on for Switzerland. Carlo told off his cousin Angelo
Guidascarpi in the list of those following Corte; but when he fled up to
the snows again, he beheld Angelo spectral as the vapour on a jut of rock
awaiting him. Barto Rizzo had chosen his own way, none knew whither.
Carlo, Angelo, Marco Sana, and a sharply-wounded Brescian lad, conceived
the scheme of traversing the South Tyrol mountain-range toward Friuli,
whence Venice, the still-breathing republic, might possibly be gained.
They carried the boy in turn till his arms drooped long down, and when
they knew the soul was out of him they buried him in snow, and thought
him happy. It was then that Marco Sana took his death for an omen, and
decided them to turn their heads once more for Switzerland; telling them
that the boy, whom he last had carried, uttered "Rome" with the flying
breath. Angelo said that Sana would get to Rome; and Carlo, smiling on
Angelo, said they were to die twins though they had been born only
cousins. The language they had fallen upon was mystical, scarce
intelligible to other than themselves. On a clear morning, with the Swiss
peaks in sight, they were condemned by want of food to quit their
fastness for the valley.

Vittoria read the faces of the mornings as human creatures base tried to
gather the sum of their destinies off changing surfaces, fair not meaning
fair, nor black black, but either the mask upon the secret of God's
terrible will; and to learn it and submit, was the spiritual burden of
her motherhood, that the child leaping with her heart might live. Not to
hope blindly, in the exceeding anxiousness of her passionate love, nor
blindly to fear; not to bet her soul fly out among the twisting chances;
not to sap her great maternal duty by affecting false stoical
serenity:--to nurse her soul's strength, and suckle her womanly weakness
with the tsars which are poison--when repressed; to be at peace with a
disastrous world for the sake of the dependent life unborn; lay such pure
efforts she clung to God. Soft dreams of sacred nuptial tenderness,
tragic images, wild pity, were like phantoms encircling her, plucking at
her as she went, lest they were beneath her feet, and she kept them from
lodging between her breasts. The thought that her husband, though he
should have perished, was not a life lost if their child lived, sustained
her powerfully. It seemed to whisper at times almost as it were Carlo's
ghost breathing in her ears: "On thee!" On her the further duty devolved;
and she trod down hope, lest it should build her up and bring a shock to
surprise her fortitude; she put back alarm.

The mountains and the valleys scarce had names for her understanding;
they were but a scene where the will of her Maker was at work. Rarely has
a soul been so subjected to its own force. She certainly had the image of
God in her mind.

Yet when her ayes lingered on any mountain gorge, the fate of her husband
sang within it a strange chant, ending in a key that rang sounding
through all her being, and seemed to question heaven. This music framed
itself; it was still when she looked at the shrouded mountain-tops. A
shadow meting sunlight on the long green slopes aroused it, and it hummed
above the tumbling hasty foam, and penetrated hanging depths of foliage,
sad-hued rock-clefts, dark green ravines; it became convulsed where the
mountain threw forward in a rushing upward line against the sky, there to
be severed at the head by cloud. It was silent among the vines.

Most painfully did human voices affect her when she had this music;
speech was a scourge to her sense of hearing, and touch distressed her:
an edge of purple flame would then unfold the vision of things to her
eyes. She had lost memory; and if by hazard unawares one idea was
projected by some sudden tumult of her enslaved emotions beyond known and
visible circumstances, her intelligence darkened with am oppressive dread
like that of zealots of the guilt of impiety.

Thus destitute, her eye took innumerable pictures sharp as on a
brass-plate: torrents, goat-tracks winding up red earth, rocks veiled
with water, cottage and children, strings of villagers mounting to the
church, one woman kneeling before a wayside cross, her basket at her
back, and her child gazing idly by; perched hamlets, rolling
pasture-fields, the vast mountain lines. She asked all that she saw,
"Does he live?" but the life was out of everything, and these shows told
of no life, neither of joy nor of grief. She could only distantly connect
the appearance of the white-coated soldiery with the source of her
trouble. They were no more than figures on a screen that hid the flashing
of the sword which renders dumb. She had charity for one who was footsore
and sat cherishing his ankle by a village spring, and she fed him, and
not until he was far behind, thought that he might have seen the white
face of her husband.

Accurate tidings could not be obtained, though the whole course of the
vale was full of stories of escapes, conflicts, and captures. Merthyr
learnt positively that some fugitives had passed the cordon. He came
across Wilfrid and Count Karl, who both verified it in the most sanguine
manner. They knew, however, that Major Nagen continued in the mountains.
Riding by a bend of the road, Merthyr beheld a man playing among
children, with one hand and his head down apparently for concealment at
his approach. It proved to be Beppo. The man believed that Count Ammiani
had fled to Switzerland. Barto Rizzo, he said, was in the mountains
still, and Beppo invoked damnation on him, as the author of those lying
proclamations which had ruined Brescia. He had got out of the city later
than the others and was seeking to evade the outposts, that he might join
his master--"that is, my captain, for I have only one master;" he
corrected the slip of his tongue appealingly to Merthyr. His left hand
was being continually plucked at by the children while he talked, and
after Merthyr had dispersed them with a shower of small coin, he showed
the hand, saying, glad of eye, that it had taken a sword-cut intended for
Count Ammiani. Merthyr sent him back to mount the carriage, enjoining him
severely not to speak.

When Carlo and his companions descended from the mountains, they entered
a village where there was an inn recognized by Angelo as the abode of
Jacopo Cruchi. He there revived Carlo's animosity toward Weisspriess by
telling the tale of the passage to Meran, and his good reasons for
determining to keep guard over the Countess Alessandra all the way.
Subsequently Angelo went to Jacopo for food. This he procured, but he was
compelled to leave the man behind, and unpaid. It was dark when he left
the inn; he had some difficulty in evading a flock of whitecoats, and his
retreat from the village was still on the Austrian side. Somewhat about
midnight Merthyr reached the inn, heralding the carriage. As Jacopo
caught sight of Vittoria's face, he fell with his shoulders straightened
against the wall, and cried out loudly that he had betrayed no one, and
mentioned Major Weisspriess by name as having held the point of his sword
at him and extracted nothing better than a wave of the hand and a lie; in
other words, that the fugitives had retired to the Tyrolese mountains,
and that he had shammed ignorance of who they were. Merthyr read at a
glance that Jacopo had the large swallow and calm digestion for bribes,
and getting the fellow alone he laid money in view, out of which, by
doubling the sum to make Jacopo correct his first statement, and then by
threatening to withdraw it altogether, he gained knowledge of the fact
that Angelo Guidascarpi had recently visited the inn, and had started
from it South-eastward, and that Major Weisspriess was following on his
track. He wrote a line of strong entreaty to Weisspriess, lest that
officer should perchance relapse into anger at the taunts of prisoners
abhorring him with the hatred of Carlo and Angelo. At the same time he
gave Beppo a considerable supply of money, and then sent him off, armed
as far as possible to speed Count Ammiani safe across the borders, if a
fugitive; or if a prisoner, to ensure the best which could be hoped for
him from an adversary become generous. That evening Vittoria lay with her
head on Laura's lap, and the pearly little crescent of her ear in
moonlight by the window. So fair and young and still she looked that
Merthyr feared for her, and thought of sending her back to Countess
Ammiani.

Her first question with the lifting of her eyelids was if he had ceased
to trust to her courage.

"No," said Merthyr; "there are bounds to human strength; that is all."

She answered: "There would be to mine--if I had not more than human
strength beside me. I bow my head, dearest; it is that. I feel that I
cannot break down as long as I know what is passing. Does my husband
live?"

"Yes, he lives," said Merthyr; and she gave him her hand, and went to her
bed.

He learnt from Laura that when Beppo mounted the carriage in silence, a
fit of ungovernable wild trembling had come on her, broken at intervals
by a cry that something was concealed. Laura could give no advice; she
looked on Merthyr and Vittoria as two that had an incomprehensible
knowledge of the power of one another's natures, and the fiery creature
remained passive in perplexity of minds as soft an attendant as a
suffering woman could have:

Merthyr did not sleep, and in the morning Vittoria said to him, "You want
to be active, my friend. Go, and we will wait for you here. I know that I
am never deceived by you, and when I see you I know that the truth speaks
and bids me be worthy of it Go up there," she pointed with shut eyes at
the mountains; "leave me to pray for greater strength. I am among
Italians at this inn; and shall spend money here; the poor people love
it." She smiled a little, showing a glimpse of her old charitable humour.

Merthyr counselled Laura that in case of evil tidings during his absence
she should reject her feminine ideas of expediency, and believe that she
was speaking to a brave soul firmly rooted in the wisdom of heaven.

"Tell her?--she will die," said Laura, shuddering.

"Get tears from her," Merthyr rejoined; "but hide nothing from her for a
single instant; keep her in daylight. For God's sake, keep her in
daylight."

"It's too sharp a task for me." She repeated that she was incapable of
it.

"Ah," said he, "look at your Italy, how she weeps! and she has cause. She
would die in her grief, if she had no faith for what is to come. I dare
say it is not, save in the hearts of one or two, a conscious faith, but
it's real divine strength; and Alessandra Ammiani has it. Do as I bid
you. I return in two days."

Without understanding him, Laura promised that she would do her utmost to
obey, and he left her muttering to herself as if she were schooling her
lips to speak reluctant words. He started for the mountains with
gladdened limbs, taking a guide, who gave his name as Lorenzo, and talked
of having been 'out' in the previous year. "I am a patriot, signore! and
not only in opposition to my beast of a wife, I assure you: a downright
patriot, I mean." Merthyr was tempted to discharge him at first, but
controlled his English antipathy to babblers, and discovered him to be a
serviceable fellow. Toward nightfall they heard shots up a rock-strewn
combe of the lower slopes; desultory shots indicating rifle-firing at
long range. Darkness made them seek shelter in a pine-hut; starting from
which at dawn, Lorenzo ran beating about like a dog over the place where
the shots had sounded on the foregoing day; he found a stone spotted with
blood. Not far from the stone lay a military glove that bore
brown-crimson finger-ends. They were striking off to a dairy-but for
fresh milk, when out of a crevice of rock overhung by shrubs a man's
voice called, and Merthyr climbing up from perch to perch, saw Marco Sana
lying at half length, shot through hand and leg. From him Merthyr learnt
that Carlo and Angelo had fled higher up; yesterday they had been
attacked by coming who tried to lure there to surrender by coming forward
at the head of his men and offering safety, and "other gabble," said
Marco. He offered a fair shot at his heart, too, while he stood below a
rock that Marco pointed at gloomily as a hope gone for ever; but Carlo
would not allow advantage to be taken of even the treacherous simulation
of chivalry, and only permitted firing after he had returned to his men.
"I was hit here and here," said Marco, touching his wounds, as men can
hardly avoid doing when speaking of the fresh wound. Merthyr got him on
his feet, put money in his pocket, and led him off the big stones
painfully. "They give no quarter," Marco assured him, and reasoned that
it must be so, for they had not taken him prisoner, though they saw him
fall, and ran by or in view of him in pursuit of Carlo. By this Merthyr
was convinced that Weisspriess meant well. He left his guide in charge of
Marco to help him into the Engadine. Greatly to his astonishment, Lorenzo
tossed the back of his hand at the offer of money. "There shall be this
difference between me and my wife," he remarked; "and besides, gracious
signore, serving my countrymen for nothing, that's for love, and the
Tedeschi can't punish me for it, so it's one way of cheating them, the
wolves!" Merthyr shook his hand and said, "Instead of my servant, be my
friend;" and Lorenzo made no feeble mouth, but answered, "Signore, it is
much to my honour," and so they went different ways.

Left to himself Merthyr set step vigorously upward. Information from
herdsmen told him that he was an hour off the foot of one of the passes.
He begged them to tell any hunted men who might come within hail that a
friend ran seeking them. Farther up, while thinking of the fine nature of
that Lorenzo, and the many men like him who could not by the very
existence of nobility in their bosoms suffer their country to go through
another generation of servitude, his heart bounded immensely, for he
heard a shout and his name, and he beheld two figures on a rock near the
gorge where the mountain opened to its heights. But they were not Carlo
and Angelo. They were Wilfrid and Count Karl, the latter of whom had
discerned him through a telescope. They had good news to revive him,
however: good at least in the main. Nagen had captured Carlo and Angelo,
they believed; but they had left Weisspriess near on Nagen's detachment,
and they furnished sound military reasons to show why, if Weisspriess
favoured the escape, they should not be present. They supposed that they
were not half-a-mile from the scene in the pass where Nagen was being
forcibly deposed from his authority: Merthyr borrowed Count Karl's glass,
and went as they directed him round a bluff of the descending hills, that
faced the vale, much like a blown and beaten sea-cliff. Wilfrid and Karl
were so certain of Count Ammiani's safety, that their only thought was to
get under good cover before nightfall, and haply into good quarters,
where the three proper requirements of the soldier-meat, wine, and
tobacco--might be furnished to them. After an imperative caution that
they should not present themselves before the Countess Alessandra,
Merthyr sped quickly over the broken ground. How gaily the two young men
cheered to him as he hurried on! He met a sort of pedlar turning the
bluntfaced mountain-spur, and this man said, "Yes, sure enough, prisoners
had been taken," and he was not aware of harm having been done to them;
he fancied there was a quarrel between two captains. His plan being
always to avoid the military, he had slunk round and away from them as
fast as might be. An Austrian common soldier, a good-humoured German,
distressed by a fall that had hurt his knee-cap, sat within the gorge,
which was very wide at the mouth. Merthyr questioned him, and he, while
mending one of his gathered cigar-ends, pointed to a meadow near the
beaten track, some distance up the rocks. Whitecoats stood thick on it.
Merthyr lifted his telescope and perceived an eager air about the men,
though they stood ranged in careless order. He began to mount forthwith,
but amazed by a sudden ringing of shot, he stopped, asking himself in
horror whether it could be an execution. The shots and the noise
increased, until the confusion of a positive mellay reigned above. The
fall of the meadow swept to a bold crag right over the pathway, and with
a projection that seen sideways made a vulture's head and beak of it.
There rolled a corpse down the precipitous wave of green grass on to the
crag, where it lodged, face to the sky; sword dangled from swordknot at
one wrist, heels and arms were in the air, and the body caught midway
hung poised and motionless. The firing deadened. Then Merthyr drawing
nearer beneath the crag, saw one who had life in him slipping down toward
the body, and knew the man for Beppo. Beppo knocked his hands together
and groaned miserably, but flung himself astride the beak of the crag,
and took the body in his arms, sprang down with it, and lay stunned at
Merthyr's feet. Merthyr looked on the face of Carlo Ammiani.




EPILOGUE

No uncontested version of the tragedy of Count Ammiani's death passed
current in Milan during many years. With time it became disconnected from
passion, and took form in a plain narrative. He and Angelo were captured
by Major Nagen, and were, as the soldiers of the force subsequently let
it be known, roughly threatened with what he termed I 'Brescian short
credit.' The appearance of Major Weisspriess and his claim to the command
created a violent discussion between the two officers. For Nagen, by all
military rules, could well contest it. But Weisspriess had any body of
the men of the army under his charm, and seeing the ascendency he gained
with them over an unpopular officer, he dared the stroke for the
charitable object he had in view. Having established his command, in
spite of Nagen's wrathful protests and menaces, he spoke to the
prisoners, telling Carlo that for his wife's sake he should be spared,
and Angelo that he must expect the fate of a murderer. His address to
them was deliberate, and quite courteous: he expressed himself sorry that
a gallant gentleman like Angelo Guidascarpi should merit a bloody grave,
but so it was. At the same time he entreated Count Ammiani to rely on his
determination to save him. Major Nagen did not stand far removed from
them. Carlo turned to him and repeated the words of Weisspriess; nor
could Angelo restrain his cousin's vehement renunciation of hope and life
in doing this. He accused Weisspriess of a long evasion of a brave man's
obligation to repair an injury, charged him with cowardice, and requested
Major Nagen, as a man of honour, to drag his brother officer to the duel.
Nagen then said that Major Weisspriess was his superior, adding that his
gallant brother officer had only of late objected to vindicate his
reputation with his sword. Stung finally beyond the control of an
irritable temper, Weisspriess walked out of sight of the soldiery with
Carlo, to whom, at a special formal request from Weisspriess, Nagen
handed his sword. Again he begged Count Ammiani to abstain from fighting;
yea, to strike him and disable him, and fly, rather--than provoke the
skill of his right hand. Carlo demanded his cousin's freedom. It was
denied to him, and Carlo claimed his privilege. The witnesses of the duel
were Jenna and another young subaltern: both declared it fair according
to the laws of honour, when their stupefaction on beholding the proud
swordsman of the army stretched lifeless on the brown leaves of the past
year left them with power to speak. Thus did Carlo slay his old enemy who
would have served as his friend. A shout of rescue was heard before Carlo
had yielded up his weapon. Four haggard and desperate men, headed by
Barto Rizzo, burst from an ambush on the guard encircling Angelo. There,
with one thought of saving his doomed cousin and comrade, Carlo rushed,
and not one Italian survived the fight.

An unarmed spectator upon the meadow-borders, Beppo, had but obscure
glimpses of scenes shifting like a sky in advance of hurricane winds.

Merthyr delivered the burden of death to Vittoria. Her soul had crossed
the darkness of the river of death in that quiet agony preceding the
revelation of her Maker's will, and she drew her dead husband to her
bosom and kissed him on the eyes and the forehead, not as one who had
quite gone away from her, but as one who lay upon another shore whither
she would come. The manful friend, ever by her side, saved her by his
absolute trust in her fortitude to bear the burden of the great sorrow
undeceived, and to walk with it to its last resting-place on earth
unobstructed. Clear knowledge of her, the issue of reverent love, enabled
him to read her unequalled strength of nature, and to rely on her
fidelity to her highest mortal duty in a conflict with extreme despair.
She lived through it as her Italy had lived through the hours which
brought her face to face with her dearest in death; and she also on the
day, ten years later, when an Emperor and a King stood beneath the vault
of the grand Duomo, and the organ and a peal of voices rendered thanks to
heaven for liberty, could show the fruit of her devotion in the dark-eyed
boy, Carlo Merthyr Ammiani, standing between Merthyr and her, with old
blind Agostino's hands upon his head. And then once more, and but for
once, her voice was heard in Milan.




     ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS FOR THE COMPLETE VITTORIA:

     A common age once, when he married her; now she had grown old
     A fortress face; strong and massive, and honourable in ruin
     Agostino was enjoying the smoke of paper cigarettes
     An angry woman will think the worst
     Anguish to think of having bent the knee for nothing
     Art of despising what he coveted
     As the Lord decided, so it would end! "Oh, delicious creed!"
     Be on your guard the next two minutes he gets you alone
     But is there such a thing as happiness
     By our manner of loving we are known
     Compliment of being outwitted by their own offspring
     Conduct is never a straight index where the heart's involved
     Confess no more than is necessary, but do everything you can
     Critical in their first glance at a prima donna
     Deep as a mother's, pure as a virgin's, fiery as a saint's
     Defiance of foes and (what was harder to brave) of friends
     Do I serve my hand? or, Do I serve my heart?
     English antipathy to babblers
     Every church of the city lent its iron tongue to the peal
     Fast growing to be an eccentric by profession
     Foolish trick of thinking for herself
     Forgetfulness is like a closing sea
     Fortitude leaned so much upon the irony
     Good nerve to face the scene which he is certain will be enacted
     Government of brain; not sufficient Insurrection of heart
     Grand air of pitying sadness
     Had taken refuge in their opera-glasses
     Hated tears, considering them a clog to all useful machinery
     He is in the season of faults
     He is inexorable, being the guilty one of the two
     He postponed it to the next minute and the next
     Her singing struck a note of grateful remembered delight
     I always respected her; I never liked her
     I hope I am not too hungry to discriminate
     I know nothing of imagination
     Impossible for us women to comprehend love without folly in man
     In Italy, a husband away, ze friend takes title
     Intentions are really rich possessions
     Ironical fortitude
     It rarely astonishes our ears It illumines our souls
     Italians were like women, and wanted--a real beating
     Longing for love and dependence
     Love of men and women as a toy that I have played with
     Madness that sane men enamoured can be struck by
     Morales, madame, suit ze sun
     Necessary for him to denounce somebody
     Never, never love a married woman
     No intoxication of hot blood to cheer those who sat at home
     No word is more lightly spoken than shame
     Not to be feared more than are the general race of bunglers
     O heaven! of what avail is human effort?
     Obedience oils necessity
     Our life is but a little holding, lent To do a mighty labour
     Pain is a cloak that wraps you about
     Patience is the pestilence
     People who can lose themselves in a ray of fancy at any season
     Profound belief in her partiality for him
     Question with some whether idiots should live
     Rarely exacted obedience, and she was spontaneously obeyed
     She thought that friendship was sweeter than love
     She was sick of personal freedom
     Simple obstinacy of will sustained her
     Speech was a scourge to her sense of hearing
     Taint of the hypocrisy which comes with shame
     The devil trusts nobody
     The divine afflatus of enthusiasm buoyed her no longer
     They take fever for strength, and calmness for submission
     Too weak to resist, to submit to an outrage quietly
     Too well used to defeat to believe readily in victory
     Was born on a hired bed
     Watch, and wait
     We are good friends till we quarrel again
     We can bear to fall; we cannot afford to draw back
     Went into endless invalid's laughter
     Who shrinks from an hour that is suspended in doubt
     Whole body of fanatics combined to precipitate the devotion
     Why should these men take so much killing?
     Will not admit the existence of a virtue in an opposite opinion
     Women and men are in two hostile camps
     You can master pain, but not doubt
     Youth will not believe that stupidity and beauty can go together






THE ADVENTURES OF HARRY RICHMOND


By George Meredith




CONTENTS

BOOK 1.
I.        I AM A SUBJECT OF CONTENTION
II.       AN ADVENTURE ON MY OWN ACCOUNT
III.      DIPWELL FARM
IV.       I HAVE A TASTE OF GRANDEUR
V.        I HAVE A DEAR FRIEND
VI.       A TALE OF A GOOSE

BOOK 2.
VII.      A FREE LIFE ON THE ROAD
VIII.     JANET ILCHESTER
IX.       AN EVENING WITH CAPTAIN BULSTED
X.        AN EXPEDITION
XI.       THE GREAT FOG AND THE FIRE AT MIDNIGHT
XII.      WE FIND OURSELVES BOUND ON A VOYAGE
XIII.     WE CONDUCT SEVERAL LEARNED ARGUMENTS WITH THE CAPTAIN OF THE
          'PRISCILLA'
XIV.      I MEET OLD FRIENDS

BOOK 3.
XV.       WE ARE ACCOSTED BY A BEAUTIFUL LITTLE LADY IN THE FOREST
XVI.      THE STATUE ON THE PROMONTORY
XVII.     MY FATHER BREATHES, MOVES, AND SPEAKS
XVIII.    WE PASS A DELIGHTFUL EVENING, AND I HAVE A MORNING VISION
XIX.      OUR RETURN HOMEWARD
XX.       NEWS OF A FRESH CONQUEST OF MY FATHER'S
XXI.      A PROMENADE IN BATH
XXII.     CONCLUSION OF THE BATH EPISODE

BOOK 4.
XXIII.    MY TWENTY-FIRST BIRTHDAY
XXIV.     I MEET THE PRINCESS
XXV.      ON BOARD A YACHT
XXVI.     IN VIEW OF THE HOHENZOLLERN'S BIRTHPLACE
XXVII.    THE TIME OF ROSES
XXVIII.   OTTILIA
XXIX.     AN EVENING WITH DR. JULIUS VON KARSTEG
XXX.      A SUMMER STORM, AND LOVE
XXXI.     PRINCESS OTTILIA'S LETTER
XXXII.    AN INTERVIEW WITH PRINCE ERNEST AND A MEETING WITH PRINCE OTTO

BOOK 5.
XXXIII.   WHAT CAME OF A SHILLING
XXXIV.    I GAIN A PERCEPTION OF PRINCELY STATE
XXXV.     THE SCENE IN THE LAKE-PALACE LIBRARY
XXXVI.    HOMEWARD AND HOME AGAIN.
XXXVII.   JANET RENOUNCES ME
XXXVIII.  MY BANKERS' BOOK.

BOOK 6.
XXXIX.    I SEE MY FATHER TAKING THE TIDE AND AM CARRIED ON IT MYSELF
XL.       MY FATHER'S MEETING WITH MY GRANDFATHER
XLI.      COMMENCEMENT OF THE SPLENDOURS AND PERPLEXITIES OF MY FATHER'S
          GRAND PARADE
XLII.     THE MARQUIS OF EDBURY AND HIS PUPPET
XLIII.    I BECOME ONE OF THE CHOSEN OF THE NATION
XLIV.     MY FATHER IS MIRACULOUSLY RELIEVED BY FORTUNE

BOOK 7.
XLV.      WITHIN AN INCH OF MY LIFE .
XLVI.     AMONG GIPSY WOMEN
XLVII.    MY FATHER ACTS THE CHARMER AGAIN
XLVIII.   THE PRINCESS ENTRAPPED
XLIX.     WHICH FORESHADOWS A GENERAL GATHERING
L.        WE ARE ALL IN MY FATHER'S NET
LI.       AN ENCOUNTER SHOWING MY FATHER'S GENIUS IN A STRONG LIGHT

BOOK 8.
LII.      STRANGE REVELATIONS, AND MY GRANDFATHER HAS HIS LAST OUTBURST
LIII.     THE HEIRESS PROVES THAT SHE INHERITS THE FEUD AND I GO DRIFTING
LIV.      MY RETURN TO ENGLAND
LV.       I MEET MY FIRST PLAYFELLOW AND TAKE MY PUNISHMENT
LVI.      CONCLUSION




CHAPTER I

I AM A SUBJECT OF CONTENTION

One midnight of a winter month the sleepers in Riversley Grange were
awakened by a ringing of the outer bell and blows upon the great
hall-doors. Squire Beltham was master there: the other members of the
household were, his daughter Dorothy Beltham; a married daughter Mrs.
Richmond; Benjamin Sewis, an old half-caste butler; various domestic
servants; and a little boy, christened Harry Lepel Richmond, the squire's
grandson. Riversley Grange lay in a rich watered hollow of the Hampshire
heath-country; a lonely circle of enclosed brook and pasture, within view
of some of its dependent farms, but out of hail of them or any dwelling
except the stables and the head-gardener's cottage. Traditions of
audacious highwaymen, together with the gloomy surrounding fir-scenery,
kept it alive to fears of solitude and the night; and there was that in
the determined violence of the knocks and repeated bell-peals which
assured all those who had ever listened in the servants' hall to
prognostications of a possible night attack, that the robbers had come at
last most awfully. A crowd of maids gathered along the upper corridor of
the main body of the building: two or three footmen hung lower down, bold
in attitude. Suddenly the noise ended, and soon after the voice of old
Sewis commanded them to scatter away to their beds; whereupon the footmen
took agile leaps to the post of danger, while the women, in whose bosoms
intense curiosity now supplanted terror, proceeded to a vacant room
overlooking the front entrance, and spied from the window.

Meanwhile Sewis stood by his master's bedside. The squire was a hunter,
of the old sort: a hard rider, deep drinker, and heavy slumberer. Before
venturing to shake his arm Sewis struck a light and flashed it over the
squire's eyelids to make the task of rousing him easier. At the first
touch the squire sprang up, swearing by his Lord Harry he had just
dreamed of fire, and muttering of buckets.

'Sewis! you're the man, are you: where has it broken out?'

'No, sir; no fire,' said Sewis; 'you be cool, sir.'

'Cool, sir! confound it, Sewis, haven't I heard a whole town of steeples
at work? I don't sleep so thick but I can hear, you dog! Fellow comes
here, gives me a start, tells me to be cool; what the deuce! nobody hurt,
then? all right!'

The squire had fallen back on his pillow and was relapsing to sleep.

Sewis spoke impressively: 'There's a gentleman downstairs; a gentleman
downstairs, sir. He has come rather late.'

'Gentleman downstairs come rather late.' The squire recapitulated the
intelligence to possess it thoroughly. 'Rather late, eh? Oh! Shove him
into a bed, and give him hot brandy and water, and be hanged to him!'

Sewis had the office of tempering a severely distasteful announcement to
the squire.

He resumed: 'The gentleman doesn't talk of staying. That is not his
business. It 's rather late for him to arrive.'

'Rather late!' roared the squire. 'Why, what's it o'clock?'

Reaching a hand to the watch over his head, he caught sight of the
unearthly hour. 'A quarter to two? Gentleman downstairs? Can't be that
infernal apothecary who broke 's engagement to dine with me last night?
By George, if it is I'll souse him; I'll drench him from head to heel as
though the rascal 'd been drawn through the duck-pond. Two o'clock in the
morning? Why, the man's drunk. Tell him I'm a magistrate, and I'll commit
him, deuce take him; give him fourteen days for a sot; another fourteen
for impudence. I've given a month 'fore now. Comes to me, a Justice of
the peace!--man 's mad! Tell him he's in peril of a lunatic asylum. And
doesn't talk of staying? Lift him out o' the house on the top o' your
boot, Sewis, and say it 's mine; you 've my leave.'

Sewis withdrew a step from the bedside. At a safe distance he fronted his
master steadily; almost admonishingly. 'It 's Mr. Richmond, sir,' he
said.

'Mr. . . .' The squire checked his breath. That was a name never uttered
at the Grange. 'The scoundrel?' he inquired harshly, half in a tone of
one assuring himself, and his rigid dropped jaw shut.

The fact had to be denied or affirmed instantly, and Sewis was silent.

Grasping his bedclothes in a lump, the squire cried:

'Downstairs? downstairs, Sewis? You've admitted him into my house?'

'No, sir.'

'You have!'

'He is not in the house, sir.'

'You have! How did you speak to him, then?'

'Out of my window, sir.'

'What place here is the scoundrel soiling now?'

'He is on the doorstep outside the house.'

'Outside, is he? and the door's locked?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Let him rot there!'

By this time the midnight visitor's patience had become exhausted. A
renewal of his clamour for immediate attention fell on the squire's ear,
amazing him to stupefaction at such challengeing insolence.

'Hand me my breeches,' he called to Sewis; 'I can't think brisk out of my
breeches.'

Sewis held the garment ready. The squire jumped from the bed, fuming
speechlessly, chafing at gaiters and braces, cravat and coat, and allowed
his buttons to be fitted neatly on his calves; the hammering at the
hall-door and plucking at the bell going on without intermission. He wore
the aspect of one who assumes a forced composure under the infliction of
outrages on his character in a Court of Law, where he must of necessity
listen and lock his boiling replies within his indignant bosom.

'Now, Sewis, now my horsewhip,' he remarked, as if it had been a simple
adjunct of his equipment.

'Your hat, sir?'

'My horsewhip, I said.'

'Your hat is in the hall,' Sewis observed gravely.

'I asked you for my horsewhip.'

'That is not to be found anywhere,' said Sewis.

The squire was diverted from his objurgations against this piece of
servitorial defiance by his daughter Dorothy's timid appeal for
permission to come in. Sewis left the room. Presently the squire
descended, fully clad, and breathing sharply from his nostrils. Servants
were warned off out of hearing; none but Sewis stood by.

The squire himself unbolted the door, and threw it open to the limit of
the chain.

'Who's there?' he demanded.

A response followed promptly from outside: 'I take you to be Mr. Harry
Lepel Beltham. Correct me if I err. Accept my apologies for disturbing
you at a late hour of the night, I pray.'

'Your name?'

'Is plain Augustus Fitz-George Roy Richmond at this moment, Mr. Beltham.
You will recognize me better by opening your door entirely: voices are
deceptive. You were born a gentleman, Mr. Beltham, and will not reduce me
to request you to behave like one. I am now in the position, as it were,
of addressing a badger in his den. It is on both sides unsatisfactory. It
reflects egregious discredit upon you, the householder.'

The squire hastily bade Sewis see that the passages to the sleeping
apartments were barred, and flung the great chain loose. He was acting
under strong control of his temper.

It was a quiet grey night, and as the doors flew open, a largely-built
man, dressed in a high-collared great-coat and fashionable hat of the
time, stood clearly defined to view. He carried a light cane, with the
point of the silver handle against his under lip. There was nothing
formidable in his appearance, and his manner was affectedly affable. He
lifted his hat as soon as he found himself face to face with the squire,
disclosing a partially bald head, though his whiskering was luxuriant,
and a robust condition of manhood was indicated by his erect attitude and
the immense swell of his furred great-coat at the chest. His features
were exceedingly frank and cheerful. From his superior height, he was
enabled to look down quite royally on the man whose repose he had
disturbed.

The following conversation passed between them.

'You now behold who it is, Mr. Beltham, that acknowledges to the
misfortune of arousing you at an unseemly hour--unbetimes, as our gossips
in mother Saxon might say--and with profound regret, sir, though my habit
is to take it lightly.'

'Have you any accomplices lurking about here?'

'I am alone.'

'What 's your business?'

'I have no business.'

'You have no business to be here, no. I ask you what 's the object of
your visit?'

'Permit me first to speak of the cause of my protracted arrival, sir. The
ridicule of casting it on the post-boys will strike you, Mr. Beltham, as
it does me. Nevertheless, I must do it; I have no resource. Owing to a
rascal of the genus, incontinent in liquor, I have this night walked
seven miles from Ewling. My complaint against him is not on my own
account.'

'What brought you here at all?'

'Can you ask me?'

'I ask you what brought you to my house at all?'

'True, I might have slept at Ewling.'

'Why didn't you?'

'For the reason, Mr. Beltham, which brought me here originally. I could
not wait-not a single minute. So far advanced to the neighbourhood, I
would not be retarded, and I came on. I crave your excuses for the hour
of my arrival. The grounds for my coming at all you will very well
understand, and you will applaud me when I declare to you that I come to
her penitent; to exculpate myself, certainly, but despising
self-justification. I love my wife, Mr. Beltham. Yes; hear me out, sir. I
can point to my unhappy star, and say, blame that more than me. That star
of my birth and most disastrous fortunes should plead on my behalf to
you; to my wife at least it will.'

'You've come to see my daughter Marian, have you?'

'My wife, sir.'

'You don't cross my threshold while I live.'

'You compel her to come out to me?'

'She stays where she is, poor wretch, till the grave takes her. You've
done your worst; be off.'

'Mr. Beltham, I am not to be restrained from the sight of my wife.'

'Scamp!'

'By no scurrilous epithets from a man I am bound to respect will I be
deterred or exasperated.'

'Damned scamp, I say!' The squire having exploded his wrath gave it free
way. 'I've stopped my tongue all this while before a scoundrel 'd
corkscrew the best-bottled temper right or left, go where you will one
end o' the world to the other, by God! And here 's a scoundrel stinks of
villany, and I've proclaimed him 'ware my gates as a common trespasser,
and deserves hanging if ever rook did nailed hard and fast to my barn
doors! comes here for my daughter, when he got her by stealing her,
scenting his carcase, and talking 'bout his birth, singing what not sort
o' foreign mewin' stuff, and she found him out a liar and a beast, by
God! And she turned home. My doors are open to my flesh and blood. And
here she halts, I say, 'gainst the law, if the law's against me. She's
crazed: you've made her mad; she knows none of us, not even her boy. Be
off; you've done your worst; the light's gone clean out in her; and hear
me, you Richmond, or Roy, or whatever you call yourself, I tell you I
thank the Lord she has lost her senses. See her or not, you 've no hold
on her, and see her you shan't while I go by the name of a man.'

Mr. Richmond succeeded in preserving an air of serious deliberation under
the torrent of this tremendous outburst, which was marked by scarce a
pause in the delivery.

He said, 'My wife deranged! I might presume it too truly an inherited
disease. Do you trifle with me, sir? Her reason unseated! and can you
pretend to the right of dividing us? If this be as you say--Oh! ten
thousand times the stronger my claim, my absolute claim, to cherish her.
Make way for me, Mr. Beltham. I solicit humbly the holiest privilege
sorrow can crave of humanity. My wife! my wife! Make way for me, sir.'

His figure was bent to advance. The squire shouted an order to Sewis to
run round to the stables and slip the dogs loose.

'Is it your final decision?' Mr. Richmond asked.

'Damn your fine words! Yes, it is. I keep my flock clear of a foul
sheep.'

'Mr. Beltham, I implore you, be merciful. I submit to any conditions:
only let me see her. I will walk the park till morning, but say that an
interview shall be granted in the morning. Frankly, sir, it is not my
intention to employ force: I throw myself utterly on your mercy. I love
the woman; I have much to repent of. I see her, and I go; but once I must
see her. So far I also speak positively.'

'Speak as positively as you like,' said the squire.

'By the laws of nature and the laws of man, Marian Richmond is mine to
support and comfort, and none can hinder me, Mr. Beltham; none, if I
resolve to take her to myself.'

'Can't they!' said the squire.

'A curse be on him, heaven's lightnings descend on him, who keeps husband
from wife in calamity!'

The squire whistled for his dogs.

As if wounded to the quick by this cold-blooded action, Mr. Richmond
stood to his fullest height.

'Nor, sir, on my application during to-morrow's daylight shall I see
her?'

'Nor, sir, on your application'--the squire drawled in uncontrollable
mimicking contempt of the other's florid forms of speech, ending in his
own style,--'no, you won't.'

'You claim a paternal right to refuse me: my wife is your child. Good. I
wish to see my son.'

On that point the squire was equally decided. 'You can't. He's asleep.'

'I insist.'

'Nonsense: I tell you he's a-bed and asleep.'

'I repeat, I insist.'

'When the boy's fast asleep, man!'

'The boy is my flesh and blood. You have spoken for your daughter--I
speak for my son. I will see him, though I have to batter at your doors
till sunrise.'

Some minutes later the boy was taken out of his bed by his aunt Dorothy,
who dressed him by the dark window-light, crying bitterly, while she
said, 'Hush, hush!' and fastened on his small garments between tender
huggings of his body and kissings of his cheeks. He was told that he had
nothing to be afraid of. A gentleman wanted to see him: nothing more.
Whether the gentleman was a good gentleman, and not a robber, he could
not learn but his aunt Dorothy, having wrapped him warm in shawl and
comforter, and tremblingly tied his hat-strings under his chin, assured
him, with convulsive caresses, that it would soon be over, and he would
soon be lying again snug and happy in his dear little bed. She handed him
to Sewis on the stairs, keeping his fingers for an instant to kiss them:
after which, old Sewis, the lord of the pantry, where all sweet things
were stored, deposited him on the floor of the hall, and he found himself
facing the man of the night. It appeared to him that the stranger was of
enormous size, like the giants of fairy books: for as he stood a little
out of the doorway there was a peep of night sky and trees behind him,
and the trees looked very much smaller, and hardly any sky was to be seen
except over his shoulders.

The squire seized one of the boy's hands to present him and retain him at
the same time: but the stranger plucked him from his grandfather's hold,
and swinging him high, exclaimed, 'Here he is! This is Harry Richmond. He
has grown a grenadier.'

'Kiss the little chap and back to bed with him,' growled the squire.

The boy was heartily kissed and asked if he had forgotten his papa. He
replied that he had no papa: he had a mama and a grandpapa. The stranger
gave a deep groan.

'You see what you have done; you have cut me off from my own,' he said
terribly to the squire; but tried immediately to soothe the urchin with
nursery talk and the pats on the shoulder which encourage a little boy to
grow fast and tall. 'Four years of separation,' he resumed, 'and my son
taught to think that he has no father. By heavens! it is infamous, it is
a curst piece of inhumanity. Mr. Beltham, if I do not see my wife, I
carry off my son.'

'You may ask till you're hoarse, you shall never see her in this house
while I am here to command,' said the squire.

'Very well; then Harry Richmond changes homes. I take him. The affair is
concluded.'

'You take him from his mother?' the squire sang out.

'You swear to me she has lost her wits; she cannot suffer. I can. I shall
not expect from you, Mr. Beltham, the minutest particle of comprehension
of a father's feelings. You are earthy; you are an animal.'

The squire saw that he was about to lift the boy, and said, 'Stop, never
mind that. Stop, look at the case. You can call again to-morrow, and you
can see me and talk it over.'

'Shall I see my wife?'

'No, you shan't.'

'You remain faithful to your word, sir, do you?'

'I do.'

'Then I do similarly.'

'What! Stop! Not to take a child like that out of a comfortable house at
night in Winter, man?'

'Oh, the night is temperate and warm; he shall not remain in a house
where his father is dishonoured.'

'Stop! not a bit of it,' cried the squire. 'No one speaks of you. I give
you my word, you 're never mentioned by man, woman or child in the
house.'

'Silence concerning a father insinuates dishonour, Mr. Beltham.'

'Damn your fine speeches, and keep your blackguardly hands off that boy,'
the squire thundered. 'Mind, if you take him, he goes for good. He
doesn't get a penny from me if you have the bringing of him up. You've
done for him, if you decide that way. He may stand here a beggar in a
stolen coat like you, and I won't own him. Here, Harry, come to me; come
to your grandad.'

Mr. Richmond caught the boy just when he was turning to run.

'That gentleman,' he said, pointing to the squire, 'is your grandpapa. I
am your papa. You must learn at any cost to know and love your papa. If I
call for you to-morrow or next day they will have played tricks with
Harry Richmond, and hid him. Mr. Beltham, I request you, for the final
time, to accord me your promise observe, I accept your promise--that I
shall, at my demand, to-morrow or the next day, obtain an interview with
my wife.'

The squire coughed out an emphatic 'Never!' and fortified it with an oath
as he repeated it upon a fuller breath.

'Sir, I will condescend to entreat you to grant this permission,' said
Mr. Richmond, urgently.

'No, never: I won't!' rejoined the squire, red in the face from a fit of
angry coughing. 'I won't; but stop, put down that boy; listen to me, you
Richmond! I'll tell you what I'll do. I 'll--if you swear on a Bible,
like a cadger before a bench of magistrates, you'll never show your face
within a circuit o' ten miles hereabouts, and won't trouble the boy if
you meet him, or my daughter or me, or any one of us-hark ye, I'll do
this: let go the boy, and I'll give ye five hundred--I'll give ye a
cheque on my banker for a thousand pounds; and, hark me out, you do this,
you swear, as I said, on the servants' Bible, in the presence of my
butler and me, "Strike you dead as Ananias and t' other one if you don't
keep to it," do that now, here, on the spot, and I'll engage to see you
paid fifty pounds a year into the bargain. Stop! and I'll pay your debts
under two or three hundred. For God's sake, let go the boy! You shall
have fifty guineas on account this minute. Let go the boy! And your
son--there, I call him your son--your son, Harry Richmond, shall inherit
from me; he shall have Riversley and the best part of my property, if not
every bit of it. Is it a bargain? Will you swear? Don't, and the boy's a
beggar, he's a stranger here as much as you. Take him, and by the Lord,
you ruin him. There now, never mind, stay, down with him. He's got a cold
already; ought to be in his bed; let the boy down!'

'You offer me money,' Mr. Richmond answered.

'That is one of the indignities belonging to a connection with a man like
you. You would have me sell my son. To see my afflicted wife I would
forfeit my heart's yearnings for my son; your money, sir, I toss to the
winds; and I am under the necessity of informing you that I despise and
loathe you. I shrink from the thought of exposing my son to your besotted
selfish example. The boy is mine; I have him, and he shall traverse the
wilderness with me. By heaven! his destiny is brilliant. He shall be
hailed for what he is, the rightful claimant of a place among the
proudest in the land; and mark me, Mr. Beltham, obstinate sensual old man
that you are! I take the boy, and I consecrate my life to the duty of
establishing him in his proper rank and station, and there, if you live
and I live, you shall behold him and bow your grovelling pig's head to
the earth, and bemoan the day, by heaven! when you,--a common country
squire, a man of no origin, a creature with whose blood we have mixed
ours--and he is stone-blind to the honour conferred on him--when you in
your besotted stupidity threatened to disinherit Harry Richmond.'

The door slammed violently on such further speech as he had in him to
utter. He seemed at first astonished; but finding the terrified boy about
to sob, he drew a pretty box from one of his pockets and thrust a
delicious sweetmeat between the whimpering lips. Then, after some moments
of irresolution, during which he struck his chest soundingly and gazed
down, talked alternately to himself and the boy, and cast his eyes along
the windows of the house, he at last dropped on one knee and swaddled the
boy in the folds of the shawl. Raising him in a business-like way, he
settled him on an arm and stepped briskly across gravel-walk and lawn,
like a horse to whose neck a smart touch of the whip has been applied.

The soft mild night had a moon behind it somewhere; and here and there a
light-blue space of sky showed small rayless stars; the breeze smelt
fresh of roots and heath. It was more a May-night than one of February.
So strange an aspect had all these quiet hill-lines and larch and
fir-tree tops in the half-dark stillness, that the boy's terrors were
overlaid and almost subdued by his wonderment; he had never before been
out in the night, and he must have feared to cry in it, for his sobs were
not loud. On a rise of the park-road where a fir-plantation began, he
heard his name called faintly from the house by a woman's voice that he
knew to be his aunt Dorothy's. It came after him only once: 'Harry
Richmond'; but he was soon out of hearing, beyond the park, among the
hollows that run dipping for miles beside the great highroad toward
London. Sometimes his father whistled to him, or held him high and nodded
a salutation to him, as though they had just discovered one another; and
his perpetual accessibility to the influences of spicy sugarplums,
notwithstanding his grief, caused his father to prognosticate hopefully
of his future wisdom. So, when obedient to command he had given his
father a kiss, the boy fell asleep on his shoulder, ceasing to know that
he was a wandering infant: and, if I remember rightly, he dreamed he was
in a ship of cinnamon-wood upon a sea that rolled mighty, but smooth
immense broad waves, and tore thing from thing without a sound or a hurt.




CHAPTER II

AN ADVENTURE ON MY OWN ACCOUNT

That night stands up without any clear traces about it or near it, like
the brazen castle of romance round which the sea-tide flows. My father
must have borne me miles along the road; he must have procured food for
me; I have an idea of feeling a damp forehead and drinking new milk, and
by-and-by hearing a roar of voices or vehicles, and seeing a dog that
went alone through crowded streets without a master, doing as he pleased,
and stopping every other dog he met. He took his turning, and my father
and I took ours. We were in a house that, to my senses, had the smell of
dark corners, in a street where all the house-doors were painted black,
and shut with a bang. Italian organ-men and milk-men paraded the street
regularly, and made it sound hollow to their music. Milk, and no cows
anywhere; numbers of people, and no acquaintances among them; my thoughts
were occupied by the singularity of such things.

My father could soon make me forget that I was transplanted; he could act
dog, tame rabbit, fox, pony, and a whole nursery collection alive, but he
was sometimes absent for days, and I was not of a temper to be on
friendly terms with those who were unable to captivate my imagination as
he had done. When he was at home I rode him all round the room and
upstairs to bed, I lashed him with a whip till he frightened me, so real
was his barking; if I said 'Menagerie' he became a caravan of wild
beasts; I undid a button of his waistcoat, and it was a lion that made a
spring, roaring at me; I pulled his coat-tails and off I went tugging at
an old bear that swung a hind leg as he turned, in the queerest way, and
then sat up and beating his breast sent out a mew-moan. Our room was
richer to me than all the Grange while these performances were going
forward. His monkey was almost as wonderful as his bear, only he was too
big for it, and was obliged to aim at reality in his representation of
this animal by means of a number of breakages; a defect that brought our
landlady on the scene. The enchantment of my father's companionship
caused me to suffer proportionately in his absence. During that period of
solitude, my nursemaid had to order me to play, and I would stumble about
and squat in the middle of the floor, struck suddenly by the marvel of
the difference between my present and my other home. My father entered
into arrangements with a Punch and Judy man for him to pay me regular
morning visits opposite our window; yet here again his genius defeated
his kind intentions; for happening once to stand by my side during the
progress of the show, he made it so vivid to me by what he said and did,
that I saw no fun in it without him: I used to dread the heralding crow
of Punch if he was away, and cared no longer for wooden heads being
knocked ever so hard.

On Sundays we walked to the cathedral, and this was a day with a delight
of its own for me. He was never away on the Sunday. Both of us attired in
our best, we walked along the streets hand in hand; my father led me
before the cathedral monuments, talking in a low tone of British
victories, and commending the heroes to my undivided attention. I
understood very early that it was my duty to imitate them. While we
remained in the cathedral he talked of glory and Old England, and dropped
his voice in the middle of a murmured chant to introduce Nelson's name or
some other great man's and this recurred regularly. 'What are we for
now?' he would ask me as we left our house. I had to decide whether we
took a hero or an author, which I soon learnt to do with capricious
resolution. We were one Sunday for Shakespeare; another for Nelson or
Pitt. 'Nelson, papa,' was my most frequent rejoinder, and he never
dissented, but turned his steps toward Nelson's cathedral dome, and
uncovered his head there, and said: 'Nelson, then, to-day'; and we went
straight to his monument to perform the act of homage. I chose Nelson in
preference to the others because near bed-time in the evening my father
told me stories of our hero of the day, and neither Pitt nor Shakespeare
lost an eye, or an arm, or fought with a huge white bear on the ice to
make himself interesting. I named them occasionally out of compassion,
and to please my father, who said that they ought to have a turn. They
were, he told me, in the habit of paying him a visit, whenever I had
particularly neglected them, to learn the grounds for my disregard of
their claims, and they urged him to intercede with me, and imparted many
of their unpublished adventures, so that I should be tempted to give them
a chance on the following Sunday.

'Great Will,' my father called Shakespeare, and 'Slender Billy,' Pitt.
The scene where Great Will killed the deer, dragging Falstaff all over
the park after it by the light of Bardolph's nose, upon which they put an
extinguisher if they heard any of the keepers, and so left everybody
groping about and catching the wrong person, was the most wonderful
mixture of fun and tears. Great Will was extremely youthful, but
everybody in the park called him, 'Father William'; and when he wanted to
know which way the deer had gone, King Lear (or else my memory deceives
me) punned, and Lady Macbeth waved a handkerchief for it to be steeped in
the blood of the deer; Shylock ordered one pound of the carcase; Hamlet
(the fact was impressed on me) offered him a three-legged stool; and a
number of kings and knights and ladies lit their torches from Bardolph;
and away they flew, distracting the keepers and leaving Will and his
troop to the deer. That poor thing died from a different weapon at each
recital, though always with a flow of blood and a successful dash of his
antlers into Falstaff; and to hear Falstaff bellow! But it was mournful
to hear how sorry Great Will was over the animal he had slain. He spoke
like music. I found it pathetic in spite of my knowing that the whole
scene was lighted up by Bardolph's nose. When I was just bursting out
crying--for the deer's tongue was lolling out and quick pantings were at
his side; he had little ones at home--Great Will remembered his
engagement to sell Shylock a pound of the carcase; determined that no Jew
should eat of it, he bethought him that Falstaff could well spare a
pound, and he said the Jew would not see the difference: Falstaff only
got off by hard running and roaring out that he knew his unclean life
would make him taste like pork and thus let the Jew into the trick.

My father related all this with such a veritable matter-of-fact air, and
such liveliness--he sounded the chase and its cries, and showed King Lear
tottering, and Hamlet standing dark, and the vast substance of
Falstaff--that I followed the incidents excitedly, and really saw them,
which was better than understanding them. I required some help from him
to see that Hamlet's offer of a three-legged stool at a feverish moment
of the chase, was laughable. He taught me what to think of it by pitching
Great Will's voice high, and Hamlet's very low. By degrees I got some
unconscious knowledge of the characters of Shakespeare.

There never was so fascinating a father as mine for a boy anything under
eight or ten years old. He could guess on Saturday whether I should name
William Pitt on the Sunday; for, on those occasions, 'Slender Billy,' as
I hope I am not irreverent in calling him, made up for the dulness of his
high career with a raspberry-jam tart, for which, my father told me
solemnly, the illustrious Minister had in his day a passion. If I named
him, my father would say, 'W. P., otherwise S. B., was born in the year
so-and-so; now,' and he went to the cupboard, 'in the name of Politics,
take this and meditate upon him.' The shops being all shut on Sunday, he
certainly bought it, anticipating me unerringly, on the Saturday, and, as
soon as the tart appeared, we both shouted. I fancy I remember his
repeating a couplet,

       'Billy Pitt took a cake and a raspberry jam,
        When he heard they had taken Seringapatam.'

At any rate, the rumour of his having done so, at periods of strong
excitement, led to the inexplicable display of foresight on my father's
part.

My meditations upon Pitt were, under this influence, favourable to the
post of a Prime Minister, but it was merely appetite that induced me to
choose him; I never could imagine a grandeur in his office,
notwithstanding my father's eloquent talk of ruling a realm, shepherding
a people, hurling British thunderbolts. The day's discipline was, that
its selected hero should reign the undisputed monarch of it, so when I
was for Pitt, I had my tart as he used to have it, and no story, for he
had none, and I think my idea of the ruler of a realm presented him to me
as a sort of shadow about a pastrycook's shop. But I surprised people by
speaking of him. I made remarks to our landlady which caused her to throw
up her hands and exclaim that I was astonishing. She would always add a
mysterious word or two in the hearing of my nursemaid or any friend of
hers who looked into my room to see me. After my father had got me
forward with instructions on the piano, and exercises in early English
history and the book of the Peerage, I became the wonder of the house. I
was put up on a stool to play 'In my Cottage near a Wood,' or 'Cherry
Ripe,' and then, to show the range of my accomplishments, I was asked,
'And who married the Dowager Duchess of Dewlap?' and I answered, 'John
Gregg Wetherall, Esquire, and disgraced the family.' Then they asked me
how I accounted for her behaviour.

'It was because the Duke married a dairymaid,' I replied, always tossing
up my chin at that. My father had concocted the questions and prepared me
for the responses, but the effect was striking, both upon his visitors
and the landlady's. Gradually my ear grew accustomed to her invariable
whisper on these occasions. 'Blood Rile,' she said; and her friends all
said 'No!' like the run of a finger down a fiddlestring.

A gentleman of his acquaintance called on him one evening to take him out
for a walk. My father happened to be playing with me when this gentleman
entered our room: and he jumped up from his hands and knees, and abused
him for intruding on his privacy, but afterwards he introduced him to me
as Shylock's great-great-great-grandson, and said that Shylock was
satisfied with a pound, and his descendant wanted two hundred pounds, or
else all his body: and this, he said, came of the emigration of the
family from Venice to England. My father only seemed angry, for he went
off with Shylock's very great grandson arm-in-arm, exclaiming, 'To the
Rialto!' When I told Mrs. Waddy about the visitor, she said, 'Oh, dear!
oh, dear! then I'm afraid your sweet papa won't return very soon, my
pretty pet.' We waited a number of days, until Mrs. Waddy received a
letter from him. She came full-dressed into my room, requesting me to
give her twenty kisses for papa, and I looked on while she arranged her
blue bonnet at the glass. The bonnet would not fix in its place. At last
she sank down crying in a chair, and was all brown silk, and said that
how to appear before a parcel of dreadful men, and perhaps a live duke
into the bargain, was more than she knew, and more than could be expected
of a lone widow woman. 'Not for worlds!' she answered my petition to
accompany her. She would not, she said, have me go to my papa there for
anything on earth; my papa would perish at the sight of me; I was not
even to wish to go. And then she exclaimed, 'Oh, the blessed child's poor
papa!' and that people were cruel to him, and would never take into
account his lovely temper, and that everybody was his enemy, when he
ought to be sitting with the highest in the land. I had realized the
extremity of my forlorn state on a Sunday that passed empty of my father,
which felt like his having gone for ever. My nursemaid came in to assist
in settling Mrs. Waddy's bonnet above the six crisp curls, and while they
were about it I sat quiet, plucking now and then at the brown silk,
partly to beg to go with it, partly in jealousy and love at the thought
of its seeing him from whom I was so awfully separated. Mrs. Waddy took
fresh kisses off my lips, assuring me that my father would have them in
twenty minutes, and I was to sit and count the time. My nursemaid let her
out. I pretended to be absorbed in counting, till I saw Mrs. Waddy pass
by the window. My heart gave a leap of pain. I found the street-door open
and no one in the passage, and I ran out, thinking that Mrs. Waddy would
be obliged to take me if she discovered me by her side in the street.

I was by no means disconcerted at not seeing her immediately. Running on
from one street to another, I took the turnings with unhesitating
boldness, as if I had a destination in view. I must have been out near an
hour before I understood that Mrs. Waddy had eluded me; so I resolved to
enjoy the shop-windows with the luxurious freedom of one whose
speculations on those glorious things all up for show are no longer
distracted by the run of time and a nursemaid. Little more than a glance
was enough, now that I knew I could stay as long as I liked. If I stopped
at all, it was rather to exhibit the bravado of liberty than to
distinguish any particular shop with my preference: all were equally
beautiful; so were the carriages; so were the people. Ladies frequently
turned to look at me, perhaps because I had no covering on my head; but
they did not interest me in the least. I should have been willing to ask
them or any one where the Peerage lived, only my mind was quite full, and
I did not care. I felt sure that a great deal of walking would ultimately
bring me to St. Paul's or Westminster Abbey; to anything else I was
indifferent.

Toward sunset my frame was struck as with an arrow by the sensations of
hunger on passing a cook's-shop. I faltered along, hoping to reach a
second one, without knowing why I had dragged my limbs from the first.
There was a boy in ragged breeches, no taller than myself, standing
tiptoe by the window of a very large and brilliant pastry-cook's. He
persuaded me to go into the shop and ask for a cake. I thought it
perfectly natural to do so, being hungry; but when I reached the counter
and felt the size of the shop, I was abashed, and had to repeat the
nature of my petition twice to the young woman presiding there.

'Give you a cake, little boy?' she said. 'We don't give cakes, we sell
them.'

'Because I am hungry,' said I, pursuing my request.

Another young woman came, laughing and shaking lots of ringlets.

'Don't you see he's not a common boy? he doesn't whine,' she remarked,
and handed me a stale bun, saying, 'Here, Master Charles, and you needn't
say thank you.'

'My name is Harry Richmond, and I thank you very much,' I replied.

I heard her say, as I went out, 'You can see he's a gentleman's son.' The
ragged boy was awaiting me eagerly. 'Gemini! you're a lucky one,' he
cried; 'here, come along, curly-poll.' I believe that I meant to share
the bun with him, but of course he could not be aware of my beneficent
intentions: so he treated me as he thought I was for treating him, and
making one snatch at the bun, ran off cramming it into his mouth. I stood
looking at any hand. I learnt in that instant what thieving was, and
begging, and hunger, for I would have perished rather than have asked for
another cake, and as I yearned for it in absolute want of food, the boy's
ungenerous treatment of me came down in a cloud on my reason. I found
myself being led through the crush of people, by an old gentleman, to
whom I must have related an extraordinary rigmarole. He shook his head,
saying that I was unintelligible; but the questions he put to me, 'Why
had I no hat on in the open street?--Where did my mother live?--What was
I doing out alone in London?' were so many incitements to
autobiographical composition to an infant mind, and I tumbled out my
history afresh each time that he spoke. He led me into a square, stooping
his head to listen all the while; but when I perceived that we had
quitted the region of shops I made myself quite intelligible by stopping
short and crying: 'I am so hungry.' He nodded and said, 'It 's no use
cross-examining an empty stomach. You'll do me the favour to dine with
me, my little man. We'll talk over your affairs by-and-by.'

My alarm at having left the savoury street of shops was not soothed until
I found myself sitting at table with him, and a nice young lady, and an
old one who wore a cap, and made loud remarks on my garments and
everything I did. I was introduced to them as the little boy dropped from
the sky. The old gentleman would not allow me to be questioned before I
had eaten. It was a memorable feast. I had soup, fish, meat, and pastry,
and, for the first time in my life, a glass of wine. How they laughed to
see me blink and cough after I had swallowed half the glass like water.
At once my tongue was unloosed. I seemed to rise right above the roofs of
London, beneath which I had been but a wandering atom a few minutes ago.
I talked of my wonderful father, and Great Will, and Pitt, and the
Peerage. I amazed them with my knowledge. When I finished a long recital
of Great Will's chase of the deer, by saying that I did not care about
politics (I meant, in my own mind, that Pitt was dull in comparison),
they laughed enormously, as if I had fired them off. 'Do you know what
you are, sir?' said the old gentleman; he had frowning eyebrows and a
merry mouth 'you're a comical character.'

I felt interested in him, and asked him what he was. He informed me that
he was a lawyer, and ready to be pantaloon to my clown, if I would engage
him.

'Are you in the Peerage?' said I.

'Not yet,' he replied.

'Well, then,' said I, 'I know nothing about you.'

The young lady screamed with laughter. 'Oh, you funny little boy; you
killing little creature!' she said, and coming round to me, lifted me out
of my chair, and wanted to know if I knew how to kiss.

'Oh, yes; I've been taught that,' said I, giving the salute without
waiting for the invitation; 'but,' I added, 'I don't care about it much.'

She was indignant, and told me she was going to be offended, so I let her
understand that I liked being kissed and played with in the morning
before I was up, and if she would come to my house ever so early, she
would find me lying next the wall and ready for her.

'And who lies outside?' she asked.

'That's my papa,' I was beginning to say, but broke the words with a sob,
for I seemed to be separated from him now by the sea itself.

They petted me tenderly. My story was extracted by alternate leading
questions from the old gentleman and timely caresses from the ladies. I
could tell them everything except the name of the street where I lived.
My midnight excursion from the house of my grandfather excited them
chiefly; also my having a mother alive who perpetually fanned her face
and wore a ball-dress and a wreath; things that I remembered of my
mother. The ladies observed that it was clear I was a romantic child. I
noticed that the old gentleman said 'Humph,' very often, and his eyebrows
were like a rook's nest in a tree when I spoke of my father walking away
with Shylock's descendant and not since returning to me. A big book was
fetched out of his library, in which he read my grandfather's name. I
heard him mention it aloud. I had been placed on a stool beside a
tea-tray near the fire, and there I saw the old red house of Riversley,
and my mother dressed in white, and my aunt Dorothy; and they all
complained that I had ceased to love them, and must go to bed, to which I
had no objection. Somebody carried me up and undressed me, and promised
me a great game of kissing in the morning.

The next day in the strange house I heard that the old gentleman had sent
one of his clerks down to my grandfather at Riversley, and communicated
with the constables in London; and, by-and-by, Mrs. Waddy arrived, having
likewise visited those authorities, one of whom supported her claims upon
me. But the old gentleman wished to keep me until his messenger returned
from Riversley. He made all sorts of pretexts. In the end, he insisted on
seeing my father, and Mrs. Waddy, after much hesitation, and even
weeping, furnished the address: upon hearing which, spoken aside to him,
he said, 'I thought so.' Mrs. Waddy entreated him to be respectful to my
father, who was, she declared, his superior, and, begging everybody's
pardon present, the superior of us all, through no sin of his own, that
caused him to be so unfortunate; and a real Christian and pattern, in
spite of outsides, though as true a gentleman as ever walked, and by
rights should be amongst the highest. She repeated 'amongst the highest'
reprovingly, with the ears of barley in her blue bonnet shaking, and her
hands clasped tight in her lap. Old Mr. Bannerbridge (that was the old
gentleman's name) came back very late from his visit to my father, so
late that he said it would be cruel to let me go out in the street after
my bed-time. Mrs. Waddy consented to my remaining, on the condition of my
being surrendered to her at nine o'clock, and no later, the following
morning.

I was assured by Mr. Bannerbridge that my father's health and appetite
were excellent; he gave me a number of unsatisfying messages, all the
rest concerning his interview he whispered to his daughter and his
sister, Miss Bannerbridge, who said they hoped they would have news from
Hampshire very early, so that the poor child might be taken away by the
friends of his infancy. I could understand that my father was disapproved
of by them, and that I was a kind of shuttlecock flying between two
battledores; but why they pitied me I could not understand. There was a
great battle about me when Mrs. Waddy appeared punctual to her appointed
hour. The victory was hers, and I, her prize, passed a whole day in
different conveyances, the last of which landed us miles away from
London, at the gates of an old drooping, mossed and streaked farmhouse,
that was like a wall-flower in colour.




CHAPTER III

DIPWELL FARM

In rain or in sunshine this old farmhouse had a constant resemblance to a
wall-flower; and it had the same moist earthy smell, except in the
kitchen, where John and Martha Thresher lived, apart from their
furniture. All the fresh eggs, and the butter stamped, with three bees,
and the pots of honey, the fowls, and the hare lifted out of the hamper
by his hind legs, and the country loaves smelling heavenly, which used to
come to Mrs. Waddy's address in London, and appear on my father's table,
were products of Dipwell farm, and presents from her sister, Martha
Thresher. On receiving this information I felt at home in a moment, and
asked right off, 'How long am I to stay here?--Am I going away
tomorrow?--What's going to be done with me?' The women found these
questions of a youthful wanderer touching. Between kissings and promises
of hens to feed, and eggs that were to come of it, I settled into
contentment. A strong impression was made on me by Mrs. Waddy's saying,
'Here, Master Harry, your own papa will come for you; and you may be sure
he will, for I have his word he will, and he's not one to break it,
unless his country's against him; and for his darling boy he'd march
against cannons. So here you'll sit and wait for him, won't you?' I sat
down immediately, looking up. Mrs. Waddy and Mrs. Thresher raised their
hands. I had given them some extraordinary proof of my love for my
father. The impression I received was, that sitting was the thing to
conjure him to me.

'Where his heart's not concerned,' Mrs. Waddy remarked of me
flatteringly, 'he's shrewd as a little schoolmaster.'

'He've a bird's-nesting eye,' said Mrs. Thresher, whose face I was
studying.

John Thresher wagered I would be a man before either of them reached that
goal. But whenever he spoke he suffered correction on account of his
English.

'More than his eating and his drinking, that child's father worrits about
his learning to speak the language of a British gentleman,' Mrs. Waddy
exclaimed. 'Before that child your h's must be like the panting of an
engine--to please his father. He 'd stop me carrying the dinner-tray on
meat-dish hot, and I'm to repeat what I said, to make sure the child
haven't heard anything ungrammatical. The child's nursemaid he'd lecture
so, the poor girl would come down to me ready to bend double, like a
bundle of nothing, his observations so took the pride out of her. That's
because he 's a father who knows his duty to the child:--"Child!" says
he, "man, ma'am." It's just as you, John, when you sow your seed you
think of your harvest. So don't take it ill of me, John; I beg of you be
careful of your English. Turn it over as you're about to speak.'

'Change loads on the road, you mean,' said John Thresher. 'Na, na, he's
come to settle nigh a weedy field, if you like, but his crop ain't nigh
reaping yet. Hark you, Mary Waddy, who're a widde, which 's as much as
say, an unocc'pied mind, there's cockney, and there's country, and there
's school. Mix the three, strain, and throw away the sediment. Now, yon
's my view.

His wife and Mrs. Waddy said reflectively, in a breath, 'True!'

'Drink or no, that's the trick o' brewery,' he added.

They assented. They began praising him, too, like meek creatures.

'What John says is worth listening to, Mary. You may be over-careful. A
stew's a stew, and not a boiling to shreds, and you want a steady fire,
and not a furnace.'

'Oh, I quite agree with John, Martha: we must take the good and the evil
in a world like this.'

'Then I'm no scholar, and you're at ease,' said John.

Mrs. Waddy put her mouth to his ear.

Up went his eyebrows, wrinkling arches over a petrified stare.

In some way she had regained her advantage. 'Art sure of it?' he
inquired.

'Pray, don't offend me by expressing a doubt of it,' she replied, bowing.

John Thresher poised me in the very centre of his gaze. He declared he
would never have guessed that, and was reproved, inasmuch as he might
have guessed it. He then said that I could not associate with any of the
children thereabout, and my dwelling in the kitchen was not to be thought
of. The idea of my dwelling in the kitchen seemed to be a serious
consideration with Mrs. Martha likewise. I was led into the rooms of
state. The sight of them was enough. I stamped my feet for the kitchen,
and rarely in my life have been happier than there, dining and supping
with John and Martha and the farm-labourers, expecting my father across
the hills, and yet satisfied with the sun. To hope, and not be impatient,
is really to believe, and this was my feeling in my father's absence. I
knew he would come, without wishing to hurry him. He had the world beyond
the hills; I this one, where a slow full river flowed from the sounding
mill under our garden wall, through long meadows. In Winter the wild
ducks made letters of the alphabet flying. On the other side of the
copses bounding our home, there was a park containing trees old as the
History of England, John Thresher said, and the thought of their
venerable age enclosed me comfortably. He could not tell me whether he
meant as old as the book of English History; he fancied he did, for the
furrow-track follows the plough close upon; but no one exactly could
swear when that (the book) was put together. At my suggestion, he fixed
the trees to the date of the Heptarchy, a period of heavy ploughing. Thus
begirt by Saxon times, I regarded Riversley as a place of extreme
baldness, a Greenland, untrodden by my Alfred and my Harold. These heroes
lived in the circle of Dipwell, confidently awaiting the arrival of my
father. He sent me once a glorious letter. Mrs. Waddy took one of John
Thresher's pigeons to London, and in the evening we beheld the bird cut
the sky like an arrow, bringing round his neck a letter warm from him I
loved. Planet communicating with planet would be not more wonderful to
men than words of his to me, travelling in such a manner. I went to
sleep, and awoke imagining the bird bursting out of heaven.

Meanwhile there was an attempt to set me moving again. A strange young
man was noticed in the neighbourhood of the farm, and he accosted me at
Leckham fair. 'I say, don't we know one another? How about your
grandfather the squire, and your aunt, and Mr. Bannerbridge? I've got
news for you.'

Not unwilling to hear him, I took his hand, leaving my companion, the
miller's little girl, Mabel Sweetwinter, at a toy-stand, while Bob, her
brother and our guardian, was shying sticks in a fine attitude. 'Yes, and
your father, too,' said the young man; 'come along and see him; you can
run?' I showed him how fast. We were pursued by Bob, who fought for me,
and won me, and my allegiance instantly returned to him. He carried me
almost the whole of the way back to Dipwell. Women must feel for the
lucky heroes who win them, something of what I felt for mine; I kissed
his bloody face, refusing to let him wipe it. John Thresher said to me at
night, 'Ay, now you've got a notion of boxing; and will you believe it,
Master Harry, there's people fools enough to want to tread that ther'
first-rate pastime under foot? I speak truth, and my word for 't, they'd
better go in petticoats. Let clergymen preach as in duty bound; you and
I'll uphold a manful sport, we will, and a cheer for Bob!'

He assured me, and he had my entire faith, that boxing was England's
natural protection from the foe. The comfort of having one like Bob to
defend our country from invasion struck me as inexpressible. Lighted by
John Thresher's burning patriotism, I entered the book of the History of
England at about the pace of a carthorse, with a huge waggon at my heels
in the shape of John. There was no moving on until he was filled. His
process of receiving historical knowledge was to fight over again the
personages who did injury to our honour as a nation, then shake hands and
be proud of them. 'For where we ain't quite successful we're cunning,' he
said; 'and we not being able to get rid of William the Conqueror, because
he's got a will of his own and he won't budge, why, we takes and makes
him one of ourselves; and no disgrace in that, I should hope! He paid us
a compliment, don't you see, Master Harry? he wanted to be an Englishman.
"Can you this?" says we, sparrin' up to him. "Pretty middlin'," says he,
"and does it well." "Well then," says we, "then you're one of us, and
we'll beat the world"; and did so.'

John Thresher had a laborious mind; it cost him beads on his forehead to
mount to these heights of meditation. He told me once that he thought
one's country was like one's wife: you were born in the first, and
married to the second, and had to learn all about them afterwards, ay,
and make the best of them. He recommended me to mix, strain, and throw
away the sediment, for that was the trick o' brewery. Every puzzle that
beset him in life resolved to this cheerful precept, the value of which,
he said, was shown by clear brown ale, the drink of the land. Even as a
child I felt that he was peculiarly an Englishman. Tales of injustice
done on the Niger river would flush him in a heat of wrath till he cried
out for fresh taxes to chastise the villains. Yet at the sight of the
beggars at his gates he groaned at the taxes existing, and enjoined me to
have pity on the poor taxpayer when I lent a hand to patch the laws. I
promised him I would unreservedly, with a laugh, but with a sincere
intention to legislate in a direct manner on his behalf. He, too, though
he laughed, thanked me kindly.

I was clad in black for my distant mother. Mrs. Waddy brought down a
young man from London to measure me, so that my mourning attire might be
in the perfect cut of fashion. 'The child's papa would strip him if he
saw him in a country tailor's funeral suit,' she said, and seemed to blow
a wind of changes on me that made me sure my father had begun to stir up
his part of the world. He sent me a prayer in his own handwriting to say
for my mother in heaven. I saw it flying up between black edges whenever
I shut my eyes. Martha Thresher dosed me for liver. Mrs. Waddy found me
pale by the fireside, and prescribed iron. Both agreed upon high-feeding,
and the apothecary agreed with both in everything, which reconciled them,
for both good women loved me so heartily they were near upon disputing
over the medicines I was to consume.

Under such affectionate treatment I betrayed the alarming symptom that my
imagination was set more on my mother than on my father: I could not help
thinking that for any one to go to heaven was stranger than to drive to
Dipwell, and I had this idea when my father was clasping me in his arms;
but he melted it like snow off the fields. He came with postillions in
advance of him wearing crape rosettes, as did the horses. We were in the
cricket-field, where Dipwell was playing its first match of the season,
and a Dipwell lad, furious to see the elevens commit such a breach of the
rules and decency as to troop away while the game was hot, and surround
my father, flung the cricket-ball into the midst and hit two or three of
the men hard. My father had to shield him from the consequences. He said
he liked that boy; and he pleaded for him so winningly and funnily that
the man who was hurt most laughed loudest.

Standing up in the carriage, and holding me by the hand, he addressed
them by their names: 'Sweetwinter, I thank you for your attention to my
son; and you, Thribble; and you, my man; and you, Baker; Rippengale, and
you; and you, Jupp'; as if he knew them personally. It was true he nodded
at random. Then he delivered a short speech, and named himself a regular
subscriber to their innocent pleasures. He gave them money, and scattered
silver coin among the boys and girls, and praised John Thresher, and
Martha, his wife, for their care of me, and pointing to the chimneys of
the farm, said that the house there was holy to him from henceforth, and
he should visit it annually if possible, but always in the month of May,
and in the shape of his subscription, as certain as the cowslip. The men,
after their fit of cheering, appeared unwilling to recommence their play,
so he alighted and delivered the first ball, and then walked away with my
hand in his, saying:

'Yes, my son, we will return to them tenfold what they have done for you.
The eleventh day of May shall be a day of pleasure for Dipwell while I
last, and you will keep it in memory of me when I am gone. And now to see
the bed you have slept in.'

Martha Thresher showed him the bed, showed him flowers I had planted, and
a Spanish chestnut tree just peeping.

'Ha!' said he, beaming at every fresh sight of my doings: 'madam, I am
your life-long debtor and friend!' He kissed her on the cheek.

John Thresher cried out: 'Why, dame, you trembles like a maid.'

She spoke very faintly, and was red in the face up to the time of our
departure. John stood like a soldier. We drove away from a cheering crowd
of cricketers and farm-labourers, as if discharged from a great gun. 'A
royal salvo!' said my father, and asked me earnestly whether I had
forgotten to reward and take a particular farewell of any one of my
friends. I told him I had forgotten no one, and thought it was true,
until on our way up the sandy lane, which offered us a last close view of
the old wall-flower farm front, I saw little Mabel Sweetwinter, often my
playfellow and bedfellow, a curly-headed girl, who would have danced on
Sunday for a fairing, and eaten gingerbread nuts during a ghost-story.
She was sitting by a furze-bush in flower, cherishing in her lap a lamb
that had been worried. She looked half up at me, and kept looking so, but
would not nod. Then good-bye, thought I, and remembered her look when I
had forgotten that of all the others.




CHAPTER IV

I HAVE A TASTE OF GRANDEUR

Though I had not previously seen a postillion in my life, I gazed on the
pair bobbing regularly on their horses before me, without a thought upon
the marvel of their sudden apparition and connection with my fortunes. I
could not tire of hearing the pleasant music of the many feet at the
trot, and tried to explain to my father that the men going up and down
made it like a piano that played of itself. He laughed and kissed me; he
remembered having once shown me the inside of a piano when the keys were
knocked. My love for him as we drove into London had a recognized
footing: I perceived that he was my best friend and only true companion,
besides his being my hero. The wicked men who had parted us were no
longer able to do harm, he said. I forgot, in my gladness at their
defeat, to ask what had become of Shylock's descendant.

Mrs. Waddy welcomed us when we alighted. Do not imagine that it was at
the door of her old house. It was in a wide street opening on a splendid
square, and pillars were before the houses, and inside there was the
enchantment of a little fountain playing thin as whipcord, among ferns,
in a rock-basin under a window that glowed with kings of England, copied
from boys' history books. All the servants were drawn up in the hall to
do homage to me. They seemed less real and living than the wonder of the
sweet-smelling chairs, the birds, and the elegant dogs. Richest of
treats, a monkey was introduced to me. 'It 's your papa's whim,' Mrs.
Waddy said, resignedly; 'he says he must have his jester. Indeed it is no
joke to me.'

Yet she smiled happily, though her voice was melancholy. From her I now
learnt that my name was Richmond Roy, and not Harry Richmond. I said,
'Very well,' for I was used to change. Everybody in the house wore a
happy expression of countenance, except the monkey, who was too busy. As
we mounted the stairs I saw more kings of England painted on the
back-windows. Mrs. Waddy said: 'It is considered to give a monarchical
effect,'--she coughed modestly after the long word, and pursued: 'as it
should.' I insisted upon going to the top floor, where I expected to find
William the Conqueror, and found him; but that strong connecting link
between John Thresher and me presented himself only to carry my
recollections of the Dipwell of yesterday as far back into the past as
the old Norman days.

'And down go all the kings, downstairs,' I said, surveying them
consecutively.

'Yes,' she replied, in a tone that might lead one to think it their
lamentable fate. 'And did the people look at you as you drove along
through the streets, Master Richmond?'

I said 'Yes,' in turn; and then we left off answering, but questioned one
another, which is a quicker way of getting at facts; I know it is with
boys and women. Mrs. Waddy cared much less to hear of Dipwell and its
inhabitants than of the sensation created everywhere by our equipage. I
noticed that when her voice was not melancholy her face was. She showed
me a beautiful little pink bed, having a crown over it, in a room opening
to my father's. Twenty thousand magnificent dreams seemed to flash their
golden doors when I knew that the bed was mine. I thought it almost as
nice as a place by my father's side.

'Don't you like it, Mrs. Waddy?' I said.

She smiled and sighed. 'Like it? Oh! yes, my dear, to be sure I do. I
only hope it won't vanish.' She simpered and looked sad.

I had too many distractions, or I should have asked her whether my
amazing and delightful new home had ever shown symptoms of vanishing; it
appeared to me, judging from my experience, that nothing moved violently
except myself, and my principal concern was lest any one should carry me
away at a moment's notice. In the evening I was introduced to a company
of gentlemen, who were drinking wine after dinner with my father. They
clapped their hands and laughed immoderately on my telling them that I
thought those kings of England who could not find room on the windows
must have gone down to the cellars.

'They are going,' my father said. He drank off a glassful of wine and
sighed prodigiously. 'They are going, gentlemen, going there, like good
wine, like old Port, which they tell us is going also. Favour me by
drinking to the health of Richmond Roy the younger.'

They drank to me heartily, but my father had fallen mournful before I
left the room.

Pony-riding, and lessons in boxing and wrestling, and lessons in French
from a French governess, at whose appearance my father always seemed to
be beginning to dance a minuet, so exuberantly courteous was he; and
lessons in Latin from a tutor, whom my father invited to dinner once a
fortnight, but did not distinguish otherwise than occasionally to take
down Latin sentences in a notebook from his dictation, occupied my
mornings. My father told the man who instructed me in the art of
self-defence that our family had always patronized his profession. I
wrestled ten minutes every day with this man's son, and was regularly
thrown. On fine afternoons I was dressed in black velvet for a drive in
the park, where my father uncovered his head to numbers of people, and
was much looked at. 'It is our duty, my son, never to forget names and
persons; I beg you to bear that in mind, my dearest Richie,' he said. We
used to go to his opera-box; and we visited the House of Lords and the
House of Commons; and my father, though he complained of the decay of
British eloquence, and mourned for the days of Chatham, and William Pitt
(our old friend of the cake and the raspberry jam), and Burke, and
Sheridan, encouraged the orators with approving murmurs.

My father no longer laid stress on my studies of the Peerage. 'Now I have
you in the very atmosphere, that will come of itself,' he said. I wished
to know whether I was likely to be transported suddenly to some other
place. He assured me that nothing save a convulsion of the earth would do
it, which comforted me, for I took the firmness of the earth in perfect
trust. We spoke of our old Sunday walks to St. Paul's and Westminster
Abbey as of a day that had its charm. Our pew among a fashionable
congregation pleased him better. The pew-opener curtseyed to none as she
did to him. For my part, I missed the monuments and the chants, and
something besides that had gone--I knew not what. At the first indication
of gloom in me, my father became alarmed, and, after making me stand with
my tongue out before himself and Mrs. Waddy, like a dragon in a piece of
tapestry, would resume his old playfulness, and try to be the same that
he had been in Mrs. Waddy's lodgings. Then we read the Arabian Nights
together, or, rather, he read them to me, often acting out the incidents
as we rode or drove abroad. An omission to perform a duty was the fatal
forgetfulness to sprinkle pepper on the cream-tarts; if my father
subjected me to an interrogation concerning my lessons, he was the dread
African magician to whom must be surrendered my acquisition of the ring
and the musty old lamp. We were quite in the habit of meeting fair
Persians. He would frequently ejaculate that he resembled the Three
Calendars in more respects than one. To divert me during my recovery from
measles, he one day hired an actor in a theatre, and put a cloth round
his neck, and seated him in a chair, rubbed his chin with soap, and
played the part of the Barber over him, and I have never laughed so much
in my life. Poor Mrs. Waddy got her hands at her sides, and kept on
gasping, 'Oh, sir! oh!' while the Barber hurried away from the
half-shaved young man to consult his pretended astrolabe in the next
room, where we heard him shouting the sun's altitude, and consulting its
willingness for the impatient young man to be further shaved; and back he
came, seeming refreshed to have learnt the sun's favourable opinion, and
gabbling at an immense rate, full of barber's business. The servants were
allowed to be spectators; but as soon as the young man was shaved, my
father dismissed them with the tone of a master. No wonder they loved
him. Mrs. Waddy asked who could help it?

I remember a pang I had when she spoke of his exposure to the risk of
marrying again; it added a curious romantic tenderness to my adoration of
him, and made me feel that he and I stood against the world. To have his
hand in mine was my delight. Then it was that I could think earnestly of
Prince Ahmed and the kind and beautiful Peribanou, whom I would not have
minded his marrying. My favourite dream was to see him shooting an arrow
in a match for a prize, and losing the prize because of not finding his
arrow, and wondering where the arrow had flown to, and wandering after it
till he passed out of green fields to grassy rocks, and to a stony
desert, where at last he found his arrow at an enormous distance from the
shooting line, and there was the desert all about him, and the sweetest
fairy ever imagined going to show herself to him in the ground under his
feet. In his absence I really hungered for him, and was jealous.

During this Arabian life, we sat on a carpet that flew to the Continent,
where I fell sick, and was cured by smelling at an apple; and my father
directed our movements through the aid of a telescope, which told us the
titles of the hotels ready to receive us. As for the cities and
cathedrals, the hot meadows under mountains, the rivers and the
castles-they were little more to me than an animated book of geography,
opening and shutting at random; and travelling from place to place must
have seemed to me so much like the life I had led, that I was generally
as quick to cry as to laugh, and was never at peace between any two
emotions. By-and-by I lay in a gondola with a young lady. My father made
friends fast on our travels: her parents were among the number, and she
fell in love with me and enjoyed having the name of Peribanou, which I
bestowed on her for her delicious talk of the blue and red-striped posts
that would spout up fountains of pearls if they were plucked from their
beds, and the palaces that had flown out of the farthest corners of the
world, and the city that would some night or other vanish suddenly,
leaving bare sea-ripple to say 'Where? where?' as they rolled over. I
would have seen her marry my father happily. She was like rest and dreams
to me, soft sea and pearls. We entered into an arrangement to correspond
for life. Her name was Clara Goodwin; she requested me to go always to
the Horse Guards to discover in what part of the world Colonel Goodwin
might be serving when I wanted to write to her. I, in return, could give
no permanent address, so I related my history from the beginning. 'To
write to you would be the same as writing to a river,' she said; and
insisted that I should drop the odious name of Roy when I grew a man. My
father quarrelled with Colonel Goodwin. Months after I felt as if I had
only just been torn from Clara, but she stood in a mist, irrecoverably
distant. I had no other friend.

Twelve dozen of splendid Burgundy were the fruit of our tour, to be laid
down at Dipwell farm for my arrival at my majority, when I should be a
legal man, embarked in my own ship, as my father said. I did not taste
the wine. 'Porter for me that day, please God!' cried Mrs. Waddy, who
did. My father eyed her with pity, and ordered her to send the wine down
to Dipwell, which was done. He took me between his knees, and said
impressively, 'Now, Richie, twelve dozen of the best that man can drink
await you at the gates of manhood. Few fathers can say that to their
sons, my boy! If we drink it together, blessings on the day! If I'm gone,
Richie, shut up in the long box,' his voice shook, and he added, 'gone to
Peribanou underneath, you know, remember that your dada saw that the wine
was a good vintage, and bought it and had it bottled in his own presence
while you were asleep in the Emperor's room in the fine old Burgundy
city, and swore that, whatever came to them both, his son should drink
the wine of princes on the day of his majority.' Here my father's tone
was highly exalted, and he sat in a great flush.

I promised him I would bend my steps toward Dipwell to be there on my
twenty-first birthday, and he pledged himself to be there in spirit at
least, bodily if possible. We sealed the subject with some tears. He
often talked of commissioning a poet to compose verses about that
wonderful coming day at Dipwell. The thought of the day in store for us
sent me strutting as though I had been in the presence of my
drill-master. Mrs. Waddy, however, grew extremely melancholy at the
mention of it.

'Lord only knows where we shall all be by that time!' she sighed.

'She is a dewy woman,' said my father, disdainfully They appeared always
to be at variance, notwithstanding her absolute devotion to him. My
father threatened to have her married to somebody immediately if she
afflicted him with what he called her Waddyism. She had got the habit of
exclaiming at the end of her remarks, 'No matter; our clock strikes
soon!' in a way that communicated to me an obscure idea of a door going
to open unexpectedly in one of the walls, and conduct us, by subterranean
passages, into a new country. My father's method of rebuking her anxious
nature was to summon his cook, the funniest of Frenchmen, Monsieur
Alphonse, and issue orders for a succession of six dinner-parties. 'And
now, ma'am, you have occupation for your mind,' he would say.

To judge by the instantaneous composure of her whole appearance, he did
produce a temporary abatement of her malady. The good soul bustled out of
the room in attendance upon M. Alphonse, and never complained while the
dinners lasted, but it was whispered that she had fits in the upper part
of the house. No sooner did my father hear the rumour than he accused her
to her face of this enormity, telling her that he was determined to
effect a permanent cure, even though she should drive him to unlimited
expense. We had a Ball party and an Aladdin supper, and for a fortnight
my father hired postillions; we flashed through London. My father backed
a horse to run in the races on Epsom Downs named Prince Royal, only for
the reason that his name was Prince Royal, and the horse won, which was,
he said, a proof to me that in our country it was common prudence to
stick to Royalty; and he bade me note that if he went in a carriage and
two, he was comparatively unnoticed, whereas when he was beheld in a
carriage and four, with postillions, at a glance from him the country
people tugged their forelocks, and would like, if he would let them, to
kiss his hand. 'We will try the scarlet livery on one of our drives,
Richie,' said he. Mrs. Waddy heard him. 'It is unlawful, sir,' she said.
'For whom, ma'am?' asked my father. 'None but Royal . . .' she was
explaining, but stopped, for he showed her an awful frown, and she cried
so that my heart ached for her. My father went out to order the livery on
the spot. He was very excited. Then it was that Mrs. Waddy, embracing me,
said, 'My dear, my own Master Richmond, my little Harry, prepare your
poor child's heart for evil days.' I construed her unintelligible speech
as an attack upon my father, and abused her violently.

While I was in this state of wrathful championship, the hall-door was
opened. I ran out and caught sight of my aunt Dorothy, in company with
old Mr. Bannerbridge. I was kissed and hugged for I know not how long,
until the smell of Riversley took entire possession of me, and my old
home seemed nearer than the one I lived in; but my aunt, seeing tears on
my cheeks, asked me what was my cause of sorrow. In a moment I poured out
a flood of complaints against Mrs. Waddy for vexing my father. When she
heard of the scarlet livery, my aunt lifted her hands. 'The man is near
the end of his wits and his money together,' said Mr. Bannerbridge; and
she said to me, 'My darling Harry will come back to his own nice little
room, and see his grandpapa soon, won't you, my pet? All is ready for him
there as it used to be, except poor mama. "Kiss my boy, my Harry--Harry
Richmond." Those were her last words on her death-bed, before she went to
God, Harry, my own! There is Sampson the pony, and Harry's dog Prince,
and his lamb Daisy, grown a sheep, and the ploughboy, Dick, with the big
boots.' Much more sweet talk of the same current that made my face cloudy
and bright, and filled me with desire for Riversley, to see my mother's
grave and my friends.

Aunt Dorothy looked at me. 'Come now,' she said; 'come with me, Harry.'
Her trembling seized on me like a fire. I said, 'Yes,' though my heart
sank as if I had lost my father with the word. She caught me in her arms
tight, murmuring, 'And dry our tears and make our house laugh. Oh! since
the night that Harry went . . . . . And I am now Harry's mama, he has
me.'

I looked on her forehead for the wreath of white flowers my mother used
to wear, and thought of my father's letter with the prayer written on the
black-bordered page. I said I would go, but my joy in going was gone. We
were stopped in the doorway by Mrs. Waddy. Nothing would tempt her to
surrender me. Mr. Bannerbridge tried reasoning with her, and, as he said,
put the case, which seemed to have perched on his forefinger. He talked
of my prospects, of my sole chance of being educated morally and
virtuously as became the grandson of an English gentleman of a good old
family, and of my father having spent my mother's estate, and of the
danger of his doing so with mine, and of religious duty and the awfulness
of the position Mrs. Waddy stood in. He certainly subdued me to very
silent breathing, but did not affect me as my aunt Dorothy's picturing of
Riversley had done; and when Mrs. Waddy, reduced to an apparent
submissiveness, addressed me piteously, 'Master Richmond, would you leave
papa?' I cried out, 'No, no, never leave my papa,' and twisted away from
my aunt's keeping. My father's arrival caused me to be withdrawn, but I
heard his offer of his hospitality and all that was his; and subsequently
there was loud talking on his part. I was kissed by my aunt before she
went. She whispered, 'Come to us when you are free; think of us when you
pray.' She was full of tears. Mr. Bannerbridge patted my head.

The door closed on them and I thought it was a vision that had passed.
But now my father set my heart panting with questions as to the terrible
possibility of us two ever being separated. In some way he painted my
grandfather so black that I declared earnestly I would rather die than go
to Riversley; I would never utter the name of the place where there was
evil speaking of the one I loved dearest. 'Do not, my son,' he said
solemnly, 'or it parts us two.' I repeated after him, 'I am a Roy and not
a Beltham.' It was enough to hear that insult and shame had been cast on
him at Riversley for me to hate the name of the place. We cried and then
laughed together, and I must have delivered myself with amazing
eloquence, for my father held me at arms' length and said, 'Richie, the
notion of training you for a General commandership of the British army is
a good one, but if you have got the winning tongue, the woolsack will do
as well for a whisper in the ear of the throne. That is our aim, my son.
We say,--you will not acknowledge our birth, you shall acknowledge our
worth.' He complained bitterly of my aunt Dorothy bringing a lawyer to
our house. The sins of Mrs. Waddy were forgiven her, owing to her noble
resistance to the legal gentleman's seductive speech. So I walked up and
down stairs with the kings of England looking at me out of the coloured
windows quietly for a week; and then two ugly men entered the house,
causing me to suffer a fearful oppression, though my father was
exceedingly kind to them and had beds provided for them, saying that they
were very old retainers of his.

But the next day our scarlet livery appeared. After exacting particular
attention to his commands, my father quitted Mrs. Waddy, and we mounted
the carriage, laughing at her deplorable eyes and prim lips, which he
imitated for my amusement. 'A load is off my head,' he remarked. He asked
me if splendour did not fatigue me also. I caught the answer from his
face and replied that it did, and that I should like to go right on to
Dipwell 'The Burgundy sleeps safe there,' said my father, and thought
over it. We had an extraordinary day. People stood fast to gaze at us; in
the country some pulled off their hats and set up a cheer. The landlords
of the inns where we baited remained bare-headed until we started afresh,
and I, according to my father's example, bowed and lifted my cap gravely
to persons saluting us along the roads. Nor did I seek to know the reason
for this excess of respectfulness; I was beginning to take to it
naturally. At the end of a dusty high-road, where it descends the hill
into a town, we drew up close by a high red wall, behind which I heard
boys shouting at play. We went among them, accompanied by their master.
My father tipped the head boy for the benefit of the school, and
following lunch with the master and his daughter, to whom I gave a kiss
at her request, a half-holiday was granted to the boys in my name. How
they cheered! The young lady saw my delight, and held me at the window
while my father talked with hers; and for a long time after I beheld them
in imagination talking: that is to say, my father issuing his
instructions and Mr. Rippenger receiving them like a pliant hodman; for
the result of it was that two days later, without seeing my kings of
England, my home again, or London, I was Julia Rippenger's intimate
friend and the youngest pupil of the school. My father told me
subsequently that we slept at an hotel those two nights intervening.
Memory transplants me from the coach and scarlet livery straight to my
place of imprisonment.




CHAPTER V

I MAKE A DEAR FRIEND

Heriot was the name of the head boy of the school. Boddy was the name of
one of the ushers. They were both in love with Julia Rippenger. It was my
fortune to outrun them in her favour for a considerable period, during
which time, though I had ceased to live in state, and was wearing out my
suits of velvet, and had neither visit nor letter from my father, I was
in tolerable bliss. Julia's kisses were showered on me for almost
anything I said or did, but her admiration of heroism and daring was so
fervent that I was in no greater danger of becoming effeminate than
Achilles when he wore girl's clothes. She was seventeen, an age
bewitching for boys to look up to and men to look down on. The puzzle of
the school was how to account for her close relationship to old
Rippenger. Such an apple on such a crab-tree seemed monstrous. Heriot
said that he hoped Boddy would marry old Rippenger's real daughter, and,
said he, that's birch-twigs. I related his sparkling speech to Julia, who
laughed, accusing him, however, of impudence. She let me see a portrait
of her dead mother, an Irish lady raising dark eyelashes, whom she
resembled. I talked of the portrait to Heriot, and as I had privileges
accorded to none of the other boys and could go to her at any hour of the
day after lessons, he made me beg for him to have a sight of it. She
considered awhile, but refused. On hearing of the unkind refusal, Heriot
stuck his hands into his pockets and gave up cricketing. We saw him
leaning against a wall in full view of her window, while the boys crowded
round him trying to get him to practise, a school-match of an important
character coming off with a rival academy; and it was only through fear
of our school being beaten if she did not relent that Julia handed me the
portrait, charging me solemnly to bring it back. I promised, of course.
Heriot went into his favourite corner of the playground, and there looked
at it and kissed it, and then buttoned his jacket over it tight, growling
when I asked him to return it. Julia grew frightened. She sent me with
numbers of petitions to him.

'Look here, young un,' said Heriot; 'you're a good little fellow, and I
like you, but just tell her I believe in nothing but handwriting, and if
she writes to me for it humbly and nicely she shall have it back. Say I
only want to get a copy taken by a first-rate painter.'

Julia shed tears at his cruelty, called him cruel, wicked, false to his
word. She wrote, but the letter did not please him, and his reply was
scornful. At prayers morning and evening, it was pitiful to observe her
glance of entreaty and her downfallen eyelashes. I guessed that in
Heriot's letters to her he wanted to make her confess something, which
she would not do. 'Now I write to him no more; let him know it, my
darling,' she said, and the consequence of Heriot's ungrateful obstinacy
was that we all beheld her, at the ceremony of the consecration of the
new church, place her hand on Mr. Boddy's arm and allow him to lead her
about. Heriot kept his eyes on them; his mouth was sharp, and his arms
stiff by his sides. I was the bearer of a long letter to her that
evening. She tore it to pieces without reading it. Next day Heriot walked
slowly past Mr. Boddy holding the portrait in his hands. The usher called
to him!

'What have you there, Heriot?'

My hero stared. 'Only a family portrait,' he answered, thrusting it safe
in his pocket and fixing his gaze on Julia's window.

'Permit me to look at it,' said Mr. Boddy.

'Permit me to decline to let you,' said Heriot.

'Look at me, sir,' cried Boddy.

'I prefer to look elsewhere, sir,' replied Heriot, and there was Julia
visible at her window.

'I asked you, sir, civilly,' quoth Boddy, 'for permission to look,--I
used the word intentionally; I say I asked you for permission . . .'

'No, you didn't,' Heriot retorted, quite cool; 'inferentially you did;
but you did not use the word permission.'

'And you turned upon me impudently,' pursued Boddy, whose colour was
thunder: 'you quibbled, sir; you prevaricated; you concealed what you
were carrying . . .'

'Am carrying,' Heriot corrected his tense; 'and mean to, in spite of
every Boddy,' he murmured audibly.

'Like a rascal detected in an act of felony,' roared Boddy, 'you
concealed it, sir . . .'

'Conceal it, sir.'

'And I demand, in obedience to my duty, that you instantly exhibit it for
my inspection, now, here, at once; no parleying; unbutton, or I call Mr.
Rippenger to compel you.'

I was standing close by my brave Heriot, rather trembling, studious of
his manfulness though I was. His left foot was firmly in advance, as he
said, just in the manner to start an usher furious:

'I concealed it, I conceal it; I was carrying it, I carry it: you demand
that I exhibit for your inspection what I mean no Boddy to see? I have to
assure you respectfully, sir, that family portraits are sacred things
with the sons of gentlemen. Here, Richie, off!'

I found the portrait in my hand, and Heriot between me and the usher, in
the attitude of a fellow keeping another out of his home at
prisoner's-base. He had spied Mr. Rippenger's head at the playground
gate. I had just time to see Heriot and the usher in collision before I
ran through the gate and into Julia's arms in her garden, whither the
dreadful prospect of an approaching catastrophe had attracted her.

Heriot was merely reported guilty of insolence. He took his five hundred
lines of Virgil with his usual sarcastic dignity: all he said to Mr.
Rippenger was, 'Let it be about Dido, sir,' which set several of the boys
upon Dido's history, but Heriot was condemned to the battles with Turnus.
My share in this event secured Heriot's friendship to me without costing
me the slightest inconvenience. 'Papa would never punish you,' Julia
said; and I felt my rank. Nor was it wonderful I should when Mr.
Rippenger was constantly speaking of my father's magnificence in my
presence before company. Allowed to draw on him largely for pocket-money,
I maintained my father's princely reputation in the school. At times,
especially when the holidays arrived and I was left alone with Julia, I
had fits of mournfulness, and almost thought the boys happier than I was.
Going home began to seem an unattainable thing to me. Having a father,
too, a regular father, instead of a dazzling angel that appeared at
intervals, I considered a benefaction, in its way, some recompense to the
boys, for their not possessing one like mine. My anxiety was relieved by
my writing letters to my father, addressed to the care of Miss Julia
Rippenger, and posting them in her work-basket. She favoured me with very
funny replies, signed, 'Your own ever-loving Papa,' about his being
engaged killing Bengal tigers and capturing white elephants, a noble
occupation that gave me exciting and consolatory dreams of him.

We had at last a real letter of his, dated from a foreign city; but he
mentioned nothing of coming to me. I understood that Mr. Rippenger was
disappointed with it.

Gradually a kind of cloud stole over me. I no longer liked to ask for
pocket-money; I was clad in a suit of plain cloth; I was banished from
the parlour, and only on Sunday was I permitted to go to Julia. I ceased
to live in myself. Through the whole course of lessons, at play-time, in
my bed, and round to morning bell, I was hunting my father in an unknown
country, generally with the sun setting before me: I ran out of a wood
almost into a brook to see it sink as if I had again lost sight of him,
and then a sense of darkness brought me back to my natural consciousness,
without afflicting me much, but astonishing me. Why was I away from him?
I could repeat my lessons in the midst of these dreams quite fairly; it
was the awakening among the circle of the boys that made me falter during
a recital and ask myself why I was there and he absent? They had given
over speculating on another holiday and treat from my father; yet he had
produced such an impression in the school that even when I had descended
to the level of a total equality with them, they continued to have some
consideration for me. I was able to talk of foreign cities and could tell
stories, and I was, besides, under the immediate protection of Heriot.
But now the shadow of a great calamity fell on me, for my dear Heriot
announced his intention of leaving the school next half.

'I can't stand being prayed at, morning and evening, by a fellow who
hasn't the pluck to strike me like a man,' he said. Mr. Rippenger had the
habit of signalizing offenders, in his public prayers, as boys whose
hearts he wished to be turned from callousness. He perpetually suspected
plots; and to hear him allude to some deep, long-hatched school
conspiracy while we knelt motionless on the forms, and fetch a big breath
to bring out, 'May the heart of Walter Heriot be turned and he comprehend
the multitudinous blessings,' etc., was intensely distressing. Together
with Walter Heriot, Andrew Saddlebank, our best bowler, the drollest
fellow in the world, John Salter, and little Gus Temple, were oftenest
cited. They declared that they invariably uttered 'Amen,' as Heriot did,
but we none of us heard this defiant murmur of assent from their lips.
Heriot pronounced it clearly and cheerfully, causing Julia's figure to
shrink as she knelt with her face in the chair hard by her father's
desk-pulpit. I received the hearty congratulations of my comrades for
singing out 'Amen' louder than Heriot, like a chorister, though not in so
prolonged a note, on hearing to my stupefaction Mr. Rippenger implore
that the heart of 'him we know as Richmond Roy' might be turned. I did it
spontaneously. Mr. Rippenger gazed at me in descending from his desk;
Julia, too, looking grieved. For my part, I exulted in having done a
thing that gave me a likeness to Heriot.

'Little Richmond, you're a little hero,' he said, caressing me. 'I saw
old Rippenger whisper to that beast, Boddy. Never mind; they won't hurt
you as long as I'm here. Grow tough, that's what you've got to do. I'd
like to see you horsed, only to see whether you're game to take it
without wincing--if it didn't hurt you much, little lad.'

He hugged me up to him.

'I'd take anything for you, Heriot,' said I.

'All right,' he answered, never meaning me to suffer on his account. He
had an inimitable manner of sweet speaking that endeared him to younger
boys capable of appreciating it, with the supernatural power of music. It
endeared him, I suppose, to young women also. Julia repeated his phrases,
as for instance, 'Silly boy, silly boy,' spoken with a wave of his hand,
when a little fellow thanked him for a kindness. She was angry at his
approval of what she called my defiance of her father, and insisted that
I was the catspaw of one of Heriot's plots to vex him. 'Tell Heriot you
have my command to say you belong to me and must not be misled,' she
said. His answer was that he wanted it in writing. She requested him to
deliver up her previous letters. Thereupon he charged me with a lengthy
epistle, which plunged us into boiling water. Mr. Boddy sat in the
schoolroom while Heriot's pen was at work, on the wet Sunday afternoon.
His keen little eyes were busy in his flat bird's head all the time
Heriot continued writing. He saw no more than that Heriot gave me a book;
but as I was marching away to Julia he called to know where I was going.

'To Miss Rippenger,' I replied.

'What have you there?'

'A book, sir.'

'Show me the book.'

I stood fast.

'It 's a book I have lent him, sir,' said Heriot, rising. 'I shall see if
it's a fit book for a young boy,' said Boddy; and before Heriot could
interpose, he had knocked the book on the floor, and out fell the letter.
Both sprang down to seize it: their heads encountered, but Heriot had the
quicker hand; he caught the letter, and cried 'Off!' to me, as on
another occasion. This time, however, he was not between me and the
usher. I was seized by the collar, and shakes roughly.

'You will now understand that you are on a footing with the rest of the
boys, you Roy,' said Boddy. 'Little scoundrelly spoilt urchins, upsetting
the discipline of the school, won't do here. Heriot, here is your book. I
regret,' he added, sneering, 'that a leaf is torn.'

'I regret, sir, that the poor boy was so savagely handled,' said Heriot.

He was warned to avoid insolence.

'Oh, as much Virgil as you like,' Heriot retorted; 'I know him by heart.'

It was past the hour of my customary visit to Julia, and she came to
discover the reason of my delay. Boddy stood up to explain. Heriot went
forward, saying, 'I think I'm the one who ought to speak, Miss Rippenger.
The fact is, I hear from little Roy that you are fond of tales of Indian
adventure, and I gave him a book for you to read, if you like it. Mr.
Boddy objected, and treated the youngster rather rigorously. It must have
been quite a misunderstanding on his part. Here is the book it's
extremely amusing.'

Julia blushed very red. She accepted the book with a soft murmur, and the
sallow usher had not a word.

'Stay,' said Heriot. 'I took the liberty to write some notes. My father
is an Indian officer, you know, and some of the terms in the book are
difficult without notes. Richie, hand that paper. Here they are, Miss
Rippenger, if you'll be so kind as to place them in the book.'

I was hoping with all my might that she would not deny him. She did, and
my heart sank.

'Oh, I can read it without notes,' she said, cheerfully.

After that, I listened with indifference to her petition to Boddy that I
might be allowed to accompany her, and was not at all chagrined by his
refusal. She laid down the book, saying that I could bring it to her when
I was out of disgrace.

In the evening we walked in the playground, where Heriot asked me to do a
brave thing, which he would never forget. This was that I should take a
sharp run right past Boddy, who was pacing up and down before the gate
leading into Julia's garden, and force her to receive the letter. I went
bounding like a ball. The usher, suspecting only that I hurried to speak
to him, let me see how indignant he was with my behaviour by striding all
the faster as I drew near, and so he passed the gate, and I rushed in. I
had just time to say to Julia, 'Hide it, or I'm in such a scrape.'

The next minute she was addressing my enemy:

'Surely you would not punish him because he loves me?' and he, though he
spoke of insubordination, merited chastisement; and other usher phrases,
seemed to melt, and I had what I believe was a primary conception of the
power of woman. She led him to talk in the gentlest way possible of how
the rain had refreshed her flowers, and of this and that poor rose.

I could think of nothing but the darling letter, which had flashed out of
sight as a rabbit pops into burrows. Boddy departed with a rose.

'Ah, Richie,' she said, 'I have to pay to have you with me now.'

We walked to the summer-house, where she read Heriot's letter through.
'But he is a boy! How old is Heriot? He is not so old as I am!'

These were her words, and she read the letter anew, and read it again
after she had placed it in her bosom, I meanwhile pouring out praises of
Heriot.

'You speak of him as if you were in love with him, Richmond,' she said.

'And I do love him,' I answered.

'Not with me?' she asked.

'Yes, I do love you too, if you will not make him angry.'

'But do you know what it is he wants of me?'

I guessed: 'Yes; he wants you to let him sit close to you for half an
hour.'

She said that he sat very near her in church.

'Ah,' said I, 'but he mustn't interrupt the sermon.'

She laughed, and mouthed me over with laughing kisses. 'There's very
little he hasn't daring enough for!'

We talked of his courage.

'Is he good as well?' said Julia, more to herself than to me; but I sang
out,

'Good! Oh, so kind!'

This appeared to convince her.

'Very generous to you and every one, is he not?' she said; and from that
moment was all questions concerning his kind treatment of the boys, and
as to their looking up to him.

I quitted her, taking her message to Heriot: 'You may tell him--tell him
that I can't write.'

Heriot frowned on hearing me repeat it.

'Humph!' he went, and was bright in a twinkling: 'that means she'll
come!' He smacked his hands together, grew black, and asked, 'Did she
give that beast Boddy a rose?'

I had to confess she did; and feeling a twinge of my treason to her, felt
hers to Heriot.

'Humph!' he went; 'she shall suffer for that.'

All this was like music going on until the curtain should lift and reveal
my father to me.

There was soon a secret to be read in Heriot's face for one who loved it
as I did. Julia's betrayed nothing. I was not taken into their
confidence, and luckily not; otherwise I fear I should have served them
ill, I was so poor a dissembler and was so hotly plied with
interrogations by the suspicious usher. I felt sure that Heriot and Julia
met. His eyes were on her all through prayer-time, and hers wandered over
the boys' heads till they rested on him, when they gave a short flutter
and dropped, like a bird shot dead. The boys must have had some knowledge
that love was busy in their midst, for they spoke of Heriot and Julia as
a jolly couple, and of Boddy as one meaning to play the part of old Nick
the first opportunity. She was kinder to them than ever. It was not a new
thing that she should send in cakes of her own making, but it was
extraordinary that we should get these thoughtful presents as often as
once a fortnight, and it became usual to hear a boy exclaim, either among
a knot of fellows or to himself, 'By jingo, she is a pretty girl!' on her
passing out of the room, and sometimes entirely of his own idea. I am
persuaded that if she had consented to marry Boddy, the boys would have
been seriously disposed to conspire to jump up in the church and forbid
the banns. We should have preferred to hand her to the junior usher,
Catman, of whom the rumour ran in the school that he once drank a bottle
of wine and was sick after it, and he was therefore a weak creature to
our minds; the truth of the rumour being confirmed by his pale
complexion. That we would have handed our blooming princess to him was
full proof of our abhorrence of Boddy. I might have thought with the
other boys that she was growing prettier, only I never could imagine her
so delicious as when she smiled at my father.

The consequence of the enlistment of the whole school in Heriot's
interests was that at cricket-matches, picnics on the hills, and boating
on the canal, Mr. Boddy was begirt with spies, and little Temple reported
to Heriot a conversation that he, lying hidden in tall grass, had heard
between Boddy and Julia. Boddy asked her to take private lessons in
French from him. Heriot listened to the monstrous tale as he was on the
point of entering Julia's boat, where Boddy sat beside her, and Heriot
rowed stroke-oar. He dipped his blade, and said, loud enough to be heard
by me in Catman's boat,

'Do you think French useful in a military education, sir?'

And Boddy said, 'Yes, of course it is.'

Says Heriot, 'Then I think I shall take lessons.'

Boddy told him he was taking lessons in the school.

'Oh!' says Heriot, 'I mean private lessons'; and here he repeated one of
Temple's pieces of communication: 'so much more can be imparted in a
private lesson!'

Boddy sprang half up from his seat. 'Row, sir, and don't talk,' he
growled.

'Sit, sir, and don't dance in the boat, if you please, or the lady will
be overset,' said Heriot.

Julia requested to be allowed to land and walk home. Boddy caught the
rudder lines and leapt on the bank to hand her out; then all the boys in
her boat and in Catman's shouted, 'Miss Julia! dear Miss Julia, don't
leave us!' and we heard wheedling voices: 'Don't go off with him alone!'
Julia bade us behave well or she would not be able to come out with us.
At her entreaty Boddy stepped back to his post, and the two boats went
forward like swans that have done ruffling their feathers.

The boys were exceedingly disappointed that no catastrophe followed the
events of the day. Heriot, they thought, might have upset the boat, saved
Julia, and drowned Boddy, and given us a feast of pleasurable excitement:
instead of which Boddy lived to harass us with his tyrannical impositions
and spiteful slaps, and it was to him, not to our Heriot, that Julia was
most gracious. Some of us discussed her conduct.

'She's a coquette,' said little Temple. I went off to the French
dictionary.

'Is Julia Rippenger a coquette, Heriot?' I asked him.

'Keep girls out of your heads, you little fellows,' said he, dealing me a
smart thump.

'Is a coquette a nasty girl?' I persisted.

'No, a nice one, as it happens,' was his answer.

My only feeling was jealousy of the superior knowledge of the sex
possessed by Temple, for I could not fathom the meaning of coquette; but
he had sisters. Temple and I walked the grounds together, mutually
declaring how much we would forfeit for Heriot's sake. By this time my
Sunday visits to Julia had been interdicted: I was plunged, as it were,
in the pit of the school, and my dreams of my father were losing
distinctness. A series of boxes on the ears from Boddy began to astound
and transform me. Mr. Rippenger, too, threatened me with carvings, though
my offences were slight. 'Yes,' said Temple and I, in chorus, 'but you
daren't strike Heriot!' This was our consolation, and the sentiment of
the school. Fancy, then, our amazement to behold him laying the cane on
Heriot's shoulders as fiercely as he could, and Boddy seconding him. The
scene was terrible. We were all at our desks doing evening tasks for the
morrow, a great matchday at cricket, Boddy watching over us, and
bellowing, 'Silence at your work, you lazy fellows, if you want lessons
to be finished at ten in the morning!' A noise came growing up to us from
below, up the stairs from the wet-weather shed, and Heriot burst into the
room, old Rippenger after him, panting.

'Mr. Boddy, you were right,' he cried, 'I find him a prowler, breaking
all rules of discipline. A perverted, impudent rascal! An example shall
be set to my school, sir. We have been falling lax. What! I find the
puppy in my garden whistling--he confesses--for one of my servants--here,
Mr. Boddy, if you please. My school shall see that none insult me with
impunity!' He laid on Heriot like a wind on a bulrush. Heriot bent his
shoulders a trifle, not his head.

'Hit away, sir,' he said, during the storm of blows, and I, through my
tears, imagined him (or I do now) a young eagle forced to bear the
thunder, but with his face to it. Then we saw Boddy lay hands on him, and
in a twinkling down pitched the usher, and the boys cheered--chirped, I
should say, they exulted so, and merely sang out like birds, without any
wilfulness of delight or defiance. After the fall of Boddy we had no
sense of our hero suffering shame. Temple and I clutched fingers tight as
long as the blows went on. We hoped for Boddy to make another attempt to
touch Heriot; he held near the master, looking ready to spring, like a
sallow panther; we kept hoping he would, in our horror of the murderous
slashes of the cane; and not a syllable did Heriot utter. Temple and I
started up, unaware of what we were going to do, or of anything until we
had got a blow a-piece, and were in the thick of it, and Boddy had us
both by the collars, and was knocking our heads together, as he dragged
us back to our seats. But the boys told us we stopped the execution. Mr.
Rippenger addressed us before he left the school-room. Saddlebank,
Salter, and a good many others, plugged their ears with their fists. That
night Boddy and Catman paced in the bedchambers, to prevent plotting and
conspiracy, they said. I longed to get my arms about Heriot, and thought
of him, and dreamed of blood, and woke in the morning wondering what made
me cry, and my arms and back very stiff. Heriot was gay as ever, but had
fits of reserve; the word passed round that we were not to talk of
yesterday evening. We feared he would refuse to play in the match.

'Why not?' said he, staring at us angrily. 'Has Saddlebank broken his
arm, and can't bowl?'

No, Saddlebank was in excellent trim, though shamefaced, as was Salter,
and most of the big boys were. They begged Heriot to let them shake his
hand.

'Wait till we win our match,' said Heriot.

Julia did not appear at morning prayers.

'Ah,' said Temple, 'it'd make her sick to hear old Massacre praying.' It
had nearly made him sick, he added, and I immediately felt that it had
nearly made me sick.

We supposed we should not see Julia at the match. She came, however, and
talked to everybody. I could not contain myself, I wanted so to tell her
what had befallen Heriot overnight, while he was batting, and the whole
ground cheering his hits. I on one side of her whispered:

'I say, Julia, my dear, I say, do you know . . .'

And Temple on the other: 'Miss Julia, I wish you'd let me tell you--'

We longed to arouse her pity for Heriot at the moment she was admiring
him, but she checked us, and as she was surrounded by ladies and
gentlemen of the town, and particular friends of hers, we could not speak
out. Heriot brought his bat to the booth for eighty-nine runs. His sleeve
happened to be unbuttoned, and there, on his arm, was a mark of the cane.

'Look!' I said to Julia. But she looked at me.

'Richie, are you ill?'

She assured me I was very pale, and I felt her trembling excessively, and
her parasol was covering us.

'Here, Roy, Temple,' we heard Heriot call; 'here, come here and bowl to
me.'

I went and bowled till I thought my head was flying after the ball and
getting knocks, it swam and throbbed so horribly.

Temple related that I fell, and was carried all the way from the
cricket-field home by Heriot, who would not give me up to the usher. I
was in Julia's charge three days. Every time I spoke of her father and
Heriot, she cried, 'Oh, hush!' and had tears on her eyelids. When I was
quite strong again, I made her hear me out. She held me and rocked over
me like a green tree in the wind and rain.

'Was any name mentioned?' she asked, with her mouth working, and to my
'No,' said 'No, she knew there was none,' and seemed to drink and choke,
and was one minute calm, all but a trembling hanging underlip, next
smiling on me, and next having her face carved in grimaces by the jerking
little tugs of her mouth, which I disliked to see, for she would say
nothing of what she thought of Heriot, and I thought to myself, though I
forbore to speak unkindly, 'It's no use your making yourself look ugly,
Julia.' If she had talked of Heriot, I should have thought that crying
persons' kisses were agreeable.

On my return into the school, I found it in a convulsion of excitement,
owing to Heriot's sending Boddy a challenge to fight a duel with pistols.
Mr. Rippenger preached a sermon to the boys concerning the unChristian
spirit and hideous moral perversity of one who would even consent to
fight a duel. How much more reprehensible, then, was one that could bring
himself to defy a fellow-creature to mortal combat! We were not of his
opinion; and as these questions are carried by majorities, we decided
that Boddy was a coward, and approved the idea that Heriot would have to
shoot or scourge him when the holidays came. Mr. Rippenger concluded his
observations by remarking that the sharpest punishment he could inflict
upon Heriot was to leave him to his own conscience; which he did for
three days, and then asked him if he was in a fit state of mind to beg
Mr. Boddy's pardon publicly.

'I'm quite prepared to tell him what I think of him publicly, sir,' said
Heriot.

A murmur of exultation passed through the school. Mr. Rippenger seized
little Temple, and flogged him. Far from dreading the rod, now that
Heriot and Temple had tasted it, I thought of punishment as a mad
pleasure, not a bit more awful than the burning furze-bush plunged into
by our fellows in a follow-my-leader scamper on the common; so I caught
Temple's hand as he went by me, and said, eagerly, 'Shall I sing out
hurrah?'

'Bother it!' was Temple's answer, for he had taken a stinging dozen, and
had a tender skin.

Mr. Rippenger called me up to him, to inform me, that whoever I was, and
whatever I was, and I might be a little impostor foisted on his
benevolence, yet he would bring me to a knowledge of myself: he gave me
warning of it; and if my father objected to his method, my father must
write word to that effect, and attend punctually to business duties, for
Surrey House was not an almshouse, either for the sons of gentlemen of
high connection, or for the sons of vagabonds. Mr. Rippenger added a
spurning shove on my shoulder to his recommendation to me to resume my
seat. I did not understand him at all. I was, in fact, indebted to a boy
named Drew, a known sneak, for the explanation, in itself difficult to
comprehend. It was, that Mr. Rippenger was losing patience because he had
received no money on account of my boarding and schooling. The
intelligence filled my head like the buzz of a fly, occupying my
meditations without leading them anywhere. I spoke on the subject to
Heriot.

'Oh, the sordid old brute!' said he of Mr. Rippenger. 'How can he know
the habits and feelings of gentlemen? Your father's travelling, and can't
write, of course. My father's in India, and I get a letter from him about
once a year. We know one another, and I know he's one of the best
officers in the British army. It's just the way with schoolmasters and
tradesmen: they don't care whether a man is doing his duty to his
country; he must attend to them, settle accounts with them--hang them!
I'll send you money, dear little lad, after I've left.'

He dispersed my brooding fit. I was sure my father was a fountain of
gold, and only happened to be travelling. Besides, Heriot's love for
Julia, whom none of us saw now, was an incessant distraction. She did not
appear at prayers. She sat up in the gallery at church, hardly to be
spied. A letter that Heriot flung over the gardenwall for her was
returned to him, open, enclosed by post.

'A letter for Walter Heriot,' exclaimed Mr. Boddy, lifting it high for
Heriot to walk and fetch it; and his small eyes blinked when Heriot said
aloud on his way, cheerfully,

'A letter from the colonel in India!'

Boddy waited a minute, and then said, 'Is your father in good health?'

Heriot's face was scarlet. At first he stuttered, 'My father!--I hope so!
What have you in common with him, sir?'

'You stated that the letter was from your father,' said Boddy.

'What if it is, sir?'

'Oh, in that case, nothing whatever to me.'

They talked on, and the youngest of us could perceive Boddy was bursting
with devilish glee. Heriot got a letter posted to Julia. It was laid on
his desk, with her name scratched completely out, and his put in its
place. He grew pale and sad, but did his work, playing his games, and
only letting his friends speak to him of lessons and play. His counsel to
me was, that in spite of everything, I was always to stick to my tasks
and my cricket. His sadness he could not conceal. He looked like an old
lamp with a poor light in it. Not a boy in the school missed seeing how
Boddy's flat head perpetually had a side-eye on him.

All this came to an end. John Salter's father lived on the other side of
the downs, and invited three of us to spend a day at his house. The
selection included Heriot, Saddlebank, and me. Mr. Rippenger, not liking
to refuse Mr. Salter, consented to our going, but pretended that I was
too young. Salter said his mother and sisters very much wished to make my
acquaintance. We went in his father's carriage. A jolly wind blew clouds
and dust and leaves: I could have fancied I was going to my own father.
The sensation of freedom had a magical effect on me, so that I was the
wildest talker of them all. Even in the middle of the family I led the
conversation; and I did not leave Salter's house without receiving an
assurance from his elder sisters that they were in love with me. We drove
home--back to prison, we called it--full of good things, talking of
Salter's father's cellar of wine and of my majority Burgundy, which I
said, believing it was true, amounted to twelve hundred dozen; and an
appointment was made for us to meet at Dipwell Farm, to assist in
consuming it, in my honour and my father's. That matter settled, I felt
myself rolling over and over at a great rate, and clasping a juniper
tree. The horses had trenched from the chalk road on to the downs. I had
been shot out. Heriot and Salter had jumped out--Heriot to look after me;
but Saddlebank and the coachman were driving at a great rate over the
dark slope. Salter felt some anxiety concerning his father's horses, so
we left him to pursue them, and walked on laughing, Heriot praising me
for my pluck.

'I say good-bye to you to-night, Richie,' said he. 'We're certain to meet
again. I shall go to a military school. Mind you enter a cavalry regiment
when you're man enough. Look in the Army List, you'll find me there. My
aunt shall make a journey and call on you while you're at Rippenger's, so
you shan't be quite lonely.'

To my grief, I discovered that Heriot had resolved he would not return to
school.

'You'll get thrashed,' he said; 'I can't help it: I hope you've grown
tough by this time. I can't stay here. I feel more like a dog than a man
in that house now. I'll see you back safe. No crying, young cornet!'

We had lost the sound of the carriage. Heriot fell to musing. He remarked
that the accident took away from Mr. Salter the responsibility of
delivering him at Surrey House, but that he, Heriot, was bound, for Mr.
Salter's sake, to conduct me to the doors; an unintelligible refinement
of reasoning, to my wits. We reached our town between two and three in
the morning. There was a ladder leaning against one of the houses in
repair near the school. 'You are here, are you!' said Heriot, speaking to
the ladder: 'you 'll do me a service--the last I shall want in the
neighbourhood.' He managed to poise the ladder on his shoulder, and moved
forward.

'Are we going in through the window?' I asked, seeing him fix the ladder
against the school-house wall.

He said, 'Hush; keep a look-out.'

I saw him mount high. When he tapped at the window I remembered it was
Julia's; I heard her cry out inside. The window rose slowly. Heriot
spoke:

'I have come to say good-bye to you, Julia, dear girl: don't be afraid of
me.' She answered inaudibly to my ears. He begged her to come to him at
once, only once, and hear him and take his hand. She was timid; he had
her fingers first, then her whole arm, and she leaned over him. 'Julia,
my sweet, dear girl,' he said; and she:

'Heriot, Walter, don't go--don't go; you do not care for me if you go.
Oh, don't go.'

'We've come to it,' said Heriot.

She asked why he was not in bed, and moaned on:

'Don't go.' I was speechless with wonder at the night and the scene. They
whispered; I saw their faces close together, and Heriot's arms round her
neck. 'Oh, Heriot, my darling, my Walter,' she said, crying, I knew by
the sound of her voice.

'Tell me you love me,' said Heriot.

'I do, I do, only don't go,' she answered.

'Will you love me faithfully?'

'I will; I do.'

'Say, "I love you, Walter."'

'I love you, Walter.'

'For ever.'

'For ever. Oh! what a morning for me. Do you smell my honeysuckle? Oh,
don't go away from me, Walter. Do you love me so?'

'I'd go through a regiment of sabres to get at you.'

'But smell the night air; how sweet! oh, how sweet! No, not kiss me, if
you are going to leave me; not kiss me, if you can be so cruel!'

'Do you dream of me in your bed?'

'Yes, every night.'

'God bless the bed!'

'Every night I dream of you. Oh! brave Heriot; dear, dear Walter, you did
not betray me; my father struck you, and you let him for my sake. Every
night I pray heaven to make you forgive him: I thought you would hate me.
I cried till I was glad you could not see me. Look at those two little
stars; no, they hurt me, I can't look at them ever again. But no, you are
not going; you want to frighten me. Do smell the flowers. Don't make them
poison to me. Oh, what a morning for me when you're lost! And me, to look
out on the night alone! No, no more kisses! Oh, yes, I will kiss you,
dear.'

Heriot said, 'Your mother was Irish, Julia.'

'Yes. She would have loved you.'

'I 've Irish blood too. Give me her portrait. It 's the image of you.'

'To take away? Walter! not to take it away?'

'You darling! to keep me sure of you.'

'Part with my mother's portrait?'

'Why, yes, if you love me one bit.'

'But you are younger than me, Heriot.'

'Then good-night, good-bye, Julia.'

'Walter, I will fetch it.'

Heriot now told her I was below, and she looked down on me and called my
name softly, sending kisses from her fingers while he gave the cause for
our late return.

'Some one must be sitting up for you--are we safe?' she said.

Heriot laughed, and pressed for the portrait.

'It is all I have. Why should you not have it? I want to be remembered.'

She sobbed as she said this and disappeared. Heriot still talked into her
room. I thought I heard a noise of the garden-door opening. A man came
out rushing at the ladder. I called in terror: 'Mr. Boddy, stop, sir.' He
pushed me savagely aside, pitching his whole force against the ladder.
Heriot pulled down Julia's window; he fell with a heavy thump on the
ground, and I heard a shriek above. He tried to spring to his feet, but
dropped, supported himself on one of his hands, and cried:

'All right; no harm done; how do you do, Mr. Boddy? I thought I'd try one
of the attics, as we were late, not to disturb the house. I 'm not hurt,
I tell you,' he cried as loud as he could.

The usher's words were in a confusion of rage and inquiries. He commanded
Heriot to stand on his legs, abused him, asked him what he meant by it,
accused him of depravity, of crime, of disgraceful conduct, and attempted
to pluck him from the spot.

'Hands off me,' said Heriot; 'I can help myself. The youngster 'll help
me, and we'll go round to the front door. I hope, sir, you will behave
like a gentleman; make no row here, Mr. Boddy, if you've any respect for
people inside. We were upset by Mr. Salter's carriage; it's damaged my
leg, I believe. Have the goodness, sir, to go in by your road, and we'll
go round and knock at the front door in the proper way. We shall have to
disturb the house after all.'

Heriot insisted. I was astonished to see Boddy obey him and leave us,
after my dear Heriot had hopped with his hand on my shoulder to the
corner of the house fronting the road. While we were standing alone a
light cart drove by. Heriot hailed it, and hopped up to the driver.

'Take me to London, there's a good fellow,' he said; 'I'm a gentleman;
you needn't look fixed. I'll pay you well and thank you. But quick. Haul
me up, up; here's my hand. By jingo! this is pain.'

The man said, 'Scamped it out of school, sir?'

Heriot replied: 'Mum. Rely on me when I tell you I'm a gentleman.'

'Well, if I pick up a gentleman, I can't be doing a bad business,' said
the man, hauling him in tenderly.

Heriot sung to me in his sweet manner, 'Good-bye, little Richie. Knock
when five minutes are over. God bless you, dear little lad! Leg 'll get
well by morning, never fear for me; and we'll meet somehow; we'll drink
the Burgundy. No crying. Kiss your hand to me.'

I kissed my hand to him. I had no tears to shed; my chest kept heaving
enormously. My friend was gone. I stood in the road straining to hear the
last of the wheels after they had long been silent.




CHAPTER VI

A TALE OF A GOOSE

From that hour till the day Heriot's aunt came to see me, I lived
systematically out of myself in extreme flights of imagination, locking
my doors up, as it were, all the faster for the extremest strokes of Mr.
Rippenger's rod. He remarked justly that I grew an impenetrably sullen
boy, a constitutional rebel, a callous lump: and assured me that if my
father would not pay for me, I at least should not escape my debts. The
title of little impostor, transmitted from the master's mouth to the
school in designation of one who had come to him as a young prince, and
for whom he had not received one penny's indemnification, naturally
caused me to have fights with several of the boys. Whereupon I was
reported: I was prayed at to move my spirit, and flogged to exercise my
flesh. The prayers I soon learnt to laugh to scorn. The floggings, after
they were over, crowned me with delicious sensations of martyrdom. Even
while the sting lasted I could say, it's for Heriot and Julia! and it
gave me a wonderful penetration into--the mournful ecstasy of love. Julia
was sent away to a relative by the sea-side, because, one of the
housemaids told me, she could not bear to hear of my being beaten. Mr.
Rippenger summoned me to his private room to bid me inform him whether I
had other relatives besides my father, such as grandfather, grandmother,
uncles, or aunts, or a mother. I dare say Julia would have led me to
break my word to my father by speaking of old Riversley, a place I half
longed for since my father had grown so distant and dim to me; but
confession to Mr. Rippenger seemed, as he said of Heriot's behaviour to
him, a gross breach of trust to my father; so I refused steadily to
answer, and suffered the consequences now on my dear father's behalf.
Heriot's aunt brought me a cake, and in a letter from him an
extraordinary sum of money for a boy of my age. He wrote that he knew I
should want it to pay my debts for treats to the boys and keep them in
good humour. He believed also that his people meant to have me for the
Christmas holidays. The sum he sent me was five pounds, carefully
enclosed. I felt myself a prince again. The money was like a golden gate
through which freedom twinkled a finger. Forthwith I paid my debts,
amounting to two pounds twelve shillings, and instructed a couple of
day-boarders, commercial fellows, whose heavy and mysterious charges for
commissions ran up a bill in no time, to prepare to bring us materials
for a feast on Saturday. Temple abominated the trading propensities of
these boys. 'They never get licked and they've always got money, at least
I know they always get mine,' said he; 'but you and I and Heriot despise
them.' Our position toward them was that of an encumbered aristocracy,
and really they paid us great respect. The fact was that, when they had
trusted us, they were compelled to continue obsequious, for Heriot had
instilled the sentiment in the school, that gentlemen never failed to
wipe out debts in the long run, so it was their interest to make us feel
they knew us to be gentlemen, who were at some time or other sure to pay,
and thus also they operated on our consciences. From which it followed
that one title of superiority among us, ranking next in the order of
nobility to the dignity conferred by Mr. Rippenger's rod, was the being
down in their books. Temple and I walked in the halo of unlimited credit
like more than mortal twins. I gave an order for four bottles of
champagne.

On the Friday evening Catman walked out with us. His studious habits
endeared him to us immensely, owing to his having his head in his book on
all occasions, and a walk under his superintendence was first cousin to
liberty. Some boys roamed ahead, some lagged behind, while Catman turned
over his pages, sounding the return only when it grew dark. The rumour of
the champagne had already intoxicated the boys. There was a companion and
most auspicious rumour that Boddy was going to be absent on Saturday. If
so, we said, we may drink our champagne under Catman's nose and he be
none the wiser. Saddlebank undertook to manage our feast for us. Coming
home over the downs, just upon twilight, Temple and I saw Saddlebank
carrying a long withy upright. We asked him what it was for. He shouted
back: 'It's for fortune. You keep the rear guard.' Then we saw him
following a man and a flock of geese, and imitating the action of the man
with his green wand. As we were ready to laugh at anything Saddlebank
did, we laughed at this. The man walked like one half asleep, and
appeared to wake up now and then to find that he was right in the middle
of his geese, and then he waited, and Saddlebank waited behind him.
Presently the geese passed a lane leading off the downs. We saw
Saddlebank duck his wand in a coaxing way, like an angler dropping his
fly for fish; he made all sorts of curious easy flourishes against the
sky and branched up the lane. We struck after him, little suspecting that
he had a goose in front, but he had; he had cut one of the loiterers off
from the flock; and to see him handle his wand on either side his goose,
encouraging it to go forward, and remonstrating, and addressing it in
bits of Latin, and the creature pattering stiff and astonished, sent us
in a dance of laughter.

'What have you done, old Saddle?' said Temple, though it was perfectly
clear what Saddlebank had done.

'I've carved off a slice of Michaelmas,' said Saddlebank, and he hewed
the air to flick delicately at his goose's head.

'What do you mean--a slice?' said we.

We wanted to be certain the goose was captured booty. Saddlebank would
talk nothing but his fun. Temple fetched a roaring sigh:

'Oh! how good this goose 'd be with our champagne.'

The idea seized and enraptured me. 'Saddlebank, I 'll buy him off you,' I
said.

'Chink won't flavour him,' said Saddlebank, still at his business: 'here,
you two, cut back by the down and try all your might to get a dozen
apples before Catman counts heads at the door, and you hold your
tongues.'

We shot past the man with the geese--I pitied him--clipped a corner of
the down, and by dint of hard running reached the main street, mad for
apples, before Catman appeared there. Apples, champagne, and cakes were
now provided; all that was left to think of was the goose. We glorified
Saddlebank's cleverness to the boys.

'By jingo! what a treat you'll have,' Temple said among them, bursting
with our secret.

Saddlebank pleaded that he had missed his way on presenting himself ten
minutes after time. To me and Temple he breathed of goose, but he shunned
us; he had no fun in him till Saturday afternoon, when Catman called out
to hear if we were for cricket or a walk.

'A walk on the downs,' said Saddlebank.

Temple and I echoed him, and Saddlebank motioned his hand as though he
were wheedling his goose along. Saddlebank spoke a word to my
commissioners. I was to leave the arrangements for the feast to him, he
said. John Salter was at home unwell, so Saddlebank was chief. No sooner
did we stand on the downs than he gathered us all in a circle, and taking
off his cap threw in it some slips of paper. We had to draw lots who
should keep by Catman out of twenty-seven; fifteen blanks were marked.
Temple dashed his hand into the cap first 'Like my luck,' he remarked,
and pocketed both fists as he began strutting away to hide his
desperation at drawing a blank. I bought a substitute for him at the
price of half-a-crown,--Drew, a fellow we were glad to get rid of; he
wanted five shillings. The feast was worth fifty, but to haggle about
prices showed the sneak. He begged us to put by a taste for him; he was
groaned out of hearing. The fifteen looked so wretched when they saw
themselves divided from us that I gave them a shilling a-piece to console
them. They took their instructions from Saddlebank as to how they were to
surround Catman, and make him fancy us to be all in his neighbourhood;
and then we shook hands, they requesting us feebly to drink their
healths, and we saying, ay, that we would.

Temple was in distress of spirits because of his having been
ignominiously bought off. Saddlebank, however, put on such a pace that no
one had leisure for melancholy. 'I'll get you fellows up to boiling
point,' said he. There was a tremendously hot sun overhead. On a sudden
he halted, exclaiming: 'Cooks and gridirons! what about sage and onions?'
Only Temple and I jumped at the meaning of this. We drew lots for a
messenger, and it was miserable to behold an unfortunate fellow touch
Saddlebank's hand containing the notched bit of stick, and find himself
condemned to go and buy sage and onions somewhere, without knowing what
it was for how could he guess we were going to cook a raw goose! The lot
fell to a boy named Barnshed, a big slow boy, half way up every class he
was in, but utterly stupid out of school; which made Saddlebank say:
'They'll take it he's the bird that wants stuffing.' Barnshed was
directed where to rejoin us. The others asked why he was trotted after
sage and onions. 'Because he's an awful goose,' said Saddlebank.

Temple and I thought the word was out and hurrahed, and back came
Barnshed. We had a task in persuading him to resume his expedition, as
well as Saddlebank to forgive us. Saddlebank's anger was excessive. We
conciliated him by calling him captain, and pretending to swear an oath
of allegiance. He now led us through a wood on to some fields down to a
shady dell, where we were to hold the feast in privacy. He did not
descend it himself. Vexatious as it was to see a tramp's tent there, we
nevertheless acknowledged the respectful greeting of the women and the
man with a few questions about tentpegs, pots, and tin mugs. Saddlebank
remained aloft, keeping a look-out for the day-school fellows, Chaunter,
Davis, and Bystop, my commissioners. They did not keep us waiting long.
They had driven to the spot in a cart, according to Saddlebank's
directions. Our provisions were in three large hampers. We praised their
forethought loudly at the sight of an extra bottle of champagne, with two
bottles of ginger-wine, two of currant, two of raisin, four pint bottles
of ale, six of ginger-beer, a Dutch cheese, a heap of tarts, three
sally-lunns, and four shillingsworth of toffy. Temple and I joined our
apples to the mass: a sight at which some of the boys exulted aloud. The
tramp-women insisted on spreading things out for us: ten yards off their
children squatted staring: the man smoked and chaffed us.

At last Saddlebank came running over the hill-side, making as if he meant
to bowl down what looked a black body of a baby against the sky, and
shouting, 'See, you fellows, here's a find!' He ran through us, swinging
his goose up to the hampers, saying that he had found the goose under a
furze-bush. While the words were coming out of his mouth, he saw the
tramps, and the male tramp's eyes and his met.

The man had one eyebrow and his lips at one corner screwed in a queer
lift: he winked slowly. 'Odd! ain't it?' he said.

Saddlebank shouldered round on us, and cried, 'Confound you fellows!
here's a beastly place you've pitched upon.' His face was the colour of
scarlet in patches.

'Now, I call it a beautiful place,' said the man, 'and if you finds
gooses hereabouts growing ready for the fire, all but plucking, why, it's
a bountiful place, I call it.'

The women tried to keep him silent. But for them we should have moved our
encampment. 'Why, of course, young gentlemen, if you want to eat the
goose, we'll pluck it for you and cook it for you, all nice,' they said.
'How can young gentlemen do that for theirselves?'

It was clear to us we must have a fire for the goose. Certain
observations current among us about the necessity to remove the goose's
inside, and not to lose the giblets, which even the boy who named them
confessed his inability to recognize, inclined the majority to accept the
woman's proposal. Saddlebank said it was on our heads, then.

To revive his good humour, Temple uncorked a bottle of champagne. The
tramp-woman lent us a tin mug, and round it went. One boy said, 'That's a
commencement'; another said, 'Hang old Rippenger.' Temple snapped his
fingers, and Bystop, a farmer's son, said, 'Well, now I've drunk
champagne; I meant to before I died!' Most of the boys seemed puzzled by
it. As for me, my heart sprang up in me like a colt turned out of stables
to graze. I determined that the humblest of my retainers should feed from
my table, and drink to my father's and Heriot's honour, and I poured out
champagne for the women, who just sipped, and the man, who vowed he
preferred beer. A spoonful of the mashed tarts I sent to each of the
children. Only one, the eldest, a girl about a year older than me, or
younger, with black eyebrows and rough black hair, refused to eat or
drink.

'Let her bide, young gentlemen,' said a woman; 'she's a regular
obstinate, once she sets in for it.'

'Ah!' said the man, 'I've seen pigs druv, and I've seen iron bent double.
She's harder 'n both, once she takes 't into her head.'

'By jingo, she's pig-iron!' cried Temple, and sighed, 'Oh, dear old
Heriot!'

I flung myself beside him to talk of our lost friend.

A great commotion stirred the boys. They shrieked at beholding their
goose vanish in a pot for stewing. They wanted roast-goose, they
exclaimed, not boiled; who cared for boiled goose! But the woman asked
them how it was possible to roast a goose on the top of wood-flames,
where there was nothing to hang it by, and nothing would come of it
except smoked bones!

The boys groaned in consternation, and Saddlebank sowed discontent by
grumbling, 'Now you see what your jolly new acquaintances have done for
you.'

So we played at catch with the Dutch cheese, and afterwards bowled it for
long-stopping, when, to the disgust of Saddlebank and others, down ran
the black-haired girl and caught the ball clean at wicket-distance. As
soon as she had done it she was ashamed, and slunk away.

The boys called out, 'Now, then, pig-iron!'

One fellow enraged me by throwing an apple that hit her in the back. We
exchanged half-a-dozen blows, whereupon he consented to apologize, and
roared, 'Hulloa, pig-iron, sorry if I hurt you.'

Temple urged me to insist on the rascal's going on his knees for flinging
at a girl.

'Why,' said Chaunter, 'you were the first to call her pig-iron.'

Temple declared he was a blackguard if he said that. I made the girl take
a piece of toffy.

'Aha!' Saddlebank grumbled, 'this comes of the precious company you would
keep in spite of my caution.'

The man told us to go it, for he liked to observe young gentlemen
enjoying themselves. Temple tossed him a pint bottle of beer, with an
injunction to him to shut his trap.

'Now, you talk my mother tongue,' said the man; 'you're what goes by the
name of a learned gentleman. Thank ye, sir. You'll be a counsellor some
day.'

'I won't get off thieves, I can tell you,' said Temple. He was the son of
a barrister.

'Nor you won't help cook their gooses for them, may be,' said the man.
'Well, kindness is kindness, all over the world.'

The women stormed at him to command him not to anger the young gentlemen,
for Saddlebank was swearing awfully in an undertone. He answered them
that he was the mildest lamb afloat.

Despairing of the goose, we resolved to finish the cold repast awaiting
us. The Dutch cheese had been bowled into bits. With a portion of the
mashed tarts on it, and champagne, it tasted excellently; toffy to
follow. Those boys who chose ginger-wine had it, and drank, despised. The
ginger-beer and ale, apples and sallylunns, were reserved for supper. My
mind became like a driving sky, with glimpses of my father and Heriot
bursting through.

'If I'm not a prince, I'm a nobleman,' I said to Temple.

He replied, 'Army or Navy. I don't much care which. We're sure of a
foreign war some time. Then you'll see fellows rise: lieutenant, captain,
colonel, General--quick as barrels popping at a bird. I should like to be
Governor of Gibraltar.'

'I'll come and see you, Temple,' said I.

'Done! old Richie,' he said, grasping my hand warmly.

'The truth is, Temple,' I confided to him, 'I've an uncle-I mean a
grandfather-of enormous property; he owns half Hampshire, I believe, and
hates my father like poison. I won't stand it. You've seen my father,
haven't you? Gentlemen never forget their servants, Temple. Let's drink
lots more champagne. I wish you and I were knights riding across that
country there, as they used to, and you saying, "I wonder whether your
father's at home in the castle expecting our arrival."'

'The Baron!' said Temple. 'He's like a Baron, too. His health. Your
health, sir! It's just the wine to drink it in, Richie. He's one of the
men I look up to. It 's odd he never comes to see you, because he's fond
of you; the right sort of father! Big men can't be always looking after
little boys. Not that we're so young, though, now. Lots of fellows of our
age have done things fellows write about. I feel--' Temple sat up
swelling his chest to deliver an important sentiment; 'I feel uncommonly
thirsty.'

So did I. We attributed it to the air of the place, Temple going so far
as to say that it came off the chalk, which somehow stuck in the throat.

'Saddleback, don't look glum,' said Temple. 'Lord, Richie, you should
hear my father plead in Court with his wig on. They used to say at home I
was a clever boy when I was a baby. Saddleback, you've looked glum all
the afternoon.'

'Treat your superiors respectfully,' Saddlebank retorted.

The tramp was irritating him. That tramp had never left off smoking and
leaning on his arm since we first saw him. Two boys named Hackman and
Montague, not bad fellows, grew desirous of a whiff from his pipe. They
had it, and lay down silent, back to back. Bystop was led away in a
wretched plight. Two others, Paynter and Ashworth, attacked the apples,
rendered desperate by thirst. Saddlebank repelled them furiously. He
harangued those who might care to listen.

'You fellows, by George! you shall eat the goose, I tell you. You've
spoilt everything, and I tell you, whether you like it or not, you shall
have apples with it, and sage and onions too. I don't ask for thanks. And
I propose to post outposts in the wood to keep watch.'

He wanted us to draw lots again. His fun had entirely departed from him;
all he thought of was seeing the goose out of the pot. I had a feeling
next to hatred for one who could talk of goose. Temple must have shared
it.

'We 've no real captain now dear old Heriot 's gone,' he said. 'The
school's topsy-turvy: we're like a lot of things rattled in a box. Oh,
dear! how I do like a good commander. On he goes, you after him, never
mind what happens.'

A pair of inseparable friends, Happitt and Larkins, nicknamed
Happy-go-Lucky, were rolling arm-in-arm, declaring they were perfectly
sober, and, for a proof of it, trying to direct their feet upon a lump of
chalk, and marching, and missing it. Up came Chaunter to them: 'Fat
goose?' he said-no more. Both the boys rushed straight as far as they
could go; both sung out, 'I'm done!' and they were.

Temple and I contemplated these proceedings as matters belonging to the
ordinary phenomena of feasting. We agreed that gentlemen were always the
last to drop, and were assured, therefore, of our living out the field;
but I dreaded the moment of the goose's appearance, and I think he did
also. Saddlebank's pertinacity in withholding the cool ginger-beer and
the apples offended us deeply; we should have conspired against him had
we reposed confidence in our legs and our tongues.

Twilight was around us. The tramp-children lay in little bundles in one
tent; another was being built by the women and the girl. Overhead I
counted numbers of stars, all small; and lights in the valley-lights of
palaces to my imagination. Stars and tramps seemed to me to go together.
Houses imprisoned us, I thought a lost father was never to be discovered
by remaining in them. Plunged among dark green leaves, smelling
wood-smoke, at night; at morning waking up, and the world alight, and you
standing high, and marking the hills where you will see the next morning
and the next, morning after morning, and one morning the dearest person
in the world surprising you just before you wake: I thought this a
heavenly pleasure. But, observing the narrowness of the tents, it struck
me there would be snoring companions. I felt so intensely sensitive, that
the very idea of a snore gave me tremours and qualms: it was associated
with the sense of fat. Saddlebank had the lid of the pot in his hand; we
smelt the goose, and he cried, 'Now for supper; now for it! Halloa, you
fellows!'

'Bother it, Saddlebank, you'll make Catman hear you,' said Temple, wiping
his forehead.

I perspired coldly.

'Catman! He's been at it for the last hour and a half,' Saddlebank
replied.

One boy ran up: he was ready, and the only one who was. Presently
Chaunter rushed by.

'Barnshed 's in custody; I'm away home,' he said, passing.

We stared at the black opening of the dell.

'Oh, it's Catman; we don't mind him,' Saddlebank reassured us; but we
heard ominous voices, and perceived people standing over a prostrate
figure. Then we heard a voice too well known to us. It said, 'The
explanation of a pupil in your charge, Mr. Catman, being sent barefaced
into the town--a scholar of mine-for sage and onions . . .'

'Old Rippenger!' breathed Temple.

We sat paralyzed. Now we understood the folly of despatching a donkey
like Barnshed for sage and onions.

'Oh, what asses we have been!' Temple continued. 'Come along-we run for
it! Come along, Richie! They 're picking up the fellows like windfalls.'

I told him I would not run for it; in fact, I distrusted my legs; and he
was staggering, answering Saddlebank's reproaches for having come among
tramps.

'Temple, I see you, sir!' called Mr. Rippenger. Poor Temple had advanced
into the firelight.

With the instinct to defeat the master, I crawled in the line of the
shadows to the farther side of a tent, where I felt a hand clutch mine.
'Hide me,' said I; and the curtain of the tent was raised. After
squeezing through boxes and straw, I lay flat, covered by a mat smelling
of abominable cheese, and felt a head outside it on my chest. Several
times Mr. Rippenger pronounced my name in the way habitual to him in
anger: 'Rye!'

Temple's answer was inaudible to me. Saddlebank spoke, and other boys,
and the man and the woman. Then a light was thrust in the tent, and the
man said, 'Me deceive you, sir! See for yourself, to satisfy yourself.
Here's our little uns laid warm, and a girl there, head on the mat, going
down to join her tribe at Lipcombe, and one of our women sleeps here, and
all told. But for you to suspect me of combining--Thank ye, sir. You've
got my word as a man.'

The light went away. My chest was relieved of the weight on it. I sat up,
and the creature who had been kind to me laid mat and straw on the
ground, and drew my head on her shoulder, where I slept fast.




CHAPTER VII

A FREE LIFE ON THE ROAD

I woke very early, though I had taken kindly to my pillow, as I found by
my having an arm round my companion's neck, and her fingers intertwisted
with mine. For awhile I lay looking at her eyes, which had every
imaginable light and signification in them; they advised me to lie quiet,
they laughed at my wonder, they said, 'Dear little fellow!' they flashed
as from under a cloud, darkened, flashed out of it, seemed to dip in
water and shine, and were sometimes like a view into a forest, sometimes
intensely sunny, never quite still. I trusted her, and could have slept
again, but the sight of the tent stupefied me; I fancied the sky had
fallen, and gasped for air; my head was extremely dizzy too; not one idea
in it was kept from wheeling. This confusion of my head flew to my legs
when, imitating her, I rose to go forth. In a fit of horror I thought, 'I
've forgotten how to walk!'

Summoning my manful resolution, I made the attempt to step across the
children swaddled in matting and straw and old gowns or petticoats. The
necessity for doing it with a rush seized me after the first step. I
pitched over one little bundle, right on to the figure of a sleeping
woman. All she did was to turn round, murmuring, 'Naughty Jackie.' My
companion pulled me along gravely, and once in the air, with a good
breath of it in my chest, I felt tall and strong, and knew what had
occurred. The tent where I had slept struck me as more curious than my
own circumstances. I lifted my face to the sky; it was just sunrise,
beautiful; bits of long and curling cloud brushed any way close on the
blue, and rosy and white, deliciously cool; the grass was all grey, our
dell in shadow, and the tops of the trees burning, a few birds
twittering.

I sucked a blade of grass.

'I wish it was all water here,' I said.

'Come and have a drink and a bathe,' said my companion.

We went down the dell and over a juniper slope, reminding me of my day at
John Salter's house and the last of dear Heriot. Rather to my shame, my
companion beat me at running; she was very swift, and my legs were stiff.

'Can you swim?' she asked me.

'I can row, and swim, and fence, and ride, and fire a pistol,' I said.

'Oh, dear,' said she, after eyeing me enviously. I could see that I had
checked a recital of her accomplishments.

We arrived at a clear stream in a gentleman's park, where grass rolled
smooth as sea-water on a fine day, and cows and horses were feeding.

'I can catch that horse and mount him,' she said.

I was astonished.

'Straddle?'

She nodded down for 'Yes.'

'No saddle?'

She nodded level for 'No.'

My respect for her returned. But she could not swim.

'Only up to my knees,' she confessed.

'Have a look at me,' said I; and I stripped and shot into the water,
happy as a fish, and thinking how much nicer it was than champagne. My
enjoyment made her so envious that she plucked off her stockings, and
came in as far as she dared. I called to her. 'You're like a cow,' and
she showed her teeth, bidding me not say that.

'A cow! a cow!' I repeated, in my superior pleasure.

She spun out in a breath, 'If you say that, I 'll run away with every
bit of your clothes, and you'll come out and run about naked, you will.'

'Now I float,' was my answer, 'now I dive'; and when I came up she
welcomed me with a big bright grin.

A smart run in the heat dried me. I dressed, finding half my money on the
grass. She asked me to give her one of those bits-a shilling. I gave her
two, upon which she asked me, invitingly, if ever I tossed. I replied
that I never tossed for money; but she had caught a shilling, and I could
not resist guessing 'heads,' and won; the same with her second shilling.
She handed them to me sullenly, sobbing, yet she would not take them
back.

'By-and-by you give me another two,' she said, growing lively again. We
agreed that it would be a good thing if we entered the village and bought
something. None of the shops were open. We walked through the churchyard.
I said, 'Here's where dead people are buried.'

'I'll dance if you talk about dead people,' said she, and began whooping
at the pitch of her voice. On my wishing to know why she did it, her
reply was that it was to make the dead people hear. My feelings were
strange: the shops not open, and no living people to be seen. We climbed
trees, and sat on a branch talking of birds' eggs till hunger drove us to
the village street, where, near the public-house, we met the man-tramp,
who whistled.

He was rather amusing. He remarked that he put no questions to me,
because he put no question to anybody, because answers excited him about
subjects that had no particular interest to him, and did not benefit him
to the extent of a pipe of 'tobacco; and all through not being
inquisitive, yesterday afternoon he had obtained, as if it had been
chucked into his lap, a fine-flavoured fat goose honourably for his
supper, besides bottles of ale, bottles of ginger-pop, and a fair-earned
half-crown. That was through his not being inquisitive, and he was not
going to be inquisitive now, knowing me for a gentleman: my master had
tipped him half-a-crown.

Fortunately for him, and perhaps for my liberty, he employed a verb
marvellously enlightening to a schoolboy. I tipped him another
half-crown. He thanked me, observing that there were days when you lay on
your back and the sky rained apples; while there were other days when you
wore your fingers down to the first joint to catch a flea. Such was
Fortune!

In a friendly manner he advised me to go to school; if not there, then to
go home. My idea, which I had only partly conceived, was to have a look
at Riversley over a hedge, kiss my aunt Dorothy unaware, and fly
subsequently in search of my father. Breakfast, however, was my immediate
thought. He and the girl sat down to breakfast at the inn as my guests.
We ate muttonchops and eggs, and drank coffee. After it, though I had no
suspicions, I noticed that the man grew thoughtful. He proposed to me,
supposing I had no objection against slow travelling, to join company for
a couple of days, if I was for Hampshire, which I stated was the county I
meant to visit.

'Well then, here now, come along, d 'ye see, look,' said he, 'I mustn't
be pounced on, and no missing young gentleman in my society, and me took
half-a-crown for his absence; that won't do. You get on pretty well with
the gal, and that 's a screaming farce: none of us do. Lord! she looks
down on such scum as us. She's gipsy blood, true sort; everything's
sausages that gets into their pockets, no matter what it was when it was
out. Well then, now, here, you and the gal go t' other side o' Bed'lming,
and you wait for us on the heath, and we 'll be there to comfort ye 'fore
dark. Is it a fister?'

He held out his hand; I agreed; and he remarked that he now counted a
breakfast in the list of his gains from never asking questions.

I was glad enough to quit the village in a hurry, for the driver of the
geese, or a man dreadfully resembling him, passed me near the
public-house, and attacked my conscience on the cowardly side, which is,
I fear, the first to awaken, and always the liveliest half while we are
undisciplined. I would have paid him money, but the idea of a
conversation with him indicated the road back to school. My companion
related her history. She belonged to a Hampshire gipsy tribe, and had
been on a visit to a relative down in the East counties, who died on the
road, leaving her to be brought home by these tramps: she called them
mumpers, and made faces when she spoke of them. Gipsies, she said, were a
different sort: gipsies camped in gentlemen's parks; gipsies, horses,
fiddles, and the wide world--that was what she liked. The wide world she
described as a heath, where you looked and never saw the end of it I let
her talk on. For me to talk of my affairs to a girl without bonnet and
boots would have been absurd. Otherwise, her society pleased me: she was
so like a boy, and unlike any boy I knew.

My mental occupation on the road was to calculate how many hill-tops I
should climb before I beheld Riversley. The Sunday bells sounded homely
from village to village as soon as I was convinced that I heard no bells
summoning boarders to Rippenger's school. The shops in the villages
continued shut; however, I told the girl they should pay me for it next
day, and we had an interesting topic in discussing as to the various
things we would buy. She was for bright ribands and draper's stuff, I for
pastry and letter-paper. The smell of people's dinners united our
appetites. Going through a village I saw a man carrying a great baked
pie, smelling overpoweringly, so that to ask him his price for it was a
natural impulse with me. 'What! sell my Sunday dinner?' he said, and
appeared ready to drop the dish. Nothing stopped his staring until we had
finished a plateful a-piece and some beer in his cottage among his
family. He wanted to take me in alone. 'She's a common tramp,' he said of
the girl.

'That's a lie,' she answered.

Of course I would not leave her hungry outside, so in the end he
reluctantly invited us both, and introduced us to his wife.

'Here's a young gentleman asks a bit o' dinner, and a young
I-d'n-know-what 's after the same; I leaves it to you, missus.'

His wife took it off his shoulders in good humour, saying it was lucky
she made the pie big enough for her family and strays. They would not
accept more than a shilling for our joint repast. The man said that was
the account to a farthing, if I was too proud to be a poor man's guest,
and insisted on treating him like a public. Perhaps I would shake hands
at parting? I did cordially, and remembered him when people were not so
civil. They wanted to know whether we had made a runaway match of it. The
fun of passing a boys'-school and hearing the usher threaten to punish
one fellow for straying from ranks, entertained me immensely. I laughed
at them just as the stupid people we met laughed at me, which was
unpleasant for the time; but I knew there was not a single boy who would
not have changed places with me, only give him the chance, though my
companion was a gipsy girl, and she certainly did look odd company for a
gentleman's son in a tea-garden and public-house parlour. At nightfall,
however, I was glad of her and she of me, and we walked hand in hand. I
narrated tales of Roman history. It was very well for her so say, 'I'll
mother you,' as we lay down to sleep; I discovered that she would never
have hooted over churchyard graves in the night. She confessed she
believed the devil went about in the night. Our bed was a cart under a
shed, our bed-clothes fern-leaves and armfuls of straw. The shafts of the
cart were down, so we lay between upright and level, and awakening in the
early light I found our four legs hanging over the seat in front. 'How
you have been kicking!' said I. She accused me of the same. Next minute
she pointed over the side of the cart, and I saw the tramp's horse and
his tents beneath a broad roadside oak-tree. Her face was comical, just
like a boy's who thinks he has escaped and is caught. 'Let's run,' she
said. Preferring positive independence, I followed her, and then she told
me that she had overheard the tramp last night swearing I was as good as
a fistful of half-crowns lost to him if he missed me. The image of
Rippenger's school overshadowed me at this communication. With some
melancholy I said: 'You'll join your friends, won't you?'

She snapped her fingers: 'Mumpers!' and walked on carelessly.

We were now on the great heaths. They brought the memory of my father
vividly; the smell of the air half inclined me to turn my steps toward
London, I grew so full of longing for him. Nevertheless I resolved to
have one gaze at Riversley, my aunt Dorothy, and Sewis, the old
grey-brown butler, and the lamb that had grown a sheep; wonderful
contrasts to my grand kings of England career. My first clear
recollection of Riversley was here, like an outline of a hill seen miles
away. I might have shed a tear or two out of love for my father, had not
the thought that I was a very queer boy displaced his image. I could not
but be a very queer boy, such a lot of things happened to me. Suppose I
joined the gipsies? My companion wished me to. She had brothers,
horse-dealers, beautiful fiddlers. Suppose I learnt the fiddle? Suppose I
learnt their language and went about with them and became king of the
gipsies? My companion shook her head; she could not encourage this
ambitious idea because she had never heard of a king of the gipsies or a
queen either. 'We fool people,' she said, and offended me, for our school
believed in a gipsy king, and one fellow, Hackman, used to sing a song of
a gipsy king; and it was as much as to say that my schoolfellows were
fools, every one of them. I accused her of telling lies. She grinned
angrily. 'I don't tell 'em to friends,' she said. We had a quarrel. The
truth was, I was enraged at the sweeping out of my prospects of rising to
distinction among the gipsies. After breakfast at an inn, where a waiter
laughed at us to our faces, and we fed scowling, shy, and hungry, we had
another quarrel. I informed her of my opinion that gipsies could not tell
fortunes.

'They can, and you come to my mother and my aunt, and see if they can't
tell your fortune,' said she, in a fury.

'Yes, and that's how they fool people,' said I. I enjoyed seeing the
flash of her teeth. But my daring of her to look me in the eyes and swear
on her oath she believed the fortunes true ones, sent her into a fit of
sullenness.

'Go along, you nasty little fellow, your shadow isn't half a yard,' she
said, and I could smile at that; my shadow stretched half across the
road. We had a quarrelsome day wherever we went; rarely walking close
together till nightfall, when she edged up to my hand, with, 'I say, I'll
keep you warm to-night, I will.' She hugged me almost too tight, but it
was warm and social, and helped to the triumph of a feeling I had that
nothing made me regret running away from Rippenger's school.

An adventure befell us in the night. A farmer's wife, whom we asked for a
drink of water after dark, lent us an old blanket to cover us in a dry
ditch on receiving our promise not to rob the orchard. An old beggar came
limping by us, and wanted to share our covering. My companion sank right
under the blanket to peer at him through one of its holes. He stood
enormous above me in the moonlight, like an apparition touching earth and
sky.

'Cold, cold,' he whined: 'there's ne'er a worse off but there's a better
off. Young un!' His words dispersed the fancy that he was something
horrible, or else my father in disguise going to throw off his rags, and
shine, and say he had found me. 'Are ye one, or are ye two?' he asked.

I replied that we were two.

'Then I'll come and lie in the middle,' said he.

'You can't; there's no room,' I sang out.

'Lord,' said he, 'there's room for any reckoning o' empty stomachs in a
ditch.'

'No, I prefer to be alone: good-night,' said I.

'Why!' he exclaimed, 'where ha' you been t' learn language? Halloa!'

'Please, leave me alone; it's my intention to go to sleep,' I said, vexed
at having to conciliate him; he had a big stick.

'Oho!' went the beggar. Then he recommenced:

'Tell me you've stole nothing in your life! You've stole a gentleman's
tongue, I knows the ring o' that. How comes you out here? Who's your mate
there down below? Now, see, I'm going to lift my stick.'

At these menacing words the girl jumped out of the blanket, and I called
to him that I would rouse the farmer.

'Why . . . because I'm goin' to knock down a apple or two on your head?'
he inquired, in a tone of reproach. 'It's a young woman you've got there,
eh? Well, odd grows odder, like the man who turned three shillings into
five. Now, you gi' me a lie under your blanket, I 'll knock down a apple
apiece. If ever you've tasted gin, you 'll say a apple at night's a
cordial, though it don't intoxicate.'

The girl whispered in my ear, 'He's lame as ducks.' Her meaning seized me
at once; we both sprang out of the ditch and ran, dragging our blanket
behind us. He pursued, but we eluded him, and dropped on a quiet
sleeping-place among furzes. Next morning, when we took the blanket to
the farm-house, we heard that the old wretch had traduced our characters,
and got a breakfast through charging us with the robbery of the
apple-tree. I proved our innocence to the farmer's wife by putting down a
shilling. The sight of it satisfied her. She combed my hair, brought me a
bowl of water and a towel, and then gave us a bowl of milk and bread, and
dismissed us, telling me I had a fair face and dare-devil written on it:
as for the girl, she said of her that she knew gipsies at a glance, and
what God Almighty made them for there was no guessing. This set me
thinking all through the day, 'What can they have been made for?' I
bought a red scarf for the girl, and other things she fixed her eyes on,
but I lost a great deal of my feeling of fellowship with her. 'I dare say
they were made for fun,' I thought, when people laughed at us now, and I
laughed also.

I had a day of rollicking laughter, puzzling the girl, who could only
grin two or three seconds at a time, and then stared like a dog that
waits for his master to send him off again running, the corners of her
mouth twitching for me to laugh or speak, exactly as a dog might wag his
tail. I studied her in the light of a harmless sort of unaccountable
creature; witness at any rate for the fact that I had escaped from
school.

We loitered half the morning round a cricketers' booth in a field, where
there was moderately good cricketing. The people thought it of first-rate
quality. I told them I knew a fellow who could bowl out either eleven in
an hour and a half. One of the men frightened me by saying, 'By Gearge!
I'll in with you into a gig, and off with you after that ther' faller.'
He pretended to mean it, and started up. I watched him without flinching.
He remarked that if I 'had not cut my lucky from school, and tossed my
cap for a free life, he was ----' whatever may be expressed by a slap on
the thigh. We played a single-wicket side game, he giving me six runs,
and crestfallen he was to find himself beaten; but, as I let him know,
one who had bowled to Heriot for hours and stood against Saddlebank's
bowling, was a tough customer, never mind his age.

This man offered me his friendship. He made me sit and eat beside him at
the afternoon dinner of the elevens, and sent platefuls of food to the
girl, where she was allowed to squat; and said he, 'You and I'll tie a
knot, and be friends for life.'

I replied, 'With pleasure.'

We nodded over a glass of ale. In answer to his questions, I stated that
I liked farms, I would come and see his farm, I would stay with him two
or three days, I would give him my address if I had one, I was on my way
to have a look at Riversley Grange.

'Hey!' says he, 'Riversley Grange! Well, to be sure now! I'm a tenant of
Squire Beltham's, and a right sort of landlord, too.'

'Oh!' says I, 'he's my grandfather, but I don't care much about him.'

'Lord!' says he. 'What! be you the little boy, why, Master Harry Richmond
that was carried off in the night, and the old squire shut up doors for a
fortnight, and made out you was gone in a hearse! Why, I know all about
you, you see. And back you are, hurrah! The squire 'll be hearty, that he
will. We've noticed a change in him ever since you left. Gout's been at
his leg, off and on, a deal shrewder. But he rides to hounds, and dines
his tenants still, that he does; he's one o' th' old style. Everything
you eat and drink's off his estate, the day he dines his tenants. No
humbug 'bout old Squire Beltham.

I asked him if Sewis was alive.

'Why, old Sewis,' says he, 'you're acquainted with old Sewis? Why, of
course you are. Yes, old Sewis 's alive, Master Harry. And you bet me at
single-wicket! That 'll be something to relate to 'em all. By Gearge, if
I didn't think I'd got a nettle in my fist when I saw you pitch into my
stumps. Dash it! thinks I. But th' old squire 'll be proud of you, that
he will. My farm lies three miles away. You look at a crow flying due
South-east five minutes from Riversley, and he's over Throckham farm, and
there I 'll drive ye to-night, and to-morrow, clean and tidy out o' my
wife's soap and water, straight to Riversley. Done, eh? My name's
Eckerthy. No matter where you comes from, here you are, eh, Master Harry?
And I see you last time in a donkey-basket, and here you come in breeches
and defy me to singlewicket, and you bet me too!'

He laughed for jollity. An extraordinary number of emotions had
possession of me: the most intelligible one being a restless vexation at
myself, as the principal person concerned, for not experiencing anything
like the farmer's happiness. I preferred a gipsy life to Riversley.
Gipsies were on the road, and that road led to my father. I endeavoured
to explain to Farmer Eckerthy that I was travelling in this direction
merely to have a short look at Riversley; but it was impossible; he could
not understand me. The more I tried, the more he pressed me to finish my
glass of ale, which had nothing to do with it. I drank, nevertheless, and
I suppose said many funny things in my anxiety that the farmer should
know what I meant; he laughed enough.

While he was fielding against the opposite eleven, the tramp came into
the booth, and we had a match of cunning.

'Schoolmaster's out after you, young gentleman,' said he, advising me to
hurry along the road if I sought to baffle pursuit.

I pretended alarm, and then said, 'Oh, you'll stand by me,' and treated
him to ale.

He assured me I left as many tracks behind me as if I went spilling a box
of lucifer-matches. He was always for my hastening on until I ordered
fresh ale for him. The girl and he grimaced at one another in contempt.
So we remained seeing the game out. By the time the game ended, the tramp
had drunk numbers of glasses of ale.

'A fine-flavoured fat goose,' he counted his gains since the commencement
of our acquaintance, 'bottles of ale and ginger-pop, two half-crowns,
more ale, and more to follow, let's hope. You only stick to your friends,
young gentleman, won't you, sir? It's a hard case for a poor man like me
if you don't. We ain't got such chances every morning of our lives. Do
you perceive, sir? I request you to inform me, do you perceive, sir? I'm
muddled a bit, sir, but a man must look after his interests.'

I perceived he was so muddled as to be unable to conceal that his
interests were involved in my capture; but I was merry too. Farmer
Eckerthy dealt the tramp a scattering slap on the back when he returned
to the booth, elated at having beaten the enemy by a single run.

'Master Harry Richmond go to Riversley to his grandfather in your
company, you scoundrel!' he cried in a rage, after listening to him. 'I
mean to drive him over. It 's a comfortable ten-mile, and no more. But I
say, Master Harry, what do you say to a peck o' supper?'

He communicated to me confidentially that he did not like to seem to
slink away from the others, who had made up their minds to stop and sup;
so we would drive home by moonlight, singing songs. And so we did. I sat
beside the farmer, the girl scrambled into the hinder part of the cart,
and the tramp stood moaning, 'Oh dear! oh dear! you goes away to
Riversley without your best friend.'

I tossed him a shilling. We sang beginnings and ends of songs. The farmer
looked at the moon, and said, 'Lord! she stares at us!' Then he sang:

       'The moon is shining on Latworth lea,
        And where'll she see such a jovial three
        As we, boys, we? And why is she pale?
        It's because she drinks water instead of ale.'

'Where 's the remainder? There's the song!--

          "Oh! handsome Miss Gammon
          Has married Lord Mammon,
          And jilted her suitors,
          All Cupid's sharpshooters,
          And gone in a carriage
          And six to her marriage,
   Singing hey! for I've landed my salmon, my salmon!"

Where's the remainder? I heard it th' only time I ever was in London
town, never rested till I'd learnt it, and now it's clean gone. What's
come to me?'

He sang to 'Mary of Ellingmere' and another maid of some place, and a
loud song of Britons.

It was startling to me to wake up to twilight in the open air and
silence, for I was unaware that I had fallen asleep. The girl had roused
me, and we crept down from the cart. Horse and farmer were quite
motionless in a green hollow beside the roadway. Looking across fields
and fir plantations, I beheld a house in the strange light of the hour,
and my heart began beating; but I was overcome with shyness, and said to
myself, 'No, no, that's not Riversley; I'm sure it isn't'; though the
certainty of it was, in my teeth, refuting me. I ran down the fields to
the park and the bright little river, and gazed. When I could say, 'Yes,
it is Riversley!' I turned away, hurt even to a sense of smarting pain,
without knowing the cause. I dare say it is true, as the girl declared
subsequently, that I behaved like one in a fit. I dropped, and I may have
rolled my body and cried. An indefinite resentment at Riversley was the
feeling I grew conscious of after very fast walking. I would not have
accepted breakfast there.

About mid-day, crossing a stubble-field, the girl met a couple of her
people-men. Near evening we entered one of their tents. The women set up
a cry, 'Kiomi! Kiomi!' like a rising rookery. Their eyes and teeth made
such a flashing as when you dabble a hand in a dark waterpool. The
strange tongue they talked, with a kind of peck of the voice at a word,
rapid, never high or low, and then a slide of similar tones all
round,--not musical, but catching and incessant,--gave me an idea that I
had fallen upon a society of birds, exceedingly curious ones. They
welcomed me kindly, each of them looking me in the face a bright second
or so. I had two helps from a splendid pot of broth that hung over a fire
in the middle of the tent.

Kiomi was my companion's name. She had sisters Adeline and Eveleen, and
brothers Osric and William, and she had a cousin a prizefighter. 'That's
what I'll be,' said I. Fiddling for money was not a prospect that charmed
me, though it was pleasant lying in Kiomi's arms to hear Osric play us
off to sleep; it was like floating down one of a number of visible
rivers; I could see them converging and breaking away while I floated
smoothly, and a wonderful fair country nodded drowsy. From that to
cock-crow at a stride. Sleep was no more than the passage through the
arch of a canal. Kiomi and I were on the heath before sunrise, jumping
gravel-pits, chasing sandpipers, mimicking pewits; it seemed to me I had
only just heard the last of Osric's fiddle when yellow colour filled in
along the sky over Riversley. The curious dark thrill of the fiddle in
the tent by night seemed close up behind the sun, and my quiet fancies as
I lay dropping to sleep, followed me like unobtrusive shadows during
daylight, or, to speak truthfully, till about dinner-time, when I thought
of nothing but the great stew-pot. We fed on plenty; nicer food than
Rippenger's, minus puddings. After dinner I was ready for mischief. My
sensations on seeing Kiomi beg of a gentleman were remarkable. I
reproached her. She showed me sixpence shining in the palm of her hand. I
gave her a shilling to keep her from it. She had now got one and
sixpence, she said: meaning, I supposed upon reflection, that her begging
had produced that sum, and therefore it was a good thing. The money
remaining in my pocket amounted to five shillings and a penny. I offered
it to Kiomi's mother, who refused to accept it; so did the father, and
Osric also. I might think of them, they observed, on my return to my own
house: they pointed at Riversley. 'No,' said I, 'I shan't go there, you
may be sure.' The women grinned, and the men yawned. The business of the
men appeared to be to set to work about everything as if they had a fire
inside them, and then to stretch out their legs and lie on their backs,
exactly as if the fire had gone out. Excepting Osric's practice on the
fiddle, and the father's bringing in and leading away of horses, they did
little work in my sight but brown themselves in the sun. One morning
Osric's brother came to our camp with their cousin the prizefighter--a
young man of lighter complexion, upon whom I gazed, remembering John
Thresher's reverence for the heroical profession. Kiomi whispered some
story concerning her brother having met the tramp. I did not listen; I
was full of a tempest, owing to two causes: a studious admiration of the
smart young prizefighter's person, and wrathful disgust at him for
calling Kiomi his wife, and telling her he was prepared to marry her as
soon as she played her harp like King David. The intense folly of his
asking a girl to play like David made me despise him, but he was
splendidly handsome and strong, and to see him put on the gloves for a
spar with big William, Kiomi's brother, and evade and ward the huge
blows, would have been a treat to others besides old John of Dipwell
Farm. He had the agile grace of a leopard; his waistcoat reminded me of
one; he was like a piece of machinery in free action. Pleased by my
enthusiasm, he gave me a lesson, promising me more.

'He'll be champion some day,' said Kiomi, at gnaw upon an apple he had
given her.

I knocked the apple on the ground, and stamped on it. She slapped my
cheek. In a minute we stood in a ring. I beheld the girl actually
squaring at me.

'Fight away,' I said, to conceal my shame, and imagining I could slip
from her hits as easily as the prizefighter did from big William's. I was
mistaken.

'Oh! you think I can't defend myself,' said Kiomi; and rushed in with
one, two, quick as a cat, and cool as a statue.

'Fight, my merry one; she takes punishment,' the prizefighter sang out.
'First blood to you, Kiomi; uncork his claret, my duck; straight at the
nozzle, he sees more lamps than shine in London, I warrant. Make him
lively, cook him; tell him who taught you; a downer to him, and I'll
marry you to-morrow!'

I conceived a fury against her as though she had injured me by appearing
the man's property--and I was getting the worst of it; her little fists
shot straight and hard as bars of iron; she liked fighting; she was at
least my match. To avoid the disgrace of seriously striking her, or of
being beaten at an open exchange of blows, I made a feint, and caught her
by the waist and threw her, not very neatly, for I fell myself in her
grip. They had to pluck her from me by force.

'And you've gone a course of tuition in wrestling, squire?' the
prizefighter said to me rather savagely.

The others were cordial, and did not snarl at me for going to the ropes,
as he called it. Kiomi desired to renew the conflict. I said aloud:

'I never fight girls, and I tell you I don't like their licking me.'

'Then you come down to the river and wash your face,' said she, and
pulled me by the fingers, and when she had washed my face clear of blood,
kissed me. I thought she tasted of the prizefighter.

Late in the afternoon Osric proposed that he and I and the prizefighter
should take a walk. I stipulated for Kiomi to be of the party, which was
allowed, and the gipsy-women shook my hand as though I had been departing
on a long expedition, entreating me not to forget them, and never to
think evil of poor gipsy-folk.

'Why, I mean to stay with you,' said I.

They grinned delightedly, and said I must be back to see them break up
camp in the evening. Every two or three minutes Kiomi nudged my elbow and
pointed behind, where I saw the women waving their coloured neckerchiefs.
Out of sight of our tents we came in view of the tramp. Kiomi said,
'Hide!' I dived into a furze dell. The tramp approached, calling out for
news of me. Now at Rippenger's school, thanks to Heriot, lying was not
the fashion; still I had heard boys lie, and they can let it out of their
mouths like a fish, so lively, simple, and solid, that you could fancy a
master had asked them for it and they answered, 'There it is.' But boys
cannot lie in one key spontaneously, a number of them to the same effect,
as my friends here did. I was off, they said; all swung round to signify
the direction of my steps; my plans were hinted at; particulars were not
stated on the plea that there should be no tellings; it was remarked that
I ought to have fair play and 'law.' Kiomi said she hoped he would not
catch me. The tramp winced with vexation, and the gipsies chaffed him. I
thanked them in my heart for their loyal conduct. Creeping under cover of
the dell I passed round to the road over a knoll of firs as quick as my
feet could carry me, and had just cried, 'Now I'm safe'; when a lady
stepping from a carriage on the road, caught me in her arms and hugged me
blind. It was my aunt Dorothy.




CHAPTER VIII

JANET ILCHESTER

I was a prisoner, captured by fraud, and with five shillings and a penny
still remaining to me for an assurance of my power to enjoy freedom.
Osric and Kiomi did not show themselves on the road, they answered none
of my shouts.

'She is afraid to look me in the face,' I said, keeping my anger on
Kiomi.

'Harry, Harry,' said my aunt, 'they must have seen me here; do you
grieve, and you have me, dear?'

Her eager brown eyes devoured me while I stood panting to be happy, if
only I might fling my money at Kiomi's feet, and tell her, 'There, take
all I have; I hate you!' One minute I was curiously perusing the soft
shade of a moustache on my aunt's upper lip; the next, we jumped into the
carriage, and she was my dear aunt Dorothy again, and the world began
rolling another way.

The gipsies had made an appointment to deliver me over to my aunt; Farmer
Eckerthy had spoken of me to my grandfather; the tramp had fetched Mr.
Rippenger on the scene. Rippenger paid the tramp, I dare say; my
grandfather paid Rippenger's bill and for Saddlebank's goose; my aunt
paid the gipsies, and I think it doubtful that they handed the tramp a
share, so he came to the end of his list of benefits from not asking
questions.

I returned to Riversley more of a man than most boys of my age, and more
of a child. A small child would not have sulked as I did at Kiomi's
behaviour; but I met my grandfather's ridiculous politeness with a man's
indifference.

'So you're back, sir, are you!'

'I am, sir.'

'Ran like a hare, 'stead of a fox, eh?'

'I didn't run like either, sir.'

'Do you ride?'

'Yes, sir; a horse.'

That was his greeting and how I took it. I had not run away from him, so
I had a quiet conscience.

He said, shortly after, 'Look here; your name is Harry Richmond in my
house--do you understand? My servants have orders to call you Master
Harry Richmond, according to your christening. You were born here, sir,
you will please to recollect. I'll have no vagabond names here'--he
puffed himself hot, muttering, 'Nor vagabond airs neither.'

I knew very well what it meant. A sore spirit on my father's behalf kept
me alive to any insult of him; and feeling that we were immeasurably
superior to the Beltham blood, I merely said, apart to old Sewis,
shrugging my shoulders, 'The squire expects me to recollect where I was
born. I'm not likely to forget his nonsense.'

Sewis, in reply, counselled me to direct a great deal of my attention to
the stables, and drink claret with the squire in the evening, things so
little difficult to do that I moralized reflectively, 'Here 's a way of
gaining a relative's affection!' The squire's punctilious regard for
payments impressed me, it is true. He had saved me from the disgrace of
owing money to my detested schoolmaster; and, besides, I was under his
roof, eating of his bread. My late adventurous life taught me that I
incurred an obligation by it. Kiomi was the sole victim of my anger that
really seemed to lie down to be trampled on, as she deserved for her
unpardonable treachery.

By degrees my grandfather got used to me, and commenced saying in
approval of certain of my performances, 'There's Beltham in that--Beltham
in that!' Once out hunting, I took a nasty hedge and ditch in front of
him; he bawled proudly, 'Beltham all over!' and praised me. At night,
drinking claret, he said on a sudden, 'And, egad, Harry, you must jump
your head across hedges and ditches, my little fellow. It won't do, in
these confounded days, to have you clever all at the wrong end. In my
time, good in the saddle was good for everything; but now you must get
your brains where you can--pick here, pick there--and sell 'em like a
huckster; some do. Nature's gone--it's damned artifice rules, I tell ye;
and a squire of our country must be three parts lawyer to keep his own.
You must learn; by God, sir, you must cogitate; you must stew at books
and maps, or you'll have some infernal upstart taking the lead of you,
and leaving you nothing but the whiff of his tail.' He concluded, 'I'm
glad to see you toss down your claret, my boy.'

Thus I grew in his favour, till I heard from him that I was to be the
heir of Riversley and his estates, but on one condition, which he did not
then mention. If I might have spoken to him of my father, I should have
loved him. As it was, I liked old Sewis better, for he would talk to me
of the night when my father carried me away, and though he never uttered
the flattering words I longed to hear, he repeated the story often, and
made the red hall glow with beams of my father's image. My walks and
rides were divided between the road he must have followed toward London,
bearing me in his arms, and the vacant place of Kiomi's camp. Kiomi stood
for freedom, pointing into the darkness I wished to penetrate that I
might find him. If I spoke of him to my aunt she trembled. She said,
'Yes, Harry, tell me all you are thinking about, whatever you want to
know'; but her excessive trembling checked me, and I kept my feelings to
myself--a boy with a puzzle in his head and hunger in his heart. At times
I rode out to the utmost limit of the hour giving me the proper number of
minutes to race back and dress for dinner at the squire's table, and a
great wrestling I had with myself to turn my little horse's head from
hills and valleys lying East; they seemed to have the secret of my
father. Blank enough they looked if ever I despaired of their knowing
more than I. My Winter and Summer were the moods of my mind constantly
shifting. I would have a week of the belief that he was near Riversley,
calling for me; a week of the fear that he was dead; long dreams of him,
as travelling through foreign countries, patting the foreheads of boys
and girls on his way; or driving radiantly, and people bowing. Radiantly,
I say: had there been touches of colour in these visions, I should have
been lured off in pursuit of him. The dreams passed colourlessly; I put
colouring touches to the figures seen in them afterward, when I was
cooler, and could say, 'What is the use of fancying things?' yet knew
that fancying things was a consolation. By such means I came to paint the
mystery surrounding my father in tender colours. I built up a fretted
cathedral from what I imagined of him, and could pass entirely away out
of the world by entering the doors.

Want of boys' society as well as hard head-work produced this mischief.
My lessons were intermittent Resident tutors arrived to instruct me, one
after another. They were clergymen, and they soon proposed to marry my
aunt Dorothy, or they rebuked the squire for swearing. The devil was in
the parsons, he said: in his time they were modest creatures and stuck to
the bottle and heaven. My aunt was of the opinion of our neighbours, who
sent their boys to school and thought I should be sent likewise.

'No, no,' said the squire; 'my life's short when the gout's marching up
to my middle, and I'll see as much of my heir as I can. Why, the lad's my
daughter's son: He shall grow up among his tenantry. We'll beat the
country and start a man at last to drive his yard of learning into him
without rolling sheep's eyes right and left.'

Unfortunately the squire's description of man was not started. My aunt
was handsome, an heiress (that is, she had money of her own coming from
her mother's side of the family), and the tenderest woman alive, with a
voice sweeter than flutes. There was a saying in the county that to marry
a Beltham you must po'chay her.

A great-aunt of mine, the squire's sister, had been carried off. She died
childless. A favourite young cousin of his likewise had run away with a
poor baronet, Sir Roderick Ilchester, whose son Charles was now and then
our playmate, and was a scapegrace. But for me he would have been
selected by the squire for his heir, he said; and he often 'confounded'
me to my face on that account as he shook my hand, breaking out: 'I'd as
lief fetch you a cuff o' the head, Harry Richmond, upon my honour!' and
cursing at his luck for having to study for his living, and be what he
called a sloppy curate now that I had come to Riversley for good.

He informed me that I should have to marry his sister Janet; for that
they could not allow the money to go out of the family. Janet Ilchester
was a quaint girl, a favourite of my aunt Dorothy, and the squire's
especial pet; red-cheeked, with a good upright figure in walking and
riding, and willing to be friendly, but we always quarrelled: she
detested hearing of Kiomi.

'Don't talk of creatures you met when you were a beggar, Harry Richmond,'
she said.

'I never was a beggar,' I replied.

'Then she was a beggar,' said Janet; and I could not deny it; though the
only difference I saw between Janet and Kiomi was, that Janet continually
begged favours and gifts of people she knew, and Kiomi of people who were
strangers.

My allowance of pocket-money from the squire was fifty pounds a year. I
might have spent it all in satisfying Janet's wishes for riding-whips,
knives, pencil-cases, cairngorm buttons, and dogs. A large part of the
money went that way. She was always getting notice of fine dogs for sale.
I bought a mastiff for her, a brown retriever, and a little terrier. She
was permitted to keep the terrier at home, but I had to take care of the
mastiff and retriever. When Janet came to look at them she called them by
their names; of course they followed me in preference to her; she cried
with jealousy. We had a downright quarrel. Lady Ilchester invited me to
spend a day at her house, Charley being home for his Midsummer holidays.
Charley, Janet, and I fished the river for trout, and Janet, to flatter
me (of which I was quite aware), while I dressed her rod as if she was
likely to catch something, talked of Heriot, and then said:

'Oh! dear, we are good friends, aren't we? Charley says we shall marry
one another some day, but mama's such a proud woman she won't much like
your having such a father as you 've got unless he 's dead by that time
and I needn't go up to him to be kissed.'

I stared at the girl in wonderment, but not too angrily, for I guessed
that she was merely repeating her brother's candid speculations upon the
future. I said: 'Now mind what I tell you, Janet: I forgive you this
once, for you are an ignorant little girl and know no better. Speak
respectfully of my father or you never see me again.'

Here Charley sang out: 'Hulloa! you don't mean to say you're talking of
your father.'

Janet whimpered that I had called her an ignorant little girl. If she had
been silent I should have pardoned her. The meanness of the girl in
turning on me when the glaring offence was hers, struck me as
contemptible beyond words. Charley and I met half way. He advised me not
to talk to his sister of my father. They all knew, he said, that it was
no fault of mine, and for his part, had he a rascal for a father, he
should pension him and cut him; to tell the truth, no objection against
me existed in his family except on the score of the sort of father I
owned to, and I had better make up my mind to shake him off before I grew
a man; he spoke as a friend. I might frown at him and clench my fists,
but he did speak as a friend.

Janet all the while was nibbling a biscuit, glancing over it at me with
mouse-eyes. Her short frock and her greediness, contrasting with the talk
of my marrying her, filled me with renewed scorn, though my heart was
sick at the mention of my father. I asked her what she knew of him. She
nibbled her biscuit, mumbling, 'He went to Riversley, pretending he was a
singing-master. I know that's true, and more.'

'Oh, and a drawing-master, and a professor of legerdemain,' added her
brother. 'Expunge him, old fellow; he's no good.'

'No, I'm sure he's no good,' said Janet.

I took her hand, and told her, 'You don't know how you hurt me; but
you're a child: you don't know anything about the world. I love my
father, remember that, and what you want me to do is mean and
disgraceful; but you don't know better. I would forfeit everything in the
world for him. And when you're of age to marry, marry anybody you
like--you won't marry me. And good-bye, Janet. Think of learning your
lessons, and not of marrying. I can't help laughing.' So I said, but
without the laughter. Her brother tried hard to get me to notice him.

Janet betook herself to the squire. Her prattle of our marriage in days
to come was excuseable. It was the squire's notion. He used to remark
generally that he liked to see things look safe and fast, and he had, as
my aunt confided to me, arranged with Lady Ilchester, in the girl's
hearing, that we should make a match. My grandfather pledged his word to
Janet that he would restore us to an amicable footing. He thought it a
light task. Invitations were sent out to a large party at Riversley, and
Janet came with all my gifts on her dress or in her pockets. The squire
led the company to the gates of his stables; the gates opened, and a
beautiful pony, with a side-saddle on, was trotted forth, amid cries of
admiration. Then the squire put the bridle-reins in my hands, bidding me
present it myself. I asked the name of the person. He pointed at Janet. I
presented the pony to Janet, and said, 'It's from the squire.'

She forgot, in her delight, our being at variance.

'No, no, you stupid Harry, I'm to thank you. He's a darling pony. I want
to kiss you.'

I retired promptly, but the squire had heard her.

'Back, sir!' he shouted, swearing by this and that. 'You slink from a
kiss, and you're Beltham blood?

Back to her, lad. Take it. Up with her in your arms or down on your
knees. Take it manfully, somehow. See there, she 's got it ready for
you.'

'I've got a letter ready for you, Harry, to say--oh! so sorry for
offending you,' Janet whispered, when I reached the pony's head; 'and if
you'd rather not be kissed before people, then by-and-by, but do shake
hands.'

'Pull the pony's mane,' said I; 'that will do as well. Observe--I pull,
and now you pull.'

Janet mechanically followed my actions. She grimaced, and whimpered, 'I
could pull the pony's mane right out.'

'Don't treat animals like your dolls,' said I.

She ran to the squire, and refused the pony. The squire's face changed
from merry to black.

'Young man,' he addressed me, 'don't show that worse half of yours in
genteel society, or, by the Lord! you won't carry Beltham buttons for
long. This young lady, mind you, is a lady by birth both sides.'

'She thinks she is marriageable,' said I; and walked away, leaving loud
laughter behind me.

But laughter did not console me for the public aspersion of him I loved.
I walked off the grounds, and thought to myself it was quite time I
should be moving. Wherever I stayed for any length of time I was certain
to hear abuse of my father. Why not wander over the country with Kiomi,
go to sea, mount the Andes, enlist in a Prussian regiment, and hear the
soldiers tell tales of Frederick the Great? I walked over Kiomi's heath
till dark, when one of our grooms on horseback overtook me, saying that
the squire begged me to jump on the horse and ride home as quick as
possible. Two other lads and the coachman were out scouring the country
to find me, and the squire was anxious, it appeared. I rode home like a
wounded man made to feel proud by victory, but with no one to stop the
bleeding of his wounds: and the more my pride rose, the more I suffered
pain. There at home sat my grandfather, dejected, telling me that the
loss of me a second time would kill him, begging me to overlook his
roughness, calling me his little Harry and his heir, his brave-spirited
boy; yet I was too sure that a word of my father to him would have
brought him very near another ejaculation concerning Beltham buttons.

'You're a fiery young fellow, I suspect,' he said, when he had recovered
his natural temper. 'I like you for it; pluck's Beltham. Have a will of
your own. Sweat out the bad blood. Here, drink my health, Harry. You're
three parts Beltham, at least, and it'll go hard if you're not all
Beltham before I die. Old blood always wins that race, I swear. We 're
the oldest in the county.

Damn the mixing. My father never let any of his daughters marry, if he
could help it, nor'll I, bar rascals.

Here's to you, young Squire Beltham. Harry Lepel Beltham--does that suit
ye? Anon, anon, as they say in the play. Take my name, and drop the
Richmond no, drop the subject: we'll talk of it by-and-by.'

So he wrestled to express his hatred of my father without offending me;
and I studied him coldly, thinking that the sight of my father in
beggar's clothes, raising a hand for me to follow his steps, would draw
me forth, though Riversley should beseech me to remain clad in wealth.




CHAPTER IX

AN EVENING WITH CAPTAIN BULSTED

A dream that my father lay like a wax figure in a bed gave me thoughts of
dying. I was ill and did not know it, and imagined that my despair at the
foot of the stairs of ever reaching my room to lie down peacefully was
the sign of death. My aunt Dorothy nursed me for a week: none but she and
my dogs entered the room. I had only two faint wishes left in me: one
that the squire should be kept out of my sight, the other that she would
speak to me of my mother's love for my father. She happened to say,
musing, 'Harry, you have your mother's heart.'

I said, 'No, my father's.'

From that we opened a conversation, the sweetest I had ever had away from
him, though she spoke shyly and told me very little. It was enough for me
in the narrow world of my dogs' faces, and the red-leaved creeper at the
window, the fir-trees on the distant heath, and her hand clasping mine.
My father had many faults, she said, but he had been cruelly used, or
deceived, and he bore a grievous burden; and then she said, 'Yes,' and
'Yes,' and 'Yes,' in the voice one supposes of a ghost retiring, to my
questions of his merits. I was refreshed and satisfied, like the parched
earth with dews when it gets no rain, and I was soon well.

When I walked among the household again, I found that my week of
seclusion had endowed me with a singular gift; I found that I could see
through everybody. Looking at the squire, I thought to myself, 'My father
has faults, but he has been cruelly used,' and immediately I forgave the
old man; his antipathy to my father seemed a craze, and to account for it
I lay in wait for his numerous illogical acts and words, and smiled
visibly in contemplation of his rough unreasonable nature, and of my
magnanimity. He caught the smile, and interpreted it.

'Grinning at me, Harry; have I made a slip in my grammar, eh?'

Who could feel any further sensitiveness at his fits of irritation,
reading him as I did? I saw through my aunt: she was always in dread of a
renewal of our conversation. I could see her ideas flutter like birds to
escape me. And I penetrated the others who came in my way just as
unerringly. Farmer Eckerthy would acknowledge, astonished, his mind was
running on cricket when I taxed him with it.

'Crops was the cart-load of my thoughts, Master Harry, but there was a
bit o' cricket in it, too, ne'er a doubt.'

My aunt's maid, Davis, was shocked by my discernment of the fact that she
was in love, and it was useless for her to pretend the contrary, for I
had seen her granting tender liberties to Lady Ilchester's footman.

Old Sewis said gravely, 'You've been to the witches, Master Harry'; and
others were sure 'I had got it from the gipsies off the common.'

The maids were partly incredulous, but I perceived that they disbelieved
as readily as they believed. With my latest tutor, the Rev. Simon Hart, I
was not sufficiently familiar to offer him proofs of my extraordinary
power; so I begged favours of him, and laid hot-house flowers on his
table in the name of my aunt, and had the gratification of seeing him
blush. His approval of my Latin exercise was verbal, and weak praise in
comparison; besides I cared nothing for praises not referring to my grand
natural accomplishment. 'And my father now is thinking of me!' That was
easy to imagine, but the certainty of it confirmed me in my conceit.

'How can you tell?--how is it possible for you to know people's
thoughts?' said Janet Ilchester, whose head was as open to me as a hat.
She pretended to be rather more frightened of me than she was.

'And now you think you are flattering me!' I said.

She looked nervous.

'And now you're asking yourself what you can do better than I can!'

She said, 'Go on.'

I stopped.

She charged me with being pulled up short.

I denied it.

'Guess, guess!' said she. 'You can't.'

My reply petrified her. 'You were thinking that you are a lady by birth
on both sides.'

At first she refused to admit it. 'No, it wasn't that, Harry, it wasn't
really. I was thinking how clever you are.'

'Yes, after, not before.'

'No, Harry, but you are clever. I wish I was half as clever. Fancy
reading people's ideas! I can read my pony's, but that's different; I
know by his ears. And as for my being a lady, of course I am, and so are
you--I mean, a gentleman. I was thinking--now this is really what I was
thinking--I wished your father lived near, that we might all be friends.
I can't bear the squire when he talks . . . . And you quite as good as
me, and better. Don't shake me off, Harry.'

I shook her in the gentlest manner, not suspecting that she had read my
feelings fully as well as I her thoughts. Janet and I fell to talking of
my father incessantly, and were constantly together. The squire caught
one of my smiles rising, when he applauded himself lustily for the
original idea of matching us; but the idea was no longer distasteful to
me. It appeared to me that if I must some day be married, a wife who
would enjoy my narratives, and travel over the four quarters of the
globe, as Janet promised to do, in search of him I loved, would be the
preferable person. I swore her to secresy; she was not to tell her
brother Charley the subject we conversed on.

'Oh dear, no!' said she, and told him straightway.

Charley, home for his winter holidays, blurted out at the squire's table:
'So, Harry Richmond, you're the cleverest fellow in the world, are you?
There's Janet telling everybody your father's the cleverest next to you,
and she's never seen him!'

'How? hulloa, what 's that?' sang out the squire.

'Charley was speaking of my father, sir,' I said, preparing for thunder.

We all rose. The squire looked as though an apoplectic seizure were
coming on.

'Don't sit at my table again,' he said, after a terrible struggle to be
articulate.

His hand was stretched at me. I swung round to depart. 'No, no, not you;
that fellow,' he called, getting his arm level toward Charley.

I tried to intercede--the last who should have done it.

'You like to hear him, eh?' said the squire.

I was ready to say that I did, but my aunt, whose courage was up when
occasion summoned it, hushed the scene by passing the decanter to the
squire, and speaking to him in a low voice.

'Biter's bit. I've dished myself, that's clear,' said Charley; and he
spoke the truth, and such was his frankness that I forgave him.

He and Janet were staying at Riversley. They left next morning, for the
squire would not speak to him, nor I to Janet.

'I 'll tell you what; there 's no doubt about one thing,' said Charley;
'Janet's right--some of those girls are tremendously deep: you're about
the cleverest fellow I've ever met in my life. I thought of working into
the squire in a sort of collateral manner, you know. A cornetcy in the
Dragoon Guards in a year or two. I thought the squire might do that for
me without much damaging you;--perhaps a couple of hundred a year, just
to reconcile me to a nose out of joint. For, upon my honour, the squire
spoke of making me his heir--or words to that effect neatly
conjugated--before you came back; and rather than be a curate like that
Reverend Hart of yours, who hands raisins and almonds, and orange-flower
biscuits to your aunt the way of all the Reverends who drop down on
Riversley--I 'd betray my bosom friend. I'm regularly "hoist on my own
petard," as they say in the newspapers. I'm a curate and no mistake. You
did it with a turn of the wrist, without striking out: and I like neat
boxing. I bear no malice when I'm floored neatly.'

Five minutes after he had spoken it would have been impossible for me to
tell him that my simplicity and not my cleverness had caused his
overthrow. From this I learnt that simplicity is the keenest weapon and a
beautiful refinement of cleverness; and I affected it extremely. I pushed
it so far that I could make the squire dance in his seat with suppressed
fury and jealousy at my way of talking of Venice, and other Continental
cities, which he knew I must have visited in my father's society; and
though he raged at me and pshawed the Continent to the deuce, he was
ready, out of sheer rivalry, to grant anything I pleased to covet. At
every stage of my growth one or another of my passions was alert to twist
me awry, and now I was getting a false self about me and becoming liker
to the creature people supposed me to be, despising them for blockheads
in my heart, as boys may who preserve a last trace of the ingenuousness
denied to seasoned men.

Happily my aunt wrote to Mr. Rippenger for the address of little Gus
Temple's father, to invite my schoolfellow to stay a month at Riversley.
Temple came, everybody liked him; as for me my delight was unbounded, and
in spite of a feeling of superiority due to my penetrative capacity, and
the suspicion it originated, that Temple might be acting the plain
well-bred schoolboy he was, I soon preferred his pattern to my own. He
confessed he had found me changed at first. His father, it appeared, was
working him as hard at Latin as Mr. Hart worked me, and he sat down
beside me under my tutor and stumbled at Tacitus after his fluent Cicero.
I offered excuses for him to Mr. Hart, saying he would soon prove himself
the better scholar. 'There's my old Richie!' said Temple, fondling me on
the shoulder, and my nonsensical airs fell away from me at once.

We roamed the neighbourhood talking old school-days over, visiting
houses, hunting and dancing, declaring every day we would write for
Heriot to join us, instead of which we wrote a valentine to Julia
Rippenger, and despatched a companion one composed in a very different
spirit to her father. Lady Ilchester did us the favour to draw a
sea-monster, an Andromeda, and a Perseus in the shape of a flying British
hussar, for Julia's valentine. It seemed to us so successful that we
scattered half-a-dozen over the neighbourhood, and rode round it on the
morning of St. Valentine's Day to see the effect of them, meeting the
postman on the road. He gave me two for myself. One was transparently
from Janet, a provoking counterstroke of mine to her; but when I opened
the other my heart began beating. The standard of Great Britain was
painted in colours at the top; down each side, encricled in laurels, were
kings and queens of England with their sceptres, and in the middle I read
the initials, A. F-G. R. R., embedded in blue forget-me-hots. I could not
doubt it was from my father. Riding out in the open air as I received it,
I could fancy in my hot joy that it had dropped out of heaven.

'He's alive; I shall have him with me; I shall have him with me soon!' I
cried to Temple. 'Oh! why can't I answer him? where is he? what address?
Let's ride to London. Don't you understand, Temple? This letter's from my
father. He knows I'm here. I'll find him, never mind what happens.'

'Yes, but,' said Temple, 'if he knows where you are, and you don't know
where he is, there's no good in your going off adventuring. If a fellow
wants to be hit, the best thing he can do is to stop still.'

Struck by the perspicacity of his views, I turned homeward. Temple had
been previously warned by me to avoid speaking of my father at Riversley;
but I was now in such a boiling state of happiness, believing that my
father would certainly appear as he had done at Dipwell farm, brilliant
and cheerful, to bear me away to new scenes and his own dear society,
that I tossed the valentine to my aunt across the breakfast-table,
laughing and telling her to guess the name of the sender. My aunt
flushed.

'Miss Bannerbridge?' she said.

A stranger was present. The squire introduced us.

'My grandson, Harry Richmond, Captain William Bulsted, frigate
Polyphemus; Captain Bulsted, Master Augustus Temple.'

For the sake of conversation, Temple asked him if his ship was fully
manned.

'All but a mate,' said the captain.

I knew him by reputation as the brother of Squire Gregory Bulsted of
Bulsted, notorious for his attachment to my aunt, and laughing-stock of
the county.

'So you've got a valentine,' the captain addressed me. 'I went on shore
at Rio last year on this very day of the month, just as lively as you
youngsters for one. Saltwater keeps a man's youth in pickle. No valentine
for me! Paid off my ship yesterday at Spithead, and here I am again on
Valentine's Day.'

Temple and I stared hard at a big man with a bronzed skin and a rubicund
laugh who expected to receive valentines.

My aunt thrust the letter back to me secretly. 'It must be from a lady,'
said she.

'Why, who'd have a valentine from any but a lady?' exclaimed the captain.

The squire winked at me to watch his guest. Captain Bulsted fed heartily;
he was thoroughly a sailor-gentleman, between the old school and the new,
and, as I perceived, as far gone in love with my aunt as his brother was.
Presently Sewis entered carrying a foaming tankard of old ale, and he and
the captain exchanged a word or two upon Jamaica.

'Now, when you've finished that washy tea of yours, take a draught of our
October, brewed here long before you were a lieutenant, captain,' said
the squire.

'Thank you, sir,' the captain replied; 'I know that ale; a moment, and I
will gladly. I wish to preserve my faculties; I don't wish to have it
supposed that I speak under fermenting influences. Sewis, hold by, if you
please.'

My aunt made an effort to retire.

'No, no, fair play; stay,' said the squire, trying to frown, but
twinkling; my aunt tried to smile, and sat as if on springs.

'Miss Beltham,' the captain bowed to her, and to each one as he spoke,
'Squire Beltham, Mr. Harry Richmond; Mr. Temple; my ship was paid off
yesterday, and till a captain's ship is paid off, he 's not his own
master, you are aware. If you think my behaviour calls for comment,
reflect, I beseech you, on the nature of a sailor's life. A three-years'
cruise in a cabin is pretty much equivalent to the same amount of time
spent in a coffin, I can assure you; with the difference that you're hard
at work thinking all the time like the--hum.'

'Ay, he thinks hard enough,' the squire struck in.

'Pardon me, sir; like the--hum--plumb-line on a leeshore, I meant to
observe. This is now the third--the fourth occasion on which I have
practised the observance of paying my first visit to Riversley to know my
fate, that I might not have it on my conscience that I had missed a day,
a minute, as soon as I was a free man on English terra firma. My brother
Greg and I were brought up in close association with Riversley. One of
the Beauties of Riversley we lost! One was left, and we both tried our
luck with her; honourably, in turn, each of us, nothing underhand;
above-board, on the quarter-deck, before all the company. I 'll say it of
my brother, I can say it of myself. Greg's chances, I need not remark,
are superior to mine; he is always in port. If he wins, then I tell
him--"God bless you, my boy; you've won the finest woman, the
handsomest, and the best, in or out of Christendom!" But my chance is my
property, though it may be value only one farthing coin of the realm, and
there is always pity for poor sinners in the female bosom. Miss Beltham,
I trespass on your kind attention. If I am to remain a bachelor and you a
maiden lady, why, the will of heaven be done! If you marry another, never
mind who the man, there's my stock to the fruit of the union, never mind
what the sex. But, if you will have one so unworthy of you as me, my hand
and heart are at your feet, ma'am, as I have lost no time in coming to
tell you.' So Captain Bulsted concluded. Our eyes were directed on my
aunt. The squire bade her to speak out, for she had his sanction to act
according to her judgement and liking.

She said, with a gracefulness that gave me a little aching of pity for
the poor captain: 'I am deeply honoured by you, Captain Bulsted, but it
is not my intention to marry.'

The captain stood up, and bowing humbly, replied 'I am ever your servant,
ma'am.'

My aunt quitted the room.

'Now for the tankard, Sewis,' said the captain.

Gradually the bottom of the great tankard turned up to the ceiling. He
drank to the last drop in it.

The squire asked him whether he found consolation in that.

The captain sighed prodigiously and said: 'It 's a commencement, sir.'

'Egad, it's a commencement 'd be something like a final end to any dozen
of our fellows round about here. I'll tell you what: if stout stomachs
gained the day in love-affairs, I suspect you'd run a good race against
the male half of our county, William. And a damned good test of a man's
metal, I say it is! What are you going to do to-day?'

'I am going to get drunk, sir.'

'Well, you might do worse. Then, stop here, William, and give my old Port
the preference. No tongue in the morning, I promise you, and pleasant
dreams at night.' The captain thanked him cordially, but declined, saying
that he would rather make a beast of himself in another place.

The squire vainly pressed his hospitality by assuring him of perfect
secresy on our part, as regarded my aunt, and offering him Sewis and one
of the footmen to lift him to bed. 'You are very good, squire,' said the
captain; 'nothing but a sense of duty restrains me. I am bound to convey
the information to my brother that the coast is clear for him.'

'Well, then, fall light, and for'ard,' said the squire, shaking him by
the hand. Forty years ago a gentleman, a baronet, had fallen on the back
of his head and never recovered.

'Ay, ay, launch stern foremost, if you like!' said the captain, nodding;
'no, no, I don't go into port pulled by the tail, my word for it, squire;
and good day to you, sir.'

'No ill will about this bothering love-business of yours, William?'

'On my soul, sir, I cherish none.'

Temple and I followed him out of the house, fascinated by his manners and
oddness. He invited us to jump into the chariot beside him. We were
witnesses of the meeting between him and his brother, a little sniffling
man, as like the captain as a withered nut is like a milky one.

'Same luck, William?' said Squire Gregory.

'Not a point of change in the wind, Greg,' said the captain.

They wrenched hands thereupon, like two carpet-shakers, with a report,
and much in a similar attitude.

'These young gentlemen will testify to you solemnly, Greg, that I took no
unfair advantage,' said the captain; 'no whispering in passages, no
appointments in gardens, no letters. I spoke out. Bravely, man! And now,
Greg, referring to the state of your cellar, our young friends here mean
to float with us to-night. It is now half-past eleven A.M. Your
dinner-hour the same as usual, of course? Therefore at four P.M. the hour
of execution. And come, Greg, you and I will visit the cellar. A dozen
and half of light and half-a-dozen of the old family--that will be about
the number of bottles to give me my quietus, and you yours--all of us!
And you, young gentlemen, take your guns or your rods, and back and be
dressed by the four bell, or you 'll not find the same man in Billy
Bulsted.'

Temple was enraptured with him. He declared he had been thinking
seriously for a long time of entering the Navy, and his admiration of the
captain must have given him an intuition of his character, for he
persuaded me to send to Riversley for our evening-dress clothes,
appearing in which at the dinner-table, we received the captain's
compliments, as being gentlemen who knew how to attire ourselves to suit
an occasion. The occasion, Squire Gregory said, happened to him too often
for him to distinguish it by the cut of his coat.

'I observe, nevertheless, Greg, that you have a black tie round your neck
instead of a red one,' said the captain.

'Then it came there by accident,' said Squire Gregory.

'Accident! There's no such thing as accident. If I wander out of the
house with a half dozen or so in me, and topple into the brook, am I
accidentally drowned? If a squall upsets my ship, is she an accidental
residue of spars and timber and old iron? If a woman refuses me, is that
an accident? There's a cause for every disaster: too much cargo, want of
foresight, want of pluck. Pooh! when I'm hauled prisoner into a foreign
port in time of war, you may talk of accidents. Mr. Harry Richmond, Mr.
Temple, I have the accidental happiness of drinking to your healths in a
tumbler of hock wine. Nominative, hic, haec, hoc.'

Squire Gregory carried on the declension, not without pride. The Vocative
confused him.

'Claret will do for the Vocative,' said the captain, gravely; 'the more
so as there is plenty of it at your table, Greg. Ablative hoc, hac, hoc,
which sounds as if the gentleman had become incapable of speech beyond
the name of his wine. So we will abandon the declension of the article
for a dash of champagne, which there's no declining, I hope. Wonderful
men, those Romans! They fought their ships well, too. A question to you,
Greg. Those heathen Pagan dogs had a religion that encouraged them to
swear. Now, my experience of life pronounces it to be a human necessity
to rap out an oath here and there. What do you say?'

Squire Gregory said: 'Drinking, and no thinking, at dinner, William.' The
captain pledged him.

'I 'll take the opportunity, as we're not on board ship, of drinking to
you, sir, now,' Temple addressed the captain, whose face was resplendent;
and he bowed, and drank, and said,

'As we are not on board ship? I like you!'

Temple thanked him for the compliment.

'No compliment, my lad. You see me in my weakness, and you have the
discernment to know me for something better than I seem. You promise to
respect me on my own quarter-deck. You are of the right stuff. Do I speak
correctly, Mr. Harry?'

'Temple is my dear friend,' I replied.

'And he would not be so if not of the right stuff! Good! That 's a way of
putting much in little. By Jove! a royal style.'

'And Harry's a royal fellow!' said Temple.

We all drank to one another. The captain's eyes scrutinized me
speculatingly.

'This boy might have been yours or mine, Greg,' I heard him say in a
faltering rough tone.

They forgot the presence of Temple and me, but spoke as if they thought
they were whispering. The captain assured his brother that Squire Beltham
had given him as much fair play as one who holds a balance. Squire
Gregory doubted it, and sipped and kept his nose at his wineglass,
crabbedly repeating his doubts of it. The captain then remarked, that
doubting it, his conscience permitted him to use stratagems, though he,
the captain, not doubting it, had no such permission.

'I count I run away with her every night of my life,' said Squire
Gregory. 'Nothing comes of it but empty bottles.'

'Court her, serenade her,' said the captain; 'blockade the port, lay
siege to the citadel. I'd give a year of service for your chances, Greg.
Half a word from her, and you have your horses ready.'

'She's past po'chaises,' Squire Gregory sighed.

'She's to be won by a bold stroke, brother Greg.'

'Oh, Lord, no! She's past po'chaises.'

'Humph! it's come to be half-bottle, half-beauty, with your worship,
Greg, I suspect.'

'No. I tell you, William, she's got her mind on that fellow. You can't
po'chay her.'

'After he jilted her for her sister? Wrong, Greg, wrong. You are muddled.
She has a fright about matrimony--a common thing at her age, I am told.
Where's the man?'

'In the Bench, of course. Where'd you have him?'

'I, sir? If I knew my worst enemy to be there, I'd send him six dozen of
the best in my cellar.'

Temple shot a walnut at me. I pretended to be meditating carelessly, and
I had the heat and roar of a conflagration round my head.

Presently the captain said, 'Are you sure the man's in the Bench?'

'Cock,' Squire Gregory replied.

'He had money from his wife.'

'And he had the wheels to make it go.' Here they whispered in earnest.

'Oh, the Billings were as rich as the Belthams,' said the captain, aloud.

'Pretty nigh, William.'

'That's our curse, Greg. Money settled on their male issue, and money in
hand; by the Lord! we've always had the look of a pair of highwaymen
lurking for purses, when it was the woman, the woman, penniless, naked,
mean, destitute; nothing but the woman we wanted. And there was one
apiece for us. Greg, old boy, when will the old county show such another
couple of Beauties! Greg, sir, you're not half a man, or you'd have
carried her, with your, opportunities. The fellow's in the Bench, you
say? How are you cocksure of that, Mr. Greg?'

'Company,' was the answer; and the captain turned to Temple and me,
apologizing profusely for talking over family matters with his brother
after a separation of three years. I had guessed but hastily at the
subject of their conversation until they mentioned the Billings, the
family of my maternal grandmother. The name was like a tongue of fire
shooting up in a cloud of smoke: I saw at once that the man in the Bench
must be my father, though what the Bench was exactly, and where it was, I
had no idea, and as I was left to imagination I became, as usual,
childish in my notions, and brooded upon thoughts of the Man in the Iron
Mask; things I dared not breathe to Temple, of whose manly sense I stood
in awe when under these distracting influences.

'Remember our feast in the combe?' I sang across the table to him.

'Never forget it!' said he; and we repeated the tale of the goose at
Rippenger's school to our entertainers, making them laugh.

'And next morning Richie ran off with a gipsy girl,' said Temple; and I
composed a narrative of my wanderings with Kiomi, much more amusing than
the real one. The captain vowed he would like to have us both on board
his ship, but that times were too bad for him to offer us a prospect of
promotion. 'Spin round the decanters,' said he; 'now's the hour for them
to go like a humming-top, and each man lend a hand: whip hard, my lads.
It's once in three years, hurrah! and the cause is a cruel woman. Toast
her; but no name. Here's to the nameless Fair! For it's not my intention
to marry, says she, and, ma'am, I'm a man of honour or I'd catch you
tight, my nut-brown maid, and clap you into a cage, fal-lal, like a
squirrel; to trot the wheel of mat-trimony. Shame to the first man down!'

'That won't be I,' said Temple.

'Be me, sir, me,' the captain corrected his grammar.

'Pardon me, Captain Bulsted; the verb "To be" governs the nominative case
in our climate,' said Temple.

'Then I'm nominative hic . . . I say, sir, I'm in the tropics, Mr. Tem
. . . Mr. Tempus. Point of honour, not forget a man's name. Rippenger,
your schoolmaster? Mr. Rippenger, you've knocked some knowledge into this
young gentleman.' Temple and I took counsel together hastily; we cried in
a breath: 'Here 's to Julia Rippenger, the prettiest, nicest girl
living!' and we drank to her.

'Julia!' the captain echoed us. 'I join your toast, gentlemen. Mr.
Richmond, Mr. Tempus-Julia! By all that's holy, she floats a sinking
ship! Julia consoles me for the fairest, cruellest woman alive. A rough
sailor, Julia! at your feet.'

The captain fell commendably forward. Squire Gregory had already dropped.
Temple and I tried to meet, but did not accomplish it till next morning
at breakfast. A couple of footmen carried us each upstairs in turn, as if
they were removing furniture.

Out of this strange evening came my discovery of my father, and the
captain's winning of a wife.




CHAPTER X

AN EXPEDITION

I wondered audibly where the Bench was when Temple and I sat together
alone at Squire Gregory's breakfast-table next morning, very thirsty for
tea. He said it was a place in London, but did not add the sort of place,
only that I should soon be coming to London with him; and I remarked,
'Shall I?' and smiled at him, as if in a fit of careless affection. Then
he talked runningly of the theatres and pantomimes and London's charms.

The fear I had of this Bench made me passingly conscious of Temple's
delicacy in not repeating its name, though why I feared it there was
nothing to tell me. I must have dreamed of it just before waking, and I
burned for reasonable information concerning it. Temple respected my
father too much to speak out the extent of his knowledge on the subject,
so we drank our tea with the grandeur of London for our theme, where,
Temple assured me, you never had a headache after a carouse overnight: a
communication that led me to think the country a far less favourable
place of abode for gentlemen. We quitted the house without seeing our
host or the captain, and greatly admired by the footmen, the maids, and
the grooms for having drunk their masters under the table, which it could
not be doubted that we had done, as Temple modestly observed while we
sauntered off the grounds under the eyes of the establishment. We had
done it fairly, too, with none of those Jack the Giant-Killer tricks my
grandfather accused us of.

The squire would not, and he could not, believe our story until he heard
the confession from the mouth of the captain. After that he said we were
men and heroes, and he tipped us both, much to Janet Ilchester's
advantage, for the squire was a royal giver, and Temple's money had
already begun to take the same road as mine.

Temple, in fact, was falling desperately in love; for this reason he
shrank from quitting Riversley. I perceived it as clearly as a thing seen
through a windowpane. He was always meditating upon dogs, and what might
be the price of this dog or that, and whether lapdogs were good
travellers. The fashionable value of pugs filled him with a sort of
despair. 'My goodness!' he used an exclamation more suitable to women,
'forty or fifty pounds you say one costs, Richie?'

I pretended to estimate the probable cost of one. 'Yes, about that; but
I'll buy you one, one day or other, Temple.'

The dear little fellow coloured hot; he was too much in earnest to laugh
at the absurdity of his being supposed to want a pug for himself, and
walked round me, throwing himself into attitudes with shrugs and loud
breathings. 'I don't . . . don't think that I . . . I care for nothing
but Newfoundlands and mastiffs,' said he. He went on shrugging and
kicking up his heels.

'Girls like pugs,' I remarked.

'I fancy they do,' said Temple, with a snort of indifference.

Then I suggested, 'A pocket-knife for the hunting-field is a very good
thing.'

'Do you think so?' was Temple's rejoinder, and I saw he was dreadfully
afraid of my speaking the person's name for whom it would be such a very
good thing.

'You can get one for thirty shillings. We'll get one when we're in
London. They're just as useful for women as they are for us, you know.'

'Why, of course they are, if they hunt,' said Temple.

'And we mustn't lose time,' I drew him to the point I had at heart, 'for
hunting 'll soon be over. It 's February, mind!'

'Oh, lots of time!' Temple cried out, and on every occasion when I tried
to make him understand that I was bursting to visit London, he kept
evading me, simply because he hated saying good-bye to Janet Ilchester.
His dulness of apprehension in not perceiving that I could not commit a
breach of hospitality by begging him downright to start, struck me as
extraordinary. And I was so acute. I saw every single idea in his head,
every shift of, his mind, and how he half knew that he profited by my
shunning to say flatly I desired to set out upon the discovery of the
Bench. He took the benefit of my shamefacedness, for which I daily
punished his. I really felt that I was justified in giving my
irritability an airing by curious allusions to Janet; yet, though I made
him wince, it was impossible to touch his conscience. He admitted to
having repeatedly spoken of London's charms, and 'Oh, yes! you and I'll
go back together, Richie,' and saying that satisfied him: he doubled our
engagements with Janet that afternoon, and it was a riding party, a
dancing-party, and a drawing of a pond for carp, and we over to Janet,
and Janet over to us, until I grew so sick of her I was incapable of
summoning a spark of jealousy in order the better to torture Temple.

Now, he was a quick-witted boy. Well, I one day heard Janet address my
big dog, Ajax, in the style she usually employed to inform her hearers,
and especially the proprietor, that she coveted a thing: 'Oh, you own
dear precious pet darling beauty! if I might only feed you every day of
my life I should be happy! I curtsey to him every time I see him. If I
were his master, the men should all off hats, and the women all curtsey,
to Emperor Ajax, my dog! my own! my great, dear irresistible love! Then
she nodded at me, 'I would make them, though.' And then at Temple, 'You
see if I wouldn't.'

Ajax was a source of pride to me. However, I heard Temple murmur, in a
tone totally unlike himself, 'He would be a great protection to you'; and
I said to him, 'You know, Temple, I shall be going to London to-morrow or
the next day, not later: I don't know when I shall be back. I wish you
would dispose of the dog just as you like: get him a kind master or
mistress, that's all.'

I sacrificed my dog to bring Temple to his senses. I thought it would
touch him to see how much I could sacrifice just to get an excuse for
begging him to start. He did not even thank me. Ajax soon wore one of
Janet's collars, like two or three other of the Riversley dogs, and I had
the satisfaction of hearing Temple accept my grandfather's invitation for
a further fortnight. And, meanwhile, I was the one who was charged with
going about looking lovelorn! I smothered my feelings and my reflections
on the wisdom of people.

At last my aunt Dorothy found the means of setting me at liberty on the
road to London. We had related to her how Captain Bulsted toasted Julia
Rippenger, and we had both declared in joke that we were sure the captain
wished to be introduced to her. My aunt reserved her ideas on the
subject, but by-and-by she proposed to us to ride over to Julia, and
engage her to come and stay at Riversley for some days. Kissing me, my
aunt said, 'She was my Harry's friend when he was an outcast.'

The words revived my affection for Julia. Strong in the sacred sense of
gratitude, I turned on Temple, reproaching him with selfish forgetfulness
of her good heart and pretty face. Without defending himself, as he might
have done, he entreated me to postpone our journey for a day; he and
Janet had some appointment. Here was given me a noble cause and matter I
need not shrink from speaking of. I lashed Temple in my aunt's presence
with a rod of real eloquence that astonished her, and him, and myself
too; and as he had a sense of guilt not quite explicable in his mind, he
consented to bear what was in reality my burden; for Julia had
distinguished me and not him with all the signs of affection, and of the
two I had the more thoroughly forgotten her; I believe Temple was first
in toasting her at Squire Gregory's table. There is nothing like a
pent-up secret of the heart for accumulating powers of speech; I mean in
youth. The mental distilling process sets in later, and then you have
irony instead of eloquence. From brooding on my father, and not daring to
mention his name lest I should hear evil of it, my thoughts were a proud
family, proud of their origin, proud of their isolation,--and not to be
able to divine them was for the world to confess itself basely beneath
their level. But, when they did pour out, they were tremendous, as Temple
found. This oratorical display of mine gave me an ascendancy over him. He
adored eloquence, not to say grandiloquence: he was the son of a
barrister. 'Let 's go and see her at once, Richie,' he said of Julia. 'I
'm ready to be off as soon as you like; I'm ready to do anything that
will please you'; which was untrue, but it was useless to tell him so. I
sighed at my sad gift of penetration, and tossed the fresh example of it
into the treasury of vanity.

'Temple,' said I, dissembling a little; 'I tell you candidly: you won't
please me by doing anything disagreeable to you. A dog pulled by the
collar is not much of a companion. I start for Julia to-morrow before
daylight. If you like your bed best, stop there; and mind you amuse Janet
for me duing my absence.'

'I'm not going to let any one make comparisons between us,' Temple
muttered.

He dropped dozens of similar remarks, and sometimes talked downright
flattery, I had so deeply impressed him.

We breakfasted by candle-light, and rode away on a frosty foggy morning,
keeping our groom fifty yards to the rear, a laughable sight, with both
his coat-pockets bulging, a couple of Riversley turnover pasties in one,
and a bottle of champagne in the other, for our lunch on the road. Now
and then, when near him, we galloped for the fun of seeing him nurse the
bottle-pocket. He was generally invisible. Temple did not think it
strange that we should be riding out in an unknown world with only a
little ring, half a stone's-throw clear around us, and blots of copse,
and queer vanishing cottages, and hard grey meadows, fir-trees
wonderfully magnified, and larches and birches rigged like fairy ships,
all starting up to us as we passed, and melting instantly. One could have
fancied the fir-trees black torches. And here the shoulder of a hill
invited us to race up to the ridge: some way on we came to crossroads,
careless of our luck in hitting the right one: yonder hung a village
church in the air, and church-steeple piercing ever so high; and out of
the heart of the mist leaped a brook, and to hear it at one moment, and
then to have the sharp freezing silence in one's ear, was piercingly
weird. It all tossed the mind in my head like hay on a pitchfork. I
forgot the existence of everything but what I loved passionately,--and
that had no shape, was like a wind.

Up on a knoll of firs in the middle of a heath, glowing rosy in the
frost, we dismounted to lunch, leaning against the warm saddles, Temple
and I, and Uberly, our groom, who reminded me of a certain tramp of my
acquaintance in his decided preference of beer to champagne; he drank,
though, and sparkled after his draught. No sooner were we on horseback
again--ere the flanks of the dear friendly brutes were in any way
cool--than Temple shouted enthusiastically, 'Richie, we shall do it yet!
I've been funking, but now I'm sure we shall do it. Janet said, "What's
the use of my coming over to dine at Riversley if Harry Richmond and you
don't come home before ten or eleven o'clock?" I told her we'd
do it by dinner-time: Don't you like Janet, Richie?--That is,
if our horses' hic-haec-hocks didn't get strained on this hard
nominative-plural-masculine of the article road. Don't you fancy yourself
dining with the captain, Richie? Dative huic, says old Squire Gregory. I
like to see him at dinner, because he loves the smell of his wine. Oh!
it's nothing to boast of, but we did drink them under the table, it can't
be denied. Janet heard of it. Hulloa! you talk of a hunting-knife. What
do you say to a pair of skates? Here we are in for a frost of six weeks.
It strikes me, a pair of skates . . .'

This was the champagne in Temple. In me it did not bubble to speech, and
I soon drew him on at a pace that rendered conversation impossible.
Uberly shouted after us to spare the horses' legs. We heard him twice out
of the deepening fog. I called to Temple that he was right, we should do
it. Temple hurrahed rather breathlessly. At the end of an hour I pulled
up at an inn, where I left the horses to be groomed and fed, and walked
away rapidly as if I knew the town, Temple following me with perfect
confidence, and, indeed, I had no intention to deceive him. We entered a
new station of a railway.

'Oh!' said Temple, 'the rest of the way by rail.'

When the railway clerk asked me what place I wanted tickets for, London
sprang to my mouth promptly in a murmur, and taking the tickets I replied
to Temple,

'The rest of the way by rail. Uberly's sure to stop at that inn'; but my
heart beat as the carriages slid away with us; an affectionate
commiseration for Temple touched me when I heard him count on our being
back at Riversley in time to dress for dinner.

He laughed aloud at the idea of our plumping down on Rippenger's school,
getting a holiday for the boys, tipping them, and then off with Julia,
exactly like two Gods of the Mythology, Apollo and Mercury.

'I often used to think they had the jolliest lives that ever were lived,'
he said, and trying to catch glimpses of the country, and musing, and
singing, he continued to feel like one of those blissful Gods until
wonder at the passage of time supervened. Amazement, when he looked at my
watch, struck him dumb. Ten minutes later we were in yellow fog, then in
brown. Temple stared at both windows and at me; he jumped from his seat
and fell on it, muttering, 'No; nonsense! I say!' but he had accurately
recognized London's fog. I left him unanswered to bring up all his
senses, which the railway had outstripped, for the contemplation of this
fact, that we two were in the city of London.




CHAPTER XI

THE GREAT FOG AND THE FIRE AT MIDNIGHT

It was London city, and the Bench was the kernel of it to me. I throbbed
with excitement, though I sat looking out of the windows into the
subterranean atmosphere quite still and firm. When you think long
undividedly of a single object it gathers light, and when you draw near
it in person the strange thing to your mind is the absence of that light;
but I, approaching it in this dense fog, seemed to myself to be only
thinking of it a little more warmly than usual, and instead of fading it
reversed the process, and became, from light, luminous. Not being able,
however, to imagine the Bench a happy place, I corrected the excess of
brightness and gave its walls a pine-torch glow; I set them in the middle
of a great square, and hung the standard of England drooping over them in
a sort of mournful family pride. Then, because I next conceived it a
foreign kind of place, different altogether from that home growth of
ours, the Tower of London, I topped it with a multitude of domes of
pumpkin or turban shape, resembling the Kremlin of Moscow, which had once
leapt up in the eye of Winter, glowing like a million pine-torches, and
flung shadows of stretching red horses on the black smoke-drift. But what
was the Kremlin, that had seen a city perish, to this Bench where my
father languished! There was no comparing them for tragic horror. And the
Kremlin had snow-fields around it; this Bench was caught out of sight,
hemmed in by an atmosphere thick as Charon breathed; it might as well be
underground.

'Oh! it's London,' Temple went on, correcting his incorrigible doubts
about it. He jumped on the platform; we had to call out not to lose one
another. 'I say, Richie, this is London,' he said, linking his arm in
mine: 'you know by the size of the station; and besides, there's the fog.
Oh! it's London. We've overshot it, we're positively in London.'

I could spare no sympathy for his feelings, and I did not respond to his
inquiring looks. Now that we were here I certainly wished myself away,
though I would not have retreated, and for awhile I was glad of the
discomforts besetting me; my step was hearty as I led on, meditating upon
asking some one the direction to the Bench presently. We had to walk, and
it was nothing but traversing on a slippery pavement atmospheric circles
of black brown and brown red, and sometimes a larger circle of pale
yellow; the colours of old bruised fruits, medlars, melons, and the smell
of them; nothing is more desolate. Neither of us knew where we were, nor
where we were going. We struggled through an interminable succession of
squalid streets, from the one lamp visible to its neighbour in the
darkness: you might have fancied yourself peering at the head of an old
saint on a smoky canvas; it was like the painting of light rather than
light. Figures rushed by; we saw no faces.

Temple spoke solemnly: 'Our dinner-hour at home is half-past six.' A
street-boy overheard him and chaffed him. Temple got the worst of it, and
it did him good, for he had the sweetest nature in the world. We declined
to be attended by link-boys; they would have hurt our sense of
independence. Possessed of a sovereign faith that, by dint of resolution,
I should ultimately penetrate to the great square enclosing the Bench, I
walked with the air of one who had the map of London in his eye and could
thread it blindfold. Temple was thereby deceived into thinking that I
must somehow have learnt the direction I meant to take, and knew my way,
though at the slightest indication of my halting and glancing round his
suspicions began to boil, and he was for asking some one the name of the
ground we stood on: he murmured, 'Fellows get lost in London.' By this
time he clearly understood that I had come to London on purpose: he could
not but be aware of the object of my coming, and I was too proud, and he
still too delicate, to allude to it.

The fog choked us. Perhaps it took away the sense of hunger by filling us
as if we had eaten a dinner of soot. We had no craving to eat until long
past the dinner-hour in Temple's house, and then I would rather have
plunged into a bath and a bed than have been requested to sit at a feast;
Temple too, I fancy. We knew we were astray without speaking of it.
Temple said, 'I wish we hadn't drunk that champagne.' It seemed to me
years since I had tasted the delicious crushing of the sweet bubbles in
my mouth. But I did not blame them; I was after my father: he, dear
little fellow, had no light ahead except his devotion to me: he must have
had a touch of conscious guilt regarding his recent behaviour, enough to
hold him from complaining formally. He complained of a London without
shops and lights, wondered how any one could like to come to it in a fog,
and so forth; and again regretted our having drunk champagne in the
morning; a sort of involuntary whimpering easily forgiven to him, for I
knew he had a gallant heart. I determined, as an act of signal
condescension, to accost the first person we met, male or female, for
Temple's sake. Having come to this resolve, which was to be an open
confession that I had misled him, wounding to my pride, I hoped eagerly
for the hearing of a footfall. We were in a labyrinth of dark streets
where no one was astir. A wretched dog trotted up to us, followed at our
heels a short distance, and left us as if he smelt no luck about us; our
cajoleries were unavailing to keep that miserable companion.

'Sinbad escaped from the, pit by tracking a lynx,' I happened to remark.
Temple would not hear of Sinbad.

'Oh, come, we're not Mussulmen,' said he; 'I declare, Richie, if I saw a
church open, I'd go in and sleep there. Were you thinking of tracking the
dog, then? Beer may be had somewhere. We shall have to find an hotel.
What can the time be?'

I owed it to him to tell him, so I climbed a lamppost and spelt out the
hour by my watch. When I descended we were three. A man had his hands on
Temple's shoulders, examining his features.

'Now speak,' the man said, roughly.

I was interposing, but Temple cried, 'All right, Richie, we are two to
one.'

The man groaned. I asked him what he wanted.

'My son! I've lost my son,' the man replied, and walked away; and he
would give no answer to our questions.

I caught hold of the lamp-post, overcome. I meant to tell Temple, in
response to the consoling touch of his hand, that I hoped the poor, man
would discover his son, but said instead, 'I wish we could see the Bench
to-night.' Temple exclaimed, 'Ah!' pretending by his tone of voice that
we had recently discussed our chance of it, and then he ventured to
inform me that he imagined he had heard of the place being shut up after
a certain hour of the night.

My heart felt released, and gushed with love for him. 'Very well,
Temple,' I said: 'then we'll wait till tomorrow, and strike out for some
hotel now.'

Off we went at a furious pace. Saddlebank's goose was reverted to by both
of us with an exchange of assurances that we should meet a dish the
fellow to it before we slept.

'As for life,' said I, as soon as the sharp pace had fetched my breathing
to a regular measure, 'adventures are what I call life.'

Temple assented. 'They're capital, if you only see the end of them.'

We talked of Ulysses and Penelope. Temple blamed him for leaving Calypso.
I thought Ulysses was right, otherwise we should have had no slaying of
the Suitors but Temple shyly urged that to have a Goddess caring for you
(and she was handsomer than Penelope, who must have been an oldish woman)
was something to make you feel as you do on a hunting morning, when there
are half-a-dozen riding-habits speckling the field--a whole glorious day
your own among them! This view appeared to me very captivating, save for
an obstruction in my mind, which was, that Goddesses were always
conceived by me as statues. They talked and they moved, it was true, but
the touch of them was marble; and they smiled and frowned, but they had
no variety they were never warm.

'If I thought that!' muttered Temple, puffing at the raw fog. He admitted
he had thought just the contrary, and that the cold had suggested to him
the absurdity of leaving a Goddess.

'Look here, Temple,' said I, 'has it never struck you? I won't say I'm
like him. It's true I've always admired Ulysses; he could fight best,
talk best, and plough, and box, and how clever he was! Take him all
round, who wouldn't rather have had him for a father than Achilles? And
there were just as many women in love with him.'

'More,' said Temple.

'Well, then,' I continued, thanking him in my heart, for it must have
cost him something to let Ulysses be set above Achilles, 'Telemachus is
the one I mean. He was in search of his father. He found him at last.
Upon my honour, Temple, when I think of it, I 'm ashamed to have waited
so long. I call that luxury I've lived in senseless. Yes! while I was
uncertain whether my father had enough to eat or not.'

'I say! hush!' Temple breathed, in pain at such allusions. 'Richie, the
squire has finished his bottle by about now; bottle number two. He won't
miss us till the morning, but Miss Beltham will. She'll be at your
bedroom door three or four times in the night, I know. It's getting
darker and darker, we must be in some dreadful part of London.'

The contrast he presented to my sensations between our pleasant home and
this foggy solitude gave me a pang of dismay. I diverged from my
favourite straight line, which seemed to pierce into the bowels of the
earth, sharp to the right. Soon or late after, I cannot tell, we were in
the midst of a thin stream of people, mostly composed of boys and young
women, going at double time, hooting and screaming with the delight of
loosened animals, not quite so agreeably; but animals never hunted on a
better scent. A dozen turnings in their company brought us in front of a
fire. There we saw two houses preyed on by the flames, just as if a lion
had his paws on a couple of human creatures, devouring them; we heard his
jaws, the cracking of bones, shrieks, and the voracious in-and-out of his
breath edged with anger. A girl by my side exclaimed, 'It's not the
Bench, after all! Would I have run to see a paltry two-story
washerwoman's mangling-shed flare up, when six penn'orth of squibs and
shavings and a cracker make twice the fun!'

I turned to her, hardly able to speak. 'Where 's the Bench, if you
please?' She pointed. I looked on an immense high wall. The blunt flames
of the fire opposite threw a sombre glow on it.

The girl said, 'And don't you go hopping into debt, my young
cock-sparrow, or you'll know one side o' the turnkey better than t'
other.' She had a friend with her who chid her for speaking so freely.

'Is it too late to go in to-night?' I asked.

She answered that it was, and that she and her friend were the persons to
show me the way in there. Her friend answered more sensibly: 'Yes, you
can't go in there before some time--in the morning.'

I learnt from her that the Bench was a debtors' prison.

The saucy girl of the pair asked me for money. I handed her a
crown-piece.

'Now won't you give another big bit to my friend?' said she.

I had no change, and the well-mannered girl bade me never mind, the saucy
one pressed for it, and for a treat. She was amusing in her talk of the
quantity of different fires she had seen; she had also seen
accidental-death corpses, but never a suicide in the act; and here she
regretted the failure of her experiences. This conversation of a
good-looking girl amazed me. Presently Temple cried, 'A third house
caught, and no engines yet! Richie, there's an old woman in her
night-dress; we can't stand by.'

The saucy girl joked at the poor half-naked old woman. Temple stood
humping and agitating his shoulders like a cat before it springs. Both
the girls tried to stop us. The one I liked best seized my watch, and
said, 'Leave this to me to take care of,' and I had no time to wrestle
for it. I had a glimpse of her face that let me think she was not fooling
me, the watch-chain flew off my neck, Temple and I clove through the
crowd of gapers. We got into the heat, which was in a minute scorching.
Three men were under the window; they had sung out to the old woman above
to drop a blanket--she tossed them a water-jug. She was saved by the
blanket of a neighbour. Temple and I strained at one corner of it to
catch her.

She came down, the men said, like a singed turkey. The flames illuminated
her as she descended. There was a great deal of laughter in the crowd,
but I was shocked. Temple shared the painful impression produced on me. I
cannot express my relief when the old woman was wrapped in the blanket
which had broken her descent, and stood like a blot instead of a figure.
I handed a sovereign to the three men, complimenting them on the humanity
of their dispositions. They cheered us, and the crowd echoed the cheer,
and Temple and I made our way back to the two girls: both of us lost our
pocket-handkerchiefs, and Temple a penknife as well. Then the engines
arrived and soused the burning houses. We were all in a crimson mist,
boys smoking, girls laughing and staring, men hallooing, hats and caps
flying about, fights going on, people throwing their furniture out of the
windows. The great wall of the Bench was awful in its reflection of the
labouring flames--it rose out of sight like the flame-tops till the
columns of water brought them down. I thought of my father, and of my
watch. The two girls were not visible. 'A glorious life a fireman's!'
said Temple.

The firemen were on the roofs of the houses, handsome as Greek heroes,
and it really did look as if they were engaged in slaying an enormous
dragon, that hissed and tongued at them, and writhed its tail, paddling
its broken big red wings in the pit of wreck and smoke, twisting and
darkening-something fine to conquer, I felt with Temple.

A mutual disgust at the inconvenience created by the appropriation of our
pocket-handkerchiefs by members of the crowd, induced us to disentangle
ourselves from it without confiding to any one our perplexity for supper
and a bed. We were now extremely thirsty. I had visions of my majority
bottles of Burgundy, lying under John Thresher's care at Dipwell, and
would have abandoned them all for one on the spot. After ranging about
the outskirts of the crowd, seeking the two girls, we walked away, not so
melancholy but that a draught of porter would have cheered us. Temple
punned on the loss of my watch, and excused himself for a joke neither of
us had spirit to laugh at. Just as I was saying, with a last glance at
the fire, 'Anyhow, it would have gone in that crowd,' the nice good girl
ran up behind us, crying, 'There!' as she put the watch-chain over my
head.

'There, Temple,' said I, 'didn't I tell you so?' and Temple kindly
supposed so.

The girl said, 'I was afraid I'd missed you, little fellow, and you'd
take me for a thief, and thank God, I'm no thief yet. I rushed into the
crowd to meet you after you caught that old creature, and I could have
kissed you both, you're so brave.'

'We always go in for it together,' said Temple.

I made an offer to the girl of a piece of gold. 'Oh, I'm poor,' she
cried, yet kept her hand off it like a bird alighting on ground, not on
prey. When I compelled her to feel the money tight, she sighed, 'If I
wasn't so poor! I don't want your gold. Why are you out so late?'

We informed her of our arrival from the country, and wanderings in the
fog.

'And you'll say you're not tired, I know,' the girl remarked, and laughed
to hear how correctly she had judged of our temper. Our thirst and
hunger, however, filled her with concern, because of our not being used
to it as she was, and no place was open to supply our wants. Her friend,
the saucy one, accompanied by a man evidently a sailor, joined us, and
the three had a consultation away from Temple and me, at the end of which
the sailor, whose name was Joe, raised his leg dancingly, and smacked it.
We gave him our hands to shake, and understood, without astonishment,
that we were invited on, board his ship to partake of refreshment. We
should not have been astonished had he said on board his balloon. Down
through thick fog of a lighter colour, we made our way to a narrow lane
leading to the river-side, where two men stood thumping their arms across
their breasts, smoking pipes, and swearing. We entered a boat and were
rowed to a ship. I was not aware how frozen and befogged my mind and
senses had become until I had taken a desperate and long gulp of smoking
rum-and-water, and then the whole of our adventures from morning to
midnight, with the fir-trees in the country fog, and the lamps in the
London fog, and the man who had lost his son, the fire, the Bench, the
old woman with her fowl-like cry and limbs in the air, and the row over
the misty river, swam flashing before my eyes, and I cried out to the two
girls, who were drinking out of one glass with the sailor Joe, my
entertainer, 'Well, I'm awake now!' and slept straight off the next
instant.




CHAPTER XII

WE FIND OURSELVES BOUND ON A VOYAGE

It seemed to me that I had but taken a turn from right to left, or gone
round a wheel, when I repeated the same words, and I heard Temple
somewhere near me mumble something like them. He drew a long breath, so
did I: we cleared our throats with a sort of whinny simultaneously. The
enjoyment of lying perfectly still, refreshed, incurious, unexcited, yet
having our minds animated, excursive, reaping all the incidents of our
lives at leisure, and making a dream of our latest experiences, kept us
tranquil and incommunicative. Occasionally we let fall a sigh fathoms
deep, then by-and-by began blowing a bit of a wanton laugh at the end of
it. I raised my foot and saw the boot on it, which accounted for an
uneasy sensation setting in through my frame.

I said softly, 'What a pleasure it must be for horses to be groomed!'

'Just what I was thinking!' said Temple.

We started up on our elbows, and one or the other cried:

'There's a chart! These are bunks! Hark at the row overhead! We're in a
ship! The ship's moving! Is it foggy this morning? It's time to get up!
I've slept in my clothes! Oh, for a dip! How I smell of smoke! What a
noise of a steamer! And the squire at Riversley! Fancy Uberly's tale!'

Temple, with averted face, asked me whether I meant to return to
Riversley that day. I assured him I would, on my honour, if possible; and
of course he also would have to return there. 'Why, you've an appointment
with Janet Ilchester,' said I, 'and we may find a pug; we'll buy the
hunting-knife and the skates. And she shall know you saved an old woman's
life.'

'No, don't talk about that,' Temple entreated me, biting his lip.
'Richie, we're going fast through the water. It reminds me of breakfast.
I should guess the hour to be nine A.M.'

My watch was unable to assist us; the hands pointed to half-past four,
and were fixed. We ran up on deck. Looking over the stern of the vessel,
across a line of rippling eddying red gold, we saw the sun low upon
cushions of beautiful cloud; no trace of fog anywhere; blue sky overhead,
and a mild breeze blowing.

'Sunrise,' I said.

Temple answered, 'Yes,' most uncertainly.

We looked round. A steam-tug was towing our ship out toward banks of
red-reflecting cloud, and a smell of sea air.

'Why, that's the East there!' cried Temple. We faced about to the sun,
and behold, he was actually sinking!

'Nonsense!' we exclaimed in a breath. From seaward to this stupefying
sunset we stood staring. The river stretched to broad lengths; gulls were
on the grey water, knots of seaweed, and the sea-foam curled in advance
of us.

'By jingo!' Temple spoke out, musing, 'here's a whole day struck out of
our existence.'

'It can't be!' said I, for that any sensible being could be tricked of a
piece of his life in that manner I thought a preposterous notion.

But the sight of a lessening windmill in the West, shadows eastward, the
wide water, and the air now full salt, convinced me we two had slept
through an entire day, and were passing rapidly out of hail of our native
land.

'We must get these fellows to put us on shore at once,' said Temple: 'we
won't stop to eat. There's a town; a boat will row us there in
half-an-hour. Then we can wash, too. I've got an idea nothing's clean
here. And confound these fellows for not having the civility to tell us
they were going to start!'

We were rather angry, a little amused, not in the least alarmed at our
position. A sailor, to whom we applied for an introduction to the
captain, said he was busy. Another gave us a similar reply, with a
monstrous grimace which was beyond our comprehension. The sailor Joe was
nowhere to be seen. None of the sailors appeared willing to listen to us,
though they stopped as they were running by to lend half an ear to what
we had to say. Some particular movement was going on in the ship. Temple
was the first to observe that the steamtug was casting us loose, and
cried he, 'She'll take us on board and back to London Bridge. Let's hail
her.' He sang out, 'Whoop! ahoy!' I meanwhile had caught sight of Joe.

'Well, young gentleman!' he accosted me, and he hoped I had slept well.
My courteous request to him to bid the tug stand by to take us on board,
only caused him to wear a look of awful gravity. 'You're such a deuce of
a sleeper,' he said. 'You see, we had to be off early to make up for
forty hours lost by that there fog. I tried to wake you both; no good;
so I let you snore away. We took up our captain mid-way down the river,
and now you're in his hands, and he'll do what he likes with you, and
that 's a fact, and my opinion is you 'll see a foreign shore before
you're in the arms of your family again.'

At these words I had the horrible sensation of being caged, and worse,
transported into the bargain.

I insisted on seeing the captain. A big bright round moon was dancing
over the vessel's bowsprit, and this, together with the tug thumping into
the distance, and the land receding, gave me--coming on my
wrath--suffocating emotions.

No difficulties were presented in my way. I was led up to a broad man in
a pilot-coat, who stood square, and looked by the bend of his eyebrows as
if he were always making head against a gale. He nodded to my respectful
salute. 'Cabin,' he said, and turned his back to me.

I addressed him, 'Excuse me, I want to go on shore, captain. I must and
will go! I am here by some accident; you have accidentally overlooked me
here. I wish to treat you like a gentleman, but I won't be detained.'

Joe spoke a word to the captain, who kept his back as broad to me as a
school-slate for geography and Euclid's propositions.

'Cabin, cabin,' the captain repeated.

I tried to get round him to dash a furious sentence or so in his face,
since there was no producing any impression on his back; but he occupied
the whole of a way blocked with wire-coil, and rope, and boxes, and it
would have been ridiculous to climb this barricade when by another
right-about-face he could in a minute leave me volleying at the blank
space between his shoulders.

Joe touched my arm, which, in as friendly a way as I could assume, I bade
him not do a second time; for I could ill contain myself as it was, and
beginning to think I had been duped and tricked, I was ready for
hostilities. I could hardly bear meeting Temple on my passage to the
cabin. 'Captain Jasper Welsh,' he was reiterating, as if sounding it to
discover whether it had an ominous ring: it was the captain's name, that
he had learnt from one of the seamen.

Irritated by his repetition of it, I said, I know not why, or how the
words came: 'A highwayman notorious for his depredations in the vicinity
of the city of Bristol.'

This set Temple off laughing: 'And so he bought a ship and had traps laid
down to catch young fellows for ransom.'

I was obliged to request Temple not to joke, but the next moment I had
launched Captain Jasper Welsh on a piratical exploit; Temple lifted the
veil from his history, revealing him amid the excesses of a cannibal
feast. I dragged him before a British jury; Temple hanged him in view of
an excited multitude. As he boasted that there was the end of Captain
Welsh, I broke the rope. But Temple spoiled my triumph by depriving him
of the use of his lower limbs after the fall, for he was a heavy man. I
could not contradict it, and therefore pitched all his ship's crew upon
the gallows in a rescue. Temple allowed him to be carried off by his
faithful ruffians, only stipulating that the captain was never after able
to release his neck from the hangman's slip knot. The consequence was
that he wore a shirt-collar up to his eyebrows for concealment by day,
and a pillow-case over his head at night, and his wife said she was a
deceived unhappy woman, and died of curiosity.

The talking of even such nonsense as this was a relief to us in our
impatience and helplessness, with the lights of land heaving far distant
to our fretful sight through the cabin windows.

When we had to talk reasonably we were not so successful. Captain Welsh
was one of those men who show you, whether you care to see them or not,
all the processes by which they arrive at an idea of you, upon which they
forthwith shape their course. Thus, when he came to us in the cabin, he
took the oil-lamp in his hand and examined our faces by its light; he had
no reply to our remonstrances and petitions: all he said was, 'Humph!
well, I suppose you're both gentlemen born'; and he insisted on
prosecuting his scrutiny without any reference to the tenour of our
observations.

We entreated him half imperiously to bring his ship to and put us on
shore in a boat. He bunched up his mouth, remarking, 'Know their grammar:
habit o' speaking to grooms, eh? humph.' We offered to pay largely.
'Loose o' their cash,' was his comment, and so on; and he was the more
exasperating to us because he did not look an evil-minded man; only he
appeared to be cursed with an evil opinion of us. I tried to remove it; I
spoke forbearingly. Temple, imitating me, was sugar-sweet. We exonerated
the captain from blame, excused him for his error, named the case a
mistake on both sides. That long sleep of ours, we said, was really
something laughable; we laughed at the recollection of it, a lamentable
piece of merriment.

Our artfulness and patience becoming exhausted, for the captain had
vouchsafed us no direct answer, I said at last, 'Captain Welsh, here we
are on board your ship will you tell us what you mean to do with us?'

He now said bluntly, 'I will.'

'You'll behave like a man of honour,' said I, and to that he cried
vehemently, 'I will.'

'Well, then,' said I, 'call out the boat, if you please; we're anxious to
be home.'

'So you shall!' the captain shouted, 'and per ship--my barque Priscilla;
and better men than you left, or I 'm no Christian.'

Temple said briskly, 'Thank you, captain.'

'You may wait awhile with that, my lad,' he answered; and, to our
astonishment, recommended us to go and clean our faces and prepare to
drink some tea at his table.

'Thank you very much, captain, we'll do that when we 're on shore,' said
we.

'You'll have black figure-heads and empty gizzards, then, by that time,'
he remarked. We beheld him turning over the leaves of a Bible.

Now, this sight of the Bible gave me a sense of personal security, and a
notion of hypocrisy in his conduct as well; and perceiving that we had
conjectured falsely as to his meaning to cast us on shore per ship, his
barque Priscilla, I burst out in great heat, 'What! we are prisoners? You
dare to detain us?'

Temple chimed in, in a similar strain. Fairly enraged, we flung at him
without anything of what I thought eloquence.

The captain ruminated up and down the columns of his Bible.

I was stung to feel that we were like two small terriers baiting a huge
mild bull. At last he said, 'The story of the Prodigal Son.'

'Oh!' groaned Temple, at the mention of this worn-out old fellow, who has
gone in harness to tracts ever since he ate the fatted calf.

But the captain never heeded his interruption.

'Young gentlemen, I've finished it while you 've been barking at me. If I
'd had him early in life on board my vessel, I hope I'm not presumptuous
in saying--the Lord forgive me if I be so!--I'd have stopped his downward
career--ay, so!--with a trip in the right direction. The Lord, young
gentlemen, has not thrown you into my hands for no purpose whatsoever.
Thank him on your knees to-night, and thank Joseph Double, my mate, when
you rise, for he was the instrument of saving you from bad company. If
this was a vessel where you 'd hear an oath or smell the smell of liquor,
I 'd have let you run when there was terra firma within stone's throw. I
came on board, I found you both asleep, with those marks of dissipation
round your eyes, and I swore--in the Lord's name, mind you--I'd help
pluck you out of the pit while you had none but one leg in. It's said!
It's no use barking. I am not to be roused. The devil in me is chained by
the waist, and a twenty-pound weight on his tongue. With your assistance
I'll do the same for the devil in you. Since you've had plenty of sleep,
I 'll trouble you to commit to memory the whole story of the Prodigal Son
'twixt now and morrow's sunrise. We 'll have our commentary on it after
labour done. Labour you will in my vessel, for your soul's health. And
let me advise you not to talk; in your situation talking's temptation to
lying. You'll do me the obligation to feed at my table. And when I hand
you back to your parents, why, they'll thank me, if you won't. But it's
not thanks I look for: it's my bounden Christian duty I look to. I reckon
a couple o' stray lambs equal to one lost sheep.'

The captain uplifted his arm, ejaculating solemnly, 'By!' and faltered.
'You were going to swear!' said Temple, with savage disdain.

'By the blessing of Omnipotence! I'll save a pair o' pups from turning
wolves. And I'm a weak mortal man, that 's too true.'

'He was going to swear,' Temple muttered to me.

I considered the detection of Captain Welsh's hypocrisy unnecessary,
almost a condescension toward familiarity; but the ire in my bosom was
boiling so that I found it impossible to roll out the flood of eloquence
with which I was big. Soon after, I was trying to bribe the man with all
my money and my watch.

'Who gave you that watch?' said he.

'Downright Church catechism!' muttered Temple.

'My grandfather,' said I.

The captain's head went like a mechanical hammer, to express something
indescribable.

'My grandfather,' I continued, 'will pay you handsomely for any service
you do to me and my friend.'

'Now, that's not far off forgoing,' said the captain, in a tone as much
as to say we were bad all over.

I saw the waters slide by his cabin-windows. My desolation, my
humiliation, my chained fury, tumbled together. Out it came--

'Captain, do behave to us like a gentleman, and you shall never repent
it. Our relatives will be miserable about us. They--captain!--they don't
know where we are. We haven't even a change of clothes. Of course we know
we're at your mercy, but do behave like an honest man. You shall be paid
or not, just as you please, for putting us on shore, but we shall be
eternally grateful to you. Of course you mean kindly to us; we see
that--'

'I thank the Lord for it!' he interposed.

'Only you really are under a delusion. It 's extraordinary. You can't be
quite in your right senses about us; you must be--I don't mean to speak
disrespectfully-what we call on shore, cracked about us. . . .

'Doddered, don't they say in one of the shires?' he remarked.

Half-encouraged, and in the belief that I might be getting eloquent, I
appealed to his manliness. Why should he take advantage of a couple of
boys? I struck the key of his possible fatherly feelings: What misery
were not our friends suffering now. ('Ay, a bucketful now saves an ocean
in time to come!' he flung in his word.) I bade him, with more pathetic
dignity reflect on the dreadful hiatus in our studies.

'Is that Latin or Greek?' he asked.

I would not reply to the cold-blooded question. He said the New Testament
was written in Greek, he knew, and happy were those who could read it in
the original.

'Well, and how can we be learning to read it on board ship?' said Temple,
an observation that exasperated me because it seemed more to the point
than my lengthy speech, and betrayed that he thought so; however, I took
it up:--

'How can we be graduating for our sphere in life, Captain Welsh, on board
your vessel? Tell us that.'

He played thumb and knuckles on his table. Just when I was hoping that
good would come of the senseless tune, Temple cried,

'Tell us what your exact intentions are, Captain Welsh. What do you mean
to do with us?'

'Mean to take you the voyage out and the voyage home, Providence
willing,' said the captain, and he rose.

We declined his offer of tea, though I fancy we could have gnawed at a
bone.

'There's no compulsion in that matter,' he said. 'You share my cabin
while you're my guests, shipmates, and apprentices in the path of living;
my cabin and my substance, the same as if you were what the
North-countrymen call bairns o' mine: I've none o' my own. My wife was a
barren woman. I've none but my old mother at home. Have your sulks out,
lads; you'll come round like the Priscilla on a tack, and discover you've
made way by it.'

We quitted his cabin, bowing stiffly.

Temple declared old Rippenger was better than this canting rascal.

The sea was around us, a distant yellow twinkle telling of land.

'His wife a barren woman! what's that to us!' Temple went on, exploding
at intervals. 'So was Sarah. His cabin and his substance! He talks more
like a preacher than a sailor. I should like to see him in a storm! He's
no sailor at all. His men hate him. It wouldn't be difficult to get up a
mutiny on board this ship. Richie, I understand the whole plot: he's in
want of cabin-boys. The fellow has impressed us. We shall have to serve
till we touch land. Thank God, there's a British consul everywhere; I say
that seriously. I love my country; may she always be powerful! My life is
always at her--Did you feel that pitch of the ship? Of all the names ever
given to a vessel, I do think Priscilla is without exception the most
utterly detestable. Oh! there again. No, it'll be too bad, Richie, if we
're beaten in this way.'

'If YOU are beaten,' said I, scarcely venturing to speak lest I should
cry or be sick.

We both felt that the vessel was conspiring to ruin our self-respect. I
set my head to think as hard as possible on Latin verses (my instinct
must have drawn me to them as to a species of intellectual biscuit
steeped in spirit, tough, and comforting, and fundamentally opposed to
existing circumstances, otherwise I cannot account for the attraction).
They helped me for a time; they kept off self-pity, and kept the
machinery of the mind at work. They lifted me, as it were, to an upper
floor removed from the treacherously sighing Priscilla. But I came down
quickly with a crash; no dexterous management of my mental resources
could save me from the hemp-like smell of the ship, nor would leaning
over the taffrail, nor lying curled under a tarpaulin. The sailors heaped
pilot-coats upon us. It was a bad ship, they said, to be sick on board
of, for no such thing as brandy was allowed in the old Priscilla. Still I
am sure I tasted some before I fell into a state of semi-insensibility.
As in a trance I heard Temple's moans, and the captain's voice across the
gusty wind, and the forlorn crunching of the ship down great waves. The
captain's figure was sometimes stooping over us, more great-coats were
piled on us; sometimes the wind whistled thinner than one fancies the
shrieks of creatures dead of starvation and restless, that spend their
souls in a shriek as long as they can hold it on, say nursery-maids; the
ship made a truce with the waters and grunted; we took two or three
playful blows, we were drenched with spray, uphill we laboured, we caught
the moon in a net of rigging, away we plunged; we mounted to plunge again
and again. I reproached the vessel in argument for some imaginary
inconsistency. Memory was like a heavy barrel on my breast, rolling with
the sea.




CHAPTER XIII

WE CONDUCT SEVERAL LEARNED ARGUMENTS WITH THE CAPTAIN OF THE PRISCILLA

Captain Welsh soon conquered us. The latest meal we had eaten was on the
frosty common under the fir-trees. After a tremendous fast, with
sea-sickness supervening, the eggs and bacon, and pleasant
benevolent-smelling tea on the captain's table were things not to be
resisted by two healthy boys who had previously stripped and faced
buckets of maddening ice-cold salt-water, dashed at us by a jolly sailor.
An open mind for new impressions came with the warmth of our clothes. We
ate, bearing within us the souls of injured innocents; nevertheless, we
were thankful, and, to the captain's grace, a long one, we bowed heads
decently. It was a glorious breakfast, for which land and sea had
prepared us in about equal degrees: I confess, my feelings when I jumped
out of the cabin were almost those of one born afresh to life and
understanding. Temple and I took counsel. We agreed that sulking would be
ridiculous, unmanly, ungentlemanly. The captain had us fast, as if we
were under a lion's paw; he was evidently a well-meaning man, a fanatic
deluded concerning our characters: the barque Priscilla was bound for a
German port, and should arrive there in a few days,--why not run the
voyage merrily since we were treated with kindness? Neither the squire
nor Temple's father could complain of our conduct; we were simply victims
of an error that was assisting us to a knowledge of the world, a youth's
proper ambition. 'And we're not going to be starved,' said Temple.

I smiled, thinking I perceived the reason why I had failed in my oration
over-night; so I determined that on no future occasion would I let pride
stand in the way of provender. Breakfast had completely transformed us We
held it due to ourselves that we should demand explanations from Joseph
Double, the mate, and then, after hearing him, furnish them with a
cordial alacrity to which we might have attached unlimited credence had
he not protested against our dreaming him to have supplied hot
rum-and-water on board, we wrote our names and addresses in the captain's
log-book, and immediately asked permission to go to the mast-head.

He laughed. Out of his cabin there was no smack of the preacher in him.
His men said he was a stout seaman, mad on the subject of grog and girls.
Why, it was on account of grog and girls that he was giving us this dish
of salt-water to purify us! Grog and girls! cried we. We vowed upon our
honour as gentlemen we had tasted grog for the first time in our lives on
board the Priscilla. How about the girls? they asked. We informed them we
knew none but girls who were ladies. Thereupon one sailor nodded, one
sent up a crow, one said the misfortune of the case lay in all girls
being such precious fine ladies; and one spoke in dreadfully blank
language, he accused us of treating the Priscilla as a tavern for the
entertainment of bad company, stating that he had helped to row me and my
associates from the shore to the ship.

'Poor Mr. Double!' says he; 'there was only one way for him to jump you
two young gentlemen out o' that snapdragon bowl you was in--or quashmire,
call it; so he 'ticed you on board wi' the bait you was swallowing, which
was making the devil serve the Lord's turn. And I'll remember that night,
for I yielded to swearing, and drank too!' The other sailors roared with
laughter.

I tipped them, not to appear offended by their suspicions. We thought
them all hypocrites, and were as much in error as if we had thought them
all honest.

Things went fairly well with the exception of the lessons in Scripture.
Our work was mere playing at sailoring, helping furl sails, haul ropes,
study charts, carry messages, and such like. Temple made his voice
shrewdly emphatic to explain to the captain that we liked the work, but
that such lessons as these out of Scripture were what the eeriest
youngsters were crammed with.

'Such lessons as these, maybe, don't have the meaning on land they get to
have on the high seas,' replied the captain: 'and those youngsters you
talk of were not called in to throw a light on passages: for I may teach
you ship's business aboard my barque, but we're all children inside the
Book.'

He groaned heartily to hear that our learning lay in the direction of
Pagan Gods and Goddesses, and heathen historians and poets; adding, it
was not new to him, and perhaps that was why the world was as it was. Nor
did he wonder, he said, at our running from studies of those filthy
writings loose upon London; it was as natural as dunghill steam. Temple
pretended he was forced by the captain's undue severity to defend Venus;
he said, I thought rather wittily, 'Sailors ought to have a respect for
her, for she was born in the middle of the sea, and she steered straight
for land, so she must have had a pretty good idea of navigation.'

But the captain answered none the less keenly, 'She had her idea of
navigating, as the devil of mischief always has, in the direction where
there's most to corrupt; and, my lad, she teaches the navigation that
leads to the bottom beneath us.'

He might be right, still our mien was evil in reciting the lessons from
Scripture; and though Captain Welsh had intelligence we could not draw
into it the how and the why of the indignity we experienced. We had
rather he had been a savage captain, to have braced our spirits to sturdy
resistance, instead of a mild, good-humoured man of kind intentions, who
lent us his linen to wear, fed us at his table, and taxed our most
gentlemanly feelings to find excuses for him. Our way of revenging
ourselves becomingly was to laud the heroes of antiquity, as if they had
possession of our souls and touched the fountain of worship. Whenever
Captain Welsh exclaimed, 'Well done,' or the equivalent, 'That 's an
idea,' we referred him to Plutarch for our great exemplar. It was
Alcibiades gracefully consuming his black broth that won the captain's
thanks for theological acuteness, or the young Telemachus suiting his
temper to the dolphin's moods, since he must somehow get on shore on the
dolphin's back. Captain Welsh could not perceive in Temple the
personifier of Alcibiades, nor Telemachus in me; but he was aware of an
obstinate obstruction behind our compliance. This he called the devil
coiled like a snake in its winter sleep. He hurled texts at it openly, or
slyly dropped a particularly heavy one, in the hope of surprising it with
a death-blow. We beheld him poring over his Bible for texts that should
be sovereign medicines for us, deadly for the devil within us.
Consequently, we were on the defensive: bits of Cicero, bits of Seneca,
soundly and nobly moral, did service on behalf of Paganism; we remembered
them certainly almost as if an imp had brought them from afar. Nor had we
any desire to be in opposition to the cause he supported. What we were
opposed to was the dogmatic arrogance of a just but ignorant man, who had
his one specific for everything, and saw mortal sickness in all other
remedies or recreations. Temple said to him,

'If the Archbishop of Canterbury were to tell me Greek and Latin authors
are bad for me, I should listen to his remarks, because he 's a scholar:
he knows the languages and knows what they contain.'

Captain Welsh replied,

'If the Archbishop o' Canterbury sailed the sea, and lived in Foul Alley,
Waterside, when on shore, and so felt what it is to toss on top of the
waves o' perdition, he'd understand the value of a big, clean,
well-manned, well-provisioned ship, instead o' your galliots wi' gaudy
sails, your barges that can't rise to a sea, your yachts that run to port
like mother's pets at first pipe o' the storm, your trim-built wherries.'

'So you'd have only one sort of vessel afloat!' said I. 'There's the
difference of a man who's a scholar.'

'I'd have,' said the captain, 'every lad like you, my lad, trained in the
big ship, and he wouldn't capsize, and be found betrayed by his light
timbers as I found you. Serve your apprenticeship in the Lord's
three-decker; then to command what you may.'

'No, no, Captain Welsh,' says Temple: 'you must grind at Latin and Greek
when you 're a chick, or you won't ever master the rudiments. Upon my
honour, I declare it 's the truth, you must. If you'd like to try, and
are of a mind for a go at Greek, we'll do our best to help you through
the aorists. It looks harder than Latin, but after a start it 's easier.
Only, I'm afraid your three-decker's apprenticeship 'll stand in your
way.'

'Greek 's to be done for me; I can pay clever gentlemen for doing Greek
for me,' said the captain. 'The knowledge and the love of virtue I must
do for myself; and not to be wrecked, I must do it early.'

'Well, that's neither learning nor human nature,' said I.

'It's the knowledge o' the right rules for human nature, my lad.'

'Would you kidnap youngsters to serve in your ship, captain?'

'I'd bless the wind that blew them there, foul or not, my lad.'

'And there they'd stick when you had them, captain?'

'I'd think it was the Lord's will they should stick there awhile, my
lad--yes.'

'And what of their parents?'

'Youngsters out like gossamers on a wind, their parents are where they
sow themselves, my lad.'

'I call that hard on the real parents, Captain Welsh,' said Temple.

'It's harder on Providence when parents breed that kind o' light
creature, my lad.'

We were all getting excited, talking our best, such as it was; the
captain leaning over his side of the table, clasping his hands
unintentionally preacher-like; we on our side supporting our chins on our
fists, quick to be at him. Temple was brilliant; he wanted to convert the
captain, and avowed it.

'For,' said he, 'you're not like one of those tract-fellows. You're a man
we can respect, a good seaman, master of your ship, and hearty, and no
mewing sanctimoniousness, and we can see and excuse your mistake as to us
two; but now, there's my father at home--he's a good man, but he 's a man
of the world, and reads his classics and his Bible. He's none the worse
for it, I assure you.'

'Where was his son the night of the fog?' said the captain.

'Well, he happened to be out in it.'

'Where'd he be now but for one o' my men?'

'Who can answer that, Captain Welsh?'

'I can, my lad-stewing in an ante-room of hell-gates, I verily believe.'

Temple sighed at the captain's infatuation, and said, 'I'll tell you of a
fellow at our school named Drew; he was old Rippenger's best theological
scholar--always got the prize for theology. Well, he was a confirmed
sneak. I've taken him into a corner and described the torments of dying
to him, and his look was disgusting--he broke out in a clammy sweat.
"Don't, don't!" he'd cry. "You're just the fellow to suffer intensely," I
told him. And what was his idea of escaping it? Why, by learning the
whole of Deuteronomy and the Acts of the Apostles by heart! His idea of
Judgement Day was old Rippenger's half-yearly examination. These are
facts, you know, Captain Welsh.'

I testified to them briefly.

The captain said a curious thing: 'I'll make an appointment with you in
leviathan's jaws the night of a storm, my lad.'

'With pleasure,' said Temple.

'The Lord send it!' exclaimed the captain.

His head was bent forward, and he was gazing up into his eyebrows.

Before we knew that anything was coming, he was out on a narrative of a
scholar of one of the Universities. Our ears were indifferent to the
young man's career from the heights of fortune to delirium tremens down
the cataract of brandy, until the captain spoke of a dark night on the
Pool of the Thames; and here his voice struggled, and we tried hard to
catch the thread of the tale. Two men and a girl were in the boat. The
men fought, the girl shrieked, the boat was upset, the three were
drowned.

All this came so suddenly that nothing but the captain's heavy thump of
his fist on the table kept us from laughing.

He was quite unable to relate the tale, and we had to gather it from his
exclamations. One of the men was mate of a vessel lying in the Pool,
having only cast anchor that evening; the girl was his sweetheart; the
other man had once been a fine young University gentleman, and had become
an outfitter's drunken agent. The brave sailor had nourished him often
when on shore, and he, with the fluent tongue which his college had
trimmed for him, had led the girl to sin during her lover's absence.
Howsoever, they put off together to welcome him on his arrival, never
suspecting that their secret had been whispered to Robert Welsh
beforehand. Howsoever, Robert gave them hearty greeting, and down to the
cabin they went, and there sat drinking up to midnight.

'Three lost souls!' said the captain.

'See how they run,' Temple sang, half audibly, and flushed hot, ashamed
of himself.

''Twas I had to bear the news to his mother,' the captain pursued; 'and
it was a task, my lads, for I was then little more than your age, and the
glass was Robert's only fault, and he was my only brother.'

I offered my hand to the captain. He grasped it powerfully. 'That crew in
a boat, and wouldn't you know the devil'd be coxswain?' he called loudly,
and buried his face.

'No,' he said, looking up at us, 'I pray for no storm, but, by the Lord's
mercy, for a way to your hearts through fire or water. And now on deck,
my lads, while your beds are made up. Three blind things we verily are.'

Captain Welsh showed he was sharp of hearing. His allusion to the humming
of the tune of the mice gave Temple a fit of remorse, and he apologized.

'Ay,' said the captain, 'it is so; own it: frivolity's the fruit of that
training that's all for the flesh. But dip you into some o' my books on
my shelves here, and learn to see living man half skeleton, like life and
shadow, and never to living man need you pray forgiveness, my lad.'

By sheer force of character he gained the command of our respect. Though
we agreed on deck that he had bungled his story, it impressed us; we felt
less able to cope with him, and less willing to encounter a storm.

'We shall have one, of course,' Temple said, affecting resignation, with
a glance aloft.

I was superstitiously of the same opinion, and praised the vessel.

'Oh, Priscilla's the very name of a ship that founders with all hands and
sends a bottle on shore,' said Temple.

'There isn't a bottle on board,' said I; and this piece of nonsense
helped us to sleep off our gloom.




CHAPTER XIV

I MEET OLD FRIENDS

Notwithstanding the prognostications it pleased us to indulge, we had a
tolerably smooth voyage. On a clear cold Sunday morning we were sailing
between a foreign river's banks, and Temple and I were alternately
reading a chapter out of the Bible to the assembled ship's crew, in
advance of the captain's short exhortation. We had ceased to look at
ourselves inwardly, and we hardly thought it strange. But our hearts beat
for a view of the great merchant city, which was called a free city, and
therefore, Temple suggested, must bear certain portions of resemblance to
old England; so we made up our minds to like it.

'A wonderful place for beer cellars,' a sailor observed to us slyly, and
hitched himself up from the breech to the scalp.

At all events, it was a place where we could buy linen.

For that purpose, Captain Welsh handed us over to the care of his trusted
mate Mr. Joseph Double, and we were soon in the streets of the city,
desirous of purchasing half their contents. My supply of money was not
enough for what I deemed necessary purchases. Temple had split his
clothes, mine were tarred; we were appearing at a disadvantage, and we
intended to dine at a good hotel and subsequently go to a theatre. Yet I
had no wish to part with my watch. Mr. Double said it might be arranged.
It was pawned at a shop for a sum equivalent in our money to about twelve
pounds, and Temple obliged me by taking charge of the ticket. Thus we
were enabled to dress suitably and dine pleasantly, and, as Mr. Double
remarked, no one could rob me of my gold watch now. We visited a couple
of beer-cellars to taste the drink of the people, and discovered three of
our men engaged in a similar undertaking. I proposed that it should be
done at my expense. They praised their captain, but asked us, as
gentlemen and scholars, whether it was reasonable to object to liquor
because your brother was carried out on a high tide? Mr. Double commended
them to moderation. Their reply was to estimate an immoderate amount of
liquor as due to them, with profound composure.

'Those rascals,' Mr. Double informed us, 'are not in the captain's
confidence they're tidy seamen, though, and they submit to the captain's
laws on board and have their liberty ashore.'

We inquired what the difference was between their privileges and his.

'Why,' said he, 'if they're so much as accused of a disobedient act, off
they 're scurried, and lose fair wages and a kind captain. And let any
man Jack of 'em accuse me, and he bounds a india-rubber ball against a
wall and gets it; all he meant to give he gets. Once you fix the
confidence of your superior, you're waterproof.'

We held our peace, but we could have spoken.

Mr. Double had no moral hostility toward theatres. Supposing he did not
relish the performance, he could enjoy a spell in the open air, he said,
and this he speedily decided to do. Had we not been bound in honour to
remain for him to fetch us, we also should have retired from a
representation of which we understood only the word ja. It was tiresome
to be perpetually waiting for the return of this word. We felt somewhat
as dogs must feel when human speech is addressed to them. Accordingly, we
professed, without concealment, to despise the whole performance. I
reminded Temple of a saying of the Emperor Charles V. as to a knowledge
of languages.

'Hem!' he went critically; 'it's all very well for a German to talk in
that way, but you can't be five times an Englishman if you're a
foreigner.'

We heard English laughter near us. Presently an English gentleman
accosted us.

'Mr. Villiers, I believe?' He bowed at me.

'My name is Richmond.'

He bowed again, with excuses, talked of the Play, and telegraphed to a
lady sitting in a box fronting us. I saw that she wrote on a slip of
paper; she beckoned; the gentleman quitted us, and soon after placed a
twisted note in my hand. It ran:

'Miss Goodwin (whose Christian name is Clara) wishes very much to know
how it has fared with Mr. Harry Richmond since he left Venice.'

I pushed past a number of discontented knees, trying, on my way to her
box, to recollect her vividly, but I could barely recollect her at all,
until I had sat beside her five minutes. Colonel Goodwin was asleep in a
corner of the box. Awakened by the sound of his native tongue, he
recognized me immediately.

'On your way to your father?' he said, as he shook my hand.

I thought it amazing he should guess that in Germany.

'Do you know where he is, sir?' I asked.

'We saw him,' replied the colonel; 'when was it, Clara? A week or ten
days ago.'

'Yes,' said Miss Goodwin; 'we will talk of that by-and-by.' And she
overflowed with comments on my personal appearance, and plied me with
questions, but would answer none of mine.

I fetched Temple into the box to introduce him. We were introduced in
turn to Captain Malet, the gentleman who had accosted me below.

'You understand German, then?' said Miss Goodwin.

She stared at hearing that we knew only the word ja, for it made our
presence in Germany unaccountable.

'The most dangerous word of all,' said Colonel Goodwin, and begged us
always to repeat after it the negative nein for an antidote.

'You have both seen my father?' I whispered to Miss Goodwin; 'both? We
have been separated. Do tell me everything. Don't look at the stage-they
speak such nonsense. How did you remember me? How happy I am to have met
you! Oh! I haven't forgotten the gondolas and the striped posts, and
stali and the other word; but soon after we were separated, and I haven't
seen him since.'

She touched her father's arm.

'At once, if you like,' said he, jumping up erect.

'In Germany was it?' I persisted.

She nodded gravely and leaned softly on my arm while we marched out of
the theatre to her hotel--I in such a state of happiness underlying
bewilderment and strong expectation that I should have cried out loud had
not pride in my partner restrained me. At her tea-table I narrated the
whole of my adventure backwards to the time of our parting in Venice,
hurrying it over as quick as I could, with the breathless termination,
'And now?'

They had an incomprehensible reluctance to perform their part of the
implied compact. Miss Goodwin looked at Captain Malet. He took his leave.
Then she said, 'How glad I am you have dropped that odious name of Roy!
Papa and I have talked of you frequently--latterly very often. I meant to
write to you, Harry Richmond. I should have done it the moment we
returned to England.'

'You must know,' said the colonel, 'that I am an amateur inspector of
fortresses, and my poor Clara has to trudge the Continent with me to pick
up the latest inventions in artillery and other matters, for which I get
no thanks at head-quarters--but it 's one way of serving one's country
when the steel lies rusting. We are now for home by way of Paris. I hope
that you and your friend will give us your company. I will see this
Captain Welsh of yours before we start. Clara, you decided on dragging me
to the theatre to-night with your usual admirable instinct.'

I reminded Miss Goodwin of my father being in Germany.

'Yes, he is at one of the Courts, a long distance from here,' she said,
rapidly. 'And you came by accident in a merchant-ship! You are one of
those who are marked for extraordinary adventures. Confess: you would
have set eyes on me, and not known me. It's a miracle that I should meet
my little friend Harry--little no longer my friend all the same, are you
not?'

I hoped so ardently.

She with great urgency added, 'Then come with us. Prove that you put
faith in our friendship.'

In desperation I exclaimed, 'But I must, I must hear of my father.'

She turned to consult the colonel's face.

'Certainly,' he said, and eulogized a loving son. 'Clara will talk to
you. I'm for bed. What was the name of the play we saw this evening? Oh!
Struensee, to be sure. We missed the scaffold.'

He wished us good-night on an appointment of the hour for breakfast, and
ordered beds for us in the hotel.

Miss Goodwin commenced: 'But really I have nothing to tell you, or very
little. You know, Papa has introductions everywhere; we are like
Continental people, and speak a variety of languages, and I am almost a
foreigner, we are so much abroad; but I do think English boys should be
educated at home: I hope you'll go to an English college.'

Noticing my painful look, 'We saw him at the Court of the Prince of
Eppenwelzen,' she said, as if her brows ached. 'He is very kindly treated
there; he was there some weeks ago. The place lies out in the Hanover
direction, far from here. He told us that you were with your grandfather,
and I must see Riversley Grange, and the truth is you must take me there.
I suspect you have your peace to make; perhaps I shall help you, and be a
true Peribanou. We go over Amsterdam, the Hague, Brussels, and you shall
see the battlefield, Paris, straight to London. Yes, you are fickle; you
have not once called me Peribanou.'

Her voluble rattling succeeded in fencing off my questions before I could
exactly shape them, as I staggered from blind to blind idea, now thinking
of the sombre red Bench, and now of the German prince's Court.

'Won't you tell me any more to-night?' I said, when she paused.

'Indeed, I have not any more to tell,' she assured me.

It was clear to me that she had joined the mysterious league against my
father. I began to have a choking in the throat. I thanked her and wished
her good-night while I was still capable of smiling.

At my next interview with Colonel Goodwin he spoke promptly on the
subject of my wanderings. I was of an age, he said, to know my own
interests. No doubt filial affection was excellent in its way, but in
fact it was highly questionable whether my father was still at the Court
of this German prince; my father had stated that he meant to visit
England to obtain an interview with his son, and I might miss him by a
harum-scarum chase over Germany. And besides, was I not offending my
grandfather and my aunt, to whom I owed so much? He appealed to my
warmest feelings on their behalf. This was just the moment, he said, when
there was a turning-point in my fortunes. He could assure me most
earnestly that I should do no good by knocking at this prince's doors,
and have nothing but bitterness if I did in the end discover my father.
'Surely you understand the advantages of being bred a gentleman?' he
wound up. 'Under your grandfather's care you have a career before you, a
fine fortune in prospect, everything a young man can wish for. And I must
tell you candidly, you run great risk of missing all these things by
hunting your father to earth. Give yourself a little time: reflect on
it.'

'I have,' I cried. 'I have come out to find him, and I must.'

The colonel renewed his arguments and persuasions until he was worn out.
I thanked him continually for his kindness. Clara Goodwin besought me in
a surprising manner to accompany her to England, called herself
Peribanou, and with that name conjured up my father to my eyes in his
breathing form. She said, as her father had done, that I was called on
now to decide upon my future: she had a presentiment that evil would come
to me of my unchecked, headstrong will, which she dignified by terming it
a true but reckless affection: she believed she had been thrown in my
path to prove herself a serviceable friend, a Peribanou of twenty-six who
would not expect me to marry her when she had earned my gratitude.

They set Temple on me, and that was very funny. To hear him with his 'I
say, Richie, come, perhaps it's as well to know where a thing should
stop; your father knows you're at Riversley, and he'll be after you when
convenient; and just fancy the squire!' was laughable. He had some
anxiety to be home again, or at least at Riversley. I offered him to Miss
Goodwin.

She reproached me and coaxed me; she was exceedingly sweet. 'Well,' she
said, in an odd, resigned fashion, 'rest a day with us; will you refuse
me that?'

I consented; she knew not with what fretfulness. We went out to gaze at
the shops and edifices, and I bought two light bags for slinging over the
shoulder, two nightshirts, toothbrushes, and pocket-combs, and a large
map of Germany. By dint of vehement entreaties I led her to point to the
territory of the Prince of Eppenwelzen-Sarkeld. 'His income is rather
less than that of your grandfather, friend Harry,' she remarked. I doated
on the spot until I could have dropped my finger on it blindfold.

Two or three pitched battles brought us to a friendly arrangement. The
colonel exacted my promise that if I saw my father at Sarkeld in
Eppenwelzen I would not stay with him longer than seven days: and that if
he was not there I would journey home forthwith. When I had yielded the
promise frankly on my honour, he introduced me to a banker of the city,
who agreed to furnish me money to carry me on to England in case I should
require it. A diligence engaged to deliver me within a few miles of
Sarkeld. I wrote a letter to my aunt Dorothy, telling her facts, and one
to the squire, beginning, 'We were caught on our arrival in London by the
thickest fog ever remembered,' as if it had been settled on my departure
from Riversley that Temple and I were bound for London. Miss Goodwin was
my post-bag. She said when we had dined, about two hours before the
starting of the diligence, 'Don't you think you ought to go and wish that
captain of the vessel you sailed in goodbye?' I fell into her plot so far
as to walk down to the quays on the river-side and reconnoitre the ship.
But there I saw my prison. I kissed my hand to Captain Welsh's mainmast
rather ironically, though not without regard for him. Miss Goodwin lifted
her eyelids at our reappearance. As she made no confession of her treason
I did not accuse her, and perhaps it was owing to a movement of her
conscience that at our parting she drew me to her near enough for a kiss
to come of itself.

Four-and-twenty German words of essential service to a traveller in
Germany constituted our knowledge of the language, and these were on
paper transcribed by Miss Goodwin's own hand. In the gloom of the
diligence, packed between Germans of a size that not even Tacitus had
prepared me for, smoked over from all sides, it was a fascinating study.
Temple and I exchanged the paper half-hourly while the light lasted. When
that had fled, nothing was left us to combat the sensation that we were
in the depths of a manure-bed, for the windows were closed, the
tobacco-smoke thickened, the hides of animals wrapping our immense
companions reeked; fire occasionally glowed in their pipe-bowls; they
were silent, and gave out smoke and heat incessantly, like inanimate
forces of nature. I had most fantastic ideas,--that I had taken root and
ripened, and must expect my head to drop off at any instant: that I was
deep down, wedged in the solid mass of the earth. But I need not repeat
them: they were accurately translated in imagination from my physical
miseries. The dim revival of light, when I had well-nigh ceased to hope
for it, showed us all like malefactors imperfectly hanged, or drowned
wretches in a cabin under water. I had one Colossus bulging over my
shoulder! Temple was blotted out. His face, emerging from beneath a block
of curly bearskin, was like that of one frozen in wonderment. Outside
there was a melting snow on the higher hills; the clouds over them grew
steel-blue. We were going through a valley in a fir-forest.




CHAPTER XV

WE ARE ACCOSTED BY A BEAUTIFUL LITTLE LADY IN THE FOREST

Bowls of hot coffee and milk, with white rolls of bread to dip in them,
refreshed us at a forest inn. For some minutes after the meal Temple and
I talked like interchangeing puffs of steam, but soon subsided to our
staring fit. The pipes were lit again. What we heard sounded like a
language of the rocks and caves, and roots plucked up, a language of
gluttons feasting; the word ja was like a door always on the hinge in
every mouth. Dumpy children, bulky men, compressed old women with baked
faces, and comical squat dogs, kept the villages partly alive. We
observed one young urchin sitting on a stone opposite a dog, and he and
the dog took alternate bites off a platter-shaped cake, big enough to
require both his hands to hold it. Whether the dog ever snapped more than
his share was matter of speculation to us. It was an education for him in
good manners, and when we were sitting at dinner we wished our companions
had enjoyed it. They fed with their heads in their plates, splashed and
clattered jaws, without paying us any hospitable attention whatever, so
that we had the dish of Lazarus. They were perfectly kind,
notwithstanding, and allowed a portion of my great map of Germany to lie
spread over their knees in the diligence, whilst Temple and I pored along
the lines of the rivers. One would thrust his square-nailed finger to the
name of a city and pronounce it; one gave us lessons in the expression of
the vowels, with the softening of three of them, which seemed like a
regulation drill movement for taking an egg into the mouth, and showing
repentance of the act. 'Sarkeld,' we exclaimed mutually, and they made a
galloping motion of their hands, pointing beyond the hills. Sarkeld was
to the right, Sarkeld to the left, as the road wound on. Sarkeld was
straight in front of us when the conductor, according to directions he
had received, requested us to alight and push through this endless
fir-forest up a hilly branch road, and away his hand galloped beyond it,
coming to a deep place, and then to grapes, then to a tip-toe station,
and under it lay Sarkeld. The pantomime was not bad. We waved our hand to
the diligence, and set out cheerfully, with our bags at our backs,
entering a gorge in the fir-covered hills before sunset, after starting
the proposition--Does the sun himself look foreign in a foreign country?

'Yes, he does,' said Temple; and so I thought, but denied it, for by the
sun's favour I hoped to see my father that night, and hail Apollo
joyfully in the morning; a hope that grew with exercise of my limbs.
Beautiful cascades of dark bright water leaped down the gorge; we chased
an invisible animal. Suddenly one of us exclaimed, 'We 're in a German
forest'; and we remembered grim tales of these forests, their awful
castles, barons, knights, ladies, long-bearded dwarfs, gnomes and thin
people. I commenced a legend off-hand.

'No, no,' said Temple, as if curdling; 'let's call this place the mouth
of Hades. Greek things don't make you feel funny.'

I laughed louder than was necessary, and remarked that I never had cared
so much for Greek as on board Captain Welsh's vessel.

'It's because he was all on the opposite tack I went on quoting,' said
Temple. 'I used to read with my father in the holidays, and your Rev.
Simon has kept you up to the mark; so it was all fair. It 's not on our
consciences that we crammed the captain about our knowledge.'

'No. I'm glad of it,' said I.

Temple pursued, 'Whatever happens to a fellow, he can meet anything so
long as he can say--I 've behaved like a man of honour. And those German
tales--they only upset you. You don't see the reason of the thing. Why is
a man to be haunted half his life? Well, suppose he did commit a murder.
But if he didn't, can't he walk through an old castle without meeting
ghosts? or a forest?'

The dusky scenery of a strange land was influencing Temple. It affected
me so, I made the worst of it for a cure.

'Fancy those pines saying, "There go two more," Temple. Well; and fancy
this--a little earth-dwarf as broad as I'm long and high as my shoulder.
One day he met the loveliest girl in the whole country, and she promised
to marry him in twenty years' time, in return for a sack of jewels worth
all Germany and half England. You should have seen her dragging it home.
People thought it full of charcoal. She married the man she loved, and
the twenty years passed over, and at the stroke of the hour when she
first met the dwarf, thousands of bells began ringing through the forest,
and her husband cries out, "What is the meaning of it?" and they rode up
to a garland of fresh flowers that dropped on her head, and right into a
gold ring that closed on her finger, and--look, Temple, look!'

'Where?' asked the dear little fellow, looking in all earnest, from which
the gloom of the place may be imagined, for, by suddenly mixing it with
my absurd story, I discomposed his air of sovereign indifference as much
as one does the surface of a lake by casting a stone in it.

We rounded the rocky corner of the gorge at a slightly accelerated pace
in dead silence. It opened out to restorative daylight, and we breathed
better and chaffed one another, and, beholding a house with pendent gold
grapes, applauded the diligence conductor's expressive pantomime. The
opportunity was offered for a draught of wine, but we held water
preferable, so we toasted the Priscilla out of the palms of our hands in
draughts of water from a rill that had the sound of aspen-leaves, such as
I used to listen to in the Riversley meadows, pleasantly familiar.

Several commanding elevations were in sight, some wooded, some bare. We
chose the nearest, to observe the sunset, and concurred in thinking it
unlike English sunsets, though not so very unlike the sunset we had taken
for sunrise on board the Priscilla. A tumbled, dark and light green
country of swelling forest-land and slopes of meadow ran to the West, and
the West from flaming yellow burned down to smoky crimson across it.
Temple bade--me 'catch the disc--that was English enough.' A glance at
the sun's disc confirmed the truth of his observation. Gazing on the
outline of the orb, one might have fancied oneself in England. Yet the
moment it had sunk under the hill this feeling of ours vanished with it.
The coloured clouds drew me ages away from the recollection of home.

A tower on a distant hill, white among pines, led us to suppose that
Sarkeld must lie somewhere beneath it. We therefore descended straight
toward the tower, instead of returning to the road, and struck
confidently into a rugged path. Recent events had given me the assurance
that in my search for my father I was subject to a special governing
direction. I had aimed at the Bench--missed it--been shipped across sea
and precipitated into the arms of friends who had seen him and could tell
me I was on his actual track, only blindly, and no longer blindly now.

'Follow the path,' I said, when Temple wanted to have a consultation.

'So we did in the London fog!' said he, with some gloom.

But my retort: 'Hasn't it brought us here?' was a silencer.

Dark night came on. Every height stood for a ruin in our eyes, every dip
an abyss. It grew bewilderingly dark, but the path did not forsake us,
and we expected, at half-hour intervals, to perceive the lights of
Sarkeld, soon to be thundering at one of the inns for admission and
supper. I could hear Temple rehearsing his German vocabulary, 'Brod,
butter, wasser, fleisch, bett,' as we stumbled along. Then it fell to
'Brod, wasser, bett,' and then, 'Bett' by itself, his confession of
fatigue. Our path had frequently the nature of a waterway, and was very
fatiguing, more agreeable to mount than descend, for in mounting the
knees and shins bore the brunt of it, and these sufferers are not such
important servants of the footfarer as toes and ankles in danger of
tripping and being turned.

I was walking on leveller ground, my head bent and eyes half-shut, when a
flash of light in a brook at my feet caused me to look aloft. The tower
we had marked after sunset was close above us, shining in a light of
torches. We adopted the sensible explanation of this mysterious sight,
but were rather in the grip of the superstitious absurd one, until we
discerned a number of reddened men.

'Robbers!' exclaimed one of us. Our common thought was, 'No; robbers
would never meet on a height in that manner'; and we were emboldened to
mount and request their help.

Fronting the tower, which was of white marble, a high tent had been
pitched on a green platform semicircled by pines. Torches were stuck in
clefts of the trees, or in the fork of the branches, or held by boys and
men, and there were clearly men at work beneath the tent at a busy rate.
We could hear the paviour's breath escape from them. Outside the ring of
torchbearers and others was a long cart with a dozen horses harnessed to
it. All the men appeared occupied too much for chatter and laughter. What
could be underneath the tent? Seeing a boy occasionally lift one of the
flapping corners, we took licence from his example to appease our
curiosity. It was the statue of a bronze horse rearing spiritedly. The
workmen were engaged fixing its pedestal in the earth.

Our curiosity being satisfied, we held debate upon our immediate
prospects. The difficulty of making sure of a bed when you are once
detached from your home, was the philosophical reflection we arrived at,
for nothing practical presented itself. To arm ourselves we pulled out
Miss Goodwin's paper. 'Gasthof is the word!' cried Temple. 'Gasthof,
zimmer, bett; that means inn, hot supper, and bed. We'll ask.' We asked
several of the men. Those in motion shot a stare at us; the torchbearers
pointed at the tent and at an unseen height, muttering 'Morgen.'
Referring to Miss Goodwin's paper we discovered this to signify the
unintelligible word morning, which was no answer at all; but the men,
apparently deeming our conduct suspicious, gave us to understand by
rather menacing gestures that we were not wanted there, so we passed into
the dusk of the trees, angry at their incivility. Had it been Summer we
should have dropped and slept. The night air of a sharp season obliged us
to keep active, yet we were not willing to get far away from the torches.
But after a time they were hidden; then we saw one moving ahead. The
holder of it proved to be a workman of the gang, and between us and him
the strangest parley ensued. He repeated the word morgen, and we insisted
on zimmer and bett.

'He takes us for twin Caspar Hausers,' sighed Temple.

'Nein,' said the man, and, perhaps enlightened by hearing a foreign
tongue, beckoned for us to step at his heels.

His lodging was a woodman's hut. He offered us bread to eat, milk to
drink, and straw to lie on: we desired nothing more, and were happy,
though the bread was black, the milk sour, the straw mouldy.

Our breakfast was like a continuation of supper, but two little girls of
our host, whose heads were cased in tight-fitting dirty linen caps,
munched the black bread and drank the sour milk so thankfully, while
fixing solemn eyes of wonder upon us, that to assure them we were the
same sort of creature as themselves we pretended to relish the stuff.
Rather to our amazement we did relish it. 'Mutter!' I said to them. They
pointed to the room overhead. Temple laid his cheek on his hand. One of
the little girls laid hers on the table. I said 'Doctor?' They nodded and
answered 'Princess,' which seemed perfectly good English, and sent our
conjectures as to the state of their mother's health astray. I shut a
silver English coin in one of their fat little hands.

We now, with the name Sarkeld, craved of their father a direction to that
place. At the door of his but he waved his hand carelessly South for
Sarkeld, and vigorously West where the tower stood, then swept both hands
up to the tower, bellowed a fire of cannon, waved his hat, and stamped
and cheered. Temple, glancing the way of the tower, performed on a
trumpet of his joined fists to show we understood that prodigious
attractions were presented by the tower; we said ja and ja, and
nevertheless turned into the Sarkeld path.

Some minutes later the sound of hoofs led us to imagine he had despatched
a messenger after us. A little lady on a pony, attended by a tawny-faced
great square-shouldered groom on a tall horse, rode past, drew up on one
side, and awaited our coming. She was dressed in a grey riding-habit and
a warm winter-jacket of gleaming grey fur, a soft white boa loose round
her neck, crossed at her waist, white gauntlets, and a pretty black felt
hat with flowing rim and plume. There she passed as under review. It was
a curious scene: the iron-faced great-sized groom on his bony black
charger dead still: his mistress, a girl of about eleven or twelve or
thirteen, with an arm bowed at her side, whip and reins in one hand, and
slips of golden brown hair straying on her flushed cheek; rocks and
trees, high silver firs rising behind her, and a slender water that fell
from the rocks running at her pony's feet. Half-a-dozen yards were
between the charger's head and the pony's flanks. She waited for us to
march by, without attempting to conceal that we were the objects of her
inspection, and we in good easy swing of the feet gave her a look as we
lifted our hats. That look was to me like a net thrown into moonlighted
water: it brought nothing back but broken lights of a miraculous beauty.

Burning to catch an excuse for another look over my shoulder, I heard her
voice:

'Young English gentlemen!'

We turned sharp round.

It was she without a doubt who had addressed us: she spurred her pony to
meet us, stopped him, and said with the sweetest painful attempt at
accuracy in pronouncing a foreign tongue:

'I sthink you go a wrong way?'

Our hats flew off again, and bareheaded, I seized the reply before Temple
could speak.

'Is not this, may I ask you, the way to Sarkeld?'

She gathered up her knowledge of English deliberately.

'Yes, one goes to Sarkeld by sthis way here, but to-day goes everybody up
to our Bella Vista, and I entreat you do not miss it, for it is
some-s-thing to write to your home of.'

'Up at the tower, then? Oh, we were there last night, and saw the bronze
horse, mademoiselle.'

'Yes, I know. I called on my poor sick woman in a but where you fell
asleep, sirs. Her little ones are my lambs; she has been of our
household; she is good; and they said, two young, strange, small
gentlemen have gone for Sarkeld; and I supposed, sthey cannot know all go
to our Bella Vista to-day.'

'You knew at once we were English, mademoiselle?'

'Yes, I could read it off your backs, and truly too your English eyes are
quite open at a glance. It is of you both I speak. If I but make my words
plain! My "th" I cannot always. And to understand, your English is indeed
heavy speech! not so in books. I have my English governess. We read
English tales, English poetry--and sthat is your excellence. And so, will
you not come, sirs, up when a way is to be shown to you? It is my
question.'

Temple thanked her for the kindness of the offer.

I was hesitating, half conscious of surprise that I should ever be
hesitating in doubt of taking the direction toward my father. Hearing
Temple's boldness I thanked her also, and accepted. Then she said,
bowing:

'I beg you will cover your heads.'

We passed the huge groom bolt upright on his towering horse; he raised
two fingers to the level of his eyebrows in the form of a salute.

Temple murmured: 'I shouldn't mind entering the German Army,' just as
after our interview with Captain Bulsted he had wished to enter the
British Navy.

This was no more than a sign that he was highly pleased. For my part
delight fluttered the words in my mouth, so that I had to repeat half I
uttered to the attentive ears of our gracious new friend and guide:

'Ah,' she said, 'one does sthink one knows almost all before experiment.
I am ashamed, yet I will talk, for is it not so? experiment is a school.
And you, if you please, will speak slow. For I say of you English
gentlemen, silk you spin from your lips; it is not as a language of an
alphabet; it is pleasant to hear when one would lull, but Italian can do
that, and do it more--am I right? soft?

'Bella Vista, lovely view,' said I.

'Lovely view,' she repeated.

She ran on in the most musical tongue, to my thinking, ever heard:

'And see my little pensioners' poor cottage, who are out up to Lovely
View. Miles round go the people to it. Good, and I will tell you
strangers: sthe Prince von Eppenwelzen had his great ancestor, and his
sister Markgrafin von Rippau said, "Erect a statue of him, for he was a
great warrior." He could not, or he would not, we know not. So she said,
"I will," she said, "I will do it in seven days." She does constantly
amuse him, everybody at de Court. Immense excitement! For suppose it!--a
statue of a warrior on horseback, in perfect likeness, chapeau tricorne,
perruque, all of bronze, and his marshal's baton. Eh bien, well, a bronze
horse is come at a gallop from Berlin; sthat we know. By fortune a most
exalted sculptor in Berlin has him ready,--and many horses pulled him to
here, to Lovely View, by post-haste; sthat we know. But we are in
extremity of puzzlement. For where is the statue to ride him? where--am I
plain to you, sirs?--is sthe Marshal Furst von Eppenwelzen, our great
ancestor? Yet the Markgrafin says, "It is right, wait!" She nods, she
smiles. Our Court is all at de lake-palace odder side sthe tower, and it
is bets of gems, of feathers, of lace, not to be numbered! The Markgrafin
says--sthere to-day you see him, Albrecht Wohlgemuth Furst von
Eppenwelzen! But no sculptor can have cast him in bronze--not copied him
and cast him in a time of seven days! And we say sthis:--Has she given a
secret order to a sculptor--you understand me, sirs, commission--where,
how, has he sthe likeness copied? Or did he come to our speisesaal of our
lake-palace disguised? Oh! but to see, to copy, to model, to cast in
bronze, to travel betwixt Berlin and Sarkeld in a time of seven days? No!
so-oh! we guess, we guess, we are in exhaustion. And to-day is like an
eagle we have sent an arrow to shoot and know not if he will come down.
For shall we see our ancestor on horseback? It will be a not-scribable
joy! Or not? So we guess, we are worried. At near eleven o'clock a cannon
fires, sthe tent is lifted, and we see; but I am impatient wid my breaths
for de gun to go.'

I said it would be a fine sight.

'For strangers, yes; you should be of de palace to know what a fine
sight! sthe finest! And you are for Sarkeld? You have friends in
Sarkeld?'

'My father is in Sarkeld, mademoiselle. I am told he is at the palace.'

'Indeed; and he is English, your fater?'

'Yes. I have not seen him for years; I have come to find him.'

'Indeed; it is for love of him, your fater, sir, you come, and not speak
German?'

I signified that it was so.

'She stroked her pony's neck musing.

'Because, of love is not much in de family in England, it is said,' she
remarked very shyly, and in recovering her self-possession asked the name
of my father.

'His name, mademoiselle, is Mr. Richmond.'

'Mr. Richmond?'

'Mr. Richmond Roy.'

She sprang in her saddle.

'You are son to Mr. Richmond Roy? Oh! it is wonderful.'

'Mademoiselle, then you have seen him lately?'

'Yes, yes! I have seen him. I have heard of his beautiful child, his son;
and you it is?'

She studied my countenance a moment.

'Tell me, is he well?' mademoiselle, is he quite well?'

'Oh, yes,' she answered, and broke into smiles of merriment, and then
seemed to bite her underlip. 'He is our fun-maker. He must always be
well. I owe to him some of my English. You are his son? you were for
Sarkeld? You will see him up at our Bella Vista. Quick, let us run.'

She put her pony to a canter up the brown path between the fir-trees,
crying that she should take our breath; but we were tight runners, and I,
though my heart beat wildly, was full of fire to reach the tower on the
height; so when she slackened her pace, finding us close on her pony's
hoofs, she laughed and called us brave boys. Temple's being no more than
my friend, who had made the expedition with me out of friendship,
surprised her. Not that she would not have expected it to be done by
Germans; further she was unable to explain her astonishment.

At a turning of the ascent she pointed her whip at the dark knots and
lines of the multitude mounting by various paths to behold the ceremony
of unveiling the monument.

I besought her to waste no time.

'You must, if you please, attend my pleasure, if I guide you,' she said,
tossing her chin.

'I thank you, I can't tell you how much, mademoiselle,' said I.

She answered: 'You were kind to my two pet lambs, sir.'

So we moved forward.




CHAPTER XVI

THE STATUE ON THE PROMONTORY

The little lady was soon bowing to respectful salutations from crowds of
rustics and others on a broad carriage-way circling level with the
height. I could not help thinking how doubly foreign I was to all the
world here--I who was about to set eyes on my lost living father, while
these people were tip-toe to gaze on a statue. But as my father might
also be taking an interest in the statue, I got myself round to a
moderate sentiment of curiosity and a partial share of the general
excitement. Temple and mademoiselle did most of the conversation, which
related to glimpses of scenery, pine, oak, beech-wood, and lake-water,
until we gained the plateau where the tower stood, when the giant groom
trotted to the front, and worked a clear way for us through a mass of
travelling sight-seers, and she leaned to me, talking quite inaudibly
amid the laughter and chatting. A band of wind instruments burst out.
'This is glorious!' I conceived Temple to cry like an open-mouthed mute.
I found it inspiriting.

The rush of pride and pleasure produced by the music was irresistible. We
marched past the tower, all of us, I am sure, with splendid feelings. A
stone's throw beyond it was the lofty tent; over it drooped a flag, and
flags were on poles round a wide ring of rope guarded by foresters and
gendarmes, mounted and afoot. The band, dressed in green, with black
plumes to their hats, played in the middle of the ring. Outside were
carriages, and ladies and gentlemen on horseback, full of animation;
rustics, foresters, town and village people, men, women, and children,
pressed against the ropes. It was a day of rays of sunshine, now from off
one edge, now from another of large slow clouds, so that at times we and
the tower were in a blaze; next the lake-palace was illuminated, or the
long grey lake and the woods of pine and of bare brown twigs making bays
in it.

Several hands beckoned on our coming in sight of the carriages. 'There he
is, then!' I thought; and it was like swallowing my heart in one solid
lump. Mademoiselle had free space to trot ahead of us. We saw a
tall-sitting lady, attired in sables, raise a finger to her, and nip her
chin. Away the little lady flew to a second carriage, and on again, as
one may when alive with an inquiry. I observed to Temple, 'I wonder
whether she says in her German, "It is my question"; do you remember?'
There was no weight whatever in what I said or thought.

She rode back, exclaiming, 'Nowhere. He is nowhere, and nobody knows. He
will arrive. But he is not yet. Now,' she bent coaxingly down to me, 'can
you not a few words of German? Only a smallest sum! It is the Markgrafin,
my good aunt, would speak wid you, and she can no English-only she is
eager to behold you, and come! You will know, for my sake, some scrap of
German--ja? You will--nicht wahr? Or French? Make your glom-pudding of
it, will you?'

I made a shocking plum-pudding of it. Temple was no happier.

The margravine, a fine vigorous lady with a lively mouth and livelier
eyes of a restless grey that rarely dwelt on you when she spoke, and
constantly started off on a new idea, did me the honour to examine me,
much as if I had offered myself for service in her corps of grenadiers,
and might do in time, but was decreed to be temporarily wanting in manly
proportions.

She smiled a form of excuse of my bungling half-English horrid French,
talked over me and at me, forgot me, and recollected me, all within a
minute, and fished poor Temple for intelligible replies to
incomprehensible language in the same manner, then threw her head back to
gather the pair of us in her sight, then eyed me alone.

'C'est peut-etre le fils de son petit papa, et c'est tout dire.'

Such was her summary comment.

But not satisfied with that, she leaned out of the carriage, and, making
an extraordinary grimace appear the mother in labour of the difficult
words, said, 'Doos yo' laff?'

There was no helping it: I laughed like a madman, giving one outburst and
a dead stop.

Far from looking displeased, she nodded. I was again put to the dreadful
test.

'Can yo' mak' laff?'

It spurred my wits. I had no speech to 'mak' laff' with. At the very
instant of my dilemma I chanced to see a soberly-clad old townsman
hustled between two helpless women of the crowd, his pipe in his mouth,
and his hat, wig, and handkerchief sliding over his face, showing his
bald crown, and he not daring to cry out, for fear his pipe should be
trodden under foot.

'He can, your Highness.'

Her quick eyes caught the absurd scene. She turned to one of her ladies
and touched her forehead. Her hand was reached out to me; Temple she
patted on the shoulder.

'He can--ja: du auch.'

A grand gentleman rode up. They whispered, gazed at the tent, and
appeared to speak vehemently. All the men's faces were foreign: none of
them had the slightest resemblance to my father's. I fancied I might
detect him disguised. I stared vainly. Temple, to judge by the expression
of his features, was thinking. Yes, thought I, we might as well be at
home at old Riversley, that distant spot! We 're as out of place here as
frogs in the desert!

Riding to and fro, and chattering, and commotion, of which the margravine
was the centre, went on, and the band played beautiful waltzes. The
workmen in and out of the tent were full of their business, like seamen
under a storm.

'Fraulein Sibley,' the margravine called.

I hoped it might be an English name. So it proved to be; and the delight
of hearing English spoken, and, what was more, having English ears to
speak to, was blissful as the leap to daylight out of a nightmare.

'I have the honour to be your countrywoman,' said a lady, English all
over to our struggling senses.

We became immediately attached to her as a pair of shipwrecked boats
lacking provender of every sort are taken in tow by a well-stored vessel.
She knew my father, knew him intimately. I related all I had to tell, and
we learnt that we had made acquaintance with her pupil, the Princess
Ottilia Wilhelmina Frederika Hedwig, only child of the Prince of
Eppenwelzen.

'Your father will certainly be here; he is generally the margravine's
right hand, and it's wonderful the margravine can do without him so
long,' said Miss Sibley, and conversed with the margravine; after which
she informed me that she had been graciously directed to assure me my
father would be on the field when the cannon sounded.

'Perhaps you know nothing of Court life?' she resumed. 'We have very
curious performances in Sarkeld, and we owe it to the margravine that we
are frequently enlivened. You see the tall gentleman who is riding away
from her. I mean the one with the black hussar jacket and thick brown
moustache. That is the prince. Do you not think him handsome? He is very
kind--rather capricious; but that is a way with princes. Indeed, I have
no reason to complain. He has lost his wife, the Princess Frederika, and
depends upon his sister the margravine for amusement. He has had it since
she discovered your papa.'

'Is the gun never going off?' I groaned.

'If they would only conduct their ceremonies without their guns!'
exclaimed Miss Sibley. 'The origin of the present ceremony is this: the
margravine wished to have a statue erected to an ancestor, a renowned
soldier--and I would infinitely prefer talking of England. But never
mind. Oh, you won't understand what you gaze at. Well, the prince did not
care to expend the money. Instead of urging that as the ground of his
refusal, he declared there were no sculptors to do justice to Prince
Albrecht Wohlgemuth, and one could not rely on their effecting a
likeness. We have him in the dining-hall; he was strikingly handsome.
Afterward he pretended--I'm speaking now of the existing Prince
Ernest--that it would be ages before the statue was completed. One day
the margravine induced him to agree to pay the sum stipulated for by the
sculptor, on condition of the statue being completed for public
inspection within eight days of the hour of their agreement. The whole
Court was witness to it. They arranged for the statue, horse and man, to
be exhibited for a quarter of an hour. Of course, the margravine did not
signify it would be a perfectly finished work. We are kept at a great
distance, that we may not scrutinize it too closely. They unveil it to
show she has been as good as her word, and then cover it up to fix the
rider to the horse,--a screw is employed, I imagine. For one thing we
know about it, we know that the horse and the horseman travelled hither
separately. In all probability, the margravine gave the order for the
statue last autumn in Berlin. Now look at the prince. He has his eye on
you. Look down. Now he has forgotten you. He is impatient to behold the
statue. Our chief fear is that the statue will not maintain its balance.
Fortunately, we have plenty of guards to keep the people from pushing
against it. If all turns out well, I shall really say the margravine has
done wonders. She does not look anxious; but then she is not one ever to
show it. The prince does. Every other minute he is glancing at the tent
and at his watch. Can you guess my idea? Your father's absence leads me
to think-oh! only a passing glimmer of an idea--the statue has not
arrived, and he is bringing it on. Otherwise, he would be sure to be
here. The margravine beckons me.'

'Don't go!' we cried simultaneously.

The Princess Ottilia supplied her place.

'I have sent to our stables for two little pretty Hungarian horses for
you two to ride,' she said. 'No, I have not yet seen him. He is asked
for, and de Markgrafin knows not at all. He bades in our lake; he has
been seen since. The man is exciteable; but he is so sensible. Oh, no.
And he is full of laughter. We shall soon see him. Would he not ever be
cautious of himself for a son like you?'

Her compliment raised a blush on me.

The patience of the people was creditable to their phlegm. The smoke of
pipes curling over the numberless heads was the most stirring thing about
them.

Temple observed to me,

'We'll give the old statue a British cheer, won't we, Richie?'

'After coming all the way from England!' said I, in dejection.

'No, no, Richie; you're sure of him now. He 's somewhere directing
affairs, I suspect. I say, do let us show them we can ring out the right
tune upon occasion. By jingo! there goes a fellow with a match.'

We saw the cannonier march up to the margravine's carriage for orders.
She summoned the prince to her side. Ladies in a dozen carriages were
standing up, handkerchief in hand, and the gentlemen got their horses'
heads on a line. Temple counted nearly sixty persons of quality stationed
there. The workmen were trooping out of the tent.

Miss Sibley ran to us, saying,--

'The gun-horror has been commanded. Now then: the prince can scarcely
contain himself. The gunner is ready near his gun; he has his frightful
match lifted. See, the manager-superintendent is receiving the
margravine's last injunctions. How firm women's nerves are! Now the
margravine insists on the prince's reading the exact time by her watch.
Everybody is doing it. Let us see. By my watch it is all but fifteen
minutes to eleven, A.M. Dearest,' she addressed the little princess;
'would you not like to hold my hand until the gun is fired?'

'Dearest,' replied the princess, whether in childish earnest or irony I
could not divine, 'if I would hold a hand it would be a gentleman's.'

All eyes were on the Prince of Eppenwelzen, as he gazed toward the
covered statue. With imposing deliberation his hand rose to his hat. We
saw the hat raised. The cannon was fired and roared; the band struck up a
pompous slow march: and the tent-veil broke apart and rolled off. It was
like the dawn flying and sunrise mounting.

I confess I forgot all thought of my father for awhile; the shouts of the
people, the braying of the brass instruments, the ladies cheering
sweetly, the gentlemen giving short, hearty expressions of applause,
intoxicated me. And the statue was superb-horse and rider in new bronze
polished by sunlight.

'It is life-like! it is really noble! it is a true Prince!' exclaimed
Miss Sibley. She translated several exclamations of the ladies and
gentlemen in German: they were entirely to the same effect. The horse
gave us a gleam of his neck as he pawed a forefoot, just reined in. We
knew him; he was a gallant horse; but it was the figure of the Prince
Albrecht that was so fine. I had always laughed at sculptured figures on
horseback. This one overawed me. The Marshal was acknowledging the salute
of his army after a famous victory over the infidel Turks. He sat
upright, almost imperceptibly but effectively bending his head in harmony
with the curve of his horse's neck, and his baton swept the air low in
proud submission to the honours cast on him by his acclaiming soldiery.
His three-cornered lace hat, curled wig, heavy-trimmed surcoat, and high
boots, reminded me of Prince Eugene. No Prince Eugene--nay, nor
Marlborough, had such a martial figure, such an animated high old
warrior's visage. The bronze features reeked of battle.

Temple and I felt humiliated (without cause, I granted) at the success of
a work of Art that struck us as a new military triumph of these Germans,
and it was impossible not to admire it. The little Princess Ottilia
clapped hands by fits. What words she addressed to me I know not. I dealt
out my stock of German--'Ja, ja--to her English. We were drawn by her to
congratulate the margravine, whose hand was then being kissed by the
prince: he did it most courteously and affectionately. Other gentlemen,
counts and barons, bowed over her hand. Ladies, according to their rank
and privileges, saluted her on the cheek or in some graceful fashion.
When our turn arrived, Miss Sibley translated for us, and as we were at
concert pitch we did not acquit ourselves badly. Temple's remark was,
that he wished she and all her family had been English. Nothing was left
for me to say but that the margravine almost made us wish we had been
German.

Smiling cordially, the margravine spoke, Miss Sibley translated:

'Her Royal Highness asks you if you have seen your father?'

I shook my head.

The Princess Ottilia translated, 'Her Highness, my good aunt, would know,
would you know him, did you see him?'

'Yes, anywhere,' I cried.

The margravine pushed me back with a gesture.

'Yes, your Highness, on my honour; anywhere on earth!'

She declined to hear the translation.

Her insulting disbelief in my ability to recognize the father I had come
so far to embrace would have vexed me but for the wretched thought that I
was losing him again. We threaded the carriages; gazed at the horsemen in
a way to pierce the hair on their faces. The little princess came on us
hurriedly.

'Here, see, are the horses. I will you to mount. Are they not pretty
animals?' She whispered, 'I believe your fater have been hurt in his mind
by something. It is only perhaps. Now mount, for de Markgrafin says you
are our good guests.'

We mounted simply to show that we could mount, for we would rather have
been on foot, and drew up close to the right of the margravine's
carriage.

'Hush! a poet is reading his ode,' said the princess. 'It is Count
Fretzel von Wolfenstein.'

This ode was dreadful to us, and all the Court people pretended they
liked it. When he waved his right hand toward the statue there was a
shout from the rustic set; when he bowed to the margravine, the ladies
and gentlemen murmured agreeably and smiled. We were convinced of its
being downright hypocrisy, rustic stupidity, Court flattery. We would
have argued our case, too. I proposed a gallop; Temple said,

'No, we'll give the old statue our cheer as soon as this awful fellow has
done. I don't care much for poetry, but don't let me ever have to stand
and hear German poetry again for the remainder of my life.'

We could not imagine why they should have poetry read out to them instead
of their fine band playing, but supposed it was for the satisfaction of
the margravine, with whom I grew particularly annoyed on hearing Miss
Sibley say she conceived her Highness to mean that my father was actually
on the ground, and that we neither of us, father and son, knew one
another. I swore on my honour, on my life, he was not present; and the
melancholy in my heart taking the form of extreme irritation, I spoke
passionately. I rose in my stirrups, ready to shout, 'Father! here's
Harry Richmond come to see you. Where are you!' I did utter something--a
syllable or two: 'Make haste!' I think the words were. They sprang from
my inmost bosom, addressed without forethought to that drawling mouthing
poet. The margravine's face met mine like a challenge. She had her lips
tight in a mere lip-smile, and her eyes gleamed with provocation.

'Her Highness,' Miss Sibley translated, 'asks whether you are prepared to
bet that your father is not on the ground?'

'Beg her to wait two minutes, and I'll be prepared to bet any sum,' said
I.

Temple took one half the circle, I the other, riding through the
attentive horsemen and carriage-lines, and making sure the face we sought
was absent, more or less discomposing everybody. The poet finished his
ode; he was cheered, of course. Mightily relieved, I beheld the band
resuming their instruments, for the cheering resembled a senseless
beating on brass shields. I felt that we English could do it better.
Temple from across the sector of the circle, running about two feet in
front of the statue, called aloud,

'Richie! he's not here!'

'Not here!' cried I.

The people gazed up at us, wondering at the tongue we talked.

'Richie! now let 's lead these fellows off with a tiptop cheer!'

Little Temple crowed lustily.

The head of the statue turned from Temple to me.

I found the people falling back with amazed exclamations. I--so
prepossessed was I--simply stared at the sudden-flashing white of the
statue's eyes. The eyes, from being an instant ago dull carved balls,
were animated. They were fixed on me. I was unable to give out a breath.
Its chest heaved; both bronze hands struck against the bosom.

'Richmond! my son! Richie! Harry Richmond! Richmond Roy!'

That was what the statue gave forth.

My head was like a ringing pan. I knew it was my father, but my father
with death and strangeness, earth, metal, about him; and his voice was
like a human cry contending with earth and metal-mine was stifled. I saw
him descend. I dismounted. We met at the ropes and embraced. All his
figure was stiff, smooth, cold. My arms slid on him. Each time he spoke I
thought it an unnatural thing: I myself had not spoken once.

After glancing by hazard at the empty saddle of the bronze horse, I
called to mind more clearly the appalling circumstance which had
stupefied the whole crowd. They had heard a statue speak--had seen a
figure of bronze walk. For them it was the ancestor of their prince; it
was the famous dead old warrior of a hundred and seventy years ago set
thus in motion. Imagine the behaviour of people round a slain tiger that
does not compel them to fly, and may yet stretch out a dreadful paw! Much
so they pressed for a nearer sight of its walnut visage, and shrank in
the act. Perhaps I shared some of their sensations. I cannot tell: my
sensations were tranced. There was no warmth to revive me in the gauntlet
I clasped. I looked up at the sky, thinking that it had fallen dark.




CHAPTER XVII

MY FATHER BREATHES, MOVES, AND SPEAKS

The people broke away from us like furrowed water as we advanced on each
side of the ropes toward the margravine's carriage.

I became a perfectly mechanical creature: incapable, of observing, just
capable of taking an impression here and there; and in such cases the
impressions that come are stamped on hot wax; they keep the scene fresh;
they partly pervert it as well. Temple's version is, I am sure, the truer
historical picture. He, however, could never repeat it twice exactly
alike, whereas I failed not to render image for image in clear succession
as they had struck me at the time. I could perceive that the figure of
the Prince Albrecht, in its stiff condition, was debarred from vaulting,
or striding, or stooping, so that the ropes were a barrier between us. I
saw the little Princess Ottilia eyeing us with an absorbed comprehensive
air quite unlike the manner of a child. Dots of heads, curious faces,
peering and starting eyes, met my vision. I heard sharp talk in German,
and a rider flung his arm, as if he wished to crash the universe, and
flew off. The margravine seemed to me more an implacable parrot than a
noble lady. I thought to myself: This is my father, and I am not
overjoyed or grateful. In the same way, I felt that the daylight was
bronze, and I did not wonder at it: nay, I reasoned on the probability of
a composition of sun and mould producing that colour. The truth was, the
powers of my heart and will were frozen; I thought and felt at random.
And I crave excuses for dwelling on such trifling phenomena of the
sensations, which have been useful to me by helping me to realize the
scene, even as at the time they obscured it.

According to Temple's description, when the statue moved its head toward
him, a shudder went through the crowd, and a number of forefingers were
levelled at it, and the head moved toward me, marked of them all. Its
voice was answered by a dull puling scream from women, and the men gaped.
When it descended from the saddle, the act was not performed with one
bound, as I fancied, but difficultly; and it walked up to me like a
figure dragging logs at its heels. Half-a-dozen workmen ran to arrest it;
some townswomen fainted. There was a heavy altercation in German between
the statue and the superintendent of the arrangements. The sun shone
brilliantly on our march to the line of carriages where the Prince of
Eppenwelzen was talking to the margravine in a fury, and he dashed away
on his horse, after bellowing certain directions to his foresters and the
workmen, by whom we were surrounded; while the margravine talked loudly
and amiably, as though everything had gone well. Her watch was out. She
acknowledged my father's bow, and overlooked him. She seemed to have made
her courtiers smile. The ladies and gentlemen obeyed the wave of her hand
by quitting the ground; the band headed a long line of the commoner sort,
and a body of foresters gathered the remnants and joined them to the rear
of the procession. A liveried groom led away Temple's horse and mine.
Temple declared he could not sit after seeing the statue descend from its
pedestal.

Her Highness's behaviour roughened as soon as the place was clear of
company. She spoke at my father impetuously, with manifest scorn and
reproach, struck her silver-mounted stick on the carriage panels, again
and again stamped her foot, lifting a most variable emphatic countenance.
Princess Ottilia tried to intercede. The margravine clenched her hands,
and, to one not understanding her speech, appeared literally to blow the
little lady off with the breath of her mouth. Her whole bearing consisted
of volleys of abuse, closed by magisterial interrogations. Temple
compared her Highness's language to the running out of Captain Welsh's
chaincable, and my father's replies to the hauling in: his sentences were
short, they sounded like manful protestations; I barely noticed them.
Temple's version of it went: 'And there was your father apologizing, and
the margravine rating him,' etc. My father, as it happened, was careful
not to open his lips wide on account of the plaster, or thick coating of
paint on his face. No one would have supposed that he was burning with
indignation; the fact being, that to give vent to it, he would have had
to exercise his muscular strength; he was plastered and painted from head
to foot. The fixture of his wig and hat, too, constrained his skin, so
that his looks were no index of his feelings. I longed gloomily for the
moment to come when he would present himself to me in his natural form.
He was not sensible of the touch of my hand, nor I of his. There we had
to stand until the voluble portion of the margravine's anger came to an
end. She shut her eyes and bowed curtly to our salute.

'You have seen the last of me, madam,' my father said to her whirling
carriage-wheels.

He tried to shake, and strained in his ponderous garments. Temple gazed
abashed. I knew not how to act. My father kept lifting his knees on the
spot as if practising a walk.

The tent was in its old place covering the bronze horse. A workman
stepped ahead of us, and we all went at a strange leisurely pace down the
hill through tall pinetrees to where a closed vehicle awaited us. Here
were also a couple of lackeys, who deposited my father on a bed of moss,
and with much effort pulled his huge boots off, leaving him in red silk
stockings. Temple and I snatched his gauntlets; Temple fell backward, but
we had no thought of laughter; people were seen approaching, and the
three of us jumped into the carriage. I had my father's living hand in
mine to squeeze; feeling him scarcely yet the living man I had sought,
and with no great warmth of feeling. His hand was very moist. Often I
said, 'Dear father!--Papa, I'm so glad at last,' in answer to his
short-breathed 'Richie, my little lad, my son Richmond! You found me out;
you found me!' We were conscious that his thick case of varnished
clothing was against us. One would have fancied from his way of speaking
that he suffered from asthma. I was now gifted with a tenfold power of
observation, and let nothing escape me.

Temple, sitting opposite, grinned cheerfully at times to encourage our
spirits; he had not recovered from his wonderment, nor had I introduced
him. My father, however, had caught his name. Temple (who might as well
have talked, I thought) was perpetually stealing secret glances of
abstracted perusal at him with a pair of round infant's eyes, sucking his
reflections the while. My father broke our silence.

'Mr. Temple, I have the honour,' he said, as if about to cough; 'the
honour of making your acquaintance; I fear you must surrender the hope of
making mine at present.'

Temple started and reddened like a little fellow detected in straying
from his spelling-book, which was the window-frame. In a minute or so the
fascination proved too strong for him; his eyes wandered from the window
and he renewed his shy inspection bit by bit as if casting up a column of
figures.

'Yes, Mr. Temple, we are in high Germany,' said my father.

It must have cost Temple cruel pain, for he was a thoroughly gentlemanly
boy, and he could not resist it. Finally he surprised himself in his
stealthy reckoning: arrived at the full-breech or buttoned waistband,
about half-way up his ascent from the red silk stocking, he would pause
and blink rapidly, sometimes jump and cough.

To put him at his ease, my father exclaimed, 'As to this exterior,' he
knocked his knuckles on the heaving hard surface, 'I can only affirm that
it was, on horseback--ahem! particularly as the horse betrayed no
restivity, pronounced perfect! The sole complaint of our interior
concerns the resemblance we bear to a lobster. Human somewhere, I do
believe myself to be. I shall have to be relieved of my shell before I
can at all satisfactorily proclaim the fact. I am a human being, believe
me.'

He begged permission to take breath a minute.

'I know you for my son's friend, Mr. Temple: here is my son, my boy,
Harry Lepel Richmond Roy. Have patience: I shall presently stand
unshelled. I have much to relate; you likewise have your narrative in
store. That you should have lit on me at the critical instant is one of
those miracles which combine to produce overwhelming testimony--ay,
Richie! without a doubt there is a hand directing our destiny.' His
speaking in such a strain, out of pure kindness to Temple, huskily, with
his painful attempt to talk like himself, revived his image as the father
of my heart and dreams, and stirred my torpid affection, though it was
still torpid enough, as may be imagined, when I state that I remained
plunged in contemplation of his stocking of red silk emerging from the
full bronzed breech, considering whether his comparison of himself to a
shell-fish might not be a really just one. We neither of us regained our
true natures until he was free of every vestige of the garb of Prince
Albrecht Wohlgemuth. Attendants were awaiting him at the garden-gate of a
beautiful villa partly girdled by rising fir-woods on its footing of
bright green meadow. They led him away, and us to bath-rooms.




CHAPTER XVIII

WE PASS A DELIGHTFUL EVENING, AND I HAVE A MORNING VISION

In a long saloon ornamented with stags' horns and instruments of the
chase, tusks of boars, spear-staves, boarknives, and silver horns, my
father, I, and Temple sat down to a memorable breakfast, my father in his
true form, dressed in black silken jacket and knee-breeches,
purple-stockings and pumps; without a wig, I thanked heaven to see. How
blithely he flung out his limbs and heaved his chest released from
confinement! His face was stained brownish, but we drank old Rhine wine,
and had no eye for appearances.

'So you could bear it no longer, Richie?' My father interrupted the
narrative I doled out, anxious for his, and he began, and I interrupted
him.

'You did think of me often, papa, didn't you?'

His eyes brimmed with tenderness.

'Think of you!' he sighed.

I gave him the account of my latest adventures in a few panting breaths,
suppressing the Bench. He set my face to front him.

'We are two fools, Mr. Temple,' he said.

'No, sir,' said Temple.

'Now you speak, papa,' said I.

He smiled warmly.

'Richie begins to remember me.'

I gazed at him to show it was true.

'I do, papa--I'm not beginning to.'

At his request, I finished the tale of my life at school. 'Ah, well! that
was bad fortune; this is good!' he exclaimed. 'Tis your father, my son:
'tis day-light, though you look at it through a bed-curtain, and think
you are half-dreaming. Now then for me, Richie.'

My father went on in this wise excitedly:

'I was laying the foundation of your fortune here, my boy. Heavens! when
I was in that bronze shell I was astonished only at my continence in not
bursting. You have grown,--you have shot up and filled out. I register my
thanks to your grandfather Beltham; the same, in a minor degree, to
Captain Jasper Welsh. Between that man Rippenger and me there shall be
dealings. He flogged you: let that pass. He exposed you to the contempt
of your school-fellows because of a breach in my correspondence with a
base-born ferule-swinger. What are we coming to? Richie, my son, I was
building a future for you here. And Colonel Goodwin-Colonel Goodwin, you
encountered him too, and his marriageable daughter--I owe it to them that
I have you here! Well, in the event of my sitting out the period this
morning as the presentment of Prince Albrecht, I was to have won
something would have astonished that unimpressionable countryman of ours.
Goodness gracious, my boy! when I heard your English shout, it went to my
marrow. Could they expect me to look down on my own flesh and blood, on
my son--my son Richmond--after a separation of years, and continue a
statue? Nay, I followed my paternal impulse. Grant that the show was
spoilt, does the Markgrafin insist on my having a bronze heart to carry
on her pastime? Why, naturally, I deplore a failure, let the cause be
what it will. Whose regrets can eclipse those of the principal actor?
Quotha! as our old Plays have it. Regrets? Did I not for fifteen minutes
and more of mortal time sit in view of a multitude, motionless, I ask
you, like a chiselled block of stone,--and the compact was one quarter of
an hour, and no farther? That was my stipulation. I told her--I can hold
out one quarter of an hour: I pledged myself to it. Who, then, is to
blame? I was exposed to view twenty-three minutes, odd seconds. Is there
not some ancient story of a monstrous wretch baked in his own bull? My
situation was as bad. If I recollect aright, he could roar; no such
relief was allowed to me. And I give you my word, Richie, lads both, that
while that most infernal Count Fretzel was pouring forth his execrable
humdrum, I positively envied the privilege of an old palsied fellow,
chief boatman of the forest lake, for, thinks I, hang him! he can nod his
head and I can not. Let me assure you, twenty minutes of an ordeal like
that,--one posture, mind you, no raising of your eyelids, taking your
breath mechanically, and your heart beating--jumping like an enraged
balletdancer boxed in your bosom--a literal description, upon my honour;
and not only jumping, jumping every now and then, I may say, with a toe
in your throat: I was half-choked:--well, I say, twenty minutes,
twenty-seven minutes and a half of that, getting on, in fact, to
half-an-hour, it is superhuman!--by heavens, it is heroical!

And observe my reward: I have a son--my only one. I have been divided
from him for years; I am establishing his fortune; I know he is provided
with comforts: Richie, you remember the woman Waddy? A faithful soul! She
obtained my consent at last--previously I had objections; in fact, your
address was withheld from the woman--to call at your school. She saw
Rippenger, a girl of considerable attractions. She heard you were located
at Riversley: I say, I know the boy is comfortably provided for; but we
have been separated since he was a little creature with curls on his
forehead, scarce breeched.'

I protested:

'Papa, I have been in jacket and trousers I don't know how long.'

'Let me pursue,' said my father. 'And to show you, Richie, it is a golden
age ever when you and I are together, and ever shall be till we lose our
manly spirit, and we cling to that,--till we lose our princely spirit,
which we never will abandon--perish rather!--I drink to you, and
challenge you; and, mind you, old Hock wine has charms. If Burgundy is
the emperor of wines, Hock is the empress. For youngsters, perhaps, I
should except the Hock that gets what they would fancy a trifle pique,
turned with age, so as to lose in their opinion its empress flavour.'

Temple said modestly: 'I should call that the margravine of wines.'

My father beamed on him with great approving splendour. 'Join us, Mr.
Temple; you are a man of wit, and may possibly find this specimen worthy
of you. This wine has a history. You are drinking wine with blood in it.
Well, I was saying, the darling of my heart has been torn from me; I am
in a foreign land; foreign, that is, by birth, and on the whole foreign.
Yes!--I am the cynosure of eyes; I am in a singular posture, a singular
situation; I hear a cry in the tongue of my native land, and what I
presume is my boy's name: I look, I behold him, I follow a parent's
impulse. On my soul! none but a fish-father could have stood against it.

Well, for this my reward is--and I should have stepped from a cathedral
spire just the same, if I had been mounted on it--that I, I,--and the
woman knows all my secret--I have to submit to the foul tirade of a
vixen.

She drew language, I protest, from the slums. And I entreat you, Mr.
Temple, with your "margravine of wines"--which was very neatly said, to
be sure--note you this curious point for the confusion of Radicals in
your after life; her Highness's pleasure was to lend her tongue to the
language--or something like it--of a besotted fish-wife; so! very well,
and just as it is the case with that particular old Hock you youngsters
would disapprove of, and we cunning oldsters know to contain more virtues
in maturity than a nunnery of May-blooming virgins, just so the very
faults of a royal lady-royal by birth and in temper a termagant--impart a
perfume! a flavour! You must age; you must live in Courts, you must sound
the human bosom, rightly to appreciate it. She is a woman of the most
malicious fine wit imaginable.

She is a generous woman, a magnanimous woman; wear her chains and she
will not brain you with her club. She is the light, the centre of every
society where she appears, like what shall I say? like the moon in a bowl
of old Rhenish. And you will drain that bowl to the bottom to seize her,
as it were--catch a correct idea of her; ay, and your brains are drowned
in the attempt. Yes, Richie; I was aware of your residence at Riversley.
Were you reminded of your wandering dada on Valentine's day? Come, my
boy, we have each of us a thousand things to relate. I may be dull--I do
not understand what started you on your journey in search of me. An
impulse? An accident? Say, a directing angel! We rest our legs here till
evening, and then we sup. You will be astonished to hear that you have
dined. 'Tis the fashion with the Germans. I promise you good wine shall
make it up to you for the return to school-habits. We sup, and we pack
our scanty baggage, and we start tonight. Brook no insult at Courts if
you are of material value: if not, it is unreservedly a question whether
you like kickings.'

My father paused, yawned and stretched, to be rid of the remainder of his
aches and stiffness. Out of a great yawn he said:

'Dear lads, I have fallen into the custom of the country; I crave your
permission that I may smoke. Wander, if you choose, within hail of me, or
sit by me, if you can bear it, and talk of your school-life, and your
studies. Your aunt Dorothy, Richie? She is well? I know not her like. I
could bear to hear of any misfortune but that she suffered pain.

My father smoked his cigar peacefully. He had laid a guitar on his knees,
and flipped a string, or chafed over all the strings, and plucked and
thrummed them as his mood varied. We chatted, and watched the going down
of the sun, and amused ourselves idly, fermenting as we were. Anything
that gave pleasure to us two boys pleased and at once occupied my father.
It was without aid from Temple's growing admiration of him that I
recovered my active belief and vivid delight in his presence. My younger
days sprang up beside me like brothers. No one talked, looked, flashed,
frowned, beamed, as he did! had such prompt liveliness as he! such
tenderness! No one was ever so versatile in playfulness. He took the
colour of the spirits of the people about him. His vivacious or sedate
man-of-the-world tone shifted to playfellow's fun in a twinkling. I used
as a little fellow to think him larger than he really was, but he was of
good size, inclined to be stout; his eyes were grey, rather prominent,
and his forehead sloped from arched eyebrows. So conversational were his
eyes and brows that he could persuade you to imagine he was carrying on a
dialogue without opening his mouth. His voice was charmingly clear; his
laughter confident, fresh, catching, the outburst of his very self, as
laughter should be. Other sounds of laughter were like echoes.

Strange to say, I lost the links of my familiarity with him when he left
us on a short visit to his trunks and portmanteaux, and had to lean on
Temple, who tickled but rejoiced me by saying: 'Richie, your father is
just the one I should like to be secretary to.'

We thought it a pity to have to leave this nice foreign place
immediately. I liked the scenery, and the wine, and what I supposed to be
the habit of the gentlemen here to dress in silks. On my father's return
to us I asked him if we could not stay till morning.

'Till morning, then,' he said: 'and to England with the first lark.'

His complexion was ruddier; his valet had been at work to restore it; he
was getting the sanguine hue which coloured my recollection of him.
Wearing a black velvet cap and a Spanish furred cloak, he led us over the
villa. In Sarkeld he resided at the palace, and generally at the
lake-palace on the removal of the Court thither. The margravine had
placed the villa, which was her own property, at his disposal, the better
to work out their conspiracy.

'It would have been mine!' said my father, bending suddenly to my ear,
and humming his philosophical 'heigho,' as he stepped on in minuet
fashion. We went through apartments rich with gilded oak and pine
panellings: in one was a rough pattern of a wooden horse opposite a
mirror; by no means a figure of a horse, but apparently a number of
pieces contributed by a carpenter's workshop, having a rueful seat in the
middle. My father had practised the attitude of Prince Albrecht
Wohlgemuth on it. 'She timed me five and twenty minutes there only
yesterday,' he said; and he now supposed he had sat the bronze horse as a
statue in public view exactly thirty-seven minutes and a quarter. Tubs
full of colouring liquid to soak the garments of the prince, pots of
paint, and paint and plaster brushes, hinted the magnitude of the
preparations.

'Here,' said my father in another apartment, 'I was this morning
apparelled at seven o'clock: and I would have staked my right arm up to
the collar-bone on the success of the undertaking!'

'Weren't they sure to have found it out in the end, papa?' I inquired.

'I am not so certain of that,' he rejoined: 'I cannot quaff consolation
from that source. I should have been covered up after exhibition; I
should have been pronounced imperfect in my fitting-apparatus; the
sculptor would have claimed me, and I should have been enjoying the
fruits of a brave and harmless conspiracy to do honour to an illustrious
prince, while he would have been moulding and casting an indubitable
bronze statue in my image. A fig for rumours! We show ourself; we are
caught from sight; we are again on show. Now this being successfully
done, do you see, Royalty declines to listen to vulgar tattle.
Presumably, Richie, it was suspected by the Court that the margravine had
many months ago commanded the statue at her own cost, and had set her
mind on winning back the money. The wonder of it was my magnificent
resemblance to the defunct. I sat some three hours before the old
warrior's portraits in the dining-saloon of the lake-palace. Accord me
one good spell of meditation over a tolerable sketch, I warrant myself to
represent him to the life, provided that he was a personage: I incline to
stipulate for handsome as well. On my word of honour as a man and a
gentleman, I pity the margravine--my poor good Frau Feldmarschall! Now,
here, Richie,'--my father opened a side-door out of an elegant little
room into a spacious dark place, 'here is her cabinet-theatre, where we
act German and French comediettas in Spring and Autumn. I have
superintended it during the two or more years of my stay at the Court.
Humph! 'tis over.'

He abruptly closed the door. His dress belonged to the part of a Spanish
nobleman, personated by him in a Play called The Hidalgo Enraged, he
said, pointing a thumb over his shoulder at the melancholy door, behind
which gay scenes had sparkled.

'Papa!' said I sadly, for consolation.

'You're change for a sovereign to the amount of four hundred and
forty-nine thousand shillings every time you speak!' cried he, kissing my
forehead.

He sparkled in good earnest on hearing that I had made acquaintance with
the little Princess Ottilia. What I thought of her, how she looked at me,
what I said to her, what words she answered, how the acquaintance began,
who were observers of it,--I had to repair my omission to mention her by
furnishing a precise description of the circumstances, describing her
face and style, repeating her pretty English.

My father nodded: he thought I exaggerated that foreign English of hers;
but, as I said, I was new to it and noticed it. He admitted the greater
keenness of attention awakened by novelty.

'Only,' said he, 'I rather wonder--' and here he smiled at me
inquiringly. ''Tis true,' he added, 'a boy of fourteen or fifteen--ay,
Richie, have your fun out. A youngster saw the comic side of her. Do you
know, that child has a remarkable character? Her disposition is totally
unfathomable. You are a deep reader of English poetry, I hope; she
adores it, and the English Navy. She informed me that if she had been the
English people she would have made Nelson king. The Royal family of
England might see objections to that, I told her. Cries she: "Oh!
anything for a sea-hero." You will find these young princes and
princesses astonishingly revolutionary when they entertain brains. Now at
present, just at present, an English naval officer, and a poet, stand
higher in the esteem of that young Princess Ottilia than dukes, kings, or
emperors. So you have seen her!' my father ejaculated musingly, and
hummed, and said: 'By the way, we must be careful not to offend our
grandpapa Beltham, Richie. Good acres--good anchorage; good coffers--good
harbourage. Regarding poetry, my dear boy, you ought to be writing it,
for I do--the diversion of leisure hours, impromptus. In poetry, I would
scorn anything but impromptus. I was saying, Richie, that if tremendous
misfortune withholds from you your legitimate prestige, you must have the
substantial element. 'Tis your springboard to vault by, and cushions on
the other side if you make a miss and fall. 'Tis the essence if you have
not the odour.'

I followed my father's meaning as the shadow of a bird follows it in
sunlight; it made no stronger an impression than a flying shadow on the
grass; still I could verify subsequently that I had penetrated him--I had
caught the outline of his meaning--though I was little accustomed to his
manner of communicating his ideas: I had no notion of what he touched on
with the words, prestige, essence, and odour.

My efforts to gather the reason for his having left me neglected at
school were fruitless. 'Business, business! sad necessity! hurry,
worry-the-hounds!' was his nearest approach to an explicit answer; and
seeing I grieved his kind eyes, I abstained. Nor did I like to defend Mr.
Rippenger for expecting to be paid. We came to that point once or twice,
when so sharply wronged did he appear, and vehement and indignant, that I
banished thoughts which marred my luxurious contentment in hearing him
talk and sing, and behave in his old ways and new habits.

Plain velvet was his dress at dinner. We had a yellow Hock. Temple's
meditative face over it, to discover the margravine, or something, in its
flavour, was a picture. It was an evening of incessant talking; no
telling of events straightforwardly, but all by fits--all here and there.
My father talked of Turkey, so I learnt he had been in that country;
Temple of the routine of our life at Riversley; I of Kiomi, the gipsy
girl; then we two of Captain Jasper Welsh; my father of the Princess
Ottilia. When I alluded to the margravine, he had a word to say of Mrs.
Waddy; so I learnt she had been in continual correspondence with him, and
had cried heavily about me, poor soul. Temple laughed out a recollection
of Captain Bulsted's 'hic, haec, hoc'; I jumped Janet Ilchester up on the
table; my father expatiated on the comfort of a volume of Shakespeare to
an exiled Englishman. We drank to one another, and heartily to the
statue. My father related the history of the margravine's plot in
duck-and-drake skips, and backward to his first introduction to her at
some Austrian Baths among the mountains. She wanted amusement--he
provided it; she never let him quit her sight from that moment.

'And now,' he said, 'she has lost me!' He drew out of his pocket-book a
number of designs for the statue of Prince Albrecht, to which the
margravine's initials were appended, and shuffled them, and sighed, and
said:'Most complete arrangements! most complete! No body of men were ever
so well drilled as those fellows up at Bella Vista--could not have been!
And at the climax, in steps the darling boy for whom I laboured and
sweated, and down we topple incontinently! Nothing would have shaken me
but the apparition of my son! I was proof against everything but that! I
sat invincible for close upon an hour--call it an hour! Not a muscle of
me moved: I repeat, the heart in my bosom capered like an independent
organ; had it all its own way, leaving me mine, until Mr. Temple, take my
word for it, there is a guiding hand in some families; believe it, and be
serene in adversity. The change of life at a merry Court to life in a
London alley will exercise our faith. But the essential thing is that
Richie has been introduced here, and I intend him to play a part here.
The grandson and heir of one of the richest commoners in England--I am
not saying commoner as a term of reproach--possessed of a property that
turns itself over and doubles itself every ten years, may--mind you,
may--on such a solid foundation as that!--and as to birth, your Highness
has only to grant us a private interview.'

Temple was dazed by this mystifying address to him; nor could I
understand it.

'Why, papa, you always wished for me to go into Parliament,' said I.

'I do,' he replied, 'and I wish you to lead the London great world. Such
topics are for by-and-by. Adieu to them!' He kissed his wafting
finger-tips.

We fell upon our random talk again with a merry rattle.

I had to give him a specimen of my piano-playing and singing.

He shook his head. 'The cricketer and the scholar have been developed at
the expense of the musician; and music, Richie, music unlocks the chamber
of satinrose.'

Late at night we separated. Temple and I slept in companion-rooms. Deadly
drowsy, the dear little fellow sat on the edge of my bed chattering of
his wonder. My dreams led me wandering with a ship's diver under the sea,
where we walked in a light of pearls and exploded old wrecks. I was
assuring the glassy man that it was almost as clear beneath the waves as
above, when I awoke to see my father standing over me in daylight; and in
an ecstasy I burst into sobs.

'Here, Richie'--he pressed fresh violets on my nostrils--'you have had a
morning visitor. Quick out of bed, and you will see the little fairy
crossing the meadow.'

I leapt to the window in time to have in view the little Princess
Ottilia, followed by her faithful gaunt groom, before she was lost in the
shadow of the fir-trees.




CHAPTER XIX

OUR RETURN HOMEWARD

We started for England at noon, much against my secret wishes; but my
father would not afford the margravine time to repent of her violent
language and injustice toward him. Reflection increased his indignation.
Anything that went wrong on the first stages of the journey caused him to
recapitulate her epithets and reply to them proudly. He confided to me in
Cologne Cathedral that the entire course of his life was a grand plot,
resembling an unfinished piece of architecture, which might, at a future
day, prove the wonder of the world: and he had, therefore, packed two
dozen of hoar old (uralt: he used comical German) Hock for a present to
my grandfather Beltham, in the hope of its being found acceptable.

'For, Richie,' said he, 'you may not know--and it is not to win your
thanks I inform you of it--that I labour unremittingly in my son's
interests. I have established him, on his majority, in Germany, at a
Court. My object now is to establish him in England. Promise me that it
shall be the decided endeavour of your energies and talents to rise to
the height I point out to you? You promise, I perceive,' he added, sharp
in detecting the unpleasant predicament of a boy who is asked to speak
priggishly. So then I could easily promise with a firm voice. He dropped
certain explosive hints, which reminded me of the funny ideas of my state
and greatness I had when a child. I shrugged at them; I cared nothing for
revelations to come by-and-by. My object was to unite my father and
grandfather on terms of friendship.

This was the view that now absorbed and fixed my mind. To have him a
frequent visitor at Riversley, if not a resident in the house, enlivening
them all, while I, perhaps, trifled a cavalry sabre, became one of my
settled dreams. The difficult part of the scheme appeared to me the
obtaining of my father's consent. I mentioned it, and he said immediately
that he must have his freedom. 'Now, for instance,' said he, 'what is my
desire at this moment? I have always a big one perched on a rock in the
distance; but I speak of my present desire. And let it be supposed that
the squire is one of us: we are returning to England. Well, I want to
show you a stork's nest. We are not far enough South for the stork to
build here. It is a fact, Richie, that I do want to show you the bird for
luck, and as a feature of the country. And in me, a desire to do a thing
partakes of the impetus of steam.

Well, you see we are jogging home to England. I resist myself for duty's
sake: that I can do. But if the squire were here with his yea and his
nay, by heavens! I should be off to the top of the Rhine like a tornado.
I submit to circumstances: I cannot, and I will not, be dictated to by
men.'

'That seems to me rather unreasonable,' I remonstrated.

'It is; I am ashamed of it,' he answered. 'Do as you will, Richie; set me
down at Riversley, but under no slight, mark you. I keep my honour
intact, like a bottled cordial; my unfailing comfort in adversity! I hand
it to you, my son, on my death-bed, and say, "You have there the essence
of my life. Never has it been known of me that I swallowed an insult."'

'Then, papa, I shall have a talk with the squire.'

'Make good your ground in the castle,' said he. 'I string a guitar
outside. You toss me a key from the walls. If there is room, and I have
leisure, I enter. If not, you know I am paving your way in other
quarters. Riversley, my boy, is an excellent foothold and fortress:
Riversley is not the world. At Riversley I should have to wear a double
face, and, egad! a double stomach-bag, like young Jack feeding with the
giant--one full of ambition, the other of provender. That place is our
touchstone to discover whether we have prudence. We have, I hope. And we
will have, Mr. Temple, a pleasant day or two in Paris.'

It was his habit to turn off the bent of these conversations by drawing
Temple into them. Temple declared there was no feeling we were in a
foreign country while he was our companion. We simply enjoyed strange
scenes, looking idly out of our windows. Our recollection of the
strangest scene ever witnessed filled us with I know not what scornful
pleasure, and laughed in the background at any sight or marvel pretending
to amuse us. Temple and I cantered over the great Belgian battlefield,
talking of Bella Vista tower, the statue, the margravine, our sour milk
and black-bread breakfast, the little Princess Ottilia, with her 'It is
my question,' and 'You were kind to my lambs, sir,' thoughtless of glory
and dead bones. My father was very differently impressed. He was in an
exultant glow, far outmatching the bloom on our faces when we rejoined
him. I cried,

'Papa, if the prince won't pay for a real statue, I will, and I'll
present it in your name!'

'To the nation?' cried he, staring, and arresting his arm in what seemed
an orchestral movement.

'To the margravine!'

He heard, but had to gather his memory. He had been fighting the battle,
and made light of Bella Vista. I found that incidents over which a day or
two had rolled lost their features to him. He never smiled at
recollections. If they were forced on him noisily by persons he liked,
perhaps his face was gay, but only for a moment. The gaiety of his nature
drew itself from hot-springs of hopefulness: our arrival in England, our
interviews there, my majority Burgundy, my revisitation of Germany--these
events to come gave him the aspect children wear out a-Maying or in an
orchard. He discussed the circumstances connected with the statue as dry
matter-of-fact, and unless it was his duty to be hilarious at the
dinner-table, he was hardly able to respond to a call on his past life
and mine. His future, too, was present tense: 'We do this,' not 'we will
do this'; so that, generally, no sooner did we speak of an anticipated
scene than he was acting in it. I studied him eagerly, I know, and yet
quite unconsciously, and I came to no conclusions. Boys are always
putting down the ciphers of their observations of people beloved by them,
but do not add up a sum total.

Our journey home occupied nearly eleven weeks, owing to stress of money
on two occasions. In Brussels I beheld him with a little beggar-girl in
his arms.

'She has asked me for a copper coin, Richie,' he said, squeezing her fat
cheeks to make cherries of her lips.

I recommended him to give her a silver one.

'Something, Richie, I must give the little wench, for I have kissed her,
and, in my list of equivalents, gold would be the sole form of repayment
after that. You must buy me off with honour, my boy.'

I was compelled to receive a dab from the child's nose, by way of a kiss,
in return for buying him off with honour.

The child stumped away on the pavement fronting our hotel, staring at its
fist that held the treasure.

'Poor pet wee drab of it!' exclaimed my father. 'One is glad, Richie, to
fill a creature out of one's emptiness. Now she toddles; she is digesting
it rapidly. The last performance of one's purse is rarely so pleasant as
that. I owe it to her that I made the discovery in time.'

In this manner I also made the discovery that my father had no further
supply of money, none whatever. How it had run out without his remarking
it, he could not tell; he could only assure me that he had become aware
of the fact while searching vainly for a coin to bestow on the
beggar-girl. I despatched a letter attested by a notary of the city,
applying for money to the banker to whom Colonel Goodwin had introduced
me on my arrival on the Continent. The money came, and in the meantime we
had formed acquaintances and entertained them; they were chiefly half-pay
English military officers, dashing men. One, a Major Dykes, my father
established in our hotel, and we carried him on to Paris, where,
consequent upon our hospitalities, the purse was again deficient.

Two reasons for not regretting it were adduced by my father; firstly,
that it taught me not to despise the importance of possessing money;
secondly, that we had served our country by assisting Dykes, who was on
the scent of a new and terrible weapon of destruction, which he believed
to be in the hands of the French Government. Major Dykes disappeared on
the scent, but we had the satisfaction of knowing that we had done our
best toward saving the Navy of Great Britain from being blown out of
water. Temple and I laughed over Major Dykes, and he became our puppet
for by-play, on account of his enormous whiskers, his passion for strong
drinks, and his air of secresy. My father's faith in his patriotic
devotedness was sufficient to withhold me from suspicions of his
character. Whenever my instinct, or common sense, would have led me to
differ with my father in opinion fun supervened; I was willing that
everything in the world should be as he would have it be, and took up
with a spirit of laughter, too happy in having won him, in having fished
him out of the deep sea at one fling of the net, as he said, to care for
accuracy of sentiment in any other particular.

Our purse was at its lowest ebb; he suggested no means of replenishing
it, and I thought of none. He had heard that it was possible to live in
Paris upon next to nothing with very great luxury, so we tried it; we
strolled through the lilac aisles among bonnes and babies, attended
military spectacles, rode on omnibuses, dined on the country heights,
went to theatres, and had a most pleasurable time, gaining everywhere
front places, friendly smiles, kind little services, in a way that would
have been incomprehensible to me but for my consciousness of the magical
influence of my father's address, a mixture of the ceremonious and the
affable such as the people could not withstand.

'The poet is perhaps, on the whole, more exhilarating than the alderman,'
he said.

These were the respective names given by him to the empty purse and the
full purse. We vowed we preferred the poet.

'Ay,' said he, 'but for all that the alderman is lighter on his feet: I
back him to be across the Channel first. The object of my instructions to
you will be lost, Richie, if I find you despising the Alderman's Pegasus.
On money you mount. We are literally chained here, you know, there is no
doubt about it; and we are adding a nail to our fetters daily. True, you
are accomplishing the Parisian accent. Paris has also this immense
advantage over all other cities: 'tis the central hotel on the high-road
of civilization. In Paris you meet your friends to a certainty; it
catches them every one in turn; so now we must abroad early and late, and
cut for trumps.' A meeting with a friend of my father, Mr. Monterez
Williams, was the result of our resolute adoption of this system. He
helped us on to Boulogne, where my father met another friend, to whom he
gave so sumptuous a dinner that we had not money enough to pay the hotel
bill.

'Now observe the inconvenience of leaving Paris,' said he. 'Ten to one we
shall have to return. We will try a week's whistling on the jetty; and if
no luck comes, and you will admit, Richie--Mr. Temple, I call your
attention to it--that luck will scarcely come in profuse expedition
through the narrow neck of a solitary seaport, why, we must return to
Paris.'

I proposed to write to my aunt Dorothy for money, but he would not hear
of that. After two or three days of whistling, I saw my old friend, Mr.
Bannerbridge, step out of the packetboat. On condition of my writing to
my aunt to say that I was coming home, he advanced me the sum we were in
need of, grudgingly though, and with the prediction that we should break
down again, which was verified. It occurred only a stage from Riversley,
where my grandfather's name was good as coin of the realm. Besides, my
father remained at the inn to guarantee the payment of the bill, while
Temple and I pushed on in a fly with the two dozen of Hock. It could
hardly be called a break-down, but my father was not unwilling for me to
regard it in that light. Among his parting remarks was an impressive
adjuration to me to cultivate the squire's attachment at all costs.

'Do this,' he said, 'and I shall know that the lesson I have taught you
on your journey homeward has not been thrown away. My darling boy! my
curse through life has been that the sense of weight in money is a sense
I am and was born utterly a stranger to. The consequence is, my grandest
edifices fall; there is no foundation for them. Not that I am worse,
understand me, than under a temporary cloud, and the blessing of heaven
has endowed me with a magnificent constitution. Heaven forefend that I
should groan for myself, or you for me! But digest what you have learnt,
Richie; press nothing on the squire; be guided by the advice of that
esteemed and admirable woman, your aunt Dorothy. And, by the way, you may
tell her confidentially of the progress of your friendship with the
Princess Ottilia. Here I shall employ my hours in a tranquil study of
nature until I see you.' Thus he sped me forward.

We sighted Riversley about mid-day on a sunny June morning. Compared with
the view from Bella Vista, our firs looked scanty, our heath-tracts dull,
as places having no page of history written on them, our fresh green
meadows not more than commonly homely. I was so full of my sense of
triumph in my adventurous journey and the recovery of my father, that I
gazed on the old Grange from a towering height. The squire was on the
lawn, surrounded by a full company: the Ilchesters, the Ambroses, the
Wilfords, Captain and Squire Gregory Bulsted, the Rubreys, and others,
all bending to roses, to admire, smell, or pluck. Charming groups of
ladies were here and there; and Temple whispered as we passed them:

'We beat foreigners in our women, Richie.'

I, making it my business to talk with perfect unconcern, replied

'Do you think so? Perhaps. Not in all cases'; all the while I was
exulting at the sweet beams of England radiating from these dear
early-morning-looking women.

My aunt Dorothy swam up to me, and, kissing me, murmured:

'Take no rebuff from your grandpapa, darling.'

My answer was: 'I have found him!'

Captain Bulsted sang out our names; I caught sight of Julia Rippenger's
face; the squire had his back turned to me, which reminded me of my first
speech with Captain Jasper Welsh, and I thought to myself, I know
something of the world now, and the thing is to keep a good temper. Here
there was no wire-coil to intercept us, so I fronted him quickly.

'Hulloa!' he cried, and gave me his shoulder.

'Temple is your guest, sir,' said I.

He was obliged to stretch out his hand to Temple.

A prompt instinct warned me that I must show him as much Beltham as I
could summon.

'Dogs and horses all right, sir?' I asked.

Captain Bulsted sauntered near.

'Here, William,' said the squire, 'tell this fellow about my stables.'

'In excellent condition, Harry Richmond,' returned the captain.

'Oh! he 's got a new name, I 'll swear,' said the squire.

'Not I!'

'Then what have you got of your trip, eh?'

'A sharper eye than I had, sir.'

'You've been sharpening it in London, have you?'

'I've been a little farther than London, squire.'

'Well, you're not a liar.'

'There, you see the lad can stand fire!' Captain Bulsted broke in. 'Harry
Richmond, I'm proud to shake your hand, but I'll wait till you're through
the ceremony with your grandad.'

The squire's hands were crossed behind him. I smiled boldly in his face.

'Shall I make the tour of you to get hold of one of them, sir?' He
frowned and blinked.

'Shuffle in among the ladies; you seem to know how to make friends among
them,' he said, and pretended to disengage his right hand for the purpose
of waving it toward one of the groups.

I seized it, saying heartily, 'Grandfather, upon my honour, I love you,
and I'm glad to be home again.'

'Mind you, you're not at home till you've begged Uberly's pardon in
public, you know what for,' he rejoined.

'Leaving the horse at that inn is on my conscience,' said I.

The squire grumbled a bit.

'Suppose he kicks?' said I; and the captain laughed, and the squire too,
and I was in such high spirits I thought of a dozen witty suggestions
relative to the seat of the conscience, and grieved for a minute at going
to the ladies.

All the better; keep him there Captain Bulsted convoyed me to pretty
Irish-eyed Julia Rippenger. Temple had previously made discovery of Janet
Ilchester. Relating our adventures on different parts of the lawn, we
both heard that Colonel Goodwin and his daughter had journeyed down to
Riversley to smooth the way for my return; so my easy conquest of the
squire was not at all wonderful; nevertheless, I maintained my sense of
triumph, and was assured in my secret heart that I had a singular
masterfulness, and could, when I chose to put it forth, compel my
grandfather to hold out his hand to my father as he had done to me.

Julia Rippenger was a guest at Riversley through a visit paid to her by
my aunt Dorothy in alarm at my absence. The intention was to cause the
squire a distraction. It succeeded; for the old man needed lively prattle
of a less childish sort than Janet Ilchester's at his elbow, and that
young lady, though true enough in her fashion, was the ardent friend of
none but flourishing heads; whereas Julia, finding my name under a cloud
at Riversley, spoke of me, I was led to imagine by Captain Bulsted, as a
ballad hero, a gloriful fellow, a darling whose deeds were all
pardonable--a mere puff of smoke in the splendour of his nature.

'To hear the young lady allude to me in that style!' he confided to my
ear, with an ineffable heave of his big chest.

Certain good influences, at any rate, preserved the squire from
threatening to disinherit me. Colonel Goodwin had spoken to him very
manfully and wisely as to my relations with my father. The squire, it was
assumed by my aunt, and by Captain Bulsted and Julia, had undertaken to
wink at my father's claims on my affection. All three vehemently
entreated me to make no mention of the present of Hock to him, and not to
attempt to bring about an interview. Concerning the yellow wine I
disregarded their advice, for I held it to be a point of filial duty, and
an obligation religiously contracted beneath a cathedral dome; so I
performed the task of offering the Hock, stating that it was of ancient
birth. The squire bunched his features; he tutored his temper, and said
not a word. I fancied all was well. Before I tried the second step,
Captain Bulsted rode over to my father, who himself generously enjoined
the prudent course, in accordance with his aforegone precepts. He was
floated off, as he termed it, from the inn where he lay stranded, to
London, by I knew not what heaven-sent gift of money, bidding me keep in
view the grand career I was to commence at Dipwell on arriving at my
majority. I would have gone with him had he beckoned a finger. The
four-and-twenty bottles of Hock were ranged in a line for the stable-boys
to cock-shy at them under the squire's supervision and my enforced
attendance, just as revolutionary criminals are executed. I felt like the
survivor of friends, who had seen their blood flow.

He handed me a cheque for the payment of debts incurred in my recent
adventures. Who could help being grateful for it? And yet his remorseless
spilling of the kindly wine full of mellow recollections of my father and
the little princess, drove the sense of gratitude out of me.




CHAPTER XX

NEWS OF A FRESH CONQUEST OF MY FATHER'S

Temple went to sea. The wonder is that I did not go with him: we were
both in agreement that adventures were the only things worth living for,
and we despised English fellows who had seen no place but England. I
could not bear the long separation from my father that was my reason for
not insisting on the squire's consent to my becoming a midshipman. After
passing a brilliant examination, Temple had the good fortune to join
Captain Bulsted's ship, and there my honest-hearted friend dismally
composed his letter of confession, letting me know that he had been
untrue to friendship, and had proposed to Janet Ilchester, and
interchanged vows with her. He begged my forgiveness, but he did love her
so!--he hoped I would not mind. I sent him a reproachful answer; I never
cared for him more warmly than when I saw the letter shoot the slope of
the postoffice mouth. Aunt Dorothy undertook to communicate assurances of
my undying affection for him. As for Janet--Temple's letter, in which he
spoke of her avowed preference for Oriental presents, and declared his
intention of accumulating them on his voyages, was a harpoon in her side.
By means of it I worried and terrified her until she was glad to have it
all out before the squire. What did he do? He said that Margery, her
mother, was niggardly; a girl wanted presents, and I did not act up to my
duty; I ought to buy Turkey and Tunis to please her, if she had a mind
for them.

The further she was flattered the faster she cried; she had the face of
an old setter with these hideous tears. The squire promised her fifty
pounds per annum in quarterly payments, that she might buy what presents
she liked, and so tie herself to constancy. He said aside to me, as if he
had a knowledge of the sex--'Young ladies must have lots of knickknacks,
or their eyes 'll be caught right and left, remember that.' I should have
been delighted to see her caught. She talked of love in a ludicrous
second-hand way, sending me into fits of disgusted laughter. On other
occasions her lips were not hypocritical, and her figure anything but
awkward. She was a bold, plump girl, fond of male society. Heriot
enraptured her. I believed at the time she would have appointed a year to
marry him in, had he put the question. But too many women were in love
with Heriot. He and I met Kiomi on the road to the race-course on the
Southdowns; the prettiest racecourse in England, shut against gipsies. A
bare-footed swarthy girl ran beside our carriage and tossed us flowers.
He and a friend of his, young Lord Destrier, son of the Marquis of
Edbury, who knew my father well, talked and laughed with her, and thought
her so very handsome that I likewise began to stare, and I suddenly
called 'Kiomi!' She bounded back into the hedge. This was our second
meeting. It would have been a pleasant one had not Heriot and Destrier
pretended all sorts of things about our previous acquaintance. Neither of
us, they said, had made a bad choice, but why had we separated? She
snatched her hand out of mine with a grin of anger like puss in a fury.
We had wonderful fun with her. They took her to a great house near the
race-course, and there, assisted by one of the young ladies, dressed her
in flowing silks, and so passed her through the gate of the enclosure
interdicted to bare feet. There they led her to groups of fashionable
ladies, and got themselves into pretty scrapes. They said she was an
Indian. Heriot lost his wagers and called her a witch. She replied,
'You'll find I'm one, young man,' and that was the only true thing she
spoke of the days to come. Owing to the hubbub around the two who were
guilty of this unmeasured joke upon consequential ladies, I had to
conduct her to the gate. Instantly, and without a good-bye, she scrambled
up her skirts and ran at strides across the road and through the wood,
out of sight. She won her dress and a piece of jewelry.

With Heriot I went on a sad expedition, the same I had set out upon with
Temple. This time I saw my father behind those high red walls, once so
mysterious and terrible to me. Heriot made light of prisons for debt. He
insisted, for my consolation, that they had but a temporary dishonourable
signification; very estimable gentlemen, as well as scamps, inhabited
them, he said. The impression produced by my visit--the feasting among
ruined men who believed in good luck the more the lower they fell from
it, and their fearful admiration of my imprisoned father--was as if I had
drunk a stupefying liquor. I was unable clearly to reflect on it. Daily
afterwards, until I released him, I made journeys to usurers to get a
loan on the faith of the reversion of my mother's estate. Heriot, like
the real friend he was, helped me with his name to the bond. When my
father stood free, I had the proudest heart alive; and as soon as we had
parted, the most amazed. For a long while, for years, the thought of him
was haunted by racketballs and bearded men in their shirtsleeves; a scene
sickening to one's pride. Yet it had grown impossible for me to think of
him without pride. I delighted to hear him. We were happy when we were
together. And, moreover, he swore to me on his honour, in Mrs. Waddy's
presence, that he and the constable would henceforth keep an even pace.
His exuberant cheerfulness and charming playfulness were always
fascinating. His visions of our glorious future enchained me. How it was
that something precious had gone out of my life, I could not comprehend.

Julia Rippenger's marriage with Captain Bulsted was, an agreeable
distraction. Unfortunately for my peace of mind, she went to the altar
poignantly pale. My aunt Dorothy settled the match. She had schemed it,
her silence and half-downcast look seemed to confess, for the sake of her
own repose, but neither to her nor to others did that come of it. I wrote
a plain warning of the approaching catastrophe to Heriot, and received
his reply after it was over, to this effect:

'In my regiment we have a tolerable knowledge of women. They like change,
old Richie, and we must be content to let them take their twenty
shillings for a sovereign. I myself prefer the Navy to the Army; I have
no right to complain. Once she swore one thing, now she has sworn
another. We will hope the lady will stick to her choice, and not seek
smaller change. "I could not forgive coppers"; that 's quoting your dad.
I have no wish to see the uxorious object, though you praise him. His
habit of falling under the table is middling old-fashioned; but she may
like him the better, or she may cure him. Whatever she is as a woman, she
was a very nice girl to enliven the atmosphere of the switch. I sometimes
look at a portrait I have of J. R., which, I fancy, Mrs. William Bulsted
has no right to demand of me; but supposing her husband thinks he has,
why then I must consult my brother officers. We want a war, old Richie,
and I wish you were sitting at our mess, and not mooning about girls and
women.'

I presumed from this that Heriot's passion for Julia was extinct. Aunt
Dorothy disapproved of his tone, which I thought admirably philosophical
and coxcombi-cally imitable, an expression of the sort of thing I should
feel on hearing of Janet Ilchester's nuptials.

The daring and success of that foreign adventure of mine had, with the
aid of Colonel and Clara Goodwin, convinced the squire of the folly of
standing between me and him I loved. It was considered the best sign
possible that he should take me down on an inspection of his various
estates and his great coal-mine, and introduce me as the heir who would
soon relieve him of the task.

Perhaps he thought the smell of wealth a promising cure for such fits of
insubordination as I had exhibited. My occasional absences on my own
account were winked at. On my return the squire was sour and snappish, I
cheerful and complaisant; I grew cold, and he solicitous; he would drink
my health with a challenge to heartiness, and I drank to him heartily and
he relapsed to a fit of sulks, informing me, that in his time young men
knew when they were well off, and asking me whether I was up to any young
men's villanies, had any concealed debts perchance, because, if so--Oh!
he knew the ways of youngsters, especially when they fell into bad hands:
the list of bad titles rumbled on in an underbreath like cowardly
thunder:--well, to cut the matter short, because, if so, his cheque-book
was at my service; didn't I know that, eh? Not being immediately
distressed by debt, I did not exhibit the gush of gratitude, and my
sedate 'Thank you, sir,' confused his appeal for some sentimental show of
affection.

I am sure the poor old man suffered pangs of jealousy; I could even at
times see into his breast and pity him. He wanted little more than to be
managed; but a youth when he perceives absurdity in opposition to him
chafes at it as much as if he were unaware that it is laughable. Had the
squire talked to me in those days seriously and fairly of my father's
character, I should have abandoned my system of defence to plead for him
as before a judge. By that time I had gained the knowledge that my father
was totally of a different construction from other men. I wished the
squire to own simply to his loveable nature. I could have told him women
did. Without citing my dear aunt Dorothy, or so humble a creature as the
devoted Mrs. Waddy, he had sincere friends among women, who esteemed him,
and were staunch adherents to his cause; and if the widow of the City
knight, Lady Sampleman, aimed openly at being something more, she was not
the less his friend. Nor was it only his powerful animation, generosity,
and grace that won them.

There occurred when I was a little past twenty, already much in his
confidence, one of those strange crucial events which try a man publicly,
and bring out whatever can be said for and against him. A young Welsh
heiress fell in love with him. She was, I think, seven or eight months
younger than myself, a handsome, intelligent, high-spirited girl, rather
wanting in polish, and perhaps in the protecting sense of decorum. She
was well-born, of course--she was Welsh. She was really well-bred too,
though somewhat brusque. The young lady fell hopelessly in love with my
father at Bath. She gave out that he was not to be for one moment accused
of having encouraged her by secret addresses. It was her unsolicited
avowal--thought by my aunt Dorothy immodest, not by me--that she
preferred him to all living men. Her name was Anna Penrhys. The squire
one morning received a letter from her family, requesting him to furnish
them with information as to the antecedents of a gentleman calling
himself Augustus Fitz-George Frederick William Richmond Guelph Roy, for
purposes which would, they assured him, warrant the inquiry. He was for
throwing the letter aside, shouting that he thanked his God he was
unacquainted with anybody on earth with such an infernal list of names as
that. Roy! Who knew anything of Roy?

'It happens to be my father's present name,' said I.

'It sounds to me like the name of one of those blackguard adventurers who
creep into families to catch the fools,' pursued the squire, not hearing
me with his eyes.

'The letter at least must be answered,' my aunt Dorothy said.

'It shall be answered!' the squire worked himself up to roar. He wrote a
reply, the contents of which I could guess at from my aunt's refusal to
let me be present at the discussion of it. The letter despatched was
written by her, with his signature. Her eyes glittered for a whole day.

Then came a statement of the young lady's case from Bath.

'Look at that! look at that!' cried the squire, and went on, 'Look at
that!' in a muffled way. There was a touch of dignity in his unforced
anger.

My aunt winced displeasingly to my sight: 'I see nothing to astonish
one.'

'Nothing to astonish one!' The squire set his mouth in imitation of her.

'You see nothing to astonish one? Well, ma'am, when a man grows old
enough to be a grandfather, I do see something astonishing in a child of
nineteen--by George! it's out o' nature. But you women like
monstrosities. Oh! I understand. Here's an heiress to fifteen thousand a
year. It's not astonishing if every ruined gambler and scapegrace in the
kingdom's hunting her hot! no, no! that's not astonishing. I suppose she
has her money in a coal mine.'

The squire had some of his in a coal-mine; my mother once had; it was the
delivery of a blow at my father, signifying that he had the scent for
this description of wealth. I left the room. The squire then affected
that my presence had constrained him, by bellowing out epithets easy for
me to hear in the hall and out on the terrace. He vowed by solemn oath he
was determined to save this girl from ruin. My aunt's speech was brief.

I was summoned to Bath by my father in a curious peremptory tone implying
the utmost urgent need of me.

I handed the letter to the squire at breakfast, saying, 'You must spare
me for a week or so, sir.'

He spread the letter flat with his knife, and turned it over with his
fork.

'Harry,' said he, half-kindly, and choking, 'you're better out of it.'

'I'm the best friend he could have by him, sir.'

'You're the best tool he could have handy, for you're a gentleman.'

'I hope I shan't offend you, grandfather, but I must go.'

'Don't you see, Harry Richmond, you're in for an infernal marriage
ceremony there!'

'The young lady is not of age,' interposed my aunt.

'Eh? An infernal elopement, then. It's clear the girl's mad-head's
cracked as a cocoa-nut bowled by a monkey, brains nowhere. Harry, you're
not a greenhorn; you don't suspect you're called down there to stop it,
do you? You jump plump into a furious lot of the girl's relatives; you
might as well take a header into a leech-pond. Come! you're a man; think
for yourself. Don't have this affair on your conscience, boy. I tell you,
Harry Richmond, I'm against your going. You go against my will; you
offend me, sir; you drag my name and blood into the mire. She's Welsh, is
she? Those Welsh are addle-pated, every one. Poor girl!'

He threw a horrible tremour into his accent of pity.

My aunt expressed her view mildly, that I was sent for to help cure the
young lady of her delusion.

'And take her himself!' cried the squire. 'Harry, you wouldn't go and do
that? Why, the law, man, the law--the whole country 'd be up about it.
You'll be stuck in a coloured caricature!'

He was really alarmed lest this should be one of the consequences of my
going, and described some of the scourging caricatures of his day with an
intense appreciation of their awfulness as engines of the moral sense of
the public. I went nevertheless.




CHAPTER XXI

A PROMENADE IN BATH

I found my father at his hotel, sitting with his friend Jorian DeWitt,
whom I had met once before, and thought clever. He was an ex-captain of
dragoons, a martyr to gout, and addicted to Burgundy, which necessitated
his resorting to the waters, causing him, as he said, between his
appetites and the penance he paid for them, to lead the life of a
pendulum. My father was in a tempered gay mood, examining a couple of the
county newspapers. One abused him virulently; he was supported by the
other. After embracing me, he desired me to listen while he read out
opposing sentences from the columns of these eminent journals:

'The person calling himself "Roy," whose monstrously absurd pretensions
are supposed to be embodied in this self-dubbed surname . . .'

'--The celebrated and courtly Mr. Richmond Roy, known no less by the
fascination of his manners than by his romantic history . . .'

'--has very soon succeeded in making himself the talk of the town . . '

'--has latterly become the theme of our tea-tables . . .'

'--which is always the adventurer's privilege . . .'

'--through no fault of his own . . '

'--That we may throw light on the blushing aspirations of a crow-sconced
Cupid, it will be as well to recall the antecedents of this (if no worse)
preposterous imitation buck of the old school . . .'

'--Suffice it, without seeking to draw the veil from those affecting
chapters of his earlier career which kindled for him the enthusiastic
sympathy of all classes of his countrymen, that he is not yet free from a
tender form of persecution . . .'

'--We think we are justified in entitling him the Perkin Warbeck of
society . . .'

'--Reference might be made to mythological heroes . . .'

Hereat I cried out mercy.

Captain DeWitt (stretched nursing a leg) removed his silk handkerchief
from his face to murmur,

'The bass stedfastly drowns the treble, if this is meant for harmony.'

My father rang up the landlord, and said to him,

'The choicest of your cellar at dinner to-day, Mr. Lumley; and, mind you,
I am your guest, and I exercise my right of compelling you to sit down
with us and assist in consuming a doubtful quality of wine. We dine four.
Lay for five, if your conscience is bad, and I excuse you.'

The man smirked. He ventured to say he had never been so tempted to
supply an inferior article.

My father smiled on him.

'You invite our editorial advocate?' said Captain DeWitt.

'Our adversary,' said my father.

I protested I would not sit at table with him. But he assured me he
believed his advocate and his adversary to be one and the same, and
referred me to the collated sentences.

'The man must earn his bread, Richie, boy! To tell truth, it is the
advocate I wish to rebuke, and to praise the adversary. It will confound
him.'

'It does me,' said DeWitt.

'You perceive, Jorian, a policy in dining these men of the Press now and
occasionally, considering their growing power, do you not?'

'Ay, ay! it's a great gossiping machine, mon Roy. I prefer to let it
spout.'

'I crave your permission to invite him in complimentary terms, cousin
Jorian. He is in the town; remember, it is for the good of the nation
that he and his like should have the opportunity of studying good
society. As to myself personally, I give him carte blanche to fire his
shots at me.'

Near the fashionable hour of the afternoon my father took my arm, Captain
DeWitt a stick, and we walked into the throng and buzz.

'Whenever you are, to quote our advocate, the theme of tea-tables,
Richie,' said my father, 'walk through the crowd: it will wash you. It is
doing us the honour to observe us. We in turn discover an interest in its
general countenance.'

He was received, as we passed, with much staring; here and there a
lifting of hats, and some blunt nodding that incensed me, but he, feeling
me bristle, squeezed my hand and talked of the scene, and ever and anon
gathered a line of heads and shed an indulgent bow along them-; so on to
the Casino. Not once did he offend my taste and make my acute sense of
self-respect shiver by appearing grateful for a recognition, or anxious
to court it, though the curtest salute met his acknowledgement.

The interior of the Casino seemed more hostile. I remarked it to him. 'A
trifle more eye-glassy,' he murmured. He was quite at his easy there.

'We walk up and down, my son,' he said, in answer to a question of mine,
'because there are very few who can; even walking is an art; and if
nobody does, the place is dull.'

'The place is pretty well supplied with newspapers,' said Captain DeWitt.

'And dowagers, friend Jorian. They are cousins. 'Tis the fashion to have
our tattle done by machinery. They have their opportunity to compare the
portrait with the original. Come, invent some scandal for us; let us make
this place our social Exchange. I warrant a good bold piece of invention
will fit them, too, some of them. Madam,'--my father bowed low to the
beckoning of a fan, 'I trust your ladyship did not chance to overhear
that last remark I made?'

The lady replied: 'I should have shut my eyes if I had. I called you to
tell me, who is the young man?'

'For twenty years I have lived in the proud belief that he is my son!'

'I would not disturb it for the world.' She did me the honour to inspect
me from the lowest waistcoat button to the eyebrows. 'Bring him to me
to-night. Captain DeWitt, you have forsaken my whist-tables.'

'Purely temporary fits of unworthiness, my lady.'

'In English, gout?'

'Not gout in the conscience, I trust,' said my father.

'Oh! that's curable,' laughed the captain.

'You men of repartee would be nothing without your wickedness,' the lady
observed.

'Man was supposed to be incomplete--' Captain DeWitt affected a murmur.

She nodded 'Yes, yes,' and lifted eyes on my father. 'So you have not
given up going to church?'

He bent and spoke low.

She humphed her lips. 'Very well, I will see. It must be a night in the
early part of the week after next, then: I really don't know why I should
serve you; but I like your courage.'

'I cannot consent to accept your ladyship's favour on account of one
single virtue,' said he, drooping.

She waved him to move forward.

During this frothy dialogue, I could see that the ear of the assembly had
been caught by the sound of it.

'That,' my father informed me, 'is the great Lady Wilts. Now you will
notice a curious thing. Lady Wilts is not so old but that, as our Jorian
here says of her, she is marriageable. Hence, Richie, she is a queen to
make the masculine knee knock the ground. I fear the same is not to be
said of her rival, Lady Denewdney, whom our good Jorian compares to an
antiquated fledgeling emerging with effort from a nest of ill
construction and worse cement. She is rich, she is sharp, she uses her
quill; she is emphatically not marriageable. Bath might still accept her
as a rival queen, only she is always behindhand in seizing an occasion.
Now you will catch sight of her fan working in a minute. She is envious
and imitative. It would be undoubtedly better policy on her part to
continue to cut me: she cannot, she is beginning to rustle like
December's oaks. If Lady Wilts has me, why, she must. We refrain from
noticing her until we have turned twice. Ay, Richie, there is this use in
adversity; it teaches one to play sword and target with etiquette and
retenue better than any crowned king in Europe. For me now to cross to
her summons immediately would be a gross breach of homage to Lady Wilts,
who was inspired to be the first to break through the fence of scandal
environing me. But I must still show that I am independent. These people
must not suppose that I have to cling to a party. Let them take sides; I
am on fair terms with both the rivals. I show just such a nuance of a
distinction in my treatment of them just such--enough, I mean, to make
the flattered one warm to me, and t' other be jealous of her. Ay, Richie,
these things are trivial things beyond the grave; but here are we, my
boy; and, by the way, I suspect the great campaign of my life is
opening.'

Captain DeWitt said that if so it would be the tenth, to his certain
knowledge.

'Not great campaign!' my father insisted: 'mere skirmishes before this.'

They conversed in humorous undertones, each in turn seeming to turn over
the earth of some amusing reminiscence, so rapt, that as far as regarded
their perception of it, the assembly might have been nowhere. Perhaps,
consequently, they became observed with all but undivided attention. My
father's hand was on my shoulder, his head toward Captain DeWitt; instead
of subduing his voice, he gave it a moderate pitch, at which it was not
intrusive, and was musical, to my ear charming, especially when he
continued talking through his soft laughter, like a hunter that would in
good humour press for his game through links of water-nymphs.

Lady Denewdney's fan took to beating time meditatively. Two or three
times she kept it elevated, and in vain: the flow of their interchangeing
speech was uninterrupted. At last my father bowed to her from a distance.
She signalled: his eyelids pleaded short sight, awakening to the
apprehension of a pleasant fact: the fan tapped, and he halted his march,
leaning scarce perceptibly in her direction. The fan showed distress.
Thereupon, his voice subsided in his conversation, with a concluding
flash of animation across his features, like a brook that comes to the
leap on a descent, and he left us.

Captain DeWitt and I were led by a common attraction to the portico, the
truth being that we neither of us could pace easily nor talk with perfect
abandonment under eye-fire any longer.

'Look,' said he to me, pointing at the equipages and equestrians: 'you'll
see a sight like this in dozens--dozens of our cities and towns! The
wealth of this country is frightful.'

My reply, addressed at the same time mentally to Temple at sea, was:

'Well, as long as we have the handsomest women, I don't care.'

Captain DeWitt was not so sure that we had. The Provencal women, the
women of a part of South Germany, and certain favoured spots of Italy,
might challenge us, he thought. This was a point I could argue on, or, I
should rather say, take up the cudgels, for I deemed such opinions
treason to one's country and an outrage to common sense, and I embarked
in controversy with the single-minded intention of knocking down the man
who held them.

He accepted his thrashing complacently.

'Now here comes a young lady on horseback,' he said; 'do you spy her?
dark hair, thick eyebrows, rides well, followed by a groom. Is she a
Beauty?'

In the heat of patriotism I declared she was handsome, and repeated it,
though I experienced a twinge of remorse, like what I should have felt
had I given Minerva the apple instead of Venus.

'Oh!' he commented, and stepped down to the road to meet her, beginning,
in my hearing, 'I am the bearer of a compliment--' Her thick eyebrows
stood in a knot, then she glanced at me and hung pensive. She had not to
wait a minute before my father came to her side.

'I knew you would face them,' she said.

He threw back his head like a swimmer tossing spray from his locks.

'You have read the paper?' he asked.

'You have horsewhipped the writer?' she rejoined.

'Oh! the poor penster!'

'Nay, we can't pretend to pity him!'

'Could we condescend to offer him satisfaction?'

'Would he dare to demand it?'

'We will lay the case before Lady Wilts to-night.'

'You are there to-night?'

'At Lady Denewdney's to-morrow night--if I may indulge a hope?'

'Both? Oh! bravo, bravo! Tell me nothing more just now. How did you
manage it? I must have a gallop. Yes, I shall be at both, be sure of
that.'

My father introduced me.

'Let me present to your notice my son, Harry Lepel Richmond, Miss
Penrhys.'

She touched my fingers, and nodded at me; speaking to him:

'He has a boy's taste: I hear he esteems me moderately well-favoured.'

'An inherited error certain to increase with age!'

'Now you have started me!' she exclaimed, and lashed the flanks of her
horse.

We had evidently been enacting a part deeply interesting to the
population of Bath, for the heads of all the strolling groups were bent
on us; and when Miss Penrhys cantered away, down dropped eyeglasses, and
the promenade returned to activity. I fancied I perceived that my father
was greeted more cordially on his way back to the hotel.

'You do well, Richie,' he observed, 'in preserving your composure until
you have something to say. Wait for your opening; it will come, and the
right word will come with it. The main things are to be able to stand
well, walk well, and look with an eye at home in its socket: I put you my
hand on any man or woman born of high blood.--Not a brazen eye!--of the
two extremes, I prefer the beaten spaniel sort.--Blindfold me, but I put
you my hand on them. As to repartee, you must have it. Wait for that,
too. Do not,' he groaned, 'do not force it! Bless my soul, what is there
in the world so bad?' And rising to the upper notes of his groan:
'Ignorance, density, total imbecility, is better; I would rather any day
of my life sit and carve for guests--the grossest of human trials--a
detestable dinner, than be doomed to hear some wretched fellow--and you
hear the old as well as the young--excruciate feelings which, where they
exist, cannot but be exquisitely delicate. Goodness gracious me! to see
the man pumping up his wit! For me, my visage is of an unalterable
gravity whenever I am present at one of these exhibitions. I care not if
I offend. Let them say I wish to revolutionize society--I declare to you,
Richie boy, delightful to my heart though I find your keen stroke of
repartee, still your fellow who takes the thrust gracefully, knows when
he's traversed by a master-stroke, and yields sign of it, instead of
plunging like a spitted buffalo and asking us to admire his agility--you
follow me?--I say I hold that man--and I delight vastly in ready wit; it
is the wine of language!--I regard that man as the superior being. True,
he is not so entertaining.'

My father pressed on my arm to intimate, with a cavernous significance of
eyebrow, that Captain DeWitt had the gift of repartee in perfection.

'Jorian,' said he, 'will you wager our editor declines to dine with us?'

The answer struck me as only passable. I think it was:

'When rats smell death in toasted cheese.'

Captain DeWitt sprang up the staircase of our hotel to his bedroom.

'I should not have forced him,' my father mused. 'Jorian DeWitt has at
times brilliant genius, Richie--in the way of rejoinders, I mean. This is
his happy moment--his one hour's dressing for dinner. I have watched him;
he most thoroughly enjoys it! I am myself a quick or slow dresser, as the
case may be. But to watch Jorian you cannot help entering into his
enjoyment of it. He will have his window with a view of the sunset; there
is his fire, his warmed linen, and his shirt-studs; his bath, his choice
of a dozen things he will or will not wear; the landlord's or host's menu
is up against the looking-glass, and the extremely handsome miniature
likeness of his wife, who is in the madhouse, by a celebrated painter, I
forget his name. Jorian calls this, new birth--you catch his idea? He
throws off the old and is on with the new with a highly hopeful
anticipation. His valet is a scoundrel, but never fails in extracting the
menu from the cook, wherever he may be, and, in fine, is too attentive to
the hour's devotion to be discarded! Poor Jorian. I know no man I pity so
much.'

I conceived him, I confessed, hardly pitiable, though not enviable.

'He has but six hundred a year, and a passion for Burgundy,' said my
father.

We were four at table. The editor came, and his timidity soon wore off in
the warmth of hospitality. He appeared a kind exciteable little man, glad
of his dinner from the first, and in due time proud of his entertainer.
His response to the toast of the Fourth Estate was an apology for its
behaviour to my father. He regretted it; he regretted it. A vinous
speech.

My father heard him out. Addressing him subsequently,

'I would not interrupt you in the delivery of your sentiments,' he said.
'I must, however, man to man, candidly tell you I should have wished to
arrest your expressions of regret. They convey to my mind an idea, that
on receipt of my letter of invitation, you attributed to me a design to
corrupt you. Protest nothing, I beg. Editors are human, after all. Now,
my object is, that as you write of me, you should have some knowledge of
me; and I naturally am interested in one who does me so much honour. The
facts of my life are at your disposal for publication and comment.
Simply, I entreat you, say this one thing of me: I seek for justice, but
I never complain of my fortunes. Providence decides:--that might be the
motto engraven on my heart. Nay, I may risk declaring it is! In the end I
shall be righted. Meanwhile you contribute to my happiness by favouring
me with your society.'

'Ah, sir,' replied the little man, 'were all our great people like you!
In the country--the provinces--they treat the representatives of the
Fourth Estate as the squires a couple of generations back used to treat
the parsons.'

'What! Have you got a place at their tables?' inquired Captain DeWitt.

'No, I cannot say that--not even below the salt. Mr. Richmond--Mr. Roy,
you may not be aware of it: I am the proprietor of the opposition
journals in this county. I tell you in confidence, one by itself would
not pay; and I am a printer, sir, and it is on my conscience to tell you
I have, in the course of business, been compelled this very morning to
receive orders for the printing of various squibs and, I much fear,
scurrilous things.'

My father pacified him.

'You will do your duty to your family, Mr. Hickson.'

Deeply moved, the little man pulled out proof-sheets and slips.

'Even now, at the eleventh hour,' he urged, 'there is time to correct any
glaring falsehoods, insults, what not!'

My father accepted the copy of proofs.

'Not a word,--not a line! You spoke of the eleventh hour, Mr. Hickson. If
we are at all near the eleventh, I must be on my way to make my bow to
Lady Wilts; or is it Lady Denewdney's to-night? No, to-morrow night.'

A light of satisfaction came over Mr. Hickson's face at the mention of my
father's visiting both these sovereign ladies.

As soon as we were rid of him, Captain DeWitt exclaimed,

'If that's the Fourth Estate, what's the Realm?'

'The Estate,' pleaded my father, 'is here in its infancy--on all fours--'

'Prehensile! Egad, it has the vices of the other three besides its own.
Do you mean that by putting it on all fours?'

'Jorian, I have noticed that when you are malignant you are not witty. We
have to thank the man for not subjecting us to a pledge of secresy. My
Lady Wilts will find the proofs amusing. And mark, I do not examine their
contents before submitting them to her inspection. You will testify to
the fact.'

I was unaware that my father played a master-stroke in handing these
proof-sheets publicly to Lady Wilts for her perusal. The incident of the
evening was the display of her character shown by Miss Penrhys in
positively declining to quit the house until she likewise had cast her
eye on them. One of her aunts wept. Their carriage was kept waiting an
hour.

'You ask too much of me: I cannot turn her out', Lady Wilts said to her
uncle. And aside to my father, 'You will have to marry her.'

'In heaven's name keep me from marriage, my lady!' I heard him reply.

There was sincerity in his tone when he said that.




CHAPTER XXII




CONCLUSION OF THE BATH EPISODE

The friends of Miss Penrhys were ill advised in trying to cry down a man
like my father. Active persecution was the breath of life to him. When
untroubled he was apt to let both his ambition and his dignity slumber.
The squibs and scandal set afloat concerning him armed his wit, nerved
his temper, touched him with the spirit of enterprise; he became a new
creature. I lost sight of certain characteristics which I had begun to
ponder over critically. I believed with all my heart that circumstances
were blameable for much that did not quite please me. Upon the question
of his magnanimity, as well as of his courage, there could not be two
opinions. He would neither retort nor defend himself. I perceived some
grandeur in his conduct, without, however, appreciating it cordially, as
I did a refinement of discretion about him that kept him from brushing
good taste while launched in ostentatious displays. He had a fine tact
and a keen intuition. He may have thought it necessary to throw a little
dust in my eyes; but I doubt his having done it, for he had only, as he
knew, to make me jealous to blind me to his faults utterly, and he
refrained.

In his allusions to the young lady he was apologetic, affectionate; one
might have fancied oneself listening to a gracious judge who had well
weighed her case, and exculpated her from other excesses than that of a
generous folly. Jorian DeWitt, a competent critic, pronounced his
behaviour consummate at all points. For my behoof, he hinted antecedent
reverses to the picture: meditating upon which, I traced them to the
fatal want of money, and that I might be able to fortify him in case of
need, I took my own counsel, and wrote to my aunt for the loan of as
large a sum as she could afford to send. Her eagerness for news of our
doings was insatiable. 'You do not describe her,' she replied, not naming
Miss Penrhys; and again, 'I can form no image of her. Your accounts of
her are confusing. Tell me earnestly, do you like her? She must be very
wilful, but is she really nice? I want to know how she appears to my
Harry's mind.'

My father borrowed these letters, and returning them to me, said, 'A
good soul! the best of women! There--there is a treasure lost!' His
forehead was clouded in speaking. He recommended me to assure my aunt
that she would never have to take a family interest in Miss Penrhys. But
this was not deemed perfectly satisfactory at Riversley. My aunt wrote:
'Am I to understand that you, Harry, raise objections to her? Think first
whether she is in herself objectionable. She is rich, she may be prudent,
she may be a forethoughtful person. She may not be able to support a
bitter shock of grief. She may be one who can help. She may not be one
whose heart will bear it. Put your own feelings aside, my dearest. Our
duties cannot ever be clear to us until we do. It is possible for
headstrong wilfulness and secret tenderness to go together. Think whether
she is capable of sacrifice before you compel her to it. Do not inflict
misery wantonly. One would like to see her. Harry, I brood on your
future; that is why I seem to you preternaturally anxious about you.'

She seemed to me preternaturally anxious about Miss Penrhys.

My father listened in silence to my flippant satire on women's letters.

He answered after a pause,

'Our Jorian says that women's letters must be read like anagrams. To put
it familiarly, they are like a child's field of hop-scotch. You may have
noticed the urchins at their game: a bit of tile, and a variety of
compartments to pass it through to the base, hopping. Or no, Richie,
pooh! 'tis an unworthy comparison, this hopscotch. I mean, laddie, they
write in zigzags; and so will you when your heart trumpets in your ear.
Tell her, tell that dear noble good woman--say, we are happy, you and I,
and alone, and shall be; and do me the favour--she loves you, my
son--address her sometimes--she has been it--call her "mother"; she will
like it she deserves--nothing shall supplant her!'

He lost his voice.

She sent me three hundred pounds; she must have supposed the occasion
pressing. Thus fortified against paternal improvidence, I expended a
hundred in the purchase of a horse, and staked the remainder on him in a
match, and was beaten. Disgusted with the horse, I sold him for half his
purchase-money, and with that sum paid a bill to maintain my father's
credit in the town. Figuratively speaking, I looked at my hands as
astonished as I had been when the poor little rascal in the street
snatched my cake, and gave me the vision of him gorging it in the
flurried alley of the London crowd.

'Money goes,' I remarked.

'That is the general experience of the nature of money,' said my father
freshly; 'but nevertheless you will be surprised to find how
extraordinarily few are the people to make allowance for particular
cases. It plays the trick with everybody, and almost nobody lets it stand
as a plea for the individual. Here is Jorian, and you, my son, and
perhaps your aunt Dorothy, and upon my word, I think I have numbered all
I know--or, ay, Sukey Sampleman, I should not omit her in an honourable
list--and that makes positively all I know who would commiserate a man
touched on the shoulder by a sheriff's officer--not that such an
indignity is any longer done to me.'

'I hope we have seen the last of Shylock's great-grandnephew,' said I
emphatically.

'Merely to give you the instance, Richie. Ay! I hope so, I hope so! But
it is the nature of money that you never can tell if the boarding's
sound, once be dependent upon it. But this is talk for tradesmen.'
Thinking it so myself, I had not attempted to discover the source of my
father's income. Such as it was, it was paid half-yearly, and spent
within a month of the receipt, for the most signal proof possible of its
shameful insufficiency. Thus ten months of the year at least he lived
protesting, and many with him, compulsorily. For two months he was a
brilliant man. I penetrated his mystery enough to abstain from
questioning him, and enough to determine that on my coming of age he
should cease to be a pensioner, petitioner, and adventurer. He aimed at a
manifest absurdity.

In the meantime, after the lesson I had received as to the nature of
money, I saw with some alarm my father preparing to dig a great pit for
it. He had no doubt performed wonders. Despite of scandal and tattle, and
the deadly report of a penniless fortune-hunter having fascinated the
young heiress, he commanded an entrance to the receptions of both the
rival ladies dominant. These ladies, Lady Wilts and Lady Denewdney, who
moved each in her select half-circle, and could heretofore be induced by
none to meet in a common centre, had pledged themselves to honour with
their presence a ball he proposed to give to the choice world here
assembled on a certain illuminated day of the calendar.

'So I have now possession of Bath, Richie,' said he, twinkling to
propitiate me, lest I should suspect him of valuing his achievements
highly. He had, he continued, promised Hickson of the Fourth Estate, that
he would, before leaving the place, do his utmost to revive the ancient
glories of Bath: Bath had once set the fashion to the kingdom; why not
again? I might have asked him, why at all, or why at his expense; but his
lead was irresistible. Captain DeWitt and his valet, and I, and a score
of ladies, scores of tradesmen, were rushing, reluctant or not, on a
torrent. My part was to show that I was an athlete, and primarily that I
could fence and shoot. 'It will do no harm to let it be known,' said
DeWitt. He sat writing letters incessantly. My father made the tour of
his fair stewardesses from noon to three, after receiving in audience his
jewellers, linen-drapers, carpenters, confectioners, from nine in the
morning till twelve. At three o'clock business ceased. Workmen then
applying to him for instructions were despatched to the bar of the hotel,
bearing the recommendation to the barmaid not to supply them refreshment
if they had ever in their lives been seen drunk. At four he dressed for
afternoon parade. Nor could his enemy have said that he was not the chief
voice and eye along his line of march. His tall full figure maintained a
superior air without insolence, and there was a leaping beam in his large
blue eyes, together with the signification of movement coming to his
kindly lips, such as hardly ever failed to waken smiles of greeting.
People smiled and bowed, and forgot their curiosity, forgot even to be
critical, while he was in sight. I can say this, for I was acutely
critical of their bearing; the atmosphere of the place was never
perfectly pleasing to me.

My attitude of watchful reserve, and my reputation as the heir of immense
wealth, tended possibly to constrain a certain number of the inimical
party to be ostensibly civil. Lady Wilts, who did me the honour to
patronize me almost warmly, complimented me on my manner of backing him,
as if I were the hero; but I felt his peculiar charm; she partly admitted
it, making a whimsical mouth, saying, in allusion to Miss Penrhys, 'I,
you know, am past twenty. At twenty forty is charming; at forty twenty.'

Where I served him perhaps was in showing my resolution to protect him:
he had been insulted before my arrival. The male relatives of Miss
Penrhys did not repeat the insult; they went to Lady Wilts and groaned
over their hard luck in not having the option of fighting me. I was, in
her phrase, a new piece on the board, and checked them. Thus, if they
provoked a challenge from me, they brought the destructive odour of
powder about the headstrong creature's name. I was therefore of use to
him so far. I leaned indolently across the rails of the promenade while
she bent and chattered in his ear, and her attendant cousin and cavalier
chewed vexation in the form of a young mustachio's curl. His horse
fretted; he murmured deep notes, and his look was savage; but he was
bound to wait on her, and she would not go until it suited her pleasure.
She introduced him to me--as if conversation could be carried on between
two young men feeling themselves simply pieces on the board, one giving
check, and the other chafing under it! I need not say that I disliked my
situation. It was worse when my father took to bowing to her from a
distance, unobservant of her hand's prompt pull at the reins as soon as
she saw him. Lady Wilts had assumed the right of a woman still possessing
attractions to exert her influence with him on behalf of the family, for
I had done my best to convince her that he entertained no serious thought
of marrying, and decidedly would not marry without my approval. He acted
on her advice to discourage the wilful girl.

'How is it I am so hateful to you?' Miss Penrhys accosted me abruptly. I
fancied she must have gone mad, and an interrogative frown was my sole
answer.

'Oh! I hear that you pronounce me everywhere unendurable,' she continued.
'You are young, and you misjudge me in some way, and I should be glad if
you knew me better. By-and-by, in Wales.--Are you fond of mountain
scenery? We might be good friends; my temper is not bad--at least, I hope
not. Heaven knows what one's relatives think of one. Will you visit us? I
hear you have promised your confidante, Lady Wilts.'

At a dancing party where we met, she was thrown on my hands by her
ungovernable vehemence, and I, as I had told Lady Wilts, not being able
to understand the liking of twenty for forty (fifty would have been
nearer the actual mark, or sixty), offered her no lively sympathy. I
believe she had requested my father to pay public court to her. If
Captain DeWitt was to be trusted, she desired him to dance, and dance
with her exclusively, and so confirm and defy the tattle of the town; but
my father hovered between the dowagers. She in consequence declined to
dance, which was the next worse thing she could do. An aunt, a miserable
woman, was on her left; on her right she contrived, too frequently for my
peace of mind, to reserve a vacant place for me, and she eyed me intently
across the room, under her persistent brows, until perforce I was drawn
to her side. I had to listen to a repetition of sharp queries and
replies, and affect a flattered gaiety, feeling myself most
uncomfortably, as Captain DeWitt (who watched us) said, Chip the son of
Block the father. By fixing the son beside her, she defeated the father's
scheme of coldness, and made it appear a concerted piece of policy. Even
I saw that. I saw more than I grasped. Love for my father was to my mind
a natural thing, a proof of taste and goodness; women might love him; but
the love of a young girl with the morning's mystery about her! and for my
progenitor!--a girl (as I reflected in the midst of my interjections)
well-built, clear-eyed, animated, clever, with soft white hands and
pretty feet; how could it be? She was sombre as a sunken fire until he at
last came round to her, and then her sudden vivacity was surprising.

Affairs were no further advanced when I had to obey the squire's commands
and return to Riversley, missing the night of the grand ball with no
profound regret, except for my father's sake. He wrote soon after one of
his characteristic letters, to tell me that the ball had, been a success.
Immediately upon this announcement, he indulged luxurious reflections, as
his manner was:

'To have stirred up the old place and given it something to dream of for
the next half century, is a satisfaction, Richie. I have a kindness for
Bath. I leave it with its factions reconciled, its tea-tables furnished
with inexhaustible supplies of the chief thing necessary, and the
persuasion firmly established in my own bosom that it is impossible to
revive the past, so we must march with the age. And let me add, all but
every one of the bills happily discharged, to please you. Pray, fag at
your German. If (as I myself confess to) you have enjoyment of old ways,
habits, customs, and ceremonies, look to Court life. It is only in Courts
that a man may now air a leg; and there the women are works of Art. If
you are deficient in calves (which my boy, thank heaven! will never be
charged with) you are there found out, and in fact every deficiency,
every qualification, is at once in patent exhibition at a Court. I fancy
Parliament for you still, and that is no impediment as a step. Jorian
would have you sit and wallow in ease, and buy (by the way, we might
think of it) a famous Burgundy vineyard (for an investment), devote the
prime of your life to the discovery of a cook, your manhood to perfect
the creature's education--so forth; I imagine you are to get five years
of ample gratification (a promise hardly to be relied on) in the sere
leaf, and so perish. Take poor Jorian for an example of what the absence
of ambition brings men to. I treasure Jorian, I hoard the poor fellow, to
have him for a lesson to my boy. Witty and shrewd, and a masterly
tactician (I wager he would have won his spurs on the field of battle),
you see him now living for one hour of the day--absolutely twenty-three
hours of the man's life are chained slaves, beasts of burden, to the
four-and-twentieth! So, I repeat, fag at your German.

'Miss Penrhys retires to her native Wales; Jorian and I on to London, to
the Continent. Plinlimmon guard us all! I send you our local newspapers.
That I cut entrechats is false. It happens to be a thing I could do, and
not an Englishman in England except myself; only I did not do it. I did
appear in what I was educated to believe was the evening suit of a
gentleman, and I cannot perceive the immodesty of showing my leg. A dress
that is not indecent, and is becoming to me, and is the dress of my
fathers, I wear, and I impose it on the generation of my sex. However, I
dined Hickson of the Fourth Estate (Jorian considers him hungry enough to
eat up his twentieth before he dies--I forget the wording of the mot),
that he might know I was without rancour in the end, as originally I had
been without any intention of purchasing his allegiance. He offered me
his columns; he wished me luck with the heiress; by his Gods, he swore he
worshipped entrechats, and held a silk leg the most admirable work of the
manufactures. "Sir, you're a gentleman," says he; "you're a nobleman,
sir; you 're a prince, you 're a star of the first magnitude." Cries
Jorian, "Retract that, scum! you see nothing large but what you dare to
think neighbours you," and quarrels the inebriate dog. And this is the
maker and destroyer of reputations in his day! I study Hickson as a
miraculous engine of the very simplest contrivance; he is himself the
epitome of a verdict on his period. Next day he disclaimed in his
opposition penny sheet the report of the entrechats, and "the spectators
laughing consumedly," and sent me (as I had requested him to do) the
names of his daughters, to whom I transmit little comforting presents,
for if they are nice children such a parent must afflict them.

'Cultivate Lady Wilts. You have made an impression. She puts you forward
as a good specimen of our young men. 'Hem! madam.

'But, my dear boy, as I said, we cannot revive the past. I acknowledge
it. Bath rebukes my last fit of ambition, and the experience is very well
worth the expense. You have a mind, Richie, for discussing outlay, upon
which I congratulate you, so long as you do not overlook equivalents. The
system of the world is barter varied by robbery. Show that you have
something in hand, and you enjoy the satisfaction of knowing that you
were not robbed. I pledge you my word to it--I shall not repeat Bath. And
mark you, an heiress is never compromised. I am not, I hope, responsible
for every creature caught up in my circle of attraction. Believe me, dear
boy, I should consult you, and another one, estimable beyond mortal
speech! if I had become involved--impossible! No; I am free of all fresh
chains, because of the old ones. Years will not be sufficient for us when
you and I once begin to talk in earnest, when I open! To resume--so I
leave Bath with a light conscience. Mixed with pleasant recollections is
the transient regret that you were not a spectator of the meeting of the
Wilts and Denewdney streams. Jorian compared them to the Rhone and the--I
forget the name of the river below Geneva--dirtyish; for there was a
transparent difference in the Denewdney style of dress, and did I choose
it I could sit and rule those two factions as despotically as Buonaparte
his Frenchmen. Ask me what I mean by scaling billows, Richie. I will some
day tell you. I have done it all my life, and here I am. But I thank
heaven I have a son I love, and I can match him against the best on
earth, and henceforward I live for him, to vindicate and right the boy,
and place him in his legitimate sphere. From this time I take to looking
exclusively forward, and I labour diligently. I have energies.

'Not to boast, darling old son, I tell truth; I am only happy when my
heart is beating near you. Here comes the mother in me pumping up. Adieu.
Lebe wohl. The German!--the German!--may God in his Barmherzigkeit!--Tell
her I never encouraged the girl, have literally nothing to trace a
temporary wrinkle on my forehead as regards conscience. I say, may it
please Providence to make you a good German scholar by the day of your
majority. Hurrah for it! Present my humble warm respects to your aunt
Dorothy. I pray to heaven nightly for one of its angels on earth. Kunst,
Wissenschaft, Ehre, Liebe. Die Liebe. Quick at the German poets. Frau:
Fraulein. I am actually dazzled at the prospect of our future. To be
candid, I no longer see to write. Gruss' dich herzlich. From Vienna to
you next. Lebe wohl!'

My aunt Dorothy sent a glance at the letter while I was folding it
evidently thinking my unwillingness to offer it a sign of bad news or
fresh complications. She spoke of Miss Penrhys.

'Oh! that's over,' said I. 'Heiresses soon get consoled.'

She accused me of having picked up a vulgar idea. I maintained that it
was my father's.

'It cannot be your father's,' said she softly; and on affirming that he
had uttered it and written it, she replied in the same tone, more
effective than the ordinary language of conviction, 'He does not think
it.'

The rage of a youth to prove himself in the right of an argument was
insufficient to make me lay the letter out before other eyes than my own,
and I shrank from exposing it to compassionate gentle eyes that would
have pleaded similar allowances to mine for the wildness of the style. I
should have thanked, but despised the intelligence of one who framed my
excuses for my father, just as the squire, by abusing him, would have
made me a desperate partisan in a minute. The vitality of the delusion I
cherished was therefore partly extinct; not so the love; yet the love of
him could no longer shake itself free from oppressive shadows.

Out of his circle of attraction books were my resource.




CHAPTER XXIII

MY TWENTY-FIRST BIRTHDAY

Books and dreams, like the two rivers cited by my father, flowed side by
side in me without mixing; and which the bright Rhone was, which the
brown Arve, needs not to be told to those who know anything of youth;
they were destined to intermingle soon enough. I read well, for I felt
ground and had mounting views; the real world, and the mind and passions
of the world, grew visible to me. My tutor pleased the squire immensely
by calling me matter-of-fact. In philosophy and history I hated
speculation; but nothing was too fantastic for my ideas of possible
occurrences. Once away from books, I carried a head that shot rockets to
the farthest hills.

My dear friend Temple was at sea, or I should have had one near me to
detect and control the springs of nonsense. I was deemed a remarkably
quiet sober thoughtful young man, acquiescent in all schemes projected
for my welfare. The squire would have liked to see me courting the girl
of his heart, as he termed Janet Ilchester, a little more
demonstratively. We had, however, come to the understanding that I was to
travel before settling. Traditional notions of the importance of the
Grand Tour in the education of gentlemen led him to consent to my taking
a year on the Continent accompanied by my tutor. He wanted some one, he
said, to represent him when I was out over there; which signified that he
wanted some one to keep my father in check; but as the Rev. Ambrose
Peterborough, successor to the Rev. Simon Hart, was hazy and manageable,
I did not object. Such faith had the quiet thoughtful young man at
Riversley in the convulsions of the future, the whirlwinds and whirlpools
spinning for him and all connected with him, that he did not object to
hear his name and Janet's coupled, though he had not a spark of love for
her.

I tried to realize to myself the general opinion that she was handsome.
Her eyebrows were thick and level and long; her eyes direct in their
gaze, of a flinty blue, with dark lashes; her nose firm, her lips
fullish, firm when joined; her shape straight, moderately flexible. But
she had no softness; she could admire herself in my presence; she claimed
possession of me openly, and at the same time openly provoked a siege
from the remainder of my sex: she was not maidenly. She caught
imagination by the sleeve, and shut it between square whitewashed walls.
Heriot thought her not only handsome, but comparable to Mrs. William
Bulsted, our Julia Rippenger of old. At his meeting with Julia, her
delicious loss of colour made her seem to me one of the loveliest women
on earth. Janet never lost colour, rarely blushed; she touched neither
nerve nor fancy.

'You want a rousing coquette,' said Heriot; 'you won't be happy till you
've been racked by that nice instrument of torture, and the fair Bulsted
will do it for you if you like. You don't want a snake or a common
serpent, you want a Python.'

I wanted bloom and mystery, a woman shifting like the light with evening
and night and dawn, and sudden fire. Janet was bald to the heart
inhabiting me then, as if quite shaven. She could speak her affectionate
mind as plain as print, and it was dull print facing me, not the arches
of the sunset. Julia had only to lisp, 'my husband,' to startle and
agitate me beyond expression. She said simple things--'I slept well last
night,' or 'I dreamed,' or 'I shivered,' and plunged me headlong down
impenetrable forests. The mould of her mouth to a reluctant 'No,' and her
almost invariable drawing in of her breath with a 'Yes,' surcharged the
everyday monosyllables with meanings of life and death. At last I was
reduced to tell her, seeing that she reproached my coldness for Janet,
how much I wished Janet resembled her. Her Irish eyes lightened: 'Me!
Harry'; then they shadowed: 'She is worth ten of me.' Such pathetic
humility tempted me to exalt her supremely.

I talked like a boy, feeling like a man: she behaved like a woman,
blushing like a girl.

'Julia! I can never call you Mrs. Bulsted.'

'You have an affection for my husband, have you not, Harry?'

Of a season when this was adorable language to me, the indication is
sufficient. Riding out perfectly crazed by it, I met Kiomi, and
transferred my emotions. The squire had paid her people an annual sum to
keep away from our neighbourhood, while there was a chance of my taking
to gipsy life. They had come back to their old camping-ground, rather
dissatisfied with the squire.

'Speak to him yourself, Kiomi,' said I; 'whatever you ask for, he can't
refuse anything to such eyes as yours.'

'You!' she rallied me; 'why can't you talk sensible stuff!'

She had grown a superb savage, proof against weather and compliments. Her
face was like an Egyptian sky fronting night. The strong old Eastern
blood put ruddy flame for the red colour; tawny olive edged from the red;
rare vivid yellow, all but amber. The light that first looks down upon
the fallen sun was her complexion above the brows, and round the cheeks,
the neck's nape, the throat, and the firm bosom prompt to lift and sink
with her vigour of speech, as her eyes were to flash and darken. Meeting
her you swore she was the personification of wandering Asia. There was no
question of beauty and grace, for these have laws. The curve of her brows
broke like a beaten wave; the lips and nostrils were wide, tragic in
repose. But when she laughed she illuminated you; where she stepped she
made the earth hers. She was as fresh of her East as the morning when her
ancient people struck tents in the track of their shadows. I write of her
in the style consonant to my ideas of her at the time. I would have
carried her off on the impulse and lived her life, merely to have had
such a picture moving in my sight, and call it mine.

'You're not married?' I said, ludicrously faintly.

'I 've not seen the man I'd marry,' she answered, grinning scorn.

The prizefighter had adopted drinking for his pursuit; one of her aunts
was dead, and she was in quest of money to bury the dead woman with the
conventional ceremonies and shows of respect dear to the hearts of
gipsies, whose sense of propriety and adherence to customs are a
sentiment indulged by them to a degree unknown to the stabled classes. In
fact, they have no other which does not come under the definite title of
pride;--pride in their physical prowess, their dexterity, ingenuity, and
tricksiness, and their purity of blood. Kiomi confessed she had hoped to
meet me; confessed next that she had been waiting to jump out on me: and
next that she had sat in a tree watching the Grange yesterday for six
hours; and all for money to do honour to her dead relative, poor little
soul! Heriot and I joined the decent procession to the grave. Her people
had some quarrel with the Durstan villagers, and she feared the scandal
of being pelted on the way to the church. I knew that nothing of the sort
would happen if I was present. Kiomi walked humbly with her head bent,
leaving me the thick rippling coarse black locks of her hair for a mark
of observation. We were entertained at her camp in the afternoon. I saw
no sign of intelligence between her and Heriot. On my asking her, the day
before, if she remembered him, she said, 'I do, I'm dangerous for that
young man.' Heriot's comment on her was impressed on me by his choosing
to call her 'a fine doe leopard,' and maintaining that it was a
defensible phrase.

She was swept from my amorous mind by Mabel Sweetwinter, the miller's
daughter of Dipwell. This was a Saxon beauty in full bud, yellow as
mid-May, with the eyes of opening June. Beauty, you will say, is easily
painted in that style. But the sort of beauty suits the style, and the
well-worn comparisons express the well-known type. Beside Kiomi she was
like a rich meadow on the border of the heaths.

We saw them together on my twenty-first birthday. To my shame I awoke in
the early morning at Riversley, forgetful of my father's old appointment
for the great Dipwell feast. Not long after sunrise, when blackbirds peck
the lawns, and swallows are out from under eaves to the flood's face, I
was hailed by Janet Ilchester beneath my open windows. I knew she had a
bet with the squire that she would be the first to hail me legal man, and
was prepared for it. She sat on horseback alone in the hazy dewy
Midsummer morning, giving clear note:

'Whoop! Harry Richmond! halloo!' To which I tossed her a fox's brush,
having a jewelled bracelet pendant. She missed it and let it lie, and
laughed.

'No, no; it's foxie himself!--anybody may have the brush. You're dressed,
are you, Harry? You were sure I should come? A thousand happy years to
you, and me to see them, if you don't mind. I 'm first to wish it, I'm
certain. I was awake at three, out at halfpast, over Durstan heath,
across Eckerthy's fields--we'll pay the old man for damage--down by the
plantation, Bran and Sailor at my heels, and here I am. Crow, cocks!
bark, dogs! up, larks! I said I'd be first. And now I 'm round to stables
to stir up Uberly. Don't be tardy, Mr. Harry, and we'll be Commodore
Arson and his crew before the world's awake.'

We rode out for a couple of hours, and had to knock at a farmhouse for
milk and bread. Possibly a sense of independence, owing to the snatching
of a meal in midflight away from home, made Janet exclaim that she would
gladly be out all day. Such freaks were exceedingly to my taste. Then I
remembered Dipwell, and sure that my father would be there, though he had
not written of it, I proposed to ride over. She pleaded for the horses
and the squire alternately. Feasting was arranged at Riversley, as well
as at Dipwell, and she said musically,

'Harry, the squire is a very old man, and you may not have many more
chances of pleasing him. To-day do, do! To-morrow, ride to your father,
if you must: of course you must if you think it right; but don't go this
day.'

'Not upset my fortune, Janet?'

'Don't hurt the kind old man's heart to-day.'

'Oh! you're the girl of his heart, I know.'

'Well, Harry, you have first place, and I want you to keep it.'

'But here's an oath I've sworn to my father.'

'He should not have exacted it, I think.'

'I promised him when I was a youngster.'

'Then be wiser now, Harry.'

'You have brilliant ideas of the sacredness of engagements.'

'I think I have common sense, that's all.'

'This is a matter of feeling.'

'It seems that you forgot it, though!'

Kiomi's tents on Durstan heath rose into view. I controlled my verbal
retort upon Janet to lead her up to the gipsy girl, for whom she had an
odd aversion, dating from childhood. Kiomi undertook to ride to Dipwell,
a distance of thirty miles, and carry the message that I would be there
by nightfall. Tears were on Janet's resolute face as we cantered home.

After breakfast the squire introduced me to his lawyer, Mr. Burgin, who,
closeted alone with me, said formally,

'Mr. Harry Richmond, you are Squire Beltham's grandson, his sole male
descendant, and you are established at present, and as far as we can
apprehend for the future, as the direct heir to the whole of his
property, which is enormous now, and likely to increase so long as he
lives. You may not be aware that your grandfather has a most sagacious
eye for business. Had he not been born a rich man he would still have
been one of our very greatest millionaires. He has rarely invested but to
double his capital; never speculated but to succeed. He may not
understand men quite so well, but then he trusts none entirely; so if
there is a chasm in his intelligence, there is a bridge thrown across it.
The metaphor is obscure perhaps: you will doubtless see my meaning. He
knows how to go on his road without being cheated. For himself, your
grandfather, Mr. Harry, is the soul of honour. Now, I have to explain
certain family matters. The squire's wife, your maternal grandmother, was
a rich heiress. Part of her money was settled on her to descend to her
children by reversion upon her death. What she herself possessed she
bequeathed to them in reversion likewise to their children. Thus at your
maternal grandmother's death, your mother and your aunt inherited money
to use as their own, and the interest of money tied fast in reversion to
their children (in case of marriage) after their death. Your grandfather,
as your natural guardian, has left the annual interest of your money to
accumulate, and now you are of age he hands it to you, as you see,
without much delay. Thus you become this day the possessor of seventy
thousand pounds, respecting the disposal of which I am here to take your
orders. Ahem!--as to the remaining property of your mother's--the sum
held by her for her own use, I mean, it devolved to her husband, your
father, who, it is probable, will furnish you an account of it--ah!--at
his leisure--ah! um! And now, in addition, Mr. Harry, I have the squire's
commands to speak to you as a man of business, on what may be deemed a
delicate subject, though from the business point of view no peculiar
delicacy should pertain to it. Your grandfather will settle on you
estates and money to the value of twenty thousand pounds per annum on the
day of your union with a young lady in this district, Miss Janet
Ilchester. He undertakes likewise to provide her pin-money. Also, let me
observe, that it is his request--but he makes no stipulation of it that
you will ultimately assume the name of Beltham, subscribing yourself
Harry Lepel Richmond Beltham; or, if it pleases you, Richmond-Beltham,
with the junction hyphen. Needless to say, he leaves it to your decision.
And now, Mr. Harry, I have done, and may most cordially congratulate you
on the blessings it has pleased a kind and discerning Providence to
shower on your head.'

None so grimly ironical as the obsequious! I thought of Burgin's
'discerning' providence (he spoke with all professional sincerity) in
after days.

On the occasion I thought of nothing but the squire's
straight-forwardness, and grieved to have to wound him. Janet helped me.
She hinted with a bashfulness, quite new to her, that I must go through
some ceremony. Guessing what it was, I saluted her on the cheek. The
squire observed that a kiss of that sort might as well have been planted
on her back hair. 'But,' said he, and wisely, 'I'd rather have the girl
worth ten of you, than you be more than her match. Girls like my girl
here are precious.' Owing to her intercession, he winked at my departure
after I had done duty among the tenants; he barely betrayed his vexation,
and it must have been excessive.

Heriot and I rode over to Dipwell. Next night we rode back by moonlight
with matter for a year of laughter, singing like two Arabian poets
praises of dark and fair, challengeing one to rival the other. Kiomi!
Mabel! we shouted separately. We had just seen the dregs of the last of
the birthday Burgundy.

'Kiomi! what a splendid panther she is!' cries Heriot; and I: 'Teeth and
claws, and a skin like a burnt patch on a common! Mabel's like a
wonderful sunflower.'

'Butter and eggs! old Richie, and about as much fire as a rushlight. If
the race were Fat she 'd beat the world.'

'Heriot, I give you my word of honour, the very look of her 's eternal
Summer. Kiomi rings thin--she tinkles; it 's the difference between metal
and flesh.'

'Did she tinkle, as you call it, when that fellow Destrier, confound him!
touched her?'

'The little cat! Did you notice Mabel's blush?'

'How could I help it? We've all had a dozen apiece. You saw little Kiomi
curled up under the hop and briony?'

'I took her for a dead jackdaw.'

'I took her for what she is, and she may slap, scream, tear, and bite, I
'll take her yet-and all her tribe crying thief, by way of a diversion.
She and I are footed a pair.'

His impetuosity surpassed mine so much that I fell to brooding on the
superior image of my charmer. The result was, I could not keep away from
her. I managed to get home with leaden limbs. Next day I was back at
Dipwell.

Such guilt as I have to answer for I may avow. I made violent love to
this silly country beauty, and held every advantage over her other
flatterers. She had met me on the evening of the great twenty-first, she
and a line of damsels dressed in white and wearing wreaths, and I had
claimed the privilege of saluting her. The chief superintendent of the
festivities, my father's old cook, Monsieur Alphonse, turned twilight
into noonday with a sheaf of rockets at the moment my lips brushed her
cheek. It was a kiss marred; I claimed to amend it. Besides, we had been
bosom friends in childhood. My wonder at the growth of the rose I had
left but an insignificant thorny shoot was exquisite natural flattery,
sweet reason, to which she could not say nonsense. At each step we trod
on souvenirs, innocent in themselves, had they recurred to childish
minds. The whisper, 'Hark! it's sunset, Mabel, Martha Thresher calls,'
clouded her face with stormy sunset colours. I respected Martha even then
for boldly speaking to me on the girl's behalf. Mrs. Waddy's courage
failed. John Thresher and Mark Sweetwinter were overcome by my father's
princely prodigality; their heads were turned, they appeared to have
assumed that I could do no wrong. To cut short the episode, some one
wrote to the squire in uncouth English, telling him I was courting a
country lass, and he at once started me for the Continent. We had some
conversation on money before parting. The squire allowed me a thousand a
year, independent of my own income. He counselled prudence, warned me
that I was on my trial, and giving me his word of honour that he should
not spy into my Bank accounts, desired me to be worthy of the trust
reposed in me. Speculation he forbade. I left him satisfied with the
assurance that I meant to make my grand tour neither as a merchant, a
gambler, nor a rake, but simply as a plain English gentleman.

'There's nothing better in the world than that,' said he.

Arrived in London, I left my travelling companion, the Rev. Ambrose
Peterborough, sipping his Port at the hotel, and rushed down to Dipwell,
shot a pebble at Mabel's window by morning twilight, and soon had her
face at the casement. But it was a cloudy and rainbeaten face. She
pointed toward the farm, saying that my father was there.

'Has he grieved you, Mabel?' I asked softly.

'Oh, no, not he! he wouldn't, he couldn't; he talked right. Oh, go, go:
for I haven't a foot to move. And don't speak so soft; I can't bear
kindness.'

My father in admonishing her had done it tenderly, I was sure. Tenderness
was the weapon which had wounded her, and so she shrank from it; and if I
had reproached and abused her she might, perhaps, have obeyed me by
coming out, not to return. She was deaf. I kissed my hand to her
regretfully; a condition of spirit gradually dissolved by the haunting
phantom of her forehead and mouth crumpling up for fresh floods of tears.
Had she concealed that vision with her handkerchief, I might have waited
to see her before I saw my father. He soon changed the set of the
current.

'Our little Mabel here,' he said, 'is an inflammable puss, I fear. By the
way, talking of girls, I have a surprise for you. Remind me of it when we
touch Ostend. We may want a yacht there to entertain high company. I have
set inquiries afloat for the hire of a schooner. This child Mabel can
read and write, I suppose? Best write no letters, boy. Do not make old
Dipwell a thorny bed. I have a portrait to show you, Richie. A portrait!
I think you will say the original was worthy of more than to be taken up
and thrown away like a weed. You see, Richie, girls have only one chance
in the world, and good God! to ruin that--no, no. You shall see this
portrait. A pretty little cow-like Mabel, I grant you. But to have her on
the conscience! What a coronet to wear! My young Lord Destrier--you will
remember him as one of our guests here; I brought him to make your
acquaintance; well, he would not be scrupulous, it is possible. Ay, but
compare yourself with him, Richie! and you and I, let us love one another
and have no nettles.'

He flourished me away to London, into new spheres of fancy. He was
irresistible.

In a London Club I was led up to the miniature of a youthful woman,
singular for her endearing beauty Her cheeks were merry red, her lips
lively with the spark of laughter, her eyes in good union with them,
showing you the laughter was gentle; eyes of overflowing blue light.

'Who is she?' I asked.

The old-fashioned building of the powdered hair counselled me to add,
'Who was she?'

Captain DeWitt, though a member of the Club, seemed unable to inform me.
His glance consulted my father. He hummed and drawled, and said:
'Mistress Anastasia Dewsbury; that was her name.'

'She does not look a grandmother,' said my father.

'She would be one by this time, I dare say,' said I.

We gazed in silence.

'Yes!' he sighed. 'She was a charming actress, and one of the best of
women. A noble-minded young woman! A woman of cultivation and genius! Do
you see a broken heart in that face? No? Very well. A walk will take us
to her grave. She died early.'

I was breathing 'Who?' when he said, 'She was my mother, my dear.'

It was piteous.

We walked to an old worn flat stone in a London street, where under I had
to imagine those features of beautiful humanity lying shut from us.

She had suffered in life miserably.




CHAPTER XXIV

I MEET THE PRINCESS

Hearing that I had not slept at the hotel, the Rev. Ambrose rushed down
to Riversley with melancholy ejaculations, and was made to rebound by the
squire's contemptuous recommendation to him to learn to know something of
the spirit of young bloods, seeing that he had the nominal charge of one,
and to preach his sermon in secret, if he would be sermonizing out of
church. The good gentleman had not exactly understood his duties, or how
to conduct them. Far from objecting to find me in company with my father,
as he would otherwise have done by transmitting information of that fact
to Riversley, he now congratulated himself on it, and after the two had
conversed apart, cordially agreed to our scheme of travelling together.
The squire had sickened him. I believe that by comparison he saw in my
father a better friend of youth.

'We shall not be the worse for a ghostly adviser at hand,' my father said
to me with his quaintest air of gravity and humour mixed, which was not
insincerely grave, for the humour was unconscious. 'An accredited casuist
may frequently be a treasure. And I avow it, I like to travel with my
private chaplain.'

Mr. Peterborough's temporary absence had allowed me time for getting
ample funds placed at our disposal through the agency of my father's
solicitors, Messrs. Dettermain and Newson, whom I already knew from
certain transactions with them on his behalf. They were profoundly
courteous to me, and showed me his box, and alluded to his Case--a long
one, and a lamentable, I was taught to apprehend, by their lugubriously
professional tone about it. The question was naturally prompted in me,
'Why do you not go on with it?'

'Want of funds.'

'There's no necessity to name that now,' I insisted. But my father
desired them to postpone any further exposition of the case, saying,
'Pleasure first, business by-and-by. That, I take it, is in the order of
our great mother Nature, gentlemen. I will not have him help shoulder his
father's pack until he has had his, fill of entertainment.'

A smooth voyage brought us in view of the towers of Ostend at sunrise.
Standing with my father on deck, and gazing on this fringe of the grand
romantic Continent, I remembered our old travels, and felt myself bound
to him indissolubly, ashamed of my recent critical probings of his
character. My boy's love for him returned in full force. I was
sufficiently cognizant of his history to know that he kept his head
erect, lighted by the fire of his robust heart in the thick of
overhanging natal clouds. As the way is with men when they are too happy
to be sentimental, I chattered of anything but my feelings.

'What a capital idea that was of yours to bring down old Alphonse to
Dipwell! You should have heard old John Thresher and Mark Sweetwinter and
the others grumbling at the interference of "French frogs;" with their
beef, though Alphonse vowed he only ordered the ox to be turned faster,
and he dressed their potatoes in six different ways. I doubt if Dipwell
has composed itself yet. You know I sat for president in their tent while
the beef went its first round; and Alphonse was in an awful hurry to drag
me into what he called the royal tent. By the way, you should have hauled
the standard down at sunset.'

'Not when the son had not come down among us,' said my father, smiling.

'Well, I forgot to tell you about Alphonse. By the way, we'll have him in
our service. There was he plucking at me: "Monsieur Henri-Richie,
Monsieur Henri-Richie! mille complimens . . . et les potages,
Monsieur!--a la Camerani, a la tortue, aux petits pois . . . c'est en
vrai artiste que j'ai su tout retarder jusqu'au dernier moment . . . .
Monsieur! cher Monsieur Henri-Richie, je vous en supplie, laissez-la, ces
planteurs de choux." And John Thresher, as spokesman for the rest:
"Master Harry, we beg to say, in my name, we can't masticate comfortably
while we've got a notion Mr. Frenchman he 's present here to play his
Frenchified tricks with our plain wholesome dishes. Our opinion is, he
don't know beef from hedgehog; and let him trim 'em, and egg 'em,' and
bread-crumb 'em, and pound the mess all his might, and then tak' and roll
'em into balls, we say we wun't, for we can't make English muscle out o'
that."--And Alphonse, quite indifferent to the vulgar: "He! mais pensez
donc au Papa, Monsieur Henri-Richie, sans doute il a une sante de fer:
mais encore faut-il lui menager le suc gastrique, pancreatique . . . ."'

'Ay, ay!' laughed my father; 'what sets you thinking of Alphonse?'

'I suppose because I shall have to be speaking French in an hour.'

'German, Richie, German.'

'But these Belgians speak French.'

'Such French as it is. You will, however, be engaged in a German
conversation first, I suspect.'

'Very well, I'll stumble on. I don't much like it.'

'In six hours from this second of time, Richie, boy, I undertake to
warrant you fonder of the German tongue than of any other spoken
language.'

I looked at him. He gave me a broad pleasant smile, without sign of a
jest lurking in one corner.

The scene attracted me. Laughing fishwife faces radiant with sea-bloom in
among the weedy pier-piles, and sombre blue-cheeked officers of the
douane, with their double row of buttons extending the breadth of their
shoulders. My father won Mr. Peterborough's approval by declaring cigars
which he might easily have passed.

'And now, sir,'--he used the commanding unction of a lady's doctor,--'you
to bed, and a short repose. We will, if it pleases you, breakfast at
eight. I have a surprise for Mr. Richie. We are about to beat the drum in
the market-place, and sing out for echoes.'

'Indeed, sir?' said the simple man.

'I promise you we shall not disturb you, Mr. Peterborough. You have
reached that middle age, have you not, when sleep is, so to put it, your
capital? And your activity is the interest you draw from it to live on.
You have three good hours. So, then, till we meet at the
breakfast-table.'

My father's first proceeding at the hotel was to examine the list of
visitors. He questioned one of the waiters aside, took information from
him, and seized my arm rather tremulously, saying,

'They are here. 'Tis as I expected. And she is taking the morning breath
of sea-air on the dunes. Come, Richie, come.'

'Who's the "she"?' I asked incuriously.

'Well, she is young, she is of high birth, she is charming. We have a
crowned head or two here. I observe in you, Richie, an extraordinary
deficiency of memory. She has had an illness; Neptune speed her recovery!
Now for a turn at our German. Die Strassen ruhen; die Stadt schlaft; aber
dort, siehst Du, dort liegt das blaue Meer, das nimmer-schlafende! She is
gazing on it, and breathing it, Richie. Ach! ihr jauchzende Seejungfern.
On my soul, I expect to see the very loveliest of her sex!

You must not be dismayed at pale cheeks-blasse Wangen. Her illness has
been alarming. Why, this air is the top of life; it will, and it shall,
revive her. How will she address him?--"Freund," in my presence,
perchance: she has her invalid's privilege. "Theure Prinzessin" you might
venture on. No ice! Ay, there she is!'

Solitary, on the long level of the sand-bank, I perceived a group that
became discernible as three persons attached to an invalid's chair,
moving leisurely toward us. I was in the state of mind between divination
and doubt when the riddle is not impossible to read, would but the heart
cease its hurry an instant; a tumbled sky where the break is coming. It
came. The dear old days of my wanderings with Temple framed her face. I
knew her without need of pause or retrospect. The crocus raising its cup
pointed as when it pierced the earth, and the crocus stretched out on
earth, wounded by frost, is the same flower. The face was the same,
though the features were changed. Unaltered in expression, but wan, and
the kind blue eyes large upon lean brows, her aspect was that of one who
had been half caught away and still shook faintly in the relaxing
invisible grasp.

We stopped at a distance of half-a-dozen paces to allow her time for
recollection. She eyed us softly in a fixed manner, while the sea-wind
blew her thick redbrown hair to threads on her cheek. Colour on the fair
skin told us we were recognized.

'Princess Ottilia!' said my father.

'It is I, my friend,' she answered. 'And you?'

'With more health than I am in need of, dearest princess.'

'And he?'

'Harry Richmond! my son, now of age, commencing his tour; and he has not
forgotten the farewell bunch of violets.'

Her eyelids gently lifted, asking me.

'Nor the mount you did me the honour to give me on the little Hungarian,'
said I.

'How nice this sea-air is!' she spoke in English. 'England and sea go
together in my thoughts. And you are here! I have been down very low,
near the lowest. But your good old sea makes me breathe again. I want to
toss on it. Have you yet seen the Markgrafin?'

My father explained that we had just landed from the boat.

'Is our meeting, then, an accident?'

'Dear princess, I heard of your being out by the shore.'

'Ah! kind: and you walked to meet me? I love that as well, though I love
chance. And it is chance that brings you here! I looked out on the boat
from England while they were dressing me: I cannot have too much of the
morning, for then I have all to myself: sea and sky and I. The night
people are all asleep, and you come like an old Marchen.'

Her eyelids dropped without closing.

'Speak no more to her just at present,' said an English voice, Miss
Silbey's. Schwartz, the huge dragoon, whose big black horse hung near him
in my memory like a phantom, pulled the chair at a quiet pace, head
downward. A young girl clad in plain black walked beside Miss Sibley,
following the wheels.

'Danger is over,' Miss Sibley answered my gaze. 'She is convalescent. You
see how weak she is.'

I praised the lady for what I deemed her great merit in not having
quitted the service of the princess.

'Oh!' said she, 'my adieux to Sarkeld were uttered years ago. But when I
heard of her fall from the horse I went and nursed her. We were once in
dread of her leaving us. She sank as if she had taken some internal
injury. It may have been only the shock to her system and the cessation
of her accustomed exercise. She has a little over-studied.'

'The margravine?'

'The margravine is really very good and affectionate, and has won my
esteem. So you and your father are united at last? We have often talked
of you. Oh! that day up by the tower. But, do you know, the statue is
positively there now, and no one--no one who had the privilege of
beholding the first bronze Albrecht Wohlgemuth, Furst von
Eppenwelzen-Sarkeld, no one will admit that the second is half worthy of
him. I can feel to this day the leap of the heart in my mouth when the
statue dismounted. The prince sulked for a month: the margravine still
longer at your father's evasion. She could not make allowance for the
impulsive man: such a father; such a son!'

'Thank you, thank you most humbly,' said I, bowing to her shadow of a
mock curtsey.

The princess's hand appeared at a side of the chair. We hastened to her.

'Let me laugh, too,' she prayed.

Miss Sibley was about to reply, but stared, and delight sprang to her
lips in a quick cry.

'What medicine is this? Why, the light of morning has come to you, my
darling!'

'I am better, dearest, better.'

'You sigh, my own.'

'No; I breathe lots, lots of salt air now, and lift like a boat. Ask
him--he had a little friend, much shorter than himself, who came the
whole way with him out of true friendship--ask him where is the friend?'

Miss Sibley turned her head to me.

'Temple,' said I; 'Temple is a midshipman; he is at sea.'

'That is something to think of,' the princess murmured, and dropped her
eyelids a moment. She resumed 'The Grand Seigneur was at Vienna last
year, and would not come to Sarkeld, though he knew I was ill.'

My father stooped low.

'The Grand Seigneur, your servant, dear princess, was an Ottoman Turk,
and his Grand Vizier advised him to send flowers in his place weekly.'

'I had them, and when we could get those flowers nowhere else,' she
replied. 'So it was you! So my friends have been about me.'

During the remainder of the walk I was on one side of the chair, and her
little maid on the other, while my father to rearward conversed with Miss
Sibley. The princess took a pleasure in telling me that this Aennchen of
hers knew me well, and had known me before ever her mistress had seen me.
Aennchen was the eldest of the two children Temple and I had eaten
breakfast with in the forester's hut. I felt myself as if in the forest
again, merely wondering at the growth of the trees, and the narrowness of
my vision in those days.

At parting, the princess said,

'Is my English improved? You smiled at it once. I will ask you when I
meet you next.'

'It is my question,' I whispered to my own ears.

She caught the words.

'Why do you say--"It is my question"?'

I was constrained to remind her of her old forms of English speech.

'You remember that? Adieu,' she said.

My father considerately left me to carry on my promenade alone. I crossed
the ground she had traversed, noting every feature surrounding it, the
curving wheel-track, the thin prickly sand-herbage, the wave-mounds, the
sparse wet shells and pebbles, the gleaming flatness of the water, and
the vast horizon-boundary of pale flat land level with shore, looking
like a dead sister of the sea. By a careful examination of my watch and
the sun's altitude, I was able to calculate what would, in all
likelihood, have been his height above yonder waves when her chair was
turned toward the city, at a point I reached in the track. But of the
matter then simultaneously occupying my mind, to recover which was the
second supreme task I proposed to myself-of what. I also was thinking
upon the stroke of five o'clock, I could recollect nothing. I could not
even recollect whether I happened to be looking on sun and waves when she
must have had them full and glorious in her face.




CHAPTER XXV

ON BOARD A YACHT

With the heartiest consent I could give, and a blank cheque, my father
returned to England to hire forthwith a commodious yacht, fitted and
manned. Before going he discoursed of prudence in our expenditure; though
not for the sake of the mere money in hand, which was a trifle, barely
more than the half of my future income; but that the squire, should he by
and by bethink him of inspecting our affairs, might perceive we were not
spendthrifts.

'I promised you a surprise, Richie,' said he, 'and you have had it;
whether at all equal to your expectations is for you to determine. I was
aware of the margravine's intention to bring the princess to these
sea-sands; they are famous on the Continent. It was bruited last Winter
and Spring that she would be here in the season for bathing; so I held it
likely we should meet. We have, you behold. In point of fact, we owe the
good margravine some show of hospitality. The princess has a passion for
tossing on the sea. To her a yacht is a thing dropped from the moon. His
Highness the prince her father could as soon present her with one as with
the moon itself. The illustrious Serenity's revenue is absorbed, my boy,
in the state he has to support. As for his daughter's dowry, the young
gentleman who anticipates getting one with her, I commend to the practise
of his whistling. It will be among the sums you may count, if you are a
moderate arithmetician, in groschen. The margravine's income I should
reckon to approach twenty thousand per annum, and she proves her
honourable sense that she holds it in trust for others by dispersing it
rapidly. I fear she loves cards. So, then, I shall go and hire the yacht
through Dettermain and Newson, furnish it with piano and swing-cot, etc.;
and if the ladies shrink from a cruise they can have an occasional sail.
Here are we at their service. I shall be seriously baffled by fortune if
I am not back to you at the end of a week. You will take your early
morning walk, I presume. On Sunday see that our chaplain, the excellent
Mr. Peterborough, officiates for the assembled Protestants of all
nations. It excites our English enthusiasm. In addition, son Richie, it
is peculiarly our duty. I, at least, hold the view that it is a family
duty. Think it over, Richie boy. Providence, you see, has sent us the
man. As for me, I feel as if I were in the dawn of one life with all the
mature experience of another. I am calm, I am perfectly unexcited, and I
tell you, old son, I believe--pick among the highest--our destinies are
about the most brilliant of any couple in Great Britain.'

His absence relieved me in spite of my renewed pleasure in his talk; I
may call it a thirsty craving to have him inflating me, puffing the deep
unillumined treasure-pits of my nature with laborious hints, as mines are
filled with air to keep the miners going. While he talked he made these
inmost recesses habitable. But the pain lay in my having now and then to
utter replies. The task of speaking was hateful. I found a sweetness in
brooding unrealizingly over hopes and dreams and possibilities, and I let
him go gladly that I might enjoy a week of silence, just taking
impressions as they came, like the sands in the ebb-tide. The impression
of the morning was always enough for a day's meditation. The green colour
and the crimson athwart it, and higher up the pinky lights, flamingo
feathers, on a warm half-circle of heaven, in hue between amethyst and
milky opal; then the rim of the sun's disc not yet severe; and then the
monstrous shadow of tall Schwartz darting at me along the sand, then the
princess. This picture, seen at sunrise, lasted till I slept. It stirred
no thoughts, conjured no images, it possessed me. In the afternoon the
margravine accompanied the princess to a point facing seaward, within
hearing of the military band. She did me the favour to tell me that she
tolerated me until I should become efficient in German to amuse her, but
the dulness of the Belgian city compared with her lively German
watering-places compelled her to try my powers of fun in French, and in
French I had to do duty, and failed in my office.

'Do you know,' said she, 'that your honourable papa is one in a million?
He has the life of a regiment in his ten fingers. What astonishes me is
that he does not make fury in that England of yours--that Lapland! Je ne
puffs me passer de cet homme! He offends me, he trifles, he outrages, he
dares permit himself to be indignant. Bon! we part, and absence pleads
for him with the eloquence of Satan. I am his victim. Does he, then,
produce no stir whatever in your England? But what a people! But yes, you
resemble us, as bottles--bottles; seulement, you are emptied of your
wine. Ce Monsieur Peterbooroo'! Il m'agace les nerfs. It cannot be blood
in his veins. One longs to see him cuffed, to see if he has the English
lion in him, one knows not where. But you are so, you English, when not
intoxicated. And so censorious! You win your battles, they say, upon beer
and cordials: it is why you never can follow up a success. Je tiens cela
du Marechal Prince B-----. Let that pass. One groans at your intolerable
tristesse. La vie en Angleterre est comme un marais. It is a scandal to
human nature. It blows fogs, foul vapours, joint-stiffnesses, agues,
pestilences, over us here,--yes, here! That is your best side: but your
worst is too atrocious! Mon Dieu! Your men-rascals! Your women-rascals!'

'Good soul!' the princess arrested her, 'I beg that you will not abuse
England.'

'Have I abused England?' exclaimed the margravine. 'Nay, then, it was
because England is shockingly unjust to the most amusing, the most
reviving, charming of men. There is he fresh as a green bubbling well,
and those English decline to do honour to his source. Now tell me, you!'
She addressed me imperiously. 'Are you prosecuting his claims? Are you
besieging your Government? What! you are in the season of generosity, an
affectionate son, wealthy as a Magyar prince of flocks, herds, mines, and
men, and you let him stand in the shade deprived of his birthright? Are
you a purse-proud commoner or an imbecile?'

'My whimsy aunt!' the princess interposed again, 'now you have taken to
abusing a defenceless Englishman.'

'Nothing of the sort, child. I compliment him on his looks and manners;
he is the only one of his race who does not appear to have marched out of
a sentinel's box with a pocket-mirror in his hand. I thank him from my
soul for not cultivating the national cat's whisker. None can imagine
what I suffer from the oppressive sight of his Monsieur Peterbooroo'! And
they are of one pattern--the entire nation! He! no, he has the step of a
trained blood-horse. Only, as Kaunitz, or somebody, said of Joseph II.,
or somebody, he thinks or he chews. Englishmen's mouths were clearly not
made for more purposes than one. In truth, I am so utterly wearied, I
could pray for the diversion of a descent of rain. The life here is as
bad as in Rippau. I might just as well be in Rippau doing duty: the silly
people complain, I hear. I am gathering dust. These, my dear, these are
the experiences which age women at a prodigious rate. I feel chains on my
limbs here.'

'Madame, I would,' said I, 'that I were the Perseus to relieve you of
your monster Ennui, but he is coming quickly.'

'You see he has his pretty phrases!' cried the margravine; adding
encouragingly, 'S'il nest pas tant sort peu impertinent?'

The advance of some German or Russian nobleman spared me further efforts.

We were on shore, listening to the band in the afternoon, when a sail
like a spark of pure white stood on the purple black edge of a
storm-cloud. It was the yacht. By sunset it was moored off shore, and at
night hung with variegated lamps. Early next morning we went on board.
The ladies were astonished at the extent of the vessel, and its luxurious
fittings and cunning arrangements. My father, in fact, had negotiated for
the hire of the yacht some weeks previously, with his accustomed
forethought.

'House and town and fortress provisioned, and moveable at will!' the
margravine interjected repeatedly.

The princess was laid on raised pillows in her swingcot under an awning
aft, and watched the sailors, the splendid offspring of old sea-fights,
as I could observe her spirited fancy conceiving them. They were a set of
men to point to for an answer to the margravine's strictures on things
English.

'Then, are you the captain, my good Herr Heilbrunn?' the margravine asked
my father.

He was dressed in cheerful blue, wearing his cheerfullest air, and seemed
strongly inclined for the part of captain, but presented the actual
commander of the schooner-yacht, and helped him through the margravine's
interrogations.

'All is excellent,--excellent for a day's sail,' she said. 'I have no
doubt you could nourish my system for a month, but to deal frankly with
you--prepared meats and cold pies!--to face them once is as much as I am
capable of.'

'Dear Lady Field-Marshal,' returned my father, 'the sons of Neptune would
be of poor account, if they could not furnish you cookery at sea.'

They did, for Alphonse was on board. He and my father had a hot
discussion about the margravine's dishes, Alphonse declaring that it was
against his conscience to season them pungently, and my father preaching
expediency. Alphonse spoke of the artist and his duty to his art, my
father of the wise diplomatist who manipulated individuals without any
sacrifice of principle. They were partly at play, of course, both having
humour.

It ended in the margravine's being enraptured. The delicacy of the
invalid's dishes, was beyond praise. 'So, then, we are absolutely better
housed and accommodated than on shore!' the margravine made her wonder
heard, and from that fell to enthusiasm for the vessel. After a couple of
pleasant smooth-sailing days, she consented to cruise off the coasts of
France and England. Adieu to the sands. Throughout the cruise she was
placable, satisfied with earth and sea, and constantly eulogizing herself
for this novel state of serenity. Cards, and a collection of tripping
French books bound in yellow, danced the gavotte with time, which made
the flying minutes endurable to her: and for relaxation there was here
the view of a shining town dropped between green hills to dip in
sea-water, yonder a ship of merchandise or war to speculate upon,
trawlers, collier-brigs, sea-birds, wave over wave. No cloud on sun and
moon. We had gold and silver in our track, like the believable children
of fairyland.

The princess, lying in her hammock-cot on deck, both day and night, or
for the greater part of the night, let her eyes feast incessantly on a
laughing sea: when she turned them to any of us, pure pleasure sparkled
in them. The breezy salt hours were visible ecstasy to her blood. If she
spoke it was but to utter a few hurried, happy words, and shrink as you
see the lightning behind a cloud-rack, suggestive of fiery swift emotion
within, and she gazed away overjoyed at the swoop and plunge of the
gannet, the sunny spray, the waves curling crested or down-like. At night
a couple of sailors, tender as women, moved her in the cot to her cabin.
We heard her voice in the dark of the morning, and her little maid
Aennchen came out and was met by me; and I at that hour had the privilege
to help move her back to her favourite place, and strap the iron-stand
fast, giving the warm-hooded cot room to swing. The keen sensations of a
return to health amid unwonted scenes made things magical to her. When
she beheld our low green Devon hills she signalled for help to rise, and
'That is England!' she said, summoning to her beautiful clear eyeballs
the recollection of her first desire to see my country. Her petition was
that the yacht should go in nearer and nearer to the land till she could
discern men, women, and children, and their occupations. A fisherman and
his wife sat in the porch above their hanging garden, the woman knitting,
the man mending his nets, barefooted boys and girls astride the keel of a
boat below them. The princess eyed them and wept. 'They give me
happiness; I can give them nothing,' she said.

The margravine groaned impatiently at talk of such a dieaway sort.

My father sent a couple of men on shore with a gift of money to their
family in the name of the Princess Ottilia. How she thanked him for his
prompt ideas! 'It is because you are generous you read one well.'

She had never thanked me. I craved for that vibrating music as of her
deep heart penetrated and thrilling, but shrank from grateful words which
would have sounded payment. Running before the wind swiftly on a night of
phosphorescent sea, when the waves opened to white hollows with frayed
white ridges, wreaths of hissing silver, her eyelids closed, and her hand
wandered over the silken coverlet to the hammock cloth, and up, in a
blind effort to touch. Mine joined to it. Little Aennchen was witness.
Ottilia held me softly till her slumber was deep.




CHAPTER XXVI

IN VIEW OF THE HOHENZOLLERN'S BIRTHPLACE

Our cruise came to an end in time to save the margravine from yawning.
The last day of it was windless, and we hung in sight of the colourless
low Flemish coast for hours, my father tasking his ingenuity to amuse
her. He sang with Miss Sibley, rallied Mr. Peterborough, played picquet
to lose, threw over the lead line to count the fathoms, and whistling for
the breeze, said to me, 'We shall decidedly have to offer her an
exhibition of tipsy British seamen as a final resource. The case is grave
either way; but we cannot allow the concluding impression to be a dull
one.'

It struck me with astonishment to see the vigilant watch she kept over
the princess this day, after having left her almost uninterruptedly to my
care.

'You are better?' She addressed Ottilia. 'You can sit up? You think you
can walk? Then I have acted rightly, nay, judiciously,--I have not made a
sacrifice for nothing. I took the cruise, mind you, on your account. You
would study yourself to the bone, till you looked like a canary's quill,
with that Herr Professor of yours. Now I 've given you a dose of life.
Yes, you begin to look like human flesh. Something has done you good.'

The princess flushing scarlet, the margravine cried,

'There's no occasion for you to have the whole British army in your
cheeks. Goodness me! what's the meaning of it? Why, you answer me like
flags, banners, uhlans' pennons, fullfrocked cardinals!'

My father stepped in.

'Ah, yes,' said the margravine. 'But you little know, my good Roy, the
burden of an unmarried princess; and heartily glad shall I be to hand her
over to Baroness Turckems. That's her instituted governess, duenna,
dragon, what you will. She was born for responsibility, I was not; it
makes me miserable. I have had no holiday. True, while she was like one
of their wax virgins I had a respite. Fortunately, I hear of you English,
that when you fall to sighing, you suck your thumbs and are consoled.'

My father bowed her, and smiled her, and whirled her away from the
subject. I heard him say, under his breath, that he had half a mind to
issue orders for an allowance of grog to be served out to the sailors on
the spot. I suggested, as I conceived in a similar spirit the forcible
ducking of Mr. Peterborough. He appeared to entertain and relish the
notion in earnest.

'It might do. It would gratify her enormously,' he said, and eyed the
complacent clerical gentleman with transparent jealousy of his claims to
decent treatment. 'Otherwise, I must confess,' he added, 'I am at a loss.
My wits are in the doldrums.'

He went up to Mr. Peterborough, and, with an air of great sincerity and
courtesy, requested him in French to create a diversion for her Highness
the Margravine of Rippau during the extreme heat of the afternoon by
precipitating himself headlong into forty fathoms, either attached or
unattached. His art in baffling Mr. Peterborough's attempts to treat the
unheard-of request as a jest was extraordinary. The ingenuity of his
successive pleas for pressing such a request pertinaciously upon Mr.
Peterborough in particular, his fixed eye, yet cordial deferential
manner, and the stretch of his forefinger, and argumentative turn of the
head--indicative of an armed disputant fully on the alert, and as if it
were of profound and momentous importance that he should thoroughly
defeat and convince his man--overwhelmed us. Mr. Peterborough, not being
supple in French, fell back upon his English with a flickering smile of
protestation; but even in his native tongue he could make no head against
the tremendous volubility and brief eager pauses besetting him.

The farce was too evanescent for me to reproduce it.

Peterborough turned and fled to his cabin. Half the crew were on the
broad grin. The margravine sprang to my father's arm, and entreated him
to be her guest in her Austrian mountain summer-seat. Ottilia was now her
darling and her comfort. Whether we English youth sucked our thumbs, or
sighed furiously, she had evidently ceased to care. Mr. Peterborough
assured me at night that he had still a difficulty in persuading himself
of my father's absolute sanity, so urgent was the fire of his eye in
seconding his preposterous proposal; and, as my father invariably treated
with the utmost reserve a farce played out, they never arrived at an
understanding about it, beyond a sententious agreement once, in the
extreme heat of an Austrian highland valley, that the option of taking a
header into sea-water would there be divine.

Our yacht winged her way home. Prince Ernest of Eppenwelzen-Sarkeld,
accompanied by Baroness Turckems, and Prince Otto, his nephew, son of the
Prince of Eisenberg, a captain of Austrian lancers, joined the margravine
in Wurtemberg, and we felt immediately that domestic affairs were under a
different management. Baroness Turckems relieved the margravine of her
guard. She took the princess into custody. Prince Ernest greeted us with
some affability; but it was communicated to my father that he expected an
apology before he could allow himself to be as absolutely unclouded
toward us as the blaze of his titles. My father declined to submit; so
the prince inquired of us what our destination was. Down the Danube to
the Black Sea and Asia Minor, Greece, Egypt, the Nile, the Desert, India,
possibly, and the Himalayas, my father said. The prince bowed. The
highest personages, if they cannot travel, are conscious of a sort of
airy majesty pertaining to one who can command so wide and far a flight.
We were supplicated by the margravine to appease her brother's pride with
half a word. My father was firm. The margravine reached her two hands to
him. He kissed over them each in turn. They interchanged smart
semi-flattering or cutting sentences.

'Good!' she concluded; 'now I sulk you for five years.'

'You would decapitate me, madam, and weep over my astonished head, would
you not?'

'Upon my honour, I would,' she shook herself to reply.

He smiled rather sadly.

'No pathos!' she implored him.

'Not while I live, madam,' said he.

At this her countenance underwent a tremour.

'And when that ends . . . friend! well, I shall have had my last laugh in
the world.'

Both seemed affected. My father murmured some soothing word.

'Then you do mean to stay with me?' the margravine caught him up.

'Not in livery, your Highness.'

'To the deuce with you!' would be a fair translation of the exalted
lady's reply. She railed at his insufferable pride.

'And you were wrong, wrong,' she pursued. 'You offended the prince
mightily: you travestied his most noble ancestor--'

'In your service, may it please you.'

'You offended, offended him, I say, and you haven't the courage to make
reparation. And when I tell you the prince is manageable as your ship, if
you will only take and handle the rudder. Do you perceive?'

She turned to me.

'Hither, Mr. Harry; come, persuade him. Why, you do not desire to leave
me, do you?'

Much the reverse. But I had to congratulate myself subsequently on having
been moderate in the expression of my wishes; for, as my father explained
to me, with sufficient lucidity to enlighten my dulness, the margravine
was tempting him grossly. She saw more than I did of his plans. She could
actually affect to wink at them that she might gain her point, and have
her amusement, and live for the hour, treacherously beguiling a
hoodwinked pair to suppose her partially blind or wholly complaisant. My
father knew her and fenced her.

'Had I yielded,' he said, when my heart was low after the parting, 'I
should have shown her my hand. I do not choose to manage the prince that
the margravine may manage me. I pose my pride--immolate my son to it,
Richie? I hope not. No. At Vienna we shall receive an invitation to
Sarkeld for the winter, if we hear nothing of entreaties to turn aside to
Ischl at Munich. She is sure to entreat me to accompany her on her annual
visit to her territory of Rippau, which she detests; and, indeed, there
is not a vine in the length and breadth of it. She thought herself broad
awake, and I have dosed her with an opiate.'

He squeezed my fingers tenderly. I was in want both of consolation and
very delicate handling when we drove out of the little Wurtemberg town: I
had not taken any farewell from Ottilia. Baroness Turckems was already
exercising her functions of dragon. With the terrible forbidding word
'Repose' she had wafted the princess to her chamber in the evening, and
folded her inextricably round and round in the morning. The margravine
huffed, the prince icy, Ottilia invisible, I found myself shooting down
from the heights of a dream among shattered fragments of my cloud-palace
before I well knew that I had left off treading common earth. All my
selfish nature cried out to accuse Ottilia. We drove along a dusty
country road that lay like a glaring shaft of the desert between
vineyards and hills.

'There,' said my father, waving his hand where the hills on our left fell
to a distance and threw up a lofty head and neck cut with one white line,
'your Hohenzollerns shot up there. Their castle looks like a tight
military stock. Upon my word, their native mountain has the air of a drum
major. Mr. Peterborough, have you a mind to climb it? We are at your
disposal.'

'Thank you, thank you, sir,' said the Rev. Ambrose, gazing
enthusiastically, but daunted by the heat: 'if it is your wish?'

'We have none that is not yours, Mr. Peterborough. You love ruins, and we
are adrift just now. I presume we can drive to the foot of the ascent. I
should wish my son perhaps to see the source of great houses.'

Here it was that my arm was touched by old Schwartz. He saluted stiffly,
and leaning from the saddle on the trot of his horse at an even pace with
our postillion, stretched out a bouquet of roses. I seized it
palpitating, smelt the roses, and wondered. May a man write of his
foolishness?--tears rushed to my eyes. Schwartz was far behind us when my
father caught sight of the magical flowers.

'Come!' said he, glowing, 'we will toast the Hohenstaufens and the
Hohenzollerns to-night, Richie.'

Later, when I was revelling in fancies sweeter than the perfume of the
roses, he pressed their stems reflectively, unbound them, and disclosed a
slip of crested paper. On it was written:

          'Violets are over.'

Plain words; but a princess had written them, and never did so golden a
halo enclose any piece of human handiwork.




CHAPTER XXVII

THE TIME OF ROSES

I sat and thrilled from head to foot with a deeper emotion than joy. Not
I, but a detached self allied to the careering universe and having life
in it.

'Violets are over.'

The first strenuous effort of my mind was to grasp the meaning, subtle as
odour, in these words. Innumerable meanings wreathed away unattainable to
thought. The finer senses could just perceive them ere they vanished.
Then as I grew material, two camps were pitched and two armies prepared
to fight to establish one distinct meaning. 'Violets are over, so I send
you roses'; she writes you simple fact. Nay, 'Our time of violets is
over, now for us the roses'; she gives you heavenly symbolism.

'From violets to roses, so run the seasons.'

Or is it,

'From violets to roses, thus far have we two travelled?'

But would she merely say, 'I have not this kind of flower, and I send you
another?'

True, but would she dare to say, 'The violets no longer express my heart;
take the roses?'

'Maidenly, and a Princess, yet sweet and grateful, she gives you the
gracefullest good speed.

'Noble above all human distinctions, she binds you to herself, if you
will it.'

The two armies came into collision, the luck of the day going to the one
I sided with.

But it was curiously observable that the opposing force recovered energy
from defeat, while mine languished in victory. I headed them alternately,
and--it invariably happened so.

'She cannot mean so much as this.'

'She must mean more than that.'

Thus the Absolute and the Symbolical factions struggled on. A princess
drew them as the moon the tides.

By degrees they subsided and united, each reserving its view; a point at
which I imagined myself to have regained my proper humility. 'The
princess has sent you these flowers out of her homely friendliness; not
seeing you to speak her farewell, she, for the very reason that she can
do it innocent of any meaning whatsoever, bids you be sure you carry her
esteem with you. Is the sun of blue heavens guilty of the shadow it
casts? Clear your mind. She means nothing. Warmth and beauty come from
her, and are on you for the moment. But full surely she is a thing to be
won: she is human: did not her hand like a gentle snake seek yours, and
detain it, and bear it away into the heart of her sleep?--Be moderate.
Let not a thought or a dream spring from her condescension, lest you do
outrage to her noble simplicity. Look on that high Hohenzollern hill-top:
she also is of the line of those who help to found illustrious Houses:
what are you?'

I turned to my father and stared him in the face. What was he? Were we
not losing precious time in not prosecuting his suit? I put this question
to him, believing that it would sound as too remote from my thoughts to
betray them. He glanced at the roses, and answered gladly,

'Yes!--no, no! we must have our holiday. Mr. Peterborough is for
exploring a battle-field in the neighbourhood of Munich. He shall. I wish
him to see the Salzkammergut, and have a taste of German Court-life.
Allow me to be captain, Richie, will you? I will show you how battles are
gained and mountains are scaled. That young Prince Otto of Eisenberg is a
fine young fellow. Those Austrian cavalry regiments are good
training-schools for the carriage of a young man's head and limbs. I
would match my boy against him in the exercises--fencing, shooting,
riding.'

'As you did at Bath,' said I.

He replied promptly: 'We might give him Anna Penrhys to marry. English
wives are liked here--adored--if they fetch a dowry. Concerning my suit,
Richie, enough if it keeps pace with us: and we are not going slow. It is
a thing certain. Dettermain and Newson have repeatedly said, "Money,
money!' hand us money, and we guarantee you a public recognition." Money
we now have. But we cannot be in two fields at once. Is it your desire to
return to England?'

'Not at all,' said I, with a chill at the prospect.

'If it is--?' he pressed me, and relenting added: 'I confess I enjoy this
Suabian land as much as you do. Indolence is occasionally charming. I am
at work, nevertheless. But, Richie, determine not to think little of
yourself: there is the main point; believe me, that is half the battle.
You, sir, are one of the wealthiest gentlemen in Europe. You are
pronouncedly a gentleman. That is what we can say of you at present, as
you appear in the world's eye. And you are by descent illustrious. Well,
no more of that, but consider if you kneel down, who will decline to put
a foot on you? Princes have the habit, and they do it as a matter of
course. Challenge them. And they, Richie, are particularly susceptible to
pity for the misfortunes of their class--kind, I should say, for class it
is not; now I have done. All I tell you is, I intend you, under my
guidance, to be happy.'

I thought his remarks the acutest worldly wisdom I had ever heard,--his
veiled method of treating my case the shrewdest, delicatest, and most
consoling, most inspiring. It had something of the mystical power of the
Oracles,--the power which belongs to anonymous writing. Had he disposed
of my apparent rival, and exalted me to the level of a princely family,
in open speech, he would have conveyed no balm to me--I should have
classed it as one confident man's opinion. Disguised and vague, but
emphatic, and interpreted by the fine beam of his eye, it was
intoxicating; and when he said subsequently, 'Our majority Burgundy was
good emperor wine, Richie. You approved it? I laid that vintage down to
give you a lesson to show you that my plans come safe to maturity,'--I
credited him with a large share of foresight, though I well knew his
habit of antedating his sagacity, and could not but smile at the
illustration of it.

You perceive my state without rendering it necessary for me to label
myself.

I saw her next in a pinewood between Ischl and the Traun. I had climbed
the steep hill alone, while my father and Mr. Peterborough drove round
the carriage-road to the margravine's white villa. Ottilia was leaning on
the arm of Baroness Turckems, walking--a miracle that disentangled her
cruelly from my net of fancies. The baroness placed a second hand upon
her as soon as I was seen standing in the path. Ottilia's face coloured
like the cyclamen at her feet.

'You!' she said.

'I might ask, is it you, princess?'

'Some wonder has been worked, you see.'

'I thank heaven.'

'You had a part in it.'

'The poorest possible.'

'Yet I shall presume to call you Doctor Oceanus,'

'Will you repeat his medicine? The yacht awaits you always.'

'When I am well I study. Do not you?'

'I have never studied in my life.'

'Ah, lose no more time. The yacht is delicious idleness, but it is
idleness. I am longing for it now, I am still so very weak. My dear
Sibley has left me to be married. She marries a Hanoverian officer. We
change countries--I mean,' the princess caught back her tongue, 'she will
become German, not compatriot of your ships of war. My English rebukes
me. I cease to express . . . It is like my walking, done half for pride,
I think. Baroness, lower me, and let me rest.'

The baroness laid her gently on the dry brown pine-sheddings, and blew a
whistle that hung at her girdle, by which old Schwartzy kept out of sight
to encourage the princess's delusion of pride in her walking, was
summoned. Ottilia had fainted. The baroness shot a suspicious glance at
me. 'It comes of this everlasting English talk,' I heard her mutter. She
was quick to interpose between me and the form I had once raised and
borne undisputedly.

'Schwartz is the princess's attendant, sir,' she said. 'In future, may I
request you to talk German?'

The Prince of Eppenwelzen and Prince Otto were shooting in the mountains.
The margravine, after conversing with the baroness, received me stiffly.
She seemed eager to be rid of us; was barely hospitable. My mind was too
confused to take much note of words and signs. I made an appointment to
meet my father the day following, and walked away and returned at night,
encountered Schwartz and fed on the crumbs of tidings I got from him, a
good, rough old faithful fellow, far past the age for sympathy, but he
had carried Ottilia when she was an infant, and meant to die in her
service. I thought him enviable above most creatures.

His principal anxiety was about my finding sleeping quarters. When he had
delivered himself three times over of all that I could lead him to say, I
left him still puffing at his pipe. He continued on guard to be in
readiness to run for a doctor, should one be wanted. Twice in the night I
came across his path. The night was quiet, dark blue, and starry; the
morning soft and fragrant. The burden of the night was bearable, but that
of daylight I fled from, and all day I was like one expecting a crisis.
Laughter, with so much to arouse it, hardly had any foothold within me to
stir my wits. For if I said 'Folly!' I did not feel it, and what I felt I
did not understand. My heart and head were positively divided. Days and
weeks were spent in reconciling them a little; days passed with a pencil
and scribbled slips of paper--the lines written with regular
commencements and irregular terminations; you know them. Why had Ottilia
fainted? She recommended hard study--thinks me idle, worthless; she has a
grave intelligence, a serious estimation of life; she thinks me
intrinsically of the value of a summer fly. But why did she say, 'We
change countries,' and immediately flush, break and falter, lose command
of her English, grow pale and swoon; why? With this question my
disastrous big heart came thundering up to the closed doors
of-comprehension. It was unanswerable. 'We change countries.' That is,
she and Miss Sibley change countries, because the English woman marries a
German, and the German princess--oh! enormous folly. Pierce it, slay it,
trample it under. Is that what the insane heart is big with? Throughout
my night-watch I had been free of it, as one who walks meditating in
cloisters on a sentence that once issued from divine lips. There was no
relief, save in those pencilled lines which gave honest laughter a
chance; they stood like such a hasty levy of raw recruits raised for war,
going through the goose-step, with pretty accurate shoulders, and feet of
distracting degrees of extension, enough to craze a rhythmical
drill-sergeant. I exulted at the first reading, shuddered at the second,
and at the third felt desperate, destroyed them and sat staring at
vacancy as if I had now lost the power of speech.

At last I flung away idleness and came to a good resolution; and I
carried it through. I studied at a famous German university, not far from
Hanover. My father, after discussing my project with me from the point of
view of amazement, settled himself in the University town, a place of
hopeless dulness, where the stones of the streets and the houses seemed
to have got their knotty problem to brood over, and never knew holiday. A
fire for acquisition possessed me, and soon an ungovernable scorn for
English systems of teaching--sound enough for the producing of gentlemen,
and perhaps of merchants; but gentlemen rather bare of graces, and
merchants not too scientific in finance. Mr. Peterborough conducted the
argument against me until my stout display of facts, or it may have been
my insolence, combined with the ponderous pressure of the atmosphere upon
one who was not imbibing a counteracting force, drove him on a tour among
German cathedrals.

Letters from Riversley informed me that my proceedings were approved,
though the squire wanted me near him. We offered entertainments to the
students on a vast scale. The local newspaper spoke of my father as the
great Lord Roy. So it happened that the margravine at Sarkeld heard of
us. Returning from a visit to the prince's palace, my father told me that
he saw an opportunity for our being useful to the prince, who wanted
money to work a newly-discovered coal-mine in his narrow dominions, and
he suggested that I might induce the squire to supply it; as a last
extremity I could advance the money. Meanwhile he had engaged to
accompany the prince in mufti to England to examine into the working of
coal-mines, and hire an overseer and workmen to commence operations on
the Sarkeld property. It would be obligatory to entertain him fitly in
London.

'Certainly,' said I.

'During our absence the margravine will do her best to console you,
Richie. The prince chafes at his poverty. We give him a display of wealth
in England; here we are particularly discreet. We shall be surer of our
ground in time. I set Dettermain and Newson at work. I have written for
them to hire a furnished mansion for a couple of months, carriages,
horses, lacqueys. But over here we must really be--goodness me! I know
how hard it is!--we must hold the reins on ourselves tight. Baroness
Turckems is a most estimable person on the side of her duty. Why, the
Dragon of Wantley sat on its eggs, you may be convinced! She is a
praiseworthy dragon. The side she presents to us is horny, and not so
agreeable. Talk German when she is on guard. Further I need not counsel a
clever old son. Counsel me, Richie. Would it be adviseable to run the
prince down to Riversley?--a Prince!'

'Oh! decidedly not,' was my advice.

'Well, well,' he assented.

I empowered him to sell out Bank stock.

He wrote word from England of a very successful expedition. The prince,
travelling under the title of Count Delzenburg, had been suitably
entertained, received by Lady Wilts, Serena Marchioness of Edbury, Lady
Denewdney, Lady Sampleman, and others. He had visited my grandfather's
mine, and that of Miss Penrhys, and was astounded; had said of me that I
wanted but a title to be as brilliant a parti as any in Europe.

The margravine must have received orders from her brother to be civil to
me; she sent me an imperious invitation from her villa, and for this
fruit of my father's diplomacy I yielded him up my daintier feelings, my
judgement into the bargain.

Snows of early Spring were on the pinewood country I had traversed with
Temple. Ottilia greeted me in health and vivacity. The margravine led me
up to her in the very saloon where Temple, my father, and I had sat after
the finale of the statue scene, saying--

'Our sea-lieutenant.'

'It delights me to hear he has turned University student,' she said; and
in English: 'You have made friends of your books?'

She was dressed in blue velvet to the throat; the hair was brushed from
the temples and bound in a simple knot. Her face and speech, fair and
unconstrained, had neither shadow nor beam directed specially for me. I
replied,

'At least I have been taught to despise idleness.'

'My Professor tells me it is strange for any of your countrymen to love
books.'

'We have some good scholars, princess.'

'You have your Bentley and Porson. Oh! I know many of the world's men
have grown in England. Who can deny that? What we mean is, your society
is not penetrated with learning. But my Professor shall dispute with you.
Now you are facile in our German you can defend yourself. He is a deep
scholar, broad over tongues and dialects, European, Asiatic-a lion to me,
poor little mouse! I am speaking of Herr Professor von Karsteg, lady
aunt.'

'Speak intelligibly, and don't drum on my ear with that hybrid language,'
rejoined the margravine.

'Hybrid! It is my Herr Professor's word. But English is the choice
gathering of languages, and honey is hybrid, unless you condemn the bee
to suck at a single flower.'

'Ha! you strain compliments like the poet Fretzel,' the margravine
exclaimed. 'Luckily, they're not, addressed to human creatures. You will
find the villa dull, Herr Harry Richmond. For my part, every place is
dull to me that your father does not enliven. We receive no company in
the prince's absence, so we are utterly cut off from fools; we have
simply none about us.'

'The deprivation is one we are immensely sensible of!' said the princess.

'Laugh on! you will some day be aware of their importance in daily life,
Ottilia.'

The princess answered: 'If I could hate, it would be such persons.' A
sentence that hung in the memory of one knowing himself to be animated by
the wildest genius of folly.

We drove to the statue of Prince Albrecht Wohlgemuth, overlooking leagues
of snow-roofed branches. Again Ottilia reverted to Temple,

'That dear little friend of yours who wandered out with you to seek your
father, and is now a sailor! I cannot forget him. It strikes me as a
beautiful piece of the heroism of boys. You both crossed the sea to
travel over the whole Continent until you should find him, did you not?
What is hard to understand, is your father's not writing to you while he
did us the favour to reside at the palace.'

'Roy is a butterfly,' said the margravine.

'That I cannot think.'

'Roy was busy, he was occupied. I won't have him abused. Besides, one
can't be always caressing and cajoling one's pretty brats.'

'He is an intensely loving father.'

'Very well; establish that, and what does it matter whether he wrote or
not? A good reputation is the best vindication.'

The princess smiled. 'See here, dearest aunty, the two boys passed half
the night here, until my Aennchen's father gave them shelter.'

'Apparently he passes half or all the night in the open air everywhere,'
said the margravine.

I glanced hurriedly over both faces. The margravine was snuffing her
nostrils up contemptuously. The princess had vividly reddened. Her face
was luminous over the nest of white fur folding her neck.

'Yes, I must have the taste for it: for when I was a child,' said I,
plunging at anything to catch a careless topic, 'I was out in my father's
arms through a winter night, and I still look back on it as one of the
most delightful I have ever known. I wish I could describe the effect it
had on me. A track of blood in the snow could not be brighter.'

The margravine repeated,

'A track of blood in the snow! My good young man, you have excited forms
of speech.'

I shuddered. Ottilia divined that her burning blush had involved me.
Divination is fiery in the season of blushes, and I, too, fell on the
track of her fair spirit, setting out from the transparent betrayal by
Schwartz of my night-watch in the pine-wood near the Traun river-falls.
My feelings were as if a wave had rolled me helpless to land, at the
margravine's mercy should she put another question. She startled us with
a loud outburst of laughter.

'No! no man upon this earth but Roy could have sat that horse I don't
know how many minutes by the clock, as a figure of bronze,' she
exclaimed.

Ottilia and I exchanged a grave look. The gentleness of the old time was
sweet to us both: but we had the wish that my father's extravagant
prominency in it might be forgotten.

At the dinner-table I made the acquaintance of the Herr Professor Dr.
Julius von Karsteg, tutor to the princess, a grey, broad-headed man,
whose chin remained imbedded in his neck-cloth when his eyelids were
raised on a speaker. The first impression of him was, that he was chiefly
neck-cloth, coat-collar, grand head, and gruffness. He had not joined the
ceremonial step from the reception to the dining saloon, but had shuffled
in from a side-door. No one paid him any deference save the princess. The
margravine had the habit of thrumming the table thrice as soon as she
heard his voice: nor was I displeased by such an exhibition of
impatience, considering that he spoke merely for the purpose of snubbing
me. His powers were placed in evidence by her not daring to utter a
sarcasm, which was possibly the main cause of her burning fretfulness.

I believe there was not a word uttered by me throughout the dinner that
escaped him. Nevertheless, he did his business of catching and worrying
my poor unwary sentences too neatly for me, an admirer of real force and
aptitude, to feel vindictive. I behaved to him like a gentleman, as we
phrase it, and obtained once an encouraging nod from the margravine. She
leaned to me to say, that they were accustomed to think themselves lucky
if no learned talk came on between the Professor and his pupil. The truth
was, that his residence in Sarkeld was an honour to the prince, and his
acceptance of the tutorship a signal condescension, accounted for by his
appreciation of the princess's intelligence. He was a man distinguished
even in Germany for scholarship, rather notorious for his political and
social opinions too. The margravine, with infinite humour in her
countenance, informed me that he wished to fit the princess for the
dignity of a Doctor of Laws.

'It says much for her that he has not spoilt her manners; her health, you
know, he succeeded in almost totally destroying, and he is at it again.
The man is, I suspect, at heart arrant Republican. He may teach a girl
whatever nonsensical politics he likes--it goes at the lifting of the
bridegroom's little finger. We could not permit him to be near a young
prince. Alas! we have none.'

The Professor allowed himself extraordinary liberties with strangers, the
guests of the margravine. I met him crossing an inner court next day. He
interrupted me in the middle of a commonplace remark, and to this effect:

'You are either a most fortunate or a most unfortunate young man!'

So profoundly penetrated with thoughtfulness was the tone of his voice
that I could not take umbrage. The attempt to analyze his signification
cost me an aching forehead, perhaps because I knew it too acutely.




CHAPTER XXVIII

OTTILIA

She was on horseback; I on foot, Schwartz for sole witness, and a wide
space of rolling silent white country around us.

We had met in the fall of the winter noon by accident. 'You like my
Professor?' said Ottilia.

'I do: I respect him for his learning.'

'You forgive him his irony? It is not meant to be personal to you.
England is the object; and partly, I may tell you, it springs from
jealousy. You have such wealth! You embrace half the world: you are such
a little island! All this is wonderful. The bitterness is, you are such a
mindless people--I do but quote to explain my Professor's ideas.
"Mindless," he says, "and arrogant, and neither in the material nor in
the spiritual kingdom of noble or gracious stature, and ceasing to have a
brave aspect." He calls you squat Goths. Can you bear to hear me?'

'Princess!'

'And to his conception, you, who were pioneers when the earth had to be
shaped for implements and dug for gold, will turn upon us and stop our
march; you are to be overthrown and left behind, there to gain humility
from the only teacher you can understand--from poverty. Will you defend
yourself?'

'Well, no, frankly, I will not. The proper defence for a nation is its
history.'

'For an individual?'

'For a man, his readiness to abide by his word.'

'For a woman--what?'

'For a princess, her ancestry.'

'Ah! but I spoke of women. There, there is my ground of love for my
Professor! I meet my equals, princes, princesses, and the man, the woman,
is out of them, gone, flown! They are out of the tide of humanity; they
are walking titles, "Now," says my Professor, "that tide is the blood of
our being; the blood is the life-giver; and to be cut off from it is to
perish." Our princely houses he esteems as dead wood. Not near so much
say I: yet I hear my equals talk, and I think, "Oh! my Professor, they
testify to your wisdom." I love him because he has given my every sense a
face-forward attitude (you will complain of my feebleness of speech) to
exterior existence. There is a princely view of life which is a true one;
but it is a false one if it is the sole one. In your Parliament your
House of Commons shows us real princes, your Throne merely titled ones. I
speak what everybody knows, and you, I am sure, are astonished to hear
me.'

'I am,' said I.

'It is owing to my Professor, my mind's father and mother. They say it is
the pleasure of low-born people to feel themselves princes; mine it is to
share their natural feelings. "For a princess, her ancestry." Yes; but
for a princess who is no more than princess, her ancestors are a bundle
of faggots, and she, with her mind and heart tied fast to them, is, at
least a good half of her, dead wood. This is our opinion. May I guess at
your thoughts?'

'It's more than I could dare to do myself, princess.'

How different from the Ottilia I had known, or could have imagined! That
was one thought.

'Out of the number, then, this,' she resumed: 'you think that your
English young ladies have command over their tongues: is it not so?'

'There are prattlers among them.'

'Are they educated strictly?'

'I know little of them. They seem to me to be educated to conceal their
education.'

'They reject ideas?'

'It is uncertain whether they have had the offer.'

Ottilia smiled. 'Would it be a home in their midst?'

Something moved my soul to lift wings, but the passion sank.

'I questioned you of English ladies,' she resumed, 'because we read your
writings of us. Your kindness to us is that which passes from nurse to
infant; your criticism reminds one of paedagogue and urchin. You make us
sorry for our manners and habits, if they are so bad; but most of all you
are merry at our simplicity. Not only we say what we feel, we display it.
Now, I am so German, this offence is especially mine.'

I touched her horse's neck, and said, 'I have not seen it.'

'Yet you understand me. You know me well. How is that?'

The murmur of honest confession came from me: 'I have seen it!'

She laughed. 'I bring you to be German, you see. Could you forsake your
England?'

'Instantly, though not willingly.'

'Not regrettingly?'

'Cheerfully, if I had my work and my--my friend.'

'No; but well I know a man's field of labour is his country. You have
your ambition.'

'Yes, now I have.'

She struck a fir-branch with her riding-whip, scattering flakes on my
head. 'Would that extinguish it?'

'In the form of an avalanche perhaps it would.'

'Then you make your aims a part of your life?'

'I do.'

'Then you win! or it is written of you that you never knew failure! So
with me. I set my life upon my aim when I feel that the object is of true
worth. I win, or death hides from me my missing it.

This I look to; this obtains my Professor's nod, and the approval of my
conscience. Worthiness, however!--the mind must be trained to discern it.
We can err very easily in youth; and to find ourselves shooting at a
false mark uncontrollably must be a cruel thing. I cannot say it is
undeserving the scourge of derision. Do you know yourself? I do not; and
I am told by my Professor that it is the sole subject to which you should
not give a close attention. I can believe him. For who beguiles so much
as Self? Tell her to play, she plays her sweetest. Lurk to surprise her,
and what a serpent she becomes! She is not to be aware that you are
watching her. You have to review her acts, observe her methods. Always be
above her; then by-and-by you catch her hesitating at cross-roads; then
she is bare: you catch her bewailing or exulting; then she can no longer
pretend she is other than she seems. I make self the feminine, for she is
the weaker, and the soul has to purify and raise her. On that point my
Professor and I disagree. Dr. Julius, unlike our modern Germans, esteems
women over men, or it is a further stroke of his irony. He does not think
your English ladies have heads: of us he is proud as a laurelled poet.
Have I talked you dumb?'

'Princess, you have given me matter to think upon.'

She shook her head, smiling with closed eyelids.

I, now that speech had been summoned to my lips, could not restrain it,
and proceeded, scarcely governing the words, quite without ideas; 'For
you to be indifferent to rank--yes, you may well be; you have intellect;
you are high above me in both--' So on, against good taste and common
sense.

She cried: 'Oh! no compliments from you to me. I will receive them, if
you please, by deputy. Let my Professor hear your immense admiration for
his pupil's accomplishments. Hear him then in return! He will beat at me
like the rainy West wind on a lily. "See," he will say, when I am broken
and bespattered, "she is fair, she is stately, is she not!" And really I
feel, at the sound of praise, though I like it, that the opposite,
satire, condemnation, has its good right to pelt me. Look; there is the
tower, there 's the statue, and under that line of pine-trees the path we
ran up;--"dear English boys!" as I remember saying to myself; and what
did you say of me?'

Her hand was hanging loose. I grasped it. She drew a sudden long breath,
and murmured, without fretting to disengage herself,

'My friend, not that!'

Her voice carried an unmistakeable command. I kissed above the fingers
and released them.

'Are you still able to run?' said she, leading with an easy canter, face
averted. She put on fresh speed; I was outstripped.

Had she quitted me in anger? Had she parted from me out of view of the
villa windows to make it possible for us to meet accidentally again in
the shadow of her old protecting Warhead, as we named him from his
appearance, gaunt Schwartz?




CHAPTER XXIX

AN EVENING WITH DR. JULIUS VON KARSTEG

In my perplexity, I thought of the Professor's saying: 'A most fortunate
or a most unfortunate young man.' These words began to strike me as
having a prophetic depth that I had not fathomed. I felt myself fast
becoming bound in every limb, every branch of my soul. Ottilia met me
smiling. She moved free as air. She could pursue her studies, and argue
and discuss and quote, keep unclouded eyes, and laugh and play, and be
her whole living self, unfettered, as if the pressure of my hand implied
nothing. Perhaps for that reason I had her pardon. 'My friend, not that!'
Her imperishably delicious English rang me awake, and lulled me asleep.
Was it not too securely friendly? Or was it not her natural voice to the
best beloved, bidding him respect her, that we might meet with the
sanction of her trained discretion? The Professor would invite me to his
room after the 'sleep well' of the ladies, and I sat with him much like
his pipe-bowl, which burned bright a moment at one sturdy puff, but
generally gave out smoke in fantastical wreaths. He told me frankly he
had a poor idea of my erudition. My fancifulness he commended as
something to be turned to use in writing stories. 'Give me time, and I'll
do better things,' I groaned. He rarely spoke of the princess; with grave
affection always when he did. He was evidently observing me
comprehensively. The result was beyond my guessing.

One night he asked me what my scheme of life was.

On the point of improvizing one of an impressive character, I stopped and
confessed: 'I have so many that I may say I have none.' Expecting
reproof, I begged him not to think the worse of me for that.

'Quite otherwise,' said he. 'I have never cared to read deliberately in
the book you open to me, my good young man.'

'The book, Herr Professor?'

'Collect your wits. We will call it Shakespeare's book; or Gothe's, in
the minor issues. No, not minor, but a narrower volume. You were about to
give me the answer of a hypocrite. Was it not so?'

I admitted it, feeling that it was easily to have been perceived. He was
elated.

'Good. Then I apprehend that you wait for the shifting of a tide to carry
you on?'

'I try to strengthen my mind.'

'So I hear,' said he dryly.

'Well, as far as your schools of teaching will allow.'

'That is, you read and commit to memory, like other young scholars.
Whereunto? Have you no aim? You have, or I am told you are to have,
fabulous wealth--a dragon's heap. You are one of the main drainpipes of
English gold. What is your object? To spend it?'

'I shall hope to do good with it.'

'To do good! There is hardly a prince or millionaire, in history or
alive, who has not in his young days hugged that notion. Pleasure swarms,
he has the pick of his market. You English live for pleasure.'

'We are the hardest workers in the world.'

'That you may live for pleasure! Deny it!'

He puffed his tobacco-smoke zealously, and resumed:

'Yes, you work hard for money. You eat and drink, and boast of your
exercises: they sharpen your appetites. So goes the round. We strive, we
fail; you are our frog-chorus of critics, and you suppose that your
brekek-koax affects us. I say we strive and fail, but we strive on, while
you remain in a past age, and are proud of it. You reproach us with lack
of common sense, as if the belly were its seat. Now I ask you whether you
have a scheme of life, that I may know whether you are to be another of
those huge human pumpkins called rich men, who cover your country and
drain its blood and intellect--those impoverishers of nature! Here we
have our princes; but they are rulers, they are responsible, they have
their tasks, and if they also run to gourds, the scandal punishes them
and their order, all in seasonable time. They stand eminent. Do you mark
me? They are not a community, and are not--bad enough! bad enough!--but
they are not protected by laws in their right to do nothing for what they
receive. That system is an invention of the commercial genius and the
English.'

'We have our aristocracy, Herr Professor.'

'Your nobles are nothing but rich men inflated with empty traditions of
insufferable, because unwarrantable, pride, and drawing, substance from
alliances with the merchant class. Are they your leaders? Do they lead
you in Letters? in the Arts? ay, or in Government? No, not, I am
informed, not even in military service! and there our titled witlings do
manage to hold up their brainless pates. You are all in one mass,
struggling in the stream to get out and lie and wallow and belch on the
banks. You work so hard that you have all but one aim, and that is
fatness and ease!'

'Pardon me, Herr Professor,' I interposed, 'I see your drift. Still I
think we are the only people on earth who have shown mankind a
representation of freedom. And as to our aristocracy, I must, with due
deference to you, maintain that it is widely respected.'

I could not conceive why he went on worrying me in this manner with his
jealous outburst of Continental bile.

'Widely!' he repeated. 'It is widely respected; and you respect it: and
why do you respect it?'

'We have illustrious names in our aristocracy.'

'We beat you in illustrious names and in the age of the lines, my good
young man.'

'But not in a race of nobles who have stood for the country's liberties.'

'So long as it imperilled their own! Any longer?'

'Well, they have known how to yield. They have helped to build our
Constitution.'

'Reverence their ancestors, then! The worse for such descendants. But you
have touched the exact stamp of the English mind:--it is, to accept
whatsoever is bequeathed it, without inquiry whether there is any change
in the matter. Nobles in very fact you would not let them be if they
could. Nobles in name, with a remote recommendation to posterity--that
suits you!'

He sat himself up to stuff a fresh bowl of tobacco, while he pursued:
'Yes, yes: you worship your aristocracy. It is notorious. You have a sort
of sagacity. I am not prepared to contest the statement that you have a
political instinct. Here it is chiefly social. You worship your so-called
aristocracy perforce in order to preserve an ideal of contrast to the
vulgarity of the nation.'

This was downright insolence.

It was intolerable. I jumped on my feet. 'The weapons I would use in
reply to such remarks I cannot address to you, Herr Professor. Therefore,
excuse me.'

He sent out quick spirts of smoke rolling into big volumes. 'Nay, my good
young Englishman, but on the other hand you have not answered me. And
hear me: yes, you have shown us a representation of freedom. True. But
you are content with it in a world that moves by computation some
considerable sum upwards of sixty thousand miles an hour.'

'Not on a fresh journey--a recurring course!' said I.

'Good!' he applauded, and I was flattered.

'I grant you the physical illustration,' the Professor continued, and
with a warm gaze on me, I thought. 'The mind journeys somewhat in that
way, and we in our old Germany hold that the mind advances
notwithstanding. Astronomers condescending to earthly philosophy may
admit that advance in the physical universe is computable, though not
perceptible. Some--whither we tend, shell and spirit. You English,
fighting your little battles of domestic policy, and sneering at us for
flying at higher game, you unimpressionable English, who won't believe in
the existence of aims that don't drop on the ground before your eyes, and
squat and stare at you, you assert that man's labour is completed when
the poor are kept from crying out. Now my question is, have you a scheme
of life consonant with the spirit of modern philosophy--with the views of
intelligent, moral, humane human beings of this period? Or are you one of
your robust English brotherhood worthy of a Caligula in his prime, lions
in gymnastics--for a time; sheep always in the dominions of mind; and all
of one pattern, all in a rut! Favour me with an outline of your ideas.
Pour them out pell-mell, intelligibly or not, no matter. I undertake to
catch you somewhere. I mean to know you, hark you, rather with your
assistance than without it.'

We were deep in the night. I had not a single idea ready for delivery. I
could have told him, that wishing was a good thing, excess of tobacco a
bad, moderation in speech one of the outward evidences of wisdom; but
Ottilia's master in the Humanities exacted civility from me.

'Indeed,' I said, 'I have few thoughts to communicate at present, Herr
Professor. My German will fail me as soon as I quit common ground. I love
my country, and I do not reckon it as perfect. We are swillers, possibly
gluttons; we have a large prosperous middle class; many good men are to
be found in it.'

His discharges of smoke grew stifling. My advocacy was certainly of a
miserable sort.

'Yes, Herr Professor, on my way when a boy to this very place I met a
thorough good man.'

Here I related the tale of my encounter with Captain Welsh.

Dr. Julius nodded rapidly for continuations. Further! further!

He refused to dig at the mine within me, and seemed to expect it to
unbosom its riches by explosion.

'Well, Herr Professor, we have conquered India, and hold it as no other
people could.'

'Vide the articles in the last file of English newspapers!' said he.

'Suppose we boast of it.'

'Can you?' he simulated wonderment.

'Why, surely it's something!'

'Something for non-commissioned officers to boast of; not for statesmen.
However, say that you are fit to govern Asiatics. Go on.'

'I would endeavour to equalize ranks at home, encourage the growth of
ideas . . .'

'Supporting a non-celibate clergy, and an intermingled aristocracy? Your
endeavours, my good young man, will lessen like those of the man who
employed a spade to uproot a rock. It wants blasting. Your married clergy
and merchandized aristocracy are coils: they are the ivy about your
social tree: you would resemble Laocoon in the throes, if one could
imagine you anything of a heroic figure. Forward.'

In desperation I exclaimed, 'It 's useless! I have not thought at all. I
have been barely educated. I only know that I do desire with all my heart
to know more, to be of some service.'

'Now we are at the bottom, then!' said he.

But I cried, 'Stay; let me beg you to tell me what you meant by calling
me a most fortunate, or a most unfortunate young man.'

He chuckled over his pipe-stem, 'Aha!'

'How am I one or the other?'

'By the weight of what you carry in your head.'

'How by the weight?'

He shot a keen look at me. 'The case, I suspect, is singular, and does
not often happen to a youth. You are fortunate if you have a solid and
adventurous mind: most unfortunate if you are a mere sensational
whipster. There 's an explanation that covers the whole. I am as much in
the dark as you are. I do not say which of us two has the convex eye.'

Protesting that I was unable to read riddles, though the heat of the one
in hand made my frame glow, I entreated to have explicit words. He might
be in Ottilia's confidence, probing me--why not? Any question he chose to
put to me, I said, I was ready to answer.

'But it's the questioner who unmasks,' said he.

'Are we masked, Herr Professor? I was not aware of it.'

'Look within, and avoid lying.'

He stood up. 'My nights,' he remarked, 'are not commonly wasted in this
manner. We Germans use the night for work.'

After a struggle to fling myself on his mercy and win his aid or counsel,
I took his hand respectfully, and holding it, said, 'I am unable to speak
out. I would if it involved myself alone.'

'Yes, yes, I comprehend; your country breeds honourable men, chivalrous
youngsters,' he replied. 'It 's not enough--not enough. I want to see a
mental force, energy of brain. If you had that, you might look as high as
you liked for the match for it, with my consent. Do you hear? What I
won't have is, flat robbery! Mark me, Germany or England, it 's one to me
if I see vital powers in the field running to a grand career. It 's a
fine field over there. As well there as here, then! But better here than
there if it 's to be a wasp's life. Do you understand me?'

I replied, 'I think I do, if I may dare to'; and catching breath: 'Herr
Professor, dear friend, forgive my boldness; grant me time to try me;
don't judge of me at once; take me for your pupil--am I presumptuous in
asking it?--make of me what you will, what you can; examine me; you may
find there's more in me than I or anybody may know. I have thoughts and
aims, feeble at present--Good God! I see nothing for me but a choice of
the two--"most unfortunate" seems likeliest. You read at a glance that I
had no other choice. Rather the extremes!--I would rather grasp the
limits of life and be swung to the pits below, be the most unfortunate of
human beings, than never to have aimed at a star. You laugh at me? An
Englishman must be horribly in earnest to talk as I do now. But it is a
star!' (The image of Ottilia sprang fountain-like into blue night heavens
before my eyes memorably.) 'She,' was my next word. I swallowed it, and
with a burning face, petitioned for help in my studies.

To such sight as I had at that instant he appeared laughing outrageously.
It was a composed smile 'Right,' he said; 'you shall have help in a
settled course. Certain Professors, friends of mine, at your University,
will see you through it. Aim your head at a star--your head!--and even if
you miss it you don't fall. It's that light dancer, that gambler, the
heart in you, my good young man, which aims itself at inaccessible
heights, and has the fall--somewhat icy to reflect on! Give that organ
full play and you may make sure of a handful of dust. Do you hear? It's a
mind that wins a mind. That is why I warn you of being most unfortunate
if you are a sensational whipster. Good-night Shut my door fast that I
may not have the trouble to rise.'

I left him with the warm lamplight falling on his forehead, and books
piled and sloped, shut and open; an enviable picture to one in my
condition. The peacefulness it indicated made scholarship seem beautiful,
attainable, I hoped. I had the sense to tell myself that it would give me
unrotting grain, though it should fail of being a practicable road to my
bright star; and when I spurned at consolations for failure, I could
still delight to think that she shone over these harvests and the
reapers.




CHAPTER XXX

A SUMMER STORM, AND LOVE

The foregoing conversations with Ottilia and her teacher, hard as they
were for passion to digest, grew luminous on a relapsing heart. Without
apprehending either their exact purport or the characters of the
speakers, I was transformed by them from a state of craving to one of
intense quietude. I thought neither of winning her, nor of aiming to win
her, but of a foothold on the heights she gazed at reverently. And if,
sometimes, seeing and hearing her, I thought, Oh, rarest soul! the wish
was, that brother and sisterhood of spirit might be ours. My other eager
thirstful self I shook off like a thing worn out. Men in my confidence
would have supposed me more rational: I was simply possessed.

My desire was to go into harness, buried in books, and for recreation to
chase visions of original ideas for benefiting mankind. A clear-wined
friend at my elbow, my dear Temple, perhaps, could have hit on the track
of all this mental vagueness, but it is doubtful that he would have
pushed me out of the strange mood, half stupor, half the folding-in of
passion; it was such magical happiness. Not to be awake, yet vividly
sensible; to lie calm and reflect, and only to reflect; be satisfied with
each succeeding hour and the privations of the hour, and, as if in the
depths of a smooth water, to gather fold over patient fold of the
submerged self, safe from wounds; the happiness was not noble, but it
breathed and was harmless, and it gave me rest when the alternative was
folly and bitterness.

Visitors were coming to the palace to meet the prince, on his return with
my father from England. I went back to the University, jealous of the
invasion of my ecstatic calm by new faces, and jealous when there of the
privileges those new faces would enjoy; and then, how my recent deadness
of life cried out against me as worse than a spendthrift, a destroyer! a
nerveless absorbent of the bliss showered on me--the light of her morning
presence when, just before embracing, she made her obeisance to the
margravine, and kindly saluted me, and stooped her forehead for the
baroness to kiss it; her gestures and her voice; her figure on horseback,
with old Warhead following, and I meeting her but once!--her walk with
the Professor, listening to his instructions; I used to see them walking
up and down the cypress path of the villa garden, her ear given to him
wholly as she continued her grave step, and he shuffling and treading out
of his line across hers, or on the path-borders, and never apologizing,
nor she noticing it. At night she sang, sometimes mountain ditties to the
accompaniment of the zither, leaning on the table and sweeping the wires
between snatches of talk. Nothing haunted me so much as those tones of,
her zither, which were little louder than summer gnats when fireflies are
at their brightest and storm impends.

My father brought horses from England, and a couple of English grooms,
and so busy an air of cheerfulness, that I had, like a sick invalid, to
beg him to keep away from me and prolong unlimitedly his visit to
Sarkeld; the rather so, as he said he had now become indispensable to the
prince besides the margravine. 'Only no more bronze statues!' I adjured
him. He nodded. He had hired Count Fretzel's chateau, in the immediate
neighbourhood, and was absolutely independent, he said. His lawyers were
busy procuring evidence. He had impressed Prince Ernest with a due
appreciation of the wealth of a young English gentleman, by taking him
over my grandfather's mine.

'And, Richie, we have advanced him a trifle of thousands for the working
of this coal discovery of his. In six weeks our schooner yacht will be in
the Elbe to offer him entertainment. He graciously deigns to accept a
couple of English hunters at our hands; we shall improve his breed of
horses, I suspect. Now, Richie, have I done well? I flatter myself I have
been attentive to your interests, have I not?'

He hung waiting for confidential communications on my part, but did not
press for them; he preserved an unvarying delicacy in that respect.

'You have nothing to tell?' he asked.

'Nothing,' I said. 'I have only to thank you.'

He left me. At no other period of our lives were we so disunited. I felt
in myself the reverse of everything I perceived in him, and such letters
as I wrote to the squire consequently had a homelier tone. It seems that
I wrote of the pleasures of simple living--of living for learning's sake.
Mr. Peterborough at the same time despatched praises of my sobriety of
behaviour and diligent studiousness, confessing that I began to outstrip
him in some of the higher branches. The squire's brief reply breathed
satisfaction, but too evidently on the point where he had been led to
misconceive the state of affairs. 'He wanted to have me near him, as did
another person, whom I appeared to be forgetting; he granted me another
year's leave of absence, bidding me bluffly not to be a bookworm and
forget I was an Englishman.' The idea that I was deceiving him never
entered my mind.

I was deceiving everybody, myself in the bargain, as a man must do when
in chase of a woman above him in rank. The chase necessitates deceit--who
knows? chicanery of a sort as well; it brings inevitable humiliations;
such that ever since the commencement of it at speed I could barely think
of my father with comfort, and rarely met him with pleasure. With what
manner of face could I go before the prince or the margravine, and say, I
am an English commoner, the son of a man of doubtful birth, and I claim
the hand of the princess? What contortions were not in store for these
features of mine! Even as affairs stood now, could I make a confidant of
Temple and let him see me through the stages of the adventure? My
jingling of verses, my fretting about the signification of flowers, and
trifling with symbols, haunted me excrutiatingly, taunting me with I know
not what abject vileness of spirit.

In the midst of these tortures an arrow struck me, in the shape of an
anonymous letter, containing one brief line: 'The princess is in need of
help.'

I threw my books aside, and repaired to Count Fretzel's chateau, from
which, happily, my father was absent; but the countenance of the princess
gave me no encouragement to dream I could be of help to her; yet a second
unsigned note worded in a quaint blunt manner, insisted that it was to me
she looked. I chanced to hear the margravine, addressing Baroness
Turckems, say: 'The princess's betrothal,' what further, escaped me. Soon
after, I heard that Prince Otto was a visitor at the lake-palace. My
unknown correspondent plied me a third time.

I pasted the scrap in my neglected book of notes and reflections, where
it had ample space and about equal lucidity. It drew me to the book,
nearly driving me desperate; I was now credulous of anything, except that
the princess cared for help from me. I resolved to go home; I had no
longer any zeal for study. The desolation of the picture of England in my
mind grew congenial. It became imperative that I should go somewhere, for
news arrived of my father's approach with a French company of actors, and
deafening entertainments were at hand. On the whole, I thought it decent
to finish my course at the University, if I had not quite lost the power
of getting into the heart of books. One who studies is not being a fool:
that is an established truth. I thanked Dr. Julius for planting it among
my recollections. The bone and marrow of study form the surest antidote
to the madness of that light gambler, the heart, and distasteful as books
were, I had gained the habit of sitting down to them, which was as good
as an instinct toward the right medicine, if it would but work.

On an afternoon of great heat I rode out for a gaze at the lake-palace,
that I chose to fancy might be the last, foreseeing the possibility of
one of my fits of movement coming on me before sunset. My very pulses
throbbed 'away!' Transferring the sense of overwhelming heat to my moral
condition, I thought it the despair of silliness to stay baking in that
stagnant place, where the sky did nothing but shine, gave nothing forth.
The sky was bronze, a vast furnace dome. The folds of light and shadow
everywhere were satin-rich; shadows perforce of blackness had light in
them, and the light a sword-like sharpness over their edges. It was
inanimate radiance. The laurels sparkled as with frost-points; the denser
foliage dropped burning brown: a sickly saint's-ring was round the heads
of the pines. That afternoon the bee hummed of thunder, and refreshed the
ear.

I pitied the horse I rode, and the dog at his heels, but for me the
intensity was inspiriting. Nothing lay in the light, I had the land to
myself. 'What hurts me?' I thought. My physical pride was up, and I
looked on the cattle in black corners of the fields, and here and there a
man tumbled anyhow, a wreck of limbs, out of the insupportable glare,
with an even glance. Not an eye was lifted on me.

I saw nothing that moved until a boat shot out of the bight of sultry
lake-water, lying close below the dark promontory where I had drawn rein.
The rower was old Schwartz Warhead. How my gorge rose at the impartial
brute! He was rowing the princess and a young man in uniform across the
lake.

That they should cross from unsheltered paths to close covert was
reasonable conduct at a time when the vertical rays of the sun were fiery
arrow-heads. As soon as they were swallowed in the gloom I sprang in my
saddle with torture, transfixed by one of the coarsest shafts of hideous
jealousy. Off I flew, tearing through dry underwood, and round the bend
of the lake, determined to confront her, wave the man aside, and have my
last word with the false woman. Of the real Ottilia I had lost
conception. Blood was inflamed, brain bare of vision: 'He takes her hand,
she jumps from the boat; he keeps her hand, she feigns to withdraw it,
all woman to him in her eyes: they pass out of sight.' A groan burst from
me. I strained my crazy imagination to catch a view of them under cover
of the wood and torture myself trebly, but it was now blank, shut fast.
Sitting bolt upright, panting on horseback in the yellow green of one of
the open woodways, I saw the young officer raise a branch of chestnut and
come out. He walked moodily up to within a yard of my horse, looked up at
me, and with an angry stare that grew to be one of astonishment, said,
'Ah? I think I have had the pleasure--somewhere? in Wurtemberg, if I
recollect.'

It was Prince Otto. I dismounted. He stood alone. The spontaneous
question on my lips would have been 'Where is she?' but I was unable to
speak a word.

'English?' he said, patting the horse's neck.

'Yes--the horse? an English hunter. How are you, Prince Otto? Do you like
the look of him?'

'Immensely. You know we have a passion for English thoroughbreds. Pardon
me, you look as if you had been close on a sunstroke. Do you generally
take rides in this weather?'

'I was out by chance. If you like him, pray take him; take him. Mount him
and try him. He is yours if you care to have him; if he doesn't suit you
send him up to Count Fretzel's. I've had riding enough in the light.'

'Perhaps you have,' said he, and hesitated. 'It's difficult to resist the
offer of such a horse. If you want to dispose of him, mention it when we
meet again. Shall I try him? I have a slight inclination to go as hard as
you have been going, but he shall have good grooming in the prince's
stables, and that 's less than half as near again as Count Pretzel's
place; and a horse like this ought not to be out in this weather, if you
will permit me the remark.'

'No: I'm ashamed of bringing him out, and shan't look on him with
satisfaction,' said I. 'Take him and try him, and then take him from me,
if you don't mind.'

'Do you know, I would advise your lying down in the shade awhile?' he
observed solicitously. 'I have seen men on the march in Hungary and
Italy. An hour's rest under cover would have saved them.'

I thanked him.

'Ice is the thing!' he ejaculated. 'I 'll ride and have some fetched to
you. Rest here.'

With visible pleasure he swung to the saddle. I saw him fix his cavalry
thighs and bound off as if he meant to take a gate. Had he glanced behind
him he would have fancied that the sun had done its worst. I ran at full
speed down the footpath, mad to think she might have returned homeward by
the lake. The two had parted--why? He this way, she that. They would not
have parted but for a division of the will. I came on the empty boat.
Schwartz lay near it beneath heavy boughs, smoking and perspiring in
peace. Neither of us spoke. And it was now tempered by a fit of alarm
that I renewed my search. So when I beheld her, intense gratitude broke
my passion; when I touched her hand it was trembling for absolute
assurance of her safety. She was leaning against a tree, gazing on the
ground, a white figure in that iron-moted gloom.

'Otto!' she cried, shrinking from the touch; but at sight of me, all
softly as a light in the heavens, her face melted in a suffusion of
wavering smiles, and deep colour shot over them, heavenly to see. She
pressed her bosom while I spoke: a lover's speech, breathless.

'You love me?' she said.

'You have known it!'

'Yes, yes!'

'Forgiven me? Speak, princess.'

'Call me by my name.'

'My own soul! Ottilia!'

She disengaged her arms tenderly.

'I have known it by my knowledge of myself,' she said, breathing with her
lips dissevered. 'My weakness has come upon me. Yes, I love you. It is
spoken. It is too true. Is it a fate that brings us together when I have
just lost my little remaining strength--all power? You hear me! I pretend
to wisdom, and talk of fate!'

She tried to laugh in scorn of herself, and looked at me with almost a
bitter smile on her features, made beautiful by her soft eyes. I feared
from the helpless hanging of her underlip that she would swoon; a shudder
convulsed her; and at the same time I became aware of the blotting out of
sunlight, and a strange bowing and shore-like noising of the forest.

'Do not heed me,' she said in happy undertones. 'I think I am going to
cry like a girl. One cannot see one's pride die like this, without but it
is not anguish of any kind. Since we are here together, I would have no
other change.'

She spoke till the tears came thick.

I told her of the letters I had received, warning me of a trouble
besetting her. They were, perhaps, the excuse for my conduct, if I had
any.

Schwartz burst on us with his drill-sergeant's shout for the princess.
Standing grey in big rain-drops he was an object of curiosity to us both.
He came to take her orders.

'The thunder,' he announced, raising a telegraphic arm, 'rolls. It rains.
We have a storm. Command me, princess! your highness!'

Ottilia's eyelids were set blinking by one look aloft. Rain and lightning
filled heaven and earth.

'Direct us, you!' she said to me gently.

The natural proposal was to despatch her giant by the direct way down the
lake to fetch a carriage from the stables, or matting from the boathouse.
I mentioned it, but did not press it.

She meditated an instant. 'I believe I may stay with my beloved?'

Schwartz and I ran to the boat, hauled it on land, and set it keel upward
against a low leafy dripping branch. To this place of shelter, protecting
her as securely as I could, I led the princess, while Schwartz happed a
rough trench around it with one of the sculls. We started him on foot to
do the best thing possible; for the storm gave no promise that it was a
passing one. In truth, I knew that I should have been the emissary and he
the guard; but the storm overhead was not fuller of its mighty burden
than I of mine. I looked on her as mine for the hour, and well won.




CHAPTER XXXI

PRINCESS OTTILIA'S LETTER

That hour of tempest went swift as one of its flashes over our little
nest of peace, where we crouched like insects. The lightning and the
deluge seemed gloriously endless. Ottilia's harbouring nook was dry
within an inch of rushing floods and pattered mire. On me the torrents
descended, and her gentle efforts drew me to her side, as with a maternal
claim to protect me, or to perish in my arms if the lightning found us.
We had for prospect an ever-outbursting flame of foliage, and the hubbub
of the hissing lake, crimson, purple, dusky grey, like the face of a
passionate creature scourged. It was useless to speak. Her lips were
shut, but I had the intent kindness of her eyes on me almost unceasingly.

The good hour slipped away. Old Warhead's splashed knees on the level of
our heads were seen by us when the thunder had abated. Ottilia prepared
to rise.

'You shall hear from me,' she said, bending with brows measuring the
boat-roof, like a bird about to fly.

'Shall I see you?'

'Ultimately you surely will. Ah! still be patient.'

'Am I not? have I not been?'

'Yes; and can you regret it?'

'No; but we separate!'

'Would you have us be two feet high for ever?' she answered smiling.

'One foot high, or under earth, if it might be together!'

'Poor little gnomes!' said she.

The homeliness of our resting-place arrested her for an instant, and
perhaps a touch of comic pity for things of such diminutive size as to
see nothing but knees where a man stood. Our heads were hidden.

'Adieu! no pledge is needed,' she said tenderly.

'None!' I replied.

She returned to the upper world with a burning blush.

Schwartz had borne himself with extraordinary discretion by forbearing to
spread alarm at the palace. He saluted his young mistress in the
regulation manner while receiving her beneath a vast umbrella, the
holiday peasant's invariable companion in these parts. A forester was in
attendance carrying shawls, clogs, and matting. The boat was turned and
launched.

'Adieu, Harry Richmond. Will you be quite patient till you hear from me?'
said Ottilia, and added, 'It is my question!' delightfully recalling old
times.

I was soon gazing at the track of the boat in rough water.

Shouts were being raised somewhere about the forest, and were replied to
by hearty bellow of the rower's lungs. She was now at liberty to join my
name to her own or not, as she willed. I had to wait. But how much richer
was I than all the world! The future owed me nothing. I would have
registered a vow to ask nothing of it. Among the many determined purposes
framing which I walked home, was one to obtain a grant of that bit of
land where we had sat together, and build a temple on it. The fear that
it might be trodden by feet of men before I had enclosed it beset me with
anguish. The most absolute pain I suffered sprang from a bewildering
incapacity to conjure up a vision of Ottilia free of the glittering
accessories of her high birth; and that was the pain of shame; but it
came only at intervals, when pride stood too loftily and the shadow of
possible mischance threatened it with the axe.

She did not condemn me to long waiting. Her favourite Aennchen brought me
her first letter. The girl's face beamed, and had a look as if she
commended me for a worthy deed.

'An answer, Aennchen?' I asked her.

'Yes, yes!' said she anxiously; 'but it will take more time than I can
spare.' She appointed a meeting near the palace garden-gates at night.

I chose a roof of limes to read under.

'Noblest and best beloved!' the princess addressed me in her own tongue,
doubting, I perceived, as her training had taught her, that my English
eyes would tolerate apostrophes of open-hearted affection. The rest was
her English confided to a critic who would have good reason to be
merciful:

'The night has come that writes the chapter of the day. My father has had
his interview with his head-forester to learn what has befallen from the
storm in the forest. All has not been told him! That shall not be delayed
beyond to-morrow.

'I am hurried to it. And I had the thought that it hung perhaps at the
very end of my life among the coloured leaves, the strokes of
sunset--that then it would be known! or if earlier, distant from this
strange imperative Now. But we have our personal freedom now, and I have
learnt from minutes what I did mean to seek from years, and from our
forest what I hoped that change of scene, travel, experience, would teach
me. Yet I was right in my intention. It was a discreet and a just meaning
I had. For things will not go smoothly for him at once: he will have his
hard battle. He is proved: he has passed his most brave ordeal. But I!
Shall I see him put to it and not certainly know myself? Even thus I
reasoned. One cannot study without knowing that our human nature is most
frail. Daily the body changes, daily the mind--why not the heart? I did
design to travel and converse with various persons.

'Pardon it to one who knew that she would require super-feminine power of
decision to resolve that she would dispose of herself!

'I heard of Harry Richmond before I saw him. My curiosity to behold the
two fair boys of the sailor kingdom set me whipping my pony after them
that day so remote, which is always yesterday. My thoughts followed you,
and I wondered--does he mean to be a distinguished countryman of his
Nelson? or a man of learning? Then many an argument with "my Professor,"
until--for so it will ever be--the weaker creature did succumb in the
open controversy, and thought her thoughts to herself. Contempt of
England gained on me still. But when I lay withered, though so young, by
the sea-shore, his country's ancient grandeur insisted, and I dreamed of
Harry Richmond, imagining that I had been false to my childhood. You
stood before me, dearest. You were kind: you were strong, and had a
gentle voice. Our souls were caught together on the sea. Do you recollect
my slip in the speaking of Lucy Sibley's marriage?--"We change
countries." At that moment I smelt salt air, which would bring you to my
sight and touch were you and I divided let me not think how far.

'To-morrow I tell the prince, my father, that I am a plighted woman. Then
for us the struggle, for him the grief. I have to look on him and deal
it.

'I can refer him to Dr. Julius for my estimate of my husband's worth.

'"My Professor" was won by it. He once did incline to be the young bold
Englishman's enemy. "Why is he here? what seeks he among us?" It was his
jealousy, not of the man, but of the nation, which would send one to
break and bear away his carefully cultivated German lily. No eye but his
did read me through. And you endured the trial that was forced on you.
You made no claim for recompense when it was over. No, there is no pure
love but strong love! It belongs to our original elements, and of its
purity should never be question, only of its strength.

'I could not help you when you were put under scrutiny before the
margravine and the baroness. Help from me would have been the betrayal of
both. The world has accurate eyes, if they are not very penetrating. The
world will see a want of balance immediately, and also too true a
balance, but it will not detect a depth of concord between two souls that
do not show some fretfulness on the surface.

'So it was considered that in refusing my cousin Otto and other proposed
alliances, I was heart-free. An instructed princess, they thought, was of
the woeful species of woman. You left us: I lost you. I heard you praised
for civil indifference to me--the one great quality you do not possess!
Then it was the fancy of people that I, being very cold, might be
suffered to hear my cousin plead for himself. The majority of our family
favour Otto. He was permitted to woo me as though I had been a simple
maid; and henceforth shall I have pity for all poor little feminine
things who are so persecuted, asked to inflict cruelty--to take a sword
and strike with it. But I--who look on marriage as more than a
surrender--I could well withstand surpassing eloquence. It was easy to me
to be inflexible in speech and will when I stood there, entreated to
change myself. But when came magically the other, who is my heart, my
voice, my mate, the half of me, and broke into illumination of things
long hidden--oh! then did I say to you that it was my weakness had come
upon me? It was my last outcry of self--the "I" expiring. I am now yours,
"We" has long overshadowed "I," and now engulphs it. We are one. If it
were new to me to find myself interrogating the mind of my beloved,
relying on his courage, taking many proofs of his devotion, I might pause
to re-peruse my words here, without scruple, written. I sign it, before
heaven, your Ottilia.

        'OTTILIA FREDERIKA WILHELMINA HEDWIG,
          'Princess of Eppenwelzen-Sarkeld.'




CHAPTER XXXII

AN INTERVIEW WITH PRINCE ERNEST AND A MEETING WITH PRINCE OTTO

A messenger from Prince Ernest commanding my immediate attendance at the
palace signified that the battle had begun. I could have waited for my
father, whose return from one of his expeditions in the prince's service
was expected every instant; but though I knew I should have, had a
powerful coadjutor in him to assist me through such a conference, I
preferred to go down alone. Prince Otto met me in the hall. He passed by,
glancing an eye sharply, and said over his shoulder,

'We shall have a word together presently!'

The library door was flung open. Prince Ernest and the margravine were in
the room. She walked out with angry majesty. The prince held his figure
in the stiff attitude of reception. He could look imposing.

The character of the interview was perceptible at once.

'You have not, I presume, to be informed of the business in hand, Mr.
Richmond!'

'Your Highness, I believe I can guess it.'

This started him pacing the floor.

'An impossibility! a monstrous extravagance! a thing unheard of! mania!
mania!' he muttered. 'You are aware, sir, that you have been doing your
worst to destroy the settled arrangements of my family? What does it
mean? In common reason you cannot indulge any legitimate hope of
succeeding. Taking you as a foreigner, you must know that. Judge of the
case by your own reigning Families. Such events never happen amongst
them. Do you suppose that the possession of immense wealth entitles you
to the immeasurable presumption of aspiring to equality of position
with reigning Houses? Such folly is more frequently castigated
than reasoned with. Why, now--now, were it published--that I had
condescended--condescend as I am doing, I should be the laughing-stock of
every Court in Europe. You English want many lessons. You are taught by
your scribes to despise the dignity which is not supported by a multitude
of bayonets, guns, and gold. I heard of it when I travelled incognito.
You make merry over little potentates. Good. But do not cross their
paths. Their dominion may be circumscribed, but they have it; and where
we are now, my power equals that of the Kaiser and the Czar. You will do
me the favour to understand that I am not boasting, not menacing; I
attempt, since it is extraordinarily imposed on me, to instruct you. I
have cause to be offended; I waive it. I meet you on common ground, and
address myself to your good sense. Have you anything to say?'

'Much, sir.'

'Much?' he said, with affected incredulity.

The painful hardship for me was to reply in the vague terms he had been
pleased to use.

'I have much to say, your Highness. First, to ask pardon of you, without
excusing myself.'

'A condition, apparently, that absolves the necessity for the grant.
Speak precisely.'

But I was as careful as he in abstaining from any direct indication of
his daughter's complicity, and said, 'I have offended your Highness. You
have done me the honour to suggest that it is owing to my English
training. You will credit my assurance that the offence was not
intentional, not preconceived.'

'You charge it upon your having been trained among a nation of
shopkeepers?'

'My countrymen are not illiterate or unmannerly, your Highness.'

'I have not spoken it; I may add, I do not think it.'

'I feared that your Highness entertained what I find to be a very
general, perhaps here and there wilful, error with regard to England.'

'When I was in the service I had a comrade, a gallant gentleman, deeply
beloved by me, and he was an Englishman. He died in the uniform and under
the flag I reverence.'

'I rejoice that your Highness has had this experience of us. I have to
imagine that I expressed myself badly. My English training certainly does
not preclude the respect due to exalted rank. Your Highness will, I trust
humbly, pardon my offence. I do not excuse myself because I cannot
withdraw, and I am incapable of saying that I regret it.'

'In cool blood you utter that?' exclaimed the prince.

His amazement was unfeigned.

'What are the impossible, monstrous ideas you--where--? Who leads you to
fancy there is one earthly chance for you when you say you cannot
withdraw? Cannot? Are you requested? Are you consulted? It is a question
to be decided in the imperative: you must. What wheel it is you think you
have sufficient vigour to stop, I am profoundly unaware, but I am
prepared to affirm that it is not the wheel of my household. I would
declare it, were I a plain citizen. You are a nullity in the case, in
point of your individual will--a nullity swept away with one wave of the
hand. You can do this, and nothing else: you can apologize, recognize
your station, repair a degree of mischief that I will not say was
preconceived or plotted. So for awhile pursue your studies, your travels.
In time it will give me pleasure to receive you. Mr. Richmond,' he added,
smiling and rising; 'even the head of a little German principality has to
give numberless audiences.' His features took a more cordial smile to
convince me that the dismissing sentence was merely playful.

As for me, my mind was confused by the visible fact that the father's
features resembled the daughter's. I mention it, that my mind's condition
may be understood.

Hardly had I been bowed out of the room when my father embraced me, and
some minutes later I heard Prince Otto talking to me and demanding
answers. That he or any one else should have hostile sentiments toward a
poor devil like me seemed strange. My gift of the horse appeared to anger
him most. I reached the chateau without once looking back, a dispirited
wretch. I shut myself up; I tried to read. The singular brevity of my
interview with the prince, from which I had expected great if not
favourable issues, affected me as though I had been struck by a cannon
shot; my brains were nowhere. His perfect courtesy was confounding. I was
tormented by the delusion that I had behaved pusillanimously.

My father rushed up to me after dark. Embracing me and holding me by the
hand, he congratulated me with his whole heart. The desire of his life
was accomplished; the thing he had plotted for ages had come to pass. He
praised me infinitely. My glorious future, he said, was to carry a
princess to England and sit among the, highest there, the husband of a
lady peerless in beauty and in birth, who, in addition to what she was
able to do for me by way of elevation in my country, could ennoble in her
own territory. I had the option of being the father of English nobles or
of German princes; so forth. I did not like the strain; yet I clung to
him. I was compelled to ask whether he had news of any sort worth
hearing.

'None,' said he calmly; 'none. I have everything to hear, nothing to
relate; and, happily, I can hardly speak for joy.' He wept.

He guaranteed to have the margravine at the chateau within a week, which
seemed to me a sufficient miracle. The prince, he said, might require
three months of discretionary treatment. Three further months to bring
the family round, and the princess would be mine. 'But she is yours! she
is yours already!' he cried authoritatively. 'She is the reigning
intellect there. I dreaded her very intellect would give us all the
trouble, and behold, it is our ally! The prince lives with an elbow out
of his income. But for me it would be other parts of his person as well,
I assure you, and the world would see such a princely tatterdemalion as
would astonish it. Money to him is important. He must carry on his mine.
He can carry on nothing without my help. By the way, we have to deal out
cheques?'

I assented.

In spite of myself, I caught the contagion of his exuberant happiness and
faith in his genius. The prince had applauded his energetic management of
the affairs of the mine two or three times in my hearing. It struck me
that he had really found his vocation, and would turn the sneer on those
who had called him volatile and reckless. This led me to a luxurious
sense of dependence on him, and I was willing to live on dreaming and
amused, though all around me seemed phantoms, especially the French
troupe, the flower of the Parisian stage: Regnault, Carigny, Desbarolles,
Mesdames Blanche Bignet and Dupertuy, and Mdlle. Jenny Chassediane, the
most spirituelle of Frenchwomen. 'They are a part of our enginery,
Richie,' my father said. They proved to be an irresistible attraction to
the margravine. She sent word to my father that she meant to come on a
particular day when, as she evidently knew, I should not be present. Two
or three hours later I had Prince Otto's cartel in my hands. Jorian
DeWitt, our guest at this season, told me subsequently, and with the
utmost seriousness, that I was largely indebted to Mdlle. Jenny for a
touching French song of a beau chevalier she sang before Ottilia in my
absence. Both he and my father believed in the efficacy of this kind of
enginery, but, as the case happened, the beau chevalier was down low
enough at the moment his highborn lady listened to the song.

It appeared that when Prince Otto met me after my interview with Prince
Ernest, he did his best to provoke a rencontre, and failing to get
anything but a nod from my stunned head, betook himself to my University.
A friendly young fellow there, Eckart vom Hof, offered to fight him on my
behalf, should I think proper to refuse. Eckart and two or three others
made a spirited stand against the aristocratic party siding with Prince
Otto, whose case was that I had played him a dishonourable trick to laugh
at him. I had, in truth, persuaded him to relieve me at once of horse and
rival at the moment when he was suffering the tortures of a rejection,
and I was rushing to take the hand he coveted; I was so far guilty. But
to how great a degree guiltless, how could I possibly explain to the
satisfaction of an angry man? I had the vision of him leaping on the
horse, while I perused his challenge; saw him fix to the saddle and smile
hard, and away to do me of all services the last he would have performed
wittingly. The situation was exactly of a sort for one of his German
phantasy-writers to image the forest jeering at him as he flew, blind,
deaf, and unreasonable, vehement for one fierce draught of speed. We are
all dogged by the humour of following events when we start on a wind of
passion. I could almost fancy myself an accomplice. I realized the scene
with such intensity in the light running at his heels: it may be quite
true that I laughed in the hearing of his messenger as I folded up the
letter. That was the man's report. I am not commonly one to be forgetful
of due observances.

The prospect of the possible eternal separation from my beloved pricked
my mechanical wits and set them tracing the consequent line by which I
had been brought to this pass as to a natural result. Had not my father
succeeded in inspiring the idea that I was something more than something?
The tendency of young men is to conceive it for themselves without
assistance; a prolonged puff from the breath of another is nearly sure to
make them mad as kings, and not so pardonably.

I see that I might have acted wisely, and did not; but that is a
speculation taken apart from my capabilities. If a man's fate were as a
forbidden fruit, detached from him, and in front of him, he might
hesitate fortunately before plucking it; but, as most of us are aware,
the vital half of it lies in the seed-paths he has traversed. We are sons
of yesterday, not of the morning. The past is our mortal mother, no dead
thing. Our future constantly reflects her to the soul. Nor is it ever the
new man of to-day which grasps his fortune, good or ill. We are pushed to
it by the hundreds of days we have buried, eager ghosts. And if you have
not the habit of taking counsel with them, you are but an instrument in
their hands.

My English tongue admonishes me that I have fallen upon a tone resembling
one who uplifts the finger of piety in a salon of conversation. A man's
review of the course of his life grows for a moment stringently serious
when he beholds the stream first broadening perchance under the light
interpenetrating mine just now.

My seconds were young Eckart vom Hof, and the barely much older, though
already famous Gregorius Bandelmeyer, a noted mathematician, a savage
Republican, lean-faced, spectacled, and long, soft-fingered; a cat to
look at, a tiger to touch. Both of them were animated by detestation of
the Imperial uniform. They distrusted my skill in the management of the
weapon I had chosen; for reasons of their own they carried a case of
pistols to the field. Prince Otto was attended by Count Loepel and a
Major Edelsheim of his army, fresh from the garrison fortress of Mainz,
gentlemen perfectly conversant with the laws of the game, which my worthy
comrades were not. Several minutes were spent in an altercation between
Edelsheim and Bandelmeyer. The major might have had an affair of his own
had he pleased. My feelings were concentrated within the immediate ring
where I stood: I can compare them only to those of a gambler determined
to throw his largest stake and abide the issue. I was not open to any
distinct impression of the surrounding scenery; the hills and leafage
seemed to wear an iron aspect. My darling, my saint's face was shut up in
my heart, and with it a little inaudible cry of love and pain. The prince
declined to listen to apologies. 'He meant to teach me that this was not
a laughing matter.' Major Edelsheim had misunderstood Bandelmeyer; no
offer of an apology had been made. A momentary human sensation of an
unworthy sort beset me when I saw them standing together again, and
contrasted the collectedness and good-humour of my adversary's
representative with the vexatious and unnecessary naggling of mine, the
sight of whose yard-long pipe scandalized me.

At last the practical word was given. The prince did not reply to my
salute. He was smoking, and kept his cigar in one corner of his mouth, as
if he were a master fencer bidding his pupil to come on. He assumed that
he had to do with a bourgeois Briton unused to arms, such as we are
generally held to be on the Continent. After feeling my wrist for a while
he shook the cigar out of his teeth.

The 'cliquetis' of the crossed steel must be very distant in memory, and
yourself in a most dilettante frame of mind, for you to be accessible to
the music of that thin skeleton's clank. Nevertheless, it is better and
finer even at the time of action, than the abominable hollow ogre's eye
of the pistol-muzzle. We exchanged passes, the prince chiefly attacking.
Of all the things to strike my thoughts, can you credit me that the
vividest was the picture of the old woman Temple and I had seen in our
boyhood on the night of the fire dropping askew, like forks of brown
flame, from the burning house in London city; I must have smiled. The
prince cried out in French: 'Laugh, sir; you shall have it!' He had
nothing but his impetuosity for an assurance of his promise, and was
never able to force me back beyond a foot. I touched him on the arm and
the shoulder, and finally pierced his arm above the elbow. I could have
done nearly what I liked with him; his skill was that of a common
regimental sabreur.

'Ludere qui nescit campestribus abstinet armis!' Bandelmeyer sang out.

'You observed?' said Major Edelsheim, and received another disconcerting
discharge of a Latin line. The prince frowned and made use of some
military slang. Was his honour now satisfied? Not a whit. He certainly
could not have kept his sword-point straight, and yet he clamoured to
fight on, stamped, and summoned me to assault him, proposed to fight me
with his left hand after his right had failed; in short, he was beside
himself, an example of the predicament of a man who has given all the
provocation and finds himself disabled. My seconds could have stopped it
had they been equal to their duties; instead of which Bandelmeyer,
hearing what he deemed an insult to the order of student and scholar,
retorted furiously and offensively, and Eckart, out of good-fellowship,
joined him, whereat Major Edelsheim, in the act of bandaging the prince's
arm, warned them that he could not pass by an outrage on his uniform.
Count Loepel stept politely forward, and gave Eckart a significant bow.
The latter remarked mockingly, 'With pleasure and condescension!' At a
murmur of the name of doctor from Edelsheim, the prince damned the doctor
until he or I were food for him. Irritated by the whole scene, and his
extravagant vindictiveness, in which light I regarded the cloak of fury
he had flung over the shame of his defeat, I called to Bandelmeyer to
open his case of pistols and offer them for a settlement. As the proposal
came from me, it was found acceptable. The major remonstrated with the
prince, and expressed to me his regrets and et caeteras of well-meant
civility. He had a hard task to keep out of the hands of Bandelmeyer, who
had seized my sword, and wanted vi et armis to defend the cause of
Learning and the People against military brigands on the spot. If I had
not fallen we should have had one or two other prostrate bodies.

A silly business on all sides.




CHAPTER XXXIII

WHAT CAME OF A SHILLING

The surgeon, who attended us both, loudly admired our mutual delicacy in
sparing arteries and vital organs: but a bullet cuts a rougher pathway
than the neat steel blade, and I was prostrate when the prince came to
press my hand on his departure for his quarters at Laibach. The utterly
unreasonable nature of a duel was manifested by his declaring to me, that
he was now satisfied I did not mean to insult him and then laugh at him.
We must regard it rather as a sudorific for feverish blood and brains. I
felt my wound acutely, seeing his brisk step when he retired. Having
overthrown me bodily, it threw my heart back to its first emotions, and I
yearned to set eyes on my father, with a haunting sense that I had of
late injured him and owed him reparation. It vanished after he had been
in my room an hour, to return when he had quitted it, and incessantly and
inexplicably it went and came in this manner. He was depressed. I longed
for drollery, relieved only by chance allusions to my beloved one,
whereas he could not conceal his wish to turn the stupid duel to account.

'Pencil a line to her,' he entreated me, and dictated his idea of a
moving line, adding urgently, that the crippled letters would be
affecting to her, as to the Great Frederick his last review of his
invalid veterans. 'Your name--the signature of your name alone, darling
Richie,' and he traced a crooked scrawl with a forefinger,--"Still,
dearest angel, in contempt of death and blood, I am yours to eternity,
Harry Lepel Richmond, sometimes called Roy--a point for your decision in
the future, should the breath everlastingly devoted to the most celestial
of her sex, continue to animate the frame that would rise on wings to say
adieu! adieu!"--Richie, just a sentence?'

He was distracting.

His natural tenderness and neatness of hand qualified him for spreading
peace in a sick-room; but he was too full of life and his scheme, and
knowing me out of danger, he could not forbear giving his despondency an
outlet. I heard him exclaim in big sighs: 'Heavens! how near!' and again,
'She must hear of it!' Never was man so incorrigibly dramatic.

He would walk up to a bookcase and take down a volume, when the
interjectional fit waxed violent, flip the pages, affecting a perplexity
he would assuredly have been struck by had he perused them, and read, as
he did once,--'Italy, the land of the sun! and she is to be hurried away
there, and we are left to groan. The conspiracy is infamous! One of the
Family takes it upon himself to murder us! and she is to be hurried out
of hearing! And so we are to have the blood of the Roys spilt for
nothing?--no!' and he shut up the book with a report, and bounded to my
side to beg pardon of me. From his particular abuse of the margravine,
the iteration of certain phrases, which he uttered to denounce and defy
them, I gathered that an interview had passed between the two, and that
she had notified a blockade against all letters addressed to the
princess. He half admitted having rushed to the palace on his road to me.

'But, Richie,' said he, pressing me again to write the moving line, 'a
letter with a broad black border addressed by me might pass.' He looked
mournfully astute. 'The margravine might say to herself, "Here's Doctor
Death in full diploma come to cure the wench of her infatuation." I am
but quoting the coarse old woman, Richie; confusion on her and me! for I
like her. It might pass in my handwriting, with a smudge for paternal
grief--it might. "To Her Serene Highness the Margravine of Rippau, etc.,
etc., etc., in trust for the Most Exalted the Princess of
Eppenwelzen-Sarkeld." I transpose or omit a title or so. "Aha!" says she,
"there's verwirrung in Roy's poor head, poor fellow; the boy has sunk to
a certainty. Here (to the princess), it seems, my dear, this is for you.
Pray do not communicate the contents for a day or so, or a month."'

His imitation of the margravine was the pleasantest thing I heard from
him. The princess's maid and confidante, he regretted to state, was
incorruptible, which I knew. That line of Ottilia's writing, 'Violets are
over,' read by me in view of the root-mountain of the Royal House of
Princes, scoffed at me insufferably whenever my father showed me these
openings of his mind, until I was dragged down to think almost that I had
not loved the woman and noble soul, but only the glorified princess--the
carved gilt frame instead of the divine portrait! a shameful acrid
suspicion, ransacking my conscience with the thrusting in of a foul torch
here and there.

For why had I shunned him of late? How was it that he tortured me now?
Did I in no degree participate in the poignant savour of his scheme? Such
questionings set me flushing in deadly chills. My brain was weak, my
heart exhausted, my body seemed truthful perforce and confessed on the
rack. I could not deny that I had partly, insensibly clung to the vain
glitter of hereditary distinction, my father's pitfall; taking it for a
substantial foothold, when a young man of wit and sensibility and, mark
you, true pride, would have made it his first care to trample that under
heel. Excellent is pride; but oh! be sure of its foundations before you
go on building monument high. I know nothing to equal the anguish of an
examination of the basis of one's pride that discovers it not solidly
fixed; an imposing, self-imposing structure, piled upon empty cellarage.
It will inevitably, like a tree striking bad soil, betray itself at the
top with time. And the anguish I speak of will be the sole healthy sign
about you. Whether in the middle of life it is adviseable to descend the
pedestal altogether, I dare not say. Few take the precaution to build a
flight of steps inside--it is not a labour to be proud of; fewer like to
let themselves down in the public eye--it amounts to a castigation; you
must, I fear, remain up there, and accept your chance in toppling over.
But in any case, delude yourself as you please, your lofty baldness will
assuredly be seen with time. Meanwhile, you cannot escape the internal
intimations of your unsoundness. A man's pride is the front and headpiece
of his character, his soul's support or snare. Look to it in youth. I
have to thank the interminable hours on my wretched sick-bed for a
singularly beneficial investigation of the ledger of my deeds and
omissions and moral stock. Perhaps it has already struck you that one who
takes the trouble to sit and write his history for as large a world as he
can obtain, and shape his style to harmonize with every development of
his nature, can no longer have much of the hard grain of pride in him. A
proud puppet-showman blowing into Pandaean pipes is an inconceivable
object, except to those who judge of characteristics from posture.

It began to be observed by others that my father was not the most
comforting of nurses to me. My landlady brought a young girl up to my
room, and introduced her under the name of Lieschen, saying that she had
for a long time been interested in me, and had been diligent in calling
to inquire for news of my condition. Commanded to speak for herself, this
Lieschen coloured and said demurely, 'I am in service here, sir, among
good-hearted people, who will give me liberty to watch by you, for three
hours of the afternoon and three of the early part of the night, if you
will honour me.'

My father took her shoulder between finger and thumb, and slightly shook
her to each ejaculation of his emphatic 'No! no! no! no! What! a young
maiden nurse to a convalescent young gentleman! Why, goodness gracious
me! Eh?'

She looked at me softly, and I said I wished her to come.

My father appealed to the sagacity of the matron. So jealous was he of a
suggested partner in his task that he had refused my earnest requests to
have Mr. Peterborough to share the hours of watching by my side. The
visits of college friends and acquaintances were cut very short, he soon
reduced them to talk in a hush with thumbs and nods and eyebrows; and if
it had not been so annoying to me, I could have laughed at his method of
accustoming the regular visitors to make ready, immediately after
greeting, for his affectionate dismissal of them. Lieschen went away with
the mute blessing of his finger on one of her modest dimples; but, to his
amazement, she returned in the evening. He gave her a lecture, to which
she listened attentively, and came again in the morning. He was
petrified. 'Idiots, insects, women, and the salt sea ocean!' said he, to
indicate a list of the untameables, without distressing the one present,
and, acknowledging himself beaten, he ruefully accepted his holiday.

The girl was like sweet Spring in my room. She spoke of Sarkeld
familiarly. She was born in that neighbourhood, she informed me, and had
been educated by a dear great lady. Her smile of pleasure on entering the
room one morning, and seeing me dressed and sitting in a grand-fatherly
chair by the breezy window, was like a salutation of returning health. My
father made another stand against the usurper of his privileges; he
refused to go out.

'Then must I go,' said Lieschen, 'for two are not allowed here.'

'No! don't leave me,' I begged of her, and stretched out my hands for
hers, while she gazed sadly from the doorway. He suspected some
foolishness or he was actually jealous. 'Hum-oh!' He went forthwith a
murmured groan.

She deceived me by taking her seat in perfect repose.

After smoothing her apron, 'Now I must go,' she said.

'What! to leave me here alone?'

She looked at the clock, and leaned out of the window.

'Not alone; oh, not alone!' the girl exclaimed. 'And please, please do
not mention me--presently. Hark! do you hear wheels? Your heart must not
beat. Now farewell. You will not be alone: at least, so I think. See what
I wear, dear Mr. Patient!' She drew from her bosom, attached to a piece
of blue ribbon, the half of an English shilling, kissed it, and blew a
soft farewell to me:

She had not been long gone when the Princess Ottilia stood in her place.

A shilling tossed by an English boy to a couple of little foreign girls
in a woodman's hut!--you would not expect it to withstand the common fate
of silver coins, and preserve mysterious virtues by living celibate,
neither multiplying nor reduced, ultimately to play the part of a
powerful magician in bringing the boy grown man to the feet of an
illustrious lady, and her to his side in sickness, treasonably to the
laws of her station. The little women quarrelled over it, and snatched
and hid and contemplated it in secret, each in her turn, until the strife
it engendered was put an end to by a doughty smith, their mother's
brother, who divided it into equal halves, through which he drove a hole,
and the pieces being now thrown out of the currency, each one wore her
share of it in her bosom from that time, proudly appeased. They were not
ordinary peasant children, and happily for them they had another friend
that was not a bird of passage, and was endowed by nature and position to
do the work of an angel. She had them educated to read, write, and knit,
and learn pretty manners, and in good season she took one of the sisters
to wait on her own person. The second went, upon her recommendation, into
the household of a Professor of a neighbouring University. But neither of
them abjured her superstitious belief in the proved merits of the
talisman she wore. So when they saw the careless giver again they
remembered him; their gratitude was as fresh as on that romantic morning
of their childhood, and they resolved without concert to serve him after
their own fashion, and quickly spied a way to it. They were German girls.

You are now enabled to guess more than was known to Ottilia and me of the
curious agency at work to shuffle us together. The doors of her suite in
the palace were barred against letters addressed to the princess; the
delivery of letters to her was interdicted, she consenting, yet she found
one: it lay on the broad walk of the orange-trees, between the pleasure
and the fruit-gardens, as if dropped by a falcon in mid air. Ottilia
beheld it, and started. Her little maid walking close by, exclaimed,
scuttling round in front of her the while like an urchin in sabots,

'Ha! what is it? a snake? let me! let me!' The guileless mistress
replied, 'A letter!' Whereupon the maid said: 'Not a window near! and no
wall neither! Why, dearest princess, we have walked up and down here a
dozen times and not seen it staring at us! Oh, my good heaven!' The
letter was seized and opened, and Ottilia read:

   'He who loves you with his heart has been cruelly used. They have
   shot him. He is not dead. He must not die. He is where he has
   studied since long. He has his medicine and doctors, and they say
   the bullet did not lodge. He has not the sight that cures. Now is
   he, the strong young man, laid helpless at anybody's mercy.'

She supped at her father's table, and amused the margravine and him
alternately with cards and a sonata. Before twelve at midnight she was
driving on the road to the University, saying farewell to what her mind
reverenced, so that her lover might but have sight of her. She imagined I
had been assassinated. For a long time, and most pertinaciously, this
idea dwelt with her. I could not dispossess her of it, even after
uttering the word 'duel' I know not how often. I had flatly to relate the
whole-of the circumstances.

'But Otto is no assassin,' she cried out.

What was that she reverenced? It was what she jeopardized--her state, her
rank, her dignity as princess and daughter of an ancient House, things
typical to her of sovereign duties, and the high seclusion of her name.
To her the escapades of foolish damsels were abominable. The laws of
society as well as of her exalted station were in harmony with her
intelligence. She thought them good, but obeyed them as a subject, not
slavishly: she claimed the right to exercise her trained reason. The
modestest, humblest, sweetest of women, undervaluing nothing that she
possessed, least of all what was due from her to others, she could go
whithersoever her reason directed her, putting anything aside to act
justly according to her light. Nor would she have had cause to repent had
I been the man she held me to be. Even with me she had not behaved
precipitately. My course of probation was severe and long before she
allowed her heart to speak.

Pale from a sleepless night and her heart's weariful eagerness to be near
me, she sat by my chair, holding my hand, and sometimes looking into my
eyes to find the life reflecting hers as in a sunken well that has once
been a spring. My books and poor bachelor comforts caught her attention
between-whiles. We talked of the day of storm by the lake; we read the
unsigned letter. With her hand in mine I slept some minutes, and awoke
grasping it, doubting and terrified, so great a wave of life lifted me
up.

'No! you are not gone,' I sighed.

'Only come,' said she.

The nature of the step she had taken began to dawn on me.

'But when they miss you at the palace? Prince Ernest?'

'Hush! they have missed me already. It is done.' She said it smiling.

'Ottilia, will he take you away?'

'Us, dear, us.'

'Can you meet his anger?'

'Our aunt will be the executioner. We have a day of sweet hours before
she can arrive.'

'May I see her first?'

'We will both see her as we are now.'

'We must have prompt answers for the margravine.'

'None, Harry. I do not defend myself ever.'

Distant hills, and folds of receding clouds and skies beyond them, were
visible from my window, and beyond the skies I felt her soul.

'Ottilia, you were going to Italy?'

'Yes: or whither they please, for as long as they please. I wished once
to go, I have told you why. One of the series' (she touched the letter
lying on a reading-table beside her) 'turned the channel of all wishes
and intentions. My friends left me to fall at the mercy of this one. I
consented to the injunction that I should neither write nor receive
letters. Do I argue ill in saying that a trust was implied? Surely it was
a breach of the trust to keep me ignorant of the danger of him I love!
Now they know it. I dared not consult them--not my dear father! about any
design of mine when I had read this odd copybook writing, all in brief
sentences, each beginning "he" and "he." It struck me like thrusts of a
sword; it illuminated me like lightning. That "he" was the heart within
my heart. The writer must be some clever woman or simple friend, who
feels for us very strongly. My lover assassinated, where could I be but
with him?'

Her little Ann coming in with chocolate and strips of fine white bread to
dip in it stopped my efforts to explain the distinction between an
assassination and a duel. I noticed then the likeness of Aennchen to
Lieschen.

'She has a sister here,' said Ottilia; 'and let her bring Lieschen to
visit me here this afternoon.'

Aennchen, with a blush, murmured, that she heard and would obey. I had a
memorable pleasure in watching my beloved eat and drink under my roof.

The duel remained incomprehensible to her. She first frightened me by
remarking that duels were the pastime of brainless young men. Her next
remark, in answer to my repeated attempts to shield my antagonist from a
capital charge: 'But only military men and Frenchmen fight duels!'
accompanied by a slightly investigating glance of timid surprise, gave me
pain, together with a flashing apprehension of what she had forfeited,
whom offended, to rush to the succour of a duellist. I had to repeat to
her who my enemy was, so that there should be no further mention of
assassination. Prince Otto's name seemed to entangle her understanding
completely.

'Otto! Otto!' she murmured; 'he has, I have heard, been obliged by some
so-called laws of honour once or twice to--to--he is above suspicion of
treachery! To my mind it is one and the same, but I would not harshly
exclude the view the world puts on things; and I use the world's language
in saying that he could not do a dishonourable deed. How far he honours
himself is a question apart. That may be low enough, while the world is
full of a man's praises.'

She knew the nature of a duel. 'It is the work of soulless creatures!'
she broke through my stammered explanations with unwonted impatience, and
pressing my hand: 'Ah! You are safe. I have you still. Do you know,
Harry, I am not yet able to endure accidents and misadventures: I have
not fortitude to meet them, or intelligence to account for them. They are
little ironical laughter. Say we build so high: the lightning strikes
us:--why build at all? The Summer fly is happier. If I had lost you! I
can almost imagine that I should have asked for revenge. For why should
the bravest and purest soul of my worship be snatched away? I am not
talking wisdom, only my shaken self will speak just now! I pardon Otto,
though he has behaved basely.'

'No, not basely,' I felt bound to plead on his behalf, thinking, in spite
of a veritable anguish of gathering dread, that she had become
enlightened and would soon take the common view of our case; 'not basely.
He was excessively irritated, without cause in my opinion; he simply
misunderstood certain matters. Dearest, you have nations fighting: a war
is only an exaggerated form of duelling.'

'Nations at war are wild beasts,' she replied. 'The passions of these
hordes of men are not an example for a living soul. Our souls grow up to
the light: we must keep eye on the light, and look no lower. Nations
appear to me to have no worse than a soiled mirror of themselves in mobs.
They are still uncivilized: they still bear a resemblance to the old
monsters of the mud. Do you not see their claws and fangs, Harry? Do you
find an apology in their acts for intemperate conduct? Men who fight
duels appear in my sight no nobler than the first desperate creatures
spelling the cruel A B C of the passions.'

'No, nor in mine,' I assented hastily. 'We are not perfect. But hear me.
Yes, the passions are cruel. Circumstances however--I mean, there are
social usages--Ay, if one were always looking up t. But should we not be
gentle with our comparisons if we would have our views in proportion?'

She hung studiously silent, and I pursued:

'I trust you so much as my helper and my friend that I tell you what we
do not usually tell to women--the facts, and the names connected with
them. Sooner or later you would have learnt everything. Beloved, I do not
wait to let you hear it by degrees, to be reconciled to it piecemeal.'

'And I forgive him,' she sighed. 'I scarcely bring myself to believe that
Harry has bled from Otto's hand.'

'It was the accident of the case, Ottilia. We had to meet.'

'To meet?'

'There are circumstances when men will not accept apologies;
they--we--heaven knows, I was ready to do all that a man could do to
avoid this folly--wickedness; give it the worst of titles!'

'It did not occur accidentally?' she inquired. Her voice sounded strange,
half withheld in the utterance.

'It occurred,' said I, feeling my strength ebb and despair set in, 'it
occurred--the prince compelled me to the meet him.'

'But my cousin Otto is no assassin?

'Compelled, I say: that is, he conceived I had injured him, and left me
no other way of making amends.'

Her defence of Otto was in reality the vehement cherishing of her idea of
me. This caused her bewilderment, and like a barrier to the flowing of
her mind it resisted and resisted. She could not suffer herself to
realize that I was one of the brainless young savages, creatures with
claws and fangs.

Her face was unchanged to me. The homeliness of her large mild eyes
embraced me unshadowed, and took me to its inner fire unreservedly.
Leaning in my roomy chair, I contemplated her at leisure while my heart
kept saying 'Mine! mine!' to awaken an active belief in its possession.
Her face was like the quiet morning of a winter day when cloud and sun
intermix and make an ardent silver, with lights of blue and faint fresh
rose; and over them the beautiful fold of her full eyebrow on the eyelid
like a bending upper heaven. Those winter mornings are divine. They move
on noiselessly. The earth is still, as if awaiting. A wren warbles, and
flits through the lank drenched brambles; hill-side opens green;
elsewhere is mist, everywhere expectancy. They bear the veiled sun like a
sangreal aloft to the wavy marble flooring of stainless cloud.

She was as fair. Gazing across her shoulder's gentle depression, I could
have desired to have the couchant brow, and round cheek, and rounding
chin no more than a young man's dream of woman, a picture alive, without
the animating individual awful mind to judge of me by my acts. I chafed
at the thought that one so young and lovely should meditate on human
affairs at all. She was of an age to be maidenly romantic: our situation
favoured it. But she turned to me, and I was glad of the eyes I knew. She
kissed me on the forehead.

'Sleep,' she whispered.

I feigned sleep to catch my happiness about me.

Some disenchanting thunder was coming, I was sure, and I was right. My
father entered.

'Princess!' He did amazed and delighted homage, and forthwith
uncontrollably poured out the history of my heroism, a hundred words for
one;--my promptitude in picking the prince's glove up on my sword's
point, my fine play with the steel, my scornful magnanimity, the
admiration of my fellow-students;--every line of it; in stupendous
language; an artillery celebration of victory. I tried to stop him.
Ottilia rose, continually assenting, with short affirmatives, to his
glorifying interrogations--a method he had of recapitulating the main
points. She glanced to right and left, as if she felt caged.

'Is it known?' I heard her ask, in the half audible strange voice which
had previously made me tremble.

'Known? I certify to you, princess,'--the unhappy man spouted his
withering fountain of interjections over us anew; known in every Court
and garrison of Germany! Known by this time in Old England! And, what was
more, the correct version of it was known! It was known that the young
Englishman had vanquished his adversary with the small sword, and had
allowed him, because he had raged demoniacally on account of his lamed
limb, to have a shot in revenge.

'The honour done me by the princess in visiting me is not to be known,' I
summoned energy enough to say.

She shook her head.

My father pledged himself to the hottest secresy, equivalent to a calm
denial of the fact, if necessary.

'Pray be at no trouble,' she addressed him.

The 'Where am I?' look was painful in her aspect.

It led me to perceive the difference of her published position in
visiting a duellist lover instead of one assassinated. In the latter
case, the rashness of an hereditary virgin princess avowing her
attachment might pass condoned or cloaked by general compassion. How
stood it in the former? I had dragged her down to the duellist's level!
And as she was not of a nature to practise concealments, and scorned to
sanction them, she was condemned, seeing that concealment as far as
possible was imperative, to suffer bitterly in her own esteem. This, the
cruellest, was the least of the evils. To keep our names disjoined was
hopeless. My weakened frame and mental misery coined tears when thoughts
were needed.

Presently I found the room empty of our poor unconscious tormentor.
Ottilia had fastened her hand to mine again.

'Be generous,' I surprised her by saying. 'Go back at once. I have seen
you! Let my father escort you the road. You will meet the margravine, or
some one. I think, with you, it will be the margravine, and my father
puts her in good humour. Pardon a wretched little scheme to save you from
annoyance! So thus you return within a day, and the margravine, shelters
you. Your name will not be spoken. But go at once, for the sake of Prince
Ernest. I have hurt him already; help me to avoid doing him a mortal
injury. It was Schwartz who drove you? our old Schwartz! Old Warhead!
You see, we may be safe; only every fresh minute adds to the danger. And
another reason for going-another--'

'Ah!' she breathed, 'my Harry will talk himself into a fever.'

'I shall have it if the margravine comes here.'

'She shall not be admitted.'

'Or if I hear her, or hear that she has come! Consent at once, and revive
me. Oh! I am begging you to leave me, and wishing it with all my soul.
Think over what I have done. Do not write to me. I shall see the
compulsion of mere kindness between the lines. You consent. Your wisdom I
never doubt--I doubt my own.'

'When it is yours you would persuade me to confide in?' said she, with
some sorrowful archness.

Wits clear as hers could see that I had advised well, except in proposing
my father for escort. It was evidently better that she should go as she
came.

I refrained from asking her what she thought of me now. Suing for
immediate pardon would have been like the applying of a lancet to a vein
for blood: it would have burst forth, meaning mere words coloured by
commiseration, kindness, desperate affection, anything but her soul's
survey of herself and me; and though I yearned for the comfort passion
could give me, I knew the mind I was dealing with, or, rather, I knew I
was dealing with a mind; and I kept my tongue silent. The talk between us
was of the possible date of my recovery, the hour of her return to the
palace, the writer of the unsigned letters, books we had read apart or
peeped into together. She was a little quicker in speech, less
meditative. My sensitive watchfulness caught no other indication of a
change.

My father drove away an hour in advance of the princess to encounter the
margravine.

'By,' said he, rehearsing his exclamation of astonishment and delight at
meeting her, 'by the most miraculous piece of good fortune conceivable,
dear madam. And now comes the question, since you have condescended to
notice a solitary atom of your acquaintance on the public highroad,
whether I am to have the honour of doubling the freight of your carriage,
or you will deign to embark in mine? But the direction of the horses'
heads must be reversed, absolutely it must, if your Highness would repose
in a bed to-night. Good. So. And now, at a conversational trot, we may
happen to be overtaken by acquaintances.'

I had no doubt of his drawing on his rarely-abandoned seven-league boots
of jargon, once so delicious to me, for the margravine's entertainment.
His lack of discernment in treating the princess to it ruined my
patience.

The sisters Aennchen and Lieschen presented themselves a few minutes
before his departure. Lieschen dropped at her feet.

'My child,' said the princess, quite maternally, 'could you be quit of
your service with the Mahrlens for two weeks, think you, to do duty
here?'

'The Professor grants her six hours out of the twenty-four already,' said
I.

'To go where?' she asked, alarmed.

'To come here.'

'Here? She knows you? She did not curtsey to you.'

'Nurses do not usually do that.'

The appearance of both girls was pitiable; but having no suspicion of the
cause for it, I superadded,

'She was here this morning.'

'Ah! we owe her more than we were aware of.'

The princess looked on her kindly, though with suspense in the
expression.

'She told me of my approaching visitor,' I said.

'Oh! not told!' Lieschen burst out.

'Did you,'--the princess questioned her, and murmured to me, 'These
children cannot speak falsehoods,' they shone miserably under the burden
of uprightness 'did you make sure that I should come?'

Lieschen thought--she supposed. But why? Why did she think and suppose?
What made her anticipate the princess's arrival? This inveterate why
communicated its terrors to Aennchen, upon whom the princess turned
scrutinizing eyes, saying, 'You write of me to your sister?'

'Yes, princess.'

'And she to you?'

Lieschen answered: 'Forgive me, your Highness, dearest lady!'

'You offered yourself here unasked?'

'Yes, princess.'

'Have you written to others besides your sister?'

'Seldom, princess; I do not remember.'

'You know the obligation of signatures to letters?'

'Ah!'

'You have been remiss in not writing to me, child.'

'Oh, princess! I did not dare to.'

'You have not written to me?'

'Ah! princess, how dared I?'

'Are you speaking truthfully?'

The unhappy girls stood trembling. Ottilia spared them the leap into the
gulfs of confession. Her intuitive glance, assisted by a combination of
minor facts, had read the story of their misdeeds in a minute. She sent
them down to the carriage, suffering her culprits to kiss her fingers;
while she said to one: 'This might be a fable of a pair of mice.'

When she was gone, after many fits of musing, the signification of it was
revealed to my slower brain. I felt that it could not but be an
additional shock to the regal pride of such a woman that these little
maidens should have been permitted to act forcibly on her destiny. The
mystery of the letters was easily explained as soon as a direct suspicion
fell on one of the girls who lived in my neighbourhood and the other who
was near the princess's person. Doubtless the revelation of their
effective mouse plot had its humiliating bitterness for her on a day of
heavy oppression, smile at it as she subsequently might. The torture of
heart with which I twisted the meaning of her words about the pair of
mice to imply that the pair had conspired to make a net for an eagle and
had enmeshed her, may have struck a vein of the truth. I could see no
other antithesis to the laudable performance of the single mouse of
fable. Lieschen, when she next appeared in the character of nurse, met my
inquiries by supplicating me to imitate her sister's generous mistress,
and be merciful.

She remarked by-and-by, of her own accord: 'Princess Ottilia does not
regret that she had us educated.'

A tender warmth crept round me in thinking that a mind thus lofty would
surely be, however severe in its insight, above regrets and recantations.




CHAPTER XXXIV

I GAIN A PERCEPTION OF PRINCELY STATE

I had a visit from Prince Ernest, nominally one of congratulation on my
escape. I was never in my life so much at any man's mercy: he might have
fevered me to death with reproaches, and I expected them on hearing his
name pronounced at the door. I had forgotten the ways of the world. For
some minutes I listened guardedly to his affable talk. My thanks for the
honour done me were awkward, as if they came upon reflection. The prince
was particularly civil and cheerful. His relative, he said, had written
of me in high terms--the very highest, declaring that I was blameless in
the matter, and that, though he had sent the horse back to my stables, he
fully believed in the fine qualities of the animal, and acknowledged his
fault in making it a cause of provocation. To all of which I assented
with easy nods.

'Your Shakespeare, I think,' said the prince, 'has a scene of young
Frenchmen praising their horses. I myself am no stranger to the
enthusiasm: one could not stake life and honour on a nobler brute. Pardon
me if I state my opinion that you young Englishmen of to-day are
sometimes rather overbearing in your assumption of a superior knowledge
of horseflesh. We Germans in the Baltic provinces and in the Austrian
cavalry think we have a right to a remark or two; and if we have not
suborned the testimony of modern history, the value of our Hanoverian
troopers is not unknown to one at least of your Generals. However, the
odds are that you were right and Otto wrong, and he certainly put himself
in the wrong to defend his ground.'

I begged him to pass a lenient sentence upon fiery youth. He assured me
that he remembered his own. Our interchange of courtesies was cordially
commonplace: we walked, as it were, arm-in-arm on thin ice, rivalling one
another's gentlemanly composure. Satisfied with my discretion, the prince
invited me to the lake-palace, and then a week's shooting in Styria to
recruit. I thanked him in as clear a voice as I could command:

'Your Highness, the mine flourishes, I trust?'

'It does; I think I may say it does,' he replied. 'There is always the
want of capital. What can be accomplished, in the present state of
affairs, your father performs, on the whole, well. You smile--but I mean
extraordinarily well. He has, with an accountant at his elbow, really the
genius of management. He serves me busily, and, I repeat, well. A better
employment for him than the direction of Court theatricals?'

'Undoubtedly it is.'

'Or than bestriding a bronze horse, personifying my good ancestor! Are
you acquainted with the Chancellor von Redwitz?'

'All I know of him, sir, is that he is fortunate to enjoy the particular
confidence of his master.'

'He has a long head. But, now, he is a disappointing man in action;
responsibility overturns him. He is the reverse of Roy, whose advice I do
not take, though I'm glad to set him running. Von Redwitz is in the town.
He shall call on you, and amuse an hour or so of your convalescence.'

I confessed that I began to feel longings for society.

Prince Ernest was kind enough to quit me without unmasking. I had not to
learn that the simplest visits and observations of ruling princes signify
more than lies on the surface. Interests so highly personal as theirs
demand from them a decent insincerity.

Chancellor von Redwitz called on me, and amused me with secret anecdotes
of all the royal Houses of Germany, amusing chiefly through the
veneration he still entertained for them. The grave senior was doing his
utmost to divert one of my years. The immoralities of blue blood, like
the amours of the Gods, were to his mind tolerable, if not beneficial to
mankind, and he presumed I should find them toothsome. Nay, he besought
me to coincide in his excuses of a widely charming young archduchess, for
whom no estimable husband of a fitting rank could anywhere be discovered,
so she had to be bestowed upon an archducal imbecile; and hence--and
hence--Oh, certainly! Generous youth and benevolent age joined hands of
exoneration over her. The princess of Satteberg actually married, under
covert, a colonel of Uhlans at the age of seventeen; the marriage was
quashed, the colonel vanished, the princess became the scandalous Duchess
of Ilm-Ilm, and was surprised one infamous night in the outer court of
the castle by a soldier on guard, who dragged her into the guard-room and
unveiled her there, and would have been summarily shot for his pains but
for the locket on his breast, which proved him to be his sovereign's
son.--A perfect romance, Mr. Chancellor. We will say the soldier son
loved a delicate young countess in attendance on the duchess. The
countess spies the locket, takes it to the duchess, is reprimanded, when
behold! the locket opens, and Colonel von Bein appears as in his blooming
youth, in Lancer uniform.--Young sir, your piece of romance has
exaggerated history to caricature. Romances are the destruction of human
interest. The moment you begin to move the individuals, they are puppets.
'Nothing but poetry, and I say it who do not read it'--(Chancellor von
Redwitz is the speaker)'nothing but poetry makes romances passable: for
poetry is the everlastingly and embracingly human. Without it your
fictions are flat foolishness, non-nourishing substance--a species of
brandy and gruel!--diet for craving stomachs that can support nothing
solider, and must have the weak stuff stiffened. Talking of poetry, there
was an independent hereditary princess of Leiterstein in love with a
poet!--a Leonora d'Este!--This was no Tasso. Nevertheless, she proposed
to come to nuptials. Good, you observe? I confine myself to the relation
of historical circumstances; in other words, facts; and of good or bad I
know not.'

Chancellor von Redwitz smoothed the black silk stocking of his crossed
leg, and set his bunch of seals and watch-key swinging. He resumed,
entirely to amuse me,

'The Princess Elizabeth of Leiterstein promised all the qualities which
the most solicitous of paternal princes could desire as a guarantee for
the judicious government of the territory to be bequeathed to her at his
demise. But, as there is no romance to be extracted from her story, I may
as well tell you at once that she did not espouse the poet.'

'On the contrary, dear Mr. Chancellor, I am interested in the princess.
Proceed, and be as minute as you please.'

'It is but a commonplace excerpt of secret historical narrative buried
among the archives of the Family, my good Mr. Richmond. The Princess
Elizabeth thoughtlessly pledged her hand to the young sonneteer. Of
course, she could not fulfil her engagement.'

'Why not?'

'You see, you are impatient for romance, young gentleman.'

'Not at all, Mr. Chancellor. I do but ask a question.'

'You fence. Your question was dictated by impatience.'

'Yes, for the facts and elucidations!

'For the romance, that is. You wish me to depict emotions.'

Hereupon this destroyer of temper embrowned his nostrils with snuff,
adding,--'I am unable to.'

'Then one is not to learn why the princess could not fulfil her
engagement?'

'Judged from the point of view of the pretender to the supreme honour of
the splendid alliance, the fault was none of hers. She overlooked his
humble, his peculiarly dubious, birth.'

'Her father interposed?'

'No.'

'The Family?'

'Quite inefficacious to arrest her determinations.'

'What then--what was in her way?'

'Germany.'

'What?'

'Great Germany, young gentleman. I should have premised that, besides
mental, she had eminent moral dispositions,--I might term it the
conscience of her illustrious rank. She would have raised the poet to
equal rank beside her had she possessed the power. She could and did defy
the Family, and subdue her worshipping father, the most noble prince, to
a form of paralysis of acquiescence--if I make myself understood. But she
was unsuccessful in her application for the sanction of the Diet.'

'The Diet?'

'The German Diet. Have you not lived among us long enough to know that
the German Diet is the seat of domestic legislation for the princely
Houses of Germany? A prince or a princess may say, "I will this or that."
The Diet says, "Thou shalt not"; pre-eminently, "Thou shalt not mix thy
blood with that of an impure race, nor with blood of inferiors." Hence,
we have it what we see it, a translucent flood down from the topmost
founts of time. So we revere it. "Qua man and woman," the Diet says, by
implication, "do as you like, marry in the ditches, spawn plentifully.
Qua prince and princess, No! Your nuptials are nought. Or would you
maintain them a legal ceremony, and be bound by them, you descend, you go
forth; you are no reigning sovereign, you are a private person." His
Serene Highness the prince was thus prohibited from affording help to his
daughter. The princess was reduced to the decision either that she, the
sole child born of him in legal wedlock, would render him qua prince
childless, or that she would--in short, would have her woman's way. The
sovereignty of Leiterstein continued uninterruptedly with the elder
branch. She was a true princess.'

'A true woman,' said I, thinking the sneer weighty.

The Chancellor begged me to recollect that he had warned me there was no
romance to be expected.

I bowed; and bowed during the remainder of the interview.

Chancellor von Redwitz had performed his mission. The hours of my
convalescence were furnished with food for amusement sufficient to
sustain a year's blockade; I had no further longing for society, but I
craved for fresh air intensely.

Did Ottilia know that this iron law, enforced with the might of a whole
empire, environed her, held her fast from any motion of heart and will? I
could not get to mind that the prince had hinted at the existence of such
a law. Yet why should he have done so? The word impossible, in which he
had not been sparing when he deigned to speak distinctly, comprised
everything. More profitable than shooting empty questions at the sky was
the speculation on his project in receiving me at the palace, and that
was dark. My father, who might now have helped me, was off on duty again.

I found myself driving into Sarkeld with a sense of a whirlwind round my
head; wheels in multitudes were spinning inside, striking sparks for
thoughts. I met an orderly in hussar uniform of blue and silver, trotting
on his errand. There he was; and whether many were behind him or he stood
for the army in its might, he wore the trappings of an old princely House
that nestled proudly in the bosom of its great jealous Fatherland.
Previously in Sarkeld I had noticed members of the diminutive army to
smile down on them. I saw the princely arms and colours on various houses
and in the windows of shops. Emblems of a small State, they belonged to
the history of the Empire. The Court-physician passed with a bit of
ribbon in his buttonhole. A lady driving in an open carriage encouraged
me to salute her. She was the wife of the Prince's Minister of Justice.
Upon what foundation had I been building?

A reflection of the ideas possessing me showed Riversley, my undecorated
home of rough red brick, in the middle of barren heaths. I entered the
palace, I sent my respects to the prince. In return, the hour of dinner
was ceremoniously named to me: ceremony damped the air. I had been
insensible to it before, or so I thought, the weight was now so crushing.
Arms, emblems, colours, liveries, portraits of princes and princesses of
the House, of this the warrior, that the seductress, burst into sudden
light. What had I to do among them?

The presence of the living members of the Family was an extreme physical
relief.

For the moment, beholding Ottilia, I counted her but as one of them. She
welcomed me without restraint.

We chattered pleasantly at the dinner-table.

'Ah! You missed our French troupe,' said the margravine.'

'Yes,' said I, resigning them to her. She nodded:

'And one very pretty little woman they had, I can tell you--for a
Frenchwoman.'

'You thought her pretty? Frenchwomen know what to do with their brains
and their pins, somebody has said.'

'And exceedingly well said, too. Where is that man Roy? Good things
always remind me of him.'

The question was addressed to no one in particular. The man happened to
be my father, I remembered. A second allusion to him was answered by
Prince Ernest:

'Roy is off to Croatia to enrol some dozens of cheap workmen. The
strength of those Croats is prodigious, and well looked after they work.
He will be back in three or four or more days.'

'You have spoilt a good man,' rejoined the margravine; 'and that reminds
me of a bad one--a cutthroat. Have you heard of that creature, the
princess's tutor? Happily cut loose from us, though! He has published a
book--a horror! all against Scripture and Divine right! Is there any one
to defend him now, I should like to ask?'

'I,' said Ottilia.

'Gracious me! you have not read the book?'

'Right through, dear aunt, with all respect to you.'

'It 's in the house?'

'It is in my study.'

'Then I don't wonder! I don't wonder!' the margravine exclaimed.

'Best hear what the enemy has to say,' Prince Ernest observed.

'Excellently argued, papa, supposing that he be an enemy.'

'An enemy as much as the fox is the enemy of the poultry-yard, and the
hound is the enemy of the fox!' said the margravine.

'I take your illustration, auntie,' said Ottilia. 'He is the enemy of
chickens, and only does not run before the numbers who bark at him. My
noble old Professor is a resolute truth-seeker: he raises a light to show
you the ground you walk on. How is it that you, adoring heroes as you do,
cannot admire him when he stands alone to support his view of the truth!
I would I were by him! But I am, whenever I hear him abused.'

'I daresay you discard nothing that the wretch has taught you!'

'Nothing! nothing!' said Ottilia, and made my heart live.

The grim and taciturn Baroness Turckems, sitting opposite to her, sighed
audibly.

'Has the princess been trying to convert you?' the margravine asked her.

'Trying? no, madam. Reading? yes.'

'My good Turckems! you do not get your share of sleep?'

'It is her Highness the princess who despises sleep.'

'See there the way with your free-thinkers! They commence by treading
under foot the pleasantest half of life, and then they impose their bad
habits on their victims. Ottilia! Ernest! I do insist upon having lights
extinguished in the child's apartments by twelve o'clock at midnight.'

'Twelve o'clock is an extraordinary latitude for children,' said Ottilia,
smiling.

The prince, with a scarce perceptible degree of emphasis, said,

'Women born to rule must be held exempt from nursery restrictions.'

Here the conversation opened to let me in. More than once the margravine
informed me that I was not the equal of my father.

'Why,' said she, 'why can't you undertake this detestable coal-mine, and
let your father disport himself?'

I suggested that it might be because I was not his equal. She
complimented me for inheriting a spark of Roy's brilliancy.

I fancied there was a conspiracy to force me back from my pretensions by
subjecting me to the contemplation of my bare self and actual condition.
Had there been, I should have suffered from less measured strokes. The
unconcerted design to humiliate inferiors is commonly successfuller than
conspiracy.

The prince invited me to smoke with him, and talked of our gradual
subsidence in England to one broad level of rank through the intermixture
by marriage of our aristocracy, squirearchy, and merchants.

'Here it is not so,' he said; 'and no democratic rageings will make it
so. Rank, with us, is a principle. I suppose you have not read the
Professor's book? It is powerful--he is a powerful man. It can do no
damage to the minds of persons destined by birth to wield
authority--none, therefore, to the princess. I would say to you--avoid
it. For those who have to carve their way, it is bad. You will enter your
Parliament, of course? There you have a fine career.'

He asked me what I had made of Chancellor von Redwitz.

I perceived that Prince Ernest could be cool and sagacious in repairing
what his imprudence or blindness had left to occur: that he must have
enlightened his daughter as to her actual position, and was most
dexterously and devilishly flattering her worldly good sense by letting
it struggle and grow, instead of opposing her. His appreciation of her
intellect was an idolatry; he really confided in it, I knew; and this
reacted upon her. Did it? My hesitations and doubts, my fantastic
raptures and despair, my loss of the power to appreciate anything at its
right value, revealed the madness of loving a princess.

There were preparations for the arrival of an important visitor. The
margravine spoke of him emphatically. I thought it might be her
farcically pompous way of announcing my father's return, and looked
pleased, I suppose, for she added, 'Do you know Prince Hermann? He spends
most of his time in Eberhardstadt. He is cousin of the King, a wealthy
branch; tant soit peu philosophe, a ce qu'on dit; a traveller. They say
he has a South American complexion. I knew him a boy; and his passion is
to put together what Nature has unpieced, bones of fishes and animals. Il
faut passer le temps. He adores the Deluge. Anything antediluvian excites
him. He can tell us the "modes" of those days; and, if I am not very much
misinformed, he still expects us to show him the very latest of these.
Happily my milliner is back from Paris. Ay, and we have fossils in our
neighbourhood, though, on my honour, I don't know where--somewhere; the
princess can guide him, and you can help at the excavations. I am told he
would go through the crust of earth for the backbone of an
idio--ilio-something-saurus.'

I scrutinized Prince Hermann as rarely my observation had dwelt on any
man. He had the German head, wide, so as seemingly to force out the ears;
honest, ready, interested eyes in conversation; parched lips; a rather
tropically-coloured skin; and decidedly the manners of a gentleman to
all, excepting his retinue of secretaries, valets, and chasseurs--his
'blacks,' he called them. They liked him. One could not help liking him.

'You study much?' he addressed the princess at table.

She answered: 'I throw aside books, now you have come to open the earth
and the sea.'

From that time the topics started on every occasion were theirs; the rest
of us ran at their heels, giving tongue or not.

To me Prince Hermann was perfectly courteous. He had made English friends
on his travels; he preferred English comrades in adventure to any other:
thought our East Indian empire the most marvellous thing the world had
seen, and our Indian Government cigars very smokeable upon acquaintance.
When stirred, he bubbled with anecdote. 'Not been there,' was his reply
to the margravine's tentatives for gossip of this and that of the German
Courts. His museum, hunting, and the Opera absorbed and divided his
hours. I guessed his age to be mounting forty. He seemed robust; he ate
vigorously. Drinking he conscientiously performed as an accompanying
duty, and was flushed after dinner, burning for tobacco and a couch for
his length. Then he talked of the littleness of Europe and the greatness
of Germany; logical postulates fell in collapse before him. America to
America, North and South; India to Europe. India was for the land with
the largest sea-board. Mistress of the Baltic, of the North Sea and the
East, as eventually she must be, Germany would claim to take India as a
matter of course, and find an outlet for the energies of the most
prolific and the toughest of the races of mankind,--the purest, in fact,
the only true race, properly so called, out of India, to which it would
return as to its source, and there create an empire magnificent in force
and solidity, the actual wedding of East and West; an empire firm on the
ground and in the blood of the people, instead of an empire of aliens,
that would bear comparison to a finely fretted cotton-hung palanquin
balanced on an elephant's back, all depending on the docility of the
elephant (his description of Great Britain's Indian Empire). 'And mind
me,' he said, 'the masses of India are in character elephant all over,
tail to proboscis! servile till they trample you, and not so stupid as
they look. But you've done wonders in India, and we can't forget it. Your
administration of Justice is worth all your battles there.'

This was the man: a milder one after the evaporation of his wine in
speech, and peculiarly moderate on his return, exhaling sandal-wood, to
the society of the ladies.

Ottilia danced with Prince Hermann at the grand Ball given in honour of
him. The wives and daughters of the notables present kept up a buzz of
comment on his personal advantages, in which, I heard it said, you saw
his German heart, though he had spent the best years of his life abroad.
Much court was paid to him by the men. Sarkeld visibly expressed
satisfaction. One remark, 'We shall have his museum in the town!' left me
no doubt upon the presumed object of his visit: it was uttered and
responded to with a depth of sentiment that showed how lively would be
the general gratitude toward one who should exhilarate the place by
introducing cases of fish-bones.

So little did he think of my presence, that returning from a ride one
day, he seized and detained the princess's hand. She frowned with pained
surprise, but unresistingly, as became a young gentlewoman's dignity. Her
hand was rudely caught and kept in the manner of a boisterous wooer--a
Harry the Fifth or lusty Petruchio. She pushed her horse on at a bound.
Prince Hermann rode up head to head with her gallantly, having now both
hands free of the reins, like an Indian spearing the buffalo--it was
buffalo courtship; and his shout of rallying astonishment at her
resistance, 'What? What?' rang wildly to heighten the scene, she leaning
constrained on one side and he bending half his body's length; a strange
scene for me to witness.

They proceeded with old Schwartz at their heels doglike. It became a
question for me whether I should follow in the bitter track, and further
the question whether I could let them escape from sight. They wound up
the roadway, two figures and one following, now dots against the sky, now
a single movement in the valley, now concealed, buried under billows of
forest, making the low noising of the leaves an intolerable whisper of
secresy, and forward I rushed again to see them rounding a belt of firs
or shadowed by rocks, solitary on shorn fields, once more dipping to the
forest, and once more emerging, vanishing. When I had grown sure of their
reappearance from some point of view or other, I spied for them in vain.
My destiny, whatever it might be, fluttered over them; to see them seemed
near the knowing of it, and not to see them, deadly. I galloped, so
intent on the three in the distance, that I did not observe a horseman
face toward me, on the road: it was Prince Hermann. He raised his hat; I
stopped short, and he spoke:

'Mr. Richmond, permit me to apologize to you. I have to congratulate you,
it appears. I was not aware.--However, the princess has done me the
favour to enlighten me. How you will manage, I can't guess, but that is
not my affair. I am a man of honour; and, on my honour, I conceived that
I was invited here to decide, as my habit is, on the spot, if I would, or
if I would not. I speak clearly to you, no doubt. There could be no
hesitation in the mind of a man of sense. My way is prompt and blunt; I
am sorry I gave you occasion to reflect on it. There! I have been
deceived--deceived myself, let's say. Sharp methods play the devil with
you now and then. To speak the truth,--perhaps you won't care to listen
to it,--family arrangements are the best; take my word for it, they are
the best. And in the case of princesses of the Blood!--Why, look you, I
happen to be suitable. It 's a matter of chance, like your height,
complexion, constitution. One is just what one is born to be, eh? You
have your English notions, I my German; but as a man of the world in the
bargain, and "gentleman," I hope, I should say, that to take a young
princess's fancy, and drag her from her station is not--of course, you
know that the actual value of the title goes if she steps down? Very
well. But enough said; I thought I was in a clear field. We are used to
having our way cleared for us, nous autres. I will not detain you.'

We saluted gravely, and I rode on at a mechanical pace, discerning by
glimpses the purport of what I had heard, without drawing warmth from it.
The man's outrageously royal way of wooing, in contempt of minor
presences and flimsy sentiment, made me jealous of him, notwithstanding
his overthrow.

I was in the mood to fall entirely into my father's hands, as I did by
unbosoming myself to him for the first time since my heart had been under
the charm. Fresh from a rapid course of travel, and with the sense of
laying the prince under weighty obligations, he made light of my
perplexity, and at once delivered himself bluntly: 'She plights her hand
to you in the presence of our good Peterborough.' His plans were shaped
on the spot. 'We start for England the day after to-morrow to urge on the
suit, Richie. Our Peterborough is up at the chateau. The Frau
Feldmarschall honours him with a farewell invitation: you have a private
interview with the princess at midnight in the library, where you are
accustomed to read, as a student of books should, my boy at a touch of
the bell, or mere opening of the door, I see that Peterborough comes to
you. It will not be a ceremony, but a binding of you both by your word of
honour before a ghostly gentleman.' He informed me that his foresight had
enlisted and detained Peterborough for this particular moment and
identical piece of duty, which seemed possible, and in a singular manner
incited me to make use of Peterborough. For the princess still denied me
the look of love's intelligence, she avoided me, she still kept to the
riddle, and my delicacy went so far that I was restrained from writing. I
agreed with my father that we could not remain in Germany; but how could
I quit the field and fly to England on such terms? I composed the
flattest letter ever written, requesting the princess to meet me about
midnight in the library, that I might have the satisfaction of taking my
leave of her; and this done, my spirits rose, and it struck me my father
was practically wise, and I looked on Peterborough as an almost
supernatural being. If Ottilia refused to come, at least I should know my
fate. Was I not bound in manly honour to be to some degree adventurous?

So I reasoned in exclamations, being, to tell truth, tired of seeming to
be what I was not quite, of striving to become what I must have divined
that I never could quite attain to. So my worthier, or ideal, self fell
away from me. I was no longer devoted to be worthy of a woman's love, but
consenting to the plot to entrap a princess. I was somewhat influenced,
too, by the consideration, which I regarded as a glimpse of practical
wisdom, that Prince Ernest was guilty of cynical astuteness in retaining
me as his guest under manifold disadvantages. Personal pride stood up in
arms, and my father's exuberant spirits fanned it. He dwelt loudly on his
services to the prince, and his own importance and my heirship to mighty
riches. He made me almost believe that Prince Ernest hesitated about
rejecting me; nor did it appear altogether foolish to think so, or why
was I at the palace? I had no head for reflections.

My father diverted me by levelling the whole battery of his comic mind
upon Peterborough, who had a heap of manuscript, directed against
heretical German theologians, to pack up for publication in his more
congenial country: how different, he ejaculated, from this nest--this
forest of heresy, where pamphlets and critical essays were issued without
let or hindrance, and, as far as he could see, no general reprobation of
the Press, such as would most undoubtedly, with one voice, hail any
strange opinions in our happy land at home! Whether he really understood
the function my father prepared him for, I cannot say. The invitation to
dine and pass a night at the lake-palace flattered him immensely.

We went up to the chateau to fetch him.

A look of woe was on Peterborough's countenance when we descended at the
palace portals: he had forgotten his pipe.

'You shall smoke one of the prince's,' my father said. Peterborough
remarked to me,--'We shall have many things to talk over in England.'

'No tobacco allowed on the premises at Riversley, I 'm afraid,' said I.

He sighed, and bade me jocosely to know that he regarded tobacco as just
one of the consolations of exiles and bachelors.

'Peterborough, my good friend, you are a hero!' cried my father. 'He
divorces tobacco to marry!'

'Permit me,' Peterborough interposed, with an ingenuous pretension to
subtle waggery, in itself very comical,--'permit me; no legitimate union
has taken place between myself and tobacco!'

'He puts an end to the illegitimate union between himself and tobacco
that he may marry according to form!' cried my father.

We entered the palace merrily, and presently Peterborough, who had worn a
studious forehead in the midst of his consenting laughter, observed,
'Well, you know, there is more in that than appears on the surface.'

His sweet simpleton air of profundity convulsed me. I handed my father
the letter addressed to the princess to entrust it to the charge of one
of the domestics, thinking carelessly at the time that Ottilia now stood
free to make appointments and receive communications, and moreover that I
was too proud to condescend to subterfuge, except this minor one, in
consideration for her, of making it appear that my father, and not I, was
in communication with her. My fit of laughter clung. I dressed chuckling.
The margravine was not slow to notice and comment on my hilarious
readiness.

'Roy,' she said, 'you have given your son spirit. One sees he has your
blood when you have been with him an hour.'

'The season has returned, if your Highness will let it be Spring,' said
my father.

'Far fetched!--from the Lower Danube!' she ejaculated in mock scorn to
excite his sprightliness, and they fell upon a duologue as good as wit
for the occasion.

Prince Hermann had gone. His departure was mentioned with the ordinary
commonplaces of regret. Ottilia was unembarrassed, both in speaking of
him and looking at me. We had the Court physician and his wife at table,
Chancellor von Redwitz and his daughter, and General Happenwyll, chief of
the prince's contingent, a Prussian at heart, said to be a good officer
on the strength of a military book of some sort that he had full leisure
to compose. The Chancellor's daughter and Baroness Turckems enclosed me.

I was questioned by the baroness as to the cause of my father's
unexpected return. 'He is generally opportune,' she remarked.

'He goes with me to England,' I said.

'Oh! he goes,' said she; and asked why we were honoured with the presence
of Mr. Peterborough that evening. There had always been a smouldering
hostility between her and my father.

To my surprise, the baroness spoke of Ottilia by her name.

'Ottilia must have mountain air. These late hours destroy her complexion.
Active exercise by day and proper fatigue by night time--that is my
prescription.'

'The princess,' I replied, envying Peterborough, who was placed on one
side of her, 'will benefit, I am sure, from mountain air. Does she read
excessively? The sea--'

'The sea I pronounce bad for her--unwholesome,' returned the baroness.
'It is damp.'

I laughed.

'Damp,' she reiterated. 'The vapours, I am convinced, affect mind and
body. That excursion in the yacht did her infinite mischief. The
mountains restored her. They will again, take my word for it. Now take
you my word for it, they will again. She is not too strong in
constitution, but in order to prescribe accurately one must find out
whether there is seated malady. To ride out in the night instead of
reposing! To drive on and on, and not reappear till the night of the next
day--I ask you, is it sensible? Does it not approach mania?'

'The princess--?' said I.

'Ottilia has done that.'

'Baroness, can I believe you?--and alone?'

A marvellous twinkle of shuffle appeared in the small slate-coloured eyes
I looked at under their roofing of thick black eyebrows.

'Alone,' she said. 'That is, she was precautious to have her giant to
protect her from violence. There you have a glimmering of reason in her;
and all of it that I can see.'

'Old Schwartz is a very faithful servant,' said I, thinking that she
resembled the old Warhead in visage.

'A dog's obedience to the master's whims you call faithfulness! Hem!' The
baroness coughed dryly.

I whispered: 'Does Prince Ernest--is he aware?'

'You are aware,' retorted the baroness, 'that what a man idolizes he
won't see flaw in. Remember, I am something here, or I am nothing.'

The enigmatical remark was received by me decorously as a piece of
merited chastisement. Nodding with gravity, I expressed regrets that the
sea did not please her, otherwise I could have offered her a yacht for a
cruise. She nodded stiffly. Her mouth shut up a smile, showing more of
the door than the ray. The dinner, virtually a German supper, ended in
general conversation on political affairs, preceded and supported by a
discussion between the Prussian-hearted General and the Austrian-hearted
margravine. Prince Ernest, true to his view that diplomacy was the weapon
of minor sovereigns, held the balance, with now a foot in one scale, now
in the other; a politic proceeding, so long as the rival powers passively
consent to be weighed.

We trifled with music, made our bow to the ladies, and changed garments
for the smoking-room. Prince Ernest smoked his one cigar among guests.
The General, the Chancellor, and the doctor, knew the signal for
retirement, and rose simultaneously with the discharge of his cigar-end
in sparks on the unlit logwood pile. My father and Mr. Peterborough kept
their chairs.

There was, I felt with relief, no plot, for nothing had been definitely
assented to by me. I received Prince Ernest's proffer of his hand, on
making my adieux to him, with a passably clear conscience.

I went out to the library. A man came in for orders; I had none to give.
He saw that the shutters were fixed and the curtains down, examined my
hand-lamp, and placed lamps on the reading-desk and mantel-piece. Bronze
busts of sages became my solitary companions. The room was long, low and
dusky, voluminously and richly hung with draperies at the farther end,
where a table stood for the prince to jot down memoranda, and a sofa to
incline him to the relaxation of romance-reading. A door at this end led
to the sleeping apartments of the West wing of the palace. Where I sat
the student had ranges of classical volumes in prospect and classic
heads; no other decoration to the walls. I paced to and fro and should
have flung myself on the sofa but for a heap of books there covered from
dust, perhaps concealed, that the yellow Parisian volumes, of which I
caught sight of some new dozen, might not be an attraction to the eyes of
chance-comers. At the lake-palace the prince frequently gave audience
here. He had said to me, when I stated my wish to read in the library,
'You keep to the classical department?' I thought it possible he might
not like the coloured volumes to be inspected; I had no taste for a
perusal of them. I picked up one that fell during my walk, and flung it
back, and disturbed a heap under cover, for more fell, and there I let
them lie.

Ottilia did not keep me waiting.




CHAPTER XXXV

THE SCENE IN THE LAKE-PALACE LIBRARY

I was humming the burden of Gothe's Zigeunerlied, a favourite one with me
whenever I had too much to think of, or nothing. A low rush of sound from
the hall-doorway swung me on my heel, and I saw her standing with a
silver lamp raised in her right hand to the level of her head, as if she
expected to meet obscurity. A thin blue Indian scarf mufed her throat and
shoulders. Her hair was loosely knotted. The lamp's full glow illumined
and shadowed her. She was like a statue of Twilight.

I went up to her quickly, and closed the door, saying, 'You have come';
my voice was not much above a breath.

She looked distrustfully down the length of the room; 'You were speaking
to some one?'

'No.'

'You were speaking.'

'To myself, then, I suppose.'

I remembered and repeated the gipsy burden.

She smiled faintly and said it was the hour for Anna and Ursel and Kith
and Liese to be out.

Her hands were gloved, a small matter to tell of.

We heard the portico-sentinel challenged and relieved.

'Midnight,' I said.

She replied: 'You were not definite in your directions about the
minutes.'

'I feared to name midnight.'

'Why?'

'Lest the appointment of midnight--I lose my knowledge of you!--should
make you reflect, frighten you. You see, I am inventing a reason; I
really cannot tell why, if it was not that I hoped to have just those few
minutes more of you. And now they're gone. I would not have asked you but
that I thought you free to act.'

'I am.'

'And you come freely?'

'A "therefore" belongs to every grant of freedom.'

'I understand: your judgement was against it.'

'Be comforted,' she said; 'it is your right to bid me come, if you think
fit.'

One of the sofa-volumes fell. She caught her breath; and smiled at her
foolish alarm.

I told her that it was my intention to start for England in the morning;
that this was the only moment I had, and would be the last interview: my
rights, if I possessed any, and I was not aware that I did, I threw down.

'You throw down one end of the chain,' she said.

'In the name of heaven, then,' cried I, 'release yourself.'

She shook her head. 'That is not my meaning.'

Note the predicament of a lover who has a piece of dishonesty lurking in
him. My chilled self-love had certainly the right to demand the
explanation of her coldness, and I could very well guess that a word or
two drawn from the neighbourhood of the heart would fetch a warmer
current to unlock the ice between us, but feeling the coldness I
complained of to be probably a suspicion, I fixed on the suspicion as a
new and deeper injury done to my loyal love for her, and armed against
that I dared not take an initiative for fear of unexpectedly justifying
it by betraying myself.

Yet, supposing her inclination to have become diverted, I was ready
frankly to release her with one squeeze of hands and take all the pain of
she pain, and I said: 'Pray, do not speak of chains.'

'But they exist. Things cannot be undone for us two by words.'

The tremble as of a strung wire in the strenuous pitch of her voice
seemed to say she was not cold, though her gloved hand resting its
finger-ends on the table, her restrained attitude, her very calm eyes,
declared the reverse. This and that sensation beset me in turn.

We shrank oddly from uttering one another's Christian name. I was the
first with it; my 'Ottilia!' brought soon after 'Harry' on her lips, and
an atmosphere about us much less Arctic.

'Ottilia, you have told me you wish me to go to England.'

'I have.'

'We shall be friends.'

'Yes, Harry; we cannot be quite divided; we have that knowledge for our
present happiness.'

'The happy knowledge that we may have our bone to gnaw when food's
denied. It is something. One would like possibly, after expulsion out of
Eden, to climb the gates to see how the trees grow there. What I cannot
imagine is the forecasting of any joy in the privilege.'

'By nature or system, then, you are more impatient than I, for I can,'
said Ottilia. She added: 'So much of your character I divined early. It
was part of my reason for wishing you to work. You will find that hard
work in England--but why should I preach to you Harry, you have called me
here for some purpose?'

'I must have detained you already too long.'

'Time is not the offender. Since I have come, the evil----'

'Evil? Are not your actions free?'

'Patience, my friend. The freer my actions, the more am I bound to
deliberate on them. I have the habit of thinking that my deliberations
are not in my sex's fashion of taking counsel of the nerves and the
blood.

In truth, Harry, I should not have come but for my acknowledgement of
your right to bid me come.'

'You know, princess, that in honouring me with your attachment, you
imperil your sovereign rank?'

'I do.'

'What next?'

'Except that it is grievously in peril, nothing!'

'Have you known it all along?'

'Dimly-scarcely. To some extent I knew it, but it did not stand out in
broad daylight. I have been learning the world's wisdom recently. Would
you have had me neglect it? Surely much is due to my father? My relatives
have claims on me. Our princely Houses have. My country has.'

'Oh, princess, if you are pleading----'

'Can you think that I am?'

The splendour of her high nature burst on me with a shock.

I could have fallen to kiss her feet, and I said indifferently: 'Not
pleading, only it is evident the claims--I hate myself for bringing you
in antagonism with them. Yes, and I have been learning some worldly
wisdom; I wish for your sake it had not been so late. What made me
overleap the proper estimate of your rank! I can't tell; but now that I
know better the kind of creature--the man who won your esteem when you
knew less of the world!'--

'Hush! I have an interest in him, and do not suffer him to be spurned,'
Ottilia checked me. 'I, too, know him better, and still, if he is dragged
down I am in the dust; if he is abused the shame is mine.' Her face
bloomed.

Her sweet warmth of colour was transfused through my veins.

'We shall part in a few minutes. I have a mind to beg a gift of you.'

'Name it.'

'That glove.'

She made her hand bare and gave me, not the glove, but the hand.

'Ah! but this I cannot keep.'

'Will you have everything spoken?' she said, in a tone that would have
been reproachful had not tenderness melted it. 'There should be a spirit
between us, Harry, to spare the task. You do keep it, if you choose. I
have some little dread of being taken for a madwoman, and more--an actual
horror of behaving ungratefully to my generous father. He has proved that
he can be indulgent, most trusting and considerate for his daughter,
though he is a prince; my duty is to show him that I do not forget I am a
princess. I owe my rank allegiance when he forgets his on my behalf, my
friend! You are young. None but an inexperienced girl hoodwinked by her
tricks of intuition, would have dreamed you superior to the passions of
other men. I was blind; I am regretful--take my word as you do my
hand--for no one's sake but my father's. You and I are bound fast; only,
help me that the blow may be lighter for him; if I descend from the place
I was born to, let me tell him it is to occupy one I am fitted for, or
should not at least feel my Family's deep blush in filling. To be in the
midst of life in your foremost England is, in my imagination, very
glorious. Harry, I remember picturing to myself when I reflected upon
your country's history--perhaps a year after I had seen the two "young
English gentlemen," that you touch the morning and evening star, and wear
them in your coronet, and walk with the sun West and East! Child's
imagery; but the impression does not wear off. If I rail at England, it
is the anger of love. I fancy I have good and great things to speak to
the people through you.'

There she stopped. The fervour she repressed in speech threw a glow over
her face, like that on a frosty bare autumn sky after sunset.

I pressed my lips to her hand.

In our silence another of the fatal yellow volumes thumped the floor.

She looked into my eyes and asked,

'Have we been speaking before a witness?'

So thoroughly had she renovated me, that I accused and reproved the
lurking suspicion with a soft laugh.

'Beloved! I wish we had been.'

'If it might be,' she said, divining me and musing.

'Why not?'

She stared.

'How? What do you ask?'

The look on my face alarmed her. I was breathless and colourless, with
the heart of a hawk eyeing his bird--a fox, would be the truer
comparison, but the bird was noble, not one that cowered. Her beauty and
courage lifted me into high air, in spite of myself, and it was a huge
weight of greed that fell away from me when I said,

'I would not urge it for an instant. Consider--if you had just plighted
your hand in mine before a witness!'

'My hand is in yours; my word to you is enough.'

'Enough. My thanks to heaven for it! But consider--a pledge of fidelity
that should be my secret angel about me in trouble and trial; my wedded
soul! She cannot falter, she is mine for ever, she guides me, holds me to
work, inspirits me!--she is secure from temptation, from threats, from
everything--nothing can touch, nothing move her, she is mine! I mean, an
attested word, a form, that is--a betrothal. For me to say--my beloved
and my betrothed! You hear that? Beloved! is a lonely word:--betrothed!
carries us joined up to death. Would you?--I do but ask to know that you
would. To-morrow I am loose in the world, and there 's a darkness in the
thought of it almost too terrible. Would you?--one sworn word that gives
me my bride, let men do what they may! I go then singing to
battle--sure!--Remember, it is but the question whether you would.'

'Harry, I would, and will,' she said, her lips shuddering--'wait'--for a
cry of joy escaped me--'I will look you me in the eyes and tell me you
have a doubt of me.'

I looked: she swam in a mist.

We had our full draught of the divine self-oblivion which floated those
ghosts of the two immortal lovers through the bounds of their purgatorial
circle, and for us to whom the minutes were ages, as for them to whom all
time was unmarked, the power of supreme love swept out circumstance. Such
embraces cast the soul beyond happiness, into no known region of sadness,
but we drew apart sadly, even as that involved pair of bleeding
recollections looked on the life lost to them. I knew well what a height
she dropped from when the senses took fire. She raised me to learn how
little of fretful thirst and its reputed voracity remains with love when
it has been met midway in air by a winged mate able to sustain, unable to
descend farther.

And it was before a witness, though unviewed by us.

The farewell had come. Her voice was humbled.

Never, I said, delighting in the now conscious bravery of her eyes
engaging mine, shadowy with the struggle, I would never doubt her, and I
renounced all pledges. To be clear in my own sight as well as in hers, I
made mention of the half-formed conspiracy to obtain her plighted troth
in a binding manner. It was not necessary for me to excuse myself; she
did that, saying, 'Could there be a greater proof of my darling's
unhappiness? I am to blame.'

We closed hands for parting. She hesitated and asked if my father was
awake; then promptly to my answer:

'I will see him. I have treated you ill. I have exacted too much
patience. The suspicion was owing to a warning I had this evening, Harry;
a silly warning to beware of snares; and I had no fear of them, believe
me, though for some moments, and without the slightest real desire to be
guarded, I fancied Harry's father was overhearing me. He is your father,
dearest: fetch him to me. My father will hear of this from my lips--why
not he? Ah! did I suspect you ever so little? I will atone for it; not
atone, I will make it my pleasure; it is my pride that has hurt you both.
O my lover! my lover! Dear head, dear eyes! Delicate and noble that you
are! my own stronger soul! Where was my heart? Is it sometimes dead, or
sleeping? But you can touch it to life. Look at me--I am yours. I
consent, I desire it; I will see him. I will be bound. The heavier the
chains, oh! the better for me. What am I, to be proud of anything not
yours, Harry? and I that have passed over to you! I will see him at
once.'

A third in the room cried out, 'No, not that--you do not!'

The tongue was German and struck on us like a roll of unfriendly musketry
before we perceived the enemy. 'Princess Ottilia! you remember your
dignity or I defend you and it, think of me what you will!'

Baroness Turckems, desperately entangled by the sofa-covering, rushed
into the ray of the lamps and laid her hand on the bell-rope. In a minute
we had an alarm sounding, my father was among us, there was a mad play of
chatter, and we stood in the strangest nightmare-light that ever ended an
interview of lovers.




CHAPTER XXXVI

HOMEWARD AND HOME AGAIN

The room was in flames, Baroness Turckems plucking at the bell-rope, my
father looking big and brilliant.

'Hold hand!' he shouted to the frenzied baroness.

She counter-shouted; both of them stamped feet; the portico sentinel
struck the butt of his musket on the hall-doors; bell answered bell along
the upper galleries.

'Foolish woman, be silent!' cried my father.

'Incendiary!' she half-shrieked.

He turned to the princess, begging her to retire, but she stared at him,
and I too, after having seen him deliberately apply the flame of her lamp
to the curtains, deemed him mad. He was perfectly self-possessed, and
said, 'This will explain the bell!' and fetched a deep breath, and again
urged the princess to retire.

Peterborough was the only one present who bethought him of doing
fireman's duty. The risk looked greater than it was. He had but to tear
the lighted curtains down and trample on them. Suddenly the baroness
called out, 'The man is right! Come with me, princess; escape, your
Highness, escape! And you,' she addressed me--'you rang the bell, you!'

'To repair your error, baroness,' said my father.

'I have my conscience pure; have you?' she retorted.

He bowed and said, 'The fire will also excuse your presence on the spot,
baroness.'

'I thank my God I am not so cool as you,' said she.

'Your warmth'--he bent to her--'shall always be your apology, baroness.'

Seeing the curtains extinguished, Ottilia withdrew. She gave me no
glance.

All this occurred before the night-porter, who was going his rounds,
could reach the library. Lacqueys and maids were soon at his heels. My
father met Prince Ernest with a florid story of a reckless student,
either asleep or too anxious to secure a particular volume, and showed
his usual consideration by not asking me to verify the narrative. With
that, and with high praise of Peterborough, as to whose gallantry I heard
him deliver a very circumstantial account, he, I suppose, satisfied the
prince's curiosity, and appeased him, the damage being small compared
with the uproar. Prince Ernest questioned two or three times, 'What set
him ringing so furiously?' My father made some reply.

Ottilia's cloud-pale windows were the sole greeting I had from her on my
departure early next morning, far wretcheder than if I had encountered a
misfortune. It was impossible for me to deny that my father had shielded
the princess: she would never have run for a menace. As he remarked, the
ringing of the bell would not of itself have forced her to retreat, and
the nature of the baroness's alarm demanded nothing less than a
conflagration to account for it to the household. But I felt humiliated
on Ottilia's behalf, and enraged on my own. And I had, I must confess, a
touch of fear of a man who could unhesitatingly go to extremities, as he
had done, by summoning fire to the rescue. He assured me that moments
such as those inspired him and were the pride of his life, and he was
convinced that, upon reflection, 'I should rise to his pitch.' He deluded
himself with the idea of his having foiled Baroness Turckems, nor did I
choose to contest it, though it struck me that she was too conclusively
the foiler. She must have intercepted the letter for the princess. I
remembered acting carelessly in handing it to my father for him to
consign it to one of the domestics, and he passed it on with a flourish.
Her place of concealment was singularly well selected under the
sofa-cover, and the little heaps of paper-bound volumes. I do not fancy
she meant to rouse the household; her notion probably was to terrorize
the princess, that she might compel her to quit my presence. In rushing
to the bell-rope, her impetuosity sent her stumbling on it with force,
and while threatening to ring, and meaning merely to threaten, she rang;
and as it was not a retractable act, she continued ringing, and the more
violently upon my father's appearance. Catching sight of Peterborough at
his heels, she screamed a word equivalent to a clergyman. She had lost
her discretion, but not her wits.

For any one save a lover--thwarted as I was, and perturbed by the shadow
falling on the princess--my father's Aplomb and promptness in conjuring a
check to what he assumed to be a premeditated piece of villany on the
part of Baroness Turckems, might have seemed tolerably worthy of
admiration. Me the whole scene affected as if it had burnt my skin. I
loathed that picture of him, constantly present to me, of his shivering
the glass of Ottilia's semi-classical night-lamp, gravely asking her
pardon, and stretching the flame to the curtain, with large eyes blazing
on the baroness. The stupid burlesque majesty of it was unendurable to
thought. Nevertheless, I had to thank him for shielding Ottilia, and I
had to brood on the fact that I had drawn her into a situation requiring
such a shield. He, meanwhile, according to his habit, was engaged in
reviewing the triumphs to come. 'We have won a princess!' And what
England would say, how England would look, when, on a further journey, I
brought my princess home, entirely occupied his imagination, to my
excessive torture--a state of mind for which it was impossible to ask his
mercy. His sole link with the past appeared to be this notion that he had
planned all the good things in store for us. Consequently I was condemned
to hear of the success of the plot, until--for I had not the best of
consciences--I felt my hand would be spell-bound in the attempt to write
to the princess; and with that sense of incapacity I seemed to be cut
loose from her, drifting back into the desolate days before I saw her
wheeled in her invalid chair along the sands and my life knew sunrise.

But whatever the mood of our affections, so it is with us island
wanderers: we cannot gaze over at England, knowing the old country to be
close under the sea-line, and not hail it, and partly forget ourselves in
the time that was. The smell of sea-air made me long for the white
cliffs, the sight of the white cliffs revived pleasant thoughts of
Riversley, and thoughts of Riversley thoughts of Janet, which were
singularly and refreshingly free from self-accusations. Some love for my
home, similar to what one may have for Winter, came across me, and some
appreciation of Janet as well, in whose society was sure to be at least
myself, a creature much reduced in altitude, but without the cramped
sensations of a man on a monument. My hearty Janet! I thanked her then
for seeing me of my natural height.

Some hours after parting with my father in London, I lay down to sleep in
my old home, feeling as if I had thrown off a coat of armour. I awoke
with a sailor's song on my lips. Looking out of window at the well-known
features of the heaths and dark firs, and waning oak copses, and the
shadowy line of the downs stretching their long whale backs South to
West, it struck me that I had been barely alive of late. Indeed one who
consents to live as I had done, in a hope and a retrospect, will find his
life slipping between the two, like the ships under the striding
Colossus. I shook myself, braced myself, and saluted every one at the
breakfast table with the frankness of Harry Richmond. Congratulated on my
splendid spirits, I was confirmed in the idea that I enjoyed them, though
I knew of something hollow which sent an echo through me at intervals.
Janet had become a fixed inmate of the house. 'I've bought her, and I
shall keep her; she's the apple of my eye,' said the squire, adding with
characteristic scrupulousness, 'if apple's female.' I asked her whether
she had heard from Temple latterly. 'No; dear little fellow!' cried she,
and I saw in a twinkling what it was that the squire liked in her, and
liked it too. I caught sight of myself, as through a rift of cloud,
trotting home from the hunt to a glad, frank, unpretending mate, with
just enough of understanding to look up to mine. For a second or so it
was pleasing, as a glance out of his library across hill and dale will be
to a strained student. Our familiarity sanctioned a comment on the growth
of her daughter-of-the-regiment moustache, the faintest conceivable
suggestion of a shadow on her soft upper lip, which a poet might have
feigned to have fallen from her dark thick eyebrows.

'Why, you don't mean to say, Hal, it's not to your taste?' said the
squire.

'No,' said I, turning an eye on my aunt Dorothy, 'I've loved it all my
life.'

The squire stared at me to make sure of this, muttered that it was to his
mind a beauty, and that it was nothing more on Janet's lip than down on a
flower, bloom on a plum. The poetical comparisons had the effect of
causing me to examine her critically. She did not raise a spark of
poetical sentiment in my bosom. She had grown a tall young woman, firmly
built, light of motion, graceful perhaps; but it was not the grace of
grace: the grace of simplicity, rather. She talked vivaciously and
frankly, and gave (to friends) her whole eyes and a fine animation in
talking; and her voice was a delight to friends; there was always the
full ring of Janet in it, and music also. She still lifted her lip when
she expressed contempt or dislike of persons; nor was she cured of her
trick of frowning. She was as ready as ever to be flattered; that was
evident. My grandfather's praise of her she received with a rewarding
look back of kindness; she was not discomposed by flattery, and threw
herself into no postures, nor blushed very deeply. 'Thank you for
perceiving my merits,' she seemed to say; and to be just I should add
that one could fancy her saying, you see them because you love me. She
wore her hair in a plain knot, peculiarly neatly rounded away from the
temples, which sometimes gave to a face not aquiline a look of swiftness.
The face was mobile, various, not at all suggestive of bad temper, in
spite of her frowns. The profile of it was less assuring than the front,
because of the dark eyebrows' extension and the occasional frown, but
that was not shared by the mouth, which was, I admitted to myself, a
charming bow, running to a length at the corners like her eyebrows, quick
with smiles. The corners of the mouth would often be in movement, setting
dimples at work in her cheek, while the brows remained fixed, and thus at
times a tender meditative air was given her that I could not think her
own. Upon what could she possibly reflect? She had not a care, she had no
education, she could hardly boast an idea--two at a time I was sure she
never had entertained. The sort of wife for a fox-hunting lord, I summed
up, and hoped he would be a good fellow.

Peterborough was plied by the squire for a description of German women.
Blushing and shooting a timid look from under his pendulous eyelids at my
aunt, indicating that he was prepared to go the way of tutors at
Riversley, he said he really had not much observed them.

'They're a whitey-brown sort of women, aren't they?' the squire
questioned him, 'with tow hair and fish eyes, high o' the shoulder, bony,
and a towel skin and gone teeth, so I've heard tell. I've heard that's
why the men have all taken to their beastly smoking.'

Peterborough ejaculated: 'Indeed! sir, really!' He assured my aunt that
German ladies were most agreeable, cultivated persons, extremely
domesticated, retiring; the encomiums of the Roman historian were as well
deserved by them in the present day as they had been in the past;
decidedly, on the whole, Peterborough would call them a virtuous race.

'Why do they let the men smoke, then?' said the squire. 'A pretty style
o' courtship. Come, sit by my hearth, ma'am; I 'll be your
chimney--faugh! dirty rascals!'

Janet said: 'I rather like the smell of cigars.'

'Like what you please, my dear--he'll be a lucky dog,' the squire
approved her promptly, and asked me if I smoked.

I was not a stranger to the act, I confessed.

'Well'--he took refuge in practical philosophy--'a man must bring some
dirt home from every journey: only don't smoke me out, mercy's sake.'

Here was a hint of Janet's influence with him, and of what he expected
from my return to Riversley.

Peterborough informed me that he suffered persecution over the last
glasses of Port in the evening, through the squire's persistent inquiries
as to whether a woman had anything to do with my staying so long abroad.
'A lady, sir?' quoth Peterborough. 'Lady, if you like,' rejoined the
squire. 'You parsons and petticoats must always mince the meat to hash
the fact.' Peterborough defended his young friend Harry's moral
reputation, and was amazed to hear that the squire did not think highly
of a man's chastity. The squire acutely chagrined the sensitive gentleman
by drawling the word after him, and declaring that he tossed that kind of
thing into the women's wash-basket. Peterborough, not without signs of
indignation, protesting, the squire asked him point-blank if he supposed
that Old England had been raised to the head of the world by such as he.
In fine, he favoured Peterborough with a lesson in worldly views. 'But
these,' Peterborough said to me, 'are not the views, dear Harry--if they
are the views of ladies of any description, which I take leave to
doubt--not the views of the ladies you and I would esteem. For instance,
the ladies of this household.' My aunt Dorothy's fate was plain.

In reply to my grandfather's renewed demand to know whether any one of
those High-Dutch women had got hold of me, Peterborough said: 'Mr.
Beltham, the only lady of whom it could be suspected that my friend Harry
regarded her with more than ordinary admiration was Hereditary-Princess
of one of the ancient princely Houses of Germany.' My grandfather
thereupon said, 'Oh!' pushed the wine, and was stopped.

Peterborough chuckled over this 'Oh!' and the stoppage of further
questions, while acknowledging that the luxury of a pipe would help to
make him more charitable. He enjoyed the Port of his native land, but he
did, likewise, feel the want of one whiff or so of the less restrictive
foreigner's pipe; and he begged me to note the curiosity of our worship
of aristocracy and royalty; and we, who were such slaves to rank, and
such tyrants in our own households,--we Britons were the great sticklers
for freedom! His conclusion was, that we were not logical. We would have
a Throne, which we would not allow the liberty to do anything to make it
worthy of rational veneration: we would have a peerage, of which we were
so jealous that it formed almost an assembly of automatons; we would have
virtuous women, only for them to be pursued by immoral men. Peterborough
feared, he must say, that we were an inconsequent people. His residence
abroad had so far unhinged him; but a pipe would have stopped his
complainings.

Moved, perhaps, by generous wine, in concert with his longing for
tobacco, he dropped an observation of unwonted shrewdness; he said: 'The
squire, my dear Harry, a most honourable and straightforward country
gentleman, and one of our very wealthiest, is still, I would venture to
suggest, an example of old blood that requires--I study race--varying,
modifying, one might venture to say, correcting; and really, a friend
with more privileges than I possess, would or should throw him a hint
that no harm has been done to the family by an intermixture . . . old
blood does occasionally need it--you know I study blood--it becomes too
coarse, or, in some cases, too fine. The study of the mixture of blood is
probably one of our great physical problems.'

Peterborough commended me to gratitude for the imaginative and chivalrous
element bestowed on me by a father that was other than a country squire;
one who could be tolerant of innocent habits, and not of guilty ones--a
further glance at the interdicted pipe. I left him almost whimpering for
it.

The contemplation of the curious littleness of the lives of men and women
lived in this England of ours, made me feel as if I looked at them out of
a palace balcony-window; for no one appeared to hope very much or to
fear; people trotted in their different kinds of harness; and I was
amused to think of my heart going regularly in imitation of those about
me. I was in a princely state of mind indeed, not disinclined for a time
to follow the general course of life, while despising it. An existence
without colour, without anxious throbbing, without salient matter for
thought, challenged contempt. But it was exceedingly funny. My aunt
Dorothy, the squire, and Janet submitted to my transparent inward
laughter at them, patiently waiting for me to share their contentment, in
the deluded belief that the hour would come. The principal items of news
embraced the death of Squire Gregory Bulsted, the marriage of this and
that young lady, a legal contention between my grandfather and Lady Maria
Higginson, the wife of a rich manufacturer newly located among us, on
account of a right of encampment on Durstan heath, my grandfather taking
side with the gipsies, and beating her ladyship--a friend of Heriot's, by
the way. Concerning Heriot, my aunt Dorothy was in trouble. She could
not, she said, approve his behaviour in coming to this neighbourhood at
all, and she hinted that I might induce him to keep away. I mentioned
Julia Bulsted's being in mourning, merely to bring in her name
tentatively.

'Ay, mourning's her outer rig, never doubt,' said the squire. 'Flick your
whip at her, she 's a charitable soul, Judy Bulsted! She knits stockings
for the poor. She'd down and kiss the stump of a sailor on a stick o'
timber. All the same, she oughtn't to be alone. Pity she hasn't a baby.
You and I'll talk it over by-and-by, Harry.'

Kiomi was spoken of, and Lady Maria Higginson, and then Heriot.

'M-m-m-m rascal!' hummed the squire. 'There's three, and that's not
enough for him. Six months back a man comes over from Surreywards, a farm
he calls Dipwell, and asks after you, Harry; rigmaroles about a handsome
lass gone off . . . some scoundrel! You and I'll talk it over by-and-by,
Harry.'

Janet raised and let fall her eyebrows. The fiction, that so much having
been said, an immediate show of reserve on such topics preserved her in
ignorance of them, was one she subscribed to merely to humour the squire.
I was half in doubt whether I disliked or admired her want of decent
hypocrisy. She allowed him to suppose that she did not hear, but spoke as
a party to the conversation. My aunt Dorothy blamed Julia. The squire
thundered at Heriot; Janet, liking both, contented herself with impartial
comments.

'I always think in these cases that the women must be the fools,' she
said. Her affectation was to assume a knowledge of the world and all
things in it. We rode over to Julia's cottage, on the outskirts of the
estate now devolved upon her husband. Irish eyes are certainly bewitching
lights. I thought, for my part, I could not do as the captain was doing,
serving his country in foreign parts, while such as these were shining
without a captain at home. Janet approved his conduct, and was right.
'What can a wife think the man worth who sits down to guard his
house-door?' she answered my slight innuendo. She compared the man to a
kennel-dog. 'This,' said I, 'comes of made-up matches,' whereat she was
silent.

Julia took her own view of her position. She asked me whether it was not
dismal for one who was called a grass widow, and was in reality a
salt-water one, to keep fresh, with a lapdog, a cook, and a maid-servant,
and a postman that passed the gate twenty times for twice that he opened
it, and nothing to look for but this disappointing creature day after
day! At first she was shy, stole out a coy line of fingers to be shaken,
and lisped; and out of that mood came right-about-face, with an
exclamation of regret that she supposed she must not kiss me now. I
projected, she drew back. 'Shall Janet go?' said I. 'Then if nobody's
present I 'll be talked of,' said she, moaning queerly. The tendency of
her hair to creep loose of its bands gave her handsome face an aspect
deliriously wild. I complimented her on her keeping so fresh, in spite of
her salt-water widowhood. She turned the tables on me for looking so
powerful, though I was dying for a foreign princess.

'Oh! but that'll blow over,' she said; 'anything blows over as long as
you don't go up to the altar'; and she eyed her ringed finger, woebegone,
and flashed the pleasantest of smiles with the name of her William.
Heriot, whom she always called Walter Heriot, was, she informed me,
staying at Durstan Hall, the new great house, built on a plot of ground
that the Lancashire millionaire had caught up, while the squire and the
other landowners of the neighbourhood were sleeping. 'And if you get
Walter Heriot to come to you, Harry Richmond, it'll be better for him,
I'm sure,' she added, and naively:

'I 'd like to meet him up at the Grange.' Temple, she said, had left the
Navy and was reading in London for the Bar--good news to me.

'You have not told us anything about your princess, Harry,' Janet
observed on the ride home.

'Do you take her for a real person, Janet?'

'One thinks of her as a snow-mountain you've been admiring.'

'Very well; so let her be.'

'Is she kind and good?'

'Yes.'

'Does she ride well?'

'She rides remarkably well.'

'She 's fair, I suppose?'

'Janet, if I saw you married to Temple, it would be the second great wish
of my heart.'

'Harry, you're a bit too cruel, as Julia would say.'

'Have you noticed she gets more and more Irish?'

'Perhaps she finds it is liked. Some women can adapt themselves . . .
they 're the happiest. All I meant to ask you is, whether your princess
is like the rest of us?'

'Not at all,' said I, unconscious of hurting.

'Never mind. Don't be hard on Julia. She has the making of a good
woman--a girl can see that; only she can't bear loneliness, and doesn't
understand yet what it is to be loved by a true gentleman. Persons of
that class can't learn it all at once.'

I was pained to see her in tears. Her figure was straight, and she spoke
without a quaver of her voice.

'Heriot's an excellent fellow,' I remarked.

'He is. I can't think ill of my friends,' said she.

'Dear girl, is it these two who make you unhappy?'

'No; but dear old grandada! . . .'

The course of her mind was obvious. I would rather have had her less
abrupt and more personal in revealing it. I stammered something.

'Heriot does not know you as I do,' she said, strangling a whimper. 'I
was sure it was serious, though one's accustomed to associate princesses
with young men's dreams. I fear, Harry, it will half break our dear old
grandada's heart. He is rough, and you have often been against him, for
one unfortunate reason. If you knew him as I do you would pity him
sincerely. He hardly grumbled at all at your terribly long absence. Poor
old man! he hopes on.'

'He's incurably unjust to my father.'

'Your father has been with you all the time, Harry? I guessed it.'

'Well?'

'It generally bodes no good to the Grange. Do pardon me for saying that.
I know nothing of him; I know only that the squire is generous, and THAT
I stand for with all my might. Forgive me for what I said.'

'Forgive you--with all my heart. I like you all the better. You 're a
brave partisan. I don't expect women to be philosophers.'

'Well, Harry, I would take your side as firmly as anybody's.'

'Do, then; tell the squire how I am situated.'

'Ah!' she half sighed, 'I knew this was coming.'

'How could it other than come? You can do what you like with the squire.
I'm dependent on him, and I am betrothed to the Princess Ottilia. God
knows how much she has to trample down on her part. She casts off--to
speak plainly, she puts herself out of the line of succession, and for
whom? for me. In her father's lifetime she will hardly yield me her hand;
but I must immediately be in a position to offer mine. She may: who can
tell? she is above all women in power and firmness. You talk of
generosity; could there be a higher example of it?'

'I daresay; I know nothing of princesses,' Janet murmured. 'I don't quite
comprehend what she has done. The point is, what am I to do?'

'Prepare him for it. Soothe him in advance. Why, dear Janet, you can
reconcile him to anything in a minute.'

'Lie to him downright?'

'Now what on earth is the meaning of that, and why can't you speak
mildly?'

'I suppose I speak as I feel. I'm a plain speaker, a plain person. You
don't give me an easy task, friend Harry.'

'If you believe in his generosity, Janet, should you be afraid to put it
to proof?'

'Grandada's generosity, Harry? I do believe in it as I believe in my own
life. It happens to be the very thing I must keep myself from rousing in
him, to be of any service to you. Look at the old house!' She changed her
tone. 'Looking on old Riversley with the eyes of my head even, I think
I'm looking at something far away in the memory. Perhaps the deep red
brick causes it. There never was a house with so many beautiful creepers.
Bright as they are, you notice the roses on the wall. There's a face for
me forever from every window; and good-bye, Riversley! Harry, I'll obey
your wishes.'

So saying, she headed me, trotting down the heath-track.




CHAPTER XXXVII

JANET RENOUNCES ME

An illness of old Sewis, the butler,--amazingly resembling a sick monkey
in his bed,--kept me from paying a visit to Temple and seeing my father
for several weeks, during which time Janet loyally accustomed the squire
to hear of the German princess, and she did it with a decent and
agreeable cheerfulness that I quite approved of. I should have been
enraged at a martyr-like appearance on her part, for I demanded a
sprightly devotion to my interests, considering love so holy a thing,
that where it existed, all surrounding persons were bound to do it homage
and service. We were thrown together a great deal in attending on poor
old Sewis, who would lie on his pillows recounting for hours my father's
midnight summons of the inhabitants of Riversley, and his little Harry's
infant expedition into the world. Temple and Heriot came to stay at the
Grange, and assisted in some rough scene-painting--torrid colours
representing the island of Jamaica. We hung it at the foot of old Sewis's
bed. He awoke and contemplated it, and went downstairs the same day,
cured, he declared: the fact being that the unfortunate picture testified
too strongly to the reversal of all he was used to in life, in having
those he served to wait on him. The squire celebrated his recovery by
giving a servants' ball. Sewis danced with the handsomest lass, swung her
to supper, and delivered an extraordinary speech, entirely concerning me,
and rather to my discomposure, particularly so when it was my fate to
hear that the old man had made me the heir of his savings. Such was his
announcement, in a very excited voice, but incidentally upon a solemn
adjuration to the squire to beware of his temper--govern his temper and
not be a turncoat.

We were present at the head of the supper-table to hear our healths
drunk. Sewis spoke like a half-caste oblivious of his training, and of
the subjects he was at liberty to touch on as well. Evidently there was a
weight of foreboding on his mind. He knew his master well. The squire
excused him under the ejaculation, 'Drunk, by the Lord!' Sewis went so
far as to mention my father 'He no disgrace, sar, he no disgrace, I say!
but he pull one way, old house pull other way, and 'tween 'em my little
Harry torn apieces, squire. He set out in the night "You not enter it any
more!" Very well. I go my lawyer next day. You see my Will, squire. Years
ago, and little Harry so high. Old Sewis not the man to change. He no
turncoat, squire. God bless you, my master; you recollect, and ladies
tell you if you forget, old Sewis no turncoat. You hate turncoat. You
taught old Sewis, and God bless you, and Mr. Harry, and British
Constitution, all Amen!'

With that he bounded to bed. He was dead next morning.

The squire was humorous over my legacy. It amounted to about seventeen
hundred pounds invested in Government Stock, and he asked me what I meant
to do with it; proposed a Charity to be established on behalf of decayed
half-castes, insisting that servants' money could never be appropriated
to the uses of gentlemen. All the while he was muttering, 'Turncoat! eh?
turncoat?'--proof that the word had struck where it was aimed. For me,
after thinking on it, I had a superstitious respect for the legacy, so I
determined, in spite of the squire's laughter over 'Sixty pounds per
annum!' to let it rest in my name: I saw for the first time the
possibility that I might not have my grandfather's wealth to depend upon.
He warned me of growing miserly. With my father in London, living freely
on my property, I had not much fear of that. However, I said discreetly,
'I don't mind spending when I see my way.'

'Oh! see your way,' said he. 'Better a niggard than a chuckfist. Only,
there 's my girl: she 's good at accounts. One 'll do for them,
Harry?--ha'n't been long enough at home yet?'

Few were the occasions when our conversation did not diverge to this sort
of interrogation. Temple and Heriot, with whom I took counsel, advised me
to wait until the idea of the princess had worn its way into his
understanding, and leave the work to Janet. 'Though,' said Heriot to me
aside, 'upon my soul, it's slaughter.' He believed that Janet felt
keenly. But then, she admired him, and so they repaid one another.

I won my grandfather's confidence in practical matters on a trip we took
into Wales. But it was not enough for me to be a man of business, he
affirmed; he wanted me to have some ambition; why not stand for our
county at the next general election? He offered me his Welsh borough if I
thought fit to decline a contest. This was to speak as mightily as a
German prince. Virtually, in wealth and power, he was a prince; but of
how queer a kind! He was immensely gratified by my refraining to look out
for my father on our return journey through London, and remarked, that I
had not seen him for some time, he supposed. To which I said, no, I had
not, He advised me to let the fellow run his length. Suggesting that he
held it likely I contributed to 'the fellow's' support: he said
generously, 'Keep clear of him, Hal: I add you a thousand a year to your
allowance,' and damned me for being so thoughtful over it. I found myself
shuddering at a breath of anger from him. Could he not with a word dash
my hopes for ever? The warning I had taken from old Sewis transformed me
to something like a hypocrite, and I dare say I gave the squire to
understand, that I had not seen my father for a very long period and knew
nothing of his recent doings.

'Been infernally quiet these last two or three years,' the squire
muttered of the object of his aversion. 'I heard of a City widow last,
sick as a Dover packet-boat 'bout the fellow! Well, the women are
ninnies, but you're a man, Harry; you're not to be taken in any longer,
eh?'

I replied that I knew my father better now, and was asked how the deuce I
knew him better; it was the world I knew better after my stay on the
Continent.

I contained myself enough to say, 'Very well, the world, sir.'

'Flirted with one of their princesses?' He winked.

'On that subject I will talk to you some other time,' said I.

'Got to pay an indemnity? or what?' He professed alarm, and pushed for
explanations, with the air of a man of business ready to help me if need
were. 'Make a clean breast of it, Harry. You 're not the son of Tom Fool
the Bastard for nothing, I'll swear. All the same you're Beltham; you're
my grandson and heir, and I'll stand by you. Out with 't! She's a
princess, is she?'

The necessity for correcting his impressions taught me to think the
moment favourable. I said, 'I am engaged to her, sir.'

He returned promptly: 'Then you'll break it off.'

I shook my head.

'Why, you can't jilt my girl at home!' said he.

'Do you find a princess objectionable, sir?'

'Objectionable? She's a foreigner. I don't know her. I never saw her.
Here's my Janet I've brought up for you, under my own eyes, out of the
way of every damned soft-sawderer, safe and plump as a melon under a
glass, and you fight shy of her, and go and engage yourself to a
foreigner I don't know and never saw! By George, Harry, I'll call in a
parson to settle you soon as ever we sight Riversley. I'll couple you, by
George, I will! 'fore either of you know whether you're on your legs or
your backs.'

We were in the streets of London, so he was obliged to moderate his
vehemence.

'Have you consulted Janet?' said I.

'Consulted her? ever since she was a chick with half a feather on.'

'A chick with half a feather on,' I remarked, 'is not always of the same
mind as a piece of poultry of full plumage.'

'Hang your sneering and your talk of a fine girl, like my Janet, as a
piece of poultry, you young rooster! You toss your head up like a cock
too conceited to crow. I 'll swear the girl 's in love with you. She does
you the honour to be fond of you. She 's one in a million. A handsome
girl, straight-backed, honest, just a dash, and not too much, of our
blood in her.'

'Consult her again, sir,' I broke in. 'You will discover she is not of
your way of thinking.'

'Do you mean to say she's given you a left-hander, Harry?'

'I have only to say that I have not given her the option.'

He groaned going up the steps of his hotel, faced me once or twice, and
almost gained my sympathy by observing, 'When we're boys, the old ones
worry us; when we're old ones, the boys begin to tug!' He rarely spoke so
humanely,--rarely, at least, to me.

For a wonder, he let the matter drop: possibly because he found me
temperate. I tried the system on him with good effect during our stay in
London; that is, I took upon myself to be always cool, always courteous,
deliberate in my replies, and not uncordial, though I was for
representing the reserved young man. I obtained some praise for my style
and bearing among his acquaintances. To one lady passing an encomium on
me, he said, 'Oh, some foreign princess has been training him,' which
seemed to me of good augury.

My friends Temple and Heriot were among the Riversley guests at
Christmas. We rode over to John Thresher's, of whom we heard that the
pretty Mabel Sweetwinter had disappeared, and understood that suspicion
had fallen upon one of us gentlemen. Bob, her brother, had gone the way
of the bravest English fellows of his class-to America. We called on the
miller, a soured old man. Bob's evasion affected him more than Mabel's,
Martha Thresher said, in derision of our sex. I was pained to hear from
her that Bob supposed me the misleader of his sister; and that he had, as
she believed, left England, to avoid the misery of ever meeting me again,
because he liked me so much. She had been seen walking down the lanes
with some one resembling me in figure. Heriot took the miller's view,
counting the loss of one stout young Englishman to his country of far
greater importance than the escapades of dozens of girls, for which
simple creatures he had no compassion: he held the expression of it a
sham. He had grown coxcombical. Without talking of his conquests, he
talked largely of the ladies who were possibly in the situation of
victims to his grace of person, though he did not do so with any unctuous
boasting. On the contrary, there was a rather taking undertone of regret
that his enfeebled over-fat country would give her military son no
worthier occupation. He laughed at the mention of Julia Bulsted's name.
'She proves, Richie, marriage is the best of all receipts for women, just
as it's the worst for men. Poor Billy Bulsted, for instance, a first-rate
seaman, and his heart's only half in his profession since he and Julia
swore their oath; and no wonder,--he made something his own that won't go
under lock and key. No military or naval man ought ever to marry.'

'Stop,' said Temple, 'is the poor old country--How about continuing the
race of heroes?'

Heriot commended him to rectories, vicarages, and curates' lodgings for
breeding grounds, and coming round to Julia related one of the racy
dialogues of her married life. 'The saltwater widow's delicious. Billy
rushes home from his ship in a hurry. What's this Greg writes me?--That
he 's got a friend of his to drink with him, d' ye mean, William?--A
friend of yours, ma'am.--And will you say a friend of mine is not a
friend of yours, William?--Julia, you're driving me mad!--And is that far
from crazy, where you said I drove you at first sight of me, William?
Back to his ship goes Billy with a song of love and constancy.'

I said nothing of my chagrin at the behaviour of the pair who had
furnished my first idea of the romantic beauty of love.

'Why does she talk twice as Irish as she used to, Heriot?'

'Just to coax the world to let her be as nonsensical as she likes. She's
awfully dull; she has only her nonsense to amuse her. I repeat: soldiers
and sailors oughtn't to marry. I'm her best friend. I am, on my honour:
for I 'm going to make Billy give up the service, since he can't give her
up. There she is!' he cried out, and waved his hat to a lady on horseback
some way down the slope of a road leading to the view of our heathland:

'There's the only girl living fit to marry a man and swear she 'll stick
to him through life and death.'

He started at a gallop. Temple would have gone too at any possible speed,
for he knew as well as I did that Janet was the girl alone capable of
winning a respectful word from Heriot; but I detained him to talk of
Ottilia and my dismal prospect of persuading the squire to consent to my
proposal for her, and to dower her in a manner worthy a princess. He
doled out his yes and no to me vacantly. Janet and Heriot came at a
walking pace to meet us, he questioning her, she replying, but a little
differently from her usual habit of turning her full face to the speaker.
He was evidently startled, and, to judge from his posture, repeated his
question, as one would say, 'You did this?' She nodded, and then uttered
some rapid words, glanced at him, laughed shyly, and sank her features
into repose as we drew near. She had a deep blush on her face. I thought
it might be, that Janet and her loud champion had come to particular
terms, a supposition that touched me with regrets for Temple's sake. But
Heriot was not looking pleased. It happened that whatever Janet uttered
struck a chord of opposition in me. She liked the Winter and the Winter
sunsets, had hopes of a frost for skating, liked our climate, thought our
way of keeping Christmas venerable, rejoiced in dispensing the squire's
bounties--called them bounties, joined Heriot in abusing foreign
countries to the exaltation of her own: all this with 'Well, Harry, I'm
sorry you don't think as we do. And we do, don't we?' she addressed him.

'I reserve a point,' he said, and not playfully.

She appeared distressed, and courted a change of expression in his
features, and I have to confess that never having seen her gaze upon any
one save myself in that fashion, which was with her very winning,
especially where some of her contralto tones of remonstrance or entreaty
aided it, I felt as a man does at a neighbour's shadow cast over his
rights of property.

Heriot dropped to the rear: I was glad to leave her with Temple, and glad
to see them canter ahead together on the sand of tie heaths.

'She has done it,' Heriot burst out abruptly. 'She has done it!' he said
again. 'Upon my soul, I never wished in my life before that I was a
marrying man: I might have a chance of ending worth something. She has
won the squire round with a thundering fib, and you're to have the German
if you can get her. Don't be in a hurry. The squire 'll speak to you
to-night: but think over it. Will you? Think what a girl this is. I
believe on my honour no man ever had such an offer of a true woman. Come,
don't think it's Heriot speaking--I've always liked her, of course. But I
have always respected her, and that's not of course. Depend upon it, a
woman who can be a friend of men is the right sort of woman to make a
match with. Do you suppose she couldn't have a dozen fellows round her at
the lift of her finger? the pick of the land! I'd trust her with an army.
I tell you, Janet Ilchester 's the only girl alive who'll double the man
she marries. I don't know another who wouldn't make the name of wife
laugh the poor devil out of house and company. She's firm as a rock; and
sweet as a flower on it! Will that touch you? Bah! Richie, let's talk
like men. I feel for her because she's fond of you, and I know what it is
when a girl like that sets her heart on a fellow. There,' he concluded,
'I 'd ask you to go down on your knees and pray before you decide against
her!'

Heriot succeeded in raising a certain dull indistinct image in my mind of
a well-meaning girl, to whom I was bound to feel thankful, and felt so. I
thanked Heriot, too, for his friendly intentions. He had never seen the
Princess Ottilia. And at night I thanked my grandfather. He bore himself,
on the whole, like the good and kindly old gentleman Janet loved to
consider him. He would not stand in my light, he said, recurring to that
sheet-anchor of a tolerant sentence whenever his forehead began to gather
clouds. He regretted that Janet was no better than her sex in her
preference for rakes, and wished me to the deuce for bringing Heriot into
the house, and not knowing when I was lucky. 'German grandchildren, eh!'
he muttered. No Beltham had ever married a foreigner. What was the time
fixed between us for the marriage? He wanted to see his line safe before
he died. 'How do I know this foreign woman'll bear?' he asked, expecting
an answer. His hand was on the back of a chair, grasping and rocking it;
his eyes bent stormily on the carpet; they were set blinking rapidly
after a glance at me. Altogether his self-command was creditable to
Janet's tuition.

Janet met me next day, saying with some insolence (so it struck me from
her liveliness): 'Well, it's all right, Harry? Now you'll be happy, I
hope. I did not shine in my reply. Her amiable part appeared to be to let
me see how brilliant and gracious the commonplace could be made to look.
She kept Heriot at the Grange, against the squire's remonstrance and her
mother's. 'It 's to keep him out of harm's way: the women he knows are
not of the best kind for him,' she said, with astounding fatuity. He
submitted, and seemed to like it. She must be teaching Temple to skate
figures in the frost, with a great display of good-humoured patience, and
her voice at musical pitches. But her principal affectation was to talk
on matters of business with Mr. Burgin and Mr. Trewint, the squire's
lawyer and bailiff, on mines and interest, on money and economical
questions; not shrinking from politics either, until the squire cries out
to the males assisting in the performance, 'Gad, she 's a head as good as
our half-dozen put together,' and they servilely joined their fragmentary
capitals in agreement. She went so far as to retain Peterborough to teach
her Latin. He was idling in the expectation of a living in the squire's
gift.

The annoyance for me was that I could not detach myself from a
contemplation of these various scenes, by reverting to my life in
Germany. The preposterous closing of my interview with Ottilia blocked
the way, and I was unable to write to her--unable to address her even in
imagination, without pangs of shame at the review of the petty conspiracy
I had sanctioned to entrap her to plight her hand to me, and without
perpetually multiplying excuses for my conduct. So to escape them I was
reduced to study Janet, forming one of her satellites. She could say to
me impudently, with all the air of a friendly comrade, 'Had your letter
from Germany yet, Harry?' She flew--she was always on the chase. I saw
her permit Heriot to kiss her hand, and then the squire appeared, and
Heriot and she burst into laughter, and the squire, with a puzzled face,
would have the game explained to him, but understood not a bit of it,
only growled at me; upon which Janet became serious and chid him. I was
told by my aunt Dorothy to admire this behaviour of hers. One day she
certainly did me a service: a paragraph in one of the newspapers spoke of
my father, not flatteringly: 'Richmond is in the field again,' it
commenced. The squire was waiting for her to hand the paper to him. None
of us could comprehend why she played him off and denied him his right to
the first perusal of the news; she was voluble, almost witty, full of
sprightly Roxalana petulance.

'This paper,' she said, 'deserves to be burnt,' and she was allowed to
burn it--money article, mining column as well--on the pretext of an
infamous anti-Tory leader, of which she herself composed the first
sentence to shock the squire completely. I had sight of that paper some
time afterwards. Richmond was in the field again, it stated, with mock
flourishes. But that was not the worst. My grandfather's name was down
there, and mine, and Princess Ottilia's. My father's connection with the
court of Eppenwelzen-Sarkeld was alluded to as the latest, and next to
his winning the heiress of Riversley, the most successful of his
ventures, inasmuch as his son, if rumour was to be trusted, had obtained
the promise of the hand of the princess. The paragraph was an excerpt
from a gossiping weekly journal, perhaps less malevolent than I thought
it. There was some fun to be got out of a man who, the journal in
question was informed, had joined the arms of England and a petty German
principality stamped on his plate and furniture.

My gratitude to Janet was fervent enough when I saw what she had saved me
from. I pressed her hand and held it. I talked stupidly, but I made my
cruel position intelligible to her, and she had the delicacy, on this
occasion, to keep her sentiments regarding my father unuttered. We sat
hardly less than an hour side by side--I know not how long hand in hand.
The end was an extraordinary trembling in the limb abandoned to me. It
seized her frame. I would have detained her, but it was plain she
suffered both in her heart and her pride. Her voice was under fair
command-more than mine was. She counselled me to go to London, at once.
'I would be off to London if I were you, Harry,'--for the purpose of
checking my father's extravagances,--would have been the further wording,
which she spared me; and I thanked her, wishing, at the same time, that
she would get the habit of using choicer phrases whenever there might, by
chance, be a stress of emotion between us. Her trembling, and her 'I'd be
off,' came into unpleasant collision in the recollection.

I acknowledge to myself that she was a true and hearty friend. She
listened with interest to my discourse on the necessity of my being in
Parliament before I could venture to propose formally for the hand of the
princess, and undertook to bear the burden of all consequent negotiations
with my grandfather. If she would but have allowed me to speak of Temple,
instead of saying, 'Don't, Harry, I like him so much!' at the very
mention of his name, I should have sincerely felt my indebtedness to her,
and some admiration of her fine spirit and figure besides. I could not
even agree with my aunt Dorothy that Janet was handsome. When I had to
grant her a pardon I appreciated her better.




CHAPTER XXXVIII

MY BANKERS' BOOK

The squire again did honour to Janet's eulogy and good management of him.

'And where,' said she, 'would you find a Radical to behave so generously,
Harry, when it touches him so?'

He accorded me his permission to select my side in politics, merely
insisting that I was never to change it, and this he requested me to
swear to, for (he called the ghost of old Sewis to witness) he abhorred a
turncoat.

'If you're to be a Whig, or a sneaking half-and-half, I can't help you
much,' he remarked. 'I can pop a young Tory in for my borough, maybe; but
I can't insult a number of independent Englishmen by asking them to vote
for the opposite crew; that's reasonable, eh? And I can't promise you
plumpers for the county neither. You can date your Address from
Riversley. You'll have your house in town. Tell me this princess of yours
is ready with her hand, and,' he threw in roughly, 'is a respectable
young woman, I'll commence building. You'll have a house fit for a prince
in town and country, both.'

Temple had produced an effect on him by informing him that 'this princess
of mine' was entitled to be considered a fit and proper person, in rank
and blood, for an alliance with the proudest royal Houses of Europe, and
my grandfather was not quite destitute of consolation in the prospect I
presented to him. He was a curious study to me, of the Tory mind, in its
attachment to solidity, fixity, certainty, its unmatched generosity
within a limit, its devotion to the family, and its family eye for the
country. An immediate introduction to Ottilia would have won him to enjoy
the idea of his grandson's marriage; but not having seen her, he could
not realize her dignity, nor even the womanliness of a 'foreign woman.'

'Thank God for one thing,' he said: 'we shan't have that fellow
bothering--shan't have the other half of your family messing the
business. You'll have to account for him to your wife as you best can. I
've nothing to do with him, mind that. He came to my house, stole my
daughter, crazed her wits, dragged us all . . .'

The excuse to turn away from the hearing of abuse of my father was too
good to be neglected, though it was horribly humiliating that I should
have to take advantage of it--vexatious that I should seem chargeable
with tacit lying in allowing the squire to suppose the man he hated to be
a stranger to the princess. Not feeling sure whether it might be common
prudence to delude him even passively, I thought of asking Janet for her
opinion, but refrained. A stout deceiver has his merits, but a feeble
hypocrite applying to friends to fortify him in his shifts and
tergiversations must provoke contempt. I desired that Janet might
continue to think well of me. I was beginning to drop in my own esteem,
which was the mirror of my conception of Ottilia's view of her lover.

Now, had I consulted Janet, I believe the course of my history would have
been different, for she would not then, I may imagine, have been guilty
of her fatal slip of the tongue that threw us into heavy seas when we
thought ourselves floating on canal waters. A canal barge (an image to me
of the most perfect attainable peace), suddenly, on its passage through
our long fir-woods, with their scented reeds and flowing rushes, wild
balsam and silky cotton-grass beds, sluiced out to sea and storm, would
be somewhat in my likeness soon after a single luckless observation had
passed at our Riversley breakfast-table one Sunday morning.

My aunt Dorothy and Mr. Peterborough were conversing upon the varieties
of Christian sects, and particularly such as approached nearest to
Anglicanism, together with the strange, saddening fact that the Christian
religion appeared to be more divided than, Peterborough regretted to say,
the forms of idolatry established by the Buddha, Mahomet, and other
impostors. He claimed the audacious merit for us, that we did not discard
the reason of man we admitted man's finite reason to our school of faith,
and it was found refractory. Hence our many divisions.

'The Roman Catholics admit reason?' said Janet, who had too strong a turn
for showing her keenness in little encounters with Peterborough.

'No,' said he; 'the Protestants.' And, anxious to elude her, he pressed
on to enchain my aunt Dorothy's attention. Janet plagued him meanwhile;
and I helped her. We ran him and his schoolboy, the finite refractory, up
and down, until Peterborough was glad to abandon him, and Janet said,
'Did you preach to the Germans much?' He had officiated in Prince
Ernest's private chapel: not, he added in his egregious modesty, not that
he personally wished to officiate.

'It was Harry's wish?' Janet said, smiling.

'My post of tutor,' Peterborough hastened to explain, 'was almost
entirely supernumerary. The circumstances being so, I the more readily
acquiesced in the title of private chaplain, prepared to fulfil such
duties as devolved upon me in that capacity, and acting thereon I
proffered my occasional services. Lutheranism and Anglicanism are not,
doubtless you are aware, divided on the broader bases. We are common
Protestants. The Papacy, I can assure you, finds as little favour with
one as with the other. Yes, I held forth, as you would say, from time to
time. My assumption of the title of private chaplain, it was thought,
improved the family dignity--that is, on our side.'

'Thought by Harry?' said Janet; and my aunt Dorothy said, 'You and Harry
had a consultation about it?'

'Wanted to appear as grand as they could,' quoth the squire.

Peterborough signified an assent, designed to modify the implication.
'Not beyond due bounds, I trust, sir.'

'Oh! now I understand,' Janet broke out in the falsetto notes of a puzzle
solved in the mind. 'It was his father! Harry proclaiming his private
chaplain!'

'Mr. Harry's father did first suggest--' said Peterborough, but her
quickly-altered features caused him to draw in his breath, as she had
done after one short laugh.

My grandfather turned a round side-eye on me, hard as a cock's.

Janet immediately started topics to fill Peterborough's mouth: the
weather, the walk to church, the probable preacher. 'And, grandada,' said
she to the squire, who was muttering ominously with a grim under-jaw,
'His private chaplain!' and for this once would not hear her, 'Grandada,
I shall drive you over to see papa this afternoon.' She talked as if
nothing had gone wrong. Peterborough, criminal red, attacked a jam-pot
for a diversion. 'Such sweets are rare indeed on the Continent,' he
observed to my aunt Dorothy. 'Our homemade dainties are matchless.'

'Private chaplain!' the squire growled again.

'It's you that preach this afternoon,' Janet said to Peterborough. 'Do
you give us an extempore sermon?'

'You remind me, Miss Ilchester, I must look to it; I have a little
trimming to do.'

Peterborough thought he might escape, but the squire arrested him.
'You'll give me five minutes before you're out of the house, please. D'
ye smoke on Sundays?'

'Not on Sundays, sir,' said Peterborough, openly and cordially, as to
signify that they were of one mind regarding the perniciousness of Sunday
smoking.

'See you don't set fire to my ricks with your foreign chaplain's tricks.
I spied you puffing behind one t' other day. There,' the squire dispersed
Peterborough's unnecessary air of abstruse recollection, 'don't look as
though you were trying to hit on a pin's head in a bushel of oats. Don't
set my ricks on fire--that 's all.'

'Mr. Peterborough,' my aunt Dorothy interposed her voice to soften this
rough treatment of him with the offer of some hot-house flowers for his
sitting-room.

'Oh, I thank you!' I heard the garlanded victim lowing as I left him to
the squire's mercy.

Janet followed me out. 'It was my fault, Harry. You won't blame him, I
know. But will he fib? I don't think he's capable of it, and I'm sure he
can't run and double. Grandada will have him fast before a minute is
over.'

I told her to lose no time in going and extracting the squire's promise
that Peterborough should have his living,--so much it seemed possible to
save.

She flew back, and in Peterborough's momentary absence, did her work.
Nothing could save the unhappy gentleman from a distracting scene and
much archaic English. The squire's power of vituperation was notorious:
he could be more than a match for roadside navvies and predatory tramps
in cogency of epithet. Peterborough came to me drenched, and wailing that
he had never heard such language,--never dreamed of it. And to find
himself the object of it!--and, worse, to be unable to conscientiously
defend himself! The pain to him was in the conscience,--which is, like
the spleen, a function whose uses are only to be understood in its
derangement. He had eased his conscience to every question right out, and
he rejoiced to me at the immense relief it gave him. Conscientiously, he
could not deny that he knew the squire's objection to my being in my
father's society; and he had connived at it 'for reasons, my dearest
Harry, I can justify to God and man, but not--I had to confess as
much--not, I grieve to say, to your grandfather. I attempted to do
justice to the amiable qualities of the absent. In a moment I was
assailed with epithets that . . . and not a word is to be got in when he
is so violent. One has to make up one's mind to act Andromeda, and let
him be the sea-monster, as somebody has said; I forget the exact origin
of the remark.'

The squire certainly had a whole ocean at command. I strung myself to
pass through the same performance. To my astonishment I went
unchallenged. Janet vehemently asserted that she had mollified the angry
old man, who, however, was dark of visage, though his tongue kept
silence. He was gruff over his wine-glass the blandishments of his
favourite did not brighten him. From his point of view he had been
treated vilely, and he was apparently inclined to nurse his rancour and
keep my fortunes trembling in the balance. Under these circumstances it
was impossible for me to despatch a letter to Ottilia, though I found
that I could write one now, and I sat in my room writing all day,--most
eloquent stuff it was. The shadow of misfortune restored the sense of my
heroical situation, which my father had extinguished, and this unlocked
the powers of speech. I wrote so admirably that my wretchedness could
enjoy the fine millinery I decorated it in. Then to tear the noble
composition to pieces was a bitter gratification. Ottilia's station
repelled and attracted me mysteriously. I could not separate her from it,
nor keep my love of her from the contentions into which it threw me. In
vain I raved, 'What is rank?' There was a magnet in it that could at
least set me quivering and twisting, behaving like a man spellbound, as
madly as any hero of the ballads under a wizard's charm.

At last the squire relieved us. He fixed that side-cast cock's eye of his
on me, and said, 'Where 's your bankers' book, sir?'

I presumed that it was with my bankers, but did not suggest the
possibility that my father might have it in his custody; for he had a
cheque-book of his own, and regulated our accounts. Why not? I thought,
and flushed somewhat defiantly. The money was mine.

'Any objection to my seeing that book?' said the squire.

'None whatever, sir.'

He nodded. I made it a point of honour to write for the book to be sent
down to me immediately.

The book arrived, and the squire handed it to me to break the cover,
insisting, 'You're sure you wouldn't rather not have me look at it?'

'Quite,' I replied. The question of money was to me perfectly
unimportant. I did not see a glimpse of danger in his perusing the list
of my expenses.

''Cause I give you my word I know nothing about it now,' he said.

I complimented him on his frank method of dealing, and told him to look
at the book if he pleased, but with prudence sufficiently awake to check
the declaration that I had not once looked at it myself.

He opened it. We had just assembled in the hall, where breakfast was laid
during Winter, before a huge wood fire. Janet had her teeth on her lower
lip, watching the old man's face. I did not condescend to be curious; but
when I turned my head to him he was puffing through thin lips, and then
his mouth crumpled in a knob. He had seen sights.

'By George, I must have breakfast 'fore I go into this!' he exclaimed,
and stared as if he had come out of an oven.

Dorothy Beltham reminded him that Prayers had not been read.

'Prayers!' He was about to objurgate, but affirmatived her motion to ring
the bell for the servants, and addressed Peterborough: 'You read 'em
abroad every morning?'

Peterborough's conscience started off on its inevitable jog-trot at a
touch of the whip. 'A-yes; that is--oh, it was my office.' He had to
recollect with exactitude:

'I should specify exceptions; there were intervals . . .'

'Please, open your Bible,' the squire cut him short; 'I don't want a
damned fine edge on everything.'

Partly for an admonition to him, or in pure nervousness, Peterborough
blew his nose monstrously: an unlucky note; nothing went well after it.
'A slight cold,' he murmured and resumed the note, and threw himself
maniacally into it. The unexpected figure of Captain Bulsted on tiptoe,
wearing the ceremonial depressed air of intruders on these occasions,
distracted our attention for a moment.

'Fresh from ship, William?' the squire called out.

The captain ejaculated a big word, to judge of it from the aperture, but
it was mute as his footing on the carpet, and he sat and gazed devoutly
toward Peterborough, who had waited to see him take his seat, and must
now, in his hurry to perform his duty, sweep the peccant little redbound
book to the floor. 'Here, I'll have that,' said the squire. 'Allow me,
sir,' said Peterborough; and they sprang into a collision.

'Would you jump out of your pulpit to pick up an old woman's umbrella?'
the squire asked him in wrath, and muttered of requiring none of his
clerical legerdemain with books of business. Tears were in Peterborough's
eyes. My aunt Dorothy's eyes dwelt kindly on him to encourage him, but
the man's irritable nose was again his enemy.

Captain Bulsted chanced to say in the musical voice of inquiry: 'Prayers
are not yet over, are they?'

'No, nor never will be with a parson blowing his horn at this rate,' the
squire rejoined. 'And mind you,' he said to Peterborough, after
dismissing the servants, to whom my aunt Dorothy read the morning lessons
apart, 'I'd not have had this happen, sir, for money in lumps. I've
always known I should hang the day when my house wasn't blessed in the
morning by prayer. So did my father, and his before him. Fiddle! sir, you
can't expect young people to wear decent faces when the parson's hopping
over the floor like a flea, and trumpeting as if the organ-pipe wouldn't
have the sermon at any price. You tried to juggle me out of this book
here.'

'On my!--indeed, sir, no!' Peterborough proclaimed his innocence, and it
was unlikely that the squire should have suspected him.

Captain Bulsted had come to us for his wife, whom he had not found at
home on his arrival last midnight.

'God bless my soul,' said the squire, 'you don't mean to tell me she's
gone off, William?'

'Oh! dear, no, sir,' said the captain, 'she's only cruising.'

The squire recommended a draught of old ale. The captain accepted it. His
comportment was cheerful in a sober fashion, notwithstanding the
transparent perturbation of his spirit. He answered my aunt Dorothy's
questions relating to Julia simply and manfully, as became a gallant
seaman, cordially excusing his wife for not having been at home to
welcome him, with the singular plea, based on his knowledge of the sex,
that the nearer she knew him to be the less able was she to sit on her
chair waiting like Patience. He drank his ale from the hands of Sillabin,
our impassive new butler, who had succeeded Sewis, the squire told him,
like a Whig Ministry the Tory; proof that things were not improving.

'I thought, sir, things were getting better,' said the captain.

'The damnedest mistake ever made, William. How about the Fall of Man,
then? eh? You talk like a heathen Radical. It's Scripture says we're
going from better to worse, and that's Tory doctrine. And stick to the
good as long as you can! Why, William, you were a jolly bachelor once.'

'Sir, and ma'am,' the captain bowed to Dorothy Beltham, 'I have, thanks
to you, never known happiness but in marriage, and all I want is my
wife.'

The squire fretted for Janet to depart. 'I 'm going, grandada,' she said.
'You'll oblige me by not attending to any matter of business to-day. Give
me that book of Harry's to keep for you.'

'How d' ye mean, my dear?'

'It 's bad work done on a Sunday, you know.'

'So it is. I'll lock up the book.'

'I have your word for that, grandada,' said Janet.

The ladies retired, taking Peterborough with them.

'Good-bye to the frocks! and now, William, out with your troubles,' said
the squire.

The captain's eyes were turned to the door my aunt Dorothy had passed
through.

'You remember the old custom, sir!'

'Ay, do I, William. Sorry for you then; infernally sorry for you now,
that I am! But you've run your head into the halter.'

'I love her, sir; I love her to distraction. Let any man on earth say
she's not an angel, I flatten him dead as his lie. By the way, sir, I am
bound in duty to inform you I am speaking of my wife.'

'To be sure you are, William, and a trim schooner-yacht she is.'

'She 's off, sir; she's off!'

I thought it time to throw in a word. 'Captain Bulsted, I should hold any
man but you accountable to me for hinting such things of my friend.'

'Harry, your hand,' he cried, sparkling.

'Hum; his hand!' growled the squire. 'His hand's been pretty lively on
the Continent, William. Here, look at this book, William, and the bundle
o' cheques! No, I promised my girl. We'll go into it to-morrow, he and I,
early. The fellow has shot away thousands and thousands--been
gallivanting among his foreign duchesses and countesses. There 's a
petticoat in that bank-book of his; and more than one, I wager. Now he's
for marrying a foreign princess--got himself in a tangle there, it
seems.'

'Mightily well done, Harry!' Captain Bulsted struck a terrific encomium
on my shoulder, groaning, 'May she be true to you, my lad!'

The squire asked him if he was going to church that morning.

'I go to my post, sir, by my fireside,' the captain replied; nor could he
be induced to leave his post vacant by the squire's promise to him of a
sermon that would pickle his temper for a whole week's wear and tear. He
regretted extremely that he could not enjoy so excellent a trial of his
patience, but he felt himself bound to go to his post and wait.

I walked over to Bulsted with him, and heard on the way that it was
Heriot who had called for her and driven her off. 'The man had been, I
supposed,' Captain Bulsted said, 'deputed by some of you to fetch her
over to Riversley. My servants mentioned his name. I thought it
adviseable not to trouble the ladies with it to-day.' He meditated. 'I
hoped I should find her at the Grange in the morning, Harry. I slept on
it, rather than startle the poor lamb in the night.'

I offered him to accompany him at once to Heriot's quarters.

'What! and let my wife know I doubted her fidelity. My girl shall never
accuse me of that.'

As it turned out, Julia had been taken by Heriot on a visit to Lady Maria
Higginson, the wife of the intrusive millionaire, who particularly
desired to know her more intimately. Thoughtless Julia, accepting the
impudent invitation without scruple, had allowed herself to be driven
away without stating the place of her destination. She and Heriot were in
the Higginsons' pew at church. Hearing from Janet of her husband's
arrival, she rushed home, and there, instead of having to beg
forgiveness, was summoned to grant pardon. Captain Bulsted had drawn
largely on Squire Gregory's cellar to assist him in keeping his post.

The pair appeared before us fondling ineffably next day, neither one of
them capable of seeing that our domestic peace at the Grange was
unseated. 'We 're the two wretchedest creatures alive; haven't any of ye
to spare a bit of sympathy for us?' Julia began. 'We 're like on a
pitchfork. There's William's duty to his country, and there 's his
affection for me, and they won't go together, because Government, which
is that horrid Admiralty, fears pitching and tossing for post-captains'
wives. And William away, I 'm distracted, and the Admiralty's hair's on
end if he stops. And, 'deed, Miss Beltham, I'm not more than married to
just half a husband.'

The captain echoed her, 'Half! but happy enough for twenty whole ones, if
you'll be satisfied, my duck.'

Julia piteously entreated me, for my future wife's sake, not to take
service under Government. As for the Admiralty, she said, it had no
characteristic but the abominable one, that it hated a woman. The squire
laid two or three moderately coarse traps for the voluble frank creature,
which she evaded with surprising neatness, showing herself more awake
than one would have imagined her. Janet and I fancied she must have come
with the intention to act uxorious husband and Irish wife for the
distinct purpose of diverting the squire's wrath from me, for he greatly
delighted in the sight of merry wedded pairs. But they were as simple as
possible in their display of happiness.

It chanced that they came opportunely. My bankers' book had been the
theme all the morning, and an astonishing one to me equally with my
grandfather: Since our arrival in England, my father had drawn nine
thousand pounds. The sums expended during our absence on the Continent
reached the perplexing figures of forty-eight thousand. I knew it too
likely, besides, that all debts were not paid. Self--self--self drew for
thousands at a time; sometimes, as the squire's convulsive forefinger
indicated, for many thousands within a week. It was incomprehensible to
him until I, driven at bay by questions and insults, and perceiving that
concealment could not long be practised, made a virtue of the situation
by telling him (what he in fact must have seen) that my father possessed
a cheque-book as well as I, and likewise drew upon the account. We had
required the money; it was mine, and I had sold out Bank Stock and
Consols,--which gave very poor interest, I remarked cursorily-and had
kept the money at my bankers', to draw upon according to our necessities.
I pitied the old man while speaking. His face was livid; language died
from his lips. He asked to have little things explained to him--the two
cheque-books, for instance,--and what I thought of doing when this money
was all gone: for he supposed I did not expect the same amount to hand
every two years; unless, he added, I had given him no more than a couple
of years' lease of life when I started for my tour. 'Then the money's
gone!' he summed up; and this was the signal for redemanding
explanations. Had he not treated me fairly and frankly in handing over my
own to me on the day of my majority? Yes.

'And like a fool, you think--eh?'

'I have no such thought in my head, sir.'

'You have been keeping that fellow in his profligacy, and you 're keeping
him now. Why, you 're all but a beggar! . . . Comes to my house, talks of
his birth, carries off my daughter, makes her mad, lets her child grow up
to lay hold of her money, and then grips him fast and pecks him, fleeces
him! . . . You 're beggared--d 'ye know that? He's had the two years of
you, and sucked you dry. What were you about? What were you doing? Did
you have your head on? You shared cheque-books? good! . . . The devil in
hell never found such a fool as you! You had your house full of your
foreign bonyrobers--eh? Out with it! How did you pass your time? Drunk
and dancing?'

By such degrees my grandfather worked himself up to the pitch for his
style of eloquence. I have given a faint specimen of it. When I took the
liberty to consider that I had heard enough, he followed me out of the
library into the hall, where Janet stood. In her presence, he charged the
princess and her family with being a pack of greedy adventurers,
conspirators with 'that fellow' to plunder me; and for a proof of it, he
quoted my words, that my father's time had been spent in superintending
the opening of a coal-mine on Prince Ernest's estate. 'That fellow
pretending to manage a coal-mine!' Could not a girl see it was a shuffle
to hoodwink a greenhorn? And now he remembered it was Colonel Goodwin and
his daughter who had told him of having seen 'the fellow' engaged in
playing Court-buffoon to a petty German prince, and performing his
antics, cutting capers like a clown at a fair.

'Shame!' said Janet.

'Hear her!' The squire turned to me.

But she cried: 'Oh! grandada, hear yourself! or don't, be silent. If
Harry has offended you, speak like one gentleman to another. Don't rob me
of my love for you: I haven't much besides that.'

'No, because of a scoundrel and his young idiot!'

Janet frowned in earnest, and said: 'I don't permit you to change the
meaning of the words I speak.'

He muttered a proverb of the stables. Reduced to behave temperately, he
began the whole history of my bankers' book anew--the same queries, the
same explosions and imprecations.

'Come for a walk with me, dear Harry,' said Janet.

I declined to be protected in such a manner, absurdly on my dignity; and
the refusal, together possibly with some air of contemptuous independence
in the tone of it, brought the squire to a climax. 'You won't go out and
walk with her? You shall go down on your knees to her and beg her to give
you her arm for a walk. By God! you shall, now, here, on the spot, or off
you go to your German princess, with your butler's legacy, and nothing
more from me but good-bye and the door bolted. Now, down with you!'

He expected me to descend.

'And if he did, he would never have my arm.' Janet's eyes glittered hard
on the squire.

'Before that rascal dies, my dear, he shall whine like a beggar out in
the cold for the tips of your fingers!'

'Not if he asks me first,' said Janet.

This set him off again. He realized her prospective generosity, and
contrasted it with my actual obtuseness. Janet changed her tactics. She
assumed indifference. But she wanted experience, and a Heriot to help her
in playing a part. She did it badly--overdid it; so that the old man, now
imagining both of us to be against his scheme for uniting us, counted my
iniquity as twofold. Her phrase, 'Harry and I will always be friends,'
roused the loudest of his denunciations upon me, as though there never
had been question of the princess, so inveterate was his mind's grasp of
its original designs. Friends! Would our being friends give him heirs by
law to his estate and name? And so forth. My aunt Dorothy came to
moderate his invectives. In her room the heavily-burdened little book of
figures was produced, and the items read aloud; and her task was to hear
them without astonishment, but with a business-like desire to comprehend
them accurately, a method that softened the squire's outbursts by
degrees. She threw out hasty running commentaries: 'Yes, that was for a
yacht'; and 'They were living at the Court of a prince'; such and such a
sum was 'large, but Harry knew his grandfather did not wish him to make a
poor appearance.'

'Why, do you mean to swear to me, on your oath, Dorothy Beltham,' said
the squire, amazed at the small amazement he created 'you think these two
fellows have been spending within the right margin? What'll be women's
ideas next!'

'No,' she answered demurely. 'I think Harry has been extravagant, and has
had his lesson. And surely it is better now than later? But you are, not
making allowances for his situation as the betrothed of a princess.'

'That 's what turns your head,' said he; and she allowed him to have the
notion, and sneer at herself and her sex.

'How about this money drawn since he came home?' the squire persisted.

My aunt Dorothy reddened. He struck his finger on the line marking the
sum, repeating his demand; and at this moment Captain Bulsted and Julia
arrived. The ladies manoeuvred so that the captain and the squire were
left alone together. Some time afterward the captain sent out word that
he begged his wife's permission to stay to dinner at the Grange, and
requested me to favour him by conducting his wife to Bulsted: proof, as
Julia said, that the two were engaged in a pretty hot tussle. She was
sure her William would not be the one to be beaten.

I led her away, rather depressed by the automaton performance assigned to
me; from which condition I awoke with a touch of horror to find myself
paying her very warm compliments; for she had been coquettish and
charming to cheer me, and her voice was sweet. We reached a point in our
conversation I know not where, but I must have spoken with some warmth.
'Then guess,' said she, 'what William is suffering for your sake now,
Harry'; that is, 'suffering in remaining away from me on your account';
and thus, in an instant, with a skill so intuitive as to be almost
unconscious, she twirled me round to a right sense of my position, and
set me reflecting, whether a love that clad me in such imperfect armour
as to leave me penetrable to these feminine graces--a plump figure,
swinging skirts, dewy dark eyelids, laughing red lips--could indeed be
absolute love. And if it was not love of the immortal kind, what was I? I
looked back on the thought like the ship on its furrow through the
waters, and saw every mortal perplexity, and death under. My love of
Ottilia delusion? Then life was delusion! I contemplated Julia in alarm,
somewhat in the light fair witches were looked on when the faggots were
piled for them. The sense of her unholy attractions abased and mortified
me: and it set me thinking on the strangeness of my disregard of Mdlle.
Jenny Chassediane when in Germany, who was far sprightlier, if not
prettier, and, as I remembered, had done me the favour to make discreet
play with her eyelids in our encounters, and long eyes in passing. I
caught myself regretting my coldness of that period; for which regrets I
could have swung the scourge upon my miserable flesh. Ottilia's features
seemed dying out of my mind. 'Poor darling Harry!' Julia sighed. 'And d'
ye know, the sight of a young man far gone in love gives me the
trembles?' I rallied her concerning the ladder scene in my old
schooldays, and the tender things she had uttered to Heriot. She
answered, 'Oh, I think I got them out of poets and chapters about
lovemaking, or I felt it very much. And that's what I miss in William; he
can't talk soft nice nonsense. I believe him, he would if he could, but
he 's like a lion of the desert--it 's a roar!'

I rejoiced when we heard the roar. Captain Bulsted returned to take
command of his ship, not sooner than I wanted him, and told us of a
fierce tussle with the squire. He had stuck to him all day, and up to 11
P.M. 'By George! Harry, he had to make humble excuses to dodge out of
eyeshot a minute. Conquered him over the fourth bottle! And now all's
right. He'll see your dad. "In a barn?" says the squire. "Here 's to your
better health, sir," I bowed to him; "gentlemen don't meet in barns; none
but mice and traps make appointments there." To shorten my story, my lad,
I have arranged for the squire and your excellent progenitor to meet at
Bulsted: we may end by bringing them over a bottle of old Greg's best.
"See the boy's father," I kept on insisting. The point is, that this
confounded book must be off your shoulders, my lad. A dirty dog may wash
in a duck-pond. You see, Harry, the dear old squire may set up your
account twenty times over, but he has a right to know how you twirl the
coin. He says you don't supply the information. I suggest to him that
your father can, and will. So we get them into a room together. I'll be
answerable for the rest. And now top your boom, and to bed here: off in
the morning and tug the big vessel into port here! And, Harry, three
cheers, and another bottle to crown the victory, if you 're the man for
it?'

Julia interposed a decided negative to the proposal; an ordinarily
unlucky thing to do with bibulous husbands, and the captain looked
uncomfortably checked; but when he seemed to be collecting to assert
himself, the humour of her remark, 'Now, no bravado, William,' disarmed
him.

'Bravado, my sweet chuck?'

'Won't another bottle be like flashing your sword after you've won the
day?' said she.

He slung his arm round her, and sent a tremendous whisper into my ear--'A
perfect angel!'

I started for London next day, more troubled aesthetically regarding the
effect produced on me by this order of perfect angels than practically
anxious about material affairs, though it is true that when I came into
proximity with my father, the thought of his all but purely mechanical
power of making money spin, fly, and vanish, like sparks from a
fire-engine, awakened a serious disposition in me to bring our monetary
partnership to some definite settlement. He was living in splendour, next
door but one to the grand establishment he had driven me to from Dipwell
in the old days, with Mrs. Waddy for his housekeeper once more, Alphonse
for his cook. Not living on the same scale, however, the troubled woman
said. She signified that it was now the whirlwind. I could not help
smiling to see how proud she was of him, nevertheless, as a god-like
charioteer--in pace, at least.

'Opera to-night,' she answered my inquiries for him, admonishing me by
her tone that I ought not to be behindhand in knowing his regal rules and
habits. Praising his generosity, she informed me that he had spent one
hundred pounds, and offered a reward of five times the sum, for the
discovery of Mabel Sweetwinter. 'Your papa never does things by halves,
Mr. Harry!' Soon after she was whimpering, 'Oh, will it last?' I was
shown into the room called 'The princess's room,' a miracle of furniture,
not likely to be occupied by her, I thought, the very magnificence of the
apartment striking down hope in my heart like cold on a nerve. Your papa
says the whole house is to be for you, Mr. Harry, when the happy day
comes.' Could it possibly be that he had talked of the princess? I took a
hasty meal and fortified myself with claret to have matters clear with
him before the night was over.




CHAPTER XXXIX

I SEE MY FATHER TAKING THE TIDE AND AM CARRIED ON IT MYSELF

My father stood in the lobby of the Opera, holding a sort of open court,
it appeared to me, for a cluster of gentlemen hung round him; and I had
presently to bow to greetings which were rather of a kind to flatter me,
leading me to presume that he was respected as well as marvelled at. The
names of Mr. Serjeant Wedderburn, Mr. Jennings, Lord Alton, Sir Weeton
Slater, Mr. Monterez Williams, Admiral Loftus, the Earl of Witlington,
were among those which struck my ear, and struck me as good ones. I could
not perceive anything of the air of cynical satellites in these
gentlemen--on the contrary, they were cordially deferential. I felt that
he was encompassed by undoubted gentlemen, and my warmer feelings to my
father returned when I became sensible of the pleasant sway he held over
the circle, both in speaking and listening. His sympathetic smile and
semi-droop of attention; his readiness, when occasion demanded it, to hit
the key of the subject and help it on with the right word; his air of
unobtrusive appreciation; his sensibility to the moment when the run of
conversation depended upon him--showed inimitable art coming of natural
genius; and he did not lose a shade of his superior manner the while. Mr.
Serjeant Wedderburn, professionally voluble, a lively talker, brimming
with anecdote, but too sparkling, too prompt, too full of personal relish
of his point, threw my father's urbane supremacy into marked relief; and
so in another fashion did the Earl of Witlington, 'a youth in the season
of guffaws,' as Jorian DeWitt described him, whom a jest would seize by
the throat, shaking his sapling frame. Jorian strolled up to us goutily.
No efforts of my father's would induce him to illustrate his fame for
repartee, so it remained established. 'Very pretty waxwork,' he said to
me of our English beauties swimming by. 'Now, those women, young
Richmond, if they were inflammable to the fiftieth degree, that is, if
they had the fiftieth part of a Frenchwoman in them, would have canvassed
society on the great man's account long before this, and sent him to the
top like a bubble. He wastes his time on them. That fat woman he's bowing
to is Viscountess Sedley, a porcine empress, widow of three, with a
soupcon of bigamy to flavour them. She mounted from a grocer's shop, I am
told. Constitution has done everything for that woman. So it will
everywhere--it beats the world! Now he's on all-fours to Lady Rachel
Stokes, our pure aristocracy; she walks as if she were going through a
doorway, and couldn't risk an eyelid. I 'd like to see her tempting St.
Anthony. That's little Wreckham's wife: she's had as many adventures as
Gil Blas before he entered the Duke of Lerma's service.' He reviewed
several ladies, certainly not very witty when malignant, as I remembered
my father to have said of him. 'The style of your Englishwoman is to keep
the nose exactly at one elevation, to show you're born to it. They
daren't run a gamut, these women. These Englishwomen are a fiction! The
model of them is the nursery-miss, but they're like the names of true
lovers cut on the bark of a tree--awfully stiff and longitudinal with the
advance of time. We've our Lady Jezebels, my boy! They're in the pay of
the bishops, or the police, to make vice hideous. The rest do the same
for virtue, and get their pay for it somewhere, I don't doubt; perhaps
from the newspapers, to keep up the fiction. I tell you, these
Englishwomen have either no life at all in them, or they're nothing but
animal life. 'Gad, how they dizen themselves! They've no other use for
their fingers. The wealth of this country's frightful!'

Jorian seemed annoyed that he could not excite me to defend my
countrywomen; but I had begun to see that there was no necessity for the
sanguine to encounter the bilious on their behalf, and was myself
inclined to be critical. Besides I was engaged in watching my father,
whose bearing toward the ladies he accosted did not dissatisfy my
critical taste, though I had repeated fears of seeing him overdo it. He
summoned me to an introduction to the Countess Szezedy, a merry little
Hungarian dame.

'So,' said she at once, speaking German, 'you are to marry the romantic
head, the Princess Ottilia of Eppenwelzen! I know her well. I have met
her in Vienna. Schone Seele, and bas bleu! It's just those that are won
with a duel. I know Prince Otto too.' She prattled away, and asked me
whether the marriage was to take place in the Summer. I was too astounded
to answer.

'No date is yet fixed,' my father struck in.

'It's the talk of London,' she said.

Before I could demand explanations of my father with regard to this
terrible rumour involving Ottilia, I found myself in the box of the City
widow, Lady Sampleman, a grievous person, of the complexion of the
autumnal bramble-leaf, whose first words were: 'Ah! the young suitor! And
how is our German princess?' I had to reply that the theme was more of
German princes than princesses in England. 'Oh! but,' said she, 'you are
having a--shall I call it--national revenge on them? "I will take one of
your princesses," says you; and as soon as said done! I'm dying for a
sight of her portrait. Captain DeWitt declares her heavenly--I mean, he
says she is fair and nice, quite a lady-that of course! And never mind
her not being rich. You can do the decoration to the match. H'm,' she
perused my features; 'pale! Lovelorn? Excuse an old friend of your
father's. One of his very oldest, I'd say, if it didn't impugn. As such,
proud of your alliance. I am. I speak of it everywhere--everywhere.'

Here she dramatized the circulation of the gossip. 'Have you heard the
news? No, what? Fitz-George's son marries a princess of the German realm.
Indeed! True as gospel. And how soon? In a month; and now you will see
the dear, neglected man command the Court . . . .'

I looked at my father: I felt stifling with confusion and rage. He leant
over to her, imparting some ecstatic news about a great lady having
determined to call on her to regulate the affairs of an approaching grand
Ball, and under cover of this we escaped.

'If it were not,' said he, 'for the Chassediane--you are aware, Richie,
poor Jorian is lost to her?--he has fallen at her quicksilver feet. She
is now in London. Half the poor fellow's income expended in bouquets! Her
portrait, in the character of the widow Lefourbe, has become a part of
his dressing apparatus; he shaves fronting her playbill. His first real
affaire de coeur, and he is forty-five! So he is taken in the stomach.
That is why love is such a dangerous malady for middle age. As I said,
but for Jenny Chassediane, our Sampleman would be the fortune for Jorian.
I have hinted it on both sides. Women, Richie, are cleverer than the
illustrious Lord Nelson in not seeing what their inclinations decline to
see, and Jorian would do me any service in the world except that one. You
are restless, my son?'

I begged permission to quit the house, and wait for him outside. He, in
return, begged me most urgently to allow myself to be introduced to Lady
Edbury, the stepmother of Lord Destrier, now Marquis of Edbury; and,
using conversational pressure, he adjured me not to slight this lady,
adding, with more significance than the words conveyed, 'I am taking the
tide, Richie.' The tide took me, and I bowed to a lady of impressive
languor, pale and young, with pleasant manners, showing her character in
outline, like a glove on the hand, but little of its quality. She accused
my father of coming direct from 'that person's' box. He replied that he
never forsook old friends. 'You should,' was her rejoinder. It suggested
to me an image of one of the sister Fates cutting a thread.

My heart sank when, from Lady Edbury too, I heard the allusion to Germany
and its princess. 'Some one told me she was dark?'

'Blonde,' my father corrected the report.

Lady Edbury 'thought it singular for a German woman of the Blood to be a
brunette. They had not much dark mixture among them, particularly in the
North. Her name? She had forgotten the name of the princess.'

My father repeated: 'The Princess Ottilia, Princess of
Eppenwelzen-Sarkeld.'

'Brunette, you say?'

'The purest blonde.'

'A complexion?'

'A complexion to dazzle the righteous!'

Lady Edbury threw a flying glance in a mirror: 'The unrighteous you leave
to us then?'

They bandied the weariful shuttlecock of gallantry. I bowed and fled. My
excuse was that I had seen Anna Penrhys in an upper tier of boxes, and I
made my way to her, doubting how I should be welcomed. 'The happy woman
is a German princess, we hear!' she set me shivering. Her welcome was
perfectly unreserved and friendly.

She asked the name of the lady whose box I had quitted, and after bending
her opera-glass on it for a moment, said, with a certain air of
satisfaction, 'She is young'; which led me to guess that Lady Edbury was
reputed to be Anna's successor; but why the latter should be flattered by
the former's youth was one of the mysteries for me then. Her aunt was
awakened from sleep by the mention of my name. 'Is the man here?' she
exclaimed, starting. Anna smiled, and talked to me of my father, saying,
that she was glad to see me at his right hand, for he had a hard battle
to fight. She spoke of him with affectionate interest in his fortunes; no
better proof of his generosity as well as hers could have been given me.
I promised her heartily I would not be guilty of letting our intimacy
drop, and handed the ladies down to the crush-room, where I saw my father
leading Lady Edbury to her carriage, much observed. Destrier, the young
marquis, coming in to meet the procession from other haunts, linked his
arm to his friend Witlington's, and said something in my hearing of old
'Duke Fitz,' which provoked, I fancied, signs of amusement equivalent to
tittering in a small ring of the select assembly. Lady Sampleman's
carriage was called. 'Another victim,' said a voice. Anna Penrhys walked
straight out to find her footman and carriage for herself.

I stood alone in the street, wondering, fretting, filled with a variety
of ugly sensations, when my father joined me humming an air of the opera.
'I was looking for Jorian, Richie. He had our Sampleman under his charge.
He is off to the Chassediane. Well! And well, Richie, you could not bear
the absence from your dada? You find me in full sail on the tide. I am at
home, if our fortunes demand it, in a little German principality, but
there is,' he threw out his chest, 'a breadth in London; nowhere else do
I breathe with absolute freedom--so largely: and this is my battlefield.
By the way, Lady Edbury accounts you complete; which is no more to say
than that she is a woman of taste. The instance: she positively would not
notice that you wear a dress-coat of a foreign cut. Correct it to-morrow;
my tailor shall wait on you. I meant to point out to you that when a
London woman has not taken note of that, the face and the man have made
the right impression on her. Richie, dear boy, how shall I speak the
delight I have in seeing you! My arm in yours, old Richie! strolling home
from the Fashion: this seems to me what I dreamt of! All in sound health
at the Grange? She too, the best of women?'

'I have come on very particular business,' I interposed briefly.

He replied, 'I am alive to you, Richie; speak.'

'The squire has seen my bankers' book. He thinks I've been drawing rather
wildly: no doubt he's right. He wants some sort of explanation. He
consents to an interview with you. I have come to ask you to go down to
him, sir.'

'To-morrow morning, without an hour's delay, my dear boy. Very agreeable
will be the sight of old Riversley. And in the daylight!'

'He prefers to meet you at Bulsted. Captain Bulsted offers his house for
the purpose. I have to warn you, sir, that we stand in a very exceptional
position. The squire insists upon having a full account of the money
rendered to him.'

'I invite him to London, Richie. I refer him to Dettermain and Newson. I
request him to compute the value of a princess.'

'You are aware that he will not come to your invitation.'

'Tell me, then, how is he to understand what I have established by the
expenditure, my son? I refer him to Dettermain and Newson.'

'But you must know that he sets his face against legal proceedings
involving exposure.'

'But surely, Richie, exposure is the very thing we court. The innocent,
the unjustly treated, court it. We would be talked about; you shall hear
of us! And into the bargain an hereditary princess. Upon my faith, Mr.
Beltham, I think you have mighty little to complain of.'

My temper was beginning to chafe at the curb. 'As regards any feeling
about the money, personally, sir, you know I have none. But I must speak
of one thing. I have heard to-night, I confess with as much astonishment
as grief, the name . . . I could not have guessed that I should hear the
princess's name associated with mine, and quite openly.'

'As a matter of course.' He nodded, and struck out a hand in wavy motion.

'Well, sir, if you can't feel for her or her family, be good enough to
think of me, and remember that I object to it.'

'For you all,' said he, buoyantly; 'I feel for you all, and I will act
for you all. I bring the princess to your arms, my dear boy. You have
written me word that the squire gives her a royal dowry--have you not? My
combinations permit of no escape to any one of you. Nay, 'tis done. I
think for you--I feel for you--I act for you. By heaven, you shall be
happy! Sigh, Richie, sigh; your destiny is now entrusted to me!'

'I daresay I'm wasting my breath, sir, but I protest against false
pretences. You know well that you have made use of the princess's name
for your own purposes.'

'Most indubitably, Richie, I have; and are they not yours? I must have
social authority to succeed in our main enterprise. Possibly the
princess's name serves for a temporary chandelier to cast light on us.
She belongs to us. For her sake, we are bringing the house she enters
into order. Thus, Richie, I could tell Mr. Beltham: you and he supply the
money, the princess the name, and I the energy, the skilfulness, and the
estimable cause. I pay the princess for the use of her name with the
dowry, which is royal; I pay you with the princess, who is royal too; and
I, Richie, am paid by your happiness most royally. Together, it is past
contest that we win.--Here, my little one,' he said to a woman, and
dropped a piece of gold into her hand, 'on condition that you go straight
home.' The woman thanked him and promised. 'As I was observing, we are in
the very tide of success. Curious! I have a slight inclination to
melancholy. Success, quotha? Why, hundreds before us have paced the
identical way homeward at night under these lamps between the mansions
and the park. The bare thought makes them resemble a double line of
undertakers. The tomb is down there at the end of them--costly or not. At
the age of four, on my birthday, I was informed that my mother lay dead
in her bed. I remember to this day my astonishment at her not moving.
"Her heart is broken," my old nurse said. To me she appeared intact. Her
sister took possession of me, and of her papers, and the
wedding-ring--now in the custody of Dettermain and Newson--together with
the portraits of both my parents; and she, poor soul, to sustain me, as I
verily believe--she had a great idea of my never asking unprofitably for
anything in life--bartered the most corroborative of the testificatory
documents, which would now make the establishment of my case a
comparatively light task. Have I never spoken to you of my boyhood? My
maternal uncle was a singing-master and master of elocution. I am
indebted to him for the cultivation of my voice. He taught me an
effective delivery of my sentences. The English of a book of his called
The Speaker is still to my mind a model of elegance. Remittances of money
came to him from an unknown quarter; and, with a break or two, have come
ever since up to this period. My old nurse-heaven bless her--resumed the
occupation of washing. I have stood by her tub, Richie, blowing bubbles
and listening to her prophecies of my exalted fortune for hours. On my
honour, I doubt, I seriously doubt, if I have ever been happier. I depend
just now--I have to avow it to you--slightly upon stimulants . . . of a
perfectly innocuous character. Mrs. Waddy will allow me a pint of
champagne. The truth is, Richie--you see these two or three poor
pensioners of mine, honi soit qui mal y pense--my mother has had hard
names thrown at her. The stones of these streets cry out to me to have
her vindicated. I am not tired; but I want my wine.'

He repeated several times before he reached his housedoor, that he wanted
his wine, in a manner to be almost alarming. His unwonted effort of
memory, the singular pictures of him which it had flashed before me, and
a sort of impatient compassion, made me forget my wrath. I saw him take
his restorative at one draught. He lay down on a sofa, and his valet drew
his boots off and threw a cloak over him. Lying there, he wished me gaily
good-night. Mrs. Waddy told me that he had adopted this system of
sleeping for the last month. 'Bless you, as many people call on him at
night now as in the day,' she said; and I was induced to suppose he had
some connection with the Press. She had implicit faith in his powers of
constitution, and would affirm, that he had been the death of dozens whom
the attraction had duped to imitate his habits. 'He is now a
Field-Marshal on his campaign.' She betrayed a twinkle of humour. He must
himself have favoured her with that remark. The report of the house-door
frequently shutting in the night suggested the passage of his
aides-de-camp.

Early in the morning, I found him pacing through the open doors of the
dining-room and the library dictating to a secretary at a desk, now and
then tossing a word to Dettermain and Newson's chief clerk. The floor was
strewn with journals. He wore Hessian boots; a voluminous black cloak
hung loosely from his shoulders.

'I am just settling the evening papers,' he said after greeting me, with
a show of formality in his warmth; and immediately added, 'That will do,
Mr. Jopson. Put in a note--"Mr. Harry Lepel Richmond of Riversley and
Twn-y-glas, my son, takes no step to official distinction in his native
land save through the ordinary Parliamentary channels." Your pardon,
Richie; presently. I am replying to a morning paper.'

'What's this? Why print my name?' I cried.

'Merely the correction of an error. I have to insist, my dear boy, that
you claim no privileges: you are apart from them. Mr. Jopson, I beseech
you, not a minute's delay in delivering that. Fetch me from the printer's
my pamphlet this afternoon. Mr. Jacobs, my compliments to Dettermain and
Newson: I request them to open proceedings instanter, and let the world
know of it. Good-morning, gentlemen.'

And now, turning to me, my father fenced me with the whole weight of his
sententious volubility, which was the force of a river. Why did my name
appear in the papers? Because I was his son. But he assured me that he
carefully separated me from public companionship with his fortunes, and
placed me on the side of my grandfather, as a plain gentleman of England,
the heir of the most colossal wealth possible in the country.

'I dis-sociate you from me, Richie, do you see? I cause it to be declared
that you need, on no account, lean on me. Jopson will bring you my
pamphlet--my Declaration of Rights--to peruse. In the Press, in
Literature, at Law, and on social ground, I meet the enemy, and I claim
my own; by heaven, I do! And I will down to the squire for a distraction,
if you esteem it necessary, certainly. Half-a-dozen words to him. Why,
do you maintain him to be insensible to a title for you? No, no. And ask
my friends. I refer him to any dozen of my friends to convince him I have
the prize almost in my possession. Why, dear boy, I have witnesses,
living witnesses, to the ceremony. Am I, tell me, to be deprived of money
now, once again, for the eleventh time? Oh! And put aside my duty to you,
I protest I am bound in duty to her who bore me--you have seen her
miniature: how lovely that dear woman was! how gentle!--bound in duty to
her to clear her good name. This does not affect you . . . '

'Oh, but it does,' he allowed me to plead.

'Ay, through your love for your dada.'

He shook me by both hands. I was touched with pity, and at the same time
in doubt whether it was not an actor that swayed me; for I was
discontented, and could not speak my discontent; I was overborne,
overflowed. His evasion of the matter of my objections relating to the
princess I felt to be a palpable piece of artfulness, but I had to
acknowledge to myself that I knew what his argument would be, and how
overwhelmingly his defence of it would spring forth. My cowardice shrank
from provoking a recurrence to the theme. In fact, I submitted
consciously to his masterful fluency and emotional power, and so I was
carried on the tide with him, remaining in London several days to witness
that I was not the only one. My father, admitting that money served him
in his conquest of society, and defying any other man to do as much with
it as he did, replied to a desperate insinuation of mine, 'This money I
spend I am actually putting out to interest as much as, or more than,
your grandad.' He murmured confidentially, 'I have alarmed the
Government. Indeed, I have warrant for saying I am in communication with
its agents. They are bribing me; they are positively bribing me, Richie.
I receive my stipend annually. They are mighty discreet. So am I. But I
push them hard. I take what they offer: I renounce none of my claims.'

Janet wrote that it would be prudent for me to return.

'I am prepared,' my father said. 'I have only to meet Mr. Beltham in a
room--I stipulate that it shall be between square walls--to win him. The
squire to back us, Richie, we have command of the entire world. His
wealth, and my good cause, and your illustrious union--by the way, it is
announced definitely in this morning's paper.'

Dismayed, I asked what was announced.

'Read,' said he. 'This will be something to hand to Mr. Beltham at our
meeting. I might trace it to one of the embassies, Imperial or Royal. No
matter--there it is.'

I read a paragraph in which Ottilia's name and titles were set down; then
followed mine and my wealthy heirship, and--woe was me in the perusing of
it!--a roundabout vindication of me as one not likely to be ranked as the
first of English commoners who had gained the hand of an hereditary
foreign princess, though it was undoubtedly in the light of a commoner
that I was most open to the congratulations of my countrymen upon my
unparalleled felicity. A display of historical erudition cited the noble
inferiors by birth who had caught princesses to their arms--Charles,
Humphrey, William, John. Under this list, a later Harry!

The paragraph closed by fixing the nuptials to take place before the end
of the Season.

I looked at my father to try a struggle with him. The whole man was
efflorescent.

'Can't it be stopped?' I implored him.

He signified the impossibility in a burst of gesticulations, motions of
the mouth, smiling frowns; various patterns of an absolute negative
beating down opposition.

'Things printed can never be stopped, Richie. Our Jorian compares them to
babies baptized. They have a soul from that moment, and go on for
ever!--an admirable word of Jorian's. And a word to you, Richie. Will you
swear to me by the veracity of your lover's heart, that paragraph affords
you no satisfaction? He cannot swear it!' my father exclaimed, seeing me
swing my shoulder round, and he made me feel that it would have been a
false oath if I had sworn it. But I could have sworn, that I had rather
we two were at the bottom of the sea than that it should come under the
princess's eyes. I read it again. It was in print. It looked like
reality. It was at least the realization of my dream. But this played
traitor and accused me of being crowned with no more than a dream. The
sole practical thing I could do was to insist on our starting for
Riversley immediately, to make sure of my own position. 'Name your hour,
Richie,' my father said confidently: and we waited.

A rather plainer view of my father's position, as I inclined to think,
was afforded to me one morning at his breakfast-table, by a conversation
between him and Jorian DeWitt, who brought me a twisted pink note from
Mdlle. Chassediane, the which he delivered with the air of a dog made to
disgorge a bone, and he was very cool to me indeed. The cutlets of
Alphonse were subject to snappish criticism. 'I assume,' he said, 'the
fellow knew I was coming?'

'He saw it in my handwriting of yesterday,' replied my father. 'But be
just to him, acknowledge that he is one of the few that perform their
daily duties with a tender conscience.'

'This English climate has bedevilled the fellow! He peppers his dishes
like a mongrel Indian reared on mangoes.'

'Ring him up, ring him up, Jorian. All I beg of you is not to disgust him
with life, for he quits any service in the world to come to me, and, in
fact, he suits me.'

'Exactly so: you spoil him.'

My father shrugged. 'The state of the case is, that your stomach is
growing delicate, friend Jorian.'

'The actual state of the case being, that my palate was never keener, and
consequently my stomach knows its business.'

'You should have tried the cold turbot with oil and capers.'

'Your man had better stick to buttered eggs, in my opinion.'

'Say, porridge!'

'No, I'll be hanged if I think he's equal to a bowl of porridge.'

'Careme might have confessed to the same!'

'With this difference,' cried Jorian in a heat, 'that he would never have
allowed the thought of any of your barbarous messes to occur to a man at
table. Let me tell you, Roy, you astonish me: up till now I have never
known you guilty of the bad taste of defending a bad dish on your own
board.'

'Then you will the more readily pardon me, Jorian.'

'Oh, I pardon you,' Jorian sneered, tripped to the carpet by such ignoble
mildness. 'A breakfast is no great loss.'

My father assured him he would have a serious conversation with Alphonse,
for whom he apologized by saying that Alphonse had not, to his knowledge,
served as hospital cook anywhere, and was therefore quite possibly not
sufficiently solicitous for appetites and digestions of invalids.

Jorian threw back his head as though to discharge a spiteful sarcasm with
good aim; but turning to me, said, 'Harry, the thing must be done; your
father must marry. Notoriety is the season for a pick and choice of the
wealthiest and the loveliest. I refuse to act the part of warming-pan any
longer; I refuse point blank. It's not a personal feeling on my part; my
advice is that of a disinterested friend, and I tell you candidly, Roy,
set aside the absurd exhibition of my dancing attendance on that last
rose of Guildhall,--egad, the alderman went like Summer, and left us the
very picture of a fruity Autumn,--I say you can't keep her hanging on the
tree of fond expectation for ever. She'll drop.'

'Catch her, Jorian; you are on guard.'

'Upwards of three hundred thousand, if a penny, Roy Richmond! Who? I? I
am not a fortune-hunter.'

'Nor am I, friend Jorian.'

'No, it 's because you're not thorough: you 'll fall between the stools.'

My father remarked that he should visit this upon Mr. Alphonse.

'You shook off that fine Welsh girl, and she was in your hand--the act of
a madman!' Jorian continued. 'You're getting older: the day will come
when you're a flat excitement. You know the first Lady Edbury spoilt one
of your best chances when you had the market. Now you're trifling with
the second. She's the head of the Light Brigade, but you might fix her
down, if she's not too much in debt. You 're not at the end of your run,
I dare say. Only, my good Roy, let me tell you, in life you mustn't wait
for the prize of the race till you touch the goal--if you prefer
metaphor. You generally come forward about every seven years or so. Add
on another seven, and women'll begin to think. You can't beat Time, mon
Roy.'

'So,' said my father, 'I touch the goal, and women begin to think, and I
can't beat time to them. Jorian, your mind is in a state of confusion. I
do not marry.'

'Then, Roy Richmond, hear what a friend says . . .'

'I do not marry, Jorian, and you know my reasons.'

'Sentiments!'

'They are a part of my life.'

'Just as I remarked, you are not thorough. You have genius and courage
out of proportion, and you are a dead failure, Roy; because, no sooner
have you got all Covent Garden before you for the fourth or fifth time,
than in go your hands into your pockets, and you say--No, there's an
apple I can't have, so I'll none of these; and, by the way, the apple
must be tolerably withered by this time. And you know perfectly well (for
you don't lack common sense at a shaking, Roy Richmond), that you're
guilty of simple madness in refusing to make the best of your situation.
You haven't to be taught what money means. With money--and a wife to take
care of it, mind you--you are pre-eminently the man for which you want to
be recognized. Without it--Harry 'll excuse me, I must speak
plainly--you're a sort of a spectacle of a bob-cherry, down on your luck,
up on your luck, and getting dead stale and never bitten; a familiar
curiosity'

Jorian added, 'Oh, by Jove! it's not nice to think of.' My father said:
'Harry, I am sure, will excuse you for talking, in your extreme
friendliness, of matters that he and I have not--and they interest us
deeply--yet thought fit to discuss. And you may take my word for it,
Jorian, that I will give Alphonse his medical dose. I am quite of your
opinion that the kings of cooks require it occasionally. Harry will
inform us of Mdlle. Chassediane's commands.'

The contents of the letter permitted me to read it aloud. She desired to
know how she could be amused on the Sunday.

'We will undertake it,' said my father. 'I depute the arrangements to
you, Jorian. Respect the prejudices, and avoid collisions, that is all.'

Captain DeWitt became by convenient stages cheerful, after the pink slip
of paper had been made common property, and from a seriously-advising
friend, in his state of spite, relapsed to the idle and shadow-like
associate, when pleased. I had to thank him for the gift of fresh
perceptions. Surely it would be as well if my father could get a woman of
fortune to take care of him!

We had at my request a consultation with Dettermain and Newson on the eve
of the journey to Riversley, Temple and Jorian DeWitt assisting. Strange
documentary evidence was unfolded and compared with the date of a royal
decree: affidavits of persons now dead; a ring, the ring; fans, and lace,
and handkerchiefs with notable initials; jewelry stamped 'To the Divine
Anastasia' from an adoring Christian name: old brown letters that
shrieked 'wife' when 'charmer' seemed to have palled; oaths of fidelity
ran through them like bass notes. Jorian held up the discoloured sheets
of ancient paper saying:

'Here you behold the mummy of the villain Love.' Such love as it was--the
love of the privileged butcher for the lamb. The burden of the letters,
put in epigram, was rattlesnake and bird. A narrative of Anastasia's
sister, Elizabeth, signed and sealed, with names of witnesses appended,
related in brief bald English the history of the events which had killed
her. It warmed pathetically when dwelling on the writer's necessity to
part with letters and papers of greater moment, that she might be enabled
to sustain and educate her sister's child. She named the certificate; she
swore to the tampering with witnesses. The number and exact indication of
the house where the ceremony took place was stated--a house in Soho;--the
date was given, and the incident on that night of the rape of the
beautiful Miss Armett by mad Lord Beaumaris at the theatre doors, aided
by masked ruffians, after Anastasia's performance of Zamira.

'There are witnesses I know to be still living, Mr. Temple,' my father
said, seeing the young student-at-law silent and observant. 'One of them
I have under my hand; I feed him. Listen to this.'

He read two or three insufferable sentences from one of the
love-epistles, and broke down. I was ushered aside by a member of the
firm to inspect an instrument prepared to bind me as surety for the costs
of the appeal. I signed it. We quitted the attorney's office convinced (I
speak of Temple and myself) that we had seen the shadow of something.




CHAPTER XL

MY FATHER'S MEETING WITH MY GRANDFATHER

My father's pleasure on the day of our journey to Bulsted was to drive me
out of London on a lofty open chariot, with which he made the circuit of
the fashionable districts, and caused innumerable heads to turn. I would
have preferred to go the way of other men, to be unnoticed, but I was
subject to an occasional glowing of undefined satisfaction in the
observance of the universally acknowledged harmony existing between his
pretensions, his tastes and habits, and his person. He contrived by I
know not what persuasiveness and simplicity of manner and speech to
banish from me the idea that he was engaged in playing a high stake; and
though I knew it, and he more than once admitted it, there was an ease
and mastery about him that afforded me some degree of positive comfort
still. I was still most securely attached to his fortunes. Supposing the
ghost of dead Hector to have hung over his body when the inflamed son of
Peleus whirled him at his chariot wheels round Troy, he would, with his
natural passions sobered by Erebus, have had some of my reflections upon
force and fate, and my partial sense of exhilaration in the tremendous
speed of the course during the whole of the period my father termed his
Grand Parade. I showed just such acquiescence or resistance as were
superinduced by the variations of the ground. Otherwise I was
spell-bound; and beyond interdicting any further public mention of my
name or the princess's, I did nothing to thwart him. It would have been
no light matter.

We struck a station at a point half-way down to Bulsted, and found little
Kiomi there, thunder in her brows, carrying a bundle, and purchasing a
railway-ticket, not to travel in our direction. She gave me the singular
answer that she could not tell me where her people were; nor would she
tell me whither she was going, alone, and by rail. I chanced to speak of
Heriot. One of her sheet-lightning flashes shot out. 'He won't be at
Bulsted,' she said, as if that had a significance. I let her know we were
invited to Bulsted. 'Oh, she 's at home'; Kiomi blinked, and her features
twitched like whip-cord. I saw that she was possessed by one of her
furies. That girl's face had the art of making me forget beautiful women,
and what beauty was by comparison.

It happened that the squire came across us as we were rounding the slope
of larch and fir plantation near a part of the Riversley hollows, leading
to the upper heath-land, where, behind a semicircle of birches, Bulsted
lay. He was on horseback, and called hoarsely to the captain's coachman,
who was driving us, to pull up. 'Here, Harry,' he sang out to me, in the
same rough voice, 'I don't see why we should bother Captain William. It's
a bit of business, not pleasure. I've got the book in my pocket. You
ask--is it convenient to step into my bailiff's cottage hard by, and run
through it? Ten minutes 'll tell me all I want to know. I want it done
with. Ask.'

My father stood up and bowed, bareheaded.

My grandfather struck his hat and bobbed.

'Mr. Beltham, I trust I see you well.'

'Better, sir, when I've got rid of a damned unpleasant bit o' business.'

'I offer you my hearty assistance.'

'Do you? Then step down and come into my bailiff's.'

'I come, sir.'

My father alighted from the carriage. The squire cast his gouty leg to be
quit of his horse, but not in time to check my father's advances and
ejaculations of condolence.

'Gout, Mr. Beltham, is a little too much a proof to us of a long line of
ancestry.'

His hand and arm were raised in the form of a splint to support the
squire, who glared back over his cheekbone, horrified that he could not
escape the contact, and in too great pain from arthritic throes to
protest: he resembled a burglar surprised by justice. 'What infernal
nonsense . . , fellow talking now?' I heard him mutter between his
hoppings and dancings, with one foot in the stirrup and a toe to earth,
the enemy at his heel, and his inclination half bent upon swinging to the
saddle again.

I went to relieve him. 'Damn! . . . Oh, it's you,' said he.

The squire directed Uberly, acting as his groom, to walk his horse up and
down the turf fronting young Tom Eckerthy's cottage, and me to remain
where I was; then hobbled up to the door, followed at a leisurely march
by my father. The door opened. My father swept the old man in before him,
with a bow and flourish that admitted of no contradiction, and the door
closed on them. I caught a glimpse of Uberly screwing his wrinkles in a
queer grimace, while he worked his left eye and thumb expressively at the
cottage, by way of communicating his mind to Samuel, Captain Bulsted's
coachman; and I became quite of his opinion as to the nature of the
meeting, that it was comical and not likely to lead to much. I thought of
the princess and of my hope of her depending upon such an interview as
this. From that hour when I stepped on the sands of the Continent to the
day of my quitting them, I had been folded in a dream: I had stretched my
hands to the highest things of earth, and here now was the retributive
material money-question, like a keen scythe-blade!

The cottage-door continued shut. The heaths were darkening. I heard a
noise of wheels, and presently the unmistakable voice of Janet saying,
'That must be Harry.' She was driving my aunt Dorothy. Both of them
hushed at hearing that the momentous duel was in progress. Janet's first
thought was of the squire. 'I won't have him ride home in the dark,' she
said, and ordered Uberly to walk the horse home. The ladies had a ladies'
altercation before Janet would permit my aunt to yield her place and
proceed on foot, accompanied by me. Naturally the best driver of the two
kept the whip. I told Samuel to go on to Bulsted, with word that we were
coming: and Janet, nodding bluntly, agreed to direct my father as to
where he might expect to find me on the Riversley road. My aunt Dorothy
and I went ahead slowly: at her request I struck a pathway to avoid the
pony-carriage, which was soon audible; and when Janet, chattering to the
squire, had gone by, we turned back to intercept my father. He was
speechless at the sight of Dorothy Beltham. At his solicitation, she
consented to meet him next day; his account of the result of the
interview was unintelligible to her as well as to me. Even after leaving
her at the park-gates, I could get nothing definite from him, save that
all was well, and that the squire was eminently practical; but he
believed he had done an excellent evening's work. 'Yes,' said he, rubbing
his hands, 'excellent! making due allowances for the emphatically
commoner's mind we have to deal with.' And then to change the subject he
dilated on that strange story of the man who, an enormous number of years
back in the date of the world's history, carried his little son on his
shoulders one night when the winds were not so boisterous, though we were
deeper in Winter, along the identical road we traversed, between the
gorsemounds, across the heaths, with yonder remembered fir-tree clump in
sight and the waste-water visible to footfarers rounding under the firs.
At night-time he vowed, that as far as nature permitted it, he had
satisfied the squire--'completely satisfied him, I mean,' he said, to
give me sound sleep. 'No doubt of it; no doubt of it, Richie.'

He won Julia's heart straight off, and Captain Bulsted's profound
admiration. 'Now I know the man I've always been adoring since you were
so high, Harry,' said she. Captain Bulsted sighed: 'Your husband bows to
your high good taste, my dear.' They relished him sincerely, and between
them and him I suffered myself to be dandled once more into a state of
credulity, until I saw my aunt Dorothy in the afternoon subsequent to the
appointed meeting. His deep respect and esteem for her had stayed him
from answering any of her questions falsely. To that extent he had been
veracious. It appeared, that driven hard by the squire, who would have no
waving of flags and lighting of fireworks in a matter of business, and
whose 'commoner's mind' chafed sturdily at a hint of the necessity for
lavish outlays where there was a princess to win, he had rallied on the
fiction that many of the cheques, standing for the bulk of the sums
expended, were moneys borrowed by him of me, which he designed to repay,
and was prepared to repay instantly--could in fact, the squire demanding
it, repay, as it were, on the spot; for behold, these borrowed moneys
were not spent; they were moneys invested in undertakings, put out to
high rates of interest; moneys that perhaps it would not be adviseable to
call in without a season of delay; still, if Mr. Beltham, acting for his
grandson and heir, insisted, it should be done. The moneys had been
borrowed purely to invest them with profit on my behalf: a gentleman's
word of honour was pledged to it.

The squire grimly gave him a couple of months to make it good.

Dorothy Beltham and my father were together for about an hour at
Eckerthy's farm. She let my father kiss her hand when he was bending to
take his farewell of her, but held her face away. He was in manifest
distress, hardly master of his voice, begged me to come to him soon, and
bowing, with 'God bless you, madam, my friend on earth!' turned his heel,
bearing his elastic frame lamentably. A sad or a culprit air did not
befit him: one reckoned up his foibles and errors when seeing him under a
partly beaten aspect. At least, I did; not my dear aunt, who was
compassionate of him, however thoroughly she condemned his ruinous
extravagance, and the shifts and evasions it put him to. She feared, that
instead of mending the difficulty, he had postponed merely to exaggerate
it in the squire's mind; and she was now of opinion that the bringing him
down to meet the squire was very bad policy, likely to result in danger
to my happiness; for, if the money should not be forthcoming on the date
named, all my father's faults would be transferred to me as his
accomplice, both in the original wastefulness and the subterfuges
invented to conceal it. I recollected that a sum of money had really been
sunk in Prince Ernest's coal-mine. My aunt said she hoped for the best.

Mounting the heaths, we looked back on the long yellow road, where the
carriage conveying my father to the railway-station was visible, and
talked of him, and of the elements of antique tragedy in his history,
which were at that period, let me say, precisely what my incessant mental
efforts were strained to expel from the idea of our human life. The
individual's freedom was my tenet of faith; but pity pleaded for him that
he was well-nigh irresponsible, was shamefully sinned against at his
birth, one who could charge the Gods with vindictiveness, and complain of
the persecution of natal Furies. My aunt Dorothy advised me to take him
under my charge, and sell his house and furniture, make him live in
bachelor chambers with his faithful waiting-woman and a single
manservant.

'He will want money even to do that,' I remarked.

She murmured, 'Is there not some annual income paid to him?'

Her quick delicacy made her redden in alluding so closely to his personal
affairs, and I loved her for the nice feeling. 'It was not much,' I said.
The miserable attempt to repair the wrongs done to him with this small
annuity angered me--and I remembered, little pleased, the foolish
expectations he founded on this secret acknowledgement of the justice of
his claims. 'We won't talk of it,' I pursued. 'I wish he had never
touched it. I shall interdict him.'

'You would let him pay his debts with it, Harry?'

'I am not sure, aunty, that he does not incur a greater debt by accepting
it.'

'One's wish would be, that he might not ever be in need of it.'

'Ay, or never be caring to find the key of it.'

'That must be waste of time,' she said.

I meant something else, but it was useless to tell her so.




CHAPTER XLI

COMMENCEMENT OF THE SPLENDOURS AND PERPLEXITIES OF MY FATHER'S GRAND
PARADE

Janet, in reply to our inquiries as to the condition of the squire's
temper, pointed out in the newspaper a notification of a grand public
Ball to be given by my father, the first of a series of three, and said
that the squire had seen it and shrugged. She thought there was no
positive cause for alarm, even though my father should fail of his word;
but expressed her view decidedly, that it was an unfortunate move to
bring him between the squire and me, and so she blamed Captain Bulsted.
This was partly for the reason that the captain and his wife, charmed by
my father, were for advocating his merits at the squire's table: our
ingenuity was ludicrously taxed to mystify him on the subject of their
extravagant eulogies. They told him they had been invited, and were going
to the great London Balls.

'Subscription Balls?' asked the squire.

'No, sir,' rejoined the captain.

'Tradesmen's Balls, d' ye call 'em, then?'

'No, sir; they are Balls given by a distinguished gentleman.'

'Take care it's not another name for tradesmen's Balls, William.'

'I do not attend tradesmen's Balls, sir.'

'Take care o' that, William.'

The captain was very angry. 'What,' said he, turning to us, 'what does
the squire mean by telling an officer of the Royal Navy that he is
conducting his wife to a tradesmen's Ball?'

Julia threatened malicious doings for the insult. She and the squire had
a controversy upon the explication of the word gentleman, she describing
my father's appearance and manners to the life. 'Now listen to me,
squire. A gentleman, I say, is one you'd say, if he wasn't born a duke,
he ought to have been, and more shame to the title! He turns the key of a
lady's heart with a twinkle of his eye. He 's never mean--what he has is
yours. He's a true friend; and if he doesn't keep his word, you know in a
jiffy it's the fault of affairs; and stands about five feet eleven: he's
a full-blown man': and so forth.

The squire listened, and perspired at finding the object of his
abhorrence crowned thus in the unassailable realms of the abstract. Julia
might have done it more elegantly; but her husband was rapturous over her
skill in portraiture, and he added: 'That's a gentleman, squire; and that
's a man pretty sure to be abused by half the world.'

'Three-quarters, William,' said the squire; 'there's about the
computation for your gentleman's creditors, I suspect.'

'Ay, sir; well,' returned the captain, to whom this kind of fencing in
the dark was an affliction, 'we make it up in quality--in quality.'

'I 'll be bound you do,' said the squire; 'and so you will so long as you
're only asked to dance to the other poor devils' fiddling.'

Captain Bulsted bowed. 'The last word to you, squire.'

The squire nodded. 'I 'll hand it to your wife, William.'

Julia took it graciously. 'A perfect gentleman! perfect! confound his
enemies!'

'Why, ma'am, you might keep from swearing,' the squire bawled.

'La! squire,' said she, 'why, don't you know the National Anthem?'

'National Anthem, ma'am! and a fellow, a velvet-tongued--confound him, if
you like.'

'And where's my last word, if you please?' Julia jumped up, and dropped a
provoking curtsey.

'You silly old grandada!' said Janet, going round to him; 'don't you see
the cunning woman wants to dress you in our garments, and means to boast
of it to us while you're finishing your wine?'

The old man fondled her. I could have done the same, she bent over him
with such homely sweetness. 'One comfort, you won't go to these
gingerbread Balls,' he said.

'I'm not invited,' she moaned comically.

'No; nor shan't be, while I can keep you out of bad company.'

'But, grandada, I do like dancing.

'Dance away, my dear; I've no objection.'

'But where's the music?'

'Oh, you can always have music.'

'But where are my partners?'

The squire pointed at me.

'You don't want more than one at a time, eh?' He corrected his error:
'No, the fellow's engaged in another quadrille. Mind you, Miss Janet, he
shall dance to your tune yet. D' ye hear, sir?' The irritation excited by
Captain Bulsted and Julia broke out in fury. 'Who's that fellow danced
when Rome was burning?'

'The Emperor Nero,' said Janet. 'He killed Harry's friend Seneca in the
eighty-somethingth year of his age; an old man, and--hush, grandada!' She
could not check him.

'Hark you, Mr. Harry; dance your hardest up in town with your rips and
reps, and the lot of ye; all very fine while the burning goes on: you
won't see the fun of dancing on the ashes. A nice king of Rome Nero was
next morning! By the Lord, if I couldn't swear you'll be down on your
knees to an innocent fresh-hearted girl 's worth five hundred of the crew
you're for partnering now while you've a penny for the piper.'

Janet shut his mouth, kissed him, and held his wine up. He drank, and
thumped the table. 'We 'll have parties here, too. The girl shall have
her choice of partners: she shan't be kept in the background by a young
donkey. Take any six of your own age, and six sensible men, to try you by
your chances. By George, the whole dozen 'd bring you in non-compos.
You've only got the women on your side because of a smart face and
figure.'

Janet exclaimed indignantly, 'Grandada, I'm offended with you'; and
walked out on a high step.

'Come, if he has the women on his side,' said Captain Bulsted, mildly.

'He'll be able to go partnering and gallopading as long as his banker 'll
let him, William--like your gentleman! That's true. We shall soon see.'

'I leave my character in your hands, sir,' said I, rising. 'If you would
scold me in private, I should prefer it, on behalf of your guests; but I
am bound to submit to your pleasure, and under any circumstances I
remember, what you appear to forget, that you are my grandfather.'

So saying, I followed the ladies. It was not the wisest of speeches, and
happened, Captain Bulsted informed me, to be delivered in my father's
manner, for the squire pronounced emphatically that he saw very little
Beltham in me. The right course would have been for me to ask him then
and there whether I had his consent to start for Germany. But I was the
sport of resentments and apprehensions; and, indeed, I should not have
gone. I could not go without some title beyond that of the heir of great
riches.

Janet kept out of my sight. I found myself strangely anxious to console
her: less sympathetic, perhaps, than desirous to pour out my sympathy in
her ear, which was of a very pretty shape, with a soft unpierced lobe. We
danced together at the Riversley Ball, given by the squire on the night
of my father's Ball in London. Janet complimented me upon having attained
wisdom. 'Now we get on well,' she said. 'Grandada only wants to see us
friendly, and feel that I am not neglected.'

The old man, a martyr to what he considered due to his favourite, endured
the horror of the Ball until suppertime, and kept his eyes on us two. He
forgot, or pretended to forget, my foreign engagement altogether, though
the announcement in the newspapers was spoken of by Sir Roderick and Lady
Echester and others.

'How do you like that?' he remarked to me, seeing her twirled away by one
of the young Rubreys.

'She seems to like it, sir,' I replied.

'Like it!' said he. 'In my day you wouldn't have caught me letting the
bloom be taken off the girl I cared for by a parcel o' scampish young
dogs. Right in their arms! Look at her build. She's strong; she's
healthy; she goes round like a tower. If you want a girl to look like a
princess!'

His eulogies were not undeserved. But she danced as lightly and happily
with Mr. Fred Rubrey as with Harry Richmond. I congratulated myself on
her lack of sentiment. Later, when in London, where Mlle. Jenny
Chassediane challenged me to perilous sarabandes, I wished that Janet had
ever so small a grain of sentiment, for a preservative to me. Ottilia
glowed high and distant; she sent me no message; her image did not step
between me and disorder. The whole structure of my idea of my superior
nature seemed to be crumbling to fragments; and beginning to feel in
despair that I was wretchedly like other men, I lost by degrees the sense
of my hold on her. It struck me that my worst fears of the effect
produced on the princess's mind by that last scene in the lake-palace
must be true, and I abandoned hope. Temple thought she tried me too
cruelly. Under these circumstances I became less and less resolutely
disposed to renew the forlorn conflict with my father concerning his
prodigal way of living. 'Let it last as long as I have a penny to support
him!' I exclaimed. He said that Dettermain and Newson were now urging on
his case with the utmost despatch in order to keep pace with him, but
that the case relied for its life on his preserving a great appearance.
He handed me his division of our twin cheque-books, telling me he
preferred to depend on his son for supplies, and I was in the mood to
think this a partial security.

'But you can take what there is,' I said.

'On the contrary, I will accept nothing but minor sums--so to speak, the
fractional shillings; though I confess I am always bewildered by silver,'
said he.

I questioned him upon his means of carrying on his expenditure. His
answer was to refer to the pavement of the city of London. By paving here
and there he had, he informed me, made a concrete for the wheels to roll
on. He calculated that he now had credit for the space of three new
years--ample time for him to fight his fight and win his victory.

'My tradesmen are not like the tradesmen of other persons,' he broke out
with a curious neigh of supreme satisfaction in that retinue. 'They
believe in me. I have de facto harnessed them to my fortunes; and if you
doubt me on the point of success, I refer you to Dettermain and Newson.
All I stipulate for is to maintain my position in society to throw a
lustre on my Case. So much I must do. My failures hitherto have been
entirely owing to the fact that I had not my son to stand by me.'

'Then you must have money, sir.'

'Yes, money.'

'Then what can you mean by refusing mine?'

'I admit the necessity for it, my son. Say you hand me a cheque for a
temporary thousand. Your credit and mine in conjunction can replace it
before the expiration of the two months. Or,' he meditated, 'it might be
better to give a bond or so to a professional lender, and preserve the
account at your bankers intact. The truth is, I have, in my interview
with the squire, drawn in advance upon the, material success I have a
perfect justification to anticipate, and I cannot allow the old gentleman
to suppose that I retrench for the purpose of giving a large array of
figures to your bankers' book. It would be sheer madness. I cannot do it.
I cannot afford to do it. When you are on a runaway horse, I prefer to
say a racehorse,--Richie, you must ride him. You dare not throw up the
reins. Only last night Wedderburn, appealing to Loftus, a practical
sailor, was approved when he offered--I forget the subject-matter--the
illustration of a ship on a lee-shore; you are lost if you do not spread
every inch of canvas to the gale. Retrenchment at this particular moment
is perdition. Count our gains, Richie. We have won a princess . . .'

I called to him not to name her.

He persisted: 'Half a minute. She is won; she is ours. And let me, in
passing,--bear with me one second--counsel you to write to Prince Ernest
instanter, proposing formally for his daughter, and, in your
grandfather's name, state her dowry at fifty thousand per annum.'

'Oh, you forget!' I interjected.

'No, Richie, I do not forget that you are off a leeshore; you are mounted
on a skittish racehorse, with, if you like, a New Forest fly operating
within an inch of his belly-girths. Our situation is so far ticklish, and
prompts invention and audacity.'

'You must forget, sir, that in the present state of the squire's mind, I
should be simply lying in writing to the prince that he offers a dowry.'

'No, for your grandfather has yielded consent.'

'By implication, you know he withdraws it.'

'But if I satisfy him that you have not been extravagant?'

'I must wait till he is satisfied.'

'The thing is done, Richie, done. I see it in advance--it is done!
Whatever befalls me, you, my dear boy, in the space of two months, may
grasp--your fortune. Besides, here is my hand. I swear by it, my son,
that I shall satisfy the squire. I go farther; I say I shall have the
means to refund to you--the means, the money. The marriage is announced
in our prints for the Summer--say early June. And I undertake that you,
the husband of the princess, shall be the first gentleman in
England--that is, Europe. Oh! not ruling a coterie: not dazzling the
world with entertainments.' He thought himself in earnest when he said,
'I attach no mighty importance to these things, though there is no harm I
can perceive in leading the fashion--none that I see in having a
consummate style. I know your taste, and hers, Richie, the noble lady's.
She shall govern the intellectual world--your poets, your painters, your
men of science. They reflect a beautiful sovereign mistress more
exquisitely than almost aristocracy does. But you head our aristocracy
also. You are a centre of the political world. So I scheme it. Between
you, I defy the Court to rival you. This I call distinction. It is no
mean aim, by heaven! I protest, it is an aim with the mark in sight, and
not out of range.'

He whipped himself up to one of his oratorical frenzies, of which a
cheque was the common fruit. The power of his persuasiveness in speech,
backed by the spectacle of his social accomplishments, continued to
subdue me, and I protested only inwardly even when I knew that he was
gambling with fortune. I wrote out many cheques, and still it appeared to
me that they were barely sufficient to meet the current expenses of his
household. Temple and I calculated that his Grand Parade would try the
income of a duke, and could but be a matter of months. Mention of it
reached Riversley from various quarters, from Lady Maria Higginson, from
Captain Bulsted and his wife, and from Sir Roderick Ilchester, who said
to me, with fine accentuation, 'I have met your father.' Sir Roderick, an
Englishman reputed of good breeding, informed the son that he had
actually met the father in lofty society, at Viscountess Sedley's, at
Lady Dolchester's, at Bramham DeWitt's, and heard of him as a frequenter
of the Prussian and Austrian Embassy entertainments; and also that he was
admitted to the exclusive dinner-parties of the Countess de Strode,
'which are,' he observed, in the moderated tone of an astonishment
devoting itself to propagation, 'the cream of society.' Indubitably,
then, my father was an impostor: more Society proved it. The squire
listened like one pelted by a storm, sure of his day to come at the close
of the two months. I gained his commendation by shunning the metropolitan
Balls, nor did my father press me to appear at them. It was tacitly
understood between us that I should now and then support him at his
dinner-table, and pass bowing among the most select of his great ladies.
And this I did, and I felt at home with them, though I had to bear with
roughnesses from one or two of the more venerable dames, which were not
quite proper to good breeding. Old Lady Kane, great-aunt of the Marquis
of Edbury, was particularly my tormentor, through her plain-spoken
comments on my father's legal suit; for I had to listen to her without
wincing, and agree in her general contempt of the Georges, and foil her
queries coolly, when I should have liked to perform Jorian DeWitt's
expressed wish to 'squeeze the acid out of her in one grip, and toss her
to the Gods that collect exhausted lemons.' She took extraordinary
liberties with me.

'Why not marry an Englishwoman? Rich young men ought to choose wives from
their own people, out of their own sets. Foreign women never get on well
in this country, unless they join the hounds to hunt the husband.'

She cited naturalized ladies famous for the pastime. Her world and its
outskirts she knew thoroughly, even to the fact of my grandfather's
desire that I should marry Janet Ilchester. She named a duke's daughter,
an earl's. Of course I should have to stop the scandal: otherwise the
choice I had was unrestricted. My father she evidently disliked, but she
just as much disliked an encounter with his invincible bonhomie and
dexterous tongue. She hinted at family reasons for being shy of him,
assuring me that I was not implicated in them.

'The Guelph pattern was never much to my taste,' she said, and it
consoled me with the thought that he was not ranked as an adventurer in
the houses he entered. I learned that he was supposed to depend chiefly
on my vast resources. Edbury acted the part of informant to the
inquisitive harridan: 'Her poor dear good-for-nothing Edbury! whose only
cure would be a nice, well-conducted girl, an heiress.' She had cast her
eye on Anna Penrhys, but considered her antecedents doubtful. Spotless
innocence was the sole receipt for Edbury's malady. My father, in a fit
of bold irony, proposed Lady Kane for President of his Tattle and Scandal
Club,--a club of ladies dotted with select gentlemen, the idea of which
Jorian DeWitt claimed the merit of starting, and my father surrendered it
to him, with the reservation, that Jorian intended an association of
backbiters pledged to reveal all they knew, whereas the Club, in its
present form, was an engine of morality and decency, and a social
safeguard, as well as an amusement. It comprised a Committee of
Investigation, and a Court of Appeal; its object was to arraign slander.
Lady Kane declined the honour. 'I am not a washerwoman,' she said to me,
and spoke of where dirty linen should be washed, and was distressingly
broad in her innuendoes concerning Edbury's stepmother. This Club sat and
became a terror for a month, adding something to my father's reputation.
His inexhaustible conversational art and humour gave it such vitality as
it had. Ladies of any age might apply for admission when well seconded:
gentlemen under forty-five years were rigidly excluded, and the seniors
must also have passed through the marriage ceremony.

Outside tattle and scandal declared, that the Club was originated to
serve as a club for Lady Edbury, but I chose to have no opinion upon what
I knew nothing of.

These matters were all ephemeral, and freaks; they produced, however,
somewhat of the same effect on me as on my father, in persuading me that
he was born for the sphere he occupied, and rendering me rather callous
as to the sources of ways and means. I put my name to a bond for several
thousand pounds, in conjunction with Lord Edbury, thinking my father
right in wishing to keep my cheque-book unworried, lest the squire should
be seized with a spasm of curiosity before the two months were over. 'I
promise you I surprise him,' my father said repeatedly. He did not say
how: I had the suspicion that he did not know. His confidence and my
growing recklessness acted in unison.

Happily the newspapers were quiet. I hoped consequently to find peace at
Riversley; but there the rumours of the Grand Parade were fabulous,
thanks to Captain Bulsted and Julia, among others. These two again
provoked an outbreak of rage from the squire, and I, after hearing them,
was almost disposed to side with him; they suggested an inexplicable
magnificence, and created an image of a man portentously endowed with the
capacity to throw dust in the eyes. No description of the Balls could
have furnished me with such an insight of their brilliancy as the
consuming ardour they awakened in the captain and his wife. He reviewed
them: 'Princely entertainments! Arabian Nights!'

She built them up piecemeal: 'The company! the dresses! the band! the
supper!' The host was a personage supernatural. 'Aladdin's magician, if
you like,' said Julia, 'only-good! A perfect gentleman! and I'll say
again, confound his enemies.' She presumed, as she was aware she might
do, upon the squire's prepossession in her favour, without reckoning that
I was always the victim.

'Heard o' that new story 'bout a Dauphin?' he asked.

'A Dauphin?' quoth Captain Bulsted. 'I don't know the fish.'

'You've been in a pretty kettle of 'em lately, William. I heard of it
yesterday on the Bench. Lord Shale, our new Lord-Lieutenant, brought it
down. A trick they played the fellow 'bout a Dauphin. Serve him right.
You heard anything 'bout it, Harry?'

I had not.

'But I tell ye there is a Dauphin mixed up with him. A Dauphin and Mr. Ik
Dine!'

'Mr. Ik Dine!' exclaimed the captain, perplexed.

'Ay, that's German lingo, William, and you ought to know it if you're a
loyal sailor--means "I serve."'

'Mr. Beltham,' said the captain, seriously, 'I give you my word of honour
as a man and a British officer, I don't understand one syllable of what
you're saying; but if it means any insinuation against the gentleman who
condescends to extend his hospitalities to my wife and me, I must, with
regret, quit the place where I have had the misfortune to hear it.'

'You stop where you are, William,' the squire motioned to him. 'Gad, I
shall have to padlock my mouth, or I shan't have a friend left soon . . .
confounded fellow. . . I tell you they call him Mr. Ik Dine in town. Ik
Dine and a Dauphin! They made a regular clown and pantaloon o' the pair,
I'm told. Couple o' pretenders to Thrones invited to dine together and
talk over their chances and show their private marks. Oho! by-and-by,
William! You and I! Never a man made such a fool of in his life!'

The ladies retired. The squire continued, in a furious whisper:

'They got the two together, William. Who are you? I'm a Dauphin; who are
you? I'm Ik Dine, bar sinister. Oh! says the other, then I take
precedence of you! Devil a bit, says the other; I've got more spots than
you. Proof, says one. You first, t' other. Count, one cries. T' other
sings out, Measles. Better than a dying Dauphin, roars t' other; and
swore both of 'm 'twas nothing but Port-wine stains and pimples. Ha! ha!
And, William, will you believe it?--the couple went round begging the
company to count spots--ha! ha! to prove their big birth! Oh, Lord, I'd
ha' paid a penny to be there! A Jack o' Bedlam Ik Dine damned
idiot!--makes name o' Richmond stink.' (Captain Bulsted shot a wild stare
round the room to make sure that the ladies had gone.) 'I tell ye,
William, I had it from Lord Shale himself only yesterday on the Bench. He
brought it to us hot from town--didn't know I knew the fellow; says the
fellow's charging and firing himself off all day and all night too-can't
make him out. Says London's mad about him: lots o' women, the fools! Ha,
ha! a Dauphin!'

'Ah, well, sir,' Captain Bulsted supplicated feverishly, rubbing his
brows and whiskers.

'It 's true, William. Fellow ought to be taken up and committed as a
common vagabond, and would be anywhere but in London. I'd jail him 'fore
you cocked your eye twice. Fellow came here and talked me over to grant
him a couple o' months to prove he hasn't swindled his son of every scrap
of his money. We shall soon see. Not many weeks to run! And
pretends--fellow swears to me--can get him into Parliament; swears he'll
get him in 'fore the two months are over! An infernal--'

'Please to recollect, sir; the old hereditary shall excuse you----'

'Gout, you mean, William? By----'

'You are speaking in the presence of his son, sir, and you are trying the
young gentleman's affection for you hard.'

'Eh? 'Cause I'm his friend? Harry,' my grandfather faced round on me,
'don't you know I 'm the friend you can trust? Hal, did I ever borrow a
farthing of you? Didn't I, the day of your majority, hand you the whole
of your inheritance from your poor broken-hearted mother, with interest,
and treat you like a man? And never played spy, never made an inquiry,
till I heard the scamp had been fastening on you like a blood-sucker, and
singing hymns into the ears of that squeamish dolt of a pipe-smoking
parson, Peterborough--never thought of doing it! Am I the man that
dragged your grandmother's name through the streets and soiled yours?'

I remarked that I was sensible of the debt of gratitude I owed to him,
but would rather submit to the scourge, or to destitution, than listen to
these attacks on my father.

'Cut yourself loose, Harry,' he cried, a trifle mollified. 'Don't season
his stew--d' ye hear? Stick to decent people. Why, you don't expect he'll
be locked up in the Tower for a finish, eh? It'll be Newgate, or the
Bench. He and his Dauphin--ha! ha! A rascal crow and a Jack Dauphin!'

Captain Bulsted reached me his hand. 'You have a great deal to bear,
Harry. I commend you, my boy, for taking it manfully.'

'I say no more,' quoth the squire. 'But what I said was true. The fellow
gives his little dinners and suppers to his marchionesses, countesses,
duchesses, and plays clown and pantaloon among the men. He thinks a
parcel o' broidered petticoats 'll float him. So they may till a
tradesman sent stark mad pops a pin into him. Harry, I'd as lief hang on
to a fire-ship. Here's Ilchester tells me . . . and Ilchester speaks of
him under his breath now as if he were sitting in a pew funking the
parson. Confound the fellow! I say he's guilty of treason. Pooh! who
cares! He cuts out the dandies of his day, does he? He's past sixty, if
he's a month. It's all damned harlequinade. Let him twirl off one
columbine or another, or a dozen, and then--the last of him! Fellow makes
the world look like a farce. He 's got about eight feet by five to caper
on, and all London gaping at him--geese! Are you a gentleman and a man of
sense, Harry Richmond, to let yourself be lugged about in public--by the
Lord! like a pair of street-tumblers in spangled haunch-bags, father and
boy, on a patch of carpet, and a drum banging, and tossed and turned
inside out, and my God! the ass of a fellow strutting the ring with you
on his shoulder! That's the spectacle. And you, Harry, now I 'll ask you,
do you mean your wife--egad, it'd be a pretty scene, with your princess
in hip-up petticoats, stiff as bottle-funnel top down'ards, airing a
whole leg, and knuckling a tambourine!'

'Not crying, my dear lad?' Captain Bulsted put his arm round me kindly,
and tried to catch a glimpse of my face. I let him see I was not going
through that process. 'Whew!' said he, 'and enough to make any Christian
sweat! You're in a bath, Harry. I wouldn't expect the man who murdered
his godmother for one shilling and fivepence three-farthings the other
day, to take such a slinging, and think he deserved it.'

My power of endurance had reached its limit.

'You tell me, sir, you had this brutal story from the Lord-Lieutenant of
the county?'

'Ay, from Lord Shale. But I won't have you going to him and betraying our
connection with a--'

'Halloo!' Captain Bulsted sang out to his wife on the lawn. 'And now,
squire, I have had my dose. And you will permit me to observe, that I
find it emphatically what we used to call at school black-jack.'

'And you were all the better for it afterwards, William.'

'We did not arrive at that opinion, sir. Harry, your arm. An hour with
the ladies will do us both good. The squire,' he murmured, wiping his
forehead as he went out, 'has a knack of bringing us into close proximity
with hell-fire when he pleases.'

Julia screamed on beholding us, 'Aren't you two men as pale as death!'

Janet came and looked. 'Merely a dose,' said the captain. 'We are anxious
to play battledore and shuttlecock madly.'

'So he shall, the dear!' Julia caressed him. 'We'll all have a tournament
in the wet-weather shed.'

Janet whispered to me, 'Was it--the Returning Thanks?'

'The what?' said I, with the dread at my heart of something worse than I
had heard.

She hailed Julia to run and fetch the battledores, and then told me she
had been obliged to confiscate the newspapers that morning and cast the
burden on post-office negligence. 'They reach grandada's hands by
afternoon post, Harry, and he finds objectionable passages blotted or cut
out; and as long as the scissors don't touch the business columns and the
debates, he never asks me what I have been doing. He thinks I keep a
scrap-book. I haven't often time in the morning to run an eye all over
the paper. This morning it was the first thing I saw.'

What had she seen? She led me out of view of the windows and showed me.

My father was accused of having stood up at a public dinner and returned
thanks on behalf of an Estate of the Realm: it read monstrously. I ceased
to think of the suffering inflicted on me by my grandfather.

Janet and I, side by side with the captain and Julia, carried on the game
of battledore and shuttlecock, in a match to see whether the unmarried
could keep the shuttle flying as long as the married, with varying
fortunes. She gazed on me, to give me the comfort of her sympathy, too
much, and I was too intent on the vision of my father either persecuted
by lies or guilty of hideous follies, to allow the match to be a fair
one. So Julia could inform the squire that she and William had given the
unmarried pair a handsome beating, when he appeared peeping round one of
the shed-pillars.

'Of course you beat 'em,' said the squire. 'It 's not my girl's fault.'
He said more, to the old tune, which drove Janet away.

I remembered, when back in the London vortex, the curious soft beauty she
won from casting up her eyes to watch the descending feathers, and the
brilliant direct beam of those thick-browed, firm, clear eyes, with her
frown, and her set lips and brave figure, when she was in the act of
striking to keep up a regular quick fusilade. I had need of calm
memories. The town was astir, and humming with one name.




CHAPTER XLII

THE MARQUIS OF EDBURY AND HIS PUPPET

I passed from man to man, hearing hints and hesitations, alarming
half-remarks, presumed to be addressed to one who could supply the
remainder, and deduce consequences. There was a clearer atmosphere in the
street of Clubs. Jennings was the first of my father's more intimate
acquaintances to meet me frankly. He spoke, though not with great
seriousness, of the rumour of a possible prosecution. Sir Weeton Slater
tripped up to us with a mixed air of solicitude and restraint, asked
whether I was well, and whether I had seen the newspapers that morning;
and on my informing him that I had just come up from Riversley, on
account of certain rumours, advised me to remain in town strictly for the
present. He also hinted at rumours of prosecutions. 'The fact is----' he
began several times, rendered discreet, I suppose, by my juvenility,
fierte, and reputed wealth.

We were joined by Admiral Loftus and Lord Alton. They queried and
counterqueried as to passages between my father and the newspapers, my
father and the committee of his Club, preserving sufficient consideration
for me to avoid the serious matter in all but distant allusions; a point
upon which the breeding of Mr. Serjeant Wedderburn was not so accurate a
guide to him. An exciting public scandal soon gathers knots of gossips in
Clubland. We saw Wedderburn break from a group some way down the pavement
and pick up a fresh crumb of amusement at one of the doorsteps. 'Roy
Richmond is having his benefit to-day!' he said, and repeated this and
that, half audible to me. For the rest, he pooh-poohed the idea of the
Law intervening. His 'How d' ye do, Mr. Richmond, how d' ye do?' was
almost congratulatory. 'I think we meet at your father's table to-night?
It won't be in the Tower, take my word for it. Oh! the papers! There's no
Act to compel a man to deny what appears in the papers. No such luck as
the Tower!--though Littlepitt (Mr. Wedderburn's nickname for our Premier)
would be fool enough for that. He would. If he could turn attention from
his Bill, he'd do it. We should have to dine off Boleyn's block:--coquite
horum obsonia he'd say, eh?''

Jennings espied my father's carriage, and stepped to speak a word to the
footman. He returned, saying, with a puff of his cheeks: 'The Grand
Monarque has been sending his state equipage to give the old backbiting
cripple Brisby an airing. He is for horse exercise to-day they've dropped
him in Courtenay Square. There goes Brisby. He'd take the good
Samaritan's shilling to buy a flask of poison for him. He 'll use Roy's
carriage to fetch and carry for that venomous old woman Kane, I'll
swear.'

'She's a male in Scripture,' said Wedderburn, and this reminded me of an
anecdote that reminded him of another, and after telling them, he handed
round his hat for the laugh, as my father would have phrased it.

'Has her ladyship declared war?' Sir Weeton Slater inquired.

'No, that's not her preliminary to wageing it,' Wedderburn replied. These
high-pressure smart talkers had a moment of dulness, and he bethought him
that he must run into the Club for letters, and was busy at Westminster,
where, if anything fresh occurred between meridian and six o'clock, he
should be glad, he said, to have word of it by messenger, that he might
not be behind his Age.

The form of humour to express the speed of the world was common, but it
struck me as a terrible illustration of my father's. I had still a sense
of pleasure in the thought that these intimates of his were gentlemen who
relished and, perhaps, really liked him. They were not parasites; not the
kind of men found hanging about vulgar profligates.

I quitted them. Sir Weeton Slater walked half-a-dozen steps beside me.
'May I presume on a friendly acquaintance with your father, Mr.
Richmond?' he said. 'The fact is--you will not be offended?--he is apt to
lose his head, unless the Committee of Supply limits him very precisely.
I am aware that there is no material necessity for any restriction.' He
nodded to me as to one of the marvellously endowed, as who should say,
the Gods presided at your birth. The worthy baronet struggled to impart
his meaning, which was, that he would have me define something like an
allowance to my father, not so much for the purpose of curtailing his
expenditure--he did not venture upon private ground--as to bridle my
father's ideas of things possible for a private gentleman in this
country. In that character none were like him. As to his suit, or appeal,
he could assure me that Serjeant Wedderburn, and all who would or could
speak on the subject, saw no prospect of success; not any. The worst of
it was, that it caused my father to commit himself in sundry ways. It
gave a handle to his enemies. It--he glanced at me indicatively.

I thanked the well-meaning gentleman without encouraging him to continue.

'It led him to perform once more as a Statue of Bronze before the whole
of gaping London!' I could have added. That scene on the pine-promontory
arose in my vision, followed by other scenes of the happy German days. I
had no power to conjure up the princess.

Jorian DeWitt was the man I wanted to see. After applications at his Club
and lodgings I found him dragging his Burgundy leg in the Park, on his
road to pay a morning visit to his fair French enchantress. I impeached
him, and he pleaded guilty, clearly not wishing to take me with him, nor
would he give me Mlle. Jenny's address, which I had. By virtue of the
threat that I would accompany him if he did not satisfy me, I managed to
extract the story of the Dauphin, aghast at the discovery of its being
true. The fatal after-dinner speech he believed to have been actually
spoken, and he touched on that first. 'A trap was laid for him, Harry
Richmond; and a deuced clever trap it was. They smuggled in special
reporters. There wasn't a bit of necessity for the toast. But the old
vixen has shown her hand, so now he must fight. He can beat her
single-handed on settees. He'll find her a tartar at long bowls: she
sticks at nothing. She blazes out, that he scandalizes her family. She
has a dozen indictments against him. You must stop in town and keep
watch. There's fire in my leg to explode a powder-magazine a mile off!'

'Is it the Margravine of Rippau?' I inquired. I could think of no other
waspish old woman.

'Lady Dane,' said Jorian. 'She set Edbury on to face him with the
Dauphin. You don't fancy it came of the young dog "all of himself," do
you? Why, it was clever! He trots about a briefless little barrister, a
scribbler, devilish clever and impudent, who does his farces for him.
Tenby 's the fellow's name, and it's the only thing I haven't heard him
pun on. Puns are the smallpox of the language;--we're cursed with an
epidemic. By gad, the next time I meet him I 'll roar out for vaccine
matter.'

He described the dinner given by Edbury at a celebrated City tavern where
my father and this so-called Dauphin were brought together. 'Dinner
to-night,' he nodded, as he limped away on his blissful visit of ceremony
to sprightly Chassediane (a bouquet had gone in advance): he left me
stupefied. The sense of ridicule enveloped me in suffocating folds,
howling sentences of the squire's Boeotian burlesque by fits. I felt that
I could not but take the world's part against the man who allowed himself
to be made preposterous externally, when I knew him to be staking his
frail chances and my fortune with such rashness. It was unpardonable for
one in his position to incur ridicule. Nothing but a sense of duty kept
me from rushing out of London, and I might have indulged the impulse
advantageously. Delay threw me into the clutches of Lady Kane herself, on
whom I looked with as composed a visage as I could command, while she
leaned out of her carriage chattering at me, and sometimes over my head
to passing gentlemen.

She wanted me to take a seat beside her, she had so much to say. Was
there not some funny story abroad of a Pretender to the Throne of France?
she asked, wrinkling her crow'sfeet eyelids to peer at me, and wished to
have the particulars. I had none to offer. 'Ah! well,' said she; 'you
stay in London? Come and see me. I'm sure you 're sensible. You and I can
put our heads together. He's too often in Courtenay Square, and he's ten
years too young for that, still. He ought to have good advice. Tell me,
how can a woman who can't guide herself help a man?--and the most
difficult man alive! I'm sure you understand me. I can't drive out in the
afternoon for them. They make a crush here, and a clatter of tongues!
. . . That's my private grievance. But he's now keeping persons away who
have the first social claim . . . I know they can't appear. Don't look
confused; no one accuses you. Only I do say it 's getting terribly hot in
London for somebody. Call on me. Will you?'

She named her hours. I bowed as soon as I perceived my opportunity. Her
allusions were to Lady Edbury, and to imputed usurpations of my father's.
I walked down to the Chambers where Temple was reading Law, for a refuge
from these annoyances. I was in love with the modest shadowed life Temple
lived, diligently reading, and glancing on the world as through a dusky
window, happy to let it run its course while he sharpened his weapons. A
look at Temple's face told me he had heard quite as much as was known in
the West. Dining-halls of lawyers are not Cistercian; he was able to give
me three distinct versions of the story of the Dauphin. No one could be
friendlier. Indeed Temple now urged me forcibly to prevent my father from
spending money and wearing his heart out in vain, by stopping the case in
Dettermain and Newson's hands. They were respectable lawyers, he said, in
a lawyer's ordinary tone when including such of his species as are not
black sheep. He thought it possible that my father's personal influence
overbore their judgment. In fact, nothing bound them to refuse to work
for him, and he believed that they had submitted their views for his
consideration.

'I do wish he'd throw it up,' Temple exclaimed. 'It makes him enemies.
And just examining it, you see he could get no earthly good out of it: he
might as well try to scale a perpendicular rock. But when I'm with him,
I'm ready to fancy what he pleases--I acknowledge that. He has excess of
phosphorus, or he's ultra-electrical; doctors could tell us better than
lawyers.' Temple spoke of the clever young barrister Tenby as the man
whom his father had heard laughing over the trick played upon 'Roy
Richmond.' I conceived that I might furnish Mr. Tenby a livelier kind of
amusement, and the thought that I had once been sur le terrain, and had
bitterly regretted it, by no means deterred me from the idea of a second
expedition, so black was my mood. A review of the circumstances, aided by
what reached my ears before the night went over, convinced me that Edbury
was my man. His subordinate helped him to the instrument, and possibly to
the plot, but Edbury was the capital offender.

The scene of the prank was not in itself so bad as the stuff which a
cunning anecdotist could make out of it. Edbury invited my father to a
dinner at a celebrated City tavern. He kept his guests (Jennings, Jorian
DeWitt, Alton, Wedderburn, were among the few I was acquainted with who
were present) awaiting the arrival of a person for whom he professed
extraordinary respect. The Dauphin of France was announced. A mild,
flabby, amiable-looking old person, with shelving forehead and grey
locks--excellently built for the object, Jorian said--entered. The Capet
head and embonpoint were there. As far as a personal resemblance might
go, his pretensions to be the long-lost Dauphin were grotesquely
convincing, for, notwithstanding the accurate picture of the Family
presented by him, the man was a pattern bourgeois:--a sturdy impostor,
one would have thought, and I thought so when I heard of him; but I have
been assured that he had actually grown old in the delusion that he,
carrying on his business in the City of London, was the identical
Dauphin.

Edbury played his part by leading his poor old victim half way to meet
his other most honoured guest, hesitating then and craving counsel
whether he was right in etiquette to advance the Dauphin so far. The
Dauphin left him mildly to decide the point: he was eminently mild
throughout, and seems to have thought himself in good faith surrounded by
believers and adherents. Edbury's task soon grew too delicate for that
coarse boy. In my father's dexterous hands he at once lost his assumption
of the gallantry of manner which could alone help him to retain his
advantage. When the wine was in him he began to bawl. I could imagine the
sort of dialogue he raised. Bets on the Dauphin, bets on Roy: they were
matched as on a racecourse. The Dauphin remembered incidents of his
residence in the Temple, with a beautiful juvenile faintness: a
conscientious angling for recollection, Wedderburn said. Roy was
requested to remember something, to drink and refresh his memory
infantine incidents were suggested. He fenced the treacherous host during
dinner with superb complacency.

The Dauphin was of an immoveable composure. He 'stated simple facts: he
was the Dauphin of France, providentially rescued from the Temple in the
days of the Terror.' For this deliverance, somewhat to the consternation
of the others, he offered up a short prayer of thanksgiving over his
plate. He had, he said, encountered incredulity. He had his proofs. He
who had never been on the soil of France since early boyhood, spoke
French with a pure accent: he had the physical and moral constitution of
the Family: owing to events attending his infant days, he was timid.
Jorian imitated him:--'I start at the opening of a door; I see dark faces
in my sleep: it is a dungeon; I am at the knees of my Unfortunate Royal
Father, with my Beautiful Mother.' His French was quaint, but not absurd.
He became loquacious, apostrophizing vacancy with uplifted hand and eye.
The unwonted invitation to the society of noblemen made him conceive his
Dauphinship to be on the high road to a recognition in England, and he
was persuaded to drink and exhibit proofs: which were that he had the
constitution of the Family, as aforesaid, in every particular; that he
was peculiarly marked with testificatory spots; and that his mere aspect
inspired all members and branch members of the Family with awe and
stupefaction. One of the latter hearing of him, had appointed to meet him
in a pastrycook's shop. He met him, and left the place with a cloud on
his brow, showing tokens of respectful sympathy.

Conceive a monomaniacal obese old English citizen, given to lift hand and
eye and address the cornices, claiming to be an Illustrious Boy, and
calling on a beautiful historic mother and unfortunate Royal sire to
attest it! No wonder the table was shaken with laughter. He appealed to
Tenby constantly, as to the one man he knew in the room. Tenby it was who
made the discovery of him somewhere in the City, where he earned his
livelihood either as a corn-merchant; or a stockbroker, or a
chronometer-maker, or a drysalter, and was always willing to gratify a
customer with the sight of his proofs of identity. Mr. Tenby made it his
business to push his clamorous waggishness for the exhibition. I could
readily believe that my father was more than his match in disposable
sallies and weight of humour, and that he shielded the old creature
successfully, so long as he had a tractable being to protect. But the
Dauphin was plied with wine, and the marquis had his fun. Proof upon
proof in verification of his claims was proffered by the now-tremulous
son of St. Louis--so he called himself. With, Jorian admitted, a real
courtly dignity, he stood up and proposed to lead the way to any
neighbouring cabinet to show the spots on his person; living witnesses to
the truth of his allegations, he declared them to be. The squire had
authority for his broad farce, except in so far as he mixed up my father
in the swinery of it.

I grew more and more convinced that my father never could have lost his
presence of mind when he found himself in the net of a plot to cover him
with ridicule. He was the only one who did not retire to the Dauphin's
'chamber of testification,' to return convulsed with vinous laughter
after gravely inspecting the evidence; for which abstention the Dauphin
reproached him violently, in round terms of abuse, challengeing him to go
through a similar process. This was the signal for Edbury, Tenby, and
some of the rest. They formed a circle, one-half for the Dauphin, one for
Roy. How long the boorish fun lasted, and what exactly came of it, I did
not hear. Jorian DeWitt said my father lost his temper, a point contested
by Wedderburn and Jennings, for it was unknown of him. Anyhow, he
thundered to some effect, inasmuch as he detached those that had
gentlemanly feelings from the wanton roysterers, and next day the latter
pleaded wine. But they told the story, not without embellishments. The
world followed their example.

I dined and slept at Temple's house, not caring to meet my incarnate
humiliation. I sent to hear that he was safe. A quiet evening with a
scholarly man, and a man of strong practical ability and shrewdness, like
Mr. Temple, did me good. I wished my father and I were on the same
footing as he and his son, and I may add his daughters. They all talked
sensibly; they were at feud with nobody; they reflected their condition.
It was a simple orderly English household, of which the father was the
pillar, the girls the ornaments, the son the hope, growing to take his
father's place. My envy of such a home was acute, and I thought of Janet,
and how well she was fashioned to build one resembling it, if only the
mate allotted to her should not be a fantastical dreamer. Temple's
character seemed to me to demand a wife like Janet on its merits; an idea
that depressed me exceedingly. I had introduced Temple to Anna Penrhys,
who was very kind to him; but these two were not framed to be other than
friends. Janet, on the contrary, might some day perceive the sterling
fellow Temple was, notwithstanding his moderate height. She might, I
thought. I remembered that I had once wished that she would, and I was
amazed at myself. But why? She was a girl sure to marry. I brushed these
meditations away. They recurred all the time I was in Temple's house.

Mr. Temple waited for my invitation to touch on my father's Case, when he
distinctly pronounced his opinion that it could end but in failure.
Though a strict Constitutionalist, he had words of disgust for princes,
acknowledging, however, that we were not practical in our use of them,
and kept them for political purposes often to the perversion of our
social laws and their natural dispositions. He spoke of his son's freak
in joining the Navy. 'That was the princess's doing,' said Temple. 'She
talked of our naval heroes, till she made me feel I had only to wear the
anchor buttons to be one myself. Don't tell her I was invalided from the
service, Richie, for the truth is, I believe, I half-shammed. And the
time won't be lost. You'll see I shall extract guineas from "old ocean"
like salt. Precious few barristers understand maritime cases. The other
day I was in Court, and prompted a great Q.C. in a case of collision.
Didn't I, sir?'

'I think there was a hoarse whisper audible up to the Judge's seat at
intervals,' said Mr. Temple.

'The Bar cannot confess to obligations from those who don't wear the
robe,' Temple rejoined.

His father advised me to read for the Bar, as a piece of very good
training.

I appealed to Temple, whether he thought it possible to read law-books in
a cockboat in a gale of wind.

Temple grimaced and his father nodded. Still it struck me that I might
one day have the felicity of quiet hours to sit down with Temple and read
Law--far behind him in the race. And he envied me, in his friendly
manner, I knew. My ambition had been blown to tatters.

A new day dawned. The household rose and met at the breakfast-table,
devoid of any dread of the morning newspapers. Their talk was like the
chirrup of birds. Temple and his father walked away together to chambers,
bent upon actual business--upon doing something! I reflected
emphatically, and compared them to ships with rudders, while I was at the
mercy of wind, tide, and wave. I called at Dettermain and Newson's, and
heard there of a discovery of a witness essential to the case, either in
North Wales or in New South. I did not, as I had intended, put a veto on
their proceedings. The thing to do was to see my father, and cut the case
at the fountain head. For this purpose, it was imperative that I should
go to him, and prepare myself for the interview by looking at the
newspapers first. I bought one, hastily running my eyes down the columns
in the shop. His name was printed, but merely in a fashionable
notification that carriages took up and set down for his costume Ball,
according to certain regulations. The relief of comparative obscurity
helped me to breathe freely: not to be laughed at, was a gain. I was
rather inclined to laud his courage in entering assembly-rooms, where he
must be aware that he would see the Dauphin on every face. Perhaps he was
guilty of some new extravagance last night, too late for scandal to
reinforce the reporters!

Mrs. Waddy had a woeful visage when informing me that he was out, gone to
Courtenay Square. She ventured a murmur of bills coming in. Like
everybody else, she fancied he drew his supplies from my inexhaustible
purse; she hoped the bills would be paid off immediately: the servants'
wages were overdue. 'Never can I get him to attend to small accounts,'
she whimpered, and was so ready to cry outright, that I said, 'Tusk,' and
with the one word gave her comfort. 'Of course, you, Mr. Harry, can
settle them, I know that.' We were drawing near to poor old Sewis's
legacy, even for the settling of the small accounts!

London is a narrow place to one not caring to be seen. I could not remain
in this creditor-riddled house; I shunned the Parks, the Clubs, and the
broad, brighter streets of the West. Musing on the refreshing change it
would be to me to find myself suddenly on board Captain Jasper Welsh's
barque Priscilla, borne away to strange climes and tongues, the world
before me, I put on the striding pace which does not invite interruption,
and no one but Edbury would have taken the liberty. I heard his shout.
'Halloa! Richmond.' He was driving his friend Witlington in his
cabriolet. 'Richmond, my hearty, where the deuce have you been? I wanted
you to dine with me the other night.'

I replied, looking at him steadily, that I wished I had been there.

'Compendious larks!' cried he, in the slang of his dog's day. 'I say;
you're one at Duke Fitz's masquerade to-night? Tell us your toggery. Hang
it, you might go for the Black Prince. I'm Prince Hal. Got a headache?
Come to my Club and try my mixture. Yoicks! it'd make Methuselah and
Melchisedec jump up and have a twirl and a fandango. I say, you're thick
with that little French actress Chastedian jolly little woman! too much
to say for herself to suit me.'

He described the style of woman that delighted him--an ideal English
shepherdess of the print-shops, it appeared, and of extremely remote
interest to me, I thought at the time. Eventually I appointed to walk
round to his Club, and he touched his horse gently, and bobbed his
diminutive henchman behind his smart cabriolet, the admiration of the
street.

I found him waiting for me on the steps of his Club, puffing a cigar with
all his vigour, in the classic attitude of a trumpeter. My first words
were: 'I think I have to accuse you of insulting me.'

'Insulting you, Richmond!' he cried, much surprised, holding his cigar in
transit.

'If you insult my father, I make you responsible to me.'

'Insult old Duke Fitz! I give you my word of honour, Richmond--why, I
like him; I like the old boy. Wouldn't hurt him for the world and all
Havannah.

What the deuce have you got into your head? Come in and smoke.'

The mention of his dinner and the Dauphin crazed him with laughter. He
begged me as a man to imagine the scene: the old Bloated Bourbon of
London Wall and Camberwell! an Illustrious Boy!--drank like a
fish!--ready to show himself to the waiters! And then with 'Gee' and
'Gaw,' the marquis spouted out reminiscences of scene, the best ever
witnessed! 'Up starts the Dauphin. "Damn you, sir! and damn me, sir, if
believe you have a spot on your whole body!" And snuffles and puffs--you
should have been there Richmond, I wrote to ask you: did, upon my life!
wanted you there. Lord! why, you won't get such fun in a century. And old
Roy! he behaved uncommonly finely: said capital things, by Jove! Never
saw him shine so; old trump! Says Dauphin, "My beautiful mother had a
longing for strawberries out of season. I am marked with a strawberry,
here." Says Roy: "It is an admirable and roomy site, but as I am not your
enemy, sir, I doubt if I shall often have the opportunity to behold it."
Ha! ha!--gee! Richmond, you've missed the deucedest good scene ever
acted.'

How could I, after having had an adversary like Prince Otto, call upon a
fellow such as Edbury to give me reason for his conduct? He rollicked and
laughed until my ungovernable impatience brought him to his senses.

'Dash it, you're a fire-eater, I know, Richmond. We can't fight in this
country; ain't allowed. And fighting 's infernal folly. By Jove! If
you're going to tumble down every man who enjoys old Roy, you've your
work cut out for you. He's long chalks the best joke out. 'Twixt you and
me, he did return thanks. What does it matter what old Duke Fitz does? I
give him a lift on his ladder with all my heart. He keeps a capital
table. And I'll be hanged if he hasn't got the secret of the women. How
he does it old Roy! If the lords were ladies they'd vote him premier
peer, double quick. And I'll tell you what, Richmond, I'm thought a devil
of a good-tempered fellow for not keeping watch over Courtenay Square. I
don't call it my business to be house dog for a pretty stepmother. But
there's talking and nodding, and oh! leave all that: come in and smoke,
and let me set you up; and I'll shake your hand. Halloa! I'm hailed.'

A lady, grasping the veil across her face, beckoned her hand from a
closed carriage below. Edbury ran down to her. I caught sight of
ravishing golden locks, reminding me of Mabel Sweetwinter's hair, and
pricking me with a sensation of spite at the sex for their deplorable
madness in the choice of favourites. Edbury called me to come to the
carriage window. I moved slowly, but the carriage wheeled about and
rolled away. I could just see the outline of a head muffled in furs and
lace.

'Queer fish, women!' he delivered himself of the philosophical
ejaculation cloudily. I was not on terms with him to offer any remark
upon the one in question. His imperturbable good humour foiled me, and I
left him, merely giving him a warning, to which his answer was:

'Oh! come in and have a bottle of claret.'

Claret or brandy had done its work on him by the time I encountered him
some hours later, in the Park. Bramham DeWitt, whom I met in the same
neighbourhood, offered me a mount after lunch, advising me to keep near
my father as much as I conveniently could; and he being sure to appear in
the Park, I went, and heard his name to the right and left of me. He was
now, as he said to me once that he should become, 'the tongue of London.'
I could hardly expect to escape from curious scrutiny myself; I was
looked at. Here and there I had to lift my hat and bow. The
stultification of one's feelings and ideas in circumstances which divide
and set them at variance is worse than positive pain. The looks shed on
me were rather flattering, but I knew that in the background I was felt
to be the son of the notorious. Edbury came trotting up to us like a
shaken sack, calling, 'Neigh! any of you seen old Roy?' Bramham DeWitt, a
stiff, fashionable man of fifty, proud of his blood and quick as his
cousin Jorian to resent an impertinence, replied:

'Are you the Marquis of Edbury, or a drunken groom, sir?'

'Gad, old gentleman, I've half a mind to ride you down,' said Edbury,
and, espying me, challenged me to a race to run down the fogies.

A cavalcade of six abreast came cantering along. I saw my father listen
to a word from Lady Edbury, and push his horse to intercept the marquis.
They spoke. 'Presently, presently,' my father said; 'ride to the rear,
and keep at half a stone's throw-say, a groom's distance.'

'Groom be hanged!' Edbury retorted. 'I made a bet I'd drive you out of
the Park, old Roy!'

'Ride behind, then,' said my father, and to my astonishment Edbury obeyed
him, with laughter. Lady Edbury smiled to herself; and I experienced the
esteem I perceived in her for a masterful manner. A few minutes later my
father beckoned me to pay my respects to Graf Kesensky, an ambassador
with strong English predilections and some influence among us. He asked
me if he was right in supposing I wished to enter Parliament. I said he
was, wondering at the interest a foreigner could find in it. The count
stopped a quiet-pacing gentleman. Bramhaxri DeWitt joined them, and a
group of friends. I was introduced to Mr. Beauchamp Hill, the Government
whip, who begged me to call on him with reference to the candidature of a
Sussex borough: 'that is,' said he, turning to Graf Kesensky, 'if you're
sure the place is open? I've heard nothing of Falmouth's accident.' The
count replied that Falmouth was his intimate friend; he had received a
special report that Falmouth was dying, just as he was on the point of
mounting his horse. 'We shan't have lost time,' said Mr. Hill. The
Government wanted votes. I went down to the House of Commons at midnight
to see him. He had then heard of Falmouth's hopeless condition, and after
extracting my political views, which were for the nonce those of a happy
subserviency, he expressed his belief that the new writ for the borough
of Chippenden might be out, and myself seated on the Government benches,
within a very short period. Nor would it be necessary, he thought, for
the Government nominee to spend money: 'though that does not affect you,
Mr. Richmond!' My supposed wealth gave me currency even in political
circles.




CHAPTER XLIII

I BECOME ONE OF THE CHOSEN OF THE NATION

An entire revulsion in my feelings and my way of thinking was caused by
this sudden change of prospect. A member of our Parliament, I could then
write to Ottilia, and tell her that I had not wasted time. And it was due
to my father, I confessed, when he returned from his ball at dawn, that
I should thank him for speaking to Graf Kesensky. 'Oh!' said he, 'that
was our luck, Richie. I have been speaking about you to hundreds for the
last six months, and now we owe it to a foreigner!' I thanked him again.
He looked eminently handsome in his Henry III. costume, and was disposed
to be as luxurious as his original. He had brought Count Lika, Secretary
of Legation to the Austrian Embassy, dressed as an Albanian, with him.
The two were stretched on couches, and discoursing of my father's
reintroduction of the sedan chair to society. My father explained that he
had ordered a couple of dozen of these chairs to be built on a pattern of
his own. And he added, 'By the way, Richie, there will be
sedaniers--porters to pay to-day. Poor men should be paid immediately.' I
agreed with the monarch. Contemplating him, I became insensible to the
sting of ridicule which had been shooting through me, agonizing me for
the last eight-and-forty hours. Still I thought: can I never escape from
the fascination?--let me only get into Parliament! The idea in me was
that Parliament lifted me nearer to Ottilia, and would prompt me to
resolute action, out of his tangle of glittering cobwebs. I told him of
my interview with Beauchamp Hill. 'I have never known Kesensky wrong
yet,' said he; 'except in his backing of Falmouth's horses.' Count Lika
murmured that he hoped his Chief would be wrong in something else: he
spoke significantly. My father raised his eyebrows. 'In his opinion,'
Lika accepted the invitation to pursue, 'Prince Ernest will not let that
announcement stand uncontradicted.'

My father's eyes dwelt on him. 'Are we accused of it?'

Lika slipped from the question. 'Who is accused of a newspaper's doings?
It is but the denial of a statement.'

'I dare them to deny it!--and, Lika, my dear fellow, light me a
cigarette,' said my father.

'Then,' said Lika, touching the flame delicately, 'you take the view that
Kesensky is wrong in another thing besides horses.'

I believe he struck on the subject casually: there was nothing for him to
gain or lose in it; and he had a liking for my father.

After puffing the cigarette twice or thrice my father threw it down,
resuming his conversation upon the sedan, the appropriate dresses of
certain of the great masquerading ladies, and an incident that appeared
to charge Jorian DeWitt with having misconducted himself. The moment Lika
had gone upstairs for two or three hours' sleep, he said to me: 'Richie,
you and I have no time for that. We must have a man at Falmouth's house
by eight o'clock. If the scrubbing-maid on all fours-not an inelegant
position, I have remarked--declares him dead, we are at Bartlett's
(money-lender) by ten: and in Chippenden borough before two post
meridian. As I am a tactician, there is mischief! but I will turn it to
my uses, as I did our poor Jorian to-night; he smuggled in the
Chassediane: I led her out on my arm. Of that by and by. The point is,
that from your oath in Parliament you fly to Sarkeld. I implore you now,
by your love for me and the princess, not to lose precious minutes.
Richie, we will press things so that you shall be in Sarkeld by the end
of the month. My son! my dear boy! how you loved me once!--you do still!
then follow my directions. I have a head. Ay, you think it wild? 'Tis
true, my mother was a poetess. But I will convince my son as I am
convincing the world-tut, tut! To avoid swelling talk, I tell you,
Richie, I have my hand on the world's wheel, and now is the time for you
to spring from it and gain your altitude. If you fail, my success is
emptiness.'

'Will you avoid Edbury and his like, and protect yourself?' was my form
of stipulation, spoken to counteract his urgency.

He gave no answer beyond a wave of the hand suitable to his princely
one-coloured costume of ruffled lavender silk, and the magnificent leg he
turned to front me. My senses even up to that period were so
impressionable as to be swayed by a rich dress and a grand manner when
circumstances were not too unfavourable. Now they seemed very favourable,
for they offered me an upward path to tread. His appearance propitiated
me less after he had passed through the hands of his man Tollingby, but I
had again surrendered the lead to him. As to the risk of proceedings
being taken against him, he laughed scornfully at the suggestion. 'They
dare not. The more I dare, the less dare they.' Again I listened to his
curious roundabout reasoning, which dragged humour at its heels like a
comical cur, proclaiming itself imposingly, in spite of the mongrel's
barking, to be prudence and common sense. Could I deny that I owed him
gratitude for the things I cherished most?--for my acquaintance with
Ottilia?--for his services in Germany?--for the prospect of my elevation
in England? I could not; and I tried hard to be recklessly grateful. As
to money, he reiterated that he could put his hand on it to satisfy the
squire on the day of accounts: for the present, we must borrow. His
argument upon borrowing--which I knew well, and wondered that I did not
at the outset disperse with a breath of contempt--gained on me singularly
when reviewed under the light of my immediate interests: it ran thus:--We
have a rich or a barren future, just as we conceive it. The art of
generalship in life consists in gathering your scattered supplies to suit
a momentous occasion; and it is the future which is chiefly in debt to
us, and adjures us for its sake to fight the fight and conquer. That man
is vile and fit to be trampled on who cannot count his future in gold and
victory. If, as we find, we are always in debt to the past, we should
determine that the future is in our debt, and draw on it. Why let our
future lie idle while we need succour? For instance, to-morrow I am to
have what saves my reputation in the battle to-day; shall I not take it
at once? The military commander who acts on that principle overcomes his
adversary to a certainty.

'You, Richie, the member for this borough of Chippenden, have won solid
ground. I guarantee it to you. And you go straight from the hustings, or
the first taste of parliamentary benches, to Sarkeld: you take your
grandad's proposition to Prince Ernest: you bring back the prince's
acceptance to the squire. Can you hope to have a princess without a
battle for her?' More and much more in this strain, until--for he could
read me and most human beings swiftly on the surface, notwithstanding the
pressure of his fancifulness--he perceived that talking influenced me far
less than activity, and so after a hurried breakfast and an innocuous
glance at the damp morning papers, we started to the money-lender's, with
Jennings to lend his name. We were in Chippenden close upon the hour my
father had named, bringing to the startled electors the first news of
their member's death.

During the heat of the canvass for votes I received a kind letter from
the squire in reply to one of mine, wherein he congratulated me on my
prospects of success, and wound up: 'Glad to see it announced you are off
with that princess of yours. Show them we are as proud as they are,
Harry, and a fig for the whole foreign lot! Come to Riversley soon, and
be happy.' What did that mean? Heriot likewise said in a letter: 'So it's
over? The proud prince kicks? You will not thank me for telling you now
what you know I think about it.' I appealed to my father. 'Canvass!
canvass!' cried he; and he persistently baffled me. It was from Temple I
learnt that on the day of our starting for Chippenden, the newspapers
contained a paragraph in large print flatly denying upon authority that
there was any foundation for the report of an intended marriage between
the Princess of Eppenwelzen-Sarkeld and an English gentleman. Then I
remembered how that morning my father had flung the papers down,
complaining of their dampness.

Would such denial have appeared without Ottilia's sanction?

My father proved that I was harnessed to him; there was no stopping, no
time for grieving. Pace was his specific. He dragged me the round of the
voters; he gave dinners at the inn of true Liberals, and ate of them
contentedly; he delivered speeches incessantly. The whole force of his.
serio-comic genius was alive in its element at Chippenden. From balls and
dinners, and a sharp contest to maintain his position in town, he was
down among us by the first morning train, bright as Apollo, and quite the
sun of the place, dazzling the independent electors and their wives, and
even me somewhat; amazing me, certainly. Dettermain, his lawyer, who had
never seen him in action, and supposed he would treat an election as he
did his Case, with fits and starts of energy, was not less astonished,
and tried to curb him.

'Mr. Dettermain, my dear sir, I apprehend it is the electoral maxim to
woo the widowed borough with the tear in its eye, and I shall do so
hotly, in a right masculine manner,' my father said. 'We have the start;
and if we beat the enemy by nothing else we will beat him by
constitution. We are the first in the field, and not to reap it is to
acknowledge oneself deficient in the very first instrument with which
grass was cut.'

Our difficulty all through the election was to contend with his humour.
The many triumphs it won for him, both in speech and in action, turned at
least the dialectics of the argument against us, and amusing, flattering,
or bewildering, contributed to silence and hold us passive. Political
convictions of his own, I think I may say with truth, he had none. He
would have been just as powerful, after his fashion, on the Tory side,
pleading for Mr. Normanton Hipperdon; more, perhaps: he would have been
more in earnest. His store of political axioms was Tory; but he did
remarkably well, and with no great difficulty, in confuting them to the
wives of voters, to the voters themselves, and at public assemblies. Our
adversary was redoubtable; a promising Opposition member, ousted from his
seat in the North--a handsome man, too, which my father admitted, and
wealthy, being junior partner in a City banking firm. Anna Penrhys knew
him, and treacherously revealed some of the enemy's secrets, notably
concerning what he termed our incorrigible turn for bribery.

'And that means,' my father said, 'that Mr. Hipperdon does not possess
the art of talking to the ladies. I shall try him in repartee on the
hustings. I must contrive to have our Jorian at my elbow.'

The task of getting Jorian to descend upon such a place as Chippenden
worried my father more than electoral anxieties. Jorian wrote, 'My best
wishes to you. Be careful of your heads. The habit of the Anglo-Saxon is
to conclude his burlesques with a play of cudgels. It is his notion of
freedom, and at once the exordium and peroration of his eloquence. Spare
me the Sussex accent on your return.'

My father read out the sentences of this letter with admiring bursts of
indignation at the sarcasms, and an evident idea that I inclined to
jealousy of the force displayed.

'But we must have him,' he said; 'I do not feel myself complete without
Jorian.'

So he made dispositions for a concert to be given in Chippenden town.
Jenny Chassediane was invited down to sing, and Jorian came in her wake,
of course. He came to suffer tortures. She was obliging enough to
transform me into her weapon of chastisement upon the poor fellow for his
behaviour to her at the Ball-atrocious, I was bound to confess. On this
point she hesitated just long enough to imply a doubt whether, under any
circumstances, the dues of men should be considered before those of her
sex, and then struck her hands together with enthusiasm for my father,
who was, she observed--critical in millinery in the height of her
ecstasy--the most majestic, charming, handsome Henri III. imaginable, the
pride and glory of the assembly, only one degree too rosy at night for
the tone of the lavender, needing a touch of French hands, and the merest
trifle in want of compression about the waistband. She related that a
certain Prince Henri d'Angleterre had buzzed at his ear annoyingly. 'Et
Gascoigne, ou est-il?' called the King, and the Judge stepped forth to
correct the obstreperous youth. The Judge was Jennings, clearly prepared
by my father to foil the Prince--no other than Edbury. It was
incomprehensible to me that my father should tolerate the tatter's
pranks; unless, indeed, he borrowed his name to bonds of which I heard
nothing.

Mademoiselle Chassediane vowed that her own dress was ravishing. She went
attired as a boudoir-shepherdess or demurely-coquettish Sevres-china
Ninette, such of whom Louis Quinze would chuck the chin down the deadly
introductory walks of Versailles. The reason of her desiring to go was
the fatal sin of curiosity, and, therefore, her sex's burden, not hers.
Jorian was a Mousquetaire, with plumes and ruffles prodigious, and a
hen's heart beneath his cock's feathers. 'Pourtant j'y allai. I saw your
great ladies, how they carry themselves when they would amuse themselves,
and, mon Dieu! Paris has done its utmost to grace their persons, and the
length of their robes did the part of Providence in bestowing height upon
them, parceque, vous savez, Monsieur, c'est extraordinaire comme ils ont
les jambes courtes, ces Anglaises!' Our aristocracy, however, was not so
bad in that respect as our bourgeoisie; yet it was easy to perceive that
our female aristocracy, though they could ride, had never been drilled to
walk: 'de belles femmes, oui; seulement, tenez, je n'admire ni les yeux
de vache, ni de souris, ni mime ceux de verre comme ornement feminin.
Avec de l'embonpoint elles font de l'effet, mais maigre il n'y a aucune
illusion possible.'

This vindictive critic smarted, with cause, at the recollection of her
walk out of her rooms. Jorian's audacity or infatuation quitted him
immediately after he had gratified her whim. The stout Mousquetaire
placed her in a corner, and enveloped her there, declaring that her
petition had been that she might come to see, not to be seen,--as if, she
cried out tearfully, the two wishes must not necessarily exist together,
like the masculine and the feminine in this world! Prince Hal, acting the
most profligate period of his career, espied her behind the
Mousquetaire's moustache, and did not fail to make much of his discovery.
In a perilous moment for the reputation of the Ball, my father handed him
over to Gascoigne, and conducted Jenny in a leisurely walk on his arm out
of the rooms.

'Il est comme les Romains,' she said: 'he never despairs of himself. It
is a Jupiter! If he must punish you he confers a dignity in doing it. Now
I comprehend, that with such women as these grandes dames Anglaises I
should have done him harm but for his greatness of soul.'

Some harm, I fancied, must have been done, in spite of his boast to the
contrary. He had to be in London every other night, and there were tales
current of intrigues against him which had their sources from very lofty
regions. But in Chippenden he threw off London, just as lightly as in
London he discarded Chippenden. No symptom of personal discouragement, or
of fatigue, was betrayed in his face. I spoke once of that paragraph
purporting to emanate from Prince Ernest.

'It may,' he said. 'Business! Richie.'

He set to counting the promises of votes, disdaining fears and
reflections. Concerts, cricket-matches, Balls, dinner-parties, and the
round of the canvass, and speech-making at our gatherings, occupied every
minute of my time, except on Saturday evenings, when I rode over to
Riversley with Temple to spend the Sunday. Temple, always willing to play
second to me, and a trifle melancholy under his partial eclipse-which,
perhaps, suggested the loss of Janet to him--would have it that this
election was one of the realizations of our boyish dreams of greatness.
The ladies were working rosettes for me. My aunt Dorothy talked very
anxiously about the day appointed by my father to repay the large sum
expended. All hung upon that day, she said, speaking from her knowledge
of the squire. She was moved to an extreme distress by the subject.

'He is confident, Harry; but where can he obtain the money? If your
grandfather sees it invested in your name in Government securities, he
will be satisfied, not otherwise: nothing less will satisfy him; and if
that is not done, he will join you and your father together in his mind;
and as he has hitherto treated one he will treat both. I know him. He is
just, to the extent of his vision; but he will not be able to separate
you. He is aware that your father has not restricted his expenses since
they met; he will say you should have used your influence.'

She insisted on this, until the tears streamed from her eyes, telling me
that my grandfather was the most upright and unsuspicious of men, and
precisely on that account the severest when he thought he had been
deceived. The fair chances of my election did not console her, as it did
me, by dazzling me. She affirmed strongly that she was sure my father
expected success at the election to be equivalent to the promised
restitution of the money, and begged me to warn him that nothing short of
the sum squandered would be deemed sufficient at Riversley. My dear aunt,
good woman though she was, seemed to me to be waxing miserly. The squire
had given her the name of Parsimony; she had vexed him, Janet told me, by
subscribing a miserable sum to a sailors' asylum that he patronized--a
sum he was ashamed to see standing as the gift of a Beltham; and she had
stopped the building of a wing of her village school-house, designed upon
his plan. Altogether, she was fretful and distressful; she appeared to
think that I could have kept my father in better order. Riversley was
hearing new and strange reports of him. But how could I at Chippenden
thwart his proceedings in London? Besides, he was serving me
indefatigably.

It can easily be imagined what description of banter he had to meet and
foil.

'This gentleman is obliging enough to ask me, "How about the Royal Arms?"
If in his extreme consideration he means to indicate my Arms, I will
inform him that they are open to him; he shall find entertainment for man
and beast; so he is doubly assured of a welcome.'

Questioned whether he did not think he was entitled to be rated at the
value of half-a-crown, he protested that whatever might be the sum of his
worth, he was pure coin, of which neither party in Chippenden could
accuse the silver of rubbing off; and he offered forthwith an impromptu
apologue of a copper penny that passed itself off for a crown-piece, and
deceived a portion of the country: that was why (with a wave of the arm
over the Hipperdon faction) it had a certain number of backers; for
everybody on whom the counterfeit had been foisted, praised it to keep it
in the currency.

'Now, gentlemen, I apprehend that Chippenden is not the pocket-borough
for Hipperdon coin. Back with him to the Mint! and, with your permission,
we will confiscate the first syllable of his name, while we consign him
to oblivion, with a hip, hip, hip, hurrah for Richmond!'

The cheers responded thunderingly, and were as loud when he answered a
'How 'bout the Dauphin?' by saying that it was the Tory hotel, of which
he knew nothing.

'A cheer for old Roy!' Edbury sang out.

My father checked the roar, and turned to him.

'Marquis of Edbury, come to the front!'

Edbury declined to budge, but the fellows round him edged aside to show
him a mark for my father's finger.

'Gentlemen, this is the young Marquis of Edbury, a member of the House of
Lords by right of his birth, born to legislate for you and me. He,
gentlemen, makes our laws. Examine him, hear him, meditate on him.'

He paused cruelly for Edbury to open his mouth. The young lord looked
confounded, and from that moment behaved becomingly.

'He might have been doing mischief to-morrow,' my father said to me, and
by letting me conceive his adroitness a matter of design, comforted me
with proofs of intelligent power, and made me feel less the melancholy
conjunction of a piece of mechanism and a piece of criticism, which I was
fast growing to be in the contemplation of the agencies leading to honour
in our land. Edbury whipped his four-in-hand to conduct our voters to the
poll. We had to pull hard against Tory interest. It was a sharp, dubious,
hot day--a day of outcries against undue influence and against bribery--a
day of beer and cheers and the insanest of tricks to cheat the
polling-booth. Old John Thresher of Dipwell, and Farmer Eckerthy drove
over to Chippenden to afford me aid and countenance, disconcerting me by
the sight of them, for I associated them with Janet rather than with
Ottilia, and it was to Ottilia that I should have felt myself rising when
the figures increased their pace in my favour, and the yeasty mob
surrounding my father's superb four-horsed chariot responded to his
orations by proclaiming me victor.

'I congratulate you, Mr. Richmond,' Dettermain said. 'Up to this day I
have had my fears that we should haul more moonshine than fish in our
net. Your father has accomplished prodigies.'

My father, with the bloom of success on his face, led me aside soon after
a safe majority of upwards of seventy had been officially announced.
'Now, Richie,' said he, 'you are a Member. Now to the squire away! Thank
the multitude and off, and as quick to Sarkeld as you well can, and tell
the squire from me that I pardon his suspicions. I have landed you a
Member--that will satisfy him. I am willing, tell him . . . you know me
competent to direct mines . . . bailiff of his estates--whatever he
pleases, to effect a reconciliation. I must be in London to-night--I am
in the thick of the fray there. No matter: go, my son.' He embraced me.
It was not a moment for me to catechize him, though I could see that he
was utterly deluded.

Between moonlight and morning, riding with Temple and Captain Bulsted on
either side of me, I drew rein under the red Grange windows, tired, and
in love with its air of sleepy grandeur. Janet's window was open. I
hailed her. 'Has he won?' she sang out in the dark of her room, as though
the cry of delight came upon the leap from bed. She was dressed. She had
commissioned Farmer Eckerthy to bring her the news at any hour of the
night. Seeing me, she clapped hands. 'Harry, I congratulate you a
thousand times.' She had wit to guess that I should never have thought of
coming had I not been the winner. I could just discern the curve and roll
of her famed thick brown hair in the happy shrug of her shoulder, and
imagined the full stream of it as she leaned out of window to talk to us.

Janet herself, unfastened the hall-door bolts. She caressed the horses,
feverishly exulting, with charming subdued laughter of victory and
welcome, and amused us by leading my horse round to stables, and
whistling for one of the lads, playing what may, now and then, be a
pretty feature in a young woman of character--the fair tom-boy girl. She
and her maid prepared coffee and toast for us, and entered the hall, one
after the other, laden with dishes of cold meat; and not until the
captain had eaten well did she tell him slyly that somebody, whom she had
brought to Riversley yesterday, was abed and asleep upstairs. The slyness
and its sisterly innocence lit up our eyes, and our hearts laughed. Her
cheeks were deliciously overcoloured. We stole I know not what from the
night and the day, and conventional circumstances, and rallied Captain
Bulsted, and behaved as decorous people who treat the night properly, and
live by rule, do not quite do. Never since Janet was a girl had I seen
her so spirited and responsive: the womanly armour of half-reserve was
put away. We chatted with a fresh-hearted natural young creature who
forfeited not a particle of her ladyship while she made herself our
comrade in talk and frolic.

Janet and I walked part of the way to the station with Temple, who had to
catch an early train, and returning--the song of skylarks covering
us--joined hands, having our choice between nothing to say, and the
excess; perilous both.




CHAPTER XLIV

MY FATHER IS MIRACULOUSLY RELIEVED BY FORTUNE

My grandfather had a gratification in my success, mingled with a
transparent jealousy of the chief agent in procuring it. He warned me
when I left him that he was not to be hoodwinked: he must see the money
standing in my name on the day appointed. His doubts were evident, but he
affected to be expectant. Not a word of Sarkeld could be spoken. My
success appeared to be on a more visionary foundation the higher I
climbed.

Now Jorian DeWitt had affirmed that the wealthy widow Lady Sampleman was
to be had by my father for the asking. Placed as we were, I regarded the
objections to his alliance with her in a mild light. She might lend me
the money to appease the squire; that done, I would speedily repay it. I
admitted, in a letter to my aunt Dorothy, the existing objections: but
the lady had long been enamoured of him, I pleaded, and he was past the
age for passionate affection, and would infallibly be courteous and kind.
She was rich. We might count on her to watch over him carefully. Of
course, with such a wife, he would sink to a secondary social sphere; was
it to be regretted if he did? The letter was a plea for my own interests,
barely veiled.

At the moment of writing it, and moreover when I treated my father with
especial coldness, my heart was far less warm in the contemplation of its
pre-eminent aim than when I was suffering him to endanger it, almost
without a protest. Janet and a peaceful Riversley, and a life of quiet
English distinction, beckoned to me visibly, and not hatefully. The image
of Ottilia conjured up pictures of a sea of shipwrecks, a scene of
immeasurable hopelessness. Still, I strove toward that. My strivings were
against my leanings, and imagining the latter, which involved no
sacrifice of the finer sense of honour, to be in the direction of my
lower nature, I repelled them to preserve a lofty aim that led me through
questionable ways.

'Can it be you, Harry,' my aunt Dorothy's reply ran (I had anticipated
her line of reasoning, though not her warmth), 'who advise him to this
marriage from a motive so inexplicably unworthy? That you will repay her
the money, I do not require your promise to assure me. The money is
nothing. It is the prospect of her life and fortune which you are
consenting, if not urging him, to imperil for your own purposes. Are you
really prepared to imitate in him, with less excuse for doing it, the
things you most condemn? Let it be checked at the outset. It cannot be. A
marriage of inclination on both sides, prudent in a worldly sense, we
might wish for him, perhaps, if he could feel quite sure of himself. His
wife might persuade him not to proceed in his law-case. There I have long
seen his ruin. He builds such expectations on it! You speak of something
worse than a mercenary marriage. I see this in your handwriting!--your
approval of it! I have to check the whisper that tells me it reads like a
conspiracy. Is she not a simpleton? Can you withhold your pity? and
pitying, can you possibly allow her to be entrapped? Forgive my seeming
harshness. I do not often speak to my Harry so. I do now because I must
appeal to you, as the one chiefly responsible, on whose head the whole
weight of a dreadful error will fall. Oh! my dearest, be guided by the
purity of your feelings to shun doubtful means. I have hopes that after
the first few weeks your grandfather will--I know he does not 'expect to
find the engagement fulfilled--be the same to you that he was before he
discovered the extravagance. You are in Parliament, and I am certain,
that by keeping as much as possible to yourself, and living soberly, your
career there will persuade him to meet your wishes.'

The letter was of great length. In conclusion, she entreated me to
despatch an answer by one of the early morning trains; entreating me once
more to cause 'any actual deed' to be at least postponed. The letter
revealed what I had often conceived might be.

My rejoinder to my aunt Dorothy laid stress on my father's pledge of his
word of honour as a gentleman to satisfy the squire on a stated day. I
shrank from the idea of the Riversley crow over him. As to the lady, I
said we would see that her money was fastened to her securely before she
committed herself to the deeps. The money to be advanced to me would lie
at my bankers, in my name,--untouched: it would be repaid in the bulk
after a season. This I dwelt on particularly, both to satisfy her and to
appease my sense of the obligation. An airy pleasantry in the tone of
this epistle amused me while writing it and vexed me when it had gone.
But a letter sent, upon special request, by railway, should not, I
thought, be couched in the ordinary strain. Besides one could not write
seriously of a person like Lady Sampleman.

I consulted my aunt Dorothy's scruples by stopping my father on his way
to the lady. His carriage was at the door: I suggested money-lenders: he
had tried them all. He begged me to permit him to start: but it was too
ignominious to think of its being done under my very eyes, and I refused.
He had tried the money-lenders yesterday. They required a mortgage
solider than expectations for the sum we wanted. Dettermain and Newson
had declined to undertake the hypothecation of his annuity. Providence
pointed to Sampleman.

'You change in a couple of nights, Richie,' said he. 'Now I am always the
identical man. I shall give happiness to one sincerely good soul. I have
only to offer myself--let me say in becoming modesty, I believe so. Let
me go to her and have it over, for with me a step taken is a thing
sanctified. I have in fact held her in reserve. Not that I think Fortune
has abandoned us: but a sagacious schemer will not leave everything to
the worthy Dame. I should have driven to her yesterday, if I had not
heard from Dettermain and Newson that there was a hint of a negotiation
for a compromise. Government is fairly frightened.'

He mused. 'However, I slept on it, and arrived at the conclusion this
morning that my old Richie stood in imminent jeopardy of losing the fruit
of all my toil. The good woman will advance the money to her husband.
When I pledged my word to the squire I had reason to imagine the two
months a sufficient time. We have still a couple of days. I have heard of
men who lost heart at the eleventh hour, and if they had only hung on,
with gallant faith in themselves, they would have been justified by the
result. Faith works miracles. At least it allows time for them.'

His fertile ingenuity spared mine the task of persuading him to postpone
the drive to Lady Sampleman. But that he would have been prompt to go, at
a word from me, and was actually about to go when I entered his house, I
could not question.

He drove in manifest relief of mind to Dettermain and Newson's.

I had an appointment with Mr. Temple at a great political Club, to meet
the gentlemen who were good enough to undertake the introduction of the
infant member to the House of Commons. My incessantly twisting
circumstances foiled the pleasure and pride due to me. From the Club I
bent my steps to Temple's district, and met in the street young Eckart
vom Hof, my champion and second on a memorable occasion, fresh upon
London, and looking very Germanic in this drab forest of our city people.
He could hardly speak of Deutschland for enthusiasm at the sight of the
moving masses. His object in coming to England, he assured me honestly,
was to study certain editions of Tibullus in the British Museum. When he
deigned to speak of Sarkeld, it was to say that Prince Hermann was
frequently there. I gave him no chance to be sly, though he pushed for
it, at a question of the Princess Ottilia's health.

The funeral pace of the block of cabs and omnibuses engrossed his
attention. Suddenly the Englishman afforded him an example of the reserve
of impetuosity we may contain. I had seen my aunt Dorothy in a middle
line of cabs coming from the City, and was darting in a twinkling among
wheels and shafts and nodding cab-horse noses to take her hand and know
the meaning of her presence in London. She had family business to do: she
said no more. I mentioned that I had checked my father for a day or two.
She appeared grateful. Her anxiety was extreme that she might not miss
the return train, so I relinquished her hand, commanded the cabman to
hasten, and turned to rescue Eckart--too young and faithful a collegian
not to follow his friend, though it were into the lion's den-from a
terrific entanglement of horseflesh and vehicles brawled over by a
splendid collision of tongues. Secure on the pavement again, Eckart
humbly acknowledged that the English tongue could come out upon
occasions. I did my best to amuse him.

Whether it amused him to see me take my seat in the House of Commons, and
hear a debate in a foreign language, I cannot say; but the only pleasure
of which I was conscious at that period lay in the thought that he or his
father, Baron vom Hof, might some day relate the circumstance at Prince
Ernest's table, and fix in Ottilia's mind the recognition of my having
tried to perform my part of the contract. Beggared myself, and knowing
Prince Hermann to be in Sarkeld, all I hoped for was to show her I had
followed the path she traced. My state was lower: besides misfortune I
now found myself exalted only to feel my profound insignificance.

'The standard for the House is a man's ability to do things,' said
Charles Etherell, my friendly introductor, by whom I was passingly,
perhaps ironically, advised to preserve silence for two or three
sessions.

He counselled the study of Foreign Affairs for a present theme. I talked
of our management of them, in the strain of Dr. Julius von Karsteg.

'That's journalism, or clippings from a bilious essay; it won't do for
the House,' he said. 'Revile the House to the country, if you like, but
not the country to the House.'

When I begged him to excuse my absurdity, he replied:

'It's full of promise, so long as you're silent.'

But to be silent was to be merely an obedient hound of the whip. And if
the standard for the House was a man's ability to do things, I was in the
seat of a better man. External sarcasms upon the House, flavoured with
justness, came to my mind, but if these were my masters surrounding me,
how indefinitely small must I be!

Leaving the House on that first night of my sitting, I received Temple's
congratulations outside, and, as though the sitting had exhausted every
personal sentiment, I became filled with his; under totally new
sensations, I enjoyed my distinction through the perception of my old
comrade's friendly jealousy.

'I'll be there, too, some day,' he said, moaning at the prospect of an
extreme age before such honours would befall him.

The society of Eckart prevented me from urging him to puff me up with his
talk as I should have wished, and after I had sent the German to be taken
care of by Mrs. Waddy, I had grown so accustomed to the worldly view of
my position that I was fearing for its stability. Threats of a petition
against me were abroad. Supposing the squire disinherited me, could I
stand? An extraordinary appetite for wealth, a novel appreciation of
it--which was, in truth, a voluntary enlistment into the army of mankind,
and the adoption of its passions--pricked me with an intensity of hope
and dread concerning my dependence on my grandfather. I lay sleepless all
night, tossing from Riversley to Sarkeld, condemned, it seemed, to marry
Janet and gain riches and power by renouncing my hope of the princess and
the glory belonging to her, unless I should within a few hours obtain a
show of figures at my bankers.

I had promised Etherell to breakfast with him. A note--a faint
scream--despatched by Mrs. Waddy to Mr. Temple's house informed me that
'the men' were upon them. If so, they were the forerunners of a horde,
and my father was as good as extinguished. He staked everything on
success; consequently, he forfeited pity.

Good-bye to ambition, I thought, and ate heartily, considering robustly
the while how far lower than the general level I might avoid falling. The
report of the debates in morning papers--doubtless, more flowing and,
perhaps, more grammatical than such as I gave ear to overnight--had the
odd effect on me of relieving me from the fit of subserviency into which
the speakers had sunk me.

A conceit of towering superiority took its place, and as Etherell was
kind enough to draw me out and compliment me, I was attacked by a tragic
sense of contrast between my capacities and my probable fortunes. It was
open to me to marry Janet. But this meant the loosening of myself with my
own hand for ever from her who was my mentor and my glory, to gain whom I
was in the very tideway. I could not submit to it, though the view was
like that of a green field of the springs passed by a climber up the
crags. I went to Anna Penrhys to hear a woman's voice, and partly told
her of my troubles. She had heard Mr. Hipperdon express his confident
opinion that he should oust me from my seat. Her indignation was at my
service as a loan: it sprang up fiercely and spontaneously in allusions
to something relating to my father, of which the Marquis of Edbury had
been guilty. 'How you can bear it!' she exclaimed, for I was not wordy.
The exclamation, however, stung me to put pen to paper--the woman was not
so remote in me as not to be roused by the woman. I wrote to Edbury, and
to Heriot, bidding him call on the young nobleman. Late at night I was at
my father's door to perform the act of duty of seeing him, and hearing
how he had entertained Eckart, if he was still master of his liberty. I
should have known him better: I expected silence and gloom. The windows
were lighted brilliantly. As the hall-door opened, a band of stringed and
wood instruments commenced an overture. Mrs. Waddy came to me in the
hall; she was unintelligible. One thing had happened to him at one hour
of the morning, and another at another hour. He was at one moment
suffering the hands of the 'officers' on his shoulder:

'And behold you, Mr. Harry! a knock, a letter from a messenger, and he
conquers Government!' It struck me that the epitome of his life had been
played in a day: I was quite incredulous of downright good fortune. He
had been giving a dinner followed by a concert, and the deafening strains
of the music clashed with my acerb spirit, irritating me excessively.
'Where are those men you spoke of?' I asked her. 'Gone,' she
replied,'gone long ago!'

'Paid?' said I.

She was afraid to be precise, but repeated that they were long since
gone.

I singled Jorian DeWitt from among the crowd of loungers on the stairs
and landing between the drawing-rooms. 'Oh, yes, Government has struck
its flag to him,' Jorian said. 'Why weren't you here to dine? Alphonse
will never beat his achievement of to-day. Jenny and Carigny gave us a
quarter-of-an-hour before dinner--a capital idea!--"VEUVE ET BACHELIER."
As if by inspiration. No preparation for it, no formal taking of seats.
It seized amazingly--floated small talk over the soup beautifully.'

I questioned him again.

'Oh, dear, yes; there can't be a doubt about it,' he answered, airily.
'Roy Richmond has won his game.'

Two or three urgent men round a great gentleman were extracting his
affable approbation of the admirable nature of the experiment of the
Chassediane before dinner. I saw that Eckart was comfortably seated, and
telling Jorian to provide for him in the matter of tobacco, I went to my
room, confused beyond power of thought by the sensible command of fortune
my father, fortune's sport at times, seemed really to have.

His statement of the circumstances bewildered me even more. He was in no
hurry to explain them; when we met next morning he waited for me to
question him, and said, 'Yes. I think we have beaten them so far!' His
mind was pre-occupied, he informed me, concerning the defence of a lady
much intrigued against, and resuming the subject: 'Yes, we have beaten
them up to a point, Richie. And that reminds me: would you have me go
down to Riversley and show the squire the transfer paper? At any rate you
can now start for Sarkeld, and you do, do you not? To-day: to-morrow at
latest.'

I insisted: 'But how, and in what manner has this money been paid?' The
idea struck me that he had succeeded in borrowing it.

'Transferred to me in the Bank, and intelligence of the fact sent to
Dettermain and Newson, my lawyers,' he replied. 'Beyond that, I know as
little as you, Richie, though indubitably I hoped to intimidate them.
If,' he added, with a countenance perfectly simple and frank, 'they
expect me to take money for a sop, I am not responsible, as I by no means
provoked it, for their mistake.

'I proceed. The money is useful to you, so I rejoice at it.'

Five and twenty thousand pounds was the amount.

'No stipulation was attached to it?'

'None. Of course a stipulation was implied: but of that I am not bound to
be cognizant.'

'Absurd!' I cried: 'it can't have come from the quarter you suspect.'

'Where else?' he asked.

I thought of the squire, Lady Edbury, my aunt, Lady Sampleman, Anna
Penrhys, some one or other of his frantic female admirers. But the
largeness of the amount, and the channel selected for the payment,
precluded the notion that any single person had come to succour him in
his imminent need, and, as it chanced, mine.

Observing that my speculations wavered, he cited numerous instances in
his life of the special action of Providence in his favour, and was bold
enough to speak of a star, which his natural acuteness would have checked
his doing before me, if his imagination had not been seriously struck.

'You hand the money over to me, sir?' I said.

'Without a moment of hesitation, my dear boy,' he melted me by answering.

'You believe you have received a bribe?'

'That is my entire belief--the sole conclusion I can arrive at. I will
tell you, Richie: the old Marquis of Edbury once placed five thousand
pounds to my account on a proviso that I should--neglect, is the better
word, my Case. I inherited from him at his death; of course his demise
cancelled the engagement. He had been the friend of personages
implicated. He knew. I suspect he apprehended the unpleasant position of
a witness.'

'But what was the stipulation you presume was implied?' said I.

'Something that passed between lawyers: I am not bound to be cognizant of
it. Abandon my claims for a few thousands? Not for ten, not for ten
hundred times the sum!'

To be free from his boisterous influence, which made my judgement as
unsteady as the weather-glass in a hurricane, I left my house and went
straight to Dettermain and Newson, who astonished me quite as much by
assuring me that the payment of the money was a fact. There was no
mystery about it. The intelligence and transfer papers, they said, had
not been communicated to them by the firm they were opposed to, but by a
solicitor largely connected with the aristocracy; and his letter had
briefly declared the unknown donator's request that legal proceedings
should forthwith be stopped. They offered no opinion of their own.
Suggestions of any kind, they seemed to think, had weight, and all of
them an equal weight, to conclude from the value they assigned to every
idea of mine. The name of the solicitor in question was Charles Adolphus
Bannerbridge. It was, indeed, my old, one of my oldest friends; the same
by whom I had been led to a feast and an evening of fun when a little
fellow starting in the London streets. Sure of learning the whole truth
from old Mr. Bannerbridge, I walked to his office and heard that he had
suddenly been taken ill. I strode on to his house, and entered a house of
mourning. The kind old man, remembered by me so vividly, had died
overnight. Miss Bannerbridge perceived that I had come on an errand, and
with her gentle good breeding led me to speak of it. She knew nothing
whatever of the sum of money. She was, however, aware that an annuity had
been regularly paid through the intervention of her father. I was
referred by her to a Mr. Richards, his recently-established partner. This
gentleman was ignorant of the whole transaction.

Throughout the day I strove to combat the pressure of evidence in favour
of the idea that an acknowledgement of special claims had been wrested
from the enemy. Temple hardly helped me, though his solid sense was dead
against the notions entertained by my father and Jorian DeWitt, and
others besides, our elders. The payment of the sum through the same
channel which supplied the annuity, pointed distinctly to an admission of
a claim, he inclined to think, and should be supposed to come from a
personage having cause either to fear him or to assist him. He set my
speculations astray by hinting that the request for the stopping of the
case might be a blind. A gift of money, he said shrewdly, was a
singularly weak method of inducing a man to stop the suit of a life-time.
I thought of Lady Edbury; but her income was limited, and her expenditure
was not of Lady Sampleman, but it was notorious that she loved her purse
as well as my aunt Dorothy, and was even more, in the squire's phrase, 'a
petticoated parsimony.' Anna Penrhys appeared the likelier, except for
the fact that the commencement of the annuity was long before our
acquaintance with her. I tried her on the subject. Her amazement was
without a shadow of reserve. 'It 's Welsh, it's not English,' she
remarked. I knew no Welshwoman save Anna.

'Do you know the whole of his history?' said she. Possibly one of the
dozen unknown episodes in it might have furnished the clue, I agreed with
her.

The sight of twenty-one thousand pounds placed to my credit in the Funds
assuaged my restless spirit of investigation. Letters from the squire and
my aunt Dorothy urged me to betake myself to Riversley, there finally to
decide upon what my course should be.

'Now that you have the money, pray,' St. Parsimony wrote,--'pray be
careful of it. Do not let it be encroached on. Remember it is to serve
one purpose. It should be guarded strictly against every appeal for aid,'
etc., with much underlining.

My grandfather returned the papers. His letter said 'I shall not break my
word. Please to come and see me before you take steps right or left.'

So here was the dawn again.

I could in a day or two start for Sarkeld. Meanwhile, to give my father a
lesson, I discharged a number of bills, and paid off the bond to which
Edbury's name was attached. My grandfather, I knew, was too sincerely and
punctiliously a gentleman in practical conduct to demand a further
inspection of my accounts. These things accomplished, I took the train
for Riversley, and proceeded from the station to Durstan, where I knew
Heriot to be staying. Had I gone straight to my grandfather, there would
have been another story to tell.




CHAPTER XLV

WITHIN AN INCH OF MY LIFE

A single tent stood in a gully running from one of the gravel-pits of the
heath, near an iron-red rillet, and a girl of Kiomi's tribe leaned over
the lazy water at half length, striking it with her handkerchief. At a
distance of about twice a stone's-throw from the new carriage-road
between Durstan and Bulsted, I fancied from old recollections she might
be Kiomi herself. This was not the time for her people to be camping on
Durstan. Besides, I feared it improbable that one would find her in any
of the tracks of her people. The noise of the wheels brought the girl's
face round to me. She was one of those who were babies in the tents when
I was a boy. We were too far apart for me to read her features. I lay
back in the carriage, thinking that it would have been better for my poor
little wild friend if I had never crossed the shadow of her tents. A life
caught out of its natural circle is as much in danger of being lost as a
limb given to a wheel in spinning machinery; so it occurred to me, until
I reflected that Prince Ernest might make the same remark, and deplore
the damage done to the superior machinery likewise.

My movements appeared to interest the girl. She was up on a mound of the
fast-purpling heath, shading her eyes to watch me, when I called at
Bulsted lodge-gates to ask for a bed under Julia's roof that night. Her
bare legs twinkled in a nimble pace on the way to Durstan Hall, as if she
was determined to keep me in sight. I waved my hand to her. She stopped.
A gipsy's girl's figure is often as good an index to her mind as her
face, and I perceived that she had not taken my greeting favourably; nor
would she advance a step to my repeated beckonings; I tried hat,
handkerchief, purse, in vain. My driver observed that she was taken with
a fit of the obstinacy of 'her lot.' He shouted, 'Silver,' and then
'Fortune.' She stood looking. The fellow discoursed on the nature of
gipsies. Foxes were kept for hunting, he said; there was reason in that.
Why we kept gipsies none could tell. He once backed a gipsy prizefighter,
who failed to keep his appointment. 'Heart sunk too low below his belt,
sir. You can't reckon on them for performances. And that same man
afterwards fought the gamest fight in the chronicles o' the Ring! I knew
he had it in him. But they're like nothing better than the weather; you
can't put money on 'em and feel safe.' Consequently he saw no good in
them.

'She sticks to her post,' he said, as we turned into the Durstan grounds.
The girl was like a flag-staff on the upper line of heathland.

Heriot was strolling, cigar in mouth, down one of the diminutive alleys
of young fir in this upstart estate. He affected to be prepossessed by
the case between me and Edbury, and would say nothing of his own affairs,
save that he meant to try for service in one of the Continental armies;
he whose susceptible love for his country was almost a malady. But he had
given himself to women it was Cissy this, Trichy that, and the wiles of a
Florence, the spites of an Agatha, duperies, innocent-seemings,
witcheries, reptile-tricks of the fairest of women, all through his
conversation. He had so saturated himself with the resources, evasions,
and desperate cruising of these light creatures of wind, tide, and
tempest, that, like one who has been gazing on the whirligoround, he saw
the whole of women running or only waiting for a suitable partner to run
the giddy ring to perdition and an atoning pathos.

I cut short one of Heriot's narratives by telling him that this picking
bones of the dish was not to my taste. He twitted me with turning parson.
I spoke of Kiomi. Heriot flushed, muttering, 'The little devil!' with his
usual contemplative relish of devilry. We parted, feeling that severe
tension of the old links keeping us together which indicates the lack of
new ones: a point where simple affection must bear the strain of
friendship if it can. Heriot had promised to walk half-way with me to
Bulsted, in spite of Lady Maria's childish fears of some attack on him.
He was now satisfied with a good-bye at the hall-doors, and he talked
ostentatiously of a method that he had to bring Edbury up to the mark. I
knew that same loud decreeing talk to be a method on his own behalf of
concealing his sensitive resentment at the tone I had adopted: Lady
Maria's carriage had gone to fetch her husband from a political dinner.
My portmanteau advised me to wait for its return. Durstan and Riversley
were at feud, however, owing to some powerful rude English used toward
the proprietor of the former place by the squire; so I thought it better
to let one of the grooms shoulder my luggage, and follow him.

The night was dark; he chose the roadway, and I crossed the heath,
meeting an exhilarating high wind that made my blood race: Egoism is not
peculiar to any period of life; it is only especially curious in a young
man beginning to match himself against his elders, for in him it suffuses
the imagination; he is not merely selfishly sentient, or selfishly
scheming: his very conceptions are selfish. I remember walking at my
swiftest pace, blaming everybody I knew for insufficiency, for want of
subordination to my interests, for poverty of nature, grossness,
blindness to the fine lights shining in me; I blamed the Fates for
harassing me, circumstances for not surrounding me with friends worthy of
me. The central 'I' resembled the sun of this universe, with the
difference that it shrieked for nourishment, instead of dispensing it.

My monstrous conceit of elevation will not suffer condensation into
sentences. What I can testify to is, that for making you bless the legs
you stand on, a knockdown blow is a specific. I had it before I knew that
a hand was up. I should have fancied that I had run athwart a tree, but
for the recollection, as I was reeling to the ground, of a hulk of a
fellow suddenly fronting me, and he did not hesitate with his fist. I
went over and over into a heathery hollow. The wind sang shrill through
the furzes; nothing was visible but black clumps, black cloud. Astonished
though I was, and shaken, it flashed through me that this was not the
attack of a highwayman. He calls upon you to stand and deliver: it is a
foe that hits without warning. The blow took me on the forehead, and
might have been worse. Not seeing the enemy, curiosity was almost as
strong in me as anger; but reflecting that I had injured no one I knew
of, my nerves were quickly at the right pitch. Brushing some spikes of
furze off my hands, I prepared for it. A cry rose. My impression seemed
to be all backward, travelling up to me a moment or two behind time. I
recognised a strange tongue in the cry, but too late that it was Romany
to answer it. Instantly a voice was audible above the noisy wind: 'I spot
him.' Then began some good and fair fighting. I got my footing on grass,
and liked the work. The fellow facing me was unmistakably gipsy-build. I,
too, had length of arm, and a disposition to use it by hitting straight
out, with footing firm, instead of dodging and capering, which told in my
favour, and is decidedly the best display of the noble art on a dark
night.

My dancer went over as neatly as I had preceded him; and therewith I
considered enough was done for vengeance. The thrill of a salmon on the
gut is known to give a savage satisfaction to our original nature; it is
but an extension and attenuation of the hearty contentment springing from
a thorough delivery of the fist upon the prominent features of an
assailant that yields to it perforce. Even when you receive such perfect
blows you are half satisfied. Feeling conqueror, my wrath was soothed; I
bent to have a look at my ruffian, and ask him what cause of complaint
gipsies camping on Durstan could find against Riversley. A sharp stroke
on the side of my neck sent me across his body. He bit viciously. In pain
and desperation I flew at another of the tawny devils. They multiplied. I
took to my heels; but this was the vainest of stratagems, they beat me in
nimbleness. Four of them were round me when I wheeled breathless to take
my chance at fighting the odds. Fiery men have not much notion of
chivalry: gipsies the least of all. They yelled disdain of my summons to
them to come on one by one: 'Now they had caught me, now they would pay
me, now they would pound me; and, standing at four corners, they
commended me to think of becoming a jelly. Four though they were, they
kept their positions; they left it to me to rush in for a close; the
hinder ones held out of arms' reach so long as I was disengaged. I had
perpetually to shift my front, thinking--Oh, for a stick! any stout bit
of timber! My fists ached, and a repetition of nasty dull knocks on back
and neck, slogging thumps dealt by men getting to make sure of me,
shattered my breathing.

I cried out for a pause, offered to take a couple of them at a time: I
challenged three-the fourth to bide. I was now the dancer: left, right,
and roundabout I had to swing, half-stunned, half-strangled with gorge.
Those terrible blows in the back did the mischief. Sickness threatened to
undermine me. Boxers have breathing-time: I had none. Stiff and sick, I
tried to run; I tottered, I stood to be knocked down, I dropped like a
log-careless of life. But I smelt earth keenly, and the damp grass and
the devil's play of their feet on my chin, chest, and thighs, revived a
fit of wrath enough to set me staggering on my legs again. They permitted
it, for the purpose of battering me further. I passed from down to up
mechanically, and enjoyed the chestful of air given me in the interval of
rising: thought of Germany and my father, and Janet at her window,
complacently; raised a child's voice in my throat for mercy, quite
inaudible, and accepted my punishment. One idea I had was, that I could
not possibly fail as a speaker after this--I wanted but a minute's grace
to fetch breath for an oration, beginning, 'You fools!' for I guessed
that they had fallen upon the wrong man. Not a second was allowed. Soon
the shrewd physical bracing, acting momentarily on my brain, relaxed; the
fitful illumination ceased: all ideas faded out-clung about my beaten
body-fled. The body might have been tossed into its grave, for aught I
knew.




CHAPTER XLVI

AMONG GIPSY WOMEN

I cannot say how long it was after my senses had gone when I began to
grope for them on the warmest of heaving soft pillows, and lost the
slight hold I had on them with the effort. Then came a series of
climbings and fallings, risings to the surface and sinkings fathoms
below. Any attempt to speculate pitched me back into darkness. Gifted
with a pair of enormous eyes, which threw surrounding objects to a
distance of a mile away, I could not induce the diminutive things to
approach; and shutting eyes led to such a rolling of mountains in my
brain, that, terrified by the gigantic revolution, I lay determinedly
staring; clothed, it seemed positive, in a tight-fitting suit of
sheet-lead; but why? I wondered why, and immediately received an
extinguishing blow. My pillow was heavenly; I was constantly being cooled
on it, and grew used to hear a croon no more musical than the unstopped
reed above my head; a sound as of a breeze about a cavern's mouth, more
soothing than a melody. Conjecture of my state, after hovering timidly in
dread of relapses, settled and assured me I was lying baked, half-buried
in an old river-bed; moss at my cheek, my body inextricable; water now
and then feebly striving to float me out, with horrid pain, with infinite
refreshingness. A shady light, like the light through leafage, I could
see; the water I felt. Why did it keep trying to move me? I questioned
and sank to the depths again.

The excruciated patient was having his wet bandages folded across his
bruises, and could not bear a motion of the mind.

The mind's total apathy was the sign of recovering health. Kind nature
put that district to sleep while she operated on the disquieted lower
functions. I looked on my later self as one observes the mossy bearded
substances travelling blind along the undercurrent of the stream,
clinging to this and that, twirling absurdly.

Where was I? Not in a house. But for my condition of absolute calm, owing
to skilful treatment, open air, and physical robustness, the scene would
have been of a kind to scatter the busy little workmen setting up the
fabric of my wits. A lighted oil-cup stood on a tripod in the middle of a
tent-roof, and over it the creased neck and chin of a tall old woman,
splendid in age, reddened vividly; her black eyes and grey brows, and
greyishblack hair fell away in a dusk of their own. I thought her
marvellous. Something she held in her hands that sent a thin steam
between her and the light. Outside, in the A cutting of the tent's
threshold, a heavy-coloured sunset hung upon dark land. My pillow
meantime lifted me gently at a regular measure, and it was with
untroubled wonder that I came to the knowledge of a human heart beating
within it. So soft could only be feminine; so firm still young. The bosom
was Kiomi's. A girl sidled at the opening of the tent, peeping in, and
from a mufed rattle of subpectoral thunder discharged at her in quick
heated snaps, I knew Kiomi's voice. After an altercation of their
monotonous gipsy undertones, the girl dropped and crouched outside.

It was morning when I woke next, stronger, and aching worse. I was lying
in the air, and she who served for nurse, pillow, parasol, and bank of
herbage, had her arms round beneath mine cherishingly, all the fingers
outspread and flat on me, just as they had been when I went to sleep.

'Kiomi!'

'Now, you be quiet.'

'Can I stand up a minute or two?'

'No, and you won't talk.'

I submitted. This was our duel all day: she slipped from me only twice,
and when she did the girl took her place.

I began to think of Bulsted and Riversley.

'Kiomi, how long have I been here?'

'You 'll be twice as long as you've been.'

'A couple of days?'

'More like a dozen.'

'Just tell me what happened.'

'Ghm-m-m,' she growled admonishingly.

Reflecting on it, I felt sure there must have been searching parties over
the heath.

'Kiomi, I say, how was it they missed me?'

She struck at once on my thought.

'They're fools.'

'How did you cheat them?'

'I didn't tie a handkercher across their eyes.'

'You half smothered me once, in the combe.'

'You go to sleep.'

'Have you been doctor?'

The growling tigerish 'Ghm-m-m' constrained me to take it for a lullaby.

'Kiomi, why the deuce did your people attack me?' She repeated the sound
resembling that which sometimes issues from the vent of a mine; but I
insisted upon her answering.

'I 'll put you down and be off,' she threatened.

'Brute of a girl! I hate you!'

'Hate away.'

'Tell me who found me.'

'I shan't. You shut your peepers.'

The other and younger girl sung out: 'I found you.'

Kiomi sent a volley at her.

'I did,' said the girl; 'yes, and I nursed you first, I did; and mother
doctored you. Kiomi hasn't been here a day.'

The old mother came out of the tent. She felt my pulse, and forthwith
squatted in front of me. 'You're hard to kill, and oily as a bean,' said
she. 'You've only to lie quiet in the sun like a handsome gentleman; I'm
sure you couldn't wish for more. Air and water's the doctor for such as
you. You've got the bound in you to jump the ditch: don't you fret at it,
or you'll lose your spring, my good gentleman.'

'Leave off talking to me as a stranger,' I bawled. 'Out with it; why have
you kept me here? Why did your men pitch into me?'

'OUR men, my good gentleman!' the old woman ejaculated. There was
innocence indeed! sufficient to pass the whole tribe before a bench of
magistrates. She wheedled: 'What have they against a handsome gentleman
like you? They'd run for you fifty mile a day, and show you all their
tricks and secrets for nothing.'

My despot Kiomi fired invectives at her mother. The old mother retorted;
the girl joined in. All three were scowling, flashing, showing teeth,
driving the wordy javelin upon one another, indiscriminately, or two to
one, without a pause; all to a sound like the slack silver string of the
fiddle.

I sang out truce to them; they racked me with laughter; and such
laughter!--the shaking of husks in a half-empty sack.

Ultimately, on a sudden cessation of the storm of tongues, they agreed
that I must have my broth.

Sheer weariness, seasoned with some hope that the broth would give me
strength to mount on my legs and walk, persuaded me to drink it. Still
the old mother declared that none of her men would ever have laid hands
on me. Why should they? she asked. What had I done to them? Was it their
way?

Kiomi's arms tightened over my breast. The involuntary pressure was like
an illumination to me.

No longer asking for the grounds of the attack on a mistaken person, and
bowing to the fiction that none of the tribe had been among my
assailants, I obtained information. The girl Eveleen had spied me
entering Durstan. Quite by chance, she was concealed near Bulsted Park
gates when the groom arrived and told the lodge-keeper that Mr. Harry
Richmond was coming up over the heath, and might have lost his way.
'Richmond!' the girl threw a world of meaning into the unexpected name.
Kiomi clutched me to her bosom, but no one breathed the name we had in
our thoughts.

Eveleen and the old mother had searched for me upon the heath, and having
haled me head and foot to their tent, despatched a message to bring Kiomi
down from London to aid them in their desperate shift. They knew Squire
Beltham's temper. He would have scattered the tribe to the shores of the
kingdom at a rumour of foul play to his grandson. Kiomi came in time to
smuggle me through an inspection of the tent and cross-examination of its
ostensible denizens by Captain Bulsted, who had no suspicions, though he
was in a state of wonderment. Hearing all this, I was the first to say it
would be better I should get out of the neighbourhood as soon as my legs
should support me. The grin that goes for a laugh among gipsies followed
my question of how Kiomi had managed to smuggle me. Eveleen was my
informant when the dreaded Kiomi happened to be off duty for a minute. By
a hasty transformation, due to a nightcap on the bandages about the head,
and an old petticoat over my feet, Captain William's insensible friend
was introduced to him as the sore sick great-grandmother of the tribe,
mother of Kiomi's mother, aged ninety-one. The captain paid like a man
for doctor and burial fees; he undertook also to send the old lady a
pound of snuff to assist her to a last sneeze or two on the right side of
the grave, and he kept his word; for, deeming it necessary to paint her
in a characteristic, these prodigious serpents told him gravely that she
delighted in snuff; it was almost the only thing that kept her alive,
barring a sip of broth. Captain William's comment on the interesting
piece of longevity whose well-covered length and framework lay exposed to
his respectful contemplation, was, that she must have been a devilish
fine old lady in her day. 'Six foot' was given as her measurement.

One pound of snuff, a bottle of rum, and five sovereigns were the fruits
of the captain's sensibility. I shattered my ribs with laughter over the
story. Eveleen dwelt on the triumph, twinkling. Kiomi despised laughter
or triumph resulting from the natural exercise of craft in an emergency.
'But my handsome gentleman he won't tell on us, will he, when we've
nursed him and doctored him, and made him one of us, and as good a stick
o' timber as grows in the forest?' whined the old mother. I had to swear
I would not.

'He!' cried Kiomi.

'He may forget us when he's gone,' the mother said. She would have liked
me to kiss a book to seal the oath. Anxiety about the safety of their
'homes,' that is, the assurance of an untroubled reception upon their
customary camping-ground, is a peculiarity of the gipsies, distinguishing
them, equally with their cleanliness and thriftiness, from mumpers and
the common wanderers.

It is their tribute to civilization, which generally keeps them within
the laws.

Who that does not know them will believe that under their domestic system
I had the best broth and the best tea I have ever tasted! They are very
cunning brewers and sagacious buyers too; their maxims show them to
direct all their acuteness upon obtaining quality for their money. A
compliment not backed by silver is hardly intelligible to the pretty
ones: money is a really credible thing to them; and when they have it,
they know how to use it. Apparently because they know so well, so
perfectly appreciating it, they have only vague ideas of a corresponding
sentiment on the opposite side to the bargain, and imagine that they fool
people much more often than they succeed in doing. Once duped themselves,
they are the wariest of the dog-burnt; the place is notched where it
occurred, and for ever avoided. On the other hand, they repose implicit
faith in a reputation vouched for by their experience. I was amused by
the girl Eveleen's dotting of houses over the breadth of five counties,
where for this and that article of apparel she designed to expend
portions of a golden guinea, confident that she would get the very best,
and a shilling besides. The unwonted coin gave her the joy of supposing
she cheated the Mint of that sum. This guinea was a present to the girl
(to whom I owed my thrashing, by the way) that excused itself under cover
of being a bribe for sight of a mirror interdicted by the implacable
Kiomi. I wanted to have a look at my face. Now that the familiar scenes
were beginning to wear their original features to me, my dread of
personal hideousness was distressing, though Eveleen declared the bad
blood in my cheeks and eyes 'had been sucked by pounds of red meat.' I
wondered, whether if I stood up and walked to either one of the three
great halls lying in an obtuse triangle within view, I should easily be
recognized. When I did see myself, I groaned verily. With the silence of
profound resignation, I handed back to Eveleen the curious fragment of
her boudoir, which would have grimaced at Helen of Troy.

'You're feeling your nose--you've been looking at a glass!' Kiomi said,
with supernatural swiftness of deduction on her return.

She added for my comfort that nothing was broken, but confessed me to be
still 'a sight'; and thereupon drove knotty language at Eveleen. The girl
retorted, and though these two would never acknowledge to me that any of
their men had been in this neighbourhood recently, the fact was treated
as a matter of course in their spiteful altercation, and each saddled the
other with the mistake they had committed. Eveleen snatched the last
word. What she said I did not comprehend, she must have hit hard. Kiomi's
eyes lightened, and her lips twitched; she coloured like the roofing
smoke of the tent fire; twice she showed her teeth, as in a spasm, struck
to the heart, unable to speak, breathing in and out of a bitterly
disjoined mouth. Eveleen ran. I guessed at the ill-word spoken. Kiomi sat
eyeing the wood-ashes, a devouring gaze that shot straight and read but
one thing. They who have seen wild creatures die will have her before
them, saving the fiery eyes. She became an ashen-colour, I took her
little hand. Unconscious of me, her brown fingers clutching at mine, she
flung up her nostrils, craving air.

This was the picture of the woman who could not weep in her misery.

'Kiomi, old friend!' I called to her. I could have cursed that other
friend, the son of mischief; for she, I could have sworn, had been
fiercely and wantonly hunted. Chastity of nature, intense personal pride,
were as proper to her as the free winds are to the heaths: they were as
visible to dull divination as the milky blue about the iris of her
eyeballs. She had actually no animal vileness, animal though she might be
termed, and would have appeared if compared with Heriot's admirable
Cissies and Gwennies, and other ladies of the Graces that run to fall,
and spend their pains more in kindling the scent of the huntsman than in
effectively flying.

There was no consolation for her.

The girl Eveleen came in sight, loitering and looking, kicking her idle
heels.

Kiomi turned sharp round to me.

'I'm going. Your father's here, up at Bulsted. I'll see him. He won't
tell. He'll come soon. You'll be fit to walk in a day. You're sound as a
nail. Goodbye--I shan't say good-bye twice,' she answered my attempt to
keep her, and passed into the tent, out of which she brought a small
bundle tied in a yellow handkerchief, and walked away, without nodding or
speaking.

'What was that you said to Kiomi?' I questioned Eveleen, who was quickly
beside me.

She replied, accurately or not: 'I told her our men'd give her as good as
she gave me, let her wait and see.'

Therewith she pouted; or, to sketch her with precision, 'snouted' would
better convey the vivacity of her ugly flash of features. It was an error
in me to think her heartless. She talked of her aunt Kiomi
affectionately, for a gipsy girl, whose modulated tones are all addressed
to the soft public. Eveleen spoke with the pride of bated breath of the
ferocious unforgivingness of their men. Perhaps if she had known that I
traced the good repute of the tribes for purity to the sweeter instincts
of the women, she would have eulogized her sex to amuse me. Gipsy girls,
like other people, are fond of showing off; but it would have been a
victory of education to have helped her to feel the distinction of the
feminine sense of shame half as awfully and warmly as she did the
inscrutable iron despotism of the males. She hinted that the mistake of
which I had been the victim would be rectified.

'Tell your men I'll hunt them down like rats if I hear of it,' said I.

While we were conversing my father arrived. Eveleen, not knowing him,
would have had me accept the friendly covering of a mat.

'Here 's a big one! he's a clergyman,' she muttered to herself, and ran
to him and set up a gipsy whine, fronting me up to the last step while
she advanced; she only yielded ground to my outcry.

My father bent over me. Kiomi had prepared him for what he saw. I quieted
his alarm by talking currently and easily. Julia Bulsted had despatched a
messenger to inform him of my mysterious disappearance; but he, as his
way was, revelling in large conjectures, had half imagined me seized by a
gust of passion, and bound for Germany. 'Without my luggage?' I laughed.

'Ay, without your luggage, Richie,' he answered seriously. His conceit of
a better knowledge of me than others possessed, had buoyed him up. 'For I
knew,' he said, 'we two do nothing like the herd of men. I thought you
were off to her, my boy. Now!' he looked at me, and this look of dismay
was a perfect mirror. I was not a presentable object.

He stretched his limbs on the heather and kept hold of my hand, looking
and talking watchfully, doctor-like, doubting me to be as sound in body
as I assured him I was, despite aches and pains. Eveleen hung near.

'These people have been kind to you?' he said.

'No, the biggest brutes on the earth,' said I.

'Oh! you say that, when I spotted you out in the dark where you might
have lied to be eaten, and carried you and washed your bloody face, and
watched you, and never slept, I didn't, to mother you and wet your head!'
cried the girl.

My father beckoned to her and thanked her appreciably in the yellow
tongue.

'So these scoundrels of the high road fell upon you and robbed you,
Richie?'

I nodded.

'You let him think they robbed you, and you had your purse to give me a
gold guinea out of it!' Eveleen cried, and finding herself in the wrong
track, volubly resumed: 'That they didn't, for they hadn't time, whether
they meant to, and the night black as a coal, whoever they were.'

The mystery of my not having sent word to Bulsted or to Riversley
perplexed my father.

'Comfortable here!' he echoed me, disconsolately, and glanced at the
heath, the tent, the black circle of the broth-pot, and the wild girl.




CHAPTER XLVII

MY FATHER ACTS THE CHARMER AGAIN

Kiomi's mother was seen in a turn of the gravel-cutting, bearing
purchases from Durstan village. She took the new circumstances in with a
single cast up of her wary eyelids; and her, and her skill in surgery and
art in medicine, I praised to lull her fears, which procured me the
denomination of old friend, as well as handsome gentleman: she went so
far as to add, in a fit of natural warmth, nice fellow; and it is the
truth, that this term effected wonders in flattering me: it seemed to
reveal to me how simple it was for Harry Richmond, one whom gipsies could
think a nice fellow, to be the lord of Janet's affections--to be her
husband. My heart throbbed; yet she was within range of a mile and a
half, and I did not wish to be taken to her. I did wish to smell the
piney air about the lake-palace; but the thought of Ottilia caused me no
quick pulsations.

My father remained an hour. He could not perceive the drift of my
objection to go either to Bulsted or to Riversley, and desire that my
misadventure should be unknown at those places. However, he obeyed me, as
I could always trust him to do scrupulously, and told a tale at Bulsted.
In the afternoon he returned in a carriage to convey me to the seaside.
When I was raised I fainted, and saw the last of the camp on Durstan much
as I had come to it first. Sickness and swimming of the head continued
for several days. I was persecuted with the sensation of the carriage
journey, and an iteration of my father's that ran: 'My son's inanimate
body in my arms,' or 'Clasping the lifeless body of my sole son, Harry
Richmond,' and other variations. I said nothing about it. He told me
aghast that I had spat blood. A battery of eight fists, having it in the
end all its own way, leaves a deeper indentation on its target than a
pistol-shot that passes free of the vital chords. My convalescence in
Germany was a melody compared with this. I ought to have stopped in the
tent, according to the wise old mother's advice, given sincerely, for
prudence counselled her to strike her canvas and be gone. There I should
have lain, interested in the progress of a bee, the course of a beetle or
a cloud, a spider's business, and the shaking of the gorse and the
heather, until good health had grown out of thoughtlessness. The very
sight of my father was as a hive of humming troubles.

His intense anxiety about me reflected in my mind the endless worry I had
concerning him. It was the intellect which condemned him when he wore a
joyful air, and the sensations when he waxed over-solicitous. Whether or
not the sentences were just, the judges should have sometimes shifted
places. I was unable to divine why he fevered me so much. Must I say
it?--He had ceased to entertain me. Instead of a comic I found him a
tragic spectacle; and his exuberant anticipations, his bursting hopes
that fed their forcing-bed with the blight and decay of their
predecessors, his transient fits of despair after a touch at my pulses,
and exclamation of 'Oh, Richie, Richie, if only I had my boy up and
well!'--assuming that nothing but my tardy recovery stood in the way of
our contentment--were examples of downright unreason such as
contemplation through the comic glass would have excused; the tragic
could not. I knew, nevertheless, that to the rest of the world he was a
progressive comedy: and the knowledge made him seem more tragic still. He
clearly could not learn from misfortune; he was not to be contained.
Money I gave him freely, holding the money at my disposal his own; I
chafed at his unteachable spirit, surely one of the most tragical things
in life; and the proof of my love for him was that I thought it so,
though I should have been kinder had he amused me, as in the old days.

Conceive to yourself the keeping watch over a fountain choked in its
spouting, incessantly labouring to spin a jet into the air; now for a
moment glittering and towering in a column, and once more straining to
mount. My father appeared to me in that and other images. He would have
had me believe him shooting to his zenith, victorious at last. I likewise
was to reap a victory of the highest kind from the attack of the
mysterious ruffians; so much; he said, he thought he could assure me of.
He chattered of an intimidated Government, and Dettermain and Newson;
duchesses, dukes, most friendly; innumerable invitations to country
castles; and among other things one which really showed him to be capable
of conceiving ideas and working from an initiative. But this, too, though
it accomplished a temporary service, he rendered illusory to me by his
unhappy manner of regarding it as an instance of his now permanent social
authority. He had instituted what he called his JURY OF HONOUR COURT,
composed of the select gentlemen of the realm, ostensibly to weigh the
causes of disputes between members of their class, and decree the method
of settlement: but actually, my father admitted, to put a stop to the
affair between Edbury and me.

'That was the origin of the notion, Richie. I carried it on. I dined some
of the best men of our day. I seized the opportunity when our choicest
"emperor" was rolling on wheels to propound my system. I mention the
names of Bramham DeWitt, Colonel Hibbert Segrave, Lord Alonzo Carr,
Admiral Loftus, the Earl of Luton, the Marquis of Hatchford, Jack
Hippony, Monterez Williams,--I think you know him?--and little Dick
Phillimore, son of a big-wig, a fellow of a capital wit and discretion; I
mention them as present to convince you we are not triflers, dear boy. My
argument ran, it is absurd to fight; also it is intolerable to be
compelled to submit to insult. As the case stands, we are under a summary
edict of the citizens, to whom chivalry is unknown. Well, well, I
delivered a short speech. Fighting, I said, resembled butting,--a
performance proper to creatures that grow horns instead of brains . . not
to allude to a multitude of telling remarks; and the question "Is man a
fighting animal?" my answer being that he is not born with spurs on his
heels or horns to his head and that those who insisted on fighting should
be examined by competent anatomists, "ologists" of some sort, to decide
whether they have the excrescences, and proclaim them . . . touching on
these lighter parts of my theme with extreme delicacy. But--and here I
dwelt on my point: Man, if not a fighting animal in his glorious--I
forgot what--is a sensitive one, and has the idea of honour. "Hear," from
Colonel Segrave, and Sir Weeton Slaterhe was one of the party. In fine,
Richie, I found myself wafted into a breathing oration. I cannot, I
confess it humbly, hear your "hear, hear," without going up and off,
inflated like a balloon. "Shall the arbitration of the magistracy,
indemnifications in money awarded by the Law-courts, succeed in
satisfying,"--but I declare to you, Richie, it was no platform speech. I
know your term--"the chaincable sentence." Nothing of the kind, I assure
you. Plain sense, as from gentlemen to gentlemen. We require, I said, a
protection that the polite world of Great Britain does not now afford us
against the aggressions of the knave, the fool, and the brute. We
establish a Court. We do hereby--no, no, not the "hereby"; quite simply,
Richie--pledge ourselves--I said some other word not "pledge" to use our
utmost authority and influence to exclude from our circles persons
refusing to make the reparation of an apology for wanton common insults:
we renounce intercourse with men declining, when guilty of provoking the
sentiment of hostility, to submit to the jurisdiction of our Court. All I
want you to see is the notion. We raise the shield against the cowardly
bully which the laws have raised against the bloody one. "And
gentlemen,"' my father resumed his oration, forgetting my sober eye for a
minute--'"Gentlemen, we are the ultimate Court of Appeal for men who
cherish their honour, yet abstain from fastening it like a millstone
round the neck of their common-sense." Credit me, Richie, the proposition
kindled. We cited Lord Edbury to appear before us, and I tell you we
extracted an ample apology to you from that young nobleman. And let me
add, one that I, that we, must impose it upon an old son to accept. He
does! Come, come. And you shall see, Richie, society shall never repose
an inert mass under my leadership. I cure it; I shake it and cure it.'

He promenaded the room, repeating: 'I do not say I am possessed of a
panacea,' and bending to my chin as he passed; 'I maintain that I can and
do fulfil the duties of my station, which is my element, attained in the
teeth of considerable difficulties, as no other man could, be he prince
or Prime Minister. Not one,' he flourished, stepping onward. 'And mind
you, Richie, this,' he swung round, conscious as ever of the critic in
me, though witless to correct his pomp of style, 'this is not
self-glorification. I point you facts. I have a thousand
schemes--projects. I recognize the value of early misfortune. The
particular misfortune of princes born is that they know nothing of the
world--babies! I grant you, babies. Now, I do. I have it on my thumbnail.
I know its wants. And just as I succeeded in making you a member of our
Parliament in assembly, and the husband of an hereditary princess--hear
me--so will I make good my original determination to be in myself the
fountain of our social laws, and leader. I have never, I believe--to
speak conscientiously--failed in a thing I have once determined on.'

The single wish that I might be a boy again, to find pleasure in his
talk, was all that remained to combat the distaste I had for such
oppressive deliveries of a mind apparently as little capable of being
seated as a bladder charged with gas. I thanked him for getting rid of
Edbury, and a touch of remorse pricked me, it is true, on his turning
abruptly and saying: 'You see me in my nakedness, Richie. To you and my
valet, the heart, the body!' He was too sympathetic not to have a keen
apprehension of a state of hostility in one whom he loved. If I had
inclined to melt, however, his next remark would have been enough to
harden me: 'I have fought as many battles, and gained as startling
victories as Napoleon Buonaparte; he was an upstart.' The word gave me a
jerk.

Sometimes he would indulge me transparently in a political controversy,
confessing that my dialectical dexterity went far to make a Radical of
him. I had no other amusement, or I should have held my peace. I tried
every argument I could think of to prove to him that there was neither
honour, nor dignity, nor profit in aiming at titular distinctions not
forced upon us by the circumstances of our birth. He kept his position
with much sly fencing, approaching shrewdness; and, whatever I might say,
I could not deny that a vile old knockknee'd world, tugging its forelock
to the look of rank and chink of wealth, backed him, if he chose to be
insensible to radical dignity.

'In my time,' said he, 'all young gentlemen were born Tories. The doctor
no more expected to see a Radical come into the world from a good family
than a radish. But I discern you, my dear boy. Our reigning Families must
now be active; they require the discipline I have undergone; and I also
dine at aldermen's tables, and lay a foundation-stone--as Jorian
says--with the facility of a hen-mother: that should not suffice them.
'Tis not sufficient for me. I lay my stone, eat my dinner, make my
complimentary speech--and that is all that is expected of us; but I am
fully aware we should do more. We must lead, or we are lost. Ay, and--to
quote you a Lord Mayor's barge is a pretty piece of gilt for the festive
and luxurious to run up the river Thames in and mark their swans. I am
convinced there is something deep in that. But what am I to do? Would you
have me frown upon the people? Richie, it is prudent--I maintain it
righteous, nay, it is, I affirm positively, sovereign wisdom--to
cultivate every flower in the British bosom. Riposte me--have you too
many? Say yes, and you pass my guard. You cannot. I fence you there. This
British loyalty is, in my estimation, absolutely beautiful. We grow to a
head in our old England. The people have an eye! I need no introduction
to them. We reciprocate a highly cordial feeling when they line the
streets and roads with respectful salutations, and I acknowledge their
demonstrative goodwill. These things make us a nation. By heaven, Richie,
you are, on this occasion, if your dad may tell you so, wrong. I ask
pardon for my bluntness; but I put it to you, could we, not travelling as
personages in our well-beloved country, count on civility to greet us
everywhere? Assuredly not. My position is, that by consenting to their
honest enthusiasm, we the identical effect you are perpetually crying out
for--we civilize them, we civilize them. Goodness!--a Great Britain
without Royalty!'

He launched on a series of desolate images. In the end, he at least
persuaded himself that he had an idea in his anxiety to cultivate the
primary British sentiment.

We moved from town to town along the South coast; but it was vain to hope
we might be taken for simple people. Nor was he altogether to blame,
except in allowing the national instinct for 'worship and reverence' to
air itself unrebuked. I fled to the island. Temple ran down to meet me
there, and I heard that Janet had written to him for news of me. He
entered our hotel a private person; when he passed out, hats flew off
before him. The modest little fellow went along a double line of
attentive observers on the pier, and came back, asking me in astonishment
who he was supposed to be.

'I petitioned for privacy here!' exclaimed my father. It accounted for
the mystery.

Temple knew my feelings, and did but glance at me.

Close upon Temple's arrival we had a strange couple of visitors.
'Mistress Dolly Disher and her husband,' my father introduced them. She
called him by one of his Christian names inadvertently at times. The
husband was a confectioner, a satisfied shade of a man who reserved the
exercise of his will for his business, we learnt; she, a bustling,
fresh-faced woman of forty-five, with still expressive dark eyes, and, I
guessed, the ideal remainder of a passion in her bosom. The guess was no
great hazard. She was soon sitting beside me, telling me of the 'years'
she had known my father, and of the most affectionate friend and perfect
gentleman he was of the ladies who had been in love with him; 'no
wonder': and of his sorrows and struggles, and his beautiful voice, and
hearts that bled for him; and of one at least who prayed and trusted he
would be successful at last.

Temple and the pallid confectioner spent the day on board a yacht with my
father. Mrs. Dolly stayed to nurse me and persuade me to swallow
medicine. She talked of her youth, when, as a fashionable bootmaker's
daughter, she permitted no bills to be sent in to Mr. Richmond, alleging,
as a sufficient reason for it to her father, that their family came from
Richmond in Yorkshire. Eventually, the bills were always paid. She had
not been able to manage her husband so well; and the consequence was,
that (she breathed low) an execution was out; 'though I tell him,' she
said tremulously, 'he 's sure to be paid in the long run, if only he'll
wait. But no; he is you cannot think how obstinate in his business. And
my girl Augusta waiting for Mr. Roy Richmond, the wish of our hearts! to
assist at her wedding; and can we ask it, and have an execution hanging
over him? And for all my husband's a guest here, he's as likely as not to
set the officers at work, do what I will, to-morrow or any day. Your
father invited us, Mr. Harry. I forced my husband to come, hoping against
hope; for your papa gave the orders, relying on me, as he believed he
might, and my husband undertook them, all through me. There it stops; he
hears reports, and he takes fright: in goes the bill: then it's law, and
last Oh! I'm ashamed.'

Mr. Disher's bill was for supplying suppers to the Balls. He received my
cheque for the amount in full, observing that he had been confident his
wife was correct when she said it would be paid, but a tradesman's
business was to hasten the day of payment; and, for a penance, he himself
would pacify the lawyers.

On hearing of the settlement of Mr. Disher's claim, my father ahem'd,
speechless, which was a sign of his swallowing vexation. He remarked that
I had, no doubt with the best intentions, encroached on his liberty. 'I
do not like to have my debts disturbed.' He put it to me, whether a man,
carrying out a life-long plan, would not be disconcerted by the
friendliest intervention. This payment to Disher he pronounced fatal in
policy. 'You have struck a heavy blow to my credit, Richie. Good little
Mistress Dolly brought the man down here--no select addition to our
society--and we were doing our utmost to endure him, as the ladies say,
for the very purpose . . . but the error stands committed! For the
future, friend Disher will infallibly expect payments within the year.
Credit for suppers is the guarantee of unlimited entertainments. And I
was inspiring him with absolute confidence for next year's campaign.
Money, you are aware, is no longer a question to terrify me. I hold
proofs that I have conclusively frightened Government, and you know it.
But this regards the manipulation of the man Disher. He will now dictate
to me. A refresher of a few hundreds would have been impolitic to this
kind of man; but the entire sum! and to a creditor in arms! You reverse
the proper situations of gentleman and tradesman. My supperman, in
particular, should be taught to understand that he is bound up in my
success. Something frightened him; he proceeded at law; and now we have
shown him that he has frightened us. An execution? My dear boy, I have
danced an execution five years running, and ordered, consecutively, at
the same house. Like other matters, an execution depends upon how you
treat it. The odds are that we have mortally offended Mistress Dolly.' He
apologized for dwelling on the subject, with the plea that it was an
essential part of his machinery of action, and the usual comparison of
'the sagacious General' whose forethought omitted no minutiae. I had to
listen.

The lady professed to be hurt. The payment, however, put an end to the
visit of this couple. Politic or not, it was a large sum to disburse, and
once more my attention became fixed on the probable display of figures in
my bankers' book. Bonds and bills were falling due: the current expenses
were exhausting. I tried to face the evil, and take a line of conduct,
staggering, as I did on my feet. Had I been well enough, I believe I
should have gone to my grandfather, to throw myself on his good-nature;
such was the brain's wise counsel: but I was all nerves and alarms,
insomuch that I interdicted Temple's writing to Janet, lest it should
bring on me letters from my aunt Dorothy, full of advice that could no
longer be followed, well-meant cautions that might as well be addressed
to the mile-posts behind me. Moreover, Janet would be flying on the wind
to me, and I had a craving for soft arms and the look of her eyebrows,
that warned me to keep her off if I intended to act as became a man of
good faith.

Fair weather, sunny green sea-water speckled with yachts shooting and
bounding, and sending me the sharp sense of life there is in dashed-up
fountains of silvery salt-spray, would have quickened my blood sooner but
for this hot-bed of fruitless adventure, tricksy precepts, and wisdom
turned imp, in which my father had again planted me. To pity him seemed a
childish affectation. His praise of my good looks pleased me, for on that
point he was fitted to be a judge, and I was still fancying I had lost
them on the heath. Troops of the satellites of his grand parade
surrounded him. I saw him walk down the pier like one breaking up a
levee. At times he appeared to me a commanding phantasm in the midst of
phantasm figures of great ladies and their lords, whose names he told off
on his return like a drover counting his herd; but within range of his
eye and voice the reality of him grew overpowering. It seduced me, and,
despite reason, I began to feel warm under his compliments. He was like
wine. Gaiety sprang under his feet. Sitting at my window, I thirsted to
see him when he was out of sight, and had touches of the passion of my
boyhood.

I listened credulously, too, as in the old days, when he repeated, 'You
will find I am a magician, and very soon, Richie, mark me.' His manner
hinted that there was a surprise in store. 'You have not been on the
brink of the grave for nothing.' He resembled wine in the other
conditions attached to its rare qualities. Oh for the choice of having
only a little of him, instead of having him on my heart! The unfilial
wish attacked me frequently: he could be, and was, so ravishing to
strangers and light acquaintances. Did by chance a likeness exist between
us? My sick fancy rushed to the Belthams for a denial. There did, of some
sort, I knew; and the thought partitioned my dreamy ideas, of which the
noblest, taking advantage of my physical weakness, compelled me to
confess that it was a vain delusion for one such as I to hope for
Ottilia. This looking at the roots of yourself, if you are possessed of a
nobler half that will do it, is a sound corrective of an excessive
ambition. Unfortunately it would seem that young men can do it only in
sickness. With the use of my legs, and open-air breathing, I became
compact, and as hungry and zealous on behalf of my individuality, as
proud of it as I had ever been: prouder and hungrier.

My first day of outing, when, looking at every face, I could reflect on
the miraculous issue of mine almost clear from its pummelling, and above
all, that my nose was safe--not stamped with the pugilist's
brand--inspired a lyrical ebullition of gratitude. Who so intoxicated as
the convalescent catching at health?

I met Charles Etherell on the pier, and heard that my Parliamentary seat
was considered in peril, together with a deal of gossip about my
disappearance.

My father, who was growing markedly restless, on the watch for letters
and new arrivals, started to pay Chippenden a flying visit. He begged me
urgently to remain for another few days, while he gathered information,
saying my presence at his chief quarters did him infinite service, and I
always thought that possible. I should find he was a magician, he
repeated, with a sort of hesitating fervour.

I had just waved my hand to him as the boat was bearing him away from the
pier-head, when a feminine voice murmured in my ear, 'Is not this our
third meeting, Mr. Harry Richmond?--Venice, Elbestadt, and the Isle of
Wight?' She ran on, allowing me time to recognize Clara Goodwin. 'What
was your last adventure? You have been ill. Very ill? Has it been
serious?'

I made light of it. 'No: a tumble.'

'You look pale,' she said quickly.

'That's from grieving at the loss of my beauty, Miss Goodwin.'

'Have you really not been seriously ill?' she asked with an astonishing
eagerness.

I told her mock-loftily that I did not believe in serious illnesses
coming to godlike youth, and plied her in turn with inquiries.

'You have not been laid up in bed?' she persisted.

'No, on my honour, not in bed.'

'Then,' said she, 'I would give much to be able to stop that boat.'

She amazed me. 'Why?'

'Because it's going on a bad errand,' she replied.

'Miss Goodwin, you perplex me. My father has started in that boat.'

'Yes, I saw him.' She glanced hastily at the foam in a way to show
indifference. 'What I am saying concerns others . . . who have heard you
were dangerously ill. I have sent for them to hasten across.'

'My aunt and Miss Ilchester?'

'No.'

'Who are they? Miss Goodwin, I'll answer any question. I've been
queerish, that's true. Now let me hear who they are, when you arrived,
when you expect them. Where are they now?'

'As to me,' she responded with what stretched on my ears like an
insufferable drawl, 'I came over last night to hire a furnished house or
lodgings. Papa has an appointment attached to the fortifications yonder.
We'll leave the pier, if you please. You draw too much attention on
ladies who venture to claim acquaintance with so important a gentleman.'

We walked the whole length of the pier, chatting of our former meetings.

'Not here,' she said, as soon as I began to question.

I was led farther on, half expecting that the accessories of time and
place would have to do with the revelation.

The bitter creature drew me at her heels into a linendraper's shop. There
she took a seat, pitched her voice to the key of a lady's at a
dinner-table, when speaking to her cavalier of the history or attire of
some one present, and said, 'You are sure the illness was not at all
feigned?'

She had me as completely at her mercy in this detestable shop as if I had
been in a witness-box.

'Feigned!' I exclaimed.

'That is no answer. And pray remember where you are.'

'No, the illness was not feigned.'

'And you have not made the most of it?'

'What an extraordinary thing to say!'

'That is no answer. And please do not imagine yourself under the
necessity of acting every sentiment of your heart before these people.'

She favoured a shopman with half-a-dozen directions.

'My answer is, then, that I have not made the most of it,' I said.

'Not even by proxy?'

'Once more I'm adrift.'

'You are certainly energetic. I must address you as a brother, or it will
be supposed we are quarrelling. Harry, do you like that pattern?'

'Yes. What's the meaning of proxy?'

'With the accent you give it, heaven only knows what it means. I would
rather you did not talk here like a Frenchman relating his last
love-affair in company.

Must your voice escape control exactly at the indicatory words? Do you
think your father made the most of it?'

'Of my illness? Oh! yes; the utmost. I should undoubtedly think so.
That's his way.'

'Why did you permit it?'

'I was what they call "wandering" half the time. Besides, who could keep
him in check? I rarely know what he is doing.'

'You don't know what he wrote?'

'Wrote?'

'That you were dying.'

'Of me? To whom?'

She scrutinized me, and rose from her chair. 'I must try some other shop.
How is it, that if these English people cannot make a "berthe" fit to
wear, they do not conceive the idea of importing such things from Paris?
I will take your arm, Harry.'

'You have bought nothing,' I remarked.

'I have as much as I went for,' she replied, and gravely thanked the
assistant leaning on his thumbs across the counter; after which, dropping
the graceless play of an enigma, she inquired whether I had forgotten the
Frau von Dittmarsch.

I had, utterly; but not her maiden name of Sibley.

'Miss Goodwin, is she one of those who are coming to the island?'

'Frau von Dittmarsch? Yes. She takes an interest in you. She and I have
been in correspondence ever since my visit to Sarkeld. It reminds me, you
may vary my maiden name with the Christian, if you like. Harry, I believe
you are truthful as ever, in spite--'

'Don't be unjust,' said I.

'I wish I could think I was!' she rejoined. 'Frau von Dittmarsch was at
Sarkeld, and received terrible news of you. She called on me, at my
father's residence over the water yonder, yesterday afternoon, desiring
greatly to know--she is as cautious as one with a jewel in her
custody--how it fared with you, whether you were actually in a dying
state. I came here to learn; I have friends here: you were not alone, or
I should have called on you. The rumour was that you were very ill; so I
hired a furnished place for Frau von Dittmarsch at once. But when I saw
you and him together, and the parting between you, I began to have fears;
I should have countermanded the despatch I sent by the boat, had it been
possible.'

'It has gone! And tell me the name of the other.'

'Frau von Dittmarsch has a husband.'

'Not with her now. Oh! cruel! speak: her name?'

'Her name, Harry?' Her title is Countess von Delzenburg.'

'Not princess?'

'Not in England.'

Then Ottilia was here!

My father was indeed a magician!




CHAPTER XLVIII

THE PRINCESS ENTRAPPED

'Not princess in England,' could betoken but one thing--an incredible act
of devotion, so great that it stunned my senses, and I thought of it, and
of all it involved, before the vision of Ottilia crossing seas took
possession of me.

'The Princess Ottilia, Miss Goodwin?'

'The Countess of Delzenburg, Harry.'

'To see me? She has come!'

'Harry, you talk like the boy you were when we met before you knew her.
Yes and yes to everything you have to say, but I think you should spare
her name.'

'She comes thinking me ill?'

'Dying.'

'I'm as strong as ever I was.'

'I should imagine you are, only rather pale.'

'Have you, tell me, Clara, seen her yourself? Is she well?'

'Pale: not unwell: anxious.'

'About me?'

'It may be about the political affairs of the Continent; they are
disturbed.'

'She spoke of me?'

'Yes.'

'She is coming by the next boat?'

'It's my fear that she is.'

'Why do you fear?'

'Shall I answer you, Harry? It is useless now. Well, because she has been
deceived. That is why. You will soon find it out.'

'Prince Ernest is at Sarkeld?'

'In Paris, I hear.'

'How will your despatch reach these ladies in time for them to come over
by the next boat?'

'I have sent my father's servant. The General--he is promoted at last,
Harry--attends the ladies in person, and is now waiting for the boat's
arrival over there, to follow my directions.'

'You won't leave me?'

Miss Goodwin had promised to meet the foreign ladies on the pier. We
quarrelled and made it up a dozen times like girl and boy, I calling her
aunt Clara, as in the old days, and she calling me occasionally son
Richie: an imitation of my father's manner of speech to me when we formed
acquaintance first in Venice. But I was very little aware of what I was
saying or doing. The forces of my life were yoked to the heart, and
tumbled as confusedly as the world under Phaethon charioteer. We walked
on the heights above the town. I looked over the water to the white line
of shore and batteries where this wonder stood, who was what poets dream
of, deep-hearted men hope for, none quite believe in. Hardly could I; and
though my relenting spinster friend at my elbow kept assuring me it was
true that she was there, my sceptical sight fixed on the stale
prominences visible in the same features which they had worn day after
empty day of late. This deed of hers was an act of devotion great as
death. I knew it from experience consonant to Ottilia's character; but
could a princess, hereditary, and bound in the league of governing
princes, dare so to brave her condition? Complex of mind, simplest in
character, the uncontrollable nobility of her spirit was no sooner
recognized by me than I was shocked throughout by a sudden light,
contrasting me appallingly with this supreme of women, who swept the
earth aside for truth. I had never before received a distinct intimation
of my littleness of nature, and my first impulse was to fly from thought,
and then, as if to prove myself justly accused, I caught myself
regretting--no, not regretting, gazing, as it were, on a picture of
regrets--that Ottilia was not a romantic little lady of semi-celestial
rank, exquisitely rash, wilful, desperately enamoured, bearing as many
flying hues and peeps of fancy as a love-ballad, and not more roughly
brushing the root-emotions.

If she had but been such an one, what sprightly colours, delicious
sadness, magical transformations, tenderest intermixture of earth and
heaven; what tears and sunbeams, divinest pathos: what descents from
radiance to consolatory twilight, would have surrounded me for poetry and
pride to dwell on! What captivating melody in the minor key would have
been mine, though I lost her--the legacy of it all for ever! Say a
petulant princess, a star of beauty, mad for me, and the whisper of our
passion and sorrows traversing the flushed world! Was she coming? Not
she, but a touchstone, a relentless mirror, a piercing eye, a mind severe
as the Goddess of the God's head: a princess indeed, but essentially a
princess above women: a remorseless intellect, an actual soul visible in
the flesh. She was truth. Was I true? Not so very false, yet how far from
truth! The stains on me (a modern man writing his history is fugitive and
crepuscular in alluding to them, as a woman kneeling at the ear-guichet)
burnt like the blood-spots on the criminal compelled to touch his victim
by savage ordinance, which knew the savage and how to search him. And
these were faults of weakness rather than the sins of strength. I might
as fairly hope for absolution of them from Ottilia as from offended laws
of my natural being, gentle though she was, and charitable.

Was I not guilty of letting her come on to me hoodwinked at this moment?
I had a faint memory of Miss Goodwin's saying that she had been deceived,
and I suggested a plan of holding aloof until she had warned the princess
of my perfect recovery, to leave it at her option to see me.

'Yes,' Miss Goodwin assented: 'if you like, Harry.'

Her compassion for me only tentatively encouraged the idea. 'It would,
perhaps, be right. You are the judge. If you can do it. You are acting
bravely.' She must have laughed at me in her heart.

The hours wore on. My curse of introspection left me, and descending
through the town to the pier, amid the breezy blue skirts and
bonnet-strings, we watched the packet-boat approaching. There was in
advance one of the famous swift island wherries. Something went wrong
with it, for it was overtaken, and the steamer came in first. I jumped on
board, much bawled at. Out of a crowd of unknown visages, Janet appeared:
my aunt Dorothy was near her. The pair began chattering of my paleness,
and wickedness in keeping my illness unknown to them. They had seen
Temple on an excursion to London; he had betrayed me, as he would have
betrayed an archangel to Janet.

'Will you not look at us, Harry?' they both said.

The passengers were quitting the boat, strangers every one.

'Harry, have we really offended you in coming?' said Janet.

My aunt Dorothy took the blame on herself.

I scarcely noticed them, beyond leading them on to the pier-steps and
leaving them under charge of Miss Goodwin, who had, in matters of luggage
and porterage, the practical mind and aplomb of an Englishwoman that has
passed much of her time on the Continent. I fancied myself vilely duped
by this lady. The boat was empty of its passengers; a grumbling pier-man,
wounded in his dignity, notified to me that there were fines for
disregard of the Company's rules and regulations. His tone altered; he
touched his hat: 'Didn't know who you was, my lord.' Janet overheard him,
and her face was humorous.

'We may break the rules, you see,' I said to her.

'We saw him landing on the other side of the water,' she replied; so
spontaneously did the circumstance turn her thoughts on my father.

'Did you speak to him?'

'No.'

'You avoided him?'

'Aunty and I thought it best. He landed . . . there was a crowd.'

Miss Goodwin interposed: 'You go to Harry's hotel?'

'Grandada is coming down to-morrow or next day,' Janet prompted my aunt
Dorothy.

'If we could seek for a furnished house; Uberly would watch the luggage,'
Dorothy murmured in distress.

'Furnished houses, even rooms at hotels, are doubtful in the height of
the season,' Miss Goodwin remarked. 'Last night I engaged the only decent
set of rooms I could get, for friends of Harry's who are coming.'

'No wonder he was disappointed at seeing us--he was expecting them!' said
Janet, smiling a little.

'They are sure to come,' said Miss Goodwin.

Near us a couple of yachtsmen were conversing.

'Oh, he'll be back in a day or two,' one said. 'When you 've once tasted
that old boy, you can't do without him. I remember when I was a
youngster--it was in Lady Betty Bolton's day; she married old Edbury, you
know, first wife--the Magnificent was then in his prime. He spent his
money in a week: so he hired an eighty-ton schooner; he laid violent
hands on a Jew, bagged him, lugged him on board, and sailed away.'

'What the deuce did he want with a Jew?' cried the other.

'Oh, the Jew supplied cheques for a three months' cruise in the
Mediterranean, and came home, I heard, very good friends with his pirate.
That's only one of dozens.'

The unconscious slaughterers laughed.

'On another occasion'--I heard it said by the first speaker, as they
swung round to parade the pier, and passed on narrating.

'Not an hotel, if it is possible to avoid it,' my aunt Dorothy, with
heightened colour, urged Miss Goodwin. They talked together.

'Grandada is coming to you, Harry,' Janet said. 'He has business in
London, or he would have been here now. Our horses and carriages follow
us: everything you would like. He does love you! he is very anxious. I'm
afraid his health is worse than he thinks. Temple did not say your father
was here, but grandada must have suspected it when he consented to our
coming, and said he would follow us. So that looks well perhaps. He has
been much quieter since your money was paid back to you. If they should
meet . . . no, I hope they will not: grandada hates noise. And, Harry,
let me tell you: it may be nothing: if he questions you, do not take
fire; just answer plainly: I'm sure you understand. One in a temper at a
time I'm sure 's enough: you have only to be patient with him. He has
been going to London, to the City, seeing lawyers, bankers, brokers, and
coming back muttering. Ah! dear old man. And when he ought to have peace!
Harry, the poor will regret him in a thousand places. I write a great
deal for him now, and I know how they will. What are you looking at?'

I was looking at a man of huge stature, of the stiffest build, whose
shoulders showed me their full breadth while he stood displaying
frontwards the open of his hand in a salute.

'Schwartz!' I called. Janet started, imagining some fierce interjection.
The giant did not stir.

But others had heard. A lady stepped forward. 'Dear Mr. Harry Richmond!
Then you are better? We had most alarming news of you.'

I bowed to the Frau von Dittmarsch, anciently Miss Sibley.

'The princess?'

'She is here.'

Frau von Dittmarsch clasped Miss Goodwin's hand. I was touching
Ottilia's. A veil partly swathed her face. She trembled: the breeze
robbed me of her voice.

Our walk down the pier was almost in silence. Miss Goodwin assumed the
guardianship of the foreign ladies. I had to break from them and provide
for my aunt Dorothy and Janet.

'They went over in a little boat, they were so impatient. Who is she?'
Dorothy Beltham asked.

'The Princess Ottilia,' said Janet.

'Are you certain? Is it really, Harry?'

I confirmed it, and my aunt said, 'I should have guessed it could be no
other; she has a foreign grace.'

'General Goodwin was with them when the boat came in from the island,'
said Janet. 'He walked up to Harry's father, and you noticed, aunty, that
the ladies stood away, as if they wished to be unobserved, as we did, and
pulled down their veils. They would not wait for our boat. We passed them
crossing. People joked about the big servant over-weighing the wherry.'

Dorothy Beltham thought the water too rough for little boats.

'She knows what a sea is,' I said.

Janet gazed steadily after the retreating figures, and then commended me
to the search for rooms. The end of it was that I abandoned my father's
suite to them. An accommodating linen-draper possessed of a sea-view, and
rooms which hurled the tenant to the windows in desire for it, gave me
harbourage.

Till dusk I scoured the town to find Miss Goodwin, without whom there was
no clue to the habitation I was seeking, and I must have passed her
blindly again and again. My aunt Dorothy and Janet thanked me for my
consideration in sitting down to dine with them; they excused my haste to
retire. I heard no reproaches except on account of my not sending them
word of my illness. Janet was not warm. She changed in colour and voice
when I related what I had heard from Miss Goodwin, namely, that 'some
one' had informed the princess I was in a dying state. I was obliged to
offer up my father as a shield for Ottilia, lest false ideas should
tarnish the image of her in their minds. Janet did not speak of him. The
thought stood in her eyes; and there lies the evil of a sore subject
among persons of one household: they have not to speak to exhibit their
minds.

After a night of suspense I fell upon old Schwartz and Aennchen out in
the earliest dawn, according to their German habits, to have a gaze at
sea, and strange country and people. Aennchen was all wonder at the
solitary place, Schwartz at the big ships. But when they tried to direct
me to the habitation of their mistress, it was discovered by them that
they had lost their bearings. Aennchen told me the margravine had been
summoned to Rippau just before they left Sarkeld. Her mistress had
informed Baroness Turckems of her intention to visit England. Prince
Ernest was travelling in France.

The hour which brought me to Ottilia was noon. The arrangements of the
ladies could only grant me thirty minutes, for Janet was to drive the
princess out into the country to view the island. She and my aunt Dorothy
had been already introduced. Miss Goodwin, after presenting them,
insisted upon ceremoniously accompanying me to the house. Quite taking
the vulgar view of a proceeding such as the princess had been guilty of,
and perhaps fearing summary audacity and interestedness in the son of a
father like mine, she ventured on lecturing me, as though it lay with me
to restrain the fair romantic head, forbear from calling up my special
advantages, advise, and stand to the wisdom of this world, and be the man
of honour. The princess had said: 'Not see him when I have come to him?'
I reassured my undiscerning friend partly, not wholly.

'Would it be commonly sensible or civil, to refuse to see me, having
come?'

Miss Goodwin doubted.

I could indicate forcibly, because I felt, the clear-judging brain and
tempered self-command whereby Ottilia had gained her decision.

Miss Goodwin nodded and gave me the still-born affirmative of politeness.
Her English mind expressed itself willing to have exonerated the rash
great lady for visiting a dying lover, but he was not the same person now
that he was on his feet, consequently her expedition wore a different
aspect:--my not dying condemned her. She entreated me to keep the fact of
the princess's arrival unknown to my father, on which point we were one.
Intensely enthusiastic for the men of her race, she would have me, above
all things, by a form of adjuration designed to be a masterpiece of
persuasive rhetoric, 'prove myself an Englishman.' I was to show that
'the honour, interests, reputation and position of any lady (demented or
not,' she added) 'were as precious to me as to the owner': that 'no woman
was ever in peril of a shadow of loss in the hands of an English
gentleman,' and so forth, rather surprisingly to me, remembering her
off-hand manner of the foregoing day. But the sense of responsibility
thrown upon her ideas of our superior national dignity had awakened her
fervider naturalness--made her a different person, as we say when
accounting, in our fashion, for what a little added heat may do.

The half hour allotted to me fled. I went from the room and the house,
feeling that I had seen and heard her who was barely of the world of
humankind for me, so strongly did imagination fly with her. I kissed her
fingers, I gazed in her eyes, I heard the beloved voice. All passed too
swift for happiness. Recollections set me throbbing, but recollection
brought longing. She said, 'Now I have come I must see you, Harry.' Did
it signify that to see me was a piece of kindness at war with her
judgement? She rejoiced at my perfect recovery, though it robbed her of
the plea in extenuation of this step she had taken. She praised me for
abstaining to write to her, when I was stammering a set of
hastily-impressed reasons to excuse myself for the omission. She praised
my step into Parliament. It did not seem to involve a nearer approach to
her. She said, 'You have not wasted your time in England.' It was for my
solitary interests that she cared, then.

I brooded desperately. I could conceive an overlooking height that made
her utterance simple and consecutive: I could not reach it. Topics which
to me were palpitating, had no terror for her. She said, 'I have offended
my father; I have written to him; he will take me away.' In speaking of
the letter which had caused her to offend, she did not blame the writer.
I was suffered to run my eyes over it, and was ashamed. It read to me too
palpably as an outcry to delude and draw her hither:--pathos and pathos:
the father holding his dying son in his arms, his sole son, Harry
Richmond; the son set upon by enemies in the night: the lover never
daring to beg for a sight of his beloved ere he passed away:--not an
ill-worded letter; read uncritically, it may have been touching: it must
have been, though it was the reverse for me. I frowned, broke down in
regrets, under sharp humiliation.

She said, 'You knew nothing of it. A little transgression is the real
offender. When we are once out of the way traced for us, we are in danger
of offending at every step; we are as lawless as the outcasts.' That
meant, 'My turning aside to you originally was the blameable thing.' It
might mean, 'My love of you sets my ideas of duty at variance with my
father's.'

She smiled; nothing was uttered in a tone of despondency. Her high
courage and breeding gave her even in this pitfall the smoothness which
most women keep for society. Why she had not sent me any message or
tidings of herself to Riversley was not a matter that she could imagine
to perplex me: she could not imagine my losing faith in her. The least we
could do, I construed it, the religious bond between us was a faith in
one another that should sanctify to our souls the external injuries it
caused us to commit. But she talked in no such strain. Her delight in
treading English ground was her happy theme. She said, 'It is as young as
when we met in the forest'; namely, the feeling revived for England. How
far off we were from the green Devonshire coast, was one of her
questions, suggestive of our old yacht-voyage lying among her dreams.
Excepting an extreme and terrorizing paleness, there was little to fever
me with the thought that she suffered mortally. Of reproach, not a word;
nor of regret. At the first touch of hands, when we stood together,
alone, she said, 'Would hearing of your recovery have given me peace?' My
privileges were the touch of hands, the touch of her fingers to my lips,
a painless hearing and seeing, and passionate recollection. She said,
'Impatience is not for us, Harry': I was not to see her again before the
evening. These were the last words she said, and seemed the lightest
until my hot brain made a harvest of them transcending thrice-told vows
of love. Did they not mean, 'We two wait': therefore, 'The years are
bondmen to our stedfastness.' Could sweeter have been said? They might
mean nothing!

She was veiled when Janet drove her out; Janet sitting upright in her
masterly way, smoothing her pet ponies with the curl of her whip,
chatting and smiling; the princess slightly leaning back. I strode up to
the country roads, proud of our land's beauty under a complacent sky. By
happy chance, which in a generous mood I ascribed to Janet's good nature,
I came across them at a seven miles' distance. They were talking
spiritedly: what was wonderful, they gave not much heed to me: they
seemed on edge for one another's conversation: each face was turned to
the other's, and after nodding an adieu, they resumed the animated
discourse. I had been rather in alarm lest Ottilia should think little of
Janet. They passed out of sight without recurring to a thought of me
behind them.

In the evening I was one among a group of ladies. I had the opportunity
of hearing the running interchange between Ottilia and Janet, which
appeared to be upon equal terms; indeed, Janet led. The subjects were not
very deep. Plain wits, candour, and an unpretending tongue, it seemed,
could make common subjects attractive, as fair weather does our English
woods and fields. The princess was attracted by something in Janet. I
myself felt the sway of something, while observing Ottilia's rapt
pleasure in her talk and her laughter, with those funny familiar frowns
and current dimples twisting and melting away like a play of shadows on
the eddies of the brook.

'I 'm glad to be with her,' Janet said of Ottilia.

It was just in that manner she spoke in Ottilia's presence. Why it should
sound elsewhere unsatisfactorily blunt, and there possess a finished
charm, I could not understand.

I mentioned to Janet that I feared my father would be returning.

She contained herself with a bridled 'Oh!'

We were of one mind as to the necessity for keeping him absent, if
possible.

'Harry, you'll pardon me; I can't talk of him,' said she.

I proposed half-earnestly to foil his return by going to London at once.

'That's manly; that's nice of you,' Janet said.

This was on our walk from the house at night. My aunt Dorothy listened,
pressing my arm. The next morning Janet urged me to go at once. 'Keep him
away, bring down grandada, Harry. She cannot quit the island, because she
has given Prince Ernest immediate rendezvous here. You must not delay to
go. Yes, the Countess of Delzenburg shall have your excuses. And no, I
promise you I will run nobody down. Besides, if I do, aunty will be at
hand to plead for the defence, and she can! She has a way that binds one
to accept everything she says, and Temple ought to study with her for a
year or two before he wears his gown. Bring him back with you and
grandada. He is esteemed here at his true worth. I love him for making
her in love with English boys. I leave the men for those who know them,
but English boys are unrivalled, I declare. Honesty, bravery, modesty,
and nice looks! They are so nice in their style and their way of talking.
I tell her, our men may be shy and sneering,--awkward, I daresay; but our
boys beat the world. Do bring down Temple. I should so like her to see a
cricket-match between two good elevens of our boys, Harry, while she is
in England! We could have arranged for one at Riversley.'

I went, and I repressed the idea, on my way, that Janet had manoeuvred by
sending me off to get rid of me, but I felt myself a living testimony to
her heartlessness: for no girl of any heart, acting the part of friend,
would have allowed me to go without a leave-taking of her I loved few
would have been so cruel as to declare it a duty to go at all, especially
when the chances were that I might return to find the princess wafted
away. Ottilia's condescension had done her no good. 'Turn to the right,
that's your path; on.' She seemed to speak in this style, much as she
made her touch of the reins understood by her ponies. 'I 'll take every
care of the princess,' she said. Her conceit was unbounded. I revelled in
contemptuous laughter at her assumption of the post of leader with
Ottilia. However, it was as well that I should go: there was no trusting
my father.




CHAPTER XLIX

WHICH FORESHADOWS A GENERAL GATHERING

At our Riversley station I observed the squire, in company with Captain
Bulsted, jump into a neighbouring carriage. I joined them, and was called
upon to answer various inquiries. The squire gave me one of his short
tight grasps of the hand, in which there was warmth and shyness, our
English mixture. The captain whispered in my ear: 'He oughtn't to be
alone.'

'How's the great-grandmother of the tribe?' said I.

Captain Bulsted nodded, as if he understood, but was at sea until I
mentioned the bottle of rum and the remarkable length of that old lady's
measurement.

'Ay, to be sure! a grand old soul,' he said. 'You know that scum of old,
Harry.'

I laughed, and so did he, at which I laughed the louder.

'He laughs, I suppose, because his party's got a majority in the House,'
said the squire.

'We gave you a handsome surplus this year, sir.'

'Sweated out of the country's skin and bone, ay!'

'You were complimented by the Chancellor of the Exchequer!'

'Yes, that fellow's compliments are like a cabman's, and cry fool:--he
never thanks you but when he's overpaid.'

Captain Bulsted applauded the sarcasm.

'Why did you keep out of knowledge all this time, Hal?' my grandfather
asked.

I referred him to the captain.

'Hang it,' cried Captain Bulsted, 'do you think I'd have been doing duty
for you if I'd known where to lay hold of you.'

'Well, if you didn't shake hands with me, you touched my toes,' said I,
and thanked him with all my heart for his kindness to an old woman on the
point of the grave. I had some fun to flavour melancholy with.

My grandfather resumed his complaint: 'You might have gone clean off, and
we none the wiser.'

'Are we quite sure that his head's clean on?' said the mystified captain.

'Of course we should run to him, wherever he was, if he was down on his
back,' the squire muttered.

'Ay, ay, sir; of course,' quoth Captain William, frowning to me to
reciprocate this relenting mood. 'But, Harry, where did you turn off that
night? We sat up expecting you. My poor Julia was in a terrible fright,
my lad. Eh? speak up.'

I raised the little finger.

'Oh, oh,' went he, happily reassured; but, reflecting, added: 'A bout of
it?'

I dropped him a penitent nod.

'That's bad, though,' said he.

'Then why did you tip me a bottle of rum, Captain William?'

'By George, Harry, you've had a crack o' the sconce,' he exclaimed, more
sagaciously than he was aware of.

My grandfather wanted to keep me by his side in London until we two
should start for the island next day; but his business was in the city,
mine toward the West. We appointed to meet two hours after reaching the
terminus.

He turned to me while giving directions to his man.

'You 've got him down there, I suppose?'

'My father's in town, sir. He shall keep away,' I said.

'Humph! I mayn't object to see him.'

This set me thinking.

Captain Bulsted--previously asking me in a very earnest manner whether I
was really all right and sound--favoured me with a hint:

'The squire has plunged into speculations of his own, or else he is
peeping at somebody else's. No danger of the dad being mixed up with
Companies? Let's hope not. Julia pledged her word to Janet that I would
look after the old squire. I suppose I can go home this evening? My girl
hates to be alone.'

'By all means,' said I; and the captain proposed to leave the squire at
his hotel, in the event of my failing to join him in the city.

'But don't fail, if you can help it,' he urged me; 'for things somehow,
my dear Harry, appear to me to look like the compass when the needle
gives signs of atmospheric disturbance. My only reason for saying so is
common observation. You can judge for yourself that he is glad to have
you with him.'

I told the captain I was equally glad; for, in fact, my grandfather's
quietness and apparently friendly disposition tempted me to petition for
a dower for the princess at once, so that I might be in the position to
offer Prince Ernest on his arrival a distinct alternative; supposing--it
was still but a supposition--Ottilia should empower me. Incessant
dialogues of perpetually shifting tendencies passed between Ottilia and
me in my brain--now dark, now mildly fair, now very wild, on one side at
least. Never, except by downright force of will, could I draw from the
phantom of her one purely irrational outcry, so deeply-rooted was the
knowledge of her nature and mind; and when I did force it, I was no
gainer: a puppet stood in her place--the vision of Ottilia melted out in
threads of vapour.

'And yet she has come to me; she has braved everything to come.' I might
say that, to liken her to the women who break rules and read duties by
their own light, but I could not cheat my knowledge of her. Mrs. Waddy
met me in the hall of my father's house, as usual, pressing, I regretted
to see, one hand to her side. 'Her heart,' she said, 'was easily set
pitty-pat now.' She had been, by her master's orders, examined by two of
the chief physicians of the kingdom, 'baronets both.' They advised total
rest. As far as I could apprehend, their baronetcies and doings in high
regions had been of more comfort than their prescriptions.

'What I am I must be,' she said, meekly; 'and I cannot quit his service
till he's abroad again, or I drop. He has promised me a monument. I don't
want it; but it shows his kindness.'

A letter from Heriot informed me that the affair between Edbury and me
was settled: he could not comprehend how.

'What is this new Jury of Honour? Who are the jurymen?' he asked, and
affected wit.

I thanked him for a thrashing in a curt reply.

My father had left the house early in the morning. Mrs. Waddy believed
that he meant to dine that evening at the season's farewell dinner of the
Trump-Trick Club: 'Leastways, Tollingby has orders to lay out his
gentlemen's-dinners' evening-suit. Yesterday afternoon he flew down to
Chippenden, and was home late. To-day he's in the City, or one of the
squares. Lady Edbury's--ah! detained in town with the jaundice or
toothache. He said he was sending to France for a dentist: or was it
Germany, for some lady's eyes? I am sure I don't know. Well or ill, so
long as you're anything to him, he will abound. Pocket and purse! You
know him by this time, Mr. Harry. Oh, my heart!'

A loud knock at the door had brought on the poor creature's palpitations.

This visitor was no other than Prince Ernest. The name on his card was
Graf von Delzenburg, and it set my heart leaping to as swift a measure as
Mrs. Waddy's.

Hearing that I was in the house, he desired to see me.

We met, with a formal bow.

'I congratulate you right heartily upon being out of the list of the
nekron,' he said, civilly. 'I am on my way to one of your
watering-places, whither my family should have preceded me. Do you
publish the names and addresses of visitors daily, as it is the custom
with us?'

I relieved his apprehensions on that head: 'Here and there, rarely; and
only at the hotels, I believe.' The excuse was furnished for offering the
princess's address.

'Possibly, in a year or two, we may have the pleasure of welcoming you at
Sarkeld,' said the prince, extending his hand. 'Then, you have seen the
Countess of Delzenburg?'

'On the day of her arrival, your Highness. Ladies of my family are
staying on the island.'

'Ah?'

He paused, and invited me to bow to him. We bowed thus in the room, in
the hall, and at the street-door.

For what purpose could he have called on my father? To hear the worst at
once? That seemed likely, supposing him to have lost his peculiar
confidence in the princess, of which the courtly paces he had put me
through precluded me from judging.

But I guessed acutely that it was not his intention to permit of my
meeting Ottilia a second time. The blow was hard: I felt it as if it had
been struck already, and thought I had gained resignation, until, like a
man reprieved on his road to execution, the narrowed circle of my heart
opened out to the breadth of the world in a minute. Returning from the
city, I hurried to my father's house, late in the afternoon, and heard
that he had started to overtake the prince, leaving word that the prince
was to be found at his address in the island. No doubt could exist
regarding the course I was bound to take. I drove to my grandfather,
stated my case to him, and by sheer vehemence took the wind out of his
sails; so that when I said, 'I am the only one alive who can control my
father,' he answered mildly, 'Seems t' other way,' and chose a small
snort for the indulgence of his private opinion.

'What! this princess came over alone, and is down driving out with my
girl under an alias?' he said, showing sour aversion at the prospect of a
collision with the foreign species, as expressive as the ridge of a cat's
back.

Temple came to dine with us, so I did not leave him quite to himself, and
Temple promised to accompany him down to the island.

'Oh, go, if you like,' the fretted old man dismissed me:

'I've got enough to think over. Hold him fast to stand up to me within
forty-eight hours, present time; you know who I mean; I've got a question
or two for him. How he treats his foreign princes and princesses don't
concern me. I'd say, like the Prevention-Cruelty-Animal's man to the
keeper of the menagerie, "Lecture 'em, wound their dignity, hurt their
feelings, only don't wop 'em." I don't wish any harm to them, but what
the deuce they do here nosing after my grandson! . . . There, go; we
shall be having it out ha' done with to-morrow or next day. I've run the
badger to earth, else I'm not fit to follow a scent.'

He grumbled at having to consume other than his Riversley bread, butter,
beef, and ale for probably another fortnight. One of the boasts of
Riversley was, that while the rest of the world ate and drank poison, the
Grange lived on its own solid substance, defying malefactory Radical
tricksters.

Temple was left to hear the rest. He had the sweetest of modest wishes
for a re-introduction to Ottilia.




CHAPTER L

WE ARE ALL IN MY FATHER'S NET

Journeying down by the mail-train in the face of a great sunken sunset
broken with cloud, I chanced to ask myself what it was that I seriously
desired to have. My purpose to curb my father was sincere and good; but
concerning my heart's desires, whitherward did they point? I thought of
Janet--she made me gasp for air; of Ottilia, and she made me long for
earth. Sharp, as I write it, the distinction smote me. I might have been
divided by an electrical shot into two halves, with such an equal force
was I drawn this way and that, pointing nowhither. To strangle the
thought of either one of them was like the pang of death; yet it did not
strike me that I loved the two: they were apart in my mind, actually as
if I had been divided. I passed the Riversley station under sombre sunset
fires, saddened by the fancy that my old home and vivacious Janet were
ashes, past hope. I came on the smell of salt air, and had that other
spirit of woman around me, of whom the controlled seadeeps were an image,
who spoke to my soul like starlight. Much wise counsel, and impatience of
the wisdom, went on within me. I walked like a man with a yawning wound,
and had to whip the sense of passion for a drug. Toward which one it
strove I know not; it was blind and stormy as the night.

Not a boatman would take me across. The lights of the island lay like a
crown on the water. I paced the ramparts, eyeing them, breathing the keen
salt of thundering waves, until they were robbed of their magic by the
coloured Fast.

It is, I have learnt, out of the conflict of sensations such as I then
underwent that a young man's brain and morality, supposing him not to
lean overmuch to sickly sentiment, becomes gradually enriched and
strengthened, and himself shaped for capable manhood. I was partly
conscious of a better condition in the morning; and a sober morning it
was to me after my long sentinel's step to and fro. I found myself
possessed of one key--whether the right one or not--wherewith to read the
princess, which was never possible to me when I was under stress of
passion, or of hope or despair; my perplexities over what she said, how
she looked, ceased to trouble me. I read her by this strange light: that
she was a woman who could only love intelligently--love, that is, in the
sense of giving herself. She had the power of passion, and it could be
stirred; but he who kindled it wrecked his chance if he could not stand
clear in her intellect's unsparing gaze. Twice already she must have felt
herself disillusioned by me. This third time, possibly, she blamed her
own fatally credulous tenderness, not me; but it was her third awakening,
and could affection and warmth of heart combat it? Her child's enthusiasm
for my country had prepared her for the impression which the waxen mind
of the dreamy invalid received deeply; and so, aided by the emotional
blood of youth, she gave me place in her imagination, probing me still
curiously, as I remembered, at a season when her sedate mind was
attaining to joint deliberations with the impulsive overgenerous heart.

Then ensued for her the successive shocks of discernment. She knew the to
have some of the vices, many follies, all the intemperateness of men who
carve a way for themselves in the common roads, if barely they do that.
And resembling common men (men, in a judgement elective as hers, common,
however able), I was not assuredly to be separated by her from my
associations; from the thought of my father, for example. Her look at him
in the lake-palace library, and her manner in unfolding and folding his
recent letter to her, and in one or two necessitated allusions, embraced
a kind of grave, pitiful humour, beyond smiles or any outward expression,
as if the acknowledgement that it was so quite obliterated the wonder
that it should be so--that one such as he could exercise influence upon
her destiny. Or she may have made her reckoning generally, not
personally, upon our human destinies: it is the more likely, if, as I
divine, the calm oval of her lifted eyelids contemplated him in the
fulness of the recognition that this world, of which we hope unuttered
things, can be shifted and swayed by an ignis-fatuus. The father of one
now seen through, could hardly fail of being transfixed himself. It was
horrible to think of. I would rather have added a vice to my faults than
that she should have penetrated him.

Nearing the island, I was reminded of the early morning when I landed on
the Flemish flats. I did not expect a similar surprise, but before my
rowers had pulled in, the tall beaconhead of old Schwartz notified that
his mistress might be abroad. Janet walked with her. I ran up the steps
to salute them, and had Ottilia's hand in mine.

'Prince Ernest has arrived?'

'My father came yesterday evening.'

'Do you leave to-day?'

'I cannot tell; he will decide.'

It seemed a good omen, until I scanned Janet's sombre face.

'You will not see us out for the rest of the day, Harry,' said she.

'That is your arrangement?'

'It is.'

'Your own?'

'Mine, if you like.'

There was something hard in her way of speaking, as though she blamed me,
and the princess were under her protection against me. She vouchsafed no
friendly significance of look and tone.

In spite of my readiness to criticize her (which in our language means
condemn) for always assuming leadership with whomsoever she might be, I
was impressed by the air of high-bred friendliness existing between her
and the princess. Their interchange was pleasant to hear. Ottilia had
caught the spirit of her frank manner of speech; and she, though in a
less degree, the princess's fine ease and sweetness. They conversed,
apparently, like equal minds. On material points, Janet unhesitatingly
led. It was she who brought the walk to a close.

'Now, Harry, you had better go and have a little sleep. I should like to
speak to you early.'

Ottilia immediately put her hand out to me.

I begged permission to see her to her door.

Janet replied for her, indicating old Schwartz: 'We have a protector, you
see, six feet and a half.'

An hour later, Schwartz was following her to the steps of her hotel. She
saw me, and waited. For a wonder, she displayed reluctance in
disburdening herself of what she had to say. 'Harry, you know that he has
come? He and Prince Ernest came together. Get him to leave the island at
once: he can return to-morrow. Grandada writes of wishing to see him. Get
him away to-day.'

'Is the prince going to stay here?' I asked.

'No. I daresay I am only guessing; I hope so. He has threatened the
prince.'

'What with?'

'Oh! Harry, can't you understand? I'm no reader of etiquette, but even I
can see that the story of a young princess travelling over to England
alone to visit . . . and you . . ., and her father fetching her away! The
prince is almost at his mercy, unless you make the man behave like a
gentleman. This is exactly the thing Miss Goodwin feared!'

'But who's to hear of the story?' said I.

Janet gave an impatient sigh.

'Do you mean that my father has threatened to publish it, Janet?'

'I won't say he has. He has made the prince afraid to move: that I think
is true.'

'Did the princess herself mention it to you?'

'She understands her situation, I am sure.'

'Did she speak of "the man," as you call him?'

'Yes: not as I do. You must try by-and-by to forgive me. Whether he set a
trap or not, he has decoyed her--don't frown at words--and it remains for
you to act as I don't doubt you will; but lose no time. Determine. Oh! if
I were a man!'

'You would muzzle us?'

'Muzzle, or anything you please; I would make any one related to me
behave honourably. I would give him the alternative . . .'

'You foolish girl! suppose he took it?'

'I would make him feel my will. He should not take it. Keep to the
circumstances, Harry. If you have no control over him--I should think I
was not fit to live, in such a position! No control over him at a moment
like this? and the princess in danger of having her reputation hurt!
Surely, Harry! But why should I speak to you as if you were undecided!'

'Where is he?'

'At the house where you sleep. He surrendered his rooms here very
kindly.'

'Aunty has seen him?'

Janet blushed: I thought I knew why. It was for subtler reasons than I
should have credited her with conceiving.

'She sent for him, at my request, late last night. She believed her
influence would be decisive. So do I. She could not even make the man
perceive that he was acting--to use her poor dear old-fashioned
word--reprehensibly in frightening the prince to further your interests.
From what I gathered he went off in a song about them. She said he talked
so well! And aunty Dorothy, too! I should nearly as soon have expected
grandada to come in for his turn of the delusion. How I wish he was here!
Uberly goes by the first boat to bring him down. I feel with Miss Goodwin
that it will be a disgrace for all of us--the country's disgrace. As for
our family! . . . Harry, and your name! Good-bye. Do your best.'

I was in the mood to ask, 'On behalf of the country?' She had, however, a
glow and a ringing articulation in her excitement that forbade trifling;
a minute's reflection set me weighing my power of will against my
father's. I nodded to her.

'Come to us when you are at liberty,' she called.

I have said that I weighed my power of will against my father's.
Contemplation of the state of the scales did not send me striding to meet
him. Let it be remembered--I had it strongly in memory that he habitually
deluded himself under the supposition that the turn of all events having
an aspect of good fortune had been planned by him of old, and were
offered to him as the legitimately-won fruits of a politic life. While
others deemed him mad, or merely reckless, wild, a creature living for
the day, he enjoyed the conceit of being a profound schemer, in which he
was fortified by a really extraordinary adroitness to take advantage of
occurrences: and because he was prompt in an emergency, and quick to
profit of a crisis, he was deluded to imagine that he had created it.
Such a man would be with difficulty brought to surrender his prize.

Again, there was his love for me. 'Pater est, Pamphile;--difficile est.'
How was this vast conceit of a not unreal paternal love to be
encountered? The sense of honour and of decency might appeal to him
personally; would either of them get a hearing if he fancied them to be
standing in opposition to my dearest interests? I, unhappily, as the case
would be sure to present itself to him, appeared the living example of
his eminently politic career. After establishing me the heir of one of
the wealthiest of English commoners, would he be likely to forego any
desperate chance of ennobling me by the brilliant marriage? His dreadful
devotion to me extinguished the hope that he would, unless I should
happen to be particularly masterful in dealing with him. I heard his
nimble and overwhelming volubility like a flood advancing. That could be
withstood, and his arguments and persuasions. But by what steps could I
restrain the man himself? I said 'the man,' as Janet did. He figured in
my apprehensive imagination as an engine more than as an individual.
Lassitude oppressed me. I felt that I required every access of strength
possible, physical besides moral, in anticipation of our encounter, and
took a swim in sea-water, which displaced my drowsy fit, and some
alarming intimations of cowardice menacing a paralysis of the will: I had
not altogether recovered from my gipsy drubbing. And now I wanted to have
the contest over instantly. It seemed presumable that my father had slept
at my lodgings. There, however, the report of him was, that he had
inspected the rooms, highly complimented the owner of them, and vanished.

Returning to the pier, I learnt that he had set sail in his hired yacht
for the sister town on the Solent, at an early hour:--for what purpose? I
knew of it too late to intercept it. One of the squire's horses trotted
me over; I came upon Colonel Hibbert Segrave near the Club-house, and
heard that my father was off again:

'But your German prince and papa-in-law shall be free of the Club for the
next fortnight,' said he, and cordially asked to have the date of the
marriage. My face astonished him. He excused himself for speaking of this
happy event so abruptly. A sting of downright anger drove me back at a
rapid canter. It flashed on me that this Prince Ernest, whose suave
fashion of depressing me, and philosophical skill in managing his
daughter, had induced me to regard him as a pattern of astuteness, was
really both credulous and feeble, or else supremely unsuspecting: and I
was confirmed in the latter idea on hearing that he had sailed to visit
the opposite harbour and docks on board my father's yacht. Janet shared
my secret opinion.

'The prince is a gentleman,' she said.

Her wrath and disgust were unspeakable. My aunt Dorothy blamed her for
overdue severity. 'The prince, I suppose, goes of his own free will where
he pleases.'

Janet burst out, 'Oh! can't you see through it, aunty? The prince goes
about without at all knowing that the person who takes him--Harry sees
it--is making him compromise himself: and by-and-by the prince will
discover that he has no will of his own, whatever he may wish to resolve
upon doing.'

'Is he quite against Harry?' asked my aunt Dorothy.

'Dear aunty, he 's a prince, and a proud man. He will never in his
lifetime consent to . . . to what you mean, without being hounded into
it. I haven't the slightest idea whether anything will force him. I know
that the princess would have too much pride to submit, even to save her
name. But it 's her name that 's in danger. Think of the scandal to a
sovereign princess! I know the signification of that now; I used to laugh
at Harry's "sovereign princess." She is one, and thorough! there is no
one like her. Don't you understand, aunty, that the intrigue, plot--I
don't choose to be nice upon terms--may be perfectly successful, and do
good to nobody. The prince may be tricked; the princess, I am sure, will
not.'

Janet's affectation of an intimate and peculiar knowledge of the princess
was a show of her character that I was accustomed to: still, it was
evident they had conversed much, and perhaps intimately. I led her to
tell me that the princess had expressed no views upon my father. 'He does
not come within her scope, Harry.' 'Scope' was one of Janet's new words,
wherewith she would now and then fall to seasoning a serviceable but
savourless outworn vocabulary of the common table. In spite of that and
other offences, rendered prominent to me by the lifting of her lip and
her frown when she had to speak of my father, I was on her side, not on
his. Her estimation of the princess was soundly based. She discerned
exactly the nature of Ottilia's entanglement, and her peril.

She and my aunt Dorothy passed the afternoon with Ottilia, while I
crossed the head of the street, looking down at the one house, where the
princess was virtually imprisoned, either by her father's express
injunction or her own discretion. And it was as well that she should not
be out. The yachting season had brought many London men to the island. I
met several who had not forgotten the newspaper-paragraph assertions and
contradictions. Lord Alton, Admiral Loftus, and others were on the pier
and in the outfitters' shops, eager for gossip, as the languid stretch of
indolence inclines men to be. The Admiral asked me for the whereabout of
Prince Ernest's territory. He too said that the prince would be free of
the Club during his residence, adding:

'Where is he?'--not a question demanding an answer. The men might have
let the princess go by, but there would have been questions urgently
demanding answers had she been seen by their women.

Late in the evening my father's yacht was sighted from the pier. Just as
he reached his moorings, and his boat was hauled round, the last steamer
came in. Sharp-eyed Janet saw the squire on board among a crowd, and
Temple next to him, supporting his arm.

'Has grandada been ill?' she exclaimed.

My chief concern was to see my father's head rising in the midst of the
crowd, uncovering repeatedly. Prince Ernest and General Goodwin were
behind him, stepping off the lower pier-platform. The General did not
look pleased. My grandfather, with Janet holding his arm, in the place of
Temple, stood waiting to see that his man had done his duty by the
luggage.

My father, advancing, perceived me, and almost taking the squire into his
affectionate salutation, said:

'Nothing could be more opportune than your arrival, Mr. Beltham.'

The squire rejoined: 'I wanted to see you, Mr. Richmond; and not in
public.'

'I grant the private interview, sir, at your convenience.'

Janet went up to General Goodwin. My father talked to me, and lost a
moment in shaking Temple's hand and saying kind things.

'Name any hour you please, Mr. Beltham,' he resumed; 'meantime, I shall
be glad to effect the introduction between Harry's grandfather and his
Highness Prince Ernest of Eppenwelzen-Sarkeld.'

He turned. General Goodwin was hurrying the prince up the steps, the
squire at the same time retreating hastily. I witnessed the spectacle of
both parties to the projected introduction swinging round to make their
escape. My father glanced to right and left. He covered in the airiest
fashion what would have been confusion to another by carrying on a jocose
remark that he had left half spoken to Temple, and involved Janet in it,
and soon--through sheer amiable volubility and his taking manner--the
squire himself for a minute or so.

'Harry, I have to tell you she is not unhappy,' Janet whispered rapidly.
'She is reading of one of our great men alive now. She is glad to be on
our ground.' Janet named a famous admiral, kindling as a fiery beacon to
our blood. She would have said more: she looked the remainder; but she
could have said nothing better fitted to spur me to the work she wanted
done. Mournfulness dropped on me like a cloud in thinking of the bright
little princess of my boyhood, and the Ottilia of to-day, faithful to her
early passion for our sea-heroes and my country, though it had grievously
entrapped her. And into what hands! Not into hands which could cast one
ray of honour on a devoted head. The contrast between the sane
service--giving men she admired, and the hopping skipping social meteor,
weaver of webs, thrower of nets, who offered her his history for a
nuptial acquisition, was ghastly, most discomforting. He seemed to have
entangled us all.

He said that he had. He treated me now confessedly as a cipher. The
prince, the princess, my grandfather, and me--he had gathered us
together, he said. I heard from him that the prince, assisted by him in
the part of an adviser, saw no way of cutting the knot but by a marriage.
All were at hand for a settlement of the terms:--Providence and destiny
were dragged in.

'Let's have no theatrical talk,' I interposed.

'Certainly, Richie; the plainest English,' he assented.

This was on the pier, while he bowed and greeted passing figures. I dared
not unlink my arm, for fear of further mischief. I got him to my rooms,
and insisted on his dining there.

'Dry bread will do,' he said.

My anticipations of the nature of our wrestle were correct. But I had not
expected him to venture on the assertion that the prince was for the
marriage. He met me at every turn with this downright iteration. 'The
prince consents: he knows his only chance is to yield. I have him fast.'

'How?' I inquired.

'How, Richie? Where is your perspicuity? I have him here. I loosen a
thousand tongues on him. I--'

'No, not on him; on the princess, you mean.'

'On him. The princess is the willing party; she and you are one. On him,
I say. 'Tis but a threat: I hold it in terrorem. And by heaven, son
Richie, it assures me I have not lived and fought for nothing. "Now is
the day and now is the hour." On your first birthday, my boy, I swore to
marry you to one of the highest ladies upon earth: she was, as it turns
out, then unborn. No matter: I keep my oath. Abandon it? pooh! you
are--forgive me--silly. Pardon me for remarking it, you have not that
dashing courage--never mind. The point is, I have my prince in his trap.
We are perfectly polite, but I have him, and he acknowledges it; he
shrugs: love has beaten him. Very well. And observe: I permit no
squire-of-low-degree insinuations; none of that. The lady--all earthly
blessings on her!--does not stoop to Harry Richmond. I have the
announcement in the newspapers. I maintain it the fruit of a life of long
and earnest endeavour, legitimately won, by heaven it is! and with the
constituted authorities of my native land against me. Your grandad
proposes formally for the princess to-morrow morning.'

He maddened me. Merely to keep him silent I burst out in a flux of
reproaches as torrent-like as his own could be; and all the time I was
wondering whether it was true that a man who talked as he did, in his
strain of florid flimsy, had actually done a practical thing.

The effect of my vehemence was to brace him and make him sedately
emphatic. He declared himself to have gained entire possession of the
prince's mind. He repeated his positive intention to employ his power for
my benefit. Never did power of earth or of hell seem darker to me than he
at that moment, when solemnly declaiming that he was prepared to forfeit
my respect and love, die sooner than 'yield his prince.' He wore a new
aspect, spoke briefly and pointedly, using the phrases of a determined
man, and in voice and gesture signified that he had us all in a grasp of
iron. The charge of his having plotted to bring it about he accepted with
exultation.

'I admit,' he said, 'I did not arrange to have Germany present for a
witness besides England, but since he is here, I take advantage of the
fact, and to-morrow you will see young Eckart down.'

I cried out, as much enraged at my feebleness to resist him, as in
disgust of his unscrupulous tricks.

'Ay, you have not known me, Richie,' said he. 'I pilot you into harbour,
and all you can do is just the creaking of the vessel to me. You are in
my hands. I pilot you. I have you the husband of the princess within the
month. No other course is open to her. And I have the assurance that she
loses nothing by it. She is yours, my son.'

'She will not be. You have wrecked my last chance. You cover me with
dishonour.'

'You are a youngster, Richie. 'Tis the wish of her heart. Probably while
you and I are talking it over, the prince is confessing that he has no
escape. He has not a loophole! She came to you; you take her. I am far
from withholding my admiration of her behaviour; but there it is--she
came. Not consent? She is a ruined woman if she refuses!'

'Through you, through you!--through my father!'

'Have you both gone mad?'

'Try to see this,' I implored him. 'She will not be subjected by any
threats. The very whisper of one will make her turn from me . . .'

He interrupted. 'Totally the contrary. The prince acknowledges that you
are master of her affections.'

'Consistently with her sense of honour and respect for us.'

'Tell me of her reputation, Richie.'

'You pretend that you can damage it!'

'Pretend? I pretend in the teeth of all concerned to establish her
happiness and yours, and nothing human shall stop me. I have you grateful
to me before your old dad lays his head on his last pillow. And that
reminds me: I surrender my town house and furniture to you. Waddy has
received the word. By the way, should you hear of a good doctor for
heart-disease, tell me: I have my fears for the poor soul.'

He stood up, saying, 'Richie, I am not like Jorian, to whom a
lodging-house dinner is no dinner, and an irreparable loss, but I must
have air. I go forth on a stroll.'

It was impossible for me to allow it. I stopped him.

We were in the midst of a debate as to his right of personal freedom,
upon the singularity of which he commented with sundry ejaculations, when
Temple arrived and General Goodwin sent up his card. Temple and I left
the general closeted with my father, and stood at the street-door. He had
seen the princess, having at her request been taken to present his
respects to her by Janet. How she looked, what she said, he was dull in
describing; he thought her lively, though she was pale. She had mentioned
my name, 'kindly,' he observed. And he knew, or suspected, the General to
be an emissary from the prince. But he could not understand the exact
nature of the complication, and plagued me with a mixture of blunt
inquiries and the delicate reserve proper to him so much that I had to
look elsewhere for counsel and sympathy. Janet had told him everything;
still he was plunged in wonder, tempting me to think the lawyer's mind of
necessity bourgeois, for the value of a sentiment seemed to have no
weight in his estimation of the case. Nor did he appear disinclined to
excuse my father. Some of his remarks partly swayed me, in spite of my
seeing that they were based on the supposition of an 'all for love'
adventure of a mad princess. They whispered a little hope, when I was
adoring her passionately for being the reverse of whatever might have
given hope a breath.

General Goodwin, followed by my father, came down and led me aside after
I had warned Temple not to let my father elude him. The General was
greatly ruffled. 'Clara tells me she can rely on you,' he said. 'I am at
the end of my arguments with that man, short of sending him to the
lock-up. You will pardon me, Mr. Harry; I foresaw the scrapes in store
for you, and advised you.'

'You did, General,' I confessed. 'Will you tell me what it is Prince
Ernest is in dread of?'

'A pitiable scandal, sir; and if he took my recommendation, he would find
instant means of punishing the man who dares to threaten him. You know
it.'

I explained that I was aware of the threat, not of the degree of the
prince's susceptibility; and asked him if he had seen the princess.

'I have had the honour,' he replied, stiffly. 'You gain nothing with her
by this infamous proceeding.'

I swallowed my anger, and said, 'Do you accuse me, General?'

'I do not accuse you,' he returned, unbendingly. 'You chose your path
some ten or twelve years ago, and you must take the consequences. I
foresaw it; but this I will say, I did not credit the man with his
infernal cleverness. If I speak to you at all, I must speak my mind. I
thought him a mere buffoon and spendthrift, flying his bar-sinister story
for the sake of distinction. He has schemed up to this point
successfully: he has the prince in his toils. I would cut through them,
as I have informed Prince Ernest. I daresay different positions lead to
different reasonings; the fellow appears to have a fascination over him.
Your father, Mr. Harry, is guilty now--he is guilty, I reiterate, now of
a piece of iniquity that makes me ashamed to own him for a countryman.'

The General shook himself erect. 'Are you unable to keep him in?' he
asked.

My nerves were pricking and stinging with the insults I had to listen to,
and conscience's justification of them.

He repeated the question.

'I will do what I can,' I said, unsatisfactorily to myself and to him,
for he transposed our situations, telling me the things he would say and
do in my place; things not dissimilar to those I had already said and
done, only more toweringly enunciated; and for that reason they struck me
as all the more hopelessly ineffectual, and made me despair.

My dumbness excited his ire. 'Come,' said he; 'the lady is a spoilt
child. She behaved foolishly; but from your point of view you should feel
bound to protect her on that very account. Do your duty, young gentleman.
He is, I believe, fond of you, and if so, you have him by a chain. I tell
you frankly, I hold you responsible.'

His way of speaking of the princess opened an idea of the world's, in the
event of her name falling into its clutches.

I said again, 'I will do what I can,' and sang out for Temple.

He was alone. My father had slipped from him to leave a card at the
squire's hotel. General Goodwin touched Temple on the shoulder kindly, in
marked contrast to his treatment of me, and wished us good-night. Nothing
had been heard of my father by Janet, but while I was sitting with her,
at a late hour, his card was brought up, and a pencilled entreaty for an
interview the next morning.

'That will suit grandada,' Janet said. 'He commissioned me before going
to bed to write the same for him.'

She related that the prince was in a state of undisguised distraction.
From what I could comprehend--it appeared incredible--he regarded his
daughter's marriage as the solution of the difficulty, the sole way out
of the meshes.

'Is not that her wish?' said Temple; perhaps with a wish of his own.

'Oh, if you think a lady like the Princess Ottilia is led by her wishes,'
said Janet. Her radiant perception of an ideal in her sex (the first she
ever had) made her utterly contemptuous toward the less enlightened.

We appointed the next morning at half-past eleven for my father's visit.

'Not a minute later,' Janet said in my ear, urgently. 'Don't--don't let
him move out of your sight, Harry! The princess is convinced you are not
to blame.'

I asked her whether she had any knowledge of the squire's designs.

'I have not, on my honour,' she answered. 'But I hope . . . It is so
miserable to think of this disgraceful thing! She is too firm to give
way. She does not blame you. I am sure I do not; only, Harry, one always
feels that if one were in another's place, in a case like this, I could
and would command him. I would have him obey me. One is not born to
accept disgrace even from a father. I should say, "You shall not stir, if
you mean to act dishonourably." One is justified, I am sure, in breaking
a tie of relationship that involves you in dishonour. Grandada has not
spoken a word to me on the subject. I catch at straws. This thing burns
me! Oh, good-night, Harry. I can't sleep.'

'Good-night,' she called softly to Temple on the stairs below. I heard
the poor fellow murmuring good-night to himself in the street, and
thought him happier than I. He slept at a room close to the hotel.

A note from Clara Goodwin adjured me, by her memory of the sweet, brave,
gracious fellow she loved in other days, to be worthy of what I had been.
The General had unnerved her reliance on me.

I sat up for my father until long past midnight. When he came his
appearance reminded me of the time of his altercation with Baroness
Turckems under the light of the blazing curtains: he had supped and drunk
deeply, and he very soon proclaimed that I should find him invincible,
which, as far as insensibility to the strongest appeals to him went, he
was.

'Deny you love her, deny she loves you, deny you are one--I knot you
fast!'

He had again seen Prince Ernest; so he said, declaring that the Prince
positively desired the marriage; would have it. 'And I,' he dramatized
their relative situations, 'consented.'

After my experience of that night, I forgive men who are unmoved by
displays of humour. Commonly we think it should be irresistible. His
description of the thin-skinned sensitive prince striving to run and
dodge for shelter from him, like a fever-patient pursued by a
North-easter, accompanied by dozens of quaint similes full of his mental
laughter, made my loathing all the more acute. But I had not been an
equal match for him previous to his taking wine; it was waste of breath
and heart to contend with him. I folded my arms tight, sitting rigidly
silent, and he dropped on the sofa luxuriously.

'Bed, Richie!' he waved to me. 'You drink no wine, you cannot stand
dissipation as I do. Bed, my dear boy! I am a God, sir, inaccessible to
mortal ailments! Seriously, dear boy, I have never known an illness in my
life. I have killed my hundreds of poor devils who were for imitating me.
This I boast--I boast constitution. And I fear, Richie, you have none of
my superhuman strength. Added to that, I know I am watched over. I ask--I
have: I scheme the tricks are in my hand! It may be the doing of my
mother in heaven; there is the fact for you to reflect on. "Stand not in
my way, nor follow me too far," would serve me for a motto admirably, and
you can put it in Latin, Richie. Bed! You shall turn your scholarship to
account as I do my genius in your interest. On my soul, that motto in
Latin will requite me. Now to bed.'

'No,' said I. 'You have got away from me once. I shall keep you in sight
and hearing, if I have to lie at your door for it. You will go with me to
London to-morrow. I shall treat you as a man I have to guard, and I shall
not let you loose before I am quite sure of you.'

'Loose!' he exclaimed, throwing up an arm and a leg.

'I mean, sir, that you shall be in my presence wherever you are, and I
will take care you don't go far and wide. It's useless to pretend
astonishment. I don't argue and I don't beseech any further: I just sit
on guard, as I would over a powder-cask.'

My father raised himself on an elbow. 'The explosion,' he said, examining
his watch, 'occurred at about five minutes to eleven--we are advancing
into the morning--last night. I received on your behalf the
congratulations of friends Loftus, Alton, Segrave, and the rest, at that
hour. So, my dear Richie, you are sitting on guard over the empty
magazine.'

I listened with a throbbing forehead, and controlled the choking in my
throat, to ask him whether he had touched the newspapers.

'Ay, dear lad, I have sprung my mine in them,' he replied.

'You have sent word--?'

'I have despatched a paragraph to the effect, that the prince and
princess have arrived to ratify the nuptial preliminaries.'

'You expect it to appear this day?'

'Or else my name and influence are curiously at variance with the
confidence I repose in them, Richie.'

'Then I leave you to yourself,' I said. 'Prince Ernest knows he has to
expect this statement in the papers?'

'We trumped him with that identical court-card, Richie.'

'Very well. To-morrow, after we have been to my grandfather, you and I
part company for good, sir. It costs me too much.'

'Dear old Richie,' he laughed, gently. 'And now to bye-bye! My blessing
on you now and always.'

He shut his eyes.




CHAPTER LI

AN ENCOUNTER SHOWING MY FATHER'S GENIUS IN A STRONG LIGHT

The morning was sultry with the first rising of the sun. I knew that
Ottilia and Janet would be out. For myself, I dared not leave the house.
I sat in my room, harried by the most penetrating snore which can ever
have afflicted wakeful ears. It proclaimed so deep-seated a peacefulness
in the bosom of the disturber, and was so arrogant, so ludicrous, and
inaccessible to remonstrance, that it sounded like a renewal of our
midnight altercation on the sleeper's part. Prolonged now and then beyond
all bounds, it ended in the crashing blare whereof utter wakefulness
cannot imagine honest sleep to be capable, but a playful melody twirled
back to the regular note. He was fast asleep on the sitting-room sofa,
while I walked fretting and panting. To this twinship I seemed condemned.
In my heart nevertheless there was a reserve of wonderment at his
apparent astuteness and resolution, and my old love for him whispered
disbelief in his having disgraced me. Perhaps it was wilful
self-deception. It helped me to meet him with a better face.

We both avoided the subject of our difference for some time: he would
evidently have done so altogether, and used his best and sweetest manner
to divert me: but when I struck on it, asking him if he had indeed told
me the truth last night, his features clouded as though with an effort of
patience. To my consternation, he suddenly broke away, with his arms up,
puffing and stammering, stamping his feet. He would have a truce--he
insisted on a truce, I understood him to exclaim, and that I was like a
woman, who would and would not, and wanted a master. He raved of the
gallant down-rightedness of the young bloods of his day, and how
splendidly this one and that had compassed their ends by winning great
ladies, lawfully, or otherwise. For several minutes he was in a state of
frenzy, appealing to his pattern youths of a bygone generation, as to
moral principles--stuttering, and of a dark red hue from the neck to the
temples. I refrained from a scuffle of tongues. Nor did he excuse himself
after he had cooled. His hand touched instinctively for his pulse, and,
with a glance at the ceiling, he exclaimed, 'Good Lord!' and brought me
to his side. 'These wigwam houses check my circulation,' said he. 'Let us
go out-let us breakfast on board.'

The open air restored him, and he told me that he had been merely
oppressed by the architect of the inferior classes, whose ceiling sat on
his head. My nerves, he remarked to me, were very exciteable. 'You should
take your wine, Richie,--you require it. Your dear mother had a low-toned
nervous system.' I was silent, and followed him, at once a captive and a
keeper.

This day of slackened sails and a bright sleeping water kept the
yachtsmen on land; there was a crowd to meet the morning boat. Foremost
among those who stepped out of it was the yellow-haired Eckart, little
suspecting what the sight of him signalled to me. I could scarcely greet
him at all, for in him I perceived that my father had fully committed
himself to his plot, and left me nothing to hope. Eckart said something
of Prince Hermann. As we were walking off the pier, I saw Janet
conversing with Prince Ernest, and the next minute Hermann himself was
one of the group. I turned to Eckart for an explanation.

'Didn't I tell you he called at your house in London and travelled down
with me this morning!' said Eckart.

My father looked in the direction of the princes, but his face was for
the moment no index. They bowed to Janet, and began talking hurriedly in
the triangle of road between her hotel, the pier, and the way to the
villas: passing on, and coming to a full halt, like men who are not
reserving their minds. My father stept out toward them. He was met by
Prince Ernest. Hermann turned his back.

It being the hour of the appointment, I delivered Eckart over to Temple's
safe-keeping, and went up to Janet. 'Don't be late, Harry,' she said.

I asked her if she knew the object of the meeting appointed by my
grandfather.

She answered impatiently, 'Do get him away from the prince.' And then: 'I
ought to tell you the princess is well, and so on--pardon me just now:
Grandada is kept waiting, and I don't like it.'

Her actual dislike was to see Prince Ernest in dialogue with my father,
it seemed to me; and the manner of both, which was, one would have said,
intimate, anything but the manner of adversaries. Prince Ernest appeared
to affect a pleasant humour; he twice, after shaking my father's hand,
stepped back to him, as if to renew some impression. Their attitude
declared them to be on the best of terms. Janet withdrew her attentive
eyes from observing them, and threw a world of meaning into her
abstracted gaze at me. My father's advance put her to flight.

Yet she gave him the welcome of a high-bred young woman when he entered
the drawing-room of my grandfather's hotel-suite. She was alone, and she
obliged herself to accept conversation graciously. He recommended her to
try the German Baths for the squire's gout, and evidently amused her with
his specific probations for English persons designing to travel in
company, that they should previously live together in a house with a
collection of undisciplined chambermaids, a musical footman, and a mad
cook: to learn to accommodate their tempers. 'I would add a touch of
earthquake, Miss Ilchester, just to make sure that all the party know one
another's edges before starting.' This was too far a shot of nonsense for
Janet, whose native disposition was to refer to lunacy or stupidity, or
trickery, whatsoever was novel to her understanding. 'I, for my part,'
said he, 'stipulate to have for comrade no man who fancies himself a born
and stamped chieftain, no inveterate student of maps, and no dog with a
turn for feeling himself pulled by the collar. And that reminds me you
are amateur of dogs. Have you a Pomeranian boar-hound?'

'No,' said Janet; 'I have never even seen one'

'That high.' My father raised his hand flat.

'Bigger than our Newfoundlands!'

'Without exaggeration, big as a pony. You will permit me to send you one,
warranted to have passed his distemper, which can rarely be done for our
human species, though here and there I venture to guarantee my man as
well as my dog.'

Janet interposed her thanks, declining to take the dog, but he dwelt on
the dog's charms, his youth, stature, appearance, fitness, and grandeur,
earnestly. I had to relieve her apprehensions by questioning where the
dog was.

'In Germany,' he said.

It was not improbable, nor less so that the dog was in Pomerania
likewise.

The entry of my aunt Dorothy, followed by my grandfather, was silent.

'Be seated,' the old man addressed us in a body, to cut short particular
salutations.

My father overshadowed him with drooping shoulders.

Janet wished to know whether she was to remain.

'I like you by me always,' he answered, bluff and sharp.

'We have some shopping to do,' my aunt Dorothy murmured, showing she was
there against her will.

'Do you shop out of London?' said my father; and for some time he
succeeded in making us sit for the delusive picture of a comfortable
family meeting.

My grandfather sat quite still, Janet next to him. 'When you've finished,
Mr. Richmond,' he remarked.

'Mr. Beltham, I was telling Miss Beltham that I join in the abuse of
London exactly because I love it. A paradox! she says. But we seem to be
effecting a kind of insurance on the life of the things we love best by
crying them down violently. You have observed it? Denounce them--they
endure for ever! So I join any soul on earth in decrying our dear London.
The naughty old City can bear it.'

There was a clearing of throats. My aunt Dorothy's foot tapped the floor.

'But I presume you have done me the honour to invite me to this
conference on a point of business, Mr. Beltham?' said my father,
admonished by the hint.

'I have, sir,' the squire replied.

'And I also have a point. And, in fact, it is urgent, and with your
permission, Mr. Beltham, I will lead the way.'

'No, sir, if you please.

I'm a short speaker, and go to it at once, and I won't detain you a
second after you've answered me.'

My father nodded to this, with the conciliatory comment that it was
business-like.

The old man drew out his pocket-book.

'You paid a debt,' he said deliberately, 'amounting to twenty-one
thousand pounds to my grandson's account.'

'Oh! a debt! I did, sir. Between father and boy, dad and lad; debts!
. . . but use your own terms, I pray you.'

'I don't ask you where that money is now. I ask you to tell me where you
got it from.'

'You speak bluntly, my dear sir.'

'You won't answer, then?'

'You ask the question as a family matter? I reply with alacrity, to the
best of my ability: and with my hand on my heart, Mr. Beltham, let me
assure you, I very heartily desire the information to be furnished to me.
Or rather--why should I conceal it? The sources are irregular, but a
child could toddle its way to them--you take my indication. Say that I
obtained it from my friends. My friends, Mr. Beltham, are of the kind
requiring squeezing. Government, as my chum and good comrade, Jorian
DeWitt, is fond of saying, is a sponge--a thing that when you dive deep
enough to catch it gives liberal supplies, but will assuredly otherwise
reverse the process by acting the part of an absorbent. I get what I get
by force of arms, or I might have perished long since.'

'Then you don't know where you got it from, sir?'

'Technically, you are correct, sir.'

'A bird didn't bring it, and you didn't find it in the belly of a fish.'

'Neither of these prodigies. They have occurred in books I am bound to
believe; they did not happen to me.'

'You swear to me you don't know the man, woman, or committee, who gave
you that sum?'

'I do not know, Mr. Beltham. In an extraordinary history, extraordinary
circumstances! I have experienced so many that I am surprised at
nothing.'

'You suppose you got it from some fool?'

'Oh! if you choose to indict Government collectively?'

'You pretend you got it from Government?'

'I am termed a Pretender by some, Mr. Beltham. The facts are these: I
promised to refund the money, and I fulfilled the promise. There you have
the only answer I can make to you. Now to my own affair. I come to
request you to demand the hand of the Princess of Eppenwelzen-Sarkeld on
behalf of my son Harry, your grandson; and I possess the assurance of the
prince, her father, that it will be granted. Doubtless you, sir, are of
as old a blood as the prince himself. You will acknowledge that the
honour brought to the family by an hereditary princess is considerable:
it is something. I am prepared to accompany you to his Highness, or not,
as you please. It is but a question of dotation, and a selection from one
or two monosyllables.'

Janet shook her dress.

The squire replied: 'We 'll take that up presently. I haven't quite done.
Will you tell me what agent paid you the sum of money?'

'The usual agent--a solicitor, Mr. Beltham; a gentleman whose business
lay amongst the aristocracy; he is defunct; and a very worthy old
gentleman he was, with a remarkable store of anecdotes of his patrons,
very discreetly told: for you never heard a name from him.'

'You took him for an agent of Government, did you? why?'

'To condense a long story, sir, the kernel of the matter is, that almost
from the hour I began to stir for the purpose of claiming my
rights--which are transparent enough this old gentleman--certainly from
no sinister motive, I may presume--commenced the payment of an annuity;
not sufficient for my necessities, possibly, but warrant of an agreeable
sort for encouraging my expectations; although oddly, this excellent old
Mr. Bannerbridge invariably served up the dish in a sauce that did not
agree with it, by advising me of the wish of the donator that I should
abandon my Case. I consequently, in common with my friends, performed a
little early lesson in arithmetic, and we came to the one conclusion open
to reflective minds--namely, that I was feared.'

My aunt Dorothy looked up for the first time.

'Janet and I have some purchases to make,' she said.

The squire signified sharply that she must remain where she was.

'I think aunty wants fresh air; she had a headache last night,' said
Janet.

I suggested that, as my presence did not seem to be required, I could
take her on my arm for a walk to the pier-head.

Her face was burning; she would gladly have gone out, but the squire
refused to permit it, and she nodded over her crossed hands, saying that
she was in no hurry.

'Ha! I am,' quoth he.

'Dear Miss Beltham!' my father ejaculated solicitously. 'Here, sir,
oblige me by attending to me,' cried the squire, fuming and blinking. 'I
sent for you on a piece of business. You got this money through a
gentleman, a solicitor, named Bannerbridge, did you?'

'His name was Bannerbridge, Mr. Beltham.'

'Dorothy, you knew a Mr. Bannerbridge?'

She faltered: 'I knew him .... Harry was lost in the streets of London
when he was a little fellow, and the Mr. Bannerbridge I knew found him
and took him to his house, and was very kind to him.'

'What was his Christian name?'

I gave them: 'Charles Adolphus.'

'The identical person!' exclaimed my father.

'Oh! you admit it,' said the squire. 'Ever seen him since the time Harry
was lost, Dorothy?'

'Yes,' she answered. 'I have heard he is dead:

'Did you see him shortly before his death?'

'I happened to see him a short time before!

'He was your man of business, was he?'

'For such little business as I had to do.'

'You were sure you could trust him, eh?'

'Yes.'

My aunt Dorothy breathed deeply.

'By God, ma'am, you're a truthful woman!'

The old man gave her a glare of admiration.

It was now my turn to undergo examination, and summoned by his apostrophe
to meet his eyes, I could appreciate the hardness of the head I had to
deal with.

'Harry, I beg your pardon beforehand; I want to get at facts; I must ask
you what you know about where the money came from?'

I spoke of my attempts to discover the whence and wherefore of it.

'Government? eh?' he sneered.

'I really can't judge whether it came from that quarter,' said I.

'What do you think?--think it likely?'

I thought it unlikely, and yet likelier than that it should have come
from an individual.

'Then you don't suspect any particular person of having sent it in the
nick of time, Harry Richmond?'

I replied: 'No, sir; unless you force me to suspect you.'

He jumped in his chair, astounded and wrathful, confounded me for
insinuating that he was a Bedlamite, and demanded the impudent reason of
my suspecting him to have been guilty of the infernal folly.

I had but the reason to instance that he was rich and kind at heart.

'Rich! kind!' he bellowed. 'Just excuse me--I must ask for the purpose of
my inquiry;--there, tell me, how much do you believe you 've got of that
money remaining? None o' that Peterborough style of counting in the back
of your pate. Say!'

There was a dreadful silence.

My father leaned persuasively forward.

'Mr. Beltham, I crave permission to take up the word. Allow me to remind
you of the prize Harry has won. The prince awaits you to bestow on him
the hand of his daughter--'

'Out with it, Harry,' shouted the squire.

'Not to mention Harry's seat in Parliament,' my father resumed, 'he has a
princess to wife, indubitably one of the most enviable positions in the
country! It is unnecessary to count on future honours; they may be
alluded to. In truth, sir, we make him the first man in the country. Not
necessarily Premier: you take my meaning: he possesses the combination of
social influence and standing with political achievements, and rank and
riches in addition--'

'I 'm speaking to my grandson, sir,' the squire rejoined, shaking himself
like a man rained on. 'I 'm waiting for a plain answer, and no lie.
You've already confessed as much as that the money you told me on your
honour you put out to interest; psh!--for my grandson was smoke. Now
let's hear him.'

My father called out: 'I claim a hearing! The money you speak of was put
out to the very highest interest. You have your grandson in Parliament,
largely acquainted with the principal members of society, husband of an
hereditary princess! You have only at this moment to propose for her
hand. I guarantee it to you. With that money I have won him everything.
Not that I would intimate to you that princesses are purchaseable. The
point is, I knew how to employ it.'

'In two months' time, the money in the Funds in the boy's name--you told
me that.'

'You had it in the Funds in Harry Richmond's name, sir.'

'Well, sir, I'm asking him whether it's in the Funds now.'

'Oh! Mr. Beltham.'

'What answer's that?'

The squire was really confused by my father's interruption, and lost
sight of me.

'I ask where it came from: I ask whether it's squandered?' he continued.

'Mr. Beltham, I reply that you have only to ask for it to have it; do so
immediately.'

'What 's he saying?' cried the baffled old man.

'I give you a thousand times the equivalent of the money, Mr. Beltham.'

'Is the money there?'

'The lady is here.'

'I said money, sir.'

'A priceless honour and treasure, I say emphatically.' My grandfather's
brows and mouth were gathering for storm. Janet touched his knee.

'Where the devil your understanding truckles, if you have any, I don't
know,' he muttered. 'What the deuce--lady got to do with money!'

'Oh!' my father laughed lightly, 'customarily the alliance is, they say,
as close as matrimony. Pardon me. To speak with becoming seriousness, Mr.
Beltham, it was duly imperative that our son should be known in society,
should be, you will apprehend me, advanced in station, which I had to do
through the ordinary political channel. There could not but be a
considerable expenditure for such a purpose.'

'In Balls, and dinners!'

'In everything that builds a young gentleman's repute.'

'You swear to me you gave your Balls and dinners, and the lot, for Harry
Richmond's sake?'

'On my veracity, I did, sir!'

'Please don't talk like a mountebank. I don't want any of your roundabout
words for truth; we're not writing a Bible essay. I try my best to be
civil.'

My father beamed on him.

'I guarantee you succeed, sir. Nothing on earth can a man be so
absolutely sure of as to succeed in civility, if he honestly tries at it.
Jorian DeWitt,--by the way, you may not know him--an esteemed old friend
of mine, says--that is, he said once--to a tolerably impudent fellow whom
he had disconcerted with a capital retort, "You may try to be a
gentleman, and blunder at it, but if you will only try to be his humble
servant, we are certain to establish a common footing." Jorian, let me
tell you, is a wit worthy of our glorious old days.'

My grandfather eased his heart with a plunging breath.

'Well, sir, I didn't ask you here for your opinion or your friend's, and
I don't care for modern wit.'

'Nor I, Mr. Beltham, nor I! It has the reek of stable straw. We are of
one mind on that subject. The thing slouches, it sprawls. It--to quote
Jorian once more--is like a dirty, idle, little stupid boy who cannot
learn his lesson and plays the fool with the alphabet. You smile, Miss
Ilchester: you would appreciate Jorian. Modern wit is emphatically
degenerate. It has no scintillation, neither thrust nor parry. I compare
it to boxing, as opposed to the more beautiful science of fencing.'

'Well, sir, I don't want to hear your comparisons,' growled the squire,
much oppressed. 'Stop a minute . . .'

'Half a minute to me, sir,' said my father, with a glowing reminiscence
of Jorian DeWitt, which was almost too much for the combustible old man,
even under Janet's admonition.

My aunt Dorothy moved her head slightly toward my father, looking on the
floor, and he at once drew in.

'Mr. Beltham, I attend to you submissively.'

'You do? Then tell me what brought this princess to England?'

'The conviction that Harry had accomplished his oath to mount to an
eminence in his country, and had made the step she is about to take less,
I will say, precipitous: though I personally decline to admit a pointed
inferiority.'

'You wrote her a letter.'

'That, containing the news of the attack on him and his desperate
illness, was the finishing touch to the noble lady's passion.'

'Attack? I know nothing about an attack. You wrote her a letter and wrote
her a lie. You said he was dying.'

'I had the boy inanimate on my breast when I despatched the epistle.'

'You said he had only a few days to live.'

'So in my affliction I feared.'

'Will you swear you didn't write that letter with the intention of
drawing her over here to have her in your power, so that you might
threaten you'd blow on her reputation if she or her father held out
against you and all didn't go as you fished for it?'

My father raised his head proudly.

'I divide your query into two parts. I wrote, sir, to bring her to his
side. I did not write with any intention to threaten.'

'You've done it, though.'

'I have done this,' said my father, toweringly: 'I have used the power
placed in my hands by Providence to overcome the hesitations of a
gentleman whose illustrious rank predisposes him to sacrifice his
daughter's happiness to his pride of birth and station. Can any one
confute me when I assert that the princess loves Harry Richmond?'

I walked abruptly to one of the windows, hearing a pitiable wrangling on
the theme. My grandfather vowed she had grown wiser, my father protested
that she was willing and anxious; Janet was appealed to. In a
strangely-sounding underbreath, she said, 'The princess does not wish
it.'

'You hear that, Mr. Richmond?' cried the squire.

He returned: 'Can Miss Ilchester say that the Princess Ottilia does not
passionately love my son Harry Richmond? The circumstances warrant me in
beseeching a direct answer.'

She uttered: 'No.'

I looked at her; she at me.

'You can conduct a case, Richmond,' the squire remarked.

My father rose to his feet. 'I can conduct my son to happiness and
greatness, my dear sir; but to some extent I require your grandfatherly
assistance; and I urge you now to present your respects to the prince and
princess, and judge yourself of his Highness's disposition for the match.
I assure you in advance that he welcomes the proposal.'

'I do not believe it,' said Janet, rising.

My aunt Dorothy followed her example, saying: 'In justice to Harry the
proposal should be made. At least it will settle this dispute.'

Janet stared at her, and the squire threw his head back with an amazed
interjection.

'What! You're for it now? Why, at breakfast you were all t' other way!
You didn't want this meeting because you pooh-poohed the match.'

'I do think you should go,' she answered. 'You have given Harry your
promise, and if he empowers you, it is right to make the proposal, and
immediately, I think.'

She spoke feverishly, with an unsweet expression of face, that seemed to
me to indicate vexedness at the squire's treatment of my father.

'Harry,' she asked me in a very earnest fashion, 'is it your desire? Tell
your grandfather that it is, and that you want to know your fate. Why
should there be any dispute on a fact that can be ascertained by crossing
a street? Surely it is trifling.'

Janet stooped to whisper in the squire's ear.

He caught the shock of unexpected intelligence apparently; faced about,
gazed up, and cried: 'You too! But I haven't done here. I 've got to
cross-examine . . . Pretend, do you mean? Pretend I'm ready to go? I can
release this prince just as well here as there.'

Janet laughed faintly.

'I should advise your going, grandada.'

'You a weathercock woman!' he reproached her, quite mystified, and fell
to rubbing his head. 'Suppose I go to be snubbed?'

'The prince is a gentleman, grandada. Come with me. We will go alone. You
can relieve the prince, and protect him.'

My father nodded: 'I approve.'

'And grandada--but it will not so much matter if we are alone, though,'
Janet said.

'Speak out.'

'See the princess as well; she must be present.'

'I leave it to you,' he said, crestfallen.

Janet pressed my aunt Dorothy's hand.

'Aunty, you were right, you are always right. This state of suspense is
bad all round, and it is infinitely worse for the prince and princess.'

My aunt Dorothy accepted the eulogy with a singular trembling wrinkle of
the forehead.

She evidently understood that Janet had seen her wish to get released.

For my part, I shared my grandfather's stupefaction at their
unaccountable changes. It appeared almost as if my father had won them
over to baffle him. The old man tried to insist on their sitting down
again, but Janet perseveringly smiled and smiled until he stood up. She
spoke to him softly. He was one black frown; displeased with her;
obedient, however.

Too soon after, I had the key to the enigmatical scene. At the moment I
was contemptuous of riddles, and heard with idle ears Janet's promptings
to him and his replies. 'It would be so much better to settle it here,'
he said. She urged that it could not be settled here without the whole
burden and responsibility falling upon him.

'Exactly,' interposed my father, triumphing.

Dorothy Beltham came to my side, and said, as if speaking to herself,
while she gazed out of window, 'If a refusal, it should come from the
prince.' She dropped her voice: 'The money has not been spent? Has it?
Has any part of it been spent? Are you sure you have more than three
parts of it?'

Now, that she should be possessed by the spirit of parsimony on my behalf
at such a time as this, was to my conception insanely comical, and her
manner of expressing it was too much for me. I kept my laughter under to
hear her continue: 'What numbers are flocking on the pier! and there is
no music yet. Tell me, Harry, that the money is all safe; nearly all; it
is important to know; you promised economy.'

'Music did you speak of, Miss Beltham?' My father bowed to her gallantly.
'I chanced to overhear you. My private band performs to the public at
midday.'

She was obliged to smile to excuse his interruption.

'What's that? whose band?' said the squire, bursting out of Janet's hand.
'A private band?'

Janet had a difficulty in resuming her command of him. The mention of the
private band made him very restive.

'I 'm not acting on my own judgement at all in going to these foreign
people,' he said to Janet. 'Why go? I can have it out here and an end to
it, without bothering them and their interpreters.'

He sang out to me: 'Harry, do you want me to go through this form for
you?--mn'd unpleasant!'

My aunt Dorothy whispered in my ear: 'Yes! yes!'

'I feel tricked!' he muttered, and did not wait for me to reply before he
was again questioning my aunt Dorothy concerning Mr. Bannerbridge, and my
father as to 'that sum of money.' But his method of interrogation was
confused and pointless. The drift of it was totally obscure.

'I'm off my head to-day,' he said to Janet, with a sideshot of his eye at
my father.

'You waste time and trouble, grandada,' said she.

He vowed that he was being bewildered, bothered by us all; and I thought
I had never seen him so far below his level of energy; but I had not seen
him condescend to put himself upon a moderately fair footing with my
father. The truth was, that Janet had rigorously schooled him to bridle
his temper, and he was no match for the voluble easy man without the
freest play of his tongue.

'This prince!' he kept ejaculating.

'Won't you understand, grandada, that you relieve him, and make things
clear by going?' Janet said.

He begged her fretfully not to be impatient, and hinted that she and he
might be acting the part of dupes, and was for pursuing his inauspicious
cross-examination in spite of his blundering, and the 'Where am I now?'
which pulled him up. My father, either talking to my aunt Dorothy, to
Janet, or to me, on ephemeral topics, scarcely noticed him, except when
he was questioned, and looked secure of success in the highest degree
consistent with perfect calmness.

'So you say you tell me to go, do you?' the squire called to me. 'Be good
enough to stay here and wait. I don't see that anything's gained by my
going: it's damned hard on me, having to go to a man whose language I
don't know, and he don't know mine, on a business we're all of us in a
muddle about. I'll do it if it's right. You're sure?'

He glanced at Janet. She nodded.

I was looking for this quaint and, to me, incomprehensible interlude to
commence with the departure of the squire and Janet, when a card was
handed in by one of the hotel-waiters.

'Another prince!' cried the squire. 'These Germans seem to grow princes
like potatoes--dozens to a root! Who's the card for? Ask him to walk up.
Show him into a quiet room. Does he speak English?'

'Does Prince Hermann of--I can't pronounce the name of the place--speak
English, Harry?' Janet asked me.

'As well as you or I,' said I, losing my inattention all at once with a
mad leap of the heart.

Hermann's presence gave light, fire, and colour to the scene in which my
destiny had been wavering from hand to hand without much more than
amusedly interesting me, for I was sure that I had lost Ottilia; I knew
that too well, and worse could not happen. I had besides lost other
things that used to sustain me, and being reckless, I was contemptuous,
and listened to the talk about money with sublime indifference to the
subject: with an attitude, too, I daresay. But Hermann's name revived my
torment. Why had he come? to persuade the squire to control my father?
Nothing but that would suffer itself to be suggested, though conjectures
lying in shadow underneath pressed ominously on my mind.

My father had no doubts.

'A word to you, Mr. Beltham, before you go to Prince Hermann. He is an
emissary, we treat him with courtesy, and if he comes to diplomatize we,
of course, give a patient hearing. I have only to observe in the most
emphatic manner possible that I do not retract one step. I will have this
marriage: I have spoken! It rests with Prince Ernest.'

The squire threw a hasty glare of his eyes back as he was hobbling on
Janet's arm. She stopped short, and replied for him.

'Mr. Beltham will speak for himself, in his own name. We are not
concerned in any unworthy treatment of Prince Ernest. We protest against
it.'

'Dear young lady!' said my father, graciously. 'I meet you frankly. Now
tell me. I know you a gallant horsewoman: if you had lassoed the noble
horse of the desert would you let him run loose because of his
remonstrating? Side with me, I entreat you! My son is my first thought.
The pride of princes and wild horses you will find wonderfully similar,
especially in the way they take their taming when once they feel they are
positively caught. We show him we have him fast--he falls into our paces
on the spot! For Harry's sake--for the princess's, I beg you exert your
universally--deservedly acknowledged influence. Even now--and you frown
on me!--I cannot find it in my heart to wish you the sweet and admirable
woman of the world you are destined to be, though you would comprehend me
and applaud me, for I could not--no, not to win your favourable
opinion!--consent that you should be robbed of a single ray of your fresh
maidenly youth. If you must misjudge me, I submit. It is the price I pay
for seeing you young and lovely. Prince Ernest is, credit me, not
unworthily treated by me, if life is a battle, and the prize of it to the
General's head. I implore you'--he lured her with the dimple of a lurking
smile--'do not seriously blame your afflicted senior, if we are to
differ. I am vastly your elder: you instil the doubt whether I am by as
much the wiser of the two; but the father of Harry Richmond claims to
know best what will ensure his boy's felicity. Is he rash? Pronounce me
guilty of an excessive anxiety for my son's welfare; say that I am too
old to read the world with the accuracy of a youthful intelligence: call
me indiscreet: stigmatize me unlucky; the severest sentence a judge'--he
bowed to her deferentially--'can utter; only do not cast a gaze of rebuke
on me because my labour is for my son--my utmost devotion. And we know,
Miss Ilchester, that the princess honours him with her love. I protest in
all candour, I treat love as love; not as a weight in the scale; it is
the heavenly power which dispenses with weighing! its ascendancy . . .'

The squire could endure no more, and happily so, for my father was losing
his remarkably moderated tone, and threatening polysyllables. He had
followed Janet, step for step, at a measured distance, drooping toward
her with his winningest air, while the old man pulled at her arm to get
her out of hearing of the obnoxious flatterer. She kept her long head in
profile, trying creditably not to appear discourteous to one who
addressed her by showing an open ear, until the final bolt made by the
frenzied old man dragged her through the doorway. His neck was shortened
behind his collar as though he shrugged from the blast of a bad wind. I
believe that, on the whole, Janet was pleased. I will wager that, left to
herself, she would have been drawn into an answer, if not an argument.
Nothing would have made her resolution swerve, I admit.

They had not been out of the room three seconds when my aunt Dorothy was
called to join them. She had found time to say that she hoped the money
was intact.




CHAPTER LII

STRANGE REVELATIONS, AND MY GRANDFATHER HAS HIS LAST OUTBURST

My father and I stood at different windows, observing the unconcerned
people below.

'Did you scheme to bring Prince Hermann over here as well?' I asked him.

He replied laughing: 'I really am not the wonderful wizard you think me,
Richie. I left Prince Ernest's address as mine with Waddy in case the
Frau Feld-Marschall should take it into her head to come. Further than
that you must question Providence, which I humbly thank for its unfailing
support, down to unexpected trifles. Only this--to you and to all of
them: nothing bends me. I will not be robbed of the fruit of a lifetime.'

'Supposing I refuse?'

'You refuse, Richie, to restore the princess her character and the prince
his serenity of mind at their urgent supplication? I am utterly unable to
suppose it. You are married in the papers this morning. I grieve to say
that the position of Prince Hermann is supremely ridiculous. I am bound
to add he is a bold boy. It requires courage in one of the pretenders to
the hand of the princess to undertake the office of intercessor, for he
must know--the man must know in his heart that he is doing her no
kindness. He does not appeal to me, you see. I have shown that my
arrangements are unalterable. What he will make of your grandad! . . .
Why on earth he should have been sent to--of all men in the world--your
grandad, Richie!'

I was invited to sympathetic smiles of shrewd amusement.

He caught sight of friends, and threw up the window, saluting them.

The squire returned with my aunt Dorothy and Janet to behold the detested
man communicating with the outer world from his own rooms. He shouted
unceremoniously, 'Shut that window!' and it was easy to see that he had
come back heavily armed for the offensive. 'Here, Mr. Richmond, I don't
want all men to know you're in my apartments.'

'I forgot, sir, temporarily,' said my father, 'I had vacated the rooms
for your convenience--be assured.'

An explanation on the subject of the rooms ensued between the old man and
the ladies;--it did not improve his temper.

His sense of breeding, nevertheless, forced him to remark, 'I can't thank
you, sir, for putting me under an obligation I should never have incurred
myself.'

'Oh, I was happy to be of use to the ladies, Mr. Beltham, and require no
small coin of exchange,' my father responded with the flourish of a
pacifying hand. 'I have just heard from a posse of friends that the
marriage is signalled in this morning's papers--numberless
congratulations, I need not observe.'

'No, don't,' said the squire. 'Nobody'll understand them here, and I
needn't ask you to sit down, because I don't want you to stop. I'll soon
have done now; the game's played. Here, Harry, quick; has all that money
been spent--no offence to you, but as a matter of business?'

'Not all, sir,' I was able to say.

'Half?'

'Yes, I think so.'

'Three parts?'

'It may be.'

'And liabilities besides?'

'There are some.'

'You're not a liar. That'll do for you.'

He turned to my aunt: her eyes had shut.

'Dorothy, you've sold out twenty-five thousand pounds' worth of stock.
You're a truthful woman, as I said, and so I won't treat you like a
witness in a box. You gave it to Harry to help him out of his scrape.
Why, short of staring lunacy, did you pass it through the hands of this
man? He sweated his thousands out of it at the start. Why did you make a
secret of it to make the man think his nonsense?--Ma'am, behave like a
lady and my daughter,' he cried, fronting her, for the sudden and blunt
attack had slackened her nerves; she moved as though to escape, and was
bewildered. I stood overwhelmed. No wonder she had attempted to break up
the scene.

'Tell me your object, Dorothy Beltham, in passing the money through the
hands of this man? Were you for helping him to be a man of his word? Help
the boy--that I understand. However, you were mistress of your money!
I've no right to complain, if you will go spending a fortune to whitewash
the blackamoor! Well, it's your own, you'll say. So it is: so 's your
character!'

The egregious mildness of these interjections could not long be
preserved.

'You deceived me, ma'am. You wouldn't build school-houses, you couldn't
subscribe to Charities, you acted parsimony, to pamper a scamp and his
young scholar! You went to London--you did it in cool blood; you went to
your stockbroker, and from the stockbroker to the Bank, and you sold out
stock to fling away this big sum. I went to the Bank on business, and the
books were turned over for my name, and there at "Beltham" I saw quite by
chance the cross of the pen, and I saw your folly, ma'am; I saw it all in
a shot. I went to the Bank on my own business, mind that. Ha! you know me
by this time; I loathe spying; the thing jumped out of the book; I
couldn't help seeing. Now I don't reckon how many positive fools go to
make one superlative humbug; you're one of the lot, and I've learnt it.'

My father airily begged leave to say: 'As to positive and superlative,
Mr. Beltham, the three degrees of comparison are no longer of service
except to the trader. I do not consider them to exist for ladies. Your
positive is always particularly open to dispute, and I venture to assert
I cap you your superlative ten times over.'

He talked the stuff for a diversion, presenting in the midst of us an
incongruous image of smiles that filled me with I knew not what feelings
of angry alienation, until I was somewhat appeased by the idea that he
had not apprehended the nature of the words just spoken.

It seemed incredible, yet it was true; it was proved to be so to me by
his pricking his ears and his attentive look at the mention of the word
prepossessing him in relation to the money: Government.

The squire said something of Government to my aunt Dorothy, with
sarcastical emphasis.

As the observation was unnecessary, and was wantonly thrown in by him,
she seized on it to escape from her compromising silence: 'I know nothing
of Government or its ways.'

She murmured further, and looked at Janet, who came to her aid, saying:
'Grandada, we've had enough talk of money, money! All is done that you
wanted done. Stocks, Shares, Banks--we've gone through them all. Please,
finish! Please, do. You have only to state what you have heard from
Prince Hermann.'

Janet gazed in the direction of my father, carefully avoiding my eyes,
but evidently anxious to shield my persecuted aunty.

'Speaking of Stocks and Shares, Miss Ilchester,' said my father, 'I
myself would as soon think of walking into a field of scythe-blades in
full activity as of dabbling in them. One of the few instances I remember
of our Jorian stooping to a pun, is upon the contango: ingenious truly,
but objectionable, because a pun. I shall not be guilty of repeating it.
"The stockmarket is the national snapdragon bowl," he says, and is very
amusing upon the Jews; whether quite fairly, Mr. Beltham knows better
than I, on my honour.'

He appealed lightly to the squire, for thus he danced on the crater's
brink, and had for answer,

'You're a cool scoundrel, Richmond.'

'I choose to respect you, rather in spite of yourself, I fear, sir,' said
my father, bracing up.

'Did you hear my conversation with my daughter?'

'I heard, if I may say so, the lion taking his share of it.'

'All roaring to you, was it?'

'Mr. Beltham, we have our little peculiarities; I am accustomed to think
of a steam-vent when I hear you indulging in a sentence of unusual
length, and I hope it is for our good, as I thoroughly believe it is for
yours, that you should deliver yourself freely.'

'So you tell me; like a stage lacquey!' muttered the old man, with
surprising art in caricaturing a weakness in my father's bearing, of
which I was cruelly conscious, though his enunciation was flowing. He
lost his naturalness through forcing for ease in the teeth of insult.

'Grandada, aunty and I will leave you,' said Janet, waxing importunate.

'When I've done,' said he, facing his victim savagely. 'The fellow
pretends he didn't understand. She's here to corroborate. Richmond,
there, my daughter, Dorothy Beltham, there's the last of your fools and
dupes. She's a truthful woman, I'll own, and she'll contradict me if what
I say is not the fact. That twenty-five thousand from "Government" came
out of her estate.'

'Out of--'

'Out of be damned, sir! She's the person who paid it.'

'If the "damns" have set up, you may as well let the ladies go,' said I.

He snapped at me like a rabid dog in career.

'She's the person--one of your petticoat "Government"--who paid--do you
hear me, Richmond?--the money to help you to keep your word: to help you
to give your Balls and dinners too. She--I won't say she told you, and
you knew it--she paid it. She sent it through her Mr. Bannerbridge. Do
you understand now? You had it from her. My God! look at the fellow!'

A dreadful gape of stupefaction had usurped the smiles on my father's
countenance; his eyes rolled over, he tried to articulate, and was indeed
a spectacle for an enemy. His convulsed frame rocked the syllables, as
with a groan, unpleasant to hear, he called on my aunt Dorothy by
successive stammering apostrophes to explain, spreading his hands wide.
He called out her Christian name. Her face was bloodless.

'Address my daughter respectfully, sir, will you! I won't have your
infernal familiarities!' roared the squire.

'He is my brother-in-law,' said Dorothy, reposing on the courage of her
blood, now that the worst had been spoken. 'Forgive me, Mr. Richmond, for
having secretly induced you to accept the loan from me.'

'Loan!' interjected the squire. 'They fell upon it like a pair of kites.
You'll find the last ghost of a bone of your loan in a bill, and well
picked. They've been doing their bills: I've heard that.'

My father touched the points of his fingers on his forehead, straining to
think, too theatrically, but in hard earnest, I believe. He seemed to be
rising on tiptoe.

'Oh, madam! Dear lady! my friend! Dorothy, my sister! Better a thousand
times that I had married, though I shrank from a heartless union! This
money?--it is not--'

The old man broke in: 'Are you going to be a damned low vulgar comedian
and tale of a trumpet up to the end, you Richmond? Don't think you'll
gain anything by standing there as if you were jumping your trunk from a
shark. Come, sir, you're in a gentleman's rooms; don't pitch your voice
like a young jackanapes blowing into a horn. Your gasps and your spasms,
and howl of a yawning brute! Keep your menagerie performances for your
pantomime audiences. What are you meaning? Do you pretend you're
astonished? She's not the first fool of a woman whose money you've
devoured, with your "Madam," and "My dear" and mouthing and elbowing your
comedy tricks; your gabble of "Government" protection, and scandalous
advertisements of the by-blow of a star-coated rapscallion. If you've a
recollection of the man in you, show your back, and be off, say you've
fought against odds--I don't doubt you have, counting the constables--and
own you're a villain: plead guilty, and be off and be silent, and do no
more harm. Is it "Government" still?'

My aunt Dorothy had come round to me. She clutched my arm to restrain me
from speaking, whispering:

'Harry, you can't save him. Think of your own head.' She made me
irresolute, and I was too late to check my father from falling into the
trap.

'Oh! Mr. Beltham,' he said, 'you are hard, sir. I put it to you: had you
been in receipt of a secret subsidy from Government for a long course of
years--'

'How long?' the squire interrupted.

Prompt though he would have been to dismiss the hateful person, he was
not, one could see, displeased to use the whip upon so exciteable and
responsive a frame. He seemed to me to be basely guilty of leading his
victim on to expose himself further.

'There's no necessity for "how long,"' I said.

The old man kept the question on his face.

My father reflected.

'I have to hit my memory, I am shattered, sir. I say, you would be
justified, amply justified--'

'How long?' was reiterated.

'I can at least date it from the period of my marriage.'

'From the date when your scoundrelism first touches my family, that's to
say! So "Government" agreed to give you a stipend to support your wife!'

'Mr. Beltham, I breathe with difficulty. It was at that period, on the
death of a nobleman interested in restraining me--I was his debtor for
kindnesses . . . my head is whirling! I say, at that period, upon the
recommendation of friends of high standing, I began to agitate for the
restitution of my rights. From infancy----'

'To the deuce, your infancy! I know too much about your age. Just hark,
you Richmond! none of your "I was a child" to provoke compassion from
women. I mean to knock you down and make you incapable of hurting these
poor foreign people you trapped. They defy you, and I'll do my best to
draw your teeth. Now for the annuity. You want one to believe 'you
thought you frightened "Government," eh?'

'Annual proof was afforded me, sir.'

'Oh! annual! through Mr. Charles Adolphus Bannerbridge, deceased!'

Janet stepped up to my aunt Dorothy to persuade her to leave the room,
but she declined, and hung by me, to keep me out of danger, as she hoped,
and she prompted me with a guarding nervous squeeze of her hand on my arm
to answer temperately when I was questioned:

'Harry, do you suspect Government paid that annuity?'

'Not now, certainly.'

'Tell the man who 'tis you suspect.'

My aunt Dorothy said: 'Harry is not bound to mention his suspicions.'

'Tell him yourself, then.'

'Does it matter--?'

'Yes, it matters. I'll break every plank he walks on, and strip him stark
till he flops down shivering into his slough--a convicted common
swindler, with his dinners and Balls and his private bands! Richmond, you
killed one of my daughters; t' other fed you, through her agent, this Mr.
Charles Adolphus Bannerbridge, from about the date of your snaring my
poor girl and carrying her off behind your postillions--your trotting
undertakers! and the hours of her life reckoned in milestones. She's here
to contradict me, if she can. Dorothy Beltham was your "Government" that
paid the annuity.'

I took Dorothy Beltham into my arms. She was trembling excessively, yet
found time to say, 'Bear up, dearest; keep still.' All I thought and felt
foundered in tears.

For a while I heard little distinctly of the tremendous tirade which the
vindictive old man, rendered thrice venomous by the immobility of the
petrified large figure opposed to him, poured forth. My poor father did
not speak because he could not; his arms dropped; and such was the
torrent of attack, with its free play of thunder and lightning in the
form of oaths, epithets, short and sharp comparisons, bitter home thrusts
and most vehement imprecatory denunciations, that our protesting voices
quailed. Janet plucked at my aunt Dorothy's dress to bear her away.

'I can't leave my father,' I said.

'Nor I you, dear,' said the tender woman; and so we remained to be
scourged by this tongue of incarnate rage.

'You pensioner of a silly country spinster!' sounded like a return to
mildness. My father's chest heaved up.

I took advantage of the lull to make myself heard: I did but heap fuel on
fire, though the old man's splenetic impetus had partly abated.

'You Richmond! do you hear him? he swears he's your son, and asks to be
tied to the stake beside you. Disown him, and I'll pay you money and
thank you. I'll thank my God for anything short of your foul blood in the
family. You married the boy's mother to craze and kill her, and guttle
her property. You waited for the boy to come of age to swallow what was
settled on him. You wait for me to lie in my coffin to pounce on the
strongbox you think me the fool to toss to a young donkey ready to ruin
all his belongings for you! For nine-and-twenty years you've sucked the
veins of my family, and struck through my house like a rotting-disease.
Nine-and-twenty years ago you gave a singing-lesson in my house: the pest
has been in it ever since! You breed vermin in the brain to think of you!
Your wife, your son, your dupes, every soul that touches you, mildews
from a blight! You were born of ropery, and you go at it straight, like a
webfoot to water. What's your boast?--your mother's disgrace! You shame
your mother. Your whole life's a ballad o' bastardy. You cry up the
woman's infamy to hook at a father. You swell and strut on her pickings.
You're a cock forced from the smoke of the dunghill! You shame your
mother, damned adventurer! You train your boy for a swindler after your
own pattern; you twirl him in your curst harlequinade to a damnation as
sure as your own. The day you crossed my threshold the devils danced on
their flooring. I've never seen the sun shine fair on me after it. With
your guitar under the windows, of moonlight nights! your Spanish
fopperies and trickeries! your French phrases and toeings! I was touched
by a leper. You set your traps for both my girls: you caught the brown
one first, did you, and flung her second for t' other, and drove a tandem
of 'em to live the spangled hog you are; and down went the mother of the
boy to the place she liked better, and my other girl here--the one you
cheated for her salvation--you tried to cajole her from home and me, to
send her the same way down. She stuck to decency. Good Lord! you
threatened to hang yourself, guitar and all. But her purse served your
turn. For why? You 're a leech. I speak before ladies or I'd rip your
town-life to shreds. Your cause! your romantic history! your fine figure!
every inch of you 's notched with villany! You fasten on every moneyed
woman that comes in your way. You've outdone Herod in murdering the
innocents, for he didn't feed on 'em, and they've made you fat. One thing
I'll say of you: you look the beastly thing you set yourself up for. The
kindest blow to you 's to call you impostor.'

He paused, but his inordinate passion of speech was unsated: his white
lips hung loose for another eruption.

I broke from my aunt Dorothy to cross over to my father, saying on the
way: 'We 've heard enough, sir. You forget the cardinal point of
invective, which is, not to create sympathy for the person you assail.'

'Oh! you come in with your infernal fine language, do you!' the old man
thundered at me. 'I 'll just tell you at once, young fellow--'

My aunt Dorothy supplicated his attention. 'One error I must correct.'
Her voice issued from a contracted throat, and was painfully thin and
straining, as though the will to speak did violence to her weaker nature.
'My sister loved Mr. Richmond. It was to save her life, because I
believed she loved him much and would have died, that Mr. Richmond--in
pity--offered her his hand, at my wish': she bent her head: 'at my cost.
It was done for me. I wished it; he obeyed me. No blame--' her dear mouth
faltered. 'I am to be accused, if anybody.'

She added more firmly: 'My money would have been his. I hoped to spare
his feelings, I beg his forgiveness now, by devoting some of it, unknown
to him, to assist him. That was chiefly to please myself, I see, and I am
punished.'

'Well, ma'am,' said the squire, calm at white heat; 'a fool's confession
ought to be heard out to the end. What about the twenty-five thousand?'

'I hoped to help my Harry.'

'Why didn't you do it openly?'

She breathed audible long breaths before she could summon courage to say:
'His father was going to make an irreparable sacrifice. I feared that if
he knew this money came from me he would reject it, and persist.'

Had she disliked the idea of my father's marrying?

The old man pounced on the word sacrifice. 'What sacrifice, ma'am? What's
the sacrifice?'

I perceived that she could not without anguish, and perhaps peril of a
further exposure, bring herself to speak, and explained: 'It relates to
my having tried to persuade my father to marry a very wealthy lady, so
that he might produce the money on the day appointed. Rail at me, sir, as
much as you like. If you can't understand the circumstances without a
chapter of statements, I'm sorry for you. A great deal is due to you, I
know; but I can't pay a jot of it while you go on rating my father like a
madman.'

'Harry!' either my aunt or Janet breathed a warning.

I replied that I was past mincing phrases. The folly of giving the tongue
an airing was upon me: I was in fact invited to continue, and animated to
do it thoroughly, by the old man's expression of face, which was that of
one who says, 'I give you rope,' and I dealt him a liberal amount of
stock irony not worth repeating; things that any cultivated man in anger
can drill and sting the Boeotian with, under the delusion that he has not
lost a particle of his self-command because of his coolness. I spoke very
deliberately, and therefore supposed that the words of composure were
those of prudent sense. The error was manifest. The women saw it. One who
has indulged his soul in invective will not, if he has power in his hand,
be robbed of his climax with impunity by a cool response that seems to
trifle, and scourges.

I wound up by thanking my father for his devotion to me: I deemed it, I
said, excessive and mistaken in the recent instance, but it was for me.

Upon this he awoke from his dreamy-looking stupefaction.

'Richie does me justice. He is my dear boy. He loves me: I love him. None
can cheat us of that. He loves his wreck of a father. You have struck me
to your feet, Mr. Beltham.'

'I don't want to see you there, sir; I want to see you go, and not stand
rapping your breast-bone, sounding like a burst drum, as you are,'
retorted the unappeasable old man.

I begged him in exasperation to keep his similes to himself.

Janet and my aunt Dorothy raised their voices.

My father said: 'I am broken.'

He put out a swimming hand that trembled when it rested, like that of an
aged man grasping a staff. I feared for a moment he was acting, he spoke
so like himself, miserable though he appeared: but it was his well-known
native old style in a state of decrepitude.

'I am broken,' he repeated. 'I am like the ancient figure of mortality
entering the mouth of the tomb on a sepulchral monument, somewhere, by a
celebrated sculptor: I have seen it: I forget the city. I shall presently
forget names of men. It is not your abuse, Mr. Beltham. I should have
bowed my head to it till the storm passed. Your facts . . . Oh! Miss
Beltham, this last privilege to call you dearest of human beings! my
benefactress! my blessing! Do not scorn me, madam.'

'I never did; I never will; I pitied you,' she cried, sobbing.

The squire stamped his foot.

'Madam,' my father bowed gently. 'I was under heaven's special
protection--I thought so. I feel I have been robbed--I have not deserved
it! Oh! madam, no: it was your generosity that I did not deserve. One of
the angels of heaven persuaded me to trust in it. I did not know. . . .
Adieu, madam. May I be worthy to meet you!--Ay, Mr. Beltham, your facts
have committed the death-wound. You have taken the staff out of my hand:
you have extinguished the light. I have existed--ay, a pensioner,
unknowingly, on this dear lady's charity; to her I say no more. To you,
sir, by all that is most sacred to a man-by the ashes of my mother! by
the prospects of my boy! I swear the annuity was in my belief a tangible
token that my claims to consideration were in the highest sources
acknowledged to be just. I cannot speak! One word to you, Mr. Beltham:
put me aside, I am nothing:--Harry Richmond!--his fortunes are not lost;
he has a future! I entreat you--he is your grandson--give him your
support; go this instant to the prince--no! you will not deny your
countenance to Harry Richmond: let him abjure my name; let me be nameless
in his house. And I promise you I shall be unheard of both in Christendom
and Heathendom: I have no heart except for my boy's nuptials with the
princess: this one thing, to see him the husband of the fairest and
noblest lady upon earth, with all the life remaining in me I pray for! I
have won it for him. I have a moderate ability, immense devotion. I
declare to you, sir, I have lived, actually subsisted, on this hope! and
I have directed my efforts incessantly, sleeplessly, to fortify it. I die
to do it! I implore you, sir, go to the prince. If I' (he said this
touchingly) 'if I am any further in anybody's way, it is only as a fallen
tree.' But his inveterate fancifulness led him to add: 'And that may
bridge a cataract.'

My grandfather had been clearing his throat two or three times.

'I 'm ready to finish and get rid of you, Richmond.'

My father bowed.

'I am gone, sir. I feel I am all but tongue-tied. Think that it is Harry
who petitions you to ensure his happiness. To-day I guarantee-it.'

The old man turned an inquiring eyebrow upon me. Janet laid her hand on
him. He dismissed the feline instinct to prolong our torture, and
delivered himself briskly.

'Richmond, your last little bit of villany 's broken in the egg. I
separate the boy from you: he's not your accomplice there, I'm glad to
know. You witched the lady over to pounce on her like a fowler, you
threatened her father with a scandal, if he thought proper to force the
trap; swore you 'd toss her to be plucked by the gossips, eh? She's free
of you! You got your English and your Germans here to point their bills,
and stretch their necks, and hiss, if this gentleman--and your
newspapers!--if he didn't give up to you like a funky traveller to a
highwayman. I remember a tale of a clumsy Turpin, who shot himself when
he was drawing the pistol out of his holsters to frighten the money-bag
out of a market farmer. You've done about the same, you Richmond; and, of
all the damned poor speeches I ever heard from a convicted felon, yours
is the worst--a sheared sheep'd ha' done it more respectably, grant the
beast a tongue! The lady is free of you, I tell you. Harry has to thank
you for that kindness. She--what is it, Janet? Never mind, I've got the
story--she didn't want to marry; but this prince, who called on me just
now, happened to be her father's nominee, and he heard of your
scoundrelism, and he behaved like a man and a gentleman, and offered
himself, none too early nor too late, as it turns out; and the princess,
like a good girl, has made amends to her father by accepting him. I've
the word of this Prince Hermann for it. Now you can look upon a game of
stale-mate. If I had gone to the prince, it wouldn't have been to back
your play; but, if you hadn't been guilty of the tricks of a blackguard
past praying for, this princess would never have been obliged to marry a
man to protect her father and herself. They sent him here to stop any
misunderstanding. He speaks good English, so that's certain. Your lies
will be contradicted, every one of 'em, seriatim, in to-morrow's
newspapers, setting the real man in place of the wrong one; and you 'll
draw no profit from them in your fashionable world, where you 've been
grinning lately, like a blackamoor's head on a conjuror's plate--the
devil alone able to account for the body and joinings. Now you can be
off.'

I went up to my father. His plight was more desperate than mine, for I
had resembled the condemned before the firing-party, to whom the expected
bullet brings a merely physical shock. He, poor man, heard his sentence,
which is the heart's pang of death; and how fondly and rootedly he had
clung to the idea of my marriage with the princess was shown in his
extinction after this blow.

My grandfather chose the moment as a fitting one to ask me for the last
time to take my side.

I replied, without offence in the tones of my voice, that I thought my
father need not lose me into the bargain, after what he had suffered that
day.

He just as quietly rejoined with a recommendation to me to divorce myself
for good and all from a scoundrel.

I took my father's arm: he was not in a state to move away unsupported.

My aunt Dorothy stood weeping; Janet was at the window, no friend to
either of us.

I said to her, 'You have your wish.'

She shook her head, but did not look back.

My grandfather watched me, step by step, until I had reached the door.

'You're going, are you?' he said. 'Then I whistle you off my fingers!'

An attempt to speak was made by my father in the doorway. He bowed wide
of the company, like a blind man. I led him out.

Dimness of sight spared me from seeing certain figures, which were at the
toll-bar of the pier, on the way to quit our shores. What I heard was not
of a character to give me faith in the sanity of the companion I had
chosen. He murmured it at first to himself:

'Waddy shall have her monument!'

My patience was not proof against the repetition of it aloud to me. Had I
been gentler I might have known that his nature was compelled to look
forward to something, and he discerned nothing in the future, save the
task of raising a memorial to a faithful servant.




CHAPTER LIII

THE HEIRESS PROVES THAT SHE INHERITS THE FEUD AND I GO DRIFTING

My grandfather lived eight months after a scene that had afforded him
high gratification at the heaviest cost a plain man can pay for his
pleasures: it killed him.

My father's supple nature helped him to survive it in apparently
unimpeded health, so that the world might well suppose him unconquerable,
as he meant that it should. But I, who was with him, knew, though he
never talked of his wounds, they had been driven into his heart. He
collapsed in speech, and became what he used to call 'one of the ordinary
nodding men,' forsaken of his swamping initiative. I merely observed him;
I did not invite his confidences, being myself in no mood to give
sympathy or to receive it. I was about as tender in my care of him as a
military escort bound to deliver up a captive alive.

I left him at Bulsted on my way to London to face the creditors.
Adversity had not lowered the admiration of the captain and his wife for
the magnificent host of those select and lofty entertainments which I was
led by my errand to examine in the skeleton, and with a wonder as big as
theirs, but of another complexion: They hung about him, and perused and
petted him quaintly; it was grotesque; they thought him deeply injured:
by what, by whom, they could not say; but Julia was disappointed in me
for refraining to come out with a sally on his behalf. He had quite
intoxicated their imaginations. Julia told me of the things he did not do
as marvellingly as of the things he did or had done; the charm, it
seemed, was to find herself familiar with him to the extent of all but
nursing him and making him belong to her. Pilgrims coming upon the source
of the mysteriously-abounding river, hardly revere it the less because
they love it more when they behold the babbling channels it issues from;
and the sense of possession is the secret, I suppose. Julia could inform
me rapturously that her charge had slept eighteen hours at a spell. His
remarks upon the proposal to fetch a doctor, feeble in themselves, were
delicious to her, because they recalled his old humour to show his great
spirit, and from her and from Captain William in turn I was condemned to
hear how he had said this and that of the doctor, which in my opinion
might have been more concise. 'Really, deuced good indeed!' Captain
William would exclaim. 'Don't you see it, Harry, my boy? He denies the
doctor has a right to cast him out of the world on account of his having
been the official to introduce him, and he'll only consent to be visited
when he happens to be as incapable of resisting as upon their very first
encounter.'

The doctor and death and marriage, I ventured to remind the captain, had
been riddled in this fashion by the whole army of humourists and their
echoes.

He and Julia fancied me cold to my father's merits. Fond as they were of
the squire, they declared war against him in private, they criticized
Janet, they thought my aunt Dorothy slightly wrong in making a secret of
her good deed: my father was the victim. Their unabated warmth consoled
me in the bitterest of seasons. He found a home with them at a time when
there would have been a battle at every step. The world soon knew that my
grandfather had cast me off, and with this foundation destroyed, the
entire fabric of the Grand Parade fell to the ground at once. The crash
was heavy. Jorian DeWitt said truly that what a man hates in adversity is
to see 'faces'; meaning that the humanity has gone out of them in their
curious observation of you under misfortune. You see neither friends nor
enemies. You are too sensitive for friends, and are blunted against
enemies. You see but the mask of faces: my father was sheltered from
that. Julia consulted his wishes in everything; she set traps to catch
his whims, and treated them as birds of paradise; she could submit to
have the toppling crumpled figure of a man, Bagenhope, his pensioner and
singular comforter, in her house. The little creature was fetched out of
his haunts in London purposely to soothe my father with performances on
his ancient clarionet, a most querulous plaintive instrument in his
discoursing, almost the length of himself; and she endured the nightly
sound of it in the guest's blue bedroom, heroically patient, a model to
me. Bagenhope drank drams: she allowanced him. He had known my father's
mother, and could talk of her in his cups: his playing, and his aged
tunes, my father said, were a certification to him that he was at the
bottom of the ladder. Why that should afford him peculiar comfort, none
of us could comprehend. 'He was the humble lover of my mother, Richie,' I
heard with some confusion, and that he adored her memory. The statement
was part of an entreaty to me to provide liberally for Bagenhope's
pension before we quitted England. 'I am not seriously anxious for much
else,' said my father. Yet was he fully conscious of the defeat he had
sustained and the catastrophe he had brought down upon me: his touch of
my hand told me that, and his desire for darkness and sleep. He had
nothing to look to, nothing to see twinkling its radiance for him in the
dim distance now; no propitiating Government, no special Providence. But
he never once put on a sorrowful air to press for pathos, and I thanked
him. He was a man endowed to excite it in the most effective manner, to a
degree fearful enough to win English sympathies despite his un-English
faults. He could have drawn tears in floods, infinite pathetic
commiseration, from our grangousier public, whose taste is to have it as
it may be had to the mixture of one-third of nature in two-thirds of
artifice. I believe he was expected to go about with this beggar's
petition for compassion, and it was a disappointment to the generous, for
which they punished him, that he should have abstained. And moreover his
simple quietude was really touching to true-hearted people. The elements
of pathos do not permit of their being dispensed from a stout smoking
bowl. I have to record no pathetic field-day. My father was never
insincere in emotion.

I spared his friends, chums, associates, excellent men of a kind, the
trial of their attachment by shunning them. His servants I dismissed
personally, from M. Alphonse down to the coachman Jeremy, whose speech to
me was, that he should be happy to serve my father again, or me, if he
should happen to be out of a situation when either of us wanted him,
which at least showed his preference for employment: on the other hand,
Alphonse, embracing the grand extremes of his stereotyped national
oratory, where 'SI JAMAIS,' like the herald Mercury new-mounting, takes
its august flight to set in the splendour of 'ausqu'n LA MORT,' declared
all other service than my father's repugnant, and vowed himself to a
hermitage, remote from condiments. They both meant well, and did but
speak the diverse language of their blood. Mrs. Waddy withdrew a respited
heart to Dipwell; it being, according to her experiences, the third time
that my father had relinquished house and furniture to go into eclipse on
the Continent after blazing over London. She strongly recommended the
Continent for a place of restoration, citing his likeness to that animal
the chameleon, in the readiness with which he forgot himself among them
that knew nothing of him. We quitted Bulsted previous to the return of
the family to Riversley. My grandfather lay at the island hotel a month,
and was brought home desperately ill. Lady Edbury happened to cross the
channel with us. She behaved badly, I thought; foolishly, my father said.
She did as much as obliqueness of vision and sharpness of feature could
help her to do to cut him in the presence of her party: and he would not
take nay. It seemed in very bad taste on his part; he explained to me
off-handedly that he insisted upon the exchange of a word or two for the
single purpose of protecting her from calumny. By and by it grew more
explicable to me how witless she had been to give gossip a handle in the
effort to escape it. She sent for him in Paris, but he did not pay the
visit.

My grandfather and I never saw one another again. He had news of me from
various quarters, and I of him from one; I was leading a life in marked
contrast from the homely Riversley circle of days: and this likewise was
set in the count of charges against my father. Our Continental pilgrimage
ended in a course of riotousness that he did not participate in, and was
entirely innocent of, but was held accountable for, because he had been
judged a sinner.

'I am ordered to say,' Janet wrote, scrupulously obeying the order, 'that
if you will leave Paris and come home, and not delay in doing it, your
grandfather will receive you on the same footing as heretofore.'

As heretofore! in a letter from a young woman supposed to nourish a
softness!

I could not leave my father in Paris, alone; I dared not bring him to
London. In wrath at what I remembered, I replied that I was willing to
return to Riversley if my father should find a welcome as well.

Janet sent a few dry lines to summon me over in April, a pleasant month
on heath-lands when the Southwest sweeps them. The squire was dead. I
dropped my father at Bulsted. I could have sworn to the terms of the
Will; Mr. Burgin had little to teach me. Janet was the heiress; three
thousand pounds per annum fell to the lot of Harry Lepel Richmond, to be
paid out of the estate, and pass in reversion to his children, or to
Janet's should the aforesaid Harry die childless.

I was hard hit, and chagrined, but I was not at all angry, for I knew
what the Will meant. My aunt Dorothy supplied the interlining eagerly to
mollify the seeming cruelty. 'You have only to ask to have it all,
Harry.' The sturdy squire had done his utmost to forward his cherished
wishes after death. My aunt received five-and-twenty thousand pounds, the
sum she had thrown away. 'I promised that no money of mine should go
where the other went,' she said.

The surprise in store for me was to find how much this rough-worded old
man had been liked by his tenantry, his agents and servants. I spoke of
it to Janet. 'They loved him,' she said. 'No one who ever met him fairly
could help loving him.' They followed him to his grave in a body. From
what I chanced to hear among them, their squire was the man of their
hearts: in short, an Englishman of the kind which is perpetually
perishing out of the land. Janet expected me to be enthusiastic likewise,
or remorseful. She expected sympathy; she read me the long list of his
charities. I was reminded of Julia Bulsted commenting on my father, with
her this he did and that. 'He had plenty,' I said, and Janet shut her
lips. Her coldness was irritating.

What ground of accusation had she against me? Our situation had become so
delicate that a cold breath sundered us as far as the Poles. I was at
liberty to suspect that now she was the heiress, her mind was simply
obedient to her grandada's wish; but, as I told my aunt Dorothy, I would
not do her that injustice.

'No,' said Dorothy; 'it is the money that makes her position so
difficult, unless you break the ice.'

I urged that having steadily refused her before, I could hardly advance
without some invitation now.

'What invitation?' said my aunt.

'Not a corpse-like consent,' said I.

'Harry,' she twitted me, 'you have not forgiven her.' That was true.

Sir Roderick and Lady Ilchester did not conceal their elation at their
daughter's vast inheritance, though the lady appealed to my feelings in
stating that her son Charles was not mentioned in the Will. Sir Roderick
talked of the squire with personal pride:--'Now, as to his management of
those unwieldy men, his miners they sent him up the items of their
complaints. He took them one by one, yielding here, discussing there, and
holding to his point. So the men gave way; he sent them a month's pay to
reward them for their good sense. He had the art of moulding the men who
served him in his own likeness. His capacity for business was
extraordinary; you never expected it of a country gentleman. He more than
quadrupled his inheritance--much more!' I state it to the worthy
Baronet's honour, that although it would have been immensely to his
satisfaction to see his daughter attracting the suitor proper to an
heiress of such magnitude, he did not attempt to impose restriction upon
my interviews with Janet: Riversley was mentioned as my home. I tried to
feel at home; the heir of the place seemed foreign, and so did Janet. I
attributed it partly to her deep mourning dress that robed her in so
sedate a womanliness, partly, in spite of myself, to her wealth.

'Speak to her kindly of your grandfather,' said my aunt Dorothy. To do
so, however, as she desired it, would be to be guilty of a form of
hypocrisy, and I belied my better sentiments by keeping silent. Thus,
having ruined myself through anger, I allowed silly sensitiveness to
prevent the repair.

It became known that my father was at Bulsted.

I saw trouble one morning on Janet's forehead.

We had a conversation that came near to tenderness; at last she said:
'Will you be able to forgive me if I have ever the misfortune to offend
you?'

'You won't offend me,' said I.

She hoped not.

I rallied her: 'Tut, tut, you talk like any twelve-years-old, Janet.'

'I offended you then!'

'Every day! it's all that I care much to remember.'

She looked pleased, but I was so situated that I required passion and
abandonment in return for a confession damaging to my pride. Besides, the
school I had been graduating in of late unfitted me for a young English
gentlewoman's shades and intervolved descents of emotion. A glance up and
a dimple in the cheek, were pretty homely things enough, not the blaze I
wanted to unlock me, and absolutely thought I had deserved.

Sir Roderick called her to the library on business, which he was in the
habit of doing ten times a day, as well as of discussing matters of
business at table, ostentatiously consulting his daughter, with a solemn
countenance and a transparently reeling heart of parental exultation.
'Janet is supreme,' he would say: 'my advice is simple advice; I am her
chief agent, that is all.' Her chief agent, as director of three
Companies and chairman of one, was perhaps competent to advise her, he
remarked. Her judgement upon ordinary matters he agreed with my
grandfather in thinking consummate.

Janet went to him, and shortly after drove him to the station for London.
My aunt Dorothy had warned me that she was preparing some deed in my
favour, and as I fancied her father to have gone to London for that
purpose, and supposed she would now venture to touch on it, I walked away
from the East gates of the park as soon as I heard the trot of her
ponies, and was led by an evil fate (the stuff the fates are composed of
in my instance I have not kept secret) to walk Westward. Thither my evil
fate propelled me, where accident was ready to espouse it and breed me
mortifications innumerable. My father chanced to have heard the
particulars of Squire Beltham's will that morning: I believe Captain
William's coachman brushed the subject despondently in my interests; it
did not reach him through Julia.

He stood outside the Western gates, and as I approached, I could perceive
a labour of excitement on his frame. He pulled violently at the bars of
the obstruction.

'Richie, I am interdicted house and grounds!' he called, and waved his
hand toward the lodge: 'they decline to open to me.'

'Were you denied admission?' I asked him.

'--Your name, if you please, sir?--Mr. Richmond Roy.--We are sorry we
have orders not to admit you. And they declined; they would not admit me
to see my son.'

'Those must be the squire's old orders,' I said, and shouted to the
lodge-keeper.

My father, with the forethoughtfulness which never forsook him, stopped
me.

'No, Richie, no; the good woman shall not have the responsibility of
letting me in against orders; she may be risking her place, poor soul!
Help me, dear lad.'

He climbed the bars to the spikes, tottering, and communicating a
convulsion to me as I assisted him in the leap down: no common feat for
one of his age and weight.

He leaned on me, quaking.

'Impossible! Richie, impossible!' he cried, and reviewed a series of
interjections.

It was some time before I discovered that they related to the Will. He
was frenzied, and raved, turning suddenly from red to pale under what I
feared were redoubtable symptoms, physical or mental. He came for sight
of the Will; he would contest it, overthrow it. Harry ruined? He would
see Miss Beltham and fathom the plot;--angel, he called her, and was
absurdly exclamatory, but in dire earnest. He must have had the
appearance of a drunken man to persons observing him from the Grange
windows.

My father was refused admission at the hall-doors.

The butler, the brute Sillabin, withstood me impassively.

Whose orders had he?

Miss Ilchester's.

'They are afraid of me!' my father thundered.

I sent a message to Janet.

She was not long in coming, followed by a footman who handed a twist of
note-paper from my aunt Dorothy to my father. He opened it and made
believe to read it, muttering all the while of the Will.

Janet dismissed the men-servants. She was quite colourless.

'We have been stopped in the doorway,' I said.

She answered: 'I wish it could have been prevented.'

'You take it on yourself, then?'

She was inaudible.

'My dear Janet, you call Riversley my home, don't you?'

'It is yours.'

'Do you intend to keep up this hateful feud now my grandfather is dead?'

'No, Harry, not I.'

'Did you give orders to stop my father from entering the house and
grounds?'

'I did.'

'You won't have him here?'

'Dear Harry, I hoped he would not come just yet.'

'But you gave the orders?'

'Yes.'

'You're rather incomprehensible, my dear Janet.'

'I wish you could understand me, Harry.'

'You arm your servants against him!'

'In a few days--' she faltered.

'You insult him and me now,' said I, enraged at the half indication of
her relenting, which spoiled her look of modestly--resolute beauty, and
seemed to show that she meant to succumb without letting me break her.
'You are mistress of the place.'

'I am. I wish I were not.'

'You are mistress of Riversley, and you refuse to let my father come in!'

'While I am the mistress, yes.'

'Anywhere but here, Harry! If he will see me or aunty, if he will kindly
appoint any other place, we will meet him, we shall be glad.'

'I request you to let him enter the house. Do you consent or not?'

'He was refused once at these doors. Do you refuse him a second time?'

'I do.'

'You mean that?'

'I am obliged to.'

'You won't yield a step to me?'

'I cannot.'

The spirit of an armed champion was behind those mild features, soft
almost to supplication to me, that I might know her to be under a
constraint. The nether lip dropped in breathing, the eyes wavered: such
was her appearance in open war with me, but her will was firm.

Of course I was not so dense as to be unable to perceive her grounds for
refusing.

She would not throw the burden on her grandada, even to propitiate
me--the man she still loved.

But that she should have a reason, and think it good, in spite of me, and
cling to it, defying me, and that she should do hurt to a sentient human
creature, who was my father, for the sake of blindly obeying to the
letter the injunction of the dead, were intolerable offences to me and
common humanity. I, for my own part, would have forgiven her, as I
congratulated myself upon reflecting. It was on her account--to open her
mind, to enlighten her concerning right and wrong determination, to bring
her feelings to bear upon a crude judgement--that I condescended to argue
the case. Smarting with admiration, both of the depths and shallows of
her character, and of her fine figure, I began:--She was to consider how
young she was to pretend to decide on the balance of duties, how little
of the world she had seen; an oath sworn at the bedside of the dead was a
solemn thing, but was it Christian to keep it to do an unnecessary
cruelty to the living? if she had not studied philosophy, she might at
least discern the difference between just resolves and insane--between
those the soul sanctioned, and those hateful to nature; to bind oneself
to carry on another person's vindictiveness was voluntarily to adopt
slavery; this was flatly-avowed insanity, and so forth, with an emphatic
display of patience.

The truth of my words could not be controverted. Unhappily I confounded
right speaking with right acting, and conceived, because I spoke so
justly, that I was specially approved in pressing her to yield.

She broke the first pause to say, 'It's useless, Harry. I do what I think
I am bound to do.'

'Then I have spoken to no purpose!'

'If you will only be kind, and wait two or three days?'

'Be sensible!'

'I am, as much as I can be.'

'Hard as a flint--you always were! The most grateful woman alive, I
admit. I know not another, I assure you, Janet, who, in return for
millions of money, would do such a piece of wanton cruelty. What! You
think he was not punished enough when he was berated and torn to shreds
in your presence? They would be cruel, perhaps--we will suppose it of
your sex--but not so fond of their consciences as to stamp a life out to
keep an oath. I forget the terms of the Will. Were you enjoined in it to
force him away?'

My father had stationed himself in the background. Mention of the Will
caught his ears, and he commenced shaking my aunt Dorothy's note,
blinking and muttering at a great rate, and pressing his temples.

'I do not read a word of this,' he said,--'upon my honour, not a word;
and I know it is her handwriting. That Will!--only, for the love of
heaven, madam,'--he bowed vaguely to Janet 'not a syllable of this to the
princess, or we are destroyed. I have a great bell in my head, or I would
say more. Hearing is out of the question.'

Janet gazed piteously from him to me.

To kill the deer and be sorry for the suffering wretch is common.

I begged my father to walk along the carriage-drive. He required that the
direction should be pointed out accurately, and promptly obeyed me,
saying: 'I back you, remember. I should certainly be asleep now but for
this extraordinary bell.' After going some steps, he turned to shout
'Gong,' and touched his ear. He walked loosely, utterly unlike the walk
habitual to him even recently in Paris.

'Has he been ill?' Janet asked.

'He won't see the doctor; the symptoms threaten apoplexy or paralysis, I
'm told. Let us finish. You were aware that you were to inherit
Riversley?'

'Yes, Riversley, Harry; I knew that; I knew nothing else.'

'The old place was left to you that you might bar my father out?'

'I gave my word.'

'You pledged it--swore?'

'No.'

'Well, you've done your worst, my dear. If the axe were to fall on your
neck for it, you would still refuse, would you not?'

Janet answered softly: 'I believe so.'

'Then, good-bye,' said I.

That feminine softness and its burden of unalterable firmness pulled me
two ways, angering me all the more that I should feel myself susceptible
to a charm which came of spiritual rawness rather than sweetness; for she
needed not to have made the answer in such a manner; there was pride in
it; she liked the soft sound of her voice while declaring herself
invincible: I could see her picturing herself meek but fixed.

'Will you go, Harry? Will you not take Riversley?' she said.

I laughed.

'To spare you the repetition of the dilemma?'

'No, Harry; but this might be done.'

'But--my fullest thanks to you for your generosity: really! I speak in
earnest: it would be decidedly against your grandada's wishes, seeing
that he left the Grange to you, and not to me.'

'Grandada's wishes! I cannot carry out all his wishes,' she sighed.

'Are you anxious to?'

We were on the delicate ground, as her crimson face revealed to me that
she knew as well as I.

I, however, had little delicacy in leading her on it. She might well feel
that she deserved some wooing.

I fancied she was going to be overcome, going to tremble and show herself
ready to fall on my bosom, and I was uncertain of the amount of
magnanimity in store there.

She replied calmly, 'Not immediately.'

'You are not immediately anxious to fulfil his wishes?'

'Harry, I find it hard to do those that are thrust on me.'

'But, as a matter of serious obligation, you would hold yourself bound by
and by to perform them all?'

'I cannot speak any further of my willingness, Harry.'

'The sense of duty is evidently always sufficient to make you act upon
the negative--to deny, at least?'

'Yes, I daresay,' said Janet.

We shook hands like a pair of commercial men.

I led my father to Bulsted. He was too feverish to remain there. In the
evening, after having had a fruitless conversation with my aunt Dorothy
upon the event of the day, I took him to London that he might visit his
lawyers, who kindly consented to treat him like doctors, when I had
arranged to make over to them three parts of my annuity, and talked of
his Case encouragingly; the effect of which should not have astonished
me. He closed a fit of reverie resembling his drowsiness, by exclaiming:
'Richie will be indebted to his dad for his place in the world after
all!' Temporarily, he admitted, we must be fugitives from creditors, and
as to that eccentric tribe, at once so human and so inhuman, he imparted
many curious characteristics gained of his experience. Jorian DeWitt had
indeed compared them to the female ivy that would ultimately kill its
tree, but inasmuch as they were parasites, they loved their debtor; he
was life and support to them, and there was this remarkable fact about
them: by slipping out of their clutches at critical moments when they
would infallibly be pulling you down, you were enabled to return to them
fresh, and they became inspired with another lease of lively faith in
your future: et caetera. I knew the language. It was a flash of himself,
and a bad one, but I was not the person whom he meant to deceive with it.
He was soon giving me other than verbal proof out of England that he was
not thoroughly beaten. We had no home in England. At an hotel in Vienna,
upon the close of the aristocratic season there, he renewed an
acquaintance with a Russian lady, Countess Kornikoff, and he and I
parted. She disliked the Margravine of Rippau, who was in Vienna, and did
not recognize us. I heard that it was the Margravine who had despatched
Prince Hermann to England as soon as she discovered Ottilia's flight
thither. She commissioned him to go straightway to Roy in London, and my
father's having infatuatedly left his own address for Prince Ernest's in
the island, brought Hermann down: he only met Eckart in the morning
train. I mention it to show the strange working of events.

Janet sent me a letter by the hands of Temple in August. It was
moderately well written for so blunt a writer, and might have touched me
but for other news coming simultaneously that shook the earth under my
feet.

She begged my forgiveness for her hardness, adding characteristically
that she could never have acted in any other manner. The delusion, that
what she was she must always be, because it was her nature, had mastered
her understanding, or rather it was one of the doors of her understanding
not yet opened: she had to respect her grandada's wishes. She made it
likewise appear that she was ready for further sacrifices to carry out
the same.

'At least you will accept a division of the property, Harry. It should be
yours. It is an excess, and I feel it a snare to me. I was a selfish
child: I may not become an estimable woman. You have not pardoned my
behaviour at the island last year, and I cannot think I was wrong:
perhaps I might learn: I want your friendship and counsel. Aunty will
live with me: she says that you would complete us. At any rate I transfer
Riversley to you. Send me your consent. Papa will have it before the
transfer is signed.'

The letter ended with an adieu, a petition for an answer, and 'yours
affectionately.'

On the day of its date, a Viennese newspaper lying on the Salzburg Hotel
table chronicled Ottilia's marriage with Prince Hermann.

I turned on Temple to walk him off his legs if I could.

Carry your fever to the Alps, you of minds diseased not to sit down in
sight of them ruminating, for bodily ease and comfort will trick the soul
and set you measuring our lean humanity against yonder sublime and
infinite; but mount, rack the limbs, wrestle it out among the peaks;
taste danger, sweat, earn rest: learn to discover ungrudgingly that
haggard fatigue is the fair vision you have run to earth, and that rest
is your uttermost reward. Would you know what it is to hope again, and
have all your hopes at hand?--hang upon the crags at a gradient: that
makes your next step a debate between the thing you are and the thing you
may become. There the merry little hopes grow for the climber like
flowers and food, immediate, prompt to prove their uses, sufficient: if
just within the grasp, as mortal hopes should be. How the old lax life
closes in about you there! You are the man of your faculties, nothing
more. Why should a man pretend to more? We ask it wonderingly when we are
healthy. Poetic rhapsodists in the vales below may tell you of the joy
and grandeur of the upper regions, they cannot pluck you the medical
herb. He gets that for himself who wanders the marshy ledge at nightfall
to behold the distant Sennhiittchen twinkle, who leaps the green-eyed
crevasses, and in the solitude of an emerald alp stretches a salt hand to
the mountain kine.




CHAPTER LIV

MY RETURN TO ENGLAND

I passed from the Alps to the desert, and fell in love with the East,
until it began to consume me. History, like the air we breathe, must be
in motion to keep us uncorrupt: otherwise its ancient homes are
infectious. My passion for the sun and his baked people lasted awhile,
the drudgery of the habit of voluntary exile some time longer, and then,
quite unawares, I was seized with a thirst for England, so violent that I
abandoned a correspondence of several months, lying for me both at
Damascus and Cairo, to catch the boat for Europe. A dream of a rainy
morning, in the midst of the glowing furnace, may have been the origin of
the wild craving I had for my native land and Janet. The moist air of
flying showers and drenched spring buds surrounded her; I saw her plainly
lifting a rose's head; was it possible I had ever refused to be her
yokefellow? Could so noble a figure of a fair young woman have been
offered and repudiated again and again by a man in his senses? I spurned
the intolerable idiot, to stop reflection. Perhaps she did likewise now.
There was nothing to alarm me save my own eagerness.

The news of my father was perplexing, leading me to suppose him
re-established in London, awaiting the coming on of his Case. Whence the
money?

Money and my father, I knew, met as they divided, fortuitously; in
illustration of which, I well remembered, while passing in view of the
Key of the Adige along the Lombard plain, a circumstance during my Alpine
tour with Temple, of more importance to him than to me, when my emulous
friend, who would never be beaten, sprained his ankle severely on the
crags of a waterfall, not far from Innsbruck, and was invited into a
house by a young English lady, daughter of a retired Colonel of Engineers
of our army. The colonel was an exile from his country for no grave
crime: but, as he told us, as much an exile as if he had committed a
capital offence in being the father of nine healthy girls. He had been,
against his judgement, he averred, persuaded to fix on his Tyrolese spot
of ground by the two elder ones. Five were now married to foreigners;
thus they repaid him, by scattering good English blood on the race of
Counts and Freiherrs! 'I could understand the decrees of Providence
before I was a parent,' said this dear old Colonel Heddon. 'I was looking
up at the rainbow when I heard your steps, asking myself whether it was
seen in England at that instant, and why on earth I should be out of
England!' He lived abroad to be able to dower his girls. His sons-in-law
were gentlemen; so far he was condemned to be satisfied, but supposing
all his girls married foreigners? His primitive frankness charmed us, and
it struck me that my susceptible Temple would have liked to be in a
position to reassure him with regard to the Lucy of the four. We were
obliged to confess that she was catching a foreign accent. The old
colonel groaned. He begged us to forgive him for not treating us as
strangers; his heart leapt out to young English gentlemen.

My name, he said, reminded him of a great character at home, in the old
days: a certain Roy-Richmond, son of an actress and somebody, so the
story went: and there was an old Lord Edbury who knew more about it than
most. 'Now Roy was an adventurer, but he had a soul of true chivalry, by
gad, he had! Plenty of foreign whiffmajigs are to be found, but you won't
come upon a fellow like that. Where he got his money from none knew: all
I can say is, I don't believe he ever did a dirty action for it. And one
matter I'll tell you of: pardon me a moment, Mr. Richmond, I haven't
talked English for half a century, or, at least, a quarter. Old Lord
Edbury put him down in his will for some thousands, and he risked it to
save a lady, who hated him for his pains. Lady Edbury was of the Bolton
blood, none of the tamest; they breed good cavalry men. She ran away from
her husband once. The old lord took her back. "It 's at your peril,
mind!" says she. Well, Roy hears by-and-by of afresh affair. He mounted
horse; he was in the saddle, I've been assured, a night and a day, and
posted himself between my lady's park-gates, and the house, at dusk. The
rumour ran that he knew of the marquis playing spy on his wife. However,
such was the fact; she was going off again, and the marquis did play the
mean part. She walked down the parkroad, and, seeing the cloaked figure
of a man, she imagined him to be her Lothario, and very naturally, you
will own, fell into his arms. The gentleman in question was an
acquaintance of mine; and the less you follow our example the better for
you. It was a damnable period in morals! He told me that he saw the scene
from the gates, where he had his carriage-and-four ready. The old lord
burst out of an ambush on his wife and her supposed paramour; the lady
was imprisoned in her rescuer's arms, and my friend retired on tiptoe,
which was, I incline to think, the best thing he could do. Our morals
were abominable. Lady Edbury would never see Roy-Richmond after that, nor
the old lord neither. He doubled the sum he had intended to leave him,
though. I heard that he married a second young wife. Roy, I believe,
ended by marrying a great heiress, and reforming. He was an eloquent
fellow, and stood like a general in full uniform, cocked hat and
feathers; most amusing fellow at table; beat a Frenchman for anecdote.'

I spared Colonel Heddon the revelation of my relationship to his hero,
thanking his garrulity for interrupting me.

How I pitied him when I drove past the gates of the main route to
Innsbruck! For I was bound homeward: I should soon see England, green
cloudy England, the white cliffs, the meadows, the heaths! And I thanked
the colonel again in my heart for having done something to reconcile me
to the idea of that strange father of mine.

A banner-like stream of morning-coloured smoke rolled North-eastward as I
entered London, and I drove to Temple's chambers. He was in Court,
engaged in a case as junior to his father. Temple had become that radiant
human creature, a working man, then? I walked slowly to the Court, and
saw him there, hardly recognising him in his wig. All that he had to do
was to prompt his father in a case of collision at sea; the barque
Priscilla had run foul of a merchant brig, near the mouth of the Thames,
and though I did not expect it on hearing the vessel's name, it proved to
be no other than the barque Priscilla of Captain Jasper Welsh. Soon after
I had shaken Temple's hand, I was going through the same ceremony with
the captain himself, not at all changed in appearance, who blessed his
heart for seeing me, cried out that a beard and mustachios made a foreign
face of a young Englishman, and was full of the 'providential'
circumstance of his having confided his case to Temple and his father.

'Ay, ay, Captain Welsh,' said Temple, 'we have pulled you through, only
another time mind you keep an eye on that look-out man of yours. Some of
your men, I suspect, see double with an easy conscience. A close net
makes slippery eels.'

'Have you anything to say against my men?' the captain inquired.

Temple replied that he would talk to him about it presently, and laughed
as he drew me away.

'His men will get him into a deuce of a scrape some day, Richie. I shall
put him on his guard. Have you had all my letters? You look made of iron.
I'm beginning capitally, not afraid of the Court a bit, and I hope I'm
not pert. I wish your father had taken it better!'

'Taken what?' said I.

'Haven't you heard from him?'

'Two or three times: a mass of interjections.'

'You know he brought his Case forward at last? Of course it went as we
all knew it would.'

'Where is he? Have you seen Janet lately?'

'He is at Miss Ilchester's house in London.'

'Write the address on a card.'

Temple wrote it rather hesitatingly, I thought.

We talked of seeing one another in the evening, and I sprang off to
Janet's residence, forgetting to grasp my old friend's hand at parting. I
was madly anxious to thank her for the unexpected tenderness to my
father. And now nothing stood between us!

My aunt Dorothy was the first to welcome me. 'He must be prepared for the
sight of you, Harry. The doctors say that a shock may destroy him. Janet
treats him so wonderfully.'

I pressed her on my heart and cheered her, praising Janet. She wept.

'Is there anything new the matter?' I said.

'It 's not new to us, Harry. I'm sure you're brave?'

'Brave! what am I asked to bear?'

'Much, if you love her, Harry!'

'Speak.'

'It is better you should hear it from me, Harry. I wrote you word of it.
We all imagined it would not be disagreeable to you. Who could foresee
this change in you? She least of all!'

'She's in love with some one?'

'I did not say in love.'

'Tell me the worst.'

'She is engaged to be married.'

Janet came into the room--another Janet for me. She had engaged herself
to marry the Marquis of Edbury. At the moment when she enslaved me with
gratitude and admiration she was lost to me. I knew her too well to see a
chance of her breaking her pledged word.

My old grandfather said of Janet, 'She's a compassionate thing.' I felt
now the tears under his speech, and how late I was in getting wisdom.
Compassion for Edbury in Janet's bosom was the matchmaker's chief engine
of assault, my aunt Dorothy told me. Lady Ilchester had been for this
suitor, Sir Roderick for the other, up to the verge of a quarrel between
the most united of wedding couples. Janet was persecuted. She heard that
Edbury's life was running to waste; she liked him for his cricketing and
hunting, his frankness, seeming manliness, and general native English
enthusiasm. I permitted myself to comprehend the case as far as I could
allow myself to excuse her.

Dorothy Beltham told me something of Janet that struck me to the dust.

'It is this, dear Harry; bear to hear it! Janet and I and his good true
woman of a housekeeper, whose name is Waddy, we are, I believe, the only
persons that know it. He had a large company to dine at a City tavern,
she told us, on the night after the decision--when the verdict went
against him. The following morning I received a note from this good Mrs.
Waddy addressed to Sir Roderick's London house, where I was staying with
Janet; it said that he was ill; and Janet put on her bonnet at once to go
to him.'

'The lady didn't fear contagion any longer?'

'She went, walking fast. He was living in lodgings, and the people of the
house insisted on removing him, Mrs. Waddy told us. She was cowering in
the parlour. I had not the courage to go upstairs. Janet went by
herself.'

My heart rose on a huge swell.

'She was alone with him, Harry. We could hear them.'

Dorothy Beltham looked imploringly on me to waken my whole comprehension.

'She subdued him. When I saw him he was white as death, but quiet, not
dangerous at all.'

'Do you mean she found him raving?' I cried out on our Maker's name, in
grief and horror.

'Yes, dear Harry, it was so.'

'She stepped between him and an asylum?'

'She quitted Sir Roderick's house to lodge your father safe in one that
she hired, and have him under her own care. She watched him day and night
for three weeks, and governed him, assisted only at intervals by the poor
frightened woman, Mrs. Waddy, and just as frightened me. And I am still
subject to the poor woman's way of pressing her hand to her heart at a
noise. It 's over now. Harry, Janet wished that you should never hear of
it. She dreads any excitement for him. I think she is right in fancying
her own influence the best: he is used to it. You know how gentle she is
though she is so firm.'

'Oh! don't torture me, ma'am, for God's sake,' I called aloud.




CHAPTER LV

I MEET MY FIRST PLAYFELLOW AND TAKE MY PUNISHMENT

There came to me a little note on foreign paper, unaddressed, an
enclosure forwarded by Janet, and containing merely one scrap from the
playful XENIEN of Ottilia's favourite brotherly poets, of untranslatable
flavour:--

     Who shuns true friends flies fortune in the concrete:
     Would he see what he aims at? let him ask his heels.

It filled me with a breath of old German peace.

From this I learnt that Ottilia and Janet corresponded. Upon what topics?
to what degree of intimacy?

Janet now confessed to me that their intimacy had never known reserve.
The princess had divined her attachment for Harry Richmond when their
acquaintance was commenced in the island, and knew at the present moment
that I had travelled round to the recognition of Janet's worth.

Thus encouraged by the princess's changeless friendship, I wrote to her,
leaving little to be guessed of my state of mind, withholding nothing of
the circumstances surrounding me. Imagination dealt me all my sharpest
misery, and now that Ottilia resumed her place there, I became infinitely
peacefuller, and stronger to subdue my hungry nature. It caused me no
pang, strangely though it read in my sight when written, to send warm
greetings and respects to the prince her husband.

Is it any waste of time to write of love? The trials of life are in it,
but in a narrow ring and a fierier. You may learn to know yourself
through love, as you do after years of life, whether you are fit to lift
them that are about you, or whether you are but a cheat, and a load on
the backs of your fellows. The impure perishes, the inefficient
languishes, the moderate comes to its autumn of decay--these are of the
kinds which aim at satisfaction to die of it soon or late. The love that
survives has strangled craving; it lives because it lives to nourish and
succour like the heavens.

But to strangle craving is indeed to go through a death before you reach
your immortality.

But again, to write of a love perverted by all the elements contributing
to foolishness, and foredoomed to chastisement, would be a graceless
business. Janet and I went through our trial, she, you may believe, the
braver under the most to bear.

I was taken by Temple down to the ship--smelling East of London, for the
double purpose of trying to convince Captain Welsh of the extravagance of
a piece of chivalry he was about to commit, and of seeing a lady with a
history, who had recently come under his guardianship. Temple thought I
should know her, but he made a mystery of it until the moment of our
introduction arrived, not being certain of her identity, and not wishing
to have me disappointed. It appeared that Captain Welsh questioned his
men closely after he had won his case, and he arrived at the conclusion
that two or three of them had been guilty of false swearing in his
interests. He did not dismiss them, for, as he said, it was twice a bad
thing to turn sinners loose: it was to shove them out of the direct road
of amendment, and it was a wrong to the population. He insisted, however,
on paying the legal costs and an indemnity for the collision at sea; and
Temple was in great distress about it, he having originally suggested the
suspicion of his men to Captain Welsh. 'I wanted to put him on his guard
against those rascals,' Temple said, 'and I suppose,' he sighed, 'I
wanted the old captain to think me enormously clever all round.' He shook
himself, and assumed a bearish aspect, significant of disgust and
recklessness. 'The captain 'll be ruined, Richie; and he's not young, you
know, to go on sailing his barque Priscilla for ever. If he pays, why, I
ought to pay, and then you ought to pay, for I shouldn't have shown off
before him alone, and then the wind that fetched you ought to pay. Toss
common sense overboard, there's no end to your fine-drawings; that's why
it's always safest to swear by the Judge.'

We rolled down to the masts among the chimneys on the top of an omnibus.
The driver was eloquent on cricket-matches. Now, cricket, he said, was
fine manly sport; it might kill a man, but it never meant mischief:
foreigners themselves had a bit of an idea that it was the best game in
the world, though it was a nice joke to see a foreigner playing at it!
None of them could stand to be bowled at. Hadn't stomachs for it; they'd
have to train for soldiers first. On one occasion he had seen a Frenchman
looking on at a match. 'Ball was hit a shooter twixt the slips: off
starts Frenchman, catches it, heaves it up, like his head, half-way to
wicket, and all the field set to bawling at him, and sending him, we knew
where. He tripped off: "You no comprong politeness in dis country." Ha!
ha!'

To prove the aforesaid Frenchman wrong, we nodded to the driver's
laughter at his exquisite imitation.

He informed us that he had backed the Surrey Eleven last year, owing to
the report of a gentleman-bowler, who had done things in the way of
tumbling wickets to tickle the ears of cricketers. Gentlemen-batters were
common: gentlemen-bowlers were quite another dish. Saddlebank was the
gentleman's name.

'Old Nandrew Saddle?' Temple called to me, and we smiled at the
supposition of Saddlebank's fame, neither of us, from what we had known
of his bowling, doubting that he deserved it.

'Acquainted with him, gentlemen?' the driver inquired, touching his hat.
'Well, and I ask why don't more gentlemen take to cricket? 'stead of
horses all round the year! Now, there's my notion of happiness,' said the
man condemned to inactivity, in the perpetual act of motion; 'cricket in
cricket season! It comprises--count: lots o' running; and that's good:
just enough o' taking it easy; that's good: a appetite for your dinner,
and your ale or your Port, as may be the case; good, number three. Add on
a tired pipe after dark, and a sound sleep to follow, and you say good
morning to the doctor and the parson; for you're in health body and soul,
and ne'er a parson 'll make a better Christian of ye, that I'll swear.'

As if anxious not to pervert us, he concluded: 'That's what I think,
gentlemen.'

Temple and I talked of the ancient raptures of a first of May
cricketing-day on a sunny green meadow, with an ocean of a day before us,
and well-braced spirits for the match. I had the vision of a matronly,
but not much altered Janet, mounted on horseback, to witness the
performance of some favourite Eleven of youngsters with her connoisseur's
eye; and then the model of an English lady, wife, and mother, waving
adieu to the field and cantering home to entertain her husband's guests.
Her husband!

Temple was aware of my grief, but saw no remedy. I knew that in his heart
he thought me justly punished, though he loved me.

We had a long sitting with Captain Welsh, whom I found immoveable, as I
expected I should. His men, he said, had confessed their sin similarly to
the crab in a hole, with one claw out, as the way of sinners was. He
blamed himself mainly. 'Where you have accidents, Mr. Richmond, you have
faults; and where you have faults aboard a ship you may trace a line to
the captain. I should have treated my ship's crew like my conscience, and
gone through them nightly. As it is, sir, here comes round one of your
accidents to tell me I have lived blinded by conceit. That is my
affliction, my young friend. The payment of the money is no more so than
to restore money held in trust.'

Temple and I argued the case with him, as of old on our voyage, on board
the barque Priscilla, quite unavailingly.

'Is a verdict built on lies one that my Maker approves of?' said he. 'If
I keep possession of that money, my young friends, will it clothe me? Ay,
with stings! Will it feed me? Ay, with poison. And they that should be
having it shiver and want!'

He was emphatic, as he would not have been, save to read us an example,
owing to our contention with him. 'The money is Satan in my very hands!'
When he had dismissed the subject he never returned to it.

His topic of extreme happiness, to which Temple led him, was the rescue
of a beautiful sinner from a life of shame. It appeared that Captain
Welsh had the habit between his voyages of making one holiday expedition
to the spot of all creation he thought the fairest, Richmond Hill,
overlooking the Thames; and there, one evening, he espied a lady in
grief, and spoke to her, and gave her consolation. More, he gave her a
blameless home. The lady's name was Mabel Bolton. She was in distress of
spirit rather than of circumstances, for temptation was thick about one
so beautiful, to supply the vanities and luxuries of the father of sin.
He described her.

She was my first playfellow, the miller's daughter of Dipwell, Mabel
Sweetwinter, taken from her home by Lord Edbury during my German
university career, and now put away by him upon command of his family on
the eve of his marriage.

She herself related her history to me, after telling me that she had seen
me once at the steps of Edbury's Club. Our meeting was no great surprise
to either of us. She had heard my name as that of an expected visitor;
she had seen Temple, moreover, and he had prompted me with her Christian
name and the praise of her really glorious hair, to anticipate the person
who was ushered into the little cabin-like parlour by Captain Welsh's
good old mother.

Of Edbury she could not speak for grief, believing that he loved her
still and was acting under compulsion. Her long and faithful attachment
to the scapegrace seemed to preserve her from the particular regrets
Captain Welsh supposed to occupy her sinner's mind; so that, after some
minutes of the hesitation and strangeness due to our common
recollections, she talked of him simply and well--as befitted her
situation, a worldling might say. But she did not conceal her relief in
escaping to this quaint little refuge (she threw a kindly-comical look,
not overtoned, at the miniature ships on the mantelpiece, and the picture
of Joseph leading Mary with her babe on the ass) from the temptations I
could imagine a face like hers would expose her to. The face was
splendid, the figure already overblown. I breathed some thanks to my
father while she and I conversed apart. The miller was dead, her brother
in America. She had no other safe home than the one Captain Welsh had
opened to her. When I asked her (I had no excuse for it) whether she
would consent to go to Edbury again, she reddened and burst into tears. I
cursed my brutality. 'Let her cry,' said Captain Welsh on parting with us
at his street door. 'Tears are the way of women and their comfort.'

To our astonishment he told us he intended to take her for a voyage in
the Priscilla. 'Why?' we asked.

'I take her,' he said, 'because not to do things wholly is worse than not
to do things at all, for it 's waste of time and cause for a chorus
below, down in hell, my young friends. The woman is beautiful as
Solomon's bride. She is weak as water. And the man is wicked. He has
written to her a letter. He would have her reserved for himself, a wedded
man: such he is, or is soon to be. I am searching, and she is not
deceitful; and I am a poor man again and must go the voyage. I wrestled
with her, and by grace I conquered her to come with me of a free will,
and be out of his snares. Aboard I do not fear him, and she shall know
the mercy of the Lord on high seas.'

We grimaced a little on her behalf, but had nothing to reply.

Seeing Janet after Mabel was strange. In the latter one could perceive
the palpably suitable mate for Edbury.

I felt that my darling was insulted--no amends for it I had to keep
silent and mark the remorseless preparations going forward. Not so
Heriot. He had come over from the camp in Ireland on leave at this
juncture. His talk of women still suggested the hawk with the downy
feathers of the last little plucked bird sticking to his beak; but his
appreciation of Janet and some kindness for me made him a vehement
opponent of her resolve. He took licence of his friendship to lay every
incident before her, to complete his persuasions. She resisted his
attacks, as I knew she would, obstinately, and replied to his entreaties
with counter-supplications that he should urge me to accept old
Riversley. The conflicts went on between those two daily, and I heard of
them from Heriot at night. He refused to comprehend her determination
under the head of anything save madness. Varied by reproaches of me for
my former inveterate blindness, he raved upon Janet's madness
incessantly, swearing that he would not be beaten. I told him his efforts
were useless, but thought them friendly, and so they were, only Janet's
resistance had fired his vanity, and he stalked up and down my room
talking a mixture of egregious coxcombry and hearty good sense that might
have shown one the cause he meant to win had become personal to him.
Temple, who was sometimes in consultation with him, and was always amused
by his quasi-fanfaronade, assured me that Herriot was actually scheming.
The next we heard of him was, that he had been seen at a whitebait hotel
down the river drunk with Edbury. Janet also heard of that, and declined
to see Heriot again.

Our last days marched frightfully fast. Janet had learnt that any the
most distant allusion to her marriage day was an anguish to the man who
was not to marry her, so it was through my aunt Dorothy that I became
aware of Julia Bulsted's kindness in offering to take charge of my father
for a term. Lady Sampleman undertook to be hostess to him for one night,
the eve of Janet's nuptials. He was quiet, unlikely to give annoyance to
persons not strongly predisposed to hear sentences finished and
exclamations fall into their right places.

Adieu to my darling! There have been women well won; here was an adorable
woman well lost. After twenty years of slighting her, did I fancy she
would turn to me and throw a man over in reward of my ultimate recovery
of my senses?--or fancy that one so tenacious as she had proved would
snap a tie depending on her pledged word? She liked Edbury; she saw the
best of him, and liked him. The improved young lord was her handiwork.
After the years of humiliation from me, she had found herself courted by
a young nobleman who clung to her for help, showed improvement, and
brought her many compliments from a wondering world. She really felt that
she was strength and true life to him. She resisted Heriot: she resisted
a more powerful advocate, and this was the princess Ottilia. My aunt
Dorothy told me that the princess had written. Janet either did or
affected to weigh the princess's reasonings; and she did not evade the
task of furnishing a full reply.

Her resolution was unchanged. Loss of colour, loss of light in her eyes,
were the sole signs of what it cost her to maintain it. Our task was to
transfer the idea of Janet to that of Julia in my father's whirling
brain, which at first rebelled violently, and cast it out like a stick
thrust between rapidly revolving wheels.

The night before I was to take him away, she gave me her hand with a
'good-bye, dear Harry.' My words were much the same. She had a ghastly
face, but could not have known it, for she smiled, and tried to keep the
shallow smile in play, as friends do. There was the end.

It came abruptly, and was schoolingly cold and short.

It had the effect on me of freezing my blood and setting what seemed to
be the nerves of my brain at work in a fury of calculation to reckon the
minutes remaining of her maiden days. I had expected nothing, but now we
had parted I thought that one last scene to break my heart on should not
have been denied to me. My aunt Dorothy was a mute; she wept when I spoke
of Janet, whatever it was I said.

The minutes ran on from circumstance to circumstance of the destiny Janet
had marked for herself, each one rounded in my mind of a blood colour
like the edge about prismatic hues. I lived through them a thousand times
before they occurred, as the wretch who fears death dies multitudinously.

Some womanly fib preserved my father from a shock on leaving Janet's
house. She left it herself at the same time that she drove him to Lady
Sampleman's, and I found him there soon after she had gone to her
bridesmaids. A letter was for me:--

   'DEAR HARRY,--I shall not live at Riversley, never go there again;
   do not let it be sold to a stranger; it will happen unless you go
   there. For the sake of the neighbourhood and poor people, I cannot
   allow it to be shut up. I was the cause of the chief misfortune.
   You never blamed me. Let me think that the old place is not dead.
   Adieu.

   'Your affectionate,
                  'JANET.'

I tore the letter to pieces, and kept them.

The aspect of the new intolerable world I was to live in after to-morrow,
paralyzed sensation. My father chattered, Lady Sampleman hushed him; she
said I might leave him to her, and I went down to Captain Welsh to bid
him good-bye and get such peace as contact with a man clad in armour
proof against earthly calamity could give.

I was startled to see little Kiomi in Mabel's company.

They had met accidentally at the head of the street, and had been friends
in childhood, Captain Welsh said, adding: 'She hates men.'

'Good reason, when they're beasts,' said Kiomi.

Amid much weeping of Mabel and old Mrs. Welsh, Kiomi showed as little
trouble as the heath when the woods are swept.

Captain Welsh wanted Mabel to be on board early, owing, he told me, to
information. Kiomi had offered to remain on board with her until the
captain was able to come. He had business to do in the City.

We saw them off from the waterside.

'Were I to leave that young woman behind me, on shore, I should be giving
the devil warrant to seize upon his prey,' said Captain Welsh, turning
his gaze from the boat which conveyed Kiomi and Mabel to the barque
Priscilla. He had information that the misleader of her youth was hunting
her.

He and I parted, and for ever, at a corner of crossways in the central
city. There I saw the last of one who deemed it as simple a matter to
renounce his savings for old age, to rectify an error of justice, as to
plant his foot on the pavement; a man whose only burden was the folly of
men.

I thought to myself in despair, under what protest can I also escape from
England and my own intemperate mind? It seemed a miraculous
answer:--There lay at my chambers a note written by Count Kesensky; I
went to the embassy, and heard of an Austrian ship of war being at one of
our ports upon an expedition to the East, and was introduced to the
captain, a gentlemanly fellow, like most of the officers of his
Government. Finding in me a German scholar, and a joyful willingness, he
engaged me to take the post of secretary to the expedition in the place
of an invalided Freiherr von Redwitz. The bargain was struck immediately:
I was to be ready to report myself to the captain on board not later than
the following day. Count Kesensky led me aside: he regretted that he
could do nothing better for me: but I thought his friendliness extreme
and astonishing, and said so; whereupon the count assured me that his
intentions were good, though he had not been of great use hitherto--an
allusion to the borough of Chippenden he had only heard of von Redwitz's
illness that afternoon. I thanked him cordially, saying I was much in his
debt, and he bowed me out, letting me fancy, as my father had fancied
before me, and as though I had never observed and reflected in my life,
that the opportuneness of this intervention signified a special action of
Providence.

The flattery of the thought served for an elixir. But with whom would my
father abide during my absence? Captain Bulsted and Julia saved me from a
fit of remorse; they had come up to town on purpose to carry him home
with them, and had left a message on my table, and an invitation to
dinner at their hotel, where the name of Janet was the Marino Faliero of
our review of Riversley people and old times. The captain and his wife
were indignant at her conduct. Since, however, I chose to excuse it, they
said they would say nothing more about her, and she was turned face to
the wall. I told them how Janet had taken him for months. 'But I 'll take
him for years,' said Julia. 'The truth is, Harry, my old dear! William
and I are never so united--for I'm ashamed to quarrel with him--as when
your father's at Bulsted. He belongs to us, and other people shall know
you 're not obliged to depend on your family for help, and your aunt
Dorothy can come and see him whenever she likes.'

That was settled. Captain Bulsted went with me to Lady Sampleman's to
prepare my father for the change of nurse and residence. We were informed
that he had gone down with Alderman Duke Saddlebank to dine at one of the
great City Companies' halls. I could hardly believe it. 'Ah! my dear Mr.
Harry,' said Lady Sampleman, 'old friends know one another best, believe
that, now. I treated him as if he was as well as ever he was, gave him
his turtle and madeira lunch; and Alderman Saddlebank, who lunched
here--your father used to say, he looks like a robin hopping out of a
larderquite jumped to dine him in the City like old times; and he will
see a great spread of plate!'

She thought my father only moderately unwell, wanting novelty. Captain
Bulsted agreed with me that it would be prudent to go and fetch him. At
the door of the City hall stood Andrew Saddlebank, grown to be simply a
larger edition of Rippenger's head boy, and he imparted to us that my
father was 'on his legs' delivering a speech: It alarmed me. With
Saddlebank's assistance I pushed in.

'A prince! a treacherous lover! an unfatherly man!'

Those were the words I caught: a reproduction of many of my phrases
employed in our arguments on this very subject.

He bade his audience to beware of princes, beware of idle princes; and
letting his florid fancy loose on these eminent persons, they were at one
moment silver lamps, at another poising hawks, and again sprawling
pumpkins; anything except useful citizens. How could they be? They had
the attraction of the lamp, the appetite of the hawk, the occupation of
the pumpkin: nothing was given them to do but to shine, destroy, and
fatten. Their hands were kept empty: a trifle in their heads would topple
them over; they were monuments of the English system of compromise. Happy
for mankind if they were monuments only! Happy for them! But they had the
passions of men. The adulation of the multitude was raised to inflate
them, whose self-respect had not one prop to rest an, unless it were
contempt for the flatterers and prophetic foresight of their perfidy.
They were the monuments of a compromise between the past and terror of
the future; puppets as princes, mannikins as men, the snares of frail
women, stop-gaps of the State, feathered nonentities!

So far (but not in epigram) he marshalled the things he had heard to his
sound of drum and trumpet, like one repeating a lesson off-hand. Steering
on a sudden completely round, he gave his audience an outline of the
changes he would have effected had he but triumphed in his cause; and now
came the lashing of arms, a flood of eloquence. Princes with brains,
princes leaders, princes flowers of the land, he had offered them!
princes that should sway assemblies, and not stultify the precepts of a
decent people 'by making you pay in the outrage of your morals for what
you seem to gain in policy.' These or similar words. The whole scene was
too grotesque and afflicting. But his command of his hearers was
extraordinary, partly a consolation I thought, until, having touched the
arm of one of the gentlemen of the banquet and said, 'I am his son; I
wish to remove him,' the reply enlightened me: 'I 'm afraid there's
danger in interrupting him; I really am.'

They were listening obediently to one whom they dared not interrupt for
fear of provoking an outburst of madness.

I had to risk it. His dilated eyes looked ready to seize on me for an
illustration. I spoke peremptorily, and he bowed his head low, saying,
'My son, gentlemen,' and submitted himself to my hands. The feasters
showed immediately that they felt released by rising and chatting in
groups. Alderman Saddlebank expressed much gratitude to me for the
service I had performed. 'That first half of your father's speech was the
most pathetic thing I ever heard!' I had not shared his privilege, and
could not say. The remark was current that a great deal was true of what
had been said of the Fitzs. My father leaned heavily on my arm with the
step and bent head of an ancient pensioner of the Honourable City
Company. He was Julia Bulsted's charge, and I was on board the foreign
vessel weighing anchor from England before dawn of Janet's marriage-day.




CHAPTER LVI




CONCLUSION

The wind was high that morning. The rain came in gray rings, through
which we worked on the fretted surface of crumbling seas, heaving up and
plunging, without an outlook.

I remember having thought of the barque Priscilla as I watched our lithe
Dalmatians slide along the drenched decks of the Verona frigate. At night
it blew a gale. I could imagine it to have been sent providentially to
brush the torture of the land from my mind, and make me feel that men are
trifles.

What are their passions, then? The storm in the clouds--even more
short-lived than the clouds.

I philosophized, but my anguish was great.

Janet's 'Good-bye, Harry,' ended everything I lived for, and seemed to
strike the day, and bring out of it the remorseless rain. A featureless
day, like those before the earth was built; like night under an angry
moon; and each day the same until we touched the edge of a southern
circle and saw light, and I could use my brain.

The matter most present to me was my injustice regarding my poor father's
speech in the City hall. He had caused me to suffer so much that I
generally felt for myself when he appealed for sympathy, or provoked some
pity: but I was past suffering, and letting kindly recollection divest
the speech of its verbiage, I took it to my heart. It was true that he
had in his blind way struck the keynote of his position, much as I myself
had conceived it before. Harsh trials had made me think of my own
fortunes more than of his. This I felt, and I thought there never had
been so moving a speech. It seemed to make the world in debt to us. What
else is so consolatory to a ruined man?

In reality the busy little creature within me, whom we call self, was
digging pits for comfort to flow in, of any kind, in any form; and it
seized on every idea, every circumstance, to turn it to that purpose, and
with such success, that when by-and-by I learnt how entirely inactive
special Providence had been in my affairs, I had to collect myself before
I could muster the conception of gratitude toward the noble woman who
clothed me in the illusion. It was to the Princess Ottilia, acting
through Count Kesensky, that I owed both my wafting away from England at
a wretched season, and that chance of a career in Parliament! The captain
of the Verona hinted as much when, after a year of voyaging, we touched
at an East Indian seaport, and von Redwitz joined the vessel to resume
the post I was occupying. Von Redwitz (the son of Prince Ernest's
Chancellor, I discovered) could have told me more than he did, but he
handed me a letter from the princess, calling me home urgently, and even
prescribing my route, and bidding me come straight to Germany and to
Sarkeld. The summons was distasteful, for I had settled into harness
under my scientific superiors, and had proved to my messmates that I was
neither morose nor over-conceited. Captain Martinitz persuaded me to
return, and besides, there lay between the lines of Ottilia's letter a
signification of welcome things better guessed at than known. Was I not
bound to do her bidding? Others had done it: young von Redwitz, for
instance, in obeying the telegraph wires and feigning sickness to
surrender his place to me, when she wished to save me from misery by
hurrying me to new scenes with a task for my hand and head;--no mean
stretch of devotion on his part. Ottilia was still my princess; she my
providence. She wrote:

'Come home, my friend Harry: you have been absent too long. He who
intercepts you to displace you has his career before him in the vessel,
and you nearer home. The home is always here where I am, but it may now
take root elsewhere, and it is from Ottilia you hear that delay is now
really loss of life. I tell you no more. You know me, that when I say
come, it is enough.'

A simple adieu and her name ended the mysterious letter. Not a word of
Prince Hermann. What had happened? I guessed at it curiously and
incessantly and only knew the nature of my suspicion by ceasing to hope
as soon as I seemed to have divined it. I did not wrong my soul's high
mistress beyond the one flash of tentative apprehension which in
perplexity struck at impossibilities. Ottilia would never have summoned
me to herself. But was Janet free? The hope which refused to live in that
other atmosphere of purest calm, sprang to full stature at the bare
thought, and would not be extinguished though all the winds beset it. Had
my girl's courage failed, to spare her at the last moment? I fancied it
might be: I was sure it was not so. Yet the doubt pressed on me with the
force of a world of unimagined shifts and chances, and just kept the
little flame alive, at times intoxicating me, though commonly holding me
back to watch its forlorn conflict with probabilities known too well. It
cost me a struggle to turn aside to Germany from the Italian highroad.

I chose the line of the Brenner, and stopped half a day at Innsbruck to
pay a visit to Colonel Heddon, of whom I had the joyful tidings that two
of his daughters were away to go through the German form of the betrothal
of one of them to an Englishman. The turn of the tide had come to him.
And it comes to me, too, in a fresh spring tide whenever I have to speak
of others instead of this everlastingly recurring I of the
autobiographer, of which the complacent penman has felt it to be his duty
to expose the mechanism when out of action, and which, like so many of
our sins of commission, appears in the shape of a terrible offence when
the occasion for continuing it draws to a close. The pleasant narrator in
the first person is the happy bubbling fool, not the philosopher who has
come to know himself and his relations toward the universe. The words of
this last are one to twenty; his mind is bent upon the causes of events
rather than their progress. As you see me on the page now, I stand
somewhere between the two, approximating to the former, but with
sufficient of the latter within me to tame the delightful expansiveness
proper to that coming hour of marriage-bells and bridal-wreaths. It is a
sign that the end, and the delivery of reader and writer alike, should
not be dallied with.

The princess had invited Lucy Heddon to Sarkeld to meet Temple, and
Temple to meet me. Onward I flew. I saw the old woods of the lake-palace,
and, as it were, the light of my past passion waning above them. I was
greeted by the lady of all nobility with her gracious warmth, and in his
usual abrupt manful fashion by Prince Hermann. And I had no time to
reflect on the strangeness of my stepping freely under the roof where a
husband claimed Ottilia, before she led me into the library, where sat my
lost and recovered, my darling; and, unlike herself, for a moment, she
faltered in rising and breathing my name.

We were alone. I knew she was no bondwoman. The question how it had come
to pass lurked behind everything I said and did; speculation on the
visible features, and touching of the unfettered hand, restrained me from
uttering or caring to utter it. But it was wonderful. It thrust me back
on Providence again for the explanation--humbly this time. It was
wonderful and blessed, as to loving eyes the first-drawn breath of a
drowned creature restored to life. I kissed her hand. 'Wait till you have
heard everything, Harry,' she said, and her voice was deeper, softer,
exquisitely strange in its known tones, as her manner was, and her eyes.
She was not the blooming, straight-shouldered, high-breathing girl of
other days, but sister to the day of her 'Good-bye, Harry,' pale and
worn. The eyes had wept. This was Janet, haply widowed. She wore no garb
nor a shade of widowhood. Perhaps she had thrown it off, not to offend an
implacable temper in me. I said, 'I shall hear nothing that can make you
other than my own Janet--if you will?'

She smiled a little. 'We expected Temple's arrival sooner than yours,
Harry!'

'Do you take to his Lucy?'

'Yes, thoroughly.'

The perfect ring of Janet was there.

Mention of Riversley made her conversation lively, and she gave me
moderately good news of my father, quaint, out of Julia Bulsted's latest
letter to her.

'Then how long,' I asked astonished, 'how long have you been staying with
the princess?'

She answered, colouring, 'So long, that I can speak fairish German.'

'And read it easily?'

'I have actually taken to reading, Harry.'

Her courage must have quailed, and she must have been looking for me on
that morning of miserable aspect when I beheld the last of England
through wailful showers, like the scene of a burial. I did not speak of
it, fearing to hurt her pride, but said, 'Have you been here--months?'

'Yes, some months,' she replied.

'Many?'

'Yes,' she said, and dropped her eyelids, and then, with a quick look at
me, 'Wait for Temple, Harry. He is a day behind his time. We can't
account for it.'

I suggested, half in play, that perhaps he had decided, for the sake of a
sea voyage, to come by our old route to Germany on board the barque
Priscilla, with Captain Welsh.

A faint shudder passed over her. She shut her eyes and shook her head.

Our interview satisfied my heart's hunger no further. The Verona's
erratic voyage had cut me off from letters.

Janet might be a widow, for aught I knew. She was always Janet to me; but
why at liberty? why many months at Sarkeld, the guest of the princess?
Was she neither maid nor widow--a wife flown from a brutal husband? or
separated, and forcibly free? Under such conditions Ottilia would not
have commanded my return but what was I to imagine? A boiling couple of
hours divided me from the time for dressing, when, as I meditated, I
could put a chance question or two to the man commissioned to wait on me,
and hear whether the English lady was a Fraulein. The Margravine and
Prince Ernest were absent. Hermann worked in his museum, displaying his
treasures to Colonel Heddon. I sat with the ladies in the airy look-out
tower of the lake-palace, a prey to intense speculations, which devoured
themselves and changed from fire to smoke, while I recounted the
adventures of our ship's voyage, and they behaved as if there were
nothing to tell me in turn, each a sphinx holding the secret I thirsted
for. I should not certainly have thirsted much if Janet had met me as far
half-way as a delicate woman may advance. The mystery lay in her evident
affection, her apparent freedom and unfathomable reserve, and her desire
that I should see Temple before she threw off her feminine armour, to
which, judging by the indications, Ottilia seemed to me to accede.

My old friend was spied first by his sweetheart Lucy, winding dilatorily
over the hill away from Sarkeld, in one of the carriages sent to meet
him. He was guilty of wasting a prodigious number of minutes with his
trumpery 'How d' ye do's,' and his glances and excuses, and then I had
him up in my room, and the tale was told; it was not Temple's fault if he
did not begin straightforwardly.

I plucked him from his narrator's vexatious and inevitable commencement:
'Temple, tell me, did she go to the altar?'

He answered 'Yes!'

'She did? Then she's a widow?'

'No, she isn't,' said Temple, distracting me by submitting to the lead I
distracted him by taking.

'Then her husband's alive?'

Temple denied it, and a devil seized him to perceive some comicality in
the dialogue.

'Was she married?'

Temple said 'No,' with a lurking drollery about his lips. He added, 'It
's nothing to laugh over, Richie.'

'Am I laughing? Speak out. Did Edbury come to grief overnight in any
way?'

Again Temple pronounced a negative, this time wilfully enigmatical: he
confessed it, and accused me of the provocation. He dashed some laughter
with gravity to prepare for my next assault.

'Was Edbury the one to throw up the marriage? Did he decline it?'

'No,' was the answer once more.

Temple stopped my wrath by catching at me and begging me to listen.

'Edbury was drowned, Richie.'

'Overnight?'

'No, not overnight. I can tell it all in half-a-dozen words, if you'll be
quiet; and I know you're going to be as happy as I am, or I shouldn't
trifle an instant. He went overnight on board the barque Priscilla to see
Mabel Sweetwinter, the only woman he ever could have cared for, and he
went the voyage, just as we did. He was trapped, caged, and transported;
it's a repetition, except that the poor old Priscilla never came to land.
She foundered in a storm in the North Sea. That 's all we know. Every
soul perished, the captain and all. I knew how it would be with that crew
of his some day or other. Don't you remember my saying the Priscilla was
the kind of name of a vessel that would go down with all hands, and leave
a bottle to float to shore? A gin-bottle was found on our East coast-the
old captain must have discovered in the last few moments that such things
were on board--and in it there was a paper, and the passengers' and
crew's names in his handwriting, written as if he had been sitting in his
parlour at home; over them a line--"The Lord's will is about to be done";
and underneath--"We go to His judgement resigned and cheerful." You know
the old captain, Richie?

Temple had tears in his eyes. We both stood blinking for a second or two.

I could not but be curious to hear the reason for Edbury's having
determined to sail.

'Don't you understand how it was, Richie?' said Temple. 'Edbury went to
persuade her to stay, or just to see her for once, and he came to
persuasions. He seems to have been succeeding, but the captain stepped on
board and he treated Edbury as he did us two: he made him take the voyage
for discipline's sake and "his soul's health."'

'How do you know all this, Temple?'

'You know your friend Kiomi was one of the party. The captain sent her
back on shore because he had no room for her. She told us Edbury offered
bribes of hundreds and thousands for the captain to let him and Mabel go
off in the boat with Kiomi, and then he took to begging to go alone. He
tried to rouse the crew. The poor fellow cringed, she says; he threatened
to swim off. The captain locked him up.'

My immediate reflections hit on the Bible lessons Edbury must have had to
swallow, and the gaping of the waters when its truths were suddenly and
tremendously brought home to him.

An odd series of accidents! I thought.

Temple continued: 'Heriot held his tongue about it next morning. He was
one of the guests, though he had sworn he wouldn't go. He said something
to Janet that betrayed him, for she had not seen him since.'

'How betrayed him?' said I.

'Why,' said Temple, 'of course it was Heriot who put Edbury in Kiomi's
hands. Edbury wouldn't have known of Mabel's sailing, or known the vessel
she was in, without her help. She led him down to the water and posted
him in sight before she went to Captain Welsh's; and when you and Captain
Welsh walked away, Edbury rowed to the Priscilla. Old Heriot is not
responsible for the consequences. What he supposed was likely enough. He
thought that Edbury and Mabel were much of a pair, and thought, I
suppose, that if Edbury saw her he'd find he couldn't leave her, and old
Lady Kane, who managed him, would stand nodding her plumes for nothing at
the altar. And so she did: and a pretty scene it was. She snatched at the
minutes as they slipped past twelve like fishes, and snarled at the
parson, and would have kept him standing till one P.M., if Janet had not
turned on her heel. The old woman got in front of her to block her way.
"Ah, Temple," she said to me, "it would be hard if I could not think I
had done all that was due to them." I didn't see her again till she was
starting for Germany. And, Richie, she thinks you can never forgive her.
She wrote me word that the princess is of another mind, but her own
opinion, she says, is based upon knowing you.'

'Good heaven! how little!' cried I.

Temple did me a further wrong by almost thanking me on Janet's behalf for
my sustained love for her, while he praised the very qualities of pride
and a spirited sense of obligation which had reduced her to dread my
unforgivingness. Yet he and Janet had known me longest. Supposing that my
idea of myself differed from theirs for the simple reason that I thought
of what I had grown to be, and they of what I had been through the
previous years? Did I judge by the flower, and they by root and stem? But
the flower is a thing of the season; the flower drops off: it may be a
different development next year. Did they not therefore judge me soundly?

Ottilia was the keenest reader. Ottilia had divined what could be wrought
out of me. I was still subject to the relapses of a not perfectly right
nature, as I perceived when glancing back at my thought of 'An odd series
of accidents!' which was but a disguised fashion of attributing to
Providence the particular concern, in my fortunes: an impiety and a
folly! This is the temptation of those who are rescued and made happy by
circumstances. The wretched think themselves spited, and are merely
childish, not egregious in egoism. Thither on leads to a chapter--already
written by the wise, doubtless. It does not become an atom of humanity to
dwell on it beyond a point where students of the human condition may see
him passing through the experiences of the flesh and the brain.

Meantime, Temple and I, at two hand-basins, soaped and towelled, and I
was more discreet toward him than I have been to you, for I reserved from
him altogether the pronunciation of the council of senators in the secret
chamber of my head. Whether, indeed, I have fairly painted the outer part
of myself waxes dubious when I think of his spluttering laugh and shout;
'Richie, you haven't changed a bit--you're just like a boy!' Certain
indications of external gravity, and a sinking of the natural springs
within characterized Temple's approach to the responsible position of a
British husband and father. We talked much of Captain Welsh, and the
sedate practical irony of his imprisoning one like Edbury to discipline
him on high seas, as well as the singular situation of the couple of
culprits under his admonishing regimen, and the tragic end. My next two
minutes alone with Janet were tempered by it. Only my eagerness for
another term of privacy persuaded her that I was her lover instead of
judge, and then, having made the discovery that a single-minded gladness
animated me in the hope that she and I would travel together one in body
and soul, she surrendered, with her last bit of pride broken; except, it
may be, a fragment of reserve traceable in the confession that came
quaintly after supreme self-blame, when she said she was bound to tell me
that possibly--probably, were the trial to come over again, she should
again act as she had done.

Happily for us both, my wits had been sharpened enough to know that there
is more in men and women than the stuff they utter. And blessed privilege
now! if the lips were guilty of nonsense, I might stop them. Besides, I
was soon to be master upon such questions. She admitted it, admitting
with an unwonted emotional shiver, that absolute freedom could be the
worst of perils. 'For women?' said I. She preferred to say, 'For girls,'
and then 'Yes, for women, as they are educated at present.' Spice of the
princess's conversation flavoured her speech. The signs unfamiliar about
her for me were marks of the fire she had come out of; the struggle, the
torture, the determined sacrifice, through pride's conception of duty.
She was iron once. She had come out of the fire finest steel.

'Riversley! Harry,' she murmured, and my smile, and word, and squeeze in
reply, brought back a whole gleam of the fresh English morning she had
been in face, and voice, and person.

Was it conceivable that we could go back to Riversley single?

Before that was answered she had to make a statement; and in doing it she
blushed, because it involved Edbury's name, and seemed to involve her
attachment to him; but she paid me the compliment of speaking it frankly.
It was that she had felt herself bound in honour to pay Edbury's debts.
Even by such slight means as her saying, 'Riversley, Harry,' and my kiss
of her fingers when a question of money was in debate, did we burst aside
the vestiges of mutual strangeness, and recognize one another, but with
an added warmth of love. When I pleaded for the marriage to be soon, she
said, 'I wish it, Harry.'

Sentiment you do not obtain from a Damascus blade. She most cordially
despised the ladies who parade and play on their sex, and are for ever
acting according to the feminine standard:--a dangerous stretch of
contempt for one less strong than she.

Riding behind her and Temple one day with the princess, I said, 'What
takes you most in Janet?'

She replied, 'Her courage. And it is of a kind that may knot up every
other virtue worth having. I have impulses, and am capable of
desperation, but I have no true courage: so I envy and admire, even if I
have to blame her; for I know that this possession of hers, which
identifies her and marks her from the rest of us, would bear the ordeal
of fire. I can imagine the qualities I have most pride in withering and
decaying under a prolonged trial. I cannot conceive her courage failing.
Perhaps because I have it not myself I think it the rarest of precious
gifts. It seems to me to imply one half, and to dispense with the other.'

I have lived to think that Ottilia was right. As nearly right, too, in
the wording of her opinion as one may be in three or four sentences
designed to be comprehensive.

My Janet's readiness to meet calamity was shown ere we reached home upon
an evening of the late autumn, and set eye on a scene, for her the very
saddest that could have been devised to test her spirit of endurance,
when, driving up the higher heath-land, we saw the dark sky ominously
reddened over Riversley, and, mounting the ridge, had the funeral flames
of the old Grange dashed in our faces. The blow was evil, sudden,
unaccountable. Villagers, tenants, farm-labourers, groups of a deputation
that had gone to the railway station to give us welcome; and returned,
owing to a delay in our arrival, stood gazing from all quarters. The
Grange was burning in two great wings, that soared in flame-tips and
columns of crimson smoke, leaving the central hall and chambers untouched
as yet, but alive inside with mysterious ranges of lights, now curtained,
now made bare--a feeble contrast to the savage blaze to right and left,
save for the wonder aroused as to its significance. These were soon
cloaked. Dead sable reigned in them, and at once a jet of flame gave the
whole vast building to destruction. My wife thrust her hand in mine. Fire
at the heart, fire at the wings--our old home stood in that majesty of
horror which freezes the limbs of men, bidding them look and no more.

'What has Riversley done to deserve this?' I heard Janet murmur to
herself. 'His room!' she said, when at the South-east wing, where my old
grandfather had slept, there burst a glut of flame. We dove down to the
park and along the carriage-road to the first red line of gazers. They
told us that no living creatures were in the house. My aunt Dorothy was
at Bulsted. I perceived my father's man Tollingby among the servants, and
called him to me; others came, and out of a clatter of tongues, and all
eyes fearfully askant at the wall of fire, we gathered that a great
reception had been prepared for us by my father: lamps, lights in all the
rooms, torches in the hall, illuminations along the windows, stores of
fireworks, such a display as only he could have dreamed of. The fire had
broken out at dusk, from an explosion of fireworks at one wing and some
inexplicable mismanagement at the other. But the house must have been
like a mine, what with the powder, the torches, the devices in paper and
muslin, and the extraordinary decorations fitted up to celebrate our
return in harmony with my father's fancy.

Gentlemen on horseback dashed up to us. Captain Bulsted seized my hand.
He was hot from a ride to fetch engines, and sang sharp in my ear, 'Have
you got him?' It was my father he meant. The cry rose for my father, and
the groups were agitated and split, and the name of the missing man,
without an answer to it, shouted. Captain Bulsted had left him bravely
attempting to quench the flames after the explosion of fireworks. He rode
about, interrogating the frightened servants and grooms holding horses
and dogs. They could tell us that the cattle were safe, not a word of my
father; and amid shrieks of women at fresh falls of timber and ceiling
into the pit of fire, and warnings from the men, we ran the heated circle
of the building to find a loophole and offer aid if a living soul should
be left; the night around us bright as day, busier than day, and a human
now added to elemental horror. Janet would not quit her place. She sent
her carriage-horses to Bulsted, and sat in the carriage to see the last
of burning Riversley. Each time that I came to her she folded her arms on
my neck and kissed me silently.

We gathered from the subsequent testimony of men and women of the
household who had collected their wits, that my father must have remained
in the doomed old house to look to the safety of my aunt Dorothy. He was
never seen again.




     ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS

     A stew's a stew, and not a boiling to shreds
     Absolute freedom could be the worst of perils
     Add on a tired pipe after dark, and a sound sleep to follow
     All passed too swift for happiness
     Allowed silly sensitiveness to prevent the repair
     As little trouble as the heath when the woods are swept
     Ask pardon of you, without excusing myself
     Attacked my conscience on the cowardly side
     Bade his audience to beware of princes
     Bandied the weariful shuttlecock of gallantry
     But the flower is a thing of the season; the flower drops off
     But to strangle craving is indeed to go through a death
     Days when you lay on your back and the sky rained apples
     Decent insincerity
     Determine that the future is in our debt, and draw on it
     Discreet play with her eyelids in our encounters
     Dogmatic arrogance of a just but ignorant man
     Excellent is pride; but oh! be sure of its foundations
     Faith works miracles. At least it allows time for them
     Habit of antedating his sagacity
     He clearly could not learn from misfortune
     He thinks or he chews
     He would neither retort nor defend himself
     He whipped himself up to one of his oratorical frenzies
     He put no question to anybody
     I can't think brisk out of my breeches
     I can pay clever gentlemen for doing Greek for me
     I do not defend myself ever
     I was discontented, and could not speak my discontent
     I laughed louder than was necessary
     If you kneel down, who will decline to put a foot on you?
     Intimations of cowardice menacing a paralysis of the will
     Irony instead of eloquence
     Is it any waste of time to write of love?
     It goes at the lifting of the bridegroom's little finger
     Kindness is kindness, all over the world
     Learn all about them afterwards, ay, and make the best of them
     Like a woman, who would and would not, and wanted a master
     Look within, and avoid lying
     Mindless, he says, and arrogant
     Nations at war are wild beasts
     No Act to compel a man to deny what appears in the papers
     Not to do things wholly is worse than not to do things at all
     One in a temper at a time I'm sure 's enough
     One who studies is not being a fool
     Only true race, properly so called, out of India--German
     Payment is no more so than to restore money held in trust
     Puns are the smallpox of the language
     Self, was digging pits for comfort to flow in
     Simple affection must bear the strain of friendship if it can
     Simplicity is the keenest weapon
     Some so-called laws of honour
     Stand not in my way, nor follow me too far
     Stultification of one's feelings and ideas
     Tears are the way of women and their comfort
     Tension of the old links keeping us together
     The most dangerous word of all--ja
     The love that survives has strangled craving
     The thought stood in her eyes
     The proper defence for a nation is its history
     The wretch who fears death dies multitudinously
     The past is our mortal mother, no dead thing
     Then for us the struggle, for him the grief
     There is more in men and women than the stuff they utter
     There's ne'er a worse off but there's a better off
     They seem to me to be educated to conceal their education
     They have not to speak to exhibit their minds
     They dare not. The more I dare, the less dare they
     They are little ironical laughter--Accidents
     Those who are rescued and made happy by circumstances
     Tight grasps of the hand, in which there was warmth and shyness
     'Tis the fashion to have our tattle done by machinery
     To hope, and not be impatient, is really to believe
     To the rest of the world he was a progressive comedy
     To kill the deer and be sorry for the suffering wretch is common
     Too prompt, too full of personal relish of his point
     Twice a bad thing to turn sinners loose
     Unseemly hour--unbetimes
     Vessel was conspiring to ruin our self-respect
     War is only an exaggerated form of duelling
     Was I true? Not so very false, yet how far from truth!
     We has long overshadowed "I"
     What a man hates in adversity is to see 'faces'
     What else is so consolatory to a ruined man?
     Who beguiles so much as Self?
     Who so intoxicated as the convalescent catching at health?
     Who shuns true friends flies fortune in the concrete
     Winter mornings are divine. They move on noiselessly
     Would he see what he aims at? let him ask his heels
     You may learn to know yourself through love







BEAUCHAMP'S CAREER

By George Meredith


1897




CONTENTS

BOOK 1.
I.        THE CHAMPION OF HIS COUNTRY
II.       UNCLE, NEPHEW, AND ANOTHER
III.      CONTAINS BARONIAL VIEWS OF THE PRESENT
IV.       A GLIMPSE OF NEVIL IN ACTION
V.        RENEE
VI.       LOVE IN VENICE
VII.      AN AWAKENING FOR BOTH
VIII.     A NIGHT ON THE ADRIATIC
IX.       MORNING AT SEA UNDER THE ALPS
X.        A SINGULAR COUNCIL

BOOK 2.
XI.       CAPTAIN BASKELETT
XII.      AN INTERVIEW WITH THE INFAMOUS Dr. SHRAPNEL
XIII.     A SUPERFINE CONSCIENCE
XIV.      THE LEADING ARTICLE AND MR. TIMOTHY TURBOT
XV.       CECILIA HALKETT
XVI.      A PARTIAL DISPLAY OF BEAUCHAMP IN HIS COLOURS
XVII.     HIS FRIEND AND FOE
XVIII.    CONCERNING THE ACT OF CANVASSING

BOOK 3.
XIX.      LORD PALMET, AND CERTAIN ELECTORS
XX.       A DAY AT ITCHINCOPE
XXI.      THE QUESTION AS TO THE EXAMINATION OF THE WHIGS,
          AND THE FINE BLOW STRUCK BY MR. EVERARD ROMFREY
XXII.     THE DRIVE INTO BEVISHAM
XXIII.    TOURDESTELLE
XXIV.     HIS HOLIDAY
XXV.      THE ADVENTURE OF THE BOAT.

BOOK 4.
XXVI.     MR. BLACKBURN TUCKHAM
XXVII.    A SHORT SIDELOOK AT THE ELECTION
XXVIII.   TOUCHING A YOUNG LADY'S HEART AND HER INTELLECT
XXIX.     THE EPISTLE OF DR. SHRAPNEL TO COMMANDER BEAUCHAMP
XXX.      THE BAITING OF DR. SHRAPNEL
XXXI.     SHOWING A CHIVALROUS GENTLEMAN SET IN MOTION
XXXII.    AN EFFORT TO CONQUER CECILIA IN BEAUCHAMP'S FASHION
XXXIII.   THE FIRST ENCOUNTER AT STEYNHAM

BOOK 5.
XXXIV.    THE FACE OF RENEE
XXXV.     THE RIDE IN THE WRONG DIRECTION
XXXVI.    PURSUIT OF THE APOLOGY OF MR. ROMFREY TO DR. SHRAPNEL
XXXVII.   CECILIA CONQUERED
XXXVIII.  LORD AVONLEY
XXXIX.    BETWEEN BEAUCHAMP AND CECILIA
XL.       A TRIAL OF HIM
XLI.      A LAME VICTORY

BOOK 6.
XLII.     THE TWO PASSIONS
XLIII.    THE EARL OF ROMFREY AND THE COUNTESS
XLIV.     THE NEPHEWS OF THE EARL, AND ANOTHER EXHIBITION OF THE TWO
          PASSIONS IN BEAUCHAMP.
XLV.      A LITTLE PLOT AGAINST CECILIA
XLVI.     AS IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN FORESEEN
XLVII.    THE REFUSAL OF HIM
XLVIII.   OF THE TRIAL AWAITING THE EARL OF ROMFREY
XLIX.     A FABRIC OF BARONIAL DESPOTISM CRUMBLES

BOOK 7.
L.        AT THE COTTAGE ON THE COMMON
LI.       IN THE NIGHT
LII.      QUESTION OF A PILGRIMAGE AND AN ACT OF PENANCE
LIII.     THE APOLOGY TO DR. SHRAPNEL
LIV.      THE FRUITS OF THE APOLOGY
LV.       WITHOUT LOVE
LVI.      THE LAST OF NEVIL BEAUCHAMP




CHAPTER I

THE CHAMPION OF HIS COUNTRY

When young Nevil Beauchamp was throwing off his midshipman's jacket for a
holiday in the garb of peace, we had across Channel a host of dreadful
military officers flashing swords at us for some critical observations of
ours upon their sovereign, threatening Afric's fires and savagery. The
case occurred in old days now and again, sometimes, upon imagined
provocation, more furiously than at others. We were unarmed, and the
spectacle was distressing. We had done nothing except to speak our minds
according to the habit of the free, and such an explosion appeared as
irrational and excessive as that of a powder-magazine in reply to nothing
more than the light of a spark. It was known that a valorous General of
the Algerian wars proposed to make a clean march to the capital of the
British Empire at the head of ten thousand men; which seems a small
quantity to think much about, but they wore wide red breeches blown out
by Fame, big as her cheeks, and a ten thousand of that sort would never
think of retreating. Their spectral advance on quaking London through
Kentish hopgardens, Sussex corn-fields, or by the pleasant hills of
Surrey, after a gymnastic leap over the riband of salt water, haunted
many pillows. And now those horrid shouts of the legions of Caesar,
crying to the inheritor of an invading name to lead them against us, as
the origin of his title had led the army of Gaul of old gloriously,
scared sweet sleep. We saw them in imagination lining the opposite shore;
eagle and standard-bearers, and gallifers, brandishing their fowls and
their banners in a manner to frighten the decorum of the universe. Where
were our men?

The returns of the census of our population were oppressively
satisfactory, and so was the condition of our youth. We could row and
ride and fish and shoot, and breed largely: we were athletes with a fine
history and a full purse: we had first-rate sporting guns, unrivalled
park-hacks and hunters, promising babies to carry on the renown of
England to the next generation, and a wonderful Press, and a Constitution
the highest reach of practical human sagacity. But where were our armed
men? where our great artillery? where our proved captains, to resist a
sudden sharp trial of the national mettle? Where was the first line of
England's defence, her navy? These were questions, and Ministers were
called upon to answer them. The Press answered them boldly, with the
appalling statement that we had no navy and no army. At the most we could
muster a few old ships, a couple of experimental vessels of war, and
twenty-five thousand soldiers indifferently weaponed.

We were in fact as naked to the Imperial foe as the merely painted
Britons.

This being apprehended, by the aid of our own shortness of figures and
the agitated images of the red-breeched only waiting the signal to jump
and be at us, there ensued a curious exhibition that would be termed, in
simple language, writing to the newspapers, for it took the outward form
of letters: in reality, it was the deliberate saddling of our ancient
nightmare of Invasion, putting the postillion on her, and trotting her
along the high-road with a winding horn to rouse old Panic. Panic we
will, for the sake of convenience, assume to be of the feminine gender,
and a spinster, though properly she should be classed with the large
mixed race of mental and moral neuters which are the bulk of comfortable
nations. She turned in her bed at first like the sluggard of the
venerable hymnist: but once fairly awakened, she directed a stare toward
the terrific foreign contortionists, and became in an instant all stormy
nightcap and fingers starving for the bell-rope. Forthwith she burst into
a series of shrieks, howls, and high piercing notes that caused even the
parliamentary Opposition, in the heat of an assault on a parsimonious
Government, to abandon its temporary advantage and be still awhile. Yet
she likewise performed her part with a certain deliberation and method,
as if aware that it was a part she had to play in the composition of a
singular people. She did a little mischief by dropping on the
stock-markets; in other respects she was harmless, and, inasmuch as she
established a subject for conversation, useful.

Then, lest she should have been taken too seriously, the Press, which had
kindled, proceeded to extinguish her with the formidable engines called
leading articles, which fling fire or water, as the occasion may require.
It turned out that we had ships ready for launching, and certain
regiments coming home from India; hedges we had, and a spirited body of
yeomanry; and we had pluck and patriotism, the father and mother of
volunteers innumerable. Things were not so bad.

Panic, however, sent up a plaintive whine. What country had anything like
our treasures to defend? countless riches, beautiful women, an inviolate
soil! True, and it must be done. Ministers were authoritatively summoned
to set to work immediately. They replied that they had been at work all
the time, and were at work now. They could assure the country, that
though they flourished no trumpets, they positively guaranteed the safety
of our virgins and coffers.

Then the people, rather ashamed, abused the Press for unreasonably
disturbing them. The Press attacked old Panic and stripped her naked.
Panic, with a desolate scream, arraigned the parliamentary Opposition for
having inflated her to serve base party purposes. The Opposition
challenged the allegations of Government, pointed to the trimness of army
and navy during its term of office, and proclaimed itself watch-dog of
the country, which is at all events an office of a kind. Hereupon the
ambassador of yonder ireful soldiery let fall a word, saying, by the
faith of his Master, there was no necessity for watch-dogs to bark; an
ardent and a reverent army had but fancied its beloved chosen Chief
insulted; the Chief and chosen held them in; he, despite obloquy,
discerned our merits and esteemed us.

So, then, Panic, or what remained of her, was put to bed again. The
Opposition retired into its kennel growling. The People coughed like a
man of two minds, doubting whether he has been divinely inspired or has
cut a ridiculous figure. The Press interpreted the cough as a warning to
Government; and Government launched a big ship with hurrahs, and ordered
the recruiting-sergeant to be seen conspicuously.

And thus we obtained a moderate reinforcement of our arms.

It was not arrived at by connivance all round, though there was a look of
it. Certainly it did not come of accident, though there was a look of
that as well. Nor do we explain much of the secret by attributing it to
the working of a complex machinery. The housewife's remedy of a good
shaking for the invalid who will not arise and dance away his gout,
partly illustrates the action of the Press upon the country: and perhaps
the country shaken may suffer a comparison with the family chariot of the
last century, built in a previous one, commodious, furnished agreeably,
being all that the inside occupants could require of a conveyance, until
the report of horsemen crossing the heath at a gallop sets it
dishonourably creaking and complaining in rapid motion, and the squire
curses his miserly purse that would not hire a guard, and his dame says,
I told you so!--Foolhardy man, to suppose, because we have constables in
the streets of big cities, we have dismissed the highwayman to limbo. And
here he is, and he will cost you fifty times the sum you would have laid
out to keep him at a mile's respectful distance! But see, the wretch is
bowing: he smiles at our carriage, and tells the coachman that he
remembers he has been our guest, and really thinks we need not go so
fast. He leaves word for you, sir, on your peril to denounce him on
another occasion from the magisterial Bench, for that albeit he is a
gentleman of the road, he has a mission to right society, and succeeds
legitimately to that bold Good Robin Hood who fed the poor.--Fresh from
this polite encounter, the squire vows money for his personal protection:
and he determines to speak his opinion of Sherwood's latest captain as
loudly as ever. That he will, I do not say. It might involve a large sum
per annum.

Similes are very well in their way. None can be sufficient in this case
without levelling a finger at the taxpayer--nay, directly mentioning him.
He is the key of our ingenuity. He pays his dues; he will not pay the
additional penny or two wanted of him, that we may be a step or two ahead
of the day we live in, unless he is frightened. But scarcely anything
less than the wild alarum of a tocsin will frighten him. Consequently the
tocsin has to be sounded; and the effect is woeful past measure: his
hugging of his army, his kneeling on the shore to his navy, his
implorations of his yeomanry and his hedges, are sad to note. His bursts
of pot-valiancy (the male side of the maiden Panic within his bosom) are
awful to his friends. Particular care must be taken after he has begun to
cool and calculate his chances of security, that he do not gather to him
a curtain of volunteers and go to sleep again behind them; for they cost
little in proportion to the much they pretend to be to him. Patriotic
taxpayers doubtless exist: prophetic ones, provident ones, do not. At
least we show that we are wanting in them. The taxpayer of a free land
taxes himself, and his disinclination for the bitter task, save under
circumstances of screaming urgency--as when the night-gear and bed-linen
of old convulsed Panic are like the churned Channel sea in the track of
two hundred hostile steamboats, let me say--is of the kind the gentle
schoolboy feels when death or an expedition has relieved him of his
tyrant, and he is entreated notwithstanding to go to his books.

Will you not own that the working of the system for scaring him and
bleeding is very ingenious? But whether the ingenuity comes of native
sagacity, as it is averred by some, or whether it shows an instinct
labouring to supply the deficiencies of stupidity, according to others, I
cannot express an opinion. I give you the position of the country
undisturbed by any moralizings of mine. The youth I introduce to you will
rarely let us escape from it; for the reason that he was born with so
extreme and passionate a love for his country, that he thought all things
else of mean importance in comparison: and our union is one in which,
following the counsel of a sage and seer, I must try to paint for you
what is, not that which I imagine. This day, this hour, this life, and
even politics, the centre and throbbing heart of it (enough, when
unburlesqued, to blow the down off the gossamer-stump of fiction at a
single breath, I have heard tell), must be treated of men, and the ideas
of men, which are--it is policy to be emphatic upon truisms--are actually
the motives of men in a greater degree than their appetites: these are my
theme; and may it be my fortune to keep them at bloodheat, and myself
calm as a statue of Memnon in prostrate Egypt! He sits there waiting for
the sunlight; I here, and readier to be musical than you think. I can at
any rate be impartial; and do but fix your eyes on the sunlight striking
him and swallowing the day in rounding him, and you have an image of the
passive receptivity of shine and shade I hold it good to aim at, if at
the same time I may keep my characters at blood-heat. I shoot my arrows
at a mark that is pretty certain to return them to me. And as to perfect
success, I should be like the panic-stricken shopkeepers in my alarm at
it; for I should believe that genii of the air fly above our tree-tops
between us and the incognizable spheres, catching those ambitious shafts
they deem it a promise of fun to play pranks with.

Young Mr. Beauchamp at that period of the panic had not the slightest
feeling for the taxpayer. He was therefore unable to penetrate the
mystery of our roundabout way of enlivening him. He pored over the
journals in perplexity, and talked of his indignation nightly to his
pretty partners at balls, who knew not they were lesser Andromedas of his
dear Andromeda country, but danced and chatted and were gay, and said
they were sure he would defend them. The men he addressed were civil.
They listened to him, sometimes with smiles and sometimes with laughter,
but approvingly, liking the lad's quick spirit. They were accustomed to
the machinery employed to give our land a shudder and to soothe it, and
generally remarked that it meant nothing. His uncle Everard, and his
uncle's friend Stukely Culbrett, expounded the nature of Frenchmen to
him, saying that they were uneasy when not periodically thrashed; it
would be cruel to deny them their crow beforehand; and so the pair of
gentlemen pooh-poohed the affair; agreeing with him, however, that we had
no great reason to be proud of our appearance, and the grounds they
assigned for this were the activity and the prevalence of the ignoble
doctrines of Manchester--a power whose very existence was unknown to Mr.
Beauchamp. He would by no means allow the burden of our national disgrace
to be cast on one part of the nation. We were insulted, and all in a
poultry-flutter, yet no one seemed to feel it but himself! Outside the
Press and Parliament, which must necessarily be the face we show to the
foreigner, absolute indifference reigned. Navy men and red-coats were
willing to join him or anybody in sneers at a clipping and paring miserly
Government, but they were insensible to the insult, the panic, the
startled-poultry show, the shame of our exhibition of ourselves in
Europe. It looked as if the blustering French Guard were to have it all
their own way. And what would they, what could they but, think of us! He
sat down to write them a challenge.

He is not the only Englishman who has been impelled by a youthful
chivalry to do that. He is perhaps the youngest who ever did it, and
consequently there were various difficulties to be overcome. As regards
his qualifications for addressing Frenchmen, a year of his prae-neptunal
time had been spent in their capital city for the purpose of acquiring
French of Paris, its latest refinements of pronunciation and polish, and
the art of conversing. He had read the French tragic poets and Moliere;
he could even relish the Gallic-classic--'Qu'il mourut!' and he spoke
French passably, being quite beyond the Bullish treatment of the tongue.
Writing a letter in French was a different undertaking. The one he
projected bore no resemblance to an ordinary letter. The briefer the
better, of course; but a tone of dignity was imperative, and the tone
must be individual, distinctive, Nevil Beauchamp's, though not in his
native language. First he tried his letter in French, and lost sight of
himself completely. 'Messieurs de la Garde Francaise,' was a good
beginning; the remainder gave him a false air of a masquerader, most
uncomfortable to see; it was Nevil Beauchamp in moustache and imperial,
and bagbreeches badly fitting. He tried English, which was really
himself, and all that heart could desire, supposing he addressed a body
of midshipmen just a little loftily. But the English, when translated,
was bald and blunt to the verge of offensiveness.

   'GENTLEMEN OF THE FRENCH GUARD,

   'I take up the glove you have tossed us. I am an Englishman.
   That will do for a reason.'

This might possibly pass with the gentlemen of the English Guard. But
read:

   'MESSIEURS DE LA GARDE FRANCAISE,

   'J'accepte votre gant. Je suis Anglais. La raison est suffisante.'

And imagine French Guardsmen reading it!

Mr. Beauchamp knew the virtue of punctiliousness in epithets and phrases
of courtesy toward a formal people, and as the officers of the French
Guard were gentlemen of birth, he would have them to perceive in him
their equal at a glance. On the other hand, a bare excess of phrasing
distorted him to a likeness of Mascarille playing Marquis. How to be
English and think French! The business was as laborious as if he had
started on the rough sea of the Channel to get at them in an open boat.

The lady governing his uncle Everard's house, Mrs. Rosamund Culling,
entered his room and found him writing with knitted brows. She was young,
that is, she was not in her middleage; and they were the dearest of
friends; each had given the other proof of it. Nevil looked up and beheld
her lifted finger.

'You are composing a love-letter, Nevil!' The accusation sounded like
irony.

'No,' said he, puffing; 'I wish I were!

'What can it be, then?'

He thrust pen and paper a hand's length on the table, and gazed at her.

'My dear Nevil, is it really anything serious?' said she.

'I am writing French, ma'am.'

'Then I may help you. It must be very absorbing, for you did not hear my
knock at your door.'

Now, could he trust her? The widow of a British officer killed nobly
fighting for his country in India, was a person to be relied on for
active and burning sympathy in a matter that touched the country's
honour. She was a woman, and a woman of spirit. Men had not pleased him
of late. Something might be hoped from a woman.

He stated his occupation, saying that if she would assist him in his
French she would oblige him; the letter must be written and must go. This
was uttered so positively that she bowed her head, amused by the funny
semi-tone of defiance to the person to whom he confided the secret. She
had humour, and was ravished by his English boyishness, with the novel
blush of the heroical-nonsensical in it.

Mrs. Culling promised him demurely that she would listen, objecting
nothing to his plan, only to his French.

'Messieurs de la Garde Francaise!' he commenced.

Her criticism followed swiftly.

'I think you are writing to the Garde Imperiale.'

He admitted his error, and thanked her warmly.

'Messieurs de la Garde Imperiale!'

'Does not that,' she said, 'include the non-commissioned officers, the
privates, and the cooks, of all the regiments?'

He could scarcely think that, but thought it provoking the French had no
distinctive working title corresponding to gentlemen, and suggested
'Messieurs les Officiers': which might, Mrs. Culling assured him,
comprise the barbers. He frowned, and she prescribed his writing,
'Messieurs les Colonels de la Garde Imperiale.' This he set down. The
point was that a stand must be made against the flood of sarcasms and
bullyings to which the country was exposed in increasing degrees, under a
belief that we would fight neither in the mass nor individually.
Possibly, if it became known that the colonels refused to meet a
midshipman, the gentlemen of our Household troops would advance a step.

Mrs. Calling's adroit efforts to weary him out of his project were
unsuccessful. He was too much on fire to know the taste of absurdity.

Nevil repeated what he had written in French, and next the English of
what he intended to say.

The lady conscientiously did her utmost to reconcile the two languages.
She softened his downrightness, passed with approval his compliments to
France and the ancient high reputation of her army, and, seeing that a
loophole was left for them to apologize, asked how many French colonels
he wanted to fight.

'I do not WANT, ma'am,' said Nevil.

He had simply taken up the glove they had again flung at our feet: and he
had done it to stop the incessant revilings, little short of positive
contempt, which we in our indolence exposed ourselves to from the
foreigner, particularly from Frenchmen, whom he liked; and precisely
because he liked them he insisted on forcing them to respect us. Let his
challenge be accepted, and he would find backers. He knew the stuff of
Englishmen: they only required an example.

'French officers are skilful swordsmen,' said Mrs. Culling. 'My husband
has told me they will spend hours of the day thrusting and parrying. They
are used to duelling.'

'We,' Nevil answered, 'don't get apprenticed to the shambles to learn our
duty on the field. Duelling is, I know, sickening folly. We go too far in
pretending to despise every insult pitched at us. A man may do for his
country what he wouldn't do for himself.'

Mrs. Culling gravely said she hoped that bloodshed would be avoided, and
Mr. Beauchamp nodded.

She left him hard at work.

He was a popular boy, a favourite of women, and therefore full of
engagements to Balls and dinners. And he was a modest boy, though his
uncle encouraged him to deliver his opinions freely and argue with men.
The little drummer attached to wheeling columns thinks not more of
himself because his short legs perform the same strides as the
grenadiers'; he is happy to be able to keep the step; and so was Nevil;
and if ever he contradicted a senior, it was in the interests of the
country. Veneration of heroes, living and dead, kept down his conceit. He
worshipped devotedly. From an early age he exacted of his flattering
ladies that they must love his hero. Not to love his hero was to be
strangely in error, to be in need of conversion, and he proselytized with
the ardour of the Moslem. His uncle Everard was proud of his good looks,
fire, and nonsense, during the boy's extreme youth. He traced him by
cousinships back to the great Earl Beauchamp of Froissart, and would have
it so; and he would have spoilt him had not the young fellow's mind been
possessed by his reverence for men of deeds. How could he think of
himself, who had done nothing, accomplished nothing, so long as he
brooded on the images of signal Englishmen whose names were historic for
daring, and the strong arm, and artfulness, all given to the service of
the country?--men of a magnanimity overcast with simplicity, which Nevil
held to be pure insular English; our type of splendid manhood, not
discoverable elsewhere. A method of enraging him was to distinguish one
or other of them as Irish, Scottish, or Cambrian. He considered it a
dismemberment of the country. And notwithstanding the pleasure he had in
uniting in his person the strong red blood of the chivalrous Lord
Beauchamp with the hard and tenacious Romfrey blood, he hated the title
of Norman. We are English--British, he said. A family resting its pride
on mere ancestry provoked his contempt, if it did not show him one of his
men. He had also a disposition to esteem lightly the family which, having
produced a man, settled down after that effort for generations to enjoy
the country's pay. Boys are unjust; but Nevil thought of the country
mainly, arguing that we should not accept the country's money for what we
do not ourselves perform. These traits of his were regarded as
characteristics hopeful rather than the reverse; none of his friends and
relatives foresaw danger in them. He was a capital boy for his elders to
trot out and banter.

Mrs. Rosamund Culling usually went to his room to see him and doat on him
before he started on his rounds of an evening. She suspected that his
necessary attention to his toilet would barely have allowed him time to
finish his copy of the letter. Certain phrases had bothered him. The
thrice recurrence of 'ma patrie' jarred on his ear. 'Sentiments'
afflicted his acute sense of the declamatory twice. 'C'est avec les
sentiments du plus profond regret': and again, 'Je suis bien scar que
vous comprendrez mes sentiments, et m'accorderez l'honneur que je reclame
au nom de ma patrie outrage.' The word 'patrie' was broadcast over the
letter, and 'honneur' appeared four times, and a more delicate word to
harp on than the others!

'Not to Frenchmen,' said his friend Rosamund. 'I would put "Je suis
convaincu": it is not so familiar.'

'But I have written out the fair copy, ma'am, and that alteration seems a
trifle.'

'I would copy it again and again, Nevil, to get it right.'

'No: I'd rather see it off than have it right,' said Nevil, and he folded
the letter.

How the deuce to address it, and what direction to write on it, were
further difficulties. He had half a mind to remain at home to conquer
them by excogitation.

Rosamund urged him not to break his engagement to dine at the Halketts',
where perhaps from his friend Colonel Halkett, who would never imagine
the reason for the inquiry, he might learn how a letter to a crack French
regiment should be addressed and directed.

This proved persuasive, and as the hour was late Nevil had to act on her
advice in a hurry.

His uncle Everard enjoyed a perusal of the manuscript in his absence.




CHAPTER II

UNCLE, NEPHEW, AND ANOTHER

The Honourable Everard Romfrey came of a race of fighting earls, toughest
of men, whose high, stout, Western castle had weathered our cyclone
periods of history without changeing hands more than once, and then but
for a short year or two, as if to teach the original possessors the
wisdom of inclining to the stronger side. They had a queen's chamber in
it, and a king's; and they stood well up against the charge of having
dealt darkly with the king. He died among them--how has not been told. We
will not discuss the conjectures here. A savour of North Sea foam and
ballad pirates hangs about the early chronicles of the family.
Indications of an ancestry that had lived between the wave and the cloud
were discernible in their notions of right and wrong. But a settlement on
solid earth has its influences. They were chivalrous knights bannerets,
and leaders in the tented field, paying and taking fair ransom for
captures; and they were good landlords, good masters blithely followed to
the wars. Sing an old battle of Normandy, Picardy, Gascony, and you
celebrate deeds of theirs. At home they were vexatious neighbours to a
town of burghers claiming privileges: nor was it unreasonable that the
Earl should flout the pretensions of the town to read things for
themselves, documents, titleships, rights, and the rest. As well might
the flat plain boast of seeing as far as the pillar. Earl and town fought
the fight of Barons and Commons in epitome. The Earl gave way; the Barons
gave way. Mighty men may thrash numbers for a time; in the end the
numbers will be thrashed into the art of beating their teachers. It is
bad policy to fight the odds inch by inch. Those primitive school masters
of the million liked it, and took their pleasure in that way. The
Romfreys did not breed warriors for a parade at Court; wars, though
frequent, were not constant, and they wanted occupation: they may even
have felt that they were bound in no common degree to the pursuit of an
answer to what may be called the parent question of humanity: Am I thy
master, or thou mine? They put it to lords of other castles, to town
corporations, and sometimes brother to brother: and notwithstanding that
the answer often unseated and once discastled them, they swam back to
their places, as born warriors, urged by a passion for land, are almost
sure to do; are indeed quite sure, so long as they multiply sturdily, and
will never take no from Fortune. A family passion for land, that survives
a generation, is as effective as genius in producing the object it
conceives; and through marriages and conflicts, the seizure of lands, and
brides bearing land, these sharp-feeding eagle-eyed earls of Romfrey
spied few spots within their top tower's wide circle of the heavens not
their own.

It is therefore manifest that they had the root qualities, the prime
active elements, of men in perfection, and notably that appetite to
flourish at the cost of the weaker, which is the blessed exemplification
of strength, and has been man's cheerfulest encouragement to fight on
since his comparative subjugation (on the whole, it seems complete) of
the animal world. By-and-by the struggle is transferred to higher ground,
and we begin to perceive how much we are indebted to the fighting spirit.
Strength is the brute form of truth. No conspicuously great man was born
of the Romfreys, who were better served by a succession of able sons.
They sent undistinguished able men to army and navy--lieutenants given to
be critics of their captains, but trustworthy for their work. In the
later life of the family, they preferred the provincial state of splendid
squires to Court and political honours. They were renowned shots,
long-limbed stalking sportsmen in field and bower, fast friends,
intemperate enemies, handsome to feminine eyes, resembling one another in
build, and mostly of the Northern colour, or betwixt the tints, with an
hereditary nose and mouth that cried Romfrey from faces thrice diluted in
cousinships.

The Hon. Everard (Stephen Denely Craven Romfrey), third son of the late
Earl, had some hopes of the title, and was in person a noticeable
gentleman, in mind a mediaeval baron, in politics a crotchety
unintelligible Whig. He inherited the estate of Holdesbury, on the
borders of Hampshire and Wilts, and espoused that of Steynham in Sussex,
where he generally resided. His favourite in the family had been the Lady
Emily, his eldest sister, who, contrary to the advice of her other
brothers and sisters, had yielded her hand to his not wealthy friend,
Colonel Richard Beauchamp. After the death of Nevil's parents, he adopted
the boy, being himself childless, and a widower. Childlessness was the
affliction of the family. Everard, having no son, could hardly hope that
his brother the Earl, and Craven, Lord Avonley, would have one, for he
loved the prospect of the title. Yet, as there were no cousins of the
male branch extant, the lack of an heir was a serious omission, and to
become the Earl of Romfrey, and be the last Earl of Romfrey, was a
melancholy thought, however brilliant. So sinks the sun: but he could not
desire the end of a great day. At one time he was a hot Parliamentarian,
calling himself a Whig, called by the Whigs a Radical, called by the
Radicals a Tory, and very happy in fighting them all round. This was
during the decay of his party, before the Liberals were defined. A
Liberal deprived him of the seat he had held for fifteen years, and the
clearness of his understanding was obscured by that black vision of
popular ingratitude which afflicts the free fighting man yet more than
the malleable public servant. The latter has a clerkly humility attached
to him like a second nature, from his habit of doing as others bid him:
the former smacks a voluntarily sweating forehead and throbbing wounds
for witness of his claim upon your palpable thankfulness. It is an insult
to tell him that he fought for his own satisfaction. Mr. Romfrey still
called himself a Whig, though it was Whig mean vengeance on account of
his erratic vote and voice on two or three occasions that denied him a
peerage and a seat in haven. Thither let your good sheep go, your echoes,
your wag-tail dogs, your wealthy pursy manufacturers! He decried the
attractions of the sublimer House, and laughed at the transparent
Whiggery of his party in replenishing it from the upper shoots of the
commonalty: 'Dragging it down to prop it up! swamping it to keep it
swimming!' he said.

He was nevertheless a vehement supporter of that House. He stood for
King, Lords, and Commons, in spite of his personal grievances, harping
the triad as vigorously as bard of old Britain. Commons he added out of
courtesy, or from usage or policy, or for emphasis, or for the sake of
the Constitutional number of the Estates of the realm, or it was because
he had an intuition of the folly of omitting them; the same, to some
extent, that builders have regarding bricks when they plan a fabric.
Thus, although King and Lords prove the existence of Commons in days of
the political deluge almost syllogistically, the example of not including
one of the Estates might be imitated, and Commons and King do not
necessitate the conception of an intermediate third, while Lords and
Commons suggest the decapitation of the leading figure. The united three,
however, no longer cast reflections on one another, and were an assurance
to this acute politician that his birds were safe. He preserved game
rigorously, and the deduction was the work of instinct with him. To his
mind the game-laws were the corner-stone of Law, and of a man's right to
hold his own; and so delicately did he think the country poised, that an
attack on them threatened the structure of justice. The three conjoined
Estates were therefore his head gamekeepers; their duty was to back him
against the poacher, if they would not see the country tumble. As to his
under-gamekeepers, he was their intimate and their friend, saying, with
none of the misanthropy which proclaims the virtues of the faithful dog
to the confusion of humankind, he liked their company better than that of
his equals, and learnt more from them. They also listened deferentially
to their instructor.

The conversation he delighted in most might have been going on in any
century since the Conquest. Grant him his not unreasonable argument upon
his property in game, he was a liberal landlord. No tenants were forced
to take his farms. He dragged none by the collar. He gave them liberty to
go to Australia, Canada, the Americas, if they liked. He asked in return
to have the liberty to shoot on his own grounds, and rear the marks for
his shot, treating the question of indemnification as a gentleman should.
Still there were grumbling tenants. He swarmed with game, and, though he
was liberal, his hares and his birds were immensely destructive:
computation could not fix the damage done by them. Probably the farmers
expected them not to eat. 'There are two parties to a bargain,' said
Everard, 'and one gets the worst of it. But if he was never obliged to
make it, where's his right to complain?' Men of sense rarely obtain
satisfactory answers: they are provoked to despise their kind. But the
poacher was another kind of vermin than the stupid tenant. Everard did
him the honour to hate him, and twice in a fray had he collared his
ruffian, and subsequently sat in condemnation of the wretch: for he who
can attest a villany is best qualified to punish it. Gangs from the
metropolis found him too determined and alert for their sport. It was the
factiousness of here and there an unbroken young scoundrelly colt poacher
of the neighbourhood, a born thief, a fellow damned in an inveterate
taste for game, which gave him annoyance. One night he took Master Nevil
out with him, and they hunted down a couple of sinners that showed fight
against odds. Nevil attempted to beg them off because of their boldness.
'I don't set my traps for nothing,' said his uncle, silencing him. But
the boy reflected that his uncle was perpetually lamenting the cowed
spirit of the common English-formerly such fresh and merry men! He
touched Rosamund Culling's heart with his description of their attitudes
when they stood resisting and bawling to the keepers, 'Come on we'll die
for it.' They did not die. Everard explained to the boy that he could
have killed them, and was contented to have sent them to gaol for a few
weeks. Nevil gaped at the empty magnanimity which his uncle presented to
him as a remarkably big morsel. At the age of fourteen he was despatched
to sea.

He went unwillingly; not so much from an objection to a naval life as
from a wish, incomprehensible to grown men and boys, and especially to
his cousin, Cecil Baskelett, that he might remain at school and learn.
'The fellow would like to be a parson!' Everard said in disgust. No
parson had ever been known of in the Romfrey family, or in the Beauchamp.
A legend of a parson that had been a tutor in one of the Romfrey houses,
and had talked and sung blandly to a damsel of the blood--degenerate
maid--to receive a handsome trouncing for his pains, instead of the holy
marriage-tie he aimed at, was the only connection of the Romfreys with
the parsonry, as Everard called them. He attributed the boy's feeling to
the influence of his great-aunt Beauchamp, who would, he said, infallibly
have made a parson of him. 'I'd rather enlist for a soldier,' Nevil said,
and he ceased to dream of rebellion, and of his little property of a few
thousand pounds in the funds to aid him in it. He confessed to his dear
friend Rosamund Culling that he thought the parsons happy in having time
to read history. And oh, to feel for certain which side was the wrong
side in our Civil War, so that one should not hesitate in choosing! Such
puzzles are never, he seemed to be aware, solved in a midshipman's mess.
He hated bloodshed, and was guilty of the 'cotton-spinners' babble,'
abhorred of Everard, in alluding to it. Rosamund liked him for his
humanity; but she, too, feared he was a slack Romfrey when she heard him
speak in precocious contempt of glory. Somewhere, somehow, he had got
hold of Manchester sarcasms concerning glory: a weedy word of the
newspapers had been sown in his bosom perhaps. He said: 'I don't care to
win glory; I know all about that; I 've seen an old hat in the Louvre.'
And he would have had her to suppose that he had looked on the
campaigning head-cover of Napoleon simply as a shocking bad, bald,
brown-rubbed old tricorne rather than as the nod of extinction to
thousands, the great orb of darkness, the still-trembling gloomy
quiver--the brain of the lightnings of battles.

Now this boy nursed no secret presumptuous belief that he was fitted for
the walks of the higher intellect; he was not having his impudent boy's
fling at superiority over the superior, as here and there a subtle-minded
vain juvenile will; nor was he a parrot repeating a line from some
Lancastrian pamphlet. He really disliked war and the sword; and scorning
the prospect of an idle life, confessing that his abilities barely
adapted him for a sailor's, he was opposed to the career opened to him
almost to the extreme of shrinking and terror. Or that was the impression
conveyed to a not unsympathetic hearer by his forlorn efforts to make
himself understood, which were like the tappings of the stick of a blind
man mystified by his sense of touch at wrong corners. His bewilderment
and speechlessness were a comic display, tragic to him.

Just as his uncle Everard predicted, he came home from his first voyage a
pleasant sailor lad. His features, more than handsome to a woman, so
mobile they were, shone of sea and spirit, the chance lights of the sea,
and the spirit breathing out of it. As to war and bloodshed, a man's
first thought must be his country, young Jacket remarked, and 'Ich dien'
was the best motto afloat. Rosamund noticed the peculiarity of the books
he selected for his private reading. They were not boys' books, books of
adventure and the like. His favourite author was one writing of Heroes,
in (so she esteemed it) a style resembling either early architecture or
utter dilapidation, so loose and rough it seemed; a wind-in-the-orchard
style, that tumbled down here and there an appreciable fruit with uncouth
bluster; sentences without commencements running to abrupt endings and
smoke, like waves against a sea-wall, learned dictionary words giving a
hand to street-slang, and accents falling on them haphazard, like slant
rays from driving clouds; all the pages in a breeze, the whole book
producing a kind of electrical agitation in the mind and the joints. This
was its effect on the lady. To her the incomprehensible was the
abominable, for she had our country's high critical feeling; but he,
while admitting that he could not quite master it, liked it. He had dug
the book out of a bookseller's shop in Malta, captivated by its title,
and had, since the day of his purchase, gone at it again and again,
getting nibbles of golden meaning by instalments, as with a solitary pick
in a very dark mine, until the illumination of an idea struck him that
there was a great deal more in the book than there was in himself. This
was sufficient to secure the devoted attachment of young Mr. Beauchamp.
Rosamund sighed with apprehension to think of his unlikeness to boys and
men among his countrymen in some things. Why should he hug a book he
owned he could not quite comprehend? He said he liked a bone in his
mouth; and it was natural wisdom, though unappreciated by women. A bone
in a boy's mind for him to gnaw and worry, corrects the vagrancies and
promotes the healthy activities, whether there be marrow in it or not.
Supposing it furnishes only dramatic entertainment in that usually vacant
tenement, or powder-shell, it will be of service.

Nevil proposed to her that her next present should be the entire list of
his beloved Incomprehensible's published works, and she promised, and was
not sorry to keep her promise dangling at the skirts of memory, to drop
away in time. For that fire-and-smoke writer dedicated volumes to the
praise of a regicide. Nice reading for her dear boy! Some weeks after
Nevil was off again, she abused herself for her half-hearted love of him,
and would have given him anything--the last word in favour of the Country
versus the royal Martyr, for example, had he insisted on it. She
gathered, bit by bit, that he had dashed at his big blustering cousin
Cecil to vindicate her good name. The direful youths fought in the
Steynham stables, overheard by the grooms. Everard received a fine
account of the tussle from these latter, and Rosamund, knowing him to be
of the order of gentlemen who, whatsoever their sins, will at all costs
protect a woman's delicacy, and a dependant's, man or woman, did not fear
to have her ears shocked in probing him on the subject.

Everard was led to say that Nevil's cousins were bedevilled with
womanfolk.

From which Rosamund perceived that women had been at work; and if so, it
was upon the business of the scandal-monger; and if so, Nevil fought his
cousin to protect her good name from a babbler of the family gossip.

She spoke to Stukely Culbrett, her dead husband's friend, to whose
recommendation she was indebted for her place in Everard Romfrey's
household.

'Nevil behaved like a knight, I hear.'

'Your beauty was disputed,' said he, 'and Nevil knocked the blind man
down for not being able to see.'

She thought, 'Not my beauty! Nevil struck his cousin on behalf of the
only fair thing I have left to me!'

This was a moment with her when many sensations rush together and form a
knot in sensitive natures. She had been very good-looking. She was
good-looking still, but she remembered the bloom of her looks in her
husband's days (the tragedy of the mirror is one for a woman to write: I
am ashamed to find myself smiling while the poor lady weeps), she
remembered his praises, her pride; his death in battle, her anguish:
then, on her strange entry to this house, her bitter wish to be older;
and then, the oppressive calm of her recognition of her wish's
fulfilment, the heavy drop to dead earth, when she could say, or pretend
to think she could say--I look old enough: will they tattle of me now?
Nevil's championship of her good name brought her history spinning about
her head, and threw a finger of light on her real position. In that she
saw the slenderness of her hold on respect, as well as felt her personal
stainlessness. The boy warmed her chill widowhood. It was written that
her, second love should be of the pattern of mother's love. She loved him
hungrily and jealously, always in fear for him when he was absent, even
anxiously when she had him near. For some cause, born, one may fancy, of
the hour of her love's conception, his image in her heart was steeped in
tears. She was not, happily, one of the women who betray strong feeling,
and humour preserved her from excesses of sentiment.




CHAPTER III

CONTAINS BARONIAL VIEWS OF THE PRESENT TIME

Upon the word of honour of Rosamund, the letter to the officers of the
French Guard was posted.

'Post it, post it,' Everard said, on her consulting him, with the letter
in her hand. 'Let the fellow stand his luck.' It was addressed to the
Colonel of the First Regiment of the Imperial Guard, Paris. That
superscription had been suggested by Colonel Halkett. Rosamund was in
favour of addressing it to Versailles, Nevil to the Tuileries; but Paris
could hardly fail to hit the mark, and Nevil waited for the reply, half
expecting an appointment on the French sands: for the act of posting a
letter, though it be to little short of the Pleiades even, will stamp an
incredible proceeding as a matter of business, so ready is the ardent
mind to take footing on the last thing done. The flight of Mr.
Beauchamp's letter placed it in the common order of occurrences for the
youthful author of it. Jack Wilmore, a messmate, offered to second him,
though he should be dismissed the service for it. Another second would
easily be found somewhere; for, as Nevil observed, you have only to set
these affairs going, and British blood rises: we are not the people you
see on the surface. Wilmore's father was a parson, for instance. What did
he do? He could not help himself: he supplied the army and navy with
recruits! One son was in a marching regiment, the other was Jack, and
three girls had vowed never to quit the rectory save as brides of
officers. Nevil thought that seemed encouraging; we were evidently not a
nation of shopkeepers at heart; and he quoted sayings of Mr. Stukely
Culbrett's, in which neither his ear nor Wilmore's detected the
under-ring Stukely was famous for: as that England had saddled herself
with India for the express purpose of better obeying the Commandments in
Europe; and that it would be a lamentable thing for the Continent and our
doctrines if ever beef should fail the Briton, and such like. 'Depend
upon it we're a fighting nation naturally, Jack,' said Nevil. 'How can we
submit! . . . however, I shall not be impatient. I dislike duelling, and
hate war, but I will have the country respected.' They planned a defence
of the country, drawing their strategy from magazine articles by military
pens, reverberations of the extinct voices of the daily and weekly
journals, customary after a panic, and making bloody stands on spots of
extreme pastoral beauty, which they visited by coach and rail, looking
back on unfortified London with particular melancholy.

Rosamund's word may be trusted that she dropped the letter into a London
post-office in pursuance of her promise to Nevil. The singular fact was
that no answer to it ever arrived. Nevil, without a doubt of her honesty,
proposed an expedition to Paris; he was ordered to join his ship, and he
lay moored across the water in the port of Bevisham, panting for notice
to be taken of him. The slight of the total disregard of his letter now
affected him personally; it took him some time to get over this indignity
put upon him, especially because of his being under the impression that
the country suffered, not he at all. The letter had served its object:
ever since the transmission of it the menaces and insults had ceased.

But they might be renewed, and he desired to stop them altogether. His
last feeling was one of genuine regret that Frenchmen should have behaved
unworthily of the high estimation he held them in. With which he
dismissed the affair.

He was rallied about it when he next sat at his uncle's table, and had to
pardon Rosamund for telling.

Nevil replied modestly: 'I dare say you think me half a fool, sir. All I
know is, I waited for my betters to speak first. I have no dislike of
Frenchmen.'

Everard shook his head to signify, 'not half.' But he was gentle enough
in his observations. 'There's a motto, Ex pede Herculem. You stepped out
for the dogs to judge better of us. It's an infernally tripping motto for
a composite structure like the kingdom of Great Britain and Manchester,
boy Nevil. We can fight foreigners when the time comes.' He directed
Nevil to look home, and cast an eye on the cotton-spinners, with the
remark that they were binding us hand and foot to sell us to the biggest
buyer, and were not Englishmen but 'Germans and Jews, and quakers and
hybrids, diligent clerks and speculators, and commercial travellers, who
have raised a fortune from foisting drugged goods on an idiot
population.'

He loathed them for the curse they were to the country. And he was one of
the few who spoke out. The fashion was to pet them. We stood against
them; were halfhearted, and were beaten; and then we petted them, and bit
by bit our privileges were torn away. We made lords of them to catch
them, and they grocers of us by way of a return. 'Already,' said Everard,
'they have knocked the nation's head off, and dry-rotted the bone of the
people.'

'Don't they,' Nevil asked, 'belong to the Liberal party?'

'I'll tell you,' Everard replied, 'they belong to any party that upsets
the party above them. They belong to the GEORGE FOXE party, and my
poultry-roosts are the mark they aim at. You shall have a glance at the
manufacturing district some day. You shall see the machines they work
with. You shall see the miserable lank-jawed half-stewed pantaloons
they've managed to make of Englishmen there. My blood 's past boiling.
They work young children in their factories from morning to night. Their
manufactories are spreading like the webs of the devil to suck the blood
of the country. In that district of theirs an epidemic levels men like a
disease in sheep. Skeletons can't make a stand. On the top of it all they
sing Sunday tunes!'

This behaviour of corn-law agitators and protectors of poachers was an
hypocrisy too horrible for comment. Everard sipped claret. Nevil lashed
his head for the clear idea which objurgation insists upon implanting,
but batters to pieces in the act.

'Manchester's the belly of this country!' Everard continued. 'So long as
Manchester flourishes, we're a country governed and led by the belly. The
head and the legs of the country are sound still; I don't guarantee it
for long, but the middle's rapacious and corrupt. Take it on a question
of foreign affairs, it 's an alderman after a feast. Bring it upon home
politics, you meet a wolf.'

The faithful Whig veteran spoke with jolly admiration of the speech of a
famous Tory chief.

'That was the way to talk to them! Denounce them traitors! Up whip, and
set the ruffians capering! Hit them facers! Our men are always for the
too-clever trick. They pluck the sprouts and eat them, as if the loss of
a sprout or two thinned Manchester! Your policy of absorption is good
enough when you're dealing with fragments. It's a devilish unlucky thing
to attempt with a concrete mass. You might as well ask your head to
absorb a wall by running at it like a pugnacious nigger. I don't want you
to go into Parliament ever. You're a fitter man out of it; but if ever
you're bitten--and it's the curse of our country to have politics as well
as the other diseases--don't follow a flag, be independent, keep a free
vote; remember how I've been tied, and hold foot against Manchester. Do
it blindfold; you don't want counselling, you're sure to be right. I'll
lay you a blood-brood mare to a cabstand skeleton, you'll have an easy
conscience and deserve the thanks of the country.'

Nevil listened gravely. The soundness of the head and legs of the country
he took for granted. The inflated state of the unchivalrous middle,
denominated Manchester, terrified him. Could it be true that England was
betraying signs of decay? and signs how ignoble! Half-a-dozen crescent
lines cunningly turned, sketched her figure before the world, and the
reflection for one ready to die upholding her was that the portrait was
no caricature. Such an emblematic presentation of the land of his filial
affection haunted him with hideous mockeries. Surely the foreigner
hearing our boasts of her must compare us to showmen bawling the
attractions of a Fat Lady at a fair!

Swoln Manchester bore the blame of it. Everard exulted to hear his young
echo attack the cotton-spinners. But Nevil was for a plan, a system,
immediate action; the descending among the people, and taking an
initiative, LEADING them, insisting on their following, not standing
aloof and shrugging.

'We lead them in war,' said he; 'why not in peace? There's a front for
peace as well as war, and that's our place rightly. We're pushed aside;
why, it seems to me we're treated like old-fashioned ornaments! The fault
must be ours. Shrugging and sneering is about as honourable as blazing
fireworks over your own defeat. Back we have to go! that's the point,
sir. And as for jeering the cotton-spinners, I can't while they've the
lead of us. We let them have it! And we have thrice the stake in the
country. I don't mean properties and titles.'

'Deuce you don't,' said his uncle.

'I mean our names, our histories; I mean our duties. As for titles, the
way to defend them is to be worthy of them.'

'Damned fine speech,' remarked Everard. 'Now you get out of that trick of
prize-orationing. I call it snuffery, sir; it's all to your own nose!
You're talking to me, not to a gallery. "Worthy of them!" Caesar wraps
his head in his robe: he gets his dig in the ribs for all his
attitudinizing. It's very well for a man to talk like that who owns no
more than his barebodkin life, poor devil. Tall talk's his jewelry: he
must have his dandification in bunkum. You ought to know better. Property
and titles are worth having, whether you are "worthy of them" or a
disgrace to your class. The best way of defending them is to keep a
strong fist, and take care you don't draw your fore-foot back more than
enough.'

'Please propose something to be done,' said Nevil, depressed by the
recommendation of that attitude.

Everard proposed a fight for every privilege his class possessed. 'They
say,' he said, 'a nobleman fighting the odds is a sight for the gods: and
I wouldn't yield an inch of ground. It's no use calling things by fine
names--the country's ruined by cowardice. Poursuivez! I cry. Haro! at
them! The biggest hart wins in the end. I haven't a doubt about that. And
I haven't a doubt we carry the tonnage.'

'There's the people,' sighed Nevil, entangled in his uncle's haziness.

'What people?'

'I suppose the people of Great Britain count, sir.'

'Of course they do; when the battle's done, the fight lost and won.'

'Do you expect the people to look on, sir?'

'The people always wait for the winner, boy Nevil.'

The young fellow exclaimed despondingly, 'If it were a race!'

'It's like a race, and we're confoundedly out of training,' said Everard.

There he rested. A mediaeval gentleman with the docile notions of the
twelfth century, complacently driving them to grass and wattling them in
the nineteenth, could be of no use to a boy trying to think, though he
could set the youngster galloping. Nevil wandered about the woods of
Steynham, disinclined to shoot and lend a hand to country sports. The
popping of the guns of his uncle and guests hung about his ears much like
their speech, which was unobjectionable in itself, but not sufficient; a
little hard, he thought, a little idle. He wanted something, and wanted
them to give their time and energy to something, that was not to be had
in a market. The nobles, he felt sure, might resume their natural
alliance with the people, and lead them, as they did of old, to the
battle-field. How might they? A comely Sussex lass could not well tell
him how. Sarcastic reports of the troublesome questioner represented him
applying to a nymph of the country for enlightenment. He thrilled
surprisingly under the charm of feminine beauty. 'The fellow's sound at
bottom,' his uncle said, hearing of his having really been seen walking
in the complete form proper to his budding age, that is, in two halves.
Nevil showed that he had gained an acquaintance with the struggles of the
neighbouring agricultural poor to live and rear their children. His
uncle's table roared at his enumeration of the sickly little beings,
consumptive or bandy-legged, within a radius of five miles of Steynham.
Action was what he wanted, Everard said. Nevil perhaps thought the same,
for he dashed out of his mooning with a wave of the Tory standard,
delighting the ladies, though in that conflict of the Lion and the
Unicorn (which was a Tory song) he seemed rather to wish to goad the dear
lion than crush the one-horned intrusive upstart. His calling on the
crack corps of Peers to enrol themselves forthwith in the front ranks,
and to anticipate opposition by initiating measures, and so cut out that
funny old crazy old galleon, the People, from under the batteries of the
enemy, highly amused the gentlemen.

Before rejoining his ship, Nevil paid his customary short visit of
ceremony to his great-aunt Beauchamp--a venerable lady past eighty,
hitherto divided from him in sympathy by her dislike of his uncle
Everard, who had once been his living hero. That was when he was in
frocks, and still the tenacious fellow could not bear to hear his uncle
spoken ill of.

'All the men of that family are heartless, and he is a man of wood, my
dear, and a bad man,' the old lady said. 'He should have kept you at
school, and sent you to college. You want reading and teaching and
talking to. Such a house as that is should never be a home for you.' She
hinted at Rosamund. Nevil defended the persecuted woman, but with no
better success than from the attacks of the Romfrey ladies; with this
difference, however, that these decried the woman's vicious arts, and
Mistress Elizabeth Mary Beauchamp put all the sin upon the man. Such a
man! she said. 'Let me hear that he has married her, I will not utter
another word.' Nevil echoed, 'Married!' in a different key.

'I am as much of an aristocrat as any of you, only I rank morality
higher,' said Mrs. Beauchamp. 'When you were a child I offered to take
you and make you my heir, and I would have educated you. You shall see a
great-nephew of mine that I did educate; he is eating his dinners for the
bar in London, and comes to me every Sunday. I shall marry him to a good
girl, and I shall show your uncle what my kind of man-making is.'

Nevil had no desire to meet the other great-nephew, especially when he
was aware of the extraordinary circumstance that a Beauchamp great-niece,
having no money, had bestowed her hand on a Manchester man defunct,
whereof this young Blackburn Tuckham, the lawyer, was issue. He took his
leave of Mrs. Elizabeth Beauchamp, respecting her for her constitutional
health and brightness, and regretting for the sake of the country that
she had not married to give England men and women resembling her. On the
whole he considered her wiser in her prescription for the malady
besetting him than his uncle. He knew that action was but a temporary
remedy. College would have been his chronic medicine, and the old lady's
acuteness in seeing it impressed him forcibly. She had given him a
peaceable two days on the Upper Thames, in an atmosphere of plain good
sense and just-mindedness. He wrote to thank her, saying:

'My England at sea will be your parlour-window looking down the grass to
the river and rushes; and when you do me the honour to write, please tell
me the names of those wildflowers growing along the banks in Summer.' The
old lady replied immediately, enclosing a cheque for fifty pounds:
'Colonel Halkett informs me you are under a cloud at Steynham, and I have
thought you may be in want of pocket-money. The wild-flowers are
willowherb, meadow-sweet, and loosestrife. I shall be glad when you are
here in Summer to see them.'

Nevil despatched the following: 'I thank you, but I shall not cash the
cheque. The Steynham tale is this:

I happened to be out at night, and stopped the keepers in chase of a
young fellow trespassing. I caught him myself, but recognized him as one
of a family I take an interest in, and let him run before they came up.
My uncle heard a gun; I sent the head gamekeeper word in the morning to
out with it all. Uncle E. was annoyed, and we had a rough parting. If you
are rewarding me for this, I have no right to it.'

Mrs. Beauchamp rejoined: 'Your profession should teach you subordination,
if it does nothing else that is valuable to a Christian gentleman. You
will receive from the publisher the "Life and Letters of Lord
Collingwood," whom I have it in my mind that a young midshipman should
task himself to imitate. Spend the money as you think fit.'

Nevil's ship, commanded by Captain Robert Hall (a most gallant officer,
one of his heroes, and of Lancashire origin, strangely!), flew to the
South American station, in and about Lord Cochrane's waters; then as
swiftly back. For, like the frail Norwegian bark on the edge of the
maelstrom, liker to a country of conflicting interests and passions, that
is not mentally on a level with its good fortune, England was drifting
into foreign complications. A paralyzed Minister proclaimed it. The
governing people, which is looked to for direction in grave dilemmas by
its representatives and reflectors, shouted that it had been accused of
pusillanimity. No one had any desire for war, only we really had (and it
was perfectly true) been talking gigantic nonsense of peace, and of the
everlastingness of the exchange of fruits for money, with angels waving
raw-groceries of Eden in joy of the commercial picture. Therefore, to
correct the excesses of that fit, we held the standing by the Moslem, on
behalf of the Mediterranean (and the Moslem is one of our customers,
bearing an excellent reputation for the payment of debts), to be good,
granting the necessity. We deplored the necessity. The Press wept over
it. That, however, was not the politic tone for us while the Imperial
berg of Polar ice watched us keenly; and the Press proceeded to remind us
that we had once been bull-dogs. Was there not an animal within us having
a right to a turn now and then? And was it not (Falstaff, on a calm
world, was quoted) for the benefit of our constitutions now and then to
loosen the animal? Granting the necessity, of course. By dint of
incessantly speaking of the necessity we granted it unknowingly. The
lighter hearts regarded our period of monotonously lyrical prosperity as
a man sensible of fresh morning air looks back on the snoring bolster.
Many of the graver were glad of a change. After all that maundering over
the blessed peace which brings the raisin and the currant for the
pudding, and shuts up the cannon with a sheep's head, it became a
principle of popular taste to descant on the vivifying virtues of war;
even as, after ten months of money-mongering in smoky London, the citizen
hails the sea-breeze and an immersion in unruly brine, despite the cost,
that breeze and brine may make a man of him, according to the doctor's
prescription: sweet is home, but health is sweeter! Then was there
another curious exhibition of us. Gentlemen, to the exact number of the
Graces, dressed in drab of an ancient cut, made a pilgrimage to the icy
despot, and besought him to give way for Piety's sake. He, courteous,
colossal, and immoveable, waved them homeward. They returned and were
hooted for belying the bellicose by their mission, and interpreting too
well the peaceful. They were the unparalyzed Ministers of the occasion,
but helpless.

And now came war, the purifier and the pestilence.

The cry of the English people for war was pretty general, as far as the
criers went. They put on their Sabbath face concerning the declaration of
war, and told with approval how the Royal hand had trembled in committing
itself to the form of signature to which its action is limited. If there
was money to be paid, there was a bugbear to be slain for it; and a
bugbear is as obnoxious to the repose of commercial communities as rivals
are to kings.

The cry for war was absolutely unanimous, and a supremely national cry,
Everard Romfrey said, for it excluded the cotton-spinners.

He smacked his hands, crowing at the vociferations of disgust of those
negrophiles and sweaters of Christians, whose isolated clamour amid the
popular uproar sounded of gagged mouths.

One of the half-stifled cotton-spinners, a notorious one, a spouter of
rank sedition and hater of aristocracy, a political poacher, managed to
make himself heard. He was tossed to the Press for morsel, and tossed
back to the people in strips. Everard had a sharp return of appetite in
reading the daily and weekly journals. They printed logic, they printed
sense; they abused the treasonable barking cur unmercifully. They printed
almost as much as he would have uttered, excepting the strong salt of his
similes, likening that rascal and his crew to the American weed in our
waters, to the rotting wild bees' nest in our trees, to the worm in our
ships' timbers, and to lamentable afflictions of the human frame, and of
sheep, oxen, honest hounds. Manchester was in eclipse. The world of
England discovered that the peace-party which opposed was the actual
cause of the war: never was indication clearer. But my business is with
Mr. Beauchamp, to know whom, and partly understand his conduct in
after-days, it will be as well to take a bird'seye glance at him through
the war.

'Now,' said Everard, 'we shall see what staff there is in that fellow
Nevil.'

He expected, as you may imagine, a true young Beauchamp-Romfrey to be
straining his collar like a leash-hound.




CHAPTER IV

A GLIMPSE OF NEVIL IN ACTION

The young gentleman to whom Everard Romfrey transferred his combative
spirit despatched a letter from the Dardanelles, requesting his uncle not
to ask him for a spark of enthusiasm. He despised our Moslem allies, he
said, and thought with pity of the miserable herds of men in regiments
marching across the steppes at the bidding of a despot that we were
helping to popularize. He certainly wrote in the tone of a jejune
politician; pardonable stuff to seniors entertaining similar opinions,
but most exasperating when it runs counter to them: though one question
put by Nevil was not easily answerable. He wished to know whether the
English people would be so anxious to be at it if their man stood on the
opposite shore and talked of trying conclusions on their green fields.
And he suggested that they had become so ready for war because of their
having grown rather ashamed of themselves, and for the special reason
that they could have it at a distance.

'The rascal's liver's out of order,' Everard said.

Coming to the sentence: 'Who speaks out in this crisis? There is one, and
I am with him'; Mr. Romfrey's compassionate sentiments veered round to
irate amazement. For the person alluded to was indeed the infamous
miauling cotton-spinner. Nevil admired him. He said so bluntly. He
pointed to that traitorous George-Foxite as the one heroical Englishman
of his day, declaring that he felt bound in honour to make known his
admiration for the man; and he hoped his uncle would excuse him. 'If we
differ, I am sorry, sir; but I should be a coward to withhold what I
think of him when he has all England against him, and he is in the right,
as England will discover. I maintain he speaks wisely--I don't mind
saying, like a prophet; and he speaks on behalf of the poor as well as of
the country. He appears to me the only public man who looks to the state
of the poor--I mean, their interests. They pay for war, and if we are to
have peace at home and strength for a really national war, the only war
we can ever call necessary, the poor must be contented. He sees that. I
shall not run the risk of angering you by writing to defend him, unless I
hear of his being shamefully mishandled, and the bearer of an old name
can be of service to him. I cannot say less, and will say no more.'

Everard apostrophized his absent nephew: 'You jackass!'

I am reminded by Mr. Romfrey's profound disappointment in the youth, that
it will be repeatedly shared by many others: and I am bound to forewarn
readers of this history that there is no plot in it. The hero is
chargeable with the official disqualification of constantly offending
prejudices, never seeking to please; and all the while it is upon him the
narrative hangs. To be a public favourite is his last thought.
Beauchampism, as one confronting him calls it, may be said to stand for
nearly everything which is the obverse of Byronism, and rarely woos your
sympathy, shuns the statuesque pathetic, or any kind of posturing. For
Beauchamp will not even look at happiness to mourn its absence; melodious
lamentations, demoniacal scorn, are quite alien to him. His faith is in
working and fighting. With every inducement to offer himself for a
romantic figure, he despises the pomades and curling-irons of modern
romance, its shears and its labels: in fine, every one of those positive
things by whose aid, and by some adroit flourishing of them, the nimbus
known as a mysterious halo is produced about a gentleman's head. And a
highly alluring adornment it is! We are all given to lose our solidity
and fly at it; although the faithful mirror of fiction has been showing
us latterly that a too superhuman beauty has disturbed popular belief in
the bare beginnings of the existence of heroes: but this, very likely, is
nothing more than a fit of Republicanism in the nursery, and a deposition
of the leading doll for lack of variety in him. That conqueror of
circumstances will, the dullest soul may begin predicting, return on his
cockhorse to favour and authority. Meantime the exhibition of a hero whom
circumstances overcome, and who does not weep or ask you for a tear, who
continually forfeits attractiveness by declining to better his own
fortunes, must run the chances of a novelty during the interregnum.
Nursery Legitimists will be against him to a man; Republicans likewise,
after a queer sniff at his pretensions, it is to be feared. For me, I
have so little command over him, that in spite of my nursery tastes, he
drags me whither he lists. It is artless art and monstrous innovation to
present so wilful a figure, but were I to create a striking fable for
him, and set him off with scenic effects and contrasts, it would be only
a momentary tonic to you, to him instant death. He could not live in such
an atmosphere. The simple truth has to be told: how he loved his country,
and for another and a broader love, growing out of his first passion,
fought it; and being small by comparison, and finding no giant of the
Philistines disposed to receive a stone in his fore-skull, pummelled the
obmutescent mass, to the confusion of a conceivable epic. His indifferent
England refused it to him. That is all I can say. The greater power of
the two, she seems, with a quiet derision that does not belie her amiable
passivity, to have reduced in Beauchamp's career the boldest readiness
for public action, and some good stout efforts besides, to the flat
result of an optically discernible influence of our hero's character in
the domestic circle; perhaps a faintly-outlined circle or two beyond it.
But this does not forbid him to be ranked as one of the most
distinguishing of her children of the day he lived in. Blame the victrix
if you think he should have been livelier.

Nevil soon had to turn his telescope from politics. The torch of war was
actually lighting, and he was not fashioned to be heedless of what
surrounded him. Our diplomacy, after dancing with all the suppleness of
stilts, gravely resigned the gift of motion. Our dauntless Lancastrian
thundered like a tempest over a gambling tent, disregarded. Our worthy
people, consenting to the doctrine that war is a scourge, contracted the
habit of thinking it, in this case, the dire necessity which is the sole
excuse for giving way to an irritated pugnacity, and sucked the
comforting caramel of an alliance with their troublesome next-door
neighbour, profuse in comfits as in scorpions. Nevil detected that
politic element of their promptitude for war. His recollections of
dissatisfaction in former days assisted him to perceive the nature of it,
but he was too young to hold his own against the hubbub of a noisy
people, much too young to remain sceptical of a modern people's
enthusiasm for war while journals were testifying to it down the length
of their columns, and letters from home palpitated with it, and shipmates
yawned wearily for the signal, and shiploads of red coats and blue,
infantry, cavalry, artillery, were singing farewell to the girl at home,
and hurrah for anything in foreign waters. He joined the stream with a
cordial spirit. Since it must be so! The wind of that haughty proceeding
of the Great Bear in putting a paw over the neutral brook brushed his
cheek unpleasantly. He clapped hands for the fezzy defenders of the
border fortress, and when the order came for the fleet to enter the old
romantic sea of storms and fables, he wrote home a letter fit for his
uncle Everard to read. Then there was the sailing and the landing, and
the march up the heights, which Nevil was condemned to look at. To his
joy he obtained an appointment on shore, and after that Everard heard of
him from other channels. The two were of a mind when the savage winter
advanced which froze the attack of the city, and might be imaged as the
hoar god of hostile elements pointing a hand to the line reached, and
menacing at one farther step. Both blamed the Government, but they
divided as to the origin of governmental inefficiency; Nevil accusing the
Lords guilty of foulest sloth, Everard the Quakers of dry-rotting the
country. He passed with a shrug Nevil's puling outcry for the enemy as
well as our own poor fellows: 'At his steppes again!' And he had to be
forgiving when reports came of his nephew's turn for overdoing his duty:
'show-fighting,' as he termed it.

'Braggadocioing in deeds is only next bad to mouthing it,' he wrote very
rationally. 'Stick to your line. Don't go out of it till you are ordered
out. Remember that we want soldiers and sailors, we don't want suicides.'
He condescended to these italics, considering impressiveness to be
urgent. In his heart, notwithstanding his implacably clear judgement, he
was passably well pleased with the congratulations encompassing him on
account of his nephew's gallantry at a period of dejection in Britain:
for the winter was dreadful; every kind heart that went to bed with cold
feet felt acutely for our soldiers on the frozen heights, and thoughts of
heroes were as good as warming-pans. Heroes we would have. It happens in
war as in wit, that all the birds of wonder fly to a flaring reputation.
He that has done one wild thing must necessarily have done the other; so
Nevil found himself standing in the thick of a fame that blew rank
eulogies on him for acts he had not performed. The Earl of Romfrey
forwarded hampers and a letter of praise. 'They tell me that while you
were facing the enemy, temporarily attaching yourself to one of the
regiments--I forget which, though I have heard it named--you sprang out
under fire on an eagle clawing a hare. I like that. I hope you had the
benefit of the hare. She is our property, and I have issued an injunction
that she shall not go into the newspapers.' Everard was entirely of a
contrary opinion concerning the episode of eagle and hare, though it was
a case of a bird of prey interfering with an object of the chase. Nevil
wrote home most entreatingly and imperatively, like one wincing, begging
him to contradict that and certain other stories, and prescribing the
form of a public renunciation of his proclaimed part in them. 'The hare,'
he sent word, 'is the property of young Michell of the Rodney, and he is
the humanest and the gallantest fellow in the service. I have written to
my Lord. Pray help to rid me of burdens that make me feel like a robber
and impostor.'

Everard replied:

'I have a letter from your captain, informing me that I am unlikely to
see you home unless you learn to hold yourself in. I wish you were in
another battery than Robert Hall's. He forgets the force of example,
however much of a dab he may be at precept. But there you are, and please
clap a hundredweight on your appetite for figuring, will you. Do you
think there is any good in helping to Frenchify our army? I loathe a
fellow who shoots at a medal. I wager he is easy enough to be caught by
circumvention--put me in the open with him. Tom Biggot, the boxer, went
over to Paris, and stood in the ring with one of their dancing pugilists,
and the first round he got a crack on the chin from the rogue's foot; the
second round he caught him by the lifted leg, and punished him till pec
was all he could say of peccavi. Fight the straightforward fight. Hang
flan! Battle is a game of give and take, and if our men get elanned, we
shall see them refusing to come up to time. This new crossing and
medalling is the devil's own notion for upsetting a solid British line,
and tempting fellows to get invalided that they may blaze it before the
shopkeepers and their wives in the city. Give us an army!--none of your
caperers. Here are lots of circusy heroes coming home to rest after their
fatigues. One was spouting at a public dinner yesterday night. He went
into it upright, and he ran out of it upright--at the head of his
men!--and here he is feasted by the citizens and making a speech upright,
and my boy fronting the enemy!'

Everard's involuntary break-down from his veteran's roughness to a touch
of feeling thrilled Nevil, who began to perceive what his uncle was
driving at when he rebuked the coxcombry of the field, and spoke of the
description of compliment your hero was paying Englishmen in affecting to
give them examples of bravery and preternatural coolness. Nevil sent home
humble confessions of guilt in this respect, with fresh praises of young
Michell: for though Everard, as Nevil recognized it, was perfectly right
in the abstract, and generally right, there are times when an example is
needed by brave men--times when the fiery furnace of death's dragon-jaw
is not inviting even to Englishmen receiving the word that duty bids them
advance, and they require a leader of the way. A national coxcombry that
pretends to an independence of human sensations, and makes a motto of our
dandiacal courage, is more perilous to the armies of the nation than that
of a few heroes. It is this coxcombry which has too often caused disdain
of the wise chief's maxim of calculation for winners, namely, to have
always the odds on your side, and which has bled, shattered, and
occasionally disgraced us. Young Michell's carrying powder-bags to the
assault, and when ordered to retire, bearing them on his back, and
helping a wounded soldier on the way, did surely well; nor did Mr.
Beauchamp himself behave so badly on an occasion when the sailors of his
battery caught him out of a fire of shell that raised jets of dust and
smoke like a range of geysers over the open, and hugged him as loving
women do at a meeting or a parting. He was penitent before his uncle,
admitting, first, that the men were not in want of an example of the
contempt of death, and secondly, that he doubted whether it was contempt
of death on his part so much as pride--a hatred of being seen running.

'I don't like the fellow to be drawing it so fine,' said Everard. It
sounded to him a trifle parsonical. But his heart was won by Nevil's
determination to wear out the campaign rather than be invalided or
entrusted with a holiday duty.

'I see with shame (admiration of them) old infantry captains and colonels
of no position beyond their rank in the army, sticking to their post,'
said Nevil, 'and a lord and a lord and a lord slipping off as though the
stuff of the man in him had melted. I shall go through with it.' Everard
approved him. Colonel Halkett wrote that the youth was a skeleton. Still
Everard encouraged him to persevere, and said of him:

'I like him for holding to his work after the strain's over. That tells
the man.'

He observed at his table, in reply to commendations of his nephew:

'Nevil's leak is his political craze, and that seems to be going: I hope
it is. You can't rear a man on politics. When I was of his age I never
looked at the newspapers, except to read the divorce cases. I came to
politics with a ripe judgement. He shines in action, and he'll find that
out, and leave others the palavering.'

It was upon the close of the war that Nevil drove his uncle to avow a
downright undisguised indignation with him. He caught a fever in the
French camp, where he was dispensing vivers and provends out of English
hampers.

'Those French fellows are every man of them trained up to
snapping-point,' said Everard. 'You're sure to have them if you hold out
long against them. And greedy dogs too: they're for half our hampers, and
all the glory. And there's Nevil down on his back in the thick of them!
Will anybody tell me why the devil he must be poking into the French
camp? They were ready enough to run to him and beg potatoes. It 's all
for humanity he does it-mark that. Never was a word fitter for a quack's
mouth than "humanity." Two syllables more, and the parsons would be
riding it to sawdust. Humanity! Humanitomtity! It's the best word of the
two for half the things done in the name of it.'

A tremendously bracing epistle, excellent for an access of fever, was
despatched to humanity's curate, and Everard sat expecting a hot
rejoinder, or else a black sealed letter, but neither one nor the other
arrived.

Suddenly, to his disgust, came rumours of peace between the mighty
belligerents.

The silver trumpets of peace were nowhere hearkened to with satisfaction
by the bull-dogs, though triumph rang sonorously through the music, for
they had been severely mangled, as usual at the outset, and they had at
last got their grip, and were in high condition for fighting.

The most expansive panegyrists of our deeds did not dare affirm of the
most famous of them, that England had embarked her costly cavalry to
offer it for a mark of artillery-balls on three sides of a square: and
the belief was universal that we could do more business-like deeds and
play the great game of blunders with an ability refined by experience.
Everard Romfrey was one of those who thought themselves justified in
insisting upon the continuation of the war, in contempt of our allies.
His favourite saying that constitution beats the world, was being
splendidly manifested by our bearing. He was very uneasy; he would not
hear of peace; and not only that, the imperial gentleman soberly
committed the naivete of sending word to Nevil to let him know
immediately the opinion of the camp concerning it, as perchance an old
Roman knight may have written to some young aquilifer of the Praetorians.

Allies, however, are of the description of twins joined by a membrane,
and supposing that one of them determines to sit down, the other will act
wisely in bending his knees at once, and doing the same: he cannot but be
extremely uncomfortable left standing. Besides, there was the Ottoman
cleverly poised again; the Muscovite was battered; fresh guilt was added
to the military glory of the Gaul. English grumblers might well be asked
what they had fought for, if they were not contented.

Colonel Halkett mentioned a report that Nevil had received a slight
thigh-wound of small importance. At any rate, something was the matter
with him, and it was naturally imagined that he would have double cause
to write home; and still more so for the reason, his uncle confessed,
that he had foreseen the folly of a war conducted by milky
cotton-spinners and their adjuncts, in partnership with a throned
gambler, who had won his stake, and now snapped his fingers at them.
Everard expected, he had prepared himself for, the young naval
politician's crow, and he meant to admit frankly that he had been wrong
in wishing to fight anybody without having first crushed the cotton
faction. But Nevil continued silent.

'Dead in hospital or a Turk hotel!' sighed Everard; 'and no more to the
scoundrels over there than a body to be shovelled into slack lime.'

Rosamund Culling was the only witness of his remarkable betrayal of
grief.




CHAPTER V

RENEE

At last, one morning, arrived a letter from a French gentleman signing
himself Comte Cresnes de Croisnel, in which Everard was informed that his
nephew had accompanied the son of the writer, Captain de Croisnel, on
board an Austrian boat out of the East, and was lying in Venice under a
return-attack of fever,--not, the count stated pointedly, in the hands of
an Italian physician. He had brought his own with him to meet his son,
who was likewise disabled.

Everard was assured by M. de Croisnel that every attention and
affectionate care were being rendered to his gallant and adored
nephew--'vrai type de tout ce qu'il y a de noble et de chevaleresque dans
la vieille Angleterre'--from a family bound to him by the tenderest
obligations, personal and national; one as dear to every member of it as
the brother, the son, they welcomed with thankful hearts to the Divine
interposition restoring him to them. In conclusion, the count proposed
something like the embrace of a fraternal friendship should Everard think
fit to act upon the spontaneous sentiments of a loving relative, and join
them in Venice to watch over his nephew's recovery. Already M. Nevil was
stronger. The gondola was a medicine in itself, the count said.

Everard knitted his mouth to intensify a peculiar subdued form of
laughter through the nose, in hopeless ridicule of a Frenchman's notions
of an Englishman's occupations--presumed across Channel to allow of his
breaking loose from shooting engagements at a minute's notice, to rush
off to a fetid foreign city notorious for mud and mosquitoes, and
commence capering and grimacing, pouring forth a jugful of ready-made
extravagances, with 'mon fils! mon cher neveu! Dieu!' and similar
fiddlededee. These were matters for women to do, if they chose: women and
Frenchmen were much of a pattern. Moreover, he knew the hotel this Comte
de Croisnel was staying at. He gasped at the name of it: he had rather
encounter a grisly bear than a mosquito any night of his life, for no
stretch of cunning outwits a mosquito; and enlarging on the qualities of
the terrific insect, he vowed it was damnation without trial or
judgement.

Eventually, Mrs. Culling's departure was permitted. He argued, 'Why go?
the fellow's comfortable, getting himself together, and you say the
French are good nurses.' But her entreaties to go were vehement, though
Venice had no happy place in her recollections, and he withheld his
objections to her going. For him, the fields forbade it. He sent hearty
messages to Nevil, and that was enough, considering that the young dog of
'humanity' had clearly been running out of his way to catch a jaundice,
and was bereaving his houses of the matronly government, deprived of
which they were all of them likely soon to be at sixes and sevens with
disorderly lacqueys, peccant maids, and cooks in hysterics.

Now if the master of his fortunes had come to Venice!--Nevil started the
supposition in his mind often after hope had sunk.--Everard would have
seen a young sailor and a soldier the thinner for wear, reclining in a
gondola half the day, fanned by a brunette of the fine lineaments of the
good blood of France. She chattered snatches of Venetian caught from the
gondoliers, she was like a delicate cup of crystal brimming with the
beauty of the place, and making one of them drink in all his impressions
through her. Her features had the soft irregularities which run to
rarities of beauty, as the ripple rocks the light; mouth, eyes, brows,
nostrils, and bloomy cheeks played into one another liquidly; thought
flew, tongue followed, and the flash of meaning quivered over them like
night-lightning. Or oftener, to speak truth, tongue flew, thought
followed: her age was but newly seventeen, and she was French.

Her name was Renee. She was the only daughter of the Comte de Croisnel.
Her brother Roland owed his life to Nevil, this Englishman proud of a
French name--Nevil Beauchamp. If there was any warm feeling below the
unruffled surface of the girl's deliberate eyes while gazing on him, it
was that he who had saved her brother must be nearly brother himself, yet
was not quite, yet must be loved, yet not approached. He was her
brother's brother-in-arms, brother-in-heart, not hers, yet hers through
her brother. His French name rescued him from foreignness. He spoke her
language with a piquant accent, unlike the pitiable English. Unlike them,
he was gracious, and could be soft and quick. The battle-scarlet,
battle-black, Roland's tales of him threw round him in her imagination,
made his gentleness a surprise. If, then, he was hers through her
brother, what was she to him? The question did not spring clearly within
her, though she was alive to every gradual change of manner toward the
convalescent necessitated by the laws overawing her sex.

Venice was the French girl's dream. She was realizing it hungrily,
revelling in it, anatomizing it, picking it to pieces, reviewing it,
comparing her work with the original, and the original with her first
conception, until beautiful sad Venice threatened to be no more her
dream, and in dread of disenchantment she tried to take impressions
humbly, really tasked herself not to analyze, not to dictate from a
French footing, not to scorn. Not to be petulant with objects
disappointing her, was an impossible task. She could not consent to a
compromise with the people, the merchandize, the odours of the city.
Gliding in the gondola through the narrow canals at low tide, she leaned
back simulating stupor, with one word--'Venezia!' Her brother was
commanded to smoke: 'Fumez, fumez, Roland!' As soon as the steel-crested
prow had pushed into her Paradise of the Canal Grande, she quietly
shrouded her hair from tobacco, and called upon rapture to recompense her
for her sufferings. The black gondola was unendurable to her. She had
accompanied her father to the Accademia, and mused on the golden Venetian
streets of Carpaccio: she must have an open gondola to decorate in his
manner, gaily, splendidly, and mock at her efforts--a warning to all that
might hope to improve the prevailing gloom and squalor by levying
contributions upon the Merceria! Her most constant admiration was for the
English lord who used once to ride on the Lido sands and visit the
Armenian convent--a lord and a poet. [Lord Byron D.W.]

This was to be infinitely more than a naval lieutenant. But Nevil claimed
her as little personally as he allowed her to be claimed by another. The
graces of her freaks of petulance and airy whims, her sprightly jets of
wilfulness, fleeting frowns of contempt, imperious decisions, were all
beautiful, like silver-shifting waves, in this lustrous planet of her
pure freedom; and if you will seize the divine conception of Artemis, and
own the goddess French, you will understand his feelings.

But though he admired fervently, and danced obediently to her tunes,
Nevil could not hear injustice done to a people or historic poetic city
without trying hard to right the mind guilty of it. A newspaper
correspondent, a Mr. John Holles, lingering on his road home from the
army, put him on the track of an Englishman's books--touching the spirit
as well as the stones of Venice, and Nevil thanked him when he had turned
some of the leaves.

The study of the books to school Renee was pursued, like the Bianchina's
sleep, in gondoletta, and was not unlike it at intervals. A translated
sentence was the key to a reverie. Renee leaned back, meditating; he
forward, the book on his knee: Roland left them to themselves, and spied
for the Bianchina behind the window-bars. The count was in the churches
or the Galleries. Renee thought she began to comprehend the spirit of
Venice, and chided her rebelliousness.

'But our Venice was the Venice of the decadence, then!' she said,
complaining. Nevil read on, distrustful of the perspicuity of his own
ideas.

'Ah, but,' said she, 'when these Venetians were rough men, chanting like
our Huguenots, how cold it must have been here!'

She hoped she was not very wrong in preferring the times of the great
Venetian painters and martial doges to that period of faith and
stone-cutting. What was done then might be beautiful, but the life was
monotonous; she insisted that it was Huguenot; harsh, nasal, sombre,
insolent, self-sufficient. Her eyes lightened for the flashing colours
and pageantries, and the threads of desperate adventure crossing the Rii
to this and that palace-door and balcony, like faint blood-streaks; the
times of Venice in full flower. She reasoned against the hard eloquent
Englishman of the books. 'But we are known by our fruits, are we not? and
the Venice I admire was surely the fruit of these stonecutters chanting
hymns of faith; it could not but be: and if it deserved, as he says, to
die disgraced, I think we should go back to them and ask them whether
their minds were as pure and holy as he supposes.' Her French wits would
not be subdued. Nevil pointed to the palaces. 'Pride,' said she. He
argued that the original Venetians were not responsible for their
offspring. 'You say it?' she cried, 'you, of an old race? Oh, no; you do
not feel it!' and the trembling fervour of her voice convinced him that
he did not, could not.

Renee said: 'I know my ancestors are bound up in me, by my sentiments to
them; and so do you, M. Nevil. We shame them if we fail in courage and
honour. Is it not so? If we break a single pledged word we cast shame on
them. Why, that makes us what we are; that is our distinction: we dare
not be weak if we would. And therefore when Venice is reproached with
avarice and luxury, I choose to say--what do we hear of the children of
misers? and I say I am certain that those old cold Huguenot stonecutters
were proud and grasping. I am sure they were, and they shall share the
blame.'

Nevil plunged into his volume.

He called on Roland for an opinion.

'Friend,' said Roland, 'opinions may differ: mine is, considering the
defences of the windows, that the only way into these houses or out of
them bodily was the doorway.'

Roland complimented his sister and friend on the prosecution of their
studies: he could not understand a word of the subject, and yawning, he
begged permission to be allowed to land and join the gondola at a distant
quarter. The gallant officer was in haste to go.

Renee stared at her brother. He saw nothing; he said a word to the
gondoliers, and quitted the boat. Mars was in pursuit. She resigned
herself, and ceased then to be a girl.




CHAPTER VI

LOVE IN VENICE

The air flashed like heaven descending for Nevil alone with Renee. They
had never been alone before. Such happiness belonged to the avenue of
wishes leading to golden mists beyond imagination, and seemed, coming on
him suddenly, miraculous. He leaned toward her like one who has broken a
current of speech, and waits to resume it. She was all unsuspecting
indolence, with gravely shadowed eyes.

'I throw the book down,' he said.

She objected. 'No; continue: I like it.'

Both of them divined that the book was there to do duty for Roland.

He closed it, keeping a finger among the leaves; a kind of anchorage in
case of indiscretion.

'Permit me to tell you, M. Nevil, you are inclined to play truant
to-day.'

'I am.'

'Now is the very time to read; for my poor Roland is at sea when we
discuss our questions, and the book has driven him away.'

'But we have plenty of time to read. We miss the scenes.'

'The scenes are green shutters, wet steps, barcaroli, brown women,
striped posts, a scarlet night-cap, a sick fig-tree, an old shawl, faded
spots of colour, peeling walls. They might be figured by a trodden melon.
They all resemble one another, and so do the days here.'

'That's the charm. I wish I could look on you and think the same. You, as
you are, for ever.'

'Would you not let me live my life?'

'I would not have you alter.'

'Please to be pathetic on that subject after I am wrinkled, monsieur.'

'You want commanding, mademoiselle.'

Renee nestled her chin, and gazed forward through her eyelashes.

'Venice is like a melancholy face of a former beauty who has ceased to
rouge, or wipe away traces of her old arts,' she said, straining for
common talk, and showing the strain.

'Wait; now we are rounding,' said he; 'now you have three of what you
call your theatre-bridges in sight. The people mount and drop, mount and
drop; I see them laugh. They are full of fun and good-temper. Look on
living Venice!

'Provided that my papa is not crossing when we go under!

'Would he not trust you to me?'

'Yes.'

'He would? And you?'

'I do believe they are improvizing an operetta on the second bridge.'

'You trust yourself willingly?'

'As to my second brother. You hear them? How delightfully quick and
spontaneous they are! Ah, silly creatures! they have stopped. They might
have held it on for us while we were passing.'

'Where would the naturalness have been then?'

'Perhaps, M. Nevil, I do want commanding. I am wilful. Half my days will
be spent in fits of remorse, I begin to think.'

'Come to me to be forgiven.'

'Shall I? I should be forgiven too readily.'

'I am not so sure of that.'

'Can you be harsh? No, not even with enemies. Least of all with . . .
with us.'

Oh for the black gondola!--the little gliding dusky chamber for two;
instead of this open, flaunting, gold and crimson cotton-work, which
exacted discretion on his part and that of the mannerly gondoliers, and
exposed him to window, balcony, bridge, and borderway.

They slipped on beneath a red balcony where a girl leaned on her folded
arms, and eyed them coming and going by with Egyptian gravity.

'How strange a power of looking these people have,' said Renee, whose
vivacity was fascinated to a steady sparkle by the girl. 'Tell me, is she
glancing round at us?'

Nevil turned and reported that she was not. She had exhausted them while
they were in transit; she had no minor curiosity.

'Let us fancy she is looking for her lover,' he said.

Renee added: 'Let us hope she will not escape being seen.'

'I give her my benediction,' said Nevil.

'And I,' said Renee; 'and adieu to her, if you please. Look for Roland.'

'You remind me; I have but a few instants.'

'M. Nevil, you are a preux of the times of my brother's patronymic. And
there is my Roland awaiting us. Is he not handsome?'

'How glad you are to have him to relieve guard!'

Renee bent on Nevil one of her singular looks of raillery. She had
hitherto been fencing at a serious disadvantage.

'Not so very glad,' she said, 'if that deprived me of the presence of his
friend.'

Roland was her tower. But Roland was not yet on board. She had peeped
from her citadel too rashly. Nevil had time to spring the flood of
crimson in her cheeks, bright as the awning she reclined under.

'Would you have me with you always?'

'Assuredly,' said she, feeling the hawk in him, and trying to baffle him
by fluttering.

'Always? forever? and--listen-give me a title?'

Renee sang out to Roland like a bird in distress, and had some trouble
not to appear too providentially rescued. Roland on board, she resumed
the attack.

'M. Nevil vows he is a better brother to me than you, who dart away on an
impulse and leave us threading all Venice till we do not know where we
are, naughty brother!'

'My little sister, the spot where you are,' rejoined Roland, 'is
precisely the spot where I left you, and I defy you to say you have gone
on without me. This is the identical riva I stepped out on to buy you a
packet of Venetian ballads.'

They recognized the spot, and for a confirmation of the surprising
statement, Roland unrolled several sheets of printed blotting-paper, and
rapidly read part of a Canzonetta concerning Una Giovine who reproved her
lover for his extreme addiction to wine:

            'Ma se, ma se,
             Cotanto beve,
             Mi no, mi no,
             No ve sposero.'

'This astounding vagabond preferred Nostrani to his heart's mistress. I
tasted some of their Nostrani to see if it could be possible for a
Frenchman to exonerate him.'

Roland's wry face at the mention of Nostrani brought out the chief
gondolier, who delivered himself:

'Signore, there be hereditary qualifications. One must be born Italian to
appreciate the merits of Nostrani!'

Roland laughed. He had covered his delinquency in leaving his sister, and
was full of an adventure to relate to Nevil, a story promising well for
him.




CHAPTER VII

AN AWAKENING FOR BOTH

Renee was downcast. Had she not coquetted? The dear young Englishman had
reduced her to defend herself, the which fair ladies, like besieged
garrisons, cannot always do successfully without an attack at times,
which, when the pursuer is ardent, is followed by a retreat, which is a
provocation; and these things are coquettry. Her still fresh
convent-conscience accused her of it pitilessly. She could not forgive
her brother, and yet she dared not reproach him, for that would have
inculpated Nevil. She stepped on to the Piazzetta thoughtfully. Her
father was at Florian's, perusing letters from France. 'We are to have
the marquis here in a week, my child,' he said. Renee nodded.
Involuntarily she looked at Nevil. He caught the look, with a lover's
quick sense of misfortune in it.

She heard her brother reply to him: 'Who? the Marquis de Rouaillout? It
is a jolly gaillard of fifty who spoils no fun.'

'You mistake his age, Roland,' she said.

'Forty-nine, then, my sister.'

'He is not that.'

'He looks it.'

'You have been absent.'

'Probably, my arithmetical sister, he has employed the interval to grow
younger. They say it is the way with green gentlemen of a certain age.
They advance and they retire. They perform the first steps of a quadrille
ceremoniously, and we admire them.'

'What's that?' exclaimed the Comte de Croisnel. 'You talk nonsense,
Roland. M. le marquis is hardly past forty. He is in his prime.'

'Without question, mon pere. For me, I was merely offering proof that he
can preserve his prime unlimitedly.'

'He is not a subject for mockery, Roland.'

'Quite the contrary; for reverence!'

'Another than you, my boy, and he would march you out.'

'I am to imagine, then, that his hand continues firm?'

'Imagine to the extent of your capacity; but remember that respect is
always owing to your own family, and deliberate before you draw on
yourself such a chastisement as mercy from an accepted member of it.'

Roland bowed and drummed on his knee.

The conversation had been originated by Renee for the enlightenment of
Nevil and as a future protection to herself. Now that it had disclosed
its burden she could look at him no more, and when her father addressed
her significantly: 'Marquise, you did me the honour to consent to
accompany me to the Church of the Frari this afternoon?' she felt her
self-accusation of coquettry biting under her bosom like a thing alive.

Roland explained the situation to Nevil.

'It is the mania with us, my dear Nevil, to marry our girls young to
established men. Your established man carries usually all the signs,
visible to the multitude or not, of the stages leading to that eminence.
We cannot, I believe, unless we have the good fortune to boast the
paternity of Hercules, disconnect ourselves from the steps we have
mounted; not even, the priests inform us, if we are ascending to heaven;
we carry them beyond the grave. However, it seems that our excellent
marquis contrives to keep them concealed, and he is ready to face
marriage--the Grandest Inquisitor, next to Death. Two furious
matchmakers--our country, beautiful France, abounds in them--met one day;
they were a comtesse and a baronne, and they settled the alliance. The
bell was rung, and Renee came out of school. There is this to be said:
she has no mother; the sooner a girl without a mother has a husband the
better. That we are all agreed upon. I have no personal objection to the
marquis; he has never been in any great scandals. He is Norman, and has
estates in Normandy, Dauphiny, Touraine; he is hospitable, luxurious.
Renee will have a fine hotel in Paris. But I am eccentric: I have read in
our old Fabliaux of December and May. Say the marquis is November, say
October; he is still some distance removed from the plump Spring month.
And we in our family have wits and passions. In fine, a bud of a rose in
an old gentleman's button-hole! it is a challenge to the whole world of
youth; and if the bud should leap? Enough of this matter, friend Nevil;
but sometimes a friend must allow himself to be bothered. I have perfect
confidence in my sister, you see; I simply protest against her being
exposed to . . . You know men. I protest, that is, in the privacy of my
cigar-case, for I have no chance elsewhere. The affair is on wheels. The
very respectable matchmakers have kindled the marquis on the one hand,
and my father on the other, and Renee passes obediently from the latter
to the former. In India they sacrifice the widows, in France the
virgins.'

Roland proceeded to relate his adventure. Nevil's inattention piqued him
to salt and salt it wonderfully, until the old story of He and She had an
exciting savour in its introductory chapter; but his friend was flying
through the circles of the Inferno, and the babble of an ephemeral upper
world simply affected him by its contrast with the overpowering horrors,
repugnances, despairs, pities, rushing at him, surcharging his senses.
Those that live much by the heart in their youth have sharp foretastes of
the issues imaged for the soul. St. Mark's was in a minute struck black
for him. He neither felt the sunlight nor understood why column and
campanile rose, nor why the islands basked, and boats and people moved.
All were as remote little bits of mechanism.

Nevil escaped, and walked in the direction of the Frari down calle and
campiello. Only to see her--to compare her with the Renee of the past
hour! But that Renee had been all the while a feast of delusion; she
could never be resuscitated in the shape he had known, not even clearly
visioned. Not a day of her, not an hour, not a single look had been his
own. She had been sold when he first beheld her, and should, he muttered
austerely, have been ticketed the property of a middle-aged man, a
worn-out French marquis, whom she had agreed to marry, unwooed, without
love--the creature of a transaction. But she was innocent, she was
unaware of the sin residing in a loveless marriage; and this restored her
to him somewhat as a drowned body is given back to mourners.

After aimless walking he found himself on the Zattere, where the lonely
Giudecca lies in front, covering mud and marsh and lagune-flames of later
afternoon, and you have sight of the high mainland hills which seem to
fling forth one over other to a golden sea-cape.

Midway on this unadorned Zattere, with its young trees and spots of
shade, he was met by Renee and her father. Their gondola was below, close
to the riva, and the count said, 'She is tired of standing gazing at
pictures. There is a Veronese in one of the churches of the Giudecca
opposite. Will you, M. Nevil, act as parade-escort to her here for half
an hour, while I go over? Renee complains that she loses the vulgar art
of walking in her complaisant attention to the fine Arts. I weary my poor
child.'

Renee protested in a rapid chatter.

'Must I avow it?' said the count; 'she damps my enthusiasm a little.'

Nevil mutely accepted the office.

Twice that day was she surrendered to him: once in his ignorance, when
time appeared an expanse of many sunny fields. On this occasion it puffed
steam; yet, after seeing the count embark, he commenced the parade in
silence.

'This is a nice walk,' said Renee; 'we have not the steps of the Riva dei
Schiavoni. It is rather melancholy though. How did you discover it? I
persuaded my papa to send the gondola round, and walk till we came to the
water. Tell me about the Giudecca.'

'The Giudecca was a place kept apart for the Jews, I believe. You have
seen their burial-ground on the Lido. Those are, I think, the Euganean
hills. You are fond of Petrarch.'

'M. Nevil, omitting the allusion to the poet, you have, permit me to
remark, the brevity without the precision of an accredited guide to
notabilities.'

'I tell you what I know,' said Nevil, brooding on the finished tone and
womanly aplomb of her language. It made him forget that she was a girl
entrusted to his guardianship. His heart came out.

'Renee, if you loved him, I, on my honour, would not utter a word for
myself. Your heart's inclinations are sacred for me. I would stand by,
and be your friend and his. If he were young, that I might see a chance
of it!'

She murmured, 'You should not have listened to Roland.'

'Roland should have warned me. How could I be near you and not . . . But
I am nothing. Forget me; do not think I speak interestedly, except to
save the dearest I have ever known from certain wretchedness. To yield
yourself hand and foot for life! I warn you that it must end miserably.
Your countrywomen . . . You have the habit in France; but like what are
you treated? You! none like you in the whole world! You consent to be
extinguished. And I have to look on! Listen to me now.'

Renee glanced at the gondola conveying her father. And he has not yet
landed! she thought, and said, 'Do you pretend to judge of my welfare
better than my papa?'

'Yes; in this. He follows a fashion. You submit to it. His anxiety is to
provide for you. But I know the system is cursed by nature, and that
means by heaven.'

'Because it is not English?'

'O Renee, my beloved for ever! Well, then, tell me, tell me you can say
with pride and happiness that the Marquis de Rouaillout is to be
your--there's the word--husband!'

Renee looked across the water.

'Friend, if my father knew you were asking me!'

'I will speak to him.'

'Useless.'

'He is generous, he loves you.'

'He cannot break an engagement binding his honour.'

'Would you, Renee, would you--it must be said--consent to have it known
to him--I beg for more than life--that your are not averse . . . that you
support me?'

His failing breath softened the bluntness.

She replied, 'I would not have him ever break an engagement binding his
honour.'

'You stretch the point of honour.'

'It is our way. Dear friend, we are French. And I presume to think that
our French system is not always wrong, for if my father had not broken it
by treating you as one of us and leaving me with you, should I have heard
. . . ?'

'I have displeased you.'

'Do not suppose that. But, I mean, a mother would not have left me.'

'You wished to avoid it.'

'Do not blame me. I had some instinct; you were very pale.'

'You knew I loved you.'

'No.'

'Yes; for this morning . . .'

This morning it seemed to me, and I regretted my fancy, that you were
inclined to trifle, as, they say, young men do.'

'With Renee?'

'With your friend Renee. And those are the hills of Petrarch's tomb? They
are mountains.'

They were purple beneath a large brooding cloud that hung against the
sun, waiting for him to enfold him, and Nevil thought that a tomb there
would be a welcome end, if he might lift Renee in one wild flight over
the chasm gaping for her. He had no language for thoughts of such a kind,
only tumultuous feeling.

She was immoveable, in perfect armour.

He said despairingly, 'Can you have realized what you are consenting to?'

She answered, 'It is my duty.'

'Your duty! it's like taking up a dice-box, and flinging once, to certain
ruin!'

'I must oppose my father to you, friend. Do you not understand duty to
parents? They say the English are full of the idea of duty.'

'Duty to country, duty to oaths and obligations; but with us the heart is
free to choose.'

'Free to choose, and when it is most ignorant?'

'The heart? ask it. Nothing is surer.'

'That is not what we are taught. We are taught that the heart deceives
itself. The heart throws your dicebox; not prudent parents.'

She talked like a woman, to plead the cause of her obedience as a girl,
and now silenced in the same manner that she had previously excited him.

'Then you are lost to me,' he said.

They saw the gondola returning.

'How swiftly it comes home; it loitered when it went,' said Renee. 'There
sits my father, brimming with his picture; he has seen one more! We will
congratulate him. This little boulevard is not much to speak of. The
hills are lovely. Friend,' she dropped her voice on the gondola's
approach, 'we have conversed on common subjects.'

Nevil had her hand in his, to place her in the gondola.

She seemed thankful that he should prefer to go round on foot. At least,
she did not join in her father's invitation to him. She leaned back,
nestling her chin and half closing her eyes, suffering herself to be
divided from him, borne away by forces she acquiesced in.

Roland was not visible till near midnight on the Piazza. The promenaders,
chiefly military of the garrison, were few at that period of social
protestation, and he could declare his disappointment aloud, ringingly,
as he strolled up to Nevil, looking as if the cigar in his mouth and the
fists entrenched in his wide trowsers-pockets were mortally at feud. His
adventure had not pursued its course luminously. He had expected romance,
and had met merchandize, and his vanity was offended. To pacify him,
Nevil related how he had heard that since the Venetian rising of '49,
Venetian ladies had issued from the ordeal of fire and famine of another
pattern than the famous old Benzon one, in which they touched earthiest
earth. He praised Republicanism for that. The spirit of the new and
short-lived Republic wrought that change in Venice.

'Oh, if they're republican as well as utterly decayed,' said Roland, 'I
give them up; let them die virtuous.'

Nevil told Roland that he had spoken to Renee. He won sympathy, but
Roland could not give him encouragement. They crossed and recrossed the
shadow of the great campanile, on the warm-white stones of the square,
Nevil admitting the weight of whatsoever Roland pointed to him in favour
of the arrangement according to French notions, and indeed, of
aristocratic notions everywhere, saving that it was imperative for Renee
to be disposed of in marriage early. Why rob her of her young springtime!

'French girls,' replied Roland, confused by the nature of the explication
in his head--'well, they're not English; they want a hand to shape them,
otherwise they grow all awry. My father will not have one of her aunts to
live with him, so there she is. But, my dear Nevil, I owe my life to you,
and I was no party to this affair. I would do anything to help you. What
says Renee?'

'She obeys.'

'Exactly. You see! Our girls are chess-pieces until they 're married.
Then they have life and character sometimes too much.'

'She is not like them, Roland; she is like none. When I spoke to her
first, she affected no astonishment; never was there a creature so nobly
sincere. She's a girl in heart, not in mind. Think of her sacrificed to
this man thrice her age!'

'She differs from other girls only on the surface, Nevil. As for the man,
I wish she were going to marry a younger. I wish, yes, my friend,' Roland
squeezed Nevil's hand, 'I wish! I'm afraid it's hopeless. She did not
tell you to hope?'

'Not by one single sign,' said Nevil.

'You see, my friend!'

'For that reason,' Nevil rejoined, with the calm fanaticism of the
passion of love, 'I hope all the more . . . because I will not believe
that she, so pure and good, can be sacrificed. Put me aside--I am
nothing. I hope to save her from that.'

'We have now,' said Roland, 'struck the current of duplicity. You are
really in love, my poor fellow.'

Lover and friend came to no conclusion, except that so lovely a night was
not given for slumber. A small round brilliant moon hung almost globed in
the depths of heaven, and the image of it fell deep between San Giorgio
and the Dogana.

Renee had the scene from her window, like a dream given out of sleep. She
lay with both arms thrown up beneath her head on the pillow, her eyelids
wide open, and her visage set and stern. Her bosom rose and sank
regularly but heavily. The fluctuations of a night stormy for her,
hitherto unknown, had sunk her to this trance, in which she lay like a
creature flung on shore by the waves. She heard her brother's voice and
Nevil's, and the pacing of their feet. She saw the long shaft of
moonlight broken to zigzags of mellow lightning, and wavering back to
steadiness; dark San Giorgio, and the sheen of the Dogana's front. But
the visible beauty belonged to a night that had shivered repose,
humiliated and wounded her, destroyed her confident happy half-infancy of
heart, and she had flown for a refuge to hard feelings. Her predominant
sentiment was anger; an anger that touched all and enveloped none, for it
was quite fictitious, though she felt it, and suffered from it. She
turned it on Nevil, as against an enemy, and became the victim in his
place. Tears for him filled in her eyes, and ran over; she disdained to
notice them, and blinked offendedly to have her sight clear of the
weakness; but these interceding tears would flow; it was dangerous to
blame him, harshly. She let them roll down, figuring to herself with
quiet simplicity of mind that her spirit was independent of them as long
as she restrained her hands from being accomplices by brushing them away,
as weeping girls do that cry for comfort. Nevil had saved her brother's
life, and had succoured her countrymen; he loved her, and was a hero. He
should not have said he loved her; that was wrong; and it was shameful
that he should have urged her to disobey her father. But this hero's love
of her might plead excuses she did not know of; and if he was to be
excused, he, unhappy that he was, had a claim on her for more than tears.
She wept resentfully. Forces above her own swayed and hurried her like a
lifeless body dragged by flying wheels: they could not unnerve her will,
or rather, what it really was, her sense of submission to a destiny.
Looked at from the height of the palm-waving cherubs over the fallen
martyr in the picture, she seemed as nerveless as a dreamy girl. The
raised arms and bent elbows were an illusion of indifference. Her shape
was rigid from hands to feet, as if to keep in a knot the resolution of
her mind; for the second and in that young season the stronger nature
grafted by her education fixed her to the religious duty of obeying and
pleasing her father, in contempt, almost in abhorrence, of personal
inclinations tending to thwart him and imperil his pledged word. She knew
she had inclinations to be tender. Her hands released, how promptly might
she not have been confiding her innumerable perplexities of sentiment and
emotion to paper, undermining self-governance; self-respect, perhaps!
Further than that, she did not understand the feelings she struggled
with; nor had she any impulse to gaze on him, the cause of her trouble,
who walked beside her brother below, talking betweenwhiles in the night's
grave undertones. Her trouble was too overmastering; it had seized her
too mysteriously, coming on her solitariness without warning in the first
watch of the night, like a spark crackling serpentine along dry leaves to
sudden flame. A thought of Nevil and a regret had done it.




CHAPTER VIII

A NIGHT ON THE ADRIATIC

The lovers met after Roland had spoken to his sister--not exactly to
advocate the cause of Nevil, though he was under the influence of that
grave night's walk with him, but to sound her and see whether she at all
shared Nevil's view of her situation. Roland felt the awfulness of a
French family arrangement of a marriage, and the impertinence of a
foreign Cupid's intrusion, too keenly to plead for his friend: at the
same time he loved his friend and his sister, and would have been very
ready to smile blessings on them if favourable circumstances had raised a
signal; if, for example, apoplexy or any other cordial ex machina
intervention had removed the middle-aged marquis; and, perhaps, if Renee
had shown the repugnance to her engagement which Nevil declared she must
have in her heart, he would have done more than smile; he would have laid
the case deferentially before his father. His own opinion was that young
unmarried women were incapable of the passion of love, being, as it were,
but half-feathered in that state, and unable to fly; and Renee confirmed
it. The suspicion of an advocacy on Nevil's behalf steeled her. His
tentative observations were checked at the outset.

'Can such things be spoken of to me, Roland? I am plighted. You know it.'

He shrugged, said a word of pity for Nevil, and went forth to let his
friend know that it was as he had predicted: Renee was obedience in
person, like a rightly educated French girl. He strongly advised his
friend to banish all hope of her from his mind. But the mind he addressed
was of a curious order; far-shooting, tough, persistent, and when acted
on by the spell of devotion, indomitable. Nevil put hope aside, or
rather, he clad it in other garments, in which it was hardly to be
recognized by himself, and said to Roland: 'You must bear this from me;
you must let me follow you to the end, and if she wavers she will find me
near.'

Roland could not avoid asking the use of it, considering that Renee,
however much she admired and liked, was not in love with him.

Nevil resigned himself to admit that she was not: and therefore,' said
he, 'you won't object to my remaining.'

Renee greeted Nevil with as clear a conventional air as a woman could
assume.

She was going, she said, to attend High Mass in the church of S. Moise,
and she waved her devoutest Roman Catholicism to show the breadth of the
division between them. He proposed to go likewise. She was mute. After
some discourse she contrived to say inoffensively that people who
strolled into her churches for the music, or out of curiosity, played the
barbarian.

'Well, I will not go,' said Nevil.

'But I do not wish to number you among them,' she said.

'Then,' said Nevil, 'I will go, for it cannot be barbarous to try to be
with you.'

'No, that is wickedness,' said Renee.

She was sensible that conversation betrayed her, and Nevil's apparently
deliberate pursuit signified to her that he must be aware of his mastery,
and she resented it, and stumbled into pitfalls whenever she opened her
lips. It seemed to be denied to them to utter what she meant, if indeed
she had a meaning in speaking, save to hurt herself cruelly by wounding
the man who had caught her in the toils: and so long as she could imagine
that she was the only one hurt, she was the braver and the harsher for
it; but at the sight of Nevil in pain her heart relented and shifted, and
discovering it to be so weak as to be almost at his mercy, she defended
it with an aggressive unkindness, for which, in charity to her sweeter
nature, she had to ask his pardon, and then had to fib to give reasons
for her conduct, and then to pretend to herself that her pride was
humbled by him; a most humiliating round, constantly recurring; the worse
for the reflection that she created it. She attempted silence. Nevil
spoke, and was like the magical piper: she was compelled to follow him
and dance the round again, with the wretched thought that it must
resemble coquettry. Nevil did not think so, but a very attentive observer
now upon the scene, and possessed of his half of the secret, did, and
warned him. Rosamund Culling added that the French girl might be only an
unconscious coquette, for she was young. The critic would not undertake
to pronounce on her suggestion, whether the candour apparent in merely
coquettish instincts was not more dangerous than a battery of the arts of
the sex. She had heard Nevil's frank confession, and seen Renee twice,
when she tried in his service, though not greatly wishing for success, to
stir the sensitive girl for an answer to his attachment. Probably she
went to work transparently, after the insular fashion of opening a
spiritual mystery with the lancet. Renee suffered herself to be probed
here and there, and revealed nothing of the pain of the operation. She
said to Nevil, in Rosamund's hearing:

'Have you the sense of honour acute in your country?' Nevil inquired for
the apropos.

'None,' said she.

Such pointed insolence disposed Rosamund to an irritable antagonism,
without reminding her that she had given some cause for it.

Renee said to her presently: 'He saved my brother's life'; the apropos
being as little perceptible as before.

Her voice dropped to her sweetest deep tones, and there was a
supplicating beam in her eyes, unintelligible to the direct Englishwoman,
except under the heading of a power of witchery fearful to think of in
one so young, and loved by Nevil.

The look was turned upon her, not upon her hero, and Rosamund thought,
'Does she want to entangle me as well?'

It was, in truth, a look of entreaty from woman to woman, signifying need
of womanly help. Renee would have made a confidante of her, if she had
not known her to be Nevil's, and devoted to him. 'I would speak to you,
but that I feel you would betray me,' her eyes had said. The strong
sincerity dwelling amid multiform complexities might have made itself
comprehensible to the English lady for a moment or so, had Renee spoken
words to her ears; but belief in it would hardly have survived the girl's
next convolutions. 'She is intensely French,' Rosamund said to Nevil--a
volume of insular criticism in a sentence.

'You do not know her, ma'am,' said Nevil. 'You think her older than she
is, and that is the error I fell into. She is a child.'

'A serpent in the egg is none the less a serpent, Nevil. Forgive me; but
when she tells you the case is hopeless!'

'No case is hopeless till a man consents to think it is; and I shall
stay.'

'But then again, Nevil, you have not consulted your uncle.'

'Let him see her! let him only see her!'

Rosamund Culling reserved her opinion compassionately. His uncle would
soon be calling to have him home: society panted for him to make much of
him and here he was, cursed by one of his notions of duty, in attendance
on a captious 'young French beauty, who was the less to be excused for
not dismissing him peremptorily, if she cared for him at all. His career,
which promised to be so brilliant, was spoiling at the outset. Rosamund
thought of Renee almost with detestation, as a species of sorceress that
had dug a trench in her hero's road, and unhorsed and fast fettered him.

The marquis was expected immediately. Renee sent up a little note to
Mrs. Calling's chamber early in the morning, and it was with an air of
one-day-more-to-ourselves, that, meeting her, she entreated the English
lady to join the expedition mentioned in her note. Roland had hired a
big Chioggian fishing-boat to sail into the gulf at night, and return at
dawn, and have sight of Venice rising from the sea. Her father had
declined; but M. Nevil wished to be one of the party, and in that
case. . . . Renee threw herself beseechingly into the mute
interrogation, keeping both of Rosamund's hands. They could slip away
only by deciding to, and this rare Englishwoman had no taste for the
petty overt hostilities. 'If I can be of use to you,' she said.

'If you can bear sea-pitching and tossing for the sake of the loveliest
sight in the whole world,' said Renee.

'I know it well,' Rosamund replied.

Renee rippled her eyebrows. She divined a something behind that remark,
and as she was aware of the grief of Rosamund's life, her quick intuition
whispered that it might be connected with the gallant officer dead on the
battle-field.

'Madame, if you know it too well . . .' she said.

'No; it is always worth seeing,' said Rosamund, 'and I think,
mademoiselle, with your permission, I should accompany you.'

'It is only a whim of mine, madame. I can stay on shore.'

'Not when it is unnecessary to forego a pleasure.'

'Say, my last day of freedom.'

Renee kissed her hand.

She is terribly winning, Rosamund avowed. Renee was in debate whether the
woman devoted to Nevil would hear her and help.

Just then Roland and Nevil returned from their boat, where they had left
carpenters and upholsterers at work, and the delicate chance for an
understanding between the ladies passed by.

The young men were like waves of ocean overwhelming it, they were so full
of their boat, and the scouring and cleaning out of it, and provisioning,
and making it worthy of its freight. Nevil was surprised that Mrs.
Culling should have consented to come, and asked her if she really wished
it--really; and 'Really,' said Rosamund; 'certainly.'

'Without dubitation,' cried Roland. 'And now my little Renee has no more
shore-qualms; she is smoothly chaperoned, and madame will present us tea
on board. All the etcaeteras of life are there, and a mariner's eye in me
spies a breeze at sunset to waft us out of Malamocco.'

The count listened to the recital of their preparations with his usual
absent interest in everything not turning upon Art, politics, or social
intrigue. He said, 'Yes, good, good,' at the proper intervals, and walked
down the riva to look at the busy boat, said to Nevil, 'You are a sailor;
I confide my family to you,' and prudently counselled Renee to put on the
dresses she could toss to the deep without regrets. Mrs. Culling he
thanked fervently for a wonderful stretch of generosity in lending her
presence to the madcaps.

Altogether the day was a reanimation of external Venice. But there was a
thunderbolt in it; for about an hour before sunset, when the ladies were
superintending and trying not to criticize the ingenious efforts to
produce a make-believe of comfort on board for them, word was brought
down to the boat by the count's valet that the Marquis de Rouaillout had
arrived. Renee turned her face to her brother superciliously. Roland
shrugged. 'Note this, my sister,' he said; 'an anticipation of dates in
paying visits precludes the ripeness of the sentiment of welcome. It is,
however, true that the marquis has less time to spare than others.'

'We have started; we are on the open sea. How can we put back?' said
Renee.

'You hear, Francois; we are on the open sea,' Roland addressed the valet.

'Monsieur has cut loose his communications with land,' Francois
responded, and bowed from the landing.

Nevil hastened to make this a true report; but they had to wait for tide
as well as breeze, and pilot through intricate mud-channels before they
could see the outside of the Lido, and meanwhile the sun lay like a
golden altarplatter on mud-banks made bare by the ebb, and curled in
drowsy yellow links along the currents. All they could do was to push off
and hang loose, bumping to right and left in the midst of volleys and
countervolleys of fishy Venetian, Chioggian, and Dalmatian, quite as
strong as anything ever heard down the Canalaggio. The representatives of
these dialects trotted the decks and hung their bodies half over the
sides of the vessels to deliver fire, flashed eyes and snapped fingers,
not a whit less fierce than hostile crews in the old wars hurling an
interchange of stink-pots, and then resumed the trot, apparently in
search of fresh ammunition. An Austrian sentinel looked on passively, and
a police inspector peeringly. They were used to it. Happily, the
combustible import of the language was unknown to the ladies, and Nevil's
attempts to keep his crew quiet, contrasting with Roland's phlegm, which
a Frenchman can assume so philosophically when his tongue is tied, amused
them. During the clamour, Renee saw her father beckoning from the riva.
She signified that she was no longer in command of circumstances; the
vessel was off. But the count stamped his foot, and nodded imperatively.
Thereupon Roland repeated the eloquent demonstrations of Renee, and the
count lost patience, and Roland shouted, 'For the love of heaven, don't
join this babel; we're nearly bursting.' The rage of the babel was
allayed by degrees, though not appeased, for the boat was behaving
wantonly, as the police officer pointed out to the count.

Renee stood up to bend her head. It was in reply to a salute from the
Marquis de Rouaillout, and Nevil beheld his rival.

'M. le Marquis, seeing it is out of the question that we can come to you,
will you come to us?' cried Roland.

The marquis gesticulated 'With alacrity' in every limb.

'We will bring you back on to-morrow midnight's tide, safe, we promise
you.'

The marquis advanced a foot, and withdrew it. Could he have heard
correctly? They were to be out a whole night at sea! The count dejectedly
confessed his incapability to restrain them: the young desperadoes were
ready for anything. He had tried the voice of authority, and was laughed
at. As to Renee, an English lady was with her.

'The English lady must be as mad as the rest,' said the marquis.

'The English are mad,' said the count; 'but their women are strict upon
the proprieties.'

'Possibly, my dear count; but what room is there for the proprieties on
board a fishing-boat?'

'It is even as you say, my dear marquis.'

'You allow it?'

'Can I help myself? Look at them. They tell me they have given the boat
the fittings of a yacht.'

'And the young man?'

'That is the M. Beauchamp of whom I have spoken to you, the very pick of
his country, fresh, lively, original; and he can converse. You will like
him.'

'I hope so,' said the marquis, and roused a doleful laugh. 'It would seem
that one does not arrive by hastening!'

'Oh! but my dear marquis, you have paid the compliment; you are like
Spring thrusting in a bunch of lilac while the winds of winter blow. If
you were not expected, your expeditiousness is appreciated, be sure.'

Roland fortunately did not hear the marquis compared to Spring. He was
saying: 'I wonder what those two elderly gentlemen are talking about';
and Nevil confused his senses by trying to realize that one of them was
destined to be the husband of his now speechless Renee. The marquis was
clad in a white silken suit, and a dash of red round the neck set off his
black beard; but when he lifted his broad straw hat, a baldness of sconce
shone. There was elegance in his gestures; he looked a gentleman, though
an ultra-Gallican one, that is, too scrupulously finished for our taste,
smelling of the valet. He had the habit of balancing his body on the
hips, as if to emphasize a juvenile vigour, and his general attitude
suggested an idea that he had an oration for you. Seen from a distance,
his baldness and strong nasal projection were not winning features; the
youthful standard he had evidently prescribed to himself in his dress and
his ready jerks of acquiescence and delivery might lead a forlorn rival
to conceive him something of an ogre straining at an Adonis. It could not
be disputed that he bore his disappointment remarkably well; the more
laudably, because his position was within a step of the ridiculous, for
he had shot himself to the mark, despising sleep, heat, dust, dirt, diet,
and lo, that charming object was deliberately slipping out of reach,
proving his headlong journey an absurdity.

As he stood declining to participate in the lunatic voyage, and bidding
them perforce good speed off the tips of his fingers, Renee turned her
eyes on him, and away. She felt a little smart of pity, arising partly
from her antagonism to Roland's covert laughter: but it was the colder
kind of feminine pity, which is nearer to contempt than to tenderness.
She sat still, placid outwardly, in fear of herself, so strange she found
it to be borne out to sea by her sailor lover under the eyes of her
betrothed. She was conscious of a tumultuous rush of sensations, none of
them of a very healthy kind, coming as it were from an unlocked chamber
of her bosom, hitherto of unimagined contents; and the marquis being now
on the spot to defend his own, she no longer blamed Nevil: it was
otherwise utterly. All the sweeter side of pity was for him.

He was at first amazed by the sudden exquisite transition. Tenderness
breathed from her, in voice, in look, in touch; for she accepted his help
that he might lead her to the stern of the vessel, to gaze well on
setting Venice, and sent lightnings up his veins; she leaned beside him
over the vessel's rails, not separated from him by the breadth of a
fluttering riband. Like him, she scarcely heard her brother when for an
instant he intervened, and with Nevil she said adieu to Venice, where the
faint red Doge's palace was like the fading of another sunset
north-westward of the glory along the hills. Venice dropped lower and
lower, breasting the waters, until it was a thin line in air. The line
was broken, and ran in dots, with here and there a pillar standing on
opal sky. At last the topmost campanile sank.

Renee looked up at the sails, and back for the submerged city.

'It is gone!' she said, as though a marvel had been worked; and swiftly:
'we have one night!'

She breathed it half like a question, like a petition, catching her
breath. The adieu to Venice was her assurance of liberty, but Venice
hidden rolled on her the sense of the return and plucked shrewdly at her
tether of bondage.

They set their eyes toward the dark gulf ahead. The night was growing
starry. The softly ruffled Adriatic tossed no foam.

'One night?' said Nevil; 'one? Why only one?'

Renee shuddered. 'Oh! do not speak.'

'Then, give me your hand.'

'There, my friend.'

He pressed a hand that was like a quivering chord. She gave it as though
it had been his own to claim. But that it meant no more than a hand he
knew by the very frankness of her compliance, in the manner natural to
her; and this was the charm, it filled him with her peculiar image and
spirit, and while he held it he was subdued.

Lying on the deck at midnight, wrapt in his cloak and a coil of rope for
a pillow, considerably apart from jesting Roland, the recollection of
that little sanguine spot of time when Renee's life-blood ran with his,
began to heave under him like a swelling sea. For Nevil the starred black
night was Renee. Half his heart was in it: but the combative division
flew to the morning and the deadly iniquity of the marriage, from which
he resolved to save her; in pure devotedness, he believed. And so he
closed his eyes. She, a girl, with a heart fluttering open and fearing,
felt only that she had lost herself somewhere, and she had neither sleep
nor symbols, nothing but a sense of infinite strangeness, as though she
were borne superhumanly through space.




CHAPTER IX

MORNING AT SEA UNDER THE ALPS

The breeze blew steadily, enough to swell the sails and sweep the vessel
on smoothly. The night air dropped no moisture on deck.

Nevil Beauchamp dozed for an hour. He was awakened by light on his
eyelids, and starting up beheld the many pinnacles of grey and red rocks
and shadowy high white regions at the head of the gulf waiting for the
sun; and the sun struck them. One by one they came out in crimson flame,
till the vivid host appeared to have stepped forward. The shadows on the
snow-fields deepened to purple below an irradiation of rose and pink and
dazzling silver. There of all the world you might imagine Gods to sit. A
crowd of mountains endless in range, erect, or flowing, shattered and
arid, or leaning in smooth lustre, hangs above the gulf. The mountains
are sovereign Alps, and the sea is beneath them. The whole gigantic body
keeps the sea, as with a hand, to right and left.

Nevil's personal rapture craved for Renee with the second long breath he
drew; and now the curtain of her tent-cabin parted, and greeting him with
a half smile, she looked out. The Adriatic was dark, the Alps had heaven
to themselves. Crescents and hollows, rosy mounds, white shelves, shining
ledges, domes and peaks, all the towering heights were in illumination
from Friuli into farthest Tyrol; beyond earth to the stricken senses of
the gazers. Colour was stedfast on the massive front ranks: it wavered in
the remoteness, and was quick and dim as though it fell on beating wings;
but there too divine colour seized and shaped forth solid forms, and
thence away to others in uttermost distances where the incredible
flickering gleam of new heights arose, that soared, or stretched their
white uncertain curves in sky like wings traversing infinity.

It seemed unlike morning to the lovers, but as if night had broken with a
revelation of the kingdom in the heart of night. While the broad smooth
waters rolled unlighted beneath that transfigured upper sphere, it was
possible to think the scene might vanish like a view caught out of
darkness by lightning. Alp over burning Alp, and around them a hueless
dawn! The two exulted they threw off the load of wonderment, and in
looking they had the delicious sensation of flight in their veins.

Renee stole toward Nevil. She was mystically shaken and at his mercy; and
had he said then, 'Over to the other land, away from Venice!' she would
have bent her head.

She asked his permission to rouse her brother and madame, so that they
should not miss the scene.

Roland lay in the folds of his military greatcoat, too completely happy
to be disturbed, Nevil Beauchamp chose to think; and Rosamund Culling, he
told Renee, had been separated from her husband last on these waters.

'Ah! to be unhappy here,' sighed Renee. 'I fancied it when I begged her
to join us. It was in her voice.'

The impressionable girl trembled. He knew he was dear to her, and for
that reason, judging of her by himself, he forbore to urge his advantage,
conceiving it base to fear that loving him she could yield her hand to
another; and it was the critical instant. She was almost in his grasp. A
word of sharp entreaty would have swung her round to see her situation
with his eyes, and detest and shrink from it. He committed the capital
fault of treating her as his equal in passion and courage, not as metal
ready to run into the mould under temporary stress of fire.

Even later in the morning, when she was cooler and he had come to speak,
more than her own strength was needed to resist him. The struggle was
hard. The boat's head had been put about for Venice, and they were among
the dusky-red Chioggian sails in fishing quarters, expecting momently a
campanile to signal the sea-city over the level. Renee waited for it in
suspense. To her it stood for the implacable key of a close and stifling
chamber, so different from this brilliant boundless region of air, that
she sickened with the apprehension; but she knew it must appear, and
soon, and therewith the contraction and the gloom it indicated to her
mind. He talked of the beauty. She fretted at it, and was her petulant
self again in an epigrammatic note of discord.

He let that pass.

'Last night you said "one night,"' he whispered. 'We will have another
sail before we leave Venice.'

'One night, and in a little time one hour! and next one minute! and
there's the end,' said Renee.

Her tone alarmed him. 'Have you forgotten that you gave me your hand?'

'I gave my hand to my friend.'

'You gave it to me for good.'

'No; I dared not; it is not mine.'

'It is mine,' said Beauchamp.

Renee pointed to the dots and severed lines and isolated columns of the
rising city, black over bright sea.

'Mine there as well as here,' said Beauchamp, and looked at her with the
fiery zeal of eyes intent on minutest signs for a confirmation, to shake
that sad negation of her face.

'Renee, you cannot break the pledge of the hand you gave me last night.'

'You tell me how weak a creature I am.'

'You are me, myself; more, better than me. And say, would you not rather
coast here and keep the city under water?'

She could not refrain from confessing that she would be glad never to
land there.

'So, when you land, go straight to your father,' said Beauchamp, to whose
conception it was a simple act resulting from the avowal.

'Oh! you torture me,' she cried. Her eyelashes were heavy with tears. 'I
cannot do it. Think what you will of me! And, my friend, help me. Should
you not help me? I have not once actually disobeyed my father, and he has
indulged me, but he has been sure of me as a dutiful girl. That is my
source of self-respect. My friend can always be my friend.'

'Yes, while it's not too late,' said Beauchamp.

She observed a sudden stringing of his features. He called to the chief
boatman, made his command intelligible to that portly capitano, and went
on to Roland, who was puffing his after-breakfast cigarette in
conversation with the tolerant English lady.

'You condescend to notice us, Signor Beauchamp,' said Roland. 'The vessel
is up to some manoeuvre?'

'We have decided not to land,' replied Beauchamp. 'And Roland,' he
checked the Frenchman's shout of laughter, 'I think of making for
Trieste. Let me speak to you, to both. Renee is in misery. She must not
go back.'

Roland sprang to his feet, stared, and walked over to Renee.

'Nevil,' said Rosamund Culling, 'do you know what you are doing?'

'Perfectly,' said he. 'Come to her. She is a girl, and I must think and
act for her.'

Roland met them.

'My dear Nevil, are you in a state of delusion? Renee denies . . .'

'There's no delusion, Roland. I am determined to stop a catastrophe. I
see it as plainly as those Alps. There is only one way, and that's the
one I have chosen.'

'Chosen! my friend'. But allow me to remind you that you have others to
consult. And Renee herself . . .'

'She is a girl. She loves me, and I speak for her.'

'She has said it?'

'She has more than said it.'

'You strike me to the deck, Nevil. Either you are downright mad--which
seems the likeliest, or we are all in a nightmare. Can you suppose I will
let my sister be carried away the deuce knows where, while her father is
expecting her, and to fulfil an engagement affecting his pledged word?'

Beauchamp simply replied:

'Come to her.'




CHAPTER X

A SINGULAR COUNCIL

The four sat together under the shadow of the helmsman, by whom they were
regarded as voyagers in debate upon the question of some hours further on
salt water. 'No bora,' he threw in at intervals, to assure them that the
obnoxious wind of the Adriatic need not disturb their calculations.

It was an extraordinary sitting, but none of the parties to it thought of
it so when Nevil Beauchamp had plunged them into it. He compelled them,
even Renee--and she would have flown had there been wings on her
shoulders--to feel something of the life and death issues present to his
soul, and submit to the discussion, in plain language of the
market-place, of the most delicate of human subjects for her, for him,
and hardly less for the other two. An overmastering fervour can do this.
It upsets the vessel we float in, and we have to swim our way out of deep
waters by the directest use of the natural faculties, without much
reflection on the change in our habits. To others not under such an
influence the position seems impossible. This discussion occurred.
Beauchamp opened the case in a couple of sentences, and when the turn
came for Renee to speak, and she shrank from the task in manifest pain,
he spoke for her, and no one heard her contradiction. She would have
wished the fearful impetuous youth to succeed if she could have slept
through the storm he was rousing.

Roland appealed to her. 'You! my sister! it is you that consent to this
wild freak, enough to break your father's heart?'

He had really forgotten his knowledge of her character--what much he
knew--in the dust of the desperation flung about her by Nevil Beauchamp.

She shook her head; she had not consented.

'The man she loves is her voice and her will,' said Beauchamp. 'She gives
me her hand and I lead her.'

Roland questioned her. It could not be denied that she had given her
hand, and her bewildered senses made her think that it had been with an
entire abandonment; and in the heat of her conflict of feelings, the
deliciousness of yielding to him curled round and enclosed her, as in a
cool humming sea-shell.

'Renee!' said Roland.

'Brother!' she cried.

'You see that I cannot suffer you to be borne away.'

'No; do not!'

But the boat was flying fast from Venice, and she could have fallen at
his feet and kissed them for not countermanding it.

'You are in my charge, my sister.'

'Yes.'

'And now, Nevil, between us two,' said Roland.

Beauchamp required no challenge. He seemed, to Rosamund Culling, twice
older than he was, strangely adept, yet more strangely wise of worldly
matters, and eloquent too. But it was the eloquence of frenzy, madness,
in Roland's ear. The arrogation of a terrible foresight that harped on
present and future to persuade him of the righteousness of this headlong
proceeding advocated by his friend, vexed his natural equanimity. The
argument was out of the domain of logic. He could hardly sit to listen,
and tore at his moustache at each end. Nevertheless his sister listened.
The mad Englishman accomplished the miracle of making her listen, and
appear to consent.

Roland laughed scornfully. 'Why Trieste? I ask you, why Trieste? You
can't have a Catholic priest at your bidding, without her father's
sanction.'

'We leave Renee at Trieste, under the care of madame,' said Beauchamp,
'and we return to Venice, and I go to your father. This method protects
Renee from annoyance.'

'It strikes me that if she arrives at any determination she must take the
consequences.'

'She does. She is brave enough for that. But she is a girl; she has to
fight the battle of her life in a day, and I am her lover, and she leaves
it to me.'

'Is my sister such a coward?' said Roland.

Renee could only call out his name.

'It will never do, my dear Nevil; Roland tried to deal with his
unreasonable friend affectionately. 'I am responsible for her. It's your
own fault--if you had not saved my life I should not have been in your
way. Here I am, and your proposal can't be heard of. Do as you will, both
of you, when you step ashore in Venice.'

'If she goes back she is lost,' said Beauchamp, and he attacked Roland on
the side of his love for Renee, and for him.

Roland was inflexible. Seeing which, Renee said, 'To Venice, quickly, my
brother!' and now she almost sighed with relief to think that she was
escaping from this hurricane of a youth, who swept her off her feet and
wrapt her whole being in a delirium.

'We were in sight of the city just now!' cried Roland, staring and
frowning. 'What's this?'

Beauchamp answered him calmly, 'The boat's under my orders.'

'Talk madness, but don't act it,' said Roland. 'Round with the boat at
once. Hundred devils! you haven't your wits.'

To his amazement, Beauchamp refused to alter the boat's present course.

'You heard my sister?' said Roland.

'You frighten her,' said Beauchamp.

'You heard her wish to return to Venice, I say.'

'She has no wish that is not mine.'

It came to Roland's shouting his command to the men, while Beauchamp
pointed the course on for them.

'You will make this a ghastly pleasantry,' said Roland.

'I do what I know to be right,' said Beauchamp.

'You want an altercation before these fellows?'

'There won't be one; they obey me.'

Roland blinked rapidly in wrath and doubt of mind.

'Madame,' he stooped to Rosamund Culling, with a happy inspiration,
'convince him; you have known him longer than I, and I desire not to lose
my friend. And tell me, madame--I can trust you to be truth itself, and
you can see it is actually the time for truth to be spoken--is he
justified in taking my sister's hand? You perceive that I am obliged to
appeal to you. Is he not dependent on his uncle? And is he not,
therefore, in your opinion, bound in reason as well as in honour to wait
for his uncle's approbation before he undertakes to speak for my sister?
And, since the occasion is urgent, let me ask you one thing more:
whether, by your knowledge of his position, you think him entitled to
presume to decide upon my sister's destiny? She, you are aware, is not so
young but that she can speak for herself . . .'

'There you are wrong, Roland,' said Beauchamp; 'she can neither speak nor
think for herself: you lead her blindfolded.'

'And you, my friend, suppose that you are wiser than any of us. It is
understood. I venture to appeal to madame on the point in question.'

The poor lady's heart beat dismally. She was constrained to answer, and
said, 'His uncle is one who must be consulted.'

'You hear that, Nevil,' said Roland.

Beauchamp looked at her sharply; angrily, Rosamund feared. She had struck
his hot brain with the vision of Everard Romfrey as with a bar of iron.
If Rosamund had inclined to the view that he was sure of his uncle's
support, it would have seemed to him a simple confirmation of his
sentiments, but he was not of the same temper now as when he exclaimed,
'Let him see her!' and could imagine, give him only Renee's love, the
world of men subservient to his wishes.

Then he was dreaming; he was now in fiery earnest, for that reason
accessible to facts presented to him; and Rosamund's reluctantly spoken
words brought his stubborn uncle before his eyes, inflicting a sense of
helplessness of the bitterest kind.

They were all silent. Beauchamp stared at the lines of the deck-planks.

His scheme to rescue Renee was right and good; but was he the man that
should do it? And was she, moreover, he thought--speculating on her bent
head--the woman to be forced to brave the world with him, and poverty?
She gave him no sign. He was assuredly not the man to pretend to powers
he did not feel himself to possess, and though from a personal, and still
more from a lover's, inability to see all round him at one time and
accurately to weigh the forces at his disposal, he had gone far, he was
not a wilful dreamer nor so very selfish a lover. The instant his
consciousness of a superior strength failed him he acknowledged it.

Renee did not look up. She had none of those lightnings of primitive
energy, nor the noble rashness and reliance on her lover, which his
imagination had filled her with; none. That was plain. She could not even
venture to second him. Had she done so he would have held out. He walked
to the head of the boat without replying.

Soon after this the boat was set for Venice again.

When he rejoined his companions he kissed Rosamund's hand, and Renee,
despite a confused feeling of humiliation and anger, loved him for it.

Glittering Venice was now in sight; the dome of Sta. Maria Salute shining
like a globe of salt.

Roland flung his arm round his friend's neck, and said, 'Forgive me.'

'You do what you think right,' said Beauchamp.

'You are a perfect man of honour, my friend, and a woman would adore you.
Girls are straws. It's part of Renee's religion to obey her father.
That's why I was astonished! . . . I owe you my life, and I would
willingly give you my sister in part payment, if I had the giving of her;
most willingly. The case is, that she's a child, and you?'

'Yes, I'm dependent,' Beauchamp assented. 'I can't act; I see it. That
scheme wants two to carry it out: she has no courage. I feel that I could
carry the day with my uncle, but I can't subject her to the risks, since
she dreads them; I see it. Yes, I see that! I should have done well, I
believe; I should have saved her.'

'Run to England, get your uncle's consent, and then try.'

'No; I shall go to her father.'

'My dear Nevil, and supposing you have Renee to back you--supposing it, I
say--won't you be falling on exactly the same bayonet-point?'

'If I leave her!' Beauchamp interjected. He perceived the quality of
Renee's unformed character which he could not express.

'But we are to suppose that she loves you?'

'She is a girl.'

'You return, my friend, to the place you started from, as you did on the
canal without knowing it. In my opinion, frankly, she is best married.
And I think so all the more after this morning's lesson. You understand
plainly that if you leave her she will soon be pliant to the legitimate
authorities; and why not?'

'Listen to me, Roland. I tell you she loves me. I am bound to her, and
when--if ever I see her unhappy, I will not stand by and look on
quietly.'

Roland shrugged. 'The future not being born, my friend, we will abstain
from baptizing it. For me, less privileged than my fellows, I have never
seen the future. Consequently I am not in love with it, and to declare
myself candidly I do not care for it one snap of the fingers. Let us
follow our usages, and attend to the future at the hour of its delivery.
I prefer the sage-femme to the prophet. From my heart, Nevil, I wish I
could help you. We have charged great guns together, but a family
arrangement is something different from a hostile battery. There's
Venice! and, as soon as you land, my responsibility's ended. Reflect, I
pray you, on what I have said about girls. Upon my word, I discover
myself talking wisdom to you. Girls are precious fragilities. Marriage is
the mould for them; they get shape, substance, solidity: that is to say,
sense, passion, a will of their own: and grace and tenderness, delicacy;
all out of the rude, raw, quaking creatures we call girls. Paris! my dear
Nevil. Paris! It's the book of women.'

The grandeur of the decayed sea-city, where folly had danced Parisianly
of old, spread brooding along the waters in morning light; beautiful; but
with that inner light of history seen through the beauty Venice was like
a lowered banner. The great white dome and the campanili watching above
her were still brave emblems. Would Paris leave signs of an ancient
vigour standing to vindicate dignity when her fall came? Nevil thought of
Renee in Paris.

She avoided him. She had retired behind her tent-curtains, and reappeared
only when her father's voice hailed the boat from a gondola. The count
and the marquis were sitting together, and there was a spare gondola for
the voyagers, so that they should not have to encounter another babel of
the riva. Salutes were performed with lifted hats, nods, and bows.

'Well, my dear child, it has all been very wonderful and uncomfortable?'
said the count.

'Wonderful, papa; splendid.'

'No qualms of any kind?'

'None, I assure you.' And madame?'

'Madame will confirm it, if you find a seat for her.'

Rosamund Culling was received in the count's gondola, cordially thanked,
and placed beside the marquis.

'I stay on board and pay these fellows,' said Roland.

Renee was told by her father to follow madame. He had jumped into the
spare gondola and offered a seat to Beauchamp.

'No,' cried Renee, arresting Beauchamp, 'it is I who mean to sit with
papa.'

Up sprang the marquis with an entreating, 'Mademoiselle!'

'M. Beauchamp will entertain you, M. le Marquis.'

'I want him here,' said the count; and Beauchamp showed that his wish was
to enter the count's gondola, but Renee had recovered her aplomb, and
decisively said 'No,' and Beauchamp had to yield.

That would have been an opportunity of speaking to her father without a
formal asking of leave. She knew it as well as Nevil Beauchamp.

Renee took his hand to be assisted in the step down to her father's arms,
murmuring:

'Do nothing--nothing! until you hear from me.'




CHAPTER XI

CAPTAIN BASKELETT

Our England, meanwhile, was bustling over the extinguished war, counting
the cost of it, with a rather rueful eye on Manchester, and soothing the
taxed by an exhibition of heroes at brilliant feasts. Of course, the
first to come home had the cream of the praises. She hugged them in a
manner somewhat suffocating to modest men, but heroism must be brought to
bear upon these excesses of maternal admiration; modesty, too, when it
accepts the place of honour at a public banquet, should not protest
overmuch. To be just, the earliest arrivals, which were such as reached
the shores of Albion before her war was at an end, did cordially
reciprocate the hug. They were taught, and they believed most naturally,
that it was quite as well to repose upon her bosom as to have stuck to
their posts. Surely there was a conscious weakness in the Spartans, who
were always at pains to discipline their men in heroical conduct, and
rewarded none save the stand-fasts. A system of that sort seems to betray
the sense of poverty in the article. Our England does nothing like it.
All are welcome home to her so long as she is in want of them. Besides,
she has to please the taxpayer. You may track a shadowy line or crazy
zigzag of policy in almost every stroke of her domestic history: either
it is the forethought finding it necessary to stir up an impulse, or else
dashing impulse gives a lively pull to the afterthought: policy becomes
evident somehow, clumsily very possibly. How can she manage an enormous
middle-class, to keep it happy, other than a little clumsily? The
managing of it at all is the wonder. And not only has she to stupefy the
taxpayer by a timely display of feastings and fireworks, she has to stop
all that nonsense (to quote a satiated man lightened in his purse) at the
right moment, about the hour when the old standfasts, who have simply
been doing duty, return, poor jog-trot fellows, and a complimentary motto
or two is the utmost she can present to them. On the other hand, it is
true she gives her first loves, those early birds, fully to understand
that a change has come in their island mother's mind. If there is a
balance to be righted, she leaves that business to society, and if it be
the season for the gathering of society, it will be righted more or less;
and if no righting is done at all, perhaps the Press will incidentally
toss a leaf of laurel on a name or two: thus in the exercise of grumbling
doing good.

With few exceptions, Nevil Beauchamp's heroes received the motto instead
of the sweetmeat. England expected them to do their duty; they did it,
and she was not dissatisfied, nor should they be. Beauchamp, at a
distance from the scene, chafed with customary vehemence, concerning the
unjust measure dealt to his favourites: Captain Hardist, of the Diomed,
twenty years a captain, still a captain! Young Michell denied the cross!
Colonel Evans Cuff, on the heights from first to last, and not advanced a
step! But Prancer, and Plunger, and Lammakin were thoroughly well taken
care of, this critic of the war wrote savagely, reviving an echo of a
queer small circumstance occurring in the midst of the high dolour and
anxiety of the whole nation, and which a politic country preferred to
forget, as we will do, for it was but an instance of strong family
feeling in high quarters; and is not the unity of the country founded on
the integrity of the family sentiment? Is it not certain, which the
master tells us, that a line is but a continuation of a number of dots?
Nevil Beauchamp was for insisting that great Government officers had paid
more attention to a dot or two than to the line. He appeared to be at war
with his country after the peace. So far he had a lively ally in his
uncle Everard; but these remarks of his were a portion of a letter, whose
chief burden was the request that Everard Romfrey would back him in
proposing for the hand of a young French lady, she being, Beauchamp
smoothly acknowledged, engaged to a wealthy French marquis, under the
approbation of her family. Could mortal folly outstrip a petition of that
sort? And apparently, according to the wording and emphasis of the
letter, it was the mature age of the marquis which made Mr. Beauchamp so
particularly desirous to stop the projected marriage and take the girl
himself. He appealed to his uncle on the subject in a 'really--really'
remonstrative tone, quite overwhelming to read. 'It ought not to be
permitted: by all the laws of chivalry, I should write to the girl's
father to interdict it: I really am particeps criminis in a sin against
nature if I don't!' Mr. Romfrey interjected in burlesque of his
ridiculous nephew, with collapsing laughter. But he expressed an
indignant surprise at Nevil for allowing Rosamund to travel alone.

'I can take very good care of myself,' Rosamund protested.

'You can do hundreds of things you should never be obliged to do while
he's at hand, or I, ma'am,' said Mr. Romfrey. 'The fellow's insane. He
forgets a gentleman's duty. Here's his "humanity" dogging a French frock,
and pooh!--the age of the marquis! Fifty? A man's beginning his prime at
fifty, or there never was much man in him. It's the mark of a fool to
take everybody for a bigger fool than himself-or he wouldn't have written
this letter to me. He can't come home yet, not yet, and he doesn't know
when he can! Has he thrown up the service? I am to preserve the alliance
between England and France by getting this French girl for him in the
teeth of her marquis, at my peril if I refuse!'

Rosamund asked, 'Will you let me see where Nevil says that, sir?'

Mr. Romfrey tore the letter to strips. 'He's one of your fellows who cock
their eyes when they mean to be cunning. He sends you to do the
wheedling, that's plain. I don't say he has hit on a bad advocate; but
tell him I back him in no mortal marriage till he shows a pair of
epaulettes on his shoulders. Tell him lieutenants are fledglings--he's
not marriageable at present. It's a very pretty sacrifice of himself he
intends for the sake of the alliance, tell him that, but a lieutenant's
not quite big enough to establish it. You will know what to tell him,
ma'am. And say, it's the fellow's best friend that advises him to be out
of it and home quick. If he makes one of a French trio, he's dished. He's
too late for his luck in England. Have him out of that mire, we can't
hope for more now.'

Rosamund postponed her mission to plead. Her heart was with Nevil; her
understanding was easily led to side against him, and for better reasons
than Mr. Romfrey could be aware of: so she was assured by her experience
of the character of Mademoiselle de Croisnel. A certain belief in her
personal arts of persuasion had stopped her from writing on her homeward
journey to inform him that Nevil was not accompanying her, and when she
drove over Steynham Common, triumphal arches and the odour of a roasting
ox richly browning to celebrate the hero's return afflicted her mind with
all the solid arguments of a common-sense country in contravention of a
wild lover's vaporous extravagances. Why had he not come with her? The
disappointed ox put the question in a wavering drop of the cheers of the
villagers at the sight of the carriage without their bleeding hero. Mr.
Romfrey, at his hall-doors, merely screwed his eyebrows; for it was the
quality of this gentleman to foresee most human events, and his capacity
to stifle astonishment when they trifled with his prognostics. Rosamund
had left Nevil fast bound in the meshes of the young French sorceress, no
longer leading, but submissively following, expecting blindly, seeing
strange new virtues in the lurid indication of what appeared to border on
the reverse. How could she plead for her infatuated darling to one who
was common sense in person?

Everard's pointed interrogations reduced her to speak defensively,
instead of attacking and claiming his aid for the poor enamoured young
man. She dared not say that Nevil continued to be absent because he was
now encouraged by the girl to remain in attendance on her, and was more
than half inspired to hope, and too artfully assisted to deceive the
count and the marquis under the guise of simple friendship. Letters
passed between them in books given into one another's hands with an
audacious openness of the saddest augury for the future of the pair, and
Nevil could be so lost to reason as to glory in Renee's intrepidity,
which he justified by their mutual situation, and cherished for a proof
that she was getting courage. In fine, Rosamund abandoned her task of
pleading. Nevil's communications gave the case a worse and worse aspect:
Renee was prepared to speak to her father; she delayed it; then the two
were to part; they were unable to perform the terrible sacrifice and slay
their last hope; and then Nevil wrote of destiny--language hitherto
unknown to him, evidently the tongue of Renee. He slipped on from Italy
to France. His uncle was besieged by a series of letters, and his cousin,
Cecil Baskelett, a captain in England's grand reserve force--her Horse
Guards, of the Blue division--helped Everard Romfrey to laugh over them.

It was not difficult, alack! Letters of a lover in an extremity of love,
crying for help, are as curious to cool strong men as the contortions of
the proved heterodox tied to a stake must have been to their chastening
ecclesiastical judges. Why go to the fire when a recantation will save
you from it? Why not break the excruciating faggot-bands, and escape,
when you have only to decide to do it? We naturally ask why. Those
martyrs of love or religion are madmen. Altogether, Nevil's adjurations
and supplications, his threats of wrath and appeals to reason, were an
odd mixture. 'He won't lose a chance while there's breath in his body,'
Everard said, quite good-humouredly, though he deplored that the chance
for the fellow to make his hero-parade in society, and haply catch an
heiress, was waning. There was an heiress at Steynham, on her way with
her father to Italy, very anxious to see her old friend Nevil--Cecilia
Halkett--and very inquisitive this young lady of sixteen was to know the
cause of his absence. She heard of it from Cecil.

'And one morning last week mademoiselle was running away with him, and
the next morning she was married to her marquis!'

Cecil was able to tell her that.

'I used to be so fond of him,' said the ingenuous young lady. She had to
thank Nevil for a Circassian dress and pearls, which he had sent to her
by the hands of Mrs. Culling--a pretty present to a girl in the nursery,
she thought, and in fact she chose to be a little wounded by the cause of
his absence.

'He's a good creature-really,' Cecil spoke on his cousin's behalf. 'Mad;
he always will be mad. A dear old savage; always amuses me. He does! I
get half my entertainment from him.'

Captain Baskelett was gifted with the art, which is a fine and a precious
one, of priceless value in society, and not wanting a benediction upon it
in our elegant literature, namely, the art of stripping his fellow-man
and so posturing him as to make every movement of the comical wretch
puppet-like, constrained, stiff, and foolish. He could present you
heroical actions in that fashion; for example:

'A long-shanked trooper, bearing the name of John Thomas Drew, was
crawling along under fire of the batteries. Out pops old Nevil, tries to
get the man on his back. It won't do. Nevil insists that it's exactly one
of the cases that ought to be, and they remain arguing about it like a
pair of nine-pins while the Muscovites are at work with the bowls. Very
well. Let me tell you my story. It's perfectly true, I give you my word.
So Nevil tries to horse Drew, and Drew proposes to horse Nevil, as at
school. Then Drew offers a compromise. He would much rather have crawled
on, you know, and allowed the shot to pass over his head; but he's a
Briton, old Nevil the same; but old Nevil's peculiarity is that, as you
are aware, he hates a compromise--won't have it--retro Sathanas! and
Drew's proposal to take his arm instead of being carried pickaback
disgusts old Nevil. Still it won't do to stop where they are, like the
cocoa-nut and the pincushion of our friends, the gipsies, on the downs:
so they take arms and commence the journey home, resembling the best of
friends on the evening of a holiday in our native clime--two steps to the
right, half-a-dozen to the left, etcaetera.'

Thus, with scarce a variation from the facts, with but a flowery chaplet
cast on a truthful narrative, as it were, Captain Baskelett could render
ludicrous that which in other quarters had obtained honourable mention.
Nevil and Drew being knocked down by the wind of a ball near the battery,
'Confound it!' cries Nevil, jumping on his feet, 'it's because I
consented to a compromise!'--a transparent piece of fiction this, but so
in harmony with the character stripped naked for us that it is accepted.
Imagine Nevil's love-affair in such hands! Recovering from a fever, Nevil
sees a pretty French girl in a gondola, and immediately thinks, 'By
jingo, I'm marriageable.' He hears she is engaged. 'By jingo, she's
marriageable too.' He goes through a sum in addition, and the total is a
couple; so he determines on a marriage. 'You can't get it out of his
head; he must be married instantly, and to her, because she is going to
marry somebody else. Sticks to her, follows her, will have her, in spite
of her father, her marquis, her brother, aunts, cousins, religion,
country, and the young woman herself. I assure you, a perfect model of
male fidelity! She is married. He is on her track. He knows his time will
come; he has only to be handy. You see, old Nevil believes in Providence,
is perfectly sure he will one day hear it cry out, "Where's
Beauchamp?"--"Here I am!"--"And here's your marquise!"--"I knew I should
have her at last," says Nevil, calm as Mont Blanc on a reduced scale.'

The secret of Captain Baskelett's art would seem to be to show the
automatic human creature at loggerheads with a necessity that winks at
remarkable pretensions, while condemning it perpetually to doll-like
action. You look on men from your own elevation as upon a quantity of our
little wooden images, unto whom you affix puny characteristics, under
restrictions from which they shall not escape, though they attempt it
with the enterprising vigour of an extended leg, or a pair of raised
arms, or a head awry, or a trick of jumping; and some of them are
extraordinarily addicted to these feats; but for all they do the end is
the same, for necessity rules, that exactly so, under stress of activity
must the doll Nevil, the doll Everard, or the dolliest of dolls, fair
woman, behave. The automatic creature is subject to the laws of its
construction, you perceive. It can this, it can that, but it cannot leap
out of its mechanism. One definition of the art is, humour made easy, and
that may be why Cecil Baskelett indulged in it, and why it is popular
with those whose humour consists of a readiness to laugh.

The fun between Cecil Baskelett and Mr. Romfrey over the doll Nevil
threatened an intimacy and community of sentiment that alarmed Rosamund
on behalf of her darling's material prospects. She wrote to him,
entreating him to come to Steynham. Nevil Beauchamp replied to her both
frankly and shrewdly: 'I shall not pretend that I forgive my uncle
Everard, and therefore it is best for me to keep away. Have no fear. The
baron likes a man of his own tastes: they may laugh together, if it suits
them; he never could be guilty of treachery, and to disinherit me would
be that. If I were to become his open enemy to-morrow, I should look on
the estates as mine-unless I did anything to make him disrespect me. You
will not suppose it likely. I foresee I shall want money. As for Cecil, I
give him as much rope as he cares to have. I know very well Everard
Romfrey will see where the point of likeness between them stops. I apply
for a ship the moment I land.'

To test Nevil's judgement of his uncle, Rosamund ventured on showing this
letter to Mr. Romfrey. He read it, and said nothing, but subsequently
asked, from time to time, 'Has he got his ship yet?' It assured her that
Nevil was not wrong, and dispelled her notion of the vulgar imbroglio of
a rich uncle and two thirsty nephews. She was hardly less relieved in
reflecting that he could read men so soberly and accurately. The
desperation of the youth in love had rendered her one little bit doubtful
of the orderliness of his wits. After this she smiled on Cecil's
assiduities. Nevil obtained his appointment to a ship bound for the coast
of Africa to spy for slavers. He called on his uncle in London, and spent
the greater part of the hour's visit with Rosamund; seemed cured of his
passion, devoid of rancour, glad of the prospect of a run among the
slaving hulls. He and his uncle shook hands manfully, at the full
outstretch of their arms, in a way so like them, to Rosamund's
thinking--that is, in a way so unlike any other possible couple of men so
situated--that the humour of the sight eclipsed all the pleasantries of
Captain Baskelett. 'Good-bye, sir,' Nevil said heartily; and Everard
Romfrey was not behind-hand with the cordial ring of his 'Good-bye,
Nevil'; and upon that they separated. Rosamund would have been willing to
speak to her beloved of his false Renee--the Frenchwoman, she termed her,
i.e. generically false, needless to name; and one question quivered on
her tongue's tip: 'How, when she had promised to fly with you, how could
she the very next day step to the altar with him now her husband?' And,
if she had spoken it, she would have added, 'Your uncle could not have
set his face against you, had you brought her to England.' She felt
strongly the mastery Nevil Beauchamp could exercise even over his uncle
Everard. But when he was gone, unquestioned, merely caressed, it came to
her mind that he had all through insisted on his possession of this
particular power, and she accused herself of having wantonly helped to
ruin his hope--a matter to be rejoiced at in the abstract; but what
suffering she had inflicted on him! To quiet her heart, she persuaded
herself that for the future she would never fail to believe in him and
second him blindly, as true love should; and contemplating one so brave,
far-sighted, and self-assured, her determination seemed to impose the
lightest of tasks.

Practically humane though he was, and especially toward cattle and all
kinds of beasts, Mr. Romfrey entertained no profound fellow-feeling for
the negro, and, except as the representative of a certain amount of
working power commonly requiring the whip to wind it up, he inclined to
despise that black spot in the creation, with which our civilization
should never have had anything to do. So he pronounced his mind, and the
long habit of listening to oracles might grow us ears to hear and
discover a meaning in it. Nevil's captures and releases of the grinning
freights amused him for awhile. He compared them to strings of bananas,
and presently put the vision of the whole business aside by talking of
Nevil's banana-wreath. He desired to have Nevil out of it. He and Cecil
handed Nevil in his banana-wreath about to their friends. Nevil, in his
banana-wreath, was set preaching 'humanitomtity.' At any rate, they
contrived to keep the remembrance of Nevil Beauchamp alive during the
period of his disappearance from the world, and in so doing they did him
a service.

There is a pause between the descent of a diver and his return to the
surface, when those who would not have him forgotten by the better world
above him do rightly to relate anecdotes of him, if they can, and to
provoke laughter at him. The encouragement of the humane sense of
superiority over an object of interest, which laughter gives, is good for
the object; and besides, if you begin to tell sly stories of one in the
deeps who is holding his breath to fetch a pearl or two for you all, you
divert a particular sympathetic oppression of the chest, that the
extremely sensitive are apt to suffer from, and you dispose the larger
number to keep in mind a person they no longer see. Otherwise it is
likely that he will, very shortly after he has made his plunge, fatigue
the contemplative brains above, and be shuffled off them, even as great
ocean smoothes away the dear vanished man's immediate circle of foam, and
rapidly confounds the rippling memory of him with its other agitations.
And in such a case the apparition of his head upon our common level once
more will almost certainly cause a disagreeable shock; nor is it
improbable that his first natural snorts in his native element, though
they be simply to obtain his share of the breath of life, will draw down
on him condemnation for eccentric behaviour and unmannerly; and this in
spite of the jewel he brings, unless it be an exceedingly splendid one.
The reason is, that our brave world cannot pardon a breach of continuity
for any petty bribe.

Thus it chanced, owing to the prolonged efforts of Mr. Romfrey and Cecil
Baskelett to get fun out of him, at the cost of considerable
inventiveness, that the electoral Address of the candidate, signing
himself 'R. C. S. Nevil Beauchamp,' to the borough of Bevisham, did not
issue from an altogether unremembered man.

He had been cruising in the Mediterranean, commanding the Ariadne, the
smartest corvette in the service. He had, it was widely made known, met
his marquise in Palermo. It was presumed that he was dancing the round
with her still, when this amazing Address appeared on Bevisham's walls,
in anticipation of the general Election. The Address, moreover, was
ultra-Radical: museums to be opened on Sundays; ominous references to the
Land question, etc.; no smooth passing mention of Reform, such as the
Liberal, become stately, adopts in speaking of that property of his, but
swinging blows on the heads of many a denounced iniquity.

Cecil forwarded the Address to Everard Romfrey without comment.

Next day the following letter, dated from Itchincope, the house of Mr.
Grancey Lespel, on the borders of Bevisham, arrived at Steynham:

'I have despatched you the proclamation, folded neatly. The electors of
Bevisham are summoned, like a town at the sword's point, to yield him
their votes. Proclamation is the word. I am your born representative! I
have completed my political education on salt water, and I tackle you on
the Land question. I am the heir of your votes, gentlemen!--I forgot, and
I apologize; he calls them fellow-men. Fraternal, and not so risky. Here
at Lespel's we read the thing with shouts. It hangs in the smoking-room.
We throw open the curacoa to the intelligence and industry of the
assembled guests; we carry the right of the multitude to our host's
cigars by a majority. C'est un farceur que notre bon petit cousin. Lespel
says it is sailorlike to do something of this sort after a cruise.
Nevil's Radicalism would have been clever anywhere out of Bevisham. Of
all boroughs! Grancey Lespel knows it. He and his family were Bevisham's
Whig M.P.'s before the day of Manchester. In Bevisham an election is an
arrangement made by Providence to square the accounts of the voters, and
settle arrears. They reckon up the health of their two members and the
chances of an appeal to the country when they fix the rents and leases.
You have them pointed out to you in the street, with their figures
attached to them like titles. Mr. Tomkins, the twenty-pound man; an
elector of uncommon purity. I saw the ruffian yesterday. He has an extra
breadth to his hat. He has never been known to listen to a member under
L20, and is respected enormously--like the lady of the Mythology, who was
an intolerable Tartar of virtue, because her price was nothing less than
a god, and money down. Nevil will have to come down on Bevisham
in the Jupiter style. Bevisham is downright the dearest of
boroughs--"vaulting-boards," as Stukely Culbrett calls them--in the
kingdom. I assume we still say "kingdom."

'He dashed into the Radical trap exactly two hours after landing. I
believe he was on his way to the Halketts at Mount Laurels. A notorious
old rascal revolutionist retired from his licenced business of
slaughterer--one of your gratis doctors--met him on the high-road, and
told him he was the man. Up went Nevil's enthusiasm like a bottle rid of
the cork. You will see a great deal about faith in the proclamation;
"faith in the future," and "my faith in you." When you become a Radical
you have faith in any quantity, just as an alderman gets turtle soup. It
is your badge, like a livery-servant's cockade or a corporal's sleeve
stripes--your badge and your bellyful. Calculations were gone through at
the Liberal newspaper-office, old Nevil adding up hard, and he was
informed that he was elected by something like a topping eight or nine
hundred and some fractions. I am sure that a fellow who can let himself
be gulled by a pile of figures trumped up in a Radical newspaper-office
must have great faith in the fractions. Out came Nevil's proclamation.

'I have not met him, and I would rather not. I shall not pretend to offer
you advice, for I have the habit of thinking your judgement can stand by
itself. We shall all find this affair a nuisance. Nevil will pay through
the nose. We shall have the ridicule spattered on the family. It would be
a safer thing for him to invest his money on the Turf, and I shall advise
his doing it if I come across him.

'Perhaps the best course would be to telegraph for the marquise!'

This was from Cecil Baskelett. He added a postscript:

'Seriously, the "mad commander" has not an ace of a chance. Grancey and I
saw some Working Men (you have to write them in capitals, king and queen
small); they were reading the Address on a board carried by a red-nosed
man, and shrugging. They are not such fools.

'By the way, I am informed Shrapnel has a young female relative living
with him, said to be a sparkler. I bet you, sir, she is not a Radical. Do
you take me?'

Rosamund Culling drove to the railway station on her way to Bevisham
within an hour after Mr. Romfrey's eyebrows had made acute play over this
communication.




CHAPTER XII

AN INTERVIEW WITH THE INFAMOUS DR. SHRAPNEL

In the High street of the ancient and famous town and port of Bevisham,
Rosamund met the military governor of a neighbouring fortress, General
Sherwin, once colonel of her husband's regiment in India; and by him, as
it happened, she was assisted in finding the whereabout of the young
Liberal candidate, without the degrading recourse of an application at
the newspaper-office of his party. The General was leisurely walking to a
place of appointment to fetch his daughter home from a visit to an old
school-friend, a Miss Jenny Denham, no other than a ward, or a niece, or
an adoption of Dr. Shrapnel's: 'A nice girl; a great favourite of mine,'
the General said. Shrapnel he knew by reputation only as a wrong-headed
politician; but he spoke of Miss Denham pleasantly two or three times,
praising her accomplishments and her winning manners. His hearer
suspected that it might be done to dissociate the idea of her from the
ruffling agitator. 'Is she pretty?' was a question that sprang from
Rosamund's intimate reflections. The answer was, 'Yes.'

'Very pretty?'

'I think very pretty,' said the General.

'Captivatingly?'

'Clara thinks she is perfect; she is tall and slim, and dresses well. The
girls were with a French Madam in Paris. But, if you are interested about
her, you can come on with me, and we shall meet them somewhere near the
head of the street. I don't,' the General hesitated and hummed--'I don't
call at Shrapnel's.'

'I have never heard her name before to-day,' said Rosamund.

'Exactly,' said the General, crowing at the aimlessness of a woman's
curiosity.

The young ladies were seen approaching, and Rosamund had to ask herself
whether the first sight of a person like Miss Denham would be of a kind
to exercise a lively influence over the political and other sentiments of
a dreamy sailor just released from ship-service. In an ordinary case she
would have said no, for Nevil enjoyed a range of society where faces
charming as Miss Denham's were plentiful as roses in the rose-garden.
But, supposing him free of his bondage to the foreign woman, there was,
she thought and feared, a possibility that a girl of this description
might capture a young man's vacant heart sighing for a new mistress. And
if so, further observation assured her Miss Denham was likely to be
dangerous far more than professedly attractive persons, enchantresses and
the rest. Rosamund watchfully gathered all the superficial indications
which incite women to judge of character profoundly. This new object of
alarm was, as the General had said of her, tall and slim, a friend of
neatness, plainly dressed, but exquisitely fitted, in the manner of
Frenchwomen. She spoke very readily, not too much, and had the rare gift
of being able to speak fluently with a smile on the mouth. Vulgar
archness imitates it. She won and retained the eyes of her hearer
sympathetically, it seemed. Rosamund thought her as little conscious as a
woman could be. She coloured at times quickly, but without confusion.
When that name, the key of Rosamund's meditations, chanced to be
mentioned, a flush swept over Miss Denham's face. The candour of it was
unchanged as she gazed at Rosamund, with a look that asked, 'Do you know
him?'

Rosamund said, 'I am an old friend of his.'

'He is here now, in this town.'

'I wish to see him very much.'

General Sherwin interposed: 'We won't talk about political characters
just for the present.'

'I wish you knew him, papa, and would advise him,' his daughter said.

The General nodded hastily. 'By-and-by, by-and-by.'

They had in fact taken seats at a table of mutton pies in a pastrycook's
shop, where dashing military men were restrained solely by their presence
from a too noisy display of fascinations before the fashionable
waiting-women.

Rosamund looked at Miss Denham. As soon as they were in the street the
latter said, 'If you will be good enough to come with me, madam . . .?'
Rosamund bowed, thankful to have been comprehended. The two young ladies
kissed cheeks and parted. General Sherwin raised his hat, and was
astonished to see Mrs. Culling join Miss Denham in accepting the salute,
for they had not been introduced, and what could they have in common? It
was another of the oddities of female nature.

'My name is Mrs. Culling, and I will tell you how it is that I am
interested in Captain Beauchamp,' Rosamund addressed her companion. 'I am
his uncle's housekeeper. I have known him and loved him since he was a
boy. I am in great fear that he is acting rashly.'

'You honour me, madam, by speaking to me so frankly,' Miss Denham
answered.

'He is quite bent upon this Election?'

'Yes, madam. I am not, as you can suppose, in his confidence, but I hear
of him from Dr. Shrapnel.'

'Your uncle?'

'I call him uncle: he is my guardian, madam.'

It is perhaps excuseable that this communication did not cause the doctor
to shine with added lustre in Rosamund's thoughts, or ennoble the young
lady.

'You are not relatives, then?' she said.

'No, unless love can make us so.'

'Not blood-relatives?'

'No.'

'Is he not very . . . extreme?'

'He is very sincere.'

'I presume you are a politician?'

Miss Denham smiled. 'Could you pardon me, madam, if I said that I was?'
The counter-question was a fair retort enfolding a gentler irony.
Rosamund felt that she had to do with wits as well as with vivid feminine
intuitions in the person of this Miss Denham.

She said, 'I really am of opinion that our sex might abstain from
politics.'

'We find it difficult to do justice to both parties,' Miss Denham
followed. 'It seems to be a kind of clanship with women; hardly even
that.'

Rosamund was inattentive to the conversational slipshod, and launched one
of the heavy affirmatives which are in dialogue full stops. She could not
have said why she was sensible of anger, but the sentiment of anger, or
spite (if that be a lesser degree of the same affliction), became stirred
in her bosom when she listened to the ward of Dr. Shrapnel. A silly
pretty puss of a girl would not have excited it, nor an avowed
blood-relative of the demagogue.

Nevil's hotel was pointed out to Rosamund, and she left her card there.
He had been absent since eight in the morning. There was the probability
that he might be at Dr. Shrapnel's, so Rosamund walked on.

'Captain Beauchamp gives himself no rest,' Miss Denham said.

'Oh! I know him, when once his mind is set on anything,' said Rosamund.

'Is it not too early to begin to--canvass, I think, is the word?'

'He is studying whatever the town can teach him of its wants; that is,
how he may serve it.'

'Indeed! But if the town will not have him to serve it?'

'He imagines that he cannot do better, until that has been decided, than
to fit himself for the post.'

'Acting upon your advice? I mean, of course, your uncle's; that is, Dr.
Shrapnel's.'

'Dr. Shrapnel thinks it will not be loss of time for Captain Beauchamp to
grow familiar with the place, and observe as well as read.'

'It sounds almost as if Captain Beauchamp had submitted to be Dr.
Shrapnel's pupil.'

'It is natural, madam, that Dr. Shrapnel should know more of political
ways at present than Captain Beauchamp.'

'To Captain Beauchamp's friends and relatives it appears very strange
that he should have decided to contest this election so suddenly. May I
inquire whether he and Dr. Shrapnel are old acquaintances?'

'No, madam, they are not. They had never met before Captain Beauchamp
landed, the other day.'

'I am surprised, I confess. I cannot understand the nature of an
influence that induces him to abandon a profession he loves and shines
in, for politics, at a moment's notice.'

Miss Denham was silent, and then said:

'I will tell you, madam, how it occurred, as far as circumstances explain
it. Dr. Shrapnel is accustomed to give a little country feast to the
children I teach, and their parents if they choose to come, and they
generally do. They are driven to Northeden Heath, where we set up a booth
for them, and try with cakes and tea and games to make them spend one of
their happy afternoons and evenings. We succeed, I know, for the little
creatures talk of it and look forward to the day. When they are at their
last romp, Dr. Shrapnel speaks to the parents.'

'Can he obtain a hearing?' Rosamund asked.

'He has not so very large a crowd to address, madam, and he is much
beloved by those that come.'

'He speaks to them of politics on those occasions?'

'Adouci a leur intention. It is not a political speech, but Dr. Shrapnel
thinks, that in a so-called free country seeking to be really free, men
of the lowest class should be educated in forming a political judgement.'

'And women too?'

'And women, yes. Indeed, madam, we notice that the women listen very
creditably.'

'They can put on the air.'

'I am afraid, not more than the men do. To get them to listen is
something. They suffer like the men, and must depend on their
intelligence to win their way out of it.'

Rosamund's meditation was exclamatory: What can be the age of this
pretentious girl?

An afterthought turned her more conciliatorily toward the person, but
less to the subject. She was sure that she was lending ear to the echo of
the dangerous doctor, and rather pitied Miss Denham for awhile,
reflecting that a young woman stuffed with such ideas would find it hard
to get a husband. Mention of Nevil revived her feeling of hostility.

We had seen a gentleman standing near and listening attentively,' Miss
Denham resumed, 'and when Dr. Shrapnel concluded a card was handed to
him. He read it and gave it to me, and said, "You know that name." It was
a name we had often talked about during the war.

He went to Captain Beauchamp and shook his hand. He does not pay many
compliments, and he does not like to receive them, but it was impossible
for him not to be moved by Captain Beauchamp's warmth in thanking him for
the words he had spoken. I saw that Dr. Shrapnel became interested in
Captain Beauchamp the longer they conversed. We walked home together.
Captain Beauchamp supped with us. I left them at half-past eleven at
night, and in the morning I found them walking in the garden. They had
not gone to bed at all. Captain Beauchamp has remained in Bevisham ever
since. He soon came to the decision to be a candidate for the borough.'

Rosamund checked her lips from uttering: To be a puppet of Dr.
Shrapnel's!

She remarked, 'He is very eloquent--Dr. Shrapnel?'

Miss Denham held some debate with herself upon the term.

'Perhaps it is not eloquence; he often . . . no, he is not an orator.'

Rosamund suggested that he was persuasive, possibly.

Again the young lady deliberately weighed the word, as though the nicest
measure of her uncle or adoptor's quality in this or that direction were
in requisition and of importance--an instance of a want of delicacy of
perception Rosamund was not sorry to detect. For good-looking,
refined-looking, quick-witted girls can be grown; but the nimble sense of
fitness, ineffable lightning-footed tact, comes of race and breeding, and
she was sure Nevil was a man soon to feel the absence of that.

'Dr. Shrapnel is persuasive to those who go partly with him, or whose
condition of mind calls on him for great patience,' Miss Denham said at
last.

'I am only trying to comprehend how it was that he should so rapidly have
won Captain Beauchamp to his views,' Rosamund explained; and the young
lady did not reply.

Dr. Shrapnel's house was about a mile beyond the town, on a common of
thorn and gorse, through which the fir-bordered highway ran. A fence
waist-high enclosed its plot of meadow and garden, so that the doctor,
while protecting his own, might see and be seen of the world, as was the
case when Rosamund approached. He was pacing at long slow strides along
the gravel walk, with his head bent and bare, and his hands behind his
back, accompanied by a gentleman who could be no other than Nevil,
Rosamund presumed to think; but drawing nearer she found she was
mistaken.

'That is not Captain Beauchamp's figure,' she said.

'No, it is not he,' said Miss Denham.

Rosamund saw that her companion was pale. She warmed to her at once; by
no means on account of the pallor in itself.

'I have walked too fast for you, I fear.'

'Oh no; I am accused of being a fast walker.'

Rosamund was unwilling to pass through the demagogue's gate. On second
thoughts, she reflected that she could hardly stipulate to have news of
Nevil tossed to her over the spikes, and she entered.

While receiving Dr. Shrapnel's welcome to a friend of Captain Beauchamp,
she observed the greeting between Miss Denham and the younger gentleman.
It reassured her. They met like two that have a secret.

The dreaded doctor was an immoderately tall man, lean and wiry,
carelessly clad in a long loose coat of no colour, loose trowsers, and
huge shoes.

He stooped from his height to speak, or rather swing the stiff upper half
of his body down to his hearer's level and back again, like a ship's mast
on a billowy sea. He was neither rough nor abrupt, nor did he roar
bullmouthedly as demagogues are expected to do, though his voice was
deep. He was actually, after his fashion, courteous, it could be said of
him, except that his mind was too visibly possessed by distant matters
for Rosamund's taste, she being accustomed to drawing-room and hunting
and military gentlemen, who can be all in the words they utter.
Nevertheless he came out of his lizard-like look with the down-dropped
eyelids quick at a resumption of the dialogue; sometimes gesturing,
sweeping his arm round. A stubborn tuft of iron-grey hair fell across his
forehead, and it was apparently one of his life's labours to get it to
lie amid the mass, for his hand rarely ceased to be in motion without an
impulsive stroke at the refractory forelock. He peered through his
eyelashes ordinarily, but from no infirmity of sight. The truth was, that
the man's nature counteracted his spirit's intenser eagerness and
restlessness by alternating a state of repose that resembled dormancy,
and so preserved him. Rosamund was obliged to give him credit for
straightforward eyes when they did look out and flash. Their filmy blue,
half overflown with grey by age, was poignant while the fire in them
lasted. Her antipathy attributed something electrical to the light they
shot.

Dr. Shrapnel's account of Nevil stated him to have gone to call on
Colonel Halkett, a new resident at Mount Laurels, on the Otley river. He
offered the welcome of his house to the lady who was Captain Beauchamp's
friend, saying, with extraordinary fatuity (so it sounded in Rosamund's
ears), that Captain Beauchamp would certainly not let an evening pass
without coming to him. Rosamund suggested that he might stay late at
Mount Laurels.

'Then he will arrive here after nightfall,' said the doctor. 'A bed is at
your service, ma'am.'

The offer was declined. 'I should like to have seen him to-day; but he
will be home shortly.'

'He will not quit Bevisham till this Election's decided unless to hunt a
stray borough vote, ma'am.'

'He goes to Mount Laurels.

'For that purpose.'

'I do not think he will persuade Colonel Halkett to vote in the Radical
interest.'

'That is the probability with a landed proprietor, ma'am. We must knock,
whether the door opens or not. Like,' the doctor laughed to himself up
aloft, 'like a watchman in the night to say that he smells smoke on the
premises.'

'Surely we may expect Captain Beauchamp to consult his family about so
serious a step as this he is taking,' Rosamund said, with an effort to be
civil.

Why should he?' asked the impending doctor.

His head continued in the interrogative position when it had resumed its
elevation. The challenge for a definite reply to so outrageous a question
irritated Rosamund's nerves, and, loth though she was to admit him to the
subject, she could not forbear from saying, 'Why? Surely his family have
the first claim on him!'

'Surely not, ma'am. There is no first claim. A man's wife and children
have a claim on him for bread. A man's parents have a claim on him for
obedience while he is a child. A man's uncles, aunts, and cousins have no
claim on him at all, except for help in necessity, which he can grant and
they require. None--wife, children, parents, relatives--none has a claim
to bar his judgement and his actions. Sound the conscience, and sink the
family! With a clear conscience, it is best to leave the family to its
own debates. No man ever did brave work who held counsel with his family.
The family view of a man's fit conduct is the weak point of the country.
It is no other view than, "Better thy condition for our sakes." Ha! In
this way we breed sheep, fatten oxen: men are dying off. Resolution
taken, consult the family means--waste your time! Those who go to it want
an excuse for altering their minds. The family view is everlastingly the
shopkeeper's! Purse, pence, ease, increase of worldly goods, personal
importance--the pound, the English pound! Dare do that, and you forfeit
your share of Port wine in this world; you won't be dubbed with a title;
you'll be fingered at! Lord, Lord! is it the region inside a man, or out,
that gives him peace? Out, they say; for they have lost faith in the
existence of an inner. They haven't it. Air-sucker, blood-pump, cooking
machinery, and a battery of trained instincts, aptitudes, fill up their
vacuum. I repeat, ma'am, why should young Captain Beauchamp spend an hour
consulting his family? They won't approve him; he knows it. They may
annoy him; and what is the gain of that? They can't move him; on that I
let my right hand burn. So it would be useless on both sides. He thinks
so. So do I. He is one of the men to serve his country on the best field
we can choose for him. In a ship's cabin he is thrown away. Ay, ay, War,
and he may go aboard. But now we must have him ashore. Too few of such as
he!'

'It is matter of opinion,' said Rosamund, very tightly compressed;
scarcely knowing what she said.

How strange, besides hateful, it was to her to hear her darling spoken of
by a stranger who not only pretended to appreciate but to possess him! A
stranger, a man of evil, with monstrous ideas! A terribly strong
inexhaustible man, of a magical power too; or would he otherwise have won
such a mastery over Nevil?

Of course she could have shot a rejoinder, to confute him with all the
force of her indignation, save that the words were tumbling about in her
head like a world in disruption, which made her feel a weakness at the
same time that she gloated on her capacity, as though she had an enormous
army, quite overwhelming if it could but be got to move in advance. This
very common condition of the silent-stricken, unused in dialectics,
heightened Rosamund's disgust by causing her to suppose that Nevil had
been similarly silenced, in his case vanquished, captured, ruined; and he
dwindled in her estimation for a moment or two. She felt that among a
sisterhood of gossips she would soon have found her voice, and struck
down the demagogue's audacious sophisms: not that they affected her in
the slightest degree for her own sake.

Shrapnel might think what he liked, and say what he liked, as far as she
was concerned, apart from the man she loved. Rosamund went through these
emotions altogether on Nevil's behalf, and longed for her affirmatizing
inspiring sisterhood until the thought of them threw another shade on
him.

What champion was she to look to? To whom but to Mr. Everard Romfrey?

It was with a spasm of delighted reflection that she hit on Mr. Romfrey.
He was like a discovery to her. With his strength and skill, his robust
common sense and rough shrewd wit, his prompt comparisons, his chivalry,
his love of combat, his old knightly blood, was not he a match, and an
overmatch, for the ramping Radical who had tangled Nevil in his rough
snares? She ran her mind over Mr. Romfrey's virtues, down even to his
towering height and breadth. Could she but once draw these two giants
into collision in Nevil's presence, she was sure it would save him. The
method of doing it she did not stop to consider: she enjoyed her triumph
in the idea.

Meantime she had passed from Dr. Shrapnel to Miss Denham, and carried on
a conversation becomingly.

Tea had been made in the garden, and she had politely sipped half a cup,
which involved no step inside the guilty house, and therefore no distress
to her antagonism. The sun descended. She heard the doctor reciting.
Could it be poetry? In her imagination the sombre hues surrounding an
incendiary opposed that bright spirit. She listened, smiling
incredulously. Miss Denham could interpret looks, and said, 'Dr. Shrapnel
is very fond of those verses.'

Rosamund's astonishment caused her to say, 'Are they his own?'--a piece
of satiric innocency at which Miss Denham laughed softly as she answered,
'No.'

Rosamund pleaded that she had not heard them with any distinctness.

'Are they written by the gentleman at his side?'

'Mr. Lydiard? No. He writes, but the verses are not his.'

'Does he know--has he met Captain Beauchamp?'

'Yes, once. Captain Beauchamp has taken a great liking to his works.'

Rosamund closed her eyes, feeling that she was in a nest that had
determined to appropriate Nevil. But at any rate there was the hope and
the probability that this Mr. Lydiard of the pen had taken a long start
of Nevil in the heart of Miss Denham: and struggling to be candid, to
ensure some meditative satisfaction, Rosamund admitted to herself that
the girl did not appear to be one of the wanton giddy-pated pusses who
play two gentlemen or more on their line. Appearances, however, could be
deceptive: never pretend to know a girl by her face, was one of
Rosamund's maxims.

She was next informed of Dr. Shrapnel's partiality for music toward the
hour of sunset. Miss Denham mentioned it, and the doctor, presently
sauntering up, invited Rosamund to a seat on a bench near the open window
of the drawing-room. He nodded to his ward to go in.

'I am a fire-worshipper, ma'am,' he said. 'The God of day is the father
of poetry, medicine, music: our best friend. See him there! My Jenny will
spin a thread from us to him over the millions of miles, with one touch
of the chords, as quick as he shoots a beam on us. Ay! on her wretched
tinkler called a piano, which tries at the whole orchestra and murders
every instrument in the attempt. But it's convenient, like our modern
civilization--a taming and a diminishing of individuals for an insipid
harmony!'

'You surely do not object to the organ?--I fear I cannot wait, though,'
said Rosamund.

Miss Denham entreated her. 'Oh! do, madam. Not to hear me--I am not so
perfect a player that I should wish it--but to see him. Captain Beauchamp
may now be coming at any instant.'

Mr. Lydiard added, 'I have an appointment with him here for this
evening.'

'You build a cathedral of sound in the organ,' said Dr. Shrapnel, casting
out a league of leg as he sat beside his only half-persuaded fretful
guest. 'You subject the winds to serve you; that's a gain. You do
actually accomplish a resonant imitation of the various instruments; they
sing out as your two hands command them--trumpet, flute, dulcimer,
hautboy, drum, storm, earthquake, ethereal quire; you have them at your
option. But tell me of an organ in the open air? The sublimity would
vanish, ma'am, both from the notes and from the structure, because
accessories and circumstances produce its chief effects. Say that an
organ is a despotism, just as your piano is the Constitutional bourgeois.
Match them with the trained orchestral band of skilled individual
performers, indoors or out, where each grasps his instrument, and each
relies on his fellow with confidence, and an unrivalled concord comes of
it. That is our republic each one to his work; all in union! There's the
motto for us! Then you have music, harmony, the highest, fullest, finest!
Educate your men to form a band, you shame dexterous trickery and
imitation sounds. Then for the difference of real instruments from clever
shams! Oh, ay, one will set your organ going; that is, one in front, with
his couple of panting air-pumpers behind--his ministers!' Dr. Shrapnel
laughed at some undefined mental image, apparently careless of any
laughing companionship. 'One will do it for you, especially if he's born
to do it. Born!' A slap of the knee reported what seemed to be an
immensely contemptuous sentiment. 'But free mouths blowing into brass and
wood, ma'am, beat your bellows and your whifflers; your artificial
choruses--crash, crash! your unanimous plebiscitums! Beat them? There's
no contest: we're in another world; we're in the sun's world,--yonder!'

Miss Denham's opening notes on the despised piano put a curb on the
doctor. She began a Mass of Mozart's, without the usual preliminary
rattle of the keys, as of a crier announcing a performance, straight to
her task, for which Rosamund thanked her, liking that kind of composed
simplicity: she thanked her more for cutting short the doctor's fanatical
nonsense. It was perceptible to her that a species of mad metaphor had
been wriggling and tearing its passage through a thorn-bush in his
discourse, with the furious urgency of a sheep in a panic; but where the
ostensible subject ended and the metaphor commenced, and which was which
at the conclusion, she found it difficult to discern--much as the sheep
would, be when he had left his fleece behind him. She could now have
said, 'Silly old man!'

Dr. Shrapnel appeared most placable. He was gazing at his Authority in
the heavens, tangled among gold clouds and purple; his head bent acutely
on one side, and his eyes upturned in dim speculation. His great feet
planted on their heels faced him, suggesting the stocks; his arms hung
loose. Full many a hero of the alehouse, anciently amenable to
leg-and-foot imprisonment in the grip of the parish, has presented as
respectable an air. His forelock straggled as it willed.

Rosamund rose abruptly as soon as the terminating notes of the Mass had
been struck.

Dr. Shrapnel seemed to be concluding his devotions before he followed her
example.

'There, ma'am, you have a telegraphic system for the soul,' he said. 'It
is harder work to travel from this place to this' (he pointed at ear and
breast) 'than from here to yonder' (a similar indication traversed the
distance between earth and sun). 'Man's aim has hitherto been to keep men
from having a soul for this world: he takes it for something infernal.
He?--I mean, they that hold power. They shudder to think the conservatism
of the earth will be shaken by a change; they dread they won't get men
with souls to fetch and carry, dig, root, mine, for them. Right!--what
then? Digging and mining will be done; so will harping and singing. But
then we have a natural optimacy! Then, on the one hand, we whip the
man-beast and the man-sloth; on the other, we seize that old fatted
iniquity--that tyrant! that tempter! that legitimated swindler cursed of
Christ! that palpable Satan whose name is Capital! by the neck, and have
him disgorging within three gasps of his life. He is the villain! Let him
live, for he too comes of blood and bone. He shall not grind the faces of
the poor and helpless--that's all.'

The comicality of her having such remarks addressed to her provoked a
smile on Rosamund's lips.

'Don't go at him like Samson blind,' said Mr. Lydiard; and Miss Denham,
who had returned, begged her guardian to entreat the guest to stay.

She said in an undertone, 'I am very anxious you should see Captain
Beauchamp, madam.'

'I too; but he will write, and I really can wait no longer,' Rosamund
replied, in extreme apprehension lest a certain degree of pressure should
overbear her repugnance to the doctor's dinner-table. Miss Denham's look
was fixed on her; but, whatever it might mean, Rosamund's endurance was
at an end. She was invited to dine; she refused. She was exceedingly glad
to find herself on the high-road again, with a prospect of reaching
Steynham that night; for it was important that she should not have to
confess a visit to Bevisham now when she had so little of favourable to
tell Mr. Everard Romfrey of his chosen nephew. Whether she had acted
quite wisely in not remaining to see Nevil, was an agitating question
that had to be silenced by an appeal to her instincts of repulsion, and a
further appeal for justification of them to her imaginary sisterhood of
gossips. How could she sit and eat, how pass an evening in that house, in
the society of that man? Her tuneful chorus cried, 'How indeed.' Besides,
it would have offended Mr. Romfrey to hear that she had done so. Still
she could not refuse to remember Miss Denham's marked intimations of
there being a reason for Nevil's friend to seize the chance of an
immediate interview with him; and in her distress at the thought,
Rosamund reluctantly, but as if compelled by necessity, ascribed the
young lady's conduct to a strong sense of personal interests.

'Evidently she has no desire he should run the risk of angering a rich
uncle.'

This shameful suspicion was unavoidable: there was no other opiate for
Rosamund's blame of herself after letting her instincts gain the
ascendancy.

It will be found a common case, that when we have yielded to our
instincts, and then have to soothe conscience, we must slaughter
somebody, for a sacrificial offering to our sense of comfort.




CHAPTER XIII

A SUPERFINE CONSCIENCE

However much Mr. Everard Romfrey may have laughed at Nevil Beauchamp with
his 'banana-wreath,' he liked the fellow for having volunteered for that
African coast-service, and the news of his promotion by his admiral to
the post of commander through a death vacancy, had given him an exalted
satisfaction, for as he could always point to the cause of failures, he
strongly appreciated success. The circumstance had offered an occasion
for the new commander to hit him hard upon a matter of fact. Beauchamp
had sent word of his advance in rank, but requested his uncle not to
imagine him wearing an additional epaulette; and he corrected the
infallible gentleman's error (which had of course been reported to him
when he was dreaming of Renee, by Mrs. Culling) concerning a lieutenant's
shoulder decorations, most gravely; informing him of the anchor on the
lieutenant's pair of epaulettes, and the anchor and star on a
commander's, and the crown on a captain's, with a well-feigned
solicitousness to save his uncle from blundering further. This was done
in the dry neat manner which Mr. Romfrey could feel to be his own turned
on him.

He began to conceive a vague respect for the fellow who had proved him
wrong upon a matter of fact. Beauchamp came from Africa rather worn by
the climate, and immediately obtained the command of the Ariadne
corvette, which had been some time in commission in the Mediterranean,
whither he departed, without visiting Steynham; allowing Rosamund to
think him tenacious of his wrath as well as of love. Mr. Romfrey
considered him to be insatiable for service. Beauchamp, during his
absence, had shown himself awake to the affairs of his country once only,
in an urgent supplication he had forwarded for all his uncle's influence
to be used to get him appointed to the first vacancy in Robert Hall's
naval brigade, then forming a part of our handful in insurgent India. The
fate of that chivalrous Englishman, that born sailor-warrior, that truest
of heroes, imperishable in the memory of those who knew him, and in our
annals, young though he was when death took him, had wrung from Nevil
Beauchamp such a letter of tears as to make Mr. Romfrey believe the naval
crown of glory his highest ambition. Who on earth could have guessed him
to be bothering his head about politics all the while! Or was the whole
stupid business a freak of the moment?

It became necessary for Mr. Romfrey to contemplate his eccentric nephew
in the light of a mannikin once more. Consequently he called to mind, and
bade Rosamund Culling remember, that he had foreseen and had predicted
the mounting of Nevil Beauchamp on his political horse one day or
another; and perhaps the earlier the better. And a donkey could have
sworn that when he did mount he would come galloping in among the Radical
rough-riders. Letters were pouring upon Steynham from men and women of
Romfrey blood and relationship concerning the positive tone of Radicalism
in the commander's address. Everard laughed at them. As a practical man,
his objection lay against the poor fool's choice of the peccant borough
of Bevisham. Still, in view of the needfulness of his learning wisdom,
and rapidly, the disbursement of a lot of his money, certain to be
required by Bevisham's electors, seemed to be the surest method for
quickening his wits. Thus would he be acting as his own chirurgeon, gaily
practising phlebotomy on his person to cure him of his fever. Too much
money was not the origin of the fever in Nevil's case, but he had too
small a sense of the value of what he possessed, and the diminishing
stock would be likely to cry out shrilly.

To this effect, never complaining that Nevil Beauchamp had not come to
him to take counsel with him, the high-minded old gentleman talked. At
the same time, while indulging in so philosophical a picture of himself
as was presented by a Romfrey mildly accounting for events and smoothing
them under the infliction of an offence, he could not but feel that Nevil
had challenged him: such was the reading of it; and he waited for some
justifiable excitement to fetch him out of the magnanimous mood, rather
in the image of an angler, it must be owned.

'Nevil understands that I am not going to pay a farthing of his expenses
in Bevisham?' he said to Mrs. Culling.

She replied blandly and with innocence, 'I have not seen him, sir.'

He nodded. At the next mention of Nevil between them, he asked, 'Where is
it he's lying perdu, ma'am?'

'I fancy in that town, in Bevisham.'

'At the Liberal, Radical, hotel?'

'I dare say; some place; I am not certain . . . .'

'The rascal doctor's house there? Shrapnel's?'

'Really . . . I have not seen him.'

'Have you heard from him?'

'I have had a letter; a short one.'

'Where did he date his letter from?'

'From Bevisham.'

'From what house?'

Rosamund glanced about for a way of escaping the question. There was none
but the door. She replied, 'From Dr. Shrapnel's.'

'That's the Anti-Game-Law agitator.'

'You do not imagine, sir, that Nevil subscribes to every thing the horrid
man agitates for?'

'You don't like the man, ma'am?'

'I detest him.'

'Ha! So you have seen Shrapnel?'

'Only for a moment; a moment or two. I cannot endure him. I am sure I
have reason.'

Rosamund flushed exceedingly red. The visit to Dr. Shrapnel's house was
her secret, and the worming of it out made her feel guilty, and that
feeling revived and heated her antipathy to the Radical doctor.

'What reason?' said Mr. Romfrey, freshening at her display of colour.

She would not expose Nevil to the accusation of childishness by
confessing her positive reason, so she answered, 'The man is a kind of
man . . . I was not there long; I was glad to escape. He . . .' she
hesitated: for in truth it was difficult to shape the charge against him,
and the effort to be reticent concerning Nevil, and communicative, now
that he had been spoken of, as to the detested doctor, reduced her to
some confusion. She was also fatally anxious to be in the extreme degree
conscientious, and corrected and modified her remarks most suspiciously.

'Did he insult you, ma'am?' Mr. Romfrey inquired.

She replied hastily, 'Oh no. He may be a good man in his way. He is one
of those men who do not seem to think a woman may have opinions. He does
not scruple to outrage those we hold. I am afraid he is an infidel. His
ideas of family duties and ties, and his manner of expressing himself,
shocked me, that is all. He is absurd. I dare say there is no harm in
him, except for those who are so unfortunate as to fall under his
influence--and that, I feel sure, cannot be permanent. He could not
injure me personally. He could not offend me, I mean. Indeed, I have
nothing whatever to say against him, as far as I . . .'

'Did he fail to treat you as a lady, ma'am?'

Rosamund was getting frightened by the significant pertinacity of her
lord.

'I am sure, sir, he meant no harm.'

'Was the man uncivil to you, ma'am?' came the emphatic interrogation.

She asked herself, had Dr. Shrapnel been uncivil toward her? And so
conscientious was she, that she allowed the question to be debated in her
mind for half a minute, answering then, 'No, not uncivil. I cannot
exactly explain . . . . He certainly did not intend to be uncivil. He is
only an unpolished, vexatious man; enormously tall.'

Mr. Romfrey ejaculated, 'Ha! humph!'

His view of Dr. Shrapnel was taken from that instant. It was, that this
enormously big blustering agitator against the preservation of birds, had
behaved rudely toward the lady officially the chief of his household, and
might be considered in the light of an adversary one would like to meet.
The size of the man increased his aspect of villany, which in return
added largely to his giant size. Everard Romfrey's mental eye could
perceive an attractiveness about the man little short of magnetic; for he
thought of him so much that he had to think of what was due to his
pacifical disposition (deeply believed in by him) to spare himself the
trouble of a visit to Bevisham.

The young gentleman whom he regarded as the Radical doctor's dupe, fell
in for a share of his view of the doctor, and Mr. Romfrey became less
fitted to observe Nevil Beauchamp's doings with the Olympian gravity he
had originally assumed.

The extreme delicacy of Rosamund's conscience was fretted by a remorseful
doubt of her having conveyed a just impression of Dr. Shrapnel, somewhat
as though the fine sleek coat of it were brushed the wrong way.
Reflection warned her that her deliberative intensely sincere pause
before she responded to Mr. Romfrey's last demand, might have implied
more than her words. She consoled herself with the thought that it was
the dainty susceptibility of her conscientiousness which caused these
noble qualms, and so deeply does a refined nature esteem the gift, that
her pride in it helped her to overlook her moral perturbation. She was
consoled, moreover, up to the verge of triumph in her realization of the
image of a rivalling and excelling power presented by Mr. Romfrey, though
it had frightened her at the time. Let not Dr. Shrapnel come across him!
She hoped he would not. Ultimately she could say to herself, 'Perhaps I
need not have been so annoyed with the horrid man.' It was on Nevil's
account. Shrapnel's contempt of the claims of Nevil's family upon him was
actually a piece of impudence, impudently expressed, if she remembered
correctly. And Shrapnel was a black malignant, the foe of the nation's
Constitution, deserving of punishment if ever man was; with his
ridiculous metaphors, and talk of organs and pianos, orchestras and
despotisms, and flying to the sun! How could Nevil listen to the
creature! Shrapnel must be a shameless, hypocrite to mask his wickedness
from one so clear-sighted as Nevil, and no doubt he indulged in his
impudence out of wanton pleasure in it. His business was to catch young
gentlemen of family, and to turn them against their families, plainly.
That was thinking the best of him. No doubt he had his objects to gain.
'He might have been as impudent as he liked to me; I would have pardoned
him!' Rosamund exclaimed. Personally, you see, she was generous. On the
whole, knowing Everard Romfrey as she did, she wished that she had
behaved, albeit perfectly discreet in her behaviour, and conscientiously
just, a shade or two differently. But the evil was done.




CHAPTER XIV

THE LEADING ARTICLE AND MR. TIMOTHY TURBOT

Nevil declined to come to Steynham, clearly owing to a dread of hearing
Dr. Shrapnel abused, as Rosamund judged by the warmth of his written
eulogies of the man, and an ensuing allusion to Game. He said that he had
not made up his mind as to the Game Laws. Rosamund mentioned the fact to
Mr. Romfrey. 'So we may stick by our licences to shoot to-morrow,' he
rejoined. Of a letter that he also had received from Nevil, he did not
speak. She hinted at it, and he stared. He would have deemed it as vain a
subject to discourse of India, or Continental affairs, at a period when
his house was full for the opening day of sport, and the expectation of
keeping up his renown for great bags on that day so entirely occupied his
mind. Good shots were present who had contributed to the fame of Steynham
on other opening days. Birds were plentiful and promised not to be too
wild. He had the range of the Steynham estate in his eye, dotted with
covers; and after Steynham, Holdesbury, which had never yielded him the
same high celebrity, but both lay mapped out for action under the
profound calculations of the strategist, ready to show the skill of the
field tactician. He could not attend to Nevil. Even the talk of the
forthcoming Elections, hardly to be avoided at his table, seemed a
puerile distraction. Ware the foe of his partridges and pheasants, be it
man or vermin! The name of Shrapnel was frequently on the tongue of
Captain Baskelett. Rosamund heard him, in her room, and his derisive
shouts of laughter over it. Cecil was a fine shot, quite as fond of the
pastime as his uncle, and always in favour with him while sport stalked
the land. He was in gallant spirits, and Rosamund, brooding over Nevil's
fortunes, and sitting much alone, as she did when there were guests in
the house, gave way to her previous apprehensions. She touched on them to
Mr. Stukely Culbrett, her husband's old friend, one of those happy men
who enjoy perceptions without opinions, and are not born to administer
comfort to other than themselves. As far as she could gather, he fancied
Nevil Beauchamp was in danger of something, but he delivered his mind
only upon circumstances and characters: Nevil risked his luck, Cecil knew
his game, Everard Romfrey was the staunchest of mankind: Stukely had
nothing further to say regarding the situation. She asked him what he
thought, and he smiled. Could a reasonable head venture to think anything
in particular? He repeated the amazed, 'You don't say so' of Colonel
Halkett, on hearing the name of the new Liberal candidate for Bevisham at
the dinner-table, together with some of Cecil's waggish embroidery upon
the theme.

Rosamund exclaimed angrily, 'Oh! if I had been there he would not have
dared.'

'Why not be there?' said Stukely. 'You have had your choice for a number
of years.'

She shook her head, reddening.

But supposing that she had greater privileges than were hers now? The
idea flashed. A taint of personal pique, awakened by the fancied
necessity for putting her devotedness to Nevil to proof, asked her if she
would then be the official housekeeper to whom Captain Baskelett bowed
low with affected respect and impertinent affability, ironically praising
her abroad as a wonder among women, that could at one time have played
the deuce in the family, had she chosen to do so.

'Just as you like,' Mr. Culbrett remarked. It was his ironical habit of
mind to believe that the wishes of men and women--women as well as
men--were expressed by their utterances.

'But speak of Nevil to Colonel Halkett,' said Rosamund, earnestly
carrying on what was in her heart. 'Persuade the colonel you do not think
Nevil foolish--not more than just a little impetuous. I want that
marriage to come off! Not on account of her wealth. She is to inherit a
Welsh mine from her uncle, you know, besides being an only child. Recall
what Nevil was during the war. Miss Halkett has not forgotten it, I am
sure, and a good word for him from a man of the world would, I am
certain, counteract Captain Baskelett's--are they designs? At any rate,
you can if you like help Nevil with the colonel. I am convinced they are
doing him a mischief. Colonel Halkett has bought an estate--and what a
misfortune that is!--close to Bevisham. I fancy he is Toryish. Will you
not speak to him? At my request? I am so helpless I could cry.

'Fancy you have no handkerchief,' said Mr. Culbrett, 'and give up
scheming, pray. One has only to begin to scheme, to shorten life to
half-a-dozen hops and jumps. I could say to the colonel, "Young
Beauchamp's a political cub: he ought to have a motherly wife."'

'Yes, yes, you are right; don't speak to him at all,' said Rosamund,
feeling that there must be a conspiracy to rob her of her proud
independence, since not a soul could be won to spare her from taking some
energetic step, if she would be useful to him she loved.

Colonel Halkett was one of the guests at Steynham who knew and respected
her, and he paid her a visit and alluded to Nevil's candidature,
apparently not thinking much the worse of him. 'We can't allow him to
succeed,' he said, and looked for a smiling approval of such natural
opposition, which Rosamund gave him readily after he had expressed the
hope that Nevil Beauchamp would take advantage of his proximity to Mount
Laurels during the contest to try the hospitality of the house. 'He won't
mind meeting his uncle?' The colonel's eyes twinkled. 'My daughter has
engaged Mr. Romfrey and Captain Baskelett to come to us when they have
shot Holdesbury.'

And Captain Baskelett! thought Rosamund; her jealousy whispering that the
mention of his name close upon Cecilia Halkett's might have a nuptial
signification.

She was a witness from her window--a prisoner's window, her 'eager heart
could have termed it--of a remarkable ostentation of cordiality between
the colonel and Cecil, in the presence of Mr. Romfrey. Was it his humour
to conspire to hand Miss Halkett to Cecil, and then to show Nevil the
prize he had forfeited by his folly? The three were on the lawn a little
before Colonel Halkett's departure. The colonel's arm was linked with
Cecil's while they conversed. Presently the latter received his
afternoon's letters, and a newspaper. He soon had the paper out at a
square stretch, and sprightly information for the other two was visible
in his crowing throat. Mr. Romfrey raised the gun from his shoulder-pad,
and grounded it. Colonel Halkett wished to peruse the matter with his own
eyes, but Cecil could not permit it; he must read it aloud for them, and
he suited his action to his sentences. Had Rosamund been accustomed to
leading articles which are the composition of men of an imposing
vocabulary, she would have recognized and as good as read one in Cecil's
gestures as he tilted his lofty stature forward and back, marking his
commas and semicolons with flapping of his elbows, and all but doubling
his body at his periods. Mr. Romfrey had enough of it half-way down the
column; his head went sharply to left and right. Cecil's peculiar foppish
slicing down of his hand pictured him protesting that there was more and
finer of the inimitable stuff to follow. The end of the scene exhibited
the paper on the turf, and Colonel Halkett's hand on Cecil's shoulder,
Mr. Romfrey nodding some sort of acquiescence over the muzzle of his gun,
whether reflective or positive Rosamund could not decide. She sent out a
footman for the paper, and was presently communing with its eloquent
large type, quite unable to perceive where the comicality or the
impropriety of it lay, for it would have struck her that never were truer
things of Nevil Beauchamp better said in the tone befitting them. This
perhaps was because she never heard fervid praises of him, or of anybody,
delivered from the mouth, and it is not common to hear Englishmen
phrasing great eulogies of one another. Still, as a rule, they do not
object to have it performed in that region of our national eloquence, the
Press, by an Irishman or a Scotchman. And what could there be to warrant
Captain Baskelett's malicious derision, and Mr. Romfrey's nodding assent
to it, in an article where all was truth?

The truth was mounted on an unusually high wind. It was indeed a leading
article of a banner-like bravery, and the unrolling of it was designed to
stir emotions. Beauchamp was the theme. Nevil had it under his eyes
earlier than Cecil. The paper was brought into his room with the beams of
day, damp from the presses of the Bevisham Gazette, exactly opposite to
him in the White Hart Hotel, and a glance at the paragraphs gave him a
lively ardour to spring to his feet. What writing! He was uplifted as
'The heroical Commander Beauchamp, of the Royal Navy,' and 'Commander
Beauchamp, R.N., a gentleman of the highest connections': he was 'that
illustrious Commander Beauchamp, of our matchless, navy, who proved on
every field of the last glorious war of this country that the traditional
valour of the noble and indomitable blood transmitted to his veins had
lost none of its edge and weight since the battle-axes of the Lords de
Romfrey, ever to the fore, clove the skulls of our national enemy on the
wide and fertile campaigns of France.' This was pageantry.

There was more of it. Then the serious afflatus of the article
condescended, as it were, to blow a shrill and well-known whistle:--the
study of the science of navigation made by Commander Beauchamp, R.N., was
cited for a jocose warranty of a seaman's aptness to assist in steering
the Vessel of the State. After thus heeling over, to tip a familiar wink
to the multitude, the leader tone resumed its fit deportment. Commander
Beauchamp, in responding to the invitation of the great and united
Liberal party of the borough of Bevisham, obeyed the inspirations of
genius, the dictates of humanity, and what he rightly considered the
paramount duty, as it is the proudest ambition, of the citizen of a free
country.

But for an occasional drop and bump of the sailing gasbag upon
catch-words of enthusiasm, which are the rhetoric of the merely windy,
and a collapse on a poetic line, which too often signalizes the
rhetorician's emptiness of his wind, the article was eminent for flight,
sweep, and dash, and sailed along far more grandly than ordinary
provincial organs for the promoting or seconding of public opinion, that
are as little to be compared with the mighty metropolitan as are the fife
and bugle boys practising on their instruments round melancholy outskirts
of garrison towns with the regimental marching full band under the
presidency of its drum-major. No signature to the article was needed for
Bevisham to know who had returned to the town to pen it. Those
long-stretching sentences, comparable to the very ship Leviathan,
spanning two Atlantic billows, appertained to none but the renowned Mr.
Timothy Turbot, of the Corn Law campaigns, Reform agitations, and all
manifestly popular movements requiring the heaven-endowed man of speech,
an interpreter of multitudes, and a prompter. Like most men who have
little to say, he was an orator in print, but that was a poor medium for
him--his body without his fire. Mr. Timothy's place was the platform. A
wise discernment, or else a lucky accident (for he came hurriedly from
the soil of his native isle, needing occupation), set him on that side in
politics which happened to be making an established current and strong
headway. Oratory will not work against the stream, or on languid tides.
Driblets of movements that allowed the world to doubt whether they were
so much movements as illusions of the optics, did not suit his genius.
Thus he was a Liberal, no Radical, fountain. Liberalism had the
attraction for the orator of being the active force in politics, between
two passive opposing bodies, the aspect of either of which it can assume
for a menace to the other, Toryish as against Radicals; a trifle red in
the eyes of the Tory. It can seem to lean back on the Past; it can seem
to be amorous of the Future. It is actually the thing of the Present and
its urgencies, therefore popular, pouring forth the pure waters of
moderation, strong in their copiousness. Delicious and rapturous effects
are to be produced in the flood of a Liberal oration by a chance infusion
of the fierier spirit, a flavour of Radicalism. That is the thing to set
an audience bounding and quirking. Whereas if you commence by tilling a
Triton pitcher full of the neat liquor upon them, 'you have to resort to
the natural element for the orator's art of variation, you are
diluted--and that's bathos, to quote Mr. Timothy. It was a fine piece of
discernment in him. Let Liberalism be your feast, Radicalism your spice.
And now and then, off and on, for a change, for diversion, for a new
emotion, just for half an hour or so-now and then the Sunday coat of
Toryism will give you an air. You have only to complain of the fit, to
release your shoulders in a trice. Mr. Timothy felt for his art as poets
do for theirs, and considered what was best adapted to speaking, purely
to speaking. Upon no creature did he look with such contempt as upon Dr.
Shrapnel, whose loose disjunct audiences he was conscious he could,
giving the doctor any start he liked, whirl away from him and have
compact, enchained, at his first flourish; yea, though they were composed
of 'the poor man,' with a stomach for the political distillery fit to
drain relishingly every private bogside or mountain-side tap in old
Ireland in its best days--the illicit, you understand.

Further, to quote Mr. Timothy's points of view, the Radical orator has
but two notes, and one is the drawling pathetic, and the other is the
ultra-furious; and the effect of the former we liken to the English
working man's wife's hob-set queasy brew of well-meant villany, that she
calls by the innocent name of tea; and the latter is to be blown, asks to
be blown, and never should be blown without at least seeming to be blown,
with an accompaniment of a house on fire. Sir, we must adapt ourselves to
our times. Perhaps a spark or two does lurk about our house, but we have
vigilant watchmen in plenty, and the house has been pretty fairly
insured. Shrieking in it is an annoyance to the inmates, nonsensical;
weeping is a sickly business. The times are against Radicalism to the
full as much as great oratory is opposed to extremes. These drag the
orator too near to the matter. So it is that one Radical speech is
amazingly like another--they all have the earth-spots. They smell, too;
they smell of brimstone. Soaring is impossible among that faction; but
this they can do, they can furnish the Tory his opportunity to soar. When
hear you a thrilling Tory speech that carries the country with it, save
when the incendiary Radical has shrieked? If there was envy in the soul
of Timothy, it was addressed to the fine occasions offered to the Tory
speaker for vindicating our ancient principles and our sacred homes. He
admired the tone to be assumed for that purpose: it was a good note. Then
could the Tory, delivering at the right season the Shakesperian 'This
England . . .' and Byronic--'The inviolate Island . . .' shake the frame,
as though smiting it with the tail of the gymnotus electricus. Ah, and
then could he thump out his Horace, the Tory's mentor and his cordial,
with other great ancient comic and satiric poets, his old Port of the
classical cellarage, reflecting veneration upon him who did but name them
to an audience of good dispositions. The Tory possessed also an innate
inimitably easy style of humour, that had the long reach, the jolly
lordly indifference, the comfortable masterfulness, of the whip of a
four-in-hand driver, capable of flicking and stinging, and of being
ironically caressing. Timothy appreciated it, for he had winced under it.
No professor of Liberalism could venture on it, unless it were in the
remote district of a back parlour, in the society of a cherishing friend
or two, and with a slice of lemon requiring to be refloated in the glass.

But gifts of this description were of a minor order. Liberalism gave the
heading cry, devoid of which parties are dogs without a scent, orators
mere pump-handles. The Tory's cry was but a whistle to his pack, the
Radical howled to the moon like any chained hound. And no wonder, for
these parties had no established current, they were as hard-bound waters;
the Radical being dyked and dammed most soundly, the Tory resembling a
placid lake of the plains, fed by springs and no confluents. For such
good reasons, Mr. Timothy rejoiced in the happy circumstances which had
expelled him from the shores of his native isle to find a refuge and a
vocation in Manchester at a period when an orator happened to be in
request because dozens were wanted. That centre of convulsions and source
of streams possessed the statistical orator, the reasoning orator, and
the inspired; with others of quality; and yet it had need of an
ever-ready spontaneous imperturbable speaker, whose bubbling
generalizations and ability to beat the drum humorous could swing halls
of meeting from the grasp of an enemy, and then ascend on incalescent
adjectives to the popular idea of the sublime. He was the artistic orator
of Corn Law Repeal--the Manchester flood, before which time Whigs were,
since which they have walked like spectral antediluvians, or floated as
dead canine bodies that are sucked away on the ebb of tides and flung
back on the flow, ignorant whether they be progressive or retrograde.
Timothy Turbot assisted in that vast effort. It should have elevated him
beyond the editorship of a country newspaper. Why it did not do so his
antagonists pretended to know, and his friends would smile to hear. The
report was that he worshipped the nymph Whisky.

Timothy's article had plucked Beauchamp out of bed; Beauchamp's card in
return did the same for him.

'Commander Beauchamp? I am heartily glad to make your acquaintance, sir;
I've been absent, at work, on the big business we have in common, I
rejoice to say, and am behind my fellow townsmen in this pleasure and
lucky I slept here in my room above, where I don't often sleep, for the
row of the machinery--it 's like a steamer that won't go, though it's
always starting ye,' Mr. Timothy said in a single breath, upon entering
the back office of the Gazette, like unto those accomplished violinists
who can hold on the bow to finger an incredible number of notes, and may
be imaged as representing slow paternal Time, that rolls his capering
dot-headed generation of mortals over the wheel, hundreds to the minute.
'You'll excuse my not shaving, sir, to come down to your summons without
an extra touch to the neck-band.'

Beauchamp beheld a middle-sized round man, with loose lips and pendant
indigo jowl, whose eyes twinkled watery, like pebbles under the
shore-wash, and whose neck-band needed an extra touch from fingers other
than his own.

'I am sorry to have disturbed you so early,' he replied.

'Not a bit, Commander Beauchamp, not a bit, sir. Early or late, and ay
ready--with the Napiers; I'll wash, I'll wash.'

'I came to speak to you of this article of yours on me. They tell me in
the office that you are the writer. Pray don't "Commander" me so
much.--It's not customary, and I object to it.'

'Certainly, certainly,' Timothy acquiesced.

'And for the future, Mr. Turbot, please to be good enough not to allude
in print to any of my performances here and there. Your intentions are
complimentary, but it happens that I don't like a public patting on the
back.'

'No, and that's true,' said Timothy.

His appreciative and sympathetic agreement with these sharp strictures on
the article brought Beauchamp to a stop.

Timothy waited for him; then, smoothing his prickly cheek, remarked: 'If
I'd guessed your errand, Commander Beauchamp, I'd have called in the
barber before I came down, just to make myself decent for a 'first
introduction.'

Beauchamp was not insensible to the slyness of the poke at him. 'You see,
I come to the borough unknown to it, and as quietly as possible, and I
want to be taken as a politician,' he continued, for the sake of showing
that he had sufficient to say to account for his hasty and peremptory
summons of the writer of that article to his presence. 'It's excessively
disagreeable to have one's family lugged into notice in a
newspaper--especially if they are of different politics. I feel it.'

All would, sir,' said Timothy.

'Then why the deuce did you do it?'

Timothy drew a lading of air into his lungs. 'Politics, Commander
Beauchamp, involves the doing of lots of disagreeable things to ourselves
and our relations; it 's positive. I'm a soldier of the Great Campaign:
and who knows it better than I, sir? It's climbing the greasy pole for
the leg o' mutton, that makes the mother's heart ache for the jacket and
the nether garments she mended neatly, if she didn't make them. Mutton or
no mutton, there's grease for certain! Since it's sure we can't be
disconnected from the family, the trick is to turn the misfortune to a
profit; and allow me the observation, that an old family, sir, and a high
and titled family, is not to be despised for a background of a portrait
in naval uniform, with medal and clasps, and some small smoke of powder
clearing off over there:--that's if we're to act sagaciously in
introducing an unknown candidate to a borough that has a sneaking liking
for the kind of person, more honour to it. I'm a political veteran, sir;
I speak from experience. We must employ our weapons, every one of them,
and all off the grindstone.'

'Very well,' said Beauchamp. 'Now understand; you are not in future to
employ the weapons, as you call them, that I have objected to.'

Timothy gaped slightly.

'Whatever you will, but no puffery,' Beauchamp added. 'Can I by any means
arrest--purchase--is it possible, tell me, to lay an embargo--stop
to-day's issue of the Gazette?'

'No more--than the bite of a mad dog,' Timothy replied, before he had
considered upon the monstrous nature of the proposal.

Beauchamp humphed, and tossed his head. The simile of the dog struck him
with intense effect.

'There'd be a second edition,' said Timothy, 'and you might buy up that.
But there'll be a third, and you may buy up that; but there'll be a
fourth and a fifth, and so on ad infinitum, with the advertisement of the
sale of the foregoing creating a demand like a rageing thirst in a
shipwreck, in Bligh's boat, in the tropics. I'm afraid, Com--Captain
Beauchamp, sir, there's no stopping the Press while the people have an
appetite for it--and a Company's at the back of it.'

'Pooh, don't talk to me in that way; all I complain of is the figure you
have made of me,' said Beauchamp, fetching him smartly out of his
nonsense; 'and all I ask of you is not to be at it again. Who would
suppose from reading an article like that, that I am a candidate with a
single political idea!'

'An article like that,' said Timothy, winking, and a little surer of his
man now that he suggested his possession of ideas, 'an article like that
is the best cloak you can put on a candidate with too many of 'em,
Captain Beauchamp. I'll tell you, sir; I came, I heard of your
candidature, I had your sketch, the pattern of ye, before me, and I was
told that Dr. Shrapnel fathered you politically. There was my brief! I
had to persuade our constituents that you, Commander Beauchamp of the
Royal Navy, and the great family of the Earls of Romfrey, one of the
heroes of the war, and the recipient of a Royal Humane Society's medal
for saving life in Bevisham waters, were something more than the Radical
doctor's political son; and, sir, it was to this end, aim, and object,
that I wrote the article I am not ashamed to avow as mine, and I do so,
sir, because of the solitary merit it has of serving your political
interests as the liberal candidate for Bevisham by counteracting the
unpopularity of Dr. Shrapnel's name, on the one part, and of reviving the
credit due to your valour and high bearing on the field of battle in
defence of your country, on the other, so that Bevisham may apprehend, in
spite of party distinctions, that it has the option, and had better seize
upon the honour, of making a M.P. of a hero.'

Beauchamp interposed hastily: 'Thank you, thank you for the best of
intentions. But let me tell you I am prepared to stand or fall with Dr.
Shrapnel, and be hanged to all that humbug.'

Timothy rubbed his hands with an abstracted air of washing. 'Well,
commander, well, sir, they say a candidate's to be humoured in his
infancy, for he has to do all the humouring before he's many weeks old at
it; only there's the fact!--he soon finds out he has to pay for his first
fling, like the son of a family sowing his oats to reap his Jews. Credit
me, sir, I thought it prudent to counteract a bit of an apothecary's shop
odour in the junior Liberal candidate's address. I found the town
sniffing, they scented Shrapnel in the composition.'

'Every line of it was mine,' said Beauchamp.

'Of course it was, and the address was admirably worded, sir, I make bold
to say it to your face; but most indubitably it threatened powerful drugs
for weak stomachs, and it blew cold on votes, which are sensitive plants
like nothing else in botany.'

'If they are only to be got by abandoning principles, and by anything but
honesty in stating them, they may go,' said Beauchamp.

'I repeat, my dear sir, I repeat, the infant candidate delights in his
honesty, like the babe in its nakedness, the beautiful virgin in her
innocence. So he does; but he discovers it's time for him to wear clothes
in a contested election. And what's that but to preserve the outlines
pretty correctly, whilst he doesn't shock and horrify the optics? A dash
of conventionalism makes the whole civilized world kin, ye know. That's
the truth. You must appear to be one of them, for them to choose you.
After all, there's no harm in a dyer's hand; and, sir, a candidate
looking at his own, when he has won the Election . . .'

'Ah, well,' said Beauchamp, swinging on his heel, 'and now I'll take my
leave of you, and I apologize for bringing you down here so early. Please
attend to what I have said; it's peremptory. You will give me great
pleasure by dining with me to-night, at the hotel opposite. Will you? I
don't know what kind of wine I shall be able to offer you. Perhaps you
know the cellar, and may help me in that.'

Timothy grasped his hand, 'With pleasure, Commander Beauchamp. They have
a bucellas over there that 's old, and a tolerable claret, and a Port to
be inquired for under the breath, in a mysteriously intimate tone of
voice, as one says, "I know of your treasure, and the corner under ground
where it lies." Avoid the champagne: 'tis the banqueting wine. Ditto the
sherry. One can drink them, one can drink them.'

'At a quarter to eight this evening, then,' said Nevil.

'I'll be there at the stroke of the clock, sure as the date of a bill,'
said Timothy.

And it's early to guess whether you'll catch Bevisham or you won't, he
reflected, as he gazed at the young gentleman crossing the road; but
female Bevisham's with you, if that counts for much. Timothy confessed,
that without the employment of any weapon save arrogance and a look of
candour, the commander had gone some way toward catching the feminine
side of himself.




CHAPTER XV

CECILIA HALKETT

Beauchamp walked down to the pier, where he took a boat for H.M.S. Isis,
to see Jack Wilmore, whom he had not met since his return from his last
cruise, and first he tried the efficacy of a dive in salt water, as a
specific for irritation. It gave the edge to a fine appetite that he
continued to satisfy while Wilmore talked of those famous dogs to which
the navy has ever been going.

'We want another panic, Beauchamp,' said Lieutenant Wilmore. 'No one
knows better than you what a naval man has to complain of, so I hope
you'll get your Election, if only that we may reckon on a good look-out
for the interests of the service. A regular Board with a permanent Lord
High Admiral, and a regular vote of money to keep it up to the mark.
Stick to that. Hardist has a vote in Bevisham. I think I can get one or
two more. Why aren't you a Tory? No Whigs nor Liberals look after us half
so well as the Tories. It's enough to break a man's heart to see the
troops of dockyard workmen marching out as soon as ever a Liberal
Government marches in. Then it's one of our infernal panics again, and
patch here, patch there; every inch of it make-believe! I'll prove to you
from examples that the humbug of Government causes exactly the same
humbugging workmanship. It seems as if it were a game of "rascals all."
Let them sink us! but, by heaven! one can't help feeling for the country.
And I do say it's the doing of those Liberals. Skilled workmen, mind you,
not to be netted again so easily. America reaps the benefit of our folly
. . . . That was a lucky run of yours up the Niger; the admiral was
friendly, but you deserved your luck. For God's sake, don't forget the
state of our service when you're one of our cherubs up aloft, Beauchamp.
This I'll say, I've never heard a man talk about it as you used to in old
midshipmite days, whole watches through--don't you remember? on the North
American station, and in the Black Sea, and the Mediterranean. And that
girl at Malta! I wonder what has become of her? What a beauty she was! I
dare say she wasn't so fine a girl as the Armenian you unearthed on the
Bosphorus, but she had something about her a fellow can't forget. That
was a lovely creature coming down the hills over Granada on her mule. Ay,
we've seen handsome women, Nevil Beauchamp. But you always were lucky,
invariably, and I should bet on you for the Election.'

'Canvass for me, Jack,' said Beauchamp, smiling at his friend's
unconscious double-skeining of subjects. 'If I turn out as good a
politician as you are a seaman, I shall do. Pounce on Hardist's vote
without losing a day. I would go to him, but I've missed the Halketts
twice. They 're on the Otley river, at a place called Mount Laurels, and
I particularly want to see the colonel. Can you give me a boat there, and
come?'

'Certainly,' said Wilmore. 'I've danced there with the lady, the
handsomest girl, English style, of her time. And come, come, our English
style's the best. It wears best, it looks best. Foreign women . . .
they're capital to flirt with. But a girl like Cecilia Halkett--one can't
call her a girl, and it won't do to say Goddess, and queen and charmer
are out of the question, though she's both, and angel into the bargain;
but, by George! what a woman to call wife, you say; and a man attached to
a woman like that never can let himself look small. No such luck for me;
only I swear if I stood between a good and a bad action, the thought of
that girl would keep me straight, and I've only danced with her once!'

Not long after sketching this rough presentation of the lady, with a
masculine hand, Wilmore was able to point to her in person on the deck of
her father's yacht, the Esperanza, standing out of Otley river. There was
a gallant splendour in the vessel that threw a touch of glory on its
mistress in the minds of the two young naval officers, as they pulled for
her in the ship's gig.

Wilmore sang out, 'Give way, men!'

The sailors bent to their oars, and presently the schooner's head was put
to the wind.

'She sees we're giving chase,' Wilmore said. 'She can't be expecting me,
so it must be you. No, the colonel doesn't race her. They've only been
back from Italy six months: I mean the schooner. I remember she talked of
you when I had her for a partner. Yes, now I mean Miss Halkett. Blest if
I think she talked of anything else. She sees us. I'll tell you what she
likes: she likes yachting, she likes Italy, she likes painting, likes
things old English, awfully fond of heroes. I told her a tale of one of
our men saving life. "Oh!" said she, "didn't your friend Nevil Beauchamp
save a man from drowning, off the guardship, in exactly the same place?"
And next day she sent me a cheque for three pounds for the fellow.
Steady, men! I keep her letter.'

The boat went smoothly alongside the schooner. Miss Halkett had come to
the side. The oars swung fore and aft, and Beauchamp sprang on deck.

Wilmore had to decline Miss Halkett's invitation to him as well as his
friend, and returned in his boat. He left the pair with a ruffling
breeze, and a sky all sail, prepared, it seemed to him, to enjoy the most
delicious you-and-I on salt water that a sailor could dream of; and
placidly envying, devoid of jealousy, there was just enough of fancy
quickened in Lieutenant Wilmore to give him pictures of them without
disturbance of his feelings--one of the conditions of the singular
visitation we call happiness, if he could have known it.

For a time his visionary eye followed them pretty correctly. So long
since they had parted last! such changes in the interval! and great
animation in Beauchamp's gaze, and a blush on Miss Halkett's cheeks.

She said once, 'Captain Beauchamp.' He retorted with a solemn formality.
They smiled, and immediately took footing on their previous intimacy.

'How good it was of you to come twice to Mount Laurels,' said she. 'I
have not missed you to-day. No address was on your card. Where are you
staying in the neighbourhood? At Mr. Lespel's?'

'I'm staying at a Bevisham hotel,' said Beauchamp.

'You have not been to Steynham yet? Papa comes home from Steynham
to-night.'

'Does he? Well, the Ariadne is only just paid off, and I can't well go to
Steynham yet. I--' Beauchamp was astonished at the hesitation he found in
himself to name it: 'I have business in Bevisham.'

'Naval business?' she remarked.

'No,' said he.

The sensitive prescience we have of a critical distaste of our
proceedings is, the world is aware, keener than our intuition of contrary
opinions; and for the sake of preserving the sweet outward forms of
friendliness, Beauchamp was anxious not to speak of the business in
Bevisham just then, but she looked and he had hesitated, so he said
flatly, 'I am one of the candidates for the borough.'

'Indeed!'

'And I want the colonel to give me his vote.'

The young lady breathed a melodious 'Oh!' not condemnatory or
reproachful--a sound to fill a pause. But she was beginning to reflect.

'Italy and our English Channel are my two Poles,' she said. 'I am
constantly swaying between them. I have told papa we will not lay up the
yacht while the weather holds fair. Except for the absence of deep colour
and bright colour, what can be more beautiful than these green waves and
that dark forest's edge, and the garden of an island! The yachting-water
here is an unrivalled lake; and if I miss colour, which I love, I remind
myself that we have temperate air here, not a sun that fiends you under
cover. We can have our fruits too, you see.' One of the yachtsmen was
handing her a basket of hot-house grapes, reclining beside crisp
home-made loaflets. 'This is my luncheon. Will you share it, Nevil?'

His Christian name was pleasant to hear from her lips. She held out a
bunch to him.

'Grapes take one back to the South,' said he. 'How do you bear
compliments? You have been in Italy some years, and it must be the South
that has worked the miracle.'

'In my growth?' said Cecilia, smiling. 'I have grown out of my Circassian
dress, Nevil.'

'You received it, then?'

'I wrote you a letter of thanks--and abuse, for your not coming to
Steynham. You may recognize these pearls.'

The pearls were round her right wrist. He looked at the blue veins.

'They're not pearls of price,' he said.

'I do not wear them to fascinate the jewellers,' rejoined Miss Halkett.
'So you are a candidate at an Election. You still have a tinge of Africa,
do you know? But you have not abandoned the navy?'

'--Not altogether.'

'Oh! no, no: I hope not. I have heard of you, . . . but who has not? We
cannot spare officers like you. Papa was delighted to hear of your
promotion. Parliament!'

The exclamation was contemptuous.

'It's the highest we can aim at,' Beauchamp observed meekly.

'I think I recollect you used to talk politics when you were a
midshipman,' she said. 'You headed the aristocracy, did you not?'

'The aristocracy wants a head,' said Beauchamp.

'Parliament, in my opinion, is the best of occupations for idle men,'
said she.

'It shows that it is a little too full of them.'

'Surely the country can go on very well without so much speech-making?'

'It can go on very well for the rich.'

Miss Halkett tapped with her foot.

'I should expect a Radical to talk in that way, Nevil.'

'Take me for one.'

'I would not even imagine it.'

'Say Liberal, then.'

'Are you not'--her eyes opened on him largely, and narrowed from surprise
to reproach, and then to pain--are you not one of us? Have you gone over
to the enemy, Nevil?'

'I have taken my side, Cecilia; but we, on our side, don't talk of an
enemy.'

'Most unfortunate! We are Tories, you know, Nevil. Papa is a thorough
Tory. He cannot vote for you. Indeed I have heard him say he is anxious
to defeat the plots of an old Republican in Bevisham--some doctor there;
and I believe he went to London to look out for a second Tory candidate
to oppose to the Liberals. Our present Member is quite safe, of course.
Nevil, this makes me unhappy. Do you not feel that it is playing traitor
to one's class to join those men?'

Such was the Tory way of thinking, Nevil Beauchamp said: the Tories
upheld their Toryism in the place of patriotism.

'But do we not owe the grandeur of the country to the Tories?' she said,
with a lovely air of conviction. 'Papa has told me how false the Whigs
played the Duke in the Peninsula: ruining his supplies, writing him down,
declaring, all the time he was fighting his first hard battles, that his
cause was hopeless--that resistance to Napoleon was impossible. The Duke
never, never had loyal support but from the Tory Government. The Whigs,
papa says, absolutely preached submission to Napoleon! The Whigs, I hear,
were the Liberals of those days. The two Pitts were Tories. The greatness
of England has been built up by the Tories. I do and will defend them: it
is the fashion to decry them now. They have the honour and safety of the
country at heart. They do not play disgracefully at reductions of taxes,
as the Liberals do. They have given us all our heroes. Non fu mai gloria
senza invidia. They have done service enough to despise the envious mob.
They never condescend to supplicate brute force for aid to crush their
opponents. You feel in all they do that the instincts of gentlemen are
active.'

Beauchamp bowed.

'Do I speak too warmly?' she asked. 'Papa and I have talked over it
often, and especially of late. You will find him your delighted host and
your inveterate opponent.'

'And you?'

'Just the same. You will have to pardon me; I am a terrible foe.'

'I declare to you, Cecilia, I would prefer having you against me to
having you indifferent.'

'I wish I had not to think it right that you should be beaten. And
now--can you throw off political Nevil, and be sailor Nevil? I
distinguish between my old friend, and my . . .our . . .'

'Dreadful antagonist?'

'Not so dreadful, except in the shock he gives us to find him in the
opposite ranks. I am grieved. But we will finish our sail in peace. I
detest controversy. I suppose, Nevil, you would have no such things as
yachts? they are the enjoyments of the rich!'

He reminded her that she wished to finish her sail in peace; and he had
to remind her of it more than once. Her scattered resources for
argumentation sprang up from various suggestions, such as the flight of
yachts, mention of the shooting season, sight of a royal palace; and
adopted a continually heightened satirical form, oddly intermixed with an
undisguised affectionate friendliness. Apparently she thought it possible
to worry him out of his adhesion to the wrong side in politics. She
certainly had no conception of the nature of his political views, for one
or two extreme propositions flung to him in jest, he swallowed with every
sign of a perfect facility, as if the Radical had come to regard
stupendous questions as morsels barely sufficient for his daily
sustenance. Cecilia reflected that he must be playing, and as it was not
a subject for play she tacitly reproved him by letting him be the last to
speak of it. He may not have been susceptible to the delicate
chastisement, probably was not, for when he ceased it was to look on the
beauty of her lowered eyelids, rather with an idea that the weight of his
argument lay on them. It breathed from him; both in the department of
logic and of feeling, in his plea for the poor man and his exposition of
the poor man's rightful claims, he evidently imagined that he had spoken
overwhelmingly; and to undeceive him in this respect, for his own good,
Cecilia calmly awaited the occasion when she might show the vanity of
arguments in their effort to overcome convictions. He stood up to take
his leave of her, on their return to the mouth of the Otley river,
unexpectedly, so that the occasion did not arrive; but on his mentioning
an engagement he had to give a dinner to a journalist and a tradesman of
the town of Bevisham, by way of excuse for not complying with her gentle
entreaty that he would go to Mount Laurels and wait to see the colonel
that evening, 'Oh! then your choice must be made irrevocably, I am sure,'
Miss Halkett said, relying upon intonation and manner to convey a great
deal more, and not without a minor touch of resentment for his having
dragged her into the discussion of politics, which she considered as a
slime wherein men hustled and tussled, no doubt worthily enough, and as
became them; not however to impose the strife upon the elect ladies of
earth. What gentleman ever did talk to a young lady upon the dreary topic
seriously? Least of all should Nevil Beauchamp have done it. That object
of her high imagination belonged to the exquisite sphere of the feminine
vision of the pure poetic, and she was vexed by the discord he threw
between her long-cherished dream and her unanticipated realization of
him, if indeed it was he presenting himself to her in his own character,
and not trifling, or not passing through a phase of young man's madness.

Possibly he might be the victim of the latter and more pardonable state,
and so thinking she gave him her hand.

'Good-bye, Nevil. I may tell papa to expect you tomorrow?'

'Do, and tell him to prepare for a field-day.'

She smiled. 'A sham fight that will not win you a vote! I hope you will
find your guests this evening agreeable companions.'

Beauchamp half-shrugged involuntarily. He obliterated the piece of
treason toward them by saying that he hoped so; as though the meeting
them, instead of slipping on to Mount Laurels with her, were an enjoyable
prospect.

He was dropped by the Esperanza's boat near Otley ferry, to walk along
the beach to Bevisham, and he kept eye on the elegant vessel as she
glided swan-like to her moorings off Mount Laurels park through dusky
merchant craft, colliers, and trawlers, loosely shaking her towering
snow-white sails, unchallenged in her scornful supremacy; an image of a
refinement of beauty, and of a beautiful servicelessness.

As the yacht, so the mistress: things of wealth, owing their graces to
wealth, devoting them to wealth--splendid achievements of art both! and
dedicated to the gratification of the superior senses.

Say that they were precious examples of an accomplished civilization; and
perhaps they did offer a visible ideal of grace for the rough world to
aim at. They might in the abstract address a bit of a monition to the
uncultivated, and encourage the soul to strive toward perfection, in
beauty: and there is no contesting the value of beauty when the soul is
taken into account. But were they not in too great a profusion in
proportion to their utility? That was the question for Nevil Beauchamp.
The democratic spirit inhabiting him, temporarily or permanently, asked
whether they were not increasing to numbers which were oppressive? And
further, whether it was good, for the country, the race, ay, the species,
that they should be so distinctly removed from the thousands who fought
the grand, and the grisly, old battle with nature for bread of life.
Those grimy sails of the colliers and fishing-smacks, set them in a great
sea, would have beauty for eyes and soul beyond that of elegance and
refinement. And do but look on them thoughtfully, the poor are
everlastingly, unrelievedly, in the abysses of the great sea . . . .

One cannot pursue to conclusions a line of meditation that is half-built
on the sensations as well as on the mind. Did Beauchamp at all desire to
have those idly lovely adornments of riches, the Yacht and the Lady,
swept away? Oh, dear, no. He admired them, he was at home with them. They
were much to his taste. Standing on a point of the beach for a last look
at them before he set his face to the town, he prolonged the look in a
manner to indicate that the place where business called him was not in
comparison at all so pleasing: and just as little enjoyable were his
meditations opposed to predilections. Beauty plucked the heart from his
breast. But he had taken up arms; he had drunk of the questioning cup,
that which denieth peace to us, and which projects us upon the missionary
search of the How, the Wherefore, and the Why not, ever afterward. He
questioned his justification, and yours, for gratifying tastes in an
ill-regulated world of wrong-doing, suffering, sin, and bounties
unrighteously dispensed--not sufficiently dispersed. He said by-and-by to
pleasure, battle to-day. From his point of observation, and with the
store of ideas and images his fiery yet reflective youth had gathered, he
presented himself as it were saddled to that hard-riding force known as
the logical impetus, which spying its quarry over precipices, across
oceans and deserts, and through systems and webs, and into shops and
cabinets of costliest china, will come at it, will not be refused, let
the distances and the breakages be what they may. He went like the
meteoric man with the mechanical legs in the song, too quick for a cry of
protestation, and reached results amazing to his instincts, his tastes,
and his training, not less rapidly and naturally than tremendous Ergo is
shot forth from the clash of a syllogism.




CHAPTER XVI

A PARTIAL DISPLAY OF BEAUCHAMP IN HIS COLOURS

Beauchamp presented himself at Mount Laurels next day, and formally asked
Colonel Halkett for his vote, in the presence of Cecilia.

She took it for a playful glance at his new profession of politician: he
spoke half-playfully. Was it possible to speak in earnest?

'I 'm of the opposite party,' said the colonel; as conclusive a reply as
could be: but he at once fell upon the rotten navy of a Liberal
Government. How could a true sailor think of joining those Liberals! The
question referred to the country, not to a section of it, Beauchamp
protested with impending emphasis: Tories and Liberals were much the same
in regard to the care of the navy. 'Nevil!' exclaimed Cecilia. He cited
beneficial Liberal bills recently passed, which she accepted for a
concession of the navy to the Tories, and she smiled. In spite of her
dislike of politics, she had only to listen a few minutes to be drawn
into the contest: and thus it is that one hot politician makes many among
women and men of a people that have the genius of strife, or else in this
case the young lady did unconsciously feel a deep interest in refuting
and overcoming Nevil Beauchamp. Colonel Halkett denied the benefits of
those bills. 'Look,' said he, 'at the scarecrow plight of the army under
a Liberal Government!' This laid him open to the charge that he was for
backing Administrations instead of principles.

'I do,' said the colonel. 'I would rather have a good Administration than
all your talk of principles: one's a fact, but principles? principles?'
He languished for a phrase to describe the hazy things. 'I have mine, and
you have yours. It's like a dispute between religions. There's no
settling it except by main force. That's what principles lead you to.'

Principles may be hazy, but heavy artillery is disposable in defence of
them, and Beauchamp fired some reverberating guns for the eternal against
the transitory; with less of the gentlemanly fine taste, the light and
easy social semi-irony, than Cecilia liked and would have expected from
him. However, as to principles, no doubt Nevil was right, and Cecilia
drew her father to another position. 'Are not we Tories to have
principles as well as the Liberals, Nevil?'

'They may have what they call principles,' he admitted, intent on
pursuing his advantage over the colonel, who said, to shorten the
controversy: 'It's a question of my vote, and my liking. I like a Tory
Government, and I don't like the Liberals. I like gentlemen; I don't like
a party that attacks everything, and beats up the mob for power, and
repays it with sops, and is dragging us down from all we were proud of.'

'But the country is growing, the country wants expansion,' said
Beauchamp; 'and if your gentlemen by birth are not up to the mark, you
must have leaders that are.'

'Leaders who cut down expenditure, to create a panic that doubles the
outlay! I know them.'

'A panic, Nevil.' Cecilia threw stress on the memorable word.

He would hear no reminder in it. The internal condition of the country
was now the point for seriously-minded Englishmen.

'My dear boy, what have you seen of the country?' Colonel Halkett
inquired.

'Every time I have landed, colonel, I have gone to the mining and the
manufacturing districts, the centres of industry; wherever there was
dissatisfaction. I have attended meetings, to see and hear for myself. I
have read the papers . . . .'

'The papers!'

'Well, they're the mirror of the country.'

'Does one see everything in a mirror, Nevil?' said Cecilia: 'even in the
smoothest?'

He retorted softly: 'I should be glad to see what you see,' and felled
her with a blush.

For an example of the mirror offered by the Press, Colonel Halkett
touched on Mr. Timothy Turbot's article in eulogy of the great Commander
Beauchamp. 'Did you like it?' he asked. 'Ah, but if you meddle with
politics, you must submit to be held up on the prongs of a fork, my boy;
soaped by your backers and shaved by the foe; and there's a figure for a
gentleman! as your uncle Romfrey says.'

Cecilia did not join this discussion, though she had heard from her
father that something grotesque had been written of Nevil. Her
foolishness in blushing vexed body and mind. She was incensed by a silly
compliment that struck at her feminine nature when her intellect stood in
arms. Yet more hurt was she by the reflection that a too lively
sensibility might have conjured up the idea of the compliment. And again,
she wondered at herself for not resenting so rare a presumption as it
implied, and not disdaining so outworn a form of flattery. She wondered
at herself too for thinking of resentment and disdain in relation to the
familiar commonplaces of licenced impertinence. Over all which hung a
darkened image of her spirit of independence, like a moon in eclipse.

Where lay his weakness? Evidently in the belief that he had thought
profoundly. But what minor item of insufficiency or feebleness was
discernible? She discovered that he could be easily fretted by similes
and metaphors they set him staggering and groping like an ancient knight
of faery in a forest bewitched.

'Your specific for the country is, then, Radicalism,' she said, after
listening to an attack on the Tories for their want of a policy and
indifference to the union of classes.

'I would prescribe a course of it, Cecilia; yes,' he turned to her.

'The Dr. Dulcamara of a single drug?'

'Now you have a name for me! Tory arguments always come to epithets.'

'It should not be objectionable. Is it not honest to pretend to have only
one cure for mortal maladies? There can hardly be two panaceas, can there
be?'

'So you call me quack?'

'No, Nevil, no,' she breathed a rich contralto note of denial: 'but if
the country is the patient, and you will have it swallow your
prescription . . .'

'There's nothing like a metaphor for an evasion,' said Nevil, blinking
over it.

She drew him another analogy, longer than was at all necessary; so
tedious that her father struck through it with the remark:

'Concerning that quack--that's one in the background, though!'

'I know of none,' said Beauchamp, well-advised enough to forbear mention
of the name of Shrapnel.

Cecilia petitioned that her stumbling ignorance, which sought the road of
wisdom, might be heard out. She had a reserve entanglement for her
argumentative friend. 'You were saying, Nevil, that you were for
principles rather than for individuals, and you instanced Mr. Cougham,
the senior Liberal candidate of Bevisham, as one whom you would prefer to
see in Parliament instead of Seymour Austin, though you confess to Mr.
Austin's far superior merits as a politician and servant of his country:
but Mr. Cougham supports Liberalism while Mr. Austin is a Tory. You are
for the principle.'

'I am,' said he, bowing.

She asked: 'Is not that equivalent to the doctrine of election by Grace?'

Beauchamp interjected: 'Grace! election?'

Cecilia was tender to his inability to follow her allusion.

'Thou art a Liberal--then rise to membership,' she said. 'Accept my
creed, and thou art of the chosen. Yes, Nevil, you cannot escape from it.
Papa, he preaches Calvinism in politics.'

'We stick to men, and good men,' the colonel flourished. 'Old English for
me!'

'You might as well say, old timber vessels, when Iron's afloat, colonel.'

'I suspect you have the worst of it there, papa,' said Cecilia, taken by
the unexpectedness and smartness of the comparison coming from wits that
she had been undervaluing.

'I shall not own I'm worsted until I surrender my vote,' the colonel
rejoined.

'I won't despair of it,' said Beauchamp.

Colonel Halkett bade him come for it as often as he liked. You'll be
beaten in Bevisham, I warn you. Tory reckonings are safest: it's an
admitted fact: and we know you can't win. According to my judgement a man
owes a duty to his class.'

'A man owes a duty to his class as long as he sees his class doing its
duty to the country,' said Beauchamp; and he added, rather prettily in
contrast with the sententious commencement, Cecilia thought, that the
apathy of his class was proved when such as he deemed it an obligation on
them to come forward and do what little they could. The deduction of the
proof was not clearly consequent, but a meaning was expressed; and in
that form it brought him nearer to her abstract idea of Nevil Beauchamp
than when he raged and was precise.

After his departure she talked of him with her father, to be charitably
satirical over him, it seemed.

The critic in her ear had pounced on his repetition of certain words that
betrayed a dialectical stiffness and hinted a narrow vocabulary: his use
of emphasis, rather reminding her of his uncle Everard, was, in a young
man, a little distressing. 'The apathy of the country, papa; the apathy
of the rich; a state of universal apathy. Will you inform me, papa, what
the Tories are doing? Do we really give our consciences to the keeping of
the parsons once a week, and let them dogmatize for us to save us from
exertion? We must attach ourselves to principles; nothing is permanent
but principles. Poor Nevil! And still I am sure you have, as I have, the
feeling that one must respect him. I am quite convinced that he supposes
he is doing his best to serve his country by trying for Parliament,
fancying himself a Radical. I forgot to ask him whether he had visited
his great-aunt, Mrs. Beauchamp. They say the dear old lady has influence
with him.'

'I don't think he's been anywhere,' Colonel Halkett half laughed at the
quaint fellow. 'I wish the other great-nephew of hers were in England,
for us to run him against Nevil Beauchamp. He's touring the world. I'm
told he's orthodox, and a tough debater. We have to take what we can
get.'

'My best wishes for your success, and you and I will not talk of politics
any more, papa. I hope Nevil will come often, for his own good; he will
meet his own set of people here. And if he should dogmatize so much as to
rouse our apathy to denounce his principles, we will remember that we are
British, and can be sweet-blooded in opposition. Perhaps he may change,
even tra le tre ore a le quattro: electioneering should be a lesson. From
my recollection of Blackburn Tuckham, he was a boisterous boy.'

'He writes uncommonly clever letters home to his aunt Beauchamp. She has
handed them to me to read,' said the colonel. 'I do like to see tolerably
solid young fellows: they give one some hope of the stability of the
country.'

'They are not so interesting to study, and not half so amusing,' said
Cecilia.

Colonel Halkett muttered his objections to the sort of amusement
furnished by firebrands.

'Firebrand is too strong a word for poor Nevil,' she remonstrated.

In that estimate of the character of Nevil Beauchamp, Cecilia soon had to
confess that she had been deceived, though not by him.




CHAPTER XVII

HIS FRIEND AND FOE

Looking from her window very early on a Sunday morning, Miss Halkett saw
Beauchamp strolling across the grass of the park. She dressed hurriedly
and went out to greet him, smiling and thanking him for his friendliness
in coming.

He said he was delighted, and appeared so, but dashed the sweetness. 'You
know I can't canvass on Sundays!

'I suppose not,' she replied. 'Have you walked up from Bevisham? You must
be tired.'

'Nothing tires me,' said he.

With that they stepped on together.

Mount Laurels, a fair broad house backed by a wood of beeches and firs,
lay open to view on the higher grassed knoll of a series of descending
turfy mounds dotted with gorseclumps, and faced South-westerly along the
run of the Otley river to the gleaming broad water and its opposite
border of forest, beyond which the downs of the island threw long
interlapping curves. Great ships passed on the line of the water to and
fro; and a little mist of masts of the fishing and coasting craft by
Otley village, near the river's mouth, was like a web in air. Cecilia led
him to her dusky wood of firs, where she had raised a bower for a place
of poetical contemplation and reading when the clear lapping salt river
beneath her was at high tide. She could hail the Esperanza from that
cover; she could step from her drawing-room window, over the flower-beds,
down the gravel walk to the hard, and be on board her yacht within seven
minutes, out on her salt-water lake within twenty, closing her wings in a
French harbour by nightfall of a summer's day, whenever she had the whim
to fly abroad. Of these enviable privileges she boasted with some happy
pride.

'It's the finest yachting-station in England,' said Beauchamp.

She expressed herself very glad that he should like it so much.
Unfortunately she added, 'I hope you will find it pleasanter to be here
than canvassing.'

'I have no pleasure in canvassing,' said he. 'I canvass poor men
accustomed to be paid for their votes, and who get nothing from me but
what the baron would call a parsonical exhortation. I'm in the thick of
the most spiritless crew in the kingdom. Our southern men will not
compare with the men of the north. But still, even among these fellows, I
see danger for the country if our commerce were to fail, if distress came
on them. There's always danger in disunion. That's what the rich won't
see. They see simply nothing out of their own circle; and they won't take
a thought of the overpowering contrast between their luxury and the way
of living, that's half-starving, of the poor. They understand it when
fever comes up from back alleys and cottages, and then they join their
efforts to sweep the poor out of the district. The poor are to get to
their work anyhow, after a long morning's walk over the proscribed space;
for we must have poor, you know. The wife of a parson I canvassed
yesterday, said to me, "Who is to work for us, if you do away with the
poor, Captain Beauchamp?"'

Cecilia quitted her bower and traversed the wood silently.

'So you would blow up my poor Mount Laurels for a peace-offering to the
lower classes?'

'I should hope to put it on a stronger foundation, Cecilia.'

'By means of some convulsion?'

'By forestalling one.'

'That must be one of the new ironclads,' observed Cecilia, gazing at the
black smoke-pennon of a tower that slipped along the water-line. 'Yes?
You were saying? Put us on a stronger----?'

'It's, I think, the Hastings: she broke down the other day on her trial
trip,' said Beauchamp, watching the ship's progress animatedly. 'Peppel
commands her--a capital officer. I suppose we must have these costly big
floating barracks. I don't like to hear of everything being done for the
defensive. The defensive is perilous policy in war. It's true, the
English don't wake up to their work under half a year. But, no: defending
and looking to defences is bad for the fighting power; and there's half a
million gone on that ship. Half a million! Do you know how many poor
taxpayers it takes to make up that sum, Cecilia?'

'A great many,' she slurred over them; 'but we must have big ships, and
the best that are to be had.'

'Powerful fast rams, sea-worthy and fit for running over shallows,
carrying one big gun; swarms of harryers and worriers known to be kept
ready for immediate service; readiness for the offensive in case of
war--there's the best defence against a declaration of war by a foreign
State.'

'I like to hear you, Nevil,' said Cecilia, beaming: 'Papa thinks we have
a miserable army--in numbers. He says, the wealthier we become the more
difficult it is to recruit able-bodied men on the volunteering system.
Yet the wealthier we are the more an army is wanted, both to defend our
wealth and to preserve order. I fancy he half inclines to compulsory
enlistment. Do speak to him on that subject.'

Cecilia must have been innocent of a design to awaken the fire-flash in
Nevil's eyes. She had no design, but hostility was latent, and hence
perhaps the offending phrase.

He nodded and spoke coolly. 'An army to preserve order? So, then, an army
to threaten civil war!'

'To crush revolutionists.'

'Agitators, you mean. My dear good old colonel--I have always loved
him--must not have more troops at his command.'

'Do you object to the drilling of the whole of the people?'

'Does not the colonel, Cecilia? I am sure he does in his heart, and, for
different reasons, I do. He won't trust the working-classes, nor I the
middle.'

'Does Dr. Shrapnel hate the middle-class?'

'Dr. Shrapnel cannot hate. He and I are of opinion, that as the
middle-class are the party in power, they would not, if they knew the use
of arms, move an inch farther in Reform, for they would no longer be in
fear of the class below them.'

'But what horrible notions of your country have you, Nevil! It is
dreadful to hear. Oh! do let us avoid politics for ever. Fear!'

'All concessions to the people have been won from fear.'

'I have not heard so.'

'I will read it to you in the History of England.'

'You paint us in a condition of Revolution.'

'Happily it's not a condition unnatural to us. The danger would be in not
letting it be progressive, and there's a little danger too at times in
our slowness. We change our blood or we perish.'

'Dr. Shrapnel?'

'Yes, I have heard Dr. Shrapnel say that. And, by-the-way, Cecilia--will
you? can you?--take me for the witness to his character. He is the most
guileless of men, and he's the most unguarded. My good Rosamund saw him.
She is easily prejudiced when she is a trifle jealous, and you may hear
from her that he rambles, talks wildly. It may seem so. I maintain there
is wisdom in him when conventional minds would think him at his wildest.
Believe me, he is the humanest, the best of men, tenderhearted as a
child: the most benevolent, simple-minded, admirable old man--the man I
am proudest to think of as an Englishman and a man living in my time, of
all men existing. I can't overpraise him.'

'He has a bad reputation.'

'Only with the class that will not meet him and answer him.'

'Must we invite him to our houses?'

'It would be difficult to get him to come, if you did. I mean, meet him
in debate and answer his arguments. Try the question by brains.'

'Before mobs?'

'Not before mobs. I punish you by answering you seriously.'

'I am sensible of the flattery.'

'Before mobs!' Nevil ejaculated. 'It's the Tories that mob together and
cry down every man who appears to them to threaten their privileges. Can
you guess what Dr. Shrapnel compares them to?'

'Indeed, Nevil, I have not an idea. I only wish your patriotism were
large enough to embrace them.'

'He compares them to geese claiming possession of the whole common, and
hissing at every foot of ground they have to yield. They're always having
to retire and always hissing. "Retreat and menace," that's the motto for
them.'

'Very well, Nevil, I am a goose upon a common.'

So saying, Cecilia swam forward like a swan on water to give the morning
kiss to her papa, by the open window of the breakfast-room.

Never did bird of Michaelmas fling off water from her feathers more
thoroughly than this fair young lady the false title she pretended to
assume.

'I hear you're of the dinner party at Grancey Lespel's on Wednesday,' the
colonel said to Beauchamp. 'You'll have to stand fire.'

'They will, papa,' murmured Cecilia. 'Will Mr. Austin be there?'

'I particularly wish to meet Mr. Austin,' said Beauchamp.

'Listen to him, if you do meet him,' she replied.

His look was rather grave.

'Lespel 's a Whig,' he said.

The colonel answered. 'Lespel was a Whig. Once a Tory always a Tory,--but
court the people and you're on quicksands, and that's where the Whigs
are. What he is now I don't think he knows himself. You won't get a
vote.'

Cecilia watched her friend Nevil recovering from his short fit of gloom.
He dismissed politics at breakfast and grew companionable, with the charm
of his earlier day. He was willing to accompany her to church too.

'You will hear a long sermon,' she warned him.

'Forty minutes.' Colonel Halkett smothered a yawn that was both retro and
prospective.

'It has been fifty, papa.'

'It has been an hour, my dear.'

It was good discipline nevertheless, the colonel affirmed, and Cecilia
praised the Rev. Mr. Brisk of Urplesdon vicarage as one of our few
remaining Protestant clergymen.

'Then he ought to be supported,' said Beauchamp. 'In the dissensions of
religious bodies it is wise to pat the weaker party on the back--I quote
Stukely Culbrett.'

'I 've heard him,' sighed the colonel. 'He calls the Protestant clergy
the social police of the English middle-class. Those are the things he
lets fly. I have heard that man say that the Church stands to show the
passion of the human race for the drama. He said it in my presence. And
there 's a man who calls himself a Tory!

You have rather too much of that playing at grudges and dislikes at
Steynham, with squibs, nicknames, and jests at things that--well, that
our stability is bound up in. I hate squibs.'

'And I,' said Beauchamp. Some shadow of a frown crossed him; but Stukely
Culbrett's humour seemed to be a refuge. 'Protestant parson-not clergy,'
he corrected the colonel. 'Can't you hear Mr. Culbrett, Cecilia? The
Protestant parson is the policeman set to watch over the respectability
of the middle-class. He has sharp eyes for the sins of the poor. As for
the rich, they support his church; they listen to his sermon--to set an
example: discipline, colonel. You discipline the tradesman, who's afraid
of losing your custom, and the labourer, who might be deprived of his
bread. But the people? It's put down to the wickedness of human nature
that the parson has not got hold of the people. The parsons have lost
them by senseless Conservatism, because they look to the Tories for the
support of their Church, and let the religion run down the gutters. And
how many thousands have you at work in the pulpit every Sunday? I'm told
the Dissenting ministers have some vitality.'

Colonel Halkett shrugged with disgust at the mention of Dissenters.

'And those thirty or forty thousand, colonel, call the men that do the
work they ought to be doing demagogues. The parsonry are a power
absolutely to be counted for waste, as to progress.'

Cecilia perceived that her father was beginning to be fretted.

She said, with a tact that effected its object: 'I am one who hear Mr.
Culbrett without admiring his wit.'

'No, and I see no good in this kind of Steynham talk,' Colonel Halkett
said, rising. 'We're none of us perfect. Heaven save us from political
parsons!'

Beauchamp was heard to utter, 'Humanity.'

The colonel left the room with Cecilia, muttering the Steynham tail to
that word: 'tomtity,' for the solace of an aside repartee.

She was on her way to dress for church. He drew her into the library, and
there threw open a vast placard lying on the table. It was printed in
blue characters and red. 'This is what I got by the post this morning. I
suppose Nevil knows about it. He wants tickling, but I don't like this
kind of thing. It 's not fair war. It 's as bad as using explosive
bullets in my old game.'

'Can he expect his adversaries to be tender with him?' Cecilia simulated
vehemence in an underbreath. She glanced down the page:

'FRENCH MARQUEES' caught her eye.

It was a page of verse. And, oh! could it have issued from a Tory
Committee?

'The Liberals are as bad, and worse,' her father said.

She became more and more distressed. 'It seems so very mean, papa; so
base. Ungenerous is no word for it. And how vulgar! Now I remember, Nevil
said he wished to see Mr. Austin.'

'Seymour Austin would not sanction it.'

'No, but Nevil might hold him responsible for it.'

'I suspect Mr. Stukely Culbrett, whom he quotes, and that smoking-room
lot at Lespel's. I distinctly discountenance it. So I shall tell them on
Wednesday night. Can you keep a secret?'

'And after all Nevil Beauchamp is very young, papa!--of course I can keep
a secret.'

The colonel exacted no word of honour, feeling quite sure of her.

He whispered the secret in six words, and her cheeks glowed vermilion.

'But they will meet on Wednesday after this,' she said, and her sight
went dancing down the column of verse, of which the following trotting
couplet is a specimen:--

  'O did you ever, hot in love, a little British middy see,
   Like Orpheus asking what the deuce to do without Eurydice?'

The middy is jilted by his FRENCH MARQUEES, whom he 'did adore,' and in
his wrath he recommends himself to the wealthy widow Bevisham, concerning
whose choice of her suitors there is a doubt: but the middy is encouraged
to persevere:

   'Up, up, my pretty middy; take a draught of foaming Sillery;
   Go in and win the uriddy with your Radical artillery.'

And if Sillery will not do, he is advised, he being for superlatives, to
try the sparkling Sillery of the Radical vintage, selected grapes.

This was but impudent nonsense. But the reiterated apostrophe to 'MY
FRENCH MARQUEES' was considered by Cecilia to be a brutal offence.

She was shocked that her party should have been guilty of it. Nevil
certainly provoked, and he required, hard blows; and his uncle Everard
might be right in telling her father that they were the best means of
teaching him to come to his understanding. Still a foul and stupid squib
did appear to her a debasing weapon to use.

'I cannot congratulate you on your choice of a second candidate, papa,'
she said scornfully.

'I don't much congratulate myself,' said the colonel.

'Here's a letter from Mrs. Beauchamp informing me that her boy Blackburn
will be home in a month. There would have been plenty of time for him.
However, we must make up our minds to it. Those two 'll be meeting on
Wednesday, so keep your secret. It will be out tomorrow week.'

'But Nevil will be accusing Mr. Austin.'

'Austin won't be at Lespel's. And he must bear it, for the sake of
peace.'

'Is Nevil ruined with his uncle, papa?'

'Not a bit, I should imagine. It's Romfrey's fun.'

'And this disgraceful squib is a part of the fun?'

'That I know nothing about, my dear. I'm sorry, but there's pitch and tar
in politics as well as on shipboard.'

'I do not see that there should be,' said Cecilia resolutely.

'We can't hope to have what should be.'

'Why not? I would have it: I would do my utmost to have it,' she flamed
out.

'Your utmost?' Her father was glancing at her foregone mimicry of
Beauchamp's occasional strokes of emphasis. 'Do your utmost to have your
bonnet on in time for us to walk to church. I can't bear driving there.'

Cecilia went to her room with the curious reflection, awakened by what
her father had chanced to suggest to her mind, that she likewise could be
fervid, positive, uncompromising--who knows? Radicalish, perhaps, when
she looked eye to eye on an evil. For a moment or so she espied within
herself a gulf of possibilities, wherein black night-birds, known as
queries, roused by shot of light, do flap their wings.--Her utmost to
have be what should be! And why not?

But the intemperate feeling subsided while she was doing duty before her
mirror, and the visionary gulf closed immediately.

She had merely been very angry on Nevil Beauchamp's behalf, and had dimly
seen that a woman can feel insurgent, almost revolutionary, for a
personal cause, Tory though her instinct of safety and love of smoothness
make her.

No reflection upon this casual piece of self or sex revelation troubled
her head. She did, however, think of her position as the friend of Nevil
in utter antagonism to him. It beset her with contradictions that blew
rough on her cherished serenity; for she was of the order of ladies who,
by virtue of their pride and spirit, their port and their beauty, decree
unto themselves the rank of princesses among women, before our world has
tried their claim to it. She had lived hitherto in upper air, high above
the clouds of earth. Her ideal of a man was of one similarly disengaged
and lofty-loftier. Nevil, she could honestly say, was not her ideal; he
was only her old friend, and she was opposed to him in his present
adventure. The striking at him to cure him of his mental errors and
excesses was an obligation; she could descend upon him calmly with the
chastening rod, pointing to the better way; but the shielding of him was
a different thing; it dragged her down so low, that in her condemnation
of the Tory squib she found herself asking herself whether haply Nevil
had flung off the yoke of the French lady; with the foolish excuse for
the question, that if he had not, he must be bitterly sensitive to the
slightest public allusion to her. Had he? And if not, how desperately
faithful he was! or else how marvellously seductive she!

Perhaps it was a lover's despair that had precipitated him into the mire
of politics. She conceived the impression that it must be so, and
throughout the day she had an inexplicable unsweet pleasure in inciting
him to argumentation and combating him, though she was compelled to admit
that he had been colloquially charming antecedent to her naughty
provocation; and though she was indebted to him for his patient decorum
under the weary wave of the Reverend Mr. Brisk. Now what does it matter
what a woman thinks in politics? But he deemed it of great moment.
Politically, he deemed that women have souls, a certain fire of life for
exercise on earth. He appealed to reason in them; he would not hear of
convictions. He quoted the Bevisham doctor!

'Convictions are generally first impressions that are sealed with later
prejudices,' and insisted there was wisdom in it. Nothing tired him, as
he had said, and addressing woman or man, no prospect of fatigue or of
hopeless effort daunted him in the endeavour to correct an error of
judgement in politics--his notion of an error. The value he put upon
speaking, urging his views, was really fanatical. It appeared that he
canvassed the borough from early morning till near midnight, and nothing
would persuade him that his chance was poor; nothing that an entrenched
Tory like her father, was not to be won even by an assault of all the
reserve forces of Radical pathos, prognostication, and statistics.

Only conceive Nevil Beauchamp knocking at doors late at night, the sturdy
beggar of a vote! or waylaying workmen, as he confessed without shame
that he had done, on their way trooping to their midday meal; penetrating
malodoriferous rooms of dismal ten-pound cottagers, to exhort bedraggled
mothers and babes, and besotted husbands; and exposed to rebuffs from
impertinent tradesmen; and lampooned and travestied, shouting speeches to
roaring men, pushed from shoulder to shoulder of the mob! . . .

Cecilia dropped a curtain on her mind's picture of him. But the blinding
curtain rekindled the thought that the line he had taken could not but be
the desperation of a lover abandoned. She feared it was, she feared it
was not. Nevil Beauchamp's foe persisted in fearing that it was not; his
friend feared that it was. Yet why? For if it was, then he could not be
quite in earnest, and might be cured. Nay, but earnestness works out its
own cure more surely than frenzy, and it should be preferable to think
him sound of heart, sincere though mistaken. Cecilia could not decide
upon what she dared wish for his health's good. Friend and foe were not
further separable within her bosom than one tick from another of a clock;
they changed places, and next his friend was fearing what his foe had
feared: they were inextricable.

Why had he not sprung up on a radiant aquiline ambition, whither one
might have followed him, with eyes and prayers for him, if it was not
possible to do so companionably? At present, in the shape of a canvassing
candidate, it was hardly honourable to let imagination dwell on him, save
compassionately.

When he rose to take his leave, Cecilia said, 'Must you go to Itchincope
on Wednesday, Nevil?'

Colonel Halkett added: 'I don't think I would go to Lespel's if I were
you. I rather suspect Seymour Austin will be coming on Wednesday, and
that 'll detain me here, and you might join us and lend him an ear for an
evening.'

'I have particular reasons for going to Lespel's; I hear he wavers toward
a Tory conspiracy of some sort,' said Beauchamp.

The colonel held his tongue.

The untiring young candidate chose to walk down to Bevisham at eleven
o'clock at night, that he might be the readier to continue his canvass of
the borough on Monday morning early. He was offered a bed or a
conveyance, and he declined both; the dog-cart he declined out of
consideration for horse and groom, which an owner of stables could not
but approve.

Colonel Halkett broke into exclamations of pity for so good a young
fellow so misguided.

The night was moonless, and Cecilia, looking through the window, said
whimsically, 'He has gone out into the darkness, and is no light in it!'

Certainly none shone. She however carried a lamp that revealed him
footing on with a wonderful air of confidence, and she was rather
surprised to hear her father regret that Nevil Beauchamp should be losing
his good looks already, owing to that miserable business of his in
Bevisham. She would have thought the contrary, that he was looking as
well as ever.

'He dresses just as he used to dress,' she observed.

The individual style of a naval officer of breeding, in which you see
neatness trifling with disorder, or disorder plucking at neatness, like
the breeze a trim vessel, had been caught to perfection by Nevil
Beauchamp, according to Cecilia. It presented him to her mind in a
cheerful and a very undemocratic aspect, but in realizing it, the
thought, like something flashing black, crossed her--how attractive such
a style must be to a Frenchwoman!

'He may look a little worn,' she acquiesced.




CHAPTER XVIII

CONCERNING THE ACT OF CANVASSING

Tories dread the restlessness of Radicals, and Radicals are in awe of the
organization of Tories. Beauchamp thought anxiously of the high degree of
confidence existing in the Tory camp, whose chief could afford to keep
aloof, while he slaved all day and half the night to thump ideas into
heads, like a cooper on a cask:--an impassioned cooper on an empty cask!
if such an image is presentable. Even so enviously sometimes the writer
and the barrister, men dependent on their active wits, regard the man
with a business fixed in an office managed by clerks. That man seems by
comparison celestially seated. But he has his fits of trepidation; for
new tastes prevail and new habits are formed, and the structure of his
business will not allow him to adapt himself to them in a minute. The
secure and comfortable have to pay in occasional panics for the serenity
they enjoy. Mr. Seymour Austin candidly avowed to Colonel Halkett, on his
arrival at Mount Laurels, that he was advised to take up his quarters in
the neighbourhood of Bevisham by a recent report of his committee,
describing the young Radical's canvass as redoubtable. Cougham he did not
fear: he could make a sort of calculation of the votes for the Liberal
thumping on the old drum of Reform; but the number for him who appealed
to feelings and quickened the romantic sentiments of the common people
now huddled within our electoral penfold, was not calculable. Tory and
Radical have an eye for one another, which overlooks the Liberal at all
times except when he is, as they imagine, playing the game of either of
them.

'Now we shall see the passions worked,' Mr. Austin said, deploring the
extension of the franchise.

He asked whether Beauchamp spoke well.

Cecilia left it to her father to reply; but the colonel appealed to her,
saying, 'Inclined to dragoon one, isn't he?'

She did not think that. 'He speaks . . . he speaks well in conversation.
I fancy he would be liked by the poor. I should doubt his being a good
public speaker. He certainly has command of his temper: that is one
thing. I cannot say whether it favours oratory. He is indefatigable. One
may be sure he will not faint by the way. He quite believes in himself.
But, Mr. Austin, do you really regard him as a serious rival?'

Mr. Austin could not tell. No one could tell the effect of an extended
franchise. The untried venture of it depressed him. 'Men have come
suddenly on a borough before now and carried it,' he said.

'Not a borough like Bevisham?'

He shook his head. 'A fluid borough, I'm afraid.'

Colonel Halkettt interposed: 'But Ferbrass is quite sure of his
district.'

Cecilia wished to know who the man was, of the mediaevally sounding name.

'Ferbrass is an old lawyer, my dear. He comes of five generations of
lawyers, and he 's as old in the county as Grancey Lespel. Hitherto he
has always been to be counted on for marching his district to the poll
like a regiment. That's our strength--the professions, especially
lawyers.'

'Are not a great many lawyers Liberals, papa?'

'A great many barristers are, my dear.'

Thereat the colonel and Mr. Austin smiled together.

It was a new idea to Cecilia that Nevil Beauchamp should be considered by
a man of the world anything but a well-meaning, moderately ridiculous
young candidate; and the fact that one so experienced as Seymour Austin
deemed him an adversary to be grappled with in earnest, created a small
revolution in her mind, entirely altering her view of the probable
pliability of his Radicalism under pressure of time and circumstances.
Many of his remarks, that she had previously half smiled at, came across
her memory hard as metal. She began to feel some terror of him, and said,
to reassure herself: 'Captain Beauchamp is not likely to be a champion
with a very large following. He is too much of a political mystic, I
think.'

'Many young men are, before they have written out a fair copy of their
meaning,' said Mr. Austin.

Cecilia laughed to herself at the vision of the fiery Nevil engaged in
writing out a fair copy of his meaning. How many erasures! what
foot-notes!

The arrangement was for Cecilia to proceed to Itchincope alone for a
couple of days, and bring a party to Mount Laurels through Bevisham by
the yacht on Thursday, to meet Mr. Seymour Austin and Mr. Everard
Romfrey. An early day of the next week had been agreed on for the
unmasking of the second Tory candidate. She promised that in case Nevil
Beauchamp should have the hardihood to enter the enemy's nest at
Itchincope on Wednesday, at the great dinner and ball there, she would do
her best to bring him back to Mount Laurels, that he might meet his uncle
Everard, who was expected there. At least he may consent to come for an
evening,' she said. 'Nothing will take him from that canvassing. It seems
to me it must be not merely distasteful . . . ?'

Mr. Austin replied: 'It 's disagreeable, but it's' the practice. I would
gladly be bound by a common undertaking to abstain.'

'Captain Beauchamp argues that it would be all to your advantage. He says
that a personal visit is the only chance for an unknown candidate to make
the people acquainted with him.'

'It's a very good opportunity for making him acquainted with them; and I
hope he may profit by it.'

'Ah! pah! "To beg the vote and wink the bribe,"' Colonel Halkett
subjoined abhorrently:

       "'It well becomes the Whiggish tribe
        To beg the vote and wink the bribe."

Canvassing means intimidation or corruption.'

'Or the mixture of the two, called cajolery,' said Mr. Austin; 'and that
was the principal art of the Whigs.'

Thus did these gentlemen converse upon canvassing.

It is not possible to gather up in one volume of sound the rattle of the
knocks at Englishmen's castle-gates during election days; so, with the
thunder of it unheard, the majesty of the act of canvassing can be but
barely appreciable, and he, therefore, who would celebrate it must follow
the candidate obsequiously from door to door, where, like a cross between
a postman delivering a bill and a beggar craving an alms, patiently he
attempts the extraction of the vote, as little boys pick periwinkles with
a pin.

'This is your duty, which I most abjectly entreat you to do,' is pretty
nearly the form of the supplication.

How if, instead of the solicitation of the thousands by the unit, the
meritorious unit were besought by rushing thousands?--as a mound of the
plains that is circumvented by floods, and to which the waters cry, Be
thou our island. Let it be answered the questioner, with no discourteous
adjectives, Thou fool! To come to such heights of popular discrimination
and political ardour the people would have to be vivified to a pitch
little short of eruptive: it would be Boreas blowing AEtna inside them;
and we should have impulse at work in the country, and immense importance
attaching to a man's whether he will or he won't--enough to womanize him.
We should be all but having Parliament for a sample of our choicest
rather than our likest: and see you not a peril in that?

Conceive, for the fleeting instants permitted to such insufferable
flights of fancy, our picked men ruling! So despotic an oligarchy as
would be there, is not a happy subject of contemplation. It is not too
much to say that a domination of the Intellect in England would at once
and entirely alter the face of the country. We should be governed by the
head with a vengeance: all the rest of the country being base members
indeed; Spartans--helots. Criticism, now so helpful to us, would wither
to the root: fun would die out of Parliament, and outside of it: we could
never laugh at our masters, or command them: and that good old-fashioned
shouldering of separate interests, which, if it stops progress, like a
block in the pit entrance to a theatre, proves us equal before the law,
puts an end to the pretence of higher merit in the one or the other, and
renders a stout build the safest assurance for coming through ultimately,
would be transformed to a painful orderliness, like a City procession
under the conduct of the police, and to classifications of things
according to their public value: decidedly no benefit to burly freedom.
None, if there were no shouldering and hustling, could tell whether
actually the fittest survived; as is now the case among survivors
delighting in a broad-chested fitness.

And consider the freezing isolation of a body of our quintessential
elect, seeing below them none to resemble them! Do you not hear in
imagination the land's regrets for that amiable nobility whose
pretensions were comically built on birth, acres, tailoring, style, and
an air? Ah, that these unchallengeable new lords could be exchanged for
those old ones! These, with the traditions of how great people should
look in our country, these would pass among us like bergs of ice--a pure
Polar aristocracy, inflicting the woes of wintriness upon us. Keep them
from concentrating! At present I believe it to be their honest opinion,
their wise opinion, and the sole opinion common to a majority of them,
that it is more salutary, besides more diverting, to have the fools of
the kingdom represented than not. As professors of the sarcastic art they
can easily take the dignity out of the fools' representative at their
pleasure, showing him at antics while he supposes he is exhibiting an
honourable and a decent series of movements. Generally, too, their
archery can check him when he is for any of his measures; and if it does
not check, there appears to be such a property in simple sneering, that
it consoles even when it fails to right the balance of power. Sarcasm, we
well know, confers a title of aristocracy straightway and sharp on the
sconce of the man who does but imagine that he is using it. What, then,
must be the elevation of these princes of the intellect in their own
minds! Hardly worth bartering for worldly commanderships, it is evident.

Briefly, then, we have a system, not planned but grown, the outcome and
image of our genius, and all are dissatisfied with parts of it; but, as
each would preserve his own, the surest guarantee is obtained for the
integrity of the whole by a happy adjustment of the energies of
opposition, which--you have only to look to see--goes far beyond concord
in the promotion of harmony. This is our English system; like our English
pudding, a fortuitous concourse of all the sweets in the grocer's shop,
but an excellent thing for all that, and let none threaten it. Canvassing
appears to be mixed up in the system; at least I hope I have shown that
it will not do to reverse the process, for fear of changes leading to a
sovereignty of the austere and antipathetic Intellect in our England,
that would be an inaccessible tyranny of a very small minority,
necessarily followed by tremendous convulsions.




CHAPTER XIX

LORD PALMET, AND CERTAIN ELECTORS OF BEVISHAM

Meantime the candidates raised knockers, rang bells, bowed, expounded
their views, praised their virtues, begged for votes, and greatly and
strangely did the youngest of them enlarge his knowledge of his
countrymen. But he had an insatiable appetite, and except in relation to
Mr. Cougham, considerable tolerance. With Cougham, he was like a young
hound in the leash. They had to run as twins; but Beauchamp's conjunct
would not run, he would walk. He imposed his experience on Beauchamp,
with an assumption that it must necessarily be taken for the law of
Beauchamp's reason in electoral and in political affairs, and this was
hard on Beauchamp, who had faith in his reason. Beauchamp's early
canvassing brought Cougham down to Bevisham earlier than usual in the
days when he and Seymour Austin divided the borough, and he inclined to
administer correction to the Radically-disposed youngster. 'Yes, I have
gone all over that,' he said, in speech sometimes, in manner perpetually,
upon the intrusion of an idea by his junior. Cougham also, Cougham had
passed through his Radical phase, as one does on the road to wisdom. So
the frog telleth tadpoles: he too has wriggled most preposterous of
tails; and he has shoved a circular flat head into corners unadapted to
its shape; and that the undeveloped one should dutifully listen to
experience and accept guidance, is devoutly to be hoped. Alas! Beauchamp
would not be taught that though they were yoked they stood at the
opposite ends of the process of evolution.

The oddly coupled pair deplored, among their respective friends, the
disastrous Siamese twinship created by a haphazard improvident Liberal
camp. Look at us! they said:--Beauchamp is a young demagogue; Cougham is
chrysalis Tory. Such Liberals are the ruin of Liberalism; but of such
must it be composed when there is no new cry to loosen floods. It was too
late to think of an operation to divide them. They held the heart of the
cause between them, were bound fast together, and had to go on.
Beauchamp, with a furious tug of Radicalism, spoken or performed, pulled
Cougham on his beam-ends. Cougham, to right himself, defined his
Liberalism sharply from the politics of the pit, pointed to France and
her Revolutions, washed his hands of excesses, and entirely overset
Beauchamp. Seeing that he stood in the Liberal interest, the junior could
not abandon the Liberal flag; so he seized it and bore it ahead of the
time, there where Radicals trip their phantom dances like shadows on a
fog, and waved it as the very flag of our perfectible race. So great was
the impetus that Cougham had no choice but to step out with him
briskly--voluntarily as a man propelled by a hand on his coat-collar. A
word saved him: the word practical. 'Are we practical?' he inquired, and
shivered Beauchamp's galloping frame with a violent application of the
stop abrupt; for that question, 'Are we practical?' penetrates the bosom
of an English audience, and will surely elicit a response if not.
plaudits. Practical or not, the good people affectingly wish to be
thought practical. It has been asked by them.

If we're not practical, what are we?--Beauchamp, talking to Cougham
apart, would argue that the daring and the far-sighted course was often
the most practical. Cougham extended a deprecating hand: 'Yes, I have
gone over all that.' Occasionally he was maddening.

The melancholy position of the senior and junior Liberals was known
abroad and matter of derision.

It happened that the gay and good-humoured young Lord Palmet, heir to the
earldom of Elsea, walking up the High Street of Bevisham, met Beauchamp
on Tuesday morning as he sallied out of his hotel to canvass. Lord Palmet
was one of the numerous half-friends of Cecil Baskelett, and it may be a
revelation of his character to you, that he owned to liking Beauchamp
because of his having always been a favourite with the women. He began
chattering, with Beauchamp's hand in his: 'I've hit on you, have I? My
dear fellow, Miss Halkett was talking of you last night. I slept at Mount
Laurels; went on purpose to have a peep. I'm bound for Itchincope.
They've some grand procession in view there; Lespel wrote for my team; I
suspect he's for starting some new October races. He talks of
half-a-dozen drags. He must have lots of women there. I say, what a
splendid creature Cissy Halkett has shot up! She topped the season this
year, and will next. You're for the darkies, Beauchamp. So am I, when I
don't see a blonde; just as a fellow admires a girl when there's no
married woman or widow in sight. And, I say, it can't be true you've gone
in for that crazy Radicalism? There's nothing to be gained by it, you
know; the women hate it! A married blonde of five-and-twenty's the Venus
of them all. Mind you, I don't forget that Mrs. Wardour-Devereux is a
thorough-paced brunette; but, upon my honour, I'd bet on Cissy Halkett at
forty. "A dark eye in woman," if you like, but blue and auburn drive it
into a corner.'

Lord Palmet concluded by asking Beauchamp what he was doing and whither
going.

Beauchamp proposed to him maliciously, as one of our hereditary
legislators, to come and see something of canvassing. Lord Palmet had no
objection. 'Capital opportunity for a review of their women,' he
remarked.

'I map the places for pretty women in England; some parts of Norfolk, and
a spot or two in Cumberland and Wales, and the island over there, I know
thoroughly. Those Jutes have turned out some splendid fair women.
Devonshire's worth a tour. My man Davis is in charge of my team, and he
drives to Itchincope from Washwater station. I am independent; I 'll have
an hour with you. Do you think much of the women here?'

Beauchamp had not noticed them.

Palmet observed that he should not have noticed anything else.

'But you are qualifying for the Upper House,' Beauchamp said in the tone
of an encomium.

Palmet accepted the statement. 'Though I shall never care to figure
before peeresses,' he said. 'I can't tell you why. There's a heavy
sprinkling of the old bird among them. It isn't that. There's too much
plumage; I think it must be that. A cloud of millinery shoots me off a
mile from a woman. In my opinion, witches are the only ones for wearing
jewels without chilling the feminine atmosphere about them. Fellows think
differently.' Lord Palmet waved a hand expressive of purely amiable
tolerance, for this question upon the most important topic of human
affairs was deep, and no judgement should be hasty in settling it. 'I'm
peculiar,' he resumed. 'A rose and a string of pearls: a woman who goes
beyond that's in danger of petrifying herself and her fellow man. Two
women in Paris, last winter, set us on fire with pale thin gold
ornaments--neck, wrists, ears, ruche, skirts, all in a flutter, and so
were you. But you felt witchcraft. "The magical Orient," Vivian Ducie
called the blonde, and the dark beauty, "Young Endor."'

'Her name?' said Beauchamp.

'A marquise; I forget her name. The other was Countess Rastaglione; you
must have heard of her; a towering witch, an empress, Helen of Troy;
though Ducie would have it the brunette was Queen of Paris. For French
taste, if you like.'

Countess Rastaglione was a lady enamelled on the scroll of Fame. 'Did you
see them together?' said Beauchamp. 'They weren't together?'

Palmet looked at him and laughed. 'You're yourself again, are you? Go to
Paris in January, and cut out the Frenchmen.'

'Answer me, Palmet: they weren't in couples?'

'I fancy not. It was luck to meet them, so they couldn't have been.'

'Did you dance with either of them?'

Unable to state accurately that he had, Palmet cried, 'Oh! for dancing,
the Frenchwoman beat the Italian.'

'Did you see her often--more than once?'

'My dear fellow, I went everywhere to see her: balls, theatres,
promenades, rides, churches.'

'And you say she dressed up to the Italian, to challenge her, rival her?'

'Only one night; simple accident. Everybody noticed it, for they stood
for Night and Day,--both hung with gold; the brunette Etruscan, and the
blonde Asiatic; and every Frenchman present was epigramizing up and down
the rooms like mad.'

'Her husband 's Legitimist; he wouldn't be at the Tuileries?' Beauchamp
spoke half to himself.

'What, then, what?' Palmet stared and chuckled. 'Her husband must have
taken the Tuileries' bait, if we mean the same woman. My dear old
Beauchamp, have I seen her, then? She's a darling! The Rastaglione was
nothing to her. When you do light on a grand smoky pearl, the milky ones
may go and decorate plaster. That's what I say of the loveliest
brunettes. It must be the same: there can't be a couple of dark beauties
in Paris without a noise about them. Marquise--? I shall recollect her
name presently.'

'Here's one of the houses I stop at,' said Beauchamp, 'and drop that
subject.'

A scared servant-girl brought out her wizened mistress to confront the
candidate, and to this representative of the sex he addressed his arts of
persuasion, requesting her to repeat his words to her husband. The
contrast between Beauchamp palpably canvassing and the Beauchamp who was
the lover of the Marquise of the forgotten name, struck too powerfully on
Palmet for his gravity he retreated.

Beauchamp found him sauntering on the pavement, and would have dismissed
him but for an agreeable diversion that occurred at that moment. A
suavely smiling unctuous old gentleman advanced to them, bowing, and
presuming thus far, he said, under the supposition that he was accosting
the junior Liberal candidate for the borough. He announced his name and
his principles Tomlinson, progressive Liberal.

'A true distinction from some Liberals I know,' said Beauchamp.

Mr. Tomlinson hoped so. Never, he said, did he leave it to the man of his
choice at an election to knock at his door for the vote.

Beauchamp looked as if he had swallowed a cordial. Votes falling into his
lap are heavenly gifts to the candidate sick of the knocker and the bell.
Mr. Tomlinson eulogized the manly candour of the junior Liberal
candidate's address, in which he professed to see ideas that
distinguished it from the address of the sound but otherwise conventional
Liberal, Mr. Cougham. He muttered of plumping for Beauchamp. 'Don't
plump,' Beauchamp said; and a candidate, if he would be an honourable
twin, must say it. Cougham had cautioned him against the heresy of
plumping.

They discoursed of the poor and their beverages, of pothouses, of the
anti-liquorites, and of the duties of parsons, and the value of a robust
and right-minded body of the poor to the country. Palmet found himself
following them into a tolerably spacious house that he took to be the old
gentleman's until some of the apparatus of an Institute for literary and
scientific instruction revealed itself to him, and he heard Mr. Tomlinson
exalt the memory of one Wingham for the blessing bequeathed by him to the
town of Bevisham. 'For,' said Mr. Tomlinson, 'it is open to both sexes,
to all respectable classes, from ten in the morning up to ten at night.
Such a place affords us, I would venture to say, the advantages without
the seductions of a Club. I rank it next--at a far remove, but next-the
church.'

Lord Palmet brought his eyes down from the busts of certain worthies
ranged along the top of the book-shelves to the cushioned chairs, and
murmured, 'Capital place for an appointment with a woman.'

Mr. Tomlinson gazed up at him mildly, with a fallen countenance. He
turned sadly agape in silence to the busts, the books, and the range of
scientific instruments, and directed a gaze under his eyebrows at
Beauchamp. 'Does your friend canvass with you?' he inquired.

'I want him to taste it,' Beauchamp replied, and immediately introduced
the affable young lord--a proceeding marked by some of the dexterity he
had once been famous for, as was shown by a subsequent observation of Mr.
Tomlinson's:

'Yes,' he said, on the question of classes, 'yes, I fear we have classes
in this country whose habitual levity sharp experience will have to
correct. I very much fear it.'

'But if you have classes that are not to face realities classes that look
on them from the box-seats of a theatre,' said Beauchamp, 'how can you
expect perfect seriousness, or any good service whatever?'

'Gently, sir, gently. No; we can, I feel confident, expand within the
limits of our most excellent and approved Constitution. I could wish that
socially . . . that is all.'

'Socially and politically mean one thing in the end,' said Beauchamp. 'If
you have a nation politically corrupt, you won't have a good state of
morals in it, and the laws that keep society together bear upon the
politics of a country.'

'True; yes,' Mr. Tomlinson hesitated assent. He dissociated Beauchamp
from Lord Palmet, but felt keenly that the latter's presence desecrated
Wingham's Institute, and he informed the candidate that he thought he
would no longer detain him from his labours.

'Just the sort of place wanted in every provincial town,' Palmet remarked
by way of a parting compliment.

Mr. Tomlinson bowed a civil acknowledgement of his having again spoken.

No further mention was made of the miraculous vote which had risen
responsive to the candidate's address of its own inspired motion; so
Beauchamp said, 'I beg you to bear in mind that I request you not to
plump.'

'You may be right, Captain Beauchamp. Good day, sir.'

Palmet strode after Beauchamp into the street.

'Why did you set me bowing to that old boy?' he asked.

'Why did you talk about women?' was the rejoinder.

'Oh, aha!' Palmet sang to himself. 'You're a Romfrey, Beauchamp. A blow
for a blow! But I only said what would strike every fellow first off. It
is the place; the very place. Pastry-cooks' shops won't stand comparison
with it. Don't tell me you 're the man not to see how much a woman
prefers to be under the wing of science and literature, in a good-sized,
well-warmed room, with a book, instead of making believe, with a red
face, over a tart.'

He received a smart lecture from Beauchamp, and began to think he had
enough of canvassing. But he was not suffered to escape. For his
instruction, for his positive and extreme good, Beauchamp determined that
the heir to an earldom should have a day's lesson. We will hope there was
no intention to punish him for having frozen the genial current of Mr.
Tomlinson's vote and interest; and it may be that he clung to one who
had, as he imagined, seen Renee. Accompanied by a Mr. Oggler, a tradesman
of the town, on the Liberal committee, dressed in a pea-jacket and
proudly nautical, they applied for the vote, and found it oftener than
beauty. Palmet contrasted his repeated disappointments with the scoring
of two, three, four and more in the candidate's list, and informed him
that he would certainly get the Election. 'I think you're sure of it,' he
said. 'There's not a pretty woman to be seen; not one.'

One came up to them, the sight of whom counselled Lord Palmet to
reconsider his verdict. She was addressed by Beauchamp as Miss Denham,
and soon passed on.

Palmet was guilty of staring at her, and of lingering behind the others
for a last look at her.

They were on the steps of a voter's house, calmly enduring a rebuff from
him in person, when Palmet returned to them, exclaiming effusively, 'What
luck you have, Beauchamp!' He stopped till the applicants descended the
steps, with the voice of the voter ringing contempt as well as refusal in
their ears; then continued: 'You introduced me neck and heels to that
undertakerly old Tomlinson, of Wingham's Institute; you might have given
me a chance with that Miss--Miss Denham, was it? She has a bit of a
style!'

'She has a head,' said Beauchamp.

'A girl like that may have what she likes. I don't care what she
has--there's woman in her. You might take her for a younger sister of
Mrs. Wardour-Devereux. Who 's the uncle she speaks of? She ought not to
be allowed to walk out by herself.'

'She can take care of herself,' said Beauchamp.

Palmet denied it. 'No woman can. Upon my honour, it's a shame that she
should be out alone. What are her people? I'll run--from you, you
know--and see her safe home. There's such an infernal lot of fellows
about; and a girl simply bewitching and unprotected! I ought to be after
her.'

Beauchamp held him firmly to the task of canvassing.

'Then will you tell me where she lives?' Palmet stipulated. He reproached
Beauchamp for a notorious Grand Turk exclusiveness and greediness in
regard to women, as well as a disposition to run hard races for them out
of a spirit of pure rivalry.

'It's no use contradicting, it's universally known of you,' reiterated
Palmet. 'I could name a dozen women, and dozens of fellows you
deliberately set yourself to cut out, for the honour of it. What's that
story they tell of you in one of the American cities or watering-places,
North or South? You would dance at a ball a dozen times with a girl
engaged to a man--who drenched you with a tumbler at the hotel bar, and
off you all marched to the sands and exchanged shots from revolvers; and
both of you, they say, saw the body of a drowned sailor in the water, in
the moonlight, heaving nearer and nearer, and you stretched your man just
as the body was flung up by a wave between you. Picturesque, if you
like!'

'Dramatic, certainly. And I ran away with the bride next morning?'

'No!' roared Palmet; 'you didn't. There's the cruelty of the whole
affair.'

Beauchamp laughed. 'An old messmate of mine, Lieutenant Jack Wilmore, can
give you a different version of the story. I never have fought a duel,
and never will. Here we are at the shop of a tough voter, Mr. Oggler. So
it says in my note-book. Shall we put Lord Palmet to speak to him first?'

'If his lordship will put his heart into what he says,' Mr. Oggler bowed.
'Are you for giving the people recreation on a Sunday, my lord?'

'Trap-bat and ball, cricket, dancing, military bands, puppet-shows,
theatres, merry-go-rounds, bosky dells--anything to make them happy,'
said Palmet.

'Oh, dear! then I 'm afraid we cannot ask you to speak to this Mr.
Carpendike.' Oggler shook his head.

'Does the fellow want the people to be miserable?'

'I'm afraid, my lord, he would rather see them miserable.'

They introduced themselves to Mr. Carpendike in his shop. He was a
flat-chested, sallow young shoemaker, with a shelving forehead, who
seeing three gentlemen enter to him recognized at once with a practised
resignation that they had not come to order shoe-leather, though he would
fain have shod them, being needy; but it was not the design of Providence
that they should so come as he in his blindness would have had them.
Admitting this he wished for nothing.

The battle with Carpendike lasted three-quarters of an hour, during which
he was chiefly and most effectively silent. Carpendike would not vote for
a man that proposed to open museums on the Sabbath day. The striking
simile of the thin end of the wedge was recurred to by him for a damning
illustration. Captain Beauchamp might be honest in putting his mind on
most questions in his address, when there was no demand upon him to do
it; but honesty was no antidote to impiety. Thus Carpendike.

As to Sunday museuming being an antidote to the pothouse--no. For the
people knew the frequenting of the pothouse to be a vice; it was a
temptation of Satan that often in overcoming them was the cause of their
flying back to grace: whereas museums and picture galleries were
insidious attractions cloaked by the name of virtue, whereby they were
allured to abandon worship.

Beauchamp flew at this young monster of unreason: 'But the people are not
worshipping; they are idling and sotting, and if you carry your despotism
farther still, and shut them out of every shop on Sundays, do you suppose
you promote the spirit of worship? If you don't revolt them you unman
them, and I warn you we can't afford to destroy what manhood remains to
us in England. Look at the facts.'

He flung the facts at Carpendike with the natural exaggeration of them
which eloquence produces, rather, as a rule, to assure itself in passing
of the overwhelming justice of the cause it pleads than to deceive the
adversary. Brewers' beer and publicans' beer, wife-beatings, the homes
and the blood of the people, were matters reviewed to the confusion of
Sabbatarians.

Carpendike listened with a bent head, upraised eyes, and brows wrinkling
far on to his poll: a picture of a mind entrenched beyond the
potentialities of mortal assault. He signified that he had spoken. Indeed
Beauchamp's reply was vain to one whose argument was that he considered
the people nearer to holiness in the: indulging of an evil propensity
than in satisfying a harmless curiosity and getting a recreation. The
Sabbath claimed them; if they were disobedient, Sin ultimately might
scourge them back to the fold, but never if they were permitted to regard
themselves as innocent in their backsliding and rebelliousness.

Such language was quite new to Beauchamp. The parsons he had spoken to
were of one voice in objecting to the pothouse. He appealed to
Carpendike's humanity. Carpendike smote him with a text from Scripture.

'Devilish cold in this shop,' muttered Palmet.

Two not flourishing little children of the emaciated Puritan burst into
the shop, followed by their mother, carrying a child in her arms. She had
a sad look, upon traces of a past fairness, vaguely like a snow landscape
in the thaw. Palmet stooped to toss shillings with her young ones, that
he might avoid the woman's face. It cramped his heart.

'Don't you see, Mr. Carpendike,' said fat Mr. Oggler, 'it's the happiness
of the people we want; that's what Captain Beauchamp works for--their
happiness; that's the aim of life for all of us. Look at me! I'm as happy
as the day. I pray every night, and I go to church every Sunday, and I
never know what it is to be unhappy. The Lord has blessed me with a good
digestion, healthy pious children, and a prosperous shop that's a
competency--a modest one, but I make it satisfy me, because I know it's
the Lord's gift. Well, now, and I hate Sabbath-breakers; I would punish
them; and I'm against the public-houses on a Sunday; but aboard my little
yacht, say on a Sunday morning in the Channel, I don't forget I owe it to
the Lord that he has been good enough to put me in the way of keeping a
yacht; no; I read prayers to my crew, and a chapter in the Bible-Genesis,
Deuteronomy, Kings, Acts, Paul, just as it comes. All's good that's
there. Then we're free for the day! man, boy, and me; we cook our
victuals, and we must look to the yacht, do you see. But we've made our
peace with the Almighty. We know that. He don't mind the working of the
vessel so long as we've remembered him. He put us in that situation,
exactly there, latitude and longitude, do you see, and work the vessel we
must. And a glass of grog and a pipe after dinner, can't be any offence.
And I tell you, honestly and sincerely, I'm sure my conscience is good,
and I really and truly don't know what it is not to know happiness.'

'Then you don't know God,' said Carpendike, like a voice from a cave.

'Or nature: or the state of the world,' said Beauchamp, singularly
impressed to find himself between two men, of whom--each perforce of his
tenuity and the evident leaning of his appetites--one was for the barren
black view of existence, the other for the fantastically bright. As to
the men personally, he chose Carpendike, for all his obstinacy and
sourness. Oggler's genial piety made him shrink with nausea.

But Lord Palmet paid Mr. Oggler a memorable compliment, by assuring him
that he was altogether of his way of thinking about happiness.

The frank young nobleman did not withhold a reference to the two or three
things essential to his happiness; otherwise Mr. Oggler might have been
pleased and flattered.

Before quitting the shop, Beauchamp warned Carpendike that he should come
again. 'Vote or no vote, you're worth the trial. Texts as many as you
like. I'll make your faith active, if it's alive at all. You speak of the
Lord loving his own; you make out the Lord to be your own, and use your
religion like a drug. So it appears to me. That Sunday tyranny of yours
has to be defended.

Remember that; for I for one shall combat it and expose it. Good day.'

Beauchamp continued, in the street: 'Tyrannies like this fellow's have
made the English the dullest and wretchedest people in Europe.'

Palmet animadverted on Carpendike: 'The dog looks like a deadly fungus
that has poisoned the woman.'

'I'd trust him with a post of danger, though,' said Beauchamp.

Before the candidate had opened his mouth to the next elector he was
beamed on. M'Gilliper, baker, a floured brick face, leaned on folded arms
across his counter and said, in Scotch: 'My vote? and he that asks me for
my vote is the man who, when he was midshipman, saved the life of a
relation of mine from death by drowning! my wife's first cousin, Johnny
Brownson--and held him up four to five minutes in the water, and never
left him till he was out of danger! There 's my hand on it, I will, and a
score of householders in Bevisham the same.' He dictated precious names
and addresses to Beauchamp, and was curtly thanked for his pains.

Such treatment of a favourable voter seemed odd to Palmet.

'Oh, a vote given for reasons of sentiment!' Beauchamp interjected.

Palmet reflected and said: 'Well, perhaps that's how it is women don't
care uncommonly for the men who love them, though they like precious well
to be loved. Opposition does it.'

'You have discovered my likeness to women,' said Beauchamp, eyeing him
critically, and then thinking, with a sudden warmth, that he had seen
Renee: 'Look here, Palmet, you're too late for Itchincope, to-day; come
and eat fish and meat with me at my hotel, and come to a meeting after
it. You can run by rail to Itchincope to breakfast in the morning, and I
may come with you. You'll hear one or two men speak well to-night.'

'I suppose I shall have to be at this business myself some day,' sighed
Palmet. 'Any women on the platform? Oh, but political women! And the
Tories get the pick of the women. No, I don't think I 'll stay. Yes, I
will; I'll go through with it. I like to be learning something. You
wouldn't think it of me, Beauchamp, but I envy fellows at work.'

'You might make a speech for me, Palmet.'

'No man better, my dear fellow, if it were proposing a toast to the poor
devils and asking them to drink it. But a dry speech, like leading them
over the desert without a well to cheer them--no oasis, as we used to
call a five-pound note and a holiday--I haven't the heart for that. Is
your Miss Denham a Radical?'

Beauchamp asserted that he had not yet met a woman at all inclining in
the direction of Radicalism. 'I don't call furies Radicals. There may be
women who think as well as feel; I don't know them.'

'Lots of them, Beauchamp. Take my word for it. I do know women. They
haven't a shift, nor a trick, I don't know. They're as clear to me as
glass. I'll wager your Miss Denham goes to the meetings. Now, doesn't
she? Of course she does. And there couldn't be a gallanter way of
spending an evening, so I'll try it. Nothing to repent of next morning!
That's to be said for politics, Beauchamp, and I confess I'm rather
jealous of you. A thoroughly good-looking girl who takes to a fellow for
what he's doing in the world, must have ideas of him precious different
from the adoration of six feet three and a fine seat in the saddle. I see
that. There's Baskelett in the Blues; and if I were he I should detest my
cuirass and helmet, for if he's half as successful as he boasts--it's the
uniform.'

Two notorious Radicals, Peter Molyneux and Samuel Killick, were called
on. The first saw Beauchamp and refused him; the second declined to see
him. He was amazed and staggered, but said little.

Among the remainder of the electors of Bevisham, roused that day to a
sense of their independence by the summons of the candidates, only one
man made himself conspicuous, by premising that he had two important
questions to ask, and he trusted Commander Beauchamp to answer them
unreservedly. They were: first, What is a FRENCH MARQUEES? and second:
Who was EURYDICEY?

Beauchamp referred him to the Tory camp, whence the placard alluding to
those ladies had issued.

'Both of them 's ladies! I guessed it,' said the elector.

'Did you guess that one of them is a mythological lady?'

'I'm not far wrong in guessing t'other's not much better, I reckon. Now,
sir, may I ask you, is there any tale concerning your morals?'

'No: you may not ask; you take a liberty.'

'Then I'll take the liberty to postpone talking about my vote. Look here,
Mr. Commander; if the upper classes want anything of me and come to me
for it, I'll know what sort of an example they're setting; now that's
me.'

'You pay attention to a stupid Tory squib?'

'Where there's smoke there's fire, sir.'

Beauchamp glanced at his note-book for the name of this man, who was a
ragman and dustman.

'My private character has nothing whatever to do with my politics,' he
said, and had barely said it when he remembered having spoken somewhat
differently, upon the abstract consideration of the case, to Mr.
Tomlinson.

'You're quite welcome to examine my character for yourself, only I don't
consent to be catechized. Understand that.'

'You quite understand that, Mr. Tripehallow,' said Oggler, bolder in
taking up the strange name than Beauchamp had been.

'I understand that. But you understand, there's never been a word against
the morals of Mr. Cougham. Here's the point: Do we mean to be a moral
country? Very well, then so let our representatives be, I say. And if I
hear nothing against your morals, Mr. Commander, I don't say you shan't
have my vote. I mean to deliberate. You young nobs capering over our
heads--I nail you down to morals. Politics secondary. Adew, as the dying
spirit remarked to weeping friends.'

'Au revoir--would have been kinder,' said Palmet.

Mr. Tripehallow smiled roguishly, to betoken comprehension.

Beauchamp asked Mr. Oggler whether that fellow was to be taken for a
humourist or a five-pound-note man.

'It may be both, sir. I know he's called Morality Joseph.'

An all but acknowledged five-pound-note man was the last they visited. He
cut short the preliminaries of the interview by saying that he was a
four-o'clock man; i.e. the man who waited for the final bids to him upon
the closing hour of the election day.

'Not one farthing!' said Beauchamp, having been warned beforehand of the
signification of the phrase by his canvassing lieutenant.

'Then you're nowhere,' the honest fellow replied in the mystic tongue of
prophecy.

Palmet and Beauchamp went to their fish and meat; smoked a cigarette or
two afterward, conjured away the smell of tobacco from their persons as
well as they could, and betook themselves to the assembly-room of the
Liberal party, where the young lord had an opportunity of beholding Mr.
Cougham, and of listening to him for an hour and forty minutes. He heard
Mr. Timothy Turbot likewise. And Miss Denham was present. Lord Palmet
applauded when she smiled. When she looked attentive he was deeply
studious. Her expression of fatigue under the sonorous ring of statistics
poured out from Cougham was translated by Palmet into yawns and sighs of
a profoundly fraternal sympathy. Her face quickened on the rising of
Beauchamp to speak. She kept eye on him all the while, as Palmet, with
the skill of an adept in disguising his petty larceny of the optics, did
on her. Twice or thrice she looked pained: Beauchamp was hesitating for
the word. Once she looked startled and shut her eyes: a hiss had sounded;
Beauchamp sprang on it as if enlivened by hostility, and dominated the
factious note. Thereat she turned to a gentleman sitting beside her;
apparently they agreed that some incident had occurred characteristic of
Nevil Beauchamp; for whom, however, it was not a brilliant evening. He
was very well able to account for it, and did so, after he had walked a
few steps with Miss Denham on her homeward way.

'You heard Cougham, Palmet! He's my senior, and I'm obliged to come
second to him, and how am I to have a chance when he has drenched the
audience for close upon a couple of hours!'

Palmet mimicked the manner of Cougham.

'They cry for Turbot naturally; they want a relief,' Beauchamp groaned.

Palmet gave an imitation of Timothy Turbot.

He was an admirable mimic, perfectly spontaneous, without stressing any
points, and Beauchamp was provoked to laugh his discontentment with the
evening out of recollection.

But a grave matter troubled Palmet's head.

'Who was that fellow who walked off with Miss Denham?'

'A married man,' said Beauchamp: 'badly married; more 's the pity; he has
a wife in the madhouse. His name is Lydiard.'

'Not her brother! Where's her uncle?'

'She won't let him come to these meetings. It's her idea; well-intended,
but wrong, I think. She's afraid that Dr. Shrapnel will alarm the
moderate Liberals and damage Radical me.'

Palmet muttered between his teeth, 'What queer things they let their
women do!' He felt compelled to say, 'Odd for her to be walking home at
night with a fellow like that.'

It chimed too consonantly with a feeling of Beauchamp's, to repress which
he replied: 'Your ideas about women are simply barbarous, Palmet. Why
shouldn't she? Her uncle places his confidence in the man, and in her.
Isn't that better--ten times more likely to call out the sense of honour
and loyalty, than the distrust and the scandal going on in your class?'

'Please to say yours too.'

'I've no class. I say that the education for women is to teach them to
rely on themselves.'

'Ah! well, I don't object, if I'm the man.'

'Because you and your set are absolutely uncivilized in your views of
women.'

'Common sense, Beauchamp!'

'Prey. You eye them as prey. And it comes of an idle aristocracy. You
have no faith in them, and they repay you for your suspicion.'

'All the same, Beauchamp, she ought not to be allowed to go about at
night with that fellow. "Rich and rare were the gems she wore": but that
was in Erin's isle, and if we knew the whole history, she'd better have
stopped at home. She's marvellously pretty, to my mind. She looks a
high-bred wench. Odd it is, Beauchamp, to see a lady's-maid now and then
catch the style of my lady. No, by Jove! I've known one or two--you
couldn't tell the difference! Not till you were intimate. I know one
would walk a minuet with a duchess. Of course--all the worse for her. If
you see that uncle of Miss Denham's--upon my honour, I should advise him:
I mean, counsel him not to trust her with any fellow but you.'

Beauchamp asked Lord Palmet how old he was.

Palmet gave his age; correcting the figures from six-and-twenty to one
year more. 'And never did a stroke of work in my life,' he said, speaking
genially out of an acute guess at the sentiments of the man he walked
with.

It seemed a farcical state of things.

There was a kind of contrition in Palmet's voice, and to put him at his
ease, as well as to stamp something in his own mind, Beauchamp said:
'It's common enough.'




CHAPTER XX

A DAY AT ITCHINCOPE

An election in Bevisham was always an exciting period at Itchincope, the
large and influential old estate of the Lespels, which at one time, with
but a ceremonious drive through the town, sent you two good Whig men to
Parliament to sit at Reform banquets; two unswerving party men, blest
subscribers to the right Review, and personally proud of its trenchancy.
Mr. Grancey Lespel was the survivor of them, and well could he remember
the happier day of his grandfather, his father, and his own hot youth. He
could be carried so far by affectionate regrets as to think of the Tories
of that day benignly:--when his champion Review of the orange and blue
livery waved a wondrous sharp knife, and stuck and bled them, proving to
his party, by trenchancy alone, that the Whig was the cause of
Providence. Then politics presented you a table whereat two parties
feasted, with no fear of the intrusion of a third, and your backs were
turned on the noisy lower world, your ears were deaf to it.

Apply we now the knocker to the door of venerable Quotation, and call the
aged creature forth, that he, half choked by his eheu!--

          'A sound between a sigh and bray,'

may pronounce the familiar but respectable words, the burial-service of a
time so happy!

Mr. Grancey Lespel would still have been sitting for Bevisham (or
politely at this elective moment bowing to resume the seat) had not those
Manchester jugglers caught up his cry, appropriated his colours,
displaced and impersonated him, acting beneficent Whig on a scale
approaching treason to the Constitution; leaning on the people in
earnest, instead of taking the popular shoulder for a temporary lift, all
in high party policy, for the clever manoeuvre, to oust the Tory and sway
the realm. See the consequences. For power, for no other consideration,
those manufacturing rascals have raised Radicalism from its primaeval
mire--from its petty backslum bookseller's shop and public-house
back-parlour effluvia of oratory--to issue dictates in England, and we,
England, formerly the oak, are topsy-turvy, like onions, our heels in the
air!

The language of party is eloquent, and famous for being grand at
illustration; but it is equally well known that much of it gives us
humble ideas of the speaker, probably because of the naughty temper party
is prone to; which, while endowing it with vehemence, lessens the stout
circumferential view that should be taken, at least historically. Indeed,
though we admit party to be the soundest method for conducting us, party
talk soon expends its attractiveness, as would a summer's afternoon given
up to the contemplation of an encounter of rams' heads. Let us be quit of
Mr. Grancey Lespel's lamentations. The Whig gentleman had some reason to
complain. He had been trained to expect no other attack than that of his
hereditary adversary-ram in front, and a sham ram--no honest animal, but
a ramming engine rather--had attacked him in the rear. Like Mr. Everard
Romfrey and other Whigs, he was profoundly chagrined by popular
ingratitude: 'not the same man,' his wife said of him. It nipped him
early. He took to proverbs; sure sign of the sere leaf in a man's mind.

His wife reproached the people for their behaviour to him bitterly. The
lady regarded politics as a business that helped hunting-men a stage
above sportsmen, for numbers of the politicians she was acquainted with
were hunting-men, yet something more by virtue of the variety they could
introduce into a conversation ordinarily treating of sport and the
qualities of wines. Her husband seemed to have lost in that Parliamentary
seat the talisman which gave him notions distinguishing him from country
squires; he had sunk, and he no longer cared for the months in London,
nor for the speeches she read to him to re-awaken his mind and make him
look out of himself, as he had done when he was a younger man and not a
suspended Whig. Her own favourite reading was of love-adventures written
in the French tongue. She had once been in love, and could be so
sympathetic with that passion as to avow to Cecilia Halkett a tenderness
for Nevil Beauchamp, on account of his relations with the Marquise de
Rouaillout, and notwithstanding the demoniacal flame-halo of the Radical
encircling him.

The allusion to Beauchamp occurred a few hours after Cecilia's arrival at
Itchincope.

Cecilia begged for the French lady's name to be repeated; she had not
heard it before, and she tasted the strange bitter relish of realization
when it struck her ear to confirm a story that she believed indeed, but
had not quite sensibly felt.

'And it is not over yet, they say,' Mrs. Grancey Lespel added, while
softly flipping some spots of the colour proper to radicals in morals on
the fame of the French lady. She possessed fully the grave judicial
spirit of her countrywomen, and could sit in judgement on the personages
of tales which had entranced her, to condemn the heroines: it was
impolitic in her sex to pity females. As for the men--poor weak things!
As for Nevil Beauchamp, in particular, his case, this penetrating lady
said, was clear: he ought to be married. 'Could you make a sacrifice?'
she asked Cecilia playfully.

'Nevil Beauchamp and I are old friends, but we have agreed that we are
deadly political enemies,' Miss Halkett replied.

'It is not so bad for a beginning,' said Mrs. Lespel.

'If one were disposed to martyrdom.'

The older woman nodded. 'Without that.'

'My dear Mrs. Lespel, wait till you have heard him. He is at war with
everything we venerate and build on. The wife you would give him should
be a creature rooted in nothing--in sea-water. Simply two or three
conversations with him have made me uncomfortable ever since; I can see
nothing durable; I dream of surprises, outbreaks, dreadful events. At
least it is perfectly true that I do not look with the same eyes on my
country. He seems to delight in destroying one's peaceful contemplation
of life. The truth is that he blows a perpetual gale, and is all
agitation,' Cecilia concluded, affecting with a smile a slight shiver.

'Yes, one tires of that,' said Mrs. Lespel. 'I was determined I would
have him here if we could get him to come. Grancey objected. We shall
have to manage Captain Beauchamp and the rest as well. He is sure to come
late to-morrow, and will leave early on Thursday morning for his canvass;
our driving into Bevisham is for Friday or Saturday. I do not see that he
need have any suspicions. Those verses you are so angry about cannot be
traced to Itchincope. My dear, they are a childish trifle. When my
husband stood first for Bevisham, the whole of his University life
appeared in print. What we have to do is to forewarn the gentlemen to be
guarded, and especially in what they say to my nephew Lord Palmet, for
that boy cannot keep a secret; he is as open as a plate.'

'The smoking-room at night?' Cecilia suggested, remembering her father's
words about Itchincope's tobacco-hall.

'They have Captain Beauchamp's address hung up there, I have heard,' said
Mrs. Lespel. 'There may be other things--another address, though it is
not yet, placarded. Come with me. For fifteen years I have never once put
my head into that room, and now I 've a superstitious fear about it.'

Mrs. Lespel led the way to the deserted smoking-room, where the stale
reek of tobacco assailed the ladies, as does that dire place of Customs
the stranger visiting savage (or too natural) potentates.

In silence they tore down from the wall Beauchamp's electoral
Address--flanked all its length with satirical pen and pencil comments
and sketches; and they consigned to flames the vast sheet of animated
verses relating to the FRENCH MARQUEES. A quarter-size chalk-drawing of a
slippered pantaloon having a duck on his shoulder, labelled to say
'Quack-quack,' and offering our nauseated Dame Britannia (or else it was
the widow Bevisham) a globe of a pill to swallow, crossed with the
consolatory and reassuring name of Shrapnel, they disposed of likewise.
And then they fled, chased forth either by the brilliancy of the
politically allusive epigrams profusely inscribed around them on the
walls, or by the atmosphere. Mrs. Lespel gave her orders for the walls to
be scraped, and said to Cecilia: 'A strange air to breathe, was it not?
The less men and women know of one another, the happier for them. I knew
my superstition was correct as a guide to me. I do so much wish to
respect men, and all my experience tells me the Turks know best how to
preserve it for us. Two men in this house would give their wives for
pipes, if it came to the choice. We might all go for a cellar of old
wine. After forty, men have married their habits, and wives are only an
item in the list, and not the most important.'

With the assistance of Mr. Stukely Culbrett, Mrs. Lespel prepared the
house and those of the company who were in the secret of affairs for the
arrival of Beauchamp. The ladies were curious to see him. The gentlemen,
not anticipating extreme amusement, were calm: for it is an axiom in the
world of buckskins and billiard-cues, that one man is very like another;
and so true is it with them, that they can in time teach it to the fair
sex. Friends of Cecil Baskelett predominated, and the absence of so
sprightly a fellow was regretted seriously; but he was shooting with his
uncle at Holdesbury, and they did not expect him before Thursday.

On Wednesday morning Lord Palmet presented himself at a remarkably
well-attended breakfast-table at Itchincope. He passed from Mrs. Lespel
to Mrs. Wardour-Devsreux and Miss Halkett, bowed to other ladies, shook
hands with two or three men, and nodded over the heads of half-a-dozen,
accounting rather mysteriously for his delay in coming, it was thought,
until he sat down before a plate of Yorkshire pie, and said:

'The fact is I've been canvassing hard. With Beauchamp!'

Astonishment and laughter surrounded him, and Palmet looked from face to
face, equally astonished, and desirous to laugh too.

'Ernest! how could you do that?' said Mrs. Lespel; and her husband cried
in stupefaction, 'With Beauchamp?'

'Oh! it's because of the Radicalism,' Palmet murmured to himself. 'I
didn't mind that.'

'What sort of a day did you have?' Mr. Culbrett asked him; and several
gentlemen fell upon him for an account of the day.

Palmet grimaced over a mouthful of his pie.

'Bad!' quoth Mr. Lespel; 'I knew it. I know Bevisham. The only chance
there is for five thousand pounds in a sack with a hole in it.'

'Bad for Beauchamp? Dear me, no'; Palmet corrected the error. 'He is
carrying all before him. And he tells them,' Palmet mimicked Beauchamp,
'they shall not have one penny: not a farthing. I gave a couple of young
ones a shilling apiece, and he rowed me for bribery; somehow I did
wrong.'

Lord Palmet described the various unearthly characters he had inspected
in their dens: Carpendike, Tripehallow, and the radicals Peter Molyneux
and Samuel Killick, and the ex-member for the borough, Cougham, posing to
suit sign-boards of Liberal inns, with a hand thrust in his waistcoat,
and his head well up, the eyes running over the under-lids, after the
traditional style of our aristocracy; but perhaps more closely resembling
an urchin on tiptoe peering above park-palings. Cougham's remark to
Beauchamp, heard and repeated by Palmet with the object of giving an
example of the senior Liberal's phraseology: 'I was necessitated to
vacate my town mansion, to my material discomfort and that of my wife,
whose equipage I have been compelled to take, by your premature canvass
of the borough, Captain Beauchamp: and now, I hear, on undeniable
authority, that no second opponent to us will be forthcoming'---this
produced the greatest effect on the company.

'But do you tell me,' said Mr. Lespel, when the shouts of the gentlemen
were subsiding, 'do you tell me that young Beauchamp is going ahead?'

'That he is. They flock to him in the street.'

'He stands there, then, and jingles a money-bag.'

Palmet resumed his mimicry of Beauchamp: 'Not a stiver; purity of
election is the first condition of instruction to the people! Principles!
Then they've got a capital orator: Turbot, an Irishman. I went to a
meeting last night, and heard him; never heard anything finer in my life.
You may laugh he whipped me off my legs; fellow spun me like a top; and
while he was orationing, a donkey calls, "Turbot! ain't you a flat fish?"
and he swings round, "Not for a fool's hook!" and out they hustled the
villain for a Tory. I never saw anything like it.'

'That repartee wouldn't have done with a Dutchman or a Torbay trawler,'
said Stukely Culbrett. 'But let us hear more.'

'Is it fair?' Miss Halkett murmured anxiously to Mrs. Lespel, who
returned a flitting shrug.

'Charming women follow Beauchamp, you know,' Palmet proceeded, as he
conceived, to confirm and heighten the tale of success. 'There's a Miss
Denham, niece of a doctor, a Dr . . . . Shot--Shrapnel! a wonderfully
good-looking, clever-looking girl, comes across him in half-a-dozen
streets to ask how he's getting on, and goes every night to his meetings,
with a man who 's a writer and has a mad wife; a man named Lydia-no,
that's a woman--Lydiard. It's rather a jumble; but you should see her
when Beauchamp's on his legs and speaking.'

'Mr. Lydiard is in Bevisham?' Mrs. Wardour-Devereux remarked.

'I know the girl,' growled Mr. Lespel. 'She comes with that rascally
doctor and a bobtail of tea-drinking men and women and their brats to
Northeden Heath--my ground. There they stand and sing.'

'Hymns?'inquired Mr. Culbrett.

'I don't know what they sing. And when it rains they take the liberty to
step over my bank into my plantation. Some day I shall have them stepping
into my house.'

'Yes, it's Mr. Lydiard; I'm sure of the man's name,' Palmet replied to
Mrs. Wardour-Devereux.

'We met him in Spain the year before last,' she observed to Cecilia.

The 'we' reminded Palmet that her husband was present.

'Ah, Devereux, I didn't see you,' he nodded obliquely down the table. 'By
the way, what's the grand procession? I hear my man Davis has come all
right, and I caught sight of the top of your coach-box in the stableyard
as I came in. What are we up to?'

'Baskelett writes, it's to be for to-morrow morning at ten-the start.'
Mr. Wardour-Devereux addressed the table generally. He was a fair, huge,
bush-bearded man, with a voice of unvarying bass: a squire in his county,
and energetic in his pursuit of the pleasures of hunting, driving,
travelling, and tobacco.

'Old Bask's the captain of us? Very well, but where do we drive the
teams? How many are we? What's in hand?'

Cecilia threw a hurried glance at her hostess.

Luckily some witling said, 'Fours-in-hand!' and so dryly that it passed
for humour, and gave Mrs. Lespel time to interpose. 'You are not to know
till to-morrow, Ernest.'

Palmet had traced the authorship of the sally to Mr. Algy Borolick, and
crowned him with praise for it. He asked, 'Why not know till to-morrow?'
A word in a murmur from Mr. Culbrett, 'Don't frighten the women,'
satisfied him, though why it should he could not have imagined.

Mrs. Lespel quitted the breakfast-table before the setting in of the
dangerous five minutes of conversation over its ruins, and spoke to her
husband, who contested the necessity for secresy, but yielded to her
judgement when it was backed by Stukely Culbrett. Soon after Lord Palmet
found himself encountered by evasions and witticisms, in spite of the
absence of the ladies, upon every attempt he made to get some light
regarding the destination of the four-in-hands next day.

'What are you going to do?' he said to Mr. Devereux, thinking him the
likeliest one to grow confidential in private.

'Smoke,' resounded from the depths of that gentleman.

Palmet recollected the ground of division between the beautiful brunette
and her lord--his addiction to the pipe in perpetuity, and deemed it
sweeter to be with the lady.

She and Miss Halkett were walking in the garden.

Miss Halkett said to him: 'How wrong of you to betray the secrets of your
friend! Is he really making way?'

'Beauchamp will head the poll to a certainty,' Palmet replied.

'Still,' said Miss Halkett, 'you should not forget that you are not in
the house of a Liberal. Did you canvass in the town or the suburbs?'

'Everywhere. I assure you, Miss Halkett, there's a feeling for
Beauchamp--they're in love with him!'

'He promises them everything, I suppose?'

'Not he. And the odd thing is, it isn't the Radicals he catches. He won't
go against the game laws for them, and he won't cut down army and navy.
So the Radicals yell at him. One confessed he had sold his vote for five
pounds last election: "you shall have it for the same," says he, "for
you're all humbugs." Beauchamp took him by the throat and shook
him--metaphorically, you know. But as for the tradesmen, he's their hero;
bakers especially.'

'Mr. Austin may be right, then!' Cecilia reflected aloud.

She went to Mrs. Lespel to repeat what she had extracted from Palmet,
after warning the latter not, in common loyalty, to converse about his
canvass with Beauchamp.

'Did you speak of Mr. Lydiard as Captain Beauchamp's friend?' Mrs.
Devereux inquired of him.

'Lydiard? why, he was the man who made off with that pretty Miss Denham,'
said Palmet. 'I have the greatest trouble to remember them all; but it
was not a day wasted. Now I know politics. Shall we ride or walk? You
will let me have the happiness? I'm so unlucky; I rarely meet you!'

'You will bring Captain Beauchamp to me the moment he comes?'

'I'll bring him. Bring him? Nevil Beauchamp won't want bringing.'

Mrs. Devereux smiled with some pleasure.

Grancey Lespel, followed at some distance by Mr. Ferbrass, the Tory
lawyer, stepped quickly up to Palmet, and asked whether Beauchamp had
seen Dollikins, the brewer.

Palmet could recollect the name of one Tomlinson, and also the calling at
a brewery. Moreover, Beauchamp had uttered contempt of the brewer's
business, and of the social rule to accept rich brewers for gentlemen.
The man's name might be Dollikins and not Tomlinson, and if so, it was
Dollikins who would not see Beauchamp. To preserve his political
importance, Palmet said, 'Dollikins! to be sure, that was the man.'

'Treats him as he does you,' Mr. Lespel turned to Ferbrass. 'I've sent to
Dollikins to come to me this morning, if he's not driving into the town.
I'll have him before Beauchamp sees him. I've asked half-a-dozen of these
country gentlemen-tradesmen to lunch at my table to-day.'

'Then, sir,' observed Ferbrass, 'if they are men to be persuaded, they
had better not see me.'

'True; they're my old supporters, and mightn't like your Tory face,' Mr.
Lespel assented.

Mr. Ferbrass congratulated him on the heartiness of his espousal of the
Tory cause.

Mr. Lespel winced a little, and told him not to put his trust in that.

'Turned Tory?' said Palmet.

Mr. Lespel declined to answer.

Palmet said to Mrs. Devereux, 'He thinks I'm not worth speaking to upon
politics. Now I'll give him some Beauchamp; I learned lots yesterday.'

'Then let it be in Captain Beauchamp's manner,' said she softly.

Palmet obeyed her commands with the liveliest exhibition of his peculiar
faculty: Cecilia, rejoining them, seemed to hear Nevil himself in his
emphatic political mood. 'Because the Whigs are defunct! They had no root
in the people! Whig is the name of a tribe that was! You have Tory,
Liberal, and Radical. There is no place for Whig. He is played out.'

'Who has been putting that nonsense into your head?' Mr. Lespel retorted.
'Go shooting, go shooting!'

Shots were heard in the woods. Palmet pricked up his ears; but he was
taken out riding to act cavalier to Mrs. Devereux and Miss Halkett.

Cecilia corrected his enthusiasm with the situation. 'No flatteries
to-day. There are hours when women feel their insignificance and
helplessness. I begin to fear for Mr. Austin; and I find I can do nothing
to aid him. My hands are tied. And yet I know I could win voters if only
it were permissible for me to go and speak to them.'

'Win them!' cried Palmet, imagining the alacrity of men's votes to be won
by her. He recommended a gallop for the chasing away of melancholy, and
as they were on the Bevisham high road, which was bordered by strips of
turf and heath, a few good stretches brought them on the fir-heights,
commanding views of the town and broad water.

'No, I cannot enjoy it,' Cecilia said to Mrs. Devereux; 'I don't mind the
grey light; cloud and water, and halftones of colour, are homely English
and pleasant, and that opal where the sun should be has a suggestiveness
richer than sunlight. I'm quite northern enough to understand it; but
with me it must be either peace or strife, and that Election down there
destroys my chance of peace. I never could mix reverie with excitement;
the battle must be over first, and the dead buried. Can you?'

Mrs. Devereux answered: 'Excitement? I am not sure that I know what it
is. An Election does not excite me.'

'There's Nevil Beauchamp himself!' Palmet sang out, and the ladies
discerned Beauchamp under a fir-tree, down by the road, not alone. A man,
increasing in length like a telescope gradually reaching its end for
observation, and coming to the height of a landmark, as if raised by
ropes, was rising from the ground beside him. 'Shall we trot on, Miss
Halkett?'

Cecilia said, 'No.'

'Now I see a third fellow,' said Palmet. 'It's the other fellow, the
Denham-Shrapnel-Radical meeting . . . Lydiard's his name: writes books!

'We may as well ride on,' Mrs. Devereux remarked, and her horse fretted
singularly.

Beauchamp perceived them, and lifted his hat. Palmet made demonstrations
for the ladies. Still neither party moved nearer.

After some waiting, Cecilia proposed to turn back.

Mrs. Devereux looked into her eyes. 'I'll take the lead,' she said, and
started forward, pursued by Palmet. Cecilia followed at a sullen canter.

Before they came up to Beauchamp, the long-shanked man had stalked away
townward. Lydiard held Beauchamp by the hand. Some last words, after the
manner of instructions, passed between them, and then Lydiard also turned
away.

'I say, Beauchamp, Mrs. Devereux wants to hear who that man is,' Palmet
said, drawing up.

'That man is Dr. Shrapnel,' said Beauchamp, convinced that Cecilia had
checked her horse at the sight of the doctor.

'Dr. Shrapnel,' Palmet informed Mrs. Devereux.

She looked at him to seek his wits, and returning Beauchamp's admiring
salutation with a little bow and smile, said, 'I fancied it was a
gentleman we met in Spain.'

'He writes books,' observed Palmet, to jog a slow intelligence.

'Pamphlets, you mean.'

'I think he is not a pamphleteer', Mrs. Devereux said.

'Mr. Lydiard, then, of course; how silly I am! How can you pardon me!'
Beauchamp was contrite; he could not explain that a long guess he had
made at Miss Halkett's reluctance to come up to him when Dr. Shrapnel was
with him had preoccupied his mind. He sent off Palmet the bearer of a
pretext for bringing Lydiard back, and then said to Cecilia, 'You
recognized Dr. Shrapnel?'

'I thought it might be Dr. Shrapnel', she was candid enough to reply. 'I
could not well recognize him, not knowing him.'

'Here comes Mr. Lydiard; and let me assure you, if I may take the liberty
of introducing him, he is no true Radical. He is a philosopher--one of
the flirts, the butterflies of politics, as Dr. Shrapnel calls them.'

Beauchamp hummed over some improvized trifles to Lydiard, then introduced
him cursorily, and all walked in the direction of Itchincope. It was
really the Mr. Lydiard Mrs. Devereux had met in Spain, so they were left
in the rear to discuss their travels. Much conversation did not go on in
front. Cecilia was very reserved. By-and-by she said, 'I am glad you have
come into the country early to-day.'

He spoke rapturously of the fresh air, and not too mildly of his pleasure
in meeting her. Quite off her guard, she began to hope he was getting to
be one of them again, until she heard him tell Lord Palmet that he had
come early out of Bevisham for the walk with Dr. Shrapnel, and to call on
certain rich tradesmen living near Itchincope. He mentioned the name of
Dollikins.

'Dollikins?' Palmet consulted a perturbed recollection. Among the
entangled list of new names he had gathered recently from the study of
politics, Dollikins rang in his head. He shouted, 'Yes, Dollikins! to be
sure. Lespel has him to lunch to-day;--calls him a gentleman-tradesman;
odd fish! and told a fellow called--where is it now?--a name like brass
or copper . . . Copperstone? Brasspot? . . . told him he'd do well to
keep his Tory cheek out of sight. It 's the names of those fellows bother
one so! All the rest's easy.'

'You are evidently in a state of confusion, Lord Palmet,' said Cecilia.

The tone of rebuke and admonishment was unperceived. 'Not about the
facts,' he rejoined. 'I 'm for fair play all round; no trickery. I tell
Beauchamp all I know, just as I told you this morning, Miss Halkett. What
I don't like is Lespel turning Tory.'

Cecilia put a stop to his indiscretions by halting for Mrs. Devereux, and
saying to Beauchamp, 'If your friend would return to Bevisham by rail,
this is the nearest point to the station.'

Palmet, best-natured of men, though generally prompted by some of his
peculiar motives, dismounted from his horse, leaving him to Beauchamp,
that he might conduct Mr. Lydiard to the station, and perhaps hear a word
of Miss Denham: at any rate be able to form a guess as to the secret of
that art of his, which had in the space of an hour restored a happy and
luminous vivacity to the languid Mrs. Wardour-Devereux.




CHAPTER XXI

THE QUESTION AS TO THE EXAMINATION OF THE WHIGS, AND THE FINE BLOW STRUCK
BY MR. EVERARD ROMFREY

Itchincope was famous for its hospitality. Yet Beauchamp, when in the
presence of his hostess, could see that he was both unexpected and
unwelcome. Mrs. Lespel was unable to conceal it; she looked meaningly at
Cecilia, talked of the house being very full, and her husband engaged
till late in the afternoon. And Captain Baskelett had arrived on a
sudden, she said. And the luncheon-table in the dining-room could not
possibly hold more.

'We three will sit in the library, anywhere,' said Cecilia.

So they sat and lunched in the library, where Mrs. Devereux served
unconsciously for an excellent ally to Cecilia in chatting to Beauchamp,
principally of the writings of Mr. Lydiard.

Had the blinds of the windows been drawn down and candles lighted,
Beauchamp would have been well contented to remain with these two ladies,
and forget the outer world; sweeter society could not have been offered
him: but glancing carelessly on to the lawn, he exclaimed in some
wonderment that the man he particularly wished to see was there. 'It must
be Dollikins, the brewer. I've had him pointed out to me in Bevisham, and
I never can light on him at his brewery.'

No excuse for detaining the impetuous candidate struck Cecilia. She
betook herself to Mrs. Lespel, to give and receive counsel in the
emergency, while Beauchamp struck across the lawn to Mr. Dollikins, who
had the squire of Itchincope on the other side of him.

Late in the afternoon a report reached the ladies of a furious contest
going on over Dollikins. Mr. Algy Borolick was the first to give them
intelligence of it, and he declared that Beauchamp had wrested Dollikins
from Grancey Lespel. This was contradicted subsequently by Mr. Stukely
Culbrett. 'But there's heavy pulling between them,' he said.

'It will do all the good in the world to Grancey,' said Mrs. Lespel.

She sat in her little blue-room, with gentlemen congregating at the open
window.

Presently Grancey Lespel rounded a projection of the house where the
drawing-room stood out: 'The maddest folly ever talked!' he delivered
himself in wrath. 'The Whigs dead? You may as well say I'm dead.'

It was Beauchamp answering: 'Politically, you're dead, if you call
yourself a Whig. You couldn't be a live one, for the party's in pieces,
blown to the winds. The country was once a chess-board for Whig and Tory:
but that game's at an end. There's no doubt on earth that the Whigs are
dead.'

'But if there's no doubt about it, how is it I have a doubt about it?'

'You know you're a Tory. You tried to get that man Dollikins from me in
the Tory interest.'

'I mean to keep him out of Radical clutches. Now that 's the truth.'

They came up to the group by the open window, still conversing hotly,
indifferent to listeners.

'You won't keep him from me; I have him,' said Beauchamp.

'You delude yourself; I have his promise, his pledged word,' said Grancey
Lespel.

'The man himself told you his opinion of renegade Whigs.'

'Renegade!'

'Renegade Whig is an actionable phrase,' Mr. Culbrett observed.

He was unnoticed.

'If you don't like "renegade," take "dead,"' said Beauchamp. 'Dead Whig
resurgent in the Tory. You are dead.'

'It's the stupid conceit of your party thinks that.'

'Dead, my dear Mr. Lespel. I'll say for the Whigs, they would not be seen
touting for Tories if they were not ghosts of Whigs. You are dead. There
is no doubt of it.'

'But,' Grancey Lespel repeated, 'if there's no doubt about it, how is it
I have a doubt about it?'

'The Whigs preached finality in Reform. It was their own funeral sermon.'

'Nonsensical talk!'

'I don't dispute your liberty of action to go over to the Tories, but you
have no right to attempt to take an honest Liberal with you. And that
I've stopped.'

'Aha! Beauchamp; the man's mine. Come, you'll own he swore he wouldn't
vote for a Shrapnelite.'

'Don't you remember?--that's how the Tories used to fight you; they stuck
an epithet to you, and hooted to set the mob an example; you hit them off
to the life,' said Beauchamp, brightening with the fine ire of strife,
and affecting a sadder indignation. 'You traded on the ignorance of a man
prejudiced by lying reports of one of the noblest of human creatures.'

'Shrapnel? There! I've had enough.' Grancey Lespel bounced away with both
hands outspread on the level of his ears.

'Dead!' Beauchamp sent the ghastly accusation after him.

Grancey faced round and said, 'Bo!' which was applauded for a smart
retort. And let none of us be so exalted above the wit of daily life as
to sneer at it. Mrs. Lespel remarked to Mr. Culbrett, 'Do you not see how
much he is refreshed by the interest he takes in this election? He is ten
years younger.'

Beauchamp bent to her, saying mock-dolefully, 'I'm sorry to tell you that
if ever he was a sincere Whig, he has years of remorse before him.'

'Promise me, Captain Beauchamp,' she answered, 'promise you will give us
no more politics to-day.'

'If none provoke me.'

'None shall.'

'And as to Bevisham,' said Mr. Culbrett, 'it's the identical borough for
a Radical candidate, for every voter there demands a division of his
property, and he should be the last to complain of an adoption of his
principles.'

'Clever,' rejoined Beauchamp; 'but I am under government'; and he swept a
bow to Mrs. Lespel.

As they were breaking up the group, Captain Baskelett appeared.

'Ah! Nevil,' said he, passed him, saluted Miss Halkett through the
window, then cordially squeezed his cousin's hand. 'Having a holiday out
of Bevisham? The baron expects to meet you at Mount Laurels to-morrow. He
particularly wishes me to ask you whether you think all is fair in war.'

'I don't,' said Nevil.

'Not? The canvass goes on swimmingly.'

'Ask Palmet!

'Palmet gives you two-thirds of the borough. The poor old Tory tortoise
is nowhere. They've been writing about you, Nevil.'

'They have. And if there 's a man of honour in the party I shall hold him
responsible for it.'

'I allude to an article in the Bevisham Liberal paper; a magnificent
eulogy, upon my honour. I give you my word, I have rarely read an article
so eloquent. And what is the Conservative misdemeanour which the man of
honour in the party is to pay for?'

'I'll talk to you about it by-and-by,' said Nevil.

He seemed to Cecilia too trusting, too simple, considering his cousin's
undisguised tone of banter. Yet she could not put him on his guard. She
would have had Mr. Culbrett do so. She walked on the terrace with him
near upon sunset, and said, 'The position Captain Beauchamp is in here is
most unfair to him.'

'There's nothing unfair in the lion's den,' said Stukely Culbrett;
adding, 'Now, observe, Miss Halkett; he talks for effect. He discovers
that Lespel is a Torified Whig; but that does not make him a bit more
alert. It's to say smart things. He speaks, but won't act, as if he were
among enemies. He's getting too fond of his bow-wow. Here he is, and he
knows the den, and he chooses to act the innocent. You see how
ridiculous? That trick of the ingenu, or peculiarly heavenly messenger,
who pretends that he ought never to have any harm done to him, though he
carries the lighted match, is the way of young Radicals. Otherwise
Beauchamp would be a dear boy. We shall see how he takes his thrashing.'

'You feel sure he will be beaten?'

'He has too strong a dose of fool's honesty to succeed--stands for the
game laws with Radicals, for example. He's loaded with scruples and
crotchets, and thinks more of them than of his winds and his tides. No
public man is to be made out of that. His idea of the Whigs being dead
shows a head that can't read the country. He means himself for mankind,
and is preparing to be the benefactor of a country parish.'

'But as a naval officer?'

'Excellent.'

Cecilia was convinced that Mr. Culbrett underestimated Beauchamp.
Nevertheless the confidence expressed in Beauchamp's defeat reassured and
pleased her. At midnight she was dancing with him in the midst of great
matronly country vessels that raised a wind when they launched on the
waltz, and exacted an anxious pilotage on the part of gentlemen careful
of their partners; and why I cannot say, but contrasts produce quaint
ideas in excited spirits, and a dancing politician appeared to her so
absurd that at one moment she had to bite her lips not to laugh. It will
hardly be credited that the waltz with Nevil was delightful to Cecilia
all the while, and dancing with others a penance. He danced with none
other. He led her to a three o'clock morning supper: one of those
triumphant subversions of the laws and customs of earth which have the
charm of a form of present deification for all young people; and she,
while noting how the poor man's advocate dealt with costly pasties and
sparkling wines, was overjoyed at his hearty comrade's manner with the
gentlemen, and a leadership in fun that he seemed to have established.
Cecil Baskelett acknowledged it, and complimented him on it. 'I give you
my word, Nevil, I never heard you in finer trim. Here's to our drive into
Bevisham to-morrow! Do you drink it? I beg; I entreat.'

'Oh, certainly,' said Nevil.

'Will you take a whip down there?'

'If you're all insured.'

'On my honour, old Nevil, driving a four-in-hand is easier than governing
the country.'

'I'll accept your authority for what you know best,' said Nevil.

The toast of the Drive into Bevisham was drunk.

Cecilia left the supper-table, mortified, and feeling disgraced by her
participation in a secret that was being wantonly abused to humiliate
Nevil, as she was made to think by her sensitiveness. All the gentlemen
were against him, excepting perhaps that chattering pie Lord Palmet, who
did him more mischief than his enemies. She could not sleep. She walked
out on the terrace with Mrs. Wardour-Devereux, in a dream, hearing that
lady breathe remarks hardly less than sentimental, and an unwearied
succession of shouts from the smoking-room.

'They are not going to bed to-night,' said Mrs. Devereux.

'They are mystifying Captain Beauchamp,' said Cecilia.

'My husband tells me they are going to drive him into the town
to-morrow.'

Cecilia flushed: she could scarcely get her breath.

'Is that their plot?' she murmured.

Sleep was rejected by her, bed itself. The drive into Bevisham had been
fixed for nine A.M. She wrote two lines on note-paper in her room: but
found them overfervid and mysterious. Besides, how were they to be
conveyed to Nevil's chamber.

She walked in the passage for half an hour, thinking it possible she
might meet him; not the most lady-like of proceedings, but her head was
bewildered. An arm-chair in her room invited her to rest and think--the
mask of a natural desire for sleep. At eight in the morning she was
awakened by her maid, and at a touch exclaimed, 'Have they gone?' and her
heart still throbbed after hearing that most of the gentlemen were in and
about the stables. Cecilia was down-stairs at a quarter to nine. The
breakfast-room was empty of all but Lord Palmet and Mr. Wardour-Devereux;
one selecting a cigar to light out of doors, the other debating between
two pipes. She beckoned to Palmet, and commissioned him to inform
Beauchamp that she wished him to drive her down to Bevisham in her
pony-carriage. Palmet brought back word from Beauchamp that he had an
appointment at ten o'clock in the town. 'I want to see him,' she said; so
Palmet ran out with the order. Cecilia met Beauchamp in the
entrance-hall.

'You must not go,' she said bluntly.

'I can't break an appointment,' said he--'for the sake of my own
pleasure,' was implied.

'Will you not listen to me, Nevil, when I say you cannot go?'

A coachman's trumpet blew.

'I shall be late. That's Colonel Millington's team. He starts first, then
Wardour-Devereux, then Cecil, and I mount beside him; Palmet's at our
heels.'

'But can't you even imagine a purpose for their driving into Bevisham so
pompously?'

'Well, men with drags haven't commonly much purpose,' he said.

'But on this occasion! At an Election time! Surely, Nevil, you can guess
at a reason.'

A second trumpet blew very martially. Footmen came in search of Captain
Beauchamp. The alternative of breaking her pledged word to her father, or
of letting Nevil be burlesqued in the sight of the town, could no longer
be dallied with.

Cecilia said, 'Well, Nevil, then you shall hear it.'

Hereupon Captain Baskelett's groom informed Captain Beauchamp that he was
off.

'Yes,' Nevil said to Cecilia, 'tell me on board the yacht.'

'Nevil, you will be driving into the town with the second Tory candidate
of the borough.'

'Which? who?' Nevil 'asked.

'Your cousin Cecil.'

'Tell Captain Baskelett that I don't drive down till an hour later,'
Nevil said to the groom. 'Cecilia, you're my friend; I wish you were
more. I wish we didn't differ. I shall hope to change you--make you come
half-way out of that citadel of yours. This is my uncle Everard! I might
have made sure there'd be a blow from him! And Cecil! of all men for a
politician! Cecilia, think of it! Cecil Baskelett! I beg Seymour Austin's
pardon for having suspected him . . .'

Now sounded Captain Baskelett's trumpet.

Angry though he was, Beauchamp laughed. 'Isn't it exactly like the baron
to spring a mine of this kind?'

There was decidedly humour in the plot, and it was a lusty quarterstaff
blow into the bargain. Beauchamp's head rang with it. He could not
conceal the stunning effect it had on him. Gratitude and tenderness
toward Cecilia for saving him, at the cost of a partial breach of faith
that he quite understood, from the scandal of the public entry into
Bevisham on the Tory coach-box, alternated with his interjections
regarding his uncle Everard.

At eleven, Cecilia sat in her pony-carriage giving final directions to
Mrs. Devereux where to look out for the Esperanza and the schooner's
boat. 'Then I drive down alone,' Mrs. Devereux said.

The gentlemen were all off, and every available maid with them on the
coach-boxes, a brilliant sight that had been missed by Nevil and Cecilia.

'Why, here's Lydiard!' said Nevil, supposing that Lydiard must be
approaching him with tidings of the second Tory candidate. But Lydiard
knew nothing of it. He was the bearer of a letter on foreign
paper--marked urgent, in Rosamund's hand--and similarly worded in the
well-known hand which had inscribed the original address of the letter to
Steynham.

Beauchamp opened it and read:

               Chateau Tourdestelle
                    '(Eure).

        'Come. I give you three days--no more.

                    'RENEE.'

The brevity was horrible. Did it spring from childish imperiousness or
tragic peril?

Beauchamp could imagine it to be this or that. In moments of excited
speculation we do not dwell on the possibility that there may be a
mixture of motives.

'I fear I must cross over to France this evening,' he said to Cecilia.

She replied, 'It is likely to be stormy to-night. The steamboat may not
run.'

'If there's a doubt of it, I shall find a French lugger. You are tired,
from not sleeping last night.'

'No,' she answered, and nodded to Mrs. Devereux, beside whom Mr. Lydiard
stood: 'You will not drive down alone, you see.'

For a young lady threatened with a tempest in her heart, as disturbing to
her as the one gathering in the West for ships at sea, Miss Halkett bore
herself well.




CHAPTER XXII

THE DRIVE INTO BEVISHAM

Beauchamp was requested by Cecilia to hold the reins. His fair companion
in the pony-carriage preferred to lean back musing, and he had leisure to
think over the blow dealt him by his uncle Everard with so sure an aim so
ringingly on the head. And in the first place he made no attempt to
disdain it because it was nothing but artful and heavy-handed, after the
mediaeval pattern. Of old he himself had delighted in artfulness as well
as boldness and the unmistakeable hit. Highly to prize generalship was in
his blood, though latterly the very forces propelling him to his
political warfare had forbidden the use of it to him. He saw the patient
veteran laying his gun for a long shot--to give as good as he had
received; and in realizing Everard Romfrey's perfectly placid bearing
under provocation, such as he certainly would have maintained while
preparing his reply to it, the raw fighting humour of the plot touched
the sense of justice in Beauchamp enough to make him own that he had been
the first to offend.

He could reflect also on the likelihood that other offended men of his
uncle's age and position would have sulked or stormed, threatening the
Parthian shot of the vindictive testator. If there was godlessness in
turning to politics for a weapon to strike a domestic blow, manfulness in
some degree signalized it. Beauchamp could fancy his uncle crying out,
Who set the example? and he was not at that instant inclined to dwell on
the occult virtues of the example he had set. To be honest, this
elevation of a political puppet like Cecil Baskelett, and the starting
him, out of the same family which Turbot, the journalist, had magnified,
into Bevisham with such pomp and flourish in opposition to the serious
young champion of popular rights and the Puritan style, was ludicrously
effective. Conscienceless of course. But that was the way of the Old
School.

Beauchamp broke the silence by thanking Cecilia once more for saving him
from the absurd exhibition of the Radical candidate on the Tory
coach-box, and laughing at the grimmish slyness of his uncle Everard's
conspiracy a something in it that was half-smile half-sneer; not exactly
malignant, and by no means innocent; something made up of the simplicity
of a lighted match, and its proximity to powder, yet neither deadly, in
spite of a wicked twinkle, nor at all pretending to be harmless: in
short, a specimen of old English practical humour.

He laboured to express these or corresponding views of it, with tolerably
natural laughter, and Cecilia rallied her spirits at his pleasant manner
of taking his blow.

'I shall compliment the baron when I meet him tonight,' he said. 'What
can we compare him to?'

She suggested the Commander of the Faithful, the Lord Haroun, who
likewise had a turn for buffooneries to serve a purpose, and could direct
them loftily and sovereignty.

'No: Everard Romfrey's a Northerner from the feet up,' said Beauchamp.

Cecilia compliantly offered him a sketch of the Scandinavian Troll: much
nearer the mark, he thought, and exclaimed: 'Baron Troll! I'm afraid,
Cecilia, you have robbed him of the best part of his fun. And you will
owe it entirely to him if you should be represented in Parliament by my
cousin Basketett.'

'Promise me, Nevit, that you will, when you meet Captain Baskelett, not
forget I did you some service, and that I wish, I shall be so glad if you
do not resent certain things . . . .Very objectionable, we all think.'

He released her from the embarrassing petition: 'Oh! now I know my man,
you may be sure I won't waste a word on him. The fact is, he would not
understand a word, and would require more--and that I don't do. When I
fancied Mr. Austin was the responsible person, I meant to speak to him.'

Cecilia smiled gratefully.

The sweetness of a love-speech would not have been sweeter to her than
this proof of civilized chivalry in Nevil.

They came to the fir-heights overlooking Bevisham. Here the breezy
beginning of a South-western autumnal gale tossed the ponies' manes and
made threads of Cecilia's shorter locks of beautiful auburn by the
temples and the neck, blustering the curls that streamed in a thick
involution from the silken band gathering them off her uncovered
clear-swept ears.

Beauchamp took an impression of her side face. It seemed to offer him
everything the world could offer of cultivated purity, intelligent beauty
and attractiveness; and 'Wilt thou?' said the winged minute. Peace, a
good repute in the mouths of men, home, and a trustworthy woman for mate,
an ideal English lady, the rarest growth of our country, and friends and
fair esteem, were offered. Last night he had waltzed with her, and the
manner of this tall graceful girl in submitting to the union of the
measure and reserving her individual distinction, had exquisitely
flattered his taste, giving him an auspicious image of her in
partnership, through the uses of life.

He looked ahead at the low dead-blue cloud swinging from across channel.
What could be the riddle of Renee's letter! It chained him completely.

'At all events, I shall not be away longer than three days,' he said;
paused, eyed Cecilia's profile, and added, 'Do we differ so much?'

'It may not be so much as we think,' said she.

'But if we do!'

'Then, Nevil, there is a difference between us.'

'But if we keep our lips closed?'

'We should have to shut our eyes as well!'

A lovely melting image of her stole over him; all the warmer for her
unwittingness in producing it: and it awakened a tenderness toward the
simple speaker.

Cecilia's delicate breeding saved her from running on figuratively. She
continued: 'Intellectual differences do not cause wounds, except when
very unintellectual sentiments are behind them:--my conceit, or your
impatience, Nevil? "Noi veggiam come quei, che ha mala luce." . . . I can
confess my sight to be imperfect: but will you ever do so?'

Her musical voice in Italian charmed his hearing.

'What poet was that you quoted?'

'The wisest: Dante.'

'Dr. Shrapnel's favourite! I must try to read him.'

'He reads Dante?' Cecilia threw a stress on the august name; and it was
manifest that she cared not for the answer.

Contemptuous exclusiveness could not go farther.

'He is a man of cultivation,' Beauchamp said cursorily, trying to avoid
dissension, but in vain. 'I wish I were half as well instructed, and the
world half as charitable as he!--You ask me if I shall admit my sight to
be imperfect. Yes; when you prove to me that priests and landlords are
willing to do their duty by the people in preference to their churches
and their property: but will you ever shake off prejudice?'

Here was opposition sounding again. Cecilia mentally reproached Dr.
Shrapnel for it.

'Indeed, Nevil, really, must not--may I not ask you this?--must not every
one feel the evil spell of some associations? And Dante and Dr.
Shrapnel!'

'You don't know him, Cecilia.'

'I saw him yesterday.'

'You thought him too tall?'

'I thought of his character.'

'How angry I should be with you if you were not so beautiful!'

'I am immensely indebted to my unconscious advocate.'

'You are clad in steel; you flash back; you won't answer me out of the
heart. I 'm convinced it is pure wilfulness that makes you oppose me.'

'I fancy you must be convinced because you cannot imagine women to have
any share of public spirit, Nevil.'

A grain of truth in that remark set Nevil reflecting.

'I want them to have it,' he remarked, and glanced at a Tory placard,
probably the puppet's fresh-printed address to the electors, on one of
the wayside fir-trees. 'Bevisham looks well from here. We might make a
North-western Venice of it, if we liked.'

'Papa told you it would be money sunk in mud.'

'Did I mention it to him?--Thoroughly Conservative!--So he would leave
the mud as it is. They insist on our not venturing anything--those
Tories! exactly as though we had gained the best of human conditions,
instead of counting crops of rogues, malefactors, egoists, noxious and
lumbersome creatures that deaden the country. Your town down there is one
of the ugliest and dirtiest in the kingdom: it might be the fairest.'

'I have often thought that of Bevisham, Nevil.'

He drew a visionary sketch of quays, embankments, bridged islands, public
buildings, magical emanations of patriotic architecture, with a practical
air, an absence of that enthusiasm which struck her with suspicion when
it was not applied to landscape or the Arts; and she accepted it, and
warmed, and even allowed herself to appear hesitating when he returned to
the similarity of the state of mud-begirt Bevisham and our great sluggish
England.

Was he not perhaps to be pitied in his bondage to the Frenchwoman, who
could have no ideas in common with him?

The rare circumstance that she and Nevil Beauchamp had found a subject of
agreement, partially overcame the sentiment Cecilia entertained for the
foreign lady; and having now one idea in common with him, she conceived
the possibility that there might be more. There must be many, for he
loved England, and she no less. She clung, however, to the topic of
Bevisham, preferring to dream of the many more, rather than run risks.
Undoubtedly the town was of an ignoble aspect; and it was declining in
prosperity; and it was consequently over-populated. And undoubtedly (so
she was induced to coincide for the moment) a Government, acting to any
extent like a supervising head, should aid and direct the energies of
towns and ports and trades, and not leave everything everywhere to
chance: schools for the people, public morality, should be the charge of
Government. Cecilia had surrendered the lead to him, and was forced to
subscribe to an equivalent of 'undoubtedly' the Tories just as little as
the Liberals had done these good offices. Party against party, neither of
them had a forethoughtful head for the land at large. They waited for the
Press to spur a great imperial country to be but defensively armed, and
they accepted the so-called volunteers, with a nominal one-month's drill
per annum, as a guarantee of defence!

Beauchamp startled her, actually kindled her mind to an activity of
wonder and regret, with the statement of how much Government, acting with
some degree of farsightedness, might have won to pay the public debt and
remit taxation, by originally retaining the lines of railway, and
fastening on the valuable land adjoining stations. Hundreds of millions
of pounds!

She dropped a sigh at the prodigious amount, but inquired, 'Who has
calculated it?'

For though perfectly aware that this kind of conversation was a special
compliment paid to her by her friend Nevil, and dimly perceiving that it
implied something beyond a compliment-in fact, that it was his manner of
probing her for sympathy, as other men would have conducted the process
preliminary to deadly flattery or to wooing, her wits fenced her heart
about; the exercise of shrewdness was an instinct of self-preservation.
She had nothing but her poor wits, daily growing fainter, to resist him
with. And he seemed to know it, and therefore assailed them, never trying
at the heart.

That vast army of figures might be but a phantom army conjured out of the
Radical mists, might it not? she hinted. And besides, we cannot surely
require a Government to speculate in the future, can we?

Possibly not, as Governments go, Beauchamp said.

But what think you of a Government of landowners decreeing the enclosure
of millions of acres of common land amongst themselves; taking the
property of the people to add to their own! Say, is not that plunder?
Public property, observe; decreed to them by their own law-making, under
the pretence that it was being reclaimed for cultivation, when in reality
it has been but an addition to their pleasure-grounds: a flat robbery of
pasture from the poor man's cow and goose, and his right of cutting furze
for firing. Consider that! Beauchamp's eyes flashed democratic in
reciting this injury to the objects of his warm solicitude--the man, the
cow, and the goose. But so must he have looked when fronting England's
enemies, and his aspect of fervour subdued Cecilia. She confessed her
inability to form an estimate of such conduct.

'Are they doing it still?' she asked.

'We owe it to Dr. Shrapnel foremost that there is now a watch over them
to stop them. But for him, Grancey Lespel would have enclosed half of
Northeden Heath. As it is, he has filched bits here and there, and he
will have to put back his palings.'

However, now let Cecilia understand that we English, calling ourselves
free, are under morally lawless rule. Government is what we require, and
our means of getting it must be through universal suffrage. At present we
have no Government; only shifting Party Ministries, which are the tools
of divers interests, wealthy factions, to the sacrifice of the
Commonwealth.

She listened, like Rosamund Culling overborne by Dr. Shrapnel, inwardly
praying that she might discover a man to reply to him.

'A Despotism, Nevil?'

He hoped not, declined the despot, was English enough to stand against
the best of men in that character; but he cast it on Tory, Whig, and
Liberal, otherwise the Constitutionalists, if we were to come upon the
despot.

'They see we are close on universal suffrage; they've been bidding each
in turn for "the people," and that has brought them to it, and now
they're alarmed, and accuse one another of treason to the Constitution,
and they don't accept the situation: and there's a fear, that to carry on
their present system, they will be thwarting the people or corrupting
them: and in that case we shall have our despot in some shape or other,
and we shall suffer.'

'Nevil,' said Cecilia, 'I am out of my depth.'

'I'll support you; I can swim for two,' said he.

'You are very self-confident, but I find I am not fit for battle; at
least not in the front ranks.'

'Nerve me, then: will you? Try to comprehend once for all what the battle
is.'

'I am afraid I am too indifferent; I am too luxurious. That reminds me:
you want to meet your uncle Everard and if you will sleep at Mount
Laurels to-night, the Esperanza shall take you to France to-morrow
morning, and can wait to bring you back.'

As she spoke she perceived a flush mounting over Nevil's face. Soon it
was communicated to hers.

The strange secret of the blood electrified them both, and revealed the
burning undercurrent running between them from the hearts of each. The
light that showed how near they were to one another was kindled at the
barrier dividing them. It remained as good as a secret, unchallenged
until they had separated, and after midnight Cecilia looked through her.
chamber windows at the driving moon of a hurricane scud, and read clearly
his honourable reluctance to be wafted over to his French love by her
assistance; and Beauchamp on board the tossing steamboat perceived in her
sympathetic reddening that she had divined him.

This auroral light eclipsed the other events of the day. He drove into a
town royally decorated, and still humming with the ravishment of the Tory
entrance. He sailed in the schooner to Mount Laurels, in the society of
Captain Baskelett and his friends, who, finding him tamer than they
expected, bantered him in the cheerfullest fashion. He waited for his
uncle Everard several hours at Mount Laurels, perused the junior Tory's
address to the Electors, throughout which there was not an idea--safest
of addresses to canvass upon! perused likewise, at Captain Baskelett's
request, a broad sheet of an article introducing the new candidate to
Bevisham with the battle-axe Romfreys to back him, in high burlesque of
Timothy Turbot upon Beauchamp: and Cecil hoped his cousin would not
object to his borrowing a Romfrey or two for so pressing an occasion. All
very funny, and no doubt the presence of Mr. Everard Romfrey would have
heightened the fun from the fountain-head; but he happened to be delayed,
and Beauchamp had to leave directions behind him in the town, besides the
discussion of a whole plan of conduct with Dr. Shrapnel, so he was under
the necessity of departing without seeing his uncle, really to his
regret. He left word to that effect.

Taking leave of Cecilia, he talked of his return 'home' within three or
four days as a certainty.

She said: 'Canvassing should not be neglected now.'

Her hostility was confused by what she had done to save him from
annoyance, while his behaviour to his cousin Cecil increased her respect
for him. She detected a pathetic meaning in his mention of the word home;
she mused on his having called her beautiful: whither was she hurrying?
Forgetful of her horror of his revolutionary ideas, forgetful of the
elevation of her own, she thrilled secretly on hearing it stated by the
jubilant young Tories at Mount Laurels, as a characteristic of Beauchamp,
that he was clever in parrying political thrusts, and slipping from the
theme; he who with her gave out unguardedly the thoughts deepest in him.
And the thoughts!--were they not of generous origin? Where so true a
helpmate for him as the one to whom his mind appealed? It could not be so
with the Frenchwoman. Cecilia divined a generous nature by generosity,
and set herself to believe that in honour he had not yet dared to speak
to her from the heart, not being at heart quite free. She was at the same
time in her remains of pride cool enough to examine and rebuke the
weakness she succumbed to in now clinging to him by that which yesterday
she hardly less than loathed, still deeply disliked.




CHAPTER XXIII

TOURDESTELLE

On the part of Beauchamp, his conversation with Cecilia during the drive
into Bevisham opened out for the first time in his life a prospect of
home; he had felt the word in speaking it, and it signified an end to the
distractions produced by the sex, allegiance to one beloved respected
woman, and also a basis of operations against the world. For she was
evidently conquerable, and once matched with him would be the very woman
to nerve and sustain him. Did she not listen to him? He liked her
resistance. That element of the barbarous which went largely to form his
emotional nature was overjoyed in wresting such a woman from the enemy,
and subduing her personally. She was a prize. She was a splendid prize,
cut out from under the guns of the fort. He rendered all that was due to
his eminently good cause for its part in so signal a success, but
individual satisfaction is not diminished by the thought that the
individual's discernment selected the cause thus beneficent to him.

Beauchamp's meditations were diverted by the sight of the coast of France
dashed in rain-lines across a weed-strewn sea. The 'three days' granted
him by Renee were over, and it scarcely troubled him that he should be
behind the time; he detested mystery, holding it to be a sign of
pretentious feebleness, often of imposture, it might be frivolity.
Punctilious obedience to the mysterious brevity of the summons, and not
to chafe at it, appeared to him as much as could be expected of a
struggling man. This was the state of the case with him, until he stood
on French earth, breathed French air, and chanced to hear the tongue of
France twittered by a lady on the quay. The charm was instantaneous. He
reminded himself that Renee, unlike her countrywomen, had no gift for
writing letters. They had never corresponded since the hour of her
marriage. They had met in Sicily, at Syracuse, in the presence of her
father and her husband, and so inanimate was she that the meeting seemed
like the conclusion of their history. Her brother Roland sent tidings of
her by fits, and sometimes a conventional message from Tourdestelle.
Latterly her husband's name had been cited as among the wildfires of
Parisian quays, in journals more or less devoted to those unreclaimed
spaces of the city. Well, if she was unhappy, was it not the fulfilment
of his prophecy in Venice?

Renee's brevity became luminous. She needed him urgently, and knowing him
faithful to the death, she, because she knew him, dispatched purely the
words which said she needed him. Why, those brief words were the poetry
of noble confidence! But what could her distress be? The lover was able
to read that, 'Come; I give you three days,' addressed to him, was not
language of a woman free of her yoke.

Excited to guess and guess, Beauchamp swept on to speculations of a
madness that seized him bodily at last. Were you loved, Cecilia? He
thought little of politics in relation to Renee; or of home, or of honour
in the world's eye, or of labouring to pay the fee for his share of life.
This at least was one of the forms of love which precipitate men: the
sole thought in him was to be with her. She was Renee, the girl of whom
he had prophetically said that she must come to regrets and tears. His
vision of her was not at Tourdestelle, though he assumed her to be there
awaiting him: she was under the sea-shadowing Alps, looking up to the red
and gold-rosed heights of a realm of morning that was hers inviolably,
and under which Renee was eternally his.

The interval between then and now was but the space of an unquiet sea
traversed in the night, sad in the passage of it, but featureless--and it
had proved him right! It was to Nevil Beauchamp as if the spirit of his
old passion woke up again to glorious hopeful morning when he stood in
Renee's France.

Tourdestelle enjoyed the aristocratic privilege of being twelve miles
from the nearest railway station. Alighting here on an evening of clear
sky, Beauchamp found an English groom ready to dismount for him and bring
on his portmanteau. The man said that his mistress had been twice to the
station, and was now at the neighbouring Chateau Dianet. Thither
Beauchamp betook himself on horseback. He was informed at the gates that
Madame la Marquise had left for Tourdestelle in the saddle only ten
minutes previously. The lodge-keeper had been instructed to invite him to
stay at Chateau Dianet in the event of his arriving late, but it would be
possible to overtake madame by a cut across the heights at a turn of the
valley. Beauchamp pushed along the valley for this visible projection; a
towering mass of woodland, in the midst of which a narrow roadway, worn
like the track of a torrent with heavy rain, wound upward. On his descent
to the farther side, he was to spy directly below in the flat for
Tourdestelle. He crossed the wooded neck above the valley, and began
descending, peering into gulfs of the twilight dusk. Some paces down he
was aided by a brilliant half-moon that divided the whole underlying
country into sharp outlines of dark and fair, and while endeavouring to
distinguish the chateau of Tourdestelle his eyes were attracted to an
angle of the downward zigzag, where a pair of horses emerged into broad
light swiftly; apparently the riders were disputing, or one had overtaken
the other in pursuit. Riding-habit and plumed hat signalized the sex of
one. Beauchamp sung out a gondolier's cry. He fancied it was answered.

He was heard, for the lady turned about, and as he rode down, still
uncertain of her, she came cantering up alone, and there could be no
uncertainty.

Moonlight is friendless to eyes that would make sure of a face long
unseen. It was Renee whose hand he clasped, but the story of the years on
her, and whether she was in bloom, or wan as the beams revealing her, he
could not see.

Her tongue sounded to him as if it were loosened without a voice. 'You
have come. That storm! You are safe!'

So phantom-like a sound of speech alarmed him. 'I lost no time. But you?'

'I am well.'

'Nothing hangs over you?'

'Nothing.'

'Why give me just three days?'

'Pure impatience. Have you forgotten me?'

Their horses walked on with them. They unlocked their hands.

'You knew it was I?' said he.

'Who else could it be? I heard Venice,' she replied.

Her previous cavalier was on his feet, all but on his knees, it appeared,
searching for something that eluded him under the road-side bank. He
sprang at it and waved it, leapt in the saddle, and remarked, as he drew
up beside Renee: 'What one picks from the earth one may wear, I presume,
especially when we can protest it is our property.'

Beauchamp saw him planting a white substance most carefully at the breast
buttonhole of his coat. It could hardly be a flower. Some drooping exotic
of the conservatory perhaps resembled it.

Renee pronounced his name: 'M. le Comte Henri d'Henriel.'

He bowed to Beauchamp with an extreme sweep of the hat.

'Last night, M. Beauchamp, we put up vows for you to the Marine God,
beseeching an exemption from that horrible mal de mer. Thanks to the
storm, I suppose, I have won. I must maintain, madame, that I won.'

'You wear your trophy,' said Renee, and her horse reared and darted
ahead.

The gentleman on each side of her struck into a trot. Beauchamp glanced
at M. d'Henriel's breast-decoration. Renee pressed the pace, and
threading dense covers of foliage they reached the level of the valley,
where for a couple of miles she led them, stretching away merrily, now in
shadow, now in moonlight, between high land and meadow land, and a line
of poplars in the meadows winding with the river that fed the vale and
shot forth gleams of silvery disquiet by rustic bridge and mill.

The strangeness of being beside her, not having yet scanned her face,
marvelling at her voice--that was like and unlike the Renee of old, full
of her, but in another key, a mellow note, maturer--made the ride magical
to Beauchamp, planting the past in the present like a perceptible ghost.

Renee slackened speed, saying: 'Tourdestelle spans a branch of our little
river. This is our gate. Had it been daylight I would have taken you by
another way, and you would have seen the black tower burnt in the
Revolution; an imposing monument, I am assured. However, you will think
it pretty beside the stream. Do you come with us, M. le Comte?'

His answer was inaudible to Beauchamp; he did not quit them.

The lamp at the lodge-gates presented the young man's face in full view,
and Beauchamp thought him supremely handsome. He perceived it to be a
lady's glove that M. d'Henriel wore at his breast.

Renee walked her horse up the park-drive, alongside the bright running
water. It seemed that she was aware of the method of provoking or
reproving M. d'Henriel. He endured some minutes of total speechlessness
at this pace, and abruptly said adieu and turned back.

Renee bounded like a vessel free of her load. 'But why should we hurry?'
said she, and checked her course to the walk again. 'I hope you like our
Normandy, and my valley. You used to love France, Nevil; and Normandy,
they tell me, is cousin to the opposite coast of England, in climate,
soil, people, it may be in manners too. A Beauchamp never can feel that
he is a foreigner in Normandy. We claim you half French. You have grander
parks, they say. We can give you sunlight.'

'And it was really only the wish to see me?' said Beauchamp.

'Only, and really. One does not live for ever--on earth; and it becomes a
question whether friends should be shadows to one another before death. I
wrote to you because I wished to see you: I was impatient because I am
Renee.'

'You relieve me!'

'Evidently you have forgotten my character, Nevil.'

'Not a feature of it.'

'Ah!' she breathed involuntarily.

'Would you have me forget it?'

'When I think by myself, quite alone, yes, I would. Otherwise how can one
hope that one's friend is friendship, supposing him to read us as we
are--minutely, accurately? And it is in absence that we desire our
friends to be friendship itself. And . . . and I am utterly astray! I
have not dealt in this language since I last thought of writing a diary,
and stared at the first line. If I mistake not, you are fond of the
picturesque. If moonlight and water will satisfy you, look yonder.'

The moon launched her fairy silver fleets on a double sweep of the little
river round an island of reeds and two tall poplars.

'I have wondered whether I should ever see you looking at that scene,'
said Renee.

He looked from it to her, and asked if Roland was well, and her father;
then alluded to her husband; but the unlettering elusive moon, bright
only in the extension of her beams, would not tell him what story this
face, once heaven to him, wore imprinted on it. Her smile upon a parted
mouth struck him as two-edged in replying: 'I have good news to give you
of them all: Roland is in garrison at Rouen, and will come when I
telegraph. My father is in Touraine, and greets you affectionately; he
hopes to come. They are both perfectly happy. My husband is travelling.'

Beauchamp was conscious of some bitter taste; unaware of what it was,
though it led him to say, undesigningly: 'How very handsome that M.
d'Henriel is!--if I have his name correctly.'

Renee answered: 'He has the misfortune to be considered the handsomest
young man in France.'

'He has an Italian look.'

'His mother was Provencale.'

She put her horse in motion, saying: 'I agree with you that handsome men
are rarities. And, by the way, they do not set our world on fire quite as
much as beautiful women do yours, my friend. Acknowledge so much in our
favour.'

He assented indefinitely. He could have wished himself away canvassing in
Bevisham. He had only to imagine himself away from her, to feel the flood
of joy in being with her.

'Your husband is travelling?'

'It is his pleasure.'

Could she have intended to say that this was good news to give of him as
well as of the happiness of her father and brother?

'Now look on Tourdestelle,' said Renee. 'You will avow that for an active
man to be condemned to seek repose in so dull a place, after the fatigues
of the season in Paris, it is considerably worse than for women, so I am
here to dispense the hospitalities. The right wing of the chateau, on
your left, is new. The side abutting the river is inhabited by Dame
Philiberte, whom her husband imprisoned for attempting to take her
pleasure in travel. I hear upon authority that she dresses in white, and
wears a black crucifix. She is many centuries old, and still she lives to
remind people that she married a Rouaillout. Do you not think she should
have come to me to welcome me? She never has; and possibly of ladies who
are disembodied we may say that they know best. For me, I desire the
interview--and I am a coward: I need not state it.' She ceased; presently
continuing: 'The other inhabitants are my sister, Agnes d'Auffray, wife
of a general officer serving in Afric--my sister by marriage, and my
friend; the baronne d'Orbec, a relation by marriage; M. d'Orbec, her son,
a guest, and a sportsman; M. Livret, an erudite. No young ladies: I can
bear much, but not their presence; girls are odious to me. I knew one in
Venice.'

They came within the rays of the lamp hanging above the unpretending
entrance to the chateau. Renee's broad grey Longueville hat curved low
with its black plume on the side farthest from him. He was favoured by
the gallant lift of the brim on the near side, but she had overshadowed
her eyes.

'He wears a glove at his breast,' said Beauchamp.

'You speak of M. d'Henriel. He wears a glove at his breast; yes, it is
mine,' said Renee.

She slipped from her horse and stood against his shoulder, as if waiting
to be questioned before she rang the bell of the chateau.

Beauchamp alighted, burning with his unutterable questions concerning
that glove.

'Lift your hat, let me beg you; let me see you,' he said.

This was not what she had expected. With one heave of her bosom, and
murmuring: 'I made a vow I would obey you absolutely if you came,' she
raised the hat above her brows, and lightning would not have surprised
him more; for there had not been a single vibration of her voice to tell
him of tears running: nay, the absence of the usual French formalities in
her manner of addressing him, had seemed to him to indicate her intention
to put him at once on an easy friendly footing, such as would be natural
to her, and not painful to him. Now she said:

'You perceive, monsieur, that I have my sentimental fits like others; but
in truth I am not insensible to the picturesque or to gratitude, and I
thank you sincerely for coming, considering that I wrote like a
Sphinx--to evade writing comme une folle!'

She swept to the bell.

Standing in the arch of the entrance, she stretched her whip out to a
black mass of prostrate timber, saying:

'It fell in the storm at two o'clock after midnight, and you on the sea!'




CHAPTER XXIV

HIS HOLIDAY

A single day was to be the term of his holiday at Tourdestelle; but it
stood forth as one of those perfect days which are rounded by an evening
before and a morning after, giving him two nights under the same roof
with Renee, something of a resemblance to three days of her; anticipation
and wonder filling the first, she the next, the adieu the last: every
hour filled. And the first day was not over yet. He forced himself to
calmness, that he might not fritter it, and walked up and down the room
he was dressing in, examining its foreign decorations, and peering
through the window, to quiet his nerves. He was in her own France with
her! The country borrowed hues from Renee, and lent some. This chivalrous
France framed and interlaced her image, aided in idealizing her, and was
in turn transfigured. Not half so well would his native land have pleaded
for the forgiveness of a British damsel who had wrecked a young man's
immoderate first love. That glorified self-love requires the touch upon
imagination of strangeness and an unaccustomed grace, to subdue it and
make it pardon an outrage to its temples and altars, and its happy
reading of the heavens, the earth too: earth foremost, we ought perhaps
to say. It is an exacting heathen, best understood by a glance at what
will appease it: beautiful, however, as everybody has proved; and shall
it be decried in a world where beauty is not overcommon, though it would
slaughter us for its angry satisfaction, yet can be soothed by a tone of
colour, as it were by a novel inscription on a sweetmeat?

The peculiarity of Beauchamp was that he knew the slenderness of the
thread which was leading him, and foresaw it twisting to a coil unless he
should hold firm. His work in life was much above the love of a woman in
his estimation, so he was not deluded by passion when he entered the
chateau; it is doubtful whether he would not hesitatingly have sacrificed
one of the precious votes in Bevisham for the pleasure of kissing her
hand when they were on the steps. She was his first love and only love,
married, and long ago forgiven:--married; that is to say, she especially
among women was interdicted to him by the lingering shadow of the
reverential love gone by; and if the anguish of the lover's worse than
death survived in a shudder of memory at the thought of her not solely
lost to him but possessed by another, it did but quicken a hunger that
was three parts curiosity to see how she who had suffered this bore the
change; how like or unlike she might be to the extinct Renee; what traces
she kept of the face he had known. Her tears were startling, but tears
tell of a mood, they do not tell the story of the years; and it was that
story he had such eagerness to read in one brief revelation: an eagerness
born only of the last few hours, and broken by fears of a tarnished
aspect; these again being partly hopes of a coming disillusion that would
restore him his independence and ask him only for pity. The slavery of
the love of a woman chained like Renee was the most revolting of
prospects to a man who cherished his freedom that he might work to the
end of his time. Moreover, it swung a thunder-cloud across his holiday.
He recurred to the idea of the holiday repeatedly, and the more he did so
the thinner it waned. He was exhausting the very air and spirit of it
with a mind that ran incessantly forward and back; and when he and the
lady of so much speculation were again together, an incapacity of
observation seemed to have come over him. In reality it was the inability
to reflect on his observations. Her presence resembled those dark sunsets
throwing the spell of colour across the world; when there is no question
with us of morning or of night, but of that sole splendour only.

Owing to their arrival late at the chateau, covers were laid for them in
the boudoir of Madame la Marquise, where he had his hostess to himself,
and certainly the opportunity of studying her. An English Navy List,
solitary on a shelf, and laid within it an extract of a paper announcing
the return of the Ariadne to port, explained the mystery of her knowing
that he was in England, as well as the correctness of the superscription
of her letter to him. 'You see, I follow you,' she said.

Beauchamp asked if she read English now.

'A little; but the paper was dispatched to me by M. Vivian Ducie, of your
embassy in Paris. He is in the valley.'

The name of Ducie recalled Lord Palmet's description of the dark beauty
of the fluttering pale gold ornaments. She was now dressed without one
decoration of gold or jewel, with scarcely a wave in the silk, a modesty
of style eloquent of the pride of her form.

Could those eyes fronting him under the lamp have recently shed tears?
They were the living eyes of a brilliant unembarrassed lady; shields
flinging light rather than well-depths inviting it.

Beauchamp tried to compare her with the Renee of Venice, and found
himself thinking of the glove she had surrendered to the handsomest young
man in France. The effort to recover the younger face gave him a dead
creature, with the eyelashes of Renee, the cast of her mouth and throat,
misty as a shape in a dream.

He could compare her with Cecilia, who never would have risked a glove,
never have betrayed a tear, and was the statelier lady, not without
language: but how much less vivid in feature and the gift of speech!
Renee's gift of speech counted unnumbered strings which she played on
with a grace that clothed the skill, and was her natural endowment--an
art perfected by the education of the world. Who cannot talk!--but who
can? Discover the writers in a day when all are writing! It is as rare an
art as poetry, and in the mouths of women as enrapturing, richer than
their voices in music.

This was the fascination Beauchamp felt weaving round him. Would you,
that are separable from boys and mobs, and the object malignly called the
Briton, prefer the celestial singing of a woman to her excellently
talking? But not if it were given you to run in unison with her genius of
the tongue, following her verbal ingenuities and feminine silk-flashes of
meaning; not if she led you to match her fine quick perceptions with more
or less of the discreet concordance of the violoncello accompanying the
viol. It is not high flying, which usually ends in heavy falling. You
quit the level of earth no more than two birds that chase from bush to
bush to bill in air, for mutual delight to make the concert heavenly.
Language flowed from Renee in affinity with the pleasure-giving laws that
make the curves we recognize as beauty in sublimer arts. Accept
companionship for the dearest of the good things we pray to have, and
what equalled her! Who could be her rival!

Her girl's crown of irradiated Alps began to tremble over her dimly, as
from moment to moment their intimacy warmed, and Beauchamp saw the young
face vanishing out of this flower of womanhood. He did not see it
appearing or present, but vanishing like the faint ray in the rosier.
Nay, the blot of her faithlessness underwent a transformation: it
affected him somewhat as the patch cunningly laid on near a liquid dimple
in fair cheeks at once allures and evades a susceptible attention.

Unused in his French of late, he stumbled at times, and she supplied the
needed phrase, taking no note of a blunder. Now men of sweet blood cannot
be secretly accusing or criticizing a gracious lady. Domestic men are
charged with thinking instantly of dark death when an ordinary illness
befalls them; and it may be so or not: but it is positive that the
gallant man of the world, if he is in the sensitive condition, and not
yet established as the lord of her, feels paralyzed in his masculine
sense of leadership the moment his lady assumes the initiative and
directs him: he gives up at once; and thus have many nimble-witted dames
from one clear start retained their advantage.

Concerning that glove: well! the handsomest young man in France wore the
glove of the loveliest woman. The loveliest? The very loveliest in the
purity of her French style--the woman to challenge England for a type of
beauty to eclipse her. It was possible to conceive her country wagering
her against all women.

If Renee had faults, Beauchamp thought of her as at sea breasting
tempests, while Cecilia was a vessel lying safe in harbour, untried,
however promising: and if Cecilia raised a steady light for him, it was
over the shores he had left behind, while Renee had really nothing to do
with warning or rescuing, or with imperilling; she welcomed him simply to
a holiday in her society. He associated Cecilia strangely with the
political labours she would have had him relinquish; and Renee with a
pleasant state of indolence, that her lightest smile disturbed. Shun
comparisons.

It is the tricksy heart which sets up that balance, to jump into it on
one side or the other. Comparisons come of a secret leaning that is sure
to play rogue under its mien of honest dealer: so Beauchamp suffered
himself to be unjust to graver England, and lost the strength she would
have given him to resist a bewitchment. The case with him was, that his
apprenticeship was new; he had been trotting in harness as a veritable
cab-horse of politics--he by blood a racer; and his nature craved for
diversions, against his will, against his moral sense and born tenacity
of spirit.

Not a word further of the glove. But at night, in his bed, the glove was
a principal actor in events of extraordinary magnitude and inconsequence.

He was out in the grounds with the early morning light. Coffee and sweet
French bread were brought out to him, and he was informed of the hours of
reunion at the chateau, whose mistress continued invisible. She might be
sleeping. He strolled about, within view of the windows, wondering at her
subservience to sleep. Tourdestelle lay in one of those Norman valleys
where the river is the mother of rich pasture, and runs hidden between
double ranks of sallows, aspens and poplars, that mark its winding line
in the arms of trenched meadows. The high land on either side is an
unwatered flat up to the horizon, little varied by dusty apple-trees
planted in the stubble here and there, and brown mud walls of hamlets; a
church-top, a copse, an avenue of dwarf limes leading to the three-parts
farm, quarter residence of an enriched peasant striking new roots, or
decayed proprietor pinching not to be severed from ancient. Descending on
the deep green valley in Summer is like a change of climes. The chateau
stood square at a branch of the river, tossing three light bridges of
pretty woodwork to park and garden. Great bouquets of swelling blue and
pink hydrangia nestled at his feet on shaven grass. An open window showed
a cloth of colour, as in a reminiscence of Italy.

Beauchamp heard himself addressed:--'You are looking for my
sister-in-law, M. Beauchamp?'

The speaker was Madame d'Auffray, to whom he had been introduced
overnight--a lady of the aquiline French outline, not ungentle.

Renee had spoken affectionately of her, he remembered. There was nothing
to make him be on his guard, and he stated that he was looking for Madame
de Rouaillout, and did not conceal surprise at the information that she
was out on horseback.

'She is a tireless person,' Madame d'Auffray remarked. 'You will not miss
her long. We all meet at twelve, as you know.'

'I grudge an hour, for I go to-morrow,' said Beauchamp.

The notification of so early a departure, or else his bluntness,
astonished her. She fell to praising Renee's goodness. He kept her to it
with lively interrogations, in the manner of a, guileless boy urging for
eulogies of his dear absent friend. Was it duplicity in him or
artlessness?

'Has she, do you think, increased in beauty?' Madame d'Auffray inquired:
an insidious question, to which he replied:

'Once I thought it would be impossible.'

Not so bad an answer for an Englishman, in a country where speaking is
fencing; the race being little famous for dialectical alertness: but was
it artful or simple?

They skirted the chateau, and Beauchamp had the history of Dame
Philiberte recounted to him, with a mixture of Gallic irony, innuendo,
openness, touchingness, ridicule, and charity novel to his ears. Madame
d'Auffray struck the note of intimacy earlier than is habitual. She
sounded him in this way once or twice, carelessly perusing him, and
waiting for the interesting edition of the Book of Man to summarize its
character by showing its pages or remaining shut. It was done delicately,
like the tap of a finger-nail on a vase. He rang clear; he had nothing to
conceal; and where he was reserved, that is, in speaking of the developed
beauty and grace of Renee, he was transparent. She read the sort of man
he was; she could also hazard a guess as to the man's present state. She
ventured to think him comparatively harmless--for the hour: for she was
not the woman to be hoodwinked by man's dark nature because she inclined
to think well of a particular man; nor was she one to trust to any man
subject to temptation. The wisdom of the Frenchwoman's fortieth year
forbade it. A land where the war between the sexes is honestly
acknowledged, and is full of instruction, abounds in precepts; but it ill
becomes the veteran to practise rigorously what she would prescribe to
young women. She may discriminate; as thus:--Trust no man. Still, this
man may be better than that man; and it is bad policy to distrust a
reasonably guileless member of the preying sex entirely, and so to lose
his good services. Hawks have their uses in destroying vermin; and though
we cannot rely upon the taming of hawks, one tied by the leg in a garden
preserves the fruit.

'There is a necessity for your leaving us to-morrow; M. Beauchamp?'

'I regret to say, it is imperative, madame.'

'My husband will congratulate me on the pleasure I have, and have long
desired, of making your acquaintance, and he will grieve that he has not
been so fortunate; he is on service in Africa. My brother, I need not
say, will deplore the mischance which has prevented him from welcoming
you. I have telegraphed to him; he is at one of the Baths in Germany, and
will come assuredly, if there is a prospect of finding you here. None?
Supposing my telegram not to fall short of him, I may count on his being
here within four days.'

Beauchamp begged her to convey the proper expressions of his regret to M.
le Marquis.

'And M. de Croisnel? And Roland, your old comrade and brother-in-arms?
What will be their disappointment!' she said.

'I intend to stop for an hour at Rouen on my way back,' said Beauchamp.

She asked if her belle-soeur was aware of the short limitation of his
visit.

He had not mentioned it to Madame la Marquise.

'Perhaps you may be moved by the grief of a friend: Renee may persuade
you to stay.'

'I came imagining I could be of some use to Madame la Marquise. She
writes as if she were telegraphing.'

'Perfectly true of her! For that matter, I saw the letter. Your looks
betray a very natural jealousy; but seeing it or not it would have been
the same: she and I have no secrets. She was, I may tell you, strictly
unable to write more words in the letter. Which brings me to inquire what
impression M. d'Henriel made on you yesterday evening.'

'He is particularly handsome.'

'We women think so. Did you take him to be . . . eccentric?'

Beauchamp gave a French jerk of the shoulders.

It confessed the incident of the glove to one who knew it as well as he:
but it masked the weight he was beginning to attach to that incident, and
Madame d'Auffray was misled. Truly, the Englishman may be just such an
ex-lover, uninflammable by virtue of his blood's native coldness; endued
with the frozen vanity called pride, which does not seek to be revenged.
Under wary espionage, he might be a young woman's friend, though male
friend of a half-abandoned wife should write himself down morally saint,
mentally sage, medically incurable, if he would win our confidence.

This lady of sharp intelligence was the guardian of Renee during the
foolish husband's flights about Paris and over Europe, and, for a proof
of her consummate astuteness, Renee had no secrets and had absolute
liberty. And hitherto no man could build a boast on her reputation. The
liberty she would have had at any cost, as Madame d'Auffray knew; and an
attempt to restrict it would have created secrets.

Near upon the breakfast-hour Renee was perceived by them going toward the
chateau at a walking pace. They crossed one of the garden bridges to
intercept her. She started out of some deep meditation, and raised her
whip hand to Beauchamp's greeting. 'I had forgotten to tell you,
monsieur, that I should be out for some hours in the morning.'

'Are you aware,' said Madame d'Auffray, 'that M. Beauchamp leaves us
to-morrow?'

'So soon?' It was uttered hardly with a tone of disappointment.

The marquise alighted, crying hold, to the stables, caressed her horse,
and sent him off with a smack on the smoking flanks to meet the groom.

'To-morrow? That is very soon; but M. Beauchamp is engaged in an
Election, and what have we to induce him to stay?'

'Would it not be better to tell M. Beauchamp why he was invited to come?'
rejoined Madame d'Auffray.

The sombre light in Renee's eyes quickened through shadowy spheres of
surprise and pain to resolution. She cried, 'You have my full consent,'
and left them.

Madame d'Auffray smiled at Beauchamp, to excuse the childishness of the
little story she was about to relate; she gave it in the essence, without
a commencement or an ending. She had in fact but two or three hurried
minutes before the breakfast-bell would ring; and the fan she opened and
shut, and at times shaded her head with, was nearly as explicit as her
tongue.

He understood that Renee had staked her glove on his coming within a
certain number of hours to the briefest wording of invitation possible.
Owing to his detention by the storm, M. d'Henriel had won the bet, and
now insisted on wearing the glove. 'He is the privileged young madman our
women make of a handsome youth,' said Madame d'Auffray.

Where am I? thought Beauchamp--in what land, he would have phrased it, of
whirlwinds catching the wits, and whipping the passions? Calmer than
they, but unable to command them, and guessing that Renee's errand of the
morning, by which he had lost hours of her, pertained to the glove, he
said quiveringly, 'Madame la Marquise objects?'

'We,' replied Madame d'Auffray, 'contend that the glove was not loyally
won. The wager was upon your coming to the invitation, not upon your
conquering the elements. As to his flaunting the glove for a favour, I
would ask you, whom does he advertize by that? Gloves do not wear white;
which fact compromises none but the wearer. He picked it up from the
ground, and does not restore it; that is all. You see a boy who catches
at anything to placard himself. There is a compatriot of yours, a M.
Ducie, who assured us you must be with an uncle in your county of Sussex.
Of course we ran the risk of the letter missing you, but the chance was
worth a glove. Can you believe it, M. Beauchamp? it was I, old woman as I
am, I who provoked the silly wager. I have long desired to meet you; and
we have little society here, we are desperate with loneliness, half mad
with our whims. I said, that if you were what I had heard of you, you
would come to us at a word. They dared Madame la Marquise to say the
same. I wished to see the friend of Frenchmen, as M. Roland calls you;
not merely to see him--to know him, whether he is this perfect friend
whose absolute devotion has impressed my dear sister Renee's mind. She
respects you: that is a sentiment scarcely complimentary to the ideas of
young men. She places you above human creatures: possibly you may not
dislike to be worshipped. It is not to be rejected when one's influence
is powerful for good. But you leave us to-morrow!'

'I' might stay . . .' Beauchamp hesitated to name the number of hours. He
stood divided between a sense of the bubbling shallowness of the life
about him, and a thought, grave as an eye dwelling on blood, of sinister
things below it.

'I may stay another day or two,' he said, 'if I can be of any earthly
service.'

Madame d'Auffray bowed as to a friendly decision on his part, saying, 'It
would be a thousand pities to disappoint M. Roland; and it will be
offering my brother an amicable chance. I will send him word that you
await him; at least, that you defer your departure as long as possible.
Ah! now you perceive, M. Beauchamp, now you have become aware of our
purely infantile plan to bring you over to us, how very ostensible a
punishment it would be were you to remain so short a period.'

Having no designs, he was neither dupe nor sceptic; but he felt oddly
entangled, and the dream of his holiday had fled like morning's beams, as
a self-deception will at a very gentle shaking.




CHAPTER XXV

THE ADVENTURE OF THE BOAT

Madame d'Auffray passed Renee, whispering on her way to take her seat at
the breakfast-table.

Renee did not condescend to whisper. 'Roland will be glad,' she said
aloud.

Her low eyelids challenged Beauchamp for a look of indifference. There
was more for her to unbosom than Madame d'Auffray had revealed, but the
comparative innocence of her position in this new light prompted her to
meet him defiantly, if he chose to feel injured. He was attracted by a
happy contrast of colour between her dress and complexion, together with
a cavalierly charm in the sullen brows she lifted; and seeing the reverse
of a look of indifference on his face, after what he had heard of her
frivolousness, she had a fear that it existed.

'Are we not to have M. d'Henriel to-day? he amuses me,' the baronne
d'Orbec remarked.

'If he would learn that he was fashioned for that purpose!' exclaimed
little M. Livret.

'Do not ask young men for too much head, my friend; he would cease to be
amusing.'

'D'Henriel should have been up in the fields at ten this morning,' said
M. d'Orbec. 'As to his head, I back him for a clever shot.'

'Or a duelling-sword,' said Renee. 'It is a quality, count it for what we
will. Your favourite, Madame la Baronne, is interdicted from presenting
himself here so long as he persists in offending me.'

She was requested to explain, and, with the fair ingenuousness which
outshines innocence, she touched on the story of the glove.

Ah! what a delicate, what an exciting, how subtle a question!

Had M. d'Henriel the right to possess it? and, having that, had he the
right to wear it at his breast?

Beauchamp was dragged into the discussion of the case.

Renee waited curiously for his judgement.

Pleading an apology for the stormy weather, which had detained him, and
for his ignorance that so precious an article was at stake, he held, that
by the terms of the wager, the glove was lost; the claim to wear it was a
matter of taste.

'Matters of taste, monsieur, are not, I think, decided by weapons in your
country?' said M. d'Orbec.

'We have no duelling,' said Beauchamp.

The Frenchman imagined the confession to be somewhat humbling, and
generously added, 'But you have your volunteers--a magnificent spectacle
of patriotism and national readiness for defence!'

A shrewd pang traversed Beauchamp's heart, as he looked back on his
country from the outside and the inside, thinking what amount of
patriotic readiness the character of the volunteering signified, in the
face of all that England has to maintain. Like a politic islander, he
allowed the patriotic spectacle to be imagined; reflecting that it did a
sort of service abroad, and had only to be unmasked at home.

'But you surrendered the glove, marquise!' The baronne d'Orbec spoke
judicially.

'I flung it to the ground: that made it neutral,' said Renee.

'Hum. He wears it with the dust on it, certainly.'

'And for how long a time,' M. Livret wished to know, 'does this amusing
young man proclaim his intention of wearing the glove?'

'Until he can see with us that his Order of Merit is utter kid,' said
Madame d'Auffray; and as she had spoken more or less neatly, satisfaction
was left residing in the ear of the assembly, and the glove was permitted
to be swept away on a fresh tide of dialogue.

The admirable candour of Renee in publicly alluding to M. d'Henriel's
foolishness restored a peep of his holiday to Beauchamp. Madame d'Auffray
took note of the effect it produced, and quite excused her sister-in-law
for intending to produce is; but that speaking out the half-truth that we
may put on the mask of the whole, is no new trick; and believing as she
did that Renee was in danger with the handsome Count Henri, the practice
of such a kind of honesty on her part appeared alarming.

Still it is imprudent to press for confidences when our friend's heart is
manifestly trifling with sincerity. Who knows but that some foregone
reckless act or word may have superinduced the healthy shame which cannot
speak, which must disguise itself, and is honesty in that form, but
roughly troubled would resolve to rank dishonesty? So thought the patient
lady, wiser in that than in her perceptions.

Renee made a boast of not persuading her guest to stay, avowing that she
would not willingly have him go. Praising him equably, she listened to
praise of him with animation. She was dumb and statue-like when Count
Henri's name was mentioned. Did not this betray liking for one,
subjection to the other? Indeed, there was an Asiatic splendour of animal
beauty about M. d'Henriel that would be serpent with most women, Madame
d'Auffray conceived; why not with the deserted Renee, who adored beauty
of shape and colour, and was compassionate toward a rashness of character
that her own unnatural solitariness and quick spirit made her emulous of?

Meanwhile Beauchamp's day of adieu succeeded that of his holiday, and no
adieu was uttered. The hours at Tourdestelle had a singular turn for
slipping. Interlinked and all as one they swam by, brought evening,
brought morning, never varied. They might have varied with such a
division as when flame lights up the night or a tempest shades the day,
had Renee chosen; she had that power over him. She had no wish to use it;
perhaps she apprehended what it would cause her to forfeit. She wished
him to respect her; felt that she was under the shadow of the glove,
slight though it was while it was nothing but a tale of a lady and a
glove; and her desire, like his, was that they should meet daily and
dream on, without a variation. He noticed how seldom she led him beyond
the grounds of the chateau. They were to make excursions when her brother
came, she said. Roland de Croisnel's colonel, Coin de Grandchamp,
happened to be engaged in a duel, which great business detained Roland.
It supplied Beauchamp with an excuse for staying, that he was angry with
himself for being pleased to have; so he attacked the practice of
duelling, and next the shrug, wherewith M. Livret and M. d'Orbec sought
at first to defend the foul custom, or apologize for it, or plead for it
philosophically, or altogether cast it off their shoulders; for the
literal interpretation of the shrug in argument is beyond human capacity;
it is the point of speech beyond our treasury of language. He attacked
the shrug, as he thought, very temperately; but in controlling his native
vehemence he grew, perforce of repression, and of incompetency to deliver
himself copiously in French, sarcastic. In fine, his contrast of the
pretence of their noble country to head civilization, and its
encouragement of a custom so barbarous, offended M. d'Orbec and irritated
M. Livret.

The latter delivered a brief essay on Gallic blood; the former maintained
that Frenchmen were the best judges of their own ways and deeds.
Politeness reigned, but politeness is compelled to throw off cloak and
jacket when it steps into the arena to meet the encounter of a bull.
Beauchamp drew on their word 'solidaire' to assist him in declaring that
no civilized nation could be thus independent. Imagining himself in the
France of brave ideas, he contrived to strike out sparks of Legitimist
ire around him, and found himself breathing the atmosphere of the most
primitive nursery of Toryism. Again he encountered the shrug, and he
would have it a verbal matter. M. d'Orbec gravely recited the programme
of the country party in France. M. Livret carried the war across Channel.
You English have retired from active life, like the exhausted author, to
turn critic--the critic that sneers: unless we copy you abjectly we are
execrable. And what is that sneer? Materially it is an acrid saliva,
withering where it drops; in the way of fellowship it is a
corpse-emanation. As to wit, the sneer is the cloak of clumsiness; it is
the Pharisee's incense, the hypocrite's pity, the post of exaltation of
the fat citizen, etc.; but, said M. Livret, the people using it should
have a care that they keep powerful: they make no friends. He terminated
with this warning to a nation not devoid of superior merit. M. d'Orbec
said less, and was less consoled by his outburst.

In the opinion of Mr. Vivian Ducie, present at the discussion, Beauchamp
provoked the lash; for, in the first place, a beautiful woman's apparent
favourite should be particularly discreet in all that he says: and next,
he should have known that the Gallic shrug over matters political is
volcanic--it is the heaving of the mountain, and, like the proverbial
Russ, leaps up Tartarly at a scratch. Our newspapers also had been
flea-biting M. Livret and his countrymen of late; and, to conclude, over
in old England you may fly out against what you will, and there is little
beyond a motherly smile, a nurse's rebuke, or a fool's rudeness to answer
you. In quick-blooded France you have whip for whip, sneer, sarcasm,
claw, fang, tussle, in a trice; and if you choose to comport yourself
according to your insular notion of freedom, you are bound to march out
to the measured ground at an invitation. To begin by saying that your
principles are opposed to it, naturally excites a malicious propensity to
try your temper.

A further cause, unknown to Mr. Ducie, of M. Livret's irritation was,
that Beauchamp had vexed him on a subject peculiarly dear to him. The
celebrated Chateau Dianet was about to be visited by the guests at
Tourdestelle. In common with some French philosophers and English
matrons, he cherished a sentimental sad enthusiasm for royal concubines;
and when dilating upon one among them, the ruins of whose family's castle
stood in the neighbourhood-Agrees, who was really a kindly soul, though
not virtuous--M. Livret had been traversed by Beauchamp with questions as
to the condition of the people, the peasantry, that were sweated in taxes
to support these lovely frailties. They came oddly from a man in the fire
of youth, and a little old gentleman somewhat seduced by the melting
image of his theme might well blink at him to ask, of what flesh are you,
then? His historic harem was insulted. Personally too, the fair creature
picturesquely soiled, intrepid in her amorousness, and ultimately
absolved by repentance (a shuddering narrative of her sins under showers
of salt drops), cried to him to champion her. Excited by the supposed
cold critical mind in Beauchamp, M. Livret painted and painted this lady,
tricked her in casuistical niceties, scenes of pomp and boudoir pathos,
with many shifting sidelights and a risky word or two, until Renee cried
out, 'Spare us the esprit Gaulois, M. Livret!' There was much to make him
angry with this Englishman.

'The esprit Gaulois is the sparkle of crystal common sense, madame, and
may we never abandon it for a Puritanism that hides its face to conceal
its filthiness, like a stagnant pond,' replied M. Livret, flashing.

'It seems, then, that there are two ways of being objectionable,' said
Renee.

'Ah! Madame la Marquise, your wit is French,' he breathed low; 'keep your
heart so!'

Both M. Livret and M. d'Orbec had forgotten that when Count Henri
d'Henriel was received at Tourdestelle, the arrival of the Englishman was
pleasantly anticipated by them as an eclipse of the handsome boy; but a
foreign interloper is quickly dispossessed of all means of pleasing save
that one of taking his departure; and they now talked of Count Henri's
disgrace and banishment in a very warm spirit of sympathy, not at all
seeing why it should be made to depend upon the movements of this M.
Beauchamp, as it appeared to be. Madame d'Auffray heard some of their
dialogue, and hurried with a mouth full of comedy to Renee, who did not
reproach them for silly beings, as would be done elsewhere. On the
contrary, she appreciated a scene of such absolute comedy, recognizing it
instantly as a situation plucked out of human nature. She compared them
to republicans that regretted the sovereign they had deposed for a
pretender to start up and govern them.

'Who hurries them round to the legitimate king again!' said Madame
d'Auffray.

Renee cast her chin up. 'How, my dear?'

'Your husband.'

'What of him?'

'He is returning.'

'What brings him?'

'You should ask who, my Renee! I was sure he would not hear of M.
Beauchamp's being here, without an effort to return and do the honours of
the chateau.'

Renee looked hard at her, saying, 'How thoughtful of you! You must have
made use of the telegraph wires to inform him that M. Beauchamp was with
us.'

'More; I made use of them to inform him that M. Beauchamp was expected.'

'And that was enough to bring him! He pays M. Beauchamp a wonderful
compliment.'

'Such as he would pay to no other man, my Renee. Virtually it is the
highest of compliments to you. I say that to M. Beauchamp's credit; for
Raoul has met him, and, whatever his personal feeling may be, must know
your friend is a man of honour.'

'My friend is . . . yes, I have no reason to think otherwise,' Renee
replied. Her husband's persistent and exclusive jealousy of Beauchamp was
the singular point in the character of one who appeared to have no
sentiment of the kind as regarded men that were much less than men of
honour. 'So, then, my sister Agnes,' she said, 'you suggested the
invitation of M. Beauchamp for the purpose of spurring my husband to
return! Apparently he and I are surrounded by plotters.'

'Am I so very guilty?' said Madame d'Auffray.

'If that mad boy, half idiot, half panther, were by chance to insult M.
Beauchamp, you would feel so.'

'You have taken precautions to prevent their meeting; and besides, M.
Beauchamp does not fight.'

Renee flushed crimson.

Madame d'Auffray added, 'I do not say that he is other than a perfectly
brave and chivalrous gentleman.'

'Oh!' cried Renee, 'do not say it, if ever you should imagine it. Bid
Roland speak of him. He is changed, oppressed: I did him a terrible wrong
. . . .' She checked herself. 'But the chief thing to do is to keep M.
d'Henriel away from him. I suspect M. d'Orbec of a design to make them
clash: and you, my dear, will explain why, to flatter me. Believe me, I
thirst for flattery; I have had none since M. Beauchamp came: and you, so
acute, must have seen the want of it in my face. But you, so skilful,
Agnes, will manage these men. Do you know, Agnes, that the pride of a
woman so incredibly clever as you have shown me you are should resent
their intrigues and overthrow them. As for me, I thought I could command
M. d'Henriel, and I find he has neither reason in him nor obedience.
Singular to say, I knew him just as well a week back as I do now, and
then I liked him for his qualities--or the absence of any. But how shall
we avoid him on the road to Dianet? He is aware that we are going.'

'Take M. Beauchamp by boat,' said Madame d'Auffray.

'The river winds to within a five minutes' walk of Dianet; we could go by
boat,' Renee said musingly. 'I thought of the boat. But does it not give
the man a triumph that we should seem to try to elude him? What matter!
Still, I do not like him to be the falcon, and Nevil Beauchamp the . . .
little bird. So it is, because we began badly, Agnes!'

'Was it my fault?'

'Mine. Tell me: the legitimate king returns when?'

'In two days or three.'

'And his rebel subjects are to address him--how?'

Madame d'Auffray smote the point of a finger softly on her cheek.

'Will they be pardoned?' said Renee.

'It is for him to kneel, my dearest.'

'Legitimacy kneeling for forgiveness is a painful picture, Agnes.
Legitimacy jealous of a foreigner is an odd one. However, we are women,
born to our lot. If we could rise en masse!--but we cannot. Embrace me.'

Madame d'Auffray embraced her, without an idea that she assisted in
performing the farewell of their confidential intimacy.

When Renee trifled with Count Henri, it was playing with fire, and she
knew it; and once or twice she bemoaned to Agnes d'Auffray her abandoned
state, which condemned her, for the sake of the sensation of living, to
have recourse to perilous pastimes; but she was revolted, as at a piece
of treachery, that Agnes should have suggested the invitation of Nevil
Beauchamp with the secret design of winning home her husband to protect
her. This, for one reason, was because Beauchamp gave her no notion of
danger; none, therefore, of requiring protection; and the presence of her
husband could not but be hateful to him, an undeserved infliction. To her
it was intolerable that they should be brought into contact. It seemed
almost as hard that she should have to dismiss Beauchamp to preclude
their meeting. She remembered, nevertheless, a certain desperation of
mind, scarce imaginable in the retrospect, by which, trembling,
fever-smitten, scorning herself, she had been reduced to hope for Nevil
Beauchamp's coming as for a rescue. The night of the storm had roused her
heart. Since then his perfect friendliness had lulled, his air of
thoughtfulness had interested it; and the fancy that he, who neither
reproached nor sentimentalized, was to be infinitely compassionated,
stirred up remorse. She could not tell her friend Agnes of these feelings
while her feelings were angered against her friend. So she talked lightly
of 'the legitimate king,' and they embraced: a situation of comedy quite
as true as that presented by the humble admirers of the brilliant
chatelaine.

Beauchamp had the pleasure of rowing Madame la Marquise to the short
shaded walk separating the river from Chateau Dianet, whither M. d'Orbec
went on horseback, and Madame d'Auffray and M. Livret were driven. The
portrait of Diane of Dianet was praised for the beauty of the dame, a
soft-fleshed acutely featured person, a fresh-of-the-toilette face, of
the configuration of head of the cat, relieved by a delicately aquiline
nose; and it could only be the cat of fairy metamorphosis which should
stand for that illustration: brows and chin made an acceptable triangle,
and eyes and mouth could be what she pleased for mice or monarchs. M.
Livret did not gainsay the impeachment of her by a great French
historian, tender to women, to frailties in particular--yes, she was
cold, perhaps grasping: but dwell upon her in her character of woman;
conceive her existing, to estimate the charm of her graciousness. Name
the two countries which alone have produced THE WOMAN, the ideal woman,
the woman of art, whose beauty, grace, and wit offer her to our
contemplation in an atmosphere above the ordinary conditions of the
world: these two countries are France and Greece! None other give you the
perfect woman, the woman who conquers time, as she conquers men, by
virtue of the divinity in her blood; and she, as little as illustrious
heroes, is to be judged by the laws and standards of lesser creatures. In
fashioning her, nature and art have worked together: in her, poetry walks
the earth. The question of good or bad is entirely to be put aside: it is
a rustic's impertinence--a bourgeois' vulgarity. She is preeminent, voila
tout. Has she grace and beauty? Then you are answered: such possessions
are an assurance that her influence in the aggregate must be for good.
Thunder, destructive to insects, refreshes earth: so she. So sang the
rhapsodist. Possibly a scholarly little French gentleman, going down the
grey slopes of sixty to second childishness, recovers a second juvenility
in these enthusiasms; though what it is that inspires our matrons to take
up with them is unimaginable. M. Livret's ardour was a contrast to the
young Englishman's vacant gaze at Diane, and the symbols of her
goddesship running along the walls, the bed, the cabinets, everywhere
that the chaste device could find frontage and a corner.

M. d'Orbec remained outside the chateau inspecting the fish-ponds. When
they rejoined him he complimented Beauchamp semi-ironically on his choice
of the river's quiet charms in preference to the dusty roads. Madame de
Rouaillout said, 'Come, M. d'Orbec; what if you surrender your horse to
M. Beauchamp, and row me back?' He changed colour, hesitated, and
declined he had an engagement to call on M. d'Henriel.

'When did you see him?' said she.

He was confused. 'It is not long since, madame.'

'On the road?'

'Coming along-the road.'

'And our glove?'

'Madame la Marquise, if I may trust my memory, M. d'Henriel was not in
official costume.'

Renee allowed herself to be reassured.

A ceremonious visit that M. Livret insisted on was paid to the chapel of
Diane, where she had worshipped and laid her widowed ashes, which, said
M. Livret, the fiends of the Revolution would not let rest.

He raised his voice to denounce them.

It was Roland de Croisnel that answered: 'The Revolution was our
grandmother, monsieur, and I cannot hear her abused.'

Renee caught her brother by the hand. He stepped out of the chapel with
Beauchamp to embrace him; then kissed Renee, and, remarking that she was
pale, fetched flooding colour to her cheeks. He was hearty air to them
after the sentimentalism they had been hearing. Beauchamp and he walked
like loving comrades at school, questioning, answering, chattering,
laughing,--a beautiful sight to Renee, and she looked at Agrnes d'Auffray
to ask her whether 'this Englishman' was not one of them in his frankness
and freshness.

Roland stopped to turn to Renee. 'I met d'Henriel on my ride here,' he
said with a sharp inquisitive expression of eye that passed immediately.

'You rode here from Tourdestelle, then,' said Renee.

'Has he been one of the company, marquise?'

'Did he ride by you without speaking, Roland?'

'Thus.' Roland described a Spanish caballero's formallest
salutation, saying to Beauchamp, 'Not the best sample of our young
Frenchman;--woman-spoiled! Not that the better kind of article need be
spoiled by them--heaven forbid that! Friend Nevil,' he spoke lower, 'do
you know, you have something of the prophet in you? I remember: much has
come true. An old spoiler of women is worse than one spoiled by them! Ah,
well: and Madame Culling? and your seven-feet high uncle? And have you a
fleet to satisfy Nevil Beauchamp yet? You shall see a trial of our new
field-guns at Rouen.'

They were separated with difficulty.

Renee wished her brother to come in the boat; and he would have done so,
but for his objection to have his Arab bestridden by a man unknown to
him.

'My love is a four-foot, and here's my love,' Roland said, going outside
the gilt gate-rails to the graceful little beast, that acknowledged his
ownership with an arch and swing of the neck round to him.

He mounted and called, 'Au revoir, M. le Capitaine.'

'Au revoir, M. le Commandant,' cried Beauchamp.

'Admiral and marshal, each of us in good season,' said Roland. 'Thanks to
your promotion, I had a letter from my sister. Advance a grade, and I may
get another.'

Beauchamp thought of the strange gulf now between him and the time when
he pined to be a commodore, and an admiral. The gulf was bridged as he
looked at Renee petting Roland's horse.

'Is there in the world so lovely a creature?' she said, and appealed
fondlingly to the beauty that brings out beauty, and, bidding it disdain
rivalry, rivalled it insomuch that in a moment of trance Beauchamp with
his bodily vision beheld her, not there, but on the Lido of Venice,
shining out of the years gone.

Old love reviving may be love of a phantom after all. We can, if it must
revive, keep it to the limits of a ghostly love. The ship in the Arabian
tale coming within the zone of the magnetic mountain, flies all its bolts
and bars, and becomes sheer timbers, but that is the carelessness of the
ship's captain; and hitherto Beauchamp could applaud himself for steering
with prudence, while Renee's attractions warned more than they beckoned.
She was magnetic to him as no other woman was. Then whither his course
but homeward?

After they had taken leave of their host and hostess of Chateau Dianet,
walking across a meadow to a line of charmilles that led to the
river-side, he said, 'Now I have seen Roland I shall have to decide upon
going.'

'Wantonly won is deservedly lost,' said Renee. 'But do not disappoint my
Roland much because of his foolish sister. Is he not looking handsome?
And he is young to be a commandant, for we have no interest at this
Court. They kept him out of the last war! My father expects to find you
at Tourdestelle, and how account to him for your hurried flight? save
with the story of that which brought you to us!'

'The glove? I shall beg for the fellow to it before I depart, marquise.'

'You perceived my disposition to light-headedness, monsieur, when I was a
girl.'

'I said that I--But the past is dust. Shall I ever see you in England?'

'That country seems to frown on me. But if I do not go there, nor you
come here, except to imperious mysterious invitations, which will not be
repeated, the future is dust as well as the past: for me, at least. Dust
here, dust there!--if one could be like a silk-worm, and live lying on
the leaf one feeds on, it would be a sort of answer to the riddle--living
out of the dust, and in the present. I find none in my religion. No
doubt, Madame de Breze did: why did you call Diane so to M. Livret?'

She looked at him smiling as they came out of the shadow of the clipped
trees. He was glancing about for the boat.

'The boat is across the river,' Renee said, in a voice that made him seek
her eyes for an explanation of the dead sound. She was very pale. 'You
have perfect command of yourself? For my sake!' she said.

He looked round.

Standing up in the boat, against the opposite bank, and leaning with
crossed legs on one of the sculls planted in the gravel of the river,
Count Henri d'Henriel's handsome figure presented itself to Beauchamp's
gaze.

With a dryness that smacked of his uncle Everard Romfrey, Beauchamp said
of the fantastical posture of the young man, 'One can do that on fresh
water.'

Renee did not comprehend the sailor-sarcasm of the remark; but she also
commented on the statuesque appearance of Count Henri: 'Is the pose for
photography or for sculpture?'

Neither of them showed a sign of surprise or of impatience.

M. d'Henriel could not maintain the attitude. He uncrossed his legs
deliberately, drooped hat in hand, and came paddling over; apologized
indolently, and said, 'I am not, I believe, trespassing on the grounds of
Tourdestelle, Madame la Marquise!'

'You happen to be in my boat, M. le Comte,' said Renee.

'Permit me, madame.' He had set one foot on shore, with his back to
Beauchamp, and reached a hand to assist her step into the boat.

Beauchamp caught fast hold of the bows while Renee laid a finger on Count
Henri's shoulder to steady herself.

The instant she had taken her seat, Count Henri dashed the scull's blade
at the bank to push off with her, but the boat was fast. His manoeuvre
had been foreseen. Beauchamp swung on board like the last seaman of a
launch, and crouched as the boat rocked away to the stream; and still
Count Henri leaned on the scull, not in a chosen attitude, but for
positive support. He had thrown his force into the blow, to push off
triumphantly, and leave his rival standing. It occurred that the boat's
brief resistance and rocking away agitated his artificial equipoise, and,
by the operation of inexorable laws, the longer he leaned across an
extending surface the more was he dependent; so that when the measure of
the water exceeded the length of his failing support on land, there was
no help for it: he pitched in. His grimace of chagrin at the sight of
Beauchamp securely established, had scarcely yielded to the grimness of
feature of the man who feels he must go, as he took the plunge; and these
two emotions combined to make an extraordinary countenance.

He went like a gallant gentleman; he threw up his heels to clear the
boat, dropping into about four feet of water, and his first remark on
rising was, 'I trust, madame, I have not had the misfortune to splash
you.'

Then he waded to the bank, scrambled to his feet, and drew out his
moustachios to their curving ends. Renee nodded sharply to Beauchamp to
bid him row. He, with less of wisdom, having seized the floating scull
abandoned by Count Henri, and got it ready for the stroke, said a word of
condolence to the dripping man.

Count Henri's shoulders and neck expressed a kind of negative that, like
a wet dog's shake of the head, ended in an involuntary whole length
shudder, dog-like and deplorable to behold. He must have been conscious
of this miserable exhibition of himself; he turned to Beauchamp: 'You
are, I am informed, a sailor, monsieur. I compliment you on your naval
tactics: our next meeting will be on land. Au revoir, monsieur. Madame la
Marquise, I have the honour to salute you.'

With these words he retreated.

'Row quickly, I beg of you,' Renee said to Beauchamp. Her desire was to
see Roland, and open her heart to her brother; for now it had to be
opened. Not a minute must be lost to prevent further mischief. And who
was guilty? she. Her heart clamoured of her guilt to waken a cry of
innocence. A disdainful pity for the superb young savage just made
ludicrous, relieved him of blame, implacable though he was. He was
nothing; an accident--a fool. But he might become a terrible instrument
of punishment. The thought of that possibility gave it an aspect of
retribution, under which her cry of innocence was insufferable in its
feebleness. It would have been different with her if Beauchamp had taken
advantage of her fever of anxiety, suddenly appeased by the sight of him
on the evening of his arrival at Tourdestelle after the storm, to attempt
a renewal of their old broken love-bonds. Then she would have seen only a
conflict between two men, neither of whom could claim a more secret right
than the other to be called her lover, and of whom both were on a common
footing, and partly despicable. But Nevil Beauchamp had behaved as her
perfect true friend, in the character she had hoped for when she summoned
him. The sense of her guilt lay in the recognition that he had saved her.
From what? From the consequences of delirium rather than from
love--surely delirium, founded on delusion; love had not existed. She had
said to Count Henri, 'You speak to me of love. I was beloved when I was a
girl, before my marriage, and for years I have not seen or corresponded
with the man who loved me, and I have only to lift my finger now and he
will come to me, and not once will he speak to me of love.' Those were
the words originating the wager of the glove. But what of her, if Nevil
Beauchamp had not come?

Her heart jumped, and she blushed ungovernably in his face,--as if he
were seeing her withdraw her foot from the rock's edge, and had that
instant rescued her. But how came it she had been so helpless? She could
ask; she could not answer.

Thinking, talking to her heart, was useless. The deceiver simply feigned
utter condemnation to make partial comfort acceptable. She burned to do
some act of extreme self-abasement that should bring an unwonted degree
of wrath on her externally, and so re-entitle her to consideration in her
own eyes. She burned to be interrogated, to have to weep, to be scorned,
abused, and forgiven, that she might say she did not deserve pardon.
Beauchamp was too English, evidently too blind, for the description of
judge-accuser she required; one who would worry her without mercy,
until-disgraced by the excess of torture inflicted--he should reinstate
her by as much as he had overcharged his accusation, and a little more.
Reasonably enough, instinctively in fact, she shunned the hollow of an
English ear. A surprise was in reserve for her.

Beauchamp gave up rowing. As he rested on the sculls, his head was bent
and turned toward the bank. Renee perceived an over-swollen monster gourd
that had strayed from a garden adjoining the river, and hung sliding
heavily down the bank on one greenish yellow cheek, in prolonged
contemplation of its image in the mirror below. Apparently this obese
Narcissus enchained his attention.

She tapped her foot. 'Are you tired of rowing, monsieur?'

'It was exactly here,' said he, 'that you told me you expected your
husband's return.'

She glanced at the gourd, bit her lip, and, colouring, said, 'At what
point of the river did I request you to congratulate me on it?'

She would not have said that, if she had known the thoughts at work
within him.

He set the boat swaying from side to side, and at once the hugeous
reflection of that conceivably self-enamoured bulk quavered and
distended, and was shattered in a thousand dancing fragments, to re-unite
and recompose its maudlin air of imaged satisfaction.

She began to have a vague idea that he was indulging grotesque fancies.

Very strangely, the ridiculous thing, in the shape of an over-stretched
likeness, that she never would have seen had he indicated it directly,
became transfused from his mind to hers by his abstract, half-amused
observation of the great dancing gourd--that capering antiquity,
lumbering volatility, wandering, self-adored, gross bald Cupid, elatest
of nondescripts! Her senses imagined the impressions agitating
Beauchamp's, and exaggerated them beyond limit; and when he amazed her
with a straight look into her eyes, and the words, 'Better let it be a
youth--and live, than fall back to that!' she understood him immediately;
and, together with her old fear of his impetuosity and downrightness,
came the vivid recollection, like a bright finger pointing upon darkness,
of what foul destiny, magnified by her present abhorrence of it, he would
have saved her from in the days of Venice and Touraine, and unto what
loathly example of the hideous grotesque she, in spite of her lover's
foresight on her behalf, had become allied.

Face to face as they sat, she had no defence for her scarlet cheeks; her
eyes wavered.

'We will land here; the cottagers shall row the boat up,' she said.

'Somewhere--anywhere,' said Beauchamp. 'But I must speak. I will tell you
now. I do not think you to blame--barely; not in my sight; though no man
living would have suffered as I should. Probably some days more and you
would have been lost. You looked for me! Trust your instinct now I'm with
you as well as when I'm absent. Have you courage? that 's the question.
You have years to live. Can you live them in this place--with honour? and
alive really?'

Renee's eyes grew wide; she tried to frown, and her brows merely
twitched; to speak, and she was inarticulate. His madness, miraculous
penetration, and the super-masculine charity in him, unknown to the world
of young men in their treatment of women, excited, awed, and melted her.
He had seen the whole truth of her relations with M. d'Henriel!--the
wickedness of them in one light, the innocence in another; and without
prompting a confession he forgave her. Could she believe it? This was
love, and manly love.

She yearned to be on her feet, to feel the possibility of an escape from
him.

She pointed to a landing. He sprang to the bank. 'It could end in nothing
else,' he said, 'unless you beat cold to me. And now I have your hand,
Renee! It's the hand of a living woman, you have no need to tell me that;
but faithful to her comrade! I can swear it for her--faithful to a true
alliance! You are not married, you are simply chained: and you are
terrorized. What a perversion of you it is! It wrecks you. But with me?
Am I not your lover? You and I are one life. What have we suffered for
but to find this out and act on it? Do I not know that a woman lives, and
is not the rooted piece of vegetation hypocrites and tyrants expect her
to be? Act on it, I say; own me, break the chains, come to me; say, Nevil
Beauchamp or death! And death for you? But you are poisoned and
thwart-eddying, as you live now: worse, shaming the Renee I knew.
Ah-Venice! But now we are both of us wiser and stronger: we have gone
through fire. Who foretold it? This day, and this misery and perversion
that we can turn to joy, if we will--if you will! No heart to dare is no
heart to love!--answer that! Shall I see you cower away from me again?
Not this time!'

He swept on in a flood, uttered mad things, foolish things, and things of
an insight electrifying to her. Through the cottager's garden, across a
field, and within the park gates of Tourdestelle it continued
unceasingly; and deeply was she won by the rebellious note in all that he
said, deeply too by his disregard of the vulgar arts of wooers: she
detected none. He did not speak so much to win as to help her to see with
her own orbs. Nor was it roughly or chidingly, though it was absolutely,
that he stripped her of the veil a wavering woman will keep to herself
from her heart's lord if she can.

They arrived long after the boat at Tourdestelle, and Beauchamp might
believe he had prevailed with her, but for her forlorn repetition of the
question he had put to her idly and as a new idea, instead of
significantly, with a recollection and a doubt 'Have I courage, Nevil?'

The grain of common sense in cowardice caused her to repeat it when her
reason was bedimmed, and passion assumed the right to show the way of
right and wrong.




CHAPTER XXVI

MR. BLACKBURN TUCKHAM

Some time after Beauchamp had been seen renewing his canvass in Bevisham
a report reached Mount Laurels that he was lame of a leg. The wits of the
opposite camp revived the FRENCH MARQUEES, but it was generally
acknowledged that he had come back without the lady: she was invisible.
Cecilia Halkett rode home with her father on a dusky Autumn evening, and
found the card of Commander Beauchamp awaiting her. He might have stayed
to see her, she thought. Ladies are not customarily so very late in
returning from a ride on chill evenings of Autumn. Only a quarter of an
hour was between his visit and her return. The shortness of the interval
made it appear the deeper gulf. She noticed that her father particularly
inquired of the man-servant whether Captain Beauchamp limped. It seemed a
piece of kindly anxiety on his part. The captain was mounted, the man
said. Cecilia was conscious of rumours being abroad relating to Nevil's
expedition to France; but he had enemies, and was at war with them, and
she held herself indifferent to tattle. This card bearing his name,
recently in his hand, was much more insidious and precise. She took it to
her room to look at it. Nothing but his name and naval title was
inscribed; no pencilled line; she had not expected to discover one. The
simple card was her dark light, as a handkerchief, a flower, a knot of
riband, has been for men luridly illuminated by such small sparks to
fling their beams on shadows and read the monstrous things for truths.
Her purer virgin blood was, not inflamed. She read the signification of
the card sadly as she did clearly. What she could not so distinctly
imagine was, how he could reconcile the devotion to his country, which he
had taught her to put her faith in, with his unhappy subjection to Madame
de Rouaillout. How could the nobler sentiment exist side by side with one
that was lawless? Or was the wildness characteristic of his political
views proof of a nature inclining to disown moral ties? She feared so; he
did not speak of the clergy respectfully. Reading in the dark, she was
forced to rely on her social instincts, and she distrusted her personal
feelings as much as she could, for she wished to know the truth of him;
anything, pain and heartrending, rather than the shutting of the eyes in
an unworthy abandonment to mere emotion and fascination. Cecilia's love
could not be otherwise given to a man, however near she might be drawn to
love--though she should suffer the pangs of love cruelly.

She placed his card in her writing-desk; she had his likeness there.
Commander Beauchamp encouraged the art of photography, as those that make
long voyages do, in reciprocating what they petition their friends for.
Mrs. Rosamund Culling had a whole collection of photographs of him, equal
to a visual history of his growth in chapters, from boyhood to
midshipmanship and to manhood. The specimen possessed by Cecilia was one
of a couple that Beauchamp had forwarded to Mrs. Grancey Lespel on the
day of his departure for France, and was a present from that lady,
purchased, like so many presents, at a cost Cecilia would have paid
heavily in gold to have been spared, namely, a public blush. She was
allowed to make her choice, and she chose the profile, repeating a remark
of Mrs. Culling's, that it suggested an arrow-head in the upflight;
whereupon Mr. Stukely Culbrett had said, 'Then there is the man, for he
is undoubtedly a projectile'; nor were politically-hostile punsters on an
arrow-head inactive. But Cecilia was thinking of the side-face she (less
intently than Beauchamp at hers) had glanced at during the drive into
Bevisham. At that moment, she fancied Madame de Rouaillout might be doing
likewise; and oh that she had the portrait of the French lady as well!

Next day her father tossed her a photograph of another gentleman, coming
out of a letter he had received from old Mrs. Beauchamp. He asked her
opinion of it. She said, 'I think he would have suited Bevisham better
than Captain Baskelett.' Of the original, who presented himself at Mount
Laurels in the course of the week, she had nothing to say, except that he
was very like the photograph, very unlike Nevil Beauchamp. 'Yes, there
I'm of your opinion,' her father observed. The gentleman was Mr.
Blackburn Tuckham, and it was amusing to find an exuberant Tory in one
who was the reverse of the cavalier type. Nevil and he seemed to have
been sorted to the wrong sides. Mr. Tuckham had a round head, square flat
forehead, and ruddy face; he stood as if his feet claimed the earth under
them for his own, with a certain shortness of leg that detracted from the
majesty of his resemblance to our Eighth Harry, but increased his air of
solidity; and he was authoritative in speaking. 'Let me set you right,
sir,' he said sometimes to Colonel Halkett, and that was his modesty.
'You are altogether wrong,' Miss Halkett heard herself informed, which
was his courtesy. He examined some of her water-colour drawings before
sitting down to dinner, approved of them, but thought it necessary to lay
a broad finger on them to show their defects. On the question of
politics, 'I venture to state,' he remarked, in anything but the tone of
a venture, 'that no educated man of ordinary sense who has visited our
colonies will come back a Liberal.' As for a man of sense and education
being a Radical, he scouted the notion with a pooh sufficient to awaken a
vessel in the doldrums. He said carelessly of Commander Beauchamp, that
he might think himself one. Either the Radical candidate for Bevisham
stood self-deceived, or--the other supposition. Mr. Tuckham would venture
to state that no English gentleman, exempt from an examination by order
of the Commissioners of Lunacy, could be sincerely a Radical. 'Not a bit
of it; nonsense,' he replied to Miss Halkett's hint at the existence of
Radical views; 'that is, those views are out of politics; they are
matters for the police. Dutch dykes are built to shut away the sea from
cultivated land, and of course it's a part of the business of the Dutch
Government to keep up the dykes,--and of ours to guard against the mob;
but that is only a political consideration after the mob has been allowed
to undermine our defences.'

'They speak,' said Miss Halkett, 'of educating the people to fit them--'

'They speak of commanding the winds and tides,' he cut her short, with no
clear analogy; 'wait till we have a storm. It's a delusion amounting to
dementedness to suppose, that with the people inside our defences, we can
be taming them and tricking them. As for sending them to school after
giving them power, it's like asking a wild beast to sit down to dinner
with us--he wants the whole table and us too. The best education for the
people is government. They're beginning to see that in Lancashire at
last. I ran down to Lancashire for a couple of days on my landing, and
I'm thankful to say Lancashire is preparing to take a step back.
Lancashire leads the country. Lancashire men see what this Liberalism has
done for the Labour-market.'

'Captain Beauchamp considers that the political change coming over the
minds of the manufacturers is due to the large fortunes they have made,'
said Miss Halkett, maliciously associating a Radical prophet with him.

He was unaffected by it, and continued: 'Property is ballast as well as
treasure. I call property funded good sense. I would give it every
privilege. If we are to speak of patriotism, I say the possession of
property guarantees it. I maintain that the lead of men of property is in
most cases sure to be the safe one.'

'I think so,' Colonel Halkett interposed, and he spoke as a man of
property.

Mr. Tuckham grew fervent in his allusions to our wealth and our commerce.
Having won the race and gained the prize, shall we let it slip out of our
grasp? Upon this topic his voice descended to tones of priestlike awe:
for are we not the envy of the world? Our wealth is countless, fabulous.
It may well inspire veneration. And we have won it with our hands, thanks
(he implied it so) to our religion. We are rich in money and industry, in
those two things only, and the corruption of an energetic industry is
constantly threatened by the profusion of wealth giving it employment.
This being the case, either your Radicals do not know the first
conditions of human nature, or they do; and if they do they are traitors,
and the Liberals opening the gates to them are fools: and some are
knaves. We perish as a Great Power if we cease to look sharp ahead, hold
firm together, and make the utmost of what we possess. The word for the
performance of those duties is Toryism: a word with an older flavour than
Conservatism, and Mr. Tuckham preferred it. By all means let workmen be
free men but a man must earn his freedom daily, or he will become a slave
in some form or another: and the way to earn it is by work and obedience
to right direction. In a country like ours, open on all sides to the
competition of intelligence and strength, with a Press that is the voice
of all parties and of every interest; in a country offering to your
investments three and a half and more per cent., secure as the firmament!

He perceived an amazed expression on Miss Halkett's countenance; and
'Ay,' said he, 'that means the certainty of food to millions of mouths,
and comforts, if not luxuries, to half the population. A safe percentage
on savings is the basis of civilization.'

But he had bruised his eloquence, for though you may start a sermon from
stones to hit the stars, he must be a practised orator who shall descend
out of the abstract to take up a heavy lump of the concrete without
unseating himself, and he stammered and came to a flat ending: 'In such a
country--well, I venture to say, we have a right to condemn in advance
disturbers of the peace, and they must show very good cause indeed for
not being summarily held--to account for their conduct.'

The allocution was not delivered in the presence of an audience other
than sympathetic, and Miss Halkett rightly guessed that it was intended
to strike Captain Beauchamp by ricochet. He puffed at the mention of
Beauchamp's name. He had read a reported speech or two of Beauchamp's,
and shook his head over a quotation of the stuff, as though he would have
sprung at him like a lion, but for his enrolment as a constable.

Not a whit the less did Mr. Tuckham drink his claret relishingly, and he
told stories incidental to his travels now and then, commended the
fishing here, the shooting there, and in some few places the cookery,
with much bright emphasis when it could be praised; it appeared to be an
endearing recollection to him. Still, as a man of progress, he declared
his belief that we English would ultimately turn out the best cooks,
having indubitably the best material. 'Our incomprehensible political
pusillanimity' was the one sad point about us: we had been driven from
surrender to surrender.

'Like geese upon a common, I have heard it said,' Miss Halkett assisted
him to Dr. Shrapnel's comparison.

Mr. Tuckham laughed, and half yawned and sighed, 'Dear me!'

His laughter was catching, and somehow more persuasive of the soundness
of the man's heart and head than his remarks.

She would have been astonished to know that a gentleman so uncourtly, if
not uncouth--judged by the standard of the circle she moved in--and so
unskilled in pleasing the sight and hearing of ladies as to treat them
like junior comrades, had raised the vow within himself on seeing her:
You, or no woman!

The colonel delighted in him, both as a strong and able young fellow, and
a refreshingly aggressive recruit of his party, who was for onslaught,
and invoked common sense, instead of waving the flag of sentiment in
retreat; a very horse-artillery man of Tories. Regretting immensely that
Mr. Tuckham had not reached England earlier, that he might have occupied
the seat for Bevisham, about to be given to Captain Baskelett, Colonel
Halkett set up a contrast of Blackburn Tuckham and Nevil Beauchamp; a
singular instance of unfairness, his daughter thought, considering that
the distinct contrast presented by the circumstances was that of Mr.
Tuckham and Captain Baskelett.

'It seems to me, papa,--that you are contrasting the idealist and the
realist,' she said.

'Ah, well, we don't want the idealist in politics,' muttered the colonel.

Latterly he also had taken to shaking his head over Nevil: Cecilia dared
not ask him why.

Mr. Tuckham arrived at Mount Laurels on the eve of the Nomination day in
Bevisham. An article in the Bevisham Gazette calling upon all true
Liberals to demonstrate their unanimity by a multitudinous show of hands,
he ascribed to the writing of a child of Erin; and he was highly diverted
by the Liberal's hiring of Paddy to 'pen and spout' for him. 'A Scotchman
manages, and Paddy does the sermon for all their journals,' he said
off-hand; adding: 'And the English are the compositors, I suppose.' You
may take that for an instance of the national spirit of Liberal
newspapers!

'Ah!' sighed the colonel, as at a case clearly demonstrated against them.

A drive down to Bevisham to witness the ceremony of the nomination in the
town-hall sobered Mr. Tuckham's disposition to generalize. Beauchamp had
the show of hands, and to say with Captain Baskelett, that they were a
dirty majority, was beneath Mr. Tuckham's verbal antagonism. He fell into
a studious reserve, noting everything, listening to everybody, greatly to
Colonel Halkett's admiration of one by nature a talker and a thunderer.

The show of hands Mr. Seymour Austin declared to be the most delusive of
electoral auspices; and it proved so. A little later than four o'clock in
the afternoon of the election-day, Cecilia received a message from her
father telling her that both of the Liberals were headed; 'Beauchamp
nowhere.'

Mrs. Grancey Lespel was the next herald of Beauchamp's defeat. She merely
stated the fact that she had met the colonel and Mr. Blackburn Tuckham
driving on the outskirts of the town, and had promised to bring Cecilia
the final numbers of the poll. Without naming them, she unrolled the
greater business in her mind.

'A man who in the middle of an Election goes over to France to fight a
duel, can hardly expect to win; he has all the morality of an English
borough opposed to him,' she said; and seeing the young lady stiffen:
'Oh! the duel is positive,' she dropped her voice. 'With the husband. Who
else could it be? And returns invalided. That is evidence. My nephew
Palmet has it from Vivian Ducie, and he is acquainted with her tolerably
intimately, and the story is, she was overtaken in her flight in the
night, and the duel followed at eight o'clock in the morning; but her
brother insisted on fighting for Captain Beauchamp, and I cannot tell you
how--but his place in it I can't explain--there was a beau jeune homme,
and it's quite possible that he should have been the person to stand up
against the marquis. At any rate, he insulted Captain Beauchamp, or
thought your hero had insulted him, and the duel was with one or the
other. It matters exceedingly little with whom, if a duel was fought, and
you see we have quite established that.'

'I hope it is not true,' said Cecilia.

'My dear, that is the Christian thing to do,' said Mrs. Lespel. 'Duelling
is horrible: though those Romfreys!--and the Beauchamps were just as bad,
or nearly. Colonel Richard fought for a friend's wife or sister. But in
these days duelling is incredible. It was an inhuman practice always, and
it is now worse--it is a reach of manners. I would hope it is not true;
and you may mean that I have it from Lord Palmet. But I know Vivian Ducie
as well as I know my nephew, and if he distinctly mentions an occurrence,
we may too surely rely on the truth of it; he is not a man to spread
mischief. Are you unaware that he met Captain Beauchamp at the chateau of
the marquise? The whole story was acted under his eyes. He had only to
take up his pen. Generally he favours me with his French gossip. I
suppose there were circumstances in this affair more suitable to Palmet
than to me. He wrote a description of Madame de Rouaillout that set
Palmet strutting about for an hour. I have no doubt she must be a very
beautiful woman, for a Frenchwoman: not regular features; expressive,
capricious. Vivian Ducie lays great stress on her eyes and eyebrows, and,
I think, her hair. With a Frenchwoman's figure, that is enough to make
men crazy. He says her husband deserves--but what will not young men
write? It is deeply to be regretted that Englishmen abroad--women the
same, I fear--get the Continental tone in morals. But how Captain
Beauchamp could expect to carry on an Election and an intrigue together,
only a head like his can tell us. Grancey is in high indignation with
him. It does not concern the Election, you can imagine. Something that
man Dr. Shrapnel has done, which he says Captain Beauchamp could have
prevented. Quarrels of men! I have instructed Palmet to write to Vivian
Ducie for a photograph of Madame de Rouaillout. Do you know, one has a
curiosity to see the face of the woman for whom a man ruins himself. But
I say again, he ought to be married.'

'That there may be two victims?' Cecilia said it smiling.

She was young in suffering, and thought, as the unseasoned and
inexperienced do, that a mask is a concealment.

'Married--settled; to have him bound in honour,' said Mrs. Lespel. 'I had
a conversation with him when he was at Itchincope; and his look, and what
I know of his father, that gallant and handsome Colonel Richard
Beauchamp, would give one a kind of confidence in him; supposing always
that he is not struck with one of those deadly passions that are like
snakes, like magic. I positively believe in them. I have seen them. And
if they end, they end as if the man were burnt out, and was ashes inside;
as you see Mr. Stukely Culbrett, all cynicism. You would not now suspect
him of a passion! It is true. Oh, I know it! That is what the men go to.
The women die. Vera Winter died at twenty-three. Caroline Ormond was
hardly older. You know her story; everybody knows it. The most singular
and convincing case was that of Lord Alfred Burnley and Lady Susan
Gardiner, wife of the general; and there was an instance of two similarly
afflicted--a very rare case, most rare: they never could meet to part! It
was almost ludicrous. It is now quite certain that they did not conspire
to meet. At last the absolute fatality became so well understood by the
persons immediately interested--You laugh?'

'Do I laugh?' said Cecilia.

'We should all know the world, my dear, and you are a strong head. The
knowledge is only dangerous for fools. And if romance is occasionally
ridiculous, as I own it can be, humdrum, I protest, is everlastingly so.
By-the-by, I should have told you that Captain Beauchamp was one hundred
and ninety below Captain Baskelett when the state of the poll was handed
to me. The gentleman driving with your father compared the Liberals to a
parachute cut away from the balloon. Is he army or navy?'

'He is a barrister, and some cousin of Captain Beauchamp.'

'I should not have taken him for a Beauchamp,' said Mrs. Lespel; and,
resuming her worldly sagacity, 'I should not like to be in opposition to
that young man.'

She seemed to have a fancy unexpressed regarding Mr. Tuckham. Reminding
herself that she might be behind time at Itchincope, where the guests
would be numerous that evening, and the song of triumph loud, with
Captain Baskelett to lead it, she kissed the young lady she had
unintentionally been torturing so long, and drove away.

Cecilia hoped it was not true. Her heart sank heavily under the belief
that it was. She imagined the world abusing Nevil and casting him out, as
those electors of Bevisham had just done, and impulsively she pleaded for
him, and became drowned in criminal blushes that forced her to defend
herself with a determination not to believe the dreadful story, though
she continued mitigating the wickedness of it; as if, by a singular
inversion of the fact, her clear good sense excused, and it was her heart
that condemned him. She dwelt fondly on an image of the 'gallant and
handsome Colonel Richard Beauchamp,' conjured up in her mind from the
fervour of Mrs. Lespel when speaking of Nevil's father, whose chivalry
threw a light on the son's, and whose errors, condoned by time, and with
a certain brilliancy playing above them, interceded strangely on behalf
of Nevil.




CHAPTER XXVII

A SHORT SIDELOOK AT THE ELECTION

The brisk Election-day, unlike that wearisome but instructive canvass of
the Englishman in his castle vicatim, teaches little; and its humours are
those of a badly managed Christmas pantomime without a columbine--old
tricks, no graces. Nevertheless, things hang together so that it cannot
be passed over with a bare statement of the fact of the Liberal-Radical
defeat in Bevisham: the day was not without fruit in time to come for him
whom his commiserating admirers of the non-voting sex all round the
borough called the poor dear commander. Beauchamp's holiday out of
England had incited Dr. Shrapnel to break a positive restriction put upon
him by Jenny Denham, and actively pursue the canvass and the harangue in
person; by which conduct, as Jenny had foreseen, many temperate electors
were alienated from Commander Beauchamp, though no doubt the Radicals
were made compact: for they may be the skirmishing faction--poor
scattered fragments, none of them sufficiently downright for the other;
each outstripping each; rudimentary emperors, elementary prophets,
inspired physicians, nostrum-devouring patients, whatsoever you will; and
still here and there a man shall arise to march them in close columns, if
they can but trust him; in perfect subordination, a model even for Tories
while they keep shoulder to shoulder. And to behold such a disciplined
body is intoxicating to the eye of a leader accustomed to count ahead
upon vapourish abstractions, and therefore predisposed to add a couple of
noughts to every tangible figure in his grasp. Thus will a realized fifty
become five hundred or five thousand to him: the very sense of number is
instinct with multiplication in his mind; and those years far on in
advance, which he has been looking to with some fatigue to the optics,
will suddenly and rollickingly roll up to him at the shutting of his eyes
in a temporary fit of gratification. So, by looking and by not looking,
he achieves his phantom victory--embraces his cloud.

Dr. Shrapnel conceived that the day was to be a Radical success; and he,
a citizen aged and exercised in reverses, so rounded by the habit of them
indeed as to tumble and recover himself on the wind of the blow that
struck him, was, it must be acknowledged, staggered and cast down when he
saw Beauchamp drop, knowing full well his regiment had polled to a man.
Radicals poll early; they would poll at cockcrow if they might; they
dance on the morning. As for their chagrin at noon, you will find
descriptions of it in the poet's Inferno. They are for lifting our clay
soil on a lever of Archimedes, and are not great mathematicians. They
have perchance a foot of our earth, and perpetually do they seem to be
producing an effect, perpetually does the whole land roll back on them.
You have not surely to be reminded that it hurts them; the weight is
immense. Dr. Shrapnel, however, speedily looked out again on his vast
horizon, though prostrate. He regained his height of stature with no
man's help. Success was but postponed for a generation or two. Is it so
very distant? Gaze on it with the eye of our parent orb! 'I shall not see
it here; you may,' he said to Jenny Denham; and he fortified his outlook
by saying to Mr. Lydiard that the Tories of our time walked, or rather
stuck, in the track of the Radicals of a generation back. Note, then,
that Radicals, always marching to the triumph, never taste it; and for
Tories it is Dead Sea fruit, ashes in their mouths! Those Liberals, those
temporisers, compromisers, a concourse of atoms! glorify themselves in
the animal satisfaction of sucking the juice of the fruit, for which they
pay with their souls. They have no true cohesion, for they have no vital
principle.

Mr. Lydiard being a Liberal, bade the doctor not to forget the work of
the Liberals, who touched on Tory and Radical with a pretty steady swing,
from side to side, in the manner of the pendulum of a clock, which is the
clock's life, remember that. The Liberals are the professors of the
practicable in politics.

'A suitable image for time-servers!' Dr. Shrapnel exclaimed, intolerant
of any mention of the Liberals as a party, especially in the hour of
Radical discomfiture, when the fact that compromisers should exist
exasperates men of a principle. 'Your Liberals are the band of Pyrrhus,
an army of bastards, mercenaries professing the practicable for pay. They
know us the motive force, the Tories the resisting power, and they feign
to aid us in battering our enemy, that they may stop the shock. We fight,
they profit. What are they? Stranded Whigs, crotchetty manufacturers;
dissentient religionists; the half-minded, the hare-hearted; the I would
and I would-not--shifty creatures, with youth's enthusiasm decaying in
them, and a purse beginning to jingle; fearing lest we do too much for
safety, our enemy not enough for safety. They a party? Let them take
action and see! We stand a thousand defeats; they not one! Compromise
begat them. Once let them leave sucking the teats of compromise, yea,
once put on the air of men who fight and die for a cause, they fly to
pieces. And whither the fragments? Chiefly, my friend, into the Tory
ranks. Seriously so I say. You between future and past are for the
present--but with the hunted look behind of all godless livers in the
present. You Liberals are Tories with foresight, Radicals without faith.
You start, in fear of Toryism, on an errand of Radicalism, and in fear of
Radicalism to Toryism you draw back. There is your pendulum-swing!'

Lectures to this effect were delivered by Dr. Shrapnel throughout the
day, for his private spiritual solace it may be supposed, unto Lydiard,
Turbot, Beauchamp, or whomsoever the man chancing to be near him, and
never did Sir Oracle wear so extraordinary a garb. The favourite missiles
of the day were flour-bags. Dr. Shrapnel's uncommon height, and his
outrageous long brown coat, would have been sufficient to attract them,
without the reputation he had for desiring to subvert everything old
English. The first discharges gave him the appearance of a thawing
snowman. Drenchings of water turned the flour to ribs of paste, and in
colour at least he looked legitimately the cook's own spitted hare,
escaped from her basting ladle, elongated on two legs. It ensued that
whenever he was caught sight of, as he walked unconcernedly about, the
young street-professors of the decorative arts were seized with a frenzy
to add their share to the whitening of him, until he might have been
taken for a miller that had gone bodily through his meal. The popular cry
proclaimed him a ghost, and he walked like one, impassive, blanched, and
silent amid the uproar of mobs of jolly ruffians, for each of whom it was
a point of honour to have a shy at old Shrapnel.

Clad in this preparation of pie-crust, he called from time to time at
Beauchamp's hotel, and renewed his monologue upon that Radical empire in
the future which was for ever in the future for the pioneers of men, yet
not the less their empire. 'Do we live in our bodies?' quoth he, replying
to his fiery interrogation: 'Ay, the Tories! the Liberals!' They lived in
their bodies. Not one syllable of personal consolation did he vouchsafe
to Beauchamp. He did not imagine it could be required by a man who had
bathed in the pure springs of Radicalism; and it should be remarked that
Beauchamp deceived him by imitating his air of happy abstraction, or
subordination of the faculties to a distant view, comparable to a ship's
crew in difficulties receiving the report of the man at the masthead.
Beauchamp deceived Miss Denham too, and himself, by saying, as if he
cherished the philosophy of defeat, besides the resolution to fight on:

'It's only a skirmish lost, and that counts for nothing in a battle
without end: it must be incessant.'

'But does incessant battling keep the intellect clear?' was her memorable
answer.

He glanced at Lydiard, to indicate that it came of that gentleman's
influence upon her mind. It was impossible for him to think that women
thought. The idea of a pretty woman exercising her mind independently,
and moreover moving him to examine his own, made him smile. Could a
sweet-faced girl, the nearest to Renee in grace of manner and in feature
of all women known to him, originate a sentence that would set him
reflecting? He was unable to forget it, though he allowed her no credit
for it.

On the other hand, his admiration of her devotedness to Dr. Shrapnel was
unbounded. There shone a strictly feminine quality! according to the
romantic visions of the sex entertained by Commander Beauchamp, and by
others who would be the objects of it. But not alone the passive virtues
were exhibited by Jenny Denham: she proved that she had high courage. No
remonstrance could restrain Dr. Shrapnel from going out to watch the
struggle, and she went with him as a matter of course on each occasion.
Her dress bore witness to her running the gauntlet beside him.

'It was not thrown at me purposely,' she said, to quiet Beauchamp's
wrath. She saved the doctor from being rough mobbed. Once when they were
surrounded she fastened his arm under hers, and by simply moving on with
an unswerving air of serenity obtained a passage for him. So much did she
make herself respected, that the gallant rascals became emulous in
dexterity to avoid powdering her, by loudly execrating any but dead shots
at the detested one, and certain boys were maltreated for an ardour
involving clumsiness. A young genius of this horde conceiving, in the
spirit of the inventors of our improved modern ordnance, that it was vain
to cast missiles which left a thing standing, hurled a stone wrapped in
paper. It missed its mark. Jenny said nothing about it. The day closed
with a comfortable fight or two in by-quarters of the town, probably to
prove that an undaunted English spirit, spite of fickle Fortune, survived
in our muscles.




CHAPTER XXVIII

TOUCHING A YOUNG LADY'S HEART AND HER INTELLECT

Mr. Tuckham found his way to Dr. Shrapnel's cottage to see his kinsman on
the day after the election. There was a dinner in honour of the Members
for Bevisham at Mount Laurels in the evening, and he was five minutes
behind military time when he entered the restive drawing-room and stood
before the colonel. No sooner had he stated that he had been under the
roof of Dr. Shrapnel, than his unpunctuality was immediately overlooked
in the burst of impatience evoked by the name.

'That pestilent fellow!' Colonel Halkett ejaculated. 'I understand he has
had the impudence to serve a notice on Grancey Lespel about encroachments
on common land.'

Some one described Dr. Shrapnel's appearance under the flour storm.

'He deserves anything,' said the colonel, consulting his mantelpiece
clock.

Captain Baskelett observed: 'I shall have my account to settle with Dr.
Shrapnel.' He spoke like a man having a right to be indignant, but
excepting that the doctor had bestowed nicknames upon him in a speech at
a meeting, no one could discover the grounds for it. He nodded briefly. A
Radical apple had struck him on the left cheekbone as he performed his
triumphal drive through the town, and a slight disfigurement remained, to
which his hand was applied sympathetically at intervals, for the
cheek-bone was prominent in his countenance, and did not well bear
enlargement. And when a fortunate gentleman, desiring to be still more
fortunate, would display the winning amiability of his character,
distension of one cheek gives him an afflictingly false look of
sweetness.

The bent of his mind, nevertheless, was to please Miss Halkett. He would
be smiling, and intimately smiling. Aware that she had a kind of pitiful
sentiment for Nevil, he smiled over Nevil--poor Nevil! 'I give you my
word, Miss Halkett, old Nevil was off his head yesterday. I daresay he
meant to be civil. I met him; I called out to him, "Good day, cousin, I'm
afraid you're beaten" and says he, "I fancy you've gained it, uncle." He
didn't know where he was; all abroad, poor boy. Uncle!--to me!'

Miss Halkett would have accepted the instance for a proof of Nevil's
distraction, had not Mr. Seymour Austin, who sat beside her, laughed and
said to her: 'I suppose "uncle" was a chance shot, but it's equal to a
poetic epithet in the light it casts on the story.' Then it seemed to her
that Nevil had been keenly quick, and Captain Baskelett's impenetrability
was a sign of his density. Her mood was to think Nevil Beauchamp only too
quick, too adventurous and restless: one that wrecked brilliant gifts in
a too general warfare; a lover of hazards, a hater of laws. Her eyes flew
over Captain Baskelett as she imagined Nevil addressing him as uncle,
and, to put aside a spirit of mockery rising within her, she hinted a
wish to hear Seymour Austin's opinion of Mr. Tuckham. He condensed it in
an interrogative tone: 'The other extreme?' The Tory extreme of Radical
Nevil Beauchamp. She assented. Mr. Tuckham was at that moment prophesying
the Torification of mankind; not as the trembling venturesome idea which
we cast on doubtful winds, but as a ship is launched to ride the waters,
with huzzas for a thing accomplished. Mr. Austin raised his shoulders
imperceptibly, saying to Miss Halkett: 'The turn will come to us as to
others--and go. Nothing earthly can escape that revolution. We have to
meet it with a policy, and let it pass with measures carried and our
hands washed of some of our party sins. I am, I hope, true to my party,
but the enthusiasm of party I do not share. He is right, however, when he
accuses the nation of cowardice for the last ten years. One third of the
Liberals have been with us at heart, and dared not speak, and we dared
not say what we wished. We accepted a compact that satisfied us
both--satisfied us better than when we were opposed by Whigs--that is,
the Liberal reigned, and we governed: and I should add, a very clever
juggler was our common chief. Now we have the consequences of hollow
peacemaking, in a suffrage that bids fair to extend to the wearing of
hats and boots for a qualification. The moral of it seems to be that
cowardice is even worse for nations than for individual men, though the
consequences come on us more slowly.'

'You spoke of party sins,' Miss Halkett said incredulously.

'I shall think we are the redoubtable party when we admit the charge.'

'Are you alluding to the landowners?'

'Like the land itself, they have rich veins in heavy matter. For
instance, the increasing wealth of the country is largely recruiting our
ranks; and we shall be tempted to mistake numbers for strength, and
perhaps again be reading Conservatism for a special thing of our own--a
fortification. That would be a party sin. Conservatism is a principle of
government; the best because the safest for an old country; and the
guarantee that we do not lose the wisdom of past experience in our
struggle with what is doubtful. Liberalism stakes too much on the chance
of gain. It is uncomfortably seated on half-a-dozen horses; and it has to
feed them too, and on varieties of corn.'

'Yes,' Miss Halkett said, pausing, 'and I know you would not talk down to
me, but the use of imagery makes me feel that I am addressed as a
primitive intelligence.'

'That's the fault of my trying at condensation, as the hieroglyphists put
an animal for a paragraph. I am incorrigible, you see; but the lecture in
prose must be for by-and-by, if you care to have it.'

'If you care to read it to me. Did a single hieroglyphic figure stand for
so much?'

'I have never deciphered one.'

'You have been speaking to me too long in earnest, Mr. Austin!'

'I accept the admonition, though it is wider than the truth. Have you
ever consented to listen to politics before?'

Cecilia reddened faintly, thinking of him who had taught her to listen,
and of her previous contempt of the subject.

A political exposition devoid of imagery was given to her next day on the
sunny South-western terrace of Mount Laurels, when it was only by
mentally translating it into imagery that she could advance a step beside
her intellectual guide; and she was ashamed of the volatility of her
ideas. She was constantly comparing Mr. Austin and Nevil Beauchamp,
seeing that the senior and the junior both talked to her with the
familiar recognition of her understanding which was a compliment without
the gross corporeal phrase. But now she made another discovery, that
should have been infinitely more of a compliment, and it was bewildering,
if not repulsive to her:--could it be credited? Mr. Austin was a firm
believer in new and higher destinies for women. He went farther than she
could concede the right of human speculation to go; he was, in fact, as
Radical there as Nevil Beauchamp politically; and would not the latter
innovator stare, perchance frown conservatively, at a prospect of woman
taking counsel, in council, with men upon public affairs, like the women
in the Germania! Mr. Austin, if this time he talked in earnest, deemed
that Englishwomen were on the road to win such a promotion, and would win
it ultimately. He said soberly that he saw more certain indications of
the reality of progress among women than any at present shown by men. And
he was professedly temperate. He was but for opening avenues to the means
of livelihood for them, and leaving it to their strength to conquer the
position they might wish to win. His belief that they would do so was the
revolutionary sign.

'Are there points of likeness between Radicals and Tories?' she inquired.

'I suspect a cousinship in extremes,' he answered.

'If one might be present at an argument,' said she.

'We have only to meet to fly apart as wide as the Poles,' Mr. Austin
rejoined.

But she had not spoken of a particular person to meet him; and how, then,
had she betrayed herself? She fancied he looked unwontedly arch as he
resumed:

'The end of the argument would see us each entrenched in his party.
Suppose me to be telling your Radical friend such truisms as that we
English have not grown in a day, and were not originally made free and
equal by decree; that we have grown, and must continue to grow, by the
aid and the development of our strength; that ours is a fairly legible
history, and a fair example of the good and the bad in human growth; that
his landowner and his peasant have no clear case of right and wrong to
divide them, one being the descendant of strong men, the other of weak
ones; and that the former may sink, the latter may rise--there is no
artificial obstruction; and if it is difficult to rise, it is easy to
sink. Your Radical friend, who would bring them to a level by
proclamation, could not adopt a surer method for destroying the manhood
of a people: he is for doctoring wooden men, and I for not letting our
stout English be cut down short as Laplanders; he would have them in a
forcing house, and I in open air, as hitherto. Do you perceive a
discussion? and you apprehend the nature of it. We have nerves. That is
why it is better for men of extremely opposite opinions not to meet. I
dare say Radicalism has a function, and so long as it respects the laws I
am ready to encounter it where it cannot be avoided. Pardon my prosing.'

'Recommend me some hard books to study through the Winter,' said Cecilia,
refreshed by a discourse that touched no emotions, as by a febrifuge.
Could Nevil reply to it? She fancied him replying, with that wild head of
his--wildest of natures. She fancied also that her wish was like Mr.
Austin's not to meet him. She was enjoying a little rest.

It was not quite generous in Mr. Austin to assume that 'her Radical
friend' had been prompting her. However, she thanked him in her heart for
the calm he had given her. To be able to imagine Nevil Beauchamp
intellectually erratic was a tonic satisfaction to the proud young lady,
ashamed of a bondage that the bracing and pointing of her critical powers
helped her to forget. She had always preferred the society of men of Mr.
Austin's age. How old was he? Her father would know. And why was he
unmarried? A light frost had settled on the hair about his temples; his
forehead was lightly wrinkled; but his mouth and smile, and his eyes,
were lively as a young man's, with more in them. His age must be
something less than fifty. O for peace! she sighed. When he stepped into
his carriage, and stood up in it to wave adieu to her, she thought his
face and figure a perfect example of an English gentleman in his prime.

Captain Baskelett requested the favour of five minutes of conversation
with Miss Halkett before he followed Mr. Austin, on his way to Steynham.

She returned from that colloquy to her father and Mr. Tuckham. The
colonel looked straight in her face, with an elevation of the brows. To
these points of interrogation she answered with a placid fall of her
eyelids. He sounded a note of approbation in his throat.

All the company having departed, Mr. Tuckham for the first time spoke of
his interview with his kinsman Beauchamp. Yesterday evening he had
slurred it, as if he had nothing to relate, except the finding of an old
schoolfellow at Dr. Shrapnel's named Lydiard, a man of ability fool
enough to have turned author on no income. But that which had appeared to
Miss Halkett a want of observancy, became attributable to depth of
character on its being clear that he had waited for the departure of the
transient guests of the house, to pour forth his impressions without
holding up his kinsman to public scorn. He considered Shrapnel mad and
Beauchamp mad. No such grotesque old monster as Dr. Shrapnel had he seen
in the course of his travels. He had never listened to a madman running
loose who was at all up to Beauchamp. At a loss for words to paint him,
he said: 'Beauchamp seems to have a head like a firework manufactory,
he's perfectly pyrocephalic.' For an example of Dr. Shrapnel's talk: 'I
happened,' said Mr. Tuckham, 'casually, meaning no harm, and not
supposing I was throwing a lighted match on powder, to mention
the word Providence. I found myself immediately confronted by
Shrapnel--overtopped, I should say. He is a lank giant of about seven
feet in height; the kind of show man that used to go about in caravans
over the country; and he began rocking over me like a poplar in a gale,
and cries out: "Stay there! away with that! Providence? Can you set a
thought on Providence, not seeking to propitiate it? And have you not
there the damning proof that you are at the foot of an Idol?"--The old
idea about a special Providence, I suppose. These fellows have nothing
new but their trimmings. And he went on with: "Ay, invisible," and his
arm chopping, "but an Idol! an Idol!"--I was to think of "nought but
Laws." He admitted there might be one above the Laws. "To realize him is
to fry the brains in their pan," says he, and struck his forehead--a
slap: and off he walked down the garden, with his hands at his
coat-tails. I venture to say it may be taken for a proof of incipient
insanity to care to hear such a fellow twice. And Beauchamp holds him up
for a sage and a prophet!'

'He is a very dangerous dog,' said Colonel Halkett.

'The best of it is--and I take this for the strongest possible proof that
Beauchamp is mad--Shrapnel stands for an advocate of morality against
him. I'll speak of it . . . .'

Mr. Tuckham nodded to the colonel, who said: 'Speak out. My daughter has
been educated for a woman of the world.'

'Well, sir, it's nothing to offend a young lady's ears. Beauchamp is for
socially enfranchising the sex--that is all. Quite enough. Not a whit
politically. Love is to be the test: and if a lady ceases to love her
husband . . . if she sets her fancy elsewhere, she's bound to leave him.
The laws are tyrannical, our objections are cowardly. Well, this Dr.
Shrapnel harangued about society; and men as well as women are to
sacrifice their passions on that altar. If he could burlesque himself it
would be in coming out as a cleric--the old Pagan!'

'Did he convince Captain Beauchamp?' the colonel asked, manifestly for
his daughter to hear the reply; which was: 'Oh dear, no!'

'Were you able to gather from Captain Beauchamp's remarks whether he is
much disappointed by the result of the election?' said Cecilia.

Mr. Tuckham could tell her only that Captain Beauchamp was incensed
against an elector named Tomlinson for withdrawing a promised vote on
account of lying rumours, and elated by the conquest of a Mr. Carpendike,
who was reckoned a tough one to drag by the neck. 'The only sane people
in the house are a Miss Denham and the cook: I lunched there,' Mr.
Tuckham nodded approvingly. 'Lydiard must be mad. What he's wasting his
time there for I can't guess. He says he's engaged there in writing a
prefatory essay to a new publication of Harry Denham's poems--whoever
that may be. And why wasting it there? I don't like it. He ought to be
earning his bread. He'll be sure to be borrowing money by-and-by. We've
got ten thousand too many fellows writing already, and they 've seen a
few inches of the world, on the Continent! He can write. But it's all
unproductive-dead weight on the country, these fellows with their
writings! He says Beauchamp's praise of Miss Denham is quite deserved. He
tells me, that at great peril to herself--and she nearly had her arm
broken by a stone he saved Shrapnel from rough usage on the
election-day.'

'Hum!' Colonel Halkett grunted significantly.

'So I thought,' Mr. Tuckham responded. 'One doesn't want the man to be
hurt, but he ought to be put down in some way. My belief is he's a
Fire-worshipper. I warrant I would extinguish him if he came before me.
He's an incendiary, at any rate.'

'Do you think,' said Cecilia, 'that Captain Beauchamp is now satisfied
with his experience of politics?'

'Dear me, no,' said Mr. Tuckham. 'It's the opening of a campaign. He's
off to the North, after he has been to Sussex and Bucks. He's to be at it
all his life. One thing he shows common sense in. If I heard him once I
heard him say half-a-dozen times, that he must have money:--"I must have
money!" And so he must if he 's to head the Radicals. He wants to start a
newspaper! Is he likely to get money from his uncle Romfrey?'

'Not for his present plan of campaign.' Colonel Halkett enunciated the
military word sarcastically. 'Let's hope he won't get money.'

'He says he must have it.'

'Who is to stand and deliver, then?'

'I don't know; I only repeat what he says: unless he has an eye on my
Aunt Beauchamp; and I doubt his luck there, if he wants money for
political campaigning.'

'Money!' Colonel Halkett ejaculated.

That word too was in the heart of the heiress.

Nevil must have money! Could he have said it? Ordinary men might say or
think it inoffensively; Captain Baskelett, for instance: but not Nevil
Beauchamp.

Captain Baskelett, as she had conveyed the information to her father for
his comfort in the dumb domestic language familiar between them on these
occasions, had proposed to her unavailingly. Italian and English
gentlemen were in the list of her rejected suitors: and hitherto she had
seen them come and go, one might say, from a watchtower in the skies.
None of them was the ideal she waited for: what their feelings were,
their wishes, their aims, she had not reflected on. They dotted the
landscape beneath the unassailable heights, busy after their fashion,
somewhat quaint, much like the pigmy husbandmen in the fields were to the
giant's daughter, who had more curiosity than Cecilia. But Nevil
Beauchamp had compelled her to quit her lofty station, pulled her low as
the littlest of women that throb and flush at one man's footstep: and
being well able to read the nature and aspirations of Captain Baskelett,
it was with the knowledge of her having been proposed to as heiress of a
great fortune that she chanced to hear of Nevil's resolve to have money.
If he did say it! And was anything likelier? was anything unlikelier? His
foreign love denied to him, why, now he devoted himself to money:
money--the last consideration of a man so single-mindedly generous as he!
But he must have money to pursue his contest! But would he forfeit the
truth in him for money for any purpose?

The debate on this question grew as incessant as the thought of him. Was
it not to be supposed that the madness of the pursuit of his political
chimaera might change his character?

She hoped he would not come to Mount Laurels, thinking she should esteem
him less if he did; knowing that her defence of him, on her own behalf,
against herself, depended now on an esteem lodged perhaps in her
wilfulness. Yet if he did not come, what an Arctic world!

He came on a November afternoon when the woods glowed, and no sun. The
day was narrowed in mist from earth to heaven: a moveless and possessing
mist. It left space overhead for one wreath of high cloud mixed with
touches of washed red upon moist blue, still as the mist, insensibly
passing into it. Wet webs crossed the grass, chill in the feeble light.
The last flowers of the garden bowed to decay. Dead leaves, red and brown
and spotted yellow, fell straight around the stems of trees, lying thick.
The glow was universal, and the chill.

Cecilia sat sketching the scene at a window of her study, on the level of
the drawing-room, and he stood by outside till she saw him. He greeted
her through the glass, then went round to the hall door, giving her time
to recover, if only her heart had been less shaken.

Their meeting was like the features of the day she set her brush to
picture: characteristic of a season rather than cheerless in tone, though
it breathed little cheer. Is there not a pleasure in contemplating that
which is characteristic? Her unfinished sketch recalled him after he had
gone: he lived in it, to startle her again, and bid her heart gallop and
her cheeks burn. The question occurred to her: May not one love, not
craving to be beloved? Such a love does not sap our pride, but supports
it; increases rather than diminishes our noble self-esteem. To attain
such a love the martyrs writhed up to the crown of saints. For a while
Cecilia revelled in the thought that she could love in this most
saint-like manner. How they fled, the sordid ideas of him which accused
him of the world's one passion, and were transferred to her own bosom in
reproach that she should have imagined them existing in his! He talked
simply and sweetly of his defeat, of time wasted away from the canvass,
of loss of money: and he had little to spare, he said. The water-colour
drawing interested him. He said he envied her that power of isolation,
and the eye for beauty in every season. She opened a portfolio of Mr.
Tuckham's water-colour drawings in every clime; scenes of Europe, Asia,
and the Americas; and he was to be excused for not caring to look through
them. His remark, that they seemed hard and dogged, was not so unjust,
she thought, smiling to think of the critic criticized. His wonderment
that a young man like his Lancastrian cousin should be 'an unmitigated
Tory' was perhaps natural.

Cecilia said, 'Yet I cannot discern in him a veneration for aristocracy.'
'That's not wanted for modern Toryism,' said Nevil. 'One may venerate old
families when they show the blood of the founder, and are not dead wood.
I do. And I believe the blood of the founder, though the man may have
been a savage and a robber, had in his day finer elements in it than were
common. But let me say at a meeting that I respect true aristocracy, I
hear a growl and a hiss beginning: why? Don't judge them hastily: because
the people have seen the aristocracy opposed to the cause that was weak,
and only submitting to it when it commanded them to resist at their
peril; clinging to traditions, and not anywhere standing for humanity:
much more a herd than the people themselves. Ah! well, we won't talk of
it now. I say that is no aristocracy, if it does not head the people in
virtue--military, political, national: I mean the qualities required by
the times for leadership. I won't bother you with my ideas now. I love to
see you paint-brush in hand.'

Her brush trembled on the illumination of a scarlet maple. 'In this
country we were not originally made free and equal by decree, Nevil.'

'No,' said he, 'and I cast no blame on our farthest ancestors.'

It struck her that this might be an outline of a reply to Mr. Austin.

'So you have been thinking over it?' he asked.

'Not to conclusions,' she said, trying to retain in her mind the
evanescent suggestiveness of his previous remark, and vexed to find
herself upon nothing but a devious phosphorescent trail there.

Her forehead betrayed the unwonted mental action. He cried out for
pardon. 'What right have I to bother you? I see it annoys you. The truth
is, I came for peace. I think of you when they talk of English homes.'

She felt then that he was comparing her home with another, a foreign
home. After he had gone she felt that there had been a comparison of two
persons. She remembered one of his observations: 'Few women seem to have
courage'; when his look at her was for an instant one of scrutiny or
calculation. Under a look like that we perceive that we are being
weighed. She had no clue to tell her what it signified.

Glorious and solely glorious love, that has risen above emotion, quite
independent of craving! That is to be the bird of upper air, poised on
his wings. It is a home in the sky. Cecilia took possession of it
systematically, not questioning whether it would last; like one who is
too enamoured of the habitation to object to be a tenant-at-will. If it
was cold, it was in recompense immeasurably lofty, a star-girdled place;
and dwelling in it she could avow to herself the secret which was now
working self-deception, and still preserve her pride unwounded. Her
womanly pride, she would have said in vindication of it: but Cecilia
Halkett's pride went far beyond the merely womanly.

Thus she was assisted to endure a journey down to Wales, where Nevil
would surely not be. She passed a Winter without seeing him. She returned
to Mount Laurels from London at Easter, and went on a visit to Steynham,
and back to London, having sight of him nowhere, still firm in the
thought that she loved ethereally, to bless, forgive, direct, encourage,
pray for him, impersonally. She read certain speeches delivered by Nevil
at assemblies of Liberals or Radicals, which were reported in papers in
the easy irony of the style of here and there a sentence, here and there
a summary: salient quotations interspersed with running abstracts: a
style terrible to friends of the speaker so reported, overwhelming if
they differ in opinion: yet her charity was a match for it. She was
obliged to have recourse to charity, it should be observed. Her father
drew her attention to the spectacle of R. C. S. Nevil Beauchamp,
Commander R.N., fighting those reporters with letters in the newspapers,
and the dry editorial comment flanked by three stars on the left. He was
shocked to see a gentleman writing such letters to the papers. 'But one
thing hangs on another,' said he.

'But you seem angry with Nevil, papa,' said she.

'I do hate a turbulent, restless fellow, my dear,' the colonel burst out.

'Papa, he has really been unfairly reported.'

Cecilia laid three privately-printed full reports of Commander
Beauchamp's speeches (very carefully corrected by him) before her father.

He suffered his eye to run down a page. 'Is it possible you read
this?--this trash!--dangerous folly, I call it.'

Cecilia's reply, 'In the interests of justice, I do,' was meant to
express her pure impartiality. By a toleration of what is detested we
expose ourselves to the keenness of an adverse mind.

'Does he write to you, too?' said the colonel.

She answered: 'Oh, no; I am not a politician.'

'He seems to have expected you to read those tracts of his, though.'

'Yes, I think he would convert me if he could,' said Cecilia.

'Though you're not a politician.'

'He relies on the views he delivers in public, rather than on writing to
persuade; that was my meaning, papa.'

'Very well,' said the colonel, not caring to show his anxiety.

Mr. Tuckham dined with them frequently in London. This gentleman betrayed
his accomplishments one by one. He sketched, and was no artist; he
planted, and was no gardener; he touched the piano neatly, and was no
musician; he sang, and he had no voice. Apparently he tried his hand at
anything, for the privilege of speaking decisively upon all things. He
accompanied the colonel and his daughter on a day's expedition to Mrs.
Beauchamp, on the Upper Thames, and they agreed that he shone to great
advantage in her society. Mrs. Beauchamp said she had seen her
great-nephew Nevil, but without a comment on his conduct or his person;
grave silence. Reflecting on it, Cecilia grew indignant at the thought
that Mr. Tuckham might have been acting a sinister part. Mrs. Beauchamp
alluded to a newspaper article of her favourite great-nephew Blackburn,
written, Cecilia knew through her father, to controvert some tremendous
proposition of Nevil's. That was writing, Mrs. Beauchamp said. 'I am not
in the habit of fearing a conflict, so long as we have stout defenders. I
rather like it,' she said.

The colonel entertained Mrs. Beauchamp, while Mr. Tuckham led Miss
Halkett over the garden. Cecilia considered that his remarks upon Nevil
were insolent.

'Seriously, Miss Halkett, to take him at his best, he is a very good
fellow, I don't doubt; I am told so; and a capital fellow among men, a
good friend and not a bad boon-fellow, and for that matter, the
smoking-room is a better test than the drawing-room; all he wants is
emphatically school--school--school. I have recommended the simple
iteration of that one word in answer to him at his meetings, and the
printing of it as a foot-note to his letters.'

Cecilia's combative spirit precipitated her to say, 'I hear the mob in it
shouting Captain Beauchamp down.'

'Ay,' said Mr. Tuckham, 'it would be setting the mob to shout wisely at
last.'

'The mob is a wild beast.'

'Then we should hear wisdom coming out of the mouth of the wild beast.'

'Men have the phrase, "fair play."'

'Fair play, I say, is not applicable to a man who deliberately goes about
to stir the wild beast. He is laughed at, plucked, hustled, and robbed,
by those who deafen him with their "plaudits"--their roars. Did you see
his advertisement of a great-coat, lost at some rapscallion gathering
down in the North, near my part of the country? A great-coat and a packet
of letters. He offers a reward of L10. But that's honest robbery compared
with the bleeding he'll get.'

'Do you know Mr. Seymour Austin?' Miss Halkett asked him.

'I met him once at your father's table. Why?'

'I think you would like to listen to him.'

'Yes, my fault is not listening enough,' said Mr. Tuckham.

He was capable of receiving correction.

Her father told her he was indebted to Mr. Tuckham past payment in coin,
for services rendered by him on a trying occasion among the miners in
Wales during the first spring month. 'I dare say he can speak effectively
to miners,' Cecilia said, outvying the contemptuous young man in
superciliousness, but with effort and not with satisfaction.

She left London in July, two days before her father could be induced to
return to Mount Laurels. Feverish, and strangely subject to caprices now,
she chose the longer way round by Sussex, and alighted at the station
near Steynham to call on Mrs. Culling, whom she knew to be at the Hall,
preparing it for Mr. Romfrey's occupation. In imitation of her father she
was Rosamund's fast friend, though she had never quite realized her
position, and did not thoroughly understand her. Would it not please her
father to hear that she had chosen the tedious route for the purpose of
visiting this lady, whose champion he was?

So she went to Steynham, and for hours she heard talk of no one, of
nothing, but her friend Nevil. Cecilia was on her guard against
Rosamund's defence of his conduct in France. The declaration that there
had been no misbehaviour at all could not be accepted; but the news of
Mr. Romfrey's having installed Nevil in Holdesbury to manage that
property, and of his having mooted to her father the question of an
alliance between her and Nevil, was wonderful. Rosamund could not say
what answer her father had made: hardly favourable, Cecilia supposed,
since he had not spoken of the circumstance to her. But Mr. Romfrey's
influence with him would certainly be powerful.

It was to be assumed, also, that Nevil had been consulted by his uncle.
Rosamund said full-heartedly that this alliance had for years been her
life's desire, and then she let the matter pass, nor did she once loop at
Cecilia searchingly, or seem to wish to probe her. Cecilia disagreed with
Rosamund on an insignificant point in relation to something Mr. Romfrey
and Captain Baskelett had done, and, as far as she could recollect
subsequently, there was a packet of letters, or a pocket-book containing
letters of Nevil's which he had lost, and which had been forwarded to Mr.
Romfrey; for the pocket-book was originally his, and his address was
printed inside. But among these letters was one from Dr. Shrapnel to
Nevil: a letter so horrible that Rosamund frowned at the reminiscence of
it, holding it to be too horrible for the quotation of a sentence. She
owned she had forgotten any three consecutive words. Her known dislike of
Captain Baskelett, however, was insufficient to make her see that it was
unjustifiable in him to run about London reading it, with comments of the
cruellest. Rosamund's greater detestation of Dr. Shrapnel blinded her to
the offence committed by the man she would otherwise have been very ready
to scorn. So small did the circumstance appear to Cecilia,
notwithstanding her gentle opposition at the time she listened to it,
that she never thought of mentioning it to her father, and only
remembered it when Captain Baskelett, with Lord Palmet in his company,
presented himself at Mount Laurels, and proposed to the colonel to read
to him 'a letter from that scoundrelly old Shrapnel to Nevil Beauchamp,
upon women, wives, thrones, republics, British loyalty, et caetera,'--an
et caetera that rolled a series of tremendous reverberations down the
list of all things held precious by freeborn Englishmen.

She would have prevented the reading. But the colonel would have it.

'Read on,' said he. 'Mr. Romfrey saw no harm.'

Captain Baskelett held up Dr. Shrapnel's letter to Commander Beauchamp,
at about half a yard's distance on the level of his chin, as a
big-chested singer in a concert-room holds his music-scroll.




CHAPTER XXIX

THE EPISTLE OF DR. SHRAPNEL TO COMMANDER BEAUCHAMP

Before we give ear to the recital of Dr. Shrapnel's letter to his pupil
in politics by the mouth of Captain Baskelett, it is necessary to defend
this gentleman, as he would handsomely have defended himself, from the
charge that he entertained ultimate designs in regard to the really
abominable scrawl, which was like a child's drawing of ocean with here
and there a sail capsized, and excited his disgust almost as much as did
the contents his great indignation. He was prepared to read it, and stood
blown out for the task, but it was temporarily too much for him. 'My dear
Colonel, look at it, I entreat you,' he said, handing the letter for
exhibition, after fixing his eye-glass, and dropping it in repulsion. The
common sentiment of mankind is offended by heterodoxy in mean attire; for
there we see the self-convicted villain--the criminal caught in the act;
we try it and convict it by instinct without the ceremony of a jury; and
so thoroughly aware of our promptitude in this respect has our arch-enemy
become since his mediaeval disgraces that his particular advice to his
followers is now to scrupulously copy the world in externals; never to
appear poorly clothed, nor to impart deceptive communications in bad
handwriting. We can tell black from white, and our sagacity has taught
him a lesson.

Colonel Halkett glanced at the detestable penmanship. Lord Palmet did the
same, and cried, 'Why, it's worse than mine!'

Cecilia had protested against the reading of the letter, and she declined
to look at the writing. She was entreated, adjured to look, in Captain
Baskelett's peculiarly pursuing fashion; a 'nay, but you shall,' that she
had been subjected to previously, and would have consented to run like a
schoolgirl to escape from.

To resume the defence of him: he was a man incapable of forming plots,
because his head would not hold them. He was an impulsive man, who could
impale a character of either sex by narrating fables touching persons of
whom he thought lightly, and that being done he was devoid of malice,
unless by chance his feelings or his interests were so aggrieved that his
original haphazard impulse was bent to embrace new circumstances and be
the parent of a line of successive impulses, in the main resembling an
extremely far-sighted plot, whereat he gazed back with fondness, all the
while protesting sincerely his perfect innocence of anything of the kind.
Circumstances will often interwind with the moods of simply irritated
men. In the present instance he could just perceive what might
immediately come of his reading out of this atrocious epistle wherein
Nevil Beauchamp was displayed the dangling puppet of a mountebank
wire-pulley, infidel, agitator, leveller, and scoundrel. Cognizant of Mr.
Romfrey's overtures to Colonel Halkett, he traced them to that scheming
woman in the house at Steynham, and he was of opinion that it was a
friendly and good thing to do to let the old colonel and Cissy Halkett
know Mr. Nevil through a bit of his correspondence. This, then, was a
matter of business and duty that furnished an excuse for his going out of
his, way to call at Mount Laurels on the old familiar footing, so as not
to alarm the heiress.

A warrior accustomed to wear the burnished breastplates between London
and Windsor has, we know, more need to withstand than to discharge the
shafts of amorous passion; he is indeed, as an object of beauty,
notoriously compelled to be of the fair sex in his tactics, and must
practise the arts and whims of nymphs to preserve himself: and no doubt
it was the case with the famous Captain Baskelett, in whose mind sweet
ladies held the place that the pensive politician gives to the masses,
dreadful in their hatred, almost as dreadful in their affection. But an
heiress is a distinct species among women; he hungered for the heiress;
his elevation to Parliament made him regard her as both the ornament and
the prop of his position; and it should be added that his pride, all the
habits of thought of a conqueror of women, had been shocked by that
stupefying rejection of him, which Cecilia had intimated to her father
with the mere lowering of her eyelids. Conceive the highest bidder at an
auction hearing the article announce that it will not have him! Captain
Baskelett talked of it everywhere for a month or so:--the girl could not
know her own mind, for she suited him exactly! and he requested the world
to partake of his astonishment. Chronicles of the season in London
informed him that he was not the only fellow to whom the gates were shut.
She could hardly be thinking of Nevil? However, let the epistle be read.
'Now for the Shrapnel shot,' he nodded finally to Colonel Halkett,
expanded his bosom, or natural cuirass, as before-mentioned, and was
vocable above the common pitch:--

   '"MY BRAVE BEAUCHAMP,--On with your mission, and never a summing of
   results in hand, nor thirst for prospects, nor counting upon
   harvests; for seed sown in faith day by day is the nightly harvest
   of the soul, and with the soul we work. With the soul we see."'

Captain Baskelett intervened: 'Ahem! I beg to observe that this
delectable rubbish is underlined by old Nevil's pencil.' He promised to
do a little roaring whenever it occurred, and continued with ghastly
false accentuation, an intermittent sprightliness and depression of tone
in the wrong places.

'"The soul," et caetera. Here we are!

   "Desires to realize our gains are akin to the passion of usury;
   these are tricks of the usurer to grasp his gold in act and
   imagination. Have none of them. Work at the people!"

--At them, remark!--

   "Moveless do they seem to you? Why, so is the earth to the sowing
   husbandman, and though we cannot forecast a reaping season, we have
   in history durable testification that our seasons come in the souls
   of men, yea, as a planet that we have set in motion, and faster and
   faster are we spinning it, and firmer and firmer shall we set it to
   regularity of revolution. That means life!"

--Shrapnel roars: you will have Nevil in a minute.

   "Recognize that now we have bare life; at best for the bulk of men
   the Saurian lizard's broad back soaking and roasting in primeval
   slime; or say, in the so-called teachers of men, as much of life as
   pricks the frog in March to stir and yawn, and up on a flaccid leap
   that rolls him over some three inches nearer to the ditchwater
   besought by his instinct."

'I ask you, did you ever hear? The flaccid frog! But on we go.'

   '"Professors, prophets, masters, each hitherto has had his creed and
   system to offer, good mayhap for the term; and each has put it forth
   for the truth everlasting, to drive the dagger to the heart of time,
   and put the axe to human growth!--that one circle of wisdom issuing
   of the experience and needs of their day, should act the despot over
   all other circles for ever!--so where at first light shone to light
   the yawning frog to his wet ditch, there, with the necessitated
   revolution of men's minds in the course of ages, darkness radiates."

'That's old Nevil. Upon my honour, I haven't a notion of what it all
means, and I don't believe the old rascal Shrapnel has himself. And pray
be patient, my dear colonel. You will find him practical presently. I'll
skip, if you tell me to. Darkness radiates, does it!

   '"The creed that rose in heaven sets below; and where we had an
   angel we have claw-feet and fangs. Ask how that is! The creed is
   much what it was when the followers diverged it from the Founder.
   But humanity is not where it was when that creed was food and
   guidance. Creeds will not die not fighting. We cannot root them up
   out of us without blood."

'He threatens blood!--'

   '"Ours, my Beauchamp, is the belief that humanity advances beyond
   the limits of creeds, is to be tied to none. We reverence the
   Master in his teachings; we behold the limits of him in his creed--
   and that is not his work. We truly are his disciples, who see how
   far it was in him to do service; not they that made of his creed a
   strait-jacket for humanity. So, in our prayers we dedicate the
   world to God, not calling him great for a title, no--showing him we
   know him great in a limitless world, lord of a truth we tend to,
   have not grasped. I say Prayer is good. I counsel it to you again
   and again: in joy, in sickness of heart. The infidel will not pray;
   the creed-slave prays to the image in his box."'

'I've had enough!' Colonel Halkett ejaculated.

'"We,"' Captain Baskelett put out his hand for silence with an ineffable
look of entreaty, for here was Shrapnel's hypocrisy in full bloom:

   '"We make prayer a part of us, praying for no gifts, no
   interventions; through the faith in prayer opening the soul to the
   undiscerned. And take this, my Beauchamp, for the good in prayer,
   that it makes us repose on the unknown with confidence, makes us
   flexible to change, makes us ready for revolution--for life, then!
   He who has the fountain of prayer in him will not complain of
   hazards. Prayer is the recognition of laws; the soul's exercise and
   source of strength; its thread of conjunction with them. Prayer for
   an object is the cajolery of an idol; the resource of superstition.
   There you misread it, Beauchamp. We that fight the living world
   must have the universal for succour of the truth in it. Cast forth
   the soul in prayer, you meet the effluence of the outer truth, you
   join with the creative elements giving breath to you; and that crust
   of habit which is the soul's tomb; and custom, the soul's tyrant;
   and pride, our volcano-peak that sinks us in a crater; and fear,
   which plucks the feathers from the wings of the soul and sits it
   naked and shivering in a vault, where the passing of a common
   hodman's foot above sounds like the king of terrors coming,--you are
   free of them, you live in the day and for the future, by this
   exercise and discipline of the soul's faith. Me it keeps young
   everlastingly, like the fountain of . . ."'

'I say I cannot sit and hear any more of it!' exclaimed the colonel,
chafing out of patience.

Lord Palmet said to Miss Halkett: 'Isn't it like what we used to remember
of a sermon?'

Cecilia waited for her father to break away, but Captain Baskelett had
undertaken to skip, and was murmuring in sing-song some of the phrases
that warned him off:

'"History--Bible of Humanity; . . . Permanency--enthusiast's
dream--despot's aim--clutch of dead men's fingers in live flesh . . . Man
animal; man angel; man rooted; man winged": . . . Really, all this is too
bad. Ah! here we are: "At them with outspeaking, Beauchamp!" Here we are,
colonel, and you will tell me whether you think it treasonable or not.
"At them," et caetera: "We have signed no convention to respect
their"--he speaks of Englishmen, Colonel Halkett--"their passive
idolatries; a people with whom a mute conformity is as good as worship,
but a word of dissent holds you up to execration; and only for the
freedom won in foregone days their hate would be active. As we have them
in their present stage,"--old Nevil's mark--"We are not parties to the
tacit agreement to fill our mouths and shut our eyes. We speak because it
is better they be roused to lapidate us than soused in their sty, with
none to let them hear they live like swine, craving only not to be
disturbed at the trough. The religion of this vast English middle-class
ruling the land is Comfort. It is their central thought; their idea of
necessity; their sole aim. Whatsoever ministers to Comfort, seems to
belong to it, pretends to support it, they yield their passive worship
to. Whatsoever alarms it they join to crush. There you get at their point
of unity. They will pay for the security of Comfort, calling it national
worship, or national defence, if too much money is not subtracted from
the means of individual comfort: if too much foresight is not demanded
for the comfort of their brains. Have at them there. Speak. Moveless as
you find them, they are not yet all gross clay, and I say again, the true
word spoken has its chance of somewhere alighting and striking root. Look
not to that. Seeds perish in nature; good men fail. Look to the truth in
you, and deliver it, with no afterthought of hope, for hope is dogged by
dread; we give our courage as hostage for the fulfilment of what we hope.
Meditate on that transaction. Hope is for boys and girls, to whom nature
is kind. For men to hope is to tremble. Let prayer--the soul's overflow,
the heart's resignation--supplant it . . ."

'Pardon, colonel; I forgot to roar, but old Nevil marks all down that
page for encomium,' said Captain Baskelett. 'Oh! here we are. English
loyalty is the subject. Now, pray attend to this, colonel. Shrapnel
communicates to Beauchamp that if ten Beauchamps were spouting over the
country without intermission he might condescend to hope. So on--to
British loyalty. We are, so long as our sovereigns are well-conducted
persons, and we cannot unseat them--observe; he is eminently explicit,
the old traitor!--we are to submit to the outward forms of respect, but
we are frankly to say we are Republicans; he has the impudence to swear
that England is a Republican country, and calls our thoroughgoing
loyalty--yours and mine, colonel--disloyalty. Hark: "Where kings lead, it
is to be supposed they are wanted. Service is the noble office on earth,
and where kings do service let them take the first honours of the State:
but"--hark at this--"the English middle-class, which has absorbed the
upper, and despises, when it is not quaking before it, the lower, will
have nothing above it but a ricketty ornament like that you see on a
confectioner's twelfth-cake."'

'The man deserves hanging!' said Colonel Halkett.

'Further, my dear colonel, and Nevil marks it pretty much throughout:
"This loyalty smacks of a terrible perfidy. Pass the lords and squires;
they are old trees, old foundations, or joined to them, whether old or
new; they naturally apprehend dislocation when a wind blows, a river
rises, or a man speaks;--that comes of age or aping age: their hearts are
in their holdings! For the loyalty of the rest of the land, it is the
shopkeeper's loyalty, which is to be computed by the exact annual sum of
his net profits. It is now at high tide. It will last with the prosperity
of our commerce."--The insolent old vagabond!--"Let commercial disasters
come on us, and what of the loyalty now paying its hundreds of thousands,
and howling down questioners! In a day of bankruptcies, how much would
you bid for the loyalty of a class shivering under deprivation of
luxuries, with its God Comfort beggared? Ay, my Beauchamp,"--the most
offensive thing to me is that "my Beauchamp," but old Nevil has evidently
given himself up hand and foot to this ruffian--"ay, when you reflect
that fear of the so-called rabble, i.e. the people, the unmoneyed class,
which knows not Comfort, tastes not of luxuries, is the main component of
their noisy frigid loyalty, and that the people are not with them but
against, and yet that the people might be won by visible forthright
kingly service to a loyalty outdoing theirs as the sun the moon; ay, that
the people verily thirst to love and reverence; and that their love is
the only love worth having, because it is disinterested love, and
endures, and takes heat in adversity,--reflect on it and wonder at the
inversion of things! So with a Church. It lives if it is at home with the
poor. In the arms of enriched shopkeepers it rots, goes to decay in
vestments--vestments! flakes of mummy-wraps for it! or else they use it
for one of their political truncheons--to awe the ignorant masses: I
quote them. So. Not much ahead of ancient Egyptians in spirituality or in
priestcraft! They call it statesmanship. O for a word for it! Let Palsy
and Cunning go to form a word. Deadmanship, I call it."--To quote my
uncle the baron, this is lunatic dribble!--"Parsons and princes are happy
with the homage of this huge passive fleshpot class. It is enough for
them. Why not? The taxes are paid and the tithes. Whilst commercial
prosperity lasts!"'

Colonel Halkett threw his arms aloft.

   '"Meanwhile, note this: the people are the Power to come.
   Oppressed, unprotected, abandoned; left to the ebb and flow of the
   tides of the market, now taken on to work, now cast off to starve,
   committed to the shifting laws of demand and supply, slaves of
   Capital-the whited name for old accursed. Mammon: and of all the.
   ranked and black-uniformed host no pastor to come out of the
   association of shepherds, and proclaim before heaven and man the
   primary claim of their cause; they are, I say, the power, worth the
   seduction of by another Power not mighty in England now: and likely
   in time to set up yet another Power not existing in England now.
   What if a passive comfortable clergy hand them over to men on the
   models of Irish pastors, who will succour, console, enfold, champion
   them? what if, when they have learnt to use their majority, sick of
   deceptions and the endless pulling of interests, they raise ONE
   representative to force the current of action with an authority as
   little fictitious as their preponderance of numbers? The despot and
   the priest! There I see our danger, Beauchamp. You and I and some
   dozen labour to tie and knot them to manliness. We are few; they
   are many and weak. Rome offers them real comfort in return for
   their mites in coin, and--poor souls! mites in conscience, many of
   them. A Tyrant offers them to be directly their friend. Ask,
   Beauchamp, why they should not have comfort for pay as well as the
   big round--"'

Captain Baskelett stopped and laid the letter out for Colonel Halkett to
read an unmentionable word, shamelessly marked by Nevil's pencil:

   "--belly-class!" Ask, too, whether the comfort they wish for is not
   approaching divine compared with the stagnant fleshliness of that
   fat shopkeeper's Comfort.

   '"Warn the people of this. Ay, warn the clergy. It is not only the
   poor that are caught by ranters. Endeavour to make those
   accommodating shepherds understand that they stand a chance of
   losing rich as well as poor! It should awaken them. The helpless
   poor and the uneasy rich are alike open to the seductions of Romish
   priests and intoxicated ranters. I say so it will be if that band
   of forty thousand go on slumbering and nodding. They walk in a
   dream. The flesh is a dream. The soul only is life."

'Now for you, colonel.

   '"No extension of the army--no! A thousand times no. Let India go,
   then! Good for India that we hold India? Ay, good: but not at such
   a cost as an extra tax, or compulsory service of our working man.
   If India is to be held for the good of India, throw open India to
   the civilized nations, that they help us in a task that overstrains
   us. At present India means utter perversion of the policy of
   England. Adrift India! rather than England red-coated. We dissent,
   Beauchamp! For by-and-by."

'That is,' Captain Baskelett explained, 'by-and-by Shrapnel will have old
Nevil fast enough.'

'Is there more of it?' said Colonel Halkett, flapping his forehead for
coolness.

'The impudence of this dog in presuming to talk about India!--eh,
colonel? Only a paragraph or two more: I skip a lot . . . . Ah! here we
are.' Captain Baskelett read to himself and laughed in derision: 'He
calls our Constitution a compact unsigned by the larger number involved
in it. What's this? "A band of dealers in fleshpottery." Do you detect a
gleam of sense? He underscores it. Then he comes to this': Captain
Baskelett requested Colonel Halkett to read for himself: 'The stench of
the trail of Ego in our History.'

The colonel perused it with an unsavoury expression of his features, and
jumped up.

'Oddly, Mr. Romfrey thought this rather clever,' said Captain Baskelett,
and read rapidly:

   '"Trace the course of Ego for them: first the king who conquers and
   can govern. In his egoism he dubs him holy; his family is of a
   selected blood; he makes the crown hereditary--Ego. Son by son the
   shame of egoism increases; valour abates; hereditary Crown, no
   hereditary qualities. The Barons rise. They in turn hold sway, and
   for their order--Ego. The traders overturn them: each class rides
   the classes under it while it can. It is ego--ego, the fountain
   cry, origin, sole source of war! Then death to ego, I say! If
   those traders had ruled for other than ego, power might have rested
   with them on broad basis enough to carry us forward for centuries.
   The workmen have ever been too anxious to be ruled. Now comes on
   the workman's era. Numbers win in the end: proof of small wisdom in
   the world. Anyhow, with numbers there is rough nature's wisdom and
   justice. With numbers ego is inter-dependent and dispersed; it is
   universalized. Yet these may require correctives. If so, they will
   have it in a series of despots and revolutions that toss, mix, and
   bind the classes together: despots, revolutions; panting
   alternations of the quickened heart of humanity."

'Marked by our friend Nevil in notes of admiration.'

'Mad as the writer,' groaned Colonel Halkett. 'Never in my life have I
heard such stuff.'

'Stay, colonel; here's Shrapnel defending Morality and Society,' said
Captain Baskelett.

Colonel Halkett vowed he was under no penal law to listen, and would not;
but Captain Baskelett persuaded him: 'Yes, here it is: I give you my
word. Apparently old Nevil has been standing up for every man's right to
run away with . . . Yes, really! I give you my word; and here we have
Shrapnel insisting on respect for the marriage laws. Do hear this; here
it is in black and white:--

   "Society is our one tangible gain, our one roofing and flooring in a
   world of most uncertain structures built on morasses. Toward the
   laws that support it men hopeful of progress give their adhesion.
   If it is martyrdom, what then? Let the martyrdom be. Contumacy is
   animalism. And attend to me," says Shrapnel, "the truer the love
   the readier for sacrifice! A thousand times yes. Rebellion against
   Society, and advocacy of Humanity, run counter. Tell me Society is
   the whited sepulchre, that it is blotched, hideous, hollow: and I
   say, add not another disfigurement to it; add to the purification of
   it. And you, if you answer, what can only one? I say that is the
   animal's answer, and applies also to politics, where the question,
   what can one? put in the relapsing tone, shows the country decaying
   in the individual. Society is the protection of the weaker,
   therefore a shield of women, who are our temple of civilization, to
   be kept sacred; and he that loves a woman will assuredly esteem and
   pity her sex, and not drag her down for another example of their
   frailty. Fight this out within you--!"

But you are right, colonel; we have had sufficient. I shall be getting a
democratic orator's twang, or a crazy parson's, if I go on much further.
He covers thirty-two pages of letter-paper. The conclusion is:--"Jenny
sends you her compliments, respects, and best wishes, and hopes she may
see you before she goes to her friend Clara Sherwin and the General."'

'Sherwin? Why, General Sherwin's a perfect gentleman,' Colonel Halkett
interjected; and Lord Palmet caught the other name: 'Jenny? That's Miss
Denham, Jenny Denham; an amazingly pretty girl: beautiful thick brown
hair, real hazel eyes, and walks like a yacht before the wind.'

'Perhaps, colonel, Jenny accounts for the defence of society,' said
Captain Baskelett. 'I have no doubt Shrapnel has a scheme for Jenny. The
old communist and socialist!' He folded up the letter: 'A curious
composition, is it not, Miss Halkett?'

Cecilia was thinking that he tempted her to be the apologist of even such
a letter.

'One likes to know the worst, and what's possible,' said the colonel.

After Captain Baskelett had gone, Colonel Halkett persisted in talking of
the letter, and would have impressed on his daughter that the person to
whom the letter was addressed must be partly responsible for the contents
of it. Cecilia put on the argumentative air of a Court of Equity to
discuss the point with him.

'Then you defend that letter?' he cried.

Oh, no: she did not defend the letter; she thought it wicked and
senseless. 'But,' said she, 'the superior strength of men to women seems
to me to come from their examining all subjects, shrinking from none. At
least, I should not condemn Nevil on account of his correspondence.'

'We shall see,' said her father, sighing rather heavily. 'I must have a
talk with Mr. Romfrey about that letter.'




CHAPTER XXX

THE BAITING OF DR. SHRAPNEL

Captain Baskelett went down from Mount Laurels to Bevisham to arrange for
the giving of a dinner to certain of his chief supporters in the borough,
that they might know he was not obliged literally to sit in Parliament in
order to pay a close attention to their affairs. He had not distinguished
himself by a speech during the session, but he had stored a political
precept or two in his memory, and, as he told Lord Palmet, he thought a
dinner was due to his villains. 'The way to manage your Englishman,
Palmet, is to dine him.' As the dinner would decidedly be dull, he
insisted on having Lord Palmet's company.

They crossed over to the yachting island, where portions of the letter of
Commander Beauchamp's correspondent were read at the Club, under the
verandah, and the question put, whether a man who held those opinions had
a right to wear his uniform.

The letter was transmitted to Steynham in time to be consigned to the
pocket-book before Beauchamp arrived there on one of his rare visits. Mr.
Romfrey handed him the pocketbook with the frank declaration that he had
read Shrapnel's letter. 'All is fair in war, Sir!' Beauchamp quoted him
ambiguously.

The thieves had amused Mr. Romfrey by their scrupulous honesty in
returning what was useless to them, while reserving the coat: but
subsequently seeing the advertized reward, they had written to claim it;
and, according to Rosamund Culling, he had been so tickled that he had
deigned to reply to them, very briefly, but very comically.

Speaking of the matter with her, Beauchamp said (so greatly was he
infatuated with the dangerous man) that the reading of a letter of Dr.
Shrapnel's could do nothing but good to any reflecting human creature: he
admitted that as the lost pocket-book was addressed to Mr. Romfrey, it
might have been by mistake that he had opened it, and read the topmost
letter lying open. But he pressed Rosamund to say whether that one only
had been read.

'Only Dr. Shrapnel's letter,' Rosamund affirmed. 'The letter from
Normandy was untouched by him.'

'Untouched by anybody?'

'Unopened, Nevil. You look incredulous.'

'Not if I have your word, ma'am.'

He glanced somewhat contemptuously at his uncle Everard's anachronistic
notions of what was fair in war.

To prove to him Mr. Romfrey's affectionate interest in his fortunes,
Rosamund mentioned the overtures which had been made to Colonel Halkett
for a nuptial alliance between the two houses; and she said: 'Your uncle
Everard was completely won by your manly way of taking his opposition to
you in Bevisham. He pays for Captain Baskelett, but you and your fortunes
are nearest his heart, Nevil.'

Beauchamp hung silent. His first remark was, 'Yes, I want money. I must
have money.' By degrees he seemed to warm to some sense of gratitude. 'It
was kind of the baron,' he said.

'He has a great affection for you, Nevil, though you know he spares no
one who chooses to be antagonistic. All that is over. But do you not
second him, Nevil? You admire her? You are not adverse?'

Beauchamp signified the horrid intermixture of yes and no, frowned in
pain of mind, and Walked up and down. 'There's no living woman I admire
so much.'

'She has refused the highest matches.'

'I hold her in every way incomparable.'

'She tries to understand your political ideas, if she cannot quite
sympathize with them, Nevil. And consider how hard it is for a young
English lady, bred in refinement, to understand such things.'

'Yes,' Beauchamp nodded; yes. Well, more 's the pity for me!'

'Ah! Nevil, that fatal Renee!'

'Ma'am, I acquit you of any suspicion of your having read her letter in
this pocket-book. She wishes me to marry. You would have seen it written
here. She wishes it.'

'Fly, clipped wing!' murmured Rosamund, and purposely sent a buzz into
her ears to shut out his extravagant talk of Renee's friendly wishes.

'How is it you women will not believe in the sincerity of a woman!' he
exclaimed.

'Nevil, I am not alluding to the damage done to your election.'

'To my candidature, ma'am. You mean those rumours, those lies of the
enemy. Tell me how I could suppose you were alluding to them. You bring
them forward now to justify your charge of "fatal" against her. She has
one fault; she wants courage; she has none other, not one that is not
excuseable. We won't speak of France. What did her father say?'

'Colonel Halkett? I do not know. He and his daughter come here next week,
and the colonel will expect to meet you here. That does not look like so
positive an objection to you?'

'To me personally, no,' said Beauchamp. 'But Mr. Romfrey has not told me
that I am to meet them.'

'Perhaps he has not thought it worth while. It is not his way. He has
asked you to come. You and Miss Halkett will be left to yourselves. Her
father assured Mr. Romfrey that he should not go beyond advising her. His
advice might not be exactly favourable to you at present, but if you sued
and she accepted--and she would, I am convinced she would; she was here
with me, talking of you a whole afternoon, and I have eyes--then he would
not oppose the match, and then I should see you settled, the husband of
the handsomest wife and richest heiress in England.'

A vision of Cecilia swam before him, gracious in stateliness.

Two weeks back Renee's expression of a wish that he would marry had
seemed to him an idle sentence in a letter breathing of her own
intolerable situation. The marquis had been struck down by illness. What
if she were to be soon suddenly free? But Renee could not be looking to
freedom, otherwise she never would have written the wish for him to
marry. She wrote perhaps hearing temptation whisper; perhaps wishing to
save herself and him by the aid of a tie that would bring his honour into
play and fix his loyalty. He remembered Dr. Shrapnel's written words:
'Rebellion against society and advocacy of humanity run counter.' They
had a stronger effect on him than when he was ignorant of his uncle
Everard's plan to match him with Cecilia. He took refuge from them in the
image of that beautiful desolate Renee, born to be beloved, now wasted,
worse than trodden under foot--perverted; a life that looked to him for
direction and resuscitation. She was as good as dead in her marriage. It
was impossible for him ever to think of Renee without the surprising
thrill of his enchantment with her, and tender pity that drew her closer
to him by darkening her brightness.

Still a man may love his wife. A wife like Cecilia was not to be imagined
coldly. Let the knot once be tied, it would not be regretted, could not
be; hers was a character, and hers a smile, firmly assuring him of that.

He told Mr. Romfrey that he should be glad to meet Colonel Halkett and
Cecilia. Business called him to Holdesbury. Thence he betook himself to
Dr. Shrapnel's cottage to say farewell to Jenny Denham previous to her
departure for Switzerland with her friend Clara Sherwin. She had never
seen a snow-mountain, and it was pleasant to him to observe in her eyes,
which he had known weighing and balancing intellectual questions more
than he quite liked, a childlike effort to conjure in imagination the
glories of the Alps. She appeared very happy, only a little anxious about
leaving Dr. Shrapnel with no one to take care of him for a whole month.
Beauchamp promised he would run over to him from Holdesbury, only an hour
by rail, as often as he could. He envied her the sight of the Alps, he
said, and tried to give her an idea of them, from which he broke off to
boast of a famous little Jersey bull that he had won from a rival, an
American, deeply in love with the bull; cutting him out by telegraph by
just five minutes. The latter had examined the bull in the island and had
passed on to Paris, not suspecting there would be haste to sell him.
Beauchamp, seeing the bull advertized, took him on trust, galloped to the
nearest telegraph station forthwith, and so obtained possession of him;
and the bull was now shipped on the voyage. But for this precious bull,
however, and other business, he would have been able to spend almost the
entire month with Dr. Shrapnel, he said regretfully. Miss Denham on the
contrary did not regret his active occupation. The story of his rush from
the breakfast-table to the stables, and gallop away to the station, while
the American Quaker gentleman soberly paced down a street in Paris on the
same errand, in invisible rivalry, touched her risible fancy. She was
especially pleased to think of him living in harmony with his uncle--that
strange, lofty, powerful man, who by plot or by violence punished
opposition to his will, but who must be kind at heart, as well as
forethoughtful of his nephew's good; the assurance of it being, that when
the conflict was at an end he had immediately installed him as manager of
one of his estates, to give his energy play and make him practically
useful.

The day before she left home was passed by the three in botanizing, some
miles distant from Bevisham, over sand country, marsh and meadow; Dr.
Shrapnel, deep in the science, on one side of her, and Beauchamp,
requiring instruction in the names and properties of every plant and
simple, on the other. It was a day of summer sweetness, gentle laughter,
conversation, and the happiest homeliness. The politicians uttered barely
a syllable of politics. The dinner basket was emptied heartily to make
way for herb and flower, and at night the expedition homeward was crowned
with stars along a road refreshed by mid-day thunder-showers and smelling
of the rain in the dust, past meadows keenly scenting, gardens giving out
their innermost balm and odour. Late at night they drank tea in Jenny's
own garden. They separated a little after two in the morning, when the
faded Western light still lay warm on a bow of sky, and on the level of
the East it quickened. Jenny felt sure she should long for that yesterday
when she was among foreign scenes, even among high Alps-those mysterious
eminences which seemed in her imagination to know of heaven and have the
dawn of a new life for her beyond their peaks.

Her last words when stepping into the railway carriage were to Beauchamp:
'Will you take care of him?' She flung her arms round Dr. Shrapnel's
neck, and gazed at him under troubled eyelids which seemed to be passing
in review every vision of possible harm that might come to him during her
absence; and so she continued gazing, and at no one but Dr. Shrapnel
until the bend of the line cut him from her sight. Beauchamp was a very
secondary person on that occasion, and he was unused to being so in the
society of women--unused to find himself entirely eclipsed by their
interest in another. He speculated on it, wondering at her concentrated
fervency; for he had not supposed her to possess much warmth.

After she was fairly off on her journey, Dr. Shrapnel mentioned to
Beauchamp a case of a Steynham poacher, whom he had thought it his duty
to supply with means of defence. It was a common poaching case.

Beauchamp was not surprised that Mr. Romfrey and Dr. Shrapnel should come
to a collision; the marvel was that it had never occurred before, and
Beauchamp said at once: 'Oh, my uncle Mr. Romfrey would rather see them
stand their ground than not.' He was disposed to think well of his uncle.
The Jersey bull called him away to Holdesbury.

Captain Baskelett heard of this poaching case at Steynham, where he had
to appear in person when he was in want of cheques, and the Bevisham
dinner furnished an excuse for demanding one. He would have preferred a
positive sum annually. Mr. Romfrey, however, though he wrote his cheques
out like the lord he was by nature, exacted the request for them; a
system that kept the gallant gentleman on his good behaviour, probably at
a lower cost than the regular stipend. In handing the cheque to Cecil
Baskelett, Mr. Romfrey spoke of a poacher, of an old poaching family
called the Dicketts, who wanted punishment and was to have it, but Mr.
Romfrey's local lawyer had informed him that the man Shrapnel was, as
usual, supplying the means of defence. For his own part, Mr. Romfrey
said, he had no objection to one rascal's backing another, and Shrapnel
might hit his hardest, only perhaps Nevil might somehow get mixed up in
it, and Nevil was going on quietly now--he had in fact just done
capitally in lassoing with a shot of the telegraph a splendid little
Jersey bull that a Yankee was after: and on the whole it was best to try
to keep him quiet, for he was mad about that man Shrapnel; Shrapnel was
his joss: and if legal knocks came of this business Nevil might be
thinking of interfering: 'Or he and I may be getting to exchange a lot of
shindy letters,' Mr. Romfrey said. 'Tell him I take Shrapnel just like
any other man, and don't want to hear apologies, and I don't mix him up
in it. Tell him if he likes to have an explanation from me, I'll give it
him when he comes here. You can run over to Holdesbury the morning after
your dinner.'

Captain Baskelett said he would go. He was pleased with his cheque at the
time, but hearing subsequently that Nevil was coming to Steynham to meet
Colonel Halkett and his daughter, he became displeased, considering it a
very silly commission. The more he thought of it the more ridiculous and
unworthy it appeared. He asked himself and Lord Palmet also why he should
have to go to Nevil at Holdesbury to tell him of circumstances that he
would hear of two or three days later at Steynham. There was no sense in
it. The only conclusion for him was that the scheming woman Culling had
determined to bring down every man concerned in the Bevisham election,
and particularly Mr. Romfrey, on his knees before Nevil. Holdesbury had
been placed at his disposal, and the use of the house in London, which
latter would have been extremely serviceable to Cecil as a place of
dinners to the Parliament of Great Britain in lieu of the speech-making
generally expected of Members, and not so effectively performed. One
would think the baron had grown afraid of old Nevil! He had spoken as if
he were.

Cecil railed unreservedly to Lord Palmet against that woman 'Mistress
Culling,' as it pleased him to term her, and who could be offended by his
calling her so? His fine wit revelled in bestowing titles that were at
once batteries directed upon persons he hated, and entrenchments for
himself.

At four o'clock on a sultry afternoon he sat at table with his Bevisham
supporters, and pledged them correspondingly in English hotel champagne,
sherry and claret. At seven he was rid of them, but parched and heated,
as he deserved to be, he owned, for drinking the poison. It would be a
good subject for Parliament if he could get it up, he reflected.

'And now,' said he to Palmet, 'we might be crossing over to the Club if I
hadn't to go about that stupid business to Holdesbury to-morrow morning.
We shall miss the race, or, at least, the start.'

The idea struck him: 'Ten to one old Nevil 's with Shrapnel,' and no idea
could be more natural.

'We 'll call on Shrapnel,' said Palmet. 'We shall see Jenny Denham. He
gives her out as his niece. Whatever she is she's a brimming little
beauty. I assure you, Bask, you seldom see so pretty a girl.'

Wine, which has directed men's footsteps upon more marvellous adventures,
took them to a chemist's shop for a cooling effervescent draught, and
thence through the town to the address, furnished to them by the chemist,
of Dr. Shrapnel on the common.

Bad wine, which is responsible for the fate of half the dismal bodies
hanging from trees, weltering by rocks, grovelling and bleaching round
the bedabbled mouth of the poet's Cave of Despair, had rendered Captain
Baskelett's temper extremely irascible; so when he caught sight of Dr.
Shrapnel walling in his garden, and perceived him of a giant's height,
his eyes fastened on the writer of the abominable letter with an
exultation peculiar to men having a devil inside them that kicks to be
out. The sun was low, blazing among the thicker branches of the pollard
forest trees, and through sprays of hawthorn. Dr. Shrapnel stopped,
facing the visible master of men, at the end of his walk before he turned
his back to continue the exercise and some discourse he was holding aloud
either to the heavens or bands of invisible men.

'Ahem, Dr. Shrapnel!' He was accosted twice, the second time imperiously.

He saw two gentlemen outside the garden-hedge.

'I spoke, sir,' said Captain Baskelett.

'I hear you now, sir,' said the doctor, walking in a parallel line with
them.

'I desired to know, sir, if you are Dr. Shrapnel?'

'I am.'

They arrived at the garden-gate.

'You have a charming garden, Dr. Shrapnel,' said Lord Palmet, very
affably and loudly, with a steady observation of the cottage windows.

Dr. Shrapnel flung the gate open.

Lord Palmet raised his hat and entered, crying loudly, 'A very charming
garden, upon my word!'

Captain Baskelett followed him, bowing stiffly.

'I am,' he said, 'Captain Beauchamp's cousin. I am Captain Baskelett, one
of the Members for the borough.'

The doctor said, 'Ah.'

'I wish to see Captain Beauchamp, sir. He is absent?'

'I shall have him here shortly, sir.'

'Oh, you will have him!' Cecil paused.

'Admirable roses!' exclaimed Lord Palmet.

'You have him, I think,' said Cecil, 'if what we hear is correct. I wish
to know, sir, whether the case you are conducting against his uncle is
one you have communicated to Captain Beauchamp. I repeat, I am here to
inquire if he is privy to it. You may hold family ties in contempt--Now,
sir! I request you abstain from provocations with me.'

Dr. Shrapnel had raised his head, with something of the rush of a rocket,
from the stooping posture to listen, and his frown of non-intelligence
might be interpreted as the coming on of the fury Radicals are prone to,
by a gentleman who believed in their constant disposition to explode.

Cecil made play with a pacifying hand. 'We shall arrive at no
understanding unless you are good enough to be perfectly calm. I repeat,
my cousin Captain Beauchamp is more or less at variance with his family,
owing to these doctrines of yours, and your extraordinary
Michael-Scott-the-wizard kind of spell you seem to have cast upon his
common sense as a man of the world. You have him, as you say. I do not
dispute it. I have no, doubt you have him fast. But here is a case
demanding a certain respect for decency. Pray, if I may ask you, be
still, be quiet, and hear me out if you can. I am accustomed to explain
myself to the comprehension of most men who are at large, and I tell you
candidly I am not to be deceived or diverted from my path by a show of
ignorance.'

'What is your immediate object, sir?' said Dr. Shrapnel, chagrined by the
mystification within him, and a fear that his patience was going.

'Exactly,' Cecil nodded. He was acute enough to see that he had
established the happy commencement of fretfulness in the victim, which is
equivalent to a hook well struck in the mouth of your fish, and with an
angler's joy he prepared to play his man. 'Exactly. I have stated it. And
you ask me. But I really must decline to run over the whole ground again
for you. I am here to fulfil a duty to my family; a highly disagreeable
one to me. I may fail, like the lady who came here previous to the
Election, for the result of which I am assured I ought to thank your
eminently disinterested services. I do. You recollect a lady calling on
you?'

Dr. Shrapnel consulted his memory. 'I think I have a recollection of some
lady calling.'

'Oh! you think you have a recollection of some lady calling.'

'Do you mean a lady connected with Captain Beauchamp?'

'A lady connected with Captain Beauchamp. You are not aware of the
situation of the lady?'

'If I remember, she was a kind of confidential housekeeper, some one
said, to Captain Beauchamp's uncle.'

'A kind of confidential housekeeper! She is recognized in our family as a
lady, sir. I can hardly expect better treatment at your hands than she
met with, but I do positively request you to keep your temper whilst I am
explaining my business to you. Now, sir! what now?'

A trifling breeze will set the tall tree bending, and Dr. Shrapnel did
indeed appear to display the agitation of a full-driving storm when he
was but harassed and vexed.

'Will you mention your business concisely, if you Please?' he said.

'Precisely; it is my endeavour. I supposed I had done so. To be frank, I
would advise you to summon a member of your household, wife, daughter,
housekeeper, any one you like, to whom you may appeal, and I too,
whenever your recollections are at fault.'

'I am competent,' said the doctor.

'But in justice to you,' urged Cecil considerately.

Dr. Shrapnel smoothed his chin hastily. 'Have you done?'

'Believe me, the instant I have an answer to my question, I have done.'

'Name your question.'

'Very well, sir. Now mark, I will be plain with you. There is no escape
for you from this. You destroy my cousin's professional prospects--I
request you to listen--you blast his career in the navy; it was
considered promising. He was a gallant officer and a smart seaman. Very
well. You set him up as a politician, to be knocked down, to a dead
certainty. You set him against his class; you embroil him with his family
. . .'

'On all those points,' interposed Dr. Shrapnel, after dashing a hand to
straighten his forelock; but Cecil vehemently entreated him to control
his temper.

'I say you embroil him with his family, you cause him to be in
everlasting altercation with his uncle Mr. Romfrey, materially to his
personal detriment; and the question of his family is one that every man
of sense would apprehend on the spot; for we, you should know, have, sir,
an opinion of Captain Beauchamp's talents and abilities forbidding us to
think he could possibly be the total simpleton you make him appear,
unless to the seductions of your political instructions, other seductions
were added . . . . You apprehend me, I am sure.'

'I don't,' cried the doctor, descending from his height and swinging
about forlornly.

'Oh! yes, you do; you do indeed, you cannot avoid it; you quite apprehend
me; it is admitted that you take my meaning: I insist on that. I have
nothing to say but what is complimentary of the young lady, whoever she
may turn out to be; bewitching, no doubt; and to speak frankly, Dr.
Shrapnel, I, and I am pretty certain every honest man would think with
me, I take it to be ten times more creditable to my cousin Captain
Beauchamp that he should be under a lady's influence than under yours.
Come, sir! I ask you. You must confess that a gallant officer and great
admirer of the sex does not look such a donkey if he is led in silken
strings by a beautiful creature. And mark--stop! mark this, Dr. Shrapnel:
I say, to the lady we can all excuse a good deal, and at the same time
you are to be congratulated on first-rate diplomacy in employing so
charming an agent. I wish, I really wish you did it generally, I assure
you: only, mark this--I do beg you to contain yourself for a minute, if
possible--I say, my cousin Captain Beauchamp is fair game to hunt, and
there is no law to prevent the chase, only you must not expect us to be
quiet spectators of your sport; and we have, I say, undoubtedly a right
to lay the case before the lady, and induce her to be a peace-agent in
the family if we can. Very well.'

'This garden is redolent of a lady's hand,' sighed Palmet, poetical in
his dejection.

'Have you taken too much wine, gentlemen?' said Dr. Shrapnel.

Cecil put this impertinence aside with a graceful sweep of his fingers.
'You attempt to elude me, sir.'

'Not I! You mention some lady.'

'Exactly. A young lady.'

'What is the name of the lady?'

'Oh! You ask the name of the lady. And I too. What is it? I have heard
two or three names.'

'Then you have heard villanies.'

'Denham, Jenny Denham, Miss Jenny Denham,' said Palmet, rejoiced at the
opportunity of trumpeting her name so that she should not fail to hear
it.

'I stake my reputation I have heard her called Shrapnel--Miss Shrapnel,'
said Cecil.

The doctor glanced hastily from one to the other of his visitors. 'The
young lady is my ward; I am her guardian,' he said.

Cecil pursed his mouth. 'I have heard her called your niece.'

'Niece--ward; she is a lady by birth and education, in manners,
accomplishments, and character; and she is under my protection,' cried
Dr. Shrapnel.

Cecil bowed. 'So you are for gentle birth? I forgot you are for morality
too, and for praying; exactly; I recollect. But now let me tell you,
entirely with the object of conciliation, my particular desire is to see
the young lady, in your presence of course, and endeavour to persuade
her, as I have very little doubt I shall do, assuming that you give me
fair play, to exercise her influence, on this occasion contrary to yours,
and save my cousin Captain Beauchamp from a fresh misunderstanding with
his uncle Mr. Romfrey. Now, sir; now, there!'

'You will not see Miss Denham with my sanction ever,' said Dr. Shrapnel.

'Oh! Then I perceive your policy. Mark, sir, my assumption was that the
young lady would, on hearing my representations, exert herself to heal
the breach between Captain Beauchamp and his family. You stand in the
way. You treat me as you treated the lady who came here formerly to wrest
your dupe from your clutches. If I mistake not, she saw the young lady
you acknowledge to be your ward.'

Dr. Shrapnel flashed back: 'I acknowledge? Mercy and justice! is there no
peace with the man? You walk here to me, I can't yet guess why, from a
town where I have enemies, and every scandal flies touching me and mine;
and you--' He stopped short to master his anger. He subdued it so far as
to cloak it in an attempt to speak reasoningly, as angry men sometimes
deceive themselves in doing, despite the good maxim for the
wrathful--speak not at all. 'See,' said he, 'I was never married. My dear
friend dies, and leaves me his child to protect and rear; and though she
bears her father's name, she is most wrongly and foully made to share the
blows levelled at her guardian. Ay, have at me, all of you, as much as
you will! Hold off from her. Were it true, the cowardice would be not a
whit the smaller. Why, casting a stone like that, were it the size of a
pebble and the weight of a glance, is to toss the whole cowardly world on
an innocent young girl. And why suspect evil? You talk of that lady who
paid me a visit here once, and whom I treated becomingly, I swear. I
never do otherwise. She was a handsome woman; and what was she? The
housekeeper of Captain Beauchamp's uncle. Hear me, if you please! To go
with the world, I have as good a right to suppose the worst of an
attractive lady in that situation as you regarding my ward: better
warrant for scandalizing, I think; to go with the world. But now--'

Cecil checked him, ejaculating, 'Thank you, Dr. Shrapnel; I thank you
most cordially,' with a shining smile. 'Stay, sir! no more. I take my
leave of you. Not another word. No "buts"! I recognize that conciliation
is out of the question: you are the natural protector of poachers, and
you will not grant me an interview with the young lady you call your
ward, that I may represent to her, as a person we presume to have a
chance of moving you, how easily--I am determined you shall hear me, Dr.
Shrapnel!--how easily the position of Captain Beauchamp may become
precarious with his uncle Mr. Romfrey. And let me add--"but" and "but" me
till Doomsday, sir!--if you were--I do hear you, sir, and you shall hear
me--if you were a younger man, I say, I would hold you answerable to me
for your scandalous and disgraceful insinuations.'

Dr. Shrapnel was adroitly fenced and over-shouted. He shrugged,
stuttered, swayed, wagged a bulrush-head, flapped his elbows, puffed like
a swimmer in the breakers, tried many times to expostulate, and finding
the effort useless, for his adversary was copious and commanding,
relapsed, eyeing him as an object far removed.

Cecil rounded one of his perplexingly empty sentences and turned on his
heel.

'War, then!' he said.

'As you like,' retorted the doctor.

'Oh! Very good. Good evening.' Cecil slightly lifted his hat, with the
short projection of the head of the stately peacock in its walk, and
passed out of the garden. Lord Palmet, deeply disappointed and mystified,
went after him, leaving Dr. Shrapnel to shorten his garden walk with
enormous long strides.

'I'm afraid you didn't manage the old boy,' Palmet complained. 'They're
people who have tea in their gardens; we might have sat down with them
and talked, the best friends in the world, and come again to-morrow might
have called her Jenny in a week. She didn't show her pretty nose at any
of the windows.'

His companion pooh-poohed and said: 'Foh! I'm afraid I permitted myself
to lose my self-command for a moment.'

Palmet sang out an amorous couplet to console himself. Captain Baskelett
respected the poetic art for its magical power over woman's virtue, but
he disliked hearing verses, and they were ill-suited to Palmet. He abused
his friend roundly, telling him it was contemptible to be quoting verses.
He was irritable still.

He declared himself nevertheless much refreshed by his visit to Dr.
Shrapnel. 'We shall have to sleep tonight in this unhallowed town, but I
needn't be off to Holdesbury in the morning; I've done my business. I
shall write to the baron to-night, and we can cross the water to-morrow
in time for operations.'

The letter to Mr. Romfrey was composed before midnight. It was a long
one, and when he had finished it, Cecil remembered that the act of
composition had been assisted by a cigar in his mouth, and Mr. Romfrey
detested the smell of tobacco. There was nothing to be done but to write
the letter over again, somewhat more briefly: it ran thus:

'Thinking to kill two birds at a blow, I went yesterday with Palmet after
the dinner at this place to Shrapnel's house, where, as I heard, I stood
a chance of catching friend Nevil. The young person living under the
man's protection was absent, and so was the "poor dear commander,"
perhaps attending on his bull. Shrapnel said he was expecting him. I
write to you to confess I thought myself a cleverer fellow than I am. I
talked to Shrapnel and tried hard to reason with him. I hope I can keep
my temper under ordinary circumstances. You will understand that it
required remarkable restraint when I make you acquainted with the fact
that a lady's name was introduced, which, as your representative in
relation to her, I was bound to defend from a gratuitous and scoundrelly
aspersion. Shrapnel's epistle to "brave Beauchamp" is Church
hymnification in comparison with his conversation. He is indubitably one
of the greatest ruffians of his time.

'I took the step with the best of intentions, and all I can plead is that
I am not a diplomatist of sixty. His last word was that he is for war
with us. As far as we men are concerned it is of small importance. I
should think that the sort of society he would scandalize a lady in is
not much to be feared. I have given him his warning. He tops me by about
a head, and loses his temper every two minutes. I could have drawn him
out deliciously if he had not rather disturbed mine. By this time my
equanimity is restored. The only thing I apprehend is your displeasure
with me for having gone to the man. I have done no good, and it prevents
me from running over to Holdesbury to see Nevil, for if "shindy letters,"
as you call them, are bad, shindy meetings are worse. I should be telling
him my opinion of Shrapnel, he would be firing out, I should retort, he
would yell, I should snap my fingers, and he would go into convulsions. I
am convinced that a cattle-breeder ought to keep himself particularly
calm. So unless I have further orders from you I refrain from going.

'The dinner was enthusiastic. I sat three hours among my Commons, they on
me for that length of time--fatiguing, but a duty.'

Cecil subscribed his name with the warmest affection toward his uncle.

The brevity of the second letter had not brought him nearer to the truth
in rescinding the picturesque accessories of his altercation with Dr.
Shrapnel, but it veraciously expressed the sentiments he felt, and that
was the palpable truth for him.

He posted the letter next morning.




CHAPTER XXXI

SHOWING A CHIVALROUS GENTLEMAN SET IN MOTION

About noon the day following, on board the steam-yacht of the Countess of
Menai, Cecil was very much astonished to see Mr. Romfrey descending into
a boat hard by, from Grancey Lespel's hired cutter. Steam was up, and the
countess was off for a cruise in the Channel, as it was not a race-day,
but seeing Mr. Romfrey's hand raised, she spoke to Cecil, and immediately
gave orders to wait for the boat. This lady was a fervent admirer of the
knightly gentleman, and had reason to like him, for he had once been her
champion. Mr. Romfrey mounted the steps, received her greeting, and
beckoned to Cecil. He carried a gold-headed horsewhip under his arm. Lady
Menai would gladly have persuaded him to be one of her company for the
day's voyage, but he said he had business in Bevisham, and moving aside
with Cecil, put the question to him abruptly: 'What were the words used
by Shrapnel?'

'The identical words?' Captain Baskelett asked. He could have tripped out
the words with the fluency of ancient historians relating what great
kings, ambassadors, or Generals may well have uttered on State occasions,
but if you want the identical words, who is to remember them the day
after they have been delivered? He said:

'Well, as for the identical words, I really, and I was tolerably excited,
sir, and upon my honour, the identical words are rather difficult to....'
He glanced at the horsewhip, and pricked by the sight of it to proceed,
thought it good to soften the matter if possible. 'I don't quite
recollect . . . I wrote off to you rather hastily. I think he said--but
Palmet was there.'

'Shrapnel spoke the words before Lord Palmet?' said Mr. Romfrey
austerely.

Captain Baskelett summoned Palmet to come near, and inquired of him what
he had heard Shrapnel say, suggesting: 'He spoke of a handsome woman for
a housekeeper, and all the world knew her character?'

Mr. Romfrey cleared his throat.

'Or knew she had no character,' Cecil pursued in a fit of gratified
spleen, in scorn of the woman. 'Don't you recollect his accent in
pronouncing housekeeper?'

The menacing thunder sounded from Mr. Romfrey. He was patient in
appearance, and waited for Cecil's witness to corroborate the evidence.

It happened (and here we are in one of the circles of small things
producing great consequences, which have inspired diminutive philosophers
with ironical visions of history and the littleness of man), it happened
that Lord Palmet, the humanest of young aristocrats, well-disposed toward
the entire world, especially to women, also to men in any way related to
pretty women, had just lit a cigar, and it was a cigar that he had been
recommended to try the flavour of; and though he, having his wits about
him, was fully aware that shipboard is no good place for a trial of the
delicacy of tobacco in the leaf, he had begun puffing and sniffing in a
critical spirit, and scarcely knew for the moment what to decide as to
this particular cigar. He remembered, however, Mr. Romfrey's objection to
tobacco. Imagining that he saw the expression of a profound distaste in
that gentleman's more than usually serious face, he hesitated between
casting the cigar into the water and retaining it. He decided upon the
latter course, and held the cigar behind his back, bowing to Mr. Romfrey
at about a couple of yards distance, and saying to Cecil, 'Housekeeper;
yes, I remember hearing housekeeper. I think so. Housekeeper? yes, oh
yes.'

'And handsome housekeepers were doubtful characters,' Captain Baskelett
prompted him.

Palmet laughed out a single 'Ha!' that seemed to excuse him for lounging
away to the forepart of the vessel, where he tugged at his fine specimen
of a cigar to rekindle it, and discharged it with a wry grimace, so
delicate is the flavour of that weed, and so adversely ever is it
affected by a breeze and a moist atmosphere. He could then return
undivided in his mind to Mr. Romfrey and Cecil, but the subject was not
resumed in his presence.

The Countess of Menai steamed into Bevisham to land Mr. Romfrey there. 'I
can be out in the Channel any day; it is not every day that I see you,'
she said, in support of her proposal to take him over.

They sat together conversing, apart from the rest of the company, until
they sighted Bevisham, when Mr. Romfrey stood up, and a little crowd of
men came round him to enjoy his famous racy talk. Captain Baskelett
offered to land with him. He declined companionship. Dropping her hand in
his, the countess asked him what he had to do in that town, and he
replied, 'I have to demand an apology.'

Answering the direct look of his eyes, she said, 'Oh, I shall not speak
of it.'

In his younger days, if the rumour was correct, he had done the same on
her account.

He stepped into the boat, and presently they saw him mount the
pier-steps, with the riding-whip under his arm, his head more than
commonly bent, a noticeable point in a man of his tall erect figure. The
ladies and some of the gentlemen thought he was looking particularly
grave, even sorrowful.

Lady Menai inquired of Captain Baskelett whether he knew the nature of
his uncle's business in Bevisham, the town he despised.

What could Cecil say but no? His uncle had not imparted it to him.

She was flattered in being the sole confidante, and said no more.

The sprightly ingenuity of Captain Baskelett's mind would have informed
him of the nature of his uncle's expedition, we may be sure, had he put
it to the trial; for Mr. Romfrey was as plain to read as a rudimentary
sum in arithmetic, and like the tracings of a pedigree-map his
preliminary steps to deeds were seen pointing on their issue in lines of
straight descent. But Cecil could protest that he was not bound to know,
and considering that he was neither bound to know nor to speculate, he
determined to stand on his right. So effectually did he accomplish the
task, that he was frequently surprised during the evening and the night
by the effervescence of a secret exultation rising imp-like within him,
that was, he assured himself, perfectly unaccountable.




CHAPTER XXXII

AN EFFORT TO CONQUER CECILIA IN BEAUCHAMP'S FASHION

The day after Mr. Romfrey's landing in Bevisham a full South-wester
stretched the canvas of yachts of all classes, schooner, cutter and yawl,
on the lively green water between the island and the forest shore.
Cecilia's noble schooner was sure to be out in such a ringing breeze, for
the pride of it as well as the pleasure. She landed her father at the
Club steps, and then bore away Eastward to sight a cutter race, the
breeze beginning to stiffen. Looking back against sun and wind, she saw
herself pursued by a saucy little 15-ton craft that had been in her track
since she left the Otley river before noon, dipping and straining, with
every inch of sail set; as mad a stern chase as ever was witnessed: and
who could the man at the tiller, clad cap-A-pie in tarpaulin, be? She led
him dancing away, to prove his resoluteness and laugh at him. She had the
powerful wings, and a glory in them coming of this pursuit: her triumph
was delicious, until the occasional sparkle of the tarpaulin was lost,
the small boat appeared a motionless object far behind, and all ahead of
her exceedingly dull, though the race hung there and the crowd of sail.

Cecilia's transient flutter of coquettry created by the animating air and
her queenly flight was over. She fled splendidly and she came back
graciously. But he refused her open hand, as it were. He made as if to
stand across her tack, and, reconsidering it, evidently scorned his
advantage and challenged the stately vessel for a beat up against the
wind. It was as pretty as a Court minuet. But presently Cecilia stood too
far on one tack, and returning to the centre of the channel, found
herself headed by seamanship. He waved an ironical salute with his
sou'wester. Her retort consisted in bringing her vessel to the wind, and
sending a boat for him.

She did it on the impulse; had she consulted her wishes she would rather
have seen him at his post, where he seemed in his element, facing the
spray and cunningly calculating to get wind and tide in his favour.
Partly with regret she saw him, stripped of his tarpaulin, jump into her
boat, as though she had once more to say farewell to sailor Nevil
Beauchamp; farewell the bright youth, the hero, the true servant of his
country!

That feeling of hers changed when he was on board. The stirring cordial
day had put new breath in him.

'Should not the flag be dipped?' he said, looking up at the peak, where
the white flag streamed.

'Can you really mistake compassion for defeat?' said she, with a smile.

'Oh! before the wind of course I hadn't a chance.'

'How could you be so presumptuous as to give chase? And who has lent you
that little cutter?'

Beauchamp had hired her for a month, and he praised her sailing, and
pretended to say that the race was not always to the strong in a stiff
breeze.

'But in point' of fact I was bent on trying how my boat swims, and had no
idea of overhauling you. To-day our salt-water lake is as fine as the
Mediterranean.'

'Omitting the islands and the Mediterranean colour, it is. I have often
told you how I love it. I have landed papa at the Club. Are you aware
that we meet you at Steynham the day after to-morrow?'

'Well, we can ride on the downs. The downs between three and four of a
summer's morning are as lovely as anything in the world. They have the
softest outlines imaginable . . . and remind me of a friend's upper lip
when she deigns to smile.'

'Is one to rise at that hour to behold the effect? And let me remind you
further, Nevil, that the comparison of nature's minor work beside her
mighty is an error, if you will be poetical.'

She cited a well-known instance of degradation in verse.

But a young man who happens to be intimately acquainted with a certain
'dark eye in woman' will not so lightly be brought to consider that the
comparison of tempestuous night to the flashing of those eyes of hers
topples the scene headlong from grandeur. And if Beauchamp remembered
rightly, the scene was the Alps at night.

He was prepared to contest Cecilia's judgement. At that moment the breeze
freshened and the canvas lifted from due South the yacht swung her sails
to drive toward the West, and Cecilia's face and hair came out golden in
the sunlight. Speech was difficult, admiration natural, so he sat beside
her, admiring in silence.

She said a good word for the smartness of his little yacht.

'This is my first trial of her,' said Beauchamp. 'I hired her chiefly to
give Dr. Shrapnel a taste of salt air. I 've no real right to be idling
about. His ward Miss Denham is travelling in Switzerland; the dear old
man is alone, and not quite so well as I should wish. Change of scene
will do him good. I shall land him on the French coast for a couple of
days, or take him down Channel.'

Cecilia gazed abstractedly at a passing schooner.

'He works too hard,' said Beauchamp.

'Who does?'

'Dr. Shrapnel.'

Some one else whom we have heard of works too hard, and it would be happy
for mankind if he did not.

Cecilia named the schooner; an American that had beaten our crack yachts.
Beauchamp sprang up to spy at the American.

'That's the Corinne, is she!'

Yankee craftiness on salt water always excited his respectful attention
as a spectator.

'And what is the name of your boat, Nevil?'

'The fool of an owner calls her the Petrel. It's not that I'm
superstitious, but to give a boat a name of bad augury to sailors appears
to me . . . however, I 've argued it with him and I will have her called
the Curlew. Carrying Dr. Shrapnel and me, Petrel would be thought the
proper title for her isn't that your idea?'

He laughed and she smiled, and then he became overcast with his political
face, and said, 'I hope--I believe--you will alter your opinion of him.
Can it be an opinion when it's founded on nothing? You know really
nothing of him. I have in my pocket what I believe would alter your mind
about him entirely. I do think so; and I think so because I feel you
would appreciate his deep sincerity and real nobleness.'

'Is it a talisman that you have, Nevil?'

'No, it's a letter.'

Cecilia's cheeks took fire.

'I should so much like to read it to you,' said he.

'Do not, please,' she replied with a dash of supplication in her voice.

'Not the whole of it--an extract here and there? I want you so much to
understand him.'

'I am sure I should not.'

'Let me try you!'

'Pray do not.'

'Merely to show you...'

'But, Nevil, I do not wish to understand him.'

'But you have only to listen for a few minutes, and I want you to know
what good reason I have to reverence him as a teacher and a friend.'

Cecilia looked at Beauchamp with wonder. A confused recollection of the
contents of the letter declaimed at Mount Laurels in Captain Baskelett's
absurd sing-song, surged up in her mind revoltingly. She signified a
decided negative. Something of a shudder accompanied the expression of
it.

But he as little as any member of the Romfrey blood was framed to let the
word no stand quietly opposed to him. And the no that a woman utters! It
calls for wholesome tyranny. Those old, those hoar-old duellists, Yes and
No, have rarely been better matched than in Beauchamp and Cecilia. For if
he was obstinate in attack she had great resisting power. Twice to listen
to that letter was beyond her endurance. Indeed it cast a shadow on him
and disfigured him; and when, affecting to plead, he said: 'You must
listen to it to please me, for my sake, Cecilia,' she answered: 'It is
for your sake, Nevil, I decline to.'

'Why, what do you know of it?' he exclaimed.

'I know the kind of writing it would be.'

'How do you know it?'

'I have heard of some of Dr. Shrapnel's opinions.'

'You imagine him to be subversive, intolerant, immoral, and the rest! all
that comes under your word revolutionary.'

'Possibly; but I must defend myself from hearing what I know will be
certain to annoy me.'

'But he is the reverse of immoral: and I intend to read you parts of the
letter to prove to you that he is not the man you would blame, but I, and
that if ever I am worthier . . . worthier of you, as I hope to become, it
will be owing to this admirable and good old man.'

Cecilia trembled: she was touched to the quick. Yet it was not pleasant
to her to be wooed obliquely, through Dr. Shrapnel.

She recognized the very letter, crowned with many stamps, thick with many
pages, in Beauchamp's hands.

'When you are at Steynham you will probably hear my uncle Everard's
version of this letter,' he said. 'The baron chooses to think everything
fair in war, and the letter came accidentally into his hands with the
seal broken; well, he read it. And, Cecilia, you can fancy the sort of
stuff he would make of it. Apart from that, I want you particularly to
know how much I am indebted to Dr. Shrapnel. Won't you learn to like him
a little? Won't you tolerate him?--I could almost say, for my sake! He
and I are at variance on certain points, but taking him altogether, I am
under deeper obligations to him than to any man on earth. He has found
where I bend and waver.'

'I recognize your chivalry, Nevil.'

'He has done his best to train me to be of some service. Where's the
chivalry in owning a debt? He is one of our true warriors; fearless and
blameless. I have had my heroes before. You know how I loved Robert Hall:
his death is a gap in my life. He is a light for fighting Englishmen--who
fight with the sword. But the scale of the war, the cause, and the end in
view, raise Dr. Shrapnel above the bravest I have ever had the luck to
meet. Soldiers and sailors have their excitement to keep them up to the
mark; praise and rewards. He is in his eight-and-sixtieth year, and he
has never received anything but obloquy for his pains. Half of the small
fortune he has goes in charities and subscriptions. Will that touch you?
But I think little of that, and so does he. Charity is a common duty. The
dedication of a man's life and whole mind to a cause, there's heroism. I
wish I were eloquent; I wish I could move you.'

Cecilia turned her face to him. 'I listen to you with pleasure, Nevil;
but please do not read the letter.'

'Yes; a paragraph or two I must read.'

She rose.

He was promptly by her side. 'If I say I ask you for one sign that you
care for me in some degree?'

'I have not for a moment ceased to be your friend, Nevil, since I was a
child.'

'But if you allow yourself to be so prejudiced against my best friend
that you will not hear a word of his writing, are you friendly?'

'Feminine, and obstinate,' said Cecilia.

'Give me your eyes an instant. I know you think me reckless and lawless:
now is not that true? You doubt whether, if a lady gave me her hand I
should hold to it in perfect faith. Or, perhaps not that: but you do
suspect I should be capable of every sophism under the sun to persuade a
woman to break her faith, if it suited me: supposing some passion to be
at work. Men who are open to passion have to be taught reflection before
they distinguish between the woman they should sue for love because she
would be their best mate, and the woman who has thrown a spell on them.
Now, what I beg you to let me read you in this letter is a truth nobly
stated that has gone into my blood, and changed me. It cannot fail, too,
in changeing your opinion of Dr. Shrapnel. It makes me wretched that you
should be divided from me in your ideas of him. I, you see--and I confess
I think it my chief title to honour--reverence him.'

'I regret that I am unable to utter the words of Ruth,' said Cecilia, in
a low voice. She felt rather tremulously; opposed only to the letter and
the writer of it, not at all to Beauchamp, except on account of his
idolatry of the wicked revolutionist. Far from having a sense of
opposition to Beauchamp; she pitied him for his infatuation, and in her
lofty mental serenity she warmed to him for the seeming boyishness of his
constant and extravagant worship of the man, though such an enthusiasm
cast shadows on his intellect.

He was reading a sentence of the letter.

'I hear nothing but the breeze, Nevil,' she said.

The breeze fluttered the letter-sheets: they threatened to fly. Cecilia
stepped two paces away.

'Hark; there is a military band playing on the pier,' said she. 'I am so
fond of hearing music a little off shore.'

Beauchamp consigned the letter to his pocket.

'You are not offended, Nevil?'

'Dear me, no. You haven't a mind for tonics, that's all.'

'Healthy persons rarely have,' she remarked, and asked him, smiling
softly, whether he had a mind for music.

His insensibility to music was curious, considering how impressionable he
was to verse, and to songs of birds. He listened with an oppressed look,
as to something the particular secret of which had to be reached by a
determined effort of sympathy for those whom it affected. He liked it if
she did, and said he liked it, reiterated that he liked it, clearly
trying hard to comprehend it, as unmoved by the swell and sigh of the
resonant brass as a man could be, while her romantic spirit thrilled to
it, and was bountiful in glowing visions and in tenderness.

There hung her hand. She would not have refused to yield it. The hero of
her childhood, the friend of her womanhood, and her hero still, might
have taken her with half a word.

Beauchamp was thinking: She can listen to that brass band, and she shuts
her ears to this letter:

The reading of it would have been a prelude to the opening of his heart
to her, at the same time that it vindicated his dear and honoured master,
as he called Dr. Shrapnel. To speak, without the explanation of his
previous reticence which this letter would afford, seemed useless: even
the desire to speak was absent, passion being absent.

'I see papa; he is getting into a boat with some one,' said Cecilia, and
gave orders for the yacht to stand in toward the Club steps. 'Do you
know, Nevil, the Italian common people are not so subject to the charm of
music as other races? They have more of the gift, and I think less of the
feeling. You do not hear much music in Italy. I remember in the year of
Revolution there was danger of a rising in some Austrian city, and a
colonel of a regiment commanded his band to play. The mob was put in good
humour immediately.'

'It's a soporific,' said Beauchamp.

'You would not rather have had them rise to be slaughtered?'

'Would you have them waltzed into perpetual servility?'

Cecilia hummed, and suggested: 'If one can have them happy in any way?'

'Then the day of destruction may almost be dated.'

'Nevil, your terrible view of life must be false.'

'I make it out worse to you than to any one else, because I want our
minds to be united.'

'Give me a respite now and then.'

'With all my heart. And forgive me for beating my drum. I see what others
don't see, or else I feel it more; I don't know; but it appears to me our
country needs rousing if it's to live. There 's a division between poor
and rich that you have no conception of, and it can't safely be left
unnoticed. I've done.'

He looked at her and saw tears on her under-lids.

'My dearest Cecilia!'

'Music makes me childish,' said she.

Her father was approaching in the boat. Beside him sat the Earl of
Lockrace, latterly classed among the suitors of the lady of Mount
Laurels.

A few minutes remained to Beauchamp of his lost opportunity. Instead of
seizing them with his usual promptitude, he let them slip, painfully
mindful of his treatment of her last year after the drive into Bevisham,
when she was England, and Renee holiday France.

This feeling he fervently translated into the reflection that the bride
who would bring him beauty and wealth, and her especial gift of tender
womanliness, was not yet so thoroughly mastered as to grant her husband
his just prevalence with her, or even indeed his complete independence of
action, without which life itself was not desireable.

Colonel Halkett stared at Beauchamp as if he had risen from the deep.

'Have you been in that town this morning?' was one of his first questions
to him when he stood on board.

'I came through it,' said Beauchamp, and pointed to his little cutter
labouring in the distance. 'She's mine for a month; I came from
Holdesbury to try her; and then he stated how he had danced attendance on
the schooner for a couple of hours before any notice was taken of him,
and Cecilia with her graceful humour held up his presumption to scorn.

Her father was eyeing Beauchamp narrowly, and appeared troubled.

'Did you see Mr. Romfrey yesterday, or this morning?' the colonel asked
him, mentioning that Mr. Romfrey had been somewhere about the island
yesterday, at which Beauchamp expressed astonishment, for his uncle
Everard seldom visited a yachting station.

Colonel Halkett exchanged looks with Cecilia. Hers were inquiring, and he
confirmed her side-glance at Beauchamp. She raised her brows; he nodded,
to signify that there was gravity in the case. Here the signalling
stopped short; she had to carry on a conversation with Lord Lockrace, one
of those men who betray the latent despot in an exhibition of
discontentment unless they have all a lady's hundred eyes attentive to
their discourse.

At last Beauchamp quitted the vessel.

When he was out of hearing, Colonel Halkett said to Cecilia: 'Grancey
Lespel tells me that Mr. Romfrey called on the man Shrapnel yesterday
evening at six o'clock.'

'Yes, Papa?'

'Now come and see the fittings below,' the colonel addressed Lord
Lockrace, and murmured to his daughter:

'And soundly horsewhipped him!'

Cecilia turned on the instant to gaze after Nevil Beauchamp. She could
have wept for pity. Her father's emphasis on 'soundly' declared an
approval of the deed, and she was chilled by a sickening abhorrence and
dread of the cruel brute in men, such as, awakened by she knew not what,
had haunted her for a year of her girlhood.

'And he deserved it!' the colonel pursued, on emerging from the cabin at
Lord Lockrace's heels. 'I've no doubt he richly deserved it. The writer
of that letter we heard Captain Baskelett read the other day deserves the
very worst he gets.'

'Baskelett bored the Club the other night with a letter of a Radical
fellow,' said Lord Lockrace. 'Men who write that stuff should be strung
up and whipped by the common hangman.'

'It was a private letter,' said Cecilia.

'Public or private, Miss Halkett.'

Her mind flew back to Seymour Austin for the sense of stedfastness when
she heard such language as this, which, taken in conjunction with Dr.
Shrapnel's, seemed to uncloak our Constitutional realm and show it
boiling up with the frightful elements of primitive societies.

'I suppose we are but half civilized,' she said.

'If that,' said the earl.

Colonel Halkett protested that he never could quite make out what
Radicals were driving at.

'The rents,' Lord Lockrace observed in the conclusive tone of brevity. He
did not stay very long.

The schooner was boarded subsequently by another nobleman, an Admiral of
the Fleet and ex-minister of the Whig Government, Lord Croyston, who was
a friend of Mr. Romfrey's, and thought well of Nevil Beauchamp as a
seaman and naval officer, but shook an old head over him as a politician.
He came to beg a passage across the water to his marine Lodge, an
accident having happened early in the morning to his yacht, the Lady
Violet. He was able to communicate the latest version of the
horsewhipping of Dr. Shrapnel, from which it appeared that after Mr.
Romfrey had handsomely flogged the man he flung his card on the prostrate
body, to let men know who was responsible for the act. He expected that
Mr. Romfrey would be subjected to legal proceedings. 'But if there's a
pleasure worth paying for it's the trouncing of a villain,' said he; and
he had been informed that Dr. Shrapnel was a big one. Lord Croyston's
favourite country residence was in the neighbourhood of old Mrs.
Beauchamp, on the Upper Thames. Speaking of Nevil Beauchamp a second
time, he alluded to his relations with his great-aunt, said his prospects
were bad, that she had interdicted her house to him, and was devoted to
her other great-nephew.

'And so she should be,' said Colonel Halkett. 'That's a young man who's
an Englishman without French gunpowder notions in his head. He works for
us down at the mine in Wales a good part of the year, and has tided us
over a threatening strike there: gratuitously: I can't get him to accept
anything. I can't think why he does it.'

'He'll have plenty,' said Lord Croyston, levelling his telescope to sight
the racing cutters.

Cecilia fancied she descried Nevil's Petrel, dubbed Curlew, to Eastward,
and had a faint gladness in the thought that his knowledge of his uncle
Everard's deed of violence would be deferred for another two or three
hours.

She tried to persuade her father to wait for Nevil, and invite him to
dine at Mount Laurels, and break the news to him gently. Colonel Halkett
argued that in speaking of the affair he should certainly not commiserate
the man who had got his deserts, and saying this he burst into a petty
fury against the epistle of Dr. Shrapnel, which appeared to be growing
more monstrous in proportion to his forgetfulness of the details, as
mountains gather vastness to the eye at a certain remove. Though he could
not guess the reason for Mr. Romfrey's visit to Bevisham, he was, he
said, quite prepared to maintain that Mr. Romfrey had a perfect
justification for his conduct.

Cecilia hinted at barbarism. The colonel hinted at high police duties
that gentlemen were sometimes called on to perform for the protection of
society. 'In defiance of its laws?' she asked; and he answered: 'Women
must not be judging things out of their sphere,' with the familiar accent
on 'women' which proves their inferiority. He was rarely guilty of it
toward his daughter. Evidently he had resolved to back Mr. Romfrey
blindly. That epistle of Dr. Shrapnel's merited condign punishment and
had met with it, he seemed to rejoice in saying: and this was his
abstract of the same: 'An old charlatan who tells his dupe to pray every
night of his life for the beheading of kings and princes, and scattering
of the clergy, and disbanding the army, that he and his rabble may fall
upon the wealthy, and show us numbers win; and he'll undertake to make
them moral!'

'I wish we were not going to Steynham,' said Cecilia.

'So do I. Well, no, I don't,' the colonel corrected himself, 'no; it 's
an engagement. I gave my consent so far. We shall see whether Nevil
Beauchamp's a man of any sense.'

Her heart sank. This was as much as to let her know that if Nevil broke
with his uncle, the treaty of union between the two families, which her
father submitted to entertain out of consideration for Mr. Romfrey, would
be at an end.

The wind had fallen. Entering her river, Cecilia gazed back at the smooth
broad water, and the band of golden beams flung across it from the
evening sun over the forest. No little cutter was visible. She could not
write to Nevil to bid him come and concert with her in what spirit to
encounter his uncle Everard at Steynham. And guests would be at Mount
Laurels next day; Lord Lockrace, Lord Croyston, and the Lespels; she
could not drive down to Bevisham on the chance of seeing him. Nor was it
to be acknowledged even to herself that she so greatly desired to see him
and advise him. Why not? Because she was one of the artificial creatures
called women (with the accent) who dare not be spontaneous, and cannot
act independently if they would continue to be admirable in the world's
eye, and who for that object must remain fixed on shelves, like other
marketable wares, avoiding motion to avoid shattering or tarnishing. This
is their fate, only in degree less inhuman than that of Hellenic and
Trojan princesses offered up to the Gods, or pretty slaves to the
dealers. Their artificiality is at once their bane and their source of
superior pride.

Seymour Austin might have reason for seeking to emancipate them, she
thought, and blushed in thought that she could never be learning anything
but from her own immediate sensations.

Of course it was in her power to write to Beauchamp, just as it had been
in his to speak to her, but the fire was wanting in her blood and absent
from his mood, so they were kept apart.

Her father knew as little as she what was the positive cause of Mr.
Romfrey's chastisement of Dr. Shrapnel. 'Cause enough, I don't doubt,' he
said, and cited the mephitic letter.

Cecilia was not given to suspicions, or she would have had them kindled
by a certain wilfulness in his incessant reference to the letter, and
exoneration, if not approval, of Mr. Romfrey's conduct.

How did that chivalrous gentleman justify himself for condescending to
such an extreme as the use of personal violence? Was there a possibility
of his justifying it to Nevil? She was most wretched in her reiteration
of these inquiries, for, with a heart subdued, she had still a mind whose
habit of independent judgement was not to be constrained, and while she
felt that it was only by siding with Nevil submissively and blindly in
this lamentable case that she could hope for happiness, she foresaw the
likelihood of her not being able to do so as much as he would desire and
demand. This she took for the protest of her pure reason. In reality,
grieved though she was on account of that Dr. Shrapnel, her captive heart
resented the anticipated challenge to her to espouse his cause or
languish.




CHAPTER XXXIII

THE FIRST ENCOUNTER AT STEYNHAM

The judge pronouncing sentence of condemnation on the criminal is
proverbially a sorrowfully-minded man; and still more would he be so had
he to undertake the part of executioner as well. This is equivalent to
saying that the simple pleasures are no longer with us; it must be a
personal enemy now to give us any satisfaction in chastising and slaying.
Perhaps by-and-by that will be savourless: we degenerate. There is,
nevertheless, ever (and let nature be praised for it) a strong
sustainment in the dutiful exertion of our physical energies, and Mr.
Everard Romfrey experienced it after he had fulfilled his double office
on the person of Dr. Shrapnel by carrying out his own decree. His
conscience approved him cheerlessly, as it is the habit of that secret
monitor to do when we have no particular advantage coming of the act we
have performed; but the righteous labour of his arm gave him high
breathing and an appetite.

He foresaw that he and Nevil would soon be having a wrestle over the
matter, hand and thigh; but a gentleman in the right engaged with a
fellow in the wrong has nothing to apprehend; is, in fact, in the
position of a game-preserver with a poacher. The nearest approach to
gratification in that day's work which Mr. Romfrey knew was offered by
the picture of Nevil's lamentable attitude above his dirty idol. He
conceived it in the mock-mediaeval style of our caricaturists:--Shrapnel
stretched at his length, half a league, in slashed yellows and blacks,
with his bauble beside him, and prodigious pointed toes; Nevil in
parti-coloured tights, on one leg, raising his fists in imprecation to a
nose in the firmament.

Gentlemen of an unpractised imaginative capacity cannot vision for
themselves exactly what they would, being unable to exercise authority
over the proportions and the hues of the objects they conceive, which are
very much at the mercy of their sportive caprices; and the state of mind
of Mr. Romfrey is not to be judged by his ridiculous view of the pair. In
the abstract he could be sorry for Shrapnel. As he knew himself
magnanimous, he promised himself to be forbearing with Nevil.

Moreover, the month of September was drawing nigh; he had plenty to think
of. The entire land (signifying all but all of those who occupy the
situation of thinkers in it) may be said to have been exhaling the same
thought in connection with September. Our England holds possession of a
considerable portion of the globe, and it keeps the world in awe to see
her bestowing so considerable a portion of her intelligence upon her
recreations. To prosecute them with her whole heart is an ingenious
exhibition of her power. Mr. Romfrey was of those who said to his
countrymen, 'Go yachting; go cricketing; go boat-racing; go shooting; go
horseracing, nine months of the year, while the other Europeans go
marching and drilling.' Those occupations he considered good for us; and
our much talking, writing, and thinking about them characteristic, and
therefore good. And he was not one of those who do penance for that
sweating indolence in the fits of desperate panic. Beauchamp's argument
that the rich idler begets the idling vagabond, the rich wagerer the
brutal swindler, the general thirst for a mad round of recreation a
generally-increasing disposition to avoid serious work, and the unbraced
moral tone of the country an indifference to national responsibility (an
argument doubtless extracted from Shrapnel, talk tall as the very
demagogue when he stood upright), Mr. Romfrey laughed at scornfully,
affirming that our manufactures could take care of themselves. As for
invasion, we are circled by the sea. Providence has done that for us, and
may be relied on to do more in an emergency.--The children of wealth and
the children of the sun alike believe that Providence is for them, and it
would seem that the former can do without it less than the latter, though
the former are less inclined to give it personification.

This year, however, the array of armaments on the Continent made Mr.
Romfrey anxious about our navy. Almost his first topic in welcoming
Colonel Halkett and Cecilia to Steynham was the rottenness of navy
administration; for if Providence is to do anything for us it must have a
sea-worthy fleet for the operation. How loudly would his contemptuous
laughter have repudiated the charge that he trusted to supernatural
agency for assistance in case of need! But so it was: and he owned to
believing in English luck. Partly of course he meant that steady fire of
combat which his countrymen have got heated to of old till fortune
blessed them.

'Nevil is not here?' the colonel asked.

'No, I suspect he's gruelling and plastering a doctor of his
acquaintance,' Mr. Romfrey said, with his nasal laugh composed of scorn
and resignation.

'Yes, yes, I've heard,' said Colonel Halkett hastily.

He would have liked to be informed of Dr. Shrapnel's particular offence:
he mentioned the execrable letter.

Mr. Romfrey complacently interjected: 'Drug-vomit!' and after an
interval: 'Gallows!'

'That man has done Nevil Beauchamp a world of mischief, Romfrey.'

'We'll hope for a cure, colonel.'

'Did the man come across you?'

'He did.'

Mr. Romfrey was mute on the subject. Colonel Halkett abstained from
pushing his inquiries.

Cecilia could only tell her father when they were alone in the
drawing-room a few minutes before dinner that Mrs. Culling was entirely
ignorant of any cause to which Nevil's absence might be attributed.

'Mr. Romfrey had good cause,' the colonel said, emphatically.

He repeated it next day, without being a bit wiser of the cause.

Cecilia's happiness or hope was too sensitive to allow of a beloved
father's deceiving her in his opposition to it.

She saw clearly now that he had fastened on this miserable incident,
expecting an imbroglio that would divide Nevil and his uncle, and be an
excuse for dividing her and Nevil. O for the passionate will to make head
against what appeared as a fate in this matter! She had it not.

Mr. and Mrs. Wardour-Devereux, Sir John and Lady Baskelett, and the
Countess of Welshpool, another sister of Mr. Romfrey's, arrived at
Steynham for a day and a night. Lady Baskelett and Lady Welshpool came to
see their brother, not to countenance his household; and Mr.
Wardour-Devereux could not stay longer than a certain number of hours
under a roof where tobacco was in evil odour. From her friend Louise, his
wife, Cecilia learnt that Mr. Lydiard had been summoned to Dr. Shrapnel's
bedside, as Mrs. Devereux knew by a letter she had received from Mr.
Lydiard, who was no political devotee of that man, she assured Cecilia,
but had an extraordinary admiration for the Miss Denham living with him.
This was kindly intended to imply that Beauchamp was released from his
attendance on Dr. Shrapnel, and also that it was not he whom the Miss
Denham attracted.

'She is in Switzerland,' said Cecilia.

'She is better there,' said Mrs. Devereux.

Mr. Stukely Culbrett succeeded to these visitors. He heard of the case of
Dr. Shrapnel from Colonel Halkett, and of Beauchamp's missing of his
chance with the heiress from Mr. Romfrey.

Rosamund Culling was in great perplexity about Beauchamp's prolonged
absence; for he had engaged to come, he had written to her to say he
would be sure to come; and she feared he was ill. She would have
persuaded Mr. Culbrett to go down to Bevisham to see him: she declared
that she could even persuade herself to call on Dr. Shrapnel a second
time, in spite of her horror of the man. Her anger at the thought of his
keeping Nevil away from good fortune and happiness caused her to speak in
resentment and loathing of the man.

'He behaved badly when you saw him, did he?' said Stukely.

'Badly, is no word. He is detestable,' Rosamund replied.

'You think he ought to be whipped?'

She feigned an extremity of vindictiveness, and twisted her brows in
comic apology for the unfeminine sentiment, as she said: 'I really do.'

The feminine gentleness of her character was known to Stukely, so she
could afford to exaggerate the expression of her anger, and she did not
modify it, forgetful that a woman is the representative of the sex with
cynical men, and escapes from contempt at the cost of her sisterhood.

Looking out of an upper window in the afternoon she beheld Nevil
Beauchamp in a group with his uncle Everard, the colonel and Cecilia, and
Mr. Culbrett. Nevil was on his feet; the others were seated under the
great tulip-tree on the lawn.

A little observation of them warned her that something was wrong. There
was a vacant chair; Nevil took it in his hand at times, stamped it to the
ground, walked away and sharply back fronting his uncle, speaking
vehemently, she perceived, and vainly, as she judged by the cast of his
uncle's figure. Mr. Romfrey's head was bent, and wagged slightly, as he
screwed his brows up and shot his eyes, queerly at the agitated young
man. Colonel Halkett's arms crossed his chest. Cecilia's eyelids drooped
their, lashes. Mr. Culbrett was balancing on the hind-legs of his chair.
No one appeared to be speaking but Nevil.

It became evident that Nevil was putting a series of questions to his
uncle. Mechanical nods were given him in reply.

Presently Mr. Romfrey rose, thundering out a word or two, without a
gesture.

Colonel Halkett rose.

Nevil flung his hand out straight to the house.

Mr. Romfrey seemed to consent; the colonel shook his head: Nevil
insisted.

A footman carrying a tea-tray to Miss Halkett received some commission
and swiftly disappeared, making Rosamund wonder whether sugar, milk or
cream had been omitted.

She met him on the first landing, and heard that Mr. Romfrey requested
her to step out on the lawn.

Expecting to hear of a piece of misconduct on the part of the household
servants, she hurried forth, and found that she had to traverse the whole
space of the lawn up to the tuliptree. Colonel Halkett and Mr. Romfrey
had resumed their seats. The colonel stood up and bowed to her.

Mr. Romfrey said: 'One question to you, ma'am, and you shall not be
detained. Did not that man Shrapnel grossly insult you on the day you
called on him to see Captain Beauchamp about a couple of months before
the Election?'

'Look at me when you speak, ma'am,' said Beauchamp.

Rosamund looked at him.

The whiteness of his face paralyzed her tongue. A dreadful levelling of
his eyes penetrated and chilled her. Instead of thinking of her answer
she thought of what could possibly have happened.

'Did he insult you at all, ma'am?' said Beauchamp.

Mr. Romfrey reminded him that he was not a cross-examining criminal
barrister.

They waited for her to speak.

She hesitated, coloured, betrayed confusion; her senses telling her of a
catastrophe, her conscience accusing her as the origin of it.

'Did Dr. Shrapnel, to your belief, intentionally hurt your feelings or
your dignity?' said Beauchamp, and made the answer easier:

'Not intentionally, surely: not . . . I certainly do not accuse him.'

'Can you tell me you feel that he wounded you in the smallest degree? And
if so, how? I ask you this, because he is anxious, if he lives, to
apologize to you for any offence that he may have been guilty of: he was
ignorant of it. I have his word for that, and his commands to me to bear
it to you. I may tell you I have never known him injure the most feeble
thing--anything alive, or wish to.'

Beauchamp's voice choked. Rosamund saw tears leap out of the stern face
of her dearest now in wrath with her.

'Is he ill?' she faltered.

'He is. You own to a strong dislike of him, do you not?'

'But not to desire any harm to him.'

'Not a whipping,' Mr. Culbrett murmured.

Everard Romfrey overheard it.

He had allowed Mrs. Culling to be sent for, that she might with a bare
affirmative silence Nevil, when his conduct was becoming intolerable
before the guests of the house.

'That will do, ma'am,' he dismissed her.

Beauchamp would not let her depart.

'I must have your distinct reply, and in Mr. Romfrey's presence:--say,
that if you accused him you were mistaken, or that they were mistaken who
supposed you had accused him. I must have the answer before you go.'

'Sir, will you learn manners!' Mr. Romfrey said to him, with a rattle of
the throat.

Beauchamp turned his face from-her.

Colonel Halkett offered her his arm to lead her away.

'What is it? Oh, what is it?' she whispered, scarcely able to walk, but
declining the colonel's arm.

'You ought not to have been dragged out here,' said he. 'Any one might
have known there would be no convincing of Captain Beauchamp. That old
rascal in Bevisham has been having a beating; that's all. And a very
beautiful day it is!--a little too hot, though. Before we leave, you must
give me a lesson or two in gardening.'

'Dr. Shrapnel--Mr. Romfrey!' said Rosamund half audibly under the
oppression of the more she saw than what she said.

The colonel talked of her renown in landscape-gardening. He added
casually: 'They met the other day.'

'By accident?'

'By chance, I suppose. Shrapnel defends one of your Steynham poaching
vermin.'

'Mr. Romfrey struck him?--for that? Oh, never!' Rosamund exclaimed.

'I suppose he had a long account to settle.'

She fetched her breath painfully. 'I shall never be forgiven.'

'And I say that a gentleman has no business with idols,' the colonel
fumed as he spoke. 'Those letters of Shrapnel to Nevil Beauchamp are a
scandal on the name of Englishman.'

'You have read that shocking one, Colonel Halkett?'

'Captain Baskelett read it out to us.'

'He? Oh! then . . .' She stopped:--Then the author of this mischief is
clear to me! her divining hatred of Cecil would have said, but her humble
position did not warrant such speech. A consideration of the lowliness
necessitating this restraint at a moment when loudly to denounce
another's infamy with triumphant insight would have solaced and supported
her, kept Rosamund dumb.

She could not bear to think of her part in the mischief.

She was not bound to think of it, knowing actually nothing of the
occurrence.

Still she felt that she was on her trial. She detected herself running in
and out of her nature to fortify it against accusations rather than
cleanse it for inspection. It was narrowing in her own sight. The
prospect of her having to submit to a further interrogatory, shut it up
entrenched in the declaration that Dr. Shrapnel had so far outraged her
sentiments as to be said to have offended her: not insulted, perhaps, but
certainly offended.

And this was a generous distinction. It was generous; and, having
recognized the generosity, she was unable to go beyond it.

She was presently making the distinction to Miss Halkett. The colonel had
left her at the door of the house: Miss Halkett sought admission to her
private room on an errand of condolence, for she had sympathized with her
very much in the semi-indignity Nevil had forced her to undergo: and very
little indeed had she been able to sympathize with Nevil, who had been
guilty of the serious fault of allowing himself to appear moved by his
own commonplace utterances; or, in other words, the theme being hostile
to his audience, he had betrayed emotion over it without first evoking
the spirit of pathos.

'As for me,' Rosamund replied, to some comforting remarks of Miss
Halkett's, 'I do not understand why I should be mixed up in Dr.
Shrapnel's misfortunes: I really am quite unable to recollect his words
to me or his behaviour: I have only a positive impression that I left his
house, where I had gone to see Captain Beauchamp, in utter disgust, so
repelled by his language that I could hardly trust myself to speak of the
man to Mr. Romfrey when he questioned me. I did not volunteer it. I am
ready to say that I believe Dr. Shrapnel did not intend to be insulting.
I cannot say that he was not offensive.

You know, Miss Halkett, I would willingly, gladly have saved him from
anything like punishment.'

'You are too gentle to have thought of it,' said Cecilia.

'But I shall never be forgiven by Captain Beauchamp. I see in his eyes
that he accuses me and despises me.'

'He will not be so unjust, Mrs. Culling.'

Rosamund begged that she might hear what Nevil had first said on his
arrival.

Cecilia related that they had seen him walking swiftly across the park,
and that Mr. Romfrey had hailed him, and held his hand out; and that
Captain Beauchamp had overlooked it, saying he feared Mr. Romfrey's work
was complete. He had taken her father's hand and hers and his touch was
like ice.

'His worship of that Dr. Shrapnel is extraordinary,' quoth Rosamund. 'And
how did Mr. Romfrey behave to him?'

'My father thinks, very forbearingly.'

Rosamund sighed and made a semblance of wringing her hands. 'It seems to
me that I anticipated ever since I heard of the man . . . or at least
ever since I saw him and heard him, he would be the evil genius of us
all: if I dare include myself. But I am not permitted to escape! And,
Miss Halkett, can you tell me how it was that my name--that I became
involved? I cannot imagine the circumstances which would bring me forward
in this unhappy affair.'

Cecilia replied: 'The occasion was, that Captain Beauchamp so scornfully
contrasted the sort of injury done by Dr. Shrapnel's defence of a poacher
on his uncle's estate, with the severe chastisement inflicted by Mr.
Romfrey in revenge for it. He would not leave the subject.'

'I see him--see his eyes!' cried Rosamund, her bosom heaving and sinking
deep, as her conscience quavered within her. 'At last Mr. Romfrey
mentioned me?'

'He stood up and said you had been personally insulted by Dr. Shrapnel.'

Rosamund meditated in a distressing doubt of her conscientious
truthfulness.

'Captain Beauchamp will be coming to me; and how can I answer him? Heaven
knows I would have shielded the poor man, if possible--poor wretch!
Wicked though he is, one has only to hear of him suffering! But what can
I answer? I do recollect now that Mr. Romfrey compelled me from question
to question to confess that the man had vexed me. Insulted, I never said.
At the worst, I said vexed. I would not have said insulted, or even
offended, because Mr. Romfrey . . . ah! we know him. What I did say, I
forget. I have no guide to what I said but my present feelings, and they
are pity for the unfortunate man much more than dislike.--Well, I must go
through the scene with Nevil!' Rosamund concluded her outcry of
ostensible exculpation.

She asked in a cooler moment how it was that Captain Beauchamp had so far
forgotten himself as to burst out on his uncle before the guests of the
house. It appeared that he had wished his uncle to withdraw with him, and
Mr. Romfrey had bidden him postpone private communications. Rosamund
gathered from one or two words of Cecilia's that Mr. Romfrey, until
finally stung by Nevil, had indulged in his best-humoured banter.




CHAPTER XXXIV

THE FACE OF RENEE

Shortly before the ringing of the dinner-bell Rosamund knocked at
Beauchamp's dressing-room door, the bearer of a telegram from Bevisham.
He read it in one swift run of the eyes, and said: 'Come in, ma'am, I
have something for you. Madame de Rouaillout sends you this.'

Rosamund saw her name written in a French hand on the back of the card.

'You stay with us, Nevil?'

'To-night and to-morrow, perhaps. The danger seems to be over.'

'Has Dr. Shrapnel been in danger?'

'He has. If it's quite over now!'

'I declare to you, Nevil . . .'

'Listen to me, ma'am; I'm in the dark about this murderous business:--an
old man, defenceless, harmless as a child!--but I know this, that you are
somewhere in it.'

'Nevil, do you not guess at some one else?'

'He! yes, he! But Cecil Baskelett led no blind man to Dr. Shrapnel's
gate.'

'Nevil, as I live, I knew nothing of it!'

'No, but you set fire to the train. You hated the old man, and you taught
Mr. Romfrey to think that you had been insulted. I see it all. Now you
must have the courage to tell him of your error. There's no other course
for you. I mean to take Mr. Romfrey to Dr. Shrapnel, to save the honour
of our family, as far as it can be saved.'

'What? Nevil!' exclaimed Rosamund, gaping.

'It seems little enough, ma'am. But he must go. I will have the apology
spoken, and man to man.'

'But you would never tell your uncle that?'

He laughed in his uncle's manner.

'But, Nevil, my dearest, forgive me, I think of you--why are the Halketts
here? It is not entirely with Colonel Halkett's consent. It is your
uncle's influence with him that gives you your chance. Do you not care to
avail yourself of it? Ever since he heard Dr. Shrapnel's letter to you,
Colonel Halkett has, I am sure, been tempted to confound you with him in
his mind: ah! Nevil, but recollect that it is only Mr. Romfrey who can
help to give you your Cecilia. There is no dispensing with him. Postpone
your attempt to humiliate--I mean, that is, Oh! Nevil, whatever you
intend to do to overcome your uncle, trust to time, be friends with him;
be a little worldly! for her sake! to ensure her happiness!'

Beauchamp obtained the information that his cousin Cecil had read out the
letter of Dr. Shrapnel at Mount Laurels.

The bell rang.

'Do you imagine I should sit at my uncle's table if I did not intend to
force him to repair the wrong he has done to himself and to us?' he said.

'Oh! Nevil, do you not see Captain Baskelett at work here?'

'What amends can Cecil Baskelett make? My uncle is a man of honour: it is
in his power. There, I leave you to speak to him; you will do it
to-night, after we break up in the drawing-room.'

Rosamund groaned: 'An apology to Dr. Shrapnel from Mr. Romfrey! It is an
impossibility, Nevil! utter!'

'So you say to sit idle: but do as I tell you.'

He went downstairs.

He had barely reproached her. She wondered at that; and then remembered
his alien sad half-smile in quitting the room.

Rosamund would not present herself at her lord's dinner-table when there
were any guests at Steynham. She prepared to receive Miss Halkett in the
drawing-room, as the guests of the house this evening chanced to be her
friends.

Madame de Rouaillout's present to her was a photograph of M. de Croisnel,
his daughter and son in a group. Rosamund could not bear to look at the
face of Renee, and she put it out of sight. But she had looked. She was
reduced to look again.

Roland stood beside his father's chair; Renee sat at his feet, clasping
his right hand. M. de Croisnel's fallen eyelids and unshorn white chin
told the story of the family reunion. He was dying: his two children were
nursing him to the end.

Decidedly Cecilia was a more beautiful woman than Renee: but on which
does the eye linger longest--which draws the heart? a radiant landscape,
where the tall ripe wheat flashes between shadow and shine in the stately
march of Summer, or the peep into dewy woodland on to dark water?

Dark-eyed Renee was not beauty but attraction; she touched the double
chords within us which are we know not whether harmony or discord, but a
divine discord if an uncertified harmony, memorable beyond plain
sweetness or majesty. There are touches of bliss in anguish that
superhumanize bliss, touches of mystery in simplicity, of the eternal in
the variable. These two chords of poignant antiphony she struck
throughout the range of the hearts of men, and strangely intervolved them
in vibrating unison. Only to look at her face, without hearing her voice,
without the charm of her speech, was to feel it. On Cecilia's entering
the drawing-room sofa, while the gentlemen drank claret, Rosamund handed
her the card of the photographic artist of Tours, mentioning no names.

'I should say the portrait is correct. A want of spirituality,' Rosamund
said critically, using one of the insular commonplaces, after that manner
of fastening upon what there is not in a piece of Art or nature.

Cecilia's avidity to see and study the face preserved her at a higher
mark.

She knew the person instantly; had no occasion to ask who this was. She
sat over the portrait blushing burningly: 'And that is a brother?' she
said.

'That is her brother Roland, and very like her, except in complexion,'
said Rosamund.

Cecilia murmured of a general resemblance in the features. Renee
enchained her. Though but a sun-shadow, the vividness of this French face
came out surprisingly; air was in the nostrils and speech flew from the
tremulous mouth. The eyes? were they quivering with internal light, or
were they set to seem so in the sensitive strange curves of the eyelids
whose awakened lashes appeared to tremble on some borderland between
lustreful significance and the mists? She caught at the nerves like
certain aoristic combinations in music, like tones of a stringed
instrument swept by the wind, enticing, unseizable. Yet she sat there at
her father's feet gazing out into the world indifferent to spectators,
indifferent even to the common sentiment of gracefulness. Her left hand
clasped his right, and she supported herself on the floor with the other
hand leaning away from him, to the destruction of conventional symmetry
in the picture. None but a woman of consummate breeding dared have done
as she did. It was not Southern suppleness that saved her from the charge
of harsh audacity, but something of the kind of genius in her mood which
has hurried the greater poets of sound and speech to impose their
naturalness upon accepted laws, or show the laws to have been our meagre
limitations.

The writer in this country will, however, be made safest, and the
excellent body of self-appointed thongmen, who walk up and down our ranks
flapping their leathern straps to terrorize us from experiments in
imagery, will best be satisfied, by the statement that she was
indescribable: a term that exacts no labour of mind from him or from
them, for it flows off the pen as readily as it fills a vacuum.

That posture of Renee displeased Cecilia and fascinated her. In an
exhibition of paintings she would have passed by it in pure displeasure:
but here was Nevil's first love, the woman who loved him; and she was
French. After a continued study of her Cecilia's growing jealousy
betrayed itself in a conscious rivalry of race, coming to the admission
that Englishwomen cannot fling themselves about on the floor without
agonizing the graces: possibly, too, they cannot look singularly without
risks in the direction of slyness and brazen archness; or talk animatedly
without dipping in slang. Conventional situations preserve them and
interchange dignity with them; still life befits them; pre-eminently that
judicial seat from which in briefest speech they deliver their judgements
upon their foreign sisters. Jealousy it was that plucked Cecilia from her
majestic place and caused her to envy in Renee things she would otherwise
have disapproved.

At last she had seen the French lady's likeness! The effect of it was a
horrid trouble in Cecilia's cool blood, abasement, a sense of eclipse,
hardly any sense of deserving worthiness: 'What am I but an heiress!'
Nevil had once called her beautiful; his praise had given her beauty. But
what is beauty when it is outshone! Ask the owners of gems. You think
them rich; they are pining.

Then, too, this Renee, who looked electrical in repose, might really love
Nevil with a love that sent her heart out to him in his enterprises,
justifying and adoring him, piercing to the hero in his very thoughts.
Would she not see that his championship of the unfortunate man Dr.
Shrapnel was heroic?

Cecilia surrendered the card to Rosamund, and it was out of sight when
Beauchamp stepped in the drawing-room. His cheeks were flushed; he had
been one against three for the better part of an hour.

'Are you going to show me the downs to-morrow morning?' Cecilia said to
him; and he replied, 'You will have to be up early.'

'What's that?' asked the colonel, at Beauchamp's heels.

He was volunteering to join the party of two for the early morning's ride
to the downs. Mr. Romfrey pressed his shoulder, saying, 'There's no third
horse can do it in my stables.'

Colonel Halkett turned to him.

'I had your promise to come over the kennels with me and see how I treat
a cry of mad dog, which is ninety-nine times out of a hundred mad fool
man,' Mr. Romfrey added.

By that the colonel knew he meant to stand by Nevil still and offer him
his chance of winning Cecilia.

Having pledged his word not to interfere, Colonel Halkett submitted, and
muttered, 'Ah! the kennels.' Considering however what he had been
witnessing of Nevil's behaviour to his uncle, the colonel was amazed at
Mr. Romfrey's magnanimity in not cutting him off and disowning him.

'Why the downs?' he said.

'Why the deuce, colonel?' A question quite as reasonable, and Mr. Romfrey
laughed under his breath. To relieve an uncertainty in Cecilia's face,
that might soon have become confusion, he described the downs fronting
the paleness of earliest dawn, and then their arch and curve and dip
against the pearly grey of the half-glow; and then, among their hollows,
lo, the illumination of the East all around, and up and away, and a
gallop for miles along the turfy thymy rolling billows, land to left, sea
to right, below you. 'It's the nearest hit to wings we can make,
Cecilia.' He surprised her with her Christian name, which kindled in her
the secret of something he expected from that ride on the downs. Compare
you the Alps with them? If you could jump on the back of an eagle, you
might. The Alps have height. But the downs have swiftness. Those long
stretching lines of the downs are greyhounds in full career. To look at
them is to set the blood racing! Speed is on the downs, glorious motion,
odorous air of sea and herb, exquisite as in the isles of Greece. And the
Continental travelling ninnies leave England for health!--run off and
forth from the downs to the steamboat, the railway, the steaming hotel,
the tourist's shivering mountain-top, in search of sensations! There on
the downs the finest and liveliest are at their bidding ready to fly
through them like hosts of angels.

He spoke somewhat in that strain, either to relieve Cecilia or prepare
the road for Nevil, not in his ordinary style; on the contrary, with a
swing of enthusiasm that seemed to spring of ancient heartfelt fervours.
And indeed soon afterward he was telling her that there on those downs,
in full view of Steynham, he and his wife had first joined hands.

Beauchamp sat silent. Mr. Romfrey despatched orders to the stables, and
Rosamund to the kitchen. Cecilia was rather dismayed by the formal
preparations for the ride. She declined the early cup of coffee. Mr.
Romfrey begged her to take it. 'Who knows the hour when you 'll be back?'
he said. Beauchamp said nothing.

The room grew insufferable to Cecilia. She would have liked to be wafted
to her chamber in a veil, so shamefully unveiled did she seem to be. But
the French lady would have been happy in her place! Her father kissed her
as fathers do when they hand the bride into the travelling-carriage. His
'Good-night, my darling!' was in the voice of a soldier on duty. For a
concluding sign that her dim apprehensions pointed correctly, Mr. Romfrey
kissed her on the forehead. She could not understand how it had come to
pass that she found herself suddenly on this incline, precipitated
whither she would fain be going, only less hurriedly, less openly, and
with her secret merely peeping, like a dove in the breast.




CHAPTER XXXV

THE RIDE IN THE WRONG DIRECTION

That pure opaque of the line of downs ran luminously edged against the
pearly morning sky, with its dark landward face crepusculine yet clear in
every combe, every dotting copse and furze-bush, every wavy fall, and the
ripple, crease, and rill-like descent of the turf. Beauty of darkness was
there, as well as beauty of light above.

Beauchamp and Cecilia rode forth before the sun was over the line, while
the West and North-west sides of the rolling downs were stamped with such
firmness of dusky feature as you see on the indentations of a shield of
tarnished silver. The mounting of the sun behind threw an obscurer gloom,
and gradually a black mask overcame them, until the rays shot among their
folds and windings, and shadows rich as the black pansy, steady as on a
dialplate rounded with the hour.

Mr. Everard Romfrey embraced this view from Steynham windows, and loved
it. The lengths of gigantic 'greyhound backs' coursing along the South
were his vision of delight; no image of repose for him, but of the life
in swiftness. He had known them when the great bird of the downs was not
a mere tradition, and though he owned conscientiously to never having
beheld the bird, a certain mystery of holiness hung about the region
where the bird had been in his time. There, too, with a timely word he
had gained a wealthy and good wife. He had now sent Nevil to do the same.

This astute gentleman had caught at the idea of a ride of the young
couple to the downs with his customary alacrity of perception as being
the very best arrangement for hurrying them to the point. At Steynham
Nevil was sure to be howling all day over his tumbled joss Shrapnel. Once
away in the heart of the downs, and Cecilia beside him, it was a matter
of calculation that two or three hours of the sharpening air would screw
his human nature to the pitch. In fact, unless each of them was
reluctant, they could hardly return unbetrothed. Cecilia's consent was
foreshadowed by her submission in going: Mr. Romfrey had noticed her
fright at the suggestive formalities he cast round the expedition, and
felt sure of her. Taking Nevil for a man who could smell the perfume of a
ripe affirmative on the sweetest of lips, he was pretty well sure of him
likewise. And then a truce to all that Radical rageing and hot-pokering
of the country! and lie in peace, old Shrapnel! and get on your legs when
you can, and offend no more; especially be mindful not to let fly one
word against a woman! With Cecilia for wife, and a year of marriage
devoted to a son and heir, Nevil might be expected to resume his duties
as a naval officer, and win an honourable name for the inheritance of the
young one he kissed.

There was benevolence in these previsions of Mr. Romfrey, proving how
good it is for us to bow to despotic authority, if only we will bring
ourselves unquestioningly to accept the previous deeds of the directing
hand.

Colonel Halkett gave up his daughter for lost when she did not appear at
the breakfast-table: for yet more decidedly lost when the luncheon saw
her empty place; and as time drew on toward the dinner-hour, he began to
think her lost beyond hope, embarked for good and all with the madbrain.
Some little hope of a dissension between the pair, arising from the
natural antagonism of her strong sense to Nevil's extravagance, had
buoyed him until it was evident that they must have alighted at an inn to
eat, which signified that they had overleaped the world and its hurdles,
and were as dreamy a leash of lovers as ever made a dreamland of hard
earth. The downs looked like dreamland through the long afternoon. They
shone as in a veil of silk-softly fair, softly dark. No spot of harshness
was on them save where a quarry South-westward gaped at the evening sun.

Red light struck into that round chalk maw, and the green slopes and
channels and half-circle hollows were brought a mile-stride higher
Steynham by the level beams.

The poor old colonel fell to a more frequent repetition of the 'Well!'
with which he had been unconsciously expressing his perplexed mind in the
kennels and through the covers during the day. None of the gentlemen went
to dress. Mr. Culbrett was indoors conversing with Rosamund Culling.

'What's come to them?' the colonel asked of Mr. Romfrey, who said
shrugging, 'Something wrong with one of the horses.' It had happened to
him on one occasion to set foot in the hole of a baked hedgehog that had
furnished a repast, not without succulence, to some shepherd of the
downs. Such a case might have recurred; it was more likely to cause an
upset at a walk than at a gallop: or perhaps a shoe had been cast; and
young people break no bones at a walking fall; ten to one if they do at
their top speed. Horses manage to kill their seniors for them: the young
are exempt from accident.

Colonel Halkett nodded and sighed: 'I daresay they're safe. It's that man
Shrapnel's letter--that letter, Romfrey! A private letter, I know; but
I've not heard Nevil disown the opinions expressed in it. I submit. It's
no use resisting. I treat my daughter as a woman capable of judging for
herself. I repeat, I submit. I haven't a word against Nevil except on the
score of his politics. I like him. All I have to say is, I don't approve
of a republican and a sceptic for my son-in-law. I yield to you, and my
daughter, if she . . . !'

'I think she does, colonel. Marriage 'll cure the fellow. Nevil will
slough his craze. Off! old coat. Cissy will drive him in strings. "My
wife!" I hear him.' Mr. Romfrey laughed quietly. 'It's all "my country,"
now. The dog'll be uxorious. He wants fixing; nothing worse.'

'How he goes on about Shrapnel!'

'I shouldn't think much of him if he didn't.'

'You're one in a thousand, Romfrey. I object to seeing a man worshipped.'

'It's Nevil's green-sickness, and Shrapnel's the god of it.'

'I trust to heaven you're right. It seems to me young fellows ought to be
out of it earlier.'

'They generally are.' Mr. Romfrey named some of the processes by which
they are relieved of brain-flightiness, adding philosophically, 'This way
or that.'

His quick ear caught a sound of hoofs cantering down the avenue on the
Northern front of the house.

He consulted his watch. 'Ten minutes to eight. Say a quarter-past for
dinner. They're here, colonel.'

Mr. Romfrey met Nevil returning from the stables. Cecilia had
disappeared.

'Had a good day?' said Mr. Romfrey.

Beauchamp replied: 'I'll tell you of it after dinner,' and passed by him.

Mr. Romfrey edged round to Colonel Halkett, conjecturing in his mind:
They have not hit it; as he remarked: 'Breakfast and luncheon have been
omitted in this day's fare,' which appeared to the colonel a confirmation
of his worst fears, or rather the extinction of his last spark of hope.

He knocked at his daughter's door in going upstairs to dress.

Cecilia presented herself and kissed him.

'Well?' said he.

'By-and-by, papa,' she answered. 'I have a headache. Beg Mr. Romfrey to
excuse me.'

'No news for me?'

She had no news.

Mrs. Culling was with her. The colonel stepped on mystified to his room.

When the door had closed Cecilia turned to Rosamund and burst into tears.
Rosamund felt that it must be something grave indeed for the proud young
lady so to betray a troubled spirit.

'He is ill--Dr. Shrapnel is very ill,' Cecilia responded to one or two
subdued inquiries in as clear a voice as she could command.

'Where have you heard of him?' Rosamund asked.

'We have been there.'

'Bevisham? to Bevisham?' Rosamund was considering the opinion Mr. Romfrey
would form of the matter from the point of view of his horses.

'It was Nevil's wish,' said Cecilia.

'Yes? and you went with him,' Rosamund encouraged her to proceed,
gladdened at hearing her speak of Nevil by that name; 'you have not been
on the downs at all?'

Cecilia mentioned a junction railway station they had ridden to; and
thence, boxing the horses, by train to Bevisham. Rosamund understood that
some haunting anxiety had fretted Nevil during the night; in the morning
he could not withstand it, and he begged Cecilia to change their
destination, apparently with a vehemence of entreaty that had been
irresistible, or else it was utter affection for him had reduced her to
undertake the distasteful journey. She admitted that she was not the most
sympathetic companion Nevil could have had on the way, either going or
coming. She had not entered Dr. Shrapnel's cottage. Remaining on
horseback she had seen the poor man reclining in his garden chair. Mr.
Lydiard was with him, and also his ward Miss Denham, who had been
summoned by telegraph by one of the servants from Switzerland. And
Cecilia had heard Nevil speak of his uncle to her, and too humbly, she
hinted. Nor had the expression of Miss Denham's countenance in listening
to him pleased her; but it was true that a heavily burdened heart cannot
be expected to look pleasing. On the way home Cecilia had been compelled
in some degree to defend Mr. Romfrey. Blushing through her tears at the
remembrance of a past emotion that had been mixed with foresight, she
confessed to Rosamund she thought it now too late to prevent a rupture
between Nevil and his uncle. Had some one whom Nevil trusted and cared
for taken counsel with him and advised him before uncle and nephew met to
discuss this most unhappy matter, then there might have been hope. As it
was, the fate of Dr. Shrapnel had gained entire possession of Nevil.
Every retort of his uncle's in reference to it rose up in him: he used
language of contempt neighbouring abhorrence: he stipulated for one sole
thing to win back his esteem for his uncle; and that was, the apology to
Dr. Shrapnel.

'And to-night,' Cecilia concluded, 'he will request Mr. Romfrey to
accompany him to Bevisham to-morrow morning, to make the apology in
person. He will not accept the slightest evasion. He thinks Dr. Shrapnel
may die, and the honour of the family--what is it he says of it?' Cecilia
raised her eyes to the ceiling, while Rosamund blinked in impatience and
grief, just apprehending the alien state of the young lady's mind in her
absence of recollection, as well as her bondage in the effort to
recollect accurately.

'Have you not eaten any food to-day, Miss Halkett?' she said; for it
might be the want of food which had broken her and changed her manner.

Cecilia replied that she had ridden for an hour to Mount Laurels.

'Alone? Mr. Romfrey must not hear of that,' said Rosamund.

Cecilia consented to lie down on her bed. She declined the dainties
Rosamund pressed on her. She was feverish with a deep and unconcealed
affliction, and behaved as if her pride had gone. But if her pride had
gone she would have eased her heart by sobbing outright. A similar
division harassed her as when her friend Nevil was the candidate for
Bevisham. She condemned his extreme wrath with his uncle, yet was
attracted and enchained by the fire of passionate attachment which
aroused it: and she was conscious that she had but shown obedience to his
wishes throughout the day, not sympathy with his feelings. Under cover of
a patient desire to please she had nursed irritation and jealousy; the
degradation of the sense of jealousy increasing the irritation. Having
consented to the ride to Dr. Shrapnel, should she not, to be consistent,
have dismounted there? O half heart! A whole one, though it be an erring,
like that of the French lady, does at least live, and has a history, and
makes music: but the faint and uncertain is jarred in action, jarred in
memory, ever behind the day and in the shadow of it! Cecilia reviewed
herself: jealous, disappointed, vexed, ashamed, she had been all day a
graceless companion, a bad actress: and at the day's close she was loving
Nevil the better for what had dissatisfied, distressed, and wounded her.
She was loving him in emulation of his devotedness to another person: and
that other was a revolutionary common people's doctor! an infidel, a
traitor to his country's dearest interests! But Nevil loved him, and it
had become impossible for her not to covet the love, or to think of the
old offender without the halo cast by Nevil's attachment being upon him.
So intensely was she moved by her intertwisting reflections that in an
access of bodily fever she stood up and moved before the glass, to behold
the image of the woman who could be the victim of these childish
emotions: and no wonderful contrast struck her eyes; she appeared to
herself as poor and small as they. How could she aspire to a man like
Nevil Beauchamp? If he had made her happy by wooing her she would not
have adored him as she did now. He likes my hair, she said, smoothing it
out, and then pressing her temples, like one insane. Two minutes
afterward she was telling Rosamund her head ached less.

'This terrible Dr. Shrapnel!' Rosamund exclaimed, but reported that no
loud voices were raised in the dining-room.

Colonel Halkett came to see his daughter, full of anxiety and curiosity.
Affairs had been peaceful below, for he was ignorant of the expedition to
Bevisham. On hearing of it he frowned, questioned Cecilia as to whether
she had set foot on that man's grounds, then said: 'Ah! well, we leave
to-morrow: I must go, I have business at home; I can't delay it. I
sanctioned no calling there, nothing of the kind. From Steynham to
Bevisham? Goodness, it's rank madness. I'm not astonished you're sick and
ill.'

He waited till he was assured Cecilia had no special matter to relate,
and recommending her to drink the tea Mrs. Culling had made for her, and
then go to bed and sleep, he went down to the drawing-room, charged with
the worst form of hostility toward Nevil, the partly diplomatic.

Cecilia smiled at her father's mention of sleep. She was in the contest
of the two men, however inanimately she might be lying overhead, and the
assurance in her mind that neither of them would give ground, so similar
were they in their tenacity of will, dissimilar in all else, dragged her
this way and that till she swayed lifeless between them. One may be as a
weed of the sea while one's fate is being decided. To love is to be on
the sea, out of sight of land: to love a man like Nevil Beauchamp is to
be on the sea in tempest. Still to persist in loving would be noble, and
but for this humiliation of utter helplessness an enviable power. Her
thoughts ran thus in shame and yearning and regret, dimly discerning
where her heart failed in the strength which was Nevil's, though it was a
full heart, faithful and not void of courage. But he never brooded, he
never blushed from insufficiency-the faintness of a desire, the callow
passion that cannot fly and feed itself: he never tottered; he walked
straight to his mark. She set up his image and Renee's, and cowered under
the heroical shapes till she felt almost extinct. With her weak limbs and
head worthlessly paining, the little infantile I within her ceased to
wail, dwindled beyond sensation. Rosamund, waiting on her in the place of
her maid, saw two big drops come through her closed eyelids, and thought
that if it could be granted to Nevil to look for a moment on this fair
and proud young lady's loveliness in abandonment, it would tame, melt,
and save him. The Gods presiding over custom do not permit such
renovating sights to men.




CHAPTER XXXVI

PURSUIT OF THE APOLOGY OF Mr. ROMFREY TO DR. SHRAPNEL

The contest, which was an alternation of hard hitting and close
wrestling, had recommenced when Colonel Halkett stepped into the
drawing-room.

'Colonel, I find they've been galloping to Bevisham and back,' said Mr.
Romfrey.

'I've heard of it,' the colonel replied. Not perceiving a sign of
dissatisfaction on his friend's face, he continued: 'To that man
Shrapnel.'

'Cecilia did not dismount,' said Beauchamp.

'You took her to that man's gate. It was not with my sanction. You know
my ideas of the man.'

'If you were to see him now, colonel, I don't think you would speak
harshly of him.'

'We 're not obliged to go and look on men who have, had their measure
dealt them.'

'Barbarously,' said Beauchamp.

Mr. Romfrey in the most placid manner took a chair. 'Windy talk, that!'
he said.

Colonel Halkett seated himself. Stukely Culbrett turned a sheet of
manuscript he was reading.

Beauchamp began a caged lion's walk on the rug under the mantelpiece.

'I shall not spare you from hearing what I think of it, sir.'

'We 've had what you think of it twice over,' said Mr. Romfrey. 'I
suppose it was the first time for information, the second time for
emphasis, and the rest counts to keep it alive in your recollection.'

'This is what you have to take to heart, sir; that Dr. Shrapnel is now
seriously ill.'

'I'm sorry for it, and I'll pay the doctor's bill.'

'You make it hard for me to treat you with respect.'

'Fire away. Those Radical friends of yours have to learn a lesson, and
it's worth a purse to teach them that a lady, however feeble she may seem
to them, is exactly of the strength of the best man of her acquaintance.'

'That's well said!' came from Colonel Halkett.

Beauchamp stared at him, amazed by the commendation of empty language.

'You acted in error; barbarously, but in error,' he addressed his uncle.

'And you have got a fine topic for mouthing,' Mr. Romfrey rejoined.

'You mean to sit still under Dr. Shrapnel's forgiveness?'

'He's taken to copy the Christian religion, has he?'

'You know you were deluded when you struck him.'

'Not a whit.'

'Yes, you know it now: Mrs. Culling--'

'Drag in no woman, Nevil Beauchamp!'

'She has confessed to you that Dr. Shrapnel neither insulted her nor
meant to ruffle her.'

'She has done no such nonsense.'

'If she has not!--but I trust her to have done it.'

'You play the trumpeter, you terrorize her.'

'Into opening her lips wider; nothing else. I'll have the truth from her,
and no mincing: and from Cecil Baskelett and Palmet.'

'Give Cecil a second licking, if you can, and have him off to Shrapnel.'

'You!' cried Beauchamp.

At this juncture Stukely Culbrett closed the manuscript in his hands, and
holding it out to Beauchamp, said:

'Here's your letter, Nevil. It's tolerably hard to decipher. It's mild
enough; it's middling good pulpit. I like it.'

'What have you got there?' Colonel Halkett asked him.

'A letter of his friend Dr. Shrapnel on the Country. Read a bit,
colonel.'

'I? That letter! Mild, do you call it?' The colonel started back his
chair in declining to touch the letter.

'Try it,' said Stukely. 'It's the letter they have been making the noise
about. It ought to be printed. There's a hit or two at the middle-class
that I should like to see in print. It's really not bad pulpit; and I
suspect that what you object to, colonel, is only the dust of a
well-thumped cushion. Shrapnel thumps with his fist. He doesn't say much
that's new. If the parsons were men they'd be saying it every Sunday. If
they did, colonel, I should hear you saying, amen.'

'Wait till they do say it.'

'That's a long stretch. They're turn-cocks of one Water-company--to wash
the greasy citizens!'

'You're keeping Nevil on the gape;' said Mr. Romfrey, with a whimsical
shrewd cast of the eye at Beauchamp, who stood alert not to be foiled,
arrow-like in look and readiness to repeat his home-shot. Mr. Romfrey
wanted to hear more of that unintelligible 'You!' of Beauchamp's. But
Stukely Culbrett intended that the latter should be foiled, and he
continued his diversion from the angry subject.

'We'll drop the sacerdotals,' he said. 'They're behind a veil for us, and
so are we for them. I'm with you, colonel; I wouldn't have them
persecuted; they sting fearfully when whipped. No one listens to them now
except the class that goes to sleep under them, to "set an example" to
the class that can't understand them. Shrapnel is like the breeze shaking
the turf-grass outside the church-doors; a trifle fresher. He knocks
nothing down.'

'He can't!' ejaculated the colonel.

'He sermonizes to shake, that's all. I know the kind of man.'

'Thank heaven, it's not a common species in England!'

'Common enough to be classed.'

Beauchamp struck through the conversation of the pair: 'Can I see you
alone to-night, sir, or to-morrow morning?'

'You may catch me where you can,' was Mr. Romfrey's answer.

'Where's that? It's for your sake and mine, not for Dr. Shrapnel's. I
have to speak to you, and must. You have done your worst with him; you
can't undo it. You have to think of your honour as a gentleman. I intend
to treat you with respect, but wolf is the title now, whether I say it or
not.'

'Shrapnel's a rather long-legged sheep?'

'He asks for nothing from you.'

'He would have got nothing, at a cry of peccavi!'

'He was innocent, perfectly blameless; he would not lie to save himself.
You mistook that for--but you were an engine shot along a line of rails.
He does you the justice to say you acted in error.'

'And you're his parrot.'

'He pardons you.'

'Ha! t' other cheek!'

'You went on that brute's errand in ignorance. Will you keep to the
character now you know the truth? Hesitation about it doubles the infamy.
An old man! the best of men! the kindest and truest! the most unselfish!'

'He tops me by half a head, and he's my junior.'

Beauchamp suffered himself to give out a groan of sick derision: 'Ah!'

'And it was no joke holding him tight,' said Mr. Romfrey, 'I 'd as lief
snap an ash. The fellow (he leaned round to Colonel Halkett) must be a
fellow of a fine constitution. And he took his punishment like a man.
I've known worse: and far worse: gentlemen by birth. There's the choice
of taking it upright or fighting like a rabbit with a weasel in his hole.
Leave him to think it over, he'll come right. I think no harm of him,
I've no animus. A man must have his lesson at some time of life. I did
what I had to do.'

'Look here, Nevil,' Stukely Culbrett checked Beauchamp in season: 'I beg
to inquire what Dr. Shrapnel means by "the people." We have in our
country the nobles and the squires, and after them, as I understand it,
the people: that's to say, the middle-class and the working-class--fat
and lean. I'm quite with Shrapnel when he lashes the fleshpots. They want
it, and they don't get it from "their organ," the Press. I fancy you and
I agree about their organ; the dismallest organ that ever ground a
hackneyed set of songs and hymns to madden the thoroughfares.'

'The Press of our country!' interjected Colonel Halkett in moaning
parenthesis.

'It's the week-day Parson of the middle-class, colonel. They have their
thinking done for them as the Chinese have their dancing. But, Nevil,
your Dr. Shrapnel seems to treat the traders as identical with the
aristocracy in opposition to his "people." The traders are the cursed
middlemen, bad friends of the "people," and infernally treacherous to the
nobles till money hoists them. It's they who pull down the country. They
hold up the nobles to the hatred of the democracy, and the democracy to
scare the nobles. One's when they want to swallow a privilege, and the
other's when they want to ring-fence their gains. How is it Shrapnel
doesn't expose the trick? He must see through it. I like that letter of
his. People is one of your Radical big words that burst at a query. He
can't mean Quince, and Bottom, and Starveling, Christopher Sly, Jack
Cade, Caliban, and poor old Hodge? No, no, Nevil. Our clowns are the
stupidest in Europe. They can't cook their meals. They can't spell; they
can scarcely speak. They haven't a jig in their legs. And I believe
they're losing their grin! They're nasty when their blood's up.
Shakespeare's Cade tells you what he thought of Radicalizing the people.
"And as for your mother, I 'll make her a duke"; that 's one of their
songs. The word people, in England, is a dyspeptic agitator's dream when
he falls nodding over the red chapter of French history. Who won the
great liberties for England? My book says, the nobles. And who made the
great stand later?--the squires. What have the middlemen done but bid for
the people they despise and fear, dishonour us abroad and make a hash of
us at home? Shrapnel sees that. Only he has got the word people in his
mouth. The people of England, my dear fellow, want heading. Since the
traders obtained power we have been a country on all fours. Of course
Shrapnel sees it: I say so. But talk to him and teach him where to look
for the rescue.'

Colonel Halkett said to Stukely: 'If you have had a clear idea in what
you have just spoken, my head's no place for it!'

Stukely's unusually lengthy observations had somewhat heated him, and he
protested with earnestness: 'It was pure Tory, my dear colonel.'

But the habitually and professedly cynical should not deliver themselves
at length: for as soon as they miss their customary incision of speech
they are apt to aim to recover it in loquacity, and thus it may be that
the survey of their ideas becomes disordered.

Mr. Culbrett endangered his reputation for epigram in a good cause, it
shall be said.

These interruptions were torture to Beauchamp. Nevertheless the end was
gained. He sank into a chair silent.

Mr. Romfrey wished to have it out with his nephew, of whose comic
appearance as a man full of thunder, and occasionally rattling, yet all
the while trying to be decorous and politic, he was getting tired. He
foresaw that a tussle between them in private would possibly be too hot
for his temper, admirably under control though it was.

'Why not drag Cecil to Shrapnel?' he said, for a provocation.

Beauchamp would not be goaded.

Colonel Halkett remarked that he would have to leave Steynham the next
day. His host remonstrated with him. The colonel said: 'Early.' He had
very particular business at home. He was positive, and declined every
inducement to stay. Mr. Romfrey glanced at Nevil, thinking, You poor
fool! And then he determined to let the fellow have five minutes alone
with him.

This occurred at midnight, in that half-armoury, half-library, which was
his private room.

Rosamund heard their voices below. She cried out to herself that it was
her doing, and blamed her beloved, and her master, and Dr. Shrapnel, in
the breath of her self-recrimination. The demagogue, the over-punctilious
gentleman, the faint lover, surely it must be reason wanting in the three
for each of them in turn to lead the other, by an excess of some sort of
the quality constituting their men's natures, to wreck a calm life and
stand in contention! Had Shrapnel been commonly reasonable he would have
apologized to Mr. Romfrey, or had Mr. Romfrey, he would not have resorted
to force to punish the supposed offender, or had Nevil, he would have
held his peace until he had gained his bride. As it was; the folly of the
three knocked at her heart, uniting to bring the heavy accusation against
one poor woman, quite in the old way: the Who is she? of the mocking
Spaniard at mention of a social catastrophe. Rosamund had a great deal of
the pride of her sex, and she resented any slur on it. She felt almost
superciliously toward Mr. Romfrey and Nevil for their not taking hands to
denounce the plotter, Cecil Baskelett. They seemed a pair of victims to
him, nearly as much so as the wretched man Shrapnel. It was their
senselessness which made her guilty! And simply because she had uttered
two or three exclamations of dislike of a revolutionary and infidel she
was compelled to groan under her present oppression! Is there anything to
be hoped of men? Rosamund thought bitterly of Nevil's idea of their
progress. Heaven help them! But the unhappy creatures have ceased to look
to a heaven for help.

We see the consequence of it in this Shrapnel complication.

Three men: and one struck down; the other defeated in his benevolent
intentions; the third sacrificing fortune and happiness: all three owing
their mischance to one or other of the vague ideas disturbing men's
heads! Where shall we look for mother wit?--or say, common suckling's
instinct? Not to men, thought Rosamund.

She was listening to the voices of Mr. Romfrey and Beauchamp in a fever.
Ordinarily the lord of Steynham was not out of his bed later than twelve
o'clock at night. His door opened at half-past one. Not a syllable was
exchanged by the couple in the hall. They had fought it out. Mr. Romfrey
came upstairs alone, and on the closing of his chamber-door she slipped
down to Beauchamp and had a dreadful hour with him that subdued her
disposition to sit in judgement upon men. The unavailing attempt to move
his uncle had wrought him to the state in which passionate thoughts pass
into speech like heat to flame. Rosamund strained her mental sight to
gain a conception of his prodigious horror of the treatment of Dr.
Shrapnel that she might think him sane: and to retain a vestige of
comfort in her bosom she tried to moderate and make light of as much as
she could conceive. Between the two efforts she had no sense but that of
helplessness. Once more she was reduced to promise that she would speak
the whole truth to Mr. Romfrey, even to the fact that she had experienced
a common woman's jealousy of Dr. Shrapnel's influence, and had alluded to
him jealously, spitefully, and falsely. There was no mercy in Beauchamp.
He was for action at any cost, with all the forces he could gather, and
without delays. He talked of Cecilia as his uncle's bride to him.
Rosamund could hardly trust her ears when he informed her he had told his
uncle of his determination to compel him to accomplish the act of
penitence. 'Was it prudent to say it, Nevil?' she asked. But, as in his
politics, he disdained prudence. A monstrous crime had been committed,
involving the honour of the family. No subtlety of insinuation, no
suggestion, could wean him from the fixed idea that the apology to Dr.
Shrapnel must be spoken by his uncle in person.

'If one could only imagine Mr. Romfrey doing it!' Rosamund groaned.

'He shall: and you will help him,' said Beauchamp.

'If you loved a woman half as much as you do that man!'

'If I knew a woman as good, as wise, as noble as he!'

'You are losing her.'

'You expect me to go through ceremonies of courtship at a time like this!
If she cares for me she will feel with me. Simple compassion--but let
Miss Halkett be. I'm afraid I overtasked her in taking her to Bevisham.
She remained outside the garden. Ma'am, she is unsullied by contact with
a single shrub of Dr. Shrapnel's territory.'

'Do not be so bitterly ironical, Nevil. You have not seen her as I have.'

Rosamund essayed a tender sketch of the fair young lady, and fancied that
she drew forth a sigh; she would have coloured the sketch, but he
commanded her to hurry off to bed, and think of her morning's work.

A commission of which we feel we can accurately forecast the unsuccessful
end is not likely to be undertaken with an ardour that might perhaps
astound the presageing mind with unexpected issues. Rosamund fulfilled
hers in the style of one who has learnt a lesson, and, exactly as she had
anticipated, Mr. Romfrey accused her of coming to him from a conversation
with that fellow Nevil overnight. He shrugged and left the house for his
morning's walk across the fields.

Colonel Halkett and Cecilia beheld him from the breakfast-room returning
with Beauchamp, who had waylaid him and was hammering his part in the now
endless altercation. It could be descried at any distance; and how fine
was Mr. Romfrey's bearing!--truly noble by contrast, as of a grave big
dog worried by a small barking dog. There is to an unsympathetic observer
an intense vexatiousness in the exhibition of such pertinacity. To a
soldier accustomed at a glance to estimate powers of attack and defence,
this repeated puny assailing of a, fortress that required years of siege
was in addition ridiculous. Mr. Romfrey appeared impregnable, and
Beauchamp mad. 'He's foaming again!' said the colonel, and was only
ultra-pictorial. 'Before breakfast!' was a further slur on Beauchamp.

Mr. Romfrey was elevated by the extraordinary comicality of the notion of
the proposed apology to heights of humour beyond laughter, whence we see
the unbounded capacity of the general man for folly, and rather
commiserate than deride him. He was quite untroubled. It demanded a
steady view of the other side of the case to suppose of one whose control
of his temper was perfect, that he could be in the wrong. He at least did
not think so, and Colonel Halkett relied on his common sense. Beauchamp's
brows were smouldering heavily, except when he had to talk. He looked
paleish and worn, and said he had been up early. Cecilia guessed that he
had not been to bed.

It was dexterously contrived by her host, in spite of the colonel's
manifest anxiety to keep them asunder, that she should have some minutes
with Beauchamp out in the gardens. Mr. Romfrey led them out, and then led
the colonel away to offer him a choice of pups of rare breed.

'Nevil,' said Cecilia, 'you will not think it presumption in me to give
you advice?'

Her counsel to him was, that he should leave Steynham immediately, and
trust to time for his uncle to reconsider his conduct.

Beauchamp urged the counter-argument of the stain on the family honour.

She hinted at expediency; he frankly repudiated it.

The downs faced them, where the heavenly vast 'might have been' of
yesterday wandered thinner than a shadow of to-day; weaving a story
without beginning, crisis, or conclusion, flowerless and fruitless, but
with something of infinite in it sweeter to brood on than the future of
her life to Cecilia.

'If meanwhile Dr. Shrapnel should die, and repentance comes too late!'
said Beauchamp.

She had no clear answer to that, save the hope of its being an unfounded
apprehension. 'As far as it is in my power, Nevil, I will avoid injustice
to him in my thoughts.'

He gazed at her thankfully. 'Well,' said he, 'that's like sighting the
cliffs. But I don't feel home round me while the colonel is so strangely
prepossessed. For a high-spirited gentleman like your father to approve,
or at least accept, an act so barbarous is incomprehensible. Speak to
him, Cecilia, will you? Let him know your ideas.'

She assented. He said instantly, 'Persuade him to speak to my uncle
Everard.'

She was tempted to smile.

'I must do only what I think wise, if I am to be of service, Nevil.'

'True, but paint that scene to him. An old man, utterly defenceless,
making no defence! a cruel error. The colonel can't, or he doesn't,
clearly get it inside him, otherwise I'm certain it would revolt him:
just as I am certain my uncle Everard is at this moment a stone-blind
man. If he has done a thing, he can't question it, won't examine it. The
thing becomes a part of him, as much as his hand or his head. He 's a man
of the twelfth century. Your father might be helped to understand him
first.'

'Yes,' she said, not very warmly, though sadly.

'Tell the colonel how it must have been brought about. For Cecil
Baskelett called on Dr. Shrapnel two days before Mr. Romfrey stood at his
gate.'

The name of Cecil caused her to draw in her shoulders in a half-shudder.
'It may indeed be Captain Baskelett who set this cruel thing in motion!'

'Then point that out to your father, said he, perceiving a chance of
winning her to his views through a concrete object of her dislike, and
cooling toward the woman who betrayed a vulgar characteristic of her sex;
who was merely woman, unable sternly to recognize the doing of a foul
wrong because of her antipathy, until another antipathy enlightened her.

He wanted in fact a ready-made heroine, and did not give her credit for
the absence of fire in her blood, as well as for the unexercised
imagination which excludes young women from the power to realize unwonted
circumstances. We men walking about the world have perhaps no more
imagination of matters not domestic than they; but what we have is quick
with experience: we see the thing we hear of: women come to it how they
can.

Cecilia was recommended to weave a narrative for her father, and
ultimately induce him, if she could, to give a gentleman's opinion of the
case to Mr. Romfrey.

Her sensitive ear caught a change of tone in the directions she received.
'Your father will say so and so: answer him with this and that.'
Beauchamp supplied her with phrases. She was to renew and renew the
attack; hammer as he did. Yesterday she had followed him: to-day she was
to march beside him--hardly as an equal. Patience! was the word she would
have uttered in her detection of the one frailty in his nature which this
hurrying of her off her feet opened her eyes to with unusual
perspicacity. Still she leaned to him sufficiently to admit that he had
grounds for a deep disturbance of his feelings.

He said: 'I go to Dr. Shrapnel's cottage, and don't know how to hold up
my head before Miss Denham. She confided him to me when she left for
Switzerland!'

There was that to be thought of, certainly.

Colonel Halkett came round a box-bush and discovered them pacing together
in a fashion to satisfy his paternal scrutiny.

'I've been calling you several times, my dear,' he complained. 'We start
in seven minutes. Bustle, and bonnet at once. Nevil, I'm sorry for this
business. Good-bye. Be a good boy, Nevil,' he murmured kindheartedly, and
shook Beauchamp's hand with the cordiality of an extreme relief in
leaving him behind.

The colonel and Mr. Romfrey and Beauchamp were standing on the hall-steps
when Rosamund beckoned the latter and whispered a request for that letter
of Dr. Shrapnel's. 'It is for Miss Halkett, Nevil.'

He plucked the famous epistle from his bulging pocketbook, and added a
couple of others in the same handwriting.

'Tell her, a first reading--it's difficult to read at first,' he said,
and burned to read it to Cecilia himself: to read it to her with his
comments and explanations appeared imperative. It struck him in a flash
that Cecilia's counsel to him to quit Steynham for awhile was good. And
if he went to Bevisham he would be assured of Dr. Shrapnel's condition:
notes and telegrams from the cottage were too much tempered to console
and deceive him.

'Send my portmanteau and bag after me to Bevisham,' he said Rosamund, and
announced to the woefully astonish colonel that he would have the
pleasure of journeying in his company as far as the town.

'Are you ready? No packing?' said the colonel.

'It's better to have your impediments in the rear of you, and march!'
said Mr. Romfrey.

Colonel Halkett declined to wait for anybody. He shouted for his
daughter. The lady's maid appeared, and then Cecilia with Rosamund.

'We can't entertain you, Nevil; we're away to the island: I'm sorry,'
said the colonel; and observing Cecilia's face in full crimson, he looked
at her as if he had lost a battle by the turn of events at the final
moment.

Mr. Romfrey handed Cecilia into the carriage. He exchanged a friendly
squeeze with the colonel, and offered his hand to his nephew. Beauchamp
passed him with a nod and 'Good-bye, sir.'

'Have ready at Holdesbury for the middle of the month,' said Mr. Romfrey,
unruffled, and bowed to Cecilia.

'If you think of bringing my cousin Baskelett, give me warning, sir,'
cried Beauchamp.

'Give me warning, if you want the house for Shrapnel,' replied his uncle,
and remarked to Rosamund, as the carriage wheeled round the mounded
laurels to the avenue, 'He mayn't be quite cracked. The fellow seems to
have a turn for catching his opportunity by the tail. He had better hold
fast, for it's his last.'




CHAPTER XXXVII

CECILIA CONQUERED

The carriage rolled out of the avenue and through the park, for some time
parallel with the wavy downs. Once away from Steynham Colonel Halkett
breathed freely, as if he had dropped a load: he was free of his bond to
Mr. Romfrey, and so great was the sense of relief in him that he resolved
to do battle against his daughter, supposing her still lively blush to be
the sign of the enemy's flag run up on a surrendered citadel. His
authority was now to be thought of: his paternal sanction was in his own
keeping. Beautiful as she looked, it was hardly credible that a fellow in
possession of his reason could have let slip his chance of such a prize;
but whether he had or had not, the colonel felt that he occupied a
position enabling him either to out-manoeuvre, or, if need were,
interpose forcibly and punish him for his half-heartedness.

Cecilia looked the loveliest of women to Beauchamp's eyes, with her
blush, and the letters of Dr. Shrapnel in her custody, at her express
desire. Certain terms in the letters here and there, unsweet to ladies,
began to trouble his mind.

'By the way, colonel,' he said, 'you had a letter of Dr. Shrapnel's read
to you by Captain Baskelett.'

'Iniquitous rubbish!'

'With his comments on it, I dare say you thought it so. I won't speak of
his right to make it public. He wanted to produce his impressions of it
and me, and that is a matter between him and me. Dr. Shrapnel makes use
of strong words now and then, but I undertake to produce a totally
different impression on you by reading the letter myself--sparing you'
(he turned to Cecilia) 'a word or two, common enough to men who write in
black earnest and have humour.' He cited his old favourite, the black and
bright lecturer on Heroes. 'You have read him, I know, Cecilia. Well, Dr.
Shrapnel is another, who writes in his own style, not the leading-article
style or modern pulpit stuff. He writes to rouse.'

'He does that to my temper,' said the colonel.

'Perhaps here and there he might offend Cecilia's taste,' Beauchamp
pursued for her behoof. 'Everything depends on the mouthpiece. I should
not like the letter to be read without my being by;--except by men: any
just-minded man may read it: Seymour Austin, for example. Every line is a
text to the mind of the writer. Let me call on you to-morrow.'

'To-morrow?' Colonel Halkett put on a thoughtful air. 'To-morrow we're
off to the island for a couple of days; and there's Lord Croyston's
garden party, and the Yacht Ball. Come this evening-dine with us. No
reading of letters, please. I can't stand it, Nevil.'

The invitation was necessarily declined by a gentleman who could not
expect to be followed by supplies of clothes and linen for evening wear
that day.

'Ah, we shall see you some day or other,' said the colonel.

Cecilia was less alive to Beauchamp's endeavour to prepare her for the
harsh words in the letter than to her father's insincerity. She would
have asked her friend to come in the morning next day, but for the dread
of deepening her blush.

'Do you intend to start so early in the morning, papa?' she ventured to
say; and he replied, 'As early as possible.'

'I don't know what news I shall have in Bevisham, or I would engage to
run over to the island,' said Beauchamp, with a flattering persistency or
singular obtuseness.

'You will dance,' he subsequently observed to Cecilia, out of the heart
of some reverie. He had been her admiring partner on the night before the
drive from Itchincope into Bevisham, and perhaps thought of her graceful
dancing at the Yacht Ball, and the contrast it would present to his watch
beside a sick man-struck down by one of his own family.

She could have answered, 'Not if you wish me not to'; while smiling at
the quaint sorrowfulness of his tone.

'Dance!' quoth Colonel Halkett, whose present temper discerned a healthy
antagonism to misanthropic Radicals in the performance, 'all young people
dance. Have you given over dancing?'

'Not entirely, colonel.'

Cecilia danced with Mr. Tuckham at the Yacht Ball, and was vividly
mindful of every slight incident leading to and succeeding her lover's
abrupt, 'You will dance' which had all passed by her dream-like up to
that hour his attempt to forewarn her of the phrases she would deem
objectionable in Dr. Shrapnel's letter; his mild acceptation of her
father's hostility; his adieu to her, and his melancholy departure on
foot from the station, as she drove away to Mount Laurels and gaiety. Why
do I dance? she asked herself. It was not in the spirit of happiness. Her
heart was not with Dr. Shrapnel, but very near him, and heavy as a
chamber of the sick. She was afraid of her father's favourite, imagining,
from the colonel's unconcealed opposition to Beauchamp, that he had
designs in the interests of Mr. Tuckham. But the hearty gentleman
scattered her secret terrors by his bluffness and openness. He asked her
to remember that she had recommended him to listen to Seymour Austin, and
he had done so, he said. Undoubtedly he was much improved, much less
overbearing.

He won her confidence by praising and loving her father, and when she
alluded to the wonderful services he had rendered on the Welsh estate, he
said simply that her father's thanks repaid him. He recalled his former
downrightness only in speaking of the case of Dr. Shrapnel, upon which,
both with the colonel and with her, he was unreservedly condemnatory of
Mr. Romfrey. Colonel Halkett's defence of the true knight and guardian of
the reputation of ladies, fell to pieces in the presence of Mr. Tuckham.
He had seen Dr. Shrapnel, on a visit to Mr. Lydiard, whom he described as
hanging about Bevisham, philandering as a married man should not, though
in truth he might soon expect to be released by the death of his crazy
wife. The doctor, he said, had been severely shaken by the monstrous
assault made on him, and had been most unrighteously handled. The doctor
was an inoffensive man in his private life, detestable and dangerous
though his teachings were. Outside politics Mr. Tuckham went altogether
with Beauchamp. He promised also that old Mrs. Beauchamp should be
accurately informed of the state of matters between Captain Beauchamp and
Mr. Romfrey. He left Mount Laurels to go back in attendance on the
venerable lady, without once afflicting Cecilia with a shiver of
well-founded apprehension, and she was grateful to him almost to friendly
affection in the vanishing of her unjust suspicion, until her father
hinted that there was the man of his heart. Then she closed all avenues
to her own.

A period of maidenly distress not previously unknown to her ensued.
Proposals of marriage were addressed to her by two untitled gentlemen,
and by the Earl of Lockrace: three within a fortnight. The recognition of
the young heiress's beauty at the Yacht Ball was accountable for the
bursting out of these fires. Her father would not have deplored her
acceptance of the title of Countess of Lockrace. In the matter of
rejections, however, her will was paramount, and he was on her side
against relatives when the subject was debated among them. He called her
attention to the fact impressively, telling her that she should not hear
a syllable from him to persuade her to marry: the emphasis of which
struck the unspoken warning on her intelligence: Bring no man to me of
whom I do not approve!

'Worthier of you, as I hope to become,' Beauchamp had said. Cecilia lit
on that part of Dr. Shrapnel's letter where 'Fight this out within you,'
distinctly alluded to the unholy love. Could she think ill of the man who
thus advised him? She shared Beauchamp's painful feeling for him in a
sudden tremour of her frame; as it were through his touch. To the rest of
the letter her judgement stood opposed, save when a sentence here and
there reminded her of Captain Baskelett's insolent sing-song declamation
of it: and that would have turned Sacred Writing to absurdity.

Beauchamp had mentioned Seymour Austin as one to whom he would willingly
grant a perusal of the letter. Mr. Austin came to Mount Laurels about the
close of the yachting season, shortly after Colonel Halkett had spent his
customary days of September shooting at Steynham. Beauchamp's folly was
the colonel's theme, for the fellow had dragged Lord Palmet there, and
driven his uncle out of patience. Mr. Romfrey's monumental patience had
been exhausted by him. The colonel boiled over with accounts of
Beauchamp's behaviour toward his uncle, and Palmet, and Baskelett, and
Mrs. Culling: how he flew at and worried everybody who seemed to him to
have had a hand in the proper chastisement of that man Shrapnel. That
pestiferous letter of Shrapnel's was animadverted on, of course; and, 'I
should like you to have heard it, Austin,' the colonel said, 'just for
you to have a notion of the kind of universal blow-up those men are
scheming, and would hoist us with, if they could get a little more
blasting-powder than they mill in their lunatic heads.'

Now Cecilia wished for Mr. Austin's opinion of Dr. Shrapnel; and as the
delicate state of her inclinations made her conscious that to give him
the letter covertly would be to betray them to him, who had once, not
knowing it, moved her to think of a possible great change in her life,
she mustered courage to say, 'Captain Beauchamp at my request lent me the
letter to read; I have it, and others written by Dr. Shrapnel.'

Her father hummed to himself, and immediately begged Seymour Austin not
to waste his time on the stuff, though he had no idea that a perusal of
it could awaken other than the gravest reprehension in so rational a Tory
gentleman.

Mr. Austin read the letter through. He asked to see the other letters
mentioned by Cecilia, and read them calmly, without a frown or an
interjection. She sat sketching, her father devouring newspaper columns.

'It's the writing of a man who means well,' Mr. Austin delivered his
opinion.

'Why, the man's an infidel!' Colonel Halkett exclaimed.

'There are numbers.'

'They have the grace not to confess, then.'

'It's as well to know what the world's made of, colonel. The clergy shut
their eyes. There's no treating a disease without reading it; and if we
are to acknowledge a "vice," as Dr. Shrapnel would say of the so-called
middle-class, it is the smirking over what they think, or their not
caring to think at all. Too many time-servers rot the State. I can
understand the effect of such writing on a mind like Captain Beauchamp's.
It would do no harm to our young men to have those letters read publicly
and lectured on-by competent persons. Half the thinking world may think
pretty much the same on some points as Dr. Shrapnel; they are too wise or
too indolent to say it: and of the other half, about a dozen members
would be competent to reply to him. He is the earnest man, and flies at
politics as uneasy young brains fly to literature, fancying they can
write because they can write with a pen. He perceives a bad adjustment of
things: which is correct. He is honest, and takes his honesty for a
virtue: and that entitles him to believe in himself: and that belief
causes him to see in all opposition to him the wrong he has perceived in
existing circumstances: and so in a dream of power he invokes the people:
and as they do not stir, he takes to prophecy. This is the round of the
politics of impatience. The study of politics should be guided by some
light of statesmanship, otherwise it comes to this wild preaching.

These men are theory-tailors, not politicians. They are the men who make
the "strait-waistcoat for humanity." They would fix us to first
principles like tethered sheep or hobbled horses. I should enjoy replying
to him, if I had time. The whole letter is composed of variations upon
one idea. Still I must say the man interests me; I should like to talk to
him.'

Mr. Austin paid no heed to the colonel's 'Dear me! dear me!' of
amazement. He said of the style of the letters, that it was the puffing
of a giant: a strong wind rather than speech: and begged Cecilia to note
that men who labour to force their dreams on mankind and turn vapour into
fact, usually adopt such a style. Hearing that this private letter had
been deliberately read through by Mr. Romfrey, and handed by him to
Captain Baskelett, who had read it out in various places, Mr. Austin
said:

'A strange couple!' He appeared perplexed by his old friend's approval of
them. 'There we decidedly differ,' said he, when the case of Dr. Shrapnel
was related by the colonel, with a refusal to condemn Mr. Romfrey. He
pronounced Mr. Romfrey's charges against Dr. Shrapnel, taken in
conjunction with his conduct, to be baseless, childish, and wanton. The
colonel would not see the case in that light; but Cecilia did. It was a
justification of Beauchamp; and how could she ever have been blind to
it?--scarcely blind, she remembered, but sensitively blinking her eyelids
to distract her sight in contemplating it, and to preserve her repose. As
to Beauchamp's demand of the apology, Mr. Austin considered that it might
be an instance of his want of knowledge of men, yet could not be called
silly, and to call it insane was the rhetoric of an adversary.

'I do call it insane,' said the colonel.

He separated himself from his daughter by a sharp division.

Had Beauchamp appeared at Mount Laurels, Cecilia would have been ready to
support and encourage him, boldly. Backed by Mr. Austin, she saw some
good in Dr. Shrapnel's writing, much in Beauchamp's devotedness. He shone
clear to her reason, at last: partly because her father in his opposition
to him did not, but was on the contrary unreasonable, cased in mail,
mentally clouded. She sat with Mr. Austin and her father, trying
repeatedly, in obedience to Beauchamp's commands, to bring the latter to
a just contemplation of the unhappy case; behaviour on her part which
rendered the colonel inveterate.

Beauchamp at this moment was occupied in doing secretary's work for Dr.
Shrapnel. So Cecilia learnt from Mr. Lydiard, who came to pay his
respects to Mrs. Wardour-Devereux at Mount Laurels. The pursuit of the
apology was continued in letters to his uncle and occasional interviews
with him, which were by no means instigated by the doctor, Mr. Lydiard
informed the ladies. He described Beauchamp as acting in the spirit of a
man who has sworn an oath to abandon every pleasure in life, that he may,
as far as it lies in his power, indemnify his friend for the wrong done
to him.

'Such men are too terrible for me,' said Mrs. Devereux.

Cecilia thought the reverse: Not for me! But she felt a strain upon her
nature, and she was miserable in her alienation from her father. Kissing
him one night, she laid her head on his breast, and begged his
forgiveness. He embraced her tenderly. 'Wait, only wait; you will see I
am right,' he said, and prudently said no more, and did not ask her to
speak.

She was glad that she had sought the reconciliation from her heart's
natural warmth, on hearing some time later that M. de Croisnel was dead,
and that Beauchamp meditated starting for France to console his Renee.
Her continual agitations made her doubtful of her human feelings: she
clung to that instance of her filial stedfastness.

The day before Cecilia and her father left Mount Laurels for their season
in Wales, Mr. Tuckham and Beauchamp came together to the house, and were
closeted an hour with her father. Cecilia sat in the drawing-room,
thinking that she did indeed wait, and had great patience. Beauchamp
entered the room alone. He looked worn and thin, of a leaden colour, like
the cloud that bears the bolt. News had reached him of the death of Lord
Avonley in the hunting-field, and he was going on to Steynham to persuade
his uncle to accompany him to Bevisham and wash the guilt of his
wrong-doing off him before applying for the title. 'You would advise me
not to go?' he said. 'I must. I should be dishonoured myself if I let a
chance pass. I run the risk of being a beggar: I'm all but one now.'

Cecilia faltered: 'Do you see a chance?'

'Hardly more than an excuse for trying it,' he replied.

She gave him back Dr. Shrapnel's letters. 'I have read them,' was all she
said. For he might have just returned from France, with the breath of
Renee about him, and her pride would not suffer her to melt him in
rivalry by saying what she had been led to think of the letters.

Hearing nothing from her, he silently put them in his pocket. The
struggle with his uncle seemed to be souring him or deadening him.

They were not alone for long. Mr. Tuckham presented himself to take his
leave of her. Old Mrs. Beauchamp was dying, and he had only come to Mount
Laurels on special business. Beauchamp was just as anxious to hurry away.

Her father found her sitting in the solitude of a drawing-room at midday,
pale-faced, with unoccupied fingers, not even a book in her lap.

He walked up and down the room until Cecilia, to say something, said:
'Mr. Tuckham could not stay.'

'No,' said her father; 'he could not. He has to be back as quick as he
can to cut his legacy in halves!'

Cecilia looked perplexed.

'I'll speak plainly,' said the colonel. 'He sees that Nevil has ruined
himself with his uncle. The old lady won't allow Nevil to visit her; in
her condition it would be an excitement beyond her strength to bear. She
sent Blackburn to bring Nevil here, and give him the option of stating
before me whether those reports about his misconduct in France were true
or not. He demurred at first: however, he says they are not true. He
would have run away with the Frenchwoman, and he would have fought the
duel: but he did neither. Her brother ran ahead of him and fought for
him: so he declares and she wouldn't run. So the reports are false. We
shall know what Blackburn makes of the story when we hear of the legacy.
I have been obliged to write word to Mrs. Beauchamp that I believe Nevil
to have made a true statement of the facts. But I distinctly say, and so
I told Blackburn, I don't think money will do Nevil Beauchamp a
farthing's worth of good. Blackburn follows his own counsel. He induced
the old lady to send him; so I suppose he intends to let her share the
money between them. I thought better of him; I thought him a wiser man.'

Gratitude to Mr. Tuckham on Beauchamp's behalf caused Cecilia to praise
him, in the tone of compliments. The difficulty of seriously admiring two
gentlemen at once is a feminine dilemma, with the maidenly among women.

'He has disappointed me,' said Colonel Halkett.

'Would you have had him allow a falsehood to enrich him and ruin Nevil,
papa?'

'My dear child, I'm sick to death of romantic fellows. I took Blackburn
for one of our solid young men. Why should he share his aunt's fortune?'

'You mean, why should Nevil have money?'

'Well, I do mean that. Besides, the story was not false as far as his
intentions went: he confessed it, and I ought to have put it in a
postscript. If Nevil wants money, let him learn to behave himself like a
gentleman at Steynham.'

'He has not failed.'

'I'll say, then, behave himself, simply. He considers it a point of
honour to get his uncle Everard to go down on his knees to Shrapnel. But
he has no moral sense where I should like to see it: none: he confessed
it.'

'What were his words, papa?'

'I don't remember words. He runs over to France, whenever it suits him,
to carry on there . . .' The colonel ended in a hum and buzz.

'Has he been to France lately?' asked Cecilia.

Her breath hung for the answer, sedately though she sat.

'The woman's father is dead, I hear,' Colonel Halkett remarked.

'But he has not been there?'

'How can I tell? He's anywhere, wherever his passions whisk him.'

'No!'

'I say, yes. And if he has money, we shall see him going sky-high and
scattering it in sparks, not merely spending; I mean living immorally,
infidelizing, republicanizing, scandalizing his class and his country.'

'Oh no!' exclaimed Cecilia, rising and moving to the window to feast her
eyes on driving clouds, in a strange exaltation of mind, secretly sure
now that her idea of Nevil's having gone over to France was groundless;
and feeling that she had been unworthy of him who strove to be 'worthier
of her, as he hoped to become.'

Colonel Halkett scoffed at her 'Oh no,' and called it woman's logic.

She could not restrain herself. 'Have you forgotten Mr. Austin, papa? It
is Nevil's perfect truthfulness that makes him appear worse to you than
men who are timeservers. Too many time-servers rot the State, Mr. Austin
said. Nevil is not one of them. I am not able to judge or speculate
whether he has a great brain or is likely to distinguish himself out of
his profession: I would rather he did not abandon it: but Mr. Austin said
to me in talking of him . . .'

'That notion of Austin's of screwing women's minds up to the pitch of
men's!' interjected the colonel with a despairing flap of his arm.

'He said, papa, that honestly active men in a country, who decline to
practise hypocrisy, show that the blood runs, and are a sign of health.'

'You misunderstood him, my dear.'

'I think I thoroughly understood him. He did not call them wise. He said
they might be dangerous if they were not met in debate. But he said, and
I presume to think truly, that the reason why they are decried is, that
it is too great a trouble for a lazy world to meet them. And, he said,
the reason why the honest factions agitate is because they encounter
sneers until they appear in force. If they were met earlier, and
fairly--I am only quoting him--they would not, I think he said, or would
hardly, or would not generally, fall into professional agitation.'

'Austin's a speculative Tory, I know; and that's his weakness,' observed
the colonel. 'But I'm certain you misunderstood him. He never would have
called us a lazy people.'

'Not in matters of business: in matters of thought.'

'My dear Cecilia! You've got hold of a language!.... a way of speaking!
.... Who set you thinking on these things?'

'That I owe to Nevil Beauchamp!

Colonel Halkett indulged in a turn or two up and down the room. He threw
open a window, sniffed the moist air, and went to his daughter to speak
to her resolutely.

'Between a Radical and a Tory, I don't know where your head has been
whirled to, my dear. Your heart seems to be gone: more sorrow for us! And
for Nevil Beauchamp to be pretending to love you while carrying on with
this Frenchwoman!'

'He has never said that he loved me.'

The splendour of her beauty in humility flashed on her father, and he
cried out: 'You are too good for any man on earth! We won't talk in the
dark, my darling. You tell me he has never, as they say, made love to
you?'

'Never, papa.'

'Well, that proves the French story. At any rate, he 's a man of honour.
But you love him?'

'The French story is untrue, papa.'

Cecilia stood in a blush like the burning cloud of the sunset.'

'Tell me frankly: I'm your father, your old dada, your friend, my dear
girl! do you think the man cares for you, loves you?'

She replied: 'I know, papa, the French story is untrue.'

'But when I tell you, silly woman, he confessed it to me out of his own
mouth!'

'It is not true now.'

'It's not going on, you mean? How do you know?'

'I know.'

'Has he been swearing it?'

'He has not spoken of it to me.'

'Here I am in a woman's web!' cried the colonel. 'Is it your instinct
tells you it's not true? or what? what? You have not denied that you love
the man.'

'I know he is not immoral.'

'There you shoot again! Haven't you a yes or a no for your father?'

Cecilia cast her arms round his neck, and sobbed.

She could not bring it to her lips to say (she would have shunned the
hearing) that her defence of Beauchamp, which was a shadowed avowal of
the state of her heart, was based on his desire to read to her the
conclusion of Dr. Shrapnel's letter touching a passion to be overcome;
necessarily therefore a passion that was vanquished, and the fullest and
bravest explanation of his shifting treatment of her: nor would she
condescend to urge that her lover would have said he loved her when they
were at Steynham, but for the misery and despair of a soul too noble to
be diverted from his grief and sense of duty, and, as she believed,
unwilling to speak to win her while his material fortune was in jeopardy.

The colonel cherished her on his breast, with one hand regularly patting
her shoulder: a form of consolation that cures the disposition to sob as
quickly as would the drip of water.

Cecilia looked up into his eyes, and said, 'We will not be parted, papa,
ever.'

The colonel said absently: 'No'; and, surprised at himself, added: 'No,
certainly not. How can we be parted? You won't run away from me? No, you
know too well I can't resist you. I appeal to your judgement, and I must
accept what you decide. But he is immoral. I repeat that. He has no
roots. We shall discover it before it's too late, I hope.'

Cecilia gazed away, breathing through tremulous dilating nostrils.

'One night after dinner at Steynham,' pursued the colonel, 'Nevil was
rattling against the Press, with Stukely Culbrett to prime him: and he
said editors of papers were growing to be like priests, and as timid as
priests, and arrogant: and for one thing, it was because they supposed
themselves to be guardians of the national morality. I forget exactly
what the matter was: but he sneered at priests and morality.'

A smile wove round Cecilia's lips, and in her towering superiority to one
who talked nonsense, she slipped out of maiden shame and said: 'Attack
Nevil for his political heresies and his wrath with the Press for not
printing him. The rest concerns his honour, where he is quite safe, and
all are who trust him.'

'If you find out you're wrong?'

She shook her head.

'But if you find out you're wrong about him,' her father reiterated
piteously, 'you won't tear me to strips to have him in spite of it?'

'No, papa, not I. I will not.'

'Well, that's something for me to hold fast to,' said Colonel Halkett,
sighing.




CHAPTER XXXVIII

LORD AVONLEY

Mr. Everard Romfrey was now, by consent, Lord Avonley, mounted on his
direct heirship and riding hard at the earldom. His elevation occurred at
a period of life that would have been a season of decay with most men;
but the prolonged and lusty Autumn of the veteran took new fires from a
tangible object to live for. His brother Craven's death had slightly
stupefied, and it had grieved him: it seemed to him peculiarly pathetic;
for as he never calculated on the happening of mortal accidents to men of
sound constitution, the circumstance imparted a curious shake to his own
solidity. It was like the quaking of earth, which tries the balance of
the strongest. If he had not been raised to so splendid a survey of the
actual world, he might have been led to think of the imaginary, where
perchance a man may meet his old dogs and a few other favourites, in a
dim perpetual twilight. Thither at all events Craven had gone, and
goodnight to him! The earl was a rapidly lapsing invalid. There could be
no doubt that Everard was to be the head of his House.

Outwardly he was the same tolerant gentleman who put aside the poor fools
of the world to walk undisturbed by them in the paths he had chosen: in
this aspect he knew himself: nor was the change so great within him as to
make him cognizant of a change. It was only a secret turn in the bent of
the mind, imperceptible as the touch of the cunning artist's brush on a
finished portrait, which will alter the expression without discomposing a
feature, so that you cannot say it is another face, yet it is not the
former one. His habits were invariable, as were his meditations. He
thought less of Romfrey Castle than of his dogs and his devices for
trapping vermin; his interest in birds and beasts and herbs, 'what
ninnies call Nature in books,' to quote him, was undiminished;
imagination he had none to clap wings to his head and be off with it. He
betrayed as little as he felt that the coming Earl of Romfrey was
different from the cadet of the family.

A novel sharpness in the 'Stop that,' with which he crushed Beauchamp's
affectedly gentle and unusually roundabout opening of the vexed Shrapnel
question, rang like a shot in the room at Steynham, and breathed a
different spirit from his customary easy pugnacity that welcomed and
lured on an adversary to wild outhitting. Some sorrowful preoccupation
is, however, to be expected in the man who has lost a brother, and some
degree of irritability at the intrusion of past disputes. He chose to
repeat a similar brief forbidding of the subject before they started
together for the scene of the accident and Romfrey Castle. No notice was
taken of Beauchamp's remark, that he consented to go though his duty lay
elsewhere. Beauchamp had not the faculty of reading inside men, or he
would have apprehended that his uncle was engaged in silently heaping
aggravations to shoot forth one fine day a thundering and astonishing
counterstroke.

He should have known his uncle Everard better.

In this respect he seemed to have no memory. But who has much that has
given up his brains for a lodging to a single idea? It is at once a
devouring dragon, and an intractable steamforce; it is a tyrant that has
eaten up a senate, and a prophet with a message. Inspired of solitariness
and gigantic size, it claims divine origin. The world can have no peace
for it.

Cecilia had not pleased him; none had. He did not bear in mind that the
sight of Dr. Shrapnel sick and weak, which constantly reanimated his
feelings of pity and of wrath, was not given to the others of whom he
demanded a corresponding energy of just indignation and sympathy. The
sense that he was left unaided to the task of bending his tough uncle,
combined with his appreciation of the righteousness of the task to
embitter him and set him on a pedestal, from which he descended at every
sign of an opportunity for striking, and to which he retired continually
baffled and wrathful, in isolation.

Then ensued the dreadful division in his conception of his powers: for he
who alone saw the just and right thing to do, was incapable of compelling
it to be done. Lay on to his uncle as he would, that wrestler shook him
off. And here was one man whom he could not move! How move a nation?

There came on him a thirst for the haranguing of crowds. They agree with
you or they disagree; exciting you to activity in either case. They do
not interpose cold Tory exclusiveness and inaccessibility. You have them
in the rough; you have nature in them, and all that is hopeful in nature.
You drive at, over, and through them, for their good; you plough them.
You sow them too. Some of them perceive that it is for their good, and
what if they be a minority? Ghastly as a minority is in an Election, in a
lifelong struggle it is refreshing and encouraging. The young world and
its triumph is with the minority. Oh to be speaking! Condemned to silence
beside his uncle, Beauchamp chafed for a loosed tongue and an audience
tossing like the well-whipped ocean, or open as the smooth sea-surface to
the marks of the breeze. Let them be hostile or amicable, he wanted an
audience as hotly as the humped Richard a horse.

At Romfrey Castle he fell upon an audience that became transformed into a
swarm of chatterers, advisers, and reprovers the instant his lips were
parted. The ladies of the family declared his pursuit of the Apology to
be worse and vainer than his politics. The gentlemen said the same, but
they were not so outspoken to him personally, and indulged in asides,
with quotations of some of his uncle Everard's recent observations
concerning him: as for example, 'Politically he's a mad harlequin jumping
his tights and spangles when nobody asks him to jump; and in private life
he's a mad dentist poking his tongs at my sound tooth:' a highly
ludicrous image of the persistent fellow, and a reminder of situations in
Moliere, as it was acted by Cecil Baskelett and Lord Welshpool. Beauchamp
had to a certain extent restored himself to favour with his uncle Everard
by offering a fair suggestion on the fatal field to account for the
accident, after the latter had taken measurements and examined the place
in perplexity. His elucidation of the puzzle was referred to by Lord
Avonley at Romfrey, and finally accepted as possible and this from a
wiseacre who went quacking about the county, expecting to upset the order
of things in England! Such a mixing of sense and nonsense in a fellow's
noddle was never before met with, Lord Avonley said. Cecil took the hint.
He had been unworried by Beauchamp: Dr. Shrapnel had not been mentioned:
and it delighted Cecil to let it be known that he thought old Nevil had
some good notions, particularly as to the duties of the aristocracy--that
first war-cry of his when a midshipman. News of another fatal accident in
the hunting-field confirmed Cecil's higher opinion of his cousin. On the
day of Craven's funeral they heard at Romfrey that Mr. Wardour-Devereux
had been killed by a fall from his horse. Two English gentlemen
despatched by the same agency within a fortnight! 'He smoked,' Lord
Avonley said of the second departure, to allay some perturbation in the
bosoms of the ladies who had ceased to ride, by accounting for this
particular mishap in the most reassuring fashion. Cecil's immediate
reflection was that the unfortunate smoker had left a rich widow. Far
behind in the race for Miss Halkett, and uncertain of a settled advantage
in his other rivalry with Beauchamp, he fixed his mind on the widow, and
as Beauchamp did not stand in his way, but on the contrary might help
him--for she, like the generality of women, admired Nevil Beauchamp in
spite of her feminine good sense and conservatism--Cecil began to regard
the man he felt less opposed to with some recognition of his merits. The
two nephews accompanied Lord Avonley to London, and slept at his
town-house.

They breakfasted together the next morning on friendly terms. Half an
hour afterward there was an explosion; uncle and nephews were scattered
fragments: and if Cecil was the first to return to cohesion with his lord
and chief, it was, he protested energetically, common policy in a man in
his position to do so: all that he looked for being a decent pension and
a share in the use of the town-house. Old Nevil, he related, began
cross-examining him and entangling him with the cunning of the deuce, in
my lord's presence, and having got him to make an admission, old Nevil
flung it at the baron, and even crossed him and stood before him when he
was walking out of the room. A furious wrangle took place. Nevil and the
baron gave it to one another unmercifully. The end of it was that all
three flew apart, for Cecil confessed to having a temper, and in contempt
of him for the admission wrung out of him, Lord Avonley had pricked it.
My lord went down to Steynham, Beauchamp to Holdesbury, and Captain
Baskelett to his quarters; whence in a few days he repaired penitently to
my lord--the most placable of men when a full submission was offered to
him.

Beauchamp did nothing of the kind. He wrote a letter to Steynham in the
form of an ultimatum.

This egregious letter was handed to Rosamund for a proof of her darling's
lunacy. She in conversation with Stukely Culbrett unhesitatingly accused
Cecil of plotting his cousin's ruin.

Mr. Culbrett thought it possible that Cecil had been a little more than
humorous in the part he had played in the dispute, and spoke to him.

Then it came out that Lord Avonley had also delivered an ultimatum to
Beauchamp.

Time enough had gone by for Cecil to forget his ruffling, and relish the
baron's grandly comic spirit in appropriating that big word Apology, and
demanding it from Beauchamp on behalf of the lady ruling his household.
What could be funnier than the knocking of Beauchamp's blunderbuss out of
his hands, and pointing the muzzle at him!

Cecil dramatized the fun to amuse Mr. Culbrett. Apparently Beauchamp had
been staggered on hearing himself asked for the definite article he
claimed. He had made a point of speaking of the Apology. Lord Avonley did
likewise. And each professed to exact it for a deeply aggrieved person:
each put it on the ground that it involved the other's rightful ownership
of the title of gentleman.

"'An apology to the amiable and virtuous Mistress Culling?" says old
Nevil: "an apology? what for?"--"For unbecoming and insolent behaviour,"
says my lord.'

'I am that lady's friend,' Stukely warned Captain Baskelett. 'Don't let
us have a third apology in the field.'

'Perfectly true; you are her friend, and you know what a friend of mine
she is,' rejoined Cecil. 'I could swear "that lady" flings the whole
affair at me. I give you my word, old Nevil and I were on a capital
footing before he and the baron broke up. I praised him for tickling the
aristocracy. I backed him heartily; I do now; I'll do it in Parliament. I
know a case of a noble lord, a General in the army, and he received an
intimation that he might as well attend the Prussian cavalry manoeuvres
last Autumn on the Lower Rhine or in Silesia--no matter where. He
couldn't go: he was engaged to shoot birds! I give you my word. Now there
I see old Nevil 's right. It 's as well we should know something about
the Prussian and Austrian cavalry, and if our aristocracy won't go abroad
to study cavalry, who is to? no class in the kingdom understands horses
as they do. My opinion is, they're asleep. Nevil should have stuck to
that, instead of trying to galvanize the country and turning against his
class. But fancy old Nevil asked for the Apology! It petrified him. "I've
told her nothing but the truth," says Nevil. "Telling the truth to women
is an impertinence," says my lord. Nevil swore he'd have a revolution in
the country before he apologized.'

Mr. Culbrett smiled at the absurdity of the change of positions between
Beauchamp and his uncle Everard, which reminded him somewhat of the old
story of the highwayman innkeeper and the market farmer who had been
thoughtful enough to recharge his pistols after quitting the inn at
midnight. A practical 'tu quoque' is astonishingly laughable, and backed
by a high figure and manner it had the flavour of triumphant repartee.
Lord Avonley did not speak of it as a retort upon Nevil, though he
reiterated the word Apology amusingly. He put it as due to the lady
governing his household; and his ultimatum was, that the Apology should
be delivered in terms to satisfy him within three months of the date of
the demand for it: otherwise blank; but the shadowy index pointed to the
destitution of Nevil Beauchamp.

No stroke of retributive misfortune could have been severer to Rosamund
than to be thrust forward as the object of humiliation for the man she
loved. She saw at a glance how much more likely it was (remote as the
possibility appeared) that her lord would perform the act of penitence
than her beloved Nevil. And she had no occasion to ask herself why. Lord
Avonley had done wrong, and Nevil had not. It was inconceivable that
Nevil should apologize to her. It was horrible to picture the act in her
mind. She was a very rational woman, quite a woman of the world, yet such
was her situation between these two men that the childish tale of a close
and consecutive punishment for sins, down to our little naughtinesses and
naturalnesses, enslaved her intelligence, and amazed her with the example
made of her, as it were to prove the tale true of our being surely hauled
back like domestic animals learning the habits of good society, to the
rueful contemplation of certain of our deeds, however wildly we appeal to
nature to stand up for them.

But is it so with all of us? No, thought Rosamund, sinking dejectedly
from a recognition of the heavenliness of the justice which lashed her
and Nevil, and did not scourge Cecil Baskelett. That fine eye for
celestially directed consequences is ever haunted by shadows of unfaith
likely to obscure it completely when chastisement is not seen to fall on
the person whose wickedness is evident to us. It has been established
that we do not wax diviner by dragging down the Gods to our level.

Rosamund knew Lord Avonley too well to harass him with further petitions
and explanations. Equally vain was it to attempt to persuade Beauchamp.
He made use of the house in London, where he met his uncle occasionally,
and he called at Steynham for money, that he could have obtained upon the
one condition, which was no sooner mentioned than fiery words flew in the
room, and the two separated. The leaden look in Beauchamp, noticed by
Cecilia Halkett in their latest interview, was deepening, and was of
itself a displeasure to Lord Avonley, who liked flourishing faces, and
said: 'That fellow's getting the look of a sweating smith': presumptively
in the act of heating his poker at the furnace to stir the country.

It now became an offence to him that Beauchamp should continue doing this
in the speeches and lectures he was reported to be delivering; he stamped
his foot at the sight of his nephew's name in the daily journals; a novel
sentiment of social indignation was expressed by his crying out, at the
next request for money: 'Money to prime you to turn the country into a
rat-hole? Not a square inch of Pennsylvanian paper-bonds! What right have
you to be lecturing and orationing? You've no knowledge. All you've got
is your instincts, and that you show in your readiness to exhibit them
like a monkey. You ought to be turned inside out on your own stage.
You've lumped your brains on a point or two about Land, and Commonland,
and the Suffrage, and you pound away upon them, as if you had the key of
the difficulty. It's the Scotchman's metaphysics; you know nothing clear,
and your working-classes know nothing at all; and you blow them with wind
like an over-stuffed cow. What you're driving at is to get hob-nail boots
to dance on our heads. Stukely says you should be off over to Ireland.
There you'd swim in your element, and have speechifying from instinct,
and howling and pummelling too, enough to last you out. I 'll hand you
money for that expedition. You're one above the number wanted here.
You've a look of bad powder fit only to flash in the pan. I saved you
from the post of public donkey, by keeping you out of Parliament. You're
braying and kicking your worst for it still at these meetings of yours. A
naval officer preaching about Republicanism and parcelling out the Land!'

Beauchamp replied quietly, 'The lectures I read are Dr. Shrapnel's. When
I speak I have his knowledge to back my deficiencies. He is too ill to
work, and I consider it my duty to do as much of his work as I can
undertake.'

'Ha! You're the old infidel's Amen clerk. It would rather astonish
orthodox congregations to see clerks in our churches getting into the
pulpit to read the sermon for sick clergymen,' said Lord Avonley. His
countenance furrowed. 'I'll pay that bill,' he added.

'Pay down half a million!' thundered Beauchamp; and dropping his voice,
'or go to him.'

'You remind me,' his uncle observed. 'I recommend you to ring that bell,
and have Mrs. Culling here.'

'If she comes she will hear what I think of her.'

'Then, out of the house!'

'Very well, sir. You decline to supply me with money?'

'I do.'

'I must have it!'

'I dare say. Money's a chain-cable for holding men to their senses.'

'I ask you, my lord, how I am to carry on Holdesbury?'

'Give it up.'

'I shall have to,' said Beauchamp, striving to be prudent.

'There isn't a doubt of it,' said his uncle, upon a series of nods
diminishing in their depth until his head assumed a droll interrogative
fixity, with an air of 'What next?'




CHAPTER XXXIX

BETWEEN BEAUCHAMP AND CECILIA

Beauchamp quitted the house without answering as to what next, and
without seeing Rosamund.

In the matter of money, as of his physical health, he wanted to do too
much at once; he had spent largely of both in his efforts to repair the
injury done to Dr. Shrapnel. He was overworked, anxious, restless,
craving for a holiday somewhere in France, possibly; he was all but
leaping on board the boat at times, and, unwilling to leave his dear old
friend who clung to him, he stayed, keeping his impulses below the
tide-mark which leads to action, but where they do not yield peace of
spirit. The tone of Renee's letters filled him with misgivings. She wrote
word that she had seen M. d'Henriel for the first time since his return
from Italy, and he was much changed, and inclined to thank Roland for the
lesson he had received from him at the sword's point. And next she urged
Beauchamp to marry, so that he and she might meet, as if she felt a
necessity for it. 'I shall love your wife; teach her to think amiably of
me,' she said. And her letter contained womanly sympathy for him in his
battle with his uncle. Beauchamp thought of his experiences of Cecilia's
comparative coldness. He replied that there was no prospect of his
marrying; he wished there were one of meeting! He forbore from writing
too fervently, but he alluded to happy days in Normandy, and proposed to
renew them if she would say she had need of him. He entreated her to deal
with him frankly; he reminded her that she must constantly look to him,
as she had vowed she would, when in any kind of trouble; and he declared
to her that he was unchanged. He meant, of an unchanged disposition to
shield and serve her; but the review of her situation, and his knowledge
of her quick blood, wrought him to some jealous lover's throbs, which led
him to impress his unchangeableness upon her, to bind her to that
standard.

She declined his visit: not now; 'not yet': and for that he presumed to
chide her, half-sincerely. As far as he knew he stood against everybody
save his old friend and Renee; and she certainly would have refreshed his
heart for a day. In writing, however, he had an ominous vision of the
morrow to the day; and, both for her sake and his own, he was not
unrejoiced to hear that she was engaged day and night in nursing her
husband. Pursuing his vision of the morrow of an unreproachful day with
Renee, the madness of taking her to himself, should she surrender at last
to a third persuasion, struck him sharply, now that he and his uncle were
foot to foot in downright conflict, and money was the question. He had
not much remaining of his inheritance--about fifteen hundred pounds. He
would have to vacate Holdesbury and his uncle's town-house in a month.
Let his passion be never so desperate, for a beggared man to think of
running away with a wife, or of marrying one, the folly is as big as the
worldly offence: no justification is to be imagined. Nay, and there is no
justification for the breach of a moral law. Beauchamp owned it, and felt
that Renee's resistance to him in Normandy placed her above him. He
remembered a saying of his moralist: 'We who interpret things heavenly by
things earthly must not hope to juggle with them for our pleasures, and
can look to no absolution of evil acts.' The school was a hard one. It
denied him holidays; it cut him off from dreams. It ran him in heavy
harness on a rough highroad, allowing no turnings to right or left, no
wayside croppings; with the simple permission to him that he should daily
get thoroughly tired. And what was it Jenny Denham had said on the
election day? 'Does incessant battling keep the intellect clear?'

His mind was clear enough to put the case, that either he beheld a
tremendous magnification of things, or else that other men did not attach
common importance to them; and he decided that the latter was the fact.

An incessant struggle of one man with the world, which position usually
ranks his relatives against him, does not conduce to soundness of
judgement. He may nevertheless be right in considering that he is right
in the main. The world in motion is not so wise that it can pretend to
silence the outcry of an ordinarily generous heart even--the very infant
of antagonism to its methods and establishments. It is not so difficult
to be right against the world when the heart is really active; but the
world is our book of humanity, and before insisting that his handwriting
shall occupy the next blank page of it, the noble rebel is bound for the
sake of his aim to ask himself how much of a giant he is, lest he fall
like a blot on the page, instead of inscribing intelligible characters
there.

Moreover, his relatives are present to assure him that he did not jump
out of Jupiter's head or come of the doctor. They hang on him like an
ill-conditioned prickly garment; and if he complains of the irritation
they cause him, they one and all denounce his irritable skin.

Fretted by his relatives he cannot be much of a giant.

Beauchamp looked from Dr. Shrapnel in his invalid's chair to his uncle
Everard breathing robustly, and mixed his uncle's errors with those of
the world which honoured and upheld him. His remainder of equability
departed; his impatience increased. His appetite for work at Dr.
Shrapnel's writing-desk was voracious. He was ready for any labour, the
transcribing of papers, writing from dictation, whatsoever was of service
to Lord Avonley's victim: and he was not like the Spartan boy with the
wolf at his vitals; he betrayed it in the hue his uncle Everard detested,
in a visible nervousness, and indulgence in fits of scorn. Sharp epigrams
and notes of irony provoked his laughter more than fun. He seemed to
acquiesce in some of the current contemporary despair of our immoveable
England, though he winced at a satire on his country, and attempted to
show that the dull dominant class of moneymakers was the ruin of her.
Wherever he stood to represent Dr. Shrapnel, as against Mr. Grancey
Lespel on account of the Itchincope encroachments, he left a sting that
spread the rumour of his having become not only a black torch of
Radicalism--our modern provincial estateholders and their wives bestow
that reputation lightly--but a gentleman with the polish scratched off
him in parts. And he, though individually he did not understand how there
was to be game in the land if game-preserving was abolished, signed his
name R. C. S. NEVIL BEAUCHAMP for Dr. SHRAPNEL, in the communications
directed to solicitors of the persecutors of poachers.

His behaviour to Grancey Lespel was eclipsed by his treatment of Captain
Baskelett. Cecil had ample reason to suppose his cousin to be friendly
with him. He himself had forgotten Dr. Shrapnel, and all other
dissensions, in a supremely Christian spirit. He paid his cousin the
compliment to think that he had done likewise. At Romfrey and in London
he had spoken to Nevil of his designs upon the widow: Nevil said nothing
against it and it was under Mrs. Wardour-Devereux's eyes, and before a
man named Lydiard, that, never calling to him to put him on his guard,
Nevil fell foul of him with every capital charge that can be brought
against a gentleman, and did so abuse, worry, and disgrace him as to
reduce him to quit the house to avoid the scandal of a resort to a
gentleman's last appeal in vindication of his character. Mrs. Devereux
spoke of the terrible scene to Cecilia, and Lydiard to Miss Denham. The
injured person communicated it to Lord Avonley, who told Colonel Halkett
emphatically that his nephew Cecil deserved well of him in having kept
command of his temper out of consideration for the family. There was a
general murmur of the family over this incident. The widow was rich, and
it ranked among the unwritten crimes against blood for one offshoot of a
great house wantonly to thwart another in the wooing of her by humbling
him in her presence, doing his utmost to expose him as a schemer, a
culprit, and a poltroon.

Could it be that Beauchamp had reserved his wrath with his cousin to
avenge Dr. Shrapnel upon him signally? Miss Denham feared her guardian
was the cause. Lydiard was indefinitely of her opinion. The idea struck
Cecilia Halkett, and as an example of Beauchamp's tenacity of purpose and
sureness of aim it fascinated her. But Mrs. Wardour-Devereux did not
appear to share it. She objected to Beauchamp's intemperateness and
unsparingness, as if she was for conveying a sisterly warning to Cecilia;
and that being off her mind, she added, smiling a little and colouring a
little: 'We learn only from men what men are.' How the scene commenced
and whether it was provoked, she failed to recollect. She described
Beauchamp as very self-contained in manner throughout his tongue was the
scorpion. Cecilia fancied he must have resembled his uncle Everard.

Cecilia was conquered, but unclaimed. While supporting and approving him
in her heart she was dreading to receive some new problem of his conduct;
and still while she blamed him for not seeking an interview with her, she
liked him for this instance of delicacy in the present state of his
relations with Lord Avonley.

A problem of her own conduct disturbed the young lady's clear conception
of herself: and this was a ruffling of unfaithfulness in her love of
Beauchamp, that was betrayed to her by her forgetfulness of him whenever
she chanced to be with Seymour Austin. In Mr. Austin's company she
recovered her forfeited repose, her poetry of life, her image of the
independent Cecilia throned above our dust of battle, gazing on broad
heaven. She carried the feeling so far that Blackburn Tuckham's
enthusiasm for Mr. Austin gave him grace in her sight, and praise of her
father's favourite from Mr. Austin's mouth made him welcome to her. The
image of that grave capable head, dusty-grey about the temples, and the
darkly sanguine face of the tried man, which was that of a seasoned
warrior and inspired full trust in him, with his vivid look, his personal
distinction, his plain devotion to the country's business, and the
domestic solitude he lived in, admired, esteemed, loved perhaps, but
unpartnered, was often her refuge and haven from tempestuous Beauchamp.
She could see in vision the pride of Seymour Austin's mate. It flushed
her reflectively. Conquered but not claimed, Cecilia was like the frozen
earth insensibly moving round to sunshine in nature, with one white
flower in her breast as innocent a sign of strong sweet blood as a woman
may wear. She ascribed to that fair mate of Seymour Austin's many lofty
charms of womanhood; above all, stateliness: her especial dream of an
attainable superlative beauty in women. And supposing that lady to be
accused of the fickle breaking of another love, who walked beside him,
matched with his calm heart and one with him in counsel, would the
accusation be repeated by them that beheld her husband? might it not
rather be said that she had not deviated, but had only stepped higher?
She chose no youth, no glistener, no idler: it was her soul striving
upward to air like a seed in the earth that raised her to him: and she
could say to the man once enchaining her: Friend, by the good you taught
me I was led to this!

Cecilia's reveries fled like columns of mist before the gale when tidings
reached her of a positive rupture between Lord Avonley and Nevil
Beauchamp, and of the mandate to him to quit possession of Holdesbury and
the London house within a certain number of days, because of his refusal
to utter an apology to Mrs. Culling. Angrily on his behalf she prepared
to humble herself to him. Louise Wardour-Devereux brought them to a
meeting, at which Cecilia, with her heart in her hand, was icy. Mr.
Lydiard, prompted by Mrs. Devereux, gave him better reasons for her
singular coldness than Cecilia could give to herself, and some time
afterward Beauchamp went to Mount Laurels, where Colonel Halkett mounted
guard over his daughter, and behaved, to her thinking, cruelly. 'Now you
have ruined yourself there's nothing ahead for you but to go to the
Admiralty and apply for a ship,' he said, sugaring the unkindness with
the remark that the country would be the gainer. He let fly a side-shot
at London men calling themselves military men who sought to repair their
fortunes by chasing wealthy widows, and complimented Beauchamp: 'You're
not one of that sort.'

Cecilia looked at Beauchamp stedfastly. 'Speak,' said the look.

But he, though not blind, was keenly wounded.

'Money I must have,' he said, half to the colonel, half to himself.

Colonel Halkett shrugged. Cecilia waited for a directness in Beauchamp's
eyes.

Her father was too wary to leave them.

Cecilia's intuition told her that by leading to a discussion of politics,
and adopting Beauchamp's views, she could kindle him. Why did she
refrain? It was that the conquered young lady was a captive, not an ally.
To touch the subject in cold blood, voluntarily to launch on those vexed
waters, as if his cause were her heart's, as much as her heart was the
man's, she felt to be impossible. He at the same time felt that the
heiress, endowing him with money to speed the good cause, should be his
match in ardour for it, otherwise he was but a common adventurer, winning
and despoiling an heiress.

They met in London. Beauchamp had not vacated either Holdesbury or the
town-house; he was defying his uncle Everard, and Cecilia thought with
him that it was a wise temerity. She thought with him passively
altogether. On this occasion she had not to wait for directness in his
eyes; she had to parry it. They were at a dinner-party at Lady Elsea's,
generally the last place for seeing Lord Palmet, but he was present, and
arranged things neatly for them, telling Beauchamp that he acted under
Mrs. Wardour-Devereux's orders. Never was an opportunity, more propitious
for a desperate lover. Had it been Renee next him, no petty worldly
scruples of honour would have held him back. And if Cecilia had spoken
feelingly of Dr. Shrapnel, or had she simulated a thoughtful interest in
his pursuits, his hesitations would have vanished. As it was, he dared to
look what he did not permit himself to speak. She was nobly lovely, and
the palpable envy of men around cried fool at his delays. Beggar and
heiress he said in his heart, to vitalize the three-parts fiction of the
point of honour which Cecilia's beauty was fast submerging. When she was
leaving he named a day for calling to see her. Colonel Halkett stood by,
and she answered, 'Come.'

Beauchamp kept the appointment. Cecilia was absent.

He was unaware that her father had taken her to old Mrs. Beauchamp's
death-bed. Her absence, after she had said, 'Come,' appeared a
confirmation of her glacial manner when they met at the house of Mrs.
Wardour-Devereux; and he charged her with waywardness. A wound of the
same kind that we are inflicting is about the severest we can feel.

Beauchamp received intelligence of his venerable great-aunt's death from
Blackburn Tuckham, and after the funeral he was informed that eighty
thousand pounds had been bequeathed to him: a goodly sum of money for a
gentleman recently beggared; yet, as the political enthusiast could not
help reckoning (apart from a fervent sentiment of gratitude toward his
benefactress), scarcely enough to do much more than start and push for
three or more years a commanding daily newspaper, devoted to Radical
interests, and to be entitled THE DAWN.

True, he might now conscientiously approach the heiress, take her hand
with an open countenance, and retain it.

Could he do so quite conscientiously? The point of honour had been
centred in his condition of beggary. Something still was in his way. A
quick spring of his blood for air, motion, excitement, holiday freedom,
sent his thoughts travelling whither they always shot away when his
redoubtable natural temper broke loose.

In the case of any other woman than Cecilia Halkett he would not have
been obstructed by the minor consideration as to whether he was wholly
heart-free to ask her in marriage that instant; for there was no
hindrance, and she was beautiful. She was exceedingly beautiful; and she
was an unequalled heiress. She would be able with her wealth to float his
newspaper, THE DAWN, so desired of Dr. Shrapnel!--the best restorative
that could be applied to him! Every temptation came supplicating him to
take the step which indeed he wished for: one feeling opposed. He really
respected Cecilia: it is not too much to say that he worshipped her with
the devout worship rendered to the ideal Englishwoman by the heart of the
nation. For him she was purity, charity, the keeper of the keys of
whatsoever is held precious by men; she was a midway saint, a light
between day and darkness, in whom the spirit in the flesh shone like the
growing star amid thin sanguine colour, the sweeter, the brighter, the
more translucent the longer known. And if the image will allow it, the
nearer down to him the holier she seemed.

How offer himself when he was not perfectly certain that he was worthy of
her?

Some jugglery was played by the adept male heart in these later
hesitations. Up to the extent of his knowledge of himself, the man was
fairly sincere. Passion would have sped him to Cecilia, but passion is
not invariably love; and we know what it can be.

The glance he cast over the water at Normandy was withdrawn. He went to
Bevisham to consult with Dr. Shrapnel about the starting of a weekly
journal, instead of a daily, and a name for it--a serious question: for
though it is oftener weekly than daily that the dawn is visible in
England, titles must not invite the public jest; and the glorious project
of the daily DAWN was prudently abandoned for by-and-by. He thought
himself rich enough to put a Radical champion weekly in the field and
this matter, excepting the title, was arranged in Bevisham. Thence he
proceeded to Holdesbury, where he heard that the house, grounds, and farm
were let to a tenant preparing to enter. Indifferent to the blow, he kept
an engagement to deliver a speech at the great manufacturing town of
Gunningham, and then went to London, visiting his uncle's town-house for
recent letters. Not one was from Renee: she had not written for six
weeks, not once for his thrice! A letter from Cecil Baskelett informed
him that 'my lord' had placed the town-house at his disposal. Returning
to dress for dinner on a thick and murky evening of February, Beauchamp
encountered his cousin on the steps. He said to Cecil, 'I sleep here
to-night: I leave the house to you tomorrow.'

Cecil struck out his underjaw to reply: 'Oh! good. You sleep here
to-night. You are a fortunate man. I congratulate you. I shall not
disturb you. I have just entered on my occupation of the house. I have my
key. Allow me to recommend you to go straight to the drawing-room. And I
may inform you that the Earl of Romfrey is at the point of death. My lord
is at the castle.'

Cecil accompanied his descent of the steps with the humming of an opera
melody: Beauchamp tripped into the hall-passage. A young maid-servant
held the door open, and she accosted him: 'If you please, there is a lady
up-stairs in the drawing-room; she speaks foreign English, sir.'

Beauchamp asked if the lady was alone, and not waiting for the answer,
though he listened while writing, and heard that she was heavily veiled,
he tore a strip from his notebook, and carefully traced half-a-dozen
telegraphic words to Mrs. Culling at Steynham. His rarely failing
promptness, which was like an inspiration, to conceive and execute
measures for averting peril, set him on the thought of possibly
counteracting his cousin Cecil's malignant tongue by means of a message
to Rosamund, summoning her by telegraph to come to town by the next train
that night. He despatched the old woman keeping the house, as trustier
than the young one, to the nearest office, and went up to the
drawing-room, with a quick thumping heart that was nevertheless as little
apprehensive of an especial trial and danger as if he had done nothing at
all to obviate it. Indeed he forgot that he had done anything when he
turned the handle of the drawing-room door.




CHAPTER XL

A TRIAL OF HIM

A low-burning lamp and fire cast a narrow ring on the shadows of the
dusky London room. One of the window-blinds was drawn up. Beauchamp
discerned a shape at that window, and the fear seized him that it might
be Madame d'Auffray with evil news of Renee: but it was Renee's name he
called. She rose from her chair, saying, 'I!'

She was trembling.

Beauchamp asked her whisperingly if she had come alone.

'Alone; without even a maid,' she murmured.

He pulled down the blind of the window exposing them to the square, and
led her into the light to see her face.

The dimness of light annoyed him, and the miserable reception of her;
this English weather, and the gloomy house! And how long had she been
waiting for him? and what was the mystery? Renee in England seemed
magical; yet it was nothing stranger than an old dream realized. He wound
up the lamp, holding her still with one hand. She was woefully pale;
scarcely able to bear the increase of light.

'It is I who come to you': she was half audible.

'This time!' said he. 'You have been suffering?'

'No.'

Her tone was brief; not reassuring.

'You came straight to me?'

'Without a deviation that I know of.'

'From Tourdestelle?'

'You have not forgotten Tourdestelle, Nevil?'

The memory of it quickened his rapture in reading her features. It was
his first love, his enchantress, who was here: and how? Conjectures shot
through him like lightnings in the dark.

Irrationally, at a moment when reason stood in awe, he fancied it must be
that her husband was dead. He forced himself to think it, and could have
smiled at the hurry of her coming, one, without even a maid: and deeper
down in him the devouring question burned which dreaded the answer.

But of old, in Normandy, she had pledged herself to join him with no
delay when free, if ever free!

So now she was free.

One side of him glowed in illumination; the other was black as Winter
night; but light subdues darkness; and in a situation like Beauchamp's,
the blood is livelier than the prophetic mind.

'Why did you tell me to marry? What did that mean?' said he. 'Did you
wish me to be the one in chains? And you have come quite alone!--you will
give me an account of everything presently:--You are here! in England!
and what a welcome for you! You are cold.'

'I am warmly clad,' said Renee, suffering her hand to be drawn to his
breast at her arm's-length, not bending with it.

Alive to his own indirectness, he was conscious at once of the slight
sign of reservation, and said: 'Tell me . . .' and swerved sheer away
from his question: 'how is Madame d'Auffray?'

'Agnes? I left her at Tourdestelle,' said Renee.

'And Roland? He never writes to me.'

'Neither he nor I write much. He is at the military camp of instruction
in the North.'

'He will run over to us.'

'Do not expect it.'

'Why not?'

Renee sighed. 'We shall have to live longer than I look for . . .' she
stopped. 'Why do you ask me why not? He is fond of us both, and sorry for
us; but have you forgotten Roland that morning on the Adriatic?'

Beauchamp pressed her hand. The stroke of Then and Now rang in his breast
like a bell instead of a bounding heart. Something had stunned his heart.
He had no clear central feeling; he tried to gather it from her touch,
from his joy in beholding her and sitting with her alone, from the grace
of her figure, the wild sweetness of her eyes, and the beloved foreign
lips bewitching him with their exquisite French and perfection of speech.

His nature was too prompt in responding to such a call on it for resolute
warmth.

'If I had been firmer then, or you one year older!' he said.

'That girl in Venice had no courage,' said Renee.

She raised her head and looked about the room.

Her instinct of love sounded her lover through, and felt the deficiency
or the contrariety in him, as surely as musical ears are pained by a
discord that they require no touchstone to detect. Passion has the
sensitiveness of fever, and is as cruelly chilled by a tepid air.

'Yes, a London house after Venice and Normandy!' said Beauchamp,
following her look.

'Sicily: do not omit Syracuse; you were in your naval uniform: Normandy
was our third meeting,' said Renee. 'This is the fourth. I should have
reckoned that.'

'Why? Superstitiously?'

'We cannot be entirely wise when we have staked our fate. Sailors are
credulous: you know them. Women are like them when they embark . . .
Three chances! Who can boast of so many, and expect one more! Will you
take me to my hotel, Nevil?'

The fiction of her being free could not be sustained.

'Take you and leave you? I am absolutely at your command. But leave you?
You are alone: and you have told me nothing.'

What was there to tell? The desperate act was apparent, and told all.

Renee's dark eyelashes lifted on him, and dropped.

'Then things are as I left them in Normandy?' said he.

She replied: 'Almost.'

He quivered at the solitary word; for his conscience was on edge. It ran
the shrewdest irony through him, inexplicably. 'Almost': that is, 'with
this poor difference of one person, now finding herself worthless,
subtracted from the list; no other; it should be little to them as it is
little to you': or, reversing it, the substance of the word became
magnified and intensified by its humble slightness: 'Things are the same,
but for the jewel of the province, a lustre of France, lured hither to
her eclipse'--meanings various, indistinguishable, thrilling and piercing
sad as the half-tones humming round the note of a strung wire, which is a
blunt single note to the common ear.

Beauchamp sprang to his feet and bent above her: 'You have come to me,
for the love of me, to give yourself to me, and for ever, for good, till
death? Speak, my beloved Renee.'

Her eyes were raised to his: 'You see me here. It is for you to speak.'

'I do. There's nothing I ask for now--if the step can't be retrieved.'

'The step retrieved, my friend? There is no step backward in life.'

'I am thinking of you, Renee.'

'Yes, I know,' she answered hurriedly.

'If we discover that the step is a wrong one?' he pursued: 'why is there
no step backward?'

'I am talking of women,' said Renee.

'Why not for women?'

'Honourable women, I mean,' said Renee.

Beauchamp inclined to forget his position in finding matter to contest.

Yet it is beyond contest that there is no step backward in life. She
spoke well; better than he, and she won his deference by it. Not only she
spoke better: she was truer, distincter, braver: and a man ever on the
look-out for superior qualities, and ready to bow to them, could not
refuse her homage. With that a saving sense of power quitted him.

'You wrote to me that you were unchanged, Nevil.'

'I am.'

'So, then, I came.'

His rejoinder was the dumb one, commonly eloquent and satisfactory.

Renee shut her eyes with a painful rigour of endurance. She opened them
to look at him steadily.

The desperate act of her flight demanded immediate recognition from him
in simple language and a practical seconding of it. There was the test.

'I cannot stay in this house, Nevil; take me away.'

She named her hotel in her French English, and the sound of it penetrated
him with remorseful pity. It was for him, and of his doing, that she was
in an alien land and an outcast!

'This house is wretched for you,' said he: 'and you must be hungry. Let
me . . .'

'I cannot eat. I will ask you': she paused, drawing on her energies, and
keeping down the throbs of her heart: 'this: do you love me?'

'I love you with all my heart and soul.'

'As in Normandy?'

'Yes.'

'In Venice?'

'As from the first, Renee! That I can swear.'

'Oaths are foolish. I meant to ask you--my friend, there is no question
in my mind of any other woman: I see you love me: I am so used to
consider myself the vain and cowardly creature, and you the boldest and
faithfullest of men, that I could not abandon the habit if I would: I
started confiding in you, sure that I should come to land. But I have to
ask you: to me you are truth: I have no claim on my lover for anything
but the answer to this:--Am I a burden to you?'

His brows flew up in furrows. He drew a heavy breath, for never had he
loved her more admiringly, and never on such equal terms. She was his
mate in love and daring at least. A sorrowful comparison struck him, of a
little boat sailing out to a vessel in deep seas and left to founder.

Without knotting his mind to acknowledge or deny the burden, for he could
do neither, he stood silent, staring at her, not so much in weakness as
in positive mental division. No, would be false; and Yes, not less false;
and if the step was irretrievable, to say Yes would be to plunge a dagger
in her bosom; but No was a vain deceit involving a double wreck.
Assuredly a man standing against the world in a good cause, with a
runaway wife on his hands, carries a burden, however precious it be to
him.

A smile of her lips, parted in an anguish of expectancy, went to death
over Renee's face. She looked at him tenderly. 'The truth,' she murmured
to herself, and her eyelids fell.

'I am ready to bear anything,' said Beauchamp. 'I weigh what you ask me,
that is all. You a burden to me? But when you ask me, you make me turn
round and inquire how we stand before the world.'

'The world does not stone men,' said Renee.

'Can't I make you feel that I am not thinking of myself?' Beauchamp
stamped in his extreme perplexity. He was gagged; he could not possibly
talk to her, who had cast the die, of his later notions of morality and
the world's dues, fees, and claims on us.

'No, friend, I am not complaining.' Renee put out her hand to him; with
compassionate irony feigning to have heard excuses. 'What right have I to
complain? I have not the sensation. I could not expect you to be
everlastingly the sentinel of love. Three times I rejected you! Now that
I have lost my father--Oh! poor father: I trifled with my lover, I
tricked him that my father might live in peace. He is dead. I wished you
to marry one of your own countrywomen, Nevil. You said it was impossible;
and I, with my snake at my heart, and a husband grateful for nursing and
whimpering to me for his youth like a beggar on the road, I thought I
owed you this debt of body and soul, to prove to you I have some courage;
and for myself, to reward myself for my long captivity and misery with
one year of life: and adieu to Roland my brother! adieu to friends! adieu
to France! Italy was our home. I dreamed of one year in Italy; I fancied
it might be two; more than that was unimaginable. Prisoners of long date
do not hope; they do not calculate: air, light, they say; to breathe
freely and drop down! They are reduced to the instincts of the beasts. I
thought I might give you happiness, pay part of my debt to you. Are you
remembering Count Henri? That paints what I was! I could fly to that for
a taste of life! a dance to death! And again you ask: Why, if I loved you
then, not turn to you in preference? No, you have answered it yourself,
Nevil;--on that day in the boat, when generosity in a man so surprised
me, it seemed a miracle to me; and it was, in its divination. How I thank
my dear brother Roland for saving me the sight of you condemned to fight,
against your conscience! He taught poor M. d'Henriel his lesson. You,
Nevil, were my teacher. And see how it hangs: there was mercy for me in
not having drawn down my father's anger on my heart's beloved. He loved
you. He pitied us. He reproached himself. In his last days he was taught
to suspect our story: perhaps from Roland; perhaps I breathed it without
speaking. He called heaven's blessings on you. He spoke of you with
tears, clutching my hand. He made me feel he would have cried out: "If I
were leaving her with Nevil Beauchamp!" and "Beauchamp," I heard him
murmuring once: "take down Froissart": he named a chapter. It was
curious: if he uttered my name Renee, yours, "Nevil," soon followed. That
was noticed by Roland. Hope for us, he could not have had; as little as
I! But we were his two: his children. I buried him--I thought he would
know our innocence, and now pardon our love. I read your letters, from my
name at the beginning, to yours at the end, and from yours back to mine,
and between the lines, for any doubtful spot: and oh, rash! But I would
not retrace the step for my own sake. I am certain of your love for me,
though . . .' She paused: 'Yes, I am certain of it. And if I am a burden
to you?'

'About as much as the air, which I can't do without since I began to
breathe it,' said Beauchamp, more clear-mindedly now that he supposed he
was addressing a mind, and with a peril to himself that escaped his
vigilance. There was a secret intoxication for him already in the
half-certainty that the step could not be retraced. The idea that he
might reason with her, made her seductive to the heart and head of him.

'I am passably rich, Nevil,' she said. 'I do not care for money, except
that it gives wings. Roland inherits the chateau in Touraine. I have one
in Burgundy, and rentes and shares, my notary informs me.'

'I have money,' said he. His heart began beating violently. He lost sight
of his intention of reasoning. 'Good God! if you were free!'

She faltered: 'At Tourdestelle . . .'

'Yes, and I am unchanged,' Beauchamp cried out. 'Your life there was
horrible, and mine's intolerable.' He stretched his arms cramped like the
yawning of a wretch in fetters. That which he would and would not became
so intervolved that he deemed it reasonable to instance their common
misery as a ground for their union against the world. And what has that
world done for us, that a joy so immeasurable should be rejected on its
behalf? And what have we succeeded in doing, that the childish effort to
move it should be continued at such a cost?

For years, down to one year back, and less--yesterday, it could be
said--all human blessedness appeared to him in the person of Renee, given
him under any condition whatsoever. She was not less adorable now. In her
decision, and a courage that he especially prized in women, she was a
sweeter to him than when he was with her in France: too sweet to be
looked at and refused.

'But we must live in England,' he cried abruptly out of his inner mind.

'Oh! not England, Italy, Italy!' Renee exclaimed: 'Italy, or Greece:
anywhere where we have sunlight. Mountains and valleys are my dream.
Promise it, Nevil. I will obey you; but this is my wish. Take me through
Venice, that I may look at myself and wonder. We can live at sea, in a
yacht; anywhere with you but in England. This country frowns on me; I can
hardly fetch my breath here, I am suffocated. The people all walk in
lines in England. Not here, Nevil! They are good people, I am sure; and
it is your country: but their faces chill me, their voices grate; I
should never understand them; they would be to me like their fogs
eternally; and I to them? O me! it would be like hearing sentence in the
dampness of the shroud perpetually. Again I say I do not doubt that they
are very good: they claim to be; they judge others; they may know how to
make themselves happy in their climate; it is common to most creatures to
do so, or to imagine it. Nevil! not England!'

Truly 'the mad commander and his French marquise' of the Bevisham
Election ballad would make a pretty figure in England!

His friends of his own class would be mouthing it. The story would be a
dogging shadow of his public life, and, quite as bad, a reflection on his
party. He heard the yelping tongues of the cynics. He saw the
consternation and grief of his old Bevisham hero, his leader and his
teacher.

'Florence,' he said, musing on the prospect of exile and idleness:
'there's a kind of society to be had in Florence.'

Renee asked him if he cared so much for society.

He replied that women must have it, just as men must have exercise.

'Old women, Nevil; intriguers, tattlers.'

'Young women, Renee.'

She signified no.

He shook the head of superior knowledge paternally.

Her instinct of comedy set a dimple faintly working in her cheek.

'Not if they love, Nevil.'

'At least,' said he, 'a man does not like to see the woman he loves
banished by society and browbeaten.'

'Putting me aside, do you care for it, Nevil?'

'Personally not a jot.'

'I am convinced of that,' said Renee.

She spoke suspiciously sweetly, appearing perfect candour.

The change in him was perceptible to her. The nature of the change was
unfathomable.

She tried her wits at the riddle. But though she could be an actress
before him with little difficulty, the torment of her situation roused
the fever within her at a bare effort to think acutely. Scarlet suffused
her face: her brain whirled.

'Remember, dearest, I have but offered myself: you have your choice. I
can pass on. Yes, I know well I speak to Nevil Beauchamp; you have
drilled me to trust you and your word as a soldier trusts to his
officer--once a faint-hearted soldier! I need not remind you: fronting
the enemy now, in hard truth. But I want your whole heart to decide. Give
me no silly, compassion! Would it have been better to me to have written
to you? If I had written I should have clipped my glorious impulse,
brought myself down to earth with my own arrow. I did not write, for I
believed in you.'

So firm had been her faith in him that her visions of him on the passage
to England had resolved all to one flash of blood-warm welcome awaiting
her: and it says much for her natural generosity that the savage delicacy
of a woman placed as she now was, did not take a mortal hurt from the
apparent voidness of this home of his bosom. The passionate gladness of
the lover was wanting: the chivalrous valiancy of manful joy.

Renee shivered at the cloud thickening over her new light of intrepid
defiant life.

'Think it not improbable that I have weighed everything I surrender in
quitting France,' she said.

Remorse wrestled with Beauchamp and flung him at her feet.

Renee remarked on the lateness of the hour.

He promised to conduct her to her hotel immediately.

'And to-morrow?' said Renee, simply, but breathlessly.

'To-morrow, let it be Italy! But first I telegraph to Roland and
Tourdestelle. I can't run and hide. The step may be retrieved: or no, you
are right; the step cannot, but the next to it may be stopped--that was
the meaning I had! I 'll try. It 's cutting my hand off, tearing my heart
out; but I will. O that you were free! You left your husband at
Tourdestelle?'

'I presume he is there at present: he was in Paris when I left.'

Beauchamp spoke hoarsely and incoherently in contrast with her composure:
'You will misunderstand me for a day or two, Renee. I say if you were
free I should have my first love mine for ever. Don't fear me: I have no
right even to press your fingers. He may throw you into my arms. Now you
are the same as if you were in your own home: and you must accept me for
your guide. By all I hope for in life, I'll see you through it, and keep
the dogs from barking, if I can. Thousands are ready to give tongue. And
if they can get me in the character of a law-breaker!--I hear them.'

'Are you imagining, Nevil, that there is a possibility of my returning to
him?'

'To your place in the world! You have not had to endure tyranny?'

'I should have had a certain respect for a tyrant, Nevil. At least I
should have had an occupation in mocking him and conspiring against him.
Tyranny! There would have been some amusement to me in that.'

'It was neglect.'

'If I could still charge it on neglect, Nevil! Neglect is very endurable.
He rewards me for nursing him . . . he rewards me with a little
persecution: wives should be flattered by it: it comes late.'

'What?' cried Beauchamp, oppressed and impatient.

Renee sank her voice.

Something in the run of the unaccented French: 'Son amour, mon ami':
drove the significance of the bitterness of the life she had left behind
her burningly through him. This was to have fled from a dragon! was the
lover's thought: he perceived the motive of her flight: and it was a
vindication of it that appealed to him irresistibly. The proposal for her
return grew hideous: and this ever multiplying horror and sting of the
love of a married woman came on him with a fresh throbbing shock, more
venom.

He felt for himself now, and now he was full of feeling for her.
Impossible that she should return! Tourdestelle shone to him like a
gaping chasm of fire. And becoming entirely selfish he impressed his
total abnegation of self upon Renee so that she could have worshipped
him. A lover that was like a starry frost, froze her veins, bewildered
her intelligence. She yearned for meridian warmth, for repose in a
directing hand; and let it be hard as one that grasps a sword: what
matter? unhesitatingness was the warrior virtue of her desire. And for
herself the worst might happen if only she were borne along. Let her life
be torn and streaming like the flag of battle, it must be forward to the
end.

That was a quality of godless young heroism not unexhausted in
Beauchamp's blood. Reanimated by him, she awakened his imagination of the
vagrant splendours of existence and the rebel delights which have their
own laws and 'nature' for an applauding mother. Radiant Alps rose in his
eyes, and the morning born in the night suns that from mountain and
valley, over sea and desert, called on all earth to witness their death.
The magnificence of the contempt of humanity posed before him superbly
satanesque, grand as thunder among the crags and it was not a sensual cry
that summoned him from his pedlar labours, pack on back along the level
road, to live and breathe deep, gloriously mated: Renee kindled his
romantic spirit, and could strike the feeling into him that to be proud
of his possession of her was to conquer the fretful vanity to possess.
She was not a woman of wiles and lures.

Once or twice she consulted her watch: but as she professed to have no
hunger, Beauchamp's entreaty to her to stay prevailed, and the subtle
form of compliment to his knightly manliness in her remaining with him,
gave him a new sense of pleasure that hung round her companionable
conversation, deepening the meaning of the words, or sometimes
contrasting the sweet surface commonplace with the undercurrent of
strangeness in their hearts, and the reality of a tragic position. Her
musical volubility flowed to entrance and divert him, as it did.

Suddenly Beauchamp glanced upward.

Renee turned from a startled contemplation of his frown, and beheld Mrs.
Rosamund Culling in the room.




CHAPTER XLI

A LAME VICTORY

The intruder was not a person that had power to divide them; yet she came
between their hearts with a touch of steel.

'I am here in obedience to your commands in your telegram of this
evening,' Rosamund replied to Beauchamp's hard stare at her; she
courteously spoke French, and acquitted herself demurely of a bow to the
lady present.

Renee withdrew her serious eyes from Beauchamp. She rose and acknowledged
the bow.

'It is my first visit to England, madame!

'I could have desired, Madame la marquise, more agreeable weather for
you.'

'My friends in England will dispel the bad weather for me, madame'; Renee
smiled softly: 'I have been studying my French-English phrase-book, that
I may learn how dialogues are conducted in your country to lead to
certain ceremonies when old friends meet, and without my book I am at
fault. I am longing to be embraced by you . . . if it will not be
offending your rules?'

Rosamund succumbed to the seductive woman, whose gentle tooth bit through
her tutored simplicity of manner and natural graciousness, administering
its reproof, and eluding a retort or an excuse.

She gave the embrace. In doing so she fell upon her conscious awkwardness
for an expression of reserve that should be as good as irony for irony,
though where Madame de Rouaillout's irony lay, or whether it was irony at
all, our excellent English dame could not have stated, after the feeling
of indignant prudery responding to it so guiltily had subsided.

Beauchamp asked her if she had brought servants with her; and it
gratified her to see that he was no actor fitted to carry a scene through
in virtue's name and vice's mask with this actress.

She replied, 'I have brought a man and a maid-servant. The establishment
will be in town the day after tomorrow, in time for my lord's return from
the Castle.'

'You can have them up to-morrow morning.'

'I could,' Rosamund admitted the possibility. Her idolatry of him was
tried on hearing him press the hospitality of the house upon Madame de
Rouaillout, and observing the lady's transparent feint of a reluctant
yielding. For the voluble Frenchwoman scarcely found a word to utter: she
protested languidly that she preferred the independence of her hotel, and
fluttered a singular look at him, as if overcome by his vehement
determination to have her in the house. Undoubtedly she had a taking face
and style. His infatuation, nevertheless, appeared to Rosamund utter
dementedness, considering this woman's position, and Cecilia Halkett's
beauty and wealth, and that the house was no longer at his disposal. He
was really distracted, to judge by his forehead, or else he was
over-acting his part.

The absence of a cook in the house, Rosamund remarked, must prevent her
from seconding Captain Beauchamp's invitation.

He turned on her witheringly. 'The telegraph will do that. You're in
London; cooks can be had by dozens. Madame de Rouaillout is alone here;
she has come to see a little of England, and you will do the honours of
the house.'

'M. le marquis is not in London?' said Rosamund, disregarding the dumb
imprecation she saw on Beauchamp's features.

'No, madame, my husband is not in London,' Renee rejoined collectedly.

'See to the necessary comforts of the house instantly,' said Beauchamp,
and telling Renee, without listening to her, that he had to issue orders,
he led Rosamund, who was out of breath at the effrontery of the pair,
toward the door. 'Are you blind, ma'am? Have you gone foolish? What
should I have sent for you for, but to protect her? I see your mind; and
off with the prude, pray! Madame will have my room; clear away every sign
of me there. I sleep out; I can find a bed anywhere. And bolt and chain
the house-door to-night against Cecil Baskelett; he informs me that he
has taken possession.'

Rosamund's countenance had become less austere.

'Captain Baskelett!' she exclaimed, leaning to Beauchamp's views on the
side of her animosity to Cecil; 'he has been promised by his uncle the
use of a set of rooms during the year, when the mistress of the house is
not in occupation. I stipulated expressly that he was to see you and suit
himself to your convenience, and to let me hear that you and he had
agreed to an arrangement, before he entered the house. He has no right to
be here, and I shall have no hesitation in locking him out.'

Beauchamp bade her go, and not be away more than five minutes; and then
he would drive to the hotel for the luggage.

She scanned him for a look of ingenuousness that might be trusted, and
laughed in her heart at her credulity for expecting it of a man in such a
case. She saw Renee sitting stonily, too proudly self-respecting to put
on a mask of flippant ease. These lovers might be accomplices in
deceiving her; they were not happy ones, and that appeared to her to be
some assurance that she did well in obeying him.

Beauchamp closed the door on her. He walked back to Renee with a
thoughtful air that was consciously acted; his only thought being--now
she knows me!

Renee looked up at him once. Her eyes were unaccusing, unquestioning.

With the violation of the secresy of her flight she had lost her
initiative and her intrepidity. The world of human eyes glared on her
through the windows of the two she had been exposed to, paralyzing her
brain and caging her spirit of revolt. That keen wakefulness of her
self-defensive social instinct helped her to an understanding of her
lover's plan to preserve her reputation, or rather to give her a corner
of retreat in shielding the worthless thing--twice detested as her cloak
of slavery coming from him! She comprehended no more. She was a house of
nerves crowding in against her soul like fiery thorns, and had no space
within her torture for a sensation of gratitude or suspicion; but feeling
herself hurried along at lightning speed to some dreadful shock, her
witless imagination apprehended it in his voice: not what he might say,
only the sound. She feared to hear him speak, as the shrinking ear fears
a thunder at the cavity; yet suspense was worse than the downward-driving
silence.

The pang struck her when he uttered some words about Mrs. Culling, and
protection, and Roland.

She thanked him.

So have common executioners been thanked by queenly ladies baring their
necks to the axe.

He called up the pain he suffered to vindicate him; and it was really an
agony of a man torn to pieces.

'I have done the best.'

This dogged and stupid piece of speech was pitiable to hear from Nevil
Beauchamp.

'You think so?' said she; and her glass-like voice rang a tremour in its
mildness that swelled through him on the plain submissive note, which was
more assent than question.

'I am sure of it. I believe it. I see it. At least I hope so.'

'We are chiefly led by hope,' said Renee.

'At least, if not!' Beauchamp cried. 'And it's not too late. I have no
right--I do what I can. I am at your mercy. Judge me later. If I am ever
to know what happiness is, it will be with you. It's not too late either
way. There is Roland--my brother as much as if you were my wife!'

He begged her to let him have Roland's exact address.

She named the regiment, the corps d'armee, the postal town, and the
department.

'Roland will come at a signal,' he pursued; 'we are not bound to consult
others.'

Renee formed the French word of 'we' on her tongue.

He talked of Roland and Roland, his affection for him as a brother and as
a friend, and Roland's love of them both.

'It is true,' said Renee.

'We owe him this; he represents your father.'

'All that you say is true, my friend.'

'Thus, you have come on a visit to madame, your old friend here--oh! your
hand. What have I done?'

Renee motioned her hand as if it were free to be taken, and smiled
faintly to make light of it, but did not give it.

'If you had been widowed!' he broke down to the lover again.

'That man is attached to the remnant of his life: I could not wish him
dispossessed of it,' said Rende.

'Parted! who parts us? It's for a night. Tomorrow!'

She breathed: 'To-morrow.'

To his hearing it craved an answer. He had none. To talk like a lover, or
like a man of honour, was to lie. Falsehood hemmed him in to the
narrowest ring that ever statue stood on, if he meant to be stone.

'That woman will be returning,' he muttered, frowning at the vacant door.
'I could lay out my whole life before your eyes, and show you I am
unchanged in my love of you since the night when Roland and I walked on
the Piazzetta . . .'

'Do not remind me; let those days lie black!' A sympathetic vision of her
maiden's tears on the night of wonderful moonlight when, as it seemed to
her now, San Giorgio stood like a dark prophet of her present abasement
and chastisement, sprang tears of a different character, and weak as she
was with her soul's fever and for want of food, she was piteously shaken.
She said with some calmness: 'It is useless to look back. I have no
reproaches but for myself. Explain nothing to me. Things that are not
comprehended by one like me are riddles I must put aside. I know where I
am: I scarcely know more. Here is madame.'

The door had not opened, and it did not open immediately.

Beauchamp had time to say, 'Believe in me.' Even that was false to his
own hearing, and in a struggle with the painful impression of insincerity
which was denied and scorned by his impulse to fling his arms round her
and have her his for ever, he found himself deferentially accepting her
brief directions concerning her boxes at the hotel, with Rosamund Culling
to witness.

She gave him her hand.

He bowed over the fingers. 'Until to-morrow, madame.'

'Adieu!' said Renee.




CHAPTER XLII

THE TWO PASSIONS

The foggy February night refreshed his head, and the business of fetching
the luggage from the hotel--a commission that necessitated the delivery
of his card and some very commanding language--kept his mind in order.
Subsequently he drove to his cousin Baskelett's Club, where he left a
short note to say the house was engaged for the night and perhaps a week
further. Concise, but sufficient: and he stated a hope to his cousin that
he would not be inconvenienced. This was courteous.

He had taken a bed at Renee's hotel, after wresting her boxes from the
vanquished hotel proprietor, and lay there, hearing the clear sound of
every little sentence of hers during the absence of Rosamund: her
'Adieu,' and the strange 'Do you think so?' and 'I know where I am; I
scarcely know more.' Her eyes and their darker lashes, and the fitful
little sensitive dimples of a smile without joy, came with her voice, but
hardened to an aspect unlike her. Not a word could he recover of what she
had spoken before Rosamund's intervention. He fancied she must have
related details of her journey. Especially there must have been mention,
he thought, of her drive to the station from Tourdestelle; and this
flashed on him the scene of his ride to the chateau, and the meeting her
on the road, and the white light on the branching river, and all that was
Renee in the spirit of the place she had abandoned for him, believing in
him. She had proved that she believed in him. What in the name of sanity
had been the meaning of his language? and what was it between them that
arrested him and caused him to mumble absurdly of 'doing best,' when in
fact he was her bondman, rejoiced to be so, by his pledged word? and when
she, for some reason that he was sure she had stated, though he could
recollect no more than the formless hideousness of it, was debarred from
returning to Tourdestelle?

He tossed in his bed as over a furnace, in the extremity of perplexity of
one accustomed to think himself ever demonstrably in the right, and now
with his whole nature in insurrection against that legitimate claim. It
led him to accuse her of a want of passionate warmth, in her not having
supplicated and upbraided him--not behaving theatrically, in fine, as the
ranting pen has made us expect of emergent ladies that they will
naturally do. Concerning himself, he thought commendingly, a tear would
have overcome him. She had not wept. The kaleidoscope was shaken in his
fragmentary mind, and she appeared thrice adorable for this noble
composure, he brutish.

Conscience and reason had resolved to a dead weight in him, like an
inanimate force, governing his acts despite the man, while he was with
Renee. Now his wishes and waverings conjured up a semblance of a
conscience and much reason to assure him that he had done foolishly as
well as unkindly, most unkindly: that he was even the ghastly spectacle
of a creature attempting to be more than he can be. Are we never to
embrace our inclinations? Are the laws regulating an old dry man like his
teacher and guide to be the same for the young and vigorous?

Is a good gift to be refused? And this was his first love! The brilliant
Renee, many-hued as a tropic bird! his lady of shining grace, with her
sole fault of want of courage devotedly amended! his pupil, he might say,
of whom he had foretold that she must come to such a pass, at the same
time prefixing his fidelity. And he was handing her over knowingly to one
kind of wretchedness--'son amour, mon ami,' shot through him, lighting up
the gulfs of a mind in wreck;--and one kind of happiness could certainly
be promised her!

All these and innumerable other handsome pleadings of the simulacra of
the powers he had set up to rule, were crushed at daybreak by the
realities in a sense of weight that pushed him mechanically on. He
telegraphed to Roland, and mentally gave chase to the message to recall
it. The slumberer roused in darkness by the relentless insane-seeming
bell which hales him to duty, melts at the charms of sleep, and feels
that logic is with him in his preference of his pillow; but the tireless
revolving world outside, nature's pitiless antagonist, has hung one of
its balances about him, and his actions are directed by the state of the
scales, wherein duty weighs deep and desireability swings like a pendant
doll: so he throws on his harness, astounded, till his blood quickens
with work, at the round of sacrifices demanded of nature: which is indeed
curious considering what we are taught here and there as to the
infallibility of our august mother. Well, the world of humanity had done
this for Beauchamp. His afflicted historian is compelled to fling his net
among prosaic similitudes for an illustration of one thus degradedly in
its grip. If he had been off with his love like the rover! why, then the
Muse would have loosened her lap like May showering flower-buds, and we
might have knocked great nature up from her sleep to embellish his
desperate proceedings with hurricanes to be danced over, to say nothing
of imitative spheres dashing out into hurly-burly after his example.

Conscious rectitude, too, after the pattern of the well-behaved AEneas
quitting the fair bosom of Carthage in obedience to the Gods, for an
example to his Roman progeny, might have stiffened his backbone and put a
crown upon his brows. It happened with him that his original training
rather imposed the idea that he was a figure to be derided. The approval
of him by the prudent was a disgust, and by the pious tasteless. He had
not any consolation in reverting to Dr. Shrapnel's heavy Puritanism. On
the contrary, such a general proposition as that of the sage of Bevisham
could not for a moment stand against the pathetic special case of Renee:
and as far as Beauchamp's active mind went, he was for demanding that
Society should take a new position in morality, considerably broader, and
adapted to very special cases.

Nevertheless he was hardly grieved in missing Renee at Rosamund's
breakfast-table. Rosamund informed him that Madame de Rouaillout's door
was locked. Her particular news for him was of a disgraceful alarum
raised by Captain Baskelett in the night, to obtain admission; and of an
interview she had with him in the early morning, when he subjected her to
great insolence. Beauchamp's attention was drawn to her repetition of the
phrase 'mistress of the house.' However, she did him justice in regard to
Renee, and thoroughly entered into the fiction of Renee's visit to her as
her guest: he passed over everything else.

To stop the mouth of a scandal-monger, he drove full speed to Cecil's
Club, where he heard that the captain had breakfasted and had just
departed for Romfrey Castle. He followed to the station. The train had
started. So mischief was rolling in that direction.

Late at night Rosamund was allowed to enter the chill unlighted chamber,
where the unhappy lady had been lying for hours in the gloom of a London
Winter's daylight and gaslight.

'Madame de Rouaillout is indisposed with headache,' was her report to
Beauchamp.

The conventional phraseology appeased him, though he saw his grief behind
it.

Presently he asked if Renee had taken food.

'No: you know what a headache is,' Rosamund replied.

It is true that we do not care to eat when we are in pain.

He asked if she looked ill.

'She will not have lights in the room,' said Rosamund.

Piecemeal he gained the picture of Renee in an image of the death within
which welcomed a death without.

Rosamund was impatient with him for speaking of medical aid. These men!
She remarked very honestly:

'Oh, no; doctors are not needed.'

'Has she mentioned me?'

'Not once.'

'Why do you swing your watch-chain, ma'am?' cried Beauchamp, bounding off
his chair.

He reproached her with either pretending to indifference or feeling it;
and then insisted on his privilege of going up-stairs-accompanied by her,
of course; and then it was to be only to the door; then an answer to a
message was to satisfy him.

'Any message would trouble her: what message would you send?' Rosamund
asked him.

The weighty and the trivial contended; no fitting message could be
thought of.

'You are unused to real suffering--that is for women!--and want to be
doing instead of enduring,' said Rosamund.

She was beginning to put faith in the innocence of these two mortally
sick lovers. Beauchamp's outcries against himself gave her the shadows of
their story. He stood in tears--a thing to see to believe of Nevil
Beauchamp; and plainly he did not know it, or else he would have taken
her advice to him to leave the house at an hour that was long past
midnight. Her method for inducing him to go was based on her intimate
knowledge of him: she made as if to soothe and kiss him compassionately.

In the morning there was a flying word from Roland, on his way to
England. Rosamund tempered her report of Renee by saying of her, that she
was very quiet. He turned to the window.

'Look, what a climate ours is!' Beauchamp abused the persistent fog.
'Dull, cold, no sky, a horrible air to breathe! This is what she has come
to! Has she spoken of me yet?'

'No.'

'Is she dead silent?'

'She answers, if I speak to her.'

'I believe, ma'am,' said Beauchamp, 'that we are the coldest-hearted
people in Europe.'

Rosamund did not defend us, or the fog. Consequently nothing was left for
him to abuse but himself. In that she tried to moderate him, and drew
forth a torrent of self-vituperation, after which he sank into the
speechless misery he had been evading; until sophistical fancy, another
evolution of his nature, persuaded him that Roland, seeing Renee, would
for love's sake be friendly to them.

'I should have told you, Nevil, by the way, that the earl is dead,' said
Rosamund.

'Her brother will be here to-day; he can't be later than the evening,'
said Beauchamp. 'Get her to eat, ma'am; you must. Command her to eat.
This terrible starvation!'

'You ate nothing yourself, Nevil, all day yesterday.'

He surveyed the table. 'You have your cook in town, I see. Here's a
breakfast to feed twenty hungry families in Spitalfields. Where does the
mass of meat go? One excess feeds another. You're overdone with servants.
Gluttony, laziness, and pilfering come of your host of unmanageable
footmen and maids; you stuff them, and wonder they're idle and immoral.
If--I suppose I must call him the earl now, or Colonel Halkett, or any
one of the army of rich men, hear of an increase of the income-tax, or
some poor wretch hints at a sliding scale of taxation, they yell as if
they were thumb-screwed: but five shillings in the pound goes to the
kitchen as a matter of course--to puff those pompous idiots! and the
parsons, who should be preaching against this sheer waste of food and
perversion of the strength of the nation, as a public sin, are maundering
about schism. There's another idle army! Then we have artists, authors,
lawyers, doctors--the honourable professions! all hanging upon wealth,
all ageing the rich, and all bearing upon labour! it's incubus on
incubus. In point of fact, the rider's too heavy for the horse in
England.'

He began to nibble at bread.

Rosamund pushed over to him a plate of the celebrated Steynham pie, of
her own invention, such as no douse in the county of Sussex could produce
or imitate.

'What would you have the parsons do?' she said.

'Take the rich by the throat and show them in the kitchen-mirror that
they're swine running down to the sea with a devil in them.' She had set
him off again, but she had enticed him to eating. 'Pooh! it has all been
said before. Stones are easier to move than your English. May I be
forgiven for saying it! an invasion is what they want to bring them to
their senses. I'm sick of the work. Why should I be denied--am I to kill
the woman I love that I may go on hammering at them? Their idea of
liberty is, an evasion of public duty. Dr. Shrapnel's right--it's a
money-logged Island! Men like the Earl of Romfrey, who have never done
work in their days except to kill bears and birds, I say they're stifled
by wealth: and he at least would have made an Admiral of mark, or a
General: not of much value, but useful in case of need. But he, like a
pretty woman, was under no obligation to contribute more than an
ornamental person to the common good. As to that, we count him by tens of
thousands now, and his footmen and maids by hundreds of thousands. The
rich love the nation through their possessions; otherwise they have no
country. If they loved the country they would care for the people. Their
hearts are eaten up by property. I am bidden to hold my tongue because I
have no knowledge. When men who have this "knowledge" will go down to the
people, speak to them, consult and argue with them, and come into
suitable relations with them--I don't say of lords and retainers, but of
knowers and doers, leaders and followers--out of consideration for public
safety, if not for the common good, I shall hang back gladly; though I
won't hear misstatements. My fault is, that I am too moderate. I should
respect myself more if I deserved their hatred. This flood of luxury,
which is, as Dr. Shrapnel says, the body's drunkenness and the soul's
death, cries for execration. I'm too moderate. But I shall quit the
country: I've no place here.'

Rosamund ahemed. 'France, Nevil? I should hardly think that France would
please you, in the present state of things over there.'

Half cynically, with great satisfaction, she had watched him fretting at
the savoury morsels of her pie with a fork like a sparrow-beak during the
monologue that would have been so dreary to her but for her appreciation
of the wholesome effect of the letting off of steam, and her admiration
of the fire of his eyes. After finishing his plate he had less the look
of a ship driving on to reef--some of his images of the country. He
called for claret and water, sighing as he munched bread in vast
portions, evidently conceiving that to eat unbuttered bread was to
abstain from luxury. He praised passingly the quality of the bread. It
came from Steynham, and so did the, milk and cream, the butter, chicken
and eggs. He was good enough not to object to the expenditure upon the
transmission of the accustomed dainties. Altogether the gradual act of
nibbling had conduced to his eating remarkably well-royally. Rosamund's
more than half-cynical ideas of men, and her custom of wringing unanimous
verdicts from a jury of temporary impressions, inclined her to imagine
him a lover that had not to be so very much condoled with, and a
politician less alarming in practice than in theory:--somewhat a
gentleman of domestic tirades on politics: as it is observed of your
generous young Radical of birth and fortune, that he will become on the
old high road to a round Conservatism.

He pitched one of the morning papers to the floor in disorderly sheets,
muttering: 'So they're at me!'

'Is Dr. Shrapnel better?' she asked. 'I hold to a good appetite as a sign
of a man's recovery.'

Beauchamp was confronting the fog at the window. He swung round: 'Dr.
Shrapnel is better. He has a particularly clever young female cook.'

'Ah! then . . .'

'Yes, then, naturally! He would naturally hasten to recover to partake of
the viands, ma'am.'

Rosamund murmured of her gladness that he should be able to enjoy them.

'Oddly enough, he is not an eater of meat,' said Beauchamp.

'A vegetarian!'

'I beg you not to mention the fact to my lord. You see, you yourself can
scarcely pardon it. He does not exclude flesh from his table. Blackburn
Tuckham dined there once. "You are a thorough revolutionist, Dr.
Shrapnel," he observed. The doctor does not exclude wine, but he does not
drink it. Poor Tuckham went away entirely opposed to a Radical he could
not even meet as a boon-fellow. I begged him not to mention the
circumstances, as I have begged you. He pledged me his word to that
effect solemnly; he correctly felt that if the truth were known, there
would be further cause for the reprobation of the man who had been his
host.'

'And that poor girl, Nevil?'

'Miss Denham? She contracted the habit of eating meat at school, and
drinking wine in Paris, and continues it, occasionally. Now run upstairs.
Insist on food. Inform Madame de Rouaillout that her brother M. le comte
de Croisnel will soon be here, and should not find her ill. Talk to her
as you women can talk. Keep the blinds down in her room; light a dozen
wax-candles. Tell her I have no thought but of her. It's a lie: of no
woman but of her: that you may say. But that you can't say. You can say I
am devoted--ha, what stuff! I've only to open my mouth!--say nothing of
me: let her think the worst--unless it comes to a question of her life:
then be a merciful good woman . . .' He squeezed her fingers,
communicating his muscular tremble to her sensitive woman's frame, and
electrically convincing her that he was a lover.

She went up-stairs. In ten minutes she descended, and found him pacing up
and down the hall. 'Madame de Rouaillout is much the same,' she said. He
nodded, looked up the stairs, and about for his hat and gloves, drew on
the gloves, fixed the buttons, blinked at his watch, and settled his hat
as he was accustomed to wear it, all very methodically, and talking
rapidly, but except for certain precise directions, which were not needed
by so careful a housekeeper and nurse as Rosamund was known to be, she
could not catch a word of meaning. He had some appointment, it seemed;
perhaps he was off for a doctor--a fresh instance of his masculine
incapacity to understand patient endurance. After opening the housedoor,
and returning to the foot of the stairs, listening and sighing, he
disappeared.

It struck her that he was trying to be two men at once.

The litter of newspaper sheets in the morning-room brought his
exclamation to her mind: 'They're at me!' Her eyes ran down the columns,
and were seized by the print of his name in large type. A leading article
was devoted to Commander's Beauchamp's recent speech delivered in the
great manufacturing town of Gunningham, at a meeting under the presidency
of the mayor, and his replies to particular questions addressed to him;
one being, what right did he conceive himself to have to wear the
Sovereign's uniform in professing Republican opinions? Rosamund winced
for her darling during her first perusal of the article. It was of the
sarcastically caressing kind, masterly in ease of style, as the flourish
of the executioner well may be with poor Bare-back hung up to a leisurely
administration of the scourge. An allusion to 'Jack on shore' almost
persuaded her that his uncle Everard had inspired the writer of the
article. Beauchamp's reply to the question of his loyalty was not quoted:
he was, however, complimented on his frankness. At the same time he was
assured that his error lay in a too great proneness to make distinctions,
and that there was no distinction between sovereign and country in a
loyal and contented land, which could thank him for gallant services in
war, while taking him for the solitary example to be cited at the present
period of the evils of a comparatively long peace.

'Doubtless the tedium of such a state to a man of the temperament of the
gallant commander,' etc., the termination of the article was indulgent.
Rosamund recurred to the final paragraph for comfort, and though she
loved Beauchamp, the test of her representative feminine sentiment
regarding his political career, when personal feeling on his behalf had
subsided, was, that the writer of the article must have received an
intimation to deal both smartly and forbearingly with the offender: and
from whom but her lord? Her notions of the conduct of the Press were
primitive. In a summary of the article Beauchamp was treated as naughty
boy, formerly brave boy, and likely by-and-by to be good boy. Her secret
heart would have spoken similarly, with more emphasis on the flattering
terms.

A telegram arrived from her lord. She was bidden to have the house clear
for him by noon of the next day.

How could that be done?

But to write blankly to inform the Earl of Romfrey that he was excluded
from his own house was another impossibility.

'Hateful man!' she apostrophized Captain Baskelett, and sat down,
supporting her chin in a prolonged meditation.

The card of a French lady, bearing the name of Madame d'Auffray, was
handed to her.

Beauchamp had gone off to his friend Lydiard, to fortify himself in his
resolve to reply to that newspaper article by eliciting counsel to the
contrary. Phrase by phrase he fought through the first half of his
composition of the reply against Lydiard, yielding to him on a point or
two of literary judgement, only the more vehemently to maintain his ideas
of discretion, which were, that he would not take shelter behind a single
subterfuge; that he would try this question nakedly, though he should
stand alone; that he would stake his position on it, and establish his
right to speak his opinions: and as for unseasonable times, he protested
it was the cry of a gorged middle-class, frightened of further action,
and making snug with compromise. Would it be a seasonable time when there
was uproar? Then it would be a time to be silent on such themes: they
could be discussed calmly now, and without danger; and whether he was
hunted or not, he cared nothing. He declined to consider the peculiar
nature of Englishmen: they must hear truth or perish.

Knowing the difficulty once afflicting Beauchamp in the art of speaking
on politics tersely, Lydiard was rather astonished at his well-delivered
cannonade; and he fancied that his modesty had been displaced by the new
acquirement; not knowing the nervous fever of his friend's condition, for
which the rattle of speech was balm, and contention a native element, and
the assumption of truth a necessity. Beauchamp hugged his politics like
some who show their love of the pleasures of life by taking to them
angrily. It was all he had: he had given up all for it. He forced Lydiard
to lay down his pen and walk back to the square with him, and went on
arguing, interjecting, sneering, thumping the old country, raising and
oversetting her, treating her alternately like a disrespected
grandmother, and like a woman anciently beloved; as a dead lump, and as a
garden of seeds; reviewing prominent political men, laughing at the
dwarf-giants; finally casting anchor on a Mechanics' Institute that he
had recently heard of, where working men met weekly for the purpose of
reading the British poets.

'That's the best thing I've heard of late,' he said, shaking Lydiard's
hand on the door-steps.

'Ah! You're Commander Beauchamp; I think I know you. I've seen you on a
platform,' cried a fresh-faced man in decent clothes, halting on his way
along the pavement; 'and if you were in your uniform, you damned
Republican dog! I'd strip you with my own hands, for the disloyal
scoundrel you are, with your pimping Republicanism and capsizing
everything in a country like Old England. It's the cat-o'-nine-tails you
want, and the bosen to lay on; and I'd do it myself. And mind me, when
next I catch sight of you in blue and gold lace, I'll compel you to show
cause why you wear it, and prove your case, or else I'll make a Cupid of
you, and no joke about it. I don't pay money for a nincompoop to outrage
my feelings of respect and loyalty, when he's in my pay, d' ye hear?
You're in my pay: and you do your duty, or I 'll kick ye out of it. It's
no empty threat. You look out for your next public speech, if it's
anywhere within forty mile of London. Get along.'

With a scowl, and a very ugly 'yah!' worthy of cannibal jaws, the man
passed off.

Beauchamp kept eye on him. 'What class does a fellow like that come of?'

'He's a harmless enthusiast,' said Lydiard. 'He has been reading the
article, and has got excited over it.'

'I wish I had the fellow's address.' Beauchamp looked wistfully at
Lydiard, but he did not stimulate the generous offer to obtain it for
him. Perhaps it was as well to forget the fellow.

'You see the effect of those articles,' he said.

'You see what I mean by unseasonable times,' Lydiard retorted.

'He didn't talk like a tradesman,' Beauchamp mused.

'He may be one, for all that. It's better to class him as an enthusiast.'

'An enthusiast!' Beauchamp stamped: 'for what?'

'For the existing order of things; for his beef and ale; for the titles
he is accustomed to read in the papers. You don't study your countrymen.'

'I'd study that fellow, if I had the chance.'

'You would probably find him one of the emptiest, with a rather worse
temper than most of them.'

Beauchamp shook Lydiard's hand, saying, 'The widow?'

'There's no woman like her!'

'Well, now you're free--why not? I think I put one man out of the field.'

'Too early! Besides--'

'Repeat that, and you may have to say too late.'

'When shall you go down to Bevisham?'

'When? I can't tell: when I've gone through fire. There never was a home
for me like the cottage, and the old man, and the dear good girl--the
best of girls! if you hadn't a little spoilt her with your philosophy of
the two sides of the case.'

'I've not given her the brains.'

'She's always doubtful of doing, doubtful of action: she has no will. So
she is fatalistic, and an argument between us ends in her submitting, as
if she must submit to me, because I'm overbearing, instead of accepting
the fact.'

'She feels your influence.'

'She's against the publication of THE DAWN--for the present. It's an
"unseasonable time." I argue with her: I don't get hold of her mind a
bit; but at last she says, "very well." She has your head.'

And you have her heart, Lydiard could have rejoined.

They said good-bye, neither of them aware of the other's task of
endurance.

As they were parting, Beauchamp perceived his old comrade Jack Wilmore
walking past.

'Jack!' he called.

Wilmore glanced round. 'How do you do, Beauchamp?'

'Where are you off to, Jack?'

'Down to the Admiralty. I'm rather in a hurry; I have an appointment.'

'Can't you stop just a minute?'

'I'm afraid I can't. Good morning.'

It was incredible; but this old friend, the simplest heart alive,
retreated without a touch of his hand, and with a sorely wounded air.

'That newspaper article appears to have been generally read,' Beauchamp
said to Lydiard, who answered:

'The article did not put the idea of you into men's minds, but gave
tongue to it: you may take it for an instance of the sagacity of the
Press.'

'You wouldn't take that man and me to have been messmates for years! Old
Jack Wilmore! Don't go, Lydiard.'

Lydiard declared that he was bound to go: he was engaged to read Italian
for an hour with Mrs. Wardour-Devereux.

'Then go, by all means,' Beauchamp dismissed him.

He felt as if he had held a review of his friends and enemies on the
door-step, and found them of one colour. If it was an accident befalling
him in a London square during a space of a quarter of an hour, what of
the sentiments of universal England? Lady Barbara's elopement with Lord
Alfred last year did not rouse much execration; hardly worse than gossip
and compassion. Beauchamp drank a great deal of bitterness from his
reflections.

They who provoke huge battles, and gain but lame victories over
themselves, insensibly harden to the habit of distilling sour thoughts
from their mischances and from most occurrences. So does the world they
combat win on them.

'For,' says Dr. Shrapnel, 'the world and nature, which are opposed in
relation to our vital interests, each agrees to demand of us a perfect
victory, on pain otherwise of proving it a stage performance; and the
victory over the world, as over nature, is over self: and this victory
lies in yielding perpetual service to the world, and none to nature: for
the world has to be wrought out, nature to be subdued.'

The interior of the house was like a change of elements to Beauchamp. He
had never before said to himself, 'I have done my best, and I am beaten!'
Outside of it, his native pugnacity had been stimulated; but here, within
the walls where Renee lay silently breathing, barely breathing, it might
be dying, he was overcome, and left it to circumstance to carry him to a
conclusion. He went up-stairs to the drawing-room, where he beheld Madame
d'Auffray in conversation with Rosamund.

'I was assured by Madame la Comtesse that I should see you to-day,' the
French lady said as she swam to meet him; 'it is a real pleasure': and
pressing his hand she continued, 'but I fear you will be disappointed of
seeing my sister. She would rashly try your climate at its worst period.
Believe me, I do not join in decrying it, except on her account: I could
have forewarned her of an English Winter and early Spring. You know her
impetuosity; suddenly she decided on accepting the invitation of Madame
la Comtesse; and though I have no fears of her health, she is at present
a victim of the inclement weather.'

'You have seen her, madame?' said Beauchamp. So well had the clever lady
played the dupe that he forgot there was a part for him to play. Even the
acquiescence of Rosamund in the title of countess bewildered him.

'Madame d'Auffray has been sitting for an hour with Madame de
Rouaillout,' said Rosamund.

He spoke of Roland's coming.

'Ah?' said Madame d'Auffray, and turned to Rosamund: 'you have determined
to surprise us: then you will have a gathering of the whole family in
your hospitable house, Madame la Comtesse!

'If M. la Marquis will do it that honour, madame!

'My brother is in London,' Madame d'Auffray said to Beauchamp.

The shattering blow was merited by one who could not rejoice that he had
acted rightly.




CHAPTER XLIII

THE EARL OF ROMFREY AND THE COUNTESS

An extraordinary telegraphic message, followed by a still more
extraordinary letter the next morning, from Rosamund Culling, all but
interdicted the immediate occupation of his house in town to Everard, now
Earl of Romfrey. She begged him briefly not to come until after the
funeral, and proposed to give him good reasons for her request at their
meeting. 'I repeat, I pledge myself to satisfy you on this point,' she
wrote. Her tone was that of one of your heroic women of history refusing
to surrender a fortress.

Everard's wrath was ever of a complexion that could suffer postponements
without his having to fear an abatement of it. He had no business to
transact in London, and he had much at the Castle, so he yielded himself
up to his new sensations, which are not commonly the portion of gentlemen
of his years. He anticipated that Nevil would at least come down to the
funeral, but there was no appearance of him, nor a word to excuse his
absence. Cecil was his only supporter. They walked together between the
double ranks of bare polls of the tenantry and peasantry, resembling in a
fashion old Froissart engravings the earl used to dote on in his boyhood,
representing bodies of manacled citizens, whose humbled heads looked like
nuts to be cracked, outside the gates of captured French towns, awaiting
the disposition of their conqueror, with his banner above him and
prancing knights around. That was a glory of the past. He had no
successor. The thought was chilling; the solitariness of childlessness to
an aged man, chief of a most ancient and martial House, and proud of his
blood, gave him the statue's outlook on a desert, and made him feel that
he was no more than a whirl of the dust, settling to the dust.

He listened to the parson curiously and consentingly. We are ashes. Ten
centuries had come to an end in him to prove the formula correct. The
chronicle of the House would state that the last Earl of Romfrey left no
heir.

Cecil was a fine figure walking beside him. Measured by feet, he might be
a worthy holder of great lands. But so heartily did the earl despise this
nephew that he never thought of trying strength with the fellow, and
hardly cared to know what his value was, beyond his immediate uses as an
instrument to strike with. Beauchamp of Romfrey had been his dream, not
Baskelett: and it increased his disgust of Beauchamp that Baskelett
should step forward as the man. No doubt Cecil would hunt the county
famously: he would preserve game with the sleepless eye of a General of
the Jesuits. These things were to be considered.

Two days after the funeral Lord Romfrey proceeded to London. He was met
at the station by Rosamund, and informed that his house was not yet
vacated by the French family.

'And where have you arranged for me to go, ma'am?' he asked her
complacently.

She named an hotel where she had taken rooms for him.

He nodded, and was driven to the hotel, saying little on the road.

As she expected, he was heavily armed against her and Nevil.

'You're the slave of the fellow, ma'am. You are so infatuated that you
second his amours, in my house. I must wait for a clearance, it seems.'

He cast a comical glance of disapprobation on the fittings of the hotel
apartment, abhorring gilt.

'They leave us the day after to-morrow,' said Rosamund, out of breath
with nervousness at the commencement of the fray, and skipping over the
opening ground of a bold statement of facts. 'Madame de Rouaillout has
been unwell. She is not yet recovered; she has just risen. Her
sister-in-law has nursed her. Her husband seems much broken in health; he
is perfect on the points of courtesy.'

'That is lucky, ma'am.'

'Her brother, Nevil's comrade in the war, was there also.'

'Who came first?'

'My lord, you have only heard Captain Baskelett's version of the story.
She has been my guest since the first day of her landing in England.
There cannot possibly be an imputation on her.'

'Ma'am, if her husband manages to be satisfied, what on earth have I to
do with it?'

'I am thinking of Nevil, my lord.'

'You're never thinking of any one else, ma'am.'

'He sleeps here, at this hotel. He left the house to Madame de
Rouaillout. I bear witness to that.'

'You two seem to have made your preparations to stand a criminal trial.'

'It is pure truth, my lord.'

'Do you take me to be anxious about the fellow's virtue?'

'She is a lady who would please you.'

'A scandal in my house does not please me.'

'The only approach to a scandal was made by Captain Baskelett.'

'A poor devil locked out of his bed on a Winter's night hullabaloos with
pretty good reason. I suppose he felt the contrast.'

'My lord, this lady did me the honour to come to me on a visit. I have
not previously presumed to entertain a friend. She probably formed no
estimate of my exact position.'

The earl with a gesture implied Rosamund's privilege to act the hostess
to friends.

'You invited her?' he said.

'That is, I had told her I hoped she would come to England.'

'She expected you to be at the house in town on her arrival?'

'It was her impulse to come.'

'She came alone?'

'She may have desired to be away from her own people for a time: there
may have been domestic differences. These cases are delicate.'

'This case appears to have been so delicate that you had to lock out a
fourth party.'

'It is indelicate and base of Captain Baskelett to complain and to hint.
Nevil had to submit to the same; and Captain Baskelett took his revenge
on the housedoor and the bells. The house was visited by the police next
morning.'

'Do you suspect him to have known you were inside the house that night?'

She could not say so: but hatred of Cecil urged her past the bounds of
habitual reticence to put it to her lord whether he, imagining the worst,
would have behaved like Cecil.

To this he did not reply, but remarked, 'I am sorry he annoyed you,
ma'am.'

'It is not the annoyance to me; it is the shocking, the unmanly insolence
to a lady, and a foreign lady.'

'That's a matter between him and Nevil. I uphold him.'

'Then, my lord, I am silent.'

Silent she remained; but Lord Romfrey was also silent: and silence being
a weapon of offence only when it is practised by one out of two, she had
to reflect whether in speaking no further she had finished her business.

'Captain Baskelett stays at the Castle?' she asked.

'He likes his quarters there.'

'Nevil could not go down to Romfrey, my lord. He was obliged to wait, and
see, and help me to entertain, her brother and her husband.'

'Why, ma'am? But I have no objection to his making the marquis a happy
husband.'

'He has done what few men would have done, that she may be a
self-respecting wife.'

'The parson's in that fellow!' Lord Romfrey exclaimed. 'Now I have the
story. She came to him, he declined the gift, and you were turned into
the curtain for them. If he had only been off with her, he would have
done the country good service. Here he's a failure and a nuisance; he's a
common cock-shy for the journals. I'm tired of hearing of him; he's a
stench in our nostrils. He's tired of the woman.'

'He loves her.'

'Ma'am, you're hoodwinked. If he refused to have her, there 's a
something he loves better. I don't believe we've bred a downright
lackadaisical donkey in our family: I know him. He's not a fellow for
abstract morality: I know him. It's bargain against bargain with him;
I'll do him that justice. I hear he has ordered the removal of the Jersey
bull from Holdesbury, and the beast is mine,' Lord Romfrey concluded in a
lower key.

'Nevil has taken him.'

'Ha! pull and pull, then!'

'He contends that he is bound by a promise to give an American gentleman
the refusal of the bull, and you must sign an engagement to keep the
animal no longer than two years.'

'I sign no engagement. I stick to the bull.'

'Consent to see Nevil to-night, my lord.'

'When he has apologized to you, I may, ma'am.'

'Surely he did more, in requesting me to render him a service.'

'There's not a creature living that fellow wouldn't get to serve him, if
he knew the trick. We should all of us be marching on London at
Shrapnel's heels. The political mania is just as incurable as
hydrophobia, and he's bitten. That's clear.'

'Bitten perhaps: but not mad. As you have always contended, the true case
is incurable, but it is very rare: and is this one?'

'It's uncommonly like a true case, though I haven't seen him foam at the
mouth, and shun water-as his mob does.'

Rosamund restrained some tears, betraying the effort to hide the
moisture. 'I am no match for you, my lord. I try to plead on his
behalf;--I do worse than if I were dumb. This I most earnestly say: he is
the Nevil Beauchamp who fought for his country, and did not abandon her
cause, though he stood there--we had it from Colonel Halkett--a skeleton:
and he is the Nevil who--I am poorly paying my debt to him!--defended me
from the aspersions of his cousin.'

'Boys!' Lord Romfrey ejaculated.

'It is the same dispute between them as men.'

'Have you forgotten my proposal to shield you from liars and
scandalmongers?'

'Could I ever forget it?' Rosamund appeared to come shining out of a
cloud. 'Princeliest and truest gentleman, I thought you then, and I know
you to be, my dear lord. I fancied I had lived the scandal down. I was
under the delusion that I had grown to be past backbiting: and that no
man could stand before me to insult and vilify me. But, for a woman in
any so-called doubtful position, it seems that the coward will not be
wanting to strike her. In quitting your service, I am able to affirm that
only once during the whole term of it have I consciously overstepped the
line of my duties: it was for Nevil: and Captain Baskelett undertook to
defend your reputation, in consequence.'

'Has the rascal been questioning your conduct?' The earl frowned.

'Oh, no! not questioning: he does not question, he accuses: he never
doubted: and what he went shouting as a boy, is plain matter of fact to
him now. He is devoted to you. It was for your sake that he desired me to
keep my name from being mixed up in a scandal he foresaw the occurrence
of in your house.'

'He permitted himself to sneer at you?'

'He has the art of sneering. On this occasion he wished to be direct and
personal.'

'What sort of hints were they?'

Lord Romfrey strode away from her chair that the answer might be easy to
her, for she was red, and evidently suffering from shame as well as
indignation.

'The hints we call distinct.' said Rosamund.

'In words?'

'In hard words.'

'Then you won't meet Cecil?'

Such a question, and the tone of indifference in which it came, surprised
and revolted her so that the unreflecting reply leapt out:

'I would rather meet a devil.'

Of how tremblingly, vehemently, and hastily she had said it, she was
unaware. To her lord it was an outcry of nature, astutely touched by him
to put her to proof.

He continued his long leisurely strides, nodding over his feet.

Rosamund stood up. She looked a very noble figure in her broad
black-furred robe. 'I have one serious confession to make, sir.'

'What's that?' said he.

'I would avoid it, for it cannot lead to particular harm; but I have an
enemy who may poison your ear in my absence. And first I resign my
position. I have forfeited it.'

'Time goes forward, ma'am, and you go round. Speak to the point. Do you
mean that you toss up the reins of my household?'

'I do. You trace it to Nevil immediately?'

'I do. The fellow wants to upset the country, and he begins with me.'

'You are wrong, my lord. What I have done places me at Captain
Baskelett's mercy. It is too loathsome to think of: worse than the whip;
worse than your displeasure. It might never be known; but the thought
that it might gives me courage. You have said that to protect a woman
everything is permissible. It is your creed, my lord, and because the
world, I have heard you say, is unjust and implacable to women. In some
cases, I think so too. In reality I followed your instructions; I mean,
your example. Cheap chivalry on my part! But it pained me not a little. I
beg to urge that in my defence.'

'Well, ma'am, you have tied the knot tight enough; perhaps now you'll cut
it,' said the earl.

Rosamund gasped softly. 'M. le Marquis is a gentleman who, after a life
of dissipation, has been reminded by bad health that he has a young and
beautiful wife.'

'He dug his pit to fall into it:--he's jealous?'

She shook her head to indicate the immeasurable.

'Senile jealousy is anxious to be deceived. He could hardly be deceived
so far as to imagine that Madame la Marquise would visit me, such as I
am, as my guest. Knowingly or not, his very clever sister, a good woman,
and a friend to husband and wife--a Frenchwoman of the purest type--gave
me the title. She insisted on it, and I presumed to guess that she deemed
it necessary for the sake of peace in that home.'

Lord Romfrey appeared merely inquisitive; his eyebrows were lifted in
permanence; his eyes were mild.

She continued: 'They leave England in a few hours. They are not likely to
return. I permitted him to address me with the title of countess.'

'Of Romfrey?' said the earl.

Rosamund bowed.

His mouth contracted. She did not expect thunder to issue from it, but
she did fear to hear a sarcasm, or that she would have to endure a deadly
silence: and she was gathering her own lips in imitation of his, to nerve
herself for some stroke to come, when he laughed in his peculiar
close-mouthed manner.

'I'm afraid you've dished yourself.'

'You cannot forgive me, my lord?'

He indulged in more of his laughter, and abruptly summoning gravity, bade
her talk to him of affairs. He himself talked of the condition of the
Castle, and with a certain off-hand contempt of the ladies of the family,
and Cecil's father, Sir John. 'What are they to me?' said he, and he
complained of having been called Last Earl of Romfrey.

'The line ends undegenerate,' said Rosamund fervidly, though she knew not
where she stood.

'Ends!' quoth the earl.

'I must see Stukely,' he added briskly, and stooped to her: 'I beg you to
drive me to my Club, countess.'

'Oh! sir.'

'Once a countess, always a countess!'

'But once an impostor, my lord?'

'Not always, we'll hope.'

He enjoyed this little variation in the language of comedy; letting it
drop, to say: 'Be here to-morrow early. Don't chase that family away from
the house. Do as you will, but not a word of Nevil to me: he's a bad mess
in any man's porringer; it's time for me to claim exemption of him from
mine.'

She dared not let her thoughts flow, for to think was to triumph, and
possibly to be deluded. They came in copious volumes when Lord Romfrey,
alighting at his Club, called to the coachman: 'Drive the countess home.'

They were not thoughts of triumph absolutely. In her cooler mind she felt
that it was a bad finish of a gallant battle. Few women had risen against
a tattling and pelting world so stedfastly; and would it not have been
better to keep her own ground, which she had won with tears and some
natural strength, and therewith her liberty, which she prized? The
hateful Cecil, a reminder of whom set her cheeks burning and turned her
heart to serpent, had forced her to it. So she honestly conceived, owing
to the circumstance of her honestly disliking the pomps of life and not
desiring to occupy any position of brilliancy. She thought assuredly of
her hoard of animosity toward the scandalmongers, and of the quiet glance
she would cast behind on them, and below. That thought came as a fruit,
not as a reflection.

But if ever two offending young gentlemen, nephews of a long-suffering
uncle, were circumvented, undermined, and struck to earth, with one blow,
here was the instance. This was accomplished by Lord Romfrey's resolution
to make the lady he had learnt to esteem his countess: and more, it fixed
to him for life one whom he could not bear to think of losing: and still
more, it might be; but what more was unwritten on his tablets.

Rosamund failed to recollect that Everard Romfrey never took a step
without seeing a combination of objects to be gained by it.




CHAPTER XLIV

THE NEPHEWS OF THE EARL, AND ANOTHER EXHIBITION OF THE TWO PASSIONS IN
BEAUCHAMP

It was now the season when London is as a lighted tower to her provinces,
and, among other gentlemen hurried thither by attraction, Captain
Baskelett arrived. Although not a personage in the House of Commons, he
was a vote; and if he never committed himself to the perils of a speech,
he made himself heard. His was the part of chorus, which he performed
with a fairly close imitation of the original cries of periods before
parliaments were instituted, thus representing a stage in the human
development besides the borough of Bevisham. He arrived in the best of
moods for the emission of high-pitched vowel-sounds; otherwise in the
worst of tempers. His uncle had notified an addition of his income to him
at Romfrey, together with commands that he should quit the castle
instantly: and there did that woman, Mistress Culling, do the honours to
Nevil Beauchamp's French party. He assured Lord Palmet of his positive
knowledge of the fact, incredible as the sanction of such immoral
proceedings by the Earl of Romfrey must appear to that young nobleman.
Additions to income are of course acceptable, but in the form of a
palpable stipulation for silence, they neither awaken gratitude nor
effect their purpose. Quite the contrary; they prick the moral mind to
sit in judgement on the donor. It means, she fears me! Cecil confidently
thought and said of the intriguing woman who managed his patron.

The town-house was open to him. Lord Romfrey was at Steynham. Cecil could
not suppose that he was falling into a pit in entering it. He happened to
be the favourite of the old housekeeper, who liked him for his
haughtiness, which was to her thinking the sign of real English nobility,
and perhaps it is the popular sign, and a tonic to the people. She raised
lamentations over the shame of the locking of the door against him that
awful night, declaring she had almost mustered courage to go down to him
herself, in spite of Mrs. Calling's orders. The old woman lowered her
voice to tell him that her official superior had permitted the French
gentleman and ladies to call her countess. This she knew for a certainty,
though she knew nothing of French; but the French lady who came second
brought a maid who knew English a little, and she said the very
words--the countess, and said also that her party took Mrs. Culling for
the Countess of Romfrey. What was more, my lord's coachman caught it up,
and he called her countess, and he had a quarrel about it with the
footman Kendall; and the day after a dreadful affair between them in the
mews, home drives madam, and Kendall is to go up to her, and down the
poor man comes, and not a word to be got out of him, but as if he had
seen a ghost. 'She have such power,' Cecil's admirer concluded.

'I wager I match her,' Cecil said to himself, pulling at his wristbands
and letting his lower teeth shine out. The means of matching her were not
so palpable as the resolution. First he took men into his confidence.
Then he touched lightly on the story to ladies, with the question, 'What
ought I to do?' In consideration for the Earl of Romfrey he ought not to
pass it over, he suggested. The ladies of the family urged him to go to
Steynham and boldly confront the woman. He was not prepared for that.
Better, it seemed to him, to blow the rumour, and make it the topic of
the season, until Lord Romfrey should hear of it. Cecil had the ear of
the town for a month. He was in the act of slicing the air with his right
hand in his accustomed style, one evening at Lady Elsea's, to protest how
vast was the dishonour done to the family by Mistress Culling, when
Stukely Culbrett stopped him, saying, 'The lady you speak of is the
Countess of Romfrey. I was present at the marriage.'

Cecil received the shock in the attitude of those martial figures we see
wielding two wooden swords in provincial gardens to tell the disposition
of the wind: abruptly abandoned by it, they stand transfixed, one sword
aloft, the other at their heels. The resemblance extended to his
astonished countenance. His big chest heaved. Like many another wounded
giant before him, he experienced the insufficiency of interjections to
solace pain. For them, however, the rocks were handy to fling, the trees
to uproot; heaven's concave resounded companionably to their bellowings.
Relief of so concrete a kind is not to be obtained in crowded London
assemblies.

'You are jesting?--you are a jester,' he contrived to say.

'It was a private marriage, and I was a witness,' replied Stukely.

'Lord Romfrey has made an honest woman of her, has he?'

'A peeress, you mean.'

Cecil bowed. 'Exactly. I am corrected. I mean a peeress.'

He got out of the room with as high an air as he could command, feeling
as if a bar of iron had flattened his head.

Next day it was intimated to him by one of the Steynham servants that
apartments were ready for him at the residence of the late earl: Lord
Romfrey's house was about to be occupied by the Countess of Romfrey.
Cecil had to quit, and he chose to be enamoured of that dignity of
sulking so seductive to the wounded spirit of man.

Rosamund, Countess of Romfrey, had worse to endure from Beauchamp. He
indeed came to the house, and he went through the formalities of
congratulation, but his opinion of her step was unconcealed, that she had
taken it for the title. He distressed her by reviving the case of Dr.
Shrapnel, as though it were a matter of yesterday, telling her she had
married a man with a stain on him; she should have exacted the Apology as
a nuptial present; ay, and she would have done it if she had cared for
the earl's honour or her own. So little did he understand men! so
tenacious was he of his ideas! She had almost forgotten the case of Dr.
Shrapnel, and to see it shooting up again in the new path of her life was
really irritating.

Rosamund did not defend herself.

'I am very glad you have come, Nevil,' she said; 'your uncle holds to the
ceremony. I may be of real use to you now; I wish to be.'

'You have only to prove it,' said he. 'If you can turn his mind to
marriage, you can send him to Bevisham.'

'My chief thought is to serve you.'

'I know it is, I know it is,' he rejoined with some fervour. 'You have
served me, and made me miserable for life, and rightly. Never mind, all's
well while the hand's to the axe.' Beauchamp smoothed his forehead
roughly, trying hard to inspire himself with the tonic draughts of
sentiments cast in the form of proverbs. 'Lord Romfrey saw her, you say?'

'He did, Nevil, and admired her.'

'Well, if I suffer, let me think of her! For courage and nobleness I
shall never find her equal. Have you changed your ideas of Frenchwomen
now? Not a word, you say, not a look, to show her disdain of me whenever
my name was mentioned!'

'She could scarcely feel disdain. She was guilty of a sad error.'

'Through trusting in me. Will nothing teach you where the fault lies? You
women have no mercy for women. She went through the parade to Romfrey
Castle and back, and she must have been perishing at heart. That, you
English call acting. In history you have a respect for such acting up to
the scaffold. Good-bye to her! There's a story ended. One thing you must
promise: you're a peeress, ma'am: the story's out, everybody has heard of
it; that babbler has done his worst: if you have a becoming appreciation
of your title, you will promise me honestly--no, give me your word as a
woman I can esteem--that you will not run about excusing me. Whatever you
hear said or suggested, say nothing yourself. I insist on your keeping
silence. Press my hand.'

'Nevil, how foolish!'

'It's my will.'

'It is unreasonable. You give your enemies licence.'

'I know what's in your head. Take my hand, and let me have your word for
it.'

'But if persons you like very much, Nevil, should hear?'

'Promise. You are a woman not to break your word.'

'If I decline?'

'Your hand! I'll kiss it.'

'Oh! my darling.' Rosamund flung her arms round him and strained him an
instant to her bosom. 'What have I but you in the world? My comfort was
the hope that I might serve you.'

'Yes! by slaying one woman as an offering to another. It would be
impossible for you to speak the truth. Don't you see, it would be a lie
against her, and making a figure of me that a man would rather drop to
the ground than have shown of him? I was to blame, and only I. Madame de
Rouaillout was as utterly deceived by me as ever a trusting woman by a
brute. I look at myself and hardly believe it 's the same man. I wrote to
her that I was unchanged--and I was entirely changed, another creature,
anything Lord Romfrey may please to call me.'

'But, Nevil, I repeat, if Miss Halkett should hear . . . ?'

'She knows by this time.'

'At present she is ignorant of it.'

'And what is Miss Halkett to me?'

'More than you imagined in that struggle you underwent, I think, Nevil.
Oh! if only to save her from Captain Baskelett! He gained your uncle's
consent when they were at the Castle, to support him in proposing for
her. He is persistent. Women have been snared without loving. She is a
great heiress. Reflect on his use of her wealth. You respect her, if you
have no warmer feeling. Let me assure you that the husband of Cecilia, if
he is of Romfrey blood, has the fairest chance of the estates. That man
will employ every weapon. He will soon be here bowing to me to turn me to
his purposes.'

'Cecilia can see through Baskelett,' said Beauchamp.

'Single-mindedly selfish men may be seen through and through, and still
be dangerous, Nevil. The supposition is, that we know the worst of them.
He carries a story to poison her mind. She could resist it, if you and
she were in full confidence together. If she did not love you, she could
resist it. She does, and for some strange reason beyond my capacity to
fathom, you have not come to an understanding. Sanction my speaking to
her, just to put her on her guard, privately: not to injure that poor
lady, but to explain. Shall she not know the truth? I need say but very
little. Indeed, all I can say is, that finding the marquise in London one
evening, you telegraphed for me to attend on her, and I joined you. You
shake your head. But surely it is due to Miss Halkett. She should be
protected from what will certainly wound her deeply. Her father is afraid
of you, on the score of your theories. I foresee it: he will hear the
scandal: he will imagine you as bad in morals as in politics. And you
have lost your friend in Lord Romfrey--though he shall not be your enemy.
Colonel Halkett and Cecilia called on us at Steynham. She was looking
beautiful; a trifle melancholy. The talk was of your--that--I do not like
it, but you hold those opinions--the Republicanism. She had read your
published letters. She spoke to me of your sincerity. Colonel Halkett of
course was vexed.

It is the same with all your friends. She, however, by her tone, led me
to think that she sees you as you are, more than in what you do. They are
now in Wales. They will be in town after Easter. Then you must expect
that her feeling for you will be tried, unless but you will! You will let
me speak to her, Nevil. My position allows me certain liberties I was
previously debarred from. You have not been so very tender to your
Cecilia that you can afford to give her fresh reasons for sorrowful
perplexity. And why should you stand to be blackened by scandalmongers
when a few words of mine will prove that instead of weak you have been
strong, instead of libertine blameless? I am not using fine phrases: I
would not. I would be as thoughtful of you as if you were present. And
for her sake, I repeat, the truth should be told to her. I have a lock of
her hair.'

'Cecilia's? Where?' said Beauchamp.

'It is at Steynham.' Rosamund primmed her lips at the success of her
probing touch; but she was unaware of the chief reason for his doting on
those fair locks, and how they coloured his imagination since the day of
the drive into Bevisham.

'Now leave me, my dear Nevil,' she said. 'Lord Romfrey will soon be here,
and it is as well for the moment that you should not meet him, if it can
be avoided.'

Beauchamp left her, like a man out-argued and overcome. He had no wish to
meet his uncle, whose behaviour in contracting a misalliance and casting
a shadow on the family, in a manner so perfectly objectless and
senseless, appeared to him to call for the reverse of compliments.
Cecilia's lock of hair lying at Steynham hung in his mind. He saw the
smooth flat curl lying secret like a smile.

The graceful head it had fallen from was dimmer in his mental eye. He
went so far in this charmed meditation as to feel envy of the possessor
of the severed lock: passingly he wondered, with the wonder of reproach,
that the possessor should deem it enough to possess the lock, and resign
it to a drawer or a desk. And as when life rolls back on us after the
long ebb of illness, little whispers and diminutive images of the old
joys and prizes of life arrest and fill our hearts; or as, to men who
have been beaten down by storms, the opening of a daisy is dearer than
the blazing orient which bids it open; so the visionary lock of Cecilia's
hair became Cecilia's self to Beauchamp, yielding him as much of her as
he could bear to think of, for his heart was shattered.

Why had she given it to his warmest friend? For the asking, probably.

This question was the first ripple of the breeze from other emotions
beginning to flow fast.

He walked out of London, to be alone, and to think and from the palings
of a road on a South-western run of high land, he gazed, at the great
city--a place conquerable yet, with the proper appliances for subjugating
it: the starting of his daily newspaper, THE DAWN, say, as a
commencement. It began to seem a possible enterprise. It soon seemed a
proximate one. If Cecilia! He left the exclamation a blank, but not an
empty dash in the brain; rather like the shroud of night on a vast and
gloriously imagined land.

Nay, the prospect was partly visible, as the unknown country becomes by
degrees to the traveller's optics on the dark hill-tops. It is much, of
course, to be domestically well-mated: but to be fortified and armed by
one's wife with a weapon to fight the world, is rare good fortune; a
rapturous and an infinite satisfaction. He could now support of his own
resources a weekly paper. A paper published weekly, however, is a poor
thing, out of the tide, behind the date, mainly a literary periodical, no
foremost combatant in politics, no champion in the arena; hardly better
than a commentator on the events of the six past days; an echo, not a
voice. It sits on a Saturday bench and pretends to sum up. Who listens?
The verdict knocks dust out of a cushion. It has no steady continuous
pressure of influence. It is the organ of sleepers. Of all the bigger
instruments of money, it is the feeblest, Beauchamp thought. His constant
faith in the good effects of utterance naturally inclined him to value
six occasions per week above one; and in the fight he was for waging, it
was necessary that he should enter the ring and hit blow for blow sans
intermission. A statement that he could call false must be challenged hot
the next morning. The covert Toryism, the fits of flunkeyism, the
cowardice, of the relapsing middle-class, which is now England before
mankind, because it fills the sails of the Press, must be exposed. It
supports the Press in its own interests, affecting to speak for the
people. It belies the people. And this Press, declaring itself
independent, can hardly walk for fear of treading on an interest here, an
interest there. It cannot have a conscience. It is a bad guide, a false
guardian; its abject claim to be our national and popular
interpreter-even that is hollow and a mockery! It is powerful only while
subservient. An engine of money, appealing to the sensitiveness of money,
it has no connection with the mind of the nation. And that it is not of,
but apart from, the people, may be seen when great crises come. Can it
stop a war? The people would, and with thunder, had they the medium. But
in strong gales the power of the Press collapses; it wheezes like a
pricked pigskin of a piper. At its best Beauchamp regarded our lordly
Press as a curiously diapered curtain and delusive mask, behind which the
country struggles vainly to show an honest feature; and as a trumpet that
deafened and terrorized the people; a mere engine of leaguers banded to
keep a smooth face upon affairs, quite soullessly: he meanwhile having to
be dumb.

But a Journal that should be actually independent of circulation and
advertisements: a popular journal in the true sense, very lungs to the
people, for them to breathe freely through at last, and be heard out of
it, with well-paid men of mark to head and aid them;--the establishment
of such a Journal seemed to him brave work of a life, though one should
die early. The money launching it would be coin washed pure of its
iniquity of selfish reproduction, by service to mankind. This DAWN of his
conception stood over him like a rosier Aurora for the country. He beheld
it in imagination as a new light rising above hugeous London. You turn
the sheets of THE DAWN, and it is the manhood of the land addressing you,
no longer that alternately puling and insolent cry of the coffers. The
health, wealth, comfort, contentment of the greater number are there to
be striven for, in contempt of compromise and 'unseasonable times.'

Beauchamp's illuminated dream of the power of his DAWN to vitalize old
England, liberated him singularly from his wearing regrets and
heart-sickness.

Surely Cecilia, who judged him sincere, might be bent to join hands with
him for so good a work! She would bring riches to her husband:
sufficient. He required the ablest men of the country to write for him,
and it was just that they should be largely paid. They at least in their
present public apathy would demand it. To fight the brewers, distillers,
publicans, the shopkeepers, the parsons, the landlords, the law limpets,
and also the indifferents, the logs, the cravens and the fools, high
talent was needed, and an ardour stimulated by rates of pay outdoing the
offers of the lucre-journals. A large annual outlay would therefore be
needed; possibly for as long as a quarter of a century. Cecilia and her
husband would have to live modestly. But her inheritance would be
immense. Colonel Halkett had never spent a tenth of his income. In time
he might be taught to perceive in THE DAWN the one greatly beneficent
enterprise of his day. He might through his daughter's eyes, and the
growing success of the Journal. Benevolent and gallant old man, patriotic
as he was, and kind at heart, he might learn to see in THE DAWN a broader
channel of philanthropy and chivalry than any we have yet had a notion of
in England!--a school of popular education into the bargain.

Beauchamp reverted to the shining curl. It could not have been clearer to
vision if it had lain under his eyes.

Ay, that first wild life of his was dead. He had slain it. Now for the
second and sober life! Who can say? The Countess of Romfrey suggested
it:--Cecilia may have prompted him in his unknown heart to the sacrifice
of a lawless love, though he took it for simply barren iron duty.
Brooding on her, he began to fancy the victory over himself less and less
a lame one: for it waxed less and less difficult in his contemplation of
it. He was looking forward instead of back.

Who cut off the lock? Probably Cecilia herself; and thinking at the
moment that he would see it, perhaps beg for it. The lustrous little ring
of hair wound round his heart; smiled both on its emotions and its aims;
bound them in one.

But proportionately as he grew tender to Cecilia, his consideration for
Renee increased; that became a law to him: pity nourished it, and
glimpses of self-contempt, and something like worship of her
high-heartedness.

He wrote to the countess, forbidding her sharply and absolutely to
attempt a vindication of him by explanations to any persons whomsoever;
and stating that he would have no falsehoods told, he desired her to keep
to the original tale of the visit of the French family to her as guests
of the Countess of Romfrey. Contradictory indeed. Rosamund shook her head
over him. For a wilful character that is guilty of issuing contradictory
commands to friends who would be friends in spite of him, appears to be
expressly angling for the cynical spirit, so surely does it rise and snap
at such provocation. He was even more emphatic when they next met. He
would not listen to a remonstrance; and though, of course, her love of
him granted him the liberty to speak to her in what tone he pleased,
there were sensations proper to her new rank which his intemperateness
wounded and tempted to revolt when he vexed her with unreason. She had a
glimpse of the face he might wear to his enemies.

He was quite as resolute, too, about that slight matter of the Jersey
bull. He had the bull in Bevisham, and would not give him up without the
sign manual of Lord Romfrey to an agreement to resign him over to the
American Quaker gentleman, after a certain term. Moreover, not once had
he, by exclamation or innuendo, during the period of his recent grief for
the loss of his first love, complained of his uncle Everard's refusal in
the old days to aid him in suing for Renee. Rosamund had expected that he
would. She thought it unloverlike in him not to stir the past, and to bow
to intolerable facts. This idea of him, coming in conjunction with his
present behaviour, convinced her that there existed a contradiction in
his nature: whence it ensued that she lost her warmth as an advocate
designing to intercede for him with Cecilia; and warmth being gone, the
power of the scandal seemed to her unassailable. How she could ever have
presumed to combat it, was an astonishment to her. Cecilia might be
indulgent, she might have faith in Nevil. Little else could be hoped for.

The occupations, duties, and ceremonies of her new position contributed
to the lassitude into which Rosamund sank. And she soon had a
communication to make to her lord, the nature of which was more startling
to herself, even tragic. The bondwoman is a free woman compared with the
wife.

Lord Romfrey's friends noticed a glow of hearty health in the splendid
old man, and a prouder animation of eye and stature; and it was agreed
that matrimony suited him well. Luckily for Cecil he did not sulk very
long. A spectator of the earl's first introduction to the House of Peers,
he called on his uncle the following day, and Rosamund accepted his
homage in her husband's presence. He vowed that my lord was the noblest
figure in the whole assembly; that it had been to him the most moving
sight he had ever witnessed; that Nevil should have been there to see it
and experience what he had felt; it would have done old Nevil
incalculable good! and as far as his grief at the idea and some reticence
would let him venture, he sighed to think of the last Earl of Romfrey
having been seen by him taking the seat of his fathers.

Lord Romfrey shouted 'Ha!' like a checked peal of laughter, and glanced
at his wife.




CHAPTER XLV

A LITTLE PLOT AGAINST CECILIA

Some days before Easter week Seymour Austin went to Mount Laurels for
rest, at an express invitation from Colonel Halkett. The working
barrister, who is also a working member of Parliament, is occasionally
reminded that this mortal machine cannot adapt itself in perpetuity to
the long hours of labour by night in the House of Commons as well as by
day in the Courts, which would seem to have been arranged by a compliant
country for the purpose of aiding his particular, and most honourable,
ambition to climb, while continuing to fill his purse. Mr. Austin broke
down early in the year. He attributed it to a cold. Other representative
gentlemen were on their backs, of whom he could admit that the protracted
nightwork had done them harm, with the reservation that their
constitutions were originally unsound. But the House cannot get on
without lawyers, and lawyers must practise their profession, and if they
manage both to practise all day and sit half the night, others should be
able to do the simple late sitting; and we English are an energetic
people, we must toil or be beaten: and besides, 'night brings counsel,'
men are cooler and wiser by night. Any amount of work can be performed by
careful feeders: it is the stomach that kills the Englishman. Brains are
never the worse for activity; they subsist on it.

These arguments and citations, good and absurd, of a man more at home in
his harness than out of it, were addressed to the colonel to stop his
remonstrances and idle talk about burning the candle at both ends. To
that illustration Mr. Austin replied that he did not burn it in the
middle.

'But you don't want money, Austin.'

'No; but since I've had the habit of making it I have taken to like it.'

'But you're not ambitious.'

'Very little; but I should be sorry to be out of the tideway.'

'I call it a system of slaughter,' said the colonel; and Mr. Austin said,
'The world goes in that way--love and slaughter.'

'Not suicide though,' Colonel Halkett muttered.

'No, that's only incidental.'

The casual word 'love' led Colonel Halkett to speak to Cecilia of an old
love-affair of Seymour Austin's, in discussing the state of his health
with her. The lady was the daughter of a famous admiral, handsome, and
latterly of light fame. Mr. Austin had nothing to regret in her having
married a man richer than himself.

'I wish he had married a good woman,' said the colonel.

'He looks unwell, papa.'

'He thinks you're looking unwell, my dear.'

'He thinks that of me?'

Cecilia prepared a radiant face for Mr. Austin.

She forgot to keep it kindled, and he suspected her to be a victim of one
of the forms of youthful melancholy, and laid stress on the benefit to
health of a change of scene.

'We have just returned from Wales,' she said.

He remarked that it was hardly a change to be within shot of our
newspapers.

The colour left her cheeks. She fancied her father had betrayed her to
the last man who should know her secret. Beauchamp and the newspapers
were rolled together in her mind by the fever of apprehension wasting her
ever since his declaration of Republicanism, and defence of it, and an
allusion to one must imply the other, she feared: feared, but far from
quailingly. She had come to think that she could read the man she loved,
and detect a reasonableness in his extravagance. Her father had
discovered the impolicy of attacking Beauchamp in her hearing. The fever
by which Cecilia was possessed on her lover's behalf, often overcame
discretion, set her judgement in a whirl, was like a delirium. How it had
happened she knew not. She knew only her wretched state; a frenzy seized
her whenever his name was uttered, to excuse, account for, all but
glorify him publicly. And the immodesty of her conduct was perceptible to
her while she thus made her heart bare. She exposed herself once of late
at Itchincope, and had tried to school her tongue before she went there.
She felt that she should inevitably be seen through by Seymour Austin if
he took the world's view of Beauchamp, and this to her was like a descent
on the rapids to an end one shuts eyes from.

He noticed her perturbation, and spoke of it to her father.

'Yes, I'm very miserable about her,' the colonel confessed. 'Girls don't
see . . . they can't guess . . . they have no idea of the right kind of
man for them. A man like Blackburn Tuckham, now, a man a father could
leave his girl to, with confidence! He works for me like a slave; I can't
guess why. He doesn't look as if he were attracted. There's a man! but,
no; harum-scarum fellows take their fancy.'

'Is she that kind of young lady?' said Mr. Austin.

'No one would have thought so. She pretends to have opinions upon
politics now. It's of no use to talk of it!'

But Beauchamp was fully indicated.

Mr. Austin proposed to Cecilia that they should spend Easter week in
Rome.

Her face lighted and clouded.

'I should like it,' she said, negatively.

'What's the objection?'

'None, except that Mount Laurels in Spring has grown dear to me; and we
have engagements in London. I am not quick, I suppose, at new projects. I
have ordered the yacht to be fitted out for a cruise in the Mediterranean
early in the Summer. There is an objection, I am sure--yes; papa has
invited Mr. Tuckham here for Easter.'

'We could carry him with us.'

'Yes, but I should wish to be entirely under your tutelage in Rome.'

'We would pair: your father and he; you and I.'

'We might do that. But Mr. Tuckham is like you, devoted to work; and,
unlike you, careless of Antiquities and Art.'

'He is a hard and serious worker, and therefore the best of companions
for a holiday. At present he is working for the colonel, who would easily
persuade him to give over, and come with us.'

'He certainly does love papa,' said Cecilia.

Mr. Austin dwelt on that subject.

Cecilia perceived that she had praised Mr. Tuckham for his devotedness to
her father without recognizing the beauty of nature in the young man who
could voluntarily take service under the elder he esteemed, in simple
admiration of him. Mr. Austin scarcely said so much, or expected her to
see the half of it, but she wished to be extremely grateful, and could
only see at all by kindling altogether.

'He does himself injustice in his manner,' said Cecilia.

'That has become somewhat tempered,' Mr. Austin assured her, and he
acknowledged what it had been with a smile that she reciprocated.

A rough man of rare quality civilizing under various influences, and half
ludicrous, a little irritating, wholly estimable, has frequently won the
benign approbation of the sex. In addition, this rough man over whom she
smiled was one of the few that never worried her concerning her hand.
There was not a whisper of it in him. He simply loved her father.

Cecilia welcomed him to Mount Laurels with grateful gladness. The colonel
had hastened Mr. Tuckham's visit in view of the expedition to Rome, and
they discoursed of it at the luncheon table. Mr. Tuckham let fall that he
had just seen Beauchamp.

'Did he thank you for his inheritance?' Colonel Halkett inquired.

'Not he!' Tuckham replied jovially.

Cecilia's eyes, quick to flash, were dropped.

The colonel said: 'I suppose you told him nothing of what you had done
for him?' and said Tuckham: 'Oh no: what anybody else would have done';
and proceeded to recount that he had called at Dr. Shrapnel's on the
chance of an interview with his friend Lydiard, who used generally to be
hanging about the cottage. 'But now he's free: his lunatic wife is dead,
and I'm happy to think I was mistaken as to Miss Denham. Men practising
literature should marry women with money. The poor girl changed colour
when I informed her he had been released for upwards of three months. The
old Radical's not the thing in health. He's anxious about leaving her
alone in the world; he said so to me. Beauchamp's for rigging out a yacht
to give him a sail. It seems that salt water did him some good last year.
They're both of them rather the worse for a row at one of their meetings
in the North in support of that public nuisance, the democrat and atheist
Roughleigh. The Radical doctor lost a hat, and Beauchamp almost lost an
eye. He would have been a Nelson of politics, if he had been a monops,
with an excuse for not seeing. It's a trifle to them; part of their
education. They call themselves students. Rome will be capital, Miss
Halkett. You're an Italian scholar, and I beg to be accepted as a pupil.'

'I fear we have postponed the expedition too long,' said Cecilia. She
could have sunk with languor.

'Too long?' cried Colonel Halkett, mystified.

'Until too late, I mean, papa. Do you not think, Mr. Austin, that a
fortnight in Rome is too short a time?'

'Not if we make it a month, my dear Cecilia.'

'Is not our salt air better for you? The yacht shall be fitted out.'

'I'm a poor sailor!'

'Besides, a hasty excursion to Italy brings one's anticipated regrets at
the farewell too close to the pleasure of beholding it, for the enjoyment
of that luxury of delight which I associate with the name of Italy.'

'Why, my dear child,' said her father, 'you were all for going, the other
day.'

'I do not remember it,' said she. 'One plans agreeable schemes. At least
we need not hurry from home so very soon after our return. We have been
travelling incessantly. The cottage in Wales is not home. It is hardly
fair to Mount Laurels to quit it without observing the changes of the
season in our flowers and birds here. And we have visitors coming. Of
course, papa, I would not chain you to England. If I am not well enough
to accompany you, I can go to Louise for a few weeks.'

Was ever transparency so threadbare? Cecilia shrank from herself in
contemplating it when she was alone; and Colonel Halkett put the question
to Mr. Austin, saying to him privately, with no further reserve: 'It's
that fellow Beauchamp in the neighbourhood; I'm not so blind. He'll be
knocking at my door, and I can't lock him out. Austin, would you guess it
was my girl speaking? I never in my life had such an example of
intoxication before me. I 'm perfectly miserable at the sight. You. know
her; she was the proudest girl living. Her ideas were orderly and sound;
she had a good intellect. Now she more than half defends him--a naval
officer! good Lord!--for getting up in a public room to announce that he
's a Republican, and writing heaps of mad letters to justify himself.
He's ruined in his profession: hopeless! He can never get a ship: his
career's cut short, he's a rudderless boat. A gentleman drifting to
Bedlam, his uncle calls him. I call his treatment of Grancey Lespel
anything but gentlemanly. This is the sort of fellow my girl worships!
What can I do? I can't interdict the house to him: it would only make
matters worse. Thank God, the fellow hangs fire somehow, and doesn't come
to me. I expect it every day, either in a letter or the man in person.
And I declare to heaven I'd rather be threading a Khyber Pass with my
poor old friend who fell to a shot there.'

'She certainly has another voice,' Mr. Austin assented gravely.

He did not look on Beauchamp as the best of possible husbands for
Cecilia.

'Let her see that you're anxious, Austin,' said the colonel. 'I'm her old
opponent in this affair. She loves me, but she's accustomed to think me
prejudiced: you she won't. You may have a good effect.'

'Not by speaking.'

'No, no; no assault: not a word, and not a word against him. Lay the wind
to catch a gossamer. I've had my experience of blowing cold, and trying
to run her down. He's at Shrapnel's. He'll be up here to-day, and I have
an engagement in the town. Don't quit her side. Let her fancy you are
interested in some discussion--Radicalism, if you like.'

Mr. Austin readily undertook to mount guard over her while her father
rode into Bevisham on business.

The enemy appeared.

Cecilia saw him, and could not step to meet him for trouble of heart. It
was bliss to know that he lived and was near.

A transient coldness following the fit of ecstasy enabled her to swin
through the terrible first minutes face to face with him.

He folded her round like a mist; but it grew a problem to understand why
Mr. Austin should be perpetually at hand, in the garden, in the woods, in
the drawing-room, wheresoever she wakened up from one of her trances to
see things as they were.

Yet Beauchamp, with a daring and cunning at which her soul exulted, and
her feminine nature trembled, as at the divinely terrible, had managed to
convey to her no less than if they had been alone together.

His parting words were: 'I must have five minutes with your father
to-morrow.'

How had she behaved? What could be Seymour Austin's idea of her?

She saw the blind thing that she was, the senseless thing, the shameless;
and vulture-like in her scorn of herself, she alighted on that disgraced
Cecilia and picked her to pieces hungrily. It was clear: Beauchamp had
meant nothing beyond friendly civility: it was only her abject greediness
pecking at crumbs. No! he loved her. Could a woman's heart be mistaken?
She melted and wept, thanking him: she offered him her remnant of pride,
pitiful to behold.

And still she asked herself between-whiles whether it could be true of an
English lady of our day, that she, the fairest stature under sun, was
ever knowingly twisted to this convulsion. She seemed to look forth from
a barred window on flower, and field, and hill. Quietness existed as a
vision. Was it impossible to embrace it? How pass into it? By
surrendering herself to the flames, like a soul unto death! For why, if
they were overpowering, attempt to resist them? It flattered her to
imagine that she had been resisting them in their present burning might
ever since her lover stepped on the Esperanza's deck at the mouth of
Otley River. How foolish, seeing that they are fatal! A thrill of
satisfaction swept her in reflecting that her ability to reason was thus
active. And she was instantly rewarded for surrendering; pain fled, to
prove her reasoning good; the flames devoured her gently they cared not
to torture so long as they had her to themselves.

At night, candle in hand, on the corridor, her father told her he had
come across Grancey Lespel in Bevisham, and heard what he had not quite
relished of the Countess of Romfrey. The glittering of Cecilia's eyes
frightened him. Taking her for the moment to know almost as much as he,
the colonel doubted the weight his communication would have on her; he
talked obscurely of a scandalous affair at Lord Romfrey's house in town,
and Beauchamp and that Frenchwoman. 'But,' said he, 'Mrs. Grancey will be
here to-morrow.'

'So will Nevil, papa,' said Cecilia.

'Ah! he's coming, yes; well!' the colonel puffed. 'Well, I shall see him,
of course, but I . . . I can only say that if his oath 's worth having, I
. . . and I think you too, my dear, if you . . . but it's no use
anticipating. I shall stand out for your honour and happiness. There,
your cheeks are flushed. Go and sleep.'

Some idle tale! Cecilia murmured to herself a dozen times, undisturbed by
the recurrence of it. Nevil was coming to speak to her father tomorrow!
Adieu to doubt and division! Happy to-morrow! and dear Mount Laurels! The
primroses were still fair in the woods: and soon the cowslips would come,
and the nightingale; she lay lapt in images of everything innocently
pleasing to Nevil. Soon the Esperanza would be spreading wings. She
revelled in a picture of the yacht on a tumbling Mediterranean Sea,
meditating on the two specks near the tiller,--who were blissful human
creatures, blest by heaven and in themselves--with luxurious Olympian
benevolence.

For all that, she awoke, starting up in the first cold circle of
twilight, her heart in violent action. She had dreamed that the vessel
was wrecked. 'I did not think myself so cowardly,' she said aloud,
pressing her side and then, with the dream in her eyes, she gasped: 'It
would be together!'

Strangely chilled, she tried to recover some fallen load. The birds of
the dawn twittered, chirped, dived aslant her window, fluttered back.
Instead of a fallen load, she fancied presently that it was an
expectation she was desiring to realize: but what? What could be expected
at that hour? She quitted her bed, and paced up and down the room beneath
a gold-starred ceiling. Her expectation, she resolved to think, was of a
splendid day of the young Spring at Mount Laurels--a day to praise to
Nevil.

She raised her window-blind at a window letting in sweet air, to gather
indications of promising weather. Her lover stood on the grass-plot among
the flower-beds below, looking up, as though it had been his expectation
to see her which had drawn her to gaze out with an idea of some
expectation of her own. So visionary was his figure in the grey
solitariness of the moveless morning that she stared at the apparition,
scarce putting faith in him as man, until he kissed his hand to her, and
had softly called her name.

Impulsively she waved a hand from her lips.

Now there was no retreat for either of them!

She awoke to this conviction after a flight of blushes that burnt her
thoughts to ashes as they sprang. Thoughts born blushing, all of the
crimson colour, a rose-garden, succeeded, and corresponding with their
speed her feet paced the room, both slender hands crossed at her throat
under an uplifted chin, and the curves of her dark eyelashes dropped as
in a swoon.

'He loves me!' The attestation of it had been visible. 'No one but me!'
Was that so evident?

Her father picked up silly stories of him--a man who made enemies
recklessly!

Cecilia was petrified by a gentle tapping at her door. Her father called
to her, and she threw on her dressing-gown, and opened the door.

The colonel was in his riding-suit.

'I haven't slept a wink, and I find it's the same with you,' he said,
paining her with his distressed kind eyes. 'I ought not to have hinted
anything last night without proofs. Austin's as unhappy as I am.'

'At what, my dear papa, at what?' cried Cecilia.

'I ride over to Steynham this morning, and I shall bring you proofs, my
poor child, proofs. That foreign tangle of his . . .'

'You speak of Nevil, papa?'

'It's a common scandal over London. That Frenchwoman was found at Lord
Romfrey's house; Lady Romfrey cloaked it. I believe the woman would swear
black's white to make Nevil Beauchamp appear an angel; and he's a
desperately cunning hand with women. You doubt that.'

She had shuddered slightly.

'You won't doubt if I bring you proofs. Till I come back from Steynham, I
ask you not to see him alone: not to go out to him.'

The colonel glanced at her windows.

Cecilia submitted to the request, out of breath, consenting to feel like
a tutored girl, that she might conceal her guilty knowledge of what was
to be seen through the windows.

'Now I'm off,' said he, and kissed her.

'If you would accept Nevil's word!' she murmured.

'Not where women are concerned!'

He left her with this remark, which found no jealous response in her
heart, yet ranged over certain dispersed inflammable grains, like a match
applied to damp powder; again and again running in little leaps of
harmless firm keeping her alive to its existence, and surprising her that
it should not have been extinguished.

Beauchamp presented himself rather late in the afternoon, when Mr. Austin
and Blackburn Tuckham were sipping tea in Cecilia's boudoir with that
lady, and a cousin of her sex, by whom she was led to notice a faint
discoloration over one of his eyes, that was, considering whence it came,
repulsive to compassion. A blow at a Radical meeting! He spoke of Dr.
Shrapnel to Tuckham, and assuredly could not complain that the latter was
unsympathetic in regard to the old man's health, though when he said,
'Poor old man! he fears he will die!' Tuckham rejoined: 'He had better
make his peace.'

'He fears he will die, because of his leaving Miss Denham unprotected,'
said Beauchamp.

'Well, she's a good-looking girl: he'll be able to leave her something,
and he might easily get her married, I should think,' said Tuckham.

'He's not satisfied with handing her to any kind of man.'

'If the choice is to be among Radicals and infidels, I don't wonder. He
has come to one of the tests.'

Cecilia heard Beauchamp speaking of a newspaper. A great Radical Journal,
unmatched in sincerity, superior in ability, soon to be equal in power,
to the leader and exemplar of the lucre-Press, would some day see the
light.

'You'll want money for that,' said Tuckham.

'I know,' said Beauchamp.

'Are you prepared to stand forty or fifty thousand a year?'

'It need not be half so much.,

'Counting the libels, I rate the outlay rather low.'

'Yes, lawyers, judges, and juries of tradesmen, dealing justice to a
Radical print!'

Tuckham brushed his hand over his mouth and ahemed. 'It's to be a penny
journal?'

'Yes, a penny. I'd make it a farthing--'

'Pay to have it read?'

'Willingly.'

Tuckham did some mental arithmetic, quaintly, with rapidly blinking
eyelids and open mouth. 'You may count it at the cost of two paying
mines,' he said firmly. 'That is, if it's to be a consistently Radical
Journal, at law with everybody all round the year. And by the time it has
won a reputation, it will be undermined by a radicaller Radical Journal.
That's how we've lowered the country to this level. That's an Inferno of
Circles, down to the ultimate mire. And what on earth are you contending
for?'

'Freedom of thought, for one thing.'

'We have quite enough free-thinking.'

'There's not enough if there's not perfect freedom.'

'Dangerous!' quoth Mr. Austin.

'But it's that danger which makes men, sir; and it's fear of the danger
that makes our modern Englishman.'

'Oh! Oh!' cried Tuckham in the voice of a Parliamentary Opposition.
'Well, you start your paper, we'll assume it: what class of men will you
get to write?'

'I shall get good men for the hire.'

'You won't get the best men; you may catch a clever youngster or two, and
an old rogue of talent; you won't get men of weight. They're prejudiced,
I dare say. The Journals which are commercial speculations give us a
guarantee that they mean to be respectable; they must, if they wouldn't
collapse. That's why the best men consent to write for them.'

'Money will do it,' said Beauchamp.

Mr. Austin disagreed with that observation.

'Some patriotic spirit, I may hope, sir.'

Mr. Austin shook his head. 'We put different constructions upon
patriotism.'

'Besides--fiddle! nonsense!' exclaimed Tuckham in the mildest
interjections he could summon for a vent in society to his offended
common sense; 'the better your men the worse your mark. You're not
dealing with an intelligent people.'

'There's the old charge against the people.'

'But they're not. You can madden, you can't elevate them by writing and
writing. Defend us from the uneducated English! The common English are
doltish; except in the North, where you won't do much with them. Compare
them with the Yankees for shrewdness, the Spaniards for sobriety, the
French for ingenuity, the Germans for enlightenment, the Italians in the
Arts; yes, the Russians for good-humour and obedience--where are they?
They're only worth something when they're led. They fight well; there's
good stuff in them.'

'I've heard all that before,' returned Beauchamp, unruffled. 'You don't
know them. I mean to educate them by giving them an interest in their
country. At present they have next to none. Our governing class is
decidedly unintelligent, in my opinion brutish, for it's indifferent. My
paper shall render your traders justice for what they do, and justice for
what they don't do.'

'My traders, as you call them, are the soundest foundation for a
civilized state that the world has yet seen.'

'What is your paper to be called?' said Cecilia.

'The DAWN,' Beauchamp answered.

She blushed fiery red, and turned the leaves of a portfolio of drawings.

'The DAWN!' ejaculated Tuckham. 'The grey-eyed, or the red? Extraordinary
name for a paper, upon my word!'

'A paper that doesn't devote half its columns to the vices of the
rich--to money-getting, spending and betting--will be an extraordinary
paper.'

'I have it before me now!--two doses of flattery to one of the whip. No,
no; you haven't hit the disease. We want union, not division. Turn your
mind to being a moralist, instead of a politician.'

'The distinction shouldn't exist!'

'Only it does!'

Mrs. Grancey Lespel's entrance diverted their dialogue from a theme
wearisome to Cecilia, for Beauchamp shone but darkly in it, and Mr.
Austin did not join in it. Mrs. Grancey touched Beauchamp's fingers.
'Still political?' she said. 'You have been seen about London with a
French officer in uniform.'

'It was M. le comte de Croisnel, a very old friend and comrade of mine,'
Beauchamp replied.

'Why do those Frenchmen everlastingly wear their uniforms?--tell me!
Don't you think it detestable style?'

'He came over in a hurry.'

'Now, don't be huffed. I know you, for defending your friends, Captain
Beauchamp! Did he not come over with ladies?'

'With relatives, yes.'

'Relatives of course. But when British officers travel with ladies,
relatives or other, they prefer the simplicity of mufti, and so do I, as
a question of taste, I must say.'

'It was quite by misadventure that M. de Croisnel chanced to come in his
uniform.'

'Ah! I know you, for defending your friends, Captain Beauchamp. He was in
too great a hurry to change his uniform before he started, or en route?'

'So it happened.'

Mrs. Grancey let a lingering eye dwell maliciously on Beauchamp, who
said, to shift the burden of it: 'The French are not so jealous of
military uniforms as we are. M. de Croisnel lost his portmanteau.'

'Ah! lost it! Then of course he is excuseable, except to the naked eye.
Dear me! you have had a bruise on yours. Was Monsieur votre ami in the
Italian campaign?'

'No, poor fellow, he was not. He is not an Imperialist; he had to remain
in garrison.'

'He wore a multitude of medals, I have been told. A cup of tea, Cecilia.
And how long did he stay in England with his relatives?'

'Two days.'

'Only two days! A very short visit indeed--singularly short. Somebody
informed me of their having been seen at Romfrey Castle, which cannot
have been true.'

She turned her eyes from Beauchamp silent to Cecilia's hand on the
teapot. 'Half a cup,' she said mildly, to spare the poor hand its
betrayal of nervousness, and relapsed from her air of mistress of the
situation to chatter to Mr. Austin.

Beauchamp continued silent. He took up a book, and presently a pencil
from his pocket, then talked of the book to Cecilia's cousin; and leaving
a paper-cutter between the leaves, he looked at Cecilia and laid the book
down.

She proceeded to conduct Mrs. Grancey Lespel to her room.

'I do admire Captain Beauchamp's cleverness; he is as good as a French
romance!' Mrs. Grancey exclaimed on the stairs. 'He fibs charmingly. I
could not help drawing him out. Two days! Why, my dear, his French party
were a fortnight in the country. It was the marquise, you know--the old
affair; and one may say he's a constant man.'

'I have not heard Captain Beauchamp's cleverness much praised,' said
Cecilia. 'This is your room, Mrs. Grancey.'

'Stay with me a moment. It is the room I like. Are we to have him at
dinner?'

Cecilia did not suppose that Captain Beauchamp would remain to dine.
Feeling herself in the clutches of a gossip, she would fain have gone.

'I am just one bit glad of it, though I can't dislike him personally,'
said Mrs. Grancey, detaining her and beginning to whisper. 'It was really
too bad. There was a French party at the end, but there was only one at
the commencement. The brother was got over for a curtain, before the
husband arrived in pursuit. They say the trick Captain Beauchamp played
his cousin Cecil, to get him out of the house when he had made a
discovery, was monstrous--fiendishly cunning. However, Lady Romfrey, as
that woman appears to be at last, covered it all. You know she has one of
those passions for Captain Beauchamp which completely blind women to
right and wrong. He is her saint, let him sin ever so! The story's in
everybody's mouth. By the way, Palmet saw her. He describes her pale as
marble, with dark long eyes, the most innocent look in the world, and a
walk, the absurd fellow says, like a statue set gliding. No doubt
Frenchwomen do walk well. He says her eyes are terrible traitors; I need
not quote Palmet. The sort of eyes that would look fondly on a stone, you
know. What her reputation is in France I have only indistinctly heard.
She has one in England by this time, I can assure you. She found her
match in Captain Beauchamp for boldness. Where any other couple would
have seen danger, they saw safety; and they contrived to accomplish it,
according to those horrid talebearers. You have plenty of time to dress,
my dear; I have an immense deal to talk about. There are half-a-dozen
scandals in London already, and you ought to know them, or you will be
behind the tittle-tattle when you go to town; and I remember, as a girl,
I knew nothing so excruciating as to hear blanks, dashes, initials, and
half words, without the key. Nothing makes a girl look so silly and
unpalatable. Naturally, the reason why Captain Beauchamp is more talked
about than the rest is the politics. Your grand reformer should be
careful. Doubly heterodox will not do! It makes him interesting to women,
if you like, but he won't soon hear the last of it, if he is for a public
career. Grancey literally crowed at the story. And the wonderful part of
it is, that Captain Beauchamp refused to be present at the earl's first
ceremonial dinner in honour of his countess. Now, that, we all think, was
particularly ungrateful: now, was it not?'

'If the countess--if ingratitude had anything to do with it,' said
Cecilia.

She escaped to her room and dressed impatiently.

Her boudoir was empty: Beauchamp had departed. She recollected his look
at her, and turned over the leaves of the book he had been hastily
scanning, and had condescended to approve of. On the two pages where the
paper-cutter was fixed she perceived small pencil dots under certain
words. Read consecutively, with a participle termination struck out to
convey his meaning, they formed the pathetically ungrammatical line:

'Hear: none: but: accused: false.'

Treble dots were under the word 'to-morrow.' He had scored the margin of
the sentences containing his dotted words, as if in admiration of their
peculiar wisdom.

She thought it piteous that he should be reduced to such means of
communication. The next instant Cecilia was shrinking from the adept
intriguer--French-taught!

In the course of the evening her cousin remarked:

'Captain Beauchamp must see merit in things undiscoverable by my poor
faculties. I will show you a book he has marked.'

'Did you see it? I was curious to examine it,' interposed Cecilia; 'and I
am as much at a loss as you to understand what could have attracted him.
One sentence . . .'

'About the sheikh in the stables, where he accused the pretended
physician? Yes, what was there in that?'

'Where is the book?' said Mrs. Grancey.

'Not here, I think.' Cecilia glanced at the drawing-room book-table, and
then at Mr. Austin, the victim of an unhappy love in his youth, and
unhappy about her, as her father had said. Seymour Austin was not one to
spread the contagion of intrigue! She felt herself caught by it, even
melting to feel enamoured of herself in consequence, though not loving
Beauchamp the more.

'This newspaper, if it's not merely an airy project, will be ruination,'
said Tuckham. 'The fact is, Beauchamp has no bend in him. He can't meet a
man without trying a wrestle, and as long as he keeps his stiffness, he
believes he has won. I've heard an oculist say that the eye that doesn't
blink ends in blindness, and he who won't bend breaks. It's a pity, for
he's a fine fellow. A Radical daily Journal of Shrapnel's colour, to
educate the people by giving them an interest in the country! Goodness,
what a delusion! and what a waste of money! He'll not be able to carry it
on a couple of years. And there goes his eighty thousand!'

Cecilia's heart beat fast. She had no defined cause for its excitement.

Colonel Halkett returned to Mount Laurels close upon midnight, very
tired, coughing and complaining of the bitter blowing East. His guests
shook hands with him, and went to bed.

'I think I'll follow their example,' he said to Cecilia, after drinking a
tumbler of mulled wine.

'Have you nothing to tell me, dear papa?' said she, caressing him
timidly.

'A confirmation of the whole story from Lord Romfrey in person--that's
all. He says Beauchamp's mad. I begin to believe it. You must use your
judgement. I suppose I must not expect you to consider me. You might open
your heart to Austin. As to my consent, knowing what I do, you will have
to tear it out of me. Here's a country perfectly contented, and that
fellow at work digging up grievances to persuade the people they're
oppressed by us. Why should I talk of it? He can't do much harm; unless
he has money--money! Romfrey says he means to start a furious paper.
He'll make a bonfire of himself. I can't stand by and see you in it too.
I may die; I may be spared the sight.'

Cecilia flung her arms round his neck. 'Oh! papa.'

'I don't want to make him out worse than he is, my dear. I own to his
gallantry--in the French sense as well as the English, it seems! It's
natural that Romfrey should excuse his wife. She's another of the women
who are crazy about Nevil Beauchamp. She spoke to me of the "pleasant
visit of her French friends," and would have enlarged on it, but Romfrey
stopped her. By the way, he proposes Captain Baskelett for you, and we're
to look for Baskelett's coming here, backed by his uncle. There's no end
to it; there never will be till you're married: and no peace for me! I
hope I shan't find myself with a cold to-morrow.'

The colonel coughed, and perhaps exaggerated the premonitory symptoms of
a cold.

'Italy, papa, would do you good,' said Cecilia.

'It might,' said he.

'If we go immediately, papa; to-morrow, early in the morning, before
there is a chance of any visitors coming to the house.'

'From Bevisham?'

'From Steynham. I cannot endure a second persecution.'

'But you have a world of packing, my dear.'

'An hour before breakfast will be sufficient for me.'

'In that case, we might be off early, as you say, and have part of the
Easter week in Rome.'

'Mr. Austin wishes it greatly, papa, though he has not mentioned it.'

'Austin, my darling girl, is not one of your impatient men who burst with
everything they have in their heads or their hearts.'

'Oh! but I know him so well,' said Cecilia, conjuring up that innocent
enthusiasm of hers for Mr. Austin as an antidote to her sharp suffering.
The next minute she looked on her father as the key of an enigma
concerning Seymour Austin, whom, she imagined, possibly she had not
hitherto known at all. Her curiosity to pierce it faded. She and her maid
were packing through the night. At dawn she requested her maid to lift
the window-blind and give her an opinion of the weather. 'Grey, Miss,'
the maid reported. It signified to Cecilia: no one roaming outside.

The step she was taking was a desperate attempt at a cure; and she
commenced it, though sorely wounded, with pity for Nevil's
disappointment, and a singularly clear-eyed perception of his aims and
motives.--'I am rich, and he wants riches; he likes me, and he reads my
weakness.'--Jealousy shook her by fits, but she had no right to be
jealous, nor any right to reproach him. Her task was to climb back to
those heavenly heights she sat on before he distracted her and drew her
down.

Beauchamp came to a vacated house that day.




CHAPTER XLVI

AS IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN FORESEEN

It was in Italy that Cecilia's maiden dreams of life had opened. She
hoped to recover them in Italy, and the calm security of a mind
untainted. Italy was to be her reviving air.

While this idea of a specific for her malady endured travelling at speed
to the ridges of the Italian frontier, across France--she simply
remembered Nevil: he was distant; he had no place in the storied
landscape, among the images of Art and the names of patient great men who
bear, as they bestow, an atmosphere other than earth's for those adoring
them. If at night, in her sleep, he was a memory that conducted her
through scenes which were lightnings, the cool swift morning of her
flight released her. France, too, her rival!--the land of France,
personified by her instinctively, though she had no vivid imaginative
gift, did not wound her with a poisoned dart.--'She knew him first: she
was his first love.' The Alps, and the sense of having Italy below them,
renewed Cecilia's lofty-perching youth. Then--I am in Italy! she sighed
with rapture. The wine of delight and oblivion was at her lips.

But thirst is not enjoyment, and a satiated thirst that we insist on
over-satisfying to drown the recollection of past anguish, is baneful to
the soul. In Rome Cecilia's vision of her track to Rome was of a run of
fire over a heath. She could scarcely feel common pleasure in Rome. It
seemed burnt out.

Flung back on herself, she was condemned to undergo the bitter torment
she had flown from: jealous love, and reproachful; and a shame in it like
nothing she had yet experienced. Previous pains were but Summer
lightnings, passing shadows. She could have believed in sorcery: the man
had eaten her heart!

A disposition to mocking humour, foreign to her nature, gave her the
notion of being off her feet, in the claws of a fabulous bird. It served
to veil her dulness. An ultra-English family in Rome, composed, shocking
to relate, of a baronet banker and his wife, two faint-faced girls, and a
young gentleman of our country, once perhaps a light-limbed boy, chose to
be followed by their footman in the melancholy pomp of state livery.
Wherever she encountered them Cecilia talked Nevil Beauchamp. Even Mr.
Tuckham perceived it. She was extremely uncharitable: she extended her
ungenerous criticism to the institution of the footman: England, and the
English, were lashed.

'These people are caricatures,' Tuckham said, in apology for poor England
burlesqued abroad. 'You must not generalize on them. Footmen are footmen
all the world over. The cardinals have a fine set of footmen.'

'They are at home. Those English sow contempt of us all over Europe. We
cannot but be despised. One comes abroad foredoomed to share the
sentiment. This is your middle-class! What society can they move in, that
sanctions a vulgarity so perplexing? They have the air of ornaments on a
cottager's parlour mantelpiece.'

Tuckham laughed. 'Something of that,' he said.

'Evidently they seek distinction, and they have it, of that kind,' she
continued. 'It is not wonderful that we have so much satirical writing in
England, with such objects of satire. It may be as little wonderful that
the satire has no effect. Immense wealth and native obtuseness combine to
disfigure us with this aspect of overripeness, not to say monstrosity. I
fall in love with the poor, and think they have a cause to be pleaded,
when I look at those people. We scoff at the vanity of the French, but it
is a graceful vanity; pardonable compared with ours.'

'I've read all that a hundred times,' quoth Tuckham bluntly.

'So have I. I speak of it because I see it. We scoff at the simplicity of
the Germans.'

'The Germans live in simple fashion, because they're poor. French
vanity's pretty and amusing. I don't know whether it's deep in them, for
I doubt their depth; but I know it's in their joints. The first spring of
a Frenchman comes of vanity. That you can't say of the English. Peace to
all! but I abhor cosmopolitanism. No man has a firm foothold who pretends
to it. None despises the English in reality. Don't be misled, Miss
Halkett. We're solid: that is the main point. The world feels our power,
and has confidence in our good faith. I ask for no more.'

'With Germans we are supercilious Celts; with Frenchmen we are sneering
Teutons:--Can we be loved, Mr. Tuckham?'

'That's a quotation from my friend Lydiard. Loved? No nation ever was
loved while it lived. As Lydiard says, it may be a good beast or a bad,
but a beast it is. A nation's much too big for refined feelings and
affections. It must be powerful or out of the way, or down it goes. When
a nation's dead you may love it; but I don't see the use of dying to be
loved. My aim for my country is to have the land respected. For that
purpose we must have power; for power wealth; for wealth industry; for
industry internal peace: therefore no agitation, no artificial divisions.
All's plain in history and fact, so long as we do not obtrude
sentimentalism. Nothing mixes well with that stuff--except poetical
ideas!'

Contrary to her anticipation, Cecilia was thrown more into companionship
with Mr. Tuckham than with Mr. Austin; and though it often vexed her, she
acknowledged that she derived a benefit from his robust antagonism of
opinion. And Italy had grown tasteless to her. She could hardly simulate
sufficient curiosity to serve for a vacant echo to Mr. Austin's historic
ardour. Pliny the Younger might indeed be the model of a gentleman of old
Rome; there might be a scholarly pleasure in calculating, as Mr. Austin
did, the length of time it took Pliny to journey from the city to his
paternal farm, or villa overlooking the lake, or villa overlooking the
bay, and some abstruse fun in the tender ridicule of his readings of his
poems to friends; for Mr. Austin smiled effusively in alluding to the
illustrious Roman pleader's foible of verse: but Pliny bore no
resemblance to that island barbarian Nevil Beauchamp: she could not
realize the friend of Trajan, orator, lawyer, student, statesman,
benefactor of his kind, and model of her own modern English gentleman,
though he was. 'Yes!' she would reply encouragingly to Seymour Austin's
fond brooding hum about his hero; and 'Yes!' conclusively: like an
incarnation of stupidity dealing in monosyllables. She was unworthy of
the society of a scholar. Nor could she kneel at the feet of her especial
heroes: Dante, Raphael, Buonarotti: she was unworthy of them. She longed
to be at Mount Laurels. Mr. Tuckham's conversation was the nearest
approach to it--as it were round by Greenland; but it was homeward.

She was really grieved to lose him. Business called him to England.

'What business can it be, papa?' she inquired: and the colonel replied
briefly: 'Ours.'

Mr. Austin now devoted much of his time to the instruction of her in the
ancient life of the Eternal City. He had certain volumes of Livy,
Niebuhr, and Gibbon, from which he read her extracts at night, shunning
the scepticism and the irony of the moderns, so that there should be no
jar on the awakening interest of his fair pupil and patient. A gentle
cross-hauling ensued between them, that they grew conscious of and
laughed over during their peregrinations in and out of Rome: she pulled
for the Republic of the Scipios; his predilections were toward the Rome
of the wise and clement emperors. To Cecilia's mind Rome rocked at a
period so closely neighbouring her decay: to him, with an imagination
brooding on the fuller knowledge of it, the city breathed securely, the
sky was clear; jurisprudence, rhetoric, statesmanship, then flourished
supreme, and men eminent for culture: the finest flowers of our race, he
thought them: and he thought their Age the manhood of Rome.

Struck suddenly by a feminine subtle comparison that she could not have
framed in speech, Cecilia bowed to his views of the happiness and
elevation proper to the sway of a sagacious and magnanimous Imperialism
of the Roman pattern:--he rejected the French. She mused on dim old
thoughts of the gracious dignity of a woman's life under high
governorship. Turbulent young men imperilled it at every step. The
trained, the grave, the partly grey, were fitting lords and mates for
women aspiring to moral beauty and distinction. Beside such they should
be planted, if they would climb! Her walks and conversations with Seymour
Austin charmed her as the haze of a summer evening charms the sight.

Upon the conclusion of her term of exile Cecilia would gladly have
remained in Italy another month. An appointment of her father's with Mr.
Tuckham at Mount Laurels on a particular day she considered as of no
consequence whatever, and she said so, in response to a meaningless nod.
But Mr. Austin was obliged to return to work. She set her face homeward
with his immediately, and he looked pleased: he did not try to dissuade
her from accompanying him by affecting to think it a sacrifice: clearly
he knew that to be near him was her greatest delight.

Thus do we round the perilous headland called love by wooing a good man
for his friendship, and requiting him with faithful esteem for the grief
of an ill-fortuned passion of his youth!

Cecilia would not suffer her fancy to go very far in pursuit of the
secret of Mr. Austin's present feelings. Until she reached Mount Laurels
she barely examined her own. The sight of the house warned her instantly
that she must have a defence: and then, in desperation but with perfect
distinctness, she entertained the hope of hearing him speak the
protecting words which could not be broken through when wedded to her
consent.

If Mr. Austin had no intentions, it was at least strange that he did not
part from her in London.

He whose coming she dreaded had been made aware of the hour of her
return, as his card, with the pencilled line, 'Will call on the 17th,'
informed her. The 17th was the morrow.

After breakfast on the morning of the 17th Seymour Austin looked her in
the eyes longer than it is customary for ladies to have to submit to keen
inspection.

'Will you come into the library?' he said.

She went with him into the library.

Was it to speak of his anxiousness as to the state of her father's health
that he had led her there, and that he held her hand? He alarmed her, and
he pacified her alarm, yet bade her reflect on the matter, saying that
her father, like other fathers, would be more at peace upon the
establishment of his daughter. Mr. Austin remarked that the colonel was
troubled.

'Does he wish for my pledge never to marry without his approval? I will
give it,' said Cecilia.

'He would like you to undertake to marry the man of his choice.'
Cecilia's features hung on an expression equivalent to:--I could almost
do that.'

At the same time she felt it was not Seymour Austin's manner of speaking.
He seemed to be praising an unknown person--some gentleman who was rough,
but of solid promise and singular strength of character.

The house-bell rang. Believing that Beauchamp had now come, she showed a
painful ridging of the brows, and Mr. Austin considerately mentioned the
name of the person he had in his mind.

She readily agreed with him regarding Mr. Tuckham's excellent
qualities--if that was indeed the name; and she hastened to recollect how
little she had forgotten Mr. Tuckham's generosity to Beauchamp, and
confessed to herself it might as well have been forgotten utterly for the
thanks he had received. While revolving these ideas she was listening to
Mr. Austin; gradually she was beginning to understand that she was
parting company with her original conjectures, but going at so swift a
pace in so supple and sure a grasp, that, like the speeding train slipped
on new lines of rails by the pointsman, her hurrying sensibility was not
shocked, or the shock was imperceptible, when she heard him proposing Mr.
Tuckham to her for a husband, by her father's authority, and with his own
warm seconding. He had not dropped her hand: he was very eloquent, a
masterly advocate: he pleaded her father's cause; it was not put to her
as Mr. Tuckham's: her father had set his heart on this union he was
awaiting her decision.

'Is it so urgent?' she asked.

'It is urgent. It saves him from an annoyance. He requires a son-in-law
whom he can confidently rely on to manage the estates, which you are
woman of the world enough to know should be in strong hands. He gives you
to a man of settled principles. It is urgent, because he may wish to be
armed with your answer at any instant.'

Her father entered the library. He embraced her, and 'Well?' he said.

'I must think, papa, I must think.'

She pressed her hand across her eyes. Disillusioned by Seymour Austin,
she was utterly defenceless before Beauchamp: and possibly Beauchamp was
in the house. She fancied he was, by the impatient brevity of her
father's voice.

Seymour Austin and Colonel Halkett left the room, and Blackburn Tuckham
walked in, not the most entirely self-possessed of suitors, puffing
softly under his breath, and blinking eyes as rapidly as a skylark claps
wings on the ascent.

Half an hour later Beauchamp appeared. He asked to see the colonel,
delivered himself of his pretensions and wishes to the colonel, and was
referred to Cecilia; but Colonel Halkett declined to send for her.
Beauchamp declined to postpone his proposal until the following day. He
went outside the house and walked up and down the grass-plot.

Cecilia came to him at last.

'I hear, Nevil, that you are waiting to speak to me.'

'I've been waiting some weeks. Shall I speak here?'

'Yes, here, quickly.'

'Before the house? I have come to ask you for your hand.'

'Mine? I cannot . . .'

'Step into the park with me. I ask you to marry me.'

'It is too late.'




CHAPTER XLVII

THE REFUSAL OF HIM

Passing from one scene of excitement to another, Cecilia was perfectly
steeled for her bitter task; and having done that which separated her a
sphere's distance from Beauchamp, she was cold, inaccessible to the face
of him who had swayed her on flood and ebb so long, incapable of tender
pity, even for herself. All she could feel was a harsh joy to have struck
off her tyrant's fetters, with a determination to cherish it passionately
lest she should presently be hating herself: for the shadow of such a
possibility fell within the narrow circle of her strung sensations. But
for the moment her delusion reached to the idea that she had escaped from
him into freedom, when she said, 'It is too late.' Those words were the
sum and voice of her long term of endurance. She said them hurriedly,
almost in a whisper, in the manner of one changeing a theme of
conversation for subjects happier and livelier, though none followed.

The silence bore back on her a suspicion of a faint reproachfulness in
the words; and perhaps they carried a poetical tone, still more
distasteful.

'You have been listening to tales of me,' said Beauchamp.

'Nevil, we can always be friends, the best of friends.'

'Were you astonished at my asking you for your hand? You said "mine?" as
if you wondered. You have known my feelings for you. Can you deny that? I
have reckoned on yours--too long?--But not falsely? No, hear me out. The
truth is, I cannot lose you. And don't look so resolute. Overlook little
wounds: I was never indifferent to you. How could I be--with eyes in my
head? The colonel is opposed to me of course: he will learn to understand
me better: but you and I! we cannot be mere friends. It's like daylight
blotted out--or the eyes gone blind:--Too late? Can you repeat it? I
tried to warn you before you left England: I should have written a letter
to put you on your guard against my enemies:--I find I have some: but a
letter is sure to stumble; I should have been obliged to tell you that I
do not stand on my defence; and I thought I should see you the next day.
You went: and not a word for me! You gave me no chance. If you have no
confidence in me I must bear it. I may say the story is false. With your
hand in mine I would swear it.'

'Let it be forgotten,' said Cecilia, surprised and shaken to think that
her situation required further explanations; fascinated and unnerved by
simply hearing him. 'We are now--we are walking away from the house.'

'Do you object to a walk with me?'

They had crossed the garden plot and were at the gate of the park leading
to the Western wood. Beauchamp swung the gate open. He cast a look at the
clouds coming up from the South-west in folds of grey and silver.

'Like the day of our drive into Bevisham!--without the storm behind,' he
said, and doated on her soft shut lips, and the mild sun-rays of her hair
in sunless light. 'There are flowers that grow only in certain valleys,
and your home is Mount Laurels, whatever your fancy may be for Italy. You
colour the whole region for me. When you were absent, you were here. I
called here six times, and walked and talked with you.'

Cecilia set her face to the garden. Her heart had entered on a course of
heavy thumping, like a sapper in the mine.

Pain was not unwelcome to her, but this threatened weakness.

What plain words could she use? If Mr. Tuckham had been away from the
house, she would have found it easier to speak of her engagement; she
knew not why. Or if the imperative communication could have been
delivered in Italian or French, she was as little able to say why it
should have slipped from her tongue without a critic shudder to arrest
it. She was cold enough to revolve the words: betrothed, affianced,
plighted: and reject them, pretty words as they are. Between the
vulgarity of romantic language, and the baldness of commonplace, it
seemed to her that our English gives us no choice; that we cannot be
dignified in simplicity. And for some reason, feminine and remote, she
now detested her 'hand' so much as to be unable to bring herself to the
metonymic mention of it. The lady's difficulty was peculiar to sweet
natures that have no great warmth of passion; it can only be indicated.
Like others of the kind, it is traceable to the most delicate of
sentiments, and to the flattest:--for Mr. Blackburn's Tuckham's figure
was (she thought of it with no personal objection) not of the graceful
order, neither cavalierly nor kingly: and imagining himself to say, 'I am
engaged,' and he suddenly appearing on the field, Cecilia's whole mind
was shocked in so marked a way did he contrast with Beauchamp.

This was the effect of Beauchamp's latest words on her. He had disarmed
her anger.

'We must have a walk to-day,' he said commandingly, but it had stolen
into him that he and she were not walking on the same bank of the river,
though they were side by side: a chill water ran between them. As in
other days, there hung her hand: but not to be taken. Incredible as it
was, the icy sense of his having lost her benumbed him. Her beautiful
face and beautiful tall figure, so familiar to him that they were like a
possession, protested in his favour while they snatched her from him all
the distance of the words 'too late.'

'Will you not give me one half-hour?'

'I am engaged,' Cecilia plunged and extricated herself, 'I am engaged to
walk with Mr. Austin and papa.'

Beauchamp tossed his head. Something induced him to speak of Mr. Tuckham.
'The colonel has discovered his Tory young man! It's an object as
incomprehensible to me as a Tory working-man. I suppose I must take it
that they exist. As for Blackburn Tuckham, I have nothing against him.
He's an honourable fellow enough, and would govern Great Britain as men
of that rich middle-class rule their wives--with a strict regard for
ostensible humanity and what the law allows them. His manners have
improved. Your cousin Mary seems to like him: it struck me when I saw
them together. Cecilia! one half-hour! You refuse me: you have not heard
me. You will not say too late.'

'Nevil, I have said it finally. I have no longer the right to conceive it
unsaid.'

'So we speak! It's the language of indolence, temper, faint hearts. "Too
late" has no meaning. Turn back with me to the park. I offer you my whole
heart; I love you. There's no woman living who could be to me the wife
you would be. I'm like your male nightingale that you told me of: I must
have my mate to sing to--that is, work for and live for; and she must not
delay too long. Did I? Pardon me if you think I did. You have known I
love you. I have been distracted by things that kept me from thinking of
myself and my wishes: and love's a selfish business while . . . while one
has work in hand. It's clear I can't do two things at a time--make love
and carry on my taskwork. I have been idle for weeks. I believed you were
mine and wanted no lovemaking. There's no folly in that, if you
understand me at all. As for vanity about women, I 've outlived it. In
comparison with you I'm poor, I know:--you look distressed, but one has
to allude to it:--I admit that wealth would help me. To see wealth
supporting the cause of the people for once would--but you say, too late!
Well, I don't renounce you till I see you giving your hand to a man who's
not myself. You have been offended: groundlessly, on my honour! You are
the woman of all women in the world to hold me fast in faith and pride in
you. It's useless to look icy: you feel what I say.'

'Nevil, I feel grief, and beg you to cease. I am----It is-----'

'"Too late" has not a rag of meaning, Cecilia! I love your name. I love
this too: this is mine, and no one can rob me of it.'

He drew forth a golden locket and showed her a curl of her hair.

Crimsoning, she said instantly: 'Language of the kind I used is open to
misconstruction, I fear. I have not even the right to listen to you. I am
. . . You ask me for what I have it no longer in my power to give. I am
engaged.'

The shot rang through him and partly stunned him; but incredulity made a
mocking effort to sustain him. The greater wounds do not immediately
convince us of our fate, though we may be conscious that we have been
hit.

'Engaged in earnest?' said he.

'Yes.'

'Of your free will?'

'Yes.'

Her father stepped out on the terrace, from one of the open windows,
trailing a newspaper like a pocket-handkerchief. Cecilia threaded the
flower-beds to meet him.

'Here's an accident to one of our ironclads,' he called to Beauchamp.

'Lives lost, sir?'

'No, thank heaven! but, upon my word, it's a warning. Read the telegram;
it's the Hastings. If these are our defences, at a cost of half a million
of money, each of them, the sooner we look to our land forces the
better.'

'The Shop will not be considered safe!' said Beauchamp, taking in the
telegram at a glance. 'Peppel's a first-rate officer too: she couldn't
have had a better captain. Ship seriously damaged!'

He handed back the paper to the colonel.

Cecilia expected him to say that he had foreseen such an event.

He said nothing; and with a singular contraction of the heart she
recollected how he had denounced our system of preparing mainly for the
defensive in war, on a day when they stood together in the park, watching
the slow passage of that very ship, the Hastings, along the broad water,
distant below them. The 'swarms of swift vessels of attack,' she
recollected particularly, and 'small wasps and rams under mighty
steam-power,' that he used to harp on when declaring that England must be
known for the assailant in war: she was to 'ray out' her worrying fleets.
'The defensive is perilous policy in war': he had said it. She
recollected also her childish ridicule of his excess of emphasis: he
certainly had foresight.'

Mr. Austin and Mr. Tuckham came strolling in conversation round the house
to the terrace. Beauchamp bowed to the former, nodded to the latter,
scrutinizing him after he had done so, as if the flash of a thought were
in his mind. Tuckham's radiant aspect possibly excited it: 'Congratulate
me!' was the honest outcry of his face and frame. He was as
over-flowingly rosy as a victorious candidate at the hustings commencing
a speech. Cecilia laid her hand on an urn, in dread of the next words
from either of the persons present. Her father put an arm in hers, and
leaned on her. She gazed at her chamber window above, wishing to be
wafted thither to her seclusion within. The trembling limbs of physical
irresoluteness was a new experience to her.

'Anything else in the paper, colonel? I've not seen it to-day,' said
Beauchamp, for the sake of speaking.

'No, I don't think there's anything,' Colonel Halkett replied. 'Our
diplomatists haven't been shining much: that 's not our forte.'

'No: it's our field for younger sons.'

'Is it? Ah! There's an expedition against the hilltribes in India, and
we're such a peaceful nation, eh? We look as if we were in for a
complication with China.'

'Well, sir, we must sell our opium.'

'Of course we must. There's a man writing about surrendering Gibraltar!'

'I'm afraid we can't do that.'

'But where do you draw the line?' quoth Tuckham, very susceptible to a
sneer at the colonel, and entirely ignorant of the circumstances
attending Beauchamp's position before him. 'You defend the Chinaman; and
it's questionable if his case is as good as the Spaniard's.'

'The Chinaman has a case against our traders. Gibraltar concerns our
imperial policy.'

'As to the case against the English merchants, the Chinaman is for
shutting up his millions of acres of productive land, and the action of
commerce is merely a declaration of a universal public right, to which
all States must submit.'

'Immorality brings its punishment, be sure of that. Some day we shall
have enough of China. As to the Rock, I know the argument; I may be
wrong. I've had the habit of regarding it as necessary to our naval
supremacy.'

'Come! there we agree.'

'I'm not so certain.'

'The counter-argument, I call treason.'

'Well,' said Beauchamp, 'there's a broad policy, and a narrow. There's
the Spanish view of the matter--if you are for peace and harmony and
disarmament.'

'I'm not.'

'Then strengthen your forces.'

'Not a bit of it!'

'Then bully the feeble and truckle to the strong; consent to be hated
till you have to stand your ground.'

'Talk!'

'It seems to me logical.'

'That's the French notion--c'est lodgique!'

Tuckham's pronunciation caused Cecilia to level her eyes at him
passingly.

'By the way,' said Colonel Halkett, 'there are lots of horrors in the
paper to-day; wife kickings, and starvations--oh, dear me! and the murder
of a woman: two columns to that.'

'That, the Tory reaction is responsible for!' said Tuckham, rather by way
of a joke than a challenge.

Beauchamp accepted it as a challenge. Much to the benevolent amusement of
Mr. Austin and Colonel Halkett, he charged the responsibility of every
crime committed in the country, and every condition of misery, upon the
party which declined to move in advance, and which therefore apologized
for the perpetuation of knavery, villany, brutality, injustice, and foul
dealing.

'Stick to your laws and systems and institutions, and so long as you
won't stir to amend them, I hold you accountable for that long newspaper
list daily.'

He said this with a visible fire of conviction.

Tuckham stood bursting at the monstrousness of such a statement.

He condensed his indignant rejoinder to: 'Madness can't go farther!'

'There's an idea in it,' said Mr. Austin.

'It's an idea foaming at the mouth, then.'

'Perhaps it has no worse fault than that of not marching parallel with
the truth,' said Mr. Austin, smiling. 'The party accusing in those terms
. . . what do you say, Captain Beauchamp?--supposing us to be pleading
before a tribunal?'

Beauchamp admitted as much as that he had made the case gigantic, though
he stuck to his charge against the Tory party. And moreover: the
Tories-and the old Whigs, now Liberals, ranked under the heading of
Tories--those Tories possessing and representing the wealth of the
country, yet had not started one respectable journal that a lady could
read through without offence to her, or a gentleman without disgust! If
there was not one English newspaper in existence independent of
circulation and advertisements, and of the tricks to win them, the Tories
were answerable for the vacancy. They, being the rich who, if they chose,
could set an example to our Press by subscribing to maintain a Journal
superior to the flattering of vile appetites--'all that nauseous matter,'
Beauchamp stretched his fingers at the sheets Colonel Halkett was
holding, and which he had not read--'those Tories,' he bowed to the
colonel, 'I'm afraid I must say you, sir, are answerable for it.'

'I am very well satisfied with my paper,' said the colonel.

Beauchamp sighed to himself. 'We choose to be satisfied,' he said. His
pure and mighty DAWN was in his thoughts: the unborn light of a day
denied to earth!

One of the doctors of Bevisham, visiting a sick maid of the house,
trotted up the terrace to make his report to her master of the state of
her health. He hoped to pull her through with the aid of high feeding. He
alluded cursorily to a young girl living on the outskirts of the town,
whom he had been called in to see at the eleventh hour, and had lost,
owing to the lowering of his patient from a prescription of a vegetable
diet by a certain Dr. Shrapnel.

That ever-explosive name precipitated Beauchamp to the front rank of the
defence.

'I happen to be staying with Dr. Shrapnel,' he observed. 'I don't eat
meat there because he doesn't, and I am certain I take no harm by
avoiding it. I think vegetarianism a humaner system, and hope it may be
wise. I should like to set the poor practising it, for their own sakes;
and I have half an opinion that it would be good for the rich--if we are
to condemn gluttony.'

'Ah? Captain Beauchamp!' the doctor bowed to him. 'But my case was one of
poor blood requiring to be strengthened. The girl was allowed to sink so
low that stimulants were ineffective when I stepped in. There's the
point. It 's all very well while you are in health. You may do without
meat till your system demands the stimulant, or else--as with this poor
girl! And, indeed, Captain Beauchamp, if I may venture the remark--I had
the pleasure of seeing you during the last Election in our town--and if I
may be so bold, I should venture to hint that the avoidance of animal
food--to judge by appearances--has not been quite wholesome for you.'

Eyes were turned on Beauchamp.




CHAPTER XLVIII

OF THE TRIAL AWAITING THE EARL OF ROMFREY

Cecilia softly dropped her father's arm, and went into the house. The
exceeding pallor of Beauchamp's face haunted her in her room. She heard
the controversy proceeding below, and an exclamation of Blackburn
Tuckham's: 'Immorality of meat-eating? What nonsense are they up to now?'

Beauchamp was inaudible, save in a word or two. As usual, he was the
solitary minority.

But how mournfully changed he was! She had not noticed it, agitated by
her own emotions as she had been, and at one time three parts frozen. He
was the ghost of the Nevil Beauchamp who had sprung on the deck of the
Esperanza out of Lieutenant Wilmore's boat, that sunny breezy day which
was the bright first chapter of her new life--of her late life, as it
seemed to her now, for she was dead to it, and another creature, the
coldest of the women of earth. She felt sensibly cold, coveted warmth,
flung a shawl on her shoulders, and sat in a corner of her room, hidden
and shivering beside the open window, till long after the gentlemen had
ceased to speak.

How much he must have suffered of late! The room she had looked to as a
refuge from Nevil was now her stronghold against the man whom she had
incredibly accepted. She remained there, the victim of a heart malady,
under the term of headache. Feeling entrapped, she considered that she
must have been encircled and betrayed. She looked back on herself as a
giddy figure falling into a pit: and in the pit she lay.

And how vile to have suspected of unfaithfulness and sordidness the
generous and stedfast man of earth! He never abandoned a common
friendship. His love of his country was love still, whatever the form it
had taken. His childlike reliance on effort and outspeaking, for which
men laughed at him, was beautiful.

Where am I? she cried amid her melting images of him, all dominated by
his wan features. She was bound fast, imprisoned and a slave. Even Mr.
Austin had conspired against him: for only she read Nevil justly. His
defence of Dr. Shrapnel filled her with an envy that no longer maligned
the object of it, but was humble, and like the desire of the sick to
creep into sunshine.

The only worthy thing she could think of doing was (it must be mentioned
for a revelation of her fallen state, and, moreover, she was not lusty of
health at the moment) to abjure meat. The body loathed it, and
consequently the mind of the invalided lady shrank away in horror of the
bleeding joints, and the increasingly fierce scramble of Christian souls
for the dismembered animals: she saw the innocent pasturing beasts, she
saw the act of slaughter. She had actually sweeping before her sight a
spectacle of the ludicrous-terrific, in the shape of an entire community
pursuing countless herds of poor scampering animal life for blood: she,
meanwhile, with Nevil and Dr. Shrapnel, stood apart contemning. For whoso
would not partake of flesh in this kingdom of roast beef must be of the
sparse number of Nevil's execrated minority in politics.

The example will show that she touched the borders of delirium.
Physically, the doctor pronounces her bilious. She was in earnest so far
as to send down to the library for medical books, and books upon diet.
These, however, did not plead for the beasts. They treated the subject
without question of man's taking that which he has conquered. Poets and
philosophers did the same. Again she beheld Nevil Beauchamp solitary in
the adverse rank to the world;--to his countrymen especially. But that it
was no material cause which had wasted his cheeks and lined his forehead,
she was sure: and to starve with him, to embark with him in his little
boat on the seas he whipped to frenzy, would have been a dream of bliss,
had she dared to contemplate herself in a dream as his companion.

It was not to be thought of.

No: but this was, and to be thought of seriously: Cecilia had said to
herself for consolation that Beauchamp was no spiritual guide; he had her
heart within her to plead for him, and the reflection came to her, like a
bubble up from the heart, that most of our spiritual guides neglect the
root to trim the flower: and thence, turning sharply on herself, she
obtained a sudden view of her allurement and her sin in worshipping
herself, and recognized that the aim at an ideal life closely approaches,
or easily inclines, to self-worship; to which the lady was woman and
artist enough to have had no objection, but that therein visibly she
discerned the retributive vain longings, in the guise of high individual
superiority and distinction, that had thwarted her with Nevil Beauchamp,
never permitting her to love single-mindedly or whole-heartedly, but
always in reclaiming her rights and sighing for the loss of her ideal;
adoring her own image, in fact, when she pretended to cherish, and regret
that she could not sufficiently cherish, the finer elements of nature.
What was this ideal she had complained of losing? It was a broken mirror:
she could think of it in no other form.

Dr. Shrapnel's 'Ego-Ego' yelped and gave chase to her through the pure
beatitudes of her earlier days down to her present regrets. It hunted all
the saints in the calendar till their haloes top-sided on their heads-her
favourite St. Francis of Assisi excepted.

The doctor was called up from Bevisham next day, and pronounced her
bilious. He was humorous over Captain Beauchamp, who had gone to the
parents of the dead girl, and gathered the information that they were a
consumptive family, to vindicate Dr. Shrapnel. 'The very family to
require strong nourishment,' said the doctor.

Cecilia did not rest in her sick-room before, hunting through one book
and another, she had found arguments on the contrary side; a waste of
labour that heaped oppression on her chest, as with the world's weight.
Apparently one had only to be in Beauchamp's track to experience that.
She horrified her father by asking questions about consumption.
Homoeopathy, hydropathy,--the revolutionaries of medicine attracted her.
Blackburn Tuckham, a model for an elected lover who is not beloved,
promised to procure all sorts of treatises for her: no man could have
been so deferential to a diseased mind. Beyond calling her by her
Christian name, he did nothing to distress her with the broad aspect of
their new relations together. He and Mr. Austin departed from Mount
Laurels, leaving her to sink into an agreeable stupor, like one deposited
on a mudbank after buffeting the waves. She learnt that her father had
seen Captain Baskelett, and remembered, marvelling, how her personal
dread of an interview, that threatened to compromise her ideal of her
feminine and peculiar dignity, had assisted to precipitate her where she
now lay helpless, almost inanimate.

She was unaware of the passage of time save when her father spoke of a
marriage-day. It told her that she lived and was moving. The fear of
death is not stronger in us, nor the desire to put it off, than Cecilia's
shunning of such a day. The naming of it numbed her blood like a
snakebite. Yet she openly acknowledged her engagement; and, happily for
Tuckham, his visits, both in London and at Mount Laurels, were few and
short, and he inflicted no foretaste of her coming subjection to him to
alarm her.

Under her air of calm abstraction she watched him rigorously for some
sign of his ownership that should tempt her to revolt from her pledge, or
at least dream of breaking loose: the dream would have sufficed. He was
never intrusive, never pressing. He did not vex, because he absolutely
trusted to the noble loyalty which made her admit to herself that she
belonged irrevocably to him, while her thoughts were upon Beauchamp. With
a respectful gravity he submitted to her perusal a collection of
treatises on diet, classed pro and con., and paged and pencil-marked to
simplify her study of the question. They sketched in company; she played
music to him, he read poetry to her, and read it well. He seemed to feel
the beauty of it sensitively, as she did critically. In other days the
positions had been reversed. He invariably talked of Beauchamp with
kindness, deploring only that he should be squandering his money on
workmen's halls and other hazy projects down in Bevisham.

'Lydiard tells me he has a very sound idea of the value of money, and has
actually made money by cattle breeding; but he has flung ten thousand
pounds on a single building outside the town, and he'll have to endow it
to support it--a Club to educate Radicals. The fact is, he wants to jam
the business of two or three centuries into a life-time. These men of
their so-called progress are like the majority of religious minds: they
can't believe without seeing and touching. That is to say, they don't
believe in the abstract at all, but they go to work blindly by agitating,
and proselytizing, and persecuting to get together a mass they can
believe in. You see it in their way of arguing; it's half done with the
fist. Lydiard tells me he left him last in a horrible despondency about
progress. Ha! ha! Beauchamp's no Radical. He hasn't forgiven the Countess
of Romfrey for marrying above her rank. He may be a bit of a Republican:
but really in this country Republicans are fighting with the shadow of an
old hat and a cockhorse. I beg to state that I have a reverence for
constituted authority: I speak of what those fellows are contending
with.'

'Right,' said Colonel Halkett. 'But "the shadow of an old hat and a
cockhorse": what does that mean?'

'That's what our Republicans are hitting at, sir.'

'Ah! so; yes,' quoth the colonel. 'And I say this to Nevil Beauchamp,
that what we've grown up well with, powerfully with, it's base
ingratitude and dangerous folly to throw over.'

He blamed Beauchamp for ingratitude to the countess, who had, he affirmed
of his own knowledge, married Lord Romfrey to protect Beauchamp's
interests.

A curious comment on this allegation was furnished by the announcement of
the earl's expectations of a son and heir. The earl wrote to Colonel
Halkett from Romfrey Castle inviting him to come and spend some time
there.

'Now, that's brave news!' the colonel exclaimed.

He proposed a cruise round by the Cornish coast to the Severn, and so to
Romfrey Castle, to squeeze the old lord's hand and congratulate him with
all his heart. Cecilia was glad to acquiesce, for an expedition of any
description was a lull in the storm that hummed about her ears in the
peace of home, where her father would perpetually speak of the day to be
fixed. Sailing the sea on a cruise was like the gazing at wonderful
colours of a Western sky: an oblivion of earthly dates and obligations.
What mattered it that there were gales in August? She loved the sea, and
the stinging salt spray, and circling gull and plunging gannet, the sun
on the waves, and the torn cloud. The revelling libertine open sea wedded
her to Beauchamp in that veiled cold spiritual manner she could muse on
as a circumstance out of her life.

Fair companies of racing yachts were left behind. The gales of August
mattered frightfully to poor Blackburn Tuckham, who was to be dropped at
a town in South Wales, and descended greenish to his cabin as soon as
they had crashed on the first wall-waves of the chalk-race, a throw
beyond the peaked cliffs edged with cormorants, and were really tasting
sea. Cecilia reclined on deck, wrapped in shawl and waterproof. As the
Alpine climber claims the upper air, she had the wild sea to herself
through her love of it; quite to herself. It was delicious to look round
and ahead, and the perturbation was just enough to preserve her from
thoughts too deep inward in a scene where the ghost of Nevil was abroad.

The hard dry gale increased. Her father, stretched beside her, drew her
attention to a small cutter under double-reefed main-sail and small jib
on the Esperanza's weather bow--a gallant boat carefully handled. She
watched it with some anxiety, but the Esperanza was bound for a Devon
bay, and bore away from the black Dorsetshire headland, leaving the
little cutter to run into haven if she pleased. The passing her was no
event.--In a representation of the common events befalling us in these
times, upon an appreciation of which this history depends, one turns at
whiles a languishing glance toward the vast potential mood, pluperfect
tense. For Nevil Beauchamp was on board the cutter, steering her, with
Dr. Shrapnel and Lydiard in the well, and if an accident had happened to
cutter or schooner, what else might not have happened? Cecilia gathered
it from Mrs. Wardour-Devereux, whom, to her surprise and pleasure, she
found at Romfrey Castle. Her friend Louise received a letter from Mr.
Lydiard, containing a literary amateur seaman's log of a cruise of a
fifteen-ton cutter in a gale, and a pure literary sketch of Beauchamp
standing drenched at the helm from five in the morning up to nine at
night, munching a biscuit for nourishment. The beautiful widow prepared
the way for what was very soon to be publicly known concerning herself by
reading out this passage of her correspondent's letter in the breakfast
room.

'Yes, the fellow's a sailor!' said Lord Romfrey.

The countess rose from her chair and walked out.

'Now, was that abuse of the fellow?' the old lord asked Colonel Halkett.
'I said he was a sailor, I said nothing else. He is a sailor, and he's
fit for nothing else, and no ship will he get unless he bends his neck
never 's nearer it.'

He hesitated a moment, and went after his wife.

Cecilia sat with the countess, in the afternoon, at a window overlooking
the swelling woods of Romfrey. She praised the loveliness of the view.

'It is fire to me,' said Rosamund.

Cecilia looked at her, startled. Rosamund said no more.

She was an excellent hostess, nevertheless, unpretending and simple in
company; and only when it chanced that Beauchamp's name was mentioned did
she cast that quick supplicating nervous glance at the earl, with a
shadow of an elevation of her shoulders, as if in apprehension of mordant
pain.

We will make no mystery about it. I would I could. Those happy tales of
mystery are as much my envy as the popular narratives of the deeds of
bread and cheese people, for they both create a tide-way in the attentive
mind; the mysterious pricking our credulous flesh to creep, the familiar
urging our obese imagination to constitutional exercise. And oh, the
refreshment there is in dealing with characters either contemptibly
beneath us or supernaturally above! My way is like a Rhone island in the
summer drought, stony, unattractive and difficult between the two
forceful streams of the unreal and the over-real, which delight
mankind--honour to the conjurors! My people conquer nothing, win none;
they are actual, yet uncommon. It is the clock-work of the brain that
they are directed to set in motion, and--poor troop of actors to vacant
benches!--the conscience residing in thoughtfulness which they would
appeal to; and if you are there impervious to them, we are lost: back I
go to my wilderness, where, as you perceive, I have contracted the habit
of listening to my own voice more than is good: The burden of a child in
her bosom had come upon Rosamund with the visage of the Angel of Death
fronting her in her path. She believed that she would die; but like much
that we call belief, there was a kernel of doubt in it, which was lively
when her frame was enlivened, and she then thought of the giving birth to
this unloved child, which was to disinherit the man she loved, in whose
interest solely (so she could presume to think, because it had been her
motive reason) she had married the earl. She had no wish to be a mother;
but that prospect, and the dread attaching to it at her time of life, she
could have submitted to for Lord Romfrey's sake. It struck her like a
scoffer's blow that she, the one woman on earth loving Nevil, should have
become the instrument for dispossessing him. The revulsion of her
feelings enlightened her so far as to suggest, without enabling her to
fathom him, that instead of having cleverly swayed Lord Romfrey, she had
been his dupe, or a blind accomplice; and though she was too humane a
woman to think of punishing him, she had so much to forgive that the
trifles daily and at any instant added to the load, flushed her
resentment, like fresh lights showing new features and gigantic outlines.
Nevil's loss of Cecilia she had anticipated; she had heard of it when she
was lying in physical and mental apathy at Steynham. Lord Romfrey had
repeated to her the nature of his replies to the searching parental
questions of Colonel Halkett, and having foreseen it all, and what was
more, foretold it, she was not aroused from her torpor. Latterly, with
the return of her natural strength, she had shown herself incapable of
hearing her husband speak of Nevil; nor was the earl tardy in taking the
hint to spare the mother of his child allusions that vexed her. Now and
then they occurred perforce. The presence of Cecilia exasperated
Rosamund's peculiar sensitiveness. It required Louise Wardour-Devereux's
apologies and interpretations to account for what appeared to Cecilia
strangely ill-conditioned, if not insane, in Lady Romfrey's behaviour.
The most astonishing thing to hear was, that Lady Romfrey had paid Mrs.
Devereux a visit at her Surrey house unexpectedly one Sunday in the
London season, for the purpose, as it became evident, of meeting Mr.
Blackburn Tuckham: and how she could have known that Mr. Tuckham would be
there, Mrs. Devereux could not tell, for it was, Louise assured Cecilia,
purely by chance that he and Mr. Lydiard were present: but the countess
obtained an interview with him alone, and Mr. Tuckham came from it
declaring it to have been more terrible than any he had ever been called
upon to endure. The object of the countess was to persuade him to
renounce his bride.

Louise replied to the natural inquiry--'Upon what plea?' with a
significant evasiveness. She put her arms round Cecilia's neck: 'I trust
you are not unhappy. You will get no release from him.'

'I am not unhappy,' said Cecilia, musically clear to convince her friend.

She was indeed glad to feel the stout chains of her anchor restraining
her when Lady Romfrey talked of Nevil; they were like the safety of
marriage without the dreaded ceremony, and with solitude to let her weep.
Bound thus to a weaker man than Blackburn Tuckham, though he had been
more warmly esteemed, her fancy would have drifted away over the deeps,
perhaps her cherished loyalty would have drowned in her tears--for Lady
Romfrey tasked it very severely: but he from whom she could hope for no
release, gave her some of the firmness which her nature craved in this
trial.

From saying quietly to her: 'I thought once you loved him,' when alluding
to Nevil, Lady Romfrey passed to mournful exclamations, and by degrees on
to direct entreaties. She related the whole story of Renee in England,
and appeared distressed with a desperate wonderment at Cecilia's mildness
after hearing it. Her hearer would have imagined that she had no moral
sense, if it had not been so perceptible that the poor lady's mind was
distempered on the one subject of Nevil Beauchamp. Cecilia's high
conception of duty, wherein she was a peerless flower of our English
civilization, was incommunicable: she could practise, not explain it. She
bowed to Lady Romfrey's praises of Nevil, suffered her hands to be wrung,
her heart to be touched, all but an avowal of her love of him to be
wrested from her, and not the less did she retain her cold resolution to
marry to please her father and fulfil her pledge. In truth, it was too
late to speak of Renee to her now. It did not beseem Cecilia to remember
that she had ever been a victim of jealousy; and while confessing to many
errors, because she felt them, and gained a necessary strength from
them--in the comfort of the consciousness of pain, for example, which she
sorely needed, that the pain in her own breast might deaden her to
Nevil's jealousy, the meanest of the errors of a lofty soul, yielded no
extract beyond the bare humiliation proper to an acknowledgement that it
had existed: so she discarded the recollection of the passion which had
wrought the mischief. Since we cannot have a peerless flower of
civilization without artificial aid, it may be understood how it was that
Cecilia could extinguish some lights in her mind and kindle others, and
wherefore what it was not natural for her to do, she did. She had,
briefly, a certain control of herself.

Our common readings in the fictitious romances which mark out a plot and
measure their characters to fit into it, had made Rosamund hopeful of the
effect of that story of Renee. A wooden young woman, or a galvanized
(sweet to the writer, either of them, as to the reader--so moveable they
are!) would have seen her business at this point, and have glided melting
to reconciliation and the chamber where romantic fiction ends joyously.
Rosamund had counted on it.

She looked intently at Cecilia. 'He is ruined, wasted, ill, unloved; he
has lost you--I am the cause!' she cried in a convulsion of grief.

'Dear Lady Romfrey!' Cecilia would have consoled her. 'There is nothing
to lead us to suppose that Nevil is unwell, and you are not to blame for
anything: how can you be?'

'I spoke falsely of Dr. Shrapnel; I am the cause. It lies on me! it
pursues me. Let me give to the poor as I may, and feel for the poor, as I
do, to get nearer to Nevil--I cannot have peace! His heart has turned
from me. He despises me. If I had spoken to Lord Romfrey at Steynham, as
he commanded me, you and he--Oh! cowardice: he is right, cowardice is the
chief evil in the world. He is ill; he is desperately ill; he will die.'

'Have you heard he is very ill, Lady Romfrey?'

'No! no!' Rosamund exclaimed; 'it is by not hearing that I know it!'

With the assistance of Louise Devereux, Cecilia gradually awakened to
what was going on in the house. There had been a correspondence between
Miss Denham and the countess. Letters from Bevisham had suddenly ceased.
Presumably the earl had stopped them: and if so it must have been for a
tragic reason.

Cecilia hinted some blame of Lord Romfrey to her father.

He pressed her hand and said: 'You don't know what that man suffers.
Romfrey is fond of Nevil too, but he must guard his wife; and the fact is
Nevil is down with fever. It 's in the papers now; he may be able to
conceal it, and I hope he will. There'll be a crisis, and then he can
tell her good news--a little illness and all right now! Of course,' the
colonel continued buoyantly, 'Nevil will recover; he's a tough wiry young
fellow, but poor Romfrey's fears are natural enough about the countess.
Her mind seems to be haunted by the doctor there--Shrapnel, I mean; and
she's exciteable to a degree that threatens the worst--in case of any
accident in Bevisham.'

'Is it not a kind of cowardice to conceal it?' Cecilia suggested.

'It saves her from fretting,' said the colonel.

'But she is fretting! If Lord Romfrey would confide in her and trust to
her courage, papa, it would be best.'

Colonel Halkett thought that Lord Romfrey was the judge.

Cecilia wished to leave a place where this visible torture of a human
soul was proceeding, and to no purpose. She pointed out to her father, by
a variety of signs, that Lady Romfrey either knew or suspected the state
of affairs in Bevisham, and repeated her remarks upon Nevil's illness.
But Colonel Halkett was restrained from departing by the earl's constant
request to him to stay. Old friendship demanded it of him. He began to
share his daughter's feelings at the sight of Lady Romfrey. She was
outwardly patient and submissive; by nature she was a strong healthy
woman; and she attended to all her husband's prescriptions for the
regulating of her habits, walked with him, lay down for the afternoon's
rest, appeared amused when he laboured to that effect, and did her utmost
to subdue the worm devouring her heart but the hours of the delivery of
the letter-post were fatal to her. Her woeful: 'No letter for me!' was
piteous. When that was heard no longer, her silence and famished gaze
chilled Cecilia. At night Rosamund eyed her husband expressionlessly,
with her head leaning back in her chair, to the sorrow of the ladies
beholding her. Ultimately the contagion of her settled misery took hold
of Cecilia. Colonel Halkett was induced by his daughter and Mrs. Devereux
to endeavour to combat a system that threatened consequences worse than
those it was planned to avert. He by this time was aware of the serious
character of the malady which had prostrated Nevil. Lord Romfrey had
directed his own medical man to go down to Bevisham, and Dr. Gannet's
report of Nevil was grave. The colonel made light of it to his daughter,
after the fashion he condemned in Lord Romfrey, to whom however he spoke
earnestly of the necessity for partially taking his wife into his
confidence to the extent of letting her know that a slight fever was
running its course with Nevil.

'There will be no slight fever in my wife's blood,' said the earl. 'I
stand to weather the cape or run to wreck, and it won't do to be taking
in reefs on a lee-shore. You don't see what frets her, colonel. For years
she has been bent on Nevil's marriage. It's off: but if you catch Cecilia
by the hand and bring her to us--I swear she loves the fellow!--that's
the medicine for my wife. Say: will you do it? Tell Lady Romfrey it shall
be done. We shall stand upright again!'

'I'm afraid that's impossible, Romfrey,' said the colonel.

'Play at it, then! Let her think it. You're helping me treat an invalid.
Colonel! my old friend! You save my house and name if you do that. It's a
hand round a candle in a burst of wind. There's Nevil dragged by a woman
into one of their reeking hovels--so that Miss Denham at Shrapnel's
writes to Lady Romfrey--because the woman's drunken husband voted for him
at the Election, and was kicked out of employment, and fell upon the
gin-bottle, and the brats of the den died starving, and the man sickened
of a fever; and Nevil goes in and sits with him! Out of that tangle of
folly is my house to be struck down? It looks as if the fellow with his
infernal "humanity," were the bad genius of an old nurse's tale. He's a
good fellow, colonel, he means well. This fever will cure him, they say
it sobers like bloodletting. He's a gallant fellow; you know that. He
fought to the skeleton in our last big war. On my soul, I believe he's
good for a husband. Frenchwoman or not, that affair's over. He shall have
Steynham and Holdesbury. Can I say more? Now, colonel, you go in to the
countess. Grasp my hand. Give me that help, and God bless you! You light
up my old days. She's a noble woman: I would not change her against the
best in the land. She has this craze about Nevil. I suppose she'll never
get over it. But there it is: and we must feed her with the spoon.'

Colonel Halkett argued stutteringly with the powerful man: 'It's the
truth she ought to hear, Romfrey; indeed it is, if you 'll believe me. It
's his life she is fearing for. She knows half.'

'She knows positively nothing, colonel. Miss Denham's first letter spoke
of the fellow's having headaches, and staggering. He was out on a cruise,
and saw your schooner pass, and put into some port, and began falling
right and left, and they got him back to Shrapnel's: and here it is--that
if you go to him you'll save him, and if you go to my wife you'll save
her: and there you have it: and I ask my old friend, I beg him to go to
them both.'

'But you can't surely expect me to force my daughter's inclinations, my
dear Romfrey?'

'Cecilia loves the fellow!'

'She is engaged to Mr. Tuckham.'

'I'll see the man Tuckham.'

'Really, my dear lord!'

'Play at it, Halkett, play at it! Tide us over this! Talk to her: hint it
and nod it. We have to round November. I could strangle the world till
that month's past. You'll own,' he added mildly after his thunder, 'I'm
not much of the despot Nevil calls me. She has not a wish I don't supply.
I'm at her beck, and everything that's mine. She's a brave good woman. I
don't complain. I run my chance. But if we lose the child--good night!
Boy or girl!--boy!'

Lord Romfrey flung an arm up. The child of his old age lived for him
already: he gave it all the life he had. This miracle, this young son
springing up on an earth decaying and dark, absorbed him. This reviver of
his ancient line must not be lost. Perish every consideration to avert
it! He was ready to fear, love, or hate terribly, according to the
prospects of his child.

Colonel Halkett was obliged to enter into a consultation, of a shadowy
sort, with his daughter, whose only advice was that they should leave the
castle. The penetrable gloom there, and the growing apprehension
concerning the countess and Nevil, tore her to pieces. Even if she could
have conspired with the earl to hoodwink his wife, her strong sense told
her it would be fruitless, besides base. Father and daughter had to make
the stand against Lord Romfrey. He saw their departure from the castle
gates, and kissed his hand to Cecilia, courteously, without a smile.

'He may well praise the countess, papa,' said Cecilia, while they were
looking back at the castle and the moveless flag that hung in folds by
the mast above it. 'She has given me her promise to avoid questioning him
and to accept his view of her duty. She said to me that if Nevil should
die she . . .'

Cecilia herself broke down, and gave way to sobs in her father's arms.




CHAPTER XLIX

A FABRIC OF BARONIAL DESPOTISM CRUMBLE

The earl's precautions did duty night and day in all the avenues leading
to the castle and his wife's apartments; and he could believe that he had
undertaken as good a defence as the mountain guarding the fertile vale
from storms: but him the elements pelted heavily. Letters from
acquaintances of Nevil, from old shipmates and from queer political
admirers and opponents, hailed on him; things not to be frigidly read
were related of the fellow.

Lord Romfrey's faith in the power of constitution to beat disease battled
sturdily with the daily reports of his physician and friends, whom he had
directed to visit the cottage on the common outside Bevisham, and with
Miss Denham's intercepted letters to the countess. Still he had to
calculate on the various injuries Nevil had done to his constitution,
which had made of him another sort of man for a struggle of life and
death than when he stood like a riddled flag through the war. That latest
freak of the fellow's, the abandonment of our natural and wholesome
sustenance in animal food, was to be taken in the reckoning. Dr. Gannet
did not allude to it; the Bevisham doctor did; and the earl meditated
with a fury of wrath on the dismal chance that such a folly as this of
one old vegetable idiot influencing a younger noodle, might strike his
House to the dust.

His watch over his wife had grown mechanical: he failed to observe that
her voice was missing. She rarely spoke. He lost the art of observing
himself: the wrinkling up and dropping of his brows became his habitual
language. So long as he had not to meet inquiries or face tears, he
enjoyed the sense of security. He never quitted his wife save to walk to
the Southern park lodge, where letters and telegrams were piled awaiting
him; and she was forbidden to take the air on the castle terrace without
his being beside her, lest a whisper, some accident of the kind that
donkeys who nod over their drowsy nose-length-ahead precautions call
fatality, should rouse her to suspect, and in a turn of the hand undo his
labour: for the race was getting terrible: Death had not yet stepped out
of that evil chamber in Dr. Shrapnel's cottage to aim his javelin at the
bosom containing the prized young life to come, but, like the smoke of
waxing fire, he shadowed forth his presence in wreaths blacker and
thicker day by day: and Everard Romfrey knew that the hideous beast of
darkness had only to spring up and pass his guard to deal a blow to his
House the direr from all he supposed himself to have gained by masking it
hitherto. The young life he looked to for renewal swallowed him: he
partly lost human feeling for his wife in the tremendous watch and strain
to hurry her as a vessel round the dangerous headland. He was oblivious
that his eyebrows talked, that his head was bent low, that his mouth was
shut, and that where a doubt had been sown, silence and such signs are
like revelations in black night to the spirit of a woman who loves.

One morning after breakfast Rosamund hung on his arm, eyeing him neither
questioningly nor invitingly, but long. He kissed her forehead. She clung
to him and closed her eyes, showing him a face of slumber, like a mask of
the dead.

Mrs. Devereux was present. Cecilia had entreated her to stay with Lady
Romfrey. She stole away, for the time had come which any close observer
of the countess must have expected.

The earl lifted his wife, and carried her to her sitting-room. A sunless
weltering September day whipped the window-panes and brought the roar of
the beaten woods to her ears. He was booted and gaitered for his
customary walk to the park lodge, and as he bent a knee beside her, she
murmured: 'Don't wait; return soon.'

He placed a cord attached to the bellrope within her reach. This utter
love of Nevil Beauchamp was beyond his comprehension, but there it was,
and he had to submit to it and manoeuvre. His letters and telegrams told
the daily tale. 'He's better,' said the earl, preparing himself to answer
what his wife's look had warned him would come.

She was an image of peace, in the same posture on the couch where he had
left her, when he returned. She did not open her eyes, but felt about for
his hand, and touching it, she seemed to weigh the fingers.

At last she said: 'The fever should be at its height.'

'Why, my dear brave girl, what ails you?' said he.

'Ignorance.'

She raised her eyelids. His head was bent down over her, like a raven's
watching, a picture of gravest vigilance.

Her bosom rose and sank. 'What has Miss Denham written to-day?'

'To-day?' he asked her gently.

'I shall bear it,' she answered. 'You were my master before you were my
husband. I bear anything you think is good for my government. Only, my
ignorance is fever; I share Nevil's.'

'Have you been to my desk at all?'

'No. I read your eyes and your hands: I have been living on them. To-day
I find that I have not gained by it, as I hoped I should. Ignorance kills
me. I really have courage to bear to hear just at this moment I have.'

'There's no bad news, my love,' said the earl.

'High fever, is it?'

'The usual fever. Gannet's with him. I sent for Gannet to go there, to
satisfy you.'

'Nevil is not dead?'

'Lord! ma'am, my dear soul!'

'He is alive?'

'Quite: certainly alive; as much alive as I am; only going a little
faster, as fellows do in the jumps of a fever. The best doctor in England
is by his bed. He 's doing fairly. You should have let me know you were
fretting, my Rosamund.'

'I did not wish to tempt you to lie, my dear lord.'

'Well, there are times when a woman . . . as you are: but you're a brave
woman, a strong heart, and my wife. You want some one to sit with you,
don't you? Louise Devereux is a pleasant person, but you want a man to
amuse you. I'd have sent to Stukely, but you want a serious man, I
fancy.'

So much had the earl been thrown out of his plan for protecting his wife,
that he felt helpless, and hinted at the aids and comforts of religion.
He had not rejected the official Church, and regarding it now as in
alliance with great Houses, he considered that its ministers might also
be useful to the troubled women of noble families. He offered, if she
pleased, to call in the rector to sit with her--the bishop of the
diocese, if she liked.

'But just as you like, my love,' he added. 'You know you have to avoid
fretting. I've heard my sisters talk of the parson doing them good off
and on about the time of their being brought to bed. He elevated their
minds, they said. I'm sure I've no objection. If he can doctor the minds
of women he's got a profession worth something.'

Rosamund smothered an outcry. 'You mean that Nevil is past hope!'

'Not if he's got a fair half of our blood in him. And Richard Beauchamp
gave the fellow good stock. He has about the best blood in England.
That's not saying much when they've taken to breed as they build--stuff
to keep the plasterers at work; devil a thought of posterity!'

'There I see you and Nevil one, my dear lord,' said Rosamund. 'You think
of those that are to follow us. Talk to me of him. Do not say, "the
fellow." Say "Nevil." No, no; call him "the fellow." He was alive and
well when you used to say it. But smile kindly, as if he made you love
him down in your heart, in spite of you. We have both known that love,
and that opposition to him; not liking his ideas, yet liking him so: we
were obliged to laugh--I have seen you! as love does laugh! If I am not
crying over his grave, Everard? Oh!'

The earl smoothed her forehead. All her suspicions were rekindled.
'Truth! truth! give me truth. Let me know what world I am in.'

'My dear, a ship's not lost because she's caught in a squall; nor a man
buffeting the waves for an hour. He's all right: he keeps up.'

'He is delirious? I ask you--I have fancied I heard him.'

Lord Romfrey puffed from his nostrils: but in affecting to blow to the
winds her foolish woman's wildness of fancy, his mind rested on Nevil,
and he said: 'Poor boy! It seems he's chattering hundreds to the minute.'

His wife's looks alarmed him after he had said it, and he was for toning
it and modifying it, when she gasped to him to help her to her feet; and
standing up, she exclaimed: 'O heaven! now I hear you; now I know he
lives. See how much better it is for me to know the real truth. It takes
me to his bedside. Ignorance and suspense have been poison. I have been
washed about like a dead body. Let me read all my letters now. Nothing
will harm me now. You will do your best for me, my husband, will you
not?' She tore at her dress at her throat for coolness, panting and
smiling. 'For me--us--yours--ours! Give me my letters, lunch with me, and
start for Bevisham. Now you see how good it is for me to hear the very
truth, you will give me your own report, and I shall absolutely trust in
it, and go down with it if it's false! But you see I am perfectly strong
for the truth. It must be you or I to go. I burn to go; but your going
will satisfy me. If you look on him, I look. I feel as if I had been
nailed down in a coffin, and have got fresh air. I pledge you my word,
sir, my honour, my dear husband, that I will think first of my duty. I
know it would be Nevil's wish. He has not quite forgiven me--he thought
me ambitious--ah! stop: he said that the birth of our child would give
him greater happiness than he had known for years: he begged me to
persuade you to call a boy Nevil Beauchamp, and a girl Renee. He has
never believed in his own long living.'

Rosamund refreshed her lord's heart by smiling archly as she said: 'The
boy to be educated to take the side of the people, of course! The girl is
to learn a profession.'

'Ha! bless the fellow!' Lord Romfrey interjected. 'Well, I might go there
for an hour. Promise me, no fretting! You have hollows in your cheeks,
and your underlip hangs: I don't like it. I haven't seen that before.'

'We do not see clearly when we are trying to deceive,' said Rosamund. 'My
letters! my letters!'

Lord Romfrey went to fetch them. They were intact in his desk. His wife,
then, had actually been reading the facts through a wall! For he was
convinced of Mrs. Devereux's fidelity, as well as of the colonel's and
Cecilia's. He was not a man to be disobeyed: nor was his wife the woman
to court or to acquiesce in trifling acts of disobedience to him. He
received the impression, consequently, that this matter of the visit to
Nevil was one in which the poor loving soul might be allowed to guide
him, singular as the intensity of her love of Nevil Beauchamp was,
considering that they were not of kindred blood.

He endeavoured to tone her mind for the sadder items in Miss Denham's
letters.

'Oh!' said Rosamund, 'what if I shed the "screaming eyedrops," as you
call them? They will not hurt me, but relieve. I was sure I should
someday envy that girl! If he dies she will have nursed him and had the
last of him.'

'He's not going to die!' said Everard powerfully.

'We must be prepared. These letters will do that for me. I have written
out the hours of your trains. Stanton will attend on you. I have directed
him to telegraph to the Dolphin in Bevisham for rooms for the night: that
is to-morrow night. To-night you sleep at your hotel in London, which
will be ready to receive you, and is more comfortable than the empty
house. Stanton takes wine, madeira and claret, and other small
necessaries. If Nevil should be very unwell, you will not leave him
immediately. I shall look to the supplies. You will telegraph to me twice
a day, and write once. We lunch at half-past twelve, so that you may hit
the twenty-minutes-to-two o'clock train. And now I go to see that the
packing is done.'

She carried off her letters to her bedroom, where she fell upon the bed,
shutting her eyelids hard before she could suffer her eyes to be the
intermediaries of that fever-chamber in Bevisham and her bursting heart.
But she had not positively deceived her husband in the reassurance she
had given him by her collectedness and by the precise directions she had
issued for his comforts, indicating a mind so much more at ease. She was
firmer to meet the peril of her beloved: and being indeed, when thrown on
her internal resources, one among the brave women of earth, though also
one who required a lift from circumstances to take her stand calmly
fronting a menace to her heart, she saw the evidence of her influence
with Lord Romfrey: the level she could feel that they were on together so
long as she was courageous, inspirited her sovereignly.

He departed at the hour settled for him. Rosamund sat at her boudoir
window, watching the carriage that was conducting him to the railway
station. Neither of them had touched on the necessity of his presenting
himself at the door of Dr. Shrapnel's house. That, and the disgust
belonging to it, was a secondary consideration with Lord Romfrey, after
he had once resolved on it as the right thing to do: and his wife admired
and respected him for so supreme a loftiness. And fervently she prayed
that it might not be her evil fate to disappoint his hopes. Never had she
experienced so strong a sense of devotedness to him as when she saw the
carriage winding past the middle oak-wood of the park, under a wet sky
brightened from the West, and on out of sight.




CHAPTER L

AT THE COTTAGE ON THE COMMON

Rain went with Lord Romfrey in a pursuing cloud all the way to Bevisham,
and across the common to the long garden and plain little
green-shuttered, neat white cottage of Dr. Shrapnel. Carriages were
driving from the door; idle men with hands deep in their pockets hung
near it, some women pointing their shoulders under wet shawls, and boys.
The earl was on foot. With no sign of discomposure, he stood at the
half-open door and sent in his card, bearing the request for permission
to visit his nephew. The reply failing to come to him immediately, he
began striding to and fro. That garden gate where he had flourished the
righteous whip was wide. Foot-farers over the sodden common were
attracted to the gateway, and lingered in it, looking at the long,
green-extended windows, apparently listening, before they broke away to
exchange undertone speech here and there. Boys had pushed up through the
garden to the kitchen area. From time to time a woman in a dripping
bonnet whimpered aloud.

An air of a country churchyard on a Sunday morning when the curate has
commenced the service prevailed. The boys were subdued by the moisture,
as they are when they sit in the church aisle or organ-loft, before their
members have been much cramped.

The whole scene, and especially the behaviour of the boys, betokened to
Lord Romfrey that an event had come to pass.

In the chronicle of a sickness the event is death.

He bethought him of various means of stopping the telegraph and
smothering the tale, if matters should have touched the worst here. He
calculated abstrusely the practicable shortness of the two routes from
Bevisham to Romfrey, by post-horses on the straightest line of road, or
by express train on the triangle of railway, in case of an extreme need
requiring him to hasten back to his wife and renew his paternal-despotic
system with her. She had but persuaded him of the policy of a liberal
openness and confidence for the moment's occasion: she could not turn his
nature, which ran to strokes of craft and blunt decision whenever the
emergency smote him and he felt himself hailed to show generalship.

While thus occupied in thoughtfulness he became aware of the monotony of
a tuneless chant, as if, it struck him, an insane young chorister or
canon were galloping straight on end hippomaniacally through the Psalms.
There was a creak at intervals, leading him to think it a machine that
might have run away with the winder's arm.

The earl's humour proposed the notion to him that this perhaps was one of
the forms of Radical lamentation, ululation, possibly practised by a
veteran impietist like Dr. Shrapnel for the loss of his youngster, his
political cub--poor lad!

Deriding any such paganry, and aught that could be set howling, Lord
Romfrey was presently moved to ask of the small crowd at the gate what
that sound was.

'It's the poor commander, sir,' said a wet-shawled woman, shivering.

'He's been at it twenty hours already, sir,' said one of the boys.

'Twenty-foor hour he 've been at it,' said another.

A short dispute grew over the exact number of hours. One boy declared
that thirty hours had been reached. 'Father heerd'n yesterday morning as
he was aff to 's work in the town afore six: that brings 't nigh thirty
and he ha'n't stopped yet.'

The earl was invited to step inside the gate, a little way up to the
house, and under the commander's window, that he might obtain a better
hearing.

He swung round, walked away, walked back, and listened.

If it was indeed a voice, the voice, he would have said, was travelling
high in air along the sky.

Yesterday he had described to his wife Nevil's chattering of hundreds to
the minute. He had not realized the description, which had been only his
manner of painting delirium: there had been no warrant for it. He heard
the wild scudding voice imperfectly: it reminded him of a string of
winter geese changeing waters. Shower gusts, and the wail and hiss of the
rows of fir-trees bordering the garden, came between, and allowed him a
moment's incredulity as to its being a human voice. Such a cry will often
haunt the moors and wolds from above at nightfall. The voice hied on,
sank, seemed swallowed; it rose, as if above water, in a hush of wind and
trees. The trees bowed their heads rageing, the voice drowned; once more
to rise, chattering thrice rapidly, in a high-pitched key, thin, shrill,
weird, interminable, like winds through a crazy chamber-door at midnight.

The voice of a broomstick-witch in the clouds could not be thinner and
stranger: Lord Romfrey had some such thought.

Dr. Gannet was the bearer of Miss Denham's excuses to Lord Romfrey for
the delay in begging him to enter the house: in the confusion of the
household his lordship's card had been laid on the table below, and she
was in the sick-room.

'Is my nephew a dead man?' said the earl.

The doctor weighed his reply. 'He lives. Whether he will, after the
exhaustion of this prolonged fit of raving, I don't dare to predict. In
the course of my experience I have never known anything like it. He
lives: there's the miracle, but he lives.'

'On brandy?'

'That would soon have sped him.'

'Ha. You have everything here that you want?'

'Everything.'

'He's in your hands, Gannet.'

The earl was conducted to a sitting-room, where Dr. Gannet left him for a
while.

Mindful that he was under the roof of his enemy, he remained standing,
observing nothing.

The voice overheard was off at a prodigious rate, like the far sound of a
yell ringing on and on.

The earl unconsciously sought a refuge from it by turning the leaves of a
book upon the table, which was a complete edition of Harry Denham's
Poems, with a preface by a man named Lydiard; and really, to read the
preface one would suppose that these poets were the princes of the earth.
Lord Romfrey closed the volume. It was exquisitely bound, and presented
to Miss Denham by the Mr. Lydiard. 'The works of your illustrious
father,' was written on the title-page. These writers deal queerly with
their words of praise of one another. There is no law to restrain them.
Perhaps it is the consolation they take for the poor devil's life they
lead!

A lady addressing him familiarly, invited him to go upstairs.

He thanked her. At the foot of the stairs he turned; he had recognized
Cecilia Halkett.

Seeing her there was more strange to him than being there himself; but he
bowed to facts.

'What do you think?' he said.

She did not answer intelligibly.

He walked up.

The crazed gabbling tongue had entire possession of the house, and rang
through it at an amazing pitch to sustain for a single minute.

A reflection to the effect that dogs die more decently than we men,
saddened the earl. But, then, it is true, we shorten their pangs by
shooting them.

A dismal figure loomed above him at the head of the stairs.

He distinguished it in the vast lean length he had once whipped and flung
to earth.

Dr. Shrapnel was planted against the wall outside that raving chamber, at
the salient angle of a common prop or buttress. The edge of a shoulder
and a heel were the supports to him sideways in his distorted attitude.
His wall arm hung dead beside his pendent frock-coat; the hair of his
head had gone to wildness, like a field of barley whipped by tempest. One
hand pressed his eyeballs: his unshaven jaw dropped.

Lord Romfrey passed him by.

The dumb consent of all present affirmed the creature lying on the bed to
be Nevil Beauchamp.

Face, voice, lank arms, chicken neck: what a sepulchral sketch of him!

It was the revelry of a corpse.

Shudders of alarm for his wife seized Lord Romfrey at the sight. He
thought the poor thing on the bed must be going, resolving to a cry,
unwinding itself violently in its hurricane of speech, that was not
speech nor exclamation, rather the tongue let loose to run to the death.
It seemed to be out in mid-sea, up wave and down wave.

A nurse was at the pillow smoothing it. Miss Denham stood at the foot of
the bed.

'Is that pain?' Lord Romfrey said low to Dr. Gannet.

'Unconscious,' was the reply.

Miss Denham glided about the room and disappeared.

Her business was to remove Dr. Shrapnel, that he might be out of the way
when Lord Romfrey should pass him again: but Dr. Shrapnel heard one voice
only, and moaned, 'My Beauchamp!' She could not get him to stir.

Miss Denham saw him start slightly as the earl stepped forth and, bowing
to him, said: 'I thank you, sir, for permitting me to visit my nephew.'

Dr. Shrapnel made a motion of the hand, to signify freedom of access to
his house. He would have spoken the effort fetched a burst of terrible
chuckles. He covered his face.

Lord Romfrey descended. The silly old wretch had disturbed his equanimity
as a composer of fiction for the comfort and sustainment of his wife: and
no sooner had he the front door in view than the calculation of the three
strides requisite to carry him out of the house plucked at his legs, much
as young people are affected by a dancing measure; for he had, without
deigning to think of matters disagreeable to him in doing so, performed
the duty imposed upon him by his wife, and now it behoved him to ward off
the coming blow from that double life at Romfrey Castle.

He was arrested in his hasty passage by Cecilia Halkett.

She handed him a telegraphic message: Rosamund requested him to stay two
days in Bevisham. She said additionally: 'Perfectly well. Shall fear to
see you returning yet. Have sent to Tourdestelle. All his friends. Ni
espoir, ni crainte, mais point de deceptions. Lumiere. Ce sont les
tenebres qui tuent.'

Her nimble wits had spied him on the road he was choosing, and outrun
him.

He resigned himself to wait a couple of days at Bevisham. Cecilia begged
him to accept a bed at Mount Laurels. He declined, and asked her: 'How is
it you are here?'

'I called here,' said she, compressing her eyelids in anguish at a wilder
cry of the voice overhead, and forgetting to state why she had called at
the house and what services she had undertaken. A heap of letters in her
handwriting explained the nature of her task.

Lord Romfrey asked her where the colonel was.

'He drives me down in the morning and back at night, but they will give
me a bed or a sofa here to-night--I can't . . .' Cecilia stretched her
hand out, blinded, to the earl.

He squeezed her hand.

'These letters take away my strength: crying is quite useless, I know
that,' said she, glancing at a pile of letters that she had partly
replied to. 'Some are from people who can hardly write. There were people
who distrusted him! Some are from people who abused him and maltreated
him. See those poor creatures out in the rain!'

Lord Romfrey looked through the venetian blinds of the parlour window.

'It's as good as a play to them,' he remarked.

Cecilia lit a candle and applied a stick of black wax to the flame,
saying: 'Envelopes have fallen short. These letters will frighten the
receivers. I cannot help it.'

'I will bring letter paper and envelopes in the afternoon,' said Lord
Romfrey. 'Don't use black wax, my dear.'

'I can find no other: I do not like to trouble Miss Denham. Letter paper
has to be sealed. These letters must go by the afternoon post: I do not
like to rob the poor anxious people of a little hope while he lives. Let
me have note paper and envelopes quickly: not black-edged.'

'Plain; that's right,' said Lord Romfrey.

Black appeared to him like the torch of death flying over the country.

'There may be hope,' he added.

She sighed: 'Oh! yes.'

'Gannet will do everything that man can do to save him.'

'He will, I am sure.'

'You don't keep watch in the room, my dear, do you?'

'Miss Denham allows me an hour there in the day: it is the only rest she
takes. She gives me her bedroom.'

'Ha: well: women!' ejaculated the earl, and paused. 'That sounded like
him!'

'At times,' murmured Cecilia. 'All yesterday! all through the night! and
to-day!'

'He'll be missed.'

Any sudden light of happier expectation that might have animated him was
extinguished by the flight of chatter following the cry which had sounded
like Beauchamp.

He went out into the rain, thinking that Beauchamp would be missed. The
fellow had bothered the world, but the world without him would be heavy
matter.

The hour was mid-day, workmen's meal-time. A congregation of shipyard
workmen and a multitude of children crowded near the door. In passing
through them, Lord Romfrey was besought for the doctor's report of
Commander Beauchamp, variously named Beesham, Bosham, Bitcham, Bewsham.
The earl heard his own name pronounced as he particularly disliked to
hear it--Rumfree. Two or three men scowled at him.

It had not occurred to him ever before in his meditations to separate his
blood and race from the common English; and he was not of a character to
dwell on fantastical and purposeless distinctions, but the
mispronunciation of his name and his nephew's at an instant when he was
thinking of Nevil's laying down his life for such men as these gross
excessive breeders, of ill shape and wooden countenance, pushed him to
reflections on the madness of Nevil in endeavouring to lift them up and
brush them up; and a curious tenderness for Nevil's madness worked in his
breast as he contrasted this much-abused nephew of his with our general
English--the so-called nobles, who were sunk in the mud of the traders:
the traders, who were sinking in the mud of the workmen: the workmen, who
were like harbour-flats at ebb tide round a stuck-fast fleet of vessels
big and little.

Decidedly a fellow like Nevil would be missed by him!

These English, huddling more and more in flocks, turning to lumps,
getting to be cut in a pattern and marked by a label--how they bark and
snap to rend an obnoxious original! One may chafe at the botheration
everlastingly raised by the fellow; but if our England is to keep her
place she must have him, and many of him. Have him? He's gone!

Lord Romfrey reasoned himself into pathetic sentiment by degrees.

He purchased the note paper and envelopes in the town for Cecilia. Late
in the afternoon he deposited them on the parlour table at Dr.
Shrapnel's. Miss Denham received him. She was about to lie down for her
hour of rest on the sofa. Cecilia was upstairs. He inquired if there was
any change in his nephew's condition.

'Not any,' said Miss Denham.

The voice was abroad for proof of that.

He stood with a swelling heart.

Jenny flung out a rug to its length beside the sofa, and; holding it by
one end, said: 'I must have my rest, to be of service, my lord.'

He bowed. He was mute and surprised.

The young lady was like no person of her age and sex that he remembered
ever to have met.

'I will close the door,' he said, retiring softly.

'Do not, my lord.'

The rug was over her, up to her throat, and her eyes were shut. He looked
back through the doorway in going out. She was asleep.

'Some delirium. Gannet of good hope. All in the usual course'; he
transmitted intelligence to his wife.

A strong desire for wine at his dinner-table warned him of something
wrong with his iron nerves.




CHAPTER LI

IN THE NIGHT

The delirious voice haunted him. It came no longer accompanied by images
and likenesses to this and that of animate nature, which were relieving
and distracting; it came to him in its mortal nakedness--an afflicting
incessant ringing peal, bare as death's ribs in telling of death. When
would it stop? And when it stopped, what would succeed? What ghastly
silence!

He walked to within view of the lights of Dr. Shrapnel's at night: then
home to his hotel.

Miss Denham's power of commanding sleep, as he could not, though contrary
to custom he tried it on the right side and the left, set him thinking of
her. He owned she was pretty. But that, he contended, was not the word;
and the word was undiscoverable. Not Cecilia Halkett herself had so
high-bred an air, for Cecilia had not her fineness of feature and full
quick eyes, of which the thin eyelids were part of the expression. And
Cecilia sobbed, snifed, was patched about the face, reddish, bluish. This
girl was pliable only to service, not to grief: she did her work for
three-and-twenty hours, and fell to her sleep of one hour like a soldier.
Lord Romfrey could not recollect anything in a young woman that had taken
him so much as the girl's tossing out of the rug and covering herself,
lying down and going to sleep under his nose, absolutely independent of
his presence.

She had not betrayed any woman's petulance with him for his conduct to
her uncle or guardian. Nor had she hypocritically affected the reverse,
as ductile women do, when they feel wanting in force to do the other. She
was not unlike Nevil's marquise in face, he thought: less foreign of
course; looking thrice as firm. Both were delicately featured.

He had a dream.

It was of an interminable procession of that odd lot called the People.
All of them were quarrelling under a deluge. One party was for umbrellas,
one was against them: and sounding the dispute with a question or two,
Everard held it logical that there should be protection from the wet:
just as logical on the other hand that so frail a shelter should be
discarded, considering the tremendous downpour. But as he himself was
dry, save for two or three drops, he deemed them all lunatics. He
requested them to gag their empty chatter-boxes, and put the mother upon
that child's cry.

He was now a simple unit of the procession. Asking naturally whither they
were going, he saw them point. 'St. Paul's,' he heard. In his own bosom
it was, and striking like the cathedral big bell.

Several ladies addressed him sorrowfully. He stood alone. It had become
notorious that he was to do battle, and no one thought well of his
chances. Devil an enemy to be seen! he muttered. Yet they said the enemy
was close upon him. His right arm was paralyzed. There was the enemy hard
in front, mailed, vizored, gauntleted. He tried to lift his right hand,
and found it grasping an iron ring at the bottom of the deep Steynham
well, sunk one hundred feet through the chalk. But the unexampled cunning
of his left arm was his little secret; and, acting upon this knowledge,
he telegraphed to his first wife at Steynham that Dr. Gannet was of good
hope, and thereupon he re-entered the ranks of the voluminous procession,
already winding spirally round the dome of St. Paul's. And there, said
he, is the tomb of Beauchamp. Everything occurred according to his
predictions, and he was entirely devoid of astonishment. Yet he would
fain have known the titles of the slain admiral's naval battles. He
protested he had a right to know, for he was the hero's uncle, and loved
him. He assured the stupid scowling people that he loved Nevil Beauchamp,
always loved the boy, and was the staunchest friend the fellow had. And
saying that, he certainly felt himself leaning up against the cathedral
rails in the attitude of Dr. Shrapnel, and crying, 'Beauchamp!
Beauchamp!' And then he walked firmly out of Romfrey oakwoods, and, at a
mile's distance from her, related to his countess Rosamund that the
burial was over without much silly ceremony, and that she needed to know
nothing of it whatever.

Rosamund's face awoke him. It was the face of a chalk-quarry,
featureless, hollowed, appalling.

The hour was no later than three in the morning. He quitted the
detestable bed where a dream--one of some half-dozen in the course of his
life-had befallen him. For the maxim of the healthy man is: up, and have
it out in exercise when sleep is for foisting base coin of dreams upon
you! And as the healthy only are fit to live, their maxims should be law.
He dressed and directed his leisurely steps to the common, under a black
sky, and stars of lively brilliancy. The lights of a carriage gleamed on
Dr. Shrapnel's door. A footman informed Lord Romfrey that Colonel Halkett
was in the house, and soon afterward the colonel appeared.

'Is it over? I don't hear him,' said Lord Romfrey.

Colonel Halkett grasped his hand. 'Not yet,' he said. 'Cissy can't be got
away. It's killing her. No, he's alive. You may hear him now.'

Lord Romfrey bent his ear.

'It's weaker,' the colonel resumed. 'By the way, Romfrey, step out with
me. My dear friend, the circumstances will excuse me: you know I'm not a
man to take liberties. I'm bound to tell you what your wife writes to me.
She says she has it on her conscience, and can't rest for it. You know
women. She wants you to speak to the man here--Shrapnel. She wants Nevil
to hear that you and he were friendly before he dies; thinks it would
console the poor dear fellow. That's only an idea; but it concerns her,
you see. I'm shocked to have to talk to you about it.'

'My dear colonel, I have no feeling against the man,' Lord Romfrey
replied. 'I spoke to him when I saw him yesterday. I bear no grudges.
Where is he? You can send to her to say I have spoken to him twice.'

'Yes, yes,' the colonel assented.

He could not imagine that Lady Romfrey required more of her husband.
'Well, I must be off. I leave Blackburn Tuckham here, with a friend of
his; a man who seems to be very sweet with Mrs. Wardour-Devereux.'

'Ha! Fetch him to me, colonel; I beg you to do that,' said Lord Romfrey.

The colonel brought out Lydiard to the earl.

'You have been at my nephew's bedside, Mr. Lydiard?'

'Within ten minutes, my lord.'

'What is your opinion of the case?'

'My opinion is, the chances are in his favour.'

'Lay me under obligation by communicating that to Romfrey Castle at the
first opening of the telegraph office to-morrow morning.'

Lydiard promised.

'The raving has ended?'

'Hardly, sir, but the exhaustion is less than we feared it would be.'

'Gannet is there?'

'He is in an arm-chair in the room.'

'And Dr. Shrapnel?'

'He does not bear speaking to; he is quiet.'

'He is attached to my nephew?'

'As much as to life itself.'

Lord Romfrey thanked Lydiard courteously. 'Let us hope, sir, that some
day I shall have the pleasure of entertaining you, as well as another
friend of yours.'

'You are very kind, my lord.'

The earl stood at the door to see Colonel Halkett drive off: he declined
to accompany him to Mount Laurels.

In the place of the carriage stood a man, who growled 'Where's your
horsewhip, butcher?'

He dogged the earl some steps across the common. Everard returned to his
hotel and slept soundly during the remainder of the dark hours.




CHAPTER LII

QUESTION OF A PILGRIMAGE AND AN ACT OF PENANCE

Then came a glorious morning for sportsmen. One sniffed the dews, and
could fancy fresh smells of stubble earth and dank woodland grass in the
very streets of dirty Bevisham. Sound sleep, like hearty dining, endows
men with a sense of rectitude, and sunlight following the former, as a
pleasant spell of conversational ease or sweet music the latter, smiles a
celestial approval of the performance: Lord Romfrey dismissed his
anxieties. His lady slightly ruffled him at breakfast in a letter saying
that she wished to join him. He was annoyed at noon by a message, wherein
the wish was put as a request. And later arrived another message, bearing
the character of an urgent petition. True, it might be laid to the
account of telegraphic brevity.

He saw Dr. Shrapnel, and spoke to him, as before, to thank him for the
permission to visit his nephew. Nevil he contemplated for the space of
five minutes. He cordially saluted Miss Denham. He kissed Cecilia's hand.

'All here is going on so well that I am with you for a day or two
to-morrow,' he despatched the message to his wife.

Her case was now the gravest. He could not understand why she desired to
be in Bevisham. She must have had execrable dreams!--rank poison to
mothers.

However, her constitutional strength was great, and his pride in the
restoration of his House by her agency flourished anew, what with fair
weather and a favourable report from Dr. Gannet: The weather was most
propitious to the hopes of any soul bent on dispersing the shadows of
death, and to sportsmen. From the windows of his railway carriage he
beheld the happy sportsmen stalking afield. The birds whirred and dropped
just where he counted on their dropping. The smoke of the guns threaded
to dazzling silver in the sunshine. Say what poor old Nevil will, or did
say, previous to the sobering of his blood, where is there a land like
England? Everard rejoiced in his country temperately. Having Nevil as
well,--of which fact the report he was framing in his mind to deliver to
his wife assured him--he was rich. And you that put yourselves forward
for republicans and democrats, do you deny the aristocracy of an oaklike
man who is young upon the verge of eighty?

These were poetic flights, but he knew them not by name, and had not to
be ashamed of them.

Rosamund met him in the hall of the castle. 'You have not deceived me, my
dear lord,' she said, embracing him. 'You have done what you could for
me. The rest is for me to do.'

He reciprocated her embrace warmly, in commendation of her fresher good
looks.

She asked him, 'You have spoken to Dr. Shrapnel?'

He answered her, 'Twice.'

The word seemed quaint. She recollected that he was quaint.

He repeated, 'I spoke to him the first day I saw him, and the second.'

'We are so much indebted to him,' said Rosamund. 'His love of Nevil
surpasses ours. Poor man! poor man! At least we may now hope the blow
will be spared him which would have carried off his life with Nevil's. I
have later news of Nevil than you.'

'Good, of course?'

'Ah me! the pleasure of the absence of pain. He is not gone.'

Lord Romfrey liked her calm resignation.

'There's a Mr. Lydiard,' he said, 'a friend of Nevil's, and a friend of
Louise Devereux's.'

'Yes; we hear from him every four hours,' Rosamund rejoined. 'Mention him
to her before me.'

'That's exactly what I was going to tell you to do before me,' said her
husband, smiling.

'Because, Everard, is it not so?--widows . . . and she loves this
gentleman!'

'Certainly, my dear; I think with you about widows. The world asks them
to practise its own hypocrisy. Louise Devereux was married to a pipe;
she's the widow of tobacco ash. We'll make daylight round her.'

'How good, how kind you are, my lord! I did not think so shrewd! But
benevolence is almost all-seeing: You said you spoke to Dr. Shrapnel
twice. Was he . . . polite?'

'Thoroughly upset, you know.'

'What did he say?'

'What was it? "Beauchamp! Beauchamp!" the first time; and the second time
he said he thought it had left off raining.'

'Ah!' Rosamund drooped her head.

She looked up. 'Here is Louise. My lord has had a long conversation with
Mr. Lydiard.'

'I trust he will come here before you leave us,' added the earl.

Rosamund took her hand. 'My lord has been more acute than I, or else your
friend is less guarded than you.'

'What have you seen?' said the blushing lady.

'Stay. I have an idea you are one of the women I promised to Cecil
Baskelett,' said the earl. 'Now may I tell him there's no chance?'

'Oh! do.'

They spent so very pleasant an evening that the earl settled down into a
comfortable expectation of the renewal of his old habits in the September
and October season. Nevil's frightful cry played on his ear-drum at
whiles, but not too affectingly. He conducted Rosamund to her room,
kissed her, hoped she would sleep well, and retired to his good hard
bachelor's bed, where he confidently supposed he would sleep. The sleep
of a dyspeptic, with a wilder than the monstrous Bevisham dream, befell
him, causing him to rise at three in the morning and proceed to his
lady's chamber, to assure himself that at least she slept well. She was
awake.

'I thought you might come,' she said.

He reproached her gently for indulging foolish nervous fears.

She replied, 'No, I do not; I am easier about Nevil. I begin to think he
will live. I have something at my heart that prevents me from sleeping.
It concerns me. Whether he is to live or die, I should like him to know
he has not striven in vain--not in everything: not where my conscience
tells me he was right, and we, I, wrong--utterly wrong, wickedly wrong.'

'My dear girl, you are exciting yourself.'

'No; feel my pulse. The dead of night brings out Nevil to me like the
Writing on the Wall. It shall not be said he failed in everything. Shame
to us if it could be said! He tried to make me see what my duty was, and
my honour.'

'He was at every man Jack of us.'

'I speak of one thing. I thought I might not have to go. Now I feel I
must. I remember him at Steynham, when Colonel Halkett and Cecilia were
there. But for me, Cecilia would now be his wife. Of that there is no
doubt; that is not the point; regrets are fruitless. I see how the
struggle it cost him to break with his old love--that endearing Madame de
Rouaillout, his Renee--broke his heart; and then his loss of Cecilia
Halkett. But I do believe, true as that I am lying here, and you hold my
hand, my dear husband, those losses were not so fatal to him as his
sufferings he went through on account of his friend Dr. Shrapnel. I will
not keep you here.

Go and have some rest. What I shall beg of you tomorrow will not injure
my health in the slightest: the reverse: it will raise me from a bitter
depression. It shall not be said that those who loved him were unmoved by
him. Before he comes back to life, or is carried to his grave, he shall
know that I was not false to my love of him.'

'My dear, your pulse is at ninety,' said the earl.

'Look lenient, be kind, be just, my husband. Oh! let us cleanse our
hearts. This great wrong was my doing. I am not only quite strong enough
to travel to Bevisham, I shall be happy in going: and when I have done
it--said: "The wrong was all mine," I shall rejoice like the pure in
spirit. Forgiveness does not matter, though I now believe that poor
loving old man who waits outside his door weeping, is wrong-headed only
in his political views. We women can read men by their power to love.
Where love exists there is goodness. But it is not for the sake of the
poor old man himself that I would go: it is for Nevil's; it is for ours,
chiefly for me, for my child's, if ever . . . !' Rosamund turned her head
on her pillow.

The earl patted her cheek. 'We 'll talk it over in the morning,' he said.
'Now go to sleep.'

He could not say more, for he did not dare to attempt cajolery with her.
Shading his lamp he stepped softly away to wrestle with a worse nightmare
than sleep's. Her meaning was clear: and she was a woman to insist on
doing it. She was nevertheless a woman not impervious to reason, if only
he could shape her understanding to perceive that the state of her
nerves, incident to her delicate situation and the shock of that fellow
Nevil's illness--poor lad!--was acting on her mind, rendering her a
victim of exaggerated ideas of duty, and so forth.

Naturally, apart from allowing her to undertake the journey by rail, he
could not sanction his lady's humbling of herself so egregiously and
unnecessarily. Shrapnel had behaved unbecomingly, and had been punished
for it. He had spoken to Shrapnel, and the affair was virtually at an
end. With his assistance she would see that, when less excited. Her
eternal brooding over Nevil was the cause of these mental vagaries.

Lord Romfrey was for postponing the appointed discussion in the morning
after breakfast. He pleaded business engagements.

'None so urgent as this of mine,' said Rosamund.

'But we have excellent news of Nevil: you have Gannet's word for it,' he
argued. 'There's really nothing to distress you.'

'My heart: I must be worthy of good news, to know happiness,' she
answered. 'I will say, let me go to Bevisham two, three, four days hence,
if you like, but there is peace for me, and nowhere else.'

'My precious Rosamund! have you set your two eyes on it? What you are
asking, is for permission to make an apology to Shrapnel!'

'That is the word.'

'That's Nevil's word.'

'It is a prescription to me.'

'An apology?'

The earl's gorge rose. Why, such an act was comparable to the circular
mission of the dog!

'If I do not make the apology, the mother of your child is a coward,'
said Rosamund.

'She's not.'

'I trust not.'

'You are a reasonable woman, my dear. Now listen the man insulted you.
It's past: done with. He insulted you . . .'

'He did not.'

'What?'

'He was courteous to me, hospitable to me, kind to me. He did not insult
me. I belied him.'

'My dear saint, you're dreaming. He spoke insultingly of you to Cecil.'

'Is my lord that man's dupe? I would stand against him before the throne
of God, with what little I know of his interview with Dr. Shrapnel, to
confront him and expose his lie. Do not speak of him. He stirs my evil
passions, and makes me feel myself the creature I was when I returned to
Steynham from my first visit to Bevisham, enraged with jealousy of Dr.
Shrapnel's influence over Nevil, spiteful, malicious: Oh! such a nest of
vileness as I pray to heaven I am not now, if it is granted me to give
life to another. Nevil's misfortunes date from that,' she continued, in
reply to the earl's efforts to soothe her. 'Not the loss of the Election:
that was no misfortune, but a lesson. He would not have shone in
Parliament: he runs too much from first principles to extremes. You see I
am perfectly reasonable, Everard: 'I can form an exact estimate of
character and things.' She smiled in his face. 'And I know my husband
too: what he will grant; what he would not, and justly would not. I know
to a certainty that vexatious as I must be to you now, you are conscious
of my having reason for being so.'

'You carry it so far--fifty miles beyond the mark,' said he. 'The man
roughed you, and I taught him manners.'

'No!' she half screamed her interposition. 'I repeat, he was in no way
discourteous or disobliging to me. He offered me a seat at his table,
and, heaven forgive me! I believe a bed in his house, that I might wait
and be sure of seeing Nevil, because I was very anxious to see him.'

'All the same, you can't go to the man.'

'I should have said so too, before my destiny touched me.'

'A certain dignity of position, my dear, demands a corresponding dignity
of conduct: you can't go.'

'If I am walking in the very eye of heaven, and feeling it shining on me
where I go, there is no question for me of human dignity.'

Such flighty talk offended Lord Romfrey.

'It comes to this: you're in want of a parson.'

Rosamund was too careful to hint that she would have expected succour and
seconding from one or other of the better order of clergymen.

She shook her head. 'To this, my dear lord: I have a troubled mind; and
it is not to listen nor to talk, that I am in need of, but to act.'

'Yes, my dear girl, but not to act insanely. I do love soundness of head.
You have it, only just now you're a little astray. We'll leave this
matter for another time.'

Rosamund held him by the arm. 'Not too long!'

Both of them applied privately to Mrs. Wardour-Devereux for her opinion
and counsel on the subject of the proposal to apologize to Dr. Shrapnel.
She was against it with the earl, and became Rosamund's echo when with
her. When alone, she was divided into two almost equal halves: deeming
that the countess should not insist, and the earl should not refuse: him
she condemned for lack of sufficient spiritual insight to perceive the
merits of his wife's request: her she accused of some vestige of
something underbred in her nature, for putting such fervid stress upon
the supplication: i.e. making too much of it--a trick of the vulgar: and
not known to the languid.

She wrote to Lydiard for advice.

He condensed a paragraph into a line:

'It should be the earl. She is driving him to it, intentionally or not.'

Mrs. Devereux doubted that the countess could have so false an idea of
her husband's character as to think it possible he would ever be bent to
humble himself to the man he had castigated. She was right. It was by
honestly presenting to his mind something more loathsome still, the
humbling of herself, that Rosamund succeeded in awakening some remote
thoughts of a compromise, in case of necessity. Better I than she!

But the necessity was inconceivable.

He had really done everything required of him, if anything was really
required, by speaking to Shrapnel civilly. He had spoken to Shrapnel
twice.

Besides, the castle was being gladdened by happier tidings of Beauchamp.
Gannet now pledged his word to the poor fellow's recovery, and the earl's
particular friends arrived, and the countess entertained them. October
passed smoothly.

She said once: 'Ancestresses of yours, my lord, have undertaken
pilgrimages as acts of penance for sin, to obtain heaven's intercession
in their extremity.'

'I dare say they did,' he replied. 'The monks got round them.'

'It is not to be laughed at, if it eased their hearts.'

Timidly she renewed her request for permission to perform the pilgrimage
to Bevisham.

'Wait,' said he, 'till Nevil is on his legs.'

'Have you considered where I may then be, Everard?'

'My love, you sleep well, don't you?'

'You see me every night.'

'I see you sound asleep.'

'I see you watching me.'

'Let's reason,' said the earl; and again they went through the argument
upon the apology to Dr. Shrapnel.

He was willing to indulge her in any amount of it: and she perceived why.
Fox! she thought. Grand fox, but fox downright. For her time was
shortening to days that would leave her no free-will.

On the other hand, the exercise of her free-will in a fast resolve, was
growing all the more a privilege that he was bound to respect. As she
became sacreder and doubly precious to him, the less would he venture to
thwart her, though he should think her mad. There would be an analogy
between his manner of regarding her and the way that superstitious
villagers look on their crazy innocents, she thought sadly. And she bled
for him too: she grieved to hurt his pride. But she had come to imagine
that there was no avoidance of this deed of personal humiliation.

Nevil had scrawled a note to her. She had it in her hand one forenoon in
mid November, when she said to her husband: 'I have ordered the carriage
for two o'clock to meet the quarter to three train to London, and I have
sent Stanton on to get the house ready for us tonight.'

Lord Romfrey levelled a marksman's eye at her.

'Why London? You know my wish that it should be here at the castle.'

'I have decided to go to Bevisham. I have little time left.'

'None, to my thinking.'

'Oh I yes; my heart will be light. I shall gain. You come with me to
London?'

'You can't go.'

'Don't attempt to reason with me, please, please!'

'I command, madam.'

'My lord, it is past the hour of commanding.'

He nodded his head, with the eyes up amid the puckered brows, and blowing
one of his long nasal expirations, cried, 'Here we are, in for another
bout of argument.'

'No; I can bear the journey, rejoice in confessing my fault, but more
argument I cannot bear. I will reason with you when I can: submit to me
in this.'

'Feminine reasoning!' he interjected.

'I have nothing better to offer. It will be prudent to attend to me. Take
my conduct for the portion I bring you. Before I put myself in God's care
I must be clean. I am unclean. Language like that offends you. I have no
better. My reasoning has not touched you; I am helpless, except in this
determination that my contrition shall be expressed to Dr. Shrapnel. If I
am to have life, to be worthy of living and being a mother, it must be
done. Now, my dear lord, see that, and submit. You're but one voice: I am
two.'

He jumped off his chair, frowning up his forehead, and staring awfully at
the insulting prospect. 'An apology to the man? By you? Away with it.'

'Make allowances for me if you can, my dear lord that is what I am going
to do.'

'My wife going there?' He strode along furiously. 'No!'

'You will not stop her.'

'There's a palsy in my arm if I don't.'

She plucked at her watch.

'Why, ma'am, I don't know you,' he said, coming close to her. 'Let 's
reason. Perhaps you overshot it; you were disgusted with Shrapnel.
Perhaps I was hasty; I get fired by an insult to a woman. There was a
rascal kissed a girl once against her will, and I heard her cry out; I
laid him on his back for six months; just to tell you; I'd do the same to
lord or beggar. Very well, my dear heart, we'll own I might have looked
into the case when that dog Cecil . . . what's the matter?'

'Speak on, my dear husband,' said Rosamund, panting.

'But your making the journey to Bevisham is a foolish notion.'

'Yes? well?'

'Well, we'll wait.'

'Oh! have we to travel over it all again?' she exclaimed in despair at
the dashing out of a light she had fancied. 'You see the wrong. You know
the fever it is in my blood, and you bid me wait.'

'Drop a line to Nevil.'

'To trick my conscience! I might have done that, and done well, once. Do
you think I dislike the task I propose to myself? It is for your sake
that I would shun it. As for me, the thought of going there is an
ecstasy. I shall be with Nevil, and be able to look in his face. And how
can I be actually abasing you when I am so certain that I am worthier of
you in what I do?'

Her exaltation swept her on. 'Hurry there, my lord, if you will. If you
think it prudent that you should go in my place, go: you deprive me of a
great joy, but I will not put myself in your way, and I consent. The
chief sin was mine; remember that. I rank it viler than Cecil
Baskelett's. And listen: when--can you reckon?--when will he confess his
wickedness? We separate ourselves from a wretch like that.'

'Pooh,' quoth the earl.

'But you will go?' She fastened her arms round the arm nearest: 'You or
I! Does it matter which? We are one. You speak for me; I should have been
forced to speak for you. You spare me the journey. I do not in truth
suppose it would have injured me; but I would not run one unnecessary
risk.'

Lord Romfrey sighed profoundly. He could not shake her off. How could he
refuse her?

How on earth had it come about that suddenly he was expected to be the
person to go?

She would not let him elude her; and her stained cheeks and her trembling
on his arm pleaded most pressingly and masteringly. It might be that she
spoke with a knowledge of her case. Positive it undoubtedly was that she
meant to go if he did not. Perhaps the hopes of his House hung on it.
Having admitted that a wrong had been done, he was not the man to leave
it unamended; only he would have chosen his time, and the manner. Since
Nevil's illness, too, he had once or twice been clouded with a little bit
of regret at the recollection of poor innocent old Shrapnel posted like a
figure of total inebriation beside the doorway of the dreadful sickroom.

There had been women of the earl's illustrious House who would have given
their hands to the axe rather than conceal a stain and have to dread a
scandal. His Rosamund, after all, was of their pattern; even though she
blew that conscience she prattled of into trifles, and swelled them, as
women of high birth in this country, out of the clutches of the priests,
do not do.

She clung to him for his promise to go.

He said: 'Well, well.'

'That means, you will,' said she.

His not denying it passed for the affirmative.

Then indeed she bloomed with love of him.

'Yet do say yes,' she begged.

'I'll go, ma'am,' shouted the earl. 'I'll go, my love,' he said softly.




CHAPTER LIII

THE APOLOGY TO DR. SHRAPNEL

'You and Nevil are so alike,' Lady Romfrey said to her lord, at some
secret resemblance she detected and dwelt on fondly, when the earl was on
the point of starting a second time for Bevisham to perform what she had
prompted him to conceive his honourable duty, without a single intimation
that he loathed the task, neither shrug nor grimace.

'Two ends of a stick are pretty much alike: they're all that length
apart,' said he, very little in the humour for compliments, however well
braced for his work.

His wife's admiring love was pleasant enough. He preferred to have it
unspoken. Few of us care to be eulogized in the act of taking a nauseous
medical mixture.

For him the thing was as good as done, on his deciding to think it both
adviseable and right: so he shouldered his load and marched off with it.
He could have postponed the right proceeding, even after the partial
recognition of his error:--one drops a word or two by hazard, one
expresses an anxiety to afford reparation, one sends a message, and so
forth, for the satisfaction of one's conventionally gentlemanly feeling:
but the adviseable proceeding under stress of peculiar circumstances, his
clearly-awakened recognition of that, impelled him unhesitatingly. His
wife had said it was the portion she brought him. Tears would not have
persuaded him so powerfully, that he might prove to her he was glad of
her whatever the portion she brought. She was a good wife, a brave woman,
likely to be an incomparable mother. At present her very virtues excited
her to fancifulness nevertheless she was in his charge, and he was bound
to break the neck of his will, to give her perfect peace of wind. The
child suffers from the mother's mental agitation. It might be a question
of a nervous or an idiot future Earl of Romfrey. Better death to the
House than such a mockery of his line! These reflections reminded him of
the heartiness of his whipping of that poor old tumbled signpost
Shrapnel, in the name of outraged womankind. If there was no outrage?

Assuredly if there was no outrage, consideration for the state of his
wife would urge him to speak the apology in the most natural manner
possible. She vowed there was none.

He never thought of blaming her for formerly deceiving him, nor of
blaming her for now expediting him.

In the presence of Colonel Halkett, Mr. Tuckham, and Mr. Lydiard, on a
fine November afternoon, standing bareheaded in the fir-bordered garden
of the cottage on the common, Lord Romfrey delivered his apology to Dr.
Shrapnel, and he said:

'I call you to witness, gentlemen, I offer Dr. Shrapnel the fullest
reparation he may think fit to demand of me for an unprovoked assault on
him, that I find was quite unjustified, and for which I am here to ask
his forgiveness.'

Speech of man could not have been more nobly uttered.

Dr. Shrapnel replied:

'To the half of that, sir--'tis over! What remains is done with the
hand.'

He stretched his hand out.

Lord Romfrey closed his own on it.

The antagonists, between whom was no pretence of their being other after
the performance of a creditable ceremony, bowed and exchanged civil
remarks: and then Lord Romfrey was invited to go into the house and see
Beauchamp, who happened to be sitting with Cecilia Halkett and Jenny
Denham. Beauchamp was thin, pale, and quiet; but the sight of him
standing and conversing after that scene of the skinny creature
struggling with bareribbed obstruction on the bed, was an example of
constitutional vigour and a compliment to the family very gratifying to
Lord Romfrey. Excepting by Cecilia, the earl was coldly received. He had
to leave early by special express for London to catch the last train to
Romfrey. Beauchamp declined to fix a day for his visit to the castle with
Lydiard, but proposed that Lydiard should accompany the earl on his
return. Lydiard was called in, and at once accepted the earl's
invitation, and quitted the room to pack his portmanteau.

A faint sign of firm-shutting shadowed the corners of Jenny's lips.

'You have brought my nephew to life,' Lord Romfrey said to her.

'My share in it was very small, my lord.'

'Gannet says that your share in it was very great.'

'And I say so, with the authority of a witness,' added Cecilia.

'And I, from my experience,' came from Beauchamp.

His voice had a hollow sound, unlike his natural voice.

The earl looked at him remembering the bright laughing lad he had once
been, and said: 'Why not try a month of Madeira? You have only to step on
board the boat.'

'I don't want to lose a month of my friend,' said Beauchamp.

'Take your friend with you. After these fevers our Winters are bad.'

'I've been idle too long.'

'But, Captain Beauchamp,' said Jenny, 'you proposed to do nothing but
read for a couple of years.'

'Ay, there's the voyage!' sighed he, with a sailor-invalid's vision of
sunny seas dancing in the far sky.

'You must persuade Dr. Shrapnel to come; and he will not come unless you
come too, and you won't go anywhere but to the Alps!' She bent her eyes
on the floor. Beauchamp remembered what had brought her home from the
Alps. He cast a cold look on his uncle talking with Cecilia: granite, as
he thought. And the reflux of that slight feeling of despair seemed to
tear down with it in wreckage every effort he had made in life, and cry
failure on him. Yet he was hoping that he had not been created for
failure.

He touched his uncle's hand indifferently: 'My love to the countess: let
me hear of her, sir, if you please.'

'You shall,' said the earl. 'But, off to Madeira, and up Teneriffe: sail
the Azores. I'll hire you a good-sized schooner.'

'There is the Esperanza,' said Cecilia. 'And the vessel is lying idle,
Nevil! Can you allow it?'

He consented to laugh at himself, and fell to coughing.

Jenny Denham saw a real human expression of anxiety cross the features of
the earl at the sound of the cough.

Lord Romfrey said 'Adieu,' to her.

He offered her his hand, which she contrived to avoid taking by dropping
a formal half-reverence.

'Think of the Esperanza; she will be coasting her nominal native land!
and adieu for to-day,' Cecilia said to Beauchamp.

Jenny Denham and he stood at the window to watch the leave-taking in the
garden, for a distraction. They interchanged no remark of surprise at
seeing the earl and Dr. Shrapnel hand-locked: but Jenny's heart
reproached her uncle for being actually servile, and Beauchamp accused
the earl of aristocratic impudence.

Both were overcome with remorse when Colonel Halkett, putting his head
into the room to say good-bye to Beauchamp and place the Esperanza at his
disposal for a Winter cruise, chanced to mention in two or three half
words the purpose of the earl's visit, and what had occurred. He took it
for known already.

To Miss Denham he remarked: 'Lord Romfrey is very much concerned about
your health; he fears you have overdone it in nursing Captain Beauchamp!

'I must be off after him,' said Beauchamp, and began trembling so that he
could not stir.

The colonel knew the pain and shame of that condition of weakness to a
man who has been strong and swift, and said: 'Seven-league boots are not
to be caught. You'll see him soon. Why, I thought some letter of yours
had fetched him here! I gave you all the credit of it.'

'No, he deserves it all himself--all,' said Beauchamp and with a dubious
eye on Jenny Denham: 'You see, we were unfair.'

The 'we' meant 'you' to her sensitiveness; and probably he did mean it
for 'you': for as he would have felt, so he supposed that his uncle must
have felt, Jenny's coldness was much the crueller. Her features, which in
animation were summer light playing upon smooth water, could be
exceedingly cold in repose: the icier to those who knew her, because they
never expressed disdain. No expression of the baser sort belonged to
them. Beauchamp was intimate with these delicately-cut features; he would
have shuddered had they chilled on him. He had fallen in love with his
uncle; he fancied she ought to have done so too; and from his excess of
sympathy he found her deficient in it.

He sat himself down to write a hearty letter to his 'dear old uncle
Everard.'

Jenny left him, to go to her chamber and cry.




CHAPTER LIV

THE FRUITS OF THE APOLOGY

This clear heart had cause for tears. Her just indignation with Lord
Romfrey had sustained her artificially hitherto now that it was erased,
she sank down to weep. Her sentiments toward Lydiard had been very like
Cecilia Halkett's in favour of Mr. Austin; with something more to warm
them on the part of the gentleman. He first had led her mind in the
direction of balanced thought, when, despite her affection for Dr.
Shrapnel, her timorous maiden wits, unable to contend with the copious
exclamatory old politician, opposed him silently. Lydiard had helped her
tongue to speak, as well as her mind to rational views; and there had
been a bond of union in common for them in his admiration of her father's
writings. She had known that he was miserably yoked, and had respected
him when he seemed inclined for compassion without wooing her for
tenderness. He had not trifled with her, hardly flattered; he had done no
more than kindle a young girl's imaginative liking. The pale flower of
imagination, fed by dews, not by sunshine, was born drooping, and hung
secret in her bosom, shy as a bell of the frail wood-sorrel. Yet there
was pain for her in the perishing of a thing so poor and lowly. She had
not observed the change in Lydiard after Beauchamp came on the scene: and
that may tell us how passionlessly pure the little maidenly sentiment
was. For do but look on the dewy wood-sorrel flower; it is not violet or
rose inviting hands to pluck it: still it is there, happy in the woods.
And Jenny's feeling was that a foot had crushed it.

She wept, thinking confusedly of Lord Romfrey; trying to think he had
made his amends tardily, and that Beauchamp prized him too highly for the
act. She had no longer anything to resent: she was obliged to weep. In
truth, as the earl had noticed, she was physically depressed by the
strain of her protracted watch over Beauchamp, as well as rather
heartsick.

But she had been of aid and use in saving him! She was not quite a
valueless person; sweet, too, was the thought that he consulted her,
listened to her, weighed her ideas. He had evidently taken to study her,
as if dispersing some wonderment that one of her sex should have ideas.
He had repeated certain of her own which had been forgotten by her. His
eyes were often on her with this that she thought humorous intentness.
She smiled. She had assisted in raising him from his bed of sickness,
whereof the memory affrighted her and melted her. The difficulty now was
to keep him indoors, and why he would not go even temporarily to a large
house like Mount Laurels, whither Colonel Halkett was daily requesting
him to go, she was unable to comprehend. His love of Dr. Shrapnel might
account for it.

'Own, Jenny,' said Beauchamp, springing up to meet her as she entered the
room where he and Dr. Shrapnel sat discussing Lord Romfrey's bearing at
his visit, 'own that my uncle Everard is a true nobleman. He has to make
the round to the right mark, but he comes to it. I could not move
him--and I like him the better for that. He worked round to it himself. I
ought to have been sure he would. You're right: I break my head with
impatience.'

'No; you sowed seed,' said Dr. Shrapnel. 'Heed not that girl, my
Beauchamp. The old woman's in the Tory, and the Tory leads the young
maid. Here's a fable I draw from a Naturalist's book, and we'll set it
against the dicta of Jenny Do-nothing, Jenny Discretion, Jenny
Wait-for-the-Gods: Once upon a time in a tropical island a man lay sick;
so ill that he could not rise to trouble his neighbours for help; so weak
that it was lifting a mountain to get up from his bed; so hopeless of
succour that the last spark of distraught wisdom perching on his brains
advised him to lie where he was and trouble not himself, since peace at
least he could command, before he passed upon the black highroad men call
our kingdom of peace: ay, he lay there. Now it chanced that this man had
a mess to cook for his nourishment. And life said, Do it, and death said,
To what end? He wrestled with the stark limbs of death, and cooked the
mess; and that done he had no strength remaining to him to consume it,
but crept to his bed like the toad into winter. Now, meanwhile a steam
arose from the mess, and he lay stretched. So it befel that the birds of
prey of the region scented the mess, and they descended and thronged at
that man's windows. And the man's neighbours looked up at them, for it
was the sign of one who is fit for the beaks of birds, lying unburied.
Fail to spread the pall one hour where suns are decisive, and the pall
comes down out of heaven! They said, The man is dead within. And they
went to his room, and saw him and succoured him. They lifted him out of
death by the last uncut thread.

'Now, my Jenny Weigh-words, Jenny Halt-there! was it they who saved the
man, or he that saved himself? The man taxed his expiring breath to sow
seed of life. Lydiard shall put it into verse for a fable in song for our
people. I say it is a good fable, and sung spiritedly may serve for
nourishment, and faith in work, to many of our poor fainting fellows! Now
you?'

Jenny said: 'I think it is a good fable of self-help. Does it quite
illustrate the case? I mean, the virtue of impatience. But I like the
fable and the moral; and I think it would do good if it were made
popular, though it would be hard to condense it to a song.'

'It would be hard! ay, then we do it forthwith. And you shall compose the
music. As for the "case of impatience," my dear, you tether the soaring
universal to your pet-lamb's post, the special. I spoke of seed sown. I
spoke of the fruits of energy and resolution. Cared I for an apology? I
took the blows as I take hail from the clouds--which apologize to you the
moment you are in shelter, if you laugh at them. So, good night to that
matter! Are we to have rain this evening? I must away into Bevisham to
the Workmen's Hall, and pay the men.'

'There will not be rain; there will be frost, and you must be well
wrapped if you must go,' said Jenny. 'And tell them not to think of
deputations to Captain Beauchamp yet.'

'No, no deputations; let them send Killick, if they want to say
anything,' said Beauchamp.

'Wrong!' the doctor cried; 'wrong! wrong! Six men won't hurt you more
than one. And why check them when their feelings are up? They burn to be
speaking some words to you. Trust me, Beauchamp, if we shun to encounter
the good warm soul of numbers, our hearts are narrowed to them. The
business of our modern world is to open heart and stretch out arms to
numbers. In numbers we have our sinews; they are our iron and gold.
Scatter them not; teach them the secret of cohesion. Practically, since
they gave you not their entire confidence once, you should not rebuff
them to suspicions of you as aristocrat, when they rise on the effort to
believe a man of, as 'tis called, birth their undivided friend. Meet
them!'

'Send them,' said Beauchamp.

Jenny Denham fastened a vast cloak and a comforter on the doctor's
heedless shoulders and throat, enjoining on him to return in good time
for dinner.

He put his finger to her cheek in reproof of such supererogatory counsel
to a man famous for his punctuality.

The day had darkened.

Beauchamp begged Jenny to play to him on the piano.

'Do you indeed care to have music?' said she. 'I did not wish you to meet
a deputation, because your strength is not yet equal to it. Dr. Shrapnel
dwells on principles, forgetful of minor considerations.'

'I wish thousands did!' cried Beauchamp. 'When you play I seem to hear
ideas. Your music makes me think.'

Jenny lit a pair of candles and set them on the piano. 'Waltzes?' she
asked.

'Call in a puppet-show at once!'

She smiled, turned over some leaves, and struck the opening notes of the
Ninth Symphony of Beethoven, and made her selections.

At the finish he said: 'Now read me your father's poem, "The Hunt of the
Fates."'

She read it to him.

'Now read, "The Ascent from the Inferno."'

That she read: and also 'Soul and Brute,' another of his favourites.

He wanted more, and told her to read 'First Love--Last Love.'

'I fear I have not the tone of voice for love-poems,' Jenny said,
returning the book to him.

'I'll read it,' said he.

He read with more impressiveness than effect. Lydiard's reading thrilled
her: Beauchamp's insisted too much on particular lines. But it was worth
while observing him. She saw him always as in a picture, remote from
herself. His loftier social station and strange character precluded any
of those keen suspicions by which women learn that a fire is beginning to
glow near them.

'How I should like to have known your father!' he said. 'I don't wonder
at Dr. Shrapnel's love of him. Yes, he was one of the great men of his
day! and it's a higher honour to be of his blood than any that rank can
give. You were ten years old when you lost him. Describe him to me.'

'He used to play with me like a boy,' said Jenny. She described her
father from a child's recollection of him.

'Dr. Shrapnel declares he would have been one of the first surgeons in
Europe: and he was one of the first of poets,' Beauchamp pursued with
enthusiasm. 'So he was doubly great. I hold a good surgeon to be in the
front rank of public benefactors--where they put rich brewers, bankers,
and speculative manufacturers now. Well! the world is young. We shall
alter that in time. Whom did your father marry?'

Jenny answered, 'My mother was the daughter of a London lawyer. She
married without her father's approval of the match, and he left her
nothing.'

Beauchamp interjected: 'Lawyer's money!'

'It would have been useful to my mother's household when I was an
infant,' said Jenny.

'Poor soul! I suppose so. Yes; well,' Beauchamp sighed. 'Money! never
mind how it comes. We're in such a primitive condition that we catch at
anything to keep us out of the cold; dogs with a bone!--instead of
living, as Dr. Shrapnel prophecies, for and, with one another. It's war
now, and money's the weapon of war. And we're the worst nation in Europe
for that. But if we fairly recognize it, we shall be the first to alter
our ways. There's the point. Well, Jenny, I can look you in the face
to-night. Thanks to my uncle Everard at last!'

'Captain Beauchamp, you have never been blamed.'

'I am Captain Beauchamp by courtesy, in public. My friends call me Nevil.
I think I have heard the name on your lips?'

'When you were very ill.'

He stood closer to her, very close.

'Which was the arm that bled for me? May I look at it? There was a
bruise.'

'Have you not forgotten that trifle? There is the faintest possible mark
of it left.'

'I wish to see.'

She gently defended the arm, but he made it so much a matter of earnest
to see the bruise of the old Election missile on her fair arm, that, with
a pardonable soft blush, to avoid making much of it herself, she turned
her sleeve a little above the wrist. He took her hand.

'It was for me!'

'It was quite an accident: no harm was intended.'

'But it was in my cause--for me!'

'Indeed, Captain Beauchamp . . .'

'Nevil, we say indoors.'

'Nevil--but is it not wiser to say what comes naturally to us?'

'Who told you to-day that you had brought me to life? I am here to prove
it true. If I had paid attention to your advice, I should not have gone
into the cottage of those poor creatures and taken away the fever. I did
no good there. But the man's wife said her husband had been ruined by
voting for me: and it was a point of honour to go in and sit with him.
You are not to have your hand back: it is mine. Don't you remember,
Jenny, how you gave me your arm on the road when I staggered; two days
before the fever knocked me over? Shall I tell you what I thought then? I
thought that he who could have you for a mate would have the bravest and
helpfullest wife in all England. And not a mere beauty, for you have good
looks: but you have the qualities I have been in search of. Why do your
eyes look so mournfully at me? I am full of hope. We'll sail the
Esperanza for the Winter: you and I, and our best friend with us. And you
shall have a voice in the council, be sure.'

'If you are two to one?' Jenny said quickly, to keep from faltering.

Beauchamp pressed his mouth to the mark of the bruise on her arm. He held
her fast.

'I mean it, if you will join me, that you and I should rejoice the heart
of the dear old man--will you? He has been brooding over your loneliness
here if you are unmarried, ever since his recovery. I owe my life to you,
and every debt of gratitude to him. Now, Jenny!'

'Oh! Captain Beauchamp--Nevil, if you will . . . if I may have my hand.
You exaggerate common kindness. He loves you. We both esteem you.'

'But you don't love me?'

'Indeed I have no fear that I shall be unable to support myself, if I am
left alone.'

'But I want your help. I wake from illness with my eyes open. I must have
your arm to lean on now and then.'

Jenny dropped a shivering sigh.

'Uncle is long absent!' she said.

Her hand was released. Beauchamp inspected his watch.

'He may have fallen! He may be lying on the common!'

'Oh!' cried Jenny, 'why did I let him go out without me?'

'Let me have his lantern; I'll go and search over the common.'

'You must not go out,' said she.

'I must. The old man may be perishing.'

'It will be death to you . . . Nevil!'

'That 's foolish. I can stand the air for a few minutes.'

'I 'll go,' said Jenny.

'Unprotected? No.'

'Cook shall come with me.'

'Two women!'

'Nevil, if you care a little for me, be good, be kind, submit.'

'He is half an hour behind dinner-time, and he's never late. Something
must have happened to him. Way for me, my dear girl.'

She stood firm between him and the door. It came to pass that she
stretched her hands to arrest him, and he seized the hands.

'Rather than you should go out in this cold weather, anything!' she said,
in the desperation of physical inability to hold him back.

'Ah!' Beauchamp crossed his arms round her. 'I'll wait for five minutes.'

One went by, with Jenny folded, broken and sobbing, senseless, against
his breast.

They had not heard Dr. Shrapnel quietly opening the hall door and hanging
up his hat. He looked in.

'Beauchamp!' he exclaimed.

'Come, doctor,' said Beauchamp, and loosened his clasp of Jenny
considerately.

She disengaged herself.

'Beauchamp! now I die a glad man.'

'Witness, doctor, she 's mine by her own confession.'

'Uncle!' Jenny gasped. 'Oh! Captain Beauchamp, what an error! what
delusion! . . . Forget it. I will. Here are more misunderstandings! You
shall be excused. But be . . .'

'Be you the blessedest woman alive on this earth, my Jenny!' shouted Dr.
Shrapnel. 'You have the choice man on all the earth for husband,
sweetheart! Ay, of all the earth! I go with a message for my old friend
Harry Denham, to quicken him in the grave; for the husband of his girl is
Nevil Beauchamp! The one thing I dared not dream of thousands is
established. Sunlight, my Jenny!'

Beauchamp kissed her hand.

She slipped away to her chamber, grovelling to find her diminished self
somewhere in the mid-thunder of her amazement, as though it were to
discover a pin on the floor by the flash of lightning. Where was she!

This ensued from the apology of Lord Romfrey to Dr. Shrapnel.




CHAPTER LV

WITHOUT LOVE

At the end of November, Jenny Denham wrote these lines to Mr. Lydiard, in
reply to his request that she should furnish the latest particulars of
Nevil Beauchamp, for the satisfaction of the Countess of Romfrey:

'There is everything to reassure Lady Romfrey in the state of Captain
Beauchamp's health, and I have never seen him so placidly happy as he has
been since the arrival, yesterday morning, of a lady from France, Madame
la Marquise de Rouaillout, with her brother, M. le Comte de Croisnel. Her
husband, I hear from M. de Croisnel, dreads our climate and coffee too
much to attempt the voyage. I understand that she writes to Lady Romfrey
to-day. Lady Romfrey's letter to her, informing her of Captain
Beauchamp's alarming illness, went the round from Normandy to Touraine
and Dauphiny, otherwise she would have come over earlier.

'Her first inquiry of me was, "Il est mort?" You would have supposed her
disappointed by my answer. A light went out in her eyes, like that of a
veilleuse in the dawn. She looked at me without speaking, while her
beautiful eyes regained their natural expression. She shut them and
sighed. "Tell him that M. de Croisnel and his sister are here."

'This morning her wish to see Miss Halkett was gratified. You know my
taste was formed in France; I agree with Captain Beauchamp in his more
than admiration of Frenchwomen; ours, though more accomplished, are
colder and less plastic. But Miss Halkett is surpassingly beautiful, very
amiable, very generous, a perfect friend. She is our country at its best.
Probably she is shy of speaking French; she frequently puts the Italian
accent. Madame de Rouaillout begged to speak with her alone: I do not
know what passed. Miss Halkett did not return to us.

'Dr. Shrapnel and Captain Beauchamp have recently been speculating on our
becoming a nation of artists, and authorities in science and philosophy,
by the time our coalfields and material wealth are exhausted. That, and
the cataclysm, are their themes.

'They say, will things end utterly?--all our gains be lost? The question
seems to me to come of that love of earth which is recognition of God:
for if they cannot reconcile themselves to believe in extinction, to what
must they be looking? It is a confirmation of your saying, that love
leads to God, through art or in acts.

'You will regret to hear that the project of Captain Beauchamp's voyage
is in danger of being abandoned. A committee of a vacant Radical borough
has offered to nominate him. My influence is weak; madame would have him
go back with her and her brother to Normandy. My influence is weak, I
suppose, because he finds me constantly leaning to expediency--I am your
pupil. It may be quite correct that powder is intended for explosion we
do not therefore apply a spark to the barrel. I ventured on that. He
pitied me in the snares of simile and metaphor. He is the same, you
perceive. How often have we not discussed what would have become of him,
with that "rocket brain" of his, in less quiet times! Yet, when he was
addressing a deputation of workmen the other day, he recommended patience
to them as one of the virtues that count under wisdom. He is curiously
impatient for knowledge. One of his reasons for not accepting Colonel
Halkett's offer of his yacht is, that he will not be able to have books
enough on board. Definite instead of vast and hazy duties are to be
desired for him, I think. Most fervently I pray that he will obtain a
ship and serve some years. At the risk of your accusing me of
"sententious posing," I would say, that men who do not live in the
present chiefly, but hamper themselves with giant tasks in excess of
alarm for the future, however devoted and noble they may be--and he is an
example of one that is--reduce themselves to the dimensions of pigmies;
they have the cry of infants. You reply, Foresight is an element of love
of country and mankind. But how often is not the foresight guess-work?
'He has not spoken of the DAWN project. To-day he is repeating one of
uncle's novelties--"Sultry Tories." The sultry Tory sits in the sun and
prophecies woefully of storm, it appears. Your accusation that I am one
at heart amuses me; I am not quite able to deny it. "Sultriness" I am not
conscious of. But it would appear to be an epithet for the Conservatives
of wealth. So that England, being very wealthy, we are to call it a
sultry country? You are much wanted, for where there is no "middleman
Liberal" to hold the scales for them, these two have it all their own
way, which is not good for them.

Captain Beauchamp quotes you too. It seems that you once talked to him of
a machine for measuring the force of blows delivered with the fist, and
compared his efforts to those of one perpetually practising at it: and
this you are said to have called "The case of the Constitutional Realm
and the extreme Radical." Elsewhere the Radical smites at iron or rotten
wood; in England it is a cushion on springs. Did you say it? He quotes it
as yours, half acquiescingly, and ruefully.

'For visitors, we have had Captain Baskelett for two minutes, and Lord
Palmet, who stayed longer, and seems to intend to come daily. He attempts
French with Madame de R., and amuses her a little: a silver foot and a
ball of worsted. Mr. and Mrs. Grancey Lespel have called, and Lord and
Lady Croyston. Colonel Halkett, Miss Halkett, and Mr. Tuckham come
frequently. Captain Beauchamp spoke to her yesterday of her marriage.
'Madame de R. leaves us to-morrow. Her brother is a delightful,
gay-tempered, very handsome boyish Frenchman--not her equal, to my mind,
for I do not think Frenchmen comparable to the women of France; but she
is exceedingly grave, with hardly a smile, and his high spirits excite
Nevil's, so it is pleasant to see them together.'

The letter was handed to Lady Romfrey. She read through it thoughtfully
till she came to the name of Nevil, when she frowned. On the morrow she
pronounced it a disingenuous letter. Renee had sent her these lines:

'I should come to you if my time were not restricted; my brother's leave
of absence is short. I have done here what lay in my power, to show you I
have learnt something in the school of self-immolation. I have seen Mlle.
Halkett. She is a beautiful young woman, deficient only in words,
doubtless. My labour, except that it may satisfy you, was the vainest of
tasks. She marries a ruddy monsieur of a name that I forget, and of the
bearing of a member of the gardes du corps, without the stature. Enfin,
madame, I have done my duty, and do not regret it, since I may hope that
it will win for me some approbation and a portion of the esteem of a lady
to whom I am indebted for that which is now the best of life to me: and I
do not undervalue it in saying I would gladly have it stamped on brass
and deposited beside my father's. I have my faith. I would it were
Nevil's too--and yours, should you be in need of it.

'He will marry Mlle. Denham. If I may foretell events, she will steady
him. She is a young person who will not feel astray in society of his
rank; she possesses the natural grace we do not expect to see out of our
country--from sheer ignorance of what is beyond it. For the moment she
affects to consider herself unworthy; and it is excuseable that she
should be slightly alarmed at her prospect. But Nevil must have a wife. I
presume to think that he could not have chosen better. Above all, make
him leave England for the Winter. Adieu, dear countess. Nevil promises me
a visit after his marriage. I shall not set foot on England again: but
you, should you ever come to our land of France, will find my heart open
to you at the gates of undying grateful recollection. I am not skilled in
writing. You have looked into me once; look now; I am the same. Only I
have succeeded in bringing myself to a greater likeness to the dead, as
it becomes a creature to be who is coupled with one of their body.
Meanwhile I shall have news of you. I trust that soon I may be warranted
in forwarding congratulations to Lord Romfrey.'

Rosamund handed the letters to her husband. Not only did she think Miss
Denham disingenuous, she saw that the girl was not in love with
Beauchamp: and the idea of a loveless marriage for him threw the
mournfullest of Hecate's beams along the course of a career that the
passionate love of a bride, though she were not well-born and not
wealthy, would have rosily coloured.

'Without love!' she exclaimed to herself. She asked the earl's opinion of
the startling intelligence, and of the character of that Miss Denham, who
could pen such a letter, after engaging to give her hand to Nevil.

Lord Romfrey laughed in his dumb way. 'If Nevil must have a wife--and the
marquise tells you so, and she ought to know--he may as well marry a girl
who won't go all the way down hill with him at his pace. He'll be
cogged.'

'You do not object to such an alliance?'

'I 'm past objection. There's no law against a man's marrying his nurse.'

'But she is not even in love with him!'

'I dare say not. He wants a wife: she accepts a husband. The two women
who were in love with him he wouldn't have.'

Lady Romfrey sighed deeply: 'He has lost Cecilia! She might still have
been his: but he has taken to that girl. And Madame de Rouaillout praises
the girl because--oh! I see it--she has less to be jealous of in Miss
Denham: of whose birth and blood we know nothing. Let that pass! If only
she loved him! I cannot endure the thought of his marrying a girl who is
not in love with him.'

'Just as you like, my dear.'

'I used to suspect Mr. Lydiard.'

'Perhaps he's the man.'

'Oh, what an end of so brilliant a beginning!'

'It strikes me, my dear,' said the earl, 'it's the proper common sense
beginning that may have a fairish end.'

'No, but what I feel is that he--our Nevil!--has accomplished hardly
anything, if anything!'

'He hasn't marched on London with a couple of hundred thousand men: no,
he hasn't done that,' the earl said, glancing back in his mind through
Beauchamp's career. 'And he escapes what Stukely calls his nation's
scourge, in the shape of a statue turned out by an English chisel. No: we
haven't had much public excitement out of him. But one thing he did do:
he got me down on my knees!'

Lord Romfrey pronounced these words with a sober emphasis that struck the
humour of it sharply into Rosamund's heart, through some contrast it
presented between Nevil's aim at the world and hit of a man: the immense
deal thought of it by the earl, and the very little that Nevil would
think of it--the great domestic achievement to be boasted of by an
enthusiastic devotee of politics!

She embraced her husband with peals of loving laughter: the last laughter
heard in Romfrey Castle for many a day.




CHAPTER LVI

THE LAST OF NEVIL BEAUCHAMP

Not before Beauchamp was flying with the Winter gales to warmer climes
could Rosamund reflect on his career unshadowed by her feminine
mortification at the thought that he was unloved by the girl he had
decided to marry. But when he was away and winds blew, the clouds which
obscured an embracing imagination of him--such as, to be true and full
and sufficient, should stretch like the dome of heaven over the humblest
of lives under contemplation--broke, and revealed him to her as one who
had other than failed: rather as one in mid career, in mid forest, who,
by force of character, advancing in self-conquest, strikes his impress
right and left around him, because of his aim at stars. He had faults,
and she gloried to think he had; for the woman's heart rejoiced in his
portion of our common humanity while she named their prince to men: but
where was he to be matched in devotedness and in gallantry? and what man
of blood fiery as Nevil's ever fought so to subject it? Rosamund followed
him like a migratory bird, hovered over his vessel, perched on deck
beside the helm, where her sailor was sure to be stationed, entered his
breast, communed with him, and wound him round and round with her love.
He has mine! she cried. Her craving that he should be blest in the
reward, or flower-crown, of his wife's love of him lessened in proportion
as her brooding spirit vividly realized his deeds. In fact it had been
but an example of our very general craving for a climax, palpable and
scenic. She was completely satisfied by her conviction that his wife
would respect and must be subordinate to him. So it had been with her. As
for love, let him come to his Rosamund for love, and appreciation,
adoration!

Rosamund drew nigh to her hour of peril with this torch of her love of
Beauchamp to illuminate her.

There had been a difficulty in getting him to go. One day Cecilia walked
down to Dr. Shrapnel's with Mr. Tuckham, to communicate that the
Esperanza awaited Captain Beauchamp, manned and provisioned, off the
pier. Now, he would not go without Dr. Shrapnel, nor the doctor without
Jenny; and Jenny could not hold back, seeing that the wish of her heart
was for Nevil to be at sea, untroubled by political questions and
prowling Radical deputies. So her consent was the seal of the voyage.
What she would not consent to, was the proposal to have her finger ringed
previous to the voyage, altogether in the manner of a sailor's bride. She
seemed to stipulate for a term of courtship. Nevil frankly told the
doctor that he was not equal to it; anything that was kind he was quite
ready to say; and anything that was pretty: but nothing particularly kind
and pretty occurred to him: he was exactly like a juvenile correspondent
facing a blank sheet of letter paper:--he really did not know what to
say, further than the uncomplicated exposition of his case, that he
wanted a wife and had found the very woman. How, then, fathom Jenny's
mood for delaying? Dr. Shrapnel's exhortations were so worded as to
induce her to comport herself like a Scriptural woman, humbly wakeful to
the surpassing splendour of the high fortune which had befallen her in
being so selected, and obedient at a sign. But she was, it appeared that
she was, a maid of scaly vision, not perceptive of the blessedness of her
lot. She could have been very little perceptive, for she did not
understand his casual allusion to Beauchamp's readiness to overcome 'a
natural repugnance,' for the purpose of making her his wife.

Up to the last moment, before Cecilia Halkett left the deck of the
Esperanza to step on the pier, Jenny remained in vague but excited
expectation of something intervening to bring Cecilia and Beauchamp
together. It was not a hope; it was with pure suspense that she awaited
the issue. Cecilia was pale. Beauchamp shook Mr. Tuckham by the hand, and
said: 'I shall not hear the bells, but send me word of it, will you?' and
he wished them both all happiness.

The sails of the schooner filled. On a fair frosty day, with a light wind
ruffling from the North-west, she swept away, out of sight of Bevisham,
and the island, into the Channel, to within view of the coast of France.
England once below the water-line, alone with Beauchamp and Dr. Shrapnel,
Jenny Denham knew her fate.

As soon as that grew distinctly visible in shape and colour, she ceased
to be reluctant. All about her, in air and sea and unknown coast, was
fresh and prompting. And if she looked on Beauchamp, the thought--my
husband! palpitated, and destroyed and re-made her. Rapidly she underwent
her transformation from doubtfully-minded woman to woman awakening
clear-eyed, and with new sweet shivers in her temperate blood, like the
tremulous light seen running to the morn upon a quiet sea. She fell under
the charm of Beauchamp at sea.

In view of the island of Madeira, Jenny noticed that some trouble had
come upon Dr. Shrapnel and Beauchamp, both of whom had been hilarious
during the gales; but sailing into Summer they began to wear that look
which indicated one of their serious deliberations. She was not taken
into their confidence, and after awhile they recovered partially.

The truth was, they had been forced back upon old English ground by a
recognition of the absolute necessity, for her sake, of handing
themselves over to a parson. In England, possibly, a civil marriage might
have been proposed to the poor girl. In a foreign island, they would be
driven not simply to accept the services of a parson, but to seek him and
solicit him: otherwise the knot, faster than any sailor's in binding,
could not be tied. Decidedly it could not; and how submit? Neither Dr.
Shrapnel nor Beauchamp were of a temper to deceive the clerical
gentleman; only they had to think of Jenny's feelings. Alas for us!--this
our awful baggage in the rear of humanity, these women who have not moved
on their own feet one step since the primal mother taught them to suckle,
are perpetually pulling us backward on the march. Slaves of custom,
forms, shows and superstitions, they are slaves of the priests. 'They are
so in gratitude perchance, as the matter works,' Dr. Shrapnel admitted.
For at one period the priests did cherish and protect the weak from
animal man. But we have entered a broader daylight now, when the sun of
high heaven has crowned our structure with the flower of brain, like him
to scatter mists, and penetrate darkness, and shoot from end to end of
earth; and must we still be grinning subserviently to ancient usages and
stale forms, because of a baggage that it is, woe to us! too true, we
cannot cut ourselves loose from? Lydiard might say we are compelling the
priests to fight, and that they are compact foemen, not always passive.
Battle, then!--The cry was valiant. Nevertheless, Jenny would certainly
insist upon the presence of a parson, in spite of her bridegroom's
'natural repugnance.' Dr. Shrapnel offered to argue it with her, being of
opinion that a British consul could satisfactorily perform the ceremony.
Beauchamp knew her too well. Moreover, though tongue-tied as to
love-making, he was in a hurry to be married. Jenny's eyes were lovely,
her smiles were soft; the fair promise of her was in bloom on her face
and figure. He could not wait; he must off to the parson.

Then came the question as to whether honesty and honour did not impose it
on them to deal openly with that gentle, and on such occasions
unobtrusive official, by means of a candid statement to him overnight, to
the effect that they were the avowed antagonists of his Church, which
would put him on his defence, and lead to an argument that would
accomplish his overthrow. You parsons, whose cause is good, marshal out
the poor of the land, that we may see the sort of army your stewardship
has gained for you. What! no army? only women and hoary men? And in the
rear rank, to support you as an institution, none but fanatics, cowards,
white-eyeballed dogmatists, timeservers, money-changers, mockers in their
sleeves? What is this?

But the prospect of so completely confounding the unfortunate parson
warned Beauchamp that he might have a shot in his locker: the parson
heavily trodden on will turn. 'I suppose we must be hypocrites,' he said
in dejection. Dr. Shrapnel was even more melancholy. He again offered to
try his persuasiveness upon Jenny. Beauchamp declined to let her be
disturbed.

She did not yield so very lightly to the invitation to go before a
parson. She had to be wooed after all; a Harry Hotspur's wooing. Three
clergymen of the Established Church were on the island: 'And where won't
they be, where there's fine scenery and comforts abound?' Beauchamp said
to the doctor ungratefully.

'Whether a celibate clergy ruins the Faith faster than a non-celibate, I
won't dispute,' replied the doctor; 'but a non-celibate interwinds with
us, and is likely to keep up a one-storied edifice longer.'

Jenny hesitated. She was a faltering unit against an ardent and
imperative two in the council. And Beauchamp had shown her a letter of
Lady Romfrey's very clearly signifying that she and her lord anticipated
tidings of the union. Marrying Beauchamp was no simple adventure. She
feared in her bosom, and resigned herself.

She had a taste of what it was to be, at the conclusion of the service.
Beauchamp thanked the good-natured clergyman, and spoke approvingly of
him to his bride, as an agreeable well-bred gentlemanly person. Then,
fronting her and taking both her hands: 'Now, my darling,' he said: 'you
must pledge me your word to this: I have stooped my head to the parson,
and I am content to have done that to win you, though I don't think much
of myself for doing it. I can't look so happy as I am. And this idle
ceremony--however, I thank God I have you, and I thank you for taking me.
But you won't expect me to give in to the parson again.'

'But, Nevil,' she said, fearing what was to come: 'they are gentlemen,
good men.'

'Yes, yes.'

'They are educated men, Nevil.'

'Jenny! Jenny Beauchamp, they're not men, they're Churchmen. My
experience of the priest in our country is, that he has abandoned--he 's
dead against the only cause that can justify and keep up a Church: the
cause of the poor--the people. He is a creature of the moneyed class. I
look on him as a pretender. I go through his forms, to save my wife from
annoyance, but there 's the end of it: and if ever I'm helpless, unable
to resist him, I rely on your word not to let him intrude; he's to have
nothing to do with the burial of me. He's against the cause of the
people. Very well: I make my protest to the death against him. When he's
a Christian instead of a Churchman, then may my example not be followed.
It 's little use looking for that.'

Jenny dropped some tears on her bridal day. She sighed her submission.
'So long as you do not change,' said she.

'Change!' cried Nevil. 'That's for the parson. Now it's over: we start
fair. My darling! I have you. I don't mean to bother you. I'm sure you'll
see that the enemies of Reason are the enemies of the human race; you
will see that. I can wait.'

'If we can be sure that we ourselves are using reason rightly,
Nevil!--not prejudice.'

'Of course. But don't you see, my Jenny, we have no interest in opposing
reason?'

'But have we not all grown up together? And is it just or wise to direct
our efforts to overthrow a solid structure that is a part . . . ?'

He put his legal right in force to shut her mouth, telling her presently
she might Lydiardize as much as she liked. While practising this mastery,
he assured her he would always listen to her: yes, whether she
Lydiardized, or what Dr. Shrapnel called Jenny-prated.

'That is to say, dear Nevil, that you have quite made up your mind to a
toddling chattering little nursery wife?'

Very much the contrary to anything of the sort, he declared; and he
proved his honesty by announcing an immediate reflection that had come to
him: 'How oddly things are settled! Cecilia Halkett and Tuckham; you and
I! Now, I know for certain that I have brought Cecilia Halkett out of her
woman's Toryism, and given her at least liberal views, and she goes and
marries an arrant Tory; while you, a bit of a Tory at heart, more than
anything else, have married an ultra.'

'Perhaps we may hope that the conflict will be seasonable on both
sides?--if you give me fair play, Nevil!'

As fair play as a woman's lord could give her, she was to have; with
which, adieu to argumentation and controversy, and all the thanks in life
to the parson! On a lovely island, free from the seductions of care,
possessing a wife who, instead of starting out of romance and poetry with
him to the supreme honeymoon, led him back to those forsaken valleys of
his youth, and taught him the joys of colour and sweet companionship,
simple delights, a sister mind, with a loveliness of person and nature
unimagined by him, Beauchamp drank of a happiness that neither Renee nor
Cecilia had promised. His wooing of Jenny Beauchamp was a flattery richer
than any the maiden Jenny Denham could have deemed her due; and if his
wonder in experiencing such strange gladness was quaintly ingenuous, it
was delicious to her to see and know full surely that he who was at
little pains to court, or please, independently of the agency of the
truth in him, had come to be her lover through being her husband.

Here I would stop. It is Beauchamp's career that carries me on to its
close, where the lanterns throw their beams off the mudbanks by the black
riverside; when some few English men and women differed from the world in
thinking that it had suffered a loss.

They sorrowed for the earl when tidings came to them of the loss of his
child, alive one hour in his arms. Rosamund caused them to be deceived as
to her condition. She survived; she wrote to Jenny, bidding her keep her
husband cruising. Lord Romfrey added a brief word: he told Nevil that he
would see no one for the present; hoped he would be absent a year, not a
day less. To render it the more easily practicable, in the next packet of
letters Colonel Halkett and Cecilia begged them not to bring the
Esperanza home for the yachting season: the colonel said his daughter was
to be married in April, and that bridegroom and bride had consented to
take an old man off with them to Italy; perhaps in the autumn all might
meet in Venice.

'And you've never seen Venice,' Beauchamp said to Jenny.

'Everything is new to me,' said she, penetrating and gladly joining the
conspiracy to have him out of England.

Dr. Shrapnel was not so compliant as the young husband. Where he could
land and botanize, as at Madeira, he let time fly and drum his wings on
air, but the cities of priests along the coast of Portugal and Spain
roused him to a burning sense of that flight of time and the vacuity it
told of in his labours. Greatly to his astonishment, he found that it was
no longer he and Beauchamp against Jenny, but Jenny and Beauchamp against
him.

'What!' he cried, 'to draw breath day by day, and not to pay for it by
striking daily at the rock Iniquity? Are you for that, Beauchamp? And in
a land where these priests walk with hats curled like the water-lily's
leaf without the flower? How far will you push indolent unreason to gain
the delusion of happiness? There is no such thing: but there's trance.
That talk of happiness is a carrion clamour of the creatures of prey.
Take it--and you're helping tear some poor wretch to pieces, whom you
might be constructing, saving perchance: some one? some thousands! You,
Beauchamp, when I met you first, you were for England, England! for a
breadth of the palm of my hand comparatively--the round of a copper
penny, no wider! And from that you jumped at a bound to the round of this
earth: you were for humanity. Ay, we sailed our planet among the icy
spheres, and were at blood-heat for its destiny, you and I! And now you
hover for a wind to catch you. So it is for a soul rejecting prayer. This
wind and that has it: the well-springs within are shut down fast! I
pardon my Jenny, my Harry Denham's girl. She is a woman, and has a brain
like a bell that rings all round to the tongue. It is her kingdom, of the
interdicted untraversed frontiers. But what cares she, or any woman, that
this Age of ours should lie like a carcase against the Sun? What cares
any woman to help to hold up Life to him? He breeds divinely upon life,
filthy upon stagnation. Sail you away, if you will, in your trance. I go.
I go home by land alone, and I await you. Here in this land of moles
upright, I do naught but execrate; I am a pulpit of curses.
Counter-anathema, you might call me.'

'Oh! I feel the comparison so, for England shining spiritually bright,'
said Jenny, and cut her husband adrift with the exclamation, and saw him
float away to Dr. Shrapnel.

'Spiritually bright!'

'By comparison, Nevil.'

'There's neither spiritual nor political brightness in England, but a
common resolution to eat of good things and stick to them,' said the
doctor: 'and we two out of England, there's barely a voice to cry scare
to the feeders. I'm back! I'm home!'

They lost him once in Cadiz, and discovered him on the quay, looking
about for a vessel. In getting him to return to the Esperanza, they
nearly all three fell into the hands of the police. Beauchamp gave him a
great deal of his time, reading and discussing with him on deck and in
the cabin, and projecting future enterprises, to pacify his restlessness.
A translation of Plato had become Beauchamp's intellectual world. This
philosopher singularly anticipated his ideas. Concerning himself he was
beginning to think that he had many years ahead of him for work. He was
with Dr. Shrapnel, as to the battle, and with Jenny as to the delay in
recommencing it. Both the men laughed at the constant employment she gave
them among the Greek islands in furnishing her severely accurate accounts
of sea-fights and land-fights: and the scenes being before them they
could neither of them protest that their task-work was an idle labour.
Dr. Shrapnel assisted in fighting Marathon and Salamis over again
cordially--to shield Great Britain from the rule of a satrapy.

Beauchamp often tried to conjure words to paint his wife. On grave
subjects she had the manner of speaking of a shy scholar, and between
grave and playful, between smiling and serious, her clear head, her nobly
poised character, seemed to him to have never had a prototype and to
elude the art of picturing it in expression, until he heard Lydiard call
her whimsically, 'Portia disrobing'

Portia half in her doctor's gown, half out of it. They met Lydiard and
his wife Louise, and Mr. and Mrs. Tuckham, in Venice, where, upon the
first day of October, Jenny Beauchamp gave birth to a son. The thrilling
mother did not perceive on this occasion the gloom she cast over the
father of the child and Dr. Shrapnel. The youngster would insist on his
right to be sprinkled by the parson, to get a legal name and please his
mother. At all turns in the history of our healthy relations with women
we are confronted by the parson! 'And, upon my word, I believe,'
Beauchamp said to Lydiard, 'those parsons--not bad creatures in private
life: there was one in Madeira I took a personal liking to--but they're
utterly ignorant of what men feel to them--more ignorant than women!' Mr.
Tuckham and Mrs. Lydiard would not listen to his foolish objections; nor
were they ever mentioned to Jenny. Apparently the commission of the act
of marriage was to force Beauchamp from all his positions one by one.

'The education of that child?' Mrs. Lydiard said to her husband.

He considered that the mother would prevail.

Cecilia feared she would not.

'Depend upon it, he'll make himself miserable if he can,' said Tuckham.

That gentleman, however, was perpetually coming fuming from arguments
with Beauchamp, and his opinion was a controversialist's. His common
sense was much afflicted. 'I thought marriage would have stopped all
those absurdities,' he said, glaring angrily, laughing, and then
frowning. 'I 've warned him I'll go out of my way to come across him if
he carries on his headlong folly. A man should accept his country for
what it is when he's born into it. Don't tell me he's a good fellow. I
know he is, but there 's an ass mounted on the good fellow. Talks of the
parsons! Why, they're men of education.'

'They couldn't steer a ship in a gale, though.'

'Oh! he's a good sailor. And let him go to sea,' said Tuckham. 'His
wife's a prize. He's hardly worthy of her. If she manages him she'll
deserve a monument for doing a public service.'

How fortunate it is for us that here and there we do not succeed in
wresting our temporary treasure from the grasp of the Fates!

This good old commonplace reflection came to Beauchamp while clasping his
wife's hand on the deck of the Esperanza, and looking up at the mountains
over the Gulf of Venice. The impression of that marvellous dawn when he
and Renee looked up hand-in-hand was ineffaceable, and pity for the
tender hand lost to him wrought in his blood, but Jenny was a peerless
wife; and though not in the music of her tongue, or in subtlety of
delicate meaning did she excel Renee, as a sober adviser she did, and as
a firm speaker; and she had homelier deep eyes, thoughtfuller brows. The
father could speculate with good hope of Jenny's child. Cecilia's wealth,
too, had gone over to the Tory party, with her incomprehensible espousal
of Tuckham. Let it go; let all go for dowerless Jenny!

It was (she dared to recollect it in her anguish) Jenny's choice to go
home in the yacht that decided her husband not to make the journey by
land in company with the Lydiards.

The voyage was favourable. Beauchamp had a passing wish to land on the
Norman coast, and take Jenny for a day to Tourdestelle. He deferred to
her desire to land baby speedily, now they were so near home. They ran
past Otley river, having sight of Mount Laurels, and on to Bevisham, with
swelling sails. There they parted. Beauchamp made it one of his 'points
of honour' to deliver the vessel where he had taken her, at her moorings
in the Otley. One of the piermen stood before Beauchamp, and saluting
him, said he had been directed to inform him that the Earl of Romfrey was
with Colonel Halkett, expecting him at Mount Laurels. Beauchamp wanted
his wife to return in the yacht. She turned her eyes to Dr. Shrapnel. It
was out of the question that the doctor should think of going. Husband
and wife parted. She saw him no more.

This is no time to tell of weeping. The dry chronicle is fittest. Hard on
nine o'clock in the December darkness, the night being still and clear,
Jenny's babe was at her breast, and her ears were awake for the return of
her husband. A man rang at the door of the house, and asked to see Dr.
Shrapnel. This man was Killick, the Radical Sam of politics. He said to
the doctor: 'I 'm going to hit you sharp, sir; I've had it myself: please
put on your hat and come out with me; and close the door. They mustn't
hear inside. And here's a fly. I knew you'd be off for the finding of the
body. Commander Beauchamp's drowned.'

Dr. Shrapnel drove round by the shore of the broad water past a great
hospital and ruined abbey to Otley village. Killick had lifted him into
the conveyance, and he lifted him out. Dr. Shrapnel had not spoken a
word. Lights were flaring on the river, illuminating the small craft
sombrely. Men, women, and children crowded the hard and landing-places,
the marshy banks and the decks of colliers and trawlers. Neither Killick
nor Dr. Shrapnel questioned them. The lights were torches and lanterns;
the occupation of the boats moving in couples was the dragging for the
dead.

'O God, let's find his body,' a woman called out.

'Just a word; is it Commander Beauchamp?' Killick said to her.

She was scarcely aware of a question. 'Here, this one,' she said, and
plucked a little boy of eight by the hand close against her side, and
shook him roughly and kissed him.

An old man volunteered information. 'That's the boy. That boy was in his
father's boat out there, with two of his brothers, larking; and he and
another older than him fell overboard; and just then Commander Beauchamp
was rowing by, and I saw him from off here, where I stood, jump up and
dive, and he swam to his boat with one of them, and got him in safe: that
boy: and he dived again after the other, and was down a long time. Either
he burst a vessel or he got cramp, for he'd been rowing himself from the
schooner grounded down at the river-mouth, and must have been hot when he
jumped in: either way, he fetched the second up, and sank with him. Down
he went.'

A fisherman said to Killick: 'Do you hear that voice thundering? That's
the great Lord Romfrey. He's been directing the dragging since five o'
the evening, and will till he drops or drowns, or up comes the body.'

'O God, let's find the body!' the woman with the little boy called out.

A torch lit up Lord Romfrey's face as he stepped ashore. 'The flood has
played us a trick,' he said. 'We want more drags, or with the next ebb
the body may be lost for days in this infernal water.'

The mother of the rescued boy sobbed, 'Oh, my lord, my lord!'

The earl caught sight of Dr. Shrapnel, and went to him.

'My wife has gone down to Mrs. Beauchamp,' he said. 'She will bring her
and the baby to Mount Laurels. The child will have to be hand-fed. I take
you with me. You must not be alone.'

He put his arm within the arm of the heavily-breathing man whom he had
once flung to the ground, to support him.

'My lord! my lord!' sobbed the woman, and dropped on her knees.

'What 's this?' the earl said, drawing his hand away from the woman's
clutch at it.

'She's the mother, my lord,' several explained to him.

'Mother of what?'

'My boy,' the woman cried, and dragged the urchin to Lord Romfrey's feet,
cleaning her boy's face with her apron.

'It's the boy Commander Beauchamp drowned to save,' said a man.

All the lights of the ring were turned on the head of the boy. Dr.
Shrapnel's eyes and Lord Romfrey's fell on the abashed little creature.
The boy struck out both arms to get his fists against his eyelids.

This is what we have in exchange for Beauchamp!

It was not uttered, but it was visible in the blank stare at one another
of the two men who loved Beauchamp, after they had examined the
insignificant bit of mudbank life remaining in this world in the place of
him.




     ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARK

     A cloud of millinery shoots me off a mile from a woman
     A kind of anchorage in case of indiscretion
     A night that had shivered repose
     A tear would have overcome him--She had not wept
     A wound of the same kind that we are inflicting
     A string of pearls: a woman who goes beyond that's in danger
     A dash of conventionalism makes the whole civilized world kin
     A bone in a boy's mind for him to gnaw and worry
     Admires a girl when there's no married woman or widow in sight
     Affectedly gentle and unusually roundabout opening
     After forty, men have married their habits
     Aimlessness of a woman's curiosity
     Alike believe that Providence is for them
     All concessions to the people have been won from fear
     Am I thy master, or thou mine?
     An instinct labouring to supply the deficiencies of stupidity
     An old spoiler of women is worse than one spoiled by them!
     And life said, Do it, and death said, To what end?
     And never did a stroke of work in my life
     And now came war, the purifier and the pestilence
     And one gets the worst of it (in any bargain)
     Anticipate opposition by initiating measures
     Appealed to reason in them; he would not hear of convictions
     Appetite to flourish at the cost of the weaker
     Are we practical?' penetrates the bosom of an English audience
     Art of speaking on politics tersely
     As fair play as a woman's lord could give her
     As to wit, the sneer is the cloak of clumsiness
     As for titles, the way to defend them is to be worthy of them
     Automatic creature is subject to the laws of its construction
     Beauchamp's career
     Beautiful servicelessness
     Better for men of extremely opposite opinions not to meet
     Boys are unjust
     Braggadocioing in deeds is only next bad to mouthing it
     Calm fanaticism of the passion of love
     Canvassing means intimidation or corruption
     Carry a scene through in virtue's name and vice's mask
     Comfortable have to pay in occasional panics for the serenity
     Compassionate sentiments veered round to irate amazement
     Consult the family means--waste your time
     Contemptuous exclusiveness could not go farther
     Convict it by instinct without the ceremony of a jury
     Convictions are generally first impressions
     Cordiality of an extreme relief in leaving
     Country can go on very well without so much speech-making
     Cowardice is even worse for nations than for individual men
     Crazy zigzag of policy in almost every stroke (of history)
     Dark-eyed Renee was not beauty but attraction
     Death within which welcomed a death without
     Decline to practise hypocrisy
     Despises the pomades and curling-irons of modern romance
     Dialectical stiffness
     Dignity of sulking so seductive to the wounded spirit of man
     Discover the writers in a day when all are writing!
     Disqualification of constantly offending prejudices
     Dogs die more decently than we men
     Dreads our climate and coffee too much to attempt the voyage
     Effort to be reticent concerning Nevil, and communicative
     Efforts to weary him out of his project were unsuccessful
     Empty magnanimity which his uncle presented to him
     Energy to something, that was not to be had in a market
     Feigned utter condemnation to make partial comfort acceptable
     Feminine pity, which is nearer to contempt than to tenderness
     Fine eye for celestially directed consequences is ever haunted
     Fit of Republicanism in the nursery
     Forewarn readers of this history that there is no plot in it
     Fretted by his relatives he cannot be much of a giant
     Frozen vanity called pride, which does not seek to be revenged
     Give our courage as hostage for the fulfilment of what we hope
     Give our consciences to the keeping of the parsons
     Given up his brains for a lodging to a single idea
     Good maxim for the wrathful--speak not at all
     Grief of an ill-fortuned passion of his youth
     Had come to be her lover through being her husband
     Half-truth that we may put on the mask of the whole
     Hates a compromise
     Haunted many pillows
     He was too much on fire to know the taste of absurdity
     He condensed a paragraph into a line
     He runs too much from first principles to extremes
     He bowed to facts
     He lost the art of observing himself
     He had expected romance, and had met merchandize
     He smoked, Lord Avonley said of the second departure
     He never calculated on the happening of mortal accidents
     Heights of humour beyond laughter
     Holding to his work after the strain's over--That tells the man
     Hopes of a coming disillusion that would restore him
     How angry I should be with you if you were not so beautiful!
     Humour preserved her from excesses of sentiment
     I can confess my sight to be imperfect: but will you ever do so?
     I do not think Frenchmen comparable to the women of France
     I cannot say less, and will say no more
     If there's no doubt about it, how is it I have a doubt about it?
     Immense wealth and native obtuseness combine to disfigure us
     Impossible for him to think that women thought
     Impudent boy's fling at superiority over the superior
     In India they sacrifice the widows, in France the virgins
     Incessantly speaking of the necessity we granted it unknowingly
     Infallibility of our august mother
     Inflicted no foretaste of her coming subjection to him
     Irony provoked his laughter more than fun
     Irritability at the intrusion of past disputes
     It would be hard! ay, then we do it forthwith
     It is not high flying, which usually ends in heavy falling
     Leader accustomed to count ahead upon vapourish abstractions
     Led him to impress his unchangeableness upon her
     Let none of us be so exalted above the wit of daily life
     Levelling a finger at the taxpayer
     Love, that has risen above emotion, quite independent of craving
     Love's a selfish business one has work in hand
     Made of his creed a strait-jacket for humanity
     Making too much of it--a trick of the vulgar
     Man owes a duty to his class
     Mankind is offended by heterodoxy in mean attire
     Mark of a fool to take everybody for a bigger fool than himself
     Martyrs of love or religion are madmen
     May not one love, not craving to be beloved?
     Men had not pleased him of late
     Mental and moral neuters
     Money's a chain-cable for holding men to their senses
     More argument I cannot bear
     Never was a word fitter for a quack's mouth than "humanity"
     Never pretend to know a girl by her face
     No heart to dare is no heart to love!
     No case is hopeless till a man consents to think it is
     No stopping the Press while the people have an appetite for it
     No man has a firm foothold who pretends to it
     None but fanatics, cowards, white-eyeballed dogmatists
     Oggler's genial piety made him shrink with nausea
     On which does the eye linger longest--which draws the heart?
     Once called her beautiful; his praise had given her beauty
     Oratory will not work against the stream, or on languid tides
     Parliament, is the best of occupations for idle men
     Passion is not invariably love
     Past fairness, vaguely like a snow landscape in the thaw
     Peace-party which opposed was the actual cause of the war
     Peculiar subdued form of laughter through the nose
     People with whom a mute conformity is as good as worship
     People is one of your Radical big words that burst at a query
     Planting the past in the present like a perceptible ghost
     Play the great game of blunders
     Please to be pathetic on that subject after I am wrinkled
     Pleasure-giving laws that make the curves we recognize as beauty
     Politics as well as the other diseases
     Practical or not, the good people affectingly wish to be
     Prayer for an object is the cajolery of an idol
     Press, which had kindled, proceeded to extinguished
     Presumptuous belief
     Protestant clergy the social police of the English middle-class
     Push indolent unreason to gain the delusion of happiness
     Ready is the ardent mind to take footing on the last thing done
     Rebellion against society and advocacy of humanity run counter
     Reproof of such supererogatory counsel
     Scotchman's metaphysics; you know nothing clear
     She was not, happily, one of the women who betray strong feeling
     She had no longer anything to resent: she was obliged to weep
     Shun comparisons
     Shuns the statuesque pathetic, or any kind of posturing
     Silence and such signs are like revelations in black night
     Slaves of the priests
     Small things producing great consequences
     So the frog telleth tadpoles
     Socially and politically mean one thing in the end
     Story that she believed indeed, but had not quite sensibly felt
     Straining for common talk, and showing the strain
     Style resembling either early architecture or utter dilapidation
     That a mask is a concealment
     The girl could not know her own mind, for she suited him exactly
     The critic that sneers
     The religion of this vast English middle-class--Comfort
     The slavery of the love of a woman chained
     The turn will come to us as to others--and go
     The language of party is eloquent
     The defensive is perilous policy in war
     The healthy only are fit to live
     The system is cursed by nature, and that means by heaven
     The world without him would be heavy matter
     The weighty and the trivial contended
     The rider's too heavy for the horse in England
     The greater wounds do not immediately convince us of our fate
     The people always wait for the winner
     The defensive is perilous policy in war
     The family view is everlastingly the shopkeeper's
     The infant candidate delights in his honesty
     The tragedy of the mirror is one for a woman to write
     Their hearts are eaten up by property
     Their not caring to think at all
     There is no step backward in life
     There may be women who think as well as feel; I don't know them
     There is no first claim
     There's nothing like a metaphor for an evasion
     They may know how to make themselves happy in their climate
     They have their thinking done for them
     They're always having to retire and always hissing
     Thirst for the haranguing of crowds
     This girl was pliable only to service, not to grief
     Those whose humour consists of a readiness to laugh
     Those happy men who enjoy perceptions without opinions
     Threatened powerful drugs for weak stomachs
     Times when an example is needed by brave men
     To beg the vote and wink the bribe
     Tongue flew, thought followed
     Too many time-servers rot the State
     Trust no man Still, this man may be better than that man
     Unanimous verdicts from a jury of temporary impressions
     Use your religion like a drug
     Virtue of impatience
     We do not see clearly when we are trying to deceive
     We women can read men by their power to love
     We could row and ride and fish and shoot, and breed largely
     We dare not be weak if we would
     We were unarmed, and the spectacle was distressing
     We can't hope to have what should be
     We have a system, not planned but grown
     We are chiefly led by hope
     We're treated like old-fashioned ornaments!
     Welcomed and lured on an adversary to wild outhitting
     Well, sir, we must sell our opium
     What ninnies call Nature in books
     When he's a Christian instead of a Churchman
     Where love exists there is goodness
     Who cannot talk!--but who can?
     Without a single intimation that he loathed the task
     Wives are only an item in the list, and not the most important
     Women don't care uncommonly for the men who love them
     Women must not be judging things out of their sphere
     Won't do to be taking in reefs on a lee-shore
     Wonderment that one of her sex should have ideas
     Wooing a good man for his friendship
     World cannot pardon a breach of continuity
     You are not married, you are simply chained
     You're talking to me, not to a gallery






THE EGOIST

A Comedy in Narrative


by GEORGE MEREDITH



This etext was prepared by Jim Tinsley jtinsley@pobox.com



PRELUDE

A CHAPTER OF WHICH THE LAST PAGE ONLY IS OF ANY IMPORTANCE

Comedy is a game played to throw reflections upon social life, and it
deals with human nature in the drawing-room of civilized men and women,
where we have no dust of the struggling outer world, no mire, no
violent crashes, to make the correctness of the representation
convincing. Credulity is not wooed through the impressionable senses;
nor have we recourse to the small circular glow of the watchmaker's eye
to raise in bright relief minutest grains of evidence for the routing
of incredulity. The Comic Spirit conceives a definite situation for a
number of characters, and rejects all accessories in the exclusive
pursuit of them and their speech. For being a spirit, he hunts the
spirit in men; vision and ardour constitute his merit; he has not a
thought of persuading you to believe in him. Follow and you will see.
But there is a question of the value of a run at his heels.

Now the world is possessed of a certain big book, the biggest book on
earth; that might indeed be called the Book of Earth; whose title is
the Book of Egoism, and it is a book full of the world's wisdom. So
full of it, and of such dimensions is this book, in which the
generations have written ever since they took to writing, that to be
profitable to us the Book needs a powerful compression.

Who, says the notable humourist, in allusion to this Book, who can
studiously travel through sheets of leaves now capable of a stretch
from the Lizard to the last few poor pulmonary snips and shreds of
leagues dancing on their toes for cold, explorers tell us, and catching
breath by good luck, like dogs at bones about a table, on the edge of
the Pole? Inordinate unvaried length, sheer longinquity, staggers the
heart, ages the very heart of us at a view. And how if we manage
finally to print one of our pages on the crow-scalp of that solitary
majestic outsider? We may get him into the Book; yet the knowledge we
want will not be more present with us than it was when the chapters
hung their end over the cliff you ken of at Dover, where sits our great
lord and master contemplating the seas without upon the reflex of that
within!

In other words, as I venture to translate him (humourists are
difficult: it is a piece of their humour to puzzle our wits), the
inward mirror, the embracing and condensing spirit, is required to give
us those interminable milepost piles of matter (extending well-nigh to
the very Pole) in essence, in chosen samples, digestibly. I conceive
him to indicate that the realistic method of a conscientious
transcription of all the visible, and a repetition of all the audible,
is mainly accountable for our present branfulness, and that
prolongation of the vasty and the noisy, out of which, as from an
undrained fen, steams the malady of sameness, our modern malady. We
have the malady, whatever may be the cure or the cause. We drove in a
body to Science the other day for an antidote; which was as if tired
pedestrians should mount the engine-box of headlong trains; and Science
introduced us to our o'er-hoary ancestry--them in the Oriental posture;
whereupon we set up a primaeval chattering to rival the Amazon forest
nigh nightfall, cured, we fancied. And before daybreak our disease was
hanging on to us again, with the extension of a tail. We had it fore
and aft. We were the same, and animals into the bargain. That is all we
got from Science.

Art is the specific. We have little to learn of apes, and they may be
left. The chief consideration for us is, what particular practice of
Art in letters is the best for the perusal of the Book of our common
wisdom; so that with clearer minds and livelier manners we may escape,
as it were, into daylight and song from a land of fog-horns. Shall we
read it by the watchmaker's eye in luminous rings eruptive of the
infinitesimal, or pointed with examples and types under the broad
Alpine survey of the spirit born of our united social intelligence,
which is the Comic Spirit? Wise men say the latter. They tell us that
there is a constant tendency in the Book to accumulate excess of
substance, and such repleteness, obscuring the glass it holds to
mankind, renders us inexact in the recognition of our individual
countenances: a perilous thing for civilization. And these wise men are
strong in their opinion that we should encourage the Comic Spirit, who
is after all our own offspring, to relieve the Book. Comedy, they say,
is the true diversion, as it is likewise the key of the great Book, the
music of the Book. They tell us how it condenses whole sections of the
book in a sentence, volumes in a character; so that a fair pan of a
book outstripping thousands of leagues when unrolled may be compassed
in one comic sitting.

For verily, say they, we must read what we can of it, at least the page
before us, if we would be men. One, with an index on the Book, cries
out, in a style pardonable to his fervency: The remedy of your
frightful affliction is here, through the stillatory of Comedy, and not
in Science, nor yet in Speed, whose name is but another for voracity.
Why, to be alive, to be quick in the soul, there should be diversity in
the companion throbs of your pulses. Interrogate them. They lump along
like the old loblegs of Dobbin the horse; or do their business like
cudgels of carpet-thwackers expelling dust or the cottage-clock
pendulum teaching the infant hour over midnight simple arithmetic. This
too in spite of Bacchus. And let them gallop; let them gallop with the
God bestriding them; gallop to Hymen, gallop to Hades, they strike the
same note. Monstrous monotonousness has enfolded us as with the arms of
Amphitrite! We hear a shout of war for a diversion.--Comedy he
pronounces to be our means of reading swiftly and comprehensively. She
it is who proposes the correcting of pretentiousness, of inflation, of
dulness, and of the vestiges of rawness and grossness to be found among
us. She is the ultimate civilizer, the polisher, a sweet cook. If, he
says, she watches over sentimentalism with a birch-rod, she is not
opposed to romance. You may love, and warmly love, so long as you are
honest. Do not offend reason. A lover pretending too much by one
foot's length of pretence, will have that foot caught in her trap. In
Comedy is the singular scene of charity issuing of disdain under the
stroke of honourable laughter: an Ariel released by Prospero's wand
from the fetters of the damned witch Sycorax. And this laughter of
reason refreshed is floriferous, like the magical great gale of the
shifty Spring deciding for Summer. You hear it giving the delicate
spirit his liberty. Listen, for comparison, to an unleavened society: a
low as of the udderful cow past milking hour! O for a titled
ecclesiastic to curse to excommunication that unholy thing!--So far an
enthusiast perhaps; but he should have a hearing.

Concerning pathos, no ship can now set sail without pathos; and we are
not totally deficient of pathos; which is, I do not accurately know
what, if not the ballast, reducible to moisture by patent process, on
board our modern vessel; for it can hardly be the cargo, and the
general water supply has other uses; and ships well charged with it
seem to sail the stiffest:--there is a touch of pathos. The Egoist
surely inspires pity. He who would desire to clothe himself at
everybody's expense, and is of that desire condemned to strip himself
stark naked, he, if pathos ever had a form, might be taken for the
actual person. Only he is not allowed to rush at you, roll you over and
squeeze your body for the briny drops. There is the innovation.

You may as well know him out of hand, as a gentleman of our time and
country, of wealth and station; a not flexile figure, do what we may
with him; the humour of whom scarcely dimples the surface and is
distinguishable but by very penetrative, very wicked imps, whose fits
of roaring below at some generally imperceptible stroke of his quality,
have first made the mild literary angels aware of something comic in
him, when they were one and all about to describe the gentleman on the
heading of the records baldly (where brevity is most complimentary) as
a gentleman of family and property, an idol of a decorous island that
admires the concrete. Imps have their freakish wickedness in them to
kindle detective vision: malignly do they love to uncover
ridiculousness in imposing figures. Wherever they catch sight of Egoism
they pitch their camps, they circle and squat, and forthwith they trim
their lanterns, confident of the ludicrous to come. So confident that
their grip of an English gentleman, in whom they have spied their game,
never relaxes until he begins insensibly to frolic and antic, unknown
to himself, and comes out in the native steam which is their scent of
the chase. Instantly off they scour, Egoist and imps. They will, it is
known of them, dog a great House for centuries, and be at the birth of
all the new heirs in succession, diligently taking confirmatory notes,
to join hands and chime their chorus in one of their merry rings round
the tottering pillar of the House, when his turn arrives; as if they
had (possibly they had) smelt of old date a doomed colossus of Egoism
in that unborn, unconceived inheritor of the stuff of the family. They
dare not be chuckling while Egoism is valiant, while sober, while
socially valuable, nationally serviceable. They wait.

Aforetime a grand old Egoism built the House. It would appear that ever
finer essences of it are demanded to sustain the structure; but
especially would it appear that a reversion to the gross original,
beneath a mask and in a vein of fineness, is an earthquake at the
foundations of the House. Better that it should not have consented to
motion, and have held stubbornly to all ancestral ways, than have bred
that anachronic spectre. The sight, however, is one to make our
squatting imps in circle grow restless on their haunches, as they bend
eyes instantly, ears at full cock, for the commencement of the comic
drama of the suicide. If this line of verse be not yet in our
literature,

          Through very love of self himself he slew,

let it be admitted for his epitaph.



CHAPTER I

A MINOR INCIDENT SHOWING AN HEREDITARY APTITUDE IN THE USE OF THE KNIFE

There was an ominously anxious watch of eyes visible and invisible over
the infancy of Willoughby, fifth in descent from Simon Patterne, of
Patterne Hall, premier of this family, a lawyer, a man of solid
acquirements and stout ambition, who well understood the
foundation-work of a House, and was endowed with the power of saying No
to those first agents of destruction, besieging relatives. He said it
with the resonant emphasis of death to younger sons. For if the oak is
to become a stately tree, we must provide against the crowding of
timber. Also the tree beset with parasites prospers not. A great House
in its beginning lives, we may truly say, by the knife. Soil is easily
got, and so are bricks, and a wife, and children come of wishing for
them, but the vigorous use of the knife is a natural gift and points to
growth. Pauper Patternes were numerous when the fifth head of the race
was the hope of his county. A Patterne was in the Marines.

The country and the chief of this family were simultaneously informed
of the existence of one Lieutenant Crossjay Patterne, of the corps of
the famous hard fighters, through an act of heroism of the unpretending
cool sort which kindles British blood, on the part of the modest young
officer, in the storming of some eastern riverain stronghold, somewhere
about the coast of China. The officer's youth was assumed on the
strength of his rank, perhaps likewise from the tale of his modesty:
"he had only done his duty". Our Willoughby was then at College,
emulous of the generous enthusiasm of his years, and strangely
impressed by the report, and the printing of his name in the
newspapers. He thought over it for several months, when, coming to his
title and heritage, he sent Lieutenant Crossjay Patterne a cheque for a
sum of money amounting to the gallant fellow's pay per annum, at the
same time showing his acquaintance with the first, or chemical,
principles of generosity, in the remark to friends at home, that "blood
is thicker than water". The man is a Marine, but he is a Patterne. How
any Patterne should have drifted into the Marines, is of the order of
questions which are senselessly asked of the great dispensary. In the
complimentary letter accompanying his cheque, the lieutenant was
invited to present himself at the ancestral Hall, when convenient to
him, and he was assured that he had given his relative and friend a
taste for a soldier's life. Young Sir Willoughby was fond of talking of
his "military namesake and distant cousin, young Patterne--the Marine".
It was funny; and not less laughable was the description of his
namesake's deed of valour: with the rescued British sailor inebriate,
and the hauling off to captivity of the three braves of the black
dragon on a yellow ground, and the tying of them together back to back
by their pigtails, and driving of them into our lines upon a newly
devised dying-top style of march that inclined to the oblique, like the
astonished six eyes of the celestial prisoners, for straight they could
not go. The humour of gentlemen at home is always highly excited by
such cool feats. We are a small island, but you see what we do. The
ladies at the Hall, Sir Willoughby's mother, and his aunts Eleanor and
Isabel, were more affected than he by the circumstance of their having
a Patterne in the Marines. But how then! We English have ducal blood
in business: we have, genealogists tell us, royal blood in common
trades. For all our pride we are a queer people; and you may be
ordering butcher's meat of a Tudor, sitting on the cane-bottom chairs
of a Plantagenet. By and by you may . . . but cherish your reverence.
Young Willoughby made a kind of shock-head or football hero of his
gallant distant cousin, and wondered occasionally that the fellow had
been content to dispatch a letter of effusive thanks without availing
himself of the invitation to partake of the hospitalities of Patterne.

He was one afternoon parading between showers on the stately garden
terrace of the Hall, in company with his affianced, the beautiful and
dashing Constantia Durham, followed by knots of ladies and gentlemen
vowed to fresh air before dinner, while it was to be had. Chancing with
his usual happy fortune (we call these things dealt to us out of the
great hidden dispensary, chance) to glance up the avenue of limes, as
he was in the act of turning on his heel at the end of the terrace, and
it should be added, discoursing with passion's privilege of the passion
of love to Miss Durham, Sir Willoughby, who was anything but obtuse,
experienced a presentiment upon espying a thick-set stumpy man crossing
the gravel space from the avenue to the front steps of the Hall,
decidedly not bearing the stamp of the gentleman "on his hat, his coat,
his feet, or anything that was his," Willoughby subsequently observed
to the ladies of his family in the Scriptural style of gentlemen who do
bear the stamp. His brief sketch of the creature was repulsive. The
visitor carried a bag, and his coat-collar was up, his hat was
melancholy; he had the appearance of a bankrupt tradesman absconding;
no gloves, no umbrella.

As to the incident we have to note, it was very slight. The card of
Lieutenant Patterne was handed to Sir Willoughby, who laid it on the
salver, saying to the footman, "Not at home."

He had been disappointed in the age, grossly deceived in the appearance
of the man claiming to be his relative in this unseasonable fashion;
and his acute instinct advised him swiftly of the absurdity of
introducing to his friends a heavy unpresentable senior as the
celebrated gallant Lieutenant of Marines, and the same as a member of
his family! He had talked of the man too much, too enthusiastically, to
be able to do so. A young subaltern, even if passably vulgar in figure,
can be shuffled through by the aid of the heroical story humourously
exaggerated in apology for his aspect. Nothing can be done with a
mature and stumpy Marine of that rank. Considerateness dismisses him on
the spot, without parley. It was performed by a gentleman supremely
advanced at a very early age in the art of cutting.

Young Sir Willoughby spoke a word of the rejected visitor to Miss
Durham, in response to her startled look: "I shall drop him a cheque,"
he said, for she seemed personally wounded, and had a face of crimson.

The young lady did not reply.

Dating from the humble departure of Lieutenant Crossjay Patterne up the
limes-avenue under a gathering rain-cloud, the ring of imps in
attendance on Sir Willoughby maintained their station with strict
observation of his movements at all hours; and were comparisons in
quest, the sympathetic eagerness of the eyes of caged monkeys for the
hand about to feed them, would supply one. They perceived in him a
fresh development and very subtle manifestation of the very old thing
from which he had sprung.



CHAPTER II

THE YOUNG SIR WILLOUGHBY

These little scoundrel imps, who have attained to some respectability
as the dogs and pets of the Comic Spirit, had been curiously attentive
three years earlier, long before the public announcement of his
engagement to the beautiful Miss Durham, on the day of Sir Willoughby's
majority, when Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson said her word of him. Mrs.
Mountstuart was a lady certain to say the remembered, if not the right,
thing. Again and again was it confirmed on days of high celebration,
days of birth or bridal, how sure she was to hit the mark that rang the
bell; and away her word went over the county: and had she been an
uncharitable woman she could have ruled the county with an iron rod of
caricature, so sharp was her touch. A grain of malice would have sent
county faces and characters awry into the currency. She was wealthy and
kindly, and resembled our mother Nature in her reasonable antipathies
to one or two things which none can defend, and her decided preference
of persons that shone in the sun. Her word sprang out of her. She
looked at you, and forth it came: and it stuck to you, as nothing
laboured or literary could have adhered. Her saying of Laetitia Dale:
"Here she comes with a romantic tale on her eyelashes," was a portrait
of Laetitia. And that of Vernon Whitford: "He is a Phoebus Apollo
turned fasting friar," painted the sunken brilliancy of the lean
long-walker and scholar at a stroke.

Of the young Sir Willoughby, her word was brief; and there was the
merit of it on a day when he was hearing from sunrise to the setting of
the moon salutes in his honour, songs of praise and Ciceronian eulogy.
Rich, handsome, courteous, generous, lord of the Hall, the feast and
the dance, he excited his guests of both sexes to a holiday of
flattery. And, says Mrs. Mountstuart, while grand phrases were mouthing
round about him, "You see he has a leg."

That you saw, of course. But after she had spoken you saw much more.
Mrs. Mountstuart said it just as others utter empty nothings, with
never a hint of a stress. Her word was taken up, and very soon, from
the extreme end of the long drawing-room, the circulation of something
of Mrs. Mountstuart's was distinctly perceptible. Lady Patterne sent a
little Hebe down, skirting the dancers, for an accurate report of it;
and even the inappreciative lips of a very young lady transmitting the
word could not damp the impression of its weighty truthfulness. It was
perfect! Adulation of the young Sir Willoughby's beauty and wit, and
aristocratic bearing and mien, and of his moral virtues, was common;
welcome if you like, as a form of homage; but common, almost vulgar,
beside Mrs. Mountstuart's quiet little touch of nature. In seeming to
say infinitely less than others, as Miss Isabel Patterne pointed out to
Lady Busshe, Mrs. Mountstuart comprised all that the others had said,
by showing the needlessness of allusions to the saliently evident. She
was the aristocrat reproving the provincial. "He is everything you have
had the goodness to remark, ladies and dear sirs, he talks charmingly,
dances divinely, rides with the air of a commander-in-chief, has the
most natural grand pose possible without ceasing for a moment to be the
young English gentleman he is. Alcibiades, fresh from a Louis IV
perruquier, could not surpass him: whatever you please; I could outdo
you in sublime comparisons, were I minded to pelt him. Have you noticed
that he has a leg?"

So might it be amplified. A simple-seeming word of this import is the
triumph of the spiritual, and where it passes for coin of value, the
society has reached a high refinement: Arcadian by the aesthetic route.
Observation of Willoughby was not, as Miss Eleanor Patterne pointed out
to Lady Culmer, drawn down to the leg, but directed to estimate him
from the leg upward. That, however, is prosaic. Dwell a short space on
Mrs. Mountstuart's word; and whither, into what fair region, and with
how decorously voluptuous a sensation, do not we fly, who have, through
mournful veneration of the Martyr Charles, a coy attachment to the
Court of his Merrie Son, where the leg was ribanded with love-knots and
reigned. Oh! it was a naughty Court. Yet have we dreamed of it as the
period when an English cavalier was grace incarnate; far from the boor
now hustling us in another sphere; beautifully mannered, every gesture
dulcet. And if the ladies were . . . we will hope they have been
traduced. But if they were, if they were too tender, ah! gentlemen
were gentlemen then--worth perishing for! There is this dream in the
English country; and it must be an aspiration after some form of
melodious gentlemanliness which is imagined to have inhabited the
island at one time; as among our poets the dream of the period of a
circle of chivalry here is encouraged for the pleasure of the
imagination.

Mrs. Mountstuart touched a thrilling chord. "In spite of men's hateful
modern costume, you see he has a leg."

That is, the leg of the born cavalier is before you: and obscure it as
you will, dress degenerately, there it is for ladies who have eyes. You
see it: or, you see he has it. Miss Isabel and Miss Eleanor disputed
the incidence of the emphasis, but surely, though a slight difference
of meaning may be heard, either will do: many, with a good show of
reason, throw the accent upon leg. And the ladies knew for a fact that
Willoughby's leg was exquisite; he had a cavalier court-suit in his
wardrobe. Mrs. Mountstuart signified that the leg was to be seen
because it was a burning leg. There it is, and it will shine through!
He has the leg of Rochester, Buckingham, Dorset, Suckling; the leg that
smiles, that winks, is obsequious to you, yet perforce of beauty
self-satisfied; that twinkles to a tender midway between imperiousness
and seductiveness, audacity and discretion; between "You shall worship
me", and "I am devoted to you;" is your lord, your slave, alternately
and in one. It is a leg of ebb and flow and high-tide ripples. Such a
leg, when it has done with pretending to retire, will walk straight
into the hearts of women. Nothing so fatal to them.

Self-satisfied it must be. Humbleness does not win multitudes or the
sex. It must be vain to have a sheen. Captivating melodies (to prove to
you the unavoidableness of self-satisfaction when you know that you
have hit perfection), listen to them closely, have an inner pipe of
that conceit almost ludicrous when you detect the chirp.

And you need not be reminded that he has the leg without the
naughtiness. You see eminent in him what we would fain have brought
about in a nation that has lost its leg in gaining a possibly cleaner
morality. And that is often contested; but there is no doubt of the
loss of the leg.

Well, footmen and courtiers and Scottish Highlanders, and the corps de
ballet, draymen too, have legs, and staring legs, shapely enough. But
what are they? not the modulated instrument we mean--simply legs for
leg-work, dumb as the brutes. Our cavalier's is the poetic leg, a
portent, a valiance. He has it as Cicero had a tongue. It is a lute to
scatter songs to his mistress; a rapier, is she obdurate. In sooth a
leg with brains in it, soul.

And its shadows are an ambush, its lights a surprise. It blushes, it
pales, can whisper, exclaim. It is a peep, a part revelation, just
sufferable, of the Olympian god--Jove playing carpet-knight.

For the young Sir Willoughby's family and his thoughtful admirers, it
is not too much to say that Mrs. Mountstuart's little word fetched an
epoch of our history to colour the evening of his arrival at man's
estate. He was all that Merrie Charles's court should have been,
subtracting not a sparkle from what it was. Under this light he
danced, and you may consider the effect of it on his company.

He had received the domestic education of a prince. Little princes
abound in a land of heaped riches. Where they have not to yield
military service to an Imperial master, they are necessarily here and
there dainty during youth, sometimes unmanageable, and as they are
bound in no personal duty to the State, each is for himself, with full
present, and what is more, luxurious, prospective leisure for the
practice of that allegiance. They are sometimes enervated by it: that
must be in continental countries. Happily our climate and our brave
blood precipitate the greater number upon the hunting-field, to do the
public service of heading the chase of the fox, with benefit to their
constitutions. Hence a manly as well as useful race of little princes,
and Willoughby was as manly as any. He cultivated himself, he would not
be outdone in popular accomplishments. Had the standard of the public
taste been set in philosophy, and the national enthusiasm centred in
philosophers, he would at least have worked at books. He did work at
science, and had a laboratory. His admirable passion to excel, however,
was chiefly directed in his youth upon sport; and so great was the
passion in him, that it was commonly the presence of rivals which led
him to the declaration of love.

He knew himself, nevertheless, to be the most constant of men in his
attachment to the sex. He had never discouraged Laetitia Dale's
devotion to him, and even when he followed in the sweeping tide of the
beautiful Constantia Durham (whom Mrs. Mountstuart called "The Racing
Cutter"), he thought of Laetitia, and looked at her. She was a shy
violet.

Willoughby's comportment while the showers of adulation drenched him
might be likened to the composure of Indian Gods undergoing worship,
but unlike them he reposed upon no seat of amplitude to preserve him
from a betrayal of intoxication; he had to continue tripping, dancing,
exactly balancing himself, head to right, head to left, addressing his
idolaters in phrases of perfect choiceness. This is only to say that it
is easier to be a wooden idol than one in the flesh; yet Willoughby was
equal to his task. The little prince's education teaches him that he
is other than you, and by virtue of the instruction he receives, and
also something, we know not what, within, he is enabled to maintain his
posture where you would be tottering.

Urchins upon whose curly pates grave seniors lay their hands with
conventional encomium and speculation, look older than they are
immediately, and Willoughby looked older than his years, not for want
of freshness, but because he felt that he had to stand eminently and
correctly poised.

Hearing of Mrs. Mountstuart's word on him, he smiled and said, "It is
at her service."

The speech was communicated to her, and she proposed to attach a
dedicatory strip of silk. And then they came together, and there was
wit and repartee suitable to the electrical atmosphere of the
dancing-room, on the march to a magical hall of supper. Willoughby
conducted Mrs. Mountstuart to the supper-table.

"Were I," said she, "twenty years younger, I think I would marry you,
to cure my infatuation."

"Then let me tell you in advance, madam," said he, "that I will do
everything to obtain a new lease of it, except divorce you."

They were infinitely wittier, but so much was heard and may be
reported.

"It makes the business of choosing a wife for him superhumanly
difficult!" Mrs. Mountstuart observed, after listening to the praises
she had set going again when the ladies were weeded of us, in Lady
Patterne's Indian room, and could converse unhampered upon their own
ethereal themes.

"Willoughby will choose a wife for himself," said his mother.



CHAPTER III

CONSTANTIA DURHAM

The great question for the county was debated in many households,
daughter-thronged and daughterless, long subsequent to the memorable
day of Willoughby's coming of age. Lady Busshe was for Constantia
Durham. She laughed at Mrs Mountstuart Jenkinson's notion of Laetitia
Dale. She was a little older than Mrs. Mountstuart, and had known
Willoughby's father, whose marriage into the wealthiest branch of the
Whitford family had been strictly sagacious. "Patternes marry money;
they are not romantic people," she said. Miss Durham had money, and she
had health and beauty: three mighty qualifications for a Patterne
bride. Her father, Sir John Durham, was a large landowner in the
western division of the county; a pompous gentleman, the picture of a
father-in-law for Willoughby. The father of Miss Dale was a battered
army surgeon from India, tenant of one of Sir Willoughby's cottages
bordering Patterne Park. His girl was portionless and a poetess. Her
writing of the song in celebration of the young baronet's birthday was
thought a clever venture, bold as only your timid creatures can be
bold. She let the cat out of her bag of verse before the multitude; she
almost proposed to her hero in her rhymes. She was pretty; her
eyelashes were long and dark, her eyes dark-blue, and her soul was
ready to shoot like a rocket out of them at a look from Willoughby. And
he looked, he certainly looked, though he did not dance with her once
that night, and danced repeatedly with Miss Durham. He gave Laetitia to
Vernon Whitford for the final dance of the night, and he may have
looked at her so much in pity of an elegant girl allied to such a
partner. The "Phoebus Apollo turned fasting friar" had entirely
forgotten his musical gifts in motion. He crossed himself and crossed
his bewildered lady, and crossed everybody in the figure, extorting
shouts of cordial laughter from his cousin Willoughby. Be it said that
the hour was four in the morning, when dancers must laugh at somebody,
if only to refresh their feet, and the wit of the hour administers to
the wildest laughter. Vernon was likened to Theseus in the maze,
entirely dependent upon his Ariadne; to a fly released from a jam-pot;
to a "salvage", or green, man caught in a web of nymphs and made to go
the paces. Willoughby was inexhaustible in the happy similes he poured
out to Miss Durham across the lines of Sir Roger de Coverley, and they
were not forgotten, they procured him a reputation as a convivial
sparkler. Rumour went the round that he intended to give Laetitia to
Vernon for good, when he could decide to take Miss Durham to himself;
his generosity was famous; but that decision, though the rope was in
the form of a knot, seemed reluctant for the conclusive close haul; it
preferred the state of slackness; and if he courted Laetitia on behalf
of his cousin, his cousinly love must have been greater than his
passion, one had to suppose. He was generous enough for it, or for
marrying the portionless girl himself.

There was a story of a brilliant young widow of our aristocracy who had
very nearly snared him. Why should he object to marry into our
aristocracy? Mrs. Mountstuart asked him, and he replied that the girls
of that class have no money, and he doubted the quality of their blood.
He had his eyes awake. His duty to his House was a foremost thought
with him, and for such a reason he may have been more anxious to give
the slim and not robust Laetitia to Vernon than accede to his personal
inclination. The mention of the widow singularly offended him,
notwithstanding the high rank of the lady named. "A widow?" he said.
"I!" He spoke to a widow; an oldish one truly; but his wrath at the
suggestion of his union with a widow led him to be for the moment
oblivious of the minor shades of good taste. He desired Mrs.
Mountstuart to contradict the story in positive terms. He repeated his
desire; he was urgent to have it contradicted, and said again, "A
widow!" straightening his whole figure to the erectness of the letter
I. She was a widow unmarried a second time, and it has been known of
the stedfast women who retain the name of their first husband, or do
not hamper his title with a little new squire at their skirts, that
they can partially approve the objections indicated by Sir Willoughby.
They are thinking of themselves when they do so, and they will rarely
say, "I might have married;" rarely within them will they avow that,
with their permission, it might have been. They can catch an idea of a
gentleman's view of the widow's cap. But a niceness that could feel
sharply wounded by the simple rumour of his alliance with the young
relict of an earl was mystifying. Sir Willoughby unbent. His military
letter I took a careless glance at itself lounging idly and proudly at
ease in the glass of his mind, decked with a wanton wreath, as he
dropped a hint, generously vague, just to show the origin of the
rumour, and the excellent basis it had for not being credited. He was
chidden. Mrs. Mountstuart read him a lecture. She was however able to
contradict the tale of the young countess. "There is no fear of his
marrying her, my dears."

Meanwhile there was a fear that he would lose his chance of marrying
the beautiful Miss Durham.

The dilemmas of little princes are often grave. They should be dwelt on
now and then for an example to poor struggling commoners, of the slings
and arrows assailing fortune's most favoured men, that we may preach
contentment to the wretch who cannot muster wherewithal to marry a
wife, or has done it and trots the streets, pack-laden, to maintain the
dame and troops of children painfully reared to fill subordinate
stations. According to our reading, a moral is always welcome in a
moral country, and especially so when silly envy is to be chastised by
it, the restless craving for change rebuked. Young Sir Willoughby,
then, stood in this dilemma:--a lady was at either hand of him; the
only two that had ever, apart from metropolitan conquests, not to be
recited, touched his emotions. Susceptible to beauty, he had never seen
so beautiful a girl as Constantia Durham. Equally susceptible to
admiration of himself, he considered Laetitia Dale a paragon of
cleverness. He stood between the queenly rose and the modest violet.
One he bowed to; the other bowed to him. He could not have both; it is
the law governing princes and pedestrians alike. But which could he
forfeit? His growing acquaintance with the world taught him to put an
increasing price on the sentiments of Miss Dale. Still Constantia's
beauty was of a kind to send away beholders aching. She had the glory
of the racing cutter full sail on a whining breeze; and she did not
court to win him, she flew. In his more reflective hour the
attractiveness of that lady which held the mirror to his features was
paramount. But he had passionate snatches when the magnetism of the
flyer drew him in her wake. Further to add to the complexity, he loved
his liberty; he was princelier free; he had more subjects, more slaves;
he ruled arrogantly in the world of women; he was more himself. His
metropolitan experiences did not answer to his liking the particular
question, Do we bind the woman down to us idolatrously by making a wife
of her?

In the midst of his deliberations, a report of the hot pursuit of Miss
Durham, casually mentioned to him by Lady Busshe, drew an immediate
proposal from Sir Willoughby. She accepted him, and they were engaged.
She had been nibbled at, all but eaten up, while he hung dubitative;
and though that was the cause of his winning her, it offended his
niceness. She had not come to him out of cloistral purity, out of
perfect radiancy. Spiritually, likewise, was he a little prince, a
despotic prince. He wished for her to have come to him out of an
egg-shell, somewhat more astonished at things than a chicken, but as
completely enclosed before he tapped the shell, and seeing him with her
sex's eyes first of all men. She talked frankly of her cousins and
friends, young males. She could have replied to his bitter wish: "Had
you asked me on the night of your twenty-first birthday, Willoughby!"
Since then she had been in the dust of the world, and he conceived his
peculiar antipathy, destined to be so fatal to him, from the earlier
hours of his engagement. He was quaintly incapable of a jealousy of
individuals. A young Captain Oxford had been foremost in the swarm
pursuing Constantia. Willoughby thought as little of Captain Oxford as
he did of Vernon Whitford. His enemy was the world, the mass, which
confounds us in a lump, which has breathed on her whom we have
selected, whom we cannot, can never, rub quite clear of her contact
with the abominated crowd. The pleasure of the world is to bowl down
our soldierly letter I; to encroach on our identity, soil our niceness.
To begin to think is the beginning of disgust of the world.

As soon the engagement was published all the county said that there had
not been a chance for Laetitia, and Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson humbly
remarked, in an attitude of penitence, "I'm not a witch." Lady Busshe
could claim to be one; she had foretold the event. Laetitia was of the
same opinion as the county. She had looked up, but not hopefully. She
had only looked up to the brightest, and, as he was the highest, how
could she have hoped? She was the solitary companion of a sick father,
whose inveterate prognostic of her, that she would live to rule at
Patterne Hall, tortured the poor girl in proportion as he seemed to
derive comfort from it. The noise of the engagement merely silenced
him; recluse invalids cling obstinately to their ideas. He had observed
Sir Willoughby in the society of his daughter, when the young baronet
revived to a sprightly boyishness immediately. Indeed, as big boy and
little girl, they had played together of old. Willoughby had been a
handsome, fair boy. The portrait of him at the Hall, in a hat, leaning
on his pony, with crossed legs, and long flaxen curls over his
shoulders, was the image of her soul's most present angel; and, as a
man, he had--she did not suppose intentionally--subjected her nature to
bow to him; so submissive was she, that it was fuller happiness for her
to think him right in all his actions than to imagine the circumstances
different. This may appear to resemble the ecstasy of the devotee of
Juggernaut, It is a form of the passion inspired by little princes, and
we need not marvel that a conservative sex should assist to keep them
in their lofty places. What were there otherwise to look up to? We
should have no dazzling beacon-lights if they were levelled and treated
as clod earth; and it is worth while for here and there a woman to be
burned, so long as women's general adoration of an ideal young man
shall be preserved. Purity is our demand of them. They may justly cry
for attraction. They cannot have it brighter than in the universal
bearing of the eyes of their sisters upon a little prince, one who has
the ostensible virtues in his pay, and can practise them without
injuring himself to make himself unsightly. Let the races of men be
by-and-by astonished at their Gods, if they please. Meantime they had
better continue to worship.

Laetitia did continue. She saw Miss Durham at Patterne on several
occasions. She admired the pair. She had a wish to witness the bridal
ceremony. She was looking forward to the day with that mixture of
eagerness and withholding which we have as we draw nigh the
disenchanting termination of an enchanting romance, when Sir Willoughby
met her on a Sunday morning, as she crossed his park solitarily to
church. They were within ten days of the appointed ceremony. He should
have been away at Miss Durham's end of the county. He had, Laetitia
knew, ridden over to her the day before; but there he was; and very
unwontedly, quite surprisingly, he presented his arm to conduct
Laetitia to the church-door, and talked and laughed in a way that
reminded her of a hunting gentleman she had seen once rising to his
feet, staggering from an ugly fall across hedge and fence into one of
the lanes of her short winter walks. "All's well, all sound, never
better, only a scratch!" the gentleman had said, as he reeled and
pressed a bleeding head. Sir Willoughby chattered of his felicity in
meeting her. "I am really wonderfully lucky," he said, and he said that
and other things over and over, incessantly talking, and telling an
anecdote of county occurrences, and laughing at it with a mouth that
would not widen. He went on talking in the church porch, and murmuring
softly some steps up the aisle, passing the pews of Mrs. Mountstuart
Jenkinson and Lady Busshe. Of course he was entertaining, but what a
strangeness it was to Laetitia! His face would have been half under an
antique bonnet. It came very close to hers, and the scrutiny he bent on
her was most solicitous.

After the service, he avoided the great ladies by sauntering up to
within a yard or two of where she sat; he craved her hand on his arm to
lead her forth by the park entrance to the church, all the while
bending to her, discoursing rapidly, appearing radiantly interested in
her quiet replies, with fits of intentness that stared itself out into
dim abstraction. She hazarded the briefest replies for fear of not
having understood him.

One question she asked: "Miss Durham is well, I trust?"

And he answered "Durham?" and said, "There is no Miss Durham to my
knowledge."

The impression he left with her was, that he might yesterday during his
ride have had an accident and fallen on his head.

She would have asked that, if she had not known him for so thorough an
Englishman, in his dislike to have it thought that accidents could hurt
even when they happened to him.

He called the next day to claim her for a walk. He assured her she had
promised it, and he appealed to her father, who could not testify to a
promise he had not heard, but begged her to leave him to have her walk.
So once more she was in the park with Sir Willoughby, listening to his
raptures over old days. A word of assent from her sufficed him. "I am
now myself," was one of the remarks he repeated this day. She dilated
on the beauty of the park and the Hall to gratify him.

He did not speak of Miss Durham, and Laetitia became afraid to mention
her name.

At their parting, Willoughby promised Laetitia that he would call on
the morrow. He did not come; and she could well excuse him, after her
hearing of the tale.

It was a lamentable tale. He had ridden to Sir John Durham's mansion, a
distance of thirty miles, to hear, on his arrival, that Constantia had
quitted her father's house two days previously on a visit to an aunt in
London, and had just sent word that she was the wife of Captain Oxford,
hussar, and messmate of one of her brothers. A letter from the bride
awaited Willoughby at the Hall. He had ridden back at night, not
caring how he used his horse in order to get swiftly home, so forgetful
of himself was he under the terrible blow. That was the night of
Saturday. On the day following, being Sunday, he met Laetitia in his
park, led her to church, led her out of it, and the day after that,
previous to his disappearance for some weeks, was walking with her in
full view of the carriages along the road.

He had, indeed, you see, been very fortunately, if not considerately,
liberated by Miss Durham. He, as a man of honour, could not have taken
the initiative, but the frenzy of a jealous girl might urge her to such
a course; and how little he suffered from it had been shown to the
world. Miss Durham, the story went, was his mother's choice for him
against his heart's inclinations; which had finally subdued Lady
Patterne. Consequently, there was no longer an obstacle between Sir
Willoughby and Miss Dale. It was a pleasant and romantic story, and it
put most people in good humour with the county's favourite, as his
choice of a portionless girl of no position would not have done without
the shock of astonishment at the conduct of Miss Durham, and the desire
to feel that so prevailing a gentleman was not in any degree pitiable.
Constantia was called "that mad thing". Laetitia broke forth in novel
and abundant merits; and one of the chief points of requisition in
relation to Patterne--a Lady Willoughby who would entertain well and
animate the deadness of the Hall, became a certainty when her
gentleness and liveliness and exceeding cleverness were considered. She
was often a visitor at the Hall by Lady Patterne's express invitation,
and sometimes on these occasions Willoughby was there too,
superintending the filling up of his laboratory, though he was not at
home to the county; it was not expected that he should be yet. He had
taken heartily to the pursuit of science, and spoke of little else.
Science, he said, was in our days the sole object worth a devoted
pursuit. But the sweeping remark could hardly apply to Laetitia, of
whom he was the courteous, quiet wooer you behold when a man has broken
loose from an unhappy tangle to return to the lady of his first and
strongest affections.

Some months of homely courtship ensued, and then, the decent interval
prescribed by the situation having elapsed, Sir Willoughby Patterne
left his native land on a tour of the globe.



CHAPTER IV

LAETITIA DALE

That was another surprise to the county.

Let us not inquire into the feelings of patiently starving women; they
must obtain some sustenance of their own, since, as you perceive, they
live; evidently they are not in need of a great amount of nourishment;
and we may set them down for creatures with a rush-light of animal fire
to warm them. They cannot have much vitality who are so little
exclamatory. A corresponding sentiment of patient compassion, akin to
scorn, is provoked by persons having the opportunity for pathos, and
declining to use it. The public bosom was open to Laetitia for several
weeks, and had she run to it to bewail herself she would have been
cherished in thankfulness for a country drama. There would have been a
party against her, cold people, critical of her pretensions to rise
from an unrecognized sphere to be mistress of Patterne Hall, but there
would also have been a party against Sir Willoughby, composed of the
two or three revolutionists, tired of the yoke, which are to be found
in England when there is a stir; a larger number of born sympathetics,
ever ready to yield the tear for the tear; and here and there a
Samaritan soul prompt to succour poor humanity in distress. The
opportunity passed undramatized. Laetitia presented herself at church
with a face mildly devout, according to her custom, and she accepted
invitations to the Hall, she assisted at the reading of Willoughby's
letters to his family, and fed on dry husks of him wherein her name was
not mentioned; never one note of the summoning call for pathos did this
young lady blow.

So, very soon the public bosom closed. She had, under the fresh
interpretation of affairs, too small a spirit to be Lady Willoughby of
Patterne; she could not have entertained becomingly; he must have seen
that the girl was not the match for him in station, and off he went to
conquer the remainder of a troublesome first attachment, no longer
extremely disturbing, to judge from the tenour of his letters; really
incomparable letters! Lady Busshe and Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson
enjoyed a perusal of them. Sir Willoughby appeared as a splendid young
representative island lord in these letters to his family, despatched
from the principal cities of the United States of America. He would
give them a sketch of "our democratic cousins", he said. Such cousins!
They might all have been in the Marines. He carried his English
standard over that continent, and by simply jotting down facts, he left
an idea of the results of the measurement to his family and friends at
home. He was an adept in the irony of incongruously grouping. The
nature of the Equality under the stars and stripes was presented in
this manner. Equality! Reflections came occasionally: "These cousins of
ours are highly amusing. I am among the descendants of the Roundheads.
Now and then an allusion to old domestic differences, in perfect good
temper. We go on in our way; they theirs, in the apparent belief that
Republicanism operates remarkable changes in human nature. Vernon tries
hard to think it does. The upper ten of our cousins are the Infernal of
Paris. The rest of them is Radical England, as far as I am acquainted
with that section of my country."--Where we compared, they were absurd;
where we contrasted, they were monstrous. The contrast of Vernon's
letters with Willoughby's was just as extreme. You could hardly have
taken them for relatives travelling together, or Vernon Whitford for a
born and bred Englishman. The same scenes furnished by these two pens
might have been sketched in different hemispheres. Vernon had no irony.
He had nothing of Willoughby's epistolary creative power, which,
causing his family and friends to exclaim: "How like him that is!"
conjured them across the broad Atlantic to behold and clap hands at his
lordliness.

They saw him distinctly, as with the naked eye; a word, a turn of the
pen, or a word unsaid, offered the picture of him in America, Japan,
China, Australia, nay, the continent of Europe, holding an English
review of his Maker's grotesques. Vernon seemed a sheepish fellow,
without stature abroad, glad of a compliment, grateful for a dinner,
endeavouring sadly to digest all he saw and heard. But one was a
Patterne; the other a Whitford. One had genius; the other pottered
after him with the title of student. One was the English gentleman
wherever he went; the other was a new kind of thing, nondescript,
produced in England of late, and not likely to come to much good
himself, or do much good to the country.

Vernon's dancing in America was capitally described by Willoughby.
"Adieu to our cousins!" the latter wrote on his voyage to Japan. "I
may possibly have had some vogue in their ball-rooms, and in showing
them an English seat on horseback: I must resign myself if I have not
been popular among them. I could not sing their national song--if a
congery of states be a nation--and I must confess I listened with
frigid politeness to their singing of it. A great people, no doubt.
Adieu to them. I have had to tear old Vernon away. He had serious
thoughts of settling, means to correspond with some of them." On the
whole, forgetting two or more "traits of insolence" on the part of his
hosts, which he cited, Willoughby escaped pretty comfortably. The
President had been, consciously or not, uncivil, but one knew his
origin! Upon these interjections, placable flicks of the lionly tail
addressed to Britannia the Ruler, who expected him in some mildish way
to lash terga cauda in retiring, Sir Willoughby Patterne passed from a
land of alien manners; and ever after he spoke of America respectfully
and pensively, with a tail tucked in, as it were. His travels were
profitable to himself. The fact is, that there are cousins who come to
greatness and must be pacified, or they will prove annoying. Heaven
forefend a collision between cousins!

Willoughby returned to his England after an absence of three years. On
a fair April morning, the last of the month, he drove along his park
palings, and, by the luck of things, Laetitia was the first of his
friends whom he met. She was crossing from field to field with a band
of school-children, gathering wild flowers for the morrow May-day. He
sprang to the ground and seized her hand. "Laetitia Dale!" he said. He
panted. "Your name is sweet English music! And you are well?" The
anxious question permitted him to read deeply in her eyes. He found the
man he sought there, squeezed him passionately, and let her go, saying:
"I could not have prayed for a lovelier home-scene to welcome me than
you and these children flower-gathering. I don't believe in chance. It
was decreed that we should meet. Do not you think so?"

Laetitia breathed faintly of her gladness.

He begged her to distribute a gold coin among the little ones; asked
for the names of some of them, and repeated: "Mary, Susan,
Charlotte--only the Christian names, pray! Well, my dears, you will
bring your garlands to the Hall to-morrow morning; and mind, early! no
slugabeds tomorrow; I suppose I am browned, Laetitia?" He smiled in
apology for the foreign sun, and murmured with rapture: "The green of
this English country is unsurpassed. It is wonderful. Leave England
and be baked, if you would appreciate it. You can't, unless you taste
exile as I have done--for how many years? How many?"

"Three," said Laetitia.

"Thirty!" said he. "It seems to me that length. At least, I am
immensely older. But looking at you, I could think it less than three.
You have not changed. You are absolutely unchanged. I am bound to hope
so. I shall see you soon. I have much to talk of, much to tell you. I
shall hasten to call on your father. I have specially to speak with
him. I--what happiness this is, Laetitia! But I must not forget I have
a mother. Adieu; for some hours--not for many!"

He pressed her hand again. He was gone.

She dismissed the children to their homes. Plucking primroses was hard
labour now--a dusty business. She could have wished that her planet had
not descended to earth, his presence agitated her so; but his
enthusiastic patriotism was like a shower that, in the Spring season of
the year, sweeps against the hard-binding East and melts the air and
brings out new colours, makes life flow; and her thoughts recurred in
wonderment to the behaviour of Constantia Durham. That was Laetitia's
manner of taking up her weakness once more. She could almost have
reviled the woman who had given this beneficent magician, this pathetic
exile, of the aristocratic sunburned visage and deeply scrutinizing
eyes, cause for grief. How deeply his eyes could read! The starveling
of patience awoke to the idea of a feast. The sense of hunger came with
it, and hope came, and patience fled. She would have rejected hope to
keep patience nigh her; but surely it can not always be Winter! said
her reasoning blood, and we must excuse her as best we can if she was
assured, by her restored warmth that Willoughby came in the order of
the revolving seasons, marking a long Winter past. He had specially to
speak with her father, he had said. What could that mean? What,
but--She dared not phrase it or view it.

At their next meeting she was "Miss Dale".

A week later he was closeted with her father.

Mr. Dale, in the evening of that pregnant day, eulogized Sir Willoughby
as a landlord. A new lease of the cottage was to be granted him on the
old terms, he said. Except that Sir Willoughby had congratulated him in
the possession of an excellent daughter, their interview was one of
landlord and tenant, it appeared; and Laetitia said, "So we shall not
have to leave the cottage?" in a tone of satisfaction, while she
quietly gave a wrench to the neck of the young hope in her breast. At
night her diary received the line: "This day I was a fool. To-morrow?"

To-morrow and many days afterwards there were dashes instead of words.

Patience travelled back to her sullenly. As we must have some kind of
food, and she had nothing else, she took to that and found it dryer
than of yore. It is a composing but a lean dietary. The dead are
patient, and we get a certain likeness to them in feeding on it
unintermittingly overlong. Her hollowed cheeks with the fallen leaf in
them pleaded against herself to justify her idol for not looking down
on one like her. She saw him when he was at the Hall. He did not
notice any change. He was exceedingly gentle and courteous. More than
once she discovered his eyes dwelling on her, and then he looked
hurriedly at his mother, and Laetitia had to shut her mind from
thinking, lest thinking should be a sin and hope a guilty spectre. But
had his mother objected to her? She could not avoid asking herself. His
tour of the globe had been undertaken at his mother's desire; she was
an ambitious lady, in failing health; and she wished to have him living
with her at Patterne, yet seemed to agree that he did wisely to reside
in London.

One day Sir Willoughby, in the quiet manner which was his humour,
informed her that he had become a country gentleman; he had abandoned
London, he loathed it as the burial-place of the individual man. He
intended to sit down on his estates and have his cousin Vernon Whitford
to assist him in managing them, he said; and very amusing was his
description of his cousin's shifts to live by literature, and add
enough to a beggarly income to get his usual two months of the year in
the Alps. Previous to his great tour, Willoughby had spoken of Vernon's
judgement with derision; nor was it entirely unknown that Vernon had
offended his family pride by some extravagant act. But after their
return he acknowledged Vernon's talents, and seemed unable to do
without him.

The new arrangement gave Laetitia a companion for her walks.
Pedestrianism was a sour business to Willoughby, whose exclamation of
the word indicated a willingness for any amount of exercise on
horseback; but she had no horse, and so, while he hunted, Laetitia and
Vernon walked, and the neighbourhood speculated on the circumstances,
until the ladies Eleanor and Isabel Patterne engaged her more
frequently for carriage exercise, and Sir Willoughby was observed
riding beside them.

A real and sunny pleasure befell Laetitia in the establishment of young
Crossjay Patterne under her roof; the son of the lieutenant, now
captain, of Marines; a boy of twelve with the sprights of twelve boys
in him, for whose board and lodgement Vernon provided by arrangement
with her father. Vernon was one of your men that have no occupation for
their money, no bills to pay for repair of their property, and are
insane to spend. He had heard of Captain Patterne's large family, and
proposed to have his eldest boy at the Hall, to teach him; but
Willoughby declined to house the son of such a father, predicting that
the boy's hair would be red, his skin eruptive, and his practices
detestable. So Vernon, having obtained Mr. Dale's consent to
accommodate this youth, stalked off to Devonport, and brought back a
rosy-cheeked, round-bodied rogue of a boy, who fell upon meats and
puddings, and defeated them, with a captivating simplicity in his
confession that he had never had enough to eat in his life. He had gone
through a training for a plentiful table. At first, after a number of
helps, young Crossjay would sit and sigh heavily, in contemplation of
the unfinished dish. Subsequently, he told his host and hostess that he
had two sisters above his own age, and three brothers and two sisters
younger than he: "All hungry!" said die boy.

His pathos was most comical. It was a good month before he could see
pudding taken away from table without a sigh of regret that he could
not finish it as deputy for the Devonport household. The pranks of the
little fellow, and his revel in a country life, and muddy wildness in
it, amused Laetitia from morning to night. She, when she had caught
him, taught him in the morning; Vernon, favoured by the chase, in the
afternoon. Young Crossjay would have enlivened any household. He was
not only indolent, he was opposed to the acquisition of knowledge
through the medium of books, and would say: "But I don't want to!" in a
tone to make a logician thoughtful. Nature was very strong in him. He
had, on each return of the hour for instruction, to be plucked out of
the earth, rank of the soil, like a root, for the exercise of his big
round headpiece on those tyrannous puzzles. But the habits of birds,
and the place for their eggs, and the management of rabbits, and the
tickling of fish, and poaching joys with combative boys of the
district, and how to wheedle a cook for a luncheon for a whole day in
the rain, he soon knew of his great nature. His passion for our naval
service was a means of screwing his attention to lessons after he had
begun to understand that the desert had to be traversed to attain
midshipman's rank. He boasted ardently of his fighting father, and,
chancing to be near the Hall as he was talking to Vernon and Laetitia
of his father, he propounded a question close to his heart, and he put
it in these words, following: "My father's the one to lead an army!"
when he paused. "I say, Mr. Whitford, Sir Willoughby's kind to me, and
gives me crown-pieces, why wouldn't he see my father, and my father
came here ten miles in the rain to see him, and had to walk ten miles
back, and sleep at an inn?"

The only answer to be given was, that Sir Willoughby could not have
been at home. "Oh! my father saw him, and Sir Willoughby said he was
not at home," the boy replied, producing an odd ring in the ear by his
repetition of "not at home" in the same voice as the apology, plainly
innocent of malice. Vernon told Laetitia, however, that the boy never
asked an explanation of Sir Willoughby.

Unlike the horse of the adage, it was easier to compel young Crossjay
to drink of the waters of instruction than to get him to the brink. His
heart was not so antagonistic as his nature, and by degrees, owing to a
proper mixture of discipline and cajolery, he imbibed. He was whistling
at the cook's windows after a day of wicked truancy, on an April night,
and reported adventures over the supper supplied to him. Laetitia
entered the kitchen with a reproving forefinger. He jumped to kiss her,
and went on chattering of a place fifteen miles distant, where he had
seen Sir Willoughby riding with a young lady. The impossibility that
the boy should have got so far on foot made Laetitia doubtful of his
veracity, until she heard that a gentleman had taken him up on the road
in a gig, and had driven him to a farm to show him strings of birds'
eggs and stuffed birds of every English kind, kingfishers, yaffles,
black woodpeckers, goat-sucker owls, more mouth than head, with dusty,
dark-spotted wings, like moths; all very circumstantial. Still, in
spite of his tea at the farm, and ride back by rail at the gentleman's
expense, the tale seemed fictitious to Laetitia until Crossjay related
how that he had stood to salute on the road to the railway, and taken
off his cap to Sir Willoughby, and Sir Willoughby had passed him, not
noticing him, though the young lady did, and looked back and nodded.
The hue of truth was in that picture.

Strange eclipse, when the hue of truth comes shadowing over our bright
ideal planet. It will not seem the planet's fault, but truth's. Reality
is the offender; delusion our treasure that we are robbed of. Then
begins with us the term of wilful delusion, and its necessary
accompaniment of the disgust of reality; exhausting the heart much more
than patient endurance of starvation.

Hints were dropping about the neighbourhood; the hedgeways twittered,
the tree-tops cawed. Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson was loud on the
subject: "Patterne is to have a mistress at last, you say? But there
never was a doubt of his marrying--he must marry; and, so long as he
does not marry a foreign woman, we have no cause to complain. He met
her at Cherriton. Both were struck at the same moment. Her father is, I
hear, some sort of learned man; money; no land. No house either, I
believe. People who spend half their time on the Continent. They are
now for a year at Upton Park. The very girl to settle down and
entertain when she does think of settling. Eighteen, perfect manners;
you need not ask if a beauty. Sir Willoughby will have his dues. We
must teach her to make amends to him--but don't listen to Lady Busshe!
He was too young at twenty-three or twenty-four. No young man is ever
jilted; he is allowed to escape. A young man married is a fire-eater
bound over to keep the peace; if he keeps it he worries it. At
thirty-one or thirty-two he is ripe for his command, because he knows
how to bend. And Sir Willoughby is a splendid creature, only wanting a
wife to complete him. For a man like that to go on running about would
never do. Soberly--no! It would soon be getting ridiculous. He has been
no worse than other men, probably better--infinitely more excusable;
but now we have him, and it was time we should. I shall see her and
study her, sharply, you may be sure; though I fancy I can rely on his
judgement."

In confirmation of the swelling buzz, the Rev. Dr. Middleton and his
daughter paid a flying visit to the Hall, where they were seen only by
the members of the Patterne family. Young Crossjay had a short
conversation with Miss Middleton, and ran to the cottage full of
her--she loved the navy and had a merry face. She had a smile of very
pleasant humour according to Vernon. The young lady was outlined to
Laetitia as tall, elegant, lively; and painted as carrying youth like a
flag. With her smile of "very pleasant humour", she could not but be
winning.

Vernon spoke more of her father, a scholar of high repute; happily, a
scholar of an independent fortune. His maturer recollection of Miss
Middleton grew poetic, or he described her in an image to suit a poetic
end: "She gives you an idea of the Mountain Echo. Doctor Middleton has
one of the grandest heads in England."

"What is her Christian name?" said Laetitia.

He thought her Christian name was Clara.

Laetitia went to bed and walked through the day conceiving the Mountain
Echo the swift, wild spirit, Clara by name, sent fleeting on a far half
circle by the voice it is roused to subserve; sweeter than beautiful,
high above drawing-room beauties as the colours of the sky; and if, at
the same time, elegant and of loveable smiling, could a man resist her?
To inspire the title of Mountain Echo in any mind, a young lady must be
singularly spiritualized. Her father doated on her, Vernon said. Who
would not? It seemed an additional cruelty that the grace of a poetical
attractiveness should be round her, for this was robbing Laetitia of
some of her own little fortune, mystical though that might be. But a
man like Sir Willoughby had claims on poetry, possessing as he did
every manly grace; and to think that Miss Middleton had won him by
virtue of something native to her likewise, though mystically, touched
Laetitia with a faint sense of relationship to the chosen girl. "What
is in me, he sees on her." It decked her pride to think so, as a wreath
on the gravestone. She encouraged her imagination to brood over Clara,
and invested her designedly with romantic charms, in spite of pain; the
ascetic zealot hugs his share of Heaven--most bitter, most blessed--in
his hair-shirt and scourge, and Laetitia's happiness was to glorify
Clara. Through that chosen rival, through her comprehension of the
spirit of Sir Willoughby's choice of one such as Clara, she was linked
to him yet.

Her mood of ecstatic fidelity was a dangerous exaltation; one that in a
desert will distort the brain, and in the world where the idol dwells
will put him, should he come nigh, to its own furnace-test, and get a
clear brain out of a burnt heart. She was frequently at the Hall,
helping to nurse Lady Patterne. Sir Willoughby had hitherto treated her
as a dear insignificant friend, to whom it was unnecessary that he
should mention the object of his rides to Upton Park.

He had, however, in the contemplation of what he was gaining, fallen
into anxiety about what he might be losing. She belonged to his
brilliant youth; her devotion was the bride of his youth; he was a man
who lived backward almost as intensely as in the present; and,
notwithstanding Laetitia's praiseworthy zeal in attending on his
mother, he suspected some unfaithfulness: hardly without cause: she had
not looked paler of late; her eyes had not reproached him; the secret
of the old days between them had been as little concealed as it was
exposed. She might have buried it, after the way of woman, whose bosoms
can be tombs, if we and the world allow them to be; absolutely
sepulchres, where you lie dead, ghastly. Even if not dead and horrible
to think of, you may be lying cold, somewhere in a corner. Even if
embalmed, you may not be much visited. And how is the world to know you
are embalmed? You are no better than a rotting wretch to the world
that does not have peeps of you in the woman's breast, and see lights
burning and an occasional exhibition of the services of worship. There
are women--tell us not of her of Ephesus!--that have embalmed you, and
have quitted the world to keep the tapers alight, and a stranger comes,
and they, who have your image before them, will suddenly blow out the
vestal flames and treat you as dust to fatten the garden of their
bosoms for a fresh flower of love. Sir Willoughby knew it; he had
experience of it in the form of the stranger; and he knew the
stranger's feelings toward his predecessor and the lady.

He waylaid Laetitia, to talk of himself and his plans: the project of a
run to Italy. Enviable? Yes, but in England you live the higher moral
life. Italy boasts of sensual beauty; the spiritual is yours. "I know
Italy well; I have often wished to act as a cicerone to you there. As
it is, I suppose I shall be with those who know the land as well as I
do, and will not be particularly enthusiastic:--if you are what you
were?" He was guilty of this perplexing twist from one person to
another in a sentence more than once. While he talked exclusively of
himself it seemed to her a condescension. In time he talked principally
of her, beginning with her admirable care of his mother; and he wished
to introduce "a Miss Middleton" to her; he wanted her opinion of Miss
Middleton; he relied on her intuition of character, had never known it
err.

"If I supposed it could err, Miss Dale, I should not be so certain of
myself. I am bound up in my good opinion of you, you see; and you must
continue the same, or where shall I be?" Thus he was led to dwell upon
friendship, and the charm of the friendship of men and women,
"Platonism", as it was called. "I have laughed at it in the world, but
not in the depth of my heart. The world's platonic attachments are
laughable enough. You have taught me that the ideal of friendship is
possible--when we find two who are capable of a disinterested esteem.
The rest of life is duty; duty to parents, duty to country. But
friendship is the holiday of those who can be friends. Wives are
plentiful, friends are rare. I know how rare!"

Laetitia swallowed her thoughts as they sprang up. Why was he torturing
her?--to give himself a holiday? She could bear to lose him--she was
used to it--and bear his indifference, but not that he should disfigure
himself; it made her poor. It was as if he required an oath of her when
he said: "Italy! But I shall never see a day in Italy to compare with
the day of my return to England, or know a pleasure so exquisite as
your welcome of me. Will you be true to that? May I look forward to
just another such meeting?"

He pressed her for an answer. She gave the best she could. He was
dissatisfied, and to her hearing it was hardly in the tone of manliness
that he entreated her to reassure him; he womanized his language. She
had to say: "I am afraid I can not undertake to make it an appointment,
Sir Willoughby," before he recovered his alertness, which he did, for
he was anything but obtuse, with the reply, "You would keep it if you
promised, and freeze at your post. So, as accidents happen, we must
leave it to fate. The will's the thing. You know my detestation of
changes. At least I have you for my tenant, and wherever I am, I see
your light at the end of my park."

"Neither my father nor I would willingly quit Ivy Cottage," said
Laetitia.

"So far, then," he murmured. "You will give me a long notice, and it
must be with my consent if you think of quitting?"

"I could almost engage to do that," she said.

"You love the place?"

"Yes; I am the most contented of cottagers."

"I believe, Miss Dale, it would be well for my happiness were I a
cottager."

"That is the dream of the palace. But to be one, and not to wish to be
other, is quiet sleep in comparison."

"You paint a cottage in colours that tempt one to run from big houses
and households."

"You would run back to them faster, Sir Willoughby."

"You may know me," said he, bowing and passing on contentedly. He
stopped. "But I am not ambitious."

"Perhaps you are too proud for ambition, Sir Willoughby."

"You hit me to the life!"

He passed on regretfully. Clara Middleton did not study and know him
like Laetitia Dale.

Laetitia was left to think it pleased him to play at cat and mouse.
She had not "hit him to the life", or she would have marvelled in
acknowledging how sincere he was.

At her next sitting by the bedside of Lady Patterne she received a
certain measure of insight that might have helped her to fathom him, if
only she could have kept her feelings down.

The old lady was affectionately confidential in talking of her one
subject, her son. "And here is another dashing girl, my dear; she has
money and health and beauty; and so has he; and it appears a fortunate
union; I hope and pray it may be; but we begin to read the world when
our eyes grow dim, because we read the plain lines, and I ask myself
whether money and health and beauty on both sides have not been the
mutual attraction. We tried it before; and that girl Durham was honest,
whatever we may call her. I should have desired an appreciative
thoughtful partner for him, a woman of mind, with another sort of
wealth and beauty. She was honest, she ran away in time; there was a
worse thing possible than that. And now we have the same chapter, and
the same kind of person, who may not be quite as honest; and I shall
not see the end of it. Promise me you will always be good to him; be
my son's friend; his Egeria, he names you. Be what you were to him when
that girl broke his heart, and no one, not even his mother, was allowed
to see that he suffered anything. Comfort him in his sensitiveness.
Willoughby has the most entire faith in you. Were that destroyed--I
shudder! You are, he says, and he has often said, his image of the
constant woman."

Laetitia's hearing took in no more. She repeated to herself for days:
"His image of the constant woman!" Now, when he was a second time
forsaking her, his praise of her constancy wore the painful
ludicrousness of the look of a whimper on the face.



CHAPTER V

CLARA MIDDLETON

The great meeting of Sir Willoughby Patterne and Miss Middleton had
taken place at Cherriton Grange, the seat of a county grandee, where
this young lady of eighteen was first seen rising above the horizon.
She had money and health and beauty, the triune of perfect starriness,
which makes all men astronomers. He looked on her, expecting her to
look at him. But as soon as he looked he found that he must be in
motion to win a look in return. He was one of a pack; many were ahead
of him, the whole of them were eager. He had to debate within himself
how best to communicate to her that he was Willoughby Patterne, before
her gloves were too much soiled to flatter his niceness, for here and
there, all around, she was yielding her hand to partners--obscurant
males whose touch leaves a stain. Far too generally gracious was Her
Starriness to please him. The effect of it, nevertheless, was to hurry
him with all his might into the heat of the chase, while yet he knew no
more of her than that he was competing for a prize, and Willoughby
Patterne was only one of dozens to the young lady.

A deeper student of Science than his rivals, he appreciated Nature's
compliment in the fair ones choice of you. We now scientifically know
that in this department of the universal struggle, success is awarded
to the bettermost. You spread a handsomer tail than your fellows, you
dress a finer top-knot, you pipe a newer note, have a longer stride;
she reviews you in competition, and selects you. The superlative is
magnetic to her. She may be looking elsewhere, and you will see--the
superlative will simply have to beckon, away she glides. She cannot
help herself; it is her nature, and her nature is the guarantee for the
noblest races of men to come of her. In complimenting you, she is a
promise of superior offspring. Science thus--or it is better to say--an
acquaintance with science facilitates the cultivation of aristocracy.
Consequently a successful pursuit and a wresting of her from a body of
competitors, tells you that you are the best man. What is more, it
tells the world so.

Willoughby aired his amiable superlatives in the eye of Miss Middleton;
he had a leg. He was the heir of successful competitors. He had a
style, a tone, an artist tailor, an authority of manner; he had in the
hopeful ardour of the chase among a multitude a freshness that gave him
advantage; and together with his undeviating energy when there was a
prize to be won and possessed, these were scarce resistible. He spared
no pains, for he was adust and athirst for the winning-post. He courted
her father, aware that men likewise, and parents pre-eminently, have
their preference for the larger offer, the deeper pocket, the broader
lands, the respectfuller consideration. Men, after their fashion, as
well as women, distinguish the bettermost, and aid him to succeed, as
Dr. Middleton certainly did in the crisis of the memorable question
proposed to his daughter within a month of Willoughby's reception at
Upton Park. The young lady was astonished at his whirlwind wooing of
her, and bent to it like a sapling. She begged for time; Willoughby
could barely wait. She unhesitatingly owned that she liked no one
better, and he consented. A calm examination of his position told him
that it was unfair so long as he stood engaged, and she did not. She
pleaded a desire to see a little of the world before she plighted
herself. She alarmed him; he assumed the amazing god of love under the
subtlest guise of the divinity. Willingly would he obey her behests,
resignedly languish, were it not for his mother's desire to see the
future lady of Patterne established there before she died. Love shone
cunningly through the mask of filial duty, but the plea of urgency was
reasonable. Dr. Middleton thought it reasonable, supposing his daughter
to have an inclination. She had no disinclination, though she had a
maidenly desire to see a little of the world--grace for one year, she
said. Willoughby reduced the year to six months, and granted that term,
for which, in gratitude, she submitted to stand engaged; and that was
no light whispering of a word. She was implored to enter the state of
captivity by the pronunciation of vows--a private but a binding
ceremonial. She had health and beauty, and money to gild these gifts;
not that he stipulated for money with his bride, but it adds a lustre
to dazzle the world; and, moreover, the pack of rival pursuers hung
close behind, yelping and raising their dolorous throats to the moon.
Captive she must be.

He made her engagement no light whispering matter. It was a solemn
plighting of a troth. Why not? Having said, I am yours, she could say,
I am wholly yours, I am yours forever, I swear it, I will never swerve
from it, I am your wife in heart, yours utterly; our engagement is
written above. To this she considerately appended, "as far as I am
concerned"; a piece of somewhat chilling generosity, and he forced her
to pass him through love's catechism in turn, and came out with fervent
answers that bound him to her too indissolubly to let her doubt of her
being loved. And I am loved! she exclaimed to her heart's echoes, in
simple faith and wonderment. Hardly had she begun to think of love ere
the apparition arose in her path. She had not thought of love with any
warmth, and here it was. She had only dreamed of love as one of the
distant blessings of the mighty world, lying somewhere in the world's
forests, across wild seas, veiled, encompassed with beautiful perils, a
throbbing secrecy, but too remote to quicken her bosom's throbs. Her
chief idea of it was, the enrichment of the world by love.

Thus did Miss Middleton acquiesce in the principle of selection.

And then did the best man of a host blow his triumphant horn, and
loudly.

He looked the fittest; he justified the dictum of Science. The survival
of the Patternes was assured. "I would," he said to his admirer, Mrs.
Mountstuart Jenkinson, "have bargained for health above everything, but
she has everything besides--lineage, beauty, breeding: is what they
call an heiress, and is the most accomplished of her sex." With a
delicate art he conveyed to the lady's understanding that Miss
Middleton had been snatched from a crowd, without a breath of the crowd
having offended his niceness. He did it through sarcasm at your modern
young women, who run about the world nibbling and nibbled at, until
they know one sex as well as the other, and are not a whit less
cognizant of the market than men; pure, possibly; it is not so easy to
say innocent; decidedly not our feminine ideal. Miss Middleton was
different: she was the true ideal, fresh-gathered morning fruit in a
basket, warranted by her bloom.

Women do not defend their younger sisters for doing what they perhaps
have done--lifting a veil to be seen, and peeping at a world where
innocence is as poor a guarantee as a babe's caul against shipwreck.
Women of the world never think of attacking the sensual stipulation for
perfect bloom, silver purity, which is redolent of the Oriental origin
of the love-passion of their lords. Mrs. Mountstuart congratulated Sir
Willoughby on the prize he had won in the fair western-eastern.

"Let me see her," she said; and Miss Middleton was introduced and
critically observed.

She had the mouth that smiles in repose. The lips met full on the
centre of the bow and thinned along to a lifting dimple; the eyelids
also lifted slightly at the outer corners, and seemed, like the lip
into the limpid cheek, quickening up the temples, as with a run of
light, or the ascension indicated off a shoot of colour. Her features
were playfellows of one another, none of them pretending to rigid
correctness, nor the nose to the ordinary dignity of governess among
merry girls, despite which the nose was of a fair design, not acutely
interrogative or inviting to gambols. Aspens imaged in water, waiting
for the breeze, would offer a susceptible lover some suggestion of her
face: a pure, smooth-white face, tenderly flushed in the cheeks, where
the gentle dints, were faintly intermelting even during quietness. Her
eyes were brown, set well between mild lids, often shadowed, not
unwakeful. Her hair of lighter brown, swelling above her temples on the
sweep to the knot, imposed the triangle of the fabulous wild woodland
visage from brow to mouth and chin, evidently in agreement with her
taste; and the triangle suited her; but her face was not significant of
a tameless wildness or of weakness; her equable shut mouth threw its
long curve to guard the small round chin from that effect; her eyes
wavered only in humour, they were steady when thoughtfulness was
awakened; and at such seasons the build of her winter-beechwood hair
lost the touch of nymphlike and whimsical, and strangely, by mere
outline, added to her appearance of studious concentration. Observe the
hawk on stretched wings over the prey he spies, for an idea of this
change in the look of a young lady whom Vernon Whitford could liken to
the Mountain Echo, and Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson pronounced to be "a
dainty rogue in porcelain".

Vernon's fancy of her must have sprung from her prompt and most musical
responsiveness. He preferred the society of her learned father to that
of a girl under twenty engaged to his cousin, but the charm of her
ready tongue and her voice was to his intelligent understanding wit,
natural wit, crystal wit, as opposed to the paste-sparkle of the wit of
the town. In his encomiums he did not quote Miss Middleton's wit;
nevertheless, he ventured to speak of it to Mrs. Mountstuart, causing
that lady to say: "Ah, well, I have not noticed the wit. You may have
the art of drawing it out."

No one had noticed the wit. The corrupted hearing of people required a
collision of sounds, Vernon supposed. For his part, to prove their
excellence, he recollected a great many of Miss Middleton's remarks;
they came flying to him; and so long as he forbore to speak them aloud,
they had a curious wealth of meaning. It could not be all her manner,
however much his own manner might spoil them. It might be, to a certain
degree, her quickness at catching the hue and shade of evanescent
conversation. Possibly by remembering the whole of a conversation
wherein she had her place, the wit was to be tested; only how could any
one retain the heavy portion? As there was no use in being
argumentative on a subject affording him personally, and apparently
solitarily, refreshment and enjoyment, Vernon resolved to keep it to
himself. The eulogies of her beauty, a possession in which he did not
consider her so very conspicuous, irritated him in consequence. To
flatter Sir Willoughby, it was the fashion to exalt her as one of the
types of beauty; the one providentially selected to set off his
masculine type. She was compared to those delicate flowers, the ladies
of the Court of China, on rice-paper. A little French dressing would
make her at home on the sward by the fountain among the lutes and
whispers of the bewitching silken shepherdesses who live though they
never were. Lady Busshe was reminded of the favourite lineaments of the
women of Leonardo, the angels of Luini. Lady Culmer had seen crayon
sketches of demoiselles of the French aristocracy resembling her. Some
one mentioned an antique statue of a figure breathing into a flute: and
the mouth at the flutestop might have a distant semblance of the bend
of her mouth, but this comparison was repelled as grotesque.

For once Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson was unsuccessful.

Her "dainty rogue in porcelain" displeased Sir Willoughby. "Why rogue?"
he said. The lady's fame for hitting the mark fretted him, and the
grace of his bride's fine bearing stood to support him in his
objection. Clara was young, healthy, handsome; she was therefore fitted
to be his wife, the mother of his children, his companion picture.
Certainly they looked well side by side. In walking with her, in
drooping to her, the whole man was made conscious of the female image
of himself by her exquisite unlikeness. She completed him, added the
softer lines wanting to his portrait before the world. He had wooed her
rageingly; he courted her becomingly; with the manly self-possession
enlivened by watchful tact which is pleasing to girls. He never seemed
to undervalue himself in valuing her: a secret priceless in the
courtship of young women that have heads; the lover doubles their sense
of personal worth through not forfeiting his own. Those were proud and
happy days when he rode Black Norman over to Upton Park, and his lady
looked forth for him and knew him coming by the faster beating of her
heart.

Her mind, too, was receptive. She took impressions of his
characteristics, and supplied him a feast. She remembered his chance
phrases; noted his ways, his peculiarities, as no one of her sex had
done. He thanked his cousin Vernon for saying she had wit. She had it,
and of so high a flavour that the more he thought of the epigram
launched at her the more he grew displeased. With the wit to understand
him, and the heart to worship, she had a dignity rarely seen in young
ladies.

"Why rogue?" he insisted with Mrs. Mountstuart.

"I said--in porcelain," she replied.

"Rogue perplexes me."

"Porcelain explains it."

"She has the keenest sense of honour."

"I am sure she is a paragon of rectitude."

"She has a beautiful bearing."

"The carriage of a young princess!"

"I find her perfect."

"And still she may be a dainty rogue in porcelain."

"Are you judging by the mind or the person, ma'am?"

"Both."

"And which is which?"

"There's no distinction."

"Rogue and mistress of Patterne do not go together."

"Why not? She will be a novelty to our neighbourhood and an animation
of the Hall."

"To be frank, rogue does not rightly match with me."

"Take her for a supplement."

"You like her?"

"In love with her! I can imagine life-long amusement in her company.
Attend to my advice: prize the porcelain and play with the rogue."

Sir Willoughby nodded, unilluminated. There was nothing of rogue in
himself, so there could be nothing of it in his bride. Elfishness,
tricksiness, freakishness, were antipathetic to his nature; and he
argued that it was impossible he should have chosen for his complement
a person deserving the title. It would not have been sanctioned by his
guardian genius. His closer acquaintance with Miss Middleton squared
with his first impressions; you know that this is convincing; the
common jury justifies the presentation of the case to them by the grand
jury; and his original conclusion that she was essentially feminine, in
other words, a parasite and a chalice, Clara's conduct confirmed from
day to day. He began to instruct her in the knowledge of himself
without reserve, and she, as she grew less timid with him, became more
reflective.

"I judge by character," he said to Mrs. Mountstuart.

"If you have caught the character of a girl," said she.

"I think I am not far off it."

"So it was thought by the man who dived for the moon in a well."

"How women despise their sex!"

"Not a bit. She has no character yet. You are forming it, and pray be
advised and be merry; the solid is your safest guide; physiognomy and
manners will give you more of a girl's character than all the divings
you can do. She is a charming young woman, only she is one of that
sort."

"Of what sort?" Sir Willoughby asked, impatiently.

"Rogues in porcelain."

"I am persuaded I shall never comprehend it."

"I cannot help you one bit further."

"The word rogue!"

"It was dainty rogue."

"Brittle, would you say?"

"I am quite unable to say."

"An innocent naughtiness?"

"Prettily moulded in a delicate substance."

"You are thinking of some piece of Dresden you suppose her to
resemble."

"I dare say."

"Artificial?"

"You would not have her natural?"

"I am heartily satisfied with her from head to foot, my dear Mrs.
Mountstuart."

"Nothing could be better. And sometimes she will lead, and generally
you will lead, and everything will go well, my dear Sir Willoughby."

Like all rapid phrasers, Mrs. Mountstuart detested the analysis of her
sentence. It had an outline in vagueness, and was flung out to be
apprehended, not dissected. Her directions for the reading of Miss
Middleton's character were the same that she practised in reading Sir
Willoughby's, whose physiognomy and manners bespoke him what she
presumed him to be, a splendidly proud gentleman, with good reason.

Mrs. Mountstuart's advice was wiser than her procedure, for she stopped
short where he declined to begin. He dived below the surface without
studying that index-page. He had won Miss Middleton's hand; he believed
he had captured her heart; but he was not so certain of his possession
of her soul, and he went after it. Our enamoured gentleman had
therefore no tally of Nature's writing above to set beside his
discoveries in the deeps. Now it is a dangerous accompaniment of this
habit of driving, that where we do not light on the discoveries we
anticipate, we fall to work sowing and planting; which becomes a
disturbance of the gentle bosom. Miss Middleton's features were legible
as to the mainspring of her character. He could have seen that she had
a spirit with a natural love of liberty, and required the next thing to
liberty, spaciousness, if she was to own allegiance. Those features,
unhappily, instead of serving for an introduction to the within, were
treated as the mirror of himself. They were indeed of an amiable
sweetness to tempt an accepted lover to angle for the first person in
the second. But he had made the discovery that their minds differed on
one or two points, and a difference of view in his bride was obnoxious
to his repose. He struck at it recurringly to show her error under
various aspects. He desired to shape her character to the feminine of
his own, and betrayed the surprise of a slight disappointment at her
advocacy of her ideas. She said immediately: "It is not too late,
Willoughby," and wounded him, for he wanted her simply to be material
in his hands for him to mould her; he had no other thought. He lectured
her on the theme of the infinity of love. How was it not too late? They
were plighted; they were one eternally; they could not be parted. She
listened gravely, conceiving the infinity as a narrow dwelling where a
voice droned and ceased not. However, she listened. She became an
attentive listener.



CHAPTER VI

HIS COURTSHIP

The world was the principal topic of dissension between these lovers.
His opinion of the world affected her like a creature threatened with a
deprivation of air. He explained to his darling that lovers of
necessity do loathe the world. They live in the world, they accept its
benefits, and assist it as well as they can. In their hearts they must
despise it, shut it out, that their love for one another may pour in a
clear channel, and with all the force they have. They cannot enjoy the
sense of security for their love unless they fence away the world. It
is, you will allow, gross; it is a beast. Formally we thank it for the
good we get of it; only we two have an inner temple where the worship
we conduct is actually, if you would but see it, an excommunication of
the world. We abhor that beast to adore that divinity. This gives us
our oneness, our isolation, our happiness. This is to love with the
soul. Do you see, darling?

She shook her head; she could not see it. She would admit none of the
notorious errors, of the world; its backbiting, selfishness,
coarseness, intrusiveness, infectiousness. She was young. She might,
Willoughby thought, have let herself be led; she was not docile. She
must be up in arms as a champion of the world; and one saw she was
hugging her dream of a romantic world, nothing else. She spoilt the
secret bower-song he delighted to tell over to her. And how, Powers of
Love! is love-making to be pursued if we may not kick the world out of
our bower and wash our hands of it? Love that does not spurn the world
when lovers curtain themselves is a love--is it not so?--that seems to
the unwhipped, scoffing world to go slinking into basiation's
obscurity, instead of on a glorious march behind the screen. Our hero
had a strong sentiment as to the policy of scorning the world for the
sake of defending his personal pride and (to his honour, be it said)
his lady's delicacy.

The act of seeming put them both above the world, said retro Sathanas!
So much, as a piece of tactics: he was highly civilized: in the second
instance, he knew it to be the world which must furnish the dry sticks
for the bonfire of a woman's worship. He knew, too, that he was
prescribing poetry to his betrothed, practicable poetry. She had a
liking for poetry, and sometimes quoted the stuff in defiance of his
pursed mouth and pained murmur: "I am no poet;" but his poetry of the
enclosed and fortified bower, without nonsensical rhymes to catch the
ears of women, appeared incomprehensible to her, if not adverse. She
would not burn the world for him; she would not, though a purer poetry
is little imaginable, reduce herself to ashes, or incense, or essence,
in honour of him, and so, by love's transmutation, literally be the man
she was to marry. She preferred to be herself, with the egoism of
women. She said it: she said: "I must be myself to be of any value to
you, Willoughby." He was indefatigable in his lectures on the
aesthetics of love. Frequently, for an indemnification to her (he had
no desire that she should be a loser by ceasing to admire the world),
he dwelt on his own youthful ideas; and his original fancies about the
world were presented to her as a substitute for the theme.

Miss Middleton bore it well, for she was sure that he meant well.
Bearing so well what was distasteful to her, she became less well able
to bear what she had merely noted in observation before; his view of
scholarship; his manner toward Mr. Vernon Whitford, of whom her father
spoke warmly; the rumour concerning his treatment of a Miss Dale. And
the country tale of Constantia Durham sang itself to her in a new key.
He had no contempt for the world's praises. Mr. Whitford wrote the
letters to the county paper which gained him applause at various great
houses, and he accepted it, and betrayed a tingling fright lest he
should be the victim of a sneer of the world he contemned. Recollecting
his remarks, her mind was afflicted by the "something illogical" in him
that we readily discover when our natures are no longer running free,
and then at once we yearn for a disputation. She resolved that she
would one day, one distant day, provoke it--upon what? The special
point eluded her. The world is too huge a client, and too pervious, too
spotty, for a girl to defend against a man. That "something illogical"
had stirred her feelings more than her intellect to revolt. She could
not constitute herself the advocate of Mr. Whitford. Still she marked
the disputation for an event to come.

Meditating on it, she fell to picturing Sir Willoughby's face at the
first accents of his bride's decided disagreement with him. The
picture once conjured up would not be laid. He was handsome; so
correctly handsome, that a slight unfriendly touch precipitated him
into caricature. His habitual air of happy pride, of indignant
contentment rather, could easily be overdone. Surprise, when he threw
emphasis on it, stretched him with the tall eyebrows of a
mask--limitless under the spell of caricature; and in time, whenever
she was not pleased by her thoughts, she had that, and not his
likeness, for the vision of him. And it was unjust, contrary to her
deeper feelings; she rebuked herself, and as much as her naughty spirit
permitted, she tried to look on him as the world did; an effort
inducing reflections upon the blessings of ignorance. She seemed to
herself beset by a circle of imps, hardly responsible for her thoughts.

He outshone Mr. Whitford in his behaviour to young Crossjay. She had
seen him with the boy, and he was amused, indulgent, almost frolicsome,
in contradistinction to Mr. Whitford's tutorly sharpness. He had the
English father's tone of a liberal allowance for boys' tastes and
pranks, and he ministered to the partiality of the genus for
pocket-money. He did not play the schoolmaster, like bookworms who get
poor little lads in their grasp.

Mr. Whitford avoided her very much. He came to Upton Park on a visit to
her father, and she was not particularly sorry that she saw him only at
table. He treated her by fits to a level scrutiny of deep-set eyes
unpleasantly penetrating. She had liked his eyes. They became
unbearable; they dwelt in the memory as if they had left a
phosphorescent line. She had been taken by playmate boys in her infancy
to peep into hedge-leaves, where the mother-bird brooded on the nest;
and the eyes of the bird in that marvellous dark thickset home, had
sent her away with worlds of fancy. Mr. Whitford's gaze revived her
susceptibility, but not the old happy wondering. She was glad of his
absence, after a certain hour that she passed with Willoughby, a
wretched hour to remember. Mr. Whitford had left, and Willoughby came,
bringing bad news of his mother's health. Lady Patterne was fast
failing. Her son spoke of the loss she would be to him; he spoke of the
dreadfulness of death. He alluded to his own death to come carelessly,
with a philosophical air.

"All of us must go! our time is short."

"Very," she assented.

It sounded like want of feeling.

"If you lose me, Clara!"

"But you are strong, Willoughby."

"I may be cut off to-morrow."

"Do not talk in such a manner."

"It is as well that it should be faced."

"I cannot see what purpose it serves."

"Should you lose me, my love!"

"Willoughby!"

"Oh, the bitter pang of leaving you!"

"Dear Willoughby, you are distressed; your mother may recover; let us
hope she will; I will help to nurse her; I have offered, you know; I am
ready, most anxious. I believe I am a good nurse."

"It is this belief--that one does not die with death!"

"That is our comfort."

"When we love?"

"Does it not promise that we meet again?"

"To walk the world and see you perhaps--with another!"

"See me?--Where? Here?"

"Wedded . . . to another. You! my bride; whom I call mine; and you are!
You would be still--in that horror! But all things are possible; women
are women; they swim in infidelity, from wave to wave! I know them."

"Willoughby, do not torment yourself and me, I beg you."

He meditated profoundly, and asked her: "Could you be such a saint
among women?"

"I think I am a more than usually childish girl."

"Not to forget me?"

"Oh! no."

"Still to be mine?"

"I am yours."

"To plight yourself?"

"It is done."

"Be mine beyond death?"

"Married is married, I think."

"Clara! to dedicate your life to our love! Never one touch; not one
whisper! not a thought, not a dream! Could you--it agonizes me to
imagine . . . be inviolate? mine above?--mine before all men, though I
am gone:--true to my dust? Tell me. Give me that assurance. True to my
name!--Oh, I hear them. 'His relict!' Buzzings about Lady Patterne.
'The widow.' If you knew their talk of widows! Shut your ears, my
angel! But if she holds them off and keeps her path, they are forced to
respect her. The dead husband is not the dishonoured wretch they
fancied him, because he was out of their way. He lives in the heart of
his wife. Clara! my Clara! as I live in yours, whether here or away;
whether you are a wife or widow, there is no distinction for love--I am
your husband--say it--eternally. I must have peace; I cannot endure the
pain. Depressed, yes; I have cause to be. But it has haunted me ever
since we joined hands. To have you--to lose you!"

"Is it not possible that I may be the first to die?" said Miss
Middleton.

"And lose you, with the thought that you, lovely as you are, and the
dogs of the world barking round you, might . . . Is it any wonder that
I have my feeling for the world? This hand!--the thought is horrible.
You would be surrounded; men are brutes; the scent of unfaithfulness
excites them, overjoys them. And I helpless! The thought is maddening.
I see a ring of monkeys grinning. There is your beauty, and man's
delight in desecrating. You would be worried night and day to quit my
name, to . . . I feel the blow now. You would have no rest for them,
nothing to cling to without your oath."

"An oath!" said Miss Middleton.

"It is no delusion, my love, when I tell you that with this thought
upon me I see a ring of monkey faces grinning at me; they haunt me. But
you do swear it! Once, and I will never trouble you on the subject
again. My weakness! if you like. You will learn that it is love, a
man's love, stronger than death."

"An oath?" she said, and moved her lips to recall what she might have
said and forgotten. "To what? what oath?"

"That you will be true to me dead as well as living! Whisper it."

"Willoughby, I shall be true to my vows at the altar."

"To me! me!"

"It will be to you."

"To my soul. No heaven can be for me--I see none, only torture, unless
I have your word, Clara. I trust it. I will trust it implicitly. My
confidence in you is absolute."

"Then you need not be troubled."

"It is for you, my love; that you may be armed and strong when I am not
by to protect you."

"Our views of the world are opposed, Willoughby."

"Consent; gratify me; swear it. Say: 'Beyond death.' Whisper it. I ask
for nothing more. Women think the husband's grave breaks the bond, cuts
the tie, sets them loose. They wed the flesh--pah! What I call on you
for is nobility; the transcendent nobility of faithfulness beyond
death. 'His widow!' let them say; a saint in widowhood."

"My vows at the altar must suffice."

"You will not? Clara!"

"I am plighted to you."

"Not a word?--a simple promise? But you love me?"

"I have given you the best proof of it that I can."

"Consider how utterly I place confidence in you."

"I hope it is well placed."

"I could kneel to you, to worship you, if you would, Clara!"

"Kneel to Heaven, not to me, Willoughby. I am--I wish I were able to
tell what I am. I may be inconstant; I do not know myself. Think;
question yourself whether I am really the person you should marry. Your
wife should have great qualities of mind and soul. I will consent to
hear that I do not possess them, and abide by the verdict."

"You do; you do possess them!" Willoughby cried. "When you know better
what the world is, you will understand my anxiety. Alive, I am strong
to shield you from it; dead, helpless--that is all. You would be clad
in mail, steel-proof, inviolable, if you would . . . But try to enter
into my mind; think with me, feel with me. When you have once
comprehended the intensity of the love of a man like me, you will not
require asking. It is the difference of the elect and the vulgar; of
the ideal of love from the coupling of the herds. We will let it drop.
At least, I have your hand. As long as I live I have your hand. Ought I
not to be satisfied? I am; only I see further than most men, and feel
more deeply. And now I must ride to my mother's bedside. She dies Lady
Patterne! It might have been that she . . . But she is a woman of
women! With a father-in-law! Just heaven! Could I have stood by her
then with the same feelings of reverence? A very little, my love, and
everything gained for us by civilization crumbles; we fall back to the
first mortar-bowl we were bruised and stirred in. My thoughts, when I
take my stand to watch by her, come to this conclusion, that,
especially in women, distinction is the thing to be aimed at. Otherwise
we are a weltering human mass. Women must teach us to venerate them, or
we may as well be bleating and barking and bellowing. So, now enough.
You have but to think a little. I must be off. It may have happened
during my absence. I will write. I shall hear from you? Come and see me
mount Black Norman. My respects to your father. I have no time to pay
them in person. One!"

He took the one--love's mystical number--from which commonly spring
multitudes; but, on the present occasion, it was a single one, and
cold. She watched him riding away on his gallant horse, as handsome a
cavalier as the world could show, and the contrast of his recent
language and his fine figure was a riddle that froze her blood. Speech
so foreign to her ears, unnatural in tone, unmanlike even for a lover
(who is allowed a softer dialect), set her vainly sounding for the
source and drift of it. She was glad of not having to encounter eyes
like Mr. Vernon Whitford's.

On behalf of Sir Willoughby, it is to be said that his mother, without
infringing on the degree of respect for his decisions and sentiments
exacted by him, had talked to him of Miss Middleton, suggesting a
volatility of temperament in the young lady that struck him as
consentaneous with Mrs Mountstuart's "rogue in porcelain", and
alarmed him as the independent observations of two world-wise women.
Nor was it incumbent upon him personally to credit the volatility in
order, as far as he could, to effect the soul-insurance of his bride,
that he might hold the security of the policy. The desire for it was in
him; his mother had merely tolled a warning bell that he had put in
motion before. Clara was not a Constantia. But she was a woman, and he
had been deceived by women, as a man fostering his high ideal of them
will surely be. The strain he adopted was quite natural to his passion
and his theme. The language of the primitive sentiments of men is of
the same expression at all times, minus the primitive colours when a
modern gentleman addresses his lady.

Lady Patterne died in the winter season of the new year. In April Dr
Middleton had to quit Upton Park, and he had not found a place of
residence, nor did he quite know what to do with himself in the
prospect of his daughter's marriage and desertion of him. Sir
Willoughby proposed to find him a house within a circuit of the
neighbourhood of Patterne. Moreover, he invited the Rev. Doctor and his
daughter to come to Patterne from Upton for a month, and make
acquaintance with his aunts, the ladies Eleanor and Isabel Patterne, so
that it might not be so strange to Clara to have them as her housemates
after her marriage. Dr. Middleton omitted to consult his daughter
before accepting the invitation, and it appeared, when he did speak to
her, that it should have been done. But she said, mildly, "Very well,
papa."

Sir Willoughby had to visit the metropolis and an estate in another
county, whence he wrote to his betrothed daily. He returned to Patterne
in time to arrange for the welcome of his guests; too late, however, to
ride over to them; and, meanwhile, during his absence, Miss Middleton
had bethought herself that she ought to have given her last days of
freedom to her friends. After the weeks to be passed at Patterne, very
few weeks were left to her, and she had a wish to run to Switzerland or
Tyrol and see the Alps; a quaint idea, her father thought. She repeated
it seriously, and Dr. Middleton perceived a feminine shuttle of
indecision at work in her head, frightful to him, considering that they
signified hesitation between the excellent library and capital
wine-cellar of Patterne Hall, together with the society of that
promising young scholar, Mr. Vernon Whitford, on the one side, and a
career of hotels--equivalent to being rammed into monster artillery
with a crowd every night, and shot off on a day's journey through space
every morning--on the other.

"You will have your travelling and your Alps after the ceremony," he
said.

"I think I would rather stay at home," said she.

Dr Middleton rejoined: "I would."

"But I am not married yet papa."

"As good, my dear."

"A little change of scene, I thought . . ."

"We have accepted Willoughby's invitation. And he helps me to a house
near you."

"You wish to be near me, papa?"

"Proximate--at a remove: communicable."

"Why should we separate?"

"For the reason, my dear, that you exchange a father for a husband."

"If I do not want to exchange?"

"To purchase, you must pay, my child. Husbands are not given for
nothing."

"No. But I should have you, papa!"

"Should?"

"They have not yet parted us, dear papa."

"What does that mean?" he asked, fussily. He was in a gentle stew
already, apprehensive of a disturbance of the serenity precious to
scholars by postponements of the ceremony and a prolongation of a
father's worries.

"Oh, the common meaning, papa," she said, seeing how it was with him.

"Ah!" said he, nodding and blinking gradually back to a state of
composure, glad to be appeased on any terms; for mutability is but
another name for the sex, and it is the enemy of the scholar.

She suggested that two weeks of Patterne would offer plenty of time to
inspect the empty houses of the district, and should be sufficient,
considering the claims of friends, and the necessity of going the round
of London shops.

"Two or three weeks," he agreed, hurriedly, by way of compromise with
that fearful prospect.



CHAPTER VII

THE BETROTHED

During the drive from Upton to Patterne, Miss Middleton hoped, she
partly believed, that there was to be a change in Sir Willoughby's
manner of courtship. He had been so different a wooer. She remembered
with some half-conscious desperation of fervour what she had thought of
him at his first approaches, and in accepting him. Had she seen him
with the eyes of the world, thinking they were her own? That look of
his, the look of "indignant contentment", had then been a most noble
conquering look, splendid as a general's plume at the gallop. It could
not have altered. Was it that her eyes had altered?

The spirit of those days rose up within her to reproach, her and
whisper of their renewal: she remembered her rosy dreams and the image
she had of him, her throbbing pride in him, her choking richness of
happiness: and also her vain attempting to be very humble, usually
ending in a carol, quaint to think of, not without charm, but quaint,
puzzling.

Now men whose incomes have been restricted to the extent that they must
live on their capital, soon grow relieved of the forethoughtful anguish
wasting them by the hilarious comforts of the lap upon which they have
sunk back, insomuch that they are apt to solace themselves for their
intolerable anticipations of famine in the household by giving loose to
one fit or more of reckless lavishness. Lovers in like manner live on
their capital from failure of income: they, too, for the sake of
stifling apprehension and piping to the present hour, are lavish of
their stock, so as rapidly to attenuate it: they have their fits of
intoxication in view of coming famine: they force memory into play,
love retrospectively, enter the old house of the past and ravage the
larder, and would gladly, even resolutely, continue in illusion if it
were possible for the broadest honey-store of reminiscences to hold out
for a length of time against a mortal appetite: which in good sooth
stands on the alternative of a consumption of the hive or of the
creature it is for nourishing. Here do lovers show that they are
perishable. More than the poor clay world they need fresh supplies,
right wholesome juices; as it were, life in the burst of the bud,
fruits yet on the tree, rather than potted provender. The latter is
excellent for by-and-by, when there will be a vast deal more to
remember, and appetite shall have but one tooth remaining. Should their
minds perchance have been saturated by their first impressions and have
retained them, loving by the accountable light of reason, they may have
fair harvests, as in the early time; but that case is rare. In other
words, love is an affair of two, and is only for two that can be as
quick, as constant in intercommunication as are sun and earth, through
the cloud or face to face. They take their breath of life from one
another in signs of affection, proofs of faithfulness, incentives to
admiration. Thus it is with men and women in love's good season. But a
solitary soul dragging a log must make the log a God to rejoice in the
burden. That is not love.

Clara was the least fitted of all women to drag a log. Few girls would
be so rapid in exhausting capital. She was feminine indeed, but she
wanted comradeship, a living and frank exchange of the best in both,
with the deeper feelings untroubled. To be fixed at the mouth of a
mine, and to have to descend it daily, and not to discover great
opulence below; on the contrary, to be chilled in subterranean
sunlessness, without any substantial quality that she could grasp, only
the mystery of the inefficient tallow-light in those caverns of the
complacent-talking man: this appeared to her too extreme a probation
for two or three weeks. How of a lifetime of it!

She was compelled by her nature to hope, expect and believe that Sir
Willoughby would again be the man she had known when she accepted him.
Very singularly, to show her simple spirit at the time, she was unaware
of any physical coldness to him; she knew of nothing but her mind at
work, objecting to this and that, desiring changes. She did not dream
of being on the giddy ridge of the passive or negative sentiment of
love, where one step to the wrong side precipitates us into the state
of repulsion.

Her eyes were lively at their meeting--so were his. She liked to see
him on the steps, with young Crossjay under his arm. Sir Willoughby
told her in his pleasantest humour of the boy's having got into the
laboratory that morning to escape his task-master, and blown out the
windows. She administered a chiding to the delinquent in the same
spirit, while Sir Willoughby led her on his arm across the threshold,
whispering: "Soon for good!" In reply to the whisper, she begged for
more of the story of young Crossjay. "Come into the laboratory," said
he, a little less laughingly than softly; and Clara begged her father
to come and see young Crossjay's latest pranks. Sir Willoughby
whispered to her of the length of their separation, and his joy to
welcome her to the house where she would reign as mistress very won. He
numbered the weeks. He whispered: "Come." In the hurry of the moment
she did not examine a lightning terror that shot through her. It
passed, and was no more than the shadow which bends the summer grasses,
leaving a ruffle of her ideas, in wonder of her having feared herself
for something. Her father was with them. She and Willoughby were not
yet alone.

Young Crossjay had not accomplished so fine a piece of destruction as
Sir Willoughby's humour proclaimed of him. He had connected a battery
with a train of gunpowder, shattering a window-frame and unsettling
some bricks. Dr. Middleton asked if the youth was excluded from the
library, and rejoiced to hear that it was a sealed door to him. Thither
they went. Vernon Whitford was away on one of his long walks.

"There, papa, you see he is not so very faithful to you," said Clara.

Dr Middleton stood frowning over MS notes on the table, in Vernon's
handwriting. He flung up the hair from his forehead and dropped into a
seat to inspect them closely. He was now immoveable. Clara was obliged
to leave him there. She was led to think that Willoughby had drawn them
to the library with the design to be rid of her protector, and she
began to fear him. She proposed to pay her respects to the ladies
Eleanor and Isabel. They were not seen, and a footman reported in the
drawing-room that they were out driving. She grasped young Crossjay's
hand. Sir Willoughby dispatched him to Mrs. Montague, the housekeeper,
for a tea of cakes and jam.

"Off!" he said, and the boy had to run.

Clara saw herself without a shield.

"And the garden!" she cried. "I love the garden; I must go and see what
flowers are up with you. In spring I care most for wild flowers, and if
you will show me daffodils and crocuses and anemones . . ."

"My dearest Clara! my bride!" said he.

"Because they are vulgar flowers?" she asked him, artlessly, to account
for his detaining her.

Why would he not wait to deserve her!--no, not deserve--to reconcile
her with her real position; not reconcile, but to repair the image of
him in her mind, before he claimed his apparent right!

He did not wait. He pressed her to his bosom.

"You are mine, my Clara--utterly mine; every thought, every feeling. We
are one: the world may do its worst. I have been longing for you,
looking forward. You save me from a thousand vexations. One is
perpetually crossed. That is all outside us. We two! With you I am
secure! Soon! I could not tell you whether the world's alive or dead.
My dearest!"

She came out of it with the sensations of the frightened child that has
had its dip in sea-water, sharpened to think that after all it was not
so severe a trial. Such was her idea; and she said to herself
immediately: What am I that I should complain? Two minutes earlier she
would not have thought it; but humiliated pride falls lower than
humbleness.

She did not blame him; she fell in her own esteem; less because she was
the betrothed Clara Middleton, which was now palpable as a shot in the
breast of a bird, than that she was a captured woman, of whom it is
absolutely expected that she must submit, and when she would rather be
gazing at flowers. Clara had shame of her sex. They cannot take a step
without becoming bondwomen: into what a slavery! For herself, her trial
was over, she thought. As for herself, she merely complained of a
prematureness and crudity best unanalyzed. In truth, she could hardly
be said to complain. She did but criticize him and wonder that a man
was unable to perceive, or was not arrested by perceiving,
unwillingness, discordance, dull compliance; the bondwoman's due
instead of the bride's consent. Oh, sharp distinction, as between two
spheres!

She meted him justice; she admitted that he had spoken in a lover-like
tone. Had it not been for the iteration of "the world", she would not
have objected critically to his words, though they were words of
downright appropriation. He had the right to use them, since she was to
be married to him. But if he had only waited before playing the
privileged lover!

Sir Willoughby was enraptured with her. Even so purely coldly,
statue-like, Dian-like, would he have prescribed his bride's reception
of his caress. The suffusion of crimson coming over her subsequently,
showing her divinely feminine in reflective bashfulness, agreed with
his highest definitions of female character.

"Let me conduct you to the garden, my love," he said.

She replied: "I think I would rather go to my room."

"I will send you a wild-flower posy."

"Flowers, no; I do not like them to be gathered."

"I will wait for you on the lawn."

"My head is rather heavy."

His deep concern and tenderness brought him close.

She assured him sparklingly that she was well. She was ready to
accompany him to the garden and stroll over the park.

"Headache it is not," she added.

But she had to pay the fee for inviting a solicitous accepted
gentleman's proximity.

This time she blamed herself and him, and the world he abused, and
destiny into the bargain. And she cared less about the probation; but
she craved for liberty. With a frigidity that astonished her, she
marvelled at the act of kissing, and at the obligation it forced upon
an inanimate person to be an accomplice. Why was she not free? By what
strange right was it that she was treated as a possession?

"I will try to walk off the heaviness," she said.

"My own girl must not fatigue herself."

"Oh, no; I shall not."

"Sit with me. Your Willoughby is your devoted attendant."

"I have a desire for the air."

"Then we will walk out."

She was horrified to think how far she had drawn away from him, and now
placed her hand on his arm to appease her self-accusations and
propitiate duty. He spoke as she had wished, his manner was what she
had wished; she was his bride, almost his wife; her conduct was a kind
of madness; she could not understand it.

Good sense and duty counselled her to control her wayward spirit.

He fondled her hand, and to that she grew accustomed; her hand was at a
distance. And what is a hand? Leaving it where it was, she treated it
as a link between herself and dutiful goodness. Two months hence she
was a bondwoman for life! She regretted that she had not gone to her
room to strengthen herself with a review of her situation, and meet him
thoroughly resigned to her fate. She fancied she would have come down
to him amicably. It was his present respectfulness and easy
conversation that tricked her burning nerves with the fancy. Five weeks
of perfect liberty in the mountains, she thought, would have prepared
her for the days of bells. All that she required was a separation
offering new scenes, where she might reflect undisturbed, feel clear
again.

He led her about the flower-beds; too much as if he were giving a
convalescent an airing. She chafed at it, and pricked herself with
remorse. In contrition she expatiated on the beauty of the garden.

"All is yours, my Clara."

An oppressive load it seemed to her! She passively yielded to the man
in his form of attentive courtier; his mansion, estate, and wealth
overwhelmed her. They suggested the price to be paid. Yet she
recollected that on her last departure through the park she had been
proud of the rolling green and spreading trees. Poison of some sort
must be operating in her. She had not come to him to-day with this
feeling of sullen antagonism; she had caught it here.

"You have been well, my Clara?"

"Quite."

"Not a hint of illness?"

"None."

"My bride must have her health if all the doctors in the kingdom die
for it! My darling!"

"And tell me: the dogs?"

"Dogs and horses are in very good condition."

"I am glad. Do you know, I love those ancient French chateaux and farms
in one, where salon windows look on poultry-yard and stalls. I like
that homeliness with beasts and peasants."

He bowed indulgently.

"I am afraid we can't do it for you in England, my Clara."

"No."

"And I like the farm," said he. "But I think our drawing-rooms have a
better atmosphere off the garden. As to our peasantry, we cannot, I
apprehend, modify our class demarcations without risk of disintegrating
the social structure."

"Perhaps. I proposed nothing."

"My love, I would entreat you to propose if I were convinced that I
could obey."

"You are very good."

"I find my merit nowhere but in your satisfaction."

Although she was not thirsting for dulcet sayings, the peacefulness of
other than invitations to the exposition of his mysteries and of their
isolation in oneness, inspired her with such calm that she beat about
in her brain, as if it were in the brain, for the specific injury he
had committed. Sweeping from sensation to sensation, the young, whom
sensations impel and distract, can rarely date their disturbance from a
particular one; unless it be some great villain injury that has been
done; and Clara had not felt an individual shame in his caress; the
shame of her sex was but a passing protest, that left no stamp. So she
conceived she had been behaving cruelly, and said, "Willoughby";
because she was aware of the omission of his name in her previous
remarks.

His whole attention was given to her.

She had to invent the sequel. "I was going to beg you, Willoughby, do
not seek to spoil me. You compliment me. Compliments are not suited to
me. You think too highly of me. It is nearly as bad as to be slighted.
I am . . . I am a . . ." But she could not follow his example; even as
far as she had gone, her prim little sketch of herself, set beside her
real, ugly, earnest feelings, rang of a mincing simplicity, and was a
step in falseness. How could she display what she was?

"Do I not know you?" he said.

The melodious bass notes, expressive of conviction on that point,
signified as well as the words that no answer was the right answer. She
could not dissent without turning his music to discord, his complacency
to amazement. She held her tongue, knowing that he did not know her,
and speculating on the division made bare by their degrees of the
knowledge, a deep cleft.

He alluded to friends in her neighbourhood and his own. The
bridesmaids were mentioned.

"Miss Dale, you will hear from my aunt Eleanor, declines, on the plea
of indifferent health. She is rather a morbid person, with all her
really estimable qualities. It will do no harm to have none but young
ladies of your own age; a bouquet of young buds: though one blowing
flower among them . . . However, she has decided. My principal
annoyance has been Vernon's refusal to act as my best man."

"Mr. Whitford refuses?"

"He half refuses. I do not take no from him. His pretext is a dislike
to the ceremony."

"I share it with him."

"I sympathize with you. If we might say the words and pass from sight!
There is a way of cutting off the world: I have it at times completely:
I lose it again, as if it were a cabalistic phrase one had to utter.
But with you! You give it me for good. It will be for ever, eternally,
my Clara. Nothing can harm, nothing touch us; we are one another's. Let
the world fight it out; we have nothing to do with it."

"If Mr. Whitford should persist in refusing?"

"So entirely one, that there never can be question of external
influences. I am, we will say, riding home from the hunt: I see you
awaiting me: I read your heart as though you were beside me. And I
know that I am coming to the one who reads mine! You have me, you have
me like an open book, you, and only you!"

"I am to be always at home?" Clara said, unheeded, and relieved by his
not hearing.

"Have you realized it?--that we are invulnerable! The world cannot hurt
us: it cannot touch us. Felicity is ours, and we are impervious in the
enjoyment of it. Something divine! surely something divine on earth?
Clara!--being to one another that between which the world can never
interpose! What I do is right: what you do is right. Perfect to one
another! Each new day we rise to study and delight in new secrets. Away
with the crowd! We have not even to say it; we are in an atmosphere
where the world cannot breathe."

"Oh, the world!" Clara partly carolled on a sigh that sunk deep.

Hearing him talk as one exulting on the mountain-top, when she knew him
to be in the abyss, was very strange, provocative of scorn.

"My letters?" he said, incitingly.

"I read them."

"Circumstances have imposed a long courtship on us, my Clara; and I,
perhaps lamenting the laws of decorum--I have done so!--still felt the
benefit of the gradual initiation. It is not good for women to be
surprised by a sudden revelation of man's character. We also have
things to learn--there is matter for learning everywhere. Some day you
will tell me the difference of what you think of me now, from what you
thought when we first . . . ?"

An impulse of double-minded acquiescence caused Clara to stammer as on
a sob.

"I--I daresay I shall."

She added, "If it is necessary."

Then she cried out: "Why do you attack the world? You always make me
pity it."

He smiled at her youthfulness. "I have passed through that stage. It
leads to my sentiment. Pity it, by all means."

"No," said she, "but pity it, side with it, not consider it so bad. The
world has faults; glaciers have crevices, mountains have chasms; but is
not the effect of the whole sublime? Not to admire the mountain and the
glacier because they can be cruel, seems to me . . . And the world is
beautiful."

"The world of nature, yes. The world of men?"

"Yes."

"My love, I suspect you to be thinking of the world of ballrooms."

"I am thinking of the world that contains real and great generosity,
true heroism. We see it round us."

"We read of it. The world of the romance writer!"

"No: the living world. I am sure it is our duty to love it. I am sure
we weaken ourselves if we do not. If I did not, I should be looking on
mist, hearing a perpetual boom instead of music. I remember hearing Mr.
Whitford say that cynicism is intellectual dandyism without the
coxcomb's feathers; and it seems to me that cynics are only happy in
making the world as barren to others as they have made it for
themselves."

"Old Vernon!" ejaculated Sir Willoughby, with a countenance rather
uneasy, as if it had been flicked with a glove. "He strings his phrases
by the dozen."

"Papa contradicts that, and says he is very clever and very simple."

"As to cynics, my dear Clara, oh, certainly, certainly: you are right.
They are laughable, contemptible. But understand me. I mean, we cannot
feel, or if we feel we cannot so intensely feel, our oneness, except by
dividing ourselves from the world."

"Is it an art?"

"If you like. It is our poetry! But does not love shun the world? Two
that love must have their sustenance in isolation."

"No: they will be eating themselves up."

"The purer the beauty, the more it will be out of the world."

"But not opposed."

"Put it in this way," Willoughby condescended. "Has experience the same
opinion of the world as ignorance?"

"It should have more charity."

"Does virtue feel at home in the world?"

"Where it should be an example, to my idea."

"Is the world agreeable to holiness?"

"Then, are you in favour of monasteries?"

He poured a little runlet of half laughter over her head, of the sound
assumed by genial compassion.

It is irritating to hear that when we imagine we have spoken to the
point.

"Now in my letters, Clara . . ."

"I have no memory, Willoughby!"

"You will, however, have observed that I am not completely myself in my
letters . . ."

"In your letters to men you may be."

The remark threw a pause across his thoughts. He was of a sensitiveness
terribly tender. A single stroke on it reverberated swellingly within
the man, and most, and infuriately searching, at the spots where he had
been wounded, especially where he feared the world might have guessed
the wound. Did she imply that he had no hand for love-letters? Was it
her meaning that women would not have much taste for his epistolary
correspondence? She had spoken in the plural, with an accent on "men".
Had she heard of Constantia? Had she formed her own judgement about the
creature? The supernatural sensitiveness of Sir Willoughby shrieked a
peal of affirmatives. He had often meditated on the moral obligation of
his unfolding to Clara the whole truth of his conduct to Constantia;
for whom, as for other suicides, there were excuses. He at least was
bound to supply them. She had behaved badly; but had he not given her
some cause? If so, manliness was bound to confess it.

Supposing Clara heard the world's version first! Men whose pride is
their backbone suffer convulsions where other men are barely aware of a
shock, and Sir Willoughby was taken with galvanic jumpings of the
spirit within him, at the idea of the world whispering to Clara that he
had been jilted.

"My letters to men, you say, my love?"

"Your letters of business."

"Completely myself in my letters of business?" He stared indeed.

She relaxed the tension of his figure by remarking: "You are able to
express yourself to men as your meaning dictates. In writing to . . .
to us it is, I suppose, more difficult."

"True, my love. I will not exactly say difficult. I can acknowledge no
difficulty. Language, I should say, is not fitted to express emotion.
Passion rejects it."

"For dumb-show and pantomime?"

"No; but the writing of it coldly."

"Ah, coldly!"

"My letters disappoint you?"

"I have not implied that they do."

"My feelings, dearest, are too strong for transcription. I feel, pen in
hand, like the mythological Titan at war with Jove, strong enough to
hurl mountains, and finding nothing but pebbles. The simile is a good
one. You must not judge of me by my letters."

"I do not; I like them," said Clara.

She blushed, eyed him hurriedly, and seeing him complacent, resumed, "I
prefer the pebble to the mountain; but if you read poetry you would not
think human speech incapable of. . ."

"My love, I detest artifice. Poetry is a profession."

"Our poets would prove to you . . ."

"As I have often observed, Clara, I am no poet."

"I have not accused you, Willoughby."

"No poet, and with no wish to be a poet. Were I one, my life would
supply material, I can assure you, my love. My conscience is not
entirely at rest. Perhaps the heaviest matter troubling it is that in
which I was least wilfully guilty. You have heard of a Miss Durham?"

"I have heard--yes--of her."

"She may be happy. I trust she is. If she is not, I cannot escape some
blame. An instance of the difference between myself and the world, now.
The world charges it upon her. I have interceded to exonerate her."

"That was generous, Willoughby."

"Stay. I fear I was the primary offender. But I, Clara, I, under a
sense of honour, acting under a sense of honour, would have carried my
engagement through."

"What had you done?"

"The story is long, dating from an early day, in the 'downy antiquity
of my youth', as Vernon says."

"Mr. Whitford says that?"

"One of old Vernon's odd sayings. It's a story of an early
fascination."

"Papa tells me Mr. Whitford speaks at times with wise humour."

"Family considerations--the lady's health among other things; her
position in the calculations of relatives--intervened. Still there was
the fascination. I have to own it. Grounds for feminine jealousy."

"Is it at an end?"

"Now? with you? my darling Clara! indeed at an end, or could I have
opened my inmost heart to you! Could I have spoken of myself so
unreservedly that in part you know me as I know myself! Oh, but would
it have been possible to enclose you with myself in that intimate
union? so secret, unassailable!"

"You did not speak to her as you speak to me?"

"In no degree."

"What could have! . . ." Clara checked the murmured exclamation.

Sir Willoughby's expoundings on his latest of texts would have poured
forth, had not a footman stepped across the lawn to inform him that his
builder was in the laboratory and requested permission to consult with
him.

Clara's plea of a horror of the talk of bricks and joists excused her
from accompanying him. He had hardly been satisfied by her manner, he
knew not why. He left her, convinced that he must do and say more to
reach down to her female intelligence.

She saw young Crossjay, springing with pots of jam in him, join his
patron at a bound, and taking a lift of arms, fly aloft, clapping
heels. Her reflections were confused. Sir Willoughby was admirable with
the lad. "Is he two men?" she thought; and the thought ensued, "Am I
unjust?" She headed a run with young Crossjay to divert her mind.



CHAPTER VIII

A RUN WITH THE TRUANT; A WALK WITH THE MASTER

The sight of Miss Middleton running inflamed young Crossjay with the
passion of the game of hare and hounds. He shouted a view-halloo, and
flung up his legs. She was fleet; she ran as though a hundred little
feet were bearing her onward smooth as water over the lawn and the
sweeps of grass of the park, so swiftly did the hidden pair multiply
one another to speed her. So sweet was she in her flowing pace, that
the boy, as became his age, translated admiration into a dogged frenzy
of pursuit, and continued pounding along, when far outstripped,
determined to run her down or die. Suddenly her flight wound to an end
in a dozen twittering steps, and she sank. Young Crossjay attained her,
with just breath enough to say: "You are a runner!"

"I forgot you had been having your tea, my poor boy," said she.

"And you don't pant a bit!" was his encomium.

"Dear me, no; not more than a bird. You might as well try to catch a
bird."

Young Crossjay gave a knowing nod. "Wait till I get my second wind."

"Now you must confess that girls run faster than boys."

"They may at the start."

"They do everything better."

"They're flash-in-the-pans."

"They learn their lessons."

"You can't make soldiers or sailors of them, though."

"And that is untrue. Have you never read of Mary Ambree? and Mistress
Hannah Snell of Pondicherry? And there was the bride of the celebrated
William Taylor. And what do you say to Joan of Arc? What do you say to
Boadicea? I suppose you have never heard of the Amazons."

"They weren't English."

"Then it is your own countrywomen you decry, sir!"

Young Crossjay betrayed anxiety about his false position, and begged
for the stories of Mary Ambree and the others who were English.

"See, you will not read for yourself, you hide and play truant with Mr.
Whitford, and the consequence is you are ignorant of your country's
history."

Miss Middleton rebuked him, enjoying his wriggle between a perception
of her fun and an acknowledgment of his peccancy. She commanded him to
tell her which was the glorious Valentine's day of our naval annals;
the name of the hero of the day, and the name of his ship. To these
questions his answers were as ready as the guns of the good ship
Captain, for the Spanish four-decker.

"And that you owe to Mr. Whitford," said Miss Middleton.

"He bought me the books," young Crossjay growled, and plucked at grass
blades and bit them, foreseeing dimly but certainly the termination of
all this.

Miss Middleton lay back on the grass and said: "Are you going to be
fond of me, Crossjay?"

The boy sat blinking. His desire was to prove to her that lie was
immoderately fond of her already; and he might have flown at her neck
had she been sitting up, but her recumbency and eyelids half closed
excited wonder in him and awe. His young heart beat fast.

"Because, my dear boy," she said, leaning on her elbow, "you are a very
nice boy, but an ungrateful boy, and there is no telling whether you
will not punish any one who cares for you. Come along with me; pluck me
some of these cowslips, and the speedwells near them; I think we both
love wild-flowers." She rose and took his arm. "You shall row me on the
lake while I talk to you seriously."

It was she, however, who took the sculls at the boat-house, for she had
been a playfellow with boys, and knew that one of them engaged in a
manly exercise is not likely to listen to a woman.

"Now, Crossjay," she said. Dense gloom overcame him like a cowl. She
bent across her hands to laugh. "As if I were going to lecture you, you
silly boy!" He began to brighten dubiously. "I used to be as fond of
birdsnesting as you are. I like brave boys, and I like you for wanting
to enter the Royal Navy. Only, how can you if you do not learn? You
must get the captains to pass you, you know. Somebody spoils you: Miss
Dale or Mr. Whitford."

"Do they?" sung out young Crossjay.

"Sir Willoughby does?"

"I don't know about spoil. I can come round him."

"I am sure he is very kind to you. I dare say you think Mr. Whitford
rather severe. You should remember he has to teach you, so that you may
pass for the navy. You must not dislike him because he makes you work.
Supposing you had blown yourself up to-day! You would have thought it
better to have been working with Mr. Whitford."

"Sir Willoughby says, when he's married, you won't let me hide."

"Ah! It is wrong to pet a big boy like you. Does not he what you call
tip you, Crossjay?"

"Generally half-crown pieces. I've had a crown-piece. I've had
sovereigns."

"And for that you do as he bids you? And he indulges you because you
. . . Well, but though Mr. Whitford does not give you money, he gives you
his time, he tries to get you into the navy."

"He pays for me."

"What do you say?"

"My keep. And, as for liking him, if he were at the bottom of the water
here, I'd go down after him. I mean to learn. We're both of us here at
six o'clock in the morning, when it's light, and have a swim. He taught
me. Only, I never cared for schoolbooks."

"Are you quite certain that Mr. Whitford pays for you."

"My father told me he did, and I must obey him. He heard my father was
poor, with a family. He went down to see my father. My father came here
once, and Sir Willoughby wouldn't see him. I know Mr. Whitford does.
And Miss Dale told me he did. My mother says she thinks he does it to
make up to us for my father's long walk in the rain and the cold he
caught coming here to Patterne."

"So you see you should not vex him, Crossjay. He is a good friend to
your father and to you. You ought to love him."

"I like him, and I like his face."

"Why his face?"

"It's not like those faces! Miss Dale and I talk about him. She thinks
that Sir Willoughby is the best-looking man ever born."

"Were you not speaking of Mr. Whitford?"

"Yes; old Vernon. That's what Sir Willoughby calls him," young Crossjay
excused himself to her look of surprise. "Do you know what he makes me
think of?--his eyes, I mean. He makes me think of Robinson Crusoe's old
goat in the cavern. I like him because he's always the same, and you're
not positive about some people. Miss Middleton, if you look on at
cricket, in comes a safe man for ten runs. He may get more, and he
never gets less; and you should hear the old farmers talk of him in the
booth. That's just my feeling."

Miss Middleton understood that some illustration from the
cricketing-field was intended to throw light on the boy's feeling for
Mr. Whitford. Young Crossjay was evidently warming to speak from his
heart. But the sun was low, she had to dress for the dinner-table, and
she landed him with regret, as at a holiday over. Before they parted,
he offered to swim across the lake in his clothes, or dive to the bed
for anything she pleased to throw, declaring solemnly that it should
not be lost.

She walked back at a slow pace, and sung to herself above her
darker-flowing thoughts, like the reed-warbler on the branch beside the
night-stream; a simple song of a lighthearted sound, independent of the
shifting black and grey of the flood underneath.

A step was at her heels.

"I see you have been petting my scapegrace."

"Mr. Whitford! Yes; not petting, I hope. I tried to give him a lecture.
He's a dear lad, but, I fancy, trying."

She was in fine sunset colour, unable to arrest the mounting tide. She
had been rowing, she said; and, as he directed his eyes, according to
his wont, penetratingly, she defended herself by fixing her mind on
Robinson Crusoe's old goat in the recess of the cavern.

"I must have him away from here very soon," said Vernon. "Here he's
quite spoiled. Speak of him to Willoughby. I can't guess at his ideas
of the boy's future, but the chance of passing for the navy won't bear
trifling with, and if ever there was a lad made for the navy, it's
Crossjay."

The incident of the explosion in the laboratory was new to Vernon.

"And Willoughby laughed?" he said. "There are sea-port crammers who
stuff young fellows for examination, and we shall have to pack off the
boy at once to the best one of the lot we can find. I would rather have
had him under me up to the last three months, and have made sure of
some roots to what is knocked into his head. But he's ruined here. And
I am going. So I shall not trouble him for many weeks longer. Dr.
Middleton is well?"

"My father is well, yes. He pounced like a falcon on your notes in the
library."

Vernon came out with a chuckle.

"They were left to attract him. I am in for a controversy."

"Papa will not spare you, to judge from his look."

"I know the look."

"Have you walked far to-day?"

"Nine and a half hours. My Flibbertigibbet is too much for me at
times, and I had to walk off my temper."

She cast her eyes on him, thinking of the pleasure of dealing with a
temper honestly coltish, and manfully open to a specific.

"All those hours were required?"

"Not quite so long."

"You are training for your Alpine tour."

"It's doubtful whether I shall get to the Alps this year. I leave the
Hall, and shall probably be in London with a pen to sell."

"Willoughby knows that you leave him?"

"As much as Mont Blanc knows that he is going to be climbed by a party
below. He sees a speck or two in the valley."

"He has not spoken of it."

"He would attribute it to changes . . ."

Vernon did not conclude the sentence.

She became breathless, without emotion, but checked by the barrier
confronting an impulse to ask, what changes? She stooped to pluck a
cowslip.

"I saw daffodils lower down the park," she said. "One or two; they're
nearly over."

"We are well off for wild flowers here," he answered.

"Do not leave him, Mr. Whitford."

"He will not want me."

"You are devoted to him."

"I can't pretend that."

"Then it is the changes you imagine you foresee . . . If any occur, why
should they drive you away?"

"Well, I'm two and thirty, and have never been in the fray: a kind of
nondescript, half scholar, and by nature half billman or bowman or
musketeer; if I'm worth anything, London's the field for me. But that's
what I have to try."

"Papa will not like your serving with your pen in London: he will say
you are worth too much for that."

"Good men are at it; I should not care to be ranked above them."

"They are wasted, he says."

"Error! If they have their private ambition, they may suppose they are
wasted. But the value to the world of a private ambition, I do not
clearly understand."

"You have not an evil opinion of the world?" said Miss Middleton, sick
at heart as she spoke, with the sensation of having invited herself to
take a drop of poison.

He replied: "One might as well have an evil opinion of a river: here
it's muddy, there it's clear; one day troubled, another at rest. We
have to treat it with common sense."

"Love it?"

"In the sense of serving it."

"Not think it beautiful?"

"Part of it is, part of it the reverse."

"Papa would quote the 'mulier formosa'".

"Except that 'fish' is too good for the black extremity. 'Woman' is
excellent for the upper."

"How do you say that?--not cynically, I believe. Your view commends
itself to my reason."

She was grateful to him for not stating it in ideal contrast with Sir
Willoughby's view. If he had, so intensely did her youthful blood
desire to be enamoured of the world, that she felt he would have lifted
her off her feet. For a moment a gulf beneath had been threatening.
When she said, "Love it?" a little enthusiasm would have wafted her
into space fierily as wine; but the sober, "In the sense of serving
it", entered her brain, and was matter for reflection upon it and him.

She could think of him in pleasant liberty, uncorrected by her woman's
instinct of peril. He had neither arts nor graces; nothing of his
cousin's easy social front-face. She had once witnessed the military
precision of his dancing, and had to learn to like him before she
ceased to pray that she might never be the victim of it as his partner.
He walked heroically, his pedestrian vigour being famous, but that
means one who walks away from the sex, not excelling in the recreations
where men and women join hands. He was not much of a horseman either.
Sir Willoughby enjoyed seeing him on horseback. And he could scarcely
be said to shine in a drawingroom, unless when seated beside a person
ready for real talk. Even more than his merits, his demerits pointed
him out as a man to be a friend to a young woman who wanted one. His
way of life pictured to her troubled spirit an enviable smoothness; and
his having achieved that smooth way she considered a sign of strength;
and she wished to lean in idea upon some friendly strength. His
reputation for indifference to the frivolous charms of girls clothed
him with a noble coldness, and gave him the distinction of a far-seen
solitary iceberg in Southern waters. The popular notion of hereditary
titled aristocracy resembles her sentiment for a man that would not
flatter and could not be flattered by her sex: he appeared superior
almost to awfulness. She was young, but she had received much flattery
in her ears, and by it she had been snared; and he, disdaining to
practise the fowler's arts or to cast a thought on small fowls,
appeared to her to have a pride founded on natural loftiness.

They had not spoken for awhile, when Vernon said abruptly, "The boy's
future rather depends on you, Miss Middleton. I mean to leave as soon
as possible, and I do not like his being here without me, though you
will look after him, I have no doubt. But you may not at first see
where the spoiling hurts him. He should be packed off at once to the
crammer, before you are Lady Patterne. Use your influence. Willoughby
will support the lad at your request. The cost cannot be great. There
are strong grounds against my having him in London, even if I could
manage it. May I count on you?"

"I will mention it: I will do my best," said Miss Middleton, strangely
dejected.

They were now on the lawn, where Sir Willoughby was walking with the
ladies Eleanor and Isabel, his maiden aunts.

"You seem to have coursed the hare and captured the hart." he said to
his bride.

"Started the truant and run down the paedagogue," said Vernon.

"Ay, you won't listen to me about the management of that boy," Sir
Willoughby retorted.

The ladies embraced Miss Middleton. One offered up an ejaculation in
eulogy of her looks, the other of her healthfulness: then both remarked
that with indulgence young Crossjay could be induced to do anything.
Clara wondered whether inclination or Sir Willoughby had disciplined
their individuality out of them and made them his shadows, his echoes.
She gazed from them to him, and feared him. But as yet she had not
experienced the power in him which could threaten and wrestle to
subject the members of his household to the state of satellites. Though
she had in fact been giving battle to it for several months, she had
held her own too well to perceive definitely the character of the
spirit opposing her.

She said to the ladies, "Ah, no! Mr. Whitford has chosen the only
method for teaching a boy like Crossjay."

"I propose to make a man of him," said Sir Willoughby.

"What is to become of him if he learns nothing?"

"If he pleases me, he will be provided for. I have never abandoned a
dependent."

Clara let her eyes rest on his and, without turning or dropping, shut
them.

The effect was discomforting to him. He was very sensitive to the
intentions of eyes and tones; which was one secret of his rigid grasp
of the dwellers in his household. They were taught that they had to
render agreement under sharp scrutiny. Studious eyes, devoid of warmth,
devoid of the shyness of sex, that suddenly closed on their look,
signified a want of comprehension of some kind, it might be hostility
of understanding. Was it possible he did not possess her utterly? He
frowned up.

Clara saw the lift of his brows, and thought, "My mind is my own,
married or not."

It was the point in dispute.



CHAPTER IX

CLARA AND LAETITIA MEET: THEY ARE COMPARED

An hour before the time for lessons next morning young Crossjay was on
the lawn with a big bunch of wild flowers. He left them at the hall
door for Miss Middleton, and vanished into bushes.

These vulgar weeds were about to be dismissed to the dustheap by the
great officials of the household; but as it happened that Miss
Middleton had seen them from the window in Crossjay's hands, the
discovery was made that they were indeed his presentation-bouquet, and
a footman received orders to place them before her. She was very
pleased. The arrangement of the flowers bore witness to fairer fingers
than the boy's own in the disposition of the rings of colour, red
campion and anemone, cowslip and speedwell, primroses and
wood-hyacinths; and rising out of the blue was a branch bearing thick
white blossom, so thick, and of so pure a whiteness, that Miss
Middleton, while praising Crossjay for soliciting the aid of Miss Dale,
was at a loss to name the tree.

"It is a gardener's improvement on the Vestal of the forest, the wild
cherry," said Dr. Middleton, "and in this case we may admit the
gardener's claim to be valid, though I believe that, with his gift of
double blossom, he has improved away the fruit. Call this the Vestal of
civilization, then; he has at least done something to vindicate the
beauty of the office as well as the justness of the title."

"It is Vernon's Holy Tree the young rascal has been despoiling," said
Sir Willoughby merrily.

Miss Middleton was informed that this double-blossom wild cherry-tree
was worshipped by Mr. Whitford.

Sir Willoughby promised he would conduct her to it.

"You," he said to her, "can bear the trial; few complexions can; it is
to most ladies a crueller test than snow. Miss Dale, for example,
becomes old lace within a dozen yards of it. I should like to place her
under the tree beside you."

"Dear me, though; but that is investing the hamadryad with novel and
terrible functions," exclaimed Dr. Middleton.

Clara said: "Miss Dale could drag me into a superior Court to show me
fading beside her in gifts more valuable than a complexion."

"She has a fine ability," said Vernon.

All the world knew, so Clara knew of Miss Dales romantic admiration of
Sir Willoughby; she was curious to see Miss Dale and study the nature
of a devotion that might be, within reason, imitable--for a man who
could speak with such steely coldness of the poor lady he had
fascinated? Well, perhaps it was good for the hearts of women to be
beneath a frost; to be schooled, restrained, turned inward on their
dreams. Yes, then, his coldness was desireable; it encouraged an ideal
of him. It suggested and seemed to propose to Clara's mind the
divineness of separation instead of the deadly accuracy of an intimate
perusal. She tried to look on him as Miss Dale might look, and while
partly despising her for the dupery she envied, and more than
criticizing him for the inhuman numbness of sentiment which offered up
his worshipper to point a complimentary comparison, she was able to
imagine a distance whence it would be possible to observe him
uncritically, kindly, admiringly; as the moon a handsome mortal, for
example.

In the midst of her thoughts, she surprised herself by saying: "I
certainly was difficult to instruct. I might see things clearer if I
had a fine ability. I never remember to have been perfectly pleased
with my immediate lesson . . ."

She stopped, wondering whither her tongue was leading her; then added,
to save herself, "And that may be why I feel for poor Crossjay."

Mr. Whitford apparently did not think it remarkable that she should
have been set off gabbling of "a fine ability", though the eulogistic
phrase had been pronounced by him with an impressiveness to make his
ear aware of an echo.

Sir Willoughby dispersed her vapourish confusion. "Exactly," he said.
"I have insisted with Vernon, I don't know how often, that you must
have the lad by his affections. He won't bear driving. It had no effect
on me. Boys of spirit kick at it. I think I know boys, Clara."

He found himself addressing eyes that regarded him as though he were a
small speck, a pin's head, in the circle of their remote contemplation.
They were wide; they closed.

She opened them to gaze elsewhere.

He was very sensitive.

Even then, when knowingly wounding him, or because of it, she was
trying to climb back to that altitude of the thin division of neutral
ground, from which we see a lover's faults and are above them, pure
surveyors. She climbed unsuccessfully, it is true; soon despairing and
using the effort as a pretext to fall back lower.

Dr. Middleton withdrew Sir Willoughby's attention from the
imperceptible annoyance. "No, sir, no: the birch! the birch! Boys of
spirit commonly turn into solid men, and the solider the men the more
surely do they vote for Busby. For me, I pray he may be immortal in
Great Britain. Sea-air nor mountain-air is half so bracing. I venture
to say that the power to take a licking is better worth having than the
power to administer one. Horse him and birch him if Crossjay runs from
his books."

"It is your opinion, sir?" his host bowed to him affably, shocked on
behalf of the ladies.

"So positively so, sir, that I will undertake, without knowledge of
their antecedents, to lay my finger on the men in public life who have
not had early Busby. They are ill-balanced men. Their seat of reason is
not a concrete. They won't take rough and smooth as they come. They
make bad blood, can't forgive, sniff right and left for approbation,
and are excited to anger if an East wind does not flatter them. Why,
sir, when they have grown to be seniors, you find these men mixed up
with the nonsense of their youth; you see they are unthrashed. We
English beat the world because we take a licking well. I hold it for a
surety of a proper sweetness of blood."

The smile of Sir Willoughby waxed ever softer as the shakes of his head
increased in contradictoriness. "And yet," said he, with the air of
conceding a little after having answered the Rev. Doctor and convicted
him of error, "Jack requires it to keep him in order. On board ship
your argument may apply. Not, I suspect, among gentlemen. No."

"Good-night to you, gentlemen!" said Dr. Middleton.

Clara heard Miss Eleanor and Miss Isabel interchange remarks:

"Willoughby would not have suffered it!"

"It would entirely have altered him!"

She sighed and put a tooth on her under-lip. The gift of humourous
fancy is in women fenced round with forbidding placards; they have to
choke it; if they perceive a piece of humour, for instance, the young
Willoughby grasped by his master,--and his horrified relatives rigid at
the sight of preparations for the seed of sacrilege, they have to
blindfold the mind's eye. They are society's hard-drilled soldiery.
Prussians that must both march and think in step. It is for the
advantage of the civilized world, if you like, since men have decreed
it, or matrons have so read the decree; but here and there a younger
woman, haply an uncorrected insurgent of the sex matured here and
there, feels that her lot was cast with her head in a narrower pit than
her limbs.

Clara speculated as to whether Miss Dale might be perchance a person of
a certain liberty of mind. She asked for some little, only some little,
free play of mind in a house that seemed to wear, as it were, a cap of
iron. Sir Willoughby not merely ruled, he throned, he inspired: and
how? She had noticed an irascible sensitiveness in him alert against a
shadow of disagreement; and as he was kind when perfectly appeased, the
sop was offered by him for submission. She noticed that even Mr.
Whitford forbore to alarm the sentiment of authority in his cousin. If
he did not breathe Sir Willoughby, like the ladies Eleanor and Isabel,
he would either acquiesce in a syllable or be silent. He never strongly
dissented. The habit of the house, with its iron cap, was on him, as it
was on the servants, and would be, oh, shudders of the shipwrecked that
see their end in drowning! on the wife.

"When do I meet Miss Dale?" she inquired.

"This very evening, at dinner," replied Sir Willoughby.

Then, thought she, there is that to look forward to.

She indulged her morbid fit, and shut up her senses that she might live
in the anticipation of meeting Miss Dale; and, long before the approach
of the hour, her hope of encountering any other than another dull
adherent of Sir Willoughby had fled. So she was languid for two of the
three minutes when she sat alone with Laetitia in the drawing-room
before the rest had assembled.

"It is Miss Middleton?" Laetitia said, advancing to her. "My jealousy
tells me; for you have won my boy Crossjay's heart, and done more to
bring him to obedience in a few minutes than we have been able to do in
months."

"His wild flowers were so welcome to me," said Clara.

"He was very modest over them. And I mention it because boys of his age
usually thrust their gifts in our faces fresh as they pluck them, and
you were to be treated quite differently."

"We saw his good fairy's hand."

"She resigns her office; but I pray you not to love him too well in
return; for he ought to be away reading with one of those men who get
boys through their examinations. He is, we all think, a born sailor,
and his place is in the navy."

"But, Miss Dale, I love him so well that I shall consult his interests
and not my own selfishness. And, if I have influence, he will not be a
week with you longer. It should have been spoke of to-day; I must have
been in some dream; I thought of it, I know. I will not forget to do
what may be in my power."

Clara's heart sank at the renewed engagement and plighting of herself
involved in her asking a favour, urging any sort of petition. The cause
was good. Besides, she was plighted already.

"Sir Willoughby is really fond of the boy," she said.

"He is fond of exciting fondness in the boy," said Miss Dale. "He has
not dealt much with children. I am sure he likes Crossjay; he could not
otherwise be so forbearing; it is wonderful what he endures and laughs
at."

Sir Willoughby entered. The presence of Miss Dale illuminated him as
the burning taper lights up consecrated plate. Deeply respecting her
for her constancy, esteeming her for a model of taste, he was never in
her society without that happy consciousness of shining which calls
forth the treasures of the man; and these it is no exaggeration to term
unbounded, when all that comes from him is taken for gold.

The effect of the evening on Clara was to render her distrustful of her
later antagonism. She had unknowingly passed into the spirit of Miss
Dale, Sir Willoughby aiding; for she could sympathize with the view of
his constant admirer on seeing him so cordially and smoothly gay; as
one may say, domestically witty, the most agreeable form of wit. Mrs
Mountstuart Jenkinson discerned that he had a leg of physical
perfection; Miss Dale distinguished it in him in the vital essence; and
before either of these ladies he was not simply a radiant, he was a
productive creature, so true it is that praise is our fructifying sun.
He had even a touch of the romantic air which Clara remembered as her
first impression of the favourite of the county; and strange she found
it to observe this resuscitated idea confronting her experience. What
if she had been captious, inconsiderate? Oh, blissful revival of the
sense of peace! The happiness of pain departing was all that she looked
for, and her conception of liberty was to learn to love her chains,
provided that he would spare her the caress. In this mood she sternly
condemned Constantia. "We must try to do good; we must not be thinking
of ourselves; we must make the best of our path in life." She revolved
these infantile precepts with humble earnestness; and not to be tardy
in her striving to do good, with a remote but pleasurable glimpse of
Mr. Whitford hearing of it, she took the opportunity to speak to Sir
Willoughby on the subject of young Crossjay, at a moment when,
alighting from horseback, he had shown himself to advantage among a
gallant cantering company. He showed to great advantage on horseback
among men, being invariably the best mounted, and he had a cavalierly
style, possibly cultivated, but effective. On foot his raised head and
half-dropped eyelids too palpably assumed superiority. "Willoughby, I
want to speak," she said, and shrank as she spoke, lest he should
immediately grant everything in the mood of courtship, and invade her
respite; "I want to speak of that dear boy Crossjay. You are fond of
him. He is rather an idle boy here, and wasting time . . ."

"Now you are here, and when you are here for good, my love for good
. . ." he fluttered away in loverliness, forgetful of Crossjay, whom
he presently took up. "The boy recognizes his most sovereign lady, and
will do your bidding, though you should order him to learn his lessons!
Who would not obey? Your beauty alone commands. But what is there
beyond?--a grace, a hue divine, that sets you not so much above as
apart, severed from the world."

Clara produced an active smile in duty, and pursued: "If Crossjay were
sent at once to some house where men prepare boys to pass for the navy,
he would have his chance, and the navy is distinctly his profession.
His father is a brave man, and he inherits bravery, and he has a
passion for a sailor's life; only he must be able to pass his
examination, and he has not much time."

Sir Willoughby gave a slight laugh in sad amusement.

"My dear Clara, you adore the world; and I suppose you have to learn
that there is not a question in this wrangling world about which we
have not disputes and contests ad nauseam. I have my notions concerning
Crossjay, Vernon has his. I should wish to make a gentleman of him.
Vernon marks him for a sailor. But Vernon is the lad's protector, I am
not. Vernon took him from his father to instruct him, and he has a
right to say what shall be done with him. I do not interfere. Only I
can't prevent the lad from liking me. Old Vernon seems to feel it. I
assure you I hold entirely aloof. If I am asked, in spite of my
disapproval of Vernon's plans for the boy, to subscribe to his
departure, I can but shrug, because, as you see, I have never opposed.
Old Vernon pays for him, he is the master, he decides, and if Crossjay
is blown from the masthead in a gale, the blame does not fall on me.
These, my dear, are matters of reason."

"I would not venture to intrude on them," said Clara, "if I had not
suspected that money . . ."

"Yes," cried Willoughby; "and it is a part. And let old Vernon
surrender the boy to me, I will immediately relieve him of the burden
on his purse. Can I do that, my dear, for the furtherance of a scheme I
condemn? The point is thus: latterly I have invited Captain Patterne to
visit me: just previous to his departure for the African Coast, where
Government despatches Marines when there is no other way of killing
them, I sent him a special invitation. He thanked me and curtly
declined. The man, I may almost say, is my pensioner. Well, he calls
himself a Patterne, he is undoubtedly a man of courage, he has elements
of our blood, and the name. I think I am to be approved for desiring to
make a better gentleman of the son than I behold in the father: and
seeing that life from an early age on board ship has anything but made
a gentleman of the father, I hold that I am right in shaping another
course for the son."

"Naval officers . . ." Clara suggested.

"Some," said Willoughby. "But they must be men of birth, coming out of
homes of good breeding. Strip them of the halo of the title of naval
officers, and I fear you would not often say gentlemen when they step
into a drawing-room. I went so far as to fancy I had some claim to make
young Crossjay something different. It can be done: the Patterne comes
out in his behaviour to you, my love; it can be done. But if I take
him, I claim undisputed sway over him. I cannot make a gentleman of the
fellow if I am to compete with this person and that. In fine, he must
look up to me, he must have one model."

"Would you, then, provide for him subsequently?"

"According to his behaviour."

"Would not that be precarious for him?"

"More so than the profession you appear inclined to choose for him?"

"But there he would be under clear regulations."

"With me he would have to respond to affection."

"Would you secure to him a settled income? For an idle gentleman is bad
enough; a penniless gentleman . . ."

"He has only to please me, my dear, and he will be launched and
protected."

"But if he does not succeed in pleasing you?"

"Is it so difficult?"

"Oh!" Clara fretted.

"You see, my love, I answer you," said Sir Willoughby.

He resumed: "But let old Vernon have his trial with the lad. He has his
own ideas. Let him carry them out. I shall watch the experiment."

Clara was for abandoning her task in sheer faintness.

"Is not the question one of money?" she said, shyly, knowing Mr.
Whitford to be poor.

"Old Vernon chooses to spend his money that way." replied Sir
Willoughby. "If it saves him from breaking his shins and risking his
neck on his Alps, we may consider it well employed."

"Yes," Clara's voice occupied a pause.

She seized her languor as it were a curling snake and cast it off.
"But I understand that Mr. Whitford wants your assistance. Is he
not--not rich? When he leaves the Hall to try his fortune in literature
in London, he may not be so well able to support Crossjay and obtain
the instruction necessary for the boy: and it would be generous to help
him."

"Leaves the Hall!" exclaimed Willoughby. "I have not heard a word of
it. He made a bad start at the beginning, and I should have thought
that would have tamed him: had to throw over his Fellowship; ahem. Then
he received a small legacy some time back, and wanted to be off to push
his luck in Literature: rank gambling, as I told him. Londonizing can
do him no good. I thought that nonsense of his was over years ago. What
is it he has from me?--about a hundred and fifty a year: and it might
be doubled for the asking: and all the books he requires: and these
writers and scholars no sooner think of a book than they must have it.
And do not suppose me to complain. I am a man who will not have a
single shilling expended by those who serve immediately about my
person. I confess to exacting that kind of dependency. Feudalism is not
an objectionable thing if you can be sure of the lord. You know, Clara,
and you should know me in my weakness too, I do not claim servitude, I
stipulate for affection. I claim to be surrounded by persons loving me.
And with one? . . . dearest! So that we two can shut out the world; we
live what is the dream of others. Nothing imaginable can be sweeter. It
is a veritable heaven on earth. To be the possessor of the whole of
you! Your thoughts, hopes, all."

Sir Willoughby intensified his imagination to conceive more: he could
not, or could not express it, and pursued: "But what is this talk of
Vernon's leaving me? He cannot leave. He has barely a hundred a year of
his own. You see, I consider him. I do not speak of the ingratitude of
the wish to leave. You know, my dear, I have a deadly abhorrence of
partings and such like. As far as I can, I surround myself with healthy
people specially to guard myself from having my feelings wrung; and
excepting Miss Dale, whom you like--my darling does like her?"--the
answer satisfied him; "with that one exception, I am not aware of a
case that threatens to torment me. And here is a man, under no
compulsion, talking of leaving the Hall! In the name of goodness, why?
But why? Am I to imagine that the sight of perfect felicity distresses
him? We are told that the world is 'desperately wicked'. I do not like
to think it of my friends; yet otherwise their conduct is often hard to
account for."

"If it were true, you would not punish Crossjay?" Clara feebly
interposed.

"I should certainly take Crossjay and make a man of him after my own
model, my dear. But who spoke to you of this?"

"Mr. Whitford himself. And let me give you my opinion, Willoughby, that
he will take Crossjay with him rather than leave him, if there is a
fear of the boy's missing his chance of the navy."

"Marines appear to be in the ascendant," said Sir Willoughby,
astonished at the locution and pleading in the interests of a son of
one. "Then Crossjay he must take. I cannot accept half the boy. I am,"
he laughed, "the legitimate claimant in the application for judgement
before the wise king. Besides, the boy has a dose of my blood in him;
he has none of Vernon's, not one drop."

"Ah!"

"You see, my love?"

"Oh, I do see; yes."

"I put forth no pretensions to perfection," Sir Willoughby continued.
"I can bear a considerable amount of provocation; still I can be
offended, and I am unforgiving when I have been offended. Speak to
Vernon, if a natural occasion should spring up. I shall, of course,
have to speak to him. You may, Clara, have observed a man who passed me
on the road as we were cantering home, without a hint of a touch to his
hat. That man is a tenant of mine, farming six hundred acres, Hoppner
by name: a man bound to remember that I have, independently of my
position, obliged him frequently. His lease of my ground has five years
to run. I must say I detest the churlishness of our country population,
and where it comes across me I chastise it. Vernon is a different
matter: he will only require to be spoken to. One would fancy the old
fellow laboured now and then under a magnetic attraction to beggary. My
love," he bent to her and checked their pacing up and down, "you are
tired?"

"I am very tired to-day," said Clara.

His arm was offered. She laid two fingers on it, and they dropped when
he attempted to press them to his rib.

He did not insist. To walk beside her was to share in the stateliness
of her walking.

He placed himself at a corner of the door-way for her to pass him into
the house, and doated on her cheek, her ear, and the softly dusky nape
of her neck, where this way and that the little lighter-coloured
irreclaimable curls running truant from the comb and the knot--curls,
half-curls, root-curls, vine-ringlets, wedding-rings, fledgling
feathers, tufts of down, blown wisps--waved or fell, waved over or up
or involutedly, or strayed, loose and downward, in the form of small
silken paws, hardly any of them much thicker than a crayon shading,
cunninger than long round locks of gold to trick the heart.

Laetitia had nothing to show resembling such beauty.



CHAPTER X

IN WHICH SIR WILLOUGHBY CHANCES TO SUPPLY THE TITLE FOR HIMSELF

Now Vernon was useful to his cousin; he was the accomplished secretary
of a man who governed his estate shrewdly and diligently, but had been
once or twice unlucky in his judgements pronounced from the magisterial
bench as a justice of the Peace, on which occasions a half column of
trenchant English supported by an apposite classical quotation
impressed Sir Willoughby with the value of such a secretary in a
controversy. He had no fear of that fiery dragon of scorching
breath--the newspaper press--while Vernon was his right hand man; and
as he intended to enter Parliament, he foresaw the greater need of him.
Furthermore, he liked his cousin to date his own controversial
writings, on classical subjects, from Patterne Hall. It caused his
house to shine in a foreign field; proved the service of scholarship by
giving it a flavour of a bookish aristocracy that, though not so well
worth having, and indeed in itself contemptible, is above the material
and titular; one cannot quite say how. There, however, is the flavour.
Dainty sauces are the life, the nobility, of famous dishes; taken
alone, the former would be nauseating, the latter plebeian. It is thus,
or somewhat so, when you have a poet, still better a scholar, attached
to your household. Sir Willoughby deserved to have him, for he was
above his county friends in his apprehension of the flavour bestowed by
the man; and having him, he had made them conscious of their
deficiency. His cook, M. Dehors, pupil of the great Godefroy, was not
the only French cook in the county; but his cousin and secretary, the
rising scholar, the elegant essayist, was an unparalleled decoration;
of his kind, of course. Personally, we laugh at him; you had better
not, unless you are fain to show that the higher world of polite
literature is unknown to you. Sir Willoughby could create an abject
silence at a county dinner-table by an allusion to Vernon "at work at
home upon his Etruscans or his Dorians"; and he paused a moment to let
the allusion sink, laughed audibly to himself over his eccentric
cousin, and let him rest.

In addition, Sir Willoughby abhorred the loss of a familiar face in his
domestic circle. He thought ill of servants who could accept their
dismissal without petitioning to stay with him. A servant that gave
warning partook of a certain fiendishness. Vernon's project of leaving
the Hall offended and alarmed the sensitive gentleman. "I shall have to
hand Letty Dale to him at last!" he thought, yielding in bitter
generosity to the conditions imposed on him by the ungenerousness of
another. For, since his engagement to Miss Middleton, his electrically
forethoughtful mind had seen in Miss Dale, if she stayed in the
neighbourhood, and remained unmarried, the governess of his infant
children, often consulting with him. But here was a prospect dashed
out. The two, then, may marry, and live in a cottage on the borders of
his park; and Vernon can retain his post, and Laetitia her devotion.
The risk of her casting it of had to be faced. Marriage has been known
to have such an effect on the most faithful of women that a great
passion fades to naught in their volatile bosoms when they have taken a
husband. We see in women especially the triumph of the animal over the
spiritual. Nevertheless, risks must be run for a purpose in view.

Having no taste for a discussion with Vernon, whom it was his habit to
confound by breaking away from him abruptly when he had delivered his
opinion, he left it to both the persons interesting themselves in young
Crossjay to imagine that he was meditating on the question of the lad,
and to imagine that it would be wise to leave him to meditate; for he
could be preternaturally acute in reading any of his fellow-creatures
if they crossed the current of his feelings. And, meanwhile, he
instructed the ladies Eleanor and Isabel to bring Laetitia Dale on a
visit to the Hall, where dinner-parties were soon to be given and a
pleasing talker would be wanted, where also a woman of intellect,
steeped in a splendid sentiment, hitherto a miracle of female
constancy, might stir a younger woman to some emulation. Definitely to
resolve to bestow Laetitia upon Vernon was more than he could do;
enough that he held the card.

Regarding Clara, his genius for perusing the heart which was not in
perfect harmony with him through the series of responsive movements to
his own, informed him of a something in her character that might have
suggested to Mrs Mountstuart Jenkinson her indefensible, absurd "rogue
in porcelain". Idea there was none in that phrase; yet, if you looked
on Clara as a delicately inimitable porcelain beauty, the suspicion of
a delicately inimitable ripple over her features touched a thought of
innocent roguery, wildwood roguery; the likeness to the costly and
lovely substance appeared to admit a fitness in the dubious epithet. He
detested but was haunted by the phrase.

She certainly had at times the look of the nymph that has gazed too
long on the faun, and has unwittingly copied his lurking lip and long
sliding eye. Her play with young Crossjay resembled a return of the
lady to the cat; she flung herself into it as if her real vitality had
been in suspense till she saw the boy. Sir Willoughby by no means
disapproved of a physical liveliness that promised him health in his
mate; but he began to feel in their conversations that she did not
sufficiently think of making herself a nest for him. Steely points were
opposed to him when he, figuratively, bared his bosom to be taken to
the softest and fairest. She reasoned: in other words, armed her
ignorance. She reasoned against him publicly, and lured Vernon to
support her. Influence is to be counted for power, and her influence
over Vernon was displayed in her persuading him to dance one evening at
Lady Culmer's, after his melancholy exhibitions of himself in the art;
and not only did she persuade him to stand up fronting her, she
manoeuvred him through the dance like a clever boy cajoling a top to
come to him without reeling, both to Vernon's contentment and to Sir
Willoughby's; for he was the last man to object to a manifestation of
power in his bride. Considering her influence with Vernon, he renewed
the discourse upon young Crossjay; and, as he was addicted to system,
he took her into his confidence, that she might be taught to look to
him and act for him.

"Old Vernon has not spoken to you again of that lad?" he said.

"Yes, Mr. Whitford has asked me."

"He does not ask me, my dear!"

"He may fancy me of greater aid than I am."

"You see, my love, if he puts Crossjay on me, he will be off. He has
this craze for 'enlisting' his pen in London, as he calls it; and I am
accustomed to him; I don't like to think of him as a hack scribe,
writing nonsense from dictation to earn a pitiful subsistence; I want
him here; and, supposing he goes, he offends me; he loses a friend; and
it will not be the first time that a friend has tried me too far; but
if he offends me, he is extinct."

"Is what?" cried Clara, with a look of fright.

"He becomes to me at once as if he had never been. He is extinct."

"In spite of your affection?"

"On account of it, I might say. Our nature is mysterious, and mine as
much so as any. Whatever my regrets, he goes out. This is not a
language I talk to the world. I do the man no harm; I am not to be
named unchristian. But . . . !"

Sir Willoughby mildly shrugged, and indicated a spreading out of the
arms.

"But do, do talk to me as you talk to the world, Willoughby; give me
some relief!"

"My own Clara, we are one. You should know me at my worst, we will say,
if you like, as well as at my best."

"Should I speak too?"

"What could you have to confess?"

She hung silent; the wave of an insane resolution swelled in her bosom
and subsided before she said, "Cowardice, incapacity to speak."

"Women!" said he.

We do not expect so much of women; the heroic virtues as little as the
vices. They have not to unfold the scroll of character.

He resumed, and by his tone she understood that she was now in the
inner temple of him: "I tell you these things; I quite acknowledge they
do not elevate me. They help to constitute my character. I tell you
most humbly that I have in me much--too much of the fallen archangel's
pride."

Clara bowed her head over a sustained in-drawn breath.

"It must be pride," he said, in a reverie superinduced by her
thoughtfulness over the revelation, and glorying in the black flames
demoniacal wherewith he crowned himself.

"Can you not correct it?" said she.

He replied, profoundly vexed by disappointment: "I am what I am. It
might be demonstrated to you mathematically that it is corrected by
equivalents or substitutions in my character. If it be a
failing--assuming that."

"It seems one to me: so cruelly to punish Mr. Whitford for seeking to
improve his fortunes."

"He reflects on my share in his fortunes. He has had but to apply to me
for his honorarium to be doubled."

"He wishes for independence."

"Independence of me!"

"Liberty!"

"At my expense!"

"Oh, Willoughby!"

"Ay, but this is the world, and I know it, my love; and beautiful as
your incredulity may be, you will find it more comforting to confide in
my knowledge of the selfishness of the world. My sweetest, you
will?--you do! For a breath of difference between us is intolerable. Do
you not feel how it breaks our magic ring? One small fissure, and we
have the world with its muddy deluge!--But my subject was old Vernon.
Yes, I pay for Crossjay, if Vernon consents to stay. I waive my own
scheme for the lad, though I think it the better one. Now, then, to
induce Vernon to stay. He has his ideas about staying under a mistress
of the household; and therefore, not to contest it--he is a man of no
argument; a sort of lunatic determination takes the place of it with
old Vernon!--let him settle close by me, in one of my cottages; very
well, and to settle him we must marry him."

"Who is there?" said Clara, beating for the lady in her mind.

"Women," said Willoughby, "are born match-makers, and the most
persuasive is a young bride. With a man--and a man like old Vernon!--
she is irresistible. It is my wish, and that arms you. It is your wish,
that subjugates him. If he goes, he goes for good. If he stays, he is
my friend. I deal simply with him, as with every one. It is the secret
of authority. Now Miss Dale will soon lose her father. He exists on a
pension; she has the prospect of having to leave the neighbourhood of
the Hall, unless she is established near us. Her whole heart is in this
region; it is the poor soul's passion. Count on her agreeing. But she
will require a little wooing: and old Vernon wooing! Picture the scene
to yourself, my love. His notion of wooing. I suspect, will be to treat
the lady like a lexicon, and turn over the leaves for the word, and fly
through the leaves for another word, and so get a sentence. Don't frown
at the poor old fellow, my Clara; some have the language on their
tongues, and some have not. Some are very dry sticks; manly men, honest
fellows, but so cut away, so polished away from the sex, that they are
in absolute want of outsiders to supply the silken filaments to attach
them. Actually!" Sir Willoughby laughed in Clara's face to relax the
dreamy stoniness of her look. "But I can assure you, my dearest, I have
seen it. Vernon does not know how to speak--as we speak. He has, or he
had, what is called a sneaking affection for Miss Dale. It was the most
amusing thing possible; his courtship!--the air of a dog with an uneasy
conscience, trying to reconcile himself with his master! We were all in
fits of laughter. Of course it came to nothing."

"Will Mr. Whitford," said Clara, "offend you to extinction if he
declines?"

Willoughby breathed an affectionate "Tush!" to her silliness.

"We bring them together, as we best can. You see, Clara, I desire, and
I will make some sacrifices to detain him."

"But what do you sacrifice?--a cottage?" said Clara, combative at all
points.

"An ideal, perhaps. I lay no stress on sacrifice. I strongly object to
separations. And therefore, you will say, I prepare the ground for
unions? Put your influence to good service, my love. I believe you
could persuade him to give us the Highland fling on the drawing-room
table."

"There is nothing to say to him of Crossjay?"

"We hold Crossjay in reserve."

"It is urgent."

"Trust me. I have my ideas. I am not idle. That boy bids fair for a
capital horseman. Eventualities might . . ." Sir Willoughby murmured to
himself, and addressing his bride, "The cavalry? If we put him into the
cavalry, we might make a gentleman of him--not be ashamed of him. Or,
under certain eventualities, the Guards. Think it over, my love. De
Craye, who will, I suppose, act best man for me, supposing old Vernon
to pull at the collar, is a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Guards, a
thorough gentleman--of the brainless class, if you like, but an elegant
fellow; an Irishman; you will see him, and I should like to set a naval
lieutenant beside him in a drawingroom, for you to compare them and
consider the model you would choose for a boy you are interested in.
Horace is grace and gallantry incarnate; fatuous, probably: I have
always been too friendly with him to examine closely. He made himself
one of my dogs, though my elder, and seemed to like to be at my heels.
One of the few men's faces I can call admirably handsome;--with
nothing behind it, perhaps. As Vernon says, 'a nothing picked by the
vultures and bleached by the desert'. Not a bad talker, if you are
satisfied with keeping up the ball. He will amuse you. Old Horace does
not know how amusing he is!"

"Did Mr. Whitford say that of Colonel De Craye?"

"I forget the person of whom he said it. So you have noticed old
Vernon's foible? Quote him one of his epigrams, and he is in motion
head and heels! It is an infallible receipt for tuning him. If I want
to have him in good temper, I have only to remark, 'as you said'. I
straighten his back instantly."

"I," said Clara, "have noticed chiefly his anxiety concerning the boy;
for which I admire him."

"Creditable, if not particularly far-sighted and sagacious. Well, then,
my dear, attack him at once; lead him to the subject of our fair
neighbour. She is to be our guest for a week or so, and the whole
affair might be concluded far enough to fix him before she leaves. She
is at present awaiting the arrival of a cousin to attend on her father.
A little gentle pushing will precipitate old Vernon on his knees as far
as he ever can unbend them; but when a lady is made ready to expect a
declaration, you know, why, she does not--does she?--demand the entire
formula?--though some beautiful fortresses . . ."

He enfolded her. Clara was growing hardened to it. To this she was
fated; and not seeing any way to escape, she invoked a friendly frost
to strike her blood, and passed through the minute unfeelingly. Having
passed it, she reproached herself for making so much of it, thinking it
a lesser endurance than to listen to him. What could she do?--she was
caged; by her word of honour, as she at one time thought; by her
cowardice, at another; and dimly sensible that the latter was a
stronger lock than the former, she mused on the abstract question
whether a woman's cowardice can be so absolute as to cast her into the
jaws of her aversion. Is it to be conceived? Is there not a moment when
it stands at bay? But haggard-visaged Honour then starts up claiming to
be dealt with in turn; for having courage restored to her, she must
have the courage to break with honour, she must dare to be faithless,
and not merely say, I will be brave, but be brave enough to be
dishonourable. The cage of a plighted woman hungering for her
disengagement has two keepers, a noble and a vile; where on earth is
creature so dreadfully enclosed? It lies with her to overcome what
degrades her, that she may win to liberty by overcoming what exalts.

Contemplating her situation, this idea (or vapour of youth taking the
god-like semblance of an idea) sprang, born of her present sickness, in
Clara's mind; that it must be an ill-constructed tumbling world where
the hour of ignorance is made the creator of our destiny by being
forced to the decisive elections upon which life's main issues hang.
Her teacher had brought her to contemplate his view of the world.

She thought likewise: how must a man despise women, who can expose
himself as he does to me!

Miss Middleton owed it to Sir Willoughby Patterne that she ceased to
think like a girl. When had the great change begun? Glancing back, she
could imagine that it was near the period we call in love the
first--almost from the first. And she was led to imagine it through
having become barred from imagining her own emotions of that season.
They were so dead as not to arise even under the form of shadows in
fancy. Without imputing blame to him, for she was reasonable so far,
she deemed herself a person entrapped. In a dream somehow she had
committed herself to a life-long imprisonment; and, oh terror! not in a
quiet dungeon; the barren walls closed round her, talked, called for
ardour, expected admiration.

She was unable to say why she could not give it; why she retreated more
and more inwardly; why she invoked the frost to kill her tenderest
feelings. She was in revolt, until a whisper of the day of bells
reduced her to blank submission; out of which a breath of peace drew
her to revolt again in gradual rapid stages, and once more the aspect
of that singular day of merry blackness felled her to earth. It was
alive, it advanced, it had a mouth, it had a song. She received letters
of bridesmaids writing of it, and felt them as waves that hurl a log of
wreck to shore. Following which afflicting sense of antagonism to the
whole circle sweeping on with her, she considered the possibility of
her being in a commencement of madness. Otherwise might she not be
accused of a capriciousness quite as deplorable to consider? She had
written to certain of these young ladies not very long since of this
gentleman--how?--in what tone? And was it her madness then?--her
recovery now? It seemed to her that to have written of him
enthusiastically resembled madness more than to shudder away from the
union; but standing alone, opposing all she has consented to set in
motion, is too strange to a girl for perfect justification to be found
in reason when she seeks it.

Sir Willoughby was destined himself to supply her with that key of
special insight which revealed and stamped him in a title to fortify
her spirit of revolt, consecrate it almost.

The popular physician of the county and famous anecdotal wit, Dr.
Corney, had been a guest at dinner overnight, and the next day there
was talk of him, and of the resources of his art displayed by Armand
Dehors on his hearing that he was to minister to the tastes of a
gathering of hommes d'esprit. Sir Willoughby glanced at Dehors with his
customary benevolent irony in speaking of the persons, great in their
way, who served him. "Why he cannot give us daily so good a dinner, one
must, I suppose, go to French nature to learn. The French are in the
habit of making up for all their deficiencies with enthusiasm. They
have no reverence; if I had said to him, 'I want something particularly
excellent, Dehors', I should have had a commonplace dinner. But they
have enthusiasm on draught, and that is what we must pull at. Know one
Frenchman and you know France. I have had Dehors under my eye two
years, and I can mount his enthusiasm at a word. He took hommes
d'esprit to denote men of letters. Frenchmen have destroyed their
nobility, so, for the sake of excitement, they put up the literary
man--not to worship him; that they can't do; it's to put themselves in
a state of effervescence. They will not have real greatness above them,
so they have sham. That they may justly call it equality, perhaps! Ay,
for all your shake of the head, my good Vernon! You see, human nature
comes round again, try as we may to upset it, and the French only
differ from us in wading through blood to discover that they are at
their old trick once more; 'I am your equal, sir, your born equal. Oh!
you are a man of letters? Allow me to be in a bubble about you!' Yes,
Vernon, and I believe the fellow looks up to you as the head of the
establishment. I am not jealous. Provided he attends to his functions!
There's a French philosopher who's for naming the days of the year
after the birthdays of French men of letters. Voltaire-day,
Rousseau-day, Racine-day, so on. Perhaps Vernon will inform us who
takes April 1st."

"A few trifling errors are of no consequence when you are in the vein
of satire," said Vernon. "Be satisfied with knowing a nation in the
person of a cook."

"They may be reading us English off in a jockey!" said Dr. Middleton.
"I believe that jockeys are the exchange we make for cooks; and our
neighbours do not get the best of the bargain."

"No; but, my dear good Vernon, it's nonsensical," said Sir Willoughby;
"why be bawling every day the name of men of letters?"

"Philosophers."

"Well, philosophers."

"Of all countries and times. And they are the benefactors of humanity."

"Bene--!" Sir Willoughby's derisive laugh broke the word. "There's a
pretension in all that, irreconcilable with English sound sense. Surely
you see it?"

"We might," said Vernon, "if you like, give alternative titles to the
days, or have alternating days, devoted to our great families that
performed meritorious deeds upon such a day."

The rebel Clara, delighting in his banter, was heard: "Can we furnish
sufficient?"

"A poet or two could help us."

"Perhaps a statesman," she suggested.

"A pugilist, if wanted."

"For blowy days," observed Dr. Middleton, and hastily in penitence
picked up the conversation he had unintentionally prostrated, with a
general remark on new-fangled notions, and a word aside to Vernon;
which created the blissful suspicion in Clara that her father was
indisposed to second Sir Willoughby's opinions even when sharing them.

Sir Willoughby had led the conversation. Displeased that the lead
should be withdrawn from him, he turned to Clara and related one of the
after-dinner anecdotes of Dr. Corney; and another, with a vast deal of
human nature in it, concerning a valetudinarian gentleman, whose wife
chanced to be desperately ill, and he went to the physicians assembled
in consultation outside the sick-room, imploring them by all he valued,
and in tears, to save the poor patient for him, saying: "She is
everything to me, everything; and if she dies I am compelled to run the
risks of marrying again; I must marry again; for she has accustomed me
so to the little attentions of a wife, that in truth I can't. I can't
lose her! She must be saved!" And the loving husband of any devoted
wife wrung his hands.

"Now, there, Clara, there you have the Egoist," added Sir Willoughby.
"That is the perfect Egoist. You see what he comes to--and his wife!
The man was utterly unconscious of giving vent to the grossest
selfishness."

"An Egoist!" said Clara.

"Beware of marrying an Egoist, my dear!" He bowed gallantly; and so
blindly fatuous did he appear to her, that she could hardly believe him
guilty of uttering the words she had heard from him, and kept her eyes
on him vacantly till she came to a sudden full stop in the thoughts
directing her gaze. She looked at Vernon, she looked at her father, and
at the ladies Eleanor and Isabel. None of them saw the man in the
word, none noticed the word; yet this word was her medical herb, her
illuminating lamp, the key of him (and, alas, but she thought it by
feeling her need of one), the advocate pleading in apology for her.
Egoist! She beheld him--unfortunate, self-designated man that he
was!--in his good qualities as well as bad under the implacable lamp,
and his good were drenched in his first person singular. His generosity
roared of I louder than the rest. Conceive him at the age of Dr.
Corney's hero: "Pray, save my wife for me. I shall positively have to
get another if I lose her, and one who may not love me half so well, or
understand the peculiarities of my character and appreciate my
attitudes." He was in his thirty-second year, therefore a young man,
strong and healthy, yet his garrulous return to his principal theme,
his emphasis on I and me, lent him the seeming of an old man spotted
with decaying youth.

"Beware of marrying an Egoist."

Would he help her to escape? The idea of the scene ensuing upon her
petition for release, and the being dragged round the walls of his
egoism, and having her head knocked against the corners, alarmed her
with sensations of sickness.

There was the example of Constantia. But that desperate young lady had
been assisted by a gallant, loving gentleman; she had met a Captain
Oxford.

Clara brooded on those two until they seemed heroic. She questioned
herself. Could she . . . ? were one to come? She shut her eyes in
languor, leaning the wrong way of her wishes, yet unable to say No.

Sir Willoughby had positively said beware! Marrying him would be a deed
committed in spite of his express warning. She went so far as to
conceive him subsequently saying: "I warned you." She conceived the
state of marriage with him as that of a woman tied not to a man of
heart, but to an obelisk lettered all over with hieroglyphics, and
everlastingly hearing him expound them, relishing renewing his lectures
on them.

Full surely this immovable stone-man would not release her. This
petrifaction of egoism would from amazedly to austerely refuse the
petition. His pride would debar him from understanding her desire to be
released. And if she resolved on it, without doing it straightway in
Constantia's manner, the miserable bewilderment of her father, for whom
such a complication would be a tragic dilemma, had to be thought of.
Her father, with all his tenderness for his child, would make a stand
on the point of honour; though certain to yield to her, he would be
distressed in a tempest of worry; and Dr. Middleton thus afflicted
threw up his arms, he shunned books, shunned speech, and resembled a
castaway on the ocean, with nothing between himself and his calamity.
As for the world, it would be barking at her heels. She might call the
man she wrenched her hand from, Egoist; jilt, the world would call her.
She dwelt bitterly on her agreement with Sir Willoughby regarding the
world, laying it to his charge that her garden had become a place of
nettles, her horizon an unlighted fourth side of a square.

Clara passed from person to person visiting the Hall. There was
universal, and as she was compelled to see, honest admiration of the
host. Not a soul had a suspicion of his cloaked nature. Her agony of
hypocrisy in accepting their compliments as the bride of Sir Willoughby
Patterne was poorly moderated by contempt of them for their
infatuation. She tried to cheat herself with the thought that they were
right and that she was the foolish and wicked inconstant. In her
anxiety to strangle the rebelliousness which had been communicated from
her mind to her blood, and was present with her whether her mind was in
action or not, she encouraged the ladies Eleanor and Isabel to magnify
the fictitious man of their idolatry, hoping that she might enter into
them imaginatively, that she might to some degree subdue herself to the
necessity of her position. If she partly succeeded in stupefying her
antagonism, five minutes of him undid the work.

He requested her to wear the Patterne pearls for a dinner-party of
grand ladies, telling her that he would commission Miss Isabel to take
them to her. Clara begged leave to decline them, on the plea of having
no right to wear them. He laughed at her modish modesty. "But really
it might almost be classed with affectation," said he. "I give you the
right. Virtually you are my wife."

"No."

"Before heaven?"

"No. We are not married."

"As my betrothed, will you wear them, to please me?"

"I would rather not. I cannot wear borrowed jewels. These I cannot
wear. Forgive me, I cannot. And, Willoughby," she said, scorning
herself for want of fortitude in not keeping to the simply blunt
provocative refusal, "does one not look like a victim decked for the
sacrifice?--the garlanded heifer you see on Greek vases, in that array
of jewellery?"

"My dear Clara!" exclaimed the astonished lover, "how can you term them
borrowed, when they are the Patterne jewels, our family heirloom
pearls, unmatched, I venture to affirm, decidedly in my county and many
others, and passing to the use of the mistress of the house in the
natural course of things?"

"They are yours, they are not mine."

"Prospectively they are yours."

"It would be to anticipate the fact to wear them."

"With my consent, my approval? at my request?"

"I am not yet . . . I never may be . . ."

"My wife?" He laughed triumphantly, and silenced her by manly
smothering.

Her scruple was perhaps an honourable one, he said. Perhaps the jewels
were safer in their iron box. He had merely intended a surprise and
gratification to her.

Courage was coming to enable her to speak more plainly, when his
discontinuing to insist on her wearing the jewels, under an appearance
of deference of her wishes, disarmed her by touching her sympathies.

She said, however, "I fear we do not often agree, Willoughby."

"When you are a little older!" was the irritating answer.

"It would then be too late to make the discovery."

"The discovery, I apprehend, is not imperative, my love."

"It seems to me that our minds are opposed."

"I should," said he, "have been awake to it at a single indication, be
sure."

"But I know," she pursued, "I have learned that the ideal of conduct
for women is to subject their minds to the part of an accompaniment."

"For women, my love? my wife will be in natural harmony with me."

"Ah!" She compressed her lips. The yawn would come. "I am sleepier here
than anywhere."

"Ours, my Clara, is the finest air of the kingdom. It has the effect of
sea-air."

"But if I am always asleep here?"

"We shall have to make a public exhibition of the Beauty."

This dash of his liveliness defeated her.

She left him, feeling the contempt of the brain feverishly quickened
and fine-pointed, for the brain chewing the cud in the happy pastures
of unawakedness. So violent was the fever, so keen her introspection,
that she spared few, and Vernon was not among them. Young Crossjay,
whom she considered the least able of all to act as an ally, was the
only one she courted with a real desire to please him, he was the one
she affectionately envied; he was the youngest, the freest, he had the
world before him, and he did not know how horrible the world was, or
could be made to look. She loved the boy from expecting nothing of him.
Others, Vernon Whitford, for instance, could help, and moved no hand.
He read her case. A scrutiny so penetrating under its air of abstract
thoughtfulness, though his eyes did but rest on her a second or two,
signified that he read her line by line, and to the end--excepting
what she thought of him for probing her with that sharp steel of
insight without a purpose.

She knew her mind's injustice. It was her case, her lamentable
case--the impatient panic-stricken nerves of a captured wild creature
which cried for help. She exaggerated her sufferings to get strength to
throw them off, and lost it in the recognition that they were
exaggerated: and out of the conflict issued recklessness, with a cry as
wild as any coming of madness; for she did not blush in saying to
herself. "If some one loved me!" Before hearing of Constantia, she had
mused upon liberty as a virgin Goddess--men were out of her thoughts;
even the figure of a rescuer, if one dawned in her mind, was more angel
than hero. That fair childish maidenliness had ceased. With her body
straining in her dragon's grasp, with the savour of loathing, unable to
contend, unable to speak aloud, she began to speak to herself, and all
the health of her nature made her outcry womanly: "If I were
loved!"--not for the sake of love, but for free breathing; and her
utterance of it was to insure life and enduringness to the wish, as the
yearning of a mother on a drowning ship is to get her infant to shore.
"If some noble gentleman could see me as I am and not disdain to aid
me! Oh! to be caught up out of this prison of thorns and brambles. I
cannot tear my own way out. I am a coward. My cry for help confesses
that. A beckoning of a finger would change me, I believe. I could fly
bleeding and through hootings to a comrade. Oh! a comrade! I do not
want a lover. I should find another Egoist, not so bad, but enough to
make me take a breath like death. I could follow a soldier, like poor
Sally or Molly. He stakes his life for his country, and a woman may be
proud of the worst of men who do that. Constantia met a soldier.
Perhaps she prayed and her prayer was answered. She did ill. But, oh,
how I love her for it! His name was Harry Oxford. Papa would call him
her Perseus. She must have felt that there was no explaining what she
suffered. She had only to act, to plunge. First she fixed her mind on
Harry Oxford. To be able to speak his name and see him awaiting her,
must have been relief, a reprieve. She did not waver, she cut the
links, she signed herself over. Oh, brave girl! what do you think of
me? But I have no Harry Whitford, I am alone. Let anything be said
against women; we must be very bad to have such bad things written of
us: only, say this, that to ask them to sign themselves over by oath
and ceremony, because of an ignorant promise, to the man they have been
mistaken in, is . . . it is--" the sudden consciousness that she had
put another name for Oxford, struck her a buffet, drowning her in
crimson.



CHAPTER XI

THE DOUBLE-BLOSSOM WILD CHERRY-TREE

Sir Willoughby chose a moment when Clara was with him and he had a good
retreat through folding-windows to the lawn, in case of cogency on the
enemy's part, to attack his cousin regarding the preposterous plot to
upset the family by a scamper to London: "By the way, Vernon, what is
this you've been mumbling to everybody save me, about leaving us to
pitch yourself into the stew-pot and be made broth of? London is no
better, and you are fit for considerably better. Don't, I beg you,
continue to annoy me. Take a run abroad, if you are restless. Take two
or three months, and join us as we are travelling home; and then think
of settling, pray. Follow my example, if you like. You can have one of
my cottages, or a place built for you. Anything to keep a man from
destroying the sense of stability about one. In London, my dear old
fellow, you lose your identity. What are you there? I ask you, what?
One has the feeling of the house crumbling when a man is perpetually
for shifting and cannot fix himself. Here you are known, you can study
at your ease; up in London you are nobody; I tell you honestly, I feel
it myself, a week of London literally drives me home to discover the
individual where I left him. Be advised. You don't mean to go."

"I have the intention," said Vernon.

"Why?"

"I've mentioned it to you."

"To my face?"

"Over your shoulder is generally the only chance you give me."

"You have not mentioned it to me, to my knowledge. As to the reason, I
might hear a dozen of your reasons, and I should not understand one.
It's against your interests and against my wishes. Come, friend, I am
not the only one you distress. Why, Vernon, you yourself have said that
the English would be very perfect Jews if they could manage to live on
the patriarchal system. You said it, yes, you said it!--but I recollect
it clearly. Oh, as for your double-meanings, you said the thing, and
you jeered at the incapacity of English families to live together, on
account of bad temper; and now you are the first to break up our union!
I decidedly do not profess to be a perfect Jew, but I do . . ."

Sir Willoughby caught signs of a probably smiling commerce between his
bride and his cousin. He raised his face, appeared to be consulting his
eyelids, and resolved to laugh: "Well, I own it. I do like the idea of
living patriarchally." He turned to Clara. "The Rev. Doctor one of
us!"

"My father?" she said.

"Why not?"

"Papa's habits are those of a scholar."

"That you might not be separated from him, my dear!"

Clara thanked Sir Willoughby for the kindness of thinking of her
father, mentally analysing the kindness, in which at least she found no
unkindness, scarcely egoism, though she knew it to be there.

"We might propose it," said he.

"As a compliment?"

"If he would condescend to accept it as a compliment. These great
scholars! . . . And if Vernon goes, our inducement for Dr. Middleton to
stay . . . But it is too absurd for discussion . . . Oh, Vernon, about
Master Crossjay; I will see to it."

He was about to give Vernon his shoulder and step into the garden, when
Clara said, "You will have Crossjay trained for the navy, Willoughby?
There is not a day to lose."

"Yes, yes; I will see to it. Depend on me for holding the young rascal
in view."

He presented his hand to her to lead her over the step to the gravel,
surprised to behold how flushed she was.

She responded to the invitation by putting her hand forth from a bent
elbow, with hesitating fingers. "It should not be postponed,
Willoughby."

Her attitude suggested a stipulation before she touched him.

"It's an affair of money, as you know, Willoughby," said Vernon. "If
I'm in London, I can't well provide for the boy for some time to come,
or it's not certain that I can."

"Why on earth should you go?"

"That's another matter. I want you to take my place with him."

"In which case the circumstances are changed. I am responsible for him,
and I have a right to bring him up according to my own prescription."

"We are likely to have one idle lout the more."

"I guarantee to make a gentleman of him."

"We have too many of your gentlemen already."

"You can't have enough, my good Vernon."

"They're the national apology for indolence. Training a penniless boy
to be one of them is nearly as bad as an education in a thieves' den;
he will be just as much at war with society, if not game for the
police."

"Vernon, have you seen Crossjay's father, the now Captain of Marines? I
think you have."

"He's a good man and a very gallant officer."

"And in spite of his qualities he's a cub, and an old cub. He is a
captain now, but he takes that rank very late, you will own. There you
have what you call a good man, undoubtedly a gallant officer,
neutralized by the fact that he is not a gentleman. Holding intercourse
with him is out of the question. No wonder Government declines to
advance him rapidly. Young Crossjay does not bear your name. He bears
mine, and on that point alone I should have a voice in the settlement
of his career. And I say emphatically that a drawing-room approval of a
young man is the best certificate for his general chances in life. I
know of a City of London merchant of some sort, and I know a firm of
lawyers, who will have none but University men at their office; at
least, they have the preference."

"Crossjay has a bullet head, fit neither for the University nor the
drawing-room," said Vernon; "equal to fighting and dying for you, and
that's all."

Sir Willoughby contented himself with replying, "The lad is a favourite
of mine."

His anxiety to escape a rejoinder caused him to step into the garden,
leaving Clara behind him. "My love!" said he, in apology, as he turned
to her. She could not look stern, but she had a look without a dimple
to soften it, and her eyes shone. For she had wagered in her heart that
the dialogue she provoked upon Crossjay would expose the Egoist. And
there were other motives, wrapped up and intertwisted, unrecognizable,
sufficient to strike her with worse than the flush of her
self-knowledge of wickedness when she detained him to speak of Crossjay
before Vernon.

At last it had been seen that she was conscious of suffering in her
association with this Egoist! Vernon stood for the world taken into her
confidence. The world, then, would not think so ill of her, she thought
hopefully, at the same time that she thought most evilly of herself.
But self-accusations were for the day of reckoning; she would and must
have the world with her, or the belief that it was coming to her, in
the terrible struggle she foresaw within her horizon of self, now her
utter boundary. She needed it for the inevitable conflict. Little
sacrifices of her honesty might be made. Considering how weak she was,
how solitary, how dismally entangled, daily disgraced beyond the power
of any veiling to conceal from her fiery sensations, a little hypocrisy
was a poor girl's natural weapon. She crushed her conscientious mind
with the assurance that it was magnifying trifles: not entirely unaware
that she was thereby preparing it for a convenient blindness in the
presence of dread alternatives; but the pride of laying such stress on
small sins gave her purity a blush of pleasure and overcame the inner
warning. In truth she dared not think evilly of herself for long,
sailing into battle as she was. Nuns and anchorites may; they have
leisure. She regretted the forfeits she had to pay for self-assistance,
and, if it might be won, the world's; regretted, felt the peril of the
loss, and took them up and flung them.

"You see, old Vernon has no argument," Willoughby said to her.

He drew her hand more securely on his arm to make her sensible that she
leaned on a pillar of strength.

"Whenever the little brain is in doubt, perplexed, undecided which
course to adopt, she will come to me, will she not? I shall always
listen," he resumed, soothingly. "My own! and I to you when the world
vexes me. So we round our completeness. You will know me; you will know
me in good time. I am not a mystery to those to whom I unfold myself. I
do not pretend to mystery: yet, I will confess, your home--your
heart's--Willoughby is not exactly identical with the Willoughby before
the world. One must be armed against that rough beast."

Certain is the vengeance of the young upon monotony; nothing more
certain. They do not scheme it, but sameness is a poison to their
systems; and vengeance is their heartier breathing, their stretch of
the limbs, run in the fields; nature avenges them.

"When does Colonel De Craye arrive?" said Clara.

"Horace? In two or three days. You wish him to be on the spot to learn
his part, my love?"

She had not flown forward to the thought of Colonel De Craye's arrival;
she knew not why she had mentioned him; but now she flew back, shocked,
first into shadowy subterfuge, and then into the criminal's dock.

"I do not wish him to be here. I do not know that he has a part to
learn. I have no wish. Willoughby, did you not say I should come to you
and you would listen?--will you listen? I am so commonplace that I
shall not be understood by you unless you take my words for the very
meaning of the words. I am unworthy. I am volatile. I love my liberty.
I want to be free . . ."

"Flitch!" he called.

It sounded necromantic.

"Pardon me, my love," he said. "The man you see yonder violates my
express injunction that he is not to come on my grounds, and here I
find him on the borders of my garden!"

Sir Willoughby waved his hand to the abject figure of a man standing to
intercept him.

"Volatile, unworthy, liberty--my dearest!" he bent to her when the man
had appeased him by departing, "you are at liberty within the law, like
all good women; I shall control and direct your volatility; and your
sense of worthiness must be re-established when we are more intimate;
it is timidity. The sense of unworthiness is a guarantee of worthiness
ensuing. I believe I am in the vein of a sermon! Whose the fault? The
sight of that man was annoying. Flitch was a stable-boy, groom, and
coachman, like his father before him, at the Hall thirty years; his
father died in our service. Mr. Flitch had not a single grievance here;
only one day the demon seizes him with the notion of bettering himself
he wants his independence, and he presents himself to me with a story
of a shop in our county town.--Flitch! remember, if you go you go for
good.--Oh, he quite comprehended.--Very well; good-bye, Flitch;--the
man was respectful: he looked the fool he was very soon to turn out to
be. Since then, within a period of several years, I have had him,
against my express injunctions, ten times on my grounds. It's curious
to calculate. Of course the shop failed, and Flitch's independence
consists in walking about with his hands in his empty pockets, and
looking at the Hall from some elevation near."

"Is he married? Has he children?" said Clara.

"Nine; and a wife that cannot cook or sew or wash linen."

"You could not give him employment?"

"After his having dismissed himself?"

"It might be overlooked."

"Here he was happy. He decided to go elsewhere, to be free--of course,
of my yoke. He quitted my service against my warning. Flitch, we will
say, emigrated with his wife and children, and the ship foundered. He
returns, but his place is filled; he is a ghost here, and I object to
ghosts."

"Some work might be found for him."

"It will be the same with old Vernon, my dear. If he goes, he goes for
good. It is the vital principle of my authority to insist on that. A
dead leaf might as reasonably demand to return to the tree. Once off,
off for all eternity! I am sorry, but such was your decision, my
friend. I have, you see, Clara, elements in me--"

"Dreadful!"

"Exert your persuasive powers with Vernon. You can do well-nigh what
you will with the old fellow. We have Miss Dale this evening for a week
or two. Lead him to some ideas of her.--Elements in me, I was
remarking, which will no more bear to be handled carelessly than
gunpowder. At the same time, there is no reason why they should not be
respected, managed with some degree of regard for me and attention to
consequences. Those who have not done so have repented."

"You do not speak to others of the elements in you," said Clara.

"I certainly do not: I have but one bride," was his handsome reply.

"Is it fair to me that you should show me the worst of you?"

"All myself, my own?"

His ingratiating droop and familiar smile rendered "All myself" so
affectionately meaningful in its happy reliance upon her excess of
love, that at last she understood she was expected to worship him and
uphold him for whatsoever he might be, without any estimation of
qualities: as indeed love does, or young love does: as she perhaps did
once, before he chilled her senses. That was before her "little brain"
had become active and had turned her senses to revolt.

It was on the full river of love that Sir Willoughby supposed the whole
floating bulk of his personality to be securely sustained; and
therefore it was that, believing himself swimming at his ease, he
discoursed of himself.

She went straight away from that idea with her mental exclamation:
"Why does he not paint himself in brighter colours to me!" and the
question: "Has he no ideal of generosity and chivalry?"

But the unfortunate gentleman imagined himself to be loved, on Love's
very bosom. He fancied that everything relating to himself excited
maidenly curiosity, womanly reverence, ardours to know more of him,
which he was ever willing to satisfy by repeating the same things. His
notion of women was the primitive black and white: there are good
women, bad women; and he possessed a good one. His high opinion of
himself fortified the belief that Providence, as a matter of justice
and fitness, must necessarily select a good one for him--or what are we
to think of Providence? And this female, shaped by that informing
hand, would naturally be in harmony with him, from the centre of his
profound identity to the raying circle of his variations. Know the
centre, you know the circle, and you discover that the variations are
simply characteristics, but you must travel on the rays from the circle
to get to the centre. Consequently Sir Willoughby put Miss Middleton on
one or other of these converging lines from time to time. Us, too, he
drags into the deeps, but when we have harpooned a whale and are
attached to the rope, down we must go; the miracle is to see us rise
again.

Women of mixed essences shading off the divine to the considerably
lower were outside his vision of woman. His mind could as little admit
an angel in pottery as a rogue in porcelain. For him they were what
they were when fashioned at the beginning; many cracked, many stained,
here and there a perfect specimen designed for the elect of men. At a
whisper of the world he shut the prude's door on them with a slam;
himself would have branded them with the letters in the hue of fire.
Privately he did so; and he was constituted by his extreme
sensitiveness and taste for ultra-feminine refinement to be a severe
critic of them during the carnival of egoism, the love-season.
Constantia . . . can it be told? She had been, be it said, a fair and
frank young merchant with him in that season; she was of a nature to be
a mother of heroes; she met the salute, almost half-way, ingenuously
unlike the coming mothers of the regiments of marionettes, who retire
in vapours, downcast, as by convention; ladies most flattering to the
egoistical gentleman, for they proclaim him the "first". Constantia's
offence had been no greater, but it was not that dramatic performance
of purity which he desired of an affianced lady, and so the offence was
great.

The love-season is the carnival of egoism, and it brings the touchstone
to our natures. I speak of love, not the mask, and not of the flutings
upon the theme of love, but of the passion; a flame having, like our
mortality, death in it as well as life, that may or may not be lasting.
Applied to Sir Willoughby, as to thousands of civilized males, the
touchstone found him requiring to be dealt with by his betrothed as an
original savage. She was required to play incessantly on the first
reclaiming chord which led our ancestral satyr to the measures of the
dance, the threading of the maze, and the setting conformably to his
partner before it was accorded to him to spin her with both hands and a
chirrup of his frisky heels. To keep him in awe and hold him enchained,
there are things she must never do, dare never say, must not think. She
must be cloistral. Now, strange and awful though it be to hear, women
perceive this requirement of them in the spirit of the man; they
perceive, too, and it may be gratefully, that they address their
performances less to the taming of the green and prankish monsieur of
the forest than to the pacification of a voracious aesthetic gluttony,
craving them insatiably, through all the tenses, with shrieks of the
lamentable letter "I" for their purity. Whether they see that it has
its foundation in the sensual, and distinguish the ultra-refined but
lineally great-grandson of the Hoof in this vast and dainty exacting
appetite is uncertain. They probably do not; the more the damage; for
in the appeasement of the glutton they have to practise much
simulation; they are in their way losers like their ancient mothers. It
is the palpable and material of them still which they are tempted to
flourish, wherewith to invite and allay pursuit: a condition under
which the spiritual, wherein their hope lies, languishes. The
capaciously strong in soul among women will ultimately detect an
infinite grossness in the demand for purity infinite, spotless bloom.
Earlier or later they see they have been victims of the singular
Egoist, have worn a mask of ignorance to be named innocent, have turned
themselves into market produce for his delight, and have really
abandoned the commodity in ministering to the lust for it, suffered
themselves to be dragged ages back in playing upon the fleshly
innocence of happy accident to gratify his jealous greed of possession,
when it should have been their task to set the soul above the fairest
fortune and the gift of strength in women beyond ornamental whiteness.
Are they not of nature warriors, like men?--men's mates to bear them
heroes instead of puppets? But the devouring male Egoist prefers them
as inanimate overwrought polished pure metal precious vessels, fresh
from the hands of the artificer, for him to walk away with hugging,
call all his own, drink of, and fill and drink of, and forget that he
stole them.

This running off on a by-road is no deviation from Sir Willoughby
Patterne and Miss Clara Middleton. He, a fairly intelligent man, and
very sensitive, was blinded to what was going on within her visibly
enough, by her production of the article he demanded of her sex. He had
to leave the fair young lady to ride to his county-town, and his design
was to conduct her through the covert of a group of laurels, there to
revel in her soft confusion. She resisted; nay, resolutely returned to
the lawn-sward. He contrasted her with Constantia in the amorous time,
and rejoiced in his disappointment. He saw the goddess Modesty guarding
Purity; and one would be bold to say that he did not hear the Precepts,
Purity's aged grannams maternal and paternal, cawing approval of her
over their munching gums. And if you ask whether a man, sensitive and a
lover, can be so blinded, you are condemned to re-peruse the foregoing
paragraph.

Miss Middleton was not sufficiently instructed in the position of her
sex to know that she had plunged herself in the thick of the strife of
one of their great battles. Her personal position, however, was
instilling knowledge rapidly, as a disease in the frame teaches us what
we are and have to contend with. Could she marry this man? He was
evidently manageable. Could she condescend to the use of arts in
managing him to obtain a placable life?--a horror of swampy flatness!
So vividly did the sight of that dead heaven over an unvarying level
earth swim on her fancy, that she shut her eyes in angry exclusion of
it as if it were outside, assailing her; and she nearly stumbled upon
young Crossjay.

"Oh, have I hurt you?" he cried.

"No," said she, "it was my fault. Lead me somewhere away from
everybody."

The boy took her hand, and she resumed her thoughts; and, pressing his
fingers and feeling warm to him both for his presence and silence, so
does the blood in youth lead the mind, even cool and innocent blood,
even with a touch, that she said to herself, "And if I marry, and then
. . . Where will honour be then? I marry him to be true to my word of
honour, and if then . . . !" An intolerable languor caused her to sigh
profoundly. It is written as she thought it; she thought in blanks, as
girls do, and some women. A shadow of the male Egoist is in the chamber
of their brains overawing them.

"Were I to marry, and to run!" There is the thought; she is offered up
to your mercy. We are dealing with a girl feeling herself desperately
situated, and not a fool.

"I'm sure you're dead tired, though," said Crossjay.

"No, I am not; what makes you think so?" said Clara.

"I do think so."

"But why do you think so?"

"You're so hot."

"What makes you think that?"

"You're so red."

"So are you, Crossjay."

"I'm only red in the middle of the cheeks, except when I've been
running. And then you talk to yourself, just as boys do when they are
blown."

"Do they?"

"They say: 'I know I could have kept up longer', or, 'my buckle broke',
all to themselves, when they break down running."

"And you have noticed that?"

"And, Miss Middleton, I don't wish you were a boy, but I should like to
live near you all my life and be a gentleman. I'm coming with Miss Dale
this evening to stay at the Hall and be looked after, instead of
stopping with her cousin who takes care of her father. Perhaps you and
I'll play chess at night."

"At night you will go to bed, Crossjay."

"Not if I have Sir Willoughby to catch hold of. He says I'm an
authority on birds' eggs. I can manage rabbits and poultry. Isn't a
farmer a happy man? But he doesn't marry ladies. A cavalry officer has
the best chance."

"But you are going to be a naval officer."

"I don't know. It's not positive. I shall bring my two dormice, and
make them perform gymnastics on the dinnertable. They're such dear
little things. Naval officers are not like Sir Willoughby."

"No, they are not," said Clara, "they give their lives to their
country."

"And then they're dead," said Crossjay.

Clara wished Sir Willoughby were confronting her: she could have
spoken.

She asked the boy where Mr. Whitford was. Crossjay pointed very
secretly in the direction of the double-blossom wild-cherry. Coming
within gaze of the stem, she beheld Vernon stretched at length,
reading, she supposed; asleep, she discovered: his finger in the leaves
of a book; and what book? She had a curiosity to know the title of the
book he would read beneath these boughs, and grasping Crossjay's hand
fast she craned her neck, as one timorous of a fall in peeping over
chasms, for a glimpse of the page; but immediately, and still with a
bent head, she turned her face to where the load of virginal blossom,
whiter than summer-cloud on the sky, showered and drooped and clustered
so thick as to claim colour and seem, like higher Alpine snows in
noon-sunlight, a flush of white. From deep to deeper heavens of white,
her eyes perched and soared. Wonder lived in her. Happiness in the
beauty of the tree pressed to supplant it, and was more mortal and
narrower. Reflection came, contracting her vision and weighing her to
earth. Her reflection was: "He must be good who loves to be and sleep
beneath the branches of this tree!" She would rather have clung to her
first impression: wonder so divine, so unbounded, was like soaring into
homes of angel-crowded space, sweeping through folded and on to folded
white fountain-bow of wings, in innumerable columns; but the thought of
it was no recovery of it; she might as well have striven to be a child.
The sensation of happiness promised to be less short-lived in memory,
and would have been had not her present disease of the longing for
happiness ravaged every corner of it for the secret of its existence.
The reflection took root. "He must be good . . . !" That reflection
vowed to endure. Poor by comparison with what it displaced, it
presented itself to her as conferring something on him, and she would
not have had it absent though it robbed her.

She looked down. Vernon was dreamily looking up.

She plucked Crossjay hurriedly away, whispering that he had better not
wake Mr. Whitford, and then she proposed to reverse their previous
chase, and she be the hound and he the hare. Crossjay fetched a
magnificent start. On his glancing behind he saw Miss Middleton walking
listlessly, with a hand at her side.

"There's a regular girl!" said he in some disgust; for his theory was,
that girls always have something the matter with them to spoil a game.



CHAPTER XII

MISS MIDDLETON AND MR. VERNON WHITFORD

Looking upward, not quite awakened out of a transient doze, at a fair
head circled in dazzling blossom, one may temporize awhile with common
sense, and take it for a vision after the eyes have regained direction
of the mind. Vernon did so until the plastic vision interwound with
reality alarmingly. This is the embrace of a Melusine who will soon
have the brain if she is encouraged. Slight dalliance with her makes
the very diminutive seem as big as life. He jumped to his feet, rattled
his throat, planted firmness on his brows and mouth, and attacked the
dream-giving earth with tremendous long strides, that his blood might
be lively at the throne of understanding. Miss Middleton and young
Crossjay were within hail: it was her face he had seen, and still the
idea of a vision, chased from his reasonable wits, knocked hard and
again for readmission. There was little for a man of humble mind
toward the sex to think of in the fact of a young lady's bending rather
low to peep at him asleep, except that the poise of her slender figure,
between an air of spying and of listening, vividly recalled his
likening of her to the Mountain Echo. Man or maid sleeping in the open
air provokes your tiptoe curiosity. Men, it is known, have in that
state cruelly been kissed; and no rights are bestowed on them, they are
teased by a vapourish rapture; what has happened to them the poor
fellows barely divine: they have a crazy step from that day. But a
vision is not so distracting; it is our own, we can put it aside and
return to it, play at rich and poor with it, and are not to be summoned
before your laws and rules for secreting it in our treasury. Besides,
it is the golden key of all the possible; new worlds expand beneath the
dawn it brings us. Just outside reality, it illumines, enriches and
softens real things;--and to desire it in preference to the simple fact
is a damning proof of enervation.

Such was Vernon's winding up of his brief drama of fantasy. He was
aware of the fantastical element in him and soon had it under. Which
of us who is of any worth is without it? He had not much vanity to
trouble him, and passion was quiet, so his task was not gigantic.
Especially be it remarked, that he was a man of quick pace, the
sovereign remedy for the dispersing of the mental fen-mist. He had
tried it and knew that nonsense is to be walked off.

Near the end of the park young Crossjay overtook him, and after acting
the pumped one a trifle more than needful, cried: "I say, Mr. Whitford,
there's Miss Middleton with her handkerchief out."

"What for, my lad?" said Vernon.

"I'm sure I don't know. All of a sudden she bumped down. And, look what
fellows girls are!--here she comes as if nothing had happened, and I
saw her feel at her side."

Clara was shaking her head to express a denial. "I am not at all
unwell," she said, when she came near. "I guessed Crossjay's business
in running up to you; he's a good-for-nothing, officious boy. I was
tired, and rested for a moment."

Crossjay peered at her eyelids. Vernon looked away and said: "Are you
too tired for a stroll?"

"Not now."

"Shall it be brisk?"

"You have the lead."

He led at a swing of the legs that accelerated young Crossjay's to the
double, but she with her short, swift, equal steps glided along easily
on a fine by his shoulder, and he groaned to think that of all the
girls of earth this one should have been chosen for the position of
fine lady.

"You won't tire me," said she, in answer to his look.

"You remind me of the little Piedmontese Bersaglieri on the march."

"I have seen them trotting into Como from Milan."

"They cover a quantity of ground in a day, if the ground's flat. You
want another sort of step for the mountains."

"I should not attempt to dance up."

"They soon tame romantic notions of them."

"The mountains tame luxurious dreams, you mean. I see how they are
conquered. I can plod. Anything to be high up!"

"Well, there you have the secret of good work: to plod on and still
keep the passion fresh."

"Yes, when we have an aim in view."

"We always have one."

"Captives have?"

"More than the rest of us."

Ignorant man! What of wives miserably wedded? What aim in view have
these most woeful captives? Horror shrouds it, and shame reddens
through the folds to tell of innermost horror.

"Take me back to the mountains, if you please, Mr. Whitford," Miss
Middleton said, fallen out of sympathy with him. "Captives have death
in view, but that is not an aim."

"Why may not captives expect a release?"

"Hardly from a tyrant."

"If you are thinking of tyrants, it may be so. Say the tyrant dies?"

"The prison-gates are unlocked and out comes a skeleton. But why will
you talk of skeletons! The very name of mountain seems life in
comparison with any other subject."

"I assure you," said Vernon, with the fervour of a man lighting on an
actual truth in his conversation with a young lady, "it's not the first
time I have thought you would be at home in the Alps. You would walk
and climb as well as you dance."

She liked to hear Clara Middleton talked of, and of her having been
thought of, and giving him friendly eyes, barely noticing that he was
in a glow, she said: "If you speak so encouragingly I shall fancy we
are near an ascent."

"I wish we were," said he.

"We can realize it by dwelling on it, don't you think?"

"We can begin climbing."

"Oh!" she squeezed herself shadowily.

"Which mountain shall it be?" said Vernon, in the right real earnest
tone.

Miss Middleton suggested a lady's mountain first, for a trial. "And
then, if you think well enough of me--if I have not stumbled more than
twice, or asked more than ten times how far it is from the top, I
should like to be promoted to scale a giant."

They went up to some of the lesser heights of Switzerland and Styria,
and settled in South Tyrol, the young lady preferring this district for
the strenuous exercise of her climbing powers because she loved Italian
colour; and it seemed an exceedingly good reason to the genial
imagination she had awakened in Mr. Whitford. "Though," said he,
abruptly, "you are not so much Italian as French."

She hoped she was English, she remarked.

"Of course you are English; . . . yes." He moderated his ascent with
the halting affirmative.

She inquired wonderingly why he spoke in apparent hesitation.

"Well, you have French feet, for example: French wits, French
impatience," he lowered his voice, "and charm"

"And love of compliments."

"Possibly. I was not conscious of paying them"

"And a disposition to rebel?"

"To challenge authority, at least."

"That is a dreadful character."

"At all events, it is a character."

"Fit for an Alpine comrade?"

"For the best of comrades anywhere."

"It is not a piece of drawing-room sculpture: that is the most one can
say for it!" she dropped a dramatic sigh.

Had he been willing she would have continued the theme, for the
pleasure a poor creature long gnawing her sensations finds in seeing
herself from the outside. It fell away. After a silence, she could not
renew it; and he was evidently indifferent, having to his own
satisfaction dissected and stamped her a foreigner. With it passed her
holiday. She had forgotten Sir Willoughby: she remembered him and said.
"You knew Miss Durham, Mr. Whitford?"

He answered briefly, "I did."

"Was she? . . ." some hot-faced inquiry peered forth and withdrew.

"Very handsome," said Vernon.

"English?"

"Yes; the dashing style of English."

"Very courageous."

"I dare say she had a kind of courage."

"She did very wrong."

"I won't say no. She discovered a man more of a match with herself;
luckily not too late. We're at the mercy . . ."

"Was she not unpardonable?"

"I should be sorry to think that of any one."

"But you agree that she did wrong."

"I suppose I do. She made a mistake and she corrected it. If she had
not, she would have made a greater mistake."

"The manner. . ."

"That was bad--as far as we know. The world has not much right to
judge. A false start must now and then be made. It's better not to take
notice of it, I think."

"What is it we are at the mercy of?"

"Currents of feeling, our natures. I am the last man to preach on the
subject: young ladies are enigmas to me; I fancy they must have a
natural perception of the husband suitable to them, and the reverse;
and if they have a certain degree of courage, it follows that they
please themselves."

"They are not to reflect on the harm they do?" said Miss Middleton.

"By all means let them reflect; they hurt nobody by doing that."

"But a breach of faith!"

"If the faith can be kept through life, all's well."

"And then there is the cruelty, the injury!"

"I really think that if a young lady came to me to inform me she must
break our engagement--I have never been put to the proof, but to
suppose it:--I should not think her cruel."

"Then she would not be much of a loss."

"And I should not think so for this reason, that it is impossible for a
girl to come to such a resolution without previously showing signs of
it to her . . . the man she is engaged to. I think it unfair to engage
a girl for longer than a week or two, just time enough for her
preparations and publications."

"If he is always intent on himself, signs are likely to be unheeded by
him," said Miss Middleton.

He did not answer, and she said, quickly:

"It must always be a cruelty. The world will think so. It is an act of
inconstancy."

"If they knew one another well before they were engaged."

"Are you not singularly tolerant?" said she.

To which Vernon replied with airy cordiality:--

"In some cases it is right to judge by results; we'll leave severity to
the historian, who is bound to be a professional moralist and put pleas
of human nature out of the scales. The lady in question may have been
to blame, but no hearts were broken, and here we have four happy
instead of two miserable."

His persecuting geniality of countenance appealed to her to confirm
this judgement by results, and she nodded and said: "Four," as the
awe-stricken speak.

From that moment until young Crossjay fell into the green-rutted lane
from a tree, and was got on his legs half stunned, with a hanging lip
and a face like the inside of a flayed eel-skin, she might have been
walking in the desert, and alone, for the pleasure she had in society.

They led the fated lad home between them, singularly drawn together by
their joint ministrations to him, in which her delicacy had to stand
fire, and sweet good-nature made naught of any trial. They were hand in
hand with the little fellow as physician and professional nurse.



CHAPTER XIII

THE FIRST EFFORT AFTER FREEDOM

Crossjay's accident was only another proof, as Vernon told Miss Dale,
that the boy was but half monkey.

"Something fresh?" she exclaimed on seeing him brought into the Hall,
where she had just arrived.

"Simply a continuation," said Vernon. "He is not so prehensile as he
should be. He probably in extremity relies on the tail that has been
docked. Are you a man, Crossjay?"

"I should think I was!" Crossjay replied, with an old man's voice, and
a ghastly twitch for a smile overwhelmed the compassionate ladies.

Miss Dale took possession of him. "You err in the other direction," she
remarked to Vernon.

"But a little bracing roughness is better than spoiling him." said Miss
Middleton.

She did not receive an answer, and she thought: "Whatever Willoughby
does is right, to this lady!"

Clara's impression was renewed when Sir Willoughby sat beside Miss Dale
in the evening; and certainly she had never seen him shine so
picturesquely as in his bearing with Miss Dale. The sprightly sallies
of the two, their rallyings, their laughter, and her fine eyes, and his
handsome gestures, won attention like a fencing match of a couple keen
with the foils to display the mutual skill. And it was his design that
she should admire the display; he was anything but obtuse; enjoying the
match as he did and necessarily did to act so excellent a part in it,
he meant the observer to see the man he was with a lady not of raw
understanding. So it went on from day to day for three days.

She fancied once that she detected the agreeable stirring of the brood
of jealousy, and found it neither in her heart nor in her mind, but in
the book of wishes, well known to the young where they write matter
which may sometimes be independent of both those volcanic albums.
Jealousy would have been a relief to her, a dear devil's aid. She
studied the complexion of jealousy to delude herself with the sense of
the spirit being in her, and all the while she laughed, as at a vile
theatre whereof the imperfection of the stage machinery rather than the
performance is the wretched source of amusement.

Vernon had deeply depressed her. She was hunted by the figure 4. Four
happy instead of two miserable. He had said it, involving her among the
four; and so it must be, she considered, and she must be as happy as
she could; for not only was he incapable of perceiving her state, he
was unable to imagine other circumstances to surround her. How, to be
just to him, were they imaginable by him or any one?

Her horrible isolation of secrecy in a world amiable in
unsuspectingness frightened her. To fling away her secret, to conform,
to be unrebellious, uncritical, submissive, became an impatient desire;
and the task did not appear so difficult since Miss Dale's arrival.
Endearments had been rare, more formal; living bodily untroubled and
unashamed, and, as she phrased it, having no one to care for her, she
turned insensibly in the direction where she was due; she slightly
imitated Miss Dale's colloquial responsiveness. To tell truth, she felt
vivacious in a moderate way with Willoughby after seeing him with Miss
Dale. Liberty wore the aspect of a towering prison-wall; the desperate
undertaking of climbing one side and dropping to the other was more
than she, unaided, could resolve on; consequently, as no one cared for
her, a worthless creature might as well cease dreaming and stipulating
for the fulfilment of her dreams; she might as well yield to her fate;
nay, make the best of it.

Sir Willoughby was flattered and satisfied. Clara's adopted vivacity
proved his thorough knowledge of feminine nature; nor did her
feebleness in sustaining it displease him. A steady look of hers had of
late perplexed the man, and he was comforted by signs of her
inefficiency where he excelled. The effort and the failure were both of
good omen.

But she could not continue the effort. He had overweighted her too much
for the mimicry of a sentiment to harden and have an apparently natural
place among her impulses; and now an idea came to her that he might, it
might be hoped, possibly see in Miss Dale, by present contrast, the
mate he sought; by contrast with an unanswering creature like herself,
he might perhaps realize in Miss Dale's greater accomplishments and her
devotion to him the merit of suitability; he might be induced to do her
justice. Dim as the loop-hole was, Clara fixed her mind on it till it
gathered light. And as a prelude to action, she plunged herself into a
state of such profound humility, that to accuse it of being simulated
would be venturesome, though it was not positive. The tempers of the
young are liquid fires in isles of quicksand; the precious metals not
yet cooled in a solid earth. Her compassion for Laetitia was less
forced, but really she was almost as earnest in her self-abasement, for
she had not latterly been brilliant, not even adequate to the ordinary
requirements of conversation. She had no courage, no wit, no diligence,
nothing that she could distinguish save discontentment like a corroding
acid, and she went so far in sincerity as with a curious shift of
feeling to pity the man plighted to her. If it suited her purpose to
pity Sir Willoughby, she was not moved by policy, be assured; her needs
were her nature, her moods her mind; she had the capacity to make
anything serve her by passing into it with the glance which discerned
its usefulness; and this is how it is that the young, when they are in
trouble, without approaching the elevation of scientific hypocrites,
can teach that able class lessons in hypocrisy.

"Why should not Willoughby be happy?" she said; and the exclamation was
pushed forth by the second thought: "Then I shall be free!" Still that
thought came second.

The desire for the happiness of Willoughby was fervent on his behalf
and wafted her far from friends and letters to a narrow Tyrolean
valley, where a shallow river ran, with the indentations of a remotely
seen army of winding ranks in column, topaz over the pebbles to hollows
of ravishing emerald. There sat Liberty, after her fearful leap over
the prison-wall, at peace to watch the water and the falls of sunshine
on the mountain above, between descending pine-stem shadows. Clara's
wish for his happiness, as soon as she had housed herself in the
imagination of her freedom, was of a purity that made it seem
exceedingly easy for her to speak to him.

The opportunity was offered by Sir Willoughby. Every morning after
breakfast Miss Dale walked across the park to see her father, and on
this occasion Sir Willoughby and Miss Middleton went with her as far as
the lake, all three discoursing of the beauty of various trees,
birches, aspens, poplars, beeches, then in their new green. Miss Dale
loved the aspen, Miss Middleton the beech, Sir Willoughby the birch,
and pretty things were said by each in praise of the favoured object,
particularly by Miss Dale. So much so that when she had gone on he
recalled one of her remarks, and said: "I believe, if the whole place
were swept away to-morrow, Laetitia Dale could reconstruct it and put
those aspens on the north of the lake in number and situation correctly
where you have them now. I would guarantee her description of it in
absence correct."

"Why should she be absent?" said Clara, palpitating.

"Well, why!" returned Sir Willoughby. "As you say, there is no reason
why. The art of life, and mine will be principally a country life--town
is not life, but a tornado whirling atoms--the art is to associate a
group of sympathetic friends in our neighbourhood; and it is a fact
worth noting that if ever I feel tired of the place, a short talk with
Laetitia Dale refreshes it more than a month or two on the Continent.
She has the well of enthusiasm. And there is a great advantage in
having a cultivated person at command, with whom one can chat of any
topic under the sun. I repeat, you have no need of town if you have
friends like Laetitia Dale within call. My mother esteemed her highly."

"Willoughby, she is not obliged to go."

"I hope not. And, my love, I rejoice that you have taken to her. Her
father's health is poor. She would be a young spinster to live alone in
a country cottage."

"What of your scheme?"

"Old Vernon is a very foolish fellow."

"He has declined?"

"Not a word on the subject! I have only to propose it to be snubbed, I
know."

"You may not be aware how you throw him into the shade with her."

"Nothing seems to teach him the art of dialogue with ladies."

"Are not gentlemen shy when they see themselves outshone?"

"He hasn't it, my love: Vernon is deficient in the lady's tongue."

"I respect him for that."

"Outshone, you say? I do not know of any shining--save to one, who
lights me, path and person!"

The identity of the one was conveyed to her in a bow and a soft
pressure.

"Not only has he not the lady's tongue, which I hold to be a man's
proper accomplishment," continued Sir Willoughby, "he cannot turn his
advantages to account. Here has Miss Dale been with him now four days
in the house. They are exactly on the same footing as when she entered
it. You ask? I will tell you. It is this: it is want of warmth. Old
Vernon is a scholar--and a fish. Well, perhaps he has cause to be shy
of matrimony; but he is a fish."

"You are reconciled to his leaving you?"

"False alarm! The resolution to do anything unaccustomed is quite
beyond old Vernon."

"But if Mr. Oxford--Whitford . . . your swans coming sailing up the
lake, how beautiful they look when they are indignant! I was going to
ask you, surely men witnessing a marked admiration for some one else
will naturally be discouraged?"

Sir Willoughby stiffened with sudden enlightenment.

Though the word jealousy had not been spoken, the drift of her
observations was clear. Smiling inwardly, he said, and the sentences
were not enigmas to her: "Surely, too, young ladies . . . a
little?--Too far? But an old friendship! About the same as the fitting
of an old glove to a hand. Hand and glove have only to meet. Where
there is natural harmony you would not have discord. Ay, but you have
it if you check the harmony. My dear girl! You child!"

He had actually, in this parabolic, and commendable, obscureness, for
which she thanked him in her soul, struck the very point she had not
named and did not wish to hear named, but wished him to strike; he was
anything but obtuse. His exultation, of the compressed sort, was
extreme, on hearing her cry out:

"Young ladies may be. Oh! not I, not I. I can convince you. Not that.
Believe me, Willoughby. I do not know what it is to feel that, or
anything like it. I cannot conceive a claim on any one's life--as a
claim: or the continuation of an engagement not founded on perfect,
perfect sympathy. How should I feel it, then? It is, as you say of Mr.
Ox--Whitford, beyond me."

Sir Willoughby caught up the Ox--Whitford.

Bursting with laughter in his joyful pride, he called it a portrait of
old Vernon in society. For she thought a trifle too highly of Vernon,
as here and there a raw young lady does think of the friends of her
plighted man, which is waste of substance properly belonging to him, as
it were, in the loftier sense, an expenditure in genuflexions to
wayside idols of the reverence she should bring intact to the temple.
Derision instructs her.

Of the other subject--her jealousy--he had no desire to hear more. She
had winced: the woman had been touched to smarting in the girl: enough.
She attempted the subject once, but faintly, and his careless parrying
threw her out. Clara could have bitten her tongue for that reiterated
stupid slip on the name of Whitford; and because she was innocent at
heart she persisted in asking herself how she could be guilty of it.

"You both know the botanic titles of these wild flowers," she said.

"Who?" he inquired.

"You and Miss Dale."

Sir Willoughby shrugged. He was amused.

"No woman on earth will grace a barouche so exquisitely as my Clara."

"Where?" said she.

"During our annual two months in London. I drive a barouche there, and
venture to prophesy that my equipage will create the greatest
excitement of any in London. I see old Horace De Craye gazing!"

She sighed. She could not drag him to the word, or a hint of it
necessary to her subject.

But there it was; she saw it. She had nearly let it go, and blushed at
being obliged to name it.

"Jealousy, do you mean. Willoughby? the people in London would be
jealous?--Colonel De Craye? How strange! That is a sentiment I cannot
understand."

Sir Willoughby gesticulated the "Of course not" of an established
assurance to the contrary.

"Indeed, Willoughby, I do not."

"Certainly not."

He was now in her trap. And he was imagining himself to be anatomizing
her feminine nature.

"Can I give you a proof, Willoughby? I am so utterly incapable of it
that--listen to me--were you to come to me to tell me, as you might,
how much better suited to you Miss Dale has appeared than I am--and I
fear I am not; it should be spoken plainly; unsuited altogether,
perhaps--I would, I beseech you to believe--you must believe me--give
you . . . give you your freedom instantly; most truly; and engage to
speak of you as I should think of you. Willoughby, you would have no
one to praise you in public and in private as I should, for you would
be to me the most honest, truthful, chivalrous gentleman alive. And in
that case I would undertake to declare that she would not admire you
more than I; Miss Dale would not; she would not admire you more than I;
not even Miss Dale."

This, her first direct leap for liberty, set Clara panting, and so much
had she to say that the nervous and the intellectual halves of her
dashed like cymbals, dazing and stunning her with the appositeness of
things to be said, and dividing her in indecision as to the cunningest
to move him of the many pressing.

The condition of feminine jealousy stood revealed.

He had driven her farther than he intended.

"Come, let me allay these . . ." he soothed her with hand and voice,
while seeking for his phrase; "these magnified pinpoints. Now, my
Clara! on my honour! and when I put it forward in attestation, my
honour has the most serious meaning speech can have; ordinarily my word
has to suffice for bonds, promises, or asseverations; on my honour! not
merely is there, my poor child! no ground of suspicion, I assure you,
I declare to you, the fact of the case is the very reverse. Now, mark
me; of her sentiments I cannot pretend to speak; I did not, to my
knowledge, originate, I am not responsible for them, and I am, before
the law, as we will say, ignorant of them; that is, I have never heard
a declaration of them, and I, am, therefore, under pain of the stigma
of excessive fatuity, bound to be non-cognizant. But as to myself I can
speak for myself and, on my honour! Clara--to be as direct as
possible, even to baldness, and you know I loathe it--I could not, I
repeat, I could not marry Laetitia Dale! Let me impress it on you. No
flatteries--we are all susceptible more or less--no conceivable
condition could bring it about; no amount of admiration. She and I are
excellent friends; we cannot be more. When you see us together, the
natural concord of our minds is of course misleading. She is a woman of
genius. I do not conceal, I profess my admiration of her. There are
times when, I confess, I require a Laetitia Dale to bring me out, give
and take. I am indebted to her for the enjoyment of the duet few know,
few can accord with, fewer still are allowed the privilege of playing
with a human being. I am indebted, I own, and I feel deep gratitude; I
own to a lively friendship for Miss Dale, but if she is displeasing in
the sight of my bride by . . . by the breadth of an eyelash, then
. . ."

Sir Willoughby's arm waved Miss Dale off away into outer darkness in
the wilderness.

Clara shut her eyes and rolled her eyeballs in a frenzy of unuttered
revolt from the Egoist.

But she was not engaged in the colloquy to be an advocate of Miss Dale
or of common humanity.

"Ah!" she said, simply determining that the subject should not drop.

"And, ah!" he mocked her tenderly. "True, though! And who knows better
than my Clara that I require youth, health, beauty, and the other
undefinable attributes fitting with mine and beseeming the station of
the lady called to preside over my household and represent me? What
says my other self? my fairer? But you are! my love, you are!
Understand my nature rightly, and you . . . "

"I do! I do!" interposed Clara; "if I did not by this time I should be
idiotic. Let me assure you, I understand it. Oh! listen to me: one
moment. Miss Dale regards me as the happiest woman on earth.
Willoughby, if I possessed her good qualities, her heart and mind, no
doubt I should be. It is my wish--you must hear me, hear me out--my
wish, my earnest wish, my burning prayer, my wish to make way for her.
She appreciates you: I do not--to my shame, I do not. She worships you:
I do not, I cannot. You are the rising sun to her. It has been so for
years. No one can account for love; I daresay not for the impossibility
of loving . . . loving where we should; all love bewilders me. I was
not created to understand it. But she loves you, she has pined. I
believe it has destroyed the health you demand as one item in your
list. But you, Willoughby, can restore that. Travelling, and . . . and
your society, the pleasure of your society would certainly restore it.
You look so handsome together! She has unbounded devotion! as for me, I
cannot idolize. I see faults: I see them daily. They astonish and wound
me. Your pride would not bear to hear them spoken of, least of all by
your wife. You warned me to beware--that is, you said, you said
something."

Her busy brain missed the subterfuge to cover her slip of the tongue.

Sir Willoughby struck in: "And when I say that the entire concatenation
is based on an erroneous observation of facts, and an erroneous
deduction from that erroneous observation!--? No, no. Have confidence
in me. I propose it to you in this instance, purely to save you from
deception. You are cold, my love? you shivered."

"I am not cold," said Clara. "Some one, I suppose, was walking over my
grave."

The gulf of a caress hove in view like an enormous billow hollowing
under the curled ridge.

She stooped to a buttercup; the monster swept by.

"Your grave!" he exclaimed over her head; "my own girl!"

"Is not the orchid naturally a stranger in ground so far away from the
chalk, Willoughby?"

"I am incompetent to pronounce an opinion on such important matters. My
mother had a passion for every description of flower. I fancy I have
some recollection of her scattering the flower you mention over the
park."

"If she were living now!"

"We should be happy in the blessing of the most estimable of women, my
Clara."

"She would have listened to me. She would have realized what I mean."

"Indeed, Clara--poor soul!" he murmured to himself, aloud; "indeed you
are absolutely in error. If I have seemed--but I repeat, you are
deceived. The idea of 'fitness' is a total hallucination. Supposing
you--I do it even in play painfully--entirely out of the way,
unthought of. . ."

"Extinct," Clara said low.

"Non-existent for me," he selected a preferable term. "Suppose it; I
should still, in spite of an admiration I have never thought it
incumbent on me to conceal, still be--I speak emphatically--utterly
incapable of the offer of my hand to Miss Dale. It may be that she is
embedded in my mind as a friend, and nothing but a friend. I received
the stamp in early youth. People have noticed it--we do, it seems,
bring one another out, reflecting, counter-reflecting."

She glanced up at him with a shrewd satisfaction to see that her wicked
shaft had stuck.

"You do; it is a common remark," she said. "The instantaneous
difference when she comes near, any one might notice."

"My love," he opened the iron gate into the garden, "you encourage the
naughty little suspicion."

"But it is a beautiful sight, Willoughby. I like to see you together. I
like it as I like to see colours match."

"Very well. There is no harm then. We shall often be together. I like
my fair friend. But the instant!--you have only to express a sentiment
of disapprobation."

"And you dismiss her."

"I dismiss her. That is, as to the word, I constitute myself your echo,
to clear any vestige of suspicion. She goes."

"That is a case of a person doomed to extinction without offending."

"Not without: for whoever offends my bride, my wife, my sovereign lady,
offends me: very deeply offends me."

"Then the caprices of your wife . . ." Clara stamped her foot
imperceptibly on the lawn-sward, which was irresponsively soft to her
fretfulness. She broke from the inconsequent meaningless mild tone of
irony, and said: "Willoughby, women have their honour to swear by
equally with men:--girls have: they have to swear an oath at the altar;
may I to you now? Take it for uttered when I tell you that nothing
would make me happier than your union with Miss Dale. I have spoken as
much as I can. Tell me you release me."

With the well-known screw-smile of duty upholding weariness worn to
inanition, he rejoined: "Allow me once more to reiterate, that it is
repulsive, inconceivable, that I should ever, under any mortal
conditions, bring myself to the point of taking Miss Dale for my wife.
You reduce me to this perfectly childish protestation--pitiably
childish! But, my love, have I to remind you that you and I are
plighted, and that I am an honourable man?"

"I know it, I feel it--release me!" cried Clara.

Sir Willoughby severely reprehended his short-sightedness for seeing
but the one proximate object in the particular attention he had
bestowed on Miss Dale. He could not disavow that they had been marked,
and with an object, and he was distressed by the unwonted want of
wisdom through which he had been drawn to overshoot his object. His
design to excite a touch of the insane emotion in Clara's bosom was too
successful, and, "I was not thinking of her," he said to himself in his
candour, contrite.

She cried again: "Will you not, Willoughby--release me?"

He begged her to take his arm.

To consent to touch him while petitioning for a detachment, appeared
discordant to Clara, but, if she expected him to accede, it was right
that she should do as much as she could, and she surrendered her hand
at arm's length, disdaining the imprisoned fingers. He pressed them and
said: "Dr Middleton is in the library. I see Vernon is at work with
Crossjay in the West-room--the boy has had sufficient for the day.
Now, is it not like old Vernon to drive his books at a cracked head
before it's half mended?"

He signalled to young Crossjay, who was up and out through the folding
windows in a twinkling.

"And you will go in, and talk to Vernon of the lady in question," Sir
Willoughby whispered to Clara. "Use your best persuasions in our joint
names. You have my warrant for saying that money is no consideration;
house and income are assured. You can hardly have taken me seriously
when I requested you to undertake Vernon before. I was quite in earnest
then as now. I prepare Miss Dale. I will not have a wedding on our
wedding-day; but either before or after it, I gladly speed their
alliance. I think now I give you the best proof possible, and though I
know that with women a delusion may be seen to be groundless and still
be cherished, I rely on your good sense."

Vernon was at the window and stood aside for her to enter. Sir
Willoughby used a gentle insistence with her. She bent her head as if
she were stepping into a cave. So frigid was she, that a ridiculous
dread of calling Mr. Whitford Mr. Oxford was her only present anxiety
when Sir Willoughby had closed the window on them.



CHAPTER XIV

SIR WILLOUGHBY AND LAETITIA

"I prepare Miss Dale."

Sir Willoughby thought of his promise to Clara. He trifled awhile with
young Crossjay, and then sent the boy flying, and wrapped himself in
meditation. So shall you see standing many a statue of statesmen who
have died in harness for their country.

In the hundred and fourth chapter of the thirteenth volume of the Book
of Egoism it is written: Possession without obligation to the object
possessed approaches felicity.

It is the rarest condition of ownership. For example: the possession of
land is not without obligation both to the soil and the tax-collector;
the possession of fine clothing is oppressed by obligation; gold,
jewelry, works of art, enviable household furniture, are positive
fetters; the possession of a wife we find surcharged with obligation.
In all these cases possession is a gentle term for enslavement,
bestowing the sort of felicity attained to by the helot drunk. You can
have the joy, the pride, the intoxication of possession; you can have
no free soul.

But there is one instance of possession, and that the most perfect,
which leaves us free, under not a shadow of obligation, receiving ever,
never giving, or if giving, giving only of our waste; as it were (sauf
votre respect), by form of perspiration, radiation, if you like;
unconscious poral bountifulness; and it is a beneficent process for the
system. Our possession of an adoring female's worship is this instance.

The soft cherishable Parsee is hardly at any season other than
prostrate. She craves nothing save that you continue in being--her
sun: which is your firm constitutional endeavour: and thus you have a
most exact alliance; she supplying spirit to your matter, while at the
same time presenting matter to your spirit, verily a comfortable
apposition. The Gods do bless it.

That they do so indeed is evident in the men they select for such a
felicitous crown and aureole. Weak men would be rendered nervous by the
flattery of a woman's worship; or they would be for returning it, at
least partially, as though it could be bandied to and fro without
emulgence of the poetry; or they would be pitiful, and quite spoil the
thing. Some would be for transforming the beautiful solitary vestal
flame by the first effort of the multiplication-table into your
hearth-fire of slippered affection. So these men are not they whom the
Gods have ever selected, but rather men of a pattern with themselves,
very high and very solid men, who maintain the crown by holding
divinely independent of the great emotion they have sown.

Even for them a pass of danger is ahead, as we shall see in our sample
of one among the highest of them.

A clear approach to felicity had long been the portion of Sir
Willoughby Patterne in his relations with Laetitia Dale. She belonged
to him; he was quite unshackled by her. She was everything that is good
in a parasite, nothing that is bad. His dedicated critic she was,
reviewing him with a favour equal to perfect efficiency in her office;
and whatever the world might say of him, to her the happy gentleman
could constantly turn for his refreshing balsamic bath. She flew to the
soul in him, pleasingly arousing sensations of that inhabitant; and he
allowed her the right to fly, in the manner of kings, as we have heard,
consenting to the privileges acted on by cats. These may not address
their Majesties, but they may stare; nor will it be contested that the
attentive circular eyes of the humble domestic creatures are an
embellishment to Royal pomp and grandeur, such truly as should one day
gain for them an inweaving and figurement--in the place of bees, ermine
tufts, and their various present decorations--upon the august great
robes back-flowing and foaming over the gaspy page-boys.

Further to quote from the same volume of The Book: There is pain in the
surrendering of that we are fain to relinquish.

The idea is too exquisitely attenuate, as are those of the whole
body-guard of the heart of Egoism, and will slip through you unless you
shall have made a study of the gross of volumes of the first and second
sections of The Book, and that will take you up to senility; or you
must make a personal entry into the pages, perchance; or an escape out
of them. There was once a venerable gentleman for whom a white hair
grew on the cop of his nose, laughing at removals. He resigned himself
to it in the end, and lastingly contemplated the apparition. It does
not concern us what effect was produced on his countenance and his
mind; enough that he saw a fine thing, but not so fine as the idea
cited above; which has been between the two eyes of humanity ever since
women were sought in marriage. With yonder old gentleman it may have
been a ghostly hair or a disease of the optic nerves; but for us it is
a real growth, and humanity might profitably imitate him in his patient
speculation upon it.

Sir Willoughby Patterne, though ready in the pursuit of duty and policy
(an oft-united couple) to cast Miss Dale away, had to consider that he
was not simply, so to speak, casting her over a hedge, he was casting
her for a man to catch her; and this was a much greater trial than it
had been on the previous occasion, when she went over bump to the
ground. In the arms of a husband, there was no knowing how soon she
might forget her soul's fidelity. It had not hurt him to sketch the
project of the conjunction; benevolence assisted him; but he winced and
smarted on seeing it take shape. It sullied his idea of Laetitia.

Still, if, in spite of so great a change in her fortune, her spirit
could be guaranteed changeless, he, for the sake of pacifying his
bride, and to keep two serviceable persons near him, at command, might
resolve to join them. The vision of his resolution brought with it a
certain pallid contempt of the physically faithless woman; no wonder he
betook himself to The Book, and opened it on the scorching chapters
treating of the sex, and the execrable wiles of that foremost creature
of the chase, who runs for life. She is not spared in the Biggest of
Books. But close it.

The writing in it having been done chiefly by men, men naturally
receive their fortification from its wisdom, and half a dozen of the
popular sentences for the confusion of women (cut in brass worn to a
polish like sombre gold), refreshed Sir Willoughby for his undertaking.

An examination of Laetitia's faded complexion braced him very
cordially.

His Clara, jealous of this poor leaf!

He could have desired the transfusion of a quality or two from Laetitia
to his bride; but you cannot, as in cookery, obtain a mixture of the
essences of these creatures; and if, as it is possible to do, and as he
had been doing recently with the pair of them at the Hall, you stew
them in one pot, you are far likelier to intensify their little
birthmarks of individuality. Had they a tendency to excellence it might
be otherwise; they might then make the exchanges we wish for; or
scientifically concocted in a harem for a sufficient length of time by
a sultan anything but obtuse, they might. It is, however, fruitless to
dwell on what was only a glimpse of a wild regret, like the crossing of
two express trains along the rails in Sir Willoughby's head.

The ladies Eleanor and Isabel were sitting with Miss Dale, all three at
work on embroideries. He had merely to look at Miss Eleanor. She rose.
She looked at Miss Isabel, and rattled her chatelaine to account for
her departure. After a decent interval Miss Isabel glided out. Such was
the perfect discipline of the household.

Sir Willoughby played an air on the knee of his crossed leg.

Laetitia grew conscious of a meaning in the silence. She said, "You
have not been vexed by affairs to-day?"

"Affairs," he replied, "must be peculiarly vexatious to trouble me.
Concerning the country or my personal affairs?"

"I fancy I was alluding to the country."

"I trust I am as good a patriot as any man living," said he; "but I am
used to the follies of my countrymen, and we are on board a stout ship.
At the worst it's no worse than a rise in rates and taxes; soup at the
Hall gates, perhaps; license to fell timber in one of the outer copses,
or some dozen loads of coal. You hit my feudalism."

"The knight in armour has gone," said Laetitia, "and the castle with
the draw-bridge. Immunity for our island has gone too since we took to
commerce."

"We bartered independence for commerce. You hit our old controversy.
Ay, but we do not want this overgrown population! However, we will put
politics and sociology and the pack of their modern barbarous words
aside. You read me intuitively. I have been, I will not say annoyed,
but ruffled. I have much to do, and going into Parliament would make me
almost helpless if I lose Vernon. You know of some absurd notion he
has?--literary fame, and bachelor's chambers, and a chop-house, and the
rest of it."

She knew, and thinking differently in the matter of literary fame, she
flushed, and, ashamed of the flush, frowned.

He bent over to her with the perusing earnestness of a gentleman about
to trifle.

"You cannot intend that frown?"

"Did I frown?"

"You do."

"Now?"

"Fiercely."

"Oh!"

"Will you smile to reassure me?"

"Willingly, as well as I can."

A gloom overcame him. With no woman on earth did he shine so as to
recall to himself seigneur and dame of the old French Court as he did
with Laetitia Dale. He did not wish the period revived, but reserved it
as a garden to stray into when he was in the mood for displaying
elegance and brightness in the society of a lady; and in speech
Laetitia helped him to the nice delusion. She was not devoid of grace
of bearing either.

Would she preserve her beautiful responsiveness to his ascendency?
Hitherto she had, and for years, and quite fresh. But how of her as a
married woman? Our souls are hideously subject to the conditions of our
animal nature! A wife, possibly mother, it was within sober calculation
that there would be great changes in her. And the hint of any change
appeared a total change to one of the lofty order who, when they are
called on to relinquish possession instead of aspiring to it, say, All
or nothing!

Well, but if there was danger of the marriage-tie effecting the
slightest alteration of her character or habit of mind, wherefore press
it upon a tolerably hardened spinster!

Besides, though he did once put her hand in Vernon's for the dance, he
remembered acutely that the injury then done by his generosity to his
tender sensitiveness had sickened and tarnished the effulgence of two
or three successive anniversaries of his coming of age. Nor had he
altogether yet got over the passion of greed for the whole group of the
well-favoured of the fair sex, which in his early youth had made it
bitter for him to submit to the fickleness, not to say the modest
fickleness, of any handsome one of them in yielding her hand to a man
and suffering herself to be led away. Ladies whom he had only heard of
as ladies of some beauty incurred his wrath for having lovers or taking
husbands. He was of a vast embrace; and do not exclaim, in
covetousness;--for well he knew that even under Moslem law he could not
have them all--but as the enamoured custodian of the sex's purity,
that blushes at such big spots as lovers and husbands; and it was
unbearable to see it sacrificed for others. Without their purity what
are they!--what are fruiterer's plums?--unsaleable. O for the bloom
on them!

"As I said, I lose my right hand in Vernon," he resumed, "and I am, it
seems, inevitably to lose him, unless we contrive to fasten him down
here. I think, my dear Miss Dale, you have my character. At least, I
should recommend my future biographer to you--with a caution, of
course. You would have to write selfishness with a dash under it. I
cannot endure to lose a member of my household--not under any
circumstances; and a change of feeling toward me on the part of any of
my friends because of marriage, I think hard. I would ask you, how can
it be for Vernon's good to quit an easy pleasant home for the wretched
profession of Literature?--wretchedly paying, I mean," he bowed to the
authoress. "Let him leave the house, if he imagines he will not
harmonize with its young mistress. He is queer, though a good fellow.
But he ought, in that event, to have an establishment. And my scheme
for Vernon--men, Miss Dale, do not change to their old friends when
they marry--my scheme, which would cause the alteration in his system
of life to be barely perceptible, is to build him a poetical little
cottage, large enough for a couple, on the borders of my park. I have
the spot in my eye. The point is, can he live alone there? Men, I say,
do not change. How is it that we cannot say the same of women?"

Laetitia remarked: "The generic woman appears to have an extraordinary
faculty for swallowing the individual."

"As to the individual, as to a particular person, I may be wrong.
Precisely because it is her case I think of, my strong friendship
inspires the fear: unworthy of both, no doubt, but trace it to the
source. Even pure friendship, such is the taint in us, knows a kind of
jealousy; though I would gladly see her established, and near me, happy
and contributing to my happiness with her incomparable social charm.
Her I do not estimate generically, be sure."

"If you do me the honour to allude to me, Sir Willoughby," said
Laetitia, "I am my father's housemate."

"What wooer would take that for a refusal? He would beg to be a third
in the house and sharer of your affectionate burden. Honestly, why
not? And I may be arguing against my own happiness; it may be the end
of me!"

"The end?"

"Old friends are captious, exacting. No, not the end. Yet if my friend
is not the same to me, it is the end to that form of friendship: not to
the degree possibly. But when one is used to the form! And do you, in
its application to friendship, scorn the word 'use'? We are creatures
of custom. I am, I confess, a poltroon in my affections; I dread
changes. The shadow of the tenth of an inch in the customary elevation
of an eyelid!--to give you an idea of my susceptibility. And, my dear
Miss Dale, I throw myself on your charity, with all my weakness bare,
let me add, as I could do to none but you. Consider, then, if I lose
you! The fear is due to my pusillanimity entirely. High-souled women
may be wives, mothers, and still reserve that home for their friend.
They can and will conquer the viler conditions of human life. Our
states, I have always contended, our various phases have to be passed
through, and there is no disgrace in it so long as they do not levy
toll on the quintessential, the spiritual element. You understand me? I
am no adept in these abstract elucidations."

"You explain yourself clearly," said Laetitia.

"I have never pretended that psychology was my forte," said he, feeling
overshadowed by her cold commendation: he was not less acutely
sensitive to the fractional divisions of tones than of eyelids, being,
as it were, a melody with which everything was out of tune that did not
modestly or mutely accord; and to bear about a melody in your person is
incomparably more searching than the best of touchstones and talismans
ever invented. "Your father's health has improved latterly?"

"He did not complain of his health when I saw him this morning. My
cousin Amelia is with him, and she is an excellent nurse."

"He has a liking for Vernon."

"He has a great respect for Mr. Whitford."

"You have?"

"Oh, yes; I have it equally."

"For a foundation, that is the surest. I would have the friends dearest
to me begin on that. The headlong match is--how can we describe it? By
its finale I am afraid. Vernon's abilities are really to be respected.
His shyness is his malady. I suppose he reflected that he was not a
capitalist. He might, one would think, have addressed himself to me; my
purse is not locked."

"No, Sir Willoughby!" Laetitia said, warmly, for his donations in
charity were famous.

Her eyes gave him the food he enjoyed, and basking in them, he
continued:

"Vernon's income would at once have been regulated commensurately with
a new position requiring an increase. This money, money, money! But the
world will have it so. Happily I have inherited habits of business and
personal economy. Vernon is a man who would do fifty times more with a
companion appreciating his abilities and making light of his little
deficiencies. They are palpable, small enough. He has always been aware
of my wishes:--when perhaps the fulfilment might have sent me off on
another tour of the world, homebird though I am. When was it that our
friendship commenced? In my boyhood, I know. Very many years back."

"I am in my thirtieth year," said Laetitia.

Surprised and pained by a baldness resembling the deeds of ladies (they
have been known, either through absence of mind, or mania, to displace
a wig) in the deadly intimacy which slaughters poetic admiration, Sir
Willoughby punished her by deliberately reckoning that she did not look
less.

"Genius," he observed, "is unacquainted with wrinkles"; hardly one of
his prettiest speeches; but he had been wounded, and he never could
recover immediately. Coming on him in a mood of sentiment, the wound
was sharp. He could very well have calculated the lady's age. It was
the jarring clash of her brazen declaration of it upon his low rich
flute-notes that shocked him.

He glanced at the gold cathedral-clock on the mantel-piece, and
proposed a stroll on the lawn before dinner. Laetitia gathered up her
embroidery work.

"As a rule," he said, "authoresses are not needle-women."

"I shall resign the needle or the pen if it stamps me an exception,"
she replied.

He attempted a compliment on her truly exceptional character. As when
the player's finger rests in distraction on the organ, it was without
measure and disgusted his own hearing. Nevertheless, she had been so
good as to diminish his apprehension that the marriage of a lady in her
thirtieth year with his cousin Vernon would be so much of a loss to
him; hence, while parading the lawn, now and then casting an eye at the
window of the room where his Clara and Vernon were in council, the
schemes he indulged for his prospective comfort and his feelings of the
moment were in such striving harmony as that to which we hear
orchestral musicians bringing their instruments under the process
called tuning. It is not perfect, but it promises to be so soon. We are
not angels, which have their dulcimers ever on the choral pitch. We are
mortals attaining the celestial accord with effort, through a stage of
pain. Some degree of pain was necessary to Sir Willoughby, otherwise he
would not have seen his generosity confronting him. He grew,
therefore, tenderly inclined to Laetitia once more, so far as to say
within himself. "For conversation she would be a valuable wife". And
this valuable wife he was presenting to his cousin.

Apparently, considering the duration of the conference of his Clara and
Vernon, his cousin required strong persuasion to accept the present.



CHAPTER XV

THE PETITION FOR A RELEASE

Neither Clara nor Vernon appeared at the mid-day table. Dr. Middleton
talked with Miss Dale on classical matters, like a good-natured giant
giving a child the jump from stone to stone across a brawling mountain
ford, so that an unedified audience might really suppose, upon seeing
her over the difficulty, she had done something for herself. Sir
Willoughby was proud of her, and therefore anxious to settle her
business while he was in the humour to lose her. He hoped to finish it
by shooting a word or two at Vernon before dinner. Clara's petition to
be set free, released from him, had vaguely frightened even more than
it offended his pride.

Miss Isabel quitted the room.

She came back, saying: "They decline to lunch."

"Then we may rise," remarked Sir Willoughby.

"She was weeping," Miss Isabel murmured to him.

"Girlish enough," he said.

The two elderly ladies went away together. Miss Dale, pursuing her
theme with the Rev. Doctor, was invited by him to a course in the
library. Sir Willoughby walked up and down the lawn, taking a glance at
the West-room as he swung round on the turn of his leg. Growing
impatient, he looked in at the window and found the room vacant.

Nothing was to be seen of Clara and Vernon during the afternoon. Near
the dinner-hour the ladies were informed by Miss Middleton's maid that
her mistress was lying down on her bed, too unwell with headache to be
present. Young Crossjay brought a message from Vernon (delayed by
birds' eggs in the delivery), to say that he was off over the hills,
and thought of dining with Dr. Corney.

Sir Willoughby despatched condolences to his bride. He was not well
able to employ his mind on its customary topic, being, like the dome of
a bell, a man of so pervading a ring within himself concerning himself,
that the recollection of a doubtful speech or unpleasant circumstance
touching him closely deranged his inward peace; and as dubious and
unpleasant things will often occur, he had great need of a worshipper,
and was often compelled to appeal to her for signs of antidotal
idolatry. In this instance, when the need of a worshipper was sharply
felt, he obtained no signs at all. The Rev. Doctor had fascinated Miss
Dale; so that, both within and without, Sir Willoughby was uncomforted.
His themes in public were those of an English gentleman; horses, dogs,
game, sport, intrigue, scandal, politics, wines, the manly themes; with
a condescension to ladies' tattle, and approbation of a racy anecdote.
What interest could he possibly take in the Athenian Theatre and the
girl whose flute-playing behind the scenes, imitating the nightingale,
enraptured a Greek audience! He would have suspected a motive in Miss
Dale's eager attentiveness, if the motive could have been conceived.
Besides, the ancients were not decorous; they did not, as we make our
moderns do, write for ladies. He ventured at the dinner-table to
interrupt Dr. Middleton once:--

"Miss Dale will do wisely, I think, sir, by confining herself to your
present edition of the classics."

"That," replied Dr. Middleton, "is the observation of a student of the
dictionary of classical mythology in the English tongue."

"The Theatre is a matter of climate, sir. You will grant me that."

"If quick wits come of climate, it is as you say, sir."

"With us it seems a matter of painful fostering, or the need of it,"
said Miss Dale, with a question to Dr. Middleton, excluding Sir
Willoughby, as though he had been a temporary disturbance of the flow
of their dialogue.

The ladies Eleanor and Isabel, previously excellent listeners to the
learned talk, saw the necessity of coming to his rescue; but you cannot
converse with your aunts, inmates of your house, on general subjects at
table; the attempt increased his discomposure; he considered that he
had ill-chosen his father-in-law; that scholars are an impolite race;
that young or youngish women are devotees of power in any form, and
will be absorbed by a scholar for a variation of a man; concluding that
he must have a round of dinner-parties to friends, especially ladies,
appreciating him, during the Doctor's visit. Clara's headache above,
and Dr. Middleton's unmannerliness below, affected his instincts in a
way to make him apprehend that a stroke of misfortune was impending;
thunder was in the air. Still he learned something, by which he was to
profit subsequently. The topic of wine withdrew the doctor from his
classics; it was magical on him. A strong fraternity of taste was
discovered in the sentiments of host and guest upon particular wines
and vintages; they kindled one another by naming great years of the
grape, and if Sir Willoughby had to sacrifice the ladies to the topic,
he much regretted a condition of things that compelled him to sin
against his habit, for the sake of being in the conversation and
probing an elderly gentleman's foible.

Late at night he heard the house-bell, and meeting Vernon in the hall,
invited him to enter the laboratory and tell him Dr. Corney's last.
Vernon was brief, Corney had not let fly a single anecdote, he said,
and lighted his candle.

"By the way, Vernon, you had a talk with Miss Middleton?"

"She will speak to you to-morrow at twelve."

"To-morrow at twelve?"

"It gives her four-and-twenty hours."

Sir Willoughby determined that his perplexity should be seen; but
Vernon said good-night to him, and was shooting up the stairs before
the dramatic exhibition of surprise had yielded to speech.

Thunder was in the air and a blow coming. Sir Willoughby's instincts
were awake to the many signs, nor, though silenced, were they hushed by
his harping on the frantic excesses to which women are driven by the
passion of jealousy. He believed in Clara's jealousy because he really
had intended to rouse it; under the form of emulation, feebly. He could
not suppose she had spoken of it to Vernon. And as for the seriousness
of her desire to be released from her engagement, that was little
credible. Still the fixing of an hour for her to speak to him after an
interval of four-and-twenty hours, left an opening for the incredible
to add its weight to the suspicious mass; and who would have fancied
Clara Middleton so wild a victim of the intemperate passion! He
muttered to himself several assuaging observations to excuse a young
lady half demented, and rejected them in a lump for their nonsensical
inapplicability to Clara. In order to obtain some sleep, he consented
to blame himself slightly, in the style of the enamoured historian of
erring beauties alluding to their peccadilloes. He had done it to edify
her. Sleep, however, failed him. That an inordinate jealousy argued an
overpowering love, solved his problem until he tried to fit the
proposition to Clara's character. He had discerned nothing southern in
her. Latterly, with the blushing Day in prospect, she had contracted
and frozen. There was no reading either of her or of the mystery.

In the morning, at the breakfast-table, a confession of sleeplessness
was general. Excepting Miss Dale and Dr. Middleton, none had slept a
wink. "I, sir," the Doctor replied to Sir Willoughby, "slept like a
lexicon in your library when Mr. Whitford and I are out of it."

Vernon incidentally mentioned that he had been writing through the
night.

"You fellows kill yourselves," Sir Willoughby reproved him. "For my
part, I make it a principle to get through my work without
self-slaughter."

Clara watched her father for a symptom of ridicule. He gazed mildly on
the systematic worker. She was unable to guess whether she would have
in him an ally or a judge. The latter, she feared. Now that she had
embraced the strife, she saw the division of the line where she stood
from that one where the world places girls who are affianced wives; her
father could hardly be with her; it had gone too far. He loved her, but
he would certainly take her to be moved by a maddish whim; he would not
try to understand her case. The scholar's detestation of a
disarrangement of human affairs that had been by miracle contrived to
run smoothly, would of itself rank him against her; and with the world
to back his view of her, he might behave like a despotic father. How
could she defend herself before him? At one thought of Sir Willoughby,
her tongue made ready, and feminine craft was alert to prompt it; but
to her father she could imagine herself opposing only dumbness and
obstinacy.

"It is not exactly the same kind of work," she said.

Dr Middleton rewarded her with a bushy eyebrow's beam of his revolting
humour at the baronet's notion of work.

So little was needed to quicken her that she sunned herself in the
beam, coaxing her father's eyes to stay with hers as long as she could,
and beginning to hope he might be won to her side, if she confessed she
had been more in the wrong than she felt; owned to him, that is, her
error in not earlier disturbing his peace.

"I do not say it is the same," observed Sir Willoughby, bowing to their
alliance of opinion. "My poor work is for the day, and Vernon's, no
doubt, for the day to come. I contend, nevertheless, for the
preservation of health as the chief implement of work."

"Of continued work; there I agree with you," said Dr. Middleton,
cordially.

Clara's heart sunk; so little was needed to deaden her.

Accuse her of an overweening antagonism to her betrothed; yet remember
that though the words had not been uttered to give her good reason for
it, nature reads nature; captives may be stript of everything save that
power to read their tyrant; remember also that she was not, as she well
knew, blameless; her rage at him was partly against herself.

The rising from table left her to Sir Willoughby. She swam away after
Miss Dale, exclaiming: "The laboratory! Will you have me for a
companion on your walk to see your father? One breathes earth and
heaven to-day out of doors. Isn't it Summer with a Spring Breeze? I
will wander about your garden and not hurry your visit, I promise."

"I shall be very happy indeed. But I am going immediately," said
Laetitia, seeing Sir Willoughby hovering to snap up his bride.

"Yes; and a garden-hat and I am on the march."

"I will wait for you on the terrace."

"You will not have to wait."

"Five minutes at the most," Sir Willoughby said to Laetitia, and she
passed out, leaving them alone together.

"Well, and my love!" he addressed his bride almost huggingly; "and what
is the story? and how did you succeed with old Vernon yesterday? He
will and he won't? He's a very woman in these affairs. I can't forgive
him for giving you a headache. You were found weeping."

"Yes, I cried," said Clara.

"And now tell me about it. You know, my dear girl, whether he does or
doesn't, our keeping him somewhere in the neighbourhood--perhaps not
in the house--that is the material point. It can hardly be necessary in
these days to urge marriages on. I'm sure the country is over . . .
Most marriages ought to be celebrated with the funeral knell!"

"I think so," said Clara.

"It will come to this, that marriages of consequence, and none but
those, will be hailed with joyful peals."

"Do not say such things in public, Willoughby."

"Only to you, to you! Don't think me likely to expose myself to the
world. Well, and I sounded Miss Dale, and there will be no violent
obstacle. And now about Vernon?"

"I will speak to you, Willoughby, when I return from my walk with Miss
Dale, soon after twelve."

"Twelve!" said he

"I name an hour. It seems childish. I can explain it. But it is named,
I cannot deny, because I am a rather childish person perhaps, and have
it prescribed to me to delay my speaking for a certain length of time.
I may tell you at once that Mr. Whitford is not to be persuaded by me,
and the breaking of our engagement would not induce him to remain."

"Vernon used those words?"

"It was I."

"'The breaking of our engagement!' Come into the laboratory, my love."

"I shall not have time."

"Time shall stop rather than interfere with our conversation! 'The
breaking . . .'! But it's a sort of sacrilege to speak of it."

"That I feel; yet it has to be spoken of"

"Sometimes? Why? I can't conceive the occasion. You know, to me, Clara,
plighted faith, the affiancing of two lovers, is a piece of religion. I
rank it as holy as marriage; nay, to me it is holier; I really cannot
tell you how; I can only appeal to you in your bosom to understand me.
We read of divorces with comparative indifference. They occur between
couples who have rubbed off all romance."

She could have asked him in her fit of ironic iciness, on hearing him
thus blindly challenge her to speak out, whether the romance might be
his piece of religion.

He propitiated the more unwarlike sentiments in her by ejaculating,
"Poor souls! let them go their several ways. Married people no longer
lovers are in the category of the unnameable. But the hint of the
breaking of an engagement--our engagement!--between us? Oh!"

"Oh!" Clara came out with a swan's note swelling over mechanical
imitation of him to dolorousness illimitable. "Oh!" she breathed short,
"let it be now. Do not speak till you have heard me. My head may not be
clear by-and-by. And two scenes--twice will be beyond my endurance. I
am penitent for the wrong I have done you. I grieve for you. All the
blame is mine. Willoughby, you must release me. Do not let me hear a
word of that word; jealousy is unknown to me . . . Happy if I could
call you friend and see you with a worthier than I, who might by-and-by
call me friend! You have my plighted troth . . . given in ignorance of
my feelings. Reprobate a weak and foolish girl's ignorance. I have
thought of it, and I cannot see wickedness, though the blame is great,
shameful. You have none. You are without any blame. You will not suffer
as I do. You will be generous to me? I have no respect for myself when
I beg you to be generous and release me."

"But was this the . . ." Willoughby preserved his calmness, "this,
then, the subject of your interview with Vernon?"

"I have spoken to him. I did my commission, and I spoke to him."

"Of me?"

"Of myself. I see how I hurt you; I could not avoid it. Yes, of you, as
far as we are related. I said I believed you would release me. I said
I could be true to my plighted word, but that you would not insist.
Could a gentleman insist? But not a step beyond; not love; I have none.
And, Willoughby, treat me as one perfectly worthless; I am. I should
have known it a year back. I was deceived in myself. There should be
love."

"Should be!" Willoughby's tone was a pungent comment on her.

"Love, then, I find I have not. I think I am antagonistic to it. What
people say of it I have not experienced. I find I was mistaken. It is
lightly said, but very painful. You understand me, that my prayer is
for liberty, that I may not be tied. If you can release and pardon me,
or promise ultimately to pardon me, or say some kind word, I shall know
it is because I am beneath you utterly that I have been unable to give
you the love you should have with a wife. Only say to me, go! It is you
who break the match, discovering my want of a heart. What people think
of me matters little. My anxiety will be to save you annoyance."

She waited for him; he seemed on the verge of speaking.

He perceived her expectation; he had nothing but clownish tumult
within, and his dignity counselled him to disappoint her.

Swaying his head, like the oriental palm whose shade is a blessing to
the perfervid wanderer below, smiling gravely, he was indirectly asking
his dignity what he could say to maintain it and deal this mad young
woman a bitterly compassionate rebuke. What to think, hung remoter. The
thing to do struck him first.

He squeezed both her hands, threw the door wide open, and said, with
countless blinkings: "In the laboratory we are uninterrupted. I was at
a loss to guess where that most unpleasant effect on the senses came
from. They are always 'guessing' through the nose. I mean, the
remainder of breakfast here. Perhaps I satirized them too smartly--if
you know the letters. When they are not 'calculating'. More offensive
than debris of a midnight banquet! An American tour is instructive,
though not so romantic. Not so romantic as Italy, I mean. Let us
escape."

She held back from his arm. She had scattered his brains; it was
pitiable: but she was in the torrent and could not suffer a pause or a
change of place.

"It must be here; one minute more--I cannot go elsewhere to begin
again. Speak to me here; answer my request. Once; one word. If you
forgive me, it will be superhuman. But, release me."

"Seriously," he rejoined, "tea-cups and coffee-cups, breadcrumbs.
egg-shells, caviare, butter, beef, bacon! Can we? The room reeks."

"Then I will go for my walk with Miss Dale. And you will speak to me
when I return?"

"At all seasons. You shall go with Miss Dale. But, my dear! my love!
Seriously, where are we? One hears of lover's quarrels. Now I never
quarrel. It is a characteristic of mine. And you speak of me to my
cousin Vernon! Seriously, plighted faith signifies plighted faith, as
much as an iron-cable is iron to hold by. Some little twist of the
mind? To Vernon, of all men! Tush! she has been dreaming of a hero of
perfection, and the comparison is unfavourable to her Willoughby. But,
my Clara, when I say to you, that bride is bride, and you are mine,
mine!"

"Willoughby, you mentioned them,--those separations of two married. You
said, if they do not love . . . Oh! say, is it not better--instead of
later?"

He took advantage of her modesty in speaking to exclaim. "Where are we
now? Bride is bride, and wife is wife, and affianced is, in honour,
wedded. You cannot be released. We are united. Recognize it; united.
There is no possibility of releasing a wife!"

"Not if she ran . . . ?"

This was too direct to be histrionically misunderstood. He had driven
her to the extremity of more distinctly imagining the circumstance she
had cited, and with that cleared view the desperate creature gloried in
launching such a bolt at the man's real or assumed insensibility as
must, by shivering it, waken him.

But in a moment she stood in burning rose, with dimmed eyesight. She
saw his horror, and, seeing, shared it; shared just then only by seeing
it; which led her to rejoice with the deepest of sighs that some shame
was left in her.

"Ran? ran? ran?" he said as rapidly as he blinked. "How? where? what
idea . . . ?"

Close was he upon an explosion that would have sullied his conception
of the purity of the younger members of the sex hauntingly.

That she, a young lady, maiden, of strictest education, should, and
without his teaching, know that wives ran!--know that by running they
compelled their husbands to abandon pursuit, surrender possession!--and
that she should suggest it of herself as a wife!--that she should
speak of running!

His ideal, the common male Egoist ideal of a waxwork sex, would have
been shocked to fragments had she spoken further to fill in the
outlines of these awful interjections.

She was tempted: for during the last few minutes the fire of her
situation had enlightened her understanding upon a subject far from her
as the ice-fields of the North a short while before; and the prospect
offered to her courage if she would only outstare shame and seem at
home in the doings of wickedness, was his loathing and dreading so vile
a young woman. She restrained herself; chiefly, after the first
bridling of maidenly timidity, because she could not bear to lower the
idea of her sex even in his esteem.

The door was open. She had thoughts of flying out to breathe in an
interval of truce.

She reflected on her situation hurriedly askance:

"If one must go through this, to be disentangled from an engagement,
what must it be to poor women seeking to be free of a marriage?"

Had she spoken it, Sir Willoughby might have learned that she was not
so iniquitously wise of the things of this world as her mere sex's
instinct, roused to the intemperateness of a creature struggling with
fetters, had made her appear in her dash to seize a weapon, indicated
moreover by him.

Clara took up the old broken vow of women to vow it afresh: "Never to
any man will I give my hand."

She replied to Sir Willoughby, "I have said all. I cannot explain what
I have said."

She had heard a step in the passage. Vernon entered.

Perceiving them, he stated his mission in apology: "Doctor Middleton
left a book in this room. I see it; it's a Heinsius."

"Ha! by the way, a book; books would not be left here if they were not
brought here, with my compliments to Doctor Middleton, who may do as he
pleases, though, seriously, order is order," said Sir Willoughby. "Come
away to the laboratory, Clara. It's a comment on human beings that
wherever they have been there's a mess, and you admirers of them," he
divided a sickly nod between Vernon and the stale breakfast-table,
"must make what you can of it. Come, Clara."

Clara protested that she was engaged to walk with Miss Dale.

"Miss Dale is waiting in the hall," said Vernon.

"Miss Dale is waiting?" said Clara.

"Walk with Miss Dale; walk with Miss Dale," Sir Willoughby remarked,
pressingly. "I will beg her to wait another two minutes. You shall
find her in the hall when you come down."

He rang the bell and went out.

"Take Miss Dale into your confidence; she is quite trustworthy," Vernon
said to Clara.

"I have not advanced one step," she replied.

"Recollect that you are in a position of your own choosing; and if,
after thinking over it, you mean to escape, you must make up your mind
to pitched battles, and not be dejected if you are beaten in all of
them; there is your only chance."

"Not my choosing; do not say choosing, Mr. Whitford. I did not choose.
I was incapable of really choosing. I consented."

"It's the same in fact. But be sure of what you wish."

"Yes," she assented, taking it for her just punishment that she should
be supposed not quite to know her wishes. "Your advice has helped me
to-day."

"Did I advise?"

"Do you regret advising?"

"I should certainly regret a word that intruded between you and him."

"But you will not leave the Hall yet? You will not leave me without a
friend? If papa and I were to leave to-morrow, I foresee endless
correspondence. I have to stay at least some days, and wear through it,
and then, if I have to speak to my poor father, you can imagine the
effect on him."

Sir Willoughby came striding in, to correct the error of his going out.

"Miss Dale awaits you, my dear. You have bonnet, hat?--No? Have you
forgotten your appointment to walk with her?"

"I am ready," said Clara, departing.

The two gentlemen behind her separated in the passage. They had not
spoken.

She had read of the reproach upon women, that they divide the
friendships of men. She reproached herself but she was in action,
driven by necessity, between sea and rock. Dreadful to think of! she
was one of the creatures who are written about.



CHAPTER XVI

CLARA AND LAETITIA

In spite of his honourable caution, Vernon had said things to render
Miss Middleton more angrily determined than she had been in the scene
with Sir Willoughby. His counting on pitched battles and a defeat for
her in all of them, made her previous feelings appear slack in
comparison with the energy of combat now animating her. And she could
vehemently declare that she had not chosen; she was too young, too
ignorant to choose. He had wrongly used that word; it sounded
malicious; and to call consenting the same in fact as choosing was
wilfully unjust. Mr. Whitford meant well; he was conscientious, very
conscientious. But he was not the hero descending from heaven
bright-sworded to smite a woman's fetters of her limbs and deliver her
from the yawning mouth-abyss.

His logical coolness of expostulation with her when she cast aside the
silly mission entrusted to her by Sir Willoughby and wept for herself,
was unheroic in proportion to its praiseworthiness. He had left it to
her to do everything she wished done, stipulating simply that there
should be a pause of four-and-twenty hours for her to consider of it
before she proceeded in the attempt to extricate herself. Of
consolation there had not been a word. Said he, "I am the last man to
give advice in such a case". Yet she had by no means astonished him
when her confession came out. It came out, she knew not how. It was led
up to by his declining the idea of marriage, and her congratulating him
on his exemption from the prospect of the yoke, but memory was too dull
to revive the one or two fiery minutes of broken language when she had
been guilty of her dire misconduct.

This gentleman was no flatterer, scarcely a friend. He could look on
her grief without soothing her. Supposing he had soothed her warmly?
All her sentiments collected in her bosom to dash in reprobation of him
at the thought. She nevertheless condemned him for his excessive
coolness; his transparent anxiety not to be compromised by a syllable;
his air of saying, "I guessed as much, but why plead your case to me?"
And his recommendation to her to be quite sure she did know what she
meant, was a little insulting. She exonerated him from the intention;
he treated her as a girl. By what he said of Miss Dale, he proposed
that lady for imitation.

"I must be myself or I shall be playing hypocrite to dig my own
pitfall," she said to herself, while taking counsel with Laetitia as to
the route for their walk, and admiring a becoming curve in her
companion's hat.

Sir Willoughby, with many protestations of regret that letters of
business debarred him from the pleasure of accompanying them, remarked
upon the path proposed by Miss Dale, "In that case you must have a
footman."

"Then we adopt the other," said Clara, and they set forth.

"Sir Willoughby," Miss Dale said to her, "is always in alarm about our
unprotectedness."

Clara glanced up at the clouds and closed her parasol. She replied, "It
inspires timidity."

There was that in the accent and character of the answer which warned
Laetitia to expect the reverse of a quiet chatter with Miss Middleton.

"You are fond of walking?" She chose a peaceful topic.

"Walking or riding; yes, of walking," said Clara. "The difficulty is to
find companions."

"We shall lose Mr. Whitford next week."

"He goes?"

"He will be a great loss to me, for I do not ride," Laetitia replied to
the off-hand inquiry.

"Ah!"

Miss Middleton did not fan conversation when she simply breathed her
voice.

Laetitia tried another neutral theme.

"The weather to-day suits our country," she said.

"England, or Patterne Park? I am so devoted to mountains that I have no
enthusiasm for flat land."

"Do you call our country flat, Miss Middleton? We have undulations,
hills, and we have sufficient diversity, meadows, rivers, copses,
brooks, and good roads, and pretty by-paths."

"The prettiness is overwhelming. It is very pretty to see; but to live
with, I think I prefer ugliness. I can imagine learning to love
ugliness. It's honest. However young you are, you cannot be deceived by
it. These parks of rich people are a part of the prettiness. I would
rather have fields, commons."

"The parks give us delightful green walks, paths through beautiful
woods."

"If there is a right-of-way for the public."

"There should be," said Miss Dale, wondering; and Clara cried: "I chafe
at restraint: hedges and palings everywhere! I should have to travel
ten years to sit down contented among these fortifications. Of course I
can read of this rich kind of English country with pleasure in poetry.
But it seems to me to require poetry. What would you say of human
beings requiring it?"

"That they are not so companionable but that the haze of distance
improves the view."

"Then you do know that you are the wisest?"

Laetitia raised her dark eyelashes; she sought to understand. She could
only fancy she did; and if she did, it meant that Miss Middleton
thought her wise in remaining single.

Clara was full of a sombre preconception that her "jealousy" had been
hinted to Miss Dale.

"You knew Miss Durham?" she said.

"Not intimately."

"As well as you know me?"

"Not so well."

"But you saw more of her?"

"She was more reserved with me."

"Oh! Miss Dale, I would not be reserved with you."

The thrill of the voice caused Laetitia to steal a look. Clara's eyes
were bright, and she had the readiness to run to volubility of the
fever-stricken; otherwise she did not betray excitement.

"You will never allow any of these noble trees to be felled, Miss
Middleton?"

"The axe is better than decay, do you not think?"

"I think your influence will be great and always used to good purpose."

"My influence, Miss Dale? I have begged a favour this morning and can
not obtain the grant."

It was lightly said, but Clara's face was more significant, and "What?"
leaped from Laetitia's lips.

Before she could excuse herself, Clara had answered: "My liberty."

In another and higher tone Laetitia said, "What?" and she looked round
on her companion; she looked in the doubt that is open to conviction by
a narrow aperture, and slowly and painfully yields access. Clara saw
the vacancy of her expression gradually filling with woefulness.

"I have begged him to release me from my engagement, Miss Dale."

"Sir Willoughby?"

"It is incredible to you. He refuses. You see I have no influence."

"Miss Middleton, it is terrible!"

"To be dragged to the marriage service against one's will? Yes."

"Oh! Miss Middleton!"

"Do you not think so?"

"That cannot be your meaning."

"You do not suspect me of trifling? You know I would not. I am as much
in earnest as a mouse in a trap."

"No, you will not misunderstand me! Miss Middleton, such a blow to Sir
Willoughby would be shocking, most cruel! He is devoted to you."

"He was devoted to Miss Durham."

"Not so deeply: differently."

"Was he not very much courted at that time? He is now; not so much: he
is not so young. But my reason for speaking of Miss Durham was to
exclaim at the strangeness of a girl winning her freedom to plunge into
wedlock. Is it comprehensible to you? She flies from one dungeon into
another. These are the acts which astonish men at our conduct, and
cause them to ridicule and, I dare say, despise us."

"But, Miss Middleton, for Sir Willoughby to grant such a request, if it
was made . . ."

"It was made, and by me, and will be made again. I throw it all on my
unworthiness, Miss Dale. So the county will think of me, and quite
justly. I would rather defend him than myself. He requires a different
wife from anything I can be. That is my discovery; unhappily a late
one. The blame is all mine. The world cannot be too hard on me. But I
must be free if I am to be kind in my judgements even of the gentleman
I have injured."

"So noble a gentleman!" Laetitia sighed.

"I will subscribe to any eulogy of him," said Clara, with a penetrating
thought as to the possibility of a lady experienced in him like
Laetitia taking him for noble. "He has a noble air. I say it sincerely,
that your appreciation of him proves his nobility." Her feeling of
opposition to Sir Willoughby pushed her to this extravagance, gravely
perplexing Laetitia. "And it is," added Clara, as if to support what
she had said, "a withering rebuke to me; I know him less, at least have
not had so long an experience of him."

Laetitia pondered on an obscurity in these words which would have
accused her thick intelligence but for a glimmer it threw on another
most obscure communication. She feared it might be, strange though it
seemed, jealousy, a shade of jealousy affecting Miss Middleton, as had
been vaguely intimated by Sir Willoughby when they were waiting in the
hall. "A little feminine ailment, a want of comprehension of a perfect
friendship;" those were his words to her: and he suggested vaguely that
care must be taken in the eulogy of her friend.

She resolved to be explicit.

"I have not said that I think him beyond criticism, Miss Middleton."

"Noble?"

"He has faults. When we have known a person for years the faults come
out, but custom makes light of them; and I suppose we feel flattered by
seeing what it would be difficult to be blind to! A very little
flatters us! Now, do you not admire that view? It is my favourite."

Clara gazed over rolling richness of foliage, wood and water, and a
church-spire, a town and horizon hills. There sung a sky-lark.

"Not even the bird that does not fly away!" she said; meaning, she had
no heart for the bird satisfied to rise and descend in this place.

Laetitia travelled to some notion, dim and immense, of Miss Middleton's
fever of distaste. She shrunk from it in a kind of dread lest it might
be contagious and rob her of her one ever-fresh possession of the
homely picturesque; but Clara melted her by saying, "For your sake I
could love it . . . in time; or some dear old English scene. Since
. . . since this . . . this change in me, I find I cannot separate
landscape from associations. Now I learn how youth goes. I have grown
years older in a week.--Miss Dale, if he were to give me my freedom? if
he were to cast me off? if he stood alone?"

"I should pity him."

"Him--not me! Oh! right! I hoped you would; I knew you would."

Laetitia's attempt to shift with Miss Middleton's shiftiness was vain;
for now she seemed really listening to the language of
Jealousy:--jealous of the ancient Letty Dale--and immediately before
the tone was quite void of it.

"Yes," she said, "but you make me feel myself in the dark, and when I
do I have the habit of throwing myself for guidance upon such light as
I have within. You shall know me, if you will, as well as I know
myself. And do not think me far from the point when I say I have a
feeble health. I am what the doctors call anaemic; a rather bloodless
creature. The blood is life, so I have not much life. Ten years
back--eleven, if I must be precise, I thought of conquering the world
with a pen! The result is that I am glad of a fireside, and not sure of
always having one: and that is my achievement. My days are monotonous,
but if I have a dread, it is that there will be an alteration in them.
My father has very little money. We subsist on what private income he
has, and his pension: he was an army doctor. I may by-and-by have to
live in a town for pupils. I could be grateful to any one who would
save me from that. I should be astonished at his choosing to have me
burden his household as well.--Have I now explained the nature of my
pity? It would be the pity of common sympathy, pure lymph of pity, as
nearly disembodied as can be. Last year's sheddings from the tree do
not form an attractive garland. Their merit is, that they have not the
ambition. I am like them. Now, Miss Middleton, I cannot make myself
more bare to you. I hope you see my sincerity."

"I do see it," Clara said.

With the second heaving of her heart, she cried: "See it, and envy you
that humility! proud if I could ape it! Oh, how proud if I could speak
so truthfully true!--You would not have spoken so to me without some
good feeling out of which friends are made. That I am sure of. To be
very truthful to a person, one must have a liking. So I judge by
myself. Do I presume too much?"

Kindness was on Laetitia's face.

"But now," said Clara, swimming on the wave in her bosom, "I tax you
with the silliest suspicion ever entertained by one of your rank. Lady,
you have deemed me capable of the meanest of our vices!--Hold this
hand, Laetitia; my friend, will you? Something is going on in me."

Laetitia took her hand, and saw and felt that something was going on.

Clara said, "You are a woman."

It was her effort to account for the something.

She swam for a brilliant instant on tears, and yielded to the overflow.

When they had fallen, she remarked upon her first long breath quite
coolly: "An encouraging picture of a rebel, is it not?"

Her companion murmured to soothe her.

"It's little, it's nothing," said Clara, pained to keep her lips in
line.

They walked forward, holding hands, deep-hearted to one another.

"I like this country better now," the shaken girl resumed. "I could lie
down in it and ask only for sleep. I should like to think of you here.
How nobly self-respecting you must be, to speak as you did! Our dreams
of heroes and heroines are cold glitter beside the reality. I have been
lately thinking of myself as an outcast of my sex, and to have a good
woman liking me a little . . . loving? Oh, Laetitia, my friend, I
should have kissed you, and not made this exhibition of myself--and if
you call it hysterics, woe to you! for I bit my tongue to keep it off
when I had hardly strength to bring my teeth together--if that idea of
jealousy had not been in your head. You had it from him."

"I have not alluded to it in any word that I can recollect."

"He can imagine no other cause for my wish to be released. I have
noticed, it is his instinct to reckon on women as constant by their
nature. They are the needles, and he the magnet. Jealousy of you, Miss
Dale! Laetitia, may I speak?"

"Say everything you please."

"I could wish:--Do you know my baptismal name?"

"Clara."

"At last! I could wish . . . that is, if it were your wish. Yes, I
could wish that. Next to independence, my wish would be that. I risk
offending you. Do not let your delicacy take arms against me. I wish
him happy in the only way that he can be made happy. There is my
jealousy."

"Was it what you were going to say just now?"

"No."

"I thought not."

"I was going to say--and I believe the rack would not make me truthful
like you, Laetitia--well, has it ever struck you: remember, I do see
his merits; I speak to his faithfullest friend, and I acknowledge he is
attractive, he has manly tastes and habits; but has it never struck you
. . . I have no right to ask; I know that men must have faults, I do
not expect them to be saints; I am not one; I wish I were."

"Has it never struck me . . . ?" Laetitia prompted her.

"That very few women are able to be straightforwardly sincere in their
speech, however much they may desire to be?"

"They are differently educated. Great misfortune brings it to them."

"I am sure your answer is correct. Have you ever known a woman who was
entirely an Egoist?"

"Personally known one? We are not better than men."

"I do not pretend that we are. I have latterly become an Egoist,
thinking of no one but myself, scheming to make use of every soul I
meet. But then, women are in the position of inferiors. They are hardly
out of the nursery when a lasso is round their necks; and if they have
beauty, no wonder they turn it to a weapon and make as many captives as
they can. I do not wonder! My sense of shame at my natural weakness and
the arrogance of men would urge me to make hundreds captive, if that is
being a coquette. I should not have compassion for those lofty birds,
the hawks. To see them with their wings clipped would amuse me. Is
there any other way of punishing them?"

"Consider what you lose in punishing them."

"I consider what they gain if we do not."

Laetitia supposed she was listening to discursive observations upon the
inequality in the relations of the sexes. A suspicion of a drift to a
closer meaning had been lulled, and the colour flooded her swiftly when
Clara said: "Here is the difference I see; I see it; I am certain of
it: women who are called coquettes make their conquests not of the best
of men; but men who are Egoists have good women for their victims;
women on whose devoted constancy they feed; they drink it like blood. I
am sure I am not taking the merely feminine view. They punish
themselves too by passing over the one suitable to them, who could
really give them what they crave to have, and they go where they . . ."
Clara stopped. "I have not your power to express ideas," she said.

"Miss Middleton, you have a dreadful power," said Laetitia.

Clara smiled affectionately. "I am not aware of any. Whose cottage is
this?"

"My father's. Will you not come in? into the garden?"

Clara took note of ivied windows and roses in the porch. She thanked
Laetitia and said: "I will call for you in an hour."

"Are you walking on the road alone?" said Laetitia, incredulously, with
an eye to Sir Willoughby's dismay.

"I put my trust in the high-road," Clara replied, and turned away, but
turned back to Laetitia and offered her face to be kissed.

The "dreadful power" of this young lady had fervently impressed
Laetitia, and in kissing her she marvelled at her gentleness and
girlishness.

Clara walked on, unconscious of her possession of power of any kind.



CHAPTER XVII

THE PORCELAIN VASE

During the term of Clara's walk with Laetitia, Sir Willoughby's
shrunken self-esteem, like a garment hung to the fire after exposure to
tempestuous weather, recovered some of the sleekness of its velvet pile
in the society of Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson, who represented to him
the world he feared and tried to keep sunny for himself by all the arts
he could exercise. She expected him to be the gay Sir Willoughby, and
her look being as good as an incantation summons, he produced the
accustomed sprite, giving her sally for sally. Queens govern the
polite. Popularity with men, serviceable as it is for winning
favouritism with women, is of poor value to a sensitive gentleman,
anxious even to prognostic apprehension on behalf of his pride, his
comfort and his prevalence. And men are grossly purchasable; good wines
have them, good cigars, a goodfellow air: they are never quite worth
their salt even then; you can make head against their ill looks. But
the looks of women will at one blow work on you the downright
difference which is between the cock of lordly plume and the moulting.
Happily they may be gained: a clever tongue will gain them, a leg. They
are with you to a certainty if Nature is with you; if you are elegant
and discreet: if the sun is on you, and they see you shining in it; or
if they have seen you well-stationed and handsome in the sun. And once
gained they are your mirrors for life, and far more constant than the
glass. That tale of their caprice is absurd. Hit their imaginations
once, they are your slaves, only demanding common courtier service of
you. They will deny that you are ageing, they will cover you from
scandal, they will refuse to see you ridiculous. Sir Willoughby's
instinct, or skin, or outfloating feelers, told him of these mysteries
of the influence of the sex; he had as little need to study them as a
lady breathed on.

He had some need to know them in fact; and with him the need of a
protection for himself called it forth; he was intuitively a conjurer
in self-defence, long-sighted, wanting no directions to the herb he was
to suck at when fighting a serpent. His dulness of vision into the
heart of his enemy was compensated by the agile sensitiveness obscuring
but rendering him miraculously active, and, without supposing his need
immediate, he deemed it politic to fascinate Mrs. Mountstuart and
anticipate ghastly possibilities in the future by dropping a hint; not
of Clara's fickleness, you may be sure; of his own, rather; or, more
justly, of an altered view of Clara's character. He touched on the
rogue in porcelain.

Set gently laughing by his relishing humour. "I get nearer to it," he
said.

"Remember I'm in love with her," said Mrs. Mountstuart.

"That is our penalty."

"A pleasant one for you."

He assented. "Is the 'rogue' to be eliminated?"

"Ask when she's a mother, my dear Sir Willoughby."

"This is how I read you:--"

"I shall accept any interpretation that is complimentary."

"Not one will satisfy me of being sufficiently so, and so I leave it to
the character to fill out the epigram."

"Do. What hurry is there? And don't be misled by your objection to
rogue; which would be reasonable if you had not secured her."

The door of a hollow chamber of horrible reverberation was opened
within him by this remark.

He tried to say in jest, that it was not always a passionate admiration
that held the rogue fast; but he muddled it in the thick of his
conscious thunder, and Mrs. Mountstuart smiled to see him shot from the
smooth-flowing dialogue into the cataracts by one simple reminder to
the lover of his luck. Necessarily, after a fall, the pitch of their
conversation relaxed.

"Miss Dale is looking well," he said.

"Fairly: she ought to marry," said Mrs. Mountstuart.

He shook his head. "Persuade her."

She nodded. "Example may have some effect."

He looked extremely abstracted. "Yes, it is time. Where is the man you
could recommend for her complement? She has now what was missing
before, a ripe intelligence in addition to her happy
disposition--romantic, you would say. I can't think women the worse for
that."

"A dash of it."

"She calls it 'leafage'."

"Very pretty. And have you relented about your horse Achmet?"

"I don't sell him under four hundred."

"Poor Johnny Busshe! You forget that his wife doles him out his money.
You're a hard bargainer, Sir Willoughby."

"I mean the price to be prohibitive."

"Very well; and 'leafage' is good for hide-and-seek; especially when
there is no rogue in ambush. And that's the worst I can say of Laetitia
Dale. An exaggerated devotion is the scandal of our sex. They say
you're the hardest man of business in the county too, and I can believe
it; for at home and abroad your aim is to get the best of everybody.
You see I've no leafage, I am perfectly matter-of-fact, bald."

"Nevertheless, my dear Mrs. Mountstuart, I can assure you that
conversing with you has much the same exhilarating effect on me as
conversing with Miss Dale."

"But, leafage! leafage! You hard bargainers have no compassion for
devoted spinsters."

"I tell you my sentiments absolutely."

"And you have mine moderately expressed."

She recollected the purpose of her morning's visit, which was to engage
Dr. Middleton to dine with her, and Sir Willoughby conducted her to the
library-door. "Insist," he said.

Awaiting her reappearance, the refreshment of the talk he had
sustained, not without point, assisted him to distinguish in its
complete abhorrent orb the offence committed against him by his bride.
And this he did through projecting it more and more away from him, so
that in the outer distance it involved his personal emotions less,
while observation was enabled to compass its vastness, and, as it were,
perceive the whole spherical mass of the wretched girl's guilt
impudently turning on its axis.

Thus to detach an injury done to us, and plant it in space, for
mathematical measurement of its weight and bulk, is an art; it may also
be an instinct of self-preservation; otherwise, as when mountains
crumble adjacent villages are crushed, men of feeling may at any moment
be killed outright by the iniquitous and the callous. But, as an art,
it should be known to those who are for practising an art so
beneficent, that circumstances must lend their aid. Sir Willoughby's
instinct even had sat dull and crushed before his conversation with
Mrs. Mountstuart. She lifted him to one of his ideals of himself. Among
gentlemen he was the English gentleman; with ladies his aim was the
Gallican courtier of any period from Louis Treize to Louis Quinze. He
could doat on those who led him to talk in that character--backed by
English solidity, you understand. Roast beef stood eminent behind the
souffle and champagne. An English squire excelling his fellows at
hazardous leaps in public, he was additionally a polished whisperer, a
lively dialoguer, one for witty bouts, with something in him--capacity
for a drive and dig or two--beyond mere wit, as they soon learned who
called up his reserves, and had a bosom for pinking. So much for his
ideal of himself. Now, Clara not only never evoked, never responded to
it, she repelled it; there was no flourishing of it near her. He
considerately overlooked these facts in his ordinary calculations; he
was a man of honour and she was a girl of beauty; but the accidental
blooming of his ideal, with Mrs. Mountstuart, on the very heels of
Clara's offence, restored him to full command of his art of detachment,
and he thrust her out, quite apart from himself, to contemplate her
disgraceful revolutions.

Deeply read in the Book of Egoism that he was, he knew the wisdom of
the sentence: An injured pride that strikes not out will strike home.
What was he to strike with? Ten years younger, Laetitia might have been
the instrument. To think of her now was preposterous. Beside Clara she
had the hue of Winter under the springing bough. He tossed her away,
vexed to the very soul by an ostentatious decay that shrank from
comparison with the blooming creature he had to scourge in
self-defence, by some agency or other.

Mrs. Mountstuart was on the step of her carriage when the silken
parasols of the young ladies were descried on a slope of the park,
where the yellow green of May-clothed beeches flowed over the brown
ground of last year's leaves.

"Who's the cavalier?" she inquired.

A gentleman escorted them.

"Vernon? No! he's pegging at Crossjay," quoth Willoughby.

Vernon and Crossjay came out for the boy's half-hour's run before his
dinner. Crossjay spied Miss Middleton and was off to meet her at a
bound. Vernon followed him leisurely.

"The rogue has no cousin, has she?" said Mrs. Mountstuart.

"It's a family of one son or one daughter for generations," replied
Willoughby.

"And Letty Dale?"

"Cousin!" he exclaimed, as if wealth had been imputed to Miss Dale;
adding: "No male cousin."

A railway station fly drove out of the avenue on the circle to the
hall-entrance. Flitch was driver. He had no right to be there, he was
doing wrong, but he was doing it under cover of an office, to support
his wife and young ones, and his deprecating touches of the hat spoke
of these apologies to his former master with dog-like pathos.

Sir Willoughby beckoned to him to approach.

"So you are here," he said. "You have luggage."

Flitch jumped from the box and read one of the labels aloud:
"Lieutenant-Colonel H. De Craye."

"And the colonel met the ladies? Overtook them?"

Here seemed to come dismal matter for Flitch to relate.

He began upon the abstract origin of it: he had lost his place in Sir
Willoughby's establishment, and was obliged to look about for work
where it was to be got, and though he knew he had no right to be where
he was, he hoped to be forgiven because of the mouths he had to feed as
a flyman attached to the railway station, where this gentleman, the
colonel, hired him, and he believed Sir Willoughby would excuse him for
driving a friend, which the colonel was, he recollected well, and the
colonel recollected him, and he said, not noticing how he was rigged:
"What! Flitch! back in your old place? Am I expected?" and he told the
colonel his unfortunate situation. "Not back, colonel; no such luck for
me" and Colonel De Craye was a very kind-hearted gentleman, as he
always had been, and asked kindly after his family. And it might be
that such poor work as he was doing now he might be deprived of, such
is misfortune when it once harpoons a man; you may dive, and you may
fly, but it sticks in you, once do a foolish thing. "May I humbly beg
of you, if you'll be so good, Sir Willoughby," said Flitch, passing to
evidence of the sad mishap. He opened the door of the fly, displaying
fragments of broken porcelain.

"But, what, what! what's the story of this?" cried Sir Willoughby.

"What is it?" said Mrs. Mountstuart, pricking up her ears.

"It was a vaws," Flitch replied in elegy.

"A porcelain vase!" interpreted Sir Willoughby.

"China!" Mrs. Mountstuart faintly shrieked.

One of the pieces was handed to her inspection.

She held it close, she held it distant. She sighed horribly.

"The man had better have hanged himself," said she.

Flitch bestirred his misfortune-sodden features and members for a
continuation of the doleful narrative.

"How did this occur?" Sir Willoughby peremptorily asked him.

Flitch appealed to his former master for testimony that he was a good
and a careful driver.

Sir Willoughby thundered: "I tell you to tell me how this occurred."

"Not a drop, my lady! not since my supper last night, if there's any
truth in me!" Flitch implored succour of Mrs Mountstuart.

"Drive straight," she said, and braced him.

His narrative was then direct.

Near Piper's mill, where the Wicker brook crossed the Rebdon road, one
of Hoppner's wagons, overloaded as usual, was forcing the horses
uphill, when Flitch drove down at an easy pace, and saw himself between
Hoppner's cart come to a stand and a young lady advancing: and just
then the carter smacks his whip, the horses pull half mad. The young
lady starts behind the cart, and up jumps the colonel, and, to save the
young lady, Flitch dashed ahead and did save her, he thanked Heaven for
it, and more when he came to see who the young lady was.

"She was alone?" said Sir Willoughby in tragic amazement, staring at
Flitch.

"Very well, you saved her, and you upset the fly," Mountstuart jogged
him on.

"Bardett, our old head-keeper, was a witness, my lady, had to drive
half up the bank, and it's true--over the fly did go; and the vaws it
shoots out against the twelfth mile-stone, just as though there was the
chance for it! for nobody else was injured, and knocked against
anything else, it never would have flown all to pieces, so that it took
Bardett and me ten minutes to collect every one, down to the smallest
piece there was; and he said, and I can't help thinking myself, there
was a Providence in it, for we all come together so as you might say we
was made to do as we did."

"So then Horace adopted the prudent course of walking on with the
ladies instead of trusting his limbs again to this capsizing fly," Sir
Willoughby said to Mrs. Mountstuart; and she rejoined: "Lucky that no
one was hurt."

Both of them eyed the nose of poor Flitch, and simultaneously they
delivered a verdict in "Humph!"

Mrs. Mountstuart handed the wretch a half-crown from her purse. Sir
Willoughby directed the footman in attendance to unload the fly and
gather up the fragments of porcelain carefully, bidding Flitch be quick
in his departing.

"The colonel's wedding-present! I shall call to-morrow." Mrs.
Mountstuart waved her adieu.

"Come every day!--Yes, I suppose we may guess the destination of the
vase." He bowed her off, and she cried:

"Well, now, the gift can be shared, if you're either of you for a
division." In the crash of the carriage-wheels he heard, "At any rate
there was a rogue in that porcelain."

These are the slaps we get from a heedless world.

As for the vase, it was Horace De Craye's loss. Wedding-present he
would have to produce, and decidedly not in chips. It had the look of a
costly vase, but that was no question for the moment:--What was meant
by Clara being seen walking on the high-road alone?--What snare,
traceable ad inferas, had ever induced Willoughby Patterne to make her
the repository and fortress of his honour!



CHAPTER XVIII

COLONEL DE CRAYE

Clara came along chatting and laughing with Colonel De Craye, young
Crossjay's hand under one of her arms, and her parasol flashing; a
dazzling offender; as if she wished to compel the spectator to
recognize the dainty rogue in porcelain; really insufferably fair:
perfect in height and grace of movement; exquisitely tressed;
red-lipped, the colour striking out to a distance from her ivory skin;
a sight to set the woodland dancing, and turn the heads of the town;
though beautiful, a jury of art critics might pronounce her not to be.
Irregular features are condemned in beauty. Beautiful figure, they
could say. A description of her figure and her walking would have won
her any praises: and she wore a dress cunning to embrace the shape and
flutter loose about it, in the spirit of a Summer's day. Calypso-clad,
Dr. Middleton would have called her. See the silver birch in a breeze:
here it swells, there it scatters, and it is puffed to a round and it
streams like a pennon, and now gives the glimpse and shine of the white
stem's line within, now hurries over it, denying that it was visible,
with a chatter along the sweeping folds, while still the white peeps
through. She had the wonderful art of dressing to suit the season and
the sky. To-day the art was ravishingly companionable with her
sweet-lighted face: too sweet, too vividly meaningful for pretty, if
not of the strict severity for beautiful. Millinery would tell us that
she wore a fichu of thin white muslin crossed in front on a dress of
the same light stuff, trimmed with deep rose. She carried a grey-silk
parasol, traced at the borders with green creepers, and across the arm
devoted to Crossjay a length of trailing ivy, and in that hand a bunch
of the first long grasses. These hues of red rose and pale green
ruffled and pouted in the billowy white of the dress ballooning and
valleying softly, like a yacht before the sail bends low; but she
walked not like one blown against; resembling rather the day of the
South-west driving the clouds, gallantly firm in commotion; interfusing
colour and varying in her features from laugh to smile and look of
settled pleasure, like the heavens above the breeze.

Sir Willoughby, as he frequently had occasion to protest to Clara, was
no poet: he was a more than commonly candid English gentleman in his
avowed dislike of the poet's nonsense, verbiage, verse; not one of
those latterly terrorized by the noise made about the fellow into
silent contempt; a sentiment that may sleep, and has not to be
defended. He loathed the fellow, fought the fellow. But he was one with
the poet upon that prevailing theme of verse, the charms of women. He
was, to his ill-luck, intensely susceptible, and where he led men after
him to admire, his admiration became a fury. He could see at a glance
that Horace De Craye admired Miss Middleton. Horace was a man of taste,
could hardly, could not, do other than admire; but how curious that in
the setting forth of Clara and Miss Dale, to his own contemplation and
comparison of them, Sir Willoughby had given but a nodding approbation
of his bride's appearance! He had not attached weight to it recently.

Her conduct, and foremost, if not chiefly, her having been discovered,
positively met by his friend Horace, walking on the high-road without
companion or attendant, increased a sense of pain so very unusual with
him that he had cause to be indignant. Coming on this condition, his
admiration of the girl who wounded him was as bitter a thing as a man
could feel. Resentment, fed from the main springs of his nature, turned
it to wormwood, and not a whit the less was it admiration when he
resolved to chastise her with a formal indication of his disdain. Her
present gaiety sounded to him like laughter heard in the shadow of the
pulpit.

"You have escaped!" he said to her, while shaking the hand of his
friend Horace and cordially welcoming him. "My dear fellow! and, by the
way, you had a squeak for it, I hear from Flitch."

"I, Willoughby? not a bit," said the colonel; "we get into a fly to
get, out of it; and Flitch helped me out as well as in, good fellow;
just dusting my coat as he did it. The only bit of bad management was
that Miss Middleton had to step aside a trifle hurriedly."

"You knew Miss Middleton at once?"

"Flitch did me the favour to introduce me. He first precipitated me at
Miss Middleton's feet, and then he introduced me, in old oriental
fashion, to my sovereign."

Sir Willoughby's countenance was enough for his friend Horace.
Quarter-wheeling to Clara, he said: "'Tis the place I'm to occupy for
life, Miss Middleton, though one is not always fortunate to have a
bright excuse for taking it at the commencement."

Clara said: "Happily you were not hurt, Colonel De Craye."

"I was in the hands of the Loves. Not the Graces, I'm afraid; I've an
image of myself. Dear, no! My dear Willoughby, you never made such a
headlong declaration as that. It would have looked like a magnificent
impulse, if the posture had only been choicer. And Miss Middleton
didn't laugh. At least I saw nothing but pity."

"You did not write," said Willoughby.

"Because it was a toss-up of a run to Ireland or here, and I came here
not to go there; and, by the way, fetched a jug with me to offer up to
the gods of ill-luck; and they accepted the propitiation."

"Wasn't it packed in a box?"

"No, it was wrapped in paper, to show its elegant form. I caught sight
of it in the shop yesterday and carried it off this morning, and
presented it to Miss Middleton at noon, without any form at all."

Willoughby knew his friend Horace's mood when the Irish tongue in him
threatened to wag.

"You see what may happen," he said to Clara.

"As far as I am in fault I regret it," she answered.

"Flitch says the accident occurred through his driving up the bank to
save you from the wheels."

"Flitch may go and whisper that down the neck of his empty
whisky-flask," said Horace De Craye. "And then let him cork it."

"The consequence is that we have a porcelain vase broken. You should
not walk on the road alone, Clara. You ought to have a companion,
always. It is the rule here."

"I had left Miss Dale at the cottage."

"You ought to have had the dogs."

"Would they have been any protection to the vase?"

Horace De Craye crowed cordially.

"I'm afraid not, Miss Middleton. One must go to the witches for
protection to vases; and they're all in the air now, having their own
way with us, which accounts for the confusion in politics and society,
and the rise in the price of broomsticks, to prove it true, as they
tell us, that every nook and corner wants a mighty sweeping. Miss Dale
looks beaming," said De Craye, wishing to divert Willoughby from his
anger with sense as well as nonsense.

"You have not been visiting Ireland recently?" said Sir Willoughby.

"No, nor making acquaintance with an actor in an Irish part in a drama
cast in the Green Island. 'Tis Flitch, my dear Willoughby, has been
and stirred the native in me, and we'll present him to you for the like
good office when we hear after a number of years that you've not
wrinkled your forehead once at your liege lady. Take the poor old dog
back home, will you? He's crazed to be at the Hall. I say, Willoughby,
it would be a good bit of work to take him back. Think of it; you'll do
the popular thing, I'm sure. I've a superstition that Flitch ought to
drive you from the church-door. If I were in luck, I'd have him drive
me."

"The man's a drunkard, Horace."

"He fuddles his poor nose. 'Tis merely unction to the exile. Sober
struggles below. He drinks to rock his heart, because he has one. Now
let me intercede for poor Flitch."

"Not a word of him. He threw up his place."

"To try his fortune in the world, as the best of us do, though livery
runs after us to tell us there's no being an independent gentleman, and
comes a cold day we haul on the metal-button coat again, with a good
ha! of satisfaction. You'll do the popular thing. Miss Middleton joins
in the pleading."

"No pleading!"

"When I've vowed upon my eloquence, Willoughby, I'd bring you to pardon
the poor dog?"

"Not a word of him!"

"Just one!"

Sir Willoughby battled with himself to repress a state of temper that
put him to marked disadvantage beside his friend Horace in high
spirits. Ordinarily he enjoyed these fits of Irish of him, which were
Horace's fun and play, at times involuntary, and then they indicated a
recklessness that might embrace mischief. De Craye, as Willoughby had
often reminded him, was properly Norman. The blood of two or three
Irish mothers in his line, however, was enough to dance him, and if his
fine profile spoke of the stiffer race, his eyes and the quick run of
the lip in the cheek, and a number of his qualities, were evidence of
the maternal legacy.

"My word has been said about the man," Willoughby replied.

"But I've wagered on your heart against your word, and cant afford to
lose; and there's a double reason for revoking for you!"

"I don't see either of them. Here are the ladies."

"You'll think of the poor beast, Willoughby."

"I hope for better occupation."

"If he drives a wheelbarrow at the Hall he'll be happier than on board
a chariot at large. He's broken-hearted."

"He's too much in the way of breakages, my dear Horace."

"Oh, the vase! the bit of porcelain!" sung De Craye. "Well, we'll talk
him over by and by."

"If it pleases you; but my rules are never amended."

"Inalterable, are they?--like those of an ancient people, who might as
well have worn a jacket of lead for the comfort they had of their
boast. The beauty of laws for human creatures is their adaptability to
new stitchings."

Colonel De Craye walked at the heels of his leader to make his bow to
the ladies Eleanor and Isabel.

Sir Willoughby had guessed the person who inspired his friend Horace to
plead so pertinaciously and inopportunely for the man Flitch: and it
had not improved his temper or the pose of his rejoinders; he had
winced under the contrast of his friend Horace's easy, laughing,
sparkling, musical air and manner with his own stiffness; and he had
seen Clara's face, too, scanning the contrast--he was fatally driven to
exaggerate his discontentment, which did not restore him to serenity.
He would have learned more from what his abrupt swing round of the
shoulder precluded his beholding. There was an interchange between
Colonel De Craye and Miss Middleton; spontaneous on both sides. His was
a look that said: "You were right"; hers: "I knew it". Her look was
calmer, and after the first instant clouded as by wearifulness of
sameness; his was brilliant, astonished, speculative, and admiring,
pitiful: a look that poised over a revelation, called up the hosts of
wonder to question strange fact.

It had passed unseen by Sir Willoughby. The observer was the one who
could also supply the key of the secret. Miss Dale had found Colonel De
Craye in company with Miss Middleton at her gateway. They were
laughing and talking together like friends of old standing, De Craye as
Irish as he could be: and the Irish tongue and gentlemanly manner are
an irresistible challenge to the opening steps of familiarity when
accident has broken the ice. Flitch was their theme; and: "Oh, but if
we go tip to Willoughby hand in hand; and bob a courtesy to 'm and 
beg his pardon for Mister Flitch, won't he melt to such a pair of
suppliants? of course he will!" Miss Middleton said he would not.
Colonel De Craye wagered he would; he knew Willoughby best. Miss
Middleton looked simply grave; a way of asserting the contrary opinion
that tells of rueful experience. "We'll see," said the colonel. They
chatted like a couple unexpectedly discovering in one another a common
dialect among strangers. Can there be an end to it when those two meet?
They prattle, they fill the minutes, as though they were violently to
be torn asunder at a coming signal, and must have it out while they
can; it is a meeting of mountain brooks; not a colloquy, but a chasing,
impossible to say which flies, which follows, or what the topic, so
interlinguistic are they and rapidly counterchanging. After their
conversation of an hour before, Laetitia watched Miss Middleton in
surprise at her lightness of mind. Clara bathed in mirth. A boy in a
summer stream shows not heartier refreshment of his whole being.
Laetitia could now understand Vernon's idea of her wit. And it seemed
that she also had Irish blood. Speaking of Ireland, Miss Middleton said
she had cousins there, her only relatives.

"The laugh told me that," said Colonel De Craye.

Laetitia and Vernon paced up and down the lawn. Colonel De Craye was
talking with English sedateness to the ladies Eleanor and Isabel. Clara
and young Crossjay strayed.

"If I might advise, I would say, do not leave the Hall immediately, not
yet," Laetitia said to Vernon.

"You know, then?"

"I cannot understand why it was that I was taken into her confidence."

"I counselled it."

"But it was done without an object that I can see."

"The speaking did her good."

"But how capricious! how changeful!"

"Better now than later."

"Surely she has only to ask to be released?--to ask earnestly: if it
is her wish."

"You are mistaken."

"Why does she not make a confidant of her father?"

"That she will have to do. She wished to spare him."

"He cannot be spared if she is to break the engagement."

She thought of sparing him the annoyance. "Now there's to be a tussle,
he must share in it."

"Or she thought he might not side with her?"

"She has not a single instinct of cunning. You judge her harshly."

"She moved me on the walk out. Coming home I felt differently."

Vernon glanced at Colonel De Craye.

"She wants good guidance," continued Laetitia.

"She has not an idea of treachery."

"You think so? It may be true. But she seems one born devoid of
patience, easily made reckless. There is a wildness . . . I judge by
her way of speaking; that at least appeared sincere. She does not
practise concealment. He will naturally find it almost incredible. The
change in her, so sudden, so wayward, is unintelligible to me. To me it
is the conduct of a creature untamed. He may hold her to her word and
be justified."

"Let him look out if he does!"

"Is not that harsher than anything I have said of her?"

"I'm not appointed to praise her. I fancy I read the case; and it's a
case of opposition of temperaments. We never can tell the person quite
suited to us; it strikes us in a flash."

"That they are not suited to us? Oh, no; that comes by degrees."

"Yes, but the accumulation of evidence, or sentience, if you like, is
combustible; we don't command the spark; it may be late in falling. And
you argue in her favour. Consider her as a generous and impulsive girl,
outwearied at last."

"By what?"

"By anything; by his loftiness, if you like. He flies too high for her,
we will say."

"Sir Willoughby an eagle?"

"She may be tired of his eyrie."

The sound of the word in Vernon's mouth smote on a consciousness she
had of his full grasp of Sir Willoughby and her own timid knowledge,
though he was not a man who played on words.

If he had eased his heart in stressing the first syllable, it was only
temporary relief. He was heavy-browed enough.

"But I cannot conceive what she expects me to do by confiding her sense
of her position to me," said Laetitia.

"We none of us know what will be done. We hang on Willoughby, who hangs
on whatever it is that supports him: and there we are in a swarm."

"You see the wisdom of staying, Mr. Whitford."

"It must be over in a day or two. Yes, I stay."

"She inclines to obey you."

"I should be sorry to stake my authority on her obedience. We must
decide something about Crossjay, and get the money for his crammer, if
it is to be got. If not, I may get a man to trust me. I mean to drag
the boy away. Willoughby has been at him with the tune of gentleman,
and has laid hold of him by one ear. When I say 'her obedience,' she is
not in a situation, nor in a condition to be led blindly by anybody.
She must rely on herself, do everything herself. It's a knot that won't
bear touching by any hand save hers."

"I fear . . ." said Laetitia.

"Have no such fear."

"If it should come to his positively refusing."

"He faces the consequences."

"You do not think of her."

Vernon looked at his companion.



CHAPTER XIX

COLONEL DE CRAYE AND CLARA MIDDLETON

MISS MIDDLETON finished her stroll with Crossjay by winding her trailer
of ivy in a wreath round his hat and sticking her bunch of grasses in
the wreath. She then commanded him to sit on the ground beside a big
rhododendron, there to await her return. Crossjay had informed her of a
design he entertained to be off with a horde of boys nesting in high
trees, and marking spots where wasps and hornets were to be attacked in
Autumn: she thought it a dangerous business, and as the boy's
dinner-bell had very little restraint over him when he was in the flush
of a scheme of this description, she wished to make tolerably sure of
him through the charm she not unreadily believed she could fling on
lads of his age. "Promise me you will not move from here until I come
back, and when I come I will give you a kiss." Crossjay promised. She
left him and forgot him.

Seeing by her watch fifteen minutes to the ringing of the bell, a
sudden resolve that she would speak to her father without another
minute's delay had prompted her like a superstitious impulse to abandon
her aimless course and be direct. She knew what was good for her; she
knew it now more clearly than in the morning. To be taken away
instantly! was her cry. There could be no further doubt. Had there been
any before? But she would not in the morning have suspected herself of
a capacity for evil, and of a pressing need to be saved from herself.
She was not pure of nature: it may be that we breed saintly souls which
are: she was pure of will: fire rather than ice. And in beginning to
see the elements she was made of she did not shuffle them to a heap
with her sweet looks to front her. She put to her account some
strength, much weakness; she almost dared to gaze unblinking at a
perilous evil tendency. The glimpse of it drove her to her father.

"He must take me away at once; to-morrow!"

She wished to spare her father. So unsparing of herself was she, that,
in her hesitation to speak to him of her change of feeling for Sir
Willoughby, she would not suffer it to be attributed in her own mind to
a daughter's anxious consideration about her father's loneliness; an
idea she had indulged formerly. Acknowledging that it was imperative
she should speak, she understood that she had refrained, even to the
inflicting upon herself of such humiliation as to run dilating on her
woes to others, because of the silliest of human desires to preserve
her reputation for consistency. She had heard women abused for
shallowness and flightiness: she had heard her father denounce them as
veering weather-vanes, and his oft-repeated quid femina possit: for her
sex's sake, and also to appear an exception to her sex, this reasoning
creature desired to be thought consistent.

Just on the instant of her addressing him, saying: "Father," a note of
seriousness in his ear, it struck her that the occasion for saying all
had not yet arrived, and she quickly interposed: "Papa"; and helped
him to look lighter. The petition to be taken away was uttered.

"To London?" said Dr. Middleton. "I don't know who'll take us in."

"To France, papa?"

"That means hotel-life."

"Only for two or three weeks."

"Weeks! I am under an engagement to dine with Mrs Mountstuart Jenkinson
five days hence: that is, on Thursday."

"Could we not find an excuse?"

"Break an engagement? No, my dear, not even to escape drinking a
widow's wine."

"Does a word bind us?"

"Why, what else should?"

"I think I am not very well."

"We'll call in that man we met at dinner here: Corney: a capital
doctor; an old-fashioned anecdotal doctor. How is it you are not well,
my love? You look well. I cannot conceive your not being well."

"It is only that I want change of air, papa."

"There we are--a change! semper eadem! Women will be wanting a change
of air in Paradise; a change of angels too, I might surmise. A change
from quarters like these to a French hotel would be a descent!--'this
the seat, this mournful gloom for that celestial light.' I am
perfectly at home in the library here. That excellent fellow Whitford
and I have real days: and I like him for showing fight to his elder and
better."

"He is going to leave."

"I know nothing of it, and I shall append no credit to the tale until I
do know. He is headstrong, but he answers to a rap."

Clara's bosom heaved. The speechless insurrection threatened her eyes.

A South-west shower lashed the window-panes and suggested to Dr.
Middleton shuddering visions of the Channel passage on board a steamer.

"Corney shall see you: he is a sparkling draught in person; probably
illiterate, if I may judge from one interruption of my discourse when
he sat opposite me, but lettered enough to respect Learning and write
out his prescription: I do not ask more of men or of physicians." Dr.
Middleton said this rising, glancing at the clock and at the back of
his hands. "'Quod autem secundum litteras difficillimum esse
artificium?' But what after letters is the more difficult practice?
'Ego puto medicum.' The medicus next to the scholar: though I have not
to my recollection required him next me, nor ever expected child of
mine to be crying for that milk. Daughter she is--of the unexplained
sex: we will send a messenger for Corney. Change, my dear, you will
speedily have, to satisfy the most craving of women, if Willoughby, as
I suppose, is in the neoteric fashion of spending a honeymoon on a
railway: apt image, exposition and perpetuation of the state of mania
conducting to the institution! In my time we lay by to brood on
happiness; we had no thought of chasing it over a continent, mistaking
hurly-burly clothed in dust for the divinity we sought. A smaller
generation sacrifices to excitement. Dust and hurly-burly must perforce
be the issue. And that is your modern world. Now, my dear, let us go
and wash our hands. Midday-bells expect immediate attention. They know
of no anteroom of assembly."

Clara stood gathered up, despairing at opportunity lost. He had noticed
her contracted shape and her eyes, and had talked magisterially to
smother and overbear the something disagreeable prefigured in her
appearance.

"You do not despise your girl, father?"

"I do not; I could not; I love her; I love my girl. But you need not
sing to me like a gnat to propound that question, my dear."

"Then, father, tell Willoughby to-day we have to leave tomorrow. You
shall return in time for Mrs. Mountstuart's dinner. Friends will take
us in, the Darletons, the Erpinghams. We can go to Oxford, where you
are sure of welcome. A little will recover me. Do not mention doctors.
But you see I am nervous. I am quite ashamed of it; I am well enough to
laugh at it, only I cannot overcome it; and I feel that a day or two
will restore me. Say you will. Say it in First-Lesson-Book language;
anything above a primer splits my foolish head to-day."

Dr Middleton shrugged, spreading out his arms.

"The office of ambassador from you to Willoughby, Clara? You decree me
to the part of ball between two bats. The Play being assured, the
prologue is a bladder of wind. I seem to be instructed in one of the
mysteries of erotic esotery, yet on my word I am no wiser. If
Willoughby is to hear anything from you, he will hear it from your
lips."

"Yes, father, yes. We have differences. I am not fit for contests at
present; my head is giddy. I wish to avoid an illness. He and I . . . I
accuse myself."

"There is the bell!" ejaculated Dr. Middleton. "I'll debate on it with
Willoughby."

"This afternoon?"

"Somewhen, before the dinner-bell. I cannot tie myself to the
minute-hand of the clock, my dear child. And let me direct you, for the
next occasion when you shall bring the vowels I and A, in verbally
detached letters, into collision, that you do not fill the hiatus with
so pronounced a Y. It is the vulgarization of our tongue of which I
accuse you. I do not like my girl to be guilty of it."

He smiled to moderate the severity of the correction, and kissed her
forehead.

She declared her inability to sit and eat; she went to her room, after
begging him very earnestly to send her the assurance that he had
spoken. She had not shed a tear, and she rejoiced in her self-control;
it whispered to her of true courage when she had given herself such
evidence of the reverse.

Shower and sunshine alternated through the half-hours of the afternoon,
like a procession of dark and fair holding hands and passing. The
shadow came, and she was chill; the light yellow in moisture, and she
buried her face not to be caught up by cheerfulness. Believing that her
head ached, she afflicted herself with all the heavy symptoms, and
oppressed her mind so thoroughly that its occupation was to speculate
on Laetitia Dale's modest enthusiasm for rural pleasures, for this
place especially, with its rich foliage and peeps of scenic peace. The
prospect of an escape from it inspired thoughts of a loveable round of
life where the sun was not a naked ball of fire, but a friend clothed
in woodland; where park and meadow swept to well-known features East
and West; and distantly circling hills, and the hearts of poor
cottagers too--sympathy with whom assured her of goodness--were
familiar, homely to the dweller in the place, morning and night. And
she had the love of wild flowers, the watchful happiness in the
seasons; poets thrilled her, books absorbed. She dwelt strongly on that
sincerity of feeling; it gave her root in our earth; she needed it as
she pressed a hand on her eyeballs, conscious of acting the invalid,
though the reasons she had for languishing under headache were so
convincing that her brain refused to disbelieve in it and went some way
to produce positive throbs. Otherwise she had no excuse for shutting
herself in her room. Vernon Whitford would be sceptical. Headache or
none, Colonel De Craye must be thinking strangely of her; she had not
shown him any sign of illness. His laughter and his talk sung about her
and dispersed the fiction; he was the very sea-wind for bracing
unstrung nerves. Her ideas reverted to Sir Willoughby, and at once they
had no more cohesion than the foam on a torrent-water.

But soon she was undergoing a variation of sentiment. Her maid Barclay
brought her this pencilled line from her father:

"Factum est; laetus est; amantium irae, etc."

That it was done, that Willoughby had put on an air of glad
acquiescence, and that her father assumed the existence of a lovers'
quarrel, was wonderful to her at first sight, simple the succeeding
minute. Willoughby indeed must be tired of her, glad of her going. He
would know that it was not to return. She was grateful to him for
perhaps hinting at the amantium irae, though she rejected the folly of
the verse. And she gazed over dear homely country through her windows
now. Happy the lady of the place, if happy she can be in her choice!
Clara Middleton envied her the double-blossom wild cherry-tree, nothing
else. One sprig of it, if it had not faded and gone to dust-colour like
crusty Alpine snow in the lower hollows, and then she could depart,
bearing away a memory of the best here! Her fiction of the headache
pained her no longer. She changed her muslin dress for silk; she was
contented with the first bonnet Barclay presented. Amicable toward
every one in the house, Willoughby included, she threw up her window,
breathed, blessed mankind; and she thought: "If Willoughby would open
his heart to nature, he would be relieved of his wretched opinion of
the world." Nature was then sparkling refreshed in the last drops of a
sweeping rain-curtain, favourably disposed for a background to her
joyful optimism. A little nibble of hunger within, real hunger, unknown
to her of late, added to this healthy view, without precipitating her
to appease it; she was more inclined to foster it, for the sake of the
sinewy activity of mind and limb it gave her; and in the style of young
ladies very light of heart, she went downstairs like a cascade, and
like the meteor observed in its vanishing trace she alighted close to
Colonel De Craye and entered one of the rooms off the hall.

He cocked an eye at the half-shut door.

Now you have only to be reminded that it is the habit of the sportive
gentleman of easy life, bewildered as he would otherwise be by the
tricks, twists, and windings of the hunted sex, to parcel out fair
women into classes; and some are flyers and some are runners; these
birds are wild on the wing, those exposed their bosoms to the shot. For
him there is no individual woman. He grants her a characteristic only
to enroll her in a class. He is our immortal dunce at learning to
distinguish her as a personal variety, of a separate growth.

Colonel De Craye's cock of the eye at the door said that he had seen a
rageing coquette go behind it. He had his excuse for forming the
judgement. She had spoken strangely of the fall of his wedding-present,
strangely of Willoughby; or there was a sound of strangeness in an
allusion to her appointed husband: and she had treated Willoughby
strangely when they met. Above all, her word about Flitch was curious.
And then that look of hers! And subsequently she transferred her polite
attentions to Willoughby's friend. After a charming colloquy, the
sweetest give and take rattle he had ever enjoyed with a girl, she
developed headache to avoid him; and next she developed blindness, for
the same purpose.

He was feeling hurt, but considered it preferable to feel challenged.

Miss Middleton came out of another door. She had seen him when she had
passed him and when it was too late to convey her recognition; and now
she addressed him with an air of having bowed as she went by.

"No one?" she said. "Am I alone in the house?"

"There is a figure naught," said he, "but it's as good as annihilated,
and no figure at all, if you put yourself on the wrong side of it, and
wish to be alone in the house."

"Where is Willoughby?"

"Away on business."

"Riding?"

"Achmet is the horse, and pray don't let him be sold, Miss Middleton. I
am deputed to attend on you."

"I should like a stroll."

"Are you perfectly restored?"

"Perfectly."

"Strong?"

"I was never better."

"It was the answer of the ghost of the wicked old man's wife when she
came to persuade him he had one chance remaining. Then, says he, I'll
believe in heaven if ye'll stop that bottle, and hurls it; and the
bottle broke and he committed suicide, not without suspicion of her
laying a trap for him. These showers curling away and leaving sweet
scents are divine, Miss Middleton. I have the privilege of the
Christian name on the nuptial-day. This park of Willoughby's is one of
the best things in England. There's a glimpse over the lake that smokes
of a corner of Killarney; tempts the eye to dream, I mean." De Craye
wound his finger spirally upward, like a smoke-wreath. "Are you for
Irish scenery?"

"Irish, English, Scottish."

"All's one so long as it's beautiful: yes, you speak for me.
Cosmopolitanism of races is a different affair. I beg leave to doubt
the true union of some; Irish and Saxon, for example, let Cupid be
master of the ceremonies and the dwelling-place of the happy couple at
the mouth of a Cornucopia. Yet I have seen a flower of Erin worn by a
Saxon gentleman proudly; and the Hibernian courting a Rowena! So we'll
undo what I said, and consider it cancelled."

"Are you of the rebel party, Colonel De Craye?"

"I am Protestant and Conservative, Miss Middleton."

"I have not a head for politics."

"The political heads I have seen would tempt me to that opinion."

"Did Willoughby say when he would be back?"

"He named no particular time. Doctor Middleton and Mr. Whitford are in
the library upon a battle of the books."

"Happy battle!"

"You are accustomed to scholars. They are rather intolerant of us poor
fellows."

"Of ignorance perhaps; not of persons."

"Your father educated you himself, I presume?"

"He gave me as much Latin as I could take. The fault is mine that it is
little."

"Greek?"

"A little Greek."

"Ah! And you carry it like a feather."

"Because it is so light."

"Miss Middleton, I could sit down to be instructed, old as I am. When
women beat us, I verily believe we are the most beaten dogs in
existence. You like the theatre?"

"Ours?"

"Acting, then."

"Good acting, of course."

"May I venture to say you would act admirably?"

"The venture is bold, for I have never tried."

"Let me see; there is Miss Dale and Mr. Whitford; you and I; sufficient
for a two-act piece. THE IRISHMAN IN SPAIN would do." He bent to touch
the grass as she stepped on it. "The lawn is wet."

She signified that she had no dread of wet, and said: "English women
afraid of the weather might as well be shut up."

De Craye proceeded: "Patrick O'Neill passes over from Hibernia to
Iberia, a disinherited son of a father in the claws of the lawyers,
with a letter of introduction to Don Beltran d'Arragon, a Grandee of
the First Class, who has a daughter Dona Seraphina (Miss Middleton),
the proudest beauty of her day, in the custody of a duenna (Miss Dale),
and plighted to Don Fernan, of the Guzman family (Mr. Whitford). There
you have our dramatis personae."

"You are Patrick?"

"Patrick himself. And I lose my letter, and I stand on the Prado of
Madrid with the last portrait of Britannia in the palm of my hand, and
crying in the purest brogue of my native land: 'It's all through
dropping a letter I'm here in Iberia instead of Hibernia, worse luck to
the spelling!'"

"But Patrick will be sure to aspirate the initial letter of Hibernia."

"That is clever criticism, upon my word, Miss Middleton! So he would.
And there we have two letters dropped. But he'd do it in a groan, so
that it wouldn't count for more than a ghost of one; and everything
goes on the stage, since it's only the laugh we want on the brink of
the action. Besides you are to suppose the performance before a London
audience, who have a native opposite to the aspirate and wouldn't bear
to hear him spoil a joke, as if he were a lord or a constable. It's an
instinct of the English democracy. So with my bit of coin turning over
and over in an undecided way, whether it shall commit suicide to supply
me a supper, I behold a pair of Spanish eyes like violet lightning in
the black heavens of that favoured clime. Won't you have violet?"

"Violet forbids my impersonation."

"But the lustre on black is dark violet blue."

"You remind me that I have no pretension to black."

Colonel De Craye permitted himself to take a flitting gaze at Miss
Middleton's eyes. "Chestnut," he said. "Well, and Spain is the land of
chestnuts."

"Then it follows that I am a daughter of Spain."

"Clearly."

"Logically?"

"By positive deduction."

"And do I behold Patrick?"

"As one looks upon a beast of burden."

"Oh!"

Miss Middleton's exclamation was louder than the matter of the dialogue
seemed to require. She caught her hands up.

In the line of the outer extremity of the rhododendron, screened from
the house windows, young Crossjay lay at his length, with his head
resting on a doubled arm, and his ivy-wreathed hat on his cheek, just
where she had left him, commanding him to stay. Half-way toward him up
the lawn, she saw the poor boy, and the spur of that pitiful sight set
her gliding swiftly. Colonel De Craye followed, pulling an end of his
moustache.

Crossjay jumped to his feet.

"My dear, dear Crossjay!" she addressed him and reproached him. "And
how hungry you must be! And you must be drenched! This is really too
had."

"You told me to wait here," said Crossjay, in shy self-defence.

"I did, and you should not have done it, foolish boy! I told him to
wait for me here before luncheon, Colonel De Craye, and the foolish,
foolish boy!--he has had nothing to eat, and he must have been wet
through two or three times:--because I did not come to him!"

"Quite right. And the lava might overflow him and take the mould of
him, like the sentinel at Pompeii, if he's of the true stuff."

"He may have caught cold, he may have a fever."

"He was under your orders to stay."

"I know, and I cannot forgive myself. Run in, Crossjay, and change your
clothes. Oh, run, run to Mrs. Montague, and get her to give you a warm
bath, and tell her from me to prepare some dinner for you. And change
every garment you have. This is unpardonable of me. I said--'not for
politics!'--I begin to think I have not a head for anything. But could
it be imagined that Crossjay would not move for the dinner-bell!
through all that rain! I forgot you, Crossjay. I am so sorry; so sorry!
You shall make me pay any forfeit you like. Remember, I am deep, deep
in your debt. And now let me see you run fast. You shall come in to
dessert this evening."

Crossjay did not run. He touched her hand.

"You said something?"

"What did I say, Crossjay?"

"You promised."

"What did I promise?"

"Something."

"Name it, my dear boy."

He mumbled, ". . . kiss me."

Clara plumped down on him, enveloped him and kissed him.

The affectionately remorseful impulse was too quick for a conventional
note of admonition to arrest her from paying that portion of her debt.
When she had sped him off to Mrs Montague, she was in a blush.

"Dear, dear Crossjay!" she said, sighing.

"Yes, he's a good lad," remarked the colonel. "The fellow may well be a
faithful soldier and stick to his post, if he receives promise of such
a solde. He is a great favourite with you."

"He is. You will do him a service by persuading Willoughby to send him
to one of those men who get boys through their naval examination. And,
Colonel De Craye, will you be kind enough to ask at the dinner-table
that Crossjay may come in to dessert?"

"Certainly," said he, wondering.

"And will you look after him while you are here? See that no one spoils
him. If you could get him away before you leave, it would be much to
his advantage. He is born for the navy and should be preparing to enter
it now."

"Certainly, certainly," said De Craye, wondering more.

"I thank you in advance."

"Shall I not be usurping . . ."

"No, we leave to-morrow."

"For a day?"

"For longer."

"Two?"

"It will be longer."

"A week? I shall not see you again?"

"I fear not."

Colonel De Craye controlled his astonishment; he smothered a sensation
of veritable pain, and amiably said: "I feel a blow, but I am sure you
would not willingly strike. We are all involved in the regrets."

Miss Middleton spoke of having to see Mrs. Montague, the housekeeper,
with reference to the bath for Crossjay, and stepped off the grass. He
bowed, watched her a moment, and for parallel reasons, running close
enough to hit one mark, he commiserated his friend Willoughby. The
winning or the losing of that young lady struck him as equally
lamentable for Willoughby.



CHAPTER XX

AN AGED AND A GREAT WINE

THE leisurely promenade up and down the lawn with ladies and
deferential gentlemen, in anticipation of the dinner-bell, was Dr.
Middleton's evening pleasure. He walked as one who had formerly danced
(in Apollo's time and the young god Cupid's), elastic on the muscles of
the calf and foot, bearing his broad iron-grey head in grand elevation.
The hard labour of the day approved the cooling exercise and the
crowning refreshments of French cookery and wines of known vintages. He
was happy at that hour in dispensing wisdom or nugae to his hearers,
like the Western sun whose habit it is, when he is fairly treated, to
break out in quiet splendours, which by no means exhaust his treasury.
Blessed indeed above his fellows, by the height of the bow-winged bird
in a fair weather sunset sky above the pecking sparrow, is he that ever
in the recurrent evening of his day sees the best of it ahead and soon
to come. He has the rich reward of a youth and manhood of virtuous
living. Dr. Middleton misdoubted the future as well as the past of the
man who did not, in becoming gravity, exult to dine. That man he
deemed unfit for this world and the next.

An example of the good fruit of temperance, he had a comfortable pride
in his digestion, and his political sentiments were attuned by his
veneration of the Powers rewarding virtue. We must have a stable world
where this is to be done.

The Rev. Doctor was a fine old picture; a specimen of art peculiarly
English; combining in himself piety and epicurism, learning and
gentlemanliness, with good room for each and a seat at one another's
table: for the rest, a strong man, an athlete in his youth, a keen
reader of facts and no reader of persons, genial, a giant at a task, a
steady worker besides, but easily discomposed. He loved his daughter
and he feared her. However much he liked her character, the dread of
her sex and age was constantly present to warn him that he was not tied
to perfect sanity while the damsel Clara remained unmarried. Her mother
had been an amiable woman, of the poetical temperament nevertheless,
too enthusiastic, imaginative, impulsive, for the repose of a sober
scholar; an admirable woman, still, as you see, a woman, a fire-work.
The girl resembled her. Why should she wish to run away from Patterne
Hall for a single hour? Simply because she was of the sex born mutable
and explosive. A husband was her proper custodian, justly relieving a
father. With demagogues abroad and daughters at home, philosophy is
needed for us to keep erect. Let the girl be Cicero's Tullia: well, she
dies! The choicest of them will furnish us examples of a strange
perversity.

Miss Dale was beside Dr. Middleton. Clara came to them and took the
other side.

"I was telling Miss Dale that the signal for your subjection is my
enfranchisement," he said to her, sighing and smiling. "We know the
date. The date of an event to come certifies to it as a fact to be
counted on."

"Are you anxious to lose me?" Clara faltered.

"My dear, you have planted me on a field where I am to expect the
trumpet, and when it blows I shall be quit of my nerves, no more."

Clara found nothing to seize on for a reply in these words. She thought
upon the silence of Laetitia.

Sir Willoughby advanced, appearing in a cordial mood.

"I need not ask you whether you are better," he said to Clara, sparkled
to Laetitia, and raised a key to the level of Dr. Middleton's breast,
remarking, "I am going down to my inner cellar."

"An inner cellar!" exclaimed the doctor.

"Sacred from the butler. It is interdicted to Stoneman. Shall I offer
myself as guide to you? My cellars are worth a visit."

"Cellars are not catacombs. They are, if rightly constructed, rightly
considered, cloisters, where the bottle meditates on joys to bestow,
not on dust misused! Have you anything great?"

"A wine aged ninety."

"Is it associated with your pedigree that you pronounce the age with
such assurance?"

"My grandfather inherited it."

"Your grandfather, Sir Willoughby, had meritorious offspring, not to
speak of generous progenitors. What would have happened had it fallen
into the female line! I shall be glad to accompany you. Port?
Hermitage?"

"Port."

"Ah! We are in England!"

"There will just be time," said Sir Willoughby, inducing Dr. Middleton
to step out.

A chirrup was in the reverend doctor's tone: "Hocks, too, have
compassed age. I have tasted senior Hocks. Their flavours are as a
brook of many voices; they have depth also. Senatorial Port! we say. We
cannot say that of any other wine. Port is deep-sea deep. It is in its
flavour deep; mark the difference. It is like a classic tragedy,
organic in conception. An ancient Hermitage has the light of the
antique; the merit that it can grow to an extreme old age; a merit.
Neither of Hermitage nor of Hock can you say that it is the blood of
those long years, retaining the strength of youth with the wisdom of
age. To Port for that! Port is our noblest legacy! Observe, I do not
compare the wines; I distinguish the qualities. Let them live together
for our enrichment; they are not rivals like the Idaean Three. Were
they rivals, a fourth would challenge them. Burgundy has great genius.
It does wonders within its period; it does all except to keep up in the
race; it is short-lived. An aged Burgundy runs with a beardless Port. I
cherish the fancy that Port speaks the sentences of wisdom, Burgundy
sings the inspired Ode. Or put it, that Port is the Homeric hexameter,
Burgundy the pindaric dithyramb. What do you say?"

"The comparison is excellent, sir."

"The distinction, you would remark. Pindar astounds. But his elder
brings us the more sustaining cup. One is a fountain of prodigious
ascent. One is the unsounded purple sea of marching billows."

"A very fine distinction."

"I conceive you to be now commending the similes. They pertain to the
time of the first critics of those poets. Touch the Greeks, and you can
nothing new; all has been said: 'Graiis . . . praeter, laudem nullius
avaris.' Genius dedicated to Fame is immortal. We, sir, dedicate genius
to the cloacaline floods. We do not address the unforgetting gods, but
the popular stomach."

Sir Willoughby was patient. He was about as accordantly coupled with
Dr. Middleton in discourse as a drum duetting with a bass-viol; and
when he struck in he received correction from the
paedagogue-instrument. If he thumped affirmative or negative, he was
wrong. However, he knew scholars to be an unmannered species; and the
doctor's learnedness would be a subject to dilate on.

In the cellar, it was the turn for the drum. Dr. Middleton was
tongue-tied there. Sir Willoughby gave the history of his wine in heads
of chapters; whence it came to the family originally, and how it had
come down to him in the quantity to be seen. "Curiously, my
grandfather, who inherited it, was a water-drinker. My father died
early."

"Indeed! Dear me!" the doctor ejaculated in astonishment and
condolence. The former glanced at the contrariety of man, the latter
embraced his melancholy destiny.

He was impressed with respect for the family. This cool vaulted cellar,
and the central square block, or enceinte, where the thick darkness was
not penetrated by the intruding lamp, but rather took it as an eye,
bore witness to forethoughtful practical solidity in the man who had
built the house on such foundations. A house having a great wine stored
below lives in our imaginations as a joyful house, fast and splendidly
rooted in the soil. And imagination has a place for the heir of the
house. His grandfather a water-drinker, his father dying early, present
circumstances to us arguing predestination to an illustrious heirship
and career. Dr Middleton's musings were coloured by the friendly
vision of glasses of the great wine; his mind was festive; it pleased
him, and he chose to indulge in his whimsical, robustious,
grandiose-airy style of thinking: from which the festive mind will
sometimes take a certain print that we cannot obliterate immediately.
Expectation is grateful, you know; in the mood of gratitude we are
waxen. And he was a self-humouring gentleman.

He liked Sir Willoughby's tone in ordering the servant at his heels to
take up "those two bottles": it prescribed, without overdoing it, a
proper amount of caution, and it named an agreeable number.

Watching the man's hand keenly, he said:

"But here is the misfortune of a thing super-excellent:--not more than
one in twenty will do it justice."

Sir Willoughby replied: "Very true, sir; and I think we may pass over
the nineteen."

"Women, for example; and most men."

"This wine would be a scaled book to them."

"I believe it would. It would be a grievous waste."

"Vernon is a claret man; and so is Horace De Craye. They are both below
the mark of this wine. They will join the ladies. Perhaps you and I,
sir, might remain together."

"With the utmost good-will on my part."

"I am anxious for your verdict, sir."

"You shall have it, sir, and not out of harmony with the chorus
preceding me, I can predict. Cool, not frigid." Dr. Middleton summed
the attributes of the cellar on quitting it. "North side and South. No
musty damp. A pure air. Everything requisite. One might lie down one's
self and keep sweet here."

Of all our venerable British of the two Isles professing a suckling
attachment to an ancient port-wine, lawyer, doctor, squire, rosy
admiral, city merchant, the classic scholar is he whose blood is most
nuptial to the webbed bottle. The reason must be, that he is full of
the old poets. He has their spirit to sing with, and the best that Time
has done on earth to feed it. He may also perceive a resemblance in the
wine to the studious mind, which is the obverse of our mortality, and
throws off acids and crusty particles in the piling of the years, until
it is fulgent by clarity. Port hymns to his conservatism. It is
magical: at one sip he is off swimming in the purple flood of the
ever-youthful antique.

By comparison, then, the enjoyment of others is brutish; they have not
the soul for it; but he is worthy of the wine, as are poets of Beauty.
In truth, these should be severally apportioned to them, scholar and
poet, as his own good thing. Let it be so.

Meanwhile Dr. Middleton sipped.

After the departure of the ladies, Sir Willoughby had practised a
studied curtness upon Vernon and Horace.

"You drink claret," he remarked to them, passing it round. "Port, I
think, Doctor Middleton? The wine before you may serve for a preface.
We shall have your wine in five minutes."

The claret jug empty, Sir Willoughby offered to send for more. De Craye
was languid over the question. Vernon rose from the table.

"We have a bottle of Doctor Middleton's port coming in," Willoughby
said to him.

"Mine, you call it?" cried the doctor.

"It's a royal wine, that won't suffer sharing," said Vernon.

"We'll be with you, if you go into the billiard-room, Vernon."

"I shall hurry my drinking of good wine for no man," said the Rev.
Doctor.

"Horace?"

"I'm beneath it, ephemeral, Willoughby. I am going to the ladies."

Vernon and De Craye retired upon the arrival of the wine; and Dr.
Middleton sipped. He sipped and looked at the owner of it.

"Some thirty dozen?" he said.

"Fifty."

The doctor nodded humbly.

"I shall remember, sir," his host addressed him, "whenever I have the
honour of entertaining you, I am cellarer of that wine."

The Rev. Doctor set down his glass. "You have, sir, in some sense, an
enviable post. It is a responsible one, if that be a blessing. On you
it devolves to retard the day of the last dozen."

"Your opinion of the wine is favourable, sir?"

"I will say this:--shallow souls run to rhapsody:--I will say, that I
am consoled for not having lived ninety years back, or at any period
but the present, by this one glass of your ancestral wine."

"I am careful of it," Sir Willoughby said, modestly; "still its natural
destination is to those who can appreciate it. You do, sir."

"Still my good friend, still! It is a charge; it is a possession, but
part in trusteeship. Though we cannot declare it an entailed estate,
our consciences are in some sort pledged that it shall be a succession
not too considerably diminished."

"You will not object to drink it, sir, to the health of your
grandchildren. And may you live to toast them in it on their
marriage-day!"

"You colour the idea of a prolonged existence in seductive hues. Ha!
It is a wine for Tithonus. This wine would speed him to the rosy
Morning--aha!"

"I will undertake to sit you through it up to morning," said Sir
Willoughby, innocent of the Bacchic nuptiality of the allusion.

Dr Middleton eyed the decanter. There is a grief in gladness, for a
premonition of our mortal state. The amount of wine in the decanter did
not promise to sustain the starry roof of night and greet the dawn.
"Old wine, my friend, denies us the full bottle!"

"Another bottle is to follow."

"No!"

"It is ordered."

"I protest."

"It is uncorked."

"I entreat."

"It is decanted."

"I submit. But, mark, it must be honest partnership. You are my worthy
host, sir, on that stipulation. Note the superiority of wine over
Venus!--I may say, the magnanimity of wine; our jealousy turns on him
that will not share! But the corks, Willoughby. The corks excite my
amazement."

"The corking is examined at regular intervals. I remember the
occurrence in my father's time. I have seen to it once."

"It must be perilous as an operation for tracheotomy; which I should
assume it to resemble in surgical skill and firmness of hand, not to
mention the imminent gasp of the patient."

A fresh decanter was placed before the doctor.

He said: "I have but a girl to give!" He was melted.

Sir Willoughby replied: "I take her for the highest prize this world
affords."

"I have beaten some small stock of Latin into her head, and a note of
Greek. She contains a savour of the classics. I hoped once . . . But
she is a girl. The nymph of the woods is in her. Still she will bring
you her flower-cup of Hippocrene. She has that aristocracy--the
noblest. She is fair; a Beauty, some have said, who judge not by lines.
Fair to me, Willoughby! She is my sky. There were applicants. In Italy
she was besought of me. She has no history. You are the first heading
of the chapter. With you she will have her one tale, as it should be.
'Mulier tum bene olet', you know. Most fragrant she that smells of
naught. She goes to you from me, from me alone, from her father to her
husband. 'Ut flos in septis secretus nascitur hortis.'" He murmured on
the lines to, "'Sic virgo, dum . . .' I shall feel the parting. She
goes to one who will have my pride in her, and more. I will add, who
will be envied. Mr. Whitford must write you a Carmen Nuptiale."

The heart of the unfortunate gentleman listening to Dr. Middleton set
in for irregular leaps. His offended temper broke away from the image
of Clara, revealing her as he had seen her in the morning beside Horace
De Craye, distressingly sweet; sweet with the breezy radiance of an
English soft-breathing day; sweet with sharpness of young sap. Her
eyes, her lips, her fluttering dress that played happy mother across
her bosom, giving peeps of the veiled twins; and her laughter, her slim
figure, peerless carriage, all her terrible sweetness touched his wound
to the smarting quick.

Her wish to be free of him was his anguish. In his pain he thought
sincerely. When the pain was easier he muffled himself in the idea of
her jealousy of Laetitia Dale, and deemed the wish a fiction. But she
had expressed it. That was the wound he sought to comfort; for the
double reason, that he could love her better after punishing her, and
that to meditate on doing so masked the fear of losing her--the dread
abyss she had succeeded in forcing his nature to shudder at as a giddy
edge possibly near, in spite of his arts of self-defence.

"What I shall do to-morrow evening!" he exclaimed. "I do not care to
fling a bottle to Colonel De Craye and Vernon. I cannot open one for
myself. To sit with the ladies will be sitting in the cold for me. When
do you bring me back my bride, sir?"

"My dear Willoughby!" The Rev. Doctor puffed, composed himself, and
sipped. "The expedition is an absurdity. I am unable to see the aim of
it. She had a headache, vapours. They are over, and she will show a
return of good sense. I have ever maintained that nonsense is not to be
encouraged in girls. I can put my foot on it. My arrangements are for
staying here a further ten days, in the terms of your hospitable
invitation. And I stay."

"I applaud your resolution, sir. Will you prove firm?"

"I am never false to my engagement, Willoughby."

"Not under pressure?"

"Under no pressure."

"Persuasion, I should have said."

"Certainly not. The weakness is in the yielding, either to persuasion
or to pressure. The latter brings weight to bear on us; the former
blows at our want of it."

"You gratify me, Doctor Middleton, and relieve me."

"I cordially dislike a breach in good habits, Willoughby. But I do
remember--was I wrong?--informing Clara that you appeared light-hearted
in regard to a departure, or gap in a visit, that was not, I must
confess, to my liking."

"Simply, my dear doctor, your pleasure was my pleasure; but make my
pleasure yours, and you remain to crack many a bottle with your
son-in-law."

"Excellently said. You have a courtly speech, Willoughby. I can imagine
you to conduct a lovers' quarrel with a politeness to read a lesson to
well-bred damsels. Aha?"

"Spare me the futility of the quarrel."

"All's well?"

"Clara," replied Sir Willoughby, in dramatic epigram, "is perfection."

"I rejoice," the Rev. Doctor responded; taught thus to understand that
the lovers' quarrel between his daughter and his host was at an end.

He left the table a little after eleven o'clock. A short dialogue
ensued upon the subject of the ladies. They must have gone to bed?
Why, yes; of course they must. It is good that they should go to bed
early to preserve their complexions for us. Ladies are creation's
glory, but they are anti-climax, following a wine of a century old.
They are anti-climax, recoil, cross-current; morally, they are
repentance, penance; imagerially, the frozen North on the young brown
buds bursting to green. What know they of a critic in the palate, and a
frame all revelry! And mark you, revelry in sobriety, containment in
exultation; classic revelry. Can they, dear though they be to us, light
up candelabras in the brain, to illuminate all history and solve the
secret of the destiny of man? They cannot; they cannot sympathize with
them that can. So therefore this division is between us; yet are we not
turbaned Orientals, nor are they inmates of the harem. We are not
Moslem. Be assured of it in the contemplation of the table's decanter.

Dr Middleton said: "Then I go straight to bed."

"I will conduct you to your door, sir," said his host.

The piano was heard. Dr. Middleton laid his hand on the banisters, and
remarked: "The ladies must have gone to bed?"

Vernon came out of the library and was hailed, "Fellow-student!"

He waved a good-night to the Doctor, and said to Willoughby: "The
ladies are in the drawing-room."

"I am on my way upstairs," was the reply.

"Solitude and sleep, after such a wine as that; and forefend us human
society!" the Doctor shouted. "But, Willoughby!"

"Sir."

"One to-morrow."

"You dispose of the cellar, sir."

"I am fitter to drive the horses of the sun. I would rigidly counsel,
one, and no more. We have made a breach in the fiftieth dozen. Daily
one will preserve us from having to name the fortieth quite so
unseasonably. The couple of bottles per diem prognosticates
disintegration, with its accompanying recklessness. Constitutionally,
let me add, I bear three. I speak for posterity."

During Dr. Middleton's allocution the ladies issued from the
drawing-room, Clara foremost, for she had heard her father's voice, and
desired to ask him this in reference to their departure: "Papa, will
you tell me the hour to-morrow?"

She ran up the stairs to kiss him, saying again: "When will you be
ready to-morrow morning?"

Dr Middleton announced a stoutly deliberative mind in the bugle-notes
of a repeated ahem. He bethought him of replying in his doctorial
tongue. Clara's eager face admonished him to brevity: it began to look
starved. Intruding on his vision of the houris couched in the inner
cellar to be the reward of valiant men, it annoyed him. His brows
joined. He said: "I shall not be ready to-morrow morning."

"In the afternoon?"

"Nor in the afternoon."

"When?"

"My dear, I am ready for bed at this moment, and know of no other
readiness. Ladies," he bowed to the group in the hall below him, "may
fair dreams pay court to you this night!"

Sir Willoughby had hastily descended and shaken the hands of the
ladies, directed Horace De Craye to the laboratory for a smoking-room,
and returned to Dr. Middleton. Vexed by the scene, uncertain of his
temper if he stayed with Clara, for whom he had arranged that her
disappointment should take place on the morrow, in his absence, he
said: "Good-night, good-night," to her, with due fervour, bending over
her flaccid finger-tips; then offered his arm to the Rev. Doctor.

"Ay, son Willoughby, in friendliness, if you will, though I am a man to
bear my load," the father of the stupefied girl addressed him.
"Candles, I believe, are on the first landing. Good-night, my love.
Clara!"

"Papa!"

"Good-night."

"Oh!" she lifted her breast with the interjection, standing in shame of
the curtained conspiracy and herself, "good night".

Her father wound up the stairs. She stepped down.

"There was an understanding that papa and I should go to London
to-morrow early," she said, unconcernedly, to the ladies, and her voice
was clear, but her face too legible. De Craye was heartily unhappy at
the sight.



CHAPTER XXI

CLARA'S MEDITATIONS

Two were sleepless that night: Miss Middleton and Colonel De Craye.

She was in a fever, lying like stone, with her brain burning. Quick
natures run out to calamity in any little shadow of it flung before.
Terrors of apprehension drive them. They stop not short of the
uttermost when they are on the wings of dread. A frown means tempest, a
wind wreck; to see fire is to be seized by it. When it is the approach
of their loathing that they fear, they are in the tragedy of the
embrace at a breath; and then is the wrestle between themselves and
horror, between themselves and evil, which promises aid; themselves and
weakness, which calls on evil; themselves and the better part of them,
which whispers no beguilement.

The false course she had taken through sophistical cowardice appalled
the girl; she was lost. The advantage taken of it by Willoughby put on
the form of strength, and made her feel abject, reptilious; she was
lost, carried away on the flood of the cataract. He had won her father
for an ally. Strangely, she knew not how, he had succeeded in swaying
her father, who had previously not more than tolerated him. "Son
Willoughby" on her father's lips meant something that scenes and scenes
would have to struggle with, to the out-wearying of her father and
herself. She revolved the "Son Willoughby" through moods of
stupefaction, contempt, revolt, subjection. It meant that she was
vanquished. It meant that her father's esteem for her was forfeited.
She saw him a gigantic image of discomposure.

Her recognition of her cowardly feebleness brought the brood of
fatalism. What was the right of so miserable a creature as she to
excite disturbance, let her fortunes be good or ill? It would be
quieter to float, kinder to everybody. Thank heaven for the chances of
a short life! Once in a net, desperation is graceless. We may be
brutes in our earthly destinies: in our endurance of them we need not
be brutish.

She was now in the luxury of passivity, when we throw our burden on the
Powers above, and do not love them. The need to love them drew her out
of it, that she might strive with the unbearable, and by sheer
striving, even though she were graceless, come to love them humbly. It
is here that the seed of good teaching supports a soul, for the
condition might be mapped, and where kismet whispers us to shut eyes,
and instruction bids us look up, is at a well-marked cross-road of the
contest.

Quick of sensation, but not courageously resolved, she perceived how
blunderingly she had acted. For a punishment, it seemed to her that she
who had not known her mind must learn to conquer her nature, and
submit. She had accepted Willoughby; therefore she accepted him. The
fact became a matter of the past, past debating.

In the abstract this contemplation of circumstances went well. A plain
duty lay in her way. And then a disembodied thought flew round her,
comparing her with Vernon to her discredit. He had for years borne much
that was distasteful to him, for the purpose of studying, and with his
poor income helping the poorer than himself. She dwelt on him in pity
and envy; he had lived in this place, and so must she; and he had not
been dishonoured by his modesty: he had not failed of self-control,
because he had a life within. She was almost imagining she might
imitate him when the clash of a sharp physical thought, "The
difference! the difference!" told her she was woman and never could
submit. Can a woman have an inner life apart from him she is yoked to?
She tried to nestle deep away in herself: in some corner where the
abstract view had comforted her, to flee from thinking as her feminine
blood directed. It was a vain effort. The difference, the cruel fate,
the defencelessness of women, pursued her, strung her to wild horses'
backs, tossed her on savage wastes. In her case duty was shame: hence,
it could not be broadly duty. That intolerable difference proscribed
the word.

But the fire of a brain burning high and kindling everything lighted up
herself against herself.--Was one so volatile as she a person with a
will?--Were they not a multitude of flitting wishes that she took for a
will? Was she, feather-headed that she was, a person to make a stand on
physical pride?--If she could yield her hand without reflection (as she
conceived she had done, from incapacity to conceive herself doing it
reflectively) was she much better than purchaseable stuff that has
nothing to say to the bargain?

Furthermore, said her incandescent reason, she had not suspected such
art of cunning in Willoughby. Then might she not be deceived
altogether--might she not have misread him? Stronger than she had
fancied, might he not be likewise more estimable? The world was
favourable to him; he was prized by his friends.

She reviewed him. It was all in one flash. It was not much less
intentionally favourable than the world's review and that of his
friends, but, beginning with the idea of them, she recollected--heard
Willoughby's voice pronouncing his opinion of his friends and the
world; of Vernon Whitford and Colonel De Craye for example, and of men
and women. An undefined agreement to have the same regard for him as
his friends and the world had, provided that he kept at the same
distance from her, was the termination of this phase, occupying about a
minute in time, and reached through a series of intensely vivid
pictures:--his face, at her petition to be released, lowering behind
them for a background and a comment.

"I cannot! I cannot!" she cried, aloud; and it struck her that her
repulsion was a holy warning. Better be graceless than a loathing wife:
better appear inconsistent. Why should she not appear such as she was?

Why? We answer that question usually in angry reliance on certain
superb qualities, injured fine qualities of ours undiscovered by the
world, not much more than suspected by ourselves, which are still our
fortress, where pride sits at home, solitary and impervious as an
octogenarian conservative. But it is not possible to answer it so when
the brain is rageing like a pine-torch and the devouring illumination
leaves not a spot of our nature covert. The aspect of her weakness was
unrelieved, and frightened her back to her loathing. From her loathing,
as soon as her sensations had quickened to realize it, she was hurled
on her weakness. She was graceless, she was inconsistent, she was
volatile, she was unprincipled, she was worse than a prey to
wickedness--capable of it; she was only waiting to be misled. Nay, the
idea of being misled suffused her with languor; for then the battle
would be over and she a happy weed of the sea no longer suffering those
tugs at the roots, but leaving it to the sea to heave and contend. She
would be like Constantia then: like her in her fortunes: never so
brave, she feared.

Perhaps very like Constantia in her fortunes!

Poor troubled bodies waking up in the night to behold visually the
spectre cast forth from the perplexed machinery inside them, stare at
it for a space, till touching consciousness they dive down under the
sheets with fish-like alacrity. Clara looked at her thought, and
suddenly headed downward in a crimson gulf.

She must have obtained absolution, or else it was oblivion, below.
Soon after the plunge her first object of meditation was Colonel De
Craye. She thought of him calmly: he seemed a refuge. He was very nice,
he was a holiday character. His lithe figure, neat firm footing of the
stag, swift intelligent expression, and his ready frolicsomeness,
pleasant humour, cordial temper, and his Irishry, whereon he was at
liberty to play, as on the emblem harp of the Isle, were soothing to
think of. The suspicion that she tricked herself with this calm
observation of him was dismissed. Issuing out of torture, her young
nature eluded the irradiating brain in search of refreshment, and she
luxuriated at a feast in considering him--shower on a parched land that
he was! He spread new air abroad. She had no reason to suppose he was
not a good man: she could securely think of him. Besides he was bound
by his prospective office in support of his friend Willoughby to be
quite harmless. And besides (you are not to expect logical sequences)
the showery refreshment in thinking of him lay in the sort of assurance
it conveyed, that the more she thought, the less would he be likely to
figure as an obnoxious official--that is, as the man to do by
Willoughby at the altar what her father would, under the supposition,
be doing by her. Her mind reposed on Colonel De Craye.

His name was Horace. Her father had worked with her at Horace. She knew
most of the Odes and some of the Satires and Epistles of the poet. They
reflected benevolent beams on the gentleman of the poet's name. He too
was vivacious, had fun, common sense, elegance; loved rusticity, he
said, sighed for a country life, fancied retiring to Canada to
cultivate his own domain; "modus agri non ita magnus:" a delight. And
he, too, when in the country, sighed for town. There were strong
features of resemblance. He had hinted in fun at not being rich. "Quae
virtus et quanta sit vivere parvo." But that quotation applied to and
belonged to Vernon Whitford. Even so little disarranged her
meditations.

She would have thought of Vernon, as her instinct of safety prompted,
had not his exactions been excessive. He proposed to help her with
advice only. She was to do everything for herself, do and dare
everything, decide upon everything. He told her flatly that so would
she learn to know her own mind; and flatly, that it was her penance.
She had gained nothing by breaking down and pouring herself out to him.
He would have her bring Willoughby and her father face to face, and be
witness of their interview--herself the theme. What alternative was
there?--obedience to the word she had pledged. He talked of patience,
of self-examination and patience. But all of her--she was all marked
urgent. This house was a cage, and the world--her brain was a cage,
until she could obtain her prospect of freedom.

As for the house, she might leave it; yonder was the dawn.

She went to her window to gaze at the first colour along the grey.
Small satisfaction came of gazing at that or at herself. She shunned
glass and sky. One and the other stamped her as a slave in a frame. It
seemed to her she had been so long in this place that she was fixed
here: it was her world, and to imagine an Alp was like seeking to get
back to childhood. Unless a miracle intervened here she would have to
pass her days. Men are so little chivalrous now that no miracle ever
intervenes. Consequently she was doomed.

She took a pen and began a letter to a dear friend, Lucy Darleton, a
promised bridesmaid, bidding her countermand orders for her bridal
dress, and purposing a tour in Switzerland. She wrote of the mountain
country with real abandonment to imagination. It became a visioned
loophole of escape. She rose and clasped a shawl over her night-dress
to ward off chillness, and sitting to the table again, could not
produce a word. The lines she had written were condemned: they were
ludicrously inefficient. The letter was torn to pieces. She stood very
clearly doomed.

After a fall of tears, upon looking at the scraps, she dressed herself,
and sat by the window and watched the blackbird on the lawn as he
hopped from shafts of dewy sunlight to the long-stretched dewy
tree-shadows, considering in her mind that dark dews are more
meaningful than bright, the beauty of the dews of woods more sweet than
meadow-dews. It signified only that she was quieter. She had gone
through her crisis in the anticipation of it. That is how quick natures
will often be cold and hard, or not much moved, when the positive
crisis arrives, and why it is that they are prepared for astonishing
leaps over the gradations which should render their conduct
comprehensible to us, if not excuseable. She watched the blackbird
throw up his head stiffly, and peck to right and left, dangling the
worm on each side his orange beak. Specklebreasted thrushes were at
work, and a wagtail that ran as with Clara's own rapid little steps.
Thrush and blackbird flew to the nest. They had wings. The lovely
morning breathed of sweet earth into her open window, and made it
painful, in the dense twitter, chirp, cheep, and song of the air, to
resist the innocent intoxication. O to love! was not said by her, but
if she had sung, as her nature prompted, it would have been. Her war
with Willoughby sprang of a desire to love repelled by distaste. Her
cry for freedom was a cry to be free to love: she discovered it, half
shuddering: to love, oh! no--no shape of man, nor impalpable nature
either: but to love unselfishness, and helpfulness, and planted
strength in something. Then, loving and being loved a little, what
strength would be hers! She could utter all the words needed to
Willoughby and to her father, locked in her love: walking in this
world, living in that.

Previously she had cried, despairing: If I were loved! Jealousy of
Constantia's happiness, envy of her escape, ruled her then: and she
remembered the cry, though not perfectly her plain-speaking to herself:
she chose to think she had meant: If Willoughby were capable of truly
loving! For now the fire of her brain had sunk, and refuges and
subterfuges were round about it. The thought of personal love was
encouraged, she chose to think, for the sake of the strength it lent
her to carve her way to freedom. She had just before felt rather the
reverse, but she could not exist with that feeling; and it was true
that freedom was not so indistinct in her fancy as the idea of love.

Were men, when they were known, like him she knew too well?

The arch-tempter's question to her was there.

She put it away. Wherever she turned it stood observing her. She knew
so much of one man, nothing of the rest: naturally she was curious.
Vernon might be sworn to be unlike. But he was exceptional. What of the
other in the house?

Maidens are commonly reduced to read the masters of their destinies by
their instincts; and when these have been edged by over-activity they
must hoodwink their maidenliness to suffer themselves to read; and then
they must dupe their minds, else men would soon see they were gifted to
discern. Total ignorance being their pledge of purity to men, they have
to expunge the writing of their perceptives on the tablets of the
brain: they have to know not when they do know. The instinct of seeking
to know, crossed by the task of blotting knowledge out, creates that
conflict of the natural with the artificial creature to which their
ultimately revealed double-face, complained of by ever-dissatisfied
men, is owing. Wonder in no degree that they indulge a craving to be
fools, or that many of them act the character. Jeer at them as little
for not showing growth. You have reared them to this pitch, and at this
pitch they have partly civilized you. Supposing you to want it done
wholly, you must yield just as many points in your requisitions as are
needed to let the wits of young women reap their due harvest and be of
good use to their souls. You will then have a fair battle, a braver,
with better results.

Clara's inner eye traversed Colonel De Craye at a shot.

She had immediately to blot out the vision of Captain Oxford in him,
the revelation of his laughing contempt for Willoughby, the view of
mercurial principles, the scribbled histories of light love-passages.

She blotted it out, kept it from her mind: so she knew him, knew him to
be a sweeter and a variable Willoughby, a generous kind of Willoughby,
a Willoughby-butterfly, without having the free mind to summarize him
and picture him for a warning. Scattered features of him, such as the
instincts call up, were not sufficiently impressive. Besides, the
clouded mind was opposed to her receiving impressions.

Young Crossjay's voice in the still morning air came to her cars. The
dear guileless chatter of the boy's voice. Why, assuredly it was young
Crossjay who was the man she loved. And he loved her. And he was going
to be an unselfish, sustaining, true, strong man, the man she longed
for, for anchorage. Oh, the dear voice! woodpecker and thrush in one.
He never ceased to chatter to Vernon Whitford walking beside him with a
swinging stride off to the lake for their morning swim. Happy couple!
The morning gave them both a freshness and innocence above human. They
seemed to Clara made of morning air and clear lake water. Crossjay's
voice ran up and down a diatonic scale with here and there a query in
semitone and a laugh on a ringing note. She wondered what he could have
to talk of so incessantly, and imagined all the dialogue. He prattled
of his yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow, which did not imply past and
future, but his vivid present. She felt like one vainly trying to fly
in hearing him; she felt old. The consolation she arrived at was to
feel maternal. She wished to hug the boy.

Trot and stride, Crossjay and Vernon entered the park, careless about
wet grass, not once looking at the house. Crossjay ranged ahead and
picked flowers, bounding back to show them. Clara's heart beat at a
fancy that her name was mentioned. If those flowers were for her she
would prize them.

The two bathers dipped over an undulation.

Her loss of them rattled her chains.

Deeply dwelling on their troubles has the effect upon the young of
helping to forgetfulness; for they cannot think without imagining,
their imaginations are saturated with their Pleasures, and the
collision, though they are unable to exchange sad for sweet, distills
an opiate.

"Am I solemnly engaged?" she asked herself. She seemed to be awakening.

She glanced at her bed, where she had passed the night of ineffectual
moaning, and out on the high wave of grass, where Crossjay and his good
friend had vanished.

Was the struggle all to be gone over again?

Little by little her intelligence of her actual position crept up to
submerge her heart.

"I am in his house!" she said. It resembled a discovery, so strangely
had her opiate and power of dreaming wrought through her tortures. She
said it gasping. She was in his house, his guest, his betrothed, sworn
to him. The fact stood out cut in steel on the pitiless daylight.

That consideration drove her to be an early wanderer in the wake of
Crossjay.

Her station was among the beeches on the flank of the boy's return; and
while waiting there the novelty of her waiting to waylay anyone--she
who had played the contrary part!--told her more than it pleased her to
think. Yet she could admit that she did desire to speak with Vernon, as
with a counsellor, harsh and curt, but wholesome.

The bathers reappeared on the grass-ridge, racing and flapping wet
towels.

Some one hailed them. A sound of the galloping hoof drew her attention
to the avenue. She saw Willoughby dash across the park level, and
dropping a word to Vernon, ride away. Then she allowed herself to be
seen.

Crossjay shouted. Willoughby turned his head, but not his horse's head.
The boy sprang up to Clara. He had swum across the lake and back; he
had raced Mr. Whitford--and beaten him! How he wished Miss Middleton
had been able to be one of them!

Clara listened to him enviously. Her thought was: We women are nailed
to our sex!

She said: "And you have just been talking to Sir Willoughby."

Crossjay drew himself up to give an imitation of the baronet's
hand-moving in adieu.

He would not have done that had he not smelled sympathy with the
performance.

She declined to smile. Crossjay repeated it, and laughed. He made a
broader exhibition of it to Vernon approaching: "I say. Mr. Whitford,
who's this?"

Vernon doubled to catch him. Crossjay fled and resumed his magnificent
air in the distance.

"Good-morning, Miss Middleton; you are out early," said Vernon, rather
pale and stringy from his cold swim, and rather hard-eyed with the
sharp exercise following it.

She had expected some of the kindness she wanted to reject, for he
could speak very kindly, and she regarded him as her doctor of
medicine, who would at least present the futile drug.

"Good morning," she replied.

"Willoughby will not be home till the evening."

"You could not have had a finer morning for your bath."

"No."

"I will walk as fast as you like."

"I'm perfectly warm."

"But you prefer fast walking."

"Out."

"Ah! yes, that I understand. The walk back! Why is Willoughby away
to-day?"

"He has business."

After several steps she said: "He makes very sure of papa."

"Not without reason, you will find," said Vernon.

"Can it be? I am bewildered. I had papa's promise."

"To leave the Hall for a day or two."

"It would have been . . ."

"Possibly. But other heads are at work as well as yours. If you had
been in earnest about it you would have taken your father into your
confidence at once. That was the course I ventured to propose, on the
supposition."

"In earnest! I cannot imagine that you doubt it. I wished to spare
him."

"This is a case in which he can't be spared."

"If I had been bound to any other! I did not know then who held me a
prisoner. I thought I had only to speak to him sincerely."

"Not many men would give up their prize for a word, Willoughby the last
of any."

"Prize" rang through her thrillingly from Vernon's mouth, and soothed
her degradation.

She would have liked to protest that she was very little of a prize; a
poor prize; not one at all in general estimation; only one to a man
reckoning his property; no prize in the true sense.

The importunity of pain saved her.

"Does he think I can change again? Am I treated as something won in a
lottery? To stay here is indeed more than I can bear. And if he is
calculating--Mr. Whitford, if he calculates on another change, his
plotting to keep me here is inconsiderate, not very wise. Changes may
occur in absence."

"Wise or not, he has the right to scheme his best to keep you."

She looked on Vernon with a shade of wondering reproach.

"Why? What right?"

"The right you admit when you ask him to release you. He has the right
to think you deluded; and to think you may come to a better mood if you
remain--a mood more agreeable to him, I mean. He has that right
absolutely. You are bound to remember also that you stand in the wrong.
You confess it when you appeal to his generosity. And every man has the
right to retain a treasure in his hand if he can. Look straight at
these facts."

"You expect me to be all reason!"

"Try to be. It's the way to learn whether you are really in earnest."

"I will try. It will drive me to worse!"

"Try honestly. What is wisest now is, in my opinion, for you to resolve
to stay. I speak in the character of the person you sketched for
yourself as requiring. Well, then, a friend repeats the same advice.
You might have gone with your father: now you will only disturb him and
annoy him. The chances are he will refuse to go."

"Are women ever so changeable as men, then? Papa consented; he agreed;
he had some of my feeling; I saw it. That was yesterday. And at night!
He spoke to each of us at night in a different tone from usual. With me
he was hardly affectionate. But when you advise me to stay, Mr.
Whitford, you do not perhaps reflect that it would be at the sacrifice
of all candour."

"Regard it as a probational term."

"It has gone too far with me."

"Take the matter into the head: try the case there."

"Are you not counselling me as if I were a woman of intellect?"

The crystal ring in her voice told him that tears were near to flowing.

He shuddered slightly. "You have intellect," he said, nodded, and
crossed the lawn, leaving her. He had to dress.

She was not permitted to feel lonely, for she was immediately joined by
Colonel De Craye.



CHAPTER XXII

THE RIDE

Crossjay darted up to her a nose ahead of the colonel.

"I say, Miss Middleton, we're to have the whole day to ourselves, after
morning lessons. Will you come and fish with me and see me
bird's-nest?"

"Not for the satisfaction of beholding another cracked crown, my son,"
the colonel interposed: and bowing to Clara: "Miss Middleton is handed
over to my exclusive charge for the day, with her consent?"

"I scarcely know," said she, consulting a sensation of languor that
seemed to contain some reminiscence. "If I am here. My father's plans
are uncertain. I will speak to him. If I am here, perhaps Crossjay
would like a ride in the afternoon."

"Oh, yes," cried the boy; "out over Bournden, through Mewsey up to
Closharn Beacon, and down on Aspenwell, where there's a common for
racing. And ford the stream!"

"An inducement for you," De Craye said to her.

She smiled and squeezed the boy's hand.

"We won't go without you, Crossjay."

"You don't carry a comb, my man, when you bathe?"

At this remark of the colonel's young Crossjay conceived the appearance
of his matted locks in the eyes of his adorable lady. He gave her one
dear look through his redness, and fled.

"I like that boy," said De Craye.

"I love him," said Clara.

Crossjay's troubled eyelids in his honest young face became a picture
for her.

"After all, Miss Middleton, Willoughby's notions about him are not so
bad, if we consider that you will be in the place of a mother to him."

"I think them bad."

"You are disinclined to calculate the good fortune of the boy in having
more of you on land than he would have in crown and anchor buttons!"

"You have talked of him with Willoughby."

"We had a talk last night."

Of how much? thought she.

"Willoughby returns?" she said.

"He dines here, I know; for he holds the key of the inner cellar, and
Doctor Middleton does him the honour to applaud his wine. Willoughby
was good enough to tell me that he thought I might contribute to amuse
you."

She was brooding in stupefaction on her father and the wine as she
requested Colonel De Craye to persuade Willoughby to take the general
view of Crossjay's future and act on it.

"He seems fond of the boy, too," said De Craye, musingly.

"You speak in doubt?"

"Not at all. But is he not--men are queer fish!--make allowance for
us--a trifle tyrannical, pleasantly, with those he is fond of?"

"If they look right and left?"

It was meant for an interrogation; it was not with the sound of one
that the words dropped. "My dear Crossjay!" she sighed. "I would
willingly pay for him out of my own purse, and I will do so rather than
have him miss his chance. I have not mustered resolution to propose
it."

"I may be mistaken, Miss Middleton. He talked of the boy's fondness of
him."

"He would."

"I suppose he is hardly peculiar in liking to play Pole-star."

"He may not be."

"For the rest, your influence should be all-powerful."

"It is not."

De Craye looked with a wandering eye at the heavens.

"We are having a spell of weather perfectly superb. And the odd thing
is, that whenever we have splendid weather at home we're all for
rushing abroad. I'm booked for a Mediterranean cruise--postponed to
give place to your ceremony."

"That?" she could not control her accent.

"What worthier?"

She was guilty of a pause.

De Craye saved it from an awkward length. "I have written half an essay
on Honeymoons, Miss Middleton."

"Is that the same as a half-written essay, Colonel De Craye?"

"Just the same, with the difference that it's a whole essay written all
on one side."

"On which side?"

"The bachelor's."

"Why does he trouble himself with such topics?"

"To warm himself for being left out in the cold."

"Does he feel envy?"

"He has to confess it."

"He has liberty."

"A commodity he can't tell the value of if there's no one to buy."

"Why should he wish to sell?"

"He's bent on completing his essay."

"To make the reading dull."

"There we touch the key of the subject. For what is to rescue the pair
from a monotony multiplied by two? And so a bachelor's recommendation,
when each has discovered the right sort of person to be dull with,
pushes them from the churchdoor on a round of adventures containing a
spice of peril, if 'tis to be had. Let them be in danger of their lives
the first or second day. A bachelor's loneliness is a private affair of
his own; he hasn't to look into a face to be ashamed of feeling it and
inflicting it at the same time; 'tis his pillow; he can punch it an he
pleases, and turn it over t'other side, if he's for a mighty variation;
there's a dream in it. But our poor couple are staring wide awake. All
their dreaming's done. They've emptied their bottle of elixir, or
broken it; and she has a thirst for the use of the tongue, and he to
yawn with a crony; and they may converse, they're not aware of it, more
than the desert that has drunk a shower. So as soon as possible she's
away to the ladies, and he puts on his Club. That's what your bachelor
sees and would like to spare them; and if he didn't see something of
the sort he'd be off with a noose round his neck, on his knees in the
dew to the morning milkmaid."

"The bachelor is happily warned and on his guard," said Clara,
diverted, as he wished her to be. "Sketch me a few of the adventures
you propose."

"I have a friend who rowed his bride from the Houses of Parliament up
the Thames to the Severn on into North Wales. They shot some pretty
weirs and rapids."

"That was nice."

"They had an infinity of adventures, and the best proof of the benefit
they derived is, that they forgot everything about them except that the
adventures occurred."

"Those two must have returned bright enough to please you."

"They returned, and shone like a wrecker's beacon to the mariner. You
see, Miss Middleton, there was the landscape, and the exercise, and the
occasional bit of danger. I think it's to be recommended. The scene is
always changing, and not too fast; and 'tis not too sublime, like big
mountains, to tire them of their everlasting big Ohs. There's the
difference between going into a howling wind and launching among
zephyrs. They have fresh air and movement, and not in a railway
carriage; they can take in what they look on. And she has the steering
ropes, and that's a wise commencement. And my lord is all day making an
exhibition of his manly strength, bowing before her some sixty to the
minute; and she, to help him, just inclines when she's in the mood. And
they're face to face in the nature of things, and are not under the
obligation of looking the unutterable, because, you see, there's
business in hand; and the boat's just the right sort of third party,
who never interferes, but must be attended to. And they feel they're
labouring together to get along, all in the proper proportion; and
whether he has to labour in life or not, he proves his ability. What do
you think of it, Miss Middleton?"

"I think you have only to propose it, Colonel De Craye."

"And if they capsize, why, 'tis a natural ducking!"

"You forgot the lady's dressing-bag."

"The stain on the metal for a constant reminder of his prowess in
saving it! Well, and there's an alternative to that scheme, and a
finer:--This, then: they read dramatic pieces during courtship, to stop
the saying of things over again till the drum of the car becomes
nothing but a drum to the poor head, and a little before they affix
their signatures to the fatal Registry-book of the vestry, they enter
into an engagement with a body of provincial actors to join the troop
on the day of their nuptials, and away they go in their coach and four,
and she is Lady Kitty Caper for a month, and he Sir Harry Highflyer.
See the honeymoon spinning! The marvel to me is that none of the young
couples do it. They could enjoy the world, see life, amuse the company,
and come back fresh to their own characters, instead of giving
themselves a dose of Africa without a savage to diversify it: an
impression they never get over, I'm told. Many a character of the
happiest auspices has irreparable mischief done it by the ordinary
honeymoon. For my part, I rather lean to the second plan of campaign."

Clara was expected to reply, and she said: "Probably because you are
fond of acting. It would require capacity on both sides."

"Miss Middleton, I would undertake to breathe the enthusiasm for the
stage and the adventure."

"You are recommending it generally."

"Let my gentleman only have a fund of enthusiasm. The lady will kindle.
She always does at a spark."

"If he has not any?"

"Then I'm afraid they must be mortally dull."

She allowed her silence to speak; she knew that it did so too
eloquently, and could not control the personal adumbration she gave to
the one point of light revealed in, "if he has not any". Her figure
seemed immediately to wear a cap and cloak of dulness.

She was full of revolt and anger, she was burning with her situation;
if sensible of shame now at anything that she did, it turned to wrath
and threw the burden on the author of her desperate distress. The hour
for blaming herself had gone by, to be renewed ultimately perhaps in a
season of freedom. She was bereft of her insight within at present, so
blind to herself that, while conscious of an accurate reading of
Willoughby's friend, she thanked him in her heart for seeking simply to
amuse her and slightly succeeding. The afternoon's ride with him and
Crossjay was an agreeable beguilement to her in prospect.

Laetitia came to divide her from Colonel De Craye. Dr. Middleton was
not seen before his appearance at the breakfast-table, where a certain
air of anxiety in his daughter's presence produced the semblance of a
raised map at intervals on his forehead. Few sights on earth are more
deserving of our sympathy than a good man who has a troubled conscience
thrust on him.

The Rev. Doctor's perturbation was observed. The ladies Eleanor and
Isabel, seeing his daughter to be the cause of it, blamed her, and
would have assisted him to escape, but Miss Dale, whom he courted with
that object, was of the opposite faction. She made way for Clara to
lead her father out. He called to Vernon, who merely nodded while
leaving the room by the window with Crossjay.

Half an eye on Dr. Middleton's pathetic exit in captivity sufficed to
tell Colonel De Craye that parties divided the house. At first he
thought how deplorable it would be to lose Miss Middleton for two days
or three: and it struck him that Vernon Whitford and Laetitia Dale were
acting oddly in seconding her, their aim not being discernible. For he
was of the order of gentlemen of the obscurely-clear in mind who have a
predetermined acuteness in their watch upon the human play, and mark
men and women as pieces of a bad game of chess, each pursuing an
interested course. His experience of a section of the world had
educated him--as gallant, frank, and manly a comrade as one could wish
for--up to this point. But he soon abandoned speculations, which may be
compared to a shaking anemometer that will not let the troubled
indicator take station. Reposing on his perceptions and his instincts,
he fixed his attention on the chief persons, only glancing at the
others to establish a postulate, that where there are parties in a
house the most bewitching person present is the origin of them. It is
ever Helen's achievement. Miss Middleton appeared to him bewitching
beyond mortal; sunny in her laughter, shadowy in her smiling; a young
lady shaped for perfect music with a lover.

She was that, and no less, to every man's eye on earth. High breeding
did not freeze her lovely girlishness.--But Willoughby did. This
reflection intervened to blot luxurious picturings of her, and made
itself acceptable by leading him back to several instances of an
evident want of harmony of the pair.

And now (for purely undirected impulse all within us is not, though we
may be eye-bandaged agents under direction) it became necessary for an
honourable gentleman to cast vehement rebukes at the fellow who did not
comprehend the jewel he had won. How could Willoughby behave like so
complete a donkey! De Craye knew him to be in his interior stiff,
strange, exacting: women had talked of him; he had been too much for
one woman--the dashing Constantia: he had worn one woman, sacrificing
far more for him than Constantia, to death. Still, with such a prize as
Clara Middleton, Willoughby's behaviour was past calculating in its
contemptible absurdity. And during courtship! And courtship of that
girl! It was the way of a man ten years after marriage.

The idea drew him to picture her doatingly in her young matronly bloom
ten years after marriage: without a touch of age, matronly wise,
womanly sweet: perhaps with a couple of little ones to love, never
having known the love of a man.

To think of a girl like Clara Middleton never having at
nine-and-twenty, and with two fair children! known the love of a man or
the loving of a man, possibly, became torture to the Colonel.

For a pacification he had to reconsider that she was as yet only
nineteen and unmarried.

But she was engaged, and she was unloved. One might swear to it, that
she was unloved. And she was not a girl to be satisfied with a big
house and a high-nosed husband.

There was a rapid alteration of the sad history of Clara the unloved
matron solaced by two little ones. A childless Clara tragically loving
and beloved flashed across the dark glass of the future.

Either way her fate was cruel.

Some astonishment moved De Craye in the contemplation of the distance
he had stepped in this morass of fancy. He distinguished the choice
open to him of forward or back, and he selected forward. But fancy was
dead: the poetry hovering about her grew invisible to him: he stood in
the morass; that was all he knew; and momently he plunged deeper; and
he was aware of an intense desire to see her face, that he might study
her features again: he understood no more.

It was the clouding of the brain by the man's heart, which had come to
the knowledge that it was caught.

A certain measure of astonishment moved him still. It had hitherto been
his portion to do mischief to women and avoid the vengeance of the sex.
What was there in Miss Middleton's face and air to ensnare a veteran
handsome man of society numbering six-and-thirty years, nearly as many
conquests? "Each bullet has got its commission." He was hit at last.
That accident effected by Mr. Flitch had fired the shot. Clean through
the heart, does not tell us of our misfortune, till the heart is asked
to renew its natural beating. It fell into the condition of the
porcelain vase over a thought of Miss Middleton standing above his
prostrate form on the road, and walking beside him to the Hall. Her
words? What have they been? She had not uttered words, she had shed
meanings. He did not for an instant conceive that he had charmed her:
the charm she had cast on him was too thrilling for coxcombry to lift a
head; still she had enjoyed his prattle. In return for her touch upon
the Irish fountain in him, he had manifestly given her relief And could
not one see that so sprightly a girl would soon be deadened by a man
like Willoughby? Deadened she was: she had not responded to a
compliment on her approaching marriage. An allusion to it killed her
smiling. The case of Mr. Flitch, with the half wager about his
reinstation in the service of the Hall, was conclusive evidence of her
opinion of Willoughby.

It became again necessary that he should abuse Willoughby for his
folly. Why was the man worrying her? In some way he was worrying her.

What if Willoughby as well as Miss Middleton wished to be quit of the
engagement? . . .

For just a second, the handsome, woman-flattered officer proved his
man's heart more whole than he supposed it. That great organ, instead
of leaping at the thought, suffered a check.

Bear in mind that his heart was not merely man's, it was a conqueror's.
He was of the race of amorous heroes who glory in pursuing, overtaking,
subduing: wresting the prize from a rival, having her ripe from
exquisitely feminine inward conflicts, plucking her out of resistance
in good old primitive fashion. You win the creature in her delicious
flutterings. He liked her thus, in cooler blood, because of society's
admiration of the capturer, and somewhat because of the strife, which
always enhances the value of a prize, and refreshes our vanity in
recollection.

Moreover, he had been matched against Willoughby: the circumstance had
occurred two or three times. He could name a lady he had won, a lady he
had lost. Willoughby's large fortune and grandeur of style had given
him advantages at the start. But the start often means the race--with
women, and a bit of luck.

The gentle check upon the galloping heart of Colonel De Craye endured
no longer than a second--a simple side-glance in a headlong pace.
Clara's enchantingness for a temperament like his, which is to say, for
him specially, in part through the testimony her conquest of himself
presented as to her power of sway over the universal heart known as
man's, assured him she was worth winning even from a hand that dropped
her.

He had now a double reason for exclaiming at the folly of Willoughby.
Willoughby's treatment of her showed either temper or weariness. Vanity
and judgement led De Craye to guess the former. Regarding her
sentiments for Willoughby, he had come to his own conclusion. The
certainty of it caused him to assume that he possessed an absolute
knowledge of her character: she was an angel, born supple; she was a
heavenly soul, with half a dozen of the tricks of earth. Skittish filly
was among his phrases; but she had a bearing and a gaze that forbade
the dip in the common gutter for wherewithal to paint the creature she
was.

Now, then, to see whether he was wrong for the first time in his life!
If not wrong, he had a chance.

There could be nothing dishonourable in rescuing a girl from an
engagement she detested. An attempt to think it a service to Willoughby
faded midway. De Craye dismissed that chicanery. It would be a service
to Willoughby in the end, without question. There was that to soothe
his manly honour. Meanwhile he had to face the thought of Willoughby as
an antagonist, and the world looking heavy on his honour as a friend.

Such considerations drew him tenderly close to Miss Middleton. It must,
however, be confessed that the mental ardour of Colonel De Craye had
been a little sobered by his glance at the possibility of both of the
couple being of one mind on the subject of their betrothal. Desirable
as it was that they should be united in disagreeing, it reduced the
romance to platitude, and the third person in the drama to the
appearance of a stick. No man likes to play that part. Memoirs of the
favourites of Goddesses, if we had them, would confirm it of men's
tastes in this respect, though the divinest be the prize. We behold
what part they played.

De Craye chanced to be crossing the hall from the laboratory to the
stables when Clara shut the library-door behind her. He said something
whimsical, and did not stop, nor did he look twice at the face he had
been longing for.

What he had seen made him fear there would be no ride out with her that
day. Their next meeting reassured him; she was dressed in her
riding-habit, and wore a countenance resolutely cheerful. He gave
himself the word of command to take his tone from her.

He was of a nature as quick as Clara's. Experience pushed him farther
than she could go in fancy; but experience laid a sobering finger on
his practical steps, and bade them hang upon her initiative. She talked
little. Young Crossjay cantering ahead was her favourite subject. She
was very much changed since the early morning: his liveliness, essayed
by him at a hazard, was unsuccessful; grave English pleased her best.
The descent from that was naturally to melancholy. She mentioned a
regret she had that the Veil was interdicted to women in Protestant
countries. De Craye was fortunately silent; he could think of no other
veil than the Moslem, and when her meaning struck his witless head, he
admitted to himself that devout attendance on a young lady's mind
stupefies man's intelligence. Half an hour later, he was as foolish in
supposing it a confidence. He was again saved by silence.

In Aspenwell village she drew a letter from her bosom and called to
Crossjay to post it. The boy sang out, "Miss Lucy Darleton! What a
nice name!"

Clara did not show that the name betrayed anything.

She said to De Craye. "It proves he should not be here thinking of nice
names."

Her companion replied, "You may be right." He added, to avoid feeling
too subservient: "Boys will."

"Not if they have stern masters to teach them their daily lessons, and
some of the lessons of existence."

"Vernon Whitford is not stern enough?"

"Mr. Whitford has to contend with other influences here."

"With Willoughby?"

"Not with Willoughby."

He understood her. She touched the delicate indication firmly. The
man's, heart respected her for it; not many girls could be so
thoughtful or dare to be so direct; he saw that she had become deeply
serious, and he felt her love of the boy to be maternal, past maiden
sentiment.

By this light of her seriousness, the posting of her letter in a
distant village, not entrusting it to the Hall post-box, might have
import; not that she would apprehend the violation of her private
correspondence, but we like to see our letter of weighty meaning pass
into the mouth of the public box.

Consequently this letter was important. It was to suppose a sequency in
the conduct of a variable damsel. Coupled with her remark about the
Veil, and with other things, not words, breathing from her (which were
the breath of her condition), it was not unreasonably to be supposed.
She might even be a very consistent person. If one only had the key of
her!

She spoke once of an immediate visit to London, supposing that she
could induce her father to go. De Craye remembered the occurrence in
the Hall at night, and her aspect of distress.

They raced along Aspenwell Common to the ford; shallow, to the chagrin
of young Crossjay, between whom and themselves they left a fitting
space for his rapture in leading his pony to splash up and down, lord
of the stream.

Swiftness of motion so strikes the blood on the brain that our thoughts
are lightnings, the heart is master of them.

De Craye was heated by his gallop to venture on the angling question:
"Am I to hear the names of the bridesmaids?"

The pace had nerved Clara to speak to it sharply: "There is no need."

"Have I no claim?"

She was mute.

"Miss Lucy Darleton, for instance; whose name I am almost as much in
love with as Crossjay."

"She will not be bridesmaid to me."

"She declines? Add my petition, I beg."

"To all? or to her?"

"Do all the bridesmaids decline?"

"The scene is too ghastly."

"A marriage?"

"Girls have grown sick of it."

"Of weddings? We'll overcome the sickness."

"With some."

"Not with Miss Darleton? You tempt my eloquence."

"You wish it?"

"To win her consent? Certainly."

"The scene?"

"Do I wish that?"

"Marriage!" exclaimed Clara, dashing into the ford, fearful of her
ungovernable wildness and of what it might have kindled.--You, father!
you have driven me to unmaidenliness!--She forgot Willoughby, in her
father, who would not quit a comfortable house for her all but
prostrate beseeching; would not bend his mind to her explanations,
answered her with the horrid iteration of such deaf misunderstanding as
may be associated with a tolling bell.

De Craye allowed her to catch Crossjay by herself. They entered a narrow
lane, mysterious with possible birds' eggs in the May-green hedges. As
there was not room for three abreast, the colonel made up the
rear-guard, and was consoled by having Miss Middleton's figure to
contemplate; but the readiness of her joining in Crossjay's pastime of
the nest-hunt was not so pleasing to a man that she had wound to a
pitch of excitement. Her scornful accent on "Marriage" rang through
him. Apparently she was beginning to do with him just as she liked,
herself entirely unconcerned.

She kept Crossjay beside her till she dismounted, and the colonel was
left to the procession of elephantine ideas in his head, whose
ponderousness he took for natural weight. We do not with impunity
abandon the initiative. Men who have yielded it are like cavalry put on
the defensive; a very small force with an ictus will scatter them.

Anxiety to recover lost ground reduced the dimensions of his ideas to a
practical standard.

Two ideas were opposed like duellists bent on the slaughter of one
another. Either she amazed him by confirming the suspicions he had
gathered of her sentiments for Willoughby in the moments of his
introduction to her; or she amazed him as a model for coquettes--the
married and the widow might apply to her for lessons.

These combatants exchanged shots, but remained standing; the encounter
was undecided. Whatever the result, no person so seductive as Clara
Middleton had he ever met. Her cry of loathing, "Marriage!" coming from
a girl, rang faintly clear of an ancient virginal aspiration of the sex
to escape from their coil, and bespoke a pure, cold, savage pride that
transplanted his thirst for her to higher fields.



CHAPTER XXIII

TREATS OF THE UNION OF TEMPER AND POLICY

Sir Willoughby meanwhile was on a line of conduct suiting his
appreciation of his duty to himself. He had deluded himself with the
simple notion that good fruit would come of the union of temper and
policy.

No delusion is older, none apparently so promising, both parties being
eager for the alliance. Yet, the theorist upon human nature will say,
they are obviously of adverse disposition. And this is true, inasmuch
as neither of them win submit to the yoke of an established union; as
soon as they have done their mischief, they set to work tugging for a
divorce. But they have attractions, the one for the other, which
precipitate them to embrace whenever they meet in a breast; each is
earnest with the owner of it to get him to officiate forthwith as
wedding-priest. And here is the reason: temper, to warrant its
appearance, desires to be thought as deliberative as policy, and
policy, the sooner to prove its shrewdness, is impatient for the quick
blood of temper.

It will be well for men to resolve at the first approaches of the
amorous but fickle pair upon interdicting even an accidental temporary
junction: for the astonishing sweetness of the couple when no more than
the ghosts of them have come together in a projecting mind is an
intoxication beyond fermented grapejuice or a witch's brewage; and
under the guise of active wits they will lead us to the parental
meditation of antics compared with which a Pagan Saturnalia were less
impious in the sight of sanity. This is full-mouthed language; but on
our studious way through any human career we are subject to fits of
moral elevation; the theme inspires it, and the sage residing in every
civilized bosom approves it.

Decide at the outset, that temper is fatal to policy: hold them with
both hands in division. One might add, be doubtful of your policy and
repress your temper: it would be to suppose you wise. You can,
however, by incorporating two or three captains of the great army of
truisms bequeathed to us by ancient wisdom, fix in your service those
veteran old standfasts to check you. They will not be serviceless in
their admonitions to your understanding, and they will so contrive to
reconcile with it the natural caperings of the wayward young sprig
Conduct, that the latter, who commonly learns to walk upright and
straight from nothing softer than raps of a bludgeon on his crown,
shall foot soberly, appearing at least wary of dangerous corners.

Now Willoughby had not to be taught that temper is fatal to policy; he
was beginning to see in addition that the temper he encouraged was
particularly obnoxious to the policy he adopted; and although his
purpose in mounting horse after yesterday frowning on his bride was
definite, and might be deemed sagacious, he bemoaned already the
fatality pushing him ever farther from her in chase of a satisfaction
impossible to grasp.

But the bare fact that her behaviour demanded a line of policy crossed
the grain of his temper: it was very offensive.

Considering that she wounded him severely, her reversal of their proper
parts, by taking the part belonging to him, and requiring his
watchfulness, and the careful dealings he was accustomed to expect from
others, and had a right to exact of her, was injuriously unjust. The
feelings of a man hereditarily sensitive to property accused her of a
trespassing imprudence, and knowing himself, by testimony of his
household, his tenants, and the neighbourhood, and the world as well,
amiable when he received his dues, he contemplated her with an air of
stiff-backed ill-treatment, not devoid of a certain sanctification of
martyrdom.

His bitterest enemy would hardly declare that it was he who was in the
wrong.

Clara herself had never been audacious enough to say that. Distaste of
his person was inconceivable to the favourite of society. The
capricious creature probably wanted a whipping to bring her to the
understanding of the principle called mastery, which is in man.

But was he administering it? If he retained a hold on her, he could
undoubtedly apply the scourge at leisure; any kind of scourge; he could
shun her, look on her frigidly, unbend to her to find a warmer place
for sarcasm, pityingly smile, ridicule, pay court elsewhere. He could
do these things if he retained a hold on her; and he could do them well
because of the faith he had in his renowned amiability; for in doing
them, he could feel that he was other than he seemed, and his own
cordial nature was there to comfort him while he bestowed punishment.
Cordial indeed, the chills he endured were flung from the world. His
heart was in that fiction: half the hearts now beating have a mild form
of it to keep them merry: and the chastisement he desired to inflict
was really no more than righteous vengeance for an offended goodness of
heart. Clara figuratively, absolutely perhaps, on her knees, he would
raise her and forgive her. He yearned for the situation. To let her
understand how little she had known him! It would be worth the pain she
had dealt, to pour forth the stream of re-established confidences, to
paint himself to her as he was; as he was in the spirit, not as he was
to the world: though the world had reason to do him honour.

First, however, she would have to be humbled.

Something whispered that his hold on her was lost.

In such a case, every blow he struck would set her flying farther, till
the breach between them would be past bridging.

Determination not to let her go was the best finish to this perpetually
revolving round which went like the same old wheel-planks of a water
mill in his head at a review of the injury he sustained. He had come to
it before, and he came to it again. There was his vengeance. It melted
him, she was so sweet! She shone for him like the sunny breeze on
water. Thinking of her caused a catch of his breath.

The dreadful young woman had a keener edge for the senses of men than
sovereign beauty.

It would be madness to let her go.

She affected him like an outlook on the great Patterne estate after an
absence, when his welcoming flag wept for pride above Patterne Hall!

It would be treason to let her go.

It would be cruelty to her.

He was bound to reflect that she was of tender age, and the foolishness
of the wretch was excusable to extreme youth.

We toss away a flower that we are tired of smelling and do not wish to
carry. But the rose--young woman--is not cast off with impunity. A
fiend in shape of man is always behind us to appropriate her. He that
touches that rejected thing is larcenous. Willoughby had been sensible
of it in the person of Laetitia: and by all the more that Clara's
charms exceeded the faded creature's, he felt it now. Ten thousand
Furies thickened about him at a thought of her lying by the road-side
without his having crushed all bloom and odour out of her which might
tempt even the curiosity of the fiend, man.

On the other hand, supposing her to be there untouched, universally
declined by the sniffling, sagacious dog-fiend, a miserable spinster
for years, he could conceive notions of his remorse. A soft remorse may
be adopted as an agreeable sensation within view of the wasted penitent
whom we have struck a trifle too hard. Seeing her penitent, he
certainly would be willing to surround her with little offices of
compromising kindness. It would depend on her age. Supposing her still
youngish, there might be captivating passages between them, as thus, in
a style not unfamiliar:

"And was it my fault, my poor girl? Am I to blame, that you have passed
a lonely, unloved youth?"

"No, Willoughby! The irreparable error was mine, the blame is mine,
mine only. I live to repent it. I do not seek, for I have not deserved,
your pardon. Had I it, I should need my own self-esteem to presume to
clasp it to a bosom ever unworthy of you."

"I may have been impatient, Clara: we are human!"

"Never be it mine to accuse one on whom I laid so heavy a weight of
forbearance!"

"Still, my old love!--for I am merely quoting history in naming you
so--I cannot have been perfectly blameless."

"To me you were, and are."

"Clara!"

"Willoughby!"

"Must I recognize the bitter truth that we two, once nearly one! so
nearly one! are eternally separated?"

"I have envisaged it. My friend--I may call you friend; you have ever
been my friend, my best friend! oh, that eyes had been mine to know the
friend I had!--Willoughby, in the darkness of night, and during days
that were as night to my soul, I have seen the inexorable finger
pointing my solitary way through the wilderness from a Paradise
forfeited by my most wilful, my wanton, sin. We have met. It is more
than I have merited. We part. In mercy let it be for ever. Oh, terrible
word! Coined by the passions of our youth, it comes to us for our sole
riches when we are bankrupt of earthly treasures, and is the passport
given by Abnegation unto Woe that prays to quit this probationary
sphere. Willoughby, we part. It is better so."

"Clara! one--one only--one last--one holy kiss!"

"If these poor lips, that once were sweet to you . . ."

The kiss, to continue the language of the imaginative composition of
his time, favourite readings in which had inspired Sir Willoughby with
a colloquy so pathetic, was imprinted.

Ay, she had the kiss, and no mean one. It was intended to swallow every
vestige of dwindling attractiveness out of her, and there was a bit of
scandal springing of it in the background that satisfactorily settled
her business, and left her 'enshrined in memory, a divine recollection
to him,' as his popular romances would say, and have said for years.

Unhappily, the fancied salute of her lips encircled him with the
breathing Clara. She rushed up from vacancy like a wind summoned to
wreck a stately vessel.

His reverie had thrown him into severe commotion. The slave of a
passion thinks in a ring, as hares run: he will cease where he began.
Her sweetness had set him off, and he whirled back to her sweetness:
and that being incalculable and he insatiable, you have the picture of
his torments when you consider that her behaviour made her as a cloud
to him.

Riding slack, horse and man, in the likeness of those two ajog homeward
from the miry hunt, the horse pricked his cars, and Willoughby looked
down from his road along the bills on the race headed by young Crossjay
with a short start over Aspenwell Common to the ford. There was no
mistaking who they were, though they were well-nigh a mile distant
below. He noticed that they did not overtake the boy. They drew rein at
the ford, talking not simply face to face, but face in face.
Willoughby's novel feeling of he knew not what drew them up to him,
enabling him to fancy them bathing in one another's eyes. Then she
sprang through the ford, De Craye following, but not close after--and
why not close? She had flicked him with one of her peremptorily saucy
speeches when she was bold with the gallop. They were not unknown to
Willoughby. They signified intimacy.

Last night he had proposed to De Craye to take Miss Middleton for a
ride the next afternoon. It never came to his mind then that he and his
friend had formerly been rivals. He wished Clara to be amused. Policy
dictated that every thread should be used to attach her to her
residence at the Hall until he could command his temper to talk to her
calmly and overwhelm her, as any man in earnest, with command of temper
and a point of vantage, may be sure to whelm a young woman. Policy,
adulterated by temper, yet policy it was that had sent him on his
errand in the early morning to beat about for a house and garden
suitable to Dr. Middleton within a circuit of five, six, or seven miles
of Patterne Hall. If the Rev. Doctor liked the house and took it (and
Willoughby had seen the place to suit him), the neighbourhood would be
a chain upon Clara: and if the house did not please a gentleman rather
hard to please (except in a venerable wine), an excuse would have been
started for his visiting other houses, and he had that response to his
importunate daughter, that he believed an excellent house was on view.
Dr. Middleton had been prepared by numerous hints to meet Clara's black
misreading of a lovers' quarrel, so that everything looked full of
promise as far as Willoughby's exercise of policy went.

But the strange pang traversing him now convicted him of a large
adulteration of profitless temper with it. The loyalty of De Craye to a
friend, where a woman walked in the drama, was notorious. It was there,
and a most flexible thing it was: and it soon resembled reason
manipulated by the sophists. Not to have reckoned on his peculiar
loyalty was proof of the blindness cast on us by temper.

And De Craye had an Irish tongue; and he had it under control, so that
he could talk good sense and airy nonsense at discretion. The strongest
overboiling of English Puritan contempt of a gabbler, would not stop
women from liking it. Evidently Clara did like it, and Willoughby
thundered on her sex. Unto such brainless things as these do we, under
the irony of circumstances, confide our honour!

For he was no gabbler. He remembered having rattled in earlier days; he
had rattled with an object to gain, desiring to be taken for an easy,
careless, vivacious, charming fellow, as any young gentleman may be who
gaily wears the golden dish of Fifty thousand pounds per annum, nailed
to the back of his very saintly young pate. The growth of the critical
spirit in him, however, had informed him that slang had been a
principal component of his rattling; and as he justly supposed it a
betraying art for his race and for him, he passed through the prim and
the yawning phases of affected indifference, to the pine Puritanism of
a leaden contempt of gabblers.

They snare women, you see--girls! How despicable the host of girls!--at
least, that girl below there!

Married women understood him: widows did. He placed an exceedingly
handsome and flattering young widow of his acquaintance, Lady Mary
Lewison, beside Clara for a comparison, involuntarily; and at once, in
a flash, in despite of him (he would rather it had been otherwise), and
in despite of Lady Mary's high birth and connections as well, the
silver lustre of the maid sicklied the poor widow.

The effect of the luckless comparison was to produce an image of
surpassingness in the features of Clara that gave him the final, or
mace-blow. Jealousy invaded him.

He had hitherto been free of it, regarding jealousy as a foreign devil,
the accursed familiar of the vulgar. Luckless fellows might be victims
of the disease; he was not; and neither Captain Oxford, nor Vernon, nor
De Craye, nor any of his compeers, had given him one shrewd pinch: the
woman had, not the man; and she in quite a different fashion from his
present wallowing anguish: she had never pulled him to earth's level,
where jealousy gnaws the grasses. He had boasted himself above the
humiliating visitation.

If that had been the case, we should not have needed to trouble
ourselves much about him. A run or two with the pack of imps would have
satisfied us. But he desired Clara Middleton manfully enough at an
intimation of rivalry to be jealous; in a minute the foreign devil had
him, he was flame: flaming verdigris, one might almost dare to say, for
an exact illustration; such was actually the colour; but accept it as
unsaid.

Remember the poets upon jealousy. It is to be haunted in the heaven of
two by a Third; preceded or succeeded, therefore surrounded, embraced,
bugged by this infernal Third: it is Love's bed of burning marl; to see
and taste the withering Third in the bosom of sweetness; to be dragged
through the past and find the fair Eden of it sulphurous; to be dragged
to the gates of the future and glory to behold them blood: to adore the
bitter creature trebly and with treble power to clutch her by the
windpipe: it is to be cheated, derided, shamed, and abject and
supplicating, and consciously demoniacal in treacherousness, and
victoriously self-justified in revenge.

And still there is no change in what men feel, though in what they do
the modern may be judicious.

You know the many paintings of man transformed to rageing beast by the
curse: and this, the fieriest trial of our egoism, worked in the Egoist
to produce division of himself from himself, a concentration of his
thoughts upon another object, still himself, but in another breast,
which had to be looked at and into for the discovery of him. By the
gaping jaw-chasm of his greed we may gather comprehension of his
insatiate force of jealousy. Let her go? Not though he were to become a
mark of public scorn in strangling her with the yoke! His concentration
was marvellous. Unused to the exercise of imaginative powers, he
nevertheless conjured her before him visually till his eyeballs ached.
He saw none but Clara, hated none, loved none, save the intolerable
woman. What logic was in him deduced her to be individual and most
distinctive from the circumstance that only she had ever wrought these
pangs. She had made him ready for them, as we know. An idea of De Craye
being no stranger to her when he arrived at the Hall, dashed him at De
Craye for a second: it might be or might not be that they had a
secret;--Clara was the spell. So prodigiously did he love and hate,
that he had no permanent sense except for her. The soul of him writhed
under her eyes at one moment, and the next it closed on her without
mercy. She was his possession escaping; his own gliding away to the
Third.

There would be pangs for him too, that Third! Standing at the altar to
see her fast-bound, soul and body, to another, would be good roasting
fire.

It would be good roasting fire for her too, should she be averse. To
conceive her aversion was to burn her and devour her. She would then be
his!--what say you? Burned and devoured! Rivals would vanish then. Her
reluctance to espouse the man she was plighted to would cease to be
uttered, cease to be felt.

At last he believed in her reluctance. All that had been wanted to
bring him to the belief was the scene on the common; such a mere spark,
or an imagined spark! But the presence of the Third was necessary;
otherwise he would have had to suppose himself personally distasteful.

Women have us back to the conditions of primitive man, or they shoot us
higher than the topmost star. But it is as we please. Let them tell us
what we are to them: for us, they are our back and front of life: the
poet's Lesbia, the poet's Beatrice; ours is the choice. And were it
proved that some of the bright things are in the pay of Darkness, with
the stamp of his coin on their palms, and that some are the very angels
we hear sung of, not the less might we say that they find us out; they
have us by our leanings. They are to us what we hold of best or worst
within. By their state is our civilization judged: and if it is hugely
animal still, that is because primitive men abound and will have their
pasture. Since the lead is ours, the leaders must bow their heads to
the sentence. Jealousy of a woman is the primitive egoism seeking to
refine in a blood gone to savagery under apprehension of an invasion of
rights; it is in action the tiger threatened by a rifle when his paw is
rigid on quick flesh; he tears the flesh for rage at the intruder. The
Egoist, who is our original male in giant form, had no bleeding victim
beneath his paw, but there was the sex to mangle. Much as he prefers
the well-behaved among women, who can worship and fawn, and in whom
terror can be inspired, in his wrath he would make of Beatrice a Lesbia
Quadrantaria.

Let women tell us of their side of the battle. We are not so much the
test of the Egoist in them as they to us. Movements of similarity shown
in crowned and undiademed ladies of intrepid independence, suggest
their occasional capacity to be like men when it is given to them to
hunt. At present they fly, and there is the difference. Our manner of
the chase informs them of the creature we are.

Dimly as young women are informed, they have a youthful ardour of
detestation that renders them less tolerant of the Egoist than their
perceptive elder sisters. What they do perceive, however, they have a
redoubtable grasp of, and Clara's behaviour would be indefensible if
her detective feminine vision might not sanction her acting on its
direction. Seeing him as she did, she turned from him and shunned his
house as the antre of an ogre. She had posted her letter to Lucy
Darleton. Otherwise, if it had been open to her to dismiss Colonel De
Craye, she might, with a warm kiss to Vernon's pupil, have seriously
thought of the next shrill steam-whistle across yonder hills for a
travelling companion on the way to her friend Lucy; so abhorrent was to
her the putting of her horse's head toward the Hall. Oh, the breaking
of bread there! It had to be gone through for another day and more;
that is to say, forty hours, it might be six-and-forty hours; and no
prospect of sleep to speed any of them on wings!

Such were Clara's inward interjections while poor Willoughby burned
himself out with verdigris flame having the savour of bad metal, till
the hollow of his breast was not unlike to a corroded old cuirass,
found, we will assume, by criminal lantern-beams in a digging beside
green-mantled pools of the sullen soil, lumped with a strange adhesive
concrete. How else picture the sad man?--the cavity felt empty to him,
and heavy; sick of an ancient and mortal combat, and burning; deeply
dinted too:

    With the starry hole
    Whence fled the soul:

very sore; important for aught save sluggish agony; a specimen and the
issue of strife.

Measurelessly to loathe was not sufficient to save him from pain: he
tried it: nor to despise; he went to a depth there also. The fact that
she was a healthy young woman returned to the surface of his thoughts
like the murdered body pitched into the river, which will not drown,
and calls upon the elements of dissolution to float it. His grand
hereditary desire to transmit his estates, wealth and name to a solid
posterity, while it prompted him in his loathing and contempt of a
nature mean and ephemeral compared with his, attached him desperately
to her splendid healthiness. The council of elders, whose descendant he
was, pointed to this young woman for his mate. He had wooed her with
the idea that they consented. O she was healthy! And he likewise: but,
as if it had been a duel between two clearly designated by quality of
blood to bid a House endure, she was the first who taught him what it
was to have sensations of his mortality.

He could not forgive her. It seemed to him consequently politic to
continue frigid and let her have a further taste of his shadow, when it
was his burning wish to strain her in his arms to a flatness provoking
his compassion.

"You have had your ride?" he addressed her politely in the general
assembly on the lawn.

"I have had my ride, yes," Clara replied.

"Agreeable, I trust?"

"Very agreeable."

So it appeared. Oh, blushless!

The next instant he was in conversation with Laetitia, questioning her
upon a dejected droop of her eyelashes.

"I am, I think," said she, "constitutionally melancholy."

He murmured to her: "I believe in the existence of specifics, and not
far to seek, for all our ailments except those we bear at the hands of
others."

She did not dissent.

De Craye, whose humour for being convinced that Willoughby cared about
as little for Miss Middleton as she for him was nourished by his
immediate observation of them, dilated on the beauty of the ride and
his fair companion's equestrian skill.

"You should start a travelling circus," Willoughby rejoined. "But the
idea's a worthy one!--There's another alternative to the expedition I
proposed, Miss Middleton," said De Craye. "And I be clown? I haven't a
scruple of objection. I must read up books of jokes."

"Don't," said Willoughby.

"I'd spoil my part! But a natural clown won't keep up an artificial
performance for an entire month, you see; which is the length of time
we propose. He'll exhaust his nature in a day and be bowled over by the
dullest regular donkey-engine with paint on his cheeks and a nodding
topknot."

"What is this expedition 'we' propose?"

De Craye was advised in his heart to spare Miss Middleton any allusion
to honeymoons.

"Merely a game to cure dulness."

"Ah!" Willoughby acquiesced. "A month, you said?"

"One'd like it to last for years."

"Ah! You are driving one of Mr. Merriman's witticisms at me, Horace; I
am dense."

Willoughby bowed to Dr. Middleton, and drew him from Vernon, filially
taking his turn to talk with him closely.

De Craye saw Clara's look as her father and Willoughby went aside thus
linked.

It lifted him over anxieties and casuistries concerning loyalty.
Powder was in the look to make a warhorse breathe high and shiver for
the signal.



CHAPTER XXIV

CONTAINS AN INSTANCE OF THE GENEROSITY OF WILLOUGHBY

Observers of a gathering complication and a character in action
commonly resemble gleaners who are intent only on picking up the cars
of grain and huddling their store. Disinterestedly or interestedly they
wax over-eager for the little trifles, and make too much of them.
Observers should begin upon the precept, that not all we see is worth
hoarding, and that the things we see are to be weighed in the scale
with what we know of the situation, before we commit ourselves to a
measurement. And they may be accurate observers without being good
judges. They do not think so, and their bent is to glean hurriedly and
form conclusions as hasty, when their business should be sift at each
step, and question.

Miss Dale seconded Vernon Whitford in the occupation of counting looks
and tones, and noting scraps of dialogue. She was quite disinterested;
he quite believed that he was; to this degree they were competent for
their post; and neither of them imagined they could be personally
involved in the dubious result of the scenes they witnessed. They were
but anxious observers, diligently collecting. She fancied Clara
susceptible to his advice: he had fancied it, and was considering it
one of his vanities. Each mentally compared Clara's abruptness in
taking them into her confidence with her abstention from any secret
word since the arrival of Colonel De Craye. Sir Willoughby requested
Laetitia to give Miss Middleton as much of her company as she could;
showing that he was on the alert. Another Constantia Durham seemed
beating her wings for flight. The suddenness of the evident intimacy
between Clara and Colonel De Craye shocked Laetitia; their acquaintance
could be computed by hours. Yet at their first interview she had
suspected the possibility of worse than she now supposed to be; and she
had begged Vernon not immediately to quit the Hall, in consequence of
that faint suspicion. She had been led to it by meeting Clara and De
Craye at her cottage-gate, and finding them as fluent and
laughter-breathing in conversation as friends. Unable to realize the
rapid advance to a familiarity, more ostensible than actual, of two
lively natures, after such an introduction as they had undergone: and
one of the two pining in a drought of liveliness: Laetitia listened to
their wager of nothing at all--a no against a yes--in the case of poor
Flitch; and Clara's, "Willoughby will not forgive"; and De Craye's "Oh,
he's human": and the silence of Clara and De Craye's hearty cry,
"Flitch shall be a gentleman's coachman in his old seat or I haven't a
tongue!" to which there was a negative of Clara's head: and it then
struck Laetitia that this young betrothed lady, whose alienated heart
acknowledged no lord an hour earlier, had met her match, and, as the
observer would have said, her destiny. She judged of the alarming
possibility by the recent revelation to herself of Miss Middleton's
character, and by Clara's having spoken to a man as well (to Vernon),
and previously. That a young lady should speak on the subject of the
inner holies to a man, though he were Vernon Whitford, was incredible
to Laetitia; but it had to be accepted as one of the dread facts of our
inexplicable life, which drag our bodies at their wheels and leave our
minds exclaiming. Then, if Clara could speak to Vernon, which Laetitia
would not have done for a mighty bribe, she could speak to De Craye,
Laetitia thought deductively: this being the logic of untrained heads
opposed to the proceeding whereby their condemnatory deduction
hangs.--Clara must have spoken to De Craye!

Laetitia remembered how winning and prevailing Miss Middleton could be
in her confidences. A gentleman hearing her might forget his duty to
his friend, she thought, for she had been strangely swayed by Clara:
ideas of Sir Willoughby that she had never before imagined herself to
entertain had been sown in her, she thought; not asking herself whether
the searchingness of the young lady had struck them and bidden them
rise from where they lay imbedded. Very gentle women take in that
manner impressions of persons, especially of the worshipped person,
wounding them; like the new fortifications with embankments of soft
earth, where explosive missiles bury themselves harmlessly until they
are plucked out; and it may be a reason why those injured ladies
outlive a Clara Middleton similarly battered.

Vernon less than Laetitia took into account that Clara was in a state
of fever, scarcely reasonable. Her confidences to him he had excused,
as a piece of conduct, in sympathy with her position. He had not been
greatly astonished by the circumstances confided; and, on the whole, as
she was excited and unhappy, he excused her thoroughly; he could have
extolled her: it was natural that she should come to him, brave in her
to speak so frankly, a compliment that she should condescend to treat
him as a friend. Her position excused her widely. But she was not
excused for making a confidential friend of De Craye. There was a
difference.

Well, the difference was, that De Craye had not the smarting sense of
honour with women which our meditator had: an impartial judiciary, it
will be seen: and he discriminated between himself and the other
justly: but sensation surging to his brain at the same instant, he
reproached Miss Middleton for not perceiving that difference as
clearly, before she betrayed her position to De Craye, which Vernon
assumed that she had done. Of course he did. She had been guilty of it
once: why, then, in the mind of an offended friend, she would be guilty
of it twice. There was evidence. Ladies, fatally predestined to appeal
to that from which they have to be guarded, must expect severity when
they run off their railed highroad: justice is out of the question:
man's brains might, his blood cannot administer it to them. By chilling
him to the bone they may get what they cry for. But that is a method
deadening to their point of appeal.

I the evening, Miss Middleton and the colonel sang a duet. She had of
late declined to sing. Her voice was noticeably firm. Sir Willoughby
said to her, "You have recovered your richness of tone, Clara." She
smiled and appeared happy in pleasing him. He named a French ballad.
She went to the music-rack and gave the song unasked. He should have
been satisfied, for she said to him at the finish, "Is that as you like
it?" He broke from a murmur to Miss Dale, "Admirable." Some one
mentioned a Tuscan popular canzone. She waited for Willoughby's
approval, and took his nod for a mandate.

Traitress! he could have bellowed.

He had read of this characteristic of caressing obedience of the women
about to deceive. He had in his time profited by it.

"Is it intuitively or by their experience that our neighbours across
Channel surpass us in the knowledge of your sex?" he said to Miss Dale,
and talked through Clara's apostrophe to the 'Santissinia Virgine
Maria,' still treating temper as a part of policy, without any effect
on Clara; and that was matter for sickly green reflections. The lover
who cannot wound has indeed lost anchorage; he is woefully adrift: he
stabs air, which is to stab himself. Her complacent proof-armour bids
him know himself supplanted.

During the short conversational period before the ladies retired for
the night, Miss Eleanor alluded to the wedding by chance. Miss Isabel
replied to her, and addressed an interrogation to Clara. De Craye
foiled it adroitly. Clara did not utter a syllable. Her bosom lifted to
a wavering height and sank. Subsequently she looked at De Craye
vacantly, like a person awakened, but she looked. She was astonished by
his readiness, and thankful for the succour. Her look was cold, wide,
unfixed, with nothing of gratitude or of personal in it. The look,
however, stood too long for Willoughby's endurance.

Ejaculating "Porcelain!" he uncrossed his legs; a signal for the ladies
Eleanor and Isabel to retire. Vernon bowed to Clara as she was rising.
He had not been once in her eyes, and he expected a partial recognition
at the good-night. She said it, turning her head to Miss Isabel, who
was condoling once more with Colonel De Craye over the ruins of his
wedding-present, the porcelain vase, which she supposed to have been in
Willoughby's mind when he displayed the signal. Vernon walked off to
his room, dark as one smitten blind: bile tumet jecur: her stroke of
neglect hit him there where a blow sends thick obscuration upon
eyeballs and brain alike.

Clara saw that she was paining him and regretted it when they were
separated. That was her real friend! But he prescribed too hard a task.
Besides, she had done everything he demanded of her, except the
consenting to stay where she was and wear out Willoughby, whose
dexterity wearied her small stock of patience. She had vainly tried
remonstrance and supplication with her father hoodwinked by his host,
she refused to consider how; through wine?--the thought was
repulsive.

Nevertheless, she was drawn to the edge of it by the contemplation of
her scheme of release. If Lucy Darleton was at home; if Lucy invited
her to come: if she flew to Lucy: oh! then her father would have cause
for anger. He would not remember that but for hateful wine! . . .

What was there in this wine of great age which expelled reasonableness,
fatherliness? He was her dear father: she was his beloved child: yet
something divided them; something closed her father's ears to her: and
could it be that incomprehensible seduction of the wine? Her
dutifulness cried violently no. She bowed, stupefied, to his arguments
for remaining awhile, and rose clear-headed and rebellious with the
reminiscence of the many strong reasons she had urged against them.

The strangeness of men, young and old, the little things (she regarded
a grand wine as a little thing) twisting and changing them, amazed her.
And these are they by whom women are abused for variability! Only the
most imperious reasons, never mean trifles, move women, thought she.
Would women do an injury to one they loved for oceans of that--ah, pah!

And women must respect men. They necessarily respect a father. "My
dear, dear father!" Clara said in the solitude of her chamber, musing
on all his goodness, and she endeavoured to reconcile the desperate
sentiments of the position he forced her to sustain, with those of a
venerating daughter. The blow which was to fall on him beat on her
heavily in advance. "I have not one excuse!" she said, glancing at
numbers and a mighty one. But the idea of her father suffering at her
hands cast her down lower than self-justification. She sought to
imagine herself sparing him. It was too fictitious.

The sanctuary of her chamber, the pure white room so homely to her
maidenly feelings, whispered peace, only to follow the whisper with
another that went through her swelling to a roar, and leaving her as a
suing of music unkindly smitten. If she stayed in this house her
chamber would no longer be a sanctuary. Dolorous bondage! Insolent
death is not worse. Death's worm we cannot keep away, but when he has
us we are numb to dishonour, happily senseless.

Youth weighed her eyelids to sleep, though she was quivering, and
quivering she awoke to the sound of her name beneath her window. "I
can love still, for I love him," she said, as she luxuriated in young
Crossjay's boy's voice, again envying him his bath in the lake waters,
which seemed to her to have the power to wash away grief and chains.
Then it was that she resolved to let Crossjay see the last of her in
this place. He should be made gleeful by doing her a piece of service;
he should escort her on her walk to the railway station next morning,
thence be sent flying for a long day's truancy, with a little note of
apology on his behalf that she would write for him to deliver to Vernon
at night.

Crossjay came running to her after his breakfast with Mrs Montague, the
housekeeper, to tell her he had called her up.

"You won't to-morrow: I shall be up far ahead of you," said she; and
musing on her father, while Crossjay vowed to be up the first, she
thought it her duty to plunge into another expostulation.

Willoughby had need of Vernon on private affairs. Dr. Middleton betook
himself as usual to the library, after answering "I will ruin you yet,"
to Willoughby's liberal offer to despatch an order to London for any
books he might want.

His fine unruffled air, as of a mountain in still morning beams, made
Clara not indisposed to a preliminary scene with Willoughby that might
save her from distressing him, but she could not stop Willoughby; as
little could she look an invitation. He stood in the Hall, holding
Vernon by the arm. She passed him; he did not speak, and she entered
the library.

"What now, my dear? what is it?" said Dr. Middleton, seeing that the
door was shut on them.

"Nothing, papa," she replied, calmly.

"You've not locked the door, my child? You turned something there: try
the handle."

"I assure you, papa, the door is not locked."

"Mr. Whitford will be here instantly. We are engaged on tough matter.
Women have not, and opinion is universal that they never will have, a
conception of the value of time."

"We are vain and shallow, my dear papa."

"No, no, not you, Clara. But I suspect you to require to learn by
having work in progress how important is . . . is a quiet commencement
of the day's task. There is not a scholar who will not tell you so. We
must have a retreat. These invasions!--So you intend to have another
ride to-day? They do you good. To-morrow we dine with Mrs. Mountstuart
Jenkinson, an estimable person indeed, though I do not perfectly
understand our accepting.--You have not to accuse me of sitting over
wine last night, my Clara! I never do it, unless I am appealed to for
my judgement upon a wine."

"I have come to entreat you to take me away, papa."

In the midst of the storm aroused by this renewal of perplexity, Dr
Middleton replaced a book his elbow had knocked over in his haste to
dash the hair off his forehead, crying: "Whither? To what spot? That
reading of guide-books, and idle people's notes of Travel, and
picturesque correspondence in the newspapers, unsettles man and maid.
My objection to the living in hotels is known. I do not hesitate to say
that I do cordially abhor it. I have had penitentially to submit to it
in your dear mother's time, [Greek], up to the full ten thousand times.
But will you not comprehend that to the older man his miseries are
multiplied by his years? But is it utterly useless to solicit your
sympathy with an old man, Clara?"

"General Darleton will take us in, papa."

"His table is detestable. I say nothing of that; but his wine is
poison. Let that pass--I should rather say, let it not pass!--but our
political views are not in accord. True, we are not under the
obligation to propound them in presence, but we are destitute of an
opinion in common. We have no discourse. Military men have produced, or
diverged in, noteworthy epicures; they are often devout; they have
blossomed in lettered men: they are gentlemen; the country rightly
holds them in honour; but, in fine, I reject the proposal to go to
General Darleton.--Tears?"

"No, papa."

"I do hope not. Here we have everything man can desire; without
contest, an excellent host. You have your transitory tea-cup tempests,
which you magnify to hurricanes, in the approved historic manner of the
book of Cupid. And all the better; I repeat, it is the better that you
should have them over in the infancy of the alliance. Come in!" Dr.
Middleton shouted cheerily in response to a knock at the door.

He feared the door was locked: he had a fear that his daughter intended
to keep it locked.

"Clara!" he cried.

She reluctantly turned the handle, and the ladies Eleanor and Isabel
came in, apologizing with as much coherence as Dr. Middleton ever
expected from their sex. They wished to speak to Clara, but they
declined to take her away. In vain the Rev. Doctor assured them she
was at their service; they protested that they had very few words to
say, and would not intrude one moment further than to speak them.

Like a shy deputation of young scholars before the master, these very
words to come were preceded by none at all; a dismal and trying cause;
refreshing however to Dr. Middleton, who joyfully anticipated that the
ladies could be induced to take away Clara when they had finished.

"We may appear to you a little formal," Miss Isabel began, and turned
to her sister.

"We have no intention to lay undue weight on our mission, if mission it
can be called," said Miss Eleanor.

"Is it entrusted to you by Willoughby?" said Clara.

"Dear child, that you may know it all the more earnest with us, and our
personal desire to contribute to your happiness: therefore does
Willoughby entrust the speaking of it to us."

Hereupon the sisters alternated in addressing Clara, and she gazed from
one to the other, piecing fragments of empty signification to get the
full meaning when she might.

"--And in saying your happiness, dear Clara, we have our Willoughby's
in view, which is dependent on yours."

"--And we never could sanction that our own inclinations should stand
in the way."

"--No. We love the old place; and if it were only our punishment for
loving it too idolatrously, we should deem it ground enough for our
departure."

"--Without, really, an idea of unkindness; none, not any."

"--Young wives naturally prefer to be undisputed queens of their own
establishment."

"--Youth and age!"

"But I," said Clara, "have never mentioned, never had a thought . . ."

"--You have, dear child, a lover who in his solicitude for your
happiness both sees what you desire and what is due to you."

"--And for us, Clara, to recognize what is due to you is to act on it."

"--Besides, dear, a sea-side cottage has always been one of our
dreams."

"--We have not to learn that we are a couple of old maids, incongruous
associates for a young wife in the government of a great house."

"--With our antiquated notions, questions of domestic management might
arise, and with the best will in the world to be harmonious!"

"--So, dear Clara, consider it settled."

"--From time to time gladly shall we be your guests."

"--Your guests, dear, not censorious critics."

"And you think me such an Egoist!--dear ladies! The suggestion of so
cruel a piece of selfishness wounds me. I would not have had you leave
the Hall. I like your society; I respect you. My complaint, if I had
one, would be, that you do not sufficiently assert yourselves. I could
have wished you to be here for an example to me. I would not have
allowed you to go. What can he think of me! Did Willoughby speak of it
this morning?"

It was hard to distinguish which was the completer dupe of these two
echoes of one another in worship of a family idol.

"Willoughby," Miss Eleanor presented herself to be stamped with the
title hanging ready for the first that should open her lips, "our
Willoughby is observant--he is ever generous--and he is not less
forethoughtful. His arrangement is for our good on all sides."

"An index is enough," said Miss Isabel, appearing in her turn the
monster dupe.

"You will not have to leave, dear ladies. Were I mistress here I should
oppose it."

"Willoughby blames himself for not reassuring you before."

"Indeed we blame ourselves for not undertaking to go."

"Did he speak of it first this morning?" said Clara; but she could draw
no reply to that from them. They resumed the duet, and she resigned
herself to have her cars boxed with nonsense.

"So, it is understood?" said Miss Eleanor.

"I see your kindness, ladies."

"And I am to be Aunt Eleanor again?"

"And I Aunt Isabel?"

Clara could have wrung her hands at the impediment which prohibited her
delicacy from telling them why she could not name them so as she had
done in the earlier days of Willoughby's courtship. She kissed them
warmly, ashamed of kissing, though the warmth was real.

They retired with a flow of excuses to Dr. Middleton for disturbing
him. He stood at the door to bow them out, and holding the door for
Clara, to wind up the procession, discovered her at a far corner of the
room.

He was debating upon the advisability of leaving her there, when Vernon
Whitford crossed the hall from the laboratory door, a mirror of himself
in his companion air of discomposure.

That was not important, so long as Vernon was a check on Clara; but the
moment Clara, thus baffled, moved to quit the library, Dr. Middleton
felt the horror of having an uncomfortable face opposite.

"No botheration, I hope? It's the worst thing possible to work on.
Where have you been? I suspect your weak point is not to arm yourself
in triple brass against bother and worry, and no good work can you do
unless you do. You have come out of that laboratory."

"I have, sir.--Can I get you any book?" Vernon said to Clara.

She thanked him, promising to depart immediately.

"Now you are at the section of Italian literature, my love," said Dr
Middleton. "Well, Mr. Whitford, the laboratory--ah!--where the amount
of labour done within the space of a year would not stretch an electric
current between this Hall and the railway station: say, four miles,
which I presume the distance to be. Well, sir, and a dilettantism
costly in time and machinery is as ornamental as foxes' tails and
deers' horns to an independent gentleman whose fellows are contented
with the latter decorations for their civic wreath. Willoughby, let me
remark, has recently shown himself most considerate for my girl. As far
as I could gather--I have been listening to a dialogue of ladies--he is
as generous as he is discreet. There are certain combats in which to be
the one to succumb is to claim the honours;--and that is what women
will not learn. I doubt their seeing the glory of it."

"I have heard of it; I have been with Willoughby," Vernon said,
hastily, to shield Clara from her father's allusive attacks. He wished
to convey to her that his interview with Willoughby had not been
profitable in her interests, and that she had better at once, having
him present to support her, pour out her whole heart to her father. But
how was it to be conveyed? She would not meet his eyes, and he was too
poor an intriguer to be ready on the instant to deal out the verbal
obscurities which are transparencies to one.

"I shall regret it, if Willoughby has annoyed you, for he stands high
in my favour," said Dr. Middleton.

Clara dropped a book. Her father started higher than the nervous
impulse warranted in his chair. Vernon tried to win a glance, and she
was conscious of his effort, but her angry and guilty feelings,
prompting her resolution to follow her own counsel, kept her eyelids on
the defensive.

"I don't say he annoys me, sir. I am here to give him my advice, and if
he does not accept it I have no right to be annoyed. Willoughby seems
annoyed that Colonel De Craye should talk of going to-morrow or next
day."

"He likes his friends about him. Upon my word, a man of a more genial
heart you might march a day without finding. But you have it on the
forehead, Mr. Whitford."

"Oh! no, sir."

"There," Dr. Middleton drew his finger along his brows.

Vernon felt along his own, and coined an excuse for their blackness;
not aware that the direction of his mind toward Clara pushed him to a
kind of clumsy double meaning, while he satisfied an inward and craving
wrath, as he said: "By the way, I have been racking my head; I must
apply to you, sir. I have a line, and I am uncertain of the run of the
line. Will this pass, do you think?

     'In Asination's tongue he asinates';

signifying that he excels any man of us at donkey-dialect."

After a decent interval for the genius of criticism to seem to have
been sitting under his frown, Dr. Middleton rejoined with sober
jocularity: "No, sir, it will not pass; and your uncertainty in regard
to the run of the line would only be extended were the line centipedal.
Our recommendation is, that you erase it before the arrival of the
ferule. This might do:

     'In Assignation's name he assignats';

signifying that he pre-eminently flourishes hypothetical promises, to
pay by appointment. That might pass. But you will forbear to cite me
for your authority."

"The line would be acceptable if I could get it to apply," said Vernon.

"Or this . . ." Dr. Middleton was offering a second suggestion, but
Clara fled, astonished at men as she never yet had been. Why, in a
burning world they would be exercising their minds in absurdities! And
those two were scholars, learned men! And both knew they were in the
presence of a soul in a tragic fever!

A minute after she had closed the door they were deep in their work.
Dr. Middleton forgot his alternative line.

"Nothing serious?" he said in reproof of the want of honourable
clearness on Vernon's brows.

"I trust not, sir; it's a case for common sense."

"And you call that not serious?"

"I take Hermann's praise of the versus dochmiachus to be not only
serious but unexaggerated," said Vernon.

Dr. Middleton assented and entered on the voiceful ground of Greek
metres, shoving your dry dusty world from his elbow.



CHAPTER XXV

THE FLIGHT IN WILD WEATHER

The morning of Lucy Darleton's letter of reply to her friend Clara was
fair before sunrise, with luminous colours that are an omen to the
husbandman. Clara had no weather-eye for the rich Eastern crimson, nor
a quiet space within her for the beauty. She looked on it as her gate
of promise, and it set her throbbing with a revived belief in radiant
things which she had once dreamed of to surround her life, but her
accelerated pulses narrowed her thoughts upon the machinery of her
project. She herself was metal, pointing all to her one aim when in
motion. Nothing came amiss to it, everything was fuel; fibs, evasions,
the serene battalions of white lies parallel on the march with dainty
rogue falsehoods. She had delivered herself of many yesterday in her
engagements for to-day. Pressure was put on her to engage herself, and
she did so liberally, throwing the burden of deceitfulness on the
extraordinary pressure. "I want the early part of the morning; the rest
of the day I shall be at liberty." She said it to Willoughby, Miss
Dale, Colonel De Craye, and only the third time was she aware of the
delicious double meaning. Hence she associated it with the colonel.

Your loudest outcry against the wretch who breaks your rules is in
asking how a tolerably conscientious person could have done this and
the other besides the main offence, which you vow you could overlook
but for the minor objections pertaining to conscience, the
incomprehensible and abominable lies, for example, or the brazen
coolness of the lying. Yet you know that we live in an undisciplined
world, where in our seasons of activity we are servants of our design,
and that this comes of our passions, and those of our position. Our
design shapes us for the work in hand, the passions man the ship, the
position is their apology: and now should conscience be a passenger on
board, a merely seeming swiftness of our vessel will keep him dumb as
the unwilling guest of a pirate captain scudding from the cruiser half
in cloven brine through rocks and shoals to save his black flag. Beware
the false position.

That is easy to say: sometimes the tangle descends on us like a net of
blight on a rose-bush. There is then an instant choice for us between
courage to cut loose, and desperation if we do not. But not many men
are trained to courage; young women are trained to cowardice. For them
to front an evil with plain speech is to be guilty of effrontery and
forfeit the waxen polish of purity, and therewith their commanding
place in the market. They are trained to please man's taste, for which
purpose they soon learn to live out of themselves, and look on
themselves as he looks, almost as little disturbed as he by the
undiscovered. Without courage, conscience is a sorry guest; and if all
goes well with the pirate captain, conscience will be made to walk the
plank for being of no service to either party.

Clara's fibs and evasions disturbed her not in the least that morning.
She had chosen desperation, and she thought herself very brave because
she was just brave enough to fly from her abhorrence. She was
light-hearted, or, more truly, drunken-hearted. Her quick nature
realized the out of prison as vividly and suddenly as it had sunk
suddenly and leadenly under the sense of imprisonment. Vernon crossed
her mind: that was a friend! Yes, and there was a guide; but he would
disapprove, and even he, thwarting her way to sacred liberty, must be
thrust aside.

What would he think? They might never meet, for her to know. Or one day
in the Alps they might meet, a middle-aged couple, he famous, she
regretful only to have fallen below his lofty standard. "For, Mr.
Whitford," says she, very earnestly, "I did wish at that time, believe
me or not, to merit your approbation." The brows of the phantom Vernon
whom she conjured up were stern, as she had seen them yesterday in the
library.

She gave herself a chiding for thinking of him when her mind should be
intent on that which he was opposed to.

It was a livelier relaxation to think of young Crossjay's shame-faced
confession presently, that he had been a laggard in bed while she swept
the dews. She laughed at him, and immediately Crossjay popped out on
her from behind a tree, causing her to clap hand to heart and stand
fast. A conspirator is not of the stuff to bear surprises. He feared he
had hurt her, and was manly in his efforts to soothe: he had been up
"hours", he said, and had watched her coming along the avenue, and did
not mean to startle her: it was the kind of fun he played with fellows,
and if he had hurt her, she might do anything to him she liked, and she
would see if he could not stand to be punished. He was urgent with her
to inflict corporal punishment on him.

"I shall leave it to the boatswain to do that when you're in the navy,"
said Clara.

"The boatswain daren't strike an officer! so now you see what you know
of the navy," said Crossjay.

"But you could not have been out before me, you naughty boy, for I
found all the locks and bolts when I went to the door."

"But you didn't go to the back door, and Sir Willoughby's private door:
you came out by the hall door; and I know what you want, Miss
Middleton, you want not to pay what you've lost."

"What have I lost, Crossjay?"

"Your wager."

"What was that?"

"You know."

"Speak."

"A kiss."

"Nothing of the sort. But, dear boy, I don't love you less for not
kissing you. All that is nonsense: you have to think only of learning,
and to be truthful. Never tell a story: suffer anything rather than be
dishonest." She was particularly impressive upon the silliness and
wickedness of falsehood, and added: "Do you hear?"

"Yes: but you kissed me when I had been out in the rain that day."

"Because I promised."

"And, Miss Middleton, you betted a kiss yesterday."

"I am sure, Crossjay--no, I will not say I am sure: but can you say you
are sure you were out first this morning? Well, will you say you are
sure that when you left the house you did not see me in the avenue? You
can't: ah!"

"Miss Middleton, I do really believe I was dressed first."

"Always be truthful, my dear boy, and then you may feel that Clara
Middleton will always love you."

"But, Miss Middleton, when you're married you won't be Clara
Middleton."

"I certainly shall, Crossjay."

"No, you won't, because I'm so fond of your name!"

She considered, and said: "You have warned me, Crossjay, and I shall
not marry. I shall wait," she was going to say, "for you," but turned
the hesitation to a period. "Is the village where I posted my letter
the day before yesterday too far for you?"

Crossjay howled in contempt. "Next to Clara, my favourite's Lucy," he
said.

"I thought Clara came next to Nelson," said she; "and a long way off
too, if you're not going to be a landlubber."

"I'm not going to be a landlubber. Miss Middleton, you may be
absolutely positive on your solemn word."

"You're getting to talk like one a little now and then, Crossjay."

"Then I won't talk at all."

He stuck to his resolution for one whole minute.

Clara hoped that on this morning of a doubtful though imperative
venture she had done some good.

They walked fast to cover the distance to the village post-office, and
back before the breakfast hour: and they had plenty of time, arriving
too early for the opening of the door, so that Crossjay began to dance
with an appetite, and was despatched to besiege a bakery. Clara felt
lonely without him: apprehensively timid in the shuttered, unmoving
village street. She was glad of his return. When at last her letter was
handed to her, on the testimony of the postman that she was the lawful
applicant, Crossjay and she put out on a sharp trot to be back at the
Hall in good time. She took a swallowing glance of the first page of
Lucy's writing:

"Telegraph, and I will meet you. I will supply you with everything you
can want for the two nights, if you cannot stop longer."

That was the gist of the letter. A second, less voracious, glance at it
along the road brought sweetness:--Lucy wrote:

"Do I love you as I did? my best friend, you must fall into unhappiness
to have the answer to that."

Clara broke a silence.

"Yes, dear Crossjay, and if you like you shall have another walk with
me after breakfast. But, remember, you must not say where you have gone
with me. I shall give you twenty shillings to go and buy those bird's
eggs and the butterflies you want for your collection; and mind,
promise me, to-day is your last day of truancy. Tell Mr. Whitford how
ungrateful you know you have been, that he may have some hope of you.
You know the way across the fields to the railway station?"

"You save a mile; you drop on the road by Combline's mill, and then
there's another five-minutes' cut, and the rest's road."

"Then, Crossjay, immediately after breakfast run round behind the
pheasantry, and there I'll find you. And if any one comes to you before
I come, say you are admiring the plumage of the Himalaya--the
beautiful Indian bird; and if we're found together, we run a race, and
of course you can catch me, but you mustn't until we're out of sight.
Tell Mr. Vernon at night--tell Mr. Whitford at night you had the money
from me as part of my allowance to you for pocket-money. I used to like
to have pocket-money, Crossjay. And you may tell him I gave you the
holiday, and I may write to him for his excuse, if he is not too harsh
to grant it. He can be very harsh."

"You look right into his eyes next time, Miss Middleton. I used to
think him awful till he made me look at him. He says men ought to look
straight at one another, just as we do when he gives me my
boxing-lesson, and then we won't have quarrelling half so much. I can't
recollect everything he says."

"You are not bound to, Crossjay."

"No, but you like to hear."

"Really, dear boy. I can't accuse myself of having told you that."

"No, but, Miss Middleton, you do. And he's fond of your singing and
playing on the piano, and watches you."

"We shall be late if we don't mind," said Clara, starting to a pace
close on a run.

They were in time for a circuit in the park to the wild double
cherry-blossom, no longer all white. Clara gazed up from under it,
where she had imagined a fairer visible heavenliness than any other
sight of earth had ever given her. That was when Vernon lay beneath.
But she had certainly looked above, not at him. The tree seemed
sorrowful in its withering flowers of the colour of trodden snow.

Crossjay resumed the conversation.

"He says ladies don't like him much."

"Who says that?"

"Mr. Whitford."

"Were those his words?"

"I forget the words: but he said they wouldn't be taught by him, like
me, ever since you came; and since you came I've liked him ten times
more."

"The more you like him the more I shall like you, Crossjay."

The boy raised a shout and scampered away to Sir Willoughby, at the
appearance of whom Clara felt herself nipped and curling inward.
Crossjay ran up to him with every sign of pleasure. Yet he had not
mentioned him during the walk; and Clara took it for a sign that the
boy understood the entire satisfaction Willoughby had in mere shows of
affection, and acted up to it. Hardly blaming Crossjay, she was a
critic of the scene, for the reason that youthful creatures who have
ceased to love a person, hunger for evidence against him to confirm
their hard animus, which will seem to them sometimes, when he is not
immediately irritating them, brutish, because they can not analyze it
and reduce it to the multitude of just antagonisms whereof it came. It
has passed by large accumulation into a sombre and speechless load upon
the senses, and fresh evidence, the smallest item, is a champion to
speak for it. Being about to do wrong, she grasped at this eagerly, and
brooded on the little of vital and truthful that there was in the man
and how he corrupted the boy. Nevertheless, she instinctively imitated
Crossjay in an almost sparkling salute to him.

"Good-morning, Willoughby; it was not a morning to lose: have you been
out long?"

He retained her hand. "My dear Clara! and you, have you not
overfatigued yourself? Where have you been?"

"Round--everywhere! And I am certainly not tired."

"Only you and Crossjay? You should have loosened the dogs."

"Their barking would have annoyed the house."

"Less than I am annoyed to think of you without protection."

He kissed her fingers: it was a loving speech.

"The household . . ." said Clara, but would not insist to convict him
of what he could not have perceived.

"If you outstrip me another morning, Clara, promise me to take the
dogs; will you?"

"Yes."

"To-day I am altogether yours."

"Are you?"

"From the first to the last hour of it!--So you fall in with Horace's
humour pleasantly?"

"He is very amusing."

"As good as though one had hired him."

"Here comes Colonel De Craye."

"He must think we have hired him!"

She noticed the bitterness of Willoughby's tone. He sang out a
good-morning to De Craye, and remarked that he must go to the stables.

"Darleton? Darleton, Miss Middleton?" said the colonel, rising from his
bow to her: "a daughter of General Darleton? If so, I have had the
honour to dance with her. And have not you?--practised with her, I
mean; or gone off in a triumph to dance it out as young ladies do? So
you know what a delightful partner she is."

"She is!" cried Clara, enthusiastic for her succouring friend, whose
letter was the treasure in her bosom.

"Oddly, the name did not strike me yesterday, Miss Middleton. In the
middle of the night it rang a little silver bell in my ear, and I
remembered the lady I was half in love with, if only for her dancing.
She is dark, of your height, as light on her feet; a sister in another
colour. Now that I know her to be your friend . . . !"

"Why, you may meet her, Colonel De Craye."

"It'll be to offer her a castaway. And one only meets a charming girl
to hear that she's engaged! 'Tis not a line of a ballad, Miss
Middleton, but out of the heart."

"Lucy Darleton . . . You were leading me to talk seriously to you,
Colonel De Craye."

"Will you one day?--and not think me a perpetual tumbler! You have
heard of melancholy clowns. You will find the face not so laughable
behind my paint. When I was thirteen years younger I was loved, and my
dearest sank to the grave. Since then I have not been quite at home in
life; probably because of finding no one so charitable as she. 'Tis
easy to win smiles and hands, but not so easy to win a woman whose
faith you would trust as your own heart before the enemy. I was poor
then. She said. 'The day after my twenty-first birthday'; and that day
I went for her, and I wondered they did not refuse me at the door. I
was shown upstairs, and I saw her, and saw death. She wished to marry
me, to leave me her fortune!"

"Then, never marry," said Clara, in an underbreath.

She glanced behind.

Sir Willoughby was close, walking on turf.

"I must be cunning to escape him after breakfast," she thought.

He had discarded his foolishness of the previous days, and the thought
in him could have replied: "I am a dolt if I let you out of my sight."

Vernon appeared, formal as usual of late. Clara begged his excuse for
withdrawing Crossjay from his morning swim. He nodded.

De Craye called to Willoughby for a book of the trains.

"There's a card in the smoking-room; eleven, one, and four are the
hours, if you must go," said Willoughby.

"You leave the Hall, Colonel De Craye?"

"In two or three days, Miss Middleton."

She did not request him to stay: his announcement produced no effect on
her. Consequently, thought he--well, what? nothing: well, then, that
she might not be minded to stay herself. Otherwise she would have
regretted the loss of an amusing companion: that is the modest way of
putting it. There is a modest and a vain for the same sentiment; and
both may be simultaneously in the same breast; and each one as honest
as the other; so shy is man's vanity in the presence of here and there
a lady. She liked him: she did not care a pin for him--how could she?
yet she liked him: O, to be able to do her some kindling bit of
service! These were his consecutive fancies, resolving naturally to the
exclamation, and built on the conviction that she did not love
Willoughby, and waited for a spirited lift from circumstances. His call
for a book of the trains had been a sheer piece of impromptu, in the
mind as well as on the mouth. It sprang, unknown to him, of conjectures
he had indulged yesterday and the day before. This morning she would
have an answer to her letter to her friend, Miss Lucy Darleton, the
pretty dark girl, whom De Craye was astonished not to have noticed more
when he danced with her. She, pretty as she was, had come to his
recollection through the name and rank of her father, a famous general
of cavalry, and tactician in that arm. The colonel despised himself for
not having been devoted to Clara Middleton's friend.

The morning's letters were on the bronze plate in the hall. Clara
passed on her way to her room without inspecting them. De Craye opened
an envelope and went upstairs to scribble a line. Sir Willoughby
observed their absence at the solemn reading to the domestic servants
in advance of breakfast. Three chairs were unoccupied. Vernon had his
own notions of a mechanical service--and a precious profit he derived
from them! but the other two seats returned the stare Willoughby cast
at their backs with an impudence that reminded him of his friend
Horace's calling for a book of the trains, when a minute afterward he
admitted he was going to stay at the Hall another two days, or three.
The man possessed by jealousy is never in need of matter for it: he
magnifies; grass is jungle, hillocks are mountains. Willoughby's legs
crossing and uncrossing audibly, and his tight-folded arms and clearing
of the throat, were faint indications of his condition.

"Are you in fair health this morning, Willoughby?" Dr. Middleton said
to him after he had closed his volumes.

"The thing is not much questioned by those who know me intimately," he
replied.

"Willoughby unwell!" and, "He is health incarnate!" exclaimed the
ladies Eleanor and Isabel.

Laetitia grieved for him. Sun-rays on a pest-stricken city, she
thought, were like the smile of his face. She believed that he deeply
loved Clara, and had learned more of her alienation.

He went into the ball to look into the well for the pair of
malefactors; on fire with what he could not reveal to a soul.

De Craye was in the housekeeper's room, talking to young Crossjay, and
Mrs. Montague just come up to breakfast. He had heard the boy
chattering, and as the door was ajar he peeped in, and was invited to
enter. Mrs. Montague was very fond of hearing him talk: he paid her the
familiar respect which a lady of fallen fortunes, at a certain period
after the fall, enjoys as a befittingly sad souvenir, and the
respectfulness of the lord of the house was more chilling.

She bewailed the boy's trying his constitution with long walks before
he had anything in him to walk on.

"And where did you go this morning, my lad?" said De Craye.

"Ah, you know the ground, colonel," said Crossjay. "I am hungry! I
shall eat three eggs and some bacon, and buttered cakes, and jam, then
begin again, on my second cup of coffee."

"It's not braggadocio," remarked Mrs. Montague. "He waits empty from
five in the morning till nine, and then he comes famished to my table,
and cats too much."

"Oh! Mrs. Montague, that is what the country people call roemancing.
For, Colonel De Craye, I had a bun at seven o'clock. Miss Middleton
forced me to go and buy it"

"A stale bun, my boy?"

"Yesterday's: there wasn't much of a stopper to you in it, like a new
bun."

"And where did you leave Miss Middleton when you went to buy the bun?
You should never leave a lady; and the street of a country town is
lonely at that early hour. Crossjay, you surprise me."

"She forced me to go, colonel. Indeed she did. What do I care for a
bun! And she was quite safe. We could hear the people stirring in the
post-office, and I met our postman going for his letter-bag. I didn't
want to go: bother the bun!--but you can't disobey Miss Middleton. I
never want to, and wouldn't."

"There we're of the same mind," said the colonel, and Crossjay shouted,
for the lady whom they exalted was at the door.

"You will be too tired for a ride this morning," De Craye said to her,
descending the stairs.

She swung a bonnet by the ribands. "I don't think of riding to-day."

"Why did you not depute your mission to me?"

"I like to bear my own burdens, as far as I can."

"Miss Darleton is well?"

"I presume so."

"Will you try her recollection for me?"

"It will probably be quite as lively as yours was."

"Shall you see her soon?"

"I hope so."

Sir Willoughby met her at the foot of the stairs, but refrained from
giving her a hand that shook.

"We shall have the day together," he said.

Clara bowed.

At the breakfast-table she faced a clock.

De Craye took out his watch. "You are five and a half minutes too slow
by that clock, Willoughby."

"The man omitted to come from Rendon to set it last week, Horace. He
will find the hour too late here for him when he does come."

One of the ladies compared the time of her watch with De Craye's, and
Clara looked at hers and gratefully noted that she was four minutes in
arrear.

She left the breakfast-room at a quarter to ten, after kissing her
father. Willoughby was behind her. He had been soothed by thinking of
his personal advantages over De Craye, and he felt assured that if he
could be solitary with his eccentric bride and fold her in himself, he
would, cutting temper adrift, be the man he had been to her not so many
days back. Considering how few days back, his temper was roused, but he
controlled it.

They were slightly dissenting as De Craye stepped into the hall.

"A present worth examining," Willoughby said to her: "and I do not
dwell on the costliness. Come presently, then. I am at your disposal
all day. I will drive you in the afternoon to call on Lady Busshe to
offer your thanks: but you must see it first. It is laid out in the
laboratory."

"There is time before the afternoon," said Clara.

"Wedding presents?" interposed De Craye.

"A porcelain service from Lady Busshe, Horace."

"Not in fragments? Let me have a look at it. I'm haunted by an idea
that porcelain always goes to pieces. I'll have a look and take a hint.
We're in the laboratory, Miss Middleton."

He put his arm under Willoughby's. The resistance to him was momentary:
Willoughby had the satisfaction of the thought that De Craye being with
him was not with Clara; and seeing her giving orders to her maid
Barclay, he deferred his claim on her company for some short period.

De Craye detained him in the laboratory, first over the China cups and
saucers, and then with the latest of London--tales of youngest Cupid
upon subterranean adventures, having high titles to light him.
Willoughby liked the tale thus illuminated, for without the title there
was no special savour in such affairs, and it pulled down his betters
in rank. He was of a morality to reprobate the erring dame while he
enjoyed the incidents. He could not help interrupting De Craye to point
at Vernon through the window, striding this way and that, evidently on
the hunt for young Crossjay. "No one here knows how to manage the boy
except myself But go on, Horace," he said, checking his contemptuous
laugh; and Vernon did look ridiculous, out there half-drenched already
in a white rain, again shuffled off by the little rascal. It seemed
that he was determined to have his runaway: he struck up the avenue at
full pedestrian racing pace.

"A man looks a fool cutting after a cricket-ball; but, putting on steam
in a storm of rain to catch a young villain out of sight, beats
anything I've witnessed," Willoughby resumed, in his amusement.

"Aiha!" said De Craye, waving a hand to accompany the melodious accent,
"there are things to beat that for fun."

He had smoked in the laboratory, so Willoughby directed a servant to
transfer the porcelain service to one of the sitting-rooms for Clara's
inspection of it.

"You're a bold man," De Craye remarked. "The luck may be with you,
though. I wouldn't handle the fragile treasure for a trifle."

"I believe in my luck," said Willoughby.

Clara was now sought for. The lord of the house desired her presence
impatiently, and had to wait. She was in none of the lower rooms.
Barclay, her maid, upon interrogation, declared she was in none of the
upper. Willoughby turned sharp on De Craye: he was there.

The ladies Eleanor and Isabel and Miss Dale were consulted. They had
nothing to say about Clara's movements, more than that they could not
understand her exceeding restlessness. The idea of her being out of
doors grew serious; heaven was black, hard thunder rolled, and
lightning flushed the battering rain. Men bearing umbrellas, shawls,
and cloaks were dispatched on a circuit of the park. De Craye said:
"I'll be one."

"No," cried Willoughby, starting to interrupt him, "I can't allow it."

"I've the scent of a hound, Willoughby; I'll soon be on the track."

"My dear Horace, I won't let you go."

"Adieu, dear boy! and if the lady's discoverable, I'm the one to find
her."

He stepped to the umbrella-stand. There was then a general question
whether Clara had taken her umbrella. Barclay said she had. The fact
indicated a wider stroll than round inside the park: Crossjay was
likewise absent. De Craye nodded to himself.

Willoughby struck a rattling blow on the barometer.

"Where's Pollington?" he called, and sent word for his man Pollington
to bring big fishing-boots and waterproof wrappers.

An urgent debate within him was in progress.

Should he go forth alone on his chance of discovering Clara and
forgiving her under his umbrella and cloak? or should he prevent De
Craye from going forth alone on the chance he vaunted so impudently?

"You will offend me, Horace, if you insist," he said.

"Regard me as an instrument of destiny, Willoughby," replied De Craye.

"Then we go in company."

"But that's an addition of one that cancels the other by conjunction,
and's worse than simple division: for I can't trust my wits unless I
rely on them alone, you see."

"Upon my word, you talk at times most unintelligible stuff, to be frank
with you, Horace. Give it in English."

"'Tis not suited, perhaps, to the genius of the language, for I thought
I talked English."

"Oh, there's English gibberish as well as Irish, we know!"

"And a deal foolisher when they do go at it; for it won't bear
squeezing, we think, like Irish."

"Where!" exclaimed the ladies, "where can she be! The storm is
terrible."

Laetitia suggested the boathouse.

"For Crossjay hadn't a swim this morning!" said De Craye.

No one reflected on the absurdity that Clara should think of taking
Crossjay for a swim in the lake, and immediately after his breakfast:
it was accepted as a suggestion at least that she and Crossjay had gone
to the lake for a row.

In the hopefulness of the idea, Willoughby suffered De Craye to go on
his chance unaccompanied. He was near chuckling. He projected a plan
for dismissing Crossjay and remaining in the boathouse with Clara,
luxuriating in the prestige which would attach to him for seeking and
finding her. Deadly sentiments intervened. Still he might expect to be
alone with her where she could not slip from him.

The throwing open of the hall-doors for the gentlemen presented a
framed picture of a deluge. All the young-leaved trees were steely
black, without a gradation of green, drooping and pouring, and the song
of rain had become an inveterate hiss.

The ladies beholding it exclaimed against Clara, even apostrophized
her, so dark are trivial errors when circumstances frown. She must be
mad to tempt such weather: she was very giddy; she was never at rest.
Clara! Clara! how could you be so wild! Ought we not to tell Dr.
Middleton?

Laetitia induced them to spare him.

"Which way do you take?" said Willoughby, rather fearful that his
companion was not to be got rid of now.

"Any way," said De Craye. "I chuck up my head like a halfpenny, and go
by the toss."

This enraging nonsense drove off Willoughby. De Craye saw him cast a
furtive eye at his heels to make sure he was not followed, and thought,
"Jove! he may be fond of her. But he's not on the track. She's a
determined girl, if I'm correct. She's a girl of a hundred thousand.
Girls like that make the right sort of wives for the right men. They're
the girls to make men think of marrying. To-morrow! only give me a
chance. They stick to you fast when they do stick."

Then a thought of her flower-like drapery and face caused him fervently
to hope she had escaped the storm.

Calling at the West park-lodge he heard that Miss Middleton had been
seen passing through the gate with Master Crossjay; but she had not
been seen coming back. Mr. Vernon Whitford had passed through half an
hour later.

"After his young man!" said the colonel.

The lodge-keeper's wife and daughter knew of Master Crossjay's pranks;
Mr. Whitford, they said, had made inquiries about him and must have
caught him and sent him home to change his dripping things; for Master
Crossjay had come back, and had declined shelter in the lodge; he
seemed to be crying; he went away soaking over the wet grass, hanging
his head. The opinion at the lodge was that Master Crossjay was
unhappy.

"He very properly received a wigging from Mr. Whitford, I have no
doubt," said Colonel Do Craye.

Mother and daughter supposed it to be the case, and considered Crossjay
very wilful for not going straight home to the Hall to change his wet
clothes; he was drenched.

Do Craye drew out his watch. The time was ten minutes past eleven. If
the surmise he had distantly spied was correct, Miss Middleton would
have been caught in the storm midway to her destination. By his guess
at her character (knowledge of it, he would have said), he judged that
no storm would daunt her on a predetermined expedition. He deduced in
consequence that she was at the present moment flying to her friend,
the charming brunette Lucy Darleton.

Still, as there was a possibility of the rain having been too much for
her, and as he had no other speculation concerning the route she had
taken, he decided upon keeping along the road to Rendon, with a keen
eye at cottage and farmhouse windows.



CHAPTER XXVI

VERNON IN PURSUIT

The lodge-keeper had a son, who was a chum of Master Crossjay's, and
errant-fellow with him upon many adventures; for this boy's passion was
to become a gamekeeper, and accompanied by one of the head-gamekeeper's
youngsters, he and Crossjay were in the habit of rangeing over the
country, preparing for a profession delightful to the tastes of all
three. Crossjay's prospective connection with the mysterious ocean
bestowed the title of captain on him by common consent; he led them,
and when missing for lessons he was generally in the society of Jacob
Croom or Jonathan Fernaway. Vernon made sure of Crossjay when he
perceived Jacob Croom sitting on a stool in the little lodge-parlour.
Jacob's appearance of a diligent perusal of a book he had presented to
the lad, he took for a decent piece of trickery. It was with amazement
that he heard from the mother and daughter, as well as Jacob, of Miss
Middleton's going through the gate before ten o'clock with Crossjay
beside her, the latter too hurried to spare a nod to Jacob. That she,
of all on earth, should be encouraging Crossjay to truancy was
incredible. Vernon had to fall back upon Greek and Latin aphoristic
shots at the sex to believe it.

Rain was universal; a thick robe of it swept from hill to hill; thunder
rumbled remote, and between the ruffled roars the downpour pressed on
the land with a great noise of eager gobbling, much like that of the
swine's trough fresh filled, as though a vast assembly of the hungered
had seated themselves clamorously and fallen to on meats and drinks in
a silence, save of the chaps. A rapid walker poetically and humourously
minded gathers multitudes of images on his way. And rain, the heaviest
you can meet, is a lively companion when the resolute pacer scorns
discomfort of wet clothes and squealing boots. South-western
rain-clouds, too, are never long sullen: they enfold and will have the
earth in a good strong glut of the kissing overflow; then, as a hawk
with feathers on his beak of the bird in his claw lifts head, they rise
and take veiled feature in long climbing watery lines: at any moment
they may break the veil and show soft upper cloud, show sun on it, show
sky, green near the verge they spring from, of the green of grass in
early dew; or, along a travelling sweep that rolls asunder overhead,
heaven's laughter of purest blue among titanic white shoulders: it may
mean fair smiling for awhile, or be the lightest interlude; but the
watery lines, and the drifting, the chasing, the upsoaring, all in a
shadowy fingering of form, and the animation of the leaves of the trees
pointing them on, the bending of the tree-tops, the snapping of
branches, and the hurrahings of the stubborn hedge at wrestle with the
flaws, yielding but a leaf at most, and that on a fling, make a glory
of contest and wildness without aid of colour to inflame the man who is
at home in them from old association on road, heath, and mountain. Let
him be drenched, his heart will sing. And thou, trim cockney, that
jeerest, consider thyself, to whom it may occur to be out in such a
scene, and with what steps of a nervous dancing-master it would be
thine to play the hunted rat of the elements, for the preservation of
the one imagined dryspot about thee, somewhere on thy luckless person!
The taking of rain and sun alike befits men of our climate, and he who
would have the secret of a strengthening intoxication must court the
clouds of the South-west with a lover's blood.

Vernon's happy recklessness was dashed by fears for Miss Middleton.
Apart from those fears, he had the pleasure of a gull wheeling among
foam-streaks of the wave. He supposed the Swiss and Tyrol Alps to have
hidden their heads from him for many a day to come, and the springing
and chiming South-west was the next best thing. A milder rain
descended; the country expanded darkly defined underneath the moving
curtain; the clouds were as he liked to see them, scaling; but their
skirts dragged. Torrents were in store, for they coursed streamingly
still and had not the higher lift, or eagle ascent, which he knew for
one of the signs of fairness, nor had the hills any belt of mist-like
vapour.

On a step of the stile leading to the short-cut to Rendon young
Crossjay was espied. A man-tramp sat on the top-bar.

"There you are; what are you doing there? Where's Miss Middleton?" said
Vernon. "Now, take care before you open your mouth."

Crossjay shut the mouth he had opened.

"The lady has gone away over to a station, sir," said the tramp.

"You fool!" roared Crossjay, ready to fly at him.

"But ain't it now, young gentleman? Can you say it ain't?"

"I gave you a shilling, you ass!"

"You give me that sum, young gentleman, to stop here and take care of
you, and here I stopped."

"Mr. Whitford!" Crossjay appealed to his master, and broke of in
disgust. "Take care of me! As if anybody who knows me would think I
wanted taking care of! Why, what a beast you must be, you fellow!"

"Just as you like, young gentleman. I chaunted you all I know, to keep
up your downcast spirits. You did want comforting. You wanted it
rarely. You cried like an infant."

"I let you 'chaunt', as you call it, to keep you from swearing."

"And why did I swear, young gentleman? because I've got an itchy coat
in the wet, and no shirt for a lining. And no breakfast to give me a
stomach for this kind of weather. That's what I've come to in this
world! I'm a walking moral. No wonder I swears, when I don't strike up
a chaunt."

"But why are you sitting here wet through, Crossjay! Be off home at
once, and change, and get ready for me."

"Mr. Whitford, I promised, and I tossed this fellow a shilling not to
go bothering Miss Middleton."

"The lady wouldn't have none o" the young gentleman, sir, and I offered
to go pioneer for her to the station, behind her, at a respectful
distance."

"As if!--you treacherous cur!" Crossjay ground his teeth at the
betrayer. "Well, Mr. Whitford, and I didn't trust him, and I stuck to
him, or he'd have been after her whining about his coat and stomach,
and talking of his being a moral. He repeats that to everybody."

"She has gone to the station?" said Vernon.

Not a word on that subject was to be won from Crossjay.

"How long since?" Vernon partly addressed Mr. Tramp.

The latter became seized with shivers as he supplied the information
that it might be a quarter of an hour or twenty minutes. "But what's
time to me, sir? If I had reglar meals, I should carry a clock in my
inside. I got the rheumatics instead."

"Way there!" Vernon cried, and took the stile at a vault.

"That's what gentlemen can do, who sleeps in their beds warm," moaned
the tramp. "They've no joints."

Vernon handed him a half-crown piece, for he had been of use for once.

"Mr. Whitford, let me come. If you tell me to come I may. Do let me
come," Crossjay begged with great entreaty. "I sha'n't see her for
. . ."

"Be off, quick!" Vernon cut him short and pushed on.

The tramp and Crossjay were audible to him; Crossjay spurning the
consolations of the professional sad man.

Vernon spun across the fields, timing himself by his watch to reach
Rendon station ten minutes before eleven, though without clearly
questioning the nature of the resolution which precipitated him.
Dropping to the road, he had better foothold than on the slippery
field-path, and he ran. His principal hope was that Clara would have
missed her way. Another pelting of rain agitated him on her behalf.
Might she not as well be suffered to go?--and sit three hours and more
in a railway-carriage with wet feet!

He clasped the visionary little feet to warm them on his breast.--But
Willoughby's obstinate fatuity deserved the blow!--But neither she nor
her father deserved the scandal. But she was desperate. Could reasoning
touch her? if not, what would? He knew of nothing. Yesterday he had
spoken strongly to Willoughby, to plead with him to favour her
departure and give her leisure to sound her mind, and he had left his
cousin, convinced that Clara's best measure was flight: a man so
cunning in a pretended obtuseness backed by senseless pride, and in
petty tricks that sprang of a grovelling tyranny, could only be taught
by facts.

Her recent treatment of him, however, was very strange; so strange that
he might have known himself better if he had reflected on the bound
with which it shot him to a hard suspicion. De Craye had prepared the
world to hear that he was leaving the Hall. Were they in concert? The
idea struck at his heart colder than if her damp little feet had been
there.

Vernon's full exoneration of her for making a confidant of himself, did
not extend its leniency to the young lady's character when there was
question of her doing the same with a second gentleman. He could
suspect much: he could even expect to find De Craye at the station.

That idea drew him up in his run, to meditate on the part he should
play; and by drove little Dr. Corney on the way to Rendon and hailed
him, and gave his cheerless figure the nearest approach to an Irish bug
in the form of a dry seat under an umbrella and water-proof covering.

"Though it is the worst I can do for you, if you decline to supplement
it with a dose of hot brandy and water at the Dolphin," said he: "and
I'll see you take it, if you please. I'm bound to ease a Rendon patient
out of the world. Medicine's one of their superstitions, which they
cling to the harder the more useless it gets. Pill and priest launch
him happy between them.--'And what's on your conscience, Pat?--It's
whether your blessing, your Riverence, would disagree with another
drop. Then put the horse before the cart, my son, and you shall have
the two in harmony, and God speed ye!'--Rendon station, did you say,
Vernon? You shall have my prescription at the Railway Arms, if you're
hurried. You have the look. What is it? Can I help?"

"No. And don't ask."

"You're like the Irish Grenadier who had a bullet in a humiliating
situation. Here's Rendon, and through it we go with a spanking clatter.
Here's Doctor Corney's dog-cart post-haste again. For there's no dying
without him now, and Repentance is on the death-bed for not calling him
in before. Half a charge of humbug hurts no son of a gun, friend
Vernon, if he'd have his firing take effect. Be tender to't in man or
woman, particularly woman. So, by goes the meteoric doctor, and I'll
bring noses to window-panes, you'll see, which reminds me of the
sweetest young lady I ever saw, and the luckiest man. When is she off
for her bridal trousseau? And when are they spliced? I'll not call her
perfection, for that's a post, afraid to move. But she's a dancing
sprig of the tree next it. Poetry's wanted to speak of her. I'm Irish
and inflammable, I suppose, but I never looked on a girl to make a man
comprehend the entire holy meaning of the word rapturous, like that
one. And away she goes! We'll not say another word. But you're a
Grecian, friend Vernon. Now, couldn't you think her just a whiff of an
idea of a daughter of a peccadillo-Goddess?"

"Deuce take you, Corney, drop me here; I shall be late for the train,"
said Vernon, laying hand on the doctor's arm to check him on the way to
the station in view.

Dr Corney had a Celtic intelligence for a meaning behind an illogical
tongue. He drew up, observing. "Two minutes run won't hurt you."

He slightly fancied he might have given offence, though he was well
acquainted with Vernon and had a cordial grasp at the parting.

The truth must be told that Vernon could not at the moment bear any
more talk from an Irishman. Dr. Corney had succeeded in persuading him
not to wonder at Clara Middleton's liking for Colonel de Craye.



CHAPTER XXVII

AT THE RAILWAY STATION

Clara stood in the waiting-room contemplating the white rails of the
rain-swept line. Her lips parted at the sight of Vernon.

"You have your ticket?" said he.

She nodded, and breathed more freely; the matter-of-fact question was
reassuring.

"You are wet," he resumed; and it could not be denied.

"A little. I do not feel it."

"I must beg you to come to the inn hard by--half a dozen steps. We
shall see your train signalled. Come."

She thought him startlingly authoritative, but he had good sense to
back him; and depressed as she was by the dampness, she was disposed to
yield to reason if he continued to respect her independence. So she
submitted outwardly, resisted inwardly, on the watch to stop him from
taking any decisive lead.

"Shall we be sure to see the signal, Mr. Whitford?"

"I'll provide for that."

He spoke to the station-clerk, and conducted her across the road.

"You are quite alone, Miss Middleton?"

"I am: I have not brought my maid."

"You must take off boots and stockings at once, and have them dried.
I'll put you in the hands of the landlady."

"But my train!"

"You have full fifteen minutes, besides fair chances of delay."

He seemed reasonable, the reverse of hostile, in spite of his
commanding air, and that was not unpleasant in one friendly to her
adventure. She controlled her alert distrustfulness, and passed from
him to the landlady, for her feet were wet and cold, the skirts of her
dress were soiled; generally inspecting herself, she was an object to
be shuddered at, and she was grateful to Vernon for his inattention to
her appearance.

Vernon ordered Dr. Corney's dose, and was ushered upstairs to a room of
portraits, where the publican's ancestors and family sat against the
walls, flat on their canvas as weeds of the botanist's portfolio,
although corpulency was pretty generally insisted on, and there were
formidable battalions of bust among the females. All of them had the
aspect of the national energy which has vanquished obstacles to subside
on its ideal. They all gazed straight at the guest. "Drink, and come to
this!" they might have been labelled to say to him. He was in the
private Walhalla of a large class of his countrymen. The existing host
had taken forethought to be of the party in his prime, and in the
central place, looking fresh-fattened there and sanguine from the
performance. By and by a son would shove him aside; meanwhile he
shelved his parent, according to the manners of energy.

One should not be a critic of our works of Art in uncomfortable
garments. Vernon turned from the portraits to a stuffed pike in a glass
case, and plunged into sympathy with the fish for a refuge.

Clara soon rejoined him, saying: "But you, you must be very wet. You
were without an umbrella. You must be wet through, Mr. Whitford."

"We're all wet through, to-day," said Vernon. "Crossjay's wet through,
and a tramp he met."

"The horrid man! But Crossjay should have turned back when I told him.
Cannot the landlord assist you? You are not tied to time. I begged
Crossjay to turn back when it began to rain: when it became heavy I
compelled him. So you met my poor Crossjay?"

"You have not to blame him for betraying you. The tramp did that. I
was thrown on your track quite by accident. Now pardon me for using
authority, and don't be alarmed, Miss Middleton; you are perfectly free
for me; but you must not run a risk to your health. I met Doctor
Corney coming along, and he prescribed hot brandy and water for a wet
skin, especially for sitting in it. There's the stuff on the table; I
see you have been aware of a singular odour; you must consent to sip
some, as medicine; merely to give you warmth."

"Impossible, Mr. Whitford: I could not taste it. But pray, obey Dr.
Corney, if he ordered it for you."

"I can't, unless you do."

"I will, then: I will try."

She held the glass, attempted, and was baffled by the reek of it.

"Try: you can do anything," said Vernon.

"Now that you find me here, Mr. Whitford! Anything for myself it would
seem, and nothing to save a friend. But I will really try."

"It must be a good mouthful."

"I will try. And you will finish the glass?"

"With your permission, if you do not leave too much."

They were to drink out of the same glass; and she was to drink some of
this infamous mixture: and she was in a kind of hotel alone with him:
and he was drenched in running after her:--all this came of breaking
loose for an hour!

"Oh! what a misfortune that it should be such a day, Mr. Whitford!"

"Did you not choose the day?"

"Not the weather."

"And the worst of it is, that Willoughby will come upon Crossjay wet to
the bone, and pump him and get nothing but shufflings, blank lies, and
then find him out and chase him from the house."

Clara drank immediately, and more than she intended. She held the glass
as an enemy to be delivered from, gasping, uncertain of her breath.

"Never let me be asked to endure such a thing again!"

"You are unlikely to be running away from father and friends again."

She panted still with the fiery liquid she had gulped: and she wondered
that it should belie its reputation in not fortifying her, but
rendering her painfully susceptible to his remarks.

"Mr. Whitford, I need not seek to know what you think of me."

"What I think? I don't think at all; I wish to serve you if I can."

"Am I right in supposing you a little afraid of me? You should not be.
I have deceived no one. I have opened my heart to you, and am not
ashamed of having done so."

"It is an excellent habit, they say."

"It is not a habit with me."

He was touched, and for that reason, in his dissatisfaction with
himself, not unwilling to hurt. "We take our turn, Miss Middleton. I'm
no hero, and a bad conspirator, so I am not of much avail."

"You have been reserved--but I am going, and I leave my character
behind. You condemned me to the poison-bowl; you have not touched it
yourself"

"In vino veritas: if I do I shall be speaking my mind."

"Then do, for the sake of mind and body."

"It won't be complimentary."

"You can be harsh. Only say everything."

"Have we time?"

They looked at their watches.

"Six minutes," Clara said.

Vernon's had stopped, penetrated by his total drenching.

She reproached herself. He laughed to quiet her. "My dies solemnes are
sure to give me duckings; I'm used to them. As for the watch, it will
remind me that it stopped when you went."

She raised the glass to him. She was happier and hoped for some little
harshness and kindness mixed that she might carry away to travel with
and think over.

He turned the glass as she had given it, turned it round in putting it
to his lips: a scarce perceptible manoeuvre, but that she had given it
expressly on one side.

It may be hoped that it was not done by design. Done even accidentally,
without a taint of contrivance, it was an affliction to see, and coiled
through her, causing her to shrink and redden.

Fugitives are subject to strange incidents; they are not vessels lying
safe in harbour. She shut her lips tight, as if they had stung. The
realizing sensitiveness of her quick nature accused them of a loss of
bloom. And the man who made her smart like this was formal as a railway
official on a platform.

"Now we are both pledged in the poison-bowl," said he. "And it has the
taste of rank poison, I confess. But the doctor prescribed it, and at
sea we must be sailors. Now, Miss Middleton, time presses: will you
return with me?"

"No! no!"

"Where do you propose to go?"

"To London; to a friend--Miss Darleton."

"What message is there for your father?"

"Say I have left a letter for him in a letter to be delivered to you."

"To me! And what message for Willoughby?"

"My maid Barclay will hand him a letter at noon."

"You have sealed Crossjay's fate."

"How?"

"He is probably at this instant undergoing an interrogation. You may
guess at his replies. The letter will expose him, and Willoughby does
not pardon."

"I regret it. I cannot avoid it. Poor boy! My dear Crossjay! I did not
think of how Willoughby might punish him. I was very thoughtless. Mr.
Whitford, my pin-money shall go for his education. Later, when I am a
little older, I shall be able to support him."

"That's an encumbrance; you should not tie yourself to drag it about.
You are unalterable, of course, but circumstances are not, and as it
happens, women are more subject to them than we are."

"But I will not be!"

"Your command of them is shown at the present moment."

"Because I determine to be free?"

"No: because you do the contrary; you don't determine: you run away
from the difficulty, and leave it to your father and friends to bear.
As for Crossjay, you see you destroy one of his chances. I should have
carried him off before this, if I had not thought it prudent to keep
him on terms with Willoughby. We'll let Crossjay stand aside. He'll
behave like a man of honour, imitating others who have had to do the
same for ladies."

"Have spoken falsely to shelter cowards, you mean, Mr. Whitford. Oh, I
know.--I have but two minutes. The die is cast. I cannot go back. I
must get ready. Will you see me to the station? I would rather you
should hurry home."

"I will see the last of you. I will wait for you here. An express runs
ahead of your train, and I have arranged with the clerk for a signal; I
have an eye on the window."

"You are still my best friend, Mr. Whitford."

"Though?"

"Well, though you do not perfectly understand what torments have driven
me to this."

"Carried on tides and blown by winds?"

"Ah! you do not understand."

"Mysteries?"

"Sufferings are not mysteries, they are very simple facts."

"Well, then, I don't understand. But decide at once. I wish you to have
your free will."

She left the room.

Dry stockings and boots are better for travelling in than wet ones, but
in spite of her direct resolve, she felt when drawing them on like one
that has been tripped. The goal was desirable, the ardour was damped.
Vernon's wish that she should have her free will compelled her to sound
it: and it was of course to go, to be liberated, to cast off incubus
and hurt her father? injure Crossjay? distress her friends? No, and ten
times no!

She returned to Vernon in haste, to shun the reflex of her mind.

He was looking at a closed carriage drawn up at the station door.

"Shall we run over now, Mr. Whitford?"

"There's no signal. Here it's not so chilly."

"I ventured to enclose my letter to papa in yours, trusting you would
attend to my request to you to break the news to him gently and plead
for me."

"We will all do the utmost we can."

"I am doomed to vex those who care for me. I tried to follow your
counsel."

"First you spoke to me, and then you spoke to Miss Dale; and at least
you have a clear conscience."

"No."

"What burdens it?"

"I have done nothing to burden it."

"Then it's a clear conscience."

"No."

Vernon's shoulders jerked. Our patience with an innocent duplicity in
women is measured by the place it assigns to us and another. If he had
liked he could have thought: "You have not done but meditated something
to trouble conscience." That was evident, and her speaking of it was
proof too of the willingness to be dear. He would not help her. Man's
blood, which is the link with women and responsive to them on the
instant for or against, obscured him. He shrugged anew when she said:
"My character would have been degraded utterly by my staying there.
Could you advise it?"

"Certainly not the degradation of your character," he said, black on
the subject of De Craye, and not lightened by feelings which made him
sharply sensible of the beggarly dependant that he was, or poor
adventuring scribbler that he was to become.

"Why did you pursue me and wish to stop me, Mr. Whitford?" said Clara,
on the spur of a wound from his tone.

He replied: "I suppose I'm a busybody; I was never aware of it till
now."

"You are my friend. Only you speak in irony so much. That was irony,
about my clear conscience. I spoke to you and to Miss Dale: and then I
rested and drifted. Can you not feel for me, that to mention it is like
a scorching furnace? Willoughby has entangled papa. He schemes
incessantly to keep me entangled. I fly from his cunning as much as
from anything. I dread it. I have told you that I am more to blame than
he, but I must accuse him. And wedding-presents! and congratulations!
And to be his guest!"

"All that makes up a plea in mitigation," said Vernon.

"Is it not sufficient for you?" she asked him timidly.

"You have a masculine good sense that tells you you won't be respected
if you run. Three more days there might cover a retreat with your
father."

"He will not listen to me. He confuses me; Willoughby has bewitched
him."

"Commission me: I will see that he listens."

"And go back? Oh, no! To London! Besides, there is the dining with Mrs.
Mountstuart this evening; and I like her very well, but I must avoid
her. She has a kind of idolatry . . . And what answers can I give? I
supplicate her with looks. She observes them, my efforts to divert them
from being painful produce a comic expression to her, and I am a
charming 'rogue', and I am entertained on the topic she assumes to be
principally interesting me. I must avoid her. The thought of her leaves
me no choice. She is clever. She could tattoo me with epigrams."

"Stay . . . there you can hold your own."

"She has told me you give me credit for a spice of wit. I have not
discovered my possession. We have spoken of it; we call it your
delusion. She grants me some beauty; that must be hers."

"There's no delusion in one case or the other, Miss Middleton. You have
beauty and wit; public opinion will say, wildness: indifference to your
reputation will be charged on you, and your friends will have to admit
it. But you will be out of this difficulty."

"Ah--to weave a second?"

"Impossible to judge until we see how you escape the first. And I have
no more to say. I love your father. His humour of sententiousness and
doctorial stilts is a mask he delights in, but you ought to know him
and not be frightened by it. If you sat with him an hour at a Latin
task, and if you took his hand and told him you could not leave him,
and no tears!--he would answer you at once. It would involve a day or
two further; disagreeable to you, no doubt: preferable to the present
mode of escape, as I think. But I have no power whatever to persuade. I
have not the 'lady's tongue'. My appeal is always to reason."

"It is a compliment. I loathe the 'lady's tongue'."

"It's a distinctly good gift, and I wish I had it. I might have
succeeded instead of failing, and appearing to pay a compliment."

"Surely the express train is very late, Mr. Whitford?"

"The express has gone by."

"Then we will cross over."

"You would rather not be seen by Mrs. Mountstuart. That is her carriage
drawn up at the station, and she is in it."

Clara looked, and with the sinking of her heart said: "I must brave
her!"

"In that case I will take my leave of you here, Miss Middleton."

She gave him her hand. "Why is Mrs. Mountstuart at the station to-day?"

"I suppose she has driven to meet one of the guests for her
dinner-party. Professor Crooklyn was promised to your father, and he
may be coming by the down-train."

"Go back to the Hall!" exclaimed Clara. "How can I? I have no more
endurance left in me. If I had some support!--if it were the sense of
secretly doing wrong, it might help me through. I am in a web. I cannot
do right, whatever I do. There is only the thought of saving Crossjay.
Yes, and sparing papa.--Good-bye, Mr. Whitford. I shall remember your
kindness gratefully. I cannot go back."

"You will not?" said he, tempting her to hesitate.

"No."

"But if you are seen by Mrs. Mountstuart, you must go back. I'll do my
best to take her away. Should she see you, you must patch up a story
and apply to her for a lift. That, I think, is imperative."

"Not to my mind," said Clara.

He bowed hurriedly, and withdrew. After her confession, peculiar to
her, of possibly finding sustainment in secretly doing wrong, her
flying or remaining seemed to him a choice of evils: and whilst she
stood in bewildered speculation on his reason for pursuing her--which
was not evident--he remembered the special fear inciting him, and so
far did her justice as to have at himself on that subject. He had done
something perhaps to save her from a cold: such was his only
consolatory thought. He had also behaved like a man of honour, taking
no personal advantage of her situation; but to reflect on it recalled
his astonishing dryness. The strict man of honour plays a part that he
should not reflect on till about the fall of the curtain, otherwise he
will be likely sometimes to feel the shiver of foolishness at his good
conduct.



CHAPTER XXVIII

THE RETURN

Posted in observation at a corner of the window Clara saw Vernon cross
the road to Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson's carriage, transformed to the
leanest pattern of himself by narrowed shoulders and raised
coat-collar. He had such an air of saying, "Tom's a-cold", that her
skin crept in sympathy.

Presently he left the carriage and went into the station: a bell had
rung. Was it her train? He approved her going, for he was employed in
assisting her to go: a proceeding at variance with many things he had
said, but he was as full of contradiction to-day as women are accused
of being. The train came up. She trembled: no signal had appeared, and
Vernon must have deceived her.

He returned; he entered the carriage, and the wheels were soon in
motion. Immediately thereupon, Flitch's fly drove past, containing
Colonel De Craye.

Vernon could not but have perceived him!

But what was it that had brought the colonel to this place? The
pressure of Vernon's mind was on her and foiled her efforts to assert
her perfect innocence, though she knew she had done nothing to allure
the colonel hither. Excepting Willoughby, Colonel De Craye was the last
person she would have wished to encounter.

She had now a dread of hearing the bell which would tell her that
Vernon had not deceived her, and that she was out of his hands, in the
hands of some one else.

She bit at her glove; she glanced at the concentrated eyes of the
publican's family portraits, all looking as one; she noticed the empty
tumbler, and went round to it and touched it, and the silly spoon in
it.

A little yielding to desperation shoots us to strange distances!

Vernon had asked her whether she was alone. Connecting that inquiry,
singular in itself, and singular in his manner of putting it, with the
glass of burning liquid, she repeated: "He must have seen Colonel De
Craye!" and she stared at the empty glass, as at something that
witnessed to something: for Vernon was not your supple cavalier
assiduously on the smirk to pin a gallantry to commonplaces. But all
the doors are not open in a young lady's consciousness, quick of nature
though she may be: some are locked and keyless, some will not open to
the key, some are defended by ghosts inside. She could not have said
what the something witnessed to. If we by chance know more, we have
still no right to make it more prominent than it was with her. And the
smell of the glass was odious; it disgraced her. She had an impulse to
pocket the spoon for a memento, to show it to grandchildren for a
warning. Even the prelude to the morality to be uttered on the occasion
sprang to her lips: "Here, my dears, is a spoon you would be ashamed to
use in your teacups, yet it was of more value to me at one period of my
life than silver and gold in pointing out, etc.": the conclusion was
hazy, like the conception; she had her idea.

And in this mood she ran down-stairs and met Colonel De Craye on the
station steps.

The bright illumination of his face was that of the confident man
confirmed in a risky guess in the crisis of doubt and dispute.

"Miss Middleton!" his joyful surprise predominated; the pride of an
accurate forecast, adding: "I am not too late to be of service?"

She thanked him for the offer.

"Have you dismissed the fly, Colonel De Craye?"

"I have just been getting change to pay Mr. Flitch. He passed me on the
road. He is interwound with our fates to a certainty. I had only to
jump in; I knew it, and rolled along like a magician commanding a
genie."

"Have I been . . ."

"Not seriously, nobody doubts you being under shelter. You will allow
me to protect you? My time is yours."

"I was thinking of a running visit to my friend Miss Darleton."

"May I venture? I had the fancy that you wished to see Miss Darleton
to-day. You cannot make the journey unescorted."

"Please retain the fly. Where is Willoughby?"

"He is in jack-boots. But may I not, Miss Middleton? I shall never be
forgiven if you refuse me."

"There has been searching for me?"

"Some hallooing. But why am I rejected? Besides, I don't require the
fly; I shall walk if I am banished. Flitch is a wonderful conjurer, but
the virtue is out of him for the next four-and-twenty hours. And it
will be an opportunity to me to make my bow to Miss Darleton!"

"She is rigorous on the conventionalities, Colonel De Craye."

"I'll appear before her as an ignoramus or a rebel, whichever she likes
best to take in leading-strings. I remember her. I was greatly struck
by her."

"Upon recollection!"

"Memory didn't happen to be handy at the first mention of the lady's
name. As the general said of his ammunition and transport, there's the
army!--but it was leagues in the rear. Like the footman who went to
sleep after smelling fire in the house, I was thinking of other things.
It will serve me right to be forgotten--if I am. I've a curiosity to
know: a remainder of my coxcombry. Not that exactly: a wish to see the
impression I made on your friend.--None at all? But any pebble casts a
ripple."

"That is hardly an impression," said Clara, pacifying her
irresoluteness with this light talk.

"The utmost to be hoped for by men like me! I have your
permission?--one minute--I will get my ticket."

"Do not," said Clara.

"Your man-servant entreats you!"

She signified a decided negative with the head, but her eyes were
dreamy. She breathed deep: this thing done would cut the cord. Her
sensation of languor swept over her.

De Craye took a stride. He was accosted by one of the railway-porters.
Flitch's fly was in request for a gentleman. A portly old gentleman
bothered about luggage appeared on the landing.

"The gentleman can have it," said De Craye, handing Flitch his money.

"Open the door." Clara said to Flitch.

He tugged at the handle with enthusiasm. The door was open: she stepped
in.

"Then mount the box and I'll jump up beside you," De Craye called out,
after the passion of regretful astonishment had melted from his
features.

Clara directed him to the seat fronting her; he protested indifference
to the wet; she kept the door unshut. His temper would have preferred
to buffet the angry weather. The invitation was too sweet.

She heard now the bell of her own train. Driving beside the railway
embankment she met the train: it was eighteen minutes late, by her
watch. And why, when it flung up its whale-spouts of steam, she was not
journeying in it, she could not tell. She had acted of her free will:
that she could say. Vernon had not induced her to remain; assuredly her
present companion had not; and her whole heart was for flight: yet she
was driving back to the Hall, not devoid of calmness. She speculated on
the circumstance enough to think herself incomprehensible, and there
left it, intent on the scene to come with Willoughby.

"I must choose a better day for London," she remarked.

De Craye bowed, but did not remove his eyes from her.

"Miss Middleton, you do not trust me."

She answered: "Say in what way. It seems to me that I do."

"I may speak?"

"If it depends on my authority."

"Fully?"

"Whatever you have to say. Let me stipulate, be not very grave. I want
cheering in wet weather."

"Miss Middleton, Flitch is charioteer once more. Think of it. There's
a tide that carries him perpetually to the place where he was cast
forth, and a thread that ties us to him in continuity. I have not the
honour to be a friend of long standing: one ventures on one's devotion:
it dates from the first moment of my seeing you. Flitch is to blame, if
any one. Perhaps the spell would be broken, were he reinstated in his
ancient office."

"Perhaps it would," said Clara, not with her best of smiles.
Willoughby's pride of relentlessness appeared to her to be receiving a
blow by rebound, and that seemed high justice.

"I am afraid you were right; the poor fellow has no chance," De Craye
pursued. He paused, as for decorum in the presence of misfortune, and
laughed sparklingly: "Unless I engage him, or pretend to! I verily
believe that Flitch's melancholy person on the skirts of the Hall
completes the picture of the Eden within.--Why will you not put some
trust in me, Miss Middleton?"

"But why should you not pretend to engage him then, Colonel De Craye?"

"We'll plot it, if you like. Can you trust me for that?"

"For any act of disinterested kindness, I am sure."

"You mean it?"

"Without reserve. You could talk publicly of taking him to London."

"Miss Middleton, just now you were going. My arrival changed your mind.
You distrust me: and ought I to wonder? The wonder would be all the
other way. You have not had the sort of report of me which would
persuade you to confide, even in a case of extremity. I guessed you
were going. Do you ask me how? I cannot say. Through what they call
sympathy, and that's inexplicable. There's natural sympathy, natural
antipathy. People have to live together to discover how deep it is!"

Clara breathed her dumb admission of his truth.

The fly jolted and threatened to lurch.

"Flitch, my dear man!" the colonel gave a murmuring remonstrance;
"for," said he to Clara, whom his apostrophe to Flitch had set smiling,
"we're not safe with him, however we make believe, and he'll be jerking
the heart out of me before he has done.--But if two of us have not the
misfortune to be united when they come to the discovery, there's hope.
That is, if one has courage and the other has wisdom. Otherwise they
may go to the yoke in spite of themselves. The great enemy is Pride,
who has them both in a coach and drives them to the fatal door, and the
only thing to do is to knock him off his box while there's a minute to
spare. And as there's no pride like the pride of possession, the
deadliest wound to him is to make that doubtful. Pride won't be taught
wisdom in any other fashion. But one must have the courage to do it!"

De Craye trifled with the window-sash, to give his words time to sink
in solution.

Who but Willoughby stood for Pride? And who, swayed by languor, had
dreamed of a method that would be surest and swiftest to teach him the
wisdom of surrendering her?

"You know, Miss Middleton, I study character," said the colonel.

"I see that you do," she answered.

"You intend to return?"

"Oh, decidedly."

"The day is unfavourable for travelling, I must say."

"It is."

"You may count on my discretion in the fullest degree. I throw myself
on your generosity when I assure you that it was not my design to
surprise a secret. I guessed the station, and went there, to put myself
at your disposal."

"Did you," said Clara, reddening slightly, "chance to see Mrs.
Mountstuart Jenkinson's carriage pass you when you drove up to the
station?"

De Craye had passed a carriage. "I did not see the lady. She was in
it?"

"Yes. And therefore it is better to put discretion on one side: we may
be certain she saw you."

"But not you, Miss Middleton."

"I prefer to think that I am seen. I have a description of courage,
Colonel De Craye, when it is forced on me."

"I have not suspected the reverse. Courage wants training, as well as
other fine capacities. Mine is often rusty and rheumatic."

"I cannot hear of concealment or plotting."

"Except, pray, to advance the cause of poor Flitch!"

"He shall be excepted."

The colonel screwed his head round for a glance at his coachman's back.

"Perfectly guaranteed to-day!" he said of Flitch's look of solidity.
"The convulsion of the elements appears to sober our friend; he is only
dangerous in calms. Five minutes will bring us to the park-gates."

Clara leaned forward to gaze at the hedgeways in the neighbourhood of
the Hall strangely renewing their familiarity with her. Both in thought
and sensation she was like a flower beaten to earth, and she thanked
her feminine mask for not showing how nerveless and languid she was.
She could have accused Vernon of a treacherous cunning for imposing it
on her free will to decide her fate.

Involuntarily she sighed.

"There is a train at three," said De Craye, with splendid promptitude.

"Yes, and one at five. We dine with Mrs. Mountstuart tonight. And I
have a passion for solitude! I think I was never intended for
obligations. The moment I am bound I begin to brood on freedom."

"Ladies who say that, Miss Middleton!. . ."

"What of them?"

"They're feeling too much alone."

She could not combat the remark: by her self-assurance that she had the
principle of faithfulness, she acknowledged to herself the truth of
it:--there is no freedom for the weak. Vernon had said that once. She
tried to resist the weight of it, and her sheer inability precipitated
her into a sense of pitiful dependence.

Half an hour earlier it would have been a perilous condition to be
traversing in the society of a closely scanning reader of fair faces.
Circumstances had changed. They were at the gates of the park.

"Shall I leave you?" said De Craye.

"Why should you?" she replied.

He bent to her gracefully.

The mild subservience flattered Clara's languor. He had not compelled
her to be watchful on her guard, and she was unaware that he passed it
when she acquiesced to his observation, "An anticipatory story is a
trap to the teller."

"It is," she said. She had been thinking as much.

He threw up his head to consult the brain comically with a dozen little
blinks.

"No, you are right, Miss Middleton, inventing beforehand never
prospers; 't is a way to trip our own cleverness. Truth and mother-wit
are the best counsellors: and as you are the former, I'll try to act up
to the character you assign me."

Some tangle, more prospective than present, seemed to be about her as
she reflected. But her intention being to speak to Willoughby without
subterfuge, she was grateful to her companion for not tempting her to
swerve. No one could doubt his talent for elegant fibbing, and she was
in the humour both to admire and adopt the art, so she was glad to be
rescued from herself. How mother-wit was to second truth she did not
inquire, and as she did not happen to be thinking of Crossjay, she was
not troubled by having to consider how truth and his tale of the
morning would be likely to harmonize.

Driving down the park, she had full occupation in questioning whether
her return would be pleasing to Vernon, who was the virtual cause of
it, though he had done so little to promote it: so little that she
really doubted his pleasure in seeing her return.



CHAPTER XXIX

IN WHICH THE SENSITIVENESS OF SIR WILLOUGHBY IS EXPLAINED: AND HE
RECEIVES MUCH INSTRUCTION

THE Hall-dock over the stables was then striking twelve. It was the
hour for her flight to be made known, and Clara sat in a turmoil of dim
apprehension that prepared her nervous frame for a painful blush on her
being asked by Colonel De Craye whether she had set her watch
correctly. He must, she understood, have seen through her at the
breakfast table: and was she not cruelly indebted to him for her
evasion of Willoughby? Such perspicacity of vision distressed and
frightened her; at the same time she was obliged to acknowledge that he
had not presumed on it. Her dignity was in no way the worse for him.
But it had been at a man's mercy, and there was the affliction.

She jumped from the fly as if she were leaving danger behind. She could
at the moment have greeted Willoughby with a conventionally friendly
smile. The doors were thrown open and young Crossjay flew out to her.
He hung and danced on her hand, pressed the hand to his mouth, hardly
believing that he saw and touched her, and in a lingo of dashes and
asterisks related how Sir Willoughby had found him under the boathouse
eaves and pumped him, and had been sent off to Hoppner's farm, where
there was a sick child, and on along the road to a labourer's cottage:
"For I said you're so kind to poor people, Miss Middleton; that's true,
now that is true. And I said you wouldn't have me with you for fear of
contagion!" This was what she had feared.

"Every crack and bang in a boys vocabulary," remarked the colonel,
listening to him after he had paid Flitch.

The latter touched his hat till he had drawn attention to himself, when
he exclaimed, with rosy melancholy: "Ah! my lady, ah! colonel, if ever
I lives to drink some of the old port wine in the old Hall at
Christmastide!" Their healths would on that occasion be drunk, it was
implied. He threw up his eyes at the windows, humped his body and drove
away.

"Then Mr. Whitford has not come back?" said Clara to Crossjay.

"No, Miss Middleton. Sir Willoughby has, and he's upstairs in his room
dressing."

"Have you seen Barclay?"

"She has just gone into the laboratory. I told her Sir Willoughby
wasn't there."

"Tell me, Crossjay, had she a letter?"

"She had something."

"Run: say I am here; I want the letter, it is mine."

Crossjay sprang away and plunged into the arms of Sir Willoughby.

"One has to catch the fellow like a football," exclaimed the injured
gentleman, doubled across the boy and holding him fast, that he might
have an object to trifle with, to give himself countenance: he needed
it. "Clara, you have not been exposed to the weather?"

"Hardly at all."

"I rejoice. You found shelter?"

"Yes."

"In one of the cottages?"

"Not in a cottage; but I was perfectly sheltered. Colonel De Craye
passed a fly before he met me . . ."

"Flitch again!" ejaculated the colonel.

"Yes, you have luck, you have luck," Willoughby addressed him, still
clutching Crossjay and treating his tugs to get loose as an invitation
to caresses. But the foil barely concealed his livid perturbation.

"Stay by me, sir," he said at last sharply to Crossjay, and Clara
touched the boy's shoulder in admonishment of him.

She turned to the colonel as they stepped into the hall: "I have not
thanked you, Colonel De Craye." She dropped her voice to its lowest: "A
letter in my handwriting in the laboratory."

Crossjay cried aloud with pain.

"I have you!" Willoughby rallied him with a laugh not unlike the squeak
of his victim.

"You squeeze awfully hard, sir."

"Why, you milksop!"

"Am I! But I want to get a book."

"Where is the book?"

"In the laboratory."

Colonel De Craye, sauntering by the laboratory door, sung out: "I'll
fetch you your book. What is it? EARLY NAVIGATORS? INFANT HYMNS? I
think my cigar-case is in here."

"Barclay speaks of a letter for me," Willoughby said to Clara, "marked
to be delivered to me at noon!"

"In case of my not being back earlier; it was written to avert
anxiety," she replied.

"You are very good."

"Oh, good! Call me anything but good. Here are the ladies. Dear
ladies!" Clara swam to meet them as they issued from a morning-room
into the hall, and interjections reigned for a couple of minutes.

Willoughby relinquished his grasp of Crossjay, who darted
instantaneously at an angle to the laboratory, whither he followed, and
he encountered De Craye coming out, but passed him in silence.

Crossjay was rangeing and peering all over the room. Willoughby went
to his desk and the battery-table and the mantelpiece. He found no
letter. Barclay had undoubtedly informed him that she had left a letter
for him in the laboratory, by order of her mistress after breakfast.

He hurried out and ran upstairs in time to see De Craye and Barclay
breaking a conference.

He beckoned to her. The maid lengthened her upper lip and beat her
dress down smooth: signs of the apprehension of a crisis and of the
getting ready for action.

"My mistress's bell has just rung, Sir Willoughby."

"You had a letter for me."

"I said . . ."

"You said when I met you at the foot of the stairs that you had left a
letter for me in the laboratory."

"It is lying on my mistress's toilet-table."

"Get it."

Barclay swept round with another of her demure grimaces. It was
apparently necessary with her that she should talk to herself in this
public manner.

Willoughby waited for her; but there was no reappearance of the maid.

Struck by the ridicule of his posture of expectation, and of his whole
behaviour, he went to his bedroom suite, shut himself in, and paced the
chambers, amazed at the creature he had become. Agitated like the
commonest of wretches, destitute of self-control, not able to preserve
a decent mask, be, accustomed to inflict these emotions and tremours
upon others, was at once the puppet and dupe of an intriguing girl. His
very stature seemed lessened. The glass did not say so, but the
shrunken heart within him did, and wailfully too. Her
compunction--'Call me anything but good'--coming after her return to
the Hall beside De Craye, and after the visible passage of a secret
between them in his presence, was a confession: it blew at him with the
fury of a furnace-blast in his face. Egoist agony wrung the outcry from
him that dupery is a more blessed condition. He desired to be deceived.

He could desire such a thing only in a temporary transport; for above
all he desired that no one should know of his being deceived; and were
he a dupe the deceiver would know it, and her accomplice would know it,
and the world would soon know of it: that world against whose tongue
he stood defenceless. Within the shadow of his presence he compressed
opinion, as a strong frost binds the springs of earth, but beyond it
his shivering sensitiveness ran about in dread of a stripping in a
wintry atmosphere. This was the ground of his hatred of the world: it
was an appalling fear on behalf of his naked eidolon, the tender infant
Self swaddled in his name before the world, for which he felt as the
most highly civilized of men alone can feel, and which it was
impossible for him to stretch out hands to protect. There the poor
little loveable creature ran for any mouth to blow on; and frostnipped
and bruised, it cried to him, and he was of no avail! Must we not
detest a world that so treats us? We loathe it the more, by the measure
of our contempt for them, when we have made the people within the
shadow-circle of our person slavish.

And he had been once a young prince in popularity: the world had been
his possession. Clara's treatment of him was a robbery of land and
subjects. His grander dream had been a marriage with a lady of so
glowing a fame for beauty and attachment to her lord that the world
perforce must take her for witness to merits which would silence
detraction and almost, not quite (it was undesireable), extinguish
envy. But for the nature of women his dream would have been realized.
He could not bring himself to denounce Fortune. It had cost him a
grievous pang to tell Horace De Craye he was lucky; he had been
educated in the belief that Fortune specially prized and cherished
little Willoughby: hence of necessity his maledictions fell upon women,
or he would have forfeited the last blanket of a dream warm as poets
revel in.

But if Clara deceived him, he inspired her with timidity. There was
matter in that to make him wish to be deceived. She had not looked him
much in the face: she had not crossed his eyes: she had looked
deliberately downward, keeping her head up, to preserve an exterior
pride. The attitude had its bewitchingness: the girl's physical pride
of stature scorning to bend under a load of conscious guilt, had a
certain black-angel beauty for which he felt a hugging hatred: and
according to his policy when these fits of amorous meditation seized
him, he burst from the present one in the mood of his more favourable
conception of Clara, and sought her out.

The quality of the mood of hugging hatred is, that if you are
disallowed the hug, you do not hate the fiercer.

Contrariwise the prescription of a decorous distance of two feet ten
inches, which is by measurement the delimitation exacted of a rightly
respectful deportment, has this miraculous effect on the great creature
man, or often it has: that his peculiar hatred returns to the reluctant
admiration begetting it, and his passion for the hug falls prostrate as
one of the Faithful before the shrine; he is reduced to worship by
fasting.

(For these mysteries, consult the sublime chapter in the GREAT BOOK,
the Seventy-first on LOVE, wherein nothing is written, but the Reader
receives a Lanthorn, a Powder-cask and a Pick-axe, and therewith
pursues his yellow-dusking path across the rubble of preceding
excavators in the solitary quarry: a yet more instructive passage than
the overscrawled Seventieth, or French Section, whence the chapter
opens, and where hitherto the polite world has halted.)

The hurry of the hero is on us, we have no time to spare for mining
works: he hurried to catch her alone, to wreak his tortures on her in a
bitter semblance of bodily worship, and satiated, then comfortably to
spurn. He found her protected by Barclay on the stairs.

"That letter for me?" he said.

"I think I told you, Willoughby, there was a letter I left with Barclay
to reassure you in case of my not returning early," said Clara. "It was
unnecessary for her to deliver it."

"Indeed? But any letter, any writing of yours, and from you to me! You
have it still?"

"No, I have destroyed it."

"That was wrong."

"It could not have given you pleasure."

"My dear Clara, one line from you!"

"There were but three."

Barclay stood sucking her lips. A maid in the secrets of her mistress
is a purchaseable maid, for if she will take a bribe with her right
hand she will with her left; all that has to be calculated is the
nature and amount of the bribe: such was the speculation indulged by
Sir Willoughby, and he shrank from the thought and declined to know
more than that he was on a volcanic hillside where a thin crust quaked
over lava. This was a new condition with him, representing Clara's gain
in their combat. Clara did not fear his questioning so much as he
feared her candour.

Mutually timid, they were of course formally polite, and no plain
speaking could have told one another more distinctly that each was
defensive. Clara stood pledged to the fib; packed, scaled and posted;
and he had only to ask to have it, supposing that he asked with a voice
not exactly peremptory.

She said in her heart, "It is your fault: you are relentless and you
would ruin Crossjay to punish him for devoting himself to me, like the
poor thoughtless boy he is! and so I am bound in honour to do my utmost
for him."

The reciprocal devotedness, moreover, served two purposes: it preserved
her from brooding on the humiliation of her lame flight, and flutter
back, and it quieted her mind in regard to the precipitate intimacy of
her relations with Colonel De Craye. Willoughby's boast of his
implacable character was to blame. She was at war with him, and she was
compelled to put the case in that light. Crossjay must be shielded from
one who could not spare an offender, so Colonel De Craye quite
naturally was called on for his help, and the colonel's dexterous aid
appeared to her more admirable than alarming.

Nevertheless, she would not have answered a direct question falsely.
She was for the fib, but not the lie; at a word she could be disdainful
of subterfuges. Her look said that. Willoughby perceived it. She had
written him a letter of three lines: "There were but three": and she
had destroyed the letter. Something perchance was repented by her? Then
she had done him an injury! Between his wrath at the suspicion of an
injury, and the prudence enjoined by his abject coveting of her, he
consented to be fooled for the sake of vengeance, and something
besides.

"Well! here you are, safe; I have you!" said he, with courtly
exultation: "and that is better than your handwriting. I have been all
over the country after you."

"Why did you? We are not in a barbarous land," said Clara.

"Crossjay talks of your visiting a sick child, my love:--you have
changed your dress?"

"You see."

"The boy declared you were going to that farm of Hoppner's, and some
cottage. I met at my gates a tramping vagabond who swore to seeing you
and the boy in a totally contrary direction."

"Did you give him money?"

"I fancy so."

"Then he was paid for having seen me."

Willoughby tossed his head: it might be as she suggested; beggars are
liars.

"But who sheltered you, my dear Clara? You had not been heard of at
Hoppner's."

"The people have been indemnified for their pains. To pay them more
would be to spoil them. You disperse money too liberally. There was no
fever in the place. Who could have anticipated such a downpour! I want
to consult Miss Dale on the important theme of a dress I think of
wearing at Mrs Mountstuart's to-night."

"Do. She is unerring."

"She has excellent taste."

"She dresses very simply herself."

"But it becomes her. She is one of the few women whom I feel I could
not improve with a touch."

"She has judgement."

He reflected and repeated his encomium.

The shadow of a dimple in Clara's cheek awakened him to the idea that
she had struck him somewhere: and certainly he would never again be
able to put up the fiction of her jealousy of Laetitia. What, then,
could be this girl's motive for praying to be released? The
interrogation humbled him: he fled from the answer.

Willoughby went in search of De Craye. That sprightly intriguer had no
intention to let himself be caught solus. He was undiscoverable until
the assembly sounded, when Clara dropped a public word or two, and he
spoke in perfect harmony with her. After that, he gave his company to
Willoughby for an hour at billiards, and was well beaten.

The announcement of a visit of Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson took the
gentlemen to the drawing-room, rather suspecting that something stood
in the way of her dinner-party. As it happened, she was lamenting only
the loss of one of the jewels of the party: to wit, the great Professor
Crooklyn, invited to meet Dr. Middleton at her table; and she related
how she had driven to the station by appointment, the professor being
notoriously a bother-headed traveller: as was shown by the fact that he
had missed his train in town, for he had not arrived; nothing had been
seen of him. She cited Vernon Whitford for her authority that the train
had been inspected, and the platform scoured to find the professor.

"And so," said she, "I drove home your Green Man to dry him; he was wet
through and chattering; the man was exactly like a skeleton wrapped in
a sponge, and if he escapes a cold he must be as invulnerable as he
boasts himself. These athletes are terrible boasters."

"They climb their Alps to crow," said Clara, excited by her
apprehension that Mrs. Mountstuart would speak of having seen the
colonel near the station.

There was a laugh, and Colonel De Craye laughed loudly as it flashed
through him that a quick-witted impressionable girl like Miss Middleton
must, before his arrival at the Hall, have speculated on such obdurate
clay as Vernon Whitford was, with humourous despair at his uselessness
to her. Glancing round, he saw Vernon standing fixed in a stare at the
young lady.

"You heard that, Whitford?" he said, and Clara's face betokening an
extremer contrition than he thought was demanded, the colonel rallied
the Alpine climber for striving to be the tallest of them--Signor
Excelsior!--and described these conquerors of mountains pancaked on the
rocks in desperate embraces, bleached here, burned there, barked all
over, all to be able to say they had been up "so high"--had conquered
another mountain! He was extravagantly funny and self-satisfied: a
conqueror of the sex having such different rewards of enterprise.

Vernon recovered in time to accept the absurdities heaped on him.

"Climbing peaks won't compare with hunting a wriggler," said he.

His allusion to the incessant pursuit of young Crossjay to pin him to
lessons was appreciated.

Clara felt the thread of the look he cast from herself to Colonel De
Craye. She was helpless, if he chose to misjudge her. Colonel De Craye
did not!

Crossjay had the misfortune to enter the drawing-room while Mrs.
Mountstuart was compassionating Vernon for his ducking in pursuit of
the wriggler; which De Craye likened to "going through the river after
his eel:" and immediately there was a cross-questioning of the boy
between De Craye and Willoughby on the subject of his latest truancy,
each gentleman trying to run him down in a palpable fib. They were
succeeding brilliantly when Vernon put a stop to it by marching him off
to hard labour. Mrs. Mountstuart was led away to inspect the beautiful
porcelain service, the present of Lady Busshe. "Porcelain again!" she
said to Willoughby, and would have signalled to the "dainty rogue" to
come with them, had not Clara been leaning over to Laetitia, talking to
her in an attitude too graceful to be disturbed. She called his
attention to it, slightly wondering at his impatience. She departed to
meet an afternoon train on the chance that it would land the professor.
"But tell Dr. Middleton," said she, "I fear I shall have no one worthy
of him! And," she added to Willoughby, as she walked out to her
carriage, "I shall expect you to do the great-gunnery talk at table."

"Miss Dale keeps it up with him best," said Willoughby.

"She does everything best! But my dinner-table is involved, and I
cannot count on a young woman to talk across it. I would hire a lion of
a menagerie, if one were handy, rather than have a famous scholar at my
table, unsupported by another famous scholar. Doctor Middleton would
ride down a duke when the wine is in him. He will terrify my poor
flock. The truth is, we can't leaven him: I foresee undigested lumps of
conversation, unless you devote yourself."

"I will devote myself," said Willoughby.

"I can calculate on Colonel De Craye and our porcelain beauty for any
quantity of sparkles, if you promise that. They play well together. You
are not to be one of the gods to-night, but a kind of Jupiter's
cup-bearer;--Juno's, if you like; and Lady Busshe and Lady Culmer, and
all your admirers shall know subsequently what you have done. You see
my alarm. I certainly did not rank Professor Crooklyn among the
possibly faithless, or I never would have ventured on Doctor Middleton
at my table. My dinner-parties have hitherto been all successes.
Naturally I feel the greater anxiety about this one. For a single
failure is all the more conspicuous. The exception is everlastingly
cited! It is not so much what people say, but my own sentiments. I hate
to fail. However, if you are true, we may do."

"Whenever the great gun goes off I will fall on my face, madam!"

"Something of that sort," said the dame, smiling, and leaving him to
reflect on the egoism of women. For the sake of her dinner-party he was
to be a cipher in attendance on Dr. Middleton, and Clara and De Craye
were to be encouraged in sparkling together! And it happened that he
particularly wished to shine. The admiration of his county made him
believe he had a flavour in general society that was not yet
distinguished by his bride, and he was to relinquish his opportunity in
order to please Mrs. Mountstuart! Had she been in the pay of his
rival, she could not have stipulated for more.

He remembered young Crossjay's instant quietude, after struggling in
his grasp, when Clara laid her hand on the boy: and from that
infinitesimal circumstance he deduced the boy's perception of a
differing between himself and his bride, and a transfer of Crossjay's
allegiance from him to her. She shone; she had the gift of female
beauty; the boy was attracted to it. That boy must be made to feel his
treason. But the point of the cogitation was, that similarly were Clara
to see her affianced shining, as shine he could when lighted up by
admirers, there was the probability that the sensation of her
littleness would animate her to take aim at him once more. And then was
the time for her chastisement.

A visit to Dr. Middleton in the library satisfied him that she had not
been renewing her entreaties to leave Patterne. No, the miserable
coquette had now her pastime, and was content to stay. Deceit was in
the air: he heard the sound of the shuttle of deceit without seeing it;
but, on the whole, mindful of what he had dreaded during the hours of
her absence, he was rather flattered, witheringly flattered. What was
it that he had dreaded? Nothing less than news of her running away.
Indeed a silly fancy, a lover's fancy! yet it had led him so far as to
suspect, after parting with De Craye in the rain, that his friend and
his bride were in collusion, and that he should not see them again. He
had actually shouted on the rainy road the theatric call "Fooled!" one
of the stage-cries which are cries of nature! particularly the cry of
nature with men who have driven other men to the cry.

Constantia Durham had taught him to believe women capable of explosions
of treason at half a minute's notice. And strangely, to prove that
women are all of a pack, she had worn exactly the same placidity of
countenance just before she fled, as Clara yesterday and to-day; no
nervousness, no flushes, no twitches of the brows, but smoothness, ease
of manner--an elegant sisterliness, one might almost say: as if the
creature had found a midway and borderline to walk on between cruelty
and kindness, and between repulsion and attraction; so that up to the
verge of her breath she did forcefully attract, repelling at one foot's
length with her armour of chill serenity. Not with any disdain, with no
passion: such a line as she herself pursued she indicated to him on a
neighbouring parallel. The passion in her was like a place of waves
evaporated to a crust of salt. Clara's resemblance to Constantia in
this instance was ominous. For him whose tragic privilege it had been
to fold each of them in his arms, and weigh on their eyelids, and see
the dissolving mist-deeps in their eyes, it was horrible. Once more the
comparison overcame him. Constantia he could condemn for revealing too
much to his manly sight: she had met him almost half-way: well, that
was complimentary and sanguine: but her frankness was a baldness often
rendering it doubtful which of the two, lady or gentleman, was the
object of the chase--an extreme perplexity to his manly soul. Now
Clara's inner spirit was shyer, shy as a doe down those rose-tinged
abysses; she allured both the lover and the hunter; forests of
heavenliness were in her flitting eyes. Here the difference of these
fair women made his present fate an intolerable anguish. For if
Constantia was like certain of the ladies whom he had rendered unhappy,
triumphed over, as it is queerly called, Clara was not. Her
individuality as a woman was a thing he had to bow to. It was
impossible to roll her up in the sex and bestow a kick on the
travelling bundle. Hence he loved her, though she hurt him. Hence his
wretchedness, and but for the hearty sincerity of his faith in the Self
he loved likewise and more, he would have been hangdog abject.

As for De Craye, Willoughby recollected his own exploits too proudly to
put his trust in a man. That fatal conjunction of temper and policy had
utterly thrown him off his guard, or he would not have trusted the
fellow even in the first hour of his acquaintance with Clara. But he
had wished her to be amused while he wove his plans to retain her at
the Hall:--partly imagining that she would weary of his neglect: vile
delusion! In truth he should have given festivities, he should have
been the sun of a circle, and have revealed himself to her in his more
dazzling form. He went near to calling himself foolish after the
tremendous reverberation of "Fooled!" had ceased to shake him.

How behave? It slapped the poor gentleman's pride in the face to ask. A
private talk with her would rouse her to renew her supplications. He
saw them flickering behind the girl's transparent calmness. That
calmness really drew its dead ivory hue from the suppression of them:
something as much he guessed; and he was not sure either of his temper
or his policy if he should hear her repeat her profane request.

An impulse to address himself to Vernon and discourse with him
jocularly on the childish whim of a young lady, moved perhaps by some
whiff of jealousy, to shun the yoke, was checked. He had always taken
so superior a pose with Vernon that he could not abandon it for a
moment: on such a subject too! Besides, Vernon was one of your men who
entertain the ideas about women of fellows that have never conquered
one: or only one, we will say in his case, knowing his secret history;
and that one no flag to boast of. Densely ignorant of the sex, his
nincompoopish idealizations, at other times preposterous, would now be
annoying. He would probably presume on Clara's inconceivable lapse of
dignity to read his master a lecture: he was quite equal to a philippic
upon woman's rights. This man had not been afraid to say that he talked
common sense to women. He was an example of the consequence!

Another result was that Vernon did not talk sense to men. Willoughby's
wrath at Clara's exposure of him to his cousin dismissed the proposal
of a colloquy so likely to sting his temper, and so certain to diminish
his loftiness. Unwilling to speak to anybody, he was isolated, yet
consciously begirt by the mysterious action going on all over the
house, from Clara and De Craye to Laetitia and young Crossjay, down to
Barclay the maid. His blind sensitiveness felt as we may suppose a
spider to feel when plucked from his own web and set in the centre of
another's. Laetitia looked her share in the mystery. A burden was on
her eyelashes. How she could have come to any suspicion of the
circumstances, he was unable to imagine. Her intense personal sympathy,
it might be; he thought so with some gentle pity for her--of the
paternal pat-back order of pity. She adored him, by decree of Venus;
and the Goddess had not decreed that he should find consolation in
adoring her. Nor could the temptings of prudent counsel in his head
induce him to run the risk of such a total turnover as the incurring of
Laetitia's pity of himself by confiding in her. He checked that impulse
also, and more sovereignly. For him to be pitied by Laetitia seemed an
upsetting of the scheme of Providence. Providence, otherwise the
discriminating dispensation of the good things of life, had made him
the beacon, her the bird: she was really the last person to whom he
could unbosom. The idea of his being in a position that suggested his
doing so, thrilled him with fits of rage; and it appalled him. There
appeared to be another Power. The same which had humiliated him once
was menacing him anew. For it could not be Providence, whose favourite
he had ever been. We must have a couple of Powers to account for
discomfort when Egoism is the kernel of our religion. Benevolence had
singled him for uncommon benefits: malignancy was at work to rob him of
them. And you think well of the world, do you!

Of necessity he associated Clara with the darker Power pointing the
knife at the quick of his pride. Still, he would have raised her
weeping: he would have stanched her wounds bleeding: he had an infinite
thirst for her misery, that he might ease his heart of its charitable
love. Or let her commit herself, and be cast off. Only she must commit
herself glaringly, and be cast off by the world as well. Contemplating
her in the form of a discarded weed, he had a catch of the breath: she
was fair. He implored his Power that Horace De Craye might not be the
man! Why any man? An illness, fever, fire, runaway horses, personal
disfigurement, a laming, were sufficient. And then a formal and noble
offer on his part to keep to the engagement with the unhappy wreck:
yes, and to lead the limping thing to the altar, if she insisted. His
imagination conceived it, and the world's applause besides.

Nausea, together with a sense of duty to his line, extinguished that
loathsome prospect of a mate, though without obscuring his chivalrous
devotion to his gentleman's word of honour, which remained in his mind
to compliment him permanently.

On the whole, he could reasonably hope to subdue her to admiration. He
drank a glass of champagne at his dressing; an unaccustomed act, but,
as he remarked casually to his man Pollington, for whom the rest of the
bottle was left, he had taken no horse-exercise that day.

Having to speak to Vernon on business, he went to the schoolroom, where
he discovered Clara, beautiful in full evening attire, with her arm on
young Crossjay's shoulder, and heard that the hard task-master had
abjured Mrs. Mountstuart's party, and had already excused himself,
intending to keep Crossjay to the grindstone. Willoughby was for the
boy, as usual, and more sparklingly than usual. Clara looked at him in
some surprise. He rallied Vernon with great zest, quite silencing him
when he said: "I bear witness that the fellow was here at his regular
hour for lessons, and were you?" He laid his hand on Crossjay, touching
Clara's.

"You will remember what I told you, Crossjay," said she, rising from
the seat gracefully to escape the touch. "It is my command."

Crossjay frowned and puffed.

"But only if I'm questioned," he said.

"Certainly," she replied.

"Then I question the rascal," said Willoughby, causing a start. "What,
sir, is your opinion of Miss Middleton in her robe of state this
evening?"

"Now, the truth, Crossjay!" Clara held up a finger; and the boy could
see she was playing at archness, but for Willoughby it was earnest.
"The truth is not likely to offend you or me either," he murmured to
her.

"I wish him never, never, on any excuse, to speak anything else."

"I always did think her a Beauty," Crossjay growled. He hated the
having to say it.

"There!" exclaimed Sir Willoughby, and bent, extending an arm to her.
"You have not suffered from the truth, my Clara!"

Her answer was: "I was thinking how he might suffer if he were taught
to tell the reverse."

"Oh! for a fair lady!"

"That is the worst of teaching, Willoughby."

"We'll leave it to the fellow's instinct; he has our blood in him. I
could convince you, though, if I might cite circumstances. Yes! But
yes! And yes again! The entire truth cannot invariably be told. I
venture to say it should not."

"You would pardon it for the 'fair lady'?"

"Applaud, my love."

He squeezed the hand within his arm, contemplating her.

She was arrayed in a voluminous robe of pale blue silk vapourous with
trimmings of light gauze of the same hue, gaze de Chambery, matching
her fair hair and dear skin for the complete overthrow of less
inflammable men than Willoughby.

"Clara!" sighed be.

"If so, it would really be generous," she said, "though the teaching h
bad."

"I fancy I can be generous."

"Do we ever know?"

He turned his head to Vernon, issuing brief succinct instructions for
letters to be written, and drew her into the hall, saying: "Know?
There are people who do not know themselves and as they are the
majority they manufacture the axioms. And it is assumed that we have to
swallow them. I may observe that I think I know. I decline to be
engulphed in those majorities. 'Among them, but not of them.' I know
this, that my aim in life is to be generous."

"Is it not an impulse or disposition rather than an aim?"

"So much I know," pursued Willoughby, refusing to be tripped. But she
rang discordantly in his ear. His "fancy that he could be generous" and
his "aim at being generous" had met with no response. "I have given
proofs," he said, briefly, to drop a subject upon which he was not
permitted to dilate; and he murmured, "People acquainted with me . . . !" 
She was asked if she expected him to boast of generous deeds. "From
childhood!" she heard him mutter; and she said to herself, "Release me,
and you shall be everything!"

The unhappy gentleman ached as he talked: for with men and with hosts
of women to whom he was indifferent, never did he converse in this
shambling, third-rate, sheepish manner, devoid of all highness of tone
and the proper precision of an authority. He was unable to fathom the
cause of it, but Clara imposed it on him, and only in anger could he
throw it off. The temptation to an outburst that would flatter him with
the sound of his authoritative voice had to be resisted on a night when
he must be composed if he intended to shine, so he merely mentioned
Lady Busshe's present, to gratify spleen by preparing the ground for
dissension, and prudently acquiesced in her anticipated slipperiness.
She would rather not look at it now, she said.

"Not now; very well," said he.

His immediate deference made her regretful. "There is hardly time,
Willoughby."

"My dear, we shall have to express our thanks to her."

"I cannot."

His arm contracted sharply. He was obliged to be silent.

Dr Middleton, Laetitia, and the ladies Eleanor and Isabel joining them
in the hall, found two figures linked together in a shadowy indication
of halves that have fallen apart and hang on the last thread of
junction. Willoughby retained her hand on his arm; he held to it as the
symbol of their alliance, and oppressed the girl's nerves by contact,
with a frame labouring for breath. De Craye looked on them from
overhead. The carriages were at the door, and Willoughby said, "Where's
Horace? I suppose he's taking a final shot at his Book of Anecdotes and
neat collection of Irishisms."

"No," replied the colonel, descending. "That's a spring works of itself
and has discovered the secret of continuous motion, more's the
pity!--unless you'll be pleased to make it of use to Science."

He gave a laugh of good-humour.

"Your laughter, Horace, is a capital comment on your wit."

Willoughby said it with the air of one who has flicked a whip.

"'Tis a genial advertisement of a vacancy," said De Craye.

"Precisely: three parts auctioneer to one for the property."

"Oh, if you have a musical quack, score it a point in his favour,
Willoughby, though you don't swallow his drug."

"If he means to be musical, let him keep time."

"Am I late?" said De Craye to the ladies, proving himself an adept in
the art of being gracefully vanquished, and so winning tender hearts.

Willoughby had refreshed himself. At the back of his mind there was a
suspicion that his adversary would not have yielded so flatly without
an assurance of practically triumphing, secretly getting the better of
him; and it filled him with venom for a further bout at the next
opportunity: but as he had been sarcastic and mordant, he had shown
Clara what he could do in a way of speaking different from the
lamentable cooing stuff, gasps and feeble protestations to which, he
knew not how, she reduced him. Sharing the opinion of his race, that
blunt personalities, or the pugilistic form, administered directly on
the salient features, are exhibitions of mastery in such encounters, he
felt strong and solid, eager for the successes of the evening. De Craye
was in the first carriage as escort to the ladies Eleanor and Isabel.
Willoughby, with Clara, Laetitia, and Dr. Middleton, followed, all
silent, for the Rev. Doctor was ostensibly pondering; and Willoughby
was damped a little when he unlocked his mouth to say:

"And yet I have not observed that Colonel de Craye is anything of a
Celtiberian Egnatius meriting fustigation for an untimely display of
well-whitened teeth, sir: 'quicquid est, ubicunque est, quodcunque
agit, renidet:':--ha? a morbus neither charming nor urbane to the
general eye, however consolatory to the actor. But this gentleman does
not offend so, or I am so strangely prepossessed in his favour as to be
an incompetent witness."

Dr Middleton's persistent ha? eh? upon an honest frown of inquiry
plucked an answer out of Willoughby that was meant to be humourously
scornful, and soon became apologetic under the Doctor's interrogatively
grasping gaze.

"These Irishmen," Willoughby said, "will play the professional jester
as if it were an office they were born to. We must play critic now and
then, otherwise we should have them deluging us with their Joe
Millerisms."

"With their O'Millerisms you would say, perhaps?"

Willoughby did his duty to the joke, but the Rev. Doctor, though he
wore the paternal smile of a man that has begotten hilarity, was not
perfectly propitiated, and pursued: "Nor to my apprehension is 'the
man's laugh the comment on his wit' unchallengeably new: instances of
cousinship germane to the phrase will recur to you. But it has to be
noted that it was a phrase of assault; it was ostentatiously battery;
and I would venture to remind you, friend, that among the elect,
considering that it is as fatally facile to spring the laugh upon a man
as to deprive him of his life, considering that we have only to
condescend to the weapon, and that the more popular necessarily the
more murderous that weapon is,--among the elect, to which it is your
distinction to aspire to belong, the rule holds to abstain from any
employment of the obvious, the percoct, and likewise, for your own
sake, from the epitonic, the overstrained; for if the former, by
readily assimilating with the understandings of your audience, are
empowered to commit assassination on your victim, the latter come under
the charge of unseemliness, inasmuch as they are a description of
public suicide. Assuming, then, manslaughter to be your pastime, and
hari-kari not to be your bent, the phrase, to escape criminality, must
rise in you as you would have it fall on him, ex improviso. Am I
right?"

"I am in the habit of thinking it impossible, sir, that you can be in
error," said Willoughby.

Dr Middleton left it the more emphatic by saying nothing further.

Both his daughter and Miss Dale, who had disapproved the waspish snap
at Colonel De Craye, were in wonderment of the art of speech which
could so soothingly inform a gentleman that his behaviour had not been
gentlemanly.

Willoughby was damped by what he comprehended of it for a few minutes.
In proportion as he realized an evening with his ancient admirers he
was restored, and he began to marvel greatly at his folly in not giving
banquets and Balls, instead of making a solitude about himself and his
bride. For solitude, thought he, is good for the man, the man being a
creature consumed by passion; woman's love, on the contrary, will only
be nourished by the reflex light she catches of you in the eyes of
others, she having no passion of her own, but simply an instinct
driving her to attach herself to whatsoever is most largely admired,
most shining. So thinking, he determined to change his course of
conduct, and he was happier. In the first gush of our wisdom drawn
directly from experience there is a mental intoxication that cancels
the old world and establishes a new one, not allowing us to ask whether
it is too late.



CHAPTER XXX

TREATING OF THE DINNER-PARTY AT MRS. MOUNTSTUART JENKINSON'S

Vernon and young Crossjay had tolerably steady work together for a
couple of hours, varied by the arrival of a plate of meat on a tray for
the master, and some interrogations put to him from time to time by the
boy in reference to Miss Middleton. Crossjay made the discovery that if
he abstained from alluding to Miss Middleton's beauty he might water
his dusty path with her name nearly as much as he liked. Mention of her
beauty incurred a reprimand. On the first occasion his master was
wistful. "Isn't she glorious!" Crossjay fancied he had started a
sovereign receipt for blessed deviations. He tried it again, but
paedagogue-thunder broke over his head.

"Yes, only I can't understand what she means, Mr. Whitford," he excused
himself "First I was not to tell; I know I wasn't, because she said so;
she quite as good as said so. Her last words were: 'Mind, Crossjay,
you know nothing about me', when I stuck to that beast of a tramp,
who's a 'walking moral,' and gets money out of people by snuffling it."

"Attend to your lesson, or you'll be one," said Vernon.

"Yes, but, Mr. Whitford, now I am to tell. I'm to answer straight out
to every question."

"Miss Middleton is anxious that you should be truthful."

"Yes; but in the morning she told me not to tell."

"She was in a hurry. She has it on her conscience that you may have
misunderstood her, and she wishes you never to be guilty of an untruth,
least of all on her account."

Crossjay committed an unspoken resolution to the air in a violent sigh:
"Ah!" and said: "If I were sure!"

"Do as she bids you, my boy."

"But I don't know what it is she wants."

"Hold to her last words to you."

"So I do. If she told me to run till I dropped, on I'd go."

"She told you to study your lessons; do that."

Crossjay buckled to his book, invigorated by an imagination of his
liege lady on the page.

After a studious interval, until the impression of his lady had
subsided, he resumed: "She's so funny. She's just like a girl, and then
she's a lady, too. She's my idea of a princess. And Colonel De Craye!
Wasn't he taught dancing! When he says something funny he ducks and
seems to be setting to his partner. I should like to be as clever as
her father. That is a clever man. I dare say Colonel De Craye will
dance with her tonight. I wish I was there."

"It's a dinner-party, not a dance," Vernon forced himself to say, to
dispel that ugly vision.

"Isn't it, sir? I thought they danced after dinner-parties, Mr.
Whitford, have you ever seen her run?"

Vernon pointed him to his task.

They were silent for a lengthened period.

"But does Miss Middleton mean me to speak out if Sir Willoughby asks
me?" said Crossjay.

"Certainly. You needn't make much of it. All's plain and simple."

"But I'm positive, Mr. Whitford, he wasn't to hear of her going to the
post-office with me before breakfast. And how did Colonel De Craye find
her and bring her back, with that old Flitch? He's a man and can go
where he pleases, and I'd have found her, too, give me the chance. You
know. I'm fond of Miss Dale, but she--I'm very fond of her--but you
can't think she's a girl as well. And about Miss Dale, when she says a
thing, there it is, clear. But Miss Middleton has a lot of meanings.
Never mind; I go by what's inside, and I'm pretty sure to please her."

"Take your chin off your hand and your elbow off the book, and fix
yourself," said Vernon, wrestling with the seduction of Crossjay's
idolatry, for Miss Middleton's appearance had been preternaturally
sweet on her departure, and the next pleasure to seeing her was hearing
of her from the lips of this passionate young poet.

"Remember that you please her by speaking truth," Vernon added, and
laid himself open to questions upon the truth, by which he learnt, with
a perplexed sense of envy and sympathy, that the boy's idea of truth
strongly approximated to his conception of what should be agreeable to
Miss Middleton.

He was lonely, bereft of the bard, when he had tucked Crossjay up in
his bed and left him. Books he could not read; thoughts were
disturbing. A seat in the library and a stupid stare helped to pass the
hours, and but for the spot of sadness moving meditation in spite of
his effort to stun himself, he would have borne a happy resemblance to
an idiot in the sun. He had verily no command of his reason. She was
too beautiful! Whatever she did was best. That was the refrain of the
fountain-song in him; the burden being her whims, variations,
inconsistencies, wiles; her tremblings between good and naughty, that
might be stamped to noble or to terrible; her sincereness, her
duplicity, her courage, cowardice, possibilities for heroism and for
treachery. By dint of dwelling on the theme, he magnified the young
lady to extraordinary stature. And he had sense enough to own that her
character was yet liquid in the mould, and that she was a creature of
only naturally youthful wildness provoked to freakishness by the ordeal
of a situation shrewd as any that can happen to her sex in civilized
life. But he was compelled to think of her extravagantly, and he leaned
a little to the discrediting of her, because her actual image ummanned
him and was unbearable; and to say at the end of it: "She is too
beautiful! whatever she does is best," smoothed away the wrong he did
her. Had it been in his power he would have thought of her in the
abstract--the stage contiguous to that which he adopted: but the
attempt was luckless; the Stagyrite would have faded in it. What
philosopher could have set down that face of sun and breeze and nymph
in shadow as a point in a problem?

The library door was opened at midnight by Miss Dale. She dosed it
quietly. "You are not working, Mr. Whitford? I fancied you would wish
to hear of the evening. Professor Crooklyn arrived after all! Mrs.
Mountstuart is bewildered: she says she expected you, and that you did
not excuse yourself to her, and she cannot comprehend, et caetera. That
is to say, she chooses bewilderment to indulge in the exclamatory. She
must be very much annoyed. The professor did come by the train she
drove to meet!"

"I thought it probable," said Vernon.

"He had to remain a couple of hours at the Railway Inn; no conveyance
was to be found for him. He thinks he has caught a cold, and cannot
stifle his fretfulness about it. He may be as learned as Doctor
Middleton; he has not the same happy constitution. Nothing more
unfortunate could have occurred; he spoilt the party. Mrs. Mountstuart
tried petting him, which drew attention to him, and put us all in his
key for several awkward minutes, more than once. She lost her head; she
was unlike herself I may be presumptuous in criticizing her, but should
not the president of a dinner-table treat it like a battlefield, and
let the guest that sinks descend, and not allow the voice of a
discordant, however illustrious, to rule it? Of course, it is when I
see failures that I fancy I could manage so well: comparison is
prudently reserved in the other cases. I am a daring critic, no doubt,
because I know I shall never be tried by experiment. I have no ambition
to be tried."

She did not notice a smile of Vernon's, and continued: "Mrs Mountstuart
gave him the lead upon any subject he chose. I thought the professor
never would have ceased talking of a young lady who had been at the inn
before him drinking hot brandy and water with a gentleman!"

"How did he hear of that?" cried Vernon, roused by the malignity of the
Fates.

"From the landlady, trying to comfort him. And a story of her lending
shoes and stockings while those of the young lady were drying. He has
the dreadful snappish humourous way of recounting which impresses it;
the table took up the subject of this remarkable young lady, and
whether she was a lady of the neighbourhood, and who she could be that
went abroad on foot in heavy rain. It was painful to me; I knew enough
to be sure of who she was."

"Did she betray it?"

"No."

"Did Willoughby look at her?"

"Without suspicion then."

"Then?"

"Colonel De Craye was diverting us, and he was very amusing. Mrs.
Mountstuart told him afterward that he ought to be paid salvage for
saving the wreck of her party. Sir Willoughby was a little too cynical;
he talked well; what he said was good, but it was not good-humoured; he
has not the reckless indifference of Colonel De Craye to uttering
nonsense that amusement may come of it. And in the drawing-room he lost
such gaiety as he had. I was close to Mrs. Mountstuart when Professor
Crooklyn approached her and spoke in my hearing of that gentleman and
that young lady. They were, you could see by his nods, Colonel De
Craye and Miss Middleton."

"And she at once mentioned it to Willoughby?"

"Colonel De Craye gave her no chance, if she sought it. He courted her
profusely. Behind his rattle he must have brains. It ran in all
directions to entertain her and her circle."

"Willoughby knows nothing?"

"I cannot judge. He stood with Mrs. Mountstuart a minute as we were
taking leave. She looked strange. I heard her say: 'The rogue!' He
laughed. She lifted her shoulders. He scarcely opened his mouth on the
way home."

"The thing must run its course," Vernon said, with the philosophical
air which is desperation rendered decorous. "Willoughby deserves it. A
man of full growth ought to know that nothing on earth tempts
Providence so much as the binding of a young woman against her will.
Those two are mutually attracted: they're both . . . They meet, and
the mischief's done: both are bright. He can persuade with a word.
Another might discourse like an angel and it would be useless. I said
everything I could think of, to no purpose. And so it is: there are
those attractions!--just as, with her, Willoughby is the reverse, he
repels. I'm in about the same predicament--or should be if she were
plighted to me. That is, for the length of five minutes; about the
space of time I should require for the formality of handing her back
her freedom. How a sane man can imagine a girl like that . . . ! But if
she has changed, she has changed! You can't conciliate a withered
affection. This detaining her, and tricking, and not listening, only
increases her aversion; she learns the art in turn. Here she is,
detained by fresh plots to keep Dr. Middleton at the Hall. That's
true, is it not?" He saw that it was. "No, she's not to blame! She has
told him her mind; he won't listen. The question then is, whether she
keeps to her word, or breaks it. It's a dispute between a conventional
idea of obligation and an injury to her nature. Which is the more
dishonourable thing to do? Why, you and I see in a moment that her
feelings guide her best. It's one of the few cases in which nature may
be consulted like an oracle."

"Is she so sure of her nature?" said Miss Dale.

"You may doubt it; I do not. I am surprised at her coming back. De
Craye is a man of the world, and advised it, I suppose. He--well, I
never had the persuasive tongue, and my failing doesn't count for
much."

"But the suddenness of the intimacy!"

"The disaster is rather famous 'at first sight'. He came in a fortunate
hour . . . for him. A pigmy's a giant if he can manage to arrive in
season. Did you not notice that there was danger, at their second or
third glance? You counselled me to hang on here, where the amount of
good I do in proportion to what I have to endure is microscopic."

"It was against your wishes, I know," said Laetitia, and when the words
were out she feared that they were tentative. Her delicacy shrank from
even seeming to sound him in relation to a situation so delicate as
Miss Middleton's.

The same sentiment guarded him from betraying himself, and he said:
"Partly against. We both foresaw the possible--because, like most
prophets, we knew a little more of circumstances enabling us to see the
fatal. A pigmy would have served, but De Craye is a handsome,
intelligent, pleasant fellow."

"Sir Willoughby's friend!"

"Well, in these affairs! A great deal must be charged on the goddess."

"That is really Pagan fatalism!"

"Our modern word for it is Nature. Science condescends to speak of
natural selection. Look at these! They are both graceful and winning
and witty, bright to mind and eye, made for one another, as country
people say. I can't blame him. Besides, we don't know that he's guilty.
We're quite in the dark, except that we're certain how it must end. If
the chance should occur to you of giving Willoughby a word of
counsel--it may--you might, without irritating him as my knowledge of
his plight does, hint at your eyes being open. His insane dread of a
detective world makes him artificially blind. As soon as he fancies
himself seen, he sets to work spinning a web, and he discerns nothing
else. It's generally a clever kind of web; but if it's a tangle to
others it's the same to him, and a veil as well. He is preparing the
catastrophe, he forces the issue. Tell him of her extreme desire to
depart. Treat her as mad, to soothe him. Otherwise one morning he will
wake a second time . . . ! It is perfectly certain. And the second time
it will be entirely his own fault. Inspire him with some philosophy."

"I have none."

"I if I thought so, I would say you have better. There are two kinds of
philosophy, mine and yours. Mine comes of coldness, yours of devotion."

"He is unlikely to choose me for his confidante."

Vernon meditated. "One can never quite guess what he will do, from
never knowing the heat of the centre in him which precipitates his
actions: he has a great art of concealment. As to me, as you perceive,
my views are too philosophical to let me be of use to any of them. I
blame only the one who holds to the bond. The sooner I am gone!--in
fact, I cannot stay on. So Dr. Middleton and the Professor did not
strike fire together?"

"Doctor Middleton was ready, and pursued him, but Professor Crooklyn
insisted on shivering. His line of blank verse, 'A Railway platform and
a Railway inn!' became pathetic in repetition. He must have suffered."

"Somebody has to!"

"Why the innocent?"

"He arrives a propos. But remember that Fridolin sometimes contrives to
escape and have the guilty scorched. The Professor would not have
suffered if he had missed his train, as he appears to be in the habit
of doing. Thus his unaccustomed good-fortune was the cause of his bad."

"You saw him on the platform?"

"I am unacquainted with the professor. I had to get Mrs Mountstuart out
of the way."

"She says she described him to you. 'Complexion of a sweetbread,
consistency of a quenelle, grey, and like a Saint without his dish
behind the head.'"

"Her descriptions are strikingly accurate, but she forgot to sketch his
back, and all that I saw was a narrow sloping back and a broad hat
resting the brim on it. My report to her spoke of an old gentleman of
dark complexion, as the only traveller on the platform. She has faith
in the efficiency of her descriptive powers, and so she was willing to
drive off immediately. The intention was a start to London. Colonel De
Craye came up and effected in five minutes what I could not compass in
thirty."

"But you saw Colonel De Craye pass you?"

"My work was done; I should have been an intruder. Besides I was acting
wet jacket with Mrs. Mountstuart to get her to drive off fast, or she
might have jumped out in search of her Professor herself."

"She says you were lean as a fork, with the wind whistling through the
prongs."

"You see how easy it is to deceive one who is an artist in phrases.
Avoid them, Miss Dale; they dazzle the penetration of the composer.
That is why people of ability like Mrs Mountstuart see so little; they
are so bent on describing brilliantly. However, she is kind and
charitable at heart. I have been considering to-night that, to cut this
knot as it is now, Miss Middleton might do worse than speak straight
out to Mrs. Mountstuart. No one else would have such influence with
Willoughby. The simple fact of Mrs. Mountstuart's knowing of it would
be almost enough. But courage would be required for that. Good-night,
Miss Dale."

"Good-night, Mr. Whitford. You pardon me for disturbing you?"

Vernon pressed her hand reassuringly. He had but to look at her and
review her history to think his cousin Willoughby punished by just
retribution. Indeed, for any maltreatment of the dear boy Love by man
or by woman, coming under your cognizance, you, if you be of common
soundness, shall behold the retributive blow struck in your time.

Miss Dale retired thinking how like she and Vernon were to one another
in the toneless condition they had achieved through sorrow. He
succeeded in masking himself from her, owing to her awe of the
circumstances. She reproached herself for not having the same devotion
to the cold idea of duty as he had; and though it provoked inquiry, she
would not stop to ask why he had left Miss Middleton a prey to the
sparkling colonel. It seemed a proof of the philosophy he preached.

As she was passing by young Crossjay's bedroom door a face appeared.
Sir Willoughby slowly emerged and presented himself in his full length,
beseeching her to banish alarm.

He said it in a hushed voice, with a face qualified to create
sentiment.

"Are you tired? sleepy?" said he.

She protested that she was not: she intended to read for an hour.

He begged to have the hour dedicated to him. "I shall be relieved by
conversing with a friend."

No subterfuge crossed her mind; she thought his midnight visit to the
boy's bedside a pretty feature in him; she was full of pity, too; she
yielded to the strange request, feeling that it did not become "an old
woman" to attach importance even to the public discovery of midnight
interviews involving herself as one, and feeling also that she was
being treated as an old friend in the form of a very old woman. Her
mind was bent on arresting any recurrence to the project she had so
frequently outlined in the tongue of innuendo, of which, because of her
repeated tremblings under it, she thought him a master.

He conducted her along the corridor to the private sitting-room of the
ladies Eleanor and Isabel.

"Deceit!" he said, while lighting the candles on the mantelpiece.

She was earnestly compassionate, and a word that could not relate to
her personal destinies refreshed her by displacing her apprehensive
antagonism and giving pity free play.



CHAPTER XXXI

SIR WILLOUGHBY ATTEMPTS AND ACHIEVES PATHOS

Both were seated. Apparently he would have preferred to watch her dark
downcast eyelashes in silence under sanction of his air of abstract
meditation and the melancholy superinducing it. Blood-colour was in
her cheeks; the party had inspirited her features. Might it be that
lively company, an absence of economical solicitudes, and a flourishing
home were all she required to make her bloom again? The supposition was
not hazardous in presence of her heightened complexion.

She raised her eyes. He could not meet her look without speaking.

"Can you forgive deceit?"

"It would be to boast of more charity than I know myself to possess,
were I to say that I can, Sir Willoughby. I hope I am able to forgive.
I cannot tell. I should like to say yes."

"Could you live with the deceiver?"

"No."

"No. I could have given that answer for you. No semblance of union
should be maintained between the deceiver and ourselves. Laetitia!"

"Sir Willoughby?"

"Have I no right to your name?"

"If it pleases you to . . ."

"I speak as my thoughts run, and they did not know a Miss Dale so well
as a dear Laetitia: my truest friend! You have talked with Clara
Middleton?"

"We had a conversation."

Her brevity affrighted him. He flew off in a cloud.

"Reverting to that question of deceivers: is it not your opinion that
to pardon, to condone, is to corrupt society by passing off as pure
what is false? Do we not," he wore the smile of haggard playfulness of
a convalescent child the first day back to its toys, "Laetitia, do we
not impose a counterfeit on the currency?"

"Supposing it to be really deception."

"Apart from my loathing of deception, of falseness in any shape, upon
any grounds, I hold it an imperious duty to expose, punish, off with
it. I take it to be one of the forms of noxiousness which a good
citizen is bound to extirpate. I am not myself good citizen enough, I
confess, for much more than passive abhorrence. I do not forgive: I am
at heart serious and I cannot forgive:--there is no possible
reconciliation, there can be only an ostensible truce, between the two
hostile powers dividing this world."

She glanced at him quickly.

"Good and evil!" he said.

Her face expressed a surprise relapsing on the heart.

He spelt the puckers of her forehead to mean that she feared he might
be speaking unchristianly.

"You will find it so in all religions, my dear Laetitia: the Hindoo,
the Persian, ours. It is universal; an experience of our humanity.
Deceit and sincerity cannot live together. Truth must kill the lie, or
the lie will kill truth. I do not forgive. All I say to the person is,
go!"

"But that is right! that is generous!" exclaimed Laetitia, glad to
approve him for the sake of escaping her critical soul, and relieved by
the idea of Clara's difficulty solved.

"Capable of generosity, perhaps," he mused, aloud.

She wounded him by not supplying the expected enthusiastic asseveration
of her belief in his general tendency to magnanimity.

He said, after a pause: "But the world is not likely to be impressed by
anything not immediately gratifying it. People change, I find: as we
increase in years we cease to be the heroes we were. I myself am
insensible to change: I do not admit the charge. Except in this we will
say: personal ambition. I have it no more. And what is it when we have
it? Decidedly a confession of inferiority! That is, the desire to be
distinguished is an acknowledgement of insufficiency. But I have still
the craving for my dearest friends to think well of me. A weakness?
Call it so. Not a dishonourable weakness!"

Laetitia racked her brain for the connection of his present speech with
the preceding dialogue. She was baffled, from not knowing "the heat of
the centre in him", as Vernon opaquely phrased it in charity to the
object of her worship.

"Well," said he, unappeased, "and besides the passion to excel, I have
changed somewhat in the heartiness of my thirst for the amusements
incident to my station. I do not care to keep a stud--I was once
tempted: nor hounds. And I can remember the day when I determined to
have the best kennels and the best breed of horses in the kingdom.
Puerile! What is distinction of that sort, or of any acquisition and
accomplishment? We ask! one's self is not the greater. To seek it, owns
to our smallness, in real fact; and when it is attained, what then? My
horses are good, they are admired, I challenge the county to surpass
them: well? These are but my horses; the praise is of the animals, not
of me. I decline to share in it. Yet I know men content to swallow the
praise of their beasts and be semi-equine. The littleness of one's
fellows in the mob of life is a very strange experience! One may regret
to have lost the simplicity of one's forefathers, which could accept
those and other distinctions with a cordial pleasure, not to say pride.
As, for instance, I am, as it is called, a dead shot. 'Give your
acclamations, gentlemen, to my ancestors, from whom I inherited a
steady hand and quick sight.' They do not touch me. Where I do not find
myself--that I am essentially I--no applause can move me. To speak to
you as I would speak to none, admiration--you know that in my early
youth I swam in flattery--I had to swim to avoid drowning!--admiration
of my personal gifts has grown tasteless. Changed, therefore, inasmuch
as there has been a growth of spirituality. We are all in submission to
mortal laws, and so far I have indeed changed. I may add that it is
unusual for country gentlemen to apply themselves to scientific
researches. These are, however, in the spirit of the time. I
apprehended that instinctively when at College. I forsook the classics
for science. And thereby escaped the vice of domineering
self-sufficiency peculiar to classical men, of which you had an amusing
example in the carriage, on the way to Mrs. Mountstuart's this evening.
Science is modest; slow, if you like; it deals with facts, and having
mastered them, it masters men; of necessity, not with a stupid,
loud-mouthed arrogance: words big and oddly garbed as the Pope's
body-guard. Of course, one bows to the Infallible; we must, when his
giant-mercenaries level bayonets."

Sir Willoughby offered Miss Dale half a minute that she might in gentle
feminine fashion acquiesce in the implied reproof of Dr. Middleton's
behaviour to him during the drive to Mrs. Mountstuart's. She did not.

Her heart was accusing Clara of having done it a wrong and a hurt. For
while he talked he seemed to her to justify Clara's feelings and her
conduct: and her own reawakened sensations of injury came to the
surface a moment to look at him, affirming that they pardoned him, and
pitied, but hardly wondered.

The heat of the centre in him had administered the comfort he wanted,
though the conclusive accordant notes he loved on woman's lips, that
subservient harmony of another instrument desired of musicians when
they have done their solo-playing, came not to wind up the performance:
not a single bar. She did not speak. Probably his Laetitia was
overcome, as he had long known her to be when they conversed;
nerve-subdued, unable to deploy her mental resources or her musical.
Yet ordinarily she had command of the latter.--Was she too condoling?
Did a reason exist for it? Had the impulsive and desperate girl spoken
out to Laetitia to the fullest?--shameless daughter of a domineering
sire that she was! Ghastlier inquiry (it struck the centre of him with
a sounding ring), was Laetitia pitying him overmuch for worse than the
pain of a little difference between lovers--for treason on the part of
his bride? Did she know of a rival? know more than he?

When the centre of him was violently struck he was a genius in
penetration. He guessed that she did know: and by this was he presently
helped to achieve pathos.

"So my election was for Science," he continued; "and if it makes me, as
I fear, a rara avis among country gentlemen, it unites me, puts me in
the main, I may say, in the only current of progress--a word
sufficiently despicable in their political jargon.--You enjoyed your
evening at Mrs. Mountstuart's?"

"Very greatly."

"She brings her Professor to dine here the day after tomorrow. Does it
astonish you? You started."

"I did not hear the invitation."

"It was arranged at the table: you and I were separated--cruelly, I
told her: she declared that we see enough of one another, and that it
was good for me that we should be separated; neither of which is true.
I may not have known what is the best for me: I do know what is good.
If in my younger days I egregiously erred, that, taken of itself alone,
is, assuming me to have sense and feeling, the surer proof of present
wisdom. I can testify in person that wisdom is pain. If pain is to add
to wisdom, let me suffer! Do you approve of that, Laetitia?"

"It is well said."

"It is felt. Those who themselves have suffered should know the benefit
of the resolution."

"One may have suffered so much as to wish only for peace."

"True: but you! have you?"

"It would be for peace, if I prayed for any earthly gift."

Sir Willoughby dropped a smile on her. "I mentioned the Pope's
parti-coloured body-guard just now. In my youth their singular attire
impressed me. People tell me they have been re-uniformed: I am sorry.
They remain one of my liveliest recollections of the Eternal City. They
affected my sense of humour, always alert in me, as you are aware. We
English have humour. It is the first thing struck in us when we land on
the Continent: our risible faculties are generally active all through
the tour. Humour, or the clash of sense with novel examples of the
absurd, is our characteristic. I do not condescend to boisterous
displays of it. I observe, and note the people's comicalities for my
correspondence. But you have read my letters--most of them, if not
all?"

"Many of them."

"I was with you then!--I was about to say--that Swiss-guard reminded
me--you have not been in Italy. I have constantly regretted it. You are
the very woman, you have the soul for Italy. I know no other of whom I
could say it, with whom I should not feel that she was out of place,
discordant with me. Italy and Laetitia! often have I joined you
together. We shall see. I begin to have hopes. Here you have literally
stagnated. Why, a dinner-party refreshes you! What would not travel do,
and that heavenly climate! You are a reader of history and poetry.
Well, poetry! I never yet saw the poetry that expressed the tenth part
of what I feel in the presence of beauty and magnificence, and when I
really meditate--profoundly. Call me a positive mind. I feel: only I
feel too intensely for poetry. By the nature of it, poetry cannot be
sincere. I will have sincerity. Whatever touches our emotions should be
spontaneous, not a craft. I know you are in favour of poetry. You would
win me, if any one could. But history! there I am with you. Walking
over ruins: at night: the arches of the solemn black amphitheatre
pouring moonlight on us--the moonlight of Italy!"

"You would not laugh there, Sir Willoughby?" said Laetitia, rousing
herself from a stupor of apprehensive amazement, to utter something and
realize actual circumstances.

"Besides, you, I think, or I am mistaken in you"--he deviated from his
projected speech--"you are not a victim of the sense of association and
the ludicrous."

"I can understand the influence of it: I have at least a conception of
the humourous, but ridicule would not strike me in the Coliseum of
Rome. I could not bear it, no, Sir Willoughby!"

She appeared to be taking him in very strong earnest, by thus
petitioning him not to laugh in the Coliseum, and now he said:
"Besides, you are one who could accommodate yourself to the society of
the ladies, my aunts. Good women, Laetitia! I cannot imagine them de
trop in Italy, or in a household. I have of course reason to be partial
in my judgement."

"They are excellent and most amiable ladies; I love them," said
Laetitia, fervently; the more strongly excited to fervour by her
enlightenment as to his drift.

She read it that he designed to take her to Italy with the ladies:
--after giving Miss Middleton her liberty; that was necessarily
implied. And that was truly generous. In his boyhood he had been famous
for his bountifulness in scattering silver and gold. Might he not have
caused himself to be misperused in later life?

Clara had spoken to her of the visit and mission of the ladies to the
library: and Laetitia daringly conceived herself to be on the certain
track of his meaning, she being able to enjoy their society as she
supposed him to consider that Miss Middleton did not, and would not
either abroad or at home.

Sir Willoughby asked her: "You could travel with them?"

"Indeed I could!"

"Honestly?"

"As affirmatively as one may protest. Delightedly."

"Agreed. It is an undertaking." He put his hand out.

"Whether I be of the party or not! To Italy, Laetitia! It would give me
pleasure to be with you, and it will, if I must be excluded, to think
of you in Italy."

His hand was out. She had to feign inattention or yield her own. She
had not the effrontery to pretend not to see, and she yielded it. He
pressed it, and whenever it shrunk a quarter inch to withdraw, he shook
it up and down, as an instrument that had been lent him for due
emphasis to his remarks. And very emphatic an amorous orator can make
it upon a captive lady.

"I am unable to speak decisively on that or any subject. I am, I think
you once quoted, 'tossed like a weed on the ocean.' Of myself I can
speak: I cannot speak for a second person. I am infinitely harassed. If
I could cry, 'To Italy tomorrow!' Ah! . . . Do not set me down for
complaining. I know the lot of man. But, Laetitia, deceit! deceit! It
is a bad taste in the mouth. It sickens us of humanity. I compare it to
an earthquake: we lose all our reliance on the solidity of the world.
It is a betrayal not simply of the person; it is a betrayal of
humankind. My friend! Constant friend! No, I will not despair. Yes, I
have faults; I will remember them. Only, forgiveness is another
question. Yes, the injury I can forgive; the falseness never. In the
interests of humanity, no. So young, and such deceit!"

Laetitia's bosom rose: her hand was detained: a lady who has yielded it
cannot wrestle to have it back; those outworks which protect her
treacherously shelter the enemy aiming at the citadel when he has taken
them. In return for the silken armour bestowed on her by our
civilization, it is exacted that she be soft and civil nigh up to
perishing-point. She breathed tremulously high, saying on her
top-breath: "If it--it may not be so; it can scarcely. . ." A deep sigh
intervened. It saddened her that she knew so much.

"For when I love I love," said Sir Willoughby; "my friends and my
servants know that. There can be no medium: not with me. I give all, I
claim all. As I am absorbed, so must I absorb. We both cancel and
create, we extinguish and we illumine one another. The error may be in
the choice of an object: it is not in the passion. Perfect confidence,
perfect abandonment. I repeat, I claim it because I give it. The
selfishness of love may be denounced: it is a part of us. My answer
would be, it is an element only of the noblest of us! Love, Laetitia! I
speak of love. But one who breaks faith to drag us through the mire,
who betrays, betrays and hands us over to the world, whose prey we
become identically because of virtues we were educated to think it a
blessing to possess: tell me the name for that!--Again, it has ever
been a principle with me to respect the sex. But if we see women false,
treacherous . . . Why indulge in these abstract views, you would ask!
The world presses them on us, full as it is of the vilest specimens.
They seek to pluck up every rooted principle: they sneer at our
worship: they rob us of our religion. This bitter experience of the
world drives us back to the antidote of what we knew before we plunged
into it: of one . . . of something we esteemed and still esteem. Is
that antidote strong enough to expel the poison? I hope so! I believe
so! To lose faith in womankind is terrible."

He studied her. She looked distressed: she was not moved.

She was thinking that, with the exception of a strain of haughtiness,
he talked excellently to men, at least in the tone of the things he
meant to say; but that his manner of talking to women went to an excess
in the artificial tongue--the tutored tongue of sentimental deference
of the towering male: he fluted exceedingly; and she wondered whether
it was this which had wrecked him with Miss Middleton.

His intuitive sagacity counselled him to strive for pathos to move her.
It was a task; for while he perceived her to be not ignorant of his
plight, he doubted her knowing the extent of it, and as his desire was
merely to move her without an exposure of himself, he had to compass
being pathetic as it were under the impediments of a mailed and
gauntletted knight, who cannot easily heave the bosom, or show it
heaving.

Moreover, pathos is a tide: often it carries the awakener of it off his
feet, and whirls him over and over armour and all in ignominious
attitudes of helpless prostration, whereof he may well be ashamed in
the retrospect. We cannot quite preserve our dignity when we stoop to
the work of calling forth tears. Moses had probably to take a nimble
jump away from the rock after that venerable Law-giver had knocked the
water out of it.

However, it was imperative in his mind that he should be sure he had
the power to move her.

He began; clumsily at first, as yonder gauntletted knight attempting
the briny handkerchief.

"What are we! We last but a very short time. Why not live to gratify
our appetites? I might really ask myself why. All the means of
satiating them are at my disposal. But no: I must aim at the
highest:--at that which in my blindness I took for the highest. You
know the sportsman's instinct, Laetitia; he is not tempted by the
stationary object. Such are we in youth, toying with happiness, leaving
it, to aim at the dazzling and attractive."

"We gain knowledge," said Laetitia.

"At what a cost!"

The exclamation summoned self-pity to his aid, and pathos was handy.

"By paying half our lives for it and all our hopes! Yes, we gain
knowledge, we are the wiser; very probably my value surpasses now what
it was when I was happier. But the loss! That youthful bloom of the
soul is like health to the body; once gone, it leaves cripples behind.
Nay, my friend and precious friend, these four fingers I must retain.
They seem to me the residue of a wreck: you shall be released shortly:
absolutely, Laetitia, I have nothing else remaining--We have spoken of
deception; what of being undeceived?--when one whom we adored is laid
bare, and the wretched consolation of a worthy object is denied to us.
No misfortune can be like that. Were it death, we could worship still.
Death would be preferable. But may you be spared to know a situation in
which the comparison with your inferior is forced on you to your
disadvantage and your loss because of your generously giving up your
whole heart to the custody of some shallow, light-minded, self--! . . .
We will not deal in epithets. If I were to find as many bad names for
the serpent as there are spots on his body, it would be serpent still,
neither better nor worse. The loneliness! And the darkness! Our
luminary is extinguished. Self-respect refuses to continue
worshipping, but the affection will not be turned aside. We are
literally in the dust, we grovel, we would fling away self-respect if
we could; we would adopt for a model the creature preferred to us; we
would humiliate, degrade ourselves; we cry for justice as if it were
for pardon . . ."

"For pardon! when we are straining to grant it!" Laetitia murmured, and
it was as much as she could do. She remembered how in her old misery
her efforts after charity had twisted her round to feel herself the
sinner, and beg forgiveness in prayer: a noble sentiment, that filled
her with pity of the bosom in which it had sprung. There was no
similarity between his idea and hers, but her idea had certainly been
roused by his word "pardon", and he had the benefit of it in the
moisture of her eyes. Her lips trembled, tears fell.

He had heard something; he had not caught the words, but they were
manifestly favourable; her sign of emotion assured him of it and of the
success he had sought. There was one woman who bowed to him to all
eternity! He had inspired one woman with the mysterious, man-desired
passion of self-abandonment, self-immolation! The evidence was before
him. At any instant he could, if he pleased, fly to her and command her
enthusiasm.

He had, in fact, perhaps by sympathetic action, succeeded in striking
the same springs of pathos in her which animated his lively endeavour
to produce it in himself.

He kissed her hand; then released it, quitting his chair to bend above
her soothingly.

"Do not weep, Laetitia, you see that I do not; I can smile. Help me to
bear it; you must not unman me."

She tried to stop her crying, but self-pity threatened to rain all her
long years of grief on her head, and she said: "I must go . . . I am
unfit . . . good-night, Sir Willoughby."

Fearing seriously that he had sunk his pride too low in her
consideration, and had been carried farther than he intended on the
tide of pathos, he remarked: "We will speak about Crossjay to-morrow.
His deceitfulness has been gross. As I said, I am grievously offended
by deception. But you are tired. Good-night, my dear friend."

"Good-night, Sir Willoughby."

She was allowed to go forth.

Colonel De Craye coming up from the smoking-room, met her and noticed
the state of her eyelids, as he wished her goodnight. He saw Willoughby
in the room she had quitted, but considerately passed without speaking,
and without reflecting why he was considerate.

Our hero's review of the scene made him, on the whole, satisfied with
his part in it. Of his power upon one woman he was now perfectly
sure:--Clara had agonized him with a doubt of his personal mastery of
any. One was a poor feast, but the pangs of his flesh during the last
few days and the latest hours caused him to snatch at it, hungrily if
contemptuously. A poor feast, she was yet a fortress, a point of
succour, both shield and lance; a cover and an impetus. He could now
encounter Clara boldly. Should she resist and defy him, he would not be
naked and alone; he foresaw that he might win honour in the world's eye
from his position--a matter to be thought of only in most urgent need.
The effect on him of his recent exercise in pathos was to compose him
to slumber. He was for the period well satisfied.

His attendant imps were well satisfied likewise, and danced around
about his bed after the vigilant gentleman had ceased to debate on the
question of his unveiling of himself past forgiveness of her to
Laetitia, and had surrendered to sleep the present direction of his
affairs.



CHAPTER XXXII

LAETITIA DALE DISCOVERS A SPIRITUAL CHANGE AND DR MIDDLETON A PHYSICAL

Clara tripped over the lawn in the early morning to Laetitia to greet
her. She broke away from a colloquy with Colonel De Craye under Sir
Willoughby's windows. The colonel had been one of the bathers, and he
stood like a circus-driver flicking a wet towel at Crossjay capering.

"My dear, I am very unhappy!" said Clara.

"My dear, I bring you news," Laetitia replied.

"Tell me. But the poor boy is to be expelled! He burst into Crossjay's
bedroom last night and dragged the sleeping boy out of bed to question
him, and he had the truth. That is one comfort: only Crossjay is to be
driven from the Hall, because he was untruthful previously--for me; to
serve me; really, I feel it was at my command. Crossjay will be out of
the way to-day, and has promised to come back at night to try to be
forgiven. You must help me, Laetitia."

"You are free, Clara! If you desire it, you have but to ask for your
freedom."

"You mean . . ."

"He will release you."

"You are sure?"

"We had a long conversation last night."

"I owe it to you?"

"Nothing is owing to me. He volunteered it."

Clara made as if to lift her eyes in apostrophe. "Professor Crooklyn!
Professor Crooklyn! I see. I did not guess that."

"Give credit for some generosity, Clara; you are unjust!"

"By and by: I will be more than just by and by. I will practise on the
trumpet: I will lecture on the greatness of the souls of men when we
know them thoroughly. At present we do but half know them, and we are
unjust. You are not deceived, Laetitia? There is to be no speaking to
papa? no delusions? You have agitated me. I feel myself a very small
person indeed. I feel I can understand those who admire him. He gives
me back my word simply? clearly? without--Oh, that long wrangle in
scenes and letters? And it will be arranged for papa and me to go not
later than to-morrow? Never shall I be able to explain to any one how I
fell into this! I am frightened at myself when I think of it. I take
the whole blame: I have been scandalous. And, dear Laetitia! you came
out so early in order to tell me?"

"I wished you to hear it."

"Take my heart."

"Present me with a part--but for good."

"Fie! But you have a right to say it."

"I mean no unkindness; but is not the heart you allude to an alarmingly
searching one?"

"Selfish it is, for I have been forgetting Crossjay. If we are going to
be generous, is not Crossjay to be forgiven? If it were only that the
boy's father is away fighting for his country, endangering his life day
by day, and for a stipend not enough to support his family, we are
bound to think of the boy! Poor dear silly lad! with his 'I say, Miss
Middleton, why wouldn't (some one) see my father when he came here to
call on him, and had to walk back ten miles in the rain?'--I could
almost fancy that did me mischief. . . But we have a splendid morning
after yesterday's rain. And we will be generous. Own, Laetitia, that it
is possible to gild the most glorious day of creation."

"Doubtless the spirit may do it and make its hues permanent," said
Laetitia.

"You to me, I to you, he to us. Well, then, if he does, it shall be one
of my heavenly days. Which is for the probation of experience. We are
not yet at sunset."

"Have you seen Mr. Whitford this morning?"

"He passed me."

"Do not imagine him ever ill-tempered."

"I had a governess, a learned lady, who taught me in person the
picturesqueness of grumpiness. Her temper was ever perfect, because she
was never in the wrong, but I being so, she was grumpy. She carried my
iniquity under her brows, and looked out on me through it. I was a
trying child."

Laetitia said, laughing: "I can believe it!"

"Yet I liked her and she liked me: we were a kind of foreground and
background: she threw me into relief and I was an apology for her
existence."

"You picture her to me."

"She says of me now that I am the only creature she has loved. Who
knows that I may not come to say the same of her?"

"You would plague her and puzzle her still."

"Have I plagued and puzzled Mr. Whitford?"

"He reminds you of her?"

"You said you had her picture."

"Ah! do not laugh at him. He is a true friend."

"The man who can be a friend is the man who will presume to be a
censor."

"A mild one."

"As to the sentence he pronounces, I am unable to speak, but his
forehead is Rhadamanthine condemnation."

"Dr Middleton!"

Clara looked round. "Who? I? Did you hear an echo of papa? He would
never have put Rhadamanthus over European souls, because it appears
that Rhadamanthus judged only the Asiatic; so you are wrong, Miss Dale.
My father is infatuated with Mr. Whitford. What can it be? We women
cannot sound the depths of scholars, probably because their pearls have
no value in our market; except when they deign to chasten an
impertinent; and Mr. Whitford stands aloof from any notice of small
fry. He is deep, studious, excellent; and does it not strike you that
if he descended among us he would be like a Triton ashore?"

Laetitia's habit of wholly subservient sweetness, which was her ideal
of the feminine, not yet conciliated with her acuter character, owing
to the absence of full pleasure from her life--the unhealed wound she
had sustained and the cramp of a bondage of such old date as to seem
iron--induced her to say, as if consenting: "You think he is not quite
at home in society?" But she wished to defend him strenuously, and as a
consequence she had to quit the self-imposed ideal of her daily acting,
whereby--the case being unwonted, very novel to her--the lady's
intelligence became confused through the process that quickened it; so
sovereign a method of hoodwinking our bright selves is the acting of a
part, however naturally it may come to us! and to this will each honest
autobiographical member of the animated world bear witness.

She added: "You have not found him sympathetic? He is. You fancy him
brooding, gloomy? He is the reverse, he is cheerful, he is indifferent
to personal misfortune. Dr. Corney says there is no laugh like Vernon
Whitford's, and no humour like his. Latterly he certainly . . . But it
has not been your cruel word grumpiness. The truth is, he is anxious
about Crossjay: and about other things; and he wants to leave. He is at
a disadvantage beside very lively and careless gentlemen at present,
but your 'Triton ashore' is unfair, it is ugly. He is, I can say, the
truest man I know."

"I did not question his goodness, Laetitia."

"You threw an accent on it."

"Did I? I must be like Crossjay, who declares he likes fun best."

"Crossjay ought to know him, if anybody should. Mr. Whitford has
defended you against me, Clara, even since I took to calling you Clara.
Perhaps when you supposed him so like your ancient governess, he was
meditating how he could aid you. Last night he gave me reasons for
thinking you would do wisely to confide in Mrs. Mountstuart. It is no
longer necessary. I merely mention it. He is a devoted friend."

"He is an untiring pedestrian."

"Oh!"

Colonel De Craye, after hovering near the ladies in the hope of seeing
them divide, now adopted the system of making three that two may come
of it.

As he joined them with his glittering chatter, Laetitia looked at Clara
to consult her, and saw the face rosy as a bride's.

The suspicion she had nursed sprung out of her arms a muscular fact on
the spot.

"Where is my dear boy?" Clara said.

"Out for a holiday," the colonel answered in her tone.

"Advise Mr. Whitford not to waste his time in searching for Crossjay,
Laetitia. Crossjay is better out of the way to-day. At least, I thought
so just now. Has he pocket-money, Colonel De Craye?"

"My lord can command his inn."

"How thoughtful you are!"

Laetitia's bosom swelled upon a mute exclamation, equivalent to:
"Woman! woman! snared ever by the sparkling and frivolous!
undiscerning of the faithful, the modest and beneficent!"

In the secret musings of moralists this dramatic rhetoric survives.

The comparison was all of her own making, and she was indignant at the
contrast, though to what end she was indignant she could not have said,
for she had no idea of Vernon as a rival of De Craye in the favour of a
plighted lady. But she was jealous on behalf of her sex: her sex's
reputation seemed at stake, and the purity of it was menaced by Clara's
idle preference of the shallower man. When the young lady spoke so
carelessly of being like Crossjay, she did not perhaps know that a
likeness, based on a similarity of their enthusiasms, loves, and
appetites, had been established between women and boys. Laetitia had
formerly chafed at it, rejecting it utterly, save when now and then in
a season of bitterness she handed here and there a volatile young lady
(none but the young) to be stamped with the degrading brand. Vernon
might be as philosophical as he pleased. To her the gaiety of these
two, Colonel De Craye and Clara Middleton, was distressingly musical:
they harmonized painfully. The representative of her sex was hurt by
it.

She had to stay beside them: Clara held her arm. The colonel's voice
dropped at times to something very like a whisper. He was answered
audibly and smoothly. The quickwitted gentleman accepted the
correction: but in immediately paying assiduous attentions to Miss
Dale, in the approved intriguer's fashion, he showed himself in need of
another amounting to a reproof. Clara said: "We have been consulting,
Laetitia, what is to be done to cure Professor Crooklyn of his cold."
De Craye perceived that he had taken a wrong step, and he was mightily
surprised that a lesson in intrigue should be read to him of all men.
Miss Middleton's audacity was not so astonishing: he recognized grand
capabilities in the young lady. Fearing lest she should proceed further
and cut away from him his vantage-ground of secrecy with her, he turned
the subject and was adroitly submissive.

Clara's manner of meeting Sir Willoughby expressed a timid disposition
to friendliness upon a veiled inquiry, understood by none save
Laetitia, whose brain was racked to convey assurances to herself of her
not having misinterpreted him. Could there be any doubt? She resolved
that there could not be; and it was upon this basis of reason that she
fancied she had led him to it. Legitimate or not, the fancy sprang from
a solid foundation. Yesterday morning she could not have conceived it.
Now she was endowed to feel that she had power to influence him,
because now, since the midnight, she felt some emancipation from the
spell of his physical mastery. He did not appear to her as a different
man, but she had grown sensible of being a stronger woman. He was no
more the cloud over her, nor the magnet; the cloud once
heaven-suffused, the magnet fatally compelling her to sway round to
him. She admired him still: his handsome air, his fine proportions, the
courtesy of his bending to Clara and touching of her hand, excused a
fanatical excess of admiration on the part of a woman in her youth, who
is never the anatomist of the hero's lordly graces. But now she admired
him piecemeal. When it came to the putting of him together, she did it
coldly. To compassionate him was her utmost warmth. Without conceiving
in him anything of the strange old monster of earth which had struck
the awakened girl's mind of Miss Middleton, Laetitia classed him with
other men; he was "one of them". And she did not bring her
disenchantment as a charge against him. She accused herself,
acknowledged the secret of the change to be, and her youthfulness was
dead:--otherwise could she have given him compassion, and not herself
have been carried on the flood of it? The compassion was fervent, and
pure too. She supposed he would supplicate; she saw that Clara
Middleton was pleasant with him only for what she expected of his
generosity. She grieved. Sir Willoughby was fortified by her sorrowful
gaze as he and Clara passed out together to the laboratory arm in arm.

Laetitia had to tell Vernon of the uselessness of his beating the house
and grounds for Crossjay. Dr. Middleton held him fast in discussion
upon an overnight's classical wrangle with Professor Crooklyn, which
was to be renewed that day. The Professor had appointed to call
expressly to renew it. "A fine scholar," said the Rev. Doctor, "but
crotchety, like all men who cannot stand their Port."

"I hear that he had a cold," Vernon remarked. "I hope the wine was
good, sir."

As when the foreman of a sentimental jury is commissioned to inform an
awful Bench exact in perspicuous English, of a verdict that must of
necessity be pronounced in favour of the hanging of the culprit, yet
would fain attenuate the crime of a palpable villain by a
recommendation to mercy, such foreman, standing in the attentive eye of
a master of grammatical construction, and feeling the weight of at
least three sentences on his brain, together with a prospect of
Judicial interrogation for the discovery of his precise meaning, is
oppressed, himself is put on trial, in turn, and he hesitates, he
recapitulates, the fear of involution leads him to be involved; as far
as a man so posted may, he on his own behalf appeals for mercy;
entreats that his indistinct statement of preposterous reasons may be
taken for understood, and would gladly, were permission to do it
credible, throw in an imploring word that he may sink back among the
crowd without for the one imperishable moment publicly swinging in his
lordship's estimation:--much so, moved by chivalry toward a lady,
courtesy to the recollection of a hostess, and particularly by the
knowledge that his hearer would expect with a certain frigid rigour
charity of him, Dr. Middleton paused, spoke and paused: he stammered.
Ladies, he said, were famous poisoners in the Middle Ages. His opinion
was, that we had a class of manufacturing wine merchants on the watch
for widows in this country. But he was bound to state the fact of his
waking at his usual hour to the minute unassailed by headache. On the
other hand, this was a condition of blessedness unanticipated when he
went to bed. Mr. Whitford, however, was not to think that he
entertained rancour toward the wine. It was no doubt dispensed with the
honourable intention of cheering. In point of flavour execrable,
judging by results it was innocuous.

"The test of it shall be the effect of it upon Professor Crooklyn, and
his appearance in the forenoon according to promise," Dr. Middleton
came to an end with his perturbed balancings. "If I hear more of the
eight or twelve winds discharged at once upon a railway platform, and
the young lady who dries herself of a drenching by drinking brandy and
water with a gentleman at a railway inn, I shall solicit your sanction
to my condemnation of the wine as anti-Bacchic and a counterfeit
presentment. Do not misjudge me. Our hostess is not responsible. But
widows should marry."

"You must contrive to stop the Professor, sir, if he should attack his
hostess in that manner," said Vernon.

"Widows should marry!" Dr. Middleton repeated.

He murmured of objecting to be at the discretion of a butler; unless,
he was careful to add, the aforesaid functionary could boast of an
University education; and even then, said he, it requires a line of
ancestry to train a man's taste.

The Rev. Doctor smothered a yawn. The repression of it caused a second
one, a real monster, to come, big as our old friend of the sea
advancing on the chained-up Beauty.

Disconcerted by this damning evidence of indigestion, his countenance
showed that he considered himself to have been too lenient to the wine
of an unhusbanded hostess. He frowned terribly.

In the interval Laetitia told Vernon of Crossjay's flight for the day,
hastily bidding the master to excuse him: she had no time to hint the
grounds of excuse. Vernon mentally made a guess.

Dr Middleton took his arm and discharged a volley at the crotchetty
scholarship of Professor Crooklyn, whom to confute by book, he directed
his march to the library. Having persuaded himself that he was
dyspeptic, he had grown irascible. He denounced all dining out,
eulogized Patterne Hall as if it were his home, and remembered he had
dreamed in the night--a most humiliating sign of physical disturbance.
"But let me find a house in proximity to Patterne, as I am induced to
suppose I shall," he said, "and here only am I to be met when I stir
abroad."

Laetitia went to her room. She was complacently anxious enough to
prefer solitude and be willing to read. She was more seriously anxious
about Crossjay than about any of the others. For Clara would be certain
to speak very definitely, and how then could a gentleman oppose her? He
would supplicate, and could she be brought to yield? It was not to be
expected of a young lady who had turned from Sir Willoughby. His
inferiors would have had a better chance. Whatever his faults, he had
that element of greatness which excludes the intercession of pity.
Supplication would be with him a form of condescension. It would be
seen to be such. His was a monumental pride that could not stoop. She
had preserved this image of the gentleman for a relic in the shipwreck
of her idolatry. So she mused between the lines of her book, and
finishing her reading and marking the page, she glanced down on the
lawn. Dr. Middleton was there, and alone; his hands behind his back,
his head bent. His meditative pace and unwonted perusal of the turf
proclaimed that a non-sentimental jury within had delivered an
unmitigated verdict upon the widow's wine.

Laetitia hurried to find Vernon.

He was in the hall. As she drew near him, the laboratory door opened
and shut.

"It is being decided," said Laetitia.

Vernon was paler than the hue of perfect calmness.

"I want to know whether I ought to take to my heels like Crossjay, and
shun the Professor," he said.

They spoke in under-tones, furtively watching the door.

"I wish what she wishes, I am sure; but it will go badly with the boy,"
said Laetitia.

"Oh, well, then I'll take him," said Vernon, "I would rather. I think I
can manage it."

Again the laboratory door opened. This time it shut behind Miss
Middleton. She was highly flushed. Seeing them, she shook the storm
from her brows, with a dead smile; the best piece of serenity she could
put on for public wear.

She took a breath before she moved.

Vernon strode out of the house.

Clara swept up to Laetitia.

"You were deceived!"

The hard sob of anger barred her voice.

Laetitia begged her to come to her room with her.

"I want air: I must be by myself," said Clara, catching at her
garden-hat.

She walked swiftly to the portico steps and turned to the right, to
avoid the laboratory windows.



CHAPTER XXXIII

IN WHICH THE COMIC MUSE HAS AN EYE ON TWO GOOD SOULS

Clara met Vernon on the bowling-green among the laurels. She asked him
where her father was.

"Don't speak to him now," said Vernon.

"Mr. Whitford, will you?"

"It is not advisable just now. Wait."

"Wait? Why not now?"

"He is not in the right humour."

She choked. There are times when there is no medicine for us in sages,
we want slaves; we scorn to temporize, we must overbear. On she sped,
as if she had made the mistake of exchanging words with a post.

The scene between herself and Willoughby was a thick mist in her head,
except the burden and result of it, that he held to her fast, would
neither assist her to depart nor disengage her.

Oh, men! men! They astounded the girl; she could not define them to her
understanding. Their motives, their tastes, their vanity, their
tyranny, and the domino on their vanity, the baldness of their tyranny,
clinched her in feminine antagonism to brute power. She was not the
less disposed to rebellion by a very present sense of the justice of
what could be said to reprove her. She had but one answer: "Anything
but marry him!" It threw her on her nature, our last and headlong
advocate, who is quick as the flood to hurry us from the heights to our
level, and lower, if there be accidental gaps in the channel. For say
we have been guilty of misconduct: can we redeem it by violating that
which we are and live by? The question sinks us back to the
luxuriousness of a sunny relinquishment of effort in the direction
against tide. Our nature becomes ingenious in devices, penetrative of
the enemy, confidently citing its cause for being frankly elvish or
worse. Clara saw a particular way of forcing herself to be
surrendered. She shut her eyes from it: the sight carried her too
violently to her escape; but her heart caught it up and huzzaed. To
press the points of her fingers at her bosom, looking up to the sky as
she did, and cry: "I am not my own; I am his!" was instigation
sufficient to make her heart leap up with all her body's blush to urge
it to recklessness. A despairing creature then may say she has
addressed the heavens and has had no answer to restrain her.

Happily for Miss Middleton, she had walked some minutes in her chafing
fit before the falcon eye of Colonel De Craye spied her away on one of
the beech-knots.

Vernon stood irresolute. It was decidedly not a moment for disturbing
Dr. Middleton's composure. He meditated upon a conversation, as
friendly as possible, with Willoughby. Round on the front-lawn, he
beheld Willoughby and Dr. Middleton together, the latter having halted
to lend attentive ear to his excellent host. Unnoticed by them or
disregarded, Vernon turned back to Laetitia, and sauntered, talking
with her of things current for as long as he could endure to listen to
praise of his pure self-abnegation; proof of how well he had disguised
himself, but it smacked unpleasantly to him. His humourous intimacy
with men's minds likened the source of this distaste to the gallant
all-or-nothing of the gambler, who hates the little when he cannot have
the much, and would rather stalk from the tables clean-picked than
suffer ruin to be tickled by driblets of the glorious fortune he has
played for and lost. If we are not to be beloved, spare us the small
coin of compliments on character; especially when they compliment only
our acting. It is partly endurable to win eulogy for our stately
fortitude in losing, but Laetitia was unaware that he flung away a
stake; so she could not praise him for his merits.

"Willoughby makes the pardoning of Crossjay conditional," he said, "and
the person pleading for him has to grant the terms. How could you
imagine Willoughby would give her up! How could he! Who! . . . He
should, is easily said. I was no witness of the scene between them just
now, but I could have foretold the end of it; I could almost recount
the passages. The consequence is, that everything depends upon the
amount of courage she possesses. Dr. Middleton won't leave Patterne
yet. And it is of no use to speak to him to-day. And she is by nature
impatient, and is rendered desperate."

"Why is it of no use to speak to Dr. Middleton today?" cried Laetitia.

"He drank wine yesterday that did not agree with him; he can't work.
To-day he is looking forward to Patterne Port. He is not likely to
listen to any proposals to leave to-day."

"Goodness!"

"I know the depth of that cry!"

"You are excluded, Mr. Whitford."

"Not a bit of it; I am in with the rest. Say that men are to be
exclaimed at. Men have a right to expect you to know your own minds
when you close on a bargain. You don't know the world or yourselves
very well, it's true; still the original error is on your side, and
upon that you should fix your attention. She brought her father here,
and no sooner was he very comfortably established than she wished to
dislocate him."

"I cannot explain it; I cannot comprehend it," said Laetitia.

"You are Constancy."

"No." She coloured. "I am 'in with rest'. I do not say I should have
done the same. But I have the knowledge that I must not sit in
judgement on her. I can waver."

She coloured again. She was anxious that he should know her to be not
that stupid statue of Constancy in a corner doating on the antic
Deception. Reminiscences of the interview overnight made it oppressive
to her to hear herself praised for always pointing like the needle. Her
newly enfranchised individuality pressed to assert its existence.
Vernon, however, not seeing this novelty, continued, to her excessive
discomfort, to baste her old abandoned image with his praises. They
checked hers; and, moreover, he had suddenly conceived an envy of her
life-long, uncomplaining, almost unaspiring, constancy of sentiment. If
you know lovers when they have not reason to be blissful, you will
remember that in this mood of admiring envy they are given to fits of
uncontrollable maundering. Praise of constancy, moreover, smote
shadowily a certain inconstant, enough to seem to ruffle her smoothness
and do no hurt. He found his consolation in it, and poor Laetitia
writhed. Without designing to retort, she instinctively grasped at a
weapon of defence in further exalting his devotedness; which reduced
him to cast his head to the heavens and implore them to partially
enlighten her. Nevertheless, maunder he must; and he recurred to it in
a way so utterly unlike himself that Laetitia stared in his face. She
wondered whether there could be anything secreted behind this
everlasting theme of constancy. He took her awakened gaze for a summons
to asseverations of sincerity, and out they came. She would have fled
from him, but to think of flying was to think how little it was that
urged her to fly, and yet the thought of remaining and listening to
praises undeserved and no longer flattering, was a torture.

"Mr. Whitford, I bear no comparison with you."

"I do and must set you for my example, Miss Dale."

"Indeed, you do wrongly; you do not know me."

"I could say that. For years . . ."

"Pray, Mr. Whitford!"

"Well, I have admired it. You show us how self can be smothered."

"An echo would be a retort on you!"

"On me? I am never thinking of anything else."

"I could say that."

"You are necessarily conscious of not swerving."

"But I do; I waver dreadfully; I am not the same two days running."

"You are the same, with 'ravishing divisions' upon the same."

"And you without the 'divisions.' I draw such support as I have from
you."

"From some simulacrum of me, then. And that will show you how little
you require support."

"I do not speak my own opinion only."

"Whose?"

"I am not alone."

"Again let me say, I wish I were like you!"

"Then let me add, I would willingly make the exchange!"

"You would be amazed at your bargain."

"Others would be!"

"Your exchange would give me the qualities I'm in want of, Miss Dale."

"Negative, passive, at the best, Mr. Whitford. But I should have . . ."

"Oh!--pardon me. But you inflict the sensations of a boy, with a dose
of honesty in him, called up to receive a prize he has won by the
dexterous use of a crib."

"And how do you suppose she feels who has a crown of Queen o' the May
forced on her head when she is verging on November?"

He rejected her analogy, and she his. They could neither of them bring
to light the circumstances which made one another's admiration so
unbearable. The more he exalted her for constancy, the more did her
mind become bent upon critically examining the object of that imagined
virtue; and the more she praised him for possessing the spirit of
perfect friendliness, the fiercer grew the passion in him which
disdained the imputation, hissing like a heated iron-bar that flings
the waterdrops to steam. He would none of it; would rather have stood
exposed in his profound foolishness.

Amiable though they were, and mutually affectionate, they came to a
stop in their walk, longing to separate, and not seeing how it was to
be done, they had so knit themselves together with the pelting of their
interlaudation.

"I think it is time for me to run home to my father for an hour," said
Laetitia.

"I ought to be working," said Vernon.

Good progress was made to the disgarlanding of themselves thus far;
yet, an acutely civilized pair, the abruptness of the transition from
floweriness to commonplace affected them both, Laetitia chiefly, as she
had broken the pause, and she remarked:--"I am really Constancy in my
opinions."

"Another title is customary where stiff opinions are concerned. Perhaps
by and by you will learn your mistake, and then you will acknowledge
the name for it."

"How?" said she. "What shall I learn?"

"If you learn that I am a grisly Egoist?"

"You? And it would not be egoism," added Laetitia, revealing to him at
the same instant as to herself that she swung suspended on a scarce
credible guess.

"--Will nothing pierce your ears, Mr. Whitford?"

He heard the intruding voice, but he was bent on rubbing out the cloudy
letters Laetitia had begun to spell, and he stammered, in a tone of
matter-of-fact: "Just that and no better"; then turned to Mrs.
Mountstuart Jenkinson.

"--Or are you resolved you will never see Professor Crooklyn when you
look on him?" said the great lady.

Vernon bowed to the Professor and apologized to him shufflingly and
rapidly, incoherently, and with a red face; which induced Mrs.
Mountstuart to scan Laetitia's.

After lecturing Vernon for his abandonment of her yesterday evening,
and flouting his protestations, she returned to the business of the
day. "We walked from the lodge-gates to see the park and prepare
ourselves for Dr. Middleton. We parted last night in the middle of a
controversy and are rageing to resume it. Where is our redoubtable
antagonist?"

Mrs. Mountstuart wheeled Professor Crooklyn round to accompany Vernon.

"We," she said, "are for modern English scholarship, opposed to the
champion of German."

"The contrary," observed Professor Crooklyn.

"Oh! We," she corrected the error serenely, "are for German scholarship
opposed to English."

"Certain editions."

"We defend certain editions."

"Defend is a term of imperfect application to my position, ma'am."

"My dear Professor, you have in Dr. Middleton a match for you in
conscientious pugnacity, and you will not waste it upon me. There,
there they are; there he is. Mr. Whitford will conduct you. I stand
away from the first shock."

Mrs. Mountstuart fell back to Laetitia, saying: "He pores over a little
inexactitude in phrases, and pecks at it like a domestic fowl."

Professor Crooklyn's attitude and air were so well described that
Laetitia could have laughed.

"These mighty scholars have their flavour," the great lady hastened to
add, lest her younger companion should be misled to suppose that they
were not valuable to a governing hostess: "their shadow-fights are
ridiculous, but they have their flavour at a table. Last night, no: I
discard all mention of last night. We failed: as none else in this
neighbourhood could fail, but we failed. If we have among us a
cormorant devouring young lady who drinks up all the--ha!--brandy and
water--of our inns and occupies all our flys, why, our condition is
abnormal, and we must expect to fail: we are deprived of accommodation
for accidental circumstances. How Mr. Whitford could have missed seeing
Professor Crooklyn! And what was he doing at the station, Miss Dale?"

"Your portrait of Professor Crooklyn was too striking, Mrs Mountstuart,
and deceived him by its excellence. He appears to have seen only the
blank side of the slate."

"Ah! He is a faithful friend of his cousin, do you not think?"

"He is the truest of friends."

"As for Dr. Middleton," Mrs. Mountstuart diverged from her inquiry, "he
will swell the letters of my vocabulary to gigantic proportions if I
see much of him: he is contagious."

"I believe it is a form of his humour."

"I caught it of him yesterday at my dinner-table in my distress, and
must pass it off as a form of mine, while it lasts. I talked Dr.
Middleton half the dreary night through to my pillow. Your candid
opinion, my dear, come! As for me, I don't hesitate. We seemed to have
sat down to a solitary performance on the bass-viol. We were positively
an assembly of insects during thunder. My very soul thanked Colonel De
Craye for his diversions, but I heard nothing but Dr. Middleton. It
struck me that my table was petrified, and every one sat listening to
bowls played overhead."

"I was amused."

"Really? You delight me. Who knows but that my guests were sincere in
their congratulations on a thoroughly successful evening? I have fallen
to this, you see! And I know, wretched people! that as often as not it
is their way of condoling with one. I do it myself: but only where
there have been amiable efforts. But imagine my being congratulated for
that!--Good-morning, Sir Willoughby.--The worst offender! and I am in
no pleasant mood with him," Mrs. Mountstuart said aside to Laetitia,
who drew back, retiring.

Sir Willoughby came on a step or two. He stopped to watch Laetitia's
figure swimming to the house.

So, as, for instance, beside a stream, when a flower on the surface
extends its petals drowning to subside in the clear still water, we
exercise our privilege to be absent in the charmed contemplation of a
beautiful natural incident.

A smile of pleased abstraction melted on his features.



CHAPTER XXXIV

MRS. MOUNTSTUART AND SIR WILLOUGHBY

"Good morning, my dear Mrs. Mountstuart," Sir Willoughby wakened
himself to address the great lady. "Why has she fled?"

"Has any one fled?"

"Laetitia Dale."

"Letty Dale? Oh, if you call that flying. Possibly to renew a close
conversation with Vernon Whitford, that I cut short. You frightened me
with your 'Shepherds-tell-me' air and tone. Lead me to one of your
garden-seats: out of hearing to Dr. Middleton, I beg. He mesmerizes me,
he makes me talk Latin. I was curiously susceptible last night. I know
I shall everlastingly associate him with an abortive entertainment and
solos on big instruments. We were flat."

"Horace was in good vein."

"You were not."

"And Laetitia--Miss Dale talked well, I thought."

"She talked with you, and no doubt she talked well. We did not mix. The
yeast was bad. You shot darts at Colonel De Craye: you tried to sting.
You brought Dr. Middleton down on you. Dear me, that man is a
reverberation in my head. Where is your lady and love?"

"Who?"

"Am I to name her?"

"Clara? I have not seen her for the last hour. Wandering, I suppose."

"A very pretty summer bower," said Mrs. Mountstuart, seating herself
"Well, my dear Sir Willoughby, preferences, preferences are not to be
accounted for, and one never knows whether to pity or congratulate,
whatever may occur. I want to see Miss Middleton."

"Your 'dainty rogue in porcelain' will be at your beck--you lunch with
us?--before you leave."

"So now you have taken to quoting me, have you?"

"But 'a romantic tale on her eyelashes' is hardly descriptive any
longer."

"Descriptive of whom? Now you are upon Laetitia Dale!"

"I quote you generally. She has now a graver look."

"And well may have!"

"Not that the romance has entirely disappeared."

"No; it looks as if it were in print."

"You have hit it perfectly, as usual, ma'am."

Sir Willoughby mused.

Like one resuming his instrument to take up the melody in a concerted
piece, he said: "I thought Laetitia Dale had a singularly animated air
last night."

"Why!--" Mrs. Mountstuart mildly gaped.

"I want a new description of her. You know, I collect your mottoes and
sentences."

"It seems to me she is coming three parts out of her shell, and wearing
it as a hood for convenience."

"Ready to issue forth at an invitation? Admirable! exact!"

"Ay, my good Sir Willoughby, but are we so very admirable and exact?
Are we never to know our own minds?"

He produced a polysyllabic sigh, like those many-jointed compounds of
poets in happy languages, which are copious in a single expression:
"Mine is known to me. It always has been. Cleverness in women is not
uncommon. Intellect is the pearl. A woman of intellect is as good as a
Greek statue; she is divinely wrought, and she is divinely rare."

"Proceed," said the lady, confiding a cough to the air.

"The rarity of it: and it is not mere intellect, it is a sympathetic
intellect; or else it is an intellect in perfect accord with an
intensely sympathetic disposition;--the rarity of it makes it too
precious to be parted with when once we have met it. I prize it the
more the older I grow."

"Are we on the feminine or the neuter?"

"I beg pardon?"

"The universal or the individual?"

He shrugged. "For the rest, psychological affinities may exist
coincident with and entirely independent of material or moral
prepossessions, relations, engagements, ties."

"Well, that is not the raving of passion, certainly," said Mrs
Mountstuart, "and it sounds as if it were a comfortable doctrine for
men. On that plea, you might all of you be having Aspasia and a wife.
We saw your fair Middleton and Colonel de Craye at a distance as we
entered the park. Professor Crooklyn is under some hallucination."

"What more likely?"

The readiness and the double-bearing of the reply struck her comic
sense with awe.

"The Professor must hear that. He insists on the fly, and the inn, and
the wet boots, and the warming mixture, and the testimony of the
landlady and the railway porter."

"I say, what more likely?"

"Than that he should insist?"

"If he is under the hallucination!"

"He may convince others."

"I have only to repeat. . ."

"'What more likely?' It's extremely philosophical. Coincident with a
pursuit of the psychological affinities."

"Professor Crooklyn will hardly descend, I suppose, from his classical
altitudes to lay his hallucinations before Dr. Middleton?"

"Sir Willoughby, you are the pink of chivalry!"

By harping on Laetitia, he had emboldened Mrs. Mountstuart to lift the
curtain upon Clara. It was offensive to him, but the injury done to his
pride had to be endured for the sake of his general plan of
self-protection.

"Simply desirous to save my guests from annoyance of any kind", he
said. "Dr Middleton can look 'Olympus and thunder', as Vernon calls
it."

"Don't. I see him. That look! It is Dictionary-bitten! Angry, homed
Dictionary!--an apparition of Dictionary in the night--to a dunce!"

"One would undergo a good deal to avoid the sight."

"What the man must be in a storm! Speak as you please of yourself: you
are a true and chivalrous knight to dread it for her. But now,
candidly, how is it you cannot condescend to a little management?
Listen to an old friend. You are too lordly. No lover can afford to be
incomprehensible for half an hour. Stoop a little. Sermonizings are
not to be thought of. You can govern unseen. You are to know that I am
one who disbelieves in philosophy in love. I admire the look of it, I
give no credit to the assumption. I rather like lovers to be out at
times: it makes them picturesque, and it enlivens their monotony. I
perceived she had a spot of wildness. It's proper that she should wear
it off before marriage."

"Clara? The wildness of an infant!" said Willoughby, paternally, musing
over an inward shiver. "You saw her at a distance just now, or you
might have heard her laughing. Horace diverts her excessively."

"I owe him my eternal gratitude for his behaviour last night. She was
one of my bright faces. Her laughter was delicious; rain in the desert!
It will tell you what the load on me was, when I assure you those two
were merely a spectacle to me--points I scored in a lost game. And I
know they were witty."

"They both have wit; a kind of wit," Willoughby assented.

"They struck together like a pair of cymbals."

"Not the highest description of instrument. However, they amuse me. I
like to hear them when I am in the vein."

"That vein should be more at command with you, my friend. You can be
perfect, if you like."

"Under your tuition."

Willoughby leaned to her, bowing languidly. He was easier in his pain
for having hoodwinked the lady. She was the outer world to him; she
could tune the world's voice; prescribe which of the two was to be
pitied, himself or Clara; and he did not intend it to be himself, if it
came to the worst. They were far away from that at present, and he
continued:

"Probably a man's power of putting on a face is not equal to a girl's.
I detest petty dissensions. Probably I show it when all is not quite
smooth. Little fits of suspicion vex me. It is a weakness, not to play
them off, I know. Men have to learn the arts which come to women by
nature. I don't sympathize with suspicion, from having none myself."

His eyebrows shot up. That ill-omened man Flitch had sidled round by
the bushes to within a few feet of him. Flitch primarily defended
himself against the accusation of drunkenness, which was hurled at him
to account for his audacity in trespassing against the interdict; but
he admitted that he had taken "something short" for a fortification in
visiting scenes where he had once been happy--at Christmastide, when
all the servants, and the butler at head, grey old Mr. Chessington, sat
in rows, toasting the young heir of the old Hall in the old port wine!
Happy had he been then, before ambition for a shop, to be his own
master and an independent gentleman, had led him into his quagmire:--to
look back envying a dog on the old estate, and sigh for the smell of
Patterne stables: sweeter than Arabia, his drooping nose appeared to
say.

He held up close against it something that imposed silence on Sir
Willoughby as effectively as a cunning exordium in oratory will enchain
mobs to swallow what is not complimenting them; and this he displayed
secure in its being his licence to drivel his abominable pathos. Sir
Willoughby recognized Clara's purse. He understood at once how the must
have come by it: he was not so quick in devising a means of stopping
the tale. Flitch foiled him. "Intact," he replied to the question:
"What have you there?" He repeated this grand word. And then he turned
to Mrs. Mountstuart to speak of Paradise and Adam, in whom he saw the
prototype of himself: also the Hebrew people in the bondage of Egypt,
discoursed of by the clergymen, not without a likeness to him.

"Sorrows have done me one good, to send me attentive to church, my
lady," said Flitch, "when I might have gone to London, the coachman's
home, and been driving some honourable family, with no great advantage
to my morals, according to what I hear of. And a purse found under the
seat of a fly in London would have a poor chance of returning intact to
the young lady losing it."

"Put it down on that chair; inquiries will be made, and you will see
Sir Willoughby," said Mrs. Mountstuart. "Intact, no doubt; it is not
disputed."

With one motion of a finger she set the man rounding.

Flitch halted; he was very regretful of the termination of his feast of
pathos, and he wished to relate the finding of the purse, but he could
not encounter Mrs. Mountstuart's look; he slouched away in very close
resemblance to the ejected Adam of illustrated books.

"It's my belief that naturalness among the common people has died out
of the kingdom," she said.

Willoughby charitably apologized for him. "He has been fuddling
himself."

Her vigilant considerateness had dealt the sensitive gentleman a shock,
plainly telling him she had her ideas of his actual posture. Nor was he
unhurt by her superior acuteness and her display of authority on his
grounds.

He said, boldly, as he weighed the purse, half tossing it: "It's not
unlike Clara's."

He feared that his lips and cheeks were twitching, and as he grew aware
of a glassiness of aspect that would reflect any suspicion of a
keen-eyed woman, he became bolder still!

"Laetitia's, I know it is not. Hers is an ancient purse."

"A present from you!"

"How do you hit on that, my dear lady?"

"Deductively."

"Well, the purse looks as good as new in quality, like the owner."

"The poor dear has not much occasion for using it."

"You are mistaken: she uses it daily."

"If it were better filled, Sir Willoughby, your old scheme might be
arranged. The parties do not appear so unwilling. Professor Crooklyn
and I came on them just now rather by surprise, and I assure you their
heads were close, faces meeting, eyes musing."

"Impossible."

"Because when they approach the point, you won't allow it! Selfish!"

"Now," said Willoughby, very animatedly, "question Clara. Now, do, my
dear Mrs. Mountstuart, do speak to Clara on that head; she will
convince you I have striven quite recently against myself, if you like.
I have instructed her to aid me, given her the fullest instructions,
carte blanche. She cannot possibly have a doubt. I may look to her to
remove any you may entertain from your mind on the subject. I have
proposed, seconded, and chorussed it, and it will not be arranged. If
you expect me to deplore that fact, I can only answer that my actions
are under my control, my feelings are not. I will do everything
consistent with the duties of a man of honour perpetually running into
fatal errors because he did not properly consult the dictates of those
feelings at the right season. I can violate them: but I can no more
command them than I can my destiny. They were crushed of old, and so
let them be now. Sentiments we won't discuss; though you know that
sentiments have a bearing on social life: are factors, as they say in
their later jargon. I never speak of mine. To you I could. It is not
necessary. If old Vernon, instead of flattening his chest at a desk,
had any manly ambition to take part in public affairs, she would be the
woman for him. I have called her my Egeria. She would be his Cornelia.
One could swear of her that she would have noble offspring!--But old
Vernon has had his disappointment, and will moan over it up to the end.
And she? So it appears. I have tried; yes, personally: without effect.
In other matters I may have influence with her: not in that one. She
declines. She will live and die Laetitia Dale. We are alone: I confess
to you, I love the name. It's an old song in my ears. Do not be too
ready with a name for me. Believe me--I speak from my experience
hitherto--there is a fatality in these things. I cannot conceal from my
poor girl that this fatality exists . . ."

"Which is the poor girl at present?" said Mrs. Mountstuart, cool in a
mystification.

"And though she will tell you that I have authorized and Clara
Middleton--done as much as man can to institute the union you suggest,
she will own that she is conscious of the presence of this--fatality, I
call it for want of a better title between us. It drives her in one
direction, me in another--or would, if I submitted to the pressure. She
is not the first who has been conscious of it."

"Are we laying hold of a third poor girl?" said Mrs. Mountstuart. "Ah!
I remember. And I remember we used to call it playing fast and loose in
those days, not fatality. It is very strange. It may be that you were
unblushingly courted in those days, and excusable; and we all supposed
. . . but away you went for your tour."

"My mother's medical receipt for me. Partially it succeeded. She was
for grand marriages: not I. I could make, I could not be, a sacrifice.
And then I went in due time to Dr. Cupid on my own account. She has the
kind of attraction. . . But one changes! On revient toujours. First we
begin with a liking; then we give ourselves up to the passion of
beauty: then comes the serious question of suitableness of the mate to
match us; and perhaps we discover that we were wiser in early youth
than somewhat later. However, she has beauty. Now, Mrs Mountstuart,
you do admire her. Chase the idea of the 'dainty rogue' out of your
view of her: you admire her: she is captivating; she has a particular
charm of her own, nay, she has real beauty."

Mrs. Mountstuart fronted him to say: "Upon my word, my dear Sir
Willoughby, I think she has it to such a degree that I don't know the
man who could hold out against her if she took the field. She is one of
the women who are dead shots with men. Whether it's in their tongues or
their eyes, or it's an effusion and an atmosphere--whatever it is,
it's a spell, another fatality for you!"

"Animal; not spiritual!"

"Oh, she hasn't the head of Letty Dale."

Sir Willoughby allowed Mrs. Mountstuart to pause and follow her
thoughts.

"Dear me!" she exclaimed. "I noticed a change in Letty Dale last night;
and to-day. She looked fresher and younger; extremely well: which is
not what I can say for you, my friend. Fatalizing is not good for the
complexion."

"Don't take away my health, pray," cried Willoughby, with a snapping
laugh.

"Be careful," said Mrs. Mountstuart. "You have got a sentimental tone.
You talk of 'feelings crushed of old'. It is to a woman, not to a man
that you speak, but that sort of talk is a way of making the ground
slippery. I listen in vain for a natural tongue; and when I don't hear
it, I suspect plotting in men. You show your under-teeth too at times
when you draw in a breath, like a condemned high-caste Hindoo my
husband took me to see in a jail in Calcutta, to give me some
excitement when I was pining for England. The creature did it regularly
as he breathed; you did it last night, and you have been doing it
to-day, as if the air cut you to the quick. You have been spoilt. You
have been too much anointed. What I've just mentioned is a sign with me
of a settled something on the brain of a man."

"The brain?" said Sir Willoughby, frowning.

"Yes, you laugh sourly, to look at," said she. "Mountstuart told me
that the muscles of the mouth betray men sooner than the eyes, when
they have cause to be uneasy in their minds."

"But, ma'am, I shall not break my word; I shall not, not; I intend, I
have resolved to keep it. I do not fatalize, let my complexion be black
or white. Despite my resemblance to a high-caste malefactor of the
Calcutta prison-wards . . ."

"Friend! friend! you know how I chatter."

He saluted her finger-ends. "Despite the extraordinary display of
teeth, you will find me go to execution with perfect calmness; with a
resignation as good as happiness."

"Like a Jacobite lord under the Georges."

"You have told me that you wept to read of one: like him, then. My
principles have not changed, if I have. When I was younger, I had an
idea of a wife who would be with me in my thoughts as well as aims: a
woman with a spirit of romance, and a brain of solid sense. I shall
sooner or later dedicate myself to a public life; and shall, I suppose,
want the counsellor or comforter who ought always to be found at home.
It may be unfortunate that I have the ideal in my head. But I would
never make rigorous demands for specific qualities. The cruellest thing
in the world is to set up a living model before a wife, and compel her
to copy it. In any case, here we are upon the road: the die is cast. I
shall not reprieve myself. I cannot release her. Marriage represents
facts, courtship fancies. She will be cured by-and-by of that coveting
of everything that I do, feel, think, dream, imagine . . . ta-ta-ta-ta
ad infinitum. Laetitia was invited here to show her the example of a
fixed character--solid as any concrete substance you would choose to
build on, and not a whit the less feminine."

"Ta-ta-ta-ta ad infinitum. You need not tell me you have a design in
all that you do, Willoughby Patterne."

"You smell the autocrat? Yes, he can mould and govern the creatures
about him. His toughest rebel is himself! If you see Clara . . . You
wish to see her, I think you said?"

"Her behaviour to Lady Busshe last night was queer."

"If you will. She makes a mouth at porcelain. Toujours la porcelaine!
For me, her pettishness is one of her charms, I confess it. Ten years
younger, I could not have compared them."

"Whom?"

"Laetitia and Clara."

"Sir Willoughby, in any case, to quote you, here we are all upon the
road, and we must act as if events were going to happen; and I must ask
her to help me on the subject of my wedding-present, for I don't want
to have her making mouths at mine, however pretty--and she does it
prettily."

"'Another dedicatory offering to the rogue in me!' she says of
porcelain."

"Then porcelain it shall not be. I mean to consult her; I have come
determined upon a chat with her. I think I understand. But she produces
false impressions on those who don't know you both. 'I shall have that
porcelain back,' says Lady Busshe to me, when we were shaking hands
last night: 'I think,' says she, 'it should have been the Willow
Pattern.' And she really said: 'He's in for being jilted a second
time!'"

Sir Willoughby restrained a bound of his body that would have sent him
up some feet into the air. He felt his skull thundered at within.

"Rather than that it should fan upon her!" ejaculated he, correcting
his resemblance to the high-caste culprit as soon as it recurred to
him.

"But you know Lady Busshe," said Mrs. Mountstuart, genuinely solicitous
to ease the proud man of his pain. She could see through him to the
depth of the skin, which his fencing sensitiveness vainly attempted to
cover as it did the heart of him. "Lady Busshe is nothing without her
flights, fads, and fancies. She has always insisted that you have an
unfortunate nose. I remember her saying on the day of your majority, it
was the nose of a monarch destined to lose a throne."

"Have I ever offended Lady Busshe?"

"She trumpets you. She carries Lady Culmer with her too, and you may
expect a visit of nods and hints and pots of alabaster. They worship
you: you are the hope of England in their eyes, and no woman is worthy
of you: but they are a pair of fatalists, and if you begin upon Letty
Dale with them, you might as well forbid your banns. They will be all
over the country exclaiming on predestination and marriages made in
heaven."

"Clara and her father!" cried Sir Willoughby.

Dr Middleton and his daughter appeared in the circle of shrubs and
flowers.

"Bring her to me, and save me from the polyglot," said Mrs Mountstuart,
in afright at Dr. Middleton's manner of pouring forth into the ears of
the downcast girl.

The leisure he loved that he might debate with his genius upon any next
step was denied to Willoughby: he had to place his trust in the skill
with which he had sown and prepared Mrs Mountstuart's understanding to
meet the girl--beautiful abhorred that she was! detested darling!
thing to squeeze to death and throw to the dust, and mourn over!

He had to risk it; and at an hour when Lady Busshe's prognostic
grievously impressed his intense apprehensiveness of nature.

As it happened that Dr. Middleton's notion of a disagreeable duty in
colloquy was to deliver all that he contained, and escape the listening
to a syllable of reply, Willoughby withdrew his daughter from him
opportunely.

"Mrs. Mountstuart wants you, Clara."

"I shall be very happy," Clara replied, and put on a new face. An
imperceptible nervous shrinking was met by another force in her bosom,
that pushed her to advance without a sign of reluctance. She seemed to
glitter.

She was handed to Mrs. Mountstuart.

Dr Middleton laid his hand over Willoughby's shoulder, retiring on a
bow before the great lady of the district. He blew and said: "An
opposition of female instincts to masculine intellect necessarily
creates a corresponding antagonism of intellect to instinct."

"Her answer, sir? Her reasons? Has she named any?"

"The cat," said Dr. Middleton, taking breath for a sentence, "that
humps her back in the figure of the letter H, or a Chinese bridge has
given the dog her answer and her reasons, we may presume: but he that
undertakes to translate them into human speech might likewise venture
to propose an addition to the alphabet and a continuation of Homer. The
one performance would be not more wonderful than the other. Daughters,
Willoughby, daughters! Above most human peccancies, I do abhor a breach
of faith. She will not be guilty of that. I demand a cheerful
fulfilment of a pledge: and I sigh to think that I cannot count on it
without administering a lecture."

"She will soon be my care, sir."

"She shall be. Why, she is as good as married. She is at the altar. She
is in her house. She is--why, where is she not? She has entered the
sanctuary. She is out of the market. This maenad shriek for freedom
would happily entitle her to the Republican cap--the Phrygian--in a
revolutionary Parisian procession. To me it has no meaning; and but
that I cannot credit child of mine with mania, I should be in
trepidation of her wits."

Sir Willoughby's livelier fears were pacified by the information that
Clara had simply emitted a cry. Clara had once or twice given him cause
for starting and considering whether to think of her sex differently or
condemningly of her, yet he could not deem her capable of fully
unbosoming herself even to him, and under excitement. His idea of the
cowardice of girls combined with his ideal of a waxwork sex to persuade
him that though they are often (he had experienced it) wantonly
desperate in their acts, their tongues are curbed by rosy prudency. And
this was in his favour. For if she proved speechless and stupid with
Mrs. Mountstuart, the lady would turn her over, and beat her flat, beat
her angular, in fine, turn her to any shape, despising her, and
cordially believe him to be the model gentleman of Christendom. She
would fill in the outlines he had sketched to her of a picture that he
had small pride in by comparison with his early vision of a
fortune-favoured, triumphing squire, whose career is like the sun's,
intelligibly lordly to all comprehensions. Not like your model
gentleman, that has to be expounded--a thing for abstract esteem!
However, it was the choice left to him. And an alternative was enfolded
in that. Mrs. Mountstuart's model gentleman could marry either one of
two women, throwing the other overboard. He was bound to marry: he was
bound to take to himself one of them: and whichever one he selected
would cast a lustre on his reputation. At least she would rescue him
from the claws of Lady Busshe, and her owl's hoot of "Willow Pattern",
and her hag's shriek of "twice jilted". That flying infant
Willoughby--his unprotected little incorporeal omnipresent Self (not
thought of so much as passionately felt for)--would not be scoffed at
as the luckless with women. A fall indeed from his original conception
of his name of fame abroad! But Willoughby had the high consolation of
knowing that others have fallen lower. There is the fate of the devils
to comfort us, if we are driven hard. "For one of your pangs another
bosom is racked by ten", we read in the solacing Book.

With all these nice calculations at work, Willoughby stood above
himself, contemplating his active machinery, which he could partly
criticize but could not stop, in a singular wonderment at the aims and
schemes and tremours of one who was handsome, manly, acceptable in the
world's eyes: and had he not loved himself most heartily he would have
been divided to the extent of repudiating that urgent and excited half
of his being, whose motions appeared as those of a body of insects
perpetually erecting and repairing a structure of extraordinary
pettiness. He loved himself too seriously to dwell on the division for
more than a minute or so. But having seen it, and for the first time,
as he believed, his passion for the woman causing it became surcharged
with bitterness, atrabiliar.

A glance behind him, as he walked away with Dr. Middleton, showed
Clara, cunning creature that she was, airily executing her malicious
graces in the preliminary courtesies with Mrs. Mountstuart.



CHAPTER XXXV

MISS MIDDLETON AND MRS. MOUNTSTUART

"Sit beside me, fair Middleton," said the great lady.

"Gladly," said Clara, bowing to her title.

"I want to sound you, my dear."

Clara presented an open countenance with a dim interrogation on the
forehead. "Yes?" she said, submissively.

"You were one of my bright faces last night. I was in love with you.
Delicate vessels ring sweetly to a finger-nail, and if the wit is true,
you answer to it; that I can see, and that is what I like. Most of the
people one has at a table are drums. A ruba-dub-dub on them is the only
way to get a sound. When they can be persuaded to do it upon one
another, they call it conversation."

"Colonel De Craye was very funny."

"Funny, and witty too."

"But never spiteful."

"These Irish or half Irishmen are my taste. If they're not politicians,
mind; I mean Irish gentlemen. I will never have another dinner-party
without one. Our men's tempers are uncertain. You can't get them to
forget themselves. And when the wine is in them the nature comes out,
and they must be buffetting, and up start politics, and good-bye to
harmony! My husband, I am sorry to say, was one of those who have a
long account of ruined dinners against them. I have seen him and his
friends red as the roast and white as the boiled with wrath on a
popular topic they had excited themselves over, intrinsically not worth
a snap of the fingers. In London!" exclaimed Mrs. Mountstuart, to
aggravate the charge against her lord in the Shades. "But town or
country, the table should be sacred. I have heard women say it is a
plot on the side of the men to teach us our littleness. I don't believe
they have a plot. It would be to compliment them on a talent. I believe
they fall upon one another blindly, simply because they are full; which
is, we are told, the preparation for the fighting Englishman. They
cannot eat and keep a truce. Did you notice that dreadful Mr. Capes?"

"The gentleman who frequently contradicted papa? But Colonel De Craye
was good enough to relieve us."

"How, my dear?"

"You did not hear him? He took advantage of an interval when Mr. Capes
was breathing after a paean to his friend, the Governor--I think--of
one of the presidencies, to say to the lady beside him: 'He was a
wonderful administrator and great logician; he married an Anglo-Indian
widow, and soon after published a pamphlet in favour of Suttee.'"

"And what did the lady say?"

"She said: 'Oh.'"

"Hark at her! And was it heard?"

"Mr. Capes granted the widow, but declared he had never seen the
pamphlet in favour of Suttee, and disbelieved in it. He insisted that
it was to be named Sati. He was vehement."

"Now I do remember:--which must have delighted the colonel. And Mr.
Capes retired from the front upon a repetition of 'in toto, in toto'.
As if 'in toto' were the language of a dinner-table! But what will ever
teach these men? Must we import Frenchmen to give them an example in
the art of conversation, as their grandfathers brought over marquises
to instruct them in salads? And our young men too! Women have to take
to the hunting-field to be able to talk with them, and be on a par with
their grooms. Now, there was Willoughby Patterne, a prince among them
formerly. Now, did you observe him last night? did you notice how,
instead of conversing, instead of assisting me--as he was bound to do
doubly owing to the defection of Vernon Whitford: a thing I don't yet
comprehend--there he sat sharpening his lower lip for cutting remarks.
And at my best man! at Colonel De Craye! If he had attacked Mr. Capes,
with his Governor of Bomby, as the man pronounces it, or Colonel
Wildjohn and his Protestant Church in Danger, or Sir Wilson Pettifer
harping on his Monarchical Republic, or any other! No, he preferred to
be sarcastic upon friend Horace, and he had the worst of it. Sarcasm is
so silly! What is the gain if he has been smart? People forget the
epigram and remember the other's good temper. On that field, my dear,
you must make up your mind to be beaten by 'friend Horace'. I have my
prejudices and I have my prepossessions, but I love good temper, and I
love wit, and when I see a man possessed of both, I set my cap at him,
and there's my flat confession, and highly unfeminine it is."

"Not at all!" cried Clara.

"We are one, then."

Clara put up a mouth empty of words: she was quite one with her. Mrs.
Mountstuart pressed her hand. "When one does get intimate with a dainty
rogue!" she said. "You forgive me all that, for I could vow that
Willoughby has betrayed me."

Clara looked soft, kind, bright, in turns, and clouded instantly when
the lady resumed: "A friend of my own sex, and young, and a close
neighbour, is just what I would have prayed for. And I'll excuse you,
my dear, for not being so anxious about the friendship of an old woman.
But I shall be of use to you, you will find. In the first place, I
never tap for secrets. In the second, I keep them. Thirdly, I have some
power. And fourth, every young married woman has need of a friend like
me. Yes, and Lady Patterne heading all the county will be the stronger
for my backing. You don't look so mighty well pleased, my dear. Speak
out."

"Dear Mrs. Mountstuart!"

"I tell you, I am very fond of Willoughby, but I saw the faults of the
boy and see the man's. He has the pride of a king, and it's a pity if
you offend it. He is prodigal in generosity, but he can't forgive. As
to his own errors, you must be blind to them as a Saint. The secret of
him is, that he is one of those excessively civilized creatures who aim
at perfection: and I think he ought to be supported in his conceit of
having attained it; for the more men of that class, the greater our
influence. He excels in manly sports, because he won't be excelled in
anything, but as men don't comprehend his fineness, he comes to us; and
his wife must manage him by that key. You look down at the idea of
managing. It has to be done. One thing you may be assured of, he will
be proud of you. His wife won't be very much enamoured of herself if
she is not the happiest woman in the world. You will have the best
horses, the best dresses, the finest jewels in England; and an
incomparable cook. The house will be changed the moment you enter it as
Lady Patterne. And, my dear, just where he is, with all his graces,
deficient of attraction, yours will tell. The sort of Othello he would
make, or Leontes, I don't know, and none of us ever needs to know. My
impression is, that if even a shadow of a suspicion flitted across him,
he is a sort of man to double-dye himself in guilt by way of vengeance
in anticipation of an imagined offence. Not uncommon with men. I have
heard strange stories of them: and so will you in your time to come,
but not from me. No young woman shall ever be the sourer for having
been my friend. One word of advice now we are on the topic: never play
at counter-strokes with him. He will be certain to out-stroke you, and
you will be driven further than you meant to go. They say we beat men
at that game; and so we do, at the cost of beating ourselves. And if
once we are started, it is a race-course ending on a precipice--over
goes the winner. We must be moderately slavish to keep our place; which
is given us in appearance; but appearances make up a remarkably large
part of life, and far the most comfortable, so long as we are discreet
at the right moment. He is a man whose pride, when hurt, would run his
wife to perdition to solace it. If he married a troublesome widow, his
pamphlet on Suttee would be out within the year. Vernon Whitford would
receive instructions about it the first frosty moon. You like Miss
Dale?"

"I think I like her better than she likes me," said Clara.

"Have you never warmed together?"

"I have tried it. She is not one bit to blame. I can see how it is that
she misunderstands me: or justly condemns me, perhaps I should say."

"The hero of two women must die and be wept over in common before they
can appreciate one another. You are not cold?"

"No."

"You shuddered, my dear."

"Did I?"

"I do sometimes. Feet will be walking over ones grave, wherever it
lies. Be sure of this: Willoughby Patterne is a man of unimpeachable
honour."

"I do not doubt it."

"He means to be devoted to you. He has been accustomed to have women
hanging around him like votive offerings."

"I . . .!"

"You cannot: of course not: any one could see that at a glance. You
are all the sweeter to me for not being tame. Marriage cures a
multitude of indispositions."

"Oh! Mrs. Mountstuart, will you listen to me?"

"Presently. Don't threaten me with confidences. Eloquence is a terrible
thing in woman. I suspect, my dear, that we both know as much as could
be spoken."

"You hardly suspect the truth, I fear."

"Let me tell you one thing about jealous men--when they are not
blackamoors married to disobedient daughters. I speak of our civil
creature of the drawing-rooms: and lovers, mind, not husbands: two
distinct species, married or not:--they're rarely given to jealousy
unless they are flighty themselves. The jealousy fixes them. They have
only to imagine that we are for some fun likewise and they grow as
deferential as my footman, as harmless as the sportsman whose gun has
burst. Ah! my fair Middleton, am I pretending to teach you? You have
read him his lesson, and my table suffered for it last night, but I
bear no rancour."

"You bewilder me, Mrs. Mountstuart."

"Not if I tell you that you have driven the poor man to try whether it
would be possible for him to give you up."

"I have?"

"Well, and you are successful."

"I am?"

"Jump, my dear!"

"He will?"

"When men love stale instead of fresh, withered better than blooming,
excellence in the abstract rather than the palpable. With their idle
prate of feminine intellect, and a grotto nymph, and a mother of
Gracchi! Why, he must think me dazed with admiration of him to talk to
me! One listens, you know. And he is one of the men who cast a kind of
physical spell on you while he has you by the ear, until you begin to
think of it by talking to somebody else. I suppose there are clever
people who do see deep into the breast while dialogue is in progress.
One reads of them. No, my dear, you have very cleverly managed to show
him that it isn't at all possible: he can't. And the real cause for
alarm, in my humble opinion, is lest your amiable foil should have been
a trifle, as he would say, deceived, too much in earnest, led too far.
One may reprove him for not being wiser, but men won't learn without
groaning that they are simply weapons taken up to be put down when done
with. Leave it to me to compose him.--Willoughby can't give you up. I'm
certain he has tried; his pride has been horridly wounded. You were
shrewd, and he has had his lesson. If these little rufflings don't come
before marriage they come after; so it's not time lost; and it's good
to be able to look back on them. You are very white, my child."

"Can you, Mrs. Mountstuart, can you think I would be so heartlessly
treacherous?"

"Be honest, fair Middleton, and answer me: Can you say you had not a
corner of an idea of producing an effect on Willoughby?"

Clara checked the instinct of her tongue to defend her reddening
cheeks, with a sense that she was disintegrating and crumbling, but she
wanted this lady for a friend, and she had to submit to the conditions,
and be red and silent.

Mrs. Mountstuart examined her leisurely.

"That will do. Conscience blushes. One knows it by the conflagration.
Don't be hard on yourself . . . there you are in the other extreme. 
That blush of yours would count with me against any quantity of
evidence--all the Crooklyns in the kingdom. You lost your purse."

"I discovered that it was lost this morning."

"Flitch has been here with it. Willoughby has it. You will ask him for
it; he will demand payment: you will be a couple of yards' length or so
of cramoisy: and there ends the episode, nobody killed, only a poor man
melancholy-wounded, and I must offer him my hand to mend him, vowing to
prove to him that Suttee was properly abolished. Well, and now to
business. I said I wanted to sound you. You have been overdone with
porcelain. Poor Lady Busshe is in despair at your disappointment. Now,
I mean my wedding-present to be to your taste."

"Madam!"

"Who is the madam you are imploring?"

"Dear Mrs. Mountstuart!"

"Well?"

"I shall fall in your esteem. Perhaps you will help me. No one else
can. I am a prisoner: I am compelled to continue this imposture. Oh, I
shun speaking much: you object to it and I dislike it: but I must
endeavour to explain to you that I am unworthy of the position you
think a proud one."

"Tut-tut; we are all unworthy, cross our arms, bow our heads; and
accept the honours. Are you playing humble handmaid? What an old
organ-tune that is! Well? Give me reasons."

"I do not wish to marry."

"He's the great match of the county!"

"I cannot marry him."

"Why, you are at the church door with him! Cannot marry him?"

"It does not bind me."

"The church door is as binding as the altar to an honourable girl.
What have you been about? Since I am in for confidences, half ones
won't do. We must have honourable young women as well as men of honour.
You can't imagine he is to be thrown over now, at this hour? What have
you against him? come!"

"I have found that I do not . . ."

"What?"

"Love him."

Mrs. Mountstuart grimaced transiently. "That is no answer. The cause!"
she said. "What has he done?"

"Nothing."

"And when did you discover this nothing?"

"By degrees: unknown to myself; suddenly."

"Suddenly and by degrees? I suppose it's useless to ask for a head. But
if all this is true, you ought not to be here."

"I wish to go; I am unable."

"Have you had a scene together?"

"I have expressed my wish."

"In roundabout?--girl's English?"

"Quite clearly; oh, very clearly."

"Have you spoken to your father?"

"I have."

"And what does Dr. Middleton say?"

"It is incredible to him."

"To me too! I can understand little differences, little whims,
caprices: we don't settle into harness for a tap on the shoulder as a
man becomes a knight: but to break and bounce away from an unhappy
gentleman at the church door is either madness or it's one of the
things without a name. You think you are quite sure of yourself?"

"I am so sure, that I look back with regret on the time when I was
not."

"But you were in love with him."

"I was mistaken."

"No love?"

"I have none to give."

"Dear me!--Yes, yes, but that tone of sorrowful conviction is often a
trick, it's not new: and I know that assumption of plain sense to pass
off a monstrosity." Mrs. Mountstuart struck her lap. "Soh! but I've
had to rack my brain for it: feminine disgust? You have been hearing
imputations of his past life? moral character? No? Circumstances might
make him behave unkindly, not unhandsomely: and we have no claim over a
man's past, or it's too late to assert it. What is the case?"

"We are quite divided."

"Nothing in the way of . . . nothing green-eyed?"

"Far from that!"

"Then name it."

"We disagree."

"Many a very good agreement is founded on disagreeing. It's to be
regretted that you are not portionless. If you had been, you would have
made very little of disagreeing. You are just as much bound in honour
as if you had the ring on your finger."

"In honour! But I appeal to his, I am no wife for him."

"But if he insists, you consent?"

"I appeal to reason. Is it, madam . . ."

"But, I say, if he insists, you consent?"

"He will insist upon his own misery as well as mine."

Mrs. Mountstuart rocked herself "My poor Sir Willoughby! What a
fate!--And I took you for a clever girl! Why, I have been admiring
your management of him! And here am I bound to take a lesson from Lady
Busshe. My dear good Middleton, don't let it be said that Lady Busshe
saw deeper than I! I put some little vanity in it, I own: I won't
conceal it. She declares that when she sent her present--I don't
believe her--she had a premonition that it would come back. Surely you
won't justify the extravagances of a woman without common
reverence:--for anatomize him as we please to ourselves, he is a
splendid man (and I did it chiefly to encourage and come at you). We
don't often behold such a lordly-looking man: so conversable too when
he feels at home; a picture of an English gentleman! The very man we
want married for our neighbourhood! A woman who can openly talk of
expecting him to be twice jilted! You shrink. It is repulsive. It would
be incomprehensible: except, of course, to Lady Busshe, who rushed to
one of her violent conclusions, and became a prophetess. Conceive a
woman's imagining it could happen twice to the same man! I am not sure
she did not send the identical present that arrived and returned once
before: you know, the Durham engagement. She told me last night she
had it back. I watched her listening very suspiciously to Professor
Crooklyn. My dear, it is her passion to foretell disasters--her
passion! And when they are confirmed, she triumphs, of course. We shall
have her domineering over us with sapient nods at every trifle
occurring. The county will be unendurable. Unsay it, my Middleton! And
don't answer like an oracle because I do all the talking. Pour out to
me. You'll soon come to a stop and find the want of reason in the want
of words. I assure you that's true. Let me have a good gaze at you.
No," said Mrs. Mountstuart, after posturing herself to peruse Clara's
features, "brains you have; one can see it by the nose and the mouth. I
could vow you are the girl I thought you; you have your wits on tiptoe.
How of the heart?"

"None," Clara sighed.

The sigh was partly voluntary, though unforced; as one may with ready
sincerity act a character that is our own only through sympathy.

Mrs. Mountstuart felt the extra weight in the young lady's falling
breath. There was no necessity for a deep sigh over an absence of heart
or confession of it. If Clara did not love the man to whom she was
betrothed, sighing about it signified what? some pretence; and a
pretence is the cloak of a secret. Girls do not sigh in that way with
compassion for the man they have no heart for, unless at the same time
they should be oppressed by the knowledge or dread of having a heart
for some one else. As a rule, they have no compassion to bestow on him:
you might as reasonably expect a soldier to bewail the enemy he strikes
in action: they must be very disengaged to have it. And supposing a
show of the thing to be exhibited, when it has not been worried out of
them, there is a reserve in the background: they are pitying themselves
under a mask of decent pity of their wretch.

So ran Mrs. Mountstuart's calculations, which were like her suspicion,
coarse and broad, not absolutely incorrect, but not of an exact measure
with the truth. That pin's head of the truth is rarely hit by design.
The search after it of the professionally penetrative in the dark of a
bosom may bring it forth by the heavy knocking all about the
neighbourhood that we call good guessing, but it does not come out
clean; other matter adheres to it; and being more it is less than
truth. The unadulterate is to be had only by faith in it or by waiting
for it.

A lover! thought the sagacious dame. There was no lover: some love
there was: or, rather, there was a preparation of the chamber, with no
lamp yet lighted.

"Do you positively tell me you have no heart for the position of first
lady of the county?" said Mrs. Mountstuart.

Clara's reply was firm: "None whatever."

"My dear, I will believe you on one condition. Look at me. You have
eyes. If you are for mischief, you are armed for it. But how much
better, when you have won a prize, to settle down and wear it! Lady
Patterne will have entire occupation for her flights and whimsies in
leading the county. And the man, surely the man--he behaved badly last
night: but a beauty like this," she pushed a finger at Clara's cheek,
and doated a half instant, "you have the very beauty to break in an
ogre's temper. And the man is as governable as he is presentable. You
have the beauty the French call--no, it's the beauty of a queen of
elves: one sees them lurking about you, one here, one there.
Smile--they dance: be doleful--they hang themselves. No, there's not a
trace of satanic; at least, not yet. And come, come, my Middleton, the
man is a man to be proud of. You can send him into Parliament to wear
off his humours. To my thinking, he has a fine style: conscious? I
never thought so before last night. I can't guess what has happened to
him recently. He was once a young Grand Monarque. He was really a
superb young English gentleman. Have you been wounding him?"

"It is my misfortune to be obliged to wound him," said Clara.

"Quite needlessly, my child, for marry him you must."

Clara's bosom rose: her shoulders rose too, narrowing, and her head
fell slight back.

Mrs. Mountstuart exclaimed: "But the scandal! You would never, never
think of following the example of that Durham girl?--whether she was
provoked to it by jealousy or not. It seems to have gone so
astonishingly far with you in a very short time, that one is alarmed as
to where you will stop. Your look just now was downright revulsion."

"I fear it is. It is. I am past my own control. Dear madam, you have my
assurance that I will not behave scandalously or dishonourably. What I
would entreat of you is to help me. I know this of myself . . . I am not
the best of women. I am impatient, wickedly. I should be no good wife.
Feelings like mine teach me unhappy things of myself."

"Rich, handsome, lordly, influential, brilliant health, fine estates,"
Mrs. Mountstuart enumerated in petulant accents as there started across
her mind some of Sir Willoughby's attributes for the attraction of the
soul of woman. "I suppose you wish me to take you in earnest?"

"I appeal to you for help."

"What help?"

"Persuade him of the folly of pressing me to keep my word."

"I will believe you, my dear Middleton, on one condition: your talk of
no heart is nonsense. A change like this, if one is to believe in the
change, occurs through the heart, not because there is none. Don't you
see that? But if you want me for a friend, you must not sham stupid.
It's bad enough in itself: the imitation's horrid. You have to be
honest with me, and answer me right out. You came here on this visit
intending to marry Willoughby Patterne."

"Yes."

"And gradually you suddenly discovered, since you came here, that you
did not intend it, if you could find a means of avoiding it."

"Oh, madam, yes, it is true."

"Now comes the test. And, my lovely Middleton, your flaming cheeks
won't suffice for me this time. The old serpent can blush like an
innocent maid on occasion. You are to speak, and you are to tell me in
six words why that was: and don't waste one on 'madam', or 'Oh! Mrs.
Mountstuart' Why did you change?"

"I came--When I came I was in some doubt. Indeed I speak the truth. I
found I could not give him the admiration he has, I dare say, a right
to expect. I turned--it surprised me; it surprises me now. But so
completely! So that to think of marrying him is . . ."

"Defer the simile," Mrs. Mountstuart interposed. "If you hit on a
clever one, you will never get the better of it. Now, by just as much
as you have outstripped my limitation of words to you, you show me you
are dishonest."

"I could make a vow."

"You would forswear yourself."

"Will you help me?"

"If you are perfectly ingenuous, I may try."

"Dear lady, what more can I say?"

"It may be difficult. You can reply to a catechism."

"I shall have your help?"

"Well, yes; though I don't like stipulations between friends. There is
no man living to whom you could willingly give your hand? That is my
question. I cannot possibly take a step unless I know. Reply briefly:
there is or there is not." Clara sat back with bated breath, mentally
taking the leap into the abyss, realizing it, and the cold prudence of
abstention, and the delirium of the confession. Was there such a man?
It resembled freedom to think there was: to avow it promised freedom.

"Oh, Mrs. Mountstuart!"

"Well?"

"You will help me?"

"Upon my word, I shall begin to doubt your desire for it."

"Willingly give my hand, madam?"

"For shame! And with wits like yours, can't you perceive where
hesitation in answering such a question lands you?"

"Dearest lady, will you give me your hand? may I whisper?"

"You need not whisper; I won't look."

Clara's voice trembled on a tense chord.

"There is one . . . compared with him I feel my insignificance. If I
could aid him."

"What necessity have you to tell me more than that there is one?"

"Ah, madam, it is different: not as you imagine. You bid me be
scrupulously truthful: I am: I wish you to know the different kind of
feeling it is from what might be suspected from . . . a confession. To
give my hand, is beyond any thought I have ever encouraged. If you had
asked me whether there is one whom I admire--yes, I do. I cannot help
admiring a beautiful and brave self-denying nature. It is one whom you
must pity, and to pity casts you beneath him: for you pity him because
it is his nobleness that has been the enemy of his fortunes. He lives
for others."

Her voice was musically thrilling in that low muted tone of the very
heart, impossible to deride or disbelieve.

Mrs. Mountstuart set her head nodding on springs.

"Is he clever?"

"Very."

"He talks well?"

"Yes."

"Handsome?"

"He might be thought so."

"Witty?"

"I think he is."

"Gay, cheerful?"

"In his manner."

"Why, the man would be a mountebank if he adopted any other. And poor?"

"He is not wealthy."

Mrs. Mountstuart preserved a lengthened silence, but nipped Clara's
fingers once or twice to reassure her without approving. "Of course
he's poor," she said at last; "directly the reverse of what you could
have, it must be. Well, my fair Middleton, I can't say you have been
dishonest. I'll help you as far as I'm able. How, it is quite
impossible to tell. We're in the mire. The best way seems to me to get
this pitiable angel to cut some ridiculous capers and present you
another view of him. I don't believe in his innocence. He knew you to
be a plighted woman."

"He has not once by word or sign hinted a disloyalty."

"Then how do you know."

"I do not know."

"He is not the cause of your wish to break your engagement?"

"No."

"Then you have succeeded in just telling me nothing. What is?"

"Ah! madam!"

"You would break your engagement purely because the admirable creature
is in existence?"

Clara shook her head: she could not say she was dizzy. She had spoken
out more than she had ever spoken to herself, and in doing so she had
cast herself a step beyond the line she dared to contemplate.

"I won't detain you any longer," said Mrs. Mountstuart. "The more we
learn, the more we are taught that we are not so wise as we thought we
were. I have to go to school to Lady Busshe! I really took you for a
very clever girl. If you change again, you will notify the important
circumstance to me, I trust."

"I will," said Clara, and no violent declaration of the impossibility
of her changing again would have had such an effect on her hearer.

Mrs. Mountstuart scanned her face for a new reading of it to match with
her later impressions.

"I am to do as I please with the knowledge I have gained?"

"I am utterly in your hands, madam."

"I have not meant to be unkind."

"You have not been unkind; I could embrace you."

"I am rather too shattered, and kissing won't put me together. I
laughed at Lady Busshe! No wonder you went off like a rocket with a
disappointing bouquet when I told you you had been successful with poor
Sir Willoughby and he could not give you up. I noticed that. A woman
like Lady Busshe, always prying for the lamentable, would have required
no further enlightenment. Has he a temper?"

Clara did not ask her to signalize the person thus abruptly obtruded.

"He has faults," she said.

"There's an end to Sir Willoughby, then! Though I don't say he will
give you up even when he hears the worst, if he must hear it, as for
his own sake he should. And I won't say he ought to give you up. He'll
be the pitiable angel if he does. For you--but you don't deserve
compliments; they would be immoral. You have behaved badly, badly,
badly. I have never had such a right-about-face in my life. You will
deserve the stigma: you will be notorious: you will be called Number
Two. Think of that! Not even original! We will break the conference, or
I shall twaddle to extinction. I think I heard the luncheon bell."

"It rang."

"You don't look fit for company, but you had better come."

"Oh, yes; every day it's the same."

"Whether you're in my hands or I'm in yours, we're a couple of
arch-conspirators against the peace of the family whose table we're
sitting at, and the more we rattle the viler we are, but we must do it
to ease our minds."

Mrs. Mountstuart spread the skirts of her voluminous dress, remarking
further: "At a certain age our teachers are young people: we learn by
looking backward. It speaks highly for me that I have not called you
mad.--Full of faults, goodish-looking, not a bad talker, cheerful,
poorish;--and she prefers that to this!" the great lady exclaimed in
her reverie while emerging from the circle of shrubs upon a view of the
Hall. Colonel De Craye advanced to her; certainly good-looking,
certainly cheerful, by no means a bad talker, nothing of a Croesus, and
variegated with faults.

His laughing smile attacked the irresolute hostility of her mien,
confident as the sparkle of sunlight in a breeze. The effect of it on
herself angered her on behalf of Sir Willoughby's bride.

"Good-morning, Mrs. Mountstuart; I believe I am the last to greet you."

"And how long do you remain here, Colonel De Craye?"

"I kissed earth when I arrived, like the Norman William, and
consequently I've an attachment to the soil, ma'am."

"You're not going to take possession of it, I suppose?"

"A handful would satisfy me."

"You play the Conqueror pretty much, I have heard. But property is held
more sacred than in the times of the Norman William."

"And speaking of property, Miss Middleton, your purse is found." he
said.

"I know it is," she replied as unaffectedly as Mrs. Mountstuart could
have desired, though the ingenuous air of the girl incensed her
somewhat.

Clara passed on.

"You restore purses," observed Mrs. Mountstuart.

Her stress on the word and her look thrilled De Craye; for there had
been a long conversation between the young lady and the dame.

"It was an article that dropped and was not stolen," said he.

"Barely sweet enough to keep, then!"

"I think I could have felt to it like poor Flitch, the flyman, who was
the finder."

"If you are conscious of these temptations to appropriate what is not
your own, you should quit the neighbourhood."

"And do it elsewhere? But that's not virtuous counsel."

"And I'm not counselling in the interests of your virtue, Colonel De
Craye."

"And I dared for a moment to hope that you were, ma'am," he said,
ruefully drooping.

They were close to the dining-room window, and Mrs Mountstuart
preferred the terminating of a dialogue that did not promise to leave
her features the austerely iron cast with which she had commenced it.
She was under the spell of gratitude for his behaviour yesterday
evening at her dinner-table; she could not be very severe.



CHAPTER XXXVI

ANIMATED CONVERSATION AT A LUNCHEON-TABLE

Vernon was crossing the hall to the dining-room as Mrs Mountstuart
stepped in. She called to him: "Are the champions reconciled?"

He replied: "Hardly that, but they have consented to meet at an altar
to offer up a victim to the gods in the shape of modern poetic
imitations of the classical."

"That seems innocent enough. The Professor has not been anxious about
his chest?"

"He recollects his cough now and then."

"You must help him to forget it."

"Lady Busshe and Lady Culmer are here," said Vernon, not supposing it
to be a grave announcement until the effect of it on Mrs. Mountstuart
admonished him.

She dropped her voice: "Engage my fair friend for one of your walks the
moment we rise from table. You may have to rescue her; but do. I mean
it."

"She's a capital walker." Vernon remarked in simpleton style.

"There's no necessity for any of your pedestrian feats," Mrs
Mountstuart said, and let him go, turning to Colonel De Craye to
pronounce an encomium on him: "The most open-minded man I know!
Warranted to do perpetual service, and no mischief. If you were all
. . . instead of catching at every prize you covet! Yes, you would
have your reward for unselfishness, I assure you. Yes, and where you
seek it! That is what none of you men will believe."

"When you behold me in your own livery!" cried the colonel.

"Do I?" said she, dallying with a half-formed design to be
confidential. "How is it one is always tempted to address you in
the language of innuendo? I can't guess."

"Except that as a dog doesn't comprehend good English we naturally talk
bad to him."

The great lady was tickled. Who could help being amused by this man?
And after all, if her fair Middleton chose to be a fool there could be
no gainsaying her, sorry though poor Sir Willoughby's friends must feel
for him.

She tried not to smile.

"You are too absurd. Or a baby, you might have added."

"I hadn't the daring."

"I'll tell you what, Colonel De Craye, I shall end by falling in love
with you; and without esteeming you, I fear."

"The second follows as surely as the flavour upon a draught of Bacchus,
if you'll but toss off the glass, ma'am."

"We women, sir, think it should be first."

"'Tis to transpose the seasons, and give October the blossom and April
the apple, and no sweet one! Esteem's a mellow thing that comes after
bloom and fire, like an evening at home; because if it went before it
would have no father and couldn't hope for progeny; for there'd be no
nature in the business. So please, ma'am, keep to the original order,
and you'll be nature's child, and I the most blessed of mankind."

"Really, were I fifteen years younger. I am not so certain . . . I
might try and make you harmless."

"Draw the teeth of the lamb so long as you pet him!"

"I challenged you, colonel, and I won't complain of your pitch. But
now lay your wit down beside your candour, and descend to an every-day
level with me for a minute."

"Is it innuendo?"

"No; though I daresay it would be easier for you to respond to if it
were."

"I'm the straightforwardest of men at a word of command."

"This is a whisper. Be alert, as you were last night. Shuffle the table
well. A little liveliness will do it. I don't imagine malice, but
there's curiosity, which is often as bad, and not so lightly foiled. We
have Lady Busshe and Lady Culmer here."

"To sweep the cobwebs out of the sky!"

"Well, then, can you fence with broomsticks?"

"I have had a bout with them in my time."

"They are terribly direct."

"They 'give point', as Napoleon commanded his cavalry to do."

"You must help me to ward it."

"They will require variety in the conversation."

"Constant. You are an angel of intelligence, and if I have the judgeing
of you, I'm afraid you'll be allowed to pass, in spite of the scandal
above. Open the door; I don't unbonnet."

De Craye threw the door open.

Lady Busshe was at that moment saying, "And are we indeed to have you
for a neighbour, Dr. Middleton?"

The Rev. Doctor's reply was drowned by the new arrivals.

"I thought you had forsaken us," observed Sir Willoughby to Mrs.
Mountstuart.

"And run away with Colonel De Craye? I'm too weighty, my dear friend.
Besides, I have not looked at the wedding-presents yet."

"The very object of our call!" exclaimed Lady Culmer.

"I have to confess I am in dire alarm about mine," Lady Busshe nodded
across the table at Clara. "Oh! you may shake your head, but I would
rather hear a rough truth than the most complimentary evasion."

"How would you define a rough truth, Dr. Middleton?" said Mrs.
Mountstuart.

Like the trained warrior who is ready at all hours for the trumpet to
arms, Dr. Middleton waked up for judicial allocution in a trice.

"A rough truth, madam, I should define to be that description of truth
which is not imparted to mankind without a powerful impregnation of the
roughness of the teller."

"It is a rough truth, ma'am, that the world is composed of fools, and
that the exceptions are knaves," Professor Crooklyn furnished that
example avoided by the Rev. Doctor.

"Not to precipitate myself into the jaws of the foregone definition,
which strikes me as being as happy as Jonah's whale, that could carry
probably the most learned man of his time inside without the necessity
of digesting him," said De Craye, "a rough truth is a rather strong
charge of universal nature for the firing off of a modicum of personal
fact."

"It is a rough truth that Plato is Moses atticizing," said Vernon to
Dr. Middleton, to keep the diversion alive.

"And that Aristotle had the globe under his cranium," rejoined the Rev.
Doctor.

"And that the Moderns live on the Ancients."

"And that not one in ten thousand can refer to the particular treasury
he filches."

"The Art of our days is a revel of rough truth," remarked Professor
Crooklyn.

"And the literature has laboriously mastered the adjective, wherever it
may be in relation to the noun," Dr. Middleton added.

"Orson's first appearance at court was in the figure of a rough truth,
causing the Maids of Honour, accustomed to Tapestry Adams, astonishment
and terror," said De Craye. That he might not be left out of the
sprightly play, Sir Willoughby levelled a lance at the quintain,
smiling on Laetitia: "In fine, caricature is rough truth."

She said, "Is one end of it, and realistic directness is the other."

He bowed. "The palm is yours."

Mrs. Mountstuart admired herself as each one trotted forth in turn
characteristically, with one exception unaware of the aid which was
being rendered to a distressed damsel wretchedly incapable of decent
hypocrisy. Her intrepid lead had shown her hand to the colonel and
drawn the enemy at a blow.

Sir Willoughby's "in fine", however, did not please her: still less did
his lackadaisical Lothario-like bowing and smiling to Miss Dale: and he
perceived it and was hurt. For how, carrying his tremendous load, was
he to compete with these unhandicapped men in the game of nonsense she
had such a fondness for starting at a table? He was further annoyed to
hear Miss Eleanor and Miss Isabel Patterne agree together that
"caricature" was the final word of the definition. Relatives should
know better than to deliver these awards to us in public.

"Well?" quoth Lady Busshe, expressive of stupefaction at the strange
dust she had raised.

"Are they on view, Miss Middleton?" inquired Lady Culmer.

"There's a regiment of us on view and ready for inspection." Colonel De
Craye bowed to her, but she would not be foiled.

"Miss Middleton's admirers are always on view." said he.

"Are they to be seen?" said Lady Busshe.

Clara made her face a question, with a laudable smoothness.

"The wedding-presents," Lady Culmer explained.

"No."

"Otherwise, my dear, we are in danger of duplicating and triplicating
and quadruplicating, not at all to the satisfaction of the bride."

"But there's a worse danger to encounter in the 'on view', my lady,"
said De Craye; "and that's the magnetic attraction a display of
wedding-presents is sure to have for the ineffable burglar, who must
have a nuptial soul in him, for wherever there's that collection on
view, he's never a league off. And 'tis said he knows a lady's
dressing-case presented to her on the occasion fifteen years after the
event."

"As many as fifteen?" said Mrs. Mountstuart.

"By computation of the police. And if the presents are on view, dogs
are of no use, nor bolts, nor bars:--he's worse than Cupid. The only
protection to be found, singular as it may be thought, is in a couple
of bottles of the oldest Jamaica rum in the British isles."

"Rum?" cried Lady Busshe.

"The liquor of the Royal Navy, my lady. And with your permission, I'll
relate the tale in proof of it. I had a friend engaged to a young lady,
niece of an old sea-captain of the old school, the Benbow school, the
wooden leg and pigtail school; a perfectly salt old gentleman with a
pickled tongue, and a dash of brine in every deed he committed. He
looked rolled over to you by the last wave on the shore, sparkling: he
was Neptune's own for humour. And when his present to the bride was
opened, sure enough there lay a couple of bottles of the oldest Jamaica
rum in the British Isles, born before himself, and his father to boot.
'Tis a fabulous spirit I beg you to believe in, my lady, the sole merit
of the story being its portentous veracity. The bottles were tied to
make them appear twins, as they both had the same claim to seniority.
And there was a label on them, telling their great age, to maintain
their identity. They were in truth a pair of patriarchal bottles
rivalling many of the biggest houses in the kingdom for antiquity. They
would have made the donkey that stood between the two bundles of hay
look at them with obliquity: supposing him to have, for an animal, a
rum taste, and a turn for hilarity. Wonderful old bottles! So, on the
label, just over the date, was written large: UNCLE BENJAMIN'S WEDDING
PRESENT TO HIS NIECE BESSY. Poor Bessy shed tears of disappointment and
indignation enough to float the old gentleman on his native element,
ship and all. She vowed it was done curmudgeonly to vex her, because
her uncle hated wedding-presents and had grunted at the exhibition of
cups and saucers, and this and that beautiful service, and epergnes and
inkstands, mirrors, knives and forks, dressing-cases, and the whole
mighty category. She protested, she flung herself about, she declared
those two ugly bottles should not join the exhibition in the
dining-room, where it was laid out for days, and the family ate their
meals where they could, on the walls, like flies. But there was also
Uncle Benjamin's legacy on view, in the distance, so it was ruled
against her that the bottles should have their place. And one fine
morning down came the family after a fearful row of the domestics;
shouting, screaming, cries for the police, and murder topping all. What
did they see? They saw two prodigious burglars extended along the
floor, each with one of the twin bottles in his hand, and a remainder
of the horror of the midnight hanging about his person like a blown
fog, sufficient to frighten them whilst they kicked the rascals
entirely intoxicated. Never was wilder disorder of wedding-presents,
and not one lost!--owing, you'll own, to Uncle Benjy's two bottles of
ancient Jamaica rum."

Colonel De Craye concluded with an asseveration of the truth of the
story.

"A most provident, far-sighted old sea-captain!" exclaimed Mrs.
Mountstuart, laughing at Lady Busshe and Lady Culmer. These ladies
chimed in with her gingerly.

"And have you many more clever stories, Colonel De Craye?" said Lady
Busshe.

"Ah! my lady, when the tree begins to count its gold 'tis nigh upon
bankruptcy."

"Poetic!" ejaculated Lady Culmer, spying at Miss Middleton's rippled
countenance, and noting that she and Sir Willoughby had not
interchanged word or look.

"But that in the case of your Patterne Port a bottle of it would
outvalue the catalogue of nuptial presents, Willoughby, I would
recommend your stationing some such constabulary to keep watch and
ward." said Dr. Middleton, as he filled his glass, taking Bordeaux in
the middle of the day, under a consciousness of virtue and its reward
to come at half-past seven in the evening.

"The rascals would require a dozen of that, sir," said De Craye.

"Then it is not to be thought of. Indeed one!" Dr. Middleton negatived
the idea.

"We are no further advanced than when we began," observed Lady Busshe.

"If we are marked to go by stages," Mrs. Mountstuart assented.

"Why, then, we shall be called old coaches," remarked the colonel.

"You," said Lady Culmer, "have the advantage of us in a closer
acquaintance with Miss Middleton. You know her tastes, and how far they
have been consulted in the little souvenirs already grouped somewhere,
although not yet for inspection. I am at sea. And here is Lady Busshe
in deadly alarm. There is plenty of time to effect a change--though we
are drawing on rapidly to the fatal day, Miss Middleton. We are, we are
very near it. Oh! yes. I am one who thinks that these little affairs
should be spoken of openly, without that ridiculous bourgeois
affectation, so that we may be sure of giving satisfaction. It is a
transaction like everything else in life. I, for my part, wish to be
remembered favourably. I put it as a test of breeding to speak of these
things as plain matter-of-fact. You marry; I wish you to have something
by you to remind you of me. What shall it be?--useful or ornamental.
For an ordinary household the choice is not difficult. But where wealth
abounds we are in a dilemma."

"And with persons of decided tastes," added Lady Busshe.

"I am really very unhappy," she protested to Clara.

Sir Willoughby dropped Laetitia; Clara's look of a sedate resolution to
preserve silence on the topic of the nuptial gifts made a diversion
imperative.

"Your porcelain was exquisitely chosen, and I profess to be a
connoisseur," he said. "I am poor in Old Saxony, as you know; I can
match the country in Savres, and my inheritance of China will not
easily be matched in the country."

"You may consider your Dragon vases a present from young Crossjay,"
said De Craye.

"How?"

"Hasn't he abstained from breaking them? the capital boy! Porcelain
and a boy in the house together is a case of prospective disaster fully
equal to Flitch and a fly."

"You should understand that my friend Horace--whose wit is in this
instance founded on another tale of a boy--brought us a magnificent
piece of porcelain, destroyed by the capsizing of his conveyance from
the station," said Sir Willoughby to Lady Busshe.

She and Lady Culmer gave out lamentable Ohs, while Miss Eleanor and
Miss Isabel Patterne sketched the incident. Then the lady visitors
fixed their eyes in united sympathy upon Clara: recovering from which,
after a contemplation of marble, Lady Busshe emphasized, "No, you do
not love porcelain, it is evident, Miss Middleton."

"I am glad to be assured of it," said Lady Culmer.

"Oh, I know that face: I know that look," Lady Busshe affected to
remark rallyingly: "it is not the first time I have seen it."

Sir Willoughby smarted to his marrow. "We will rout these fancies of an
overscrupulous generosity, my dear Lady Busshe."

Her unwonted breach of delicacy in speaking publicly of her present,
and the vulgar persistency of her sticking to the theme, very much
perplexed him. And if he mistook her not, she had just alluded to the
demoniacal Constantia Durham.

It might be that he had mistaken her: he was on guard against his
terrible sensitiveness. Nevertheless it was hard to account for this
behaviour of a lady greatly his friend and admirer, a lady of birth.
And Lady Culmer as well!--likewise a lady of birth. Were they in
collusion? had they a suspicion? He turned to Laetitia's face for the
antidote to his pain.

"Oh, but you are not one yet, and I shall require two voices to
convince me," Lady Busshe rejoined, after another stare at the marble.

"Lady Busshe, I beg you not to think me ungrateful," said Clara.

"Fiddle!--gratitude! it is to please your taste, to satisfy you. I
care for gratitude as little as for flattery."

"But gratitude is flattering," said Vernon.

"Now, no metaphysics, Mr. Whitford."

"But do care a bit for flattery, my lady," said De Craye. "'Tis the
finest of the Arts; we might call it moral sculpture. Adepts in it can
cut their friends to any shape they like by practising it with the
requisite skill. I myself, poor hand as I am, have made a man act
Solomon by constantly praising his wisdom. He took a sagacious turn at
an early period of the dose. He weighed the smallest question of his
daily occasions with a deliberation truly oriental. Had I pushed it,
he'd have hired a baby and a couple of mothers to squabble over the
undivided morsel."

"I shall hope for a day in London with you," said Lady Culmer to Clara.

"You did not forget the Queen of Sheba?" said Mrs. Mountstuart to De
Craye.

"With her appearance, the game has to be resigned to her entirely," he
rejoined.

"That is," Lady Culmer continued, "if you do not despise an old woman
for your comrade on a shopping excursion."

"Despise whom we fleece!" exclaimed Dr. Middleton. "Oh, no, Lady
Culmer, the sheep is sacred."

"I am not so sure," said Vernon.

"In what way, and to what extent, are you not so sure?" said Dr.
Middleton.

"The natural tendency is to scorn the fleeced."

"I stand for the contrary. Pity, if you like: particularly when they
bleat."

"This is to assume that makers of gifts are a fleeced people: I demur,"
said Mrs. Mountstuart.

"Madam, we are expected to give; we are incited to give; you have
dubbed it the fashion to give; and the person refusing to give, or
incapable of giving, may anticipate that he will be regarded as
benignly as a sheep of a drooping and flaccid wool by the farmer, who
is reminded by the poor beast's appearance of a strange dog that
worried the flock. Even Captain Benjamin, as you have seen, was unable
to withstand the demand on him. The hymeneal pair are licensed
freebooters levying blackmail on us; survivors of an uncivilized
period. But in taking without mercy, I venture to trust that the
manners of a happier era instruct them not to scorn us. I apprehend
that Mr. Whitford has a lower order of latrons in his mind."

"Permit me to say, sir, that you have not considered the ignoble aspect
of the fleeced," said Vernon. "I appeal to the ladies: would they not,
if they beheld an ostrich walking down a Queen's Drawing Room,
clean-plucked, despise him though they were wearing his plumes?"

"An extreme supposition, indeed," said Dr. Middleton, frowning over it;
"scarcely legitimately to be suggested."

"I think it fair, sir, as an instance."

"Has the circumstance occurred, I would ask?"

"In life? a thousand times."

"I fear so," said Mrs. Mountstuart.

Lady Busshe showed symptoms of a desire to leave a profitless table.

Vernon started up, glancing at the window.

"Did you see Crossjay?" he said to Clara.

"No; I must, if he is there," said she.

She made her way out, Vernon after her. They both had the excuse.

"Which way did the poor boy go?" she asked him.

"I have not the slightest idea," he replied. "But put on your bonnet,
if you would escape that pair of inquisitors."

"Mr. Whitford, what humiliation!"

"I suspect you do not feel it the most, and the end of it can't be
remote," said he.

Thus it happened that when Lady Busshe and Lady Culmer quitted the
dining-room, Miss Middleton had spirited herself away from summoning
voice and messenger.

Sir Willoughby apologized for her absence. "If I could be jealous, it
would be of that boy Crossjay."

"You are an excellent man, and the best of cousins," was Lady Busshe's
enigmatical answer.

The exceedingly lively conversation at his table was lauded by Lady
Culmer.

"Though," said she, "what it all meant, and what was the drift of it, I
couldn't tell to save my life. Is it every day the same with you here?"

"Very much."

"How you must enjoy a spell of dulness!"

"If you said simplicity and not talking for effect! I generally cast
anchor by Laetitia Dale."

"Ah!" Lady Busshe coughed. "But the fact is, Mrs. Mountstuart is made
for cleverness!"

"I think, my lady, Laetitia Dale is to the full as clever as any of the
stars Mrs. Mountstuart assembles, or I."

"Talkative cleverness, I mean."

"In conversation as well. Perhaps you have not yet given her a chance."

"Yes, yes, she is clever, of course, poor dear. She is looking better
too."

"Handsome, I thought," said Lady Culmer.

"She varies," observed Sir Willoughby.

The ladies took seat in their carriage and fell at once into a
close-bonnet colloquy. Not a single allusion had they made to the
wedding-presents after leaving the luncheon-table. The cause of their
visit was obvious.



CHAPTER XXXVII

CONTAINS CLEVER FENCING AND INTIMATIONS OF THE NEED FOR IT

That woman, Lady Busshe, had predicted, after the event, Constantia
Durham's defection. She had also, subsequent to Willoughby's departure
on his travels, uttered sceptical things concerning his rooted
attachment to Laetitia Dale. In her bitter vulgarity, that beaten rival
of Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson for the leadership of the county had
taken his nose for a melancholy prognostic of his fortunes; she had
recently played on his name: she had spoken the hideous English of his
fate. Little as she knew, she was alive to the worst interpretation of
appearances. No other eulogy occurred to her now than to call him the
best of cousins, because Vernon Whitford was housed and clothed and fed
by him. She had nothing else to say for a man she thought luckless!
She was a woman barren of wit, stripped of style, but she was wealthy
and a gossip--a forge of showering sparks--and she carried Lady Culmer
with her. The two had driven from his house to spread the malignant
rumour abroad; already they blew the biting world on his raw wound.
Neither of them was like Mrs. Mountstuart, a witty woman, who could be
hoodwinked; they were dull women, who steadily kept on their own scent
of the fact, and the only way to confound such inveterate forces was to
be ahead of them, and seize and transform the expected fact, and
astonish them, when they came up to him, with a totally unanticipated
fact.

"You see, you were in error, ladies."

"And so we were, Sir Willoughby, and we acknowledge it. We never could
have guessed that!"

Thus the phantom couple in the future delivered themselves, as well
they might at the revelation. He could run far ahead.

Ay, but to combat these dolts, facts had to be encountered, deeds done,
in groaning earnest. These representatives of the pig-sconces of the
population judged by circumstances: airy shows and seems had no effect
on them. Dexterity of fence was thrown away.

A flying peep at the remorseless might of dulness in compelling us to a
concrete performance counter to our inclinations, if we would deceive
its terrible instinct, gave Willoughby for a moment the survey of a
sage. His intensity of personal feeling struck so vivid an illumination
of mankind at intervals that he would have been individually wise, had
he not been moved by the source of his accurate perceptions to a
personal feeling of opposition to his own sagacity. He loathed and he
despised the vision, so his mind had no benefit of it, though he
himself was whipped along. He chose rather (and the choice is open to
us all) to be flattered by the distinction it revealed between himself
and mankind.

But if he was not as others were, why was he discomfited, solicitous,
miserable? To think that it should be so, ran dead against his
conqueror's theories wherein he had been trained, which, so long as he
gained success awarded success to native merit, grandeur to the grand
in soul, as light kindles light: nature presents the example. His
early training, his bright beginning of life, had taught him to look to
earth's principal fruits as his natural portion, and it was owing to a
girl that he stood a mark for tongues, naked, wincing at the possible
malignity of a pair of harridans. Why not whistle the girl away?

Why, then he would be free to enjoy, careless, younger than his youth
in the rebound to happiness!

And then would his nostrils begin to lift and sniff at the creeping up
of a thick pestiferous vapour. Then in that volume of stench would he
discern the sullen yellow eye of malice. A malarious earth would hunt
him all over it. The breath of the world, the world's view of him, was
partly his vital breath, his view of himself. The ancestry of the
tortured man had bequeathed him this condition of high civilization
among their other bequests. Your withered contracted Egoists of the hut
and the grot reck not of public opinion; they crave but for liberty and
leisure to scratch themselves and soothe an excessive scratch.
Willoughby was expansive, a blooming one, born to look down upon a
tributary world, and to exult in being looked to. Do we wonder at his
consternation in the prospect of that world's blowing foul on him?
Princes have their obligations to teach them they are mortal, and the
brilliant heir of a tributary world is equally enchained by the homage
it brings him;--more, inasmuch as it is immaterial, elusive, not
gathered by the tax, and he cannot capitally punish the treasonable
recusants. Still must he be brilliant; he must court his people. He
must ever, both in his reputation and his person, aching though he be,
show them a face and a leg.

The wounded gentleman shut himself up in his laboratory, where he could
stride to and fro, and stretch out his arms for physical relief, secure
from observation of his fantastical shapes, under the idea that he was
meditating. There was perhaps enough to make him fancy it in the heavy
fire of shots exchanged between his nerves and the situation; there
were notable flashes. He would not avow that he was in an agony: it was
merely a desire for exercise.

Quintessence of worldliness, Mrs. Mountstuart appeared through his
farthest window, swinging her skirts on a turn at the end of the lawn,
with Horace De Craye smirking beside her. And the woman's vaunted
penetration was unable to detect the histrionic Irishism of the fellow.
Or she liked him for his acting and nonsense; nor she only. The voluble
beast was created to snare women. Willoughby became smitten with an
adoration of stedfastness in women. The incarnation of that divine
quality crossed his eyes. She was clad in beauty. A horrible
nondescript convulsion composed of yawn and groan drove him to his
instruments, to avert a renewal of the shock; and while arranging and
fixing them for their unwonted task, he compared himself advantageously
with men like Vernon and De Craye, and others of the county, his
fellows in the hunting-field and on the Magistrate's bench, who neither
understood nor cared for solid work, beneficial practical work, the
work of Science.

He was obliged to relinquish it: his hand shook.

"Experiments will not advance much at this rate," he said, casting the
noxious retardation on his enemies.

It was not to be contested that he must speak with Mrs Mountstuart,
however he might shrink from the trial of his facial muscles. Her not
coming to him seemed ominous: nor was her behaviour at the
luncheon-table quite obscure. She had evidently instigated the
gentlemen to cross and counterchatter Lady Busshe and Lady Culmer. For
what purpose?

Clara's features gave the answer.

They were implacable. And he could be the same.

In the solitude of his room he cried right out: "I swear it, I will
never yield her to Horace De Craye! She shall feel some of my torments,
and try to get the better of them by knowing she deserves them." He had
spoken it, and it was an oath upon the record.

Desire to do her intolerable hurt became an ecstasy in his veins, and
produced another stretching fit that terminated in a violent shake of
the body and limbs; during which he was a spectacle for Mrs.
Mountstuart at one of the windows. He laughed as he went to her,
saying: "No, no work to-day; it won't be done, positively refuses."

"I am taking the Professor away," said she; "he is fidgety about the
cold he caught."

Sir Willoughby stepped out to her. "I was trying at a bit of work for
an hour, not to be idle all day."

"You work in that den of yours every day?"

"Never less than an hour, if I can snatch it."

"It is a wonderful resource!"

The remark set him throbbing and thinking that a prolongation of his
crisis exposed him to the approaches of some organic malady, possibly
heart-disease.

"A habit," he said. "In there I throw off the world."

"We shall see some results in due time."

"I promise none: I like to be abreast of the real knowledge of my day,
that is all."

"And a pearl among country gentlemen!"

"In your gracious consideration, my dear lady. Generally speaking, it
would be more advisable to become a chatterer and keep an anecdotal
note-book. I could not do it, simply because I could not live with my
own emptiness for the sake of making an occasional display of
fireworks. I aim at solidity. It is a narrow aim, no doubt; not much
appreciated."

"Laetitia Dale appreciates it."

A smile of enforced ruefulness, like a leaf curling in heat, wrinkled
his mouth.

Why did she not speak of her conversation with Clara?

"Have they caught Crossjay?" he said.

"Apparently they are giving chase to him."

The likelihood was, that Clara had been overcome by timidity.

"Must you leave us?"

"I think it prudent to take Professor Crooklyn away."

"He still . . . ?"

"The extraordinary resemblance!"

"A word aside to Dr. Middleton will dispel that."

"You are thoroughly good."

This hateful encomium of commiseration transfixed him. Then she knew of
his calamity!

"Philosophical," he said, "would be the proper term, I think."

"Colonel De Craye, by the way, promises me a visit when he leaves you."

"To-morrow?"

"The earlier the better. He is too captivating; he is delightful. He
won me in five minutes. I don't accuse him. Nature gifted him to cast
the spell. We are weak women, Sir Willoughby."

She knew!

"Like to like: the witty to the witty, ma'am."

"You won't compliment me with a little bit of jealousy?"

"I forbear from complimenting him."

"Be philosophical, of course, if you have the philosophy."

"I pretend to it. Probably I suppose myself to succeed because I have
no great requirement of it; I cannot say. We are riddles to ourselves."

Mrs. Mountstuart pricked the turf with the point of her parasol. She
looked down and she looked up.

"Well?" said he to her eyes.

"Well, and where is Laetitia Dale?"

He turned about to show his face elsewhere.

When he fronted her again, she looked very fixedly, and set her head
shaking.

"It will not do, my dear Sir Willoughby!"

"What?"

"I never could solve enigmas."

"Playing ta-ta-ta-ta ad infinitum, then. Things have gone far. All
parties would be happier for an excursion. Send her home."

"Laetitia? I can't part with her."

Mrs. Mountstuart put a tooth on her under lip as her head renewed its
brushing negative.

"In what way can it be hurtful that she should be here, ma'am?" he
ventured to persist.

"Think."

"She is proof."

"Twice!"

The word was big artillery. He tried the affectation of a staring
stupidity. She might have seen his heart thump, and he quitted the mask
for an agreeable grimace.

"She is inaccessible. She is my friend. I guarantee her, on my honour.
Have no fear for her. I beg you to have confidence in me. I would
perish rather. No soul on earth is to be compared with her."

Mrs. Mountstuart repeated "Twice!"

The low monosyllable, musically spoken in the same tone of warning of a
gentle ghost, rolled a thunder that maddened him, but he dared not take
it up to fight against it on plain terms.

"Is it for my sake?" he said.

"It will not do, Sir Willoughby."

She spurred him to a frenzy.

"My dear Mrs. Mountstuart, you have been listening to tales. I am not a
tyrant. I am one of the most easy-going of men. Let us preserve the
forms due to society: I say no more. As for poor old Vernon, people
call me a good sort of cousin; I should like to see him comfortably
married; decently married this time. I have proposed to contribute to
his establishment. I mention it to show that the case has been
practically considered. He has had a tolerably souring experience of
the state; he might be inclined if, say, you took him in hand, for
another venture. It's a demoralizing lottery. However, Government
sanctions it."

"But, Sir Willoughby, what is the use of my taking him in hand when, as
you tell me, Laetitia Dale holds back?"

"She certainly does."

"Then we are talking to no purpose, unless you undertake to melt her."

He suffered a lurking smile to kindle to some strength of meaning.

"You are not over-considerate in committing me to such an office."

"You are afraid of the danger?" she all but sneered.

Sharpened by her tone, he said, "I have such a love of stedfastness of
character, that I should be a poor advocate in the endeavour to break
it. And frankly, I know the danger. I saved my honour when I made the
attempt: that is all I can say."

"Upon my word," Mrs. Mountstuart threw back her head to let her eyes
behold him summarily over their fine aquiline bridge, "you have the art
of mystification, my good friend."

"Abandon the idea of Laetitia Dale."

"And marry your cousin Vernon to whom? Where are we?"

"As I said, ma'am, I am an easy-going man. I really have not a spice of
the tyrant in me. An intemperate creature held by the collar may have
that notion of me, while pulling to be released as promptly as it
entered the noose. But I do strictly and sternly object to the scandal
of violent separations, open breaches of solemn engagements, a public
rupture. Put it that I am the cause, I will not consent to a violation
of decorum. Is that clear? It is just possible for things to be
arranged so that all parties may be happy in their way without much
hubbub. Mind, it is not I who have willed it so. I am, and I am forced
to be, passive. But I will not be obstructive."

He paused, waving his hand to signify the vanity of the more that might
be said.

Some conception of him, dashed by incredulity, excited the lady's
intelligence.

"Well!" she exclaimed, "you have planted me in the land of conjecture.
As my husband used to say, I don't see light, but I think I see the
lynx that does. We won't discuss it at present. I certainly must be a
younger woman than I supposed, for I am learning hard.--Here comes the
Professor, buttoned up to the ears, and Dr. Middleton flapping in the
breeze. There will be a cough, and a footnote referring to the young
lady at the station, if we stand together, so please order my
carriage."

"You found Clara complacent? roguish?"

"I will call to-morrow. You have simplified my task, Sir Willoughby,
very much; that is, assuming that I have not entirely mistaken you. I
am so far in the dark that I have to help myself by recollecting how
Lady Busshe opposed my view of a certain matter formerly. Scepticism is
her forte. It will be the very oddest thing if after all . . . ! No, I
shall own, romance has not departed. Are you fond of dupes?"

"I detest the race."

"An excellent answer. I could pardon you for it." She refrained from
adding, "If you are making one of me."

Sir Willoughby went to ring for her carriage.

She knew. That was palpable: Clara had betrayed him.

"The earlier Colonel De Craye leaves Patterne Hall the better:" she had
said that: and, "all parties would be happier for an excursion." She
knew the position of things and she guessed the remainder. But what she
did not know, and could not divine, was the man who fenced her. He
speculated further on the witty and the dull. These latter are the
redoubtable body. They will have facts to convince them: they had, he
confessed it to himself, precipitated him into the novel sphere of his
dark hints to Mrs. Mountstuart; from which the utter darkness might
allow him to escape, yet it embraced him singularly, and even
pleasantly, with the sense of a fact established.

It embraced him even very pleasantly. There was an end to his tortures.
He sailed on a tranquil sea, the husband of a stedfast woman--no rogue.
The exceeding beauty of stedfastness in women clothed Laetitia in
graces Clara could not match. A tried stedfast woman is the one jewel
of the sex. She points to her husband like the sunflower; her love
illuminates him; she lives in him, for him; she testifies to his worth;
she drags the world to his feet; she leads the chorus of his praises;
she justifies him in his own esteem. Surely there is not on earth such
beauty!

If we have to pass through anguish to discover it and cherish the peace
it gives to clasp it, calling it ours, is a full reward. Deep in his
reverie, he said his adieus to Mrs. Mountstuart, and strolled up the
avenue behind the carriage-wheels, unwilling to meet Laetitia till he
had exhausted the fresh savour of the cud of fancy.

Supposing it done!--

It would be generous on his part. It would redound to his credit.

His home would be a fortress, impregnable to tongues. He would have
divine security in his home.

One who read and knew and worshipped him would be sitting there
star-like: sitting there, awaiting him, his fixed star.

It would be marriage with a mirror, with an echo; marriage with a
shining mirror, a choric echo.

It would be marriage with an intellect, with a fine understanding; to
make his home a fountain of repeatable wit: to make his dear old
Patterne Hall the luminary of the county.

He revolved it as a chant: with anon and anon involuntarily a
discordant animadversion on Lady Busshe. Its attendant imps heard the
angry inward cry.

Forthwith he set about painting Laetitia in delectable human colours,
like a miniature of the past century, reserving her ideal figure for
his private satisfaction. The world was to bow to her visible beauty,
and he gave her enamel and glow, a taller stature, a swimming air, a
transcendency that exorcized the image of the old witch who had driven
him to this.

The result in him was, that Laetitia became humanly and avowedly
beautiful. Her dark eyelashes on the pallor of her cheeks lent their
aid to the transformation, which was a necessity to him, so it was
performed. He received the waxen impression.

His retinue of imps had a revel. We hear wonders of men, and we see a
lifting up of hands in the world. The wonders would be explained, and
never a hand need to interject, if the mystifying man were but
accompanied by that monkey-eyed confraternity. They spy the heart and
its twists.

The heart is the magical gentleman. None of them would follow where
there was no heart. The twists of the heart are the comedy.

"The secret of the heart is its pressing love of self ", says the Book.

By that secret the mystery of the organ is legible: and a comparison of
the heart to the mountain rillet is taken up to show us the unbaffled
force of the little channel in seeking to swell its volume,
strenuously, sinuously, ever in pursuit of self; the busiest as it is
the most single-aiming of forces on our earth. And we are directed to
the sinuosities for posts of observation chiefly instructive.

Few maintain a stand there. People see, and they rush away to
interchange liftings of hands at the sight, instead of patiently
studying the phenomenon of energy.

Consequently a man in love with one woman, and in all but absolute
consciousness, behind the thinnest of veils, preparing his mind to love
another, will be barely credible. The particular hunger of the forceful
but adaptable heart is the key of him. Behold the mountain rillet,
become a brook, become a torrent, how it inarms a handsome boulder: yet
if the stone will not go with it, on it hurries, pursuing self in
extension, down to where perchance a dam has been raised of a
sufficient depth to enfold and keep it from inordinate restlessness.
Laetitia represented this peaceful restraining space in prospect.

But she was a faded young woman. He was aware of it; and
systematically looking at himself with her upturned orbs, he accepted
her benevolently as a God grateful for worship, and used the divinity
she imparted to paint and renovate her. His heart required her so. The
heart works the springs of imagination; imagination received its
commission from the heart, and was a cunning artist.

Cunning to such a degree of seductive genius that the masterpiece it
offered to his contemplation enabled him simultaneously to gaze on
Clara and think of Laetitia. Clara came through the park-gates with
Vernon, a brilliant girl indeed, and a shallow one: a healthy creature,
and an animal; attractive, but capricious, impatient, treacherous,
foul; a woman to drag men through the mud. She approached.



CHAPTER XXXVIII

IN WHICH WE TAKE A STEP TO THE CENTRE OF EGOISM

They met; Vernon soon left them.

"You have not seen Crossjay?" Willoughby inquired.

"No," said Clara. "Once more I beg you to pardon him. He spoke falsely,
owing to his poor boy's idea of chivalry."

"The chivalry to the sex which commences in lies ends by creating the
woman's hero, whom we see about the world and in certain courts of
law."

His ability to silence her was great: she could not reply to speech
like that.

"You have," said he, "made a confidante of Mrs. Mountstuart."

"Yes."

"This is your purse."

"I thank you."

"Professor Crooklyn has managed to make your father acquainted with
your project. That, I suppose, is the railway ticket in the fold of the
purse. He was assured at the station that you had taken a ticket to
London, and would not want the fly."

"It is true. I was foolish."

"You have had a pleasant walk with Vernon--turning me in and out?"

"We did not speak of you. You allude to what he would never consent
to."

"He's an honest fellow, in his old-fashioned way. He's a secret old
fellow. Does he ever talk about his wife to you?"

Clara dropped her purse, and stooped and picked it up.

"I know nothing of Mr. Whitford's affairs," she said, and she opened
the purse and tore to pieces the railway ticket.

"The story's a proof that romantic spirits do not furnish the most
romantic history. You have the word 'chivalry' frequently on your lips.
He chivalrously married the daughter of the lodging-house where he
resided before I took him. We obtained information of the auspicious
union in a newspaper report of Mrs. Whitford's drunkenness and rioting
at a London railway terminus--probably the one whither your ticket
would have taken you yesterday, for I heard the lady was on her way to
us for supplies, the connubial larder being empty."

"I am sorry; I am ignorant; I have heard nothing; I know nothing," said
Clara.

"You are disgusted. But half the students and authors you hear of marry
in that way. And very few have Vernon's luck."

"She had good qualities?" asked Clara.

Her under lip hung.

It looked like disgust; he begged her not indulge the feeling.

"Literary men, it is notorious, even with the entry to society, have no
taste in women. The housewife is their object. Ladies frighten and
would, no doubt, be an annoyance and hindrance to them at home."

"You said he was fortunate."

"You have a kindness for him."

"I respect him."

"He is a friendly old fellow in his awkward fashion; honourable, and so
forth. But a disreputable alliance of that sort sticks to a man. The
world will talk. Yes, he was fortunate so far; he fell into the mire
and got out of it. Were he to marry again . . ."

"She . . ."

"Died. Do not be startled; it was a natural death. She responded to the
sole wishes left to his family. He buried the woman, and I received
him. I took him on my tour. A second marriage might cover the first:
there would be a buzz about the old business: the woman's relatives
write to him still, try to bleed him, I dare say. However, now you
understand his gloominess. I don't imagine he regrets his loss. He
probably sentimentalizes, like most men when they are well rid of a
burden. You must not think the worse of him."

"I do not," said Clara.

"I defend him whenever the matter's discussed."

"I hope you do."

"Without approving his folly. I can't wash him clean."

They were at the Hall-doors. She waited for any personal communications
he might be pleased to make, and as there was none, she ran upstairs to
her room.

He had tossed her to Vernon in his mind, not only painlessly, but with
a keen acid of satisfaction. The heart is the wizard.

Next he bent his deliberate steps to Laetitia.

The mind was guilty of some hesitation; the feet went forward.

She was working at an embroidery by an open window. Colonel De Craye
leaned outside, and Willoughby pardoned her air of demure amusement, on
hearing him say: "No, I have had one of the pleasantest half-hours of
my life, and would rather idle here, if idle you will have it, than
employ my faculties on horse-back,"

"Time is not lost in conversing with Miss Dale," said Willoughby.

The light was tender to her complexion where she sat in partial shadow.

De Craye asked whether Crossjay had been caught.

Laetitia murmured a kind word for the boy. Willoughby examined her
embroidery.

The ladies Eleanor and Isabel appeared.

They invited her to take carriage exercise with them.

Laetitia did not immediately answer, and Willoughby remarked: "Miss
Dale has been reproving Horace for idleness and I recommend you to
enlist him to do duty, while I relieve him here."

The ladies had but to look at the colonel. He was at their disposal, if
they would have him. He was marched to the carriage.

Laetitia plied her threads.

"Colonel De Craye spoke of Crossjay," she said. "May I hope you have
forgiven the poor boy, Sir Willoughby?"

He replied: "Plead for him."

"I wish I had eloquence."

"In my opinion you have it."

"If he offends, it is never from meanness. At school, among comrades,
he would shine. He is in too strong a light; his feelings and his moral
nature are over-excited."

"That was not the case when he was at home with you."

"I am severe; I am stern."

"A Spartan mother!"

"My system of managing a boy would be after that model: except in this:
he should always feet that he could obtain forgiveness."

"Not at the expense of justice?"

"Ah! young creatures are not to be arraigned before the higher Courts.
It seems to me perilous to terrify their imaginations. If we do so,
are we not likely to produce the very evil we are combating? The
alternations for the young should be school and home: and it should be
in their hearts to have confidence that forgiveness alternates with
discipline. They are of too tender an age for the rigours of the world;
we are in danger of hardening them. I prove to you that I am not
possessed of eloquence. You encouraged me to speak, Sir Willoughby."

"You speak wisely, Laetitia."

"I think it true. Will not you reflect on it? You have only to do so to
forgive him. I am growing bold indeed, and shall have to beg
forgiveness for myself."

"You still write? you continue to work with your pen?" said Willoughby.

"A little; a very little."

"I do not like you to squander yourself, waste yourself, on the public.
You are too precious to feed the beast. Giving out incessantly must end
by attenuating. Reserve yourself for your friends. Why should they be
robbed of so much of you? Is it not reasonable to assume that by lying
fallow you would be more enriched for domestic life? Candidly, had I
authority I would confiscate your pen: I would 'away with that bauble'.
You will not often find me quoting Cromwell, but his words apply in
this instance. I would say rather, that lancet. Perhaps it is the more
correct term. It bleeds you, it wastes you. For what? For a breath of
fame!"

"I write for money."

"And there--I would say of another--you subject yourself to the risk of
mental degradation. Who knows?--moral! Trafficking the brains for money
must bring them to the level of the purchasers in time. I confiscate
your pen, Laetitia."

"It will be to confiscate your own gift, Sir Willoughby."

"Then that proves--will you tell me the date?"

"You sent me a gold pen-holder on my sixteenth birthday."

"It proves my utter thoughtlessness then, and later. And later!"

He rested an elbow on his knee, and covered his eyes, murmuring in that
profound hollow which is haunted by the voice of a contrite past: "And
later!"

The deed could be done. He had come to the conclusion that it could be
done, though the effort to harmonize the figure sitting near him, with
the artistic figure of his purest pigments, had cost him labour and a
blinking of the eyelids. That also could be done. Her pleasant tone,
sensible talk, and the light favouring her complexion, helped him in
his effort. She was a sober cup; sober and wholesome. Deliriousness is
for adolescence. The men who seek intoxicating cups are men who invite
their fates.

Curiously, yet as positively as things can be affirmed, the husband of
this woman would be able to boast of her virtues and treasures abroad,
as he could not--impossible to say why not--boast of a beautiful wife
or a blue-stocking wife. One of her merits as a wife would be this
extraordinary neutral merit of a character that demanded colour from
the marital hand, and would take it.

Laetitia had not to learn that he had much to distress him. Her wonder
at his exposure of his grief counteracted a fluttering of vague alarm.
She was nervous; she sat in expectation of some burst of regrets or of
passion.

"I may hope that you have pardoned Crossjay?" she said.

"My friend," said he, uncovering his face, "I am governed by
principles. Convince me of an error, I shall not obstinately pursue a
premeditated course. But you know me. Men who have not principles to
rule their conduct are--well, they are unworthy of a half hour of
companionship with you. I will speak to you to-night. I have letters to
dispatch. To-night: at twelve: in the room where we spoke last. Or
await me in the drawing-room. I have to attend to my guests till late."

He bowed; he was in a hurry to go.

The deed could be done. It must be done; it was his destiny.



CHAPTER XXXIX

IN THE HEART OF THE EGOIST

But already he had begun to regard the deed as his executioner. He
dreaded meeting Clara. The folly of having retained her stood before
him. How now to look on her and keep a sane resolution unwavering? She
tempted to the insane. Had she been away, he could have walked through
the performance composed by the sense of doing a duty to himself;
perhaps faintly hating the poor wretch he made happy at last, kind to
her in a manner, polite. Clara's presence in the house previous to the
deed, and, oh, heaven! after it, threatened his wits. Pride? He had
none; he cast it down for her to trample it; he caught it back ere it
was trodden on. Yes; he had pride: he had it as a dagger in his breast:
his pride was his misery. But he was too proud to submit to misery.
"What I do is right." He said the words, and rectitude smoothed his
path, till the question clamoured for answer: Would the world
countenance and endorse his pride in Laetitia? At one time, yes. And
now? Clara's beauty ascended, laid a beam on him. We are on board the
labouring vessel of humanity in a storm, when cries and countercries
ring out, disorderliness mixes the crew, and the fury of
self-preservation divides: this one is for the ship, that one for his
life. Clara was the former to him, Laetitia the latter. But what if
there might not be greater safety in holding tenaciously to Clara than
in casting her off for Laetitia? No, she had done things to set his
pride throbbing in the quick. She had gone bleeding about first to one,
then to another; she had betrayed him to Vernon, and to Mrs.
Mountstuart; a look in the eyes of Horace De Craye said, to him as
well: to whom not? He might hold to her for vengeance; but that
appetite was short-lived in him if it ministered nothing to his
purposes. "I discard all idea of vengeance," he said, and thrilled
burningly to a smart in his admiration of the man who could be so
magnanimous under mortal injury; for the more admirable he, the more
pitiable. He drank a drop or two of self-pity like a poison, repelling
the assaults of public pity. Clara must be given up. It must be seen by
the world that, as he felt, the thing he did was right. Laocoon of his
own serpents, he struggled to a certain magnificence of attitude in the
muscular net of constrictions he flung around himself. Clara must be
given up. Oh, bright Abominable! She must be given up: but not to one
whose touch of her would be darts in the blood of the yielder, snakes
in his bed: she must be given up to an extinguisher; to be the second
wife of an old-fashioned semi-recluse, disgraced in his first. And were
it publicly known that she had been cast off, and had fallen on old
Vernon for a refuge, and part in spite, part in shame, part in
desperation, part in a fit of good sense under the circumstances,
espoused him, her beauty would not influence the world in its
judgement. The world would know what to think. As the instinct of
self-preservation whispered to Willoughby, the world, were it
requisite, might be taught to think what it assuredly would not think
if she should be seen tripping to the altar with Horace De Craye.
Self-preservation, not vengeance, breathed that whisper. He glanced at
her iniquity for a justification of it, without any desire to do her a
permanent hurt: he was highly civilized: but with a strong intention to
give her all the benefit of a scandal, supposing a scandal, or ordinary
tattle.

"And so he handed her to his cousin and secretary, Vernon Whitford, who
opened his mouth and shut his eyes."

You hear the world? How are we to stop it from chattering? Enough that
he had no desire to harm her. Some gentle anticipations of her being
tarnished were imperative; they came spontaneously to him; otherwise
the radiance of that bright Abominable in loss would have been
insufferable; he could not have borne it; he could never have
surrendered her. Moreover, a happy present effect was the result. He
conjured up the anticipated chatter and shrug of the world so vividly
that her beauty grew hectic with the stain, bereft of its formidable
magnetism. He could meet her calmly; he had steeled himself. Purity in
women was his principal stipulation, and a woman puffed at, was not
the person to cause him tremours.

Consider him indulgently: the Egoist is the Son of Himself. He is
likewise the Father. And the son loves the father, the father the son;
they reciprocate affection through the closest of ties; and shall they
view behaviour unkindly wounding either of them, not for each other's
dear sake abhorring the criminal? They would not injure you, but they
cannot consent to see one another suffer or crave in vain. The two rub
together in sympathy besides relationship to an intenser one. Are you,
without much offending, sacrificed by them, it is on the altar of their
mutual love, to filial piety or paternal tenderness: the younger has
offered a dainty morsel to the elder, or the elder to the younger.
Absorbed in their great example of devotion do they not think of you.
They are beautiful.

Yet is it most true that the younger has the passions of youth:
whereof will come division between them; and this is a tragic state.
They are then pathetic. This was the state of Sir Willoughby lending
ear to his elder, until he submitted to bite at the fruit proposed to
him--with how wry a mouth the venerable senior chose not to mark. At
least, as we perceive, a half of him was ripe of wisdom in his own
interests. The cruder half had but to be obedient to the leadership of
sagacity for his interests to be secured, and a filial disposition
assisted him; painfully indeed; but the same rare quality directed the
good gentleman to swallow his pain. That the son should bewail his fate
were a dishonour to the sire. He reverenced, and submitted. Thus, to
say, consider him indulgently, is too much an appeal for charity on
behalf of one requiring but initial anatomy--a slicing in halves--to
exonerate, perchance exalt him. The Egoist is our fountain-head,
primeval man: the primitive is born again, the elemental reconstituted.
Born again, into new conditions, the primitive may be highly polished
of men, and forfeit nothing save the roughness of his original nature.
He is not only his own father, he is ours; and he is also our son. We
have produced him, he us. Such were we, to such are we returning: not
other, sings the poet, than one who toilfully works his shallop against
the tide, "si brachia forte remisit":--let him haply relax the labour
of his arms, however high up the stream, and back he goes, "in pejus",
to the early principle of our being, with seeds and plants, that are as
carelessly weighed in the hand and as indiscriminately husbanded as our
humanity.

Poets on the other side may be cited for an assurance that the
primitive is not the degenerate: rather is he a sign of the
indestructibility of the race, of the ancient energy in removing
obstacles to individual growth; a sample of what we would be, had we
his concentrated power. He is the original innocent, the pure simple.
It is we who have fallen; we have melted into Society, diluted our
essence, dissolved. He stands in the midst monumentally, a land-mark of
the tough and honest old Ages, with the symbolic alphabet of striking
arms and running legs, our early language, scrawled over his person,
and the glorious first flint and arrow-head for his crest: at once the
spectre of the Kitchen-midden and our ripest issue.

But Society is about him. The occasional spectacle of the primitive
dangling on a rope has impressed his mind with the strength of his
natural enemy: from which uncongenial sight he has turned shuddering
hardly less to behold the blast that is blown upon a reputation where
one has been disrespectful of the many. By these means, through
meditation on the contrast of circumstances in life, a pulse of
imagination has begun to stir, and he has entered the upper sphere or
circle of spiritual Egoism: he has become the civilized Egoist;
primitive still, as sure as man has teeth, but developed in his manner
of using them.

Degenerate or not (and there is no just reason to suppose it) Sir
Willoughby was a social Egoist, fiercely imaginative in whatsoever
concerned him. He had discovered a greater realm than that of the
sensual appetites, and he rushed across and around it in his conquering
period with an Alexander's pride. On these wind-like journeys he had
carried Constantia, subsequently Clara; and however it may have been in
the case of Miss Durham, in that of Miss Middleton it is almost certain
she caught a glimpse of his interior from sheer fatigue in hearing him
discourse of it. What he revealed was not the cause of her sickness:
women can bear revelations--they are exciting: but the monotonousness.
He slew imagination. There is no direr disaster in love than the death
of imagination. He dragged her through the labyrinths of his
penetralia, in his hungry coveting to be loved more and still more,
more still, until imagination gave up the ghost, and he talked to her
plain hearing like a monster. It must have been that; for the spell of
the primitive upon women is masterful up to the time of contact.

"And so he handed her to his cousin and secretary, Vernon Whitford, who
opened his mouth and shut his eyes."

The urgent question was, how it was to be accomplished. Willoughby
worked at the subject with all his power of concentration: a power that
had often led him to feel and say, that as a barrister, a diplomatist,
or a general, he would have won his grades: and granting him a personal
interest in the business, he might have achieved eminence: he schemed
and fenced remarkably well.

He projected a scene, following expressions of anxiety on account of
old Vernon and his future settlement: and then Clara maintaining her
doggedness, to which he was now so accustomed that he could not
conceive a change in it--says he: "If you determine on breaking I give
you back your word on one condition." Whereupon she starts: he insists
on her promise: she declines: affairs resume their former footing; she
frets: she begs for the disclosure: he flatters her by telling her his
desire to keep her in the family: she is unilluminated, but strongly
moved by curiosity: he philosophizes on marriage "What are we? poor
creatures! we must get through life as we can, doing as much good as we
can to those we love; and think as you please, I love old Vernon. Am I
not giving you the greatest possible proof of it?" She will not see.
Then flatly out comes the one condition. That and no other. "Take
Vernon and I release you." She refuses. Now ensues the debate, all the
oratory being with him. "Is it because of his unfortunate first
marriage? You assured me you thought no worse of him," etc. She
declares the proposal revolting. He can distinguish nothing that should
offend her in a proposal to make his cousin happy if she will not him.
Irony and sarcasm relieve his emotions, but he convinces her he is
dealing plainly and intends generosity. She is confused; she speaks in
maiden fashion. He touches again on Vernon's early escapade. She does
not enjoy it. The scene closes with his bidding her reflect on it, and
remember the one condition of her release. Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson,
now reduced to believe that he burns to be free, is then called in for
an interview with Clara. His aunts Eleanor and Isabel besiege her.
Laetitia in passionate earnest besieges her. Her father is wrought on
to besiege her. Finally Vernon is attacked by Willoughby and Mrs.
Mountstuart:--and here, Willoughby chose to think, was the main
difficulty. But the girl has money; she is agreeable; Vernon likes her;
she is fond of his "Alps", they have tastes in common, he likes her
father, and in the end he besieges her. Will she yield? De Craye is
absent. There is no other way of shunning a marriage she is
incomprehensibly but frantically averse to. She is in the toils. Her
father will stay at Patterne Hall as long as his host desires it. She
hesitates, she is overcome; in spite of a certain nausea due to
Vernon's preceding alliance, she yields.

Willoughby revolved the entire drama in Clara's presence. It helped him
to look on her coolly. Conducting her to the dinner-table, he spoke of
Crossjay, not unkindly; and at table, he revolved the set of scenes
with a heated animation that took fire from the wine and the face of
his friend Horace, while he encouraged Horace to be flowingly Irish. He
nipped the fellow good-humouredly once or twice, having never felt so
friendly to him since the day of his arrival; but the position of
critic is instinctively taken by men who do not flow: and Patterne Port
kept Dr Middleton in a benevolent reserve when Willoughby decided that
something said by De Craye was not new, and laughingly accused him of
failing to consult his anecdotal notebook for the double-cross to his
last sprightly sally. "Your sallies are excellent, Horace, but spare us
your Aunt Sallies!" De Craye had no repartee, nor did Dr. Middleton
challenge a pun. We have only to sharpen our wits to trip your
seductive rattler whenever we may choose to think proper; and
evidently, if we condescended to it, we could do better than he. The
critic who has hatched a witticism is impelled to this opinion. Judging
by the smiles of the ladies, they thought so, too.

Shortly before eleven o'clock Dr. Middleton made a Spartan stand
against the offer of another bottle of Port. The regulation couple of
bottles had been consumed in equal partnership, and the Rev. Doctor
and his host were free to pay a ceremonial visit to the drawing-room,
where they were not expected. A piece of work of the elder ladies, a
silken boudoir sofa-rug, was being examined, with high approval of the
two younger. Vernon and Colonel De Craye had gone out in search of
Crossjay, one to Mr. Dale's cottage, the other to call at the head and
under-gamekeeper's. They were said to be strolling and smoking, for the
night was fine. Willoughby left the room and came back with the key of
Crossjay's door in his pocket. He foresaw that the delinquent might be
of service to him.

Laetitia and Clara sang together. Laetitia was flushed, Clara pale. At
eleven they saluted the ladies Eleanor and Isabel. Willoughby said
"Good-night" to each of them, contrasting as he did so the downcast
look of Laetitia with Clara's frigid directness. He divined that they
were off to talk over their one object of common interest, Crossjay.
Saluting his aunts, he took up the rug, to celebrate their diligence
and taste; and that he might make Dr. Middleton impatient for bed, he
provoked him to admire it, held it out and laid it out, and caused the
courteous old gentleman some confusion in hitting on fresh terms of
commendation.

Before midnight the room was empty. Ten minutes later Willoughby paid
it a visit, and found it untenanted by the person he had engaged to be
there. Vexed by his disappointment, he paced up and down, and chanced
abstractedly to catch the rug in his hand; for what purpose, he might
well ask himself; admiration of ladies' work, in their absence, was
unlikely to occur to him. Nevertheless, the touch of the warm, soft
silk was meltingly feminine. A glance at the mantel-piece clock told
him Laetitia was twenty minutes behind the hour. Her remissness might
endanger all his plans, alter the whole course of his life. The colours
in which he painted her were too lively to last; the madness in his
head threatened to subside. Certain it was that he could not be ready a
second night for the sacrifice he had been about to perform.

The clock was at the half hour after twelve. He flung the silken thing
on the central ottoman, extinguished the lamps, and walked out of the
room, charging the absent Laetitia to bear her misfortune with a
consciousness of deserving it.



CHAPTER XL

MIDNIGHT: SIR WILLOUGHBY AND LAETITIA: WITH YOUNG CROSSJAY UNDER A
COVERLET

Young Crossjay was a glutton at holidays and never thought of home till
it was dark. The close of the day saw him several miles away from the
Hall, dubious whether he would not round his numerous adventures by
sleeping at an inn; for he had lots of money, and the idea of jumping
up in the morning in a strange place was thrilling. Besides, when he
was shaken out of sleep by Sir Willoughby, he had been told that he was
to go, and not to show his face at Patterne again. On the other hand,
Miss Middleton had bidden him come back. There was little question with
him which person he should obey: he followed his heart.

Supper at an inn, where he found a company to listen to his adventures,
delayed him, and a short cut, intended to make up for it, lost him his
road. He reached the Hall very late, ready to be in love with the
horrible pleasure of a night's rest under the stars, if necessary. But
a candle burned at one of the back windows. He knocked, and a
kitchen-maid let him in. She had a bowl of hot soup prepared for him.
Crossjay tried a mouthful to please her. His head dropped over it. She
roused him to his feet, and he pitched against her shoulder. The dry
air of the kitchen department had proved too much for the tired
youngster. Mary, the maid, got him to step as firmly as he was able,
and led him by the back-way to the hall, bidding him creep noiselessly
to bed. He understood his position in the house, and though he could
have gone fast to sleep on the stairs, he took a steady aim at his room
and gained the door cat-like. The door resisted. He was appalled and
unstrung in a minute. The door was locked. Crossjay felt as if he were
in the presence of Sir Willoughby. He fled on ricketty legs, and had a
fall and bumps down half a dozen stairs. A door opened above. He rushed
across the hall to the drawing-room, invitingly open, and there
staggered in darkness to the ottoman and rolled himself in something
sleek and warm, soft as hands of ladies, and redolent of them; so
delicious that he hugged the folds about his head and heels. While he
was endeavouring to think where he was, his legs curled, his eyelids
shut, and he was in the thick of the day's adventures, doing yet more
wonderful things.

He heard his own name: that was quite certain. He knew that he heard it
with his ears, as he pursued the fleetest dreams ever accorded to
mortal. It did not mix: it was outside him, and like the danger-pole in
the ice, which the skater shooting hither and yonder comes on again, it
recurred; and now it marked a point in his career, how it caused him to
relax his pace; he began to circle, and whirled closer round it, until,
as at a blow, his heart knocked, he tightened himself, thought of
bolting, and lay dead-still to throb and hearken.

"Oh! Sir Willoughby," a voice had said.

The accents were sharp with alarm.

"My friend! my dearest!" was the answer.

"I came to speak of Crossjay."

"Will you sit here on the ottoman?"

"No, I cannot wait. I hoped I had heard Crossjay return. I would rather
not sit down. May I entreat you to pardon him when he comes home?"

"You, and you only, may do so. I permit none else. Of Crossjay
to-morrow."

"He may be lying in the fields. We are anxious."

"The rascal can take pretty good care of himself."

"Crossjay is perpetually meeting accidents."

"He shall be indemnified if he has had excess of punishment."

"I think I will say good-night, Sir Willoughby."

"When freely and unreservedly you have given me your hand."

There was hesitation.

"To say good-night?"

"I ask you for your hand."

"Good-night, Sir Willoughby."

"You do not give it. You are in doubt? Still? What language must I use
to convince you? And yet you know me. Who knows me but you? You have
always known me. You are my home and my temple. Have you forgotten your
verses of the day of my majority?

       'The dawn-star has arisen
         In plenitude of light . . .'"

"Do not repeat them, pray!" cried Laetitia, with a gasp.

"I have repeated them to myself a thousand times: in India, America,
Japan: they were like our English skylark, carolling to me.

       'My heart, now burst thy prison
         With proud aerial flight!'"

"Oh, I beg you will not force me to listen to nonsense that I wrote
when I was a child. No more of those most foolish lines! If you knew
what it is to write and despise one's writing, you would not distress
me. And since you will not speak of Crossjay to-night, allow me to
retire."

"You know me, and therefore you know my contempt for verses, as a rule,
Laetitia. But not for yours to me. Why should you call them foolish?
They expressed your feelings--hold them sacred. They are something
religious to me, not mere poetry. Perhaps the third verse is my
favourite . . ."

"It will be more than I can bear!"

"You were in earnest when you wrote them?"

"I was very young, very enthusiastic, very silly."

"You were and are my image of constancy!"

"It is an error, Sir Willoughby; I am far from being the same."

"We are all older, I trust wiser. I am, I will own; much wiser. Wise
at last! I offer you my hand."

She did not reply. "I offer you my hand and name, Laetitia."

No response.

"You think me bound in honour to another?"

She was mute.

"I am free. Thank Heaven! I am free to choose my mate--the woman I have
always loved! Freely and unreservedly, as I ask you to give your hand,
I offer mine. You are the mistress of Patterne Hall; my wife."

She had not a word.

"My dearest! do you not rightly understand? The hand I am offering you
is disengaged. It is offered to the lady I respect above all others. I
have made the discovery that I cannot love without respecting; and as I
will not marry without loving, it ensues that I am free--I am yours. At
last?--your lips move: tell me the words. Have always loved, I said.
You carry in your bosom the magnet of constancy, and I, in spite of
apparent deviations, declare to you that I have never ceased to be
sensible of the attraction. And now there is not an impediment. We two
against the world! we are one. Let me confess to an old
foible--perfectly youthful, and you will ascribe it to youth: once I
desired to absorb. I mistrusted; that was the reason: I perceive it.
You teach me the difference of an alliance with a lady of intellect.
The pride I have in you, Laetitia, definitely cures me of that insane
passion--call it an insatiable hunger. I recognize it as a folly of
youth. I have, as it were, gone the tour, to come home to you--at
last?--and live our manly life of comparative equals. At last, then!
But remember that in the younger man you would have had a
despot--perhaps a jealous despot. Young men, I assure you, are
orientally inclined in their ideas of love. Love gets a bad name from
them. We, my Laetitia, do not regard love as a selfishness. If it is,
it is the essence of life. At least it is our selfishness rendered
beautiful. I talk to you like a man who has found a compatriot in a
foreign land. It seems to me that I have not opened my mouth for an
age. I certainly have not unlocked my heart. Those who sing for joy are
not unintelligible to me. If I had not something in me worth saying I
think I should sing. In every sense you reconcile me to men and the
world, Laetitia. Why press you to speak? I will be the speaker. As
surely as you know me, I know you: and . . ."

Laetitia burst forth with: "No!"

"I do not know you?" said he, searchingly mellifluous.

"Hardly."

"How not?"

"I am changed."

"In what way?"

"Deeply."

"Sedater?"

"Materially."

"Colour will come back: have no fear; I promise it. If you imagine you
want renewing, I have the specific, I, my love, I!"

"Forgive me--will you tell me, Sir Willoughby, whether you have broken
with Miss Middleton?"

"Rest satisfied, my dear Laetitia. She is as free as I am. I can do no
more than a man of honour should do. She releases me. To-morrow or
next day she departs. We, Laetitia, you and I, my love, are home birds.
It does not do for the home bird to couple with the migratory. The
little imperceptible change you allude to, is nothing. Italy will
restore you. I am ready to stake my own health--never yet shaken by a
doctor of medicine:--I say medicine advisedly, for there are doctors of
divinity who would shake giants:--that an Italian trip will send you
back--that I shall bring you home from Italy a blooming bride. You
shake your head--despondently? My love, I guarantee it. Cannot I give
you colour? Behold! Come to the light, look in the glass."

"I may redden," said Laetitia. "I suppose that is due to the action of
the heart. I am changed. Heart, for any other purpose, I have not. I am
like you, Sir Willoughby, in this: I could not marry without loving,
and I do not know what love is, except that it is an empty dream."

"Marriage, my dearest. . ."

"You are mistaken."

"I will cure you, my Laetitia. Look to me, I am the tonic. It is not
common confidence, but conviction. I, my love, I!"

"There is no cure for what I feel, Sir Willoughby."

"Spare me the formal prefix, I beg. You place your hand in mine,
relying on me. I am pledge for the remainder. We end as we began: my
request is for your hand--your hand in marriage."

"I cannot give it."

"To be my wife!"

"It is an honour; I must decline it."

"Are you quite well, Laetitia? I propose in the plainest terms I can
employ, to make you Lady Patterne--mine."

"I am compelled to refuse."

"Why? Refuse? Your reason!"

"The reason has been named."

He took a stride to inspirit his wits.

"There's a madness comes over women at times, I know. Answer me,
Laetitia:--by all the evidence a man can have, I could swear it:--but
answer me; you loved me once?"

"I was an exceedingly foolish, romantic girl."

"You evade my question: I am serious. Oh!" he walked away from her
booming a sound of utter repudiation of her present imbecility, and
hurrying to her side, said: "But it was manifest to the whole world! It
was a legend. To love like Laetitia Dale, was a current phrase. You
were an example, a light to women: no one was your match for devotion.
You were a precious cameo, still gazing! And I was the object. You
loved me. You loved me, you belonged to me, you were mine, my
possession, my jewel; I was prouder of your constancy than of anything
else that I had on earth. It was a part of the order of the universe to
me. A doubt of it would have disturbed my creed. Why, good heaven!
where are we? Is nothing solid on earth? You loved me!"

"I was childish, indeed."

"You loved me passionately!"

"Do you insist on shaming me through and through, Sir Willoughby? I
have been exposed enough."

"You cannot blot out the past: it is written, it is recorded. You loved
me devotedly, silence is no escape. You loved me."

"I did."

"You never loved me, you shallow woman! 'I did!' As if there could be a
cessation of a love! What are we to reckon on as ours? We prize a
woman's love; we guard it jealously, we trust to it, dream of it; there
is our wealth; there is our talisman! And when we open the casket it
has flown!--barren vacuity!--we are poorer than dogs. As well think of
keeping a costly wine in potter's clay as love in the heart of a woman!
There are women--women! Oh, they are all of a stamp coin! Coin for any
hand! It's a fiction, an imposture--they cannot love. They are the
shadows of men. Compared with men, they have as much heart in them as
the shadow beside the body. Laetitia!"

"Sir Willoughby."

"You refuse my offer?"

"I must."

"You refuse to take me for your husband?"

"I cannot be your wife."

"You have changed? . . . you have set your heart? . . . you could
marry? . . . there is a man? . . . you could marry one! I will have an
answer, I am sick of evasions. What was in the mind of Heaven when
women were created, will be the riddle to the end of the world! Every
good man in turn has made the inquiry. I have a right to know who robs
me--We may try as we like to solve it.--Satan is painted laughing!--I
say I have a right to know who robs me. Answer me."

"I shall not marry."

"That is not an answer."

"I love no one."

"You loved me.--You are silent?--but you confessed it. Then you confess
it was a love that could die! Are you unable to perceive how that
redounds to my discredit? You loved me, you have ceased to love me. In
other words you charge me with incapacity to sustain a woman's love.
You accuse me of inspiring a miserable passion that cannot last a
lifetime! You let the world see that I am a man to be aimed at for a
temporary mark! And simply because I happen to be in your neighbourhood
at an age when a young woman is impressionable! You make a public
example of me as a for whom women may have a caprice, but that is all;
he cannot enchain them; he fascinates passingly; they fall off. Is it
just, for me to be taken up and cast down at your will? Reflect on that
scandal! Shadows? Why, a man's shadow is faithful to him at least.
What are women? There is not a comparison in nature that does not tower
above them! not one that does not hoot at them! I, throughout my life,
guided by absolute deference to their weakness--paying them politeness,
courtesy--whatever I touch I am happy in, except when I touch women!
How is it? What is the mystery? Some monstrous explanation must exist.
What can it be? I am favoured by fortune from my birth until I enter
into relations with women. But will you be so good as to account for it
in your defence of them? Oh! were the relations dishonourable, it
would be quite another matter. Then they . . . I could recount . . . I
disdain to chronicle such victories. Quite another matter. But they are
flies, and I am something more stable. They are flies. I look beyond
the day; I owe a duty to my line. They are flies. I foresee it, I shall
be crossed in my fate so long as I fail to shun them--flies! Not merely
born for the day, I maintain that they are spiritually ephemeral--Well,
my opinion of your sex is directly traceable to you. You may alter it,
or fling another of us men out on the world with the old bitter
experience. Consider this, that it is on your head if my ideal of women
is wrecked. It rests with you to restore it. I love you. I discover
that you are the one woman I have always loved. I come to you, I sue
you, and suddenly--you have changed! 'I have changed: I am not the
same.' What can it mean? 'I cannot marry: I love no one.' And you say
you do not know what love is--avowing in the same breath that you did
love me! Am I the empty dream? My hand, heart, fortune, name, are
yours, at your feet; you kick them hence. I am here--you reject me. But
why, for what mortal reason am I here other than my faith in your love?
You drew me to you, to repel me, and have a wretched revenge."

"You know it is not that, Sir Willoughby."

"Have you any possible suspicion that I am still entangled, not, as I
assure you I am, perfectly free in fact and in honour?"

"It is not that."

"Name it; for you see your power. Would you have me kneel to you,
madam?"

"Oh, no; it would complete my grief."

"You feel grief? Then you believe in my affection, and you hurl it
away. I have no doubt that as a poetess you would say, love is eternal.
And you have loved me. And you tell me you love me no more. You are not
very logical, Laetitia Dale."

"Poetesses rarely are: if I am one, which I little pretend to be for
writing silly verses. I have passed out of that delusion, with the
rest."

"You shall not wrong those dear old days, Laetitia. I see them now;
when I rode by your cottage and you were at your window, pen in hand,
your hair straying over your forehead. Romantic, yes; not foolish. Why
were you foolish in thinking of me? Some day I will commission an
artist to paint me that portrait of you from my description. And I
remember when we first whispered . . . I remember your trembling. You
have forgotten--I remember. I remember our meeting in the park on the
path to church. I remember the heavenly morning of my return from my
travels, and the same Laetitia meeting me, stedfast and unchangeable.
Could I ever forget? Those are ineradicable scenes; pictures of my
youth, interwound with me. I may say, that as I recede from them, I
dwell on them the more. Tell me, Laetitia, was there not a certain
prophecy of your father's concerning us two? I fancy I heard of one.
There was one."

"He was an invalid. Elderly people nurse illusions."

"Ask yourself Laetitia, who is the obstacle to the fulfilment of his
prediction?--truth, if ever a truth was foreseen on earth. You have
not changed so far that you would feel no pleasure in gratifying him? I
go to him to-morrow morning with the first light."

"You will compel me to follow, and undeceive him."

"Do so, and I denounce an unworthy affection you are ashamed to avow."

"That would be idle, though it would be base."

"Proof of love, then! For no one but you should it be done, and no one
but you dare accuse me of a baseness."

"Sir Willoughby, you will let my father die in peace."

"He and I together will contrive to persuade you."

"You tempt me to imagine that you want a wife at any cost."

"You, Laetitia, you."

"I am tired," she said. "It is late, I would rather not hear more. I
am sorry if I have caused you pain. I suppose you to have spoken with
candour. I defend neither my sex nor myself. I can only say I am a
woman as good as dead: happy to be made happy in my way, but so little
alive that I cannot realize any other way. As for love, I am thankful
to have broken a spell. You have a younger woman in your mind; I am an
old one: I have no ambition and no warmth. My utmost prayer is to float
on the stream--a purely physical desire of life: I have no strength to
swim. Such a woman is not the wife for you, Sir Willoughby. Good night."

"One final word. Weigh it. Express no conventional regrets. Resolutely
you refuse?"

"Resolutely I do."

"You refuse?"

"Yes."

"I have sacrificed my pride for nothing! You refuse?"

"Yes."

"Humbled myself! And this is the answer! You do refuse?"

"I do."

"Good night, Laetitia Dale."

He gave her passage.

"Good night, Sir Willoughby."

"I am in your power," he said, in a voice between supplication and
menace that laid a claw on her, and she turned and replied:

"You will not be betrayed."

"I can trust you . . . ?"

"I go home to-morrow before breakfast."

"Permit me to escort you upstairs."

"If you please: but I see no one here either to-night or tomorrow."

"It is for the privilege of seeing the last of you."

They withdrew.

Young Crossjay listened to the drumming of his head. Somewhere in or
over the cavity a drummer rattled tremendously.

Sir Willoughby's laboratory door shut with a slam.

Crossjay tumbled himself off the ottoman. He stole up to the unclosed
drawing-room door, and peeped. Never was a boy more thoroughly
awakened. His object was to get out of the house and go through the
night avoiding everything human, for he was big with information of a
character that he knew to be of the nature of gunpowder, and he feared
to explode. He crossed the hall. In the passage to the scullery he ran
against Colonel De Craye.

"So there you are," said the colonel, "I've been hunting you."

Crossjay related that his bedroom door was locked and the key gone, and
Sir Willoughby sitting up in the laboratory.

Colonel De Craye took the boy to his own room, where Crossjay lay on a
sofa, comfortably covered over and snug in a swelling pillow; but he
was restless; he wanted to speak, to bellow, to cry; and he bounced
round to his left side, and bounced to his right, not knowing what to
think, except that there was treason to his adored Miss Middleton.

"Why, my lad, you're not half a campaigner," the colonel called out to
him; attributing his uneasiness to the material discomfort of the sofa:
and Crossjay had to swallow the taunt, bitter though it was. A dim
sentiment of impropriety in unburdening his overcharged mind on the
subject of Miss Middleton to Colonel De Craye restrained him from
defending himself; and so he heaved and tossed about till daybreak. At
an early hour, while his hospitable friend, who looked very handsome in
profile half breast and head above the sheets, continued to slumber,
Crossjay was on his legs and away. "He says I'm not half a campaigner,
and a couple of hours of bed are enough for me," the boy thought
proudly, and snuffed the springing air of the young sun on the fields.
A glance back at Patterne Hall dismayed him, for he knew not how to
act, and he was immoderately combustible, too full of knowledge for
self-containment; much too zealously excited on behalf of his dear Miss
Middleton to keep silent for many hours of the day.



CHAPTER XLI

THE REV. DR. MIDDLETON, CLARA, AND SIR WILLOUGHBY

When Master Crossjay tumbled down the stairs, Laetitia was in Clara's
room, speculating on the various mishaps which might have befallen that
battered youngster; and Clara listened anxiously after Laetitia had run
out, until she heard Sir Willoughby's voice; which in some way
satisfied her that the boy was not in the house.

She waited, expecting Miss Dale to return; then undressed, went to bed,
tried to sleep. She was tired of strife. Strange thoughts for a young
head shot through her: as, that it is possible for the sense of duty to
counteract distaste; and that one may live a life apart from one's
admirations and dislikes: she owned the singular strength of Sir
Willoughby in outwearying: she asked herself how much she had gained by
struggling:--every effort seemed to expend her spirit's force, and
rendered her less able to get the clear vision of her prospects, as
though it had sunk her deeper: the contrary of her intention to make
each further step confirm her liberty. Looking back, she marvelled at
the things she had done. Looking round, how ineffectual they appeared!
She had still the great scene of positive rebellion to go through with
her father.

The anticipation of that was the cause of her extreme discouragement.
He had not spoken to her since he became aware of her attempted flight:
but the scene was coming; and besides the wish not to inflict it on
him, as well as to escape it herself, the girl's peculiar unhappiness
lay in her knowledge that they were alienated and stood opposed, owing
to one among the more perplexing masculine weaknesses, which she could
not hint at, dared barely think of, and would not name in her
meditations. Diverting to other subjects, she allowed herself to
exclaim, "Wine, wine!" in renewed wonder of what there could be in wine
to entrap venerable men and obscure their judgements. She was too young
to consider that her being very much in the wrong gave all the
importance to the cordial glass in a venerable gentleman's appreciation
of his dues. Why should he fly from a priceless wine to gratify the
caprices of a fantastical child guilty of seeking to commit a breach of
faith? He harped on those words. Her fault was grave. No doubt the wine
coloured it to him, as a drop or two will do in any cup: still her
fault was grave.

She was too young for such considerations. She was ready to expatiate
on the gravity of her fault, so long as the humiliation assisted to her
disentanglement: her snared nature in the toils would not permit her to
reflect on it further. She had never accurately perceived it: for the
reason perhaps that Willoughby had not been moving in his appeals: but,
admitting the charge of waywardness, she had come to terms with
conscience, upon the understanding that she was to perceive it and
regret it and do penance for it by-and-by:--by renouncing marriage
altogether? How light a penance!

In the morning, she went to Laetitia's room, knocked, and had no
answer.

She was informed at the breakfast-table of Miss Dale's departure. The
ladies Eleanor and Isabel feared it to be a case of urgency at the
cottage. No one had seen Vernon, and Clara requested Colonel De Craye
to walk over to the cottage for news of Crossjay. He accepted the
commission, simply to obey and be in her service: assuring her,
however, that there was no need to be disturbed about the boy. He would
have told her more, had not Dr. Middleton led her out.

Sir Willoughby marked a lapse of ten minutes by his watch. His
excellent aunts had ventured a comment on his appearance that
frightened him lest he himself should be the person to betray his
astounding discomfiture. He regarded his conduct as an act of madness,
and Laetitia's as no less that of a madwoman--happily mad! Very happily
mad indeed! Her rejection of his ridiculously generous proposal seemed
to show an intervening hand in his favour, that sent her distraught at
the right moment. He entirely trusted her to be discreet; but she was a
miserable creature, who had lost the one last chance offered her by
Providence, and furnished him with a signal instance of the mediocrity
of woman's love.

Time was flying. In a little while Mrs. Mountstuart would arrive. He
could not fence her without a design in his head; he was destitute of
an armoury if he had no scheme: he racked the brain only to succeed in
rousing phantasmal vapours. Her infernal "Twice!" would cease now to
apply to Laetitia; it would be an echo of Lady Busshe. Nay, were all in
the secret, Thrice jilted! might become the universal roar. And this,
he reflected bitterly, of a man whom nothing but duty to his line had
arrested from being the most mischievous of his class with women! Such
is our reward for uprightness!

At the expiration of fifteen minutes by his watch, he struck a knuckle
on the library door. Dr. Middleton held it open to him.

"You are disengaged, sir?"

"The sermon is upon the paragraph which is toned to awaken the clerk,"
replied the Rev. Doctor.

Clara was weeping.

Sir Willoughby drew near her solicitously.

Dr Middleton's mane of silvery hair was in a state bearing witness to
the vehemence of the sermon, and Willoughby said: "I hope, sir, you
have not made too much of a trifle."

"I believe, sir, that I have produced an effect, and that was the point
in contemplation."

"Clara! my dear Clara!" Willoughby touched her.

"She sincerely repents her conduct, I may inform you," said Dr.
Middleton.

"My love!" Willoughby whispered. "We have had a misunderstanding. I am
at a loss to discover where I have been guilty, but I take the blame,
all the blame. I implore you not to weep. Do me the favour to look at
me. I would not have had you subjected to any interrogation whatever."

"You are not to blame," Clara said on a sob.

"Undoubtedly Willoughby is not to blame. It was not he who was bound on
a runaway errand in flagrant breach of duty and decorum, nor he who
inflicted a catarrh on a brother of my craft and cloth," said her
father.

"The clerk, sir, has pronounced Amen," observed Willoughby.

"And no man is happier to hear an ejaculation that he has laboured for
with so much sweat of his brow than the parson, I can assure you," Dr.
Middleton mildly groaned. "I have notions of the trouble of Abraham. A
sermon of that description is an immolation of the parent, however it
may go with the child."

Willoughby soothed his Clara.

"I wish I had been here to share it. I might have saved you some tears.
I may have been hasty in our little dissensions. I will acknowledge
that I have been. My temper is often irascible."

"And so is mine!" exclaimed Dr. Middleton. "And yet I am not aware that
I made the worse husband for it. Nor do I rightly comprehend how a
probably justly excitable temper can stand for a plea in mitigation of
an attempt at an outrageous breach of faith."

"The sermon is over, sir."

"Reverberations!" the Rev. Doctor waved his arm placably. "Take it for
thunder heard remote."

"Your hand, my love," Willoughby murmured.

The hand was not put forth.

Dr. Middleton remarked the fact. He walked to the window, and
perceiving the pair in the same position when he faced about, he
delivered a cough of admonition.

"It is cruel!" said Clara.

"That the owner of your hand should petition you for it?" inquired her
father.

She sought refuge in a fit of tears.

Willoughby bent above her, mute.

"Is a scene that is hardly conceivable as a parent's obligation once in
a lustrum, to be repeated within the half hour?" shouted her father.

She drew up her shoulders and shook; let them fall and dropped her
head.

"My dearest! your hand!" fluted Willoughby.

The hand surrendered; it was much like the icicle of a sudden thaw.

Willoughby squeezed it to his ribs.

Dr. Middleton marched up and down the room with his arms locked behind
him. The silence between the young people seemed to denounce his
presence.

He said, cordially: "Old Hiems has but to withdraw for buds to burst.
'Jam ver egelidos refert tepores.' The equinoctial fury departs. I
will leave you for a term."

Clara and Willoughby simultaneously raised their faces with opposing
expressions.

"My girl!" Her father stood by her, laying gentle hand on her.

"Yes, papa, I will come out to you," she replied to his apology for the
rather heavy weight of his vocabulary, and smiled.

"No, sir, I beg you will remain," said Willoughby.

"I keep you frost-bound."

Clara did not deny it.

Willoughby emphatically did.

Then which of them was the more lover-like? Dr. Middleton would for the
moment have supposed his daughter.

Clara said: "Shall you be on the lawn, papa?"

Willoughby interposed. "Stay, sir; give us your blessing."

"That you have." Dr. Middleton hastily motioned the paternal ceremony
in outline.

"A few minutes, papa," said Clara.

"Will she name the day?" came eagerly from Willoughby.

"I cannot!" Clara cried in extremity.

"The day is important on its arrival," said her father; "but I
apprehend the decision to be of the chief importance at present. First
prime your piece of artillery, my friend."

"The decision is taken, sir."

"Then I will be out of the way of the firing. Hit what day you please."

Clara checked herself on an impetuous exclamation. It was done that her
father might not be detained.

Her astute self-compression sharpened Willoughby as much as it
mortified and terrified him. He understood how he would stand in an
instant were Dr. Middleton absent. Her father was the tribunal she
dreaded, and affairs must be settled and made irrevocable while he was
with them. To sting the blood of the girl, he called her his darling,
and half enwound her, shadowing forth a salute.

She strung her body to submit, seeing her father take it as a signal
for his immediate retirement.

Willoughby was upon him before he reached the door.

"Hear us out, sir. Do not go. Stay, at my entreaty. I fear we have not
come to a perfect reconcilement."

"If that is your opinion," said Clara, "it is good reason for not
distressing my father."

"Dr Middleton, I love your daughter. I wooed her and won her; I had
your consent to our union, and I was the happiest of mankind. In some
way, since her coming to my house, I know not how--she will not tell
me, or cannot--I offended. One may be innocent and offend. I have never
pretended to impeccability, which is an admission that I may very
naturally offend. My appeal to her is for an explanation or for pardon.
I obtain neither. Had our positions been reversed, oh, not for any real
offence--not for the worst that can be imagined--I think not--I hope
not--could I have been tempted to propose the dissolution of our
engagement. To love is to love, with me; an engagement a solemn bond.
With all my errors I have that merit of utter fidelity--to the world
laughable! I confess to a multitude of errors; I have that single
merit, and am not the more estimable in your daughter's eyes on account
of it, I fear. In plain words, I am, I do not doubt, one of the fools
among men; of the description of human dog commonly known as
faithful--whose destiny is that of a tribe. A man who cries out when he
is hurt is absurd, and I am not asking for sympathy. Call me luckless.
But I abhor a breach of faith. A broken pledge is hateful to me. I
should regard it myself as a form of suicide. There are principles
which civilized men must contend for. Our social fabric is based on
them. As my word stands for me, I hold others to theirs. If that is not
done, the world is more or less a carnival of counterfeits. In this
instance--Ah! Clara, my love! and you have principles: you have
inherited, you have been indoctrinated with them: have I, then, in my
ignorance, offended past penitence, that you, of all women? . . . And
without being able to name my sin!--Not only for what I lose by it, but
in the abstract, judicially--apart from the sentiment of personal
interest, grief, pain, and the possibility of my having to endure that
which no temptation would induce me to commit:--judicially;--I fear,
sir, I am a poor forensic orator . . ."

"The situation, sir, does not demand a Cicero: proceed," said Dr.
Middleton, balked in his approving nods at the right true things
delivered.

"Judicially, I am bold to say, though it may appear a presumption in
one suffering acutely, I abhor a breach of faith."

Dr. Middleton brought his nod down low upon the phrase he had
anticipated. "And I," said he, "personally, and presently, abhor a
breach of faith. Judicially? Judicially to examine, judicially to
condemn: but does the judicial mind detest? I think, sir, we are not on
the bench when we say that we abhor: we have unseated ourselves. Yet
our abhorrence of bad conduct is very certain. You would signify,
impersonally: which suffices for this exposition of your feelings."

He peered at the gentleman under his brows, and resumed:

"She has had it, Willoughby; she has had it in plain Saxon and in
uncompromising Olympian. There is, I conceive, no necessity to revert
to it."

"Pardon me, sir, but I am still unforgiven."

"You must babble out the rest between you. I am about as much at home
as a turkey with a pair of pigeons."

"Leave us, father," said Clara.

"First join our hands, and let me give you that title, sir."

"Reach the good man your hand, my girl; forthright, from the shoulder,
like a brave boxer. Humour a lover. He asks for his own."

"It is more than I can do, father."

"How, it is more than you can do? You are engaged to him, a plighted
woman."

"I do not wish to marry."

"The apology is inadequate."

"I am unworthy. . ."

"Chatter! chatter!"

"I beg him to release me."

"Lunacy!"

"I have no love to give him."

"Have you gone back to your cradle, Clara Middleton?"

"Oh, leave us, dear father!"

"My offence, Clara, my offence! What is it? Will you only name it?"

"Father, will you leave us? We can better speak together . . ."

"We have spoken, Clara, how often!" Willoughby resumed, "with what
result?--that you loved me, that you have ceased to love me: that your
heart was mine, that you have withdrawn it, plucked it from me: that
you request me to consent to a sacrifice involving my reputation, my
life. And what have I done? I am the same, unchangeable. I loved and
love you: my heart was yours, and is, and will be yours forever. You
are my affianced--that is, my wife. What have I done?"

"It is indeed useless," Clara sighed.

"Not useless, my girl, that you should inform this gentleman, your
affianced husband, of the ground of the objection you conceived against
him."

"I cannot say."

"Do you know?"

"If I could name it, I could hope to overcome it."

Dr. Middleton addressed Sir Willoughby.

"I verily believe we are directing the girl to dissect a caprice. Such
things are seen large by these young people, but as they have neither
organs, nor arteries, nor brains, nor membranes, dissection and
inspection will be alike profitlessly practised. Your inquiry is
natural for a lover, whose passion to enter into relations with the sex
is ordinarily in proportion to his ignorance of the stuff composing
them. At a particular age they traffic in whims: which are, I presume,
the spiritual of hysterics; and are indubitably preferable, so long as
they are not pushed too far. Examples are not wanting to prove that a
flighty initiative on the part of the male is a handsome corrective. In
that case, we should probably have had the roof off the house, and the
girl now at your feet. Ha!"

"Despise me, father. I am punished for ever thinking myself the
superior of any woman," said Clara.

"Your hand out to him, my dear, since he is for a formal
reconciliation; and I can't wonder."

"Father! I have said I do not . . . I have said I cannot . . ."

"By the most merciful! what? what? the name for it, words for it!"

"Do not frown on me, father. I wish him happiness. I cannot marry him.
I do not love him."

"You will remember that you informed me aforetime that you did love
him."

"I was ignorant . . . I did not know myself. I wish him to be happy."

"You deny him the happiness you wish him!"

"It would not be for his happiness were I to wed him."

"Oh!" burst from Willoughby.

"You hear him. He rejects your prediction, Clara Middleton." She caught
her clasped hands up to her throat. "Wretched, wretched, both!"

"And you have not a word against him, miserable girl."

"Miserable! I am."

"It is the cry of an animal!"

"Yes, father."

"You feel like one? Your behaviour is of that shape. You have not a
word?"

"Against myself, not against him."

"And I, when you speak so generously, am to yield you? give you up?"
cried Willoughby. "Ah! my love, my Clara, impose what you will on me;
not that. It is too much for man. It is, I swear it, beyond my
strength."

"Pursue, continue the strain; 'tis in the right key," said Dr.
Middleton, departing.

Willoughby wheeled and waylaid him with a bound.

"Plead for me, sir; you are all-powerful. Let her be mine, she shall be
happy, or I will perish for it. I will call it on my head.--Impossible!
I cannot lose her. Lose you, my love? it would be to strip myself of
every blessing of body and soul. It would be to deny myself possession
of grace, beauty, wit, all the incomparable charms of loveliness of
mind and person in woman, and plant myself in a desert. You are my
mate, the sum of everything I call mine. Clara, I should be less than
man to submit to such a loss. Consent to it? But I love you! I worship
you! How can I consent to lose you . . . ?"

He saw the eyes of the desperately wily young woman slink sideways. Dr.
Middleton was pacing at ever shorter lengths closer by the door.

"You hate me?" Willoughby sunk his voice.

"If it should turn to hate!" she murmured.

"Hatred of your husband?"

"I could not promise," she murmured, more softly in her wiliness.

"Hatred?" he cried aloud, and Dr. Middleton stopped in his walk and
flung up his head: "Hatred of your husband? of the man you have vowed
to love and honour? Oh, no! Once mine, it is not to be feared. I trust
to my knowledge of your nature; I trust in your blood, I trust in your
education. Had I nothing else to inspire confidence, I could trust in
your eyes. And, Clara, take the confession: I would rather be hated
than lose you. For if I lose you, you are in another world, out of this
one holding me in its death-like cold; but if you hate me we are
together, we are still together. Any alliance, any, in preference to
separation!"

Clara listened with critical ear. His language and tone were new; and
comprehending that they were in part addressed to her father, whose
phrase: "A breach of faith": he had so cunningly used, disdain of the
actor prompted the extreme blunder of her saying--frigidly though she
said it:

"You have not talked to me in this way before."

"Finally," remarked her father, summing up the situation to settle it
from that little speech, "he talks to you in this way now; and you are
under my injunction to stretch your hand out to him for a symbol of
union, or to state your objection to that course. He, by your
admission, is at the terminus, and there, failing the why not, must you
join him."

Her head whirled. She had been severely flagellated and weakened
previous to Willoughby's entrance. Language to express her peculiar
repulsion eluded her. She formed the words, and perceived that they
would not stand to bear a breath from her father. She perceived too
that Willoughby was as ready with his agony of supplication as she with
hers. If she had tears for a resource, he had gestures quite as
eloquent; and a cry of her loathing of the union would fetch a
countervailing torrent of the man's love.--What could she say? he is
an Egoist? The epithet has no meaning in such a scene. Invent! shrieked
the hundred-voiced instinct of dislike within her, and alone with her
father, alone with Willoughby, she could have invented some equivalent,
to do her heart justice for the injury it sustained in her being unable
to name the true and immense objection: but the pair in presence
paralyzed her. She dramatized them each springing forward by turns,
with crushing rejoinders. The activity of her mind revelled in giving
them a tongue, but would not do it for herself. Then ensued the
inevitable consequence of an incapacity to speak at the heart's urgent
dictate: heart and mind became divided. One throbbed hotly, the other
hung aloof, and mentally, while the sick inarticulate heart kept
clamouring, she answered it with all that she imagined for those two
men to say. And she dropped poison on it to still its reproaches:
bidding herself remember her fatal postponements in order to preserve
the seeming of consistency before her father; calling it hypocrite;
asking herself, what was she! who loved her! And thus beating down her
heart, she completed the mischief with a piercing view of the
foundation of her father's advocacy of Willoughby, and more lamentably
asked herself what her value was, if she stood bereft of respect for
her father.

Reason, on the other hand, was animated by her better nature to plead
his case against her: she clung to her respect for him, and felt
herself drowning with it: and she echoed Willoughby consciously,
doubling her horror with the consciousness, in crying out on a world
where the most sacred feelings are subject to such lapses. It doubled
her horror, that she should echo the man: but it proved that she was no
better than be: only some years younger. Those years would soon be
outlived: after which, he and she would be of a pattern. She was
unloved: she did no harm to any one by keeping her word to this man;
she had pledged it, and it would be a breach of faith not to keep it.
No one loved her. Behold the quality of her father's love! To give him
happiness was now the principal aim for her, her own happiness being
decently buried; and here he was happy: why should she be the cause of
his going and losing the poor pleasure he so much enjoyed?

The idea of her devotedness flattered her feebleness. She betrayed
signs of hesitation; and in hesitating, she looked away from a look at
Willoughby, thinking (so much against her nature was it to resign
herself to him) that it would not have been so difficult with an
ill-favoured man. With one horribly ugly, it would have been a horrible
exultation to cast off her youth and take the fiendish leap.

Unfortunately for Sir Willoughby, he had his reasons for pressing
impatience; and seeing her deliberate, seeing her hasty look at his
fine figure, his opinion of himself combined with his recollection of a
particular maxim of the Great Book to assure him that her resistance
was over: chiefly owing, as he supposed, to his physical perfections.

Frequently indeed, in the contest between gentlemen and ladies, have
the maxims of the Book stimulated the assailant to victory. They are
rosy with blood of victims. To bear them is to hear a horn that blows
the mort: has blown it a thousand times. It is good to remember how
often they have succeeded, when, for the benefit of some future Lady
Vauban, who may bestir her wits to gather maxims for the inspiriting of
the Defence, the circumstance of a failure has to be recorded.

Willoughby could not wait for the melting of the snows. He saw full
surely the dissolving process; and sincerely admiring and coveting her
as he did, rashly this ill-fated gentleman attempted to precipitate it,
and so doing arrested.

Whence might we draw a note upon yonder maxim, in words akin to these:
Make certain ere a breath come from thee that thou be not a frost.

"Mine! She is mine!" he cried: "mine once more! mine utterly! mine
eternally!" and he followed up his devouring exclamations in person as
she, less decidedly, retreated. She retreated as young ladies should
ever do, two or three steps, and he would not notice that she had
become an angry Dian, all arrows: her maidenliness in surrendering
pleased him. Grasping one fair hand, he just allowed her to edge on the
outer circle of his embrace, crying: "Not a syllable of what I have
gone through! You shall not have to explain it, my Clara. I will study
you more diligently, to be guided by you, my darling. If I offend
again, my wife will not find it hard to speak what my bride withheld--I
do not ask why: perhaps not able to weigh the effect of her reticence:
not at that time, when she was younger and less experienced, estimating
the sacredness of a plighted engagement. It is past, we are one, my
dear sir and father. You may leave us now."

"I profoundly rejoice to hear that I may," said Dr. Middleton. Clara
writhed her captured hand.

"No, papa, stay. It is an error, an error. You must not leave me. Do
not think me utterly, eternally, belonging to any one but you. No one
shall say I am his but you."

"Are you quicksands, Clara Middleton, that nothing can be built on you?
Whither is a flighty head and a shifty will carrying the girl?"

"Clara and I, sir," said Willoughby.

"And so you shall," said the Doctor, turning about.

"Not yet, papa:" Clara sprang to him.

"Why, you, you, you, it was you who craved to be alone with
Willoughby!" her father shouted; "and here we are rounded to our
starting-point, with the solitary difference that now you do not want
to be alone with Willoughby. First I am bidden go; next I am pulled
back; and judging by collar and coat-tag, I suspect you to be a young
woman to wear an angel's temper threadbare before you determine upon
which one of the tides driving him to and fro you intend to launch on
yourself, Where is your mind?"

Clara smoothed her forehead.

"I wish to please you, papa."

"I request you to please the gentleman who is your appointed husband."

"I am anxious to perform my duty."

"That should be a satisfactory basis for you, Willoughby; as girls go!"

"Let me, sir, simply entreat to have her hand in mine before you."

"Why not, Clara?"

"Why an empty ceremony, papa?"

"The implication is, that she is prepared for the important one, friend
Willoughby."

"Her hand, sir; the reassurance of her hand in mine under your
eyes:--after all that I have suffered, I claim it, I think I claim it
reasonably, to restore me to confidence."

"Quite reasonably; which is not to say, necessarily; but, I will add,
justifiably; and it may be, sagaciously, when dealing with the
volatile."

"And here," said Willoughby, "is my hand."

Clara recoiled.

He stepped on. Her father frowned. She lifted both her hands from the
shrinking elbows, darted a look of repulsion at her pursuer, and ran to
her father, crying: "Call it my mood! I am volatile, capricious,
flighty, very foolish. But you see that I attach a real meaning to it,
and feel it to be binding: I cannot think it an empty ceremony, if it
is before you. Yes, only be a little considerate to your moody girl.
She will be in a fitter state in a few hours. Spare me this moment; I
must collect myself. I thought I was free; I thought he would not press
me. If I give my hand hurriedly now, I shall, I know, immediately
repent it. There is the picture of me! But, papa, I mean to try to be
above that, and if I go and walk by myself, I shall grow calm to
perceive where my duty lies . . ."

"In which direction shall you walk?" said Willoughby.

"Wisdom is not upon a particular road," said Dr. Middleton.

"I have a dread, sir, of that one which leads to the railway-station."

"With some justice!" Dr. Middleton sighed over his daughter.

Clara coloured to deep crimson: but she was beyond anger, and was
rather gratified by an offence coming from Willoughby.

"I will promise not to leave his grounds, papa."

"My child, you have threatened to be a breaker of promises."

"Oh!" she wailed. "But I will make it a vow to you."

"Why not make it a vow to me this moment, for this gentleman's
contentment, that he shall be your husband within a given period?"

"I will come to you voluntarily. I burn to be alone."

"I shall lose her," exclaimed Willoughby, in heartfelt earnest.

"How so?" said Dr. Middleton. "I have her, sir, if you will favour me
by continuing in abeyance.--You will come within an hour voluntarily,
Clara; and you will either at once yield your hand to him or you will
furnish reasons, and they must be good ones, for withholding it."

"Yes, papa."

"You will?"

"I will."

"Mind, I say reasons."

"Reasons, papa. If I have none . . ."

"If you have none that are to my satisfaction, you implicitly and
instantly, and cordially obey my command."

"I will obey."

"What more would you require?" Dr. Middleton bowed to Sir Willoughby in
triumph.

"Will she. . ."

"Sir! Sir!"

"She is your daughter, sir. I am satisfied."

"She has perchance wrestled with her engagement, as the aboriginals of
a land newly discovered by a crew of adventurous colonists do battle
with the garments imposed on them by our considerate civilization;--
ultimately to rejoice with excessive dignity in the wearing of a 
battered cocked-hat and trowsers not extending to the shanks: but she 
did not break her engagement, sir; and we will anticipate that, 
moderating a young woman's native wildness, she may, after the manner
of my comparison, take a similar pride in her fortune in good season."

Willoughby had not leisure to sound the depth of Dr. Middleton's
compliment. He had seen Clara gliding out of the room during the
delivery; and his fear returned on him that, not being won, she was
lost.

"She has gone." Her father noticed her absence. "She does not waste
time in her mission to procure that astonishing product of a shallow
soil, her reasons; if such be the object of her search. But no: it
signifies that she deems herself to have need of composure--nothing
more. No one likes to be turned about; we like to turn ourselves about;
and in the question of an act to be committed, we stipulate that it
shall be our act--girls and others. After the lapse of an hour, it
will appear to her as her act. Happily, Willoughby, we do not dine
away from Patterne to-night."

"No, sir."

"It may be attributable to a sense of deserving, but I could plead
guilty to a weakness for old Port to-day."

"There shall be an extra bottle, sir."

"All going favourably with you, as I have no cause to doubt," said Dr
Middleton, with the motion of wafting his host out of the library.



CHAPTER XLII

SHOWS THE DIVINING ARTS OF A PERCEPTIVE MIND

Starting from the Hall a few minutes before Dr. Middleton and Sir
Willoughby had entered the drawing-room overnight, Vernon parted
company with Colonel De Craye at the park-gates, and betook himself to
the cottage of the Dales, where nothing had been heard of his wanderer;
and he received the same disappointing reply from Dr. Corney, out of
the bedroom window of the genial physician, whose astonishment at his
covering so long a stretch of road at night for news of a boy like
Crossjay--gifted with the lives of a cat--became violent and rapped
Punch-like blows on the window-sill at Vernon's refusal to take shelter
and rest. Vernon's excuse was that he had "no one but that fellow to
care for", and he strode off, naming a farm five miles distant. Dr.
Corney howled an invitation to early breakfast to him, in the event of
his passing on his way back, and retired to bed to think of him. The
result of a variety of conjectures caused him to set Vernon down as
Miss Middleton's knight, and he felt a strong compassion for his poor
friend. "Though," thought he, "a hopeless attachment is as pretty an
accompaniment to the tune of life as a gentleman might wish to have,
for it's one of those big doses of discord which make all the minor
ones fit in like an agreeable harmony, and so he shuffles along as
pleasantly as the fortune-favoured, when they come to compute!"

Sir Willoughby was the fortune-favoured in the little doctor's mind;
that high-stepping gentleman having wealth, and public consideration,
and the most ravishing young lady in the world for a bride. Still,
though he reckoned all these advantages enjoyed by Sir Willoughby at
their full value, he could imagine the ultimate balance of good fortune
to be in favour of Vernon. But to do so, he had to reduce the whole
calculation to the extreme abstract, and feed his lean friend, as it
were, on dew and roots; and the happy effect for Vernon lay in a
distant future, on the borders of old age, where he was to be blessed
with his lady's regretful preference, and rejoice in the fruits of good
constitutional habits. The reviewing mind was Irish. Sir Willoughby was
a character of man profoundly opposed to Dr. Corney's nature; the
latter's instincts bristled with antagonism--not to his race, for
Vernon was of the same race, partly of the same blood, and Corney loved
him: the type of person was the annoyance. And the circumstance of its
prevailing successfulness in the country where he was placed, while it
held him silent as if under a law, heaped stores of insurgency in the
Celtic bosom. Corney contemplating Sir Willoughby, and a trotting kern
governed by Strongbow, have a point of likeness between them; with the
point of difference, that Corney was enlightened to know of a friend
better adapted for eminent station, and especially better adapted to
please a lovely lady--could these high-bred Englishwomen but be taught
to conceive another idea of manliness than the formal carved-in-wood
idol of their national worship!

Dr Corney breakfasted very early, without seeing Vernon. He was off to
a patient while the first lark of the morning carolled above, and the
business of the day, not yet fallen upon men in the shape of cloud, was
happily intermixed with nature's hues and pipings. Turning off the
high-road tip a green lane, an hour later, he beheld a youngster prying
into a hedge head and arms, by the peculiar strenuous twist of whose
hinder parts, indicative of a frame plunged on the pursuit in hand, he
clearly distinguished young Crossjay. Out came eggs. The doctor pulled
up.

"What bird?" he bellowed.

"Yellowhammer," Crossjay yelled back.

"Now, sir, you'll drop a couple of those eggs in the nest."

"Don't order me," Crossjay was retorting. "Oh, it's you, Doctor Corney.
Good morning. I said that, because I always do drop a couple back. I
promised Mr. Whitford I would, and Miss Middleton too."

"Had breakfast?"

"Not yet."

"Not hungry?"

"I should be if I thought about it."

"Jump up."

"I think I'd rather not, Doctor Corney."

"And you'll just do what Doctor Corney tells you; and set your mind on
rashers of curly fat bacon and sweetly smoking coffee, toast, hot
cakes, marmalade, and damson-jam. Wide go the fellow's nostrils, and
there's water at the dimples of his mouth! Up, my man."

Crossjay jumped up beside the doctor, who remarked, as he touched his
horse: "I don't want a man this morning, though I'll enlist you in my
service if I do. You're fond of Miss Middleton?"

Instead of answering, Crossjay heaved the sigh of love that bears a
burden.

"And so am I," pursued the doctor: "You'll have to put up with a rival.
It's worse than fond: I'm in love with her. How do you like that?"

"I don't mind how many love her," said Crossjay.

"You're worthy of a gratuitous breakfast in the front parlour of the
best hotel of the place they call Arcadia. And how about your bed last
night?"

"Pretty middling."

"Hard, was it, where the bones haven't cushion?"

"I don't care for bed. A couple of hours, and that's enough for me."

"But you're fond of Miss Middleton anyhow, and that's a virtue."

To his great surprise, Dr. Corney beheld two big round tears force
their way out of this tough youngster's eyes, and all the while the
boy's face was proud.

Crossjay said, when he could trust himself to disjoin his lips:

"I want to see Mr. Whitford."

"Have you got news for him?"

"I've something to ask him. It's about what I ought to do."

"Then, my boy, you have the right name addressed in the wrong
direction: for I found you turning your shoulders on Mr. Whitford. And
he has been out of his bed hunting you all the unholy night you've made
it for him. That's melancholy. What do you say to asking my advice?"

Crossjay sighed. "I can't speak to anybody but Mr. Whitford."

"And you're hot to speak to him?"

"I want to."

"And I found you running away from him. You're a curiosity, Mr.
Crossjay Patterne."

"Ah! so'd anybody be who knew as much as I do," said Crossjay, with a
sober sadness that caused the doctor to treat him seriously.

"The fact is," he said, "Mr. Whitford is beating the country for you.
My best plan will be to drive you to the Hall."

"I'd rather not go to the Hall," Crossjay spoke resolutely.

"You won't see Miss Middleton anywhere but at the Hall."

"I don't want to see Miss Middleton, if I can't be a bit of use to
her."

"No danger threatening the lady, is there?"

Crossjay treated the question as if it had not been put.

"Now, tell me," said Dr. Corney, "would there be a chance for me,
supposing Miss Middleton were disengaged?"

The answer was easy. "I'm sure she wouldn't."

"And why, sir, are you so cock sure?"

There was no saying; but the doctor pressed for it, and at last
Crossjay gave his opinion that she would take Mr. Whitford.

The doctor asked why; and Crossjay said it was because Mr. Whitford
was the best man in the world. To which, with a lusty "Amen to that,"
Dr. Corney remarked: "I should have fancied Colonel De Craye would have
had the first chance: he's more of a lady's man."

Crossjay surprised him again by petulantly saying: "Don't."

The boy added: "I don't want to talk, except about birds and things.
What a jolly morning it is! I saw the sun rise. No rain to-day. You're
right about hungry, Doctor Corney!"

The kindly little man swung his whip. Crossjay informed him of his
disgrace at the Hall, and of every incident connected with it, from the
tramp to the baronet, save Miss Middleton's adventure and the night
scene in the drawing-room. A strong smell of something left out struck
Dr. Corney, and he said: "You'll not let Miss Middleton know of my
affection. After all, it's only a little bit of love. But, as Patrick
said to Kathleen, when she owned to such a little bit, 'that's the best
bit of all!' and he was as right as I am about hungry."

Crossjay scorned to talk of loving, he declared. "I never tell Miss
Middleton what I feel. Why, there's Miss Dale's cottage!"

"It's nearer to your empty inside than my mansion," said the doctor,
"and we'll stop just to inquire whether a bed's to be had for you there
to-night, and if not, I'll have you with me, and bottle you, and
exhibit you, for you're a rare specimen. Breakfast you may count on
from Mr. Dale. I spy a gentleman."

"It's Colonel De Craye."

"Come after news of you."

"I wonder!"

"Miss Middleton sends him; of course she does."

Crossjay turned his full face to the doctor. "I haven't seen her for
such a long time! But he saw me last night, and he might have told her
that, if she's anxious.--Good-morning, colonel. I've had a good walk,
and a capital drive, and I'm as hungry as the boat's crew of Captain
Bligh."

He jumped down.

The colonel and the doctor saluted, smiling.

"I've rung the bell," said De Craye.

A maid came to the gate, and upon her steps appeared Miss Dale, who
flung herself at Crossjay, mingling kisses and reproaches. She scarcely
raised her face to the colonel more than to reply to his greeting, and
excuse the hungry boy for hurrying indoors to breakfast.

"I'll wait," said De Craye. He had seen that she was paler than usual.
So had Dr. Corney; and the doctor called to her concerning her father's
health. She reported that he had not yet risen, and took Crossjay to
herself.

"That's well," said the doctor, "if the invalid sleeps long. The lady
is not looking so well, though. But ladies vary; they show the mind on
the countenance, for want of the punching we meet with to conceal it;
they're like military flags for a funeral or a gala; one day furled,
and next day streaming. Men are ships' figure-heads, about the same for
a storm or a calm, and not too handsome, thanks to the ocean. It's an
age since we encountered last, colonel: on board the Dublin boat, I
recollect, and a night it was."

"I recollect that you set me on my legs, doctor."

"Ah! and you'll please to notify that Corney's no quack at sea, by
favour of the monks of the Chartreuse, whose elixir has power to still
the waves. And we hear that miracles are done with!"

"Roll a physician and a monk together, doctor!"

"True: it'll be a miracle if they combine. Though the cure of the soul
is often the entire and total cure of the body: and it's maliciously
said that the body given over to our treatment is a signal to set the
soul flying. By the way, colonel, that boy has a trifle on his mind."

"I suppose he has been worrying a farmer or a gamekeeper."

"Try him. You'll find him tight. He's got Miss Middleton on the brain.
There's a bit of a secret; and he's not so cheerful about it."

"We'll see," said the colonel.

Dr Corney nodded. "I have to visit my patient here presently. I'm too
early for him: so I'll make a call or two on the lame birds that are
up," he remarked, and drove away.

De Craye strolled through the garden. He was a gentleman of those
actively perceptive wits which, if ever they reflect, do so by hops and
jumps: upon some dancing mirror within, we may fancy. He penetrated a
plot in a flash; and in a flash he formed one; but in both cases, it
was after long hovering and not over-eager deliberation, by the patient
exercise of his quick perceptives. The fact that Crossjay was
considered to have Miss Middleton on the brain, threw a series of
images of everything relating to Crossjay for the last forty hours into
relief before him: and as he did not in the slightest degree speculate
on any one of them, but merely shifted and surveyed them, the falcon
that he was in spirit as well as in his handsome face leisurely allowed
his instinct to direct him where to strike. A reflective disposition
has this danger in action, that it commonly precipitates conjecture for
the purpose of working upon probabilities with the methods and in the
tracks to which it is accustomed: and to conjecture rashly is to play
into the puzzles of the maze. He who can watch circling above it
awhile, quietly viewing, and collecting in his eye, gathers matter that
makes the secret thing discourse to the brain by weight and balance; he
will get either the right clue or none; more frequently none; but he
will escape the entanglement of his own cleverness, he will always be
nearer to the enigma than the guesser or the calculator, and he will
retain a breadth of vision forfeited by them. He must, however, to have
his chance of success, be acutely besides calmly perceptive, a reader
of features, audacious at the proper moment.

De Craye wished to look at Miss Dale. She had returned home very
suddenly, not, as it appeared, owing to her father's illness; and he
remembered a redness of her eyelids when he passed her on the corridor
one night. She sent Crossjay out to him as soon as the boy was well
filled. He sent Crossjay back with a request. She did not yield to it
immediately. She stepped to the front door reluctantly, and seemed
disconcerted. De Craye begged for a message to Miss Middleton. There
was none to give. He persisted. But there was really none at present,
she said.

"You won't entrust me with the smallest word?" said he, and set her
visibly thinking whether she could dispatch a word. She could not; she
had no heart for messages.

"I shall see her in a day or two, Colonel De Craye."

"She will miss you severely."

"We shall soon meet."

"And poor Willoughby!"

Laetitia coloured and stood silent.

A butterfly of some rarity allured Crossjay.

"I fear he has been doing mischief," she said. "I cannot get him to
look at me."

"His appetite is good?"

"Very good indeed."

De Craye nodded. A boy with a noble appetite is never a hopeless lock.

The colonel and Crossjay lounged over the garden.

"And now," said the colonel, "we'll see if we can't arrange a meeting
between you and Miss Middleton. You're a lucky fellow, for she's always
thinking of you."

"I know I'm always thinking of her," said Crossjay.

"If ever you're in a scrape, she's the person you must go to."

"Yes, if I know where she is!"

"Why, generally she'll be at the Hall."

There was no reply: Crossjay's dreadful secret jumped to his throat. He
certainly was a weaker lock for being full of breakfast.

"I want to see Mr. Whitford so much," he said.

"Something to tell him?"

"I don't know what to do: I don't understand it!" The secret wriggled
to his mouth. He swallowed it down. "Yes, I want to talk to Mr.
Whitford."

"He's another of Miss Middleton's friends."

"I know he is. He's true steel."

"We're all her friends, Crossjay. I flatter myself I'm a Toledo when
I'm wanted. How long had you been in the house last night before you
ran into me?"

"I don't know, sir; I fell asleep for some time, and then I woke!
. . ."

"Where did you find yourself?"

"I was in the drawing-room."

"Come, Crossjay, you're not a fellow to be scared by ghosts? You looked
it when you made a dash at my midriff."

"I don't believe there are such things. Do you, colonel? You can't!"

"There's no saying. We'll hope not; for it wouldn't be fair fighting. A
man with a ghost to back him'd beat any ten. We couldn't box him or
play cards, or stand a chance with him as a rival in love. Did you,
now, catch a sight of a ghost?"

"They weren't ghosts!" Crossjay said what he was sure of, and his voice
pronounced his conviction.

"I doubt whether Miss Middleton is particularly happy," remarked the
colonel. "Why? Why, you upset her, you know, now and then."

The boy swelled. "I'd do . . . I'd go . . . I wouldn't have her unhappy
. . . It's that! that's it! And I don't know what I ought to do. I wish
I could see Mr. Whitford."

"You get into such headlong scrapes, my lad."

"I wasn't in any scrape yesterday."

"So you made yourself up a comfortable bed in the drawing-room? Luckily
Sir Willoughby didn't see you."

"He didn't, though!"

"A close shave, was it?"

"I was under a covering of something silk."

"He woke you?"

"I suppose he did. I heard him."

"Talking?"

"He was talking."

"What! talking to himself?"

"No."

The secret threatened Crossjay to be out or suffocate him. De Craye
gave him a respite.

"You like Sir Willoughby, don't you?"

Crossjay produced a still-born affirmative.

"He's kind to you," said the colonel; "he'll set you up and look after
your interests."

"Yes, I like him," said Crossjay, with his customary rapidity in
touching the subject; "I like him; he's kind and all that, and tips and
plays with you, and all that; but I never can make out why he wouldn't
see my father when my father came here to see him ten miles, and had to
walk back ten miles in the rain, to go by rail a long way, down home,
as far as Devonport, because Sir Willoughby wouldn't see him, though he
was at home, my father saw. We all thought it so odd: and my father
wouldn't let us talk much about it. My father's a very brave man."

"Captain Patterne is as brave a man as ever lived," said De Craye.

"I'm positive you'd like him, colonel."

"I know of his deeds, and I admire him, and that's a good step to
liking."

He warmed the boy's thoughts of his father.

"Because, what they say at home is, a little bread and cheese, and a
glass of ale, and a rest, to a poor man--lots of great houses will give
you that, and we wouldn't have asked for more than that. My sisters
say they think Sir Willoughby must be selfish. He's awfully proud; and
perhaps it was because my father wasn't dressed well enough. But what
can we do? We're very poor at home, and lots of us, and all hungry. My
father says he isn't paid very well for his services to the Government.
He's only a marine."

"He's a hero!" said De Craye.

"He came home very tired, with a cold, and had a doctor. But Sir
Willoughby did send him money, and mother wished to send it back, and
my father said she was not like a woman--with our big family. He said
he thought Sir Willoughby an extraordinary man."

"Not at all; very common; indigenous," said De Craye. "The art of
cutting is one of the branches of a polite education in this country,
and you'll have to learn it, if you expect to be looked on as a
gentleman and a Patterne, my boy. I begin to see how it is Miss
Middleton takes to you so. Follow her directions. But I hope you did
not listen to a private conversation. Miss Middleton would not approve
of that."

"Colonel De Craye, how could I help myself? I heard a lot before I knew
what it was. There was poetry!"

"Still, Crossjay, if it was important--was it?"

The boy swelled again, and the colonel asked him, "Does Miss Dale know
of your having played listener?"

"She!" said Crossjay. "Oh, I couldn't tell her."

He breathed thick; then came a threat of tears. "She wouldn't do
anything to hurt Miss Middleton. I'm sure of that. It wasn't her fault.
She--There goes Mr. Whitford!" Crossjay bounded away.

The colonel had no inclination to wait for his return. He walked fast
up the road, not perspicuously conscious that his motive was to be well
in advance of Vernon Whitford: to whom, after all, the knowledge
imparted by Crossjay would be of small advantage. That fellow would
probably trot of to Willoughby to row him for breaking his word to Miss
Middleton! There are men, thought De Craye, who see nothing, feel
nothing.

He crossed a stile into the wood above the lake, where, as he was in
the humour to think himself signally lucky, espying her, he took it as
a matter of course that the lady who taught his heart to leap should be
posted by the Fates. And he wondered little at her power, for rarely
had the world seen such union of princess and sylph as in that lady's
figure. She stood holding by a beech-branch, gazing down on the water.

She had not heard him. When she looked she flushed at the spectacle of
one of her thousand thoughts, but she was not startled; the colour
overflowed a grave face.

"And 'tis not quite the first time that Willoughby has played this
trick!" De Craye said to her, keenly smiling with a parted mouth.

Clara moved her lips to recall remarks introductory to so abrupt and
strange a plunge.

He smiled in that peculiar manner of an illuminated comic perception:
for the moment he was all falcon; and he surprised himself more than
Clara, who was not in the mood to take surprises. It was the sight of
her which had animated him to strike his game; he was down on it.

Another instinct at work (they spring up in twenties oftener than in
twos when the heart is the hunter) prompted him to directness and
quickness, to carry her on the flood of the discovery.

She regained something of her mental self-possession as soon as she was
on a level with a meaning she had not yet inspected; but she had to
submit to his lead, distinctly perceiving where its drift divided to
the forked currents of what might be in his mind and what was in hers.

"Miss Middleton, I bear a bit of a likeness to the messenger to the
glorious despot--my head is off if I speak not true! Everything I have
is on the die. Did I guess wrong your wish?--I read it in the dark, by
the heart. But here's a certainty: Willoughby sets you free."

"You have come from him?" she could imagine nothing else, and she was
unable to preserve a disguise; she trembled.

"From Miss Dale."

"Ah!" Clara drooped. "She told me that once."

"'Tis the fact that tells it now."

"You have not seen him since you left the house?"

"Darkly: clear enough: not unlike the hand of destiny--through a veil.
He offered himself to Miss Dale last night, about between the witching
hours of twelve and one."

"Miss Dale . . ."

"Would she other? Could she? The poor lady has languished beyond a
decade. She's love in the feminine person."

"Are you speaking seriously, Colonel De Craye?"

"Would I dare to trifle with you, Miss Middleton?"

"I have reason to know it cannot be."

"If I have a head, it is a fresh and blooming truth. And more--I stake
my vanity on it!"

"Let me go to her." She stepped.

"Consider," said he.

"Miss Dale and I are excellent friends. It would not seem indelicate to
her. She has a kind of regard for me, through Crossjay.--Oh, can it be?
There must be some delusion. You have seen--you wish to be of service
to me; you may too easily be deceived. Last night?--he last night . . .?
And this morning!"

"'Tis not the first time our friend has played the trick, Miss
Middleton."

"But this is incredible, that last night . . . and this morning, in my
father's presence, he presses! . . . You have seen Miss Dale?
Everything is possible of him: they were together, I know. Colonel De
Craye, I have not the slightest chance of concealment with you. I think
I felt that when I first saw you. Will you let me hear why you are so
certain?"

"Miss Middleton, when I first had the honour of looking on you, it was
in a posture that necessitated my looking up, and morally so it has
been since. I conceived that Willoughby had won the greatest prize of
earth. And next I was led to the conclusion that he had won it to lose
it. Whether he much cares, is the mystery I haven't leisure to fathom.
Himself is the principal consideration with himself, and ever was."

"You discovered it!" said Clara.

"He uncovered it," said De Craye. "The miracle was, that the world
wouldn't see. But the world is a piggy-wiggy world for the wealthy
fellow who fills a trough for it, and that he has always very
sagaciously done. Only women besides myself have detected him. I have
never exposed him; I have been an observer pure and simple; and because
I apprehended another catastrophe--making something like the fourth, to
my knowledge, one being public . . ."

"You knew Miss Durham?"

"And Harry Oxford too. And they're a pair as happy as blackbirds in a
cherry-tree, in a summer sunrise, with the owner of the garden asleep.
Because of that apprehension of mine, I refused the office of best man
till Willoughby had sent me a third letter. He insisted on my coming. I
came, saw, and was conquered. I trust with all my soul I did not betray
myself, I owed that duty to my position of concealing it. As for
entirely hiding that I had used my eyes, I can't say: they must answer
for it."

The colonel was using his eyes with an increasing suavity that
threatened more than sweetness.

"I believe you have been sincerely kind," said Clara. "We will descend
to the path round the lake."

She did not refuse her hand on the descent, and he let it escape the
moment the service was done. As he was performing the admirable
character of the man of honour, he had to attend to the observance of
details; and sure of her though he was beginning to feel, there was a
touch of the unknown in Clara Middleton which made him fear to stamp
assurance; despite a barely resistible impulse, coming of his emotions
and approved by his maxims. He looked at the hand, now a free lady's
hand. Willoughby settled, his chance was great. Who else was in the
way? No one. He counselled himself to wait for her; she might have
ideas of delicacy. Her face was troubled, speculative; the brows
clouded, the lips compressed.

"You have not heard this from Miss Dale?" she said.

"Last night they were together: this morning she fled. I saw her this
morning distressed. She is unwilling to send you a message: she talks
vaguely of meeting you some days hence. And it is not the first time he
has gone to her for his consolation."

"That is not a proposal," Clara reflected. "He is too prudent. He did
not propose to her at the time you mention. Have you not been hasty,
Colonel De Craye?"

Shadows crossed her forehead. She glanced in the direction of the house
and stopped her walk.

"Last night, Miss Middleton, there was a listener."

"Who?"

"Crossjay was under that pretty silk coverlet worked by the Miss
Patternes. He came home late, found his door locked, and dashed
downstairs into the drawing-room, where he snuggled up and dropped
asleep. The two speakers woke him; they frightened the poor dear lad in
his love for you, and after they had gone, he wanted to run out of the
house, and I met him just after I had come back from my search,
bursting, and took him to my room, and laid him on the sofa, and abused
him for not lying quiet. He was restless as a fish on a bank. When I
woke in the morning he was off. Doctor Corney came across him somewhere
on the road and drove him to the cottage. I was ringing the bell.
Corney told me the boy had you on his brain, and was miserable, so
Crossjay and I had a talk."

"Crossjay did not repeat to you the conversation he had heard?" said
Clara.

"No."

She smiled rejoicingly, proud of the boy, as she walked on.

"But you'll pardon me, Miss Middleton--and I'm for him as much as you
are--if I was guilty of a little angling."

"My sympathies are with the fish."

"The poor fellow had a secret that hurt him. It rose to the surface
crying to be hooked, and I spared him twice or thrice, because he had a
sort of holy sentiment I respected, that none but Mr. Whitford ought to
be his father confessor."

"Crossjay!" she cried, hugging her love of the boy.

"The secret was one not to be communicated to Miss Dale of all people."

"He said that?"

"As good as the very words. She informed me, too, that she couldn't
induce him to face her straight."

"Oh, that looks like it. And Crossjay was unhappy? Very unhappy?"

"He was just where tears are on the brim, and would have been over, if
he were not such a manly youngster."

"It looks. . ." She reverted in thought to Willoughby, and doubted, and
blindly stretched hands to her recollection of the strange old monster
she had discovered in him. Such a man could do anything.

That conclusion fortified her to pursue her walk to the house and give
battle for freedom. Willoughby appeared to her scarce human,
unreadable, save by the key that she could supply. She determined to
put faith in Colonel De Craye's marvellous divination of circumstances
in the dark. Marvels are solid weapons when we are attacked by real
prodigies of nature. Her countenance cleared. She conversed with De
Craye of the polite and the political world, throwing off her personal
burden completely, and charming him.

At the edge of the garden, on the bridge that crossed the haha from the
park, he had a second impulse, almost a warning within, to seize his
heavenly opportunity to ask for thanks and move her tender lowered
eyelids to hint at his reward. He repressed it, doubtful of the wisdom.

Something like "heaven forgive me" was in Clara's mind, though she
would have declared herself innocent before the scrutator.



CHAPTER XLIII

IN WHICH SIR WILLOUGHBY IS LED TO THINK THAT THE ELEMENTS HAVE
CONSPIRED AGAINST HIM

Clara had not taken many steps in the garden before she learned how
great was her debt of gratitude to Colonel De Craye. Willoughby and
her father were awaiting her. De Craye, with his ready comprehension of
circumstances, turned aside unseen among the shrubs. She advanced
slowly.

"The vapours, we may trust, have dispersed?" her father hailed her.

"One word, and these discussions are over, we dislike them equally,"
said Willoughby.

"No scenes," Dr. Middleton added. "Speak your decision, my girl, pro
forma, seeing that he who has the right demands it, and pray release
me."

Clara looked at Willoughby.

"I have decided to go to Miss Dale for her advice."

There was no appearance in him of a man that has been shot.

"To Miss Dale?--for advice?"

Dr Middleton invoked the Furies. "What is the signification of this new
freak?"

"Miss Dale must be consulted, papa."

"Consulted with reference to the disposal of your hand in marriage?"

"She must be."

"Miss Dale, do you say?"

"I do, Papa."

Dr Middleton regained his natural elevation from the bend of body
habitual with men of an established sanity, paedagogues and others, who
are called on at odd intervals to inspect the magnitude of the
infinitesimally absurd in human nature: small, that is, under the light
of reason, immense in the realms of madness.

His daughter profoundly confused him. He swelled out his chest,
remarking to Willoughby: "I do not wonder at your scared expression of
countenance, my friend. To discover yourself engaged to a girl mad as
Cassandra, without a boast of the distinction of her being sun-struck,
can be no specially comfortable enlightenment. I am opposed to delays,
and I will not have a breach of faith committed by daughter of mine."

"Do not repeat those words," Clara said to Willoughby. He started. She
had evidently come armed. But how, within so short a space? What could
have instructed her? And in his bewilderment he gazed hurriedly above,
gulped air, and cried: "Scared, sir? I am not aware that my countenance
can show a scare. I am not accustomed to sue for long: I am unable to
sustain the part of humble supplicant. She puts me out of harmony with
creation--We are plighted, Clara. It is pure waste of time to speak of
soliciting advice on the subject."

"Would it be a breach of faith for me to break my engagement?" she
said.

"You ask?"

"It is a breach of sanity to propound the interrogation," said her
father.

She looked at Willoughby. "Now?"

He shrugged haughtily.

"Since last night?" she said.

"Last night?"

"Am I not released?"

"Not by me."

"By your act."

"My dear Clara!"

"Have you not virtually disengaged me?"

"I who claim you as mine?"

"Can you?"

"I do and must."

"After last night?"

"Tricks! shufflings! jabber of a barbarian woman upon the evolutions of
a serpent!" exclaimed Dr. Middleton. "You were to capitulate, or to
furnish reasons for your refusal. You have none. Give him your hand,
girl, according to the compact. I praised you to him for returning
within the allotted term, and now forbear to disgrace yourself and me."

"Is he perfectly free to offer his? Ask him, papa."

"Perform your duty. Do let us have peace!"

"Perfectly free! as on the day when I offered it first." Willoughby
frankly waved his honourable hand.

His face was blanched: enemies in the air seemed to have whispered
things to her: he doubted the fidelity of the Powers above.

"Since last night?" said she.

"Oh! if you insist, I reply, since last night."

"You know what I mean, Sir Willoughby."

"Oh! certainly."

"You speak the truth?"

"'Sir Willoughby!'" her father ejaculated in wrath. "But will you
explain what you mean, epitome that you are of all the contradictions
and mutabilities ascribed to women from the beginning! 'Certainly', he
says, and knows no more than I. She begs grace for an hour, and returns
with a fresh store of evasions, to insult the man she has injured. It
is my humiliation to confess that our share in this contract is rescued
from public ignominy by his generosity. Nor can I congratulate him on
his fortune, should he condescend to bear with you to the utmost; for
instead of the young woman I supposed myself to be bestowing on him, I
see a fantastical planguncula enlivened by the wanton tempers of a
nursery chit. If one may conceive a meaning in her, in miserable
apology for such behaviour, some spirit of jealousy informs the girl."

"I can only remark that there is no foundation for it," said
Willoughby. "I am willing to satisfy you, Clara. Name the person who
discomposes you. I can scarcely imagine one to exist: but who can
tell?"

She could name no person. The detestable imputation of jealousy would
be confirmed if she mentioned a name: and indeed Laetitia was not to be
named.

He pursued his advantage: "Jealousy is one of the fits I am a stranger
to,--I fancy, sir, that gentlemen have dismissed it. I speak for
myself.--But I can make allowances. In some cases, it is considered a
compliment; and often a word will soothe it. The whole affair is so
senseless! However, I will enter the witness-box, or stand at the
prisoner's bar! Anything to quiet a distempered mind."

"Of you, sir," said Dr. Middleton, "might a parent be justly proud."

"It is not jealousy; I could not be jealous!" Clara cried, stung by the
very passion; and she ran through her brain for a suggestion to win a
sign of meltingness if not esteem from her father. She was not an iron
maiden, but one among the nervous natures which live largely in the
moment, though she was then sacrificing it to her nature's deep
dislike. "You may be proud of me again, papa."

She could hardly have uttered anything more impolitic.

"Optume; but deliver yourself ad rem," he rejoined, alarmingly
pacified. "Firmavit fidem. Do you likewise, and double on us no more
like puss in the field."

"I wish to see Miss Dale," she said.

Up flew the Rev. Doctor's arms in wrathful despair resembling an
imprecation.

"She is at the cottage. You could have seen her," said Willoughby.

Evidently she had not.

"Is it untrue that last night, between twelve o'clock and one, in the
drawing-room, you proposed marriage to Miss Dale?" He became convinced
that she must have stolen down-stairs during his colloquy with
Laetitia, and listened at the door.

"On behalf of old Vernon?" he said, lightly laughing. "The idea is not
novel, as you know. They are suited, if they could see it.--Laetitia
Dale and my cousin Vernon Whitford, sir."

"Fairly schemed, my friend, and I will say for you, you have the
patience, Willoughby, of a husband!"

Willoughby bowed to the encomium, and allowed some fatigue to be
visible. He half yawned: "I claim no happier title, sir," and made
light of the weariful discussion.

Clara was shaken: she feared that Crossjay had heard incorrectly, or
that Colonel De Craye had guessed erroneously. It was too likely that
Willoughby should have proposed Vernon to Laetitia.

There was nothing to reassure her save the vision of the panic
amazement of his face at her persistency in speaking of Miss Dale. She
could have declared on oath that she was right, while admitting all the
suppositions to be against her. And unhappily all the Delicacies (a
doughty battalion for the defence of ladies until they enter into
difficulties and are shorn of them at a blow, bare as dairymaids), all
the body-guard of a young gentlewoman, the drawing-room sylphides,
which bear her train, which wreathe her hair, which modulate her voice
and tone her complexion, which are arrows and shield to awe the
creature man, forbade her utterance of what she felt, on pain of
instant fulfilment of their oft-repeated threat of late to leave her to
the last remnant of a protecting sprite. She could not, as in a dear
melodrama, from the aim of a pointed finger denounce him, on the
testimony of her instincts, false of speech, false in deed. She could
not even declare that she doubted his truthfulness. The refuge of a
sullen fit, the refuge of tears, the pretext of a mood, were denied her
now by the rigour of those laws of decency which are a garment to
ladies of pure breeding.

"One more respite, papa," she implored him, bitterly conscious of the
closer tangle her petition involved, and, if it must be betrayed of
her, perceiving in an illumination how the knot might become so
woefully Gordian that haply in a cloud of wild events the intervention
of a gallant gentleman out of heaven, albeit in the likeness of one of
earth, would have to cut it: her cry within, as she succumbed to
weakness, being fervider, "Anything but marry this one!" She was faint
with strife and dejected, a condition in the young when their
imaginative energies hold revel uncontrolled and are projectively
desperate.

"No respite!" said Willoughby, genially.

"And I say, no respite!" observed her father. "You have assumed a
position that has not been granted you, Clara Middleton."

"I cannot bear to offend you, father."

"Him! Your duty is not to offend him. Address your excuses to him. I
refuse to be dragged over the same ground, to reiterate the same
command perpetually."

"If authority is deputed to me, I claim you," said Willoughby.

"You have not broken faith with me?"

"Assuredly not, or would it be possible for me to press my claim?"

"And join the right hand to the right," said Dr. Middleton; "no, it
would not be possible. What insane root she has been nibbling, I know
not, but she must consign herself to the guidance of those whom the
gods have not abandoned, until her intellect is liberated. She was once
. . . there: I look not back--if she it was, and no simulacrum of a
reasonable daughter. I welcome the appearance of my friend Mr.
Whitford. He is my sea-bath and supper on the beach of Troy, after the
day's battle and dust."

Vernon walked straight up to them: an act unusual with him, for he was
shy of committing an intrusion.

Clara guessed by that, and more by the dancing frown of speculative
humour he turned on Willoughby, that he had come charged in support of
her. His forehead was curiously lively, as of one who has got a
surprise well under, to feed on its amusing contents.

"Have you seen Crossjay, Mr. Whitford?" she said.

"I've pounced on Crossjay; his bones are sound."

"Where did he sleep?"

"On a sofa, it seems."

She smiled, with good hope--Vernon had the story.

Willoughby thought it just to himself that he should defend his measure
of severity.

"The boy lied; he played a double game."

"For which he should have been reasoned with at the Grecian portico of
a boy," said the Rev. Doctor.

"My system is different, sir. I could not inflict what I would not
endure myself"

"So is Greek excluded from the later generations; and you leave a
field, the most fertile in the moralities in youth, unplowed and
unsown. Ah! well. This growing too fine is our way of relapsing upon
barbarism. Beware of over-sensitiveness, where nature has plainly
indicated her alternative gateway of knowledge. And now, I presume, I
am at liberty."

"Vernon will excuse us for a minute or two."

"I hold by Mr. Whitford now I have him."

"I'll join you in the laboratory, Vernon," Willoughby nodded bluntly.

"We will leave them, Mr. Whitford. They are at the time-honoured
dissension upon a particular day, that, for the sake of dignity,
blushes to be named."

"What day?" said Vernon, like a rustic.

"THE day, these people call it."

Vernon sent one of his vivid eyeshots from one to the other. His eyes
fixed on Willoughby's with a quivering glow, beyond amazement, as if
his humour stood at furnace-heat, and absorbed all that came.

Willoughby motioned to him to go.

"Have you seen Miss Dale, Mr. Whitford?" said Clara.

He answered, "No. Something has shocked her."

"Is it her feeling for Crossjay?"

"Ah!" Vernon said to Willoughby, "your pocketing of the key of
Crossjay's bedroom door was a master-stroke!"

The celestial irony suffused her, and she bathed and swam in it, on
hearing its dupe reply: "My methods of discipline are short. I was not
aware that she had been to his door."

"But I may hope that Miss Dale will see me," said Clara. "We are in
sympathy about the boy."

"Mr. Dale might be seen. He seems to be of a divided mind with his
daughter," Vernon rejoined. "She has locked herself up in her room."

"He is not the only father in that unwholesome predicament," said Dr
Middleton.

"He talks of coming to you, Willoughby."

"Why to me?" Willoughby chastened his irritation: "He will be welcome,
of course. It would be better that the boy should come."

"If there is a chance of your forgiving him," said Clara. "Let the
Dales know I am prepared to listen to the boy, Vernon. There can be no
necessity for Mr. Dale to drag himself here."

"How are Mr. Dale and his daughter of a divided mind, Mr. Whitford?"
said Clara.

Vernon simulated an uneasiness. With a vacant gaze that enlarged around
Willoughby and was more discomforting than intentness, he replied:
"Perhaps she is unwilling to give him her entire confidence, Miss
Middleton."

"In which respect, then, our situations present their solitary point of
unlikeness in resemblance, for I have it in excess," observed Dr.
Middleton.

Clara dropped her eyelids for the wave to pass over. "It struck me that
Miss Dale was a person of the extremest candour."

"Why should we be prying into the domestic affairs of the Dales?"
Willoughby interjected, and drew out his watch, merely for a diversion;
he was on tiptoe to learn whether Vernon was as well instructed as
Clara, and hung to the view that he could not be, while drenching in
the sensation that he was:--and if so, what were the Powers above but a
body of conspirators? He paid Laetitia that compliment. He could not
conceive the human betrayal of the secret. Clara's discovery of it had
set his common sense adrift.

"The domestic affairs of the Dales do not concern me," said Vernon.

"And yet, my friend," Dr. Middleton balanced himself, and with an air
of benevolent slyness the import of which did not awaken Willoughby,
until too late, remarked: "They might concern you. I will even add,
that there is a probability of your being not less than the fount and
origin of this division of father and daughter, though Willoughby in
the drawingroom last night stands accusably the agent."

"Favour me, sir, with an explanation," said Vernon, seeking to gather
it from Clara.

Dr Middleton threw the explanation upon Willoughby.

Clara, communicated as much as she was able in one of those looks of
still depth which say, Think! and without causing a thought to stir,
takes us into the pellucid mind.

Vernon was enlightened before Willoughby had spoken. His mouth shut
rigidly, and there was a springing increase of the luminous wavering of
his eyes. Some star that Clara had watched at night was like them in
the vivid wink and overflow of its light. Yet, as he was perfectly
sedate, none could have suspected his blood to be chasing wild with
laughter, and his frame strung to the utmost to keep it from volleying.
So happy was she in his aspect, that her chief anxiety was to recover
the name of the star whose shining beckons and speaks, and is in the
quick of spirit-fire. It is the sole star which on a night of frost and
strong moonlight preserves an indomitable fervency: that she
remembered, and the picture of a hoar earth and a lean Orion in flooded
heavens, and the star beneath Eastward of him: but the name! the
name!--She heard Willoughby indistinctly.

"Oh, the old story; another effort; you know my wish; a failure, of
course, and no thanks on either side, I suppose I must ask your
excuse.--They neither of them see what's good for them, sir."

"Manifestly, however," said Dr. Middleton, "if one may opine from the
division we have heard of, the father is disposed to back your
nominee."

"I can't say; as far as I am concerned, I made a mess of it." Vernon
withstood the incitement to acquiesce, but he sparkled with his
recognition of the fact.

"You meant well, Willoughby."

"I hope so, Vernon."

"Only you have driven her away."

"We must resign ourselves."

"It won't affect me, for I'm off to-morrow."

"You see, sir, the thanks I get."

"Mr. Whitford," said Dr. Middleton, "You have a tower of strength in
the lady's father."

"Would you have me bring it to bear upon the lady, sir?"

"Wherefore not?"

"To make her marriage a matter of obedience to her father?"

"Ay, my friend, a lusty lover would have her gladly on those terms,
well knowing it to be for the lady's good. What do you say,
Willoughby?"

"Sir! Say? What can I say? Miss Dale has not plighted her faith. Had
she done so, she is a lady who would never dishonour it."

"She is an ideal of constancy, who would keep to it though it had been
broken on the other side," said Vernon, and Clara thrilled.

"I take that, sir, to be a statue of constancy, modelled upon which a
lady of our flesh may be proclaimed as graduating for the condition of
idiocy," said Dr. Middleton.

"But faith is faith, sir."

"But the broken is the broken, sir, whether in porcelain or in human
engagements; and all that one of the two continuing faithful, I should
rather say, regretful, can do, is to devote the remainder of life to
the picking up of the fragments; an occupation properly to be pursued,
for the comfort of mankind, within the enclosure of an appointed
asylum."

"You destroy the poetry of sentiment, Dr. Middleton."

"To invigorate the poetry of nature, Mr. Whitford."

"Then you maintain, sir, that when faith is broken by one, the
engagement ceases, and the other is absolutely free?"

"I do; I am the champion of that platitude, and sound that knell to the
sentimental world; and since you have chosen to defend it, I will
appeal to Willoughby, and ask him if he would not side with the world
of good sense in applauding the nuptials of man or maid married within
a month of a jilting?" Clara slipped her arm under her father's.

"Poetry, sir," said Willoughby, "I never have been hypocrite enough to
pretend to understand or care for."

Dr. Middleton laughed. Vernon too seemed to admire his cousin for a
reply that rung in Clara's ears as the dullest ever spoken. Her arm
grew cold on her father's. She began to fear Willoughby again.

He depended entirely on his agility to elude the thrusts that assailed
him. Had he been able to believe in the treachery of the Powers above,
he would at once have seen design in these deadly strokes, for his
feelings had rarely been more acute than at the present crisis; and he
would then have led away Clara, to wrangle it out with her, relying on
Vernon's friendliness not to betray him to her father: but a wrangle
with Clara promised no immediate fruits, nothing agreeable; and the
lifelong trust he had reposed in his protecting genii obscured his
intelligence to evidence he would otherwise have accepted on the spot,
on the faith of his delicate susceptibility to the mildest impressions
which wounded him. Clara might have stooped to listen at the door: she
might have heard sufficient to create a suspicion. But Vernon was not
in the house last night; she could not have communicated it to him, and
he had not seen Laetitia, who was, besides trustworthy, an admirable if
a foolish and ill-fated woman.

Preferring to consider Vernon a pragmatical moralist played upon by a
sententious drone, he thought it politic to detach them, and vanquish
Clara while she was in the beaten mood, as she had appeared before
Vernon's vexatious arrival.

"I'm afraid, my dear fellow, you are rather too dainty and fussy for a
very successful wooer," he said. "It's beautiful on paper, and absurd
in life. We have a bit of private business to discuss. We will go
inside, sir, I think. I will soon release you." Clara pressed her
father's arm.

"More?" said he.

"Five minutes. There's a slight delusion to clear, sir. My dear Clara,
you will see with different eyes."

"Papa wishes to work with Mr. Whitford."

Her heart sunk to hear her father say: "No, 'tis a lost morning. I must
consent to pay tax of it for giving another young woman to the world. I
have a daughter! You will, I hope, compensate me, Mr. Whitford, in the
afternoon. Be not downcast. I have observed you meditative of late. You
will have no clear brain so long as that stuff is on the mind. I could
venture to propose to do some pleading for you, should it be needed for
the prompter expedition of the affair."

Vernon briefly thanked him, and said:

"Willoughby has exerted all his eloquence, and you see the result: you
have lost Miss Dale and I have not won her. He did everything that one
man can do for another in so delicate a case: even to the repeating of
her famous birthday verses to him, to flatter the poetess. His best
efforts were foiled by the lady's indisposition for me."

"Behold," said Dr. Middleton, as Willoughby, electrified by the mention
of the verses, took a sharp stride or two, "you have in him an advocate
who will not be rebuffed by one refusal, and I can affirm that he is
tenacious, pertinacious as are few. Justly so. Not to believe in a
lady's No is the approved method of carrying that fortress built to
yield. Although unquestionably to have a young man pleading in our
interests with a lady, counts its objections. Yet Willoughby being
notoriously engaged, may be held to enjoy the privileges of his
elders."

"As an engaged man, sir, he was on a level with his elders in pleading
on my behalf with Miss Dale," said Vernon. Willoughby strode and
muttered. Providence had grown mythical in his thoughts, if not
malicious: and it is the peril of this worship that the object will
wear such an alternative aspect when it appears no longer subservient.

"Are we coming, sir?" he said, and was unheeded. The Rev. Doctor would
not be defrauded of rolling his billow.

"As an honourable gentleman faithful to his own engagement and desirous
of establishing his relatives, he deserves, in my judgement, the lady's
esteem as well as your cordial thanks; nor should a temporary failure
dishearten either of you, notwithstanding the precipitate retreat of
the lady from Patterne, and her seclusion in her sanctum on the
occasion of your recent visit."

"Supposing he had succeeded," said Vernon, driving Willoughby to
frenzy, "should I have been bound to marry?" Matter for cogitation was
offered to Dr. Middleton.

"The proposal was without your sanction?"

"Entirely."

"You admire the lady?"

"Respectfully."

"You do not incline to the state?"

"An inch of an angle would exaggerate my inclination."

"How long are we to stand and hear this insufferable nonsense you
talk?" cried Willoughby.

"But if Mr. Whitford was not consulted . . ." Dr. Middleton said, and
was overborne by Willoughby's hurried, "Oblige me, sir.--Oblige me, my
good fellow!" He swept his arm to Vernon, and gestured a conducting
hand to Clara.

"Here is Mrs. Mountstuart!" she exclaimed.

Willoughby stared. Was it an irruption of a friend or a foe? He
doubted, and stood petrified between the double question. Clara had
seen Mrs. Mountstuart and Colonel De Craye separating: and now the
great lady sailed along the sward like a royal barge in festival trim.

She looked friendly, but friendly to everybody, which was always a
frost on Willoughby, and terribly friendly to Clara.

Coming up to her she whispered: "News, indeed! Wonderful! I could not
credit his hint of it yesterday. Are you satisfied?"

"Pray, Mrs. Mountstuart, take an opportunity to speak to papa," Clara
whispered in return.

Mrs. Mountstuart bowed to Dr. Middleton, nodded to Vernon, and swam
upon Willoughby, with, "Is it? But is it? Am I really to believe? You
have? My dear Sir Willoughby? Really?" The confounded gentleman heaved
on a bare plank of wreck in mid sea.

He could oppose only a paralyzed smile to the assault.

His intuitive discretion taught him to fall back a step while she said,
"So!" the plummet word of our mysterious deep fathoms; and he fell back
further saying, "Madam?" in a tone advising her to speak low.

She recovered her volubility, followed his partial retreat, and dropped
her voice,--

"Impossible to have imagined it as an actual fact! You were always full
of surprises, but this! this! Nothing manlier, nothing more gentlemanly
has ever been done: nothing: nothing that so completely changes an
untenable situation into a comfortable and proper footing for
everybody. It is what I like: it is what I love:--sound sense! Men are
so selfish: one cannot persuade them to be reasonable in such
positions. But you, Sir Willoughby, have shown wisdom and sentiment:
the rarest of all combinations in men."

"Where have you? . . ." Willoughby contrived to say.

"Heard? The hedges, the housetops, everywhere. All the neighbourhood
will have it before nightfall. Lady Busshe and Lady Culmer will soon be
rushing here, and declaring they never expected anything else, I do not
doubt. I am not so pretentious. I beg your excuse for that 'twice' of
mine yesterday. Even if it hurt my vanity, I should be happy to confess
my error: I was utterly out. But then I did not reckon on a fatal
attachment, I thought men were incapable of it. I thought we women were
the only poor creatures persecuted by a fatality. It is a fatality! You
tried hard to escape, indeed you did. And she will do honour to your
final surrender, my dear friend. She is gentle, and very clever, very:
she is devoted to you: she will entertain excellently. I see her like a
flower in sunshine. She will expand to a perfect hostess. Patterne will
shine under her reign; you have my warrant for that. And so will you.
Yes, you flourish best when adored. It must be adoration. You have been
under a cloud of late. Years ago I said it was a match, when no one
supposed you could stoop. Lady Busshe would have it was a screen, and
she was deemed high wisdom. The world will be with you. All the women
will be: excepting, of course, Lady Busshe, whose pride is in prophecy;
and she will soon be too glad to swell the host. There, my friend, your
sincerest and oldest admirer congratulates you. I could not contain
myself; I was compelled to pour forth. And now I must go and be talked
to by Dr. Middleton. How does he take it? They leave?"

"He is perfectly well," said Willoughby, aloud, quite distraught.

She acknowledged his just correction of her for running on to an
extreme in low-toned converse, though they stood sufficiently isolated
from the others. These had by this time been joined by Colonel De
Craye, and were all chatting in a group--of himself, Willoughby
horribly suspected.

Clara was gone from him! Gone! but he remembered his oath and vowed it
again: not to Horace de Craye! She was gone, lost, sunk into the world
of waters of rival men, and he determined that his whole force should
be used to keep her from that man, the false friend who had supplanted
him in her shallow heart, and might, if he succeeded, boast of having
done it by simply appearing on the scene.

Willoughby intercepted Mrs. Mountstuart as she was passing over to Dr
Middleton. "My dear lady! spare me a minute."

De Craye sauntered up, with a face of the friendliest humour:

"Never was man like you, Willoughby, for shaking new patterns in a
kaleidoscope."

"Have you turned punster, Horace?" Willoughby replied, smarting to find
yet another in the demon secret, and he draw Dr. Middleton two or three
steps aside, and hurriedly begged him to abstain from prosecuting the
subject with Clara.

"We must try to make her happy as we best can, sir. She may have her
reasons--a young lady's reasons!" He laughed, and left the Rev. Doctor
considering within himself under the arch of his lofty frown of
stupefaction.

De Craye smiled slyly and winningly as he shadowed a deep droop on the
bend of his head before Clara, signifying his absolute devotion to her
service, and this present good fruit for witness of his merits.

She smiled sweetly though vaguely. There was no concealment of their
intimacy.

"The battle is over," Vernon said quietly, when Willoughby had walked
some paces beside Mrs. Mountstuart, adding: "You may expect to see Mr.
Dale here. He knows."

Vernon and Clara exchanged one look, hard on his part, in contrast with
her softness, and he proceeded to the house. De Craye waited for a word
or a promising look. He was patient, being self-assured, and passed on.

Clara linked her arm with her father's once more, and said, on a sudden
brightness: "Sirius, papa!" He repeated it in the profoundest manner:
"Sirius! And is there," he asked, "a feminine scintilla of sense in
that?"

"It is the name of the star I was thinking of, dear papa."

"It was the star observed by King Agamemnon before the sacrifice in
Aulis. You were thinking of that? But, my love, my Iphigenia, you have
not a father who will insist on sacrificing you."

"Did I hear him tell you to humour me, papa?"

Dr Middleton humphed.

"Verily the dog-star rages in many heads," he responded.



CHAPTER XLIV

DR MIDDLETON: THE LADIES ELEANOR AND ISABEL: AND MR. DALE

Clara looked up at the flying clouds. She travelled with them now, and
tasted freedom, but she prudently forbore to vex her father; she held
herself in reserve.

They were summoned by the midday bell.

Few were speakers at the meal, few were eaters. Clara was impelled to
join it by her desire to study Mrs. Mountstuart's face. Willoughby was
obliged to preside. It was a meal of an assembly of mutes and plates,
that struck the ear like the well-known sound of a collection of
offerings in church after an impressive exhortation from the pulpit. A
sally of Colonel De Craye's met the reception given to a charity-boy's
muffled burst of animal spirits in the silence of the sacred edifice.
Willoughby tried politics with Dr. Middleton, whose regular appetite
preserved him from uncongenial speculations when the hour for appeasing
it had come; and he alone did honour to the dishes, replying to his
host:

"Times are bad, you say, and we have a Ministry doing with us what they
will. Well, sir, and that being so, and opposition a manner of kicking
them into greater stability, it is the time for wise men to retire
within themselves, with the steady determination of the seed in the
earth to grow. Repose upon nature, sleep in firm faith, and abide the
seasons. That is my counsel to the weaker party."

The counsel was excellent, but it killed the topic.

Dr. Middleton's appetite was watched for the signal to rise and breathe
freely; and such is the grace accorded to a good man of an untroubled
conscience engaged in doing his duty to himself, that he perceived
nothing of the general restlessness; he went through the dishes calmly,
and as calmly he quoted Milton to the ladies Eleanor and Isabel, when
the company sprung up all at once upon his closing his repast. Vernon
was taken away from him by Willoughby. Mrs Mountstuart beckoned
covertly to Clara. Willoughby should have had something to say to him,
Dr. Middleton thought: the position was not clear. But the situation
was not disagreeable; and he was in no serious hurry, though he wished
to be enlightened.

"This," Dr. Middleton said to the spinster aunts, as he accompanied
them to the drawing-room, "shall be no lost day for me if I may devote
the remainder of it to you."

"The thunder, we fear, is not remote," murmured one.

"We fear it is imminent," sighed the other.

They took to chanting in alternation.

"--We are accustomed to peruse our Willoughby, and we know him by a
shadow."

"--From his infancy to his glorious youth and his established manhood."

"--He was ever the soul of chivalry."

"--Duty: duty first. The happiness of his family. The well-being of his
dependants."

"--If proud of his name it was not an overweening pride; it was founded
in the conscious possession of exalted qualities. He could be humble
when occasion called for it."

Dr Middleton bowed to the litany, feeling that occasion called for
humbleness from him.

"Let us hope . . . !" he said, with unassumed penitence on behalf of
his inscrutable daughter.

The ladies resumed:--

"--Vernon Whitford, not of his blood, is his brother!"

"--A thousand instances! Laetitia Dale remembers them better than we."

"--That any blow should strike him!"

"--That another should be in store for him!"

"--It seems impossible he can be quite misunderstood!"

"Let us hope . . . !" said Dr. Middleton.

"--One would not deem it too much for the dispenser of goodness to
expect to be a little looked up to!"

"--When he was a child he one day mounted a chair, and there he stood
in danger, would not let us touch him because he was taller than we,
and we were to gaze. Do you remember him, Eleanor? 'I am the sun of the
house!' It was inimitable!"

"--Your feelings; he would have your feelings! He was fourteen when his
cousin Grace Whitford married, and we lost him. They had been the
greatest friends; and it was long before he appeared among us. He has
never cared to see her since."

"--But he has befriended her husband. Never has he failed in
generosity. His only fault is--"

"--His sensitiveness. And that is--"

"--His secret. And that--"

"--You are not to discover! It is the same with him in manhood. No one
will accuse Willoughby Patterne of a deficiency of manlinesss: but what
is it?--he suffers, as none suffer, if he is not loved. He himself is
inalterably constant in affection."

"--What it is no one can say. We have lived with him all his life, and
we know him ready to make any sacrifice; only, he does demand the whole
heart in return. And if he doubts, he looks as we have seen him
to-day."

"--Shattered: as we have never seen him look before."

"We will hope," said Dr. Middleton, this time hastily. He tingled to
say, "what it was": he had it in him to solve perplexity in their
inquiry. He did say, adopting familiar speech to suit the theme, "You
know, ladies, we English come of a rough stock. A dose of rough dealing
in our youth does us no harm, braces us. Otherwise we are likely to
feel chilly: we grow too fine where tenuity of stature is necessarily
buffetted by gales, namely, in our self-esteem. We are barbarians, on a
forcing soil of wealth, in a conservatory of comfortable security; but
still barbarians. So, you see, we shine at our best when we are
plucked out of that, to where hard blows are given, in a state of war.
In a state of war we are at home, our men are high-minded fellows,
Scipios and good legionaries. In the state of peace we do not live in
peace: our native roughness breaks out in unexpected places, under
extraordinary aspects--tyrannies, extravagances, domestic exactions:
and if we have not had sharp early training . . . within and without
. . . the old-fashioned island-instrument to drill into us the
civilization of our masters, the ancients, we show it by running here
and there to some excess. Ahem. Yet," added the Rev. Doctor,
abandoning his effort to deliver a weighty truth obscurely for the
comprehension of dainty spinster ladies, the superabundance of whom in
England was in his opinion largely the cause of our decay as a people,
"Yet I have not observed this ultra-sensitiveness in Willoughby. He has
borne to hear more than I, certainly no example of the frailty, could
have endured."

"He concealed it," said the ladies. "It is intense."

"Then is it a disease?"

"It bears no explanation; it is mystic."

"It is a cultus, then, a form of self-worship."

"Self!" they ejaculated. "But is not Self indifferent to others? Is it
Self that craves for sympathy, love, and devotion?"

"He is an admirable host, ladies."

"He is admirable in all respects."

"Admirable must he be who can impress discerning women, his life-long
housemates, so favourably. He is, I repeat, a perfect host."

"He will be a perfect husband."

"In all probability."

"It is a certainty. Let him be loved and obeyed, he will be guided.
That is the secret for her whom he so fatally loves. That, if we had
dared, we would have hinted to her. She will rule him through her love
of him, and through him all about her. And it will not be a rule he
submits to, but a love he accepts. If she could see it!"

"If she were a metaphysician!" sighed Dr. Middleton.

"--But a sensitiveness so keen as his might--"

"--Fretted by an unsympathizing mate--"

"--In the end become, for the best of us is mortal--"

"--Callous!"

"--He would feel perhaps as much--"

"--Or more!--"

"--He would still be tender--"

"--But he might grow outwardly hard!"

Both ladies looked up at Dr. Middleton, as they revealed the dreadful
prospect.

"It is the story told of corns!" he said, sad as they.

The three stood drooping: the ladies with an attempt to digest his
remark; the Rev. Doctor in dejection lest his gallantry should no
longer continue to wrestle with his good sense.

He was rescued.

The door opened and a footman announced:--

"Mr. Dale."

Miss Eleanor and Miss Isabel made a sign to one another of raising
their hands.

They advanced to him, and welcomed him.

"Pray be seated, Mr. Dale. You have not brought us bad news of our
Laetitia?"

"So rare is the pleasure of welcoming you here, Mr. Dale, that we are
in some alarm, when, as we trust, it should be matter for unmixed
congratulation."

"Has Doctor Corney been doing wonders?"

"I am indebted to him for the drive to your house, ladies," said Mr.
Dale, a spare, close-buttoned gentleman, with an Indian complexion
deadened in the sick-chamber. "It is unusual for me to stir from my
precincts."

"The Rev. Dr. Middleton."

Mr. Dale bowed. He seemed surprised.

"You live in a splendid air, sir," observed the Rev. Doctor.

"I can profit little by it, sir," replied Mr. Dale. He asked the
ladies: "Will Sir Willoughby be disengaged?"

They consulted. "He is with Vernon. We will send to him."

The bell was rung.

"I have had the gratification of making the acquaintance of your
daughter, Mr. Dale, a most estimable lady," said Dr. Middleton.

Mr. Dale bowed. "She is honoured by your praises, sir. To the best of
my belief--I speak as a father--she merits them. Hitherto I have had no
doubts."

"Of Laetitia?" exclaimed the ladies; and spoke of her as gentleness and
goodness incarnate.

"Hitherto I have devoutly thought so," said Mr. Dale.

"Surely she is the very sweetest nurse, the most devoted of daughters."

"As far as concerns her duty to her father, I can say she is that,
ladies."

"In all her relations, Mr. Dale!"

"It is my prayer," he said.

The footman appeared. He announced that Sir Willoughby was in the
laboratory with Mr. Whitford, and the door locked.

"Domestic business," the ladies remarked. "You know Willoughby's
diligent attention to affairs, Mr. Dale."

"He is well?" Mr. Dale inquired.

"In excellent health."

"Body and mind?"

"But, dear Mr. Dale, he is never ill."

"Ah! for one to hear that who is never well! And Mr. Whitford is quite
sound?"

"Sound? The question alarms me for myself," said Dr. Middleton. "Sound
as our Constitution, the Credit of the country, the reputation of our
Prince of poets. I pray you to have no fears for him."

Mr. Dale gave the mild little sniff of a man thrown deeper into
perplexity.

He said: "Mr. Whitford works his head; he is a hard student; he may not
be always, if I may so put it, at home on worldly affairs."

"Dismiss that defamatory legend of the student, Mr. Dale; and take my
word for it, that he who persistently works his head has the strongest
for all affairs."

"Ah! Your daughter, sir, is here?"

"My daughter is here, sir, and will be most happy to present her
respects to the father of her friend, Miss Dale."

"They are friends?"

"Very cordial friends."

Mr. Dale administered another feebly pacifying sniff to himself.

"Laetitia!" he sighed, in apostrophe, and swept his forehead with a
hand seen to shake.

The ladies asked him anxiously whether he felt the heat of the room;
and one offered him a smelling-bottle.

He thanked them. "I can hold out until Sir Willoughby comes."

"We fear to disturb him when his door is locked, Mr. Dale; but, if you
wish it, we will venture on a message. You have really no bad news of
our Laetitia? She left us hurriedly this morning, without any
leave-taking, except a word to one of the maids, that your condition
required her immediate presence."

"My condition! And now her door is locked to me! We have spoken through
the door, and that is all. I stand sick and stupefied between two
locked doors, neither of which will open, it appears, to give me the
enlightenment I need more than medicine."

"Dear me!" cried Dr. Middleton, "I am struck by your description of
your position, Mr. Dale. It would aptly apply to our humanity of the
present generation; and were these the days when I sermonized, I could
propose that it should afford me an illustration for the pulpit. For my
part, when doors are closed I try not their locks; and I attribute my
perfect equanimity, health even, to an uninquiring acceptation of the
fact that they are closed to me. I read my page by the light I have. On
the contrary, the world of this day, if I may presume to quote you for
my purpose, is heard knocking at those two locked doors of the secret
of things on each side of us, and is beheld standing sick and stupefied
because it has got no response to its knocking. Why, sir, let the world
compare the diverse fortunes of the beggar and the postman: knock to
give, and it is opened unto you: knock to crave, and it continues shut.
I say, carry a letter to your locked door, and you shall have a good
reception: but there is none that is handed out. For which reason
. . ."

Mr. Dale swept a perspiring forehead, and extended his hand in
supplication. "I am an invalid, Dr. Middleton," he said. "I am unable
to cope with analogies. I have but strength for the slow digestion of
facts."

"For facts, we are bradypeptics to a man, sir. We know not yet if
nature be a fact or an effort to master one. The world has not yet
assimilated the first fact it stepped on. We are still in the endeavour
to make good blood of the fact of our being." Pressing his hands at his
temples, Mr. Dale moaned: "My head twirls; I did unwisely to come out.
I came on an impulse; I trust, honourable. I am unfit--I cannot follow
you, Dr. Middleton. Pardon me."

"Nay, sir, let me say, from my experience of my countrymen, that if you
do not follow me and can abstain from abusing me in consequence, you
are magnanimous," the Rev. Doctor replied, hardly consenting to let go
the man he had found to indemnify him for his gallant service of
acquiescing as a mute to the ladies, though he knew his breathing
robustfulness to be as an East wind to weak nerves, and himself an
engine of punishment when he had been torn for a day from his books.

Miss Eleanor said: "The enlightenment you need, Mr. Dale? Can we
enlighten you?"

"I think not," he answered, faintly. "I think I will wait for Sir
Willoughby . . . or Mr. Whitford. If I can keep my strength. Or could I
exchange--I fear to break down--two words with the young lady who is,
was . . ."

"Miss Middleton, my daughter, sir? She shall be at your disposition; I
will bring her to you." Dr. Middleton stopped at the window. "She, it
is true, may better know the mind of Miss Dale than I. But I flatter
myself I know the gentleman better. I think, Mr. Dale, addressing you
as the lady's father, you will find me a persuasive, I could be an
impassioned, advocate in his interests."

Mr. Dale was confounded; the weakly sapling caught in a gust falls back
as he did.

"Advocate?" he said. He had little breath.

"His impassioned advocate, I repeat; for I have the highest opinion of
him. You see, sir, I am acquainted with the circumstances. I believe,"
Dr. Middleton half turned to the ladies, "we must, until your potent
inducements, Mr. Dale, have been joined to my instances, and we
overcome what feminine scruples there may be, treat the circumstances
as not generally public. Our Strephon may be chargeable with shyness.
But if for the present it is incumbent on us, in proper consideration
for the parties, not to be nominally precise, it is hardly requisite in
this household that we should be. He is now for protesting indifference
to the state. I fancy we understand that phase of amatory frigidity.
Frankly, Mr. Dale, I was once in my life myself refused by a lady, and
I was not indignant, merely indifferent to the marriage-tie."

"My daughter has refused him, sir?"

"Temporarily it would appear that she has declined the proposal."

"He was at liberty? . . . he could honourably? . . ."

"His best friend and nearest relative is your guarantee."

"I know it; I hear so; I am informed of that: I have heard of the
proposal, and that he could honourably make it. Still, I am helpless, I
cannot move, until I am assured that my daughter's reasons are such as
a father need not underline."

"Does the lady, perchance, equivocate?"

"I have not seen her this morning; I rise late. I hear an astounding
account of the cause for her departure from Patterne, and I find her
door locked to me--no answer."

"It is that she had no reasons to give, and she feared the demand for
them."

"Ladies!" dolorously exclaimed Mr. Dale.

"We guess the secret, we guess it!" they exclaimed in reply; and they
looked smilingly, as Dr. Middleton looked.

"She had no reasons to give?" Mr. Dale spelled these words to his
understanding. "Then, sir, she knew you not adverse?"

"Undoubtedly, by my high esteem for the gentleman, she must have known
me not adverse. But she would not consider me a principal. She could
hardly have conceived me an obstacle. I am simply the gentleman's
friend. A zealous friend, let me add."

Mr. Dale put out an imploring hand; it was too much for him.

"Pardon me; I have a poor head. And your daughter the same, sir?"

"We will not measure it too closely, but I may say, my daughter the
same, sir. And likewise--may I not add--these ladies."

Mr. Dale made sign that he was overfilled. "Where am I! And Laetitia
refused him?"

"Temporarily, let us assume. Will it not partly depend on you, Mr.
Dale?"

"But what strange things have been happening during my daughter's
absence from the cottage!" cried Mr. Dale, betraying an elixir in his
veins. "I feel that I could laugh if I did not dread to be thought
insane. She refused his hand, and he was at liberty to offer it? My
girl! We are all on our heads. The fairy-tales were right and the
lesson-books were wrong. But it is really, it is really very
demoralizing. An invalid--and I am one, and no momentary exhilaration
will be taken for the contrary--clings to the idea of stability, order.
The slightest disturbance of the wonted course of things unsettles him.
Why, for years I have been prophesying it! and for years I have had
everything against me, and now when it is confirmed, I am wondering
that I must not call myself a fool!"

"And for years, dear Mr. Dale, this union, in spite of counter-currents
and human arrangements, has been our Willoughby's constant
preoccupation," said Miss Eleanor.

"His most cherished aim," said Miss Isabel.

"The name was not spoken by me," said Dr. Middleton.

"But it is out, and perhaps better out, if we would avoid the chance of
mystifications. I do not suppose we are seriously committing a breach
of confidence, though he might have wished to mention it to you first
himself. I have it from Willoughby that last night he appealed to your
daughter, Mr. Dale--not for the first time, if I apprehend him
correctly; and unsuccessfully. He despairs. I do not: supposing, that
is, your assistance vouchsafed to us. And I do not despair, because the
gentleman is a gentleman of worth, of acknowledged worth. You know him
well enough to grant me that. I will bring you my daughter to help me
in sounding his praises."

Dr Middleton stepped through the window to the lawn on an elastic foot,
beaming with the happiness he felt charged to confer on his friend Mr.
Whitford.

"Ladies! it passes all wonders," Mr. Dale gasped.

"Willoughby's generosity does pass all wonders," they said in chorus.

The door opened; Lady Busshe and Lady Culmer were announced.



CHAPTER XLV

THE PATTERNE LADIES: MR. DALE: LADY BUSSHE AND LADY CULMER: WITH MRS.
MOUNTSTUART JENKINSON

Lady Busshe and Lady Culmer entered spying to right and left. At the
sight of Mr. Dale in the room Lady Busshe murmured to her friend:
"Confirmation!"

Lady Culmer murmured: "Corney is quite reliable."

"The man is his own best tonic."

"He is invaluable for the country."

Miss Eleanor and Miss Isabel greeted them.

The amiability of the Patterne ladies combined with their total eclipse
behind their illustrious nephew invited enterprising women of the world
to take liberties, and they were not backward.

Lady Busshe said: "Well? the news! we have the outlines. Don't be
astonished: we know the points: we have heard the gun. I could have
told you as much yesterday. I saw it. And I guessed it the day before.
Oh, I do believe in fatalities now. Lady Culmer and I agree to take
that view: it is the simplest. Well, and are you satisfied, my dears?"

The ladies grimaced interrogatively: "With what?"

"With it? with all! with her! with him!"

"Our Willoughby?"

"Can it be possible that they require a dose of Corney?" Lady Busshe
remarked to Lady Culmer.

"They play discretion to perfection," said Lady Culmer. "But, my dears,
we are in the secret."

"How did she behave?" whispered Lady Busshe. "No high flights and
flutters, I do hope. She was well-connected, they say; though I don't
comprehend what they mean by a line of scholars--one thinks of a row of
pinafores: and she was pretty."

"That is well enough at the start. It never will stand against brains.
He had the two in the house to contrast them, and . . . the result! A
young woman with brains--in a house--beats all your beauties. Lady
Culmer and I have determined on that view. He thought her a delightful
partner for a dance, and found her rather tiresome at the end of the
gallopade. I saw it yesterday, clear as daylight. She did not
understand him, and he did understand her. That will be our report."

"She is young: she will learn," said the ladies uneasily, but in total
ignorance of her meaning.

"And you are charitable, and always were. I remember you had a good
word for that girl Durham."

Lady Busshe crossed the room to Mr. Dale, who was turning over leaves
of a grand book of the heraldic devices of our great Families.

"Study it," she said, "study it, my dear Mr. Dale; you are in it, by
right of possessing a clever and accomplished daughter. At page 300
you will find the Patterne crest. And mark me, she will drag you into
the peerage before she has done--relatively, you know. Sir Willoughby
and wife will not be contented to sit down and manage the estates. Has
not Laetitia immense ambition? And very creditable, I say."

Mr. Dale tried to protest something. He shut the book, examining the
binding, flapped the cover with a finger, hoped her ladyship was in
good health, alluded to his own and the strangeness of the bird out of
the cage.

"You will probably take up your residence here, in a larger and
handsomer cage. Mr. Dale."

He shook his head. "Do I apprehend . . ." he said.

"I know," said she.

"Dear me, can it be?"

Mr. Dale gazed upward, with the feelings of one awakened late to see a
world alive in broad daylight.

Lady Busshe dropped her voice. She took the liberty permitted to her
with an inferior in station, while treating him to a tone of
familiarity in acknowledgment of his expected rise; which is high
breeding, or the exact measurement of social dues.

"Laetitia will be happy, you may be sure. I love to see a long and
faithful attachment rewarded--love it! Her tale is the triumph of
patience. Far above Grizzel! No woman will be ashamed of pointing to
Lady Patterne. You are uncertain? You are in doubt? Let me hear--as low
as you like. But there is no doubt of the new shifting of the
scene?--no doubt of the proposal? Dear Mr. Dale! a very little louder.
You are here because--? of course you wish to see Sir Willoughby. She?
I did not catch you quite. She? . . . it seems, you say . . . ?"

Lady Culmer said to the Patterne ladies:--

"You must have had a distressing time. These affairs always mount up to
a climax, unless people are very well bred. We saw it coming.
Naturally we did not expect such a transformation of brides: who could?
If I had laid myself down on my back to think, I should have had it. I
am unerring when I set to speculating on my back. One is cooler: ideas
come; they have not to be forced. That is why I am brighter on a dull
winter afternoon, on the sofa, beside my tea-service, than at any other
season. However, your trouble is over. When did the Middletons leave?"

"The Middletons leave?" said the ladies.

"Dr. Middleton and his daughter."

"They have not left us."

"The Middletons are here?"

"They are here, yes. Why should they have left Patterne?"

"Why?"

"Yes. They are likely to stay some days longer."

"Goodness!"

"There is no ground for any report to the contrary, Lady Culmer."

"No ground!"

Lady Culmer called out to Lady Busshe.

A cry came back from that startled dame.

"She has refused him!"

"Who?"

"She has."

"She?--Sir Willoughby?"

"Refused!--declines the honour."

"Oh, never! No, that carries the incredible beyond romance. But is he
perfectly at . . ."

"Quite, it seems. And she was asked in due form and refused."

"No, and no again!"

"My dear, I have it from Mr. Dale."

"Mr. Dale, what can be the signification of her conduct?"

"Indeed, Lady Culmer," said Mr. Dale, not unpleasantly agitated by the
interest he excited, in spite of his astonishment at a public
discussion of the matter in this house, "I am in the dark. Her father
should know, but I do not. Her door is locked to me; I have not seen
her. I am absolutely in the dark. I am a recluse. I have forgotten the
ways of the world. I should have supposed her father would first have
been addressed."

"Tut-tut. Modern gentlemen are not so formal; they are creatures of
impulse and take a pride in it. He spoke. We settle that. But where did
you get this tale of a refusal?"

"I have it from Dr. Middleton."

"From Dr. Middleton?" shouted Lady Busshe.

"The Middletons are here," said Lady Culmer.

"What whirl are we in?" Lady Busshe got up, ran two or three steps and
seated herself in another chair. "Oh! do let us proceed upon system. If
not we shall presently be rageing; we shall be dangerous. The
Middletons are here, and Dr. Middleton himself communicates to Mr. Dale
that Laetitia Dale has refused the hand of Sir Willoughby, who is
ostensibly engaged to his own daughter! And pray, Mr. Dale, how did
Dr. Middleton speak of it? Compose yourself; there is no violent hurry,
though our sympathy with you and our interest in all the parties does
perhaps agitate us a little. Quite at your leisure--speak!"

"Madam . . . Lady Busshe." Mr. Dale gulped a ball in his throat. "I see
no reason why I should not speak. I do not see how I can have been
deluded. The Miss Patternes heard him. Dr. Middleton began upon it, not
I. I was unaware, when I came, that it was a refusal. I had been
informed that there was a proposal. My authority for the tale was
positive. The object of my visit was to assure myself of the integrity
of my daughter's conduct. She had always the highest sense of honour.
But passion is known to mislead, and there was this most strange
report. I feared that our humblest apologies were due to Dr. Middleton
and his daughter. I know the charm Laetitia can exercise. Madam, in the
plainest language, without a possibility of my misapprehending him, Dr.
Middleton spoke of himself as the advocate of the suitor for my
daughter's hand. I have a poor head. I supposed at once an amicable
rupture between Sir Willoughby and Miss Middleton, or that the version
which had reached me of their engagement was not strictly accurate. My
head is weak. Dr. Middleton's language is trying to a head like mine;
but I can speak positively on the essential points: he spoke of himself
as ready to be the impassioned advocate of the suitor for my daughter's
hand. Those were his words. I understood him to entreat me to intercede
with her. Nay, the name was mentioned. There was no concealment. I am
certain there could not be a misapprehension. And my feelings were
touched by his anxiety for Sir Willoughby's happiness. I attributed it
to a sentiment upon which I need not dwell. Impassioned advocate, he
said."

"We are in a perfect maelstrom!" cried Lady Busshe, turning to
everybody.

"It is a complete hurricane!" cried Lady Culmer.

A light broke over the faces of the Patterne ladies. They exchanged it
with one another.

They had been so shocked as to be almost offended by Lady Busshe, but
their natural gentleness and habitual submission rendered them unequal
to the task of checking her.

"Is it not," said Miss Eleanor, "a misunderstanding that a change of
names will rectify?"

"This is by no means the first occasion," said Miss Isabel, "that
Willoughby has pleaded for his cousin Vernon."

"We deplore extremely the painful error into which Mr. Dale has
fallen."

"It springs, we now perceive, from an entire misapprehension of Dr.
Middleton."

"Vernon was in his mind. It was clear to us."

"Impossible that it could have been Willoughby!"

"You see the impossibility, the error!"

"And the Middletons here!" said Lady Busshe. "Oh! if we leave
unilluminated we shall be the laughing-stock of the county. Mr. Dale,
please, wake up. Do you see? You may have been mistaken."

"Lady Busshe," he woke up; "I may have mistaken Dr. Middleton; he has a
language that I can compare only to a review-day of the field forces.
But I have the story on authority that I cannot question: it is
confirmed by my daughter's unexampled behaviour. And if I live through
this day I shall look about me as a ghost to-morrow."

"Dear Mr. Dale!" said the Patterne ladies, compassionately. Lady Busshe
murmured to them: "You know the two did not agree; they did not get on:
I saw it; I predicted it."

"She will understand him in time," said they.

"Never. And my belief is, they have parted by consent, and Letty Dale
wins the day at last. Yes, now I do believe it."

The ladies maintained a decided negative, but they knew too much not to
feel perplexed, and they betrayed it, though they said: "Dear Lady
Busshe! is it credible, in decency?"

"Dear Mrs. Mountstuart!" Lady Busshe invoked her great rival appearing
among them: "You come most opportunely; we are in a state of
inextricable confusion: we are bordering on frenzy. You, and none but
you, can help us. You know, you always know; we hang on you. Is there
any truth in it? a particle?"

Mrs. Mountstuart seated herself regally "Ah, Mr. Dale!" she said,
inclining to him. "Yes, dear Lady Busshe, there is a particle."

"Now, do not roast us. You can; you have the art. I have the whole
story. That is, I have a part. I mean, I have the outlines, I cannot be
deceived, but you can fill them in, I know you can. I saw it yesterday.
Now, tell us, tell us. It must be quite true or utterly false. Which is
it?"

"Be precise."

"His fatality! you called her. Yes, I was sceptical. But here we have
it all come round again, and if the tale is true, I shall own you
infallible. Has he?--and she?"

"Both."

"And the Middletons here? They have not gone; they keep the field. And
more astounding, she refuses him. And to add to it, Dr. Middleton
intercedes with Mr. Dale for Sir Willoughby."

"Dr. Middleton intercedes!" This was rather astonishing to Mrs.
Mountstuart.

"For Vernon," Miss Eleanor emphasized.

"For Vernon Whitford, his cousin." said Miss Isabel, still more
emphatically.

"Who," said Mrs. Mountstuart, with a sovereign lift and turn of her
head, "speaks of a refusal?"

"I have it from Mr. Dale," said Lady Busshe.

"I had it, I thought, distinctly from Dr. Middleton," said Mr. Dale.

"That Willoughby proposed to Laetitia for his cousin Vernon, Doctor
Middleton meant," said Miss Eleanor.

Her sister followed: "Hence this really ridiculous misconception!
--sad, indeed," she added, for balm to Mr. Dale.

"Willoughby was Vernon's proxy. His cousin, if not his first, is ever
the second thought with him."

"But can we continue . . . ?"

"Such a discussion!"

Mrs. Mountstuart gave them a judicial hearing. They were regarded in
the county as the most indulgent of nonentities, and she as little as
Lady Busshe was restrained from the burning topic in their presence.
She pronounced:

"Each party is right, and each is wrong."

A dry: "I shall shriek!" came from Lady Busshe.

"Cruel!" groaned Lady Culmer.

"Mixed, you are all wrong. Disentangled, you are each of you right. Sir
Willoughby does think of his cousin Vernon; he is anxious to establish
him; he is the author of a proposal to that effect."

"We know it!" the Patterne ladies exclaimed. "And Laetitia rejected
poor Vernon once more!"

"Who spoke of Miss Dale's rejection of Mr. Whitford?"

"Is he not rejected?" Lady Culmer inquired.

"It is in debate, and at this moment being decided."

"Oh! do he seated, Mr. Dale," Lady Busshe implored him, rising to
thrust him back to his chair if necessary. "Any dislocation, and we are
thrown out again! We must hold together if this riddle is ever to be
read. Then, dear Mrs. Mountstuart, we are to say that there is-no truth
in the other story?"

"You are to say nothing of the sort, dear Lady Busshe."

"Be merciful! And what of the fatality?"

"As positive as the Pole to the needle."

"She has not refused him?"

"Ask your own sagacity."

"Accepted?"

"Wait."

"And all the world's ahead of me! Now, Mrs. Mountstuart, you are
oracle. Riddles, if you like, only speak. If we can't have corn, why,
give us husks."

"Is any one of us able to anticipate events, Lady Busshe?"

"Yes, I believe that you are. I bow to you. I do sincerely. So it's
another person for Mr. Whitford? You nod. And it is our Laetitia for
Sir Willoughby? You smile. You would not deceive me? A very little,
and I run about crazed and howl at your doors. And Dr. Middleton is
made to play blind man in the midst? And the other person is--now I see
day! An amicable rupture, and a smooth new arrangement. She has money;
she was never the match for our hero; never; I saw it yesterday, and
before, often; and so he hands her over--tuthe-rum-tum-tum,
tuthe-rum-tum-tum," Lady Busshe struck a quick march on her knee. "Now
isn't that clever guessing? The shadow of a clue for me. And because I
know human nature. One peep, and I see the combination in a minute. So
he keeps the money in the family, becomes a benefactor to his cousin by
getting rid of the girl, and succumbs to his fatality. Rather a pity he
let it ebb and flow so long. Time counts the tides, you know. But it
improves the story. I defy any other county in the kingdom to produce
one fresh and living to equal it. Let me tell you I suspected Mr.
Whitford, and I hinted it yesterday."

"Did you indeed!" said Mrs. Mountstuart, humouring her excessive
acuteness.

"I really did. There is that dear good man on his feet again. And looks
agitated again."

Mr. Dale had been compelled both by the lady's voice and his interest
in the subject to listen. He had listened more than enough; he was
exceedingly nervous. He held on by his chair, afraid to quit his
moorings, and "Manners!" he said to himself unconsciously aloud, as he
cogitated on the libertine way with which these chartered great ladies
of the district discussed his daughter. He was heard and unnoticed. The
supposition, if any, would have been that he was admonishing himself.
At this juncture Sir Willoughby entered the drawing-room by the garden
window, and simultaneously Dr. Middleton by the door.



CHAPTER XLVI

THE SCENE OF SIR WILLOUGHBY'S GENERALSHIP

History, we may fear, will never know the qualities of leadership
inherent in Sir Willoughby Patterne to fit him for the post of
Commander of an army, seeing that he avoided the fatigues of the
service and preferred the honours bestowed in his country upon the
quiet administrators of their own estates: but his possession of
particular gifts, which are military, and especially of the proleptic
mind, which is the stamp and sign-warrant of the heaven-sent General,
was displayed on every urgent occasion when, in the midst of
difficulties likely to have extinguished one less alert than he to the
threatening aspect of disaster, he had to manoeuvre himself.

He had received no intimation of Mr. Dale's presence in his house, nor
of the arrival of the dreaded women Lady Busshe and Lady Culmer: his
locked door was too great a terror to his domestics. Having finished
with Vernon, after a tedious endeavour to bring the fellow to a sense
of the policy of the step urged on him, he walked out on the lawn with
the desire to behold the opening of an interview not promising to lead
to much, and possibly to profit by its failure. Clara had been
prepared, according to his directions, by Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson,
as Vernon had been prepared by him. His wishes, candidly and kindly
expressed both to Vernon and Mrs Mountstuart, were, that since the girl
appeared disinclined to make him a happy man, she would make one of his
cousin. Intimating to Mrs. Mountstuart that he would be happier
without her, he alluded to the benefit of the girl's money to poor old
Vernon, the general escape from a scandal if old Vernon could manage to
catch her as she dropped, the harmonious arrangement it would be for
all parties. And only on the condition of her taking Vernon would he
consent to give her up. This he said imperatively, adding that such was
the meaning of the news she had received relating to Laetitia Dale.
From what quarter had she received it? he asked. She shuffled in her
reply, made a gesture to signify that it was in the air, universal, and
fell upon the proposed arrangement. He would listen to none of Mrs.
Mountstuart's woman-of-the-world instances of the folly of pressing it
upon a girl who had shown herself a girl of spirit. She foretold the
failure. He would not be advised; he said: "It is my scheme"; and
perhaps the look of mad benevolence about it induced the lady to try
whether there was a chance that it would hit the madness in our nature,
and somehow succeed or lead to a pacification. Sir Willoughby
condescended to arrange things thus for Clara's good; he would then
proceed to realize his own. Such was the face he put upon it. We can
wear what appearance we please before the world until we are found out,
nor is the world's praise knocking upon hollowness always hollow music;
but Mrs Mountstuart's laudation of his kindness and simplicity
disturbed him; for though he had recovered from his rebuff enough to
imagine that Laetitia could not refuse him under reiterated pressure,
he had let it be supposed that she was a submissive handmaiden
throbbing for her elevation; and Mrs Mountstuart's belief in it
afflicted his recent bitter experience; his footing was not perfectly
secure. Besides, assuming it to be so, he considered the sort of prize
he had won; and a spasm of downright hatred of a world for which we
make mighty sacrifices to be repaid in a worn, thin, comparatively
valueless coin, troubled his counting of his gains. Laetitia, it was
true, had not passed through other hands in coming to him, as Vernon
would know it to be Clara's case: time only had worn her: but the
comfort of the reflection was annoyed by the physical contrast of the
two. Hence an unusual melancholy in his tone that Mrs. Mountstuart
thought touching. It had the scenic effect on her which greatly
contributes to delude the wits. She talked of him to Clara as being a
man who had revealed an unsuspected depth.

Vernon took the communication curiously. He seemed readier to be in
love with his benevolent relative than with the lady. He was confused,
undisguisedly moved, said the plan was impossible, out of the question,
but thanked Willoughby for the best of intentions, thanked him warmly.
After saying that the plan was impossible, the comical fellow allowed
himself to be pushed forth on the lawn to see how Miss Middleton might
have come out of her interview with Mrs. Mountstuart. Willoughby
observed Mrs. Mountstuart meet him, usher him to the place she had
quitted among the shrubs, and return to the open turf-spaces. He sprang
to her.

"She will listen." Mrs. Mountstuart said: "She likes him, respects him,
thinks he is a very sincere friend, clever, a scholar, and a good
mountaineer; and thinks you mean very kindly. So much I have impressed
on her, but I have not done much for Mr. Whitford."

"She consents to listen," said Willoughby, snatching at that as the
death-blow to his friend Horace.

"She consents to listen, because you have arranged it so that if she
declined she would be rather a savage."

"You think it will have no result?"

"None at all."

"Her listening will do."

"And you must be satisfied with it."

"We shall see."

"'Anything for peace', she says: and I don't say that a gentleman with
a tongue would not have a chance. She wishes to please you."

"Old Vernon has no tongue for women, poor fellow! You will have us be
spider or fly, and if a man can't spin a web all he can hope is not to
be caught in one. She knows his history, too, and that won't be in his
favour. How did she look when you left them?"

"Not so bright: like a bit of china that wants dusting. She looked a
trifle gauche, it struck me; more like a country girl with the hoyden
taming in her than the well-bred creature she is. I did not suspect her
to have feeling. You must remember, Sir Willoughby, that she has obeyed
your wishes, done her utmost: I do think we may say she has made some
amends; and if she is to blame she repents, and you will not insist too
far."

"I do insist," said he.

"Beneficent, but a tyrant!"

"Well, well." He did not dislike the character.

They perceived Dr. Middleton wandering over the lawn, and Willoughby
went to him to put him on the wrong track: Mrs. Mountstuart swept into
the drawing-room. Willoughby quitted the Rev. Doctor, and hung about
the bower where he supposed his pair of dupes had by this time ceased
to stutter mutually:--or what if they had found the word of harmony? He
could bear that, just bear it. He rounded the shrubs, and, behold, both
had vanished. The trellis decorated emptiness. His idea was, that they
had soon discovered their inability to be turtles: and desiring not to
lose a moment while Clara was fretted by the scene, he rushed to the
drawing-room with the hope of lighting on her there, getting her to
himself, and finally, urgently, passionately offering her the sole
alternative of what she had immediately rejected. Why had he not used
passion before, instead of limping crippled between temper and policy?
He was capable of it: as soon as imagination in him conceived his
personal feelings unwounded and unimperiled, the might of it inspired
him with heroical confidence, and Clara grateful, Clara softly moved,
led him to think of Clara melted. Thus anticipating her he burst into
the room.

One step there warned him that he was in the jaws of the world. We have
the phrase, that a man is himself under certain trying circumstances.
There is no need to say it of Sir Willoughby: he was thrice himself
when danger menaced, himself inspired him. He could read at a single
glance the Polyphemus eye in the general head of a company. Lady
Busshe, Lady Culmer, Mrs. Mountstuart, Mr. Dale, had a similarity in
the variety of their expressions that made up one giant eye for him
perfectly, if awfully, legible. He discerned the fact that his demon
secret was abroad, universal. He ascribed it to fate. He was in the
jaws of the world, on the world's teeth. This time he thought Laetitia
must have betrayed him, and bowing to Lady Busshe and Lady Culmer,
gallantly pressing their fingers and responding to their becks and
archnesses, he ruminated on his defences before he should accost her
father. He did not want to be alone with the man, and he considered how
his presence might be made useful.

"I am glad to see you, Mr. Dale. Pray, be seated. Is it nature
asserting her strength? or the efficacy of medicine? I fancy it can't
be both. You have brought us back your daughter?"

Mr. Dale sank into a chair, unable to resist the hand forcing him.

"No, Sir Willoughby, no. I have not; I have not seen her since she came
home this morning from Patterne."

"Indeed? She is unwell?"

"I cannot say. She secludes herself."

"Has locked herself in," said Lady Busshe.

Willoughby threw her a smile. It made them intimate.

This was an advantage against the world, but an exposure of himself to
the abominable woman.

Dr. Middleton came up to Mr. Dale to apologize for not presenting his
daughter Clara, whom he could find neither in nor out of the house.

"We have in Mr. Dale, as I suspected," he said to Willoughby, "a stout
ally."

"If I may beg two minutes with you, Sir Willoughby," said Mr. Dale.

"Your visits are too rare for me to allow of your numbering the
minutes," Willoughby replied. "We cannot let Mr. Dale escape us now
that we have him, I think, Dr. Middleton."

"Not without ransom," said the Rev. Doctor.

Mr. Dale shook his head. "My strength, Sir Willoughby, will not sustain
me long."

"You are at home, Mr. Dale."

"Not far from home, in truth, but too far for an invalid beginning to
grow sensible of weakness."

"You will regard Patterne as your home, Mr. Dale," Willoughby repeated
for the world to hear.

"Unconditionally?" Dr. Middleton inquired, with a humourous air of
dissenting.

Willoughby gave him a look that was coldly courteous, and then he
looked at Lady Busshe. She nodded imperceptibly. Her eyebrows rose, and
Willoughby returned a similar nod.

Translated, the signs ran thus:

"--Pestered by the Rev. gentleman:--I see you are. Is the story I have
heard correct?--Possibly it may err in a few details."

This was fettering himself in loose manacles.

But Lady Busshe would not be satisfied with the compliment of the
intimate looks and nods. She thought she might still be behind Mrs.
Mountstuart; and she was a bold woman, and anxious about him,
half-crazed by the riddle of the pot she was boiling in, and having
very few minutes to spare. Not extremely reticent by nature, privileged
by station, and made intimate with him by his covert looks, she stood
up to him. "One word to an old friend. Which is the father of the
fortunate creature? I don't know how to behave to them." No time was
afforded him to be disgusted with her vulgarity and audacity.

He replied, feeling her rivet his gyves: "The house will be empty
to-morrow."

"I see. A decent withdrawal, and very well cloaked. We had a tale here
of her running off to decline the honour, afraid, or on her dignity or
something."

How was it that the woman was ready to accept the altered posture of
affairs in his house--if she had received a hint of them? He forgot
that he had prepared her in self-defence.

"From whom did you have that?" he asked.

"Her father. And the lady aunts declare it was the cousin she refused!"
Willoughby's brain turned over. He righted it for action, and crossed
the room to the ladies Eleanor and Isabel. His ears tingled. He and his
whole story discussed in public! Himself unroofed! And the marvel that
he of all men should be in such a tangle, naked and blown on, condemned
to use his cunningest arts to unwind and cover himself, struck him as
though the lord of his kind were running the gauntlet of a legion of
imps. He felt their lashes.

The ladies were talking to Mrs. Mountstuart and Lady Culmer of Vernon
and the suitableness of Laetitia to a scholar. He made sign to them,
and both rose.

"It is the hour for your drive. To the cottage! Mr. Dale is in. She
must come. Her sick father! No delay, going or returning. Bring her
here at once."

"Poor man!" they sighed; and "Willoughby," said one, and the other
said: "There is a strange misconception you will do well to correct."

They were about to murmur what it was. He swept his hand round, and
excusing themselves to their guests, obediently they retired.

Lady Busshe at his entreaty remained, and took a seat beside Lady
Culmer and Mrs. Mountstuart.

She said to the latter: "You have tried scholars. What do you think?"

"Excellent, but hard to mix," was the reply.

"I never make experiments," said Lady Culmer.

"Some one must!" Mrs. Mountstuart groaned over her dull dinner-party.

Lady Busshe consoled her. "At any rate, the loss of a scholar is no
loss to the county."

"They are well enough in towns," Lady Culmer said.

"And then I am sure you must have them by themselves."

"We have nothing to regret."

"My opinion."

The voice of Dr. Middleton in colloquy with Mr. Dale swelled on a
melodious thunder: "For whom else should I plead as the passionate
advocate I proclaimed myself to you, sir? There is but one man known to
me who would move me to back him upon such an adventure. Willoughby,
join me. I am informing Mr. Dale . . ."

Willoughby stretched his hands out to Mr. Dale to support him on his
legs, though he had shown no sign of a wish to rise.

"You are feeling unwell, Mr. Dale."

"Do I look very ill, Sir Willoughby?"

"It will pass. Laetitia will be with us in twenty minutes." Mr. Dale
struck his hands in a clasp. He looked alarmingly ill, and
satisfactorily revealed to his host how he could be made to look so.

"I was informing Mr. Dale that the petitioner enjoys our concurrent
good wishes: and mine in no degree less than yours, Willoughby,"
observed Dr. Middleton, whose billows grew the bigger for a check. He
supposed himself speaking confidentially. "Ladies have the trick, they
have, I may say, the natural disposition for playing enigma now and
again. Pressure is often a sovereign specific. Let it be tried upon her
all round from every radiating line of the circle. You she refuses.
Then I venture to propose myself to appeal to her. My daughter has
assuredly an esteem for the applicant that will animate a woman's
tongue in such a case. The ladies of the house will not be backward.
Lastly, if necessary, we trust the lady's father to add his instances.
My prescription is, to fatigue her negatives; and where no rooted
objection exists, I maintain it to be the unfailing receipt for the
conduct of the siege. No woman can say No forever. The defence has not
such resources against even a single assailant, and we shall have
solved the problem of continuous motion before she will have learned to
deny in perpetuity. That I stand on."

Willoughby glanced at Mrs. Mountstuart.

"What is that?" she said. "Treason to our sex, Dr. Middleton?"

"I think I heard that no woman can say No forever!" remarked Lady
Busshe.

"To a loyal gentleman, ma'am: assuming the field of the recurring
request to be not unholy ground; consecrated to affirmatives rather."

Dr Middleton was attacked by three angry bees. They made him say yes
and no alternately so many times that he had to admit in men a shiftier
yieldingness than women were charged with.

Willoughby gesticulated as mute chorus on the side of the ladies; and a
little show of party spirit like that, coming upon their excitement
under the topic, inclined them to him genially. He drew Mr. Dale away
while the conflict subsided in sharp snaps of rifles and an interval
rejoinder of a cannon. Mr. Dale had shown by signs that he was growing
fretfully restive under his burden of doubt.

"Sir Willoughby, I have a question. I beg you to lead me where I may
ask it. I know my head is weak."

"Mr. Dale, it is answered when I say that my house is your home, and
that Laetitia will soon be with us."

"Then this report is true?"

"I know nothing of reports. You are answered."

"Can my daughter be accused of any shadow of falseness, dishonourable
dealing?"

"As little as I."

Mr. Dale scanned his face. He saw no shadow.

"For I should go to my grave bankrupt if that could be said of her; and
I have never yet felt poor, though you know the extent of a pensioner's
income. Then this tale of a refusal . . . ?"

"Is nonsense."

"She has accepted?"

"There are situations, Mr. Dale, too delicate to be clothed in positive
definitions."

"Ah, Sir Willoughby, but it becomes a father to see that his daughter
is not forced into delicate situations. I hope all is well. I am
confused. It may be my head. She puzzles me. You are not . . . Can I
ask it here? You are quite . . . ? Will you moderate my anxiety? My
infirmities must excuse me."

Sir Willoughby conveyed by a shake of the head and a pressure of Mr.
Dale's hand, that he was not, and that he was quite.

"Dr Middleton?" said Mr. Dale.

"He leaves us to-morrow."

"Really!" The invalid wore a look as if wine had been poured into him.
He routed his host's calculations by calling to the Rev. Doctor. "We
are to lose you, sir?"

Willoughby attempted an interposition, but Dr. Middleton crashed
through it like the lordly organ swallowing a flute.

"Not before I score my victory, Mr. Dale, and establish my friend upon
his rightful throne."

"You do not leave to-morrow, sir?"

"Have you heard, sir, that I leave to-morrow?"

Mr. Dale turned to Sir Willoughby.

The latter said: "Clara named to-day. To-morrow I thought preferable."

"Ah!" Dr. Middleton towered on the swelling exclamation, but with no
dark light. He radiated splendidly. "Yes, then, to-morrow. That is, if
we subdue the lady."

He advanced to Willoughby, seized his hand, squeezed it, thanked him,
praised him. He spoke under his breath, for a wonder; but: "We are in
your debt lastingly, my friend", was heard, and he was impressive, he
seemed subdued, and saying aloud: "Though I should wish to aid in the
reduction of that fortress", he let it be seen that his mind was rid of
a load.

Dr. Middleton partly stupefied Willoughby by his way of taking it, but
his conduct was too serviceable to allow of speculation on his
readiness to break the match. It was the turning-point of the
engagement.

Lady Busshe made a stir.

"I cannot keep my horses waiting any longer," she said, and beckoned.
Sir Willoughby was beside her immediately.

"You are admirable! perfect! Don't ask me to hold my tongue. I retract,
I recant. It is a fatality. I have resolved upon that view. You could
stand the shot of beauty, not of brains. That is our report. There! And
it's delicious to feel that the county wins you. No tea. I cannot
possibly wait. And, oh! here she is. I must have a look at her. My dear
Laetitia Dale!"

Willoughby hurried to Mr. Dale.

"You are not to be excited, sir: compose yourself. You will recover and
be strong to-morrow: you are at home; you are in your own house; you
are in Laetitia's drawing-room. All will be clear to-morrow. Till
to-morrow we talk riddles by consent. Sit, I beg. You stay with us."

He met Laetitia and rescued her from Lady Busshe, murmuring, with the
air of a lover who says, "my love! my sweet!" that she had done rightly
to come and come at once. Her father had been thrown into the proper
condition of clammy nervousness to create the impression. Laetitia's
anxiety sat prettily on her long eyelashes as she bent over him in his
chair.

Hereupon Dr. Corney appeared; and his name had a bracing effect on Mr.
Dale. "Corney has come to drive me to the cottage," he said. "I am
ashamed of this public exhibition of myself, my dear. Let us go. My
head is a poor one."

Dr. Corney had been intercepted. He broke from Sir Willoughby with a
dozen little nods of accurate understanding of him, even to beyond the
mark of the communications. He touched his patient's pulse lightly,
briefly sighed with professional composure, and pronounced: "Rest. Must
not be moved. No, no, nothing serious," he quieted Laetitia's fears,
"but rest, rest. A change of residence for a night will tone him. I
will bring him a draught in the course of the evening. Yes, yes, I'll
fetch everything wanted from the cottage for you and for him. Repose
on Corney's forethought."

"You are sure, Dr. Corney?" said Laetitia, frightened on her father's
account and on her own.

"Which aspect will be the best for Mr. Dale's bedroom?" the hospitable
ladies Eleanor and Isabel inquired.

"Southeast, decidedly: let him have the morning sun: a warm air, a
vigorous air, and a bright air, and the patient wakes and sings in his
bed."

Still doubtful whether she was in a trap, Laetitia whispered to her
father of the privacy and comforts of his home. He replied to her that
he thought he would rather be in his own home.

Dr Corney positively pronounced No to it.

Laetitia breathed again of home, but with the sigh of one overborne.

The ladies Eleanor and Isabel took the word from Willoughby, and said:
"But you are at home, my dear. This is your home. Your father will be
at least as well attended here as at the cottage."

She raised her eyelids on them mournfully, and by chance diverted her
look to Dr. Middleton, quite by chance.

It spoke eloquently to the assembly of all that Willoughby desired to
be imagined.

"But there is Crossjay," she cried. "My cousin has gone, and the boy is
left alone. I cannot have him left alone. If we, if, Dr. Corney, you
are sure it is unsafe for papa to be moved to-day, Crossjay must . . .
he cannot be left."

"Bring him with you, Corney," said Sir Willoughby; and the little
doctor heartily promised that he would, in the event of his finding
Crossjay at the cottage, which he thought a distant probability.

"He gave me his word he would not go out till my return," said
Laetitia.

"And if Crossjay gave you his word," the accents of a new voice
vibrated close by, "be certain that he will not come back with Dr.
Corney unless he has authority in your handwriting."

Clara Middleton stepped gently to Laetitia, and with a manner that was
an embrace, as much as kissed her for what she was doing on behalf of
Crossjay. She put her lips in a pouting form to simulate saying: "Press
it."

"He is to come," said Laetitia.

"Then write him his permit."

There was a chatter about Crossjay and the sentinel true to his post
that he could be, during which Laetitia distressfully scribbled a line
for Dr. Corney to deliver to him. Clara stood near. She had rebuked
herself for want of reserve in the presence of Lady Busshe and Lady
Culmer, and she was guilty of a slightly excessive containment when she
next addressed Laetitia. It was, like Laetitia's look at Dr. Middleton,
opportune: enough to make a man who watched as Willoughby did a
fatalist for life: the shadow of a difference in her bearing toward
Laetitia sufficed to impute acting either to her present coolness or
her previous warmth. Better still, when Dr. Middleton said: "So we
leave to-morrow, my dear, and I hope you have written to the
Darletons," Clara flushed and beamed, and repressed her animation on a
sudden, with one grave look, that might be thought regretful, to where
Willoughby stood.

Chance works for us when we are good captains.

Willoughby's pride was high, though he knew himself to be keeping it up
like a fearfully dexterous juggler, and for an empty reward: but he
was in the toils of the world.

"Have you written? The post-bag leaves in half an hour," he addressed
her.

"We are expected, but I will write," she replied: and her not having
yet written counted in his favour.

She went to write the letter. Dr. Corney had departed on his mission to
fetch Crossjay and medicine. Lady Busshe was impatient to be gone.
"Corney," she said to Lady Culmer, "is a deadly gossip."

"Inveterate," was the answer.

"My poor horses!"

"Not the young pair of bays?"

"Luckily they are, my dear. And don't let me hear of dining to-night!"

Sir Willoughby was leading out Mr. Dale to a quiet room, contiguous to
the invalid gentleman's bedchamber. He resigned him to Laetitia in the
hall, that he might have the pleasure of conducting the ladies to their
carriage.

"As little agitation as possible. Corney will soon be back," he said,
bitterly admiring the graceful subservience of Laetitia's figure to her
father's weight on her arm.

He had won a desperate battle, but what had he won?

What had the world given him in return for his efforts to gain it?
Just a shirt, it might be said: simple scanty clothing, no warmth.
Lady Busshe was unbearable; she gabbled; she was ill-bred, permitted
herself to speak of Dr. Middleton as ineligible, no loss to the county.
And Mrs. Mountstuart was hardly much above her, with her inevitable
stroke of caricature:--"You see Doctor Middleton's pulpit scampering
after him with legs!" Perhaps the Rev. Doctor did punish the world for
his having forsaken his pulpit, and might be conceived as haunted by it
at his heels, but Willoughby was in the mood to abhor comic images; he
hated the perpetrators of them and the grinners. Contempt of this
laughing empty world, for which he had performed a monstrous
immolation, led him to associate Dr. Middleton in his mind, and Clara
too, with the desireable things he had sacrificed--a shape of youth and
health; a sparkling companion; a face of innumerable charms; and his
own veracity; his inner sense of his dignity; and his temper, and the
limpid frankness of his air of scorn, that was to him a visage of
candid happiness in the dim retrospect. Haply also he had sacrificed
more: he looked scientifically into the future: he might have
sacrificed a nameless more. And for what? he asked again. For the
favourable looks and tongues of these women whose looks and tongues he
detested!

"Dr Middleton says he is indebted to me: I am deeply in his debt," he
remarked.

"It is we who are in your debt for a lovely romance, my dear Sir
Willoughby," said Lady Busshe, incapable of taking a correction, so
thoroughly had he imbued her with his fiction, or with the belief that
she had a good story to circulate. Away she drove, rattling her tongue
to Lady Culmer.

"A hat and horn, and she would be in the old figure of a post-boy on a
hue-and-cry sheet," said Mrs. Mountstuart.

Willoughby thanked the great lady for her services, and she
complimented the polished gentleman on his noble self-possession. But
she complained at the same time of being defrauded of her "charmer"
Colonel De Craye, since luncheon. An absence of warmth in her
compliment caused Willoughby to shrink and think the wretched shirt he
had got from the world no covering after all: a breath flapped it.

"He comes to me to-morrow, I believe," she said, reflecting on her
superior knowledge of facts in comparison with Lady Busshe, who would
presently be hearing of something novel, and exclaiming: "So, that is
why you patronized the colonel!" And it was nothing of the sort, for
Mrs. Mountstuart could honestly say she was not the woman to make a
business of her pleasure.

"Horace is an enviable fellow," said Willoughby, wise in The Book,
which bids us ever, for an assuagement to fancy our friend's condition
worse than our own, and recommends the deglutition of irony as the most
balsamic for wounds in the whole moral pharmacopoeia.

"I don't know," she replied, with a marked accent of deliberation.

"The colonel is to have you to himself to-morrow!"

"I can't be sure of what I shall have in the colonel!"

"Your perpetual sparkler?"

Mrs. Mountstuart set her head in motion. She left the matter silent.

"I'll come for him in the morning," she said, and her carriage whirled
her off. Either she had guessed it, or Clara had confided to her the
treacherous passion of Horace De Craye.

However, the world was shut away from Patterne for the night.



CHAPTER XLVII

SIR WILLOUGHBY AND HIS FRIEND HORACE DE CRAYE

Willoughby shut himself up in his laboratory to brood awhile after the
conflict. Sounding through himself, as it was habitual with him to do,
for the plan most agreeable to his taste, he came on a strange
discovery among the lower circles of that microcosm. He was no longer
guided in his choice by liking and appetite: he had to put it on the
edge of a sharp discrimination, and try it by his acutest judgement
before it was acceptable to his heart: and knowing well the direction
of his desire, he was nevertheless unable to run two strides on a wish.
He had learned to read the world: his partial capacity for reading
persons had fled. The mysteries of his own bosom were bare to him; but
he could comprehend them only in their immediate relation to the world
outside. This hateful world had caught him and transformed him to a
machine. The discovery he made was, that in the gratification of the
egoistic instinct we may so beset ourselves as to deal a slaughtering
wound upon Self to whatsoever quarter we turn.

Surely there is nothing stranger in mortal experience. The man was
confounded. At the game of Chess it is the dishonour of our adversary
when we are stale-mated: but in life, combatting the world, such a
winning of the game questions our sentiments.

Willoughby's interpretation of his discovery was directed by pity: he
had no other strong emotion left in him. He pitied himself, and he
reached the conclusion that he suffered because he was active; he could
not be quiescent. Had it not been for his devotion to his house and
name, never would he have stood twice the victim of womankind. Had he
been selfish, he would have been the happiest of men! He said it aloud.
He schemed benevolently for his unborn young, and for the persons about
him: hence he was in a position forbidding a step under pain of injury
to his feelings. He was generous: otherwise would he not in scorn of
soul, at the outset, straight off have pitched Clara Middleton to the
wanton winds? He was faithful in his affection: Laetitia Dale was
beneath his roof to prove it. Both these women were examples of his
power of forgiveness, and now a tender word to Clara might fasten shame
on him--such was her gratitude! And if he did not marry Laetitia,
laughter would be devilish all around him--such was the world's!
Probably Vernon would not long be thankful for the chance which varied
the monotony of his days. What of Horace? Willoughby stripped to enter
the ring with Horace: he cast away disguise. That man had been the
first to divide him in the all but equal slices of his egoistic from
his amatory self: murder of his individuality was the crime of Horace
De Craye. And further, suspicion fixed on Horace (he knew not how,
except that The Book bids us be suspicious of those we hate) as the man
who had betrayed his recent dealings with Laetitia.

Willoughby walked the thoroughfares of the house to meet Clara and make
certain of her either for himself, or, if it must be, for Vernon,
before he took another step with Laetitia Dale. Clara could reunite
him, turn him once more into a whole and an animated man; and she might
be willing. Her willingness to listen to Vernon promised it. "A
gentleman with a tongue would have a chance", Mrs. Mountstuart had
said. How much greater the chance of a lover! For he had not yet
supplicated her: he had shown pride and temper. He could woo, he was a
torrential wooer. And it would be glorious to swing round on Lady
Busshe and the world, with Clara nestling under an arm, and protest
astonishment at the erroneous and utterly unfounded anticipations of
any other development. And it would righteously punish Laetitia.

Clara came downstairs, bearing her letter to Miss Darleton.

"Must it be posted?" Willoughby said, meeting her in the hall.

"They expect us any day, but it will be more comfortable for papa," was
her answer. She looked kindly in her new shyness.

She did not seem to think he had treated her contemptuously in flinging
her to his cousin, which was odd.

"You have seen Vernon?"

"It was your wish."

"You had a talk?"

"We conversed."

"A long one?"

"We walked some distance."

"Clara, I tried to make the best arrangement I could."

"Your intention was generous."

"He took no advantage of it?"

"It could not be treated seriously."

"It was meant seriously."

"There I see the generosity."

Willoughby thought this encomium, and her consent to speak on the
subject, and her scarcely embarrassed air and richness of tone in
speaking, very strange: and strange was her taking him quite in
earnest. Apparently she had no feminine sensation of the unwontedness
and the absurdity of the matter!

"But, Clara, am I to understand that he did not speak out?"

"We are excellent friends."

"To miss it, though his chance were the smallest!"

"You forget that it may not wear that appearance to him."

"He spoke not one word of himself?"

"No."

"Ah! the poor old fellow was taught to see it was hopeless--chilled.
May I plead? Will you step into the laboratory for a minute? We are two
sensible persons . . ."

"Pardon me, I must go to papa."

"Vernon's personal history, perhaps . . ."

"I think it honourable to him."

"Honourable!--'hem!"

"By comparison."

"Comparison with what?"

"With others."

He drew up to relieve himself of a critical and condemnatory expiration
of a certain length. This young lady knew too much. But how physically
exquisite she was!

"Could you, Clara, could you promise me--I hold to it. I must have it,
I know his shy tricks--promise me to give him ultimately another
chance? Is the idea repulsive to you?"

"It is one not to be thought of."

"It is not repulsive?"

"Nothing could be repulsive in Mr. Whitford."

"I have no wish to annoy you, Clara."

"I feel bound to listen to you, Willoughby. Whatever I can do to please
you, I will. It is my life-long duty."

"Could you, Clara, could you conceive it, could you simply conceive
it--give him your hand?"

"As a friend. Oh, yes."

"In marriage."

She paused. She, so penetrative of him when he opposed her, was
hoodwinked when he softened her feelings: for the heart, though the
clearest, is not the most constant instructor of the head; the heart,
unlike the often obtuser head, works for itself and not for the
commonwealth.

"You are so kind . . . I would do much . . ." she said.

"Would you accept him--marry him? He is poor."

"I am not ambitious of wealth."

"Would you marry him?"

"Marriage is not in my thoughts."

"But could you marry him?"

Willoughby expected no. In his expectation of it he hung inflated.

She said these words: "I could engage to marry no one else." His
amazement breathed without a syllable.

He flapped his arms, resembling for the moment those birds of enormous
body which attempt a rise upon their wings and achieve a hop.

"Would you engage it?" he said, content to see himself stepped on as an
insect if he could but feel the agony of his false friend Horace--their
common pretensions to win her were now of that comparative size.

"Oh! there can be no necessity. And an oath--no!" said Clara, inwardly
shivering at a recollection.

"But you could?"

"My wish is to please you."

"You could?"

"I said so."

It has been known to the patriotic mountaineer of a hoary pile of
winters, with little life remaining in him, but that little on fire for
his country, that by the brink of the precipice he has flung himself on
a young and lusty invader, dedicating himself exultingly to death if
only he may score a point for his country by extinguishing in his
country's enemy the stronger man. So likewise did Willoughby, in the
blow that deprived him of hope, exult in the toppling over of Horace De
Craye. They perished together, but which one sublimely relished the
headlong descent? And Vernon taken by Clara would be Vernon simply
tolerated. And Clara taken by Vernon would be Clara previously touched,
smirched. Altogether he could enjoy his fall.

It was at least upon a comfortable bed, where his pride would be
dressed daily and would never be disagreeably treated.

He was henceforth Laetitia's own. The bell telling of Dr. Corney's
return was a welcome sound to Willoughby, and he said good-humouredly:
"Wait, Clara, you will see your hero Crossjay."

Crossjay and Dr. Corney tumbled into the hall. Willoughby caught
Crossjay under the arms to give him a lift in the old fashion pleasing
to Clara to see. The boy was heavy as lead.

"I had work to hook him and worse to net him," said Dr. Corney. "I had
to make him believe he was to nurse every soul in the house, you among
them, Miss Middleton."

Willoughby pulled the boy aside.

Crossjay came back to Clara heavier in looks than his limbs had been.
She dropped her letter in the hall-box, and took his hand to have a
private hug of him. When they were alone, she said: "Crossjay, my
dear, my dear! you look unhappy."

"Yes, and who wouldn't be, and you're not to marry Sir Willoughby!" his
voice threatened a cry. "I know you're not, for Dr. Corney says you are
going to leave."

"Did you so very much wish it, Crossjay?"

"I should have seen a lot of you, and I sha'n't see you at all, and I'm
sure if I'd known I wouldn't have--And he has been and tipped me this."

Crossjay opened his fist in which lay three gold pieces.

"That was very kind of him," said Clara.

"Yes, but how can I keep it?"

"By handing it to Mr. Whitford to keep for you."

"Yes, but, Miss Middleton, oughtn't I to tell him? I mean Sir
Willoughby."

"What?"

"Why, that I"--Crossjay got close to her--"why, that I, that I--you
know what you used to say. I wouldn't tell a lie, but oughtn't I,
without his asking . . . and this money! I don't mind being turned out
again."

"Consult Mr. Whitford," said Clara.

"I know what you think, though."

"Perhaps you had better not say anything at present, dear boy."

"But what am I to do with this money?"

Crossjay held the gold pieces out as things that had not yet mingled
with his ideas of possession.

"I listened, and I told of him," he said. "I couldn't help listening,
but I went and told; and I don't like being here, and his money, and he
not knowing what I did. Haven't you heard? I'm certain I know what you
think, and so do I, and I must take my luck. I'm always in mischief,
getting into a mess or getting out of it. I don't mind, I really don't,
Miss Middleton, I can sleep in a tree quite comfortably. If you're not
going to be here, I'd just as soon be anywhere. I must try to earn my
living some day. And why not a cabin-boy? Sir Cloudesley Shovel was no
better. And I don't mind his being wrecked at last, if you're drowned
an admiral. So I shall go and ask him to take his money back, and if he
asks me I shall tell him, and there. You know what it is: I guessed
that from what Dr. Corney said. I'm sure I know you're thinking what's
manly. Fancy me keeping his money, and you not marrying him! I wouldn't
mind driving a plough. I shouldn't make a bad gamekeeper. Of course I
love boats best, but you can't have everything."

"Speak to Mr. Whitford first," said Clara, too proud of the boy for
growing as she had trained him, to advise a course of conduct opposed
to his notions of manliness, though now that her battle was over she
would gladly have acquiesced in little casuistic compromises for the
sake of the general peace.

Some time later Vernon and Dr. Corney were arguing upon the question.
Corney was dead against the sentimental view of the morality of the
case propounded by Vernon as coming from Miss Middleton and partly
shared by him. "If it's on the boy's mind," Vernon said, "I can't
prohibit his going to Willoughby and making a clean breast of it,
especially as it involves me, and sooner or later I should have to tell
him myself."

Dr. Corney said no at all points. "Now hear me," he said, finally.
"This is between ourselves, and no breach of confidence, which I'd not
be guilty of for forty friends, though I'd give my hand from the
wrist-joint for one--my left, that's to say. Sir Willoughby puts me one
or two searching interrogations on a point of interest to him, his
house and name. Very well, and good night to that, and I wish Miss Dale
had been ten years younger, or had passed the ten with no heartrisings
and sinkings wearing to the tissues of the frame and the moral fibre to
boot. She'll have a fairish health, with a little occasional doctoring;
taking her rank and wealth in right earnest, and shying her pen back to
Mother Goose. She'll do. And, by the way, I think it's to the credit
of my sagacity that I fetched Mr. Dale here fully primed, and roused
the neighbourhood, which I did, and so fixed our gentleman, neat as a
prodded eel on a pair of prongs--namely, the positive fact and the
general knowledge of it. But, mark me, my friend. We understand one
another at a nod. This boy, young Squire Crossjay, is a good stiff
hearty kind of a Saxon boy, out of whom you may cut as gallant a fellow
as ever wore epaulettes. I like him, you like him, Miss Dale and Miss
Middleton like him; and Sir Willoughby Patterne, of Patterne Hall and
other places, won't be indisposed to like him mightily in the event of
the sun being seen to shine upon him with a particular determination to
make him appear a prominent object, because a solitary, and a
Patterne." Dr. Corney lifted his chest and his finger: "Now mark me,
and verbum sap: Crossjay must not offend Sir Willoughby. I say no
more. Look ahead. Miracles happen, but it's best to reckon that they
won't. Well, now, and Miss Dale. She'll not be cruel."

"It appears as if she would," said Vernon, meditating on the cloudy
sketch Dr. Corney had drawn.

"She can't, my friend. Her position's precarious; her father has little
besides a pension. And her writing damages her health. She can't. And
she likes the baronet. Oh, it's only a little fit of proud blood. She's
the woman for him. She'll manage him--give him an idea he's got a lot
of ideas. It'd kill her father if she were obstinate. He talked to me,
when I told him of the business, about his dream fulfilled, and if the
dream turns to vapour, he'll be another example that we hang more upon
dreams than realities for nourishment, and medicine too. Last week I
couldn't have got him out of his house with all my art and science. Oh,
she'll come round. Her father prophesied this, and I'll prophesy that.
She's fond of him."

"She was."

"She sees through him?"

"Without quite doing justice to him now," said Vernon. "He can be
generous--in his way."

"How?" Corney inquired, and was informed that he should hear in time to
come.

Meanwhile Colonel De Craye, after hovering over the park and about the
cottage for the opportunity of pouncing on Miss Middleton alone, had
returned crest-fallen for once, and plumped into Willoughby's hands.

"My dear Horace," Willoughby said, "I've been looking for you all the
afternoon. The fact is--I fancy you'll think yourself lured down here
on false pretences: but the truth is, I am not so much to blame as the
world will suppose. In point of fact, to be brief, Miss Dale and I
. . . I never consult other men how they would have acted. The fact of
the matter is, Miss Middleton . . . I fancy you have partly guessed it."

"Partly," said De Craye.

"Well, she has a liking that way, and if it should turn out strong
enough, it's the best arrangement I can think of," The lively play of
the colonel's features fixed in a blank inquiry.

"One can back a good friend for making a good husband," said
Willoughby. "I could not break with her in the present stage of affairs
without seeing to that. And I can speak of her highly, though she and I
have seen in time that we do not suit one another. My wife must have
brains."

"I have always thought it," said Colonel De Craye, glistening, and
looking hungry as a wolf through his wonderment.

"There will not be a word against her, you understand. You know my
dislike of tattle and gossip. However, let it fall on me; my shoulders
are broad. I have done my utmost to persuade her, and there seems a
likelihood of her consenting. She tells me her wish is to please me,
and this will please me."

"Certainly. Who's the gentleman?"

"My best friend, I tell you. I could hardly have proposed another.
Allow this business to go on smoothly just now." There was an uproar
within the colonel to blind his wits, and Willoughby looked so friendly
that it was possible to suppose the man of projects had mentioned his
best friend to Miss Middleton.

And who was the best friend?

Not having accused himself of treachery, the quick-eyed colonel was
duped.

"Have you his name handy, Willoughby?"

"That would be unfair to him at present, Horace--ask yourself--and to
her. Things are in a ticklish posture at present. Don't be hasty."

"Certainly. I don't ask. Initials'll do."

"You have a remarkable aptitude for guessing, Horace, and this case
offers you no tough problem--if ever you acknowledged toughness. I have
a regard for her and for him--for both pretty equally; you know I have,
and I should be thoroughly thankful to bring the matter about."

"Lordly!" said De Craye.

"I don't see it. I call it sensible."

"Oh, undoubtedly. The style, I mean. Tolerably antique?"

"Novel, I should say, and not the worse for that. We want plain
practical dealings between men and women. Usually we go the wrong way
to work. And I loathe sentimental rubbish."

De Craye hummed an air. "But the lady?" said he.

"I told you, there seems a likelihood of her consenting."

Willoughby's fish gave a perceptible little leap now that he had been
taught to exercise his aptitude for guessing.

"Without any of the customary preliminaries on the side of the
gentleman?" he said.

"We must put him through his paces, friend Horace. He's a notorious
blunderer with women; hasn't a word for them, never marked a conquest."

De Craye crested his plumes under the agreeable banter. He presented a
face humourously sceptical.

"The lady is positively not indisposed to give the poor fellow a
hearing?"

"I have cause to think she is not," said Willoughby, glad of acting the
indifference to her which could talk of her inclinations.

"Cause?"

"Good cause."

"Bless us!"

"As good as one can have with a woman."

"Ah?"

"I assure you."

"Ah! Does it seem like her, though?"

"Well, she wouldn't engage herself to accept him."

"Well, that seems more like her."

"But she said she could engage to marry no one else."

The colonel sprang up, crying: "Clara Middleton said it?" He curbed
himself "That's a bit of wonderful compliancy."

"She wishes to please me. We separate on those terms. And I wish her
happiness. I've developed a heart lately and taken to think of others."

"Nothing better. You appear to make cock sure of the other party--our
friend?"

"You know him too well, Horace, to doubt his readiness."

"Do you, Willoughby?"

"She has money and good looks. Yes, I can say I do."

"It wouldn't be much of a man who'd want hard pulling to that lighted
altar!"

"And if he requires persuasion, you and I, Horace, might bring him to
his senses."

"Kicking, 't would be!"

"I like to see everybody happy about me," said Willoughby, naming the
hour as time to dress for dinner.

The sentiment he had delivered was De Craye's excuse for grasping his
hand and complimenting him; but the colonel betrayed himself by doing
it with an extreme fervour almost tremulous.

"When shall we hear more?" he said.

"Oh, probably to-morrow," said Willoughby. "Don't be in such a hurry."

"I'm an infant asleep!" the colonel replied, departing.

He resembled one, to Willoughby's mind: or a traitor drugged.

"There is a fellow I thought had some brains!"

Who are not fools to beset spinning if we choose to whip them with
their vanity! it is the consolation of the great to watch them spin.
But the pleasure is loftier, and may comfort our unmerited misfortune
for a while, in making a false friend drunk.

Willoughby, among his many preoccupations, had the satisfaction of
seeing the effect of drunkenness on Horace De Craye when the latter was
in Clara's presence. He could have laughed. Cut in keen epigram were
the marginal notes added by him to that chapter of The Book which
treats of friends and a woman; and had he not been profoundly
preoccupied, troubled by recent intelligence communicated by the
ladies, his aunts, he would have played the two together for the royal
amusement afforded him by his friend Horace.



CHAPTER XLVIII

THE LOVERS

The hour was close upon eleven at night. Laetitia sat in the room
adjoining her father's bedchamber. Her elbow was on the table beside
her chair, and two fingers pressed her temples. The state between
thinking and feeling, when both are molten and flow by us, is one of
our natures coming after thought has quieted the fiery nerves, and can
do no more. She seemed to be meditating. She was conscious only of a
struggle past.

She answered a tap at the door, and raised her eyes on Clara. Clara
stepped softly. "Mr. Dale is asleep?"

"I hope so."

"Ah! dear friend."

Laetitia let her hand be pressed.

"Have you had a pleasant evening?"

"Mr. Whitford and papa have gone to the library."

"Colonel De Craye has been singing?"

"Yes--with a voice! I thought of you upstairs, but could not ask him to
sing piano."

"He is probably exhilarated."

"One would suppose it: he sang well."

"You are not aware of any reason?"

"It cannot concern me."

Clara was in rosy colour, but could meet a steady gaze.

"And Crossjay has gone to bed?"

"Long since. He was at dessert. He would not touch anything."

"He is a strange boy."

"Not very strange, Laetitia."

"He did not come to me to wish me good-night."

"That is not strange."

"It is his habit at the cottage and here; and he professes to like me."

"Oh, he does. I may have wakened his enthusiasm, but you he loves."

"Why do you say it is not strange, Clara?"

"He fears you a little."

"And why should Crossjay fear me?"

"Dear, I will tell you. Last night--You will forgive him, for it was by
accident: his own bed-room door was locked and he ran down to the
drawing-room and curled himself up on the ottoman, and fell asleep,
under that padded silken coverlet of the ladies--boots and all, I am
afraid!"

Laetitia profited by this absurd allusion, thanking Clara in her heart
for the refuge.

"He should have taken off his boots," she said.

"He slept there, and woke up. Dear, he meant no harm. Next day he
repeated what he had heard. You will blame him. He meant well in his
poor boy's head. And now it is over the county. Ah! do not frown."

"That explains Lady Busshe!" exclaimed Laetitia.

"Dear, dear friend," said Clara. "Why--I presume on your tenderness for
me; but let me: to-morrow I go--why will you reject your happiness?
Those kind good ladies are deeply troubled. They say your resolution
is inflexible; you resist their entreaties and your father's. Can it be
that you have any doubt of the strength of this attachment? I have
none. I have never had a doubt that it was the strongest of his
feelings. If before I go I could see you . . . both happy, I should be
relieved, I should rejoice."

Laetitia said, quietly: "Do you remember a walk we had one day together
to the cottage?"

Clara put up her hands with the motion of intending to stop her ears.

"Before I go!" said she. "If I might know this was to be, which all
desire, before I leave, I should not feel as I do now. I long to see
you happy . . . him, yes, him too. Is it like asking you to pay my
debt? Then, please! But, no; I am not more than partly selfish on this
occasion. He has won my gratitude. He can be really generous."

"An Egoist?"

"Who is?"

"You have forgotten our conversation on the day of our walk to the
cottage?"

"Help me to forget it--that day, and those days, and all those days! I
should be glad to think I passed a time beneath the earth, and have
risen again. I was the Egoist. I am sure, if I had been buried, I
should not have stood up seeing myself more vilely stained, soiled,
disfigured--oh! Help me to forget my conduct, Laetitia. He and I were
unsuited--and I remember I blamed myself then. You and he are not: and
now I can perceive the pride that can be felt in him. The worst that
can be said is that he schemes too much."

"Is there any fresh scheme?" said Laetitia.

The rose came over Clara's face.

"You have not heard? It was impossible, but it was kindly intended.
Judging by my own feeling at this moment, I can understand his. We love
to see our friends established."

Laetitia bowed. "My curiosity is piqued, of course."

"Dear friend, to-morrow we shall be parted. I trust to be thought of by
you as a little better in grain than I have appeared, and my reason for
trusting it is that I know I have been always honest--a boorish young
woman in my stupid mad impatience: but not insincere. It is no lofty
ambition to desire to be remembered in that character, but such is your
Clara, she discovers. I will tell you. It is his wish . . . his wish
that I should promise to give my hand to Mr. Whitford. You see the
kindness."

Laetitia's eyes widened and fixed:

"You think it kindness?"

"The intention. He sent Mr. Whitford to me, and I was taught to expect
him."

"Was that quite kind to Mr. Whitford?"

"What an impression I must have made on you during that walk to the
cottage, Laetitia! I do not wonder; I was in a fever."

"You consented to listen?"

"I really did. It astonishes me now, but I thought I could not refuse."

"My poor friend Vernon Whitford tried a love speech?"

"He? no: Oh! no."

"You discouraged him?"

"I? No."

"Gently, I mean."

"No."

"Surely you did not dream of trifling? He has a deep heart."

"Has he?"

"You ask that: and you know something of him."

"He did not expose it to me, dear; not even the surface of the mighty
deep."

Laetitia knitted her brows.

"No," said Clara, "not a coquette: she is not a coquette, I assure
you."

With a laugh, Laetitia replied: "You have still the 'dreadful power'
you made me feel that day."

"I wish I could use it to good purpose!"

"He did not speak?"

"Of Switzerland, Tyrol, the Iliad, Antigone."

"That was all?"

"No, Political Economy. Our situation, you will own, was unexampled: or
mine was. Are you interested in me?"

"I should be if I knew your sentiments."

"I was grateful to Sir Willoughby: grieved for Mr. Whitford."

"Real grief?"

"Because the task unposed on him of showing me politely that he did not
enter into his cousin's ideas was evidently very great, extremely
burdensome."

"You, so quick-eyed in some things, Clara!"

"He felt for me. I saw that in his avoidance of. . . And he was, as he
always is, pleasant. We rambled over the park for I know not how long,
though it did not seem long."

"Never touching that subject?"

"Not ever neighbouring it, dear. A gentleman should esteem the girl he
would ask . . . certain questions. I fancy he has a liking for me as a
volatile friend."

"If he had offered himself?"

"Despising me?"

"You can be childish, Clara. Probably you delight to tease. He had his
time of it, and it is now my turn."

"But he must despise me a little."

"Are you blind?"

"Perhaps, dear, we both are, a little."

The ladies looked deeper into one another.

"Will you answer me?" said Laetitia.

"Your if? If he had, it would have been an act of condescension."

"You are too slippery."

"Stay, dear Laetitia. He was considerate in forbearing to pain me."

"That is an answer. You allowed him to perceive that it would have
pained you."

"Dearest, if I may convey to you what I was, in a simile for
comparison: I think I was like a fisherman's float on the water,
perfectly still, and ready to go down at any instant, or up. So much
for my behaviour."

"Similes have the merit of satisfying the finder of them, and cheating
the hearer," said Laetitia. "You admit that your feelings would have
been painful."

"I was a fisherman's float: please admire my simile; any way you like,
this way or that, or so quiet as to tempt the eyes to go to sleep. And
suddenly I might have disappeared in the depths, or flown in the air.
But no fish bit."

"Well, then, to follow you, supposing the fish or the fisherman, for I
don't know which is which . . . Oh! no, no: this is too serious for
imagery. I am to understand that you thanked him at least for his
reserve."

"Yes."

"Without the slightest encouragement to him to break it?"

"A fisherman's float, Laetitia!"

Baffled and sighing, Laetitia kept silence for a space. The simile
chafed her wits with a suspicion of a meaning hidden in it.

"If he had spoken?" she said.

"He is too truthful a man."

"And the railings of men at pussy women who wind about and will not be
brought to a mark, become intelligible to me."

"Then Laetitia, if he had spoken, if, and one could have imagined him
sincere . . ."

"So truthful a man?"

"I am looking at myself If!--why, then, I should have burnt to death
with shame. Where have I read?--some story--of an inextinguishable
spark. That would have been shot into my heart."

"Shame, Clara? You are free."

"As much as remains of me."

"I could imagine a certain shame, in such a position, where there was
no feeling but pride."

"I could not imagine it where there was no feeling but pride."

Laetitia mused. "And you dwell on the kindness of a proposition so
extraordinary!" Gaining some light, impatiently she cried: "Vernon
loves you."

"Do not say it!"

"I have seen it."

"I have never had a sign of it."

"There is the proof."

"When it might have been shown again and again!"

"The greater proof!"

"Why did he not speak when he was privileged?--strangely, but
privileged."

"He feared."

"Me?"

"Feared to wound you--and himself as well, possibly. Men may be
pardoned for thinking of themselves in these cases."

"But why should he fear?"

"That another was dearer to you?"

"What cause had I given . . . Ah I see! He could fear that; suspect it!
See his opinion of me! Can he care for such a girl? Abuse me, Laetitia.
I should like a good round of abuse. I need purification by fire. What
have I been in this house? I have a sense of whirling through it like a
madwoman. And to be loved, after it all!--No! we must be hearing a tale
of an antiquary prizing a battered relic of the battle-field that no
one else would look at. To be loved, I see, is to feel our littleness,
hollowness--feel shame. We come out in all our spots. Never to have
given me one sign, when a lover would have been so tempted! Let me be
incredulous, my own dear Laetitia. Because he is a man of honour, you
would say! But are you unconscious of the torture you inflict? For if I
am--you say it--loved by this gentleman, what an object it is he
loves--that has gone clamouring about more immodestly than women will
bear to hear of, and she herself to think of! Oh, I have seen my own
heart. It is a frightful spectre. I have seen a weakness in me that
would have carried me anywhere. And truly I shall be charitable to
women--I have gained that. But loved! by Vernon Whitford! The miserable
little me to be taken up and loved after tearing myself to pieces! Have
you been simply speculating? You have no positive knowledge of it! Why
do you kiss me?"

"Why do you tremble and blush so?"

Clara looked at her as clearly as she could. She bowed her head. "It
makes my conduct worse!"

She received a tenderer kiss for that. It was her avowal, and it was
understood: to know that she had loved or had been ready to love him,
shadowed her in the retrospect.

"Ah! you read me through and through," said Clara, sliding to her for a
whole embrace.

"Then there never was cause for him to fear?" Laetitia whispered.

Clara slid her head more out of sight. "Not that my heart . . . But I
said I have seen it; and it is unworthy of him. And if, as I think now,
I could have been so rash, so weak, wicked, unpardonable--such
thoughts were in me!--then to hear him speak would make it necessary
for me to uncover myself and tell him--incredible to you, yes!--that
while . . . yes, Laetitia, all this is true: and thinking of him as the
noblest of men, I could have welcomed any help to cut my knot. So
there," said Clara, issuing from her nest with winking eyelids, "you
see the pain I mentioned."

"Why did you not explain it to me at once?"

"Dearest, I wanted a century to pass."

"And you feel that it has passed?"

"Yes; in Purgatory--with an angel by me. My report of the place will be
favourable. Good angel, I have yet to say something."

"Say it, and expiate."

"I think I did fancy once or twice, very dimly, and especially to-day
. . . properly I ought not to have had any idea: but his coming to me,
and his not doing as another would have done, seemed . . . A gentleman
of real nobleness does not carry the common light for us to read him
by. I wanted his voice; but silence, I think, did tell me more: if a
nature like mine could only have had faith without bearing the rattle
of a tongue."

A knock at the door caused the ladies to exchange looks. Laetitia rose
as Vernon entered.

"I am just going to my father for a few minutes," she said.

"And I have just come from yours." Vernon said to Clara. She observed a
very threatening expression in him. The sprite of contrariety mounted
to her brain to indemnify her for her recent self-abasement. Seeing the
bedroom door shut on Laetitia, she said: "And of course papa has gone
to bed"; implying, "otherwise . . ."

"Yes, he has gone. He wished me well."

"His formula of good-night would embrace that wish."

"And failing, it will be good-night for good to me!"

Clara's breathing gave a little leap. "We leave early tomorrow."

"I know. I have an appointment at Bregenz for June."

"So soon? With papa?"

"And from there we break into Tyrol, and round away to the right,
Southward."

"To the Italian Alps! And was it assumed that I should be of this
expedition?"

"Your father speaks dubiously."

"You have spoken of me, then?"

"I ventured to speak of you. I am not over-bold, as you know."

Her lovely eyes troubled the lids to hide their softness.

"Papa should not think of my presence with him dubiously."

"He leaves it to you to decide."

"Yes, then: many times: all that can be uttered."

"Do you consider what you are saying?"

"Mr. Whitford, I shut my eyes and say Yes."

"Beware. I give you one warning. If you shut your eyes . . ."

"Of course," she flew from him, "big mountains must be satisfied with
my admiration at their feet."

"That will do for a beginning."

"They speak encouragingly."

"One of them." Vernon's breast heaved high.

"To be at your feet makes a mountain of you?" said she.

"With the heart of a mouse if that satisfies me!"

"You tower too high; you are inaccessible."

"I give you a second warning. You may be seized and lifted."

"Some one would stoop, then."

"To plant you like the flag on the conquered peak!"

"You have indeed been talking to papa, Mr. Whitford."

Vernon changed his tone.

"Shall I tell you what he said?"

"I know his language so well."

"He said--"

"But you have acted on it?"

"Only partly. He said--"

"You will teach me nothing."

"He said . . ."

"Vernon, no! oh! not in this house!"

That supplication coupled with his name confessed the end to which her
quick vision perceived she was being led, where she would succumb.

She revived the same shrinking in him from a breath of their great word
yet: not here; somewhere in the shadow of the mountains.

But he was sure of her. And their hands might join. The two hands
thought so, or did not think, behaved like innocents.

The spirit of Dr. Middleton, as Clara felt, had been blown into Vernon,
rewarding him for forthright outspeaking. Over their books, Vernon had
abruptly shut up a volume and related the tale of the house. "Has this
man a spice of religion in him?" the Rev. Doctor asked midway. Vernon
made out a fair general case for his cousin in that respect. "The
complemental dot on his i of a commonly civilized human creature!" said
Dr. Middleton, looking at his watch and finding it too late to leave
the house before morning. The risky communication was to come. Vernon
was proceeding with the narrative of Willoughby's generous plan when
Dr. Middleton electrified him by calling out: "He whom of all men
living I should desire my daughter to espouse!" and Willoughby rose in
the Rev. Doctor's esteem: he praised that sensibly minded gentleman,
who could acquiesce in the turn of mood of a little maid, albeit
Fortune had withheld from him a taste of the switch at school. The
father of the little maid's appreciation of her volatility was
exhibited in his exhortation to Vernon to be off to her at once with
his authority to finish her moods and assure him of peace in the
morning. Vernon hesitated. Dr. Middleton remarked upon being not so
sure that it was not he who had done the mischief. Thereupon Vernon, to
prove his honesty, made his own story bare. "Go to her," said Dr.
Middleton. Vernon proposed a meeting in Switzerland, to which Dr.
Middleton assented, adding: "Go to her": and as he appeared a total
stranger to the decorum of the situation, Vernon put his delicacy
aside, and taking his heart up, obeyed. He too had pondered on Clara's
consent to meet him after she knew of Willoughby's terms, and her grave
sweet manner during the ramble over the park. Her father's breath had
been blown into him; so now, with nothing but the faith lying in
sensation to convince him of his happy fortune (and how unconvincing
that may be until the mind has grasped and stamped it, we experience
even then when we acknowledge that we are most blessed), he held her
hand. And if it was hard for him, for both, but harder for the man, to
restrain their particular word from a flight to heaven when the cage
stood open and nature beckoned, he was practised in self-mastery, and
she loved him the more.

Laetitia was a witness of their union of hands on her coming back to
the room.

They promised to visit her very early in the morning, neither of them
conceiving that they left her to a night of storm and tears.

She sat meditating on Clara's present appreciation of Sir Willoughby's
generosity.



CHAPTER XLIX

LAETITIA AND SIR WILLOUGHBY

We cannot be abettors of the tribes of imps whose revelry is in the
frailties of our poor human constitution. They have their place and
their service, and so long as we continue to be what we are now, they
will hang on to us, restlessly plucking at the garments which cover our
nakedness, nor ever ceasing to twitch them and strain at them until
they have stripped us for one of their horrible Walpurgis nights: when
the laughter heard is of a character to render laughter frightful to
the ears of men throughout the remainder of their days. But if in these
festival hours under the beam of Hecate they are uncontrollable by the
Comic Muse, she will not flatter them with her presence during the
course of their insane and impious hilarities, whereof a description
would out-Brocken Brockens and make Graymalkin and Paddock too
intimately our familiars.

It shall suffice to say that from hour to hour of the midnight to the
grey-eyed morn, assisted at intervals by the ladies Eleanor and Isabel,
and by Mr. Dale awakened and re-awakened--hearing the vehemence of his
petitioning outcry to soften her obduracy--Sir Willoughby pursued
Laetitia with solicitations to espouse him, until the inveteracy of his
wooing wore the aspect of the life-long love he raved of aroused to a
state of mania. He appeared, he departed, he returned; and all the
while his imps were about him and upon him, riding him, prompting,
driving, inspiring him with outrageous pathos, an eloquence to move any
one but the dead, which its object seemed to be in her torpid
attention. He heard them, he talked to them, caressed them; he flung
them off, and ran from them, and stood vanquished for them to mount him
again and swarm on him. There are men thus imp-haunted. Men who,
setting their minds upon an object, must have it, breed imps. They are
noted for their singularities, as their converse with the invisible and
amazing distractions are called. Willoughby became aware of them that
night. He said to himself, upon one of his dashes into solitude: I
believe I am possessed! And if he did not actually believe it, but only
suspected it, or framed speech to account for the transformation he had
undergone into a desperately beseeching creature, having lost
acquaintance with his habitual personality, the operations of an impish
host had undoubtedly smitten his consciousness.

He had them in his brain: for while burning with an ardour for
Laetitia, that incited him to frantic excesses of language and
comportment, he was aware of shouts of the names of Lady Busshe and
Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson, the which, freezing him as they did, were
directly the cause of his hurrying to a wilder extravagance and more
headlong determination to subdue before break of day the woman he
almost dreaded to behold by daylight, though he had now passionately
persuaded himself of his love of her. He could not, he felt, stand in
the daylight without her. She was his morning. She was, he raved, his
predestinated wife. He cried, "Darling!" both to her and to solitude.
Every prescription of his ideal of demeanour as an example to his class
and country, was abandoned by the enamoured gentleman. He had lost
command of his countenance. He stooped so far as to kneel, and not
gracefully. Nay, it is in the chronicles of the invisible host around
him, that in a fit of supplication, upon a cry of "Laetitia!" twice
repeated, he whimpered.

Let so much suffice. And indeed not without reason do the multitudes of
the servants of the Muse in this land of social policy avoid scenes of
an inordinate wantonness, which detract from the dignity of our leaders
and menace human nature with confusion. Sagacious are they who conduct
the individual on broad lines, over familiar tracks, under well-known
characteristics. What men will do, and amorously minded men will do,
is less the question than what it is politic they should be shown to
do.

The night wore through. Laetitia was bent, but had not yielded. She
had been obliged to say--and how many times she could not bear to
recollect: "I do not love you; I have no love to give"; and issuing
from such a night to look again upon the face of day, she scarcely felt
that she was alive.

The contest was renewed by her father with the singing of the birds.
Mr. Dale then produced the first serious impression she had received.
He spoke of their circumstances, of his being taken from her and
leaving her to poverty, in weak health; of the injury done to her
health by writing for bread; and of the oppressive weight he would be
relieved of by her consenting.

He no longer implored her; he put the case on common ground.

And he wound up: "Pray do not be ruthless, my girl."

The practical statement, and this adjuration incongruously to conclude
it, harmonized with her disordered understanding, her loss of all
sentiment and her desire to be kind. She sighed to herself. "Happily,
it is over!"

Her father was too weak to rise. He fell asleep. She was bound down to
the house for hours; and she walked through her suite, here at the
doors, there at the windows, thinking of Clara's remark "of a century
passing". She had not wished it, but a light had come on her to show
her what she would have supposed a century could not have effected: she
saw the impossible of overnight a possible thing: not desireable, yet
possible, wearing the features of the possible. Happily, she had
resisted too firmly to be again besought.

Those features of the possible once beheld allured the mind to
reconsider them. Wealth gives us the power to do good on earth. Wealth
enables us to see the world, the beautiful scenes of the earth.
Laetitia had long thirsted both for a dowering money-bag at her girdle,
and the wings to fly abroad over lands which had begun to seem fabulous
in her starved imagination. Then, moreover, if her sentiment for this
gentleman was gone, it was only a delusion gone; accurate sight and
knowledge of him would not make a woman the less helpful mate. That was
the mate he required: and he could be led. A sentimental attachment
would have been serviceless to him. Not so the woman allied by a purely
rational bond: and he wanted guiding. Happily, she had told him too
much of her feeble health and her lovelessness to be reduced to submit
to another attack.

She busied herself in her room, arranging for her departure, so that no
minutes might be lost after her father had breakfasted and dressed.

Clara was her earliest visitor, and each asked the other whether she
had slept, and took the answer from the face presented to her. The
rings of Laetitia's eyes were very dark. Clara was her mirror, and she
said: "A singular object to be persecuted through a night for her hand!
I know these two damp dead leaves I wear on my cheeks to remind me of
midnight vigils. But you have slept well, Clara."

"I have slept well, and yet I could say I have not slept at all,
Laetitia. I was with you, dear, part in dream and part in thought:
hoping to find you sensible before I go."

"Sensible. That is the word for me."

Laetitia briefly sketched the history of the night; and Clara said,
with a manifest sincerity that testified of her gratitude to Sir
Willoughby: "Could you resist him, so earnest as he is?" Laetitia saw
the human nature, without sourness: and replied, "I hope, Clara, you
will not begin with a large stock of sentiment, for there is nothing
like it for making you hard, matter-of-fact, worldly, calculating."

The next visitor was Vernon, exceedingly anxious for news of Mr. Dale.
Laetitia went into her father's room to obtain it for him. Returning,
she found them both with sad visages, and she ventured, in alarm for
them, to ask the cause.

"It's this," Vernon said: "Willoughby will everlastingly tease that boy
to be loved by him. Perhaps, poor fellow, he had an excuse last night.
Anyhow, he went into Crossjay's room this morning, woke him up and
talked to him, and set the lad crying, and what with one thing and
another Crossjay got a berry in his throat, as he calls it, and poured
out everything he knew and all he had done. I needn't tell you the
consequence. He has ruined himself here for good, so I must take him."

Vernon glanced at Clara. "You must indeed," said she. "He is my boy as
well as yours. No chance of pardon?"

"It's not likely."

"Laetitia!"

"What can I do?"

"Oh! what can you not do?"

"I do not know."

"Teach him to forgive!"

Laetitia's brows were heavy and Clara forbore to torment her.

She would not descend to the family breakfast-table. Clara would fain
have stayed to drink tea with her in her own room, but a last act of
conformity was demanded of the liberated young lady. She promised to
run up the moment breakfast was over. Not unnaturally, therefore,
Laetitia supposed it to be she to whom she gave admission, half an hour
later, with a glad cry of, "Come in, dear."

The knock had sounded like Clara's.

Sir Willoughby entered.

He stepped forward. He seized her hands. "Dear!" he said.

"You cannot withdraw that. You call me dear. I am, I must be dear to
you. The word is out, by accident or not, but, by heaven, I have it and
I give it up to no one. And love me or not--marry me, and my love will
bring it back to you. You have taught me I am not so strong. I must
have you by my side. You have powers I did not credit you with."

"You are mistaken in me, Sir Willoughby." Laetitia said feebly, outworn
as she was.

"A woman who can resist me by declining to be my wife, through a whole
night of entreaty, has the quality I need for my house, and I will
batter at her ears for months, with as little rest as I had last night,
before I surrender my chance of her. But I told you last night I want
you within the twelve hours. I have staked my pride on it. By noon you
are mine: you are introduced to Mrs. Mountstuart as mine, as the lady
of my life and house. And to the world! I shall not let you go."

"You will not detain me here, Sir Willoughby?"

"I will detain you. I will use force and guile. I will spare nothing."

He raved for a term, as he had done overnight.

On his growing rather breathless, Laetitia said: "You do not ask me for
love?"

"I do not. I pay you the higher compliment of asking for you, love or
no love. My love shall be enough. Reward me or not. I am not used to be
denied."

"But do you know what you ask for? Do you remember what I told you of
myself? I am hard, materialistic; I have lost faith in romance, the
skeleton is present with me all over life. And my health is not good.
I crave for money. I should marry to be rich. I should not worship you.
I should be a burden, barely a living one, irresponsive and cold.
Conceive such a wife, Sir Willoughby!"

"It will be you!"

She tried to recall how this would have sung in her cars long back. Her
bosom rose and fell in absolute dejection. Her ammunition of arguments
against him had been expended overnight.

"You are so unforgiving," she said.

"Is it I who am?"

"You do not know me."

"But you are the woman of all the world who knows me, Laetitia."

"Can you think it better for you to be known?"

He was about to say other words: he checked them. "I believe I do not
know myself. Anything you will, only give me your hand; give it; trust
to me; you shall direct me. If I have faults, help me to obliterate
them."

"Will you not expect me to regard them as the virtues of meaner men?"

"You will be my wife!"

Laetitia broke from him, crying: "Your wife, your critic! Oh, I cannot
think it possible. Send for the ladies. Let them hear me."

"They are at hand," said Willoughby, opening the door.

They were in one of the upper rooms anxiously on the watch.

"Dear ladies," Laetitia said to them, as they entered. "I am going to
wound you, and I grieve to do it: but rather now than later, if I am to
be your housemate. He asks me for a hand that cannot carry a heart,
because mine is dead. I repeat it. I used to think the heart a woman's
marriage portion for her husband. I see now that she may consent, and
he accept her, without one. But it is right that you should know what I
am when I consent. I was once a foolish, romantic girl; now I am a
sickly woman, all illusions vanished. Privation has made me what an
abounding fortune usually makes of others--I am an Egoist. I am not
deceiving you. That is my real character. My girl's view of him has
entirely changed; and I am almost indifferent to the change. I can
endeavour to respect him, I cannot venerate."

"Dear child!" the ladies gently remonstrated.

Willoughby motioned to them.

"If we are to live together, and I could very happily live with you,"
Laetitia continued to address them, "you must not be ignorant of me.
And if you, as I imagine, worship him blindly, I do not know how we are
to live together. And never shall you quit this house to make way for
me. I have a hard detective eye. I see many faults."

"Have we not all of us faults, dear child?"

"Not such as he has; though the excuses of a gentleman nurtured in
idolatry may be pleaded. But he should know that they are seen, and
seen by her he asks to be his wife, that no misunderstanding may exist,
and while it is yet time he may consult his feelings. He worships
himself."

"Willoughby?"

"He is vindictive!"

"Our Willoughby?"

"That is not your opinion, ladies. It is firmly mine. Time has taught
it me. So, if you and I are at such variance, how can we live together?
It is an impossibility."

They looked at Willoughby. He nodded imperiously.

"We have never affirmed that our dear nephew is devoid of faults, if
he is offended . . . And supposing he claims to be foremost, is it not
his rightful claim, made good by much generosity? Reflect, dear
Laetitia. We are your friends too."

She could not chastise the kind ladies any further.

"You have always been my good friends."

"And you have no other charge against him?"

Laetitia was milder in saying, "He is unpardoning."

"Name one instance, Laetitia."

"He has turned Crossjay out of his house, interdicting the poor boy
ever to enter it again."

"Crossjay," said Willoughby, "was guilty of a piece of infamous
treachery."

"Which is the cause of your persecuting me to become your wife!"

There was a cry of "Persecuting!"

"No young fellow behaving so basely can come to good," said Willoughby,
stained about the face with flecks of redness at the lashings he
received.

"Honestly," she retorted. "He told of himself: and he must have
anticipated the punishment he would meet. He should have been studying
with a master for his profession. He has been kept here in comparative
idleness to be alternately petted and discarded: no one but Vernon
Whitford, a poor gentleman doomed to struggle for a livelihood by
literature--I know something of that struggle--too much for me!--no one
but Mr. Whitford for his friend."

"Crossjay is forgiven," said Willoughby.

"You promise me that?"

"He shall be packed off to a crammer at once."

"But my home must be Crossjay's home."

"You are mistress of my house, Laetitia."

She hesitated. Her eyelashes grew moist. "You can be generous."

"He is, dear child!" the ladies cried. "He is. Forget his errors, in
his generosity, as we do."

"There is that wretched man Flitch."

"That sot has gone about the county for years to get me a bad
character," said Willoughby.

"It would have been generous in you to have offered him another chance.
He has children."

"Nine. And I am responsible for them?"

"I speak of being generous."

"Dictate." Willoughby spread out his arms.

"Surely now you should be satisfied, Laetitia?" said the ladies.

"Is he?"

Willoughby perceived Mrs. Mountstuart's carriage coming down the
avenue.

"To the full." He presented his hand.

She raised hers with the fingers catching back before she ceased to
speak and dropped it:--

"Ladies. You are witnesses that there is no concealment, there has been
no reserve, on my part. May Heaven grant me kinder eyes than I have
now. I would not have you change your opinion of him; only that you
should see how I read him. For the rest, I vow to do my duty by him.
Whatever is of worth in me is at his service. I am very tired. I feel I
must yield or break. This is his wish, and I submit."

"And I salute my wife," said Willoughby, making her hand his own, and
warming to his possession as he performed the act.

Mrs. Mountstuart's indecent hurry to be at the Hall before the
departure of Dr. Middleton and his daughter, afflicted him with visions
of the physical contrast which would be sharply perceptible to her this
morning of his Laetitia beside Clara.

But he had the lady with brains! He had: and he was to learn the nature
of that possession in the woman who is our wife.



CHAPTER L

UPON WHICH THE CURTAIN FALLS

"Plain sense upon the marriage question is my demand upon man and
woman, for the stopping of many a tragedy."

These were Dr. Middleton's words in reply to Willoughby's brief
explanation.

He did not say that he had shown it parentally while the tragedy was
threatening, or at least there was danger of a precipitate descent from
the levels of comedy. The parents of hymeneal men and women he was
indisposed to consider as dramatis personae. Nor did he mention certain
sympathetic regrets he entertained in contemplation of the health of
Mr. Dale, for whom, poor gentleman, the proffer of a bottle of the
Patterne Port would be an egregious mockery. He paced about, anxious
for his departure, and seeming better pleased with the society of
Colonel De Craye than with that of any of the others. Colonel De Craye
assiduously courted him, was anecdotal, deferential, charmingly
vivacious, the very man the Rev. Doctor liked for company when plunged
in the bustle of the preliminaries to a journey.

"You would be a cheerful travelling comrade, sir," he remarked, and
spoke of his doom to lead his daughter over the Alps and Alpine lakes
for the Summer months.

Strange to tell, the Alps, for the Summer months, was a settled project
of the colonel's.

And thence Dr. Middleton was to be hauled along to the habitable
quarters of North Italy in high Summer-tide.

That also had been traced for a route on the map of Colonel De Craye.

"We are started in June, I am informed," said Dr. Middleton.

June, by miracle, was the month the colonel had fixed upon.

"I trust we shall meet, sir," said he.

"I would gladly reckon it in my catalogue of pleasures," the Rev.
Doctor responded; "for in good sooth it is conjecturable that I shall
be left very much alone."

"Paris, Strasburg, Basle?" the colonel inquired.

"The Lake of Constance, I am told," said Dr. Middleton. Colonel De
Craye spied eagerly for an opportunity of exchanging a pair of
syllables with the third and fairest party of this glorious expedition
to come.

Willoughby met him, and rewarded the colonel's frankness in stating
that he was on the look-out for Miss Middleton to take his leave of
her, by furnishing him the occasion. He conducted his friend Horace to
the Blue Room, where Clara and Laetitia were seated circling a half
embrace with a brook of chatter, and contrived an excuse for leading
Laetitia forth. Some minutes later Mrs. Mountstuart called aloud for
the colonel, to drive him away. Willoughby, whose good offices were
unabated by the services he performed to each in rotation, ushered her
into the Blue Room, hearing her say, as she stood at the entrance: "Is
the man coming to spend a day with me with a face like that?"

She was met and detained by Clara.

De Craye came out.

"What are you thinking of?" said Willoughby.

"I was thinking," said the colonel, "of developing a heart, like you,
and taking to think of others."

"At last!"

"Ay, you're a true friend, Willoughby, a true friend. And a cousin to
boot!"

"What! has Clara been communicative?"

"The itinerary of a voyage Miss Middleton is going to make."

"Do you join them?"

"Why, it would be delightful, Willoughby, but it happens I've got a lot
of powder I want to let off, and so I've an idea of shouldering my gun
along the sea-coast and shooting gulls: which'll be a harmless form of
committing patricide and matricide and fratricide--for there's my
family, and I come of it!--the gull! And I've to talk lively to Mrs.
Mountstuart for something like a matter of twelve hours, calculating
that she goes to bed at midnight: and I wouldn't bet on it; such is the
energy of ladies of that age!"

Willoughby scorned the man who could not conceal a blow, even though he
joked over his discomfiture.

"Gull!" he muttered.

"A bird that's easy to be had, and better for stuffing than for
eating," said De Craye. "You'll miss your cousin."

"I have," replied Willoughby, "one fully equal to supplying his place."

There was confusion in the hall for a time, and an assembly of the
household to witness the departure of Dr. Middleton and his daughter.
Vernon had been driven off by Dr. Corney, who further recommended rest
for Mr. Dale, and promised to keep an eye for Crossjay along the road.

"I think you will find him at the station, and if you do, command him
to come straight back here," Laetitia said to Clara. The answer was an
affectionate squeeze, and Clara's hand was extended to Willoughby, who
bowed over it with perfect courtesy, bidding her adieu.

So the knot was cut. And the next carriage to Dr. Middleton's was Mrs.
Mountstuart's, conveying the great lady and Colonel De Craye.

"I beg you not to wear that face with me," she said to him.

"I have had to dissemble, which I hate, and I have quite enough to
endure, and I must be amused, or I shall run away from you and enlist
that little countryman of yours, and him I can count on to be
professionally restorative. Who can fathom the heart of a girl! Here
is Lady Busshe right once more! And I was wrong. She must be a gambler
by nature. I never should have risked such a guess as that. Colonel De
Craye, you lengthen your face preternaturally, you distort it
purposely."

"Ma'am," returned De Craye, "the boast of our army is never to know
when we are beaten, and that tells of a great-hearted soldiery. But
there's a field where the Briton must own his defeat, whether smiling
or crying, and I'm not so sure that a short howl doesn't do him
honour."

"She was, I am certain, in love with Vernon Whitford all along.
Colonel De Craye!"

"Ah!" the colonel drank it in. "I have learnt that it was not the
gentleman in whom I am chiefly interested. So it was not so hard for
the lady to vow to friend Willoughby she would marry no one else?"

"Girls are unfathomable! And Lady Busshe--I know she did not go by
character--shot one of her random guesses, and she triumphs. We shall
never hear the last of it. And I had all the opportunities. I'm bound
to confess I had."

"Did you by chance, ma'am," De Craye said, with a twinkle, "drop a hint
to Willoughby of her turn for Vernon Whitford?"

"No," said Mrs. Mountstuart, "I'm not a mischief-maker; and the policy
of the county is to keep him in love with himself, or Patterne will be
likely to be as dull as it was without a lady enthroned. When his pride
is at ease he is a prince. I can read men. Now, Colonel De Craye, pray,
be lively."

"I should have been livelier, I'm afraid, if you had dropped a bit of a
hint to Willoughby. But you're the magnanimous person, ma'am, and
revenge for a stroke in the game of love shows us unworthy to win."

Mrs. Mountstuart menaced him with her parasol. "I forbid sentiments,
Colonel De Craye. They are always followed by sighs."

"Grant me five minutes of inward retirement, and I'll come out formed
for your commands, ma'am," said he.

Before the termination of that space De Craye was enchanting Mrs.
Mountstuart, and she in consequence was restored to her natural wit.

So, and much so universally, the world of his dread and his unconscious
worship wagged over Sir Willoughby Patterne and his change of brides,
until the preparations for the festivities of the marriage flushed him
in his county's eyes to something of the splendid glow he had worn on
the great day of his majority. That was upon the season when two lovers
met between the Swiss and Tyrol Alps over the Lake of Constance.
Sitting beside them the Comic Muse is grave and sisterly. But taking a
glance at the others of her late company of actors, she compresses her lips.









THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS

A STUDY IN A WELL-KNOWN STORY

By George Meredith

1892



BOOK 1.

The word 'fantastical' is accentuated in our tongue to so scornful an
utterance that the constant good service it does would make it seem an
appointed instrument for reviewers of books of imaginative matter
distasteful to those expository pens. Upon examination, claimants to the
epithet will be found outside of books and of poets, in many quarters,
Nature being one of the prominent, if not the foremost. Wherever she can
get to drink her fill of sunlight she pushes forth fantastically. As for
that wandering ship of the drunken pilot, the mutinous crew and the angry
captain, called Human Nature, 'fantastical' fits it no less completely
than a continental baby's skull-cap the stormy infant.

Our sympathies, one may fancy, will be broader, our critical acumen
shrewder, if we at once accept the thing as a part of us and worthy of
study.

The pair of tragic comedians of whom there will be question pass under
this word as under their banner and motto. Their acts are incredible:
they drank sunlight and drove their bark in a manner to eclipse
historical couples upon our planet. Yet they do belong to history, they
breathed the stouter air than fiction's, the last chapter of them is
written in red blood, and the man pouring out that last chapter, was of a
mighty nature not unheroical, a man of the active grappling modern brain
which wrestles with facts, to keep the world alive, and can create them,
to set it spinning.

A Faust-like legend might spring from him: he had a devil. He was the
leader of a host, the hope of a party, venerated by his followers, well
hated by his enemies, respected by the intellectual chiefs of his time,
in the pride of his manhood and his labours when he fell. And why this
man should have come to his end through love, and the woman who loved him
have laid her hand in the hand of the slayer, is the problem we have to
study, nothing inventing, in the spirit and flesh of both. To ask if it
was love is useless. Love may be celestial fire before it enters into the
systems of mortals. It will then take the character of its place of
abode, and we have to look not so much for the pure thing as for the
passion. Did it move them, hurry them, animating the giants and gnomes of
one, the elves and sprites of the other, and putting animal nature out of
its fashionable front rank? The bare railway-line of their story tells of
a passion honest enough to entitle it to be related. Nor is there
anything invented, because an addition of fictitious incidents could
never tell us how she came to do this, he to do that; or how the comic in
their natures led by interplay to the tragic issue. They are real
creatures, exquisitely fantastical, strangely exposed to the world by a
lurid catastrophe, who teach us, that fiction, if it can imagine events
and persons more agreeable to the taste it has educated, can read us no
such furrowing lesson in life.




THE TRAGIC COMEDIANS



CHAPTER I

An unresisted lady-killer is probably less aware that he roams the
pastures in pursuit of a coquette, than is the diligent Arachne that her
web is for the devouring lion. At an early age Clotilde von Rudiger was
dissatisfied with her conquests, though they were already numerous in her
seventeenth year, for she began precociously, having at her dawn a lively
fancy, a womanly person, and singular attractions of colour, eyes, and
style. She belonged by birth to the small aristocracy of her native land.
Nature had disposed her to coquettry, which is a pastime counting among
the arts of fence, and often innocent, often serviceable, though
sometimes dangerous, in the centres of polished barbarism known as
aristocratic societies, where nature is not absent, but on the contrary
very extravagant, tropical, by reason of her idle hours for the imbibing
of copious draughts of sunlight. The young lady of charming countenance
and sprightly manners is too much besought to choose for her choice to be
decided; the numbers beseeching prevent her from choosing instantly,
after the fashion of holiday schoolboys crowding a buffet of pastry.
These are not coquettish, they clutch what is handy: and little so is the
starved damsel of the sequestered village, whose one object of the
worldly picturesque is the passing curate; her heart is his for a nod.
But to be desired ardently of trooping hosts is an incentive to taste to
try for yourself. Men (the jury of householders empanelled to deliver
verdicts upon the ways of women) can almost understand that. And as it
happens, tasting before you have sounded the sense of your taste will
frequently mislead by a step or two difficult to retrieve: the young
coquette must then be cruel, as necessarily we kick the waters to escape
drowning: and she is not in all cases dealing with simple blocks or limp
festoons, she comes upon veteran tricksters that have a knowledge of her
sex, capable of outfencing her nascent individuality. The more
imagination she has, for a source of strength in the future days, the
more is she a prey to the enemy in her time of ignorance.

Clotilde's younger maiden hours and their love episodes are wrapped in
the mists Diana considerately drops over her adventurous favourites. She
was not under a French mother's rigid supervision. In France the mother
resolves that her daughter shall be guarded from the risks of that
unequal rencounter between foolish innocence and the predatory. Vigilant
foresight is not so much practised where the world is less accurately
comprehended. Young people of Clotilde's upper world everywhere, and the
young women of it especially, are troubled by an idea drawn from what
they inhale and guess at in the spirituous life surrounding them, that
the servants of the devil are the valiant host, this world's elect,
getting and deserving to get the best it can give in return for a little
dashing audacity, a flavour of the Fronde in their conduct; they sin, but
they have the world; and then they repent perhaps, but they have had the
world. The world is the golden apple. Thirst for it is common during
youth: and one would think the French mother worthy of the crown of
wisdom if she were not so scrupulously provident in excluding love from
the calculations on behalf of her girl.

Say (for Diana's mists are impenetrable and freeze curiosity) that
Clotilde was walking with Count Constantine, the brilliant Tartar trained
in Paris, when first she met Prince Marko Romaris, at the Hungarian Baths
on the borders of the Styrian highlands. The scene at all events is
pretty, and weaves a fable out of a variety of floating threads. A
stranger to the Baths, dressed in white and scarlet, sprang from his
carriage into a group of musical gypsies round an inn at the arch of the
chestnut avenue, after pulling up to listen to them for a while. The
music had seized him. He snatched bow and fiddle from one of the ring,
and with a few strokes kindled their faces. Then seating himself, on a
bench he laid the fiddle on his knee, and pinched the strings and flung
up his voice, not ceasing to roll out the spontaneous notes when Clotilde
and her cavalier, and other couples of the party, came nigh; for he was
on the tide of the song, warm in it, and loved it too well to suffer
intruders to break the flow, or to think of them. They were close by when
the last of it rattled (it was a popular song of a fiery tribe) to its
finish: He rose and saluted Clotilde, smiled and jumped back to his
carriage, sending a cry of adieu to the swarthy, lank-locked,
leather-hued circle, of which his dark oriental eyes and skin of
burnished walnut made him look an offshoot, but one of the celestial
branch.

He was in her father's reception-room when she reached home: he was
paying a visit of ceremony on behalf of his family to General von
Rudiger; which helped her to remember that he had been expected, and also
that his favourite colours were known to be white and scarlet. In those
very colours, strange to tell, Clotilde was dressed; Prince Marko had
recognized her by miraculous divination, he assured her he could have
staked his life on the guess as he bowed to her. Adieu to Count
Constantine. Fate had interposed the prince opportunely, we have to
suppose, for she received a strong impression of his coming straight from
her invisible guardian; and the stroke was consequently trenchant which
sent the conquering Tartar raving of her fickleness. She struck, like
fate, one blow. She discovered that the prince, in addition to his beauty
and sweet manners and gift of song, was good; she fell in love with
goodness, whereof Count Constantine was not an example: so she set her
face another way, soon discovering that there may be fragility in
goodness. And now first her imagination conceived the hero who was to
subdue her. Could Prince Marko be he, soft as he was, pliable, a docile
infant, burning to please her, enraptured in obeying?--the hero who would
wrestle with her, overcome and hold her bound? Siegfried could not be
dreamed in him, or a Siegfried's baby son-in-arms. She caught a glorious
image of the woman rejecting him and his rival, and it informed her that
she, dissatisfied with an Adonis, and more than a match for a famous
conqueror, was a woman of decisive and independent, perhaps unexampled,
force of character. Her idea of a spiritual superiority that could soar
over those two men, the bad and the good--the bad because of his
vileness, the good because of his frailness--whispered to her of
deserving, possibly of attracting, the best of men: the best, that is, in
the woman's view of us--the strongest, the great eagle of men, lord of
earth and air.

One who will dominate me, she thought.

Now when a young lady of lively intelligence and taking charm has brought
her mind to believe that she possesses force of character, she persuades
the rest of the world easily to agree with her, and so long as her
pretensions are not directly opposed to their habits of thought, her
parents will be the loudest in proclaiming it, fortifying so the maid's
presumption, which is ready to take root in any shadow of subserviency.
Her father was a gouty general of infantry in the diplomatic service,
disinclined to unnecessary disputes, out of consideration for his
vehement irritability when roused. Her mother had been one of the
beauties of her set, and was preserving an attenuated reign, through the
conversational arts, to save herself from fading into the wall. Her
brothers and sisters were not of an age to contest her lead. The temper
of the period was revolutionary in society by reflection of the state of
politics, and juniors were sturdy democrats, letting their elders know
that they had come to their inheritance, while the elders, confused by
the impudent topsy-turvy, put on the gaping mask (not unfamiliar to
history) of the disestablished conservative, whose astounded state
paralyzes his wrath.

Clotilde maintained a decent measure in the liberty she claimed, and it
was exercised in wildness of dialogue rather than in capricious
behaviour. If her flowing tongue was imperfectly controlled, it was
because she discoursed by preference to men upon our various affairs and
tangles, and they encouraged her with the tickled wonder which bids the
bold advance yet farther into bogland. Becoming the renowned original of
her society, wherever it might be, in Germany, Italy, Southern France,
she grew chillily sensible of the solitude decreed for their heritage to
our loftiest souls. Her Indian Bacchus, as a learned professor supplied
Prince Marko's title for her, was a pet, not a companion. She to him was
what she sought for in another. As much as she pitied herself for not
lighting on the predestined man, she pitied him for having met the woman,
so that her tenderness for both inspired many signs of warm affection,
not very unlike the thing it moaned secretly the not being. For she could
not but distinguish a more poignant sorrow in the seeing of the object we
yearn to vainly than in vainly yearning to one unseen. Dressed, to
delight him, in Prince Marko's colours, the care she bestowed on her
dressing was for the one absent, the shrouded comer: so she pleased the
prince to be pleasing to her soul's lord, and this, owing to an
appearance of satisfactory deception that it bore, led to her thinking
guiltily. We may ask it: an eagle is expected, and how is he to declare
his eagleship save by breaking through our mean conventional systems,
tearing links asunder, taking his own in the teeth of vulgar ordinances?
Clotilde's imagination drew on her reading for the knots it tied and
untied, and its ideas of grandeur. Her reading was an interfusion of
philosophy skimmed, and realistic romances deep-sounded. She tried hard,
but could get no other terrible tangle for her hero's exhibition of
flaming azure divineness than the vile one of the wedded woman. Further
thinking of it, she revived and recovered; she despised the complication,
yet without perceiving how else he was to manifest himself legitimately
in a dull modern world. The rescuing her from death would be a poor
imitation of worn-out heroes. His publication of a trumpeting book fell
appallingly flat in her survey. Deeds of gallantry done as an officer in
war (defending his country too) distinguished the soldier, but failed to
add the eagle feather to the man. She had a mind of considerable soaring
scope, and eclectic: it analyzed a Napoleon, and declined the position of
his empress. The man must be a gentleman. Poets, princes, warriors,
potentates, marched before her speculative fancy unselected.

So far, as far as she can be portrayed introductorily, she is not without
exemplars in the sex. Young women have been known to turn from us
altogether, never to turn back, so poor and shrunken, or so fleshly-bulgy
have we all appeared in the fairy jacket they wove for the right one of
us to wear becomingly. But the busy great world was round Clotilde while
she was malleable, though she might be losing her fresh ideas of the
hammer and the block, and that is a world of much solicitation to induce
a vivid girl to merge an ideal in a living image. Supposing, when she has
accomplished it, that men justify her choice, the living will retain the
colours of the ideal. We have it on record that he may seem an eagle.

'You talk curiously like Alvan, do you know,' a gentleman of her country
said to her as they were descending the rock of Capri, one day. He said
it musingly.

He belonged to a circle beneath her own: the learned and artistic. She
had not heard of this Alvan, or had forgotten him; but professing
universal knowledge, especially of celebrities, besides having an envious
eye for that particular circle, which can pretend to be the choicest of
all, she was unwilling to betray her ignorance, and she dimpled her
cheek, as one who had often heard the thing said to her before. She
smiled musingly.




CHAPTER II

'Who is the man they call Alvan?' She put the question at the first
opportunity to an aunt of hers.

Up went five-fingered hands. This violent natural sign of horror was
comforting: she saw that he was a celebrity indeed.

'Alvan! My dear Clotilde! What on earth can you want to know about a
creature who is the worst of demagogues, a disreputable person, and a
Jew!'

Clotilde remarked that she had asked only who he was. 'Is he clever?'

'He is one of the basest of those wretches who are for upsetting the
Throne and Society to gratify their own wicked passions: that is what he
is.'

'But is he clever?'

'Able as Satan himself, they say. He is a really dangerous, bad man. You
could not have been curious about a worse one.'

'Politically, you mean.'

'Of course I do.'

The lady had not thought of any other kind of danger from a man of that
station.

The likening of one to Satan does not always exclude meditation upon him.
Clotilde was anxious to learn in what way her talk resembled Alvan's. He
being that furious creature, she thought of herself at her wildest, which
was in her estimation her best; and consequently, she being by no means a
furious creature, though very original, she could not meditate on him
without softening the outlines given him by report; all because of the
likeness between them; and, therefore, as she had knowingly been taken
for furious by very foolish people, she settled it that Alvan was also a
victim of the prejudices he scorned. It had pleased her at times to scorn
our prejudices and feel the tremendous weight she brought on herself by
the indulgence. She drew on her recollections of the Satanic in her bosom
when so situated, and never having admired herself more ardently than
when wearing that aspect, she would have admired the man who had won the
frightful title in public, except for one thing--he was a Jew.

The Jew was to Clotilde as flesh of swine to the Jew. Her parents had the
same abhorrence of Jewry. One of the favourite similes of the family for
whatsoever grunted in grossness, wriggled with meanness, was Jew: and it
was noteworthy from the fact that a streak of the blood was in the veins
of the latest generation and might have been traced on the maternal side.

Now a meanness that clothes itself in the Satanic to terrify cowards is
the vilest form of impudence venturing at insolence; and an insolent
impudence with Jew features, the Jew nose and lips, is past endurance
repulsive. She dismissed her contemplation of Alvan. Luckily for the
gentleman who had compared her to the Jew politician, she did not meet
him again in Italy.

She had meanwhile formed an idea of the Alvanesque in dialogue; she
summoned her forces to take aim at it, without becoming anything Jewish,
still remaining clean and Christian; and by her astonishing practice of
the art she could at any time blow up a company--scatter mature and
seasoned dames, as had they been balloons on a wind, ay, and give our
stout sex a shaking.

Clotilde rejected another aspirant proposed by her parents, and falling
into disgrace at home, she went to live for some months with an ancient
lady who was her close relative residing in the capital city where the
brain of her race is located. There it occurred that a dashing officer of
social besides military rank, dancing with her at a ball, said, for a
comment on certain boldly independent remarks she had been making: 'I see
you know Alvan.'

Alvan once more.

'Indeed I do not,' she said, for she was addressing an officer high above
Alvan in social rank; and she shrugged, implying that she was almost past
contradiction of the charge.

'Surely you must,' said he; 'where is the lady who could talk and think
as you do without knowing Alvan and sharing his views!'

Clotilde was both startled and nettled.

'But I do not know him at all; I have never met him, never seen him. I am
unlikely to meet the kind of person,' she protested; and she was amazed
yet secretly rejoiced on hearing him, a noble of her own circle, and a
dashing officer, rejoin: 'Come, come, let us be honest. That is all very
well for the little midges floating round us to say of Alvan, but we two
can clasp hands and avow proudly that we both know and love the man.'

'Were it true, I would own it at once, but I repeat, that he is a total
stranger to me,' she said, seeing the Jew under quite a different
illumination.

'Actually?'

'In honour.'

'You have never met, never seen him, never read any of his writings?'

'Never. I have heard his name, that is all.'

'Then,' the officer's voice was earnest, 'I pity him, and you no less,
while you remain strangers, for you were made for one another. Those
ideas you have expressed, nay, the very words, are Alvan's: I have heard
him use them. He has just the same original views of society and history
as yours; they're identical; your features are not unlike . . . you talk
alike: I could fancy your voice the sister of his. You look incredulous?
You were speaking of Pompeius, and you said "Plutarch's Pompeius," and
more for it is almost incredible under the supposition that you do not
know and have never listened to Alvan--you said that Pompeius appeared to
have been decorated with all the gifts of the Gods to make the greater
sacrifice of him to Caesar, who was not personally worth a pretty woman's
"bite." Come, now--you must believe me: at a supper at Alvan's table the
other night, the talk happened to be of a modern Caesar, which led to the
real one, and from him to "Plutarch's Pompeius," as Alvan called him; and
then he said of him what you have just said, absolutely the same down to
the allusion to the bite. I assure you. And you have numbers of little
phrases in common: you are partners in aphorisms: Barriers are for those
who cannot fly: that is Alvan's. I could multiply them if I could
remember; they struck me as you spoke.'

'I must be a shameless plagiarist,' said Clotilde.

'Or he,' said Count Kollin.

It is here the place of the Chorus to state that these: ideas were in the
air at the time; sparks of the Vulcanic smithy at work in politics and
pervading literature: which both Alvan and Clotilde might catch and give
out as their own, in the honest belief that the epigram was, original to
them. They were not members of a country where literature is confined to
its little paddock, without, influence on the larger field (part lawn,
part marsh) of the social world: they were readers in sympathetic action
with thinkers and literary artists. Their saying in common, 'Plutarch's
Pompeius,' may be traceable to a reading of some professorial article on
the common portrait-painting of the sage of Chaeroneia. The dainty
savageness in the 'bite' Plutarch mentions, evidently struck on a
similarity of tastes in both, as it has done with others. And in regard
to Caesar, Clotilde thought much of Caesar; she had often wished that
Caesar (for the additional pleasure in thinking of him) had been endowed
with the beauty of his rival: one or two of Plutarch's touches upon the
earlier history of Pompeius had netted her fancy, faintly (your
generosity must be equal to hearing it) stung her blood; she liked the
man; and if he had not been beaten in the end, she would have preferred
him femininely. His name was not written Pompey to her, as in English, to
sound absurd: it was a note of grandeur befitting great and lamentable
fortunes, which the young lady declined to share solely because of her
attraction to the victor, her compulsion to render unto the victor the
sunflower's homage. She rendered it as a slave: the splendid man beloved
to ecstasy by the flower of Roman women was her natural choice.

Alvan could not be even a Caesar in person, he was a Jew. Still a Jew of
whom Count Kollin spoke so warmly must be exceptional, and of the
exceptional she dreamed. He might have the head of a Caesar. She imagined
a huge head, the cauldron of a boiling brain, anything but bright to the
eye, like a pot always on the fire, black, greasy, encrusted, unkempt:
the head of a malicious tremendous dwarf. Her hungry inquiries in a city
where Alvan was well known, brought her full information of one who
enjoyed a highly convivial reputation besides the influence of his
political leadership; but no description of his aspect accompanied it,
for where he was nightly to be met somewhere about the city, none thought
of describing him, and she did not push that question because she had
sketched him for herself, and rather wished, the more she heard of his
genius, to keep him repulsive. It appeared that his bravery was as well
proved as his genius, and a brilliant instance of it had been given in
the city not long since. He had her ideas, and he won multitudes with
them: he was a talker, a writer, and an orator; and he was learned, while
she could not pretend either to learning or to a flow of rhetoric. She
could prattle deliciously, at times pointedly, relying on her intuition
to tell her more than we get from books, and on her sweet impudence for a
richer original strain. She began to appreciate now a reputation for
profound acquirements. Learned professors of jurisprudence and history
were as enthusiastic for Alvan in their way as Count Kollin. She heard
things related of Alvan by the underbreath. That circle below her own,
the literary and artistic, idolized him; his talk, his classic breakfasts
and suppers, his undisguised ambition, his indomitable energy, his
dauntlessness and sway over her sex, were subjects of eulogy all round
her; and she heard of an enamoured baroness. No one blamed Alvan. He had
shown his chivalrous valour in defending her. The baroness was not a
young woman, and she was a hardbound Blue. She had been the first to
discover the prodigy, and had pruned, corrected, and published him; he
was one of her political works, promising to be the most successful. An
old affair apparently; but the association of a woman's name with
Alvan's, albeit the name of a veteran, roused the girl's curiosity,
leading her to think his mental and magnetic powers must be of the very
highest, considering his physical repulsiveness, for a woman of rank to
yield him such extreme devotion. She commissioned her princely
serving-man, who had followed and was never far away from her, to obtain
precise intelligence of this notorious Alvan.

Prince Marko did what he could to please her; he knew something of the
rumours about Alvan and the baroness. But why should his lady trouble
herself for particulars of such people, whom it could scarcely be
supposed she would meet by accident? He asked her this. Clotilde said it
was common curiosity. She read him a short lecture on the dismal
narrowness of their upper world; and on the advantage of taking an
interest in the world below them and more enlightened; a world where
ideas were current and speech was wine. The prince nodded; if she had
these opinions, it must be good for him to have them too, and he shared
them, as it were, by the touch of her hand, and for the length of time
that he touched her hand, as an electrical shock may be taken by one far
removed from the battery, susceptible to it only through the link; he was
capable of thinking all that came to him from her a blessing--shocks,
wounds and disruptions. He did not add largely to her stock of items, nor
did he fetch new colours. The telegraph wire was his model of style. He
was more or less a serviceless Indian Bacchus, standing for sign of the
beauty and vacuity of their world: and how dismally narrow that world
was, she felt with renewed astonishment at every dive out of her
gold-fish pool into the world of tides below; so that she was ready to
scorn the cultivation of the graces, and had, when not submitting to the
smell, fanciful fits of a liking for tobacco smoke--the familiar incense
of those homes where speech was wine.

At last she fell to the asking of herself whether, in the same city with
him, often among his friends, hearing his latest intimate remarks--things
homely redolent of him as hot bread of the oven--she was ever to meet
this man upon whom her thoughts were bent to the eclipse of all others.
She desired to meet him for comparison's sake, and to criticize a popular
hero. It was inconceivable that any one popular could approach her
standard, but she was curious; flame played about him; she had some
expectation of easing a spiteful sentiment created by the recent
subjection of her thoughts to the prodigious little Jew; and some feeling
of closer pity for Prince Marko she had, which urged her to be rid of her
delusion as to the existence of a wonder-working man on our earth, that
she might be sympathetically kind to the prince, perhaps compliant, and
so please her parents, be good and dull, and please everybody, and adieu
to dreams, good night, and so to sleep with the beasts! . . .

Calling one afternoon on a new acquaintance of the flat table-land she
liked tripping down to from her heights, Clotilde found the lady in
supreme toilette, glowing, bubbling: 'Such a breakfast, my dear!' The
costly profusion, the anecdotes, the wit, the fun, the copious draughts
of the choicest of life--was there ever anything to match it? Never in
that lady's recollection, or her husband's either, she exclaimed. And
where was the breakfast? Why, at Alvan's, to be sure; where else could
such a breakfast be?

'And you know Alvan!' cried Clotilde, catching excitement from the lady's
flush.

'Alvan is one of my husband's closest friends'

Clotilde put on the playful frenzy; she made show of wringing her hands:
'Oh! happy you! you know Alvan? And everybody is to know him except me?
why? I proclaim it unjust. Because I am unmarried? I'll take a husband
to-morrow morning to be entitled to meet Alvan in the evening.'

The playful frenzy is accepted in its exact innocent signification of
'this is my pretty wilful will and way,' and the lady responded to it
cordially; for it is pleasant to have some one to show, and pleasant to
assist some one eager to see: besides, many had petitioned her for a
sight of Alvan; she was used to the request.

'You're not obliged to wait for to-morrow,' she said. 'Come to one of our
gatherings to-night. Alvan will be here.'

'You invite me?'

'Distinctly. Pray, come. He is sure to be here. We have his promise, and
Alvan never fails. Was it not Frau v. Crestow who did us the favour of
our introduction? She will bring you.'

The Frau v. Crestow was a cousin of Clotilde's by marriage, sentimental,
but strict in her reading of the proprieties. She saw nothing wrong in
undertaking to conduct Clotilde to one of those famous gatherings of the
finer souls of the city and the race; and her husband agreed to join them
after the sitting of the Chamber upon a military-budget vote. The whole
plan was nicely arranged and went well. Clotilde dressed carefully,
letting her gold-locks cloud her fine forehead carelessly, with finishing
touches to the negligence, for she might be challenged to take part in
disputations on serious themes, and a handsome young woman who has to
sustain an argument against a man does wisely when she forearms her
beauties for a reserve, to carry out flanking movements if required. The
object is to beat him.




CHAPTER III

Her hostess met her at the entrance of the rooms, murmuring that Alvan
was present, and was there: a direction of a nod that any quick-witted
damsel must pretend to think sufficient, so Clotilde slipped from her
companion and gazed into the recess of a doorless inner room, where three
gentlemen stood, backed by book cases, conversing in blue vapours of
tobacco. They were indistinct; she could see that one of them was of good
stature. One she knew; he was the master of the house, mildly Jewish. The
third was distressingly branded with the slum and gutter signs of the
Ahasuerus race. Three hats on his head could not have done it more
effectively. The vindictive caricatures of the God Pan, executed by
priests of the later religion burning to hunt him out of worship in the
semblance of the hairy, hoofy, snouty Evil One, were not more loathsome.
She sank on a sofa. That the man? Oh! Jew, and fifty times over Jew!
nothing but Jew!

The three stepped into the long saloon, and she saw how veritably
magnificent was the first whom she had noticed.

She sat at her lamb's-wool work in the little ivory frame, feeding on the
contrast. This man's face was the born orator's, with the light-giving
eyes, the forward nose, the animated mouth, all stamped for speechfulness
and enterprise, of Cicero's rival in the forum before he took the
headship of armies and marched to empire.

The gifts of speech, enterprise, decision, were marked on his features
and his bearing, but with a fine air of lordly mildness. Alas, he could
not be other than Christian, so glorious was he in build! One could
vision an eagle swooping to his helm by divine election. So vigorously
rich was his blood that the swift emotion running with the theme as he
talked pictured itself in passing and was like the play of sheet
lightning on the variations of the uninterrupted and many-glancing
outpour. Looking on him was listening. Yes, the looking on him sufficed.
Here was an image of the beauty of a new order of godlike men, that
drained an Indian Bacchus of his thin seductions at a breath-reduced him
to the state of nursery plaything, spangles and wax, in the contemplation
of a girl suddenly plunged on the deeps of her womanhood. She shrank to
smaller and smaller as she looked.

Be sure that she knew who he was. No, says she. But she knew. It
terrified her soul to think he was Alvan. She feared scarcely less that
it might not be he. Between these dreads of doubt and belief she played
at cat and mouse with herself, escaped from cat, persecuted mouse, teased
herself, and gloated. It is he! not he! he! not he! most certainly!
impossible!--And then it ran: If he, oh me! If another, woe me! For she
had come to see Alvan. Alvan and she shared ideas. They talked
marvellously alike, so as to startle Count Kollin: and supposing he was
not Alvan, it would be a bitter disappointment. The supposition that he
was, threatened her with instant and life-long bondage.

Then again, could that face be the face of a Jew? She feasted. It was a
noble profile, an ivory skin, most lustrous eyes. Perchance a Jew of the
Spanish branch of the exodus, not the Polish. There is the noble Jew as
well as the bestial Gentile. There is not in the sublimest of Gentiles a
majesty comparable to that of the Jew elect. He may well think his race
favoured of heaven, though heaven chastise them still. The noble Jew is
grave in age, but in his youth he is the arrow to the bow of his fiery
eastern blood, and in his manhood he is--ay, what you see there! a figure
of easy and superb preponderance, whose fire has mounted to inspirit and
be tempered by the intellect.

She was therefore prepared all the while for the surprise of learning
that the gentleman so unlike a Jew was Alvan; and she was prepared to
express her recordation of the circumstance in her diary with phrases of
very eminent surprise. Necessarily it would be the greatest of surprises.

The three, this man and his two of the tribe, upon whom Clotilde's
attention centred, with a comparison in her mind too sacred to be other
than profane (comparisons will thrust themselves on minds disordered),
dropped to the cushions of the double-seated sofa, by one side of which
she cowered over her wool-work, willing to dwindle to a pin's head if her
insignificance might enable her to hear the words of the speaker. He
pursued his talk: there was little danger of not hearing him. There was
only the danger of feeling too deeply the spell of his voice. His voice
had the mellow fulness of the clarionet. But for the subject, she could
have fancied a noontide piping of great Pan by the sedges. She had never
heard a continuous monologue so musical, so varied in music, amply
flowing, vivacious, interwovenly the brook, the stream, the torrent: a
perfect natural orchestra in a single instrument. He had notes less
pastorally imageable, notes that fired the blood, with the ranging of his
theme. The subject became clearer to her subjugated wits, until the
mental vivacity he roused on certain impetuous phrases of assertion
caused her pride to waken up and rebel as she took a glance at herself,
remembering that she likewise was a thinker, deemed in her society an
original thinker, an intrepid thinker and talker, not so very much
beneath this man in audacity of brain, it might be. He kindled her thus,
and the close-shut but expanded and knew the fretting desire to breathe
out the secret within it, and be appreciated in turn.

The young flower of her sex burned to speak, to deliver an opinion. She
was unaccustomed to yield a fascinated ear. She was accustomed rather to
dictate and be the victorious performer, and though now she was not
anxious to occupy the pulpit--being too strictly bred to wish for a post
publicly in any of the rostra--and meant still less to dispossess the
present speaker of the place he filled so well, she yearned to join him:
and as that could not be done by a stranger approving, she panted to
dissent. A young lady cannot so well say to an unknown gentleman: 'You
have spoken truly, sir,' as, 'That is false!' for to speak in the former
case would be gratuitous, and in the latter she is excused by the moral
warmth provoking her. Further, dissent rings out finely, and approval is
a feeble murmur--a poor introduction of oneself. Her moral warmth was
ready and waiting for the instigating subject, but of course she was
unconscious of the goad within. Excitement wafted her out of herself, as
we say, or out of the conventional vessel into the waves of her troubled
nature. He had not yet given her an opportunity for dissenting; she was
compelled to agree, dragged at his chariot-wheels in headlong agreement.

His theme was Action; the political advantages of Action; and he
illustrated his view with historical examples, to the credit of the
French, the temporary discredit of the German and English races, who tend
to compromise instead. Of the English he spoke as of a power extinct, a
people 'gone to fat,' who have gained their end in a hoard of gold and
shut the door upon bandit ideas. Action means life to the soul as to the
body. Compromise is virtual death: it is the pact between cowardice and
comfort under the title of expediency. So do we gather dead matter about
us. So are we gradually self-stifled, corrupt. The war with evil in every
form must be incessant; we cannot have peace. Let then our joy be in war:
in uncompromising Action, which need not be the less a sagacious conduct
of the war . . . . Action energizes men's brains, generates grander
capacities, provokes greatness of soul between enemies, and is the
guarantee of positive conquest for the benefit of our species. To doubt
that, is to doubt of good being to be had for the seeking. He drew
pictures of the healthy Rome when turbulent, the doomed quiescent. Rome
struggling grasped the world. Rome stagnant invited Goth and Vandal. So
forth: alliterative antitheses of the accustomed pamphleteer. At last her
chance arrived.

His opposition sketch of Inaction was refreshed by an analysis of the
character of Hamlet. Then he reverted to Hamlet's promising youth. How
brilliantly endowed was the Prince of Denmark in the beginning!

'Mad from the first!' cried Clotilde.

She produced an effect not unlike that of a sudden crack of thunder. The
three made chorus in a noise of boots on the floor.

Her hero faced about and stood up, looking at her fulgently. Their eyes
engaged without wavering on either side. Brave eyes they seemed, each
pair of them, for his were fastened on a comely girl, and she had strung
herself to her gallantest to meet the crisis.

His friends quitted him at a motion of the elbows. He knelt on the sofa,
leaning across it, with clasped hands.

'You are she!--So, then, is a contradiction of me to be the
commencement?'

'After the apparition of Hamlet's father the prince was mad,' said
Clotilde hurriedly, and she gazed for her hostess, a paroxysm of alarm
succeeding that of her boldness.

'Why should we two wait to be introduced?' said he. 'We know one another.
I am Alvan. You are she of whom I heard from Kollin: who else? Lucretia
the gold-haired; the gold-crested serpent, wise as her sire; Aurora
breaking the clouds; in short, Clotilde!'

Her heart exulted to hear him speak her name. She laughed with a radiant
face. His being Alvan, and his knowing her and speaking her name, all was
like the happy reading of a riddle. He came round to her, bowing, and his
hand out. She gave hers: she could have said, if asked, 'For good!' And
it looked as though she had given it for good.




CHAPTER IV

'Hamlet in due season,' said he, as they sat together. 'I shall convince
you.'

She shook her head.

'Yes, yes, an opinion formed by a woman is inflexible; I know that: the
fact is not half so stubborn. But at present there are two more important
actors: we are not at Elsinore. You are aware that I hoped to meet you?'

'Is there a periodical advertisement of your hopes?--or do they come to
us by intuition?'

'Kollin was right!--the ways of the serpent will be serpentine. I knew we
must meet. It is no true day so long as the goddess of the morning and
the sun-god are kept asunder. I speak of myself, by what I have felt
since I heard of you.'

'You are sure of your divinity?'

'Through my belief in yours!'

They bowed smiling at the courtly exchanges.

'And tell me,' said he, 'as to meeting me . . . ?'

She replied: 'When we are so like the rest of the world we may confess
our weakness.'

'Unlike! for the world and I meet and part: not we two.'

Clotilde attempted an answer: it would not come. She tried to be revolted
by his lording tone, and found it strangely inoffensive. His lording
presence and the smile that was like a waving feather on it compelled her
so strongly to submit to hear, as to put her in danger of appearing to
embrace this man's rapid advances.

She said: 'I first heed of you at Capri.'

'And I was at Capri seven days after you had left.'

'You knew my name then?'

'Be not too curious with necromancers. Here is the date--March 15th. You
departed on the 8th.'

'I think I did. That is a year from now.'

'Then we missed: now we meet. It is a year lost. A year is a great age!
Reflect on it and what you owe me. How I wished for a comrade at Capri!
Not a "young lady," and certainly no man. The understanding Feminine, was
my desire--a different thing from the feminine understanding, usually. I
wanted my comrade young and fair, necessarily of your sex, but with heart
and brain: an insane request, I fancied, until I heard that you were the
person I wanted. In default of you I paraded the island with Tiberius,
who is my favourite tyrant. We took the initiative against the
patricians, at my suggestion, and the Annals were written by a plebeian
demagogue, instead of by one of that party, whose account of my
extinction by command of the emperor was pathetic. He apologized in turn
for my imperial master and me, saying truly, that the misunderstanding
between us was past cement: for each of us loved the man but hated his
office; and as the man is always more in his office than he is in
himself, clearly it was the lesser portion of our friend that each of us
loved. So, I, as the weaker, had to perish, as he would have done had I
been the stronger; I admitted it, and sent my emperor my respectful
adieux, with directions for the avoiding of assassins. Mademoiselle, by
delaying your departure seven days you would have saved me from death.
You see, the official is the artificial man, and I ought to have known
there is no natural man left in us to weigh against the artificial. I
counted on the emperor's personal affection, forgetting that princes
cannot be our friends.'

'You died bravely?'

Clotilde entered into the extravagance with a happy simulation of zest.

'Simply, we will say. My time had come, and I took no sturdy pose, but
let the life-stream run its course for a less confined embankment.
Sapphire sea, sapphire sky: one believes in life there, thrills with it,
when life is ebbing: ay, as warmly as when life is at the flow in our
sick and shrivelled North--the climate for dried fish! Verily the second
death of hearing that a gold-haired Lucretia had been on the island seven
days earlier, was harder to bear. Tell me frankly--the music in Italy?'

'Amorous and martial, brainless and monotonous.'

'Excellent!' his eyes flashed delightedly. 'O comrade of comrades! that
year lost to me will count heavily as I learn to value those I have
gained. Yes, brainless! There, in music, we beat them, as politically
France beats us. No life without brain! The brainless in Art and in
Statecraft are nothing but a little more obstructive than the dead. It is
less easy to cut a way through them. But it must be done, or the
Philistine will be as the locust in his increase, and devour the green
blades of the earth. You have been trained to shudder at the demagogue?'

'I do not shudder,' said Clotilde.

'A diamond from the lapidary!--Your sentences have many facets. Well, you
are conversing with a demagogue, an avowed one: a demagogue and a Jew.
You take it as a matter of course: you should exhibit some sparkling
incredulity. The Christian is like the politician in supposing the
original obverse of him everlastingly the same, after the pattern of the
monster he was originally taught to hate. But the Jew has been a little
christianized, and we have a little bejewed the Christian. So with
demagogues: as we see the conservative crumbling, we grow conservatived.
Try to think individually upon what you have to learn collectively--that
is your task. You are of the few who will be equal to it. We are not men
of blood, believe me. I am not. For example, I detest and I decline the
duel. I have done it, and proved myself a man of metal notwithstanding.
To say nothing of the inhumanity, the senselessness of duelling revolts
me. 'Tis a folly, so your nobles practise it, and your royal wiseacre
sanctions. No blood for me: and yet I tell you that whatever opposes me,
I will sweep away. How? With the brain. If we descend to poor brute
strength or brutal craft, it is from failing in the brain: we quit the
leadership of our forces, and the descent is the beast's confession. Do I
say how? Perhaps by your aid.--You do not start and cry: "Mine!" That is
well. I have not much esteem for non-professional actresses. They are
numerous and not entertaining.--You leave it to me to talk.'

'Could I do better?'

'You listen sweetly.'

'It is because I like to hear.'

'You have the pearly little ear of a shell on the sand.'

'With the great sea sounding near it!'

Alvan drew closer to her.

'I look into your eyes and perceive that one may listen to you and speak
to you. Heart to heart, then! Yes, a sea to lull you, a sea to win
you--temperately, let us hope; by storm, if need be. My prize is found!
The good friend who did the part of Iris for us came bounding to me: "I
have discovered the wife for you, Alvan." I had previously heard of her
from another as having touched the islet of Capri. "But," said Kollin,
"she is a gold-crested serpent--slippery!" Is she? That only tells me of
a little more to be mastered. I feel my future now. Hitherto it has been
a land without sunlight. Do you know how the look of sunlight on a land
calms one? It signifies to the eye possession and repose, the end
gained--not the end to labour, just heaven! but peace to the heart's
craving, which is the renewal of strength for work, the fresh dip in the
waters of life. Conjure up your vision of Italy. Remember the meaning of
Italian light and colour: the clearness, the luminous fulness, the
thoughtful shadows. Mountain and wooded headland are solid, deep to the
eye, spirit-speaking to the mind. They throb. You carve shapes of Gods
out of that sky, the sea, those peaks. They live with you. How they
satiate the vacant soul by influx, and draw forth the troubled from its
prickly nest!--Well, and you are my sunlighted land. And you will have to
be fought for. And I see not the less repose in the prospect! Part of you
may be shifty-sand. The sands are famous for their golden shining--as you
shine. Well, then, we must make the quicksands concrete. I have a perfect
faith in you, and in the winning of you. Clearly you will have to be
fought for. I should imagine it a tough battle to come. But as I doubt
neither you nor myself, I see beyond it.--We use phrases in common, and
aphorisms, it appears. Why? but that our minds act in unison. What if I
were to make a comparison of you with Paris?--the city of Paris,
Lutetia.'

'Could you make it good?' said Clotilde.

He laughed and postponed it for a series of skimming discussions, like
swallow-flights from the nest beneath the eaves to the surface of the
stream, perpetually reverting to her, and provoking spirited replies,
leading her to fly with him in expectation of a crowning compliment that
must be singular and was evidently gathering confirmation in his mind
from the touchings and probings of her character on these flights.

She was like a lady danced off her sense of fixity, to whom the
appearance of her whirling figure in the mirror is both wonderful and
reassuring; and she liked to be discussed, to be compared to anything,
for the sake of being the subject, so as to be sure it was she that
listened to a man who was a stranger, claiming her for his own; sure it
was she that by not breaking from him implied consent, she that went
speeding in this magical rapid round which slung her more and more out of
her actual into her imagined self, compelled her to proceed, denied her
the right to faint and call upon the world for aid, and catch at it,
though it was close by and at a signal would stop the terrible circling.
The world was close by and had begun to stare. She half apprehended that
fact, but she was in the presence of the irresistible. In the presence of
the irresistible the conventional is a crazy structure swept away with
very little creaking of its timbers on the flood. When we feel its power
we are immediately primitive creatures, flying anywhere in space,
indifferent to nakedness. And after trimming ourselves for it, the sage
asks your permission to add, it will be the thing we are most certain
some day to feel. Had not she trimmed herself?--so much that she had won
fame for an originality mistaken by her for the independent mind, and
perilously, for courage. She had trimmed herself and Alvan too--herself
to meet it, and Alvan to be it. Her famous originality was a trumpet
blown abroad proclaiming her the prize of the man who sounded as loudly
his esteem for the quality--in a fair young woman of good breeding. Each
had evoked the other. Their common anticipations differed in this, that
he had expected comeliness, she the reverse--an Esau of the cities; and
seeing superb manly beauty in the place of the thick-featured sodden
satyr of her miscreating fancy, the irresistible was revealed to her on
its divinest whirlwind.

They both desired beauty; they had each stipulated for beauty before
captivity could be acknowledged; and he beholding her very attractive
comeliness, walked into the net, deeming the same a light thing to wear,
and rather a finishing grace to his armoury; but she, a trained disciple
of the conventional in social behaviour (as to the serious points and the
extremer trifles), fluttered exceedingly; she knew not what she was
doing, where her hand was, how she looked at him, how she drank in his
looks on her. Her woman's eyes had no guard they had scarcely
speculation. She saw nothing in its passing, but everything backward,
under haphazard flashes. The sight of her hand disengaged told her it had
been detained; a glance at the company reminded her that those were men
and women who had been other than phantoms; recollections of the words
she listened to, assented to, replied to, displayed the gulfs she had
crossed. And nevertheless her brain was as quick as his to press forward
to pluck the themes which would demonstrate her mental vividness and at
least indicate her force of character. The splendour of the man quite
extinguished, or over-brightened, her sense of personal charm; she set
fire to her brain to shine intellectually, treating the tale of her fair
face as a childish tale that might have a grain of truth in it, some
truth, a very little, and that little nearly worthless, merely womanly, a
poor charm of her sex. The intellectual endowment was rarer: still rarer
the moral audacity. O, to match this man's embracing discursiveness! his
ardour, his complacent energy, the full strong sound he brought out of
all subjects! He struck, and they rang. There was a bell in everything
for him; Nature gave out her cry, and significance was on all sides of
the universe; no dead stuff, no longer any afflicting lumpishness. His
brain was vivifying light. And how humane he was! how supremely tolerant!
Where she had really thought instead of flippantly tapping at the doors
of thought, or crying vagrantly for an echo, his firm footing in the
region thrilled her; and where she had felt deeper than fancifully, his
wise tenderness overwhelmed. Strange to consider: with all his precious
gifts, which must make the gift of life thrice dear to him, he was
fearless. Less by what he said than by divination she discerned that he
knew not fear. If for only that, she would have hung to him like his
shadow. She could have detected a brazen pretender. A meaner mortal
vaunting his great stores she would have written down coxcomb. Her social
training and natural perception raised her to a height to measure the
bombastical and distinguish it from the eloquently lofty. He spoke of
himself, as the towering Alp speaks out at a first view, bidding that
which he was be known. Fearless, confident, able, he could not but be, as
he believed himself, indomitable. She who was this man's mate would
consequently wed his possessions, including courage. Clotilde at once
reached the conclusion of her having it in an equal degree. Was she not
displaying it? The worthy people of the company stared, as she now
perceived, and she was indifferent; her relatives were present without
disturbing her exaltation. She wheeled above their heads in the fiery
chariot beside her sun-god. It could not but be courage, active courage,
superior to her previous tentative steps--the verbal temerities she had
supposed so dauntless. For now she was in action, now she was being tried
to match the preacher and incarnation of the virtues of action!

Alvan shaped a comparison of her with Paris, his beloved of cities--the
symbolized goddess of the lightning brain that is quick to conceive,
eager to realize ideas, impassioned for her hero, but ever putting him to
proof, graceful beyond all rhyme, colloquial as never the Muse; light in
light hands, yet valiant unto death for a principle; and therefore not
light, anything but light in strong hands, very stedfast rather: and oh!
constantly entertaining.

The comparison had to be strained to fit the living lady's shape. Did he
think it, or a dash of something like it?

His mood was luxurious. He had found the fair and youthful original woman
of refinement and station desired by him. He had good reason to wish to
find her. Having won a name, standing on firm ground, with promise of a
great career, chief of what was then taken for a growing party and is not
yet a collapsed, nor will be, though the foot on it is iron, his youth
had flown under the tutelage of an extraordinary Mentor, whom to call
Athene robs the goddess of her personal repute for wisdom in conduct, but
whose head was wise, wise as it was now grey. Verily she was original;
and a grey original should seem remarkable above a blooming blonde. If
originality in woman were our prime request, the grey should bear the
palm. She has gone through the battle, retaining the standard she carried
into it, which is a victory. Alas, that grey, so spirit-touching in Art,
should be so wintry in reality!

The discovery of a feminine original breathing Spring, softer, warmer
than the ancient one, gold instead of snowcrested, and fully as intrepid
as devoted, was an immense joy to Alvan. He took it luxuriously because
he believed in his fortune, a kind of natal star, the common heritage of
the adventurous, that brought him his good things in time, in return for
energetic strivings in a higher direction apart from his natural
longings.

Fortune had delayed, he had wintered long. All the sweeter was the breath
of the young Spring. That exquisite new sweetness robed Clotilde in the
attributes of the person dreamed of for his mate; and deductively
assuming her to possess them, he could not doubt his power of winning
her. Barriers are for those who cannot fly. The barriers were palpable
about a girl of noble Christian birth: so was the courage in her which
would give her wings, he thought, coming to that judgement through the
mixture of his knowledge of himself and his perusal of her exterior. He
saw that she could take an impression deeply enough to express it
sincerely, and he counted on it, sympathetically endowing her with his
courage to support the originality she was famed for.

They were interrupted between-whiles by weariful men running to Alvan for
counsel on various matters--how to play their game, or the exact phrasing
of some pregnant sentence current in politics or literature. He satisfied
them severally and shouldered them away, begging for peace that night.
Clotilde corroborated his accurate recital of the lines of a contested
verse of the incomparable Heinrich, and they fell to capping verses of
the poet-lucid metheglin, with here and there no dubious flavour of acid,
and a lively sting in the tail of the honey. Sentiment, cynicism, and
satin impropriety and scabrous, are among those verses, where pure poetry
has a recognized voice; but the lower elements constitute the popularity
in a cultivated society inclining to wantonness out of bravado as well as
by taste. Alvan, looking indolently royal and royally roguish, quoted a
verse that speaks of the superfluousness of a faithless lady's vowing
bite:

       'The kisses were in the course of things,
        The bite was a needless addition.'

Clotilde could not repress her reddening--Count Kollin had repeated too
much! She dropped her eyes, with a face of sculpture, then resumed their
chatter. He spared her the allusion to Pompeius. She convinced him of her
capacity for reserve besides intrepidity, and flattered him too with her
blush. She could dare to say to Kollin what her scarlet sensibility
forbade her touching on with him: not that she would not have had an airy
latitude with him to touch on what she pleased: he liked her for her
boldness and the cold peeping of the senses displayed in it: he liked
also the distinction she made.

The cry to supper conduced to a further insight of her adaptation to his
requirements in a wife. They marched to the table together, and sat
together, and drank a noble Rhine wine together--true Rauenthal. His
robustness of body and soul inspired the wish that his well-born wife
might be, in her dainty fashion, yet honestly and without mincing, his
possible boonfellow: he and she, glass in hand, thanking the bountiful
heavens, blessing mankind in chorus. It belonged to his hearty dream of
the wife he would choose, were she to be had. The position of interpreter
of heaven's benevolence to mankind through his own enjoyment of the
gifts, was one that he sagaciously demanded for himself, sharing it with
the Philistine unknowingly; and to have a wife no less wise than he on
this throne of existence was a rosy exaltation. Clotilde kindled to the
hint of his festival mood of Solomon at the banquet. She was not devoid
of a discernment of flavours; she had heard grave judges at her father's
board profoundly deliver their verdicts upon this and that vineyard and
vintage; and it is a note of patriotism in her country to be enthusiastic
for wine of the Rhine: she was, moreover, thirsty from much talking and
excitement. She drank her glass relishingly, declaring the wine princely.
Alvan smacked his hands in a rapture: 'You are not for the extract of
raisin our people have taken to copy from French Sauternes, to suit a
female predilection for sugar?'

'No, no, the grape for me!' said she: 'the Rhine grape with the elf in
it, and the silver harp and the stained legend!'

'Glorious!'

He toasted the grape. 'Wine of the grape is the young bride--the young
sun-bride! divine, and never too sweet, never cloying like the withered
sun-dried, with its one drop of concentrated sugar, that becomes ten of
gout. No raisin-juice for us! None of their too-long-on-the-stem
clusters! We are for the blood of the grape in her youth, her
heaven-kissing ardour. I have a cellar charged with the bravest of the
Rhine. We--will we not assail it, bleed it in the gallant days to come?
we two!' The picture of his bride and him drinking the sun down after a
day of savage toil was in the shout--a burst unnoticed in the incessantly
verbalizing buzz of a continental supper-table. Clotilde acquiesced: she
chimed to it like a fair boonfellow of the rollicking faun. She was
realizing fairyland.

They retired to the divan-corner where it was you-and-I between them as
with rivulets meeting and branching, running parallel, uniting and
branching again, divided by the theme, but unending in the flow of the
harmony. So ran their chirping arguments and diversions. The carrying on
of a prolonged and determined you-and-I in company intimates to those
undetermined floating atoms about us that a certain sacred something is
in process of formation, or has formed; and people looked; and looked
hard at the pair, and at one another afterward: none approached them. The
Signor conjuror who has a thousand arts for conjuring with nature was
generally considered to have done that night his most ancient and
reputedly fabulous trick--the dream of poets, rarely witnessed anywhere,
and almost too wonderful for credence in a haunt of our later
civilization. Yet there it was: the sudden revelation of the intense
divinity to a couple fused in oneness by his apparition, could be
perceived of all having man and woman in them; love at first sight, was
visible. 'Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?' And if nature,
character, circumstance, and a maid clever at dressing her mistress's
golden hair, did prepare them for Love's lightning-match, not the less
were they proclaimingly alight and in full blaze. Likewise, Time,
imperious old gentleman though we know him to be, with his fussy
reiterations concerning the hour for bed and sleep, bowed to the magical
fact of their condition, and forbore to warn them of his passing from
night to day. He had to go, he must, he has to be always going, but as
long as he could he left them on their bank by the margin of the stream,
where a shadow-cycle of the eternal wound a circle for them and allowed
them to imagine they had thrust that old driver of the dusty high-road
quietly out of the way. They were ungrateful, of course, when the
performance of his duties necessitated his pulling them up beside him
pretty smartly, but he uttered no prophecy of ever intending to rob them
of the celestial moments they had cut from him and meant to keep between
them 'for ever,' and fresh.

The hour was close on the dawn of a March morning. Alvan assisted at the
cloaking and hooding of Clotilde. Her relatives were at hand; they hung
by while he led her to the stairs and down into a spacious moonlight that
laid the traceries of the bare tree-twigs clear-black on grass and stone.

'A night to head the Spring!' said Alvan. 'Come.'

He lifted her off the steps and set her on the ground, as one who had an
established right to the privilege and she did not contest it, nor did
her people, so kingly was he, arrayed in the thunder of the bolt which
had struck the pair. These things, and many things that islands know not
of, are done upon continents, where perhaps traditions of the awfulness
of Love remain more potent in society; or it may be, that an island
atmosphere dispossesses the bolt of its promptitude to strike, or the
breastplates of the islanders are strengthened to resist the bolt, or no
tropical heat is there to create and launch it, or nothing is to be seen
of it for the haziness, or else giants do not walk there. But even where
he walked, amid a society intellectually fostering sentiment, in a land
bowing to see the simplicity of the mystery paraded, Alvan's behaviour
was passing heteroclite. He needed to be the kingly fellow he was,
crowned by another kingly fellow--the lord of hearts--to impose it
uninterruptedly. 'She is mine; I have won her this night!' his bearing
said; and Clotilde's acquiesced; and the worthy couple following them had
to exhibit a copy of the same, much wondering. Partly by habit, and of
his natural astuteness, Alvan peremptorily usurped a lead that once taken
could not easily be challenged, and would roll him on a good tideway
strong in his own passion and his lady's up against the last
defences--her parents. A difficulty with them was foreseen. What is a
difficulty!--a gate in the hunting-field: an opponent on a platform: a
knot beneath a sword: the dam to waters that draw from the heavens. Not
desiring it in this case--it would have been to love the difficulty
better than the woman--he still enjoyed the bracing prospect of a
resistance, if only because it was a portion of the dowry she brought
him. Good soldiers (who have won their grades) are often of a peaceful
temper and would not raise an invocation to war, but a view of the enemy
sets their pugnacious forces in motion, the bugle fills their veins with
electrical fire, till they are as racers on the race-course.--His inmost
hearty devil was glad of a combat that pertained to his possession of
her, for battle gives the savour of the passion to win, and victory
dignifies a prize: he was, however, resolved to have it, if possible,
according to the regular arrangement of such encounters, formal, without
snatchings, without rash violence; a victory won by personal ascendancy,
reasoning eloquence.

He laughed to hear her say, in answer to a question as to her present
feelings: 'I feel that I am carried away by a centaur!' The comparison
had been used or implied to him before.

'No!' said he, responding to a host of memories, to shake them off, 'no
more of the quadruped man! You tempt him--may I tell you that? Why, now,
this moment, at the snap of my fingers, what is to hinder our taking the
short cut to happiness, centaur and nymph? One leap and a gallop, and we
should be into the morning, leaving night to grope for us, parents and
friends to run about for the wits they lose in running. But no! No more
scandals. That silver moon invites us by its very spell of bright
serenity, to be mad: just as, when you drink of a reverie, the more
prolonged it is the greater the readiness for wild delirium at the end of
the draught. But no!' his voice deepened--'the handsome face of the orb
that lights us would be well enough were it only a gallop between us two.
Dearest, the orb that lights us two for a lifetime must be taken all
round, and I have been on the wrong side of the moon.

I have seen the other face of it--a visage scored with regrets, dead
dreams, burnt passions, bald illusions, and the like, the like!--sunless,
waterless, without a flower! It is the old volcano land: it grows one
bitter herb: if ever you see my mouth distorted you will know I am
revolving a taste of it; and as I need the antidote you give, I will not
be the centaur to win you, for that is the land where he stables himself;
yes, there he ends his course, and that is the herb he finishes by
pasturing on. You have no dislike of metaphors and parables? We Jews are
a parable people.'

'I am sure I do understand . . .' said Clotilde, catching her breath to
be conscientious, lest he should ask her for an elucidation.

'Provided always that the metaphor be not like the metaphysician's
treatise on Nature: a torch to see the sunrise!--You were going to add?'

'I was going to say, I think I understand, but you run away with me
still.'

'May the sensation never quit you!'

'It will not.'

'What a night!' Alvan raised his head: 'A night cast for our first
meeting and betrothing! You are near home?'

'The third house yonder in the moonlight.'

'The moonlight lays a white hand on it!'

'That is my window sparkling.'

'That is the vestal's cresset. Shall I blow it out?'

'You are too far. And it is a celestial flame, sir!'

'Celestial in truth! My hope of heaven! Dian's crescent will be ever on
that house for me, Clotilde. I would it were leagues distant, or the door
not forbidden!'

'I could minister to a good knight humbly.'

Alvan bent to her, on a sudden prompting:

'When do father and mother arrive?'

'To-morrow.'

He took her hand. 'To-morrow, then! The worst of omens is delay.'

Clotilde faintly gasped. Could he mean it?--he of so evil a name in her
family and circle!

Her playfulness and pleasure in the game of courtliness forsook her.

'Tell me the hour when it will be most convenient to them to receive me,'
said Alvan.

She stopped walking in sheer fright.

'My father--my mother?' she said, imaging within her the varied horror of
each and the commotion.

'To-morrow or the day after--not later. No delays! You are mine, we are
one; and the sooner my cause is pleaded the better for us both. If I
could step in and see them this instant, it would be forestalling
mischances. Do you not see, that time is due to us, and the minutes are
our gold slipping away?'

She shrank her hand back: she did not wish to withdraw the hand, only to
shun the pledge it signified. He opened an abyss at her feet, and in
deadly alarm of him she exclaimed: 'Oh! not yet; not immediately.' She
trembled, she made her petition dismal by her anguish of speechlessness.
'There will be such . . . not yet! Perhaps later. They must not be
troubled yet--at present. I am . . . I cannot--pray, delay!'

'But you are mine!' said Alvan. 'You feel it as I do. There can be no
real impediment?'

She gave an empty sigh that sought to be a run of entreaties. In fear of
his tongue she caught at words to baffle it, senseless of their
imbecility: 'Do not insist: yes, in time: they will--they--they may. My
father is not very well . . . my mother: she is not very well. They are
neither of them very well: not at present!--Spare them at present.'

To avoid being carried away, she flung herself from the centaur's back to
the disenchanting earth; she separated herself from him in spirit, and
beheld him as her father and mother and her circle would look on this
pretender to her hand, with his lordly air, his Jew blood, and his
hissing reputation--for it was a reputation that stirred the snakes and
the geese of the world. She saw him in their eyes, quite coldly: which
imaginative capacity was one of the remarkable feats of cowardice, active
and cold of brain even while the heart is active and would be warm.

He read something of her weakness. 'And supposing I decide that it must
be?'

'How can I supplicate you!' she replied with a shiver, feeling that she
had lost her chance of slipping from his grasp, as trained women of the
world, or very sprightly young wits know how to do at the critical
moment: and she had lost it by being too sincere. Her cowardice appeared
to her under that aspect.

'Now I perceive that the task is harder,' said Alvan, seeing her huddled
in a real dismay. 'Why will you not rise to my level and fear nothing!
The way is clear: we have only to take the step. Have you not seen
tonight that we are fated for one another? It is your destiny, and
trifling with destiny is a dark business. Look at me. Do you doubt my
having absolute control of myself to bear whatever they put on me to
bear, and hold firmly to my will to overcome them! Oh! no delays.'

'Yes!' she cried; 'yes, there must be.'

'You say it?'

The courage to repeat her cry was wanting.

She trembled visibly: she could more readily have bidden him bear her
hence than have named a day for the interview with her parents; but
desperately she feared that he would be the one to bid; and he had this
of the character of destiny about him, that she felt in him a maker of
facts. He was her dream in human shape, her eagle of men, and she felt
like a lamb in the air; she had no resistance, only terror of his power,
and a crushing new view of the nature of reality.

'I see!' said he, and his breast fell. Her timid inability to join with
him for instant action reminded him that he carried many weights: a bad
name among her people and class, and chains in private. He was old enough
to strangle his impulses, if necessary, or any of the brood less fiery
than the junction of his passions. 'Well, well!--but we might so soon
have broken through the hedge into the broad highroad! It is but to
determine to do it--to take the bold short path instead of the wearisome
circuit. Just a little lightning in the brain and tightening of the
heart. Battles are won in that way: not by tender girls! and she is a
girl, and the task is too much for her. So, then, we are in your hands,
child! Adieu, and let the gold-crested serpent glide to her bed, and
sleep, dream, and wake, and ask herself in the morning whether she is not
a wedded soul. Is she not a serpent? gold-crested, all the world may see;
and with a mortal bite, I know. I have had the bite before the kisses.
That is rather an unjust reversal of the order of things. Apropos, Hamlet
was poisoned--ghost-poisoned.'

'Mad, he was mad!' said Clotilde, recovering and smiling.

'He was born bilious; he partook of the father's constitution, not the
mother's. High-thoughted, quick-nerved to follow the thought, reflective,
if an interval yawned between his hand and the act, he was by nature
two-minded: as full of conscience as a nursing mother that sleeps beside
her infant:--she hears the silent beginning of a cry. Before the ghost
walked he was an elementary hero; one puff of action would have whiffed
away his melancholy. After it, he was a dizzy moralizer, waiting for the
winds to blow him to his deed-ox out. The apparition of his father to him
poisoned a sluggish run of blood, and that venom in the blood distracted
a head steeped in Wittenberg philosophy. With metaphysics in one and
poison in the other, with the outer world opened on him and this world
stirred to confusion, he wore the semblance of madness; he was throughout
sane; sick, but never with his reason dethroned.'

'Nothing but madness excuses his conduct to Ophelia!'

'Poison in the blood is a pretty good apology for infidelity to a lady.'

'No!'

'Well, to an Ophelia of fifty?' said Alvan.

Clotilde laughed, not perfectly assured of the wherefore, but pleased to
be able to laugh. Her friends were standing at the house door, farewells
were spoken, Alvan had gone. And then she thought of the person that
Ophelia of fifty might be, who would have to find a good apology for him
in his dose of snake-bite, or love of a younger woman whom he termed
gold-crested serpent.

He was a lover, surely a lover: he slid off to some chance bit of
likeness to himself in every subject he discussed with her.

And she? She speeded recklessly on the back of the centaur when he had
returned to the state of phantom and the realities he threatened her with
were no longer imminent.




CHAPTER V

Clotilde was of the order of the erring who should by rights have a short
sermon to preface an exposure of them, administering the whip to her own
sex and to ours, lest we scorn too much to take an interest in her. The
exposure she had done for herself, and she has not had the art to frame
her apology. The day after her meeting, with her eagle, Alvan, she saw
Prince Marko. She was gentle to him, in anticipation of his grief; she
could hardly be ungentle on account of his obsequious beauty, and when
her soft eyes and voice had thrilled him to an acute sensibility to the
blow, honourably she inflicted it.

'Marko, my friend, you know that I cannot be false; then let me tell you
I yesterday met the man who has but to lift his hand and I go to him, and
he may lead me whither he will.'

The burning eyes of her Indian Bacchus fixed on her till their brightness
moistened and flashed.

Whatever was for her happiness he bowed his head to, he said. He knew the
man.

Her duty was thus performed; she had plighted herself. For the first few
days she was in dread of meeting, seeing, or hearing of Alvan. She feared
the mention of a name that rolled the world so swiftly. Her parents had
postponed their coming, she had no reason for instant alarm; it was his
violent earnestness, his imperial self-confidence that she feared, as
nervous people shrink from cannon: and neither meeting, seeing, nor
hearing of him, she began to yearn, like the child whose curiosity is
refreshed by a desire to try again the startling thing which frightened
it. Her yearning grew, the illusion of her courage flooded back; she
hoped he would present himself to claim her, marvelled that he did not,
reproached him; she could almost have scorned him for listening to the
hesitations of the despicable girl so little resembling what she really
was--a poor untried girl, anxious only on behalf of her family to spare
them a sudden shock. Remembering her generous considerations in their
interests, she thought he should have known that the creature he called a
child would have yielded upon supplication to fly with him. Her
considerateness for him too, it struck her next, was the cause of her
seeming cowardly, and the man ought to have perceived it and put it
aside. He should have seen that she could be brave, and was a mate for
him. And if his shallow experience of her wrote her down nerveless, his
love should be doing.

Was it love? Her restoration to the belief in her possessing a decided
will whispered of high achievements she could do in proof of love, had
she the freedom of a man. She would not have listened (it was quite true)
to a silly supplicating girl; she would not have allowed an interval to
yawn after the first wild wooing of her. Prince Marko loved. Yes, that
was love! It failed in no sign of the passion. She set herself to study
it in Marko, and was moved by many sentiments, numbering among them pity,
thankfulness, and the shiver of a feeling between admiration and pathetic
esteem, like that the musician has for a precious instrument giving sweet
sound when shattered. He served her faithfully, in spite of his distaste
for some of his lady's commissions. She had to get her news of Alvan
through Marko. He brought her particulars of the old trial of Alvan, and
Alvan's oration in defence of himself for a lawless act of devotion to
the baroness; nothing less than the successfully scheming to wrest by
force from that lady's enemy a document precious to her lawful interests.
It was one of those cases which have a really high gallant side as well
as a bad; an excellent case for rhetoric. Marko supplied the world's
opinion of the affair, bravely owning it to be not unfavourable. Her
worthy relatives, the Frau v. Crestow and husband, had very properly
furnished a report to the family of the memorable evening; and the hubbub
over it, with the epithets applied to Alvan, intimated how he would have
been received on a visit to demand her in marriage. There was no chance
of her being allowed to enter houses where this 'rageing demagogue and
popular buffoon' was a guest; his name was banished from her hearing, so
she was compelled to have recourse to Marko. Unable to take such services
without rewarding him, she fondled: it pained her to see him suffer.
Those who toss crumbs to their domestic favourites will now and then be
moved to toss meat, which is not so good for them, but the dumb
mendicant's delight in it is winning, and a little cannot hurt. Besides,
if any one had a claim on her it was the prince; and as he was always
adoring, never importunate, he restored her to the pedestal she had been
really rudely shaken from by that other who had caught her up suddenly
into the air, and dropped her! A hand abandoned to her slave rewarded him
immeasurably. A heightening of the reward almost took his life. In the
peacefulness of dealing with a submissive love that made her queenly, the
royal, which plucked her from throne to footstool, seemed predatory and
insolent. Thus, after that scene of 'first love,' in which she had been
actress, she became almost (with an inward thrill or two for the
recovering of him) reconciled to the not seeing of the noble actor; for
nothing could erase the scene--it was historic; and Alvan would always be
thought of as a delicious electricity. She and Marko were together on the
summer excursion of her people, and quite sisterly, she could say, in her
delicate scorn of his advantages and her emotions. True gentlemen are
imperfectly valued when they are under the shadow of giants; but still
Clotilde's experience of a giant's manners was favourable to the liberty
she could enjoy in a sisterly intimacy of this kind, rather warmer than
her word for it would imply. She owned that she could better live the
poetic life--that is, trifle with fire and reflect on its charms in the
society of Marko. He was very young, he was little more than an
adolescent, and safely timid; a turn of her fingers would string or
slacken him. One could play on him securely, thinking of a distant
day--and some shipwreck of herself for an interlude--when he might be
made happy.

Her strangest mood of the tender cruelty was when the passion to
anatomize him beset her. The ground of it was, that she found him in her
likeness, adoring as she adored, and a similar loftiness; now grovelling,
now soaring; the most radiant of beings, the most abject; and the
pleasure she had of the sensational comparison was in an alteregoistic
home she found in him, that allowed of her gathering a picked
self-knowledge, and of her saying: 'That is like me: that is very like
me: that is terribly like': up to the point where the comparison wooed
her no longer with an agreeable lure of affinity, but nipped her so
shrewdly as to force her to say: 'That is he, not I': and the vivisected
youth received the caress which quickened him to wholeness at a touch. It
was given with impulsive tenderness, in pity of him. Anatomy is the title
for the operation, because the probing of herself in another, with the
liberty to cease probing as soon as it hurt her, allowed her while unhurt
to feel that she prosecuted her researches in a dead body. The moment her
strong susceptibility to the likeness shrank under a stroke of pain, she
abstained from carving, and simultaneously conscious that he lived, she
was kind to him.

'This love of yours, Marko--is it so deep?'

'I love you.'

'You think me the highest and best?'

'You are.'

'So deep that you could bear anything from me?'

'Try me!'

'Unfaithfulness?'

'You would be you!'

'Do you not say that because you cannot suspect evil of me?'

'Let me only see you!'

'You are sure that happiness would not smother it?'

'Has it done so yet?'

'Though you know I am a serpent to that man's music?'

'Ah, heaven! Oh!--do not say music. Yes! though anything!'

'And if ever you were to witness the power of his just breathing to me?'

'I would . . . . Ah!'

'What? If you saw his music working the spell?--even the first notes of
his prelude!'

'I would wait'

'It might be for long.'

'I would eat my heart.'

'Bitter! bitter!'

'I would wait till he flung you off, and kneel to you.'

She had a seizure of the nerves.

The likeness between them was, she felt, too flamingly keen to be looked
at further. She reached to the dim idea of some such nauseous devotion,
and took a shot in her breast as she did so, and abjured it, and softened
to her victim. Clotilde opened her arms, charming away her wound, as she
soothed him, both by the act of soothing and the reflection that she
could not be so very like one whom she pitied and consoled.

She was charitably tender. If it be thought that she was cruel to excess,
plead for her the temptation to simple human nature at sight of a youth
who could be precipitated into the writhings of dissolution, and raised
out of it by a smile. This young man's responsive spirit acted on her as
the discovery of specifics for restoring soundness to the frame excites
the brilliant empiric: he would slay us with benevolent soul to show the
miracle of our revival. Worship provokes the mortal goddess to a
manifestation of her powers; and really the devotee is full half to
blame.

She had latterly been thinking of Alvan's rejection of the part of
centaur; and his phrase, the quadruped man, breathed meaning. He was to
gain her lawfully after dominating her utterly. That was right, but it
levelled imagination. There is in the sentimental kingdom of Love a form
of reasoning, by which a lady of romantic notions who is dominated
utterly, will ask herself why she should be gained lawfully: and she is
moved to do so by the consideration that if the latter, no necessity can
exist for the former: and the reverse. In the union of the two conditions
she sees herself slavishly domesticated. With her Indian Bacchus
imagination rose, for he was pliant: she had only to fancy, and he was
beside her.--Quick to the saddle, away! The forest of terrors is ahead;
they are at the verge of it; a last hamlet perches on its borders; the
dwellers have haunted faces; the timbers of their huts lean to an upright
in wry splinters; warnings are moaned by men and women with the voice of
a night-wind; but on and on! the forest cannot be worse than a world
defied. They drain a cup of milk apiece and they spur, for this is the
way to the golden Indian land of the planted vine and the lover's
godship.--Ludicrous! There is no getting farther than the cup of milk
with Marko. They curvet and caper to be forward unavailingly. It should
be Alvan to bring her through the forest to the planted vine in sunland.
Her splendid prose Alvan could do what the sprig of poetry can but
suggest. Never would malicious fairy in old woman's form have offered
Alvan a cup of milk to paralyze his bride's imagination of him
confronting perils. Yet, O shameful contrariety of the fates! he who
could, will not; he who would, is incapable. Let it not be supposed that
the desire of her bosom was to be run away with in person. Her simple
human nature wished for the hero to lift her insensibly over the
difficult opening chapter of the romance--through 'the forest,' or half
imagined: that done, she felt bold enough to meet the unimagined, which,
as there was no picture of it to terrify her, seemed an easy gallop into
sunland.--Yes, but in the grasp of a great prose giant, with the poetic
departed! Naturally she turned to caress the poetic while she had it
beside her. And it was a wonder to observe the young prince's heavenly
sensitiveness to every variation of her moods. He knew without hearing
when she had next seen Alvan, though it had not been to speak to him. He
looked, and he knew. The liquid darkness of his large eastern eyes cast a
light that brought her heart out: she confessed it, and she comforted
him. The sweetest in the woman caused her double-dealing.

Now she was aware that Alvan moved behind the screen concealing him. A
common friend of Alvan and her family talked to her of him. He was an
eminent professor, a middleaged, grave and honourable man, not ignorant
that her family entertained views opposed to the pretensions of such a
man as the demagogue and Jew. Nevertheless Alvan could persuade him to
abet the scheme for his meeting Clotilde; nay, to lead to it; ultimately
to allow his own house to be their place of meeting. Alvan achieved the
first of the steps unassisted. Whether or not his character stood well
with a man of the world, his force of character, backed by solid
attainments in addition to brilliant gifts, could win a reputable citizen
and erudite to support him. Rhetoric in a worthy cause has good chances
of carrying the gravest, and the cause might reasonably seem excellent to
the professor when one promising fair to be the political genius of his
time, but hitherto not the quietest of livers, could make him believe
that marriage with this girl would be his clear salvation. The second
step was undesignedly Clotilde's.

She was on the professor's arm at one of the great winter balls of her
conductor's brethren in the law, and he said: 'Alvan is here.' She
answered: 'No, he has not yet come.'--How could she tell that he was not
present in the crowd?

'Has he come now?' said the professor.

'No.'

And no Alvan was discernible.

'Now?'

'Not yet.'

The professor stared about. She waited.

'Now he has come; he is in the room now,' said Clotilde.

Alvan was perceived. He stood in the centre of the throng surrounding him
to buzz about some recent pamphlet.

She could well play at faith in his magnetization of her, for as by
degrees she made herself more nervously apprehensive by thinking of him,
it came to an overclouding and then a panic; and that she took for the
physical sign of his presence, and by that time, the hour being late,
Alvan happened to have arrived. The touch of his hand, the instant
naturalness in their speaking together after a long separation, as if
there had not been an interval, confirmed her notion of his influence on
her, almost to the making it planetary. And a glance at the professor
revealed how picturesque it was. Alvan and he murmured aside. They spoke
of it: What wonder that Alvan, though he saw Prince Marko whirl her in
the dance, and keep her to the measure--dancing like a song of the limbs
in his desperate poor lover's little flitting eternity of the possession
of her--should say, after she had been led back to her friends: 'That is
he, then! one of the dragons guarding my apple of the Hesperides, whom I
must brush away.'

'He?' replied Clotilde, sincerely feeling Marko to be of as fractional a
weight as her tone declared him. 'Oh, he is my mute, harmless, he does
not count among the dragons.'

But there had been, notwithstanding the high presumption of his remark, a
manful thickness of voice in Alvan's 'That is he!' The rivals had
fastened a look on one another, wary, strong, and summary as the
wrestlers' first grapple. In fire of gaze, Marko was not outdone.

'He does not count? With those eyes of his?' Alvan exclaimed. He knew
something of the sex, and spied from that point of knowledge into the
character of Clotilde; not too venturesomely, with the assistance of
rumour, hazarding the suspicion which he put forth as a certainty, and
made sharply bitter to himself in proportion to the belief in it that his
vehemence engendered: 'I know all--without exception; all, everything;
all! I repeat. But what of it, if I win you? as I shall--only aid me a
little.'

She slightly surprised the man by not striving to attenuate the import of
the big and surcharged All: but her silence bore witness to his
penetrative knowledge. Dozens of amorous gentlemen, lovers, of excellent
substance, have before now prepared this peculiar dose for
themselves--the dose of the lady silent under a sort of pardoning grand
accusation; and they have had to drink it, and they have blinked over the
tonic draught with such power of taking a bracing as their constitutions
could summon. At no moment of their quaint mutual history are the sexes
to be seen standing more acutely divided. Well may the lady be silent;
her little sins are magnified to herself to the proportion of the
greatness of heart forgiving her; and that, with his mysterious
penetration and a throb of her conscience, holds her tongue-tied. She
does not imagine the effect of her silence upon the magnanimous wretch.
Some of these lovers, it has to be stated in sadness for the good name of
man, have not preserved an attitude that said so nobly, 'Child, thou art
human--thou art woman!' They have undone it and gone to pieces with an
injured lover's babble of persecuting inquiries for confessions. Some, on
the contrary, retaining the attitude, have been unable to digest the
tonic; they did not prepare their systems as they did their dose,
possibly thinking the latter a supererogatory heavy thump on a trifle,
the which was performed by them artfully for a means of swallowing and
getting that obnoxious trifle well down. These are ever after love's
dyspeptics. Very few indeed continue at heart in harmony with their
opening note to the silent fair, because in truth the general
anticipation is of her proclaiming, if not angelical innocence, a softly
reddened or blush-rose of it, where the little guiltiness lies pathetic
on its bed of white.

Alvan's robustness of temper, as a conqueror pleased with his capture,
could inspirit him to feel as he said it:

'I know all; what matters that to me?' Even her silence, extending the
'all' beyond limits, as it did to the over-knowing man, who could number
these indicative characteristics of the young woman: impulsive, without
will, readily able to lie: her silence worked no discord in him. He would
have remarked, that he was not looking out for a saint, but rather for a
sprightly comrade, perfectly feminine, thoroughly mastered, young,
graceful, comely, and a lady of station. Once in his good keeping, her
lord would answer for her. And this was a manfully generous view of the
situation. It belongs to the robustness of the conqueror's mood. But how
of his opinion of her character in the fret of a baffling, a repulse, a
defeat? Supposing the circumstances not to have helped her to shine as a
heroine, while he was reduced to appear no hero to himself! Wise are the
mothers who keep vigilant personal watch over their girls, were it only
to guard them at present, from the gentleman's condescending generosity,
until he has become something more than robust in his ideas of the
sex--say, for lack of the ringing word, fraternal.

Clotilde never knew, and Alvan would have been unable to date, the origin
of the black thing flung at her in time to come--when the man was
frenzied, doubtless, but it was in his mind, and more than froth of
madness.

After the night of the ball they met beneath the sanctioning roof of the
amiable professor; and on one occasion the latter, perhaps waxing
anxious, and after bringing about the introduction of Clotilde to the
sister of Alvan, pursued his prudent measures bypassing the pair through
a demi-ceremony of betrothal. It sprang Clotilde astride nearer to
reality, both actually and in feeling; and she began to show the change
at home. A rebuff that came of the coupling of her name with Alvan's
pushed her back as far below the surface as she had ever been. She waited
for him to take the step she had again implored him not yet to take; she
feared that he would, she marvelled at his abstaining; the old wheel
revolved, as it ever does with creatures that wait for circumstances to
bring the change they cannot work for themselves; and once more the two
fell asunder. She had thoughts of the cloister. Her venerable relative
died joining her hand to Prince Marko's; she was induced to think of
marriage. An illness laid her prostrate; she contemplated the peace of
death.

Shortly before she fell sick the prince was a guest of her father's, and
had won the household by his perfect amiability as an associate. The
grace and glow, and some of the imaginable accomplishments of an Indian
Bacchus were native to him. In her convalescence, she asked herself what
more she could crave than the worship of a godlike youth, whom she in
return might cherish, strengthening his frail health with happiness. For
she had seen how suffering ate him up; he required no teaching in the
Spartan virtue of suffering, wolf-gnawed, silently. But he was a flower
in sunshine to happiness, and he looked to her for it. Why should she
withhold from him a thing so easily given? The convalescent is receptive
and undesiring, or but very faintly desiring: the new blood coming into
the frame like first dawn of light has not stirred the old passions; it
is infant nature, with a tinge of superadded knowledge that is not cloud
across it and lends it only a tender wistfulness.

Her physician sentenced her to the Alps, whither a friend, a daughter of
our island, whose acquaintance she had made in Italy, was going, and at
an invitation Clotilde accompanied her, and she breathed Alpine air.
Marko sank into the category of dreams during sickness. There came a
letter from the professor mentioning that Alvan was on one of the kingly
Alpine heights in view, and the new blood running through her veins
became a torrent. He there! So near! Could he not be reached?

He had a saying: Two wishes make a will.

The wishes of two lovers, he meant. A prettier sentence for lovers, and
one more intoxicating to them, was never devised. It chirrups of the dear
silly couple. Well, this was her wish. Was it his? Young health on the
flow of her leaping blood cried out that it could not be other than
Alvan's wish; she believed in his wishing it. Then as he wished and she
wished, she had the will immediately, and it was all the more her own for
being his as well. She hurried her friend and her friend's friends on
horseback off to the heights where the wounded eagle lodged overlooking
mountain and lake. The professor reported him outwearied with excess of
work. Alvan lived the lives of three; the sins of thirty were laid to his
charge. Do you judge of heroes as of lesser men? Her reckless defence of
him, half spoken, half in her mind, helped her to comprehend his dealings
with her, and how it was that he stormed her and consented to be beaten.
He had a thousand occupations, an ambition out of the world of love,
chains to break, temptations, leanings . . . tut, tut! She had not lived
in her circle of society, and listened to the tales of his friends and
enemies, and been the correspondent of flattering and flattered men of
learning, without understanding how a man like Alvan found diversions
when forbidden to act in a given direction: and now that her healthful
new blood inspired the courage to turn two wishes to a will, she saw both
herself and him very clearly, enough at least to pardon the man more than
she did herself. She had perforce of her radiant new healthfulness
arrived at an exact understanding of him. Where she was deluded was in
supposing that she would no longer dread his impetuous disposition to
turn rosy visions into facts. But she had the revived convalescent's
ardour to embrace things positive while they were not knocking at the
door; dreams were abhorrent to her, tasteless and innutritious; she cast
herself on the flood, relying on his towering strength and mastery of men
and events to bring her to some safe landing--the dream of hearts athirst
for facts.




CHAPTER VI

Alvan was at his writing-table doing stout gladiator's work on paper in a
chamber of one of the gaunt hotels of the heights, which are Death's
Heads there in Winter and have the tongues in Summer, when a Swiss lad
entered with a round grin to tell him that a lady on horseback below had
asked for him--Dr. Alvan. Who could the lady be? He thought of too many.
The thought of Clotilde was dismissed in its dimness. Issuing and
beholding her, his face became illuminated as by a stroke of sunlight.

'Clotilde! by all the holiest!'

She smiled demurely, and they greeted.

She admired the look of rich pleasure shining through surprise in him.
Her heart thanked him for appearing so handsome before her friends.

'I was writing,' said he. 'Guess to whom?--I had just finished my
political stuff, and fell on a letter to the professor and another for an
immediate introduction to your father.'

'True?'

'The truth, as you shall see. So, you have come, you have found me! This
time if I let you slip, may I be stamped slack-fingered!'

'"Two wishes make a will," you say.'

He answered her with one of his bursts of brightness.

Her having sought him he read for the frank surrender which he was ready
to match with a loyal devotion to his captive. Her coming cleared
everything.

Clotilde introduced him to her friends, and he was enrolled a member of
the party. His appearance was that of a man to whom the sphinx has
whispered. They ascended to the topmost of the mountain stages, to
another caravanserai of tourists, whence the singular people emerge in
morning darkness night-capped and blanketed, and behold the great orb of
day at his birth--he them.

Walking slowly beside Clotilde on the mountain way, Alvan said: 'Two
wishes! Mine was in your breast. You wedded yours to it. At last!--and we
are one. Not a word more of time lost. My wish is almost a will in
itself--was it not?--and has been wooing yours all this while!--till the
sleeper awakened, the well-spring leapt up from the earth; and our two
wishes united dare the world to divide them. What can? My wish was your
destiny, yours is mine. We are one.' He poetized on his passion, and
dramatized it: 'Stood you at the altar, I would pluck you from the man
holding your hand! There is no escape for you. Nay, into the vaults, were
you to grow pale and need my vital warmth--down to the vaults! Speak--or
no: look! That will do. You hold a Titan in your eyes, like metal in the
furnace, to turn him to any shape you please, liquid or solid. You make
him a god: he is the river Alvan or the rock Alvan: but fixed or flowing,
he is lord of you. That is the universal penalty: you must, if you have
this creative soul, be the slave of your creature: if you raise him to
heaven, you must be his! Ay, look! I know the eyes! They can melt
granite, they can freeze fire. Pierce me, sweet eyes! And now flutter,
for there is that in me to make them.'

'Consider!' Clotilde flutteringly entreated him.

'The world? you dear heaven of me! Looking down on me does not compromise
you, and I am not ashamed of my devotions. I sat in gloom: you came: I
saw my goddess and worshipped. The world, Lutece, the world is a variable
monster; it rends the weak whether sincere or false; but those who weld
strength with sincerity may practise their rites of religion publicly,
and it fawns to them, and bellows to imitate. Nay, I say that strength in
love is the sole sincerity, and the world knows it, muffs it in the air
about us, and so we two are privileged. Politically also we know that
strength is the one reality: the rest is shadow. Behind the veil of our
human conventions power is constant as ever, and to perceive the fact is
to have the divining rod-to walk clear of shams. He is the teacher who
shows where power exists: he is the leader who wakens and forms it. Why
have I unfailingly succeeded?--I never doubted! The world voluntarily
opens a path to those who step determinedly. You--to your honour?--I
won't decide--but you have the longest in my experience resisted. I have
a Durandal to hew the mountain walls; I have a voice for ears, a net for
butterflies, a hook for fish, and desperation to plunge into marshes: but
the feu follet will not be caught. One must wait--wait till her desire to
have a soul bids her come to us. She has come! A soul is hers: and see
how, instantly, the old monster, the world, which has no soul--not yet:
we are helping it to get one--becomes a shadow, powerless to stop or
overawe. For I do give you a soul, think as you will of it. I give you
strength to realize, courage to act. It is the soul that does things in
this life--the rest is vapour. How do we distinguish love?--as we do
music by the pure note won from resolute strings. The tense chord is
music, and it is love. This higher and higher mountain air, with you
beside me, sweeps me like a harp.'

'Oh! talk on, talk on! talk ever! do not cease talking to me!' exclaimed
Clotilde.

'You feel the mountain spirit?'

'I feel that you reveal it.'

'Tell me the books you have been reading.'

'Oh, light literature-poor stuff.'

'When we two read together you will not say that. Light literature is the
garden and the orchard, the fountain, the rainbow, the far view; the view
within us as well as without. Our blood runs through it, our history in
the quick. The Philistine detests it, because he has no view, out or in.
The dry confess they are cut off from the living tree, peeled and
sapless, when they condemn it. The vulgar demand to have their pleasures
in their own likeness--and let them swamp their troughs! they shall not
degrade the fame of noble fiction. We are the choice public, which will
have good writing for light reading. Poet, novelist, essayist, dramatist,
shall be ranked honourable in my Republic. I am neither, but a man of
law, a student of the sciences, a politician, on the road to government
and statecraft: and yet I say I have learnt as much from light literature
as from heavy-as much, that is, from the pictures of our human blood in
motion as from the clever assortment of our forefatherly heaps of bones.
Shun those who cry out against fiction and have no taste for elegant
writing. For to have no sympathy with the playful mind is not to have a
mind: it is a test. But name the books.'

She named one or two.

'And when does Dr. Alvan date the first year of his Republic?'

'Clotilde!' he turned on her.

'My good sir?'

'These worthy good people who are with you: tell me-to-morrow we leave
them!'

'Leave them?'

'You with me. No more partings. The first year, the first day shall be
dated from to-morrow. You and I proclaim our Republic on these heights.
All the ceremonies to follow. We will have a reaping of them, and make a
sheaf to present to the world with compliments. To-morrow!'

'You do not speak seriously?'

'I jest as little as the Talmud. Decide at once, in the happy flush of
this moment.'

'I cannot listen to you, dear sir!'

'But your heart beats!'

'I am not mistress of it.'

'Call me master of it. I make ready for to-morrow.'

'No! no! no! A thousand times no! You have been reading too much fiction
and verse. Properly I should spurn you.'

'Will you fail me, play feu follet, ward me off again?'

'I must be won by rules, brave knight!'

'Will you be won?'

'And are you he--the Alvan who would not be centaur?'

'I am he who chased a marsh-fire, and encountered a retiarius, and the
meshes are on my head and arms. I fancied I dealt with a woman; a woman
needing protection! She has me fast--I am netted, centaur or man. That is
between us two. But think of us facing the world, and trust me; take my
hand, take the leap; I am the best fighter in that fight. Trust it to me,
and all your difficulties are at an end. To fly solves the problem.'

'Indeed, indeed, I have more courage than I had,' said Clotilde.

His eyes dilated, steadied, speculated, weighed her.

'Put it to proof while you can believe in it!'

'How is it every one but you thinks me bold?' she complained.

'Because I carry a touchstone that brings out the truth. I am your
reality: all others are phantoms. You can impose on them, not on me.
Courage for one inspired plunge you may have, and it will be your
salvation:--southward, over to Italy, that is the line of flight, and the
subsequent struggle will be mine: you will not have to face it. But the
courage for daily contention at home, standing alone, while I am distant
and maligned--can you fancy your having that? No! be wise of what you
really are; cast the die for love, and mount away tomorrow.'

'Then,' said Clotilde, with elvish cunning, 'do you doubt your ability to
win me without a scandal?'

'Back me, and I win you!' he replied in a tone of unwonted humility: a
sudden droop.

She let her hand fall. He grasped it.

'Gradations appear to be unknown to you,' she said.

He cried out: 'Count the years of life, span them, think of the work to
be done, and ask yourself whether time and strength should run to waste
in retarding the inevitable? Pottering up steps that can be taken at one
bound is very well for peasant pilgrims whose shrine is their bourne, and
their kneecaps the footing stumps. But for us two life begins up there.
Onward, and everywhere around, when we two are together, is our shrine. I
have worked, and wasted life; I have not lived, and I thirst to live.'

She murmured, in a fervour, 'You shall!' and slipped behind her defences.
'To-morrow morning we shall wander about; I must have a little time; all
to-morrow morning we can discuss plans.'

'You know you command me,' said he, and gazed at her.

She was really a child compared with him in years, and if it was an
excuse for taking her destiny into his hands, she consenting,--it was
also a reason why he dared not press his whole weight to win her to the
step.

She had the pride of the secret knowledge of her command of this giant at
the long table of the guests at dinner, where, after some play of knife
and fork among notable professors, Prussian officers, lively Frenchmen
and Italians, and the usual over-supply of touring English of both sexes,
not encouraging to conversation in their look of pallid disgust of the
art, Alvan started general topics and led them. The lead came to him
naturally, because he was a natural speaker, of a mind both stored and
effervescent; and he was genial, interested in every growth of life. She
did not wonder at his popularity among men of all classes and sets, or
that he should be famed for charming women. Her friend was enraptured
with him. Friendly questions pressed in an evening chatter between the
ladies, and Clotilde fenced, which is half a confession.

'But you are not engaged?' said the blunt Englishwoman.

According to the explanation, Clotilde was hardly engaged. It was not an
easy thing to say how she stood definitely. She had obeyed her dying
relative and dearest on earth by joining her hand to Prince Marko's, and
had pleased her parents by following it up with the kindest attentions to
the prince. It had been done, however, for the sake of peace; and chiefly
for his well-being. She had reserved her full consent: the plighting was
incomplete. Prince Marko knew that there was another, a magical person, a
genius of the ring, irresistible. He had been warned, that should the
other come forth to claim her . . . . And she was about to write to him
this very night to tell him . . . tell him fully . . . . In truth, she
loved both, but each so differently! And both loved her! And she had to
make her choice of one, and tell the prince she did love him, but . . .
Dots are the best of symbols for rendering cardisophistical subtleties
intelligible, and as they are much used in dialogue, one should have now
and then permission to print them. Especially feminine dialogue referring
to matters of the uncertain heart takes assistance from troops of dots;
and not to understand them at least as well as words, when words have as
it were conducted us to the brink of expression, and shown us the
precipice, is to be dull, bucolic of the marketplace.

Sunless rose the morning. The blanketed figures went out to salute a
blanketed sky. Drizzling they returned, images of woefulness in various
forms, including laughter's. Alvan frankly declared himself the
disappointed showman; he had hoped for his beloved to see the sight long
loved by him of golden chariot and sun-steeds crossing the peaks and the
lakes; and his disappointment became consternation on hearing Clotilde's
English friend (after objection to his pagan clothing of the solemn
reality of sunrise, which destroyed or minimized by too materially
defining a grandeur that derived its essence from mystery, she thought)
announce the hour for her departure. He promised her a positive sunrise
if she would delay. Her child lay recovering from an illness in the town
below, and she could not stay. But Clotilde had coughed in the damp
morning air, and it would, he urged, be dangerous for her to be exposed
to it. Had not the lady heard her cough? She had, but personally she was
obliged to go; with her child lying ill she could not remain. 'But,
madam, do you hear that cough again? Will you drag her out with such a
cough as that?' The lady repeated 'My child!' Clotilde said it had been
agreed they should descend this day; her friend must be beside her child.
Alvan thundered an 'Impossible!' The child was recovering; Clotilde was
running into danger: he argued with the senseless woman, opposing reason
to the feminine sentiment of the maternal, and of course he was beaten.
He was compelled to sit and gnaw his eloquence. Clotilde likened his
appearance to a strangled roar. 'Mothers and their children are too much
for me!' he said, penitent for his betrayal of over-urgency, as he helped
to wrap her warmly, and counselled her very mode of breathing in the raw
mountain atmosphere.

'I admire you for knowing when to yield,' said she.

He groaned, with frown and laugh: 'You know what I would beg!'

She implored him to have some faith in her.

The missiles of the impassioned were discharged at the poor English: a
customary volley in most places where they intrude after quitting their
shores, if they diverge from the avenue of hotel-keepers and waiters: but
Clotilde pointed out to him that her English friend was not showing
coldness in devoting herself to her child.

'No, they attend to their duties,' he assented generally, desperately
just.

'And you owe it to her that you have seen me.'

'I do,' he said, and forthwith courted the lady to be forgiven.

Clotilde was taken from him in a heavy downpour and trailing of mists.

At the foot of the mountain a boy handed her a letter from Alvan--a
burning flood, rolled out of him like lava after they had separated on
the second plateau, and confided to one who knew how to outstrip
pathfarers. She entered her hotel across the lake, and met a telegram. At
night the wires flashed 'Sleep well' to her; on her awakening, 'Good
morning.' A lengthened history of the day was telegraphed for her
amusement. Again at night there was a 'God guard you!'

'Who can resist him?' sighed Clotilde, excited, nervous, flattered,
happy, but yearning to repose and be curtained from the buzz of the
excess of life that he put about her. This time there was no prospect of
his courtship relapsing.

'He is a wonderful, an ideal lover!' replied her friend.

'If he were only that!' said Clotilde, musing expressively. 'If, dear
Englishwoman, he were only that, he might be withstood. But Alvan mounts
high over such lovers: he is a wonderful and ideal man: so great, so
generous, heroical, giant-like, that what he wills must be.'

The Englishwoman was quick enough to seize an indication difficult to
miss--more was expected to be said of him.

'You see the perfect gentleman in Dr. Alvan,' she remarked, for she had
heard him ordering his morning bath at the hotel, and he had also been
polite to her under vexation.

Clotilde nodded hurriedly; she saw something infinitely greater, and
disliked the bringing of that island microscope to bear upon a giant. She
found it repugnant to hear a word of Alvan as a perfect gentleman.
Justly, however, she took him for a splendid nature, and assuming upon
good authority that the greater contains the lesser, she supposed the
lesser to be a chiselled figure serviceably alive in the embrace.




BOOK 2.




CHAPTER VII

He was down on the plains to her the second day, and as usual when they
met, it was as if they had not parted; his animation made it seem so. He
was like summer's morning sunlight, his warmth striking instantly through
her blood dispersed any hesitating strangeness that sometimes gathers
during absences, caused by girlish dread of a step to take, or shame at
the step taken, when coldish gentlemen rather create these backflowings
and gaps in the feelings. She had grown reconciled to the perturbation of
his messages, and would have preferred to have him startling and
thrilling her from a distance; but seeing him, she welcomed him, and
feeling in his bright presence not the faintest chill of the fit of
shyness, she took her bravery of heart for a sign that she had reached
his level, and might own it by speaking of the practical measures to lead
to their union. On one subject sure to be raised against him by her
parents, she had a right to be inquisitive: the baroness.

She asked to see a photograph of her.

Alvan gave her one out of his pocketbook, and watched her eyelids in
profile as she perused those features of the budless grey woman. The
eyelids in such scrutinies reveal the critical mind; Clotilde's drooped
till they almost closed upon their lashes--deadly criticism.

'Think of her age,' said Alvan, colouring. He named a grandmaternal date
for the year of the baroness's birth.

Her eyebrows now stood up; her contemplation of those disenchanting
lineaments came to an abrupt finish.

She returned the square card to him, slowly shaking her head, still
eyeing earth as her hand stretched forth the card laterally. He could not
contest the woeful verdict.

'Twenty years back!' he murmured, writhing. The baroness was a woman fair
to see in the days twenty years back, though Clotilde might think it
incredible: she really was once.

Clotilde resumed her doleful shaking of the head; she sighed. He
shrugged; she looked at him, and he blinked a little. For the first time
since they had come together she had a clear advantage, and as it was
likely to be a rare occasion, she did not let it slip. She sighed again.
He was wounded by her underestimate of his ancient conquest.

'Yes--now,' he said, impatiently.

'I cannot feel jealousy, I cannot feel rivalry,' said she, sad of voice.

The humour of her tranced eyes in the shaking head provoked him to defend
the baroness for her goodness of heart, her energy of brain.

Clotilde 'tolled' her naughty head.

'But it is a strong face,' she said, 'a strong face--a strong jaw, by
Lavater! You were young--and daringly adventurous; she was captivating in
her distress. Now she is old--and you are friends.'

'Friends, yes,' Alvan replied, and praised the girl, as of course she
deserved to be praised for her open mind.

'We are friends!' he said, dropping a deep-chested breath. The title this
girl scornfully supplied was balm to the vanity she had stung, and his
burnt skin was too eager for a covering of any sort to examine the mood
of the giver. She had positively humbled him so far as with a single word
to relieve him; for he had seen bristling chapters in her look at the
photograph. Yet for all the natural sensitiveness of the man's vanity, he
did not seek to bury the subject at the cost of a misconception injurious
in the slightest degree to the sentiments he entertained toward the older
lady as well as the younger. 'Friends! you are right; good friends; only
you should know that it is just a little--a trifle different. The fact
is, I cannot kill the past, and I would not. It would try me sharply to
break the tie connecting us, were it possible to break it. I am bound to
her by gratitude. She is old now; and were she twice that age, I should
retain my feeling for her. You raise your eyes, Clotilde! Well, when I
was much younger I found this lady in desperate ill-fortune, and she
honoured me with her confidence. Young man though I was, I defended her;
I stopped at no measure to defend her: against a powerful husband,
remember--the most unscrupulous of foes, who sought to rob her of every
right she possessed. And what I did then I again would do. I was vowed to
her interests, to protect a woman shamefully wronged; I did not stick at
trifles, as you know; you have read my speech in defence of myself before
the court. By my interpretation of the case, I was justified; but I
estranged my family and made the world my enemy. I gave my time and
money, besides the forfeit of reputation, to the case, and reasonably
there was an arrangement to repay me out of the estate reserved for her,
so that the baroness should not be under the degradation of feeling
herself indebted. You will not think that out of the way: men of the
world do not. As for matters of the heart between us, we're as far apart
as the Poles.'

He spoke hurriedly. He had said all that could be expected of him.

They were in a wood, walking through lines of spruce firs of deep golden
green in the yellow beams. One of these trees among its well-robed
fellows fronting them was all lichen-smitten. From the low sweeping
branches touching earth to the plumed top, the tree was dead-black as its
shadow; a vision of blackness.

'I will compose a beautiful, dutiful, modest, oddest, beseeching,
screeching, mildish, childish epistle to her, and you shall read it, and
if you approve it, we shall despatch it,' said Clotilde.

'There speaks my gold-crested serpent at her wisest!' replied Alvan. 'And
now for my visit to your family: I follow you in a day. En avant! contre
les canons! A run to Lake Leman brings us to them in the afternoon. I
shall see you in the evening. So our separation won't be for long this
time. All the auspices are good. We shall not be rich--nor poor.'

Clotilde reminded him that a portion of money would be brought to the
store by her.

'We don't count it,' said he. 'Not rich, certainly. And you will not
expect me to make money by my pen. Above all things I detest the writing
for money. Fiction and verse appeal to a besotted public, that judges of
the merit of the work by the standard of its taste: avaunt! And
journalism for money is Egyptian bondage. No slavery is comparable to the
chains of hired journalism. My pen is my fountain--the key of me; and I
give my self, I do not sell. I write when I have matter in me and in the
direction it presses for, otherwise not one word!'

'I would never ask you to sell yourself,' said Clotilde. 'I would rather
be in want of common comforts.'

He squeezed her wrist. They were again in front of the black-draped
blighted tree. It was the sole tree of the host clad thus in scurf
bearing a semblance of livid metal. They looked at it as having seen it
before, and passed on.

'But the wife of Sigismund Alvan will not be poor in renown!' he resumed,
radiating his full bloom on her.

'My highest ambition is to be Sigismund Alvan's wife!' she exclaimed.

To hear her was as good as wine, and his heart came out on a genial
chuckle. 'Ay, the choice you have made is not, by heaven, so bad.
Sigismund Alvan's wife shall take the foremost place of all. Look at me.'
He lifted his head to the highest on his shoulders, widening his eagle
eyes. He was now thoroughly restored and in his own upper element,
expansive after the humiliating contraction of his man's vanity under the
glances of a girl. 'Do you take me for one who could be content with the
part of second? I will work and do battle unceasingly, but I will have
too the prize of battle to clasp it, savour it richly. I was not
fashioned to be the lean meek martyr of a cause, not I. I carry too
decisive a weight in the balance to victory. I have a taste for fruits,
my fairest! And Republics, my bright Lutetia, can give you splendid
honours.' He helped her to realize this with the assuring splendour of
his eyes.

'"Bride of the Elect of the People!" is not that as glorious a title,
think you, as queen of an hereditary sovereign mumbling of God's grace on
his worm-eaten throne? I win that seat by service, by the dedication of
this brain to the people's interests. They have been ground to the dust,
and I lift them, as I did a persecuted lady in my boyhood. I am the
soldier of justice against the army of the unjust. But I claim my reward.
If I live to fight, I live also to enjoy. I will have my station. I win
it not only because I serve, but because also I have seen, have seen
ahead, seen where all is dark, read the unwritten--because I am soldier
and prophet. The brain of man is Jove's eagle and his lightning on
earth--the title to majesty henceforth. Ah! my fairest; entering the city
beside me, and the people shouting around, she would not think her choice
a bad one?'

Clotilde made sign and gave some earnest on his arm of ecstatic hugging.

'We may have hard battles, grim deceptions, to go through before that day
comes,' he continued after a while. 'The day is coming, but we must wait
for it, work on. I have the secret of how to head the people--to put a
head to their movement and make it irresistible, as I believe it will be
beneficent. I set them moving on the lines of the law of things. I am no
empty theorizer, no phantasmal speculator; I am the man of science in
politics. When my system is grasped by the people, there is but a step to
the realization of it. One step. It will be taken in my time, or
acknowledged later. I stand for index to the people of the path they
should take to triumph--must take, as triumph they must sooner or later:
not by the route of what is called Progress--pooh! That is a middle-class
invention to effect a compromise. With the people the matter rests with
their intelligence! meanwhile my star is bright and shines reflected.'

'I notice,' she said, favouring him with as much reflection as a splendid
lover could crave for, 'that you never look down, you never look on the
ground, but always either up or straight before you.'

'People have remarked it,' said he, smiling. 'Here we are at this
funereal tree again. All roads lead to Rome, and ours appears to conduct
us perpetually to this tree. It 's the only dead one here.'

He sighted the plumed black top and along the swelling branches
decorously clothed in decay: a salted ebon moss when seen closely; the
small grey particles giving a sick shimmer to the darkness of the mass.
It was very witch-like, of a witch in her incantation-smoke.

'Not a single bare spot! but dead, dead as any peeled and fallen!' said
Alvan, fingering a tuft of the sooty snake-lichen. 'This is a tree for a
melancholy poet--eh, Clotilde?--for him to come on it by moonlight, after
a scene with his mistress, or tales of her! By the way and by the way, my
fair darling, let me never think of your wearing this kind of garb for
me, should I be ordered off the first to join the dusky army below. Women
who put on their dead husbands in public are not well-mannered women,
though they may be excellent professional widows, excellent!'

He snapped the lichen-dust from his fingers, observing that he was not
sure the contrast of the flourishing and blighted was not more impressive
in sunlight: and then he looked from the tree to his true love's hair.
The tree at a little distance seemed run over with sunless lizards: her
locks were golden serpents.

'Shall I soon see your baroness?' Clotilde asked him.

'Not in advance of the ceremony,' he answered. 'In good time. You
understand--an old friend making room for a new one, and that one young
and beautiful, with golden tresses; at first . . . ! But her heart is
quite sound. Have no fear! I guarantee it; I know her to the roots. She
desires my welfare, she does my behests. If I am bound to her by
gratitude, so, and in a greater degree, is she to me. The utmost she will
demand is that my bride shall be worthy of me--a good mate for me in the
fight to come; and I have tested my bride and found her half my heart;
therefore she passes the examination with the baroness.'

They left the tree behind them.

'We will take good care not to return this way again,' said Alvan,
without looking back. 'That tree belongs to a plantation of the under
world; its fellows grow in the wood across Acheron, and that tree has
looked into the ghastliness of the flood and seen itself. Hecate and
Hermes know about it. Phoebus cannot light it. That tree stands for Death
blooming. We think it sinister, but down there it is a homely tree. Down
there! When do we go? The shudder in that tree is the air exchanging
between Life and Death--the ghosts going and coming: it's on the border
line. I just felt the creep. I think you did. The reason is--there is
always a material reason--that you were warm, and a bit of chill breeze
took you as you gazed; while for my part I was imagining at that very
moment what of all possible causes might separate us, and I acknowledged
that death could do the trick. But death, my love, is far from us two!'

'Does she look as grimmish as she does in the photograph?' said Clotilde.

'Who? the baroness?' Alvan laughed. The baroness was not so easily
defended from a girl as from her husband, it appeared. 'She is the best
of comrades, best of friends. She has her faults; may not relish the writ
announcing her final deposition, but be you true to me, and as true as
she has unfailingly been to me, she will be to you. That I can promise.
My poor Lucie! She is winter, if you will. It is not the winter of the
steppes; you may compare her to winter in a noble country; a fine
landscape of winter. The outlines of her face . . . . She has a great
brain. How much I owe that woman for instruction! You meet now and then
men who have the woman in them without being womanized; they are the pick
of men. And the choicest women are those who yield not a feather of their
womanliness for some amount of manlike strength. And she is one; man's
brain, woman's heart. I thought her unique till I heard of you. And how
do I stand between you two? She has the only fault you can charge me
with; she is before me in time, as I am before you. Shall I spoil you as
she spoilt me? No, no! Obedience to a boy is the recognition of the
heir-apparent, and I respect the salique law as much as I love my love. I
do not offer obedience to a girl, but succour, support. You will not rule
me, but you will invigorate, and if you are petted, you shall not be
spoilt. Do not expect me to show like that undertakerly tree till my
years are one hundred. Even then it will be dangerous to repose beneath
my branches in the belief that I am sapless because I have changed
colour. We Jews have a lusty blood. We are strong of the earth. We serve
you, but you must minister to us. Sensual? We have truly excellent
appetites. And why not? Heroical too! Soldiers, poets, musicians; the
Gentile's masters in mental arithmetic--keenest of weapons: surpassing
him in common sense and capacity for brotherhood. Ay, and in charity; or
what stores of vengeance should we not have nourished! Already we have
the money-bags. Soon we shall hold the chief offices. And when the
popular election is as unimpeded as the coursing of the blood in a
healthy body, the Jew shall be foremost and topmost, for he is
pre-eminently by comparison the brain of these latter-day communities.
But that is only my answer to the brutish contempt of the Jew. I am no
champion of a race. I am for the world, for man!'

Clotilde remarked that he had many friends, all men of eminence, and a
large following among the people.

He assented: 'Yes: Tresten, Retka, Kehlen, the Nizzian. Yes, if I were
other than for legality:--if it came to a rising, I could tell off able
lieutenants.'

'Tell me of your interview with Ironsides,' she said proudly and fondly.

'Would this ambitious little head know everything?' said Alvan, putting
his lips among the locks. 'Well, we met: he requested it. We agreed that
we were on neutral ground for the moment: that he might ultimately have
to decapitate me, or I to banish him, but temporarily we could compare
our plans for governing. He showed me his hand. I showed him mine. We
played open-handed, like two at whist. He did not doubt my honesty, and I
astonished him by taking him quite in earnest. He has dealt with
diplomatists, who imagine nothing but shuffling: the old Ironer! I love
him for his love of common sense, his contempt of mean deceit. He will
outwit you, but his dexterity is a giant's--a simple evolution rapidly
performed: and nothing so much perplexes pygmies! Then he has them,
bagsful of them! The world will see; and see giant meet giant, I suspect.
He and I proposed each of us in the mildest manner contrary
schemes--schemes to stiffen the hair of Europe! Enough that we parted
with mutual respect. He is a fine fellow: and so was my friend the
Emperor Tiberius, and so was Richelieu. Napoleon was a fine
engine:--there is a difference. Yes, Ironsides is a fine fellow! but he
and I may cross. His ideas are not many. The point to remember is that he
is iron on them: he can drive them hard into the density of the globe. He
has quick nerves and imagination: he can conjure up, penetrate, and
traverse complications--an enemy's plans, all that the enemy will be able
to combine, and the likeliest that he will do. Good. We opine that we are
equal to the same. He is for kingcraft to mask his viziercraft--and save
him the labour of patiently attempting oratory and persuasion, which
accomplishment he does not possess:--it is not in iron. We think the more
precious metal will beat him when the broader conflict comes. But such an
adversary is not to be underrated. I do not underrate him: and certainly
not he me. Had he been born with the gifts of patience and a fluent
tongue, and not a petty noble, he might have been for the people, as
knowing them the greater power. He sees that their knowledge of their
power must eventually come to them. In the meantime his party is forcible
enough to assure him he is not fighting a losing game at present: and he
is, no doubt, by lineage and his traditions monarchical. He is curiously
simple, not really cynical. His apparent cynicism is sheer irritability.
His contemptuous phrases are directed against obstacles: against things,
persons, nations that oppose him or cannot serve his turn against his
king, if his king is restive; but he respects his king: against your
friends' country, because there is no fixing it to a line of policy, and
it seems to have collapsed; but he likes that country the best in Europe
after his own. He is nearest to contempt in his treatment of his dupes
and tools, who are dropped out of his mind when he has quite squeezed
them for his occasion; to be taken up again when they are of use to him.
Hence he will have no following. But let me die to-morrow, the party I
have created survives. In him you see the dam, in me the stream. Judge,
then, which of them gains the future!--admitting that, in the present he
may beat me. He is a Prussian, stoutly defined from a German, and yet
again a German stoutly defined from our borderers: and that completes
him. He has as little the idea of humanity as the sword of our Hermann,
the cannon-ball of our Frederick. Observe him. What an eye he has! I
watched it as we were talking: and he has, I repeat, imagination; he can
project his mind in front of him as far as his reasoning on the possible
allows: and that eye of his flashes; and not only flashes, you see it
hurling a bolt; it gives me the picture of a Balearic slinger about to
whizz the stone for that eye looks far, and is hard, and is dead certain
of its mark-within his practical compass, as I have said. I see farther,
and I fancy I proved to him that I am not a dreamer. In my opinion, when
we cross our swords I stand a fair chance of not being worsted. We shall:
you shrink? Figuratively, my darling have no fear! Combative as we may
be, both of us, we are now grave seniors, we have serious business: a
party looks to him, my party looks to me. Never need you fear that I
shall be at sword or pistol with any one. I will challenge my man,
whoever he as that needs a lesson, to touch buttons on a waistcoat with
the button on the foil, or drill fiver and eights in cards at twenty
paces: but I will not fight him though he offend me, for I am stronger
than my temper, and as I do not want to take his nip of life, and judge
it to be of less value than mine, the imperilling of either is an
absurdity.'

'Oh! because I know you are incapable of craven fear,' cried Clotilde,
answering aloud the question within herself of why she so much admired,
why she so fondly loved him. To feel his courage backing his high good
sense was to repose in security, and her knowledge that an astute
self-control was behind his courage assured her he was invincible. It
seemed to her, therefore, as they walked side by side, and she saw their
triumphant pair of figures in her fancy, natural that she should
instantly take the step to prepare her for becoming his Republican
Princess. She walked an equal with the great of the earth, by virtue of
her being the mate of the greatest of the great; she trod on some, and
she thrilled gratefully to the man who sustained her and shielded her on
that eminence. Elect of the people he! and by a vaster power than kings
can summon through the trumpet! She could surely pass through the trial
with her parents that she might step to the place beside him! She pressed
his arm to be physically a sharer of his glory. Was it love? It was as
lofty a stretch as her nature could strain to.

She named the city on the shores of the great Swiss lake where her
parents were residing; she bade him follow her thither, and name the
hotel where he was to be found, the hour when he was to arrive. 'Am I not
precise as an office clerk?' she said, with a pleasant taste of the
reality her preciseness pictured.

'Practical as the head of a State department,' said he, in good faith.

'I shall not keep you waiting,' she resumed.

'The sooner we are together after the action opens the better for our
success, my golden crest!'

'Have no misgivings, Sigismund. You have transformed me. A spark of you
is in my blood. Come. I shall send word to your hotel when you are to
appear. But you will come, you will be there, I know. I know you so
entirely.'

'As a rule, Lutetia, women know no more than half of a man even when they
have married him. At least you ought to know me. You know that if I were
to exercise my will firmly now--it would not waver if I called it
forth--I could carry you off and spare you the flutter you will have to
go through during our interlude with papa and mama.'

'I almost wish you would,' said she. She looked half imploringly, biting
her lip to correct the peeping wish.

Alvan pressed a finger on one of her dimples: 'Be brave. Flight and
defiance are our last resource. Now that I see you resolved I shun the
scandal, and we will leave it to them to insist on it, if it must be. How
can you be less than resolved after I have poured my influence into your
veins? The other day on the heights--had you consented then? Well! it
would have been very well, but not so well. We two have a future, and are
bound to make the opening chapters good sober reading, for an example, if
we can. I take you from your father's house, from your mother's arms,
from the "God speed" of your friends. That is how Alvan's wife should be
presented to the world.'

Clotilde's epistle to the baroness was composed, approved, and
despatched. To a frigid eye it read as more hypocritical than it really
was; for supposing it had to be written, the language of the natural
impulse called up to write it was necessarily in request, and that
language is easily overdone, so as to be discordant with the situation,
while it is, as the writer feels, a fairly true and well-formed
expression of the pretty impulse. But wiser is it always that the star in
the ascendant should not address the one waning. Hardly can a word be
uttered without grossly wounding. She would not do it to a younger rival:
the letter strikes on the recipient's age! She babbles of a friendship:
she plays at childish ninny! The display of her ingenuous happiness
causes feminine nature's bosom to rise in surges. The declarations of her
devotedness to the man waken comparisons with a deeper, a longer-tried
suffering. Actually the letter of the rising star assumes personal
feeling to have died out of the abandoned luminary, and personal feeling
is chafed to its acutest edge by the perusal; contempt also of one who
can stupidly simulate such innocence, is roused.

Among Alvan's gifts the understanding of women did not rank high. He was
too robust, he had been too successful. Your very successful hero regards
them as nine-pins destined to fall, the whole tuneful nine, at a peculiar
poetical twist of the bowler's wrist, one knocking down the
other--figuratively, for their scruples, or for their example with their
sisters. His tastes had led him into the avenues of success, and as he
had not encountered grand resistances, he entertained his opinion of
their sex. The particular maxim he cherished was, to stake everything on
his making a favourable first impression: after which single figure, he
said, all your empty naughts count with women for hundreds, thousands,
millions: noblest virtues are but sickly units. He would have stared like
any Philistine at the tale of their capacity to advance to a likeness
unto men in their fight with the world. Women for him were objects to be
chased, the politician's relaxation, taken like the sportsman's business,
with keen relish both for the pursuit and the prey, and a view of the
termination of his pastime. Their feelings he could appreciate during the
time when they flew and fell, perhaps a little longer; but the change in
his own feelings withdrew him from the communion of sentiment. This is
the state of men who frequent the avenues of success. At present he was
thinking of a wife, and he approved the epistle to the baroness
cordially.

'I do think it a nice kind of letter, and quite humble enough,' said
Clotilde.

He agreed, 'Yes, yes: she knows already that this is really serious with
me.'

So much for the baroness.

Now for their parting. A parting that is no worse than the turning of a
page to a final meeting is made light of, but felt. Reason is all in our
favour, and yet the gods are jealous of the bliss of mortals; the slip
between the cup and the lip is emotionally watched for, even though it be
not apprehended, when the cup trembles for very fulness. Clotilde
required reassuring and comforting: 'I am certain you will prevail; you
must; you cannot be resisted; I stand to witness to the fact,' she sighed
in a languor: 'only, my people are hard to manage. I see more clearly
now, that I have imposed on them; and they have given away by a sort of
compact so long as I did nothing decisive. That I see. But, then again,
have I not your spirit in me now? What has ever resisted you?--Then, as I
am Alvan's wife, I share his heart with his fortunes, and I do not really
dread the scenes from anticipating failure, still-the truth is, I fear I
am three parts an actress, and the fourth feels itself a shivering morsel
to face reality. No, I do not really feel it, but press my hand, I shall
be true--I am so utterly yours: and because I have such faith in you. You
never, yet have failed'

'Never: and it is impossible for me to conceive it,' said Alvan
thoughtfully.

His last word to her on her departure was 'Courage!' Hers to him was
conveyed by the fondest of looks. She had previously said 'To-morrow!' to
remind him of his appointment to be with her on the morrow, and herself
that she would not long stand alone. She did not doubt of her courage
while feasting on the beauty of one of the acknowledged strong men of
earth. She kissed her hand, she flung her heart to him from the waving
fingers.




CHAPTER VIII

Alvan, left to himself, had a quiet belief in the subjugation of his
tricksy Clotilde, and the inspiriting he had given her. All the rest to
come was mere business matter of the conflict, scarcely calling for a
plan of action. Who can hold her back when a woman is decided to move?
Husbands have tried it vainly, and parents; and though the husband and
the parents are not dealing with the same kind of woman, you see the same
elemental power in her under both conditions of rebel wife and rebel
daughter to break conventional laws, and be splendidly irrational. That
is, if she can be decided: in other words, aimed at a mark and inflamed
to fly the barriers intercepting. He fancied he had achieved it. Alvan
thanked his fortune that he had to treat with parents. The consolatory
sensation of a pure intent soothed his inherent wildness, in the
contemplation of the possibility that the latter might be roused by those
people, her parents, to upset his honourable ambition to win a wife after
the fashion of orderly citizens. It would be on their heads! But why
vision mischance? An old half-jesting prophecy of his among his friends,
that he would not pass his fortieth year, rose upon his recollection
without casting a shadow. Lo, the reckless prophet about to marry!

No dark bride, no skeleton, no colourless thing, no lichened tree, was
she. Not Death, my friends, but Life, is the bride of this doomed
fortieth year! Was animation ever vivider in contrast with obstruction?
Her hair would kindle the frosty shades to a throb of vitality: it would
be sunshine in the subterranean sphere. The very thinking of her
dispersed that realm of the poison hue, and the eternally inviting
phosphorescent, still, curved forefinger, which says, 'Come.'

To think of her as his vernal bride, while the snowy Alps were a
celestial garden of no sunset before his eyes, was to have the taste of
mortal life in the highest. He wondered how it was that he could have
waited so long for her since the first night of their meeting, and he
just distinguished the fact that he lived with the pulses of the minutes,
much as she did, only more fierily. The ceaseless warfare called politics
must have been the distraction: he forgot any other of another kind. He
was a bridegroom for whom the rosed Alps rolled out, a panorama of
illimitable felicity. And there were certain things he must overcome
before he could name his bride his own, so that his innate love of
contention, which had been constantly flattered by triumph, brought, his
whole nature into play with the prospect of the morrow: not much liking
it either. There is a nerve, in brave warriors that does not like the
battle before, the crackle of musketry is heard, and the big artillery.

Methodically, according to his habit, he jotted down the hours of the
trains, the hotel mentioned by Clotilde, the address of her father; he
looked to his card-case, his writing materials, his notes upon Swiss law;
considering that the scene would be in Switzerland, and he was a lawyer
bent on acting within and up to the measure of the law as well as
pleading eloquently. The desire to wing a telegram to her he thought it
wise to repress, and he found himself in consequence composing verses,
turgid enough, even to his own judgement. Poets would have failed at such
a time, and he was not one, but an orator enamoured. He was a wild man,
cased in the knowledge of jurisprudence, and wishing to enter the ranks
of the soberly blissful. These he could imagine that he complimented by
the wish. Then why should he doubt of his fortune? He did not.

The night passed, the morning came, and carried him on his journey. Late
in the afternoon he alighted at the hotel he called Clotilde's. A letter
was handed to him. His eyes all over the page caught the note of it for
her beginning of the battle and despair at the first repulse. 'And now my
turn!' said he, not overjoyously. The words Jew and demagogue and
baroness, quoted in the letter, were old missiles hurling again at him.
But Clotilde's parents were yet to learn that this Jew, demagogue, and
champion of an injured lady, was a gentleman respectful to their legal
and natural claims upon their child while maintaining his own: they were
to know him and change their tone.

As he was reading the letter upstairs by sentences, his door opened at
the answer to a tap. He started; his face was a shield's welcome to the
birdlike applicant for admission. Clotilde stood hesitating.

He sent the introducing waiter speeding on his most kellnerish legs, and
drew her in.

'Alvan, I have come.'

She was like a bird in his hands, palpitating to extinction.

He bent over her: 'What has happened?'

Trembling, and very pale, hard in her throat she said, 'The worst.'

'You have spoken to them both subsequent to this?' he shook the letter.

'It is hopeless.'

'Both to father and mother?'

'Both. They will not hear your name; they will not hear me speak. I
repeat, it is past all hope, all chance of moving them. They hate--hate
you, hate me for thinking of you. I had no choice; I wrote at once and
followed my letter; I ran through the streets; I pant for want of breath,
not want of courage. I prove I have it, Alvan; I have done all I can do.

She was enfolded; she sank on the nest, dropping her eyelids.

But he said nothing. She looked up at him. Her strained pale eyes
provoked a closer embrace.

'This would be the home for you if we were flying,' said he, glancing
round at the room, with a sensation like a shudder, 'Tell me what there
is to be told.'

'Alvan, I have; that is all. They will not listen; they loathe Oh! what
possesses them!'

'They have not met me yet!'

'They will not, will not ever--no!'

'They must.'

'They refuse. Their child, for daring to say she loves you, is detested.
Take me--take me away!'

'Run?--facing the enemy?' His countenance was the fiery laugh of a
thirster for strife. 'They have to be taught the stuff Alvan is made of!'

Clotilde moaned to signify she was sure he nursed an illusion. 'I found
them celebrating the betrothal of my sister Lotte with the Austrian Count
Walburg; I thought it favourable for us. I spoke of you to my mother. Oh,
that scene! What she said I cannot recollect: it was a hiss. Then my
father. Your name changed his features and his voice. They treated me as
impure for mentioning it. You must have deadly enemies. I was unable to
recognize either father or mother--they have become transformed. But you
see I am here. Courage! you said; and I determined I would show it, and
be worthy of you. But I am pursued, I am sure. My father is powerful in
this place; we shall barely have time to escape.'

Alvan's resolution was taken.

'Some friend--a lady living in the city here--name her, quick!--one you
can trust,' he said, and fondled her hastily, much as a gentle kind of
drillmaster straightens a fair pupil's shoulders. 'Yes, you have shown
courage. Now it must be submission to me. You shall be no runaway bride,
but honoured at the altar. Out of this hotel is the first point. You know
some such lady?'

Clotilde tried to remonstrate and to suggest. She could have prophesied
certain evil from any evasion of the straight line of flight; she was so
sure of it because of her intuition that her courage had done its utmost
in casting her on him, and that the remainder within her would be a
drawing back. She could not get the word or even the look to encounter
his close and warm imperiousness; and, hesitating, she noticed where they
were together alone. She could not refuse the protection he offered in a
person of her own sex; and now, flushing with the thought of where they
were together alone, feminine modesty shrivelled at the idea of
entreating a man to bear her off, though feminine desperation urged to
it. She felt herself very bare of clothing, and she named a lady, a
Madame Emerly, living near the hotel. Her heart sank like a stone. 'It is
for you!' cried Alvan, keenly sensible of his loss and his generosity in
temporarily resigning her--for a subsequent triumph. 'But my wife shall
not be snatched by a thief in the night. Are you not my wife--my golden
bride? And you may give me this pledge of it, as if the vows had just
been uttered . . . and still I resign you till we speak the vows. It
shall not be said of Alvan's wife, in the days of her glory, that she ran
to her nuptials through rat-passages.'

His pride in his prevailingness thrilled her. She was cooled by her
despondency sufficiently to perceive where the centre of it lay, but that
centre of self was magnificent; she recovered some of her enthusiasm,
thinking him perhaps to be acting rightly; in any case they were united,
her step was irrevocable. Her having entered the hotel, her being in this
room, certified to that. It seemed to her while she was waiting for the
carriage he had ordered that she was already half a wife. She was not
conscious of a blush. The sprite in the young woman's mind whispered of
fire not burning when one is in the heart of it. And undoubtedly,
contemplated from the outside, this room was the heart of fire. An
impulse to fall on Alvan's breast and bless him for his chivalrousness
had to be kept under lest she should wreck the thing she praised.
Otherwise she was not ill at ease. Alvan summoned his gaiety, all his
homeliness of tone, to give her composure, and on her quitting the room
she was more than ever bound to him, despite her gloomy foreboding. A
maid of her household, a middle-aged woman, gabbling of devotion to her,
ran up the steps of the hotel. Her tale was, that the General had roused
the city in pursuit of his daughter; and she heard whither Clotilde was
going.

Within half an hour, Clotilde was in Madame Emerly's drawing-room
relating her desperate history of love and parental tyranny, assisted by
the lover whom she had introduced. Her hostess promised shelter and
exhibited sympathy. The whole Teutonic portion of the Continent knew
Alvan by reputation. He was insurrectionally notorious in morals and
menacingly in politics; but his fine air, handsome face, flowing tongue,
and the signal proof of his respect for the lady of his love and
deference toward her family, won her personally. She promised the best
help she could give them. They were certainly in a romantic situation,
such as few women could see and decline their aid to the lovers.

Madame Emerly proved at least her sincerity before many minutes had
passed.

Chancing to look out into the street, she saw Clotilde's mother and her
betrothed sister stepping up to the house. What was to be done? And was
the visit accidental? She announced it, and Clotilde cried out, but Alvan
cried louder: 'Heaven-directed! and so, let me see her and speak to
her--nothing could be better.'

Madame Emerly took mute counsel of Clotilde, shaking her own head
premonitorily; and then she said: 'I think indeed it will be safer, if I
am asked, to say you are not here, and I know not where you are.'

'Yes! yes!' Clotilde replied: 'Oh! do that.'

She half turned to Alvan, rigid with an entreaty that hung on his coming
voice.

'No!' said Alvan, shocked in both pride and vanity. 'Plain-dealing; no
subterfuge! Begin with foul falsehood? No. I would not have you burdened,
madame, with the shadow of a conventional untruth on our account. And
when it would be bad policy? . . . Oh, no, worse than the sin! as the
honest cynic says. We will go down to Madame von Rudiger, and she shall
make acquaintance with the man who claims her daughter's hand.'

Clotilde rocked in an agony. Her friend was troubled. Both ladies knew
what there would be to encounter better than he. But the man, strong in
his belief in himself, imposed his will on them.

Alvan and Clotilde clasped hands as they went downstairs to Madame
Emerly's reception room. She could hardly speak: 'Do not forsake me.'

'Is this forsaking?' He could ask it in the deeply questioning tone which
supplies the answer.

'Oh, Alvan!' She would have said: 'Be warned.'

He kissed her fingers. 'Trust to me.'

She had to wrap her shivering spirit in a blind reliance and utter
leaning on him.

She could almost have said: 'Know me better'; and she would, sincere as
her passion in its shallow vessel was, have been moved to say it for a
warning while yet there was time to leave the house instead of turning
into that room, had not a remainder of her first exaltation (rapidly
degenerating to desperation) inspired her with the thought of her being a
part of this handsome, undaunted, triumph-flashing man.

Such a state of blind reliance and utter leaning, however, has a certain
tendency to disintegrate the will, and by so doing it prepares the spirit
to be a melting prize of the winner.

Men and women alike, who renounce their own individuality by cowering
thus abjectly under some other before the storm, are in reality abjuring
their idea of that other, and offering themselves up to the genius of
Power in whatsoever direction it may chance to be manifested, in
whatsoever person. We no sooner shut our eyes than we consent to be prey,
we lose the soul of election.

Mark her as she proceeds. For should her hero fail, and she be suffering
through his failure and her reliance on him, the blindness of it will
seem to her to have been an infinite virtue, anything but her deplorable
weakness crouching beneath his show of superhuman strength. And it will
seem to her, so long as her sufferings endure, that he deceived her just
expectations, and was a vain pretender to the superhuman:--for it was
only a superhuman Jew and democrat whom she could have thought of
espousing. The pusillanimous are under a necessity to be self-consoled
when they are not self-justified: it is their instinctive manner of
putting themselves in the right to themselves. The love she bore him,
because it was the love his high conceit exacted, hung on success she was
ready to fly with him and love him faithfully but not without some reason
(where reason, we will own, should not quite so coldly obtrude) will it
seem to her, that the man who would not fly, and would try the conflict,
insisted to stake her love on the issue he provoked. He roused the
tempest, he angered the Fates, he tossed her to them; and reason, coldest
reason, close as it ever is to the craven's heart in its hour of trial,
whispers that he was prompted to fling the gambler's die by the swollen
conceit in his fortune rather than by his desire for the prize. That
frigid reason of the craven has red-hot perceptions. It spies the spot of
truth. Were the spot revealed in the man the whole man, then, so unerring
is the eyeshot at him, we should have only to transform ourselves into
cowards fronting a crisis to read him through and topple over the Sphinx
of life by presenting her the sum of her most mysterious creature in an
epigram. But there was as much more in Alvan than any faint-hearted
thing, seeing however keenly, could see, as there is more in the world
than the epigrams aimed at it contain.

'Courage!' said he: and she tremblingly: 'Be careful!' And then they were
in the presence of her mother and sister.

Her sister was at the window, hanging her head low, a poor figure. Her
mother stood in the middle of the room, and met them full face, with a
woman's combative frown of great eyes, in which the stare is a bolt.

'Away with that man! I will not suffer him near me,' she cried.

Alvan advanced to her: 'Tell me, madame, in God's name, what you have
against me.'

She swung her back on him. 'Go, sir! my husband will know how to deal
with one like you. Out of my sight, I say!'

The brutality of this reception of Alvan nerved Clotilde. She went up to
him, and laying her hand on his arm, feeling herself almost his equal,
said: 'Let us go: come. I will not bear to hear you so spoken to. No one
shall treat you like that when I am near.'

She expected him to give up the hopeless task, after such an experience
of the commencement. He did but clasp her hand, assuring the Frau von
Rudiger that no word of hers could irritate him. 'Nothing can make me
forget that you are Clotilde's mother. You are the mother of the lady I
love, and may say what you will to me, madame. I bear it.'

'A man spotted with every iniquity the world abhors, and I am to see him
holding my daughter by the hand!--it is too abominable! And because there
is no one present to chastise him, he dares to address me and talk of his
foul passion for my daughter. I repeat: that which you have to do is to
go. My ears are shut. You can annoy, you can insult, you cannot move me.
Go.' She stamped: her aspect spat.

Alvan bowed. Under perfect self-command, he said: 'I will go at once to
Clotilde's father. I may hope, that with a reasonable man I shall
speedily come to an understanding.'

She retorted: 'Enter his house, and he will have you driven out by his
lacqueys.'

'Hardly: I am not of those men who are driven from houses,' Alvan said,
smiling. 'But, madame, I will act on your warning, and spare her father,
for all sakes, the attempt; seeing he does not yet know whom he deals
with. I will write to him.'

'Letters from you will be flung back unopened.

'It may, of course, be possible to destroy even my patience, madame.'

'Mine, sir, is at an end.'

'You reduce us to rely on ourselves; it is the sole alternative.'

'You have not waited for that,' rejoined Frau von Rudiger. 'You have
already destroyed my daughter's reputation by inducing her to leave her
father's house and hesitate to return. Oh! you are known. You are known
for your dealings with women as well as men. We know you. We have, we
pray to God, little more to learn of you. You! ah--thief!'

'Thief!' Alvan's voice rose on hers like the clapping echo of it. She had
up the whole angry pride of the man in arms, and could discern that she
had struck the wound in his history; but he was terrible to look at, so
she made the charge supportable by saying:

'You have stolen my child from me!'

Clotilde raised her throat, shrewish in excitement. 'False! He did not. I
went to him of my own will, to run from your heartlessness, mother--that
I call mother!--and be out of hearing of my father's curses and threats.
Yes, to him I fled, feeling that I belonged more to him than to you. And
never will I return to you. You have killed my love; I am this man's own
because I love him only; him ever! him you abuse, as his partner in life
for all it may give!--as his wife! Trample on him, you trample on me.
Make black brows at your child for choosing the man, of all men alive, to
worship and follow through the world. I do. I am his. I glory in him.'

Her gaze on Alvan said: 'Now!' Was she not worthy of him now? And would
they not go forth together now? Oh! now!

Her gaze was met by nothing like the brilliant counterpart she merited.
It was as if she had offered her beauty to a glass, and found a
reflection in dull metal. He smiled calmly from her to her mother. He
said:

'You accuse me of stealing your child, madame. You shall acknowledge that
you have wronged me. Clotilde, my Clotilde! may I count on you to do all
and everything for me? Is there any sacrifice I could ask that would be
too hard for you? Will you at one sign from me go or do as I request
you?'

She replied, in an anguish over the chilling riddle of his calmness: 'I
will,' but sprang out of that obedient consent, fearful of over-acting
her part of slave to him before her mother, in a ghastly apprehension of
the part he was for playing to the same audience. 'Yes, I will do all,
all that you command. I am yours. I will go with you. Bid me do whatever
you can think of, all except bid me go back to the people I have hitherto
called mine:--not that!'

'And that is what I have to request of you,' said he, with his calm smile
brightening and growing more foreign, histrionic, unreadable to her. 'And
this greatest sacrifice that you can perform for me, are you prepared to
do it? Will you?'

She tried to decipher the mask he wore: it was proof against her
imploring eyes. 'If you can ask me--if you can positively wish it--yes,'
she said. 'But think of what you are doing. Oh! Alvan, not back to them!
Think!'

He smiled insufferably. He was bent on winning a parent-blest bride, an
unimpeachable wife, a lady handed to him instead of taken, one of the
world's polished silver vessels.

'Think that you are doing this for me!' said he. 'It is for my sake. And
now, madame, I give you back your daughter. You see she is mine to give,
she obeys me, and I--though it can be only for a short time--give her
back to you. She goes with you purely because it is my wish: do not
forget that. And so, madame, I have the honour,' he bowed profoundly.

He turned to Clotilde and drew her within his arm. 'What you have done in
obedience to my wish, my beloved, shall never be forgotten. Never can I
sufficiently thank you. I know how much it has cost you. But here is the
end of your trials. All the rest is now my task. Rely on me with your
whole heart. Let them not misuse you: otherwise do their bidding. Be sure
of my knowing how you are treated, and at the slightest act of injustice
I shall be beside you to take you to myself. Be sure of that, and be not
unhappy. They shall not keep you from me for long. Submit a short while
to the will of your parents: mine you will find the stronger. Resolve it
in your soul that I, your lover, cannot fail, for it is impossible to me
to waver. Consider me as the one fixed light in your world, and look to
me. Soon, then! Have patience, be true, and we are one!'

He kissed cold lips, he squeezed an inanimate hand. The horribly empty
sublimity of his behaviour appeared to her in her mother's contemptuous
face.

His eyes were on her as he released her and she stood alone. She seemed a
dead thing; but the sense of his having done gloriously in mastering
himself to give these worldly people of hers a lesson and proof that he
could within due measure bow to their laws and customs, dispelled the
brief vision of her unfitness to be left. The compressed energy of the
man under his conscious display of a great-minded deference to the claims
of family ties and duties, intoxicated him. He thought but of the present
achievement and its just effect: he had cancelled a bad reputation among
these people, from whom he was about to lead forth a daughter for Alvan's
wife, and he reasoned by the grandeur of his exhibition of
generosity--which was brought out in strong relief when he delivered his
retiring bow to the Frau von Rudiger's shoulder--that the worst was over;
he had to deal no more with silly women: now for Clotilde's father! Women
were privileged to oppose their senselessness to the divine fire: men
could not retreat behind such defences; they must meet him on the common
ground of men, where this constant battler had never yet encountered a
reverse.

Clotilde's cold staring gaze, a little livelier to wonderment than to
reflection, observed him to be scrupulous of the formalities in the
diverse character of his parting salutations to her mother, her sister;
and the lady of the house. He was going--he could actually go and leave
her! She stretched herself to him faintly; she let it be seen that she
did so as much as she had force to make it visible. She saw him smiling
incomprehensibly, like a winner of the field to be left to the enemy. She
could get nothing from him but that insensible round smile, and she took
the ebbing of her poor effort for his rebuff.

'You that offered yourself in flight to him who once proposed it, he had
the choice of you and he abjured you. He has cast you off!'

She phrased it in speech to herself. It was incredible, but it was clear:
he had gone.

The room was vacant; the room was black and silent as a dungeon.

'He will not have you: he has handed you back to them the more readily to
renounce you.'

She framed the words half aloud in a moan as she glanced at her mother
heaving in stern triumph, her sister drooping, Madame Emerly standing at
the window.

The craven's first instinct for safety, quick as the cavern lynx for
light, set her on the idea that she was abandoned: it whispered of
quietness if she submitted.

And thus she reasoned: Had Alvan taken her, she would not have been
guilty of more than a common piece of love-desperation in running to him,
the which may be love's glory when marriage crowns it. By his rejecting
her and leaving her, he rendered her not only a runaway, but a castaway.
It was not natural that he should leave her; 'not natural in him to act
his recent part; but he had done it; consequently she was at the mercy of
those who might pick her up. She was, in her humiliation and dread, all
of the moment, she could see to no distance; and judging of him, feeling
for herself, within that contracted circle of sensation--sure, from her
knowledge of her cowardice, that he had done unwisely--she became swayed
about like a castaway in soul, until her distinguishing of his mad
recklessness in the challenge of a power greater than his own grew
present with her as his personal cruelty to the woman who had flung off
everything, flung herself on the tempestuous deeps, on his behalf. And
here she was, left to float or founder! Alvan had gone. The man rageing
over the room, abusing her 'infamous lover, the dirty Jew, the notorious
thief, scoundrel, gallowsbird,' etc., etc., frightful epithets, not to be
transcribed--was her father. He had come, she knew not how. Alvan had
tossed her to him.

Abuse of a lover is ordinarily retorted on in the lady's heart by the
brighter perception of his merits; but when the heart is weak, the
creature suffering shame, her lover the cause of it, and seeming cruel,
she is likely to lose all perception and bend like a flower pelted. Her
cry to him: 'If you had been wiser, this would not have been!' will sink
to the inward meditation: 'If he had been truer!'--and though she does
not necessarily think him untrue for charging him with it, there is
already a loosening of the bonds where the accusation has begun. They are
not broken because they are loosened: still the loosening of them makes
it possible to cut them with less of a snap and less pain.

Alvan had relinquished her he loved to brave the tempest in a frail small
boat, and he certainly could not have apprehended the furious outbreak
she was exposed to. She might so far have exonerated him had she been
able to reflect; but she whom he had forced to depend on him in blind
reliance, now opened her eyes on an opposite power exercising material
rigours. After having enjoyed extraordinary independence for a young
woman, she was treated as a refractory child, literally marched through
the streets in the custody of her father, who clutched her by the
hair-Alvan's beloved golden locks!--and held her under terror of a huge
forester's weapon, that he had seized at the first tidings of his
daughter's flight to the Jew. He seemed to have a grim indifference to
exposure; contempt, with a sense of the humour of it: and this was a
satisfaction to him, founded on his practical observance of two or three
maxims quite equal to the fullest knowledge of women for rightly managing
them: preferable, inasmuch as they are simpler, and, by merely cracking a
whip, bring her back to the post, instead of wasting time by hunting her
as she likes to run. Police were round his house. The General chattered
and shouted of the desperate lawlessness and larcenies of that Jew--the
things that Jew would attempt. He dragged her indoors, muttering of his
policy in treating her at last to a wholesome despotism.

This was the medicine for her--he knew her! Whether he did or not, he
knew the potency of his physic. He knew that osiers can be made to bend.
With a frightful noise of hammering, he himself nailed up the
window-shutters of the room she was locked in hard and fast, and he left
her there and roared across the household that any one holding
communication with the prisoner should be shot like a dog. This was a
manifestation of power in a form more convincing than the orator's.

She was friendless, abused, degraded, benighted in broad daylight;
abandoned by her lover. She sank on the floor of the room, conceiving
with much strangeness of sentiment under these hard stripes of
misfortune, that reality had come. The monster had hold of her. She was
isolated, fed like a dungeoned captive. She had nothing but our natural
obstinacy to hug, or seem to do so when wearifulness reduced her to cling
to the semblance of it only. 'I marry Alvan!' was her iterated answer to
her father, on his visits to see whether he had yet broken her; and she
spoke with the desperate firmness of weak creatures that strive to nail
themselves to the sound of it. He listened and named his time for
returning. The tug between rigour and endurance continued for about forty
hours. She then thought, in an exhaustion: 'Strange that my father should
be so fiercely excited against this man! Can he have reasons I have not
heard of?' Her father's unwonted harshness suggested the question in her
quailing nature, which was beginning to have a movement to kiss the whip.
The question set her thinking of the reasons she knew. She saw them
involuntarily from the side of parents, and they wore a sinister
appearance; in reality her present scourging was due to them as well as
to Alvan's fatal decision. Her misery was traceable to his conduct and
his judgement--both bad. And yet all this while he might be working to
release her, near upon rescuing! She swung round to the side of her lover
against these executioner parents, and scribbled to him as well as she
could under the cracks in her windowshutters, urging him to appear. She
spent her heart on it. A note to her friend, the English lady, protested
her love for Alvan, but with less abandonment, with a frozen resignation
to the loss of him--all around her was so dark! By-and-by there was a
scratching at her door. The maid whom she trusted brought her news of
Alvan: outside the door and in, the maid and mistress knelt. Hope
flickered up in the bosom of Clotilde: the whispers were exchanged
through the partition.

'Where is he?'

'Gone.'

'But where?'

'He has left the city.'

Clotilde pushed the letter for her friend under the door: that one for
Alvan she retained, stung by his desertion of her, and thinking
practically that it was useless to aim a letter at a man without an
address. She did not ask herself whether the maid's information was
honest, for she wanted to despair, as the exhausted want to lie down.

She wept through the night. It was one of those nights of the torrents of
tears which wash away all save the adamantine within us, if there be
ought of that besides the breathing structure. The reason why she wept
with so delirious a persistency was, that her nature felt the necessity
for draining her of her self-pitifulness, knowing that it nourished the
love whereby she was tormented. They do not weep thus who have a heart
for the struggle. In the morning she was a dried channel of tears, no
longer self-pitiful; careless of herself, as she thought: in other words,
unable any further to contend.

Reality was too strong! This morning her sisters came to her room
imploring her to yield:--if she married Alvan, what could be their
prospects as the sisters-in law of such a man?--her betrothed sister
Lotte could not hope to espouse Count Walburg: Alvan's name was infamous
in society; their house would be a lazar-house, they would be condemned
to seclusion. A favourite brother followed, with sympathy that set her
tears running again, and arguments she could not answer: how could he
hold up his head in his regiment as the relative of the scandalous Jew
democrat? He would have to leave the service, or be duelling with his
brother officers every other day of his life, for rightly or wrongly
Alvan was abhorred, and his connection would be fatal to them all,
perhaps to her father's military and diplomatic career principally: the
head of their house would be ruined. She was compelled to weep again by
having no other reply. The tears were now mixed drops of pity for her
absent lover and her family; she was already disunited from him when she
shed them, feeling that she was dry rock to herself, heartless as many
bosoms drained of self-pity will become.

Incapable of that any further, she leaned still in that direction and had
a languid willingness to gain outward comfort. To be caressed a little by
her own kindred before she ceased to live was desireable after her heavy
scourging. She wished for the touches of affection, knowing them to be
selfish, but her love of life and hard view of its reality made them seem
a soft reminder of what life had been. Alvan had gone. Her natural
blankness of imagination read his absence as an entire relinquishment; it
knelled in a vacant chamber. He had gone; he had committed an
irretrievable error, he had given up a fight of his own vain provoking,
that was too severe for him: he was not the lover he fancied himself, or
not the lord of men she had fancied him. Her excessive misery would not
suffer a picture of him, not one clear recollection of him, to stand
before her. He who should have been at hand, had gone, and she was
fearfully beset, almost lifeless; and being abandoned, her blank night of
imagination felt that there was nothing left for her save to fall upon
those nearest.

She gave her submission to her mother. In her mind, during the last
wrestling with a weakness that was alternately her love, and her
cowardice, the interpretation of the act ran: 'He may come, and I am his
if he comes: and if not, I am bound to my people.' He had taught her to
rely on him blindly, and thus she did it inanimately while cutting
herself loose from him. In a similar mood, the spiritual waverer vows to
believe if the saint will appear. However, she submitted. Then there was
joy in the family, and she tasted their caresses.




CHAPTER IX

After his deed of loftiness Alvan walked to his hotel, where the sight of
the room Clotilde had entered that morning caught his breath. He
proceeded to write his first letter to General von Rudiger, repressing
his heart's intimations that he had stepped out of the friendly path, and
was on a strange and tangled one. The sense of power in him was leonine
enough to promise the forcing of a way whithersoever the path: yet did
that ghost of her figure across the room haunt him with searching eyes.
They set him spying over himself at an actor who had not needed to be
acting his part, brilliant though it was. He crammed his energy into his
idea of the part, to carry it forward victoriously. Before the world, it
would without question redound to his credit, and he heard the world
acclaiming him:

'Alvan's wife was honourably won, as became the wife of a Doctor of Law,
from the bosom of her family, when he could have had her in the old
lawless fashion, for a call to a coachman! Alvan, the republican, is
eminently a citizen. Consider his past life by that test of his
character.'

He who had many times defied the world in hot rebellion, had become,
through his desire to cherish a respectable passion, if not exactly
slavish to it, subservient, as we see royal personages, that are happy to
be on bowing terms with the multitude bowing lower. Lower, of course, the
multitude must bow, to inspire an august serenity; but the nod they have
in exchange for it is not an independent one. Ceasing to be a social
rebel, he conceived himself as a recognized dignitary, and he passed
under the bondage of that position.

Clotilde had been in this room; she had furnished proof that she could be
trusted now. She had committed herself, perished as a maiden of society,
and her parents, even the senseless mother, must see it and decide by it.
The General would bring her to reason: General von Rudiger was a man of
the world. An honourable son-in-law could not but be acceptable to
him--now, at least. And such a son-in-law would ultimately be the pride
of his house. 'A flower from thy garden, friend, and my wearing it shall
in good time be cause for some parental gratification.'

The letter despatched, Alvan paced his chamber with the ghost of
Clotilde. He was presently summoned to meet Count Walburg and another
intimate of the family, in the hotel downstairs. These gentlemen brought
no message from General von Rudiger: their words were directed to extract
a promise from him that he would quit his pursuit of Clotilde, and of
course he refused; they hinted that the General might have official
influence to get him expelled the city, and he referred them to the
proof; but he looked beyond the words at a new something of extraordinary
and sinister aspect revealed to him in their manner of treating his
pretensions to the hand of the lady.

He had not yet perfectly seen the view the world took of him, because of
his armed opposition to the world; nor could he rightly reflect on it
yet, being too anxious to sign the peace. He felt as it were a blow
startling him from sleep. His visitors tasked themselves to be strictly
polite; they did not undervalue his resources for commanding respect
between man and man. The strange matter was behind their bearing, which
indicated the positive impossibility of the union of Clotilde with one
such as he, and struck at the curtain covering his history. He could not
raise it to thunder his defence of himself, or even allude to the implied
contempt of his character: with a boiling gorge he was obliged to swallow
both the history and the insult, returning them the equivalent of their
courtesies, though it was on his lips to thunder heavily.

A second endeavour, in an urgent letter before nightfall to gain him
admission to head-quarters, met the same repulse as the foregoing. The
bearer of it was dismissed without an answer.

Alvan passed a night of dire disturbance. The fate of the noble Genoese
conspirator, slipping into still harbour water on the step from boat to
boat, and borne down by the weight of his armour in the moment of the
ripeness of his plot at midnight, when the signal for action sparkled to
lighten across the ships and forts, had touched him in his boy's
readings, and he found a resemblance of himself to Fiesco, stopped as he
was by a base impediment, tripped ignominiously, choked by the weight of
the powers fitting him for battle. A man such as Alvan, arrested on his
career by an opposition to his enrolment of a bride!--think of it! What
was this girl in a life like his? But, oh! the question was no sooner
asked than the thought that this girl had been in this room illuminated
the room, telling him she might have been his own this instant,
confounding him with an accusation of madness for rejecting her. Why had
he done it? Surely women, weak women, must be at times divinely inspired.
She warned him against the step. But he, proud of his armoury, went his
way. He choked, he suffered the torture of the mailed Genoese going
under; worse, for the drowner's delirium swirls but a minute in the
gaping brain, while he had to lie all, night at the mercy of the night.

He was only calmer when morning came. Night has little mercy for the
self-reproachful, and for a strong man denouncing the folly of his error,
it has none. The bequest of the night was a fever of passion; and upon
that fever the light of morning cleared his head to weigh the force
opposing him. He gnawed the paradox, that it was huge because it was
petty, getting a miserable sour sustenance out of his consciousness of
the position it explained. Great enemies, great undertakings, would have
revived him as they had always revived and fortified. But here was a
stolid small obstacle, scarce assailable on its own level; and he had
chosen that it should be attacked through its own laws and forms. By
shutting a door, by withholding an answer to his knocks, the thing
reduced him to hesitation. And the thing had weapons to shoot at him; his
history, his very blood, stood open to its shafts; and the sole quality
of a giant, which he could show to front it, was the breath of one for a
mark.

These direct perceptions of the circumstances were played on by the fever
he drew from his Fiesco bed. Accuracy of vision in our crises is not so
uncommon as the proportionate equality of feeling: we do indeed.
frequently see with eyes of just measurement while we are conducting
ourselves like madmen. The facts are seen, and yet the spinning nerves
will change their complexion; and without enlarging or minimizing, they
will alternate their effect on us immensely through the colour presenting
them now sombre, now hopeful: doing its work of extravagance upon
perceptibly plain matter. The fitful colour is the fever. He must win
her, for he never yet had failed--he had lost her by his folly! She was
his--she was torn from him! She would come at his bidding--she would
cower to her tyrants! The thought of her was life and death in his frame,
bright heaven and the abyss. At one beat of the heart she swam to his
arms, at another he was straining over darkness. And whose the fault?

He rose out of his amazement crying it with a roar, and foreignly
beholding himself. He pelted himself with epithets; his worst enemies
could not have been handier in using them. From Alvan to Alvan, they
signified such an earthquake in a land of splendid structures as shatters
to dust the pride of the works of men. He was down among them, lower than
the herd, rolling in vulgar epithets that, attached to one like him,
became of monstrous distortion. O fool! dolt! blind ass! tottering idiot!
drunken masquerader! miserable Jack Knave, performing suicide with that
blessed coxcomb air of curling a lock!--Clotilde! Clotilde! Where has one
read the story of a man who had the jewel of jewels in his hand, and
flung in into the deeps, thinking that he flung a pebble? Fish, fool,
fish! and fish till Doomsday! There's nothing but your fool's face in the
water to be got to bite at the bait you throw, fool! Fish for the
flung-away beauty, and hook your shadow of a Bottom's head! What impious
villain was it refused the gift of the gods, that he might have it
bestowed on him according to his own prescription of the ceremonies! They
laugh! By Orcus! how they laugh! The laughter of the gods is the
lightning of death's irony over mortals. Can they have a finer subject
than a giant gone fool?

Tears burst from him: tears of rage, regret, selflashing. O for
yesterday! He called aloud for the recovery of yesterday, bellowed,
groaned. A giant at war with pigmies, having nought but their weapons,
having to fight them on his knees, to fight them with the right hand
while smiting himself with the left, has too much upon him to keep his
private dignity in order. He was the same in his letters--a Cyclops
hurling rocks and raising the seas to shipwreck. Dignity was cast off; he
came out naked. Letters to Clotilde, and to the baroness, to the friend
nearest him just then, Colonel von Tresten, calling them to him, were
dashed to paper in this naked frenzy, and he could rave with all the
truth of life, that to have acted the idiot, more than the loss of the
woman, was the ground of his anguish. Each antecedent of his career had
been a step of strength and success departed. The woman was but a
fragment of the tremendous wreck; the woman was utterly diminutive, yet
she was the key of the reconstruction; the woman won, he would be himself
once more: and feeling that, his passion for her swelled to full tide and
she became a towering splendour whereat his eyeballs ached, she became a
melting armful that shook him to big bursts of tears.

The feeling of the return of strength was his love in force. The giant in
him loved her warmly. Her sweetness, her archness, the opening of her
lips, their way of holding closed, and her brightness of wit, her tender
eyelashes, her appreciating looks, her sighing, the thousand varying
shades of her motions and her features interflowing like a lighted water,
swam to him one by one like so many handmaiden messengers distinctly
beheld of the radiant indistinct whom he adored with more of spirit in
his passion than before this tempest. A giant going through a giant's
contortions, fleshly as the race of giants, and gross, coarse, dreadful,
likely to be horrible when whipped and stirred to the dregs, Alvan was
great-hearted: he could love in his giant's fashion, love and lay down
life for the woman he loved, though the nature of the passion was not
heavenly; or for the friend who would have to excuse him often; or for
the public cause--which was to minister to his appetites. He was true
man, a native of earth, and if he could not quit his huge personality to
pipe spiritual music during a storm of trouble, being a soul wedged in
the gnarled wood of the standing giant oak, and giving mighty sound of
timber at strife rather than the angelical cry, he suffered, as he loved,
to his depths.

We have not to plumb the depths; he was not heroic, but hugely man. Love
and man sometimes meet for noble concord; the strings of the hungry
instrument are not all so rough that Love's touch on them is
indistinguishable from the rattling of the wheels within; certain herald
harmonies have been heard. But Love, which purifies and enlarges us, and
sets free the soul, Love visiting a fleshly frame must have time and
space, and some help of circumstance, to give the world assurance that
the man is a temple fit for the rites. Out of romances, he is not
melodiously composed. And in a giant are various giants to be slain, or
thoroughly subdued, ere this divinity is taken for leader. It is not done
by miracle.

As it happened cruelly for Alvan, the woman who had become the radiant
indistinct in his desiring mind was one whom he knew to be of a shivery
stedfastness. His plucking her from another was neither wonderful nor
indefensible; they two were suited as no other two could be; the handsome
boy who had gone through a form of plighting with her was her slave, and
she required for her mate a master: she felt it and she sided to him
quite naturally, moved by the sacred direction of the acknowledgement of
a mutual fitness. Twice, however, she had relapsed on the occasions of
his absence, and owning his power over her when they were together again,
she sowed the fatal conviction that he held her at present, and that she
was a woman only to be held at present, by the palpable grasp of his
physical influence. Partly it was correct, not entirely, seeing that she
kept the impression of a belief in him even when she drifted away through
sheer weakness, but it was the single positive view he had of her, and it
was fatal, for it begat a devil of impatience.

'They are undermining her now--now--now!'

He started himself into busy frenzies to reach to her, already
indifferent to the means, and waxing increasingly reckless as he fed on
his agitation. Some faith in her, even the little she deserved, would
have arrested him: unhappily he had less than she, who had enough to
nurse the dim sense of his fixity, and sank from him only in her heart's
faintness, but he, when no longer flattered by the evidence of his
mastery, took her for sand. Why, then, had he let her out of his grasp?
The horrid echoed interrogation flashed a hideous view of the woman. But
how had he come to be guilty of it? he asked himself again; and, without
answering him, his counsellors to that poor wisdom set to work to
complete it: Giant Vanity urged Giant Energy to make use of Giant
Duplicity. He wrote to Clotilde, with one voice quoting the law in their
favour, with another commanding her to break it. He gathered and drilled
a legion of spies, and showered his gold in bribes and plots to get the
letter to her, to get an interview--one human word between them.




CHAPTER X

His friend Colonel von Tresten was beside him when he received the
enemy's counter-stroke. Count Walburg and his companion brought a letter
from Clotilde--no reply; a letter renouncing him.

Briefly, in cold words befitting the act, she stated that the past must
be dead between them; for the future she belonged to her parents; she had
left the city. She knew not where he might be, her letter concluded, but
henceforward he should know that they were strangers.

Alvan held out the deadly paper when he had read the contents; he smote a
forefinger on it and crumpled it in his hand. That was the dumb oration
of a man shocked by the outrage upon passionate feeling to the state of
brute. His fist, outstretched to the length of his arm, shook the reptile
letter under a terrible frown.

Tresten saw that he supposed himself to be perfectly master of his acts
because he had not spoken, and had managed to preserve the ordinary
courtesies.

'You have done your commission,' the colonel said to Count Walburg, whose
companion was not disposed to go without obtaining satisfactory
assurances, and pressed for them.

Alvan fastened on him. 'You adopt the responsibility of this?' He
displayed the letter.

'I do.'

'It lies.'

Tresten remarked to Count Walburg: 'These visits are provocations.'

'They are not so intended,' said the count, bowing pacifically. His
friend was not a man of the sword, and was not under the obligation to
accept an insult. They left the letter to do its work.

Big natures in their fits of explosiveness must be taken by flying shots,
as dwarfs peep on a monster, or the Scythian attacked a phalanx. Were we
to hear all the roarings of the shirted Heracles, a world of comfortable
little ones would doubt the unselfishness of his love of Dejaneira. Yes,
really; they would think it was not a chivalrous love: they would
consider that he thought of himself too much. They would doubt, too, of
his being a gentleman! Partial glimpses of him, one may fear, will be
discomposing to simple natures. There was a short black eruption. Alvan
controlled it, to ask hastily what the baroness thought and what she had
heard of Clotilde. Tresten made sign that it was nothing of the best.

'See! my girl has hundreds of enemies, and I, only I, know her and can
defend her--weak, base shallow trickster, traitress that she is!' cried
Alvan, and came down in a thundershower upon her: 'Yesterday--the day
before--when? just now, here, in this room; gave herself--and now!' He
bent, and immediately straightening his back, addressed Colonel von
Tresten as her calumniator, 'Say your worst of her, and I say I will make
of that girl the peerless woman of earth! I! in earnest! it's no dream.
She can be made . . . . O God! the beast has turned tail! I knew she
could. There 's three of beast to one of goddess in her, and set her
alone, and let her be hunted and I not by, beast it is with her! cowardly
skulking beast--the noblest and very bravest under my wing!
Incomprehensible to you, Tresten? But who understands women! You hate
her. Do not. She 's a riddle, but no worse than the rest of the tangle.
She gives me up? Pooh! She writes it. She writes anything. And that
vilest, I say, I will make more enviable, more Clotilde! he thundered her
signature in an amazement, broken suddenly by the sight of her putting
her name to the letter. She had done that, written her name to the
renunciation of him! No individual could bear the sight of such a crime,
and no suffering man could be appeased by a single victim to atone for
it. Her sex must be slaughtered; he raged against the woman; she became
that ancient poisonous thing, the woman; his fury would not distinguish
her as Clotilde, though the name had started him, and it was his
knowledge of the particular sinner which drew down his curses on the sex.
He twisted his body, hugging at his breast as if he had her letter
sticking in his ribs. The letter was up against his ribs, and he thumped
it, crushed it, patted it; he kissed it, and flung it, stamped on it, and
was foul-mouthed. Seeing it at his feet, he bent to it like a man snapped
in two, lamenting, bewailing himself, recovering sight of her
fragmentarily. It stuck in his ribs, and in scorn of the writer, and
sceptical of her penning it, he tugged to pull it out, and broke the
shaft, but left the rankling arrow-head:--she had traced the lines, and
though tyranny racked her to do that thing, his agony followed her hand
over the paper to her name, which fixed and bit in him like the
deadly-toothed arrow-head called asp, and there was no uprooting it. The
thing lived; her deed was the woman; there was no separating them:
witness it in love murdered.

O that woman! She has murdered love. She has blotted love completely out.
She is the arch-thief and assassin of mankind--the female Apollyon. He
lost sight of her in the prodigious iniquity covering her sex with a cowl
of night, and it was what women are, what women will do, the one and all
alike simpering simulacra that men find them to be, soulless, clogs on
us, bloodsuckers! until a feature of the particular sinner peeped out on
him, and brought the fresh agony of a reminder of his great-heartedness.
'For that woman--Tresten, you know me--I would have sacrificed for that
woman fortune and life, my hope, my duty, my immortality. She knew it,
and she--look!' he unwrinkled the letter carefully for it to be legible,
and clenched it in a ball.' Signs her name, signs her name, her
name!--God of heaven! it would be incredible in a holy chronicle--signs
her name to the infamous harlotry! See: "Clotilde von Rudiger." It's her
writing; that's her signature: "Clotilde" in full. You'd hardly fancy
that, now? But look!' the colonel's eyelids were blinking, and Alvan
dinted his finger-nail under her name: 'there it is: Clotilde: signed
shamelessly. Just as she might have written to one of her friends about
bonnets, and balls, and books! Henceforward strangers, she and I?'

His laughter, even to Tresten, a man of camps, sounded profane as a yell
beneath a cathedral dome. 'Why, the woman has been in my hands--I
released her, spared her, drilled brain and blood, ransacked all the
code, to do her homage and honour in every mortal way; and we two
strangers! Do you hear that, Tresten? Why, if you had seen her!--she was
lost, and I, this man she now pierces with ice, kept hell down under bolt
and bar-worse, I believe, broke a good woman's heart! that never a breath
should rise that could accuse her on suspicion, or in malice, or by
accident, justly, or with a shadow of truth. "I think it best for us
both." So she thinks for me! She not only decides, she thinks; she is the
active principle; 'tis mine to submit.--A certain presumption was in that
girl always. Ha! do you hear me? Her letter may sting, it shall not dupe.
Strangers? Poor fool! You see plainly she was nailed down to write the
thing. This letter is a flat lie. She can lie--Oh! born to the art! born
to it!--lies like a Saint tricking Satan! But she says she has left the
city. Now to find her!'

He began marching about the room with great strides. 'I 'll have the
whole Continent up; her keepers shall have no rest; I 'll have them by
the Law Courts; and by stratagem, and, if law and cunning fail, force. I
have sworn it. I have done all that honour can ask of a man; more than
any man, to my knowledge, would have done, and now it's war. I declare
war on them. They will have it! I mean to take that girl from
them--snatch or catch! The girl is my girl, and if there are laws against
my having my own, to powder with the laws! Well, and do you suppose me
likely to be beaten? Then Cicero was a fiction, and Caesar a people's
legend. Not if they are history, and eloquence and commandership have
power over the blood and souls of men. First, I write to her!'

His friend suggested that he knew not where she was. But already the pen
was at work, the brain pouring as from a pitcher.

Writing was blood-letting, and the interminable pages drained him of his
fever. As he wrote, she grew more radiant, more indistinct, more fiercely
desired. The concentration of his active mind directed his whole being on
the track of Clotilde, idealizing her beyond human. That last day when he
had seen her appeared to him as the day of days. That day was Clotilde
herself, she in person; he saw it as the woman, and saw himself
translucent in the great luminousness; and behind it all was dark, as in
front. That one day was the sun of his life. It had been a day of rain,
and he beheld it in memory just as it had been, with the dark threaded
air, the dripping streets; and he glorified it past all daily radiance.
His letter was a burning hymn to the day. His moral grandeur on the day
made him live as part of the splendour. Was it possible for the woman who
had seen him then to be faithless to him? The swift deduction from his
own feelings cleansed her of a suspicion to the contrary, and he became
lighthearted. He hummed an air when he had finished his letter to her.

Councils with his adherents and couriers were held, and some were
despatched to watch the house and slip the letter to her maid; others
were told off to bribe and hound their way on the track of Clotilde. His
gold rained into their hands with the directions.

Colonel von Tresten was the friend of his attachment to the baroness; a
friend of both, and a warm one. Men coming into contact with Alvan took
their shape of friend or enemy sharply, for he was friend or enemy of no
dubious feature, devoted to them he loved, and a battery on them he
opposed. The colonel had been the confidant of the baroness's grief over
this love-passion of Alvan's, and her resignation. He shared her doubts
of Clotilde's nobility of character: the reports were not favourable to
the young lady. But the baroness and he were of one opinion, that Alvan
in love was not likely to be governable by prudent counsel. He dropped a
word of the whispers of Clotilde's volatility.

Alvan nodded his perfect assent. 'She is that, she is anything you like;
you cannot exaggerate her for good or evil. She is matchless, colour her
as you please.' Adopting the tone of argument, he said: 'She writes that
letter. Well? It is her writing, and the moment, I am sure of it as hers,
I would not have it unwritten. I love it!' He looked maddish with his
love of the horrible thing, and resumed soberly: 'The point is, that she
has the charm for me. She is plastic in my hands. Other men would waste
the treasure. I make of her what I will, and she knows it, and knows that
she hangs on me to flourish worthily. I breathe the very soul of the
woman into her. As for that letter of hers--' it burnt him this time to
speak of the letter: 'she may write and write! She's weak, thin, a reed;
she--let her be! Say of her when she plays beast--she is absent from
Alvan! I can forgive. The letter's nothing; it means nothing--except
"Thou fool, Alvan, to let me go." Yes, that! Her people are acting tyrant
with her--as legally they have no right to do in this country, and I
shall prove it to them. When I have gained admission to her--and I soon
shall: it can't be refused: I am off to the head of her father's office
to-morrow, and I have only to represent the state of affairs to the
Minister in my language to obtain his authority to demand admission to
her:--then, friend, you will see! I lift my finger, and you will see! At
my request she went back to her mother. I have but to beckon.'

He had cooled to the happy assurance of his authority over her, all the
giants of his system being well in action, and when that is the case with
a big nature it is at rest, or such is the condition of repose granted it
in life.

On the morrow he was off to batter at doors which would have expected
rather the summons of an armed mob at his heels than the strange cry of
the Radical man maltreated by love.




CHAPTER XI

The story of Clotilde's departure from the city, like that of Alvan's,
communicated to her by her maid, was an anticipation of the truth,
disseminated by her parents. She was removed when the swarm of spies and
secret letter-bearers were attaining a position of dignity through the
rumour of legal gentlemen about to direct the movements of the besieging
army.

A stir seemed to her to prognosticate a rescue and she went not
unwillingly. To be in motion, to see roadside faces, pricked her senses
with some hope. She had gained the peace she needed, and in that state
her heart began to be agitated by a fresh awakening, luxurious at first
rather than troublesome. She had sunk so low that the light of Alvan
seemed too distant for a positive expectation of him; but few approached
her whom she did not fancy under strange disguises: the gentlemen were
servants, the blouses were gentlemen; she looked wistfully at old women
bearing baskets, for the forbidden fruit to peep out in the form of an
envelope. All passed her blankly, noticing her eyes.

The journey was short; she was taken to a place a little beyond the head
of the lake, and there, though she had liberty to breathe the air, fast
fixed within the walls of a daily sameness that became gradually the hum
of voices accusing Alvan of one in excess of the many sins laid against
him by his enemies. Was he not possibly an empty pretender to power--a
mere great talker?

Her bit of liberty increased her chafing at the deadly monotony of this
existence, and envenomed the accusation by seeming to push her forth
quite half way to meet him, if he would but come or show sign! She
impetuously vindicated him from the charge of crediting the sincerity of
any words she might have committed to paper at the despotic dictation of
her father. Oh, no; Alvan could not be guilty of such folly as that; he
could not; it would be to suppose him unacquainted with her, ignorant of
the nature of women. He would know that she wrote the words--why? She
could not perfectly recollect how she had come to write them, and found
it easier to extinguish the act of having written them at all, which was
done by the angry recurrence to his failure to intervene now when the
drama cried for his godlike appearance. Perhaps he was really
unacquainted with her thought her stronger than she was! The idea
reflected a shadow on his intelligence. She was not in a situation that
could bear of her blaming herself.

While she was thus devoured by the legions of her enfeebled wits,
Clotilde was assiduously courted by her family, and her father from time
to time brought pen and paper for her to write anew from his dictation.
He was pleased to hail her as his fair secretary, and when the letters
were unimportant she wrote flowingly, happy to be praised. They were
occasionally addressed to friends; she discovered herself writing one to
the professor, in which he was about to be informed that she had resolved
to banish Alvan from her mind for ever. She stopped; her heart stopped;
the pen fell from her hand, in loathing. Her father warily bade her
proceed. She could not; she signified it choking. Only a few days before
she had written to the professor exultingly of her engagement. She
refused to belie herself in such a manner; retrospectively her rapid
contradictions appeared impossible; the picture of her was not human, and
she gave out a negative of her whole frame convulsed, whereat the General
was not slow to remind her of the scourgings she had undergone by a
sudden burst of his wrath. He knew the proper physic. 'You girls want the
lesson we read to skittish recruits; you shall have it. Write: "He is now
as nothing to me." You shall write that you hate him, if you hesitate!
Why, you unreasonable slut, you have given him up; you have told him you
have given him up, and what objection can you have to telling others now
you have done it?'

'I was forced to it, body and soul!' cried Clotilde, sobbing and bursting
into desperation out of a weak show of petulance that she had put on to
propitiate him. 'If I have to tell, I will tell how it was. For that my
heart is unchanged, and Alvan is, and will be, my lord, all the world may
see. I would rather write that I hate him.'

'You write, the man is now as nothing to me!' said her father, dashing
his finger in a fiery zig-zag along the line for her pen to follow. 'Or
else, my girl, you've been playing us a pretty farce!' He strung himself
for a mad gallop of wrath, gave her a shudder, and relapsed. 'No, no,
you're wiser, you're a better girl than that. Write it. I must have it
written-here, come! The worst is over; the rest is child's play. Come,
take the pen, I'll guide your hand.'

The pen was fixed in her hand, and the first words formed. They looked
such sprawling skeletons that Clotilde had the comfort of feeling sure
they would be discerned as the work of compulsion. So she wrote on
mechanically, solacing herself for what she did with vows of future
revolt. Alvan had a saying, that want of courage is want of sense; and
she remembered his illustration of how sense would nourish courage by
scattering the fear of death, if we would only grasp the thought that we
sink to oblivion gladly at night, and, most of us, quit it reluctantly in
the morning. She shut her eyes while writing; she fancied death would be
welcome; and as she certainly had sense, she took it for the promise of
courage. She flattered herself by believing, therefore, that she who did
not object to die was only awaiting the cruelly-delayed advent of her
lover to be almost as brave as he--the feminine of him. With these ideas
in her head much clearer than when she wrote the couple of lines to
Alvan--for then her head was reeling, she was then beaten and
prostrate--she signed her name to a second renunciation of him, and was
aware of a flush of self-reproach at the simple suspicion of his being
deceived by it; it was an insult to his understanding. Full surely the
professor would not be deceived, and a lover with a heart to reach to her
and read her could never be hoodwinked by so palpable a piece of
slavishness. She was indeed slavish; the apology necessitated the
confession. But that promise of courage, coming of her ownership of
sense, vindicated her prospectively; she had so little of it that she
embraced it as a present possession, and she made it Alvan's task to put
it to the trial. Hence it became Alvan's offence if, owing to his
absence, she could be charged with behaving badly. Her generosity
pardoned him his inexplicable delay to appear in his might: 'But see what
your continued delay causes!' she said, and her tone was merely
sorrowful.

She had forgotten her signature to the letter to the professor when his
answer arrived. The sight of the handwriting of one of her lover's
faithfullest friends was like a peal of bells to her, and she tore the
letter open, and began to blink and spell at a strange language, taking
the frosty sentences piecemeal. He begged her to be firm in her
resolution, give up Alvan and obey her parents! This man of high
intelligence and cultivation wrote like a provincial schoolmistress
moralizing. Though he knew the depth of her passion for Alvan, and had
within the month received her lark-song of her betrothal, he, this
man--if living man he could be thought--counselled her to endeavour to
deserve the love and respect of her parents, alluded to Alvan's age and
her better birth, approved her resolve to consult the wishes of her
family, and in fine was as rank a traitor to friendship as any
chronicled. Out on him! She swept him from earth.

And she had built some of her hopes on the professor. 'False friend!' she
cried.

She wept over Alvan for having had so false a friend.

There remained no one that could be expected to intervene with a strong
arm save the baroness. The professor's emphasized approval of her resolve
to consult the wishes of her family was a shocking hypocrisy, and
Clotilde thought of the contrast to it in her letter to the baroness. The
tripping and stumbling, prettily awkward little tone of gosling innocent
new from its egg, throughout the letter, was a triumph of candour. She
repeated passages, paragraphs, of the letter, assuring herself that such
affectionately reverential prattle would have moved her, and with the
strongest desire to cast her arms about the writer: it had been composed
to be moving to a woman, to any woman. The old woman was entreated to
bestow her blessing on the young one, all in Arcadia, and let the young
one nestle to the bosom she had not an idea of robbing. She could not
have had the idea, else how could she have made the petition? And in
order to compliment a venerable dame on her pure friendship for a
gentleman, it was imperative to reject the idea. Besides, after seeing
the photograph of the baroness, common civility insisted on the purity of
her friendship. Nay, in mercy to the poor gentleman, friendship it must
be.

A letter of reply from that noble lady was due. Possibly she had
determined not to write, but to act. She was a lady of exalted birth, a
lady of the upper aristocracy, who could, if she would, bring both a
social and official pressure upon the General: and it might be in motion
now behind the scenes, Clotilde laid hold of her phantom baroness, almost
happy under the phantom's whisper that she need not despair. 'You have
been a little weak,' the phantom said to her, and she acquiesced with a
soft sniffle, adding: 'But, dearest, honoured lady, you are a woman, and
know what our trials are when we are so persecuted. O that I had your
beautiful sedateness! I do admire it, madam. I wish I could imitate.' She
carried her dramatic ingenuousness farthel still by saying: 'I have seen
your photograph'; implying that the inimitable, the much coveted air of
composure breathed out of yonder presentment of her features. 'For I
can't call you good looking,' she said within herself, for the
satisfaction of her sense of candour, of her sense of contrast as well.
And shutting her eyes, she thought of the horrid penitent a harsh-faced
woman in confession must be:

The picture sent her swimmingly to the confessional, where sat a man with
his head in a hood, and he soon heard enough of mixed substance to dash
his hood, almost his head, off. Beauty may be immoderately frank in soul
to the ghostly. The black page comprised a very long list. 'But put this
on the white page,' says she to the surging father inside his box--'I
loved Alvan!' A sentence or two more fetches the Alvanic man jumping out
of the priest: and so closely does she realize it that she has to hunt
herself into a corner with the question, whether she shall tell him she
guessed him to be no other than her lover. 'How could you expect a girl,
who is not a Papist, to come kneeling here?' she says. And he answers
with no matter what of a gallant kind.

In this manner her natural effervescence amused her sorrowful mind while
gazing from her chamber window at the mountain sides across the valley,
where tourists, in the autumnal season, sweep up and down like a tidal
river. She had ceased to weep; she had outwept the colour of her eyes and
the consolation of weeping. Dressed in black to the throat, she sat and
waited the arrival of her phantom friend, the baroness--that angel! who
proved her goodness in consenting to be the friend of Alvan's beloved,
because she was the true friend of Alvan! How cheap such a way of proving
goodness, Clotilde did not consider. She wanted it so.

The mountain heights were in dusty sunlight. She had seen them day after
day thinly lined on the dead sky, inviting thunder and doomed to
sultriness. She looked on the garden of the house, a desert under bee and
butterfly. Looking beyond the garden she perceived her father on the
glaring road, and one with him, the sight of whom did not flush her cheek
or spring her heart to a throb, though she pitied the poor boy: he was
useless to her, utterly.

Soon her Indian Bacchus was in her room, and alone with her, and at her
feet. Her father had given him hope. He came bearing eyes that were like
hope's own; and kneeling, kissing her hands, her knees, her hair, he
seemed unaware that she was inanimate.

There was nothing imaginable in which he could be of use.

He was only another dust-cloud of the sultry sameness. She had been
expecting a woman, a tempest choral with sky and mountain and
valley-hollows, as the overture to Alvan's appearance.

But he roused her. With Marko she had never felt her cowardice, and his
passionately beseeching, trembling, 'Will you have me?' called up the
tiger in the girl; in spite of pity for his voice she retorted on her
parents:

'Will I have you? I? You ask me what is my will? It sounds oddly from
you, seeing that I wrote to you in Lucerne what I would have, and nothing
has changed in me since then, nothing! My feeling for him is unaltered,
and everything you have heard of me was wrung out of me by my
unhappiness. The world is dead to me, and all in it that is not.
Sigismund Alvan. To you I am accustomed to speak every thought of my
soul, and I tell you the world and all it has is dead to me, even my
parents--I hate them.'

Marko pressed her hands. If he loved her slavishly, it was generously.
The wild thing he said was one of the frantic leaps of generosity in a
heart that was gone to impulse: 'I see it, they have martyrized you. I
know you so well, Clotilde! So, then, come to me, come with me, let me
cherish you. I will take you and rescue you from your people, and should
it be your positive wish to meet Alvan again, I myself will take you to
him, and then you may choose between us.'

The generosity was evident. There was nevertheless, to a young woman
realizing the position foreshadowed by such a project, the suspicion of a
slavish hope nestling among the circumstances in the background, and this
she was taught by the dangerous emotion of gratitude gaining on her, and
melting her to him.

She too had a slavish hope that was athirst and sinking, and it flew at
the throat of Marko's, eager to satiate its vengeance for these long
delays in the destroying of a weaker.

She left her chair and cried: 'As you will. What is it to me? Take me, if
you please. Take that glove; it is the shape of my hand. You have as much
of me as is there. My life is gone. You or another! But take this warning
and my oath with it. I swear to you, that wherever I see Sigismund Alvan
I go straight to him, though the way be over you, all of you, lying dead
beneath me.'

The lift of incredulous horror in Marko's large black eyes excited her to
a more savage imagination: 'Rejoice! I should rejoice to see you, all of
you, dead, that I might walk across you safe from disturbance to get to
him I love. Be under no delusion. I love him better than the lives of any
dear to me, or my own. I am his. He is my faith, my worship. I am true to
him, I am, I am. You force my hand from me, you take this miserable body,
but my soul is free to love him and to go to him when God gives me sight
of him. I am Alvan's eternally. All your laws are mockeries. You, and my
people, and your priests, and your law-makers, are shadows,
brain-vapours. Let him beckon!--So you have your warning. Do what I may,
I cannot be called untrue. And now let me be; I want repose; my head
breaks; I have been on the rack and I am in pieces!'

Marko clung to her hand, said she was terrible and pitiless, but clung.

The hand was nerveless: it was her dear hand. Had her tongue been more
venomous in wildness than the encounter with a weaker than herself made
it be, the holding of her hand would have been his antidote. In him there
was love for two.

Clotilde allowed him to keep the hand, assuring herself she was
unconscious he did so. He brought her peace, he brought her old throning
self back to her, and he was handsome and tame as a leopard-skin at her
feet.

If she was doomed to reach to Alvan through him, at least she had warned
him. The vision of the truthfulness of her nature threw a celestial wan
beam on her guilty destiny.

She patted his head and bade him leave her, narrowing her shoulders on
the breast to let it be seen that the dark household within was locked
and shuttered.

He went. He was good, obedient, humane; he was generous, exquisitely
bred; he brought her peace, and he had been warned. It is difficult in
affliction to think of one who belongs to us as one to whom we owe a
duty. The unquestionably sincere and devoted lover is also in his candour
a featureless person; and though we would not punish him for his
goodness, we have the right to anticipate that it will be equal to every
trial. Perhaps, for the sake of peace . . . after warning him . . . her
meditations tottered in dots.

But when the heart hungers behind such meditations, that thinking without
language is a dangerous habit; for there will suddenly come a dash
usurping the series of tentative dots, which is nothing other than the
dreadful thing resolved on, as of necessity, as naturally as the
adventurous bow-legged infant pitches back from an excursion of two paces
to mother's lap; and not much less innocently within the mind, it would
appear. The dash is a haven reached that would not be greeted if it stood
out in words. Could we live without ourselves letting our animal do our
thinking for us legibly? We live with ourselves agreeably so long as his
projects are phrased in his primitive tongue, even though we have clearly
apprehended what he means, and though we sufficiently well understand the
whither of our destination under his guidance. No counsel can be saner
than that the heart should be bidden to speak out in plain verbal speech
within us. For want of it, Clotilde's short explorations in Dot-and-Dash
land were of a kind to terrify her, and yet they seemed not only
unavoidable, but foreshadowing of the unavoidable to come. Or
possibly--the thought came to her--Alvan would keep his word, and save
her from worse by stepping to the altar between her and Marko, there
calling on her to decide and quit the prince; and his presence would
breathe courage into her to go to him. It set her looking to the altar
as a prospect of deliverance.

Her mother could not fail to notice a change in Clotilde's wintry face
now that Marko was among them; her inference tallied with his report of
their interview, so she supposed the girl to have accepted more or less
heartily Marko's forgiveness. For him the girl's eyes were soft and kind;
her gaze was through the eyelashes, as one seeing a dream on a far
horizon. Marko spoke of her cheerfully, and was happy to call her his
own, but would not have her troubled by any ceremonial talk of their
engagement, so she had much to thank him for, and her consciousness of
the signal instance of ingratitude lying ahead in the darkness, like a
house mined beneath the smiling slumberer, made her eager to show the
real gratefulness and tenderness of her feelings. This had the appearance
of renewed affection; consequently her parents lost much of their fear of
the besieger outside, and she was removed to the city. Two parties were
in the city, one favouring Alvan, and one abhorring the audacious Jew.
Together they managed to spread incredible reports of his doings, which
required little exaggeration to convince an enemy that he was a man with
whom hostility could not be left to sleep. The General heard of the man's
pleading his cause in all directions to get pressure put upon him,
showing something like a devilish persuasiveness, Jew and demagogue
though he was; for there seemed to be a feeling abroad that the interview
this howling lover claimed with Clotilde ought to be granted. The latest
report spoke of him as off to the General's Court for an audience of his
official chief. General von Rudiger looked to his defences, and he had
sufficient penetration to see that the weakest point of them might be a
submissive daughter.

A letter to Clotilde from the baroness was brought to the house by a
messenger. The General thought over it. The letter was by no means a
seductive letter for a young lady to receive from such a person, yet he
did not anticipate the whole effect it would produce when ultimately he
decided to give it to her, being of course unaware of the noble style of
Clotilde's address to the baroness. He stipulated that there must be no
reply to it except through him, and Clotilde had the coveted letter in
her hands at last. Here was the mediatrix--the veritable goddess with the
sword to cut the knot! Here was the manifestation of Alvan!




BOOK 3.




CHAPTER XII

She ran out to the shade of the garden walls to be by herself and in the
air, and she read; and instantly her own letter to the baroness crashed
sentence upon sentence, in retort, springing up with the combative
instinct of a beast, to make discord of the stuff she read, and deride
it. Twice she went over the lines with this defensive accompaniment; then
they laid octopus-limbs on her. The writing struck chill as a glacier
cave. Oh, what an answer to that letter of fervid respectfulness, of
innocent supplication for maternal affection, for some degree of
benignant friendship!

The baroness coldly stated, that she had arrived in the city to do her
best in assisting to arrange matters which had come to a most unfortunate
and impracticable pass. She alluded to her established friendship for
Alvan, but it was chiefly in the interests of Clotilde that the latter
was requested to perceive the necessity for bringing her relations with
Dr. Alvan to an end in the discreetest manner now possible to the
circumstances. This, the baroness pursued, could only be done by her
intervention, and her friendship for Dr. Alvan had caused her to
undertake the little agreeable office. For which purpose, promising her
an exemption from anything in the nature of tragedy scenes, the baroness
desired Clotilde to call on her the following day between certain
specified hours of the afternoon.

That was all.

The girl in her letter to the baroness had constrained herself to write,
and therefore to think, in so beautiful a spirit of ignorant innocence,
that the vileness of an answer thus brutally throwing off the mask of
personal disinterestedness appeared to her both an abominable piece of
cynicism on the part of a scandalous old woman, and an insulting
rejection of the cover of decency proposed to the creature by a
daisy-minded maiden.

She scribbled a single line in receipt of the letter and signed her
initials.

'The woman is hateful!' she said to her father; she was ready to agree
with him about the woman and Alvan. She was ashamed to have hoped
anything of the woman, and stamped down her disappointment under a
vehement indignation, that disfigured the man as well. He had put the
matter into the hands of this most detestable of women, to settle it as
she might think best! He and she!--the miserable old thing with her
ancient arts and cajoleries had lured him back! She had him fast again,
in spite of--for who could tell? perhaps by reason of her dirty habits:
she smoked dragoon cigars! All day she was emitting tobacco-smoke; it was
notorious, Clotilde had not to learn it from her father; but now she saw
the filthy rag that standard of female independence was--that petticoated
Unfeminine, fouler than masculine! Alvan preferred the lichen-draped tree
to the sunny flower, it was evident, for never a letter from Alvan had
come to her. She thought in wrath, nothing but the thoughts of wrath, and
ran her wits through every reasonable reflection like a lighted brand
that flings its colour, if not fire, upon surrounding images. Contempt of
the square-jawed withered woman was too great for Clotilde to have a
sensation of her driving jealousy until painful glimpses of the man made
jealousy so sharp that she flew for refuge to contempt of the pair. That
beldam had him back: she had him fast. Oh! let her keep him! Was he to be
regretted who could make that choice?

Her father did not let the occasion slip to speak insistingly as the
world opined of Alvan and his baroness. He forced her to swallow the
calumny, and draw away with her family against herself through strong
disgust.

Out of a state of fire Clotilde passed into solid frigidity. She had
neither a throb nor a passion. Wishing seemed to her senseless as life
was. She could hear without a thrill of her frame that Alvan was in the
city, without a question whether it was true. He had not written, and he
had handed her over to the baroness! She did not ask herself how it was
that she had no letter from him, being afraid to think about it, because,
if a letter had been withheld by her father, it was a part of her
whipping; if none had been written, there was nothing to hope for. Her
recent humiliation condemned him by the voice of her sufferings for his
failure to be giant, eagle, angel, or any of the prodigious things he had
taught her to expect; and as he had thus deceived her, the glorious lover
she had imaged in her mind was put aside with some of the angry disdain
she bestowed upon the woman by whom she had been wounded. He ceased to be
a visioned Alvan, and became an obscurity; her principal sentiment in
relation to him was, that he threatened her peace. But for him she would
never have been taught to hate her parents; she would have enjoyed the
quiet domestic evenings with her people, when Marko sang, and her sisters
knitted, and the betrothed sister wore a look very enviable in the
abstract; she would be seeing a future instead of a black iron gate! But
for him she certainly would never have had, that letter from the
baroness!

On the morning after the information of Alvan's return, her father, who
deserved credit as a tactician, came to her to say that Alvan had sent to
demand his letters and presents. The demand was unlike what her stunned
heart recollected of Alvan; but a hint that the baroness was behind it,
and that a refusal would bring the baroness down on her with another
piece of insolence, was effective. She dealt out the letters, arranged
the presents, made up the books, pamphlets, trinkets, amulet coins, lock
of black hair, and worn post-marked paper addressed in his hand to
Clotilde von Rudiger, carefully; and half as souvenir, half with the
forlorn yearning of the look of lovers when they break asunder--or of one
of them--she signed inside the packet not 'Clotilde,' but the gentlest
title he had bestowed on her, trusting to the pathos of the word 'child'
to tell him that she was enforced and still true, if he should be
interested in knowing it. Weak souls are much moved by having the pathos
on their side. They are consoled too.

Time passed, whole days: the tender reminder had no effect on him! It had
been her last appeal: she reflected that she had really felt when he had
not been feeling at all: and this marks a division.

She was next requested to write a letter to Alvan, signifying his release
by the notification of her engagement to Prince Marko. She was personally
to deliver it to a gentleman who was of neither party, and who would give
her a letter from Alvan in exchange, which, while assuring the gentleman
she was acting with perfect freedom, she was to be under her oath not to
read, and dutifully to hand to Marko, her betrothed. Her father assumed
the fact of her renewed engagement to the prince, as her whole family
did; strangely, she thought: it struck her as a fatality. He said that
Alvan was working him great mischief, doing him deadly injury in his
position, and for no just reason, inasmuch as he--a bold, bad man
striving to ruin the family on a point of pride--had declared that he
simply considered himself bound in honour to her, only a little doubtful
of her independent action at present; and a release of him, accompanied
by her plain statement of her being under no compulsion, voluntarily the
betrothed of another, would solve the difficulty. A certain old woman, it
seemed, was anxious to have him formally released.

With the usual dose for such a patient, of cajoleries and threats, the
General begged her to comply, pulling the hands he squeezed in a way to
strongly emphasize his affectionate entreaty.

She went straight to Marko, consenting that he should have Alvan's letter
unopened (she cared not to read it, she said), on his promise to give it
up to her within a stated period. There was a kind of prohibited
pleasure, sweet acid, catching discord, in the idea of this lover's
keeping the forbidden thing she could ask for when she was curious about
the other, which at present she was not; dead rather; anxious to please
her parents, and determined to be no rival of the baroness. Marko
promised it readily, adding: 'Only let the storm roll over, that we may
have more liberty, and I myself, when we two are free, will lead you to
Alvan, and leave it to you to choose between us. Your happiness, beloved,
is my sole thought. Submit for the moment.' He spoke sweetly, with his
dearest look, touching her luxurious nature with a belief that she could
love him; untroubled by another, she could love and be true to him: her
maternal inner nature yearned to the frailbodied youth.

She made a comparison in her mind of Alvan's love and Marko's, and of the
lives of the two men. There was no grisly baroness attached to the
prince's life.

She wrote the letter to Alvan, feeling in the words that said she was
plighted to Prince Marko, that she said, and clearly said, the baroness
is now relieved of a rival, and may take you! She felt it so acutely as
to feel that she said nothing else.

Severances are accomplished within the heart stroke by stroke; within the
craven's heart each new step resulting from a blow is temporarily an
absolute severance. Her letter to Alvan written, she thought not tenderly
of him but of the prince, who had always loved a young woman, and was
unhampered by an old one. The composition of the letter, and the sense
that the thing was done, made her stony to Alvan.

On the introduction of Colonel von Tresten, whose name she knew, but was
dull to it, she delivered him her letter with unaffected composure,
received from him Alvan's in exchange, left the room as if to read it,
and after giving it unopened to Marko, composedly reappeared before the
colonel to state, that the letter could make no difference, and all was
to be as she had written it.

The colonel bowed stiffly.

It would have comforted her to have been allowed to say: 'I cease to be
the rival of that execrable harridan!'

The delivery of so formidable a cat-screech not being possible, she stood
in an attitude of mild resignation, revolving thoughts of her father's
praises of his noble daughter, her mother's kiss, the caresses of her
sisters, and the dark bright eyes of Marko, the peace of the domestic
circle. This was her happiness! And still there was time, still hope for
Alvan to descend and cut the knot. She conceived it slowly, with some
flush of the brain like a remainder of fever, but no throbs of her
pulses. She had been swayed to act against him by tales which in her
heart she did not credit exactly, therefore did not take within herself,
though she let them influence her by the goad of her fears and angers;
and these she could conjure up at will for the defence of her conduct,
aware of their shallowness, and all the while trusting him to come in the
end and hear her reproaches for his delay. He seemed to her now to have
the character of a storm outside a household wrapped in comfortable
monotony. Her natural spiritedness detested the monotony, her craven soul
fawned for the comfort. After her many recent whippings the comfort was
immensely desireable, but a glance at the monotony gave it the look of a
burial, and standing in her attitude of resignation under Colonel von
Tresten's hard military stare she could have shrieked for Alvan to come,
knowing that she would have cowered and trembled at the scene following
his appearance. Yet she would have gone to him; without any doubt his
presence and the sense of his greater power declared by his coming would
have lifted her over to him. The part of her nature adoring storminess
wanted only a present champion to outweigh the other part which cuddled
security. Colonel von Tresten, however, was very far from offering
himself in such a shape to a girl that had jilted the friend he loved,
insulted the woman he esteemed; and he stood there like a figure of
soldierly complacency in marble. Her pencilled acknowledgement of the
baroness's letter, and her reply to it almost as much, was construed as
an intended insult to that lady, whose champion Tresten was. He had
departed before Clotilde heard a step.

Immediately thereupon it came: to her mind that Tresten was one of
Alvan's bosom friends. How, then, could he be of neither party? And her
father spoke of him as an upright rational man, who, although, strangely
enough, he entertained, as it appeared, something like a profound
reverence for the baroness, could see and confess the downright
impossibility of the marriage Alvan proposed. Tresten, her father said,
talked of his friend Alvan as wild and eccentric, but now becoming
convinced that such a family as hers could never tolerate
him--considering his age, his birth, his blood, his habits, his politics,
his private entanglements and moral reputation, it was partly hinted.

She shuddered at this false Tresten. He and the professor might be strung
together for examples of perfidy! His reverence of the baroness gave his
cold blue eyes the iciness of her loathed letter. Alvan, she remembered,
used to exalt him among the gallantest of the warriors dedicating their
swords to freedom. The dedication of the sword, she felt sure, was an
accident: he was a man of blood. And naturally, she must be hated by the
man reverencing the baroness. If ever man had executioner stamped on his
face, it was he! Like the professor, nay, like Alvan himself, he would
not see that she was the victim of tyranny: none of her signs would they
see. They judged of her by her inanimate frame in the hands of her
torturers breaking her on the wheel. She called to mind a fancy that she
had looked at Tresten out of her deadness earnestly for just one instant:
more than an instant she could not, beneath her father's vigilant watch
and into those repellant cold blue butcher eyes. Tresten might clearly
have understood the fleeting look. What were her words! what her deeds!

The look was the truth revealed-her soul. It begged for life like an
infant; and the man's face was an iron rock in reply! No wonder--he
worshipped the baroness! So great was Clotilde's hatred of him that it
overflooded the image of Alvan, who called him friend, and deputed him to
act as friend. Such blindness, weakness, folly, on the part of one of
Alvan's pretensions, incurred a shade of her contempt. She had not ever
thought of him coldly: hitherto it would have seemed a sacrilege; but now
she said definitely, the friend of Tresten cannot be the man I supposed
him! and she ascribed her capacity for saying it, and for perceiving and
adding up Alvan's faults of character, to the freezing she had taken from
that most antipathetic person. She confessed to sensations of spite which
would cause her to reject and spurn even his pleadings for Alvan, if they
were imaginable as actual. Their not being imaginable allowed her to
indulge her naughtiness harmlessly, for the gratification of the idea of
wounding some one, though it were her lover, connected with this Tresten.

The letter of the baroness and the visit of the woman's admirer had
vitiated Clotilde's blood. She was not only not mistress of her thoughts,
she was undirected either in thinking or wishing by any desires, except
that the people about her should caress and warm her, until, with no gaze
backward, she could say good-bye to them, full of meaning as a good-bye
to the covered grave, as unreluctantly as the swallow quits her
eaves-nest in autumn: and they were to learn that they were chargeable
with the sequel of the history. There would be a sequel, she was sure, if
it came only to punish them for the cruelty which thwarted her timid
anticipation of it by pressing on her natural instinct at all costs to
bargain for an escape from pain, and making her simulate contentment to
cheat her muffled wound and them.




CHAPTER XIII

His love meantime was the mission and the burden of Alvan, and he was not
ashamed to speak of it and plead for it; and the pleading was not done
troubadourishly, in soft flute-notes, as for easement of tuneful emotions
beseeching sympathy. He was liker to a sturdy beggar demanding his crust,
to support life, of corporations that can be talked into admitting the
rights of man; and he vollied close logical argumentation, on the basis
of the laws, in defence of his most natural hunger, thunder in his breast
and bright new heavenly morning alternating or clashing while the
electric wires and post smote him with evil tidings of Clotilde, and the
success of his efforts caught her back to him. Daily many times he
reached to her and lost her, had her in his arms and his arms withered
with emptiness. The ground he won quaked under him. All the evidence
opposed it, but he was in action, and his reason swore that he had her
fast. He had seen and felt his power over her; his reason told him by
what had been that it must be. Could he doubt? He battled for his reason.
Doubt was an extinguishing wave, and he clung to his book of the Law,
besieging Church and State with it, pointing to texts of the law which
proved her free to choose her lord and husband for herself, expressing
his passionate love by his precise interpretation of the law: and still
with the cold sentience gaining on him, against the current of his
tumultuous blood and his hurried intelligence, of her being actually what
he had named her in moments of playful vision--slippery, a serpent, a
winding hare; with the fear that she might slip from him, betray, deny
him, deliver him to ridicule, after he had won his way to her over every
barrier. During his proudest exaltations in success, when his eyes were
sparkling, there was a wry twitch inward upon his heart of hearts.

But if she was a hare, he was a hunter, little inclining to the chase now
for mere physical recreation. She had roused the sportsman's passion as
well as the man's; he meant to hunt her down, and was not more scrupulous
than our ancient hunters, who hunted for a meal and hunted to kill, with
none of the later hesitations as to circumventing, trapping, snaring by
devices, and the preservation of the animal's coat spotless. Let her be
lured from her home, or plucked from her home, and if reluctant,
disgraced, that she may be dependent utterly on the man stooping to pick
her up! He was equal to the projecting of a scheme socially infamous,
with such fanatical intensity did the thought of his losing the woman
harass him, and the torrent of his passion burst restraint to get to her
to enfold her--this in the same hour of the original wild monster's
persistent and sober exposition of the texts of the law with the voice of
a cultivated modern gentleman; and, let it be said, with a modern
gentleman's design to wed a wife in honour. All means were to be tried.
His eye burned on his prize, mindless of what she was dragged through, if
there was resistance, or whether by the hair of her head or her skirts,
or how she was obtained. His interpretation of the law was for the powers
of earth, and other plans were to propitiate the powers under the earth,
and certain distempered groanings wrenched from him at intervals he
addressed (after they were out of him, reflectively) to the powers above,
so that nothing of him should be lost which might get aid of anything
mundane, infernal, or celestial.

Thus it is when Venus bites a veritable ancient male. She puts her venom
in a magnificent beast, not a pathetic Phaedra. She does it rarely, for
though to be loved by a bitten giant is one of the dreams of woman, the
considerate Mother of Love knows how needful it is to protect the
sentiment of the passion and save them from an exhibition of the fires of
that dragon's breath. Do they not fly shrieking when they behold it?
Barely are they able to read of it. Men, too, accustomed to minor doses
of the goddess, which moderate, soften, counteract, instead of inflicting
the malady, abhor and have no brotherhood with its turbulent victim.

It was justly matter for triumph, due to an extraordinary fervour of
pleading upon a plain statement of the case, that Alvan should return
from his foray bringing with him an emissary deputed by General von
Rudiger's official chief to see that the young lady, so passionately
pursued by the foremost of his time in political genius and oratory, was
not subjected to parental tyranny, but stood free to exercise her choice.
Of the few who would ever have thought of attempting, a diminished number
would have equalled that feat. Alvan was no vain boaster; he could gain
the ears of grave men as well as mobs and women. The interview with
Clotilde was therefore assured to him, and the distracting telegrams and
letters forwarded to him by Tresten during his absence were consequently
stabs already promising to heal. They were brutal stabs--her packet of
his letters and presents on his table made them bleed afresh, and the odd
scrawl of the couple of words on the paper set him wondering at the
imbecile irony of her calling herself 'The child' in accompaniment to
such an act, for it reminded him of his epithet for her, while it dealt
him a tremendous blow; it seemed senselessly malign, perhaps flippant, as
she could be, he knew. She could be anything weak and shallow when out of
his hands; she had recently proved it still, in view of the interview,
and on the tide of his labours to come to that wished end, he struck his
breast to brave himself with a good hopeful spirit. 'Once mine!' he said.

Moreover, to the better account, Clotilde's English friend had sent him
the lines addressed to her, in which the writer dwelt on her love of him
with a whimper of the voice of love. That was previous to her perjury by
little, by a day-eighteen hours. How lurid a satire was flung on events
by the proximity of the dates! But the closeness of the time between this
love-crooning and the denying of him pointed to a tyrannous intervention.
One could detect it. Full surely the poor craven was being tyrannized and
tutored to deny him! though she was a puss of the fields too, as the
mounted sportsman was not unwilling to think.

Before visiting his Mentor, Alvan applied for an audience of General von
Rudiger, who granted it at once to a man coming so well armed to claim
the privilege. Tresten walked part of the way to the General's house with
him, and then turned aside to visit the baroness.

Lucie, Baroness von Crefeldt, was one of those persons who, after a
probationary term in the character of woman, have become men, but of whom
offended man, amazed by the flowering up of that hard rough jaw from the
tender blooming promise of a petticoat, finds it impossible to imagine
they had once on a sweet Spring time the sex's gentleness and charm of
aspect. Mistress Flanders, breeched and hatted like a man, pulling at the
man's short pipe and heartily invoking frouzy deities, committing a whole
sackful of unfeminine etcaetera, is an impenetrable wall to her maiden
past; yet was there an opening day when nothing of us moustached her. She
was a clear-faced girl and mother of young blushes before the years were
at their work of transformation upon her countenance and behind her
bosom. The years were rough artists: perhaps she was combative, and
fought them for touching her ungallantly; and that perhaps was her first
manly step. Baroness Lucie was of high birth, a wife openly maltreated, a
woman of breeding, but with a man's head, capable of inspiring man-like
friendships, and of entertaining them. She was radically-minded, strongly
of the Radical profession of faith, and a correspondent of revolutionary
chiefs; both the trusted adviser and devoted slave of him whose future
glorious career she measured by his abilities. Rumour blew out a candle
and left the wick to smoke in relation to their former intercourse. The
Philistines revenged themselves on an old aristocratic Radical and a Jew
demagogue with the weapon that scandal hands to virtue. They are virtuous
or nothing, and they must show that they are so when they can; and best
do they show it by publicly dishonouring the friendship of a man and a
woman; for to be in error in malice does not hurt them, but they
profoundly feel that they are fools if they are duped.

She was aware of the recent course of events; she had as she protested,
nothing to accuse herself of, and she could hardly part her lips without
a self-exculpation.

'It will fall on me!' she said to Tresten, in her emphatic tone. 'He will
have his interview with the girl. He will subdue the girl. He will
manacle himself in the chains he makes her wear. She will not miss her
chance! I am the object of her detestation. I am the price paid for their
reconcilement. She will seize her opportunity to vilipend me, and I shall
be condemned by the kind of court-martial which hurries over the forms of
a brial to sign the execution-warrant that makes it feel like justice.
You will see. She cannot forgive me for not pretending to enter into her
enthusiasm. She will make him believe I conspired against her. Men in
love are children with their mistresses--the greatest of them; their
heads are under the woman's feet. What have I not done to aid him! At his
instance, I went to the archbishop, to implore one of the princes of the
Church for succour. I knelt to an ecclesiastic. I did a ludicrous and a
shameful thing, knowing it in advance to be a barren farce. I obeyed his
wish. The tale will be laughable. I obeyed him. I would not have it on my
conscience that the commission of any deed ennomic, however unwonted, was
refused by me to serve Alvan. You are my witness, Tresten, that for a
young woman of common honesty I was ready to pack and march. Qualities of
mind-mind! They were out of the question. He had a taste for a wife. If
he had hit on a girl commonly honest, she might not have harmed him--the
contrary; cut his talons. What is this girl? Exactly what one might be
sure his appreciation, in woman-flesh, would lead him to fix on; a
daughter of the Philistines, naturally, and precisely the one of all on
earth likely to confound him after marriage as she has played fast and
loose with him before it. He has never understood women--cannot read
them. Could a girl like that keep a secret? She's a Cressida--a creature
of every camp! Not an idea of the cause he is vowed to! not a sentiment
in harmony with it! She is viler than any of those Berlin light o' loves
on the eve of Jena. Stable as a Viennese dancing slut home from
Mariazell! This is the girl-transparent to the whole world! But his heart
is on her, and he must have her, I suppose; and I shall have to bear her
impertinences, or sign my demission and cease to labour for the cause at
least in conjunction with Alvan. And how other wise? He is the life of
it, and I am doomed to uselessness.'

Tresten nodded a protesting assent.

'Not quite so bad,' he said, with the encouraging smile which could
persuade a friend to put away bilious visions. 'Of the two, if you two
are divisible, we could better dispense with him. She'll slip him, she's
an eel. I have seen eels twine on a prong of the fork that prods them;
but she's an actress, a slippery one through and through, with no real
embrace in her, not even a common muscular contraction. Of every camp! as
you say. She was not worth carrying off. I consented to try it to quiet
him. He sets no bounds to his own devotion to friendship, and we must
take pattern by him. It's a mad love.'

'A Titan's love!' the baroness exclaimed, groaning. 'The woman!--no
matter how or at what cost! I can admire that primal barbarism of a great
man's passion, which counts for nothing the stains and accidents fraught
with extinction for it to meaner men. It reads ill, it sounds badly, but
there is grand stuff in it. See the royalty of the man, for whom no
degradation of the woman can be, so long as it brings her to him!
He--that great he--covers all. He burns her to ashes, and takes the
flame--the pure spirit of her--to himself. Were men like him!--they would
have less to pardon. We must, as I have ever said, be morally on alpine
elevations to comprehend Alvan; he is Mont Blanc above his fellows. Do
not ask him to be considerate of her. She has planted him in a storm, and
the bigger the mountain, the more savage, monstrous, cruel--yes, but she
blew up the tourmente! That girl is the author of his madness. It is the
snake's nature of the girl which distracts him; she is in his blood. Had
she come to me, I would have helped her to cure him; or had you succeeded
in carrying her off, I would have stood by their union; or were she a
different creature, and not the shifty thing she is, I could desire him
to win her. A peasant girl, a workman's daughter, a tradesman's, a
professional singer, actress, artist--I would have given my hand to one
of these in good faith, thankful to her! As it is, I have acted in
obedience to his wishes, without idle remonstrances--I know him too well;
and with as much cordiality as I could put into an evil service. She will
drag him down, down, Tresten!'

'They are not joined yet,' said the colonel.

'She has him by the worst half of him. Her correspondence with me--her
letter to excuse her insolence, which she does like a prim chit--throws a
light on the girl she is. She will set him aiming at power to trick her
out in the decorations. She will not keep him to his labours to
consolidate the power. She will pervert the aesthetic in him, through her
hold on his material nature, his vanity, his luxuriousness. She is one of
the young women who begin timidly, and when they see that they enjoy
comparative impunity, grow intrepid in dissipation, and that palling,
they are ravenously ambitious. She will drive him at his mark before the
time is ripe--ruin-him. He is a Titan, not a god, though god-like he
seems in comparison with men. He would be fleshly enough in any hands.
This girl will drain him of all his nobler fire.'

'She shows mighty little of the inclination,' said the colonel.

'To you. But when they come together? I know his voice!'

The colonel protested his doubts of their coming together.

'Ultimately?' the baroness asked, and brooded. 'But she will have to see
him; and then will she resist him? I shall change one view of her if she
does.'

'She will shirk the interview,' Tresten remarked. 'Supposing they meet: I
don't think much will come of it, unless they meet on a field, and he has
an hour's grace to catch her up and be off with her. She's as calm as the
face of a clock, and wags her Yes and No about him just as unconcernedly
as a clock's pendulum. I've spoken to many a sentinel outpost who wasn't
deader on the subject in monosyllables than mademoiselle. She has a
military erectness, and answers you and looks you straight at the eyes,
perfectly unabashed by your seeing "the girl she is," as you say. She
looked at me downright defying me to despise her. Alvan has been tricked
by her colour: she's icy. She has no passion. She acts up to him when
they're together, and that deceives him. I doubt her having
blood--there's no heat in it, if she has.'

'And he cajoled Count Hollinger to send an envoy to see him righted!' the
baroness ejaculated. 'Hollinger is not a sentimental person, I assure
you, and not likely to have taken a step apparently hostile to the
Rudigers, if he had not been extraordinarily shaken by Alvan. What
character of man is this Dr. Storchel?'

Tresten described Count Hollinger's envoy, so quaintly deputed to act the
part of legal umpire in a family business, as a mild man of law with no
ideas or interests outside the law; spectacled, nervous, formal, a
stranger to the passions; and the baroness was amused to hear of Storchel
and Alvan's placid talk together upon themes of law, succeeded by the
little advocate's bewildered fright at one of Alvan's gentler explosions.
Tresten sketched it. The baroness realized it, and shut her lips tight
for a laugh of essential humour.




CHAPTER HIV

Late in the day Alvan was himself able to inform her that he had overcome
Clotilde's father after a struggle of hours. The General had not
consented to everything: he had granted enough, evidently in terror of
the man who had captured Count Hollinger; and it way arranged that
Tresten and Storchel were to wait on Clotilde next morning, and hear from
her mouth whether she yielded or not to Alvan's request to speak with her
alone before the official interview in the presence of the notary, when
she was publicly to state her decision and freedom of choice, according
to Count Hollinger's amicable arrangement through his envoy.

'She will see me-and the thing is done!' said Alvan. 'But I have worked
for it--I have worked! I have been talking to-day for six hours
uninterruptedly at a stretch to her father, who reminds me of a caged
bear I saw at a travelling menagerie, and the beast would perform none of
his evolutions for the edification of us lads till his keeper touched a
particular pole, and the touch of it set him to work like the, winding of
a key. Hollinger's name was my magic wand with the General. I could get
no sense from him, nor any acquiescence in sense, till I called up
Hollinger, when the General's alacrity was immediately that of the bear,
or a little boy castigated for his share of original sin. They have been
hard at her, the whole family! and I shall want the two hours I
stipulated for to the full. What do you say?--come, I wager I do it
within one hour! They have stockaded her pretty closely, and it will be
some time before I shall get her to have a clear view of me behind her
defences; but an hour's an age with a woman. Clotilde? I wager I have her
on her knees in half an hour! These notions of duty, and station, and her
fiddle-de-dee betrothal to that Danube osier with Indian-idol eyes, count
for so much mist. She was and is mine. I swear to strike to her heart in
ten minutes! But, madam, if not, you may pronounce me incapable of
conquering any woman, or of taking an absolute impression of facts. I say
I will do it! I am insane if I may not judge from antecedents that my
voice, my touch, my face, will draw her to me at one signal--at a look! I
am prepared to stake my reason on her running to me before I speak a
word:--and I will not beckon. I promise to fold my arms and simply look.'

'Your task of two hours, then, will be accomplished, I compute, in about
half a minute--but it is on the assumption that she consents to see you
alone,' said the baroness.

Alvan opened his eyes. He perceived in his deep sagaciousness woman at
the bottom of her remark, and replied: 'You will know Clotilde in time.
She points to me straight; but of course if you agitate the compass the
needle's all in a tremble: and the vessel is weak, I admit, but the
instinct's positive. To doubt it would upset my understanding. I have had
three distinct experiences of my influence over her, and each time,
curiously each time exactly in proportion to my degree of resolve--but,
baroness, I tell you it was minutely in proportion to it; weighed down to
the grain!--each time did that girl respond to me with a similar degree
of earnestness. As I waned, she waned; as I heated, so did she, and from
spark-heat to flame and to furnace-heat!'

'A refraction of the rays according to the altitude of the orb,' observed
the baroness in a tone of assent, and she smiled to herself at the
condition of the man who could accept it for that.

He did not protest beyond presently a transient frown as at a bad taste
on his tongue, and a rather petulant objection to her use of analogies,
which he called the sapping of language. She forbore to remind him in
retort of his employment of metaphor when the figure served his purpose.

'Marvellously,' cried Alvan, 'marvellously that girl answered to my lead!
and to-morrow--you'll own me right--I must double the attraction. I shall
have to hand her back to her people for twenty-four hours, and the dose
must be doubled to keep her fast and safe. You see I read her flatly. I
read and am charitable. I have a perfect philosophical tolerance. I'm in
the mood to-day of Horace hymning one of his fair Greeks.'

'No, no that is a comparison past my endurance,' interposed the baroness.
'Friend Sigismund, you have no philosophy, you never had any; and the
small crow and croon of Horace would be the last you could take up. It is
the chanted philosophy of comfortable stipendiaries, retired merchants,
gouty patients on a restricted allowance of the grape, old men who have
given over thinking, and young men who never had feeling--the philosophy
of swine grunting their carmen as they turn to fat in the sun. Horace
avaunt! You have too much poetry in you to quote that unsanguine
sensualist for your case. His love distressed his liver, and gave him a
jaundice once or twice, but where his love yields its poor ghost to his
philosophy, yours begins its labours. That everlasting Horace! He is the
versifier of the cushioned enemy, not of us who march along flinty ways:
the piper of the bourgeois in soul, poet of the conforming unbelievers!'

'Pyrrha, Lydia, Lalage, Chloe, Glycera,' Alvan murmured, amorous of the
musical names. 'Clotilde is a Greek of one of the Isles, an Ionian. I see
her in the Horatian ode as in one of those old round shield-mirrors which
give you a speck of the figure on a silver-solar beam, brilliant, not
much bigger than a dewdrop. And so should a man's heart reflect her! Take
her on the light in it, she is perfection. We won't take her in the shady
part or on your flat looking-glasses. There never was necessity for
accuracy of line in the portraiture of women. The idea of them is all we
want: it's the best of them. You will own she's Greek; she's a
Perinthian, Andrian, Olythian, Saurian, Messenian. One of those delicious
girls in the New Comedy, I remember, was called THE POSTPONER, THE
DEFERRER, or, as we might say, THE TO-MORROWER. There you have Clotilde:
she's a TO-MORROWER. You climb the peak of to-morrow, and to see her at
all you must see her on the next peak: but she leaves you her promise to
hug on every yesterday, and that keeps you going. Ay, so we have
patience! Feeding on a young woman's promises of yesterday in one's
fortieth year!--it must end to-morrow, though I kill something.'

Kill, he meant, the aerial wild spirit he could admire as her character,
when he had the prospect of extinguishing it in his grasp.

'What do you meditate killing?' said the baroness.

'The fool of the years behind me,' he replied, 'and entering on my
forty-first a sage.'

'To be the mate and equal of your companion?'

'To prove I have had good training under the wisest to act as her guide
and master.'

'If she--' the baroness checked her exclamation, saying: 'She declined to
come to me. I would have plumbed her for some solid ground, something to
rest one's faith on. Your Pyrrhas, Glyceras, and others of the like, were
not stable persons for a man of our days to bind his life to one of them.
Harness is harness, and a light yoke-fellow can make a proud career
deviate.'

'But I give her a soul!' said Alvan. 'I am the wine, and she the crystal
cup. She has avowed it again and again. You read her as she is when away
from me. Then she is a reed, a weed, what you will; she is unfit to
contend when she stands alone. But when I am beside her, when we are
together--the moment I have her at arms' length she will be part of me by
the magic I have seen each time we encountered. She knows it well.'

'She may know it too well.'

'For what?' He frowned.

'For the chances of your meeting.'

'You think it possible she will refuse?'

A blackness passing to lividness crossed his face. He fetched a big
breath.

'Then finish my history, shut up the book; I am a phantom of a man, and
everything written there is imposture! I can account for all that she has
done hitherto, but not that she should refuse to see me. Not that she
should refuse to see me now when I come armed to demand it! Refuse? But I
have done my work, done what I said I would do. I stand in my order of
battle, and she refuses? No! I stake my head on it! I have not a clod's
perception, I have not a spark of sense to distinguish me from a
flat-headed Lapp, if she refuses:--call me a mountebank who has gained
his position by clever tumbling; a lucky gamester; whatever plays blind
with chance.'

He started up in agitation. 'Lucie! I am a grinning skull without a brain
if that girl refuses! She will not.' He took his hat to leave, adding, to
seem rational to the cool understanding he addressed: 'She will not
refuse; I am bound to think so in common respect for myself; I have done
tricks to make me appear a rageing ape if she--oh! she cannot, she will
not refuse. Never! I have eyes, I have wits, I am not tottering yet on my
grave--or it's blindly, if I am. I have my clear judgement, I am not an
imbecile. It seems to me a foolish suspicion that she can possibly
refuse. Her manners are generally good; freakish, but good in the main.
Perhaps she takes a sting . . . but there is no sting here. It would be
bad manners to refuse; to say nothing of . . . she has a heart! Well,
then, good manners and right feeling forbid her to refuse. She is an
exceedingly intelligent girl, and I half fear I have helped you to a
wrong impression of her. You will really appreciate her wit; you will
indeed; believe me, you will. We pardon nonsense in a girl. Married, she
will put on the matron with becoming decency, and I am responsible for
her then; I stand surety for her then; when I have her with me I warrant
her mine and all mine, head and heels, at a whistle, like the Cossack's
horse. I fancy that at forty I am about as young as most young men. I
promise her another forty manful working years. Are you dubious of that?'

'I nod to you from the palsied summit of ninety,' said the baroness.

Alvan gave a short laugh and stammered excuses for his naked egoism,
comparing himself to a forester who has sharpened such an appetite in
toiling to slay his roe that he can think of nothing but the fire
preparing the feast.

'Hymen and things hymenaeal!' he said, laughing at himself for resuming
the offence on the apology for it. 'I could talk with interest of a
trousseau. I have debated in my mind with parliamentary acrimony about a
choice of wedding-presents. As she is legally free to bestow her hand on
me--and only a brute's horns could contest the fact--she may decide to be
married the day after to-morrow, and get the trousseau in Paris. She has
a turn for startling. I can imagine that if I proposed a run for it she
would be readier to spring to be on the road with me than in acquiescing
in a quiet arrangement about a ceremonial day; partly because, in the
first case, she would throw herself and the rest of the adventure on me,
at no other cost than the enjoyment of one of her impulses; and in the
second, because she is a girl who would require a full band of the best
Berlin orchestra in perpetual play to keep up her spirits among her
people during the preparations for espousing a democrat, demagogue, and
Jew, of a presumed inferior station by birth to her own. Give Momus a
sister, Clotilde is the lady! I know her. I would undertake to put a
spell on her and keep her contented on a frontier--not Russian, any
barbarous frontier where there is a sun. She must have sun. One might
wrap her in sables, but sun is best. She loves it best, though she looks
remarkably well in sables. Never shall I forget . . . she is frileuse,
and shivers into them! There are Frenchmen who could paint it--only
Frenchmen. Our artists, no. She is very French. Born in France she would
have been a matchless Parisienne. Oh! she's a riddle of course. I don't
pretend to spell every letter of her. The returning of my presents is
odd. No, I maintain that she is a coward acting under domination, and
there's no other way of explaining the puzzle. I was out of sight, they
bullied her, and she yielded--bewilderingly, past comprehension it
seems--cat!--until you remember what she's made of: she's a reed. Now I
reappear armed with powers to give her a free course, and she, that
abject whom you beheld recently renouncing me, is, you will see, the
young Aurora she was when she came striking at my door on the upper Alp.
That was a morning! That morning is Clotilde till my eyes turn over! She
is all young heaven and the mountains for me! She's the filmy light above
the mountains that weds white snow and sky. By the way, I dreamt last
night she was half a woman, half a tree, and her hair was like a dead
yewbough, which is as you know of a brown burnt-out colour, suitable to
the popular conception of widows. She stood, and whatever turning you
took, you struck back on her. Whether my widow, I can't say: she must
first be my wife. Oh, for tomorrow!'

'What sort of evening is it?' said the baroness.

'A Mont Blanc evening: I saw him as I came along,' Alvan replied, and
seized his hat to be out to look on the sovereign mountain again. They
touched hands. He promised to call in the forenoon next day.

'Be cool,' she counselled him.

'Oh!' He flung back his head, making light of the crisis. 'After all,
it's only a girl. But, you know, what I set myself to win! . . . The
thing's too small--I have been at such pains about it that I should be
ridiculous if I allowed myself to be beaten. There is no other reason for
the trouble we 're at, except that, as I have said a thousand times, she
suits me. No man can be cooler than I.'

'Keep so,' said the baroness.

He walked to where the strenuous blue lake, finding outlet, propels a
shoulder, like a bright-muscled athlete in action, and makes the
Rhone-stream. There he stood for an hour, disfevered by the limpid liquid
tumult, inspirited by the glancing volumes of a force that knows no
abatement, and is the skiey Alps behind, the great historic citied plains
ahead.

His meditation ended with a resolution half in the form of a prayer (to
mixed deities undefined) never to ask for a small thing any more if this
one were granted him!

He had won it, of course, having brought all his powers to bear on the
task; and he rejoiced in winning it: his heart leapt, his imagination
spun radiant webs of colour: but he was a little ashamed of his frenzies,
though he did not distinctly recall them; he fancied he had made some
noise, loud or not, because his intentions were so pure that it was
infamous to thwart them. At a certain age honest men made sacrifice of
their liberty to society, and he had been ready to perform the duty of
husbanding a woman. A man should have a wife and rear children, not to be
forgotten in the land, and to help mankind by transmitting to future
times qualities he has proved priceless: he thought of the children, and
yearned to the generations of men physically and morally through them.

This was his apology to the world for his distantly-recollected excesses
of temper.

Was she so small a thing? Not if she succumbed. She was petty, vexatious,
irritating, stinging, while she resisted: she cast an evil beam on his
reputation, strength and knowledge of himself, and roused the giants of
his nature to discharge missiles at her, justified as they were by his
pure intentions and the approbation of society. But he had a broad full
heart for the woman who would come to him, forgiving her, uplifting her,
richly endowing her. No meanness of heart was in him. He lay down at
night thinking of Clotilde in an abandonment of tenderness. 'Tomorrow!
you bird of to-morrow!' he let fly his good-night to her.




CHAPTER XV

He slept. Near upon morning he roused with his tender fit strong on him,
but speechless in the waking as it had been dreamless in sleep. It was a
happy load on his breast, a life about to be born, and he thought that a
wife beside him would give it language. She should have, for she would
call out, his thousand flitting ideas now dropped on barren ground for
want of her fair bosom to inspire, to vivify, to receive. Poetry laid a
hand on him: his desire of the wife, the children, the citizen's good
name--of these our simple civilized ambitions--was lowly of the earth,
throbbing of earth, and at the same time magnified beyond scope of speech
in vast images and emblems resembling ranges of Olympian cloud round the
blue above earth, all to be decipherable, all utterable, when she was by.
What commoner word!--yet wife seemed to him the word most reverberating
of the secret sought after by man, fullest at once of fruit and of
mystery, or of that light in the heart of mystery which makes it
magically fruitful.

He felt the presence of Clotilde behind the word; but in truth the
delicate sensations breeding these half-thoughts of his, as he lay
between sleeping and waking, shrank from conjuring up the face of the
woman who had wounded them, and a certain instinct to preserve and be
sure of his present breathing-space of luxurious tranquillity kept her
veiled. Soon he would see her as his wife, and then she would be she,
unveiled ravishingly, the only she, the only wife! He knew the cloud he
clasped for Clotilde enough to be at pains to shun a possible prospect of
his execrating it. Oh, the only she, the only wife! the wild man's
reclaimer! the sweet abundant valley and channel of his river of
existence henceforward! Doubting her in the slightest was doubting her
human. It is the brain, the satanic brain which will ever be pressing to
cast its shadows: the heart is clearer and truer.

He multiplied images, projected visions, nestled in his throbs to drug
and dance his brain. He snatched at the beauty of a day that outrolled
the whole Alpine hand-in-hand of radiant heaven-climbers for an assurance
of predestined celestial beneficence; and again, shadowily thoughtful of
the littleness of the thing he exalted and claimed, he staked his reason
on the positive blessing to come to him before nightfall, telling himself
calmly that he did so because there would be madness in expecting it
otherwise: he asked for so little! Since he asked for so little, to
suppose that it would not be granted was irrational. None but a very
coward could hesitate to stake his all on the issue.

Singularly small indeed the other aims in life appeared by comparison
with this one, but his intellect, in the act of pleading excuses for his
impatience, distinguished why it should be so. The crust, which is not
much, is everything to the starving beggar; and he was eager for the
crust that he might become sound and whole again, able to give their just
proportion to things, as at present he acknowledged himself hardly able
to do. He could not pursue two thoughts on a political question, or grasp
the idea of a salutary energy in the hosts animated by his leadership.
There would have to be an end of it speedily, else men might name him
worthless dog!

Morning swam on the lake in her beautiful nakedness, a wedding of white
and blue, of purest white and bluest blue. Alvan crossed the island
bridges when the sun had sprung on his shivering fair prey, to make the
young fresh Morning rosy, and was glittering along the smooth
lake-waters. Workmen only were abroad, and Alvan was glad to be out with
them to feel with them as one of them. Close beside him the vivid genius
of the preceding century, whose love of workmen was a salt of heaven in
his human corruptness, looked down on the lake in marble. Alvan cherished
a worship of him as of one that had first thrilled him with the feeling
of our common humanity, with the tenderness for the poor, with the
knowledge of our frailty. Him, as well as the great Englishman and a
Frenchman, his mind called Father, and his conscience replied to that
progenitor's questioning of him, but said 'You know the love of woman: He
loved indeed, but he was not an amatory trifler. He too was a worker, a
champion worker. He doated on the prospect of plunging into his work; the
vision of jolly giant labours told of peace obtained, and there could be
no peace without his prize.

He listened to the workmen's foot-falls. The solitary sound and steady
motion of their feet were eloquent of early morning in a city, not less
than the changes of light in heaven above the roofs. With the golden
light came numbers, workmen still. Their tread on the stones roused some
of his working thoughts, like an old tune in his head, and he watched the
scattered files passing on, disciplined by their daily necessities,
easily manageable if their necessities are but justly considered. These
numbers are the brute force of earth, which must have the earth in time,
as they had it in the dawn of our world, and then they entered into
bondage for not knowing how to use it. They will have it again: they have
it partially, at times, in the despot, who is only the reflex of their
brute force, and can give them only a shadow of their claim. They will
have it all, when they have illumination to see and trust to the
leadership of a greater force than they--in force of brain, in the
spiritual force of ideas; ideas founded on justice; and not the justice
of these days of the governing few whose wits are bent to steady our
column of civilized humanity by a combination of props and jugglers'
arts, but a justice coming of the recognized needs of majorities, which
will base the column on a broad plinth for safety-broad as the base of
yonder mountain's towering white immensity--and will be the guarantee for
the solid uplifting of our civilization at last. 'Right, thou!' he
apostrophized--the old Ironer, at a point of his meditation. 'And right,
thou! more largely right!' he thought, further advanced in it, of the
great Giuseppe, the Genoese. 'And right am I too, between that metal-rail
of a politician and the deep dreamer, each of them incomplete for want of
an element of the other!' Practically and in vision right was Alvan, for
those two opposites met fusing in him: like the former, he counted on the
supremacy of might; like the latter, he distinguished where it lay in
perpetuity.

During his younger years he had been like neither in the moral curb they
could put on themselves--particularly the southern-blooded man. He had
resembled the naturally impatient northerner most, though not so supple
for business as he. But now he possessed the calmness of the Genoese; he
had strong self-command now; he had the principle that life is too short
for the indulgence of public fretfulness or of private quarrels; too
valuable for fruitless risks; too sacred, one may say, for the shedding
of blood on personal grounds. Oh! he had himself well under, fear not.

He could give and take from opposition. And rightly so, seeing that he
confessed to his own bent for sarcastically stinging: he was therefore
bound to endure a retort. Speech for speech, pamphlet for pamphlet, he
could be temperate. Nay, he defied an adversary to produce in him the
sensation of intemperateness; so there would not be much danger of his
being excited to betray it. Shadowily he thought of the hard words hurled
at him by the Rudigers, and of the injury Clotilde's father did him by
plotting to rob him of his daughter. But how had an Alvan replied?--with
the arts of peaceful fence victoriously. He conceived of no temptation to
his repressed irascibility save the political. A day might come for him
and the vehement old Ironer to try their mettle in a tussle. On that day
he would have to be wary, but, as Alvan felt assured, he would be more
master of himself than his antagonist. He was for the young world, in the
brain of a new order of things; the other based his unbending system on
the visions of a feudal chief, and would win a great step perchance, but
there he would stop: he was not with the future!

This immediate prospect of a return to serenity after his recent
charioteering, had set him thinking of himself and his days to come,
which hung before him in a golden haze that was tranquillizing. He had a
name, he had a station: he wanted power and he saw it approaching.

He wanted a wife too. Colonel von Tresten took coffee with him previous
to the start with Dr. Storchel to General von Rudiger's house. Alvan
consequently was unable any longer to think of a wife in the abstract. He
wanted Clotilde. Here was a man going straight to her, going to see her,
positively to see her and hear her voice!--almost instantly to hear her
voice, and see her eyes and hair, touch her hand. Oh! and rally her,
rouse her wit; and be able to tell him the flower she wore for the day,
and where she wore it--at her temples, or sliding to the back hair, or in
her bosom, or at her waist! She had innumerable tricks of indication in
these shifty pretty ways of hers, and was full of varying speech to the
cunning reader of her.

'But keep her to seriousness,' Alvan said. 'Our meeting must be early
to-day--early in the afternoon. She is not unlikely to pretend to trifle.
She has not seen me for some time, and will probably enough play at
emancipation and speak of the "singular impatience of the seigneur
Alvan." Don't you hear her? I swear to those very words! She "loves her
liberty," and she curves her fan and taps her foot. "The seigneur Alvan
appears pressed for time:" She has "letters to write to friends to-day."
Stop that! I can't join in play: to-morrow, if she likes; not to-day. Or
not till I have her by the hand. She shall be elf and fairy, French
coquette, whatever she pleases to-morrow, and I'll be satisfied. All I
beg is for plain dealing on a business matter. This is a business matter,
a business meeting. I thoroughly know the girl's heart, and know that in
winning the interview I win her. Only'--he pressed his friend's
arm--'but, my dear Tresten, you understand. You're a luckier fellow than
I--for the time, at all events. Make it as short as you can. You'll find
me here. I shall take a book--one of the Pandects. I don't suppose I
shall work. I feel idle. Any book handy; anything will interest me. I
should walk or row on the lake, but I would rather be sure of readiness
for your return. You meet Storchel at the General's house?'

'The appointment was at the house,' Tresten said.

'I have not seen him this morning. I know of nothing to prepare him for.
You see, it was invariable with her: as soon as she met me she had twice
her spirit: and that she knows;--she was a new woman, ten times the
happier for having some grains of my courage. So she'll be glad to come
to terms and have me by to support her. Press it, if necessary; otherwise
she might be disappointed, my dear fellow. Storchel looks on, and
observes, and that 's about all he can do, or need do. Up Mont Blanc
to-day, Tresten! It's the very day for an ascent:--one of the rare
crystalline jewels coming in a Swiss August; we should see the kingdoms
of the earth--and a Republic! But I could climb with all my heart in a
snowstorm to-day. Andes on Himalayas! as high as you like. The Republic
by the way, small enough in the ring of empires and monarchies, if you
measure it geometrically! You remember the laugh at the exact elevation
of Mount Olympus? But Zeus's eagle sat on it, and top me Olympus, after
you have imagined the eagle aloft there! after Homer, is the meaning.
That will be one of the lessons for our young Republicans--to teach them
not to give themselves up to the embrace of dead materialism because, as
they fancy, they have had to depend on material weapons for carving their
way, and have had no help from other quarters. A suicidal delusion! The
spiritual weapon has done most, and always does. They are sons of an
idea. They deny their parentage when they scoff at idealism. It's a
tendency we shall have to guard against; it leads back to the old order
of things, if we do not trim our light. She is waiting for you! Go. You
will find me here. And don't forget my instructions. Appoint for the
afternoon--not late. Too near night will seem like Orpheus going below,
and I hope to meet a living woman, not a ghost--ha! coloured like a
lantern in a cavern, good Lord! Covered with lichen! Say three o'clock,
not later. The reason is, I want to have it over early and be sure of
what I am doing; I'm bothered by it; I shall have to make arrangements
. . . a thousand little matters . . . telegraph to Paris, I daresay; she's
fond of Paris, and I must learn who's there to meet her. Now start. I'll
walk a dozen steps with you. I think of her as if, since we parted, she
had been sitting on a throne in Erebus, and must be ghastly. I had a
dream of a dead tree that upset me. In fact, you see I must have it over.
The whole affair makes me feel too young.'

Tresten advised him to spend an hour with the baroness.

'I can't; she makes me feel too old,' said Alvan. 'She talks. She
listens, but I don't want to speak. Dead silence!--let it be a dash of
the pen till you return. As for these good people hurrying to their
traffic, and tourists and loungers, they have a trick for killing time
without hurting him. I wish I had. I try to smother a minute, and up the
old fellow jumps quivering all over and threatening me body and soul.
They don't appear as if they had news on their faces this morning. I've
not seen a newspaper and won't look at one. Here we separate. Be formal
in mentioning me to her but be particularly civil. I know you have the
right tone: she's a critical puss. Days like these are the days for her
to be out. There goes a parasol like one I 've seen her carry. Stay--no!
Don't forget my instructions. Paris for a time. It may be the Pyrenees.
Paris on our way back. She would like the Pyrenees. It's not too late for
society at Luchon and Cauterets. She likes mountains, she mounts well: in
any case, plenty of mules can be had. Paris to wind up with. Paris will
be fuller about the beginning of October.'

He had quitted Tresten, and was talking to himself, cheating' himself,
not discordantly at all. The poet of the company within him claimed the
word and was allowed by the others to dilate on Clotilde's likings, and
the honeymoon or post-honeymoon amusements to be provided for her in
Pyrenean valleys, and Parisian theatres and salons. She was friande of
chocolates, bon-bons: she enjoyed fine pastry, had a real relish of good
wine. She should have the best of everything; he knew the spots of the
very best that Paris could supply, in confiseurs and restaurants, and in
millinery likewise. A lively recollection of the prattle of Parisian
ladies furnished names and addresses likely to prove invaluable to
Clotilde. He knew actors and actresses, and managers of theatres, and
mighty men in letters. She should have the cream of Paris. Does she hint
at rewarding him for his trouble? The thought of her indebted lips, half
closed, asking him how to repay him, sprang his heart to his throat.




CHAPTER XVI

Then he found himself saying: 'At the age I touch!' . . .

At the age of forty, men that love love rootedly. If the love is plucked
from them, the life goes with it.

He backed on his physical pride, a stout bulwark. His forty years--the
forty, the fifty, the sixty of Alvan, matched the twenties and thirties
of other men.

Still it was true that he had reached an age when the desire to plant his
affections in a dear fair bosom fixedly was natural. Fairer, dearer than
she was never one on earth! He stood bareheaded for coolness, looking in
the direction Tresten had taken, his forehead shining and eyes charged
with the electrical activity of the mind, reading intensely all who
passed him, without a thought upon any of these objects in their passage.
The people were read, penetrated, and flung off as from a whirring of
wheels; to cut their place in memory sharp as in steel when imagination
shall by and by renew the throbbing of that hour, if the wheels be not
stilled. The world created by the furnaces of vitality inside him
absorbed his mind; and strangely, while receiving multitudinous vivid
impressions, he did not commune with one, was unaware of them. His thick
black hair waved and glistened over the fine aquiline of his face. His
throat was open to the breeze. His great breast and head were joined by a
massive column of throat that gave volume for the coursing of the blood
to fire the battery of thought, perchance in a tempest overflood it,
extinguish it. His fortieth year was written on his complexion and
presence: it was the fortieth of a giant growth that will bend at the
past eightieth as little as the rock-pine, should there come no uprooting
tempest. It said manhood, and breathed of settled strength of muscle,
nerve, and brain.

Of the people passing, many knew him not, but marked him; some knew him
by repute, one or two his person. To all of them he was a noticeable
figure; even those of sheeplike nature, having an inclination to start
upon the second impulse in the flanks of curious sheep when their first
had been arrested by the appearance of one not of their kind,
acknowledged the eminence of his bearing. There may have been a passenger
in the street who could tell the double tale of the stick he swung in his
hand, showing a gleam of metal, whereon were engraved names of the lurid
historic original owner, and of the donor and the recipient. According to
the political sentiments of the narrator would his tale be coloured, and
a simple walking-stick would be clothed in Tarquin guilt for striking off
heads of the upper ranks of Frenchmen till the blood of them topped the
handle, or else wear hues of wonder, seem very memorable; fit at least
for a museum. If the Christian aristocrat might shrink from it in terror
and loathing, the Paynim Republican of deep dye would be ready to kiss it
with veneration. But, assuming them to have a certain bond of manliness,
both agree in pronouncing the deed a right valiant and worthy one, which
caused this instrument to be presented to Alvan by a famous doctor, who,
hearing of his repudiation of the duel, and of his gallant and triumphant
defence of himself against a troop of ruffians, enemies or scum of their
city, at night, by the aid of a common stout pedestrian stick, alone in a
dark alley of the public park, sent him, duly mounted and engraved, an
illustrious fellow to the weapon of defence, as a mode of commemorating
his just abhorrence of bloodshed and his peaceful bravery.

Observers of him would probably speculate on his features and the
carriage of his person as he went by them; with a result in their minds
that can be of no import to us, men's general speculations being directed
by their individual aims and their moods, their timidities, prejudices,
envies, rivalries; but none could contest that he was a potential figure.
If to know him the rising demagogue of the time dressed him in such
terrors as to make him appear an impending Attila of the voracious hordes
which live from hand to mouth, without intervention of a banker and
property to cry truce to the wolf, he would have shone under a different
aspect enough to send them to the poets to solve their perplexity, had
the knowledge been subjoined that this terrific devastator swinging the
sanguinary stick was a slave of love, who staked his all upon his love,
loved up to his capacity desperately, loved a girl, and hung upon her
voice to hear whether his painful knocking at a door should
gain him admittance to the ranks of the orderly citizens of the
legitimately-satiated passions, or else--the voice of a girl annihilate
him.

He loved like the desert-bred Eastern, as though his blood had never
ceased to be steeped in its fountain Orient; loved barbarously, but with
a compelling resolve to control his blood and act and be the civilized
man, sober by virtue of his lady's gracious aid. In fact, it was the
civilized man in him that had originally sought the introduction to her,
with a bribe to the untameable. The former had once led, and hoped to
lead again. Alvan was a revolutionist in imagination, the workman's
friend in rational sympathy, their leader upon mathematical calculation,
but a lawyer, a reasoner in law, and therefore of necessity a cousin
germane, leaning to become an ally, of the Philistines--the founders and
main supporters of his book of the Law. And so, between the nature of his
blood, and the inclination of his mind, Alvan set his heart on a damsel
of the Philistines, endowed with their trained elegancies and governed by
some of their precepts, but suitable to his wildness in her reputation
for originality, suiting him in her cultivated liveliness and her turn
for luxury. Only the Philistines breed these choice beauties, put forth
these delicate fresh young buds of girls; and only here and there among
them is there an exquisite, eccentric, yet passably decorous Clotilde.
What his brother politicians never discovered in him, and the baroness
partly suspected, through her interpretation of things opposing her
sentiments, Clotilde uncloaks. Catching and mastering her, his wilder
animation may be appeased, but his political life is threatened with a
diversion of its current, for he will be uxorious, impassioned to gratify
the tastes and whims of a youthful wife; the Republican will be in danger
of playing prematurely for power to seat her beside him high: while at
the same time, children, perchance, and his hardening lawyer's head are
secretly Philistinizing the demagogue, blunting the fine edge of his
Radicalism, turning him into a slow-stepping Liberal, otherwise your
half-Conservative in his convictions. Can she think it much to have
married that drab-coloured unit? Power must be grasped . . . .

His watch told him that Tresten was now beholding her, or just about to.
The stillness of the heavens was remarkable. The hour held breath. She
delayed her descent from her chamber. He saw how she touched at her hair,
more distinctly than he saw the lake before his eyes. He watched her, and
the growl of a coming roar from him rebuked her tricky deliberateness.
Deciding at last, she slips down the stairs like a waterfall, and is in
the room, erect, composed--if you do not lay ear against her bosom.
Tresten stares at her, owns she is worth a struggle. Love does this,
friend Tresten! Love, that stamps out prejudice and bids inequality be
smooth. Tresten stares and owns she is worth heavier labours, worse than
his friend has endured. Love does it! Love, that hallows a stranger's
claim to the flower of a proud garden: Love has won her the freedom to
suffer herself to be chosen by the stranger. What matters which of them
toiled to bring them to so sweet an end! It was not either of them, but
Love. By and by, after acting serenest innocent, suddenly broken, she
will be copious of sad confessions. That will be in their secresy: in the
close and boundless together of clasped hands. Deep eyes, that give him
in realms of light within light all that he has dreamed of rapturousness
and blessedness, you are threatened with a blinding kiss if you look
abashed:--if her voice shall dare repeat another of those foolish
self-reproaches, it shall be construed as a petition for further kisses.
Silence! he said to her, imagining that he had been silent, and enjoying
silence with a perfect quietude beyond the trouble of a thought of her
kisses and his happiness. His full heart craved for the infinity of
silence.

Another moment and he was counting to her the days, hours, minutes, which
had been the gulf of torture between then and now--the separation and the
reunion: he was voluble, living to speak, and a pause was only for the
drawing of most blissful breath.

His watch went slowly. She was beginning to drop her eyelids in front of
Tresten. Oh! he knew her so well. He guessed the length of her acting,
and the time for her earnestness. She would have to act a coquette at
first to give herself a countenance; and who would not pardon the girl
for putting on a mask? who would fail to see the mask? But he knew her so
well: she would not trifle very long: his life on it, that she will soon
falter! her bosom will lift, lift and check: a word from Tresten then, if
he is a friend, and she melts to the truth in her. Alvan heard her
saying: 'I will see him yes, to-day. Let him appoint. He may come when he
likes--come at once'

'My life on it!' he swore by his unerring knowledge of her, the certainty
that she loved him.

He had walked into a quarter of the town strange to him, he thought; he
had no recollection of the look of the street. A friend came up and put
him in the right way, walking back with him. This was General Leczel, a
famous leader of one of the heroical risings whose passage through blood
and despair have led to the broader law men ask for when they name
freedom devotedly. Alvan stated the position of his case to Leczel with
continental frankness regarding a natural theme, and then pursued the
talk on public affairs, to the note of: 'What but knocks will ever open
the Black-Yellow Head to the fact that we are no longer in the first
years of the eighteenth century!'

Leczel left him at his hotel steps, promising to call on him before
night. Tresten had not returned, neither he nor the advocate, and he had
been absent fully an hour. He was not in sight right or left. Alvan went
to his room, looked at his watch, and out of the window, incapable of
imagining any event. He began to breathe as if an atmosphere thick as
water were pressing round him. Unconsciously he had staked his all on the
revelation the moment was to bring. So little a thing! His intellect
weighed the littleness of it, but he had become level with it; he
magnified it with the greatness of his desire, and such was his nature
that the great desire of a thing withheld from him and his own, as he
could think, made the world a whirlpool till he had it. He waited,
figureable by nothing so much as a wild horse in captivity sniffing the
breeze, when the flanks of the quivering beast are like a wind-struck
barley-field, and his nerves are cords, and his nostrils trumpet him: he
is flame kept under and straining to rise.




CHAPTER XVII

The baroness expected to see Alvan in the morning, for he kept
appointments, and he had said he would come. She conceived that she was
independent of personal wishes on the subject of Clotilde; the fury of
his passion prohibited her forming any of the wishes we send up to
destiny when matters interesting us are in suspense, whether we have
liberated minds or not. She thought the girl would grant the interview;
was sure the creature would yield in his presence; and then there was an
end to the shining of Alvan! Supposing the other possibility, he had
shown her such fierce illuminations of eye and speech that she foresaw it
would be a blazing of the insurrectionary beacon-fires of hell with him.
He was a man of angels and devils. The former had long been conquering,
but the latter were far from extinct. His passion for this shallow girl
had consigned him to the lower host. Let him be thwarted, his desperation
would be unlikely to stop at legal barriers. His lawyer's head would be
up and armed astoundingly to oppose the law; he would read, argue, and
act with hot conviction upon the reverse of every text of law. She beheld
him storming the father's house to have out Clotilde, reluctant or
conniving; and he harangued the people, he bore off his captive, he held
her firmly as he had sworn he would; he defied authority, he was a public
rebel--he with his detected little secret aim, which he nursed like a
shamed mother of an infant, fond but afraid to be proud of it! She had
seen that he aimed at standing well with the world and being one with it
honourably: holding to his principles of course: but a disposition that
way had been perceived, and the vision of him in open rebellion because
of his shy catching at the thread of an alliance with the decorous world,
carved an ironic line on her jaw.

Full surely he would not be baffled without smiting the world on the
face. And he might suffer for it; the Rudigers would suffer likewise.

She considered them very foolish people. Her survey of the little
nobility beneath her station had previously enabled her to account for
their disgust of such a suitor as Alvan, and maintain that they would
oppose him tooth and nail. Owing to his recent success, the anticipation
of a peaceful surrender to him seemed now on the whole to carry most
weight. This girl gives Alvan her hand and her family repudiate her.
Volatile, flippant, shallow as she is, she must have had some turn for
him; a physical spell was on her once, and it will be renewed when they
meet. It sometimes inspires a semblance of courage; she may determine;
she may be stedfast long enough for him to take his measures to bear her
away. And the Brocken witches congratulate him on his prize!

Almost better would it be, she thought, that circumstance should thwart
him and kindle his own demon element.

The forenoon, the noon, the afternoon, went round.

Late in the evening her door was flung wide for Colonel von Tresten.

She looked her interrogative 'Well?' His features were not used to betray
the course of events.

'How has it gone?' she said.

He replied: 'As I told you. I fancied I gauged the hussy pretty closely.'

'She will not see him?'

'Not she.'

The baroness crossed her arms.

'And Alvan?'

The colonel shrugged. It was not done to tease a tremulous woman, for she
was calm. It painted the necessary consequence of the refusal: an
explosion of AEtna, and she saw it.

'Where is he now?' said she.

'At his hotel.'

'Alone?'

'Leczel is with him.'

'That looks like war.'

Tresten shrugged again. 'It might have been foreseen by everybody
concerned in the affair. The girl does not care for him one corner of an
eye! She stood up before us cool as at a dancing-lesson, swore she had
never committed herself to an oath to him, sneered at him. She positively
sneered. Her manner to me assures me without question that if he had
stood in my place she would have insulted him:

'Scarcely. She would do in his absence what she would not do under his
eyes,' remarked the baroness. 'It's decided, then?'

'Quite.'

'Will he be here to-night?'

'I think not.'

'Was she really insolent?'

'For a girl in her position, she was.'

'Did you repeat her words to him?'

'Some of them.'

'What description of insolence?'

'She spoke of his vanity . . . .'

'Proceed.'

'It was more her manner to me, as the one of the two appearing as his
friend. She was tolerably civil to Storchel: and the difference of
behaviour must have been designed, for she not only looked at Storchel in
a way to mark the difference, she addressed him rather eagerly before we
turned on our heels, to tell him she would write to him, and let him have
her reply in a letter. He will get some coquettish rigmarole.'

'That seems monstrous!--if one could be astonished by her,' said the
baroness. 'When is she to write?'

'She may write: the letter will find no receiver,' said Tresten,
significantly raising his eyebrows. 'The legal gentleman is gone--blown
from a gun! He's off home. He informed me that he should write to the
General, throwing up his office, and an end to his share in the
business.'

'There was no rudeness to the poor man?'

'Dear me, no. But imagine a quiet little advocate, very precise and
silky--you've had a hint of him--and all of a sudden the client he has by
the ear swells into a tremendous beast--a combination of lion and
elephant--bellows and shakes the room, stops and stamps before him,
discharging an unintelligible flood of racy vernacular punctuated in
thunder. You hear him and see him! Alvan lost his head--some of his hair
too. The girl is not worth a lock. But he's past reason.'

'He takes it so,' said the baroness, musing. 'It will be the sooner over.
She never cared for him a jot. And there's the sting. He has called up
the whole world in an amphitheatre to see a girl laugh him to scorn. Hard
for any man to bear!--Alvan of all men! Why does he not come here? He
might rage at me for a day and a night, and I would rock him to sleep in
the end. However, he has done nothing?'

That was the point. The baroness perceived it to be a serious point, and
repeated the question sharply. 'Has he been to the house?--no?--writing?'

Tresten dropped a nod.

'Not to the girl, I suppose. To the father?' said she.

'He has written to the General.'

'You should have stopped it.'

'Tell a vedette to stop cavalry. You're not thinking of the man. He's in
a white frenzy.'

'I will go to him.'

'You will do wrong. Leave him to spout the stuff and get rid of his
poison. I remember a sister of poor Nuciotti's going to him after he had
let his men walk into a trap--and that was through a woman: and he was
quieted; and the chief overlooked it; and two days after, Nuciotti blew
his brains out. He'd have been alive now if he had been left alone.
Furious cursing is a natural relief to some men, like women's weeping. He
has written a savage letter to her father, sending the girl to the deuce
with the name she deserves, and challengeing the General.'

'That letter is despatched?'

'Rudiger has it by this time.'

The baroness fixed her eyes on Tresten: she struck her lap. 'Alvan! Is it
he? But the General is old, gouty, out of the lists. There can be no
fighting. He apologized to you for his daughter's insolence to me. He
will not fight, be sure.'

'Perhaps not,' Tresten said.

'As for the girl, Alvan has the fullest right to revile her: it cannot be
too widely known. I could cry: "What wisdom there is in men when they are
mad!" We must allow it to counterbalance breaches of ordinary courtesy.
"With the name--she deserves," you say?

He pitched the very name at her character plainly?--called her what she
is?'

The baroness could have borne to hear it: she had no feminine horror of
the staining epithet for that sex. But a sense of the distinction between
camps and courts restrained the soldier. He spoke of a discharge of
cuttlefish ink at the character of the girl, and added: 'The bath's a
black one for her, and they had better keep it private. Regrettable, no
doubt, but it 's probably true, and he 's out of his mind. It would be
dangerous to check him: he'd force his best friend to fight. Leczel is
with him and gives him head. It 's about time for me to go back to him,
for there may be business.'

The baroness thought it improbable. She was hoping that with Alvan's
eruption the drop-scene would fall.

Tresten spoke of the possibility. He knew the contents of the letter, and
knew further that a copy of it, with none of the pregnant syllables
expunged, had been forwarded to Prince Marko. He counselled calm waiting
for a certain number of hours. The baroness committed herself to a
promise to wait. Now that Alvan had broken off from the baleful girl, the
worst must have been passed, she thought.

He had broken with the girl: she reviewed him under the light of that
sole fact. So the edge of the cloud obscuring him was lifted, and he
would again be the man she prized and hoped much of! How thickly he had
been obscured was visible to her through a retreating sensation of scorn
of him for his mad excesses, which she had not known herself to entertain
while he was writhing in the toils, and very bluntly and dismissingly
felt now that his madness was at its climax. An outrageous lunatic fit,
that promised to release him from his fatal passion, seemed, on the
contrary, respectable in essence if not in the display. Wives he should
have by fifties and hundreds if he wanted them, she thought in her
great-heartedness, reflecting on the one whose threatened pretensions to
be his mate were slain by the title flung at her, and merited. The word
(she could guess it) was an impassable gulf, a wound beyond healing. It
pronounced in a single breath the girl's right name and his pledge of a
return to sanity. For it was the insanest he could do; it uttered
anathema on his love of her; it painted his white glow of unreason and
fierce ire at the scorn which her behaviour flung upon every part of his
character that was tenderest with him. After speaking such things a man
comes to his senses or he dies. So thought the baroness, and she was not
more than commonly curious to hear how the Rudigers had taken the insult
they had brought on themselves, and not unwilling to wait to see Alvan
till he was cool. His vanity, when threatening to bleed to the death,
would not be civil to the surgeon before the second or third dressing of
his wound.




CHAPTER XVIII

In the house of the Rudigers there was commotion. Clotilde sat apart from
it, locked in her chamber. She had performed her crowning act of
obedience to her father by declining the interview with Alvan, and as a
consequence she was full of grovelling revolt.

Two things had helped her to carry out her engagement to submit in this
final instance of dutifulness--one was the sight of that hateful rigid
face and glacier eye of Tresten; the other was the loophole she left for
subsequent insurgency by engaging to write to Count Hollinger's envoy,
Dr. Storchel. She had gazed most earnestly at him, that he might not
mistake her meaning, and the little man's pair of spectacles had, she
fancied, been dim. He was touched. Here was a friend! Here was the friend
she required, the external aid, the fresh evasion, the link with Alvan!
Now to write to him to bind him to his beautiful human emotion. By
contrast with the treacherous Tresten, whose iciness roused her to
defiance, the nervous little advocate seemed an emissary of the skies,
and she invoked her treasure-stores of the craven's craftiness in revolt
to compose a letter that should move him, melt the good angel to espouse
her cause. He was to be taught to understand--nay, angelically he would
understand at once--why she had behaved apparently so contradictorily.
Fettered, cruelly constrained by threats and wily sermons upon her duty
to her family, terrorized, a prisoner 'beside this blue lake, in sight of
the sublimest scenery of earth,' and hating his associate--hating him,
she repeated and underscored--she had belied herself; she was willing to
meet Alvan, she wished to meet him. She could open her heart to Alvan's
true friend--his only true friend. He would instantly discern her unhappy
plight. In the presence of his associate she could explain nothing, do
nothing but what she had done. He had frozen her. She had good reason to
know that man for her enemy. She could prove him a traitor to Alvan.
Certain though she was from the first moment of Dr. Storchel's integrity
and kindness of heart, she had stood petrified before him, as if affected
by some wicked spell. She owned she had utterly belied herself; she
protested she had been no free agent.

The future labours in her cause were thrown upon Dr. Storchel's
shoulders, but with such compliments to him on his mission from above as
emissary angels are presumed to be sensibly affected by.

The letter was long, involved, rather eloquent when she forgot herself
and wrote herself, and intentionally very feminine, after the manner of
supplicatory ladies appealing to lawyers, whom they would sway by the
feeble artlessness of a sex that must confide in their possession of a
heart, their heads being too awful.

She was directing the letter when Marko Romaris gave his name outside her
door. He was her intimate, her trustiest ally; he was aware of her design
to communicate with Dr. Storchel, and came to tell her it would be a
waste of labour. He stood there singularly pale and grave, unlike the
sprightly slave she petted on her search for a tyrant. 'Too late,' he
said, pointing to the letter she held. 'Dr. Storchel has gone.'

She could not believe it, for Storchel had informed her that he would
remain three days. Her powers of belief were more heavily taxed when
Marko said: 'Alvan has challenged your father to fight him.' With that he
turned on his heel; he had to assist in the deliberations of the family.

She clasped her temples. The collision of ideas driven together by Alvan
and a duel--Alvan challengeing her father--Alvan, the contemner of the
senseless appeal to arms for the settlement 'of personal
disputes!--darkened her mind. She ran about the house plying all whom she
met for news and explanations; but her young brother was absent, her
sisters were ignorant, and her parents were closeted in consultation with
the gentleman. At night Marko sent her word that she might sleep in
peace, for things would soon be arranged and her father had left the
city.

She went to her solitude to study the hard riddle of her shattered
imagination of Alvan. The fragments would not suffer joining, they
assailed her in huge heaps; and she did not ask herself whether she had
ever known him, but what disruption it was that had unsettled the reason
of the strongest man alive. At times he came flashing through the scud of
her thoughts magnificently in person, and how to stamp that splendid
figure of manhood on a madman's conduct was the task she supposed herself
to be attempting while she shrank from it, and worshipped the figure,
abhorred the deed. She could not unite them. He was like some great
cathedral organ foully handled in the night by demons. He, whose lucent
reason was an unclouded sky over every complexity of our sphere, he to
crave to fight! to seek the life-blood of the father of his beloved! More
unintelligible than this was it to reflect that he must know the
challenge to be of itself a bar to his meeting his Clotilde ever again.
She led her senses round to weep, and produced a state of mental drowning
for a truce to the bitter riddle.

Quiet reigned in the household next day, and for the length of the day.
Her father had departed, her mother treated her vixenishly, snubbing her
for a word, but the ugly business of yesterday seemed a matter settled
and dismissed. Alvan, then, had been appeased. He was not a man of blood:
he was the humanest of men. She was able to reconstruct him under the
beams of his handsome features and his kingly smile. She could
occasionally conjure them up in their vividness; but had she not in truth
been silly to yield to spite and send him back the photographs of him
with his presents, so that he should have the uttermost remnant of the
gifts he asked for? Had he really asked to have anything back? She
inclined to doubt all that had been done and said since their
separation--if only it were granted her to look on a photograph showing
him as he was actually before their misunderstanding! The sun-tracing
would not deceive, as her own tricks of imageing might do: seeing him as
he was then, the hour would be revived,--she would certainly feel him as
he lived and breathed now. Thus she fancied, on the effort to get him to
her heart after the shock he had dealt it, for he had become almost a
stranger, as a god that has taken human shape and character.

Next to the sight of Alvan her friend Marko was welcome. The youth
visited her in the evening, and with the glitter of his large black eyes
bent to her, and began talking incomprehensibly of leave-taking and
farewell, until she cried aloud that she had riddles enough: one was too
much. What had he to say? She gave him her hand to encourage him. She
listened, and soon it was her hand that mastered his in the grasp, though
she was putting questions incredulously, with an understanding duller
than her instinct. Or how if the frightful instinct while she listened
shot lightnings in her head, whose revelations were too intelligible to
be looked at? We think it devilish when our old nature is incandescent to
talk to us in this way, kindled by its vilest in hoping, hungering, and
fearing; and we call on the civilized mind to disown it. The tightened
grasp of her hand confessed her understanding of the thing she pressed to
hear repeated, for the sake of seeming to herself to repudiate it under
an accumulating horror, at the same time that the repetition doubly and
trebly confirmed it, so as to exonerate her criminal sensations by
casting the whole burden on the material fact.

Marko, with her father's consent and the approval of the friends of the
family, had taken up Alvan's challenge! That was the tale. She saw him
dead in the act of telling it.

'What?' she cried: 'what?' and then: 'You?' and her fingers were bonier
in their clutch: 'Let me hear. It can't be!' She snapped at herself for
not pitying him more but a sword had flashed to cut her gordian knot: she
her saw him dead, the obstacle removed, the man whom her parents opposed
to Alvan swept away: she saw him as a black gate breaking to a flood of
light. She had never invoked it, never wished, never dreamed it, but if
it was to be? . . . 'Oh! impossible. One of us is crazy. You to fight?
. . . they put it upon you? You fight him? But it is cruel, it is
abominable. Incredible! You have accepted the challenge, you say?'

He answered that he had, and gazed into her eyes for love.

She blinked over them, crying out against parents and friends for their
heartlessness in permitting him to fight.

'This is positive? This is really true?' she said, burning and dreading
to realize the magical change it pointed on, and touching him with her
other hand, loathing herself, loathing parents and friends who had
brought her to the plight of desiring some terrible event in sheer
necessity. Not she, it was the situation they had created which was
guilty! By dint of calling out on their heartlessness, and a spur of
conscience, she roused the feeling of compassion:

'But, Marko! Marko! poor child! you cannot fight; you have never fired a
pistol or a gun in your life. Your health was always too delicate for
these habits of men; and you could not pull a trigger taking aim, do you
not know?'

'I have been practising for a couple of hours to-day,' he said.

Compassion thrilled her. 'A couple of hours! Unhappy boy! But do you not
know that he is a dead shot? He is famous for his aim. He never misses.
He can do all the duellist's wonders both with sword and pistol, and that
is why he was respected when he refused the duel because he--before these
parents of mine drove him . . . and me! I think we are both mad--he
despised duelling. He! He! Alvan! who has challenged my father! I have
heard him speak of duelling as cowardly. But what is he? what has he
changed to? And it would be cowardly to kill you, Marko.'

'I take my chance,' Marko said.

'You have no chance. His aim is unerring.' She insisted on the deadliness
of his aim, and dwelt on it with a gloating delight that her conscience
approved, for she was persuading the youth to shun his fatal aim.

If you stood against him he would not spare you--perhaps not; I fear he
would not, as far as I know him now. He can be terrible in wrath. I think
he would warn you; but two men face to face! and he suspecting that you
cross his path! Find some way of avoiding him. Do, I entreat you. By your
love of me! Oh! no blood. I do not want to lose you. I could not bear
it.'

'Would you regret me?' said he.

Her eyes fell on his, and the beauty of those great dark eyes made her
fondness for him legible. He caused her a spasm of anguish, foreknowing
him doomed. She thought that haply this devoted heart was predestined to
be the sacrifice which should bring her round to Alvan. She murmured
phrases of dissuasion until her hollow voice broke; she wept for being
speechless, and turned upon Providence and her parents, in railing at
whom a voice of no ominous empty sound was given her; and still she felt
more warmly than railing expressed, only her voice shrank back from a
tone of feeling. She consoled herself with the reflection that utterance
was inadequate. Besides, her active good sense echoed Marko ringingly
when he cited the usages of their world and the impossibility of his
withdrawing or wishing to withdraw from the line of a challenge accepted.
It was destiny. She bowed her head lower and lower, oppressed without and
within, unwilling to look at him. She did not look when he left her.

The silence of him encouraged her head to rise. She stared about: his
phantom seemed present, and for a time she beheld him both upright in
life and stretched in death. It could not be her fault that he should
die! it was the fatality. How strange it was! Providence, after bitterly
misusing her, offered this reparation through the death of Marko.

Possibly she ought to run out and beseech Alvan to spare the innocent
youth. She stood up trembling on her legs. She called to Alvan. 'Do not
put blood between us. Oh! I love you more than ever. Why did you let that
horrible man you take for a friend come here? I hate him, and cannot feel
my love of you when I see him. He chills me to the bone. He made me say
the reverse of what was in my heart. But spare poor Marko! You have no
cause for jealousy. You would be above it, if you had. Do not aim; fire
in the air. Do not let me kiss that hand and think . . .'

She sank to her chair, exclaiming: 'I am a prisoner!' She could not walk
two steps; she was imprisoned by the interdict of the house and the
paralysis of her limbs. Providence decreed that she must abide the
result. Dread Power! To be dragged to her happiness through a river of
blood was indeed dreadful, but the devotional sense of reliance upon
hidden wisdom in the direction of human affairs when it appears
considerate of our wishes, inspirited her to be ready for what Providence
was about to do, mysterious in its beneficence that it was! It is the
dark goddess Fortune to the craven. The craven with desires will offer up
bloody sacrifices to it submissively. The craven, with desires expecting
to be blest, is a zealot of the faith which ascribes the direction of
events to the outer world. Her soul was in full song to that contriving
agency, and she with the paralyzed limbs became practically active,
darting here and there over the room, burning letters, packing a portable
bundle of clothes, in preparation for the domestic confusion of the
morrow when the body of Marko would be driven to their door, and amid the
wailing and the hubbub she would escape unnoticed to Alvan,
Providence-guided! Out of the house would then signify assuredly to
Alvan's arms.

The prospect might have seemed too heavenly to be realizable had she not
been sensible of paying heavily for it; and thus, as he would wish to be,
was Marko of double service to her; for she was truly fond of the
beautiful and chivalrous youth, and far from wishing to lose him. His
blood was on the heads of those who permitted him to face the danger! She
would have felt for him still more tenderly if it were permitted to a
woman's heart to enfold two men at a time. This, it would seem, she
cannot do: she is compelled by the painful restriction sadly to consent
that one of them should be swept away.

Night passed dragging and galloping. In the very early light she thought
of adding some ornaments to her bundle of necessaries. She learnt of the
object of her present faith to be provident on her own behalf, and
dressed in two of certain garments which would have swollen her bundle
too much.

This was the day of Providence: she had strung herself to do her part in
it and gone through the pathos of her fatalism above stairs in her
bedroom before Marko took his final farewell of her, so she could speak
her 'Heaven be with you!' unshaken, though sadly. Her father had
returned. To be away from him, and close to her bundle, she hurried to
her chamber and awaited the catastrophe, like one expecting to be raised
from the vaults. Carriage, wheels would give her the first intimation of
it. Slow, very slow, would imply badly wounded, she thought: dead, if the
carriage stopped some steps from the house and one of the seconds of the
poor boy descended to make the melancholy announcement. She could not but
apprehend the remorselessness of the decree. Death, it would probably be!
Alvan had resolved to sweep him off the earth. She could not blame Alvan
for his desperate passion, though pitying the victim of it. In any case
the instant of the arrival of the carriage was her opportunity marked by
the finger of Providence rendered visible, and she sat rocking her parcel
on her lap. Her love of Alvan now was mixed with an alluring terror of
him as an immediate death-dealer who stood against red-streaked heavens,
more grandly satanic in his angry mightiness than she had ever realized
that figure, and she, trembled and shuddered, fearing to meet him,
yearning to be taken to him, to close her eyes on his breast in blindest
happiness. She gave the very sob for the occasion.

A carriage drove at full speed to the door. Full speed could not be the
pace for a funeral load. That was a visitor to her father on business.
She waited for fresh wheels, telling herself she would be patient and
must be ready.

Her pathos ways ready and scarcely controllable. The tear thickened on
her eyelid as she projected her mind on the grief she would soon be
undergoing for Marko: or at least she would undergo it subsequently; she
would certainly mourn for him. She dared not proceed to an accumulated
enumeration of his merits, as her knowledge of the secret of pathos knew
to be most moving, in an extreme fear that she might weaken her required
energies for action at the approaching signal.

Feet came rushing up the stairs: her door was thrown open, and the living
Marko, stranger than a dead, stood present. He had in his look an
expectation that she would be glad to behold him, and he asked her, and
she said: 'Oh, yes, she was glad, of course.' She was glad that Alvan had
pardoned him for his rashness; she was vexed that her projected confusion
of the household had been thwarted: vexed, petrified with astonishment.

'But how if I tell you that Alvan is wounded?' he almost wept to say.

Clotilde informs the world that she laughed on hearing this. She was
unaware of her ground for laughing: It was the laugh of the tragic
comedian.

Could one believe in a Providence capable of letting such a sapling and
weakling strike down the most magnificent stature upon earth?

'You--him!' she said, in the tremendous compression of her contempt.

She laughed. The world is upside down--a world without light, or pointing
finger, or affection for special favourites, and therefore bereft of all
mysterious and attractive wisdom, a crazy world, a corpse of a world--if
this be true!

But it can still be disbelieved.

He stood by her dejectedly, and she sent him flying with a repulsive,
'Leave me!' The youth had too much on his conscience to let him linger.
His manner of going smote her brain.

Was it credible? Was it possible to think of Alvan wounded?--the giant
laid on his back and in the hands of the leech? Assuredly it was a
mockery of all calculations. She could not conjure up the picture of him,
and her emotions were merely struck and stunned. If this be true!

But it can be resolutely disbelieved.

We can put it before Providence to cleanse itself of this thing, or
suffer the consequence that we now and for ever quit our worship, lose
our faith in it and our secret respect. She heard Marko's tale confirmed,
whispers of leaden import, physicians' rumours, and she doubted. She
clung insanely to her incredulity. Laughter had been slain, but not her
belief in the invincibility of Alvan; she could not imagine him
overthrown in a conflict--and by a hand that she had taken and twisted in
her woman's hand subduingly! He, the unerring shot, laid low by one who
had never burnt powder till the day before the duel! It was easier to
remain incredulous notwithstanding the gradational distinctness of the
whispers. She dashed her 'Impossible!' at Providence, conceived the tale
in wilful and almost buoyant self-deception to be a conspiracy in the
family to hide from her Alvan's magnanimous dismissal of poor Marko from
the field of strife. That was the most evident fact. She ran through
delusion and delusion, exhausting each and hugging it after the false
life was out.

So violent was the opposition to reason in the idea of Alvans descending
to the duel and falling by the hand of Marko, that it cried to be
rebutted by laughter: and she could not, she could laugh no more, nor
imagine laughing, though she could say of the people of the house, 'They
act it well!' and hate them for the serious whispering air, and the
dropping of medical terms and weights of drugs, which robbed her of what
her instinct told her was the surest weapon for combating deception.
Them, however, and their acting she could have with stood enough to
silently discredit them through sheer virulence of a hatred that proved
them to be duly credited. But her savage wilfulness could not resist the
look of Marko. She had to yield up her breast to the truth, and stimulate
further unbelief lest her loaded heart should force her to run to the
wounded lion's bedside, and hear his reproaches. She had to cheat her
heart, and the weak thing consented to it, loathing her for the
imposture. Seeing Marko too, assured of it by his broken look, the
terrible mournfulness less than the horrible irony of the truth gnawed
within her. It spoke to her in metal, not in flesh. It haunted her
feelings and her faint imaginations alienly. It discoloured, it scorned
the earth, and earth's teachings, and the understanding of life. Rational
clearness at all avenues was blurred by it. The thought that Alvan lay
wounded and in danger, was one thought: that Marko had stretched him
there, was quite another, and was a livid eclipsing thought through which
her grief had to work its way to get to heat and a state of burning. She
knew not in truth what to feel: the craven's dilemma when yet feeling
much. Anger at Providence--rose uppermost. She had so shifted and wound
about, and so pulled her heart to pieces, that she could no longer sanely
and with wholeness encounter a shock: she had no sensation firm enough to
be stamped by a signet.

Even on the fatal third day, when Marko, white as his shrouded
antagonist, led her to the garden of the house, and there said the word
of death, an execrating amazement, framing the thought 'Why is it not
Alvan who speaks?' rose beside her gaping conception of her loss. She
framed it as an earnest interrogation for the half minute before misery
had possession of her, coming down like a cloud. Providence then was too
shadowy a thing to upbraid. She could not blame herself, for the
intensity of her suffering testified to the bitter realness of her love
of the dead man. Her craven's instinct to make a sacrifice of others flew
with claws of hatred at her parents. These she offered up, and the spirit
presiding in her appears to have accepted them as proper substitutes for
her conscience.




CHAPTER XIX

Alvan was dead. The shot of his adversary, accidentally well-directed,
had struck him mortally. He died on the morning of the third day after
the duel. There had been no hope that he could survive, and his agonies
made a speedy dissolution desirable by those most wishing him to live.

The baroness had her summons to hurry to him after his first swoon. She
was his nurse and late confidante a tearless woman, rigid in service.
Death relaxed his hold in her hand. He met his fate like the valiant soul
he was. Haply if he had lingered without the sweats of bodily tortures to
stay reflectiveness, he, also, in the strangeness of his prostration,
might have cast a thought on the irony of the fates felling a man like
him by a youngster's hand and for a shallow girl! He might have fathered
some jest at life, with rueful relish of the flavour: for such is our
manner of commenting on ourselves when we come to shipwreck through
unseaworthy pretensions. There was no interval on his passage from
anguish to immobility.

Silent was that house of many chambers. That mass of humanity profusely
mixed of good and evil, of generous ire and mutinous, of the passion for
the future of mankind and vanity of person, magnanimity and sensualism,
high judgement, reckless indiscipline, chivalry, savagery, solidity,
fragmentariness, was dust.

The two men composing it, the untamed and the candidate for citizenship,
in mutual dissension pulled it down. He perished of his weakness, but it
was a strong man that fell. If his end was unheroic, the blot does not
overshadow his life. His end was a derision because the animal in him ran
him unchained and bounding to it. A stormy blood made wreck of a splendid
intelligence. Yet they that pronounce over him the ordinary fatalistic
epitaph of the foregone and done, which is the wisdom of men measuring
the dead by the last word of a lamentable history, should pause to think
whether fool or madman is the title for one who was a zealous worker,
respected by great heads of his time, acknowledged the head of the
voluminous coil of the working people, and who, as we have seen,
insensibly though these wrought within him, was getting to purer fires
through his coarser when the final intemperateness drove him to ruin. As
little was he the vanished God whom his working people hailed deploringly
on the long procession of his remains from city to city under charge of
the baroness. That last word of his history ridicules the eulogy of
partisan and devotee, and to commit the excess of worshipping is to
conjure up by contrast a vulgar giant: for truth will have her just
proportions, and vindicates herself upon a figure over-idealized by
bidding it grimace, leaving appraisers to get the balance of the two
extremes. He was neither fool nor madman, nor man to be adored: his last
temptation caught him in the season before he had subdued his blood, and
amid the multitudinously simple of this world, stamped him a tragic
comedian: that is, a grand pretender, a self-deceiver, one of the lividly
ludicrous, whom we cannot laugh at, but must contemplate, to distinguish
where their character strikes the note of discord with life; for
otherwise, in the reflection of their history, life will seem a thing
demoniacally inclined by fits to antic and dive into gulfs. The
characters of the hosts of men are of the simple order of the comic; not
many are of a stature and a complexity calling for the junction of the
two Muses to name them.

While for his devotees he lay still warm in the earth, that other, the
woman, poor Clotilde, astonished her compatriots by passing comedy and
tragic comedy with the gift of her hand to the hand which had slain
Alvan. In sooth, the explanation is not so hard when we recollect our
knowledge of her. It was a gentle youth; her parents urged her to it: a
particular letter, the letter of the challenge to her father, besliming
her, was shown;--a hideous provocation pushed to the foullest. Who can
blame Prince Marko? who had ever given sign of more noble bravery than
he? He had stood to defend her name and fame. He was very love, the never
extinguished torch of love. And he hung on her for the little of life
appearing to remain to him. Before heaven he was guiltless. He was good.
Her misery had shrunk her into nothingness, and she rose out of
nothingness cold and bloodless, bearing a thought that she might make a
good youth happy, or nurse him sinking--be of that use. Besides he was a
refuge from the roof of her parents. She shut her eyes on the past, sure
of his goodness; goodness, on her return to some sense of being, she
prized above other virtues, and perhaps she had a fancy that to be allied
to it was to be doing good. After a few months she buried him. From that
day, or it may be, on her marriage day, her heart was Alvan's. Years
later she wrote her version of the story, not sparing herself so much as
she supposed. Providence and her parents were not forgiven. But as we are
in her debt for some instruction, she may now be suffered to go.

     ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS

     A tragic comedian: that is, a grand pretender, a self-deceiver
     Above all things I detest the writing for money
     At the age of forty, men that love love rootedly
     Barriers are for those who cannot fly
     Be good and dull, and please everybody
     Beginning to have a movement to kiss the whip
     Centres of polished barbarism known as aristocratic societies
     Clotilde fenced, which is half a confession
     Comparisons will thrust themselves on minds disordered
     Compromise is virtual death
     Conservative, whose astounded state paralyzes his wrath
     Creatures that wait for circumstances to bring the change
     Dignitary, and he passed under the bondage of that position
     Dissent rings out finely, and approval is a feeble murmur
     Do you judge of heroes as of lesser men?
     Empanelled to deliver verdicts upon the ways of women
     Fantastical
     Finishing touches to the negligence
     Giant Vanity urged Giant Energy to make use of Giant Duplicity
     Gone to pieces with an injured lover's babble
     Gradations appear to be unknown to you
     He had to go, he must, he has to be always going
     He stormed her and consented to be beaten
     Hesitating strangeness that sometimes gathers during absences
     His violent earnestness, his imperial self-confidence
     His apparent cynicism is sheer irritability
     Hosts of men are of the simple order of the comic
     I give my self, I do not sell
     I have learnt as much from light literature as from heavy
     I would wait till he flung you off, and kneel to you
     If you have this creative soul, be the slave of your creature
     Imagination she has, for a source of strength in the future days
     Looking on him was listening
     Love the difficulty better than the woman
     Men in love are children with their mistresses
     Metaphysician's treatise on Nature: a torch to see the sunrise
     Music in Italy? Amorous and martial, brainless and monotonous
     Night has little mercy for the self-reproachful
     Not much esteem for non-professional actresses
     Not in a situation that could bear of her blaming herself
     O for yesterday!
     Pact between cowardice and comfort under the title of expediency
     Philosophy skimmed, and realistic romances deep-sounded
     Polished barbarism
     Professional widows
     Providence and her parents were not forgiven
     Scorned him for listening to the hesitations (hers)
     Self-consoled when they are not self-justified
     She ran through delusion and delusion, exhausting each
     She felt in him a maker of facts
     Strength in love is the sole sincerity
     The worst of omens is delay
     The way is clear: we have only to take the step
     The brainless in Art and in Statecraft
     Time is due to us, and the minutes are our gold slipping away
     Time and strength run to waste in retarding the inevitable
     To have no sympathy with the playful mind is not to have a mind
     Trick for killing time without hurting him
     Two wishes make a will
     Venerated by his followers, well hated by his enemies
     Want of courage is want of sense
     We shall not be rich--nor poor
     Weak souls are much moved by having the pathos on their side
     Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?
     Win you--temperately, let us hope; by storm, if need be
     Work of extravagance upon perceptibly plain matter
     World voluntarily opens a path to those who step determinedly






DIANA OF THE CROSSWAYS

By George Meredith

1897




CONTENTS

BOOK 1.
I.        OF DIARIES AND DIARISTS TOUCHING THE HEROINE
II.       AN IRISH BALL
III.      THE INTERIOR OF MR. REDWORTH AND THE EXTERIOR OF MR. SULLIVAN
          SMITH
IV.       CONTAINING HINTS OF DIANA'S EXPERIENCES AND OF WHAT THEY LED TO
V.        CONCERNING THE SCRUPULOUS GENTLEMAN WHO CAME TOO LATE
VI.       THE COUPLE
VII.      THE CRISIS
VIII.     IN WHICH IS EXHIBITED HOW A PRACTICAL MAN AND A DIVINING WOMAN
          LEARN TO RESPECT ONE ANOTHER

BOOK 2.
IX.       SHOWS HOW A POSITION OF DELICACY FOR A LADY AND GENTLEMAN WAS
          MET IN SIMPLE FASHION WITHOUT HURT TO EITHER.
X.        THE CONFLICT OF THE NIGHT
XI.       RECOUNTS THE JOURNEY IN A CHARIOT, WITH A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF
          DIALOGUE, AND A SMALL INCIDENT ON THE ROAD
XII.      BETWEEN EMMA AND DIANA
XIII.     TOUCHING THE FIRST DAYS OF HER PROBATION
XIV.      GIVING GLIMPSES OF DIANA UNDER HER CLOUD BEFORE THE WORLD AND
          OF HER FURTHER APPRENTICESHIP
XV.       INTRODUCES THE HON. PERCY DACIER
XVI.      TREATS OF A MIDNIGHT BELL, AND OF A SCENE OF EARLY MORNING
XVII.     THE PRINCESS EGERIA

BOOK 3.
XVIII.    THE AUTHORESS
XIX.      A DRIVE IN SUNLIGHT AND A DRIVE IN MOONLIGHT
XX.       DIANA'S NIGHT-WATCH IN THE CHAMBER OF DEATH
XXI.      THE YOUNG MINISTER OF STATE
XXII.     BETWEEN DIANA AND DACIER : THE WIND EAST OVER BLEAK LAND
XXIII.    RECORDS A VISIT TO DIANA FROM ONE OF THE WORLD'S GOOD WOMEN
XXIV.     INDICATES A SOUL PREPARED FOR DESPERATION
XXV.      ONCE MORE THE CROSSWAYS AND A CHANGE OF TURNINGS
XXVI.     IN WHICH A DISAPPOINTED LOVER RECEIVES A MULTITUDE OF LESSONS


BOOK 5.
XXXVI.    IS CONCLUSIVE AS TO THE HEARTLESSNESS OF WOMEN WITH BRAINS
XXXVII.   AN EXHIBITION OF SOME CHAMPIONS OF THE STRICKEN LADY
XXXVIII.  CONVALESCENCE OF A HEALTHY MIND DISTRAUGHT
XXXIX.    OF NATURE WITH ONE OF HER CULTIVATED DAUGHTERS AND A SHORT
          EXCURSION IN ANTI-CLIMAX
XL.       IN WHICH WE SEE NATURE MAKING OF A WOMAN A MAID AGAIN, AND A
          THRICE WHIMSICAL
XLI.      CONTAINS A REVELATION OF THE ORIGIN OF THE TIGRESS IN DIANA
XLII.     THE PENULTIMATE : SHOWING A FINAL STRUGGLE FOR LIBERTY AND RUN
          INTO HARNESS
XLIII.    NUPTIAL CHAPTER: AND OF HOW A BARELY WILLING WOMAN WAS LED TO
          BLOOM WITH NUPTIAL SENTIMENT





        A lady of high distinction for wit and beauty,
        the daughter of an illustrious Irish House,
        came under the shadow of a calumny. It has
        latterly been examined and exposed as baseless.
        The story of Diana of the Crossways is to be read
        as fiction.




CHAPTER I

OF DIARIES AND DIARISTS TOUCHING THE HEROINE

Among the Diaries beginning with the second quarter of our century, there
is frequent mention of a lady then becoming famous for her beauty and her
wit: 'an unusual combination,' in the deliberate syllables of one of the
writers, who is, however, not disposed to personal irony when speaking of
her. It is otherwise in his case and a general fling at the sex we may
deem pardonable, for doing as little harm to womankind as the stone of an
urchin cast upon the bosom of mother Earth; though men must look some day
to have it returned to them, which is a certainty; and indeed full surely
will our idle-handed youngster too, in his riper season; be heard
complaining of a strange assault of wanton missiles, coming on him he
knows not whence; for we are all of us distinctly marked to get back what
we give, even from the thing named inanimate nature.

The 'LEAVES FROM THE DIARY OF HENRY WILMERS' are studded with examples of
the dinner-table wit of the time, not always worth quotation twice; for
smart remarks have their measured distances, many requiring to be a brule
pourpoint, or within throw of the pistol, to make it hit; in other words,
the majority of them are addressed directly to our muscular system, and
they have no effect when we stand beyond the range. On the contrary, they
reflect sombrely on the springs of hilarity in the generation preceding
us; with due reserve of credit, of course, to an animal vivaciousness
that seems to have wanted so small an incitement. Our old yeomanry
farmers--returning to their beds over ferny commons under bright
moonlight from a neighbour's harvest-home, eased their bubbling breasts
with a ready roar not unakin to it. Still the promptness to laugh is an
excellent progenitorial foundation for the wit to come in a people; and
undoubtedly the diarial record of an imputed piece of wit is witness to
the spouting of laughter. This should comfort us while we skim the
sparkling passages of the 'Leaves.' When a nation has acknowledged that
it is as yet but in the fisticuff stage of the art of condensing our
purest sense to golden sentences, a readier appreciation will be extended
to the gift: which is to strike not the dazzled eyes, the unanticipating
nose, the ribs, the sides, and stun us, twirl us, hoodwink, mystify,
tickle and twitch, by dexterities of lingual sparring and shuffling, but
to strike roots in the mind, the Hesperides of good things. We shall then
set a price on the 'unusual combination.' A witty woman is a treasure; a
witty Beauty is a power. Has she actual beauty, actual wit?--not simply a
tidal material beauty that passes current any pretty flippancy or
staggering pretentiousness? Grant. the combination, she will appear a
veritable queen of her period, fit for homage; at least meriting a
disposition to believe the best of her, in the teeth of foul rumour;
because the well of true wit is truth itself, the gathering of the
precious drops of right reason, wisdom's lightning; and no soul
possessing and dispensing it can justly be a target for the world,
however well armed the world confronting her. Our temporary world, that
Old Credulity and stone-hurling urchin in one, supposes it possible for a
woman to be mentally active up to the point of spiritual clarity and also
fleshly vile; a guide to life and a biter at the fruits of death; both
open mind and hypocrite. It has not yet been taught to appreciate a
quality certifying to sound citizenship as authoritatively as acres of
land in fee simple, or coffers of bonds, shares and stocks, and a more
imperishable guarantee. The multitudes of evil reports which it takes for
proof, are marshalled against her without question of the nature of the
victim, her temptress beauty being a sufficiently presumptive delinquent.
It does not pretend to know the whole, or naked body of the facts; it
knows enough for its furry dubiousness; and excepting the sentimental of
men, a rocket-headed horde, ever at the heels of fair faces for ignition,
and up starring away at a hint of tearfulness; excepting further by
chance a solid champion man, or some generous woman capable of faith in
the pelted solitary of her sex, our temporary world blows direct East on
her shivering person. The scandal is warrant for that; the circumstances
of the scandal emphasize the warrant. And how clever she is! Cleverness
is an attribute of the selecter missionary lieutenants of Satan. We pray
to be defended from her cleverness: she flashes bits of speech that catch
men in their unguarded corner. The wary stuff their ears, the stolid bid
her best sayings rebound on her reputation. Nevertheless the world, as
Christian, remembers its professions, and a portion of it joins the burly
in morals by extending to her a rough old charitable mercifulness; better
than sentimental ointment, but the heaviest blow she has to bear, to a
character swimming for life.

That the lady in question was much quoted, the Diaries and Memoirs
testify. Hearsay as well as hearing was at work to produce the abundance;
and it was a novelty in England, where (in company) the men are the
pointed talkers, and the women conversationally fair Circassians. They
are, or they know that they should be; it comes to the same. Happily our
civilization has not prescribed the veil to them. The mutes have here and
there a sketch or label attached to their names: they are 'strikingly
handsome'; they are 'very good-looking'; occasionally they are noted as
'extremely entertaining': in what manner, is inquired by a curious
posterity, that in so many matters is left unendingly to jump the empty
and gaping figure of interrogation over its own full stop. Great ladies
must they be, at the web of politics, for us to hear them cited
discoursing. Henry Wilmers is not content to quote the beautiful Mrs.
Warwick, he attempts a portrait. Mrs. Warwick is 'quite Grecian.' She
might 'pose for a statue.' He presents her in carpenter's lines, with a
dab of school-box colours, effective to those whom the Keepsake fashion
can stir. She has a straight nose, red lips, raven hair, black eyes, rich
complexion, a remarkably fine bust, and she walks well, and has an
agreeable voice; likewise 'delicate extremities.' The writer was created
for popularity, had he chosen to bring his art into our literary market.

Perry Wilkinson is not so elaborate: he describes her in his
'Recollections' as a splendid brune, eclipsing all the blondes coming
near her: and 'what is more, the beautiful creature can talk.' He
wondered, for she was young, new to society. Subsequently he is rather
ashamed of his wonderment, and accounts for it by 'not having known she
was Irish.' She 'turns out to be Dan Merion's daughter.'

We may assume that he would have heard if she had any whiff of a brogue.
Her sounding of the letter R a trifle scrupulously is noticed by Lady
Pennon: 'And last, not least, the lovely Mrs. Warwick, twenty minutes
behind the dinner-hour, and r-r-really fearing she was late.'

After alluding to the soft influence of her beauty and ingenuousness on
the vexed hostess, the kindly old marchioness adds, that it was no wonder
she was late, 'for just before starting from home she had broken loose
from her husband for good, and she entered the room absolutely
houseless!' She was not the less 'astonishingly brilliant.' Her
observations were often 'so unexpectedly droll I laughed till I cried.'
Lady Pennon became in consequence one of the stanch supporters of Mrs.
Warwick.

Others were not so easily won. Perry Wilkinson holds a balance when it
goes beyond a question of her wit and beauty. Henry Wilmers puts the case
aside, and takes her as he finds her. His cousin, the clever and cynical
Dorset Wilmers, whose method of conveying his opinions without stating
them was famous, repeats on two occasions when her name appears in his
pages, 'handsome, lively, witty'; and the stressed repetition of
calculated brevity while a fiery scandal was abroad concerning the lady,
implies weighty substance--the reservation of a constable's truncheon,
that could legally have knocked her character down to the pavement. We
have not to ask what he judged. But Dorset Wilmers was a political
opponent of the eminent Peer who yields the second name to the scandal,
and politics in his day flushed the conceptions of men. His short
references to 'that Warwick-Dannisburgh affair' are not verbally
malicious. He gets wind of the terms of Lord Dannisburgh's will and
testament, noting them without comment. The oddness of the instrument in
one respect may have served his turn; we have no grounds for thinking him
malignant. The death of his enemy closes his allusions to Mrs. Warwick.
He was growing ancient, and gout narrowed the circle he whirled in. Had
he known this 'handsome, lively, witty' apparition as a woman having
political and social views of her own, he would not, one fancies, have
been so stingless. Our England exposes a sorry figure in his
Reminiscences. He struck heavily, round and about him, wherever he moved;
he had by nature a tarnishing eye that cast discolouration. His unadorned
harsh substantive statements, excluding the adjectives, give his Memoirs
the appearance of a body of facts, attractive to the historic Muse, which
has learnt to esteem those brawny sturdy giants marching club on
shoulder, independent of henchman, in preference to your panoplied
knights with their puffy squires, once her favourites, and wind-filling
to her columns, ultimately found indigestible.

His exhibition of his enemy Lord Dannisburgh, is of the class of noble
portraits we see swinging over inn-portals, grossly unlike in likeness.
The possibility of the man's doing or saying this and that adumbrates the
improbability: he had something of the character capable of it, too much
good sense for the performance. We would think so, and still the shadow
is round our thoughts. Lord Dannisburgh was a man of ministerial tact,
official ability, Pagan morality; an excellent general manager, if no
genius in statecraft. But he was careless of social opinion, unbuttoned,
and a laugher. We know that he could be chivalrous toward women,
notwithstanding the perplexities he brought on them, and this the
Dorset-Diary does not show.

His chronicle is less mischievous as regards Mrs. Warwick than the
paragraphs of Perry Wilkinson, a gossip presenting an image of perpetual
chatter, like the waxen-faced street advertizements of light and easy
dentistry. He has no belief, no disbelief; names the pro-party and the
con; recites the case, and discreetly, over-discreetly; and pictures the
trial, tells the list of witnesses, records the verdict: so the case
went, and some thought one thing, some another thing: only it is reported
for positive that a miniature of the incriminated lady was cleverly
smuggled over to the jury, and juries sitting upon these eases, ever
since their bedazzlement by Phryne, as you know . . . . And then he
relates an anecdote of the husband, said to have been not a bad fellow
before he married his Diana; and the naming of the Goddess reminds him
that the second person in the indictment is now everywhere called 'The
elderly shepherd';--but immediately after the bridal bells this husband
became sour and insupportable, and either she had the trick of putting
him publicly in the wrong, or he lost all shame in playing the churlish
domestic tyrant. The instances are incredible of a gentleman. Perry
Wilkinson gives us two or three; one on the authority of a personal
friend who witnessed the scene; at the Warwick whist-table, where the
fair Diana would let loose her silvery laugh in the intervals. She was
hardly out of her teens, and should have been dancing instead of fastened
to a table. A difference of fifteen years in the ages of the wedded pair
accounts poorly for the husband's conduct, however solemn a business the
game of whist. We read that he burst out at last, with bitter mimicry,
'yang--yang--yang!' and killed the bright laugh, shot it dead. She had
outraged the decorum of the square-table only while the cards were
making. Perhaps her too-dead ensuing silence, as of one striving to bring
back the throbs to a slain bird in her bosom, allowed the gap between the
wedded pair to be visible, for it was dated back to prophecy as soon as
the trumpet proclaimed it.

But a multiplication of similar instances, which can serve no other
purpose than that of an apology, is a miserable vindication of innocence.
The more we have of them the darker the inference. In delicate situations
the chatterer is noxious. Mrs. Warwick had numerous apologists. Those
trusting to her perfect rectitude were rarer. The liberty she allowed
herself in speech and action must have been trying to her defenders in a
land like ours; for here, and able to throw its shadow on our giddy
upper-circle, the rigour of the game of life, relaxed though it may
sometimes appear, would satisfy the staidest whist-player. She did not
wish it the reverse, even when claiming a space for laughter: 'the breath
of her soul,' as she called it, and as it may be felt in the early youth
of a lively nature. She, especially, with her multitude of quick
perceptions and imaginative avenues, her rapid summaries, her sense of
the comic, demanded this aerial freedom.

We have it from Perry Wilkinson that the union of the divergent couple
was likened to another union always in a Court of Law. There was a
distinction; most analogies will furnish one; and here we see England and
Ireland changeing their parts, until later, after the breach, when the
Englishman and Irishwoman resumed a certain resemblance to the yoked
Islands.

Henry Wilmers, I have said, deals exclusively with the wit and charm of
the woman. He treats the scandal as we might do in like manner if her
story had not to be told. But these are not reporting columns; very
little of it shall trouble them. The position is faced, and that is all.
The position is one of the battles incident to women, their hardest. It
asks for more than justice from men, for generosity, our civilization not
being yet of the purest. That cry of hounds at her disrobing by Law is
instinctive. She runs, and they give tongue; she is a creature of the
chase. Let her escape unmangled, it will pass in the record that she did
once publicly run, and some old dogs will persist in thinking her
cunninger than the virtuous, which never put themselves in such
positions, but ply the distaff at home. Never should reputation of woman
trail a scent! How true! and true also that the women of waxwork never
do; and that the women of happy marriages do not; nor the women of holy
nunneries; nor the women lucky in their arts. It is a test of the
civilized to see and hear, and add no yapping to the spectacle.

Thousands have reflected on a Diarist's power to cancel our Burial
Service. Not alone the cleric's good work is upset by him; but the
sexton's as well. He howks the grave, and transforms the quiet worms,
busy on a single poor peaceable body, into winged serpents that disorder
sky and earth with a deadly flight of zig-zags, like military rockets,
among the living. And if these are given to cry too much, to have their
tender sentiments considered, it cannot be said that History requires the
flaying of them. A gouty Diarist, a sheer gossip Diarist, may thus, in
the bequest of a trail of reminiscences, explode our temples (for our
very temples have powder in store), our treasuries, our homesteads, alive
with dynamitic stuff; nay, disconcert our inherited veneration, dislocate
the intimate connexion between the tugged flaxen forelock and a title.

No similar blame is incurred by Henry Wilmers. No blame whatever, one
would say, if he had been less, copious, or not so subservient, in
recording the lady's utterances; for though the wit of a woman may be
terse, quite spontaneous, as this lady's assuredly was here and there,
she is apt to spin it out of a museful mind, at her toilette, or by the
lonely fire, and sometimes it is imitative; admirers should beware of
holding it up to the withering glare of print: she herself, quoting an
obscure maximmonger, says of these lapidary sentences, that they have
merely 'the value of chalk-eggs, which lure the thinker to sit,' and
tempt the vacuous to strain for the like, one might add; besides
flattering the world to imagine itself richer than it is in eggs that are
golden. Henry Wilmers notes a multitude of them. 'The talk fell upon our
being creatures of habit, and how far it was good: She said:--It is there
that we see ourselves crutched between love grown old and indifference
ageing to love.' Critic ears not present at the conversation catch an
echo of maxims and aphorisms overchannel, notwithstanding a feminine
thrill in the irony of 'ageing to love.' The quotation ranks rather among
the testimonies to her charm.

She is fresher when speaking of the war of the sexes. For one sentence
out of many, though we find it to be but the clever literary clothing of
a common accusation: 'Men may have rounded Seraglio Point: they have not
yet doubled Cape Turk.'

It is war, and on the male side, Ottoman war: her experience reduced her
to think so positively. Her main personal experience was in the social
class which is primitively venatorial still, canine under its polish.

She held a brief for her beloved Ireland. She closes a discussion upon
Irish agitation by saying rather neatly: 'You have taught them it is
English as well as common human nature to feel an interest in the dog
that has bitten you.'

The dog periodically puts on madness to win attention; we gather then
that England, in an angry tremour, tries him with water-gruel to prove
him sane.

Of the Irish priest (and she was not of his retinue), when he was deemed
a revolutionary, Henry Wilmers notes her saying: 'Be in tune with him; he
is in the key-note for harmony. He is shepherd, doctor, nurse, comforter,
anecdotist and fun-maker to his poor flock; and you wonder they see the
burning gateway of their heaven in him? Conciliate the priest.'

It has been partly done, done late, when the poor flock have found their
doctoring and shepherding at other hands: their 'bulb-food and fiddle,'
that she petitioned for, to keep them from a complete shaving off their
patch of bog and scrub soil, without any perception of the tremulous
transatlantic magnification of the fiddle, and the splitting discord of
its latest inspiriting jig.

And she will not have the consequences of the 'weariful old Irish duel
between Honour and Hunger judged by bread and butter juries.'

She had need to be beautiful to be tolerable in days when Englishmen
stood more openly for the strong arm to maintain the Union. Her troop of
enemies was of her summoning.

Ordinarily her topics were of wider range, and those of a woman who mixed
hearing with reading, and observation with her musings. She has no
doleful ejaculatory notes, of the kind peculiar to women at war,
containing one-third of speculative substance to two of sentimental--a
feminine plea for comprehension and a squire; and it was probably the
reason (as there is no reason to suppose an emotional cause) why she
exercised her evident sway over the mind of so plain and straightforward
an Englishman as Henry Wilmers. She told him that she read rapidly, 'a
great deal at one gulp,' and thought in flashes--a way with the makers of
phrases. She wrote, she confessed, laboriously. The desire to prune,
compress, overcharge, was a torment to the nervous woman writing under a
sharp necessity for payment. Her songs were shot off on the impulsion;
prose was the heavy task. 'To be pointedly rational,' she said, 'is a
greater difficulty for me than a fine delirium.' She did not talk as if
it would have been so, he remarks. One is not astonished at her appearing
an 'actress' to the flat-minded. But the basis of her woman's nature was
pointed flame: In the fulness of her history we perceive nothing
histrionic. Capricious or enthusiastic in her youth, she never trifled
with feeling; and if she did so with some showy phrases and occasionally
proffered commonplaces in gilt, as she was much excited to do, her moods
of reflection were direct, always large and honest, universal as well as
feminine.

Her saying that 'A woman in the pillory restores the original bark of
brotherhood to mankind,' is no more than a cry of personal anguish. She
has golden apples in her apron. She says of life: 'When I fail to cherish
it in every fibre the fires within are waning,' and that drives like rain
to the roots. She says of the world, generously, if with tapering idea:
'From the point of vision of the angels, this ugly monster, only half out
of slime, must appear our one constant hero.' It can be read maliciously,
but abstain.

She says of Romance: 'The young who avoid that region escape the title of
Fool at the cost of a celestial crown.' Of Poetry: 'Those that have souls
meet their fellows there.'

But she would have us away with sentimentalism. Sentimental people, in
her phrase, 'fiddle harmonics on the strings of sensualism,' to the
delight of a world gaping for marvels of musical execution rather than
for music. For our world is all but a sensational world at present, in
maternal travail of a soberer, a braver, a brighter-eyed. Her reflections
are thus to be interpreted, it seems to me. She says, 'The vices of the
world's nobler half in this day are feminine.' We have to guard against
'half-conceptions of wisdom, hysterical goodness, an impatient
charity'--against the elementary state of the altruistic virtues,
distinguishable as the sickness and writhings of our egoism to cast its
first slough. Idea is there. The funny part of it is our finding it in
books of fiction composed for payment. Manifestly this lady did not
'chameleon' her pen from the colour of her audience: she was not of the
uniformed rank and file marching to drum and fife as gallant interpreters
of popular appetite, and going or gone to soundlessness and the icy
shades.

Touches inward are not absent: 'To have the sense of the eternal in life
is a short flight for the soul. To have had it, is the soul's vitality.'
And also: 'Palliation of a sin is the hunted creature's refuge and final
temptation. Our battle is ever between spirit and flesh. Spirit must
brand the flesh, that it may live.'

You are entreated to repress alarm. She was by preference light-handed;
and her saying of oratory, that 'It is always the more impressive for the
spice of temper which renders it untrustworthy,' is light enough. On
Politics she is rhetorical and swings: she wrote to spur a junior
politician: 'It is the first business of men, the school to mediocrity,
to the covetously ambitious a sty, to the dullard his amphitheatre, arms
of Titans to the desperately enterprising, Olympus to the genius.' What a
woman thinks of women, is the test of her nature. She saw their existing
posture clearly, yet believed, as men disincline to do, that they grow.
She says, that 'In their judgements upon women men are females, voices of
the present (sexual) dilemma.' They desire to have 'a still woman; who
can make a constant society of her pins and needles.' They create by
stoppage a volcano, and are amazed at its eruptiveness. 'We live alone,
and do not much feel it till we are visited.' Love is presumably the
visitor. Of the greater loneliness of women, she says: 'It is due to the
prescribed circumscription of their minds, of which they become aware in
agitation. Were the walls about them beaten down, they would understand
that solitariness is a common human fate and the one chance of growth,
like space for timber.' As to the sensations of women after the beating
down of the walls, she owns that the multitude of the timorous would
yearn in shivering affright for the old prison-nest, according to the
sage prognostic of men; but the flying of a valiant few would form a
vanguard. And we are informed that the beginning of a motive life with
women must be in the head, equally with men (by no means a truism when
she wrote). Also that 'men do not so much fear to lose the hearts of
thoughtful women as their strict attention to their graces.' The present
market is what men are for preserving: an observation of still
reverberating force. Generally in her character of the feminine combatant
there is a turn of phrase, like a dimple near the lips showing her
knowledge that she was uttering but a tart measure of the truth. She had
always too much lambent humour to be the dupe of the passion wherewith,
as she says, 'we lash ourselves into the persuasive speech distinguishing
us from the animals.'

The instances of her drollery are rather hinted by the Diarists for the
benefit of those who had met her and could inhale the atmosphere at a
word. Drolleries, humours, reputed witticisms, are like odours of roast
meats, past with the picking of the joint. Idea is the only vital breath.
They have it rarely, or it eludes the chronicler. To say of the great
erratic and forsaken Lady A****, after she had accepted the consolations
of Bacchus, that her name was properly signified in asterisks 'as she was
now nightly an Ariadne in heaven through her God,' sounds to us a
roundabout, with wit somewhere and fun nowhere. Sitting at the roast we
might have thought differently. Perry Wilkinson is not happier in citing
her reply to his compliment on the reviewers' unanimous eulogy of her
humour and pathos:--the 'merry clown and poor pantaloon demanded of us in
every work of fiction,' she says, lamenting the writer's compulsion to go
on producing them for applause until it is extremest age that knocks
their knees. We are informed by Lady Pennon of 'the most amusing
description of the first impressions of a pretty English simpleton in
Paris'; and here is an opportunity for ludicrous contrast of the French
and English styles of pushing flatteries--'piping to the charmed animal,'
as Mrs. Warwick terms it in another place: but Lady Pennon was acquainted
with the silly woman of the piece, and found her amusement in the
'wonderful truth' of that representation.

Diarists of amusing passages are under an obligation to paint us a
realistic revival of the time, or we miss the relish. The odour of the
roast, and more, a slice of it is required, unless the humorous thing be
preternaturally spirited to walk the earth as one immortal among a number
less numerous than the mythic Gods. 'He gives good dinners,' a candid old
critic said, when asked how it was that he could praise a certain poet.
In an island of chills and fogs, coelum crebris imbribus ac nebulis
foedum, the comic and other perceptions are dependent on the stirring of
the gastric juices. And such a revival by any of us would be impolitic,
were it a possible attempt, before our systems shall have been fortified
by philosophy. Then may it be allowed to the Diarist simply to relate,
and we can copy from him.

Then, ah! then, moreover, will the novelist's Art, now neither blushless
infant nor executive man, have attained its majority. We can then be
veraciously historical, honestly transcriptive. Rose-pink and dirty drab
will alike have passed away. Philosophy is the foe of both, and their
silly cancelling contest, perpetually renewed in a shuffle of extremes,
as it always is where a phantasm falseness reigns, will no longer baffle
the contemplation of natural flesh, smother no longer the soul issuing
out of our incessant strife. Philosophy bids us to see that we are not so
pretty as rose-pink, not so repulsive as dirty drab; and that instead of
everlastingly shifting those barren aspects, the sight of ourselves is
wholesome, bearable, fructifying, finally a delight. Do but perceive that
we are coming to philosophy, the stride toward it will be a giant's--a
century a day. And imagine the celestial refreshment of having a pure
decency in the place of sham; real flesh; a soul born active,
wind-beaten, but ascending. Honourable will fiction then appear;
honourable, a fount of life, an aid to life, quick with our blood. Why,
when you behold it you love it--and you will not encourage it?--or only
when presented by dead hands? Worse than that alternative dirty drab,
your recurring rose-pink is rebuked by hideous revelations of the filthy
foul; for nature will force her way, and if you try to stifle her by
drowning, she comes up, not the fairest part of her uppermost! Peruse
your Realists--really your castigators for not having yet embraced
Philosophy. As she grows in the flesh when discreetly tended, nature is
unimpeachable, flower-eke, yet not too decoratively a flower; you must
have her with the stem, the thorns, the roots, and the fat bedding of
roses. In this fashion she grew, says historical fiction; thus does she
flourish now, would say the modern transcript, reading the inner as well
as exhibiting the outer.

And how may you know that you have reached to Philosophy? You touch her
skirts when you share her hatred of the sham decent, her derision of
sentimentalism. You are one with her when--but I would not have you a
thousand years older! Get to her, if in no other way, by the sentimental
route:--that very winding path, which again and again brings you round to
the point of original impetus, where you have to be unwound for another
whirl; your point of original impetus being the grossly material, not at
all the spiritual. It is most true that sentimentalism springs from the
former, merely and badly aping the latter,--fine flower, or pinnacle
flame-spire, of sensualism that it is, could it do other? and
accompanying the former it traverses tracts of desert here and there
couching in a garden, catching with one hand at fruits, with another at
colours; imagining a secret ahead, and goaded by an appetite, sustained
by sheer gratifications. Fiddle in harmonics as it may, it will have
these gratifications at all costs. Should none be discoverable, at once
you are at the Cave of Despair, beneath the funereal orb of Glaucoma, in
the thick midst of poniarded, slit-throat, rope-dependant figures,
placarded across the bosom Disillusioned, Infidel, Agnostic, Miserrimus.
That is the sentimental route to advancement. Spirituality does not light
it; evanescent dreams: are its oil-lamps, often with wick askant in the
socket.

A thousand years! You may count full many a thousand by this route before
you are one with divine Philosophy. Whereas a single flight of brains
will reach and embrace her; give you the savour of Truth, the right use
of the senses, Reality's infinite sweetness; for these things are in
philosophy; and the fiction which is the summary of actual Life, the
within and without of us, is, prose or verse, plodding or soaring,
philosophy's elect handmaiden. To such an end let us bend our aim to
work, knowing that every form of labour, even this flimsiest, as you
esteem it, should minister to growth. If in any branch of us we fail in
growth, there is, you are aware, an unfailing aboriginal democratic old
monster that waits to pull us down; certainly the branch, possibly the
tree; and for the welfare of Life we fall. You are acutely conscious of
yonder old monster when he is mouthing at you in politics. Be wary of him
in the heart; especially be wary of the disrelish of brainstuff. You must
feed on something. Matter that is not nourishing to brains can help to
constitute nothing but the bodies which are pitched on rubbish heaps.
Brainstuff is not lean stuff;--the brainstuff of fiction is internal
history, and to suppose it dull is the profoundest of errors; how deep,
you will understand when I tell you that it is the very football of the
holiday-afternoon imps below. They kick it for pastime; they are
intelligences perverted. The comic of it, the adventurous, the tragic,
they make devilish, to kindle their Ogygian hilarity. But--sharply comic,
adventurous, instructively tragic, it is in the interwinding with human
affairs, to give a flavour of the modern day reviving that of our Poet,
between whom and us yawn Time's most hollow jaws. Surely we owe a little
to Time, to cheer his progress; a little to posterity, and to our
country. Dozens of writers will be in at yonder yawning breach, if only
perusers will rally to the philosophic standard. They are sick of the
woodeny puppetry they dispense, as on a race-course to the roaring
frivolous. Well, if not dozens, half-dozens; gallant pens are alive; one
can speak of them in the plural. I venture to say that they would be
satisfied with a dozen for audience, for a commencement. They would
perish of inanition, unfed, unapplauded, amenable to the laws perchance
for an assault on their last remaining pair of ears or heels, to hold
them fast. But the example is the thing; sacrifices must be expected. The
example might, one hopes, create a taste. A great modern writer, of
clearest eye and head, now departed, capable in activity of presenting
thoughtful women, thinking men, groaned over his puppetry, that he dared
not animate them, flesh though they were, with the fires of positive
brainstuff. He could have done it, and he is of the departed! Had he
dared, he would (for he was Titan enough) have raised the Art in dignity
on a level with History; to an interest surpassing the narrative of
public deeds as vividly as man's heart and brain in their union excel his
plain lines of action to eruption. The everlasting pantomime, suggested
by Mrs. Warwick in her exclamation to Perry Wilkinson, is derided, not
unrighteously, by our graver seniors. They name this Art the pasture of
idiots, a method for idiotizing the entire population which has taken to
reading; and which soon discovers that it can write likewise, that sort
of stuff at least. The forecast may be hazarded, that if we do not
speedily embrace Philosophy in fiction, the Art is doomed to extinction,
under the shining multitude of its professors. They are fast capping the
candle. Instead, therefore, of objurgating the timid intrusions of
Philosophy, invoke her presence, I pray you. History without her is the
skeleton map of events: Fiction a picture of figures modelled on no
skeleton-anatomy. But each, with Philosophy in aid, blooms, and is
humanly shapely. To demand of us truth to nature, excluding Philosophy,
is really to bid a pumpkin caper. As much as legs are wanted for the
dance, Philosophy is required to make our human nature credible and
acceptable. Fiction implores you to heave a bigger breast and take her in
with this heavenly preservative helpmate, her inspiration and her
essence. You have to teach your imagination of the feminine image you
have set up to bend your civilized knees to, that it must temper its
fastidiousness, shun the grossness of the over-dainty. Or, to speak in
the philosophic tongue, you must turn on yourself, resolutely track and
seize that burrower, and scrub and cleanse him; by which process, during
the course of it, you will arrive at the conception of the right heroical
woman for you to worship: and if you prove to be of some spiritual
stature, you may reach to an ideal of the heroical feminine type for the
worship of mankind, an image as yet in poetic outline only, on our upper
skies.

'So well do we know ourselves, that we one and all determine to know a
purer,' says the heroine of my columns. Philosophy in fiction tells,
among various other matters, of the perils of this intimate acquaintance
with a flattering familiar in the 'purer'--a person who more than ceases
to be of else to us after his ideal shall have led up men from their
flint and arrowhead caverns to intercommunicative daylight. For when the
fictitious creature has performed that service of helping to civilize the
world, it becomes the most dangerous of delusions, causing first the
individual to despise the mass, and then to join the mass in crushing the
individual. Wherewith let us to our story, the froth being out of the
bottle.




CHAPTER II

AN IRISH BALL

In the Assembly Rooms of the capital city of the Sister Island there was
a public Ball, to celebrate the return to Erin of a British hero of Irish
blood, after his victorious Indian campaign; a mighty struggle splendidly
ended; and truly could it be said that all Erin danced to meet him; but
this was the pick of the dancing, past dispute the pick of the supping.
Outside those halls the supping was done in Lazarus fashion, mainly
through an excessive straining of the organs of hearing and vision, which
imparted the readiness for more, declared by physicians to be the state
inducing to sound digestion. Some one spied the figure of the hero at the
window and was fed; some only to hear the tale chewed the cud of it; some
told of having seen him mount the steps; and sure it was that at an hour
of the night, no matter when, and never mind a drop or two of cloud, he
would come down them again, and have an Irish cheer to freshen his
pillow. For 'tis Ireland gives England her soldiers, her generals too.
Farther away, over field and bogland, the whiskies did their excellent
ancient service of watering the dry and drying the damp, to the toast of
'Lord Larrian, God bless him! he's an honour to the old country!' and a
bit of a sigh to follow, hints of a story, and loud laughter, a drink, a
deeper sigh, settling into conversation upon the brave Lord Larrian's
deeds, and an Irish regiment he favoured--had no taste for the enemy
without the backing of his 'boys.' Not he. Why, he'd never march to
battle and they not handy; because when he struck he struck hard, he
said. And he has a wound on the right hip and two fingers off his left
hand; has bled for England, to show her what Irishmen are when they're
well treated.

The fine old warrior standing at the upper end of the long saloon, tall,
straight, grey-haired, martial in his aspect and decorations, was worthy
to be the flag-pole for enthusiasm. His large grey eyes lightened from
time to time as he ranged them over the floating couples, and dropped a
word of inquiry to his aide, Captain Sir Lukin Dunstane, a good model of
a cavalry officer, though somewhat a giant, equally happy with his chief
in passing the troops of animated ladies under review. He named as many
as were known to him. Reviewing women exquisitely attired for inspection,
all variously and charmingly smiling, is a relief after the monotonous
regiments of men. Ireland had done her best to present the hero of her
blood an agreeable change; and he too expressed a patriotic satisfaction
on hearing that the faces most admired by him were of the native isle. He
looked upon one that came whirling up to him on a young officer's arm and
swept off into the crowd of tops, for a considerable while before he put
his customary question. She was returning on the spin when he said,

'Who is she?'

Sir Lukin did not know. 'She 's a new bird; she nodded to my wife; I'll
ask.'

He manoeuvred a few steps cleverly to where his wife reposed. The
information he gathered for the behoof of his chief was, that the
handsome creature answered to the name of Miss Merion; Irish; aged
somewhere between eighteen and nineteen; a dear friend of his wife's, and
he ought to have remembered her; but she was a child when he saw her
last.

'Dan Merion died, I remember, about the day of my sailing for India,'
said the General. 'She may be his daughter.'

The bright cynosure rounded up to him in the web of the waltz, with her
dark eyes for Lady Dunstane, and vanished again among the twisting
columns.

He made his way, handsomely bumped by an apologetic pair, to Lady
Dunstane, beside whom a seat was vacated for him; and he trusted she had
not over-fatigued herself.

'Confess,' she replied, 'you are perishing to know more than Lukin has
been able to tell you. Let me hear that you admire her: it pleases me;
and you shall hear what will please you as much, I promise you, General.'

'I do. Who wouldn't?' said he frankly.

'She crossed the Channel expressly to dance here tonight at the public
Ball in honour of you.'

'Where she appears, the first person falls to second rank, and accepts it
humbly.'

'That is grandly spoken.'

'She makes everything in the room dust round a blazing jewel.'

'She makes a poet of a soldier. Well, that you may understand how pleased
I am, she is my dearest friend, though she is younger than I, as may be
seen; she is the only friend I have. I nursed her when she was an infant;
my father and Mr. Dan Merion were chums. We were parted by my marriage
and the voyage to India. We have not yet exchanged a syllable: she was
snapped up, of course, the moment she entered the room. I knew she would
be a taking girl: how lovely, I did not guess. You are right, she
extinguishes the others. She used to be the sprightliest of living
creatures, and to judge by her letters, that has not faded. She 's in the
market, General.'

Lord Larrian nodded to everything he heard, concluding with a mock
doleful shake of the head. 'My poorest subaltern!' he sighed, in the
theatrical but cordially melancholy style of green age viewing Cytherea's
market.

His poorest subaltern was richer than he in the wherewithal to bid for
such prizes.

'What is her name in addition to Merion?'

'Diana Antonia Merion. Tony to me, Diana to the world.'

'She lives over there?'

'In England, or anywhere; wherever she is taken in. She will live, I
hope, chiefly with me.'

'And honest Irish?'

'Oh, she's Irish.'

'Ah!' the General was Irish to the heels that night.

Before further could be said the fair object of the dialogue came darting
on a trip of little runs, both hands out, all her face one tender sparkle
of a smile; and her cry proved the quality of her blood: 'Emmy! Emmy! my
heart!'

'My dear Tony!

I should not have come but for the hope of seeing you here.'

Lord Larrian rose and received a hurried acknowledgement of his courtesy
from the usurper of his place.

'Emmy! we might kiss and hug; we're in Ireland. I burn to! But you're not
still ill, dear? Say no! That Indian fever must have gone. You do look a
dash pale, my own; you're tired.'

'One dance has tired me. Why were you so late?'

'To give the others a chance? To produce a greater impression by
suspense? No and no. I wrote you I was with the Pettigrews. We caught the
coach, we caught the boat, we were only two hours late for the Ball; so
we did wonders. And good Mrs. Pettigrew is, pining somewhere to complete
her adornment. I was in the crush, spying for Emmy, when Mr. Mayor
informed me it was the duty of every Irishwoman to dance her toes off, if
she 'd be known for what she is. And twirl! a man had me by the waist,
and I dying to find you.'

'Who was the man?'

'Not to save these limbs from the lighted stake could I tell you!'

'You are to perform a ceremonious bow to Lord Larrian.'

'Chatter first! a little!'

The plea for chatter was disregarded. It was visible that the hero of the
night hung listening and in expectation. He and the Beauty were named to
one another, and they chatted through a quadrille. Sir Lukin introduced a
fellow-Harrovian of old days, Mr. Thomas Redworth, to his wife.

'Our weather-prophet, meteorologist,' he remarked, to set them going;
'you remember, in India, my pointing to you his name in a
newspaper--letter on the subject. He was generally safe for the
cricketing days.'

Lady Dunstane kindly appeared to call it to mind, and she led upon the
them-queried at times by an abrupt 'Eh?' and 'I beg pardon,' for
manifestly his gaze and one of his ears, if not the pair, were given to
the young lady discoursing with Lord Larrian. Beauty is rare; luckily is
it rare, or, judging from its effect on men, and the very stoutest of
them, our world would be internally more distracted planet than we see,
to the perversion of business, courtesy, rights of property, and the
rest. She perceived an incipient victim, of the hundreds she anticipated,
and she very tolerantly talked on: 'The weather and women have some
resemblance they say. Is it true that he who reads the one can read the
other?'

Lord Larrian here burst into a brave old laugh, exclaiming, 'Oh! good!'

Mr. Redworth knitted his thick brows. 'I beg pardon? Ah! women! Weather
and women? No; the one point more variable in women makes all the
difference.'

'Can you tell me what the General laughed at?'

The honest Englishman entered the trap with promptitude. 'She said:--who
is she, may I ask you?'

Lady Dunstane mentioned her name.

Daughter of the famous Dan Merion? The young lady merited examination for
her father's sake. But when reminded of her laughter-moving speech, Mr.
Redworth bungled it; he owned he spoilt it, and candidly stated his
inability to see the fun. 'She said, St. George's Channel in a gale ought
to be called St. Patrick's--something--I missed some point. That
quadrille-tune, the Pastourelle, or something . . .'

'She had experience of the Channel last night,' Lady Dunstane pursued,
and they both, while in seeming converse, caught snatches from their
neighbours, during a pause of the dance.

The sparkling Diana said to Lord Larrian, 'You really decline to make any
of us proud women by dancing to-night?'

The General answered: 'I might do it on two stilts; I can't on one.' He
touched his veteran leg.

'But surely,' said she, 'there's always an inspiration coming to it from
its partner in motion, if one of them takes the step.'

He signified a woeful negative. 'My dear young lady, you say dark things
to grey hairs!'

She rejoined: 'If we were over in England, and you fixed on me the stigma
of saying dark things, I should never speak without being thought
obscure.'

'It's because you flash too brightly for them.'

'I think it is rather the reminiscence of the tooth that received a stone
when it expected candy.'

Again the General laughed; he looked pleased and warmed. 'Yes, that 's
their way, that 's their way!' and he repeated her words to himself,
diminishing their importance as he stamped them on his memory, but so
heartily admiring the lovely speaker, that he considered her wit an
honour to the old country, and told her so. Irish prevailed up to
boiling-point.

Lady Dunstane, not less gratified, glanced up at Mr. Redworth, whose
brows bore the knot of perplexity over a strong stare. He, too, stamped
the words on his memory, to see subsequently whether they had a vestige
of meaning. Terrifically precocious, he thought her. Lady Dunstane, in
her quick sympathy with her friend, read the adverse mind in his face.
And her reading of the mind was right, wrong altogether her deduction of
the corresponding sentiment.

Music was resumed to confuse the hearing of the eavesdroppers.

They beheld a quaint spectacle: a gentleman, obviously an Englishman,
approached, with the evident intention of reminding the Beauty of the
night of her engagement to him, and claiming her, as it were, in the
lion's jaws. He advanced a foot, withdrew it, advanced, withdrew; eager
for his prize, not over-enterprising; in awe of the illustrious General
she entertained--presumeably quite unaware of the pretender's presence;
whereupon a voice was heard: 'Oh! if it was minuetting you meant before
the lady, I'd never have disputed your right to perform, sir.' For it
seemed that there were two claimants in the field, an Irishman and an
Englishman; and the former, having a livelier sense of the situation,
hung aloof in waiting for her eye; the latter directed himself to strike
bluntly at his prey; and he continued minuetting, now rapidly blinking,
flushed, angry, conscious of awkwardness and a tangle, incapable of
extrication. He began to blink horribly under the raillery of his rival.
The General observed him, but as an object remote and minute, a fly or
gnat. The face of the brilliant Diana was entirely devoted to him she
amused.

Lady Dunstane had the faint lines of a decorous laugh on her lips, as she
said: 'How odd it is that our men show to such disadvantage in a
Ball-room. I have seen them in danger, and there they shine first of any,
and one is proud of them. They should always be facing the elements or in
action.' She glanced at the minuet, which had become a petrified figure,
still palpitating, bent forward, an interrogative reminder.

Mr. Redworth reserved his assent to the proclamation of any English
disadvantage. A whiff of Celtic hostility in the atmosphere put him on
his mettle. 'Wherever the man is tried,' he said.

'My lady!' the Irish gentleman bowed to Lady Dunstane. 'I had the honour
. . . Sullivan Smith . . . at the castle . . .'

She responded to the salute, and Mr. Sullivan Smith proceeded to tell
her, half in speech, half in dots most luminous, of a civil contention
between the English gentleman and himself, as to the possession of the
loveliest of partners for this particular ensuing dance, and that they
had simultaneously made a rush from the Lower Courts, namely, their
cards, to the Upper, being the lady; and Mr. Sullivan Smith partly
founded his preferable claim on her Irish descent, and on his
acquaintance with her eminent defunct father--one of the ever-radiating
stars of his quenchless country.

Lady Dunstane sympathized with him for his not intruding his claim when
the young lady stood pre-engaged, as well as in humorous appreciation of
his imaginative logic.

'There will be dancing enough after supper,' she said.

'If I could score one dance with her, I'd go home supperless and
feasted,' said he. 'And that's not saying much among the hordes of hungry
troopers tip-toe for the signal to the buffet. See, my lady, the
gentleman, as we call him; there he is working his gamut perpetually up
to da capo. Oh! but it's a sheep trying to be wolf; he 's sheep-eyed and
he 's wolf-fanged, pathetic and larcenous! Oh, now! who'd believe
it!--the man has dared . . . I'd as soon think of committing sacrilege in
a cathedral!'

The man was actually; to quote his indignant rival, 'breaching the
fortress,' and pointing out to Diana Merion 'her name on his dirty scrap
of paper': a shocking sight when the lady's recollection was the sole
point to be aimed at, and the only umpire. 'As if all of us couldn't have
written that, and hadn't done it!' Mr. Sullivan Smith groaned disgusted.
He hated bad manners, particularly in cases involving ladies; and the bad
manners of a Saxon fired his antagonism to the race; individual members
of which he boasted of forgiving and embracing, honouring. So the man
blackened the race for him, and the race was excused in the man. But his
hatred of bad manners was vehement, and would have extended to a
fellow-countryman. His own were of the antecedent century, therefore
venerable.

Diana turned from her pursuer with a comic woeful lifting of the brows at
her friend. Lady Dunstane motioned her fan, and Diana came, bending head.

'Are you bound in honour?'

'I don't think I am. And I do want to go on talking with the General. He
is so delightful and modest--my dream of a true soldier!--telling me of
his last big battle, bit by bit, to my fishing.'

'Put off this person for a square dance down the list, and take out Mr.
Redworth--Miss Diana Merlon, Mr. Redworth: he will bring you back to the
General, who must not totally absorb you, or he will forfeit his
popularity.'

Diana instantly struck a treaty with the pertinacious advocate of his
claims, to whom, on his relinquishing her, Mr. Sullivan Smith remarked:
'Oh! sir, the law of it, where a lady's concerned! You're one for
evictions, I should guess, and the anti-human process. It's that letter
of the law that stands between you and me and mine and yours. But you've
got your congee, and my blessing on ye!'

'It was a positive engagement,' said the enemy.

Mr. Sullivan Smith derided him. 'And a pretty partner you've pickled for
yourself when she keeps her positive engagement!'

He besought Lady Dunstane to console him with a turn. She pleaded
weariness. He proposed to sit beside her and divert her. She smiled, but
warned him that she was English in every vein. He interjected: 'Irish men
and English women! though it's putting the cart before the horse--the
copper pennies where the gold guineas should be. So here's the gentleman
who takes the oyster, like the lawyer of the fable. English is he? But we
read, the last shall be first. And English women and Irish men make the
finest coupling in the universe.'

'Well, you must submit to see an Irish woman led out by an English man,'
said Lady Dunstane, at the same time informing the obedient Diana, then
bestowing her hand on Mr. Redworth to please her friend, that he was a
schoolfellow of her husband's.

'Favour can't help coming by rotation, except in very extraordinary
circumstances, and he was ahead of me with you, and takes my due, and
'twould be hard on me if I weren't thoroughly indemnified.' Mr. Sullivan
Smith bowed. 'You gave them just the start over the frozen minute for
conversation; they were total strangers, and he doesn't appear a bad sort
of fellow for a temporary mate, though he's not perfectly sure of his
legs. And that we'll excuse to any man leading out such a fresh young
beauty of a Bright Eyes--like the stars of a winter's night in the frosty
season over Columkill, or where you will, so that's in Ireland, to be
sure of the likeness to her.'

'Her mother was half English.'

'Of course she was. And what was my observation about the coupling? Dan
Merion would make her Irish all over. And she has a vein of Spanish blood
in her; for he had; and she's got the colour.--But you spoke of their
coupling--or I did. Oh, a man can hold his own with an English roly-poly
mate: he's not stifled! But a woman hasn't his power of resistance to
dead weight. She's volatile, she's frivolous, a rattler and
gabbler--haven't I heard what they say of Irish girls over there? She
marries, and it's the end of her sparkling. She must choose at home for a
perfect harmonious partner.'

Lady Dunstane expressed her opinion that her couple danced excellently
together.

'It'd be a bitter thing to see, if the fellow couldn't dance, after
leading her out!' sighed Mr. Sullivan Smith. 'I heard of her over there.
They, call her the Black Pearl, and the Irish Lily--because she's dark.
They rack their poor brains to get the laugh of us.'

'And I listen to you,' said Lady Dunstane.

'Ah! if all England, half, a quarter, the smallest piece of the land were
like you, my lady, I'd be loyal to the finger-nails. Now, is she
engaged?--when I get a word with her?'

'She is nineteen, or nearly, and she ought to have five good years of
freedom, I think.'

'And five good years of serfdom I'd serve to win her!'

A look at him under the eyelids assured Lady Dunstane that there would be
small chance for Mr. Sullivan Smith; after a life of bondage, if she knew
her Diana, in spite of his tongue, his tact, his lively features, and
breadth of shoulders.

Up he sprang. Diana was on Mr. Redworth's arm. 'No refreshments,' she
said; and 'this is my refreshment,' taking the seat of Mr. Sullivan
Smith, who ejaculated,

'I must go and have that gentleman's name.' He wanted a foe.

'You know you are ready to coquette with the General at any moment,
Tony,' said her friend.

'Yes, with the General!'

'He is a noble old man.'

'Superb. And don't say "old man." With his uniform and his height and his
grey head, he is like a glorious October day just before the brown leaves
fall.'

Diana hummed a little of the air of Planxty Kelly, the favourite of her
childhood, as Lady Dunstane well remembered, they smiled together at the
scenes and times it recalled.

'Do you still write verses, Tony?'

'I could about him. At one part of the fight he thought he would be
beaten. He was overmatched in artillery, and it was a cavalry charge he
thundered on them, riding across the field to give the word of command to
the couple of regiments, riddled to threads, that gained the day. That is
life--when we dare death to live! I wonder at men, who are men, being
anything but soldiers! I told you, madre, my own Emmy, I forgave you for
marrying, because it was a soldier.'

'Perhaps a soldier is to be the happy man. But you have not told me a
word of yourself. What has been done with the old Crossways?'

'The house, you know, is mine. And it's all I have: ten acres and the
house, furnished, and let for less than two hundred a year. Oh! how I
long to evict the tenants! They can't have my feeling for the place where
I was born. They're people of tolerably good connections, middling
wealthy, I suppose, of the name of Warwick, and, as far as I can
understand, they stick there to be near the Sussex Downs, for a nephew,
who likes to ride on them. I've a half engagement, barely legible, to
visit them on an indefinite day, and can't bear the idea of strangers
masters in the old house. I must be driven there for shelter, for a roof,
some month. And I could make a pilgrimage in rain or snow just to doat on
the outside of it. That's your Tony.'

'She's my darling.'

'I hear myself speak! But your voice or mine, madre, it's one soul. Be
sure I am giving up the ghost when I cease to be one soul with you, dear
and dearest! No secrets, never a shadow of a deception, or else I shall
feel I am not fit to live. Was I a bad correspondent when you were in
India?'

'Pretty well. Copious letters when you did write.'

'I was shy. I knew I should be writing, to Emmy and another, and only
when I came to the flow could I forget him. He is very finely built; and
I dare say he has a head. I read of his deeds in India and quivered. But
he was just a bit in the way. Men are the barriers to perfect
naturalness, at least, with girls, I think. You wrote to me in the same
tone as ever, and at first I had a struggle to reply. And I, who have
such pride in being always myself!'

Two staring semi-circles had formed, one to front the Hero; the other the
Beauty. These half moons imperceptibly dissolved to replenish, and became
a fixed obstruction.

'Yes, they look,' Diana made answer to Lady Dunstane's comment on the
curious impertinence. She was getting used to it, and her friend had a
gratification in seeing how little this affected her perfect naturalness.

'You are often in the world--dinners, dances?' she said.

'People are kind.'

'Any proposals?'

'Nibbles.'

'Quite heart-free?'

'Absolutely.'

Diana's unshadowed bright face defied all menace of an eclipse.

The block of sturdy gazers began to melt. The General had dispersed his
group of satellites by a movement with the Mayoress on his arm, construed
as the signal for procession to the supper-table.




CHAPTER III

THE INTERIOR OF MR. REDWORTH, AND THE EXTERIOR OF MR. SULLIVAN SMITH

'It may be as well to take Mr. Redworth's arm; you will escape the crush
for you,' said Lady Dunstane to Diana. 'I don't sup. Yes! go! You must
eat, and he is handiest to conduct you.'

Diana thought of her chaperon and the lateness of the hour. She murmured,
to soften her conscience, 'Poor Mrs. Pettigrew!'

And once more Mr. Redworth, outwardly imperturbable, was in the maelstrom
of a happiness resembling tempest. He talked, and knew not what he
uttered. To give this matchless girl the best to eat and drink was his
business, and he performed it. Oddly, for a man who had no loaded design,
marshalling the troops in his active and capacious cranium, he fell upon
calculations of his income, present and prospective, while she sat at the
table and he stood behind her. Others were wrangling for places, chairs,
plates, glasses, game-pie, champagne: she had them; the lady under his
charge to a certainty would have them; so far good; and he had seven
hundred pounds per annum--seven hundred and fifty, in a favourable
aspect, at a stretch . . . .

'Yes, the pleasantest thing to me after working all day is an opera of
Carini's,' she said, in full accord with her taste, 'and Tellio for
tenor, certainly.'

--A fair enough sum for a bachelor: four hundred personal income, and a
prospect of higher dividends to increase it; three hundred odd from his
office, and no immediate prospects of an increase there; no one died
there, no elderly martyr for the advancement of his juniors could be
persuaded to die; they were too tough to think of retiring. Say, seven
hundred and fifty . . . . eight hundred, if the commerce of the country
fortified the Bank his property was embarked in; or eight-fifty or nine
ten. . . .

'I could call him my poet also,' Mr. Redworth agreed with her taste in
poets. 'His letters are among the best ever written--or ever published:
the raciest English I know. Frank, straight out: capital descriptions.
The best English letter-writers are as good as the French--

You don't think so?--in their way, of course. I dare' say we don't
sufficiently cultivate the art. We require the supple tongue a closer
intercourse of society gives.'

--Eight or ten hundred. Comfortable enough for a man in chambers. To
dream of entering as a householder on that sum, in these days, would be
stark nonsense: and a man two removes from a baronetcy has no right to
set his reckoning on deaths:--if he does, he becomes a sort of meditative
assassin. But what were the Fates about when they planted a man of the
ability of Tom Redworth in a Government office! Clearly they intended him
to remain a bachelor for life. And they sent him over to Ireland on
inspection duty for a month to have sight of an Irish Beauty . . . .

'Think war the finest subject for poets?' he exclaimed. 'Flatly no: I
don't think it. I think exactly the reverse. It brings out the noblest
traits in human character? I won't own that even. It brings out some but
under excitement, when you have not always the real man.--Pray don't
sneer at domestic life. Well, there was a suspicion of disdain.--Yes, I
can respect the hero, military or civil; with this distinction, that the
military hero aims at personal reward--'

'He braves wounds and death,' interposed Diana.

'Whereas the civilian hero--'

'Pardon me, let me deny that the soldier-hero aims at a personal reward,'
she again interposed.

'He gets it.'

'If he is not beaten.'

'And then he is no longer a hero.'

'He is to me.'

She had a woman's inveterate admiration of the profession of aims. Mr.
Redworth endeavoured to render practicable an opening in her mind to
reason. He admitted the grandeur of the poetry of Homer. We are a few
centuries in advance of Homer. We do not slay damsels for a sacrifice to
propitiate celestial wrath; nor do we revel in details of slaughter. He
reasoned with her; he repeated stories known to him of civilian heroes,
and won her assent to the heroical title for their deeds, but it was
languid, or not so bright as the deeds deserved--or as the young lady
could look; and he insisted on the civilian hero, impelled by some
unconscious motive to make her see the thing he thought, also the thing
he was--his plain mind and matter-of-fact nature. Possibly she caught a
glimpse of that. After a turn of fencing, in which he was impressed by
the vibration of her tones when speaking of military heroes, she quitted
the table, saying: 'An argument between one at supper and another handing
plates, is rather unequal if eloquence is needed. As Pat said to the
constable, when his hands were tied, You beat me with the fists, but my
spirit is towering and kicks freely.'

--Eight hundred? a thousand a year, two thousand, are as nothing in the
calculation of a householder who means that the mistress of the house
shall have the choicest of the fruits and flowers of the Four Quarters;
and Thomas Redworth had vowed at his first outlook on the world of women,
that never should one of the sisterhood coming under his charge complain
of not having them in profusion. Consequently he was a settled bachelor.
In the character of disengaged and unaspiring philosophical bachelor, he
reviewed the revelations of her character betrayed by the beautiful
virgin devoted to the sanguine coat. The thrill of her voice in speaking
of soldier-heroes shot him to the yonder side of a gulf. Not knowing why,
for he had no scheme, desperate or other, in his head, the least
affrighted of men was frightened by her tastes, and by her aplomb, her
inoffensiveness in freedom of manner and self-sufficiency--sign of purest
breeding: and by her easy, peerless vivacity, her proofs of descent from
the blood of Dan Merion--a wildish blood. The candour of the look of her
eyes in speaking, her power of looking forthright at men, and looking the
thing she spoke, and the play of her voluble lips, the significant repose
of her lips in silence, her weighing of the words he uttered, for a
moment before the prompt apposite reply, down to her simple quotation of
Pat, alarmed him; he did not ask himself why. His manly self was not
intruded on his cogitations. A mere eight hundred or thousand per annum
had no place in that midst. He beheld her quietly selecting the position
of dignity to suit her: an eminent military man, or statesman, or wealthy
nobleman: she had but to choose. A war would offer her the decorated
soldier she wanted. A war! Such are women of this kind! The thought
revolted him, and pricked his appetite for supper. He did service by Mrs.
Pettigrew, to which lady Miss Merion, as she said, promoted him, at the
table, and then began to refresh in person, standing.

'Malkin! that's the fellow's name' he heard close at his ear.

Mr. Sullivan Smith had drained a champagne-glass, bottle in hand, and was
priming the successor to it. He cocked his eye at Mr. Redworth's quick
stare. 'Malkin!' And now we'll see whether the interior of him is grey,
or black, or tabby, or tortoise-shell, or any other colour of the Malkin
breed.'

He explained to Mr. Redworth that he had summoned Mr. Malkin to answer to
him as a gentleman for calling Miss Merion a jilt. 'The man, sir, said in
my hearing, she jilted him, and that's to call the lady a jilt. There's
not a point of difference, not a shade. I overheard him. I happened by
the blessing of Providence to be by when he named her publicly jilt. And
it's enough that she's a lady to have me for her champion. The same if
she had been an Esquimaux squaw. I'll never live to hear a lady
insulted.'

'You don't mean to say you're the donkey to provoke a duel!' Mr. Redworth
burst out gruffly, through turkey and stuffing.

'And an Irish lady, the young Beauty of Erin!' Mr. Sullivan Smith was
flowing on. He became frigid, he politely bowed: 'Two, sir, if you
haven't the grace to withdraw the offensive term before it cools and
can't be obliterated.'

'Fiddle! and go to the deuce!' Mr. Redworth cried.

'Would a soft slap o' the cheek persuade you, sir?'

'Try it outside, and don't bother me with nonsense of that sort at my
supper. If I'm struck, I strike back. I keep my pistols for bandits and
law-breakers. Here,' said Mr. Redworth, better inspired as to the way of
treating an ultra of the isle; 'touch glasses: you're a gentleman, and
won't disturb good company. By-and-by.'

The pleasing prospect of by-and-by renewed in Mr. Sullivan Smith his
composure. They touched the foaming glasses: upon which, in a friendly
manner, Mr. Sullivan Smith proposed that they should go outside as soon
as Mr. Redworth had finished supper-quite finished supper: for the reason
that the term 'donkey' affixed to him was like a minster cap of
schooldays, ringing bells on his topknot, and also that it stuck in his
gizzard.

Mr. Redworth declared the term to be simply hypothetical. 'If you fight,
you're a donkey for doing it. But you won't fight.'

'But I will fight.'

'He won't fight.'

'Then for the honour of your country you must. But I'd rather have him
first, for I haven't drunk with him, and it should be a case of necessity
to put a bullet or a couple of inches of steel through the man you've
drunk with. And what's in your favour, she danced with ye. She seemed to
take to ye, and the man she has the smallest sugar-melting for is sacred
if he's not sweet to me. If he retracts!'

'Hypothetically, No.'

'But supposititiously?'

'Certainly.'

'Then we grasp hands on it. It's Malkin or nothing!' said Mr. Sullivan
Smith, swinging his heel moodily to wander in search of the foe. How one
sane man could name another a donkey for fighting to clear an innocent
young lady's reputation, passed his rational conception.

Sir Lukin hastened to Mr. Redworth to have a talk over old schooldays and
fellows.

'I'll tell you what,' said the civilian, 'There are Irishmen and
Irishmen. I've met cool heads and long heads among them, and you and I
knew Jack Derry, who was good at most things. But the burlesque Irishman
can't be caricatured. Nature strained herself in a 'fit of absurdity to
produce him, and all that Art can do is to copy.'

This was his prelude to an account of Mr. Sullivan Smith, whom, as a
specimen, he rejoiced to have met.

'There's a chance of mischief,' said Sir Lukin. 'I know nothing of the
man he calls Malkin. I'll inquire presently.'

He talked of his prospects, and of the women. Fair ones, in his opinion,
besides Miss Merion were parading; he sketched two or three of his
partners with a broad brush of epithets.

'It won't do for Miss Merion's name to be mixed up in a duel,' said
Redworth.

'Not if she's to make her fortune in England,' said Sir Lukin. 'It's
probably all smoke.'

The remark had hardly escaped him when a wreath of metaphorical smoke,
and fire, and no mean report, startled the company of supping gentlemen.
At the pitch of his voice, Mr. Sullivan Smith denounced Mr. Malkin in
presence for a cur masquerading as a cat.

'And that is not the scoundrel's prime offence. For what d' ye think? He
trumps up an engagement to dance with a beautiful lady, and because she
can't remember, binds her to an oath for a dance to come, and then,
holding her prisoner to 'm, he sulks, the dirty dogcat goes and sulks,
and he won't dance and won't do anything but screech up in corners that
he's jilted. He said the word. Dozens of gentlemen heard the word. And I
demand an apology of Misterr Malkin--or . . ! And none of your guerrier
nodding and bravado, Mister Malkin, at me, if you please. The case is for
settlement between gentlemen.'

The harassed gentleman of the name of Malkin, driven to extremity by the
worrying, stood in braced preparation for the English attitude of
defence. His tormentor drew closer to him.

'Mind, I give you warning, if you lay a finger on me I'll knock you
down,' said he.

Most joyfully Mr. Sullivan Smith uttered a low melodious cry. 'For a
specimen of manners, in an assembly of ladies and gentlemen . . . I ask
ye!' he addressed the ring about him, to put his adversary entirely in
the wrong before provoking the act of war. And then, as one intending
gently to remonstrate, he was on the point of stretching out his finger
to the shoulder of Mr. Malkin, when Redworth seized his arm, saying: 'I
'm your man: me first: you're due to me.'

Mr. Sullivan Smith beheld the vanishing of his foe in a cloud of faces.
Now was he wroth on patently reasonable grounds. He threatened Saxondom.
Man up, man down, he challenged the race of short-legged, thickset,
wooden-gated curmudgeons: and let it be pugilism if their white livers
shivered at the notion of powder and ball. Redworth, in the struggle to
haul him away, received a blow from him. 'And you've got it! you would
have it!' roared the Celt.

'Excuse yourself to the company for a misdirected effort,' Redworth said;
and he observed generally: 'No Irish gentleman strikes a blow in good
company.'

'But that's true as Writ! And I offer excuses--if you'll come along with
me and a couple of friends. The thing has been done before by
torchlight--and neatly.'

'Come along, and come alone,' said Redworth.

A way was cleared for them. Sir Lukin hurried up to Redworth, who had no
doubt of his ability to manage Mr. Sullivan Smith.

He managed that fine-hearted but purely sensational fellow so well that
Lady Dunstane and Diana, after hearing in some anxiety of the hubbub
below, beheld them entering the long saloon amicably, with the nods and
looks of gentlemen quietly accordant.

A little later, Lady Dunstane questioned Redworth, and he smoothed her
apprehensions, delivering himself, much to her comfort, thus: 'In no case
would any lady's name have been raised. The whole affair was nonsensical.
He's a capital fellow of a kind, capable of behaving like a man of the
world and a gentleman. Only he has, or thinks he has, like lots of his
countrymen, a raw wound--something that itches to be grazed. Champagne on
that! . . . Irishmen, as far as I have seen of them, are, like horses,
bundles of nerves; and you must manage them, as you do with all nervous
creatures, with firmness, but good temper. You must never get into a fury
of the nerves yourself with them. Spur and whip they don't want; they'll
be off with you in a jiffy if you try it.

They want the bridle-rein. That seems to me the secret of Irish
character. We English are not bad horsemen. It's a wonder we blunder so
in our management of such a people.'

'I wish you were in a position to put your method to the proof,' said
she.

He shrugged. 'There's little chance of it!'

To reward him for his practical discretion, she contrived that Diana
should give him a final dance; and the beautiful gill smiled quickly
responsive to his appeal. He was, moreover, sensible in her look and
speech that he had advanced in her consideration to be no longer the mere
spinning stick, a young lady's partner. By which he humbly understood
that her friend approved him. A gentle delirium enfolded his brain. A
householder's life is often begun on eight hundred a year: on less: on
much less:--sometimes on nothing but resolution to make a fitting income,
carving out a fortune. Eight hundred may stand as a superior basis. That
sum is a distinct point of vantage. If it does not mean a carriage and
Parisian millinery and a station for one of the stars of society, it
means at any rate security; and then, the heart of the man being strong
and sound . . .

'Yes,' he replied to her, 'I like my experience of Ireland and the Irish;
and better than I thought I should. St. George's Channel ought to be
crossed oftener by both of us.'

'I'm always glad of the signal,' said Diana.

He had implied the people of the two islands. He allowed her
interpretation to remain personal, for the sake of a creeping
deliciousness that it carried through his blood.

'Shall you soon be returning to England?' he ventured to ask.

'I am Lady Dunstane's guest for some months.'

'Then you will. Sir Lukin has an estate in Surrey. He talks of quitting
the Service.'

'I can't believe it!'

His thrilled blood was chilled. She entertained a sentiment amounting to
adoration for the profession of arms!

Gallantly had the veteran General and Hero held on into the night, that
the festivity might not be dashed by his departure; perhaps, to a certain
degree, to prolong his enjoyment of a flattering scene. At last Sir Lukin
had the word from him, and came to his wife. Diana slipped across the
floor to her accommodating chaperon, whom, for the sake of another five
minutes with her beloved Emma, she very agreeably persuaded to walk in the
train of Lord Larrian, and forth they trooped down a pathway of nodding
heads and curtsies, resembling oak and birch-trees under a tempered gale,
even to the shedding of leaves, for here a turban was picked up by Sir
Lukin, there a jewelled ear-ring by the self-constituted attendant, Mr.
Thomas Redworth. At the portico rang a wakening cheer, really worth
hearing. The rain it rained, and hats were formless,' as in the first
conception of the edifice, backs were damp, boots liquidly musical, the
pipe of consolation smoked with difficulty, with much pulling at the stem,
but the cheer arose magnificently, and multiplied itself, touching at the
same moment the heavens and Diana's heart-at least, drawing them together;
for she felt exalted, enraptured, as proud of her countrymen as of their
hero.

'That's the natural shamrock, after the artificial!' she heard Mr.
Redworth say, behind her.

She turned and sent one of her brilliant glances flying over him, in
gratitude for a timely word well said. And she never forgot the remark,
nor he the look.




CHAPTER IV

CONTAINING HINTS OF DIANA'S EXPERIENCES AND OF WHAT THEY LED TO

A fortnight after this memorable Ball the principal actors of both sexes
had crossed the Channel back to England, and old Ireland was left to her
rains from above and her undrained bogs below; her physical and her
mental vapours; her ailments and her bog-bred doctors; as to whom the
governing country trusted they would be silent or discourse humorously.

The residence of Sir Lukin Dunstane, in the county of Surrey, inherited
by him during his recent term of Indian services, was on the hills, where
a day of Italian sky, or better, a day of our breezy South-west, washed
from the showery night, gives distantly a tower to view, and a murky web,
not without colour: the ever-flying banner of the metropolis, the smoke
of the city's chimneys, if you prefer plain language. At a first
inspection of the house, Lady Dunstane did not like it, and it was
advertized to be let, and the auctioneer proclaimed it in his dialect.
Her taste was delicate; she had the sensitiveness of an invalid: twice
she read the stalking advertizement of the attractions of Copsley, and
hearing Diana call it 'the plush of speech,' she shuddered; she decided
that a place where her husband's family had lived ought not to stand
forth meretriciously spangled and daubed, like a show-booth at a fair,
for a bait; though the grandiloquent man of advertizing letters assured
Sir Lukin that a public agape for the big and gaudy mouthful is in no
milder way to be caught; as it is apparently the case. She withdrew the
trumpeting placard. Retract we likewise 'banner of the metropolis.' That
plush of speech haunts all efforts to swell and illuminate citizen prose
to a princely poetic.

Yet Lady Dunstane herself could name the bank of smoke, when looking
North-eastward from her summerhouse, the flag of London: and she was a
person of the critical mind, well able to distinguish between the simple
metaphor and the superobese. A year of habitation induced her to conceal
her dislike of the place in love: cat's love, she owned. Here, she
confessed to Diana, she would wish to live to her end. It seemed remote,
where an invigorating upper air gave new bloom to her cheeks; but she
kept one secret from her friend.

Copsley was an estate of nearly twelve hundred acres, extending across
the ridge of the hills to the slopes North and South. Seven counties
rolled their backs under this commanding height, and it would have tasked
a pigeon to fly within an hour the stretch of country visible at the
Copsley windows. Sunrise to right, sunset leftward, the borders of the
grounds held both flaming horizons. So much of the heavens and of earth
is rarely granted to a dwelling. The drawback was the structure, which
had no charm, scarce a face. 'It is written that I should live in
barracks,' Lady Dunstane said. The colour of it taught white to impose a
sense of gloom. Her cat's love of the familiar inside corners was never
able to embrace the outer walls. Her sensitiveness, too, was racked by
the presentation of so pitiably ugly a figure to the landscape. She
likened it to a coarse-featured country wench, whose cleaning and
decorating of her countenance makes complexion grin and ruggedness yawn.
Dirty, dilapidated, hung with weeds and parasites, it would have been
more tolerable. She tried the effect of various creepers, and they were
as a staring paint. What it was like then, she had no heart to say.

One may, however, fall on a pleasurable resignation in accepting great
indemnities, as Diana bade her believe, when the first disgust began to
ebb. 'A good hundred over there would think it a Paradise for an asylum':
she signified London. Her friend bore such reminders meekly. They were
readers of books of all sorts, political, philosophical, economical,
romantic; and they mixed the diverse readings in thought, after the
fashion of the ardently youthful. Romance affected politics, transformed
economy, irradiated philosophy. They discussed the knotty question, Why
things were not done, the things being confessedly to do; and they cut
the knot: Men, men calling themselves statesmen, declined to perform that
operation, because, forsooth, other men objected to have it performed on
them. And common humanity declared it to be for the common weal! If so,
then it is clearly indicated as a course of action: we shut our eyes
against logic and the vaunted laws of economy. They are the knot we cut;
or would cut, had we the sword. Diana did it to the tune of Garryowen or
Planxty Kelly. O for a despot! The cry was for a beneficent despot,
naturally: a large-minded benevolent despot. In short, a despot to obey
their bidding. Thoughtful young people who think through the heart soon
come to this conclusion. The heart is the beneficent despot they would
be. He cures those miseries; he creates the novel harmony. He sees all
difficulties through his own sanguine hues. He is the musical poet of the
problem, demanding merely to have it solved that he may sing: clear proof
of the necessity for solving it immediately.

Thus far in their pursuit of methods for the government of a nation, to
make it happy, Diana was leader. Her fine ardour and resonance, and more
than the convincing ring of her voice, the girl's impassioned rapidity in
rushing through any perceptible avenue of the labyrinth, or beating down
obstacles to form one, and coming swiftly to some solution, constituted
her the chief of the pair of democratic rebels in questions that
clamoured for instant solution. By dint of reading solid writers, using
the brains they possessed, it was revealed to them gradually that their
particular impatience came perhaps of the most earnest desire to get to a
comfortable termination of the inquiry: the heart aching for mankind
sought a nest for itself. At this point Lady Dunstane took the lead.
Diana had to be tugged to follow. She could not accept a 'perhaps' that
cast dubiousness on her disinterested championship. She protested a
perfect certainty of the single aim of her heart outward. But she
reflected. She discovered that her friend had gone ahead of her.

The discovery was reached, and even acknowledged, before she could
persuade herself to swallow the repulsive truth. O self! self! self! are
we eternally masking in a domino that reveals your hideous old face when
we could be most positive we had escaped you? Eternally! the desolating
answer knelled. Nevertheless the poor, the starving, the overtaxed in
labour, they have a right to the cry of Now! now! They have; and if a cry
could conduct us to the secret of aiding, healing, feeding, elevating
them, we might swell the cry. As it is, we must lay it on our wits
patiently to track and find the secret; and meantime do what the
individual with his poor pittance can. A miserable contribution! sighed
the girl. Old Self was perceived in the sigh. She was haunted.

After all, one must live one's life. Placing her on a lower pedestal in
her self-esteem, the philosophy of youth revived her; and if the
abatement of her personal pride was dispiriting, she began to see an
advantage in getting inward eyes.

'It's infinitely better I should know it, Emmy--I'm a reptile! Pleasure
here, pleasure there, I'm always thinking of pleasure. I shall give up
thinking and take to drifting. Neither of us can do more than open
purses; and mine's lean. If the old Crossways had no tenant, it would be
a purse all mouth. And charity is haunted, like everything we do. Only I
say with my whole strength yes, I am sure, in spite of the men professing
that they are practical, the rich will not move without a goad. I have
and hold--you shall hunger and covet, until you are strong enough to
force my hand:--that 's the speech of the wealthy. And they are
Christians. In name. Well, I thank heaven I'm at war, with myself.'

'You always manage to strike out a sentence worth remembering, Tony,'
said Lady Dunstane. 'At war with ourselves, means the best happiness we
can have.'

It suited her, frail as her health was, and her wisdom striving to the
spiritual of happiness. War with herself was far from happiness in the
bosom of Diana. She wanted external life, action, fields for energies, to
vary the struggle. It fretted and rendered her ill at ease. In her
solitary rides with Sir Lukin through a long winter season, she appalled
that excellent but conventionally-minded gentleman by starting, nay
supporting, theories next to profane in the consideration of a
land-owner. She spoke of Reform: of the Repeal of the Corn Laws as the
simple beginning of the grants due to the people. She had her ideas, of
course, from that fellow Redworth, an occasional visitor at Copsley; and
a man might be a donkey and think what he pleased, since he had a
vocabulary to back his opinions. A woman, Sir Lukin held, was by nature a
mute in politics. Of the thing called a Radical woman, he could not
believe that she was less than monstrous: 'with a nose,' he said; and
doubtless, horse teeth, hatchet jaws, slatternly in the gown, slipshod,
awful. As for a girl, an unmarried, handsome girl, admittedly beautiful,
her interjections, echoing a man, were ridiculous, and not a little
annoying now and them, for she could be piercingly sarcastic. Her
vocabulary in irony was a quiverful. He admired her and liked her
immensely; complaining only of her turn for unfeminine topics. He
pardoned her on the score of the petty difference rankling between them
in reference to his abandonment of his Profession, for here she was
patriotically wrong-headed. Everybody knew that he had sold out in order
to look after his estates of Copsley and Dunena, secondly: and in the
first place, to nurse and be a companion to his wife. He had left her but
four times in five months; he had spent just three weeks of that time
away from her in London. No one could doubt of his having kept his
pledge, although his wife occupied herself with books and notions and
subjects foreign to his taste--his understanding, too, he owned. And
Redworth had approved of his retirement, had a contempt for soldiering.
'Quite as great as yours for civilians, I can tell you,' Sir Lukin said,
dashing out of politics to the vexatious personal subject. Her
unexpressed disdain was ruffling.

'Mr. Redworth recommends work: he respects the working soldier,' said
Diana.

Sir Lukin exclaimed that he had been a working soldier; he was ready to
serve if his country wanted him. He directed her to anathematize Peace,
instead of scorning a fellow for doing the duties next about him: and the
mention of Peace fetched him at a bound back to politics. He quoted a
distinguished Tory orator, to the effect, that any lengthened term of
peace bred maggots in the heads of the people.

'Mr. Redworth spoke of it: he translated something from Aristophanes for
a retort,' said Diana.

'Well, we're friends, eh?' Sir Lukin put forth a hand.

She looked at him surprised at the unnecessary call for a show, of
friendship; she touched his hand with two tips of her fingers, remarking,
'I should think so, indeed.'

He deemed it prudent to hint to his wife that Diana Merion appeared to be
meditating upon Mr. Redworth.

'That is a serious misfortune, if true,' said Lady Dunstane. She thought
so for two reasons: Mr. Redworth generally disagreed in opinion with
Diana, and contradicted her so flatly as to produce the impression of his
not even sharing the popular admiration of her beauty; and, further, she
hoped for Diana to make a splendid marriage. The nibbles threatened to be
snaps and bites. There had been a proposal, in an epistle, a quaint
effusion, from a gentleman avowing that he had seen her, and had not
danced with her on the night of the Irish ball. He was rejected, but
Diana groaned over the task of replying to the unfortunate applicant, so
as not to wound him. 'Shall I have to do this often, I wonder?' she said.

'Unless you capitulate,' said her friend.

Diana's exclamation: 'May I be heart-free for another ten years!'
encouraged Lady Dunstane to suppose her husband quite mistaken.

In the Spring Diana, went on a first pilgrimage to her old home, The
Crossways, and was kindly entertained by the uncle and aunt of a
treasured nephew, Mr. Augustus Warwick. She rode with him on the Downs. A
visit of a week humanized her view of the intruders. She wrote almost
tenderly of her host and hostess to Lady Dunstane; they had but 'the one
fault--of spoiling their nephew.' Him she described as a 'gentlemanly
official,' a picture of him. His age was thirty-four. He seemed 'fond of
her scenery.' Then her pen swept over the Downs like a flying horse. Lady
Dunstane thought no more of the gentlemanly official. He was a barrister
who did not practise: in nothing the man for Diana. Letters came from the
house of the Pettigrews in Kent; from London; from Halford Manor in
Hertfordshire; from Lockton Grange in Lincolnshire: after which they
ceased to be the thrice weekly; and reading the latest of them, Lady
Dunstane imagined a flustered quill. The letter succeeding the omission
contained no excuse, and it was brief. There was a strange interjection,
as to the wearifulness of constantly wandering, like a leaf off the tree.
Diana spoke of looking for a return of the dear winter days at Copsley.
That was her station. Either she must have had some disturbing
experience, or Copsley was dear for a Redworth reason, thought the
anxious peruser; musing, dreaming, putting together divers shreds of
correspondence and testing them with her intimate knowledge of Diana's
character, Lady Dunstane conceived that the unprotected beautiful girl
had suffered a persecution, it might be an insult. She spelt over the
names of the guests at the houses. Lord Wroxeter was of evil report:
Captain Rampan, a Turf captain, had the like notoriety. And it is
impossible in a great house for the hostess to spread her aegis to cover
every dame and damsel present. She has to depend on the women being
discreet, the men civilized.

'How brutal men can be!' was one of Diana's incidental remarks, in a
subsequent letter, relating simply to masculine habits. In those days the
famous ancestral plea of 'the passion for his charmer' had not been
altogether socially quashed down among the provinces, where the bottle
maintained a sort of sway, and the beauty which inflamed the sons of men
was held to be in coy expectation of violent effects upon their boiling
blood. There were, one hears that there still are, remnants of the
pristine male, who, if resisted in their suing, conclude that they are
scorned, and it infuriates them: some also whose 'passion for the
charmer' is an instinct to pull down the standard of the sex, by a bully
imposition of sheer physical ascendancy, whenever they see it flying with
an air of gallant independence: and some who dedicate their lives to a
study of the arts of the Lord Of Reptiles, until they have worked the
crisis for a display of him in person. Assault or siege, they have
achieved their triumphs; they have dominated a frailer system of nerves,
and a young woman without father, or brother, or husband, to defend her,
is cryingly a weak one, therefore inviting to such an order of heroes.
Lady Dunstane was quick-witted and had a talkative husband; she knew a
little of the upper social world of her time. She was heartily glad to
have Diana by her side again.

Not a word of any serious experience was uttered. Only on one occasion
while they conversed, something being mentioned of her tolerance, a flush
of swarthy crimson shot over Diana, and she frowned, with the outcry 'Oh!
I have discovered that I can be a tigress!'

Her friend pressed her hand, saying, 'The cause a good one!'

'Women have to fight.'

Diana said no more. There had been a bad experience of her isolated
position in the world.

Lady Dunstane now indulged a partial hope that Mr. Redworth might see in
this unprotected beautiful girl a person worthy of his esteem. He had his
opportunities, and evidently he liked her. She appeared to take more
cordially to him. She valued the sterling nature of the man. But they
were a hopeless couple, they were so friendly. Both ladies noticed in him
an abstractedness of look, often when conversing, as of a man in
calculation; they put it down to an ambitious mind. Yet Diana said then,
and said always, that it was he who had first taught her the art of
observing. On the whole, the brilliant marriage seemed a fairer prospect
for her; how reasonable to anticipate, Lady Dunstane often thought when
admiring the advance of Diana's beauty in queenliness, for never did
woman carry her head more grandly, more thrillingly make her presence
felt; and if only she had been an actress showing herself nightly on a
London stage, she would before now have met the superb appreciation,
melancholy to reflect upon!

Diana regained her happy composure at Copsley. She had, as she imagined,
no ambition. The dulness of the place conveyed a charm to a nature
recovering from disturbance to its clear smooth flow. Air, light, books,
and her friend, these good things she had; they were all she wanted. She
rode, she walked, with Sir Lukin or Mr. Redworth, for companion; or with
Saturday and Sunday guests, Lord Larrian, her declared admirer, among
them. 'Twenty years younger!' he said to her, shrugging, with a merry
smile drawn a little at the corners to sober sourness; and she vowed to
her friend that she would not have had the heart to refuse him. 'Though,'
said she, 'speaking generally, I cannot tell you what a foreign animal a
husband would appear in my kingdom.' Her experience had wakened a sexual
aversion, of some slight kind, enough to make her feminine pride
stipulate for perfect independence, that she might have the calm out of
which imagination spreads wing. Imagination had become her broader life,
and on such an earth, under such skies, a husband who is not the fountain
of it, certainly is a foreign animal: he is a discordant note. He
contracts the ethereal world, deadens radiancy. He is gross fact, a
leash, a muzzle, harness, a hood; whatever is detestable to the free
limbs and senses. It amused Lady Dunstane to hear Diana say, one evening
when their conversation fell by hazard on her future, that the idea of a
convent was more welcome to her than the most splendid marriage. 'For,'
she added, 'as I am sure I shall never know anything of this love they
rattle about and rave about, I shall do well to keep to my good single
path; and I have a warning within me that a step out of it will be a
wrong one--for me, dearest!'

She wished her view of the yoke to be considered purely personal, drawn
from no examples and comparisons. The excellent Sir Lukin was passing a
great deal of his time in London. His wife had not a word of blame for
him; he was a respectful husband, and attentive when present; but so
uncertain, owing to the sudden pressure of engagements, that Diana, bound
on a second visit to The Crossways, doubted whether she would be able to
quit her friend, whose condition did not allow of her being left solitary
at Copsley. He came nevertheless a day before Diana's appointed departure
on her round of visits. She was pleased with him, and let him see it, for
the encouragement of a husband in the observance of his duties. One of
the horses had fallen lame, so they went out for a walk, at Lady
Dunstane's request. It was a delicious afternoon of Spring, with the full
red disk of sun dropping behind the brown beech-twigs. She remembered
long afterward the sweet simpleness of her feelings as she took in the
scent of wild flowers along the lanes and entered the woods jaws of
another monstrous and blackening experience. He fell into the sentimental
vein, and a man coming from that heated London life to these glorified
woods, might be excused for doing so, though it sounded to her just a
little ludicrous in him. She played tolerantly second to it; she quoted a
snatch of poetry, and his whole face was bent to her, with the petition
that she would repeat the verse. Much struck was this giant ex-dragoon.
Ah! how fine! grand! He would rather hear that than any opera: it was
diviner! 'Yes, the best poetry is,' she assented. 'On your lips,' he
said. She laughed. 'I am not a particularly melodious reciter.' He vowed
he could listen to her eternally, eternally. His face, on a screw of the
neck and shoulders, was now perpetually three-quarters fronting. Ah! she
was going to leave. 'Yes, and you will find my return quite early
enough,' said Diana, stepping a trifle more briskly. His fist was raised
on the length of the arm, as if in invocation. 'Not in the whole of
London is there a woman worthy to fasten your shoe-buckles! My oath on
it! I look; I can't spy one.' Such was his flattering eloquence.

She told him not to think it necessary to pay her compliments. 'And here,
of all places!' They were in the heart of the woods. She found her hand
seized--her waist. Even then, so impossible is it to conceive the
unimaginable even when the apparition of it smites us, she expected some
protesting absurdity, or that he had seen something in her path.--What
did she hear? And from her friend's husband!

If stricken idiotic, he was a gentleman; the tigress she had detected in
her composition did not require to be called forth; half-a-dozen words,
direct, sharp as fangs and teeth, with the eyes burning over them,
sufficed for the work of defence. 'The man who swore loyalty to Emma!'
Her reproachful repulsion of eyes was unmistakeable, withering; as
masterful as a superior force on his muscles.--What thing had he been
taking her for?--She asked it within: and he of himself, in a reflective
gasp. Those eyes of hers appeared as in a cloud, with the wrath above:
she had: the look of a Goddess in anger. He stammered, pleaded across her
flying shoulder--Oh! horrible, loathsome, pitiable to hear! . . . 'A
momentary aberration . . . her beauty . . . he deserved to be shot! . . .
could not help admiring . . . quite lost his head . . on his honour!
never again!'

Once in the roadway, and Copsley visible, she checked her arrowy pace for
breath, and almost commiserated the dejected wretch in her thankfulness
to him for silence. Nothing exonerated him, but at least he had the grace
not to beg secresy. That would have been an intolerable whine of a
poltroon, adding to her humiliation. He abstained; he stood at her mercy
without appealing.

She was not the woman to take poor vengeance. But, Oh! she was profoundly
humiliated, shamed through and through. The question, was I guilty of any
lightness--anything to bring this on me? would not be laid. And how she
pitied her friend! This house, her heart's home, was now a wreck to her:
nay, worse, a hostile citadel. The burden of the task of meeting Emma
with an open face, crushed her like very guilt. Yet she succeeded. After
an hour in her bedchamber she managed to lock up her heart and summon the
sprite of acting to her tongue and features: which ready attendant on the
suffering female host performed his liveliest throughout the evening, to
Emma's amusement, and to the culprit ex-dragoon's astonishment; in whom,
to tell the truth of him, her sparkle and fun kindled the sense of his
being less criminal than he had supposed, with a dim vision of himself as
the real proven donkey for not having been a harmless dash more so. But,
to be just as well as penetrating, this was only the effect of her
personal charm on his nature. So it spurred him a moment, when it struck
this doleful man that to have secured one kiss of those fresh and witty
sparkling lips he would endure forfeits, pangs, anything save the hanging
of his culprit's head before his Emma. Reflection washed him clean.
Secresy is not a medical restorative, by no means a good thing for the
baffled amorously-adventurous cavalier, unless the lady's character shall
have been firmly established in or over his hazy wagging noddle.
Reflection informed him that the honourable, generous, proud girl spared
him for the sake of the house she loved. After a night of tossing, he
rose right heartily repentant. He showed it in the best manner, not
dramatically. On her accepting his offer to drive her down to the valley
to meet the coach, a genuine illumination of pure gratitude made a better
man of him, both to look at and in feeling. She did not hesitate to
consent; and he had half expected a refusal. She talked on the way quite
as usual, cheerfully, if not altogether so spiritedly. A flash of her
matchless wit now and then reduced him to that abject state of man beside
the fair person he has treated high cavalierly, which one craves
permission to describe as pulp. He was utterly beaten.

The sight of Redworth on the valley road was a relief to them both. He
had slept in one of the houses of the valley, and spoke of having had the
intention to mount to Copsley. Sir Lukin proposed to drive him back. He
glanced at Diana, still with that calculating abstract air of his; and he
was rallied. He confessed to being absorbed in railways, the new lines of
railways projected to thread the land and fast mapping it.

'You 've not embarked money in them?' said Sir Lukin.

The answer was: 'I have; all I possess.' And Redworth for a sharp instant
set his eyes on Diana, indifferent to Sir Lukin's bellow of stupefaction
at such gambling on the part of a prudent fellow.

He asked her where she was to be met, where written to, during the
Summer, in case of his wishing to send her news.

She replied: 'Copsley will be the surest. I am always in communication
with Lady Dunstane.' She coloured deeply. The recollection of the change
of her feeling for Copsley suffused her maiden mind.

The strange blush prompted an impulse in Redworth to speak to her at once
of his venture in railways. But what would she understand of them, as
connected with the mighty stake he was playing for? He delayed. The coach
came at a trot of the horses, admired by Sir Lukin, round a corner. She
entered it, her maid followed, the door banged, the horses trotted. She
was off.

Her destiny of the Crossways tied a knot, barred a gate, and pointed to a
new direction of the road on that fine spring morning, when beech-buds
were near the burst, cowslips yellowed the meadow-flats, and skylarks
quivered upward.

For many long years Redworth had in his memory, for a comment on
procrastination and excessive scrupulousness in his calculating faculty,
the blue back of a coach.

He declined the vacated place beside Sir Lukin, promising to come and
spend a couple of days at Copsley in a fortnight--Saturday week. He
wanted, he said, to have a talk with Lady Dunstane. Evidently he had
railways on the brain, and Sir Lukin warned his wife to be guarded
against the speculative mania, and advise the man, if she could.




CHAPTER V

CONCERNING THE SCRUPULOUS GENTLEMAN WHO CAME TOO LATE

On the Saturday of his appointment Redworth arrived at Copsley, with a
shade deeper of the calculating look under his thick brows, habitual to
him latterly. He found Lady Dunstane at her desk, pen in hand, the paper
untouched; and there was an appearance of trouble about her somewhat
resembling his own, as he would have observed, had he been open-minded
enough to notice anything, except that she was writing a letter. He
begged her to continue it; he proposed to read a book till she was at
leisure.

'I have to write, and scarcely know how,' said she, clearing her face to
make the guest at home, and taking a chair by the fire, 'I would rather
chat for half an hour.'

She spoke of the weather, frosty, but tonic; bad for the last days of
hunting, good for the farmer and the country, let us hope.

Redworth nodded assent. It might be surmised that he was brooding over
those railways, in which he had embarked his fortune. Ah! those railways!
She was not long coming to the wailful exclamation upon them, both to
express her personal sorrow at the disfigurement of our dear England, and
lead to a little, modest, offering of a woman's counsel to the rash
adventurer; for thus could she serviceably put aside her perplexity
awhile. Those railways! When would there be peace in the land? Where one
single nook of shelter and escape from them! And the English, blunt as
their senses are to noise and hubbub, would be revelling in hisses,
shrieks, puffings and screeches, so that travelling would become an
intolerable affliction. 'I speak rather as an invalid,' she admitted; 'I
conjure up all sorts of horrors, the whistle in the night beneath one's
windows, and the smoke of trains defacing the landscape; hideous
accidents too. They will be wholesale and past help. Imagine a collision!
I have borne many changes with equanimity, I pretend to a certain degree
of philosophy, but this mania for cutting up the land does really cause
me to pity those who are to follow us. They will not see the England we
have seen. It will be patched and scored, disfigured . . . a sort of
barbarous Maori visage--England in a New Zealand mask. You may call it
the sentimental view. In this case, I am decidedly sentimental: I love my
country. I do love quiet, rural England. Well, and I love beauty, I love
simplicity. All that will be destroyed by the refuse of the towns
flooding the land--barring accidents, as Lukin says. There seems nothing
else to save us.'

Redworth acquiesced. 'Nothing.'

'And you do not regret it?' he was asked.

'Not a bit. We have already exchanged opinions on the subject. Simplicity
must go, and the townsman meet his equal in the countryman. As for
beauty, I would sacrifice that to circulate gumption. A bushelful of
nonsense is talked pro and con: it always is at an innovation. What we
are now doing, is to take a longer and a quicker stride, that is all.'

'And establishing a new field for the speculator.'

'Yes, and I am one, and this is the matter I wanted to discuss with you,
Lady Dunstane,' said Redworth, bending forward, the whole man devoted to
the point of business.

She declared she was complimented; she felt the compliment, and trusted
her advice might be useful, faintly remarking that she had a woman's
head: and 'not less' was implied as much as 'not more,' in order to give
strength to her prospective opposition.

All his money, she heard, was down on the railway table. He might within
a year have a tolerable fortune: and, of course, he might be ruined. He
did not expect it; still he fronted the risks. 'And now,' said he, 'I
come to you for counsel. I am not held among my acquaintances to be a
marrying man, as it's called.'

He paused. Lady Dunstane thought it an occasion to praise him for his
considerateness.

'You involve no one but yourself, you mean?' Her eyes shed approval.
'Still the day may come . . . I say only that it may: and the wish to
marry is a rosy colouring . . . equal to a flying chariot in conducting
us across difficulties and obstructions to the deed. And then one may
have to regret a previous rashness.'

These practical men are sometimes obtuse: she dwelt on that vision of the
future.

He listened, and resumed: 'My view of marriage is, that no man should ask
a woman to be his wife unless he is well able to support her in the
comforts, not to say luxuries, she is accustomed to.' His gaze had
wandered to the desk; it fixed there. 'That is Miss Merion's writing,' he
said.

'The letter?' said Lady Dunstane, and she stretched out her hand to press
down a leaf of it. 'Yes; it is from her.'

'Is she quite well?'

'I suppose she is. She does not speak of her health.'

He looked pertinaciously in the direction of the letter, and it was not
rightly mannered. That letter, of all others, was covert and sacred to
the friend. It contained the weightiest of secrets.

'I have not written to her,' said Redworth.

He was astonishing: 'To whom? To Diana? You could very well have done so,
only I fancy she knows nothing, has never given a thought to railway
stocks and shares; she has a loathing for speculation.'

'And speculators too, I dare say!'

'It is extremely probable.' Lady Dunstane spoke with an emphasis, for the
man liked Diana, and would be moved by the idea of forfeiting her esteem.

'She might blame me if I did anything dishonourable!'

'She certainly would.'

'She will have no cause.'

Lady Dunstane began to look, as at a cloud charged with remote
explosions: and still for the moment she was unsuspecting. But it was a
flitting moment. When he went on, and very singularly droning to her ear:
'The more a man loves a woman, the more he should be positive, before
asking her, that she will not have to consent to a loss of position, and
I would rather lose her than fail to give her all--not be sure, as far as
a man can be sure, of giving her all I think she's worthy of': then the
cloud shot a lightning flash, and the doors of her understanding swung
wide to the entry of a great wonderment. A shock of pain succeeded it.
Her sympathy was roused so acutely that she slipped over the reflective
rebuke she would have addressed to her silly delusion concerning his
purpose in speaking of his affairs to a woman. Though he did not mention
Diana by name, Diana was clearly the person. And why had he delayed to
speak to her?--Because of this venture of his money to make him a
fortune, for the assurance of her future comfort! Here was the best of
men for the girl, not displeasing to her; a good, strong, trustworthy
man, pleasant to hear and to see, only erring in being a trifle too
scrupulous in love: and a fortnight back she would have imagined he had
no chance; and now she knew that the chance was excellent in those days,
with this revelation in Diana's letter, which said that all chance was
over.

'The courtship of a woman,' he droned away, 'is in my mind not fair to
her until a man has to the full enough to sanction his asking her to
marry him. And if he throws all he possesses on a stake . . . to win
her--give her what she has a right to claim, he ought . . . . Only at
present the prospect seems good . . . . He ought of course to wait. Well,
the value of the stock I hold has doubled, and it increases. I am a
careful watcher of the market. I have friends--brokers and railway
Directors. I can rely on them.'

'Pray,' interposed Lady Dunstane, 'specify--I am rather in a mist--the
exact point upon which you do me the honour to consult me.' She ridiculed
herself for having imagined that such a man would come to consult her
upon a point of business.

'It is,' he replied, 'this: whether, as affairs now stand with me--I have
an income from my office, and personal property . . . say between
thirteen and fourteen hundred a year to start with--whether you think me
justified in asking a lady to share my lot?'

'Why not? But will you name the lady?'

'Then I may write at once? In your judgement. . . . Yes, the lady. I have
not named her. I had no right. Besides, the general question first, in
fairness to the petitioner. You might reasonably stipulate for more for a
friend. She could make a match, as you have said . . .' he muttered of
'brilliant,' and 'the highest'; and his humbleness of the honest man
enamoured touched Lady Dunstane. She saw him now as the man of strength
that she would have selected from a thousand suitors to guide her dear
friend.

She caught at a straw: 'Tell me, it is not Diana?'

'Diana Merion!'

As soon as he had said it he perceived pity, and he drew himself tight
for the stroke. 'She's in love with some one?'

'She is engaged.'

He bore it well. He was a big-chested fellow, and that excruciating twist
within of the revolution of the wheels of the brain snapping their course
to grind the contrary to that of the heart, was revealed in one short
lift and gasp, a compression of the tremendous change he underwent.

'Why did you not speak before?' said Lady Dunstane. Her words were
tremulous.

'I should have had no justification!'

'You might have won her!' She could have wept; her sympathy and her
self-condolence under disappointment at Diana's conduct joined to swell
the feminine flood.

The poor fellow's quick breathing and blinking reminded her of cruelty in
a retrospect. She generalized, to ease her spirit of regret, by hinting
it without hurting: 'Women really are not puppets. They are not so
excessively luxurious. It is good for young women in the early days of
marriage to rough it a little.' She found herself droning, as he had
done.

He had ears for nothing but the fact.

'Then I am too late!'

'I have heard it to-day.'

'She is engaged! Positively?'

Lady Dunstane glanced backward at the letter on her desk. She had to
answer the strangest of letters that had ever come to her, and it was
from her dear Tony, the baldest intimation of the weightiest piece of
intelligence which a woman can communicate to her heart's friend. The
task of answering it was now doubled. 'I fear so, I fancy so,' she said,
and she longed to cast eye over the letter again, to see if there might
possibly be a loophole behind the lines.

'Then I must make my mind up to it,' said Redworth. 'I think I'll take a
walk.'

She smiled kindly. 'It will be our secret.'

'I thank you with all my heart, Lady Dunstane.'

He was not a weaver of phrases in distress. His blunt reserve was
eloquent of it to her, and she liked him the better; could have thanked
him, too, for leaving her promptly.

When she was alone she took in the contents of the letter at a hasty
glimpse. It was of one paragraph, and fired its shot like a cannon with
the muzzle at her breast:--

   'MY OWN EMMY,--I have been asked in marriage by Mr. Warwick, and
   have accepted him. Signify your approval, for I have decided that
   it is the wisest thing a waif can do. We are to live at The
   Crossways for four months of the year, so I shall have Dada in his
   best days and all my youngest dreams, my sunrise and morning dew,
   surrounding me; my old home for my new one. I write in haste, to
   you first, burning to hear from you. Send your blessing to yours in
   life and death, through all transformations,
                            'TONY.'

That was all. Not a word of the lover about to be decorated with the
title of husband. No confession of love, nor a single supplicating word
to her friend, in excuse for the abrupt decision to so grave a step. Her
previous description of, him, as a 'gentlemanly official' in his
appearance, conjured him up most distastefully. True, she might have made
a more lamentable choice; a silly lordling, or a hero of scandals; but if
a gentlemanly official was of stabler mould, he failed to harmonize quite
so well with the idea of a creature like Tony. Perhaps Mr. Redworth also
failed in something. Where was the man fitly to mate her! Mr. Redworth,
however, was manly and trustworthy, of the finest Saxon type in build and
in character. He had great qualities, and his excess of scrupulousness
was most pitiable.

She read: 'The wisest thing a waif can do.' It bore a sound of
desperation. Avowedly Tony had accepted him without being in love. Or was
she masking the passion? No: had it been a case of love, she would have
written very differently to her friend.

Lady Dunstane controlled the pricking of the wound inflicted by Diana's
novel exercise in laconics where the fullest flow was due to tenderness,
and despatched felicitations upon the text of the initial line: 'Wonders
are always happening.' She wrote to hide vexation beneath surprise;
naturally betraying it. 'I must hope and pray that you have not been
precipitate.' Her curiosity to inspect the happiest of men, the most
genuine part of her letter, was expressed coldly.

When she had finished the composition she perused it, and did not
recognize herself in her language, though she had been so guarded to
cover the wound her Tony dealt their friendship--in some degree injuring
their sex. For it might now, after such an example, verily seem that
women are incapable of a translucent perfect confidence: their impulses,
caprices, desperations, tricks of concealment, trip a heart-whole
friendship. Well, to-morrow, if not to-day, the tripping may be expected!
Lady Dunstane resigned herself sadly to a lowered view of her Tony's
character. This was her unconscious act of reprisal. Her brilliant
beloved Tony, dazzling but in beauty and the gifted mind, stood as one
essentially with the common order of women. She wished to be settled, Mr.
Warwick proposed, and for the sake of living at The Crossways she
accepted him--she, the lofty scorner of loveless marriages! who had
said--how many times! that nothing save love excused it! She degraded
their mutual high standard of womankind. Diana was in eclipse, full three
parts. The bulk of the gentlemanly official she had chosen obscured her.
But I have written very carefully, thought Lady Dunstane, dropping her
answer into the post-bag. She had, indeed, been so care ful, that to
cloak her feelings, she had written as another person. Women with otiose
husbands have a task to preserve friendship.

Redworth carried his burden through the frosty air at a pace to melt
icicles in Greenland. He walked unthinkingly, right ahead, to the red
West, as he discovered when pausing to consult his watch. Time was left
to return at the same pace and dress for dinner; he swung round and
picked up remembrances of sensations he had strewn by the way. She knew
these woods; he was walking in her footprints; she was engaged to be
married. Yes, his principle, never to ask a woman to marry him, never to
court her, without bank-book assurance of his ability to support her in
cordial comfort, was right. He maintained it, and owned himself a donkey
for having stuck to it. Between him and his excellent principle there was
war, without the slightest division. Warned of the danger of losing her,
he would have done the same again, confessing himself donkey for his
pains. The principle was right, because it was due to the woman. His
rigid adherence to the principle set him belabouring his donkey-ribs, as
the proper due to himself. For he might have had a chance, all through
two Winters. The opportunities had been numberless. Here, in this beech
wood; near that thornbush; on the juniper slope; from the corner of chalk
and sand in junction, to the corner of clay and chalk; all the length of
the wooded ridge he had reminders of her presence and his priceless
chances: and still the standard of his conduct said No, while his heart
bled.

He felt that a chance had been. More sagacious than Lady Dunstane, from
his not nursing a wound, he divined in the abruptness of Diana's
resolution to accept a suitor, a sober reason, and a fitting one, for the
wish that she might be settled. And had he spoken!--If he had spoken to
her, she might have given her hand to him, to a dishonourable brute! A
blissful brute. But a worse than donkey. Yes, his principle was right,
and he lashed with it, and prodded with it, drove himself out into the
sour wilds where bachelordom crops noxious weeds without a hallowing
luminary, and clung to it, bruised and bleeding though he was.

The gentleness of Lady Dunstane soothed him during the term of a visit
that was rather like purgatory sweetened by angelical tears. He was glad
to go, wretched in having gone. She diverted the incessant conflict
between his insubordinate self and his castigating, but avowedly
sovereign, principle. Away from her, he was the victim of a flagellation
so dire that it almost drove him to revolt against the lord he served,
and somehow the many memories at Copsley kept him away. Sir Lukin, when
speaking of Diana's 'engagement to that fellow Warwick,' exalted her with
an extraordinary enthusiasm, exceedingly hard for the silly beast who had
lost her to bear. For the present the place dearest to Redworth of all
places on earth was unendurable.

Meanwhile the value of railway investments rose in the market, fast as
asparagus-heads for cutting: a circumstance that added stings to
reflection. Had he been only a little bolder, a little less the fanatical
devotee of his rule of masculine honour, less the slave to the letter of
success . . . . But why reflect at all? Here was a goodly income
approaching, perhaps a seat in Parliament; a station for the airing of
his opinions--and a social status for the wife now denied to him. The
wife was denied to him; he could conceive of no other. The tyrant-ridden,
reticent, tenacious creature had thoroughly wedded her in mind; her view
of things had a throne beside his own, even in their differences. He
perceived, agreeing or disagreeing, the motions of her brain, as he did
with none other of women; and this it is which stamps character on her,
divides her from them, upraises and enspheres. He declined to live with
any other of the sex.

Before he could hear of the sort of man Mr. Warwick was--a perpetual
object of his quest--the bridal bells had rung, and Diana Antonia Merion
lost her maiden name. She became the Mrs. Warwick of our footballing
world.

Why she married, she never told. Possibly, in amazement at herself
subsequently, she forgot the specific reason. That which weighs heavily
in youth, and commits us to desperate action, will be a trifle under
older eyes, to blunter senses, a more enlightened understanding. Her
friend Emma probed for the reason vainly. It was partly revealed to
Redworth, by guess-work and a putting together of pieces, yet quite
luminously, as it were by touch of tentacle-feelers--one evening that he
passed with Sir Lukin Dunstane, when the lachrymose ex-dragoon and son of
Idlesse, had rather more than dined.




CHAPTER VI

THE COUPLE

Six months a married woman, Diana came to Copsley to introduce her
husband. They had run over Italy: 'the Italian Peninsula,' she quoted him
in a letter to Lady Dunstane: and were furnishing their London house. Her
first letters from Italy appeared to have a little bloom of sentiment.
Augustus was mentioned as liking this and that in the land of beauty. He
patronized Art, and it was a pleasure to hear him speak upon pictures and
sculptures; he knew a great deal about them. 'He is an authority.' Her
humour soon began to play round the fortunate man, who did not seem, to
the reader's mind, to bear so well a sentimental clothing. His pride was
in being very English on the Continent, and Diana's instances of his
lofty appreciations of the garden of Art and Nature, and statuesque walk
through it, would have been more amusing if her friend could have
harmonized her idea of the couple. A description of 'a bit of a wrangle
between us' at Lucca, where an Italian post-master on a journey of
inspection, claimed a share of their carriage and audaciously attempted
entry, was laughable, but jarred. Would she some day lose her relish for
ridicule, and see him at a distance? He was generous, Diana, said she saw
fine qualities in him. It might be that he was lavish on his bridal tour.
She said he was unselfish, kind, affable with his equals; he was cordial
to the acquaintances he met. Perhaps his worst fault was an affected
superciliousness before the foreigner, not uncommon in those days. 'You
are to know, dear Emmy, that we English are the aristocracy of
Europeans.' Lady Dunstane inclined to think we were; nevertheless, in the
mouth of a 'gentlemanly official' the frigid arrogance added a stroke of
caricature to his deportment. On the other hand, the reports of him
gleaned by Sir Lukin sounded favourable. He was not taken to be
preternaturally stiff, nor bright, but a goodish sort of fellow; good
horseman, good shot, good character. In short, the average Englishman,
excelling as a cavalier, a slayer, and an orderly subject. That was a
somewhat elevated standard to the patriotic Emma. Only she would never
have stipulated for an average to espouse Diana. Would he understand her,
and value the best in her? Another and unanswered question was, how could
she have condescended to wed with an average? There was transparently
some secret not confided to her friend.

He appeared. Lady Dunstane's first impression of him recurred on his
departure. Her unanswered question drummed at her ears, though she
remembered that Tony's art in leading him out had moderated her rigidly
judicial summary of the union during a greater part of the visit. But his
requiring to be led out, was against him. Considering the subjects, his
talk was passable. The subjects treated of politics, pictures,
Continental travel, our manufactures, our wealth and the reasons for
it--excellent reasons well-weighed. He was handsome, as men go; rather
tall, not too stout, precise in the modern fashion of his dress, and the
pair of whiskers encasing a colourless depression up to a long, thin,
straight nose, and closed lips indicating an aperture. The contraction of
his mouth expressed an intelligence in the attitude of the firmly
negative.

The lips opened to smile, the teeth were faultless; an effect was
produced, if a cold one--the colder for the unparticipating northern
eyes; eyes of that half cloud and blue, which make a kind of hueless
grey, and are chiefly striking in an authoritative stage. Without
contradicting, for he was exactly polite, his look signified a person
conscious of being born to command: in fine, an aristocrat among the
'aristocracy of Europeans.' His differences of opinion were prefaced by a
'Pardon me,' and pausing smile of the teeth; then a succinctly worded
sentence or two, a perfect settlement of the dispute. He disliked
argumentation. He said so, and Diana remarked it of him, speaking as, a
wife who merely noted a characteristic. Inside his boundary, he had neat
phrases, opinions in packets. Beyond it, apparently the world was void of
any particular interest. Sir Lukin, whose boundary would have shown a
narrower limitation had it been defined, stood no chance with him. Tory
versus Whig, he tried a wrestle, and was thrown. They agreed on the topic
of Wine. Mr. Warwick had a fine taste in wine. Their after-dinner
sittings were devoted to this and the alliterative cognate theme, equally
dear to the gallant ex-dragoon, from which it resulted that Lady Dunstane
received satisfactory information in a man's judgement of him. 'Warwick
is a clever fellow, and a thorough man of the world, I can tell you,
Emmy.' Sir Lukin further observed that he was a gentlemanly fellow. 'A
gentlemanly official!' Diana's primary dash of portraiture stuck to him,
so true it was! As for her, she seemed to have forgotten it. Not only did
she strive to show him to advantage by leading him out; she played second
to him; subserviently, fondly; she quite submerged herself, content to be
dull if he might shine; and her talk of her husband in her friend's
blue-chamber boudoir of the golden stars, where they had discussed the
world and taken counsel in her maiden days, implied admiration of his
merits. He rode superbly: he knew Law: he was prepared for any position:
he could speak really eloquently; she had heard him at a local meeting.
And he loved the old Crossways almost as much as she did. 'He has
promised me he will never ask me to sell it,' she said, with a simpleness
that could hardly have been acted.

When she was gone, Lady Dunstane thought she had worn a mask, in the
natural manner of women trying to make the best of their choice; and she
excused her poor Tony for the artful presentation of him at her own cost.
But she could not excuse her for having married the man. Her first and
her final impression likened him to a house locked up and empty: a London
house conventionally furnished and decorated by the upholsterer, and
empty of inhabitants. How a brilliant and beautiful girl could have
committed this rashness, was the perplexing riddle: the knottier because
the man was idle: and Diana had ambition; she despised and dreaded
idleness in men. Empty of inhabitants even to the ghost! Both human and
spiritual were wanting. The mind contemplating him became reflectively
stagnant.

I must not be unjust! Lady Dunstane hastened to exclaim, at a whisper
that he had at least proved his appreciation of Tony; whom he preferred
to call Diana, as she gladly remembered: and the two were bound together
for a moment warmly by her recollection of her beloved Tony's touching
little petition: 'You will invite us again?' and then there had flashed
in Tony's dear dark eyes the look of their old love drowning. They were
not to be thought of separately. She admitted that the introduction to a
woman of her friend's husband is crucially trying to him: he may well
show worse than he is. Yet his appreciation of Tony in espousing her, was
rather marred by Sir Lukin's report of him as a desperate admirer of
beautiful woman. It might be for her beauty only, not for her spiritual
qualities! At present he did not seem aware of their existence. But, to
be entirely just, she had hardly exhibited them or a sign of them during
the first interview: and sitting with his hostess alone, he had seized
the occasion to say, that he was the happiest of men. He said it with the
nearest approach to fervour she had noticed. Perhaps the very fact of his
not producing a highly favourable impression, should be set to plead on
his behalf. Such as he was, he was himself, no simulator. She longed for
Mr. Redworth's report of him.

Her compassion for Redworth's feelings when beholding the woman he loved
another man's wife, did not soften the urgency of her injunction that he
should go speedily, and see as much of them as he could. 'Because,' she
gave her reason, 'I wish Diana to know she has not lost a single friend
through her marriage, and is only one the richer.'

Redworth buckled himself to the task. He belonged to the class of his
countrymen who have a dungeon-vault for feelings that should not be
suffered to cry abroad, and into this oubliette he cast them, letting
them feed as they might, or perish. It was his heart down below, and in
no voluntary musings did he listen to it, to sustain the thing. Grimly
lord of himself, he stood emotionless before the world. Some worthy
fellows resemble him, and they are called deep-hearted. He was
dungeon-deep. The prisoner underneath might clamour and leap; none heard
him or knew of him; nor did he ever view the day. Diana's frank: 'Ah, Mr.
Redworth, how glad I am to see you!' was met by the calmest formalism of
the wish for her happiness. He became a guest at her London house, and
his report of the domesticity there, and notably of the lord of the
house, pleased Lady Dunstane more than her husband's. He saw the kind of
man accurately, as far as men are to be seen on the surface; and she
could say assentingly, without anxiety: 'Yes, yes,' to his remarks upon
Mr. Warwick, indicative of a man of capable head in worldly affairs,
commonplace beside his wife. The noble gentleman for Diana was yet
unborn, they tacitly agreed. Meantime one must not put a mortal husband
to the fiery ordeal of his wife's deserts, they agreed likewise. 'You may
be sure she is a constant friend,' Lady Dunstane said for his comfort;
and she reminded herself subsequently of a shade of disappointment at his
imperturbable rejoinder: 'I could calculate on it.' For though not at all
desiring to witness the sentimental fit, she wished to see that he held
an image of Diana:--surely a woman to kindle poets and heroes, the
princes of the race; and it was a curious perversity that the two men she
had moved were merely excellent, emotionless, ordinary men, with heads
for business. Elsewhere, out of England, Diana would have been a woman
for a place in song, exalted to the skies. Here she had the destiny to
inflame Mr. Redworth and Mr. Warwick, two railway Directors, bent upon
scoring the country to the likeness of a child's lines of hop-scotch in a
gravel-yard.

As with all invalids, the pleasure of living backward was haunted by the
tortures it evoked, and two years later she recalled this outcry against
the Fates. She would then have prayed for Diana to inflame none but such
men as those two. The original error was; of course, that rash and most
inexplicable marriage, a step never alluded to by the driven victim of
it. Lady Dunstane heard rumours of dissensions. Diana did not mention
them. She spoke of her husband as unlucky in railway ventures, and of a
household necessity for money, nothing further. One day she wrote of a
Government appointment her husband had received, ending the letter: 'So
there is the end of our troubles.' Her friend rejoiced, and afterward
looking back at her satisfaction, saw the dire beginning of them.

Lord Dannisburgh's name, as one of the admirers of Mrs. Warwick, was
dropped once or twice by Sir Lukin. He had dined with the Warwicks, and
met the eminent member of the Cabinet at their table. There is no harm in
admiration, especially on the part of one of a crowd observing a star. No
harm can be imputed when the husband of a beautiful woman accepts an
appointment from the potent Minister admiring her. So Lady Dunstane
thought, for she was sure of Diana to her inmost soul. But she soon
perceived in Sir Lukin that the old Dog-world was preparing to yelp on a
scent. He of his nature belonged to the hunting pack, and with a cordial
feeling for the quarry, he was quite with his world in expecting to see
her run, and readiness to join the chase. No great scandal had occurred
for several months. The world was in want of it; and he, too, with a very
cordial feeling for the quarry, piously hoping she would escape, already
had his nose to ground, collecting testimony in the track of her. He said
little to his wife, but his world was getting so noisy that he could not
help half pursing his lips, as with the soft whistle of an innuendo at
the heels of it. Redworth was in America, engaged in carving up that
hemisphere. She had no source of information but her husband's chance
gossip; and London was death to her; and Diana, writing faithfully twice
a week, kept silence as to Lord Dannisburgh, except in naming him among
her guests. She wrote this, which might have a secret personal
signification: 'We women are the verbs passive of the alliance; we have
to learn, and if we take to activity, with the best intentions, we
conjugate a frightful disturbance. We are to run on lines, like the
steam-trains, or we come to no station, dash to fragments. I have the
misfortune to know I was born an active. I take my chance.'

Once she coupled the names of Lord Larrian and Lord Dannisburgh,
remarking that she had a fatal attraction for antiques.

The death of her husband's uncle and illness of his aunt withdrew her to
The Crossways, where she remained nursing for several months, reading
diligently, as her letters showed, and watching the approaches of the
destroyer. She wrote like her former self, subdued by meditation in the
presence of that inevitable. The world ceased barking. Lady Dunstane
could suppose Mr. Warwick to have now a reconciling experience of his
wife's noble qualities. He probably did value them more. He spoke of her
to Sir Lukin in London with commendation. 'She is an attentive nurse.' He
inherited a considerable increase of income when he and his wife were the
sole tenants of The Crossways, but disliking the house, for reasons hard
to explain by a man previously professing to share her attachment to it,
he wished to sell or let the place, and his wife would do neither. She
proposed to continue living in their small London house rather than be
cut off from The Crossways, which, he said, was ludicrous: people should
live up to their position; and he sneered at the place, and slightly
wounded her, for she was open to a wound when the cold fire of a renewed
attempt at warmth between them was crackling and showing bits of flame,
after she had given proof of her power to serve. Service to himself and
his relatives affected him. He deferred to her craze for The Crossways,
and they lived in a larger London house, 'up to their position,' which
means ever a trifle beyond it, and gave choice dinner-parties to the most
eminent. His jealousy slumbered. Having ideas of a seat in Parliament at
this period, and preferment superior to the post he held, Mr. Warwick
deemed it sagacious to court the potent patron Lord Dannisburgh could be;
and his wife had his interests at heart, the fork-tongued world said. The
cry revived. Stories of Lord D. and Mrs. W. whipped the hot pursuit. The
moral repute of the great Whig lord and the beauty of the lady composed
inflammable material.

'Are you altogether cautious?' Lady Dunstane wrote to Diana; and her
friend sent a copious reply: 'You have the fullest right to ask your Tony
anything, and I will answer as at the Judgement bar. You allude to Lord
Dannisburgh. He is near what Dada's age would have been, and is, I think
I can affirm, next to my dead father and my Emmy, my dearest friend. I
love him. I could say it in the streets without shame; and you do not
imagine me shameless. Whatever his character in his younger days, he can
be honestly a woman's friend, believe me. I see straight to his heart; he
has no disguise; and unless I am to suppose that marriage is the end of
me, I must keep him among my treasures. I see him almost daily; it is not
possible to think I can be deceived; and as long as he does me the honour
to esteem my poor portion of brains by coming to me for what he is good
enough to call my counsel, I shall let the world wag its tongue. Between
ourselves, I trust to be doing some good. I know I am of use in various
ways. No doubt there is a danger of a woman's head being turned, when she
reflects that a powerful Minister governing a kingdom has not considered
her too insignificant to advise him; and I am sensible of it. I am, I
assure you, dearest, on my guard against it. That would not attach me to
him, as his homely friendliness does. He is the most amiable, cheerful,
benignant of men; he has no feeling of an enemy, though naturally his
enemies are numerous and venomous. He is full of observation and humour.
How he would amuse you! In many respects accord with you. And I should
not have a spark of jealousy. Some day I shall beg permission to bring
him to Copsley. At present, during the Session, he is too busy, as you
know. Me--his "crystal spring of wisdom"--he can favour with no more than
an hour in the afternoon, or a few minutes at night. Or I get a pencilled
note from the benches of the House, with an anecdote, or news of a
Division. I am sure to be enlivened.

'So I have written to you fully, simply, frankly. Have perfect faith in
your Tony, who would, she vows to heaven; die rather than disturb it and
her heart's beloved.'

The letter terminated with one of Lord Dannisburgh's anecdotes, exciting
to merriment in the season of its freshness;--and a postscript of
information: 'Augustus expects a mission--about a month; uncertain
whether I accompany him.'

Mr. Warwick departed on his mission. Diana remained in London. Lady
Dunstane wrote entreating her to pass the month--her favourite time of
the violet yielding to the cowslip--at Copsley. The invitation could not
be accepted, but the next day Diana sent word that she had a surprise for
the following Sunday, and would bring a friend to lunch, if Sir Lukin
would meet them at the corner of the road in the valley leading up to the
heights, at a stated hour.

Lady Dunstane gave the listless baronet his directions, observing: 'It's
odd, she never will come alone since her marriage.'

'Queer,' said he of the serenest absence of conscience; and that there
must be something not, entirely right going on, he strongly inclined to
think.




CHAPTER VII

THE CRISIS

It was a confirmed suspicion when he beheld Lord Dannisburgh on the box
of a four-in-hand, and the peerless Diana beside him, cockaded lackeys in
plain livery and the lady's maid to the rear. But Lord Dannisburgh's
visit was a compliment, and the freak of his driving down under the beams
of Aurora on a sober Sunday morning capital fun; so with a gaiety that
was kept alive for the invalid Emma to partake of it, they rattled away
to the heights, and climbed them, and Diana rushed to the arms of her
friend, whispering and cooing for pardon if she startled her, guilty of a
little whiff of blarney:--Lord Dannisburgh wanted so much to be
introduced to her, and she so much wanted her to know him, and she hoped
to be graciously excused for thus bringing them together, 'that she might
be chorus to them!' Chorus was a pretty fiction on the part of the
thrilling and topping voice. She was the very radiant Diana of her
earliest opening day, both in look and speech, a queenly comrade, and a
spirit leaping and shining like a mountain water. She did not seduce, she
ravished. The judgement was taken captive and flowed with her. As to the
prank of the visit, Emma heartily enjoyed it and hugged it for a holiday
of her own, and doating on the beautiful, darkeyed, fresh creature, who
bore the name of the divine Huntress, she thought her a true Dian in
stature, step, and attributes, the genius of laughter superadded. None
else on earth so sweetly laughed, none so spontaneously, victoriously
provoked the healthful openness. Her delicious chatter, and her museful
sparkle in listening, equally quickened every sense of life. Adorable as
she was to her friend Emma at all times, she that day struck a new
fountain in memory. And it was pleasant to see the great lord's
admiration of this wonder. One could firmly believe in their friendship,
and his winning ideas from the abounding bubbling well. A recurrent smile
beamed on his face when hearing and observing her. Certain dishes
provided at the table were Diana's favourites, and he relished them,
asking for a second help, and remarking that her taste was good in that
as in all things. They lunched, eating like boys. They walked over the
grounds of Copsley, and into the lanes and across the meadows of the
cowslip, rattling, chatting, enlivening the frosty air, happy as children
biting to the juices of ripe apples off the tree. But Tony was the tree,
the dispenser of the rosy gifts. She had a moment of reflection, only a
moment, and Emma felt the pause as though a cloud had shadowed them and a
spirit had been shut away. Both spoke of their happiness at the kiss of
parting. That melancholy note at the top of the wave to human hearts
conscious of its enforced decline was repeated by them, and Diana's
eyelids blinked to dismiss a tear.

'You have no troubles?' Emma said.

'Only the pain of the good-bye to my beloved,' said Diana. 'I have never
been happier--never shall be! Now you know him you think with me? I knew
you would. You have seen him as he always is--except when he is armed for
battle. He is the kindest of souls. And soul I say. He is the one man
among men who gives me notions of a soul in men.'

The eulogy was exalted. Lady Dunstane made a little mouth for Oh, in
correction of the transcendental touch, though she remembered their
foregone conversations upon men--strange beings that they are!--and
understood Diana's meaning.

'Really! really! honour!' Diana emphasized her extravagant praise, to
print it fast. 'Hear him speak of Ireland.'

'Would he not speak of Ireland in a tone to catch the Irishwoman?'

'He is past thoughts of catching, dearest. At that age men are pools of
fish, or what you will: they are not anglers. Next year, if you invite
us, we will come again.'

'But you will come to stay in the Winter?'

'Certainly. But I am speaking of one of my holidays.'

They kissed fervently. The lady mounted; the grey and portly lord
followed her; Sir Lukin flourished his whip, and Emma was left to brood
over her friend's last words: 'One of my holidays.' Not a hint to the
detriment of her husband had passed. The stray beam balefully
illuminating her marriage slipped from her involuntarily. Sir Lukin was
troublesome with his ejaculations that evening, and kept speculating on
the time of the arrival of the four-in-hand in London; upon which he
thought a great deal depended. They had driven out of town early, and if
they drove back late they would not be seen, as all the cacklers were
sure then to be dressing for dinner, and he would not pass the Clubs. 'I
couldn't suggest it,' he said. 'But Dannisburgh's an old hand. But they
say he snaps his fingers at tattle, and laughs. Well, it doesn't matter
for him, perhaps, but a game of two . . . . Oh! it'll be all right. They
can't reach London before dusk. And the cat's away.'

'It's more than ever incomprehensible to me how she could have married
that man,' said his wife.

'I've long since given it up,' said he.

Diana wrote her thanks for the delightful welcome, telling of her drive
home to smoke and solitude, with a new host of romantic sensations to
keep her company. She wrote thrice in the week, and the same addition of
one to the ordinary number next week. Then for three weeks not a line.
Sir Lukin brought news from London that Warwick had returned, nothing to
explain the silence. A letter addressed to The Crossways was likewise
unnoticed. The supposition that they must be visiting on a round,
appeared rational; but many weeks elapsed, until Sir Lukin received a
printed sheet in the superscription of a former military comrade, who had
marked a paragraph. It was one of those journals, now barely credible,
dedicated to the putrid of the upper circle, wherein initials raised
sewer-lamps, and Asmodeus lifted a roof, leering hideously. Thousands
detested it, and fattened their crops on it. Domesticated beasts of
superior habits to the common will indulge themselves with a luxurious
roll in carrion, for a revival of their original instincts. Society was
largely a purchaser. The ghastly thing was dreaded as a scourge, hailed
as a refreshment, nourished as a parasite. It professed undaunted
honesty, and operated in the fashion of the worms bred of decay. Success
was its boasted justification. The animal world, when not rigorously
watched, will always crown with success the machine supplying its
appetites. The old dog-world took signal from it. The one-legged
devil-god waved his wooden hoof, and the creatures in view, the hunt was
uproarious. Why should we seem better than we are? down with hypocrisy,
cried the censor morum, spicing the lamentable derelictions of this and
that great person, male and female. The plea of corruption of blood in
the world, to excuse the public chafing of a grievous itch, is not less
old than sin; and it offers a merry day of frisky truant running to the
animal made unashamed by another and another stripped, branded, and
stretched flat. Sir Lukin read of Mr. and Mrs. W. and a distinguished
Peer of the realm. The paragraph was brief; it had a flavour. Promise of
more to come, pricked curiosity. He read it enraged, feeling for his
wife; and again indignant, feeling for Diana. His third reading found him
out: he felt for both, but as a member of the whispering world, much
behind the scenes, he had a longing for the promised insinuations, just
to know what they could say, or dared say. The paper was not shown to
Lady Dunstane. A run to London put him in the tide of the broken dam of
gossip. The names were openly spoken and swept from mouth to mouth of the
scandalmongers, gathering matter as they flew. He knocked at Diana's
door, where he was informed that the mistress of the house was absent.
More than official gravity accompanied the announcement. Her address was
unknown. Sir Lukin thought it now time to tell his wife. He began with a
hesitating circumlocution, in order to prepare her mind for bad news. She
divined immediately that it concerned Diana, and forcing him to speak to
the point, she had the story jerked out to her in a sentence. It stopped
her heart.

The chill of death was tasted in that wavering ascent from oblivion to
recollection. Why had not Diana come to her, she asked herself, and asked
her husband; who, as usual, was absolutely unable to say. Under
compulsory squeezing, he would have answered, that she did not come
because she could not fib so easily to her bosom friend: and this he
thought, notwithstanding his personal experience of Diana's generosity.
But he had other personal experiences of her sex, and her sex plucked at
the bright star and drowned it.

The happy day of Lord Dannisburgh's visit settled in Emma's belief as the
cause of Mr. Warwick's unpardonable suspicions and cruelty. Arguing from
her own sensations of a day that had been like the return of sweet health
to her frame, she could see nothing but the loveliest freakish innocence
in Diana's conduct, and she recalled her looks, her words, every fleeting
gesture, even to the ingenuousness of the noble statesman's admiration of
her, for the confusion of her unmanly and unworthy husband. And Emma was
nevertheless a thoughtful person; only her heart was at the head of her
thoughts, and led the file, whose reasoning was accurate on erratic
tracks. All night her heart went at fever pace. She brought the repentant
husband to his knees, and then doubted, strongly doubted, whether she
would, whether in consideration for her friend she could, intercede with
Diana to forgive him. In the morning she slept heavily. Sir Lukin had
gone to London early for further tidings. She awoke about midday, and
found a letter on her pillow. It was Diana's. Then while her fingers
eagerly tore it open, her heart, the champion rider over-night, sank. It
needed support of facts, and feared them: not in distrust of that dear
persecuted soul, but because the very bravest of hearts is of its nature
a shivering defender, sensitive in the presence of any hostile array,
much craving for material support, until the mind and spirit displace it,
depute it to second them instead of leading.

She read by a dull November fog-light a mixture of the dreadful and the
comforting, and dwelt upon the latter in abandonment, hugged it, though
conscious of evil and the little that there was to veritably console.

The close of the letter struck the blow. After bluntly stating that Mr.
Warwick had served her with a process, and that he had no case without
suborning witnesses, Diana said: 'But I leave the case, and him, to the
world. Ireland, or else America, it is a guiltless kind of suicide to
bury myself abroad. He has my letters. They are such as I can own to you;
and ask you to kiss me--and kiss me when you have heard all the evidence,
all that I can add to it, kiss me. You know me too well to think I would
ask you to kiss criminal lips. But I cannot face the world. In the dock,
yes. Not where I am expected to smile and sparkle, on pain of incurring
suspicion if I show a sign of oppression. I cannot do that. I see myself
wearing a false grin--your Tony! No, I do well to go. This is my
resolution; and in consequence,--my beloved! my only truly loved on
earth! I do not come to you, to grieve you, as I surely should. Nor would
it soothe me, dearest. This will be to you the best of reasons. It could
not soothe me to see myself giving pain to Emma. I am like a pestilence,
and let me swing away to the desert, for there I do no harm. I know I am
right. I have questioned myself--it is not cowardice. I do not quail. I
abhor the part of actress. I should do it well--too well; destroy my soul
in the performance. Is a good name before such a world as this worth that
sacrifice? A convent and self-quenching;--cloisters would seem to me like
holy dew. But that would be sleep, and I feel the powers of life. Never
have I felt them so mightily. If it were not for being called on to act
and mew, I would stay, fight, meet a bayonet-hedge of charges and rebut
them. I have my natural weapons and my cause. It must be confessed that I
have also more knowledge of men and the secret contempt--it must be--the
best of them entertain for us. Oh! and we confirm it if we trust them.
But they have been at a wicked school.

'I will write. From whatever place, you shall have letters, and constant.
I write no more now. In my present mood I find no alternative between
rageing and drivelling. I am henceforth dead to the world. Never dead to
Emma till my breath is gone--poor flame! I blow at a bed-room candle, by
which I write in a brown fog, and behold what I am--though not even
serving to write such a tangled scrawl as this. I am of no mortal
service. In two days I shall be out of England. Within a week you shall
hear where. I long for your heart on mine, your dear eyes. You have faith
in me, and I fly from you!--I must be mad. Yet I feel calmly reasonable.
I know that this is the thing to do. Some years hence a grey woman may
return, to hear of a butterfly Diana, that had her day and disappeared.
Better than a mewing and courtseying simulacrum of the woman--I drivel
again. Adieu. I suppose I am not liable to capture and imprisonment until
the day when my name is cited to appear. I have left London. This letter
and I quit the scene by different routes--I would they were one. My
beloved! I have an ache--I think I am wronging you. I am not mistress of
myself, and do as something within me, wiser, than I, dictates.--You will
write kindly. Write your whole heart. It is not compassion I want, I want
you. I can bear stripes from you. Let me hear Emma's voice--the true
voice. This running away merits your reproaches. It will look like--. I
have more to confess: the tigress in me wishes it were! I should then
have a reckless passion to fold me about, and the glory infernal, if you
name it so, and so it would be--of suffering for and with some one else.
As it is, I am utterly solitary, sustained neither from above nor below,
except within myself, and that is all fire and smoke, like their new
engines.--I kiss this miserable sheet of paper. Yes, I judge that I have
run off a line--and what a line! which hardly shows a trace for breathing
things to follow until they feel the transgression in wreck. How
immensely nature seems to prefer men to women!--But this paper is happier
than the writer.

                         'Your TONY.'

That was the end. Emma kissed it in tears. They had often talked of the
possibility of a classic friendship between women, the alliance of a
mutual devotedness men choose to doubt of. She caught herself accusing
Tony of the lapse from friendship. Hither should the true friend have
flown unerringly.

The blunt ending of the letter likewise dealt a wound. She reperused it,
perused and meditated. The flight of Mrs. Warwick! She heard that
cry-fatal! But she had no means of putting a hand on her. 'Your Tony.'
The coldness might be set down to exhaustion: it might, yet her not
coming to her friend for counsel and love was a positive weight in the
indifferent scale. She read the letter backwards, and by snatches here
and there; many perusals and hours passed before the scattered creature
exhibited in its pages came to her out of the flying threads of the web
as her living Tony, whom she loved and prized and was ready to defend
gainst the world. By that time the fog had lifted; she saw the sky on the
borders of milky cloudfolds. Her invalid's chill sensitiveness conceived
a sympathy in the baring heavens, and lying on her sofa in the
drawing-room she gained strength of meditative vision, weak though she
was to help, through ceasing to brood on her wound and herself. She cast
herself into her dear Tony's feelings; and thus it came, that she
imagined Tony would visit The Crossways, where she kept souvenirs of her
father, his cane, and his writing-desk, and a precious miniature of him
hanging above it, before leaving England forever. The fancy sprang to
certainty; every speculation confirmed it.

Had Sir Lukin been at home she would have despatched him to The Crossways
at once. The West wind blew, and gave her a view of the Downs beyond the
Weald from her southern window. She thought it even possible to drive
there and reach the place, on the chance of her vivid suggestion, some
time after nightfall; but a walk across the room to try her forces was
too convincing of her inability. She walked with an ebony silver-mounted
stick, a present from Mr. Redworth. She was leaning on it when the card
of Thomas Redworth was handed to her.




CHAPTER VIII

IN WHICH IS EXHIBITED HOW A PRACTICAL MAN AND A DIVINING WOMAN LEARN TO
RESPECT ONE ANOTHER

'You see, you are my crutch,' Lady Dunstane said to him,--raising the
stick in reminder of the present.

He offered his arm and hurriedly informed her, to dispose of dull
personal matter, that he had just landed. She looked at the clock. 'Lukin
is in town. You know the song: "Alas, I scarce can go or creep While
Lukin is away." I do not doubt you have succeeded in your business over
there. Ah! Now I suppose you have confidence in your success. I should
have predicted it, had you come to me.' She stood, either musing or in
weakness, and said abruptly: 'Will you object to lunching at one
o'clock?'

'The sooner the better,' said Redworth. She had sighed: her voice
betrayed some agitation, strange in so serenely-minded a person.

His partial acquaintance with the Herculean Sir Lukin's reputation in
town inspired a fear of his being about to receive admission to the
distressful confidences of the wife, and he asked if Mrs. Warwick was
well. The answer sounded ominous, with its accompaniment of evident pain:
'I think her health is good.'

Had they quarrelled? He said he had not heard a word of Mrs. Warwick for
several months.

'I--heard from her this morning,' said Lady Dunstane, and motioned him to
a chair beside the sofa, where she half reclined, closing her eyes. The
sight of tears on the eyelashes frightened him. She roused herself to
look at the clock. 'Providence or accident, you are here,' she said. 'I
could not have prayed for the coming of a truer' man. Mrs. Warwick is in
great danger . . . . You know our love. She is the best of me, heart and
soul. Her husband has chosen to act on vile suspicions--baseless, I could
hold my hand in the fire and swear. She has enemies, or the jealous fury
is on the man--I know little of him. He has commenced an action against
her. He will rue it. But she . . . you understand this of women at
least;--they are not cowards in all things!--but the horror of facing a
public scandal: my poor girl writes of the hatefulness of having to act
the complacent--put on her accustomed self! She would have to go about, a
mark for the talkers, and behave as if nothing were in the air-full of
darts! Oh, that general whisper!--it makes a coup de massue--a gale to
sink the bravest vessel: and a woman must preserve her smoothest front;
chat, smile--or else!--Well, she shrinks from it. I should too. She is
leaving the country.'

'Wrong!' cried Redworth.

'Wrong indeed. She writes, that in two days she will be out of it. Judge
her as I do, though you are a man, I pray. You have seen the hunted hare.
It is our education--we have something of the hare in us when the hounds
are full cry. Our bravest, our best, have an impulse to run. "By this,
poor Wat far off upon a hill." Shakespeare would have the divine
comprehension. I have thought all round it and come back to him. She is
one of Shakespeare's women: another character, but one of his
own:--another Hermione! I dream of him--seeing her with that eye of
steady flame. The bravest and best of us at bay in the world need an eye
like his, to read deep and not be baffled by inconsistencies.'

Insensibly Redworth blinked. His consciousness of an exalted compassion
for the lady was heated by these flights of advocacy to feel that he was
almost seated beside the sovereign poet thus eulogized, and he was of a
modest nature.

'But you are practical,' pursued Lady Dunstane, observing signs that she
took for impatience. 'You are thinking of what can be done. If Lukin were
here I would send him to The Crossways without a moment's delay, on the
chance, the mere chance:--it shines to me! If I were only a little
stronger! I fear I might break down, and it would be unfair to my
husband. He has trouble enough with my premature infirmities already. I
am certain she will go to The Crossways. Tony is one of the women who
burn to give last kisses to things they love. And she has her little
treasures hoarded there. She was born there. Her father died there. She
is three parts Irish--superstitious in affection. I know her so well. At
this moment I see her there. If not, she has grown unlike herself.'

'Have you a stout horse in the stables?' Redworth asked.

'You remember the mare Bertha; you have ridden her.'

'The mare would do, and better than a dozen horses.' He consulted his
watch. 'Let me mount Bertha, I engage to deliver a letter at The
Crossways to-night.'

Lady Dunstane half inclined to act hesitation in accepting the aid she
sought, but said: 'Will you find your way?'

He spoke of three hours of daylight and a moon to rise. 'She has often
pointed out to me from your ridges where The Crossways lies, about three
miles from the Downs, near a village named Storling, on the road to
Brasted.

The house has a small plantation of firs behind it, and a bit of
river--rare for Sussex--to the right. An old straggling red brick house
at Crossways, a stone's throw from a fingerpost on a square of green:
roads to Brasted, London, Wickford, Riddlehurst. I shall find it. Write
what you have to say, my lady, and confide it to me. She shall have it
to-night, if she's where you suppose. I 'll go, with your permission, and
take a look at the mare. Sussex roads are heavy in this damp weather, and
the frost coming on won't improve them for a tired beast. We haven't our
rails laid down there yet.'

'You make me admit some virtues in the practical,' said Lady Dunstane;
and had the poor fellow vollied forth a tale of the everlastingness of
his passion for Diana, it would have touched her far less than his exact
memory of Diana's description of her loved birthplace.

She wrote:

   'I trust my messenger to tell you how I hang on you. I see my ship
   making for the rocks. You break your Emma's heart. It will be the
   second wrong step. I shall not survive it. The threat has made me
   incapable of rushing to you, as I might have had strength to do
   yesterday. I am shattered, and I wait panting for Mr. Redworth's
   return with you. He has called, by accident, as we say. Trust to
   him. If ever heaven was active to avert a fatal mischance it is
   to-day. You will not stand against my supplication. It is my life I
   cry for. I have no more time. He starts. He leaves me to pray--
   like the mother seeing her child on the edge of the cliff. Come.
   This is your breast, my Tony? And your soul warns you it is right
   to come. Do rightly. Scorn other counsel--the coward's. Come with
   our friend--the one man known to me who can be a friend of women.

                         'Your EMMA.'

Redworth was in the room. 'The mare 'll do it well,' he said. 'She has
had her feed, and in five minutes will be saddled at the door.'

'But you must eat, dear friend,' said the hostess.

'I'll munch at a packet of sandwiches on the way. There seems a chance,
and the time for lunching may miss it.'

'You understand . . . ?'

'Everything, I fancy.'

'If she is there!'

'One break in the run will turn her back.'

The sensitive invalid felt a blow in his following up the simile of the
hunted hare for her friend, but it had a promise of hopefulness. And this
was all that could be done by earthly agents, under direction of
spiritual, as her imagination encouraged her to believe.

She saw him start, after fortifying him with a tumbler of choice
Bordeaux, thinking how Tony would have said she was like a lady arming
her knight for battle. On the back of the mare he passed her window,
after lifting his hat, and he thumped at his breast-pocket, to show her
where the letter housed safely. The packet of provision bulged on his
hip, absurdly and blessedly to her sight, not unlike the man, in his
combination of robust serviceable qualities, as she reflected during the
later hours, until the sun fell on smouldering November woods, and
sensations of the frost he foretold bade her remember that he had gone
forth riding like a huntsman. His great-coat lay on a chair in the hall,
and his travelling-bag was beside it. He had carried it up from the
valley, expecting hospitality, and she had sent him forth half naked to
weather a frosty November night! She called in the groom, whose derision
of a great-coat for any gentleman upon Bertha, meaning work for the mare,
appeased her remorsefulness. Brisby, the groom, reckoned how long the
mare would take to do the distance to Storling, with a rider like Mr.
Redworth on her back. By seven, Brisby calculated, Mr. Redworth would be
knocking at the door of the Three Ravens Inn, at Storling, when the mare
would have a decent grooming, and Mr. Redworth was not the gentleman to
let her be fed out of his eye. More than that, Brisby had some
acquaintance with the people of the inn. He begged to inform her ladyship
that he was half a Sussex man, though not exactly born in the county; his
parents had removed to Sussex after the great event; and the Downs were
his first field of horse-exercise, and no place in the world was like
them, fair weather or foul, Summer or Winter, and snow ten feet deep in
the gullies. The grandest air in England, he had heard say.

His mistress kept him to the discourse, for the comfort of hearing hard
bald matter-of-fact; and she was amused and rebuked by his assumption
that she must be entertaining an anxiety about master's favourite mare.
But, ah! that Diana had delayed in choosing a mate; had avoided her
disastrous union with perhaps a more imposing man, to see the true beauty
of masculine character in Mr. Redworth, as he showed himself to-day. How
could he have doubted succeeding? One grain more of faith in his energy,
and Diana might have been mated to the right husband for her--an
open-minded clear-faced English gentleman. Her speculative ethereal mind
clung to bald matter-of-fact to-day. She would have vowed that it was the
sole potentially heroical. Even Brisby partook of the reflected rays, and
he was very benevolently considered by her. She dismissed him only when
his recounting of the stages of Bertha's journey began to fatigue her and
deaden the medical efficacy of him and his like. Stretched on the sofa,
she watched the early sinking sun in South-western cloud, and the changes
from saffron to intensest crimson, the crown of a November evening, and
one of frost.

Redworth struck on a southward line from chalk-ridge to sand, where he
had a pleasant footing in familiar country, under beeches that browned
the ways, along beside a meadowbrook fed by the heights, through pines
and across deep sand-ruts to full view of weald and Downs. Diana had been
with him here in her maiden days. The coloured back of a coach put an end
to that dream. He lightened his pocket, surveying the land as he munched.
A favourable land for rails: and she had looked over it: and he was now
becoming a wealthy man: and she was a married woman straining the leash.
His errand would not bear examination, it seemed such a desperate long
shot. He shut his inner vision on it, and pricked forward. When the
burning sunset shot waves above the juniper and yews behind him, he was
far on the weald, trotting down an interminable road. That the people
opposing railways were not people of business, was his reflection, and it
returned persistently: for practical men, even the most devoted among
them, will think for themselves; their army, which is the rational, calls
them to its banners, in opposition to the sentimental; and Redworth
joined it in the abstract, summoning the horrible state of the roads to
testify against an enemy wanting almost in common humaneness. A slip of
his excellent stepper in one of the half-frozen pits of the highway was
the principal cause of his confusion of logic; she was half on her knees.
Beyond the market town the roads were so bad that he quitted them, and
with the indifference of an engineer, struck a line of his own
Southeastward over fields and ditches, favoured by a round horizon moon
on his left. So for a couple of hours he went ahead over rolling fallow
land to the meadow-flats and a pale shining of freshets; then hit on a
lane skirting the water, and reached an amphibious village; five miles
from Storling, he was informed, and a clear traverse of lanes, not to be
mistaken, 'if he kept a sharp eye open.' The sharpness of his eyes was
divided between the sword-belt of the starry Hunter and the shifting
lanes that zig-tagged his course below. The Downs were softly illumined;
still it amazed him to think of a woman like Diana Warwick having an
attachment to this district, so hard of yield, mucky, featureless, fit
but for the rails she sided with her friend in detesting. Reasonable
women, too! The moon, stood high on her march as he entered Storling. He
led his good beast to the stables of The Three Ravens, thanking her and
caressing her. The ostler conjectured from the look of the mare that he
had been out with the hounds and lost his way. It appeared to Redworth
singularly, that near the ending of a wild goose chase, his plight was
pretty well described by the fellow. However, he had to knock at the door
of The Crossways now, in the silent night time, a certainly empty house,
to his fancy. He fed on a snack of cold meat and tea, standing, and set
forth, clearly directed, 'if he kept a sharp eye open.' Hitherto he had
proved his capacity, and he rather smiled at the repetition of the
formula to him, of all men. A turning to the right was taken, one to the
left, and through the churchyard, out of the gate, round to the right,
and on. By this route, after an hour, he found himself passing beneath
the bare chestnuts of the churchyard wall of Storling, and the sparkle of
the edges of the dead chestnut-leaves at his feet reminded him of the
very ideas he had entertained when treading them. The loss of an hour
strung him to pursue the chase in earnest, and he had a beating of the
heart as he thought that it might be serious. He recollected thinking it
so at Copsley. The long ride, and nightfall, with nothing in view, had
obscured his mind to the possible behind the thick obstruction of the
probable; again the possible waved its marsh-light. To help in saving her
from a fatal step, supposing a dozen combinations of the conditional
mood, became his fixed object, since here he was--of that there was no
doubt; and he was not here to play the fool, though the errand were
foolish. He entered the churchyard, crossed the shadow of the tower, and
hastened along the path, fancying he beheld a couple of figures vanishing
before him. He shouted; he hoped to obtain directions from these natives:
the moon was bright, the gravestones legible; but no answer came back,
and the place appeared to belong entirely to the dead. 'I've frightened
them,' he thought. They left a queerish sensation in his frame. A ride
down to Sussex to see ghosts would be an odd experience; but an
undigested dinner of tea is the very grandmother of ghosts; and he
accused it of confusing him, sight and mind. Out of the gate, now for the
turning to the right, and on. He turned. He must have previously turned
wrongly somewhere--and where? A light in a cottage invited him to apply
for the needed directions. The door was opened by a woman, who had never
heard tell of The Crossways, nor had her husband, nor any of the children
crowding round them. A voice within ejaculated: 'Crassways!' and soon
upon the grating of a chair, an old man, whom the woman named her lodger,
by way of introduction, presented himself with his hat on, saying: 'I
knows the spot they calls Crassways,' and he led. Redworth understood the
intention that a job was to be made of it, and submitting, said: 'To the
right, I think.' He was bidden to come along, if he wanted 'they
Crassways,' and from the right they turned to the left, and further sharp
round, and on to a turn, where the old man, otherwise incommunicative,
said: 'There, down thik theer road, and a post in the middle.'

'I want a house, not a post!' roared Redworth, spying a bare space.

The old man despatched a finger travelling to his nob. 'Naw, there's
ne'er a house. But that's crassways for four roads, if it 's crassways,
you wants.'

They journeyed backward. They were in such a maze of lanes that the old
man was master, and Redworth vowed to be rid of him at the first cottage.
This, however, they were long in reaching, and the old man was promptly
through the garden-gate, hailing the people and securing 'information,
before Redworth could well hear. He smiled at the dogged astuteness of a
dense-headed old creature determined to establish a claim to his fee.
They struck a lane sharp to the left.

'You're Sussex?' Redworth asked him, and was answered: 'Naw; the Sheers.'

Emerging from deliberation, the old man said: 'Ah'm a Hampshireman.'

'A capital county!'

'Heigh!' The old man heaved his chest. 'Once!'

'Why, what has happened to it?'

'Once it were a capital county, I say. Hah! you asks me what have
happened to it. You take and go and look at it now. And down heer'll be
no better soon, I tells 'em. When ah was a boy, old Hampshire was a proud
country, wi' the old coaches and the old squires, and Harvest Homes, and
Christmas merryings.--Cutting up the land! There's no pride in livin'
theer, nor anywhere, as I sees, now.'

'You mean the railways.'

'It's the Devil come up and abroad ower all England!' exclaimed the
melancholy ancient patriot.

A little cheering was tried on him, but vainly. He saw with unerring
distinctness the triumph of the Foul Potentate, nay his personal
appearance 'in they theer puffin' engines.' The country which had
produced Andrew Hedger, as he stated his name to be, would never show the
same old cricketing commons it did when he was a boy. Old England, he
declared, was done for.

When Redworth applied to his watch under the brilliant moonbeams, he
discovered that he had been listening to this natural outcry of a
decaying and shunted class full three-quarters of an hour, and The
Crossways was not in sight. He remonstrated. The old man plodded along.
'We must do as we're directed,' he said.

Further walking brought them to a turn. Any turn seemed hopeful. Another
turn offered the welcome sight of a blazing doorway on a rise of ground
off the road. Approaching it, the old man requested him to 'bide a bit,'
and stalked the ascent at long strides. A vigorous old fellow. Redworth
waited below, observing how he joined the group at the lighted door, and,
as it was apparent, put his question of the whereabout of The Crossways.
Finally, in extreme impatience, he walked up to the group of spectators.
They were all, and Andrew Hedger among them, the most entranced and
profoundly reverent, observing the dissection of a pig.

Unable to awaken his hearing, Redworth jogged his arm, and the shake was
ineffective until it grew in force.

'I've no time to lose; have they told you the way?'

Andrew Hedger yielded his arm. He slowly withdrew his intent fond gaze
from the fair outstretched white carcase, and with drooping eyelids, he
said: 'Ah could eat hog a solid hower!'

He had forgotten to ask the way, intoxicated by the aspect of the pig;
and when he did ask it, he was hard of understanding, given wholly to his
last glimpses.

Redworth got the directions. He would have dismissed Mr. Andrew Hedger,
but there was no doing so. 'I'll show ye on to The Crossways House,' the
latter said, implying that he had already earned something by showing him
The Crossways post.

'Hog's my feed,' said Andrew Hedger. The gastric springs of eloquence
moved him to discourse, and he unburdened himself between succulent
pauses. 'They've killed him early. He 's fat; and he might ha' been
fatter. But he's fat. They've got their Christmas ready, that they have.
Lord! you should see the chitterlings, and--the sausages hung up to and
along the beams. That's a crown for any dwellin'! They runs 'em round the
top of the room--it's like a May-day wreath in old times. Home-fed hog!
They've a treat in store, they have. And snap your fingers at the world
for many a long day. And the hams! They cure their own hams at that
house. Old style! That's what I say of a hog. He's good from end to end,
and beats a Christian hollow. Everybody knows it and owns it.'

Redworth was getting tired. In sympathy with current conversation, he
said a word for the railways: they would certainly make the flesh of
swine cheaper, bring a heap of hams into the market. But Andrew Hedger
remarked with contempt that he had not much opinion of foreign hams:
nobody, knew what they fed on. Hog, he said, would feed on anything,
where there was no choice they had wonderful stomachs for food. Only,
when they had a choice, they left the worst for last, and home-fed filled
them with stuff to make good meat and fat 'what we calls prime bacon.' As
it is not right to damp a native enthusiasm, Redworth let him dilate on
his theme, and mused on his boast to eat hog a solid hour, which roused
some distant classic recollection:--an odd jumble.

They crossed the wooden bridge of a flooded stream.

'Now ye have it,' said the hog-worshipper; 'that may be the house, I
reckon.'

A dark mass of building, with the moon behind it, shining in spires
through a mound of firs, met Redworth's gaze. The windows all were blind,
no smoke rose from the chimneys. He noted the dusky square of green, and
the finger-post signalling the centre of the four roads. Andrew Hedger
repeated that it was The Crossways house, ne'er a doubt. Redworth paid
him his expected fee, whereupon Andrew, shouldering off, wished him a
hearty good night, and forthwith departed at high pedestrian pace,
manifestly to have a concluding look at the beloved anatomy.

There stood the house. Absolutely empty! thought Redworth. The sound of
the gate-bell he rang was like an echo to him. The gate was unlocked. He
felt a return of his queer churchyard sensation when walking up the
garden-path, in the shadow of the house. Here she was born: here her
father died: and this was the station of her dreams, as a girl at school
near London and in Paris. Her heart was here. He looked at the windows
facing the Downs with dead eyes. The vivid idea of her was a phantom
presence, and cold, assuring him that the bodily Diana was absent. Had
Lady Dunstane guessed rightly, he might perhaps have been of service!

Anticipating the blank silence, he rang the house-bell. It seemed to set
wagging a weariful tongue in a corpse. The bell did its duty to the last
note, and one thin revival stroke, for a finish, as in days when it
responded livingly to the guest. He pulled, and had the reply, just the
same, with the faint terminal touch, resembling exactly a 'There!' at the
close of a voluble delivery in the negative. Absolutely empty. He pulled
and pulled. The bell wagged, wagged. This had been a house of a witty
host, a merry girl, junketting guests; a house of hilarious thunders,
lightnings of fun and fancy. Death never seemed more voiceful than in
that wagging of the bell.

For conscience' sake, as became a trusty emissary, he walked round to the
back of the house, to verify the total emptiness. His apprehensive
despondency had said that it was absolutely empty, but upon consideration
he supposed the house must have some guardian: likely enough, an old
gardener and his wife, lost in deafness double-shotted by sleep! There
was no sign of them. The night air waxed sensibly crisper. He thumped the
backdoors. Blank hollowness retorted on the blow. He banged and kicked.
The violent altercation with wood and wall lasted several minutes, ending
as it had begun.

Flesh may worry, but is sure to be worsted in such an argument.

'Well, my dear lady!'--Redworth addressed Lady Dunstane aloud, while
driving his hands into his pockets for warmth--'we've done what we could.
The next best thing is to go to bed and see what morning brings us.'

The temptation to glance at the wild divinings of dreamy-witted women
from the point of view of the practical man, was aided by the intense
frigidity of the atmosphere in leading him to criticize a sex not much
used to the exercise of brains. 'And they hate railways!' He associated
them, in the matter of intelligence, with Andrew Hedger and Company. They
sank to the level of the temperature in his esteem--as regarded their
intellects. He approved their warmth of heart. The nipping of the
victim's toes and finger-tips testified powerfully to that.

Round to the front of the house at a trot, he stood in moonlight. Then,
for involuntarily he now did everything running, with a dash up the steps
he seized the sullen pendant bell-handle, and worked it pumpwise, till he
perceived a smaller bell-knob beside the door, at which he worked
piston-wise. Pump and piston, the hurly-burly and the tinkler created an
alarm to scare cat and mouse and Cardinal spider, all that run or weave
in desolate houses, with the good result of a certain degree of heat to
his frame. He ceased, panting. No stir within, nor light. That white
stare of windows at the moon was undisturbed.

The Downs were like a wavy robe of shadowy grey silk. No wonder that she
had loved to look on them!

And it was no wonder that Andrew Hedger enjoyed prime bacon. Bacon
frizzling, fat rashers of real homefed on the fire-none of your
foreign-suggested a genial refreshment and resistance to antagonistic
elements. Nor was it, granting health, granting a sharp night--the
temperature at least fifteen below zero--an excessive boast for a man to
say he could go on eating for a solid hour.

These were notions darting through a half nourished gentleman nipped in
the frame by a severely frosty night. Truly a most beautiful night! She
would have delighted to see it here. The Downs were like floating
islands, like fairy-laden vapours; solid, as Andrew Hedger's hour of
eating; visionary, as too often his desire!

Redworth muttered to himself, after taking the picture of the house and
surrounding country from the sward, that he thought it about the sharpest
night he had ever encountered in England. He was cold, hungry,
dispirited, and astoundingly stricken with an incapacity to separate any
of his thoughts from old Andrew Hedger. Nature was at her pranks upon
him.

He left the garden briskly, as to the legs, and reluctantly. He would
have liked to know whether Diana had recently visited the house, or was
expected. It could be learnt in the morning; but his mission was urgent
and he on the wings of it. He was vexed and saddened.

Scarcely had he closed the garden-gate when the noise of an opening
window arrested him, and he called. The answer was in a feminine voice,
youngish, not disagreeable, though not Diana's.

He heard none of the words, but rejoined in a bawl: 'Mrs. Warwick!--Mr.
Redworth!'

That was loud enough for the deaf or the dead.

The window closed. He went to the door and waited. It swung wide to him;
and O marvel of a woman's divination of a woman! there stood Diana.




CHAPTER IX

SHOWS HOW A POSITION OF DELICACY FOR A LADY AND GENTLEMAN WAS MET IN
SIMPLE FASHION WITHOUT HURT TO EITHER

Redworth's impulse was to laugh for very gladness of heart, as he
proffered excuses for his tremendous alarums and in doing so, the worthy
gentleman imagined he must have persisted in clamouring for admission
because he suspected, that if at home, she would require a violent
summons to betray herself. It was necessary to him to follow his abashed
sagacity up to the mark of his happy animation.

'Had I known it was you!' said Diana, bidding him enter the passage. She
wore a black silk mantilla and was warmly covered.

She called to her maid Danvers, whom Redworth remembered: a firm woman of
about forty, wrapped, like her mistress, in head-covering, cloak, scarf
and shawl. Telling her to scour the kitchen for firewood, Diana led into
a sitting-room. 'I need not ask--you have come from Lady Dunstane,' she
said. 'Is she well?'

'She is deeply anxious.'

'You are cold. Empty houses are colder than out of doors. You shall soon
have a fire.'

She begged him to be seated.

The small glow of candle-light made her dark rich colouring orange in
shadow.

'House and grounds are open to a tenant,' she resumed. 'I say good-bye to
them to-morrow morning. The old couple who are in charge sleep in the
village to-night. I did not want them here. You have quitted the
Government service, I think?'

'A year or so since.'

'When did you return from America?'

'Two days back.'

'And paid your visit to Copsley immediately?'

'As early as I could.'

'That was true friendliness. You have a letter for me?'

'I have.'

He put his hand to his pocket for the letter.

'Presently,' she said. She divined the contents, and nursed her
resolution to withstand them. Danvers had brought firewood and coal.
Orders were given to her, and in spite of the opposition of the maid and
intervention of the gentleman, Diana knelt at the grate, observing:

'Allow me to do this. I can lay and light a fire.'

He was obliged to look on: she was a woman who spoke her meaning. She
knelt, handling paper, firewood and matches, like a housemaid. Danvers
proceeded on her mission, and Redworth eyed Diana in the first fire-glow.
He could have imagined a Madonna on an old black Spanish canvas.

The act of service was beautiful in gracefulness, and her simplicity in
doing the work touched it spiritually. He thought, as she knelt there,
that never had he seen how lovely and how charged with mystery her
features were; the dark large eyes full on the brows; the proud line of a
straight nose in right measure to the bow of the lips; reposeful red
lips, shut, and their curve of the slumber-smile at the corners. Her
forehead was broad; the chin of a sufficient firmness to sustain: that
noble square; the brows marked by a soft thick brush to the temples; her
black hair plainly drawn along her head to the knot, revealed by the
mantilla fallen on her neck.

Elegant in plainness, the classic poet would have said of her hair and
dress. She was of the women whose wits are quick in everything they do.
That which was proper to her position, complexion, and the hour, surely
marked her appearance. Unaccountably this night, the fair fleshly
presence over-weighted her intellectual distinction, to an observer bent
on vindicating her innocence. Or rather, he saw the hidden in the
visible.

Owner of such a woman, and to lose her! Redworth pitied the husband.

The crackling flames reddened her whole person. Gazing, he remembered
Lady Dunstane saying of her once, that in anger she had the nostrils of a
war-horse. The nostrils now were faintly alive under some sensitive
impression of her musings. The olive cheeks, pale as she stood in the
doorway, were flushed by the fire-beams, though no longer with their
swarthy central rose, tropic flower of a pure and abounding blood, as it
had seemed. She was now beset by battle. His pity for her, and his eager
championship, overwhelmed the spirit of compassion for the foolish
wretched husband. Dolt, the man must be, Redworth thought; and he asked
inwardly, Did the miserable tyrant suppose of a woman like this, that she
would be content to shine as a candle in a grated lanthorn? The
generosity of men speculating upon other men's possessions is known. Yet
the man who loves a woman has to the full the husband's jealousy of her
good name. And a lover, that without the claims of the alliance, can be
wounded on her behalf, is less distracted in his homage by the personal
luminary, to which man's manufacture of balm and incense is mainly drawn
when his love is wounded. That contemplation of her incomparable beauty,
with the multitude of his ideas fluttering round it, did somewhat shake
the personal luminary in Redworth. He was conscious of pangs. The
question bit him: How far had she been indiscreet or wilful? and the bite
of it was a keen acid to his nerves. A woman doubted by her husband, is
always, and even to her champions in the first hours of the noxious
rumour, until they had solidified in confidence through service, a
creature of the wilds, marked for our ancient running. Nay, more than a
cynical world, these latter will be sensible of it. The doubt casts her
forth, the general yelp drags her down; she runs like the prey of the
forest under spotting branches; clear if we can think so, but it has to
be thought in devotedness: her character is abroad. Redworth bore a
strong resemblance to, his fellowmen, except for his power of faith in
this woman. Nevertheless it required the superbness of her beauty and the
contrasting charm of her humble posture of kneeling by the fire, to set
him on his right track of mind. He knew and was sure of her. He dispersed
the unhallowed fry in attendance upon any stirring of the reptile part of
us, to look at her with the eyes of a friend. And if . . . !--a little
mouse of a thought scampered out of one of the chambers of his head and
darted along the passages, fetching a sweat to his brows. Well,
whatsoever the fact, his heart was hers! He hoped he could be charitable
to women.

She rose from her knees and said: 'Now, please, give me the letter.'

He was entreated to excuse her for consigning him to firelight when she
left the room.

Danvers brought in a dismal tallow candle, remarking that her mistress
had not expected visitors: her mistress had nothing but tea and bread and
butter to offer him. Danvers uttered no complaint of her sufferings;
happy in being the picture of them. 'I'm not hungry,' said he.

A plate of Andrew Hedger's own would not have tempted him. The foolish
frizzle of bacon sang in his ears as he walked from end to end of the
room; an illusion of his fancy pricked by a frost-edged appetite. But the
anticipated contest with Diana checked and numbed the craving.

Was Warwick a man to proceed to extremities on a mad suspicion?--What
kind of proof had he?

Redworth summoned the portrait of Mr. Warwick before him, and beheld a
sweeping of close eyes in cloud, a long upper lip in cloud; the rest of
him was all cloud. As usual with these conjurations of a face, the index
of the nature conceived by him displayed itself, and no more; but he took
it for the whole physiognomy, and pronounced of the husband thus
delineated, that those close eyes of the long upper lip would both
suspect and proceed madly.

He was invited by Danvers to enter the dining-room.

There Diana joined him.

'The best of a dinner on bread and butter is, that one is ready for
supper soon after it,' she said, swimming to the tea-tray. 'You have
dined?'

'At the inn,' he replied.

'The Three Ravens! When my father's guests from London flooded The
Crossways, The Three Ravens provided the overflow with beds. On nights
like this I have got up and scraped the frost from my window-panes to see
them step into the old fly, singing some song of his. The inn had a good
reputation for hospitality in those days. I hope they treated you well?'

'Excellently,' said Redworth, taking an enormous mouthful, while his
heart sank to see that she who smiled to encourage his eating had been
weeping. But she also consumed her bread and butter.

'That poor maid of mine is an instance of a woman able to do things
against the grain,' she said. 'Danvers is a foster-child of luxury. She
loves it; great houses, plentiful meals, and the crowd of twinkling
footmen's calves. Yet you see her here in a desolate house, consenting to
cold, and I know not what, terrors of ghosts! poor soul. I have some
mysterious attraction for her. She would not let me come alone. I should
have had to hire some old Storling grannam, or retain the tattling
keepers of the house. She loves her native country too, and disdains the
foreigner. My tea you may trust.'

Redworth had not a doubt of it. He was becoming a tea-taster. The merit
of warmth pertained to the beverage. 'I think you get your tea from
Scoppin's, in the City,' he said.

That was the warehouse for Mrs. Warwick's tea. They conversed of Teas;
the black, the green, the mixtures; each thinking of the attack to come,
and the defence. Meantime, the cut bread and butter having flown,
Redwerth attacked the loaf. He apologized.

'Oh! pay me a practical compliment,' Diana said, and looked really happy
at his unfeigned relish of her simple fare.

She had given him one opportunity in speaking of her maid's love of
native country. But it came too early.

'They say that bread and butter is fattening,' he remarked.

'You preserve the mean,' said she.

He admitted that his health was good. For some little time, to his
vexation at the absurdity, she kept him talking of himself. So flowing
was she, and so sweet the motion of her mouth in utterance, that he
followed her lead, and he said odd things and corrected them. He had to
describe his ride to her.

'Yes! the view of the Downs from Dewhurst,' she exclaimed. 'Or any point
along the ridge. Emma and I once drove there in Summer, with clotted
cream from her dairy, and we bought fresh-plucked wortleberries, and
stewed them in a hollow of the furzes, and ate them with ground biscuits
and the clotted cream iced, and thought it a luncheon for seraphs. Then
you dropped to the road round under the sand-heights--and meditated
railways!'

'Just a notion or two.'

'You have been very successful in America?'

'Successful; perhaps; we exclude extremes in our calculations of the
still problematical.'

'I am sure,' said she, 'you always have faith in your calculations.'

Her innocent archness dealt him a stab sharper than any he had known
since the day of his hearing of her engagement. He muttered of his
calculations being human; he was as much of a fool as other men--more!

'Oh! no,' said she.

'Positively.'

'I cannot think it.'

'I know it.'

'Mr. Redworth, you will never persuade me to believe it.'

He knocked a rising groan on the head, and rejoined 'I hope I may not
have to say so to-night.'

Diana felt the edge of the dart. 'And meditating railways, you scored our
poor land of herds and flocks; and night fell, and the moon sprang up,
and on you came. It was clever of you to find your way by the moonbeams.'

'That's about the one thing I seem fit for!'

'But what delusion is this, in the mind of a man succeeding in everything
he does!' cried Diana, curious despite her wariness. 'Is there to be the
revelation of a hairshirt ultimately?--a Journal of Confessions? You
succeeded in everything you aimed at, and broke your heart over one
chance miss?'

'My heart is not of the stuff to break,' he said, and laughed off her
fortuitous thrust straight into it. 'Another cup, yes. I came . . .'

'By night,' said she, 'and cleverly found your way, and dined at The
Three Ravens, and walked to The Crossways, and met no ghosts.'

'On the contrary--or at least I saw a couple.'

'Tell me of them; we breed them here. We sell them periodically to the
newspapers!'

'Well, I started them in their natal locality. I saw them, going down the
churchyard, and bellowed after them with all my lungs. I wanted
directions to The Crossways; I had missed my way at some turning. In an
instant they were vapour.'

Diana smiled. 'It was indeed a voice to startle delicate apparitions! So
do roar Hyrcanean tigers. Pyramus and Thisbe--slaying lions! One of your
ghosts carried a loaf of bread, and dropped it in fright; one carried a
pound of fresh butter for home consumption. They were in the churchyard
for one in passing to kneel at her father's grave and kiss his
tombstone.'

She bowed her head, forgetful of her guard.

The pause presented an opening. Redworth left his chair and walked to the
mantelpiece. It was easier to him to speak, not facing her.

'You have read Lady Dunstane's letter,' he began.

She nodded. 'I have.'

'Can you resist her appeal to you?'

'I must.'

'She is not in a condition to bear it well. You will pardon me, Mrs.
Warwick . . .'

'Fully! Fully!'

'I venture to offer merely practical advice. You have thought of it all,
but have not felt it. In these cases, the one thing to do is to make a
stand. Lady Dunstane has a clear head. She sees what has to be endured by
you. Consider: she appeals to me to bring you her letter. Would she have
chosen me, or any man, for her messenger, if it had not appeared to her a
matter of life and death? You count me among your friends.'

'One of the truest.'

'Here are two, then, and your own good sense. For I do not believe it to
be a question of courage.'

'He has commenced. Let him carry it out,' said Diana.

Her desperation could have added the cry--And give me freedom! That was
the secret in her heart. She had struck on the hope for the detested yoke
to be broken at any cost.

'I decline to meet his charges. I despise them. If my friends have faith
in me--and they may!--I want nothing more.'

'Well, I won't talk commonplaces about the world,' said Redworth. 'We can
none of us afford to have it against us. Consider a moment: to your
friends you are the Diana Merion they knew, and they will not suffer an
injury to your good name without a struggle. But if you fly? You leave
the dearest you have to the whole brunt of it.

'They will, if they love me.'

'They will. But think of the shock to her. Lady Dunstane reads you--'

'Not quite. No, not if she even wishes me to stay!' said Diana.

He was too intent on his pleading to perceive a signification.

'She reads you as clearly in the dark as if you were present with her.'

'Oh! why am I not ten years older!' Diana cried, and tried to face round
to him, and stopped paralyzed. 'Ten years older, I could discuss my
situation, as an old woman of the world, and use my wits to defend
myself.'

'And then you would not dream of flight before it!'

'No, she does not read me: no! She saw that I might come to The
Crossways. She--no one but myself can see the wisdom of my holding aloof,
in contempt of this baseness.'

'And of allowing her to sink under that which your presence would arrest.
Her strength will not support it.'

'Emma! Oh, cruel!' Diana sprang up to give play to her limbs. She dropped
on another chair. 'Go I must, I cannot turn back. She saw my old
attachment to this place. It was not difficult to guess . . . Who but I
can see the wisest course for me!'

'It comes to this, that the blow aimed at you in your absence will strike
her, and mortally,' said Redworth.

'Then I say it is terrible to have a friend,' said Diana, with her bosom
heaving.

'Friendship, I fancy, means one heart between two.'

His unstressed observation hit a bell in her head, and set it
reverberating. She and Emma had spoken, written, the very words. She drew
forth her Emma's letter from under her left breast, and read some
half-blinded lines.

Redworth immediately prepared to leave her to her feelings--trustier
guides than her judgement in this crisis.

'Adieu, for the night, Mrs. Warwick,' he said, and was guilty of
eulogizing the judgement he thought erratic for the moment. 'Night is a
calm adviser. Let me presume to come again in the morning. I dare not go
back without you.'

She looked up. As they faced together each saw that the other had passed
through a furnace, scorching enough to him, though hers was the delicacy
exposed. The reflection had its weight with her during the night.

'Danvers is getting ready a bed for you; she is airing linen,' Diana,
said. But the bed was declined, and the hospitality was not pressed. The
offer of it seemed to him significant of an unwary cordiality and
thoughtlessness of tattlers that might account possibly for many
things--supposing a fool or madman, or malignants, to interpret them.

'Then, good night,' said she.

They joined hands. He exacted no promise that she would be present in the
morning to receive him; and it was a consolation to her desire for
freedom, until she reflected on the perfect confidence it implied, and
felt as a quivering butterfly impalpably pinned.




CHAPTER X

THE CONFLICT OF THE NIGHT

Her brain was a steam-wheel throughout the night; everything that could
be thought of was tossed, nothing grasped.

The unfriendliness of the friends who sought to retain her recurred. For
look--to fly could not be interpreted as a flight. It was but a stepping
aside, a disdain of defending herself, and a wrapping herself in her
dignity. Women would be with her. She called on the noblest of them to
justify the course she chose, and they did, in an almost audible murmur.

And O the rich reward. A black archway-gate swung open to the glittering
fields of freedom.

Emma was not of the chorus. Emma meditated as an invalid. How often had
Emma bewailed to her that the most, grievous burden of her malady was her
fatal tendency to brood sickly upon human complications! She could not
see the blessedness of the prospect of freedom to a woman abominably
yoked. What if a miserable woman were dragged through mire to reach it!
Married, the mire was her portion, whatever she might do. That man--but
pass him!

And that other--the dear, the kind, careless, high-hearted old friend. He
could honestly protest his guiltlessness, and would smilingly leave the
case to go its ways. Of this she was sure, that her decision and her
pleasure would be his. They were tied to the stake. She had already
tasted some of the mortal agony. Did it matter whether the flames
consumed her?

Reflecting on the interview with Redworth, though she had performed her
part in it placidly, her skin burned. It was the beginning of tortures if
she stayed in England.

By staying to defend herself she forfeited her attitude of dignity and
lost all chance of her reward. And name the sort of world it is, dear
friends, for which we are to sacrifice our one hope of freedom, that we
may preserve our fair fame in it!

Diana cried aloud, 'My freedom!' feeling as a butterfly flown out of a
box to stretches of sunny earth beneath spacious heavens. Her bitter
marriage, joyless in all its chapters, indefensible where the man was
right as well as where insensately wrong, had been imprisonment. She
excused him down to his last madness, if only the bonds were broken.
Here, too, in this very house of her happiness with her father, she had
bound herself to the man voluntarily, quite inexplicably. Voluntarily, as
we say. But there must be a spell upon us at times. Upon young women
there certainly is.

The wild brain of Diana, armed by her later enlightenment as to the laws
of life and nature, dashed in revolt at the laws of the world when she
thought of the forces, natural and social, urging young women to marry
and be bound to the end.

It should be a spotless world which is thus ruthless.

But were the world impeccable it would behave more generously.

The world is ruthless, dear friends, because the world is hypocrite! The
world cannot afford to be magnanimous, or even just.

Her dissensions with her husband, their differences of opinion, and puny
wranglings, hoistings of two standards, reconciliations for the sake of
decency, breaches of the truce, and his detested meanness, the man behind
the mask; and glimpses of herself too, the half-known, half-suspected,
developing creature claiming to be Diana, and unlike her dreamed Diana,
deformed by marriage, irritable, acerb, rebellious, constantly
justifiable against him, but not in her own mind, and therefore accusing
him of the double crime of provoking her and perverting her--these were
the troops defiling through her head while she did battle with the
hypocrite world.

One painful sting was caused by the feeling that she could have
loved--whom? An ideal. Had he, the imagined but unvisioned, been her
yoke-fellow, would she now lie raising caged-beast cries in execration of
the yoke? She would not now be seeing herself as hare, serpent, tigress!
The hypothesis was reviewed in negatives: she had barely a sense of
softness, just a single little heave of the bosom, quivering upward and
leadenly sinking, when she glanced at a married Diana heartily mated. The
regrets of the youthful for a life sailing away under medical sentence of
death in the sad eyes of relatives resemble it. She could have loved.
Good-bye to that!

A woman's brutallest tussle with the world was upon her. She was in the
arena of the savage claws, flung there by the man who of all others
should have protected her from them. And what had she done to deserve it?
She listened to the advocate pleading her case; she primed him to admit
the charges, to say the worst, in contempt of legal prudence, and thereby
expose her transparent honesty. The very things awakening a mad suspicion
proved her innocence. But was she this utterly simple person? Oh, no! She
was the Diana of the pride in her power of fencing with evil--by no means
of the order of those ninny young women who realize the popular
conception of the purely innocent. She had fenced and kept her guard. Of
this it was her angry glory to have the knowledge. But she had been
compelled to fence. Such are men in the world of facts, that when a woman
steps out of her domestic tangle to assert, because it is a tangle, her
rights to partial independence, they sight her for their prey, or at
least they complacently suppose her accessible. Wretched at home, a woman
ought to bury herself in her wretchedness, else may she be assured that
not the cleverest, wariest guard will cover her character.

Against the husband her cause was triumphant. Against herself she decided
not to plead it, for this reason, that the preceding Court, which was the
public and only positive one, had entirely and justly exonerated her. But
the holding of her hand by the friend half a minute too long for
friendship, and the over-friendliness of looks, letters, frequency of
visits, would speak within her. She had a darting view of her husband's
estimation of them in his present mood. She quenched it; they were
trifles, things that women of the world have to combat. The revelation to
a fair-minded young woman of the majority of men being naught other than
men, and some of the friendliest of men betraying confidence under the
excuse of temptation, is one of the shocks to simplicity which leave her
the alternative of misanthropy or philosophy. Diana had not the heart to
hate her kind, so she resigned herself to pardon, and to the recognition
of the state of duel between the sexes-active enough in her sphere of
society. The circle hummed with it; many lived for it. Could she pretend
to ignore it? Her personal experience might have instigated a less clear
and less intrepid nature to take advantage of the opportunity for playing
the popular innocent, who runs about with astonished eyes to find herself
in so hunting a world, and wins general compassion, if not shelter in
unsuspected and unlicenced places. There is perpetually the inducement to
act the hypocrite before the hypocrite world, unless a woman submits to
be the humbly knitting housewife, unquestioningly worshipful of her lord;
for the world is ever gracious to an hypocrisy that pays homage to the
mask of virtue by copying it; the world is hostile to the face of an
innocence not conventionally simpering and quite surprised; the world
prefers decorum to honesty. 'Let me be myself, whatever the martyrdom!'
she cried, in that phase of young sensation when, to the blooming woman;
the putting on of a mask appears to wither her and reduce her to the show
she parades. Yet, in common with her sisterhood, she owned she had worn a
sort of mask; the world demands it of them as the price of their station.
That she had never worn it consentingly, was the plea for now casting it
off altogether, showing herself as she was, accepting martyrdom, becoming
the first martyr of the modern woman's cause--a grand position! and one
imaginable to an excited mind in the dark, which does not conjure a
critical humour, as light does, to correct the feverish sublimity. She
was, then, this martyr, a woman capable of telling the world she knew it,
and of, confessing that she had behaved in disdain of its rigider rules,
according to her own ideas of her immunities. O brave!

But was she holding the position by flight? It involved the challenge of
consequences, not an evasion of them.

She moaned; her mental steam-wheel stopped; fatigue brought sleep.

She had sensationally led her rebellious wits to The Crossways,
distilling much poison from thoughts on the way; and there, for the
luxury of a still seeming indecision, she sank into oblivion.




CHAPTER XI

RECOUNTS THE JOURNEY IN A CHARIOT, WITH A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF DIALOGUE, AND
A SMALL INCIDENT ON THE ROAD

In the morning the fight was over. She looked at the signpost of The
Crossways whilst dressing, and submitted to follow, obediently as a
puppet, the road recommended by friends, though a voice within, that
she took for the intimations of her reason, protested that they were
wrong, that they were judging of her case in the general, and
unwisely--disastrously for her.

The mistaking of her desires for her reasons was peculiar to her
situation.

'So I suppose I shall some day see The Crossways again,' she said, to
conceive a compensation in the abandonment of freedom. The night's red
vision of martyrdom was reserved to console her secretly, among the
unopened lockers in her treasury of thoughts. It helped to sustain her;
and she was too conscious of things necessary for her sustainment to
bring it to the light of day and examine it. She had a pitiful bit of
pleasure in the gratification she imparted to Danvers, by informing her
that the journey of the day was backward to Copsley.

'If I may venture to say so, ma'am, I am very glad,' said her maid.

'You must be prepared for the questions of lawyers, Danvers.'

'Oh, ma'am! they'll get nothing out of me, and their wigs won't frighten
me.'

'It is usually their baldness that is most frightening, my poor Danvers.'

'Nor their baldness, ma'am,' said the literal maid; 'I never cared for
their heads, or them. I've been in a Case before.'

'Indeed!' exclaimed her mistress; and she had a chill.

Danvers mentioned a notorious Case, adding, 'They got nothing out of me.'

'In my Case you will please to speak the truth,' said Diana, and beheld
in the looking-glass the primming of her maid's mouth. The sight shot a
sting.

'Understand that there is to be no hesitation about telling the truth of
what you know of me,' said Diana; and the answer was, 'No, ma'am.'

For Danvers could remark to herself that she knew little, and was not a
person to hesitate. She was a maid of the world, with the quality of
faithfulness, by nature, to a good mistress.

Redworth's further difficulties were confined to the hiring of a
conveyance for the travellers, and hot-water bottles, together with a
postillion not addicted to drunkenness. He procured a posting-chariot, an
ancient and musty, of a late autumnal yellow unrefreshed by paint; the
only bottles to be had were Dutch Schiedam. His postillion, inspected at
Storling, carried the flag of habitual inebriation on his nose, and he
deemed it adviseable to ride the mare in accompaniment as far as
Riddlehurst, notwithstanding the postillion's vows upon his honour that
he was no drinker. The emphasis, to a gentleman acquainted with his
countrymen, was not reassuring. He had hopes of enlisting a trustier
fellow at Riddlehurst, but he was disappointed; and while debating upon
what to do, for he shrank from leaving two women to the conduct of that
inflamed troughsnout, Brisby, despatched to Storling by an afterthought
of Lady Dunstane's, rushed out of the Riddlehurst inn taproom, and
relieved him of the charge of the mare. He was accommodated with a seat
on a stool in the chariot. 'My triumphal car,' said his captive. She was
very amusing about her postillion; Danvers had to beg pardon for
laughing. 'You are happy,' observed her mistress. But Redworth laughed
too, and he could not boast of any happiness beyond the temporary
satisfaction, nor could she who sprang the laughter boast of that little.
She said to herself, in the midst of the hilarity, 'Wherever I go now, in
all weathers, I am perfectly naked!' And remembering her readings of a
certain wonderful old quarto book in her father's library, by an
eccentric old Scottish nobleman, wherein the wearing of garments and
sleeping in houses is accused as the cause of human degeneracy, she took
a forced merry stand on her return to the primitive healthful state of
man and woman, and affected scorn of our modern ways of dressing and
thinking. Whence it came that she had some of her wildest seizures of
iridescent humour. Danvers attributed the fun to her mistress's gladness
in not having pursued her bent to quit the country. Redworth saw deeper,
and was nevertheless amazed by the airy hawk-poise and pounce-down of her
wit, as she ranged high and low, now capriciously generalizing, now
dropping bolt upon things of passage--the postillion jogging from rum to
gin, the rustics baconly agape, the horse-kneed ostlers. She touched them
to the life in similes and phrases; and next she was aloft, derisively
philosophizing, but with a comic afflatus that dispersed the sharpness of
her irony in mocking laughter. The afternoon refreshments at the inn of
the county market-town, and the English idea of public hospitality, as to
manner and the substance provided for wayfarers, were among the themes
she made memorable to him. She spoke of everything tolerantly, just
naming it in a simple sentence, that fell with a ring and chimed: their
host's ready acquiescence in receiving, orders, his contemptuous
disclaimer of stuff he did not keep, his flat indifference to the sheep
he sheared, and the phantom half-crown flickering in one eye of the
anticipatory waiter; the pervading and confounding smell of stale beer
over all the apartments; the prevalent, notion of bread, butter, tea,
milk, sugar, as matter for the exercise of a native inventive
genius--these were reviewed in quips of metaphor.

'Come, we can do better at an inn or two known to me,' said Redworth.

'Surely this is the best that can be done for us, when we strike them
with the magic wand of a postillion?' said she.

'It depends, as elsewhere, on the individuals entertaining us.'

'Yet you admit that your railways are rapidly "polishing off" the
individual.'

'They will spread the metropolitan idea of comfort.'

'I fear they will feed us on nothing but that big word. It booms--a
curfew bell--for every poor little light that we would read by.'

Seeing their beacon-nosed postillion preparing too mount and failing in
his jump, Redworth was apprehensive, and questioned the fellow concerning
potation.

'Lord, sir, they call me half a horse, but I can't 'bids water,' was the
reply, with the assurance that he had not 'taken a pailful.'

Habit enabled him to gain his seat.

'It seems to us unnecessary to heap on coal when the chimney is afire;
but he may know the proper course,' Diana said, convulsing Danvers; and
there was discernibly to Redworth, under the influence of her phrases, a
likeness of the flaming 'half-horse,' with the animals all smoking in the
frost, to a railway engine. 'Your wrinkled centaur,' she named the man.
Of course he had to play second to her, and not unwillingly; but he
reflected passingly on the instinctive push of her rich and sparkling
voluble fancy to the initiative, which women do not like in a woman, and
men prefer to distantly admire. English women and men feel toward the
quick-witted of their species as to aliens, having the demerits of
aliens-wordiness, vanity, obscurity, shallowness, an empty glitter, the
sin of posturing. A quick-witted woman exerting her wit is both a
foreigner and potentially a criminal. She is incandescent to a breath of
rumour. It accounted for her having detractors; a heavy counterpoise to
her enthusiastic friends. It might account for her husband's
discontent-the reduction of him to a state of mere masculine antagonism.
What is the husband of a vanward woman? He feels himself but a diminished
man. The English husband of a voluble woman relapses into a dreary mute.
Ah, for the choice of places! Redworth would have yielded her the loquent
lead for the smallest of the privileges due to him who now rejected all,
except the public scourging of her. The conviction was in his mind that
the husband of this woman sought rather to punish than be rid of her. But
a part of his own emotion went to form the judgement.

Furthermore, Lady Dunstane's allusion to her 'enemies' made him set down
her growing crops of backbiters to the trick she had of ridiculing things
English. If the English do it themselves, it is in a professionally
robust, a jocose, kindly way, always with a glance at the other things,
great things, they excel in; and it is done to have the credit of doing
it. They are keen to catch an inimical tone; they will find occasion to
chastise the presumptuous individual, unless it be the leader of a party,
therefore a power; for they respect a power. Redworth knew their
quaintnesses; without overlooking them he winced at the acid of an irony
that seemed to spring from aversion, and regretted it, for her sake. He
had to recollect that she was in a sharp-strung mood, bitterly
surexcited; moreover he reminded himself of her many and memorable
phrases of enthusiasm for England--Shakespeareland, as she would
sometimes perversely term it, to sink the country in the poet. English
fortitude, English integrity, the English disposition to do justice to
dependents, adolescent English ingenuousness, she was always ready to
laud. Only her enthusiasm required rousing by circumstances; it was less
at the brim than her satire. Hence she made enemies among a placable
people.

He felt that he could have helped her under happier conditions. The
beautiful vision she had been on the night of the Irish Ball swept before
him, and he looked at her, smiling.

'Why do you smile?' she said.

'I was thinking of Mr. Sullivan Smith.'

'Ah! my dear compatriot! And think, too, of Lord Larrian.'

She caught her breath. Instead of recreation, the names brought on a fit
of sadness. It deepened; shy neither smiled nor rattled any more. She
gazed across the hedgeways at the white meadows and bare-twigged copses
showing their last leaves in the frost.

'I remember your words: "Observation is the most, enduring of the
pleasures of life"; and so I have found it,' she said. There was a
brightness along her under-eyelids that caused him to look away.

The expected catastrophe occurred on the descent of a cutting in the
sand, where their cordial postillion at a trot bumped the chariot against
the sturdy wheels of a waggon, which sent it reclining for support upon a
beech-tree's huge intertwisted serpent roots, amid strips of brown
bracken and pendant weeds, while he exhibited one short stump of leg, all
boot, in air. No one was hurt. Diana disengaged herself from the shoulder
of Danvers, and mildly said:

'That reminds me, I forgot to ask why we came in a chariot.'

Redworth was excited on her behalf, but the broken glass had done no
damage, nor had Danvers fainted. The remark was unintelligible to him,
apart from the comforting it had been designed to give. He jumped out,
and held a hand for them to do the same. 'I never foresaw an event more
positively,' said he.

'And it was nothing but a back view that inspired you all the way,' said
Diana.

A waggoner held the horses, another assisted Redworth to right the
chariot. The postillion had hastily recovered possession of his official
seat, that he might as soon as possible feel himself again where he was
most intelligent, and was gay in stupidity, indifferent to what happened
behind him. Diana heard him counselling the waggoner as to the common
sense of meeting small accidents with a cheerful soul.

'Lord!' he cried, 'I been pitched a Somerset in my time, and taken up for
dead, and that didn't beat me!'

Disasters of the present kind could hardly affect such a veteran. But he
was painfully disconcerted by Redworth's determination not to entrust the
ladies any farther to his guidance. Danvers had implored for permission
to walk the mile to the town, and thence take a fly to Copsley. Her
mistress rather sided with the postillion; who begged them to spare him
the disgrace of riding in and delivering a box at the Red Lion.

'What'll they say? And they know Arthur Dance well there,' he groaned.
'What! Arthur! chariotin' a box! And me a better man to his work now than
I been for many a long season, fit for double the journey! A bit of a
shake always braces me up. I could read a newspaper right off, small
print and all. Come along, sir, and hand the ladies in.'

Danvers vowed her thanks to Mr. Redworth for refusing. They walked ahead;
the postillion communicated his mixture of professional and human
feelings to the waggoners, and walked his horses in the rear, meditating
on the weak-heartedness of gentryfolk, and the means for escaping being
chaffed out of his boots at the Old Red Lion, where he was to eat, drink,
and sleep that night. Ladies might be fearsome after a bit of a shake; he
would not have supposed it of a gentleman. He jogged himself into an
arithmetic of the number of nips of liquor he had taken to soothe him on
the road, in spite of the gentleman. 'For some of 'em are sworn enemies
of poor men, as yonder one, ne'er a doubt.'

Diana enjoyed her walk beneath the lingering brown-red of the frosty
November sunset, with the scent of sand-earth strong in the air.

'I had to hire a chariot because there was no two-horse carriage,' said
Redworth, 'and I wished to reach Copsley as early as possible.'

She replied, smiling, that accidents were fated. As a certain marriage
had been! The comparison forced itself on her reflections.

'But this is quite an adventure,' said she, reanimated by the brisker
flow of her blood. 'We ought really to be thankful for it, in days when
nothing happens.'

Redworth accused her of getting that idea from the perusal of romances.

'Yes, our lives require compression, like romances, to be interesting,
and we object to the process,' she said. 'Real happiness is a state of
dulness. When we taste it consciously it becomes mortal--a thing of the
Seasons. But I like my walk. How long these November sunsets burn, and
what hues they have! There is a scientific reason, only don't tell it me.
Now I understand why you always used to choose your holidays in
November.'

She thrilled him with her friendly recollection of his customs.

'As to happiness, the looking forward is happiness,' he remarked.

'Oh, the looking back! back!' she cried.

'Forward! that is life.'

'And backward, death, if you will; and still at is happiness. Death, and
our postillion!'

'Ay; I wonder why the fellow hangs to the rear,' said Redworth, turning
about.

'It's his cunning strategy, poor creature, so that he may be thought to
have delivered us at the head of the town, for us to make a purchase or
two, if we go to the inn on foot,' said Diana. 'We 'll let the manoeuvre
succeed.'

Redworth declared that she had a head for everything, and she was
flattered to hear him.

So passing from the southern into the western road, they saw the
town-lights beneath an amber sky burning out sombrely over the woods of
Copsley, and entered the town, the postillion following.




CHAPTER XII

BETWEEN EMMA AND DIANA

Diana was in the arms of her friend at a late hour of the evening, and
Danvers breathed the amiable atmosphere of footmen once more, professing
herself perished. This maid of the world, who could endure hardships and
loss of society for the mistress to whom she was attached, no sooner saw
herself surrounded by the comforts befitting her station, than she
indulged in the luxury of a wailful dejectedness, the better to
appreciate them. She was unaffectedly astonished to find her outcries
against the cold and the journeyings to and fro interpreted as a
serving-woman's muffled comments on her mistress's behaviour. Lady
Dunstane's maid Bartlett, and Mrs. Bridges the housekeeper, and Foster
the butler, contrived to let her know that they could speak an if they
would; and they expressed their pity of her to assist her to begin the
speaking. She bowed in acceptance of Fosters offer of a glass of wine
after supper, but treated him and the other two immediately as though
they had been interrogating bigwigs.

'They wormed nothing out of me,' she said to her mistress at night,
undressing her. 'But what a set they are! They've got such comfortable
places, they've all their days and hours for talk of the doings of their
superiors. They read the vilest of those town papers, and they put their
two and two together of what is happening in and about. And not one of
the footmen thinks of staying, because it 's so dull; and they and the
maids object--did one ever hear?--to the three uppers retiring, when they
've done dining, to the private room to dessert.'

'That is the custom?' observed her mistress.

'Foster carries the decanter, ma'am, and Mrs. Bridges the biscuits, and
Bartlett the plate of fruit, and they march out in order.'

'The man at the head of the procession, probably.'

'Oh yes. And the others, though they have everything except the wine and
dessert, don't like it. When I was here last they were new, and hadn't a
word against it. Now they say it's invidious! Lady Dunstane will be left
without an under-servant at Copsley soon. I was asked about your boxes,
ma'am, and the moment I said they were at Dover, that instant all three
peeped. They let out a mouse to me. They do love to talk!'

Her mistress could have added, 'And you too, my good Danvers!'
trustworthy though she knew the creature to be in the main.

'Now go, and be sure you have bedclothes enough before you drop asleep,'
she said; and Danvers directed her steps to gossip with Bartlett.

Diana wrapped herself in a dressing-gown Lady Dunstane had sent her, and
sat by the fire, thinking of the powder of tattle stored in servants'
halls to explode beneath her: and but for her choice of roads she might
have been among strangers. The liking of strangers best is a curious
exemplification of innocence.

'Yes, I was in a muse,' she said, raising her head to Emma, whom she
expected and sat armed to meet, unaccountably iron-nerved. 'I was
questioning whether I could be quite as blameless as I fancy, if I sit
and shiver to be in England. You will tell me I have taken the right
road. I doubt it. But the road is taken, and here I am. But any road that
leads me to you is homeward, my darling!' She tried to melt, determining
to be at least open with her.

'I have not praised you enough for coming,' said Emma, when they had
embraced again.

'Praise a little your "truest friend of women." Your letter gave the tug.
I might have resisted it.'

'He came straight from heaven! But, cruel Tony where is your love?'

'It is unequal to yours, dear, I see. I could have wrestled with anything
abstract and distant, from being certain. But here I am.'

'But, my own dear girl, you never could have allowed this infamous charge
to be undefended?'

'I think so. I've an odd apathy as to my character; rather like death,
when one dreams of flying the soul. What does it matter? I should have
left the flies and wasps to worry a corpse. And then-good-bye gentility!
I should have worked for my bread. I had thoughts of America. I fancy I
can write; and Americans, one hears, are gentle to women.'

'Ah, Tony! there's the looking back. And, of all women, you!'

'Or else, dear-well, perhaps once on foreign soil, in a different air, I
might--might have looked back, and seen my whole self, not shattered, as
I feel it now, and come home again compassionate to the poor persecuted
animal to defend her. Perhaps that was what I was running away for. I
fled on the instinct, often a good thing to trust.'

'I saw you at The Crossways.'

'I remembered I had the dread that you would, though I did not imagine
you would reach me so swiftly. My going there was an instinct, too. I
suppose we are all instinct when we have the world at our heels. Forgive
me if I generalize without any longer the right to be included in the
common human sum. "Pariah" and "taboo" are words we borrow from barbarous
tribes; they stick to me.'

'My Tony, you look as bright as ever, and you speak despairingly.'

'Call me enigma. I am that to myself, Emmy.'

'You are not quite yourself to your friend.'

'Since the blow I have been bewildered; I see nothing upright. It came on
me suddenly; stunned me. A bolt out of a clear sky, as they say. He
spared me a scene: There had been threats, and yet the sky was clear, or
seemed. When we have a man for arbiter, he is our sky.'

Emma pressed her Tony's unresponsive hand, feeling strangely that her
friend ebbed from her.

'Has he . . . to mislead him?' she said, colouring at the breach in the
question.

'Proofs? He has the proofs he supposes.'

'Not to justify suspicion?'

'He broke open my desk and took my letters.'

'Horrible! But the letters?' Emma shook with a nervous revulsion.

'You might read them.'

'Basest of men! That is the unpardonable cowardice!', exclaimed Emma.

'The world will read them, dear,' said Diana, and struck herself to ice.
She broke from the bitter frigidity in fury. 'They are letters--none very
long--sometimes two short sentences--he wrote at any spare moment. On my
honour, as a woman, I feel for him most. The letters--I would bear any
accusation rather than that exposure. Letters of a man of his age to a
young woman he rates too highly!

The world reads them. Do you hear it saying it could have excused her for
that fiddle-faddle with a younger--a young lover? And had I thought of a
lover! . . . I had no thought of loving or being loved. I confess I was
flattered. To you, Emma, I will confess . . . . You see the public
ridicule!--and half his age, he and I would have appeared a romantic
couple! Confess, I said. Well, dear, the stake is lighted for a trial of
its effect on me. It is this: he was never a dishonourable friend; but
men appear to be capable of friendship with women only for as long as we
keep out of pulling distance of that line where friendship ceases. They
may step on it; we must hold back a league. I have learnt it. You will
judge whether he disrespects me. As for him, he is a man; at his worst,
not one of the worst; at his best, better than very many. There, now,
Emma, you have me stripped and burning; there is my full confession.
Except for this--yes, one thing further--that I do rage at the ridicule,
and could choose, but for you, to have given the world cause to revile
me, or think me romantic. Something or somebody to suffer for would
really be agreeable. It is a singular fact, I have not known what this
love is, that they talk about. And behold me marched into
Smithfield!--society's heretic, if you please. I must own I think it
hard.'

Emma chafed her cold hand softly.

'It is hard; I understand it,' she murmured. 'And is your Sunday visit to
us in the list of offences?'

'An item.'

'You gave me a happy day.'

'Then it counts for me in heaven.'

'He set spies on you?'

'So we may presume.'

Emma went through a sphere of tenuious reflections in a flash.

'He will rue it. Perhaps now . . . he may now be regretting his wretched
frenzy. And Tony could pardon; she has the power of pardoning in her
heart.'

'Oh! certainly, dear. But tell me why it is you speak to-night rather
unlike the sedate, philosophical Emma; in a tone-well, tolerably
sentimental?'

'I am unaware of it,' said Emma, who could have retorted with a like
reproach. 'I am anxious, I will not say at present for your happiness,
for your peace; and I have a hope that possibly a timely word from some
friend--Lukin or another--might induce him to consider.'

'To pardon me, do you mean?' cried Diana, flushing sternly.

'Not pardon. Suppose a case of faults on both sides.'

'You address a faulty person, my dear. But do you know that you are
hinting at a reconcilement?'

'Might it not be?'

'Open your eyes to what it involves. I trust I can pardon. Let him go his
ways, do his darkest, or repent. But return to the roof of the "basest of
men," who was guilty of "the unpardonable cowardice"? You expect me to be
superhuman. When I consent to that, I shall be out of my woman's skin,
which he has branded. Go back to him!' She was taken with a shudder of
head and limbs. 'No; I really have the power of pardoning, and I am bound
to; for among my debts to him, this present exemption, that is like
liberty dragging a chain, or, say, an escaped felon wearing his manacles,
should count. I am sensible of my obligation. The price I pay for it is
an immovable patch-attractive to male idiots, I have heard, and a mark of
scorn to females. Between the two the remainder of my days will be
lively. "Out, out, damned spot!" But it will not. And not on the hand--on
the forehead! We'll talk of it no longer. I have sent a note, with an
enclosure, to my lawyers. I sell The Crossways, if I have the married
woman's right to any scrap of property, for money to scatter fees.'

'My purse, dear Tony!' exclaimed Emma. 'My house! You will stay with me?
Why do you shake your head? With me you are safe.' She spied at the
shadows in her friend's face. 'Ever since your marriage, Tony, you have
been strange in your trick of refusing to stay with me. And you and I
made our friendship the pledge of a belief in eternity! We vowed it.
Come, I do talk sentimentally, but my heart is in it. I beg you--all the
reasons are with me--to make my house your home. You will. You know I am
rather lonely.'

Diana struggled to keep her resolution from being broken by tenderness.
And doubtless poor Sir Lukin had learnt his lesson; still, her defensive
instincts could never quite slumber under his roof; not because of any
further fear that they would have to be summoned; it was chiefly owing to
the consequences of his treacherous foolishness. For this half-home with
her friend thenceforward denied to her, she had accepted a protector,
called husband--rashly, past credence, in the retrospect; but it had been
her propelling motive; and the loathings roused by her marriage helped to
sicken her at the idea of a lengthened stay where she had suffered the
shock precipitating her to an act of insanity.

'I do not forget you were an heiress, Emmy, and I will come to you if I
need money to keep my head up. As for staying, two reasons are against
it. If I am to fight my battle, I must be seen; I must go about--wherever
I am received. So my field is London. That is obvious. And I shall rest
better in a house where my story is not known.'

Two or three questions ensued. Diana had to fortify her fictitious
objection by alluding to her maid's prattle of the household below; and
she excused the hapless, overfed, idle people of those regions.

To Emma it seemed a not unnatural sensitiveness. She came to a settled
resolve in her thoughts, as she said, 'They want a change. London is
their element.'

Feeling that she deceived this true heart, however lightly and
necessarily, Diana warmed to her, forgiving her at last for having netted
and dragged her back to front the enemy; an imposition of horrors, of
which the scene and the travelling with Redworth, the talking of her case
with her most intimate friend as well, had been a distempering foretaste.

They stood up and kissed, parting for the night.

An odd world, where for the sin we have not participated in we must fib
and continue fibbing, she reflected. She did not entirely cheat her
clearer mind, for she perceived that her step in flight had been urged
both by a weak despondency and a blind desperation; also that the world
of a fluid civilization is perforce artificial. But her mind was in the
background of her fevered senses, and when she looked in the glass and
mused on uttering the word, 'Liar!' to the lovely image, her senses were
refreshed, her mind somewhat relieved, the face appeared so sovereignly
defiant of abasement.

Thus did a nature distraught by pain obtain some short lull of repose.
Thus, moreover, by closely reading herself, whom she scourged to excess
that she might in justice be comforted, she gathered an increasing
knowledge of our human constitution, and stored matter for the brain.




CHAPTER XIII

TOUCHING THE FIRST DAYS OF HER PROBATION

The result of her sleeping was, that Diana's humour, locked up overnight,
insisted on an excursion, as she lay with half-buried head and open
eyelids, thinking of the firm of lawyers she had to see; and to whom, and
to the legal profession generally, she would be, under outward
courtesies, nothing other than 'the woman Warwick.' She pursued the woman
Warwick unmercifully through a series of interviews with her decorous and
crudely-minded defenders; accurately perusing them behind their senior
staidness. Her scorching sensitiveness sharpened her intelligence in
regard to the estimate of discarded wives entertained by men of business
and plain men of the world, and she drove the woman Warwick down their
ranks, amazed by the vision of a puppet so unlike to herself in reality,
though identical in situation. That woman, reciting her side of the case,
gained a gradual resemblance to Danvers; she spoke primly; perpetually
the creature aired her handkerchief; she was bent on softening those
sugarloaves, the hard business-men applying to her for facts. Facts were
treated as unworthy of her; mere stuff of the dustheap, mutton-bones, old
shoes; she swam above them in a cocoon of her spinning, sylphidine,
unseizable; and between perplexing and mollifying the slaves of facts,
she saw them at their heels, a tearful fry, abjectly imitative of her
melodramatic performances. The spectacle was presented of a band of legal
gentlemen vociferating mightily for swords and the onset, like the
Austrian empress's Magyars, to vindicate her just and holy cause. Our
Law-courts failing, they threatened Parliament, and for a last resort,
the country! We are not going to be the woman Warwick without a stir, my
brethren.

Emma, an early riser that morning, for the purpose of a private
consultation with Mr. Redworth, found her lying placidly wakeful, to
judge by appearances.

'You have not slept, my dear child?'

'Perfectly,' said Diana, giving her hand and offering the lips. 'I'm only
having a warm morning bath in bed,' she added, in explanation of a chill
moisture that the touch of her exposed skin betrayed; for whatever the
fun of the woman Warwick, there had been sympathetic feminine horrors in
the frame of the sentient woman.

Emma fancied she kissed a quiet sufferer. A few remarks very soon set her
wildly laughing. Both were laughing when Danvers entered the room, rather
guilty, being late; and the sight of the prim-visaged maid she had been
driving among the lawyers kindled Diana's comic imagination to such a
pitch that she ran riot in drolleries, carrying her friend headlong on
the tide.

'I have not laughed so much since you were married,' said Emma.

'Nor I, dear; proving that the bar to it was the ceremony,' said Diana.

She promised to remain at Copsley three days. 'Then for the campaign in
Mr. Redworth's metropolis. I wonder whether I may ask him to get me
lodgings: a sitting-room and two bedrooms. The Crossways has a board up
for letting. I should prefer to be my own tenant; only it would give me a
hundred pounds more to get a substitute's money. I should like to be at
work writing instantly. Ink is my opium, and the pen my nigger, and he
must dig up gold for me. It is written. Danvers, you can make ready to
dress me when I ring.'

Emma helped the beautiful woman to her dressing-gown and the step from
her bed. She had her thoughts, and went down to Redworth at the
breakfast-table, marvelling that any husband other than a madman could
cast such a jewel away. The material loveliness eclipses intellectual
qualities in such reflections.

'He must be mad,' she said, compelled to disburden herself in a congenial
atmosphere; which, however, she infrigidated by her overflow of
exclamatory wonderment--a curtain that shook voluminous folds, luring
Redworth to dreams of the treasure forfeited. He became rigidly
practical.

'Provision will have to be made for her. Lukin must see Mr. Warwick. She
will do wisely to stay with friends in town, mix in company. Women are
the best allies for such cases. Who are her solicitors?'

'They are mine: Braddock, Thorpe, and Simnel.'

'A good firm. She is in safe hands with them. I dare say they may come to
an arrangement.'

'I should wish it. She will never consent.'

Redworth shrugged. A woman's 'never' fell far short of outstripping the
sturdy pedestrian Time, to his mind.

Diana saw him drive off to catch the coach in the valley, regulated to
meet the train, and much though she liked him, she was not sorry that he
had gone. She felt the better clad for it. She would have rejoiced to
witness the departure on wings of all her friends, except Emma, to whom
her coldness overnight had bound her anew warmly in contrition. And yet
her friends were well-beloved by her; but her emotions were distraught.

Emma told her that Mr. Redworth had undertaken to hire a suite of
convenient rooms, and to these she looked forward, the nest among
strangers, where she could begin to write, earning bread: an idea that,
with the pride of independence, conjured the pleasant morning smell of a
bakery about her.

She passed three peaceable days at Copsley, at war only with the luxury
of the house. On the fourth, a letter to Lady Dunstane from Redworth gave
the address of the best lodgings he could find, and Diana started for
London.

She had during a couple of weeks, besides the first fresh exercising of
her pen, as well as the severe gratification of economy, a savage
exultation in passing through the streets on foot and unknown. Save for
the plunges into the office of her solicitors, she could seem to herself
a woman who had never submitted to the yoke. What a pleasure it was,
after finishing a number of pages, to start Eastward toward the
lawyer-regions, full of imaginary cropping incidents, and from that
churchyard Westward, against smoky sunsets, or in welcome fogs, an atom
of the crowd! She had an affection for the crowd. They clothed her. She
laughed at the gloomy forebodings of Danvers concerning the perils
environing ladies in the streets after dark alone. The lights in the
streets after dark and the quick running of her blood, combined to strike
sparks of fancy and inspirit the task of composition at night. This new,
strange, solitary life, cut off from her adulatory society, both by the
shock that made the abyss and by the utter foreignness, threw her in upon
her natural forces, recasting her, and thinning away her memory of her
past days, excepting girlhood, into the remote. She lived with her
girlhood as with a simple little sister. They were two in one, and she
corrected the dreams of the younger, protected and counselled her very
sagely, advising her to love Truth and look always to Reality for her
refreshment. She was ready to say, that no habitable spot on our planet
was healthier and pleasanter than London. As to the perils haunting the
head of Danvers, her experiences assured her of a perfect immunity from
them; and the maligned thoroughfares of a great city, she was ready to
affirm, contrasted favourably with certain hospitable halls.

The long-suffering Fates permitted her for a term to enjoy the generous
delusion. Subsequently a sweet surprise alleviated the shock she had
sustained. Emma Dunstane's carriage was at her door, and Emma entered her
sitting-room, to tell her of having hired a house in the neighbourhood,
looking on the park. She begged to have her for guest, sorrowfully
anticipating the refusal. At least they were to be near one another.

'You really like this life in lodgings?' asked Emma, to whom the stiff
furniture and narrow apartments were a dreariness, the miserably small
fire of the sitting-room an aspect of cheerless winter.

'I do,' said Diana; 'yes,' she added with some reserve, and smiled at her
damped enthusiasm, 'I can eat when I like, walk, work--and I am working!
My legs and my pen demand it. Let me be independent! Besides, I begin to
learn something of the bigger world outside the one I know, and I crush
my mincing tastes. In return for that, I get a sense of strength I had
not when I was a drawing-room exotic. Much is repulsive. But I am taken
with a passion for reality.'

They spoke of the lawyers, and the calculated period of the trial; of the
husband too, in his inciting belief in the falseness of his wife. 'That
is his excuse,' Diana said, her closed mouth meditatively dimpling the
comers over thoughts of his grounds for fury. He had them, though none
for the incriminating charge. The Sphinx mouth of the married woman at
war and at bay must be left unriddled. She and the law differed in their
interpretation of the dues of wedlock.

But matters referring to her case were secondary with Diana beside the
importance of her storing impressions. Her mind required to hunger for
something, and this Reality which frequently she was forced to loathe,
she forced herself proudly to accept, despite her youthfulness. Her
philosophy swallowed it in the lump, as the great serpent his meal; she
hoped to digest it sleeping likewise. Her visits of curiosity to the Law
Courts, where she stood spying and listening behind a veil, gave her a
great deal of tough substance to digest. There she watched the process of
the tortures to be applied to herself, and hardened her senses for the
ordeal. She saw there the ribbed and shanked old skeleton world on which
our fair fleshly is moulded. After all, your Fool's Paradise is not a
garden to grow in. Charon's ferry-boat is not thicker with phantoms. They
do not live in mind or soul. Chiefly women people it: a certain class of
limp men; women for the most part: they are sown there. And put their
garden under the magnifying glass of intimacy, what do we behold? A world
not better than the world it curtains, only foolisher.

Her conversations with Lady Dunstane brought her at last to the point of
her damped enthusiasm. She related an incident or two occurring in her
career of independence, and they discussed our state of civilization
plainly and gravely, save for the laughing peals her phrases occasionally
provoked; as when she named the intruders and disturbers of
solitarily-faring ladies, 'Cupid's footpads.' Her humour was created to
swim on waters where a prescribed and cultivated prudery should pretend
to be drowning.

'I was getting an exalted idea of English gentlemen, Emmy. "Rich and rare
were the gems she wore." I was ready to vow that one might traverse the
larger island similarly respected. I praised their chivalry. I thought it
a privilege to live in such a land. I cannot describe to you how
delightful it was to me to walk out and home generally protected. I might
have been seriously annoyed but that one of the clerks-"articled," he
called himself--of our lawyers happened to be by. He offered to guard me,
and was amusing with his modest tiptoe air. No, I trust to the English
common man more than ever. He is a man of honour. I am convinced he is
matchless in any other country, except Ireland. The English gentleman
trades on his reputation.'

He was condemned by an afflicted delicacy, the sharpest of critical
tribunals.

Emma bade her not to be too sweeping from a bad example.

'It is not a single one,' said Diana. 'What vexes me and frets me is,
that I must be a prisoner, or allow Danvers to mount guard. And I can't
see the end of it. And Danvers is no magician. She seems to know her
countrymen, though. She warded one of them off, by saying to me: "This is
the crossing, my lady." He fled.'

Lady Dunstane affixed the popular title to the latter kind of gentleman.
She was irritated on her friend's behalf, and against the worrying of her
sisterhood, thinking in her heart, nevertheless, that the passing of a
face and figure like Diana's might inspire honourable emotions, pitiable
for being hapless.

'If you were with me, dear, you would have none of these annoyances,' she
said, pleading forlornly.

Diana smiled to herself. 'No! I should relapse into softness. This life
exactly suits my present temper. My landlady is respectful and attentive;
the little housemaid is a willing slave; Danvers does not despise them
pugnaciously; they make a home for me, and I am learning daily. Do you
know, the less ignorant I become, the more considerate I am for the
ignorance of others--I love them for it.' She squeezed Emma's hand with
more meaning than her friend apprehended. 'So I win my advantage from the
trifles I have to endure. They are really trifles, and I should once have
thought them mountains!'

For the moment Diana stipulated that she might not have to encounter
friends or others at Lady Dunstane's dinner-table, and the season not
being favourable to those gatherings planned by Lady Dunstane in her
project of winning supporters, there was a respite, during which Sir
Lukin worked manfully at his three Clubs to vindicate Diana's name from
the hummers and hawers, gaining half a dozen hot adherents, and a body of
lukewarm, sufficiently stirred to be desirous to see the lady. He worked
with true champion zeal, although an interview granted him by the husband
settled his opinion as to any possibility of the two ever coming to
terms. Also it struck him that if he by misadventure had been a woman and
the wife of such a fellow, by Jove! . . .his apostrophe to the father of
the gods of pagandom signifying the amount of matter Warwick would have
had reason to complain of in earnest. By ricochet his military mind
rebounded from his knowledge of himself to an ardent, faith in Mrs.
Warwick's innocence; for, as there was no resemblance between them, there
must, he deduced, be a difference in their capacity for enduring the
perpetual company of a prig, a stick, a petrified poser. Moreover, the
novel act of advocacy, and the nature of the advocacy, had effect on him.
And then he recalled the scene in the winter beech-woods, and Diana's
wild-deer eyes; her, perfect generosity to a traitor and fool. How could
he have doubted her? Glimpses of the corrupting cause for it partly
penetrated his density: a conqueror of ladies, in mid-career, doubts them
all. Of course he had meant no harm, nothing worse than some petty
philandering with the loveliest woman of her time. And, by Jove! it was
worth the rebuff to behold the Beauty in her wrath.

The reflections of Lothario, however much tending tardily to do justice
to a particular lady, cannot terminate wholesomely. But he became a
gallant partisan. His portrayal of Mr. Warwick to his wife and his
friends was fine caricature. 'The fellow had his hand up at my first
word--stood like a sentinel under inspection. "Understand, Sir Lukin,
that I receive you simply as an acquaintance. As an intermediary, permit
me to state that you are taking superfluous trouble. The case must
proceed. It is final. She is at liberty, in the meantime, to draw on my
bankers for the provision she may need, at the rate of five hundred
pounds per annum." He spoke of "the lady now bearing my name." He was
within an inch of saying "dishonouring." I swear I heard the "dis," and
he caught himself up. He "again declined any attempt towards
reconciliation." It could "only be founded on evasion of the truth to be
made patent on the day of trial." Half his talk was lawyers' lingo. The
fellow's teeth looked like frost. If Lot's wife had a brother, his name's
Warwick. How Diana Merion, who could have had the pick of the best of us,
ever came to marry a fellow like that, passes my comprehension, queer
creatures as women are! He can ride; that's about all he can do. I told
him Mrs. Warwick had no thought of reconciliation. "Then, Sir Lukin, you
will perceive that we have no standpoint for a discussion." I told him
the point was, for a man of honour not to drag his wife before the
public, as he had no case to stand on--less than nothing. You should have
seen the fellow's face. He shot a sneer up to his eyelids, and flung his
head back. So I said, "Good-day." He marches me to the door, "with his
compliments to Lady Dunstane." I could have floored him for that. Bless
my soul, what fellows the world is made of, when here's a man, calling
himself a gentleman, who, just because he gets in a rage with his wife
for one thing or another--and past all competition the handsomest woman
of her day, and the cleverest, the nicest, the best of the whole
boiling--has her out for a public horsewhipping, and sets all the idiots
of the kingdom against her! I tried to reason with him. He made as if he
were going to sleep standing.'

Sir Lukin gratified Lady Dunstane by his honest championship of Diana.
And now, in his altered mood (the thrice indebted rogue was just cloudily
conscious of a desire to propitiate his dear wife by serving her friend),
he began a crusade against the scandal-newspapers, going with an Irish
military comrade straight to the editorial offices, and leaving his card
and a warning that the chastisement for print of the name of the lady in
their columns would be personal and condign. Captain Carew Mahony, albeit
unacquainted with Mrs. Warwick, had espoused her cause. She was a woman,
she was an Irishwoman, she was a beautiful woman. She had, therefore,
three positive claims on him as a soldier and a man. Other Irish
gentlemen, animated by the same swelling degrees, were awaking to the
intimation that they might be wanted. Some words were dropped here and
there by General Lord Larrian: he regretted his age and infirmities. A
goodly regiment for a bodyguard might have been selected to protect her
steps in the public streets; when it was bruited that the General had
sent her a present of his great Newfoundland dog, Leander, to attend on
her and impose a required respect. But as it chanced that her address was
unknown to the volunteer constabulary, they had to assuage their ardour
by thinking the dog luckier than they.

The report of the dog was a fact. He arrived one morning at Diana's
lodgings, with a soldier to lead him, and a card to introduce:--the
Hercules of dogs, a very ideal of the species, toweringly big,
benevolent, reputed a rescuer of lives, disdainful of dog-fighting,
devoted to his guardian's office, with a majestic paw to give and the
noblest satisfaction in receiving caresses ever expressed by mortal male
enfolded about the head, kissed, patted, hugged, snuggled, informed that
he was his new mistress's one love and darling.

She despatched a thrilling note of thanks to Lord Larrian, sure of her
touch upon an Irish heart.

The dog Leander soon responded to the attachment of a mistress enamoured
of him. 'He is my husband,' she said to Emma, and started a tear in the
eyes of her smiling friend; 'he promises to trust me, and never to have
the law of me, and to love my friends as his own; so we are certain to
agree.' In rain, snow, sunshine, through the parks and the streets, he
was the shadow of Diana, commanding, on the whole, apart from some
desperate attempts to make him serve as introducer, a civilized behaviour
in the legions of Cupid's footpads. But he helped, innocently enough, to
create an enemy.




CHAPTER XIV

GIVING GLIMPSES OF DIANA UNDER HER CLOUD BEFORE THE WORLD AND OF HER
FURTHER APPRENTICESHIP

As the day of her trial became more closely calculable, Diana's
anticipated alarms receded with the deadening of her heart to meet the
shock. She fancied she had put on proof-armour, unconscious that it was
the turning of the inward flutterer to steel, which supplied her cuirass
and shield. The necessity to brave society, in the character of honest
Defendant, caused but a momentary twitch of the nerves. Her heart beat
regularly, like a serviceable clock; none of her faculties abandoned her
save songfulness, and none belied her, excepting a disposition to
tartness almost venomous in the sarcastic shafts she let fly at friends
interceding with Mr. Warwick to spare his wife, when she had determined
to be tried. A strange fit of childishness overcame her powers of
thinking, and was betrayed in her manner of speaking, though--to herself
her dwindled humour allowed her to appear the towering Britomart. She
pouted contemptuously on hearing that a Mr. Sullivan Smith (a remotely
recollected figure) had besought Mr. Warwick for an interview, and gained
it, by stratagem, 'to bring the man to his senses': but an ultra-Irishman
did not compromise her battle-front, as the busybody supplications of a
personal friend like Mr. Redworth did; and that the latter, without
consulting her, should be 'one of the plaintive crew whining about the
heels of the Plaintiff for a mercy she disdained and rejected' was bitter
to her taste.

'He does not see that unless I go through the fire there is no
justification for this wretched character of mine!' she exclaimed. Truce,
treaty, withdrawal, signified publicly pardon, not exoneration by any
means; and now that she was in armour she had no dread of the public. So
she said. Redworth's being then engaged upon the canvass of a borough,
added to the absurdity of his meddling with the dilemmas of a woman.
'Dear me, Emma! think of stepping aside from the parliamentary road to
entreat a husband to relent, and arrange the domestic alliance of a
contrary couple! Quixottry is agreeable reading, a silly performance.'
Lady Dunstane pleaded his friendship. She had to quit the field where
such darts were showering.

The first dinner-party was aristocratic, easy to encounter. Lord and Lady
Crane, Lady Pennon, Lord and Lady Esquart, Lord Larrian, Mr. and Mrs.
Montvert of Halford Manor, Lady Singleby, Sir Walter Capperston friends,
admirers of Diana; patrons, in the phrase of the time, of her father,
were the guests. Lady Pennon expected to be amused, and was gratified,
for Diana had only to open her mouth to set the great lady laughing. She
petitioned to have Mrs. Warwick at her table that day week, because the
marquis was dying to make her acquaintance, and begged to have all her
sayings repeated to him; vowed she must be salt in the desert. 'And
remember, I back you through thick and thin,' said Lady Pennon. To which
Diana replied: 'If I am salt in the desert, you are the spring'; and the
old lady protested she must put that down for her book. The witty Mrs.
Warwick, of whom wit was expected, had many incitements to be guilty of
cheap wit; and the beautiful Mrs. Warwick, being able to pass anything
she uttered, gave good and bad alike, under the impulsion to give out
something, that the stripped and shivering Mrs. Warwick might find a
cover in applause. She discovered the social uses of cheap wit; she laid
ambushes for anecdotes, a telling form of it among a people of no
conversational interlocution, especially in the circles depending for
dialogue upon perpetual fresh supplies of scandal; which have plentiful
crops, yet not sufficient. The old dinner and supper tables at The
Crossways furnished her with an abundant store; and recollection failing,
she invented. Irish anecdotes are always popular in England, as
promoting, besides the wholesome shake of the sides, a kindly sense of
superiority. Anecdotes also are portable, unlike the lightning flash,
which will not go into the pocket; they can be carried home, they are
disbursable at other tables. These were Diana's weapons. She was perforce
the actress of her part.

In happier times, when light of heart and natural, her vogue had not been
so enrapturing. Doubtless Cleopatra in her simple Egyptian uniform would
hardly have won such plaudits as her stress of barbaric Oriental
splendours evoked for her on the swan and serpent Nile-barge--not from
posterity at least. It is a terrible decree, that all must act who would
prevail; and the more extended the audience, the greater need for the
mask and buskin.

From Lady Pennon's table Diana passed to Lady Crane's, Lady Esquart's,
Lady Singleby's, the Duchess of Raby's, warmly clad in the admiration she
excited. She appeared at Princess Therese Paryli's first ball of the
season, and had her circle, not of worshippers only. She did not dance.
The princess, a fair Austrian, benevolent to her sisterhood, an admirer
of Diana's contrasting complexion, would have had her dance once in a
quadrille of her forming, but yielded to the mute expression of the
refusal. Wherever Mrs. Warwick went, her arts of charming were addressed
to the women. Men may be counted on for falling bowled over by a handsome
face and pointed tongue; women require some wooing from their ensphered
and charioted sister, particularly if she is clouded; and old
women--excellent buttresses--must be suavely courted. Now, to woo the
swimming matron and court the settled dowager, she had to win forgiveness
for her beauty; and this was done, easily done, by forbearing to angle
with it in the press of nibblers. They ranged about her, individually
unnoticed. Seeming unaware of its effect where it kindled, she smote a
number of musical female chords, compassion among them. A general grave
affability of her eyes and smiles was taken for quiet pleasure in the
scene. Her fitful intentness of look when conversing with the older
ladies told of the mind within at work upon what they said, and she was
careful that plain dialogue should make her comprehensible to them.
Nature taught her these arts, through which her wit became extolled
entirely on the strength of her reputation, and her beauty did her
service by never taking aim abroad. They are the woman's arts of
self-defence, as legitimately and honourably hers as the manful use of
the fists with a coarser sex. If it had not been nature that taught her
the practice of them in extremity, the sagacious dowagers would have seen
brazenness rather than innocence--or an excuseable indiscretion--in the
part she was performing. They are not lightly duped by one of their sex.
Few tasks are more difficult than for a young woman under a cloud to
hoodwink old women of the world. They are the prey of financiers, but
Time has presented them a magic ancient glass to scan their sex in.

At Princess Paryli's Ball two young men of singular elegance were
observed by Diana, little though she concentered her attention on any
figures of the groups. She had the woman's faculty (transiently bestowed
by perfervid jealousy upon men) of distinguishing minutely in the calmest
of indifferent glances. She could see without looking; and when her eyes
were wide they had not to dwell to be detective. It did not escape her
that the Englishman of the two hurried for the chance of an introduction,
nor that he suddenly, after putting a question to a man beside him,
retired. She spoke of them to Emma as they drove home. 'The princess's
partner in the first quadrille . . . Hungarian, I suppose? He was like a
Tartar modelled by a Greek: supple as the Scythian's bow, braced as the
string! He has the air of a born horseman, and valses perfectly. I won't
say he was handsomer than a young Englishman there, but he had the
advantage of soldierly training. How different is that quick springy
figure from our young men's lounging style! It comes of military exercise
and discipline.'

'That was Count Jochany, a cousin of the princess, and a cavalry
officer,' said Emma. 'You don't know the other? I am sure the one you
mean must be Percy Dacier.'

His retiring was explained: the Hon. Percy Dacier was the nephew of Lord
Dannisburgh, often extolled to her as the promising youngster of his day,
with the reserve that he wasted his youth: for the young gentleman was
decorous and studious; ambitious, according to report; a politician
taking to politics much too seriously and exclusively to suit his uncle's
pattern for the early period of life. Uncle and nephew went their
separate ways, rarely meeting, though their exchange of esteem was
cordial.

Thinking over his abrupt retirement from the crowded semicircle, Diana
felt her position pinch her, she knew not why.

Lady Dunstane was as indefatigable by day as by night in the business of
acting goddess to her beloved Tony, whom she assured that the service,
instead of exhausting, gave her such healthfulness as she had imagined
herself to have lost for ever. The word was passed, and invitations
poured in to choice conversational breakfasts, private afternoon
concerts, all the humming season's assemblies. Mr. Warwick's treatment of
his wife was taken by implication for lunatic; wherever she was heard or
seen, he had no case; a jury of some hundreds of both sexes, ready to be
sworn, pronounced against him. Only the personal enemies of the lord in
the suit presumed to doubt, and they exercised the discretion of a
minority.

But there is an upper middle class below the aristocratic, boasting an
aristocracy of morals, and eminently persuasive of public opinion, if not
commanding it. Previous to the relaxation, by amendment, of a certain
legal process, this class was held to represent the austerity of the
country. At present a relaxed austerity is represented; and still the
bulk of the members are of fair repute, though not quite on the level of
their pretensions. They were then, while more sharply divided from the
titular superiors they are socially absorbing, very powerful to brand a
woman's character, whatever her rank might be; having innumerable
agencies and avenues for that high purpose, to say nothing of the
printing-press. Lady Dunstane's anxiety to draw them over to the cause of
her friend set her thinking of the influential Mrs. Cramborne Wathin,
with whom she was distantly connected; the wife of a potent
serjeant-at-law fast mounting to the Bench and knighthood; the centre of
a circle, and not strangely that, despite her deficiency in the arts and
graces, for she had wealth and a cook, a husband proud of his
wine-cellar, and the ambition to rule; all the rewards, together with the
expectations, of the virtuous. She was a lady of incisive features bound
in stale parchment. Complexion she had none, but she had spotlessness of
skin, and sons and daughters just resembling her, like cheaper editions
of a precious quarto of a perished type. You discerned the imitation of
the type, you acknowledged the inferior compositor. Mr. Cramborne Wathin
was by birth of a grade beneath his wife; he sprang (behind a curtain of
horror) from tradesmen. The Bench was in designation for him to wash out
the stain, but his children suffered in large hands and feet, short legs,
excess of bone, prominences misplaced. Their mother inspired them
carefully with the religion she opposed to the pretensions of a nobler
blood, while instilling into them that the blood they drew from her was
territorial, far above the vulgar. Her appearance and her principles
fitted her to stand for the Puritan rich of the period, emerging by the
aid of an extending wealth into luxurious worldliness, and retaining the
maxims of their forefathers for the discipline of the poor and erring.

Lady Dunstane called on her, ostensibly to let her know she had taken a
house in town for the season, and in the course of the chat Mrs.
Cramborne Wathin was invited to dinner. 'You will meet my dear friend,
Mrs. Warwick,' she said, and the reply was: 'Oh, I have heard of her.'

The formal consultation with Mr. Cramborne Wathin ended in an agreement
to accept Lady Dunstane's kind invitation.

Considering her husband's plenitude of old legal anecdotes, and her own
diligent perusal of the funny publications of the day, that she might be
on the level of the wits and celebrities she entertained, Mrs. Cramborne
Wathin had a right to expect the leading share in the conversation to
which she was accustomed. Every honour was paid to them; they met
aristocracy in the persons of Lord Larrian, of Lady Rockden, Colonel
Purlby, the Pettigrews, but neither of them held the table for a moment;
the topics flew, and were no sooner up than down; they were unable to get
a shot. They had to eat in silence, occasionally grinning, because a
woman labouring under a stigma would rattle-rattle, as if the laughter of
the company were her due, and decency beneath her notice. Some one
alluded to a dog of Mrs. Warwick's, whereupon she trips out a story of
her dog's amazing intelligence.

'And pray,' said Mrs. Cramborne Wathin across the table, merely to slip
in a word, 'what is the name of this wonderful dog?'

'His name is Leander,' said Diana.

'Oh, Leander. I don't think I hear myself calling to a dog in a name of
three syllables. Two at the most.'

No, so I call Hero! if I want him to come immediately,' said Diana, and
the gentlemen, to Mrs. Cramborne Wathin's astonishment, acclaimed it. Mr.
Redworth, at her elbow, explained the point, to her disgust. . .

That was Diana's offence.

If it should seem a small one, let it be remembered that a snub was
intended, and was foiled; and foiled with an apparent simplicity, enough
to exasperate, had there been no laughter of men to back the countering
stroke. A woman under a cloud, she talked, pushed to shine; she would be
heard, would be applauded. Her chronicler must likewise admit the error
of her giving way to a petty sentiment of antagonism on first beholding
Mrs. Cramborne Wathin, before whom she at once resolved to be herself,
for a holiday, instead of acting demurely to conciliate. Probably it was
an antagonism of race, the shrinking of the skin from the burr. But when
Tremendous Powers are invoked, we should treat any simple revulsion of
our blood as a vice. The Gods of this world's contests demand it of us,
in relation to them, that the mind, and not the instincts, shall be at
work. Otherwise the course of a prudent policy is never to invoke them,
but avoid.

The upper class was gained by her intrepidity, her charm, and her
elsewhere offending wit, however the case might go. It is chivalrous, but
not, alas, inflammable in support of innocence. The class below it is
governed in estimates of character by accepted patterns of conduct; yet
where innocence under persecution is believed to exist, the members
animated by that belief can be enthusiastic. Enthusiasm is a heaven-sent
steeplechaser, and takes a flying leap of the ordinary barriers; it is
more intrusive than chivalry, and has a passion to communicate its
ardour. Two letters from stranger ladies reached Diana, through her
lawyers and Lady Dunstane. Anonymous letters, not so welcome, being male
effusions, arrived at her lodgings, one of them comical almost over the
verge to pathos in its termination: 'To me you will ever be the Goddess
Diana--my faith in woman!'

He was unacquainted with her!

She had not the heart to think the writers donkeys. How they obtained her
address was a puzzle; they stole in to comfort her slightly. They
attached her to her position of Defendant by the thought of what would
have been the idea of her character if she had flown--a reflection
emanating from inexperience of the resources of sentimentalists.

If she had flown! She was borne along by the tide like a butterfly that a
fish may gobble unless a friendly hand shall intervene. And could it in
nature? She was past expectation of release. The attempt to imagine
living with any warmth of blood in her vindicated character, for the sake
of zealous friends, consigned her to a cold and empty house upon a
foreign earth. She had to set her mind upon the mysterious enshrouded
Twelve, with whom the verdict would soon be hanging, that she might
prompt her human combativeness to desire the vindication at such a price
as she would have to pay for it. When Emma Dunstane spoke to her of the
certainty of triumphing, she suggested a possible dissentient among the
fateful Twelve, merely to escape the drumming sound of that hollow big
word. The irreverent imp of her humour came to her relief by calling
forth the Twelve, in the tone of the clerk of the Court, and they
answered to their names of trades and crafts after the manner of
Titania's elves, and were questioned as to their fitness, by education,
habits, enlightenment, to pronounce decisively upon the case in dispute,
the case being plainly stated. They replied, that the long habit of
dealing with scales enabled them to weigh the value of evidence the most
delicate. Moreover, they were Englishmen, and anything short of downright
bullet facts went to favour the woman. For thus we light the balance of
legal injustice toward the sex: we conveniently wink, ma'am. A rough,
old-fashioned way for us! Is it a Breach of Promise?--She may reckon on
her damages: we have daughters of our own. Is it a suit for
Divorce?--Well, we have wives of our own, and we can lash, or we can
spare; that's as it may be; but we'll keep the couple tied, let 'em hate
as they like, if they can't furnish pork-butchers' reasons for sundering;
because the man makes the money in this country.--My goodness! what a
funny people, sir!--It 's our way of holding the balance, ma'am.--But
would it not be better to rectify the law and the social system, dear
sir?--Why, ma'am, we find it comfortabler to take cases as they come, in
the style of our fathers.--But don't you see, my good man, that you are
offering scapegoats for the comfort of the majority?--Well, ma'am, there
always were scapegoats, and always will be; we find it comes round pretty
square in the end.

'And I may be the scapegoat, Emmy! It is perfectly possible. The grocer,
the pork-butcher, drysalter, stationer, tea-merchant, et caetera--they
sit on me. I have studied the faces of the juries, and Mr. Braddock tells
me of their composition. And he admits that they do justice roughly--a
rough and tumble country! to quote him--though he says they are honest in
intention.'

'More shame to the man who drags you before them--if he persists!' Emma
rejoined.

'He will. I know him. I would not have him draw back now,' said Diana,
catching her breath. 'And, dearest, do not abuse him; for if you do, you
set me imagining guiltiness. Oh, heaven!--suppose me publicly pardoned!
No, I have kinder feelings when we stand opposed. It is odd, and rather
frets my conscience, to think of the little resentment I feel. Hardly
any! He has not cause to like his wife. I can own it, and I am sorry for
him, heartily. No two have ever come together so naturally antagonistic
as we two. We walked a dozen steps in stupefied union, and hit upon
crossways. From that moment it was tug and tug; he me, I him. By
resisting, I made him a tyrant; and he, by insisting, made me a rebel.
And he was the maddest of tyrants--a weak one. My dear, he was also a
double-dealer. Or no, perhaps not in design. He was moved at one time by
his interests; at another by his idea of his honour. He took what I could
get for him, and then turned and drubbed me for getting it.'

'This is the creature you try to excuse!' exclaimed indignant Emma.

'Yes, because--but fancy all the smart things I said being called my
"sallies"!--can a woman live with it?--because I behaved . . . I despised
him too much, and I showed it. He is not a contemptible man before the
world; he is merely a very narrow one under close inspection. I could
not--or did not--conceal my feeling. I showed it not only to him, to my
friend. Husband grew to mean to me stifler, lung-contractor, iron mask,
inquisitor, everything anti-natural. He suffered under my "sallies": and
it was the worse for him when he did not perceive their drift. He is an
upright man; I have not seen marked meanness. One might build up a
respectable figure in negatives. I could add a row of noughts to the
single number he cherishes, enough to make a millionnaire of him; but
strike away the first, the rest are wind. Which signifies, that if you do
not take his estimate of himself, you will think little of his: negative
virtues. He is not eminently, that is to say, not saliently, selfish; not
rancorous, not obtrusive--tata-ta-ta. But dull!--dull as a woollen
nightcap over eyes and ears and mouth. Oh! an executioner's black cap to
me. Dull, and suddenly staring awake to the idea of his honour. I
"rendered" him ridiculous--I had caught a trick of "using men's phrases."
Dearest, now that the day of trial draws nigh--you have never questioned
me, and it was like you to spare me pain--but now I can speak of him and
myself.' Diana dropped her voice. Here was another confession. The
proximity of the trial acted like fire on her faded recollection of
incidents. It may be that partly the shame of alluding to them had
blocked her woman's memory. For one curious operation of the charge of
guiltiness upon the nearly guiltless is to make them paint themselves
pure white, to the obliteration of minor spots, until the whiteness being
acknowledged, or the ordeal imminent, the spots recur and press upon
their consciences. She resumed, in a rapid undertone: 'You know that a
certain degree of independence had been, if not granted by him, conquered
by me. I had the habit of it. Obedience with him is imprisonment--he is a
blind wall. He received a commission, greatly to his advantage, and was
absent. He seems to have received information of some sort. He returned
unexpectedly, at a late hour, and attacked me at once, middling violent.
My friend--and that he is! was coming from the House for a ten minutes'
talk, as usual, on his way home, to refresh him after the long sitting
and bear-baiting he had nightly to endure. Now let me confess: I grew
frightened; Mr. Warwick was "off his head," as they say-crazy, and I
could not bear the thought of those two meeting. While he raged I threw
open the window and put the lamp near it, to expose the whole
interior--cunning as a veteran intriguer: horrible, but it had to be done
to keep them apart. He asked me what madness possessed me, to sit by an
open window at midnight, in view of the public, with a damp wind blowing.
I complained of want of air and fanned my forehead. I heard the steps on
the pavement; I stung him to retort loudly, and I was relieved; the steps
passed on. So the trick succeeded--the trick! It was the worst I was
guilty of, but it was a trick, and it branded me trickster. It teaches me
to see myself with an abyss in my nature full of infernal possibilities.
I think I am hewn in black rock. A woman who can do as I did by instinct,
needs to have an angel always near her, if she has not a husband she
reveres.'

'We are none of us better than you, dear Tony; only some are more
fortunate, and many are cowards,' Emma said. 'You acted prudently in a
wretched situation, partly of your own making, partly of the
circumstances. But a nature like yours could not sit still and moan. That
marriage was to blame! The English notion of women seems to be that we
are born white sheep or black; circumstances have nothing to do with our
colour. They dread to grant distinctions, and to judge of us discerningly
is beyond them. Whether the fiction, that their homes are purer than
elsewhere, helps to establish the fact, I do not know: there is a class
that does live honestly; and at any rate it springs from a liking for
purity; but I am sure that their method of impressing it on women has the
dangers of things artificial. They narrow their understanding of human
nature, and that is not the way to improve the breed.'

'I suppose we women are taken to be the second thoughts of the Creator;
human nature's fringes, mere finishing touches, not a part of the
texture,' said Diana; 'the pretty ornamentation. However, I fancy I
perceive some tolerance growing in the minds of the dominant sex. Our old
lawyer Mr. Braddock, who appears to have no distaste for conversations
with me, assures me he expects the day to come when women will be
encouraged to work at crafts and professions for their independence. That
is the secret of the opinion of us at present--our dependency. Give us
the means of independence, and we will gain it, and have a turn at
judging you, my lords! You shall behold a world reversed. Whenever I am
distracted by existing circumstances, I lay my finger on the material
conditions, and I touch the secret. Individually, it may be moral with
us; collectively, it is material-gross wrongs, gross hungers. I am a
married rebel, and thereof comes the social rebel. I was once a dancing
and singing girl: You remember the night of the Dublin Ball. A Channel
sea in uproar, stirred by witches, flows between.'

'You are as lovely as you were then--I could say, lovelier,' said Emma.

'I have unconquerable health, and I wish I could give you the half of it,
dear. I work late into the night, and I wake early and fresh in the
morning. I do not sing, that is all. A few days more, and my character
will be up before the Bull's Head to face him in the arena. The worst of
a position like mine is, that it causes me incessantly to think and talk
of myself. I believe I think less than I talk, but the subject is growing
stale; as those who are long dying feel, I dare say--if they do not take
it as the compensation for their departure.'

The Bull's Head, or British Jury of Twelve, with the wig on it, was faced
during the latter half of a week of good news. First, Mr. Thomas Redworth
was returned to Parliament by a stout majority for the Borough of
Orrybridge: the Hon. Percy Dacier delivered a brilliant speech in the
House of Commons, necessarily pleasing to his uncle: Lord Larrian
obtained the command of the Rock: the house of The Crossways was let to a
tenant approved by Mr. Braddock: Diana received the opening proof-sheets
of her little volume, and an instalment of the modest honorarium: and
finally, the Plaintiff in the suit involving her name was adjudged to
have not proved his charge.

She heard of it without a change of countenance.

She could not have wished it the reverse; she was exonerated. But she was
not free; far from that; and she revenged herself on the friends who made
much of her triumph and overlooked her plight, by showing no sign of
satisfaction. There was in her bosom a revolt at the legal consequences
of the verdict--or blunt acquiescence of the Law in the conditions
possibly to be imposed on her unless she went straight to the relieving
phial; and the burden of keeping it under, set her wildest humour alight,
somewhat as Redworth remembered of her on the journey from The Crossways
to Copsley. This ironic fury, coming of the contrast of the outer and the
inner, would have been indulged to the extent of permanent injury to her
disposition had not her beloved Emma, immediately after the tension of
the struggle ceased, required her tenderest aid. Lady Dunstane chanted
victory, and at night collapsed. By the advice of her physician she was
removed to Copsley, where Diana's labour of anxious nursing restored her
through love to a saner spirit. The hopefulness of life must bloom again
in the heart whose prayers are offered for a life dearer than its own to
be preserved. A little return of confidence in Sir Lukin also refreshed
her when she saw that the poor creature did honestly, in his shaggy rough
male fashion, reverence and cling to the flower of souls he named as his
wife. His piteous groans of self-accusation during the crisis haunted
her, and made the conduct and nature of men a bewilderment to her still
young understanding. Save for the knot of her sensations (hardly a mental
memory, but a sullen knot) which she did not disentangle to charge him
with his complicity in the blind rashness of her marriage, she might have
felt sisterly, as warmly as she compassionated him.

It was midwinter when Dame Gossip, who keeps the exotic world alive with
her fanning whispers, related that the lovely Mrs. Warwick had left
England on board the schooner-yacht Clarissa, with Lord and Lady Esquart,
for a voyage in the Mediterranean: and (behind her hand) that the reason
was urgent, inasmuch as she fled to escape the meshes of the terrific net
of the marital law brutally whirled to capture her by the man her
husband.




CHAPTER XV

INTRODUCES THE HON. PERCY DACIER

The Gods of this world's contests, against whom our poor stripped
individual is commonly in revolt, are, as we know, not miners, they are
reapers; and if we appear no longer on the surface, they cease to bruise
us: they will allow an arena character to be cleansed and made
presentable while enthusiastic friends preserve discretion. It is of
course less than magnanimity; they are not proposed to you for your
worship; they are little Gods, temporary as that great wave, their parent
human mass of the hour. But they have one worshipful element in them,
which is, the divine insistency upon there being two sides to a case--to
every case. And the People so far directed by them may boast of
healthfulness. Let the individual shriek, the innocent, triumphant, have
in honesty to admit the fact. One side is vanquished, according to decree
of Law, but the superior Council does not allow it to be extinguished.

Diana's battle was fought shadowily behind her for the space of a week or
so, with some advocates on behalf of the beaten man; then it became a
recollection of a beautiful woman, possibly erring, misvalued by a
husband, who was neither a man of the world nor a gracious yokefellow,
nor anything to match her. She, however, once out of the public flames,
had to recall her scorchings to be gentle with herself. Under a defeat,
she would have been angrily self-vindicated. The victory of the ashen
laurels drove her mind inward to gird at the hateful yoke, in compassion
for its pair of victims. Quite earnestly by such means, yet always
bearing a comical eye on her subterfuges, she escaped the extremes of
personal blame. Those advocates of her opponent in and out of court
compelled her honest heart to search within and own to faults. But were
they not natural faults? It was her marriage; it was marriage in the
abstract: her own mistake and the world's clumsy machinery of
civilization: these were the capital offenders: not the wife who would
laugh ringingly, and would have friends of the other sex, and shot her
epigrams at the helpless despot, and was at times--yes, vixenish; a
nature driven to it, but that was the word. She was too generous to
recount her charges against the vanquished. If his wretched jealousy had
ruined her, the secret high tribunal within her bosom, which judged her
guiltless for putting the sword between their marriage tie when they
stood as one, because a quarrelling couple could not in honour play the
embracing, pronounced him just pardonable. She distinguished that he
could only suppose, manlikely, one bad cause for the division.

To this extent she used her unerring brains, more openly than on her
night of debate at The Crossways. The next moment she was off in vapour,
meditating grandly on her independence of her sex and the passions. Love!
she did not know it, she was not acquainted with either the criminal or
the domestic God, and persuaded herself that she never could be. She was
a Diana of coldness, preferring friendship; she could be the friend of
men. There was another who could be the friend of women. Her heart leapt
to Redworth. Conjuring up his clear trusty face, at their grasp of hands
when parting, she thought of her visions of her future about the period
of the Dublin Ball, and acknowledged, despite the erratic step to
wedlock, a gain in having met and proved so true a friend. His face,
figure, character, lightest look, lightest word, all were loyal signs of
a man of honour, cold as she; he was the man to whom she could have
opened her heart for inspection. Rejoicing in her independence of an
emotional sex, the impulsive woman burned with a regret that at their
parting she had not broken down conventional barriers and given her cheek
to his lips in the antiinsular fashion with a brotherly friend. And why
not when both were cold? Spirit to spirit, she did, delightfully
refreshed by her capacity to do so without a throb. He had held her hands
and looked into her eyes half a minute, like a dear comrade; as little
arousing her instincts of defensiveness as the clearing heavens; and
sisterly love for it was his due, a sister's kiss. He needed a sister,
and should have one in her. Emma's recollected talk of 'Tom Redworth'
painted him from head to foot, brought the living man over the waters to
the deck of the yacht. A stout champion in the person of Tom Redworth was
left on British land; but for some reason past analysis, intermixed, that
is, among a swarm of sensations, Diana named her champion to herself with
the formal prefix: perhaps because she knew a man's Christian name to be
dangerous handling. They differed besides frequently in opinion, when the
habit of thinking of him as Mr. Redworth would be best. Women are bound
to such small observances, and especially the beautiful of the
sisterhood, whom the world soon warns that they carry explosives and must
particularly guard against the ignition of petty sparks. She was less
indiscreet in her thoughts than in her acts, as is the way with the
reflective daughter of impulse; though she had fine mental distinctions:
what she could offer to do 'spirit to spirit,' for instance, held nothing
to her mind of the intimacy of calling the gentleman plain Tom in mere
contemplation of him. Her friend and champion was a volunteer, far from a
mercenary, and he deserved the reward, if she could bestow it unalarmed.
They were to meet in Egypt. Meanwhile England loomed the home of hostile
forces ready to shock, had she been a visible planet, and ready to
secrete a virus of her past history, had she been making new.

She was happily away, borne by a whiter than swan's wing on the sapphire
Mediterranean. Her letters to Emma were peeps of splendour for the
invalid: her way of life on board the yacht, and sketches of her host and
hostess as lovers in wedlock on the other side of our perilous forties;
sketches of the bays, the towns, the people-priests, dames, cavaliers,
urchins, infants, shifting groups of supple southerners-flashed across
the page like a web of silk, and were dashed off, redolent of herself, as
lightly as the silvery spray of the blue waves she furrowed; telling,
without allusions to the land behind her, that she had dipped in the
wells of blissful oblivion. Emma Dunstane, as is usual with those who
receive exhilarating correspondence from makers of books, condemned the
authoress in comparison, and now first saw that she had the gift of
writing. Only one cry: 'Italy, Eden of exiles!' betrayed the seeming of a
moan. She wrote of her poet and others immediately. Thither had they
fled; with adieu to England!

How many have waved the adieu! And it is England nourishing, England
protecting them, England clothing them in the honours they wear. Only the
posturing lower natures, on the level of their buskins, can pluck out the
pocket-knife of sentimental spite to cut themselves loose from her at
heart in earnest. The higher, bleed as they may, too pressingly feel
their debt. Diana had the Celtic vivid sense of country. In England she
was Irish, by hereditary, and by wilful opposition. Abroad, gazing along
the waters, observing, comparing, reflecting, above all, reading of the
struggles at home, the things done and attempted, her soul of generosity
made her, though not less Irish, a daughter of Britain. It is at a
distance that striving countries should be seen if we would have them in
the pure idea; and this young woman of fervid mind, a reader of public
speeches and speculator on the tides of politics (desirous, further, to
feel herself rather more in the pure idea), began to yearn for England
long before her term of holiday exile had ended. She had been flattered
by her friend, her 'wedded martyr at the stake,' as she named him, to
believe that she could exercise a judgement in politics--could think,
even speak acutely, on public affairs. The reports of speeches delivered
by the men she knew or knew of, set her thrilling; and she fancied the
sensibility to be as independent of her sympathy with the orators as her
political notions were sovereignty above a sex devoted to trifles, and
the feelings of a woman who had gone through fire. She fancied it
confidently, notwithstanding a peculiar intuition that the plunge into
the nobler business of the world would be a haven of safety for a woman
with blood and imagination, when writing to Emma: 'Mr. Redworth's great
success in Parliament is good in itself, whatever his views of present
questions; and I do not heed them when I look to what may be done by a
man of such power in striking at unjust laws, which keep the really
numerically better-half of the population in a state of slavery. If he
had been a lawyer! It must be a lawyer's initiative--a lawyer's Bill. Mr.
Percy Dacier also spoke well, as might have been expected, and his
uncle's compliment to him was merited. Should you meet him sound him. He
has read for the Bar, and is younger than Mr. Redworth. The very young
men and the old are our hope. The middleaged are hard and fast for
existing facts. We pick our leaders on the slopes, the incline and
decline of the mountain--not on the upper table-land midway, where all
appears to men so solid, so tolerably smooth, save for a few
excrescences, roughnesses, gradually to be levelled at their leisure;
which induces one to protest that the middle-age of men is their time of
delusion. It is no paradox. They may be publicly useful in a small way. I
do not deny it at all. They must be near the gates of life--the opening
or the closing--for their minds to be accessible to the urgency of the
greater questions. Otherwise the world presents itself to them under too
settled an aspect--unless, of course, Vesuvian Revolution shakes the
land. And that touches only their nerves. I dream of some old Judge!
There is one--if having caught we could keep him. But I dread so tricksy
a pilot. You have guessed him--the ancient Puck! We have laughed all day
over the paper telling us of his worrying the Lords. Lady Esquart
congratulates her husband on being out of it. Puck 'biens ride' and
bewigged might perhaps--except that at the critical moment he would be
sure to plead allegiance to Oberon. However, the work will be performed
by some one: I am prophetic:--when maidens are grandmothers!--when your
Tony is wearing a perpetual laugh in the unhusbanded regions where there
is no institution of the wedding-tie.'

For the reason that she was not to participate in the result of the old
Judge's or young hero's happy championship of the cause of her sex, she
conceived her separateness high aloof, and actually supposed she was a
contemplative, simply speculative political spirit, impersonal albeit a
woman. This, as Emma, smiling at the lines, had not to learn, was always
her secret pride of fancy--the belief in her possession of a disengaged
intellect.

The strange illusion, so clearly exposed to her correspondent, was
maintained through a series of letters very slightly descriptive, dated
from the Piraeus, the Bosphorus, the coasts of the Crimea, all more or
less relating to the latest news of the journals received on board the
yacht, and of English visitors fresh from the country she now seemed fond
of calling 'home.' Politics, and gentle allusions to the curious
exhibition of 'love in marriage' shown by her amiable host and hostess:
'these dear Esquarts, who are never tired of one another, but courtly
courting, tempting me to think it possible that a fortunate selection and
a mutual deference may subscribe to human happiness:--filled the
paragraphs. Reviews of her first literary venture were mentioned once: 'I
was well advised by Mr. Redworth in putting ANTONIA for authoress. She is
a buff jerkin to the stripes, and I suspect that the signature of D. E.
M., written in full, would have cawed woefully to hear that her style is
affected, her characters nullities, her cleverness forced, etc., etc. As
it is, I have much the same contempt for poor Antonia's performance.
Cease penning, little fool! She writes, "with some comprehension of the
passion of love." I know her to be a stranger to the earliest cry. So you
see, dear, that utter ignorance is the mother of the Art. Dialogues
"occasionally pointed." She has a sister who may do better.--But why was
I not apprenticed to a serviceable profession or a trade? I perceive now
that a hanger-on of the market had no right to expect a happier fate than
mine has been.'

On the Nile, in the winter of the year, Diana met the Hon. Percy Dacier.
He was introduced to her at Cairo by Redworth. The two gentlemen had
struck up a House of Commons acquaintanceship, and finding themselves
bound for the same destination, had grown friendly. Redworth's arrival
had been pleasantly expected. She remarked on Dacier's presence to Emma,
without sketch or note of him as other than much esteemed by Lord and
Lady Esquart. These, with Diana, Redworth, Dacier, the German Eastern
traveller Schweizerbarth, and the French Consul and Egyptologist
Duriette, composed a voyaging party up the river, of which expedition
Redworth was Lady Dunstane's chief writer of the records. His novel
perceptiveness and shrewdness of touch made them amusing; and his
tenderness to the Beauty's coquettry between the two foreign rivals,
moved a deeper feeling. The German had a guitar, the Frenchman a voice;
Diana joined them in harmony. They complained apart severally of the
accompaniment and the singer. Our English criticized them apart; and that
is at any rate to occupy a post, though it contributes nothing to
entertainment. At home the Esquarts had sung duets; Diana had assisted
Redworth's manly chest-notes at the piano. Each of them declined to be
vocal. Diana sang alone for the credit of the country, Italian and French
songs, Irish also. She was in her mood of Planxty Kelly and Garryowen all
the way. 'Madame est Irlandaise?' Redworth heard the Frenchman say, and
he owned to what was implied in the answering tone of the question. 'We
should be dull dogs without the Irish leaven!' So Tony in exile still
managed to do something for her darling Erin. The solitary woman on her
heights at Copsley raised an exclamation of, 'Oh! that those two had been
or could be united!' She was conscious of a mystic symbolism in the
prayer.

She was not apprehensive of any ominous intervention of another. Writing
from Venice, Diana mentioned Mr. Percy Dacier as being engaged to an
heiress; 'A Miss Asper, niece of a mighty shipowner, Mr. Quintin Manx,
Lady Esquart tells me: money fabulous, and necessary to a younger son
devoured with ambition. The elder brother, Lord Creedmore, is a common
Nimrod, always absent in Hungary, Russia, America, hunting somewhere. Mr.
Dacier will be in the Cabinet with the next Ministry.' No more of him. A
new work by ANTONIA was progressing.

The Summer in South Tyrol passed like a royal procession before young
eyes for Diana, and at the close of it, descending the Stelvio, idling
through the Valtelline, Como Lake was reached, Diana full of her work,
living the double life of the author. At Bellagio one afternoon Mr. Percy
Dacier appeared. She remembered subsequently a disappointment she felt in
not beholding Mr. Redworth either with him or displacing him. If engaged
to a lady, he was not an ardent suitor; nor was he a pointedly
complimentary acquaintance. His enthusiasm was reserved for Italian
scenery. She had already formed a sort of estimate of his character, as
an indifferent observer may do, and any woman previous to the inflaming
of her imagination, if that is in store for her; and she now fell to work
resetting the puzzle it became as soon her positive conclusions had to be
shaped again. 'But women never can know young men,' she wrote to Emma,
after praising his good repute as one of the brotherhood. 'He drops
pretty sentences now and then: no compliments; milky nuts. Of course he
has a head, or he would not be where he is--and that seems always to me
the most enviable place a young man can occupy.' She observed in him a
singular conflicting of a buoyant animal nature with a curb of
studiousness, as if the fardels of age were piling on his shoulders
before youth had quitted its pastures.

His build of limbs and his features were those of the finely-bred
English; he had the English taste for sports, games, manly diversions;
and in the bloom of life, under thirty, his head was given to bend. The
head bending on a tall upright figure, where there was breadth of chest,
told of weights working. She recollected his open look, larger than
inquiring, at the introduction to her; and it recurred when she uttered
anything specially taking. What it meant was past a guess, though
comparing it with the frank directness of Redworth's eyes, she saw the
difference between a look that accepted her and one that dilated on two
opinions.

Her thought of the gentleman was of a brilliant young charioteer in the
ruck of the race, watchful for his chance to push to the front; and she
could have said that a dubious consort might spoil a promising career. It
flattered her to think that she sometimes prompted him, sometimes
illumined. He repeated sentences she had spoken. 'I shall be better able
to describe Mr. Dacier when you and I sit together, my Emmy, and a stroke
here and there completes the painting. Set descriptions are good for
puppets. Living men and women are too various in the mixture fashioning
them--even the "external presentment"--to be livingly rendered in a
formal sketch. I may tell you his eyes are pale blue, his features
regular, his hair silky, brownish, his legs long, his head rather
stooping (only the head), his mouth commonly closed; these are the facts,
and you have seen much the same in a nursery doll. Such literary craft is
of the nursery. So with landscapes. The art of the pen (we write on
darkness) is to rouse the inward vision, instead of labouring with a
Drop-scene brush, as if it were to the eye; because our flying minds
cannot contain a protracted description. That is why the poets, who
spring imagination with a word or a phrase, paint lasting pictures. The
Shakespearian, the Dantesque, are in a line, two at most. He lends an
attentive ear when I speak, agrees or has a quaint pucker of the eyebrows
dissenting inwardly. He lacks mental liveliness--cheerfulness, I should
say, and is thankful to have it imparted. One suspects he would be a dull
domestic companion. He has a veritable thirst for hopeful views of the
world, and no spiritual distillery of his own. He leans to depression.
Why! The broken reed you call your Tony carries a cargo, all of her
manufacture--she reeks of secret stills; and here is a young man--a
sapling oak--inclined to droop. His nature has an air of imploring me que
je d'arrose! I begin to perform Mrs. Dr. Pangloss on purpose to brighten
him--the mind, the views. He is not altogether deficient in
conversational gaiety, and he shines in exercise. But the world is a poor
old ball bounding down a hill--to an Irish melody in the evening
generally, by request. So far of Mr. Percy Dacier, of whom I have some
hopes--distant, perhaps delusive--that he may be of use to our cause. He
listens. It is an auspicious commencement.'

Lugano is the Italian lake most lovingly encircled by mountain arms, and
every height about it may be scaled with esce. The heights have their
nest of waters below for a home scene, the southern Swiss peaks, with
celestial Monta Rosa, in prospect. It was there that Diana reawakened,
after the trance of a deadly draught, to the glory of the earth and her
share in it. She wakened like the Princess of the Kiss; happily not to
kisses; to no sign, touch or call that she could trace backward. The
change befell her without a warning. After writing deliberately to her
friend Emma, she laid down her pen and thought of nothing; and into this
dreamfulness a wine passed, filling her veins, suffusing her mind,
quickening her soul: and coming whence? out of air, out of the yonder of
air. She could have imagined a seraphic presence in the room, that bade
her arise and live; take the cup of the wells of youth arrested at her
lips by her marriage; quit her wintry bondage for warmth, light, space,
the quick of simple being. And the strange pure ecstasy was not a
transient electrification; it came in waves on a continuous tide; looking
was living; walking flying. She hardly knew that she slept. The heights
she had seen rosy at eve were marked for her ascent in the dawn. Sleep
was one wink, and fresh as the dewy field and rockflowers on her way
upward, she sprang to more and more of heaven, insatiable, happily
chirruping over her possessions. The threading of the town among the dear
common people before others were abroad, was a pleasure and pleasant her
solitariness threading the gardens at the base of the rock, only she
astir; and the first rough steps of the winding footpath, the first
closed buds, the sharper air, the uprising of the mountain with her
ascent; and pleasant too was her hunger and the nibble at a little loaf
of bread. A linnet sang in her breast, an eagle lifted her feet. The feet
were verily winged, as they are in a season of youth when the blood leaps
to light from the pressure of the under forces, like a source at the
wellheads, and the whole creature blooms, vital in every energy as a
spirit. To be a girl again was magical. She could fancy her having risen
from the dead. And to be a girl, with a woman's broader vision and
receptiveness of soul, with knowledge of evil, and winging to ethereal
happiness, this was a revelation of our human powers.

She attributed the change to the influences of nature's beauty and
grandeur. Nor had her woman's consciousness to play the chrysalis in any
shy recesses of her heart; she was nowhere veiled or torpid; she was
illumined, like the Salvatore she saw in the evening beams and mounted in
the morning's; and she had not a spot of seeresy; all her nature flew and
bloomed; she was bird, flower, flowing river, a quivering sensibility
unweighted, enshrouded. Desires and hopes would surely have weighted and
shrouded her. She had none, save for the upper air, the eyes of the
mountain.

Which was the dream--her past life or this ethereal existence? But this
ran spontaneously, and the other had often been stimulated--her
vivaciousness on the Nile-boat, for a recent example. She had not a doubt
that her past life was the dream, or deception: and for the reason that
now she was compassionate, large of heart toward all beneath her. Let
them but leave her free, they were forgiven, even to prayers for their
well-being! The plural number in the case was an involuntary multiplying
of the single, coming of her incapacity during this elevation and rapture
of the senses to think distinctly of that One who had discoloured her
opening life. Freedom to breathe, gaze, climb, grow with the grasses, fly
with the clouds, to muse, to sing, to be an unclaimed self, dispersed
upon earth, air, sky, to find a keener transfigured self in that
radiation--she craved no more.

Bear in mind her beauty, her charm of tongue, her present state of white
simplicity in fervour: was there ever so perilous a woman for the most
guarded and clearest-eyed of young men to meet at early morn upon a
mountain side?




CHAPTER XVI

TREATS OF A MIDNIGHT BELL, AND OF A SCENE OF EARLY MORNING

On a round of the mountains rising from Osteno, South eastward of Lugano,
the Esquart party rose from the natural grotto and headed their carriages
up and down the defiles, halting for a night at Rovio, a little village
below the Generoso, lively with waterfalls and watercourses; and they
fell so in love with the place, that after roaming along the flowery
borderways by moonlight, they resolved to rest there two or three days
and try some easy ascents. In the diurnal course of nature, being
pleasantly tired, they had the avowed intention of sleeping there; so
they went early to their beds, and carelessly wished one another
good-night, none of them supposing slumber to be anywhere one of the
warlike arts, a paradoxical thing you must battle for and can only win at
last when utterly beaten. Hard by their inn, close enough for a priestly
homily to have been audible, stood a church campanile, wherein hung a
Bell, not ostensibly communicating with the demons of the pit; in
daylight rather a merry comrade. But at night, when the children of
nerves lay stretched, he threw off the mask. As soon as they had fairly
nestled, he smote their pillows a shattering blow, loud for the retold
preluding quarters, incredibly clanging the number ten. Then he waited
for neighbouring campanili to box the ears of slumber's votaries in turn;
whereupon, under pretence of excessive conscientiousness, or else
oblivious of his antecedent, damnable misconduct, or perhaps in actual
league and trapdoor conspiracy with the surging goblin hosts beneath us,
he resumed his blaring strokes, a sonorous recapitulation of the number;
all the others likewise. It was an alarum fit to warn of Attila or
Alaric; and not, simply the maniacal noise invaded the fruitful provinces
of sleep like Hun and Vandal, the irrational repetition ploughed the
minds of those unhappy somnivolents, leaving them worse than sheared by
barbarians, disrupt, as by earthquake, with the unanswerable question to
Providence, Why!--Why twice?

Designing slumberers are such infants. When they have undressed and
stretched themselves, flat, it seems that they have really gone back to
their mothers' breasts, and they fret at whatsoever does not smack of
nature, or custom. The cause of a repetition so senseless in its
violence, and so unnecessary, set them querying and kicking until the
inevitable quarters recommenced. Then arose an insurgent rabble in their
bosoms, it might be the loosened imps of darkness, urging them to
speculate whether the proximate monster about to dole out the eleventh
hour in uproar would again forget himself and repeat his dreary
arithmetic a second time; for they were unaware of his religious
obligation, following the hour of the district, to inform them of the
tardy hour of Rome. They waited in suspense, curiosity enabling them to
bear the first crash callously. His performance was the same. And now
they took him for a crazy engine whose madness had infected the whole
neighbourhood. Now was the moment to fight for sleep in contempt of him,
and they began by simulating an entry into the fortress they were to
defend, plunging on their pillows, battening down their eyelids,
breathing with a dreadful regularity. Alas! it came to their knowledge
that the Bell was in possession and they the besiegers. Every resonant
quarter was anticipated up to the blow, without averting its murderous
abruptness; and an executioner Midnight that sounded, in addition to the
reiterated quarters, four and twenty ringing hammerstrokes, with the
aching pause between the twelves, left them the prey of the legions of
torturers which are summed, though not described, in the title of a
sleepless night.

From that period the curse was milder, but the victims raged. They swam
on vasty deeps, they knocked at rusty gates, they shouldered all the
weapons of black Insomnia's armoury and became her soldiery, doing her
will upon themselves. Of her originally sprang the inspired teaching of
the doom of men to excruciation in endlessness. She is the fountain of
the infinite ocean whereon the exceedingly sensitive soul is tumbled
everlastingly, with the diversion of hot pincers to appease its appetite
for change.

Dacier was never the best of sleepers. He had taken to exercise his
brains prematurely, not only in learning, but also in reflection; and a
reflectiveness that is indulged before we have a rigid mastery of the
emotions, or have slain them, is apt to make a young man more than
commonly a child of nerves: nearly as much so as the dissipated, with the
difference that they are hilarious while wasting their treasury, which he
is not; and he may recover under favouring conditions, which is a point
of vantage denied to them. Physically he had stout reserves, for he had
not disgraced the temple. His intemperateness lay in the craving to rise
and lead: a precocious ambition. This apparently modest young man started
with an aim--and if in the distance and with but a slingstone, like the
slender shepherd fronting the Philistine, all his energies were in his
aim--at Government. He had hung on the fringe of an Administration. His
party was out, and he hoped for higher station on its return to power.
Many perplexities were therefore buzzing about his head; among them at
present one sufficiently magnified and voracious to swallow the
remainder. He added force to the interrogation as to why that Bell should
sound its inhuman strokes twice, by asking himself why he was there to
hear it! A strange suspicion of a bewitchment might have enlightened him
if he had been a man accustomed to yield to the peculiar kind of sorcery
issuing from that sex. He rather despised the power of women over men:
and nevertheless he was there, listening to that Bell, instead of having
obeyed the call of his family duties, when the latter were urgent. He had
received letters at Lugano, summoning him home, before he set forth on
his present expedition. The noisy alarum told him he floundered in quags,
like a silly creature chasing a marsh-lamp. But was it so? Was it not, on
the contrary, a serious pursuit of the secret of a woman's
character?--Oh, a woman and her character! Ordinary women and their
characters might set to work to get what relationship and likeness they
could. They had no secret to allure. This one had: she had the secret of
lake waters under rock, unfathomable in limpidness. He could not think of
her without shooting at nature, and nature's very sweetest and subtlest,
for comparison. As to her sex, his active man's contempt of the
petticoated secret attractive to boys and graylings, made him believe
that in her he hunted the mind and the spirit: perchance a double mind, a
twilighted spirit; but not a mere woman. She bore no resemblance to the
bundle of women. Well, she was worth studying; she had ideas, and could
give ear to ideas. Furthermore, a couple of the members of his family
inclined to do her injustice. At least, they judged her harshly, owing,
he thought, to an inveterate opinion they held regarding Lord
Dannisburgh's obliquity in relation to women. He shared it, and did not
concur in, their verdict upon the woman implicated. That is to say,
knowing something of her now, he could see the possibility of her
innocence in the special charm that her mere sparkle of features and
speech, and her freshness would have for a man like his uncle. The
possibility pleaded strongly on her behalf, while the darker possibility
weighted by his uncle's reputation plucked at him from below.

She was delightful to hear, delightful to see; and her friends loved her
and had faith in her. So clever a woman might be too clever for her
friends! . . .

The circle he moved in hummed of women, prompting novices as well as
veterans to suspect that the multitude of them, and notably the fairest,
yet more the cleverest, concealed the serpent somewhere.

She certainly had not directed any of her arts upon him. Besides he was
half engaged. And that was a burning perplexity; not because of abstract
scruples touching the necessity for love in marriage. The young lady,
great heiress though she was, and willing, as she allowed him to assume;
graceful too, reputed a beauty; struck him cold. He fancied her
transparent, only Arctic. Her transparency displayed to him all the
common virtues, and a serene possession of the inestimable and eminent
one outweighing all; but charm, wit, ardour, intercommunicative
quickness, and kindling beauty, airy grace, were qualities that a man, it
seemed, had to look for in women spotted by a doubt of their having the
chief and priceless.

However, he was not absolutely plighted. Nor did it matter to him whether
this or that woman concealed the tail of the serpent and trail, excepting
the singular interest this woman managed to excite, and so deeply as set
him wondering how that Resurrection Bell might be affecting her ability
to sleep. Was she sleeping?--or waking? His nervous imagination was a
torch that alternately lighted her lying asleep with the innocent, like a
babe, and tossing beneath the overflow of her dark hair, hounded by
haggard memories. She fluttered before him in either aspect; and another
perplexity now was to distinguish within himself which was the aspect he
preferred. Great Nature brought him thus to drink of her beauty, under
the delusion that the act was a speculation on her character.

The Bell, with its clash, throb and long swoon of sound, reminded him of
her name: Diana!--An attribute? or a derision?

It really mattered nothing to him, save for her being maligned; and if
most unfairly, then that face of the varying expressions, and the rich
voice, and the remembered gentle and taking words coming from her,
appealed to him with a supplicating vividness that pricked his heart to
leap.

He was dozing when the Bell burst through the thin division between
slumber and wakefulness, recounting what seemed innumerable peals, hard
on his cranium. Gray daylight blanched the window and the bed: his watch
said five of the morning. He thought of the pleasure of a bath beneath
some dashing spray-showers; and jumped up to dress, feeling a queer
sensation of skin in his clothes, the sign of a feverish night; and
yawning he went into the air. Leftward the narrow village street led to
the footway along which he could make for the mountain-wall. He cast one
look at the head of the campanile, silly as an owlish roysterer's glazed
stare at the young Aurora, and hurried his feet to check the yawns coming
alarmingly fast, in the place of ideas.

His elevation above the valley was about the kneecap of the Generoso.
Waters of past rain-clouds poured down the mountain-sides like veins of
metal, here and there flinging off a shower on the busy descent; only
dubiously animate in the lack lustre of the huge bulk piled against a
yellow East that wafted fleets of pinky cloudlets overhead. He mounted
his path to a level with inviting grassmounds where water circled,
running from scoops and cups to curves and brook-streams, and in his
fancy calling to him to hear them. To dip in them was his desire. To roll
and shiver braced by the icy flow was the spell to break that baleful
incantation of the intolerable night; so he struck across a ridge of
boulders, wreck of a landslip from the height he had hugged, to the open
space of shadowed undulations, and soon had his feet on turf. Heights to
right and to left, and between them, aloft, a sky the rosy wheelcourse of
the chariot of morn, and below, among the knolls, choice of sheltered
nooks where waters whispered of secresy to satisfy Diana herself. They
have that whisper and waving of secresy in secret scenery; they beckon to
the bath; and they conjure classic visions of the pudency of the Goddess
irate or unsighted. The semi-mythological state of mind, built of old
images and favouring haunts, was known to Dacier. The name of Diana,
playing vaguely on his consciousness, helped to it. He had no definite
thought of the mortal woman when the highest grass-roll near the rock
gave him view of a bowered source and of a pool under a chain of
cascades, bounded by polished shelves and slabs. The very spot for him,
he decided at the first peep; and at the second, with fingers
instinctively loosening his waist-coat buttons for a commencement, he
shouldered round and strolled away, though not at a rapid pace, nor far
before he halted.

That it could be no other than she, the figure he had seen standing
beside the pool, he was sure. Why had he turned? Thoughts thick and swift
as a blush in the cheeks of seventeen overcame him; and queen of all, the
thought bringing the picture of this mountain-solitude to vindicate a
woman shamefully assailed.--She who found her pleasure in these haunts of
nymph and Goddess, at the fresh cold bosom of nature, must be clear as
day. She trusted herself to the loneliness here, and to the honour of
men, from a like irreflective sincereness. She was unable to imagine
danger where her own impelling thirst was pure. . .

The thoughts, it will be discerned, were but flashes of a momentary vivid
sensibility. Where a woman's charm has won half the battle, her character
is an advancing standard and sings victory, let her do no more than take
a quiet morning walk before breakfast.

But why had he turned his back on her? There was nothing in his presence
to alarm, nothing in her appearance to forbid. The motive and the
movement were equally quaint; incomprehensible to him; for after putting
himself out of sight, he understood the absurdity of the supposition that
she would seek the secluded sylvan bath for the same purpose as he. Yet
now he was, debarred from going to meet her. She might have an impulse to
bathe her feet. Her name was Diana . . . .

Yes, and a married woman; and a proclaimed one!

And notwithstanding those brassy facts, he was ready to side with the
evidence declaring her free from stain; and further, to swear that her
blood was Diana's!

Nor had Dacier ever been particularly poetical about women. The present
Diana had wakened his curiosity, had stirred his interest in her, pricked
his admiration, but gradually, until a sleepless night with its flock of
raven-fancies under that dominant Bell, ended by colouring her, the
moment she stood in his eyes, as freshly as the morning heavens. We are
much influenced in youth by sleepless nights: they disarm, they
predispose us to submit to soft occasion; and in our youth occasion is
always coming.

He heard her voice. She had risen up the grass-mound, and he hung
brooding half-way down. She was dressed in some texture of the hue of
lavender. A violet scarf loosely knotted over the bosom opened on her
throat. The loop of her black hair curved under a hat of gray beaver.
Memorably radiant was her face.

They met, exchanged greetings, praised the beauty of the morning, and
struck together on the Bell. She laughed: 'I heard it at ten; I slept
till four. I never wake later. I was out in the air by half-past. Were
you disturbed?'

He alluded to his troubles with the Bell.

'It sounded like a felon's heart in skeleton ribs,' he said.

'Or a proser's tongue in a hollow skull,' said she.

He bowed to her conversible readiness, and at once fell into the
background, as he did only with her, to perform accordant bass in their
dialogue; for when a woman lightly caps our strained remarks, we
gallantly surrender the leadership, lest she should too cuttingly assert
her claim.

Some sweet wild cyclamen flowers were at her breast. She held in her left
hand a bunch of buds and blown cups of the pale purple meadow-crocus. He
admired them. She told him to look round. He confessed to not having
noticed them in the grass: what was the name? Colchicum, in Botany, she
said.

'These are plucked to be sent to a friend; otherwise I'm reluctant to
take the life of flowers for a whim. Wild flowers, I mean. I am not
sentimental about garden flowers: they are cultivated for decoration,
grown for clipping.'

'I suppose they don't carry the same signification,' said Dacier, in the
tone of a pupil to such themes.

'They carry no feeling,' said she. 'And that is my excuse for plucking
these, where they seem to spring like our town-dream of happiness. I
believe they are sensible of it too; but these must do service to my
invalid friend, who cannot travel. Are you ever as much interested in the
woes of great ladies as of country damsels? I am not--not unless they
have natural distinction. You have met Lady Dunstane?'

The question sounded artless. Dacier answered that he thought he had seen
her somewhere once, and Diana shut her lips on a rising under-smile.

'She is the coeur d'or of our time; the one soul I would sacrifice these
flowers to.'

'A bit of a blue-stocking, I think I have heard said.'

'She might have been admitted to the Hotel Rambouillet, without being
anything of a Precieuse. She is the woman of the largest heart now
beating.'

'Mr. Redworth talked of her.'

'As she deserved, I am sure.'

'Very warmly.'

'He would!'

'He told me you were the Damon and Pythias of women.'

'Her one fault is an extreme humility that makes her always play second
to me; and as I am apt to gabble, I take the lead; and I am froth in
comparison. I can reverence my superiors even when tried by intimacy with
them. She is the next heavenly thing to heaven that I know. Court her, if
ever you come across her. Or have you a man's horror of women with
brains?'

'Am I expressing it?' said he.

'Do not breathe London or Paris here on me.' She fanned the crocuses
under her chin. 'The early morning always has this--I wish I had a
word!--touch . . . whisper . . . gleam . . . beat of wings--I envy poets
now more than ever!--of Eden, I was going to say. Prose can paint evening
and moonlight, but poets are needed to sing the dawn. That is because
prose is equal to melancholy stuff. Gladness requires the finer language.
Otherwise we have it coarse--anything but a reproduction. You politicians
despise the little distinctions "twixt tweedledum and tweedledee," I
fancy.'

Of the poetic sort, Dacier's uncle certainly did. For himself he
confessed to not having thought much on them.

'But how divine is utterance!' she said. 'As we to the brutes, poets are
to us.'

He listened somewhat with the head of the hanged. A beautiful woman
choosing to rhapsodize has her way, and is not subjected to the critical
commentary within us. He wondered whether she had discoursed in such a
fashion to his uncle.

'I can read good poetry,' said he.

'If you would have this valley--or mountain-cleft, one should call
it--described, only verse could do it for you,' Diana pursued, and
stopped, glanced at his face, and smiled. She had spied the end of a
towel peeping out of one of his pockets. 'You came out for a bath! Go
back, by all means, and mount that rise of grass where you first saw me;
and down on the other side, a little to the right, you will find the very
place for a bath, at a corner of the rock--a natural fountain; a bubbling
pool in a ring of brushwood, with falling water, so tempting that I could
have pardoned a push: about five feet deep. Lose no time.'

He begged to assure her that he would rather stroll with her: it had been
only a notion of bathing by chance when he pocketed the towel.

'Dear me,' she cried, 'if I had been a man I should have scurried off at
a signal of release, quick as a hare I once woke up in a field with my
foot on its back.'

Dacier's eyebrows knotted a trifle over her eagerness to dismiss him: he
was not used to it, but rather to be courted by women, and to condescend.

'I shall not long, I'm afraid, have the pleasure of walking beside you
and hearing you. I had letters at Lugano. My uncle is unwell, I hear.'

'Lord Dannisburgh?'

The name sprang from her lips unhesitatingly.

His nodded affirmative altered her face and her voice.

'It is not a grave illness?'

'They rather fear it.'

'You had the news at Lugano?'

He answered the implied reproach: 'I can be of no, service.'

'But surely!'

'It's even doubtful that he would be bothered to receive me. We hold no
views in common--excepting one.'

'Could I?' she exclaimed. 'O that I might! If he is really ill! But if
it is actually serious he would perhaps have a wish . . . I can nurse. I
know I have the power to cheer him. You ought indeed to be in England.'

Dacier said he had thought it better to wait for later reports. 'I shall
drive to Lugano this afternoon, and act on the information I get there.
Probably it ends my holiday.'

'Will you do me the favour to write me word?--and especially tell me if
you think he would like to have me near him,' said Diana. 'And let him
know that if he wants nursing or cheerful companionship, I am at any
moment ready to come.'

The flattery of a beautiful young woman to wait on him would be very
agreeable to Lord Dannisburgh, Dacier conceived. Her offer to go was
possibly purely charitable. But the prudence of her occupation of the
post obscured whatever appeared admirable in her devotedness. Her choice
of a man like Lord Dannisburgh for the friend to whom she could sacrifice
her good name less falteringly than she gathered those field-flowers was
inexplicable; and she herself a darker riddle at each step of his
reading.

He promised curtly to write. 'I will do my best to hit a flying address.'

'Your Club enables me to hit a permanent one that will establish the
communication,' said Diana. 'We shall not sleep another night at Rovio.
Lady Esquart is the lightest of sleepers, and if you had a restless time,
she and her husband must have been in purgatory. Besides, permit me to
say, you should be with your party. The times are troublous--not for
holidays! Your holiday has had a haunted look, creditably to your
conscience as a politician. These Corn Law agitations!'

'Ah, but no politics here!' said Dacier.

'Politics everywhere!--in the Courts of Faery! They are not discord to
me.'

'But not the last day--the last hour!' he pleaded.

'Well! only do not forget your assurance to me that you would give some
thoughts to Ireland--and the cause of women. Has it slipped from your
memory?'

'If I see the chance of serving you, you may trust to me.'

She sent up an interjection on the misfortune of her not having been born
a man.

It was to him the one smart of sourness in her charm as a woman.

Among the boulder-stones of the ascent to the path, he ventured to
propose a little masculine assistance in a hand stretched mutely.
Although there was no great need for help, her natural kindliness checked
the inclination to refuse it. When their hands disjoined she found
herself reddening. She cast it on the exertion. Her heart was throbbing.
It might be the exertion likewise.

He walked and talked much more airily along the descending pathway, as if
he had suddenly become more intimately acquainted with her.

She listened, trying to think of the manner in which he might be taught
to serve that cause she had at heart; and the colour deepened on her
cheeks till it set fire to her underlying consciousness: blood to spirit.
A tremour of alarm ran through her.

His request for one of the crocuses to keep as a souvenir of the morning
was refused. 'They are sacred; they were all devoted to my friend when I
plucked them.'

He pointed to a half-open one, with the petals in disparting pointing to
junction, and compared it to the famous tiptoe ballet-posture, arms above
head and fingers like swallows meeting in air, of an operatic danseuse of
the time.

'I do not see it, because I will not see it,' she said, and she found a
personal cooling and consolement in the phrase.--We have this power of
resisting invasion of the poetic by the commonplace, the spirit by the
blood, if we please, though you men may not think that we have! Her
alarmed sensibilities bristled and made head against him as an enemy. She
fancied (for the aforesaid reason--because she chose) that it was on
account of the offence to her shy morning pleasure by his Londonizing. At
any other moment her natural liveliness and trained social ease would
have taken any remark on the eddies of the tide of converse; and so she
told herself, and did not the less feel wounded, adverse, armed. He
seemed somehow--to have dealt a mortal blow to the happy girl she had
become again. The woman she was protested on behalf of the girl, while
the girl in her heart bent lowered sad eyelids to the woman; and which of
them was wiser of the truth she could not have said, for she was honestly
not aware of the truth, but she knew she was divided in halves, with one
half pitying the other, one rebuking: and all because of the incongruous
comparison of a wild flower to an opera dancer! Absurd indeed. We human
creatures are the silliest on earth, most certainly.

Dacier had observed the blush, and the check to her flowing tongue did
not escape him as they walked back to the inn down the narrow street of
black rooms, where the women gossiped at the fountain and the cobbler
threaded on his doorstep. His novel excitement supplied the deficiency,
sweeping him past minor reflections. He was, however, surprised to hear
her tell Lady Esquart, as soon as they were together at the
breakfast-table, that he had the intention of starting for England; and
further surprised, and slightly stung too, when on the poor lady's,
moaning over her recollection of the midnight Bell, and vowing she could
not attempt to sleep another night in the place, Diana declared her
resolve to stay there one day longer with her maid, and explore the
neighbourhood for the wild flowers in which it abounded. Lord and Lady
Esquart agreed to anything agreeable to her, after excusing themselves
for the necessitated flight, piteously relating the story of their
sufferings. My lord could have slept, but he had remained awake to
comfort my lady.

'True knightliness!' Diana said, in praise of these long married lovers;
and she asked them what they had talked of during the night.

'You, my dear, partly,' said Lady Esquart.

'For an opiate?'

'An invocation of the morning,' said Dacier.

Lady Esquart looked at Diana and, at him. She thought it was well that
her fair friend should stay. It was then settled for Diana to rejoin them
the next evening at Lugano, thence to proceed to Luino on the Maggiore.

'I fear it is good-bye for me,' Dacier said to her, as he was about to
step into the carriage with the Esquarts.

'If you have not better news of your uncle, it must be,' she replied, and
gave him her hand promptly and formally, hardly diverting her eyes from
Lady Esquart to grace the temporary gift with a look. The last of her he
saw was a waving of her arm and finger pointing triumphantly at the Bell
in the tower. It said, to an understanding unpractised in the feminine
mysteries: 'I can sleep through anything.' What that revealed of her
state of conscience and her nature, his efforts to preserve the lovely
optical figure blocked his guessing. He was with her friends, who liked
her the more they knew her, and he was compelled to lean to their view of
the perplexing woman.

'She is a riddle to the world,' Lady Esquart said, 'but I know that she
is good. It is the best of signs when women take to her and are proud to
be her friend.'

My lord echoed his wife. She talked in this homely manner to stop any
notion of philandering that the young gentleman might be disposed to
entertain in regard to a lady so attractive to the pursuit as Diana's
beauty and delicate situation might make her seem.

'She is an exceedingly clever person, and handsomer than report, which is
uncommon,' said Dacier, becoming voluble on town-topics, Miss Asper
incidentally among them. He denied Lady Esquart's charge of an
engagement; the matter hung.

His letters at Lugano summoned him to England instantly.

'I have taken leave of Mrs. Warwick, but tell her I regret, et caetera,'
he said; 'and by the way, as my uncle's illness appears to be serious,
the longer she is absent the better, perhaps.'

'It would never do,' said Lady Esquart, understanding his drift
immediately. 'We winter in Rome. She will not abandon us--I have her word
for it. Next Easter we are in Paris; and so home, I suppose. There will
be no hurry before we are due at Cowes. We seem to have become confirmed
wanderers; for two of us at least it is likely to be our last great
tour.'

Dacier informed her that he had pledged his word to write to Mrs. Warwick
of his uncle's condition, and the several appointed halting-places of the
Esquarts between the lakes and Florence were named to him. Thus all
things were openly treated; all had an air of being on the surface; the
communications passing between Mrs. Warwick and the Hon. Percy Dacier
might have been perused by all the world. None but that portion of it,
sage in suspiciousness, which objects to such communications under any
circumstances, could have detected in their correspondence a spark of
coming fire or that there was common warmth. She did not feel it, nor did
he. The position of the two interdicted it to a couple honourably
sensible of social decencies; and who were, be it added, kept apart. The
blood is the treacherous element in the story of the nobly civilized, of
which secret Diana, a wife and no wife, a prisoner in liberty, a blooming
woman imagining herself restored to transcendent maiden ecstacies--the
highest youthful poetic--had received some faint intimation when the
blush flamed suddenly in her cheeks and her heart knelled like the towers
of a city given over to the devourer. She had no wish to meet him again.
Without telling herself why, she would have shunned the meeting.
Disturbers that thwarted her simple happiness in sublime scenery were
best avoided. She thought so the more for a fitful blur to the simplicity
of her sensations, and a task she sometimes had in restoring and toning
them, after that sweet morning time in Rovio.




CHAPTER XVII

'THE PRINCESS EGERIA'

London, say what we will of it, is after all the head of the British
giant, and if not the liveliest in bubbles, it is past competition the
largest broth-pot of brains anywhere simmering on the hob: over the
steadiest of furnaces too. And the oceans and the continents, as you
know, are perpetual and copious contributors, either to the heating
apparatus or to the contents of the pot. Let grander similes besought.
This one fits for the smoky receptacle cherishing millions, magnetic to
tens of millions more, with its caked outside of grime, and the inward
substance incessantly kicking the lid, prankish, but never casting it
off. A good stew, you perceive; not a parlous boiling. Weak as we may be
in our domestic cookery, our political has been sagaciously adjusted as
yet to catch the ardours of the furnace without being subject to their
volcanic activities.

That the social is also somewhat at fault, we have proof in occasional
outcries over the absence of these or those particular persons famous for
inspiriting. It sticks and clogs. The improvising songster is missed, the
convivial essayist, the humorous Dean, the travelled cynic, and he, the
one of his day, the iridescent Irishman, whose remembered repartees are a
feast, sharp and ringing, at divers tables descending from the upper to
the fat citizen's, where, instead of coming in the sequence of talk, they
are exposed by blasting, like fossil teeth of old Deluge sharks in
monotonous walls of our chalk-quarries. Nor are these the less welcome
for the violence of their introduction among a people glad to be set
burning rather briskly awhile by the most unexpected of digs in the ribs.
Dan Merion, to give an example. That was Dan Merion's joke with the
watchman: and he said that other thing to the Marquis of Kingsbury, when
the latter asked him if he had ever won a donkey-race. And old Dan is
dead, and we are the duller for it! which leads to the question: Is
genius hereditary? And the affirmative and negative are respectively
maintained, rather against the Yes is the dispute, until a member of the
audience speaks of Dan Merion's having left a daughter reputed for a
sparkling wit not much below the level of his own. Why, are you unaware
that the Mrs. Warwick of that scandal case of Warwick versus Dannisburgh
was old Dan Merion's girl--and his only child? It is true; for a friend
had it from a man who had it straight from Mr. Braddock, of the firm of
Braddock, Thorpe and Simnel, her solicitors in the action, who told him
he could sit listening to her for hours, and that she was as innocent as
day; a wonderful combination of a good woman and a clever woman and a
real beauty. Only her misfortune was to have a furiously jealous husband,
and they say he went mad after hearing the verdict.

Diana was talked of in the London circles. A witty woman is such salt
that where she has once been tasted she must perforce be missed more than
any of the absent, the dowering heavens not having yet showered her like
very plentifully upon us. Then it was first heard that Percy Dacier had
been travelling with her. Miss Asper heard of it. Her uncle, Mr. Quintin
Manx, the millionnaire, was an acquaintance of the new Judge and titled
dignitary, Sir Cramborne Wathin, and she visited Lady Wathin, at whose
table the report in the journals of the Nile-boat party was mentioned.
Lady Wathin's table could dispense with witty women, and, for that
matter, witty men. The intrusion of the spontaneous on the stereotyped
would have clashed. She preferred, as hostess, the old legal anecdotes
sure of their laugh, and the citations from the manufactories of fun in
the Press, which were current and instantly intelligible to all her
guests. She smiled suavely on an impromptu pun, because her experience of
the humorous appreciation of it by her guests bade her welcome the
upstart. Nothing else impromptu was acceptable. Mrs. Warwick therefore
was not missed by Lady Wathin. 'I have met her,' she said. 'I confess I
am not one of the fanatics about Mrs. Warwick. She has a sort of skill in
getting men to clamour. If you stoop to tickle them, they will applaud.
It is a way of winning a reputation.' When the ladies were separated from
the gentlemen by the stream of Claret, Miss Asper heard Lady Wathin speak
of Mrs. Warwick again. An allusion to Lord Dannisburgh's fit of illness
in the House of Lords led to her saying that there was no doubt he had
been fascinated, and that, in her opinion, Mrs. Warwick was a dangerous
woman. Sir Cramborne knew something of Mr. Warwick; 'Poor man!' she
added. A lady present put a question concerning Mrs. Warwick's beauty.
'Yes,' Lady Wathin said, 'she has good looks to aid her. Judging from
what I hear and have seen, her thirst is for notoriety. Sooner or later
we shall have her making a noise, you may be certain. Yes, she has the
secret of dressing well--in the French style.'

A simple newspaper report of the expedition of a Nileboat party could
stir the Powers to take her up and turn her on their wheel in this
manner.

But others of the sons and daughters of London were regretting her
prolonged absence. The great and exclusive Whitmonby, who had dined once
at Lady Wathin's table, and vowed never more to repeat that offence to
his patience, lamented bitterly to Henry Wilmers that the sole woman
worthy of sitting at a little Sunday evening dinner with the cream of the
choicest men of the time was away wasting herself in that insane modern
chase of the picturesque! He called her a perverted Celimene.

Redworth had less to regret than the rest of her male friends, as he was
receiving at intervals pleasant descriptive letters, besides manuscript
sheets of ANTONIA'S new piece of composition, to correct the proofs for
the press, and he read them critically, he thought. He read them with a
watchful eye to guard them from the critics. ANTONIA, whatever her faults
as a writer, was not one of the order whose Muse is the Public Taste. She
did at least draw her inspiration from herself, and there was much to be
feared in her work, if a sale was the object. Otherwise Redworth's highly
critical perusal led him flatly to admire. This was like her, and that
was like her, and here and there a phrase gave him the very play of her
mouth, the flash of her eyes. Could he possibly wish, or bear, to, have
anything altered? But she had reason to desire an extended sale of the
work. Her aim, in the teeth of her independent style, was at the means of
independence--a feminine method of attempting to conciliate contraries;
and after despatching the last sheets to the printer, he meditated upon
the several ways which might serve to, assist her; the main way running
thus in his mind:--We have a work of genius. Genius is good for the
public. What is good for the public should be recommended by the critics.
It should be. How then to come at them to, get it done? As he was not a
member of the honourable literary craft, and regarded its arcana
altogether externally, it may be confessed of him that he deemed the
Incorruptible corruptible;--not, of course, with filthy coin slid into
sticky palms. Critics are human, and exceedingly, beyond the common lot,
when touched; and they are excited by mysterious hints of loftiness in
authorship; by rumours of veiled loveliness; whispers, of a general
anticipation; and also Editors can jog them. Redworth was rising to be a
Railway King of a period soon to glitter with rails, iron in the
concrete, golden in the visionary. He had already his Court, much against
his will. The powerful magnetic attractions of those who can help the
world to fortune, was exercised by him in spite of his disgust of
sycophants. He dropped words to right and left of a coming work by
ANTONIA. And who was ANTONIA?--Ah! there hung the riddle.--An exalted
personage?--So much so that he dared not name her even in confidence to
ladies; he named the publishers. To men he said he was at liberty to
speak of her only as the most beautiful woman of her time. His courtiers
of both sexes were recommended to read the new story, THE PRINCESS
EGERIA.

Oddly, one great lady of his Court had heard a forthcoming work of this
title spoken of by Percy Dacier, not a man to read silly fiction, unless
there was meaning behind the lines: that is, rich scandal of the
aristocracy, diversified by stinging epigrams to the address of
discernible personages. She talked of THE PRINCESS EGERIA: nay, laid her
finger on the identical Princess. Others followed her. Dozens were soon
flying with the torch: a new work immediately to be published from the
pen of the Duchess of Stars!--And the Princess who lends her title to the
book is a living portrait of the Princess of Highest Eminence, the Hope
of all Civilization.--Orders for copies of THE PRINCESS EGERIA reached
the astonished publishers before the book was advertized.

Speaking to editors, Redworth complimented them with friendly intimations
of the real authorship of the remarkable work appearing. He used a
certain penetrative mildness of tone in saying that 'he hoped the book
would succeed': it deserved to; it was original; but the originality
might tell against it. All would depend upon a favourable launching of
such a book. 'Mrs. Warwick? Mrs. Warwick?' said the most influential of
editors, Mr. Marcus Tonans; 'what! that singularly handsome woman? . .
The Dannisburgh affair? . . . She's Whitmonby's heroine. If she writes as
cleverly as she talks, her work is worth trumpeting.' He promised to see
that it went into good hands for the review, and a prompt review--an
essential point; none of your long digestions of the contents.

Diana's indefatigable friend had fair assurances that her book would be
noticed before it dropped dead to the public appetite for novelty. He was
anxious next, notwithstanding his admiration of the originality of the
conception and the cleverness of the writing, lest the Literary Reviews
should fail 'to do it justice': he used the term; for if they wounded
her, they would take the pleasure out of success; and he had always
present to him that picture of the beloved woman kneeling at the
fire-grate at The Crossways, which made the thought of her suffering any
wound his personal anguish, so crucially sweet and saintly had her image
then been stamped on him. He bethought him, in consequence, while sitting
in the House of Commons; engaged upon the affairs of the nation, and
honestly engaged, for he was a vigilant worker--that the Irish Secretary,
Charles Raiser, with whom he stood in amicable relations, had an
interest, to the extent of reputed ownership, in the chief of the
Literary Reviews. He saw Raiser on the benches, and marked him to speak
for him. Looking for him shortly afterward, the man was gone. 'Off to the
Opera, if he's not too late for the drop,' a neighbour said, smiling
queerly, as though he ought to know; and then Redworth recollected
current stories of Raiser's fantastical devotion to the popular prima
donna of the angelical voice.--He hurried to the Opera and met the vomit,
and heard in the crushroom how divine she had been that night. A fellow
member of the House, tolerably intimate with Raiser, informed him,
between frightful stomachic roulades of her final aria, of the likeliest
place where Raiser might be found when the Opera was over: not at his
Club, nor at his chambers: on one of the bridges--Westminster, he
fancied.

There was no need for Redworth to run hunting the man at so late an hour,
but he was drawn on by the similarity in dissimilarity of this devotee of
a woman, who could worship her at a distance, and talk of her to
everybody. Not till he beheld Raiser's tall figure cutting the
bridge-parapet, with a star over his shoulder, did he reflect on the
views the other might entertain of the nocturnal solicitation to see
'justice done' to a lady's new book in a particular Review, and the
absurd outside of the request was immediately smothered by the natural
simplicity and pressing necessity of its inside.

He crossed the road and said, 'Ah?' in recognition. 'Were you at the
Opera this evening?'

'Oh, just at the end,' said Raiser, pacing forward. 'It's a fine night.
Did you hear her?'

'No; too late.'

Raiser pressed ahead, to meditate by himself, as was his wont. Finding
Redworth beside him, he monologuized in his depths: 'They'll kill her.
She puts her soul into it, gives her blood. There 's no failing of the
voice. You see how it wears her. She's doomed. Half a year's rest on Como
. . . somewhere . . . she might be saved! She won't refuse to work.'

'Have you spoken to her?' said Redworth.

'And next to Berlin! Vienna! A horse would be . . . .

I? I don't know her,' Raiser replied. 'Some of their women stand it.
She's delicately built. You can't treat a lute like a drum without
destroying the instrument. We look on at a murder!'

The haggard prospect from that step of the climax checked his delivery.

Redworth knew him to be a sober man in office, a man with a head for
statecraft: he had made a weighty speech in the House a couple of hours
back. This Opera cantatrice, no beauty, though gentle, thrilling,
winning, was his corner of romance.

'Do you come here often?' he asked.

'Yes, I can't sleep.'

'London at night, from the bridge, looks fine. By the way . . .'

'It 's lonely here, that's the advantage,' said Rainer; 'I keep silver in
my pocket for poor girls going to their homes, and I'm left in peace. An
hour later, there's the dawn down yonder.'

'By the way,' Redworth interposed, and was told that after these nights
of her singing she never slept till morning. He swallowed the fact,
sympathized, and resumed: 'I want a small favour.'

'No business here, please!'

'Not a bit of it. You know Mrs. Warwick. . . . You know of her. She 's
publishing a book. I want you to use your influence to get it noticed
quickly, if you can.'

'Warwick? Oh, yes, a handsome woman. Ah, yes; the Dannisburgh affair,
yes. What did I hear!--They say she 's thick with Percy Dacier at
present. Who was talking of her! Yes, old Lady Dacier. So she 's a friend
of yours?'

'She's an old friend,' said Redworth, composing himself; for the dose he
had taken was not of the sweetest, and no protestations could be uttered
by a man of the world to repel a charge of tattlers. 'The truth is, her
book is clever. I have read the proofs. She must have an income, and she
won't apply to her husband, and literature should help her, if she 's
fairly treated. She 's Irish by descent; Merion's daughter, witty as her
father. It's odd you haven't met her. The mere writing of the book is
extraordinarily good. If it 's put into capable hands for review! that's
all it requires. And full of life . . . bright dialogue . . capital
sketches. The book's a piece of literature. Only it must have competent
critics!'

So he talked while Rainer ejaculated: 'Warwick? Warwick?' in the
irritating tone of dozens of others. 'What did I hear of her husband? He
has a post . . . . Yes, yes. Some one said the verdict in that case
knocked him over--heart disease, or something.'

He glanced at the dark Thames water. 'Take my word for it, the groves of
Academe won't compare with one of our bridges at night, if you seek
philosophy. You see the London above and the London below: round us the
sleepy city, and the stars in the water looking like souls of suicides. I
caught a girl with a bad fit on her once. I had to lecture her! It's when
we become parsons we find out our cousinship with these poor
peripatetics, whose "last philosophy" is a jump across the parapet. The
bridge at night is a bath for a public man. But choose another; leave me
mine.'

Redworth took the hint. He stated the title of Mrs. Warwick's book, and
imagined from the thoughtful cast of Rainer's head, that he was
impressing THE PRINCESS EGERIA On his memory.

Rainer burst out, with clenched fists: 'He beats her! The fellow lives on
her and beats her; strikes that woman! He drags her about to every
Capital in Europe to make money for him, and the scoundrel pays her with
blows.'

In the course of a heavy tirade against the scoundrel, Redworth
apprehended that it was the cantatrice's husband. He expressed his horror
and regret; paused, and named THE PRINCESS EGERIA and a certain Critical
Review. Another outburst seemed to be in preparation. Nothing further was
to be done for the book at that hour. So, with a blunt 'Good night,' he
left Charles Rainer pacing, and thought on his walk home of the strange
effects wrought by women unwittingly upon men (Englishmen); those women,
or some of them, as little knowing it as the moon her traditional
influence upon the tides. He thought of Percy Dacier too. In his bed he
could have wished himself peregrinating a bridge.

The PRINCESS EGERIA appeared, with the reviews at her heels, a pack of
clappers, causing her to fly over editions clean as a doe the gates and
hedges--to quote Mr. Sullivan Smith, who knew not a sentence of the work
save what he gathered of it from Redworth, at their chance meeting on
Piccadilly pavement, and then immediately he knew enough to blow his
huntsman's horn in honour of the sale. His hallali rang high. 'Here's
another Irish girl to win their laurels! 'Tis one of the blazing
successes. A most enthralling work, beautifully composed. And where is
she now, Mr. Redworth, since she broke away from that husband of hers,
that wears the clothes of the worst tailor ever begotten by a thread on a
needle, as I tell every soul of 'em in my part of the country?'

'You have seen him?' said Redworth.

'Why, sir, wasn't he on show at the Court he applied to for relief and
damages? as we heard when we were watching the case daily, scarce drawing
our breath for fear the innocent--and one of our own blood, would be
crushed. Sure, there he stood; ay, and looking the very donkey for a
woman to flip off her fingers, like the dust from my great uncle's prise
of snuff! She's a glory to the old country. And better you than another,
I'd say, since it wasn't an Irishman to have her: but what induced the
dear lady to take him, is the question we 're all of us asking! And it's
mournful to think that somehow you contrive to get the pick of us in the
girls! If ever we 're united, 'twill be by a trick of circumvention of
that sort, pretty sure. There's a turn in the market when they shut their
eyes and drop to the handiest: and London's a vortex that poor dear dull
old Dublin can't compete with. I 'll beg you for the address of the lady
her friend, Lady Dunstane.'

Mr. Sullivan Smith walked with Redworth through the park to the House of
Commons, discoursing of Rails and his excellent old friend's rise to the
top rung of the ladder and Beanstalk land, so elevated that one had to
look up at him with watery eyes, as if one had flung a ball at the
meridian sun. Arrived at famed St. Stephen's, he sent in his compliments
to the noble patriot and accepted an invitation to dinner.

'And mind you read THE PRINCESS EGERIA,' said Redworth.

'Again and again, my friend. The book is bought.' Sullivan Smith slapped
his breastpocket.

'There's a bit of Erin in it.'

'It sprouts from Erin.'

'Trumpet it.'

'Loud as cavalry to the charge!'

Once with the title stamped on his memory, the zealous Irishman might be
trusted to become an ambulant advertizer. Others, personal friends,
adherents, courtiers of Redworth's, were active. Lady Pennon and Henry
Wilmers, in the upper circle; Whitmonby and Westlake, in the literary;
spread the fever for this new book. The chief interpreter of public
opinion caught the way of the wind and headed the gale.

Editions of the book did really run like fires in summer furze; and to
such an extent that a simple literary performance grew to be respected in
Great Britain, as representing Money.




CHAPTER XVIII

THE AUTHORESS

The effect of a great success upon Diana, at her second literary venture,
was shown in the transparent sedateness of a letter she wrote to Emma
Dunstane, as much as in her immediate and complacent acceptance of the
magical change of her fortunes. She spoke one thing and acted another,
but did both with a lofty calm that deceived the admiring friend who
clearly saw the authoress behind her mask, and feared lest she should be
too confidently trusting to the powers of her pen to support an
establishment.

'If the public were a perfect instrument to strike on, I should be
tempted to take the wonderful success of my PRINCESS at her first
appearance for a proof of natural aptitude in composition, and might
think myself the genius. I know it to be as little a Stradivarius as I am
a Paganini. It is an eccentric machine, in tune with me for the moment,
because I happen to have hit it in the ringing spot. The book is a new
face appealing to a mirror of the common surface emotions; and the
kitchen rather than the dairy offers an analogy for the real value of
that "top-skim." I have not seen what I consider good in the book once
mentioned among the laudatory notices--except by your dear hand, my Emmy.
Be sure I will stand on guard against the "vaporous generalizations," and
other "tricks" you fear. Now that you are studying Latin for an
occupation--how good and wise it was of Mr. Redworth to propose it!--I
look upon you with awe as a classic authority and critic. I wish I had
leisure to study with you. What I do is nothing like so solid and
durable.

'THE PRINCESS EGERIA' originally (I must have written word of it to
you--I remember the evening off Palermo!) was conceived as a sketch; by
gradations she grew into a sort of semi-Scudery romance, and swelled to
her present portliness. That was done by a great deal of piecing, not to
say puffing, of her frame. She would be healthier and have a chance of
living longer if she were reduced by a reversal of the processes. But how
would the judicious clippings and prickings affect our "pensive public"?
Now that I have furnished a house and have a fixed address, under the
paws of creditors, I feel I am in the wizard-circle of my popularity and
subscribe to its laws or waken to incubus and the desert. Have I been
rash? You do not pronounce. If I have bound myself to pipe as others
please, it need not be entirely; and I can promise you it shall not be;
but still I am sensible when I lift my "little quill" of having forced
the note of a woodland wren into the popular nightingale's--which may end
in the daw's, from straining; or worse, a toy-whistle.

'That is, in the field of literature. Otherwise, within me deep, I am not
aware of any transmutation of the celestial into coined gold. I sound
myself, and ring clear. Incessant writing is my refuge, my solace--escape
out of the personal net. I delight in it, as in my early morning walks at
Lugano, when I went threading the streets and by the lake away to "the
heavenly mount," like a dim idea worming upward in a sleepy head to
bright wakefulness.

'My anonymous critic, of whom I told you, is intoxicating with eulogy.
The signature "Apollonius" appears to be of literary-middle indication.
He marks passages approved by you. I have also had a complimentary letter
from Mr. Dacier:

'For an instance of this delight I have in writing, so strong is it that
I can read pages I have written, and tear the stuff to strips (I did
yesterday), and resume, as if nothing had happened. The waves within are
ready for any displacement. That must be a good sign. I do not doubt of
excelling my PRINCESS; and if she received compliments, the next may hope
for more. Consider, too, the novel pleasure of earning money by the
labour we delight in. It is an answer to your question whether I am
happy. Yes, as the savage islander before the ship entered the bay with
the fire-water. My blood is wine, and I have the slumbers of an infant. I
dream, wake, forget my dream, barely dress before the pen is galloping;
barely breakfast; no toilette till noon. A savage in good sooth! You see,
my Emmy, I could not house with the "companionable person" you hint at.
The poles can never come together till the earth is crushed. She would
find my habits intolerable, and I hers contemptible, though we might both
be companionable persons. My dear, I could not even live with myself. My
blessed little quill, which helps me divinely to live out of myself, is
and must continue to be my one companion. It is my mountain height,
morning light, wings, cup from the springs, my horse, my goal, my lancet
and replenisher, my key of communication with the highest, grandest,
holiest between earth and heaven-the vital air connecting them.

'In justice let me add that I have not been troubled by hearing of any of
the mysterious legal claims, et caetera. I am sorry to hear bad reports
of health. I wish him entire felicity--no step taken to bridge division!
The thought of it makes me tigrish.

'A new pianist playing his own pieces (at Lady Singleby's concert) has
given me exquisite pleasure' and set me composing songs--not to his
music, which could be rendered only by sylphs moving to "soft recorders"
in the humour of wildness, languor, bewitching caprices, giving a new
sense to melody. How I wish you had been with me to hear him! It was the
most AEolian thing ever caught from a night-breeze by the soul of a poet.

'But do not suppose me having headlong tendencies to the melting mood.
(The above, by the way, is a Pole settled in Paris, and he is to be
introduced to me at Lady Pennon's.)--What do you say to my being invited
by Mr. Whitmonby to aid him in writing leading articles for the paper he
is going to conduct! "write as you talk and it will do," he says. I am
choosing my themes. To write--of politics--as I talk, seems to me like an
effort to jump away from my shadow. The black dog of consciousness
declines to be shaken off. If some one commanded me to talk as I write! I
suspect it would be a way of winding me up to a sharp critical pitch
rapidly.

'Not good news of Lord D. I have had messages. Mr. Dacier conceals his
alarm. The PRINCESS gave great gratification. She did me her best service
there. Is it not cruel that the interdict of the censor should force me
to depend for information upon such scraps as I get from a gentleman
passing my habitation on his way to the House? And he is not, he never
has been, sympathetic in that direction. He sees my grief, and assumes an
undertakerly air, with some notion of acting in concert, one supposes
little imagining how I revolt from that crape-hatband formalism of
sorrow!

'One word of her we call our inner I. I am not drawing upon her resources
for my daily needs; not wasting her at all, I trust; certainly not
walling her up, to deafen her voice. It would be to fall away from you.
She bids me sign myself, my beloved, ever, ever your Tony.'

The letter had every outward show of sincereness in expression, and was
endowed to wear that appearance by the writer's impulse to protest with
so resolute a vigour as to delude herself. Lady Dunstane heard of Mr.
Dacier's novel attendance at concerts. The world made a note of it; for
the gentleman was notoriously without ear for music.

Diana's comparison of her hours of incessant writing to her walks under
the dawn at Lugano, her boast of the similarity of her delight in both,
deluded her uncorrupted conscience to believe that she was now
spiritually as free: as in that fair season of the new spring in her
veins. She, was not an investigating physician, nor was Lady Dunstane,
otherwise they would have examined the material points of her
conduct--indicators of the spiritual secret always. What are the
patient's acts? The patient's, mind was projected too far beyond them to
see the fore finger they stretched at her; and the friend's was not that
of a prying doctor on the look out for betraying symptoms. Lady Dunstane
did ask herself why Tony should have incurred the burden of a costly
household--a very costly: Sir Lukin had been at one of Tony's little'
dinners: but her wish to meet the world on equal terms, after a long
dependency, accounted for it in seeming to excuse. The guests on the
occasion were Lady Pennon. Lady Singleby, Mr. Whitmonby, Mr. Percy
Dacier, Mr. Tonans;--'Some other woman,' Sir Lukin said, and himself. He
reported the cookery as matching the: conversation, and that was
princely; the wines not less--an extraordinary fact to note of a woman.
But to hear Whitmonby and Diana Warwick! How he told a story, neat as a
postman's knock, and she tipped it with a remark and ran to a second,
drawing in Lady Pennon, and then Dacier, 'and me!' cried Sir Lukin; 'she
made us all toss the ball from hand to hand, and all talk up to the mark;
and none of us noticed that we all went together to the drawing-room,
where we talked for another hour, and broke up fresher than we began.'

'That break between the men and the women after dinner was Tony's
aversion, and I am glad she has instituted a change,' said Lady Dunstane.

She heard also from Redworth of the unexampled concert of the guests at
Mrs. Warwick's dinner parties. He had met on one occasion the Esquarts,
the Pettigrews, Mr. Percy Dacier, and a Miss Paynham. Redworth had not a
word to say of the expensive household. Whatever Mrs. Warwick did was
evidently good to him. On another evening the party was composed of Lady
Pennon, Lord Larrian, Miss Paynham, a clever Mrs. Wollasley, Mr. Henry
Wilmers, and again Mr. Percy Dacier.

When Diana came to Copsley, Lady Dunstane remarked on the recurrence of
the name of Miss Paynham in the list of her guests.

'And Mr. Percy Dacier's too,' said Diana, smiling. 'They are invited each
for specific reasons. It pleases Lord Dannisburgh to hear that a way has
been found to enliven his nephew; and my little dinners are effective, I
think. He wakes. Yesterday evening he capped flying jests with Mr.
Sullivan Smith. But you speak of Miss. Paynham.' Diana lowered her voice
on half a dozen syllables, till the half-tones dropped into her steady
look. 'You approve, Emmy?'

The answer was: 'I do--true or not.'

'Between us two, dear, I fear! . . . In either case, she has been badly
used. Society is big engine enough to protect itself. I incline with
British juries to do rough justice to the victims. She has neither father
nor brother. I have had no confidences: but it wears the look of a
cowardly business. With two words in his ear, I could arm an Irishman to
do some work of chastisement: he would select the rascal's necktie for a
cause of quarrel and lords have to stand their ground as well as
commoners. They measure the same number of feet when stretched their
length. However, vengeance with the heavens! though they seem tardy. Lady
Pennon has been very kind about it; and the Esquarts invite her to
Lockton. Shoulder to shoulder, the tide may be stemmed.'

'She would have gone under, but for you, dear Tony!' said Emma' folding
arms round her darling's neck anal kissing her. 'Bring her here some
day.'

Diana did not promise it. She had her vision of Sir Lukin in his fit of
lunacy.

'I am too weak for London now,' Emma resumed. 'I should like to be
useful. Is she pleasant?'

'Sprightly by nature. She has worn herself with fretting.'

'Then bring her to stay with me, if I cannot keep you. She will talk of
you to me.'

'I will bring her for a couple of days,' Diana said. 'I am too busy to
remain longer. She paints portraits to amuse herself. She ought to be
pushed, wherever she is received about London, while the season is warm.
One season will suffice to establish her. She is pretty, near upon six
and twenty: foolish, of course:--she pays for having had a romantic head.
Heavy payment, Emmy! I drive at laws, but hers is an instance of the
creatures wanting simple human kindness.'

'The good law will come with a better civilization; but before society
can be civilized it has to be debarbarized,' Emma remarked, and Diana
sighed over the task and the truism.

I should have said in younger days, because it will not look plainly on
our nature and try to reconcile it with our conditions. But now I see
that the sin is cowardice. The more I know of the world the more clearly
I perceive that its top and bottom sin is cowardice, physically and
morally alike. Lord Larrian owns to there being few heroes in an army. We
must fawn in society. What is the meaning of that dread of one example of
tolerance? O my dear! let us give it the right name. Society is the best
thing we have, but it is a crazy vessel worked by a crew that formerly
practised piracy, and now, in expiation, professes piety, fearful of a
discovered Omnipotence, which is in the image of themselves and captain.
Their old habits are not quite abandoned, and their new one is used as a
lash to whip the exposed of us for a propitiation of the capricious
potentate whom they worship in the place of the true God.'

Lady Dunstane sniffed. 'I smell the leading article.'

Diana joined with her smile, 'No, the style is rather different.'

'Have you not got into a trick of composing in speaking, at times?'

Diana confessed, 'I think I have at times. Perhaps the daily writing of
all kinds and the nightly talking . . . I may be getting strained.'

'No, Tony; but longer visits in the country to me would refresh you. I
miss your lighter touches. London is a school, but, you know it, not a
school for comedy nor for philosophy; that is gathered on my hills, with
London distantly in view, and then occasional descents on it well
digested.'

'I wonder whether it is affecting me!' said Diana, musing. 'A
metropolitan hack! and while thinking myself free, thrice harnessed; and
all my fun gone. Am I really as dull as a tract, my dear? I must be, or I
should be proving the contrary instead of asking. My pitfall is to fancy
I have powers equal to the first look-out of the eyes of the morning.
Enough of me. We talked of Mary Paynham. If only some right good man
would marry her!'

Lady Dunstane guessed at the right good man in Diana's mind. 'Do you
bring them together?'

Diana nodded, and then shook doleful negatives to signify no hope.

'None whatever--if we mean the same person,' said Lady Dunstane,
bethinking her, in the spirit of wrath she felt at such a scheme being
planned by Diana to snare the right good man, that instead of her own
true lover Redworth, it might be only Percy Dacier. So filmy of mere
sensations are these little ideas as they flit in converse, that she did
not reflect on her friend's ignorance of Redworth's love of her, or on
the unlikely choice of one in Dacier's high station to reinstate a
damsel.

They did not name the person.

'Passing the instance, which is cruel, I will be just to society thus
far,' said Diana. 'I was in a boat at Richmond last week, and Leander was
revelling along the mud-banks, and took it into his head to swim out to
me, and I was moved to take him on board. The ladies in the boat
objected, for he was not only wet but very muddy. I was forced to own
that their objections were reasonable. My sentimental humaneness had no
argument against muslin dresses, though my dear dog's eyes appealed
pathetically, and he would keep swimming after us. The analogy excuses
the world for protecting itself in extreme cases; nothing, nothing
excuses its insensibility to cases which may be pleaded. You see the
pirate crew turned pious-ferocious in sanctity.' She added, half
laughing: 'I am reminded by the boat, I have unveiled my anonymous
critic, and had a woeful disappointment. He wrote like a veteran; he is
not much more than a boy. I received a volume of verse, and a few lines
begging my acceptance. I fancied I knew the writing, and wrote asking him
whether I had not to thank him, and inviting him to call. He seems a nice
lad of about two and twenty, mad for literature; and he must have talent.
Arthur Rhodes by name. I may have a chance of helping him. He was an
articled clerk of Mr. Braddock's, the same who valiantly came to my
rescue once. He was with us in the boat.'

'Bring him to me some day,' said Lady Dunstane.

Miss Paynham's visit to Copsley was arranged, and it turned out a
failure. The poor young lady came in a flutter, thinking that the friend
of Mrs. Warwick would expect her to discourse cleverly. She attempted it,
to Diana's amazement. Lady Dunstane's opposingly corresponding stillness
provoked Miss Paynham to expatiate, for she had sprightliness and some
mental reserves of the common order. Clearly, Lady Dunstane mused while
listening amiably, Tony never could have designed this gabbler for the
mate of Thomas Redworth!

Percy Dacier seemed to her the more likely one, in that light, and she
thought so still, after Sir Lukin had introduced him at Copsley for a
couple of days of the hunting season. Tony's manner with him suggested
it; she had a dash of leadership. They were not intimate in look or
tongue.

But Percy Dacier also was too good for Miss Paynham, if that was Tony's
plan for him, Lady Dunstane thought, with the relentlessness of an
invalid and recluse's distaste. An aspect of penitence she had not
demanded, but the silly gabbier under a stigma she could not pardon.

Her opinion of Miss Paynham was diffused in her silence.

Speaking of Mr. Dacier, she remarked, 'As you say of him, Tony, he can
brighten, and when you give him a chance he is entertaining. He has fine
gifts. If I were a member of his family I should beat about for a match
for him. He strikes me as one of the young men who would do better
married.'

'He is doing very well, but the wonder is that he doesn't marry,' said
Diana. 'He ought to be engaged. Lady Esquart told me that he was. A Miss
Asper--great heiress; and the Daciers want money. However, there it is.'

Not many weeks later Diana could not have spoken of Mr. Percy Dacier with
this air of indifference without corruption of her inward guide.




CHAPTER XIX

A DRIVE IN SUNLIGHT AND A DRIVE IN MOONLIGHT

The fatal time to come for her was in the Summer of that year.

Emma had written her a letter of unwonted bright spirits, contrasting
strangely with an inexplicable oppression of her own that led her to
imagine her recent placid life the pause before thunder, and to sharp the
mood of her solitary friend she flew to Copsley, finding Sir Lukin
absent, as usual. They drove out immediately after breakfast, on one of
those high mornings of the bared bosom of June when distances are given
to our eyes, and a soft air fondles leaf and grass-blade, and beauty and
peace are overhead, reflected, if we will. Rain had fallen in the night.
Here and there hung a milk-white cloud with folded sail. The South-west
left it in its bay of blue, and breathed below. At moments the fresh
scent of herb and mould swung richly in warmth. The young beech-leaves
glittered, pools of rain-water made the roadways laugh, the grass-banks
under hedges rolled their interwoven weeds in cascades of many-shaded
green to right and left of the pair of dappled ponies, and a squirrel
crossed ahead, a lark went up a little way to ease his heart, closing his
wings when the burst was over, startled black-birds, darting with a
clamour like a broken cockcrow, looped the wayside woods from hazel to
oak-scrub; short flights, quick spirts everywhere, steady sunshine above.

Diana held the reins. The whip was an ornament, as the plume of feathers
to the general officer. Lady Dunstane's ponies were a present from
Redworth, who always chose the pick of the land for his gifts. They joyed
in their trot, and were the very love-birds of the breed for their
pleasure of going together, so like that Diana called them the Dromios.
Through an old gravel-cutting a gateway led to the turf of the down,
springy turf bordered on a long line, clear as a racecourse, by golden
gorse covers, and leftward over the gorse the dark ridge of the fir and
heath country ran companionably to the Southwest, the valley between,
with undulations of wood and meadow sunned or shaded, clumps, mounds,
promontories, away to broad spaces of tillage banked by wooded hills, and
dimmer beyond and farther, the faintest shadowiness of heights, as a veil
to the illimitable. Yews, junipers, radiant beeches, and gleams of the
service-tree or the white-beam spotted the semicircle of swelling green
Down black and silver. The sun in the valley sharpened his beams on
squares of buttercups, and made a pond a diamond.

'You see, Tony,' Emma said, for a comment on the scene, 'I could envy
Italy for having you, more than you for being in Italy.'

'Feature and colour!' said Diana. 'You have them here, and on a scale
that one can embrace. I should like to build a hut on this point, and
wait for such a day to return. It brings me to life.' She lifted her
eyelids on her friend's worn sweet face, and knowing her this friend up
to death, past it in her hopes, she said bravely, 'It is the Emma of days
and scenes to me! It helps me to forget myself, as I do when I think of
you, dearest; but the subject has latterly been haunting me, I don't know
why, and ominously, as if my nature were about to horrify my soul. But I
am not sentimentalizing, you are really this day and scene in my heart.'

Emma smiled confidingly. She spoke her reflection: 'The heart must be
troubled a little to have the thought. The flower I gather here tells me
that we may be happy in privation and suffering if simply we can accept
beauty. I won't say expel the passions, but keep passion sober, a trotter
in harness.'

Diana caressed the ponies' heads with the droop of her whip: 'I don't
think I know him!' she said.

Between sincerity and a suspicion so cloaked and dull that she did not
feel it to be the opposite of candour, she fancied she was passionless
because she could accept the visible beauty, which was Emma's
prescription and test; and she forced herself to make much of it, cling
to it, devour it; with envy of Emma's contemplative happiness, through
whose grave mind she tried to get to the peace in it, imagining that she
succeeded. The cloaked and dull suspicion weighed within her
nevertheless. She took it for a mania to speculate on herself. There are
states of the crimson blood when the keenest wits are childish, notably
in great-hearted women aiming at the majesty of their sex and fearful of
confounding it by the look direct and the downright word. Yet her nature
compelled her inwardly to phrase the sentence: 'Emma is a wife!' The
character of her husband was not considered, nor was the meaning of the
exclamation pursued.

They drove through the gorse into wild land of heath and flowering
hawthorn, and along by tracts of yew and juniper to another point,
jutting on a furzy sand-mound, rich with the mild splendour of English
scenery, which Emma stamped on her friend's mind by saying: 'A cripple
has little to envy in you who can fly when she has feasts like these at
her doors.'

They had an inclination to boast on the drive home of the solitude they
had enjoyed; and just then, as the road in the wood wound under great
beeches, they beheld a London hat. The hat was plucked from its head. A
clear-faced youth, rather flushed, dusty at the legs, addressed Diana.

'Mr. Rhodes!' she said, not discouragingly.

She was petitioned to excuse him; he thought she would wish to hear the
news in town last night as early as possible; he hesitated and murmured
it.

Diana turned to Emma: 'Lord Dannisburgh!' her paleness told the rest.

Hearing from Mr. Rhodes that he had walked the distance from town, and
had been to Copsley, Lady Dunstane invited him to follow the
pony-carriage thither, where he was fed and refreshed by a tea-breakfast,
as he preferred walking on tea, he said. 'I took the liberty to call at
Mrs. Warwick's house,' he informed her; 'the footman said she was at
Copsley. I found it on the map--I knew the directions--and started about
two in the morning. I wanted a walk.'

It was evident to her that he was one of the young squires bewitched whom
beautiful women are constantly enlisting. There was no concealment of it,
though he stirred a sad enviousness in the invalid lady by descanting on
the raptures of a walk out of London in the youngest light of day, and on
the common objects he had noticed along the roadside, and through the
woods, more sustaining, closer with nature than her compulsory feeding on
the cream of things.

'You are not fatigued?' she inquired, hoping for that confession at
least; but she pardoned his boyish vaunting to walk the distance back
without any fatigue at all.

He had a sweeter reward for his pains; and if the business of the
chronicler allowed him to become attached to pure throbbing felicity
wherever it is encountered, he might be diverted by the blissful
unexpectedness of good fortune befalling Mr. Arthur Rhodes in having the
honour to conduct Mrs. Warwick to town. No imagined happiness, even in
the heart of a young man of two and twenty, could have matched it. He was
by her side, hearing and seeing her, not less than four hours. To add to
his happiness, Lady Dunstane said she would be glad to welcome him again.
She thought him a pleasant specimen of the self-vowed squire.

Diana was sure that there would be a communication for her of some sort
at her house in London; perhaps a message of farewell from the dying
lord, now dead. Mr. Rhodes had only the news of the evening journals, to
the effect that Lord Dannisburgh had expired at his residence, the
Priory, Hallowmere, in Hampshire. A message of farewell from him, she
hoped for: knowing him as she did, it seemed a certainty; and she
hungered for that last gleam of life in her friend. She had no
anticipation of the burden of the message awaiting her.

A consultation as to the despatching of the message, had taken place
among the members of Lord Dannisburgh's family present at his death.
Percy Dacier was one of them, and he settled the disputed point, after
some time had been spent in persuading his father to take the plain view
of obligation in the matter, and in opposing the dowager countess, his
grandmother, by stating that he had already sent a special messenger to
London. Lord Dannisburgh on his death-bed had expressed a wish that Mrs.
Warwick would sit with him for an hour one night before the nails were
knocked in his coffin. He spoke of it twice, putting it the second time
to Percy as a formal request to be made to her, and Percy had promised
him that Mrs. Warwick should have the message. He had done his best to
keep his pledge, aware of the disrelish of the whole family for the
lady's name, to say nothing of her presence.

'She won't come,' said the earl.

'She'll come,' said old Lady Dacier.

'If the woman respects herself she'll hold off it,' the earl insisted
because of his desire that way. He signified in mutterings that the thing
was improper and absurd, a piece of sentiment, sickly senility, unlike
Lord Dannisburgh. Also that Percy had been guilty of excessive folly.

To which Lady Dacier nodded her assent, remarking, 'The woman is on her
mettle. From what I've heard of her, she's not a woman to stick at
trifles. She'll take it as a sort of ordeal by touch, and she 'll come.'

They joined in abusing Percy, who had driven away to another part of the
country. Lord Creedmore, the heir of the house, was absent, hunting in
America, or he might temporarily have been taken into favour by contrast.
Ultimately they agreed that the woman must be allowed to enter the house,
but could not be received. The earl was a widower; his mother managed the
family, and being hard to convince, she customarily carried her point,
save when it involved Percy's freedom of action. She was one of the
veterans of her sex that age to toughness; and the 'hysterical fuss' she
apprehended in the visit of this woman to Lord Dannisburgh's death-bed
and body, did not alarm her. For the sake of the household she determined
to remain, shut up in her room. Before night the house was empty of any
members of the family excepting old Lady Dacier and the outstretched
figure on the bed.

Dacier fled to escape the hearing of the numberless ejaculations
re-awakened in the family by his uncle's extraordinary dying request.
They were an outrage to the lady, of whom he could now speak as a
privileged champion; and the request itself had an air of proving her
stainless, a white soul and efficacious advocate at the celestial gates
(reading the mind of the dying man). So he thought at one moment: he had
thought so when charged with the message to her; had even thought it a
natural wish that she should look once on the face she would see no more,
and say farewell to it, considering that in life it could not be
requested. But the susceptibility to sentimental emotion beside a
death-bed, with a dying man's voice in the ear, requires fortification if
it is to be maintained;' and the review of his uncle's character did not
tend to make this very singular request a proof that the lady's innocence
was honoured in it. His epicurean uncle had no profound esteem for the
kind of innocence. He had always talked of Mrs. Warwick--with warm
respect for her: Dacier knew that he had bequeathed her a sum of money.
The inferences were either way. Lord Dannisburgh never spoke evilly of
any woman, and he was perhaps bound to indemnify her materially as well
as he could for what she had suffered.--On the other hand, how easy it
was to be the dupe of a woman so handsome and clever.--Unlikely too that
his uncle would consent to sit at the Platonic banquet with her.--Judging
by himself, Dacier deemed it possible for man. He was not quick to
kindle, and had lately seen much of her, had found her a Lady Egeria,
helpful in counsel, prompting, inspiriting, reviving as well-waters, and
as temperately cool: not one sign of native slipperiness. Nor did she
stir the mud in him upon which proud man is built. The shadow of the
scandal had checked a few shifty sensations rising now and then of their
own accord, and had laid them, with the lady's benign connivance. This
was good proof in her favour, seeing that she must have perceived of late
the besetting thirst he had for her company; and alone or in the medley
equally. To see her, hear, exchange ideas with her; and to talk of new
books, try to listen to music at the opera and at concerts, and admire
her playing of hostess, were novel pleasures, giving him fresh notions of
life, and strengthening rather than disturbing the course of his life's
business.

At any rate, she was capable of friendship. Why not resolutely believe
that she had been his uncle's true and simple friend! He adopted the
resolution, thanking her for one recognized fact:--he hated marriage, and
would by this time have been in the yoke, but for the agreeable deviation
of his path to her society. Since his visit to Copsley, moreover, Lady
Dunstane's idolizing, of her friend had influenced him. Reflecting on it,
he recovered from the shock which his uncle's request had caused.

Certain positive calculations were running side by side with the
speculations in vapour. His messenger would reach her house at about four
of the afternoon. If then at home, would she decide to start
immediately?--Would she come? That was a question he did not delay to
answer. Would she defer the visit? Death replied to that. She would not
delay it.

She would be sure to come at once. And what of the welcome she would
meet? Leaving the station at London at six in the evening, she might
arrive at the Priory, all impediments counted, between ten and eleven at
night. Thence, coldly greeted, or not greeted, to the chamber of death.

A pitiable and cruel reception for a woman upon such a mission!

His mingled calculations and meditations reached that exclamatory
terminus in feeling, and settled on the picture of Diana, about as clear
as light to blinking eyes, but enough for him to realize her being there
and alone, woefully alone. The supposition of an absolute loneliness was
most possible. He had intended to drive back the next day, when the
domestic storm would be over, and take the chances of her coming. It
seemed now a piece of duty to return at night, a traverse of twenty rough
up and down miles from Itchenford to the heath-land rolling on the chalk
wave of the Surrey borders, easily done after the remonstrances of his
host were stopped.

Dacier sat in an open carriage, facing a slip of bright moon. Poetical
impressions, emotions, any stirrings of his mind by the sensational stamp
on it, were new to him, and while he swam in them, both lulled and
pricked by his novel accessibility to nature's lyrical touch, he asked
himself whether, if he were near the throes of death, the thought of
having Diana Warwick to sit beside his vacant semblance for an hour at
night would be comforting. And why had his uncle specified an hour of the
night? It was a sentiment, like the request: curious in a man so little
sentimental. Yonder crescent running the shadowy round of the hoop roused
comparisons. Would one really wish to have her beside one in death? In
life--ah! But suppose her denied to us in life. Then the desire for her
companionship appears passingly comprehensible. Enter into the sentiment,
you see that the hour of darkness is naturally chosen. And would even a
grand old Pagan crave the presence beside his dead body for an hour of
the night of a woman he did not esteem? Dacier answered no. The negative
was not echoed in his mind. He repeated it, and to the same deadness.

He became aware that he had spoken for himself, and he had a fit of
sourness. For who can say he is not a fool before he has been tried by a
woman! Dacier's wretched tendency under vexation to conceive grotesque
analogies, anti-poetic, not to say cockney similes, which had slightly
chilled Diana at Rovio, set him looking at yonder crescent with the hoop,
as at the shape of a white cat climbing a wheel. Men of the northern
blood will sometimes lend their assent to poetical images, even to those
that do not stun the mind lie bludgeons and imperatively, by much
repetition, command their assent; and it is for a solid exchange and
interest in usury with soft poetical creatures when they are so
condescending; but they are seized by the grotesque. In spite of efforts
to efface or supplant it, he saw the white cat, nothing else, even to
thinking that she had jumped cleverly to catch the wheel. He was a true
descendant of practical hard-grained fighting Northerners, of gnarled
dwarf imaginations, chivalrous though they were, and heroes to have
serviceable and valiant gentlemen for issue. Without at all tracing back
to its origin his detestable image of the white cat on the dead circle,
he kicked at the links between his uncle and Diana Warwick, whatever they
had been; particularly at the present revival of them. Old Lady Dacier's
blunt speech, and his father's fixed opinion, hissed in his head.

They were ignorant of his autumnal visit to the Italian Lakes, after the
winter's Nile-boat expedition; and also of the degree of his recent
intimacy with Mrs. Warwick; or else, as he knew, he would have heard more
hissing things. Her patronage of Miss Paynham exposed her to attacks
where she was deemed vulnerable; Lady Dacier muttered old saws as to the
flocking of birds; he did not accurately understand it, thought it
indiscreet, at best. But in regard to his experience, he could tell
himself that a woman more guileless of luring never drew breath. On the
contrary, candour said it had always been he who had schemed and pressed
for the meeting. He was at liberty to do it, not being bound in honour
elsewhere. Besides, despite his acknowledgement of her beauty, Mrs.
Warwick was not quite his ideal of the perfectly beautiful woman.

Constance Asper came nearer to it. He had the English taste for red and
white, and for cold outlines: he secretly admired a statuesque demeanour
with a statue's eyes. The national approbation of a reserved haughtiness
in woman, a tempered disdain in her slightly lifted small upperlip and
drooped eyelids, was shared by him; and Constance Asper, if not exactly
aristocratic by birth, stood well for that aristocratic insular type,
which seems to promise the husband of it a casket of all the trusty
virtues, as well as the security of frigidity in the casket. Such was
Dacier's native taste; consequently the attractions of Diana Warwick for
him were, he thought, chiefly mental, those of a Lady Egeria. She might
or might not be good, in the vulgar sense. She was an agreeable woman, an
amusing companion, very suggestive, inciting, animating; and her past
history must be left as her own. Did it matter to him? What he saw was
bright, a silver crescent on the side of the shadowy ring. Were it a
question of marrying her!--That was out of the possibilities. He
remembered, moreover, having heard from a man, who professed to know,
that Mrs. Warwick had started in married life by treating her husband
cavalierly to an intolerable degree: 'Such as no Englishman could stand,'
the portly old informant thundered, describing it and her in racy
vernacular. She might be a devil of a wife. She was a pleasant friend;
just the soft bit sweeter than male friends which gave the flavour of sex
without the artful seductions. He required them strong to move him.

He looked at last on the green walls of the Priory, scarcely supposing a
fair watcher to be within; for the contrasting pale colours of dawn had
ceased to quicken the brilliancy of the crescent, and summer daylight
drowned it to fainter than a silver coin in water. It lay dispieced like
a pulled rag. Eastward, over Surrey, stood the full rose of morning. The
Priory clock struck four. When the summons of the bell had gained him
admittance, and he heard that Mrs. Warwick had come in the night, he
looked back through the doorway at the rosy colour, and congratulated
himself to think that her hour of watching was at an end. A sleepy
footman was his informant. Women were in my lord's dressing-room, he
said. Upstairs, at the death-chamber, Dacier paused. No sound came to
him. He hurried to his own room, paced about, and returned. Expecting to
see no one but the dead, he turned the handle, and the two circles of a
shaded lamp, on ceiling and on table, met his gaze.




CHAPTER XX

DIANA A NIGHT-WATCH IN THE CHAMBER OF DEATH

He stepped into the room, and thrilled to hear the quiet voice beside the
bed: 'Who is it?'

Apologies and excuses were on his tongue. The vibration of those grave
tones checked them.

'It is you,' she said.

She sat in shadow, her hands joined on her lap. An unopened book was
under the lamp.

He spoke in an underbreath: 'I have just come. I was not sure I should
find you here. Pardon.'

'There is a chair.'

He murmured thanks and entered into the stillness, observing her.

'You have been watching . . . . You must be tired.'

'No.'

'An hour was asked, only one.'

'I could not leave him.'

'Watchers are at hand to relieve you'

'It is better for him to have me.'

The chord of her voice told him of the gulf she had sunk in during the
night. The thought of her endurance became a burden.

He let fall his breath for patience, and tapped the floor with his foot.

He feared to discompose her by speaking. The silence grew more fearful,
as the very speech of Death between them.

'You came. I thought it right to let you know instantly. I hoped you
would come to-morrow'

'I could not delay.'

'You have been sitting alone here since eleven!'

'I have not found it long.'

'You must want some refreshment . . . tea?'

'I need nothing.'

'It can be made ready in a few minutes.'

'I could not eat or drink.'

He tried to brush away the impression of the tomb in the
heavily-curtained chamber by thinking of the summer-morn outside; he
spoke of it, the rosy sky, the dewy grass, the piping birds. She
listened, as one hearing of a quitted sphere.

Their breathing in common was just heard if either drew a deeper breath.
At moments his eyes wandered and shut. Alternately in his mind Death had
vaster meanings and doubtfuller; Life cowered under the shadow or
outshone it. He glanced from her to the figure in the bed, and she seemed
swallowed.

He said: 'It is time for you to have rest. You know your room. I will
stay till the servants are up.'

She replied: 'No, let this night with him be mine.'

'I am not intruding . . .?'

'If you wish to remain . . .'

No traces of weeping were on her face. The lampshade revealed it
colourless, and lustreless her eyes. She was robed in black. She held her
hands clasped.

'You have not suffered?'

'Oh, no.'

She said it without sighing: nor was her speech mournful, only brief.

'You have seen death before?'

'I sat by my father four nights. I was a girl then. I cried till I had no
more tears.'

He felt a burning pressure behind his eyeballs.

'Death is natural,' he said.

'It is natural to the aged. When they die honoured . . .'

She looked where the dead man lay. 'To sit beside the young, cut off from
their dear opening life . . . !' A little shudder swept over her. 'Oh!
that!'

'You were very good to come. We must all thank you for fulfilling his
wish.'

'He knew it would be my wish.'

Her hands pressed together.

'He lies peacefully!'

'I have raised the lamp on him, and wondered each time. So changeless he
lies. But so like a sleep that will wake. We never see peace but in the
features of the dead. Will you look? They are beautiful. They have a
heavenly sweetness.'

The desire to look was evidently recurrent with her. Dacier rose.

Their eyes fell together on the dead man, as thoughtfully as Death allows
to the creatures of sensation.

'And after?' he said in low tones.

'I trust to my Maker,' she replied. 'Do you see a change since he
breathed his last?'

'Not any.'

'You were with him?'

'Not in the room. Two minutes later.'

'Who . . .?'

'My father. His niece, Lady Cathairn.'

'If our lives are lengthened we outlive most of those we would have to
close our eyes. He had a dear sister.'

'She died some years back.'

'I helped to comfort him for that loss.'

'He told me you did.'

The lamp was replaced on the table.

'For a moment, when I withdraw the light from him, I feel sadness. As if
the light we lend to anything were of value to him now!'

She bowed her head deeply. Dacier left her meditation undisturbed. The
birds on the walls outside were audible, tweeting, chirping.

He went to the window-curtains and tried the shutter-bars. It seemed to
him that daylight would be cheerfuller for her. He had a thirst to behold
her standing bathed in daylight.

'Shall I open them?' he asked her.

'I would rather the lamp,' she said.

They sat silently until she drew her watch from her girdle. 'My train
starts at half-past six. It is a walk of thirty-five minutes to the
station. I did it last night in that time.'

'You walked here in the dark alone?'

'There was no fly to be had. The station-master sent one of his porters
with me. We had a talk on the road. I like those men.'

Dacier read the hour by the mantelpiece clock. 'If you must really go by
the early train, I will drive you.'

'No, I will walk; I prefer it.'

'I will order your breakfast at once.'

He turned on his heel. She stopped him. 'No, I have no taste for eating
or drinking.'

'Pray . . .' said he, in visible distress.

She shook her head. 'I could not. I have twenty minutes longer. I can
find my way to the station; it is almost a straight road out of the
park-gates.'

His heart swelled with anger at the household for they treatment she had
been subjected to, judging by her resolve not to break bread in the
house.

They resumed their silent sitting. The intervals for a word to pass
between them were long, and the ticking of the time-piece fronting the
death-bed ruled the chamber, scarcely varied.

The lamp was raised for the final look, the leave-taking.

Dacier buried his face, thinking many things--the common multitude in
insurrection.

'A servant should be told to come now,' she said. 'I have only to put on
my bonnet and I am ready.'

'You will take no . . . ?'

'Nothing.'

'It is not too late for a carriage to be ordered.'

'No--the walk!'

They separated.

He roused the two women in the dressing-room, asleep with heads against
the wall. Thence he sped to his own room for hat and overcoat, and a
sprinkle of cold water. Descending the stairs, he beheld his companion
issuing from the chamber of death. Her lips were shut, her eyelids
nervously tremulous.

They were soon in the warm sweet open air, and they walked without an
interchange of a syllable through the park into the white hawthorn lane,
glad to breathe. Her nostrils took long draughts of air, but of the
change of, scene she appeared scarcely sensible.

At the park-gates, she said: 'There is no necessity four your coming.'

His answer was: 'I think of myself. I gain something every step I walk
with you.'

'To-day is Thursday,' said she. 'The funeral is . . . ?'

'Monday has been fixed. According to his directions, he will lie in the
churchyard of his village--not in the family vault.'

'I know,' she said hastily. 'They are privileged who follow him and see
the coffin lowered. He spoke of this quiet little resting-place.'

'Yes, it's a good end. I do not wonder at his wish for the honour you
have done him. I could wish it too. But more living than dead--that is a
natural wish.'

'It is not to be called an honour.'

'I should feel it so-an honour to me.'

'It is a friend's duty. The word is too harsh; it was his friend's
desire. He did not ask it so much as he sanctioned it. For to him what
has my sitting beside him been!'

'He had the prospective happiness.'

'He knew well that my soul would be with him--as it was last night. But
he knew it would be my poor human happiness to see him with my eyes,
touch him with my hand, before he passed from our sight.'

Dacier exclaimed: 'How you can love!'

'Is the village church to be seen?' she asked.

'To the right of those elms; that is the spire. The black spot below is a
yew. You love with the whole heart when you love.'

'I love my friends,' she replied.

'You tempt me to envy those who are numbered among them.'

'They are not many.'

'They should be grateful!'

'You have some acquaintance with them all.'

'And an enemy? Had you ever one? Do you know of one?'

'Direct and personal designedly? I think not. We give that title to those
who are disinclined to us and add a dash of darker colour to our errors.
Foxes have enemies in the dogs; heroines of melodramas have their
persecuting villains. I suppose that conditions of life exist where one
meets the original complexities. The bad are in every rank. The
inveterately malignant I have not found. Circumstances may combine to
make a whisper as deadly as a blow, though not of such evil design.
Perhaps if we lived at a Court of a magnificent despot we should learn
that we are less highly civilized than we imagine ourselves; but that is
a fire to the passions, and the extreme is not the perfect test. Our
civilization counts positive gains--unless you take the melodrama for the
truer picture of us. It is always the most popular with the English.--And
look, what a month June is! Yesterday morning I was with Lady Dunstane on
her heights, and I feel double the age. He was fond of this wild country.
We think it a desert, a blank, whither he has gone, because we will
strain to see in the utter dark, and nothing can come of that but the
bursting of the eyeballs.'

Dacier assented: 'There's no use in peering beyond the limits.'

'No,' said she; 'the effect is like the explaining of things to a dull
head--the finishing stroke to the understanding! Better continue to
brood. We get to some unravelment if we are left to our own efforts. I
quarrel with no priest of any denomination. That they should quarrel
among themselves is comprehensible in their wisdom, for each has the
specific. But they show us their way of solving the great problem, and we
ought to thank them, though one or the other abominate us. You are
advised to talk with Lady Dunstane on these themes.

She is perpetually in the antechamber of death, and her soul is
perennially sunshine.--See the pretty cottage under the laburnum curls!
Who lives there?'

'His gamekeeper, Simon Rofe.'

'And what a playground for the children, that bit of common by their
garden-palings! and the pond, and the blue hills over the furzes. I hope
those people will not be turned out.'

Dacier could not tell. He promised to do his best for them.

'But,' said she, 'you are the lord here now.'

'Not likely to be the tenant. Incomes are wanted to support even small
estates.'

'The reason is good for courting the income.'

He disliked the remark; and when she said presently:

'Those windmills make the landscape homely,' he rejoined: 'They remind
one of our wheeling London gamins round the cab from the station.'

'They remind you,' said she, and smiled at the chance discordant trick he
had, remembering occasions when it had crossed her.

'This is homelier than Rovio,' she said; 'quite as nice in its way.'

'You do not gather flowers here.'

'Because my friend has these at her feet.'

'May one petition without a rival, then, for a souvenir?'

'Certainly, if you care to have a common buttercup.'

They reached the station, five minutes in advance of the train. His
coming manoeuvre was early detected, and she drew from her pocket the
little book he had seen lying unopened on the table, and said: 'I shall
have two good hours for reading.'

'You will not object? . . . I must accompany you to town. Permit it, I
beg. You shall not be worried to talk.'

'No; I came alone and return alone.'

'Fasting and unprotected! Are you determined to take away the worst
impression of us? Do not refuse me this favour.'

'As to fasting, I could not eat: and unprotected no woman is in England,
if she is a third-class traveller. That is my experience of the class;
and I shall return among my natural protectors--the most unselfishly
chivalrous to women in the whole world.'

He had set his heart on going with her, and he attempted eloquence in
pleading, but that exposed him to her humour; he was tripped.

'It is not denied that you belong to the knightly class,' she said; 'and
it is not necessary that you should wear armour and plumes to proclaim
it; and your appearance would be ample protection from the drunken
sailors travelling, you say, on this line; and I may be deplorably
mistaken in imagining that I could tame them. But your knightliness is
due elsewhere; and I commit myself to the fortune of war. It is a battle
for women everywhere; under the most favourable conditions among my dear
common English. I have not my maid with me, or else I should not dare.'

She paid for a third-class ticket, amused by Dacier's look of entreaty
and trouble.

'Of course I obey,' he murmured.

'I have the habit of exacting it in matters concerning my independence,'
she said; and it arrested some rumbling notions in his head as to a piece
of audacity on the starting of the train. They walked up and down the
platform till the bell rang and the train came rounding beneath an arch.

'Oh, by the way, may I ask?'--he said: 'was it your article in
Whitmonby's journal on a speech of mine last week?'

'The guilty writer is confessed.'

'Let me thank you.'

'Don't. But try to believe it written on public grounds--if the task is
not too great.'

'I may call?'

'You will be welcome.'

'To tell you of the funeral--the last of him.'

'Do not fail to come.'

She could have laughed to see him jumping on the steps of the third-class
carriages one after another to choose her company for her. In those
pre-democratic blissful days before the miry Deluge, the opinion of the
requirements of poor English travellers entertained by the Seigneur
Directors of the class above them, was that they differed from cattle in
stipulating for seats. With the exception of that provision to suit their
weakness, the accommodation extended to them resembled pens, and the
seats were emphatically seats of penitence, intended to grind the sitter
for his mean pittance payment and absence of aspiration to a higher
state. Hard angular wood, a low roof, a shabby square of window aloof,
demanding of him to quit the seat he insisted on having, if he would
indulge in views of the passing scenery,--such was the furniture of dens
where a refinement of castigation was practised on villain poverty by
denying leathers to the windows, or else buttons to the leathers, so that
the windows had either to be up or down, but refused to shelter and
freshen simultaneously.

Dacier selected a compartment occupied by two old women, a mother and
babe and little maid, and a labouring man. There he installed her, with
an eager look that she would not notice.

'You will want the window down,' he said.

She applied to her fellow-travellers for the permission; and struggling
to get the window down, he was irritated to animadvert on 'these
carriages' of the benevolent railway Company.

'Do not forget that the wealthy are well treated, or you may be unjust,'
said she, to pacify him.

His mouth sharpened its line while he tried arts and energies on the
refractory window. She told him to leave it. 'You can't breathe this
atmosphere!' he cried, and called to a porter, who did the work,
remarking that it was rather stiff.

The door was banged and fastened. Dacier had to hang on the step to see
her in the farewell. From the platform he saw the top of her bonnet; and
why she should have been guilty of this freak of riding in an unwholesome
carriage, tasked his power of guessing. He was too English even to have
taken the explanation, for he detested the distinguishing of the races in
his country, and could not therefore have comprehended her peculiar
tenacity of the sense of injury as long as enthusiasm did not arise to
obliterate it. He required a course of lessons in Irish.

Sauntering down the lane, he called at Simon Rofe's cottage, and spoke
very kindly to the gamekeeper's wife. That might please Diana. It was all
he could do at present.




CHAPTER XXI

'THE YOUNG MINISTER OF STATE'

Descriptions in the newspapers of the rural funeral of Lord Dannisburgh
had the effect of rousing flights of tattlers with a twittering of the
disused name of Warwick; our social Gods renewed their combat, and the
verdict of the jury was again overhauled, to be attacked and maintained,
the carpers replying to the champions that they held to their view of it:
as heads of bull-dogs are expected to do when they have got a grip of
one. It is a point of muscular honour with them never to relax their
hold. They will tell you why:--they formed that opinion from the first.
And but for the swearing of a particular witness, upon whom the plaintiff
had been taught to rely, the verdict would have been different--to prove
their soundness of judgement. They could speak from private positive
information of certain damnatory circumstances, derived from authentic
sources. Visits of a gentleman to the house of a married lady in the
absence of the husband? Oh!--The British Lucretia was very properly not
legally at home to the masculine world of that day. She plied her distaff
in pure seclusion, meditating on her absent lord; or else a fair
proportion of the masculine world, which had not yet, has not yet,
'doubled Cape Turk,' approved her condemnation to the sack.

There was talk in the feminine world, at Lady Wathin's assemblies. The
elevation of her husband had extended and deepened her influence on the
levels where it reigned before, but without, strange as we may think it
now, assisting to her own elevation, much aspired for, to the smooth and
lively upper pavement of Society, above its tumbled strata. She was near
that distinguished surface, not on it. Her circle was practically the
same as it was previous to the coveted nominal rank enabling her to
trample on those beneath it. And women like that Mrs. Warwick, a woman of
no birth, no money, not even honest character, enjoyed the entry
undisputed, circulated among the highest:--because people took her rattle
for wit!--and because also our nobility, Lady Wathin feared, had no due
regard for morality. Our aristocracy, brilliant and ancient though it
was, merited rebuke. She grew severe upon aristocratic scandals, whereof
were plenty among the frolicsome host just overhead, as vexatious as the
drawing-room party to the lodger in the floor below, who has not received
an invitation to partake of the festivities and is required to digest the
noise. But if ambition is oversensitive, moral indignation is ever
consolatory, for it plants us on the Judgement Seat. There indeed we may,
sitting with the very Highest, forget our personal disappointments in
dispensing reprobation for misconduct, however eminent the offenders.

She was Lady Wathin, and once on an afternoon's call to see poor Lady
Dunstane at her town-house, she had been introduced to Lady Pennon, a
patroness of Mrs. Warwick, and had met a snub--an icy check-bow of the
aristocratic head from the top of the spinal column, and not a word, not
a look; the half-turn of a head devoid of mouth and eyes! She practised
that forbidding checkbow herself to perfection, so the endurance of it
was horrible. A noli me tangere, her husband termed it, in his ridiculous
equanimity; and he might term it what he pleased--it was insulting. The
solace she had was in hearing that hideous Radical Revolutionary
things were openly spoken at Mrs. Warwick's evenings with her
friends:--impudently named 'the elect of London.' Pleasing to reflect
upon Mrs. Warwick as undermining her supporters, to bring them some day
down with a crash! Her 'elect of London' were a queer gathering, by
report of them! And Mr. Whitmonby too, no doubt a celebrity, was the
right-hand man at these dinner-parties of Mrs. Warwick. Where will not
men go to be flattered by a pretty woman! He had declined repeated,
successive invitations to Lady Wathin's table. But there of course he
would not have had 'the freedom': that is, she rejoiced in thinking
defensively and offensively, a moral wall enclosed her topics. The Hon.
Percy Dacier had been brought to her Thursday afternoon by. Mr. Quintin
Manx, and he had one day dined with her; and he knew Mrs. Warwick--a
little, he said. The opportunity was not lost to convey to him, entirely
in the interest of sweet Constance Asper, that the moral world
entertained a settled view of the very clever woman Mrs. Warwick
certainly was. He had asked Diana, on their morning walk to the station,
whether she had an enemy: so prone are men, educated by the Drama and
Fiction in the belief that the garden of civilized life must be at the
mercy of the old wild devourers, to fancy 'villain whispers' an
indication of direct animosity. Lady Wathin had no sentiment of the kind.

But she had become acquainted with the other side of the famous
Dannisburgh case--the unfortunate plaintiff; and compassion as well as
morality moved her to put on a speaking air when Mr. Warwick's name was
mentioned. She pictured him to the ladies of her circle as 'one of our
true gentlemen in his deportment and his feelings.' He was, she would
venture to say, her ideal of an English gentleman. 'But now,' she added
commiseratingly, 'ruined; ruined in his health and in his prospects.' A
lady inquired if it was the verdict that had thus affected him. Lady
Wathin's answer was reported over moral, or substratum, London: 'He is
the victim of a fatal passion for his wife; and would take her back
to-morrow were she to solicit his forgiveness.' Morality had something to
say against this active marital charity, attributable, it was to be
feared, to weakness of character on the part of the husband. Still Mrs.
Warwick undoubtedly was one of those women (of Satanic construction) who
have the art of enslaving the men unhappy enough to cross their path. The
nature of the art was hinted, with the delicacy of dainty feet which have
to tread in mire to get to safety. Men, alas! are snared in this way.
Instances too numerous for the good repute of the swinish sex, were
cited, and the question of how Morality was defensible from their
grossness passed without a tactical reply. There is no defence: Those
women come like the Cholera Morbus--and owing to similar causes. They
will prevail until the ideas of men regarding women are purified.
Nevertheless the husband who could forgive, even propose to forgive, was
deemed by consent generous, however weak. Though she might not have been
wholly guilty, she had bitterly offended. And he despatched an emissary
to her?--The theme, one may, in their language, 'fear,' was relished as a
sugared acid. It was renewed in the late Autumn of the year, when ANTONIA
published her new book, entitled THE YOUNG MINISTER of STATE. The
signature of the authoress was now known; and from this resurgence of her
name in public, suddenly a radiation of tongues from the circle of Lady
Wathin declared that the repentant Mrs. Warwick had gone back to her
husband's bosom and forgiveness! The rumour spread in spite of sturdy
denials at odd corners, counting the red-hot proposal of Mr. Sullivan
Smith to eat his head and boots for breakfast if it was proved correct.
It filled a yawn of the Clubs for the afternoon. Soon this wanton rumour
was met and stifled by another of more morbific density, heavily charged
as that which led the sad Eliza to her pyre.

ANTONIA's hero was easily identified. THE YOUNG MINISTER of STATE could
be he only who was now at all her parties, always meeting her; had been
spied walking with her daily in the park near her house, on his march
down to Westminster during the session; and who positively went to
concerts and sat under fiddlers to be near her. It accounted moreover for
his treatment of Constance Asper. What effrontery of the authoress, to
placard herself with him in a book! The likeness of the hero to Percy
Dacier once established became striking to glaringness--a proof of her
ability, and more of her audacity; still more of her intention to flatter
him up to his perdition. By the things written of him, one would imagine
the conversations going on behind the scenes. She had the wiles of a
Cleopatra, not without some of the Nilene's experiences. A youthful
Antony Dacier would be little likely to escape her toils. And so
promising a young man! The sigh, the tear for weeping over his
destruction, almost fell, such vivid realizing of the prophesy appeared
in its pathetic pronouncement.

This low rumour, or malaria, began blowing in the winter, and did not
travel fast; for strangely, there was hardly a breath of it in the
atmosphere of Dacier, none in Diana's. It rose from groups not so rapidly
and largely mixing, and less quick to kindle; whose crazy sincereness
battened on the smallest morsel of fact and collected the fictitious by
slow absorption. But as guardians of morality, often doing good duty in
their office, they are persistent. When Parliament assembled, Mr. Quintin
Manx, a punctual member of the House, if nothing else, arrived in town.
He was invited to dine with Lady Wathin. After dinner she spoke to him of
the absent Constance, and heard of her being well, and expressed a great
rejoicing at that. Whereupon the burly old shipowner frowned and puffed.
Constance, he said, had plunged into these new spangle, candle and high
singing services; was all for symbols, harps, effigies, what not. Lady
Wathin's countenance froze in hearing of it. She led Mr. Quintin to a
wall-sofa, and said: 'Surely the dear child must have had a
disappointment, for her to have taken to those foolish displays of
religion! It is generally a sign.'

'Well, ma'am-my lady--I let girls go their ways in such things. I don't
interfere. But it's that fellow, or nobody, with her. She has fixed her
girl's mind on him, and if she can't columbine as a bride, she will as a
nun. Young people must be at some harlequinade.'

'But it is very shocking. And he?'

'He plays last and loose, warm and cold. I'm ready to settle twenty times
a nobleman's dowry on my niece and she's a fine girl, a handsome girl,
educated up to the brim, fit to queen it in any drawing-room. He holds
her by some arts that don't hold him, it seems. He's all for politics.'

'Constance can scarcely be his dupe so far, I should think.'

'How do you mean?'

'Everything points to one secret of his conduct.'

'A woman?'

Lady Wathin's head shook for her sex's pained affirmative.

Mr. Quintin in the same fashion signified the downright negative. 'The
fellow's as cold as a fish.'

'Flattery will do anything. There is, I fear, one.'

'Widow? wife? maid?'

'Married, I regret to say.'

'Well, if he'd get over with it,' said Quintin, in whose notions the
seductiveness of a married woman could be only temporary, for all the
reasons pertaining to her state. At the same time his view of Percy
Dacier was changed in thinking it possible that a woman could divert him
from his political and social interests. He looked incredulous.

'You have heard of a Mrs. Warwick?' said Lady Wathin.

'Warwick! I have. I've never seen her. At my broker's in the City
yesterday I saw the name on a Memorandum of purchase of Shares in a
concern promising ten per cent., and not likely to carry the per annum
into the plural. He told me she was a grand kind of woman, past
advising.'

'For what amount'

'Some thousands, I think it was.'

'She has no money': Lady Wathin corrected her emphasis: 'or ought to have
none.'

'She can't have got it from him.'

'Did you notice her Christian name?'

'I don't recollect it, if I did. I thought the woman a donkey.'

'Would you consider me a busybody were I to try to mitigate this woman's
evil influence? I love dear Constance, and should be happy to serve her.'

'I want my girl married,' said old Quintin. 'He's one of my Parliamentary
chiefs, with first-rate prospects; good family, good sober fellow--at
least I thought so; by nature, I mean; barring your incantations. He
suits me, she liking him.'

'She admires him, I am sure.'

'She's dead on end for the fellow!'

Lady Wathin felt herself empowered by Quintin Manx to undertake the
release of sweet Constance Asper's knight from the toils of his
enchantress. For this purpose she had first an interview with Mr.
Warwick, and next she hurried to Lady Dunstane at Copsley. There, after
jumbling Mr. Warwick's connubial dispositions and Mrs. Warwick's last
book, and Mr. Percy Dacier's engagement to the great heiress in a gossipy
hotch-potch, she contrived to gather a few items of fact, as that THE
YOUNG MINISTER was probably modelled upon Mr. Percy Dacier. Lady Dunstane
made no concealment of it as soon as she grew sensible of the angling.
But she refused her help to any reconciliation between Mr. and Mrs.
Warwick. She declined to listen to Lady Wathin's entreaties. She declined
to give her reasons.--These bookworm women, whose pride it is to fancy
that they can think for themselves, have a great deal of the heathen in
them, as morality discovers when it wears the enlistment ribands and
applies yo them to win recruits for a service under the direct blessing
of Providence.

Lady Wathin left some darts behind her, in the form of moral
exclamations; and really intended morally. For though she did not like
Mrs. Warwick, she had no wish to wound, other than by stopping her
further studies of the Young Minister, and conducting him to the young
lady loving him, besides restoring a bereft husband to his own. How sadly
pale and worn poor Mr. Warwick appeared? The portrayal of his withered
visage to Lady Dunstane had quite failed to gain a show of sympathy. And
so it is ever with your book-worm women pretending to be philosophical!
You sound them vainly for a manifestation of the commonest human
sensibilities, They turn over the leaves of a Latin book on their laps
while you are supplicating them to assist in a work of charity!

Lady Wathin's interjectory notes haunted Emma's ear. Yet she had seen
nothing in Tony to let her suppose that there was trouble of her heart
below the surface; and her Tony when she came to Copsley shone in the
mood of the day of Lord Dannisburgh's drive down from London with her.
She was running on a fresh work; talked of composition as a trifle.

'I suppose the YOUNG MINISTER is Mr. Percy Dacier?' said Emma.

'Between ourselves he is,' Diana replied, smiling at a secret guessed.
'You know my model and can judge of the likeness.'

'You write admiringly of him, Tony.'

'And I do admire him. So would you, Emmy, if you knew him as well as I do
now. He pairs with Mr. Redworth; he also is the friend of women. But he
lifts us to rather a higher level of intellectual friendship. When the
ice has melted--and it is thick at first--he pours forth all his ideas
without reserve; and they are deep and noble. Ever since Lord
Dannisburgh's death and our sitting together, we have been warm
friends--intimate, I would say, if it could be said of one so
self-contained. In that respect, no young man was ever comparable with
him. And I am encouraged to flatter myself that he unbends to me more
than to others.'

'He is engaged, or partly, I hear; why does he not marry?'

'I wish he would!' Diana said, with a most brilliant candour of aspect.

Emma read in it, that it would complete her happiness, possibly by
fortifying her sense of security; and that seemed right. Her own
meditations, illumined by the beautiful face in her presence, referred to
the security of Mr. Dacier.

'So, then, life is going smoothly,' said Emma.

'Yes, at a good pace and smoothly: not a torrent--Thames-like, "without
o'erflowing full." It is not Lugano and the Salvatore. Perhaps it is
better: as action is better than musing.'

'No troubles whatever?'

'None. Well, except an "adorer" at times. I have to take him as my
portion. An impassioned Caledonian has a little bothered me. I met him at
Lady Pennon's, and have been meeting him, as soon as I put foot out of my
house, ever since. If I could impress and impound him to marry Mary
Paynham, I should be glad. By the way, I have consented to let her try at
a portrait of me. No, I have no troubles. I have friends, the choicest of
the nation; I have health, a field for labour, fairish success with it; a
mind alive, such as it is. I feel like that midsummer morning of our last
drive out together, the sun high, clearish, clouded enough to be cool.
And still I envy Emmy on her sofa, mastering Latin, biting at Greek. What
a wise recommendation that was of Mr. Redworth's! He works well in the
House. He spoke excellently the other night.'

'He runs over to Ireland this Easter.'

'He sees for himself, and speaks with authority. He sees and feels.
Englishmen mean well, but they require an extremity of misery to waken
their feelings.'

'It is coming, he says; and absit omen!'

'Mr. Dacier says he is the one Englishman who may always be sure of an
Irish hearing; and he does not cajole them, you know. But the English
defect is really not want of feeling so much as want of foresight. They
will not look ahead. A famine ceasing, a rebellion crushed, they jog on
as before, with their Dobbin trot and blinker confidence in "Saxon
energy." They should study the Irish: I think it was Mr. Redworth who
compared the governing of the Irish to the management of a horse: the
rider should not grow restive when the steed begins to kick: calmer;
firm, calm, persuasive.'

'Does Mr. Dacier agree?'

'Not always. He has the inveterate national belief that Celtic blood is
childish, and the consequently illogical disregard of its hold of
impressions. The Irish--for I have them in my heart, though I have not
been among them for long at a time--must love you to serve you, and will
hate you if you have done them injury and they have not wiped it
out--they with a treble revenge, or you with cordial benefits. I have
told him so again and again: ventured to suggest measures.'

'He listens to you, Tony?'

'He says I have brains. It ends in a compliment.'

'You have inspired Mr. Redworth.'

'If I have, I have lived for some good.'

Altogether her Tony's conversation proved to Emma that her perusal of the
model of THE YOUNG MINISTER OF STATE was an artist's, free, open, and not
discoloured by the personal tincture. Her heart plainly was free and
undisturbed. She had the same girl's love of her walks where wildflowers
grew; if possible, a keener pleasure. She hummed of her happiness in
being at Copsley, singing her Planxty Kelly and The Puritani by turns.
She stood on land: she was not on the seas. Emma thought so with good
reason.

She stood on land, it was true, but she stood on a cliff of the land, the
seas below and about her; and she was enabled to hoodwink her friend
because the assured sensation of her firm footing deceived her own soul,
even while it took short flights to the troubled waters. Of her firm
footing she was exultingly proud. She stood high, close to danger,
without giddiness. If at intervals her soul flew out like lightning from
the rift (a mere shot of involuntary fancy, it seemed to her), the
suspicion of instability made her draw on her treasury of impressions of
the mornings at Lugano--her loftiest, purest, dearest; and these
reinforced her. She did not ask herself why she should have to seek them
for aid. In other respects her mind was alert and held no sly covers, as
the fiction of a perfect ignorant innocence combined with common
intelligence would have us to suppose that the minds of women can do. She
was honest as long as she was not directly questioned, pierced to the
innermost and sanctum of the bosom. She could honestly summon bright
light to her eyes in wishing the man were married. She did not ask
herself why she called it up. The remorseless progressive interrogations
of a Jesuit Father in pursuit of the bosom's verity might have transfixed
it and shown her to herself even then a tossing vessel as to the spirit,
far away from that firm land she trod so bravely.

Descending from the woody heights upon London, Diana would have said that
her only anxiety concerned young Mr. Arthur Rhodes, whose position she
considered precarious, and who had recently taken a drubbing for
venturing to show a peep of his head, like an early crocus, in the
literary market. Her ANTONIA'S last book had been reviewed obediently to
smart taps from the then commanding baton of Mr. Tonans, and Mr.
Whitmonby's choice picking of specimens down three columns of his paper.
A Literary Review (Charles Rainer's property) had suggested that perhaps
'the talented authoress might be writing too rapidly'; and another,
actuated by the public taste of the period for our 'vigorous homely
Saxon' in one and two syllable words, had complained of a 'tendency to
polysyllabic phraseology.' The remainder, a full majority, had sounded
eulogy with all their band-instruments, drum, trumpet, fife, trombone.
Her foregoing work had raised her to Fame, which is the Court of a Queen
when the lady has beauty and social influence, and critics are her
dedicated courtiers, gaping for the royal mouth to be opened, and
reserving the kicks of their independent manhood for infamous outsiders,
whom they hoist in the style and particular service of pitchforks. They
had fallen upon a little volume of verse, 'like a body of barn-door hens
on a stranger chick,' Diana complained; and she chid herself angrily for
letting it escape her forethought to propitiate them on the author's
behalf. Young Rhodes was left with scarce a feather; and what remained to
him appeared a preposterous ornament for the decoration of a shivering
and welted poet. He laughed, or tried the mouth of laughter. ANTONIA's
literary conscience was vexed at the different treatment she had met and
so imperatively needed that the reverse of it would have threatened the
smooth sailing of her costly household. A merry-go-round of creditors
required a corresponding whirligig of receipts.

She felt mercenary, debased by comparison with the well-scourged
verse-mason, Orpheus of the untenanted city, who had done his publishing
ingenuously for glory: a good instance of the comic-pathetic. She wrote
to Emma, begging her to take him in at Copsley for a few days: 'I told
you I had no troubles. I am really troubled about this poor boy. He has
very little money and has embarked on literature. I cannot induce any of
my friends to lend him a hand. Mr. Redworth gruffly insists on his going
back to his law-clerk's office and stool, and Mr. Dacier says that no
place is vacant. The reality of Lord Dannisburgh's death is brought
before me by my helplessness. He would have made him an assistant private
Secretary, pending a Government appointment, rather than let me plead in
vain.'

Mr. Rhodes with his travelling bag was packed off to Copsley, to enjoy a
change of scene after his run of the gauntlet. He was very heartily
welcomed by Lady Dunstane, both for her Tony's sake and his own modest
worship of that luminary, which could permit of being transparent; but
chiefly she welcomed him as the living proof of Tony's disengagement from
anxiety, since he was her one spot of trouble, and could easily be
comforted by reading with her, and wandering through the Spring woods
along the heights. He had a happy time, midway in air between his
accomplished hostess and his protecting Goddess. His bruises were soon
healed. Each day was radiant to him, whether it rained or shone; and by
his looks and what he said of himself Lady Dunstane understood that he
was in the highest temper of the human creature tuned to thrilling accord
with nature. It was her generous Tony's work. She blessed it, and liked
the youth the better.

During the stay of Mr. Arthur Rhodes at Copsley, Sir Lukin came on a
visit to his wife. He mentioned reports in the scandal-papers: one, that
Mr. P. D. would shortly lead to the altar the lovely heiress Miss A.,
Percy Dacier and Constance Asper:--another, that a reconciliation was to
be expected between the beautiful authoress Mrs. W. and her husband.
'Perhaps it's the best thing she can do,' Sir Lukin added.

Lady Dunstane pronounced a woman's unforgiving: 'Never.' The revolt of
her own sensations assured her of Tony's unconquerable repugnance. In
conversation subsequently with Arthur Rhodes, she heard that he knew the
son of Mr. Warwick's attorney, a Mr. Fern; and he had gathered from him
some information of Mr. Warwick's condition of health. It had been
alarming; young Fern said it was confirmed heart-disease. His father
frequently saw Mr. Warwick, and said he was fretting himself to death.

It seemed just a possibility that Tony's natural compassionateness had
wrought on her to immolate herself and nurse to his end the man who had
wrecked her life. Lady Dunstane waited for the news. At last she wrote,
touching the report incidentally. There was no reply. The silence ensuing
after such a question responded forcibly.




CHAPTER XXII

BETWEEN DIANA AND DACIER: THE WIND EAST OVER BLEAK LAND

On the third day of the Easter recess Percy Dacier landed from the Havre
steamer at Caen and drove straightway for the sandy coast, past fields of
colza to brine-blown meadows of coarse grass, and then to the low dunes
and long stretching sands of the ebb in semicircle: a desolate place at
that season; with a dwarf fishing-village by the shore; an East wind
driving landward in streamers every object that had a scrap to fly. He
made head to the inn, where the first person he encountered in the
passage was Diana's maid Danvers, who relaxed from the dramatic
exaggeration of her surprise at the sight of a real English gentleman in
these woebegone regions, to inform him that her mistress might be found
walking somewhere along the sea-shore, and had her dog to protect her.
They were to stay here a whole week, Danvers added, for a conveyance of
her private sentiments. Second thoughts however whispered to her
shrewdness that his arrival could only be by appointment. She had been
anticipating something of the sort for some time.

Dacier butted against the stringing wind, that kept him at a rocking
incline to his left for a mile. He then discerned in what had seemed a
dredger's dot on the sands, a lady's figure, unmistakably she, without
the corroborating testimony of Leander paw-deep in the low-tide water.
She was out at a distance on the ebb-sands, hurtled, gyred, beaten to all
shapes, in rolls, twists, volumes, like a blown banner-flag, by the
pressing wind. A kerchief tied her bonnet under her chin. Bonnet and
breast-ribands rattled rapidly as drummer-sticks. She stood near the
little running ripple of the flat sea-water, as it hurried from a long
streaked back to a tiny imitation of spray. When she turned to the shore
she saw him advancing, but did not recognize; when they met she merely
looked with wide parted lips. This was no appointment.

'I had to see you,' Dacier said.

She coloured to a deeper red than the rose-conjuring wind had whipped in
her cheeks. Her quick intuition of the reason of his coming barred a
mental evasion, and she had no thought of asking either him or herself
what special urgency had brought him.

'I have been here four days.'

'Lady Esquart spoke of the place.'

'Lady Esquart should not have betrayed me.'

'She did it inadvertently, without an idea of my profiting by it.'

Diana indicated the scene in a glance. 'Dreary country, do you think?'

'Anywhere!'--said he.

They walked up the sand-heap. The roaring Easter with its shrieks and
whistles at her ribands was not favourable to speech. His 'Anywhere!' had
a penetrating significance, the fuller for the break that left it vague.

Speech between them was commanded; he could not be suffered to remain.
She descended upon a sheltered pathway running along a ditch, the border
of pastures where cattle cropped, raised heads, and resumed their one
comforting occupation.

Diana gazed on them, smarting from the buffets of the wind she had met.

'No play of their tails to-day'; she said, as she slackened her steps.
'You left Lady Esquart well?'

'Lady Esquart . . . I think was well. I had to see you. I thought you
would be with her in Berkshire. She told me of a little sea-side place
close to Caen.'

'You had to see me?'

'I miss you now if it's a day!'

'I heard a story in London . . .'

'In London there are many stories. I heard one. Is there a foundation for
it?'

'No.'

He breathed relieved. 'I wanted to see you once before . . . if it was
true. It would have made a change in my life-a gap.'

'You do me the honour to like my Sunday evenings?'

'Beyond everything London can offer.'

'A letter would have reached me.'

'I should have had to wait for the answer. There is no truth in it?'

Her choice was to treat the direct assailant frankly or imperil her
defence by the ordinary feminine evolutions, which might be taken for
inviting: poor pranks always.

'There have been overtures,' she said.

'Forgive me; I have scarcely the right to ask . . . speak of it!'

'My friends may use their right to take an interest in my fortunes.'

'I thought I might, on my way to Paris, turn aside . . . coming by this
route.'

'If you determined not to lose much of your time.'

The coolness of her fencing disconcerted a gentleman conscious of his
madness. She took instant advantage of any circuitous move; she gave him
no practicable point. He was little skilled in the arts of attack, and
felt that she checked his impetuousness; respected her for it, chafed at
it, writhed with the fervours precipitating him here, and relapsed on his
pleasure in seeing her face, hearing her voice.

'Your happiness, I hope, is the chief thought in such a case,' he said.

'I am sure you would consider it.'

'I can't quite forget my own.'

'You compliment an ambitious hostess.'

Dacier glanced across the pastures, 'What was it that tempted you to this
place?'

'A poet would say it looks like a figure in the shroud. It has no
features; it has a sort of grandeur belonging to death. I heard of it as
the place where I might be certain of not meeting an acquaintance.'

'And I am the intruder.'

'An hour or two will not give you that title.'

'Am I to count the minutes by my watch?'

'By the sun. We will supply you an omelette and piquette, and send you
back sobered and friarly--to Caen for Paris at sunset.'

'Let the fare be Spartan. I could take my black broth with philosophy
every day of the year under your auspices. What I should miss . . .'

'You bring no news of the world or the House?'

'None. You know as much as I know. The Irish agitation is chronic. The
Corn-law threatens to be the same.'

'And your Chief--in personal colloquy?'

'He keeps a calm front. I may tell you: there is nothing I would not
confide to you: he has let fall some dubious words in private. I don't
know what to think of them.'

'But if he should waver?'

'It's not wavering. It's the openness of his mind.'

'Ah! the mind. We imagine it free. The House and the country are the
sentient frame governing the mind of the politician more than his ideas.
He cannot think independently of them:--nor I of my natural anatomy. You
will test the truth of that after your omelette and piquette, and marvel
at the quitting of your line of route for Paris. As soon as the mind
attempts to think independently, it is like a kite with the cord cut, and
performs a series of darts and frisks, that have the look of wildest
liberty till you see it fall flat to earth. The openness of his mind is
most honourable to him.'

'Ominous for his party.'

'Likely to be good for his country.'

'That is the question.'

'Prepare to encounter it. In politics I am with the active minority on
behalf of the inert but suffering majority. That is my rule. It leads,
unless you have a despotism, to the conquering side. It is always the
noblest. I won't say, listen to me; only do believe my words have some
weight. This is a question of bread.'

'It involves many other questions.'

'And how clearly those leaders put their case! They are admirable
debaters. If I were asked to write against them, I should have but to
quote them to confound my argument. I tried it once, and wasted a couple
of my precious hours.'

'They are cogent debaters,' Dacier assented. 'They make me wince now and
then, without convincing me: I own it to you. The confession is not
agreeable, though it's a small matter.'

'One's pride may feel a touch with the foils as keenly as the point of a
rapier,' said Diana.

The remark drew a sharp look of pleasure from him.

'Does the Princess Egeria propose to dismiss the individual she inspires,
when he is growing most sensible of her wisdom?'

'A young Minister of State should be gleaning at large when holiday is
granted him.'

Dacier coloured. 'May I presume on what is currently reported?'

'Parts, parts; a bit here, a bit there,' she rejoined. 'Authors find
their models where they can, and generally hit on the nearest.'

'Happy the nearest!'

'If you run to interjections I shall cite you a sentence, from your
latest speech in the House.'

He asked for it, and to school him she consented to flatter with her
recollection of his commonest words:

'"Dealing with subjects of this nature emotionally does, not advance us a
calculable inch."'

'I must have said that in relation to hard matter of business.'

'It applies. There is my hostelry, and the spectral form of Danvers,
utterly depaysee. Have you spoken to the poor soul? I can never discover
the links of her attachment to my service.'

'She knows a good mistress.--I have but a few minutes, if you are
relentless. May I . . ., shall I ever be privileged to speak your
Christian name?'

'My Christian name! It is Pagan. In one sphere I am Hecate. Remember
that.'

'I am not among the people who so regard you.'

'The time may come.'

'Diana!'

'Constance!'

'I break no tie. I owe no allegiance whatever to the name.'

'Keep to the formal title with me. We are Mrs. Warwick and Mr. Dacier. I
think I am two years younger than you; socially therefore ten in
seniority; and I know how this flower of friendship is nourished and may
be withered. You see already what you have done? You have cast me on the
discretion of my maid. I suppose her trusty, but I am at her mercy, and a
breath from her to the people beholding me as Hecate queen of Witches!
. . . I have a sensation of the scirocco it would blow.'

'In that event, the least I can offer is my whole life.'

'We will not conjecture the event.'

'The best I could hope for!'

'I see I shall have to revise the next edition of THE YOUNG MINISTER, and
make an emotional curate of him. Observe Danvers. The woman is wretched;
and now she sees me coming she pretends to be using her wits in studying
the things about her, as I have directed. She is a riddle. I have the
idea that any morning she may explode; and yet I trust her and sleep
soundly. I must be free, though I vex the world's watchdogs.--So,
Danvers, you are noticing how thoroughly Frenchwomen do their work.'

Danvers replied with a slight mincing: 'They may, ma'am; but they chatter
chatter so.'

'The result proves that it is not a waste of energy. They manage their
fowls too.'

'They've no such thing as mutton, ma'am.'

Dacier patriotically laughed.

'She strikes the apology for wealthy and leisurely landlords,' Diana
said.

Danvers remarked that the poor fed meagrely in France. She was not
convinced of its being good for them by hearing that they could work on
it sixteen hours out of the four and twenty.

Mr. Percy Dacier's repast was furnished to him half an hour later. At
sunset Diana, taking Danvers beside her, walked with him to the line of
the country road bearing on Caen. The wind had sunk. A large brown disk
paused rayless on the western hills.

'A Dacier ought to feel at home in Normandy; and you may have sprung from
this neighbourhood,' said she, simply to chat. 'Here the land is poorish,
and a mile inland rich enough to bear repeated crops of colza, which
tries the soil, I hear. As for beauty, those blue hills you see, enfold
charming valleys. I meditate an expedition to Harcourt before I return.
An English professor of his native tongue at the Lycee at Caen told me on
my way here that for twenty shillings a week you may live in royal ease
round about Harcourt. So we have our bed and board in prospect if fortune
fails us, Danvers!

'I would rather die in England, ma'am,' was the maid's reply.

Dacier set foot on his carriage-step. He drew a long breath to say a
short farewell, and he and Diana parted.

They parted as the plainest of sincere good friends, each at heart
respecting the other for the repression of that which their hearts
craved; any word of which might have carried them headlong, bound
together on a Mazeppa-race, with scandal for the hounding wolves, and
social ruin for the rocks and torrents.

Dacier was the thankfuller, the most admiring of the two; at the same
time the least satisfied. He saw the abyss she had aided him in escaping;
and it was refreshful to look abroad after his desperate impulse.
Prominent as he stood before the world, he could not think without a
shudder of behaving like a young frenetic of the passion. Those whose aim
is at the leadership of the English people know, that however truly based
the charges of hypocrisy, soundness of moral fibre runs throughout the
country and is the national integrity, which may condone old sins for
present service; but will not have present sins to flout it. He was in
tune with the English character. The passion was in him nevertheless, and
the stronger for a slow growth that confirmed its union of the mind and
heart. Her counsel fortified him, her suggestions opened springs; her
phrases were golden-lettered in his memory; and more, she had worked an
extraordinary change in his views of life and aptitude for social
converse: he acknowledged it with genial candour. Through her he was
encouraged, led, excited to sparkle with the witty, feel new gifts, or a
greater breadth of nature; and thanking her, he became thirstily
susceptible to her dark beauty; he claimed to have found the key of her,
and he prized it. She was not passionless: the blood flowed warm. Proud,
chaste, she was nobly spirited; having an intellectual refuge from the
besiegings of the blood; a rockfortress. The 'wife no wife' appeared to
him, striking the higher elements of the man, the commonly masculine
also.--Would he espouse her, had he the chance?--to-morrow! this instant!
With her to back him, he would be doubled in manhood, doubled in brain
and heart-energy. To call her wife, spring from her and return, a man
might accept his fate to fight Trojan or Greek, sure of his mark on the
enemy.

But if, after all, this imputed Helen of a decayed Paris passed,
submissive to the legitimate solicitor, back to her husband?

The thought shot Dacier on his legs for a look at the blank behind him.
He vowed she had promised it should not be. Could it ever be, after the
ruin the meanly suspicious fellow had brought upon her?--Diana
voluntarily reunited to the treacherous cur?

He sat, resolving sombrely that if the debate arose he would try what
force he had to save her from such an ignominy, and dedicate his life to
her, let the world wag its tongue. So the knot would be cut.

Men unaccustomed to a knot in their system find the prospect of cutting
it an extreme relief, even when they know that the cut has an edge to
wound mortally as well as pacify. The wound was not heavy payment for the
rapture of having so incomparable a woman his own. He reflected
wonderingly on the husband, as he had previously done, and came again to
the conclusion that it was a poor creature, abjectly jealous of a wife,
he could neither master, nor equal, nor attract. And thinking of
jealousy, Dacier felt none; none of individuals, only of facts: her
marriage, her bondage. Her condemnation to perpetual widowhood angered
him, as at an unrighteous decree. The sharp sweet bloom of her beauty,
fresh in swarthiness, under the whipping Easter, cried out against that
loathed inhumanity. Or he made it cry.

Being a stranger to the jealousy of men, he took the soft assurance that
he was preferred above them all. Competitors were numerous: not any won
her eyes as he did. She revealed nothing of the same pleasures in the
shining of the others touched by her magical wand. Would she have
pardoned one of them the 'Diana!' bursting from his mouth?

She was not a woman for trifling, still less for secresy. He was as
little the kind of lover. Both would be ready to take up their burden, if
the burden was laid on them. Diana had thus far impressed him.

Meanwhile he faced the cathedral towers of the ancient Norman city,
standing up in the smoky hues of the West; and a sentence out of her book
seemed fitting to the scene and what he felt. He rolled it over
luxuriously as the next of delights to having her beside him.--She wrote
of; 'Thoughts that are bare dark outlines, coloured by some odd passion
of the soul, like towers of a distant city seen in the funeral waste of
day.'--His bluff English anti-poetic training would have caused him to
shrug at the stuff coming from another pen: he might condescendingly have
criticized it, with a sneer embalmed in humour. The words were hers; she
had written them; almost by a sort of anticipation, he imagined; for he
at once fell into the mood they suggested, and had a full crop of the
'bare dark outlines' of thoughts coloured by his particular form of
passion.

Diana had impressed him powerfully when she set him swallowing and
assimilating a sentence ethereally thin in substance of mere sentimental
significance, that he would antecedently have read aloud in a
drawing-room, picking up the book by hazard, as your modern specimen of
romantic vapouring. Mr. Dacier however was at the time in observation of
the towers of Caen, fresh from her presence, animated to some conception
of her spirit. He drove into the streets, desiring, half determining, to
risk a drive back on the morrow.

The cold light of the morrow combined with his fear of distressing her to
restrain him. Perhaps he thought it well not to risk his gains. He was a
northerner in blood. He may have thought it well not further to run the
personal risk immediately.




CHAPTER XXIII

RECORDS A VISIT TO DIANA FROM ONE OF THE WORLD'S GOOD WOMEN

Pure disengagement of contemplativeness had selected. Percy Dacier as the
model of her YOUNG MINISTER OF STATE, Diana supposed. Could she otherwise
have dared to sketch him? She certainly would not have done it now.

That was a reflection similar to what is entertained by one who has
dropped from a precipice to the midway ledge over the abyss, where
caution of the whole sensitive being is required for simple
self-preservation. How could she have been induced to study and portray
him! It seemed a form of dementia.

She thought this while imagining the world to be interrogating her. When
she interrogated herself, she flew to Lugano and her celestial Salvatore,
that she might be defended from a charge of the dreadful weakness of her
sex. Surely she there had proof of her capacity for pure disengagement.
Even in recollection the springs of spiritual happiness renewed the
bubbling crystal play. She believed that a divineness had wakened in her
there, to strengthen her to the end, ward her from any complicity in her
sex's culprit blushing.

Dacier's cry of her name was the cause, she chose to think, of the
excessive circumspection she must henceforth practise; precariously
footing, embracing hardest earth, the plainest rules, to get back to
safety. Not that she was personally endangered, or at least not
spiritually; she could always fly in soul to her heights. But she had now
to be on guard, constantly in the fencing attitude. And watchful of
herself as well. That was admitted with a ready frankness, to save it
from being a necessitated and painful confession: for the
voluntary-acquiescence, if it involved her in her sex, claimed an
individual exemption. 'Women are women, and I am a woman but I am I, and
unlike them: I see we are weak, and weakness tempts: in owning the
prudence of guarded steps, I am armed. It is by dissembling, feigning
immunity, that we are imperilled.' She would have phrased it so, with
some anger at her feminine nature as well as at the subjection forced on
her by circumstances.

Besides, her position and Percy Dacier's threw the fancied danger into
remoteness. The world was her stepmother, vigilant to become her judge;
and the world was his taskmaster, hopeful of him, yet able to strike him
down for an offence. She saw their situation as he did. The course of
folly must be bravely taken, if taken at all: Disguise degraded her to
the reptiles.

This was faced. Consequently there was no fear of it.

She had very easily proved that she had skill and self-possession to keep
him rational, and therefore they could continue to meet. A little
outburst of frenzy to a reputably handsome woman could be treated as the
froth of a passing wave. Men have the trick, infants their fevers.

Diana's days were spent in reasoning. Her nights were not so tuneable to
the superior mind. When asleep she was the sport of elves that danced her
into tangles too deliciously unravelled, and left new problems for the
wise-eyed and anxious morning. She solved them with the thought that in
sleep it was the mere ordinary woman who fell a prey to her tormentors;
awake, she dispersed the swarm, her sky was clear. Gradually the
persecution ceased, thanks to her active pen.

A letter from her legal adviser, old Mr. Braddock, informed her that no
grounds existed for apprehending marital annoyance, and late in May her
household had resumed its customary round.

She examined her accounts. The Debit and Credit sides presented much of
the appearance of male and female in our jog-trot civilization. They
matched middling well; with rather too marked a tendency to strain the
leash and run frolic on the part of friend Debit (the wanton male), which
deepened the blush of the comparison. Her father had noticed the same
funny thing in his effort to balance his tugging accounts: 'Now then for
a look at Man and Wife': except that he made Debit stand for the portly
frisky female, Credit the decorous and contracted other half, a prim
gentleman of a constitutionally lean habit of body, remonstrating with
her. 'You seem to forget that we are married, my dear, and must walk in
step or bundle into the Bench,' Dan Merion used to say.

Diana had not so much to rebuke in Mr. Debit; or not at the first
reckoning. But his ways were curious. She grew distrustful of him, after
dismissing him with a quiet admonition and discovering a series of ambush
bills, which he must have been aware of when he was allowed to pass as an
honourable citizen. His answer to her reproaches pleaded the
necessitousness of his purchases and expenditure: a capital plea; and
Mrs. Credit was requested by him, in a courteous manner, to drive her pen
the faster, so that she might wax to a corresponding size and satisfy the
world's idea of fitness in couples. She would have costly furniture,
because it pleased her taste; and a French cook, for a like reason, in
justice to her guests; and trained servants; and her tribe of pensioners;
flowers she would have profuse and fresh at her windows and over the
rooms; and the pictures and engravings on the walls were (always for the
good reason mentioned) choice ones; and she had a love of old lace, she
loved colours as she loved cheerfulness, and silks, and satin hangings,
Indian ivory carvings, countless mirrors, Oriental woods, chairs and
desks with some feature or a flourish in them, delicate tables with
antelope legs, of approved workmanship in the chronology of European
upholstery, and marble clocks of cunning device to symbol Time,
mantelpiece decorations, illustrated editions of her favourite authors;
her bed-chambers, too, gave the nest for sleep a dainty cosiness in
aerial draperies. Hence, more or less directly, the peccant bills. Credit
was reduced to reckon to a nicety the amount she could rely on
positively: her fixed income from her investments and the letting of The
Crossways: the days of half-yearly payments that would magnify her to
some proportions beside the alarming growth of her partner, who was proud
of it, and referred her to the treasures she could summon with her pen,
at a murmur of dissatisfaction. His compliments were sincere; they were
seductive. He assured her that she had struck a rich vein in an
inexhaustible mine; by writing only a very little faster she could double
her income; counting a broader popularity, treble it; and so on a tide of
success down the widening river to a sea sheer golden. Behold how it
sparkles! Are we then to stint our winged hours of youth for want of
courage to realize the riches we can command? Debit was eloquent, he was
unanswerable.

Another calculator, an accustomed and lamentably-scrupulous
arithmetician, had been at work for some time upon a speculative summing
of the outlay of Diana's establishment, as to its chances of swamping the
income. Redworth could guess pretty closely the cost of a house hold, if
his care for the holder set him venturing on aver ages. He knew nothing
of her ten per cent. investment and considered her fixed income a
beggarly regiment to marshal against the invader. He fancied however, in
his ignorance of literary profits, that a popular writer, selling several
editions, had come to an El Dorado. There was the mine. It required a
diligent worker. Diana was often struck by hearing Redworth ask her when
her next book might be expected. He appeared to have an eagerness in
hurrying her to produce, and she had to say that she was not a nimble
writer. His flattering impatience was vexatious. He admired her work, yet
he did his utmost to render it little admirable. His literary taste was
not that of young Arthur Rhodes, to whom she could read her chapters,
appearing to take counsel upon them while drinking the eulogies: she
suspected him of prosaic ally wishing her to make money, and though her
exchequer was beginning to know the need of it, the author's lofty mind
disdained such sordidness: to be excused, possibly, for a failing
productive energy. She encountered obstacles to imaginative composition.
With the pen in her hand, she would fall into heavy musings; break a
sentence to muse, and not on the subject. She slept unevenly at night,
was drowsy by day, unless the open air was about her, or animating
friends. Redworth's urgency to get her to publish was particularly
annoying when she felt how greatly THE YOUNG MINISTER OF STATE would have
been improved had she retained the work to brood over it, polish,
re-write passages, perfect it. Her musings embraced long dialogues of
that work, never printed; they sprang up, they passed from memory;
leaving a distaste for her present work: THE CANTATRICE: far more
poetical than the preceding, in the opinion of Arthur Rhodes; and the
story was more romantic; modelled on a Prima Donna she had met at the
musical parties of Henry Wilmers, after hearing Redworth tell of Charles
Rainer's quaint passion for the woman, or the idea of the woman. Diana
had courted her, studied and liked her. The picture she was drawing of
the amiable and gifted Italian, of her villain Roumanian husband, and of
the eccentric, high-minded, devoted Englishman, was good in a fashion;
but considering the theme, she had reasonable apprehension that her
CANTATRICE would not repay her for the time and labour bestowed on it. No
clever transcripts of the dialogue of the day occurred; no hair-breadth
'scapes, perils by sea and land, heroisms of the hero, fine shrieks of
the heroine; no set scenes of catching pathos and humour; no
distinguishable points of social satire--equivalent to a smacking of the
public on the chaps, which excites it to grin with keen discernment of
the author's intention. She did not appeal to the senses nor to a
superficial discernment. So she had the anticipatory sense of its
failure; and she wrote her best, in perverseness; of course she wrote
slowly; she wrote more and more realistically of the characters and the
downright human emotions, less of the wooden supernumeraries of her
story, labelled for broad guffaw or deluge tears--the grappling natural
links between our public and an author. Her feelings were aloof. They
flowed at a hint of a scene of THE YOUNG MINISTER. She could not put them
into THE CANTATRICE. And Arthur Rhodes pronounced this work poetical
beyond its predecessors, for the reason that the chief characters were
alive and the reader felt their pulses. He meant to say, they were
poetical inasmuch as they were creations.

The slow progress of a work not driven by the author's feelings
necessitated frequent consultations between Debit and Credit, resulting
in altercations, recriminations, discord of the yoked and divergent
couple. To restore them to their proper trot in harness, Diana
reluctantly went to her publisher for an advance item of the sum she was
to receive, and the act increased her distaste. An idea came that she
would soon cease to be able to write at all. What then? Perhaps by
selling her invested money, and ultimately The Crossways, she would have
enough for her term upon earth. Necessarily she had to think that short,
in order to reckon it as nearly enough. 'I am sure,' she said to herself,
'I shall not trouble the world very long.' A strange languor beset her;
scarcely melancholy, for she conceived the cheerfulness of life and added
to it in company; but a nervelessness, as though she had been left by the
stream on the banks, and saw beauty and pleasure sweep along and away,
while the sun that primed them dried her veins. At this time she was
gaining her widest reputation for brilliancy of wit. Only to welcome
guests were her evenings ever spent at home. She had no intimate
understanding of the deadly wrestle of the conventional woman with her
nature which she was undergoing below the surface. Perplexities she
acknowledged, and the prudence of guardedness. 'But as I am sure not to
live very long, we may as well meet.' Her meetings with Percy Dacier were
therefore hardly shunned; and his behaviour did not warn her to
discountenance them. It would have been cruel to exclude him from her
select little dinners of eight. Whitmonby, Westlake, Henry Wilmers and
the rest, she perhaps aiding, schooled him in the conversational art. She
heard it said of him, that the courted discarder of the sex, hitherto a
mere politician, was wonderfully humanized. Lady Pennon fell to talking
of him hopefully. She declared him to be one of the men who unfold
tardily, and only await the mastering passion. If the passion had come,
it was controlled. His command of himself melted Diana. How could she
forbid his entry to the houses she frequented? She was glad to see him.
He showed his pleasure in seeing her. Remembering his tentative
indiscretion on those foreign sands, she reflected that he had been
easily checked: and the like was not to be said of some others. Beautiful
women in her position provoke an intemperateness that contrasts
touchingly with the self-restraint of a particular admirer. Her
'impassioned Caledonian' was one of a host, to speak of whom and their
fits of lunacy even to her friend Emma, was repulsive. She bore with
them, foiled them, passed them, and recovered her equanimity; but the
contrast called to her to dwell on it, the self-restraint whispered of a
depth of passion . . . .

She was shocked at herself for a singular tremble 'she experienced,
without any beating of the heart, on hearing one day that the marriage of
Percy Dacier and Miss Asper was at last definitely fixed. Mary Paynham
brought her the news. She had it from a lady who had come across Miss
Asper at Lady Wathin's assemblies, and considered the great heiress
extraordinarily handsome.

'A golden miracle,' Diana gave her words to say. 'Good looks and gold
together are rather superhuman. The report may be this time true.' Next
afternoon the card of Lady Wathin requested Mrs. Warwick to grant her a
private interview.

Lady Wathin, as one of the order of women who can do anything in a holy
cause, advanced toward Mrs. Warwick, unabashed by the burden of her
mission, and spinally prepared, behind benevolent smilings, to repay
dignity of mien with a similar erectness of dignity. They touched fingers
and sat. The preliminaries to the matter of the interview were brief
between ladies physically sensible of antagonism and mutually too
scornful of subterfuges in one another's presence to beat the bush.

Lady Wathin began. 'I am, you are aware, Mrs. Warwick, a cousin of your
friend Lady Dunstane.'

'You come to me on business?' Diana said.

'It may be so termed. I have no personal interest in it. I come to lay
certain facts before you which I think you should know. We think it
better that an acquaintance, and one of your sex, should state the case
to you, instead of having recourse to formal intermediaries, lawyers--'

'Lawyers?'

'Well, my husband is a lawyer, it is true. In the course of his
professional vocations he became acquainted with Mr. Warwick. We have
latterly seen a good deal of him. He is, I regret to say, seriously
unwell.'

'I have heard of it.'

'He has no female relations, it appears. He needs more care than he can
receive from hirelings.'

'Are you empowered by him, Lady Wathin?'

'I am, Mrs. Warwick. We will not waste time in apologies. He is most
anxious for a reconciliation. It seems to Sir Cramborne and to me the
most desireable thing for all parties concerned, if you can be induced to
regard it in that light. Mr. Warwick may or may not live; but the
estrangement is quite undoubtedly the cause of his illness. I touch on
nothing connected with it. I simply wish that you should not be in
ignorance of his proposal and his condition.'

Diana bowed calmly. 'I grieve at his condition. His proposal has already
been made and replied to.'

'Oh, but, Mrs. Warwick, an immediate and decisive refusal of a proposal
so fraught with consequences . . . !'

'Ah, but, Lady Wathin, you are now outstepping the limits prescribed by
the office you have undertaken.'

'You will not lend ear to an intercession?'

'I will not.'

'Of course, Mrs. Warwick, it is not for me to hint at things that lawyers
could say on the subject.'

'Your forbearance is creditable, Lady Wathin.'

'Believe me, Mrs. Warwick, the step is--I speak in my husband's name as
well as my own--strongly to be advised.'

'If I hear one word more of it, I leave the country.'

'I should be sorry indeed at any piece of rashness depriving your
numerous friends of your society. We have recently become acquainted with
Mr. Redworth, and I know the loss you would be to them. I have not
attempted an appeal to your feelings, Mrs. Warwick.'

'I thank you warmly, Lady Wathin, for what you have not done.'

The aristocratic airs of Mrs. Warwick were annoying to Lady Wathin when
she considered that they were borrowed, and that a pattern morality could
regard the woman as ostracized: nor was it agreeable to be looked at
through eyelashes under partially lifted brows. She had come to appeal to
the feelings of the wife; at any rate, to discover if she had some and
was better than a wild adventuress.

'Our life below is short!' she said. To which Diana tacitly assented.

'We have our little term, Mrs. Warwick. It is soon over.'

'On the other hand, the platitudes concerning it are eternal.'

Lady Wathin closed her eyes, that the like effect might be produced on
her ears. 'Ah! they are the truths. But it is not my business to preach.
Permit me to say that I feel deeply for your husband.'

'I am glad of Mr. Warwick's having friends; and they are many, I hope.'

'They cannot behold him perishing, without an effort on his behalf.'

A chasm of silence intervened. Wifely pity was not sounded in it.

'He will question me, Mrs. Warwick.'

'You can report to him the heads of our conversation, Lady Wathin.'

'Would you--it is your husband's most earnest wish; and our house is open
to his wife and to him for the purpose; and it seems to us that . . .
indeed it might avert a catastrophe you would necessarily deplore:--would
you consent to meet him at my house?'

'It has already been asked, Lady Wathin, and refused.'

'But at my house-under our auspices!'

Diana glanced at the clock. 'Nowhere.'

'Is it not--pardon me--a wife's duty, Mrs. Warwick, at least to listen?'

'Lady Wathin, I have listened to you.'

'In the case of his extreme generosity so putting it, for the present,
Mrs. Warwick, that he asks only to be heard personally by his wife! It
may preclude so much.'

Diana felt a hot wind across her skin.

She smiled and said: 'Let me thank you for bringing to an end a mission
that must have been unpleasant to you.'

'But you will meditate on it, Mrs. Warwick, will you not? Give me that
assurance!'

'I shall not forget it,' said Diana.

Again the ladies touched fingers, with an interchange of the social
grimace of cordiality. A few words of compassion for poor Lady Dunstane's
invalided state covered Lady Wathin's retreat.

She left, it struck her ruffled sentiments, an icy libertine, whom any
husband caring for his dignity and comfort was well rid of; and if only
she could have contrived allusively to bring in the name of Mr. Percy
Dacier, just to show these arrant coquettes, or worse, that they were not
quite so privileged to pursue their intrigues obscurely as they imagined,
it would have soothed her exasperation.

She left a woman the prey of panic.

Diana thought of Emma and Redworth, and of their foolish interposition to
save her character and keep her bound. She might now have been free! The
struggle with her manacles reduced her to a state of rebelliousness, from
which issued vivid illuminations of the one means of certain escape; an
abhorrent hissing cavern, that led to a place named Liberty, her refuge,
but a hectic place.

Unable to write, hating the house which held her a fixed mark for these
attacks, she had an idea of flying straight to her beloved Lugano lake,
and there hiding, abandoning her friends, casting off the slave's name
she bore, and living free in spirit. She went so far as to reckon the
cost of a small household there, and justify the violent step by an
exposition of retrenchment upon her large London expenditure. She had but
to say farewell to Emma, no other tie to cut! One morning on the
Salvatore heights would wash her clear of the webs defacing and
entangling her.




CHAPTER XXIV

INDICATES A SOUL PREPARED FOR DESPERATION

The month was August, four days before the closing of Parliament, and
Diana fancied it good for Arthur Rhodes to run down with her to Copsley.
He came to her invitation joyfully, reminding her of Lady Dunstane's wish
to hear some chapters of THE CANTATRICE, and the MS. was packed. They
started, taking rail and fly, and winding up the distance on foot. August
is the month of sober maturity and majestic foliage, songless, but a
crowned and royal-robed queenly month; and the youngster's appreciation
of the homely scenery refreshed Diana; his delight in being with her was
also pleasant. She had no wish to exchange him for another; and that was
a strengthening thought.

At Copsley the arrival of their luggage had prepared the welcome. Warm
though it was, Diana perceived a change in Emma, an unwonted reserve, a
doubtfulness of her eyes, in spite of tenderness; and thus thrown back on
herself, thinking that if she had followed her own counsel (as she called
her impulse) in old days, there would have been no such present misery,
she at once, and unconsciously, assumed a guarded look. Based on her
knowledge of her honest footing, it was a little defiant. Secretly in her
bosom it was sharpened to a slight hostility by the knowledge that her
mind had been straying. The guilt and the innocence combined to clothe
her in mail, the innocence being positive, the guilt so vapoury. But she
was armed only if necessary, and there was no requirement for armour.
Emma did not question at all. She saw the alteration in her Tony: she was
too full of the tragic apprehensiveness, overmastering her to speak of
trifles. She had never confided to Tony the exact nature and the growth
of her malady, thinking it mortal, and fearing to alarm her dearest.

A portion of the manuscript was read out by Arthur Rhodes in the evening;
the remainder next morning. Redworth perceptibly was the model of the
English hero; and as to his person, no friend could complain of the
sketch; his clear-eyed heartiness, manliness, wholesomeness--a word of
Lady Dunstane's regarding him,--and his handsome braced figure, were well
painted. Emma forgave the: insistance on a certain bluntness of the nose,
in consideration of the fond limning of his honest and expressive eyes,
and the 'light on his temples,' which they had noticed together. She
could not so easily forgive the realistic picture of the man: an
exaggeration, she thought, of small foibles, that even if they existed,
should not have been stressed. The turn for 'calculating' was shown up
ridiculously; Mr. Cuthbert Dering was calculating in his impassioned
moods as well as in his cold. His head was a long division of ciphers. He
had statistics for spectacles, and beheld the world through them, and the
mistress he worshipped.

'I see,' said Emma, during a pause; 'he is a Saxon. You still affect to
have the race en grippe, Tony.'

'I give him every credit for what he is,' Diana replied. 'I admire the
finer qualities of the race as much as any one. You want to have them
presented to you in enamel, Emmy.'

But the worst was an indication that the mania for calculating in and out
of season would lead to the catastrophe destructive of his happiness.
Emma could not bear that. Without asking herself whether it could be
possible that Tony knew the secret, or whether she would have laid it
bare, her sympathy for Redworth revolted at the exposure. She was
chilled. She let it pass; she merely said: 'I like the writing.'

Diana understood that her story was condemned.

She put on her robes of philosophy to cloak discouragement. 'I am glad
the writing pleases you.'

'The characters are as true as life!' cried Arthur Rhodes. 'The
Cantatrice drinking porter from the pewter at the slips after harrowing
the hearts of her audience, is dearer to me than if she had tottered to a
sofa declining sustenance; and because her creatrix has infused such
blood of life into her that you accept naturally whatever she does. She
was exhausted, and required the porter, like a labourer in the
cornfield.'

Emma looked at him, and perceived the poet swamped by the admirer. Taken
in conjunction with Mr. Cuthbert Dering's frenzy for calculating, she
disliked the incident of the porter and the pewter.

'While the Cantatrice swallowed her draught, I suppose Mr. Dering counted
the cost?' she said.

'It really might be hinted,' said Diana.

The discussion closed with the accustomed pro and con upon the wart of
Cromwell's nose, Realism rejoicing in it, Idealism objecting.

Arthur Rhodes was bidden to stretch his legs on a walk along the heights
in the afternoon, and Emma was further vexed by hearing Tony complain of
Redworth's treatment of the lad, whom he would not assist to any of the
snug little posts he was notoriously able to dispense.

'He has talked of Mr. Rhodes to me,' said Emma. 'He thinks the profession
of literature a delusion, and doubts the wisdom of having poets for
clerks.'

'John-Bullish!' Diana exclaimed. 'He speaks contemptuously of the poor
boy.'

'Only inasmuch as the foolishness of the young man in throwing up the Law
provokes his practical mind to speak.'

'He might take my word for the "young man's" ability. I want him to have
the means of living, that he may write. He has genius.'

'He may have it. I like him, and have said so. If he were to go back to
his law-stool, I have no doubt that Redworth would manage to help him.'

'And make a worthy ancient Braddock of a youth of splendid promise! Have
I sketched him too Saxon?'

'It is the lens, and hot the tribe, Tony.'

THE CANTATRICE was not alluded to any more; but Emma's disapproval
blocked the current of composition, already subject to chokings in the
brain of the author. Diana stayed three days at Copsley, one longer than
she had intended, so that Arthur Rhodes might have his fill of country
air.

'I would keep him, but I should be no companion for him,' Emma said.

'I suspect the gallant squire is only to be satisfied by landing me
safely,' said Diana, and that small remark grated, though Emma saw the
simple meaning. When they parted, she kissed her Tony many times. Tears
were in her eyes. It seemed to Diana that she was anxious to make amends
for the fit of alienation, and she was kissed in return warmly, quite
forgiven, notwithstanding the deadly blank she had caused in the
imagination of the writer for pay, distracted by the squabbles of Debit
and Credit.

Diana chatted spiritedly to young Rhodes on their drive to the train. She
was profoundly discouraged by Emma's disapproval of her work. It wanted
but that one drop to make a recurrence to the work impossible. There it
must lie! And what of the aspects of her household?--Perhaps, after all,
the Redworths of the world are right, and Literature as a profession is a
delusive pursuit. She did not assent to it without hostility to the
world's Redworths.--'They have no sensitiveness, we have too much. We are
made of bubbles that a wind will burst, and as the wind is always
blowing, your practical Redworths have their crow of us.'

She suggested advice to Arthur Rhodes upon the prudence of his resuming
the yoke of the Law.

He laughed at such a notion, saying that he had some expectations of
money to come.

'But I fear,' said he, 'that Lady Dunstane is very very ill. She begged
me to keep her informed of your address.'

Diana told him he was one of those who should know it whithersoever she
went. She spoke impulsively, her sentiments of friendliness for the youth
being temporarily brightened by the strangeness of Emma's conduct in
deputing it to him to fulfil a duty she had never omitted. 'What can she
think I am going to do!'

On her table at home lay, a letter from Mr. Warwick. She read it hastily
in the presence of Arthur Rhodes, having at a glance at the handwriting
anticipated the proposal it contained and the official phrasing.

Her gallant squire was invited to dine with her that evening, costume
excused.

They conversed of Literature as a profession, of poets dead and living,
of politics, which he abhorred and shied at, and of his prospects. He
wrote many rejected pages, enjoyed an income of eighty pounds per annum,
and eked out a subsistence upon the modest sum his pen procured him; a
sum extremely insignificant; but great Nature was his own, the world was
tributary to him, the future his bejewelled and expectant bride. Diana
envied his youthfulness. Nothing is more enviable, nothing richer to the
mind, than the aspect of a cheerful poverty. How much nobler it was,
contrasted with Redworth's amassing of wealth!

When alone, she went to her bedroom and tried to write, tried to sleep.
Mr. Warwick's letter was looked at. It seemed to indicate a threat; but
for the moment it did not disturb her so much as the review of her moral
prostration. She wrote some lines to her lawyers, quoting one of Mr.
Warwick's sentences. That done, his letter was dismissed. Her intolerable
languor became alternately a defeating drowsiness and a fever. She
succeeded in the effort to smother the absolute cause: it was not
suffered to show a front; at the cost of her knowledge of a practised
self-deception. 'I wonder whether the world is as bad as a certain class
of writers tell us!' she sighed in weariness, and mused on their
soundings and probings of poor humanity, which the world accepts for the
very bottom truth if their dredge brings up sheer refuse of the
abominable. The world imagines those to be at our nature's depths who are
impudent enough to expose its muddy shallows. She was in the mood for
such a kind of writing: she could have started on it at once but that the
theme was wanting; and it may count on popularity, a great repute for
penetration. It is true of its kind, though the dredging of nature is the
miry form of art. When it flourishes we may be assured we have been
overenamelling the higher forms. She felt, and shuddered to feel, that
she could draw from dark stores. Hitherto in her works it had been a
triumph of the good. They revealed a gaping deficiency of the subtle
insight she now possessed. 'Exhibit humanity as it is, wallowing,
sensual, wicked, behind the mask,' a voice called to her; she was allured
by the contemplation of the wide-mouthed old dragon Ego, whose portrait,
decently painted, establishes an instant touch of exchange between author
and public, the latter detected and confessing. Next to the pantomime of
Humour and Pathos, a cynical surgical knife at the human bosom seems the
surest talisman for this agreeable exchange; and she could cut. She gave
herself a taste of her powers. She cut at herself mercilessly, and had to
bandage the wound in a hurry to keep in life.

Metaphors were her refuge. Metaphorically she could allow her mind to
distinguish the struggle she was undergoing, sinking under it. The
banished of Eden had to put on metaphors, and the common use of them has
helped largely to civilize us. The sluggish in intellect detest them, but
our civilization is not much indebted to that major faction. Especially
are they needed by the pedestalled woman in her conflict with the
natural. Diana saw herself through the haze she conjured up. 'Am I worse
than other women?' was a piercing twithought. Worse, would be hideous
isolation. The not worse, abased her sex. She could afford to say that
the world was bad: not that women were.

Sinking deeper, an anguish of humiliation smote her to a sense of
drowning. For what of the poetic ecstasy on her Salvatore heights had not
been of origin divine? had sprung from other than spiritual founts? had
sprung from the reddened sources she was compelled to conceal? Could it
be? She would not believe it. But there was matter to clip her wings,
quench her light, in the doubt.

She fell asleep like the wrecked flung ashore.

Danvers entered her room at an early hour for London to inform her that
Mr. Percy Dacier was below, and begged permission to wait.

Diana gave orders for breakfast to be proposed to him. She lay staring at
the wall until it became too visibly a reflection of her mind.




CHAPTER XXV

ONCE MORE THE CROSSWAYS AND A CHANGE OF TURNINGS

The suspicion of his having come to impart the news of his proximate
marriage ultimately endowed her with sovereign calmness. She had need to
think it, and she did. Tea was brought to her while she dressed; she
descended the stairs revolving phrases of happy congratulation and the
world's ordinary epigrams upon the marriage-tie, neatly mixed.

They read in one another's faces a different meaning from the empty words
of excuse and welcome. Dacier's expressed the buckling of a strong set
purpose; but, grieved by the look of her eyes, he wasted a moment to say:
'You have not slept. You have heard . . . ?'

'What?' said she, trying to speculate; and that was a sufficient answer.

'I hadn't the courage to call last night; I passed the windows. Give me
your hand, I beg.'

She gave her hand in wonderment, and more wonderingly felt it squeezed.
Her heart began the hammerthump. She spoke an unintelligible something;
saw herself melting away to utter weakness-pride, reserve, simple
prudence, all going; crumbled ruins where had stood a fortress imposing
to men. Was it love? Her heart thumped shiveringly.

He kept her hand, indifferent to the gentle tension.

'This is the point: I cannot live without you: I have gone on . . . Who
was here last night? Forgive me.'

'You know Arthur Rhodes.'

'I saw him leave the door at eleven. Why do you torture me? There's no
time to lose now. You will be claimed. Come, and let us two cut the knot.
It is the best thing in the world for me--the only thing. Be brave! I
have your hand. Give it for good, and for heaven's sake don't play the
sex. Be yourself. Dear soul of a woman! I never saw the soul in one but
in you. I have waited: nothing but the dread of losing you sets me
speaking now. And for you to be sacrificed a second time to that--! Oh,
no! You know you can trust me. On my honour, I take breath from you. You
are my better in everything--guide, goddess, dearest heart! Trust me;
make me master of your fate.'

'But my friend!' the murmur hung in her throat. He was marvellously
transformed; he allowed no space for the arts of defence and evasion.

'I wish I had the trick of courting. There's not time; and I 'm a
simpleton at the game. We can start this evening. Once away, we leave it
to them to settle the matter, and then you are free, and mine to the
death.'

'But speak, speak! What is it?' Diana said.

'That if we delay, I 'm in danger of losing you altogether.'

Her eyes lightened: 'You mean that you have heard he has determined--?'

'There's a process of the law. But stop it. Just this one step, and it
ends. Whether intended or not, it hangs over you, and you will be
perpetually tormented. Why waste your whole youth?--and mine as well! For
I am bound to you as much as if we had stood at the altar--where we will
stand together the instant you are free.'

'But where have you heard . . .?

'From an intimate friend. I will tell you--sufficiently intimate--from
Lady Wathin. Nothing of a friend, but I see this woman at times. She
chose to speak of it to me it doesn't matter why. She is in his
confidence, and pitched me a whimpering tale. Let those people chatter.
But it 's exactly for those people that you are hanging in chains, all
your youth shrivelling. Let them shout their worst! It's the bark of a
day; and you won't hear it; half a year, and it will be over, and I shall
bring you back--the husband of the noblest bride in Christendom! You
don't mistrust me?'

'It is not that,' said she. 'But now drop my hand. I am imprisoned.'

'It's asking too much. I've lost you--too many times. I have the hand and
I keep it. I take nothing but the hand. It's the hand I want. I give you
mine. I love you. Now I know what love is!--and the word carries nothing
of its weight. Tell me you do not doubt my honour.'

'Not at all. But be rational. I must think, and I cannot while you keep
my hand.'

He kissed it. 'I keep my own against the world.'

A cry of rebuke swelled to her lips at his conqueror's tone. It was not
uttered, for directness was in his character and his wooing loyal--save
for bitter circumstances, delicious to hear; and so narrow was the ring
he had wound about her senses, that her loathing of the circumstances
pushed her to acknowledge within her bell of a heart her love for him.

He was luckless enough to say: 'Diana!'

It rang horridly of her husband. She drew her hand to loosen it, with
repulsing brows. 'Not that name!'

Dacier was too full of his honest advocacy of the passionate lover to
take a rebuff. There lay his unconscious mastery, where the common arts
of attack would have tripped him with a quick-witted woman, and where a
man of passion, not allowing her to succumb in dignity, would have
alarmed her to the breaking loose from him.

'Lady Dunstane calls you Tony.'

'She is my dearest and oldest friend.'

'You and I don't count by years. You are the dearest to me on earth,
Tony!'

She debated as to forbidding that name.

The moment's pause wrapped her in a mental hurricane, out of which she
came with a heart stopped, her olive cheeks ashen-hued. She had seen that
the step was possible.

'Oh! Percy, Percy, are we mad?'

'Not mad. We take what is ours. Tell me, have I ever, ever disrespected
you? You were sacred to me; and you are, though now the change has come.
Look back on it--it is time lost, years that are dust. But look forward,
and you cannot imagine our separation. What I propose is plain sense for
us two. Since Rovio, I have been at your feet. Have I not some just claim
for recompense? Tell me! Tony!'

The sweetness of the secret name, the privileged name, in his mouth stole
through her blood, melting resistance.

She had consented. The swarthy flaming of her face avowed it even more
than the surrender of her hand. He gained much by claiming little: he
respected her, gave her no touches of fright and shame; and it was her
glory to fall with pride. An attempt at a caress would have awakened her
view of the whitherward: but she was treated as a sovereign lady
rationally advised.

'Is it since Rovio, Percy?'

'Since the morning when you refused me one little flower.'

'If I had given it, you might have been saved!'

'I fancy I was doomed from the beginning.'

'I was worth a thought?'

'Worth a life! worth ten thousand!'

'You have reckoned it all like a sane man:--family, position, the world,
the scandal?'

'All. I have long known that you were the mate for me. You have to
weather a gale, Tony. It won't last. My dearest! it won't last many
months. I regret the trial for you, but I shall be with you, burning for
the day to reinstate you and show you the queen you are.'

'Yes, we two can have no covert dealings, Percy,' said Diana. They would
be hateful--baseness! Rejecting any baseness, it seemed to her that she
stood in some brightness. The light was of a lurid sort. She called on
her heart to glory in it as the light of tried love, the love that defied
the world. Her heart rose. She and he would at a single step give proof
of their love for one another--and this kingdom of love--how different
from her recent craven languors!--this kingdom awaited her, was hers for
one word; and beset with the oceans of enemies, it was unassailable. If
only they were true to the love they vowed, no human force could subvert
it: and she doubted him as little as of herself. This new kingdom of
love, never entered by her, acclaiming her, was well-nigh unimaginable,
in spite of the many hooded messengers it had despatched to her of late.
She could hardly believe that it had come.

'But see me as I am,' she said; she faltered it through her direct gaze
on him.

'With chains to strike off? Certainly; it is done,' he replied.

'Rather heavier than those of the slave-market! I am the deadest of
burdens. It means that your enemies, personal--if you have any, and
political--you have numbers; will raise a cry . . . . Realize it. You may
still be my friend. I forgive the bit of wildness.'

She provoked a renewed kissing of her hand; for magnammity in love is an
overflowing danger; and when he said: 'The burden you have to bear
outweighs mine out of all comparison. What is it to a man--a public man
or not! The woman is always the victim. That's why I have held myself in
so long:--her strung frame softened. She half yielded to the tug on her
arm.

'Is there no talking for us without foolishness?' she murmured. The
foolishness had wafted her to sea, far from sight of land. 'Now sit, and
speak soberly. Discuss the matter.--Yes, my hand, but I must have my
wits. Leave me free to use them till we choose our path. Let it be the
brains between us, as far as it can. You ask me to join my fate to yours.
It signifies a sharp battle for you, dear friend; perhaps the blighting
of the most promising life in England. One question is, can I countervail
the burden I shall be, by such help to you as I can afford? Burden, is no
word--I rake up a buried fever. I have partially lived it down, and
instantly I am covered with spots. The old false charges and this plain
offence make a monster of me.'

'And meanwhile you are at the disposal of the man who falsely charged you
and armed the world against you,' said Dacier.

'I can fly. The world is wide.'

'Time slips. Your youth is wasted. If you escape the man, he will have
triumphed in keeping you from me. And I thirst for you; I look to you for
aid and counsel; I want my mate. You have not to be told how you inspire
me? I am really less than half myself without you. If I am to do anything
in the world, it must be with your aid, you beside me. Our hands are
joined: one leap! Do you not see that after . . . well, it cannot be
friendship. It imposes rather more on me than I can bear. You are not the
woman to trifle; nor I; Tony, the man for it with a woman like you. You
are my spring of wisdom. You interdict me altogether--can you?--or we
unite our fates, like these hands now. Try to get yours away!'

Her effort ended in a pressure. Resistance, nay, to hesitate at the
joining of her life with his after her submission to what was a scorching
fire in memory, though it was less than an embrace, accused her of worse
than foolishness.

'Well, then,' said she, 'wait three days. Deliberate. Oh! try to know
yourself, for your clear reason to guide you. Let us be something better
than the crowd abusing us, not simple creatures of impulse--as we choose
to call the animal. What if we had to confess that we took to our heels
the moment the idea struck us! Three days. We may then pretend to a
philosophical resolve. Then come to me: or write to me.'

'How long is it since the old Rovio morning, Tony?'

'An age.'

'Date my deliberations from that day.'

The thought of hers having to be dated possibly from an earlier day,
robbed her of her summit of feminine isolation, and she trembled, chilled
and flushed; she lost all anchorage.

'So it must be to-morrow,' said he, reading her closely, 'not later.
Better at once. But women are not to be hurried.'

'Oh! don't class me, Percy, pray! I think of you, not of myself.'

'You suppose that in a day or two I might vary?'

She fixed her eyes on him, expressing certainty of his unalterable
stedfastness. The look allured. It changed: her head shook. She held away
and said: 'No, leave me; leave me, dear, dear friend. Percy, my dearest!
I will not "play the sex." I am yours if . . . if it is your wish. It may
as well be to-morrow. Here I am useless; I cannot write, not screw a
thought from my head. I dread that "process of the Law" a second time.
To-morrow, if it must be. But no impulses. Fortune is blind; she may be
kind to us. The blindness of Fortune is her one merit, and fools accuse
her of it, and they profit by it! I fear we all of us have our turn of
folly: we throw the stake for good luck. I hope my sin is not very great.
I know my position is desperate. I feel a culprit. But I am sure I have
courage, perhaps brains to help. At any rate, I may say this: I bring no
burden to my lover that he does not know of.'

Dacier pressed her hand. 'Money we shall have enough. My uncle has left
me fairly supplied.'

'What would he think?' said Diana, half in a glimpse of meditation.

'Think me the luckiest of the breeched. I fancy I hear him thanking you
for "making a man" of me.'

She blushed. Some such phrase might have been spoken by Lord Dannisburgh.

'I have but a poor sum of money,' she said. 'I may be able to write
abroad. Here I cannot--if I am to be persecuted.'

'You shall write, with a new pen!' said Dacier. 'You shall live, my
darling Tony. You have been held too long in this miserable suspension,
neither maid nor wife, neither woman nor stockfish. Ah! shameful. But we
'll right it. The step, for us, is the most reasonable that could be
considered. You shake your head. But the circumstances make it so.
Courage, and we come to happiness! And that, for you and me, means work.
Look at the case of Lord and Lady Dulac. It's identical, except that she
is no match beside you: and I do not compare her antecedents with yours.
But she braved the leap, and forced the world to swallow it, and now, you
see, she's perfectly honoured. I know a place on a peak of the Maritime
Alps, exquisite in summer, cool, perfectly solitary, no English, snow
round us, pastures at our feet, and the Mediterranean below. There! my
Tony. To-morrow night we start. You will meet me-shall I call
here?--well, then at the railway station, the South-Eastern, for Paris:
say, twenty minutes to eight. I have your pledge? You will come?'

She sighed it, then said it firmly, to be worthy of him. Kind Fortune,
peeping under the edge of her bandaged eyes, appeared willing to bestow
the beginning of happiness upon one who thought she had a claim to a
small taste of it before she died. It seemed distinguishingly done, to
give a bite of happiness to the starving!

'I fancied when you were announced that you came for congratulations upon
your approaching marriage, Percy.'

'I shall expect to hear them from you to-morrow evening at the station,
dear Tony,' said he.

The time was again stated, the pledge repeated. He forbore entreaties for
privileges, and won her gratitude.

They named once more the place of meeting and the hour: more significant
to them than phrases of intensest love and passion. Pressing hands
sharply for pledge of good faith, they sundered.

She still had him in her eyes when he had gone. Her old world lay
shattered; her new world was up without a dawn, with but one figure, the
sun of it, to light the swinging strangeness.

Was ever man more marvellously transformed? or woman more wildly swept
from earth into the clouds? So she mused in the hum of her tempest of
heart and brain, forgetful of the years and the conditions preparing both
of them for this explosion.

She had much to do: the arrangements to dismiss her servants, write to
house-agents and her lawyer, and write fully to Emma, write the enigmatic
farewell to the Esquarts and Lady Pennon, Mary Paynham, Arthur Rhodes,
Whitmonby (stanch in friendship, but requiring friendly touches), Henry
Wilmers, and Redworth. He was reserved to the last, for very enigmatical
adieux: he would hear the whole story from Emma; must be left to think as
he liked.

The vague letters were excellently well composed: she was going abroad,
and knew not when she would return; bade her friends think the best they
could of her in the meantime. Whitmonby was favoured with an anecdote, to
be read as an apologue by the light of subsequent events. But the letter
to Emma tasked Diana. Intending to write fully, her pen committed the
briefest sentences: the tenderness she felt for Emma wakening her heart
to sing that she was loved, loved, and knew love at last; and Emma's
foreseen antagonism to the love and the step it involved rendered her
pleadings in exculpation a stammered confession of guiltiness,
ignominious, unworthy of the pride she felt in her lover. 'I am like a
cartridge rammed into a gun, to be discharged at a certain hour
tomorrow,' she wrote; and she sealed a letter so frigid that she could
not decide to post it. All day she imagined hearing a distant cannonade.
The light of the day following was not like earthly light. Danvers
assured her there was no fog in London.

'London is insupportable; I am going to Paris, and shall send for you in
a week or two,' said Diana.

'Allow me to say, ma'am, that you had better take me with you,' said
Danvers.

'Are you afraid of travelling by yourself, you foolish creature?'

'No, ma'am, but I don't like any hands to undress and dress my mistress
but my own.'

'I have not lost the art,' said Diana, chafing for a magic spell to
extinguish the woman, to whom, immediately pitying her, she said: 'You
are a good faithful soul. I think you have never kissed me. Kiss me on
the forehead.'

Danvers put her lips to her mistress's forehead, and was asked: 'You
still consider yourself attached to my fortunes?'

'I do, ma'am, at home or abroad; and if you will take me with you . . .'

'Not for a week or so.'

'I shall not be in the way, ma'am.'

They played at shutting eyes. The petition of Danvers was declined; which
taught her the more; and she was emboldened to say: 'Wherever my mistress
goes, she ought to have her attendant with her.' There was no answer to
it but the refusal.

The hours crumbled slowly, each with a blow at the passages of retreat.
Diana thought of herself as another person, whom she observed, not
counselling her, because it was a creature visibly pushed by the Fates.
In her own mind she could not perceive a stone of solidity anywhere, nor
a face that had the appearance of our common life. She heard the cannon
at intervals. The things she said set Danvers laughing, and she wondered
at the woman's mingled mirth and stiffness. Five o'clock struck. Her
letters were sent to the post. Her boxes were piled from stairs to door.
She read the labels, for her good-bye to the hated name of Warwick:--why
ever adopted! Emma might well have questioned why! Women are guilty of
such unreasoning acts! But this was the close to that chapter. The hour
of six went by. Between six and seven came a sound of knocker and bell at
the street-door. Danvers rushed into the sitting-room to announce that it
was Mr. Redworth. Before a word could be mustered, Redworth was in the
room. He said: 'You must come with me at once!'




CHAPTER XXVI

IN WHICH A DISAPPOINTED LOVER RECEIVES A MULTITUDE OF LESSONS

Dacier welted at the station, a good figure of a sentinel over his
luggage and a spy for one among the inpouring passengers. Tickets had
been confidently taken, the private division of the carriages happily
secured. On board the boat she would be veiled. Landed on French soil,
they threw off disguises, breasted the facts. And those? They lightened.
He smarted with his eagerness.

He had come well in advance of the appointed time, for he would not have
had her hang about there one minute alone.

Strange as this adventure was to a man of prominent station before the
world, and electrical as the turning-point of a destiny that he was given
to weigh deliberately and far-sightedly, Diana's image strung him to the
pitch of it. He looked nowhere but ahead, like an archer putting hand for
his arrow.

Presently he compared his watch and the terminus clock. She should now be
arriving. He went out to meet her and do service. Many cabs and carriages
were peered into, couples inspected, ladies and their maids, wives and
their husbands--an August exodus to the Continent. Nowhere the starry
she. But he had a fund of patience. She was now in some block of the
streets. He was sure of her, sure of her courage. Tony and recreancy
could not go together. Now that he called her Tony, she was his close
comrade, known; the name was a caress and a promise, breathing of her, as
the rose of sweetest earth. He counted it to be a month ere his family
would have wind of the altered position of his affairs, possibly a year
to the day of his making the dear woman his own in the eyes of the world.
She was dear past computation, womanly, yet quite unlike the womanish
woman, unlike the semi-males courteously called dashing, unlike the
sentimental. His present passion for her lineaments, declared her
surpassingly beautiful, though his critical taste was rather for the
white statue that gave no warmth. She had brains and ardour, she had
grace and sweetness, a playful petulancy enlivening our atmosphere, and
withal a refinement, a distinction, not to be classed; and justly might
she dislike the being classed. Her humour was a perennial refreshment, a
running well, that caught all the colours of light; her wit studded the
heavens of the recollection of her. In his heart he felt that it was a
stepping down for the brilliant woman to give him her hand; a
condescension and an act of valour. She who always led or prompted when
they conversed, had now in her generosity abandoned the lead and herself
to him, and she deserved his utmost honouring.

But where was she? He looked at his watch, looked at the clock. They said
the same: ten minutes to the moment of the train's departure.

A man may still afford to dwell on the charms and merits of his heart's
mistress while he has ten minutes to spare. The dropping minutes,
however, detract one by one from her individuality and threaten to sink
her in her sex entirely. It is the inexorable clock that says she is as
other women. Dacier began to chafe. He was unaccustomed to the part he
was performing:--and if she failed him? She would not. She would be late,
though. No, she was in time! His long legs crossed the platform to
overtake a tall lady veiled and dressed in black. He lifted his hat; he
heard an alarmed little cry and retired. The clock said, Five minutes: a
secret chiromancy in addition indicating on its face the word Fool. An
odd word to be cast at him! It rocked the icy pillar of pride in the
background of his nature. Certainly standing solos at the hour of eight
P.M., he would stand for a fool. Hitherto he had never allowed a woman to
chance to posture him in that character. He strode out, returned, scanned
every lady's shape, and for a distraction watched the veiled lady whom he
had accosted. Her figure suggested pleasant features. Either she was
disappointed or she was an adept. At the shutting of the gates she glided
through, not without a fearful look around and at him. She disappeared.
Dacier shrugged. His novel assimilation to the rat-rabble of amatory
intriguers tapped him on the shoulder unpleasantly. A luckless member of
the fraternity too! The bell, the clock and the train gave him his title.
'And I was ready to fling down everything for the woman!' The trial of a
superb London gentleman's resources in the love-passion could not have
been much keener. No sign of her.

He who stands ready to defy the world, and is baffled by the absence of
his fair assistant, is the fool doubled, so completely the fool that he
heads the universal shout; he does not spare himself. The sole
consolation he has is to revile the sex. Women! women! Whom have they not
made a fool of! His uncle as much as any--and professing to know them.
Him also! the man proud of escaping their wiles. 'For this woman . . . !'
he went on saying after he had lost sight of her in her sex's trickeries.
The nearest he could get to her was to conceive that the arrant coquette
was now laughing at her utter subjugation and befooling of the man
popularly supposed invincible. If it were known of him! The idea of his
being a puppet fixed for derision was madly distempering. He had only to
ask the affirmative of Constance Asper to-morrow! A vision of his
determination to do it, somewhat comforted him.

Dacier walked up and down the platform, passing his pile of luggage,
solitary and eloquent on the barrow. Never in his life having been made
to look a fool, he felt the red heat of the thing, as a man who has not
blessedly become acquainted with the swish in boyhood finds his
untempered blood turn to poison at a blow; he cannot healthily take a
licking. But then it had been so splendid an insanity when he urged Diana
to fly with him. Any one but a woman would have appreciated the
sacrifice.

His luggage had to be removed. He dropped his porter a lordly fee and
drove home. From that astonished solitude he strolled to his Club.
Curiosity mastering the wrath it was mixed with, he left his Club and
crossed the park southward in the direction of Diana's house, abusing her
for her inveterate attachment to the regions of Westminster. There she
used to receive Lord Dannisburgh; innocently, no doubt-assuredly quite
innocently; and her husband had quitted the district. Still it was rather
childish for a woman to-be always haunting the seats of Parliament. Her
disposition to imagine that she was able to inspire statesmen came in for
a share of ridicule; for when we know ourselves to be ridiculous, a
retort in kind, unjust upon consideration, is balm. The woman dragged him
down to the level of common men; that was the peculiar injury, and it
swept her undistinguished into the stream of women. In appearance, as he
had proved to the fellows at his Club, he was perfectly self-possessed,
mentally distracted and bitter, hating himself for it, snapping at the
cause of it. She had not merely disappointed, she had slashed his high
conceit of himself, curbed him at the first animal dash forward, and he
champed the bit with the fury of a thwarted racer.

Twice he passed her house. Of course no light was shown at her windows.
They were scanned malignly.

He held it due to her to call and inquire whether there was any truth in
the report of Mrs. Warwick's illness. Mrs. Warwick! She meant to keep the
name.

A maid-servant came to the door with a candle in her hand revealing red
eyelids. She was not aware that her mistress was unwell. Her mistress had
left home some time after six o'clock with a gentleman. She was unable to
tell him the gentleman's name. William, the footman, had opened the door
to him. Her mistress's maid Mrs. Danvers had gone to the Play--with
William. She thought that Mrs. Danvers might know who the gentleman was.
The girl's eyelids blinked, and she turned aside. Dacier consoled her
with a piece of gold, saying he would come and see Mrs. Danvers in the
morning.

His wrath was partially quieted by the new speculations offered up to it.
He could not conjure a suspicion of treachery in Diana Warwick; and a
treachery so foully cynical! She had gone with a gentleman. He guessed on
all sides; he struck at walls, as in complete obscurity.

The mystery of her conduct troubling his wits for the many hours was
explained by Danvers. With a sympathy that she was at pains to show, she
informed him that her mistress was not at all unwell, and related of how
Mr. Redworth had arrived just when her mistress was on the point of
starting for Paris and the Continent; because poor Lady Dunstane was this
very day to undergo an operation under the surgeons at Copsley, and she
did not wish her mistress to be present, but Mr. Redworth thought her
mistress ought to be there, and he had gone down thinking she was there,
and then came back in hot haste to fetch her, and was just in time, as it
happened, by two or three minutes.

Dacier rewarded the sympathetic woman for her intelligence, which
appeared to him to have shot so far as to require a bribe. Gratitude to
the person soothing his unwontedly ruffled temper was the cause of the
indiscretion in the amount he gave.

It appeared to him that he ought to proceed to Copsley for tidings of
Lady Dunstane. Thither he sped by the handy railway and a timely train.
He reached the parkgates at three in the afternoon, telling his flyman to
wait. As he advanced by short cuts over the grass, he studied the look of
the rows of windows. She was within, and strangely to his clouded senses
she was no longer Tony, no longer the deceptive woman he could in justice
abuse. He and she, so close to union, were divided. A hand resembling the
palpable interposition of Fate had swept them asunder. Having the poorest
right--not any--to reproach her, he was disarmed, he felt himself a
miserable intruder; he summoned his passion to excuse him, and gained
some unsatisfied repose of mind by contemplating its devoted sincerity;
which roused an effort to feel for the sufferer--Diana Warwick's friend.
With the pair of surgeons named, the most eminent of their day, in
attendance, the case must be serious. To vindicate the breaker of her
pledge, his present plight likewise assured him of that, and nearing the
house he adopted instinctively the funeral step and mood, just sensible
of a novel smallness. For the fortifying testimony of his passion had to
be put aside, he was obliged to disavow it for a simpler motive if he
applied at the door. He stressed the motive, produced the sentiment, and
passed thus naturally into hypocrisy, as lovers precipitated by their
blood among the crises of human conditions are often forced to do. He had
come to inquire after Lady Dunstane. He remembered that it had struck him
as a duty, on hearing of her dangerous illness.

The door opened before he touched the bell. Sir Lukin knocked against him
and stared.

'Ah!--who--?--you?' he said, and took him by the arm and pressed him on
along the gravel. 'Dacier, are you? Redworth's in there. Come on a step,
come! It's the time for us to pray. Good God! There's mercy for sinners.
If ever there was a man! . . . But, oh, good God! she's in their hands
this minute. My saint is under the knife.'

Dacier was hurried forward by a powerful hand. 'They say it lasts about
five minutes, four and a half--or more! My God! When they turned me out
of her room, she smiled to keep me calm. She said: "Dear husband": the
veriest wretch and brutallest husband ever poor woman . . . and a saint!
a saint on earth! Emmy!' Tears burst from him.

He pulled forth his watch and asked Dacier for the time.

'A minute's gone in a minute. It's three minutes and a half. Come faster.
They're at their work! It's life or death. I've had death about me. But
for a woman! and your wife! and that brave soul! She bears it so. Women
are the bravest creatures afloat. If they make her shriek, it'll be only
if she thinks I 'm out of hearing. No: I see her. She bears it!--They
mayn't have begun yet. It may all be over! Come into the wood. I must
pray. I must go on my knees.'

Two or three steps in the wood, at the mossed roots of a beech, he fell
kneeling, muttering, exclaiming.

The tempest of penitence closed with a blind look at his watch, which he
left dangling. He had to talk to drug his thoughts.

'And mind you,' said he, when he had rejoined Dacier and was pushing his
arm again, rounding beneath the trees to a view of the house, 'for a man
steeped in damnable iniquity! She bears it all for me, because I begged
her, for the chance of her living. It's my doing--this knife! Macpherson
swears there is a chance. Thomson backs him. But they're at her, cutting!
. . . The pain must be awful--the mere pain! The gentlest creature ever
drew breath! And women fear blood--and her own! And a head! She ought to
have married the best man alive, not a--! I can't remember her once
complaining of me--not once. A common donkey compared to her! All I can
do is to pray. And she knows the beast I am, and has forgiven me. There
isn't a blessed text of Scripture that doesn't cry out in praise of her.
And they cut and hack . . . !' He dropped his head. The vehement big man
heaved, shuddering. His lips worked fast.

'She is not alone with them, unsupported?' said Dacier.

Sir Lukin moaned for relief. He caught his watch swinging and stared at
it. 'What a good fellow you were to come! Now 's the time to know your
friends. There's Diana Warwick, true as steel. Redworth came on her
tiptoe for the Continent; he had only to mention . . . Emmy wanted to
spare her. She would not have sent--wanted to spare her the sight. I
offered to stand by . . . Chased me out. Diana Warwick's there:--worth
fifty of me! Dacier, I've had my sword-blade tried by Indian horsemen,
and I know what true as steel means. She's there. And I know she shrinks
from the sight of blood. My oath on it, she won't quiver a muscle! Next
to my wife, you may take my word for it, Dacier, Diana Warwick is the
pick of living women. I could prove it. They go together. I could prove
it over and over. She 's the loyallest woman anywhere. Her one error was
that marriage of hers, and how she ever pitched herself into it, none of
us can guess.' After a while, he said: 'Look at your watch.'

'Nearly twenty minutes gone.'

'Are they afraid to send out word? It's that window!' He covered his
eyes, and muttered, sighed. He became abruptly composed in appearance.
'The worst of a black sheep like me is, I'm such an infernal sinner, that
Providence! . . . But both surgeons gave me their word of honour that
there was a chance. A chance! But it's the end of me if Emmy . . . . Good
God! no! the knife's enough; don't let her be killed! It would be murder.
Here am I talking! I ought to be praying. I should have sent for the
parson to help me; I can't get the proper words--bellow like a rascal
trooper strung up for the cat. It must be twenty-five minutes now. Who's
alive now!'

Dacier thought of the Persian Queen crying for news of the slaughtered,
with her mind on her lord and husband: 'Who is not dead?' Diana exalted
poets, and here was an example of the truth of one to nature, and of the
poor husband's depth of feeling. They said not the same thing, but it was
the same cry de profundis.

He saw Redworth coming at a quick pace.

Redworth raised his hand. Sir Lukin stopped. 'He's waving!'

'It's good,' said Dacier.

'Speak! are you sure?'

'I judge by the look.'

Redworth stepped unfalteringly.

'It's over, all well,' he said. He brushed his forehead and looked
sharply cheerful.

'My dear fellow! my dear fellow!' Sir Lukin grasped his hand. 'It's more
than I deserve. Over? She has borne it! She would have gone to heaven and
left me!

Is she safe?'

'Doing well.'

'Have you seen the surgeons?'

'Mrs. Warwick.'

'What did she say?'

'A nod of the head.'

'You saw her?'

'She came to the stairs.'

'Diana Warwick never lies. She wouldn't lie, not with a nod! They've
saved Emmy--do you think?'

'It looks well.'

My girl has passed the worst of it?'

'That's over.'

Sir Lukin gazed glassily. The necessity of his agony was to lean to the
belief, at a beckoning, that Providence pardoned him, in tenderness for
what would have been his loss. He realized it, and experienced a sudden
calm: testifying to the positive pardon.

'Now, look here, you two fellows, listen half a moment,' he addressed
Redworth and Dacier; 'I've been the biggest scoundrel of a husband
unhung, and married to a saint; and if she's only saved to me; I'll swear
to serve her faithfully, or may a thunderbolt knock me to perdition! and
thank God for his justice! Prayers are answered, mind you, though a
fellow may be as black as a sweep. Take a warning from me. I've had my
lesson.'

Dacier soon after talked of going. The hope of seeing Diana had abandoned
him, the desire was almost extinct.

Sir Lukin could not let him go. He yearned to preach to him or any one
from his personal text of the sinner honourably remorseful on account of
and notwithstanding the forgiveness of Providence, and he implored Dacier
and Redworth by turns to be careful when they married of how they behaved
to--the sainted women their wives; never to lend ear to the devil, nor to
believe, as he had done, that there is no such thing as a devil, for he
had been the victim of him, and he knew. The devil, he loudly proclaimed,
has a multiplicity of lures, and none more deadly than when he baits with
a petticoat. He had been hooked, and had found the devil in person. He
begged them urgently to keep his example in memory. By following this and
that wildfire he had stuck himself in a bog--a common result with those
who would not see the devil at work upon them; and it required his dear
suffering saint to be at death's doors, cut to pieces and gasping, to
open his eyes. But, thank heaven, they were opened at last! Now he saw
the beast he was: a filthy beast! unworthy of tying his wife's
shoestring. No confessions could expose to them the beast he was. But let
them not fancy there was no such thing as an active DEVIL about the
world.

Redworth divined that the simply sensational man abased himself before
Providence and heaped his gratitude on the awful Power in order to render
it difficult for the promise of the safety of his wife to be withdrawn.

He said: 'There is good hope'; and drew an admonition upon himself.

'Ah! my dear good Redworth,' Sir Lukin sighed from his elevation of
outspoken penitence: 'you will see as I do some day. It is the devil,
think as you like of it. When you have pulled down all the Institutions
of the Country, what do you expect but ruins? That Radicalism of yours
has its day. You have to go through a wrestle like mine to understand it.
You say, the day is fine, let's have our game. Old England pays for it!
Then you'll find how you love the old land of your birth--the noblest
ever called a nation!--with your Corn Law Repeals!--eh, Dacier?--You 'll
own it was the devil tempted you. I hear you apologizing. Pray God, it
mayn't be too late!'

He looked up at the windows. 'She may be sinking!'

'Have no fears,' Redworth said; 'Mrs. Warwick would send for you.'

'She would. Diana Warwick would be sure to send. Next to my wife, Diana
Warwick's . . . she'd send, never fear. I dread that room. I'd rather go
through a regiment of sabres--though it 's over now. And Diana Warwick
stood it. The worst is over, you told me. By heaven! women are wonderful
creatures. But she hasn't a peer for courage. I could trust her--most
extraordinary thing; that marriage of hers!--not a soul has ever been
able to explain it:--trust her to the death.'

Redworth left them, and Sir Lukin ejaculated on the merits of Diana
Warwick to Dacier. He laughed scornfully: 'And that's the woman the world
attacks for want of virtue! Why, a fellow hasn't a chance with her, not a
chance. She comes out in blazing armour if you unmask a battery. I don't
know how it might be if she were in love with a fellow. I doubt her
thinking men worth the trouble. I never met the man. But if she were to
take fire, Troy 'd be nothing to it. I wonder whether we might go in: I
dread the house.'

Dacier spoke of departing.

'No, no, wait,' Sir Lukin begged him. 'I was talking about women. They
are the devil--or he makes most use of them: and you must learn to see
the cloven foot under their petticoats, if you're to escape them. There's
no protection in being in love with your wife; I married for love; I am,
I always have been, in love with her; and I went to the deuce. The music
struck up and away I waltzed. A woman like Diana Warwick might keep a
fellow straight, because she,'s all round you; she's man and woman in
brains; and legged like a deer, and breasted like a swan, and a regular
sheaf of arrows--in her eyes. Dark women--ah! But she has a contempt for
us, you know. That's the secret of her.--Redworth 's at the door. Bad? Is
it bad? I never was particularly fond of that house--hated it. I love it
now for Emmy's sake. I couldn't live in another--though I should be
haunted. Rather her ghost than nothing--though I'm an infernal coward
about the next world. But if you're right with religion you needn't fear.
What I can't comprehend in Redworth is his Radicalism, and getting richer
and richer.'

'It's not a vow of poverty,' said Dacier.

'He'll find they don't coalesce, or his children will. Once the masses
are uppermost! It's a bad day, Dacier, when we 've no more gentlemen in
the land. Emmy backs him, so I hold my tongue. To-morrow's a Sunday. I
wish you were staying here; I 'd take you to church with me-we shirk it
when we haven't a care. It couldn't do you harm. I've heard capital
sermons. I've always had the good habit of going to church, Dacier. Now
's the time for remembering them. Ah, my dear fellow, I 'm not a parson.
It would have been better for me if I had been.'

And for you too! his look added plainly. He longed to preach; he was
impelled to chatter.

Redworth reported the patient perfectly quiet, breathing calmly.

'Laudanum?' asked Sir Lukin. 'Now there's a poison we've got to bless!
And we set up in our wisdom for knowing what is good for us!'

He had talked his hearers into a stupefied assent to anything he uttered.

'Mrs. Warwick would like to see you in two or three minutes; she will
come down,' Redworth said to Dacier.

'That looks well, eh? That looks bravely,' Sir Lukin cried. 'Diana,
Warwick wouldn't leave the room without a certainty. I dread the look of
those men; I shall have to shake their hands! And so I do, with all my
heart: only--But God bless them! But we must go in, if she's coming
down.'

They entered the house, and sat in the drawing-room, where Sir Lukin took
up from the table one of his wife's Latin books, a Persius, bearing her
marginal notes. He dropped his head on it, with sobs.

The voice of Diana recalled him to the present. She counselled him to
control himself; in that case he might for one moment go to the
chamber-door and assure himself by the silence that his wife was resting.
She brought permission from the surgeons and doctor, on his promise to be
still.

Redworth supported Sir Lukin tottering out.

Dacier had risen. He was petrified by Diana's face, and thought of her as
whirled from him in a storm, bearing the marks of it. Her underlip hung
for short breaths; the big drops of her recent anguish still gathered on
her brows; her eyes were tearless, lustreless; she looked ancient in
youth, and distant by a century, like a tall woman of the vaults, issuing
white-ringed, not of our light.

She shut her mouth for strength to speak to him.

He said: 'You are not ill? You are strong?'

'I? Oh, strong. I will sit. I cannot be absent longer than two minutes.
The trial of her strength is to come. If it were courage, we might be
sure. The day is fine?'

'A perfect August day.'

'I held her through it. I am thankful to heaven it was no other hand than
mine. She wished to spare me. She was glad of her Tony when the time
came. I thought I was a coward--I could have changed with her to save
her; I am a strong woman, fit to submit to that work. I should not have
borne it as she did. She expected to sink under it. All her dispositions
were made for death-bequests to servants and to . . . to friends: every
secret liking they had, thought of!'

Diana clenched her hands.

'I hope!' Dacier said.

'You shall hear regularly. Call at Sir William's house to-morrow. He
sleeps here to-night. The suspense must last for days. It is a question
of vital power to bear the shock. She has a mind so like a flying spirit
that, just before the moment, she made Mr. Lanyan Thomson smile by
quoting some saying of her Tony's.'

'Try by-and-by to recollect it,' said Dacier.

'And you were with that poor man! How did he pass the terrible time? I
pitied him.'

'He suffered; he prayed.'

'It was the best he could do. Mr. Redworth was as he always is at the
trial, a pillar. Happy the friend who knows him for one! He never thinks
of himself in a crisis. He is sheer strength to comfort and aid. They
will drive you to the station with Mr. Thomson. He returns to relieve Sir
William to-morrow. I have learnt to admire the men of the knife! No
profession equals theirs in self-command and beneficence. Dr. Bridgenorth
is permanent here.'

'I have a fly, and go back immediately,' said Dacier.

'She shall hear of your coming. Adieu.'

Diana gave him her hand. It was gently pressed.

A wonderment at the utter change of circumstances took Dacier passingly
at the sight of her vanishing figure.

He left the house, feeling he dared have no personal wishes. It had
ceased to be the lover's hypocrisy with him.

The crisis of mortal peril in that house enveloped its inmates, and so
wrought in him as to enshroud the stripped outcrying husband, of whom he
had no clear recollection, save of the man's agony. The two women,
striving against death, devoted in friendship, were the sole living
images he brought away; they were a new vision of the world and our life.

He hoped with Diana, bled with her. She rose above him high, beyond his
transient human claims. He envied Redworth the common friendly right to
be near her. In reflection, long after, her simplicity of speech, washed
pure of the blood-emotions, for token of her great nature, during those
two minutes of their sitting together, was, dearer, sweeter to the lover
than if she had shown by touch or word that a faint allusion to their
severance was in her mind; and this despite a certain vacancy it created.

He received formal information of Lady Dunstane's progress to
convalescence. By degrees the simply official tone of Diana's letters
combined with the ceasing of them and the absence of her personal charm
to make a gentleman not remarkable for violence in the passion so calmly
reasonable as to think the dangerous presence best avoided for a time.
Subject to fits of the passion, he certainly was, but his position in the
world was a counselling spouse, jealous of his good name. He did not
regret his proposal to take the leap; he would not have regretted it if
taken. On the safe side of the abyss, however, it wore a gruesome look to
his cool blood.




CHAPTER XXVII

CONTAINS MATTER FOR SUBSEQUENT EXPLOSION

Among the various letters inundating Sir Lukin Dunstane upon the report
of the triumph of surgical skill achieved by Sir William Macpherson and
Mr. Lanyan Thomson, was one from Lady Wathin, dated Adlands, an estate of
Mr. Quintin Manx's in Warwickshire, petitioning for the shortest line of
reassurance as to the condition of her dear cousin, and an intimation of
the period when it might be deemed possible for a relative to call and
offer her sincere congratulations: a letter deserving a personal reply,
one would suppose. She received the following, in a succinct female hand
corresponding to its terseness; every 't' righteously crossed, every 'i'
punctiliously dotted, as she remarked to Constance Asper, to whom the
communication was transferred for perusal:

   'DEAR LADY WATHIN,--Lady Dunstane is gaining strength. The measure
   of her pulse indicates favourably. She shall be informed in good
   time of your solicitude for her recovery. The day cannot yet be
   named for visits of any kind. You will receive information as soon
   as the house is open.

   'I have undertaken the task of correspondence, and beg you to
   believe me,

             'Very truly yours,
                       'D. A. WARWICK.'

Miss Asper speculated on the handwriting of her rival. She obtained
permission to keep the letter, with the intention of transmitting it per
post to an advertising interpreter of character in caligraphy.

Such was the character of the fair young heiress, exhibited by her
performances much more patently than the run of a quill would reveal it.

She said, 'It is rather a pretty hand, I think.'

'Mrs. Warwick is a practised writer,' said Lady Wathin. 'Writing is her
profession, if she has any. She goes to nurse my cousin. Her husband says
she is an excellent nurse. He says what he can for her. But you must be
in the last extremity, or she is ice. His appeal to her has been totally
disregarded. Until he drops down in the street, as his doctor expects him
to do some day, she will continue her course; and even then . . .' An
adventuress desiring her freedom! Lady Wathin looked. She was too devout
a woman to say what she thought. But she knew the world to be very
wicked. Of Mrs. Warwick, her opinion was formed. She would not have
charged the individual creature with a criminal design; all she did was
to stuff the person her virtue abhorred with the wickedness of the world,
and that is a common process in antipathy.

She sympathized, moreover, with the beautiful devotedness of the wealthy
heiress to her ideal of man. It had led her to make the acquaintance of
old Lady Dacier, at the house in town, where Constance Asper had first
met Percy; Mrs. Grafton Winstanley's house, representing neutral
territory or debateable land for the occasional intercourse of the upper
class and the climbing in the professions or in commerce; Mrs. Grafton
Winstanley being on the edge of aristocracy by birth, her husband, like
Mr. Quintin Manx, a lord of fleets. Old Lady Dacier's bluntness in
speaking of her grandson would have shocked Lady Wathin as much as it
astonished, had she been less of an ardent absorber of aristocratic
manners. Percy was plainly called a donkey, for hanging off and on with a
handsome girl of such expectations as Miss Asper. 'But what you can't do
with a horse, you can't hope to do with a donkey.' She added that she had
come for the purpose of seeing the heiress, of whose points of person she
delivered a judgement critically appreciative as a horsefancier's on the
racing turf. 'If a girl like that holds to it, she's pretty sure to get
him at last. It 's no use to pull his neck down to the water.'

Lady Wathin delicately alluded to rumours of an entanglement, an
admiration he had, ahem.

'A married woman,' the veteran nodded. 'I thought that was off? She must
be a clever intriguer to keep him so long.'

'She is undoubtedly clever,' said Lady Wathin, and it was mumbled in her
hearing: 'The woman seems to have a taste for our family.'

They agreed that they could see nothing to be done. The young lady must
wither, Mrs. Warwick have her day. The veteran confided her experienced
why to Lady Wathin: 'All the tales you tell of a woman of that sort are
sharp sauce to the palates of men.'

They might be, to the men of the dreadful gilded idle class!

Mrs. Warwick's day appeared indefinitely prolonged, judging by Percy
Dacier's behaviour to Miss Asper. Lady Wathin watched them narrowly when
she had the chance, a little ashamed of her sex, or indignant rather at
his display of courtliness in exchange for her open betrayal of her
preference. It was almost to be wished that she would punish him by
sacrificing herself to one of her many brilliant proposals of marriage.
But such are women!--precisely because of his holding back he tightened
the cord attaching him to her tenacious heart. This was the truth. For
the rest, he was gracefully courteous; an observer could perceive the
charm he exercised. He talked with a ready affability, latterly with
greater social ease; evidently not acting the indifferent conqueror, or
so consummately acting it as to mask the air. And yet he was ambitious,
and he was not rich. Notoriously was he ambitious, and with wealth to
back him, a great entertaining house, troops of adherents, he would
gather influence, be propelled to leadership. The vexation of a constant
itch to speak to him on the subject, and the recognition, that he knew it
all as well as she, tormented Lady Wathin. He gave her comforting news of
her dear cousin in the Winter.

'You have heard from Mrs. Warwick?' she said.

He replied, 'I had the latest from Mr. Redworth.'

'Mrs. Warwick has relinquished her post?'

'When she does, you may be sure that Lady Dunstane is, perfectly
reestablished.'

'She is an excellent nurse.'

'The best, I believe.'

'It is a good quality in sickness.'

'Proof of good all through.'

'Her husband might have the advantage of it. His state is really
pathetic. If she has feeling, and could only be made aware, she might
perhaps be persuaded to pass from the friendly to the wifely duty.'

Mr. Dacier bent his head to listen, and he bowed.

He was fast in the toils; and though we have assurance that evil cannot
triumph in perpetuity, the aspect of it throning provokes a kind of
despair. How strange if ultimately the lawyers once busy about the uncle
were to take up the case of the nephew, and this time reverse the issue,
by proving it! For poor Mr. Warwick was emphatic on the question of his
honour. It excited him dangerously. He was long-suffering, but with the
slightest clue terrible. The unknotting of the entanglement might thus
happen--and Constance Asper would welcome her hero still.

Meanwhile there was actually nothing to be done: a deplorable absence of
motive villainy; apparently an absence of the beneficent Power directing
events to their proper termination. Lady Wathin heard of her cousin's
having been removed to Cowes in May, for light Solent and Channel voyages
on board Lord Esquart's yacht. She heard also of heavy failures and
convulsions in the City of London, quite unconscious that the Fates, or
agents of the Providence she invoked to precipitate the catastrophe, were
then beginning cavernously their performance of the part of villain in
Diana's history.

Diana and Emma enjoyed happy quiet sailings under May breezes on the
many-coloured South-western waters, heart in heart again; the physical
weakness of the one, the moral weakness of the other, creating that
mutual dependency which makes friendship a pulsating tie. Diana's
confession had come of her letter to Emma. When the latter was able to
examine her correspondence, Diana brought her the heap for perusal, her
own sealed scribble, throbbing with all the fatal might-have-been, under
her eyes. She could have concealed and destroyed it. She sat beside her
friend, awaiting her turn, hearing her say at the superscription: 'Your
writing, Tony?' and she nodded. She was asked: 'Shall I read it?' She
answered: 'Read.' They were soon locked in an embrace. Emma had no
perception of coldness through those brief dry lines; her thought was of
the matter.

'The danger is over now?' she said.

'Yes, that danger is over now.'

'You have weathered it?'

'I love him.'

Emma dropped a heavy sigh in pity of her, remotely in compassion for
Redworth, the loving and unbeloved. She was too humane and wise of our
nature to chide her Tony for having her sex's heart. She had charity to
bestow on women; in defence of them against men and the world, it was a
charity armed with the weapons of battle. The wife madly stripped before
the world by a jealous husband, and left chained to the rock, her youth
wasting, her blood arrested, her sensibilities chilled and assailing her
under their multitudinous disguises, and for whom the world is merciless,
called forth Emma's tenderest commiseration; and that wife being Tony,
and stricken with the curse of love, in other circumstances the blessing,
Emma bled for her.

'But nothing desperate?' she said.

'No; you have saved me.'

'I would knock at death's doors again, and pass them, to be sure of
that.'

'Kiss me; you may be sure. I would not put my lips to your cheek if there
were danger of my faltering.'

'But you love him.'

'I do: and because I love him I will not let him be fettered to me.'

'You will see him.'

'Do not imagine that his persuasions undermined your Tony. I am subject
to panics.'

'Was it your husband?'

'I had a visit from Lady Wathin. She knows him. She came as peacemaker.
She managed to hint at his authority. Then came a letter from him--of
supplication, interpenetrated with the hint: a suffused atmosphere. Upon
that; unexpected by me, my--let me call him so once, forgive me!--lover
came. Oh! he loves me, or did then. Percy! He had been told that I should
be claimed. I felt myself the creature I am--a wreck of marriage. But I
fancied I could serve him:--I saw golden. My vanity was the chief
traitor. Cowardice of course played a part. In few things that we do,
where self is concerned, will cowardice not be found. And the
hallucination colours it to seem a lovely heroism. That was the second
time Mr. Redworth arrived. I am always at crossways, and he rescues me;
on this occasion unknowingly.'

'There's a divinity . . .' said Emma. 'When I think of it I perceive
that Patience is our beneficent fairy godmother, who brings us our
harvest in the long result.'

'My dear, does she bring us our labourers' rations, to sustain us for the
day?' said Diana.'

'Poor fare, but enough.'

'I fear I was born godmotherless.'

'You have stores of patience, Tony; only now and then fits of
desperation.'

'My nature's frailty, the gap in it: we will give it no fine names--they
cover our pitfalls. I am open to be carried on a tide of unreasonableness
when the coward cries out. But I can say, dear, that after one rescue, a
similar temptation is unlikely to master me. I do not subscribe to the
world's decrees for love of the monster, though I am beginning to
understand the dues of allegiance. We have ceased to write letters. You
may have faith in me.'

'I have, with my whole soul,' said Emma.

So the confession closed; and in the present instance there were not any
forgotten chambers to be unlocked and ransacked for addenda confessions.

The subjects discoursed of by the two endeared the hours to them. They
were aware that the English of the period would have laughed a couple of
women to scorn for venturing on them, and they were not a little hostile
in consequence, and shot their epigrams profusely, applauding the keener
that appeared to score the giant bulk of their intolerant enemy, who
holds the day, but not the morrow. Us too he holds for the day, to punish
us if we have temporal cravings. He scatters his gifts to the abject;
tossing to us rebels bare dog-biscuit. But the life of the spirit is
beyond his region; we have our morrow in his day when we crave nought of
him. Diana and Emma delighted to discover that they were each the rebel
of their earlier and less experienced years; each a member of the
malcontent minor faction, the salt of earth, to whom their salt must
serve for nourishment, as they admitted, relishing it determinedly, not
without gratification.

Sir Lukin was busy upon his estate in Scotland. They summoned young
Arthur Rhodes to the island, that he might have a taste of the new
scenes. Diana was always wishing for his instruction and refreshment; and
Redworth came to spend a Saturday and Sunday with them, and showed his
disgust of the idle boy, as usual, at the same time consulting them on
the topic of furniture for the Berkshire mansion he had recently bought,
rather vaunting the Spanish pictures his commissioner in Madrid was
transmitting. The pair of rebels, vexed by his treatment of the
respectful junior, took him for an incarnation of their enemy, and pecked
and worried the man astonishingly. He submitted to it like the placable
giant. Yes, he was a Liberal, and furnishing and decorating the house in
the stability of which he trusted. Why not? We must accept the world as
it is, try to improve it by degrees.--Not so: humanity will not wait for
you, the victims are shrieking beneath the bricks of your enormous
edifice, behind the canvas of your pictures. 'But you may really say that
luxurious yachting is an odd kind of insurgency,' avowed Diana. 'It's the
tangle we are in.'

'It's the coat we have to wear; and why fret at it for being
comfortable?'

'I don't half enough, when I think of my shivering neighbours.'

'Money is of course a rough test of virtue,' said Redworth. 'We have no
other general test.'

Money! The ladies proclaimed it a mere material test; Diana, gazing on
sunny sea, with an especial disdain. And name us your sort of virtue.
There is more virtue in poverty, He denied that. Inflexibly British, he
declared money, and also the art of getting money, to be hereditary
virtues, deserving of their reward. The reward a superior wealth and its
fruits? Yes, the power to enjoy and spread enjoyment: and let idleness
envy both! He abused idleness, and by implication the dilettante
insurgency fostering it. However, he was compensatingly heterodox in his
view of the Law's persecution of women; their pertinacious harpings on
the theme had brought him to that; and in consideration of the fact, as
they looked from yacht to shore, of their being rebels participating
largely in the pleasures of the tyrant's court, they allowed him to
silence them, and forgave him.

Thoughts upon money and idleness were in confusion with Diana. She had a
household to support in London, and she was not working; she could not
touch THE CANTATRICE while Emma was near. Possibly, she again ejaculated,
the Redworths of the world were right: the fruitful labours were with the
mattock and hoe, or the mind directing them. It was a crushing invasion
of materialism, so she proposed a sail to the coast of France, and
thither they flew, touching Cherbourg, Alderney, Sark, Guernsey, and
sighting the low Brittany rocks. Memorable days to Arthur Rhodes. He saw
perpetually the one golden centre in new scenes. He heard her voice, he
treasured her sayings; her gestures, her play of lip and eyelid, her lift
of head, lightest movements, were imprinted on him, surely as the heavens
are mirrored in the quiet seas, firmly and richly as earth answers to the
sprinkled grain. For he was blissfully athirst, untroubled by a hope. She
gave him more than she knew of: a present that kept its beating heart
into the future; a height of sky, a belief in nobility, permanent through
manhood down to age. She was his foam-born Goddess of those leaping
waters; differently hued, crescented, a different influence. He had a
happy week, and it charmed Diana to hear him tell her so. In spite of
Redworth, she had faith in the fruit-bearing powers of a time of simple
happiness, and shared the youth's in reflecting it. Only the happiness
must be simple, that of the glass to the lovely face: no straining of
arms to retain, no heaving of the bosom in vacancy.

His poverty and capacity for pure enjoyment led her to think of him
almost clingingly when hard news reached her from the quaint old City of
London, which despises poverty and authorcraft and all mean adventurers,
and bows to the lordly merchant, the mighty financier, Redworth's
incarnation of the virtues. Happy days on board the yacht Clarissa! Diana
had to recall them with effort. They who sow their money for a promising
high percentage have built their habitations on the sides of the most
eruptive mountain in Europe. AEtna supplies more certain harvests, wrecks
fewer vineyards and peaceful dwellings. The greed of gain is our volcano.
Her wonder leapt up at the slight inducement she had received to embark
her money in this Company: a South-American mine, collapsed almost within
hearing of the trumpets of prospectus, after two punctual payments of the
half-yearly interest. A Mrs. Ferdinand Cherson, an elder sister of the
pretty Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett, had talked to her of the cost of things one
afternoon at Lady Singleby's garden-party, and spoken of the City as the
place to help to swell an income, if only you have an acquaintance with
some of the chief City men. The great mine was named, and the rush for
allotments. She knew a couple of the Directors. They vowed to her that
ten per cent. was a trifle; the fortune to be expected out of the mine
was already clearly estimable at forties and fifties. For their part they
anticipated cent. per cent. Mrs. Cherson said she wanted money, and had
therefore invested in the mine. It seemed so consequent, the cost of
things being enormous! She and her sister Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett owned
husbands who did their bidding, because of their having the brains, it
might be understood. Thus five thousand pounds invested would speedily
bring five thousand pounds per annum. Diana had often dreamed of the City
of London as the seat of magic; and taking the City's contempt for
authorcraft and the intangible as, from its point of view, justly
founded, she had mixed her dream strangely with an ancient notion of the
City's probity. Her broker's shaking head did not damp her ardour for
shares to the full amount of her ability to purchase. She remembered her
satisfaction at the allotment; the golden castle shot up from this
fountain mine. She had a frenzy for mines and fished in some English with
smaller sums. 'I am now a miner,' she had exclaimed, between dismay at
her audacity and the pride of it. Why had she not consulted Redworth? He
would peremptorily have stopped the frenzy in its first intoxicating
effervescence. She, like Mrs. Cherson, like all women who have plunged
upon the cost of things, wanted money. She naturally went to the mine.
Address him for counsel in the person of dupe, she could not; shame was a
barrier. Could she tell him that the prattle of a woman, spendthrift as
Mrs. Cherson, had induced her to risk her money? Latterly the reports of
Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett were not of the flavour to make association of their
names agreeable to his hearing.

She had to sit down in the buzz of her self-reproaches and amazement at
the behaviour of that reputable City, shrug, and recommence the labour of
her pen. Material misfortune had this one advantage; it kept her from
speculative thoughts of her lover, and the meaning of his absence and,
silence.

Diana's perusal of the incomplete CANTATRICE was done with the cold
critical eye interpreting for the public. She was forced to write on
nevertheless, and exactly in the ruts of the foregoing matter. It
propelled her. No longer perversely, of necessity she wrote her best,
convinced that the work was doomed to unpopularity, resolved that it
should be at least a victory in style. A fit of angry cynicism now and
then set her composing phrases as baits for the critics to quote,
condemnatory of the attractiveness of the work. Her mood was bad. In
addition, she found Whitmonby cool; he complained of the coolness of her
letter of adieu; complained of her leaving London so long. How could she
expect to be his Queen of the London Salon if she lost touch of the
topics? He made no other allusion. They were soon on amicable terms, at
the expense of flattering arts that she had not hitherto practised. But
Westlake revealed unimagined marvels of the odd corners of the masculine
bosom. He was the man of her circle the neatest in epigram, the widest of
survey, an Oriental traveller, a distinguished writer, and if not
personally bewitching, remarkably a gentleman of the world. He was
wounded; he said as much. It came to this: admitting that he had no
claims, he declared it to be unbearable for him to see another preferred.
The happier was unmentioned, and Diana scraped his wound by rallying him.
He repeated that he asked only to stand on equal terms with the others;
her preference of one was past his tolerance. She told him that since
leaving Lady Dunstane she had seen but Whitmonby, Wilmers, and him. He
smiled sarcastically, saying he had never had a letter from her, except
the formal one of invitation.

'Powers of blarney, have you forsaken a daughter of Erin?' cried Diana.
'Here is a friend who has a craving for you, and I talk sense to him. I
have written to none of my set since I last left London.'

She pacified him by doses of cajolery new to her tongue. She liked him,
abhorred the thought of losing any of her friends, so the cajoling
sentences ran until Westlake betrayed an inflammable composition, and had
to be put out, and smoked sullenly. Her resources were tried in restoring
him to reason. The months of absence from London appeared to have
transformed her world. Tonans was moderate. The great editor rebuked her
for her prolonged absence from London, not so much because it discrowned
her as Queen of the Salon, but candidly for its rendering her service
less to him. Everything she knew of men and affairs was to him stale.

'How do you get to the secrets?' she asked.

'By sticking to the centre of them,' he said.

'But how do you manage to be in advance and act the prophet?'

'Because I will have them at any price, and that is known.'

She hinted at the peccant City Company.

'I think I have checked the mining mania, as I did the railway,' said he;
'and so far it was a public service. There's no checking of maniacs.'

She took her whipping within and without. 'On another occasion I shall
apply to you, Mr. Tonans.'

'Ah, there was a time when you could have been a treasure to me,' he
rejoined; alluding of course to the Dannisburgh days.

In dejection, as she mused on those days, and on her foolish ambition to
have a London house where her light might burn, she advised herself, with
Redworth's voice, to quit the house, arrest expenditure, and try for
happiness by burning and shining in the spirit: devoting herself, as
Arthur Rhodes did, purely to literature. It became almost a decision.

Percy she had still neither written to nor heard from, and she dared not
hope to meet him. She fancied a wish to have tidings of his marriage: it
would be peace; if in desolation. Now that she had confessed and given
her pledge to Emma, she had so far broken with him as to render the
holding him chained a cruelty, and his reserve whispered of a rational
acceptance of the end between them. She thanked him for it; an act
whereby she was: instantly melted to such softness that a dread of him
haunted her. Coward, take up your burden for armour! she called to her
poor dungeoned self wailing to have common nourishment. She knew how
prodigiously it waxed on crumbs; nay, on the imagination of small
morsels. By way of chastizing it, she reviewed her life, her behaviour to
her husband, until she sank backward to a depth deprived of air and
light. That life with her husband was a dungeon to her nature deeper than
any imposed by present conditions. She was then a revolutionary to reach
to the breath of day. She had now to be, only not a coward, and she could
breathe as others did. 'Women who sap the moral laws pull down the
pillars of the temple on their sex,' Emma had said. Diana perceived
something of her personal debt to civilization. Her struggles passed into
the doomed CANTATRICE occupying days and nights under pressure for
immediate payment; the silencing of friend Debit, ridiculously calling
himself Credit, in contempt of sex and conduct, on the ground, that he
was he solely by virtue of being she. He had got a trick of singing
operatic solos in the form and style of the delightful tenor Tellio, and
they were touching in absurdity, most real in unreality. Exquisitely
trilled, after Tellio's manner,

          'The tradesmen all beseech ye,
          The landlord, cook and maid,
          Complete THE CANTATRICE,
          That they may soon be paid.'

provoked her to laughter in pathos. He approached, posturing himself
operatically, with perpetual new verses, rhymes to Danvers, rhymes to
Madame Sybille, the cook. Seeing Tellio at one of Henry Wilmers' private
concerts, Diana's lips twitched to dimples at the likeness her familiar
had assumed. She had to compose her countenance to talk to him; but the
moment of song was the trial. Lady Singleby sat beside her, and remarked:

'You have always fun going on in you!' She partook of the general
impression that Diana Warwick was too humorous to nurse a downright
passion.

Before leaving, she engaged Diana to her annual garden-party of the
closing season, and there the meeting with Percy occurred, not
unobserved. Had they been overheard, very little to implicate them would
have been gathered. He walked in full view across the lawn to her, and
they presented mask to mask.

'The beauty of the day tempts you at last, Mrs. Warwick.'

'I have been finishing a piece of work.'

Lovely weather, beautiful dresses: agreed. Diana wore a yellow robe with
a black bonnet, and he commented on the becoming hues; for the first
time, he noticed her dress! Lovely women? Dacier hesitated. One he saw.
But surely he must admire Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett? And who steps beside her,
transparently fascinated, with visage at three-quarters to the rays
within her bonnet? Can it be Sir Lukin Dunstane? and beholding none but
his charmer!

Dacier withdrew his eyes thoughtfully from the spectacle, and moved to
woo Diana to a stroll. She could not restrain her feet; she was out of
the ring of her courtiers for the moment. He had seized his opportunity.

'It is nearly a year!' he said.

'I have been nursing nearly all the time, doing the work I do best.'

'Unaltered?'

'A year must leave its marks.'

'Tony!'

'You speak of a madwoman, a good eleven months dead. Let her rest. Those
are the conditions.'

'Accepted, if I may see her.'

'Honestly accepted?'

'Imposed fatally, I have to own. I have felt with you: you are the wiser.
But, admitting that, surely we can meet. I may see you?'

'My house has not been shut.'

'I respected the house. I distrusted myself.'

'What restores your confidence?'

'The strength I draw from you.'

One of the Beauties at a garden-party is lucky to get as many minutes as
had passed in quietness. Diana was met and captured. But those last words
of Percy's renewed her pride in him by suddenly building a firm faith in
herself. Noblest of lovers! she thought, and brooded on the little that
had been spoken, the much conveyed, for a proof of perfect truthfulness.

The world had watched them. It pronounced them discreet if culpable;
probably cold to the passion both. Of Dacier's coldness it had no doubt,
and Diana's was presumed from her comical flights of speech. She was
given to him because of the known failure of her other adorers. He in the
front rank of politicians attracted her with the lustre of his ambition;
she him with her mingling of talent and beauty. An astute world; right in
the main, owing to perceptions based upon brute nature; utterly astray in
particulars, for the reason that it takes no count of the soul of man or
woman. Hence its glee at a catastrophe; its poor stock of mercy. And when
no catastrophe follows, the prophet, for the honour of the profession,
must decry her as cunning beyond aught yet revealed of a serpent sex.

Save for a word or two, the watchman might have overheard and trumpeted
his report of their interview at Diana's house. After the first pained
breathing, when they found themselves alone in that room where they had
plighted their fortunes, they talked allusively to define the terms
imposed on them by Reason. The thwarted step was unmentioned; it was a
past madness. But Wisdom being recognized, they could meet. It would be
hard if that were denied! They talked very little of their position; both
understood the mutual acceptance of it; and now that he had seen her and
was again under the spell, Dacier's rational mind, together with his
delight in her presence, compelled him honourably to bow to the terms.
Only, as these were severe upon lovers, the innocence of their meetings
demanded indemnification in frequency.

'Come whenever you think I can be useful,' said Diana.

They pressed hands at parting, firmly and briefly, not for the ordinary
dactylology of lovers, but in sign of the treaty of amity.

She soon learnt that she had tied herself to her costly household.




CHAPTER XXVIII

DIALOGUE ROUND THE SUBJECT OF A PORTRAIT, WITH SOME INDICATIONS OF THE
TASK FOR DIANA

An enamoured Egeria who is not a princess in her worldly state nor a
goddess by origin has to play one of those parts which strain the woman's
faculties past naturalness. She must never expose her feelings to her
lover; she must make her counsel weighty--otherwise she is little his
nymph of the pure wells, and what she soon may be, the world will say.
She has also, most imperatively, to dazzle him without the betrayal of
artifice, where simple spontaneousness is beyond conjuring. But feelings
that are constrained becloud the judgement besides arresting the fine jet
of delivery wherewith the mastered lover is taught through his ears to
think himself prompted, and submit to be controlled, by a creature
super-feminine. She must make her counsel so weighty in poignant praises
as to repress impulses that would rouse her own; and her betraying
impulsiveness was a subject of reflection to Diana after she had given
Percy Dacier, metaphorically, the key of her house. Only as true Egeria
could she receive him. She was therefore grateful, she thanked and
venerated this noblest of lovers for his not pressing to the word of
love, and so strengthening her to point his mind, freshen his moral
energies and inspirit him. His chivalrous acceptance of the conditions of
their renewed intimacy was a radiant knightliness to Diana, elevating her
with a living image for worship:--he so near once to being the absolute
lord of her destinies! How to reward him, was her sole dangerous thought.
She prayed and strove that she might give him of her best, to practically
help him; and she had reason to suppose she could do it, from the visible
effect of her phrases. He glistened in repeating them; he had fallen into
the habit; before witnesses too; in the presence of Miss Paynham, who had
taken earnestly to the art of painting, and obtained her dear Mrs.
Warwick's promise of a few sittings for the sketch of a portrait, near
the close of the season. 'A very daring thing to attempt,' Miss Paynham
said, when he was comparing her first outlines and the beautiful
breathing features. 'Even if one gets the face, the lips will seem
speechless, to those who know her.'

'If they have no recollection,' said Dacier.

'I mean, the endeavour should be to represent them at the moment of
speaking.'

'Put it into the eyes.' He looked at the eyes.

She looked at the mouth. 'But it is the mouth, more than the eyes.'

He looked at the face. 'Where there is character, you have only to study
it to be sure of a likeness.'

'That is the task, with one who utters jewels, Mr. Dacier.'

'Bright wit, I fear, is above the powers of your art.'

'Still I feel it could be done. See--now--that!'

Diana's lips had opened to say: 'Confess me a model model: I am dissected
while I sit for portrayal. I must be for a moment like the frog of the
two countrymen who were disputing as to the manner of his death, when he
stretched to yawn, upon which they agreed that he had defeated the truth
for both of them. I am not quite inanimate.'

'Irish countrymen,' said Dacier.

'The story adds, that blows were arrested; so confer the nationality as
you please.'

Diana had often to divert him from a too intent perusal of her features
with sparkles and stories current or invented to serve the immediate
purpose.

Miss Paynham was Mrs. Warwick's guest for a fortnight, and observed them
together. She sometimes charitably laid down her pencil and left them,
having forgotten this or that. They were conversing of general matters
with their usual crisp precision on her return, and she was rather like
the two countrymen, in debating whether it was excess of coolness or
discreetness; though she was convinced of their inclinations, and
expected love some day to be leaping up. Diana noticed that she had no
reminder for leaving the room when it was Mr. Redworth present. These two
had become very friendly, according to her hopes; and Miss Paynham was
extremely solicitous to draw suggestions from Mr. Redworth and win his
approval.

'Do I appear likely to catch the mouth now, do you think, Mr. Redworth?'

He remarked, smiling at Diana's expressive dimple, that the mouth was
difficult to catch. He did not gaze intently. Mr. Redworth was the genius
of friendship, 'the friend of women,' Mrs. Warwick had said of him. Miss
Paynham discovered it, as regarded herself. The portrait was his
commission to her, kindly proposed, secretly of course, to give her
occupation and the chance of winning a vogue with the face of a famous
Beauty. So many, however, were Mrs. Warwick's visitors, and so lively the
chatter she directed, that accurate sketching was difficult to an
amateurish hand. Whitmonby, Sullivan Smith, Westlake, Henry Wilmers,
Arthur Rhodes, and other gentlemen, literary and military, were almost
daily visitors when it became known that the tedium of the beautiful
sitter required beguiling and there was a certainty of finding her at
home. On Mrs. Warwick's Wednesday numerous ladies decorated the group.
Then was heard such a rillet of dialogue without scandal or politics, as
nowhere else in Britain; all vowed it subsequently; for to the
remembrance it seemed magical. Not a breath of scandal, and yet the
liveliest flow. Lady Pennon came attended by a Mr. Alexander Hepburn, a
handsome Scot, at whom Dacier shot one of his instinctive keen glances,
before seeing that the hostess had mounted a transient colour. Mr.
Hepburn, in settling himself on his chair rather too briskly, contrived
the next minute to break a precious bit of China standing by his elbow;
and Lady Pennon cried out, with sympathetic anguish: 'Oh, my dear, what a
trial for you!'

'Brittle is foredoomed,' said Diana, unruffled.

She deserved compliments, and would have had them if she had not wounded
the most jealous and petulant of her courtiers.

'Then the Turk is a sapient custodian!' said Westlake, vexed with her
flush at the entrance of the Scot.

Diana sedately took his challenge. 'We, Mr. Westlake, have the philosophy
of ownership.'

Mr. Hepburn penitentially knelt to pick up the fragments, and Westlake
murmured over his head: 'As long as it is we who are the cracked.'

'Did we not start from China?'

'We were consequently precipitated to Stamboul.'

'You try to elude the lesson.'

'I remember my first paedagogue telling me so when he rapped the book on
my cranium.'

'The mark of the book is not a disfigurement.'

It was gently worded, and the shrewder for it. The mark of the book, if
not a disfigurement, was a characteristic of Westlake's fashion of
speech. Whitmonby nodded twice, for signification of a palpable hit in
that bout; and he noted within him the foolishness of obtruding the
remotest allusion to our personality when crossing the foils with a
woman. She is down on it like the lightning, quick as she is in her
contracted circle, politeness guarding her from a riposte.

Mr. Hepburn apologized very humbly, after regaining his chair. Diana
smiled and said: 'Incidents in a drawing-room are prize-shots at
Dulness.'

'And in a dining-room too,' added Sullivan Smith. 'I was one day at a
dinner-party, apparently of undertakers hired to mourn over the joints
and the birds in the dishes, when the ceiling came down, and we all
sprang up merry as crickets. It led to a pretty encounter and a real
prize-shot.'

'Does that signify a duel?' asked Lady Pennon.

''Twould be the vulgar title, to bring it into discredit with the
populace, my lady.'

'Rank me one of the populace then! I hate duelling and rejoice that it is
discountenanced.'

'The citizens, and not the populace, I think Mr. Sullivan Smith means,'
Diana said. 'The citizen is generally right in morals. My father also was
against the practice, when it raged at its "prettiest." I have heard him
relate a story of a poor friend of his, who had to march out for a
trifle, and said, as he accepted the invitation, "It's all nonsense!" and
walking to the measured length, "It's all nonsense, you know!" and when
lying on the ground, at his last gasp, "I told you it was all nonsense!"'

Sullivan Smith leaned over to Whitmonby and Dacier amid the ejaculations,
and whispered: 'A lady's way of telling the story!--and excuseable to
her:--she had to Jonah the adjective. What the poor fellow said was--' He
murmured the sixty-pounder adjective, as in the belly of the whale, to
rightly emphasize his noun.

Whitmonby nodded to the superior relish imparted by the vigour of
masculine veracity in narration. 'A story for its native sauce piquante,'
he said.

'Nothing without it!'

They had each a dissolving grain of contempt for women compelled by their
delicacy to spoil that kind of story which demands the piquant
accompaniment to flavour it racily and make it passable. For to see
insipid mildness complacently swallowed as an excellent thing, knowing
the rich smack of savour proper to the story, is your anecdotal
gentleman's annoyance. But if the anecdote had supported him, Sullivan
Smith would have let the expletive rest.

Major Carew Mahoney capped Mrs. Warwick's tale of the unfortunate
duellist with another, that confessed the practice absurd, though he
approved of it; and he cited Lord Larrian's opinion: 'It keeps men braced
to civil conduct.'

'I would not differ with the dear old lord; but no! the pistol is the
sceptre of the bully,' said Diana.

Mr. Hepburn, with the widest of eyes on her in perpetuity, warmly agreed;
and the man was notorious among men for his contrary action.

'Most righteously our Princess Egeria distinguishes her reign by
prohibiting it,' said Lady Singleby.

'And how,' Sullivan Smith sighed heavily, 'how, I'd ask, are ladies to be
protected from the bully?'

He was beset: 'So it was all for us? all in consideration for our
benefit?'

He mournfully exclaimed: 'Why, surely!'

'That is the funeral apology of the Rod, at the close of every barbarous
chapter,' said Diana.

'Too fine in mind, too fat in body; that is a consequence with men, dear
madam. The conqueror stands to his weapons, or he loses his possessions.'

'Mr. Sullivan Smith jumps at his pleasure from the special to the
general, and will be back, if we follow him, Lady Pennon. It is the trick
men charge to women, showing that they can resemble us.'

Lady Pennon thumped her knee. 'Not a bit. There's no resemblance, and
they know nothing of us.'

'Women are a blank to them, I believe,' said Whitmonby, treacherously
bowing;--and Westlake said:

'Traces of a singular scrawl have been observed when they were held in
close proximity to the fire.'

'Once, on the top of a coach,' Whitmonby resumed, 'I heard a comely dame
of the period when summers are ceasing threatened by her husband with a
divorce, for omitting to put sandwiches in their luncheon-basket. She
made him the inscrutable answer: "Ah, poor man! you will go down ignorant
to your grave!" We laughed, and to this day I cannot tell you why.'

'That laugh was from a basket lacking provision; and I think we could
trace our separation to it,' Diana said to Lady Pennon, who replied:
'They expose themselves; they get no nearer to the riddle.'

Miss Courtney, a rising young actress, encouraged by a smile from Mrs.
Warwick, remarked: 'On the stage, we have each our parts equally.'

'And speaking parts; not personae mutae.'

'The stage has advanced in verisimilitude,' Henry Wilmers added slyly;
and Diana rejoined: 'You recognize a verisimilitude of the mirror when it
is in advance of reality. Flatter the sketch, Miss Paynham, for a
likeness to be seen. Probably there are still Old Conservatives who would
prefer the personation of us by boys.'

'I don't know,' Westlake affected dubiousness. 'I have heard that a step
to the riddle is gained by a serious contemplation of boys.'

'Serious?'

'That is the doubt.'

'The doubt throws its light on the step!'

'I advise them not to take any leap from their step,' said Lady Pennon.

'It would be a way of learning that we are no wiser than our sires; but
perhaps too painful a way,' Whitmonby observed. 'Poor Mountford Wilts
boasted of knowing women; and--he married. To jump into the mouth of the
enigma, is not to read it.'

'You are figures of conceit when you speculate on us, Mr. Whitmonby.'

'An occupation of our leisure, my lady, for your amusement.'

'The leisure of the humming-top, a thousand to the minute, with the
pretence that it sleeps!' Diana said.

'The sacrilegious hand to strip you of your mystery is withered as it
stretches,' exclaimed Westlake. 'The sage and the devout are in accord
for once.'

'And whichever of the two I may be, I'm one of them, happy to do my
homage blindfold!' Sullivan Smith waved the sign of it.

Diana sent her eyes over him and Mr. Hepburn, seeing Dacier. 'That rosy
mediaevalism seems the utmost we can expect.' An instant she saddened,
foreboding her words to be ominous, because of suddenly thirsting for a
modern cry from him, the silent. She quitted her woman's fit of
earnestness, and took to the humour that pleased him. 'Aslauga's knight,
at his blind man's buff of devotion, catches the hem of the tapestry and
is found by his lady kissing it in a trance of homage five hours long!
Sir Hilary of Agincourt, returned from the wars to his castle at
midnight, hears that the chitellaine is away dancing, and remains with
all his men mounted in the courtyard till the grey morn brings her back!
Adorable! We had a flag flying in those days. Since men began to fret the
riddle, they have hauled it down half-mast. Soon we shall behold a bare
pole and hats on around it. That is their solution.'

A smile circled at the hearing of Lady Singleby say: 'Well, I am all for
our own times, however literal the men.'

'We are two different species!' thumped Lady Pennon, swimming on the
theme. 'I am sure, I read what they write of women! And their heroines!'

Lady Esquart acquiesced: 'We are utter fools or horrid knaves.'

'Nature's original hieroglyphs--which have that appearance to the
peruser,' Westlake assented.

'And when they would decipher us, and they hit on one of our "arts," the
literary pirouette they perform is memorable.' Diana looked invitingly at
Dacier. 'But I for one discern a possible relationship and a likeness.'

'I think it exists--behind a curtain,' Dacier replied.

'Before the era of the Nursery. Liberty to grow; independence is the key
of the secret.'

'And what comes after the independence?' he inquired.

Whitmonby, musing that some distraction of an earnest incentive spoilt
Mrs. Warwick's wit, informed him: 'The two different species then break
their shallow armistice and join the shock of battle for possession of
the earth, and we are outnumbered and exterminated, to a certainty. So I
am against independence.'

'Socially a Mussulman, subject to explosions!' Diana said. 'So the
eternal duel between us is maintained, and men will protest that they are
for civilization. Dear me, I should like to write a sketch of the women
of the future--don't be afraid!--the far future. What a different earth
you will see!'

And very different creatures! the gentlemen unanimously surmised.
Westlake described the fairer portion, no longer the weaker; frightful
hosts.

Diana promised him a sweeter picture, if ever she brought her hand to
paint it.

'You would be offered up to the English national hangman, Jehoiachim
Sneer,' interposed Arthur Rhodes, evidently firing a gun too big for him,
of premeditated charging, as his patroness perceived; but she knew him to
be smarting under recent applications of the swish of Mr. Sneer, and that
he rushed to support her. She covered him by saying: 'If he has to be
encountered, he kills none but the cripple,' wherewith the dead pause
ensuing from a dose of outlandish speech in good company was bridged,
though the youth heard Westlake mutter unpleasantly: 'Jehoiachim,' and
had to endure a stare of Dacier's, who did not conceal his want of
comprehension of the place he occupied in Mrs. Warwick's gatherings.

'They know nothing of us whatever!' Lady Pennon harped on her dictum.

'They put us in a case and profoundly study the captive creature,' said
Diana: 'but would any man understand this . . . ?' She dropped her voice
and drew in the heads of Lady Pennon, Lady Singleby, Lady Esquart and
Miss Courtney: 'Real woman's nature speaks. A maid of mine had a
"follower." She was a good girl; I was anxious about her and asked her if
she could trust him. "Oh, yes, ma'am," she replied, "I can; he's quite
like a female." I longed to see the young man, to tell him he had
received the highest of eulogies.'

The ladies appreciatingly declared that such a tale was beyond the
understandings of men. Miss Paynham primmed her mouth, admitting to
herself her inability to repeat such a tale; an act that she deemed not
'quite like a lady.' She had previously come to the conclusion that Mrs.
Warwick, with all her generous qualities, was deficient in delicate
sentiment--owing perhaps to her coldness of temperament. Like Dacier
also, she failed to comprehend the patronage of Mr. Rhodes: it led to
suppositions; indefinite truly, and not calumnious at all; but a young
poet, rather good-looking and well built, is not the same kind of
wing-chick as a young actress, like Miss Courtney--Mrs. Warwick's latest
shieldling: he is hardly enrolled for the reason that was assumed to
sanction Mrs. Warwick's maid in the encouragement of her follower. Miss
Paynham sketched on, with her thoughts in her bosom: a damsel
castigatingly pursued by the idea of sex as the direct motive of every
act of every person surrounding, her; deductively therefore that a
certain form of the impelling passion, mild or terrible, or capricious,
or it might be less pardonable, was unceasingly at work among the human
couples up to decrepitude. And she too frequently hit the fact to doubt
her gift of reading into them. Mr. Dacier was plain, and the state of
young Mr. Rhodes; and the Scottish gentleman was at least a vehement
admirer. But she penetrated the breast of Mr. Thomas Redworth as well,
mentally tore his mask of friendship to shreds. He was kind indeed in
commissioning her to do the portrait. His desire for it, and his urgency
to have the features exactly given, besides the infrequency of his visits
of late, when a favoured gentleman was present, were the betraying signs.
Deductively, moreover, the lady who inspired the passion in numbers of
gentlemen and set herself to win their admiration with her lively play of
dialogue, must be coquettish; she could hold them only by coldness.
Anecdotes, epigrams, drolleries, do not bubble to the lips of a woman who
is under an emotional spell: rather they prove that she has the spell for
casting. It suited Mr. Dacier, Miss Paynham thought: it was cruel to Mr.
Redworth; at whom, of all her circle, the beautiful woman looked, when
speaking to him, sometimes tenderly.

'Beware the silent one of an assembly!' Diana had written. She did not
think of her words while Miss Paynham continued mutely sketching. The
silent ones, with much conversation around them, have their heads at
work, critically perforce; the faster if their hands are occupied; and
the point they lean to do is the pivot of their thoughts. Miss Paynham
felt for Mr. Redworth.

Diana was unaware of any other critic present than him she sought to
enliven, not unsuccessfully, notwithstanding his English objection to the
pitch of the converse she led, and a suspicion of effort to support
it:--just a doubt, with all her easy voluble run, of the possibility of
naturalness in a continuous cleverness. But he signified pleasure, and in
pleasing him she was happy: in the knowledge that she dazzled, was her
sense of safety. Percy hated scandal; he heard none. He wanted stirring,
cheering; in her house he had it. He came daily, and as it was her wish
that new themes, new flights of converse, should delight him and show her
exhaustless, to preserve her ascendancy, she welcomed him without
consulting the world. He was witness of Mr. Hepburn's presentation of a
costly China vase, to repair the breach in her array of ornaments, and
excuse a visit. Judging by the absence of any blow within, he saw not a
sign of coquettry. Some such visit had been anticipated by the prescient
woman, so there was no reddening. She brought about an exchange of
sentences between him and her furious admirer, sparing either of them a
glimpse of which was the sacrifice to the other, amusing them both.
Dacier could allow Mr. Hepburn to outsit him; and he left them, proud of
his absolute confidence in her.

She was mistaken in imagining that her social vivacity, mixed with
comradeship of the active intellect, was the charm which kept Mr. Percy
Dacier temperate when he well knew her to distinguish him above her
courtiers. Her powers of dazzling kept him tame; they did not stamp her
mark on him. He was one of the order of highly polished men, ignorant of
women, who are impressed for long terms by temporary flashes, that hold
them bound until a fresh impression comes, to confirm or obliterate the
preceding. Affairs of the world he could treat competently; he had a head
for high politics and the management of men; the feminine half of the
world was a confusion and a vexation to his intelligence, characterless;
and one woman at last appearing decipherable, he fancied it must be owing
to her possession of character, a thing prized the more in women because
of his latent doubt of its existence. Character, that was the mark he
aimed at; that moved him to homage as neither sparkling wit nor
incomparable beauty, nor the unusual combination, did. To be
distinguished by a woman of character (beauty and wit for jewellery), was
his minor ambition in life, and if Fortune now gratified it, he owned to
the flattery. It really seemed by every test that she had the quality.
Since the day when he beheld her by the bedside of his dead uncle, and
that one on the French sea-sands, and again at Copsley, ghostly white out
of her wrestle with death, bleeding holy sweat of brow for her friend,
the print of her features had been on him as an index of depth of
character, imposing respect and admiration--a sentiment imperilled by her
consent to fly with him. Her subsequent reserve until they met--by an
accident that the lady at any rate was not responsible for, proved the
quality positively. And the nature of her character, at first suspected,
vanquished him more, by comparison, than her vivid intellect, which he
originally, and still lingeringly, appreciated in condescension, as a
singular accomplishment, thrilling at times, now and then assailably
feminine. But, after her consent to a proposal that caused him
retrospective worldly shudders, and her composed recognition of the
madness, a character capable of holding him in some awe was real majesty,
and it rose to the clear heights, with her mental attributes for
satellites. His tendency to despise women was wholesomely checked by the
experience to justify him in saying, Here is a worthy one! She was health
to him, as well as trusty counsel. Furthermore, where he respected, he
was a governed man, free of the common masculine craze to scale
fortresses for the sake of lowering flags. Whilst under his impression of
her character, he submitted honourably to the ascendancy of a lady whose
conduct suited him and whose preference flattered; whose presence was
very refreshing; whose letters were a stimulant. Her letters were really
running well-waters, not a lover's delusion of the luminous mind of his
lady. They sparkled in review and preserved their integrity under
critical analysis. The reading of them hurried him in pursuit of her from
house to house during the autumn; and as she did not hint at the shadow
his coming cast on her, his conscience was easy. Regarding their future,
his political anxieties were a mountainous defile, curtaining the
outlook. They met at Lockton, where he arrived after a recent
consultation with his Chief, of whom, and the murmurs of the Cabinet, he
spoke to Diana openly, in some dejection.

'They might see he has been breaking with his party for the last four
years,' she said. 'The plunge to be taken is tremendous.'

'But will he? He appears too despondent for a header.'

'We cannot dance on a quaking floor.'

'No; it 's exactly that quake of the floor which gives "much qualms," to
me as well,' said Dacier.

'A treble Neptune's power!' she rejoined, for his particular delectation.
'Enough if he hesitates. I forgive him his nausea. He awaits the impetus,
and it will reach him, and soon. He will not wait for the mob at his
heels, I am certain. A Minister who does that, is a post, and goes down
with the first bursting of the dam. He has tried compromise and
discovered that it does not appease the Fates; is not even a
makeshift-mending at this hour. He is a man of nerves, very sensitively
built; as quick--quicker than a woman, I could almost say, to feel the
tremble of the air-forerunner of imperative changes.'

Dacier brightened fondly. 'You positively describe him; paint him to the
life, without knowing him!'

'I have seen him; and if I paint, whose are the colours?'

'Sometimes I repeat you to him, and I get all the credit,' said Dacier.

'I glow with pride to think of speaking anything that you repeat,' said
Diana, and her eyes were proudly lustreful.

Their love was nourished on these mutual flatteries. Thin food for
passion! The innocence of it sanctioned the meetings and the appointments
to meet. When separated they were interchanging letters, formally worded
in the apostrophe and the termination, but throbbingly full: or Diana
thought so of Percy's letters, with grateful justice; for his manner of
opening his heart in amatory correspondence was to confide important,
secret matters, up to which mark she sprang to reply in counsel. He
proved his affection by trusting her; his respect by his tempered style:
'A Greenland style of writing,' she had said of an unhappy gentleman's
epistolary compositions resembling it; and now the same official baldness
was to her mind Italianly rich; it called forth such volumes.

Flatteries that were thin food for passion appeared the simplest
exchanges of courtesy, and her meetings with her lover, judging by the
nature of the discourse they held, so, consequent to their joint interest
in the great crisis anticipated, as to rouse her indignant surprise and a
turn for downright rebellion when the Argus world signified the fact of
its having one eye, or more, wide open.

Debit and Credit, too, her buzzing familiars, insisted on an audience at
each ear, and at the house-door, on her return to London.




CHAPTER XXIX

SHOWS THE APPROACHES OF THE POLITICAL AND THE DOMESTIC CRISIS IN COMPANY

There was not much talk of Diana between Lady Dunstane and her customary
visitor Tom Redworth now. She was shy in speaking of the love-stricken
woman, and more was in his mind for thought than for speech. She some
times wondered how much he might know, ending with the reflection that
little passing around was unknown to him. He had to shut his mind against
thought, against all meditation upon Mrs. Warwick; it was based
scientifically when speculating and calculating, on the material
element--a talisman. Men and women crossing the high seas of life he had
found most readable under that illuminating inquiry, as to their means.
An inspector of sea worthy ships proceeds in like manner. Whence would
the money come? He could not help the bent of his mind; but he could
avoid subjecting her to the talismanic touch. The girl at the Dublin
Ball, the woman at the fire-grate of The Crossways, both in one were his
Diana. Now and then, hearing an ugly whisper, his manful sympathy with
the mere woman in her imprisoned liberty, defended her desperately from
charges not distinctly formulated within him:--'She's not made of stone.'
That was a height of self-abnegation to shake the poor fellow to his
roots; but, then, he had no hopes of his own; and he stuck to it. Her
choice of a man like Dacier, too, of whom Redworth judged highly, showed
nobility. She irradiated the man; but no baseness could be in such an
alliance. If allied, they were bound together for good. The
tie--supposing a villain world not wrong--was only not the sacred tie
because of impediments. The tie!--he deliberated, and said stoutly--No.
Men of Redworth's nature go through sharp contests, though the duration
of them is short, and the tussle of his worship of this woman with the
materialistic turn of his mind was closed by the complete shutting up of
the latter under lock and bar; so that a man, very little of an idealist,
was able to sustain her in the pure imagination--where she did almost
belong to him. She was his, in a sense, because she might have been
his--but for an incredible extreme of folly. The dark ring of the eclipse
cast by some amazing foolishness round the shining crescent perpetually
in secret claimed the whole sphere of her, by what might have been, while
admitting her lost to him in fact. To Thomas Redworth's mind the lack of
perfect sanity in his conduct at any period of manhood, was so entirely
past belief that he flew at the circumstances confirming the charge, and
had wrestles with the angel of reality, who did but set him dreaming
backward, after flinging him.

He heard at Lady Wathin's that Mrs. Warwick was in town for the winter.
'Mr. Dacier is also in town,' Lady Wathin said, with an acid indication
of the needless mention of it. 'We have not seen him.' She invited
Redworth to meet a few friends at dinner. 'I think you admire Miss Asper:
in my idea a very saint among young women;--and you know what the young
women of our day are. She will be present. She is, you are aware,
England's greatest heiress. Only yesterday, hearing of that poor man Mr.
Warwick's desperate attack of illness--heart!--and of his having no
relative or friend to soothe his pillow,--he is lying in absolute
loneliness,--she offered to go and nurse him! Of course it could not be
done. It is not her place. The beauty of the character of a dear innocent
young girl, with every gratification at command, who could make the
offer, strikes me as unparalleled. She was perfectly sincere--she is
sincerity. She asked at once, Where is he? She wished me to accompany her
on a first visit. I saw a tear.'

Redworth had called at Lady Wathin's for information of the state of Mr.
Warwick, concerning which a rumour was abroad. No stranger to the vagrant
compassionateness of sentimentalists;--rich, idle, conscience-pricked or
praise-catching;--he was unmoved by the tale that Miss Asper had proposed
to go to Mr. Warwick's sick-bed in the uniform of a Sister of
Charity.--'Speaking French!' Lady Wathin exclaimed; and his head rocked,
as he said:

'An Englishman would not be likely to know better.'

'She speaks exquisite French--all European languages, Mr. Redworth. She
does not pretend to wit. To my thinking, depth of sentiment is a far more
feminine accomplishment. It assuredly will be found a greater treasure.'

The modest man (modest in such matters) was led by degrees to fancy
himself sounded regarding Miss Asper: a piece of sculpture glacially
decorative of the domestic mansion in person, to his thinking; and as to
the nature of it--not a Diana, with all her faults!

If Diana had any faults, in a world and a position so heavily against
her! He laughed to himself, when alone, at the neatly implied bitter
reproach cast on the wife by the forsaken young lady, who proposed to
nurse the abandoned husband of the woman bereaving her of the man she
loved. Sentimentalists enjoy these tricks, the conceiving or the doing of
them--the former mainly, which are cheaper, and equally effective. Miss
Asper might be deficient in wit; this was a form of practical wit,
occasionally exhibited by creatures acting on their instincts. Warwick he
pitied, and he put compulsion on himself to go and see the poor fellow,
the subject of so sublime a generosity. Mr. Warwick sat in an arm-chair,
his legs out straight on the heels, his jaw dragging hollow cheeks, his
hands loosely joined; improving in health, he said. A demure woman of
middle age was in attendance. He did not speak of his wife. Three times
he said disconnectedly, 'I hear reports,' and his eyelids worked.
Redworth talked of general affairs, without those consolatory efforts,
useless between men, which are neither medicine nor good honest
water:--he judged by personal feelings. In consequence, he left an
invalid the sourer for his visit.

Next day he received a briefly-worded summons from Mrs. Warwick.

Crossing the park on the line to Diana's house, he met Miss Paynham, who
grieved to say that Mrs. Warwick could not give her a sitting; and in a
still mournfuller tone, imagined he would find her at home, and alone by
this time. 'I left no one but Mr. Dacier there,' she observed.

'Mrs. Warwick will be disengaged to-morrow, no doubt,' he said
consolingly.

Her head performed the negative. 'They talk politics, and she becomes
animated, loses her pose. I will persevere, though I fear I have
undertaken a task too much for me.'

'I am deeply indebted to you for the attempt.' Redworth bowed to her and
set his face to the Abbey-towers, which wore a different aspect in the
smoked grey light since his two minutes of colloquy. He had previously
noticed that meetings with Miss Paynham produced a similar effect on him,
a not so very impressionable man. And how was it done? She told him
nothing he did not know or guess.

Diana was alone. Her manner, after the greeting, seemed feverish. She had
not to excuse herself for abruptness when he heard the nature of the
subject. Her counsellor and friend was informed, in feminine style, that
she had, requested him to call, for the purpose of consulting him with
regard to a matter she had decided upon; and it was, the sale of The
Crossways. She said that it would have gone to her heart once; she
supposed she had lost her affection for the place, or had got the better
of her superstitions. She spoke lamely as well as bluntly. The place was
hers, she said; her own property. Her husband could not interdict a sale.

Redworth addressed himself to her smothered antagonism. 'Even if he had
rights, as they are termed . . . I think you might count on their not
being pressed.'

'I have been told of illness.' She tapped her foot on the floor.

'His present state of health is unequal to his ordinary duties.'

'Emma Dunstane is fully supplied with the latest intelligence, Mr.
Redworth. You know the source.'

'I mention it simply . . .'

'Yes, yes. What I have to protest is, that in this respect I am free. The
Law has me fast, but leaves me its legal view of my small property. I
have no authority over me. I can do as I please, in this, without a
collision, or the dread of one. It is the married woman's perpetual dread
when she ventures a step. Your Law originally presumed her a China-footed
animal. And more, I have a claim for maintenance.'

She crimsoned angrily.

Redworth showed a look of pleasure, hard to understand. 'The application
would be sufficient, I fancy,' he said.

'It should have been offered.'

'Did you not decline it?'

'I declined to apply for it. I thought--But, Mr. Redworth, another thing,
concerning us all: I want very much to hear your ideas of the prospects
of the League; because I know you have ideas. The leaders are terrible
men; they fascinate me. They appear to move with an army of facts. They
are certainly carrying the country. I am obliged to think them sincere.
Common agitators would not hold together, as they do. They gather
strength each year. If their statistics are not illusory--an army of
phantoms instead of one of facts; and they knock at my head without
admission, I have to confess; they must win.'

'Ultimately, it is quite calculable that they will win,' said Redworth;
and he was led to discourse of rates and duties and prohibitive tariffs
to a woman surprisingly athirst, curious for every scrap of intelligence
relating to the power, organization, and schemes of the League. 'Common
sense is the secret of every successful civil agitation,' he said. 'Rap
it unremittingly on crowds of the thickest of human heads, and the
response comes at last to sweep all before it. You may reckon that the
country will beat the landlords--for that is our question. Is it one of
your political themes?'

'I am not presumptuous to such a degree:--a poor scholar,' Diana replied.
'Women striving to lift their heads among men deserve the sarcasm.'

He denied that any sarcasm was intended, and the lesson continued. When
she had shaped in her mind some portion of his knowledge of the subject,
she reverted casually to her practical business. Would he undertake to
try to obtain a purchaser of The Crossways, at the price he might deem
reasonable? She left the price entirely to his judgement. And now she had
determined to part with the old place, the sooner the better! She said
that smiling; and Redworth smiled, outwardly and inwardly. Her talk of
her affairs was clearer to him than her curiosity for the mysteries of
the League. He gained kind looks besides warm thanks by the promise to
seek a purchaser; especially by his avoidance of prying queries. She
wanted just this excellent automaton fac-totum; and she referred him to
Mr. Braddock for the title-deeds, et caetera--the chirping phrase of
ladies happily washing their hands of the mean details of business.

'How of your last work?' he asked her.

Serenest equanimity rejoined: 'As I anticipated, it is not popular. The
critics are of one mind with the public. You may have noticed, they
rarely flower above that rocky surface. THE CANTATRICE sings them a false
note. My next will probably please them less.'

Her mobile lips and brows shot the faint upper-wreath of a smile
hovering. It was designed to display her philosophy.

'And what is the name of your next?' said he.

'I name it THE MAN OF TWO MINDS, if you can allow that to be in nature.'

'Contra-distinguished from the woman?'

'Oh! you must first believe the woman to have one.'

'You are working on it?'

'By fits. And I forgot, Mr. Redworth: I have mislaid my receipts, and
must ask you for the address of your wine-merchant;--or, will you?
Several dozen of the same wines. I can trust him to be in awe of you, and
the good repute of my table depends on his honesty.'

Redworth took the definite order for a large supply of wine.

She gave him her hand: a lost hand, dear to hold, needing to be guided,
he feared. For him, it was merely a hand, cut off from the wrist; and he
had performed that executive part! A wiser man would now have been the
lord of it . . . . So he felt, with his burning wish to protect and
cherish the beloved woman, while saying: 'If we find a speedy bidder for
The Crossways, you will have to thank our railways.'

'You!' said Diana, confident in his ability to do every-thing of the
practical kind.

Her ingenuousness tickled him. He missed her comic touches upon men and
things, but the fever shown by her manner accounted for it.

As soon as he left her, she was writing to the lover who had an hour
previously been hearing her voice; the note of her theme being Party; and
how to serve it, when to sacrifice it to the Country. She wrote,
carolling bars of the Puritani marches; and such will passion do, that
her choice of music was quite in harmony with her theme. The
martially-amorous melodies of Italian Opera in those days fostered a
passion challenged to intrepidity from the heart of softness; gliding at
the same time, and putting warm blood even into dull arithmetical figures
which might be important to her lover, her hero fronting battle. She
condensed Redworth's information skilfully, heartily giving it and
whatever she had imbibed, as her own, down to the remark: 'Common sense
in questions of justice, is a weapon that makes way into human heads and
wins the certain majority, if we strike with it incessantly.' Whether
anything she wrote was her own, mattered little: the savour of Percy's
praise, which none could share with her, made it instantly all her own.
Besides she wrote to strengthen him; she naturally laid her friends and
the world under contribution; and no other sort of writing was possible.
Percy had not a common interest in fiction; still less for high comedy.
He liked the broad laugh when he deigned to open books of that sort; puns
and strong flavours and harlequin surprises; and her work would not admit
of them, however great her willingness to force her hand for his
amusement: consequently her inventiveness deadened. She had to cease
whipping it. 'My poor old London cabhorse of a pen shall go to grass!'
she sighed, looking to the sale of The Crossways for money; looking no
farther.

Those marshalled battalions of Debit and Credit were in hostile order,
the weaker simply devoted to fighting for delay, when a winged messenger
bearing the form of old Mr. Braddock descended to her with the
reconciling news that a hermit bachelor, an acquaintance of Mr.
Redworth's--both of whom wore a gloomy hue in her mind immediately--had
offered a sum for the purchase of The Crossways. Considering the
out-of-the-way district, Mr. Braddock thought it an excellent price to
get. She thought the reverse, but confessed that double the sum would not
have altered her opinion. Double the sum scarcely counted for the service
she required of it for much more than a year. The money was paid shortly
after into her Bank, and then she enjoyed the contemptuous felicity of
tossing meat to her lions, tigers, wolves, and jackals, who, but for the
fortunate intervention, would have been feeding on her. These menagerie
beasts of prey were the lady's tradesmen, Debit's hungry-brood. She had a
rapid glimpse of a false position in regarding that legitimate band so
scornfully: another glimpse likewise of a day to come when they might not
be stopped at the door. She was running a race with something; with what?
It was unnamed; it ran in a shroud.

At times she surprised her heart violently beating when there had not
been a thought to set it in motion. She traced it once to the words,
'next year,' incidentally mentioned. 'Free,' was a word that checked her
throbs, as at a question of life or death. Her solitude, excepting the
hours of sleep, if then, was a time of irregular breathing. The something
unnamed, running beside her, became a dreadful familiar; the race between
them past contemplation for ghastliness. 'But this is your Law!' she
cried to the world, while blinding her eyes against a peep of the
shrouded features.

Singularly, she had but to abandon hope, and the shadowy figure vanished,
the tragic race was ended. How to live and think, and not to hope: the
slave of passion had this problem before her.

Other tasks were supportable, though one seemed hard at moments and was
not passive; it attacked her. The men and women of her circle derisively,
unanimously, disbelieved in an innocence that forfeited reputation. Women
were complimentarily assumed to be not such gaping idiots. And as the
weeks advanced, a change came over Percy. The gentleman had grown
restless at covert congratulations, hollow to his knowledge, however much
caressing vanity, and therefore secretly a wound to it. One day, after
sitting silent, he bluntly proposed to break 'this foolish trifling';
just in his old manner, though not so honourably; not very definitely
either. Her hand was taken.

'I feared that dumbness!' Diana said, letting her hand go, but keeping
her composure. 'My friend Percy, I am not a lion-tamer, and if you are of
those animals, we break the chapter. Plainly you think that where there
appears to be a choice of fools, the woman is distinctly designed for the
person. Drop my hand, or I shall repeat the fable of the Goose with the
Golden Eggs.'

'Fables are applicable only in the school-room,' said he; and he ventured
on 'Tony!'

'I vowed an oath to my dear Emma--as good as to the heavens! and that of
itself would stay me from being insane again.' She released herself.
'Signor Percy, you teach me to suspect you of having an idle wish to
pluck your plaything to pieces:--to boast of it? Ah! my friend, I fancied
I was of more value to you. You must come less often; even to not at all,
if you are one of those idols with feet of clay which leave the print of
their steps in a room; or fall and crush the silly idolizer.'

'But surely you know . . .' said he. 'We can't have to wait long.' He
looked full of hopeful meanings.

'A reason . . . !' She kept down her breath. A longdrawn sigh followed,
through parted lips. She had a sensation of horror. 'And I cannot propose
to nurse him--Emma will not hear of it,' she said. 'I dare not. Hypocrite
to that extreme? Oh, no! But I must hear nothing. As it is, I am haunted.
Now let this pass. Tony me no Tonies; I am stony to such whimpering
business now we are in the van of the struggle. All round us it sounds
like war. Last night I had Mr. Tonans dining here;--he wished to meet
you; and you must have a private meeting with Mr. Whitmonby: he will be
useful; others as well. You are wrong in affecting contempt of the Press.
It perches you on a rock; but the swimmer in politics knows what draws
the tides. Your own people, your set, your class, are a drag to you, like
inherited superstitions to the wakening brain. The greater the glory! For
you see the lead you take? You are saving your class. They should lead,
and will, if they prove worthy in the crisis. Their curious error is to
believe in the stability of a monumental position.'

'Perfectly true!' cried Dacier; and the next minute, heated by
approbation, was begging for her hand earnestly. She refused it.

'But you say things that catch me!' he pleaded. 'Remember, it was nearly
mine. It soon will be mine. I heard yesterday from Lady Wathin . . .
well, if it pains you!'

'Speak on,' said Diana, resigned to her thirsty ears.

'He is not expected to last through the autumn.'

'The calculation is hers?'

'Not exactly:--judging from the symptoms.'

Diana flashed a fiery eye into Dacier's, and rose. She was past danger of
melting, with her imagination darkened by the funeral image; but she
craved solitude, and had to act the callous, to dismiss him.

'Good. Enough for the day. Now leave me, if you please. When we meet
again, stifle that raven's croak. I am not a "Sister of Charity," but
neither am I a vulture hovering for the horse in the desert to die. A
poor simile!--when it is my own and not another's breath that I want.
Nothing in nature, only gruesome German stories will fetch comparisons
for the yoke of this Law of yours. It seems the nightmare dream following
an ogre's supper.'

She was not acting the shiver of her frame.

To-morrow was open to him, and prospect of better fortune, so he
departed, after squeezing the hand she ceremoniously extended.

But her woman's intuition warned her that she had not maintained the
sovereign impression which was her security. And hope had become a flame
in her bosom that would no longer take the common extinguisher. The race
she ran was with a shrouded figure no more, but with the figure of the
shroud; she had to summon paroxysms of a pity hard to feel, images of
sickness, helplessness, the vaults, the last human silence for the
stilling of her passionate heart. And when this was partly effected, the
question, Am I going to live? renewed her tragical struggle. Who was it
under the vaults, in the shroud, between the planks? and with human
sensibility to swell the horror! Passion whispered of a vaster sorrow
needed for herself; and the hope conjuring those frightful complexities
was needed to soothe her. She pitied the man, but she was an enamoured
woman. Often of late she had been sharply stung, relaxed as well, by the
observations of Danvers assisting at her toilette. Had she beauty and
charm, beauty and rich health in the young summer blooming of her
days?--and all doomed to waste? No insurgency of words arose in
denunciation of the wrong done to her nature. An undefined heavy feeling
of wrong there was, just perceptive enough to let her know, without
gravely shaming, that one or another must be slain for peace to come; for
it is the case in which the world of the Laws overloading her is pitiless
to women, deaf past ear-trumpets, past intercession; detesting and
reviling them for a feeble human cry, and for one apparent step of revolt
piling the pelted stones on them. It will not discriminate shades of hue,
it massacres all the shadowed. They are honoured, after a fashion, at a
certain elevation. Descending from it, and purely to breathe common air
(thus in her mind), they are scourged and outcast. And alas! the very
pleading for them excites a sort of ridicule in their advocate. How? She
was utterly, even desperately, nay personally, earnest, and her humour
closed her lips; though comical views of the scourged and outcast coming
from the opposite party--the huge bully world--she would not have
tolerated. Diana raged at a prevailing strength on the part of that huge
bully world, which seemed really to embrace the atmosphere. Emma had
said: 'The rules of Christian Society are a blessed Government for us
women. We owe it so much that there is not a brick of the fabric we
should not prop.' Emma's talk of obedience to the Laws, being Laws, was
repeated by the rebel, with an involuntary unphrased comparison of the
vessel in dock and the vessel at sea.

When Dacier next called to see Mrs. Warwick, he heard that she had gone
to Copsley for a couple of weeks. The lesson was emphasized by her not
writing:--and was it the tricky sex, or the splendid character of the
woman, which dealt him this punishment? Knowing how much Diana forfeited
for him, he was moved to some enthusiasm, despite his inclination to be
hurt.

She, on her return to London, gained a considerable increase of knowledge
as to her position in the eye of the world; and unlike the result of her
meditations derived from the clamouring tradesmen, whom she could excuse,
she was neither illuminated nor cautioned by that dubious look; she
conscientiously revolted. Lady Pennon hinted a word for her Government.
'A good deal of what you so capitally call "Green tea talk" is going on,
my dear.' Diana replied, without pretending to misunderstand.

'Gossip is a beast of prey that does not wait for the death of the
creature it devours. They are welcome to my shadow, if the liberty I
claim casts one, and it feeds them.' To which the old lady rejoined: 'Oh!
I am with you through thick and thin. I presented you at Court, and I
stand by you. Only, walk carefully. Women have to walk with a train. You
are too famous not to have your troops of watchers.'

'But I mean to prove,' said Diana, 'that a woman can walk with her train
independent of the common reserves and artifices.'

'Not on highways, my dear!'

Diana, praising the speaker, referred the whole truth in that to the
material element of her metaphor.

She was more astonished by Whitmonby's candid chiding; but with him she
could fence, and men are easily diverted. She had sent for him, to bring
him and Percy Dacier together to a conference. Unaware of the project, he
took the opportunity of their privacy to speak of the great station open
to her in London being imperilled; and he spoke of 'tongues,' and ahem! A
very little would have induced him to fill that empty vocable with a
name.

She had to pardon the critic in him for an unpleasant review of her
hapless CANTATRICE; and as a means of evasion, she mentioned the poor
book and her slaughter of the heroine, that he had complained of.

'I killed her; I could not let her live. You were unjust in accusing the
authoress of heartlessness.'

'If I did, I retract,' said he. 'She steers too evidently from the centre
of the vessel. She has the organ in excess.'

'Proof that it is not squandered.'

'The point concerns direction.'

'Have I made so bad a choice of my friends?'

'It is the common error of the sprightly to suppose that in parrying a
thrust they blind our eyes.'

'The world sees always what it desires to see, Mr. Whitmonby.'

'The world, my dear Mrs. Warwick, is a blundering machine upon its own
affairs, but a cruel sleuth-hound to rouse in pursuit.'

'So now you have me chased by sight and scent. And if I take wing?'

'Shots! volleys!--You are lawful game. The choice you have made of your
friends, should oblige you to think of them.'

'I imagine I do. Have I offended any, or one?'

'I will not say that. You know the commotion in a French kitchen when the
guests of the house declined a particular dish furnished them by command.
The cook and his crew were loyal to their master, but, for the love of
their Art, they sent him notice. It is ill serving a mad sovereign.'

Diana bowed to the compact little apologue.

'I will tell you another story, traditional in our family from my
great-grandmother, a Spanish woman,' she said. 'A cavalier serenaded his
mistress, and rascal mercenaries fell upon him before he could draw
sword. He battered his guitar on their pates till the lattice opened with
a cry, and startled them to flight. "Thrice blessed and beloved!" he
called to her above, in reference to the noise, "it was merely a
diversion of the accompaniment." Now there was loyal service to a
sovereign!'

'You are certainly an angel!' exclaimed Whitmonby. 'I swallow the story,
and leave it to digestion to discover the appositeness. Whatever tuneful
instrument one of your friends possesses shall solace your slumbers or
batter the pate of your enemy. But discourage the habitual serenader.'

'The musician you must mean is due here now, by appointment to meet you,'
said Diana, and set him momentarily agape with the name of Mr. Percy
Dacier.

That was the origin of the alliance between the young statesman and a
newspaper editor. Whitmonby, accepting proposals which suited him,
quitted the house, after an hour of political talk, no longer inclined to
hint at the 'habitual serenader,' but very ready to fall foul of those
who did, as he proved when the numbers buzzed openly. Times were
masculine; the excitement on the eve of so great a crisis, and Diana's
comprehension of it and fine heading cry, put that weak matter aside.
Moreover, he was taught to suppose himself as welcome a guest as Dacier;
and the cook could stand criticism; the wines--wonderful to say of a
lady's table--were trusty; the talk, on the political evenings and the
social and anecdotal supper-nights, ran always in perfect accord with his
ideal of the conversational orchestra: an improvized harmony, unmatched
elsewhere. She did not, he considered, so perfectly assort her
dinner-guests; that was her one fault. She had therefore to strain her
adroitness to cover their deficiencies and fuse them. But what other
woman could have done it! She led superbly. If an Irishman was present,
she kept him from overflooding, managed to extract just the flavour of
him, the smack of salt. She did even, at Whitmonby's table, on a
red-letter Sunday evening, in concert with him and the Dean, bring down
that cataract, the Bodleian, to the levels of interchanging dialogue by
seasonable touches, inimitably done, and never done before. Sullivan
Smith, unbridled in the middle of dinner, was docile to her. 'Irishmen;'
she said, pleading on their behalf to Whitmonby, who pronounced the race
too raw for an Olympian feast, 'are invaluable if you hang them up to
smoke and cure'; and the master of social converse could not deny that
they were responsive to her magic. The supper-nights were mainly devoted
to Percy's friends. He brought as many as he pleased, and as often as it
pleased him; and it was her pride to provide Cleopatra banquets for the
lover whose anxieties were soothed by them, and to whom she sacrificed
her name willingly in return for a generosity that certain chance
whispers of her heart elevated to the pitch of measureless.

So they wore through the Session and the Autumn, clouds heavier, the
League drumming, the cry of Ireland 'ominously Banshee,' as she wrote to
Emma.




CHAPTER XXX

IN WHICH THERE IS A TASTE OF A LITTLE DINNER AND AN AFTERTASTE

'But Tony lives!' Emma Dunstane cried, on her solitary height, with the
full accent of envy marking the verb; and when she wrote enviously to her
friend of the life among bright intelligences, and of talk worth hearing,
it was a happy signification that health, frail though it might be, had
grown importunate for some of the play of life. Diana sent her word to
name her day, and she would have her choicest to meet her dearest. They
were in the early days of December, not the best of times for improvized
gatherings. Emma wanted, however, to taste them as they cropped; she was
also, owing to her long isolation, timid at a notion of encountering the
pick of the London world, prepared by Tony to behold 'a wonder more than
worthy of them,' as her friend unadvisedly wrote. That was why she came
unexpectedly, and for a mixture of reasons, went to an hotel. Fatality
designed it so. She was reproached, but she said: 'You have to write or
you entertain at night; I should be a clog and fret you. My hotel is
Maitland's; excellent; I believe I am to lie on the pillow where a
crowned head reposed! You will perceive that I am proud as well as
comfortable. And I would rather meet your usual set of guests.'

'The reason why I have been entertaining at night is, that Percy is
harassed and requires enlivening,' said Diana. 'He brings his friends. My
house is open to them, if it amuses him. What the world says, is past a
thought. I owe him too much.'

Emma murmured that the world would soon be pacified.

Diana shook her head. 'The poor man is better; able to go about his
affairs; and I am honestly relieved. It lays a spectre. As for me, I do
not look ahead. I serve as a kind of secretary to Percy. I labour at
making abstracts by day, and at night preside at my suppertable. You
would think it monotonous; no incident varies the course we run. I have
no time to ask whether it is happiness. It seems to bear a resemblance.'

Emma replied: 'He may be everything you tell me. He should not have
chosen the last night of the Opera to go to your box and sit beside you
till the fall of the curtain. The presence at the Opera of a man
notoriously indifferent to music was enough in itself.'

Diana smiled with languor. 'You heard of that? But the Opera was The
Puritani, my favourite. And he saw me sitting in Lady Pennon's box alone.
We were compromised neck-deep already. I can kiss you, my own Emmy, till
I die; 'but what the world says, is what the wind says. Besides he has
his hopes.... If I am blackened ever so thickly, he can make me white.
Dear me! if the world knew that he comes here almost nightly! It will;
and does it matter? I am his in soul; the rest is waste-paper--a
half-printed sheet.'

'Provided he is worthy of such devotion!'

'He is absolute worthiness. He is the prince of men: I dread to say,
mine! for fear. But Emmy will not judge him to-morrow by contrast with
more voluble talkers.--I can do anything but read poetry now. That kills
me!--See him through me. In nature, character, intellect, he has no
rival. Whenever I despond--and it comes now and then--I rebuke myself
with this one admonition.

Simply to have known him! Admit that for a woman to find one who is
worthy among the opposite creatures, is a happy termination of her quest,
and in some sort dismisses her to the Shades, an uncomplaining
ferry-bird. If my end were at hand I should have no cause to lament it.
We women miss life only when we have to confess we have never met the man
to reverence.'

Emma had to hear a very great deal of Mr. Percy. Diana's comparison of
herself to 'the busy bee at a window-pane,' was more in her old manner;
and her friend would have hearkened to the marvels of the gentle man less
unrefreshed, had it not appeared to her that her Tony gave in excess for
what was given in return. She hinted her view. . .

'It is expected of our sex,' Diana said.

The work of busy bee at a window-pane had at any rate not spoilt her
beauty, though she had voluntarily, profitlessly, become this man's
drudge, and her sprightly fancy, her ready humour and darting look all
round in discussion, were rather deadened.

But the loss was not perceptible in the circle of her guests. Present at
a dinner little indicating the last, were Whitmonby, in lively trim for
shuffling, dealing, cutting, trumping or drawing trumps; Westlake,
polishing epigrams under his eyelids; Henry Wilmers, who timed an
anecdote to strike as the passing hour without freezing the current;
Sullivan Smith, smoked, cured and ready to flavour; Percy Dacier,
pleasant listener, measured speaker; and young Arthur Rhodes, the
neophyte of the hostess's training; of whom she had said to Emma, 'The
dear boy very kindly serves to frank an unlicenced widow'; and whom she
prompted and made her utmost of, with her natural tact. These she mixed
and leavened. The talk was on high levels and low; an enchantment to Emma
Dunstane: now a story; a question opening new routes, sharp sketches of
known personages; a paradox shot by laughter as soon as uttered; and all
so smoothly; not a shadow of the dominant holder-forth or a momentary
prospect of dead flats; the mellow ring of appositeness being the
concordant note of deliveries running linked as they flashed, and a
tolerant philosophy of the sage in the world recurrently the keynote.

Once only had Diana to protect her nurseling. He cited a funny line from
a recent popular volume of verse, in perfect A propos, looking at
Sullivan Smith; who replied, that the poets had become too many for him,
and he read none now. Diana said: 'There are many Alexanders, but
Alexander of Macedon is not dwarfed by the number.' She gave him an
opening for a smarter reply, but he lost it in a comment--against
Whitmonby's cardinal rule: 'The neatest turn of the wrist that ever swung
a hero to crack a crown!' and he bowed to young Rhodes: 'I 'll read your
versicler to-morrow morning early.' The latter expressed a fear that the
hour was too critical for poetry.

'I have taken the dose at a very early hour,' said Whitmonby, to bring
conversation to the flow again, 'and it effaced the critical mind
completely.'

'But did not silence the critical nose,' observed Westlake.

Wilmers named the owner of the longest nose in Europe.

'Potentially, indeed a critic!' said Diana.

'Nights beside it must be fearful, and good matter for a divorce, if the
poor dear lady could hale it to the doors of the Vatican!' Sullivan Smith
exclaimed. 'But there's character in noses.'

'Calculable by inches?' Dacier asked.

'More than in any other feature,' said Lady Dunstane. 'The Riffords are
all prodigiously gifted and amusing: suspendens omnia naso. It should be
prayed for in families.'

'Totum ut to faciant, Fabulle, nasum,' rejoined Whitmonby. 'Lady Isabella
was reading the tale of the German princess, who had a sentinel stationed
some hundred yards away to whisk off the flies, and she owned to me that
her hand instinctively travelled upward.'

'Candour is the best concealment, when one has to carry a saddle of
absurdity,' said Diana. 'Touchstone's "poor thing, but mine own," is
godlike in its enveloping fold.'

'The most comforting sermon ever delivered on property in poverty,' said
Arthur Rhodes.

Westlake assented. 'His choice of Audrey strikes me as an exhibition of
the sure instinct for pasture of the philosophical jester in a forest.'

'With nature's woman, if he can find her, the urban seems equally at
home,' said Lady Dunstane.

'Baron Pawle is an example,' added Whitmonby. 'His cook is a pattern wife
to him. I heard him say at table that she was responsible for all except
the wines. "I wouldn't have them on my conscience, with a Judge!" my lady
retorted.'

'When poor Madame de Jacquieres was dying,' said Wilmers, 'her confessor
sat by her bedside, prepared for his ministrations. "Pour commencer, mon
ami, jamais je n'ai fait rien hors nature."'

Lord Wadaster had uttered something tolerably similar: 'I am a sinner,
and in good society.' Sir Abraham Hartiston, a minor satellite of the
Regent, diversified this: 'I am a sinner, and go to good society.' Madame
la Comtesse de la Roche-Aigle, the cause of many deaths, declared it
unwomanly to fear anything save 'les revenants.' Yet the countess could
say the pretty thing: 'Foot on a flower, then think of me!'

'Sentimentality puts up infant hands for absolution,' said Diana.

'But tell me,' Lady Dunstane inquired generally, 'why men are so much
happier than women in laughing at their spouses?'

They are humaner, was one dictum; they are more frivolous, ironically
another.

'It warrants them for blowing the bugle-horn of masculine superiority
night and morning from the castle-walls,' Diana said.

'I should imagine it is for joy of heart that they still have cause to
laugh!' said Westlake.

On the other hand, are women really pained by having to laugh at their
lords? Curious little speeches flying about the great world, affirmed the
contrary. But the fair speakers were chartered libertines, and their
laugh admittedly had a biting acid. The parasite is concerned in the
majesty of the tree.

'We have entered Botany Bay,' Diana said to Emma; who answered: 'A
metaphor is the Deus ex machine, of an argument'; and Whitmonby, to
lighten a shadow of heaviness, related allusively an anecdote of the Law
Courts. Sullivan Smith begged permission to 'black cap' it with Judge
FitzGerald's sentence upon a convicted criminal: 'Your plot was perfect
but for One above.' Dacier cited an execrable impromptu line of the Chief
of the Opposition in Parliament. The Premier, it was remarked, played him
like an angler his fish on the hook; or say, Mr. Serjeant Rufus his
witness in the box.

'Or a French journalist an English missionary,' said Westlake; and as the
instance was recent it was relished.

The talk of Premiers offered Whitmonby occasion for a flight to the Court
of Vienna and Kaunitz. Wilmers told a droll story of Lord Busby's missing
the Embassy there. Westlake furnished a sample of the tranquil
sententiousness of Busby's brother Robert during a stormy debate in the
House of Commons.

'I remember,' Dacier was reminded, 'hearing him say, when the House
resembled a Chartist riot, "Let us stand aside and meditate on Life. If
Youth could know, in the season of its reaping of the Pleasures, that it
is but sowing Doctor's bills!"'

Latterly a malady had supervened, and Bob Busby had retired from the
universal to the special;--his mysterious case.

'Assure him, that is endemic. He may be cured of his desire for the
exposition of it,' said Lady Dunstane.

Westlake chimed with her: 'Yes, the charm in discoursing of one's case is
over when the individual appears no longer at odds with Providence.'

'But then we lose our Tragedy,' said Whitmonby.

'Our Comedy too,' added Diana. 'We must consent to be Busbied for the
sake of the instructive recreations.'

'A curious idea, though,' said Sullivan Smith, 'that some of the grand
instructive figures were in their day colossal bores!'

'So you see the marvel of the poet's craft at last?' Diana smiled on him,
and he vowed: 'I'll read nothing else for a month!' Young Rhodes bade him
beware of a deluge in proclaiming it.

They rose from table at ten, with the satisfaction of knowing that they
had not argued, had not wrangled, had never stagnated, and were
digestingly refreshed; as it should be among grown members of the
civilized world, who mean to practise philosophy, making the hour of the
feast a balanced recreation and a regeneration of body and mind.

'Evenings like these are worth a pilgrimage,' Emma said, embracing Tony
outside the drawing-room door. 'I am so glad I came: and if I am strong
enough, invite me again in the Spring. To-morrow early I start for
Copsley, to escape this London air. I shall hope to have you there soon.'

She was pleased by hearing Tony ask her whether she did not think that
Arthur Rhodes had borne himself well; for it breathed of her simply
friendly soul.

The gentlemen followed Lady Dunstane in a troop, Dacier yielding perforce
the last adieu to young Rhodes.

Five minutes later Diana was in her dressing-room, where she wrote at
night, on the rare occasions now when she was left free for composition.
Beginning to dwell on THE MAN OF TWO MINDS, she glanced at the woman
likewise divided, if not similarly; and she sat brooding. She did not
accuse her marriage of being the first fatal step: her error was the step
into Society without the wherewithal to support her position there. Girls
of her kind, airing their wings above the sphere of their birth, are
cryingly adventuresses. As adventuresses they are treated.

Vain to be shrewish with the world! Rather let us turn and scold our
nature for irreflectively rushing to the cream and honey! Had she
subsisted on her small income in a country cottage, this task of writing
would have been holiday. Or better, if, as she preached to Mary Paynham,
she had apprenticed herself to some productive craft. The simplicity of
the life of labour looked beautiful. What will not look beautiful
contrasted with the fly in the web? She had chosen to be one of the flies
of life.

Instead of running to composition, her mind was eloquent with a sermon to
Arthur Rhodes, in Redworth's vein; more sympathetically, of course. 'For
I am not one of the lecturing Mammonites!' she could say.

She was far from that. Penitentially, in the thick of her disdain of the
arrogant money-Betters, she pulled out a drawer where her bank-book lay,
and observed it contemplatively; jotting down a reflection before the
dread book of facts was opened: 'Gaze on the moral path you should have
taken, you are asked for courage to commit a sanctioned suicide, by
walking back to it stripped--a skeleton self.' She sighed forth: 'But I
have no courage: I never had!' The book revealed its tale in a small
pencilled computation of the bank-clerk's; on the peccant side. Credit
presented many pages blanks. She seemed to have withdrawn from the
struggle with such a partner.

It signified an immediate appeal to the usurers, unless the publisher
could be persuaded, with three parts of the book in his hands, to come to
the rescue. Work! roared old Debit, the sinner turned slavedriver.

Diana smoothed her wrists, compressing her lips not to laugh at the
simulation of an attitude of combat. She took up her pen.

And strange to think, she could have flowed away at once on the stuff
that Danvers delighted to read!--wicked princes, rogue noblemen, titled
wantons, daisy and lily innocents, traitorous marriages, murders, a
gallows dangling a corpse dotted by a moon, and a woman bowed beneath.
She could have written, with the certainty that in the upper and the
middle as well as in the lower classes of the country, there would be a
multitude to read that stuff, so cordially, despite the gaps between
them, are they one in their literary tastes. And why should they not read
it? Her present mood was a craving for excitement; for incident, wild
action, the primitive machinery of our species; any amount of theatrical
heroics, pathos, and clown-gabble. A panorama of scenes came sweeping
round her.

She was, however, harnessed to a different kind of vehicle, and had to
drag it. The sound of the house-door shutting, imagined perhaps, was a
fugitive distraction. Now to animate The Man of Two Minds!

He is courting, but he is burdened with the task of tasks. He has an
ideal of womanhood and of the union of couples: a delicacy extreme as his
attachment: and he must induce the lady to school herself to his ideal,
not allowing her to suspect him less devoted to her person; while she, an
exacting idol, will drink any quantity of idealization as long as he
starts it from a full acceptance of her acknowledged qualities. Diana
could once have tripped the scene along airily. She stared at the opening
sentence, a heavy bit of moralized manufacture, fit to yoke beside that
on her view of her bank-book.

'It has come to this--I have no head,' she cried.

And is our public likely to muster the slightest taste for comic analysis
that does not tumble to farce? The doubt reduced her whole MS. to a
leaden weight, composed for sinking. Percy's addiction to burlesque was a
further hindrance, for she did not perceive how her comedy could be
strained to gratify it.

There was a knock, and Danvers entered. 'You have apparently a liking for
late hours,' observed her mistress. 'I told you to go to bed.' 'It is Mr.
Dacier,' said Danvers. 'He wishes to see me?' 'Yes, ma'am. He apologized
for disturbing you.' 'He must have some good reason.' What could it be!
Diana's glass approved her appearance. She pressed the black swell of
hair above her temples, rather amazed, curious, inclined to a beating of
the heart.




CHAPTER XXXI

A CHAPTER CONTAINING GREAT POLITICAL NEWS AND THEREWITH AN INTRUSION OF
THE LOVE-GOD

Dacier was pacing about the drawing-room, as in a place too narrow for
him.

Diana stood at the door. 'Have you forgotten to tell me anything I ought
to know?'

He came up to her and shut the door softly behind her, holding her hand.
'You are near it. I returned . . But tell me first:--You were slightly
under a shadow this evening, dejected.'

'Did I show it?'

She was growing a little suspicious, but this cunning touch of lover-like
interest dispersed the shade.

'To me you did.'

'It was unpardonable to let it be seen.'

'No one else could have observed it.'

Her woman's heart was thrilled; for she had concealed the dejection from
Emma.

'It was nothing,' she said; 'a knot in the book I am writing. We poor
authors are worried now and then. But you?'

His face rippled by degrees brightly, to excite a reflection in hers.

'Shall I tune you with good news? I think it will excuse me for coming
back.'

'Very good news?'

'Brave news, as far as it goes.'

'Then it concerns you!'

'Me, you, the country.'

'Oh! do I guess?' cried Diana. 'But speak, pray; I burn.'

'What am I to have for telling it?'

'Put no price. You know my heart. I guess--or fancy. It relates to your
Chief?'

Dacier smiled in a way to show the lock without the key; and she was
insensibly drawn nearer to him, speculating on the smile.

'Try again,' said he, keenly appreciating the blindness to his motive of
her studious dark eyes, and her open-lipped breathing.

'Percy! I must be right.'

'Well, you are. He has decided!'

'Oh! that is the bravest possible. When did you hear?'

'He informed me of his final decision this afternoon.'

'And you were charged with the secret all the evening, and betrayed not a
sign! I compliment the diplomatic statesman. But when will it be public?'

'He calls Parliament together the first week of next month.'

'The proposal is--? No more compromises!'

'Total!'

Diana clapped hands; and her aspect of enthusiasm was intoxicating. 'He
is a wise man and a gallant Minister! And while you were reading me
through, I was blind to you,' she added meltingly.

'I have not made too much of it?' said he.

'Indeed you have not.'

She was radiant with her dark lightnings, yet visibly subject to him
under the spell of the news he had artfully lengthened out to excite and
overbalance her:--and her enthusiasm was all pointed to his share in the
altered situation, as he well knew and was flattered in knowing.

'So Tony is no longer dejected? I thought I could freshen you and get my
excuse.'

'Oh! a high wind will make a dead leaf fly like a bird. I soar. Now I do
feel proud. I have longed for it--to have you leading the country: not
tugged at like a waggon with a treble team uphill. We two are a month in
advance of all England. You stand by him?--only to hear it, for I am sure
of it!'

'We stand or fall together.'

Her glowing look doated on the faithful lieutenant.

'And if the henchman is my hero, I am but a waiting-woman. But I must
admire his leader.'

'Tony!'

'Ah! no,' she joined her hands, wondering whither her armed majesty had
fled; 'no softness! no payments! Flatter me by letting me think you came
to a head not a silly woman's heart, with one name on it, as it has not
to betray. I have been frank; you need no proofs . . .' The supplicating
hands left her figure an easy prey to the storm, and were crushed in a
knot on her bosom. She could only shrink. 'Ah! Percy . . you undo my
praise of you--my pride in receiving you.'

They were speechless perforce.

'You see, Tony, my dearest, I am flesh and blood after all.'

'You drive me to be ice and door-bolts!'

Her eyes broke over him reproachfully.

'It is not so much to grant,' he murmured.

'It changes everything between us.'

'Not me. It binds me the faster.'

'It makes me a loathsome hypocrite.'

'But, Tony! is it so much?'

'Not if you value it low.'

'But how long do you keep me in this rag-puppet's state of suspension?'

'Patience.'

'Dangling and swinging day and night!'

'The rag-puppet shall be animated and repaid if I have life. I wish to
respect my hero. Have a little mercy. Our day will come: perhaps as
wonderfully as this wonderful news. My friend, drop your hands. Have you
forgotten who I am? I want to think, Percy!'

'But you are mine.'

'You are abasing your own.'

'No, by heaven!'

'Worse, dear friend; you are lowering yourself to the woman who loves
you.'

'You must imagine me superhuman.'

'I worship you--or did.'

'Be reasonable, Tony. What harm! Surely a trifle of recompense? Just to
let me feel I live! You own you love me. Then I am your lover.'

'My dear friend Percy, when I have consented to be your paramour, this
kind of treatment of me will not want apologies.'

The plain speaking from the wound he dealt her was effective with a
gentleman who would never have enjoyed his privileges had he been of a
nature unsusceptible to her distinct wish and meaning.

He sighed. 'You know how my family bother me. The woman I want, the only
woman I could marry, I can't have.'

'You have her in soul.'

'Body and soul, it must be! I believe you were made without fire.'

'Perhaps. The element is omitted with some of us happily, some think. Now
we can converse. There seems to be a measurement of distances required
before men and women have a chance with their brains:--or before a man
will understand that he can be advised and seconded. When will the
Cabinet be consulted?'

'Oh, a few days. Promise me . . .'

'Any honourable promise!'

'You will not keep me waiting longer than the end of the Session?'

'Probably there will be an appeal to the country.'

'In any case, promise me: have some compassion.'

'Ah, the compassion! You do not choose your words, Percy, or forget who
is the speaker.'

'It is Tony who forgets the time she has kept her lover dangling.
Promise, and I will wait.'

'You hurt my hand, sir.'

'I could crack the knuckles. Promise!'

'Come to me to-morrow.'

'To-morrow you are in your armour-triple brass! All creation cries out
for now. We are mounted on barbs and you talk of ambling.'

'Arthur Rhodes might have spoken that.'

'Rhodes!' he shook off the name in disgust. 'Pet him as much as you like;
don't . . .' he was unable to phrase his objection.

She cooled him further with eulogies of the chevaleresque manner of
speaking which young Mr. Rhodes could assume; till for very wrath of
blood--not jealousy: he had none of any man, with her; and not passion;
the little he had was a fitful gust--he punished her coldness by taking
what hastily could be gathered.

Her shape was a pained submission; and she thought: Where is the woman
who ever knows a man!--as women do think when one of their artifices of
evasion with a lover, or the trick of imposingness, has apparently been
subduing him. But the pain was less than previously, for she was now
mistress of herself, fearing no abysses.

Dacier released her quickly, saying: 'If I come tomorrow, shall I have
the promise?'

She answered: 'Be sure I shall not lie.'

'Why not let me have it before I go?'

'My friend, to tell you the truth, you have utterly distracted me.'

'Forgive me if I did hurt your hand.'

'The hand? You might strike it off.'

'I can't be other than a mortal lover, Tony. There's the fact.'

'No; the fault is mine when I am degraded. I trust you: there's the
error.'

The trial for Dacier was the sight of her quick-lifting; bosom under the
mask of cold language: an attraction and repulsion in union; a delirium
to any lover impelled to trample on weak defences. But the evident pain
he inflicted moved his pity, which helped to restore his conception of
the beauty of her character. She stood so nobly meek. And she was never
prudish, only self-respecting. Although the great news he imparted had
roused an ardent thirst for holiday and a dash out of harness, and he
could hardly check it, he yielded her the lead.

'Trust me you may,' he said. 'But you know--we are one. The world has
given you to me, me to you. Why should we be asunder? There's no reason
in it.'

She replied: 'But still I wish to burn a little incense in honour of
myself, or else I cannot live. It is the truth. You make Death my truer
friend, and at this moment I would willingly go out. You would respect me
more dead than alive. I could better pardon you too.'

He pleaded for the red mouth's pardon, remotely irritated by the
suspicion that she swayed him overmuch: and he had deserved the small
benevolences and donations of love, crumbs and heavenly dews!

'Not a word of pardon,' said Diana. 'I shall never count an iota against
you "in the dark backward and abysm of Time." This news is great, and I
have sunk beneath it. Come tomorrow. Then we will speak upon whatever you
can prove rational. The hour is getting late.'

Dacier took a draught of her dark beauty with the crimson he had kindled
over the cheeks. Her lips were firmly closed, her eyes grave; dry, but
seeming to waver tearfully in their heavy fulness. He could not doubt her
love of him; and although chafing at the idea that she swayed him
absurdly--beyond the credible in his world of wag-tongues--he resumed his
natural soberness, as a garment, not very uneasily fitting: whence it
ensued--for so are we influenced by the garb we put on us--that his manly
sentiment of revolt in being condemned to play second, was repressed by
the refreshment breathed on him from her lofty character, the pure jewel
proffered to his, inward ownership.

'Adieu for the night,' he said, and she smiled. He pressed for a pressure
of her hand. She brightened her smile instead, and said only: 'Good
night, Percy.'




CHAPTER XXXII

WHEREIN WE BEHOLD A GIDDY TURN AT THE SPECTRAL CROSSWAYS

Danvers accompanied Mr. Dacier to the house-door. Climbing the stairs,
she found her mistress in the drawing-room still.

'You must be cold, ma'am,' she said, glancing at the fire-grate.

'Is it a frost?' said Diana.

'It's midnight and midwinter, ma'am.'

'Has it struck midnight?'

The mantel-piece clock said five minutes past.

'You had better go to bed, Danvers, or you will lose your bloom. Stop;
you are a faithful soul. Great things are happening and I am agitated.
Mr. Dacier has told me news. He came back purposely.'

'Yes, ma'am,' said Danvers. 'He had a great deal to tell?'

'Well, he had.' Diana coloured at the first tentative impertinence she
had heard from her maid. 'What is the secret of you, Danvers? What
attaches you to me?'

'I'm sure I don't know, ma'am. I'm romantic.'

'And you think me a romantic object?'

'I'm sure I can't say, ma'am. I'd rather serve you than any other lady;
and I wish you was happy.'

'Do you suppose I am unhappy?'

'I'm sure--but if I may speak, ma'am: so handsome and clever a lady! and
young! I can't bear to see it.'

'Tush, you silly woman. You read your melting tales, and imagine. I must
go and write for money: it is my profession. And I haven't an idea in my
head. This news disturbs me. Ruin if I don't write; so I must.--I can't!'

Diana beheld the ruin. She clasped the great news for succour. Great
indeed: and known but to her of all the outer world. She was ahead of
all--ahead of Mr. Tonans!

The visionary figure of Mr. Tonans petrified by the great news, drinking
it, and confessing her ahead of him in the race for secrets, arose
toweringly. She had not ever seen the Editor in his den at midnight. With
the rumble of his machinery about him, and fresh matter arriving and
flying into the printing-press, it must be like being in the very
furnace-hissing of Events: an Olympian Council held in Vulcan's smithy.
Consider the bringing to the Jove there news of such magnitude as to
stupefy him! He, too, who had admonished her rather sneeringly for
staleness in her information. But this news, great though it was, and
throbbing like a heart plucked out of a breathing body, throbbed but for
a brief term, a day or two; after which, great though it was, immense, it
relapsed into a common organ, a possession of the multitude, merely
historically curious.

'You are not afraid of the streets at night?' Diana said to her maid, as
they were going upstairs.

'Not when we're driving, ma'am,' was the answer.

THE MAN OF TWO MINDS faced his creatrix in the dressing-room, still
delivering that most ponderous of sentences--a smothering pillow!

I have mistaken my vocation, thought Diana: I am certainly the flattest
proser who ever penned a line.

She sent Dangers into the bedroom on a trifling errand, unable to bear
the woman's proximity, and oddly unwilling to dismiss her.

She pressed her hands on her eyelids. Would Percy have humiliated her so
if he had respected her? He took advantage of the sudden loss of her
habitual queenly initiative at the wonderful news to debase and stain
their intimacy. The lover's behaviour was judged by her sensations: she
felt humiliated, plucked violently from the throne where she had long
been sitting securely, very proudly. That was at an end. If she was to be
better than the loathsomest of hypocrites, she must deny him his
admission to the house. And then what was her life!

Something that was pressing her low, she knew not how, and left it
unquestioned, incited her to exaggerate the indignity her pride had
suffered. She was a dethroned woman. Deeper within, an unmasked actress,
she said. Oh, she forgave him! But clearly he took her for the same as
other women consenting to receive a privileged visitor. And sounding
herself to the soul, was she so magnificently better? Her face flamed.
She hugged her arms at her breast to quiet the beating, and dropped them
when she surprised herself embracing the memory. He had brought political
news, and treated her as--name the thing! Not designedly, it might be:
her position invited it. 'The world had given her to him.' The world is
always a prophet of the mire; but the world is no longer an utterly
mistaken world. She shook before it.

She asked herself why Percy or the world should think highly of an
adventuress, who was a denounced wife, a wretched author, and on the
verge of bankruptcy. She was an adventuress. When she held The Crossways
she had at least a bit of solid footing: now gone. An adventuress without
an idea in her head: witness her dullard, The Man of Two Minds, at his
work of sermonizing his mistress.

The tremendous pressure upon our consciousness of the material cause,
when we find ourselves cast among the breakers of moral difficulties and
endeavour to elude that mudvisaged monster, chiefly by feigning
unconsciousness, was an experience of Diana's, in the crisis to which she
was wrought. Her wits were too acute, her nature too direct, to permit of
a lengthened confusion. She laid the scourge on her flesh smartly.--I
gave him these privileges because I am weak as the weakest, base as my
enemies proclaim me. I covered my woman's vile weakness with an air of
intellectual serenity that he, choosing his moment, tore away, exposing
me to myself, as well as to him, the most ordinary of reptiles. I kept up
a costly household for the sole purpose of seeing him and having him near
me. Hence this bitter need of money!--Either it must be money or
disgrace. Money would assist her quietly to amend and complete her work.
Yes, and this want of money, in a review of the last two years, was the
material cause of her recklessness. It was, her revived and uprising
pudency declared, the principal; the only cause. Mere want of money.

And she had a secret worth thousands! The secret of a day, no more:
anybody's secret after some four and twenty hours.

She smiled at the fancied elongation and stare of the features of Mr.
Tonans in his editorial midnight den.

What if he knew it and could cap it with something novel and stranger?
Hardly. But it was an inciting suggestion.

She began to tremble as a lightning-flash made visible her fortunes
recovered, disgrace averted, hours of peace for composition stretching
before her: a summer afternoon's vista.

It seemed a duel between herself and Mr. Tonans, and she sure of her
triumph--Diana victrix!

'Danvers!' she called.

'Is it to undress, ma'am?' said the maid, entering to her.

'You are not afraid of the streets, you tell me. I have to go down to the
City, I think. It is urgent. Yes, I must go. If I were to impart the news
to you, your head would be a tolling bell for a month.'

'You will take a cab, ma'am.'

'We must walk out to find one. I must go, though I should have to go on
foot. Quick with bonnet and shawl; muffle up warmly. We have never been
out so late: but does it matter? You're a brave soul, I'm sure, and you
shall have your fee.'

'I don't care for money, ma'am.'

'When we get home you shall kiss me.'

Danvers clothed her mistress in furs and rich wrappings: Not paid for!
was Diana's desperate thought, and a wrong one; but she had to seem the
precipitated bankrupt and succeeded. She was near being it. The boiling
of her secret carried her through the streets rapidly and unobservantly
except of such small things as the glow of the lights on the pavements
and the hushed cognizance of the houses, in silence to a thoroughfare
where a willing cabman was met. The destination named, he nodded alertly
he had driven gentlemen there at night from the House of Commons, he
said.

'Our Parliament is now sitting, and you drive ladies,' Diana replied.

'I hope I know one, never mind the hour,' said he of the capes.

He was bidden to drive rapidly.

'Complexion a tulip: you do not often see a pale cabman,' she remarked to
Danvers, who began laughing, as she always expected to do on an excursion
with her mistress.

'Do you remember, ma'am, the cabman taking us to the coach, when you
thought of going to the continent?'

'And I went to The Crossways? I have forgotten him.'

'He declared you was so beautiful a lady he would drive you to the end of
England for nothing.'

'It must have been when I was paying him. Put it out of your mind,
Danvers, that there are individual cabmen. They are the painted flowers
of our metropolitan thoroughfares, and we gather them in rows.'

'They have their feelings, ma'am.'

'Brandied feelings are not pathetic to me.'

'I like to think kindly of them,' Danvers remarked, in reproof of her
inhumanity; adding: 'They may overturn us!' at which Diana laughed. Her
eyes were drawn to a brawl of women and men in the street. 'Ah! that
miserable sight!' she cried. 'It is the everlasting nightmare of London.'

Danvers humped, femininely injured by the notice of it. She wondered her
mistress should deign to.

Rolling on between the blind and darkened houses, Diana transferred her
sensations to them, and in a fit of the nerves imagined them beholding a
funeral convoy without followers.

They came in view of the domed cathedral, hearing, in a pause of the
wheels, the bell of the hour. 'Faster--faster! my dear man,' Diana
murmured, and they entered a small still square of many lighted windows.

'This must be where the morrow is manufactured,' she said. 'Tell the man
to wait.--Or rather it's the mirror of yesterday: we have to look
backward to see forward in life.'

She talked her cool philosophy to mask her excitement from herself. Her
card, marked: 'Imperative-two minutes,' was taken up to Mr. Tonans. They
ascended to the editorial ante-room. Doors opened and shut, hasty feet
traversed the corridors, a dull hum in dumbness told of mighty business
at work. Diana received the summons to the mighty head of the
establishment. Danvers was left to speculate. She heard the voice of Mr.
Tonans: 'Not more than two!' This was not a place for compliments. Men
passed her, hither and yonder, cursorily noticing the presence of a
woman. She lost, very strangely to her, the sense of her sex and became
an object--a disregarded object. Things of more importance were about.
Her feminine self-esteem was troubled; all idea of attractiveness
expired. Here was manifestly a spot where women had dropped from the
secondary to the cancelled stage of their extraordinary career in a world
either blowing them aloft like soap-bubbles or quietly shelving them as
supernumeraries. A gentleman--sweet vision!--shot by to the editor's
door, without even looking cursorily. He knocked. Mr. Tonans appeared and
took him by the arm, dictating at a great rate; perceived Danvers,
frowned at the female, and requested him to wait in the room, which the
gentleman did, not once casting eye upon a woman. At last her mistress
returned to her, escorted so far by Mr. Tonans, and he refreshingly bent
his back to bow over her hand: so we have the satisfaction of knowing
that we are not such poor creatures after all! Suffering in person,
Danvers was revived by the little show of homage to her sex.

They descended the stairs.

'You are not an Editor of a paper, but you may boast that you have been
near the nest of one,' Diana said, when they resumed their seats in the
cab. She breathed deeply from time to time, as if under a weight, or
relieved of it, but she seemed animated, and she dropped now and again a
funny observation of the kind that tickled Danvers and caused the maid to
boast of her everywhere as better than a Play.

At home, Danvers busied her hands to supply her mistress a cup of
refreshing tea and a plate of biscuits.

Diana had stunned herself with the strange weight of the expedition, and
had not a thought. In spite of tea at that hour, she slept soundly
through the remainder of the night, dreamlessly till late into the
morning.




CHAPTER XXXIII

EXHIBITS THE SPRINGING OF A MINE IN A NEWSPAPER ARTICLE

The powers of harmony would seem to be tried to their shrewdest pitch
when Politics and Love are planted together in a human breast. This
apparently opposite couple can nevertheless chant a very sweet accord, as
was shown by Dacier on his homeward walk from Diana's house. Let Love
lead, the God will make music of any chamber-comrade. He was able to
think of affairs of State while feeling the satisfied thirst of the lover
whose pride, irritated by confidential wild eulogies of the beautiful
woman, had recently clamoured for proofs of his commandership. The
impression she stamped on him at Copsley remained, but it could not
occupy the foreground for ever. He did not object to play second to her
sprightly wits in converse, if he had some warm testimony to his mastery
over her blood. For the world had given her to him, enthusiastic friends
had congratulated him: she had exalted him for true knightliness; and he
considered the proofs well earned, though he did not value them low. They
were little by comparison. They lighted, instead of staining, her
unparalleled high character.

She loved him. Full surely did she love him, or such a woman would never
have consented to brave the world; once in their project of flight, and
next, even more endearingly when contemplated, in the sacrifice of her
good name; not omitting that fervent memory of her pained submission, but
a palpitating submission, to his caress. She was in his arms again at the
thought of it. He had melted her, and won the confession of her senses by
a surprise, and he owned that never had woman been so vigilantly
self-guarded or so watchful to keep her lover amused and aloof. Such a
woman deserved long service. But then the long service deserved its time
of harvest. Her surging look of reproach in submission pointed to the
golden time, and as he was a man of honour, pledged to her for life, he
had no remorse, and no scruple in determining to exact her dated promise,
on this occasion deliberately. She was the woman to be his wife; she was
his mind's mate: they had hung apart in deference to mere scruples too
long. During the fierce battle of the Session she would be his help, his
fountain of counsel; and she would be the rosy gauze-veiled more than
cold helper and adviser, the being which would spur her womanly
intelligence to acknowledge, on this occasion deliberately, the wisdom of
the step. They had been so close to it! She might call it madness then:
now it was wisdom. Each had complete experience of the other, and each
vowed the step must be taken. As to the secret communicated, he exulted
in the pardonable cunning of the impulse turning him back to her house
after the guests had gone, and the dexterous play of his bait on the
line, tempting her to guess and quit her queenly guard. Though it had not
been distinctly schemed, the review of it in that light added to the
enjoyment. It had been dimly and richly conjectured as a hoped result.
Small favours from her were really worth, thrice worth, the utmost from
other women. They tasted the sweeter for the winning of them artfully--an
honourable thing in love. Nature, rewarding the lover's ingenuity and
enterprise, inspires him with old Greek notions of right and wrong: and
love is indeed a fluid mercurial realm, continually shifting the
principles of rectitude and larceny. As long as he means nobly, what is
there to condemn him? Not she in her heart. She was the presiding
divinity.

And she, his Tony, that splendid Diana, was the woman the world abused!
Whom will it not abuse?

The slough she would have to plunge in before he could make her his own
with the world's consent, was already up to her throat. She must, and
without further hesitation, be steeped, that he might drag her out,
washed of the imputed defilement, and radiant, as she was in character.
Reflection now said this; not impulse. Her words rang through him. At
every meeting she said things to confound his estimate of the wits of
women, or be remembered for some spirited ring they had: A high wind will
make a dead leaf fly like a bird. He murmured it and flew with her. She
quickened a vein of imagination that gave him entrance to a strangely
brilliant sphere, above his own, where, she sustaining, he too could
soar; and he did, scarce conscious of walking home, undressing, falling
asleep.

The act of waking was an instantaneous recovery of his emotional rapture
of the overnight; nor was it a bar to graver considerations. His Chief
had gone down to a house in the country; his personal business was to see
and sound the followers of their party--after another sight of his Tony.
She would be sure to counsel sagaciously; she always did. She had a
marvellous intuition of the natures of the men he worked with, solely
from his chance descriptions of them; it was as though he started the
bird and she transfixed it. And she should not have matter to rule her
smooth brows: that he swore to. She should sway him as she pleased, be
respected after her prescribed manner. The promise must be exacted;
nothing besides, promise.--You see, Tony, you cannot be less than Tony to
me now, he addressed the gentle phantom of her. Let me have your word,
and I am your servant till the Session ends.--Tony blushes her swarthy
crimson: Diana, fluttering, rebukes her; but Diana is the appeasable
Goddess; Tony is the woman, and she loves him. The glorious Goddess need
not cut them adrift; they can show her a book of honest pages.

Dacier could truthfully say he had worshipped, done knightly service to
the beloved woman, homage to the aureole encircling her. Those friends of
his, covertly congratulating him on her preference, doubtless thought him
more privileged than he was; but they did not know Diana; and they were
welcome, if they would only believe, to the knowledge that he was at the
feet of this most sovereign woman. He despised the particular Satyr-world
which, whatever the nature or station of the woman, crowns the
desecrator, and bestows the title of Fool on the worshipper. He could
have answered veraciously that she had kept him from folly.

Nevertheless the term to service must come. In the assurance of the
approaching term he stood braced against a blowing world; happy as men
are when their muscles are strung for a prize they pluck with the energy
and aim of their whole force.

Letters and morning papers were laid for him to peruse in his
dressing-room. He read his letters before the bath. Not much public news
was expected at the present season. While dressing, he turned over the
sheets of Whitmonby's journal. Dull comments on stale things. Foreign
news. Home news, with the leaders on them, identically dull. Behold the
effect of Journalism: a witty man, sparkling overnight, gets into his
pulpit and proses; because he must say something, and he really knows
nothing.

Journalists have an excessive overestimate of their influence. They
cannot, as Diana said, comparing them with men on the Parliamentary
platform, cannot feel they are aboard the big vessel; they can only
strive to raise a breeze, or find one to swell; and they cannot measure
the stoutness or the greatness of the good ship England. Dacier's
personal ambition was inferior to his desire to extend and strengthen his
England. Parliament was the field, Government the office. How many
conversations had passed between him and Diana on that patriotic dream!
She had often filled his drooping sails; he owned it proudly:--and while
the world, both the hoofed and the rectilinear portions, were biting at
her character! Had he fretted her self-respect? He blamed himself, but a
devoted service must have its term.

The paper of Mr. Tonans was reserved for perusal at breakfast. He
reserved it because Tonans was an opponent, tricksy and surprising now
and then, amusing too; unlikely to afford him serious reflections. The
recent endeavours of his journal to whip the Government-team to a
right-about-face were annoying, preposterous. Dacier had admitted to
Diana that Tonans merited the thanks of the country during 'the
discreditable Railway mania, when his articles had a fine exhortative and
prophetic twang, and had done marked good. Otherwise, as regarded the
Ministry, the veering gusts of Tonans were objectionable: he 'raised the
breeze' wantonly as well as disagreeably. Any one can whip up the
populace if he has the instruments; and Tonans frequently intruded on the
Ministry's prerogative to govern. The journalist was bidding against the
statesman. But such is the condition of a rapidly Radicalizing country!
We must take it as it is.

With a complacent, What now, Dacier fixed his indifferent eyes on the
first column of the leaders. He read, and his eyes grew horny. He jerked
back at each sentence, electrified, staring. The article was shorter than
usual. Total Repeal was named; the precise date when the Minister
intended calling Parliament together to propose it. The 'Total Repeal'
might be guess-work--an Editor's bold stroke; but the details, the date,
were significant of positive information. The Minister's definite and
immediate instructions were exactly stated.

Where could the fellow have got hold of that? Dacier asked the blank
ceiling.

He frowned at vacant corners of the room in an effort to conjure some
speculation indicative of the source.

Had his Chief confided the secret to another and a traitor? Had they been
overheard in his library when the project determined on was put in plain
speech?

The answer was no, impossible, to each question.

He glanced at Diana. She? But it was past midnight when he left her. And
she would never have betrayed him, never, never. To imagine it a moment
was an injury to her.

Where else could he look? It had been specially mentioned in the
communication as a secret by his Chief, who trusted him and no others. Up
to the consultation with the Cabinet, it was a thing to be guarded like
life itself. Not to a soul except Diana would Dacier have breathed
syllable of any secret--and one of this weight!

He ran down the article again. There were the facts; undeniable facts;
and they detonated with audible roaring and rounding echoes of them over
England. How did they come there? As well inquire how man came on the,
face of the earth.

He had to wipe his forehead perpetually. Think as he would in exaltation
of Diana to shelter himself, he was the accused. He might not be the
guilty, but he had opened his mouth; and though it was to her only, and
she, as Dunstane had sworn, true as steel, he could not escape
condemnation. He had virtually betrayed his master. Diana would never
betray her lover, but the thing was in the air as soon as uttered: and
off to the printing-press! Dacier's grotesque fancy under annoyance
pictured a stream of small printer's devils in flight from his babbling
lips.

He consumed bits of breakfast, with a sour confession that a
newspaper-article had hit him at last, and stunningly.

Hat and coat were called for. The state of aimlessness in hot perplexity
demands a show of action. Whither to go first was as obscure as what to
do. Diana said of the Englishman's hat and coat, that she supposed they
were to make him a walking presentment of the house he had shut up behind
him. A shot of the eye at the glass confirmed the likeness, but with a
ruefully wry-faced repudiation of it internally:--Not so shut up! the
reverse of that-a common babbler.

However, there was no doubt of Diana. First he would call on her. The
pleasantest dose in perturbations of the kind is instinctively taken
first. She would console, perhaps direct him to guess how the secret had
leaked. But so suddenly, immediately! It was inexplicable.

Sudden and immediate consequences were experienced. On the steps of his
house his way was blocked by the arrival of Mr. Quintin Manx, who jumped
out of a cab, bellowing interjections and interrogations in a breath. Was
there anything in that article? He had read it at breakfast, and it had
choked him. Dacier was due at a house and could not wait: he said, rather
sharply, he was not responsible for newspaper articles. Quintin Manx, a
senior gentleman and junior landowner, vowed that no Minister intending
to sell the country should treat him as a sheep. The shepherd might go;
he would not carry his flock with him. But was there a twinkle of
probability in the story? . . . that article! Dacier was unable to inform
him; he was very hurried, had to keep an appointment.

'If I let you go, will you come and lunch with me at two?' said Quintin.

To get rid of him, Dacier nodded and agreed.

'Two o'clock, mind!' was bawled at his heels as he walked off with his
long stride, unceremoniously leaving the pursy gentleman of sixty to
settle with his cabman far to the rear.




CHAPTER XXXIV

IN WHICH IT IS DARKLY SEEN HOW THE CRIMINAL'S JUDGE MAY BE LOVE'S
CRIMINAL

When we are losing balance on a precipice we do not think much of the
thing we have clutched for support. Our balance is restored and we have
not fallen; that is the comfortable reflection: we stand as others do,
and we will for the future be warned to avoid the dizzy stations which
cry for resources beyond a common equilibrium, and where a slip
precipitates us to ruin.

When, further, it is a woman planted in a burning blush, having to
idealize her feminine weakness, that she may not rebuke herself for
grovelling, the mean material acts by which she sustains a tottering
position are speedily swallowed in the one pervading flame. She sees but
an ashen curl of the path she has traversed to safety, if anything.

Knowing her lover was to come in the morning, Diana's thoughts dwelt
wholly upon the way to tell him, as tenderly as possible without danger
to herself, that her time for entertaining was over until she had
finished her book; indefinitely, therefore. The apprehension of his
complaining pricked the memory that she had something to forgive. He had
sunk her in her own esteem by compelling her to see her woman's softness.
But how high above all other men her experience of him could place him
notwithstanding! He had bowed to the figure of herself, dearer than
herself, that she set before him: and it was a true figure to the world;
a too fictitious to any but the most knightly of lovers. She forgave; and
a shudder seized her.--Snake! she rebuked the delicious run of fire
through her veins; for she was not like the idol women of imperishable
type, who are never for a twinkle the prey of the blood: statues created
by man's common desire to impress upon the sex his possessing pattern of
them as domestic decorations.

When she entered the room to Dacier and they touched hands, she rejoiced
in her coolness, without any other feeling or perception active. Not to
be unkind, not too kind: this was her task. She waited for the passage of
commonplaces.

'You slept well, Percy?'

'Yes; and you?'

'I don't think I even dreamed.'

They sat. She noticed the cloud on him and waited for his allusion to it,
anxious concerning him simply.

Dacier flung the hair off his temples. Words of Titanic formation were
hurling in his head at journals and journalists. He muttered his disgust
of them.

'Is there anything to annoy you in the papers to-day?' she asked, and
thought how handsome his face was in anger.

The paper of Mr. Tonans was named by him. 'You have not seen it?

'I have not opened it yet.'

He sprang up. 'The truth is, those fellows can now afford to buy right
and left, corrupt every soul alive! There must have been a spy at the
keyhole. I'm pretty certain--I could swear it was not breathed to any ear
but mine; and there it is this morning in black and white.'

'What is?' cried Diana, turning to him on her chair.

'The thing I told you last night.'

Her lips worked, as if to spell the thing. 'Printed, do you say?' she
rose.

'Printed. In a leading article, loud as a trumpet; a hue and cry running
from end to end of the country. And my Chief has already had the
satisfaction of seeing the secret he confided to me yesterday roared in
all the thoroughfares this morning. They've got the facts: his decision
to propose it, and the date--the whole of it! But who could have betrayed
it?'

For the first time since her midnight expedition she felt a sensation of
the full weight of the deed. She heard thunder.

She tried to disperse the growing burden by an inward summons to contempt
of the journalistic profession, but nothing would come. She tried to
minimize it, and her brain succumbed. Her views of the deed last night
and now throttled reason in two contending clutches. The enormity swelled
its dimensions, taking shape, and pointing magnetically at her. She stood
absolutely, amazedly, bare before it.

'Is it of such very great importance?' she said, like one supplicating
him to lessen it.

'A secret of State? If you ask whether it is of great importance to me,
relatively it is of course. Nothing greater. Personally my conscience is
clear. I never mentioned it--couldn't have mentioned it--to any one but
you. I'm not the man to blab secrets. He spoke to me because he knew he
could trust me. To tell you the truth, I'm brought to a dead stop. I
can't make a guess.

I'm certain, from what he said, that he trusted me only with it:
perfectly certain. I know him well. He was in his library, speaking in
his usual conversational tone, deliberately, nor overloud. He stated that
it was a secret between us.'

'Will it affect him?'

'This article? Why, naturally it will. You ask strange questions. A
Minister coming to a determination like that! It affects him vitally. The
members of the Cabinet are not so devoted . . . . It affects us all--the
whole Party; may split it to pieces! There's no reckoning the upset right
and left. If it were false, it could be refuted; we could despise it as a
trick of journalism. It's true. There's the mischief. Tonans did not
happen to call here last night?--absurd! I left later than twelve.'

'No, but let me hear,' Diana said hurriedly, for the sake of uttering the
veracious negative and to slur it over. 'Let me hear . . .' She could not
muster an idea.

Her delicious thrilling voice was a comfort to him. He lifted his breast
high and thumped it, trying to smile. 'After all, it's pleasant being
with you, Tony. Give me your hand--you may: I 'm bothered--confounded by
this morning surprise. It was like walking against the muzzle of a loaded
cannon suddenly unmasked. One can't fathom the mischief it will do. And I
shall be suspected, and can't quite protest myself the spotless innocent.
Not even to my heart's mistress! to the wife of the bosom! I suppose I'm
no Roman. You won't give me your hand? Tony, you might, seeing I am
rather . . .'

A rush of scalding tears flooded her eyes.

'Don't touch me,' she said, and forced her sight to look straight at him
through the fiery shower. 'I have done positive mischief?'

'You, my dear Tony?' He doated on her face. 'I don't blame you, I blame
myself. These things should never be breathed. Once in the air, the devil
has hold of them. Don't take it so much to heart. The thing's bad enough
to bear as it is. Tears! Let me have the hand. I came, on my honour, with
the most honest intention to submit to your orders: but if I see you
weeping in sympathy!'

'Oh! for heaven's sake,' she caught her hands away from him, 'don't be
generous. Whip me with scorpions. And don't touch me,' cried Diana. 'Do
you understand? You did not name it as a secret. I did not imagine it to
be a secret of immense, immediate importance.'

'But--what?' shouted Dacier, stiffening.

He wanted her positive meaning, as she perceived, having hoped that it
was generally taken and current, and the shock to him over.

'I had . . . I had not a suspicion of doing harm, Percy.'

'But what harm have you done? No riddles!'

His features gave sign of the break in their common ground, the widening
gulf.

'I went . . . it was a curious giddiness: I can't account for it. I
thought . . .'

'Went? You went where?'

'Last night. I would speak intelligibly: my mind has gone. Ah! you look.
It is not so bad as my feeling.'

'But where did you go last night? What!--to Tonans?'

She drooped her head: she saw the track of her route cleaving the
darkness in a demoniacal zig-zag and herself in demon's grip.

'Yes,' she confronted him. 'I went to Mr. Tonans.'

'Why?'

'I went to him--'

'You went alone?'

'I took my maid.'

'Well?'

'It was late when you left me . . .'

'Speak plainly!'

'I am trying: I will tell you all.'

'At once, if you please.'

'I went to him--why? There is no accounting for it. He sneered constantly
at my stale information.'

'You gave him constant information?'

'No: in our ordinary talk. He railed at me for being "out of it." I must
be childish: I went to show him--oh! my vanity! I think I must have been
possessed.'

She watched the hardening of her lover's eyes. They penetrated, and
through them she read herself insufferably.

But it was with hesitation still that he said: 'Then you betrayed me?'

'Percy! I had not a suspicion of mischief.'

'You went straight to this man?'

'Not thinking . . .'

'You sold me to a journalist!'

'I thought it was a secret of a day. I don't think you--no, you did not
tell me to keep it secret. A word from you would have been enough. I was
in extremity.'

Dacier threw his hands up and broke away. He had an impulse to dash from
the room, to get a breath of different air. He stood at the window,
observing tradesmen's carts, housemaids, blank doors, dogs, a beggar
fifer. Her last words recurred to him. He turned: 'You were in extremity,
you said. What is the meaning of that? What extremity?'

Her large dark eyes flashed powerlessly; her shape appeared to have
narrowed; her tongue, too, was a feeble penitent.

'You ask a creature to recall her acts of insanity.'

'There must be some signification in your words, I suppose.'

'I will tell you as clearly as I can. You have the right to be my judge.
I was in extremity--that is, I saw no means . . . I could not write: it
was ruin coming.'

'Ah?--you took payment for playing spy?'

'I fancied I could retrieve . . . Now I see the folly, the baseness. I
was blind.'

'Then you sold me to a journalist for money?'

The intolerable scourge fetched a stifled scream from her and drove her
pacing, but there was no escape; she returned to meet it.

The room was a cage to both of them, and every word of either was a
sting.

'Percy, I did not imagine he would use it--make use of it as he has
done.'

'Not? And when he paid for it?'

'I fancied it would be merely of general service--if any.'

'Distributed; I see: not leading to the exposure of the communicant!'

'You are harsh; but I would not have you milder.'

The meekness of such a mischief-doer was revolting and called for the
lash.

'Do me the favour to name the sum. I am curious to learn what my
imbecility was counted worth.'

'No sum was named.'

'Have I been bought for a song?'

'It was a suggestion--no definite . . . nothing stipulated.'

'You were to receive money!'

'Leave me a bit of veiling! No, you shall behold me the thing I am.
Listen . . . I was poor . . .'

'You might have applied to me.'

'For money! That I could not do:

'Better than betraying me, believe me.'

'I had no thought of betraying. I hope I could have died rather than
consciously betray.'

'Money! My whole fortune was at your, disposal.'

'I was beset with debts, unable to write, and, last night when you left
me, abject. It seemed to me that you disrespected me . . .'

'Last night!' Dacier cried with lashing emphasis.

'It is evident to me that I have the reptile in me, Percy. Or else I am
subject to lose my reason. I went . . . I went like a bullet: I cannot
describe it; I was mad. I need a strong arm, I want help. I am given to
think that I do my best and can be independent; I break down. I went
blindly--now I see it--for the chance of recovering my position, as the
gambler casts; and he wins or loses. With me it is the soul that is lost.
No exact sum was named; thousands were hinted.'

'You are hardly practical on points of business.'

'I was insane.'

'I think you said you slept well after it,' Dacier remarked.

'I had so little the idea of having done evilly, that I slept without a
dream.'

He shrugged:--the consciences of women are such smooth deeps, or running
shallows.

'I have often wondered how your newspaper men got their information,' he
said, and muttered: 'Money-women!' adding: 'Idiots to prime them! And I
one of the leaky vessels! Well, we learn. I have been rather astonished
at times of late at the scraps of secret knowledge displayed by Tonans.
If he flourishes his thousands! The wonder is, he doesn't corrupt the
Ministers' wives. Perhaps he does. Marriage will become a danger-sign to
Parliamentary members. Foreign women do these tricks . . . women of a
well-known stamp. It is now a full year, I think, since I began to speak
to you of secret matters--and congratulated myself, I recollect, on your
thirst for them.'

'Percy, if you suspect that I have uttered one word before last night,
you are wrong. I cannot paint my temptation or my loss of sense last
night. Previously I was blameless. I thirsted, yes; but in the hope of
helping you.'

He looked at her. She perceived how glitteringly loveless his eyes had
grown. It was her punishment; and though the enamoured woman's heart
protested it excessive, she accepted it.

'I can never trust you again,' he said.

'I fear you will not,' she replied.

His coming back to her after the departure of the guests last night shone
on him in splendid colours of single-minded loverlike devotion. 'I came
to speak to my own heart. I thought it would give you pleasure; thought I
could trust you utterly. I had not the slightest conception I was
imperilling my honour . . . !'

He stopped. Her bloodless fixed features revealed an intensity of anguish
that checked him. Only her mouth, a little open for the sharp breath,
appeared dumbly beseeching. Her large eyes met his like steel to steel,
as of one who would die fronting the weapon.

He strangled a loathsome inclination to admire.

'So good bye,' he said.

She moved her lips.

He said no more. In half a minute he was gone.

To her it was the plucking of life out of her breast.

She pressed her hands where heart had been. The pallor and cold of death
took her body.




CHAPTER XXXV

REVEALS HOW THE TRUE HEROINE OF ROMANCE COMES FINALLY TO HER, TIME OF
TRIUMPH

The shutting of her house-door closed for Dacier that woman's history in
connection with himself. He set his mind on the consequences of the act
of folly--the trusting a secret to a woman. All were possibly not so bad:
none should be trusted.

The air of the street fanned him agreeably as he revolved the horrible
project of confession to the man who had put faith in him. Particulars
might be asked. She would be unnamed, but an imagination of the effect of
naming her placarded a notorious woman in fresh paint: two members of the
same family her victims!

And last night, no later than last night, he had swung round at this very
corner of the street to give her the fullest proof of his affection. He
beheld a dupe trotting into a carefully-laid pitfall. She had him by the
generosity of his confidence in her. Moreover, the recollection of her
recent feeble phrasing, when she stood convicted of the treachery, when a
really clever woman would have developed her resources, led him to doubt
her being so finely gifted. She was just clever enough to hoodwink. He
attributed the dupery to a trick of imposing the idea of her virtue upon
men. Attracted by her good looks and sparkle, they entered the circle of
her charm, became delightfully intimate, suffered a rebuff, and were from
that time prepared to serve her purpose. How many other wretched dupes
had she dangling? He spied at Westlake, spied at Redworth, at old Lord
Larrian, at Lord Dannisburgh, at Arthur Rhodes, dozens. Old and young
were alike to her if she saw an end to be gained by keeping them hooked.
Tonans too, and Whitmonby. Newspaper editors were especially serviceable.
Perhaps 'a young Minister of State' held the foremost rank in that
respect: if completely duped and squeezeable, he produced more
substantial stuff.

The background of ice in Dacier's composition was brought to the front by
his righteous contempt of her treachery. No explanation of it would have
appeased him. She was guilty, and he condemned her. She stood condemned
by all the evil likely to ensue from her misdeed. Scarcely had he left
her house last night when she was away to betray him!--He shook her from
him without a pang. Crediting her with the one merit she had--that of not
imploring for mercy--he the more easily shook her off. Treacherous, she
had not proved theatrical. So there was no fuss in putting out her light,
and it was done. He was justified by the brute facts. Honourable,
courteous, kindly gentleman, highly civilized, an excellent citizen and a
patriot, he was icy at an outrage to his principles, and in the dominion
of Love a sultan of the bow-string and chopper period, sovereignly
endowed to stretch a finger for the scimitared Mesrour to make the erring
woman head and trunk with one blow: and away with those remnants! This
internally he did. Enough that the brute facts justified him.

St. James's park was crossed, and the grass of the Green park, to avoid
inquisitive friends. He was obliged to walk; exercise, action of any
sort, was imperative, and but for some engagement he would have gone to
his fencing-rooms for a bout with the master. He remembered his
engagement and grew doubly embittered. He had absurdly pledged himself to
lunch with Quintin Manx; that was, to pretend to eat while submitting to
be questioned by a political dullard strong on his present right to
overhaul and rail at his superiors. The house was one of a block along
the North-Western line of Hyde park. He kicked at the subjection to go
there, but a promise was binding, though he gave it when stunned. He
could have silenced Mr. Manx with the posing interrogation: Why have I so
long consented to put myself at the mercy of a bore? For him, he could
not answer it, though Manx, as leader of the Shipping interest, was
influential. The man had to be endured, like other doses in politics.

Dacier did not once think of the great ship-owner's niece till Miss
Constance Asper stepped into her drawing-room to welcome him. She was an
image of repose to his mind. The calm pure outline of her white features
refreshed him as the Alps the Londoner newly alighted at Berne; smoke,
wrangle, the wrestling city's wickedness, behind him.

'My uncle is very disturbed,' she said. 'Is the news--if I am not very
indiscreet in inquiring?'

'I have a practice of never paying attention to newspaper articles,'
Dacier replied.

'I am only affected by living with one who does,' Miss Asper observed,
and the lofty isolation of her head above politics gave her a moral
attractiveness in addition to physical beauty. Her water-colour sketches
were on her uncle's walls: the beautiful in nature claimed and absorbed
her. She dressed with a pretty rigour, a lovely simplicity, picturesque
of the nunnery. She looked indeed a high-born young lady-abbess.

'It's a dusty game for ladies,' Dacier said, abhorring the women defiled
by it.

And when one thinks of the desire of men to worship women, there is a
pathos in a man's discovery of the fair young creature undefiled by any
interest in public affairs, virginal amid her bower's environments.

The angelical beauty of a virgin mind and person captivated him, by
contrast. His natural taste was to admire it, shunning the lures and
tangles of the women on high seas, notably the married: who, by the way,
contrive to ensnare us through wonderment at a cleverness caught from
their traffic with the masculine world: often--if we did but know!--a
parrot-repetition of the last male visitor's remarks. But that which the
fair maiden speaks, though it may be simple, is her own.

She too is her own: or vowed but to one. She is on all sides impressive
in purity. The world worships her as its perfect pearl: and we are
brought refreshfully to acknowledge that the world is right.

By contrast, the white radiation of Innocence distinguished Constance
Asper celestially. As he was well aware, she had long preferred him--the
reserved among many pleading pressing suitors. Her steady faithfulness
had fed on the poorest crumbs.

He ventured to express the hope that she was well.

'Yes,' she answered, with eyelids lifted softly to thank him for his
concern in so humble a person.

'You look a little pale,' he said.

She coloured like a sea-water shell. 'I am inclined to paleness by
nature.'

Her uncle disturbed them. Lunch was ready. He apologized for the absence
of Mrs. Markland, a maternal aunt of Constance, who kept house for them.
Quintin Manx fell upon the meats, and then upon the Minister. Dacier
found himself happily surprised by the accession of an appetite. He
mentioned it, to escape from the worrying of his host, as unusual with
him at midday: and Miss Asper, supporting him in that effort, said
benevolently: 'Gentlemen should eat; they have so many fatigues and
troubles.' She herself did not like to be seen eating in public. Her lips
opened to the morsels, as with a bird's bill, though with none of the
pecking eagerness we complacently observe in poultry.

'But now, I say, positively, how about that article?' said Quintin.

Dacier visibly winced, and Constance immediately said 'Oh! spare us
politics, dear uncle.'

Her intercession was without avail, but by contrast with the woman
implicated in the horrible article, it was a carol of the seraphs.

'Come, you can say whether there's anything in it,' Dacier's host pushed
him.

'I should not say it if I could,' he replied.

The mild sweetness of Miss Asper's look encouraged him.

He was touched to the quick by hearing her say: 'You ask for Cabinet
secrets, uncle. All secrets are holy, but secrets of State are under a
seal next to divine.'

Next to divine! She was the mouthpiece of his ruling principle.

'I 'm not, prying into secrets,' Quintin persisted; 'all I want to know
is, whether there 's any foundation for that article--all London's
boiling about it, I can tell you--or it's only newspaper's humbug.'

'Clearly the oracle for you is the Editor's office,' rejoined Dacier.

'A pretty sort of answer I should get.'

'It would at least be complimentary.'

'How do you mean?'

'The net was cast for you--and the sight of a fish in it!'

Miss Asper almost laughed. 'Have you heard the choir at St. Catherine's?'
she asked.

Dacier had not. He repented of his worldliness, and drinking persuasive
claret, said he would go to hear it next Sunday.

'Do,' she murmured.

'Well, you seem to be a pair against me,' her uncle grumbled. 'Anyhow I
think it's important. People have been talking for some time, and I don't
want to be taken unawares; I won't be a yoked ox, mind you.'

'Have you been sketching lately?' Dacier asked Miss Asper.

She generally filled a book in the autumn, she said.

'May I see it?'

'If you wish.'

They had a short tussle with her uncle and escaped. He was conducted to a
room midway upstairs: an heiress's conception of a saintly little room;
and more impresive in purity, indeed it was, than a saint's, with the
many crucifixes, gold and silver emblems, velvet prie-Dieu chairs,
jewel-clasped sacred volumes: every invitation to meditate in luxury on
an ascetic religiousness.

She depreciated her sketching powers. 'I am impatient with my
imperfections. I am therefore doomed not to advance.'

'On the contrary, that is the state guaranteeing ultimate excellence,' he
said, much disposed to drone about it.

She sighed: 'I fear not.'

He turned the leaves, comparing her modesty with the performance. The
third of the leaves was a subject instantly recognized by him. It
represented the place he had inherited from Lord Dannisburgh.

He named it.

She smiled: 'You are good enough to see a likeness? My aunt and I were
passing it last October, and I waited for a day, to sketch.'

'You have taken it from my favourite point of view.'

'I am glad.'

'How much I should like a copy!'

'If you will accept that?'

'I could not rob you.'

'I can make a duplicate.'

'The look of the place pleases you?'

'Oh! yes; the pines behind it; the sweet little village church; even the
appearance of the rustics;--it is all impressively old English. I suppose
you are very seldom there?'

'Does it look like a home to you?'

'No place more!'

'I feel the loneliness.'

'Where I live I feel no loneliness!'

'You have heavenly messengers near you.'

'They do not always come.'

'Would you consent to make the place less lonely to me?'

Her bosom rose. In deference to her maidenly understanding, she gazed
inquiringly.

'If you love it!' said he.

'The place?' she said, looking soft at the possessor.

'Constance!'

'Is it true?'

'As you yourself. Could it be other than true? This hand is mine?'

'Oh! Percy.'

Borrowing the world's poetry to describe them, the long prayed-for Summer
enveloped the melting snows.

So the recollection of Diana's watch beside his uncle's death-bed was
wiped out. Ay, and the hissing of her treachery silenced. This maidenly
hand put him at peace with the world, instead of his defying it for a
worthless woman--who could not do better than accept the shelter of her
husband's house, as she ought to be told, if her friends wished her to
save her reputation.

Dacier made his way downstairs to Quintin Manx, by whom he was hotly
congratulated and informed of the extent of the young lady's fortune: on
the strength of which it was expected that he would certainly speak a
private word in elucidation of that newspaper article.

'I know nothing of it,' said Dacier, but promised to come and dine. Alone
in her happiness Constance Asper despatched various brief notes under her
gold-symbolled crest to sisterly friends; one to Lady Wathin, containing
the, single line:

'Your prophesy is confirmed.'

Dacier was comfortably able to face his Club after the excitement of a
proposal, with a bride on his hands. He was assaulted concerning the
article, and he parried capitally. Say that her lips were rather cold: at
any rate, they invigorated him. Her character was guaranteed--not the
hazy idea of a dupe. And her fortune would be enormous: a speculation
merely due to worldly prudence and prospective ambition.

At the dinner-table of four, in the evening, conversation would have
seemed dull to him, by contrast, had it not, been for the presiding grace
of his bride, whose habitually eminent feminine air of superiority to the
repast was throned by her appreciative receptiveness of his looks and
utterances. Before leaving her, he won her consent to a very early
marriage; on the plea of a possibly approaching Session, and also that
they had waited long. The consent, notwithstanding the hurry of
preparations, it involved, besides the annihilation of her desire to
meditate on so solemn a change in her life and savour the congratulations
of her friends and have the choir of St. Catherine's rigorously drilled
in her favourite anthems was beautifully yielded to the pressure of
circumstances.

There lay on his table at night a letter; a bulky letter. No need to tear
it open for sight of the signature: the superscription was redolent of
that betraying woman. He tossed it unopened into the fire.

As it was thick, it burned sullenly, discolouring his name on the
address, as she had done, and still offering him a last chance of viewing
the contents. She fought on the consuming fire to have her exculpation
heard.

But was she not a shameless traitor? She had caught him by his love of
his country and hope to serve it. She had wound into his heart to bleed
him of all he knew and sell the secrets for money. A wonderful sort of
eloquence lay there, on those coals, no doubt. He felt a slight movement
of curiosity to glance at two or three random sentences: very slight. And
why read them now? They were valueless to him, mere outcries. He judged
her by the brute facts. She and her slowly-consuming letter were of a
common blackness. Moreover, to read them when he was plighted to another
woman would be senseless. In the discovery of her baseness, she had made
a poor figure. Doubtless during the afternoon she had trimmed her
intuitive Belial art of making 'the worse appear the better cause': queer
to peruse, and instructive in an unprofitable department of knowledge-the
tricks of the sex.

He said to himself, with little intuition of the popular taste: She
wouldn't be a bad heroine of Romance! He said it derisively of the
Romantic. But the right worshipful heroine of Romance was the front-face
female picture he had won for his walls. Poor Diana was the flecked
heroine of Reality: not always the same; not impeccable; not an
ignorant-innocent, nor a guileless: good under good leading; devoted to
the death in a grave crisis; often wrestling with her terrestrial nature
nobly; and a growing soul; but not one whose purity was carved in marble
for the assurance to an Englishman that his possession of the changeless
thing defies time and his fellows, is the pillar of his home and
universally enviable. Your fair one of Romance cannot suffer a mishap
without a plotting villain, perchance many of them; to wreak the dread
iniquity: she cannot move without him; she is the marble block, and if
she is to have a feature, he is the sculptor; she depends on him for
life, and her human history at least is married to him far more than to
the rescuing lover. No wonder, then, that men should find her thrice
cherishable featureless, or with the most moderate possible indication of
a countenance. Thousands of the excellent simple creatures do; and every
reader of her tale. On the contrary, the heroine of Reality is that woman
whom you have met or heard of once in your course of years, and very
probably despised for bearing in her composition the motive principle; at
best, you say, a singular mixture of good and bad; anything but the
feminine ideal of man. Feature to some excess, you think, distinguishes
her. Yet she furnishes not any of the sweet sensual excitement pertaining
to her spotless rival pursued by villany. She knocks at the doors of the
mind, and the mind must open to be interested in her. Mind and heart must
be wide open to excuse her sheer descent from the pure ideal of man.

Dacier's wandering reflections all came back in crowds to the judicial
Bench of the Black Cap. He felt finely, apart from the treason, that her
want of money degraded her: him too, by contact. Money she might have had
to any extent: upon application for it, of course. How was he to imagine
that she wanted money! Smilingly as she welcomed him and his friends,
entertaining them royally, he was bound to think she had means. A decent
propriety bound him not to think of the matter at all. He naturally
supposed she was capable of conducting her affairs. And--money! It soiled
his memory: though the hour at Rovio was rather pretty, and the scene at
Copsley touching: other times also, short glimpses of the woman, were
taking. The flood of her treachery effaced them. And why reflect?
Constance called to him to look her way.

Diana's letter died hard. The corners were burnt to black tissue, with an
edge or two of discoloured paper. A small frayed central heap still
resisted, and in kindness to the necessity for privacy, he impressed the
fire-tongs to complete the execution. After which he went to his desk and
worked, under the presidency of Constance.




CHAPTER XXXVI

IS CONCLUSIVE AS TO THE HEARTLESSNESS OF WOMEN WITH BRAINS

Hymenaeal rumours are those which might be backed to run a victorious
race with the tale of evil fortune; and clearly for the reason that man's
livelier half is ever alert to speed them. They travel with an
astonishing celerity over the land, like flames of the dry beacon-faggots
of old time in announcement of the invader or a conquest, gathering as
they go: wherein, to say nothing of their vastly wider range, they
surpass the electric wires. Man's nuptial half is kindlingly concerned in
the launch of a new couple; it is the business of the fair sex: and man
himself (very strangely, but nature quickens him still) lends a not
unfavouring eye to the preparations of the matrimonial vessel for its
oily descent into the tides, where billows will soon be rising, captain
and mate soon discussing the fateful question of who is commander. We
consent, it appears, to hope again for mankind; here is another chance!
Or else, assuming the happiness of the pair, that pomp of ceremonial,
contrasted with the little wind-blown candle they carry between them,
catches at our weaker fibres.

After so many ships have foundered, some keel up, like poisoned fish, at
the first drink of water, it is a gallant spectacle, let us avow; and
either the world perpetuating it is heroical or nature incorrigible in
the species. Marriages are unceasing. Friends do it, and enemies; the
unknown contractors of this engagement, or armistice, inspire an
interest. It certainly is both exciting and comforting to hear that man
and woman are ready to join in a mutual affirmative, say Yes together
again. It sounds like the end of the war.

The proclamation of the proximate marriage of a young Minister of State
and the greatest heiress of her day; notoriously 'The young Minister of
State' of a famous book written by the beautiful, now writhing, woman
madly enamoured of him--and the heiress whose dowry could purchase a
Duchy; this was a note to make the gossips of England leap from their
beds at the midnight hour and wag tongues in the market-place. It did
away with the political hubbub over the Tonans article, and let it noise
abroad like nonsense. The Hon. Percy Dacier espouses Miss Asper; and she
rescues him from the snares of a siren, he her from the toils of the
Papists. She would have gone over to them, she was going when, luckily
for the Protestant Faith, Percy Dacier intervened with his proposal. Town
and country buzzed the news; and while that dreary League trumpeted about
the business of the nation, a people suddenly become Oriental chattered
of nothing but the blissful union to be celebrated in princely state,
with every musical accessory, short of Operatic.

Lady Wathin was an active agent in this excitement. The excellent woman
enjoyed marriages of High Life: which, as there is presumably wealth to
support them, are manifestly under sanction: and a marriage that she
could consider one of her own contrivance, had a delicate flavour of a
marriage in the family; not quite equal to the seeing a dear daughter of
her numerous progeny conducted to the altar, but excelling it in the pomp
that bids the heavens open. She and no other spread the tidings of Miss
Asper's debating upon the step to Rome at the very instant of Percy
Dacier's declaration of his love; and it was a beautiful struggle, that
of the half-dedicated nun and her deep-rooted earthly passion, love
prevailing! She sent word to Lady Dunstane: 'You know the interest I have
always taken in dear Constance Aspen' etc.; inviting her to come on a
visit a week before the end of the month, that she might join in the
ceremony of a wedding 'likely to be the grandest of our time.' Pitiful
though it was, to think of the bridal pair having but eight or ten days
at the outside, for a honeymoon, the beauty of their 'mutual devotion to
duty' was urged by Lady Wathin upon all hearers.

Lady Dunstane declined the invitation. She waited to hear from her
friend, and the days went by; she could only sorrow for her poor Tony,
divining her state. However little of wrong in the circumstances, they
imposed a silence on her decent mind, and no conceivable shape of writing
would transmit condolences. She waited, with a dull heartache: by no
means grieving at Dacier's engagement to the heiress; until Redworth
animated her, as the bearer of rather startling intelligence, indirectly
relating to the soul she loved. An accident in the street had befallen
Mr. Warwick. Redworth wanted to know whether Diana should be told of it,
though he had no particulars to give; and somewhat to his disappointment,
Lady Dunstane said she would write. She delayed, thinking the accident
might not be serious; and the information of it to Diana surely would be
so. Next day at noon her visitor was Lady Wathin, evidently perturbed and
anxious to say more than she dared: but she received no assistance. After
beating the air in every direction, especially dwelling on the fond
reciprocal affection of the two devoted lovers, to be united within three
days' time, Lady Wathin said at last: 'And is it not shocking! I talk of
a marriage and am appalled by a death. That poor man died last night in
the hospital. I mean poor Mr. Warwick. He was recovering, getting strong
and well, and he was knocked down at a street-crossing and died last
night. It is a warning to us!'

'Mr. Redworth happened to hear of it at his Club, near which the accident
occurred, and he called at the hospital. Mr. Warwick was then alive,'
said Lady Dunstane; adding: 'Well, if prevention is better than cure, as
we hear! Accidents are the specific for averting the maladies of age,
which are a certain crop!'

Lady Wathin's eyelids worked and her lips shut fast at the cold-hearted
remark void of meaning.

She sighed. 'So ends a life of misery, my dear!'

'You are compassionate.'

'I hope so. But . . . Indeed I must speak, if you will let me. I think of
the living.'

Lady Dunstane widened her eyes. 'Of Mrs. Warwick?'

'She has now the freedom she desired. I think of others. Forgive me, but
Constance Asper is to me as a daughter. I have perhaps no grounds for any
apprehension. Love so ardent, so sincere, was never shown by bridegroom
elect: and it is not extraordinary to those acquainted with dear
Constance. But--one may be a worshipped saint and experience defection.
The terrible stories one hears of a power of fascination almost . . . !'
Lady Wathin hung for the word.

'Infernal,' said Lady Dunstane, whose brows had been bent inquiringly.
'Have no fear. The freedom you allude to will not be used to interfere
with any entertainment in prospect. It was freedom my friend desired. Now
that her jewel is restored to her, she is not the person to throw it
away, be sure. And pray, drop the subject.'

'One may rely . . . you think?'

'Oh! Oh!'

'This release coming just before the wedding . . . !'

'I should hardly suppose the man to be the puppet you depict, or
indicate.'

'It is because men--so many--are not puppets that one is conscious of
alarm.'

'Your previous remark,' said Lady Dunstane, 'sounded superstitious. Your
present one has an antipodal basis. But, as for your alarm, check it: and
spare me further. My friend has acknowledged powers. Considering that,
she does not use them, you should learn to respect her.'

Lady Wathin bowed stiffly. She refused to partake of lunch, having, she
said, satisfied her conscience by the performance of a duty and arranged
with her flyman to catch a train. Her cousin Lady Dunstane smiled loftily
at everything she uttered, and she felt that if a woman like this Mrs.
Warwick could put division between blood-relatives, she could do worse,
and was to be dreaded up to the hour of the nuptials.

'I meant no harm in coming,' she said, at the shaking of hands.

'No, no; I understand,' said her hostess: 'you are hen-hearted over your
adopted brood. The situation is perceptible and your intention
creditable.'

As one of the good women of the world, Lady Wathin in departing was
indignant at the tone and dialect of a younger woman not modestly
concealing her possession of the larger brain. Brains in women she both
dreaded and detested; she believed them to be devilish. Here were
instances:--they had driven poor Sir Lukin to evil courses, and that poor
Mr. Warwick straight under the wheels of a cab. Sir Lukin's name was
trotting in public with a naughty Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett's: Mrs. Warwick
might still trim her arts to baffle the marriage. Women with brains,
moreover, are all heartless: they have no pity for distress, no horror of
catastrophes, no joy in the happiness of the deserving. Brains in men
advance a household to station; but brains in women divide it and are the
wrecking of society. Fortunately Lady Wathin knew she could rally a
powerful moral contingent, the aptitude of which for a one-minded
cohesion enabled it to crush those fractional daughters of mischief. She
was a really good woman of the world, heading a multitude; the same whom
you are accustomed to hear exalted; lucky in having had a guided
girlhood, a thick-curtained prudence; and in having stock in the moral
funds, shares in the sentimental tramways. Wherever the world laid its
hoards or ran its lines, she was found, and forcible enough to be
eminent; though at fixed hours of the day, even as she washed her hands,
she abjured worldliness: a performance that cleansed her. If she did not
make morality appear loveable to the objects of her dislike, it was owing
to her want of brains to see the origin, nature and right ends of
morality. But a world yet more deficient than she, esteemed her cordially
for being a bulwark of the present edifice; which looks a solid structure
when the microscope is not applied to its components.

Supposing Percy Dacier a dishonourable tattler as well as an icy lover,
and that Lady Wathin, through his bride, had become privy to the secret
between him and Diana? There is reason to think that she would have held
it in terror over the baneful woman, but not have persecuted her: for she
was by no means the active malignant of theatrical plots. No, she would
have charged it upon the possession of brains by women, and have had a
further motive for inciting the potent dignitary her husband to employ
his authority to repress the sex's exercise of those fell weapons,
hurtful alike to them and all coming near them.

So extreme was her dread of Mrs. Warwick, that she drove from the London
railway station to see Constance and be reassured by her tranquil aspect.

Sweet Constance and her betrothed Percy were together, examining a
missal.

Lady Dunstane despatched a few words of the facts to Diana. She hoped to
hear from her; rather hoped, for the moment, not to see her. No answer
came. The great day of the nuptials came and passed. She counted on her
husband's appearance the next morning, as the good gentleman made a point
of visiting her, to entertain the wife he adored, whenever he had a
wallet of gossip that would overlay the blank of his absence. He had been
to the church of the wedding--he did not say with whom: all the world was
there; and he rapturously described the ceremony, stating that it set
women weeping and caused him to behave like a fool.

'You are impressionable,' said his wife.

He murmured something in praise of the institution of marriage--when
celebrated impressively, it seemed.

'Tony calls the social world "the theatre of appetites," as we have it at
present,' she said; 'and the world at a wedding is, one may reckon, in
the second act of the hungry tragicomedy.'

'Yes, there's the breakfast,' Sir Lukin assented. Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett was
much more intelligible to him: in fact, quite so, as to her speech.

Emma's heart now yearned to her Tony: Consulting her strength, she
thought she might journey to London, and on the third morning after the
Dacier-Asper marriage, she started.

Diana's door was open to Arthur Rhodes when Emma reached it.

'Have you seen her?' she asked him.

His head shook dolefully. 'Mrs. Warwick is unwell; she has been working
too hard.'

'You also, I'm afraid.'

'No.' He could deny that, whatever the look of him.

'Come to me at Copsley soon,' said she, entering to Danvers in the
passage.

'My mistress is upstairs, my lady,' said Danvers. 'She is lying on her
bed.'

'She is ill?'

'She has been lying on her bed ever since.'

'Since what?' Lady Dunstane spoke sharply.

Danvers retrieved her indiscretion. 'Since she heard of the accident, my
lady.'

'Take my name to her. Or no: I can venture.'

'I am not allowed to go in and speak to her. You will find the room quite
dark, my lady, and very cold. It is her command. My mistress will not let
me light the fire; and she has not eaten or drunk of anything since . . .
She will die, if you do not persuade her to take nourishment: a little,
for a beginning. It wants the beginning.'

Emma went upstairs, thinking of the enigmatical maid, that she must be a
good soul after all. Diana's bedroom door was opened slowly.

'You will not be able to see at first, my lady,' Danvers whispered. 'The
bed is to the left, and a chair. I would bring in a candle, but it hurts
her eyes. She forbids it.'

Emma stepped in. The chill thick air of the unlighted London room was
cavernous. She almost forgot the beloved of her heart in the thought that
a living woman had been lying here more than two days and nights,
fasting. The proof of an uttermost misery revived the circumstances
within her to render her friend's presence in this desert of darkness
credible. She found the bed by touch, silently, and distinguished a dark
heap on the bed; she heard no breathing. She sat and listened; then she
stretched out her hand and met her Tony's. It lay open. It was the hand
of a drowned woman.

Shutters and curtains and the fireless grate gave the room an appalling
likeness to the vaults.

So like to the home of death it seemed, that in a few minutes the watcher
had lost count of time and kept but a wormy memory of the daylight. She
dared not speak, for some fear of startling; for the worse fear of never
getting answer. Tony's hand was lifeless. Her clasp of it struck no
warmth.

She stung herself with bitter reproaches for having let common mundane
sentiments, worthy of a Lady Wathin, bar her instant offer of her bosom
to the beloved who suffered in this depth of mortal agony. Tony's love of
a man, as she should have known, would be wrought of the elements of our
being: when other women named Happiness, she said Life; in division,
Death. Her body lying still upon the bed here was a soul borne onward by
the river of Death.

The darkness gave sight after a while, like a curtain lifting on a veil:
the dead light of the underworld. Tony lay with her face up, her underlip
dropped; straight from head to feet. The outline of her face, without hue
of it, could be seen: sign of the hapless women that have souls in love.
Hateful love of men! Emma thought, and was; moved to feel at the wrist
for her darling's pulse. He has, killed her! the thought flashed, as,
with pangs chilling her frame, the pressure at the wrist continued
insensible of the faintest beat. She clasped it, trembling, in pain to
stop an outcry.

'It is Emmy,' said the voice.

Emma's heart sprang to heaven on a rush of thanks.

'My Tony,' she breathed softly.

She hung for a further proof of life in the motionless body. 'Tony!' she
said.

The answer was at her hand, a thread-like return of her clasp.

'It is Emmy come to stay with you, never to leave you.'

The thin still answer was at her hand a moment; the fingers fell away. A
deep breath was taken twice to say:

'Don't talk to me.'

Emma retained the hand. She was warned not to press it by the deadness
following its effort to reply.

But Tony lived; she had given proof of life. Over this little wavering
taper in the vaults Emma cowered, cherishing the hand, silently hoping
for the voice.

It came: 'Winter.'

'It is a cold winter, Tony.'

'My dear will be cold.'

'I will light the fire.'

Emma lost no time in deciding to seek the match-box. The fire was lit and
it flamed; it seemed a revival in the room. Coming back to the bedside,
she discerned her Tony's lacklustre large dark eyes and her hollow
cheeks: her mouth open to air as to the drawing-in of a sword; rather as
to the releaser than the sustainer. Her feet were on the rug her maid had
placed to cover them. Emma leaned across the bed to put them to her
breast, beneath her fur mantle, and held them there despite the
half-animate tug of the limbs and the shaft of iciness they sent to her
very heart. When she had restored them to some warmth, she threw aside
her bonnet and lying beside Tony, took her in her arms, heaving now and
then a deep sigh.

She kissed her cheek.

'It is Emmy.'

'Kiss her.'

'I have no strength.'

Emma laid her face on the lips. They were cold; even the breath between
them cold.

'Has Emmy been long . . .?'

'Here, dear? I think so. I am with my darling.'

Tony moaned. The warmth and the love were bringing back her anguish.

She said: 'I have been happy. It is not hard to go.'

Emma strained to her. 'Tony will wait for her soul's own soul to go, the
two together.'

There was a faint convulsion in the body. 'If I cry, I shall go in pain.'

'You are in Emmy's arms, my beloved.'

Tony's eyes closed for forgetfulness under that sensation. A tear ran
down from her, but the pain was lag and neighboured sleep, like the
pleasure.

So passed the short winter day, little spoken.

Then Emma bethought her of a way of leading Tony to take food, and she
said: 'I shall stay with you; I shall send for clothes; I am rather
hungry. Don't stir, dear. I will be mistress of the house.'

She went below to the kitchen, where a few words in the ear of a
Frenchwoman were sufficient to waken immediate comprehension of what was
wanted, and smart service: within ten minutes an appetizing bouillon sent
its odour over the bedroom. Tony, days back, had said her last to the act
of eating; but Emma sipping at the spoon and expressing satisfaction, was
a pleasant picture. The bouillon smelt pleasantly.

'Your servants love you,' Emma said.

'Ah, poor good souls.'

'They crowded up to me to hear of you. Madame of course at the first word
was off to her pots. And we English have the habit of calling ourselves
the practical people!--This bouillon is consummate.--However, we have the
virtues of barbarians; we can love and serve for love. I never tasted
anything so good. I could become a glutton.'

'Do,' said Tony.

'I should be ashamed to "drain the bowl" all to myself: a solitary toper
is a horrid creature, unless he makes a song of it.'

'Emmy makes a song of it to me.'

'But "pledge me" is a noble saying, when you think of humanity's original
hunger for the whole. It is there that our civilizing commenced, and I am
particularly fond of hearing the call. It is grandly historic. So pledge
me, Tony. We two can feed from one spoon; it is a closer, bond than the
loving cup. I want you just to taste it and excuse my gluttony.'

Tony murmured, 'No.' The spoon was put to her mouth. She sighed to
resist. The stronger will compelled her to move her lips. Emma fed her as
a child, and nature sucked for life.

The first effect was a gush of tears.

Emma lay with her that night, when the patient was, the better sleeper.
But during the night at intervals she had the happiness of feeling Tony's
hand travelling to make sure of her.




CHAPTER XXXVII

AN EXHIBITION OF SOME CHAMPIONS OF THE STRICKEN LADY

Close upon the hour of ten every morning the fortuitous meeting of two
gentlemen at Mrs. Warwick's housedoor was a signal for punctiliously
stately greetings, the salutation of the raised hat and a bow of the head
from a position of military erectness, followed by the remark: 'I trust
you are well, sir': to which the reply: 'I am very well, sir, and trust
you are the same,' was deemed a complimentary fulfilment of their mutual
obligation in presence. Mr. Sullivan Smith's initiative imparted this
exercise of formal manners to Mr. Arthur Rhodes, whose renewed
appearance, at the minute of his own arrival, he viewed, as he did not
conceal, with a disappointed and a reproving eye. The inquiry after the
state of Mrs. Warwick's health having received its tolerably comforting
answer from the footman, they left their cards in turn, then descended
the doorsteps, faced for the performance of the salute, and departed
their contrary ways.

The pleasing intelligence refreshed them one morning, that they would be
welcomed by Lady Dunstane. Thereupon Mr. Sullivan Smith wheeled about to
Mr. Arthur Rhodes and observed to him: 'Sir, I might claim, by right of
seniority, to be the foremost of us two in offering my respects to the
lady, but the way is open to you.'

'Sir,' said Mr. Arthur Rhodes, 'permit me to defer to your many superior
titles to that distinction.'

'The honour, sir, lies rather in the bestowing than in the taking.'

'I venture to think, sir, that though I cannot speak pure Castilian, I
require no lesson from a Grandee of Spain in acknowledging the dues of my
betters.'

'I will avow myself conquered, sir, by your overpowering condescension;'
said Mr. Sullivan Smith; 'and I entreat you--to ascribe my acceptance of
your brief retirement to the urgent character of the business I have at
heart.'

He laid his fingers on the panting spot, and bowed.

Mr. Arthur Rhodes, likewise bowing, deferentially fell to rearward.

'If I mistake not,' said the Irish gentleman, 'I am indebted to Mr.
Rhodes; and we have been joint participators in the hospitality of Mrs.
Warwick's table.'

The English gentleman replied: 'It was there that I first had the
pleasure of an acquaintance which is graven on my memory, as the words of
the wise king on tablets of gold and silver.'

Mr. Sullivan Smith gravely smiled at the unwonted match he had found in
ceremonious humour, in Saxonland, and saying: 'I shall not long detain
you, Mr. Rhodes,' he passed through the doorway.

Arthur waited for him, pacing up and down, for a quarter of an hour, when
a totally different man reappeared in the same person, and was the
Sullivan Smith of the rosy beaming features and princely heartiness. He
was accosted: 'Now, my dear boy, it's your turn to try if you have a
chance, and good luck go with ye. I've said what I could on your behalf,
for you're one of ten thousand in this country, you are.'

Mr. Sullivan Smith had solemnified himself to proffer a sober petition
within the walls of the newly widowed lady's house; namely, for nothing
less than that sweet lady's now unfettered hand: and it had therefore
been perfectly natural to him, until his performance ended with the
destruction of his hopes, to deliver himself in the high Castilian
manner. Quite unexpected, however, was the reciprocal loftiness of tone
spontaneously adopted by the young English squire, for whom, in
consequence, he conceived a cordial relish; and as he paced in the
footsteps of Arthur, anxious to quiet his curiosity by hearing how it had
fared with one whom he had to suppose the second applicant, he kept
ejaculating: 'Not a bit! The fellow can't be Saxon! And she had a liking
for him. She's nigh coming of the age when a woman takes to the chicks.
Better he than another, if it's to be any one. For he's got fun in him;
he carries his own condiments, instead of borrowing from the popular
castors, as is their way over here. But I might have known there 's
always sure to be salt and savour in the man she covers with her wing.
Excepting, if you please, my dear lady, a bad shot you made at a rascal
cur, no more worthy of you than Beelzebub of Paradise. No matter! The
daughters' of Erin must share the fate of their mother Isle, that their
tears may shine in the burst of sun to follow. For personal and patriotic
motives, I would have cheered her and been like a wild ass combed and
groomed and tamed by the adorable creature. But her friend says there 's
not a whisk of a chance for me, and I must roam the desert, kicking up,
and worshipping the star I hail brightest. They know me not, who think I
can't worship. Why, what were I without my star? At best a pickled
porker.'

Sullivan Smith became aware of a ravishing melodiousness in the
soliloquy, as well as a clean resemblance in the simile. He would
certainly have proceeded to improvize impassioned verse, if he had not
seen Arthur Rhodes on the pavement. 'So, here's the boy. Query, the face
he wears.'

'How kind of you to wait,' said Arthur.

'We'll call it sympathy, for convenience,' rejoined Sullivan Smith.
'Well, and what next?'

'You know as much as I do. Thank heaven, she is recovering.'

'Is that all?'

'Why, what more?'

Arthur was jealously, inspected.

'You look open-hearted, my dear boy.' Sullivan Smith blew the sound of a
reflected ahem. 'Excuse me for cornemusing in your company,' he said.
'But seriously, there was only one thing to pardon your hurrying to the
lady's door at such a season, when the wind tells tales to the world.
She's down with a cold, you know.'

'An influenza,' said Arthur.

The simplicity of the acquiescence was vexatious to a champion desirous
of hostilities, to vindicate the lady, in addition to his anxiety to
cloak her sad plight.

'She caught it from contact with one of the inhabitants of this country.
'Tis the fate of us Irish, and we're condemned to it for the sin of
getting tired of our own. I begin to sneeze when I land at Holyhead.
Unbutton a waistcoat here, in the hope of meeting a heart, and you're
lucky in escaping a pulmonary attack of no common severity, while the dog
that infected you scampers off, to celebrate his honeymoon mayhap. Ah,
but call at her house in shoals, the world 'll soon be saying it's worse
than a coughing cold. If you came to lead her out of it in triumph, the
laugh 'd be with you, and the lady well covered. D' ye understand?'

The allusion to the dog's honeymoon had put Arthur Rhodes on the track of
the darting cracker-metaphor.

'I think I do,' he said. 'She will soon be at Copsley--Lady Dunstane's
house, on the hills--and there we can see her.'

'And that's next to the happiness of consoling--if only it had been
granted! She's not an ordinary widow, to be caught when the tear of
lamentation has opened a practicable path or water-way to the poor
nightcapped jewel within. So, and you're a candid admirer, Mr. Rhodes!
Well, and I'll be one with you; for there's not a star in the firmament
more deserving of homage than that lady.'

'Let's walk in the park and talk of her,' said Arthur. 'There's no
sweeter subject to me.'

His boyish frankness rejoiced Sullivan Smith. 'As long as you like!--nor
to me!' he exclaimed. 'And that ever since I first beheld her on the
night of a Ball in Dublin: before I had listened to a word of her
speaking: and she bore her father's Irish name:--none of your Warwicks
and your . . . But let the cur go barking. He can't tell what he's lost;
perhaps he doesn't care. And after inflicting his hydrophobia on her
tender fame! Pooh, sir; you call it a civilized country, where you and I
and dozens of others are ready to start up as brothers of the lady, to
defend her, and are paralyzed by the Law. 'Tis a law they've instituted
for the protection of dirty dogs--their majority!'

'I owe more to Mrs. Warwick than to any soul I know,' said Arthur.

'Let 's hear,' quoth Sullivan Smith; proceeding: 'She's the Arabian
Nights in person, that's sure; and Shakespeare's Plays, tragic and comic;
and the Book of Celtic History; and Erin incarnate--down with a cold, no
matter where; but we know where it was caught. So there's a pretty
library for who's to own her now she's enfranchized by circumstances; and
a poetical figure too!'

He subsided for his companion to rhapsodize.

Arthur was overcharged with feeling, and could say only: 'It would be
another world to me if I lost her.'

'True; but what of the lady?'

'No praise of mine could do her justice.'

'That may be, but it's negative of yourself, and not a portrait of the
object. Hasn't she the brain of Socrates--or better, say Minerva, on the
bust of Venus, and the remainder of her finished off to an exact
resemblance of her patronymic Goddess of the bow and quiver?'

'She has a wise head and is beautiful.'

'And chaste.'

Arthur reddened: he was prepared to maintain it, could not speak it.

'She is to us in this London, what the run of water was to Theocritus in
Sicily: the nearest to the visibly divine,' he said, and was applauded.

'Good, and on you go. Top me a few superlatives on that, and I 'm your
echo, my friend. Isn't the seeing and listening to her like sitting under
the silvery canopy of a fountain in high Summer?'

'All the comparisons are yours,' Arthur said enviously.

'Mr. Rhodes, you are a poet, I believe, and all you require to loosen
your tongue is a drop of Bacchus, so if you will do me the extreme honour
to dine with me at my Club this evening, we'll resume the toast that
should never be uttered dry. You reprove me justly, my friend.'

Arthur laughed and accepted. The Club was named, and the hour, and some
items of the little dinner: the birds and the year of the wines.

It surprised him to meet Mr. Redworth at the table of his host. A greater
surprise was the partial thaw in Redworth's bearing toward him. But, as
it was partial, and he a youth and poor, not even the genial influences
of Bacchus could lift him to loosen his tongue under the repressing
presence of the man he knew to be his censor, though Sullivan Smith
encouraged him with praises and opportunities. He thought of the many
occasions when Mrs. Warwick's art of management had produced a tacit
harmony between them. She had no peer. The dinner failed of the pleasure
he had expected from it. Redworth's bluntness killed the flying
metaphors, and at the end of the entertainment he and Sullivan Smith were
drumming upon politics.

'Fancies he has the key of the Irish difficulty!' said the latter,
clapping hand on his shoulder, by way of blessing, as they parted at the
Club-steps.

Redworth asked Arthur Rhodes the way he was going, and walked beside him.

'I suppose you take exercise; don't get colds and that kind of thing,' he
remarked in the old bullying fashion; and changed it abruptly. 'I am glad
to have met you this evening. I hope you'll dine with me one day next
week. Have you seen Mrs. Warwick lately?'

'She is unwell; she has been working too hard,' said Arthur.

'Seriously unwell, do you mean?'

'Lady Dunstane is at her house, and speaks of her recovering.'

'Ah. You've not seen her?'

'Not yet.'

'Well, good-night.'

Redworth left him, and only when moved by gratitude to the lad for his
mention of Mrs. Warwick's 'working too hard,' as the cause of her
illness, recollected the promised dinner and the need for having his
address.

He had met Sullivan Smith accidentally in the morning and accepted the
invitation to meet young Rhodes, because these two, of all men living,
were for the moment dearest to him, as Diana Warwick's true and simple
champions; and he had intended a perfect cordiality toward them both; the
end being a semi-wrangle with the patriot, and a patronizing bluntness
with the boy; who, by the way, would hardly think him sincere in the
offer of a seat at his table. He owned himself incomplete. He never could
do the thing he meant, in the small matters not leading to fortune. But
they led to happiness! Redworth was guilty of a sigh: for now Diana
Warwick stood free; doubly free, he was reduced to reflect in a wavering
dubiousness. Her more than inclination for Dacier, witnessed by him, and
the shot of the world, flying randomly on the subject, had struck this
cuirassier, making light of his armour, without causing any change of his
habitual fresh countenance. As for the scandal, it had never shaken his
faith in her nature. He thought of the passion. His heart struck at
Diana's, and whatever might by chance be true in the scandal affected him
little, if but her heart were at liberty. That was the prize he coveted,
having long read the nature of the woman and wedded his spirit to it. She
would complete him.

Of course, infatuated men argue likewise, and scandal does not move them.
At a glance, the lower instincts and the higher spirit appear equally to
have the philosophy of overlooking blemishes. The difference between
appetite and love is shown when a man, after years of service, can hear
and see, and admit the possible, and still desire in worship; knowing
that we of earth are begrimed and must be cleansed for presentation daily
on our passage through the miry ways, but that our souls, if flame of a
soul shall have come of the agony of flesh, are beyond the baser
mischances: partaking of them indeed, but sublimely. Now Redworth
believed in the soul of Diana. For him it burned, and it was a celestial
radiance about her, unquenched by her shifting fortunes, her wilfulnesses
and, it might be, errors. She was a woman and weak; that is, not trained
for strength. She was a soul; therefore perpetually pointing to growth in
purification. He felt it, and even discerned it of her, if he could not
have phrased it. The something sovereignty characteristic that aspired in
Diana enchained him. With her, or rather with his thought of her soul, he
understood the right union of women and men, from the roots to the
flowering heights of that rare graft. She gave him comprehension of the
meaning of love: a word in many mouths, not often explained. With her,
wound in his idea of her, he perceived it to signify a new start in our
existence, a finer shoot of the tree stoutly planted in good gross earth;
the senses running their live sap, and the minds companioned, and the
spirits made one by the whole-natured conjunction. In Booth, a happy
prospect for the sons and daughters of Earth, divinely indicating more
than happiness: the speeding of us, compact of what we are, between the
ascetic rocks and the sensual whirlpools, to the creation of certain
nobler races, now very dimly imagined.

Singularly enough, the man of these feelings was far from being a social
rebel. His Diana conjured them forth in relation to her, but was not on
his bosom to enlighten him generally. His notions of citizenship
tolerated the female Pharisees, as ladies offering us an excellent social
concrete where quicksands abound, and without quite justifying the Lady
Wathins and Constance Aspers of the world, whose virtues he could set
down to accident or to acid blood, he considered them supportable and
estimable where the Mrs. Fryar-Gunnetts were innumerable, threatening to
become a majority; as they will constantly do while the sisterhood of the
chaste are wattled in formalism and throned in sourness.

Thoughts of Diana made phantoms of the reputable and their reverse alike.
He could not choose but think of her. She was free; and he too; and they
were as distant as the horizon sail and the aft-floating castaway. Her
passion for Dacier might have burnt out her heart. And at present he had
no claim to visit her, dared not intrude. He would have nothing to say,
if he went, save to answer questions upon points of business: as to
which, Lady Dunstane would certainly summon him when he was wanted.

Riding in the park on a frosty morning, he came upon Sir Lukin, who
looked gloomy and inquired for news of Diana Warwick, saying that his
wife had forbidden him to call at her house just yet. 'She's got a cold,
you know,' said Sir Lukin; adding, 'confoundedly hard on women!--eh?
Obliged to keep up a show. And I'd swear, by all that's holy, Diana
Warwick hasn't a spot, not a spot, to reproach herself with. I fancy I
ought to know women by this time. And look here, Redworth, last
night--that is, I mean yesterday evening, I broke with a woman--a lady of
my acquaintance, you know, because she would go on scandal-mongering
about Diana Warwick. I broke with her. I told her I'd have out any man
who abused Diana Warwick, and I broke with her. By Jove! Redworth, those
women can prove spitfires. They've bags of venom under their tongues,
barley-sugar though they look--and that's her colour. But I broke with
her for good. I doubt if I shall ever call on her again. And in point of
fact, I won't.'

Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett was described in the colouring of the lady.

Sir Lukin, after some further remarks, rode on, and Redworth mused on a
moral world that allows a woman of Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett's like to hang on
to it, and to cast a stone at Diana; forgetful, in his championship, that
Diana was not disallowed a similar licence.

When he saw Emma Dunstane, some days later, she was in her carriage
driving, as she said, to Lawyerland, for an interview with old Mr.
Braddock, on her friend's affairs. He took a seat beside her. 'No, Tony
is not well,' she replied to his question, under the veil of candour.
'She is recovering, but she--you can understand--suffered a shock. She is
not able to attend to business, and certain things have to be done.'

'I used to be her man of business,' Redworth observed.

'She speaks of your kind services. This is mere matter for lawyers.'

'She is recovering?'

'You may see her at Copsley next week. You can come down on Wednesdays or
Saturdays?'

'Any day. Tell her I want her opinion upon the state of things.'

'It will please her; but you will have to describe the state of things.'

Emma feared she had said too much. She tried candour again for
concealment. 'My poor Tony has been struck down low. I suppose it is like
losing a diseased limb:--she has her freedom, at the cost of a blow to
the system.'

'She may be trusted for having strength,' said Redworth.'

'Yes.' Emma's mild monosyllable was presently followed by an exclamation:
'One has to experience the irony of Fate to comprehend how cruel it is!'
Then she remembered that such language was peculiarly abhorrent to him.

'Irony of Fate!' he echoed her. 'I thought you were above that literary
jargon.'

'And I thought I was: or thought it would be put in a dialect practically
explicable,' she answered, smiling at the lion roused.

'Upon my word,' he burst out, 'I should like to write a book of Fables,
showing how donkeys get into grinding harness, and dogs lose their bones,
and fools have their sconces cracked, and all run jabbering of the irony
of Fate, to escape the annoyance of tracing the causes. And what are
they? nine times out of ten, plain want of patience, or some debt for
indulgence. There's a subject:--let some one write, Fables in
illustration of the irony of Fate: and I'll undertake to tack-on my
grandmother's maxims for a moral to teach of 'em. We prate of that irony
when we slink away from the lesson--the rod we conjure. And you to talk
of Fate! It's the seed we sow, individually or collectively. I'm bound-up
in the prosperity of the country, and if the ship is wrecked, it ruins my
fortune, but not me, unless I'm bound-up in myself. At least I hope
that's my case.'

He apologized for intruding Mr. Thomas Redworth.

His hearer looked at him, thinking he required a more finely pointed gift
of speech for the ironical tongue, but relishing the tonic directness of
his faculty of reason while she considered that the application of the
phrase might be brought home to him so as to render 'my Grandmother's
moral' a conclusion less comfortingly, if quite intelligibly, summary.
And then she thought of Tony's piteous instance; and thinking with her
heart, the tears insisted on that bitter irony of the heavens, which
bestowed the long-withheld and coveted boon when it was empty of value or
was but as a handful of spices to a shroud.

Perceiving the moisture in her look, Redworth understood that it was
foolish to talk rationally. But on her return to her beloved, the real
quality of the man had overcome her opposing state of sentiment, and she
spoke of him with an iteration and throb in the voice that set a singular
query whirring round Diana's ears. Her senses were too heavy for a
suspicion.




CHAPTER XXXVIII

CONVALESCENCE OF A HEALTHY MIND DISTRAUGHT

From an abandonment that had the last pleasure of life in a willingness
to yield it up, Diana rose with her friend's help in some state of
fortitude, resembling the effort of her feet to bear the weight of her
body. She plucked her courage out of the dust to which her heart had been
scattered, and tasked herself to walk as the world does. But she was
indisposed to compassionate herself in the manner of the burdened world.
She lashed the creature who could not raise a head like others, and made
the endurance of torture a support, such as the pride of being is to men.
She would not have seen any similarity to pride in it; would have deemed
it the reverse. It was in fact the painful gathering of the atoms
composing pride. For she had not only suffered; she had done wrongly: and
when that was acknowledged, by the light of her sufferings the
wrong-doing appeared gigantic, chorussing eulogies of the man she had
thought her lover: and who was her lover once, before the crime against
him. In the opening of her bosom to Emma, he was painted a noble figure;
one of those that Romance delights to harass for the sake of ultimately
the more exquisitely rewarding. He hated treachery: she had been guilty
of doing what he most hated. She glorified him for the incapacity to
forgive; it was to her mind godlike. And her excuses of herself?

At the first confession, she said she had none, and sullenly maintained
that there was none to exonerate. Little by little her story was
related--her version of the story: for not even as woman to woman, friend
to great-hearted friend, pure soul to soul, could Diana tell of the state
of shivering abjection in which Dacier had left her on the fatal night;
of the many causes conducing to it, and of the chief. That was an
unutterable secret, bound by all the laws of feminine civilization not to
be betrayed. Her excessive self-abasement and exaltation of him who had
struck her down, rendered it difficult to be understood; and not till
Emma had revolved it and let it ripen in the mind some days could she
perceive with any clearness her Tony's motives, or mania. The very word
Money thickened the riddle: for Tony knew that her friend's purse was her
own to dip in at her pleasure; yet she, to escape so small an obligation,
had committed the enormity for which she held the man blameless in
spurning her.

'You see what I am, Emmy,' Diana said.

'What I do not see, is that he had grounds for striking so cruelly.'

'I proved myself unworthy of him.'

But does a man pretending to love a woman cut at one blow, for such a
cause, the ties uniting her to him? Unworthiness of that kind, is not
commonly the capital offence in love. Tony's deep prostration and her
resplendent picture of her judge and executioner, kept Emma questioning
within herself. Gradually she became enlightened enough to distinguish in
the man a known, if not common, type of the externally soft and polished,
internally hard and relentless, who are equal to the trials of love only
as long as favouring circumstances and seemings nurse the fair object of
their courtship.

Her thoughts recurred to the madness driving Tony to betray the secret;
and the ascent unhelped to get a survey of it and her and the conditions,
was mountainous. She toiled up but to enter the regions of cloud; sure
nevertheless that the obscurity was penetrable and excuses to be
discovered somewhere. Having never wanted money herself, she was unable
perfectly to realize the urgency of the need: she began however to
comprehend that the very eminent gentleman, before whom all human
creatures were to bow in humility, had for an extended term considerably
added to the expenses of Tony's household, by inciting her to give those
little dinners to his political supporters, and bringing comrades
perpetually to supper-parties, careless of how it might affect her
character and her purse. Surely an honourable man was bound to her in
honour? Tony's remark: 'I have the reptile in me, dear,' her exaggeration
of the act, in her resigned despair,--was surely no justification for his
breaking from her, even though he had discovered a vestige of the common
'reptile,' to leave her with a stain on her name?--There would not have
been a question about it if Tony had not exalted him so loftily,
refusing, in visible pain, to hear him blamed.

Danvers had dressed a bed for Lady Dunstane in her mistress's chamber,
where often during the night Emma caught a sound of stifled weeping or
the long falling breath of wakeful grief. One night she asked whether
Tony would like to have her by her side.

'No, dear,' was the answer in the dark; 'but you know my old pensioners,
the blind fifer and his wife; I've been thinking of them.'

'They were paid as they passed down the street yesterday, my love.'

'Yes, dear, I hope so. But he flourishes his tune so absurdly. I've been
thinking, that is the part I have played, instead of doing the female's
duty of handing round the tin-cup for pennies. I won't cry any more.'

She sighed and turned to sleep, leaving Emma to disburden her heart in
tears.

For it seemed to her that Tony's intellect was weakened. She not merely
abased herself and exalted Dacier preposterously, she had sunk her
intelligence in her sensations: a state that she used to decry as the sin
of mankind, the origin of error and blood.

Strangely too, the proposal came from her, or the suggestion of it,
notwithstanding her subjectedness to the nerves, that she should show her
face in public. She said: 'I shall have to run about, Emmy, when I can
fancy I am able to rattle up to the old mark. At present, I feel like a
wrestler who has had a fall. As soon as the stiffness is over, it's best
to make an appearance, for the sake of one's backers, though I shall
never be in the wrestling ring again.'

'That is a good decision--when you feel quite yourself, dear Tony,' Emma
replied.

'I dare say I have disgraced my sex, but not as they suppose. I feel my
new self already, and can make the poor brute go through fire on behalf
of the old. What is the task?--merely to drive a face!'

'It is not known.'

'It will be known.'

'But this is a sealed secret.'

'Nothing is a secret that has been spoken. It 's in the air, and I have
to breathe to live by it. And I would rather it were out. "She betrayed
him." Rather that, than have them think--anything! They will exclaim, How
could she! I have been unable to answer it to you--my own heart. How? Oh!
our weakness is the swiftest dog to hunt us; we cannot escape it. But I
have the answer for them, that I trust with my whole soul none of them
would have done the like.'

'None, my Tony, would have taken it to the soul as you do.'

'I talk, dear. If I took it honestly, I should be dumb, soon dust. The
moment we begin to speak, the guilty creature is running for cover. She
could not otherwise exist. I am sensible of evasion when I open my lips.'

'But Tony has told me all.'

'I think I have. But if you excuse my conduct, I am certain I have not.'

'Dear girl, accounting for it, is not the same as excusing.'

'Who can account for it! I was caught in a whirl--Oh! nothing
supernatural: my weakness; which it pleases me to call a madness--shift
the ninety-ninth! When I drove down that night to Mr. Tonans, I am
certain I had my clear wits, but I felt like a bolt. I saw things, but at
too swift a rate for the conscience of them. Ah! let never Necessity draw
the bow of our weakness: it is the soul that is winged to its perdition.
I remember I was writing a story, named THE MAN OF TWO MINDS. I shall
sign it, By the Woman of Two Natures. If ever it is finished. Capacity
for thinking should precede the act of writing. It should; I do not say
that it does. Capacity for assimilating the public taste and reproducing
it, is the commonest. The stuff is perishable, but it pays us for our
labour, and in so doing saves us from becoming tricksters. Now I can see
that Mr. Redworth had it in that big head of his--the authoress outliving
her income!'

'He dared not speak.'

'Why did he not dare?'

'Would it have checked you?'

'I was a shot out of a gun, and I am glad he did not stand in my way.
What power charged the gun, is another question. Dada used to say, that
it is the devil's masterstroke to get us to accuse him. "So fare ye well,
old Nickie Ben." My dear, I am a black sheep; a creature with a spotted
reputation; I must wash and wash; and not with water--with
sulphur-flames.' She sighed. 'I am down there where they burn. You should
have let me lie and die. You were not kind. I was going quietly.'

'My love!' cried Emma, overborne by a despair that she traced to the
woman's concealment of her bleeding heart, 'you live for me. Do set your
mind on that. Think of what you are bearing, as your debt to Emma. Will
you?'

Tony bowed her head mechanically.

'But I am in love with King Death, and must confess it,' she said. 'That
hideous eating you forced on me, snatched me from him. And I feel that if
I had gone, I should have been mercifully forgiven by everybody.'

'Except by me,' said Emma, embracing her. 'Tony would have left her
friend for her last voyage in mourning. And my dearest will live to know
happiness.'

'I have no more belief in it, Emmy.'

'The mistake of the world is to think happiness possible to the senses.'

'Yes; we distil that fine essence through the senses; and the act is
called the pain of life. It is the death of them. So much I understand of
what our existence must be. But I may grieve for having done so little.'

'That is the sound grief, with hope at the core--not in love with itself
and wretchedly mortal, as we find self is under every shape it takes;
especially the chief one.'

'Name it.'

'It is best named Amor.'

There was a writhing in the frame of the hearer, for she did want Love to
be respected; not shadowed by her misfortune. Her still-flushed senses
protested on behalf of the eternalness of the passion, and she was
obliged to think Emma's cold condemnatory intellect came of the no
knowledge of it.

A letter from Mr. Tonans, containing an enclosure, was a sharp trial of
Diana's endurance of the irony of Fate. She had spoken of the irony in
allusion to her freedom. Now that, according to a communication from her
lawyers, she was independent of the task of writing, the letter which
paid the price of her misery bruised her heavily.

'Read it and tear it all to strips,' she said in an abhorrence to Emma,
who rejoined: 'Shall I go at once and see him?'

'Can it serve any end? But throw it into the fire. Oh! no simulation of
virtue. There was not, I think, a stipulated return for what I did. But I
perceive clearly--I can read only by events--that there was an
understanding. You behold it. I went to him to sell it. He thanks me,
says I served the good cause well. I have not that consolation. If I had
thought of the cause--of anything high, it would have arrested me. On the
fire with it!'

The letter and square slip were consumed. Diana watched the blackening
papers.

So they cease their sinning, Emmy; and as long as I am in torment, I may
hope for grace. We talked of the irony. It means, the pain of fire.'

'I spoke of the irony to Redworth,' said Emma; 'incidentally, of course.'

'And he fumed?'

'He is really not altogether the Mr. Cuthbert Dering of your caricature.
He is never less than acceptably rational. I won't repeat his truisms;
but he said, or I deduced from what he said, that a grandmother's maxims
would expound the enigma.'

'Probably the simple is the deep, in relation to the mysteries of life,'
said Diana, whose wits had been pricked to a momentary activity by the
letter. 'He behaves wisely; so perhaps we are bound to take his words for
wisdom. Much nonsense is talked and written, and he is one of the world's
reserves, who need no more than enrolling, to make a sturdy phalanx of
common sense. It's a pity they are not enlisted and drilled to express
themselves.' She relapsed. 'But neither he nor any of them could
understand my case.'

'He puts the idea of an irony down to the guilt of impatience, Tony.'

'Could there be a keener irony than that? A friend of Dada's waited
patiently for a small fortune, and when it arrived, he was a worn-out
man, just assisted to go decently to his grave.'

'But he may have gained in spirit by his patient waiting.'

'Oh! true. We are warmer if we travel on foot sunward, but it is a
discovery that we are colder if we take to ballooning upward. The
material good reverses its benefits the more nearly we clasp it. All life
is a lesson that we live to enjoy but in the spirit. I will brood on your
saying.'

'It is your own saying, silly Tony, as the only things worth saying
always, are!' exclaimed Emma, as she smiled happily to see her friend's
mind reviving, though it was faintly and in the dark.




CHAPTER XXXIX

OF NATURE WITH ONE OF HER CULTIVATED DAUGHTERS AND A SHORT EXCURSION IN
ANTI-CLIMAX

A mind that after a long season of oblivion in pain returns to
wakefulness without a keen edge for the world, is much in danger of
souring permanently. Diana's love of nature saved her from the dire
mischance during a two months' residence at Copsley, by stupefying her
senses to a state like the barely conscious breathing on the verge of
sleep. February blew South-west for the pairing of the birds. A broad
warm wind rolled clouds of every ambiguity of form in magnitude over
peeping azure, or skimming upon lakes of blue and lightest green, or
piling the amphitheatre for majestic sunset. Or sometimes those daughters
of the wind flew linked and low, semi-purple, threatening the shower they
retained and teaching gloom to rouse a songful nest in the bosom of the
viewer. Sometimes they were April, variable to soar with rain-skirts and
sink with sunshafts. Or they drenched wood and field for a day and opened
on the high South-western star. Daughters of the wind, but shifty
daughters of this wind of the dropping sun, they have to be watched to be
loved in their transformations.

Diana had Arthur Rhodes and her faithful Leander for walking companions.
If Arthur said: 'Such a day would be considered melancholy by London
people,' she thanked him in her heart, as a benefactor who had revealed
to her things of the deepest. The simplest were her food. Thus does
Nature restore us, by drugging the brain and making her creature
confidingly animal for its new growth. She imagined herself to have lost
the power to think; certainly she had not the striving or the wish.
Exercise of her limbs to reach a point of prospect, and of her ears and
eyes to note what bird had piped, what flower was out on the banks, and
the leaf of what tree it was that lay beneath the budding, satiated her
daily desires. She gathered unknowingly a sheaf of landscapes, images,
keys of dreamed horizons, that opened a world to her at any chance breath
altering shape or hue: a different world from the one of her old
ambition. Her fall had brought her renovatingly to earth, and the saving
naturalness of the woman recreated her childlike, with shrouded
recollections of her strange taste of life behind her; with a tempered
fresh blood to enjoy aimlessly, and what would erewhile have been a
barrenness to her sensibilities.

In time the craving was evolved for positive knowledge, and shells and
stones and weeds were deposited on the library-table at Copsley,
botanical and geological books comparingly examined, Emma Dunstane always
eager to assist; for the samples wafted her into the heart of the woods.
Poor Sir Lukin tried three days of their society, and was driven away
headlong to Club-life. He sent down Redworth, with whom the walks of the
zealous inquirers were profitable, though Diana, in acknowledging it to
herself, reserved a decided preference for her foregone ethereal mood,
larger, and untroubled by the presence of a man. The suspicion Emma had
sown was not excited to an alarming activity; but she began to question:
could the best of men be simply--a woman's friend?--was not long service
rather less than a proof of friendship? She could be blind when her heart
was on fire for another. Her passion for her liberty, however, received
no ominous warning to look to the defences. He was the same blunt
speaker, and knotted his brows as queerly as ever at Arthur, in a
transparent calculation of how this fellow meant to gain his livelihood.
She wilfully put it to the credit of Arthur's tact that his elder was
amiable, without denying her debt to the good man for leaving her illness
and her appearance unmentioned. He forbore even to scan her features.
Diana's wan contemplativeness, in which the sparkle of meaning slowly
rose to flash, as we see a bubble rising from the deeps of crystal
waters, caught at his heart while he talked his matter-of-fact. But her
instinct of a present safety was true. She and Arthur discovered--and it
set her first meditating whether she did know the man so very
accurately--that he had printed, for private circulation, when at Harrow
School, a little book, a record of his observations in nature. Lady
Dunstane was the casual betrayer. He shrugged at the nonsense of a boy's
publishing; anybody's publishing he held for a doubtful proof of sanity.
His excuse was, that he had not published opinions. Let us observe, and
assist in our small sphere; not come mouthing to the footlights!

'We retire,' Diana said, for herself and Arthur.

'The wise thing, is to avoid the position that enforces publishing,' said
he, to the discomposure of his raw junior.

In the fields he was genially helpful; commending them to the study of
the South-west wind, if they wanted to forecast the weather and
understand the climate of our country. 'We have no Seasons, or only a
shuffle of them. Old calendars give seven months of the year to the
Southwest, and that's about the average. Count on it, you may generally
reckon what to expect. When you don't have the excess for a year or two,
you are drenched the year following.' He knew every bird by its flight
and its pipe, habits, tricks, hints of sagacity homely with the original
human; and his remarks on the sensitive life of trees and herbs were a
spell to his thirsty hearers. Something of astronomy he knew; but in
relation to that science, he sank his voice, touchingly to Diana, who
felt drawn to kinship with him when he had a pupil's tone. An allusion by
Arthur to the poetical work of Aratus, led to a memorably pleasant
evening's discourse upon the long reading of the stars by these our
mortal eyes. Altogether the mind of the practical man became
distinguishable to them as that of a plain brother of the poetic. Diana
said of him to Arthur: 'He does not supply me with similes; he points to
the source of them.' Arthur, with envy of the man of positive knowledge,
disguised an unstrung heart in agreeing.

Redworth alluded passingly to the condition of public affairs. Neither of
them replied. Diana was wondering how one who perused the eternal of
nature should lend a thought to the dusty temporary of the world.
Subsequently she reflected that she was asking him to confine his great
male appetite to the nibble of bread which nourished her immediate sense
of life. Her reflections were thin as mist, coming and going like the
mist, with no direction upon her brain, if they sprang from it. When he
had gone, welcome though Arthur had seen him to be, she rebounded to a
broader and cheerfuller liveliness. Arthur was flattered by an idea of
her casting off incubus--a most worthy gentleman, and a not perfectly
sympathetic associate. Her eyes had their lost light in them, her step
was brisker; she challenged him to former games of conversation,
excursions in blank verse here and there, as the mood dictated. They
amused themselves, and Emma too. She revelled in seeing Tony's younger
face and hearing some of her natural outbursts. That Dacier never could
have been the man for her, would have compressed and subjected her, and
inflicted a further taste of bondage in marriage, she was assured. She
hoped for the day when Tony would know it, and haply that another, whom
she little comprehended, was her rightful mate.

March continued South-westerly and grew rainier, as Redworth had
foretold, bidding them look for gales and storm, and then the change of
wind. It came, after wettings of a couple scorning the refuge of dainty
townsfolk under umbrellas, and proud of their likeness to dripping
wayside wildflowers. Arthur stayed at Copsley for a week of the crisp
North-easter; and what was it, when he had taken his leave, that brought
Tony home from her solitary walk in dejection? It could not be her
seriously regretting the absence of the youthful companion she had parted
with gaily, appointing a time for another meeting on the heights, and
recommending him to repair idle hours with strenuous work. The fit passed
and was not explained. The winds are sharp with memory. The hard shrill
wind crowed to her senses of an hour on the bleak sands of the French
coast; the beginning of the curtained misery, inscribed as her happiness.
She was next day prepared for her term in London with Emma, who promised
her to make an expedition at the end of it by way of holiday, to see The
Crossways, which Mr. Redworth said was not tenanted.

'You won't go through it like a captive?' said Emma.

'I don't like it, dear,' Diana put up a comic mouth. 'The debts we owe
ourselves are the hardest to pay. That is the discovery of advancing age:
and I used to imagine it was quite the other way. But they are the debts
of honour, imperative. I shall go through it grandly, you will see. If I
am stopped at my first recreancy and turned directly the contrary way, I
think I have courage.'

'You will not fear to meet . . . any one?' said Emma.

'The world and all it contains! I am robust, eager for the fray, an
Amazon, a brazen-faced hussy. Fear and I have parted. I shall not do you
discredit. Besides you intend to have me back here with you? And besides
again, I burn to make a last brave appearance. I have not outraged the
world, dear Emmy, whatever certain creatures in it may fancy.'

She had come out of her dejectedness with a shrewder view of Dacier;
equally painful, for it killed her romance, and changed the garden of
their companionship in imagination to a waste. Her clearing intellect
prompted it, whilst her nature protested, and reviled her to uplift him.
He had loved her. 'I shall die knowing that a man did love me once,' she
said to her widowed heart, and set herself blushing and blanching. But
the thought grew inveterate: 'He could not bear much.' And in her quick
brain it shot up a crop of similitudes for the quality of that man's
love. She shuddered, as at a swift cleaving of cold steel. He had not
given her a chance; he had not replied to her letter written with the pen
dipped in her heart's blood; he must have gone straight away to the woman
he married. This after almost justifying the scandalous world:--after
. . . She realized her sensations of that night when the house-door had
closed on him; her feeling of lost sovereignty, degradation, feminine
danger, friendliness: and she was unaware, and never knew, nor did the
world ever know, what cunning had inspired the frosty Cupid to return to
her and be warmed by striking a bargain for his weighty secret. She knew
too well that she was not of the snows which do not melt, however high
her conceit of herself might place her. Happily she now stood out of the
sun, in a bracing temperature, Polar; and her compassion for women was
deeply sisterly in tenderness and understanding. She spoke of it to Emma
as her gain.

'I have not seen that you required to suffer to be considerate,' Emma
said.

'It is on my conscience that I neglected Mary Paynham, among others--and
because you did not take to her, Emmy.'

'The reading of it appears to me, that she has neglected you.'

'She was not in my confidence, and so I construe it as delicacy. One
never loses by believing the best.'

'If one is not duped.'

'Expectations dupe us, not trust. The light of every soul burns upward.
Of course, most of them are candles in the wind. Let us allow for
atmospheric disturbance. Now I thank you, dear, for bringing me back to
life. I see that I was really a selfish suicide, because I feel I have
power to do some good, and belong to the army. When we are beginning to
reflect, as I do now, on a recovered basis of pure health, we have the
world at the dawn and know we are young in it, with great riches, great
things gained and greater to achieve. Personally I behold a queer little
wriggling worm for myself; but as one, of the active world I stand high
and shapely; and the very thought of doing work, is like a draught of the
desert-springs to me. Instead of which, I have once more to go about
presenting my face to vindicate my character. Mr. Redworth would admit no
irony in that! At all events, it is anti-climax.'

'I forgot to tell you, Tony, you have been proposed for,' said Emma; and
there was a rush of savage colour over Tony's cheeks.

Her apparent apprehensions were relieved by hearing the name of Mr.
Sullivan Smith.

'My poor dear countryman! And he thought me worthy, did he? Some day,
when we are past his repeating it, I'll thank him.'

The fact of her smiling happily at the narration of Sullivan Smith's
absurd proposal by mediatrix, proved to Emma how much her nature thirsted
for the smallest support in her self-esteem.

The second campaign of London was of bad augury at the commencement,
owing to the ridiculous intervention of a street-organ, that ground its
pipes in a sprawling roar of one of the Puritani marches, just as the
carriage was landing them at the door of her house. The notes were harsh,
dissonant, drunken, interlocked and horribly torn asunder, intolerable to
ears not keen to extract the tune through dreadful memories. Diana sat
startled and paralyzed. The melody crashed a revival of her days with
Dacier, as in gibes; and yet it reached to her heart. She imagined a
Providence that was trying her on the threshold, striking at her
feebleness. She had to lock herself in her room for an hour of deadly
abandonment to misery, resembling the run of poison through her blood,
before she could bear to lift eyes on her friend; to whom subsequently
she said: 'Emmy, there are wounds that cut sharp as the enchanter's
sword, and we don't know we are in halves till some rough old intimate
claps us on the back, merely to ask us how we are! I have to join myself
together again, as well as I can. It's done, dear; but don't notice the
cement.'

'You will be brave,' Emma petitioned.

'I long to show you I will.'

The meeting with those who could guess a portion of her story, did not
disconcert her. To Lady Pennon and Lady Singleby, she was the brilliant
Diana of her nominal luminary issuing from cloud. Face and tongue, she
was the same; and once in the stream, she soon gathered its current
topics and scattered her arrowy phrases. Lady Pennon ran about with them,
declaring that the beautiful speaker, if ever down, was up, and up to her
finest mark. Mrs. Fryar-Gannett had then become the blazing regnant
antisocial star; a distresser of domesticity, the magnetic attraction in
the spirituous flames of that wild snapdragon bowl, called the Upper
class; and she was angelically blonde, a straw-coloured Beauty. 'A lovely
wheat sheaf, if the head were ripe,' Diana said of her.

'Threshed, says her fame, my dear,' Lady Pennon replied, otherwise
allusive.

'A wheatsheaf of contention for the bread of wind,' said Diana, thinking
of foolish Sir Lukin; thoughtless of talking to a gossip.

She would have shot a lighter dart, had she meant it to fly and fix.

Proclaim, ye classics, what minor Goddess, or primal, Iris or Ate, sped
straight away on wing to the empty wheatsheaf-ears of the golden-visaged
Amabel Fryar-Gunnett, daughter of Demeter in the field to behold, of
Aphrodite in her rosy incendiarism for the many of men; filling that
pearly concave with a perversion of the uttered speech, such as never
lady could have repeated, nor man, if less than a reaping harvester:
which verily for women to hear, is to stamp a substantial damnatory
verification upon the delivery of the saying:--

'Mrs. Warwick says of you, that you're a bundle of straws for everybody
and bread for nobody.'

Or, stranger speculation, through what, and what number of conduits,
curious, and variously colouring, did it reach the fair Amabel of the
infant-in-cradle smile, in that deformation of the original utterance! To
pursue the thing, would be to enter the subter-sensual perfumed caverns
of a Romance of Fashionable Life, with no hope of coming back to light,
other than by tail of lynx, like the great Arabian seaman, at the last
page of the final chapter. A prospectively popular narrative indeed! and
coin to reward it, and applause. But I am reminded that a story properly
closed on the marriage of the heroine Constance and her young Minister of
State, has no time for conjuring chemists' bouquet of aristocracy to lure
the native taste. When we have satisfied English sentiment, our task is
done, in every branch of art, I hear: and it will account to posterity
for the condition of the branches. Those yet wakeful eccentrics
interested in such a person as Diana, to the extent of remaining
attentive till the curtain falls, demand of me to gather-up the threads
concerning her: which my gardener sweeping his pile of dead leaves before
the storm and night, advises me to do speedily. But it happens that her
resemblance to her sex and species of a civilized period plants the main
threads in her bosom. Rogues and a policeman, or a hurried change of
front of all the actors, are not a part of our slow machinery.

Nor is she to show herself to advantage. Only those who read her woman's
blood and character with the head, will care for Diana of the Crossways
now that the knot of her history has been unravelled. Some little love
they must have for her likewise: and how it can be quickened on behalf of
a woman who never sentimentalizes publicly, and has no dolly-dolly
compliance, and muses on actual life, and fatigues with the exercise of
brains, and is in sooth an alien: a princess of her kind and time, but a
foreign one, speaking a language distinct from the mercantile,
trafficking in ideas:--this is the problem. For to be true to her, one
cannot attempt at propitiation. She said worse things of the world than
that which was conveyed to the boxed ears of Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett.
Accepting the war declared against her a second time, she performed the
common mental trick in adversity of setting her personally known
innocence to lessen her generally unknown error--but anticipating that
this might become known, and the other not; and feeling that the motives
of the acknowledged error had served to guard her from being the culprit
of the charge she writhed under, she rushed out of a meditation
compounded of mind and nerves, with derision of the world's notion of
innocence and estimate of error. It was a mood lasting through her stay
in London, and longer, to the discomfort of one among her friends; and it
was worthy of The Anti-climax Expedition, as she called it.

For the rest, her demeanour to the old monster world exacting the
servility of her, in repayment for its tolerating countenance, was
faultless. Emma beheld the introduction to Mrs. Warwick of his bride, by
Mr. Percy Dacier. She had watched their approach up the Ball-room,
thinking, how differently would Redworth and Tony have looked.
Differently, had it been Tony and Dacier: but Emma could not persuade
herself of a possible harmony between them, save at the cost of Tony's
expiation of the sin of the greater heart in a performance equivalent to
Suttee. Perfectly an English gentleman of the higher order, he seemed the
effigy of a tombstone one, fixed upright, and civilly proud of his effigy
bride. So far, Emma considered them fitted. She perceived his quick eye
on her corner of the room; necessarily, for a man of his breeding,
without a change of expression. An emblem pertaining to her creed was on
the heroine's neck; also dependant at her waist. She was white from head
to foot; a symbol of purity. Her frail smile appeared deeply studied in
purity. Judging from her look and her reputation, Emma divined that the
man was justly mated with a devious filmy sentimentalist, likely to
'fiddle harmonics on the sensual strings' for him at a mad rate in the
years to come. Such fiddling is indeed the peculiar diversion of the
opulent of a fatly prosperous people; who take it, one may concede to
them, for an inspired elimination of the higher notes of life: the very
highest. That saying of Tony's ripened with full significance to Emma
now. Not sensualism, but sham spiritualism, was the meaning; and however
fine the notes, they come skilfully evoked of the under-brute in us.
Reasoning it so, she thought it a saying for the penetration of the most
polished and deceptive of the later human masks. She had besides, be it
owned, a triumph in conjuring a sentence of her friend's, like a sword's
edge, to meet them; for she was boiling angrily at the ironical destiny
which had given to those Two a beclouding of her beloved, whom she could
have rebuked in turn for her insane caprice of passion.

But when her beloved stood-up to greet Mrs. Percy Dacier, all idea save
tremulous admiration of the valiant woman, who had been wounded nigh to
death, passed from Emma's mind. Diana tempered her queenliness to address
the favoured lady with smiles and phrases of gentle warmth, of goodness
of nature; and it became a halo rather than a personal eclipse that she
cast.

Emma looked at Dacier. He wore the prescribed conventional air, subject
in half a minute to a rapid blinking of the eyelids. His wife could have
been inimically imagined fascinated and dwindling. A spot of colour came
to her cheeks. She likewise began to blink.

The happy couple bowed, proceeding; and Emma had Dacier's back for a
study. We score on that flat slate of man, unattractive as it is to
hostile observations, and unprotected, the device we choose. Her
harshest, was the positive thought that he had taken the woman best
suited to him. Doubtless, he was a man to prize the altar-candle above
the lamp of day. She fancied the back-view of him shrunken and
straitened: perhaps a mere hostile fancy: though it was conceivable that
he should desire as little of these meetings as possible. Eclipses are
not courted.

The specially womanly exultation of Emma Dunstane in her friend's noble
attitude, seeing how their sex had been struck to the dust for a trifling
error, easily to be overlooked by a manful lover, and had asserted its
dignity in physical and moral splendour, in self-mastery and benignness,
was unshared by Diana. As soon as the business of the expedition was
over, her orders were issued for the sale of the lease of her house and
all it contained. 'I would sell Danvers too,' she said, 'but the creature
declines to be treated as merchandize. It seems I have a faithful
servant; very much like my life, not quite to my taste; the one thing out
of the wreck!--with my dog!'

Before quitting her house for the return to Copsley, she had to grant Mr.
Alexander Hepburn, post-haste from his Caledonia, a private interview.
She came out of it noticeably shattered. Nothing was related to Emma,
beyond the remark: 'I never knew till this morning the force of No in
earnest.' The weighty little word--woman's native watchdog and guardian,
if she calls it to her aid in earnest--had encountered and withstood a
fiery ancient host, astonished at its novel power of resistance.

Emma contented herself with the result. 'Were you much supplicated?'

'An Operatic Fourth-Act,' said Diana, by no means; feeling so flippantly
as she spoke.

She received, while under the impression of this man's, honest, if
primitive, ardour of courtship, or effort to capture, a characteristic
letter from Westlake, choicely phrased, containing presumeably an
application for her hand, in the generous offer of his own. Her reply to
a pursuer of that sort was easy. Comedy, after the barbaric attack,
refreshed her wits and reliance on her natural fencing weapons. To
Westlake, the unwritten No was conveyed in a series of kindly ironic
subterfuges, that, played it like an impish flea across the pages, just
giving the bloom of the word; and rich smiles come to Emma's life in
reading the dexterous composition: which, however, proved so thoroughly
to Westlake's taste, that a second and a third exercise in the comedy of
the negative had to be despatched to him from Copsley.




CHAPTER XL

IN WHICH WE SEE NATURE MAKING OF A WOMAN A MAID AGAIN, AND A THRICE
WHIMSICAL

On their way from London, after leaving the station, the drive through
the valley led them past a field, where cricketers were at work bowling
and batting under a vertical sun: not a very comprehensible sight to
ladies, whose practical tendencies, as observers of the other sex,
incline them to question the gain of such an expenditure of energy. The
dispersal of the alphabet over a printed page is not less perplexing to
the illiterate. As soon as Emma Dunstane discovered the Copsley
head-gamekeeper at one wicket, and, actually, Thomas Redworth facing him,
bat in hand, she sat up, greatly interested. Sir Lukin stopped the
carriage at the gate, and reminded his wife that it was the day of the
year for the men of his estate to encounter a valley Eleven. Redworth,
like the good fellow he was, had come down by appointment in the morning
out of London, to fill the number required, Copsley being weak this year.
Eight of their wickets had fallen for a lament able figure of twenty-nine
runs; himself clean-bowled the first ball. But Tom Redworth had got fast
hold of his wicket, and already scored fifty to his bat. 'There! grand
hit!' Sir Lukin cried, the ball flying hard at the rails. 'Once a
cricketer, always a cricketer, if you've legs to fetch the runs. And
Pullen's not doing badly. His business is to stick. We shall mark them a
hundred yet. I do hate a score on our side without the two 00's.' He
accounted for Redworth's mixed colours by telling the ladies he had lent
him his flannel jacket; which, against black trousers, looked odd but not
ill.

Gradually the enthusiasm of the booth and bystanders converted the flying
of a leather ball into a subject of honourable excitement.

'And why are you doing nothing?' Sir Lukin was asked; and he explained:

'My stumps are down: I'm married.' He took his wife's hand prettily.

Diana had a malicious prompting. She smothered the wasp, and said: 'Oh!
look at that!'

'Grand hit again! Oh! good! good!' cried Sir Lukin, clapping to it, while
the long-hit-off ran spinning his legs into one for an impossible catch;
and the batsmen were running and stretching bats, and the ball flying
away, flying back, and others after it, and still the batsmen running,
till it seemed that the ball had escaped control and was leading the
fielders on a coltish innings of its own, defiant of bowlers.

Diana said merrily: 'Bravo our side!'

'Bravo, old Tom Redworth'; rejoined Sir Lukin. 'Four, and a three! And
capital weather, haven't we: Hope we shall have same sort day next
month--return match, my ground. I've seen Tom Redworth score--old
days--over two hundred t' his bat. And he used to bowl too. But bowling
wants practice. And, Emmy, look at the old fellows lining the booth, pipe
in mouth and cheering. They do enjoy a day like this. We'll have a supper
for fifty at Copsley's:--it's fun. By Jove! we must have reached up to
near the hundred.'

He commissioned a neighbouring boy to hie to the booth for the latest
figures, and his emissary taught lightning a lesson.

Diana praised the little fellow.

'Yes, he's a real English boy,' said Emma.

'We 've thousands of 'em, thousands, ready to your hand,' exclaimed Sir
Lukin, 'and a confounded Radicalized country . . .' he murmured gloomily
of 'lets us be kicked! . . . any amount of insult, meek as gruel! . . .
making of the finest army the world has ever seen! You saw the papers
this morning? Good heaven! how a nation with an atom of self-respect can
go on standing that sort of bullying from foreigners! We do. We're
insulted and we're threatened, and we call for a hymn!--Now then, my man,
what is it?'

The boy had flown back. 'Ninety-two marked, sir; ninety-nine runs; one
more for the hundred.'

'Well reckoned; and mind you're up at Copsley for the return match.--And
Tom Redworth says, they may bite their thumbs to the bone--they don't
hurt us. I tell him, he has no sense of national pride. He says, we're
not prepared for war: We never are! And whose the fault? Says, we're a
peaceful people, but 'ware who touches us! He doesn't feel a kick.--Oh!
clever snick! Hurrah for the hundred!--Two-three. No, don't force the
running, you fools!--though they 're wild with the ball: ha!--no?--all
right!' The wicket stood. Hurrah!

The heat of the noonday sun compelled the ladies to drive on.

'Enthusiasm has the privilege of not knowing monotony,' said Emma. 'He
looks well in flannels.'

'Yes, he does,' Diana replied, aware of the reddening despite her having
spoken so simply. 'I think the chief advantage men have over us is in
their amusements.'

'Their recreations.'

'That is the better word.' Diana fanned her cheeks and said she was warm.
'I mean, the permanent advantage. For you see that age does not affect
them.'

'Tom Redworth is not a patriarch, my dear.'

'Well, he is what would be called mature.'

'He can't be more than thirty-two or three; and that, for a man of his
constitution, means youth.'

'Well, I can imagine him a patriarch playing cricket.'

'I should imagine you imagine the possible chances. He is the father who
would play with his boys.'

'And lock up his girls in the nursery.' Diana murmured of the
extraordinary heat.

Emma begged her to remember her heterodox views of the education for
girls.

'He bats admirably,' said Diana. 'I wish I could bat half as well.'

'Your batting is with the tongue.'

'Not so good. And a solid bat, or bludgeon, to defend the poor stumps, is
surer. But there is the difference of cricket:--when your stumps are
down, you are idle, at leisure; not a miserable prisoner.'

'Supposing all marriages miserable.'

'To the mind of me,' said Diana, and observed Emma's rather saddened
eyelids for a proof that schemes to rob her of dear liberty were
certainly planned.

They conversed of expeditions to Redworth's Berkshire mansion, and to The
Crossways, untenanted at the moment, as he had informed Emma, who fancied
it would please Tony to pass a night in the house she loved; but as he
was to be of the party she coldly acquiesced.

The woman of flesh refuses pliancy when we want it of her, and will not,
until it is her good pleasure, be bent to the development called a
climax, as the puppet-woman, mother of Fiction and darling of the
multitude! ever amiably does, at a hint of the Nuptial Chapter. Diana in
addition sustained the weight of brains. Neither with waxen optics nor
with subservient jointings did she go through her pathways of the world.
Her direct individuality rejected the performance of simpleton, and her
lively blood, the warmer for its containment quickened her to penetrate
things and natures; and if as yet, in justness to the loyal male friend,
she forbore to name him conspirator, she read both him and Emma, whose
inner bosom was revealed to her, without an effort to see. But her
characteristic chasteness of mind, not coldness of the 'blood,--which had
supported an arduous conflict, past all existing rights closely to
depict, and which barbed her to pierce to the wishes threatening her
freedom, deceived her now to think her flaming blushes came of her
relentless divination on behalf of her recovered treasure: whereby the
clear reading of others distracted the view of herself. For one may be
the cleverest alive, and still hoodwinked while blood is young and warm.

The perpetuity of the contrast presented to her reflections, of
Redworth's healthy, open, practical, cheering life, and her own
freakishly interwinding, darkly penetrative, simulacrum of a life,
cheerless as well as useless, forced her humiliated consciousness by
degrees, in spite of pride, to the knowledge that she was engaged in a
struggle with him; and that he was the stronger;--it might be, the
worthier: she thought him the handsomer. He throve to the light of day,
and she spun a silly web that meshed her in her intricacies. Her
intuition of Emma's wishes led to this; he was constantly before her. She
tried to laugh at the image of the concrete cricketer, half-flannelled,
and red of face: the 'lucky calculator,' as she named him to Emma, who
shook her head, and sighed. The abstract, healthful and powerful man,
able to play besides profitably working, defied those poor efforts.
Consequently, at once she sent up a bubble to the skies, where it became
a spheral realm, of far too fine an atmosphere for men to breathe in it;
and thither she transported herself at will, whenever the contrast, with
its accompanying menace of a tyrannic subjugation, overshadowed her. In
the above, the kingdom composed of her shattered romance of life and her
present aspirings, she was free and safe. Nothing touched her
there--nothing that Redworth did. She could not have admitted there her
ideal of a hero. It was the sublimation of a virgin's conception of life,
better fortified against the enemy. She peopled it with souls of the
great and pure, gave it illimitable horizons, dreamy nooks, ravishing
landscapes, melodies of the poets of music. Higher and more-celestial
than the Salvatore, it was likewise, now she could assure herself
serenely, independent of the horrid blood-emotions. Living up there, she
had not a feeling.

The natural result of this habit of ascending to a superlunary home, was
the loss of an exact sense of how she was behaving below. At the
Berkshire mansion, she wore a supercilious air, almost as icy as she
accused the place of being. Emma knew she must have seen in the library a
row of her literary ventures, exquisitely bound; but there was no
allusion to the books. Mary Paynham's portrait of Mrs. Warwick hung
staring over the fireplace, and was criticized, as though its occupancy
of that position had no significance.

'He thinks she has a streak of genius,' Diana said to Emma.

'It may be shown in time,' Emma replied, for a comment on the work. 'He
should know, for the Spanish pictures are noble acquisitions.'

'They are, doubtless, good investments.'

He had been foolish enough to say, in Diana's hearing, that he considered
the purchase of the Berkshire estate a good investment. It had not yet a
name. She suggested various titles for Emma to propose: 'The Funds'; or
'Capital Towers'; or 'Dividend Manor'; or 'Railholm'; blind to the
evidence of inflicting pain. Emma, from what she had guess concerning the
purchaser of The Crossways, apprehended a discovery there which might
make Tony's treatment of him unkinder, seeing that she appeared actuated
contrariously; and only her invalid's new happiness in the small
excursions she was capable of taking to a definite spot, of some homely
attractiveness, moved her to follow her own proposal for the journey.
Diana pleaded urgently, childishly in tone, to have Arthur Rhodes with
them, 'so as to be sure of a sympathetic companion for a walk on the
Downs.' At The Crossways, they were soon aware that Mr. Redworth's
domestics were in attendance to serve them. Manifestly the house was his
property, and not much of an investment! The principal bed-room, her
father's once, and her own, devoted now to Emma's use, appalled her with
a resemblance to her London room. She had noticed some of her furniture
at 'Dividend Manor,' and chosen to consider it in the light of a bargain
from a purchase at the sale of her goods. Here was her bed, her
writing-table, her chair of authorship, desks, books, ornaments,
water-colour sketches. And the drawing-room was fitted with her brackets
and etageres, holding every knickknack she had possessed and scattered,
small bronzes, antiques, ivory junks, quaint ivory figures Chinese and
Japanese, bits of porcelain, silver incense-urns, dozens of dainty
sundries. She had a shamed curiosity to spy for an omission of one of
them; all were there. The Crossways had been turned into a trap.

Her reply to this blunt wooing, conspired, she felt justifled in
thinking, between him and Emma, was emphatic in muteness. She treated it
as if unobserved. At night, in bed, the scene of his mission from Emma to
her under this roof, barred her customary ascent to her planetary
kingdom. Next day she took Arthur after breakfast for a walk on the Downs
and remained absent till ten minutes before the hour of dinner. As to
that young gentleman, he was near to being caressed in public. Arthur's
opinions, his good sayings, were quoted; his excellent companionship on
really poetical walks, and perfect sympathy, praised to his face.
Challenged by her initiative to a kind of language that threw Redworth
out, he declaimed: 'We pace with some who make young morning stale.'

'Oh! stale as peel of fruit long since consumed,' she chimed.

And go they proceeded; and they laughed, Emma smiled a little, Redworth
did the same beneath one of his questioning frowns--a sort of fatherly
grimace.

A suspicion that this man, when infatuated, was able to practise the
absurdest benevolence, the burlesque of chivalry, as a man-admiring sex
esteems it, stirred very naughty depths of the woman in Diana, labouring
under her perverted mood. She put him to proof, for the chance of arming
her wickedest to despise him. Arthur was petted, consulted, cited,
flattered all round; all but caressed. She played, with a reserve, the
maturish young woman smitten by an adorable youth; and enjoyed doing it
because she hoped for a visible effect--more paternal benevolence--and
could do it so dispassionately. Coquettry, Emma thought, was most
unworthily shown; and it was of the worst description. Innocent of
conspiracy, she had seen the array of Tony's lost household treasures she
wondered at a heartlessness that would not even utter common thanks to
the friendly man for the compliment of prizing her portrait and the
things she had owned; and there seemed an effort to wound him.

The invalided woman, charitable with allowances for her erratic husband,
could offer none for the woman of a long widowhood, that had become a
trebly sensitive maidenhood; abashed by her knowledge of the world,
animated by her abounding blood; cherishing her new freedom, dreading the
menacer; feeling that though she held the citadel, she was daily less
sure of its foundations, and that her hope of some last romance in life
was going; for in him shone not a glimpse. He appeared to Diana as a
fatal power, attracting her without sympathy, benevolently overcoming:
one of those good men, strong men, who subdue and do not kindle. The
enthralment revolted a nature capable of accepting subjection only by
burning. In return for his moral excellence, she gave him the moral
sentiments: esteem, gratitude, abstract admiration, perfect faith. But
the man? She could not now say she had never been loved; and a flood of
tenderness rose in her bosom, swelling from springs that she had
previously reproved with a desperate severity: the unhappy, unsatisfied
yearning to be more than loved, to love. It was alive, out of the wreck
of its first trial. This, the secret of her natural frailty, was bitter
to her pride: chastely-minded as she was, it whelmed her. And then her
comic imagination pictured Redworth dramatically making love. And to a
widow! It proved him to be senseless of romance. Poetic men take aim at
maidens. His devotedness to a widow was charged against him by the
widow's shudder at antecedents distasteful to her soul, a discolouration
of her life. She wished to look entirely forward, as upon a world washed
clear of night, not to be cast back on her antecedents by practical
wooings or words of love; to live spiritually; free of the shower at her
eyelids attendant on any idea of her loving. The woman who talked of the
sentimentalist's 'fiddling harmonics,' herself stressed the material
chords, in her attempt to escape out of herself and away from her
pursuer.

Meanwhile she was as little conscious of what she was doing as of how she
appeared. Arthur went about with the moony air of surcharged sweetness,
and a speculation on it, alternately tiptoe and prostrate. More of her
intoxicating wine was administered to him, in utter thoughtlessness of
consequences to one who was but a boy and a friend, almost of her own
rearing. She told Emma, when leaving The Crossways, that she had no
desire to look on the place again: she wondered at Mr. Redworth's liking
such a solitude. In truth, the look back on it let her perceive that her
husband haunted it, and disfigured the man, of real generosity, as her
heart confessed, but whom she accused of a lack of prescient delicacy,
for not knowing she would and must be haunted there. Blaming him, her
fountain of colour shot up, at a murmur of her unjustness and the poor
man's hopes.

A week later, the youth she publicly named 'her Arthur' came down to
Copsley with news of his having been recommended by Mr. Redworth for the
post of secretary to an old Whig nobleman famous for his patronage of men
of letters. And besides, he expected to inherit, he said, and gazed in a
way to sharpen her instincts. The wine he had drunk of late from her
flowing vintage was in his eyes. They were on their usual rambles out
along the heights. 'Accept, by all means, and thank Mr. Redworth,' said
she, speeding her tongue to intercept him. 'Literature is a good stick
and a bad horse. Indeed, I ought to know. You can always write; I hope
you will.'

She stepped fast, hearing: 'Mrs. Warwick--Diana! May I take your hand?'

This was her pretty piece of work! 'Why should you? If you speak my
Christian name, no: you forfeit any pretext. And pray, don't loiter. We
are going at the pace of the firm of Potter and Dawdle, and you know they
never got their shutters down till it was time to put them up again.'

Nimble-footed as she was, she pressed ahead too fleetly for amorous
eloquence to have a chance. She heard 'Diana!' twice, through the
rattling of her discourse and flapping of her dress.

'Christian names are coin that seem to have an indifferent valuation of
the property they claim,' she said in the Copsley garden; 'and as for
hands, at meeting and parting, here is the friendliest you could have.
Only don't look rueful. My dear Arthur, spare me that, or I shall blame
myself horribly.'

His chance had gone, and he composed his face. No hope in speaking had
nerved him; merely the passion to speak. Diana understood the state, and
pitied the naturally modest young fellow, and chafed at herself as a
senseless incendiary, who did mischief right and left, from seeking to
shun the apparently inevitable. A sidethought intruded, that he would
have done his wooing poetically--not in the burly storm, or bull-Saxon,
she apprehended. Supposing it imperative with her to choose? She looked
up, and the bird of broader wing darkened the whole sky, bidding her know
that she had no choice.

Emma was requested to make Mr. Redworth acquainted with her story, all of
it:--'So that this exalted friendship of his may be shaken to a common
level. He has an unbearably high estimate of me, and it hurts me. Tell
him all; and more than even you have known:--but for his coming to me, on
the eve of your passing under the surgeon's hands, I should have
gone--flung the world my glove! A matter of minutes. Ten minutes later!
The train was to start for France at eight, and I was awaited. I have to
thank heaven that the man was one of those who can strike icily. Tell Mr.
Redworth what I say. You two converse upon every subject. One may be too
loftily respected--in my case. By and by--for he is a tolerant reader of
life and women, I think--we shall be humdrum friends of the lasting
order.'

Emma's cheeks were as red as Diana's. 'I fancy Tom Redworth has not much
to learn concerning any person he cares for,' she said. 'You like him? I
have lost touch of you, my dear, and ask.'

'I like him: that I can say. He is everything I am not. But now I am
free, the sense of being undeservedly over-esteemed imposes fetters, and
I don't like them. I have been called a Beauty. Rightly or other, I have
had a Beauty's career; and a curious caged beast's life I have found it.
Will you promise me to speak to him? And also, thank him for helping
Arthur Rhodes to a situation.'

At this, the tears fell from her. And so enigmatical had she grown to
Emma, that her bosom friend took them for a confessed attachment to the
youth.

Diana's wretched emotion shamed her from putting any inquiries whether
Redworth had been told. He came repeatedly, and showed no change of face,
always continuing in the form of huge hovering griffin; until an idea,
instead of the monster bird, struck her. Might she not, after all, be
cowering under imagination? The very maidenly idea wakened her
womanliness--to reproach her remainder of pride, not to see more
accurately. It was the reason why she resolved, against Emma's extreme
entreaties, to take lodgings in the South valley below the heights, where
she could be independent of fancies and perpetual visitors, but near her
beloved at any summons of urgency; which Emma would not habitually send
because of the coming of a particular gentleman. Dresses were left at
Copsley for dining and sleeping there upon occasion, and poor Danvers,
despairing over the riddle of her mistress, was condemned to the
melancholy descent.

'It's my belief,' she confided to Lady Dunstane's maid Bartlett, 'she'll
hate men all her life after that Mr. Dacier.'

If women were deceived, and the riddle deceived herself, there is excuse
for a plain man like Redworth in not having the slightest clue to the
daily shifting feminine maze he beheld. The strange thing was, that
during her maiden time she had never been shifty or flighty, invariably
limpid and direct.




CHAPTER XLI

CONTAINS A REVELATION OF THE ORIGIN OF THE TIGRESS IN DIANA

An afternoon of high summer blazed over London through the City's awning
of smoke, and the three classes of the population, relaxed by the
weariful engagement with what to them was a fruitless heat, were
severally bathing their ideas in dreams of the contrast possible to
embrace: breezy seas or moors, aerial Alps, cool beer. The latter, if
confessedly the lower comfort, is the readier at command; and Thomas
Redworth, whose perspiring frame was directing his inward vision to fly
for solace to a trim new yacht, built on his lines, beckoning from
Southampton Water, had some of the amusement proper to things plucked off
the levels, in the conversation of a couple of journeymen close ahead of
him, as he made his way from a quiet street of brokers' offices to a City
Bank. One asked the other if he had ever tried any of that cold stuff
they were now selling out of barrows, with cream. His companion answered,
that he had not got much opinion of stuff of the sort; and what was it
like?

'Well, it's cheap, it ain't bad; it's cooling. But it ain't refreshing.'

'Just what I reckoned all that newfangle rubbish.'

Without a consultation, the conservatives in beverage filed with a smart
turn about, worthy of veterans at parade on the drill-ground, into a
public-house; and a dialogue chiefly remarkable for absence of point,
furnished matter to the politician's head of the hearer. Provided that
their beer was unadulterated! Beer they would have; and why not, in
weather like this? But how to make the publican honest! And he was not
the only trickster preying on the multitudinous poor copper crowd,
rightly to be protected by the silver and the golden. Revelations of the
arts practised to plump them with raw-earth and minerals in the guise of
nourishment, had recently knocked at the door of the general conscience
and obtained a civil reply from the footman. Repulsive as the thought was
to one still holding to Whiggish Liberalism, though flying various
Radical kites, he was caught by the decisive ultratorrent, and whirled to
amid the necessity for the interference of the State, to stop the
poisoning of the poor. Upper classes have never legislated systematically
in their interests; and quid . . . rabidae tradis ovile lupae? says one
of the multitude. We may be seeing fangs of wolves where fleeces waxed.
The State that makes it a vital principle to concern itself with the
helpless poor, meets instead of waiting for Democracy; which is a
perilous flood but when it is dammed. Or else, in course of time,
luxurious yachting, my friend, will encounter other reefs and breakers
than briny ocean's! Capital, whereat Diana Warwick aimed her superbest
sneer, has its instant duties. She theorized on the side of poverty, and
might do so: he had no right to be theorizing on the side of riches.
Across St. George's Channel, the cry for humanity in Capital was an
agony. He ought to be there, doing, not cogitating. The post of Irish
Secretary must be won by real service founded on absolute local
knowledge. Yes, and sympathy, if you like; but sympathy is for proving,
not prating . . . .

These were the meditations of a man in love; veins, arteries, headpiece
in love, and constantly brooding at a solitary height over the beautiful
coveted object; only too bewildered by her multifarious evanescent
feminine evasions, as of colours on a ruffle water, to think of pouncing
for he could do nothing to soften, nothing that seemed to please her: and
all the while, the motive of her mind impelled him in reflection beyond
practicable limits: even pointing him to apt quotations! Either he
thought within her thoughts, or his own were at her disposal. Nor was it
sufficient for him to be sensible of her influence, to restrain the
impetus he took from her. He had already wedded her morally, and much
that he did, as well as whatever he debated, came of Diana; more than if
they had been coupled, when his downright practical good sense could have
spoken. She held him suspended, swaying him in that posture; and he was
not a whit ashamed of it. The beloved woman was throned on the very
highest of the man.

Furthermore, not being encouraged, he had his peculiar reason for delay,
though now he could offer her wealth. She had once in his hearing derided
the unpleasant hiss of the ungainly English matron's title of Mrs. There
was no harm in the accustomed title, to his taste; but she disliking it,
he did the same, on her special behalf; and the prospect, funereally
draped, of a title sweeter-sounding to her ears, was above his horizon.
Bear in mind, that he underwent the reverse of encouragement. Any small
thing to please her was magnified, and the anticipation of it nerved the
modest hopes of one who deemed himself and any man alive deeply her
inferior.

Such was the mood of the lover condemned to hear another malignant
scandal defiling the name of the woman he worshipped. Sir Lukin Dunstane,
extremely hurried, bumped him on the lower step of the busy Bank, and
said:

'Pardon!' and 'Ha! Redwarth! making money?'

'Why, what are you up to down here?' he was asked, and he answered: 'Down
to the Tower, to an officer quartered there. Not bad quarters, but an
infernal distance. Business.'

Having cloaked his expedition to the distance with the comprehensive
word, he repeated it; by which he feared he had rendered it too
significant, and he said: 'No, no; nothing particular'; and that caused
the secret he contained to swell in his breast rebelliously, informing
the candid creature of the fact of his hating to lie: whereupon thus he
poured himself out, in the quieter bustle of an alley, off the main
thoroughfare. 'You're a friend of hers. I 'm sure you care for her
reputation; you 're an old friend of hers, and she's my wife's dearest
friend; and I'm fond of her too; and I ought to be, and ought to know,
and do know:--pure? Strike off my fist if there's a spot on her
character! And a scoundrel like that fellow Wroxeter! Damnedest rage I
ever was in!--Swears . . . down at Lockton . . . when she was a girl.
Why, Redworth, I can tell you, when Diana Warwick was a girl!'

Redworth stopped him. 'Did he say it in your presence?'

Sir Lukin was drawn-up by the harsh question. 'Well, no; not exactly.' He
tried to hesitate, but he was in the hot vein of a confidence and he
wanted advice. 'The cur said it to a woman--hang the woman! And she hates
Diana Warwick: I can't tell why--a regular snake's hate. By Jove! how
women carp hate!'

'Who is the woman?' said Redworth.

Sir Lukin complained of the mob at his elbows. 'I don't like mentioning
names here.'

A convenient open door of offices invited him to drag his receptacle, and
possible counsellor, into the passage, where immediately he bethought him
of a postponement of the distinct communication; but the vein was too
hot. 'I say, Redworth, I wish you'd dine with me. Let's drive up to my
Club.--Very well, two words. And I warn you, I shall call him out, and
make it appear it 's about another woman, who'll like nothing so much, if
I know the Jezebel. Some women are hussies, let 'em be handsome as
houris. And she's a fire-ship; by heaven, she is! Come, you're a friend
of my wife's, but you're a man of the world and my friend, and you know
how fellows are tempted, Tom Redworth.--Cur though he is, he's likely to
step out and receive a lesson.--Well, he's the favoured cavalier for the
present . . . h'm . . . Fryar-Gannett. Swears he told her,
circumstantially; and it was down at Lockton, when Diana Warwick was a
girl. Swears she'll spit her venom at her, so that Diana Warwick shan't
hold her head up in London Society, what with that cur Wroxeter, Old
Dannisburgh, and Dacier. And it does count a list, doesn't it? confound
the handsome hag! She's jealous of a dark rival. I've been down to
Colonel Hartswood at the Tower, and he thinks Wroxeter deserves
horsewhipping, and we may manage it. I know you 're dead against
duelling; and so am I, on my honour. But you see there are cases where a
lady must be protected; and anything new, left to circulate against a
lady who has been talked of twice--Oh, by Jove! it must be stopped. If
she has a male friend on earth, it must be stopped on the spot.'

Redworth eyed Sir Lukin curiously through his wrath.

'We'll drive up to your Club,' he said.

'Hartswood dines with me this evening, to confer,' rejoined Sir Lukin.
'Will you meet him?'

'I can't,' said Redworth, 'I have to see a lady, whose affairs I have
been attending to in the City; and I 'm engaged for the evening. You
perceive, my good fellow,' he resumed, as they rolled along, 'this is a
delicate business. You have to consider your wife. Mrs. Warwick's, name
won't come up, but another woman's will.'

'I meet Wroxeter at a gambling-house he frequents, and publicly call him
cheat--slap his face, if need be.'

'Sure to!' repeated Redworth. 'No stupid pretext will quash the woman's
name. Now, such a thing as a duel would give pain enough.'

'Of course; I understand,' Sir Lukin nodded his clear comprehension. 'But
what is it you advise, to trounce the scoundrel, and silence him?'

'Leave it to me for a day. Let me have your word that you won't take a
step: positively--neither you nor Colonel Hartswood. I'll see you by
appointment at your Club.' Redworth looked up over the chimneys. 'We 're
going to have a storm and a gale, I can tell you.'

'Gale and storm!' cried Sir Lukin; 'what has that got to do with it?'

'Think of something else for, a time.'

'And that brute of a woman--deuced handsome she is!--if you care for fair
women, Redworth:--she's a Venus, jumped slap out of the waves, and the
Devil for sire--that you learn: running about, sowing her lies. She's a
yellow witch. Oh! but she's a shameless minx. And a black-leg cur like
Wroxeter! Any woman intimate with a fellow like that, stamps herself. I
loathe her. Sort of woman who swears in the morning you're the only man
on earth; and next day--that evening-engaged!--fee to Polly Hopkins--and
it's a gentleman, a nobleman, my lord!--been going on behind your back
half the season!--and she isn't hissed when she abuses a lady, a saint in
comparison! You know the world, old fellow:--Brighton, Richmond, visits
to a friend as deep in the bog. How Fryar-Gunnett--a man, after all--can
stand it! And drives of an afternoon for an airing-by heaven! You're out
of that mess, Redworth: not much taste for the sex; and you're right,
you're lucky. Upon my word, the corruption of society in the present day
is awful; it's appalling.--I rattled at her: and oh! dear me, perks on
her hind heels and defies me to prove: and she's no pretender, but hopes
she's as good as any of my "chaste Dianas." My dear old friend, it's when
you come upon women of that kind you have a sickener. And I'm bound by
the best there is in a man-honour, gratitude, all the' list--to defend
Diana Warwick.'

'So, you see, for your wife's sake, your name can't be hung on a woman of
that kind,' said Redworth. 'I'll call here the day after to-morrow at
three P.M.'

Sir Lukin descended and vainly pressed Redworth to run up into his Club
for refreshment. Said he roguishly:

'Who 's the lady?'

The tone threw Redworth on his frankness.

'The lady I 've been doing business for in the City, is Miss Paynham.'

'I saw her once at Copsley; good-looking. Cleverish?'

'She has ability.'

Entering his Club, Sir Lukin was accosted in the reading-room by a
cavalry officer, a Colonel Launay, an old Harrovian, who stood at the
window and asked him whether it was not Tom Redworth in the cab. Another,
of the same School, standing squared before a sheet of one of the evening
newspapers, heard the name and joined them, saying: 'Tom Redworth is
going to be married, some fellow told me.'

'He'll make a deuced good husband to any woman--if it's true,' said Sir
Lukin, with Miss Paynham ringing in his head. 'He's a cold-blooded old
boy, and likes women for their intellects.'

Colonel Launay hummed in meditative emphasis. He stared at vacancy with a
tranced eye, and turning a similar gaze on Sir Lukin, as if through him,
burst out: 'Oh, by George, I say, what a hugging that woman 'll get!'

The cocking of ears and queries of Sir Lukin put him to the test of his
right to the remark; for it sounded of occult acquaintance with
interesting subterranean facts; and there was a communication, in brief
syllables and the dot language, crudely masculine. Immensely surprised,
Sir Lukin exclaimed: 'Of course! when fellows live quietly and are
careful of themselves. Ah! you may think you know a man for years, and
you don't: you don't know more than an inch or two of him. Why, of
course, Tom Redworth would be uxorious--the very man! And tell us what
has become of the Firefly now? One never sees her. Didn't complain?'

'Very much the contrary.'

Both gentlemen were grave, believing their knowledge in the subterranean
world of a wealthy city to give them a positive cognizance of female
humanity; and the substance of Colonel Launay's communication had its
impressiveness for them.

'Well, it's a turn right-about-face for me,' said Sir Lukin. 'What a
world we live in! I fancy I've hit on the woman he means to marry;--had
an idea of another woman once; but he's one of your friendly fellows with
women. That's how it was I took him for a fish. Great mistake, I admit.
But Tom Redworth 's a man of morals after all; and when those men do
break loose for a plunge--ha! Have you ever boxed with him? Well, he
keeps himself in training, I can tell you.'

Sir Lukin's round of visits drew him at night to Lady Singleby's, where
he sighted the identical young lady of his thoughts, Miss Paynham,
temporarily a guest of the house; and he talked to her of Redworth, and
had the satisfaction to spy a blush, a rageing blush: which avowal
presented her to his view as an exceedingly good-looking girl; so that he
began mentally to praise Redworth for a manly superiority to small
trifles and the world's tattle.

'You saw him to-day,' he said.

She answered: 'Yes. He goes down to Copsley tomorrow.'

'I think not,' said Sir Lukin.'

'I have it from him.' She closed her eyelids in speaking.

'He and I have some rather serious business in town.'

'Serious?'

'Don't be alarmed: not concerning him.'

'Whom, then? You have told me so much--I have a right to know.'

'Not an atom of danger, I assure you?'

'It concerns Mrs. Warwick!' said she.

Sir Lukin thought the guess extraordinary. He preserved an impenetrable
air. But he had spoken enough to set that giddy head spinning.

Nowhere during the night was Mrs. Fryar-Gannett visible. Earlier than
usual, she was riding next day in the Row, alone for perhaps two minutes,
and Sir Lukin passed her, formally saluting. He could not help the look
behind him, she sat so bewitchingly on horseback! He looked, and behold,
her riding-whip was raised erect from the elbow. It was his horse that
wheeled; compulsorily he was borne at a short canter to her side.

'Your commands?'

The handsome Amabel threw him a sombre glance from the corners of her
uplifted eyelids; and snakish he felt it; but her colour and the line of
her face went well with sullenness; and, her arts of fascination cast
aside, she fascinated him more in seeming homelier, girlish. If the trial
of her beauty of a woman in a temper can bear the strain, she has
attractive lures indeed; irresistible to the amorous idler: and when, in
addition, being the guilty person, she plays the injured, her show of
temper on the taking face pitches him into perplexity with his own
emotions, creating a desire to strike and be stricken, howl and set
howling, which is of the happiest augury for tender reconcilement, on the
terms of the gentleman on his kneecap.

'You've been doing a pretty thing!' she said, and briefly she named her
house and half an hour, and flew. Sir Lukin was left to admire the figure
of the horsewoman. Really, her figure had an air of vindicating her
successfully, except for the poison she spat at Diana Warwick. And what
pretty thing had he been doing? He reviewed dozens of speculations until
the impossibility of seizing one determined him to go to Mrs.
Fryar-Gunnett at the end of the half-hour--'Just to see what these women
have to say for themselves.'

Some big advance drops of Redworth's thunderstorm drawing gloomily
overhead, warned him to be quick and get his horse into stables.
Dismounted, the sensational man was irresolute, suspecting a female trap.
But curiosity, combined with the instinctive turning of his nose in the
direction of the lady's house, led him thither, to an accompaniment of
celestial growls, which impressed him, judging by that naughty-girl face
of hers and the woman's tongue she had, as a likely prelude to the scene
to come below.




CHAPTER XLII

THE PENULTIMATE: SHOWING A FINAL STRUGGLE FOR LIBERTY AND RUN INTO
HARNESS

The prophet of the storm had forgotten his prediction; which, however,
was of small concern to him, apart from the ducking he received midway
between the valley and the heights of Copsley; whither he was bound, on a
mission so serious that, according to his custom in such instances, he
chose to take counsel of his active legs: an adviseable course when the
brain wants clearing and the heart fortifying. Diana's face was clearly
before him through the deluge; now in ogle features, the dimple running
from her mouth, the dark bright eyes and cut of eyelids, and nostrils
alive under their lightning; now inkier whole radiant smile, or musefully
listening, nursing a thought. Or she was obscured, and he felt the face.
The individuality of it had him by the heart, beyond his powers of
visioning. On his arrival, he stood in the hall, adrip like one of the
trees of the lawn, laughing at Lady Dunstane's anxious exclamations. His
portmanteau had come and he was expected; she hurried out at the first
ringing of the bell, to greet and reproach him for walking in such
weather.

'Diana has left me,' she said, when he reappeared in dry clothing. 'We
are neighbours; she has taken cottage-lodgings at Selshall, about an
hour's walk:--one of her wild dreams of independence. Are you
disappointed?'

'I am,' Redworth confessed.

Emma coloured. 'She requires an immense deal of humouring at present. The
fit will wear off; only we must wait for it. Any menace to her precious
liberty makes her prickly. She is passing the day with the Pettigrews,
who have taken a place near her village for a month. She promised to dine
and sleep here, if she returned in time. What is your news?'

'Nothing; the world wags on.'

'You have nothing special to tell her?'

'Nothing'; he hummed; 'nothing, I fancy, that she does not know.'

'You said you were disappointed.'

'It's always a pleasure to see her.'

'Even in her worst moods, I find it so.'

'Oh! moods!' quoth Redworth.

'My friend, they are to be reckoned, with women.'

'Certainly; what I meant was, that I don't count them against women.'

'Good: but my meaning was . . . I think I remember your once comparing
them and the weather; and you spoke of the "one point more variable in
women." You may forestall your storms. There is no calculating the effect
of a few little words at a wrong season.'

'With women! I suppose not. I have no pretension to a knowledge of the
sex.'

Emma imagined she had spoken plainly enough, if he had immediate designs;
and she was not sure of that, and wished rather to shun his confidences
while Tony was in her young widowhood, revelling in her joy of liberty.
By and by, was her thought: perhaps next year. She dreaded Tony's refusal
of the yoke, and her iron-hardness to the dearest of men proposing it;
and moreover, her further to be apprehended holding to the refusal, for
the sake of consistency, if it was once uttered. For her own sake, she
shrank from hearing intentions, that distressing the good man, she would
have to discountenance. His candour in confessing disappointment, and his
open face, his excellent sense too, gave her some assurance of his not
being foolishly impetuous. After he had read to her for an hour, as his
habit was on evenings and wet days, their discussion of this and that in
the book lulled any doubts she had of his prudence, enough to render it
even a dubious point whether she might be speculating upon a wealthy
bachelor in the old-fashioned ultra-feminine manner; the which she so
abhorred that she rejected the idea. Consequently, Redworth's proposal to
walk down to the valley for Diana, and bring her back, struck her as
natural when a shaft of western sunshine from a whitened edge of
raincloud struck her windows. She let him go without an intimated
monition or a thought of one; thinking simply that her Tony would be more
likely to come, having him for escort. Those are silly women who are
always imagining designs and intrigues and future palpitations in the
commonest actions of either sex. Emma Dunstane leaned to the contrast
between herself and them.

Danvers was at the house about sunset, reporting her mistress to be on
her way, with Mr. Redworth. The maid's tale of the dreadful state of the
lanes, accounted for their tardiness; and besides the sunset had been
magnificent. Diana knocked at Emma's bedroom door, to say, outside,
hurriedly in passing, how splendid the sunset had been, and beg for an
extra five minutes. Taking full fifteen, she swam into the drawing-room,
lively with kisses on Emma's cheeks, and excuses, referring her
misconduct in being late to the seductions of 'Sol' in his glory.
Redworth said he had rarely seen so wonderful a sunset. The result of
their unanimity stirred Emma's bosom to match-making regrets; and the
walk of the pair together, alone under the propitious laming heavens,
appeared to her now as an opportunity lost. From sisterly sympathy, she
fancied she could understand Tony's liberty-loving reluctance: she had no
comprehension of the backwardness of the man beholding the dear woman
handsomer than in her maiden or her married time: and sprightlier as
well. She chatted deliciously, and drew Redworth to talk his best on his
choicer subjects, playing over them like a fide-wisp, determined at once
to flounder him and to make him shine. Her tender esteem for the man was
transparent through it all; and Emma, whose evening had gone happily
between them, said to her, in their privacy, before parting: 'You seemed
to have been inspired by "Sol," my dear. You do like him, don't you?'

Diana vowed she adored him; and with a face of laughter in rosy
suffusion, put Sol for Redworth, Redworth for Sol; but, watchful of
Emma's visage, said finally: 'If you mean the mortal man, I think him up
to almost all your hyperboles--as far as men go; and he departed to his
night's rest, which I hope will be good, like a king. Not to admire him,
would argue me senseless, heartless. I do; I have reason to.'

'And you make him the butt of your ridicule, Tony.'

'No; I said "like a king"; and he is one. He has, to me, morally the
grandeur of your Sol sinking, Caesar stabbed, Cato on the sword-point. He
is Roman, Spartan, Imperial; English, if you like, the pick, of the land.
It is an honour to call him friend, and I do trust he will choose the
pick among us, to make her a happy woman--if she's for running in
harness. There, I can't say more.'

Emma had to be satisfied with it, for the present.

They were astonished at breakfast by seeing Sir Lukin ride past the
windows. He entered with the veritable appetite of a cavalier who had
ridden from London fasting; and why he had come at that early hour, he
was too hungry to explain. The ladies retired to read their letters by
the morning's post; whereupon Sir Lukin called to Redworth; 'I met that
woman in the park yesterday, and had to stand a volley. I went beating
about London for you all the afternoon and evening. She swears you rated
her like a scullery wench, and threatened to ruin Wroxeter. Did you see
him? She says, the story's true in one particular, that he did snatch a
kiss, and got mauled. Not so much to pay for it! But what a ruffian--eh?'

'I saw him,' said Redworth. 'He 's one of the new set of noblemen who
take bribes to serve as baits for transactions in the City. They help to
the ruin of their order, or are signs of its decay. We won't judge it by
him. He favoured me with his "word of honour" that the thing you heard
was entirely a misstatement, and so forth:--apologized, I suppose. He
mumbled something.'

'A thorough cur!'

'He professed his readiness to fight, if either of us was not contented.'

'He spoke to the wrong man. I've half a mind to ride back and have him
out for that rascal "osculation" and the lady unwilling!--and she a young
one, a girl, under the protection of the house! By Jove! Redworth, when
you come to consider the scoundrels men can be, it stirs a fellow's bile.
There's a deal of that sort of villany going--and succeeding sometimes!
He deserves the whip or a bullet.'

'A sermon from Lukin Dunstane might punish him.'

'Oh! I'm a sinner, I know. But, go and tell one woman of another woman,
and that a lie! That's beyond me.'

'The gradations of the deeps are perhaps measurable to those who are in
them.'

'The sermon's at me--pop!' said Sir Lukin. 'By the way, I'm coming round
to think Diana Warwick was right when she used to jibe at me for throwing
up my commission. Idleness is the devil--or mother of him. I manage my
estates; but the truth is, it doesn't occupy my mind.'

'Your time.'

'My mind, I say.'

'Whichever you please.'

'You're crusty to-day, Redworth. Let me tell you, I think--and hard too,
when the fit's on me. However, you did right in stopping--I'll own--a
piece of folly, and shutting the mouths of those two; though it caused me
to come in for a regular drencher. But a pretty woman in a right-down
termagant passion is good theatre; because it can't last, at that pace;
and you're sure of your agreeable tableau. Not that I trust her ten
minutes out of sight--or any woman, except one or two; my wife and Diana
Warwick. Trust those you've tried, old boy. Diana Warwick ought to be
taught to thank you; though I don't know how it's to be done.'

'The fact of it is,' Redworth frowned and rose, 'I've done mischief. I
had no right to mix myself in it. I'm seldom caught off my feet by an
impulse; but I was. I took the fever from you.'

He squared his figure at the window, and looked up on a driving sky.

'Come, let's play open cards, Tom Redworth,' said Sir Lukin, leaving the
table and joining his friend by the window. 'You moral men are doomed to
be marrying men, always; and quite right. Not that one doesn't hear a
roundabout thing or two about you: no harm. Very much the contrary:--as
the world goes. But you're the man to marry a wife; and if I guess the
lady, she's a sensible girl and won't be jealous. I 'd swear she only
waits for asking.'

'Then you don't guess the lady,' said Redworth.

'Mary Paynham?'

The desperate half-laugh greeting the name convinced more than a dozen
denials.

Sir Lukin kept edging round for a full view of the friend who shunned
inspection. 'But is it? . . . can it be? it must be, after all! . . .
why, of course it is! But the thing staring us in the face is just what
we never see. Just the husband for her!--and she's the wife! Why, Diana
Warwick 's the very woman, of course! I remember I used to think so
before she was free to wed.'

'She is not of that opinion.' Redworth blew a heavy breath; and it should
be chronicled as a sigh; but it was hugely masculine.

'Because you didn't attack, the moment she was free; that 's what upset
my calculations,' the sagacious gentleman continued, for a vindication of
his acuteness: then seizing the reply: 'Refuses? you don't mean to say
you're the man to take a refusal? and from a green widow in the blush?
Did you see her cheeks when she was peeping at the letter in her hand?
She colours at half a word--takes the lift of a finger for Hymen coming.
And lots of fellows are after her; I know it from Emmy. But you're not
the man to be refused. You're her friend--her champion. That woman
Fryar-Gunnett would have it you were the favoured lover, and sneered at
my talk of old friendship. Women are always down dead on the facts; can't
put them off a scent!'

'There's the mischief!' Redworth blew again. 'I had no right to be
championing Mrs. Warwick's name. Or the world won't give it, at all
events. I'm a blundering donkey. Yes, she wishes to keep her liberty.
And, upon my soul, I'm in love with everything she wishes! I've got the
habit.'

'Habit be hanged!' cried Sir Lukin. 'You're in love with the woman. I
know a little more of you now, Mr. Tom. You're a fellow in earnest about
what you do. You're feeling it now, on the rack, by heaven! though you
keep a bold face. Did she speak positively?--sort of feminine of "you're
the monster, not the man"? or measured little doctor's dose of
pity?--worse sign.' You 're not going?'

'If you'll drive me down in half an hour,' said Redworth.

'Give me an hour,' Sir Lukin replied, and went straight to his wife's
blue-room.

Diana was roused from a meditation on a letter she held, by the entrance
of Emma in her bed-chamber, to whom she said: 'I have here the very
craziest bit of writing!--but what is disturbing you, dear?'

Emma sat beside her, panting and composing her lips to speak. 'Do you,
love me? I throw policy to the winds, if only, I can batter at you for
your heart and find it! Tony, do you love me? But don't answer: give me
your hand. You have rejected him!'

'He has told you?'

'No. He is not the man to cry out for a wound. He heard in London--Lukin
has had the courage to tell me, after his fashion:--Tom Redworth heard an
old story, coming from one of the baser kind of women: grossly false, he
knew. I mention only Lord Wroxeter and Lockton. He went to man and woman
both, and had it refuted, and stopped their tongues, on peril; as he of
all men is able to do when he wills it.'

Observing the quick change in Tony's eyes, Emma exclaimed: 'How you
looked disdain when you asked whether he had told me! But why are you the
handsome tigress to him, of all men living! The dear fellow, dear to me
at least! since the day he first saw you, has worshipped you and striven
to serve you:--and harder than any Scriptural service to have the beloved
woman to wife. I know nothing to compare with it, for he is a man of
warmth. He is one of those rare men of honour who can command their
passion; who venerate when they love: and those are the men that women
select for punishment! Yes, you! It is to the woman he loves that he
cannot show himself as he is, because he is at her feet. You have managed
to stamp your spirit on him; and as a consequence, he defends you now,
for flinging him off. And now his chief regret is, that he has caused his
name to be coupled with yours. I suppose he had some poor hope, seeing
you free. Or else the impulse to protect the woman of his heart and soul
was too strong. I have seen what he suffered, years back, at the news of
your engagement.'

'Oh, for God's sake, don't,' cried Tony, tears running over, and her
dream of freedom, her visions of romance, drowning.

'It was like the snapping of the branch of an oak, when the trunk stands
firm,' Emma resumed, in her desire to scourge as well as to soften. 'But
similes applied to him will strike you as incongruous.' Tony swayed her
body, for a negative, very girlishly and consciously. 'He probably did
not woo you in a poetic style, or the courtly by prescription.' Again
Tony swayed; she had to hug herself under the stripes, and felt as if
alone at sea, with her dear heavens pelting. 'You have sneered at him for
his calculating--to his face: and it was when he was comparatively poor
that he calculated--to his cost! that he dared not ask you to marry a man
who could not offer you a tithe of what he considered fit for the
peerless woman. Peerless, I admit. There he was not wrong. But if he had
valued you half a grain less, he might have won you. You talk much of
chivalry; you conceive a superhuman ideal, to which you fit a very
indifferent wooden model, while the man of all the world the most
chivalrous! . . . He is a man quite other from what you think him:
anything but a "Cuthbert Dering" or a "Man of Two Minds." He was in the
drawing-room below, on the day I received your last maiden letter from
The Crossways--now his property, in the hope of making it yours.'

'I behaved abominably there!' interposed Tony, with a gasp.

'Let it pass. At any rate, that was the prick of a needle, not the blow
of a sword.'

'But marriage, dear Emmy! marriage! Is marriage to be the end of me?'

'What amazing apotheosis have you in prospect? And are you steering so
particularly well by yourself?'

'Miserably! But I can dream. And the thought of a husband cuts me from
any dreaming. It's all dead flat earth at once!'

'Would, you lave rejected him when you were a girl?'

'I think so.'

'The superior merits of another . . .?'

'Oh, no, no, no, no! I might have accepted him: and I might not have made
him happy. I wanted a hero, and the jewelled garb and the feather did not
suit him.'

'No; he is not that description of lay-figure. You have dressed it, and
gemmed it, and--made your discovery. Here is a true man; and if you can
find me any of your heroes to match him, I will thank you. He came on the
day I speak of, to consult me as to whether, with the income he then had
. . . Well, I had to tell him you were engaged. The man has never wavered
in his love of you since that day. He has had to bear something.'

This was an electrical bolt into Tony's bosom, shaking her from self-pity
and shame to remorseful pity of the suffering lover; and the tears ran in
streams, as she said:

'He bore it, Emmy, he bore it.' She sobbed out: 'And he went on building
a fortune and batting! Whatever he undertakes he does perfectly-approve
of the pattern or not. Oh! I have no doubt he had his nest of wish piping
to him all the while: only it seems quaint, dear, quaint, and against
everything we've been reading of lovers! Love was his bread and butter!'
Her dark eyes showered. 'And to tell you what you do not know of him, his
way of making love is really,' she sobbed, 'pretty. It . . . it took me
by surprise; I was expecting a bellow and an assault of horns; and if,
dear:--you will say, what boarding-school girl have you got with you! and
I feel myself getting childish:--if Sol in his glory had not been so m
. . . majestically m . . . magnificent, nor seemed to show me the king
. . . kingdom of my dreams, I might have stammered the opposite word to the
one he heard. Last night, when he took my hand kindly before going to bed
I had a fit for dropping on my knees to him. I saw him bleed, and he held
himself right royally. I told you he did;--Sol in his moral grandeur! How
infinitely above the physical monarch--is he not, Emmy? What one
dislikes, is the devotion of all that grandeur to win a widow. It should
be a maiden princess. You feel it so, I am sure. And here am I, as if a
maiden princess were I, demanding romantic accessories of rubious vapour
in the man condescending to implore the widow to wed him. But, tell me,
does he know everything of his widow--everything? I shall not have to go
through the frightful chapter?'

'He is a man with his eyes awake; he knows as much as any husband could
require to know,' said Emma; adding: 'My darling! he trusts you. It is
the soul of the man that loves you, as it is mine. You will not tease
him? Promise me. Give yourself frankly. You see it clearly before you.'

'I see compulsion, my dear. What I see, is a regiment of Proverbs,
bearing placards instead of guns, and each one a taunt at women,
especially at widows. They march; they form square; they enclose me in
the middle, and I have their inscriptions to digest. Read that crazy
letter from Mary Paynham while I am putting on my bonnet. I perceive I
have been crying like a raw creature in her teens. I don't know myself.
An advantage of the darker complexions is our speedier concealment of the
traces.'

Emma read Miss Paynham's letter, and returned it with the comment:
'Utterly crazy.' Tony said: 'Is it not? I am to "Pause before I trifle
with a noble heart too long." She is to "have her happiness in the
constant prayer for ours"; and she is "warned by one of those intimations
never failing her, that he runs a serious danger." It reads like a
Wizard's Almanack. And here "Homogeneity of sentiment the most perfect,
is unable to contend with the fatal charm, which exercised by an
indifferent person, must be ascribed to original predestination." She
should be under the wing of Lady Wathin. There is the mother for such
chicks! But I'll own to you, Emmy, that after the perusal, I did ask
myself a question as to my likeness of late to the writer. I have
drivelled . . . I was shuddering over it when you came in. I have
sentimentalized up to thin smoke. And she tells a truth when she says I
am not to "count social cleverness"--she means volubility--"as a warrant
for domineering a capacious intelligence": because of the gentleman's
modesty. Agreed: I have done it; I am contrite. I am going into slavery
to make amends for presumption. Banality, thy name is marriage!'

'Your business is to accept life as we have it,' said Emma; and Tony
shrugged. She was precipitate in going forth to her commonplace fate, and
scarcely looked at the man requested by Emma to escort her to her
cottage. After their departure, Emma fell into laughter at the last words
with the kiss of her cheeks: 'Here goes old Ireland!' But, from her look
and from what she had said upstairs, Emma could believe that the singular
sprite of girlishness invading and governing her latterly, had yielded
place to the woman she loved.




CHAPTER XLIII

NUPTIAL CHAPTER; AND OF HOW A BARELY WILLING WOMAN WAS LED TO BLOOM WITH
THE NUPTIAL SENTIMENT

Emma watched them on their way through the park, till they rounded the
beechwood, talking, it could be surmised, of ordinary matters; the face
of the gentleman turning at times to his companion's, which steadily
fronted the gale. She left the ensuing to a prayer for their good
direction, with a chuckle at Tony's evident feeling of a ludicrous
posture, and the desperate rush of her agile limbs to have it over. But
her prayer throbbed almost to a supplication that the wrong done to her
beloved by Dacier--the wound to her own sisterly pride rankling as an
injury to her sex, might be cancelled through the union of the woman
noble in the sight of God with a more manlike man.

Meanwhile the feet of the couple were going faster than their heads to
the end of the journey. Diana knew she would have to hoist the signal-and
how? The prospect was dumb-foundering. She had to think of appeasing her
Emma. Redworth, for his part; actually supposed she had accepted his
escorting in proof of the plain friendship offered him overnight.

'What do your "birds" do in weather like this?' she said.

'Cling to their perches and wait patiently. It's the bad time with them
when you don't hear them chirp.'

'Of course you foretold the gale.'

'Oh, well, it did not require a shepherd or a skipper for that.'

'Your grand gift will be useful to a yachtsman.'

'You like yachting. When I have tried my new schooner in the Channel, she
is at your command for as long as you and Lady Dunstane please.'

'So you acknowledge that birds--things of nature--have their bad time?'

'They profit ultimately by the deluge and the wreck. Nothing on earth is
"tucked-up" in perpetuity.'

'Except the dead. But why should the schooner be at our command?'

'I shall be in Ireland.'

He could not have said sweeter to her ears or more touching.

'We shall hardly feel safe without the weatherwise on board.'

'You may count on my man Barnes; I have proved him. He is up to his work
even when he's bilious: only, in that case, occurring about once a
fortnight, you must leave him to fight it out with the elements.'

'I rather like men of action to have a temper.'

'I can't say much for a bilious temper.'

The weather to-day really seemed of that kind, she remarked. He assented,
in the shrug manner--not to dissent: she might say what she would. He
helped nowhere to a lead; and so quick are the changes of mood at such
moments that she was now far from him under the failure of an effort to
come near. But thoughts of Emma pressed.

'The name of the new schooner? Her name is her picture to me.'

'I wanted you to christen her.'

'Launched without a name?'

'I took a liberty.'

Needless to ask, but she did. 'With whom?'

'I named her Diana.'

'May the Goddess of the silver bow and crescent protect her! To me the
name is ominous of mischance.'

'I would commit my fortunes and life . . . !' He checked his tongue,
ejaculating: 'Omens!'

She had veered straight away from her romantic aspirations to the blunt
extreme of thinking that a widow should be wooed in unornamented
matter-of-fact, as she is wedded, with a 'wilt thou,' and 'I will,' and
no decorative illusions. Downright, for the unpoetic creature, if you
please! So she rejected the accompaniment of the silver Goddess and high
seas for an introduction of the crisis.

'This would be a thunderer on our coasts. I had a trial of my sailing
powers in the Mediterranean.'

As she said it, her musings on him then, with the contract of her
position toward him now, fierily brushed her cheeks; and she wished him
the man to make one snatch at her poor lost small butterfly bit of
freedom, so that she might suddenly feel in haven, at peace with her
expectant Emma. He could have seen the inviting consciousness, but he was
absurdly watchful lest the flying sprays of border trees should strike
her. He mentioned his fear, and it became an excuse for her seeking
protection of her veil. 'It is our natural guardian,' she said.

'Not much against timber,' said he.

The worthy creature's anxiety was of the pattern of cavaliers escorting
dames--an exaggeration of honest zeal; a present example of clownish
goodness, it might seem; until entering the larch and firwood along the
beaten heights, there was a rocking and straining of the shallow-rooted
trees in a tremendous gust that quite pardoned him for curving his arm in
a hoop about her and holding a shoulder in front. The veil did her
positive service.

He was honourably scrupulous not to presume. A right good unimpulsive
gentleman: the same that she had always taken him for and liked.

'These firs are not taproots,' he observed, by way of apology.

Her dress volumed and her ribands rattled and chirruped on the verge of
the slope. 'I will take your arm here,' she said.

Redworth received the little hand, saying: 'Lean to me.'

They descended upon great surges of wind piping and driving every light
surface-atom as foam; and they blinked and shook; even the man was
shaken. But their arms were interlinked and they grappled; the battering
enemy made them one. It might mean nothing, or everything: to him it
meant the sheer blissful instant.

At the foot of the hill, he said: 'It's harder to keep to, the terms of
yesterday.'

'What were they?' said she, and took his breath more than the fury of the
storm had done.

'Raise the veil, I beg.'

'Widows do not wear it.'

The look revealed to him was a fugitive of the wilds, no longer the
glittering shooter of arrows.

'Have you . . .?' changed to me, was the signification understood. 'Can
you?--for life'. Do you think you can?'

His poverty in the pleading language melted her.

'What I cannot do, my best of friends, is to submit to be seated on a
throne, with you petitioning. Yes, as far as concerns this hand of mine,
if you hold it worthy of you. We will speak of that. Now tell me the name
of the weed trailing along the hedge there!

He knew it well; a common hedgerow weed; but the placid diversion baffled
him. It was clematis, he said.

'It drags in the dust when it has no firm arm to cling to. I passed it
beside you yesterday with a flaunting mind and not a suspicion of a
likeness. How foolish I was! I could volubly sermonize; only it should be
a young maid to listen. Forgive me the yesterday.'

'You have never to ask. You withdraw your hand--was I rough?'

'No,' she smiled demurely; 'it must get used to the shackles: but my
cottage is in sight. I have a growing love for the place. We will enter
it like plain people--if you think of coming in.'

As she said it she had a slight shock of cowering under eyes tolerably
hawkish in their male glitter; but her coolness was not disturbed; and
without any apprehensions she reflected on what has been written of the
silly division and war of the sexes:--which two might surely enter on an
engagement to live together amiably, unvexed by that barbarous old fowl
and falcon interlude. Cool herself, she imagined the same of him, having
good grounds for the delusion; so they passed through the cottage-garden
and beneath the low porchway, into her little sitting-room, where she was
proceeding to speak composedly of her preference for cottages, while
untying her bonnet-strings:--'If I had begun my life in a cottage!'--when
really a big storm-wave caught her from shore and whirled her to mid-sea,
out of every sensibility but the swimming one of her loss of self in the
man.

'You would not have been here!' was all he said. She was up at his heart,
fast-locked, undergoing a change greater than the sea works; her thoughts
one blush, her brain a fire-fount. This was not like being seated on a
throne.

'There,' said he, loosening his hug, 'now you belong to me! I know you
from head to foot. After that, my darling, I could leave you for years,
and call you wife, and be sure of you. I could swear it for you--my life
on it! That 's what I think of you. Don't wonder that I took my
chance--the first:--I have waited!'

Truer word was never uttered, she owned, coming into some harmony with
man's kiss on her mouth: the man violently metamorphozed to a stranger,
acting on rights she had given him. And who was she to dream of denying
them? Not an idea in her head! Bound verily to be thankful for such love,
on hearing that it dated from the night in Ireland . . . . 'So in love
with you that, on my soul, your happiness was my marrow--whatever you
wished; anything you chose. It's reckoned a fool's part. No, it's love:
the love of a woman--the one woman! I was like the hand of a clock to the
springs. I taught this old watch-dog of a heart to keep guard and bury
the bones you tossed him.'

'Ignorantly, admit,' said she, and could have bitten her tongue for the
empty words that provoked: 'Would you have flung him nothing?' and caused
a lowering of her eyelids and shamed glimpses of recollections. 'I hear
you have again been defending me. I told you, I think, I wished I had
begun my girl's life in a cottage. All that I have had to endure! . . or
so it seems to me: it may be my way of excusing myself:--I know my
cunning in that peculiar art. I would take my chance of mixing among the
highest and the brightest.'

'Naturally.'

'Culpably.'

'It brings you to me.'

'Through a muddy channel.'

'Your husband has full faith in you, my own.'

'The faith has to be summoned and is buffeted, as we were just now on the
hill. I wish he had taken me from a cottage.'

'You pushed for the best society, like a fish to its native sea.'

'Pray say, a salmon to the riverheads.'

'Better,' Redworth laughed joyfully, between admiration of the tongue
that always outflew him, and of the face he reddened.

By degrees her apter and neater terms of speech helped her to a notion of
regaining some steps of her sunken ascendancy, under the weight of the
novel masculine pressure on her throbbing blood; and when he bent to her
to take her lord's farewell of her, after agreeing to go and delight Emma
with a message, her submission and her personal pride were not so much at
variance: perhaps because her buzzing head had no ideas. 'Tell Emma you
have undertaken to wash the blackamoor as white as she can be,' she said
perversely, in her spite at herself for not coming, as it were, out of
the dawn to the man she could consent to wed: and he replied: 'I shall
tell her my dark girl pleads for a fortnight's grace before she and I set
sail for the West coast of Ireland': conjuring a picture that checked any
protest against the shortness of time:--and Emma would surely be his
ally.

They talked of the Dublin Ball: painfully to some of her thoughts. But
Redworth kissed that distant brilliant night as freshly as if no
belabouring years rolled in the chasm: which led her to conceive partly,
and wonderingly, the nature of a strong man's passion; and it subjugated
the woman knowing of a contrast. The smart of the blow dealt her by him
who had fired the passion in her became a burning regret for the loss of
that fair fame she had sacrificed to him, and could not bring to her
truer lover: though it was but the outer view of herself--the world's
view; only she was generous and of honest conscience, and but for the
sake of her truer lover, she would mentally have allowed the world to
lash and abuse her, without a plea of material purity. Could it be named?
The naming of it in her clear mind lessened it to accidental:--By good
fortune, she was no worse!--She said to Redworth, when finally dismissing
him; 'I bring no real disgrace to you, my friend.'--To have had this
sharp spiritual battle at such a time, was proof of honest conscience,
rarer among women, as the world has fashioned them yet, than the purity
demanded of them.--His answer: 'You are my wife!' rang in her hearing.

When she sat alone at last, she was incapable, despite her nature's
imaginative leap to brightness, of choosing any single period, auspicious
or luminous or flattering, since the hour of her first meeting this man,
rather than the grey light he cast on her, promising helpfulness, and
inspiring a belief in her capacity to help. Not the Salvatore high
raptures nor the nights of social applause could appear preferable: she
strained her shattered wits to try them. As for her superlunary sphere,
it was in fragments; and she mused on the singularity, considering that
she was not deeply enamoured. Was she so at all? The question drove her
to embrace the dignity of being reasonable--under Emmy's guidance. For
she did not stand firmly alone; her story confessed it. Marriage might be
the archway to the road of good service, even as our passage through the
flesh may lead to the better state. She had thoughts of the kind, and had
them while encouraging herself to deplore the adieu to her little
musk-scented sitting-room, where a modest freedom breathed, and her
individuality had seemed pointing to a straighter growth.

She nodded subsequently to the truth of her happy Emma's remark: 'You
were created for the world, Tony.' A woman of blood and imagination in
the warring world, without a mate whom she can revere, subscribes to a
likeness with those independent minor realms between greedy mighty
neighbours, which conspire and undermine when they do not openly threaten
to devour. So, then, this union, the return to the wedding yoke, received
sanction of grey-toned reason. She was not enamoured she could say it to
herself. She had, however, been surprised, both by the man and her
unprotesting submission; surprised and warmed, unaccountably warmed.
Clearness of mind in the woman chaste by nature, however little ignorant
it allowed her to be in the general review of herself, could not compass
the immediately personal, with its acknowledgement of her subserviency to
touch and pressure--and more, stranger, her readiness to kindle. She left
it unexplained. Unconsciously the image of Dacier was effaced. Looking
backward, her heart was moved to her long-constant lover with most
pitying tender wonderment--stormy man, as her threatened senses told her
that he was. Looking at him, she had to mask her being abashed and
mastered. And looking forward, her soul fell in prayer for this true
man's never repenting of his choice. Sure of her now, Mr. Thomas Redworth
had returned to the station of the courtier, and her feminine sovereignty
was not ruffled to make her feel too feminine. Another revelation was his
playful talk when they were more closely intimate. He had his humour as
well as his hearty relish of hers.

'If all Englishmen were like him!' she chimed with Emma Dunstane's
eulogies, under the influence.

'My dear,' the latter replied, 'we should simply march over the Four
Quarters and be blessed by the nations! Only, avoid your trick of dashing
headlong to the other extreme. He has his faults.'

'Tell me of them,' Diana cooed for an answer. 'Do. I want the flavour. A
girl would be satisfied with superhuman excellence. A widow asks for
feature.'

'To my thinking, the case is, that if it is a widow who sees the
superhuman excellence in a man, she may be very well contented to cross
the bridge with him,' rejoined Emma. . . .

'Suppose the bridge to break, and for her to fall into the water, he
rescuing her--then perhaps!'

'But it has been happening!'

'But piecemeal, in extension, so slowly. I go to him a derelict, bearing
a story of the sea; empty of ideas. I remember sailing out of harbour
passably well freighted for commerce.'

'When Tom Redworth has had command of the "derelict" a week, I should
like to see her!'

The mention of that positive captaincy drowned Diana in morning colours.
She was dominated, physically and morally, submissively too. What she
craved, in the absence of the public whiteness which could have caused
her to rejoice in herself as a noble gift, was the spring of enthusiasm.
Emma touched a quivering chord of pride with her hint at the good augury,
and foreshadowing of the larger Union, in the Irishwoman's bestowal of
her hand on the open-minded Englishman she had learned to trust. The
aureole glimmered transiently: she could neither think highly of the
woman about to be wedded, nor poetically of the man; nor, therefore,
rosily of the ceremony, nor other than vacuously of life. And yet, as she
avowed to Emma, she had gathered the three rarest good things of life: a
faithful friend, a faithful lover, a faithful servant: the two latter
exposing an unimagined quality of emotion. Danvers, on the night of the
great day for Redworth, had undressed her with trembling fingers, and her
mistress was led to the knowledge that the maid had always been all eye;
and on reflection to admit that it came of a sympathy she did not share.

But when Celtic brains are reflective on their emotional vessel they
shoot direct as the arrow of logic. Diana's glance at the years behind
lighted every moving figure to a shrewd transparency, herself among them.
She was driven to the conclusion that the granting of any of her heart's
wild wishes in those days would have lowered her--or frozen. Dacier was a
coldly luminous image; still a tolling name; no longer conceivably her
mate. Recollection rocked, not she. The politician and citizen was
admired: she read the man;--more to her own discredit than to his, but
she read him, and if that is done by the one of two lovers who was true
to love, it is the God of the passion pronouncing a final release from
the shadow of his chains.

Three days antecedent to her marriage, she went down the hill over her
cottage chimneys with Redworth, after hearing him praise and cite to Emma
Dunstane sentences of a morning's report of a speech delivered by Dacier
to his constituents. She alluded to it, that she might air her power of
speaking of the man coolly to him, or else for the sake of stirring
afresh some sentiment he had roused; and he repeated his high opinion of
the orator's political wisdom: whereby was revived in her memory a
certain reprehensible view, belonging to her period of mock-girlish
naughtiness--too vile!--as to his paternal benevolence, now to clear
vision the loftiest manliness. What did she do? She was Irish; therefore
intuitively decorous in amatory challenges and interchanges. But she was
an impulsive woman, and foliage was thick around, only a few small birds
and heaven seeing; and penitence and admiration sprang the impulse. It
had to be this or a burst of weeping:--she put a kiss upon his arm.

She had omitted to think that she was dealing with a lover a man of
smothered fire, who would be electrically alive to the act through a
coat-sleeve. Redworth had his impulse. He kept it under,--she felt the
big breath he drew in. Imagination began busily building a nest for him,
and enthusiasm was not sluggish to make a home of it. The impulse of each
had wedded; in expression and repression; her sensibility told her of the
stronger.

She rose on the morning of her marriage day with his favourite Planxty
Kelly at her lips, a natural bubble of the notes. Emma drove down to the
cottage to breakfast and superintend her bride's adornment, as to which,
Diana had spoken slightingly; as well as of the ceremony, and the
institution, and this life itself:--she would be married out of her
cottage, a widow, a cottager, a woman under a cloud; yes, a sober person
taking at last a right practical step, to please her two best friends.
The change was marked. She wished to hide it, wished to confide it. Emma
was asked: 'How is he this morning?' and at the answer, describing his
fresh and spirited looks, and his kind ways with Arthur Rhodes, and his
fun with Sullivan Smith, and the satisfaction with the bridegroom
declared by Lord Larrian (invalided from his Rock and unexpectingly
informed of the wedding), Diana forgot that she had kissed her, and this
time pressed her lips, in a manner to convey the secret bridally.

'He has a lovely day.'

'And bride,' said Emma.

'If you two think so! I should like to agree with my dear old lord and
bless him for the prize he takes, though it feels itself at present
rather like a Christmas bon-bon--a piece of sugar in the wrap of a rhymed
motto. He is kind to Arthur, you say?'

'Like a cordial elder brother.'

'Dear love, I have it at heart that I was harsh upon Mary Paynham for her
letter. She meant well--and I fear she suffers. And it may have been a
bit my fault. Blind that I was! When you say "cordial elder brother," you
make him appear beautiful to me. The worst of that is, one becomes aware
of the inability to match him.'

'Read with his eyes when you meet him this morning, my Tony.'

The secret was being clearly perceived by Emma, whose pride in assisting
to dress the beautiful creature for her marriage--with the man of men had
a tinge from the hymenaeal brand, exulting over Dacier, and in the
compensation coming to her beloved for her first luckless footing on this
road.

'How does he go down to the church?' said Diana.

'He walks down. Lukin and his Chief drive. He walks, with your Arthur and
Mr. Sullivan Smith. He is on his way now.'

Diana looked through the window in the direction of the hill. 'That is so
like him, to walk to his wedding!'

Emma took the place of Danvers in the office of the robing, for the maid,
as her mistress managed to hint, was too steeped 'in the colour of the
occasion' to be exactly tasteful, and had the art, no doubt through
sympathy, of charging permissible common words with explosive
meanings:--she was in an amorous palpitation, of the reflected state.
After several knockings and enterings of the bedchamber-door, she came
hurriedly to say: 'And your pillow, ma'am? I had almost forgotten it!' A
question that caused her mistress to drop the gaze of a moan on Emma,
with patience trembling. Diana preferred a hard pillow, and usually
carried her own about. 'Take it,' she had to reply.

The friends embraced before descending to step into the fateful carriage.
'And tell me,' Emma said, 'are not your views of life brighter to-day?'

'Too dazzled to know! It may be a lamp close to the eyes or a radiance of
sun. I hope they are.'

'You are beginning to think hopefully again?'

'Who can really think, and not think hopefully? You were in my mind last
night, and you brought a little boat to sail me past despondency of life
and the fear of extinction. When we despair or discolour things, it is
our senses in revolt, and they have made the sovereign brain their
drudge. I heard you whisper; with your very breath in my ear: "There is
nothing the body suffers that the soul may not profit by." That is Emma's
history. With that I sail into the dark; it is my promise of the
immortal: teaches me to see immortality for us. It comes from you, my
Emmy.'

If not a great saying, it was in the heart of deep thoughts: proof to
Emma that her Tony's mind had resumed its old clear high-aiming activity;
therefore that her nature was working sanely, and that she accepted her
happiness, and bore love for a dower to her husband. No blushing
confession of the woman's love of the man would have told her so much as
the return to mental harmony with the laws of life shown in her darling's
pellucid little sentence.

She revolved it long after the day of the wedding. To Emma, constantly on
the dark decline of the unillumined verge, between the two worlds, those
words were a radiance and a nourishment. Had they waned she would have
trimmed them to feed her during her soul-sister's absence. They shone to
her of their vitality. She was lying along her sofa, facing her
South-western window, one afternoon of late November, expecting Tony from
her lengthened honeymoon trip, while a sunset in the van of frost, not
without celestial musical reminders of Tony's husband, began to deepen;
and as her friend was coming, she mused on the scenes of her friend's
departure, and how Tony, issuing from her cottage porch had betrayed her
feelings in the language of her sex by stooping to lift above her head
and kiss the smallest of her landlady's children ranged up the
garden-path to bid her farewell over their strewing of flowers;--and of
her murmur to Tony, entering the churchyard, among the grave-mounds: 'Old
Ireland won't repent it!' and Tony's rejoinder, at the sight of the
bridegroom advancing, beaming: 'A singular transformation of Old
England!'--and how, having numberless ready sources of laughter and tears
down the run of their heart-in-heart intimacy, all spouting up for a word
in the happy tremour of the moment, they had both bitten their lips and
blinked on a moisture of the eyelids. Now the dear woman was really
wedded, wedded and mated. Her letters breathed, in their own lively or
thoughtful flow, of the perfect mating. Emma gazed into the depths of the
waves of crimson, where brilliancy of colour came out of central heaven
preternaturally near on earth, till one shade less brilliant seemed an
ebbing away to boundless remoteness. Angelical and mortal mixed, making
the glory overhead a sign of the close union of our human conditions with
the ethereal and psychically divined. Thence it grew that one thought in
her breast became a desire for such extension of days as would give her
the blessedness to clasp in her lap--if those kind heavens would grant
it!--a child of the marriage of the two noblest of human souls, one the
dearest; and so have proof at heart that her country and our earth are
fruitful in the good, for a glowing future. She was deeply a woman,
dumbly a poet. True poets and true women have the native sense of the
divineness of what the world deems gross material substance. Emma's
exaltation in fervour had not subsided when she held her beloved in her
arms under the dusk of the withdrawing redness. They sat embraced, with
hands locked, in the unlighted room, and Tony spoke of the splendid sky.
'You watched it knowing I was on my way to you?'

'Praying, dear.'

'For me?'

'That I might live long enough to be a godmother.'

There was no reply: there was an involuntary little twitch of Tony's
fingers.




     ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS

     A witty woman is a treasure; a witty Beauty is a power
     A high wind will make a dead leaf fly like a bird
     A kindly sense of superiority
     Accidents are the specific for averting the maladies of age
     Accounting for it, is not the same as excusing
     Assist in our small sphere; not come mouthing to the footlights
     At war with ourselves, means the best happiness we can have
     Avoid the position that enforces publishing
     Beautiful women in her position provoke an intemperateness
     Beauty is rare; luckily is it rare
     Between love grown old and indifference ageing to love
     Beware the silent one of an assembly!
     Brittle is foredoomed
     But they were a hopeless couple, they were so friendly
     By resisting, I made him a tyrant
     Capacity for thinking should precede the act of writing
     Capricious potentate whom they worship
     Carry explosives and must particularly guard against sparks
     Charitable mercifulness; better than sentimental ointment
     Chaste are wattled in formalism and throned in sourness
     Circumstances may combine to make a whisper as deadly as a blow
     Common sense is the secret of every successful civil agitation
     Compared the governing of the Irish to the management of a horse
     Could have designed this gabbler for the mate
     Could the best of men be simply--a woman's friend?
     Debit was eloquent, he was unanswerable
     Dedicated to the putrid of the upper circle
     Depending for dialogue upon perpetual fresh supplies of scandal
     Dose he had taken was not of the sweetest
     Dreaded as a scourge, hailed as a refreshment (Scandalsheet)
     Elderly martyr for the advancement of his juniors
     Enthusiasm has the privilege of not knowing monotony
     Envy of the man of positive knowledge
     Expectations dupe us, not trust
     Explaining of things to a dull head
     Externally soft and polished, internally hard and relentless
     Favour can't help coming by rotation
     Fiddle harmonics on the sensual strings
     Flashes bits of speech that catch men in their unguarded corner
     For 'tis Ireland gives England her soldiers, her generals too
     Friendship, I fancy, means one heart between two
     Get back what we give
     Goodish sort of fellow; good horseman, good shot, good character
     Grossly unlike in likeness (portraits)
     Happy in privation and suffering if simply we can accept beauty
     He was not a weaver of phrases in distress
     He had by nature a tarnishing eye that cast discolouration
     He gained much by claiming little
     He, by insisting, made me a rebel
     He had neat phrases, opinions in packets
     He was the maddest of tyrants--a weak one
     He's good from end to end, and beats a Christian hollow (a hog)
     Heart to keep guard and bury the bones you tossed him
     Her peculiar tenacity of the sense of injury
     Her feelings--trustier guides than her judgement in this crisis
     Her final impression likened him to a house locked up and empty
     Herself, content to be dull if he might shine
     His gaze and one of his ears, if not the pair, were given
     His ridiculous equanimity
     Holding to the refusal, for the sake of consistency
     How immensely nature seems to prefer men to women!
     Human nature to feel an interest in the dog that has bitten you
     I wanted a hero
     I do not see it, because I will not see it
     I never knew till this morning the force of No in earnest
     I have and hold--you shall hunger and covet
     I don't count them against women (moods)
     I'm in love with everything she wishes! I've got the habit
     Idea is the only vital breath
     If I'm struck, I strike back
     If he had valued you half a grain less, he might have won you
     Inclined to act hesitation in accepting the aid she sought
     Inducement to act the hypocrite before the hypocrite world
     Infatuated men argue likewise, and scandal does not move them
     Insistency upon there being two sides to a case--to every case
     Intrusion of the spontaneous on the stereotyped would clash
     Irony that seemed to spring from aversion
     It is the best of signs when women take to her
     It is the devil's masterstroke to get us to accuse him
     Its glee at a catastrophe; its poor stock of mercy
     Keep passion sober, a trotter in harness
     Lengthened term of peace bred maggots in the heads of the people
     Let never Necessity draw the bow of our weakness
     Literature is a good stick and a bad horse
     Loathing for speculation
     Mare would do, and better than a dozen horses
     Material good reverses its benefits the more nearly we clasp it
     Matter that is not nourishing to brains
     Mistake of the world is to think happiness possible to the sense
     Mistaking of her desires for her reasons
     Money is of course a rough test of virtue
     Moral indignation is ever consolatory
     Music was resumed to confuse the hearing of the eavesdroppers
     Mutual deference
     Needed support of facts, and feared them
     Never fell far short of outstripping the sturdy pedestrian Time
     Nothing the body suffers that the soul may not profit by
     Nothing is a secret that has been spoken
     Now far from him under the failure of an effort to come near
     O self! self! self!
     Observation is the most, enduring of the pleasures of life
     Omnipotence, which is in the image of themselves
     One might build up a respectable figure in negatives
     Openly treated; all had an air of being on the surface
     Or where you will, so that's in Ireland
     Our weakness is the swiftest dog to hunt us
     Our bravest, our best, have an impulse to run
     Owner of such a woman, and to lose her!
     Paint themselves pure white, to the obliteration of minor spots
     Perused it, and did not recognize herself in her language
     Pride in being always myself
     Procrastination and excessive scrupulousness
     Question the gain of such an expenditure of energy
     Quixottry is agreeable reading, a silly performance
     Rare men of honour who can command their passion
     Read with his eyes when you meet him this morning
     Read deep and not be baffled by inconsistencies
     Real happiness is a state of dulness
     Reluctant to take the life of flowers for a whim
     Rewards, together with the expectations, of the virtuous
     Salt of earth, to whom their salt must serve for nourishment
     Sentimentality puts up infant hands for absolution
     Service of watering the dry and drying the damp (Whiskey)
     Sham spiritualism
     She had sunk her intelligence in her sensations
     She marries, and it's the end of her sparkling
     She herself did not like to be seen eating in public
     She had a fatal attraction for antiques
     Sleepless night
     Slightest taste for comic analysis that does not tumble to farce
     Smart remarks have their measured distances
     Smoky receptacle cherishing millions
     Something of the hare in us when the hounds are full cry
     Strain to see in the utter dark, and nothing can come of that
     Swell and illuminate citizen prose to a princely poetic
     Sympathy is for proving, not prating
     Tendency to polysyllabic phraseology
     Terrible decree, that all must act who would prevail
     That is life--when we dare death to live!
     That's the natural shamrock, after the artificial
     The man had to be endured, like other doses in politics
     The burlesque Irishman can't be caricatured
     The greed of gain is our volcano
     The debts we owe ourselves are the hardest to pay
     The well of true wit is truth itself
     The blindness of Fortune is her one merit
     They have no sensitiveness, we have too much
     They create by stoppage a volcano
     This love they rattle about and rave about
     Tooth that received a stone when it expected candy
     Top and bottom sin is cowardice
     Touch him with my hand, before he passed from our sight
     Trial of her beauty of a woman in a temper
     Vagrant compassionateness of sentimentalists
     Vowed never more to repeat that offence to his patience
     Was not one of the order whose Muse is the Public Taste
     We live alone, and do not much feel it till we are visited
     We never see peace but in the features of the dead
     We must fawn in society
     We don't know we are in halves
     We're a peaceful people, but 'ware who touches us
     Weather and women have some resemblance they say
     Weighty little word--woman's native watchdog and guardian (No!)
     What might have been
     What the world says, is what the wind says
     What a woman thinks of women, is the test of her nature
     When we despair or discolour things, it is our senses in revolt
     Where she appears, the first person falls to second rank
     Who can really think, and not think hopefully?
     Who venerate when they love
     Wife and no wife, a prisoner in liberty
     With that I sail into the dark
     Without those consolatory efforts, useless between men
     Women are taken to be the second thoughts of the Creator
     Women with brains, moreover, are all heartless
     World is ruthless, dear friends, because the world is hypocrite
     World prefers decorum to honesty
     Yawns coming alarmingly fast, in the place of ideas
     You beat me with the fists, but my spirit is towering
     You are entreated to repress alarm






ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS, Complete

By George Meredith


1897




CONTENTS:

BOOK 1.
I.        ACROSS LONDON BRIDGE
II.       THROUGH THE VAGUE TO THE INFINITELY LITTLE
III.      OLD VEUVE
IV.       THE SECOND BOTTLE
V.        THE LONDON WALK WESTWARD
VI.       NATALY
VII.      BETWEEN A GENERAL MAN OF THE WORLD AND A PROFESSIONAL
VIII.     SOME FAMILIAR GUESTS.
IX.       AN INSPECTION OF LAKELANDS
X.        SKEPSEY IN MOTION
XI.       WHEREIN WE BEHOLD THE COUPLE JUSTIFIED OF LOVE HAVING SIGHT OF
          THEIR SCOURGE

BOOK 2.
XII.      TREATS OF THE DUMBNESS POSSIBLE WITH MEMBERS OF A HOUSEHOLD
          HAVING ONE HEART
XIII.     THE LATEST OF MRS. BURMAN
XIV.      DISCLOSES A STAGE ON THE DRIVE TO PARIS
XV.       A PATRIOT ABROAD
XVI.      ACCOUNTS FOR SKEPSEY'S MISCONDUCT, SHOWING HOW IT AFFECTED
          NATALY
XVII.     CHIEFLY UPON THE THEME OF A YOUNG MAID'S IMAGININGS
XVIII.    SUITORS FOR THE HAND OF NESTA VICTORIA

BOOK 3.
XIX.      TREATS OF NATURE AND CIRCUMSTANCE AND THE DISSENSION BETWEEN
          THEM AND OF A SATIRIST'S MALIGNITY IN THE DIRECTION OF HIS
          COUNTRY
XX.       THE GREAT ASSEMBLY AT LAKELAND
XXI.      DARTREY FENELLAN
XXII.     CONCERNS THE INTRUSION OF JARNIMAN
XXIII.    TREATS OF THE LADIES' LAPDOG TASSO FOR AN INSTANCE OF MOMENTOUS
          EFFECTS PRODUCED BY VERY MINOR CAUSES
XXIV.     NESTA'S ENGAGEMENT

BOOK 4.
XXV.      NATALY IN ACTION
XXVI.     IN WHICH WE SEE A CONVENTIONAL GENTLE MAN ENDEAVOURING TO
          EXAMINE A SPECTRE OF HIMSELF
XXVII.    CONTAINS WHAT IS A SMALL THING OR A GREAT, AS THE SOUL OF THE
          CHIEF ACTOR MAY DECIDE
XXVIII.   MRS. MARSETT
XXIX.     SHOWS ONE OF THE SHADOWS OF THE WORLD CROSSING A VIRGIN'S MIND
XXX.      THE BURDEN UPON NESTA
XXXI.     SHOWS HOW THE SQUIRES IN A CONQUEROR'S SERVICE HAVE AT TIMES TO
          DO KNIGHTLY CONQUEST OF THEMSELVES
XXXII.    SHOWS HOW TEMPER MAY KINDLE TEMPER AND AN INDIGNANT WOMAN GET
          HER WEAPON
XXXIII.   A PAIR OF WOOERS
XXXIV.    CONTAINS DEEDS UNRELATED AND EXPOSITIONS OF FEELINGS
XXXV.     IN WHICH AGAIN WE MAKE USE OF THE OLD LAMPS FOR LIGHTING AN
          ABYSMAL DARKNESS

BOOK 5.
XXXVI.    NESTA AND HER FATHER
XXXVII.   THE MOTHER--THE DAUGHTER
XXXVIII.  NATALY, NESTA, AND DARTREY FENELLAN
XXXIX.    A CHAPTER IN THE SHADOW OF MRS. MARSETT
XL.       AN EXPIATION
XLI.      THE NIGHT OF THE GREAT UNDELIVERED SPEECH
XLII.     THE LAST




CHAPTER I

ACROSS LONDON BRIDGE

A gentleman, noteworthy for a lively countenance and a waistcoat to match
it, crossing London Bridge at noon on a gusty April day, was almost
magically detached from his conflict with the gale by some sly strip of
slipperiness, abounding in that conduit of the markets, which had more or
less adroitly performed the trick upon preceding passengers, and now laid
this one flat amid the shuffle of feet, peaceful for the moment as the
uncomplaining who have gone to Sabrina beneath the tides. He was unhurt,
quite sound, merely astonished, he remarked, in reply to the inquiries of
the first kind helper at his elbow; and it appeared an acceptable
statement of his condition. He laughed, shook his coat-tails, smoothed
the back of his head rather thoughtfully, thankfully received his runaway
hat, nodded bright beams to right and left, and making light of the muddy
stigmas imprinted by the pavement, he scattered another shower of his
nods and smiles around, to signify, that as his good friends would wish,
he thoroughly felt his legs and could walk unaided. And he was in the act
of doing it, questioning his familiar behind the waistcoat amazedly, to
tell him how such a misadventure could have occurred to him of all men,
when a glance below his chin discomposed his outward face. 'Oh, confound
the fellow!' he said, with simple frankness, and was humorously ruffled,
having seen absurd blots of smutty knuckles distributed over the maiden
waistcoat.

His outcry was no more than the confidential communication of a genial
spirit with that distinctive article of his attire. At the same time, for
these friendly people about him to share the fun of the annoyance, he
looked hastily brightly back, seeming with the contraction of his brows
to frown, on the little band of observant Samaritans; in the centre of
whom a man who knew himself honourably unclean, perhaps consequently a
bit of a political jewel, hearing one of their number confounded for his
pains, and by the wearer of a superfine dashing-white waistcoat, was
moved to take notice of the total deficiency of gratitude in this kind of
gentleman's look and pocket. If we ask for nothing for helping gentlemen
to stand upright on their legs, and get it, we expect civility into the
bargain. Moreover, there are reasons in nature why we choose to give sign
of a particular surliness when our wealthy superiors would have us think
their condescending grins are cordials.

The gentleman's eyes were followed on a second hurried downward grimace,
the necessitated wrinkles of which could be stretched by malevolence to a
semblance of haughty disgust; reminding us, through our readings in
journals, of the wicked overblown Prince Regent and his Court, together
with the view taken of honest labour in the mind of supercilious luxury,
even if indebted to it freshly for a trifle; and the hoar-headed
nineteenth-century billow of democratic ire craved the word to be set
swelling.

'Am I the fellow you mean, sir?' the man said.

He was answered, not ungraciously: 'All right, my man.'

But the balance of our public equanimity is prone to violent antic
bobbings on occasions when, for example, an ostentatious garment shall
appear disdainful our class and ourself, and coin of the realm has not
usurped command of one of the scales: thus a fairly pleasant answer, cast
in persuasive features, provoked the retort:

'There you're wrong; nor wouldn't be.'

'What's that?' was the gentleman's musical inquiry.

'That's flat, as you was half a minute ago,' the man rejoined.

'Ah, well, don't be impudent,' the gentleman said, by way of amiable
remonstrance before a parting.

'And none of your dam punctilio,' said the man.

Their exchange rattled smartly, without a direct hostility, and the
gentleman stepped forward.

It was observed in the crowd, that after a few paces he put two fingers
on the back of his head.

They might suppose him to be condoling with his recent mishap. But, in
fact, a thing had occurred to vex him more than a descent upon the
pavement or damage to his waistcoat's whiteness: he abominated the
thought of an altercation with a member of the mob; he found that
enormous beat comprehensible only when it applauded him; and besides he
wished it warmly well; all that was good for it; plentiful dinners,
country excursions, stout menagerie bars, music, a dance, and to bed: he
was for patting, stroking, petting the mob, for tossing it sops, never
for irritating it to show an eye-tooth, much less for causing it to
exhibit the grinders: and in endeavouring to get at the grounds of his
dissension with that dirty-fisted fellow, the recollection of the word
punctilio shot a throb of pain to the spot where his mishap had rendered
him susceptible. Headache threatened--and to him of all men! But was
there ever such a word for drumming on a cranium? Puzzles are presented
to us now and then in the course of our days; and the smaller they are
the better for the purpose, it would seem; and they come in rattle-boxes,
they are actually children's toys, for what they contain, but not the
less do they buzz at our understandings and insist that they break or we,
and, in either case, to show a mere foolish idle rattle in hollowness. Or
does this happen to us only after a fall?

He tried a suspension of his mental efforts, and the word was like the
clapper of a disorderly bell, striking through him, with reverberations,
in the form of interrogations, as to how he, of all men living, could by
any chance have got into a wrangle, in a thoroughfare, on London Bridge,
of all places in the world!--he, so popular, renowned for his affability,
his amiability; having no dislike to common dirty dogs, entirely the
reverse, liking them and doing his best for them; and accustomed to
receive their applause. And in what way had he offered a hint to bring on
him the charge of punctilio?

'But I am treating it seriously!' he said, and jerked a dead laugh while
fixing a button of his coat.

That he should have treated it seriously, furnished next the subject of
cogitation; and here it was plainly suggested, that a degradation of his
physical system, owing to the shock of the fall, must be seen and
acknowledged; for it had become a perverted engine, to pull him down
among the puerilities, and very soon he was worrying at punctilio anew,
attempting to read the riddle of the application of it to himself, angry
that he had allowed it to be the final word, and admitting it a famous
word for the closing of a controversy:--it banged the door and rolled
drum-notes; it deafened reason. And was it a London cockney crow-word of
the day, or a word that had stuck in the fellow's head from the perusal
of his pothouse newspaper columns?

Furthermore, the plea of a fall, and the plea of a shock from a fall,
required to account for the triviality of the mind, were humiliating to
him who had never hitherto missed a step, or owned to the shortest of
collapses. This confession of deficiency in explosive repartee--using a
friend's term for the ready gift--was an old and a rueful one with Victor
Radnor. His godmother Fortune denied him that. She bestowed it on his
friend Fenellan, and little else. Simeon Fenellan could clap the halter
on a coltish mob; he had positively caught the roar of cries and stilled
it, by capping the cries in turn, until the people cheered him; and the
effect of the scene upon Victor Radnor disposed him to rank the gift of
repartee higher than a certain rosily oratorical that he was permitted to
tell himself he possessed, in bottle if not on draught. Let it only be
explosive repartee: the well-fused bomb, the bubble to the stone, echo
round the horn. Fenellan, would have discharged an extinguisher on
punctilio in emission. Victor Radnor was unable to cope with it
reflectively.

No, but one doesn't like being beaten by anything! he replied to an
admonishment of his better mind, as he touched his two fingers, more
significantly dubious than the whole hand, at the back of his head, and
checked or stemmed the current of a fear. For he was utterly unlike
himself; he was dwelling on a trifle, on a matter discernibly the
smallest, an incident of the streets; and although he refused to feel a
bump or any responsive notification of a bruise, he made a sacrifice of
his native pride to his intellectual, in granting that he must have been
shaken, so childishly did he continue thinking.

Yes, well, and if a tumble distorts our ideas of life, and an odd word
engrosses our speculations, we are poor creatures, he addressed another
friend, from whom he stood constitutionally in dissent naming him Colney;
and under pressure of the name, reviving old wrangles between them upon
man's present achievements and his probable destinies: especially upon
England's grandeur, vitality, stability, her intelligent appreciation of
her place in the universe; not to speak of the historic dignity of London
City. Colney had to be overcome afresh, and he fled, but managed, with
two or three of his bitter phrases, to make a cuttle-fish fight of it,
that oppressively shadowed his vanquisher:

The Daniel Lambert of Cities: the Female Annuitant of Nations:--and such
like, wretched stuff, proper to Colney Durance, easily dispersed and
out-laughed when we have our vigour. We have as much as we need of it in
summoning a contemptuous Pooh to our lips, with a shrug at venomous
dyspepsia.

Nevertheless, a malignant sketch of Colney's, in the which Hengist and
Horsa, our fishy Saxon originals, in modern garb of liveryman and
gaitered squire, flat-headed, paunchy, assiduously servile, are shown
blacking Ben-Israel's boots and grooming the princely stud of the Jew,
had come so near to Victor Radnor's apprehensions of a possible, if not
an impending, consummation, that the ghastly vision of the Jew Dominant
in London City, over England, over Europe, America, the world (a picture
drawn in literary sepia by Colney: with our poor hang neck population
uncertain about making a bell-rope of the forelock to the Satyr-snouty
master; and the Norman Lord de Warenne handing him for a lump sum son and
daughter, both to be Hebraized in their different ways), fastened on the
most mercurial of patriotic men, and gave him a whole-length plunge into
despondency.

It lasted nearly a minute. His recovery was not in this instance due to
the calling on himself for the rescue of an ancient and glorious country;
nor altogether to the spectacle of the shipping, over the parapet, to his
right: the hundreds of masts rising out of the merchant river; London's
unrivalled mezzotint and the City' rhetorician's inexhaustible argument:
he gained it rather from the imperious demand of an animated and thirsty
frame for novel impressions. Commonly he was too hot with his business,
and airy fancies above it when crossing the bridge, to reflect in
freshness on its wonders; though a phrase could spring him alive to them;
a suggestion of the Foreigner, jealous, condemned to admire in despair of
outstripping, like Satan worsted; or when a Premier's fine inflation
magnified the scene at City banquets--exciting while audible, if a
waggery in memory; or when England's cherished Bard, the Leading Article,
blew bellows, and wind primed the lieges.

That a phrase on any other subject was of much the same effect, in
relation to it, may be owned; he was lightly kindled. The scene, however,
had a sharp sparkle of attractiveness at the instant. Down went the
twirling horizontal pillars of a strong tide from the arches of the
bridge, breaking to wild water at a remove; and a reddish Northern cheek
of curdling pipeing East, at shrilly puffs between the Tower and the
Custom House, encountered it to whip and ridge the flood against
descending tug and long tail of stern-ajerk empty barges; with a steamer
slowly noseing round off the wharf-cranes, preparing to swirl the screw;
and half-bottom-upward boats dancing harpooner beside their whale; along
an avenue, not fabulously golden, of the deputy masts of all nations, a
wintry woodland, every rag aloft curling to volume; and here the spouts
and the mounds of steam, and rolls of brown smoke there, variously
undulated, curved to vanish; cold blue sky ashift with the whirl and dash
of a very Tartar cavalry of cloud overhead.

Surely a scene pretending to sublimity?

Gazeing along that grand highway of the voyageing forest, your London
citizen of good estate has reproached his country's poets for not pouring
out, succinctly and melodiously, his multitudinous larvae of notions
begotten by the scene. For there are times when he would, pay to have
them sung; and he feels them big; he thinks them human in their bulk;
they are Londinensian; they want but form and fire to get them scored on
the tablets of the quotable at festive boards. This he can promise to his
poets. As for otherwhere than at the festive, Commerce invoked is a
Goddess that will have the reek of those boards to fill her nostrils, and
poet and alderman alike may be dedicate to the sublime, she leads them,
after two sniffs of an idea concerning her, for the dive into the
turtle-tureen. Heels up they go, poet first--a plummet he!

And besides it is barely possible for our rounded citizen, in the mood of
meditation, to direct his gaze off the bridge along the waterway
North-eastward without beholding as an eye the glow of whitebait's
bow-window by the riverside, to the front of the summer sunset, a league
or so down stream; where he sees, in memory savours, the Elysian end of
Commerce: frontispiece of a tale to fetch us up the out-wearied spectre
of old Apicius; yea, and urge Crispinus to wheel his purse into the
market for the purchase of a costlier mullet!

But is the Jew of the usury gold becoming our despot-king of Commerce?

In that case, we do not ask our country's poets to compose a single
stanza of eulogy's rhymes--far from it. Far to the contrary, we bid
ourselves remember the sons of whom we are; instead of revelling in the
fruits of Commerce, we shoot scornfully past those blazing bellied
windows of the aromatic dinners, and beyond Thames, away to the
fishermen's deeps, Old England's native element, where the strenuous
ancestry of a race yet and ever manful at the stress of trial are heard
around and aloft whistling us back to the splendid strain of muscle, and
spray fringes cloud, and strong heart rides the briny scoops and
hillocks, and Death and Man are at grip for the haul.

There we find our nationality, our poetry, no Hebrew competing.

We do: or there at least we left it. Whether to recover it when wanted,
is not so certain. Humpy Hengist and dumpy Horsa, quitting ledger and
coronet, might recur to their sea bowlegs and red-stubble chins, might
take to their tarpaulins again; they might renew their manhood on the
capture of cod; headed by Harald and Hardiknut, they might roll surges to
whelm a Dominant Jew clean gone to the fleshpots and effeminacy. Aldermen
of our ancient conception, they may teach him that he has been
backsliding once more, and must repent in ashes, as those who are for
jewels, titles, essences, banquets, for wallowing in slimy spawn of
lucre, have ever to do. They dispossess him of his greedy gettings.

And how of the Law?

But the Law is always, and must ever be, the Law of the stronger.

--Ay, but brain beats muscle, and what if the Jew should prove to have
superior power of brain? A dreaded hypothesis! Why, then you see the
insurgent Saxon seamen (of the names in two syllables with accent on the
first), and their Danish captains, and it may be but a remnant of
high-nosed old Norman Lord de Warenne beside them, in the criminal box:
and presently the Jew smoking a giant regalia cigar on a balcony giving
view of a gallows-tree. But we will try that: on our side, to back a
native pugnacity, is morality, humanity, fraternity--nature's rights,
aha! and who withstands them? on his, a troop of mercenaries!

And that lands me in Red Republicanism, a hop and a skip from Socialism!
said Mr. Radnor, and chuckled ironically at the natural declivity he had
come to. Still, there was an idea in it . . . .

A short run or attempt at running after the idea, ended in pain to his
head near the spot where the haunting word punctilio caught at any excuse
for clamouring.

Yet we cannot relinquish an idea that was ours; we are vowed to the
pursuit of it. Mr. Radnor lighted on the tracks, by dint of a thought
flung at his partner Mr. Inchling's dread of the Jews. Inchling dreaded
Scotchmen as well, and Americans, and Armenians, and Greeks: latterly
Germans hardly less; but his dread of absorption in Jewry, signifying
subjection, had often precipitated a deplorable shrug, in which Victor
Radnor now perceived the skirts of his idea, even to a fancy that
something of the idea must have struck Inchling when he shrugged: the
idea being . . . he had lost it again. Definition seemed to be an
extirpation enemy of this idea, or she was by nature shy. She was very
feminine; coming when she willed and flying when wanted. Not until nigh
upon the close of his history did she return, full-statured and
embraceable, to Victor Radnor.




CHAPTER II

THROUGH THE VAGUE TO THE INFINITELY LITTLE

The fair dealing with readers demands of us, that a narrative shall not
proceed at slower pace than legs of a man in motion; and we are still but
little more than midway across London Bridge. But if a man's mind is to
be taken as a part of him, the likening of it, at an introduction, to an
army on the opening march of a great campaign, should plead excuses for
tardy forward movements, in consideration of the large amount of matter
you have to review before you can at all imagine yourselves to have made
his acquaintance. This it is not necessary to do when you are set astride
the enchanted horse of the Tale, which leaves the man's mind at home
while he performs the deeds befitting him: he can indeed be rapid.
Whether more active, is a question asking for your notions of the
governing element in the composition of man, and of hid present business
here. The Tale inspirits one's earlier ardours, when we sped without
baggage, when the Impossible was wings to imagination, and heroic
sculpture the simplest act of the chisel. It does not advance, 'tis true;
it drives the whirligig circle round and round the single existing
central point; but it is enriched with applause of the boys and girls of
both ages in this land; and all the English critics heap their honours on
its brave old Simplicity: our national literary flag, which signalizes us
while we float, subsequently to flap above the shallows. One may sigh for
it. An ill-fortuned minstrel who has by fateful direction been brought to
see with distinctness, that man is not as much comprised in external
features as the monkey, will be devoted to the task of the fuller
portraiture.

After his ineffectual catching at the volatile idea, Mr. Radnor found
repose in thoughts of his daughter and her dear mother. They had begged
him to put on an overcoat this day of bitter wind, or a silken kerchief
for the throat. Faithful to the Spring, it had been his habit since
boyhood to show upon his person something of the hue of the vernal month,
the white of the daisied meadow, and although he owned a light overcoat
to dangle from shoulders at the Opera crush, he declined to wear it for
protection. His gesture of shaking and expanding whenever the tender
request was urged on him, signified a physical opposition to the control
of garments. Mechanically now, while doating in fancy over the couple
beseeching him, he loosened the button across his defaced waistcoat,
exposed a large measure of chest to flaws of a wind barbed on Norwegian
peaks by the brewers of cough and catarrh--horrid women of the whistling
clouts, in the pay of our doctors. He braved them; he starved the
profession. He was that man in fifty thousand who despises hostile
elements and goes unpunished, calmly erect among a sneezing and tumbled
host, as a lighthouse overhead of breezy fleets. The coursing of his
blood was by comparison electrical; he had not the sensation of cold,
other than that of an effort of the elements to arouse him; and so quick
was he, through this fine animation, to feel, think, act, that the three
successive tributaries of conduct appeared as an irreflective flash and a
gamester's daring in the vein to men who had no deep knowledge of him and
his lightning arithmetic for measuring, sounding, and deciding.

Naturally he was among the happiest of human creatures; he willed it so,
with consent of circumstances; a boisterous consent, as when votes are
reckoned for a favourite candidate: excepting on the part of a small band
of black dissentients in a corner, a minute opaque body, devilish in
their irreconcilability, who maintain their struggle to provoke discord,
with a cry disclosing the one error of his youth, the sole bad step
chargeable upon his antecedents. But do we listen to them? Shall we not
have them turned out? He gives the sign for it; and he leaves his buoying
constituents to outroar them: and he tells a friend that it was not, as
one may say, an error, although an erratic step: but let us explain to
our bosom friend; it was a step quite unregretted, gloried in; a step
deliberately marked, to be done again, were the time renewed: it was a
step necessitated (emphatically) by a false preceding step; and having
youth to plead for it, in the first instance, youth and ignorance; and
secondly, and O how deeply truly! Love. Deep true love, proved by years,
is the advocate.

He tells himself at the same time, after lending ear to the advocate's
exordium and a favourite sentence, that, judged by the Powers (to them
only can he expose the whole skeleton-cupboard of the case), judged by
those clear-sighted Powers, he is exonerated.

To be exonerated by those awful Powers, is to be approved.

As to that, there is no doubt: whom they, all-seeing, discerning as they
do, acquit they justify.

Whom they justify, they compliment.

They, seeing all the facts, are not unintelligent of distinctions, as the
world is.

What, to them, is the spot of the error?--admitting it as an error. They
know it for a thing of convention, not of Nature. We stand forth to plead
it in proof of an adherence to Nature's laws: we affirm, that far from a
defilement, it is an illumination and stamp of nobility. On the beloved
who shares it with us, it is a stamp of the highest nobility. Our world
has many ways for signifying its displeasure, but it cannot brand an
angel.

This was another favourite sentence of Love's grand oration for the
defence. So seductive was it to the Powers who sat in judgement on the
case, that they all, when the sentence came, turned eyes upon the angel,
and they smiled.

They do not smile on the condemnable.

She, then, were he rebuked, would have strength to uplift him. And who,
calling her his own, could be placed in second rank among the blissful!

Mr. Radnor could rationally say that he was made for happiness; he flew
to it, he breathed, dispensed it. How conceive the clear-sighted
celestial Powers as opposing his claim to that estate? Not they. He knew,
for he had them safe in the locked chamber of his breast, to yield him
subservient responses. The world, or Puritanic members of it, had pushed
him to the trial once or twice--or had put on an air of doing so;
creating a temporary disturbance, ending in a merry duet with his
daughter Nesta Victoria: a glorious trio when her mother Natalia, sweet
lily that she was, shook the rainwater from her cup and followed the good
example to shine in the sun.

He had a secret for them.

Nesta's promising soprano, and her mother's contralto, and his
baritone--a true baritone, not so well trained as their accurate
notes--should be rising in spirited union with the curtain of that
secret: there was matter for song and concert, triumph and gratulation in
it. And during the whole passage of the bridge, he had not once cast
thought on a secret so palpitating, the cause of the morning's expedition
and a long year's prospect of the present day! It seemed to have been
knocked clean out of it--punctilioed out, Fenellan might say. Nor had any
combinations upon the theme of business displaced it. Just before the
fall, the whole drama of the unfolding of that secret was brilliant to
his eyes as a scene on a stage.

He refused to feel any sensible bruise on his head, with the admission
that he perhaps might think he felt one which was virtually no more than
the feeling of a thought;--what his friend Dr. Peter Yatt would define as
feeling a rotifer astir in the curative compartment of a homoeopathic
globule: and a playful fancy may do that or anything. Only, Sanity does
not allow the infinitely little to disturb us.

Mr. Radnor had a quaint experience of the effects of the infinitely
little while threading his way to a haberdasher's shop for new white
waistcoats. Under the shadow of the representative statue of City
Corporations and London's majesty, the figure of Royalty, worshipful in
its marbled redundancy, fronting the bridge, on the slope where the seas
of fish and fruit below throw up a thin line of their drift, he stood
contemplating the not unamiable, reposefully-jolly, Guelphic countenance,
from the loose jowl to the bent knee, as if it were a novelty to him;
unwilling to trust himself to the roadway he had often traversed, equally
careful that his hesitation should not be seen. A trifle more
impressible, he might have imagined the smoky figure and magnum of
pursiness barring the City against him. He could have laughed aloud at
the hypocrisy behind his quiet look of provincial wonderment at London's
sculptor's art; and he was partly tickled as well by the singular fit of
timidity enchaining him. Cart, omnibus, cab, van, barrow, donkey-tray,
went by in strings, broken here and there, and he could not induce his
legs to take advantage of the gaps; he listened to a warning that he
would be down again if he tried it, among those wheels; and his nerves
clutched him, like a troop of household women, to keep him from the
hazard of an exposure to the horrid crunch, pitiless as tiger's teeth;
and we may say truly, that once down, or once out of the rutted line, you
are food for lion and jackal--the forces of the world will have you in
their mandibles.

An idea was there too; but it would not accept pursuit.

'A pretty scud overheard?' said a voice at his ear.

'For fine!--to-day at least,' Mr. Radnor affably replied to a stranger;
and gazing on the face of his friend Fenellan, knew the voice, and
laughed: 'You?' He straightened his back immediately to cross the road,
dismissing nervousness as a vapour, asking, between a cab and a van:
'Anything doing in the City?' For Mr. Fenellan's proper station faced
Westward.

The reply was deferred until they had reached the pavement, when Mr.
Fenellan said: 'I'll tell you,' and looked a dubious preface, to his
friend's thinking.

But it was merely the mental inquiry following a glance at mud-spots on
the coat.

'We'll lunch; lunch with me, I must eat, tell me then,' said Mr. Radnor,
adding within himself: 'Emptiness! want of food!' to account for recent
ejaculations and qualms. He had not eaten for a good four hours.

Fenellan's tone signified to his feverish sensibility of the moment, that
the matter was personal; and the intimation of a touch on domestic
affairs caused sinkings in his vacuity, much as though his heart were
having a fall.

He mentioned the slip on the bridge, to explain his: need to visit a
haberdasher's shop, and pointed at the waistcoat.

Mr. Fenellan was compassionate over the 'Poor virgin of the smoky city!'

'They have their ready-made at these shops--last year's: perhaps, never
mind, do for the day,' said Mr. Radnor, impatient for eating, now that he
had spoken of it. 'A basin of turtle; I can't wait. A brush of the coat;
mud must be dry by this time. Clear turtle, I think, with a bottle of the
Old Veuve. Not bad news to tell? You like that Old Veuve?'

'Too well to tell bad news of her,' said Mr. Fenellan in a manner to
reassure his friend, as he intended. 'You wouldn't credit it for the
Spring of the year, without the spotless waistcoat?'

'Something of that, I suppose.' And so saying, Mr. Radnor entered the
shop of his quest, to be complimented by the shopkeeper, while the
attendants climbed the ladder to upper stages for white-waistcoat boxes,
on his being; the first bird of the season; which it pleased him to hear;
for the smallest of our gratifications in life could give a happy tone to
this brightly-constituted gentleman.




CHAPTER III

OLD VEUVE

They were known at the house of the turtle and the attractive Old Veuve:
a champagne of a sobered sweetness, of a great year, a great age,
counting up to the extremer maturity attained by wines of stilly depths;
and their worthy comrade, despite the wanton sparkles, for the promoting
of the state of reverential wonderment in rapture, which an ancient wine
will lead to, well you wot. The silly girly sugary crudity his given way
to womanly suavity, matronly composure, with yet the sparkles; they
ascend; but hue and flavour tell of a soul that has come to a lodgement
there. It conducts the youthful man to temples of dusky thought:
philosophers partaking of it are drawn by the arms of garlanded nymphs
about their necks into the fathomless of inquiries. It presents us with a
sphere, for the pursuit of the thing we covet most. It bubbles over
mellowness; it has, in the marriage with Time, extracted a spice of
individuality from the saccharine: by miracle, one would say, were it not
for our knowledge of the right noble issue of Time when he and good
things unite. There should be somewhere legends of him and the
wine-flask. There must be meanings to that effect in the Mythology,
awaiting unravelment. For the subject opens to deeper than cellars, and
is a tree with vast ramifications of the roots and the spreading growth,
whereon half if not all the mythic Gods, Inferior and Superior, Infernal
and Celestial, might be shown sitting in concord, performing in concert,
harmoniously receiving sacrificial offerings of the black or the white;
and the black not extinguishing the fairer fellow. Tell us of a certainty
that Time has embraced the wine-flask, then may it be asserted (assuming
the great year for the wine, i.e. combinations above) that a speck of the
white within us who drink will conquer, to rise in main ascension over
volumes of the black. It may, at a greater venture, but confidently, be
said in plain speech, that the Bacchus of auspicious birth induces ever
to the worship of the loftier Deities.

Think as you will; forbear to come hauling up examples of malarious men,
in whom these pourings of the golden rays of life breed fogs; and be
moved, since you are scarcely under an obligation to hunt the meaning, in
tolerance of some dithyrambic inebriety of narration (quiverings of the
reverent pen) when we find ourselves entering the circle of a most
magnetic polarity. Take it for not worse than accompanying choric
flourishes, in accord with Mr. Victor Radnor and Mr. Simeon Fenellan at
their sipping of the venerable wine.

Seated in a cosy corner, near the grey City window edged with a sooty
maze, they praised the wine, in the neuter and in the feminine; that for
the glass, this for the widow-branded bottle: not as poets hymning; it
was done in the City manner, briefly, part pensively, like men travelling
to the utmost bourne of flying flavour (a dell in infinite nether), and
still masters of themselves and at home.

Such a wine, in its capturing permeation of us, insists on being for a
time a theme.

'I wonder!' said Mr. Radnor, completely restored, eyeing his half-emptied
second glass and his boon-fellow.

'Low!' Mr. Fenellan shook his head.

'Half a dozen dozen left?'

'Nearer the half of that. And who's the culprit?'

'Old days! They won't let me have another dozen out of the house now.'

'They'll never hit on such another discovery in their cellar, unless they
unearth a fifth corner.'

'I don't blame them for making the price prohibitive. And sound as ever!'

Mr. Radnor watched the deliberate constant ascent of bubbles through
their rose-topaz transparency. He drank. That notion of the dish of
turtle was an inspiration of the right: he ought always to know it for
the want of replenishment when such a man as he went quaking. His latest
experiences of himself were incredible; but they passed, as the dimples
of the stream. He finished his third glass. The bottle, like the
cellar-wine, was at ebb: unlike the cellar-wine, it could be set flowing
again: He prattled, in the happy ignorance of compulsion:

'Fenellan, remember, I had a sort of right to the wine--to the best I
could get; and this Old Veuve, more than any other, is a bridal wine! We
heard of Giulia Sanfredini's marriage to come off with the Spanish Duke,
and drank it to the toast of our little Nesta's godmother. I 've told
you. We took the girl to the Opera, when quite a little one--that
high:--and I declare to you, it was marvellous! Next morning after
breakfast, she plants herself in the middle of the room, and strikes her
attitude for song, and positively, almost with the Sanfredini's
voice--illusion of it, you know,--trills us out more than I could have
believed credible to be recollected by a child. But I've told you the
story. We called her Fredi from that day. I sent the diva, with excuses
and compliments, a nuptial present-necklace, Roman goldwork,
locket-pendant, containing sunny curl, and below a fine pearl; really
pretty; telling her our grounds for the liberty. She replied, accepting
the responsible office; touching letter--we found it so; framed in
Fredi's room, under her godmother's photograph. Fredi has another heroine
now, though she worships her old one still; she never abandons her old
ones. You've heard the story over and over!'

Mr. Fenellan nodded; he had a tenderness for the garrulity of Old Veuve,
and for the damsel. Chatter on that subject ran pleasantly with their
entertainment.

Mr. Radnor meanwhile scribbled, and despatched a strip of his Note-book,
bearing a scrawl of orders, to his office. He was now fully himself,
benevolent, combative, gay, alert for amusement or the probeing of
schemes to the quick, weighing the good and the bad in them with his fine
touch on proportion.

'City dead flat? A monotonous key; but it's about the same as fetching a
breath after a run; only, true, it lasts too long--not healthy! Skepsey
will bring me my letters. I was down in the country early this morning,
looking over the house, with Taplow, my architect; and he speaks fairly
well of the contractors. Yes, down at Lakelands; and saw my first lemon
butterfly in a dell of sunshine, out of the wind, and had half a mind to
catch it for Fredi,--and should have caught it myself, if I had! The
truth is, we three are country born and bred; we pine in London. Good for
a season; you know my old feeling. They are to learn the secret of
Lakelands to-morrow. It 's great fun; they think I don't see they've had
their suspicion for some time. You said--somebody said--"the eye of a
needle for what they let slip of their secrets, and the point of it for
penetrating yours":--women. But no; my dear souls didn't prick and
bother. And they dealt with a man in armour. I carry them down to
Lakelands to-morrow, if the City's flat.'

'Keeping a secret's the lid on a boiling pot with you,' Mr. Fenellan
said; and he mused on the profoundness of the flavour at his lips.

'I do it.'

'You do: up to bursting at the breast.'

'I keep it from Colney!'

'As Vesuvius keeps it from Palmieri when shaking him.'

'Has old Colney an idea of it?'

'He has been foretelling an eruption of an edifice.'

The laugh between them subsided to pensiveness.

Mr. Fenellan's delay in the delivery of his news was eloquent to reveal
the one hateful topic; and this being seen, it waxed to such increase of
size with the passing seconds, that prudence called for it.

'Come!' said Mr. Radnor.

The appeal was understood.

'Nothing very particular. I came into the City to look at a warehouse
they want to mount double guard on. Your idea of the fireman's
night-patrol and wires has done wonders for the office.'

'I guarantee the City if all my directions are followed.'

Mr. Fenellan's remark, that he had nothing very particular to tell,
reduced it to the mere touch upon a vexatious matter, which one has to
endure in the ears at times; but it may be postponed. So Mr. Radnor
encouraged him to talk of an Insurance Office Investment. Where it is all
bog and mist, as in the City to-day, the maxim is, not to take a step,
they agreed. Whether it was attributable to an unconsumed glut of the
markets, or apprehension of a panic, had to be considered. Both gentlemen
were angry with the Birds on the flags of foreign nations, which would
not imitate a sawdust Lion to couch reposefully. Incessantly they scream
and sharpen talons.

'They crack the City bubbles and bladders, at all events,' Mr. Fenellan
said. 'But if we let our journals go on making use of them, in the shape
of sham hawks overhead, we shall pay for their one good day of the game
with our loss of the covey. An unstable London's no world's
market-place.'

'No, no; it's a niggardly national purse, not the journals,' Mr. Radnor
said. 'The journals are trading engines. Panics are grist to them; so are
wars; but they do their duty in warning the taxpayer and rousing
Parliament. Dr. Schlesien's right: we go on believing that our God
Neptune will do everything for us, and won't see that Steam has paralyzed
his Trident: good! You and Colney are hard on Schlesien--or at him, I
should say. He's right: if we won't learn that we have become
Continentals, we shall be marched over. Laziness, cowardice, he says.'

'Oh, be hanged!' interrupted Fenellan. 'As much of the former as you
like. He 's right about our "individualismus" being another name for
selfishness, and showing the usual deficiency in external features; it's
an individualism of all of a pattern, as when a mob cuts its lucky, each
fellow his own way. Well, then, conscript them, and they'll be all of a
better pattern. The only thing to do, and the cheapest. By heaven! it's
the only honourable thing to do.'

Mr. Radnor disapproved. 'No conscription here.'

'Not till you've got the drop of poison in your blood, in the form of an
army landed. That will teach you to catch at the drug.'

'No, Fenellan! Besides they've got to land. I guarantee a trusty army and
navy under a contract, at two-thirds of the present cost. We'll start a
National Defence Insurance Company after the next panic.'

'During,' said Mr. Fenellan, and there was a flutter of laughter at the
unobtrusive hint for seizing Dame England in the mood.

Both dropped a sigh.

'But you must try and run down with us to Lakelands to-morrow,' Mr.
Radnor resumed on a cheerfuller theme. 'You have not yet seen all I 've
done there. And it 's a castle with a drawbridge: no exchangeing of
visits, as we did at Craye Farm and at Creckholt; we are there for
country air; we don't court neighbours at all--perhaps the elect; it will
depend on Nataly's wishes. We can accommodate our Concert-set, and about
thirty or forty more, for as long as they like. You see, that was my
intention--to be independent of neighbouring society. Madame Callet
guarantees dinners or hot suppers for eighty--and Armandine is the last
person to be recklessly boasting.--When was it I was thinking last of
Armandine?' He asked himself that, as he rubbed at the back of his head.

Mr. Fenellan was reading his friend's character by the light of his
remarks and in opposition to them, after the critical fashion of
intimates who know as well as hear: but it was amiably and trippingly, on
the dance of the wine in his veins.

His look, however, was one that reminded; and Mr. Radnor cried: 'Now!
whatever it is!'

'I had an interview: I assure you,' Mr. Fenellan interposed to pacify:
'the smallest of trifles, and to be expected: I thought you ought to know
it:--an interview with her lawyer; office business, increase of Insurance
on one of her City warehouses.'

'Speak her name, speak the woman's name; we're talking like a pair of
conspirators,' exclaimed Mr. Radnor.

'He informed me that Mrs. Burman has heard of the new mansion.'

'My place at Lakelands?'

Mr. Radnor's clear-water eyes hardened to stony as their vision ran along
the consequences of her having heard it.

'Earlier this time!' he added, thrummed on the table, and thumped with
knuckles. 'I make my stand at Lakelands for good! Nothing mortal moves
me!'

'That butler of hers--'

'Jarniman, you mean: he's her butler, yes, the scoundrel--h'm-pah! Heaven
forgive me! she's an honest woman at least; I wouldn't rob her of her
little: fifty-nine or sixty next September, fifteenth of the month! with
the constitution of a broken drug-bottle, poor soul! She hears everything
from Jarniman: he catches wind of everything. All foreseen, Fenellan,
foreseen. I have made my stand at Lakelands, and there's my flag till
it's hauled down over Victor Radnor. London kills Nataly as well as
Fredi--and me: that is--I can use the words to you--I get back to primal
innocence in the country. We all three have the feeling. You're a man to
understand. My beasts, and the wild flowers, hedge-banks, and stars.
Fredi's poetess will tell you. Quiet waters reflecting. I should feel it
in Paris as well, though they have nightingales in their Bois. It's the
rustic I want to bathe me; and I had the feeling at school, biting at
Horace. Well, this is my Sabine Farm, rather on a larger scale, for the
sake of friends. Come, and pure air, water from the springs, walks and
rides in lanes, high sand-lanes; Nataly loves them; Fredi worships the
old roots of trees: she calls them the faces of those weedy sandy lanes.
And the two dear souls on their own estate, Fenellan! And their poultry,
cows, cream. And a certain influence one has in the country socially. I
make my stand on a home--not empty punctilio.'

Mr. Fenellan repeated, in a pause, 'Punctilio,' and not emphatically.

'Don't bawl the word,' said Mr. Radnor, at the drum of whose ears it rang
and sang. 'Here in the City the woman's harmless; and here,' he struck
his breast. 'But she can shoot and hit another through me. Ah, the
witch!--poor wretch! poor soul! Only, she's malignant. I could swear! But
Colney 's right for once in something he says about oaths--"dropping
empty buckets," or something.'

'"Empty buckets to haul up impotent demons, whom we have to pay as
heavily as the ready devil himself,"' Mr. Fenellan supplied the phrase.
'Only, the moment old Colney moralizes, he's what the critics call
sententious. We've all a parlous lot too much pulpit in us.'

'Come, Fenellan, I don't think . . .'

'Oh, yes, but it's true of me too.'

'You reserve it for your enemies.'

'I 'd like to distract it a bit from the biggest of 'em.' He pointed
finger at the region of the heart.

'Here we have Skepsey,' said Mr. Radnor, observing the rapid approach of
a lean small figure, that in about the time of a straight-aimed javelin's
cast, shot from the doorway to the table.




CHAPTER IV

THE SECOND BOTTLE

This little dart of a man came to a stop at a respectful distance from
his master, having the look of an arrested needle in mechanism. His lean
slip of face was an illumination of vivacious grey from the quickest of
prominent large eyes. He placed his master's letters legibly on the
table, and fell to his posture of attention, alert on stiff legs, the
hands like sucking-cubs at play with one another.

Skepsey waited for Mr. Fenellan to notice him.

'How about the Schools for Boxing?' that gentleman said.

Deploring in motion the announcement he had to make, Skepsey replied: 'I
have a difficulty in getting the plan treated seriously: a person of no
station:--it does not appear of national importance. Ladies are against.
They decline their signatures; and ladies have great influence; because
of the blood; which we know is very slight, rather healthy than not; and
it could be proved for the advantage of the frailer sex. They seem to be
unaware of their own interests--ladies. The contention all around us is
with ignorance. My plan is written; I have shown it, and signatures of
gentlemen, to many of our City notables favourable in most cases:
gentlemen of the Stock Exchange highly. The clergy and the medical
profession are quite with me.'

'The surgical, perhaps you mean?'

'Also, sir. The clergy strongly.'

'On the grounds of--what, Skepsey?'

'Morality. I have fully explained to them:--after his work at the desk
all day, the young City clerk wants refreshment. He needs it, must have
it. I propose to catch him on his way to his music-halls and other
places, and take him to one of our establishments. A short term of
instruction, and he would find a pleasure in the gloves; it would delight
him more than excesses-beer and tobacco. The female in her right place,
certainly.' Skepsey supplicated honest interpretation of his hearer, and
pursued,

'It would improve his physical strength, at the same time add to his
sense of personal dignity.'

'Would you teach females as well--to divert them from their frivolities?'

'That would have to be thought over, sir. It would be better for them
than using their nails.'

'I don't know, Skepsey: I'm rather a Conservative there.'

'Yes; with regard to the female, sir: I confess, my scheme does not
include them. They dance; that is a healthy exercise. One has only to
say, that it does not add to the national force, in case of emergency. I
look to that. And I am particular in proposing an exercise independent
of--I have to say--sex. Not that there is harm in sex. But we are for
training. I hope my meaning is clear?'

'Quite. You would have boxing with the gloves to be a kind of monastic
recreation.'

'Recreation is the word, sir; I have often admired it,' said Skepsey,
blinking, unsure of the signification of monastic.

'I was a bit of a boxer once,' Mr. Fenellan said, conscious of height and
breadth in measuring the wisp of a figure before him.

'Something might be done with you still, sir.'

Skepsey paid him the encomium after a respectful summary of his gifts in
a glimpse. Mr. Fenellan bowed to him.

Mr. Radnor raised head from the notes he was pencilling upon letters
perused.

'Skepsey's craze: regeneration of the English race by boxing--nucleus of
a national army?'

'To face an enemy at close quarters--it teaches that, sir. I have always
been of opinion, that courage may be taught. I do not say heroism. And
setting aside for a moment thoughts of an army, we create more valuable
citizens. Protection to the weak in streets and by-places--shocking
examples of ruffians maltreating women, in view of a crowd.'

'One strong man is an overmatch for your mob,' said Mr. Fenellan.

Skepsey toned his assent to the diminishing thinness where a suspicion of
the negative begins to wind upon a distant horn.

'Knowing his own intentions; and before an ignorant mob:--strong, you
say, sir? I venture my word that a, decent lad, with science, would beat
him. It is a question of the study and practice of first principles.'

'If you were to see a rascal giant mishandling a woman?' Skepsey conjured
the scene by bending his head and peering abstractedly, as if over
spectacles.

'I would beg him to abstain, for his own sake.'

Mr. Fenellan knew that the little fellow was not boasting.

'My brother Dartrey had a lesson or two from you in the first principles,
I think?'

'Captain Dartrey is an athlete, sir: exceedingly quick and clever; a hard
boxer to beat.'

'You will not call him captain when you see him; he has dismissed the
army.'

'I much regret it, sir, much, that we have lost him. Captain Dartrey
Fenellan was a beautiful fencer. He gave me some instruction; unhappily,
I have to acknowledge, too late. It is a beautiful art. Captain Dartrey
says, the French excel at it. But it asks for a weapon, which nature has
not given: whereas the fists . . .'

'So,' Mr. Radnor handed notes and papers to Skepsey: 'No sign of life?'

'It is not yet seen in the City, sir.'

'The first principles of commercial activity have retreated to earth's
maziest penetralia, where no tides are! is it not so, Skepsey?' said Mr.
Fenellan, whose initiative and exuberance in loquency had been restrained
by a slight oppression, known to guests; especially to the guest in the
earlier process of his magnification and illumination by virtue of a
grand old wine; and also when the news he has to communicate may be a
stir to unpleasant heaps. The shining lips and eyes of his florid face
now proclaimed speech, with his Puckish fancy jack-o'-lanterning over it.
'Business hangs to swing at every City door, like a ragshop Doll, on the
gallows of overproduction. Stocks and Shares are hollow nuts not a
squirrel of the lot would stop to crack for sight of the milky kernel
mouldered to beard.

Percentage, like a cabman without a fare, has gone to sleep inside his
vehicle. Dividend may just be seen by tiptoe: stockholders, twinkling
heels over the far horizon. Too true!--and our merchants, brokers,
bankers, projectors of Companies, parade our City to remind us of the
poor steamed fellows trooping out of the burst-boiler-room of the big
ship Leviathan, in old years; a shade or two paler than the crowd o' the
passengers, apparently alive and conversible, but corpses, all of them to
lie their length in fifteen minutes.'

'And you, Fenellan?' cried his host, inspired for a second bottle by the
lovely nonsense of a voluble friend wound up to the mark.

'Doctor of the ship! with this prescription!' Mr. Fenellan held up his
glass.

'Empty?'

Mr. Fenellan made it completely so. 'Confident!' he affirmed.

An order was tossed to the waiter, and both gentlemen screwed their lips
in relish of his heavy consent to score off another bottle from the
narrow list.

'At the office in forty minutes,' Skepsey's master nodded to him and shot
him forth, calling him back: 'By the way, in case a man named Jarniman
should ask to see me, you turn him to the rightabout.'

Skepsey repeated: 'Jarniman!' and flew.

'A good servant,' Mr. Radnor said. 'Few of us think of our country so
much, whatever may be said of the specific he offers. Colney has
impressed him somehow immensely: he studies to write too; pushes to
improve himself; altogether a worthy creature.'

The second bottle appeared. The waiter, in sincerity a reluctant
executioner, heightened his part for the edification of the admiring
couple.

'Take heart, Benjamin,' said Mr. Fenellan; 'it's only the bottle dies;
and we are the angels above to receive the spirit.'

'I'm thinking of the house,' Benjamin replied. He told them that again.

'It 's the loss of the fame of having the wine, that he mourns. But,
Benjamin,' said Mr. Fenellan, 'the fame enters into the partakers of it,
and we spread it, and perpetuate it for you.'

'That don't keep a house upright,' returned Benjamin.

Mr. Fenellan murmured to himself: 'True enough, it 's elegy--though we
perform it through a trumpet; and there's not a doubt of our being down
or having knocked the world down, if we're loudly praised.'

Benjamin waited to hear approval sounded on the lips uncertain as a woman
is a wine of ticklish age. The gentlemen nodded, and he retired.

A second bottle, just as good as the first, should, one thoughtlessly
supposes, procure us a similar reposeful and excursive enjoyment, as of
men lying on their backs and flying imagination like a kite. The effect
was quite other. Mr. Radnor drank hastily and spoke with heat: 'You told
me All? tell me that!'

Mr. Fenellan gathered himself together; he sipped, and relaxed his
bracing. But there really was a bit more to tell: not much, was it? Not
likely to puff a gale on the voluptuous indolence of a man drawn along by
Nereids over sunny sea-waves to behold the birth of the Foam-Goddess?
'According to Carling, her lawyer; that is, he hints she meditates a
blow.'

'Mrs. Burman means to strike a blow?'

'The lady.'

'Does he think I fear any--does he mean a blow with a weapon? Is it a
legal . . . ? At last? Fenellan!'

'So I fancied I understood.'

'But can the good woman dream of that as a blow to strike and hurt, for a
punishment?--that's her one aim.'

'She may have her hallucinations.'

'But a blow--what a word for it! But it's life to us life! It's the blow
we've prayed for. Why, you know it! Let her strike, we bless her. We've
never had an ill feeling to the woman; utterly the contrary--pity, pity,
pity! Let her do that, we're at her feet, my Nataly and I. If you knew
what my poor girl suffers! She 's a saint at the stake. Chiefly on behalf
of her family. Fenellan, you may have a sort of guess at my fortune: I'll
own to luck; I put in a claim to courage and calculation.'

'You've been a bulwark to your friends.'

'All, Fenellan, all-stocks, shares, mines, companies, industries at home
and--abroad--all, at a sweep, to have the woman strike that blow!
Cheerfully would I begin to build a fortune over again--singing! Ha! the
woman has threatened it before. It's probably feline play with us.'

His chin took support, he frowned.

'You may have touched her.'

'She won't be touched, and she won't be driven. What 's the secret of
her? I can't guess, I never could. She's a riddle.'

'Riddles with wigs and false teeth have to be taken and shaken for the
ardently sought secret to reveal itself,' said Mr. Fenellan.

His picture, with the skeleton issue of any shaking, smote Mr. Radnor's
eyes, they turned over. 'Oh!--her charms! She had a desperate belief in
her beauty. The woman 's undoubtedly charitable; she's not without a
mind--sort of mind: well, it shows no crack till it's put to use. Heart!
yes, against me she has plenty of it. They say she used to be courted;
she talked of it: "my courtiers, Mr. Victor!" There, heaven forgive me, I
wouldn't mock at her to another.'

'It looks as if she were only inexorably human,' said Mr. Fenellan,
crushing a delicious gulp of the wine, that foamed along the channel to
flavour. 'We read of the tester of a bandit-bed; and it flattened unwary
recumbents to pancakes. An escape from the like of that seems pleadable,
should be: none but the drowsy would fail to jump out and run, or the
insane.'

Mr. Radnor was taken with the illustration of his case. 'For the sake of
my sanity, it was! to preserve my . . . . but any word makes nonsense of
it. Could--I must ask you--could any sane man--you were abroad in those
days, horrible days! and never met her: I say, could you consent to be
tied--I admit the vow, ceremony, so forth-tied to--I was barely
twenty-one: I put it to you, Fenellan, was it in reason an
engagement--which is, I take it, a mutual plight of faith, in good faith;
that is, with capacity on both sides to keep the engagement: between the
man you know I was in youth and a more than middle-aged woman crazy up to
the edge of the cliff--as Colney says half the world is, and she
positively is when her spite is roused. No, Fenellan, I have nothing on
my conscience with regard to the woman. She had wealth: I left her not
one penny the worse for--but she was not one to reckon it, I own. She
could be generous, was, with her money. If she had struck this blow--I
know she thought of it: or if she would strike it now, I could not only
forgive her, I could beg forgiveness.'

A sight of that extremity fetched prickles to his forehead.

'You've borne your part bravely, my friend.'

'I!' Mr. Radnor shrugged at mention of his personal burdens. 'Praise my
Nataly if you like! Made for one another, if ever two in this world! You
know us both, and do you doubt it? The sin would have been for us two to
meet and--but enough when I say, that I am she, she me, till death and
beyond it: that's my firm faith. Nataly teaches me the religion of life,
and you may learn what that is when you fall in love with a woman.
Eighteen-nineteen-twenty years!'

Tears fell from him, two drops. He blinked, bugled in his throat, eyed
his watch, and smiled: 'The finishing glass! We should have had to put
Colney to bed. Few men stand their wine. You and I are not lamed by it;
we can drink and do business: my first experience in the City was, that
the power to drink--keeping a sound head--conduces to the doing of
business.'

'It's a pleasant way of instructing men to submit to their conqueror.'

'If it doubles the energies, mind.'

'Not if it fiddles inside. I confess to that effect upon me. I've a waltz
going on, like the snake with the tail in his mouth, eternal; and it
won't allow of a thought upon Investments.'

'Consult me to-morrow,' said Mr. Radnor, somewhat pained for having
inconsiderately misled the man he had hitherto helpfully guided. 'You've
looked at the warehouse?'

'That's performed.'

'Make a practice of getting over as much of your business in the early
morning as you well can.'

Mr. Radnor added hints of advice to a frail humanity he was indulgent,
the giant spoke in good fellowship. It would have been to have strained
his meaning, for purposes of sarcasm upon him, if one had taken him to
boast of a personal exemption from our common weakness.

He stopped, and laughed: 'Now I 'm pumping my pulpit-eh? You come with us
to Lakelands. I drive the ladies down to my office, ten A.M.: if it's
fine; train half-past. We take a basket. By the way, I had no letter from
Dartrey last mail.'

'He has buried his wife. It happens to some men.'

Mr. Radnor stood gazing. He asked for the name of the place of the
burial. He heard without seizing it. A simulacrum spectre-spark of
hopefulness shot up in his imagination, glowed and quivered, darkening at
the utterance of the Dutch syllables, leaving a tinge of witless envy.
Dartrey--Fenellan had buried the wife whose behaviour vexed and
dishonoured him: and it was in Africa! One would have to go to Africa to
be free of the galling. But Dartrey had gone, and he was free!--The
strange faint freaks of our sensations when struck to leap and throw off
their load after a long affliction, play these disorderly pranks on the
brain; and they are faint, but they come in numbers, they are recurring,
always in ambush. We do not speak of them: we have not words to stamp the
indefinite things; generally we should leave them unspoken if we had the
words; we know them as out of reason: they haunt us, pluck at us, fret
us, nevertheless.

Dartrey free, he was relieved of the murderous drama incessantly in the
mind of shackled men.

It seemed like one of the miracles of a divine intervention, that Dartrey
should be free, suddenly free; and free while still a youngish man. He
was in himself a wonderful fellow, the pick of his country for vigour,
gallantry, trustiness, high-mindedness; his heavenly good fortune decked
him as a prodigy.

'No harm to the head from that fall of yours?' Mr. Fenellan said.

'None.' Mr. Radnor withdrew his hand from head to hat, clapped it on and
cried cheerily: 'Now to business'; as men may, who have confidence in
their ability to concentrate an instant attention upon the substantial.
'You dine with us. The usual Quartet: Peridon, Pempton, Colney, Yatt, or
Catkin: Priscilla Graves and Nataly--the Rev. Septimus; Cormyn and his
wife: Young Dudley Sowerby and I--flutes: he has precision, as naughty
Fredi said, when some one spoke of expression. In the course of the
evening, Lady Grace, perhaps: you like her.'

'Human nature in the upper circle is particularly likeable.'

'Fenellan,' said Mr. Radnor, emboldened to judge hopefully of his
fortunes by mere pressure of the thought of Dartrey's, 'I put it to you:
would you say, that there is anything this time behind your friend
Carling's report?'

Although it had not been phrased as a report, Mr. Fenellan's answering
look and gesture, and a run of indiscriminate words, enrolled it in that
form, greatly to the inspiriting of Mr. Radnor.

Old Veuve in one, to the soul of Old Veuve in the other, they recalled a
past day or two, touched the skies; and merriment or happiness in the
times behind them held a mirror to the present: or the hour of the
reverse of happiness worked the same effect by contrast: so that notions
of the singular election of us by Dame Fortune, sprang like vinous
bubbles. For it is written, that however powerful you be, you shall not
take the Winegod on board to entertain him as a simple passenger; and you
may captain your vessel, you may pilot it, and keep to your reckonings,
and steer for all the ports you have a mind to, even to doing profitable
exchange with Armenian and Jew, and still you shall do the something
more, which proves that the Winegod is on board: he is the pilot of your
blood if not the captain of your thoughts.

Mr. Fenellan was unused to the copious outpouring of Victor Radnor's
confidences upon his domestic affairs; and the unwonted excitement of
Victor's manner of speech would have perplexed him, had there not been
such a fiddling of the waltz inside him.

Payment for the turtle and the bottles of Old Veuve was performed apart
with Benjamin, while Simeon Fenellan strolled out of the house,
questioning a tumbled mind as to what description of suitable
entertainment, which would be dancing and flirting and fal-lallery in the
season of youth, London City could provide near meridian hours for a man
of middle age carrying his bottle of champagne, like a guest of an
old-fashioned wedding-breakfast. For although he could stand his wine as
well as his friend, his friend's potent capacity martially after the
feast to buckle to business at a sign of the clock, was beyond him. It
pointed to one of the embodied elements, hot from Nature's workshop. It
told of the endurance of powers, that partly explained the successful,
astonishing career of his friend among a people making urgent, if
unequal, demands perpetually upon stomach and head.




CHAPTER V

THE LONDON WALK WESTWARD

In that nationally interesting Poem, or Dramatic Satire, once famous, THE
RAJAH IN LONDON (London, Limbo and Sons, 1889), now obliterated under the
long wash of Press-matter, the reflection--not unknown to philosophical
observers, and natural perhaps in the mind of an Oriental
Prince--produced by his observation of the march of London citizens
Eastward at morn, Westward at eve, attributes their practice to a
survival of the Zoroastrian form of worship. His Minister, favourable to
the people or for the sake of fostering an idea in his Master's head,
remarks, that they show more than the fidelity of the sunflower to her
God. The Rajah, it would appear, frowns interrogatively, in the princely
fashion, accusing him of obscureness of speech:--princes and the louder
members of the grey public are fraternally instant to spurn at the whip
of that which they do not immediately comprehend. It is explained by the
Minister: not even the flower, he says, would hold constant, as they, to
the constantly unseen--a trebly cataphractic Invisible. The Rajah
professes curiosity to know how it is that the singular people nourish
their loyalty, since they cannot attest to the continued being of the
object in which they put their faith. He is informed by his prostrate
servant of a settled habit they have of diligently seeking their
Divinity, hidden above, below; and of copiously taking inside them doses
of what is denied to their external vision: thus they fortify credence
chemically on an abundance of meats and liquors; fire they eat, and they
drink fire; they become consequently instinct with fire. Necessarily
therefore they believe in fire. Believing, they worship. Worshipping,
they march Eastward at morn, Westward at eve. For that way lies the key,
this way the cupboard, of the supplies, their fuel.

According to Stage directions, THE RAJAH AND HIS MINISTER Enter a
Gin-Palace.--It is to witness a service that they have learnt to
appreciate as Anglicanly religious.

On the step of the return to their Indian clime, they speak of the hatted
sect, which is most, or most commercially, succoured and fattened by our
rule there: they wave adieu to the conquering Islanders, as to 'Parsees
beneath a cloud.'

The two are seen last on the deck of the vessel, in perusal of a medical
pamphlet composed of statistics and sketches, traceries, horrid blots,
diagrams with numbers referring to notes, of the various maladies caused
by the prolonged prosecution of that form of worship.

'But can they suffer so and live?' exclaims the Rajah, vexed by the
physical sympathetic twinges which set him wincing.

'Science,' his Minister answers, 'took them up where Nature, in pity of
their martyrdom, dropped them. They do not live; they are engines,
insensible things of repairs and patches; insteamed to pursue their
infuriate course, to the one end of exhausting supplies for the renewing
of them, on peril of an instant suspension if they deviate a step or
stop: nor do they.'

The Rajah is of opinion, that he sails home with the key of the riddle of
their power to vanquish. In some apparent allusion to an Indian story of
a married couple who successfully made their way, he accounts for their
solid and resistless advance, resembling that of--

             The doubly-wedded man and wife,
        Pledged to each other and against the world
        With mutual union.

One would like to think of the lengthened tide-flux of pedestrian
citizens facing South-westward, as being drawn by devout attraction to
our nourishing luminary: at the hour, mark, when the Norland cloud-king,
after a day of wild invasion, sits him on his restful bank of bluefish
smack-o'-cheek red above Whitechapel, to spy where his last puff of icy
javelins pierces and dismembers the vapoury masses in cluster about the
circle of flame descending upon the greatest and most elevated of
Admirals at the head of the Strand, with illumination of smoke-plumed
chimneys, house-roofs, window-panes, weather-vanes, monument and
pedimental monsters, and omnibus umbrella. One would fair believe that
they advance admireing; they are assuredly made handsome by the beams. No
longer mere concurrent atoms of the furnace of business (from coal-dust
to sparks, rushing, as it were, on respiratory blasts of an enormous
engine's centripetal and centrifugal energy), their step is leisurely to
meet the rosy Dinner, which is ever a see-saw with the God of Light in
his fall; the mask of the noble human visage upon them is not roughened,
as at midday, by those knotted hard ridges of the scrambler's hand seen
from forehead down to jaw; when indeed they have all the appearance of
sour scientific productions. And unhappily for the national portrait, in
the Poem quoted, the Rajah's Minister chose an hour between morning and
meridian, or at least before an astonished luncheon had come to composure
inside their persons, for drawing his Master's attention to the quaint
similarity of feature in the units of the busy antish congregates they
had travelled so far to visit and to study:

               These Britons wear
        The driven and perplexed look of men
        Begotten hastily 'twixt business hours

It could not have been late afternoon.

These Orientals should have seen them, with Victor Radnor among them,
fronting the smoky splendours of the sunset. In April, the month of piled
and hurried cloud, it is a Rape of the Sabines overhead from all
quarters, either one of the winds brawnily larcenous; and London, smoking
royally to the open skies, builds images of a dusty epic fray for
possession of the portly dames. There is immensity, swinging motion,
collision, dusky richness of colouring, to the sight; and to the mind
idea. London presents it. If we can allow ourselves a moment for not
inquireing scrupulously (you will do it by inhaling the aroma of the ripe
kitchen hour), here is a noble harmony of heaven and the earth of the
works of man, speaking a grander tongue than barren sea or wood or
wilderness. Just a moment; it goes; as, when a well-attuned barrel-organ
in a street has drawn us to recollections of the Opera or Italy, another
harshly crashes, and the postman knocks at doors, and perchance a
costermonger cries his mash of fruit, a beggar woman wails her hymn. For
the pinched are here, the dinnerless, the weedy, the gutter-growths, the
forces repressing them. That grand tongue of the giant City inspires none
human to Bardic eulogy while we let those discords be. An embittered Muse
of Reason prompts her victims to the composition of the adulatory Essay
and of the Leading Article, that she may satiate an angry irony 'upon
those who pay fee for their filling with the stuff. Song of praise she
does not permit. A moment of satisfaction in a striking picture is
accorded, and no more. For this London, this England, Europe, world, but
especially this London, is rather a thing for hospital operations than
for poetic rhapsody; in aspect, too, streaked scarlet and pock-pitted
under the most cumbrous of jewelled tiaras; a Titanic work of
long-tolerated pygmies; of whom the leaders, until sorely discomforted in
body and doubtful in soul, will give gold and labour, will impose
restrictions upon activity, to maintain a conservatism of diseases. Mind
is absent, or somewhere so low down beneath material accumulations that
it is inexpressive, powerless to drive the ponderous bulk to such
excisings, purgeings, purifyings as might--as may, we will suppose,
render it acceptable, for a theme of panegyric, to the Muse of Reason;
ultimately, with her consent, to the Spirit of Song.

But first there must be the cleansing. When Night has fallen upon London,
the Rajah remarks:

        Monogamic Societies present
        A decent visage and a hideous rear.

His Minister (satirically, or in sympathetic Conservatism) would have
them not to move on, that they may preserve among beholders the
impression of their handsome frontage. Night, however, will come; and
they, adoreing the decent face, are moved on, made to expose what the
Rajah sees. Behind his courteousness, he is an antagonistic observer of
his conquerors; he pushes his questions farther than the need for them;
his Minister the same; apparently to retain the discountenanced people in
their state of exposure. Up to the time of the explanation of the puzzle
on board the departing vessel (on the road to Windsor, at the Premier's
reception, in the cell of the Police, in the presence of the
Magistrate-whose crack of a totally inverse decision upon their case,
when he becomes acquainted with the titles and station of these imputedly
peccant, refreshes them), they hold debates over the mysterious
contrarieties of a people professing in one street what they confound in
the next, and practising by day a demureness that yells with the cat of
the tiles at night.

Granting all that, it being a transient novelist's business to please the
light-winged hosts which live for the hour, and give him his only chance
of half of it, let him identify himself with them, in keeping to the
quadrille on the surface and shirking the disagreeable.

Clouds of high colour above London City are as the light of the Goddess
to lift the angry heroic head over human. They gloriously transfigure. A
Murillo beggar is not more precious than sight of London in any of the
streets admitting coloured cloud-scenes; the cunning of the sun's hand so
speaks to us. And if haply down an alley some olive mechanic of
street-organs has quickened little children's legs to rhythmic footing,
they strike on thoughts braver than pastoral. Victor Radnor, lover of the
country though he was, would have been the first to say it. He would
indeed have said it too emphatically. Open London as a theme, to a
citizen of London ardent for the clear air out of it, you have roused an
orator; you have certainly fired a magazine, and must listen to his
reminiscences of one of its paragraphs or pages.

The figures of the hurtled fair ones in sky were wreathing Nelson's
cocked hat when Victor, distinguishably bright-faced amid a crowd of the
irradiated, emerged from the tideway to cross the square, having thoughts
upon Art, which were due rather to the suggestive proximity of the
National Gallery than to the Flemish mouldings of cloud-forms under
Venetian brushes. His purchases of pictures had been his unhappiest
ventures. He had relied and reposed on the dicta of newspaper critics;
who are sometimes unanimous, and are then taken for guides, and are
fatal. He was led to the conclusion that our modern-lauded pictures do
not ripen. They have a chance of it, if abused. But who thinks of buying
the abused? Exalted by the critics, they have, during the days of
Exhibition, a glow, a significance or a fun, abandoning them where
examination is close and constant, and the critic's trumpet-note
dispersed to the thinness of the fee for his blowing. As to foreign
pictures, classic pictures, Victor had known his purse to leap for a
Raphael with a history in stages of descent from the Master, and critics
to swarm: a Raphael of the dealers, exposed to be condemned by the
critics, universally derided. A real Raphael in your house is aristocracy
to the roof-tree. But the wealthy trader will reach to title before he
may hope to get the real Raphael or a Titian. Yet he is the one who
would, it may be, after enjoyment of his prize, bequeath it to the
nation--PRESENTED TO THE NATION BY VICTOR MONTGOMERY RADNOR. There stood
the letters in gilt; and he had a thrill of his generosity; for few were
the generous acts he could not perform; and if an object haunted the
deed, it came of his trader's habit of mind.

He revelled in benevolent projects of gifts to the nation, which would
coat a sensitive name. Say, an ornamental City Square, flowers,
fountains, afternoon bands of music--comfortable seats in it, and a
shelter, and a ready supply of good cheap coffee or tea. Tobacco? why not
rolls of honest tobacco! nothing so much soothes the labourer. A volume
of plans for the benefit of London smoked out of each ascending pile in
his brain. London is at night a moaning outcast round the policeman's'
legs. What of an all-night-long, cosy, brightly lighted, odoriferous
coffee-saloon for rich or poor, on the model of the hospitable Paduan?
Owner of a penny, no soul among us shall be rightly an outcast . . . .

Dreams of this kind are taken at times by wealthy people as a cordial at
the bar of benevolent intentions. But Victor was not the man to steal his
refreshments in that known style. He meant to make deeds of them, as far
as he could, considering their immense extension; and except for the
sensitive social name, he was of single-minded purpose.

Turning to the steps of a chemist's shop to get a prescription made up
for his Nataly's doctoring of her domestics, he was arrested by a rap on
his elbow; and no one was near; and there could not be a doubt of the
blow--a sharp hard stroke, sparing the funny-bone, but ringing. His head,
at the punctilio bump, throbbed responsively--owing to which or
indifference to the prescription, as of no instant requirement, he
pursued his course, resembling mentally the wanderer along a misty beach,
who hears cannon across the waters.

He certainly had felt it. He remembered the shock: he could not remember
much of pain. How about intimations? His asking caused a smile.

Very soon the riddle answered itself. He had come into view of the
diminutive marble cavalier of the infantile cerebellum; recollecting a
couplet from the pen of the disrespectful Satirist Peter, he thought of a
fall: his head and his elbow responded simultaneously to the thought.

All was explained save his consequent rightabout from the chemist's shop:
and that belongs to the minor involutions of circumstances and the will.
It passed like a giver's wrinkle. He read the placards of the Opera;
reminding himself of the day when it was the single Opera-house; and now
we have two-or three. We have also a distracting couple of Clowns and
Pantaloons in our Pantomimes: though Colney says that the multiplication
of the pantaloon is a distinct advance to representative truth--and
bother Colney! Two Columbines also. We forbear to speak of men, but where
is the boy who can set his young heart upon two Columbines at once!
Victor felt the boy within him cold to both: and in his youth he had
doated on the solitary twirling spangled lovely Fairy. The tale of a
delicate lady dancer leaping as the kernel out of a nut from the arms of
Harlequin to the legalized embrace of a wealthy brewer, and thenceforth
living, by repute, with unagitated legs, as holy a matron, despite her
starry past, as any to be shown in a country breeding the like
abundantly, had always delighted him. It seemed a reconcilement of
opposing stations, a defeat of Puritanism. Ay, and poor women!--women in
the worser plight under the Puritan's eye. They may be erring and good:
yes, finding the man to lift them the one step up! Read the history of
the error. But presently we shall teach the Puritan to act by the
standards of his religion. All is coming right--must come right. Colney
shall be confounded.

Hereupon Victor hopped on to Fenellan's hint regarding the designs of
Mrs. Burman.

His Nataly might have to go through a short sharp term of
scorching--Godiva to the gossips.

She would come out of it glorified. She would be reconciled with her
family. With her story of her devotion to the man loving her, the world
would know her for the heroine she was: a born lady, in appearance and
manner an empress among women. It was a story to be pleaded in any court,
before the sternest public. Mrs. Burman had thrown her into temptation's
way. It was a story to touch the heart, as none other ever written of
over all the earth was there a woman equalling his Nataly!

And their Nesta would have a dowry to make princesses envious:--she would
inherit . . . he ran up an arithmetical column, down to a line of figures
in addition, during three paces of his feet. Dartrey Fenellan had said of
little Nesta once, that she had a nature pure and sparkling as mid-sea
foam. Happy he who wins her! But she was one of the young women who are
easily pleased and hardly enthralled. Her father strained his mind for
the shape of the man to accomplish the feat. Whether she had an ideal of
a youth in her feminine head, was beyond his guessing. She was not the
damsel to weave a fairy waistcoat for the identical prince, and try it
upon all comers to discover him: as is done by some; excuseably, if we
would be just. Nesta was of the elect, for whom excuses have not to be
made. She would probably like a flute-player best; because her father
played the flute, and she loved him--laughably a little maiden's reason!
Her father laughed at her.

Along the street of Clubs, where a bruised fancy may see black balls
raining, the narrow way between ducal mansions offers prospect of the
sweep of greensward, all but touching up to the sunset to draw it to the
dance.

Formerly, in his very early youth, he clasped a dream of gaining way to
an alliance with one of these great surrounding houses; and he had a
passion for the acquisition of money as a means. And it has to be
confessed, he had sacrificed in youth a slice of his youth, to gain it
without labour--usually a costly purchase. It had ended disastrously: or
say, a running of the engine off the rails, and a speedy re-establishment
of traffic. Could it be a loss, that had led to the winning of his
Nataly? Can we really loathe the first of the steps when the one in due
sequence, cousin to it, is a blessedness? If we have been righted to
health by a medical draught, we are bound to be respectful to our drug.
And so we are, in spite of Nature's wry face and shiver at a mention of
what we went through during those days, those horrible days:--hide them!

The smothering of them from sight set them sounding he had to listen.
Colney Durance accused him of entering into bonds with somebody's
grandmother for the simple sake of browsing on her thousands: a picture
of himself too abhorrent to Victor to permit of any sort of acceptance.
Consequently he struck away to the other extreme of those who have a
choice in mixed motives: he protested that compassion had been the cause
of it. Looking at the circumstance now, he could see, allowing for human
frailty-perhaps a wish to join the ranks of the wealthy compassion for
the woman as the principal motive. How often had she not in those old
days praised his generosity for allying his golden youth to her withered
age--Mrs. Burman's very words! And she was a generous woman or had been:
she was generous in saying that. Well, and she was generous in having a
well-born, well-bred beautiful young creature like Nataly for her
companion, when it was a case of need for the dear girl; and
compassionately insisting, against remonstrances: they were spoken by
him, though they were but partial. How, then, had she become--at least,
how was it that she could continue to behave as the vindictive Fury who
persecuted remorselessly, would give no peace, poisoned the wells round
every place where he and his dear one pitched their tent!

But at last she had come to charity, as he could well believe. Not too
late! Victor's feeling of gratitude to Mrs. Burman assured him it was
genuine because of his genuine conviction, that she had determined to end
her incomprehensibly lengthened days in reconcilement with him: and he
had always been ready to 'forget and forgive.' A truly beautiful old
phrase! It thrilled off the most susceptible of men.

His well-kept secret of the spacious country-house danced him behind a
sober demeanour from one park to another; and along beside the drive to
view of his townhouse--unbeloved of the inhabitants, although by
acknowledgement it had, as Fredi funnily drawled, to express her sense of
justice in depreciation, 'good accommodation.' Nataly was at home, he was
sure. Time to be dressing: sun sets at six-forty, he said, and glanced at
the stained West, with an accompanying vision of outspread primroses
flooding banks of shadowy fields near Lakelands.

He crossed the road and rang.

Upon the opening of the door, there was a cascade of muslin downstairs.
His darling Fredi stood out of it, a dramatic Undine.




CHAPTER VI

NATALY

'Il segreto!' the girl cried commandingly, with a forefinger at his
breast.

He crossed arms, toning in similar recitative, with anguish, 'Dove
volare!'

They joined in half a dozen bars of operatic duet.

She flew to him, embraced and kissed.

'I must have it, my papa! unlock. I've been spying the bird on its
hedgerow nest so long! And this morning, my own dear cunning papa,
weren't you as bare as winter twigs? "Tomorrow perhaps we will have a day
in the country." To go and see the nest? Only, please, not a big one. A
real nest; where mama and I can wear dairymaid's hat and apron all
day--the style you like; and strike roots. We've been torn away two or
three times: twice, I know.'

'Fixed, this time; nothing shall tear us up,' said her father, moving on
to the stairs, with an arm about her.

'So, it is . . . ?'

'She's amazed at her cleverness!'

'A nest for three?'

'We must have a friend or two.'

'And pretty country?'

'Trust her papa for that.'

'Nice for walking and running over fields? No rich people?'

'How escape that rabble in England! as Colney says. It's a place for
being quite independent of neighbours, free as air.'

'Oh! bravo!'

'And Fredi will have her horse, and mama her pony-carriage; and Fredi can
have a swim every Summer morning.'

'A swim?' Her note was dubious. 'A river?'

'A good long stretch--fairish, fairish. Bit of a lake; bathing-shed; the
Naiad's bower: pretty water to see.'

'Ah. And has the house a name?'

'Lakelands. I like the name.'

'Papa gave it the name!'

'There's nothing he can conceal from his girl. Only now and then a little
surprise.'

'And his girl is off her head with astonishment. But tell me, who has
been sharing the secret with you?'

'Fredi strikes home! And it is true, you dear; I must have a confidant:
Simeon Fenellan.'

'Not Mr. Durance?'

He shook out a positive negative. 'I leave Col to his guesses. He'd have
been prophesying fire the works before the completion.'

'Then it is not a dear old house, like Craye and Creckholt?'

'Wait and see to-morrow.'

He spoke of the customary guests for concert practice; the music,
instrumental and vocal; quartet, duet, solo; and advising the girl to be
quick, as she had but twenty-five minutes, he went humming and trilling
into his dressing-room.

Nesta signalled at her mother's door for permission to enter. She slipped
in, saw that the maid was absent, and said: 'Yes, mama; and prepare, I
feared it; I was sure.'

Her mother breathed a little moan: 'Not a cottage?'

'He has not mentioned it to Mr. Durance.'

'Why not?'

'Mr. Fenellan has been his confidant.'

'My darling, we did wrong to let it go on, without speaking. You don't
know for certain yet?'

'It's a large estate, mama, and a big new house.'

Nataly's bosom sank. 'Ah me! here's misery! I ought to have known. And
too late now it has gone so far! But I never imagined he would be
building.'

She caught herself languishing at her toilette-glass, as, if her beauty
were at stake; and shut her eyelids angrily. To be looking in that
manner, for a mere suspicion, was too foolish. But Nesta's divinations
were target-arrows; they flew to the mark. Could it have been expected
that Victor would ever do anything on a small scale? O the dear little
lost lost cottage! She thought of it with a strain of the arms of
womanhood's longing in the unblessed wife for a babe. For the secluded
modest cottage would not rack her with the old anxieties, beset her with
suspicions. . . .

'My child, you won't possibly have time before the dinner-hour,' she said
to Nesta, dismissing her and taking her kiss of comfort with a short and
straining look out of the depths.

Those bitter doubts of the sentiments of neighbours are an incipient
dislike, when one's own feelings to the neighbours are kind, could be
affectionate. We are distracted, perverted, made strangers to ourselves
by a false position.

She heard his voice on a carol. Men do not feel this doubtful position as
women must. They have not the same to endure; the world gives them land
to tread, where women are on breaking seas. Her Nesta knew no more than
the pain of being torn from a home she loved. But now the girl was older,
and if once she had her imagination awakened, her fearful directness
would touch the spot, question, bring on the scene to-come, necessarily
to come, dreaded much more than death by her mother. But if it might be
postponed till the girl was nearer to an age of grave understanding, with
some knowledge of our world, some comprehension of a case that could be
pleaded!

He sang: he never acknowledged a trouble, he dispersed it; and in her
present wrestle with the scheme of a large country estate involving new
intimacies, anxieties, the courtship of rival magnates, followed by the
wretched old cloud, and the imposition upon them to bear it in silence
though they knew they could plead a case, at least before charitable and
discerning creatures or before heaven, the despondent lady could have
asked whether he was perfectly sane.

Who half so brilliantly!--Depreciation of him, fetched up at a stroke the
glittering armies of her enthusiasm. He had proved it; he proved it daily
in conflicts and in victories that dwarfed emotional troubles like hers:
yet they were something to bear, hard to bear, at times unbearable.

But those were times of weakness. Let anything be doubted rather than the
good guidance of the man who was her breath of life! Whither he led, let
her go, not only submissively, exultingly.

Thus she thought, under pressure of the knowledge, that unless rushing
into conflicts bigger than conceivable, she had to do it, and should
therefore think it.

This was the prudent woman's clear deduction from the state wherein she
found herself, created by the one first great step of the mad woman. Her
surrender then might be likened to the detachment of a flower on the
river's bank by swell of flood: she had no longer root of her own; away
she sailed, through beautiful scenery, with occasionally a crashing fall,
a turmoil, emergence from a vortex, and once more the sunny whirling
surface. Strange to think, she had not since then power to grasp in her
abstract mind a notion of stedfastness without or within.

But, say not the mad, say the enamoured woman. Love is a madness, having
heaven's wisdom in it--a spark. But even when it is driving us on the
breakers, call it love: and be not unworthy of it, hold to it. She and
Victor had drunk of a cup. The philtre was in her veins, whatever the
directions of the rational mind.

Exulting or regretting, she had to do it, as one in the car with a racing
charioteer. Or up beside a more than Titanically audacious balloonist.
For the charioteer is bent on a goal; and Victor's course was an
ascension from heights to heights. He had ideas, he mastered Fortune. He
conquered Nataly and held her subject, in being above his ambition; which
was now but an occupation for his powers, while the aim of his life was
at the giving and taking of simple enjoyment. In spite of his fits of
unreasonableness in the means--and the woman loving him could trace them
to a breath of nature--his gentle good friendly innocent aim in life was
of this very simplest; so wonderful, by contrast with his powers, that
she, assured of it as she was by experience of him, was touched, in a
transfusion of her feelings through lucent globes of admiration and of
tenderness, to reverence. There had been occasions when her wish for the
whole world to have proof and exhibition of his greatness, goodness, and
simplicity amid his gifts, prompted her incitement of him to stand forth
eminently: ('lead a kingdom,' was the phrase behind the curtain within her
shy bosom;) and it revealed her to herself, upon reflection, as being
still the Nataly who drank the cup with him, to join her fate with his.

And why not? Was that regretted? Far from it. In her maturity, the woman
was unable to send forth any dwelling thought or more than a flight of
twilight fancy, that cancelled the deed of her youth, and therewith
seemed to expunge near upon the half--of her term of years. If it came to
consideration of her family and the family's opinion of her conduct, her
judgement did not side with them or with herself, it whirled, swam to a
giddiness and subsided.

Of course, if she and Victor were to inhabit a large country-house, they
might as well have remained at Craye Farm or at Creckholt; both places
dear to them in turn. Such was the plain sense of the surface question.
And how strange it was to her, that he, of the most quivering
sensitiveness on her behalf; could not see, that he threw her into
situations where hard words of men and women threatened about her head;
where one or two might on a day, some day, be heard; and where, in the
recollection of two years back, the word 'Impostor' had smacked her on
both cheeks from her own mouth.

Now once more they were to run the same round of alarms, undergo the love
of the place, with perpetual apprehensions of having to leave it: alarms,
throbbing suspicions, like those of old travellers through the haunted
forest, where whispers have intensity of meaning, and unseeing we are
seen, and unaware awaited.

Nataly shook the rolls of her thick brown hair from her forehead; she
took strength from a handsome look of resolution in the glass. She could
always honestly say, that her courage would not fail him.

Victor tapped at the door; he stepped into the room, wearing his evening
white flower over a more open white waistcoat; and she was composed and
uninquiring. Their Nesta was heard on the descent of the stairs, with a
rattle of Donizetti's Il segreto to the skylights.

He performed his never-omitted lover's homage.

Nataly enfolded him in a homely smile. 'A country-house? We go and see it
to-morrow?'

'And you've been pining for a country home, my dear soul.'

'After the summer six weeks, the house in London does not seem a home to
return to.'

'And next day, Nataly draws five thousand pounds for the first sketch of
the furniture.'

'There is the Creckholt . . .' she had a difficulty in saying.

'Part of it may do. Lakelands requires--but you will see to-morrow.'

After a close shutting of her eyes, she rejoined: 'It is not a cottage?'

'Well, dear, no: when the Slave of the Lamp takes to building, he does
not run up cottages. And we did it without magic, all in a year; which is
quite as good as a magical trick in a night.' He drew her close to him.
'When was it my dear girl guessed me at work?'

'It was the other dear girl. Nesta is the guesser.'

'You were two best of souls to keep from bothering me; and I might have
had to fib; and we neither of us like that.' He noticed a sidling of her
look. 'More than the circumstances oblige:--to be frank. But now we can
speak of them. Wait--and the change comes; and opportunely, I have found.
It's true we have waited long; my darling has had her worries. However,
it 's here at last. Prepare yourself. I speak positively. You have to
brace up for one sharp twitch--the woman's portion! as Natata says--and
it's over.' He looked into her eyes for comprehension; and not finding
inquiry, resumed: 'Just in time for the entry into Lakelands. With the
pronouncement of the decree, we present the licence . . . at an altar
we've stood before, in spirit . . . one of the ladies of your family to
support you:--why not? Not even then?'

'No, Victor; they have cast me off.'

'Count on my cousins, the Duvidney ladies. Then we can say, that those
two good old spinsters are less narrow than the Dreightons. I have to
confess I rather think I was to blame for leaving Creckholt. Only, if I
see my girl wounded, I hate the place that did the mischief. You and
Fredi will clap hands for the country about Lakelands.'

'Have you heard from her . . . of her . . . is it anything, Victor?'
Nataly asked him shyly; with not much of hope, but some readiness to be
inflated. The prospect of an entry into the big new house, among a new
society, begirt by the old nightmares and fretting devils, drew her into
staring daylight or furnace-light.

He answered: 'Mrs. Burman has definitely decided. In pity of us?--to be
free herself?--who can say! She 's a woman with a conscience--of a kind:
slow, but it brings her to the point at last. You know her, know her
well. Fenellan has it from her lawyer--her lawyer! a Mr. Carting; a
thoroughly trustworthy man--'

'Fenellan, as a reporter?'

'Thoroughly to be trusted on serious matters. I understand that Mrs.
Burman:--her health is awful: yes, yes; poor woman! poor woman! we feel
for her:--she has come to perceive her duty to those she leaves behind.
Consider: she HAS used the rod. She must be tired out--if human. And she
is. One remembers traits.'

Victor sketched one or two of the traits allusively to the hearer
acquainted with them. They received strong colouring from midday's Old
Veuve in his blood. His voice and words had a swing of conviction: they
imparted vinousness to a heart athirst.

The histrionic self-deceiver may be a persuasive deceiver of another, who
is again, though not ignorant of his character, tempted to swallow the
nostrums which have made so gallant a man of him: his imperceptible
sensible playing of the part, on a substratum of sincereness, induces
fascinatingly to the like performance on our side, that we may be armed
as he is for enjoying the coveted reality through the partial simulation
of possessing it. And this is not a task to us when we have looked our
actor in the face, and seen him bear the look, knowing that he is not
intentionally untruthful; and when we incline to be captivated by his
rare theatrical air of confidence; when it seems as an outside thought
striking us, that he may not be altogether deceived in the present
instance; when suddenly an expectation of the thing desired is born and
swims in a credible featureless vagueness on a misty scene: and when we
are being kissed and the blood is warmed. In fine, here as everywhere
along our history, when the sensations are spirited up to drown the mind,
we become drift-matter of tides, metal to magnets. And if we are women,
who commonly allow the lead to men, getting it for themselves only by
snaky cunning or desperate adventure, credulity--the continued trust in
the man--is the alternative of despair.

'But, Victor, I must ask,' Nataly said: 'you have it through Simeon
Fenellan; you have not yourself received the letter from her lawyer?'

'My knowledge of what she would do near the grave--poor soul, yes! I
shall soon be hearing.'

'You do not, propose to enter this place until--until it is over?'

'We enter this place, my love, without any sort of ceremony. We live
there independently, and we can we have quarters there for our friends.
Our one neighbour is London--there! And at Lakelands we are able to
entertain London and wife;--our friends, in short; with some, what we
have to call, satellites. You inspect the house and grounds
to-morrow--sure to be fair. Put aside all but the pleasant recollections
of Craye and Creckholt. We start on a different footing. Really nothing
can be simpler. Keeping your town-house, you are now and then in
residence at Lakelands, where you entertain your set, teach them to feel
the charm of country life: we have everything about us; could have had
our own milk and cream up to London the last two months. Was it very
naughty?--I should have exploded my surprise! You will see, you will see
to-morrow.'

Nataly nodded, as required. 'Good news from the mines?' she said.

He answered: 'Dartrey is--yes, poor fellow! Dartrey is confident, from
the yield of stones, that the value of our claim counts in a number of
millions. The same with the gold. But gold-mines are lodgeings, not
homes.'

'Oh, Victor! if money . . . ! But why did you say "poor fellow" of
Dartrey Fenellan?'

'You know how he's . . .'

'Yes, yes,' she said hastily. 'But has that woman been causing fresh
anxiety?'

'And Natata's chief hero on earth is not to be named a poor fellow,' said
he, after a negative of the head on a subject they neither of them liked
to touch.

Then he remembered that Dartrey Fenellan was actually a lucky fellow; and
he would have mentioned the circumstance confided to him by Simeon, but
for a downright dread of renewing his painful fit of envy. He had also
another, more distant, very faint idea, that it had better not be
mentioned just yet, for a reason entirely undefined.

He consulted his watch. The maid had come in for the robeing of her
mistress. Nataly's mind had turned to the little country cottage which
would have given her such great happiness. She raised her eyes to him;
she could not check their filling; they were like a river carrying
moonlight on the smooth roll of a fall.

He loved the eyes, disliked the water in them. With an impatient, 'There,
there!' and a smart affectionate look, he retired, thinking in our old
satirical vein of the hopeless endeavour to satisfy a woman's mind
without the intrusion of hard material statements, facts. Even the best
of women, even the most beautiful, and in their moments of supremest
beauty, have this gross ravenousness for facts. You must not expect to
appease them unless you administer solids. It would almost appear that
man is exclusively imaginative and poetical; and that his mate, the fair,
the graceful, the bewitching, with the sweetest and purest of natures,
cannot help being something of a groveller.

Nataly had likewise her thoughts.




CHAPTER VII

BETWEEN A GENERAL MAN OF THIN WORLD AND A PROFESSIONAL

Rather earlier in the afternoon of that day, Simeon Fenellan, thinking of
the many things which are nothing, and so melancholy for lack of
amusements properly to follow Old Veuve, that he could ask himself
whether he had not done a deed of night, to be blinking at his fellow-men
like an owl all mad for the reveller's hoots and flights and mice and
moony roundels behind his hypocritical judex air of moping composure,
chanced on Mr. Carling, the solicitor, where Lincoln's Inn pumps lawyers
into Fleet Street through the drain-pipe of Chancery Lane. He was in the
state of the wine when a shake will rouse the sluggish sparkles to foam.
Sight of Mrs. Burman's legal adviser had instantly this effect upon him:
his bubbling friendliness for Victor Radnor, and the desire of the voice
in his bosom for ears to hear, combined like the rush of two waves
together, upon which he may be figured as the boat: he caught at Mr.
Carling's hand more heartily than their acquaintanceship quite
sanctioned; but his grasp and his look of overflowing were immediately
privileged; Mr. Carling, enjoying this anecdotal gentleman's conversation
as he did, liked the warmth, and was flattered during the squeeze with a
prospect of his wife and friends partaking of the fun from time to time.

'I was telling my wife yesterday your story of the lady contrabandist: I
don't think she has done laughing since,' Mr. Calling said.

Fenellan fluted: 'Ah?' He had scent, in the eulogy of a story grown flat
as Election hats, of a good sort of man in the way of men, a step or two
behind the man of the world. He expressed profound regret at not having
heard the silvery ring of the lady's laughter.

Carling genially conceived a real gratification to be conferred on his
wife. 'Perhaps you will some day honour us?'

'You spread gold-leaf over the days to come, sir.'

'Now, if I might name the day?'

'You lump the gold and make it current coin;--says the blushing bride,
who ought not to have delivered herself so boldly, but she had forgotten
her bashful part and spoilt the scene, though, luckily for the damsel,
her swain was a lover of nature, and finding her at full charge, named
the very next day of the year, and held her to it, like the complimentary
tyrant he was.'

'To-morrow, then!' said Carling intrepidly, on a dash of enthusiasm,
through a haggard thought of his wife and the cook and the netting of
friends at short notice. He urged his eagerness to ask whether he might
indeed have the satisfaction of naming to-morrow.

'With happiness,' Fenellan responded.

Mrs. Carling was therefore in for it.

'To-morrow, half-past seven: as for company to meet you, we will do what
we can. You go Westward?'

'To bed with the sun,' said the reveller.

'Perhaps by Covent Garden? I must give orders there.'

'Orders given in Covent Garden, paint a picture for bachelors of the
domestic Paradise an angel must help them to enter! Ah, dear me! Is there
anything on earth to compare with the pride of a virtuous life?'

'I was married at four and twenty,' said Carling, as one taking up the
expository second verse of a poem; plain facts, but weighty and
necessary: 'my wife was in her twentieth year: we have five children; two
sons, three daughters, one married, with a baby. So we are grandfather
and mother, and have never regretted the first step, I may say for both
of us.'

'Think of it! Good luck and sagacity joined hands overhead on the day you
proposed to the lady: and I'd say, that all the credit is with her, but
that it would seem to be at the expense of her sex.'

'She would be the last to wish it, I assure you.'

'True of all good women! You encourage me, touching a matter of deep
interest, not unknown to you. The lady's warm heart will be with us.
Probably she sees Mrs. Burman?'

'Mrs. Burman Radnor receives no one.'

A comic severity in the tone of the correction was deferentially accepted
by Fenellan.

'Pardon. She flies her flag, with her captain wanting; and she has,
queerly, the right. So, then, the worthy dame who receives no one, might
be treated, it struck us, conversationally, as a respectable
harbour-hulk, with more history than top-honours. But she has the
indubitable legal right to fly them--to proclaim it; for it means little
else.'

'You would have her, if I follow you, divest herself of the name?'

'Pin me to no significations, if you please, O shrewdest of the legal
sort! I have wit enough to escape you there. She is no doubt an estimable
person.'

'Well, she is; she is in her way a very good woman.'

'Ah. You see, Mr. Carling, I cannot bring myself to rank her beside
another lady, who has already claimed the title of me; and you will
forgive me if I say, that your word "good" has a look of being stuck upon
the features we know of her, like a coquette's naughty patch; or it's a
jewel of an eye in an ebony idol: though I've heard tell she performs her
charities.'

'I believe she gives away three parts of her income and that is large.'

'Leaving the good lady a fine fat fourth.'

'Compare her with other wealthy people.'

'And does she outshine the majority still with her personal attractions.

Carling was instigated by the praise he had bestowed on his wife to
separate himself from a female pretender so ludicrous; he sought
Fenellan's nearest ear, emitting the sound of 'hum.'

'In other respects, unimpeachable!'

'Oh! quite!'

'There was a fishfag of classic Billingsgate, who had broken her
husband's nose with a sledgehammer fist, and swore before the magistrate,
that the man hadn't a crease to complain of in her character. We are
condemned, Mr. Carling, sometimes to suffer in the flesh for the
assurance we receive of the inviolability of those moral fortifications.'

'Character, yes, valuable--I do wish you had named to-night for doing me
the honour of dining with me!' said the lawyer impulsively, in a rapture
of the appetite for anecdotes. 'I have a ripe Pichon Longueville, '65.'

'A fine wine. Seductive to hear of. I dine with my friend Victor Radnor.
And he knows wine.--There are good women in the world, Mr. Carling, whose
characters . . .'

'Of course, of course there are; and I could name you some.
We lawyers . . . . !'

'You encounter all sorts.'

'Between ourselves,' Carling sank his tones to the indiscriminate, where
it mingled with the roar of London.

'You do?' Fenellan hazarded a guess at having heard enlightened liberal
opinions regarding the sex. 'Right!'

'Many!'

'I back you, Mr. Carling.'

The lawyer pushed to yet more confidential communication, up to the verge
of the clearly audible: he spoke of examples, experiences. Fenellan
backed him further.

'Acting on behalf of clients, you understand, Mr. Fenellan.'

'Professional, but charitable; I am with you.'

'Poor things! we--if we have to condemn--we owe them something.'

'A kind word for poor Polly Venus, with all the world against her! She
doesn't hear it often.'

'A real service,' Carling's voice deepened to the legal 'without
prejudice,'--'I am bound to say it--a service to Society.'

'Ah, poor wench! And the kind of reward she gets?'

'We can hardly examine . . . mysterious dispensations . . . here we are
to make the best we can of it.'

'For the creature Society's indebted to? True. And am I to think there's
a body of legal gentlemen to join with you, my friend, in founding an
Institution to distribute funds to preach charity over the country, and
win compassion for her, as one of the principal persons of her time, that
Society's indebted to for whatever it's indebted for?'

'Scarcely that,' said Carling, contracting.

'But you 're for great Reforms?'

'Gradual.'

'Then it's for Reformatories, mayhap.'

'They would hardly be a cure.'

'You 're in search of a cure?'

'It would be a blessed discovery.'

'But what's to become of Society?'

'It's a puzzle to the cleverest.'

'All through History, my dear Mr. Carling, we see that.

'Establishments must have their sacrifices. Beware of interfering: eh?'

'By degrees, we may hope . . . .'

'Society prudently shuns the topic; and so 'll we. For we might tell of
one another, in a fit of distraction, that t' other one talked of it, and
we should be banished for an offence against propriety. You should read
my friend Durance's Essay on Society. Lawyers are a buttress of Society.
But, come: I wager they don't know what they support until they read that
Essay.'

Carling had a pleasant sense of escape, in not being personally asked to
read the Essay, and not hearing that a copy of it should be forwarded to
him.

He said: 'Mr. Radnor is a very old friend?'

'Our fathers were friends; they served in the same regiment for years. I
was in India when Victor Radnor took the fatal!'

'Followed by a second, not less . . . ?'

'In the interpretation of a rigid morality arming you legal gentlemen to
make it so!'

'The Law must be vindicated.'

'The law is a clumsy bludgeon.'

'We think it the highest effort of human reason--the practical
instrument.'

'You may compare it to a rustic's finger on a fiddlestring, for the
murdered notes you get out of the practical instrument.

'I am bound to defend it, clumsy bludgeon or not.'

'You are one of the giants to wield it, and feel humanly, when, by
chance, down it comes on the foot an inch off the line.--Here's a peep of
Old London; if the habit of old was not to wash windows. I like these old
streets!'

'Hum,' Carling hesitated. 'I can remember when the dirt at the windows
was appalling.'

'Appealing to the same kind of stuff in the passing youngster's
green-scum eye: it was. And there your Law did good work.--You're for
Bordeaux. What is your word on Burgundy?'

'Our Falernian!'

'Victor Radnor has the oldest in the kingdom. But he will have the best
of everything. A Romanee! A Musigny! Sip, my friend, you embrace the
Goddess of your choice above. You are up beside her at a sniff of that
wine.--And lo, venerable Drury! we duck through the court, reminded a bit
by our feelings of our first love, who hadn't the cleanest of faces or
nicest of manners, but she takes her station in memory because we were
boys then, and the golden halo of youth is upon her.'

Carling, as a man of the world, acquiesced in souvenirs he did not share.
He said urgently: 'Understand me; you speak of Mr. Radnor; pray, believe
I have the greatest respect for Mr. Radnor's abilities. He is one of our
foremost men . . . proud of him. Mr. Radnor has genius; I have watched
him; it is genius; he shows it in all he does; one of the memorable men
of our times. I can admire him, independent of--well, misfortune of that
kind . . . a mistaken early step. Misfortune, it is to be named. Between
ourselves--we are men of the world--if one could see the way! She
occasionally . . . as I have told you. I have ventured suggestions. As I
have mentioned, I have received an impression . . .'

'But still, Mr. Carling, if the lady doesn't release him and will keep
his name, she might stop her cowardly persecutions.'

'Can you trace them?'

'Undisguised!'

'Mrs. Burman Radnor is devout. I should not exactly say revengeful. We
have to discriminate. I gather, that her animus is, in all honesty,
directed at the--I quote--state of sin. We are mixed, you know.'

The Winegod in the blood of Fenellan gave a leap. 'But, fifty thousand
times more mixed, she might any moment stop the state of sin, as she
calls it, if it pleased her.'

'She might try. Our Judges look suspiciously on long delayed actions. And
there are, too, women who regard the marriage-tie as indissoluble. She
has had to combat that scruple.'

'Believer in the renewing of the engagement overhead!--well. But put a
by-word to Mother Nature about the state of sin. Where, do you imagine,
she would lay it? You'll say, that Nature and Law never agreed. They
ought.'

'The latter deferring to the former?'

'Moulding itself on her swelling proportions. My dear dear sir, the state
of sin was the continuing to live in defiance of, in contempt of, in
violation of, in the total degradation of, Nature.'

'He was under no enforcement to take the oath at the altar.'

'He was a small boy tempted by a varnished widow, with pounds of barley
sugar in her pockets;--and she already serving as a test-vessel or mortar
for awful combinations in druggery! Gilt widows are equal to decrees of
Fate to us young ones. Upon my word, the cleric who unites, and the Law
that sanctions, they're the criminals. Victor Radnor is the noblest of
fellows, the very best friend a man can have. I will tell you: he saved
me, after I left the army, from living on the produce of my pen--which
means, if there is to be any produce, the prostrating of yourself to the
level of the round middle of the public: saved me from that! Yes, Mr.
Carling, I have trotted our thoroughfares a poor Polly of the pen; and it
is owing to Victor Radnor that I can order my thoughts as an individual
man again before I blacken paper. Owing to him, I have a tenderness for
mercenaries; having been one of them and knowing how little we can help
it. He is an Olympian--who thinks of them below. The lady also is an
admirable woman at all points. The pair are a mated couple, such as you
won't find in ten households over Christendom. Are you aware of the
story?'

Carling replied: 'A story under shadow of the Law, has generally two very
distinct versions.'

'Hear mine.--And, by Jove! a runaway cab. No, all right. But a crazy cab
it is, and fit to do mischief in narrow Drury. Except that it's sheer
riff-raff here to knock over.'

'Hulloa?--come!' quoth the wary lawyer.

'There's the heart I wanted to rouse to hear me! One may be sure that the
man for old Burgundy has it big and sound, in spite of his legal
practices; a dear good spherical fellow! Some day, we'll hope, you will
be sitting with us over a magnum of Victor Radnor's Romance Conti aged
thirty-one: a wine, you'll say at the second glass, High Priest for the
celebration of the uncommon nuptials between the body and the soul of
man.'

'You hit me rightly,'said Carting, tickled and touched; sensually excited
by the bouquet of Victor Radnor's hospitality and companionship, which
added flavour to Fenellan's compliments. These came home to him through
his desire to be the 'good spherical fellow'; for he, like modern
diplomatists in the track of their eminent Berlinese New Type of the
time, put on frankness as an armour over wariness, holding craft in
reserve: his aim was at the refreshment of honest fellowship: by no means
to discover that the coupling of his native bias with his professional
duty was unprofitable nowadays. Wariness, however, was not somnolent,
even when he said: 'You know, I am never the lawyer out of my office. Man
of the world to men of the world; and I have not lost by it. I am Mrs.
Barman Radnor's legal adviser: you are Mr. Victor Radnor's friend. They
are, as we see them, not on the best of terms. I would rather--at its
lowest, as a matter of business--be known for having helped them to some
kind of footing than send in a round bill to my client--or another. I
gain more in the end. Frankly, I mean to prove, that it's a lawyer's
interest to be human.'

'Because, now, see!' said Fenellan, 'here's the case. Miss Natalia
Dreighton, of a good Yorkshire family--a large one, reads an
advertisement for the post of companion to a lady, and answers it, and
engages herself, previous to the appearance of the young husband. Miss
Dreighton is one of the finest young women alive. She has a glorious
contralto voice. Victor and she are encouraged by Mrs. Barman to sing
duets together. Well?

Why, Euclid would have theorem'd it out for you at a glance at the trio.
You have only to look on them, you chatter out your three Acts of a Drama
without a stop. If Mrs. Barman cares to practise charity, she has only to
hold in her Fury-forked tongue, or her Jarniman I think 's the name.'

Carting shrugged.

'Let her keep from striking, if she's Christian,' pursued Fenetlan, 'and
if kind let her resume the name of her first lord, who did a better thing
for himself than for her, when he shook off his bars of bullion, to rise
the lighter, and left a wretched female soul below, with the devil's own
testimony to her attractions--thousands in the Funds, houses in the City.
She threw the young couple together. And my friend Victor Radnor is of a
particularly inflammable nature. Imagine one of us in such a situation,
Mr. Carting!'

'Trying!' said the lawyer.

'The dear fellow was as nigh death as a man can be and know the sweetness
of a woman's call to him to live. And here's London's garden of pines,
bananas, oranges; all the droppings of the Hesperides here! We don't
reflect on it, Mr. Carling.'

'Not enough, not enough.'

'I feel such a spout of platitudes that I could out With a Leading
Article on a sheet of paper on your back while you're bending over the
baskets. I seem to have got circularly round again to Eden when I enter a
garden. Only, here we have to pay for the fruits we pluck. Well, and just
the same there; and no end to the payment either. We're always paying! By
the way, Mrs. Victor Radnor's dinner-table's a spectacle. Her taste in
flowers equals her lord's in wine. But age improves the wine and spoils
the flowers, you'll say. Maybe you're for arguing that lovely women show
us more of the flower than the grape, in relation to the course of time.
I pray you not to forget the terrible intoxicant she is. We reconcile it,
Mr. Carling, with the notion that the grape's her spirit, the flower her
body. Or is it the reverse? Perhaps an intertwining. But look upon
bouquets and clusters, and the idea of woman springs up at once, proving
she's composed of them. I was about to remark, that with deference to the
influence of Mrs. Burman's legal adviser, an impenitent or penitent
sinner's pastor, the Reverend gentleman ministering to her spiritual
needs, would presumptively exercise it, in this instance, in a superior
degree.'

Carling murmured: 'The Rev. Groseman Buttermore'; and did so for
something of a cover, to continue a run of internal reflections: as, that
he was assuredly listening to vinous talk in the streets by day; which
impression placed him on a decorous platform above the amusing gentleman;
to whom, however, he grew cordial, in recognizing consequently, that his
exuberant flow could hardly be a mask; and that an indication here and
there of a trap in his talk, must have been due rather to excess of
wariness, habitual in the mind of a long-headed man, whose incorrigibly
impulsive fits had necessarily to be rectified by a vigilant dexterity.

'Buttermore!' ejaculated Fenellan: 'Groseman Buttermore! Mrs.
Victor's Father Confessor is the Rev. Septimus Barmby. Groseman
Buttermore--Septimus Barmby. Is there anything in names? Truly, unless
these clerical gentlemen take them up at the crossing of the roads long
after birth, the names would appear the active parts of them, and
themselves mere marching supports, like the bearers of street
placard-advertisements. Now, I know a Septimus Barmby, and you a Groseman
Buttermore, and beyond the fact that Reverend starts up before their
names without mention, I wager it's about all we do know of them. They're
Society's trusty rock-limpets, no doubt.'

'My respect for the cloth is extreme.' Carling's short cough prepared the
way for deductions. 'Between ourselves, they are men of the world.'

Fenellan eyed benevolently the worthy attorney, whose innermost imp burst
out periodically, like a Dutch clocksentry, to trot on his own small
grounds for thinking himself of the community of the man of the world.
'You lawyers dress in another closet,' he said. 'The Rev. Groseman has
the ear of the lady?'

'He has:--one ear.'

'Ah? She has the other open for a man of the world, perhaps.'

'Listens to him, listens to me, listens to Jarniman; and we neither of us
guide her. She's very curious--a study. You think you know her--next day
she has eluded you. She's emotional, she's hard; she's a woman, she's a
stone. Anything you like; but don't count on her. And another thing--I'm
bound to say it of myself,' Carling claimed close hearing of Fenellan
over a shelf of saladstuff, 'no one who comes near her has any real
weight with her in this matter.'

'Probably you mix cream in your salad of the vinegar and oil,' said
Fenellan. 'Try jelly of mutton.'--'You give me a new idea. Latterly, fond
as I am of salads, I've had rueful qualms. We'll try it.'

'You should dine with Victor Radnor.'

'French cook, of course!'

'Cordon bleu.'

'I like to be sure of my cutlet.'

'I like to be sure of a tastiness in my vegetables.'

'And good sauces!'

'And pretty pastry. I said, Cordon bleu. The miracle is, it 's a woman
that Victor Radnor has trained: French, but a woman; devoted to him, as
all who serve him are. Do I say "but" a woman? There's not a Frenchman
alive to match her. Vatel awaits her in Paradise with his arms extended;
and may he wait long!'

Carling indulged his passion for the genuine by letting a flutter of real
envy be seen. 'My wife would like to meet such a Frenchwoman. It must be
a privilege to dine with him--to know him. I know what he has done for
English Commerce, and to build a colossal fortune: genius, as I said: and
his donations to Institutions. Odd, to read his name and Mrs. Burman
Radnor's at separate places in the lists! Well, we'll hope. It's a case
for a compromise of sentiments and claims.'

'A friend of mine, spiced with cynic, declares that there's always an
amicable way out of a dissension, if we get rid of Lupus and Vulpus.'

Carling spied for a trap in the citation of Lupus and Vulpus; he saw
none, and named the square of his residence on the great Russell
property, and the number of the house, the hour of dinner next day. He
then hung silent, breaking the pause with his hand out and a sharp
'Well?' that rattled a whirligig sound in his head upward. His leave of
people was taken in this laughing falsetto, as of one affected by the
curious end things come to.

Fenellan thought of him for a moment or two, that he was a better than
the common kind of lawyer; who doubtless knew as much of the wrong side
of the world as lawyers do, and held his knowledge for the being a man of
the world:--as all do, that have not Alpine heights in the mind to mount
for a look out over their own and the world's pedestrian tracks. I could
spot the lawyer in your composition, my friend, to the exclusion of the
man he mused. But you're right in what you mean to say of yourself:
you're a good fellow, for a lawyer, and together we may manage somehow to
score a point of service to Victor Radnor.




CHAPTER VIII

SOME FAMILIAR GUESTS

Nesta read her mother's face when Mrs. Victor entered the drawing-room to
receive the guests. She saw a smooth fair surface, of the kind as much
required by her father's eyes as innocuous air by his nostrils: and it
was honest skin, not the deceptive feminine veiling, to make a dear man
happy over his volcano. Mrs. Victor was to meet the friends with whom her
feelings were at home, among whom her musical gifts gave her station:
they liked her for herself; they helped her to feel at home with herself
and be herself: a rarer condition with us all than is generally supposed.
So she could determine to be cheerful in the anticipation of an evening
that would at least be restful to the outworn sentinel nerve of her
heart, which was perpetually alert and signalling to the great organ;
often colouring the shows and seems of adverse things for an apeing of
reality with too cruel a resemblance. One of the scraps of practical
wisdom gained by hardened sufferers is, to keep from spying at horizons
when they drop into a pleasant dingle. Such is the comfort of it, that we
can dream, and lull our fears, and half think what we wish: and it is a
heavenly truce with the fretful mind divided from our wishes.

Nesta wondered at her mother's complacent questions concerning this
Lakelands: the house, the county, the kind of people about, the features
of the country. Physically unable herself to be regretful under a burden
three parts enrapturing her, the girl expected her mother to display a
shadowy vexation, with a proud word or two, that would summon her
thrilling sympathy in regard to the fourth part: namely, the aristocratic
iciness of country magnates, who took them up and cast them off; as they
had done, she thought, at Craye Farm and at Creckholt: she remembered it,
of the latter place, wincingly, insurgently, having loved the dear home
she had been expelled from by her pride of the frosty surrounding
people--or no, not all, but some of them. And what had roused their
pride?

Striking for a reason, her inexperience of our modern England,
supplemented by readings in the England of a preceding generation, had
hit on her father's profession of merchant. It accounted to her for the
behaviour of the haughty territorial and titled families. But certain of
the minor titles headed City Firms, she had heard; certain of the
families were avowedly commercial. 'They follow suit,' her father said at
Creckholt, after he had found her mother weeping, and decided instantly
to quit and fly once more. But if they followed suit in such a way, then
Mr. Durance must be right when he called the social English the most
sheepy of sheep:--and Nesta could not consent to the cruel verdict, she
adored her compatriots. Incongruities were pacified for her by the
suggestion of her quick wits, that her father, besides being a merchant,
was a successful speculator; and perhaps the speculator is not liked by
merchants; or they were jealous of him; or they did not like his being
both.

She pardoned them with some tenderness, on a suspicion that a quaint old
high-frilled bleached and puckered Puritanical rectitude (her thoughts
rose in pictures) possibly condemned the speculator as a description of
gambler. An erratic severity in ethics is easily overlooked by the
enthusiast for things old English. She was consciously ahead of them in
the knowledge that her father had been, without the taint of gambling, a
beneficent speculator. The Montgomery colony in South Africa, and his
dealings with the natives in India, and his Railways in South America,
his establishment of Insurance Offices, which were Savings Banks, and the
Stores for the dispensing of sound goods to the poor, attested it. O and
he was hospitable, the kindest, helpfullest of friends, the dearest, the
very brightest of parents: he was his girl's playmate. She could be
critic of him, for an induction to the loving of him more justly: yet if
he had an excessive desire to win the esteem of people, as these keen
young optics perceived in him, he strove to deserve it; and no one could
accuse him of laying stress on the benefits he conferred. Designedly,
frigidly to wound a man so benevolent, appeared to her as an
incomprehensible baseness. The dropping of acquaintanceship with him,
after the taste of its privileges, she ascribed, in the void of any
better elucidation, to a mania of aristocratic conceit. It drove her,
despite her youthful contempt of politics, into a Radicalism that could
find food in the epigrams of Mr. Colney Durance, even when they passed
her understanding; or when he was not too distinctly seen by her to be
shooting at all the parties of her beloved England, beneath the wicked
semblance of shielding each by turns.

The young gentleman introduced to the Radnor Concert-parties by Lady
Grace Halley as the Hon. Dudley Sowerby, had to bear the sins of his
class. Though he was tall, straight-featured, correct in costume,
appearance, deportment, second son of a religious earl and no scandal to
the parentage, he was less noticed by Nesta than the elderly and the
commoners. Her father accused her of snubbing him. She reproduced her
famous copy of the sugared acid of Mr. Dudley Sowerby's closed mouth: a
sort of sneer in meekness, as of humility under legitimate compulsion;
deploring Christianly a pride of race that stamped it for this cowled
exhibition: the wonderful mimicry was a flash thrown out by a born
mistress of the art, and her mother was constrained to laugh, and so was
her father; but he wilfully denied the likeness. He charged her with
encouraging Colney Durance to drag forth the sprig of nobility, in the
nakedness of evicted shell-fish, on themes of the peril to England,
possibly ruin, through the loss of that ruling initiative formerly
possessed, in the days of our glory, by the titular nobles of the land.
Colney spoke it effectively, and the Hon. Dudley's expressive lineaments
showed print of the heaving word Alas, as when a target is penetrated,
centrally. And he was not a particularly dull fellow 'for his class and
country,' Colney admitted; adding: 'I hit his thought and out he came.'
One has, reluctantly with Victor Radnor, to grant, that when a man's
topmost unspoken thought is hit, he must be sharp on his guard to keep
from coming out:--we have won a right to him.

'Only, it's too bad; it 's a breach of hospitality,' Victor said, both to
Nesta and to Nataly, alluding to several instances of Colney's ironic
handling of their guests, especially of this one, whom Nesta would
attack, and Nataly would not defend.

They were alive at a signal to protect the others. Miss Priscilla Graves,
an eater of meat, was ridiculous in her ant'alcoholic exclusiveness and
scorn: Mr. Pempton, a drinker of wine, would laud extravagantly the more
transparent purity of vegetarianism. Dr. Peter Yatt jeered at globules:
Dr. John Cormyn mourned over human creatures treated as cattle by big
doses. The Rev. Septimus Barmby satisfactorily smoked: Mr. Peridon traced
mortal evil to that act. Dr. Schlesien had his German views, Colney
Durance his ironic, Fenellan his fanciful and free-lance. And here was an
optimist, there a pessimist; and the rank Radical, the rigid
Conservative, were not wanting. All of them were pointedly opposed,
extraordinarily for so small an assembly: absurdly, it might be thought:
but these provoked a kind warm smile, with the exclamation: 'They are
dears!' They were the dearer for their fads and foibles.

Music harmonized them. Music, strangely, put the spell on Colney Durance,
the sayer of bitter things, manufacturer of prickly balls, in the form of
Discord's apples of whom Fenellan remarked, that he took to his music
like an angry little boy to his barley-sugar, with a growl and a grunt.
All these diverse friends could meet and mix in Victor's Concert-room
with an easy homely recognition of one another's musical qualities, at
times enthusiastic; and their natural divergencies and occasional clashes
added a salient tastiness to the group of whom Nesta could say: 'Mama,
was there ever such a collection of dear good souls with such contrary
minds?' Her mother had the deepest of reasons for loving them, so as not
to wish to see the slightest change in their minds, that the accustomed
features making her nest of homeliness and real peace might be retained,
with the humour of their funny silly antagonisms and the subsequent march
in concord; excepting solely as regarded the perverseness of Priscilla
Graves in her open contempt of Mr. Pempton's innocent two or three
wine-glasses. The vegetarian gentleman's politeness forbore to direct
attention to the gobbets of meat Priscilla consumed, though he could
express disapproval in general terms; but he entertained sentiments as
warlike to the lady's habit of 'drinking the blood of animals.' The
mockery of it was, that Priscilla liked Mr. Pempton and admired his
violoncello-playing, and he was unreserved in eulogy of her person and
her pure soprano tones. Nataly was a poetic match-maker. Mr. Peridon was
intended for Mademoiselle de Seilles, Nesta's young French governess; a
lady of a courtly bearing, with placid speculation in the eyes she cast
on a foreign people, and a voluble muteness shadowing at intervals along
the line of her closed lips.

The one person among them a little out of tune with most, was Lady Grace
Halley. Nataly's provincial gentlewoman's traditions of the manners
indicating conduct, reproved unwonted licences assumed by Lady Grace;
who, in allusion to Hymen's weaving of a cousinship between the earldom
of Southweare and that of Cantor, of which Mr. Sowerby sprang, set her
mouth and fan at work to delineate total distinctions, as it were from
the egg to the empyrean. Her stature was rather short, all of it
conversational, at the eyebrows, the shoulders, the finger-tips, the
twisting shape; a ballerina's expressiveness; and her tongue dashed half
sentences through and among these hieroglyphs, loosely and funnily
candid. Anybody might hear that she had gone gambling into the City, and
that she had got herself into a mess, and that by great good luck she had
come across Victor Radnor, who, with two turns of the wrist, had plucked
her out of the mire, the miraculous man! And she had vowed to him, never
again to run doing the like without his approval.

The cause of her having done it, was related with the accompaniments;
brows twitching, flitting smiles, shrugs, pouts, shifts of posture: she
was married to a centaur; out of the saddle a man of wood, 'an excellent
man.' For the not colloquial do not commit themselves. But one wants a
little animation in a husband. She called on bell-motion of the head to
toll forth the utter nightcap negative. He had not any: out of the
saddle, he was asleep:--'next door to the Last Trump,' Colney Durance
assisted her to describe the soundest of sleep in a husband, after wooing
her to unbosom herself. She was awake to his guileful arts, and sailed
along with him, hailing his phrases, if he shot a good one; prankishly
exposing a flexible nature, that took its holiday thus in a grinding
world, among maskers, to the horrification of the prim. So to refresh
ourselves, by having publicly a hip-bath in the truth while we shock our
hearers enough to be discredited for what we reveal, was a dexterous
merry twist, amusing to her; but it was less a cynical malice than her
nature that she indulged, 'A woman must have some excitement.' The most
innocent appeared to her the Stock Exchange. The opinions of husbands who
are not summoned to pay are hardly important; they vary.

Colney helped her now and then to step the trifle beyond her stride, but
if he was humorous, she forgave; and if together they appalled the
decorous, it was great gain. Her supple person, pretty lips, the style
she had, gave a pass to the wondrous confidings, which were for masculine
ears, whatever the sex. Nataly might share in them, but women did not
lead her to expansiveness; or not the women of the contracted class: Miss
Graves, Mrs. Cormyn, and others at the Radnor Concerts. She had a special
consideration for Mademoiselle de Seilles, owing to her exquisite French,
as she said; and she may have liked it, but it was the young
Frenchwoman's air of high breeding that won her esteem. Girls were spring
frosts to her. Fronting Nesta, she put on her noted smile, or wood-cut of
a smile, with its label of indulgence; except when the girl sang. Music
she loved. She said it was the saving of poor Dudley. It distinguished
him in the group of the noble Evangelical Cantor Family; and it gave him
a subject of assured discourse in company; and oddly, it contributed to
his comelier air. Flute [This would be the German Blockeflute or our
Recorder. D.W.] in hand, his mouth at the blow-stop was relieved of its
pained updraw by the form for puffing; he preserved a gentlemanly high
figure in his exercises on the instrument, out of ken of all likeness to
the urgent insistency of Victor Radnor's punctuating trunk of the puffing
frame at almost every bar--an Apollo brilliancy in energetic pursuit of
the nymph of sweet sound. Too methodical one, too fiery the other.

In duets of Hauptmann's, with Nesta at the piano, the contrast of dull
smoothness and overstressed significance was very noticeable beside the
fervent accuracy of her balanced fingering; and as she could also flute,
she could criticize; though latterly, the flute was boxed away from lips
that had devoted themselves wholly to song: song being one of the
damsel's present pressing ambitions. She found nothing to correct in Mr.
Sowerby, and her father was open to all the censures; but her father
could plead vitality, passion. He held his performances cheap after the
vehement display; he was a happy listener, whether to the babble of his
'dear old Corelli,' or to the majesty of the rattling heavens and swaying
forests of Beethoven.

His air of listening was a thing to see; it had a look of disembodiment;
the sparkle conjured up from deeps, and the life in the sparkle, as of a
soul at holiday. Eyes had been given this man to spy the pleasures and
reveal the joy of his pasture on them: gateways to the sunny within,
issues to all the outer Edens. Few of us possess that double significance
of the pure sparkle. It captivated Lady Grace. She said a word of it to
Fenellan: 'There is a man who can feel rapture!' He had not to follow the
line of her sight: she said so on a previous evening, in a similar tone;
and for a woman to repeat herself, using the very emphasis, was quaint.
She could feel rapture; but her features and limbs were in motion to
designate it, between simply and wilfully; she had the instinct to be
dimpling, and would not for a moment control it, and delighted in its
effectiveness: only when observing that winged sparkle of eyes did an
idea of envy, hardly a consciousness, inform her of being surpassed; and
it might be in the capacity to feel besides the gift to express. Such a
reflection relating to a man, will make women mortally sensible that they
are the feminine of him.

'His girl has the look,' Fenellan said in answer.

She cast a glance at Nesta, then at Nataly.

And it was true, that the figure of a mother, not pretending to the
father's vividness, eclipsed it somewhat in their child. The mother gave
richness of tones, hues and voice, and stature likewise, and the thick
brown locks, which in her own were threads of gold along the brush from
the temples: she gave the girl a certain degree of the composure of
manner which Victor could not have bestowed; she gave nothing to clash
with his genial temper; she might be supposed to have given various
qualities, moral if you like. But vividness was Lady Grace's admirable
meteor of the hour: she was unable to perceive, so as to compute, the
value of obscurer lights. Under the charm of Nataly's rich contralto
during a duet with Priscilla Graves, she gesticulated ecstasies, and
uttered them, and genuinely; and still, when reduced to meditations, they
would have had no weight, they would hardly have seemed an apology for
language, beside Victor's gaze of pleasure in the noble forthroll of the
notes.

Nataly heard the invitation of the guests of the evening to Lakelands
next day.

Her anxieties were at once running about to gather provisions for the
baskets. She spoke of them at night. But Victor had already put the
matter in the hands of Madame Callet; and all that could be done, would
be done by Armandine, he knew. 'If she can't muster enough at home,
she'll be off to her Piccadilly shop by seven A.M. Count on plenty for
twice the number.'

Nataly was reposing on the thought that they were her friends, when
Victor mentioned his having in the afternoon despatched a note to his
relatives, the Duvidney ladies, inviting them to join him at the station
to-morrow, for a visit of inspection to the house of his building on his
new estate. He startled her. The Duvidney ladies were, to his knowledge,
of the order of the fragile minds which hold together by the cement of a
common trepidation for the support of things established, and have it not
in them to be able to recognize the unsanctioned. Good women, unworldly
of the world, they were perforce harder than the world, from being
narrower and more timorous.

'But, Victor, you were sure they would refuse!'

He answered: 'They may have gone back to Tunbridge Wells. By the way,
they have a society down there I want for Fredi. Sure, do you say, my
dear? Perfectly sure. But the accumulation of invitations and refusals in
the end softens them, you will see. We shall and must have them for
Fredi.'

She was used to the long reaches of his forecasts, his burning activity
on a project; she found it idle to speak her thought, that his ingenuity
would have been needless in a position dictated by plain prudence, and so
much happier for them.

They talked of Mrs. Burman until she had to lift a prayer to be saved
from darker thoughts, dreadfully prolific, not to be faced. Part of her
prayer was on behalf of Mrs. Burman, for life to be extended to her, if
the poor lady clung to life--if it was really humane to wish it for her:
and heaven would know: heaven had mercy on the afflicted.

Nataly heard the snuffle of hypocrisy in her prayer. She had to cease to
pray.




CHAPTER IX

AN INSPECTION OF LAKELANDS

One may not have an intention to flourish, and may be pardoned for a
semblance of it, in exclaiming, somewhat royally, as creator and owner of
the place: 'There you see Lakelands.'

The conveyances from the railway station drew up on a rise of road
fronting an undulation, where our modern English architect's fantasia in
crimson brick swept from central gables to flying wings, over pents,
crooks, curves, peaks, cowled porches, balconies, recesses, projections,
away to a red village of stables and dependent cottages; harmonious in
irregularity; and coloured homely with the greensward about it, the pines
beside it, the clouds above it. Not many palaces would be reckoned as
larger. The folds and swells and stream of the building along the roll of
ground, had an appearance of an enormous banner on the wind. Nataly
looked. Her next look was at Colney Durance. She sent the expected nods
to Victor's carriage. She would have given the whole prospect for the
covering solitariness of her chamber. A multitude of clashing sensations,
and a throat-thickening hateful to her, compelled her to summon so as to
force herself to feel a groundless anger, directed against none, against
nothing, perfectly crazy, but her only resource for keeping down the
great wave surgent at her eyes.

Victor was like a swimmer in morning sea amid the exclamations encircling
him. He led through the straight passage of the galleried hall, offering
two fair landscapes at front door and at back, down to the lake, Fredi's
lake; a good oblong of water, notable in a district not abounding in the
commodity. He would have it a feature of the district; and it had been
deepened and extended; up rose the springs, many ran the ducts. Fredi's
pretty little bathshed or bower had a space of marble on the three-feet
shallow it overhung with a shade of carved woodwork; it had a
diving-board for an eight-feet plunge; a punt and small row-boat of
elegant build hard by. Green ran the banks about, and a beechwood fringed
with birches curtained the Northward length: morning sun and evening had
a fair face of water to paint. Saw man ever the like for pleasing a
poetical damsel? So was Miss Fredi, the coldest of the party hitherto,
and dreaming a preference of 'old places' like Creckholt and Craye Farm,
'captured to be enraptured,' quite according to man's ideal of his
beneficence to the sex. She pressed the hand of her young French
governess, Louise de Seilles. As in everything he did for his girl,
Victor pointed boastfully to his forethought of her convenience and her
tastes: the pine-panels of the interior, the shelves for her books, pegs
to hang her favourite drawings, and the couch-bunk under a window to
conceal the summerly recliner while throwing full light on her book; and
the hearth-square for logs, when she wanted fire: because Fredi bathed in
any weather: the oaken towel-coffer; the wood-carvings of doves, tits,
fishes; the rod for the flowered silken hangings she was to choose, and
have shy odalisque peeps of sunny water from her couch.

'Fredi's Naiad retreat, when she wishes to escape Herr Strauscher or
Signor Ruderi,' said Victor, having his grateful girl warm in an arm;
'and if they head after her into the water, I back her to leave them
puffing; she's a dolphin. That water has three springs and gets all the
drainage of the upland round us. I chose the place chiefly on account of
it and the pines. I do love pines!'

'But, excellent man! what do you not love?' said Lady Grace, with the
timely hit upon the obvious, which rings.

'It saves him from accumulation of tissue,' said Colney.

'What does?' was eagerly asked by the wife of the homoeopathic Dr. John
Cormyn, a sentimental lady beset with fears of stoutness.

Victor cried: 'Tush; don't listen to Colney, pray.'

But she heard Colney speak of a positive remedy; more immediately
effective than an abjuration of potatoes and sugar. She was obliged by
her malady to listen, although detesting the irreverent ruthless man, who
could direct expanding frames, in a serious tone, to love; love
everybody, everything; violently and universally love; and so without
intermission pay out the fat created by a rapid assimilation of
nutriment. Obeseness is the most sensitive of our ailments: probably as
being aware, that its legitimate appeal to pathos is ever smothered in
its pudding-bed of the grotesque. She was pained, and showed it, and was
ashamed of herself for showing it; and that very nearly fetched the tear.

'Our host is an instance in proof,' Colney said. He waved hand at the
house. His meaning was hidden; evidently he wanted victims. Sight of
Lakelands had gripped him with the fell satiric itch; and it is a passion
to sting and tear, on rational grounds. His face meanwhile, which had
points of the handsome, signified a smile asleep, as if beneath a cloth.
Only those who knew him well were aware of the claw-like alertness under
the droop of eyelids.

Admiration was the common note, in the various keys. The station selected
for the South-eastward aspect of the dark-red gabled pile on its white
shell-terrace, backed by a plantation of tall pines, a mounded and
full-plumed company, above the left wing, was admired, in files and in
volleys. Marvellous, effectively miraculous, was the tale of the vow to
have the great edifice finished within one year: and the strike of
workmen, and the friendly colloquy with them, the good reasoning, the
unanimous return to duty; and the doubling, the trebling of the number of
them; and the most glorious of sights--O the grand old English working with
a will! as Englishmen do when they come at last to heat; and they
conquer, there is then nothing that they cannot conquer. So the conqueror
said.--And admirable were the conservatories running three long lines,
one from the drawing-room, to a central dome for tropical growths. And
the parterres were admired; also the newly-planted Irish junipers
bounding the West-walk; and the three tiers of stately descent from the
three green terrace banks to the grassy slopes over the lake. Again the
lake was admired, the house admired. Admiration was evoked for great
orchid-houses 'over yonder,' soon to be set up.

Off we go to the kitchen-garden. There the admiration is genial,
practical. We admire the extent of the beds marked out for asparagus, and
the French disposition of the planting at wide intervals; and the French
system of training peach, pear, and plum trees on the walls to win length
and catch sun, we much admire. We admire the gardener. We are induced
temporarily to admire the French people. They are sagacious in
fruit-gardens. They have not the English Constitution, you think rightly;
but in fruit-gardens they grow for fruit, and not, as Victor quotes a
friend, for wood, which the valiant English achieve. We hear and we see
examples of sagacity; and we are further brought round to the old
confession, that we cannot cook; Colney Durance has us there; we have not
studied herbs and savours; and so we are shocked backward step by step
until we retreat precipitately into the nooks where waxen tapers,
carefully tended by writers on the Press, light-up mysterious images of
our national selves for admiration. Something surely we do, or we should
not be where we are. But what is it we do (excepting cricket, of course)
which others cannot do? Colney asks; and he excludes cricket and
football.

An acutely satiric man in an English circle, that does not resort to the
fist for a reply to him, may almost satiate the excessive fury roused in
his mind by an illogical people of a provocative prosperity, mainly
tongueless or of leaden tongue above the pressure of their necessities,
as he takes them to be. They give him so many opportunities. They are
angry and helpless as the log hissing to the saw. Their instinct to make
use of the downright in retort, restrained as it is by a buttoned coat of
civilization, is amusing, inviting. Colney Durance allured them to the
quag's edge and plunged them in it, to writhe patriotically; and although
it may be said, that they felt their situation less than did he the venom
they sprang in his blood, he was cruel; he caused discomfort. But these
good friends about him stood for the country, an illogical country; and
as he could not well attack his host Victor Radnor, an irrational man, he
selected the abstract entity for the discharge of his honest spite.

The irrational friend was deeper at the source of his irritation than the
illogical old motherland. This house of Lakelands, the senselessness of
his friend in building it and designing to live in it, after experiences
of an incapacity to stand in a serene contention with the world he
challenged, excited Colney's wasp. He was punished, half way to frenzy
behind his placable demeanour, by having Dr. Schlesien for chorus. And
here again, it was the unbefitting, not the person, which stirred his
wrath. A German on English soil should remember the dues of a guest. At
the same time, Colney said things to snare the acclamation of an
observant gentleman of that race, who is no longer in his first
enthusiasm for English beef and the complexion of the women. 'Ah, ya, it
is true, what you say: "The English grow as fast as odders, but they grow
to corns instead of brains." They are Bull. Quaat true.' He bellowed on a
laugh the last half of the quotation.

Colney marked him. His encounters with Fenellan were enlivening
engagements and left no malice; only a regret, when the fencing passed
his guard, that Fenellan should prefer to flash for the minute. He would
have met a pert defender of England, in the person of Miss Priscilla
Graves, if she had not been occupied with observation of the bearing of
Lady Grace Halley toward Mr. Victor Radnor; which displeased her on
behalf of Mrs. Victor; she was besides hostile by race and class to an
aristocratic assumption of licence. Sparing Colney, she with some scorn
condemned Mr. Pempton for allowing his country to be ridiculed without a
word. Mr. Pempton believed that the Vegetarian movement was more
progressive in England than in other lands, but he was at the
disadvantage with the fair Priscilla, that eulogy of his compatriots on
this account would win her coldest approval. 'Satire was never an
argument,' he said, too evasively.

The Rev. Septimus Barmby received the meed of her smile, for saying in
his many-fathom bass, with an eye on Victor: 'At least we may boast of
breeding men, who are leaders of men.'

The announcement of luncheon, by Victor's butler Arlington, opportunely
followed and freighted the remark with a happy recognition of that which
comes to us from the hands of conquerors. Dr. Schlesien himself, no
antagonist to England, but like Colney Durance, a critic, speculated in
view of the spread of pic-nic provision beneath the great glass dome, as
to whether it might be, that these English were on another start out of
the dust in vigorous commercial enterprise, under leadership of one of
their chance masterly minds-merchant, in this instance: and be debated
within, whether Genius, occasionally developed in a surprising superior
manner by these haphazard English, may not sometimes wrest the prize from
Method; albeit we count for the long run, that Method has assurance of
success, however late in the race to set forth.

Luncheon was a merry meal, with Victor and Nataly for host and hostess;
Fenellan, Colney Durance, and Lady Grace Halley for the talkers. A gusty
bosom of sleet overhung the dome, rattled on it, and rolling Westward,
became a radiant mountain-land, partly worthy of Victor's phrase: 'A
range of Swiss Alps in air.'

'With periwigs Louis Quatorze for peaks,' Colney added.

And Fenellan improved on him: 'Or a magnified Bench of Judges at the
trial of your caerulean Phryne.'

The strip of white cloud flew on a whirl from the blue, to confirm it.

But Victor and Lady Grace rejected any play of conceits upon nature.
Violent and horrid interventions of the counterfeit, such mad similes
appeared to them, when pure coin was offered. They loathed the Rev.
Septimus Barmby for proclaiming, that he had seen 'Chapters of Hebrew
History in the grouping of clouds.'

His gaze was any one of the Chapters upon Nesta. The clerical gentleman's
voice was of a depth to claim for it the profoundest which can be thought
or uttered; and Nesta's tender youth had taken so strong an impression of
sacredness from what Fenellan called 'his chafer tones,' that her looks
were often given him in gratitude, for the mere sound. Nataly also had
her sense of safety in acquiescing to such a voice coming from such a
garb. Consequently, whenever Fenellan and Colney were at him, drawing him
this way and that for utterances cathedral in sentiment and sonorousness,
these ladies shed protecting beams; insomuch that he was inspired to the
agreeable conceptions whereof frequently rash projects are an issue.

Touching the neighbours of Lakelands, they were principally enriched
merchants, it appeared; a snippet or two of the fringe of aristocracy lay
here and there among them; and one racy-of-the-soil old son of Thames,
having the manners proper to last century's yeoman. Mr. Pempton knew
something of this quaint Squire of Hefferstone, Beaves Urmsing by name; a
ruddy man, right heartily Saxon; a still glowing brand amid the ashes of
the Heptarchy hearthstone; who had a song, The Marigolds, which he would
troll out for you anywhere, on any occasion. To have so near to the
metropolis one from the centre of the venerable rotundity of the country,
was rare. Victor exclaimed 'Come!' in ravishment over the picturesqueness
of a neighbour carrying imagination away to the founts of England; and
his look at Nataly proposed. Her countenance was inapprehensive. He
perceived resistance, and said: 'I have met two or three of them in the
train: agreeable men: Gladding, the banker; a General Fanning; that man
Blathenoy, great billbroker. But the fact is, close on London, we're
independent of neighbours; we mean to be. Lakelands and London
practically join.'

'The mother city becoming the suburb,' murmured Colney, in report of the
union.

'You must expect to be invaded, sir,' said Mr. Sowerby; and Victor
shrugged: 'We are pretty safe.'

'The lock of a door seems a potent security until some one outside is
heard fingering the handle nigh midnight,' Fenellan threw out his airy
nothing of a remark.

It struck on Nataly's heart. 'So you will not let us be lonely here,' she
said to her guests.

The Rev. Septimus Barmby was mouthpiece for congregations. Sound of a
subterranean roar, with a blast at the orifice, informed her of their
'very deep happiness in the privilege.'

He comforted her. Nesta smiled on him thankfully.

'Don't imagine, Mrs. Victor, that you can be shut off from neighbours, in
a house like this; and they have a claim,' said Lady Grace, quitting the
table.

Fenellan and Colney thought so:

'Like mice at a cupboard.'

'Beetles in a kitchen.'

'No, no-no, no!' Victor shook head, pitiful over the good people likened
to things unclean, and royally upraising them: in doing which, he
scattered to vapour the leaden incubi they had been upon his flatter
moods of late. 'No, but it's a rapture to breathe the air here!' His
lifted chest and nostrils were for the encouragement of Nataly to soar
beside him.

She summoned her smile and nodded.

He spoke aside to Lady Grace: 'The dear soul wants time to compose
herself after a grand surprise.'

She replied: 'I think I could soon be reconciled. How much land?'

'In treaty for some hundred and eighty or ninety acres . . . in all at
present three hundred and seventy, including plantations, lake,
outhouses.'

'Large enough; land paying as it does--that is, not paying. We shall be
having to gamble in the City systematically for subsistence.'

'You will not so much as jest on the subject.'

Coming from such a man, that was clear sky thunder. The lady played it
off in a shadowy pout and shrug while taking a stamp of his
masterfulness, not so volatile.

She said to Nataly: 'Our place in Worcestershire is about half the size,
if as much. Large enough when we're not crowded out with gout and can
open to no one. Some day you will visit us, I hope.'

'You we count on here, Lady Grace.'

It was an over-accentuated response; unusual with this well-bred woman;
and a bit of speech that does not flow, causes us to speculate. The lady
resumed: 'I value the favour. We're in a horsey-doggy-foxy circle down
there. We want enlivening. If we had your set of musicians and talkers!'

Nataly smiled in vacuous kindness, at a loss for the retort of a
compliment to a person she measured. Lady Grace also was an amiable
hostile reviewer. Each could see, to have cited in the other, defects
common to the lower species of the race, admitting a superior personal
quality or two; which might be pleaded in extenuation; and if the apology
proved too effective, could be dispersed by insistence upon it, under an
implied appeal to benevolence. When we have not a liking for the creature
whom we have no plain cause to dislike, we are minutely just.

During the admiratory stroll along the ground-floor rooms, Colney Durance
found himself beside Dr. Schlesien; the latter smoking, striding,
emphasizing, but bearable, as the one of the party who was not
perpetually at the gape in laudation. Colney was heard to say: 'No doubt:
the German is the race the least mixed in Europe: it might challenge
aboriginals for that. Oddly, it has invented the Cyclopaedia for
knowledge, the sausage for nutrition! How would you explain it?'

Dr. Schlesien replied with an Atlas shrug under fleabite to the
insensately infantile interrogation.

He in turn was presently heard.

'But, my good sir! you quote me your English Latin. I must beg of you you
write it down. It is orally incomprehensible to Continentals.'

'We are Islanders!' Colney shrugged in languishment.

'Oh, you do great things . . .' Dr. Schlesien rejoined in kindness,
making his voice a musical intimation of the smallness of the things.

'We build great houses, to employ our bricks'

'No, Colney, to live in,' said Victor.

'Scarcely long enough to warm them.'

'What do you . . . fiddle!'

'They are not Hohenzollerns!'

'It is true,' Dr. Schlesien called. 'No, but you learn discipline; you
build. I say wid you, not Hohenzollerns you build! But you shall look
above: Eyes up. Ire necesse est. Good, but mount; you come to something.
Have ideas.'

'Good, but when do we reach your level?'

'Sir, I do not say more than that we do not want instruction from
foreigners.'

'Pupil to paedagogue indeed. You have the wreath in Music, in
Jurisprudence, Chemistry, Scholarship, Beer, Arms, Manners.'

Dr. Schlesien puffed a tempest of tobacco and strode.

'He is chiselling for wit in the Teutonic block,' Colney said, falling
back to Fenellan.

Fenellan observed: 'You might have credited him with the finished
sculpture.'

'They're ahead of us in sticking at the charge of wit.'

'They've a widening of their swallow since Versailles.'

'Manners?'

'Well, that's a tight cravat for the Teutonic thrapple! But he's off by
himself to loosen it.'

Victor came on the couple testily. 'What are you two concocting! I say,
do keep the peace, please. An excellent good fellow; better up in
politics than any man I know; understands music; means well, you can see.
You two hate a man at all serious. And he doesn't bore with his
knowledge. A scholar too.'

'If he'll bring us the atmosphere of the groves of Academe, he may swing
his ferule pickled in himself, and welcome,' said Fenellan.

'Yes!' Victor nodded at a recognized antagonism in Fenellan; 'but
Colney's always lifting the Germans high above us.'

'It's to exercise his muscles.'

Victor headed to the other apartments, thinking that the Rev. Septimus
and young Sowerby, Old England herself, were spared by the diversion of
these light skirmishing shots from their accustomed victims to the
'masculine people of our time. His friends would want a drilling to be of
aid to him in his campaign to come. For it was one, and a great one. He
remembered his complete perception of the plan, all the elements of it,
the forward whirling of it, just before the fall on London Bridge. The
greatness of his enterprise laid such hold of him that the smallest of
obstacles had a villanous aspect; and when, as anticipated, Colney and
Fenellan were sultry flies for whomsoever they could fret, he was blind
to the reading of absurdities which caused Fredi's eyes to stream and
Lady Grace beside him to stand awhile and laugh out her fit. Young
Sowerby appeared forgiving enough--he was a perfect gentleman: but
Fredi's appalling sense of fun must try him hard. And those young fellows
are often more wounded by a girl's thoughtless laughter than by a man's
contempt. Nataly should have protected him. Her face had the air of a
smiling general satisfaction; sign of a pleasure below the mark required;
sign too of a sleepy partner for a battle. Even in the wonderful kitchen,
arched and pillared (where the explanation came to Nesta of Madame
Callet's frequent leave of absence of late, when an inferior dinner
troubled her father in no degree), even there his Nataly listened to the
transports of the guests with benign indulgence.

'Mama!' said Nesta, ready to be entranced by kitchens in her bubbling
animation: she meant the recalling of instances of the conspirator her
father had been.

'You none of you guessed Armandine's business!' Victor cried, in a glee
that pushed to make the utmost of this matter and count against chagrin.
'She was off to Paris; went to test the last inventions:--French brains
are always alert:--and in fact, those kitchen-ranges, gas and coal, and
the apparatus for warming plates and dishes, the whole of the battery is
on the model of the Duc d'Ariane's--finest in Europe. Well,' he agreed
with Colney, 'to say France is enough.'

Mr. Pempton spoke to Miss Graves of the task for a woman to conduct a
command so extensive. And, as when an inoffensive wayfarer has chanced to
set foot near a wasp's nest, out on him came woman and her champions, the
worthy and the sham, like a blast of powder.

Victor ejaculated: 'Armandine!' Whoever doubted her capacity, knew not
Armandine; or not knowing Armandine, knew not the capacity in women.

With that utterance of her name, he saw the orangey spot on London
Bridge, and the sinking Tower and masts and funnels, and the rising of
them, on his return to his legs; he recollected, that at the very edge of
the fall he had Armandine strongly in his mind. She was to do her part:
Fenellan and Colney on the surface, she below: and hospitality was to do
its part, and music was impressed--the innocent Concerts; his wealth, all
his inventiveness were to serve;--and merely to attract and win the
tastes of people, for a social support to Lakelands! Merely that? Much
more:--if Nataly's coldness to the place would but allow him to form an
estimate of how much. At the same time, being in the grasp of his present
disappointment, he perceived a meanness in the result, that was
astonishing and afflicting. He had not ever previously felt imagination
starving at the vision of success. Victor had yet to learn, that the man
with a material object in aim, is the man of his object; and the nearer
to his mark, often the farther is he from a sober self; he is more the
arrow of his bow than bow to his arrow. This we pay for scheming: and
success is costly; we find we have pledged the better half of ourselves
to clutch it; not to be redeemed with the whole handful of our prize! He
was, however, learning after his leaping fashion. Nataly's defective
sympathy made him look at things through the feelings she depressed. A
shadow of his missed Idea on London Bridge seemed to cross him from the
close flapping of a wing within reach. He could say only, that it would,
if caught, have been an answer to the thought disturbing him.

Nataly drew Colney Durance with her eyes to step beside her, on the
descent to the terrace. Little Skepsey hove in sight, coming swift as the
point of an outrigger over the flood.




CHAPTER X

SKEPSEY IN MOTION

The bearer of his master's midday letters from London shot beyond Nataly
as soon as seen, with an apparent snap of his body in passing. He steamed
to the end of the terrace and delivered the packet, returning at the same
rate of speed, to do proper homage to the lady he so much respected. He
had left the railway-station on foot instead of taking a fly, because of
a calculation that he would save three minutes; which he had not lost for
having to come through the raincloud. 'Perhaps the contrary,' Skepsey
said: it might be judged to have accelerated his course: and his hat
dripped, and his coat shone, and he soaped his hands, cheerful as an
ouzel-cock when the sun is out again.

'Many cracked crowns lately, in the Manly Art?' Colney inquired of him.
And Skepsey answered with precision of statement: 'Crowns, no, sir; the
nose, it may happen; but it cannot be said to be the rule.'

'You are of opinion, that the practice of Scientific Pugilism offers us
compensation for the broken bridge of a nose?'

'In an increase of manly self-esteem: I do, sir, yes.'

Skepsey was shy of this gentleman's bite; and he fancied his defence had
been correct. Perceiving a crumple of the lips of Mr. Durance, he took
the attitude of a watchful dubiety.

'But, my goodness, you are wet through!' cried Nataly, reproaching
herself for the tardy compassion; and Nesta ran up to them and heaped a
thousand pities on her 'poor dear Skip,' and drove him in beneath the
glass-dome to the fragments of pic-nic, and poured champagne for him,
'lest his wife should have to doctor him for a cold,' and poured afresh,
when he had obeyed her: 'for the toasting of Lakelands, dear Skepsey!'
impossible to resist: so he drank, and blinked; and was then told, that
before using his knife and fork he must betake himself to some fire of
shavings and chips, where coffee was being made, for the purpose of
drying his clothes. But this he would not hear of: he was pledged to
business, to convey his master's letters, and he might have to catch a
train by the last quarter-minute, unless it was behind the time-tables;
he must hold himself ready to start. Entreated, adjured, commanded,
Skepsey commiseratingly observed to Colney Durance, 'The ladies do not
understand, sir!' For Turk of Constantinople had never a more haremed
opinion of the unfitness of women in the brave world of action. The
persistence of these ladies endeavouring to obstruct him in the course of
his duty, must have succeeded save that for one word of theirs he had
two, and twice the promptitude of motion. He explained to them, as to
good children, that the loss of five minutes might be the loss of a Post,
the loss of thousands of pounds, the loss of the character of a Firm; and
he was away to the terrace. Nesta headed him and waved him back. She and
her mother rebuked him: they called him unreasonable; wherein they
resembled the chief example of the sex to him, in a wife he had at home,
who levelled that charge against her husband when most she needed
discipline: the woman laid hand on the very word legitimately his own for
the justification of his process with her.

'But, Skips! if you are ill and we have to nurse you!' said Nesta.

She forgot the hospital, he told her cordially, and laughed at the notion
of a ducking producing a cold or a cold a fever, or anything consumption,
with him. So the ladies had to keep down their anxious minds and allow
him to stand in wet clothing to eat his cold pie and salad.

Miss Priscilla Graves entering to them, became a witness that they were
seductresses for inducing him to drink wine--and a sparkling wine.

'It is to warm him,' they pleaded; and she said: 'He must be warm from
his walk'; and they said: 'But he is wet'; and said she, without a show
of feeling: 'Warm water, then'; and Skepsey writhed, as if in the grasp
of anatomists, at being the subject of female contention or humane
consideration. Miss Graves caught signs of the possible proselyte in him;
she remarked encouragingly:

'I am sure he does not like it; he still has a natural taste.'

She distressed his native politeness, for the glass was in his hand, and
he was fully aware of her high-principled aversion; and he profoundly
bowed to principles, believing his England to be pillared on them; and
the lady looked like one who bore the standard of a principle; and if we
slap and pinch and starve our appetites, the idea of a principle seems
entering us to support. Subscribing to a principle, our energies are
refreshed; we have a faith in the country that was not with us before the
act; and of a real well-founded faith come the glowing thoughts which we
have at times: thoughts of England heading the nations; when the smell of
an English lane under showers challenges Eden, and the threading of a
London crowd tunes discords to the swell of a cathedral organ. It may be,
that by the renunciation of any description of alcohol, a man will stand
clearer-headed to serve his country. He may expect to have a clearer
memory, for certain: he will not be asking himself, unable to decide,
whether his master named a Mr. Journeyman or a Mr. Jarniman, as the
person he declined to receive. Either of the two is repulsed upon his
application, owing to the guilty similarity of sounds but what we are to
think of is, our own sad state of inefficiency in failing to remember;
which accuses our physical condition, therefore our habits.--Thus the
little man debated, scarcely requiring more than to hear the right word,
to be a convert and make him a garland of the proselyte's fetters.

Destructively for the cause she advocated, Miss Priscilla gestured the
putting forth of an abjuring hand, with the recommendation to him, so to
put aside temptation that instant; and she signified in a very ugly jerk
of her features, the vilely filthy stuff Morality thought it, however
pleasing it might be to a palate corrupted by indulgence of the sensual
appetites.

But the glass had been handed to him by the lady he respected, who looked
angelical in offering it, divinely other than ugly; and to her he could
not be discourteous; not even to pay his homage to the representative of
a principle. He bowed to Miss Graves, and drank, and rushed forth;
hearing shouts behind him.

His master had a packet of papers ready, easy for the pocket.

'By the way, Skepsey,' he said, 'if a man named Jarniman should call at
the office, I will see him.'

Skepsey's grey eyes came out.

Or was it Journeyman, that his master would not see; and Jarniman that he
would?

His habit of obedience, pride of apprehension, and the time to catch the
train, forbade inquiry. Besides he knew of himself of old, that his
puzzles were best unriddled running.

The quick of pace are soon in the quick of thoughts.

Jarniman, then, was a man whom his master, not wanting to see, one day,
and wanting to see, on another day, might wish to conciliate: a case of
policy. Let Jarniman go. Journeyman, on the other hand, was nobody at
all, a ghost of the fancy. Yet this Journeyman was as important an
individual, he was a dread reality; more important to Skepsey in the
light of patriot: and only in that light was he permitted of a scrupulous
conscience and modest mind to think upon himself when the immediate
subject was his master's interests. For this Journeyman had not an excuse
for existence in Mr. Radnor's pronunciation: he was born of the buzz of a
troubled ear, coming of a disordered brain, consequent necessarily upon a
disorderly stomach, that might protest a degree of comparative innocence,
but would be shamed utterly under inspection of the eye of a lady of
principle.

What, then, was the value to his country of a servant who could not
accurately recollect his master's words! Miss Graves within him asked the
rapid little man, whether indeed his ideas were his own after draughts of
champagne.

The ideas, excited to an urgent animation by his racing trot, were a
quiverful in flight over an England terrible to the foe and dancing on
the green. Right so: but would we keep up the dance, we must be red iron
to touch: and the fighter for conquering is the one who can last and has
the open brain;--and there you have a point against alcohol. Yes, and
Miss Graves, if she would press it, with her natural face, could be
pleasant and persuasive: and she ought to be told she ought to marry, for
the good of the country. Women taking liquor: Skepsey had a vision of his
wife with rheumy peepers and miauly mouth, as he had once beheld the
creature:--Oh! they need discipline not such would we have for the
mothers of our English young. Decidedly the women of principle are bound
to enter wedlock; they should be bound by law. Whereas, in the opposing
case--the binding of the unprincipled to a celibate state--such a law
would have saved Skepsey from the necessitated commission of deeds of
discipline with one of the female sex, and have rescued his progeny from
a likeness to the corn-stalk reverting to weed. He had but a son for
England's defence; and the frame of his boy might be set quaking by a
thump on the wind of a drum; the courage of William Barlow Skepsey would
not stand against a sheep; it would wind-up hares to have a run at him
out in the field. Offspring of a woman of principle! . . . but there is
no rubbing out in life: why dream of it? Only that one would not have
one's country the loser!

Dwell a moment on the reverse--and first remember the lesson of the
Captivity of the Jews and the outcry of their backsliding and
repentance:--see a nation of the honourably begotten; muscular men
disdaining the luxuries they will occasionally condescend to taste, like
some tribe in Greece; boxers, rowers, runners, climbers; braced,
indomitable; magnanimous, as only the strong can be; an army at word,
winning at a stroke the double battle of the hand and the heart: men who
can walk the paths through the garden of the pleasures. They receive
fitting mates, of a build to promise or aid in ensuring depth of chest
and long reach of arm for their progeny.

Down goes the world before them.

And we see how much would be due for this to a corps of ladies like Miss
Graves, not allowed to remain too long on the stalk of spinsterhood. Her
age might count twenty-eight: too long! She should be taught that men
can, though truly ordinary women cannot, walk these orderly paths through
the garden. An admission to women, hinting restrictions, on a ticket
marked 'in moderation' (meaning, that they may pluck a flower or fruit
along the pathway border to which they are confined), speedily, alas,
exhibits them at a mad scramble across the pleasure-beds. They know not
moderation. Neither for their own sakes nor for the sakes of Posterity
will they hold from excess, when they are not pledged to shun it.

The reason is, that their minds cannot conceive the abstract, as men do.

But there are grounds for supposing that the example before them of a sex
exercising self-control in freedom, would induce women to pledge
themselves to a similar abnegation, until they gain some sense of touch
upon the impalpable duty to the generations coming after us thanks to the
voluntary example we set them.

The stupendous task, which had hitherto baffled Skepsey in the course of
conversational remonstrances with his wife;--that of getting the Idea of
Posterity into the understanding of its principal agent, might then be
mastered.

Therefore clearly men have to begin the salutary movement: it manifestly
devolves upon them. Let them at once take to rigorous physical training.
Women under compulsion, as vessels: men in their magnanimity,
patriotically, voluntarily.

Miss Graves must have had an intimation for him; he guessed it; and it
plunged him into a conflict with her, that did not suffer him to escape
without ruefully feeling the feebleness of his vocabulary: and
consequently he made a reluctant appeal to figures, and it hung upon the
bolder exhibition of lists and tables as to whether he was beaten; and if
beaten, he was morally her captive; and this being the case, nothing
could be more repulsive to Skepsey; seeing that he, unable of his nature
passively or partially to undertake a line of conduct, beheld himself
wearing a detestable 'ribbon,' for sign of an oath quite needlessly sworn
(simply to satisfy the lady overcoming him with nimbler tongue), and
blocking the streets, marching in bands beneath banners, howling hymns.

Statistics, upon which his master and friends, after exchanging opinions
in argument, always fell back, frightened him. As long as they had no
opponents of their own kind, they swept the field, they were
intelligible, as the word 'principle' had become. But the appearance of
one body of Statistics invariably brought up another; and the strokes and
counterstrokes were like a play of quarter-staff on the sconce, to knock
all comprehension out of Skepsey. Otherwise he would not unwillingly have
inquired to-morrow into the Statistics of the controversy between the
waters of the wells and of the casks, prepared to walk over to the
victorious, however objectionable that proceeding. He hoped to question
his master some day except that his master would very naturally have a
tendency to sum-up in favour of wine--good wine, in moderation; just as
Miss Graves for the cup of tea--not so thoughtfully stipulating that it
should be good and not too copious. Statistics are according to their
conjurors; they are not independent bodies, with native colours; they
needs must be painted by the different hands they pass through, and they
may be multiplied; a nought or so counts for nothing with the teller.
Skepsey saw that. Yet they can overcome: even as fictitious battalions,
they can overcome. He shrank from the results of a ciphering match having
him for object, and was ashamed of feeling to Statistics as women to
giants; nevertheless he acknowledged that the badge was upon him, if Miss
Graves should beat her master in her array of figures, to insist on his
wearing it, as she would, she certainly would. And against his internal
conviction perhaps; with the knowledge that the figures were an
unfortified display, and his oath of bondage an unmanly servility, the
silliest of ceremonies! He was shockingly feminine to Statistics.

Mr. Durance despised them: he called them, arguing against Mr. Radnor,
'those emotional things,' not comprehensibly to Skepsey. But Mr. Durance,
a very clever gentleman, could not be right in everything. He made
strange remarks upon his country. Dr. Yatt attributed them to the state
of 'his digestion.

And Mr. Fenellan had said of Mr. Durance that, as 'a barrister wanting
briefs, the speech in him had been bottled too long and was an overripe
wine dripping sour drops through the rotten cork.' Mr. Fenellan said it
laughing, he meant no harm. Skepsey was sure he had the words. He heard
no more than other people hear; he remembered whole sentences, and many:
on one of his runs, this active little machine, quickened by motion to
fire, revived the audible of years back; whatever suited his turn of mind
at the moment rushed to the rapid wheels within him. His master's
business and friends, his country's welfare and advancement, these, with
records, items, anticipations, of the manlier sports to decorate, were
his current themes; all being chopped and tossed and mixed in salad
accordance by his fervour of velocity. And if you would like a further
definition of Genius, think of it as a form of swiftness. It is the
lively young great-grandson, in the brain, of the travelling force which
mathematicians put to paper, in a row of astounding ciphers, for the
motion of earth through space; to the generating of heat, whereof is
multiplication, whereof deposited matter, and so your chaos, your
half-lighted labyrinth, your, ceaseless pressure to evolvement; and then
Light, and so Creation, order, the work of Genius. What do you say?

Without having a great brain, the measure of it possessed by Skepsey was
alive under strong illumination. In his heart, while doing penance for
his presumptuousness, he believed that he could lead regiments of men. He
was not the army's General, he was the General's Lieutenant, now and then
venturing to suggest a piece of counsel to his Chief. On his own
particular drilled regiments, his Chief may rely; and on his knowledge of
the country of the campaign, roads, morasses, masking hills, dividing
rivers. He had mapped for himself mentally the battles of conquerors in
his favourite historic reading; and he understood the value of a plan,
and the danger of sticking to it, and the advantage of a big army for
flanking; and he manoeuvred a small one cunningly to make it a bolt at
the telling instant. Dartrey Fenellan had explained to him Frederick's
oblique attack, Napoleon's employment of the artillery arm preparatory to
the hurling of the cataract on the spot of weakness, Wellington's
parallel march with Marmont up to the hour of the decisive cut through
the latter at Salamanca; and Skepsey treated his enemy to the like,
deferentially reporting the engagement to a Chief whom his modesty kept
in eminence, for the receiving of the principal honours. As to his men,
of all classes and sorts, they are so supple with training that they
sustain a defeat like the sturdy pugilist a knock off his legs, and up
smiling a minute after--one of the truly beautiful sights on this earth!
They go at the double half a day, never sounding a single pair of bellows
among them. They have their appetites in full control, to eat when they
can, or cheerfully fast. They have healthy frames, you see; and as the
healthy frame is not artificially heated, it ensues that, under any title
you like, they profess the principles--into the bog we go, we have got
round to it!--the principles of those horrible marching and chanting
people!

Then, must our England, to be redoubtable to the enemy, be a detestable
country for habitation?

Here was a knot.

Skepsey's head dropped lower, he went as a ram. The sayings of Mr.
Durance about his dear England: that 'her remainder of life is in the
activity of her diseases'--that 'she has so fed upon Pap of Compromise as
to be unable any longer to conceive a muscular resolution': that 'she is
animated only as the carcase to the blow-fly'; and so forth:--charged on
him during his wrestle with his problem. And the gentlemen had said, had
permitted himself to say, that our England's recent history was a
provincial apothecary's exhibition of the battle of bane and antidote.
Mr. Durance could hardly mean it. But how could one answer him when he
spoke of the torpor of the people, and of the succeeding Governments as a
change of lacqueys--or the purse-string's lacqueys? He said, that Old
England has taken to the arm-chair for good, and thinks it her whole
business to pronounce opinions and listen to herself; and that, in the
face of an armed Europe, this great nation is living on sufferance. Oh!

Skepsey had uttered the repudiating exclamation.

'Feel quite up to it?' he was asked by his neighbour.

The mover of armed hosts for the defence of the country sat in a
third-class carriage of the train, approaching the first of the stations
on the way to town. He was instantly up to the level of an external
world, and fell into give and take with a burly broad communicative man;
located in London, but born in the North, in view of Durham cathedral, as
he thanked his Lord; who was of the order of pork-butcher; which
succulent calling had carried him down to near upon the borders of Surrey
and Sussex, some miles beyond the new big house of a Mister whose name he
had forgotten, though he had heard it mentioned by an acquaintance
interested in the gentleman's doings. But his object was to have a look
at a rare breed of swine, worth the journey; that didn't run to fat so
much as to flavour, had longer legs, sharp snouts to plump their hams;
over from Spain, it seemed; and the gentleman owning them was for selling
them, finding them wild past correction. But the acquaintance mentioned,
who was down to visit t' other gentleman's big new edifice in workmen's
hands, had a mother, who had been cook to a family, and was now widow of
a cook's shop; ham, beef, and sausages, prime pies to order; and a good
specimen herself; and if ever her son saw her spirit at his bedside,
there wouldn't be room for much else in that chamber--supposing us to
keep our shapes. But he was the right sort of son, anxious to push his
mother's shop where he saw a chance, and do it cheap; and those foreign
pigs, after a disappointment to their importer, might be had pretty
cheap, and were accounted tasty.

Skepsey's main thought was upon war: the man had discoursed of pigs.

He informed the man of his having heard from a scholar, that pigs had
been the cause of more bloody battles than any other animal.

How so? the pork-butcher asked, and said he was not much of a scholar,
and pigs might be provoking, but he had not heard they were a cause of
strife between man and man. For possession of them, Skepsey explained.
Oh! possession! Why, we've heard of bloody battles for the possession of
women! Men will fight for almost anything they care to get or call their
own, the pork-butcher said; and he praised Old England for avoiding war.
Skepsey nodded. How if war is forced on us? Then we fight. Suppose we are
not prepared?--We soon get that up. Skepsey requested him to state the
degree of resistance he might think he could bring against a pair of
skilful fists, in a place out of hearing of the police.

'Say, you!' said the pork-butcher, and sharply smiled, for he was a man
of size.

'I would give you two minutes,' rejoined Skepsey, eyeing him intently and
kindly: insomuch that it could be seen he was not in the conundrum vein.

'Rather short allowance, eh, master?' said the bigger man. 'Feel here';
he straightened out his arm and doubled it, raising a proud bridge of
muscle.

Skepsey performed the national homage to muscle.

'Twice that, would not help without the science,' he remarked, and let
his arm be gripped in turn.

The pork-butcher's throat sounded, as it were, commas and colons,
punctuations in his reflections, while he tightened fingers along the
iron lump. 'Stringy. You're a wiry one, no mistake.' It was encomium.
With the ingrained contempt of size for a smallness that has not yet
taught it the prostrating lesson, he said: 'Weight tells.'

'In a wrestle,' Skepsey admitted. 'Allow me to say, you would not touch
me.'

'And how do you know I'm not a trifle handy with the maulers myself?'

'You will pardon me for saying, it would be worse for you if you were.'

The pork-butcher was flung backward. 'Are you a Professor, may I
inquire?'

Skepsey rejected the title. 'I can engage to teach young men, upon a
proper observance of first principles.'

'They be hanged!' cried the ruffled pork-butcher. 'Our best men never got
it out of books. Now, you tell me--you've got a spiflicating style of
talk about you--no brag, you tell me--course, the best man wins, if you
mean that: now, if I was one of 'em, and I fetches you a bit of a flick,
how then? Would you be ready to step out with a real Professor?'

'I should claim a fair field,' was the answer, made in modesty.

'And you'd expect to whop me with they there principles of yours?'

'I should expect to.'

'Bang me!' was roared. After a stare at the mild little figure with the
fitfully dead-levelled large grey eyes in front of him, the pork-butcher
resumed: 'Take you for the man you say you be, you're just the man for my
friend Jam and me. He dearly loves to see a set-to, self the same. What
prettier? And if you would be so obliging some day as to favour us with a
display, we'd head a cap conformably, whether you'd the best of it,
according to your expectations, or t' other way:--For there never was
shame in a jolly good licking as the song says: that is, if you take it
and make it appear jolly good. And find you an opponent meet and fit,
never doubt. Ever had the worse of an encounter, sir?'

'Often, Sir.'

'Well, that's good. And it didn't destroy your confidence?'

'Added to it, I hope.'

At this point, it became a crying necessity for Skepsey to escape from an
area of boastfulness, into which he had fallen inadvertently; and he
hastened to apologize 'for his personal reference,' that was intended for
an illustration of our country caught unawares by a highly trained picked
soldiery, inferior in numbers to the patriotic levies, but sharp at the
edge and knowing how to strike. Measure the axe, measure the tree; and
which goes down first?

'Invasion, is it?--and you mean, we're not to hit back?' the pork-butcher
bellowed, and presently secured a murmured approbation from an audience
of three, that had begun to comprehend the dialogue, and strengthened him
in a manner to teach Skepsey the foolishness of ever urging analogies of
too extended a circle to close sharply on the mark. He had no longer a
chance, he was overborne, identified with the fated invader, rolled away
into the chops of the Channel, to be swallowed up entire, and not a rag
left of him, but John Bull tucking up his shirtsleeves on the shingle
beach, ready for a second or a third; crying to them to come on.

Warmed by his Bullish victory, and friendly to the vanquished, the
pork-butcher told Skepsey he should like to see more of him, and
introduced himself on a card Benjamin Shaplow, not far from the Bank.

They parted at the Terminus, where three shrieks of an engine, sounding
like merry messages of the damned to their congeners in the anticipatory
stench of the cab-droppings above, disconnected sane hearing; perverted
it, no doubt. Or else it was the stamp of a particular name on his mind,
which impressed Skepsey, as he bored down the street and across the
bridge, to fancy in recollection, that Mr. Shaplow, when reiterating the
wish for self and friend to witness a display of his cunning with the
fists, had spoken the name of Jarniman. An unusual name yet more than one
Jarniman might well exist. And unlikely that a friend of the pork-butcher
would be the person whom Mr. Radnor first prohibited and then desired to
receive. It hardly mattered:--considering that the Dutch Navy did really,
incredible as it seems now, come sailing a good way up the River Thames,
into the very main artery of Old England. And what thought the Tower of
it? Skepsey looked at the Tower in sympathy, wondering whether the Tower
had seen those impudent Dutch a nice people at home, he had heard. Mr.
Shaplow's Jarniman might actually be Mr. Radnor's, he inclined to think.
At any rate he was now sure of the name.




CHAPTER XI

WHEREIN WE BEHOLD THE COUPLE JUSTIFIED OF LOVE HAVING SIGHT OF THEIR
SCOURGE

Fenellan, in a musing exclamation, that was quite spontaneous, had put a
picture on the departing Skepsey, as observed from an end of the
Lakelands upper terrace-walk.

'Queer little water-wagtail it is!' And Lady Grace Halley and Miss Graves
and Mrs. Cormyn, snugly silken dry ones, were so taken with the pretty
likeness after hearing Victor call the tripping dripping creature the
happiest man in England, that they nursed it in their minds for a Bewick
tailpiece to the chapter of a pleasant rural day. It imbedded the day in
an idea that it had been rural.

We are indebted almost for construction to those who will define us
briefly: we are but scattered leaves to the general comprehension of us
until such a work of binding and labelling is done. And should the
definition be not so correct as brevity pretends to make it at one
stroke, we are at least rendered portable; thus we pass into the
conceptions of our fellows, into the records, down to posterity.
Anecdotes of England's happiest man were related, outlines of his
personal history requested. His nomination in chief among the
traditionally very merry Islanders was hardly borne out by the tale of
his enchainment with a drunken yokefellow--unless upon the Durance
version of the felicity of his countrymen; still, the water-wagtail
carried it, Skepsey trotted into memories. Heroes conducted up Fame's
temple-steps by ceremonious historians, who are studious, when the
platform is reached, of the art of setting them beneath the flambeau of a
final image, before thrusting them inside to be rivetted on their
pedestals, have an excellent chance of doing the same, let but the
provident narrators direct that image to paint the thing a moth-like
humanity desires, in the thing it shrinks from. Miss Priscilla Graves now
fastened her meditations upon Skepsey; and it was important to him.

Tobacco withdrew the haunting shadow of the Rev. Septimus Barmby from
Nesta. She strolled beside Louise de Seilles, to breathe sweet-sweet in
the dear friend's ear and tell her she loved her. The presence of the
German had, without rousing animosity, damped the young Frenchwoman, even
to a revulsion when her feelings had been touched by hearing praise of
her France, and wounded by the subjects of the praise. She bore the
national scar, which is barely skin-clothing of a gash that will not heal
since her country was overthrown and dismembered. Colney Durance could
excuse the unreasonableness in her, for it had a dignity, and she
controlled it, and quietly suffered, trusting to the steady, tireless,
concentrated aim of her France. In the Gallic mind of our time, France
appears as a prematurely buried Glory, that heaves the mound oppressing
breath and cannot cease; and calls hourly, at times keenly, to be
remembered, rescued from the pain and the mould-spots of that foul
sepulture. Mademoiselle and Colney were friends, partly divided by her
speaking once of revanche; whereupon he assumed the chair of the
Moralist, with its right to lecture, and went over to the enemy; his talk
savoured of a German. Our holding of the balance, taking two sides, is
incomprehensible to a people quivering with the double wound to body and
soul. She was of Breton blood. Cymric enough was in Nesta to catch any
thrill from her and join to her mood, if it hung out a colour sad or gay,
and was noble, as any mood of this dear Louise would surely be.

Nataly was not so sympathetic. Only the Welsh and pure Irish are quick at
the feelings of the Celtic French. Nataly came of a Yorkshire stock; she
had the bravery, humaneness and generous temper of our civilized North,
and a taste for mademoiselle's fine breeding, with a distaste for the
singular air of superiority in composure which it was granted to
mademoiselle to wear with an unassailable reserve when the roughness of
the commercial boor was obtrusive. She said of her to Colney, as they
watched the couple strolling by the lake below: 'Nesta brings her out of
her frosts. I suppose it's the presence of Dr. Schlesien. I have known it
the same after an evening of Wagner's music.'

'Richard Wagner Germanized ridicule of the French when they were down,'
said Colney. 'She comes of a blood that never forgives.'

'"Never forgives" is horrible to think of! I fancied you liked your
"Kelts," as you call them.'

Colney seized on a topic that shelved a less agreeable one that he saw
coming. 'You English won't descend to understand what does not resemble
you. The French are in a state of feverish patriotism. You refuse to
treat them for a case of fever. They are lopped of a limb: you tell them
to be at rest!'

'You know I am fond of them.'

'And the Kelts, as they are called, can't and won't forgive injuries;
look at Ireland, look at Wales, and the Keltic Scot. Have you heard them
talk? It happened in the year 1400: it's alive to them as if it were
yesterday. Old History is as dead to the English as their first father.
They beg for the privilege of pulling the forelock to the bearers of the
titles of the men who took their lands from them and turn them to the
uses of cattle. The Saxon English had, no doubt, a heavier thrashing than
any people allowed to subsist ever received: you see it to this day; the
crick of the neck at the name of a lord is now concealed and denied, but
they have it and betray the effects; and it's patent in their Journals,
all over their literature. Where it's not seen, another blood's at work.
The Kelt won't accept the form of slavery. Let him be servile, supple,
cunning, treacherous, and to appearance time-serving, he will always
remember his day of manly independence and who robbed him: he is the
poetic animal of the races of modern men.'

'You give him Pagan colours.'

'Natural colours. He does not offer the other cheek or turn his back to
be kicked after a knock to the ground. Instead of asking him to forgive,
which he cannot do, you must teach him to admire. A mercantile community
guided by Political Economy from the ledger to the banquet presided over
by its Dagon Capital, finds that difficult. However, there 's the secret
of him; that I respect in him. His admiration of an enemy or oppressor
doing great deeds, wins him entirely. He is an active spirit, not your
negative passive letter-of-Scripture Insensible. And his faults, short of
ferocity, are amusing.'

'But the fits of ferocity!'

'They are inconscient, real fits. They come of a hot nerve. He is
manageable, sober too, when his mind is charged. As to the French people,
they are the most mixed of any European nation; so they are packed with
contrasts: they are full of sentiment, they are sharply logical;
free-thinkers, devotees; affectionate, ferocious; frivolous, tenacious;
the passion of the season operating like sun or moon on these qualities;
and they can reach to ideality out of sensualism. Below your level,
they're above it: a paradox is at home with them!'

'My friend, you speak seriously--an unusual compliment,' Nataly said, and
ungratefully continued: 'You know what is occupying me. I want your
opinion. I guess it. I want to hear--a mean thirst perhaps, and you would
pay me any number of compliments to avoid the subject; but let me
hear:--this house!'

Colney shrugged in resignation. 'Victor works himself out,' he replied.

'We are to go through it all again?'

'If you have not the force to contain him.'

'How contain him?'

Up went Colney's shoulders.

'You may see it all before you,' he said, 'straight as the Seine chaussee
from the hill of La Roche Guyon.'

He looked for her recollection of the scene.

'Ah, the happy ramble that year!' she cried. 'And my Nesta just seven. We
had been six months at Craye. Every day of our life together looks happy
to me, looking back, though I know that every day had the same troubles.
I don't think I'm deficient in courage; I think I could meet .... But the
false position so cruelly weakens me. I am no woman's equal when I have
to receive or visit. It seems easier to meet the worst in life-danger,
death, anything. Pardon me for talking so. Perhaps we need not have left
Craye or Creckholt . . . ?' she hinted an interrogation. 'Though I am not
sorry; it is not good to be where one tastes poison. Here it may be as
deadly, worse. Dear friend, I am so glad you remember La Roche Guyon. He
was popular with the dear French people.'

'In spite of his accent.'

'It is not so bad?'

'And that you'll defend!'

'Consider: these neighbours we come among; they may have heard . . .'

'Act on the assumption.'

'You forget the principal character. Victor promises; he may have learnt
a lesson at Creckholt. But look at this house he has built. How can
I--any woman--contain him! He must have society.'

'Paraitre!'

'He must be in the front. He has talked of Parliament.'

Colney's liver took the thrust of a skewer through it. He spoke as in
meditative encomium: 'His entry into Parliament would promote himself and
family to a station of eminence naked over the Clock Tower of the House.'

She moaned. 'At the vilest, I cannot regret my conduct--bear what I may.
I can bear real pain: what kills me is, the suspicion. And I feel it like
a guilty wretch! And I do not feel the guilt! I should do the same again,
on reflection. I do believe it saved him. I do; oh! I do, I do. I cannot
expect my family to see with my eyes. You know them--my brother and
sisters think I have disgraced them; they put no value on my saving him.
It sounds childish; it is true. He had fallen into a terrible black
mood.'

'He had an hour of gloom.'

'An hour!'

'But an hour, with him! It means a good deal.'

'Ah, friend, I take your words. He sinks terribly when he sinks at
all.--Spare us a little while.--We have to judge of what is good in the
circumstances: I hear your reply! But the principal for me to study is
Victor. You have accused me of being the voice of the enamoured woman. I
follow him, I know; I try to advise; I find it is wisdom to submit. My
people regard my behaviour as a wickedness or a madness. I did save him.
I joined my fate with his. I am his mate, to help, and I cannot oppose
him, to distract him. I do my utmost for privacy. He must entertain.
Believe me, I feel for them--sisters and brother. And now that my sisters
are married . . . My brother has a man's hardness.'

'Colonel Dreighton did not speak harshly, at our last meeting.'

'He spoke of me?'

'He spoke in the tone of a brother.'

'Victor promises--I won't repeat it. Yes, I see the house! There appears
to be a prospect, a hope--I cannot allude to it. Craye and Creckholt may
have been some lesson to him. Selwyn spoke of me kindly? Ah, yes, it is
the way with my people to pretend that Victor has been the ruin of me,
that they may come round to family sentiments. In the same way, his
relatives, the Duvidney ladies, have their picture of the woman
misleading him. Imagine me the naughty adventuress!'--Nataly falsified
the thought insurgent at her heart, in adding: 'I do not say I am
blameless.' It was a concession to the circumambient enemy, of whom even
a good friend was apart, and not better than a respectful emissary. The
dearest of her friends belonged to that hostile world. Only Victor, no
other, stood with her against the world. Her child, yes; the love of her
child she had; but the child's destiny was an alien phantom, looking at
her with harder eyes than she had vision of in her family. She did not
say she was blameless, did not affect the thought. She would have wished
to say, for small encouragement she would have said, that her case could
be pleaded.

Colney's features were not inviting, though the expression was not
repellent. She sighed deeply; and to count on something helpful by
mentioning it, reverted to the 'prospect' which there appeared to be.
'Victor speaks of the certainty of his release.'

His release! Her language pricked a satirist's gallbladder. Colney
refrained from speaking to wound, and enjoyed a silence that did it.

'Do you see any possibility?--you knew her,' she said coldly.

'Counting the number of times he has been expecting the release, he is
bound to believe it near at hand.'

'You don't?' she asked: her bosom was up in a crisis of expectation for
the answer: and on a pause of half-a-minute, she could have uttered the
answer herself.

He perceived the insane eagerness through her mask, and despised it,
pitying the woman. 'And you don't,' he said. 'You catch at delusions, to
excuse the steps you consent to take. Or you want me to wear the
blinkers, the better to hoodwink your own eyes. You see it as well as I:
If you enter that house, you have to go through the same as at
Creckholt:--and he'll be the first to take fright.'

'He finds you in tears: he is immensely devoted; he flings up all to
protect "his Nataly."'

'No: you are unjust to him. He would fling up all:'--

'But his Nataly prefers to be dragged through fire? As you please!'

She bowed to her chastisement. One motive in her consultation with him
came of the knowledge of his capacity to inflict it and his honesty in
the act, and a thirst she had to hear the truth loud-tongued from him;
together with a feeling that he was excessive and satiric, not to be read
by the letter of his words: and in consequence, she could bear the lash
from him, and tell her soul that he overdid it, and have an
unjustly-treated self to cherish.--But in very truth she was a woman who
loved to hear the truth; she was formed to love the truth her position
reduced her to violate; she esteemed the hearing it as medical to her;
she selected for counsellor him who would apply it: so far she went on
the straight way; and the desire for a sustaining deception from the
mouth of a trustworthy man set her hanging on his utterances with an
anxious hope of the reverse of what was to come and what she herself
apprehended, such as checked her pulses and iced her feet and fingers.
The reason being, not that she was craven or absurd or paradoxical, but
that, living at an intenser strain upon her nature than she or any around
her knew, her strength snapped, she broke down by chance there where
Colney was rendered spiteful in beholding the display of her inconsequent
if not puling sex.

She might have sought his counsel on another subject, if a paralyzing
chill of her frame in the foreview of it had allowed her to speak: she
felt grave alarms in one direction, where Nesta stood in the eye of her
father; besides an unformed dread that the simplicity in generosity of
Victor's nature was doomed to show signs of dross ultimately, under the
necessity he imposed upon himself to run out his forecasts, and scheme,
and defensively compel the world to serve his ends, for the protection of
those dear to him.

At night he was particularly urgent with her for the harmonious duet in
praise of Lakelands; and plied her with questions all round and about it,
to bring out the dulcet accord. He dwelt on his choice of costly marbles,
his fireplace and mantelpiece designs, the great hall, and suggestions
for imposing and beautiful furniture; concordantly enough, for the large,
the lofty and rich of colour won her enthusiasm; but overwhelmingly to
any mood of resistance; and strangely in a man who had of late been
adopting, as if his own, a modern tone, or the social and literary hints
of it, relating to the right uses of wealth, and the duty as well as the
delight of living simply.

'Fredi was pleased.'

'Yes, she was, dear.'

'She is our girl, my love. "I could live and die here!" Live, she may.
There's room enough.'

Nataly saw the door of a covert communication pointed at in that remark.
She gathered herself for an effort to do battle.

'She's quite a child, Victor.'

'The time begins to run. We have to look forward now:--I declare, it's I
who seem the provident mother for Fredi!'

'Let our girl wait; don't hurry her mind to . . . She is happy with her
father and mother. She is in the happiest time of her life, before those
feelings distract.'

'If we see good fortune for her, we can't let it pass her.'

A pang of the resolution now to debate the case with Victor, which would
be of necessity to do the avoided thing and roll up the forbidden curtain
opening on their whole history past and prospective, was met in Nataly's
bosom by the more bitter immediate confession that she was not his match.
To speak would be to succumb; and shamefully after the effort; and
hopelessly after being overborne by him. There was not the anticipation
of a set contest to animate the woman's naturally valiant heart; he was
too strong: and his vividness in urgency overcame her in advance,
fascinated her sensibility through recollection; he fanned an
inclination, lighted it to make it a passion, a frenzied resolve--she
remembered how and when. She had quivering cause to remember the fateful
day of her step, in a letter received that morning from a married sister,
containing no word of endearment or proposal for a meeting. An
unregretted day, if Victor would think of the dues to others; that is,
would take station with the world to see his reflected position, instead
of seeing it through their self-justifying knowledge of the honourable
truth of their love, and pressing to claim and snatch at whatsoever the
world bestows on its orderly subjects.

They had done evil to no one as yet. Nataly thought that;
not-withstanding the outcry of the ancient and withered woman who bore
Victor Radnor's name: for whom, in consequence of the rod the woman had
used, this tenderest of hearts could summon no emotion. If she had it,
the thing was not to be hauled up to consciousness. Her feeling was, that
she forgave the wrinkled Malignity: pity and contrition dissolving in the
effort to produce the placable forgiveness. She was frigid because she
knew rightly of herself, that she in the place of power would never have
struck so meanly. But the mainspring of the feeling in an almost
remorseless bosom drew from certain chance expressions of retrospective
physical distaste on Victor's part;--hard to keep from a short utterance
between the nuptial two, of whom the unshamed exuberant male has found
the sweet reverse in his mate, a haven of heavenliness, to delight
in:--these conjoined with a woman's unspoken pleading ideas of her own,
on her own behalf, had armed her jealously in vindication of Nature.

Now, as long as they did no palpable wrong about them, Nataly could argue
her case in her conscience--deep down and out of hearing, where women
under scourge of the laws they have not helped decree may and do deliver
their minds. She stood in that subterranean recess for Nature against the
Institutions of Man: a woman little adapted for the post of revel; but to
this, by the agency of circumstances, it had come; she who was designed
by nature to be an ornament of those Institutions opposed them and
when thinking of the rights and the conduct of the decrepit
Legitimate--virulent in a heathen vindictiveness declaring itself
holy--she had Nature's logic, Nature's voice, for self-defence. It was
eloquent with her, to the deafening of other voices in herself, even to
the convincing of herself, when she was wrought by the fires within to
feel elementally. The other voices within her issued of the acknowledged
dues to her family and to the world--the civilization protecting women:
sentences thereanent in modern books and Journals. But the remembrance of
moods of fiery exaltation, when the Nature she called by name of Love
raised the chorus within to stop all outer buzzing, was, in a perpetual
struggle with a whirlpool, a constant support while she and Victor were
one at heart. The sense of her standing alone made her sway; and a
thought of differences with him caused frightful apprehensions of the
abyss.

Luxuriously she applied to his public life for witness that he had
governed wisely as well as affectionately so long; and he might
therefore, with the chorussing of the world of public men, expect a woman
blindfold to follow his lead. But no; we may be rebels against our time
and its Laws: if we are really for Nature, we are not lawless. Nataly's
untutored scruples, which came side by side with her ability to plead for
her acts, restrained her from complicity in the ensnaring of a young man
of social rank to espouse the daughter of a couple socially
insurgent-stained, to common thinking, should denunciation come. The
Nature upholding her fled at a vision of a stranger entangled. Pitiable
to reflect, that he was not one of the adventurer-lords of prey who hunt
and run down shadowed heiresses and are congratulated on their luck in a
tolerating country! How was the young man to be warned? How, under the
happiest of suppositions, propitiate his family! And such a family, if
consenting with knowledge, would consent only for the love of money. It
was angling with as vile a bait as the rascal lord's. Humiliation hung on
the scheme; it struck to scorching in the contemplation of it. And it
darkened her reading of Victor's character.

She did not ask for the specification of a 'good fortune that might
pass'; wishing to save him from his wonted twists of elusiveness, and
herself with him from the dread discussion it involved upon one point.

'The day was pleasant to all, except perhaps poor mademoiselle,' she
said.

'Peridon should have come?'

'Present or absent, his chances are not brilliant, I fear.'

'And Pempton and Priscy!'

'They are growing cooler!'

'With their grotesque objections to one another's habits at table!'

'Can we ever hope to get them over it?'

'When Priscy drinks Port and Pempton munches beef, Colney says.'

'I should say, when they feel warmly enough to think little of their
differences.'

'Fire smoothes the creases, yes; and fire is what they're both wanting
in. Though Priscy has Concert-pathos in her voice:--couldn't act a bit!
And Pempton's 'cello tones now and then have gone through me--simply from
his fiddle-bow, I believe. Don't talk to me of feeling in a couple,
within reach of one another and sniffing objections.--Good, then, for a
successful day to-day so far?'

He neared her, wooing her; and she assented, with a franker smile than
she had worn through the day.

The common burden on their hearts--the simple discussion to come of the
task of communicating dire actualities to their innocent Nesta--was laid
aside.




CHAPTER XII

TREATS OF THE DUMBNESS POSSIBLE WITH MEMBERS OF A HOUSEHOLD HAVING ONE
HEART

Two that live together in union are supposed to be intimate on every
leaf. Particularly when they love one another and the cause they have at
heart is common to them in equal measure, the uses of a cordial
familiarity forbid reserves upon important matters between them, as we
think; not thinking of an imposed secretiveness, beneath the false
external of submissiveness, which comes of an experience of repeated
inefficiency to maintain a case in opposition, on the part of the
loquently weaker of the pair. In Constitutional Kingdoms a powerful
Government needs not to be tyrannical to lean oppressively; it is more
serviceable to party than agreeable to country; and where the alliance of
men and women binds a loving couple, of whom one is a torrent of
persuasion, their differings are likely to make the other resemble a log
of the torrent. It is borne along; it dreams of a distant corner of the
way for a determined stand; it consents to its whirling in anticipation
of an undated hour when it will no longer be neutral.

There may be, moreover, while each has the key of the fellow breast, a
mutually sensitive nerve to protest against intrusion of light or sound.
The cloud over the name of their girl could now strike Nataly and Victor
dumb in their taking of counsel. She divined that his hint had encouraged
him to bring the crisis nearer, and he that her comprehension had become
tremblingly awake. They shrank, each of them, the more from an end
drawing closely into view. All subjects glooming off or darkening up to
it were shunned by them verbally, and if they found themselves entering
beneath that shadow, conversation passed to an involuntary gesture, more
explicit with him, significant of the prohibited, though not
acknowledging it.

All the stronger was it Victor's purpose, leaping in his fashion to the
cover of action as an escape from perplexity, to burn and scheme for the
wedding of their girl--the safe wedding of that dearest, to have her
protected, secure, with the world warm about her. And he well knew why
his Nataly had her look of a closed vault (threatening, if opened, to
thunder upon Life) when he dropped his further hints. He chose to call it
feminine inconsistency, in a woman who walked abroad with a basket of
marriage-ties for the market on her arm. He knew that she would soon have
to speak the dark words to their girl; and the idea of any doing of it,
caught at his throat. Reasonably she dreaded the mother's task;
pardonably indeed. But it is for the mother to do, with a girl. He
deputed it lightly to the mother because he could see himself stating the
facts to a son. 'And, my dear boy, you will from this day draw your five
thousand a year, and we double it on the day of your marriage, living at
Lakelands or where you will.'

His desire for his girl's protection by the name of one of our great
Families, urged him to bind Nataly to the fact, with the argument, that
it was preferable for the girl to hear their story during her green early
youth, while she reposed her beautiful blind faith in the discretion of
her parents, and as an immediate step to the placing of her hand in a
husband's. He feared that her mother required schooling to tell the story
vindicatingly and proudly, in a manner to distinguish instead of
degrading or temporarily seeming to accept degradation.

The world would weigh on her confession of the weight of the world on her
child; she would want inciting and strengthening, if one judged of her
capacity to meet the trial by her recent bearing; and how was he to do
it! He could not imagine himself encountering the startled, tremulous,
nascent intelligence in those pure brown darklashed eyes of Nesta; he
pitied the poor mother. Fancifully directing her to say this and that to
the girl, his tongue ran till it was cut from his heart and left to wag
dead colourless words.

The prospect of a similar business of exposition, certainly devolving
upon the father in treaty with the fortunate youth, gripped at his vitals
a minute, so intense was his pride in appearing woundless and scarless, a
shining surface, like pure health's, in the sight of men. Nevertheless he
skimmed the story, much as a lecturer strikes his wand on the prominent
places of a map, that is to show us how he arrived at the principal
point, which we are all agreed to find chiefly interesting. This with
Victor was the naming of Nesta's bridal endowment. He rushed to it. 'My
girl will have ten thousand a year settled on her the day of her
marriage.' Choice of living at Lakelands was offered.

It helped him over the unpleasant part of that interview. At the same
time, it moved him to a curious contempt of the youth. He had to
conjure-up an image of the young man in person, to correct the
sentiment:--and it remained as a kind of bruise only half cured.

Mr. Dudley Sowerby was not one of the youths whose presence would rectify
such an abstract estimate of the genus pursuer. He now came frequently of
an evening, to practise a duet for flutes with Victor;--a Mercadante,
honeyed and flowing; too honeyed to suit a style that, as Fenellan
characterized it to Nataly, went through the music somewhat like an
inquisitive tourist in a foreign town, conscientious to get to the end of
the work of pleasure; until the notes had become familiar, when it rather
resembled a constable's walk along the midnight streets into collision
with a garlanded roysterer; and the man of order and the man of passion,
true to the measure though they were, seeming to dissent, almost to
wrangle, in their different ways of winding out the melody, on to the
last movement; which was plainly a question between home to the strayed
reveller's quarters or off to the lockup. Victor was altogether the
younger of the two. But his vehement accompaniment was a tutorship; Mr.
Sowerby improved; it was admitted by Nesta and mademoiselle that he
gained a show of feeling; he had learnt that feeling was wanted. Passion,
he had not a notion of: otherwise he would not be delaying; the
interview, dramatized by the father of the young bud of womanhood, would
be taking place, and the entry into Lakelands calculable, for Nataly's
comfort, as under the aegis of the Cantor earldom. Gossip flies to a
wider circle round the members of a great titled family, is inaudible; or
no longer the diptherian whisper the commonalty hear of the commonalty:
and so we see the social uses of our aristocracy survive. We do not want
the shield of any family; it is the situation that wants it; Nataly ought
to be awake to the fact. One blow and we have silenced our enemy: Nesta's
wedding-day has relieved her parents.

Victor's thoughts upon the instrument for striking that, blow, led him to
suppose Mr. Sowerby might be meditating on the extent of the young lady's
fortune. He talked randomly of money, in a way to shatter Nataly's
conception of him. He talked of City affairs at table, as it had been his
practice to shun the doing; and hit the resounding note on mines, which
have risen in the market like the crest of a serpent, casting a certain
spell upon the mercantile understanding. 'Fredi's diamonds from her own
mine, or what once was--and she still reserves a share,' were to be shown
to Mr. Sowerby.

Nataly respected the young fellow for not displaying avidity at the
flourish of the bait, however it might be affecting him; and she fancied
that he did laboriously, in his way earnestly, study her girl, to sound
for harmony between them, previous to a wooing. She was a closer reader
of social character than Victor; from refraining to run on the broad
lines which are but faintly illustrative of the individual one in being
common to all--unless we have hit by chance on an example of the
downright in roguery or folly or simple goodness. Mr. Sowerby'g bearing
to Nesta was hardly warmed by the glitter of diamonds. His next visit
showed him livelier in courtliness, brighter, fresher; but that was
always his way at the commencement of every visit, as if his reflections
on the foregone had come to a satisfactory conclusion; and the labours of
the new study of the maiden ensued again in due course to deaden him.

Gentleman he was. In the recognition of his quality as a man of principle
and breeding, Nataly was condemned by thoughts of Nesta's future to
question whether word or act of hers should, if inclination on both sides
existed, stand between her girl and a true gentleman. She counselled
herself, as if the counsel were in requisition, to be passive; and so
doing, she more acutely than Victor--save in his chance
flashes--discerned the twist of her very nature caused by their false
position. And her panacea for ills, the lost little cottage, would not
have averted it: she would there have had the same coveting desire to
name a man of breeding, honour, station, for Nesta's husband. Perhaps in
the cottage, choosing at leisure, her consent to see the brilliant young
creature tied to the best of dull men would have been unready, without
the girl to push it. For the Hon. Dudley was lamentably her pupil in
liveliness; he took the second part, as it is painful for a woman with
the old-fashioned ideas upon the leading of the sexes to behold;
resembling in his look the deaf, who constantly require to have an
observation repeated; resembling the most intelligent of animals, which
we do not name, and we reprove ourselves for seeing likeness.

Yet the likeness or apparent likeness would suggest that we have not so
much to fear upon the day of the explanation to him. Some gain is there.
Shameful thought! Nataly hastened her mind to gather many instances or
indications testifying to the sterling substance in young Mr. Sowerby,
such as a mother would pray for her son-in-law to possess. She discovered
herself feeling as the burdened mother, not providently for her girl, in
the choice of a mate. The perception was clear, and not the less did she
continue working at the embroidery of Mr. Sowerby on the basis of his
excellent moral foundations, all the while hoping, praying, that he might
not be lured on to the proposal for Nesta. But her subservience to the
power of the persuasive will in Victor--which was like the rush of a
conflagration--compelled her to think realizingly of any scheme he
allowed her darkly to read.

Opposition to him, was comparable to the stand of blocks of timber before
flame. Colney Durance had done her the mischief we take from the
pessimist when we are overweighted: in darkening the vision of external
aid from man or circumstance to one who felt herself mastered. Victor
could make her treacherous to her wishes, in revolt against them, though
the heart protested. His first conquest of her was in her blood, to
weaken a spirit of resistance. For the precedent of submission is a charm
upon the faint-hearted through love: it unwinds, unwills them. Nataly
resolved fixedly, that there must be a day for speaking; and she had her
moral sustainment in the resolve; she had also a tormenting consciousness
of material support in the thought, that the day was not present, was
possibly distant, might never arrive. Would Victor's release come sooner?
And that was a prospect bearing resemblance to hopes of the cure of a
malady through a sharp operation.

These were matters going on behind the curtain; as wholly vital to her,
and with him at times almost as dominant, as the spiritual in memory,
when flesh has left but its shining track in dust of a soul outwritten;
and all their talk related to the purchase of furniture, the expeditions
to Lakelands, music, public affairs, the pardonable foibles of friends
created to amuse their fellows, operatic heroes and heroines, exhibitions
of pictures, the sorrows of Crowned Heads, so serviceable ever to mankind
as an admonition to the ambitious, a salve to the envious!--in fine,
whatsoever can entertain or affect the most social of couples,
domestically without a care to appearance. And so far they
partially--dramatically--deceived themselves by imposing on the world
while they talked and duetted; for the purchase of furniture from a
flowing purse is a cheerful occupation; also a City issuing out of
hospital, like this poor City of London, inspires good citizens to
healthy activity. But the silence upon what they were most bent on, had
the sinister effect upon Victor, of obscuring his mental hold of the
beloved woman, drifting her away from him. In communicating Fenellan's
news through the lawyer Carling of Mrs. Burman's intentions, he was aware
that there was an obstacle to his being huggingly genial, even candidly
genial with her, until he could deal out further news, corroborative and
consecutive, to show the action of things as progressive. Fenellan had
sunk into his usual apathy:--and might plead the impossibility of his
moving faster than the woman professing to transform herself into,
beneficence out of malignity;--one could hear him saying the words!
Victor had not seen him since last Concert evening, and he deemed it as
well to hear the words Fenellan's mouth had to say. He called at an early
hour of the Westward tidal flow at the Insurance Office looking over the
stormy square of the first of Seamen.




CHAPTER XIII

THE LATEST OF MRS. BURMAN

After cursory remarks about the business of the Office and his friend's
contributions to periodical literature, in which he was interested for as
long as he had assurance that the safe income depending upon official
duties was not endangered by them, Victor kicked his heels to and fro.
Fenellan waited for him to lead.

'Have you seen that man, her lawyer, again?'

'I have dined with Mr. Carling:--capital claret.'

Emptiness was in the reply.

Victor curbed himself and said: 'By the way, you're not likely to have
dealings with Blathenoy. The fellow has a screw to the back of a shifty
eye; I see it at work to fix the look for business. I shall sit on the
Board of my Bank. One hears things. He lives in style at Wrensham. By the
way, Fredi has little Mab Mountney from Creckholt staying with her. You
said of little Mabsy--"Here she comes into the room all pink and white,
like a daisy." She's the daisy still; reminds us of our girl at that
age.--So, then, we come to another dead block!'

'Well, no; it's a chemist's shop, if that helps us on,' said Fenellan,
settling to a new posture in his chair. 'She's there of an afternoon for
hours.'

'You mean it's she?'

'The lady. I 'll tell you. I have it from Carling, worthy man; and
lawyers can be brought to untruss a point over a cup of claret. He's a
bit of a "Mackenzie Man," as old aunts of mine used to say at home--a Man
of Feeling. Thinks he knows the world, from having sifted and sorted a
lot of our dustbins; as the modern Realists imagine it's an exposition of
positive human nature when they've pulled down our noses to the worst
parts--if there's a worse where all are useful: but the Realism of the
dogs is to have us by the nose:--excite it and befoul it, and you're
fearfully credible! You don't read that olfactory literature. However,
friend Carling is a conciliatory carle. Three or four days of the week
the lady, he says, drives to her chemist's, and there she sits in the
shop; round the corner, as you enter; and sees all Charing in the shop
looking-glass at the back; herself a stranger spectacle, poor lady, if
Carling's picture of her is not overdone; with her fashionable no-bonnet
striding the contribution chignon on the crown, and a huge square green
shade over her forehead. Sits hours long, and cocks her ears at orders of
applicants for drugs across the counter, and sometimes catches wind of a
prescription, and consults her chemist, and thinks she 'll try it
herself. It's a basket of medicine bottles driven to Regent's Park pretty
well every day.'

'Ha! Regent's Park!' exclaimed Victor, and shook at recollections of the
district and the number of the house, dismal to him. London buried the
woman deep until a mention of her sent her flaring over London. 'A
chemist's shop! She sits there?'

'Mrs. Burman. We pass by the shop.'

'She had always a turn for drugs.--Not far from here, did you say? And
every day! under a green shade?'

'Dear fellow, don't be suggesting ballads; we'll go now,' said Fenellan.
'It 's true it's like sitting on the banks of the Stygian waters.'

He spied at an obsequious watch, that told him it was time to quit the
office.

'You've done nothing?' Victor asked in a tone of no expectation.

'Only to hear that her latest medical man is Themison.'

'Where did you hear?'

'Across the counter of Boyle and Luckwort, the lady's chemists. I called
the day before yesterday, after you were here at our last Board Meeting.'

'The Themison?'

'The great Dr. Themison; who kills you kindlier than most, and is much in
request for it.'

'There's one of your echoes of Colney!' Victor cried. 'One gets dead sick
of that worn-out old jibeing at doctors. They don't kill, you know very
well. It 's not to their interest to kill. They may take the relish out
of life; and upon my word, I believe that helps to keep the patient
living!'

Fenellan sent an eye of discreet comic penetration travelling through his
friend.

'The City's mending; it's not the weary widow woman of the day when we
capsized the diurnal with your royal Old Veuve,' he said, as they trod
the pavement. 'Funny people, the English! They give you all the primeing
possible for amusement and jollity, and devil a sentry-box for the
exercise of it; and if you shake a leg publicly, partner or not, you're
marched off to penitence. I complain, that they have no philosophical
appreciation of human nature.'

'We pass the shop?' Victor interrupted him.

'You're in view of it in a minute. And what a square, for recreative
dancing! And what a people, to be turning it into a place of political
agitation! And what a country, where from morning to night it's an
endless wrangle about the first conditions of existence! Old Colney seems
right now and then: they 're the offspring of pirates, and they 've got
the manners and tastes of their progenitors, and the trick of quarrelling
everlastingly over the booty. I 'd have band-music here for a couple of
hours, three days of the week at the least; and down in the East; and
that forsaken North quarter of London; and the Baptist South too. But
just as those omnibus-wheels are the miserable music of this London of
ours, it 's only too sadly true that the people are in the first rumble
of the notion of the proper way to spend their lives. Now you see the
shop: Boyle and Luckwort: there.'

Victor looked. He threw his coat open, and pulled the waistcoat, and
swelled it, ahemming. 'That shop?' said he. And presently: 'Fenellan, I'm
not superstitious, I think. Now listen; I declare to you, on the day of
our drinking Old Veuve together last--you remember it,--I walked home up
this way across the square, and I was about to step into that identical
shop, for some household prescription in my pocket, having forgotten
Nataly's favourite City chemists Fenbird and Jay, when--I'm stating a
fact--I distinctly--I 'm sure of the shop--felt myself plucked back by
the elbow; pulled back the kind of pull when you have to put a foot
backward to keep your equilibrium.'

So does memory inspired by the sensations contribute an additional item
for the colouring of history.

He touched the elbow, showed a flitting face of crazed amazement in
amusement, and shrugged and half-laughed, dismissing the incident, as
being perhaps, if his hearer chose to have it so, a gem of the rubbish
tumbled into the dustcart out of a rather exceptional householder's
experience.

Fenellan smiled indulgently. 'Queer things happen. I recollect reading in
my green youth of a clergyman, who mounted a pulpit of the port where he
was landed after his almost solitary rescue from a burning ship at
midnight in mid-sea, to inform his congregation, that he had overnight of
the catastrophe a personal Warning right in his ear from a Voice, when at
his bed or bunk-side, about to perform the beautiful ceremony of
undressing: and the Rev. gentleman was to lie down in his full uniform,
not so much as to relieve himself of his boots, the Voice insisted twice;
and he obeyed it, despite the discomfort to his poor feet; and he jumped
up in his boots to the cry of Fire, and he got them providentially over
the scuffling deck straight at the first rush into the boat awaiting
them, and had them safe on and polished the day he preached the sermon of
gratitude for the special deliverance. There was a Warning! and it might
well be called, as he called it, from within. We're cared for, never
doubt. Aide-toi. Be ready dressed to help yourself in a calamity, or
you'll not stand in boots at your next Sermon, contrasting with the
burnt. That sounds like the moral.'

'She could have seen me,' Victor threw out an irritable suggestion. The
idea of the recent propinquity set hatred in motion.

'Scarcely likely. I'm told she sits looking on her lap, under the
beetling shade, until she hears an order for tinctures or powders, or a
mixture that strikes her fancy. It's possible to do more suicidal things
than sit the afternoons in a chemist's shop and see poor creatures get
their different passports to Orcus.'

Victor stepped mutely beneath the windows of the bellied glass-urns of
chemical wash. The woman might be inside there now! She might have seen
his figure in the shop-mirror! And she there! The wonder of it all seemed
to be, that his private history was not walking the streets. The thinness
of the partition concealing it, hardly guaranteed a day's immunity:
because this woman would live in London, in order to have her choice of a
central chemist's shop, where she could feed a ghastly imagination on the
various recipes . . . and while it would have been so much healthier for
her to be living in a recess of the country!

He muttered: 'Diseases--drugs!'

Those were the corresponding two strokes of the pendulum which kept the
woman going.

'And deadly spite.' That was the emanation of the monotonous horrible
conflict, for which, and by which, the woman lived.

In the neighbourhood of the shop, he could not but think of her through
the feelings of a man scorched by a furnace.

A little further on, he said: 'Poor soul!' He confessed to himself, that
latterly he had, he knew not why, been impatient with her, rancorous in
thought, as never before. He had hitherto aimed at a picturesque
tolerance of her vindictiveness; under suffering, both at Craye and
Creckholt; and he had been really forgiving. He accused her of dragging
him down to humanity's lowest.

But if she did that, it argued the possession of a power of a sort.

Her station in the chemist's shop he passed almost daily, appeared to him
as a sudden and a terrific rush to the front; though it was only a short
drive from the house in Regent's Park; but having shaken-off that house,
he had pushed it back into mists, obliterated it. The woman certainly had
a power.

He shot away to the power he knew of in himself; his capacity for winning
men in bodies, the host of them, when it came to an effort of his
energies: men and, individually, women. Individually, the women were to
be counted on as well; warm supporters.

It was the admission of a doubt that he might expect to enroll them
collectively. Eyeing the men, he felt his command of them. Glancing at
congregated women, he had a chill. The Wives and Spinsters in ghostly
judicial assembly: that is, the phantom of the offended collective woman:
that is, the regnant Queen Idea issuing from our concourse of civilized
life to govern Society, and pronounce on the orderly, the tolerable, the
legal, and banish the rebellious: these maintained an aspect of the stand
against him.

Did Nataly read the case: namely, that the crowned collective woman is
not to be subdued? And what are we to say of the indefinite but forcible
Authority, when we see it upholding Mrs. Burman to crush a woman like
Nataly!

Victor's novel exercises in reflection were bringing him by hard degrees
to conceive it to be the impalpable which has prevailing weight. Not many
of our conquerors have scored their victories on the road of that index:
nor has duration been granted them to behold the minute measure of value
left even tangible after the dust of the conquest subsides. The passing
by a shop where a broken old woman might be supposed to sit beneath her
green forehead-shade--Venetian-blind of a henbane-visage!--had
precipitated him into his first real grasp of the abstract verity: and it
opens on to new realms, which are a new world to the practical mind. But
he made no advance. He stopped in a fever of sensibility, to contemplate
the powerful formless vapour rolling from a source that was nothing other
than yonder weak lonely woman.

In other words, the human nature of the man was dragged to the school of
its truancy by circumstances, for him to learn the commonest of sums done
on a slate, in regard to payment of debts and the unrelaxing grip of the
creditor on the defaulter. Debtors are always paying like those who are
guilty of the easiest thing in life, the violation of Truth, they have
made themselves bondmen to pay, if not in substance, then in soul; and
the nipping of the soul goes on for as long as the concrete burden is
undischarged. You know the Liar; you must have seen him diminishing,
until he has become a face without features, withdrawn to humanity's
preliminary sketch (some half-dozen frayed threads of woeful outline on
our original tapestry-web); and he who did the easiest of things, he must
from such time sweat in being the prodigy of inventive nimbleness, up to
the day when he propitiates Truth by telling it again. There is a
repentance that does reconstitute! It may help to the traceing to springs
of a fable whereby men have been guided thus far out of the wood.

Victor would have said truly that he loved Truth; that he paid every debt
with a scrupulous exactitude: money, of course; and prompt apologies for
a short brush of his temper. Nay, he had such a conscience for the
smallest eruptions of a transient irritability, that the wish to say a
friendly mending word to the Punctilio donkey of London Bridge, softened
his retrospective view of the fall there, more than once. Although this
man was a presentation to mankind of the force in Nature which drives to
unresting speed, which is the vitality of the heart seen at its beating
after a plucking of it from the body, he knew himself for the reverse of
lawless; he inclined altogether to good citizenship. So social a man
could not otherwise incline. But when it came to the examination of
accounts between Mrs. Burman and himself, spasms of physical revulsion,
loathings, his excessive human nature, put her out of Court. To men, it
was impossible for him to speak the torments of those days of the
monstrous alliance. The heavens were cognizant. He pleaded his case in
their accustomed hearing:--a youngster tempted by wealth, attracted,
besought, snared, revolted, etc. And Mrs. Burman, when roused to
jealousy, had shown it by teazing him for a confession of his admiration
of splendid points in the beautiful Nataly, the priceless fair woman
living under their roof, a contrast of very life, with the corpse and
shroud; and she seen by him daily, singing with him, her breath about
him, her voice incessantly upon every chord of his being!

He pleaded successfully. But the silence following the verdict was heavy;
the silence contained an unheard thunder. It was the sound, as when out
of Court the public is dissatisfied with a verdict. Are we expected to
commit a social outrage in exposing our whole case to the
public?--Imagine it for a moment as done. Men are ours at a word--or at
least a word of invitation. Women we woo; fluent smooth versions of our
tortures, mixed with permissible courtship, win the individual woman. And
that unreasoning collective woman, icy, deadly, condemns the poor racked
wretch who so much as remembers them! She is the enemy of Nature.--Tell
us how? She is the slave of existing conventions.--And from what cause?
She is the artificial production of a state that exalts her so long as
she sacrifices daily and hourly to the artificial.

Therefore she sides with Mrs. Burman--the foe of Nature: who, with her
arts and gold lures, has now possession of the Law (the brass idol
worshipped by the collective) to drive Nature into desolation.

He placed himself to the right of Mrs. Burman, for the world to behold
the couple: and he lent the world a sigh of disgust.

What he could not do, as in other matters he did, was to rise above the
situation, in a splendid survey and rapid view of the means of reversing
it. He was too social to be a captain of the socially insurgent;
imagination expired.

But having a courageous Nataly to second him!--how then? It was the
succour needed. Then he would have been ready to teach the world that
Nature--honest Nature--is more to be prized than Convention: a new Era
might begin.

The thought was tonic for an instant and illuminated him springingly. It
sank, excused for the flaccidity by Nataly's want of common adventurous
daring. She had not taken to Lakelands; she was purchasing furniture from
a flowing purse with a heavy heart--unfeminine, one might say; she
preferred to live obscurely; she did not, one had to think--but it was
unjust: and yet the accusation, that she did not cheerfully make a strain
and spurt on behalf of her child, pressed to be repeated.

These short glimpses at reflection in Victor were like the verberant
twang of a musical instrument that has had a smart blow, and wails away
independent of the player's cunning hand. He would have said, that he was
more his natural self when the cunning hand played on him, to make him
praise and uplift his beloved: mightily would it have astonished him to
contemplate with assured perception in his own person the Nature he
invoked. But men invoking Nature, do not find in her the Holy Mother she
in such case becomes to her daughters, whom she so persecutes. Men call
on her for their defence, as a favourable witness: she is a note of their
rhetoric. They are not bettered by her sustainment; they have not, as
women may have, her enaemic aid at a trying hour. It is not an effort at
epigram to say, that whom she scourges most she most supports.

An Opera-placard drew his next remark to Fenellan.

'How Wagner seems to have stricken the Italians! Well, now, the Germans
have their Emperor to head their armies, and I say that the German
emperor has done less for their lasting fame and influence than Wagner
has done. He has affected the French too; I trace him in Gounod's Romeo
et Juliette--and we don't gain by it; we have a poor remuneration for the
melody gone; think of the little shepherd's pipeing in Mireille; and
there's another in Sapho-delicious. I held out against Wagner as long as
I could. The Italians don't much more than Wagnerize in exchange for the
loss of melody. They would be wiser in going back to Pergolese,
Campagnole. The Mefistofole was good--of the school of the foreign
master. Aida and Otello, no. I confess to a weakness for the old
barleysugar of Bellini or a Donizetti-Serenade. Aren't you seduced by
cadences? Never mind Wagner's tap of his paedagogue's baton--a cadence
catches me still. Early taste for barley-sugar, perhaps! There's a march
in Verdi's Attila and I Lombardi, I declare I'm in military step when I
hear them, as in the old days, after leaving the Opera. Fredi takes
little Mab Mountney to her first Opera to-night. Enough to make us old
ones envious! You remember your first Opera, Fenellan? Sonnambula, with
me. I tell you, it would task the highest poetry--say, require, if you
like--showing all that's noblest, splendidest, in a young man, to
describe its effect on me. I was dreaming of my box at the Opera for a
year after. The Huguenots to-night. Not the best suited for little Mabsy;
but she'll catch at the Rataplan. Capital Opera; we used to think it the
best, before we had Tannhauser and Lohengrin and the Meistersinger.'

Victor hinted notes of the Conspiration Scene closing the Third Act of
the Huguenots. That sombre Chorus brought Mrs. Burman before him. He
drummed the Rataplan, which sent her flying. The return of a lively
disposition for dinner and music completed his emancipation from the yoke
of the baleful creature sitting half her days in the chemist's shop; save
that a thought of drugs brought the smell, and the smell the picture; she
threatened to be an apparition at any moment pervading him through his
nostrils. He spoke to Fenellan of hunger for dinner, a need for it;
singular in one whose appetite ran to the stroke of the hour abreast with
Armandine's kitchen-clock. Fenellan proposed a glass of sherry and
bitters at his Club over the way. He had forgotten a shower of
black-balls (attributable to the conjurations of old Ate) on a certain
past day. Without word of refusal, Victor entered a wine-merchant's
office, where he was unknown, and stating his wish for bitters and dry
sherry, presently received the glass, drank, nodded to the administering
clerk, named the person whom he had obliged and refreshed, and passed
out, remarking to Fenellan: 'Colney on Clubs! he's right; they're the
mediaeval in modern times, our Baron's castles, minus the Baron; dead
against public life and social duties. Business excuses my City Clubs;
but I shall take my name off my Club up West.'

'More like monasteries, with a Committee for Abbot, and Whist for the
services,' Fenellan said. 'Or tabernacles for the Chosen, and Grangousier
playing Divinity behind the veil. Well, they're social.'

'Sectionally social, means anything but social, my friend. However--and
the monastery had a bell for the wanderer! Say, I'm penniless or
poundless, up and down this walled desert of a street, I feel, I must
feel, these palaces--if we're Christian, not Jews: not that the Jews are
uncharitable; they set an: example, in fact . . . . '

He rambled, amusingly to the complacent hearing of Fenellan, who thought
of his pursuit of wealth and grand expenditure.

Victor talked as a man having his mind at leaps beyond the subject. He
was nearing to the Idea he had seized and lost on London Bridge.

The desire for some good news wherewith to inspirit Nataly, withdrew him
from his ineffectual chase. He had nought to deliver; on the contrary, a
meditation concerning her comfort pledged him to concealment which was
the no step, or passive state, most abhorrent to him.

He snatched at the name of Themison.

With Dr. Themison fast in his grasp, there was a report of progress to be
made to Nataly; and not at all an empty report.

Themison, then: he leaned on Themison. The woman's doctor should have an
influence approaching to authority with her.

Land-values in the developing Colonies, formed his theme of discourse to
Fenellan: let Banks beware.

Fenellan saw him shudder and rub the back of his head. 'Feel the wind?'
he said.

Victor answered him with that humane thrill of the deep tones, which at
times he had: 'No: don't be alarmed; I feel the devil. If one has wealth
and a desperate wish, he will speak. All he does, is to make me more
charitable to those who give way to him. I believe in a devil.'

'Horns and tail?'

'Bait and hook.'

'I haven't wealth, and I wish only for dinner,' Fenellan said.

'You know that Armandine is never two minutes late. By the way, you
haven't wealth--you have me.'

'And I thank God for you!' said Fenellan, acutely reminiscent of his
having marked the spiritual adviser of Mrs. Burman, the Rev. Groseman
Buttermore, as a man who might be useful to his friend.




CHAPTER XIV

DISCLOSES A STAGE ON THE DRIVE TO PARIS

A fortnight later, an extremely disconcerting circumstance occurred:
Armandine was ten minutes behind the hour with her dinner. But the
surprise and stupefaction expressed by Victor, after glances at his
watch, were not so profound as Fenellan's, on finding himself exchangeing
the bow with a gentleman bearing the name of Dr. Themison. His friend's
rapidity in pushing the combinations he conceived, was known: Fenellan's
wonder was not so much that Victor had astonished him again, as that he
should be called upon again to wonder at his astonishment. He did; and he
observed the doctor and Victor and Nataly: aided by dropping remarks.
Before the evening was over, he gathered enough of the facts, and had to
speculate only on the designs. Dr. Themison had received a visit from the
husband of Mrs. Victor Radnor concerning her state of health. At an
interview with the lady, laughter greeted him; he was confused by her
denial of the imputation of a single ailment: but she, to recompose him,
let it be understood, that she was anxious about her husband's condition,
he being certainly overworked; and the husband's visit passed for a
device on the part of the wife. She admitted a willingness to try a
change of air, if it was deemed good for her husband. Change of air was
prescribed to each for both. 'Why not drive to Paris?' the doctor said,
and Victor was taken with the phrase.

He told Fenellan at night that Mrs. Burman, he had heard, was by the sea,
on the South coast. Which of her maladies might be in the ascendant, he
did not know. He knew little. He fancied that Dr. Themison was
unsuspicious of the existence of a relationship between him and Mrs.
Burman: and Fenellan opined, that there had been no communication upon
private affairs. What, then, was the object in going to Dr. Themison? He
treated her body merely; whereas the Rev. Groseman Buttermore could be
expected to impose upon her conduct. Fenellan appreciated his own
discernment of the superior uses to which a spiritual adviser may be put,
and he too agreeably flattered himself for the corrective reflection to
ensue, that he had not done anything. It disposed him to think a happy
passivity more sagacious than a restless activity. We should let Fortune
perform her part at the wheel in working out her ends, should we
not?--for, ten to one, nine times out of ten we are thwarting her if we
stretch out a hand. And with the range of enjoyments possessed by Victor,
why this unceasing restlessness? Why, when we are not near drowning,
catch at apparent straws, which may be instruments having sharp edges?
Themison, as Mrs. Burman's medical man, might tell the lady tales that
would irritate her bag of venom.

Rarely though Fenellan was the critic on his friend, the shadow cast over
his negligent hedonism by Victor's boiling pressure, drove him into the
seat of judgement. As a consequence, he was rather a dull table-guest in
the presence of Dr. Themison, whom their host had pricked to anticipate
high entertainment from him. He did nothing to bridge the crevasse and
warm the glacier air at table when the doctor, anecdotal intentionally to
draw him out, related a decorous but pungent story of one fair member of
a sweet new sisterhood in agitation against the fixed establishment of
our chain-mail marriage-tie. An anecdote of immediate diversion was
wanted, expected: and Fenellan sat stupidly speculating upon whether the
doctor knew of a cupboard locked. So that Dr. Themison was carried on by
Lady Grace Halley's humourous enthusiasm for the subject to dilate and
discuss and specify, all in the irony of a judicial leaning to the side
of the single-minded social adventurers, under an assumed accord with his
audience; concluding: 'So there's an end of Divorce.'

'By the trick of multiplication,' Fenellan, now reassured, was content to
say. And that did not extinguish the cracker of a theme; handled very
carefully, as a thing of fire, it need scarce be remarked, three young
women being present.

Nataly had eyes on her girl, and was pleased at an alertness shown by Mr.
Sowerby to second her by crossing the dialogue. As regarded her personal
feelings, she was hardened, so long as the curtains were about her to
keep the world from bending black brows of inquisition upon one of its
culprits. But her anxiety was vigilant to guard her girl from an infusion
of any of the dread facts of life not coming through the mother's lips:
and she was a woman having the feminine mind's pudency in that direction,
which does not consent to the revealing of much. Here was the mother's
dilemma: her girl--Victor's girl, as she had to think in this
instance,--the most cloudless of the young women of earth, seemed, and
might be figured as really, at the falling of a crumb off the table of
knowledge, taken by the brain to shoot up to terrific heights of
surveyal; and there she rocked; and only her youthful healthiness brought
her down to grass and flowers. She had once or twice received the
electrical stimulus, to feel and be as lightning, from a seizure of facts
in infinitesimal doses, guesses caught off maternal evasions or the
circuitous explanation of matters touching sex in here and there a
newspaper, harder to repress completely than sewer-gas in great cities:
and her mother had seen, with an apprehensive pang of anguish, how
witheringly the scared young intelligence of the innocent creature
shocked her sensibility. She foresaw the need to such a flameful soul, as
bride, wife, woman across the world, of the very princeliest of men in
gifts of strength, for her sustainer and guide. And the provident mother
knew this peerless gentleman: but he had his wife.

Delusions and the pain of the disillusioning were to be feared for the
imaginative Nesta; though not so much as that on some future day of a
perchance miserable yokemating--a subjection or an entanglement--the
nobler passions might be summoned to rise for freedom, and strike a line
to make their logically estimable sequence from a source not honourable
before the public. Constantly it had to be thought, that the girl was her
father's child.

At present she had no passions; and her bent to the happiness she could
so richly give, had drawn her sailing smoothly over the harbour-bar of
maidenhood; where many of her sisters are disconcerted to the loss of
simplicity. If Nataly with her sleepless watchfulness and forecasts
partook of the French mother, Nesta's Arcadian independence likened her
somewhat in manner to the Transatlantic version of the English girl. Her
high physical animation and the burden of themes it plucked for delivery
carried her flowing over impediments of virginal self-consciousness, to
set her at her ease in the talk with men; she had not gone through the
various Nursery exercises in dissimulation; she had no appearance of
praying forgiveness of men for the original sin of being woman; and no
tricks of lips or lids, or traitor scarlet on the cheeks, or assumptions
of the frigid mask, or indicated reserve-cajoleries. Neither ignorantly
nor advisedly did she play on these or other bewitching strings of her
sex, after the fashion of the stamped innocents, who are the boast of
Englishmen and matrons, and thrill societies with their winsome
ingenuousness; and who sometimes when unguarded meet an artful serenader,
that is a cloaked bandit, and is provoked by their performances, and
knows anthropologically the nature behind the devious show; a sciential
rascal; as little to be excluded from our modern circles as Eve's own old
deuce from Eden's garden whereupon, opportunity inviting, both the fool
and the cunning, the pure donkey princess of insular eulogy, and the sham
one, are in a perilous pass.

Damsels of the swiftness of mind of Nesta cannot be ignorant utterly amid
a world where the hints are hourly scattering seed of the inklings; when
vileness is not at work up and down our thoroughfares, proclaiming its
existence with tableau and trumpet. Nataly encountered her girl's
questions, much as one seeks to quiet an enemy. The questions had soon
ceased. Excepting repulsive and rejected details, there is little to be
learnt when a little is known: in populous communities, density only will
keep the little out. Only stupidity will suppose that it can be done for
the livelier young. English mothers forethoughtful for their girls, have
to take choice of how to do battle with a rough-and-tumble Old England,
that lumbers bumping along, craving the precious things, which can be had
but in semblance under the conditions allowed by laziness to subsist, and
so curst of its shifty inconsequence as to worship in the concrete an
hypocrisy it abhors in the abstract. Nataly could smuggle or confiscate
here and there a newspaper; she could not interdict or withhold every one
of them, from a girl ardent to be in the race on all topics of popular
interest: and the newspapers are occasionally naked savages; the streets
are imperfectly garmented even by day; and we have our stumbling social
anecdotist, our spot-mouthed young man, our eminently silly woman; our
slippery one; our slimy one, the Rahab of Society; not to speak of Mary
the maid and the footman William. A vigilant mother has to contend with
these and the like in an increasing degree. How best?

There is a method: one that Colney Durance advocated. The girl's
intelligence and sweet blood invited a trial of it. Since, as he argued,
we cannot keep the poisonous matter out, mothers should prepare and
strengthen young women for the encounter with it, by lifting the veil,
baring the world, giving them knowledge to arm them for the fight they
have to sustain; and thereby preserve them further from the spiritual
collapse which follows the nursing of a false ideal of our life in
youth:--this being, Colney said, the prominent feminine disease of the
time, common to all our women; that is, all having leisure to shine in
the sun or wave in the wind as flowers of the garden.

Whatever there was of wisdom in his view, he spoilt it for English
hearing, by making use of his dry compressed sentences. Besides he was a
bachelor; therefore but a theorist. And his illustrations of his theory
were grotesque; meditation on them extracted a corrosive acid to consume,
in horrid derision, the sex, the nation, the race of man. The satirist
too devotedly loves his lash to be a persuasive teacher. Nataly had
excuses to cover her reasons for not listening to him.

One reason was, as she discerned through her confusion at the thought,
that the day drew near for her speaking fully to Nesta; when, between
what she then said and what she said now, a cruel contrast might strike
the girl and in toneing revelations now, to be more consonant with them
then;--in softening and shading the edges of social misconduct, it seemed
painfully possible to be sowing in the girl's mind something like the
reverse of moral precepts, even to smoothing the way to a rebelliousness
partly or wholly similar to her own. But Nataly's chief and her appeasing
reason for pursuing the conventional system with this exceptional young
creature, referred to the sentiments on that subject of the kind of young
man whom a mother elects from among those present and eligible, as
perhaps next to worthy to wed the girl, by virtue of good promise in the
moral department. She had Mr. Dudley Sowerby under view; far from the man
of her choice and still the practice of decorum, discretion, a pardonable
fastidiousness, appears, if women may make any forecast of the behaviour
of young men or may trust the faces they see, to, promise a future
stability in the husband. Assuredly a Dudley Sowerby would be immensely
startled to find in his bride a young woman more than babily aware of the
existence of one particular form of naughtiness on earth.

Victor was of no help: he had not an idea upon the right education of the
young of the sex. Repression and mystery, he considered wholesome for
girls; and he considered the enlightening of them--to some extent--a
prudential measure for their defence; and premature instruction is a
fire-water to their wild-in-woods understanding; and histrionic innocence
is no doubt the bloom on corruption; also the facts of current human
life, in the crude of the reports or the cooked of the sermon in the
newspapers, are a noxious diet for our daughters; whom nevertheless we
cannot hope to be feeding always on milk: and there is a time when their
adorable pretty ignorance, if credibly it exists out of noodledom, is
harmful:--but how beautiful the shining simplicity of our dear young
English girls! He was one of the many men to whose minds women come in
pictures and are accepted much as they paint themselves. Like his
numerous fellows, too, he required a conflict with them, and a worsting
at it, to be taught, that they are not the mere live stock we scheme to
dispose of for their good: unless Love should interpose, he would have
exclaimed. He broke from his fellows in his holy horror of a father's
running counter to love. Nesta had only to say, that she loved another,
for Dudley Sowerby to be withdrawn into the background of aspirants. But
love was unknown to the girl.

Outwardly, the plan of the Drive to Paris had the look of Victor's
traditional hospitality. Nataly smiled at her incorrigibly lagging
intelligence of him, on hearing that he had invited a company: 'Lady
Grace, for gaiety; Peridon and Catkin, fiddles; Dudley Sowerby and
myself, flutes; Barmby, intonation; in all, nine of us; and by the dear
old Normandy route, for the sake of the voyage, as in old times; towers
of Dieppe in the morning-light; and the lovely road to the capital! Just
three days in Paris, and home by any of the other routes. It's the drive
we want. Boredom in wet weather, we defy; we have our Concert--an hour at
night and we're sure of sleep.' It had a sweet simple air, befitting him;
as when in bygone days they travelled with the joy of children. For
travelling shook Nataly out of her troubles and gave her something of the
child's inheritance of the wisdom of life--the living ever so little
ahead of ourselves; about as far as the fox in view of the hunt. That is
the soul of us out for novelty, devouring as it runs, an endless feast;
and the body is eagerly after it, recording the pleasures, a daily chase.
Remembrance of them is almost a renewal, anticipation a revival. She
enraptured Victor with glimpses of the domestic fun she had ceased to
show sign of since the revelation of Lakelands. Her only regret was on
account of the exclusion of Colney Durance from the party, because of
happy memories associating him with the Seine-land, and also that his
bilious criticism of his countrymen was moderated by a trip to the
Continent. Fenellan reported Colney to be 'busy in the act of distilling
one of his Prussic acid essays.' Fenellan would have jumped to go. He
informed Victor, as a probe, that the business of the Life Insurance was
at periods 'fearfully necrological! Inexplicably, he was not invited. Did
it mean, that he was growing dull? He looked inside instead of out, and
lost the clue.

His behaviour on the evening of the departure showed plainly what would
have befallen Mr. Sowerby on the expedition, had not he as well as Colney
been excluded. Two carriages and a cab conveyed the excursionists, as
they merrily called themselves, to the terminus. They were Victor's
guests; they had no trouble, no expense, none of the nipper reckonings
which dog our pleasures; the state of pure bliss. Fenellan's enviousness
drove him at the Rev. Mr. Barmby until the latter jumped to the seat
beside Nesta in her carriage, Mademoiselle de Seilles and Mr. Sowerby
facing them. Lady Grace Halley, in the carriage behind, heard Nesta's
laugh; which Mr. Barmby had thought vacuous, beseeming little girls, that
laugh at nothings. She questioned Fenellan.

'Oh,' said he, 'I merely mentioned that the Rev. gentleman carries his
musical instrument at the bottom of his trunk.'

She smiled: 'And who are in the cab?'

'Your fiddles are in the cab, in charge of Peridon and Catkin. Those two
would have writhed like head and tail of a worm, at a division on the way
to the station. Point a finger at Peridon, you run Catkin through the
body. They're a fabulous couple.'

Victor cut him short. 'I deny that those two are absurd.'

'And Catkin's toothache is a galvanic battery upon Peridon.'

Nataly strongly denied it. Peridon and Catkin pertained to their genial
picture of the dear sweet nest in life; a dale never traversed by the
withering breath they dreaded.

Fenellan then, to prove that he could be as bad in his way as Colney,
fell to work on the absent Miss Priscilla Graves and Mr. Pempton, with a
pitchfork's exaltation of the sacred attachment of the divergently
meritorious couple, and a melancholy reference to implacable obstacles in
the principles of each. The pair were offending the amatory corner in the
generous good sense of Nataly and Victor; they were not to be hotly
protected, though they were well enough liked for their qualities, except
by Lady Grace, who revelled in the horrifying and scandalizing of Miss
Graves. Such a specimen of the Puritan middle English as Priscilla
Graves, was eastwind on her skin, nausea to her gorge. She wondered at
having drifted into the neighbourhood of a person resembling in her
repellent formal chill virtuousness a windy belfry tower, down among
those districts of suburban London or appalling provincial towns passed
now and then with a shudder, where the funereal square bricks-up the
Church, that Arctic hen-mother sits on the square, and the moving dead
are summoned to their round of penitential exercise by a monosyllabic
tribulation-bell. Fenellan's graphic sketch of the teetotaller woman
seeing her admirer pursued by Eumenides flagons--abominations of
emptiness--to the banks of the black river of suicides, where the one
most wretched light is Inebriation's nose; and of the vegetarian
violoncello's horror at his vision of the long procession of the flocks
and herds into his lady's melodious Ark of a mouth, excited and delighted
her antipathy. She was amused to transports at the station, on hearing
Mr. Barmby, in a voice all ophicleide, remark: 'No, I carry no
instrument.' The habitation of it at the bottom of his trunk, was not
forgotten when it sounded.

Reclining in warmth on the deck of the vessel at night, she said, just
under Victor's ear: 'Where are those two?'

'Bid me select the couple,' said he.

She rejoined: 'Silly man'; and sleepily gave him her hand for good night,
and so paralyzed his arm, that he had to cover the continued junction by
saying more than he intended: 'If they come to an understanding!'

'Plain enough on one side.'

'You think it suitable?'

'Perfection; and well-planned to let them discover it.' 'This is really
my favourite route; I love the saltwater and the night on deck.'

'Go on.'

'How?'

'Number your loves. It would tax your arithmetic.'

'I can hate.'

'Not me?'

Positively the contrary, an impulsive squeeze of fingers declared it; and
they broke the link, neither of them sensibly hurt; though a leaf or two
of the ingenuities, which were her thoughts, turned over in the
phantasies of the lady; and the gentleman was taught to feel that a never
so slightly lengthened compression of the hand female shoots within us
both straight and far and round the corners. There you have Nature, if
you want her naked in her elements, for a text. He loved his Nataly
truly, even fervently, after the twenty years of union; he looked about
at no other woman; it happened only that the touch of one, the chance
warm touch, put to motion the blind forces of our mother so remarkably
surcharging him. But it was without kindling. The lady, the much cooler
person, did nurse a bit of flame. She had a whimsical liking for the man
who enjoyed simple things when commanding the luxuries; and it became a
fascination, by extreme contrast, at the reminder of his adventurous
enterprises in progress while he could so childishly enjoy. Women who
dance with the warrior-winner of battles, and hear him talk his ball-room
trifles to amuse, have similarly a smell of gunpowder to intoxicate them.

For him, a turn on the deck brought him into new skies. Nataly lay in the
cabin. She used to be where Lady Grace was lying. A sort of pleadable,
transparent, harmless hallucination of the renewal of old service induced
him to refresh and settle the fair semi-slumberer's pillow, and fix the
tarpaulin over her silks and wraps; and bend his head to the soft mouth
murmuring thanks. The women who can dare the nuit blanche, and under
stars; and have a taste for holiday larks after their thirtieth, are
rare; they are precious. Nataly nevertheless was approved for guarding
her throat from the nightwind. And a softer southerly breath never
crossed Channel! The very breeze he had wished for! Luck was with him.

Nesta sat by the rails of the vessel beside her Louise. Mr. Sowerby in
passing, exchanged a description of printed agreement with her, upon the
beauty of the night--a good neutral topic for the encounter of the sexes
not that he wanted it neutral; it furnished him with a vocabulary. Once
he perceptibly washed his hands of dutiful politeness, in addressing
Mademoiselle de Seilles, likewise upon the beauty of the night; and the
French lady, thinking--too conclusively from the breath on the glass at
the moment, as it is the Gallic habit--that if her dear Nesta must
espouse one of the uninteresting creatures called men in her native land,
it might as well be this as another, agreed that the night was very
beautiful.

'He speaks grammatical French,' Nesta commented on his achievement. 'He
contrives in his walking not to wet his boots,' mademoiselle rejoined.

Mr. Peridon was a more welcome sample of the islanders, despite an
inferior pretension to accent. He burned to be near these ladies, and he
passed them but once. His enthusiasm for Mademoiselle de Seilles was
notorious. Gratefully the compliment was acknowledged by her, in her
demure fashion; with a reserve of comic intellectual contempt for the man
who could not see that women, or Frenchwomen, or eminently she among
them, must have their enthusiasm set springing in the breast before they
can be swayed by the most violent of outer gales. And say, that she is
uprooted;--he does but roll a log. Mr. Peridon's efforts to perfect
himself in the French tongue touched her.

A night of May leaning on June, is little more than a deliberate wink of
the eye of light. Mr. Barmby, an exile from the ladies by reason of an
addiction to tobacco, quitted the forepart of the vessel at the first
greying. Now was the cloak of night worn threadbare, and grey astir for
the heralding of gold, day visibly ready to show its warmer throbs. The
gentle waves were just a stronger grey than the sky, perforce of an
interfusion that shifted gradations; they were silken, in places oily
grey; cold to drive the sight across their playful monotonousness for
refuge on any far fisher-sail.

Miss Radnor was asleep, eyelids benignly down, lips mildly closed. The
girl's cheeks held colour to match a dawn yet unawakened though born.
They were in a nest shading amid silks of pale blue, and there was a
languid flutter beneath her chin to the catch of the morn-breeze.
Bacchanal threads astray from a disorderly front-lock of rich brown hair
were alive over an eyebrow showing like a seal upon the lightest and
securest of slumbers.

Mr. Barmby gazed, and devoutly. Both the ladies were in their oblivion;
the younger quite saintly; but the couple inseparably framed, elevating
to behold; a reproach to the reminiscence of pipes. He was near; and
quietly the eyelids of mademoiselle lifted on him. Her look was grave,
straight, uninquiring, soon accurately perusing; an arrow of Artemis for
penetration. He went by, with the sound in the throat of a startled
bush-bird taking to wing; he limped off some nail of the deck, as if that
young Frenchwoman had turned the foot to a hoof. Man could not be more
guiltless, yet her look had perturbed him; nails conspired; in his
vexation, he execrated tobacco. And ask not why, where reason never was.

Nesta woke babbling on the subject she had relinquished for sleep.
Mademoiselle touched a feathery finger at her hair and hood during their
silvery French chimes.

Mr. Sowerby presented the risen morning to them, with encomiums, after
they had been observing every variation in it. He spoke happily of the
pleasant passage, and of the agreeable night; particularly of the
excellent idea of the expedition by this long route at night; the
prospect of which had disfigured him with his grimace of
speculation--apparently a sourness that did not exist. Nesta had a
singular notion, coming of a girl's mingled observation and intuition,
that the impressions upon this gentleman were in arrear, did not strike
him till late. Mademoiselle confirmed it when it was mentioned; she
remembered to have noticed the same in many small things. And it was a
pointed perception.

Victor sent his girl down to Nataly, with a summons to hurry up and see
sunlight over the waters. Nataly came; she looked, and the outer wakened
the inner, she let the light look in on her, her old feelings danced to
her eyes like a, string of bubbles in ascent. 'Victor, Victor, it seems
only yesterday that we crossed, twelve years back--was it?--and in May,
and saw the shoal of porpoises, and five minutes after, Dieppe in view.
Dear French people! I share your love for France.'

'Home of our holidays!--the "drives"; and they may be the happiest. And
fifty minutes later we were off the harbour; and Natata landed, a
stranger; and at night she was the heroine of the town.'

Victor turned to a stately gentleman and passed his name to Nataly: 'Sir
Rodwell Balchington, a neighbour of Lakelands! She understood that Lady
Grace Halley was acquainted with Sir Rodwell:--hence this dash of brine
to her lips while she was drinking of happy memories, and Victor
evidently was pluming himself upon his usual luck in the fortuitous
encounter with an influential neighbour of Lakelands. He told Sir Rodwell
the story of how they had met in the salle a manger of the hotel the
impresario of a Concert in the town, who had in his hand the doctor's
certificate of the incapacity of the chief cantatrice to appear, and
waved it, within a step of suicide. 'Well, to be brief, my wife--"noble
dame Anglaise," as the man announced her on the Concert platform,
undertook one of the songs, and sang another of her own-pure contralto
voice, as you will say; with the result that there was a perfect tumult
of enthusiasm. Next day, the waiters of the hotel presented her with a
bouquet of Spring flowers, white, and central violets. It was in the
Paris papers, under the heading: Une amie d'outre Manche--I think that
was it?' he asked Nataly.

'I forget,' said she.

He glanced at her: a cloud had risen. He rallied her, spoke of the old
Norman silver cross which the manager of the Concert had sent, humbly
imploring her to accept the small memento of his gratitude. She nodded an
excellent artificial brightness.

And there was the coast of France under young sunlight over the waters.
Once more her oft-petitioning wish through the years, that she had
entered the ranks of professional singers, upon whom the moral scrutiny
is not so microscopic, invaded her, resembling a tide-swell into
rock-caves, which have been filled before and left to emptiness, and will
be left to emptiness again. Nataly had the intimation visiting us when,
in a decline of physical power, the mind's ready vivacity to conjure
illusions forsakes us; and it was, of a wall ahead, and a force impelling
her against it, and no hope of deviation. And this is the featureless
thing, Destiny; not without eyes, if we have a conscience to throw them
into it to look at us.

Counsel to her to live in the hour, came, as upon others on the vessel,
from an active breath of the salt prompting to healthy hunger; and hardly
less from the splendour of the low full sunlight on the waters, the
skimming and dancing of the thousands of golden shells away from under
the globe of fire.




CHAPTER XV

A PATRIOT ABROAD

Nine days after his master's departure, Daniel Skepsey, a man of some
renown of late, as a subject of reports and comments in the newspapers,
obtained a passport, for the identification, if need were, of his missing
or misapprehended person in a foreign country, of the language of which
three unpronounceable words were knocking about his head to render the
thought of the passport a staff of safety; and on the morning that
followed he was at speed through Normandy, to meet his master rounding
homeward from Paris, at a town not to be spoken as it is written, by
reason of the custom of the good people of the country, with whom we
would fain live on neighbourly terms:--yes, and they had proof of it, not
so very many years back, when they were enduring the worst which can
befall us--though Mr. Durance, to whom he was indebted for the writing of
the place of his destination large on a card, and the wording of the
French sound beside it, besides the jotting down of trains and the
station for the change of railways, Mr. Durance could say, that the
active form of our sympathy consisted in the pouring of cheeses upon them
when they were prostrate and unable to resist!

A kind gentleman, Mr. Durance, as Daniel Skepsey had recent cause to
know, but often exceedingly dark; not so patriotic as desireable, it was
to be feared; and yet, strangely indeed, Mr. Durance had said cogent
things on the art of boxing and on manly exercises, and he hoped--he was
emphatic in saying he hoped--we should be regenerated. He must have
meant, that boxing--on a grand scale would contribute to it. He said,
that a blow now and then was wholesome for us all. He recommended a
monthly private whipping for old gentlemen who decline the use of the
gloves, to disperse their humours; not excluding Judges and Magistrates:
he could hardly be in earnest. He spoke in a clergyman's voice, and said
it would be payment of good assurance money, beneficial to their souls:
he seemed to mean it. He said, that old gentlemen were bottled vapours,
and it was good for them to uncork them periodically. He said, they
should be excused half the strokes if they danced nightly--they resented
motion. He seemed sadly wanting in veneration.

But he might not positively intend what he said. Skepsey could overlook
everything he said, except the girding at England. For where is a braver
people, notwithstanding appearances! Skepsey knew of dozens of gallant
bruisers, ready for the cry to strip to the belt; worthy, with a little
public encouragement, to rank beside their grandfathers of the Ring, in
the brilliant times when royalty and nobility countenanced the manly art,
our nursery of heroes, and there was not the existing unhappy division of
classes. He still trusted to convince Mr. Durance, by means of argument
and happy instances, historical and immediate, that the English may
justly consider themselves the elect of nations, for reasons better than
their accumulation of the piles of gold-better than 'usurers' reasons,'
as Mr. Durance called them. Much that Mr. Durance had said at intervals
was, although remembered almost to the letter of the phrase, beyond his
comprehension, and he put it aside, with penitent blinking at his
deficiency.

All the while, he was hearing a rattle of voluble tongues around him, and
a shout of stations, intelligible as a wash of pebbles, and blocks in a
torrent. Generally the men slouched when they were not running. At Dieppe
he had noticed muscular fellows; he admitted them to be nimbler on the
legs than ours; and that may count both ways, he consoled a patriotic
vanity by thinking; instantly rebuking the thought; for he had read
chapters of Military History. He sat eyeing the front row of figures in
his third-class carriage, musing on the kind of soldiers we might, heaven
designing it, have to face, and how to beat them; until he gazed on
Rouen, knowing by the size of it and by what Mr. Durance had informed him
of the city on the river, that it must be the very city of Rouen, not so
many years back a violated place, at the mercy of a foreign foe. Strong
pity laid hold of Skepsey. He fortified the heights for defence, but saw
at a glance that it was the city for modern artillery to command, crush
and enter. He lost idea of these afflicted people as foes, merely
complaining of their attacks on England, and their menaces in their
Journals and pamphlets; and he renounced certain views of the country to
be marched over on the road by this route to Paris, for the dictation of
terms of peace at the gates of the French capital, sparing them the
shameful entry; and this after the rout of their attempt at an invasion
of the Island!

A man opposite him was looking amicably on his lively grey eyes. Skepsey
handed a card from his pocket. The man perused it, and crying: 'Dreux?'
waved out of the carriage-window at a westerly distance, naming Rouen as
not the place, not at all, totally other. Thus we are taught, that a
foreign General, ignorant of the language, must confine himself to
defensive operations at home; he would be a child in the hands of the
commonest man he meets. Brilliant with thanks in signs, Skepsey drew from
his friend a course of instruction in French names, for our necessities
on a line of march. The roads to Great Britain's metropolis, and the
supplies of forage and provision at every stage of a march on London, are
marked in the military offices of these people; and that, with their
barking Journals, is a piece of knowledge to justify a belligerent return
for it. Only we pray to be let live peacefully.

Fervently we pray it when this good man, a total stranger to us, conducts
an ignorant foreigner from one station to another through the streets of
Rouen, after a short stoppage at the buffet and assistance in the
identification of coins; then, lifting his cap to us, retires.

And why be dealing wounds and death? It is a more blessed thing to keep
the Commandments. But how is it possible to keep the Commandments if you
have a vexatious wife?

Martha Skepsey had given him a son to show the hereditary energy in his
crying and coughing; and it was owing, he could plead, to her habits and
her tongue, that he sometimes, that he might avoid the doing of
worse--for she wanted correction and was improved by it--courted the
excitement of a short exhibition of skill, man to man, on publicans'
first floors. He could have told the magistrates so, in part apology for
the circumstances dragging him the other day, so recently, before his
Worship; and he might have told it, if he had not remembered Captain
Dartrey Fenellan's words about treating women chivalrously which was
interpreted by Skepsey as correcting them, when called upon to do it, but
never exposing them only, if allowed to account for the circumstances
pushing us into the newspapers, we should not present so guilty a look
before the public.

Furthermore, as to how far it is the duty of a man to serve his master,
there is likewise question: whether is he, while receiving reproof and
punishment for excess of zeal in the service of his master, not to
mention the welfare of the country, morally--without establishing it as a
principle--exonerated? Miss Graves might be asked save that one would not
voluntarily trouble a lady on such subjects. But supposing, says the
opposing counsel, now at work in Skepsey's conscience, supposing this
act, for which, contraveneing the law of the land, you are reproved and
punished, to be agreeable to you, how then? We answer, supposing it--and
we take uncomplainingly the magistrate's reproof and punishment--morally
justified can it be expected of us to have the sense of guilt, although
we wear and know we wear a guilty look before the public?

His master and the dear ladies would hear of it; perhaps they knew of it
now; with them would rest the settlement of the distressing inquiry. The
ladies would be shocked ladies cannot bear any semblance of roughness,
not even with the gloves:--and knowing, as they must, that our practise
of the manly art is for their protection.

Skepsey's grievous prospect of the hour to come under judgement of a sex
that was ever a riddle unread, clouded him on the approach to Dreux. He
studied the country and the people eagerly; he forbore to conduct great
military operations. Mr. Durance had spoken of big battles round about
the town of Dreux; also of a wonderful Mausoleum there, not equally
interesting. The little man was in deeper gloom than a day sobering on
crimson dusk when the train stopped and his quick ear caught the sound of
the station, as pronounced by his friend at Rouen.

He handed his card to the station-master. A glance, and the latter
signalled to a porter, saying: 'Paradis'; and the porter laid hold of
Skepsey's bag. Skepsey's grasp was firm; he pulled, the porter pulled.
Skepsey heard explanatory speech accompanying a wrench. He wrenched back
with vigour, and in his own tongue exclaimed, that he held to the bag
because his master's letters were in the bag, all the way from England.
For a minute, there was a downright trial of muscle and will: the porter
appeared furiously excited, Skepsey had a look of cooled steel. Then the
Frenchman, requiring to shrug, gave way to the Englishman's eccentric
obstinacy, and signified that he was his guide. Quite so, and Skepsey
showed alacrity and confidence in following; he carried his bag. But with
the remembrance of the kindly serviceable man at Rouen, he sought to
convey to the porter, that the terms of their association were cordial. A
waving of the right hand to the heavens ratified the treaty on the French
side. Nods and smiles and gesticulations, with across-Channel vocables,
as it were Dover cliffs to Calais sands and back, pleasantly beguiled the
way down to the Hotel du Paradis, under the Mausoleum heights, where
Skepsey fumbled at his pocket for coin current; but the Frenchman, all
shaken by a tornado of negation, clapped him on the shoulder, and sang
him a quatrain. Skepsey had in politeness to stand listening, and
blinking, plunged in the contrition of ignorance, eclipsed. He took it to
signify something to the effect, that money should not pass between
friends. It was the amatory farewell address of Henri IV. to his
Charmante Gabrielle; and with

            'Perce de mille lords,
             L'honneur m'appelle
             Au champ de Mars,'

the Frenchman, in a backing of measured steps, apologized for his
enforced withdrawal from the stranger who had captured his heart.

Skepsey's card was taken in the passage of the hotel. A clean-capped
maid, brave on the legs, like all he had seen of these people, preceded
him at quick march to an upper chamber. When he descended, bag in hand,
she flung open the salon-door of a table d'hote, where a goodly number
were dining and chattering; waiters drew him along to the section
occupied by his master's party. A chair had been kept vacant for him; his
master waved a hand, his dear ladies graciously smiled; he struck the bag
in front of a guardian foot, growing happy. He could fancy they had not
seen the English newspapers. And his next observation of the table showed
him wrecked and lost: Miss Nesta's face was the oval of a woeful O at his
wild behaviour in England during their absence. She smiled. Skepsey had
nevertheless to consume his food--excellent, very tasty soup-with the
sour sauce of the thought that he must be tongue-tied in his defence for
the time of the dinner.

'No, dear Skips, please! you are to enjoy yourself,' said Nesta.

He answered confusedly, trying to assure her that he was doing so, and he
choked.

His master had fixed his arrival for twenty minutes earlier. Skepsey
spoke through a cough of long delays at stations. The Rev. Septimus
Barmby, officially peacemaker, sounded the consequent excuse for a
belated comer. It was final; such is the power of sound. Looks were cast
from the French section of the table at the owner of the prodigious
organ. Some of the younger men, intent on the charms of Albion's
daughters, expressed in a, sign and a word or two alarm at what might be
beneath the flooring: and 'Pas encore Lui!' and 'Son avant-courrier!' and
other flies of speech passed on a whiff, under politest of cover, not to
give offence. But prodigies, claim attention.

Our English, at the close of the dinner, consented to say it was good,
without specifying a dish, because a selection of this or that would have
seemed to italicize, and commit, them, in the presence of ladies, to a
notice of the matter of-course, beneath us, or the confession of a low
sensual enjoyment; until Lady Grace Halley named the particular dressing
of a tete de veau approvingly to Victor; and he stating, that he had
offered a suggestion for the menu of the day, Nataly exclaimed, that she
had suspected it: upon which Mr. Sowerby praised the menu, Mr. Barmby,
Peridon and Catkin named other dishes, there was the right after-dinner
ring in Victor's ears, thanks to the woman of the world who had travelled
round to nature and led the shackled men to deliver themselves heartily.
One tap, and they are free. That is, in the moments after dinner, when
nature is at the gates with them. Only, it must be a lady and a
prevailing lady to give the tap. They need (our English) and will for the
ages of the process of their transformation need a queen.

Skepsey, bag in hand, obeyed the motion of his master's head and followed
him.

He was presently back, to remain with the ladies during his master's
perusal of letters. Nataly had decreed that he was not to be troubled; so
Nesta and mademoiselle besought him for a recital of his French
adventures; and strange to say, he had nothing to tell. The journey,
pregnant at the start, exciting in the course of it, was absolutely blank
at the termination. French people had been very kind; he could not say
more. But there was more; there was a remarkable fulness, if only he
could subordinate it to narrative. The little man did not know, that time
was wanted for imagination to make the roadway or riverway of a true
story, unless we press to invent; his mind had been too busy on the way
for him to clothe in speech his impressions of the passage of incidents
at the call for them. Things had happened, numbers of interesting minor
things, but they all slipped as water through the fingers; and he being
of the band of honest creatures who will not accept a lift from fiction,
drearily he sat before the ladies, confessing to an emptiness he was far
from feeling.

Nesta professed excessive disappointment. 'Now, if it had been in
England, Skips!' she said, under her mother's gentle gloom of brows.

He made show of melancholy submission.

'There, Skepsey, you have a good excuse, we are sure,' Nataly said.

And women, when they are such ladies as these, are sent to prove to us
that they can be a blessing; instead of the dreadful cry to Providence
for the reason of the spread of the race of man by their means! He
declared his readiness, rejecting excuses, to state his case to them, but
for his fear of having it interpreted as an appeal for their kind aid in
obtaining his master's forgiveness. Mr. Durance had very considerately
promised to intercede. Skepsey dropped a hint or two of his naughty
proceedings drily aware that their untutored antipathy to the manly art
would not permit of warmth.

Nesta said: 'Do you know, Skips, we saw a grand exhibition of fencing in
Paris.'

He sighed. 'Ladies can look on at fencing! foils and masks! Captain
Dartrey Fenellan has shown me, and says, the French are our masters at
it.' He bowed constrainedly to mademoiselle.

'You box, M. Skepsey!' she said.

His melancholy increased: 'Much discouragement from Government, Society!
If ladies . . . but I do not venture. They are not against Games. But
these are not a protection . . . to them, when needed; to the country.
The country seems asleep to its position. Mr. Durance has remarked on
it:--though I would not always quote Mr. Durance . . . indeed, he says,
that England has invested an Old Maid's All in the Millennium, and is
ruined if it delays to come. "Old Maid," I do not see. I do not--if I may
presume to speak of myself in the same breath with so clever a gentleman,
agree with Mr. Durance in everything. But the chest-measurement of
recruits, the stature of the men enlisted, prove that we are losing the
nursery of our soldiers.'

'We are taking them out of the nursery, Skips, if you 're for quoting
Captain Dartrey,' said Nesta. 'We'll never haul down our flag, though,
while we have him!'

'Ah! Captain Dartrey!' Skepsey was refreshed by the invocation of the
name.

A summons to his master's presence cut short something he was beginning
to say about Captain Dartrey.




CHAPTER XVI

ACCOUNTS FOR SKEPSEY'S MISCONDUCT, SHOWING HOW IT AFFECTED NATALY

His master opened on the bristling business.

'What's this, of your name in the papers, your appearing before a
magistrate, and a fine? Tell the tale shortly.'

Skepsey fell upon his attitude for dialectical defence the modest form of
the two hands at rolling play and the head deferentially sidecast. But
knowing that he had gratified his personal tastes in the act of serving
his master's interests, an interfusion of sentiments plunged him into
self-consciousness; an unwonted state with him, clogging to a simple
story.

'First, sir, I would beg you to pardon the printing of your name beside
mine . . .'

'Tush: on with you.'

'Only to say, necessitated by the circumstances of the case. I read, that
there was laughter in the court at my exculpation of my conduct--as I
have to call it; and there may have been. I may have expressed myself
. . . . I have a strong feeling for the welfare of the country.'

'So, it seems, you said to the magistrate. Do you tell me, that the cause
of your gross breach of the law, was a consideration for the welfare of
the country? Run on the facts.'

'The facts--I must have begun badly, sir.' Skepsey rattled the dry facts
in his head to right them. From his not having begun well, they had
become dry as things underfoot. It was an error to have led off with the
sentiments. 'Two very, two very respectable persons--respectable--were
desirous to witness a short display of my, my system, I would say; of my
science, they call it.'

'Don't be nervous. To the point; you went into a field five miles out of
London, in broad day, and stood in a ring, the usual Tiff-raff about
you!'

'With the gloves: and not for money, Sir: for the trial of skill; not
very many people. I cannot quite see the breach of the law.'

'So you told the magistrate. You were fined for your inability to quite
see. And you had to give security.'

'Mr. Durance was kindly responsible for me, sir: an acquaintance of the
magistrate.'

'This boxing of yours is a positive mania, Skepsey. You must try to get
the better of it--must! And my name too! I'm to be proclaimed, as having
in my service an inveterate pugilist--who breaks the law from patriotism!
Male or female, these very respectable persons--the people your show was
meant for?'

'Male, sir. Females! . . . that is, not the respectable ones.'

'Take the opinion of the respectable ones for your standard of behaviour
in future.'

'It was a mere trial of skill, sir, to prove to one of the spectators,
that I could be as good as my word. I wished I may say, to conciliate
him, partly. He would not--he judged by size--credit me with . . . he
backed my adversary Jerry Scroom--a sturdy boxer, without the knowledge
of the first principles.'

'You beat him?'

'I think I taught the man that I could instruct, sir; he was
complimentary before we parted. He thought I could not have lasted. After
the second round, the police appeared.'

'And you ran!'

'No, sir; I had nothing on my conscience.'

'Why not have had your pugilistic display in a publican's room in town,
where you could have hammer-nailed and ding-donged to your heart's
content for as long as you liked!'

'That would have been preferable, from the point of view of safety from
intrusion, I can admit-speaking humbly. But one of the parties--I had a
wish to gratify him--is a lover of old English times and habits and our
country scenes. He wanted it to take place on green grass. We drove over
Hampstead in three carts and a gig, as a company of pleasure--as it was.
A very beautiful morning. There was a rest at a public-house. Mr. Shaplow
traces the misfortune to that. Mr. Jarniman, I hear, thinks it what he
calls a traitor in the camp. I saw no sign; we were all merry and
friendly.'

'Jarniman?' said Victor sharply. 'Who is the Jarniman?'

'Mr. Jarniman is, I am to understand from the acquaintance introducing
us--a Mr. Shaplow I met in the train from Lakelands one day, and again at
the corner of a street near Drury Lane, a ham and beef shop kept by a
Mrs. Jarniman, a very stout lady, who does the chief carving in the shop,
and is the mother of Mr. Jarniman: he is in a confidential place, highly
trusted.' Skepsey looked up from the hands he soaped: 'He is a curious
mixture; he has true enthusiasm for boxing, he believes in ghosts. He
mourns for the lost days of prize-fighting, he thinks that spectres are
on the increase. He has a very large appetite, depressed spirits. Mr.
Shaplow informs me he is a man of substance, in the service of a wealthy
lady in poor health, expecting a legacy and her appearance to him. He has
the look--Mr. Shaplow assures me he does not drink to excess: he is a
slow drinker.'

Victor straightened: 'Bad way of health, you said?'

'Mr. Jarniman spoke of his expectations, as being immediate: he put it,
that he expected her spirit to be out for him to meet it any day--or
night. He desires it. He says, she has promised it--on oath, he says, and
must feel that she must do her duty to him before she goes, if she is to
appear to him with any countenance after. But he is anxious for her in
any case to show herself, and says, he should not have the heart to
reproach her. He has principles, a tear for suffering; he likes to be
made to cry. Mrs. Jarniman, his mother, he is not married, is much the
same so far, except ghosts; she will not have them; except after strong
tea, they come, she says, come to her bed. She is foolish enough to sleep
in a close-curtained bed. But the poor lady is so exceedingly stout that
a puff of cold would carry her off, she fears.'

Victor stamped his foot. 'This man Jarniman serves a lady now in
a--serious, does he say? Was he precise?'

'Mr. Jarniman spoke of a remarkable number of diseases; very complicated,
he says. He has no opinion of doctors. He says, that the lady's doctor
and the chemist--she sits in a chemist's shop and swallows other people's
prescriptions that take her fancy. He says, her continuing to live is
wonderful. He has no reason to hurry her, only for the satisfaction of a
natural curiosity.'

'He mentioned her name?'

'No name, sir.'

Skepsey's limpid grey eyes confirmed the negative to Victor, who was
assured that the little man stood clean of any falsity.

'You are not on equal terms. You and the magistrate have helped him to
know who it is you serve, Skepsey.'

'Would you please to direct me, sir.'

'Another time. Now go and ease your feet with a run over the town. We
have music in half an hour. That you like, I know. See chiefly to amusing
yourself.'

Skepsey turned to go; he murmured, that he had enjoyed his trip.

Victor checked him: it was to ask whether this Jarniman had specified
one, any one of the numerous diseases afflicting his aged mistress.

Now Jarniman had shocked Skepsey with his blunt titles for a couple of
the foremost maladies assailing the poor lady's decayed constitution: not
to be mentioned, Skepsey's thought, in relation to ladies; whose organs
and functions we, who pay them a proper homage by restricting them to the
sphere so worthily occupied by their mothers up to the very oldest date,
respectfully curtain; their accepted masters are chivalrous to them,
deploring their need at times for the doctors and drugs. He stood looking
most unhappy. 'She was to appear, sir, in a few--perhaps a week, a
month.'

A nod dismissed him.

The fun of the expedition (and Dudley Sowerby had wound himself up to
relish it) was at night in the towns, when the sound of instrumental and
vocal music attracted crowds beneath the windows of the hotel, and they
heard zon, zon, violon, fete et basse; not bad fluting, excellent
fiddling, such singing as a maestro, conducting his own Opera, would have
approved. So Victor said of his darlings' voices. Nesta's and her
mother's were a perfect combination; Mr. Barmby's trompe in union,
sufficiently confirmed the popular impression, that they were artistes.
They had been ceremoniously ushered to their carriages, with expressions
of gratitude, at the departure from Rouen; and the Boniface at Gisors had
entreated them to stay another night, to give an entertainment. Victor
took his pleasure in letting it be known, that they were a quiet English
family, simply keeping-up the habits they practiced in Old England: all
were welcome to hear them while they were doing it; but they did not give
entertainments.

The pride of the pleasure of reversing the general idea of English
dulness among our neighbours, was perceived to have laid fast hold of
Dudley Sowerby at Dreux. He was at the window from time to time, counting
heads below. For this reason or a better, he begged Nesta to supplant the
flute duet with the soprano and contralto of the Helena section of the
Mefistofele, called the Serenade: La Luna immobile. She consulted her
mother, and they sang it. The crowds below, swollen to a block of the
street, were dead still, showing the instinctive good manners of the
people. Then mademoiselle astonished them with a Provencal or Cevennes
air, Huguenot, though she was Catholic; but it suited her mezzo-soprano
tones; and it rang massively of the martial-religious. To what heights of
spiritual grandeur might not a Huguenot France have marched! Dudley
Sowerby, heedlessly, under an emotion that could be stirred in him with
force, by the soul of religion issuing through music, addressed his
ejaculation to Lady Grace Halley. She did nor shrug or snub him, but
rejoined: 'I could go to battle with that song in the ears.' She liked
seeing him so happily transformed; and liked the effect of it on Nesta
when his face shone in talking. He was at home with the girl's eyes, as
he had never been. A song expressing in one of the combative and
devotional, went to the springs of his blood; for he was of an old
warrior race, beneath the thick crust of imposed peaceful maxims and
commercial pursuits and habitual stiff correctness. As much as wine, will
music bring out the native bent of the civilized man: endow him with
language too. He was as if unlocked; he met Nesta's eyes and ran in a
voluble interchange, that gave him flattering after-thoughts; and at the
moment sensibly a new and assured, or to some extent assured, station
beside a girl so vivid; by which the young lady would be helped to
perceive his unvoiced solider gifts.

Nataly observed them, thinking of Victor's mastering subtlety. She had
hoped (having clearly seen the sheep's eye in the shepherd) that Mr.
Barmby would be watchful to act as a block between them; and therefore
she had stipulated for his presence on the journey. She remembered
Victor's rapid look of readiness to consent:--he reckoned how naturally
Mr. Barmby would serve as a foil to any younger man. Mr. Barmby had tried
all along to perform his part: he had always been thwarted; notably once
at Gisors, where by some cunning management he and mademoiselle found
themselves in the cell of the prisoner's Nail-wrought work while Nesta
had to take Sowerby's hand for help at a passage here and there along the
narrow outer castle-walls. And Mr. Barmby, upon occasions, had set that
dimple in Nesta's cheek quivering, though Simeon Fenellan was not at
hand, and there was no telling how it was done, beyond the evidence that
Victor willed it so.

From the day of the announcement of Lakelands, she had been brought more
into contact with his genius of dexterity and foresight than ever
previously: she had bent to the burden of it more; had seen herself and
everybody else outstripped--herself, of course; she did not count in a
struggle with him. But since that red dawn of Lakelands, it was almost as
if he had descended to earth from the skies. She now saw his mortality in
the miraculous things he did. The reason of it was, that through the
perceptible various arts and shifts on her level, an opposing spirit had
plainer view of his aim, to judge it. She thought it a mean one.

The power it had to hurry her with the strength of a torrent to an end
she dreaded, impressed her physically; so far subduing her mind, in
consequence, as to keep the idea of absolute resistance obscure, though
her bosom heaved with the breath; but what was her own of a mind hung
hovering above him, criticizing; and involuntarily, discomfortingly. She
could have prayed to be led blindly or blindly dashed on: she could trust
him for success; and her critical mind seemed at times a treachery. Still
she was compelled to judge.

When he said to her at night, pressing both her hands: 'This is the news
of the day, my love! It's death at last. We shall soon be thanking heaven
for freedom'; her fingers writhed upon his and gripped them in a torture
of remorse on his behalf. A shattering throb of her heart gave her sight
of herself as well. For so it is with the woman who loves in subjection,
she may be a critic of the man, she is his accomplice.'

'You have a letter, Victor?'

'Confirmation all round: Fenellan, Themison, and now Skepsey.'

He told her the tale of Skepsey and Jarniman, colouring it, as any
interested animated conduit necessarily will. Neither of them smiled.

The effort to think soberly exhausted and rolled her back on credulity.

It might not be to-day or next week or month: but so much testimony
pointed to a day within the horizon, surely!

She bowed her head to heaven for forgiveness. The murderous hope stood
up, stood out in forms and pictures. There was one of a woman at her ease
at last in the reception of guests; contrasting with an ironic haunting
figure of the woman of queenly air and stature under a finger of scorn
for a bold-faced impostor. Nataly's lips twitched at the remembrance of
quaint whimpers of complaint to the Fates, for directing that a large
instead of a rather diminutive woman should be the social offender
fearing exposure. Majesty in the criminal's dock, is a confounding
spectacle. To the bosom of the majestic creature, all her glorious
attributes have become the executioner's implements. She must for her
soul's health believe that a day of release and exoneration approaches.

'Barmby!--if my dear girl would like him best,' Victor said, in tenderest
undertones, observing the shadowing variations of her face; and pierced
her cruelly, past explanation or understanding;--not that she would have
objected to the Rev. Septimus as officiating clergyman.

She nodded. Down rolled the first big tear.

We cry to women; Land, ho!--a land of palms after storms at sea; and at
once they inundate us with a deluge of eye-water.

'Half a minute, dear Victor, not longer,' Nataly said, weeping, near on
laughing over his look of wanton abandonment to despair at sight of her
tears. 'Don't mind me. I am rather like Fenellan's laundress, the tearful
woman whose professional apparatus was her soft heart and a cake of soap.
Skepsey has made his peace with you?'

Victor answered: 'Yes, yes; I see what he has been about. We're a mixed
lot, all of us-the best! You've noticed, Skepsey has no laugh: however
absurd the thing he tells you, not a smile!'

'But you trust his eyes; you look fathoms into them. Captain Dartrey
thinks him one of the men most in earnest of any of his country.'

'So Nataly of course thinks the same. And he's a worthy little
velocipede, as Fenellan calls him. One wishes Colney had been with us.
Only Colney!--pity one can't cut his talons for the space before they
grow again.'

Ay, and in the presence of Colney Durance, Victor would not have been so
encouraging, half boyishly caressing, with Dudley Sowerby! It was the
very manner to sow seed of imitativeness in the girl, devoted as she was
to her father. Nataly sighed, foreseeing evil, owning it a superstition,
feeling it a certainty. We are easily prophets, sure of being justified,
when the cleverness of schemes devoted to material ends appears most
delicately perfect. History, the tales of households, the tombstone, are
with us to inspire. In Nataly's bosom, the reproof of her inefficiency
for offering counsel where Victor for his soul's sake needed it, was
beginning to thunder at whiles as a reproach of unfittingness in his
mate, worse than a public denunciation of the sin against Society.

It might be decreed that she and Society were to come to reconcilement. A
pain previously thought of, never previously so realized, seized her at
her next sight of Nesta. She had not taken in her front mind the contrast
of the innocent one condemned to endure the shadow from which the guilty
was by a transient ceremony released. Nature could at a push be eloquent
to defend the guilty. Not a word of vindicating eloquence rose up to
clear the innocent. Nothing that she could do; no devotedness, not any
sacrifice, and no treaty of peace, no possible joy to come, nothing could
remove the shadow from her child. She dreamed of the succour in
eloquence, to charm the ears of chosen juries while a fact spoke over the
population, with a relentless rolling out of its one hard word. But
eloquence, powerful on her behalf, was dumb when referred to Nesta. It
seemed a cruel mystery. How was it permitted by the Merciful Disposer!
. . . . Nataly's intellect and her reverence clashed. They clash to the end
of time if we persist in regarding the Spirit of Life as a remote
Externe, who plays the human figures, to bring about this or that issue,
instead of being beside us, within us, our breath, if we will; marking on
us where at each step we sink to the animal, mount to the divine, we and
ours who follow, offspring of body or mind. She was in her error, from
judgeing of the destiny of man by the fate of individuals. Chiefly her
error was, to try to be thinking at all amid the fevered tangle of her
sensations.

A darkness fell upon the troubled woman, and was thicker overhead when
her warm blood had drawn her to some acceptance of the philosophy of
existence, in a savour of gratification at the prospect of her equal
footing with the world while yet she lived. She hated herself for taking
pleasure in anything to be bestowed by a world so hap-hazard,
ill-balanced, unjust; she took it bitterly, with such naturalness as not
to be aware that it was irony and a poisonous irony moving her to welcome
the restorative ceremony because her largeness of person had a greater
than common need of the protection.




CHAPTER XVII

CHIEFLY UPON THE THEME OF A YOUNG MAID'S IMAGININGS

That Mausoleum at Dreux may touch to lift us. History, pleads for the
pride of the great discrowned Family giving her illumination there. The
pride is reverently postured, the princely mourning-cloak it wears
becomingly braided at the hem with fair designs of our mortal humility in
the presence of the vanquisher; against whom, acknowledgeing a visible
conquest of the dust, it sustains a placid contention in coloured glass
and marbles.

Mademoiselle de Seilles, a fervid Orleanist, was thanked for having
advised the curvature of the route homeward to visit 'the spot of so
impressive a monument': as it, was phrased by the Rev. Septimus Barmby;
whose exposition to Nesta of the beautiful stained-glass pictures of
incidents in the life of the crusading St. Louis, was toned to be
likewise impressive:--Colney Durance not being at hand to bewail the
pathos of his exhaustless 'whacking of the platitudes'; which still
retain their tender parts, but cry unheard when there is no cynic near.
Mr. Barmby laid-on solemnly.

Professional devoutness is deemed more righteous on such occasions than
poetic fire. It robes us in the cloak of the place, as at a funeral.
Generally, Mr. Barmby found, and justly, that it is in superior
estimation among his countrymen of all classes. They are shown by example
how to look, think, speak; what to do. Poets are disturbing; they cannot
be comfortably imitated, they are unsafe, not certainly the metal, unless
you have Laureates, entitled to speak by their pay and decorations; and
these are but one at a time-and a quotation may remind us of a parody, to
convulse the sacred dome! Established plain prose officials do better for
our English. The audience moved round with heads of undertakers.

Victor called to recollection Fenellan's 'Rev. Glendoveer' while Mr.
Barmby pursued his discourse, uninterrupted by tripping wags. And those
who have schemes, as well as those who are startled by the criticism in
laughter to discover that they have cause for shunning it, rejoice when
wits are absent. Mr. Sowerby and Nesta interchanged a comment on Mr.
Barmby's remarks: The Fate of Princes! The Paths of Glory! St. Louis was
a very distant Roman Catholic monarch; and the young gentleman of
Evangelical education could admire him as a Crusader. St. Louis was for
Nesta a figure in the rich hues of royal Saintship softened to homeliness
by tears. She doated on a royalty crowned with the Saint's halo, that
swam down to us to lift us through holy human showers. She listened to
Mr. Barmby, hearing few sentences, lending his eloquence all she felt: he
rolled forth notes of a minster organ, accordant with the devotional
service she was holding mutely. Mademoiselle upon St. Louis: 'Worthy to
be named King of Kings!' swept her to a fount of thoughts, where the
thoughts are not yet shaped, are yet in the breast of the mother
emotions. Louise de Seilles had prepared her to be strangely and deeply
moved. The girl had a heart of many strings, of high pitch, open to be
musical to simplest wandering airs or to the gales. This crypt of the
recumbent sculptured figures and the coloured series of acts in the
passage of the crowned Saint thrilled her as with sight of flame on an
altar-piece of History. But this King in the lines of the Crucifixion
leading, gave her a lesson of life, not a message from death. With such a
King, there would be union of the old order and the new, cessation to
political turmoil: Radicalism, Socialism, all the monster names of things
with heads agape in these our days to gobble-up the venerable, obliterate
the beautiful, leave a stoniness of floods where field and garden were,
would be appeased, transfigured. She hoped, she prayed for that glorious
leader's advent.

On one subject, conceived by her only of late, and not intelligibly, not
communicably: a subject thickly veiled; one which struck at her through
her sex and must, she thought, ever be unnamed (the ardent young creature
saw it as a very thing torn by the winds to show hideous gleams of a body
rageing with fire behind the veil): on this one subject, her hopes and
prayers were dumb in her bosom. It signified shame. She knew not the how,
for she had no power to contemplate it: there was a torment of earth and
a writhing of lurid dust-clouds about it at a glimpse. But if the new
crusading Hero were to come attacking that--if some born prince nobly man
would head the world to take away the withering scarlet from the face of
women, she felt she could kiss the print of his feet upon the ground.
Meanwhile she had enjoyment of her plunge into the inmost forest-well of
mediaeval imaginativeness, where youthful minds of good aspiration
through their obscurities find much akin to them.

She had an eye for little Skepsey too: unaware that these French Princes
had hurried him off to Agincourt, for another encounter with them and the
old result--poor dear gentlemen, with whom we do so wish to be friendly!
What amused her was, his evident fatigue in undergoing the slow parade,
and sheer deference to his betters, as to the signification of a holiday
on arrested legs. Dudley Sowerby's attention to him, in elucidating the
scenes with historical scraps, greatly pleased her. The Rev. Septimus of
course occupied her chiefly.

Mademoiselle was always near, to receive his repeated expressions of
gratitude for the route she had counselled. Without personal objections
to a well-meaning orderly man, whose pardonable error it was to be aiming
too considerably higher than his head, she did but show him the voluble
muteness of a Frenchwoman's closed lips; not a smile at all, and
certainly no sign of hostility; when bowing to his reiterated compliment
in the sentence of French. Mr. Barmby had noticed (and a strong sentiment
rendered him observant, unwontedly) a similar alert immobility of her
lips, indicating foreign notions of this kind or that, in England: an all
but imperceptible shortening or loss of corners at the mouth, upon
mention of marriages of his clergy: particularly once, at his reading of
a lengthy report in a newspaper of a Wedding Ceremony involving his
favourite Bishop for bridegroom: a report to make one glow like Hymen
rollicking the Torch after draining the bumper to the flying slipper. He
remembered the look, and how it seemed to intensify on the slumbering
features, at a statement, that his Bishop was a widower, entering into
nuptials in his fifty-fourth year. Why not? But we ask it of Heaven and
Man, why not? Mademoiselle was pleasant: she was young or youngish; her
own clergy were celibates, and--no, he could not argue the matter with a
young or youngish person of her sex. Could it be a reasonable woman--a
woman!--who, disapproved the holy nuptials of the pastors of the flocks?
But we are forbidden to imagine the conducting of an argument thereon
with a lady.

Luther . . . but we are not in Luther's time:--Nature . . . no, nor can
there possibly be allusions to Nature. Mr. Barmby wondered at Protestant
parents taking a Papistical governess for their young flower of English
womanhood. However, she venerated St. Louis; he cordially also; there
they met; and he admitted, that she had, for a Frenchwoman, a handsome
face, and besides an agreeably artificial ingenuousness in the looks
which could be so politely dubious as to appear only dubiously adverse.

The spell upon Nesta was not blown away on English ground; and when her
father and mother were comparing their impressions, she could not but
keep guard over the deeper among her own. At the Chateau de Gisors,
leftward off Vernon on Seine, it had been one of romance and wonderment,
with inquisitive historic soundings of her knowledge and mademoiselle's,
a reverence for the prisoner's patient holy work, and picturings of his
watchful waiting daily, Nail in hand, for the heaven-sent sunlight on the
circular dungeon-wall through the slits of the meurtrieres. But the
Mausoleum at Dreux spake religiously; it enfolded Mr. Barmby, his voice
re-edified it. The fact that he had discoursed there, though not a word
of the discourse was remembered, allied him to the spirit of a day rather
increasing in sacredness as it receded and left her less the possessor of
it, more the worshipper.

Mademoiselle had to say to herself: 'Impossible!' after seeing the drift
of her dear Nesta's eyes in the wake of the colossal English clergyman.
She fed her incredulousness indignantly on the evidence confounding it.
Nataly was aware of unusual intonations, treble-stressed, in the Bethesda
and the Galilee of Mr. Barmby on Concert evenings: as it were, the
towering wood-work of the cathedral organ in quake under emission of its
multitudinous outroar. The 'Which?' of the Rev. Septimus, addressed to
Nesta, when song was demanded of him; and her 'Either'; and his gentle
hesitation, upon a gaze at her for the directing choice, could not be
unnoticed by women.

Did he know a certain thing?--and dream of urging the suit, as an
indulgent skipper of parental pages?

Such haunting interrogations were the conspirators' daggers out at any
instant, or leaping in sheath, against Nataly's peace of mind. But she
trusted her girl's laughing side to rectify any little sentimental
overbalancing. She left the ground where maternal meditations are
serious, at an image of Mr. Barmby knocking at Nesta's heart as a lover.
Was it worth inquiry?

A feminine look was trailed across the eyes of mademoiselle, with mention
of Mr. Barmby's name.

Mademoiselle rippled her shoulders. 'We are at present much enamoured of
Bethesda.'

That watchfullest showing no alarm, the absurdity of the suspicion
smothered it.

Nataly had moreover to receive startling new guests:

Lady Rodwell Blachington: Mrs. Fanning, wife of the General: young Mrs.
Blathenoy, wife of the great bill-broker: ladies of Wrensham and about.
And it was a tasking of her energies equal to the buffeting of recurrent
waves on deep sea. The ladies were eager for her entry into Lakelands.
She heard that Victor had appointed Lady Blachington's third son to the
coveted post of clerk in the Indian house of Inchling and Radnor. These
are the deluge days when even aristocracy will cry blessings on the man
who procures a commercial appointment for one of its younger sons
offended and rebutted by the barrier of Examinations for the Civil
Service. 'To have our Adolphus under Mr. Victor Radnor's protection, is a
step!' Lady Blachington said. Nataly was in an atmosphere of hints and
revealings. There were City Dinners, to which one or other of the
residents about Lakelands had been taken before he sat at Victor's London
table. He was already winning his way, apparently without effort, to be
the popular man of that neighbourhood. A subterranean tide or a slipping
of earth itself seemed bearing her on. She had his promise indeed, that
he would not ask of her to enter Lakelands until the day of his freedom
had risen; but though she could trust to his word, the heart of the word
went out of it when she heard herself thanked by Lady Blachington (who
could so well excuse her at such a time of occupation for not returning
her call, that she called in a friendly way a second time, warmly to
thank her) for throwing open the Concert room at Lakelands in August, to
an Entertainment in assistance of the funds for the purpose of erecting
an East of London Clubhouse, where the children of the poor by day could
play, and their parents pass a disengaged evening. Doubtless a worthy
Charity. Nataly was alive to the duties of wealth. Had it been simply a
demand for a donation, she would not have shown that momentary pucker of
the brows, which Lady Blachington read as a contrast with the generous
vivacity of the husband.

Nataly read a leaf of her fate in this announcement. Nay, she beheld
herself as the outer world wexedly beholds a creature swung along to the
doing of things against the better mind. An outer world is thoughtless of
situations which prepare us to meet the objectionable with a will
benumbed;--if we do not, as does that outer world, belong to the party of
the readily heroical. She scourged her weakness: and the intimation of
the truth stood over her, more than ever manifest, that the deficiency
affecting her character lay in her want of language. A tongue to speak
and contend, would have helped her to carve a clearer way. But then
again, the tongue to speak must be one which could reproach, and strike
at errors; fence, and continually summon resources to engage the
electrical vitality of a man like Victor. It was an exultation of their
life together, a mark of his holiness for them both, that they had never
breathed a reproach upon one another.

She dropped away from ideas of remonstrance; faintly seeing, in her sigh
of submission, that the deficiency affecting her character would have
been supplied by a greater force of character, pressing either to speech
or acts. The confession of a fated inevitable in the mind, is weakness
prostrate. She knew it: but she could point to the manner of man she was
matched with; and it was not a poor excuse.

Mr. Barmby, she thought, deserved her gratitude in some degree for
stepping between Mr. Sowerby and Nesta. The girl not having inclinations,
and the young gentleman being devoid of stratagem, they were easily kept
from the dangerous count of two.

Mademoiselle would have said, that the shepherd also had rarely if ever a
minute quite alone with her lamb. Incredulously she perceived signs of a
shock. The secret following the signs was betrayed by Nesta in return for
a tender grasp of hands and a droll flutter of eyelids. Out it came, on a
nod first; then a dreary mention of a date, and an incident, to bring it
nearer to comprehension. Mr. Barmby--and decide who will whether it is
that Love was made to elude or that curates impelled by his fires are
subtle as nether--had outwitted French watchfulness by stealing minutes
enough on a day at Lakelands to declare himself. And no wonder the girl
looked so forlorn: he had shivered her mediaeval forest-palace of
illuminated glass, to leave her standing like a mountain hind, that
sniffs the tainted gale off the crag of her first quick leap from hounds;
her instincts alarmed, instead of rich imagination colouring and
fostering.

She had no memory for his words; so, and truly, she told her Louise:
meaning that she had only a spiceless memory; especially for the word
love in her ears from the mouth of a man.

There had been a dream of it; with the life-awakening marvel it would be,
the humbleness it would bring to her soul beneath the golden clothing of
her body: one of those faint formless dreams, which are as the bend of
grasses to the breath of a still twilight. She lived too spiritedly to
hang on any dream; and had moreover a muffled dread-shadow-sister to the
virginal desire--of this one, as of a fateful power that might drag her
down, disorder, discolour. But now she had heard it: the word, the very
word itself! in her own ears! addressed to her! in a man's voice! The
first utterance had been heard, and it was over; the chapter of the book
of bulky promise of the splendours and mysteries;--the shimmering woods
and bushy glades, and the descent of the shape celestial, and the
recognition--the mutual cry of affinity; and overhead the crimson
outrolling of the flag of beneficent enterprises hand in hand, all was at
an end. These, then, are the deceptions our elders tell of! That
masculine voice should herald a new world to the maiden. The voice she
had heard did but rock to ruin the world she had been living in.

Mademoiselle prudently forbore from satirical remarks on his person or on
his conduct. Nesta had nothing to defend: she walked in a bald waste.

'Can I have been guilty of leading him to think . . .?' she said, in a
tone that writhed, at a second discussion of this hapless affair.

'They choose to think,' mademoiselle replied. 'It is he or another. My
dear and dearest, you have entered the field where shots fly thick, as
they do to soldiers in battle; and it is neither your fault nor any
one's, if you are hit.'

Nesta gazed at her, with a shy supplicating cry of 'Louise.'

Mademoiselle immediately answered the tone of entreaty. 'Has it happened
to me? I am of the age of eight and twenty; passable, to look at: yes, my
dear, I have gone through it. To spare you the questions tormenting you,
I will tell you, that perhaps our experience of our feelings comes nigh
on a kind of resemblance. The first gentleman who did me the honour to
inform me of his passion, was a hunchback.'

Nesta cried 'Oh!' in a veritable pang of sympathy, and clapped hands to
her ears, to shut out Mr. Barmby's boom of the terrific word attacking
Louise from that deformed one.

Her disillusionment became of the sort which hears derision. A girl of
quick blood and active though unregulated intellect, she caught at the
comic of young women's hopes and experiences, in her fear of it.

'My own precious poor dear Louise! what injustice there is in the world
for one like my Louise to have a hunchback to be the first . . . !'

'But, my dear, it did me no harm.'

'But if it had been known!'

'But it was known!'

Nesta controlled a shuddering: 'It is the knowledge of it in
ourselves--that it has ever happened;--you dear Louise, who deserve so
much better! And one asks--Oh, why are we not left in peace! And do look
at the objects it makes of us!' Mademoiselle: could see, that the girl's
desperation had got hold of her humour for a life-buoy. 'It is really
worse to have it unknown--when you are compelled to be his partner in
sharing the secret, and feel as if it were a dreadful doll you conceal
for fear that everybody will laugh at its face.'

She resumed her seriousness: 'I find it so hard to be vexed with him and
really really like him. For he is a good man; but he will not let one
shake him off. He distresses: because we can't quite meet as we did. Last
Wednesday Concert evening, he kept away; and I am annoyed that I was
glad.'

'Moths have to pass through showers, and keep their pretty patterns from
damage as best they can,' said mademoiselle.

Nesta transformed herself into a disciple of Philosophy on the spot.
'Yes, all these feelings of ours are moth-dust! One feels them. I suppose
they pass. They must. But tell me, Louise, dear soul, was your poor dear
good little afflicted suitor--was he kindly pitied?'

'Conformably with the regulations prescribed to young damsels who are in
request to surrender the custody of their hands. It is easy to commit a
dangerous excess in the dispensing of that article they call pity of
them.'

'And he--did he?--vowed to you he could not take No for an answer?'

At this ingenuous question, woefully uttered, mademoiselle was pricked,
to smile pointedly. Nesta had a tooth on her under-lip. Then, shaking
vapours to the winds, she said: 'It is an honour, to be asked; and we
cannot be expected to consent. So I shall wear through it.--Only I do
wish that Mr. Fenellan would not call him The Inchcape Bell!' She
murmured this to herself.

Mr. Barmby was absent for two weeks. 'Can anything have offended him?'
Victor inquired, in some consternation, appreciating the man's worth, and
the grand basso he was; together with the need for him at the Lakelands
Concert in August.

Nataly wrote Mr. Barmby a direct invitation. She had no reply. Her
speculations were cut short by Victor, who handed her a brief note
addressed to him and signed by the Rev. Septimus, petitioning for a
private interview.

The formality of the request incensed Victor. 'Now, dear love, you see
Colney's meaning, when he says, there are people who have no intimacy in
them. Here's a man who visits me regularly once a week or more, has been
familiar for years--four, at least; and he wants to speak to me, and must
obtain the "privilege" by special appointment! What can be the meaning of
it?'

'You will hear to-morrow afternoon,' Nataly said, seeing one paved way to
the meaning--a too likely meaning. . . 'He hasn't been . . . nothing
about Fredi, surely!'

'I have had no information.'

'Impossible! Barmby has good sense; Bottesini can't intend to come
scraping on that string. But we won't lose him; he's one of us. Barmby
counts for more at a Charity Concert than all the catalogue, and
particularly in the country. But he's an excellent fellow--eh?'

'That he is,' Nataly agreed.

Victor despatched a cheerful curt consent to see Mr. Barmby privately on
the late afternoon of the day to follow.

Nesta, returning home from the park at that hour of the interview,
ignorant of Mr. Barmby's purpose though she was, had her fires
extinguished by the rolling roar of curfew along the hall-passage, out of
the library.




CHAPTER XVIII

SUITORS FOR THE HAND OF NESTA VICTORIA

When, upon the well-known quest, the delightful singer Orpheus took that
downward way, coming in sight of old Cerberus centiceps, he astutely
feigned inattention to the hostile appearances of the multiple beast, and
with a wave of his plectrum over the responsive lyre, he at the stroke
raised voice. This much you know. It may be communicated to you, that
there was then beheld the most singular spectacle ever exhibited on the
dizzy line of division between the living and the dead. For those
unaccustomed musical tones in the last thin whiff of our sustaining air
were so smartingly persuasive as to pierce to the vitals of the faithful
Old Dog before his offended sentiments had leisure to rouse their heads
against a beggar of a mortal. The terrible sugariness which poured into
him worked like venom to cause an encounter and a wrestling: his battery
of jaws expressed it. They gaped. At the same time, his eyeballs gave up.
All the Dog, that would have barked the breathing intruder an hundredfold
back to earth, was one compulsory centurion yawn. Tears, issue of the
frightful internal wedding of the dulcet and the sour (a ravishing rather
of the latter by the former), rolled off his muzzles.

Now, if you are not for insisting that a magnificent simile shall be
composed of exactly the like notes in another octave, you will catch the
fine flavour of analogy and be wafted in a beat of wings across the scene
of the application of the Rev. Septimus Barmby to Mr. Victor Radnor, that
he might enter the house in the guise of suitor for the hand of Nesta
Victoria. It is the excelling merit of similes and metaphors to spring us
to vault over gaps and thickets and dreary places. But, as with the
visits of Immortals, we must be ready to receive them. Beware, moreover,
of examining them too scrupulously: they have a trick of wearing to
vapour if closely scanned. Let it be gratefully for their aid.

So far the comparison is absolute, that Mr. Barmby passed: he was at
liberty to pursue his quest.

Victor could not explain how he had been brought to grant it. He was at
pains to conceal the bewilderment Mr. Barmby had cast on him, and make
Nataly see the smallness of the grant:--both of them were unwilling to
lose Barmby; there was not the slightest fear about Fredi, he said; and
why should not poor Barmby have his chance with the others in the
race!--and his Nataly knew that he hated to speak unkindly: he could cry
the negative like a crack of thunder in the City. But such matters as
these! and a man pleading merely for the right to see the girl!--and
pleading in a tone . . . 'I assure you, my love, he touched chords.'

'Did he allude to advantages in the alliance with him?' Nataly asked
smoothly.

'His passion--nothing else. Candid enough. And he had a tone--he has a
tone, you know. It 's not what he said. Some allusion to belief in a
favourable opinion of him . . . encouragement . . . on the part of the
mama. She would have him travelling with us! I foresaw it.'

'You were astonished when it came.'

'We always are.'

Victor taunted her softly with having encouraged Mr. Barmby.

She had thought in her heart--not seriously; on a sigh of
despondency--that Mr. Barmby espousing the girl would smooth a troubled
prospect: and a present resentment at her weakness rendered her shrewd to
detect Victor's cunning to cover his own: a thing imaginable of him
previously in sentimental matters, yet never accurately and so legibly
printed on her mind. It did not draw her to read him with a novel
familiarity; it drew her to be more sensible of foregone intimations of
the man he was--irresistible in attack, not impregnably defensive. Nor
did he seem in this instance humanely considerate: if mademoiselle's
estimate of the mind of the girl was not wrong, then Mr. Barmby's
position would be both a ridiculous and a cruel one. She had some silly
final idea that the poor man might now serve permanently to check the
more dreaded applicant: a proof that her ordinary reflectiveness was
blunted.

Nataly acknowledged, after rallying Victor for coming to have his
weakness condoned, a justice in his counter-accusation, of a loss of her
natural cheerfulness, and promised amendment, with a steely smile, that
his lips mimicked fondly; and her smile softened. To strengthen the dear
soul's hopes, he spoke, as one who had received the latest information,
of Dr. Themison and surgeons; little conscious of the tragic depths he
struck or of the burden he gave her heart to bear. Her look alarmed him.
She seemed to be hugging herself up to the tingling scalp, and was in a
moment marble to sight and touch. She looked like the old engravings of
martyrs taking the bite of the jaws of flame at the stake.

He held her embraced, feeling her body as if it were in the awful grip of
fingers from the outside of life.

The seizure was over before it could be called ominous. When it was once
over, and she had smiled again and rebuked him for excessive anxiety, his
apprehensions no longer troubled him, but subsided sensationally in wrath
at the crippled woman who would not obey the dictate of her ailments
instantly to perish and spare this dear one annoyance.

Subsequently, later than usual, he performed his usual mental penance for
it. In consequence, the wrath, and the wish, and the penitence, haunted
him, each swelling to possession of him in turn; until they united to
head a plunge into retrospects; which led to his reviewing the army of
charges against Mrs. Burman.

And of this he grew ashamed, attributing it to the morbid indulgence in
reflection: a disease never afflicting him anterior to the stupid fall on
London Bridge. He rubbed instinctively for the punctilio-bump, and could
cheat his fancy to think a remainder of it there, just below, half an
inch to the right of, the spot where a phrenologist, invited by Nataly in
old days, had marked philo-progenitiveness on his capacious and enviable
cerebrum. He knew well it was a fancy. But it was a fact also, that since
the day of the fall (never, save in merest glimpses, before that day), he
had taken to look behind him, as though an eye had been knocked in the
back of his head.

Then, was that day of the announcement of Lakelands to Nataly, to be
accounted a gloomy day? He would not have it so.

She was happily occupied with her purchases of furniture, Fredi with her
singing lessons, and he with his business; a grasp of many ribands,
reining-in or letting loose; always enjoyable in the act. Recently only
had he known when at home, a relaxation, a positive pleasure in looking
forward to the hours of the City office. This was odd, but so it was; and
looking homeward from the City, he had a sense of disappointment when it
was not Concert evening. The Cormyns, the Yatts, and Priscilla Graves,
and Pempton, foolish fellow, and that bothering Barmby, and Peridon and
Catkin, were the lineing of his nest. Well, and so they had been before
Lakelands rose. What had induced! . . . he suddenly felt foreign to
himself. The shrouded figure of his lost Idea on London Bridge went by.

A peep into the folds of the shroud was granted him:--Is it a truth, that
if we are great owners of money, we are so swollen with a force not
native to us, as to be precipitated into acts the downright contrary of
our tastes?

He inquired it of his tastes, which have the bad habit of unmeasured
phrasing when they are displeased, and so they yield no rational answer.
Still he gave heed to violent extraneous harpings against money. Epigrams
of Colney's; abuse of it and the owners of it by Socialist orators
reported in some newspaper corner; had him by the ears.

They ceased in the presence of Lady Grace Halley, who entered his office
to tell him she was leaving town for Whinfold, her husband's family-seat,
where the dear man lay in evil case. She signified her resignation to the
decrees from above, saying generously:

'You look troubled, my friend. Any bad City news?'

'I look troubled?' Victor said laughing, and bethought him of what the
trouble might be. 'City news would not cause the look. Ah, yes;--I was
talking in the street to a friend of mine on horseback the other day, and
he kept noticing his horse's queer starts. We spied half a dozen children
in the gutter, at the tail of the horse, one of them plucking at a hair.
"Please, sir, may I have a hair out of your horse's tail?" said the mite.
We patted the poor horse that grew a tail for urchins to pluck at. Men
come to the fathers about their girls. It's my belief that mothers more
easily say no. If they learn the word as maids, you'll say! However,
there's no fear about my girl. Fredi's hard to snare. And what brings you
Cityward?'

'I want to know whether I shall do right in selling out of the Tiddler
mine.'

'You have multiplied your investment by ten.'

'If it had been thousands!'

'Clearly, you sell; always jump out of a mounted mine, unless you're at
the bottom of it.'

'There are City-articles against the mine this morning--or I should have
been on my way to Whinfold at this moment. The shares are lower.'

'The merry boys are at work to bring your balloon to the ground, that you
may quit it for them to ascend. Tiddler has enemies, like the best of
mines: or they may be named lovers, if you like. And mines that have gone
up, go down for a while before they rise again; it's an affair of
undulations; rocket mines are not so healthy. The stories are false, for
the time. I had the latest from Dartrey Fenellan yesterday. He's here
next month; some time in August.'

'He is married, is he not?'

'Was.'

Victor's brevity sounded oddly to Lady Grace.

'Is he not a soldier?' she said.

'Soldiers and parsons!' Victor interjected.

Now she saw. She understood the portent of Mr. Barmby's hovering offer of
the choice of songs, and the recent tremulousness of the welling
Bethesda.

But she had come about her own business; and after remarking, that when
there is a prize there must be competition, or England will have to lower
her flag, she declared her resolve to stick to Tiddler, exclaiming: 'It's
only in mines that twenty times the stake is not a dream of the past!'

'The Riviera green field on the rock is always open to you,' said Victor.

She put out her hand to be taken. 'Not if you back me here. It really is
not gambling when yours is the counsel I follow. And if I'm to be a
widow, I shall have to lean on a friend, gifted like you. I love
adventure, danger;--well, if we two are in it; just to see my captain in
a storm. And if the worst happens, we go down together. It 's the
detestation of our deadly humdrum of modern life; some inherited love of
fighting.'

'Say, brandy.'

'Does not Mr. Durance accuse you of an addiction to the brandy novel?'

'Colney may call it what he pleases. If I read fiction, let it be
fiction; airier than hard fact. If I see a ballet, my troop of short
skirts must not go stepping like pavement policemen. I can't read dull
analytical stuff or "stylists" when I want action--if I'm to give my mind
to a story. I can supply the reflections. I'm English--if Colney 's right
in saying we always come round to the story with the streak of
supernaturalism.

I don't ask for bloodshed: that's what his "brandy" means.'

'But Mr. Durance is right, we require a shedding; I confess I expect it
where there's love; it's part of the balance, and justifies one's
excitement. How otherwise do you get any real crisis? I must read and
live something unlike this flat life around us.'

'There's the Adam life and the Macadam life, Fenellan says. Pass it in
books, but in life we can have quite enough excitement coming out of our
thoughts. No brandy there! And no fine name for personal predilections or
things done in domino!' Victor said, with his very pleasant face,
pressing her hand, to keep the act of long holding it in countenance and
bring it to a well-punctuated conclusion: thinking involuntarily of the
other fair woman, whose hand was his, and who betrayed a beaten visage
despite--or with that poor kind of--trust in her captain. But the thought
was not guilty of drawing comparisons. 'This is one that I could trust,
as captain or mate,' he pressed the hand again before dropping it.

'You judge entirely by the surface, if you take me for a shifty person at
the trial,' said Lady Grace.

Skepsey entered the room with one of his packets, and she was reminded of
trains and husbands.

She left Victor uncomfortably rufed: and how? for she had none of the
physical charms appealing peculiarly to the man who was taken with
grandeur of shape. She belonged rather to the description physically
distasteful to him.

It is a critical comment on a civilization carelessly distilled from the
jealous East, when visits of fair women to City offices can have this
effect. If the sexes are separated for an hour, the place where one is
excluded or not common to see, becomes inflammable to that appearing
spark. He does outrage to a bona Dea: she to the monasticism of the Court
of Law: and he and she awaken unhallowed emotions. Supposing, however,
that western men were to de-orientalize their gleeful notions of her, and
dis-Turk themselves by inviting the woman's voluble tongue to sisterly
occupation there in the midst of the pleading Court, as in the domestic
circle: very soon would her eyes be harmless: unless directed upon us
with intent.

That is the burning core of the great Question, our Armageddon in
Morality: Is she moral? Does she mean to be harmless? Is she not
untamable Old Nature? And when once on an equal footing with her lordly
half, would not the spangled beauty, in a turn, like the realistic
transformation-trick of a pantomime, show herself to be that wanton old
thing--the empress of disorderliness? You have to recollect, as the
Conservative acutely suggests, that her timidities, at present urging her
to support Establishments, pertain to her state of dependence. The party
views of Conservatism are, must be, founded, we should remember, on an
intimate acquaintance with her in the situations where she is almost
unrestrictedly free and her laughter rings to confirm the sentences of
classical authors and Eastern sages. Conservatives know what they are
about when they refuse to fling the last lattice of an ancient harem open
to air and sun-the brutal dispersers of mystery, which would despoil an
ankle of its flying wink.

Victor's opinions were those of the entrenched majority; objecting to the
occult power of women, as we have the women now, while legislating to
maintain them so; and forbidding a step to a desperately wicked female
world lest the step should be to wickeder. His opinions were in the
background, rarely stirred; but the lady had brought them forward; and he
fretted at his restlessness, vexed that it should be due to the intrusion
of the sex instead of to the charms of the individual. No sting of the
sort had bothered him, he called to mind, on board the Channel
boat-nothing to speak of. 'Why does she come here! Why didn't she go to
her husband! She gets into the City scramble blindfold, and catches at
the nearest hand to help her out! Nice woman enough.' Yes, but he was
annoyed with her for springing sensations that ran altogether heartless
to the object, at the same time that they were disloyal to the dear woman
their natural divinity. And between him and that dear woman, since the
communication made by Skepsey in the town of Dreux, nightly the dividing
spirit of Mrs. Burman lay cold as a corpse. They both felt her there.
They kissed coldly, pressed a hand, said good night.

Next afternoon the announcement by Skepsey of the Hon. Dudley Sowerby,
surprised Victor's eyebrows at least, and caused him genially to review
the visit of Lady Grace.

Whether or not Colney Durance drew his description of a sunken nobility
from the 'sick falcon' distinguishing the handsome features of Mr.
Sowerby, that beaked invalid was particularly noticeable to Victor during
the statement of his case, although the young gentleman was far from
being one, in Colney's words, to enliven the condition of domestic fowl
with an hereditary turn for 'preying'; eminently the reverse; he was of
good moral repute, a worker, a commendable citizen. But there was the
obligation upon him to speak--it is expected in such cases, if only as a
formality--of his 'love': hard to do even in view and near to the
damsel's reddening cheeks: it perplexed him. He dropped a veil on the
bashful topic; his tone was the same as when he reverted to the material
points; his present income, his position in the great Bank of Shotts and
Co., his prospects, the health of the heir to the Cantor earldom. He
considered that he spoke to a member of the City merchants, whose
preference for the plain positive, upon the question of an alliance
between families by marriage, lends them for once a resemblance to lords.
When a person is not read by character, the position or profession is
called on to supply raised print for the finger-ends to spell.

Hard on poor Fredi! was Victor's thought behind the smile he bent on this
bald Cupid. She deserved a more poetical lover! His paternal sympathies
for the girl besought in love, revived his past feelings as a wooer;
nothing but a dread of the influence of Mr. Barmby's toned eloquence upon
the girl, after her listening to Dudley Sowerby's addresses, checked his
contempt for the latter. He could not despise the suitor he sided with
against another and seemingly now a more dangerous. Unable quite to
repress the sentiment, he proceeded immediately to put it to his uses.
For we have no need to be scrupulously formal and precise in the
exposition of circumstances to a fellow who may thank the stars if such a
girl condescends to give him a hearing. He had this idea through the
conception of his girl's generosity. And furthermore, the cognizant eye
of a Lucretian Alma Mater having seat so strongly in Victor, demanded as
a right an effusion of the promising amorous graces on the part of the
acceptable applicant to the post of husband of that peerless. These being
absent, evidently non-existent, it seemed sufficient for the present,
after the fashion of the young gentleman, to capitulate the few material
matters briefly.

They were dotted along with a fine disregard of the stateliness of the
sum to be settled on Nesta Victoria, and with a distant but burning wish
all the while, that the suitor had been one to touch his heart and open
it, inspiriting it--as could have been done--to disclose for good and all
the things utterable. Victor loved clear honesty, as he loved light: and
though he hated to be accused of not showing a clean face in the light,
he would have been moved and lifted to confess to a spot by the touch at
his heart. Dudley Sowerby's deficiencies, however, were outweighed by the
palpable advantages of his birth, his prospects, and his good repute for
conduct; add thereto his gentlemanly manners. Victor sighed again over
his poor Fredi; and in telling Mr. Sowerby that the choice must be left
to her, he had the regrets of a man aware of his persuasive arts and how
they would be used, to think that he was actually making the choice.

Observe how fatefully he who has a scheme is the engine of it; he is no
longer the man of his tastes or of his principles; he is on a line of
rails for a terminus; and he may cast languishing eyes across waysides to
right and left, he has doomed himself to proceed, with a self-devouring
hunger for the half desired; probably manhood gone at the embrace of it.
This may be or not, but Nature has decreed to him the forfeit of
pleasure. She bids us count the passage of a sober day for the service of
the morrow; that is her system; and she would have us adopt it, to keep
in us the keen edge for cutting, which is the guarantee of enjoyment:
doing otherwise, we lose ourselves in one or other of the furious matrix
instincts; we are blunt to all else.

Young Dudley fully agreed that the choice must be with Miss Radnor; he
alluded to her virtues, her accomplishments. He was waxing to fervidness.
He said he must expect competitors; adding, on a start, that he was to
say, from his mother, she, in the case of an intention to present Miss
Radnor at Court . . . .

Victor waved hand for a finish, looking as though, his head had come out
of hot water. He sacrificed Royalty to his necessities, under a kind of
sneer at its functions: 'Court! my girl? But the arduous duties are over
for the season. We are a democratic people retaining the seductions of
monarchy, as a friend says; and of course a girl may like to count among
the flowers of the kingdom for a day, in the list of Court presentations;
no harm. Only there's plenty of time . . . very young girls have their
heads turned--though I don't say, don't imagine, my girl would. By and by
perhaps.'

Dudley was ushered into Mr. Inchling's room and introduced to the
figure-head of the Firm of Inchling, Pennergate, and Radnor: a
respectable City merchant indeed, whom Dudley could read-off in a glimpse
of the downright contrast to his partner. He had heard casual remarks on
the respectable City of London merchant from Colney Durance. A short
analytical gaze at him, helped to an estimate of the powers of the man
who kept him up. Mr. Inchling was a florid City-feaster, descendant of a
line of City merchants, having features for a wife to identify; as
drovers, they tell us, can single one from another of their round-bellied
beasts. Formerly the leader of the Firm, he was now, after dreary fits of
restiveness, kickings, false prophecies of ruin, Victor's obedient
cart-horse. He sighed in set terms for the old days of the Firm, when,
like trouts in the current, the Firm had only to gape for shoals of good
things to fatten it: a tale of English prosperity in quiescence; narrated
interjectorily among the by-ways of the City, and wanting only metre to
make it our national Poem.

Mr. Inchling did not deny that grand mangers of golden oats were still
somehow constantly allotted to him. His wife believed in Victor, and
deemed the loss of the balancing Pennergate a gain. Since that lamentable
loss, Mr. Inchling, under the irony of circumstances the Tory of
Commerce, had trotted and gallopped whither driven, racing like mad
against his will and the rival nations now in the field to force the
pace; a name for enterprise; the close commercial connection of a man who
speculated--who, to put it plainly, lived on his wits; hurried onward and
onward; always doubting, munching, grumbling at satisfaction, in
perplexity of the gratitude which is apprehensive of black Nemesis at a
turn of the road,--to confound so wild a whip as Victor Radnor. He had
never forgiven the youth's venture in India of an enormous purchase of
Cotton many years back, and which he had repudiated, though not his share
of the hundreds of thousands realized before the refusal to ratify the
bargain had come to Victor. Mr. Inchling dated his first indigestion from
that disquieting period. He assented to the praise of Victor's genius,
admitting benefits; his heart refused to pardon, and consequently his
head wholly to trust, the man who robbed him of his quondam comfortable
feeling of security. And if you will imagine the sprite of the aggregate
English Taxpayer personifying Steam as the malignant who has despoiled
him of the blessed Safety-Assurance he once had from his God Neptune
against invaders, you will comprehend the state of Mr. Inchling's mind in
regard to his terrific and bountiful, but very disturbing partner.

He thanked heaven to his wife often, that he had nothing to do with North
American or South American mines and pastures or with South Africa and,
gold and diamonds: and a wife must sometimes listen, mastering her inward
comparisons. Dr. Schlesien had met and meditated on this example of the
island energy. Mr. Inchling was not permitted by his wife to be much the
guest of the Radnor household, because of the frequent meeting there with
Colney Durance; Colney's humour for satire being instantly in bristle at
sight of his representative of English City merchants: 'over whom,' as he
wrote of the venerable body, 'the disciplined and instructed Germans not
deviously march; whom acute and adventurous Americans, with half a cock
of the eye in passing, compassionately outstrip.' He and Dr. Schlesien
agreed upon Mr. Inchling. Meantime the latter gentleman did his part at
the tables of the wealthier City Companies, and retained his appearance
of health; he was beginning to think, upon a calculation of the increased
treasures of those Companies and the country, that we, the Taxpayer,
ought not to leave it altogether to Providence to defend them;
notwithstanding the watchful care of us hitherto shown by our briny
Providence, to save us from anxiety and expense. But there are, he said,
'difficulties'; and the very word could stop him, as commonly when our
difficulty lies in the exercise of thinking.

Victor's African room, containing large wall-maps of auriferous regions,
was inspected; and another, where clerks were busy over miscellaneous
Continents. Dudley Sowerby hoped he might win the maiden.

He and Victor walked in company Westward. The shop of Boyle and Luckwort,
chemists, was not passed on this occasion. Dudley grieved that he had to
be absent from the next Concert for practise, owing to his engagement to
his mother to go down to the family seat near Tunbridge Wells. Victor
mentioned his relatives, the Duvidney maiden ladies, residing near the
Wells. They measured the distance between Cronidge and Moorsedge, the two
houses, as for half an hour on horseback.

Nesta told her father at home that the pair of them had been observed
confidentially arm in arm, and conversing so profoundly.

'Who, do you think, was the topic?' Victor asked.

She would not chase the little blue butterfly of a guess.




CHAPTER XIX

TREATS OF NATURE AND CIRCUMSTANCE AND THE DISSENSION BETWEEN THEM AND OF
A SATIRIST'S MALIGNITY IN THE DIRECTION OF HIS COUNTRY

There is at times in the hearts of all men of active life a vivid wild
moment or two of dramatic dialogue between the veteran antagonists,
Nature and Circumstance, when they, whose business it should be to be
joyfully one, furiously split; and the Dame is up with her shrillest
querulousness to inquire of her offspring, for the distinct original
motive of his conduct. Why did he bring her to such a pass! And what is
the gain? If he be not an alienated issue of the great Mother, he will
strongly incline to her view, that he put himself into harness to join
with a machine going the dead contrary way of her welfare; and thereby
wrote himself donkey, for his present reading. Soldiers, heroes, even the
braided, even the wearers of the gay cock's feathers, who get the honours
and the pocket-pieces, know the moment of her electrical eloquence. They
have no answer for her, save an index at the machine pushing them on yet
farther under the enemy's line of fire, where they pluck the golden
wreath or the livid, and in either case listen no more. They glorify her
topping wisdom while on the march to confound it. She is wise in her way.
But, it is asked by the disputant, If we had followed her exclusively,
how far should we have travelled from our starting-point? We of the world
and its prizes and duties must do her an injury to make her tongue
musical to us, and her argument worthy of attention. So it seems. How to
keep the proper balance between those two testy old wranglers, that
rarely pull the right way together, is as much the task for men in the
grip of the world, as for the wanton youthful fry under dominion of their
instincts; and probably, when it is done, man will have attained the
golden age of his retirement from service.

Why be scheming? Victor asked. Unlike the gallant soldiery, his question
was raised in the blush of a success, from an examination of the quality
of the thing won; although it had not changed since it was first coveted;
it was demonstrably the same: and an astonishing dry stick he held, as a
reward for perpetual agitations and perversions of his natural tastes.
Here was a Dudley Sowerby, the direct issue of the conception of
Lakelands; if indeed they were not conceived together in one; and the
young gentleman had moral character, good citizen substance, and station,
rank, prospect of a title; and the grasp of him was firm. Yet so far was
it from hearty, that when hearing a professed satirist like Colney
Durance remark on the decorous manner of Dudley's transparent courtship
of the girl, under his look of an awakened approval of himself, that he
appeared to be asking everybody:--Do you not think I bid fair for an
excellent father of Philistines?--Victor had a nip of spite at the
thought of Dudley's dragging him bodily to be the grandfather. Poor
Fredi, too!--necessarily the mother: condemned by her hard fate to feel
proud of Philistine babies! Though women soon get reconciled to it! Or do
they? They did once. What if his Fredi turned out one of the modern young
women, who have drunk of ideas? He caught himself speculating on that, as
on a danger. The alliance with Dudley really seemed to set him facing
backward.

Colney might not have been under prompting of Nataly when he derided
Dudley; but Victor was at war with the picture of her, in her compression
of a cruel laugh, while her eyelids were hard shut, as if to exclude the
young patriarch of Philistines' ridiculous image.

He hearkened to the Nature interrogating him, why had he stepped on a
path to put division between himself and his beloved?--the smallest of
gaps; and still the very smallest between nuptial lovers is a
division--and that may become a mortal wound to their one-life. Why had
he roused a slumbering world? Glimpses of the world's nurse-like,
old-fashioned, mother-nightcap benevolence to its kicking favourites; its
long-suffering tolerance for the heroic breakers of its rough-cast laws,
while the decent curtain continues dropped, or lifted only ankle-high;
together with many scenes, lively suggestions, of the choice of ways he
liked best, told of things, which were better things, incomprehensibly
forfeited. So that the plain sense of value insisted on more than one
weighing of the gain in hand: a dubious measure.

He was as little disposed to reject it as to stop his course at a goal of
his aim. Nevertheless, a gain thus poorly estimated, could not command
him to do a deed of humiliation on account of it. The speaking to this
dry young Dudley was not imperative at present. A word would do in the
day to come.

Nataly was busy with her purchases of furniture, and the practise for the
great August Concert. He dealt her liberal encouragements, up to the
verge of Dr. Themison's latest hummed words touching Mrs. Burman, from
which he jumped in alarm lest he should paralyze her again: the dear
soul's dreaded aspect of an earthy pallor was a spectre behind her
cheeks, ready to rush forth. Fenellan brought Carling to dine with him;
and Themison was confirmed by Carting, with incidents in proof; Caning by
Jarniman, also with incidents; one very odd one--or so it seemed, in the
fury of the first savour of it:--she informed Jarniman, Skepsey said his
friend Jarniman said, that she had dreamed of making her appearance to
him on the night of the 23rd August, and of setting the date on the
calendar over his desk, when she entered his room: 'Sitting-room, not
bedroom; she was always quite the lady,' Skepsey reported his Jarniman.
Mrs. Burman, as a ghost, would respect herself; she would keep to her
character. Jarniman quite expected the dream to be verified; she was a
woman of her word: he believed she had received a revelation of the
approaching fact: he was preparing for the scene.

Victor had to keep silent and discourse of general prosperity. His happy
vivaciousness assisted him to feel it by day. Nataly heard him at night,
on a moan: 'Poor soul!' and loudly once while performing an abrupt
demi-vault from back to side: 'Perhaps now!' in a voice through doors.
She schooled herself to breathe equably.

Not being allowed to impart the distressing dose of comfort he was
charged with, he swallowed it himself; and these were the consequences.
And an uneasy sleep was traditionally a matter for grave debate in the
Radnor family. The Duvidney ladies, Dorothea and Virginia, would have
cited ancestral names, showing it to be the worst of intimations. At
night, lying on his back beneath a weight of darkness, one heavily craped
figure, distinguishable through the gloom, as a blot on a black pad,
accused the answering darkness within him, until his mind was dragged to
go through the whole case by morning light; and the compassionate man
appealed to common sense, to stamp and pass his delectable sophistries;
as, that it was his intense humaneness, which exposed him to an
accusation of inhumanity; his prayer for the truly best to happen, which
anticipated Mrs. Burman's expiry. They were simple sophistries,
fabricated to suit his needs, readily taking and bearing the imprimatur
of common sense. They refreshed him, as a chemical scent a crowded room.

All because he could not open his breast to Nataly, by reason of her
feebleness; or feel enthusiasm in the possession of young Dudley! A dry
stick indeed beside him on the walk Westward. Good quality wood, no
doubt, but dry, varnished for conventional uses. Poor dear Fredi would
have to crown it like the May-day posy of the urchins of Craye Farm and
Creckholt!

Dudley wished the great City-merchant to appreciate him as a diligent
student of commercial matters: rivalries of Banks; Foreign and Municipal
Loans, American Rails, and Argentine; new Companies of wholesome
appearance or sinister; or starting with a dram in the stomach, or born
to bleat prostrate, like sheep on their backs in a ditch; Trusts and
Founders; Breweries bursting vats upon the markets, and England prone
along the gutters, gobbling, drunk for shares, and sober in the
possession of certain of them. But when, as Colney says, a grateful
England has conferred the Lordship on her Brewer, he gratefully
hands-over the establishment to his country; and both may disregard the
howls of a Salvation Army of shareholders.--Beaten by the Germans in
Brewery, too! Dr. Schlesien has his right to crow. We were ahead of them,
and they came and studied us, and they studied Chemistry as well; while
we went on down our happy-go-lucky old road; and then had to hire their
young Professors, and then to import their beer.

Have the Germans more brains than we English? Victor's blood up to the
dome of his cranium knocked the patriotic negative. But, as old Colney
says (and bother him, for constantly intruding!), the comfortably
successful have the habit of sitting, and that dulls the brain yet more
than it eases the person: hence are we outpaced; we have now to know we
are racing. Victor scored a mark for one of his projects. A
well-conducted Journal of the sharpest pens in the land might, at a
sacrifice of money grandly sunk, expose to his English how and to what
degree their sports, and their fierce feastings, and their opposition to
ideas, and their timidity in regard to change, and their execration of
criticism applied to themselves, and their unanimous adoption of it for a
weapon against others, are signs of a prolonged indulgence in the
cushioned seat. Victor saw it. But would the people he loved? He agreed
with Colney, forgetting the satirist's venom: to-wit; that the
journalists should be close under their editor's rod to put it in sound
bold English;--no metaphors, no similes, nor flowery insubstantiality:
but honest Saxon manger stuff: and put it repeatedly, in contempt of the
disgust of iteration; hammering so a soft place on the Anglican skull,
which is rubbed in consequence, and taught at last through soreness to
reflect.--A Journal?--with Colney Durance for Editor?--and called
conformably THE WHIPPING-TOP? Why not, if it exactly hits the
signification of the Journal and that which it would have the country do
to itself, to keep it going and truly topping? For there is no vulgarity
in a title strongly signifying the intent. Victor wrote it at night,
naming Colney for Editor, with a sum of his money to be devoted to the
publication, in a form of memorandum; and threw it among the papers in
his desk.

Young Dudley had a funny inquisitiveness about Dartrey Fenellan; owing to
Fredi's reproduction or imitation of her mother's romantic sentiment for
Dartrey, doubtless: a bit of jealousy, indicating that the dry fellow had
his feelings. Victor touched--off an outline of Dartrey's history and
character:--the half-brother of Simeon, considerably younger, and totally
different. 'Dartrey's mother was Lady Charlotte Kiltorne, one of the
Clanconans; better mother than wife, perhaps; and no reproach on her, not
a shadow; only she made the General's Bank-notes fly black paper. And--if
you 're for heredity--the queer point is, that Simeon, whose mother was a
sober-minded woman, has always been the spendthrift. Dartrey married one
of the Hennen women, all an odd lot, all handsome. I met her once. Colney
said, she came up here with a special commission from the Prince of
Darkness. There are women who stir the unholy in men--whether they mean
it or not, you know.'

Dudley pursed to remark, that he could not say he did know. And good for
Fredi if he did not know, and had his objections to the knowledge! But he
was like the men who escape colds by wrapping in comforters instead of
trusting to the spin of the blood.

'She played poor Dartrey pranks before he buried--he, behaved well to
her; and that says much for him; he has: a devil of a temper. I 've seen
the blood in his veins, mount to cracking. But there's the man: because
she was a woman, he never let it break out with her. And, by heaven, he
had cause. She couldn't be left. She tricked him, and she loved
him-passionately, I believe. You don't understand women loving the
husband they drag through the mire?'

Dudley did not. He sharpened his mouth.

'Buried, you said, sir?--a widower?'

'I've no positive information; we shall hear when he: comes back,' Victor
replied hurriedly. 'He got a drenching of all the damns in the British
service from his. Generalissimo one day at a Review, for a trooper's
negligence-button or stock missing, or something; and off goes Dartrey to
his hut, and breaks his sword, and sends in his resignation. Good soldier
lost. And I can't complain; he has been a right-hand man to me over in
Africa. But a man ought to have some control of his temper, especially a
soldier.'

Dudley put emphasis into his acquiescence.

'Worse than that temper of Dartrey's, he can't forgive an injury. He
bears a grudge against his country. You've heard Colney Durance abuse old
England. It's three parts factitious-literary exercise. It 's milk beside
the contempt of Dartrey's shrug. He thinks we're a dead people, if a
people; "subsisting on our fat," as Colney says.'

'I am not of opinion that we show it,' observed Dudley.

'We don't,' Victor agreed. He disrelished his companion's mincing tone of
a monumental security, and yearned for Dartrey or Simeon or Colney to be
at his elbow rather than this most commendable of orderly citizens, who
little imagined the treacherous revolt from him in the bosom of the
gentleman cordially signifying full agreement. But Dudley was not gifted
to read behind words and looks.

They were in the Park of the dwindling press of carriages, and here was
this young Dudley saying, quite commendably: 'It's a pity we seem to have
no means of keeping our parks select.'

Victor flung Simeon Fenellan at him in thought. He remembered a fable of
Fenellan's, about a Society of the Blest, and the salt it was to them to
discover an intruder from below, and the consequent accelerated measure
in their hymning.

'Have you seen anything offensive to you?' he asked.

'One sees notorious persons.'

Dudley spoke aloof from them--'out of his cold attics,' Fenellan would
have said.

Victor approved: with the deadened feeling common to us when first in sad
earnest we consent to take life as it is.

He perceived, too, the comicality of his having to resign himself to the
fatherly embrace of goodness.

Lakelands had him fast, and this young Dudley was the kernel of
Lakelands. If he had only been intellectually a little flexible in his
morality! But no; he wore it cap a pie, like a mediaeval knight his
armour. One had to approve. And there was no getting away from him. He
was good enough to stay in town for the practise of the opening overture
of the amateurs, and the flute-duet, when his family were looking for him
at Tunbridge Wells; and almost every day Victor was waylaid by him at a
corner of the Strand.

Occasionally, Victor appeared at the point of interception armed with
Colney Durance, for whom he had called in the Temple, bent on
self-defence, although Colney was often as bitter to his taste as to
Dudley's. Latterly the bitter had become a tonic. We rejoice in the
presence of goodness, let us hope; and still an impersonation of
conventional, goodness perpetually about us depresses. Dudley drove him
to Colney for relief. Besides it pleased Nataly that he should be
bringing Colney home; it looked to her as if he were subjecting Dudley to
critical inspection before he decided a certain question much, and
foolishly, dreaded by the dear soul. That quieted her. And another thing,
she liked him to be with Colney, for a clog on him; as it were, a
tuning-fork for the wild airs he started. A little pessimism, also, she
seemed to like; probably as an appeasement after hearing, and having to
share, high flights. And she was, in her queer woman's way, always
reassured by his endurance of Colney's company:--she read it to mean,
that he could bear Colney's perusal of him, and satiric stings. Victor
had seen these petty matters among the various which were made to serve
his double and treble purposes; now, thanks to the operation of young
Dudley within him, he felt them. Preferring Fenellan's easy humour to
Colney's acid, he was nevertheless braced by the latter's antidote to
Dudley, while reserving his entire opposition in the abstract.

For Victor Radnor and Colney Durance were the Optimist and Pessimist of
their society. They might have headed those tribes in the country. At a
period when the omnibus of the world appears to its quaint occupants to
be going faster, men are shaken into the acceptation, if not performance,
of one part or the other as it is dictated to them by their temperaments.
Compose the parts, and you come nigh to the meaning of the Nineteenth
Century: the mother of these gosling affirmatives and negatives divorced
from harmony and awakened by the slight increase of incubating motion to
vitality. Victor and Colney had been champion duellists for the rosy and
the saturnine since the former cheerfully slaved for a small stipend in
the City of his affection, and the latter entered on an inheritance
counted in niggard hundreds, that withdrew a briefless barrister disposed
for scholarship from the forlornest of seats in the Courts. They had
foretold of one another each the unfulfilled; each claimed the actual as
the child of his prediction. Victor was to have been ruined long back;
Colney the prey of independent bachelors. Colney had escaped his harpy,
and Victor could be called a millionaire and more. Prophesy was crowned
by Colney's dyspepsia, by Victor's ticklish domestic position. Their pity
for one another, their warm regard, was genuine; only, they were of
different temperaments; and we have to distinguish, that in many
estimable and some gifted human creatures, it is the quality of the blood
which directs the current of opinion.

Victor played-off Colney upon Dudley, for his internal satisfaction, and
to lull Nataly and make her laugh; but he could not, as she hoped he was
doing, take Colney into his confidence; inasmuch as the Optimist,
impelled by his exuberant anticipatory trustfulness, is an author, and
does things; whereas the Pessimist is your chaired critic, with the
delivery of a censor, generally an undoer of things. Our Optimy has his
instinct to tell him of the cast of Pessimy's countenance at the
confession of a dilemma-foreseen! He hands himself to Pessimy, as it were
a sugar-cane, for the sour brute to suck the sugar and whack with the
wood. But he cannot perform his part in return; he gets no compensation:
Pessimy is invulnerable. You waste your time in hurling a common
'tu-quoque' at one who hugs the worst.

The three walking in the park, with their bright view, and black view,
and neutral view of life, were a comical trio. They had come upon the
days of the unfanned electric furnace, proper to London's early August
when it is not pipeing March. Victor complacently bore heat as well as
cold: but young Dudley was a drought, and Colney a drug to refresh it;
and why was he stewing in London? It was for this young Dudley, who
resembled a London of the sparrowy roadways and wearisome pavements and
blocks of fortress mansions, by chance a water-cart spirting a stale
water: or a London of the farewell dinner-parties, where London's
professed anecdotist lays the dust with his ten times told: Why was not
Nataly relieved of her dreary round of the purchases of furniture! They
ought all now to be in Switzerland or Tyrol. Nesta had of late been
turning over leaves of an Illustrated book of Tyrol, dear to her after a
run through the Innthal to the Dolomites one splendid August; and she and
Nataly had read there of Hofer, Speckbacker, Haspinger; and wrath had
filled them at the meanness of the Corsican, who posed after it as victim
on St. Helena's rock; the scene in grey dawn on Mantua's fortress-walls
blasting him in the Courts of History, when he strikes for his pathetic
sublime.

Victor remembered how he had been rhetorical, as the mouthpiece of his
darlings. But he had in memory prominently now the many glorious pictures
of that mountain-land beckoning to him, waving him to fly forth from the
London oven:--lo, the Tyrolese limestone crags with livid peaks and snow
lining shelves and veins of the crevices; and folds of pinewood
undulations closed by a shoulder of snow large on the blue; and a
dazzling pinnacle rising over green pasture-Alps, the head of it shooting
aloft as the blown billow, high off a broken ridge, and wide-armed in its
pure white shroud beneath; tranced, but all motion in immobility, to the
heart in the eye; a splendid image of striving, up to crowned victory.
And see the long valley-sweeps of the hanging meadows and maize, and
lower vineyards and central tall green spires! Walking beside young
Dudley, conversing, observing too, Victor followed the trips and twists
of a rill, that was lured a little further down through scoops, ducts,
and scaffolded channels to serve a wainwright.

He heard the mountain-song of the joyful water: a wren-robin-thrush on
the dance down of a faun; till it was caught and muted, and the silver
foot slid along the channel, swift as moonbeams through a cloud, with an
air of 'Whither you will, so it be on'; happy for service as in freedom.
Then the yard of the inn below, and the rillwater twirling rounded
through the trout-trough, subdued, still lively for its beloved onward:
dues to business, dues to pleasure; a wedding of the two, and the wisest
on earth:-eh? like some one we know, and Nataly has made the comparison.
Fresh forellen for lunch: rhyming to Fenellan, he had said to her; and
that recollection struck the day to blaze; for his friend was a ruined
military captain living on a literary quill at the time; and Nataly's
tender pleading, 'Could you not help to give him another chance, dear
Victor?'--signifying her absolute trust in his ability to do that or more
or anything, had actually set him thinking of the Insurance Office; which
he started to prosperity, and Fenellan in it, previously an untutored
rill of the mountains, if ever was one.

Useless to be dwelling on holiday pictures: Lakelands had hold of him!

Colney or somebody says, that the greater our successes, the greater the
slaves we become.--But we must have an aim, my friend, and success must
be the aim of any aim!--Yes, and, says Colney, you are to rejoice in the
disappointing miss, which saved you from being damned by your bullet on
the centre.--You're dead against Nature, old Colney.--That is to carry
the flag of Liberty.--By clipping a limb!

Victor overcame the Pessimist in his own royal cranium-Court. He
entertained a pronounced dissension with bachelors pretending to
independence. It could not be argued publicly, and the more the
pity:--for a slight encouragement, he would have done it: his outlook
over the waves of bachelors and (by present conditions mostly
constrained) spinsters--and another outlook, midnight upon Phlegethon to
the thoughts of men, made him deem it urgent. And it helped the plea in
his own excuse, as Colney pointed out to the son of Nature. That, he had
to admit, was true. He charged it upon Mrs. Burman, for twisting the most
unselfish and noblest of his thoughts; and he promised himself it was to
cease on the instant when the circumstance, which Nature was remiss in
not bringing about to-day or to-morrow, had come to pass. He could see
his Nataly's pained endurance beneath her habitual submission. Her effort
was a poor one, to conceal her dread of the day of the gathering at
Lakelands.

On the Sunday previous to the day, Dr. Themison accompanied the amateurs
by rail to Wrensham, to hear 'trial of the acoustics' of the
Concert-hall. They were a goodly company; and there was fun in the
railway-carriage over Colney's description of Fashionable London's vast
octopus Malady-monster, who was letting the doctor fly to the tether of
its longest filament for an hour, plying suckers on him the while. He had
the look, to general perception, of a man but half-escaped: and as when
the notes of things taken by the vision in front are being set down upon
tablets in the head behind. Victor observed his look at Nataly. The look
was like a door aswing, revealing in concealing. She was not or did not
appear struck by it; perhaps, if observant, she took it for a busy
professional gentleman's holiday reckoning of the hours before the return
train to his harness, and his arrangements for catching it. She was, as
she could be on a day of trial, her enchanting majestic self
again--defying suspicions. She was his true mate for breasting a world
honoured in uplifting her.

Her singing of a duet with Nesta, called forth Dr. Themison's very warm
applause. He named the greatest of contraltos. Colney did better service
than Fenellan at the luncheon-table: he diverted Nataly and captured Dr.
Themison's ear with the narrative of his momentous expedition of European
Emissaries, to plead the cause of their several languages at the Court of
Japan: a Satiric Serial tale, that hit incidentally the follies of the
countries of Europe, and intentionally, one had to think, those of Old
England. Nesta set him going. Just when he was about to begin, she made
her father laugh by crying out in a rapture, 'Oh! Delphica!' For she was
naughtily aware of Dudley Sowerby's distaste for the story and disgust
with the damsel Delphica.

Nesta gave Dr. Themison the preliminary sketch of the grand object of the
expedition: indeed one of the eminent ones of the world; matter for an
Epic; though it is to be feared, that our part in it will not encourage a
Cis-Atlantic bard. To America the honours from beginning to end belong.

So, then, Japan has decided to renounce its language, for the adoption of
the language it may choose among the foremost famous European tongues.
Japan becomes the word for miraculous transformations of a whole people
at the stroke of a wand; and let our English enrol it as the most
precious of the powerful verbs. An envoy visits the principal Seats of
Learning in Europe. He is of a gravity to match that of his unexampled
and all but stupefying mission. A fluent linguist, yet an Englishman, the
slight American accent contracted during a lengthened residence in the
United States is no bar to the patriotism urging him to pay his visit of
exposition and invitation from the Japanese Court to the distinguished
Doctor of Divinity Dr. Bouthoin. The renown of Dr. Bouthoin among the
learned of Japan has caused the special invitation to him; a scholar
endowed by an ample knowledge and persuasive eloquence to cite and
instance as well as illustrate the superior advantages to Japan and
civilization in the filial embrace of mother English. 'For to this it
must come predestinated,' says the astonishing applicant. 'We seem to see
a fitness in it,' says the cogitative Rev. Doctor. 'And an Island England
in those waters, will do wonders for Commerce,' adds the former. 'We
think of things more pregnant,' concludes the latter, with a dry gleam of
ecclesiastical knowingness. And let the Editor of the Review upon his
recent pamphlet, and let the prelate reprimanding him, and let the
newspapers criticizing his pure Saxon, have a care!

Funds, universally the most convincing of credentials, are placed at Dr.
Bouthoin's disposal: only it is requested, that for the present the
expedition be secret. 'Better so,' says pure Saxon's champion. On a day
patented for secresy, and swearing-in the whole American Continent
through the cables to keep the secret by declaring the patent, the Rev.
Dr. Bouthoin, accompanied by his curate, the Rev. Mancate Semhians,
stumbling across portmanteaux crammed with lexicons and dictionaries and
other tubes of the voice of Hermes, takes possession of berths in the
ship Polypheme, bound, as they mutually conceive, for the biggest
adventure ever embarked on by a far-thoughted, high-thoughted, patriotic
pair speaking pure Saxon or other.

Colney, with apologies to his hearers, avoided the custom of our period
(called the Realistic) to create, when casual opportunity offers, a
belief in the narrative by promoting nausea in the audience. He passed
under veil the Rev. Doctor's acknowledgement of Neptune's power, and the
temporary collapse of Mr. Semhians. Proceeding at once to the comments of
these high-class missionaries on the really curious inquisitiveness of
certain of the foreign passengers on board, he introduced to them the
indisputably learned, the very argumentative, crashing, arrogant,
pedantic, dogmatic, philological German gentleman, Dr. Gannius, reeking
of the Teutonic Professor, as a library volume of its leather. With him
is his fairhaired artless daughter Delphica. An interesting couple for
the beguilement of a voyage: she so beautifully moderates his irascible
incisiveness! Yet there is a strange tone that they have. What, then, of
the polite, the anecdotic Gallic M. Falarique, who studiously engages the
young lady in colloquy when Mr. Semhians is agitating outside them to say
a word? What of that outpouring, explosive, equally voluble, uncontrolled
M. Bobinikine, a Mongol Russian, shaped, featured, hued like the
pot-boiled, round and tight young dumpling of our primitive boyhood,
which smokes on the dish from the pot? And what of another, hitherto
unnoticed, whose nose is of the hooked vulturine, whose name transpires
as Pisistratus Mytharete? He hears Dr. Bouthoin declaim some lines of
Homer, and beseeches him for the designation of that language. Greek, is
it? Greek of the Asiatic ancient days of the beginning of the poetic
chants? Dr. Gannius crashes cachinnation. Dr. Bouthoin caps himself with
the offended Don. Mr. Semhians opens half an eye and a whole mouth. There
must be a mystery, these two exclaim to one another in privacy. Delphica
draws Mr. Semhians aside.

Blushing over his white necktie, like the coast of Labrador at the
transient wink of its Jack-in-the-box Apollo, Mr. Semhians faintly tells
of a conversation he has had with the ingenuous fair one; and she ardent
as he for the throning of our incomparable Saxon English in the mouths of
the races of mankind. Strange!--she partly suspects the Frenchman, the
Russian, the attentive silent Greek, to be all of them bound for the
Court of Japan. Concurrents? Can it be? We are absolutely to enter on a
contention with rivals? Dr. Bouthoin speaks to Dr. Gannius. He is
astonished, he says; he could not have imagined it!

'Have you ever imagined anything?' Dr. Gannius asks him. Entomologist,
botanist, palaeontologist, philologist, and at sound of horn a ready
regimental corporal, Dr. Gannius wears good manners as a pair of
bath-slippers, to rally and kick his old infant of an Englishman; who, in
awe of his later renown and manifest might, makes it a point of
discretion to be ultra-amiable; for he certainly is not in training, he
has no alliances, and he must diplomatize; and the German is a strong
one; a relative too; he is the Saxon's cousin, to say the least. This
German has the habit of pushing past politeness to carry his
argumentative war into the enemy's country: and he presents on all sides
a solid rampart of recent great deeds done, and mailed readiness for the
doing of more, if we think of assailing him in that way. We are really
like the poor beasts which have cast their shells or cases, helpless
flesh to his beak. So we are cousinly.

Whether more amused than amazed, we know not, Dr. Gannius hears from 'our
simpleton of the pastures,' as he calls the Rev. Doctor to his daughter,
that he and Mr. Semhians have absolutely pushed forth upon this most
mighty of enterprises naked of any backing from their Government! Babes
in the Wood that they are! 'a la grace de dieu' at every turn that cries
for astutia, they show no sign or symbol of English arms behind them, to
support--and with the grandest of national prizes in view!--the pleading
oration before the Court of the elect, erudites, we will call them, of an
intelligent, yet half barbarous, people; hesitating, these, between
eloquence and rival eloquence, cunning and rival cunning. Why, in such a
case, the shadow-nimbus of Force is needed to decide the sinking of the
scale. But have these English never read their Shakespeare, that they
show so barren an acquaintance with human, to say nothing of
semi-barbaric, nature? But it is here that we Germans prove our claim to
being the sons of his mind.--Dr. Gannius, in contempt, throws off the
mask: he also is a concurrent. And not only is he the chosen by election
of the chief Universities of his land, he has behind him, as Athene
dilating Achilles, the clenched fist of the Prince of thunder and
lightning of his time. German, Japan shall be! he publicly swears before
them all. M. Falarique damascenes his sharpest smile; M. Bobinikine
double-dimples his puddingest; M. Mytharete rolls a forefinger over his
beak; Dr. Bouthoin enlarges his eye on a sunny mote. And such is the
masterful effect of a frank diplomacy, that when one party shows his
hand, the others find the reverse of concealment in hiding their own.

Dr. Bouthoin and Mr. Semhians are compelled to suspect themselves to be
encompassed with rivals, presumptively supported by their Governments.
The worthy gentlemen had hoped to tumble into good fortune, as in the
blessed old English manner. 'It has even been thus with us: unhelped we
do it!' exclaims the Rev. Doctor. He is roused from dejection by hearing
Mr. Semhians shyly (he has published verse) tell of the fairtressed
Delphica's phosphorial enthusiasm for our galaxy of British Poets.
Assisted by Mr. Semhians, he begins to imagine, that he has, in the
person of this artless devotee an ally, who will, through her worship of
our poets (by treachery to her sire-a small matter) sacrifice her
guttural tongue, by enabling him (through the exercise of her arts,
charms, intrigues--also a small matter) to obtain the first audience of
the Japanese erudites. Delphica, with each of the rivals in turn, is very
pretty Comedy. She is aware that M. Falarique is her most redoubtable
adversary, by the time that the vast fleet of steamboats (containing
newspaper reporters) is beheld from the decks of the Polypheme puffing
past Sandy Hook.

There Colney left them, for the next instalment of the serial.

Nesta glanced at Dudley Sowerby. She liked him for his pained frown at
the part his countrymen were made to play, but did wish that he would
keep from expressing it in a countenance that suggested a worried knot;
and mischievously she said: 'Do you take to Delphica?'

He replied, with an evident sincerity, 'I cannot say I do.'

Had Mr. Semhians been modelled on him?

'One bets on the German, of course--with Colney Durance,' Victor said to
Dr. Themison, leading him over the grounds of Lakelands.

'In any case, the author teaches us to feel an interest in the rivals. I
want to know what comes of it,' said the doctor.

'There's a good opportunity, one sees. But, mark me, it will all end in
satire upon poor Old England. According to Colney, we excel in nothing.'

'I do not think there is a country that could offer the entertainment for
which I am indebted to you to-day.'

'Ah, my friend, and you like their voices? The contralto?'

'Exquisite.'

Dr. Themison had not spoken the name of Radnor.

'Shall we see you at our next Concert-evening in town?' said Victor; and
hearing 'the privilege' mentioned, his sharp bright gaze cleared to
limpid. 'You have seen how it stands with us here!' At once he related
what indeed Dr. Themison had begun speculatively to think might be the
case.

Mrs. Burman Radnor had dropped words touching a husband, and of her
desire to communicate with him, in the event of her being given over to
the surgeons: she had said, that her husband was a greatly gifted man;
setting her head in a compassionate swing. This revelation of the husband
soon after, was filling. And this Mr. Radnor's comrade's manner of it,
was winning: a not too self-justifying tone; not void of feeling for the
elder woman; with a manly eulogy of the younger, who had flung away the
world for him and borne him their one dear child. Victor took the blame
wholly upon himself. 'It is right that you should know,' he said to the
doctor's thoughtful posture; and he stressed the blame; and a flame shot
across his eyeballs. He brought home to his hearer the hurricane of a man
he was in the passion: indicating the subjection of such a temperament as
this Victor Radnor's to trials of the moral restraints beyond his human
power.

Dr. Themison said: 'Would you--we postpone that as long as we can: but
supposing the poor lady . . . ?'

Victor broke in: 'I see her wish: I will.'

The clash of his answer rang beside Dr. Themison's faltering query.

We are grateful when spared the conclusion of a sentence born to stammer.
If for that only, the doctor pressed Victor's hand warmly.

'I may, then, convey some form of assurance, that a request of the kind
will be granted?' he said.

'She has but to call me to her,' said Victor, stiffening his back.




CHAPTER XX

THE GREAT ASSEMBLY AT LAKELANDS

Round the neighbourhood of Lakelands it was known that the day of the
great gathering there had been authoritatively foretold as fine, by Mr.
Victor Radnor; and he delivered his prophecy in the teeth of the
South-western gale familiar to our yachting month; and he really inspired
belief or a kind of trust; some supposing him to draw from reserves of
observation, some choosing to confide in the singularly winged sparkle of
his eyes. Lady Rodwell Blachington did; and young Mrs. Blathenoy; and
Mrs. Fanning; they were enamoured of it. And when women stand for Hope,
and any worshipped man for Promise, nothing less than redoubled confusion
of him dissolves the union. Even then they cling to it, under an
ejaculation, that it might and should have been otherwise; fancy partly
has it otherwise, in her caerulean home above the weeping. So it is good
at all points to prophecy with the aspect of the radiant day foretold.

A storm, bearing battle overhead, tore the night to pieces. Nataly's
faith in the pleasant prognostic wavered beneath the crashes. She had not
much power of heart to desire anything save that which her bosom
disavowed. Uproar rather appeased her, calmness agitated. She wished her
beloved to be spared from a disappointment, thinking he deserved all
successes, because of the rigours inflicted by her present tonelessness
of blood and being. Her unresponsive manner with him was not due to lack
of fire in the blood or a loss of tenderness. The tender feeling, under
privations unwillingly imposed, though willingly shared, now suffused her
reflections, owing to a gratitude induced by a novel experience of him;
known, as it may chance, and as it does not always chance, to both sexes
in wedded intimacy here and there; known to women whose mates are proved
quick to compliance with delicate intuitions of their moods of nature. A
constant, almost visible, image of the dark thing she desired, and was
bound not to desire, and was remorseful for desiring, oppressed her; a
perpetual consequent warfare of her spirit and the nature subject to the
thousand sensational hypocrisies invoked for concealment of its reviled
brutish baseness, held the woman suspended from her emotions. She coldly
felt that a caress would have melted her, would have been the temporary
rapture. Coldly she had the knowledge that the considerate withholding of
it helped her spirit to escape a stain. Less coldly, she thanked at heart
her beloved, for being a gentleman in their yoke. It plighted them over
flesh.

He talked to her on the pillow, just a few sentences; and, unlike
himself, a word of City affairs: 'That fellow Blathenoy, with his
increasing multitude of bills at the Bank: must watch him there, sit
there regularly. One rather likes his wife. By the way, if you see him
near me to-morrow, praise the Spanish climate; don't forget. He heads the
subscription list of Lady Blachington's Charity.'

Victor chuckled at Colney's humping of shoulders and mouth, while the
tempest seemed echoing a sulphurous pessimist. 'If old Colney had
listened to me, when India gave proof of the metal and South Africa began
heaving, he'd have been a fairly wealthy man by now . . . ha! it would
have genialized him. A man may be a curmudgeon with money: the rule is
for him to cuddle himself and take a side, instead of dashing at his
countrymen all round and getting hated. Well, Colney popular, can't be
imagined; but entertaining guests would have diluted his acid. He has the
six hundred or so a year he started old bachelor on; add his miserable
pay for Essays. Literature! Of course, he sours. But don't let me hear of
bachelors moralists. There he sits at his Temple Chambers hatching
epigrams . . . pretends to have the office of critic! Honest old fellow,
as far as his condition permits. I tell him it will be fine to-morrow.'

'You are generally right, dear,' Nataly said.

Her dropping breath was audible.

Victor smartly commended her to slumber, with heaven's blessing on her
and a dose of soft nursery prattle.

He squeezed her hand. He kissed her lips by day. She heard him sigh
settling himself into the breast of night for milk of sleep, like one of
the world's good children. She could have turned to him, to show him she
was in harmony with the holy night and loving world, but for the fear
founded on a knowledge of the man he was; it held her frozen to the
semblance of a tombstone lady beside her lord, in the aisle where horror
kindles pitchy blackness with its legions at one movement. Verily it was
the ghost of Mrs. Burman come to the bed, between them.

Meanwhile the sun of Victor Radnor's popularity was already up over the
extended circle likely to be drenched by a falsification of his daring
augury, though the scud flew swift, and the beeches raved, and the oaks
roared and snarled, and pine-trees fell their lengths. Fine tomorrow, to
a certainty! he had been heard to say. The doubt weighed for something;
the balance inclined with the gentleman who had become so popular: for he
had done the trick so suddenly, like a stroke of the wizard; and was a
real man, not one of your spangled zodiacs selling for sixpence and
hopping to a lucky hit, laughed at nine times out of ten. The reasoning
went--and it somewhat affected the mansion as well as the cottage,--that
if he had become popular in this astonishing fashion, after making one of
the biggest fortunes of modern times, he might, he must, have secret
gifts. 'You can't foretell weather!' cried a pothouse sceptic. But the
workmen at Lakelands declared that he had foretold it. Sceptics among the
common folk were quaintly silenced by other tales of him, being a whiff
from the delirium attending any mention of his name.

How had he become suddenly so popular as to rouse in the mind of Mr.
Caddis, the sitting Member for the division of the county (said to have
the seat in his pocket), a particular inquisitiveness to know the bearing
of his politics? Mr. Radnor was rich, true: but these are days when
wealthy men, ambitious of notoriety, do not always prove faithful to
their class; some of them are cunning to bid for the suffrages of the
irresponsible, recklessly enfranchised, corruptible masses. Mr. Caddis,
if he had the seat in his pocket, had it from the support of a class
trusting him to support its interests: he could count on the landowners,
on the clergy, on the retired or retiring or comfortably cushioned
merchants resident about Wrensham, on the many obsequious among electoral
shopmen; annually he threw open his grounds, and he subscribed,
patronized, did what was expected; and he was not popular; he was
unpopular. Why? But why was the sun of this 23rd August, shining from its
rise royally upon pacified, enrolled and liveried armies of cloud, more
agreeable to earth's populations than his pinched appearance of the poor
mopped red nose and melancholic rheumy eyelets on a January day!
Undoubtedly Victor Radnor risked his repute of prophet. Yet his
popularity would have survived the continuance of the storm and deluge.
He did this:--and the mystery puzzling the suspicious was nothing
wonderful: in addition to a transparent benevolence, he spread a sort of
assurance about him, that he thought the better of the people for their
thinking well of themselves. It came first from the workmen at his house.
'The right sort, and no humbug: likes you to be men.' Such a report made
tropical soil for any new seed.

Now, it is a postulate, to strengthen all poor commoners, that not even
in comparison with the highest need we be small unless we yield to think
it of ourselves. Do but stretch a hand to the touch of earth in you, and
you spring upon combative manhood again, from the basis where all are
equal. Humanity's historians, however, tell us, that the exhilaration
bringing us consciousness of a stature, is gas which too frequently has
to be administered. Certes the cocks among men do not require the
process; they get it off the sight of the sun arising or a simple hen
submissive: but we have our hibernating bears among men, our yoked oxen,
cab horses, beaten dogs; we have on large patches of these Islands, a
Saxon population, much wanting assistance, if they are not to feel
themselves beaten, driven, caught by the neck, yoked and heavyheaded.
Blest, then, is he who gives them a sense of the pride of standing on
legs. Beer, ordinarily their solitary helper beneath the iron canopy of
wealth, is known to them as a bitter usurer; it knocks them flat in their
persons and their fortunes, for the short spell of recreative exaltation.
They send up their rough glory round the name of the gentleman--a
stranger, but their friend: and never is friend to be thought of as a
stranger--who manages to get the holiday for Wrensham and thereabout,
that they may hurl away for one jolly day the old hat of a doddered
humbleness, and trip to the strains of the internal music he has unwound.

Says he: Is it a Charity Concert? Charity begins at home, says he: and if
I welcome you gentry on behalf of the poor of London, why, it follows you
grant me the right to make a beginning with the poor of our parts down
here. He puts it so, no master nor mistress neither could refuse him.
Why, the workmen at his house were nigh pitching the contractors all
sprawling on a strike, and Mr. Radnor takes train, harangues 'em and rubs
'em smooth; ten minutes by the clock, they say; and return train to his
business in town; by reason of good sense and feeling, it was; poor men
don't ask for more. A working man, all the world over, asks but justice
and a little relaxation--just a collar of fat to his lean.

Mr. Caddis, M.P., pursuing the riddle of popularity, which irritated and
repelled as constantly as it attracted him, would have come nearer to an
instructive presentment of it, by listening to these plain fellows, than
he was in the line of equipages, at a later hour of the day. The remarks
of the comfortably cushioned and wheeled, though they be eulogistic to
extravagance, are vapourish when we court them for nourishment;
substantially, they are bones to the cynical. He heard enumerations of
Mr. Radnor's riches, eclipsing his own past compute. A merchant, a holder
of mines, Director of a mighty Bank, projector of running rails, a
princely millionaire, and determined to be popular--what was the aim of
the man? It is the curse of modern times, that we never can be sure of
our Parliamentary seat; not when we have it in our pockets! The Romans
have left us golden words with regard to the fickleness of the populace;
we have our Horace, our Juvenal, we have our Johnson; and in this vaunted
age of reason it is, that we surrender ourselves into the hands of the
populace! Panem et circenses! Mr. Caddis repeated it, after his fathers;
his fathers and he had not headed them out of that original voracity.
There they were, for moneyed legislators to bewail their appetites. And
it was an article of his legislation, to keep them there.

Pedestrian purchasers of tickets for the Charity Concert, rather openly,
in an envelope of humour, confessed to the bait of the Radnor bread with
bit of fun. Savoury rumours were sweeping across Wrensham. Mr. Radnor had
borrowed footmen of the principal houses about. Cartloads of provisions
had been seen to come. An immediate reward of a deed of benevolence, is a
thing sensibly heavenly; and the five-shilling tickets were paid for as
if for a packet on the counter. Unacquainted with Mr. Radnor, although
the reports of him struck a summons to their gastric juices, resembling
in its effect a clamorous cordiality, they were chilled, on their steps
along the halfrolled new gravel-roads to the house, by seeing three
tables of prodigious length, where very evidently a feast had raged: one
to plump the people--perhaps excessively courted by great gentlemen of
late; shopkeepers, the villagers, children. These had been at it for two
merry hours. They had risen. They were beef and pudding on legs; in some
quarters, beer amiably manifest, owing to the flourishes of a military
band. Boys, who had shaken room through their magical young corporations
for fresh stowage, darted out of a chasing circle to the crumbled
cornucopia regretfully forsaken fifteen minutes back, and buried another
tart. Plenty still reigned: it was the will of the Master that it should.

We divert our attention, resigned in stoic humour, to the bill of the
Concert music, handed us with our tickets at the park-gates: we have no
right to expect refreshment; we came for the music, to be charitable.
Signora Bianca Luciani: of whom we have read almost to the hearing her;
enough to make the mistake at times. The grand violinist Durandarte:
forcibly detained on his way to America. Mr. Radnor sent him a blank
cheque:--no!--so Mr. Radnor besought him in person: he is irresistible; a
great musician himself; it is becoming quite the modern style. We have
now English noblemen who play the horn, the fife--the drum, some say! We
may yet be Merrie England again, with our nobles taking the lead.

England's nobles as a musical band at the head of a marching and dancing
population, pictured happily an old Conservative country, that retained
its members of aristocracy in the foremost places while subjecting them
to downright uses. Their ancestors, beholding them there, would be
satisfied on the point of honour; perhaps enlivened by hearing them at
fife and drum.

But middle-class pedestrians, having paid five shillings for a ticket to
hear the music they love, and not having full assurance of refreshment,
are often, latterly, satirical upon their superiors; and, over this
country at least, require the refreshment, that the democratic sprouts in
them may be reconciled with aristocracy. Do not listen to them further on
the subject. They vote safely enough when the day comes, if there is no
praetematurally strong pull the other way.

They perceive the name of the Hon. Dudley Sowerby, fourth down the
Concert-bill; marked for a flute-duet with Mr. Victor Radnor, Miss Nesta
Victoria Radnor accompanying at the piano. It may mean? . . . do you want
a whisper to suggest to you what it may mean? The father's wealth is
enormous; the mother is a beautiful majestic woman in her prime. And see,
she sings: a wonderful voice. And lower down, a duet with her daughter:
violins and clarionet; how funny; something Hungarian. And in the Second
Part, Schubert's Ave Maria--Oh! when we hear that, we dissolve. She was a
singer before he married her, they say: a lady by birth one of the first
County families. But it was a gift, and she could not be kept from it,
and was going, when they met--and it was love! the most perfect duet. For
him she abandoned the Stage. You must remember, that in their young days
the Stage was many stages beneath the esteem entertained for it now.
Domestic Concerts are got up to gratify her: a Miss Fredericks: good old
English name. Mr. Radnor calls his daughter, Freddy; so Mr. Taplow, the
architect, says. They are for modern music and ancient. Tannhauser,
Wagner, you see. Pergolese.

Flute-duet, Mercadante. Here we have him! O--Durandarte: Air Basque,
variations--his own. Again, Senor Durandarte, Mendelssohn. Encore him,
and he plays you a national piece. A dark little creature a
Life-guardsman could hold-up on his outstretched hand for the fifteen
minutes of the performance; but he fills the hall and thrills the heart,
wafts you to heaven; and does it as though he were conversing with his
Andalusian lady-love in easy whispers about their mutual passion for
Spanish chocolate all the while: so the musical critic of the Tirra-Lirra
says. Express trains every half hour from London; all the big people of
the city. Mr. Radnor commands them, like Royalty. Totally different from
that old figure of the wealthy City merchant; young, vigorous, elegant, a
man of taste, highest culture, speaks the languages of Europe, patron of
the Arts, a perfect gentleman. His mother was one of the Montgomerys, Mr.
Taplow says.

And it was General Radnor, a most distinguished officer, dying knighted.
But Mr. Victor Radnor would not take less than a Barony--and then only
with descent of title to his daughter, in her own right.

Mr. Taplow had said as much as Victor Radnor chose that he should say.

Carriages were in flow for an hour: pedestrians formed a wavy coil.
Judgeing by numbers, the entertainment was a success; would the hall
contain them? Marvels were told of the hall. Every ticket entered and was
enfolded; almost all had a seat. Chivalry stood. It is a breeched
abstraction, sacrificeing voluntarily and genially to the Fair, for a
restoring of the balance between the sexes, that the division of good
things be rather in the fair ones' favour, as they are to think: with the
warning to them, that the establishment of their claim for equality puts
an end to the priceless privileges of petticoats. Women must be mad, to
provoke such a warning; and the majority of them submissively show their
good sense. They send up an incense of perfumery, all the bouquets of the
chemist commingled; most nourishing to the idea of woman in the nose of
man. They are a forest foliage--rustle of silks and muslins, magic
interweaving, or the mythology, if you prefer it. See, hear, smell, they
are Juno, Venus, Hebe, to you. We must have poetry with them; otherwise
they are better in the kitchen. Is there--but there is not; there is not
present one of the chivalrous breeched who could prefer the shocking
emancipated gristly female, which imposes propriety on our sensations and
inner dreams, by petrifying in the tender bud of them.

Colonel Corfe is the man to hear on such a theme. He is a colonel of
Companies. But those are his diversion, as the British Army has been to
the warrior. Puellis idoneus, he is professedly a lady's man, a
rose-beetle, and a fine specimen of a common kind: and he has been that
thing, that shining delight of the lap of ladies, for a spell of years,
necessitating a certain sparkle of the saccharine crystals preserving
him, to conceal the muster. He has to be fascinating, or he would look
outworn, forlorn. On one side of him is Lady Carmine; on the other, Lady
Swanage; dames embedded in the blooming maturity of England's
conservatory. Their lords (an Earl, a Baron) are of the lords who go down
to the City to sow a title for a repair of their poor incomes, and are to
be commended for frankly accepting the new dispensation while they retain
the many advantages of the uncancelled ancient. Thus gently does a
maternal Old England let them down. Projectors of Companies, Directors,
Founders; Railway magnates, actual kings and nobles (though one cannot
yet persuade old reverence to do homage with the ancestral spontaneity to
the uncrowned, uncoroneted, people of our sphere); holders of Shares in
gold mines, Shares in Afric's blue mud of the glittering teeth we draw
for English beauty to wear in the ear, on the neck, at the wrist; Bankers
and wives of Bankers. Victor passed among them, chatting right and left.

Lady Carmine asked him: 'Is Durandarte counted on?'

He answered: 'I made sure of the Luciani.'

She serenely understood. Artistes are licenced people, with a Bohemian
instead of the titular glitter for the bewildering of moralists; as paste
will pass for diamonds where the mirror is held up to Nature by bold
supernumeraries.

He wished to introduce Nesta. His girl was on the raised orchestral
flooring. Nataly held her fast to a music-scroll.

Mr. Peridon, sad for the absence and cause of absence of Louise de
Seilles,--summoned in the morning abruptly to Bourges, where her brother
lay with his life endangered by an accident at Artillery practise,--Mr.
Peridon was generally conductor. Victor was to lead the full force of
amateurs in the brisk overture to Zampa. He perceived a movement of
Nataly, Nesta, and Peridon. 'They have come,' he said; he jumped on the
orchestra boards and hastened to greet the Luciani with Durandarte in the
retiring-room.

His departure raised the whisper that he would wield the baton. An
opinion was unuttered. His name for the flute-duet with the Hon. Dudley
Sowerby had not provoked the reserve opinion; it seemed, on the whole, a
pretty thing in him to condescend to do: the sentiment he awakened was
not flustered by it. But the act of leading, appeared as an official
thing to do. Our soufe of sentiment will be seen subsiding under a
breath, without a repressive word to send it down. Sir Rodwell
Blachington would have preferred Radnor's not leading or playing either.
Colonel Corfe and Mr. Caddis declined to consider such conduct English,
in a man of station . . . notwithstanding Royal Highnesses, who are at
least partly English: partly, we say, under our breath, remembering our
old ideal of an English gentleman, in opposition to German tastes. It is
true, that the whole country is changeing, decomposing!

The colonel fished for Lady Carmine's view. And Lady Swanage too? Both of
the distinguished ladies approved of Mr. Radnor's leading--for a leading
off. Women are pleased to see their favourite in the place of
prominence--as long as Fortune swims him unbuffeted, or one should say,
unbattered, up the mounting wave. Besides these ladies had none of the
colonel's remainder of juvenile English sense of the manly, his
adolescent's intolerance of the eccentric, suspicion and contempt of any
supposed affectation, which was not ostentatiously, stalkingly practised
to subdue the sex. And you cannot wield a baton without looking affected.
And at one of the Colonel's Clubs in town, only five years back, an
English musical composer, who had not then made his money--now by the
mystery of events knighted!--had been (he makes now fifteen thousand a
year) black-balled. 'Fiddler? no; can't admit a Fiddler to associate on
equal terms with gentlemen.' Only five years back: and at present we are
having the Fiddler everywhere.

A sprinkling of the minor ladies also would have been glad if Mr. Radnor
had kept himself somewhat more exclusive. Dr. Schlesien heard remarks,
upon which his weighty Teutonic mind sat crushingly. Do these English
care one bit for music?--for anything finer than material stuffs?--what
that man Durance calls, 'their beef, their beer, and their pew in
eternity'? His wrath at their babble and petty brabble doubted that they
did.

But they do. Art has a hold of them. They pay for it; and the thing
purchased grapples. It will get to their bosoms to breathe from them in
time: entirely overcoming the taste for feudalism, which still a little
objects to see their born gentleman acting as leader of musicians. A
people of slow movement, developing tardily, their country is wanting in
the distincter features, from being always in the transitional state,
like certain sea-fish rolling head over-you know not head from tail.
Without the Welsh, Irish, Scot; in their composition, there would not be
much of the yeasty ferment: but it should not be forgotten that Welsh,
Irish, Scot, are now largely of their numbers; and the taste for
elegance, and for spiritual utterance, for Song, nay, for Ideas, is there
among them, though it does not everywhere cover a rocky surface to
bewitch the eyes of aliens;--like Louise de Seilles and Dr. Schlesien,
for example; aliens having no hostile disposition toward the people they
were compelled to criticize; honourably granting, that this people has a
great history. Even such has the Lion, with Homer for the transcriber of
his deeds. But the gentle aliens would image our emergence from wildness
as the unsocial spectacle presented by the drear menagerie Lion, alone or
mated; with hardly an animated moment save when the raw red joint is
beneath his paw, reminding him of the desert's pasture.

Nevertheless, where Strength is, there is hope:--it may be said more
truly than of the breath of Life; which is perhaps but the bucket of
breath, muddy with the sediment of the well: whereas we have in Strength
a hero, if a malefactor; whose muscles shall haul him up to the light he
will prove worthy of, when that divinity has shown him his uncleanness.
And when Strength is not exercising, you are sure to see Satirists jump
on his back. Dozens, foreign and domestic, are on the back of Old
England; a tribute to our quality if at the same time an irritating
scourge. The domestic are in excess; and let us own that their view of
the potentate, as an apathetic beast of power, who will neither show the
power nor woo the graces; pretending all the while to be eminently above
the beast, and posturing in an inefficient mimicry of the civilized,
excites to satire. Colney Durance had his excuses. He could point to the
chief creative minds of the country for generations, as beginning their
survey genially, ending venomously, because of an exasperating unreason
and scum in the bubble of the scenes, called social, around them. Viola
under his chin, he gazed along the crowded hall, which was to him a rich
national pudding of the sycophants, the hypocrites, the burlies, the
idiots; dregs of the depths and froth of the surface; bowing to one, that
they may scorn another; instituting a Charity, for their poorer fawning
fellows to relieve their purses and assist them in tricking the world and
their Maker: and so forth, a tiresome tirade: and as it was not on his
lips, but in the stomach of the painful creature, let him grind that
hurdy-gurdy for himself. His friend Victor set it stirring: Victor had
here what he aimed at!

How Success derides Ambition! And for this he imperilled the happiness of
the worthy woman he loved! Exposed her to our fen-fogs and foul
snakes--of whom one or more might be in the assembly now: all because of
his insane itch to be the bobbing cork on the wave of the minute!
Colney's rapid interjections condensed upon the habitual shrug at human
folly, just when Victor, fronting the glassy stare of Colonel Corfe,
tapped to start his orchestra through the lively first bars of the
overture to Zampa.

We soon perceive that the post Mr. Radnor fills he thoroughly fills,
whatever it may be. Zampa takes horse from the opening. We have no
amateur conductor riding ahead: violins, 'cellos, piano, wind-stops:
Peridon, Catkin, Pempton, Yatt, Cormyn, Colney, Mrs. Cormyn, Dudley
Sowerby: they are spirited on, patted, subdued, muted, raised, rushed
anew, away, held in hand, in both hands. Not earnestness worn as a cloak,
but issuing, we see; not simply a leader of musicians, a leader of men.
The halo of the millionaire behind, assures us of a development in the
character of England's merchant princes. The homage we pay him flatters
us. A delightful overture, masterfully executed; ended too soon; except
that the programme forbids the ordinary interpretation of prolonged
applause. Mr. Radnor is one of those who do everything consummately. And
we have a monition within, that a course of spiritual enjoyment will
rouse the call for bodily refreshment. His genial nod and laugh and word
of commendation to his troop persuade us oddly, we know not how, of
provision to come. At the door of the retiring-room, see, he is
congratulated by Luciani and Durandarte. Miss Priscilla Graves is now to
sing a Schumann. Down later, it is a duet with the Rev. Septimus Barmby.
We have nothing to be ashamed of in her, before an Italian Operatic
singer! Ices after the first part is over.




CHAPTER XXI

DARTREY FENELLAN

Had Nataly and Nesta known who was outside helping Skepsey to play ball
with the boys, they would not have worked through their share of the
performance with so graceful a composure. Even Simeon Fenellan was
unaware that his half-brother Dartrey had landed in England. Dartrey went
first to Victor's office, where he found Skepsey packing the day's
letters and circulars into the bag for the delivery of them at Lakelands.
They sprang a chatter, and they missed the last of the express trains
which did, not greatly signify, Skepsey said, 'as it was a Concert.' To
hear his hero talk, was the music for him; and he richly enjoyed the
pacing along the railway-platform.

Arrived on the grounds, they took opposite sides in a game of rounders,
at that moment tossing heads or tails for innings. These boys were
slovenly players, and were made unhappy by Skepsey's fussy instructions
to them in smartness. They had a stupid way of feeding the stick, and
they ran sprawling; it concerned Great Britain for them to learn how to
use their legs. It was pitiful for the country to see how lumpish her
younger children were. Dartrey knew his little man and laughed, after
warning him that his English would want many lessons before they
stomached the mixture of discipline and pleasure. So it appeared: the
pride of the boys in themselves, their confidence, enjoyment of the game,
were all gone; and all were speedily out but Skepsey; who ran for the
rounder, with his coat off, sharp as a porpoise, and would have got it,
he had it in his grasp, when, at the jump, just over the line of the
goal, a clever fling, if ever was, caught him a crack on that part of the
human frame where sound is best achieved. Then were these young lumps
transformed to limber, lither, merry fellows. They rejoiced Skepsey's
heart; they did everything better, ran and dodged and threw in a style to
win the nod from the future official inspector of Games and Amusements of
the common people; a deputy of the Government, proposed by Skepsey to his
hero with a deferential eagerness. Dartrey clapped him on the shoulder,
softly laughing.

'System--Mr. Durance is right--they must have system, if they are to
appreciate a holiday,' Skepsey said; and he sent a wretched gaze around,
at the justification of some of the lurid views of Mr. Durance, in signs
of the holiday wasted;--impoverishing the country's manhood in a small
degree, it may be argued, but we ask, can the country afford it, while
foreign nations are drilling their youth, teaching them to be ready to
move in squads or masses, like the fist of a pugilist. Skepsey left it to
his look to speak his thought. He saw an enemy in tobacco. The drowsiness
of beer had stretched various hulks under trees. Ponderous cricket
lumbered half-alive. Flabby fun knocked-up a yell. And it was rather
vexatious to see girls dancing in good time to the band-music. One had a
male-partner, who hopped his loutish burlesque of the thing he could not
do.

Apparently, too certainly, none but the girls had a notion of orderly
muscular exercise. Of what use are girls! Girls have their one mission on
earth; and let them be healthy by all means, for the sake of it; only,
they should not seem to prove that old England is better represented on
the female side. Skepsey heard, with a nip of spite at his bosom, a small
body of them singing in chorus as they walked in step, arm in arm,
actually marched: and to the rearward, none of these girls heeding; there
were the louts at their burlesque of jigs and fisticuffs! 'Cherry Ripe,'
was the song.

'It's delightful to hear them!' said Dartrey.

Skepsey muttered jealously of their having been trained.

The song, which drew Dartrey Fenellan to the quick of an English home,
planted him at the same time in Africa to hear it. Dewy on a parched
forehead it fell, England the shedding heaven.

He fetched a deep breath, as of gratitude for vital refreshment. He had
his thoughts upon the training of our English to be something besides the
machinery of capitalists, and upon the country as a blessed mother
instead of the most capricious of maudlin step-dames.

He flicked his leg with the stick he carried, said: 'Your master's the
man to make a change among them, old friend!' and strolled along to a
group surrounding two fellows who shammed a bout at single-stick. Vacuity
in the attack on either side, contributed to the joint success of the
defense. They paused under inspection; and Dartrey said: 'You're burning
to give them a lesson, Skepsey.'

Skepsey had no objection to his hero's doing so, though at his personal
cost.

The sticks were handed to them; the crowd increased; their rounders boys
had spied them, and came trooping to the scene. Skepsey was directed to
hit in earnest. His defensive attitude flashed, and he was at head and
right and left leg, and giving point, recovering, thrusting madly, and
again at shoulder and thigh, with bravos for reward of a man meaning
business; until a topper on his hat, a cut over the right thigh, and the
stick in his middlerib, told the spectators of a scientific adversary;
and loudly now the gentleman was cheered. An undercurrent of warm feeling
ran for the plucky little one at it hot again in spite of the strokes,
and when he fetched his master a handsome thud across the shoulder, and
the gentleman gave up and complimented him, Skepsey had applause.

He then begged his hero to put the previous couple in position, through a
few of the opening movements. They were horribly sheepish at first.
Meantime two boys had got hold of sticks, and both had gone to work in
Skepsey's gallant style; and soon one was howling. He excused himself,
because of the funny-bone, situated, in his case, higher than usual up
the arm. And now the pair of men were giving and taking cuts to make a
rhinoceros caper.

'Very well; begin that way; try what you can bear,' said Dartrey.

Skepsey watched them, in felicity for love of the fray, pained by the
disregard of science.

Comments on the pretty play, indicating a reminiscent acquaintance with
it, and the capacity for critical observations, were started. Assaults,
wonderful tricks of a slashing Life-Guardsman, one spectator had
witnessed at an exhibition in a London hall. Boxing too. You may see
displays of boxing still in places. How about a prizefight?--With money
on it?--Eh, but you don't expect men to stand up to be knocked into
rumpsteaks for nothing?--No, but it's they there bets!--Right, and that's
a game gone to ruin along of outsiders.--But it always was and it always
will be popular with Englishmen!

Great English names of young days, before the wintry shadow of the Law
had blighted them, received their withered laurels. Emulous boys were in
the heroic posture. Good! sparring does no hurt: Skepsey seized a likely
lad, Dartrey another. Nature created the Ring for them. Now then, arms
and head well up, chest hearty, shoulders down, out with the right fist,
just below the level of the chin; out with the left fist farther, right
out, except for that bit of curve; so, and draw it slightly back for
wary-pussy at the spring. Firm you stand, feeling the muscles of both
legs, left half a pace ahead, right planted, both stringy. None of your
milk-pail looks; show us jaw, you bulldogs. Now then, left from the
shoulder, straight at right of head.--Good, and alacrity called on vigour
in Skepsey's pupil; Dartrey's had the fist on his mouth before he could
parry right arm up. 'Foul blow!' Dartrey cried. Skepsey vowed to the
contrary. Dartrey reiterated his charge. Skepsey was a figure of
negation, gesticulating and protesting. Dartrey appealed tempestuously to
the Ring; Skepsey likewise, in a tone of injury. He addressed a
remonstrance to Captain Dartrey.

'Hang your captain, sir! I call you a coward; come on,' said the resolute
gentleman, already in ripe form for the attack. His blue eyes were like
the springing sunrise over ridges of the seas; and Skepsey jumped to his
meaning.

Boys and men were spectators of a real scientific set-to, a lovely show.
They were half puzzled, it seemed so deadly. And the little one got in
his blows at the gentleman, who had to be hopping. Only, the worse the
gentleman caught it, the friendlier his countenance became. That was the
wonder, and that gave them the key. But it was deliciously near to the
real thing.

Dartrey and Skepsey shook hands.

'And now, you fellows, you're to know, that this is one of the champions;
and you take your lesson from him and thank him,' Dartrey said, as he
turned on his heel to strike and greet the flow from the house.

'Dartrey come!' Victor, Fenellan, Colney, had him by the hand in turn.
Pure sweetness of suddenly awakened joy sat in Nataly's eyes as she swam
to welcome him, Nesta moved a step, seemed hesitating, and she tripped
forward. 'Dear Captain Dartrey!'

He did not say: 'But what a change in you!'

'It is blue-butterfly, all the same,' Nataly spoke to his look.

Victor hurriedly pronounced the formal introduction between the Hon.
Dudley Sowerby and Captain Dartrey Fenellan. The bronze face and the
milky bowed to one another ceremoniously; the latter faintly flushing.

'So here you are at last,' Victor said. 'You stay with us.'

'To-morrow or later, if you'll have me. I go down to my people to-night.'

'But you stay in England now?' Nataly's voice wavered on the question.

'There's a chance of my being off to Upper Burmah before the week's
ended.'

'Ah, dear, dear!' sighed Fenellan; 'and out of good comes evil!--as
grandfather Deucalion exclaimed, when he gallantly handed up his dripping
wife from the mud of the Deluge waters. Do you mean to be running and
Dewing it on for ever, with only a nod for friends, Dart?'

'Lord, Simmy, what a sound of home there is in your old nonsense!'
Dartrey said.

His eyes of strong dark blue colour and the foreign swarthiness of his
brows and cheeks and neck mixed the familiar and the strange, in the
sight of the women who knew him.

The bill-broker's fair-tressed young wife whispered of curiosity
concerning him to Nataly. He dressed like a sailor, he stood like a
soldier: and was he married? Yes, he was married.

Mrs. Blathenoy imagined a something in Mrs. Radnor's tone. She could
account for it; not by the ordinary reading of the feminine in the
feminine, but through a husband who professed to know secrets. She was
young in years and experience, ten months wedded, disappointedly
awakened, enlivened by the hour, kindled by a novel figure of man,
fretful for a dash of imprudence. This Mrs. Radnor should be the one to
second her very innocent turn for a galopade; her own position allowed of
any little diverting jig or reel, or plunge in a bath--she required it,
for the domestic Jacob Blathenoy was a dry chip: proved such, without a
day's variation during the whole of the ten wedded months. Nataly
gratified her spoken wish. Dartrey Fenellan bowed to the lady, and she
withdrew him, seeing composedly that other and greater ladies had the
wish ungratified. Their husbands were not so rich as hers, and their
complexions would hardly have pleased the handsome brown-faced officer so
well.

Banquet, equal to a blast of trumpet, was the detaining word for the
multitude. It circulated, one knows not how. Eloquent as the whiffs to
the sniffs (and nowhere is eloquence to match it, when the latter are
sharpened from within to without), the word was very soon over the field.
Mr. Carling may have helped; he had it from Fenellan; and he was among
the principal groups, claiming or making acquaintances, as a lawyer
should do. The Concert was complimentarily a topic: Durandarte
divine!--did not everybody think so? Everybody did, in default of a term
for overtopping it. Our language is poor at hyperbole; our voices are
stronger. Gestures and heaven-sent eyeballs invoke to display the
ineffable. Where was Durandarte now? Gone; already gone; off with the
Luciani for evening engagements; he came simply to oblige his dear friend
Mr. Radnor. Cheque fifty guineas: hardly more on both sides than an
exchange of smiles. Ah, these merchant-princes! What of Mr. Radnor's
amateur instrumentalists? Amateurs, they are not to be named: perfect
musicians. Mr. Radnor is the perfection of a host. Yes, yes; Mrs. Radnor;
Miss Radnor too: delicious voices; but what is it about Mr. Radnor so
captivating! He is not quite English, yet he is not at all foreign. Is he
very adventurous in business, as they say?

'Soundest head in the City of London,' Mr. Blathenoy remarked.

Sir Rodwell Blachington gave his nod.

The crowd interjected, half-sighing. We ought to be proud of such a man!
Perhaps we are a trifle exaggerating, says its heart. But that we are
wholly grateful to him, is a distinct conclusion. And he may be one of
the great men of his time: he has a quite individual style of dress.

Lady Rodwell Blachington observed to Colney Durance:

'Mr. Radnor bids fair to become the idol of the English people.'

'If he can prove himself to be sufficiently the dupe of the English
people,' said Colney.

'Idol--dupe?' interjected Sir Rodwell, and his eyebrows fixed at the
perch of Colney's famous 'national interrogation' over vacancy of
understanding, as if from the pull of a string. He had his audience with
him; and the satirist had nothing but his inner gush of acids at sight of
a planted barb.

Colney was asked to explain. He never explained. He performed a series of
astonishing leaps, like the branchy baboon above the traveller's head in
the tropical forest, and led them into the trap they assisted him to
prepare for them. 'No humour, do you say? The English have no humour?' a
nephew of Lady Blachington's inquired of him, with polite pugnacity, and
was cordially assured, that 'he vindicated them.'

'And Altruistic! another specimen of the modern coinage,' a classical
Church dignitary, in grammarian disgust, remarked to a lady, as they
passed.

Colney pricked-up his ears. It struck him that he might fish for
suggestions in aid of the Grand Argument before the Elders of the Court
of Japan. Dr. Wardan, whose recognition he could claim, stated to him,
that the lady and he were enumerating words of a doubtfully legitimate
quality now being inflicted upon the language.

'The slang from below is perhaps preferable?' said Colney.

'As little-less.'

'But a pirate-tongue, cut-off from its roots, must continue to practise
piracy, surely, or else take reinforcements in slang, otherwise it is
inexpressive of new ideas.'

'Possibly the new ideas are best expressed in slang.'

'If insular. They will consequently be incommunicable to foreigners. You
would, then, have us be trading with tokens instead of a precious
currency? Yet I cannot perceive the advantage of letting our ideas be
clothed so racy of the obscener soil; considering the pretensions of the
English language to become the universal. If we refuse additions from
above, they force themselves on us from below.'

Dr. Wardan liked the frame of the observations, disliked the substance.

'One is to understand that the English language has these pretensions?'
he said:--he minced in his manner, after the well-known mortar-board and
tassel type; the mouthing of a petrifaction: clearly useless to the
pleadings of the patriotic Dr. Bouthoin and his curate.

He gave no grip to Colney, who groaned at cheap Donnish sarcasm, and let
him go, after dealing him a hard pellet or two in a cracker-covering.

There was Victor all over the field netting his ephemerae! And he who
feeds on them, to pay a price for their congratulations and flatteries,
he is one of them himself!

Nesta came tripping from the Rev. Septimus Barmby. 'Dear Mr. Durance,
where is Captain Dartrey?'

Mrs. Blathenoy had just conducted her husband through a crowd, for an
introduction of him to Captain Dartrey. That was perceptible.

Dudley Sowerby followed Nesta closely: he struck across the path of the
Rev. Septimus: again he had the hollow of her ear at his disposal.

'Mr. Radnor was excellent. He does everything consummately: really, we
are all sensible of it. I am. He must lead us in a symphony. These light
"champagne overtures" of French composers, as Mr. Fenellan calls them, do
not bring out his whole ability:--Zampa, Le Pre aux clercs, Masaniello,
and the like.'

'Your duet together went well.'

'Thanks to you--to you. You kept us together.'

'Papa was the runaway or strain-the-leash, if there was one.'

'He is impetuous, he is so fervent. But, Miss Radnor, I could not be the
runaway-with you . . . with you at the piano. Indeed, I . . . shall we
stroll down? I love the lake.'

'You will hear the bell for your cold dinner very soon.'

'I am not hungry. I would so much rather talk--hear you. But you are
hungry? You have been singing twice: three times! Opera singers, they
say, eat hot suppers; they drink stout. And I never heard your voice more
effective. Yours is a voice that . . . something of the feeling one has
in hearing cathedral voices: carry one up. I remember, in Dresden, once,
a Fraulein Kuhnstreich, a prodigy, very young, considering her
accomplishments. But it was not the same.'

Nesta wondered at Dartrey Fenellan for staying so long with Mr. and Mrs.
Blathenoy.

'Ah, Mr. Sowerby, if I am to have flattery, I cannot take it as a
milliner's dumb figure wears the beautiful dress; I must point out my
view of some of my merits.'

'Oh! do, I beg, Miss . . . You have a Christian name and I too: and once
. . . not Mr. Sowerby: yes, it was Dudley!

'Quite accidentally, and a world of pardons entreated.'

'And Dudley begged Dudley might be Dudley always!'

He was deepening to the Barmby intonation--apparently Cupid's; but a
shade more airily Pagan, not so fearfully clerical.

Her father had withdrawn Dartrey Fenellan from Mr. and Mrs. Blathenoy.
Dr. Schlesien was bowing with Dartrey.

'And if Durandarte would only--but you are one with Miss Graves to
depreciate my Durandarte, in favour of the more classical Jachimo; whom
we all admire; but you shall be just,' said she, and she pouted. She had
seen her father plant Dartrey Fenellan in the midst of a group of City
gentlemen.

Simeon touched among them to pluck at his brother. He had not a chance;
he retired, and swam into the salmon-net of seductive Mrs. Blathenoy's
broad bright smile.

'It's a matter of mines, and they're hovering in the attitude of the
query, like corkscrews over a bottle, profoundly indifferent to
blood-relationships,' he said to her.

'Pray, stay and be consoled by me,' said the fair young woman. 'You are
to point me out all the distinguished people. Is it true, that your
brother has left the army?'

'Dartrey no longer wears the red. Here comes Colonel Corfe, who does.
England has her army still!'

'His wife persuaded him?'

'You see he is wearing the black.'

'For her? How very very sad! Tell me--what a funnily dressed woman
meeting that gentleman!'

'Hush--a friend of the warrior. Splendid weather, Colonel Corfe.'

'Superb toilettes!' The colonel eyed Mrs. Blathenoy dilatingly, advanced,
bowed, and opened the siege.

She decided a calculation upon his age, made a wall of it, smilingly
agreed with his encomium of the Concert, and toned her voice to
Fenellan's comprehension: 'Did it occur recently?'

'Months; in Africa; I haven't the date.'

'Such numbers of people one would wish to know! Who are those ladies
holding a Court, where Mr. Radnor is?'

'Lady Carmine, Lady Swanage--if it is your wish?' interposed the colonel.

She dealt him a forgiving smile. 'And that pleasant-looking old
gentleman?'

Colonel Corfe drew-up. Fenellan said: 'Are we veterans at forty or so?'

'Well, it 's the romance, perhaps!' She raised her shoulders.

The colonel's intelligence ran a dog's nose for a lady's interjections.
'The romance? . . . at forty, fifty? gone? Miss Julinks, the great
heiress and a beauty; has chosen him over the heads of all the young men
of his time. Cranmer Lotsdale. Most romantic history!'

'She's in love with that, I suppose.'

'Now you direct my attention to him,' said Fenellan, 'the writing of the
romantic history has made the texture look a trifle thready. You have a
terrible eye.'

It was thrown to where the person stood who had first within a few
minutes helped her to form critical estimates of men, more consciously to
read them.

'Your brother stays in England?'

'The fear is, that he's off again.'

'Annoying for you. If I had a brother, I would not let him go.'

'How would you detain him?'

'Locks and bolts, clock wrong, hands and arms, kneeling--the fourth act
of the Huguenots!'

'He went by way of the window, I think. But that was a lover.'

'Oh! well!' she flushed. She did not hear the 'neglected and astonished
colonel speak, and she sought diversion in saying to Fenellan: 'So many
people of distinction are assembled here to-day! Tell me, who is that
pompous gentleman, who holds his arms up doubled, as he walks?'

'Like flappers of a penguin: and advances in jerks: he is head of the
great Firm of Quatley Brothers: Sir Abraham: finances or farms one of the
South American Republics: we call him, Pride of Port. He consumes it and
he presents it.'

'And who is that little man, who stops everybody?'

'People of distinction indeed! That little man--is your upper lip
underrateing him? . . . When a lady's lip is erratically disdainful, it
suggests a misuse of a copious treasury, deserving to be mulcted,
punished--how?--who can say?--that little man, now that little man, with
a lift of his little finger, could convulse the Bacon Market!'

Mrs. Blathenoy shook. Hearing Colonel Corfe exclaim:

'Bacon Market!' she let fly a peal. Then she turned to a fresh satellite,
a round and a ruddy, 'at her service ever,' Mr. Beaves Urmsing, and
repeated Fenellan's words. He, in unfeigned wonderment at such
unsuspected powers, cried: 'Dear me!' and stared at the little man,
making the pretty lady's face a twinkling dew.

He had missed the Concert. Was it first-rate? Ecstasy answered in the
female voice.

'Hem'd fool I am to keep appointments!' he muttered.

She reproved him: 'Fie, Mr. Urmsing; it's the making of them, not the
keeping!'

'Ah, my dear ma'am, if I'd had Blathenoy's luck when he made a certain
appointment. And he was not so much older than me? The old ones get the
prizes!'

Mr. Beaves Urmsing prompted Colonel Corfe to laugh in triumph. The
colonel's eyebrows were up in fixity over sleepy lids. He brightened to
propose the conducting of the pretty woman to the banquet.

'We shall see them going in,' said she. 'Mr. Radnor has a French cook,
who does wonders. But I heard him asking for Mr. Beaves Urmsing. I'm sure
he expected The Marigolds at his Concert.'

'Anything to oblige the company,' said the rustic ready chorister,
clearing his throat.

The lady's feet were bent in the direction of a grassy knoll, where
sunflowers, tulips, dahlias, peonies, of the sex eclipsed at a distance
its roses and lilies. Fenellan saw Dartrey, still a centre of the
merchantmen, strolling thither.

'And do you know, your brother is good enough to dine with us next week,
Thursday, down here,' she murmured. 'I could venture to command?--if you
are not induced.'

'Whichever word applies to a faithful subject.'

'I do so wish your brother had not left the army!'

'You have one son of Mars.'

Her eyes took the colonel up to cast him down: he was not the antidote.
She said to him: 'Luciani's voice wears better than her figure.'

The colonel replied: 'I remember,' and corrected himself, 'at Eton, in
jackets: she was not so particularly slim; never knew how to dress. You
beat Italians there! She moved one as a youngster.'

'Eton boys are so susceptible!'

'Why, hulloa, don't I remember her coming out!--and do you mean to tell
me,' Mr. Beaves Urmsing brutally addressed the colonel, 'that you were at
Eton when . . . why, what age do you give the poor woman, then!' He
bellowed, 'Eh?' as it were a bull crowing.

The colonel retreated to one of his defensive corners. 'I am not aware
that I meant to tell you anything.'

Mr. Beaves Urmsing turned square-breasted on Fenellan: 'Fellow's a born
donkey!'

'And the mother lived?' said Fenellan.

Mr. Beaves Urmsing puffed with wrath at the fellow.

Five minutes later, in the midst of the group surrounding and
felicitating Victor, he had sight of Fenellan conversing with fair ones,
and it struck a light in him; he went three steps backward, with shouts.
'Dam funny fellow! eh? who is he? I must have that man at my table. Worth
fifty Colonel Jackasses! And I 've got a son in the Guards: and as much
laugh in him, he 's got, as a bladder. But we'll make a party, eh,
Radnor? with that friend o' yours. Dam funny fellow! and precious little
of it going on now among the young lot. They're for seeing ghosts and
gaping their jaws; all for the quavers instead of the capers.'

He sounded and thrummed his roguish fling-off for the capers. A second
glimpse of Fenellan agitated the anecdote, as he called it, seizing
Victor's arm, to have him out of earshot of the ladies. Delivery, not
without its throes, was accomplished, but imperfectly, owing to
sympathetic convulsions, under which Mr. Beaves Urmsing's countenance was
crinkled of many colours, as we see the Spring rhubarb-leaf. Unable to
repeat the brevity of Fenellan's rejoinder, he expatiated on it to convey
it, swearing that it was the kind of thing done in the old days, when men
were witty dogs:--'pat! and pat back! as in the pantomime.'

'Repartee!' said Victor. 'He has it. You shall know him. You're the man
for him.'

'He for me, that he is!--"Hope the mother's doing well? My card":--eh?
Grave as an owl! Look, there goes the donkey, lady to right and left, all
ears for him--ha! ha! I must have another turn with your friend. "Mother
lived, did she?" Dam funny fellow, all of the olden time! And a dinner,
bachelor dinner, six of us, at my place, next week, say Wednesday,
half-past six, for a long evening--flowing bowl--eh, shall it be?'

Nesta came looking to find her Captain Dartrey.

Mr. Beaves Urmsing grew courtly of the olden time. He spied Colonel Corfe
anew, and 'Donkey!' rose to split the roar at his mouth, and full of his
anecdote, he pursued some congenial acquaintances, crying to his host:
'Wednesday, mind! eh? by George, your friend's gizzarded me for the day!'

Plumped with the rich red stream of life, this last of the squires of old
England thumped along among the guests, a very tuning-fork to keep them
at their pitch of enthusiasm. He encountered Mr. Caddis, and it was an
encounter. Mr. Caddis represented his political opinions; but here was
this cur of a Caddis whineing his niminy note from his piminy nob, when
he was asked for his hearty echo of the praises of this jolly good fellow
come to waken the neighbourhood, to be a blessing, a blazing hearth, a
fall of manna:--and thank the Lord for him, you desertdog! 'He 's a
merchant prince, and he's a prince of a man, if you're for titles. Eh?
you "assent to my encomiums." You'll be calling me Mr. Speaker next. Hang
me, Caddis, if those Parliamentary benches of yours aren't freezing you
from your seat up, and have got to your jaw--my belief!'

Mr. Caddis was left reflecting, that we have, in the dispensations of
Providence, when we have a seat, to submit to castigations from butcherly
men unaccountably commissioned to solidify the seat. He could have
preached a discourse upon Success, to quiet the discontentment of the
unseated. And our world of seats oddly gained, quaintly occupied,
maliciously beset, insensately envied, needs the discourse. But it was
not delivered, else would it have been here written down without mercy,
as a medical prescript, one of the grand specifics. He met Victor, and,
between his dread of him and the counsels of a position subject to
stripes, he was a genial thaw. Victor beamed; for Mr. Caddis had
previously stood eminent as an iceberg of the Lakelands' party. Mr.
Inchling and Mr. Caddis were introduced. The former in Commerce, the
latter in Politics, their sustaining boast was, the being our stable
Englishmen; and at once, with cousinly minds, they fell to chatting upon
the nothings agreeably and seriously. Colney Durance forsook a set of
ladies for fatter prey, and listened to them. What he said, Victor did
not hear. The effect was always to be seen, with Inchling under Colney.
Fenellan did better service, really good service.

Nataly played the heroine she was at heart. Why think of her as having to
act a character! Twice had Carling that afternoon, indirectly and
directly, stated Mrs. Burman to be near the end we crape a natural, a
defensible, satisfaction to hear of:--not wishing it--poor woman!--but
pardonably, before man and all the angels, wishing, praying for the
beloved one to enter into her earthly peace by the agency of the other's
exit into her heavenly.

Fenellan and Colney came together, and said a word apiece of their
friend.

'In his element! The dear old boy has the look of a goldfish, king of his
globe.'

'The dear old boy has to me the look of a pot on the fire, with a loose
lid.'

I may have the summons from Themison to-morrow, Victor thought. The
success of the day, was a wine that rocked the soberest of thoughts. For,
strange to confess, ever since the fall on London Bridge, his heart,
influenced in some degree by Nataly's depression perhaps, had been
shadowed by doubts of his infallible instinct for success. Here, at a
stroke, and before entering the house, he had the whole neighbourhood
about him: he could feel that he and Nataly stood in the minds of the
worthy people variously with the brightness if not with the warmth
distinguishable in the bosom of Beaves Urmsing--the idea of whom gave
Lakelands an immediate hearth-glow.

Armandine was thirteen minutes, by his watch, behind the time she had
named. Small blame to her. He excused her to Lady Carmine, Lady Swanage,
Lady Blachington, Mrs. Fanning, Sir Abraham Quatley, Mr. Danny (of Bacon
fame) and the rest of the group surrounding Nataly on the mound leftward
of the white terraces descending to the lake; where she stood beating her
foot fretfully at the word brought by Nesta, that Dartrey Fenellan had
departed. It was her sunshine departed. But she went through her task of
conversing amiably. Colney, for a wonder, consented to be useful in
assisting Fenellan to relate stories of French Cooks; which were, like
the Royal Hanoverian oyster, of an age for offering acceptable flavour to
English hearers. Nesta drew her mother's attention to Priscilla Graves
and Skepsey; the latter bending head and assenting. Nataly spoke of the
charm of Priscilla's voice that day, in her duet with the Rev. Septimus.
Mr. Pempton looked; he saw that Priscilla was proselytizing. She was
perfection to him but for one blotting thing. With grief on his eyelids,
he said to Nataly or to himself: 'Meat!'

'Dear friend, don't ride your hobby over us,' she replied.

'But it's with that object they mount it,' said Victor.

The greater ladies of the assembly were quite ready to accuse the
sections, down to the individuals, of the social English (reserving our
elect) of an itch to be tyrants.

Colney was apologizing for them, with his lash: 'It's merely the sensible
effect of a want of polish of the surface when they rub together.'

And he heard Carling exclaim to Victor: 'How comes the fellow here!'

Skepsey had rushed across an open space to intercept a leisurely
progressive man, whose hat was of the shape Victor knew; and the man wore
the known black gaiters. In appearance, he had the likeness of a fallen
parson.

Carling and Victor crossed looks that were questions carrying their
answers.

Nataly's eyes followed Victor's. 'Who is the man?' she said; and she got
no reply beyond a perky sparkle in his gaze.

Others were noticing the man, who was trying to pass by Skepsey, now on
his right side, now on his left.

'There'll be no stopping him,' Carling said, and he slipped to the rear.'

At this juncture, Armandine's mellow bell proclaimed her readiness.

Victor rubbed the back of his head. Nataly asked him: 'Dear, is it that
man?'

He nodded scantly: 'Expected, expected. I think we have our summons from
Armandine. One moment--poor soul! poor soul! Lady Carmine--Sir Abraham
Quatley. Will you lead? Lady Blachington, I secure you. One moment.'

He directed Nataly to pair a few of the guests; he hurried down the slope
of sward.

Nataly applied to Colney Durance. 'Do you know the man?--is it that man?'

Colney rejoined: 'The man's name is Jarniman.'

Armandine's bell swung melodiously. The guests had grouped, thickening
for the stream to procession. Mrs. Blathenoy claimed Fenellan; she
requested him to tell her whether he had known Mrs. Victor Radnor many
years. She mused. 'You like her?'

'One likes one's dearest of friends among women, does one not?'

The lady nodded to his response. 'And your brother?'

'Dartrey is devoted to her.'

'I am sure,' said she, 'your brother is a chivalrous gentleman. I like
her too.' She came to her sentiment through the sentiment of the
chivalrous gentleman. Sinking from it, she remarked that Mr. Radnor was
handsome still. Fenellan commended the subject to her, as one to
discourse of when she met Dartrey. A smell of a trap-hatch, half-open,
afflicted and sharpened him. It was Blathenoy's breath: husbands of young
wives do these villanies, for the sake of showing their knowledge.
Fenellan forbore to praise Mrs. Victor: he laid his colours on Dartrey.
The lady gave ear till she reddened. He meant no harm, meant nothing but
good; and he was lighting the most destructive of our lower fires.

Visibly, that man Jarniman was disposed of with ease. As in the
street-theatres of crowing Punch, distance enlisted pantomime to do the
effective part of the speeches. Jarniman's hat was off, he stood bent, he
delivered his message. He was handed over to Skepsey's care for the
receiving of meat and drink. Victor returned; he had Lady Blachington's
hand on his arm; he was all hers, and in the heart of his company of
guests at the same time. Eyes that had read him closely for years, were
unable to spell a definite signification on his face, below the
overflowing happiness of the hospitable man among contented guests. He
had in fact something within to enliven him; and that was the more than
suspicion, amounting to an odour of certainty, that Armandine intended
one of her grand surprises for her master, and for the hundred and fifty
or so to be seated at her tables in the unwarmed house of Lakelands.




CHAPTER XXII

CONCERNS THE INTRUSION OF JARNIMAN

Armandine did her wonders. There is not in the wide range of the Muses a
more responsive instrument than man to his marvellous cook; and if his
notes were but as flowing as his pedals are zealous, we should be carried
on the tale of the enthusiasm she awakened, away from the rutted
highroad, where History now thinks of tightening her girdle for an
accelerated pace.

The wonders were done: one hundred and seventy guests plenteously fed at
tables across the great Concert Hall, down a length of the
conservatory-glass, on soups, fish, meats, and the kitchen-garden, under
play of creative sauces, all in the persuasive steam of savouriness;
every dish, one may say, advancing, curtseying, swimming to be your
partner, instead of passively submitting to the eye of appetite,
consenting to the teeth, as that rather melancholy procession of the
cold, resembling established spinsters thrice-corseted in decorum, will
appear to do. Whether Armandine had the thought or that she simply acted
in conformity with a Frenchwoman's direct good sense, we do require to
smell a sort of animation in the meats we consume. We are still perhaps
traceably related to the Adamite old-youngster just on his legs, who
betrayed at every turn his Darwinian beginnings, and relished a
palpitating unwillingness in the thing refreshing him; only we
young-oldsters cherish the milder taste for willingness, with a throb of
the vanquished in it. And a seeming of that we get from the warm roast.
The banquet to be fervently remembered, should smoke, should send out a
breath to meet us. Victor's crowded saloon-carriage was one voice of
eulogy, to raise Armandine high as the finale rockets bursting over
Wrensham Station at the start Londonward. How had she managed? We
foolishly question the arts of magicians.

Mr. Pempton was an apparent dissentient, as the man must be who is half a
century ahead of his fellows in humaneness, and saddened by the display
of slaughtered herds and their devourers. He had picked out his vegetable
and farinaceous morsels, wherever he could get them uncontaminated;
enough for sustenance; and the utmost he could show was, that he did not
complain. When mounted and ridden by the satirist, in wrath at him for
systematically feasting the pride of the martyr on the maceration of his
animal part, he put on his martyr's pride, which assumed a perfect
contentment in the critical depreciation of opposing systems: he was
drawn to state, as he had often done, that he considered our animal part
shamefully and dangerously over nourished, and that much of the
immorality of the world was due to the present excessive indulgence in
meats. 'Not in drink?' Miss Graves inquired. 'No,' he said boldly; 'not
equally; meats are more insidious. I say nothing of taking life--of
fattening for that express purpose: diseases of animals: bad blood made:
cruelty superinduced: it will be seen to be, it will be looked back on,
as a form of, a second stage of, cannibalism. Let that pass. I say, that
for excess in drinking, the penalty is paid instantly, or at least on the
morrow.'

'Paid by the drunkard's wife, you should say.'

'Whereas intemperance in eating, corrupts constitutionally, more
spiritually vitiates, we think: on the whole, gluttony is the
least-generous of the vices.'

Colney lured Mr. Pempton through a quagmire of the vices to declare, that
it brutalized; and stammeringly to adopt the suggestion, that our
breeding of English ladies--those lights of the civilized world--can
hardly go with a feeding upon flesh of beasts. Priscilla regretted that
champagne should have to be pleaded in excuse of impertinences to her
sex. They were both combative, nibbed for epigram, edged to inflict
wounds; and they were set to shudder openly at one another's practises;
they might have exposed to Colney which of the two maniacal sections of
his English had the vaster conceit of superiority in purity; they were
baring themselves, as it were with a garment flung-off at each retort. He
reproached them for undermineing their countrymen; whose Falstaff panics
demanded blood of animals to restore them; and their periods of bragging,
that they should brandify their wits to imagine themselves Vikings.

Nataly interposed. She was vexed with him. He let his eyelids drop: but
the occasion for showing the prickliness of the bristly social English,
could not be resisted. Dr. Peter Yatt was tricked to confess, that small
annoyances were, in his experience, powerful on the human frame; and Dr.
John Cormyn was very neatly brought round to assure him he was mistaken
if he supposed the homoeopathic doctor who smoked was exercising a
destructive influence on the efficacy of the infinitesimal doses he
prescribed; Dr. Yatt chuckled a laugh at globules; Dr. Cormyn at patients
treated as horses; while Mr. Catkin was brought to praise the smoke of
tobacco as our sanctuary from the sex; and Mr. Peridon quietly denied,
that the taking of it into his nostrils from the puffs of his friend
caused him sad silences: Nesta flew to protect the admirer of her beloved
Louise. Her subsiding young excitement of the day set her Boating on that
moony melancholy in Mr. Peridon.

No one could understand the grounds for Colney's more than usual
waspishness. He trotted out the fulgent and tonal Church of the Rev.
Septimus; the skeleton of worship, so truly showing the spirit, in that
of Dudley Sowerby's family; maliciously admiring both; and he had a spar
with Fenellan, ending in a snarl and a shout. Victor said to him: 'Yes,
here, as much as you like, old Colney, but I tell you, you've staggered
that poor woman Lady Blachington to-day, and her husband too; and I don't
know how many besides. What the pleasure of it can be, I can't guess.'

'Nor I,' said Fenellan, 'but I'll own I feel envious; like the girl among
a family of boys I knew, who were all of them starved in their infancy by
a miserly father, that gave them barely a bit of Graves to eat and not a
drop of Pempton to drink; and on the afternoon of his funeral, I found
them in the drawing-room, four lank fellows, heels up, walking on their
hands, from long practice; and the girl informed me, that her brothers
were able so to send the little blood they had in their bodies to their
brains, and always felt quite cheerful for it, happy, and empowered to
deal with the problems of the universe; as they couldn't on their legs;
but she, poor thing, was forbidden to do the same! And I'm like her. I
care for decorum too much to get the brain to act on Colney's behaviour;
but I see it enraptures him and may be comprehensible to the
topsy-turvy.'

Victor rubbed hands. It was he who filled Colney's bag of satiric spite.
In addition to the downright lunacy of the courting of country society,
by means of the cajolements witnessed this day, a suspicion that Victor
was wearing a false face over the signification--of Jarniman's visit and
meant to deceive the trustful and too-devoted loving woman he seemed
bound to wreck, irritated the best of his nature. He had a resolve to
pass an hour with the couple, and speak and insist on hearing plain words
before the night had ended. But Fenellan took it out of him. Victor's
show of a perfect contentment emulating Pempton's, incited Colney to some
of his cunning rapier-thrusts with his dancing adversary; and the heat
which is planted in us for the composition: of those cool epigrams, will
not allow plain words to follow. Or, handing him over to the police of
the Philistines, you may put it, that a habit of assorting spices will
render an earnest simplicity distasteful. He was invited by Nataly to
come home with them; her wish for his presence, besides personal, was
moved by an intuition, that his counsel might specially benefit them. He
shrugged; he said he had work at his chambers.

'Work!' Victor ejaculated: he never could reach to a right comprehension
of labour, in regard to the very unremunerative occupation of literature.
Colney he did not want, and he let him go, as Nataly noticed, without a
sign of the reluctance he showed when the others, including Fenellan,
excused themselves.

'So! we're alone?' he said, when the door of the hall had closed on them.
He kept Nesta talking of the success of the day until she, observing her
mother's look, simulated the setting-in of a frenzied yawn. She was
kissed, and she tripped to her bed.

'Now we are alone,' Nataly said.

'Well, dear, and the day was, you must own . . . ' he sought to trifle
with her heavy voice; but she recalled him: 'Victor!' and the naked
anguish in her cry of his name was like a foreign world threatening the
one he filled.

'Ah, yes; that man, that Jarniman. You saw him, I remember. You
recollected him?--stouter than he was. In her service ever since. Well, a
little drop of bitter, perhaps: no harm, tonic.'

'Victor, is she very ill?'

'My love, don't feel at your side: she is ill, ill, not the extreme case:
not yet: old and ill. I told Skepsey to give the man refreshment: he had
to do his errand.'

'What? why did he come?'

'Curious; he made acquaintance with Skepsey, and appears to have
outwitted poor Skepsey, as far as I see it. But if that woman thinks of
intimidating me now--!' His eyes brightened; he had sprung from evasions.
'Living in flagrant sin, she says: you and I! She will not have it; warns
me. Heard this day at noon of company at Lakelands. Jarniman off at once.
Are to live in obscurity;--you and I! if together! Dictates from her
death-bed-I suppose her death-bed.'

'Dearest,' Nataly pressed hand on her left breast, 'may we not think that
she may be right?'

'An outrageous tyranny of a decrepit woman naming herself wife when she
is only a limpet of vitality, with drugs for blood, hanging-on to blast
the healthy and vigorous! I remember old Colney's once, in old days,
calling that kind of marriage a sarcophagus. It was to me. There I
lay--see myself lying! wasting! Think what you can good of her, by all
means! From her bed! despatches that Jarniman to me from her bedside,
with the word, that she cannot in her conscience allow--what imposition
was it I practised? . . . flagrant sin?--it would have been an infinitely
viler . . . . She is the cause of suffering enough: I bear no more from
her; I've come to the limit. She has heard of Lakelands: she has taken
one of her hatreds to the place. She might have written, might have sent
me a gentleman, privately. No: it must be done in dramatic style-for
effect: her confidential--lawyer?--doctor?--butler! Perhaps to frighten
me:--the boy she knew, and--poor soul! I don't mean to abuse her: but
such conduct as this is downright brutal. I laugh at it, I snap my
fingers. I can afford to despise it. Only I do say it deserves to be
called abominable.'

'Victor, has she used a threat?'

'Am I brought to listen to any of her threats!--Funny thing, I 'm certain
that woman never can think of me except as the boy she knew. I saw her
first when she was first a widow. She would keep talking to me of the
seductions of the metropolis--kept informing me I was a young man . . .
shaking her head. I 've told you. She--well, I know we are mixtures,
women as well as men. I can, I hope, grant the same--I believe I
can--allowances to women as to men; we are poor creatures, all of using
one sense: though I won't give Colney his footing; there's a better way
of reading us. I hold fast to Nature. No violation of Nature, my good
Colney! We can live the lives of noble creatures; and I say that
happiness was meant for us:--just as, when you sit down to your dinner,
you must do it cheerfully, and you make good blood: otherwise all's
wrong. There's the right answer to Colney! But when a woman like that
. . . . and marries a boy: well, twenty-one--not quite that: and an
innocent, a positive innocent--it may seem incredible, after a term of
school-life: it was a fact: I can hardly understand it myself when I look
back. Marries him! And then sets to work to persecute him, because he has
blood in his veins, because he worships beauty; because he seeks a real
marriage, a real mate. And, I say it! let the world take its own view, the
world is wrong! because he preferred a virtuous life to the kind of life
she would, she must--why, necessarily!--have driven him to, with a mummy's
grain of nature in his body. And I am made of flesh, I admit it.'

'Victor, dearest, her threat concerns only your living at Lakelands.'

'Pray, don't speak excitedly, my love,' he replied to the woman whose
tones had been subdued to scarce more than waver. 'You see how I meet it:
water off a duck's back, or Indian solar beams on the skin of a Hindoo! I
despise it hardly worth contempt;--But, come: our day was a good one.
Fenellan worked well. Old Colney was Colney Durance, of course. He did no
real mischief.'

'And you will not determine to enter Lakelands--not yet, dear?' said
Nataly.

'My own girl, leave it all to me.'

'But, Victor, I must, must know.'

'See the case. You have lots of courage. We can't withdraw. Her intention
is mischief. I believe the woman keeps herself alive for it: we've given
her another lease!--though it can only be for a very short time; Themison
is precise; Carling too. If we hold back--I have great faith in
Themison--the woman's breath on us is confirmed. We go down, then;
complete the furnishing, quite leisurely; accept--listen--accept one or
two invitations: impossible to refuse!--but they are accepted!--and we
defy her: a crazy old creature: imagines herself the wife of the
ex-Premier, widow of Prince Le Boo, engaged to the Chinese Ambassador, et
caetera. Leave the tussle with that woman to me. No, we don't repeat the
error of Crayc Farm and Creckholt. And here we have stout friends. Not to
speak of Beaver Urmsing: a picture of Old Christmas England! You took to
him?--must have taken to Beaver Urmsing! The Marigolds! And Sir Rodwell
and Lady Blachington are altogether above the mark of Sir Humphrey and
Lady Pottil, and those half and half Mountneys. There's a warm centre of
home in Lakelands. But I know my Nataly: she is thinking of our girl.
Here is the plan: we stand our ground: my dear soul won't forsake me only
there's the thought of Fredi, in the event . . . improbable enough. I
lift Fredi out of the atmosphere awhile; she goes to my cousins the
Duvidney ladies.'

Nataly was hit by a shot. 'Can you imagine it, Victor?'

'Regard it as done.'

'They will surely decline!'

'Their feeling for General Radnor is a worship.'

'All the more . . . ?'

'The son inherits it. He goes to them personally. Have you ever known me
personally fail? Fredi stays at Moorsedge for a month or two. Dorothea
and Virginia Duvidney will give her a taste of a new society; good for
the girl. All these little shiftings can be turned to good. Meantime, I
say, we stand our ground: but you are not to be worried; for though we
have gone too far to recede, we need not and we will not make the entry
into Lakelands until--you know: that is, auspiciously, to suit you in
every way. Thus I provide to meet contingencies. What one may really
fancy is, that the woman did but threaten. There's her point of view to
be considered: silly, crazy; but one sees it. We are not sure that she
struck a blow at Craye or Creckholt. I wonder she never wrote. She was
frightened, when she came to manage her property, of signing her name to
anything. Absurd, that sending of Jarniman! However, it's her move; we
make a corresponding disposition of our chessmen.'

'And I am to lose my Nesta for a month?' Nataly said, after catching here
and there at the fitful gleams of truce or comfort dropped from his
words. And simultaneously, the reproach of her mind to her nature for
again and so constantly yielding to the domination of his initiative:
unable to find the words, even the ideas, to withstand him,--brought big
tears. Angry at herself both for the internal feebleness and the
exhibition of it, she blinked and begged excuse. There might be nothing
that should call her to resist him. She could not do much worse than she
had done to-day. The reflection, that to-day she had been actually
sustained by the expectation of a death to come, diminished her estimate
of to-morrow's burden on her endurance, in making her seem a less
criminal woman, who would have no such expectation: which was virtually a
stab at a fellow creature's future. Her head was acute to work in the
direction of the casuistries and the sensational webs and films. Facing
Victor, it was a block.

But the thought came: how could she meet those people about Lakelands,
without support of the recent guilty whispers! She said coldly, her heart
shaking her: 'You think there has been a recovery?'

'Invalids are up and down. They are--well, no; I should think she dreads
the . . .' he kept 'surgeon' out of hearing. 'Or else she means this for
the final stroke: "though I'm lying here, I can still make him feel."
That, or--poor woman--she has her notions of right and wrong.'

'Could we not now travel for a few weeks, Victor?'

'Certainly, dear; we will, after we have kept our engagements to dine--I
accepted--with the Blathenoys, the Blachingtons, Beaver Urmsing.'

Nataly's vision of the peaceful lost little dairy cottage swelled to
brilliance, like the large tear at the fall; darkening under her present
effort to comprehend the necessity it was for him to mix and be foremost
with the world. Unable to grasp it perfectly in mind, her compassionate
love embraced it: she blamed herself, for being the obstruction to him.

'Very well,' she said on a sigh. 'Then we shall not have to let our girl
go from us?'

'Just a few weeks. In the middle of dinner, I scribbled a telegram to the
Duvidneys, for Skepsey to take.'

'Speaking of Nesta?'

'Of my coming to-morrow. They won't stop me. I dine with them, sleep at
the Wells; hotel for a night. We are to be separated for a night.'

She laid her hand in his and gave him a passing view of her face: 'For
two, dear. I am . . . that man's visit--rather shaken: I shall have a
better chance of sleeping if I know I am not disturbing you.'

She was firm; and they kissed and parted. Each had an unphrased
speculation upon the power of Mrs. Burman to put division between them.




CHAPTER XXIII

TREATS OF THE LADIES' LAPDOG TASSO FOR AN INSTANCE OF MOMENTOUS EFFECTS
PRODUCED BY VERY MINOR CAUSES

The maiden ladies Dorothea and Virginia Duvidney were thin--sweet
old-fashioned grey gentlewomen, demurely conscious of their excellence
and awake to the temptation in the consciousness, who imposed a certain
reflex primness on the lips of the world when addressing them or when
alluding to them. For their appearance was picturesque of the ancestral
time, and their ideas and scrupulousness of delivery suggested the
belated in ripeness; orchard apples under a snow-storm; or any image that
will ceremoniously convey the mind's profound appreciation together with
the tooth's panic dread of tartness. They were by no means tart; only, as
you know, the tooth is apprehensively nervous; an uninviting sign will
set it on edge. Even the pen which would sketch them has a spell on it
and must don its coat of office, walk the liveried footman behind them.

Their wealth, their deeds of charity, their modesty, their built grey
locks, their high repute; a 'Chippendale elegance' in a quaintly formal
correctness, that they had, as Colney Durance called it; gave them some
queenliness, and allowed them to claim the ear as an oracle and banish
rebellious argument. Intuitive knowledge, assisted by the Rev. Stuart Rem
and the Rev. Abram Posterley, enabled them to pronounce upon men and
things; not without effect; their country owned it; the foreigner beheld
it. Nor were they corrupted by the servility of the surrounding ear. They
were good women, striving to be humbly good. They might, for all the
little errors they nightly unrolled to then perceptions, have stood
before the world for a study in the white of our humanity. And this may
be but a washed wall, it is true: revolutionary sceptics are measuring
the depths of it. But the hue refreshes, the world admires; and we know
it an object of aim to the bettermost of the wealthy. If, happily,
complacent circumstances have lifted us to the clean paved platform out
of grip of puddled clay and bespattering wheeltracks, we get our chance
of coming to it.

Possessing, for example, nine thousand pounds per annum in Consols, and
not expending the whole of it upon our luxuries, we are, without further
privation, near to kindling the world's enthusiasm for whiteness. Yet
there, too, we find, that character has its problems to solve; there are
shades in salt. We must be charitable, but we should be just; we give to
the poor of the land, but we are eminently the friends of our servants;
duty to mankind diverts us not from the love we bear to our dog; and with
a pathetic sorrow for silt, we discard it from sight and hearing. We hate
dirt. Having said so much, having shown it, by sealing the mouth of Mr.
Stuart Rem and iceing the veins of Mr. Abram Posterley, in relation to a
dreadful public case and a melancholy private, we have a pleased sense of
entry into the world's ideal.

At the same time, we protest our unworthiness. Acknowledgeing that they
were not purely spotless, these ladies genuinely took the tiny fly-spot
for a spur to purification; and they viewed it as a patch to raise in
relief their goodness. They gazed on it, saw themselves in it, and veiled
it: warned of the cunning of an oft-defeated Tempter.

To do good and sleep well, was their sowing and their reaping. Uneasy
consciences could not have slept. The sleeping served for proof of an
accurate reckoning and an expungeing of the day's debits. They differed
in opinion now and then, as we see companion waves of the river, blown by
a gust, roll a shadow between them; and almost equally transient were
their differences with a world that they condemned when they could not
feel they (as an embodiment of their principles) were leading it. The
English world at times betrayed a restiveness in the walled pathway of
virtue; for, alas, it closely neighbours the French; only a Channel,
often dangerously smooth, to divide: but it is not perverted for long;
and the English Funds are always constant and a tower. Would they be
suffered to be so, if libertinism were in the ascendant?

Colney Durance was acquainted with the Duvidney ladies. Hearing of the
journey to them and the purport of it, he said, with the mask upon glee:
'Then Victor has met his match!' Nataly had sent for him to dine with her
in Victor's absence: she was far from grieved, as to the result, by his
assurance to her, that Victor had not a chance. Colney thought so. 'Just
like him! to be off gaily to try and overcome or come over the greatest
power in England.' They were England herself; the squat old woman she has
become by reason of her overlapping numbers of the comfortable
fund-holder annuitants: a vast body of passives and negatives, living by
precept, according to rules of precedent, and supposing themselves to be
righteously guided because of their continuing undisturbed. Them he
branded, as hypocritical materialists, and the country for pride in her
sweetmeat plethora of them:--mixed with an ancient Hebrew fear of offence
to an inscrutable Lord, eccentrically appeasable through the dreary
iteration of the litany of sinfulness. He was near a truth; and he had
the heat of it on him.

Satirists in their fervours might be near it to grasp it, if they could
be moved to moral distinctness, mental intention, with a preference of
strong plain speech over the crack of their whips. Colney could not or
would not praise our modern adventurous, experimental, heroic, tramping
active, as opposed to yonder pursy passives and negatives; he had
occasions for flicking the fellow sharply: and to speak of the Lord as
our friend present with us, palpable to Reason, perceptible to natural
piety solely through the reason, which justifies punishment; that would
have stopped his mouth upon the theme of God-forsaken creatures. Our
satirist is an executioner by profession, a moralist in excuse, or at the
tail of it; though he thinks the position reversed, when he moralizes
angrily to have his angry use of the scourge condoned. Nevertheless, he
fills a serviceable place; and certainly he is not happy in his business.
Colney suffered as heavily as he struck. If he had been no more than a
mime in the motley of satire, he would have sucked compensation from the
acid of his phrases, for the failure to prick and goad, and work
amendment.

He dramatized to Nataly some of the scene going on at the Wells: Victor's
petition; his fugue in urgency of it; the brief reply of Miss Dorothea
and her muted echo Miss Virginia. He was rather their apologist for
refusing. But, as when, after himself listening to their 'views,' he had
deferentially withdrawn from the ladies of Moorsedge, and had then beheld
their strangely-hatted lieutenants and the regiments of the toneless
respectable on the pantiles and the mounts, the curse upon the satirist
impelled him to generalize. The quiet good ladies were multiplied: they
were 'the thousands of their sisters, petticoated or long-coated or
buck-skinned; comfortable annuitants under clerical shepherding, close
upon outnumbering the labourers they paralyze at home and stultify
abroad.' Colney thumped away. The country's annuitants had for type 'the
figure with the helmet of the Owl-Goddess and the trident of the
Earth-shaker, seated on a wheel, at the back of penny-pieces; in whom you
see neither the beauty of nakedness nor the charm of drapery; not the
helmet's dignity or the trident's power; but she has patently that which
stops the wheel; and poseing for representative of an imperial nation,
she helps to pass a penny.' So he passed his epigram, heedless of the
understanding or attention of his hearer; who temporarily misjudged him
for a man impelled by the vanity of literary point and finish, when
indeed it was hot satiric spite, justified of its aim, which crushed a
class to extract a drop of scathing acid, in the interests of the
country, mankind as well. Nataly wanted a picture painted, colours and
details, that she might get a vision of the scene at Moorsedge. She did
her best to feel an omen and sound it, in his question 'whether the
yearly increasing army of the orderly annuitants and their parasites does
not demonstrate the proud old country as a sheath for pith rather than of
the vital run of sap.'

Perhaps it was patriotic to inquire; and doubtless she was the weakest of
women; she could follow no thought; her heart was beating blindly beside
Victor, hopeing for the refusal painful to her through his
disappointment.

'You think me foolish,' she made answer to one of Colney's shrugs; 'and
it has come to that pitch with me, that I cannot be sensible of a merit
except in being one with him--obeying, is the word. And I have never yet
known him fail. That terrible Lakelands wears a different look to me,
when I think of what he can do; though I would give half my days to
escape it.'

She harped on the chord of feverish extravagance; the more hateful to
Colney because of his perceiving, that she simulated a blind devotedness
to stupefy her natural pride; and he was divided between stamping on her
for an imbecile and dashing at Victor for a maniac. But her situation
rendered her pitiable. 'You will learn tomorrow what Victor has done,' he
said, and thought how the simple words carried the bitterness.

That was uttered within a few minutes of midnight, when the ladies of
Moorsedge themselves, after an exhausting resistance to their dearest
relative, were at the hall-door of the house with Victor, saying the
good-night, to which he responded hurriedly, cordially, dumbly, a baffled
man. They clasped hands. Miss Dorothea said:

'You, Victor, always.' Miss Virginia said: 'You will be sure of welcome.'
He walked out upon the moonless night; and for lack of any rounded object
in the smothering darkness to look at, he could nowhere take moorings to
gather himself together and define the man who had undergone so
portentous a defeat. He was glad of quarters at an hotel, a solitary bed,
absence from his Nataly.

For their parts, the ladies were not less shattered. They had no triumph
in their victory: the weight of it bore them down. They closed, locked,
shot the bolts and fastened the chain of the door. They had to be
reminded by the shaking of their darling dog Tasso's curly silky coat,
that he had not taken his evening's trot to notify malefactors of his
watchfulness and official wrath at sound of footfall or a fancied one.
Without consultation, they unbolted the door, and Tasso went forth, to
'compose his vesper hymn,' as Mr. Posterley once remarked amusingly.

Though not pretending to the Muse's crown so far, the little dog had
qualities to entrance the spinster sex. His mistresses talked of him; of
his readiness to go forth; of the audible first line of his hymn or
sonnet; of his instinct telling him that something was wrong in the
establishment. For most of the servants at Moorsedge were prostrated by a
fashionable epidemic; a slight attack, the doctor said; but Montague, the
butler, had withdrawn for the nursing of his wife; Perrin, the footman,
was confined to his chamber; Manton, the favourite maid, had appeared in
the morning with a face that caused her banishment to bed; and the cook,
Mrs. Bannister, then sighingly agreed to send up cold meat for the
ladies' dinner. Hence their melancholy inhospitality to their cousin
Victor, who had, in spite of his errors, the right to claim his place at
their table, was 'of the blood,' they said. He was recognized as the
living prince of it. His every gesture, every word, recalled the General.
The trying scene with him had withered them, they did not speak of it;
each had to the other the look of a vessel that has come out of a gale.
Would they sleep? They scarcely dared ask it of themselves. They had done
rightly; silence upon that reflection seemed best. It was the silence of
an inward agitation; still they knew the power of good consciences to
summon sleep.

Tasso was usually timed for five minutes. They were astonished to
discover by the clock, that they had given him ten. He was very quiet: if
so, and for whatever he did, he had his reason, they said: he was a dog
endowed with reason: endowed--and how they wished that Mr. Stuart Rem
would admit it!--with, their love of the little dog believed (and Mr.
Posterley acquiesced), a soul. Do but think it of dear animals, and any
form of cruelty to them becomes an impossibility, Mr. Stuart Rem! But he
would not be convinced: ungenerously indeed he named Mr. Posterley a
courtier. The ladies could have retorted, that Mr. Posterley had not a
brother who was the celebrated surgeon Sir Nicholas Rem.

Usually Tasso came running in when the hall-door was opened to him. Not a
sound of him could be heard. The ladies blew his familiar whistle. He
trotted back to a third appeal, and was, unfortunately for them, not
caressed; he received reproaches from two forefingers directed straight
at his reason. He saw it and felt it. The hug of him was deferred to the
tender good-night to him in his basket at the foot of the ladies' beds.

On entering their spacious bed-chamber, they were so fatigued that sleep
appeared to their minds the compensating logical deduction. Miss Dorothea
suppressed a yawn, and inflicted it upon Miss Virginia, who returned it,
with an apology, and immediately had her sister's hand on her shoulder,
for, an attempted control of one of the irresistibles; a specacle
imparting bitter shudders and shots to the sympathetic jawbones of an
observer. Hand at mouth, for not in privacy would they have been guilty
of exposing a grimace, they signified, under an interim smile, their
maidenly submission to the ridiculous force of nature: after which, Miss
Virginia retired to the dressing-room, absorbed in woeful recollection of
the resolute No they had been compelled to reiterate, in response to the
most eloquent and, saving for a single instance, admirable man, their
cousin, the representative of 'the blood,' supplicating them. A recreant
thankfulness coiled within her bosom at the thought, that Dorothea, true
to her office of speaker, had tasked herself with the cruel utterance and
repetition of the word. Victor's wonderful eyes, his voice, yet more than
his urgent pleas; and also, in the midst of his fiery flood of speech,
his gentleness, his patience, pathos, and a man's tone through it all;
were present to her.

Disrobed, she knocked at the door.

'I have called to you twice,' Dorothea said; and she looked a motive for
the call.

'What is it?' said Virginia, with faltering sweetness, with a terrible
divination.

The movement of a sigh was made. 'Are you aware of anything, dear?'

Virginia was taken with the contrary movement of a sniff. But the fear
informing it prevented it from being venturesome. Doubt of the pure
atmosphere of their bed-chamber, appeared to her as too heretic even for
the positive essay. In affirming, that she was not aware of anything, her
sight fell on Tasso. His eyeballs were those of a little dog that has
been awfully questioned.

'It is more than a suspicion,' said Dorothea; and plainly now, while open
to the seductions of any pleasing infidel testimony, her nose in
repugnance convicted him absolutely.

Virginia's nose was lowered a few inches; it inhaled and stopped midway.
'You must be mistaken, dear. He never . . . '

'But are you insensible to the . . .' Dorothea's eyelids fainted.

Virginia dismissed the forlornest of efforts at incredulity. A whiff of
Tasso had smitten her. 'Ah!' she exclaimed and fell away. 'Is it Tasso!
How was it you noticed nothing before undressing, dear?'

'Thinking of what we have gone through to-night! I forgot him. At last
the very strange . . . The like of it I have not ever! . . . And upon
that thick coat! And, dear, it is late. We are in the morning hours.'

'But, my dear-Oh, dear, what is to be done with him?'

That was the crucial point for discussion. They had no servant to give
them aid; Manton, they could not dream of disturbing. And Tasso's
character was in the estimate; he hated washing; it balefully depraved
his temper; and not only, creature of habit that he was, would he decline
to lie down anywhere save in their bedroom, he would lament, plead,
insist unremittingly, if excluded; terrifying every poor invalid of the
house. Then again, were they at this late hour to dress themselves, and
take him downstairs, and light a fire in the kitchen, and boil sufficient
water to give him a bath and scrubbing? Cold water would be death to him.
Besides, he would ring out his alarum for the house to hear, pour out all
his poetry, poor dear, as Mr. Posterley called it, at a touch of cold
water. The catastrophe was one to weep over, the dilemma a trial of the
strongest intelligences.

In addition to reviews of their solitary alternative-the having of a
befouled degraded little dog in their chamber through the night, they
were subjected to a conflict of emotions when eyeing him: and there came
to them the painful, perhaps irreverent, perhaps uncharitable,
thought:--that the sinner who has rolled in the abominable, must cleanse
him and do things to polish him and perfume before again embraced even by
the mind: if indeed we can ever have our old sentiment for him again! Mr.
Stuart Rem might decide it for them. Nay, before even the heart embraces
him, he must completely purify himself. That is to say, the ordinary
human sinner--save when a relative. Contemplating Tasso, the hearts of
the ladies gushed out in pity of an innocent little dog, knowing not
evil, dependent on his friends for help to be purified;--necessarily kept
at a distance: the very look of him prescribed extreme separation, as far
as practicable. But they had proof of a love almost greater than it was
previous to the offence, in the tender precautions they took to elude
repulsion.

He was rolling on the rug, communicating contagion. Flasks of
treble-distilled lavender water, and their favourite, traditional in the
family, eau d'Arquebusade, were on the toilet-table. They sprinkled his
basket, liberally sprinkled the rug and the little dog. Perfume-pastilles
were in one of the sitting-rooms below; and Virginia would have gone down
softly to fetch a box, but Dorothea restrained her, in pity for the
servants, with the remark: 'It would give us a nightmare of a Roman
Catholic Cathedral!' A bit of the window was lifted by Dorothea,
cautiously, that prowling outsiders might not be attracted. Tasso was
wooed to his basket. He seemed inquisitive; the antidote of his
naughtiness excited him; his tail circled after his muzzle several times;
then he lay. A silken scarf steeped in eau d'Arquebusade was flung across
him.

Their customary devout observances concluded, lights were extinguished,
and the ladies kissed, and entered their beds.

Their beds were not homely to them. Dorothea thought that Virginia was
long in settling herself. Virginia did not like the sound of Dorothea's
double sigh. Both listened anxiously for the doings of Tasso. He rested.

He was uneasy; he was rounding his basket once more; unaware of the
exaggeration of his iniquitous conduct, poor innocent, he shook that
dreadful coat of his! He had displaced the prophylactic cover of the
scarf.

He drove them in a despair to speculate on the contention between the
perfume and the stench in junction, with such a doubt of the victory of
which of the two, as drags us to fear our worst. It steals into our
nostrils, possesses them. As the History of Mankind has informed us, we
were led up to our civilization by the nose. But Philosophy warns us on
that eminence; to beware of trusting exclusively to our conductor, lest
the mind of us at least be plunged back into barbarism. The ladies hated
both the cause and the consequence, they had a revulsion from the object,
of the above contention. But call it not a contention: there is nobility
in that. This was a compromise, a degrading union, with very sickening
results. Whether they came of an excess of the sprinkling, could not well
be guessed. The drenching at least was righteously intended.

Beneath their shut eyelids, they felt more and more the oppression of a
darkness not laden with slumber. They saw it insolidity; themselves as
restless billows, driven dashing to the despondent sigh. Sleep was denied
them.

Tasso slept. He had sinned unknowingly, and that is not a spiritual sin;
the chastisement confers the pardon.

But why was this ineffable blessing denied to them? Was it that they
might have a survey of all the day's deeds and examine them under the
cruel black beams of Insomnia?

Virginia said: 'You are wakeful.'

'Thoughtful,' was the answer.

A century of the midnight rolled on.

Dorothea said: 'He behaved very beautifully.'

'I looked at the General's portrait while he besought us,' Virginia
replied.

'One sees him in Victor, at Victor's age. Try to sleep.'

'I do. I pray that you may.'

Silence courted slumber. Their interchange of speech from the posture of
bodies on their backs, had been low and deliberate, in the tone of the
vaults. Dead silence recalled the strangeness of it. The night was
breathless; their open window a peril bestowing no boon. They were
mutually haunted by sound of the gloomy query at the nostrils of each
when drawing the vital breath. But for that, they thought they might have
slept.

Bed spake to bed:

'The words of Mr. Stuart Rem last Sunday!' 'He said: "Be just." Could one
but see direction!'

'In obscurity, feeling is a guide.'

'The heart.'

'It may sometimes be followed.'

'When it concerns the family.'

'He would have the living, who are seeking peace, be just.'

'Not to assume the seat of justice.'

Again they lay as tombstone effigies, that have committed the passage of
affairs to another procession of the Ages.

There was a gentle sniff, in hopeless confirmation of the experience of
its predecessors. A sister to it ensued.

'Could Victor have spoken so, without assurance in his conscience, that
his entreaty was righteously addressed to us? that we . . .'

'And no others!'

'I think of his language. He loves the child.'

'In heart as in mind, he is eminently gifted; acknowledgeing error.'

'He was very young.'

The huge funereal minutes conducted their sonorous hearse, the hour.

It struck in the bed-room: Three.

No more than three of the clock, it was the voice telling of half the
precious restorative night-hours wasted.

Now, as we close our eyelids when we would go to sleep, so must we, in
expectation of the peace of mind granting us the sweet oblivion,
preliminarily do something which invokes, that we may obtain it.

'Dear,' Dorothea said.

'I know indeed,' said Virginia.

'We may have been!'

'Not designingly.'

'Indeed not. But harsh it may be named, if the one innocent is to be the
sufferer.'

'The child can in no sense be adjudged guilty.'

'It is Victor's child.'

'He adores the child.'

Wheels were in mute motion within them; and presently the remark was
tossed-up:

'In his coming to us, it is possible to see paternal solicitude'

Thence came fruit of reflection:

'To be instrumental as guides to a tender young life!'

Reflection heated with visions:

'Once our dream!'

They had the happier feeling of composure, though Tasso possessed the
room. Not Tasso, but a sublimated offensiveness, issue of the
antagonistically combined, dispersed to be the more penetrating; insomuch
that it seemed to them they could not ever again make use of eau
d'Arquebusade without the vitiating reminder. So true were the words of
Mr. Stuart Rem: 'Half measures to purification are the most delusive of
our artifices.' Fatigue and its reflections helped to be peacefuller.
Their souls were mounting to a serenity above the nauseating degradation,
to which the poor little dog had dragged them.

'Victor gave his promise.'

'At least, concession would not imply contact with the guilty.'

Both sighed as they took up the burden of the vaporous Tasso to drop him;
with the greater satisfaction in the expelling of their breath.

'It might be said, dear, that concession to his entreaty does not in any
way countenance the sin.'

'I can see, dear, how it might be read as a reproof.'

Their exchange of sentences followed meditative pauses; Dorothea leading.

'To one so sensitive as Victor!'

'A month or two of our society for the child!'

'It is not the length of time.'

'The limitation assures against maternal claims.'

'She would not dare.'

'He used the words: "her serious respect" for us. I should not wish to
listen to him often.'

'We listen to a higher.'

'It may really be, that the child is like him.'

'Not resembling Mr. Stuart Rem's Clementina!'

'A week of that child gave us our totally sleepless night.' 'One thinks
more hopefully of a child of Victor's.'

'He would preponderate.'

'He would.'

They sighed; but it was now with the relief of a lightened oppression.

'If, dear, in truth the father's look is in the child, he has the greater
reason to desire for her a taste of our atmosphere.'

'Do not pursue it. Sleep.'

'One prayer!'

'Your mention of our atmosphere, dear, destroys my power to frame one. Do
you, for two. But I would cleanse my heart.'

'There is none purer.'

'Hush.'

Virginia spoke a more fervent word of praise of her sister, and had not
the hushing response to it. She heard the soft regular breathing. Her own
was in downy fellowship with it a moment later.

At the hour of nine, in genial daylight, sitting over the crumbs of his
hotel breakfast, Victor received a little note that bore the handwriting
of Dorothea Duvidney.

   'Dear Victor, we are prepared to receive the child for a month.
   In haste, before your train. Our love. D. and V.'

His face flashed out of cloud.

A more precious document had never been handed to him. It chased back to
midnight the doubt hovering over his belief in himself;--phrased to say,
that he was no longer the Victor Radnor known to the world. And it
extinguished a corpse-like recollection of a baleful dream in the night.
Here shone radiant witness of his being the very man; save for the spot
of his recent confusion in distinguishing his identity or in feeling that
he stood whole and solid.--Because of two mature maiden ladies? Yes,
because of two maiden ladies, my good fellow. And friend Colney, you know
the ladies, and what the getting round them for one's purposes really
means.

The sprite of Colney Durance had struck him smartly overnight. Victor's
internal crow was over Colney now. And when you have the optimist and
pessimist acutely opposed in a mixing group, they direct lively
conversations at one another across the gulf of distance, even of time.
For a principle is involved, besides the knowledge of the other's triumph
or dismay. The couple are scales of a balance; and not before last night
had Victor ever consented to think of Colney ascending while he dropped
low to graze the pebbles.

He left his hotel for the station, singing the great aria of the fourth
Act of the Favorita: neglected since that mighty German with his Rienzi,
and Tannhauser, and Tristan and Isolda, had mastered him, to the
displacement of his boyhood's beloved sugary -inis and -antes and
-zettis; had clearly mastered, not beguiled, him; had wafted him up to a
new realm, invigorating if severer. But now his youth would have its
voice. He travelled up to town with Sir Abraham Quatley and talked, and
took and gave hints upon City and Commercial affairs, while the honeyed
Italian of the conventional, gloriously animal, stress and flutter had a
revel in his veins, now and then mutedly ebullient at the mouth: honeyed,
golden, rich in visions;--having surely much more of Nature's
encouragement to her children?




CHAPTER XXIV

NESTA'S ENGAGEMENT

A word in his ear from Fenellan, touching that man Blathenoy, set the
wheels of Victor's brain at work upon his defences, for a minute, on the
walk Westward. Who knew?--who did not know! He had a torpid consciousness
that he cringed to the world, with an entreaty to the great monster to
hold off in ignorance; and the next instant, he had caught its miserable
spies by the lurcher neck and was towering. He dwelt on his contempt of
them, to curtain the power they could stir.

'The little woman, you say, took to Dartrey?'

Fenellan, with the usual apologetic moderation of a second statement,
thought 'there was the look of it.'

'Well, we must watch over her. Dartrey!--but Dartrey's an honest fellow
with women. But men are men. Very few men spare a woman when the mad fit
is on her. A little woman-pretty little woman!--wife to Jacob Blathenoy!
She mustn't at her age have any close choosing--under her hand. And
Dartrey's just the figure to strike a spark in a tinder-box head.'

'With a husband who'd reduce Minerva's to tinder, after a month of him!'

'He spent his honeymoon at his place at Wrensham; told me so.' Blathenoy
had therefore then heard of the building of Lakelands by the Victor
Radnor of the City; and had then, we guess--in the usual honeymoon
boasting of a windbag with his bride--wheezed the foul gossip, to hide
his emptiness and do duty for amusement of the pretty little caged bird.
Probably so. But Victor knew that Blathenoy needed him and feared him.
Probably the wife had been enjoined to keep silence; for the
Blachingtons, Fannings and others were, it could be sworn, blank and
unscratched folio sheets on the subject:--as yet; unless Mrs. Burman had
dropped venom.

'One pities the little woman, eh, Fenellan?'

'Dartrey won't be back for a week or so; and they're off to Switzerland,
after the dinner they give. I heard from him this morning; one of the
Clanconans is ill.

'Lucky. But wherever Blathenoy takes her, he must be the same "arid
bore," as old Colney says.'

'A domestic simoom,' said Fenellan, booming it: and Victor had a shudder.

'Awful thing, marriage, to some women! We chain them to that domestic
round; most of them haven't the means of independence or a chance of
winning it; and all that's open to them, if they've made a bad cast for a
mate--and good Lord! how are they to know before it's too late!--they
haven't a choice except to play tricks or jump to the deuce or sit and
"drape in blight," as Colney has it; though his notion of the optional
marriages, broken or renewed every seven years!--if he means it. You
never know, with him. It sounds like another squirt of savage irony. It's
donkey nonsense, eh?'

'The very hee-haw of nonsense,' Fenellan acquiesced.

'Come, come; read your Scriptures; donkeys have shown wisdom,' Victor
said, rather leaning to the theme of a fretfulness of women in the legal
yoke. 'They're donkeys till we know them for prophets. Who can tell!
Colney may be hailed for one fifty years hence.'

Fenellan was not invited to enter the house, although the loneliness of
his lodgeings was known, and also, that he played whist at his Club.
Victor had grounds for turning to him at the door and squeezing his hand
warmly, by way of dismissal. In ascribing them to a weariness at
Fenellan's perpetual acquiescence, he put the cover on them, and he
stamped it with a repudiation of the charge, that Colney's views upon the
great Marriage Question were the 'very hee-haw of nonsense.' They were
not the hee-haw; in fact, viewing the host of marriages, they were for
discussion; there was no bray about them. He could not feel them to be
absurd while Mrs. Burman's tenure of existence barred the ceremony.
Anything for a phrase! he murmured of Fenellan's talk; calling him, Dear
old boy, to soften the slight.

Nataly had not seen Fenellan or heard from Dartrey; so she continued to
be uninformed of her hero's release; and that was in the order of happy
accidents. She had hardly to look her interrogation for the news; it
radiated. But he stated such matter-of-course briefly. 'The good ladies
are ready to receive our girl.'

Her chagrin resolved to a kind of solace of her draggled pride, in the
idea, that he who tamed everybody to submission, might well have command
of her.

The note, signed D. and V., was shown.

There stood the words. And last night she had been partly of the opinion
of Colney Durance. She sank down among the unreasoning abject;--not this
time with her perfect love of him, but with a resistance and a dubiety
under compression. For she had not quite comprehended why Nesta should
go. This readiness of the Duvidney ladies to receive the girl, stopped
her mental inquiries.

She begged for a week's delay; 'before the parting'; as her dear old
silly mother's pathos whimpered it, of the separation for a month! and he
smiled and hummed pleasantly at any small petition, thinking her in error
to expect Dartrey's return to town before the close of a week; and then
wondering at women, mildly denouncing in his heart the mothers who ran
risk of disturbing their daughters' bosoms with regard to particular
heroes married or not. Dartrey attracted women: he was one of the men who
do it without effort. Victor's provident mind blamed the mother for the
indiscreetness of her wish to have him among them. But Dudley had been
making way bravely of late; he improved; he began to bloom, like a Spring
flower of the garden protected from frosts under glass; and Fredi was the
sheltering and nourishing bestower of the lessons. One could see, his
questions and other little points revealed, that he had a certain lover's
dread of Dartrey Fenellan; a sort of jealousy: Victor understood the
feeling. To love a girl, who has her ideal of a man elsewhere in another;
though she may know she never can wed the man, and has not the hope of
it; is torment to the lover quailing, as we do in this terrible season of
the priceless deliciousness, stripped against all the winds that blow;
skinless at times. One gets up a sympathy for the poor shy dependent
shivering lover. Nevertheless, here was young Dudley waking, visibly
becoming bolder. As in the flute-duets, he gained fire from concert. The
distance between Cronidge and Moorsedge was two miles and a quarter.

Instead of the delay of a whole week, Victor granted four days, which
embraced a musical evening at Mrs. John Cormyn's on the last of the days,
when Nesta was engaged to sing with her mother a duet of her own
composition, the first public fruit of her lessons in counterpoint from
rigid Herr Strauscher, who had said what he had said, in letting it pass:
eulogy, coming from him. So Victor heard, and he doated am the surprise
to come for him, in a boyish anticipation. The girl's little French
ballads under tutelage of Louise de Seilles promised, though they were
imitative. If Strauscher let this pass . . . Victor saw Grand Opera
somewhere to follow; England's claim to be a creative musical nation
vindicated; and the genius of the fair sex as well.

He heard the duet at Mrs. Cormyn's; and he imagined a hearing of his
Fredi's Opera, and her godmother's delight in it; the once famed
Sanfredini's consent to be the diva at a rehearsal, and then her
compelling her hidalgo duque to consent further: an event not
inconceivable. For here was downright genius; the flowering aloe of the
many years in formation; and Colney admitted the song to have a streak of
genius; though he would pettishly and stupidly say, that our modern
newspaper Press is able now to force genius for us twenty or so to the
month, excluding Sundays-our short pauses for the incubation of it. Real
rare genius was in that song, nothing forced; and exquisite melody; one
of those melodies which fling gold chains about us and lead us off, lead
us back into Eden. Victor hummed at bars of it on the drive homeward. His
darlings had to sing it again in the half-lighted drawing-room. The
bubble-happiness of the three was vexed only by tidings heard from Colney
during the evening of a renewed instance of Skepsey's misconduct.
Priscilla Graves had hurried away to him at the close of Mr. John
Cormyn's Concert, in consequence; in grief and in sympathy. Skepsey was
to appear before the magistrate next morning, for having administered
physical chastisement to his wife during one of her fits of drunkenness.
Colney had seen him. His version of the story was given, however, in the
objectionable humorous manner: none could gather from it of what might be
pleaded for Skepsey. His 'lesson to his wife in the art of pugilism,
before granting her Captain's rank among the Defensive Amazons of Old
England,' was the customary patent absurdity. But it was odd, that
Skepsey always preferred his appeal for help to Colney Durance. Nesta
proposed following Priscilla that night. She had hinted her wish, on the
way home; she was urgent, beseeching, when her father lifted praises of
her: she had to start with her father by the train at seven in the
morning, and she could not hear of poor Skepsey for a number of hours.
She begged a day's delay; which would enable her, she said, to join them
in dining at the Blachingtons', and seeing dear Lakelands again. 'I was
invited, you know.' She spoke in childish style, and under her eyes she
beheld her father and mother exchange looks. He had a fear that Nataly
might support the girl's petition. Nataly read him to mean, possible
dangers among the people at Wrensham. She had seemed hesitating. After
meeting Victor's look, her refusal was firm. She tried to make it one of
distress for the use of the hard word to her own dear girl. Nesta spied
beneath.

But what was it? There was a reason for her going! She had a right to
stay, and see and talk with Captain Dartrey, and she was to be deported!

So now she set herself to remember little incidents at Creckholt:
particularly a conversation in a very young girl's hearing, upon Sir
Humphrey and Lady Pottil's behaviour to the speakers, her parents. She
had then, and she now had, an extraordinary feeling, as from a wind
striking upon soft summer weather off regions of ice, that she was in her
parents' way. How? The feeling was irrational; it could give her no
reply, or only the multitudinous which are the question violently
repeated. She slept on it.

She and her father breakfasted by the London birds' first twitter. They
talked of Skepsey. She spoke of her going as exile. 'No,' said he,
'you're sure to meet friends.'

Her cheeks glowed. It came wholly through the suddenness of the
recollection, that the family-seat of one among the friends was near the
Wells.

He was allowed to fancy, as it suited him to fancy, that a vivid secret
pleasure laid the colour on those ingenuous fair cheeks.

'A solitary flute for me, for a month! I shall miss my sober comrade: got
the habit of duetting: and he's gentle, bears with me.'

Tears lined her eyelids. 'Who would not be, dearest dada! But there is
nothing to bear except the honour.'

'You like him? You and I always have the same tastes, Fredi.'

Now there was a reddening of the sun at the mount; all the sky aflame.
How could he know that it was not the heart in the face! She reddened
because she had perused his wishes; had detected a scheme striking off
from them, and knew a man to be the object of it; and because she had at
the same time the sense of a flattery in her quick divination; and she
was responsively emotional, her blood virginal; often it was a tropical
lightning.

It looked like the heart doing rich painter's work on maiden features.
Victor was naturally as deceived as he wished to be.

From his being naturally so, his remarks on Dudley had an air of
embracing him as one of the family. 'His manner to me just hits me.'

'I like to see him with you,' she said.

Her father let his tongue run: 'One of the few young men I feel perfectly
at home with! I do like dealing with a gentleman. I can confide in a
gentleman: honour, heart, whatever I hold dearest.'

There he stopped, not too soon. The girl was mute, fully agreeing,
slightly hardening. She had a painful sense of separation from her dear
Louise. And it was now to be from her mother as well: she felt the pain
when kissing her mother in bed. But this was moderated by the prospect of
a holiday away out of reach of Mr. Barmby's pursuing voice, whom her
mother favoured: and her mother was concealing something from her; so she
could not make the confidante of her mother. Nataly had no forewarnings.
Her simple regrets filled her bosom. All night she had been taking her
chastisement, and in the morning it seemed good to her, that she should
be denuded, for her girl to learn the felicity of having relatives.

For some reason, over which Nataly mused in the succeeding hours, the
girl had not spoken of any visit her mother was to pay to the Duvidney
ladies or they to her. Latterly she had not alluded to her mother's
family. It might mean, that the beloved and dreaded was laying finger on
a dark thing in the dark; reading syllables by touch; keeping silence
over the communications to a mind not yet actively speculative, as it is
a way with young women. 'With young women educated for the market, to be
timorous, consequently secretive, rather snaky,' Colney Durance had said.
Her Nesta was not one of the 'framed and glazed' description, cited by
him, for an example of the triumph of the product; 'exactly harmonious
with the ninny male's ideal of female innocence.' No; but what if the
mother had opened her heart to her girl? It had been of late her wish or
a dream, shaping hourly to a design, now positively to go through that
furnace. Her knowledge of Victor's objection, restrained an impulse that
had not won spring enough to act against his counsel or vivify an
intelligence grown dull in slavery under him, with regard to the one
seeming right course. The adoption of it would have wounded
him--therefore her. She had thought of him first; she had also thought of
herself, and she blamed herself now. She went so far as to think, that
Victor was guilty of the schemer's error of counting human creatures
arithmetically, in the sum, without the estimate of distinctive qualities
and value here and there. His return to a shivering sensitiveness on the
subject of his girl's enlightenment 'just yet,' for which Nataly pitied
and loved him, sharing it, with humiliation for doing so, became finally
her excuse. We must have some excuse, if we would keep to life.

Skepsey's case appeared in the evening papers. He confessed, 'frankly,'
he said, to the magistrate, that, 'acting under temporary exasperation,
he had lost for a moment a man's proper self-command.' He was as frank in
stating, that he 'occupied the prisoner's place before his Worship a
second time, and was a second time indebted to the gentleman, Mr. Colney
Durance, who so kindly stood by him.' There was hilarity in the Court at
his quaint sententious envelopment of the idiom of the streets, which he
delivered with solemnity: 'He could only plead, not in absolute
justification--an appeal to human sentiments--the feelings of a man of
the humbler orders, returning home in the evening, and his thoughts upon
things not without their importance, to find repeatedly the guardian of
his household beastly drunk, and destructive.' Colney made the case quite
intelligible to the magistrate; who gravely robed a strain of the
idiomatic in the officially awful, to keep in tune with his delinquent.
No serious harm had been done to the woman. Skepsey was admonished and
released. His wife expressed her willingness to forgive him, now he had
got his lesson; and she hoped he would understand, that there was no need
for a woman to learn pugilism. Skepsey would have explained; but the case
was over, he was hustled out.

However, a keen young reporter present smelt fun for copy; he followed
the couple; and in a particular evening Journal, laughable matter was
printed concerning Skepsey's view of the pugilism to be imparted to women
for their physical-protection in extremity, and the distinction of it
from the blow conveying the moral lesson to them; his wife having
objected to the former, because it annoyed her and he pestered her; and
she was never, she said, ready to stand up to him for practice, as he
called it, except when she had taken more than he thought wholesome for
her: he had no sense. There was a squabble between them, because he chose
to scour away to his master's office instead of conducting her home with
the honours. Nesta read the young reporter's version, with shrieks. She
led the ladies of Moorsedge to discover amusement in it.

At first, as her letter to her mother described them, they were like a
pair of pieces of costly China, with the settled smile, and cold. She saw
but the outside of them, and she continued reporting the variations,
which steadily determined the warmth. On the night of the third day, they
kissed her tenderly; they were human figures.

No one could be aware of the trial undergone by the good ladies in
receiving her: Victor's child; but, as their phrase would have run, had
they dared to give it utterance to one another, a child of sin. How
foreign to them, in that character, how strange, when she was looked on
as an inhabitant of their house, they hardly dared to estimate; until the
timorous estimation, from gradually swelling, suddenly sank; nature
invaded them; they could discard the alienating sense of the taint; and
not only did they no longer fear the moment when Mr. Stuart Rem or Mr.
Posterley might call for evening tea, but they consulted upon inviting
the married one of those gentlemen, to 'divert dear Nesta.' Every night
she slept well. In all she did, she proved she was 'of the blood.' She
had Victor's animated eyes; she might have, they dreaded to think, his
eloquence. They put it down to his eloquence entirely, that their
resistance to his petition had been overcome, for similarly with the
treatment of the private acts of royal personages by lacquey History,
there is, in the minds of the ultra-civilized, an insistance, that any
event having a consequence in matters personal to them, be at all hazards
recorded with the utmost nicety in decency. By such means, they preserve
the ceremonial self-respect, which is a necessity of their existence; and
so they maintain the regal elevation over the awe-struck subjects of
their interiors; who might otherwise revolt, pull down, scatter,
dishonour, expose for a shallow fiction the holiest, the most vital to
them. A democratic evil spirit is abroad, generated among congregations,
often perilously communicating its wanton laughter to the desperate
wickedness they know (not solely through the monition of Mr. Stuart Rem)
to lurk within. It has to be excluded: on certain points they must not
think. The night of Tasso was darkly clouded in the minds of the pure
ladies: a rift would have seized their half-slumbering sense of smell, to
revive the night, perhaps disorder the stately march of their
intelligences.

Victor's eloquence, Victor's influence, Victor's child he carried them as
a floodstream, insomuch, that their reception of this young creature of
the blot on her birth, was regarded by them in the unmentioned abstract,
and the child's presence upon earth seen with the indulgence (without the
naughty curiosity) of the loyal moral English for the numerous offspring
of the peccadillos of their monarchs. These things pass muster from being
'Britannically cocooned in the purple,' says our irreverent satirist; and
the maiden ladies' passion of devotion to 'the blood' helped to blind
them; but still more so did the imperious urgency to curtain closely the
night of Tasso, throwing all its consequences upon Victor's masterful
tongue. Whence it ensued (and here is the danger for illogical
individuals as well as vast communities, who continue to batten upon
fiction when the convenience of it has taken the place of pleasure), that
they had need to exalt his eloquence, for a cloak to their conduct; and
doing it, they fell into a habit of yielding to him; they disintegrated
under him; rules, principles, morality, were shaken to some confusion.
And still proceeding thus, they now and then glanced back, more
wonderingly than convicted sinners upon their days of early innocence, at
the night when successfully they withstood him. They who had doubted of
the rightness of letting Victor's girl come into collision with two
clerical gentlemen, one of whom was married, permitted him now to bring
the Hon. Dudley Sowerby to their house, and make appointments to meet Mr.
Dudley Sowerby under a roof that sheltered a young lady, evidently the
allurement to the scion of aristocracy; of whose family Mr. Stuart Rem
had spoken in the very kindling hushed tones, proper to the union of a
sacerdotal and an English citizen's veneration.

How would it end? And if some day this excellent Mr. Dudley Sowerby
reproached them! He could not have a sweeter bride, one more truly a lady
in education and manners; but the birth! the child's name! Their trouble
was emitted in a vapour of interjections. Very perplexing was it for the
good ladies of strict principles to reflect, as dimly they did, that the
concrete presence of dear Nesta silenced and overcame objections to her
being upon earth. She seemed, as it were, a draught of redoubtable Nature
inebriating morality. But would others be similarly affected? Victor
might get his release, to do justice to the mother: it would not cover
the child. Prize as they might the quality of the Radnor blood (drawn
from the most ancient of original Britain's princes), there was also the
Cantor blood for consideration; and it was old, noble, proud. Would it be
satisfied in matching itself with great wealth, a radiant health, and the
good looks of a young flower? For the sake of the dear girl, the ladies
hoped that it would; and they enlarged the outline of their wedding
present, while, in their minds, the noble English family which could be
satisfied so, was lowered, partaking of the taint they had personally
ceased to recognize.

Of one thing they were sure, and it enlisted them: the gentleman loved
the girl. Her love of him, had it been prominent to view, would have
stirred a feminine sigh; not more, except a feminine lecture to follow.
She was quite uninflamed, fresh and cool as a spring. His ardour had no
disguise. They measured him by the favourite fiction's heroes of their
youth, and found him to gaze, talk, comport himself, according to the
prescription; correct grammar, finished sentences, all that is expected
of a gentleman enamoured; and ever with the watchful intentness for his
lady's faintest first dawn of an inclining to a wish. Mr. Dudley
Sowerby's eye upon Nesta was really an apprentice. There is in Love's
young season a magnanimity in the male kind. Their superior strength and
knowledge are made subservient to the distaff of the weaker and
shallower: they crown her queen; her look is their mandate. So was it
when Sir Charles and Sir Rupert and the estimable Villiers Davenant
touched maidenly hearts to throb: so is it now, with the Hon. Dudley
Sowerby.

Very haltingly, the ladies were guilty of a suggestion to Victor. 'Oh!
Fredi?' said he; 'admires her, no doubt; and so do I, so we all do; she's
one of the nice girls; but as to Cupid's darts, she belongs to the
cucumber family, and he shoots without fireing. We shall do the mischief
if we put an interdict. Don't you remember the green days when obstacles
were the friction to light that match?' Their pretty nod of assent
displayed the virgin pride of the remembrance: they dreamed of having
once been exceedingly wilful; it refreshed their nipped natures; and
dwelling on it, they forgot to press their suggestion. Incidentally, he
named the sum his Fredi would convey to her husband; with, as was
calculable, the further amount his only child would inherit. A curious
effect was produced on them. Though they were not imaginatively
mercenary, as the creatures tainted with wealth commonly are, they talked
of the sum over and over in the solitude of their chamber. 'Dukes have
married for less.' Such an heiress, they said, might buy up a
Principality. Victor had supplied them with something of an apology to
the gentleman proposing to Nesta in their house.

The chronicle of it is, that Dudley Sowerby did this on the fifteenth day
of September; and that it was not known to the damsel's parents before
the twenty-third; as they were away on an excursion in South
Tyrol:--away, flown, with just a word of the hurried departure to their
envious, exiled girl; though they did not tell her of new constructions
at the London house partly causing them to fly. Subject to their consent,
she wrote, she had given hers. The letter was telegramic on the essential
point. She wrote of Mr. Barmby's having visited Mr. Posterley at the
Wells, and she put it just as flatly. Her principal concern, to judge by
her writing, was, to know what Mr. Durance had done, during her absence,
with the group of emissary-advocates of the various tongues of Europe on
board the steam-Liner conducting them the first stage of their journey to
the Court of Japan.

Mr. Simeon Fenellan had written his opinion, that all these delegates of
the different European nationalities were nothing other than dupes of a
New-York Syndicate of American Humorists, not without an eye on the
mainchance; and he was sure they would be set to debate publicly, before
an audience of high-priced tickets, in the principal North American
Cities, previous to the embarcation for Japan at San Francisco. Mr.
Fenellan eulogized the immense astuteness of Dr. Gannius in taking his
daughter Delphica with him. Dr. Gannius had singled forth poor Dr.
Bouthoin for the object of his attacks; but Nesta was chiefly anxious to
hear of Delphica's proceedings; she was immensely interested in Delphica,
and envied her; and the girl's funny speculations over the play of
Delphica's divers arts upon the Greek, and upon the Russian, and upon the
English curate Mr. Semhians, and upon M. Falarique--set Gallically
pluming and crowing out of an Alsace-Lorraine growl--were clever. Only,
in such a letter, they were amazing.

Nataly received it at Campiglio, when about to start for an excursion
down the Sarca Valley to Arco. Her letter of reply was delayed. One to
Victor from Dudley Sowerby, awaited them, on their return. 'Confirms
Fredi,' he said, showing it, and praising it as commendable, properly
fervid. She made pretence to read, she saw the words.

Her short beat of wings was over. She had joined herself with Victor's
leap for a change, thirsting for the scenery of the white peaks in
heaven, to enjoy through his enjoyment, if her own capacity was dead: and
she had found it revive, up to some recovery of her old songful readiness
for invocations of pleasure. Escape and beauty beckoned ahead; behind
were the chains. These two letters of the one fact plucked her back. The
chained body bore the fluttering spirit: or it was the spirit in bonds,
that dragged the body. Both were abashed before the image of her girl.
Out of the riddle of her strange Nesta, one thing was clear: she did not
love the man: and Nataly tasted gladness in that, from the cup of
poisonous regrets at the thought. Her girl's heart would not be broken.
But if he so strongly loved her, as to hold to this engagement? . . . It
might then be worse. She dropped a plumb-line into the young man,
sounding him by what she knew of him and judged. She had to revert to
Nesta's charm, for the assurance of his anchored attachment.

Her holiday took the burden of her trouble, and amid the beauty of a
disenchanted scene, she resumed the London incubus.

'You told him of her being at the Wells? in the neighbourhood, Victor?'

'Didn't you know, my dear, the family-seat is Cronidge, two miles out
from the Wells?--and particularly pretty country.'

'I had forgotten, if I ever heard. You will not let him be in ignorance?'

'My dear love, you are pale about it. This is a matter between men. I
write, thanking for the honour and so forth; and I appoint an interview;
and I show him my tablets. He must be told, necessarily. Incidents of
this kind come in their turn. If Dudley does not account himself the
luckiest young fellow in the kingdom, he's not worthy of his good
fortune. I wish they were both here now, honeymooning among these peaks,
seeing the crescent over one, as we did last night!'

'Have you an idea, in reading Nesta's letter?'

'Seems indifferent?--mere trick to hide the blushes. And I, too, I'm
interested in Delphica. Delphica and Falarique will be fine stage
business. Of course, Dr. Bouthoin and his curate!--we know what Old
England has to expect from Colney.'

'At any rate, Mr. Durance hurts no one. You will, in your letter, appoint
the day of the interview?'

'Hurts himself! Yes, dearest; appoint for--ten days homeward--eleventh
day from to-day. And you to Fredi: a bit of description--as you can, my
Nataly! Happy to be a dolomite, to be painted by Nataly's pen.'

The sign is evil, when we have a vexatious ringing in the ear of some
small piece of familiar domestic chatter, and subject it to scrutiny,
hang on it, worry and magnify it. What will not creatures under sway of
the sensational life, catch at to emphasize and strengthen distaste,
until distaste shall have a semblance of reason, in the period of the
mind's awakening to revolt! Nataly shrank from the name of dolomite,
detested the name, though the scenes regained their beauty or something
of it beneath her showery vision. Every time Victor spoke of dolomites on
the journey homeward, she had at heart an accusation of her cowardice,
her duplicity, frailty, treachery to the highest of her worship and sole
support of her endurance in the world: not much blaming him: but the
degrading view of herself sank them both. On a shifty soil, down goes the
idol. For him she could plead still, for herself she could not.

The smell of the Channel brine inspirited her sufficiently to cast off
the fit and make it seem, in the main, a bodily depression; owing to
causes, of which she was beginning to have an apprehensive knowledge: and
they were not so fearful to her as the gloom they displaced.




CHAPTER XXV

NATALY IN ACTION

A ticket of herald newspapers told the world of Victor's returning to his
London. Pretty Mrs. Blathenoy was Nataly's first afternoon visitor, and
was graciously received; no sign of inquiry for the cause of the lady's
alacrity to greet her being shown. Colney Durance came in, bringing the
rumour of an Australian cantatrice to kindle Europe; Mr. Peridon, a
seeker of tidings from the city of Bourges; Miss Priscilla Graves,
reporting of Skepsey, in a holiday Sunday tone, that his alcoholic
partner might at any moment release him; Mr. Septimus Barmby, with a
hanged heavy look, suggestive of a wharfside crane swinging the ponderous
thing he had to say. 'I have seen Miss Radnor.'

'She was well?' the mother asked, and the grand basso pitched forth an
affirmative.

'Dear sweet girl she is!' Mrs. Blathenoy exclaimed to Colney.

He bowed. 'Very sweet. And can let fly on you, like a haggis, for a
scratch.'

She laughed, glad of an escape from the conversational formalities
imposed on her by this Mrs. Victor Radnor's mighty manner. 'But what girl
worth anything! . . .

We all can do that, I hope, for a scratch!'

Mr. Barmby's Profession dissented.

Mr. Catkin appeared; ten minutes after his Peridon. He had met Victor
near the Exchange, and had left him humming the non fu sogno of ERNANI.

'Ah, when Victor takes to Verdi, it's a flat City, and wants a burst of
drum and brass,' Colney said; and he hummed a few bars of the march in
Attila, and shrugged. He and Victor had once admired that blatancy.

Mr. Pempton appeared, according to anticipation. He sat himself beside
Priscilla. Entered Mrs. John Cormyn, voluminous; Mrs. Peter Yatt,
effervescent; Nataly's own people were about her and she felt at home.

Mrs. Blathenoy pushed a small thorn into it, by speaking of Captain
Fenellan, and aside, as if sharing him with her. Nataly heard that
Dartrey had been the guest of these Blathenoys. Even Dartrey was but a
man!

Rather lower under her voice, the vain little creature asked: 'You knew
her?'

'Her?'

The cool counter-interrogation was disregarded. 'So sad! In the desert! a
cup of pure water worth more than barrow-loads of gold! Poor woman!'

'Who?'

'His wife.'

'Wife!'

'They were married?'

Nataly could have cried: Snake! Her play at brevity had certainly been
foiled. She nodded gravely. A load of dusky wonders and speculations
pressed at her bosom. She disdained to question the mouth which had
bitten her.

Mrs. Blathenoy, resolving, that despite the jealousy she excited, she
would have her friend in Captain Fenellan, whom she liked--liked, she was
sure, quite as innocently as any other woman of his acquaintance did,
departed and she hugged her innocence defiantly, with the mournful pride
which will sometimes act as a solvent.

A remark or two passed among the company upon her pretty face.

Nataly murmured to Colney: 'Is there anything of Dartrey's wife?'

'Dead,' he answered.

'When?'

'Months back. I had it from Simeon. You didn't hear?'

She shook her head. Her ears buzzed. If he had it from Simeon Fenellan,
Victor must have known it.

Her duties of hostess were conducted with the official smile.

As soon as she stood alone, she dropped on a chair, like one who has
taken a shot in the heart, and that hideous tumult of wild cries at her
ears blankly ceased. Dartrey, Victor, Nesta, were shifting figures of the
might-have-been for whom a wretched erring woman, washed clean of her
guilt by death, in a far land, had gone to her end: vainly gone: and now
another was here, a figure of wood, in man's shape, conjured up by one of
the three, to divide the two others; likely to be fatal to her or to
them: to her, she hoped, if the choice was to be: and beneath the leaden
hope, her heart set to a rapid beating, a fainter, a chill at the core.

She snatched for breath. She shut her eyes, and with open lips, lay
waiting; prepared to thank the kindness about to hurry her hence, out of
the seas of pain, without pain.

Then came sighs. The sad old servant in her bosom was resuming his
labours.

But she had been near it--very near it? A gush of pity for Victor,
overwhelmed her hardness of mind.

Unreflectingly, she tried her feet to support her, and tottered to the
door, touched along to the stairs, and descended them, thinking strangely
upon such a sudden weakness of body, when she would no longer have
thought herself the weak woman. Her aim was to reach the library. She sat
on the stairs midway, pondering over the length of her journey: and now
her head was clearer; for she was travelling to get Railway-guides, and
might have had them from the hands of a footman, and imagined that she
had considered it prudent to hide her investigation of those books:
proofs of an understanding fallen backward to the state of infant and
having to begin our drear ascent again.

A slam of the kitchen stair-door restored her. She betrayed no infirmity
of footing as she walked past Arlington in the hall; and she was alive to
the voice of Skepsey presently on the door-steps. Arlington brought her a
note.

Victor had written: 'My love, I dine with Blathenoy in the City, at the
Walworth. Business. Skepsey for clothes. Eight of us. Formal. A thousand
embraces. Late.'

Skepsey was ushered in. His wife had expired at noon, he said; and he
postured decorously the grief he could not feel, knowing that a lady
would expect it of him. His wife had fallen down stone steps; she died in
hospital. He wished to say, she was no loss to the country; but he was
advised within of the prudence of abstaining from comment and trusting to
his posture, and he squeezed a drop of conventional sensibility out of
it, and felt improved.

Nataly sent a line to Victor: 'Dearest, I go to bed early, am tired. Dine
well. Come to me in the morning.'

She reproached herself for coldness to poor Skepsey, when he had gone.
The prospect of her being alone until the morning had been so absorbing a
relief.

She found a relief also in work at the book of the trains. A walk to the
telegraph-station strengthened her. Especially after despatching a
telegram to Mr. Dudley Sowerby at Cronidge, and one to Nesta at
Moorsedge, did she become stoutly nerved. The former was requested to
meet her at Penhurst station at noon. Nesta was to be at the station for
the Wells at three o'clock.

From the time of the flying of these telegrams, up to the tap of Victor's
knuckle on her bed-room door next morning, she was not more reflectively
conscious than a packet travelling to its destination by pneumatic tube.
Nor was she acutely impressionable to the features and the voice she
loved.

'You know of Skepsey?' she said.

'Ah, poor Skepsey!' Victor frowned and heaved.

'One of us ought to stand beside him at the funeral.'

'Colney or Fenellan?'

'I will ask Mr. Durance.'

'Do, my darling.'

'Victor, you did not tell me of Dartrey's wife.'

'There again! They all get released! Yes, Dartrey! Dartrey has his luck
too.'

She closed her eyes, with the desire to be asleep.

'You should have told me, dear.'

'Well, my love! Well--poor Dartrey! I fancy I hadn't a confirmation of
the news. I remember a horrible fit of envy on hearing the hint: not much
more than a hint: serious illness, was it?--or expected event. Hardly
worth while to trouble my dear soul, till certain. Anything about wives,
forces me to think of myself--my better self!'

'I had to hear of it first from Mrs. Blathenoy.'

'You've heard of duels in dark rooms:--that was the case between
Blathenoy and me last night for an hour.'

She feigned somnolent fatigue over her feverish weariness of heart. He
kissed her on the forehead.

Her spell-bound intention to speak of Dudley Sowerby to him, was broken
by the sounding of the hall-door, thirty minutes later. She had lain in a
trance.

Life surged to her with the thought, that she could decide and take her
step. Many were the years back since she had taken a step; less
independently then than now; unregretted, if fatal. Her brain was heated
for the larger view of things and the swifter summing of them. It could
put the man at a remove from her and say, that she had lived with him and
suffered intensely. It gathered him to her breast rejoicing in their
union: the sharper the scourge, the keener the exultation. But she had
one reproach to deafen and beat down. This did not come on her from the
world: she and the world were too much foot to foot on the antagonist's
line, for her to listen humbly. It came of her quick summary survey of
him, which was unnoticed by the woman's present fiery mind as being new
or strange in any way: simply it was a fact she now read; and it directed
her to reproach herself for an abasement beneath his leadership, a blind
subserviency and surrender of her faculties to his greater powers, such
as no soul of a breathing body should yield to man: not to the highest,
not to the Titan, not to the most Godlike of men. Under cloak, they
demand it. They demand their bane.

And Victor! . . . She had seen into him.

The reproach on her was, that she, in her worship, had been slave, not
helper. Scarcely was she irreproachable in the character of slave. If it
had been utter slave! she phrased the words, for a further reproach. She
remembered having at times murmured, dissented. And it would have been a
desperate proud thought to comfort a slave, that never once had she known
even a secret opposition to the will of her lord.

But she had: she recalled instances. Up they rose; up rose everything her
mind ranged over, subsiding immediately when the service was done. She
had not conceived her beloved to be infallible, surest of guides in all
earthly-matters. Her intellect had sometimes protested.

What, then, had moved her to swamp it?

Her heart answered. And that heart also was arraigned: and the heart's
fleshly habitation acting on it besides: so flagellant of herself was
she: covertly, however, and as the chaste among women can consent to let
our animal face them. Not grossly, still perceptibly to her penetrative
hard eye on herself, she saw the senses of the woman under a charm. She
saw, and swam whirling with a pang of revolt from her personal being and
this mortal kind.

Her rational intelligence righted her speedily. She could say in truth,
by proof, she loved the man: nature's love, heart's love, soul's love.
She had given him her life.

It was a happy cross-current recollection, that the very beginning and
spring of this wild cast of her life, issued from something he said and
did (merest of airy gestures) to signify the blessing of life--how good
and fair it is. A drooping mood in her had been struck; he had a look
like the winged lyric up in blue heavens: he raised the head of the young
flower from its contemplation of grave-mould. That was when he had much
to bear: Mrs. Burman present: and when the stranger in their household
had begun to pity him and have a dread of her feelings. The lucent
splendour of his eyes was memorable, a light above the rolling oceans of
Time.

She had given him her life, little aid. She might have closely
counselled, wound in and out with his ideas. Sensible of capacity, she
confessed to the having been morally subdued, physically as well; swept
onward; and she was arrested now by an accident, like a waif of the
river-floods by the dip of a branch. Time that it should be! But was not
Mr. Durance, inveighing against the favoured system for the education of
women, right when he declared them to be unfitted to speak an opinion on
any matter external to the household or in a crisis of the household? She
had not agreed with him: he presented stinging sentences, which irritated
more than they enlightened. Now it seemed to her, that the model women of
men make pleasant slaves, not true mates: they lack the worldly training
to know themselves or take a grasp of circumstances.

There is an exotic fostering of the senses for women, not the
strengthening breath of vital common air. If good fortune is with them,
all may go well: the stake of their fates is upon the perpetual smooth
flow of good fortune. She had never joined to the cry of the women. Few
among them were having it in the breast as loudly.

Hard on herself, too, she perceived how the social rebel had reduced her
mind to propitiate a simulacrum, reflected from out, of an enthroned
Society within it, by an advocacy of the existing laws and rules and
habits. Eminently servile is the tolerated lawbreaker: none so
conservative. Not until we are driven back upon an unviolated Nature, do
we call to the intellect to think radically: and then we begin to think
of our fellows.

Or when we have set ourselves in motion direct for the doing of the right
thing: have quitted the carriage at the station, and secured the ticket,
and entered the train, counting the passage of time for a simple rapid
hour before we have eased heart in doing justice to ourself and to
another; then likewise the mind is lighted for radiation. That doing of
the right thing, after a term of paralysis, cowardice--any evil name--is
one of the mighty reliefs, equal to happiness, of longer duration.

Nataly had it. But her mind was actually radiating, and the comfort to
her heart evoked the image of Dartrey Fenellan. She saw a possible reason
for her bluntness to the coming scene with Dudley.

At once she said, No! and closed the curtain; knowing what was behind,
counting it nought. She repeated almost honestly her positive negative.
How we are mixed of the many elements! she thought, as an observer; and
self-justifyingly thought on, and with truth, that duty urged her upon
this journey; and proudly thought, that she had not a shock of the
painful great organ in her breast at the prospect at the end, or any
apprehension of its failure to carry her through.

Yet the need of peace or some solace needed to prepare her for her
interview turned her imagination burningly on Dartrey. She would not
allow herself to meditate over hopes and schemes:--Nesta free: Dartrey
free. She vowed to her soul sacredly--and she was one of those in whom
the Divinity lives, that they may do so--not to speak a word for the
influencing of Dudley save the one fact. Consequently, for a personal
indulgence, she mused; she caressed maternally the object of her musing;
of necessity, she excluded Nesta; but in tenderness she gave Dartrey a
fair one to love him.

The scene was waved away. That one so loving him, partly worthy of him,
ready to traverse the world now beside him--who could it be other than
she who knew and prized his worth? Foolish! It is one of the hatefuller
scourges upon women whenever, a little shaken themselves, they muse upon
some man's image, that they cannot put in motion the least bit of drama
without letting feminine self play a part; generally to develop into a
principal part. . . The apology makes it a melancholy part.

Dartrey's temper of the caged lion dominated by his tamer, served as
keynote for any amount of saddest colouring. He controlled the brute: but
he held the contempt of danger, the love of strife, the passion for
adventure; he had crossed the desert of human anguish. He of all men
required a devoted mate, merited her. Of all men living, he was the
hardest to match with a woman--with a woman deserving him.

The train had quitted London. Now for the country, now for free
breathing! She who two days back had come from Alps, delighted in the
look on flat green fields. It was under the hallucination of her saying
in flight adieu to them, and to England; and, that somewhere hidden, to
be found in Asia, Africa, America, was the man whose ideal of life was
higher than enjoyment. His caged brute of a temper offered opportunities
for delicious petting; the sweetest a woman can bestow: it lifts her out
of timidity into an adoration still palpitatingly fearful. Ah, but
familiarity, knowledge, confirmed assurance of his character, lift her to
another stage, above the pleasures. May she not prove to him how really
matched with him she is, to disdain the pleasures, cheerfully accept the
burdens, meet death, if need be; readily face it as the quietly grey
to-morrow: at least, show herself to her hero for a woman--the incredible
being to most men--who treads the terrors as well as the pleasures of
humanity beneath her feet, and may therefore have some pride in her
stature. Ay, but only to feel the pride of standing not so shamefully
below his level beside him.

Woods were flying past the carriage-windows. Her solitary companion was
of the class of the admiring gentlemen. Presently he spoke. She answered.
He spoke again. Her mouth smiled, and her accompanying look of abstract
benevolence arrested the tentative allurement to conversation.

New ideas were set revolving in her. Dartrey and Victor grew to a
likeness; they became hazily one man, and the mingled phantom
complimented her on her preserving a good share of the beauty of her
youth. The face perhaps: the figure rather too well suits the years! she
replied. To reassure her, this Dartrey-Victor drew her close and kissed
her; and she was confused and passed into the breast of Mrs. Burman
expecting an operation at the hands of the surgeons. The train had
stopped. 'Penhurst?' she said.

'Penhurst is the next station,' said the gentleman. Here was a theme for
him! The stately mansion, the noble grounds, and Sidney! He discoursed of
them.

The handsome lady appeared interested. She was interested also by his
description of a neighbouring village, likely one hundred years hence to
be a place of pilgrimage for Americans and for Australians. Age, he said,
improves true beauty; and his eyelids indicated a levelling to perform
the soft intentness. Mechanically, a ball rose in her throat; the remark
was illuminated by a saying of Colney's, with regard to his countrymen at
the play of courtship. No laughter came. The gentleman talked on.

All fancies and internal communications left her. Slowness of motion
brought her to the plain piece of work she had to do, on a colourless
earth, that seemed foggy; but one could see one's way. Resolution is a
form of light, our native light in this dubious world.

Dudley Sowerby opened her carriage-door. They greeted.

'You have seen Nesta?' she said.

'Not for two days. You have not heard? The Miss Duvidneys have gone to
Brighton.'

'They are rather in advance of the Season.'

She thanked him for meeting her. He was grateful for the summons.

Informing the mother of his betrothed, that he had ridden over from
Cronidge, he speculated on the place to select for her luncheon, and he
spoke of his horse being led up and down outside the station. Nataly
inquired for the hour of the next train to London. He called to one of
the porters, obtained and imparted the time; evidently now, as shown by
an unevenness of his lifted brows, expecting news of some little weight.

'Your husband is quite well?' he said, in affection for the name of
husband.

'Mr. Radnor is well; I have to speak to you; I have more than time.'

'You will lunch at the inn?'

'I shall not eat. We will walk.'

They crossed the road and passed under trees.

'My mother was to have called on the Miss Duvidneys. They left hurriedly;
I think it was unanticipated by Nesta. I venture . . . you pardon the
liberty . . . she allows me to entertain hopes. Mr. Radnor, I am hardly
too bold in thinking . . . I trust, in appealing to you . . . at least I
can promise!

'Mr. Sowerby, you have done my daughter the honour to ask her hand in
marriage.'

He said: 'I have,' and had much to say besides, but deferred: a blow was
visible. The father had been more encouraging to him than the mother.

'You have not known of any circumstance that might cause hesitation in
asking?'

'Miss Radnor?'

'My daughter:--you have to think of your family.'

'Indeed, Mrs. Radnor, I was coming to London tomorrow, with the consent
of my family.'

'You address me as Mrs. Radnor. I have not the legal right to the name.'

'Not legal!' said he, with a catch at the word.

He spun round in her sight, though his demeanour was manfully rigid.

'Have I understood, madam . . . ?'

'You would not request me to repeat it. Is that your horse the man is
leading?'

'My horse: it must be my horse.'

'Mount and ride back. Leave me: I shall not eat. Reflect, by yourself.
You are in a position of one who is not allowed to decide by his
feelings. Mr. Radnor you know where to find.'

'But surely, some food? I cannot have misapprehended?'

'I cannot eat. I think you have understood me clearly.'

'You wish me to go?'

'I beg.'

'It pains me, dear madam.'

'It relieves me, if you will. Here is your horse.'

She gave her hand. He touched it and bent. He looked at her. A surge of
impossible questions rolled to his mouth and rolled back, with the
thought of an incredible thing, that her manner, more than her words,
held him from doubting.

'I obey you,' he said.

'You are kind.'

He mounted horse, raised hat, paced on, and again bowing, to one of the
wayside trees, cantered. The man was gone; but not from Nataly's vision
that face of wet chalk under one of the shades of fire.




CHAPTER XXVI

IN WHICH WE SEE A CONVENTIONAL GENTLEMAN ENDEAVOURING TO EXAMINE A
SPECTRE OF HIMSELF

Dudley rode back to Cronidge with his thunderstroke. It filled him, as in
those halls of political clamour, where explanatory speech is not
accepted, because of a drowning tide of hot blood on both sides. He
sought to win attention by submitting a resolution, to the effect, that
he would the next morning enter into the presence of Mr. Victor Radnor,
bearing his family's feelings, for a discussion upon them. But the
brutish tumult, in addition to surcharging, encased him: he could not
rightly conceive the nature of feelings: men were driving shoals; he had
lost hearing and touch of individual men; had become a house of angrily
opposing parties.

He was hurt, he knew; and therefore he supposed himself injured, though
there were contrary outcries, and he admitted that he stood free; he had
not been inextricably deceived.

The girl was caught away to the thinnest of wisps in a dust-whirl.
Reverting to the father and mother, his idea of a positive injury, that
was not without its congratulations, sank him down among his disordered
deeper sentiments; which were a diver's wreck, where an armoured livid
subtermarine, a monstrous puff-ball of man, wandered seriously light in
heaviness; trembling his hundredweights to keep him from dancing like a
bladder-block of elastic lumber; thinking occasionally, amid the mournful
spectacle, of the atmospheric pipe of communication with the world above,
whereby he was deafened yet sustained. One tug at it, and he was up on
the surface, disengaged from the hideous harness, joyfully no more that
burly phantom cleaving green slime, free! and the roaring stopped; the
world looked flat, foreign, a place of crusty promise. His wreck,
animated by the dim strange fish below, appeared fairer; it winked
lurefully when abandoned.

The internal state of a gentleman who detested intangible metaphor as
heartily as the vulgarest of our gobblegobbets hate it, metaphor only can
describe; and for the reason, that he had in him just something more than
is within the compass of the language of the meat-markets. He had--and
had it not the less because he fain would not have had--sufficient stuff
to furnish forth a soul's epic encounter between Nature and Circumstance:
and metaphor, simile, analysis, all the fraternity of old lamps for
lighting our abysmal darkness, have to be rubbed, that we may get a
glimpse of the fray.

Free, and rejoicing; without the wish to be free; at the same time humbly
and sadly acquiescing in the stronger claim of his family to pronounce
the decision: such was the second stage of Dudley's perturbation after
the blow. A letter of Nesta's writing was in his pocket: he knew her
address. He could not reply to her until he had seen her father: and that
interview remained necessarily prospective until he had come to his exact
resolve, not omitting his critical approval of the sentences giving it
shape, stamp, dignity--a noble's crest, as it were.

Nesta wrote briefly. The apostrophe was, 'Dear Mr. Sowerby.' She had
engaged to send her address. Her father had just gone. The Miss Duvidneys
had left the hotel yesterday for the furnished house facing the sea.
According to arrangements, she had a livery-stable hack, and had that
morning trotted out to the downs with a riding-master and company, one of
whom was 'an agreeable lady.'

He noticed approvingly her avoidance of an allusion to the 'Delphica' of
Mr. Durance's incomprehensible serial story, or whatever it was; which,
as he had shown her, annoyed him, for its being neither fact nor fun; and
she had insisted on the fun; and he had painfully tried to see it or
anything of a meaning; and it seemed to him now, that he had been
humiliated by the obedience to her lead: she had offended by her harping
upon Delphica. However, here it was unmentioned. He held the letter out
to seize it in the large, entire.

Her handwriting was good, as good as the writing of the most agreeable
lady on earth. Dudley did not blame her for letting the lady be deceived
in her--if she knew her position. She might be ignorant of it. And to
strangers, to chance acquaintances, even to friends, the position, of the
loathsome name, was not materially important. Marriage altered the view.
He sided with his family.

He sided, edgeing away, against his family. But a vision of the earldom
coming to him, stirred reverential objections, composed of all which his
unstained family could protest in religion, to repudiate an alliance with
a stained house, and the guilty of a condonation of immorality. Who would
have imagined Mr. Radnor a private sinner flaunting for one of the
righteous? And she, the mother, a lady--quite a lady; having really a
sense of duty, sense of honour! That she must be a lady, Dudley was
convinced. He beheld through a porous crape, woven of formal
respectfulness, with threads of personal disgust, the scene, striking him
drearly like a distant great mansion's conflagration across moorland at
midnight, of a lady's breach of bonds and plunge of all for love. How had
it been concealed? In Dudley's upper sphere, everything was exposed:
Scandal walked naked and unashamed-figurante of the polite world. But
still this lady was of the mint and coin, a true lady. Handsome now, she
must have been beautiful. And a comprehensible pride (for so would Dudley
have borne it) keeps the forsaken man silent up to death: . . . grandly
silent; but the loss of such a woman is enough to kill a man! Not in
time, though! Legitimacy evidently, by the mother's confession, cannot
protect where it is wanted. Dudley was optically affected by a round spot
of the world swinging its shadow over Nesta.

He pitied, and strove to be sensible of her. The effort succeeded so
well, that he was presently striving to be insensible. The former state,
was the mounting of a wall; the latter, was a sinking through a chasm.
There would be family consultations, abhorrent; his father's agonized
amazement at the problem presented to a family of scrupulous principles
and pecuniary requirements; his mother's blunt mention of the abominable
name--mediaevally vindicated in champions of certain princely families
indeed, but morally condemned; always under condemnation of the Church: a
blot: and handed down: Posterity, and it might be a titled posterity,
crying out. A man in the situation of Dudley could not think solely of
himself. The nobles of the land are bound in honour to their posterity.
There you have one of the prominent permanent distinctions between them
and the commonalty.

His mother would again propose her chosen bride for him: Edith Averst,
with the dowry of a present one thousand pounds per annum, and prospect
of six or so, excluding Sir John's estate, Carping, in Leicestershire; a
fair estate, likely to fall to Edith; consumption seized her brothers as
they ripened. A fair girl too; only Dudley did not love her; he wanted to
love. He was learning the trick from this other one, who had become
obscured and diminished, tainted, to the thought of her; yet not extinct.
Sight of her was to be dreaded.

Unguiltily tainted, in herself she was innocent. That constituted the
unhappy invitation to him to swallow one half of his feelings, which had
his world's blessing on it, for the beneficial enlargement and
enthronement of the baser unblest half, which he hugged and distrusted.
Can innocence issue of the guilty? He asked it, hopeing it might be
possible: he had been educated in his family to believe, that the laws
governing human institutions are divine--until History has altered them.
They are altered, to present a fresh bulwark against the infidel. His
conservative mind, retiring in good order, occupied the next rearward
post of resistance. Secretly behind it, the man was proud of having a
heart to beat for the cause of the besiegeing enemy, in the present
instance. When this was blabbed to him, and he had owned it, he
attributed his weakness to excess of nature, the liking for a fair
face.--Oh, but more! spirit was in the sweet eyes. She led him--she did
lead him in spiritual things; led him out of common circles of thought,
into refreshing new spheres; he had reminiscences of his having relished
the juices of the not quite obviously comic, through her indications: and
really, in spite of her inferior flimsy girl's education, she could boast
her acquirements; she was quick, startlingly; modest, too, in commerce
with a slower mind that carried more; though she laughed and was a needle
for humour: she taught him at times to put away his contempt of the
romantic; she had actually shown him, that his expressed contempt of it
disguised a dread: as it did, and he was conscious of the foolishness of
it now while pursuing her image, while his intelligence and senses gave
her the form and glory of young morning.

Wariness counselled him to think it might be merely the play of her
youth; and also the disposition of a man in harness of business,
exaggeratingly to prize an imagined finding of the complementary feminine
of himself. Venerating purity as he did, the question, whether the very
sweetest of pure young women, having such an origin, must not at some
time or other show trace of the origin, surged up. If he could only have
been sure of her moral exemption from taint, a generous ardour, in
reserve behind his anxious dubieties, would have precipitated Dudley to
quench disapprobation and brave the world under a buckler of those
monetary advantages, which he had but stoutly to plead with the House of
Cantor, for the speedy overcoming of a reluctance to receive the nameless
girl and prodigious heiress. His family's instruction of him, and his
inherited tastes, rendered the aspect of a Nature stripped of the
clothing of the laws offensive down to devilish: we grant her certain
steps, upon certain conditions accompanied by ceremonies; and when she
violates them, she becomes visibly again the revolutionary wicked old
beast bent on levelling our sacredest edifices. An alliance with any of
her votaries, appeared to Dudley as an act of treason to his house, his
class, and his tenets. And nevertheless he was haunted by a cry of
criminal happiness for and at the commission of the act.

He would not decide to be 'precipitate,' and the days ran their course,
until Lady Grace Halley arrived at Cronidge, a widow. Lady Cantor spoke
to her of Dudley's unfathomable gloom. Lady Grace took him aside.

She said, without preface: 'You've heard, have you!'

'You were aware of it?' said he, and his tone was irritable with a
rebuke.

'Coming through town, for the first time yesterday. I had it--of all
men!--from a Sir Abraham Quatley, to whom I was recommended to go, about
my husband's shares in a South American Railway; and we talked, and it
came out. He knows; he says, it is not generally known; and he likes,
respects Mr. Victor Radnor; we are to keep the secret. Hum? He had heard
of your pretensions; and our relationship, etc.: "esteemed" it--you know
the City dialect--his duty to mention, etc. That was after I had spied on
his forehead the something I wormed out of his mouth. What are you going
to do?'

'What can I do!'

'Are you fond of the girl?'

An attachment was indicated, as belonging to the case. She was not a
woman to whom the breathing of pastoral passion would be suitable; yet he
saw that she despised him for a lover; and still she professed to
understand his dilemma. Perplexity at the injustice of fate and persons
universally, put a wrinkled mask on his features and the expression of
his feelings. They were torn, and the world was torn; and what he wanted,
was delay, time for him to define his feelings and behold a recomposed
picture of the world. He had already taken six days. He pleaded the shock
to his family.

'You won't have such a chance again,' she said. Shrugs had set in.

They agreed as to the behaviour of the girl's mother. It reflected on the
father, he thought.

'Difficult thing to proclaim, before an engagement!' Her shoulders were
restless.

'When a man's feelings get entangled!'

'Oh! a man's feelings! I'm your British Jury for, a woman's.'

'He has married her?'

She declared to not knowing particulars. She could fib smoothly.

The next day she was on the line to London, armed with the proposal of an
appointment for the Hon. Dudley to meet 'the girl's father.'




CHAPTER XXVII

CONTAINS WHAT IS A SMALL THING OR A GREAT, AS THE SOUL OF THE CHIEF ACTOR
MAY DECIDE

Skepsey ushered Lady Grace into his master's private room, and
entertained her during his master's absence. He had buried his wife, he
said: she feared, seeing his posture of the soaping of hands at one
shoulder, that he was about to bewail it; and he did wish to talk of it,
to show his modest companionship with her in loss, and how a consolation
for our sorrows may be obtained: but he won her approval, by taking the
acceptable course between the dues to the subject and those to his
hearer, as a model cab should drive considerate equally of horse and
fare.

A day of holiday at Hampstead, after the lowering of the poor woman's
bones into earth, had been followed by a descent upon London; and at
night he had found himself in the immediate neighbourhood of a public
house, noted for sparring exhibitions and instructions on the first
floor; and he was melancholy, unable quite to disperse 'the ravens'
flocking to us on such days: though, if we ask why we have to go out of
the world, there is a corresponding inquiry, of what good was our coming
into it; and unless we are doing good work for our country, the answer is
not satisfactory--except, that we are as well gone. Thinking which, he
was accosted by a young woman: perfectly respectable, in every way: who
inquired if he had seen a young man enter the door. She described him,
and reviled the temptations of those houses; and ultimately, as she
insisted upon going in to look for the young man and use her persuasions
to withdraw him from 'that snare of Satan,' he had accompanied her, and
he had gone upstairs and brought the young man down. But friends, or the
acquaintances they call friends, were with him, and they were 'in drink,'
and abused the young woman; and she had her hand on the young man's arm,
quoting Scripture. Sad to relate of men bearing the name of
Englishmen--and it was hardly much better if they pleaded
intoxication!--they were not content to tear the young man from her
grasp, they hustled her, pushed her out, dragged her in the street.

'It became me to step to her defence: she was meek,' said Skepsey. 'She
had a great opinion of the efficacy of quotations from Scripture; she did
not recriminate. I was able to release her and the young man she
protected, on condition of my going upstairs to give a display of my
proficiency. I had assured them, that the poor fellows who stood against
me were not a proper match. And of course, they jeered, but they had the
evidence, on the pavement. So I went up with them. I was heavily
oppressed, I wanted relief, I put on the gloves. He was a bigger man;
they laughed at the little one. I told them, it depended upon a knowledge
of first principles, and the power to apply them. I will not boast, my
lady: my junior by ten years, the man went down; he went down a second
time; and the men seemed surprised; I told them, it was nothing but first
principles put into action. I mention the incident, for the extreme
relief it afforded me at the close of a dark day.'

'So you cured your grief!' said Lady Grace; and Skepsey made way for his
master.

Victor's festival-lights were kindled, beholding her; cressets on the
window-sill, lamps inside.

'Am I so welcome?' There was a pull of emotion at her smile. 'What with
your little factotum and you, we are flattered to perdition when we come
here. He has been proposing, by suggestion, like a Court-physician, the
putting on of his boxing-gloves, for the consolation of the
widowed:--meant most kindly! and it's a thousand pities women haven't
their padded gloves.'

'Oh! but our boxing-gloves can do mischief enough. You have something to
say, I see.'

'How do you see?'

'Tusk, tush.'

The silly ring of her voice and the pathless tattle changed; she talked
to suit her laden look. 'You hit it. I come from Dudley. He knows the
facts. I wish to serve you, in every way.'

Victor's head had lifted.

'Who was it?'

'No enemy.'

'Her mother. She did rightly!

'Certainly she did,' said Victor, and he thought that instantaneously of
the thing done. 'Oh, then she spoke to him! She has kept it from me. For
now nearly a week--six days--I've seen her spying for something she
expected, like a face behind a door three inches ajar. She has not been
half alive; she refused explanations;--she was expecting to hear from
him, of him:--the decision, whatever it's to be!'

'I can't aid you there,' said Lady Grace. 'He's one of the unreadables.
He names Tuesday next week.'

'By all means.'

'She?'

'Fredi?--poor Fredi!--ah, my poor girl, yes!--No, she knows nothing. Here
is the truth of it.--she, the legitimate, lives: they say she lives.
Well, then, she lives against all rules physical or medical, lives by
sheer force of will--it's a miracle of the power of a human creature to
. . . . I have it from doctors, friends, attendants, they can't guess what
she holds on, to keep her breath. All the happiness in life!--if only it
could benefit her. But it 's the cause of death to us. Do you see, dear
friend;--you are a friend, proved friend,' he took her hand, and held and
pressed it, in great need of a sanguine response to emphasis; and having
this warm feminine hand, his ideas ran off with it. 'The friend I need!
You have courage. My Nataly, poor dear--she can endure, in her quiet way.
A woman of courage would take her place beside me and compel the world to
do her homage, help;--a bright ready smile does it! She would never be
beaten. Of course, we could have lived under a bushel--stifled next to
death! But I am for light, air-battle, if you like. I want a comrade, not
a--not that I complain. I respect, pity, love--I do love her, honour:
only, we want something else--courage--to face the enemy. Quite right,
that she should speak to Dudley Sowerby. He has to know, must know; all
who deal closely with us must know. But see a moment: I am waiting to see
the impediment dispersed, which puts her at an inequality with the world:
and then I speak to all whom it concerns--not before: for her sake. How
is it now? Dudley will ask . . . you understand. And when I am forced to
confess, that the mother, the mother of the girl he seeks in marriage, is
not yet in that state herself, probably at that very instant the obstacle
has crumbled to dust! I say, probably: I have information--doctors,
friends, attendants--they all declare it cannot last outside a week. But
you are here--true, I could swear! a touch of a hand tells me. A woman's
hand? Well, yes: I read by the touch of a woman's hand:--betrays more
than her looks or her lips!' He sank his voice. 'I don't talk of
condoling: if you are in grief, you know I share it.' He kissed her hand,
and laid it on her lap; eyed it, and met her eyes; took a header into her
eyes, and lost himself. A nip of his conscience moved his tongue to say:
'As for guilt, if it were known . . . a couple of ascetics--absolutely!'
But this was assumed to be unintelligible; and it was merely the apology
to his conscience in communion with the sprite of a petticoated fair one
who was being subjected to tender little liberties, necessarily addressed
in enigmas. He righted immediately, under a perception of the
thoroughbred's contempt for the barriers of wattled sheep; and caught the
word 'guilt,' to hide the Philistine citizen's lapse, by relating
historically, in abridgement, the honest beauty of the passionate loves
of the two whom the world proscribed for honestly loving. There was no
guilt. He harped on the word, to erase the recollection of his first use
of it.

'Fiddle,' said Lady Grace. 'The thing happened. You have now to carry it
through. You require a woman's aid in a social matter. Rely on me, for
what I can do. You will see Dudley on Tuesday? I will write. Be plain
with him; not forgetting the gilding, I need not remark. Your Nesta has
no aversion?'

'Admires, respects, likes; is quite--is willing.'

'Good enough beginning.' She rose, for the atmosphere was heated, rather
heavy. 'And if one proves to be of aid, you'll own that a woman has her
place in the battle.'

The fair black-clad widow's quick and singular interwreathing of the
evanescent pretty pouts and frowns dimpled like the brush of the wind on
a sunny pool in a shady place; and her forehead was close below his chin,
her lips not far. Her apparel was attractively mourning.

Widows in mourning, when they do not lean over extremely to the Stygian
shore, with the complexions of the drugs which expedited the defunct to
the ferry, provoke the manly arm within reach of them to pluck their
pathetic blooming persons clean away from it. What of the widow who
visibly likes the living? Compassion; sympathy, impulse; and gratitude,
impulse again, living warmth; and a spring of the blood to wrestle with
the King of Terrors for the other poor harper's half-night capped
Eurydice; and a thirst, sudden as it is overpowering; and the solicitude,
a reflective solicitude, to put the seal on a thing and call it a fact,
to the astonishment of history; and a kick of our naughty youth in its
coffin; all the insurgencies of Nature, with her colonel of the regiment
absent, and her veering trick to drive two vessels at the cross of a
track into collision, combine for doing that, which is very much more,
and which affects us at times so much less than did the pressure of a
soft wedded hand by our own elsewhere pledged one. On the contrary, we
triumph, we have the rich flavour of the fruit for our pains; we
commission the historian to write in hieroglyphs a round big fact.

The lady passed through the trial submitting, stiffening her shoulders,
and at the close, shutting her eyes. She stood cool in her blush, and
eyed him, like one gravely awakened. Having been embraced and kissed, she
had to consider her taste for the man, and acknowledge a neatness of
impetuosity in the deed; and he was neither apologizing culprit nor
glorying-bandit when it was done, but something of the lyric God
tempering his fervours to a pleased sereneness, not offering a renewal of
them. He glowed transparently. He said: 'You are the woman to take a
front place in the battle!' With this woman beside him, it was a
conquered world.

Comparisons, in the jotting souvenirs of a woman of her class and set,
favoured him; for she disliked enterprising libertines and despised
stumbling youths; and the genial simple glow of his look assured her,
that the vanished fiery moment would not be built on by a dating master.
She owned herself. Or did she? Some understanding of how the other woman
had been won to the leap with him, was drawing in about her. She would
have liked to beg for the story; and she could as little do that as bring
her tongue to reproach. If we come to the den! she said to her thought of
reproach. Our semi-civilization makes it a den, where a scent in his
nostrils will spring the half-tamed animal away to wildness. And she had
come unanticipatingly, without design, except perhaps to get a superior
being to direct and restrain a gambler's hand perhaps for the fee of a
temporary pressure.

'I may be able to help a little--I hope!' she fetched a breath to say,
while her eyelids mildly sermonized; and immediately she talked of her
inheritance of property in stocks and shares.

Victor commented passingly on the soundness of them, and talked of
projects he entertained:--Parliament! 'But I have only to mention it at
home, and my poor girl will set in for shrinking.'

He doated on the diverse aspect of the gallant woman of the world.

'You succeed in everything you do,' said she, and she cordially believed
it; and that belief set the neighbour memory palpitating. Success folded
her waist, was warm upon her lips: she worshipped the figure of Success.

'I can't consent to fail, it's true, when my mind is on a thing,' Victor
rejoined.

He looked his mind on Lady Grace. The shiver of a maid went over her.
These transparent visages, where the thought which is half design is
perceived as a lightning, strike lightning into the physically feebler.
Her hand begged, with the open palm, her head shook thrice; and though
she did not step back, he bowed to the negation, and then she gave him a
grateful shadow of a smile, relieved, with a startled view of how greatly
relieved, by that sympathetic deference in the wake of the capturing
intrepidity.

'I am to name Tuesday for Dudley?' she suggested.

'At any hour he pleases to appoint.'

'A visit signifies . . .'

'Whatever it signifies!'

'I'm thinking of the bit of annoyance.'

'To me? Anything appointed, finds me ready the next minute.'

Her smile was flatteringly bright. 'By the way, keep your City people
close about you: entertain as much as possible; dine them,' she said.

'At home?'

'Better. Sir Rodwell Blachington, Sir Abraham Quatley: and their wives.
There's no drawing back now. And I will meet them.'

She received a compliment. She was on the foot to go.

But she had forgotten the Tiddler mine.

The Tiddler mine was leisurely mounting. Victor stated the figures; he
saluted her hand, and Lady Grace passed out, with her heart on the top of
them, and a buzz about it of the unexpected having occurred She had her
experiences to match new patterns in events; though not very many.
Compared with gambling, the game of love was an idle entertainment.
Compared with other players, this man was gifted.

Victor went in to Mr. Inchling's room, and kept Inchling from speaking,
that he might admire him for he knew not what, or knew not well what. The
good fellow was devoted to his wife. Victor in old days had called the
wife Mrs. Grundy. She gossiped, she was censorious; she knew--could not
but know--the facts; yet never by a shade was she disrespectful. He had a
curious recollection of how his knowledge of Inchling and his wife being
always in concert, entirely--whatever they might think in
private--devoted to him in action, had influenced, if it had not
originally sprung, his resolve to cast off the pestilential cloak of
obscurity shortening his days, and emerge before a world he could
illumine to give him back splendid reflections. Inchling and his wife, it
was: because the two were one: and if one, and subservient to him,
knowing all the story, why, it foreshadowed a conquered world.

They were the one pulse of the married Grundy beating in his hand. So it
had been.

He rattled his views upon Indian business, to hold Inchling silent, and
let his mind dwell almost lovingly on the good faithful spouse, who had
no phosphorescent writing of a recent throbbing event on the four walls
of his room.

Nataly was not so generously encountered in idea.

He felt and regretted this. He greeted her with a doubled
affectionateness. Her pitiable deficiency of courage, excusing a man for
this and that small matter in the thick of the conflict, made demands on
him for gentle treatment.

'You have not seen any one?' she asked.

'City people. And you, my love?'

'Mr. Barmby called. He has gone down to Tunbridge Wells for a week, to
some friend there.' She added, in pain of thought: 'I have seen Dartrey.
He has brought Lord Clanconan to town, for a consultation, and expects he
will have to take him to Brighton.'

'Brighton? What a life for a man like Dartrey, at Brighton!'

Her breast heaved. 'If I cannot see my Nesta there, he will bring her up
to me for a day:

'But, my dear, I will bring her up to you, if it is your wish to see
her.'

'It is becoming imperative that I should.'

'No hurry, no hurry: wait till the end of next week. And I must see
Dartrey, on business, at once!'

She gave the address in a neighbouring square. He had minutes to spare
before dinner, and flew. She was not inquisitive.

Colney Durance had told Dartrey that Victor was killing her. She had
little animation; her smiles were ready, but faint. After her interview
with Dudley, there had been a swoon at home; and her maid, sworn to
secrecy, willingly spared a tender-hearted husband--so good a master.




CHAPTER XXVIII

MRS. MARSETT

Little acts of kindness were not beyond the range of Colney Durance, and
he ran down to Brighton, to give the exiled Nesta some taste of her
friendly London circle. The Duvidney ladies knew that the dreaded
gentleman had a regard for the girl. Their own, which was becoming warmer
than they liked to think, was impressed by his manner of conversing with
her. 'Child though she was,' he paid her the compliment of a sober as
well as a satirical review of the day's political matter and recent
publications; and the ladies were introduced, in a wonderment, to the
damsel Delphica. They listened placidly to a discourse upon her
performances, Japanese to their understandings.

At New York, behold, another adventurous representative and advocate of
the European tongues has joined the party: Signor Jeridomani: a
philologer, of course; a politician in addition; Macchiavelli redivivus,
it seems to fair Delphica. The speech he delivers at the Syndicate
Delmonico Dinner, is justly applauded by the New York Press as a
masterpiece of astuteness. He appears to be the only one of the party who
has an eye for the dark. She fancies she may know a more widely awake in
the abstract. But now, thanks to jubilant Journals and Homeric laughter
over the Continent, the secret is out, in so far as the concurrents are
all unmasked and exposed for the edification of the American public. Dr.
Bouthoin's eyebrows are up, Mr. Semhians disfigures his name by greatly
gaping. Shall they return to their Great Britain indignant? Patriotism,
with the sauce of a luxurious expedition at no cost to the private purse,
restrains them. Moreover, there is no sign of any one of the others
intending to quit the expedition; and Mr. Semhians has done a marvel or
two in the cricket-field: Old England looks up where she can. What is
painfully extraordinary to our couple, they find in the frigid attitude
of the Americans toward their 'common tongue'; together with the rumour
of a design to despatch an American rival emissary to Japan.

Nesta listened, inquired, commented, laughed; the ladies could not have a
doubt that she was interested and understood. She would have sketches of
scenes between Delphica and M. Falarique, with whom the young Germania
was cleverly ingenuous indeed--a seminary Celimene; and between Delphica
and M. Mytharete, with whom she was archaeological, ravishingly amoebaean
of Homer. Dr. Gannius holds a trump card in his artless daughter,
conjecturally, for the establishment of the language of the gutturals in
the far East. He has now a suspicion, that the inventive M. Falarique,
melted down to sobriety by misfortune, may some day startle their camp by
the cast of more than a crow into it, and he is bent on establishing
alliances; frightens the supple Signor Jeridomani to lingual fixity;
eulogizes Football, with Dr. Bouthoin; and retracts, or modifies, his
dictum upon the English, that, 'masculine brawn they have in their
bodies, but muscle they have not in their feminine minds'; to exalt them,
for a signally clean, if a dense, people: 'Amousia, not Alousia, is their
enemy:'--How, when we have the noblest crop of poets? 'You have never
heartily embraced those aliens among you until you learnt from us, that
you might brag of them.'--Have they not endowed us with the richest of
languages? 'The words of which are used by you, as old slippers, for
puns.' Mr. Semhians has been superciliously and ineffectively punning in
foreign presences: he and his chief are inwardly shocked by a new
perception; What if, now that we have the populace for paymaster,
subservience to the literary tastes of the populace should reduce the
nation to its lowest mental level, and render us not only unable to
compete with the foreigner, but unintelligible to him, although so
proudly paid at home! Is it not thus that nations are seen of the Highest
to be devouring themselves?

'For,' says Dr. Gannius, as if divining them, 'this excessive and
applauded productiveness, both of your juvenile and your senile, in your
modern literature, is it ever a crop? Is it even the restorative
perishable stuff of the markets? Is it not rather your street-pavement's
patter of raindrops, incessantly in motion, and as fruitful?' Mr.
Semhians appeals to Delphica. 'Genius you have,' says she, stiffening his
neck-band, 'genius in superabundance':--he throttles to the complexion of
the peony:--'perhaps criticism is wanting.' Dr. Gannius adds: 'Perhaps it
is the drill-sergeant everywhere wanting for an unrivalled splendid
rabble!'

Colney left the whole body of concurrents on the raised flooring of a
famous New York Hall, clearly entrapped, and incited to debate before an
enormous audience, as to the merits of their respective languages. 'I
hear,' says Dr. Bouthoin to Mr. Semhians (whose gape is daily extending),
'that the tickets cost ten dollars!'

There was not enough of Delphicafor Nests.

Colney asked: 'Have you seen any of our band?'

'No,' she said, with good cheer, and became thoughtful, conscious of a
funny reason for the wish to hear of the fictitious creature disliked by
Dudley. A funny and a naughty reason, was it? Not so very naughty: but it
was funny; for it was a spirit of opposition to Dudley, without an
inferior feeling at all, such as girls should have.

Colney brought his viola for a duet; they had a pleasant musical evening,
as in old days at Creckholt; and Nesta, going upstairs with the ladies to
bed, made them share her father's amused view of the lamb of the flock
this bitter gentleman became when he had the melodious instrument tucked
under his chin. He was a guest for the night. Dressing in the early hour,
Nests saw him from her window on the parade, and soon joined him, to hear
him at his bitterest, in the flush of the brine. 'These lengths of
blank-faced terraces fronting sea!' were the satirist's present black
beast. 'So these moneyed English shoulder to the front place; and that is
the appearance they offer to their commercial God!' He gazed along the
miles of 'English countenance,' drearily laughing. Changeful ocean seemed
to laugh at the spectacle. Some Orphic joke inspired his exclamation:
'Capital!'

'Come where the shops are,' said Nesta.

'And how many thousand parsons have you here?'

'Ten, I think,' she answered in his vein, and warmed him; leading him
contemplatively to scrutinize her admirers: the Rev. Septimus; Mr.
Sowerby.

'News of our friend of the whimpering flute?'

'Here? no. I have to understand you!'

Colney cast a weariful look backward on the 'regiments of Anglo-Chinese'
represented to him by the moneyed terraces, and said: 'The face of a
stopped watch!--the only meaning it has is past date.'

He had no liking for Dudley Sowerby. But it might have been an allusion
to the general view of the houses. But again, 'the meaning of it past
date,' stuck in her memory. A certain face close on handsome, had a fatal
susceptibility to caricature.

She spoke of her 'exile': wanted Skepsey to come down to her; moaned over
the loss of her Louise. The puzzle of the reason for the long separation
from her parents, was evident in her mind, and unmentioned.

They turned on to the pier.

Nesta reminded him of certain verses he had written to celebrate her
visit to the place when she was a child:

         '"And then along the pier we sped,
          And there we saw a Whale
          He seemed to have a Normous Head,
          And not a bit of Tail!"'

'Manifestly a foreigner to our shores, where the exactly inverse
condition rules,' Colney said.

         '"And then we scampered on the beach,
          To chase the foaming wave;
          And when we ran beyond its reach
          We all became more brave."'

Colney remarked: 'I was a poet--for once.'

A neat-legged Parisianly-booted lady, having the sea, winds very
enterprising with her dark wavy, locks and jacket and skirts, gave a cry
of pleasure and--a silvery 'You dear!' at sight of Nesta; then at sight
of one of us, moderated her tone to a propriety equalling the most
conventional. 'We ride to-day?'

'I shall be one,' said Nesta.

'It would not be the commonest pleasure to me, if you were absent.'

'Till eleven, then!'

'After my morning letter to Ned.'

She sprinkled silvery sound on that name or on the adieu, blushed,
blinked, frowned, sweetened her lip-lines, bit at the underone, and
passed in a discomposure.

'The lady?' Colney asked.

'She is--I meet her in the troop conducted by the riding-master: Mrs.
Marsett.'

'And who is Ned?'

'It is her husband, to whom she writes every morning. He is a captain in
the army, or was. He is in Norway, fishing.'

'Then the probability is, that the English officer continues his military
studies.'

'Do you not think her handsome, Mr. Durance?'

'Ned may boast of his possession, when he has trimmed it and toned it a
little!

'She is different, if you are alone with her.'

'It is not unusual,' said Colney.

At eleven o'clock he was in London, and Nesta rode beside Mrs. Marsett
amid the troop.

A South-easterly wind blew the waters to shifty goldleaf prints of
brilliance under the sun.

'I took a liberty this morning, I called you "Dear" this morning,' the
lady said. 'It's what I feel, only I have no right to blurt out
everything I feel, and I was ashamed. I am sure I must have appeared
ridiculous. I got quite nervous.'

'You would not be ridiculous to me.'

'I remember I spoke of Ned!

'You have spoken of him before.'

'Oh! I know: to you alone. I should like to pluck out my heart and pitch
it on the waves, to see whether it would sink or swim. That's a funny
idea, isn't it! I tell you everything that comes up. What shall I do when
I lose you! You always make me feel you've a lot of poetry ready-made in
you.'

'We will write. And you will have your husband then.'

'When I had finished my letter to Ned, I dropped my head on it and
behaved like a fool for several minutes. I can't bear the thought of
losing you!'

'But you don't lose me,' said Nesta; 'there is no ground for your
supposing that you will. And your wish not to lose me, binds me to you
more closely.'

'If you knew!' Mrs. Marsett caught at her slippery tongue, and she
carolled: 'If we all knew everything, we should be wiser, and what a
naked lot of people we should be!'

They were crossing the passage of a cavalcade of gentlemen, at the end of
the East Cliff. One among them, large and dominant, with a playful voice
of brass, cried out:

'And how do you do, Mrs. Judith Marsett--ha? Beautiful morning?'

Mrs. Marsett's figure tightened; she rode stonily erect, looked level
ahead. Her woman's red mouth was shut fast on a fighting underlip.

'He did not salute you,' Nesta remarked, to justify her for not having
responded.

The lady breathed a low thunder: 'Coward!'

'He cannot have intended to insult you,' said Nesta.

'That man knows I will not notice him. He is a beast. He will learn that
I carry a horsewhip.'

'Are you not taking a little incident too much to heart?'

The sigh of the heavily laden came from Mrs. Marsett.

'Am I pale? I dare say. I shall go on my knees tonight hating myself that
I was born "one of the frail sex." We are, or we should ride at the
coward and strike him to the ground. Pray, pray do not look distressed!
Now you know my Christian name. That dog of a man barks it out on the
roads. It doesn't matter.'

'He has offended you before?'

'You are near me. They can't hurt me, can't touch me, when I think that I
'm talking with you. How I envy those who call you by your Christian
name!'

'Nesta,' said smiling Nesta. The smile was forced, that she might show
kindness, for the lady was jarring on her.

Mrs. Marsett opened her lips: 'Oh, my God, I shall be crying!--let's
gallop. No, wait, I'll tell you. I wish I could! I will tell you of that
man. That man is Major Worrell. One of the majors who manage to get to
their grade. A retired warrior. He married a handsome woman, above him in
rank, with money; a good woman. She was a good woman, or she would have
had her vengeance, and there was never a word against her. She must have
loved that--Ned calls him, full-blooded ox. He spent her money and he
deceived her.--You innocent! Oh, you dear! I'd give the world to have
your eyes. I've heard tell of "crystal clear," but eyes like yours have
to tell me how deep and clear. Such a world for them to be in! I did
pray, and used your name last night on my knees, that you--I said
Nesta--might never have to go through other women's miseries. Ah me! I
have to tell you he deceived her. You don't quite understand.'

'I do understand,' said Nesta.

'God help you!--I am excited to-day. That man is poison to me. His wife
forgave him three times. On three occasions, that unhappy woman forgave
him. He is great at his oaths, and a big breaker of them. She walked out
one November afternoon and met him riding along with a notorious
creature. You know there are bad women. They passed her, laughing. And
look there, Nesta, see that groyne; that very one.' Mrs. Marsett pointed
her whip hard out. 'The poor lady went down from the height here; she
walked into that rough water look!--steadying herself along it, and she
plunged; she never came out alive. A week after her burial, Major
Worrell--I 've told you enough.'

'We 'll gallop now,' said Nesta.

Mrs. Marsett's talk, her presence hardly less, affected the girl with
those intimations of tumult shown upon smooth waters when the great
elements are conspiring. She felt that there was a cause why she had to
pity, did pity her. It might be, that Captain Marsett wedded one who was
of inferior station,' and his wife had to bear blows from cruel people.
The supposition seemed probable. The girl accepted it; for beyond it, as
the gathering of the gale masked by hills, lay a brewing silence. What?
She did not reflect. Her quick physical sensibility curled to some breath
of heated atmosphere brought about her by this new acquaintance: not
pleasant, if she had thought of pleasure: intensely suggestive of our
life at the consuming tragic core, round which the furnace pants. But she
was unreflecting, feeling only a beyond and hidden.

Besides, she was an exile. Spelling at dark things in the dark, getting
to have the sight which peruses darkness, she touched the door of a
mystery that denied her its key, but showed the lock; and her life was
beginning to know of hours that fretted her to recklessness. Her friend
Louise was absent: she had so few friends--owing to that unsolved reason:
she wanted one, of any kind, if only gentle: and this lady seemed to need
her: and she flattered; Nesta was in the mood for swallowing and
digesting and making sweet blood of flattery.

At one time, she liked Mrs. Marsett best absent: in musing on her,
wishing her well, having said the adieu. For it was wearisome to hear
praises of 'innocence'; and women can do so little to cure that
'wickedness of men,' among the lady's conversational themes; and 'love'
too: it may be a 'plague,' and it may be 'heaven': it is better left
unspoken of. But there were times when Mrs. Marsett's looks and tones
touched compassion to press her hand: an act that had a pledgeing
signification in the girl's bosom: and when, by the simple avoidance of
ejaculatory fervours, Mrs. Marsett's quieted good looks had a shadow of a
tender charm, more pathetic than her outcries were.

These had not always the sanction of polite usage: and her English was
guilty of sudden lapses to the Thameswater English of commerce and
drainage instead of the upper wells. But there are many uneducated ladies
in the land. Many, too, whose tastes in romantic literature betray now
and then by peeps a similarity to Nesta's maid Mary's. Mrs. Marsett liked
love, blood, and adventure. She had, moreover, a favourite noble poet,
and she begged Nesta's pardon for naming him, and she would not name him,
and told her she must not read him until she was a married woman, because
he did mischief to girls. Thereupon she fell into one of her silences,
emerging with a cry of hate of herself for having ever read him. She did
not blame the bard. And, ah, poor bard! he fought his battle: he shall
not be named for the brand on the name. He has lit a sulphur match for
the lover of nature through many a generation; and to be forgiven by sad
frail souls who could accuse him of pipeing devil's agent to them at the
perilous instant--poor girls too!--is chastisement enough. This it is to
be the author of unholy sweets: a Posterity sitting in judgement will
grant, that they were part of his honest battle with the hypocrite
English Philistine, without being dupe of the plea or at all the thirsty
swallower of his sugary brandy. Mrs. Marsett expressed aloud her gladness
of escape in never having met a man like him; followed by her regret that
'Ned' was so utterly unlike; except 'perhaps'--and she hummed; she was
off on the fraternity in wickedness.

Nesta's ears were fatigued. 'My mother writes of you,' she said, to vary
the subject.

Mrs. Marsett looked. She sighed downright: 'I have had my dream of a
friend!--It was that gentleman with you on the pier! Your mother
objects?'

'She has inquired, nothing more.'

'I am not twenty-three: not as old as I should be, for a guide to you. I
know I would never do you harm. That I know. I would walk into that water
first, and take Mrs. Worrell's plunge:--the last bath; a thorough
cleanser for a woman! Only, she was a good woman and didn't want it, as
we--as lots of us do:--to wash off all recollection of having met a man!
Your mother would not like me to call you Nesta! I have never begged you
to call me Judith. Damnable name!' Mrs. Marsett revelled in the heat of
the curse on it, as a relief to torture of the breast, until a sense of
the girl's alarmed hearing sent the word reverberating along her nerves
and shocked her with such an exposure of our Shaggy wild one on a lady's
lips. She murmured: 'Forgive me,' and had the passion to repeat the
epithet in shrieks, and scratch up male speech for a hatefuller; but the
twitch of Nesta's brows made her say: 'Do pardon me. I did something in
Scripture. Judith could again. Since that brute Worrell crossed me riding
with you, I loathe my name; I want to do things. I have offended you.'

'We have been taught differently. I do not use those words. Nothing
else.'

'They frighten you.'

'They make me shut; that is all.'

'Supposing you were some day to discover . . . ta-tata, all the things
there are in the world.' Mrs. Marsett let fly an artificial chirrup. 'You
must have some ideas of me.'

'I think you have had unhappy experiences.'

'Nesta . . . just now and then! the first time we rode out together,
coming back from the downs, I remember, I spoke, without thinking--I was
enraged--of a case in the newspapers; and you had seen it, and you were
not afraid to talk of it. I remember I thought, Well, for a girl, she's
bold! I thought you knew more than a girl ought to know: until--you
did--you set my heart going. You spoke of the poor women like an angel of
compassion. You said, we were all mixed up with their fate--I forget the
words. But no one ever heard in Church anything that touched me so. I
worshipped you. You said, you thought of them often, and longed to find
out what you could do to help. And I thought, if they could hear you, and
only come near you, as I was--ah, my heaven! Unhappy experiences? Yes.
But when men get women on the slope to their perdition, they have no
mercy, none. They deceive, and they lie; they are false in acts and
words; they do as much as murder. They're never hanged for it. They make
the Laws! And then they become fathers of families, and point the finger
at the "wretched creatures." They have a dozen names against women, for
one at themselves.'

'It maddens me at times to think . . . !' said Nesta, burning with the
sting of vile names.

Oh, there are bad women as well as bad men: but men have the power and
the lead, and they take advantage of it; and then they turn round and
execrate us for not having what they have robbed us of!'

'I blame women--if I may dare, at my age,' said Nesta, and her bosom
heaved. 'Women should feel for their sex; they should not allow the
names; they should go among their unhappier sisters. At the worst, they
are sisters! I am sure, that fallen cannot mean--Christ shows it does
not. He changes the tone of Scripture. The women who are made outcasts,
must be hopeless and go to utter ruin. We should, if we pretend to be
better, step between them and that. There cannot be any goodness unless
it is a practiced goodness. Otherwise it is nothing more than paint on
canvas. You speak to me of my innocence. What is it worth, if it is only
a picture and does no work to help to rescue? I fear I think most of the
dreadful names that redden and sicken us.--The Old Testament!--I have a
French friend, a Mademoiselle Louise de Seines--you should hear her: she
is intensely French, and a Roman Catholic, everything which we are not:
but so human, so wise, and so full of the pride of her sex! I love her.
It is love. She will never marry until she meets a man who has the
respect for women, for all women. We both think we cannot separate
ourselves from our sisters. She seems to me to wither men, when she
speaks of their injustice, their snares to mislead and their cruelty when
they have succeeded. She is right, it is the--brute: there is no other
word.'

'And French and good!' Mrs. Marsett ejaculated. 'My Ned reads French
novels, and he says, their women . . . . But your mademoiselle is a real
one. If she says all that, I could kneel to her, French or not. Does she
talk much about men and women?'

'Not often: we lose our tempers. She wants women to have professions; at
present they have not much choice to avoid being penniless. Poverty, and
the sight of luxury! It seems as if we produced the situation, to create
an envious thirst, and cause the misery. Things are improving for them;
but we groan at the slowness of it.'

Mrs. Marsett now declared a belief, that women were nearly quite as bad
as men. 'I don't think I could take up with a profession. Unless to be a
singer. Ah! Do you sing?'

Nesta smiled: 'Yes, I sing.'

'How I should like to hear you! My Ned's a thorough
Englishman--gentleman, you know: he cares only for sport; Shooting,
Fishing, Hunting; and Football, Cricket, Rowing, and matches. He's
immensely proud of England in those things. And such muscle he has!
though he begins to fancy his heart's rather weak. It's digestion, I tell
him. But he takes me to the Opera sometimes--Italian Opera; he can't
stand German. Down at his place in Leicestershire, he tells me, when
there 's company, he has--I'm sure you sing beautifully. When I hear
beautiful singing, even from a woman they tell tales of, upon my word,
it's true, I feel my sins all melting out of me and I'm new-made: I can't
bear Ned to speak. Would you one day, one afternoon, before the end of
next week?--it would do me such real good, you can't guess how much; if I
could persuade you! I know I'm asking something out of rules. For just
half an hour: I judge by your voice in talking. Oh! it would do me
good-good-good to hear you sing. There is a tuned piano--a cottage; I
don't think it sounds badly. You would not see any great harm in calling
on me? once!'

'No,' said Nesta. And it was her nature that projected the word. Her
awakened wits were travelling to her from a distance, and she had an
intimation of their tidings; and she could not have said what they were;
or why, for a moment, she hesitated to promise she would come. Her vision
of the reality of things was without written titles, to put the stamp of
the world on it. She felt this lady to be one encompassed and in the hug
of the elementary forces, which are the terrors to inexperienced pure
young women. But she looked at her, and dared trust those lips, those
eyes. She saw, through whatever might be the vessel, the spirit of the
woman; as the upper nobility of our brood are enabled to do in a crisis
mixed of moral aversion and sisterly sympathy, when nature cries to them,
and the scales of convention, the mud-spots of accident, even
naughtiness, even wickedness, all misfortune's issue, if we but see the
one look upward, fall away. Reason is not excluded from these blind
throbs of a blood that strikes to right the doings of the Fates. Nesta
did not err in her divination of the good and the bad incarnate beside
her, though both good and bad were behind a curtain; the latter sparing
her delicate senses, appealing to chivalry, to the simply feminine claim
on her. Reason, acting in her heart as a tongue of the flames of the
forge where we all are wrought, told her surely that the good
predominated. She had the heart which is at our primal fires when nature
speaks.

She gave the promise to call on Mrs. Marsett and sing to her.

'An afternoon? Oh! what afternoon?' she was asked, and she said: 'This
afternoon, if you like.'

So it was agreed: Mrs. Marsett acted violently the thrill of delight she
felt in the prospect.

The ladies Dorothea and Virginia, consulted, and pronounced the name of
Marsett to be a reputable County name. 'There was a Leicestershire
baronet of the name of Marsett.' They arranged to send their
button-blazing boy at Nesta's heels. Mrs. Marsett resided in a
side-street not very distant from the featureless but washed and orderly
terrace of the glassy stare at sea.




CHAPTER XXIX

SHOWS ONE OF THE SHADOWS OF THE WORLD CROSSING A VIRGIN'S MIND

Nasta and her maid were brought back safely through the dusk by their
constellation of a boy, to whom the provident ladies had entrusted her.
They could not but note how short her syllables were. Her face was only
partly seen. They had returned refreshed from their drive on the populous
and orderly parade---so fair a pattern of their England!--after
discoursing of 'the dear child,' approving her manners, instancing proofs
of her intelligence, nay, her possession of 'character.' They did so,
notwithstanding that these admissions were worse than their growing love
for the girl, to confound established ideas. And now, in thoughtfulness
on her behalf, Dorothea said, 'We have considered, Nesta, that you may be
lonely; and if it is your wish, we will leave our card on your new
acquaintance.' Nesta took her hand and kissed it; she declined, saying,
'No,' without voice.

They had two surprises at the dinner-hour. One was the card of Dartrey
Fenellan, naming an early time next day for his visit; and the other was
the appearance of the Rev. Stuart Rem, a welcome guest. He had come to
meet his Bishop.

He had come also with serious information for the ladies, regarding the
Rev. Abram Posterley. No sooner was this out of his mouth than both
ladies exclaimed:

'Again!' So serious was it, that there had been a consultation at the
Wells; Mr. Posterley's friend, the Rev. Septimus Barmby, and his own
friend, the Rev. Groseman Buttermore, had journeyed from London to sit
upon the case: and, 'One hoped,' Mr. Stuart Rem said, 'poor Posterley
would be restored to the senses he periodically abandoned.' He laid a
hand on Tasso's curls, and withdrew it at a menace of teeth. Tasso would
submit to rough caresses from Mr. Posterley; he would not allow Mr.
Stuart Rem to touch him. Why was that? Perhaps for the reason of Mr.
Posterley's being so emotional as perpetually to fall a victim to some
bright glance and require the rescue of his friends; the slave of woman
had a magnet for animals!

Dorothea and Virginia were drawn to compassionate sentiments, in spite of
the provokeing recurrence of Mr. Posterley's malady. He had not an income
to support a wife. Always was this unfortunate gentleman entangling
himself in a passion for maid or widow of the Wells and it was desperate,
a fever. Mr. Stuart Rem charitably remarked on his taking it so severely
because of his very scrupulous good conduct. They pardoned a little wound
to their delicacy, and asked: 'On this occasion?' Mr. Stuart Rem named a
linendraper's establishment near the pantiles, where a fair young woman
served. 'And her reputation?' That was an article less presentable
through plate-glass, it seemed: Mr. Stuart Rem drew a prolonged breath
into his nose.

'It is most melancholy!' they said in unison. 'Nothing positive,' said
he. 'But the suspicion of a shadow, Mr. Stuart Rem! You will not permit
it?' He stated, that his friend Buttermore might have influence. Dorothea
said: 'When I think of Mr. Posterley's addiction to ceremonial
observances, and to matrimony, I cannot but think of a sentence that fell
from Mr. Durance one day, with reference to that division of our Church:
he called it:--you frown! and I would only quote Mr. Durance to you in
support of your purer form, as we hold it to be--with the candles, the
vestments, Confession, alas! he called it, "Rome and a wife."'

Mr. Stuart Rem nodded an enforced assent: he testily dismissed mention of
Mr. Durance, and resumed on Mr. Posterley.

The good ladies now, with some of their curiosity appeased, considerately
signified to him, that a young maiden was present.

The young maiden had in heart stuff to render such small gossip a hum of
summer midges. She did not imagine the dialogue concerned her in any way.
She noticed Mr. Stuart Rem's attentive scrutiny of her from time to time.
She had no sensitiveness, hardly a mind for things about her. To-morrow
she was to see Captain Dartrey. She dwelt on that prospect, for an escape
from the meshes of a painful hour--the most woeful of the hours she had
yet known-passed with Judith Marsett: which dragged her soul through a
weltering of the deeps, tossed her over and over, still did it with her
ideas. It shocked her nevertheless to perceive how much of the world's
flayed life and harsh anatomy she had apprehended, and so coldly,
previous to Mrs. Marsett's lift of the veil in her story of herself: a
skipping revelation, terrible enough to the girl; whose comparison of the
previously suspected things with the things now revealed imposed the
thought of her having been both a precocious and a callous young woman: a
kind of 'Delphica without the erudition,' her mind phrased it airily over
her chagrin.--And the silence of Dudley proved him to have discovered his
error in choosing such a person--he was wise, and she thanked him. She
had an envy of the ignorant-innocents adored by the young man she
cordially thanked for quitting her. She admired the white coat of armour
they wore, whether bestowed on them by their constitution or by prudence.
For while combating mankind now on Judith Marsett's behalf, personally
she ran like a hare from the mere breath of an association with the very
minor sort of similar charges; ardently she desired the esteem of
mankind; she was at moments abject. But had she actually been aware of
the facts now known?

Those wits of the virgin young, quickened to shrewdness by their budding
senses--and however vividly--require enlightenment of the audible and
visible before their sterner feelings can be heated to break them away
from a blushful dread and force the mind to know. As much as the wilfully
or naturally blunted, the intelligently honest have to learn by touch:
only, their understandings cannot meanwhile be so wholly obtuse as our
society's matron, acting to please the tastes of the civilized man--a
creature that is not clean-washed of the Turk in him--barbarously exacts.
The signor aforesaid is puzzled to read the woman, who is after all in
his language; but when it comes to reading the maiden, she appears as a
phosphorescent hieroglyph to some speculative Egyptologer; and he insists
upon distinct lines and characters; no variations, if he is to have sense
of surety. Many a young girl is misread by the amount she seems to know
of our construction, history, and dealings, when it is not more than her
sincere ripeness of nature, that has gathered the facts of life profuse
about her, and prompts her through one or other of the instincts, often
vanity, to show them to be not entirely strange to her; or haply her
filly nature is having a fling at the social harness of hypocrisy. If you
(it is usually through the length of ears of your Novelist that the
privilege is yours) have overheard queer communications passing between
girls, and you must act the traitor eavesdropper or Achilles masquerader
to overhear so clearly, these, be assured, are not specially the signs of
their corruptness. Even the exceptionally cynical are chiefly to be
accused of bad manners. Your Moralist is a myopic preacher, when he
stamps infamy, on them, or on our later generation, for the kick they
have at grandmother decorum, because you do not or cannot conceal from
them the grinning skeleton behind it.

Nesta once had dreams of her being loved: and she was to love in return
for a love that excused her for loving double, treble; as not her lover
could love, she thought with grateful pride in the treasure she was to
pour out at his feet; as only one or two (and they were women) in the
world had ever loved. Her notion of the passion was parasitic: man the
tree, woman the bine: but the bine was flame to enwind and to soar,
serpent to defend, immortal flowers to crown. The choice her parents had
made for her in Dudley, behind the mystery she had scent of, nipped her
dream, and prepared her to meet, as it were, the fireside of a November
day instead of springing up and into the dawn's blue of full summer with
swallows on wing. Her station in exile at the Wells of the weariful rich,
under the weight of the sullen secret, unenlivened by Dudley's courtship,
subdued her to the world's decrees; phrased thus: 'I am not to be a
heroine.' The one golden edge to the view was, that she would greatly
please her father.

Her dream of a love was put away like a botanist's pressed weed. But
after hearing Judith Marsett's wild sobs, it had no place in her
cherishing. For, above all, the unhappy woman protested love to have been
the cause of her misery. She moaned of 'her Ned'; of his goodness, his
deceitfulness, her trustfulness; his pride and the vileness of his
friends; her longsuffering and her break down of patience. It was done
for the proof of her unworthiness of Nesta's friendship: that she might
be renounced, and embraced. She told the pathetic half of her story, to
suit the gentle ear, whose critical keenness was lost in compassion. How
deep the compassion, mixed with the girl's native respect for the
evil-fortuned, may be judged by her inaccessibility to a vulgar tang that
she was aware of in the deluge of the torrent, where Innocence and Ned
and Love and a proud Family and that beast Worrell rolled together in
leaping and shifting involutions.

A darkness of thunder was on the girl. Although she was not one to shrink
beneath it like the small bird of the woods, she had to say within
herself many times, 'I shall see Captain Dartrey to-morrow,' for a
recovery and a nerving. And with her thought of him, her tooth was at her
underlip, she struggled abashed, in hesitation over men's views of her
sex, and how to bring a frank mind to meet him; to be sure of his not at
heart despising; until his character swam defined and bright across her
scope. 'He is good to women.' Fragments of conversation, principally her
father's, had pictured Captain Dartrey to her most manfully tolerant
toward a frivolous wife.

He came early in the morning, instantly after breakfast.

Not two minutes had passed before she was at home with him. His words,
his looks, revived her spirit of romance, gave her the very landscapes,
and new ones. Yes, he was her hero. But his manner made him also an
adored big brother, stamped splendid by the perils of life. He sat
square, as if alert to rise, with an elbow on a knee, and the readiest
turn of head to speakers, the promptest of answers, eyes that were a
brighter accent to the mouth, so vividly did look accompany tone. He
rallied her, chatted and laughed; pleased the ladies by laughing at
Colney Durance, and inspired her with happiness when he spoke of
England:--that 'One has to be in exile awhile, to see the place she
takes.'

'Oh, Captain Dartrey, I do like to hear you say so,' she cried; his voice
was reassuring also in other directions: it rang of true man.

He volunteered, however, a sad admission, that England had certainly lost
something of the great nation's proper conception of Force: the meaning
of it, virtue of it, and need for it. 'She bleats for a lesson, and will
get her lesson.'

But if we have Captain Dartrey, we shall come through! So said the
sparkle of Nesta's eyes.

'She is very like her father,' he said to the ladies.

'We think so,' they remarked.

'There's the mother too,' said he; and Nesta saw that the ladies
shadowed.

They retired. Then she begged him to 'tell her of her own dear mother.'
The news gave comfort, except for the suspicion, that the dear mother was
being worn by her entertaining so largely. 'Papa is to blame,' said
Nesta.

'A momentary strain. Your father has an idea of Parliament; one of the
London Boroughs.'

'And I, Captain Dartrey, when do I go back to them?'

'Your mother comes down to consult with you. And now, do we ride
together?'

'You are free?'

'My uncle, Lord Clan, lets me out.'

'To-day?'

'Why, yes!'

'This morning?'

'In an hour's time.'

'I will be ready.'

Nesta sent a line of excuse to Mrs. Marsett, throwing in a fervent
adjective for balm.

That fair person rode out with the troop under conduct of the hallowing
squire of the stables, and passed by Nesta on horseback beside Dartrey
Fenellan at the steps of a huge hotel; issuing from which, pretty Mrs.
Blathenoy was about to mount. Mrs. Marsett looked ahead and coloured, but
she could not restrain one look at Nesta, that embraced her cavalier.
Nesta waved hand to her, and nodded. Mrs. Marsett withdrew her eyes; her
doing so, silent though it was, resembled the drag back to sea of the
shingle-wave below her, such a screaming of tattle she heard in the
questions discernible through the attitude of the cavalier and of the
lady, who paused to stare, before the leap up in the saddle. 'Who is
she?--what is she?--how did you know her?--where does she come
from?--wears her hat on her brows!--huge gauntlets out of style!--shady!
shady! shady!' And as always during her nervous tumults, the name of
Worrell made diapason of that execrable uproar. Her hat on her brows had
an air of dash, defying a world it could win, as Ned well knew. But she
scanned her gauntlets disapprovingly. This town, we are glad to think,
has a bright repute for glove-shops. And Mrs. Marsett could applaud
herself for sparing Ned's money; she had mended her gloves, if they were
in the fashion.--But how does the money come? Hark at that lady and that
gentleman questioning Miss Radnor of everything, everything in the world
about her! Not a word do they get from Miss Radnor. And it makes them the
more inquisitive. Idle rich people, comfortably fenced round, are so
inquisitive! And Mrs. Marsett, loving Nesta for the notice of her,
maddened by the sting of tongues it was causing, heard the wash of the
beach, without consciousness of analogies, but with a body ready to jump
out of skin, out of life, in desperation at the sound.

She was all impulse; a shifty piece of unmercenary stratagem occasionally
directing it. Arrived at her lodgings, she wrote to Nesta: 'I entreat you
not to notice me, if you pass me on the road again. Let me drop, never
mind how low I go. I was born to be wretched. A line from you, just a
line now and then, only to show me I am not forgotten. I have had a
beautiful dream. I am not bad in reality; I love goodness, I know. I
cling to the thought of you, as my rescue, I declare. Please, let me
hear: if it's not more than "good day" and your initials on a post-card.'

The letter brought Nesta in person to her.




CHAPTER XXX

THE BURDEN UPON NESTA

Could there be confidences on the subject of Mrs. Marsett with Captain
Dartrey?--Nesta timidly questioned her heart: she knocked at an iron door
shut upon a thing alive. The very asking froze her, almost to stopping
her throbs of pity for the woman. With Captain Dartrey, if with any one;
but with no one. Not with her mother even. Toward her mother, she felt
guilty of knowing. Her mother had a horror of that curtain. Nesta had
seen it, and had taken her impressions; she, too, shrank from it; the
more when impelled to draw near it. Louise de Seilles would have been
another self; Louise was away; when to return, the dear friend could not
state. Speaking in her ear, would have been possible; the theme precluded
writing.

It was ponderous combustible new knowledge of life for a girl to hold
unaided. In the presence of the simple silvery ladies Dorothea and
Virginia, she had qualms, as if she were breaking out in spots before
them. The ladies fancied, that Mr. Stuart Rem had hinted to them oddly of
the girl; and that he might have meant, she appeared a little too
cognizant of poor Mr. Abram Posterley's malady--as girls in these
terrible days, only too frequently, too brazenly, are. They discoursed to
her of the degeneracy of the manners, nay, the morals of young
Englishwomen, once patterns! They sketched the young English gentlewoman
of their time; indeed a beauty; with round red cheeks, and rounded open
eyes, and a demure shut mouth, a puppet's divine ignorance; inoffensive
in the highest degree, rightly worshipped. They were earnest, and Nesta
struck at herself. She wished to be as they had been, reserving her
painful independence.

They were good: they were the ideal women of our country; which demands
if it be but the semblance of the sureness of stationary excellence; such
as we have in Sevres and Dresden, polished bright and smooth as
ever by the morning's flick of a duster; perhaps in danger of
accidents--accidents must be kept away; but enviable, admirable, we
think, when we are not thinking of seed sown or help given to the
generations to follow. Nesta both envied and admired; she revered them;
yet her sharp intelligence, larger in the extended boundary of thought
coming of strange crimson-lighted new knowledge, discerned in a dimness
what blest conditions had fixed them on their beautiful barren eminence.
Without challengeing it, she had a rebellious rush of sympathy for our
evil-fortuned of the world; the creatures in the battle, the wounded,
trodden, mud-stained: and it alarmed her lest she should be at heart one
out of the fold.

She had the sympathy, nevertheless, and renewing and increasing with the
pulsations of a compassion that she took for her reflective survey. The
next time she saw Dartrey Fenellan, she was assured of him, as being the
man who might be spoken to; and by a woman: though not by a girl; not
spoken to by her. The throb of the impulse precipitating speech subsided
to a dumb yearning. He noticed her look: he was unaware of the human sun
in the girl's eyes taking an image of him for permanent habitation in her
breast. That face of his, so clearly lined, quick, firm, with the blue
smile on it like the gleam of a sword coming out of sheath, did not mean
hardness, she could have vowed. O that some woman, other than the unhappy
woman herself, would speak the words denied to a girl! He was the man who
would hearken and help. Essential immediate help was to be given besides
the noble benevolence of mind. Novel ideas of manliness and the world's
need for it were printed on her understanding. For what could women do in
aid of a good cause! She fawned: she deemed herself very despicably her
hero's inferior. The thought of him enclosed her. In a prison, the gaoler
is a demi-God-hued bright or black, as it may be; and, by the present
arrangement between the sexes, she, whom the world allowed not to have an
intimation from eye or ear, or from nature's blood-ripeness in commune
with them, of certain matters, which it suffers to be notorious,
necessarily directed her appeal almost in worship to the man, who was the
one man endowed to relieve, and who locked her mouth for shame.

Thus was she, too, being put into her woman's harness of the bit and the
blinkers, and taught to know herself for the weak thing, the gentle
parasite, which the fiction of our civilization expects her, caressingly
and contemptuously, to become in the active, while it is exacted of hero
Comedy of Clowns!--that in the passive she be a rockfortress impregnable,
not to speak of magically encircled. She must also have her feelings; she
must not be an unnatural creature. And she must have a sufficient
intelligence; for her stupidity does not flatter the possessing man. It
is not an organic growth that he desires in his mate, but a happy
composition. You see the world which comes of the pair.

This burning Nesta, Victor's daughter, tempered by Nataly's milder blood,
was a girl in whom the hard shocks of the knowledge of life, perforce of
the hardness upon pure metal, left a strengthening for generous
imagination. She did not sit to brood on her injured senses or set them
through speculation touching heat; they were taken up and consumed by the
fire of her mind. Nor had she leisure for the abhorrences, in a heart all
flowing to give aid, and uplift and restore. Self was as urgent in her as
in most of the young; but the gift of humour, which had previously
diverted it, was now the quick feeling for her sisterhood, through the
one piteous example she knew; and broadening it, through her insurgent
abasement on their behalf, which was her scourged pride of sex. She but
faintly thought of blaming the men whom her soul besought for justice,
for common kindness, to women. There was the danger, that her aroused
young ignorance would charge the whole of the misery about and abroad
upon the stronger of those two: and another danger, that the vision of
the facts below the surface would discolour and disorder her views of
existence. But she loved, she sprang to, the lighted world; and she had
figures of male friends, to which to cling; and they helped in animating
glorious historical figures on the world's library-shelves or under yet
palpitating earth. Promise of a steady balance of her nature, too, was
shown in the absence of any irritable urgency to be doing, when her bosom
bled to help. Beyond the resolve, that she would not abandon the woman
who had made confession to her, she formed no conscious resolutions. Far
ahead down her journey of the years to come, she did see muffled things
she might hope and would strive to do. They were chrysalis shapes. Above
all, she flew her blind quickened heart on the wings of an imaginative
force; and those of the young who can do that, are in their blood
incorruptible by dark knowledge, irradiated under darkness in the mind.
Let but the throb be kept for others. That is the one secret, for
redemption; if not for preservation.

Victor descended on his marine London to embrace his girl, full of
regrets at Fredi's absence from the great whirl 'overhead,' as places of
multitudinous assembly, where he shone, always appeared to him. But it
was not to last long; she would soon be on the surface again! At the
first clasp of her, he chirped some bars of her song. He challenged her
to duet before the good ladies, and she kindled, she was caught up by his
gaiety, wondering at herself; faintly aware of her not being spontaneous.
And she made her father laugh, just in the old way; and looked at herself
in his laughter, with the thought, that she could not have become so
changed; by which the girl was helped to jump to her humour. Victor
turned his full front to Dorothea and Virginia, one sunny beam of delight
and although it was Mr. Stuart Rem who was naughty Nesta's victim, and
although it seemed a trespass on her part to speak in such a manner of a
clerical gentleman, they were seized; they were the opposite partners of
a laughing quadrille, lasting till they were tired out.

Victor had asked his girl, if she sang on a Sunday. The ladies
remembered, that she had put the question for permission to Mr. Stuart
Rem, who was opposed to secular singing.

'And what did he say?' said Victor.

Nesta shook her head: 'It was not what he said, papa; it was his look.
His duty compelled him, though he loves music. He had the look of a
Patriarch putting his handmaiden away into the desert.'

Dorothea and Virginia, in spite of protests within, laughed to streams.
They recollected the look; she had given the portrait of Mr. Stuart Rem
in the act of repudiating secular song.

'Victor conjured up a day when this darling Fredi, a child, stood before
a famous picture in the Brera, at Milan; when he and her mother noticed
the child's very studious graveness; and they had talked of it; he
remarking, that she disapproved of the Patriarch; and Nataly, that she
was taken with Hagar's face.

He seemed surprised at her not having heard from Dudley.

'How is that?' said he.

'Most probably because he has not written, papa.'

He paused after the cool reply. She had no mournful gaze at all; but in
the depths of the clear eyes he knew so well, there was a coil of
something animate, whatever it might be. And twice she drew a heavy
breath.

He mentioned it in London. Nataly telegraphed at night for her girl to
meet her next day at Dartrey's hotel.

Their meeting was incomprehensibly joyless to the hearts of each, though
it was desired, and had long been desired, and mother was mother,
daughter daughter, without diminution of love between them. They held
hands, they kissed and clasped, they showered their tender phrases with
full warm truth, and looked into eyes and surely saw one another. But the
heart of each was in a battle of its own, taking wounds or crying for
supports. Whether to speak to her girl at once, despite the now vehement
contrary counsel of Victor, was Nataly's deliberation, under the thought
of the young creature's perplexity in not seeing her at the house of the
Duvidney ladies: while Nesta conjured in a flash the past impressions of
her mother's shrinking distaste from any such hectic themes as this which
burdened and absorbed her; and she was almost joining to it, through
sympathy with any thought or feeling of one in whom she had such pride;
she had the shudder of revulsion. Further, Nataly put on, rather cravenly
an air, of distress, or she half designingly permitted her trouble to be
seen, by way of affecting her girl's recollection when the confession was
to come, that Nesta might then understand her to have been restrained
from speaking, not evasive of her duty. The look was interpreted by Nesta
as belonging to the social annoyances dating, in her calendar, from
Creckholt, apprehensively dreaded at Lakelands. She hinted asking, and
her mother nodded; not untruthfully; but she put on a briskness after the
nod; and a doubt was driven into Nesta's bosom.

Her dear Skepsey was coming down to her for a holiday, she was glad to
hear. Of Dudley, there was no word. Nataly shunned his name, with a
superstitious dread lest any mention of him should renew pretensions that
she hoped, and now supposed, were quite withdrawn. So she had told poor
Mr. Barmby only yesterday, at his humble request to know. He had seen
Dudley on the pantiles, walking with a young lady, he said. And 'he
feared,' he said; using, a pardonable commonplace of deceit. Her
compassion accounted for the 'fear' which was the wish, and caused her
not to think it particularly strange, that he should imagine Dudley to
have quitted the field. Now that a disengaged Dartrey Fenellan was at
hand, poor Mr. Barmby could have no chance.

Dartrey came to her room by appointment. She wanted to see him alone, and
he informed her, that Mrs. Blathenoy was in the hotel, and would
certainly receive and amuse Nesta for any length of time.

'I will take her up,' said Nataly, and rose, and she sat immediately, and
fluttered a hand at her breast. She laughed: 'Perhaps I'm tired!'

Dartrey took Nesta.

He returned, saying: 'There's a lift in the hotel. Do the stairs affect
you at all?'

She fenced his sharp look. 'Laziness, I fancy; age is coming on. How is
it Mrs. Blathenoy is here?'

'Well! how?' 'Foolish curiosity?' 'I think I have made her of service. I
did not bring the lady here.' 'Of service to whom?' 'Why, to Victor!'
'Has Victor commissioned you?' 'You can bear to hear it. Her husband
knows the story.  He has a grudge . . . commercial reasons. I fancy it
is, that Victor stood against his paper at the table of the Bank.
Blathenoy vowed blow for blow. But I think the little woman holds him in.
She says she does.' 'Victor prompted you?' 'It occurred as it occurred.'
'She does it for love of us?--Oh! I can't trifle. Dartrey!' 'Tell me.'
'First, you haven't let me know what you think of my Nesta.' 'She's a
dear good girl.' 'Not so interesting to you as a flighty little woman!'
'She has a speck of some sort on her mind.' Nataly spied at Dudley's
behaviour, and said: 'That will wear away. Is Mr. Blathenoy much here?'
'As often as he can come, I believe.' 'That is . . . ?' 'I have seen him
twice.' 'His wife remains?' 'Fixed here for the season.' 'My friend!' 'No
harm, no harm!' 'But-to her!' 'You have my word of honour.' 'Yes: and she
is doing you a service, at your request; you occasionally reward her with
thanks; and she sees you are a man of honour. Do you not know women?'

Dartrey blew his pooh-pooh on feminine suspicions. 'There's very little
left of the Don Amoroso in me. Women don't worship stone figures.'

'They do: like the sea-birds. And what do you say to me, Dartrey?--I can
confess it: I am one of them: I love you. When last you left England, I
kissed your hand. It was because of your manly heart in that stone
figure. I kept from crying: you used to scorn us English for the
"whimpering fits" you said we enjoy and must have in books, if we can't
get them up for ourselves. I could have prayed to have you as brother or
son. I love my Victor the better for his love of you. Oh!--poor soul--how
he is perverted since that building of Lakelands! He cannot take
soundings of the things he does. Formerly he confided in me, in all
things: now not one;--I am the chief person to deceive. If only he had
waited! We are in a network of intrigues and schemes, every artifice in
London--tempting one to hate simple worthy people, who naturally have
their views, and see me an impostor, and tolerate me, fascinated by
him:--or bribed--it has to be said. There are ways of bribeing. I trust
he may not have in the end to pay too heavily for succeeding. He seems a
man pushed by Destiny; not irresponsible, but less responsible than most.
He is desperately tempted by his never failing. Whatever he does! . . it
is true! And it sets me thinking of those who have never had an ailment,
up to a certain age, when the killing blow comes. Latterly I have seen
into him: I never did before. Had I been stronger, I might have saved, or
averted . . . . But, you will say, the stronger woman would not have
occupied my place. I must have been blind too. I did not see, that his
nature shrinks from the thing it calls up. He dreads the exposure he
courts--or has to combat with all his powers. It has been a revelation to
me of him life as well. Nothing stops him. Now it is Parliament--a vacant
London Borough. He counts on a death: Ah! terrible! I have it like a
snake's bite night and day.'

Nataly concluded: 'There: it has done me some good to speak. I feel so
base.' She breathed heavily.

Dartrey took her hand and bent his lips to it. 'Happy the woman who has
not more to speak! How long will Nesta stay here?'

'You will watch over her, Dartrey? She stays-her father wishes--up
to--ah! We can hardly be in such extreme peril. He has her doctor, her
lawyer, and her butler--a favourite servant--to check, and influence,
her: She--you know who it is!--does not, I am now convinced, mean
persecution. She was never a mean-minded woman. Oh! I could wish she
were. They say she is going. Then I am to be made an "honest woman of."
Victor wants Nesta, now that she is away, to stay until . . . You
understand. He feels she is safe from any possible kind of harm with
those good ladies. And I feel she is the safer for having you near.
Otherwise, how I should pray to have you with us! Daily I have to pass
through, well, something like the ordeal of the red-hot ploughshares--and
without the innocence, dear friend! But it's best that my girl should not
have to be doing the same; though she would have the innocence. But she
writhes under any shadow of a blot. And for her to learn the things that
are in the world, through her mother's history!--and led to know it by
the falling away of friends, or say, acquaintances! However ignorant at
present, she learns from a mere nothing. I dread! . . . . In a moment,
she is a blaze of light. There have been occurrences. Only Victor could
have overcome them! I had to think it better for my girl, that she was
absent. We are in such a whirl up there! So I work round again to "how
long?" and the picture of myself counting the breaths of a dying woman.
The other day I was told I was envied!'

'Battle, battle, battle; for all of us, in every position!' said Dartrey
sharply, to clip a softness: 'except when one's attending on an invalid
uncle. Then it's peace; rather like extinction. And I can't be crying for
the end either. I bite my moustache and tap foot on the floor, out of his
hearing; make believe I'm patient. Now I 'll fetch Nesta.'

Mrs. Blathenoy came down with an arm on Nesta's shoulder. She held a
telegram, and said to Nataly--

'What can this mean? It's from my husband; he puts "Jacob": my husband's
Christian name:--so like my husband, where there's no concealment!
There--he says:

"Down to-night else pack ready start to-morrow." Can it signify, affairs
are bad with my husband in the city?'

It had that signification to Nataly's understanding. At the same time,
the pretty little woman's absurd lisping repetition of 'my husband' did
not seem without design to inflict the wound it caused.

In reality, it was not malicious; it came of the bewitchment of a silly
tongue by her knowledge of the secret to be controlled: and after
contrasting her fortunes with Nataly's, on her way downstairs, she had
comforted herself by saying, that at least she had a husband. She was not
aware that she dealt a hurt until she had found a small consolation in
the indulgence: for Captain Dartrey Fenellan admired this commanding
figure of a woman, who could not legally say that which the woman he
admired less, if at all, legally could say.

'I must leave you to interpret,' Nataly remarked.

Mrs. Blathenoy resented her unbefitting queenly style. For this reason,
she abstained from an intended leading up to mention of the
'singular-looking lady' seen riding with Miss Radnor more than once; and
as to whom, Miss Radnor (for one gives her the name) had not just now,
when questioned, spoken very clearly. So the mother's alarms were not
raised.

And really it was a pity, Mrs. Blathenoy said to Dartrey subsequently;
finding him colder than before Mrs. Radnor's visit; it was a pity,
because a young woman in Miss Radnor's position should not by any
possibility be seen in association with a person of commonly doubtful
appearance.

She was denied the petulant satisfaction of rousing the championship
bitter to her. Dartrey would not deliver an opinion on Miss Radnor's
conduct. He declined, moreover, to assist in elucidating the telegram by
'looking here,' and poring over the lines beside a bloomy cheek. He was
petulantly whipped on the arm with her glove, and pouted at. And it was
then--and then only or chiefly through Nataly's recent allusion--that the
man of honour had his quakings in view of the quagmire, where he was
planted on an exceedingly narrow causeway, not of the firmest. For she
was a pretty little woman, one of the prize gifts of the present
education of women to the men who are for having them quiescent domestic
patterns; and her artificial ingenuousness or candid frivolities came to
her by nature to kindle the nature of the gentleman on the other bank of
the stream, and witch him to the plunge, so greatly mutually regretted
after taken: an old duet to the moon.

Dartrey escaped to the Club, where he had a friend. The friend was
Colonel Sudley, one of the modern studious officers, not in good esteem
with the authorities. He had not forgiven Dartrey for the intemperateness
which cut off a brilliant soldier from the service. He was reduced to
acknowledge, however, that there was a sparkling defence for him to reply
with, in the shape of a fortune gained and where we have a Society
forcing us to live up to an expensive level, very trying to a soldier's
income, a fortune gained will offer excuses for misconduct short of
disloyal or illegal. They talked of the state of the Army: we are moving.
True, and at the last Review, the 'march past' was performed before a
mounted generalissimo profoundly asleep, head on breast. Our English
military 'moving' may now be likened to Somnolency on Horseback. 'Oh,
come, no rancour,' said the colonel; 'you know he's a kind old boy at
heart; nowhere a more affectionate man alive!'

'So the sycophants are sure of posts!'

'Come, I say! He's devoted to the Service.'

'Invalid him, and he shall have a good epitaph.'

'He's not so responsible as the taxpayer.'

'There you touch home. Mother Goose can't imagine the need for defence
until a hand's at her feathers.'

'What about her shrieks now and then?'

'Indigestion of a surfeit?'

They were in a laughing wrangle when two acquaintances of the colonel's
came near. One of them recognized Dartrey. He changed a prickly subject
to one that is generally as acceptable to the servants of Mars. His
companion said: 'Who is the girl out with Judith Marsett?' He flavoured
eulogies of the girl's good looks in easy garrison English. She was
praised for sitting her horse well. One had met her on the parade, in the
afternoon, walking with Mrs. Marsett. Colonel Sudley had seen them on
horseback. He remarked to Dartrey:

'And by the way, you're a clean stretch ahead of us. I've seen you go by
these windows, with the young lady on one side, and a rather pretty woman
on the other too.'

'Nothing is unseen in this town!' Dartrey rejoined.

Strolling to his quarters along the breezy parade at night, he proposed
to himself, that he would breathe an immediate caution to Nesta. How had
she come to know this Mrs. Marsett? But he was more seriously thinking of
what Colney Durance called 'The Mustard Plaster'; the satirist's phrase
for warm relations with a married fair one: and Dartrey, clear of any
design to have it at his breast, was beginning to take intimations of
pricks and burns. They are an almost positive cure of inflammatory
internal conditions. They were really hard on him, who had none to be
cured.

The hour was nigh midnight. As he entered his hotel, the porter ran off
to the desk in his box, and brought him a note, saying, that a lady had
left it at half-past nine. Left it?--Then the lady could not be the
alarming lady. He was relieved. The words of the letter were cabalistic;
these, beneath underlined address:

'I beg you to call on me, if I do not see you this evening. It is urgent;
you will excuse me when I explain. Not late to-morrow. I am sure you will
not fail to come. I could write what would be certain to bring you. I
dare not trust any names to paper.'

The signature was, Judith Marsett.




CHAPTER XXXI

SHOWS HOW THE SQUIRES IN A CONQUEROR'S SERVICE HAVE AT TIMES TO DO
KNIGHTLY CONQUEST OF THEMSELVES

By the very earliest of the trains shot away to light and briny air from
London's November gloom, which knows the morning through increase of
gasjets, little Skepsey was hurried over suburban chimneys, in his
friendly third-class carriage; where we have reminders of ancient
pastoral times peculiar to our country, as it may chance; but where a man
may speak to his neighbour right off without being deemed offensive. That
is homely. A social fellow knitting closely to his fellows when he meets
them, enjoys it, even at the cost of uncushioned seats he can, if imps
are in him, merryandrew as much as he pleases; detested punctilio does
not reign there; he can proselytize for the soul's welfare; decry or
uphold the national drink; advertize a commercial Firm deriving
prosperity from the favour of the multitude; exhort to patriotism. All is
accepted. Politeness is the rule, according to Skepsey's experience of
the Southern part of the third-class kingdom. And it is as well to mark
the divisions, for the better knowledge of our countrymen. The North
requires volumes to itself.

The hard-grained old pirate-stock Northward has built the land, and is to
the front when we are at our epic work. Meanwhile it gets us a blowzy
character, by shouldering roughly among the children of civilization.
Skepsey, journeying one late afternoon up a Kentish line, had, in both
senses of the word, encountered a long-limbed navvy; an intoxicated, he
was compelled by his manly modesty to desire to think; whose loathly
talk, forced upon the hearing of a decent old woman opposite him, passed
baboonish behaviour; so much so, that Skepsey civilly intervened;
subsequently inviting him to leave the carriage and receive a lesson at
the station they were nearing. Upon his promising faithfully, that it
should be a true and telling lesson, the navvy requested this pygmy spark
to flick his cheek, merely to show he meant war in due sincerity; and he
as faithfully, all honour, promising not to let it bring about a breakage
of the laws of the Company, Skepsey promptly did the deed. So they went
forth.

Skepsey alluded to the incident, for an example of the lamentable
deficiency in science betrayed by most of our strong men when put to it;
and the bitter thought, that he could count well nigh to a certainty on
the total absence of science in the long-armed navvy, whose fist on his
nose might have been as the magnet of a pin, was chief among his
reminiscences after the bout, destroying pleasure for the lover of Old
England's might. One blow would have sent Skepsey travelling. He was not
seriously struck once. They parted, shaking hands; the navvy confessing
himself to have 'drunk a drop'; and that perhaps accounted for his having
been 'topped by a dot on him.'

He declined to make oath never to repeat his offence; but said, sending
his vanquisher to the deuce, with an amicable push at his shoulder,
'Damned if I ever forget five foot five stretched six foot flat!'

Skepsey counted his feet some small amount higher; but our hearty rovers'
sons have their ballad moods when giving or taking a thrashing. One of
the third-class passengers, a lad of twenty, became Skepsey's pupil, and
turned out clever with the gloves, and was persuaded to enter the
militia, and grew soon to be a corporal. Thus there was profit of the
affair, though the navvy sank out of sight. Let us hope and pray he will
not insult the hearing of females again. If only females knew how
necessary it is, for their sakes, to be able to give a lesson now and
then! Ladies are positively opposed. And Judges too, who dress so like
them. The manhood of our country is kept down, in consequence. Mr.
Durance was right, when he said something about the state of war being
wanted to weld our races together: and yet we are always praying for the
state of peace, which causes cracks and gaps among us! Was that what he
meant by illogical? It seemed to Skepsey--oddly, considering his inferior
estimate of the value of the fair sex--that a young woman with whom he
had recently made acquaintance; and who was in Brighton now, upon
missionary work; a member of the 'Army,' an officer of advancing rank,
Matilda Pridden, by name; was nearer to the secret of the right course of
conduct for individual citizens and the entire country than any gentleman
he knew.

Yes, nearer to it than his master was! Thinking of Mr. Victor Radnor,
Skepsey fetched a sigh. He had knocked at his master's door at the office
one day, and imagining the call to enter, had done so, and had seen a
thing he could not expunge. Lady Grace Halley was there. From matters he
gathered, Skepsey guessed her to be working for his master among the
great folks, as he did with Jarniman, and Mr. Fenellan with Mr. Carling.
But is it usual; he asked himself--his natural veneration framing the
rebuke to his master thus--to repay the services of a lady so warmly?--We
have all of us an ermined owl within us to sit in judgement of our
superiors as well as our equals; and the little man, notwithstanding a
servant's bounden submissiveness, was forced to hear the judicial
pronouncement upon his master's behaviour. His master had, at the same
time, been saying most weighty kind words more and more of late: one
thing:--that, if he gave all he had to his fellows, and did all he could,
he should still be in their debt. And he was a very wealthy gentleman.
What are we to think? The ways of our superiors are wonderful. We do them
homage: still we feel, we painfully feel, we are beginning to worship
elsewhere. It is the pain of a detachment of the very roots of our
sea-weed heart from a rock. Mr. Victor Radnor was an honour to his
country. Skepsey did not place the name of Matilda Pridden beside it or
in any way compare two such entirely different persons. At the same time
and most earnestly, while dreading to hear, he desired to have Matilda
Pridden's opinion of the case distressing him. He never could hear it,
because he could never be allowed to expound the case to her. Skepsey
sighed again: he as much as uttered: Oh, if we had a few thousands like
her!--But what if we do have them? They won't marry! There they are, all
that the country requires in wives and mothers; and like Miss Priscilla
Graves, they won't marry!

He looked through sad thoughts across the benches of the compartments to
the farther end of the carriage, where sat the Rev. Septimus Barmby,
looking at him through a meditation as obscure if not so mournful. Few
are the third-class passengers outward at that early hour in the winter
season, and Skepsey's gymnastics to get beside the Rev. Septimus were
unimpeded; though a tight-packed carriage of us poor journaliers would
not have obstructed them with as much as a sneer. Mr. Barmby and Skepsey
greeted. The latter said, he had a holiday, to pay a visit to Miss Nesta.
The former said, he hoped he should see Miss Nesta. Skepsey then rapidly
brought the conversation to a point where Matilda Pridden was comprised.
He discoursed of the 'Army' and her position in the Army, giving
instances of her bravery, the devotion shown by her to the cause of
morality, in all its forms. Mr. Barmby had his fortunes on his hands at
the moment, he could not lend an attentive ear; and he disliked this
Army, the title it had taken, and the mixing of women and men in its
ranks; not to speak of a presumption in its proceedings, and the public
marching and singing. Moreover, he enjoyed his one or two permissible
glasses: he doubted that the Chiefs of the Army had common benevolence
for the inoffensive pipe. But the cause of morality was precious to him;
morality and a fit of softness, and the union of the happiest contrast of
voices, had set him for a short while, before the dawn of Nesta's day,
hankering after Priscilla Graves. Skepsey's narrative of Matilda
Pridden's work down at the East of London; was effective; it had the ring
to thrill a responsive chord in Mr. Barmby, who mused on London's East,
and martyrly service there. His present expectations were of a very
different sort; but a beautiful bride, bringing us wealth, is no
misleading beam, if we direct the riches rightly. Septimus, a solitary
minister in those grisly haunts of the misery breeding vice, must needs
accomplish less than a Septimus the husband of one of England's chief
heiresses:--only not the most brilliant, owing to circumstances known to
the Rev. Groseman Buttermore: strangely, and opportunely, revealed: for
her exceeding benefit, it may be hoped. She is no longer the ignorant
girl, to reject the protecting hand of one whose cloth is the best of
cloaking. A glance at Dudley Sowerby's defection, assures our worldly
wisdom too, that now is the time to sue.

Several times while Mr. Barmby made thus his pudding of the desires of
the flesh and the spirit, Skepsey's tales of Matilda Pridden's heroism
caught his attention. He liked her deeds; he disliked the position in
which the young woman placed herself to perform them; and he said so.
Women are to be women, he said.

Skepsey agreed: 'If we could get men to do the work, sir!'

Mr. Barmby was launching forth: Plenty of men!--His mouth was blocked by
the reflection, that we count the men on our fingers; often are we, as it
were, an episcopal thumb surveying scarce that number of followers! He
diverged to censure of the marchings and the street-singing: the
impediment to traffic, the annoyance to a finely musical ear. He
disapproved altogether of Matilda Pridden's military display, pronouncing
her to be, 'Doubtless a worthy young person.'

'Her age is twenty-seven,' said Skepsey, spying at the number of his own.

'You have known her long?' Mr. Barmby asked.

'Not long, sir. She has gone through trouble. She believes very strongly
in the will:--If I will this, if I will that, and it is the right will,
not wickedness, it is done--as good as done; and force is quite
superfluous. In her sermons, she exhorts to prayer before action.'

'Preaches?'

'She moves a large assembly, sir.'

'It would seem, that England is becoming Americanized!' exclaimed the
Conservative in Mr. Barmby. Almost he groaned; and his gaze was fish-like
in vacancy, on hearing the little man speak of the present intrepid
forwardness of the sex to be publicly doing. It is for men the most
indigestible fact of our century: one that--by contrast throws an
overearthly holiness on our decorous dutiful mothers, who contentedly
worked below the surface while men unremittingly attended to their
interests above.

Skepsey drew forth a paper-covered shilling-book: a translation from the
French, under a yelling title of savage hate of Old England and cannibal
glee at her doom. Mr. Barmby dropped his eyelashes on it, without
comment; nor did he reply to Skepsey's forlorn remark: 'We let them think
they could do it!'

Behold the downs. Breakfast is behind them. Miss Radnor likewise: if the
poor child has a name. We propose to supply the deficiency. She does not
declare war upon tobacco. She has a cultured and a beautiful voice. We
abstain from enlargeing on the charms of her person. She has resources,
which representatives of a rival creed would plot to secure.

'Skepsey, you have your quarters at the house of Miss Radnor's
relatives?' said Mr. Barmby, as they emerged from tunnelled chalk.

'Mention, that I think of calling in the course of the day.'

A biscuit had been their breakfast without a name.

They parted at the station, roused by the smell of salt to bestow a more
legitimate title on the day's restorative beginning. Down the hill, along
by the shops, and Skepsey, in sight of Miss Nesta's terrace, considered
it still an early hour for a visitor; so, to have the sea about him, he
paid pier-money, and hurried against the briny wings of a South-wester;
green waves, curls of foam, flecks of silver, under low-flying grey-dark
cloud-curtains shaken to a rift, where at one shot the sun had a line of
Nereids nodding, laughing, sparkling to him. Skepsey enjoyed it, at the
back of thoughts military and naval. Visible sea, this girdle of Britain,
inspired him to exultations in reverence. He wished Mr. Durance could
behold it now and have such a breastful. He was wishing he knew a song of
Britain and sea, rather fancying Mr. Durance to be in some way a bar to
patriotic poetical recollection, when he saw his Captain Dartrey mounting
steps out of an iron anatomy of the pier, and looking like a razor off a
strap.

'Why, sir!' cried Skepsey.

'Just a plunge and a dozen strokes,' Dartrey said; 'and you'll come to my
hotel and give me ten minutes of the "recreation"; and if you don't come
willingly, I shall insult your country.'

'Ah! I wish Mr. Durance were here,' Skepsey rejoined.

'It would upset his bumboat of epigrams. He rises at ten o'clock to a
queasy breakfast by candlelight, and proceeds to composition. His picture
of the country is a portrait of himself by the artist.'

'But, sir, Captain Dartrey, you don't think as Mr. Durance does of
England!'

'There are lots to flatter her, Skepsey! A drilling can't do her harm.
You're down to see Miss Nesta. Ladies don't receive quite so early. And
have you breakfasted? Come on with me quick.' Dartrey led him on, saying:
'You have an eye at my stick. It was a legacy to me, by word of mouth,
from a seaman of a ship I sailed in, who thought I had done him a
service; and he died after all. He fell overboard drunk. He perished of
the villain stuff. One of his messmates handed me the stick in Cape Town,
sworn to deliver it. A good knot to grasp; and it 's flexible and strong;
stick or rattan, whichever you please; it gives point or caresses the
shoulder; there's no break in it, whack as you may. They call it a
Demerara supple-jack. I'll leave it to you.'

Skepsey declared his intention to be the first to depart. He tried the
temper of the stick, bent it a bit, and admired the prompt straightening.

'It would give a good blow, sir.'

'Does its business without braining.'

Perhaps for the reason, that it was not a handsome instrument for display
on fashionable promenades, Dartrey chose it among his collection by
preference; as ugly dogs of a known fidelity are chosen for companions.
The Demerara supple-jack surpasses bull-dogs in its fashion of assisting
the master; for when once at it, the clownish-looking thing reflects upon
him creditably, by developing a refined courtliness of style, while in no
way showing a diminution of jolly ardour for the fray. It will deal you
the stroke of a bludgeon with the playfulness of a cane. It bears
resemblance to those accomplished natural actors, who conversationally
present a dramatic situation in two or three spontaneous flourishes, and
are themselves again, men of the world, the next minute.

Skepsey handed it back. He spoke of a new French rifle. He mentioned, in
the form of query for no answer, the translation of the barking little
volume he had shown to Mr. Barmby: he slapped at his breast-pocket, where
it was. Not a ship was on the sea-line; and he seemed to deplore that
vacancy.

'But it tells both ways,' Dartrey said. 'We don't want to be hectoring in
the Channel. All we want, is to be sure of our power, so as not to go
hunting and fawning for alliances. Up along that terrace Miss Nesta
lives. Brighton would be a choice place for a landing.'

Skepsey temporized, to get his national defences, by pleading the
country's love of peace.

'Then you give-up your portion of the gains of war--an awful
disgorgement,' said Dartrey. 'If you are really for peace, you toss all
your spare bones to the war-dogs. Otherwise, Quakerly preaching is taken
for hypocrisy.'

'I 'm afraid we are illogical, sir,' said Skepsey, adopting one of the
charges of Mr. Durance, to elude the abominable word.

'In you run, my friend.' Dartrey sped him up the steps of the hotel.

A little note lay on his breakfast-table. His invalid uncle's valet gave
the morning's report of the night.

The note was from Mrs. Blathenoy: she begged Captain Dartrey, in double
underlinings of her brief words, to mount the stairs. He debated, and he
went.

She was excited, and showed a bosom compressed to explode: she had been
weeping. 'My husband is off. He bids me follow him. What would you have
me do?'

'Go.'

'You don't care what may happen to your friends, the Radnors?'

'Not at the cost of your separation from your husband.'

'You have seen him!'

'Be serious.'

'Oh, you cold creature! You know--you see: I can't conceal. And you tell
me to go. "Go!" Gracious heavens! I've no claim on you; I haven't been
able to do much; I would have--never mind! believe me or not. And now I'm
to go: on the spot, I suppose. You've seen the man I 'm to go to, too. I
would bear it, if it were not away from . . . out of sight of I'm a fool
of a woman, I know. There's frankness for you! and I could declare you're
saying "impudence" in your heart--or what you have for one. Have you
one?'

'My dear soul, it 's a flint. So just think of your duty.' Dartrey played
the horrid part of executioner with some skill.

Her bosom sprang to descend into abysses.

'And never a greater fool than when I sent for you to see such a face as
I'm showing!' she cried, with lips that twitched and fingers that plucked
at her belt. 'But you might feel my hatred of being tied to--dragged
about over the Continent by that . . . perhaps you think a woman is not
sensible of vulgarity in her husband! I 'm bothering you? I don't say I
have the slightest claim. You never made love to me, never! Never so much
as pressed my hand or looked. Others have--as much as I let them. And
before I saw you, I had not an idea of another man but that man. So you
advise me to go?'

'There's no other course.'

'No other course. I don't see one. What have I been dreaming of! Usually
a woman feeling . . .' she struck at her breast, 'has had a soft word in
her ear. "Go!" I don't blame you, Captain Dartrey. At least, you 're not
the man to punish a woman for stripping herself, as I 've done. I call
myself a fool--I'm a lunatic. Trust me with your hand.'

'There you are.'

She grasped the hand, and shut her eyes to make a long age of the holding
on to him. 'Oh, you dear dear fellow!--don't think me unwomanly; I must
tell you now: I am naked and can't disguise. I see you are ice--feel: and
if you were different, I might be. You won't be hurt by hearing you've
made yourself dear to me--without meaning to, I know! It began that day
at Lakelands; I fell in love with you the very first minute I set eyes on
you! There's a confession for a woman to make! and a married woman! I'm
married, and I no more feel allegiance, as they call it, than if there
never had been a ceremony and no Jacob Blathenoy was in existence. And
why I should go to him! But you shan't be troubled. I did not begin to
live, as a woman, before I met you. I can speak all this to you
because--we women can't be deceived in that--you are one of the men who
can be counted on for a friend.'

'I hope so,' Dartrey said, and his mouth hardened as nature's electricity
shot sparks into him from the touch and rocked him.

'No, not yet: I will soon let it drop,' said she, and she was just then
thrillingly pretty; she caressed the hand, placing it at her throat and
moving her chin on it, as women fondle birds. 'I am positively to go,
then?'

'Positively, you are to go; and it's my command.'

'Not in love with any one at all?'

'Not with a soul.'

'Not with a woman?'

'With no woman.'

'Nor maid?'

'No! and no to everything. And an end to the catechism!'

'It is really a flint that beats here?' she said, and with a shyness in
adventurousness, she struck the point of her forefinger on the rib.
'Fancy me in love with a flint! And running to be dutiful to a Jacob
Blathenoy, at my flint's command. I'm half in love with doing what I
hate, because this cold thing here bids me do it. I believe I married for
money, and now it looks as if I were to have my bargain with poverty to
bless it.'

'There I may help,' said Dartrey, relieved at sight of a loophole, to
spring to some initiative out of the paralysis cast on him by a pretty
little woman's rending of her veil. A man of honour alone with a woman
who has tossed concealment to the winds, is a riddled target indeed: he
is tempted to the peril of cajoleing, that he may escape from the torment
and the ridicule; he is tempted to sigh for the gallant spirit of his
naughty adolescence. 'Come to me--will you?--apply to me, if there's ever
any need. I happen to have money. And forgive me for naming it.'

She groaned: 'Don't! I'm, sure, and I thought it from the first, you're
one of the good men, and the woman who meets you is lucky, and wretched,
and so she ought to be! Only to you should I! . . . do believe that! I
won't speak of what excuses I've got. You've seen.'

'Don't think of them: there'll be danger in it.

'Shall you think of me in danger?'

'Silly, silly! Don't you see you have to do with a flint! I've gone
through fire. And if I were in love with you, I should start you off to
your husband this blessed day.'

'And you're not the slightest wee wee bit in love with me!'

'Perfectly true; but I like you; and if we're to be hand in hand, in the
time to come, you must walk firm at present.'

'I'm to go to-day?'

'You are.'

'Without again.'

The riddled target kicked. Dartrey contrasted Jacob Blathenoy with the
fair wife, and commiseratingly exonerated her; he lashed at himself for
continuing to be in this absurdest of postures, and not absolutely secure
for all that. His head shook. 'Friends, you'll find best.'

'Well!' she sighed, 'I feel I'm doomed to go famished through life.
There's never to be such a thing as, love, for me! I can't tell you no
woman could: though you'll say I've told enough. I shall burn with shame
when I think of it. I could go on my knees to have your arms round me
once. I could kill myself for saying it!--I should feel that I had one
moment of real life.--I know I ought to admire you. They say a woman
hates if she's refused. I can't: I wish I were able to. I could have
helped the Radnors better by staying here and threatening never to go to
him unless he swore not to do them injury. He's revengeful. Just as you
like. You say "Go," and I go. There. I may kiss your hand?'

'Give me yours.'

Dartrey kissed the hand. She kissed the mark of his lips. He got himself
away, by promising to see her to the train for Paris. Outside her door,
he was met by the reflection, coming as a thing external, that he might
veraciously and successfully have pleaded a passionate hunger for
breakfast: nay, that he would have done so, if he had been downright in
earnest. For she had the prettiness to cast a spell; a certain curve at
the lips, a fluttering droop of the eyelids, a corner of the eye, that
led long distances away to forests and nests. This little woman had the
rosy-peeping June bud's plumpness. What of the man who refused to kiss
her once? Cold antecedent immersion had to be thanked; and stringent
vacuity; perhaps a spotting ogre-image of her possessor. Some sense of
right-doing also, we hope. Dartrey angrily attributed his good conduct to
the lowest motives. He went so far as to accuse himself of having
forborne to speak of breakfast, from a sort of fascinated respect for the
pitch of a situation that he despised and detested. Then again, when
beginning to eat, his good conduct drew on him a chorus of the jeers of
all the martial comrades he had known. But he owned he would have had
less excuse than they, had he taken advantage of a woman's inability, at
a weak moment, to protect herself: or rather, if he had not behaved in a
manner to protect her from herself. He thought of his buried wife, and
the noble in the base of that poor soul; needing constantly a present
helper, for the nobler to conquer. Be true man with a woman, she must be
viler than the devil has yet made one, if she does not follow a strong
right lead:--but be patient, of course. And the word patience here means
more than most men contain. Certainly a man like Jacob Blathenoy was a
mouthful for any woman: and he had bought his wife, he deserved no pity.
Not? Probably not. That view, however, is unwholesome and opens on
slides. Pity of his wife, too, gets to be fervidly active with her
portrait, fetches her breath about us. As for condemnation of the poor
little woman, her case was not unexampled, though the sudden flare of it
startled rather. Mrs. Victor could read men and women closely. Yes, and
Victor, when he schemed--but Dartrey declined to be throwing blame right
or left. More than by his breakfast, and in a preferable direction, he
was refreshed by Skepsey's narrative of the deeds of Matilda Pridden.

'The right sort of girl for you to know, Skepsey,' he said. 'The best in
life is a good woman.'

Skepsey exhibited his book of the Gallic howl.

'They have their fits now and then, and they're soon over and forgotten,'
Dartrey said. 'The worst of it is, that we remember.'

After the morning's visit to his uncle, he peered at half a dozen sticks
in the corner of the room, grasped their handles, and selected the
Demerara supple-jack, for no particular reason; the curved knot was easy
to the grasp. It was in his mind, that this person signing herself Judith
Marsett, might have something to say, which intimately concerned Nesta.
He fell to brooding on it, until he wondered why he had not been made a
trifle anxious by the reading of the note overnight. Skepsey was left at
Nesta's house.

Dartrey found himself expected by the servant waiting on Mrs. Marsett.




CHAPTER XXXII

SHOWS HOW TEMPER MAY KINDLE TEMPER AND AN INDIGNANT WOMAN GET HER WEAPON

Judith Marsett stood in her room to receive Nesta's hero. She was
flushed, and had thinned her lips for utterance of a desperate thing,
after the first severe formalities.

Her aim was to preserve an impressive decorum. She was at the same time
burning to speak out furious wrath, in words of savage rawness, if they
should come, as a manner of slapping the world's cheek for the state to
which it reduces its women; whom one of the superior creatures can
insult, and laugh.

Men complaining of the 'peace which is near their extinction,' have but
to shuffle with the sex; they will experience as remarkable a change as
if they had passed off land on to sea.

Dartrey had some flitting notion of the untamed original elements women
can bring about us, in his short observant bow to Mrs. Marsett, following
so closely upon the scene with Mrs. Blathenoy.

But this handsome woman's look of the dull red line of a sombre fire,
that needed only stir of a breath to shoot the blaze, did not at all
alarm him. He felt refreshingly strung by it.

She was discerned at a glance to be an aristocratic member of regions
where the senses perpetually simmer when they are not boiling. The talk
at the Club recurred to him. How could Nesta have come to know the woman?
His questioning of the chapter of marvellous accidents, touched Nesta
simply, as a young girl to be protected, without abhorrently involving
the woman. He had his ideas of the Spirit of Woman stating her case to
the One Judge, for lack of an earthly just one: a story different from
that which is proclaimed pestilential by the body of censors under
conservatory glass; where flesh is delicately nurtured, highly prized;
spirit not so much so; and where the pretty tricking of the flesh is
taken for a spiritual ascendancy.

In spite of her turbulent breast's burden to deliver, Mrs. Marsett's
feminine acuteness was alive upon Dartrey, confirming here and there
Nesta's praises of him. She liked his build and easy carriage of a
muscular frame: her Ned was a heavy man. More than Dartrey's figure, as
she would have said, though the estimate came second, she liked his
manner with her. Not a doubt was there, that he read her position. She
could impose upon some: not upon masculine eyes like these. They did not
scrutinize, nor ruffle a smooth surface with a snap at petty impressions;
and they were not cynically intimate or dominating or tentatively
amorous: clear good fellowship was in them. And it was a blessedness
(whatever might be her feeling later, when she came to thank him at
heart) to be in the presence of a man whose appearance breathed of
offering her common ground, whereon to meet and speak together,
unburdened by the hunting world, and by the stoneing world. Such common
ground seems a kind of celestial to the better order of those excluded
from it.

Dartrey relieved her midway in a rigid practice of the formalities: 'I
think I may guess that you have something to tell me relating to Miss
Radnor?'

'It is.' Mrs. Marsett gathered up for an immediate plunge, and deferred
it. 'I met her--we went out with the riding-master. She took to me. I
like her--I could say' (the woman's voice dropped dead low, in a
tremble), 'I love her. She is young: I could kneel to her. Do you know a
Major Worrell?'

'Worrell? no.'

'He is a-calls himself a friend of my--of Captain Marsett's. He met us
out one day.'

'He permitted himself to speak to Miss Radnor?'

She rejoiced in Dartrey's look. 'Not then. First let me tell you. I can
hardly tell you. But Miss Radnor tells me you are not like other men. You
have made your conclusions already. Are you asking what right I had to be
knowing her? It is her goodness. Accident began it; I did not deceive
her; as soon as ever I could I--I have Captain Marsett's promise to me:
at present he's situated, he--but I opened my heart to her: as much as a
woman can. It came! Did I do very wrong?'

'I'm not here to decide: continue, pray.'

Mrs. Marsett aimed at formal speech, and was driving upon her natural in
anger. 'I swear I did it for the best. She is an innocent girl . . .
young lady: only she has a head; she soon reads things. I saw the kind of
cloud in her. I spoke. I felt bound to: she said she would not forsake
me.--I was bound to! And it was enough to break my heart, to think of her
despising me. No, she forgave, pitied;--she was kind. Those are the
angels who cause us to think of changeing. I don't care for sermons, but
when I meet charity: I won't bore you!'

'You don't.'

'My . . . Captain Marsett can't bear--he calls it Psalmody. He thinks
things ought always to be as they are, with women and men; and women
preachers he does detest. She is not one to preach. You are waiting to
hear what I have to tell. That man Major Worrell has tried to rob me of
everything I ever had to set a value on:--love, I 'd say;--he laughs at a
woman like me loving.'

Dartrey nodded, to signify a known sort of fellow.

'She came here.' Mrs. Marsett's tears had risen. 'I ought not to have let
her come. I invited her--for once: I am lonely. None of my sex--none I
could respect! I meant it for only once. She promised to sing to me. And,
Oh! how she sings! You have heard her. My whole heart came out. I declare
I believe girls exist who can hear our way of life--and I'm not so bad
except compared with that angel, who heard me, and was and is, I could
take oath, no worse for it. Some girls can; she is one. I am all for
bringing them up in complete innocence. If I was a great lady, my
daughters should never know anything of the world until they were
married. But Miss Radnor is a young lady who cannot be hurt. She is above
us. Oh! what a treasure for a man!--and my God! for any man born of woman
to insult a saint, as she is!--He is a beast!'

'Major Worrell met her here?'

'Blame me as much as you like: I do myself. Half my rage with him is at
myself for putting her in the way of such a beast to annoy. Each time she
came, I said it was to be the last. I let her see what a mercy from
heaven she was to me. She would come. It has not been many times. She
wishes me either to . . . Captain Marsett has promised. And nothing seems
hard--to me when my own God's angel is by. She is! I'm not such a bad
woman, but I never before I knew her knew the meaning of the word virtue.
There is the young lady that man worried with his insulting remarks!
though he must have known she was a lady:--because he found her in my
rooms.'

'You were present when, as you say, he insulted her?'

'I was. Here it commenced; and he would see her downstairs.'

'You heard?'

'Of course, I never left her.'

'Give me a notion . . .'

'To get her to make an appointment: to let him conduct her home.'

'She was alone?'

'Her maid was below.'

'And this happened . . .?'

'Yesterday, after dark. My Ned--Captain Marsett encourages him to be
familiar. I should be the lowest of women if I feared the threats of such
a reptile of a man. I could tell you more. I can't always refuse his
visits, though if Ned knew the cur he is! Captain Marsett is easy-going.'

'I should like to know where he lives.'

She went straight to the mantelpiece, and faced about with a card,
handing it, quite aware that it was a charge of powder.

Desperate things to be done excused the desperate said; and especially
they seemed a cover to the bald and often spotty language leaping out of
her, against her better taste, when her temper was up.

'Somewhere not very distant,' said Dartrey perusing. 'Is he in the town
to-day, do you know?'

'I am not sure; he may be. Her name . . .'

'Have no fear. Ladies' names are safe.'

'I am anxious that she may not be insulted again.'

'Did she show herself conscious of it?'

'She stopped speaking: she looked at the door. She may come again--or
never! through that man!'

'You receive him, at his pleasure?'

'Captain Marsett wishes me to. He is on his way home. He calls Major
Worrell my pet spite. All I want is; not to hear of the man. I swear he
came yesterday on the chance of seeing--for he forced his way up past my
servant; he must have seen Miss Radnor's maid below.'

'You don't mean, that he insulted her hearing?'

'Oh! Captain Fenellan, you know the style.'

'Well, I thank you,' Dartrey said. 'The young lady is the daughter of my
dearest friends. She's one of the precious--you're quite right. Keep the
tears back.'

'I will.' She heaved open-mouthed to get physical control of the tide.
'When you say that of her!--how can I help it? It's I fear, because I
fear . . . and I've no right to expect ever . . . but if I'm never again
to look on that dear face, tell her I shall--I shall pray for her in my
grave. Tell her she has done all a woman can, an angel can, to save my
soul. I speak truth: my very soul! I could never go to the utter bad
after knowing her. I don't--you know the world--I'm a poor helpless
woman!--don't swear to give up my Ned if he does break the word he
promised once; I can't see how I could. I haven't her courage. I
haven't--what it is! You know her: it's in her eyes and her voice. If I
had her beside me, then I could starve or go to execution--I could, I am
certain. Here I am, going to do what you men hate. Let me sit.'

'Here's a chair,' said Dartrey. 'I've no time to spare; good day, for the
present. You will permit me to call.'

'Oh! come'; she cried, out of her sobs, for excuse. They were genuine, or
she would better have been able to second her efforts to catch a distinct
vision of his retreating figure.

She beheld him, when he was in the street, turn for the district where
Major Worrell had his lodgeings. That set her mind moving, and her tears
fell no longer.

Major Worrell was not at home. Dartrey was informed that he might be at
his Club.

At the Club he heard of the major as having gone to London and being
expected down in the afternoon. Colonel Sudley named the train: an early
train; the major was engaged to dine at the Club. Dartrey had information
supplied to him concerning Major Worrell and Captain Marsett, also Mrs.
Marsett. She had a history. Worthy citizens read the description of
history with interest when the halo of Royalty is round it. They may, if
their reading extends, perceive, that it has been the main turbid stream
in old Mammon's train since he threw his bait for flesh. They might ask,
too, whether it is likely to cease to flow while he remains potent. The
lady's history was brief, and bore recital in a Club; came off quite
honourably there. Regarding Major Worrell, the tale of him showed him to
have a pass among men. He managed cleverly to get his pleasures out of a
small income and a 'fund of anecdote.' His reputation indicated an
anecdotist of the table, prevailing in the primitive societies, where the
art of conversing does not come by nature, and is exercised in
monosyllabic undertones or grunts until the narrator's well-masticated
popular anecdote loosens a digestive laughter, and some talk ensues. He
was Marsett's friend, and he boasted of not letting Ned Marsett make a
fool of himself.

Dartrey was not long in shaping the man's character: Worrell belonged to
the male birds of upper air, who mangle what female prey they are
forbidden to devour. And he had Miss Radnor's name: he had spoken her
name at the Club overnight. He had roused a sensation, because of a man
being present, Percy Southweare, who was related to a man as good as
engaged to marry her. The major never fell into a quarrel with sons of
nobles, if he could help it, or there might have been a pretty one.

So Colonel Sudley said.

Dartrey spoke musing: 'I don't know how he may class me; I have an
account to square with him.'

'It won't do in these days, my good friend. Come and cool yourself; and
we'll lunch here. I shan't leave you.'

'By all means. We'll lunch, and walk up to the station, and you will
point him out to me.'

Dartrey stated Major Worrell's offence. The colonel was not astonished;
but evidently he thought less of Worrell's behaviour to Miss Radnor in
Mrs. Marsett's presence than of the mention of her name at the Club: and
that, he seemed to think, had a shade of excuse against the charge of
monstrous. He blamed the young lady who could go twice to visit a Mrs.
Marsett; partly exposed a suspicion of her. Dartrey let him talk. They
strolled along the parade, and were near the pier.

Suddenly saying: 'There, beside our friend in clerical garb: here she
comes; judge if that is the girl for the foulest of curs to worry, no
matter where she's found.' Dartrey directed the colonel's attention to
Nesta and Mr. Barmby turning off the pier and advancing.

He saluted. She bowed. There was no contraction of her eyelids; and her
face was white. The mortal life appeared to be deadened in her cold wide
look; as when the storm-wind banks a leaden remoteness, leaving blown
space of sky.

The colonel said: 'No, that's not the girl a gentleman would offend.'

'What man!' cried Dartrey. 'If we had a Society for the trial of your
gentleman!--but he has only to call himself gentleman to get grant of
licence: and your Society protects him. It won't punish, and it won't let
you. But you saw her: ask yourself--what man could offend that girl!'

'Still, my friend, she ought to keep clear of the Marsetts.'

'When I meet him, I shall treat him as one out of the law.'

'You lead on to an ultimate argument with the hangman.'

We 'll dare it, to waken the old country. Old England will count none but
Worrells in time. As for discreet, if you like!--the young lady might
have been more discreet. She's a girl with a big heart. If we were all
everlastingly discreet!'

Dartrey may have meant, that the consequence of a prolonged conformity
would be the generation of stenches to shock to purgeing tempests the
tolerant heavens over such smooth stagnancy. He had his ideas about
movement; about the good of women, and the health of his England. The
feeling of the hopelessness of pleading Nesta's conduct, for the perfect
justification of it to son or daughter of our impressing conventional
world--even to a friend, that friend a true man, a really chivalrous
man--drove him back in a silence upon his natural brotherhood with souls
that dare do. It was a wonder, to think of his finding this kinship in a
woman. In a girl?--and the world holding that virgin spirit to be unclean
or shadowed because its rays were shed on foul places? He clasped the
girl. Her smitten clear face, the face of the second sigh after torture,
bent him in devotion to her image.

The clasping and the worshipping were independent of personal ardours:
quaintly mixed with semi-paternal recollections of the little 'blue
butterfly' of the days at Craye. Farm and Creckholt; and he had heard of
Dudley Sowerby's pretensions to; her hand. Nesta's youthfulness cast
double age on him from the child's past. He pictured the child; pictured
the girl, with her look of solitariness of sight; as in the desolate wide
world, where her noble compassion for a woman had unexpectedly,
painfully, almost by transubstantiation, rack-screwed her to woman's
mind. And above sorrowful, holy were those eyes.

They held sway over Dartrey, and lost it some steps on; his demon temper
urgeing him to strike at Major Worrell, as the cause of her dismayed
expression. He was not the happier for dropping to his nature; but we
proceed more easily, all of us, when the strain which lifts us a foot or
two off our native level is relaxed.




CHAPTER XXXIII

A PAIR OF WOOERS

That ashen look of the rise out of death from one of our mortal wounds,
was caused by deeper convulsions in Nesta's bosom than Dartrey could
imagine.

She had gone for the walk with Mr. Barmby, reading the omen of his tones
in the request. Dorothea and Virginia would have her go. The clerical
gentleman, a friend of the Rev. Abram Posterley; and one who deplored
poor Mr. Posterley's infatuation; and one besides who belonged to Nesta's
musical choir in London: seemed a safe companion for the child. The grand
organ of Mr. Barmby's voice, too, assured them of a devout seriousness in
him, that arrested any scrupulous little questions. They could not
conceive his uttering the nonsensical empty stuff, compliments to their
beauty and what not, which girls hear sometimes from inconsiderate
gentlemen, to the having of their heads turned. Moreover, Nesta had
rashly promised her father's faithful servant Skepsey to walk, out with
him in the afternoon; and the ladies hoped she would find the morning's
walk to have been enough; good little man though Skepsey was, they were
sure. But there is the incongruous for young women of station on a
promenade.

Mr. Barmby headed to the pier. After pacing up and down between the briny
gulls and a polka-band, he made his way forethoughtfully to the
glass-sheltered seats fronting East: where, as his enthusiasm for the
solemnity of the occasion excited him to say, 'We have a view of the
terraces and the cliffs'; and where not more than two enwrapped invalid
figures were ensconsed. Then it was, that Nesta recalled her anticipation
of his possible design; forgotten by her during their talk of her dear
people: Priscilla Graves and Mr. Pempton, and the Yatts, and Simeon
Fenellan, Peridon and Catkin, and Skepsey likewise; and the very latest
news of her mother. She wished she could have run before him, to spare
him. He would not notice a sign. Girls must wait and hear.

It was an oratorio. She watched the long wave roll on to the sinking into
its fellow; and onward again for the swell and the weariful lapse; and up
at last bursting to the sheet of white. The far-heard roar and the near
commingled, giving Mr. Barmby a semblance to the powers of ocean.

At the first direct note, the burden of which necessitated a pause, she
petitioned him to be her friend, to think of himself as her friend.

But a vessel laden with merchandize, that has crossed wild seas for this
particular port, is hardly to be debarred from discharging its goods on
the quay by simple intimations of their not being wanted. We are
precipitated both by the aim and the tedium of the lengthened voyage to
insist that they be seen. We believe perforce in their temptingness; and
should allurement fail, we fall back to the belief in our eloquence. An
eloquence to expose the qualities they possess, is the testification in
the promise of their excellence. She is to be induced by feeling to see
it. We are asking a young lady for the precious gift of her hand. We
respect her; and because of our continued respect, despite an
obstruction, we have come to think we have a claim upon her gratitude;
could she but be led to understand how different we are from some other
man!--from one hitherto favoured among them, unworthy of this prize,
however personally exalted and meritorious.

The wave of wide extension rolled and sank and rose, heaving lifeless
variations of the sickly streaks on its dull green back.

Dudley Sowerby's defection was hinted at and accounted for, by the
worldly test of worldly considerations.

What were they?--Nesta glanced.

An indistinct comparison was modestly presented, of one unmoved by
worldly considerations.

But what were they? She was wakened by a lamp, and her darkness was all
inflammable to it.

'Oh! Mr. Barmby, you have done me the honour to speak before; you know my
answer,' she said.

'You were then subject to an influence. A false, I may say wicked,
sentiment upholding celibacy.'

'My poor Louise? She never thought of influencing me. She has her views,
I mine. Our friendship does not depend on a "treaty of reciprocity." We
are one at heart, each free to judge and act, as it should be in
friendship. I heard from her this morning. Her brother will be able to
resume his military duties next month. Then she will return to me.'

'We propose!' rejoined Mr. Barmby.

Beholding the involuntary mercurial rogue-dimple he had started from a
twitch at the corner, of her lips, the good gentleman pursued: 'Can we
dare write our designs for the month to come? Ah!--I will say--Nesta!
give me the hope I beg to have. See the seriousness. You are at liberty.
That other has withdrawn his pretensions. We will not blame him. He is in
expectation of exalted rank. Where there is any shadow . . . !' Mr.
Barmby paused on his outroll of the word; but immediately, not intending
to weigh down his gentle hearer with the significance in it, resumed at a
yet more sonorous depth: 'He is under the obligation to his family; an
old, a venerable family. In the full blaze of public opinion! His conduct
can be palliated by us, too. There is a right and wrong in minor things,
independent of the higher rectitude. We pardon, we can partly support,
the worldly view.'

'There is a shadow?' said Nesta; and her voice was lurefully encouraging.

He was on the footing where men are precipitated by what is within them
to blunder. 'On you--no. On you personally, not at all. No. It could not
be deemed so. Not by those knowing, esteeming--not by him who loves you,
and would, with his name, would, with his whole strength, envelop, shield
. . . certainly, certainly not.'

'It is on my parents?' she said.

'But to me nothing, nothing, quite nought! To confound the innocent with
the guilty! . . . and excuses may exist. We know but how little we know!'

'It is on both my parents?' she said; with a simplicity that induced him
to reply: 'Before the world. But not, I repeat . . .'

The band-instruments behind the sheltering glass flourished on their
termination of a waltz.

She had not heeded their playing. Now she said:

'The music is over; we must not be late at lunch'; and she stood up and
moved.

He sprang to his legs and obediently stepped out:

'I shall have your answer to-day, this evening? Nesta!'

'Mr. Barmby, it will be the same. You will be kind to me in not asking me
again.'

He spoke further. She was dumb.

Had he done ill or well for himself and for her when he named the shadow
on her parents? He dwelt more on her than on himself: he would not have
wounded her to win the blest affirmative. Could she have been entirely
ignorant?--and after Dudley Sowerby's defection? For such it was: the
Rev. Stuart Rem had declared the union between the almost designated head
of the Cantor family and a young person of no name, of worse than no
birth, impossible: 'absolutely and totally impossible,' he, had said, in
his impressive fashion, speaking from his knowledge of the family, and an
acquaintance with Dudley. She must necessarily have learnt why Dudley
Sowerby withdrew. No parents of an attractive daughter should allow her
to remain unaware of her actual position in the world. It is criminal, a
reduplication of the criminality! Yet she had not spoken as one
astonished. She was mysterious. Women are so: young women most of all. It
is undecided still whether they do of themselves conceive principles, or
should submit to an imposition of the same upon them in terrorem.
Mysterious truly, but most attractive! As Lady Bountiful of a district,
she would have in her maturity the majestic stature to suit a
dispensation of earthly good things. And, strangely, here she was, at
this moment, rivalling to excelling all others of her sex (he verified it
in the crowd of female faces passing), when they, if they but knew the
facts, would visit her very appearance beside them on a common footing as
an intrusion and a scandal. To us who know, such matters are indeed
wonderful!

Moved by reflective compassion, Mr. Barmby resumed the wooer's note, some
few steps after he had responded to the salutation of Dartrey Fenellan
and Colonel Sudley. She did not speak. She turned her forehead to him;
and the absence of the world from her eyes chilled his tongue.

He declined the pleasure of the lunch with the Duvidney ladies. He
desired to be alone, to question himself fasting, to sound the deed he
had done; for he had struck on a suspicion of selfishness in it: and
though Love must needs be an egoism, Love is no warrant for the doing of
a hurt to the creature beloved. Thoughts upon Skepsey and the tale of his
Matilda Pridden's labours in poor neighbourhoods, to which he had been
inattentive during the journey down to the sea, invaded him; they were
persistent. He was a worthy man, having within him the spiritual impulse
curiously ready to take the place where a material disappointment left
vacancy. The vulgar sort embrace the devil at that stage. Before the day
had sunk, Mr. Barmby's lowest wish was, to be a light, as the instrument
of his Church in her ministrations amid the haunts of sin and slime, to
such plain souls as Daniel Skepsey and Matilda Pridden. And he could
still be that, if Nesta, in the chapters of the future, changed her mind.
She might; for her good she would; he reserved the hope. His light was
one to burn beneath an extinguisher.

At the luncheon table of the Duvidney ladies, it was a pain to Dorothea
and Virginia to witness how poor the appetite their Nesta brought in from
the briny blowy walk. They prophesied against her chances of a good sleep
at night, if she did not eat heartily. Virginia timidly remarked on her
paleness. Both of them put their simple arts in motion to let her know,
that she was dear to them: so dear as to make them dread the hour of
parting. They named their dread of it. They had consulted in private and
owned to one another, that they did really love the child, and dared not
look forward to what they would do without her. The dear child's paleness
and want of appetite (they remembered they were observing a weak innocent
girl) suggested to them mutually the idea of a young female heart
sickening, for the old unhappy maiden reason. But, if only she might
return with them to the Wells, the Rev. Stuart Rem would assure her to
convince her of her not being quite, quite forsaken. He, or some one
having sanction from Victor, might ultimately (the ladies waiting
anxiously in the next room, to fold her on the warmth of their bosoms
when she had heard) impart to her the knowledge of circumstances, which
would, under their further tuition concerning the particular sentiments
of great families and the strict duties of the scions of the race, help
to account for and excuse the Hon. Dudley Sowerby's behaviour.

They went up to the drawing-room, talking of Skepsey and his tale of Miss
Pridden, for Nesta's amusement. Any talk of her Skepsey usually quickened
her lips to reminiscent smiles and speech. Now she held on to gazeing;
and sadly, it seemed; as if some object were not present.

For a vague encouragement, Dorothea said: 'One week, and we are back home
at Moorsedge!'--not so far from Cronidge, was implied, for the
administering of some foolish temporary comfort. And it was as when a
fish on land springs its hollow sides in alien air for the sustaining
element; the girl panted; she clasped Dorothea's hand and looked at
Virginia: 'My mother--I must see her!' she said. They were slightly
stupefied by the unwonted mention of her mother. They made no reply. They
never had done so when there was allusion to her mother. Their silence
now struck a gong at the girl's bosom.

Dorothea had it in mind to say, that if she thirsted for any special
comfort, the friends about her would offer consolation for confidence.

Before she could speak, Perrin the footman entered, bearing the card of
the Hon. Dudley Sowerby.

Mr. Dudley Sowerby begged for an immediate interview with Miss Radnor.

The ladies were somewhat agitated, but no longer perplexed as to their
duties. They had quitted Moorsedge to avoid the visit of his family. If
he followed, it signified that which they could not withstand:--The
'Tivoli falls!' as they named the fateful tremendous human passion, from
the reminiscences of an impressive day on their travels in youth; when
the leaping torrent had struck upon a tale of love they were reading.
They hurriedly entreated Nesta to command her nerves; peremptorily
requested her to stay where she was; showed her spontaneously, by way of
histrionic adjuration, the face to be worn by young ladies at greetings
on these occasions; kissed her and left her; Virginia whispering: 'He is
true!'

Dudley entered the drawing-room, charged with his happy burden of a love
that had passed through the furnace. She stood near a window, well in the
light; she hardly gave him welcome. His address to her was hurried,
rather uncertain, coherent enough between the drop and the catch of
articulate syllables. He found himself holding his hat. He placed it on
the table, and it rolled foolishly; but soon he was by her side, having
two free hands to claim her one.

'You are thinking, you have not heard from me! I have been much
occupied,' he said. 'My brother is ill, very ill. I have your pardon?'

'Indeed you have--if it has to be asked.'

'I have it?'

'Have I to grant it?'

'I own to remissness!

'I did not blame you.'

'Nesta . . . !'

Her coldness was unshaken.

He repeated the call of her name. 'I should have written--I ought to have
written!--I could not have expressed . . . You do forgive? So many
things!'

'You come from Cronidge to-day?'

'From my family--to you.'

She seemed resentful. His omissions as a correspondent were explicable in
a sentence. It had to be deferred.

Reviewing for a moment the enormous internal conflict undergone by him
during the period of the silence between them, he wondered at the
vastness of the love which had conquered objections, to him so poignant.

There was at least no seeing of the public blot on her birth when looking
on her face. Nor when thinking of the beauty of her character, in absence
or in presence, was there any. He had mastered distaste to such a degree,
that he forgot the assistance he had received from the heiress for
enabling him to appreciate the fair young girl. Money is the imperious
requirement of superior station; and more money and more: in these our
modern days of the merchant's wealth, and the miner's, and the gigantic
American and Australian millionaires, high rank is of necessity vowed, in
peril of utter eclipse; to the possession of money. Still it is, when
assured, a consideration far to the rear with a gentleman in whose bosom
love and the buzzing world have fought their battle out. He could believe
it thoroughly fought out, by the prolonged endurance of a contest lasting
many days and nights; in the midst of which, at one time, the task of
writing to tell her of his withdrawal from the engagement, was the cause
of his omission to write.

As to her character, he dwelt on the charm of her recovered features, to
repress an indicative dread of some intrepid force behind it, that might
be unfeminine, however gentle the external lineaments. Her features, her
present aristocratic deficiency of colour, greatly pleased him; her
character would submit to moulding. Of all young ladies in the world, she
should be the one to shrink from a mental independence and hold to the
guidance of the man ennobling her. Did she? Her eyes were reading him.
She had her father's limpid eyes, and when they concentrated rays, they
shot.

'Have you seen my parents, Mr. Sowerby?'

He answered smilingly, for reassuringly: 'I have seen them.'

'My mother?'

'From your mother first. But am I not to be Dudley?'

'She spoke to you? She told you?'

'And yesterday your father--a second time.'

Some remainder of suspicion in the dealing with members of this family,
urged Dudley to say: 'I understood from them, you were not? . . . that
you were quite . . .?'

'I have heard: I have guessed: it was recently--this morning, as it
happened. I wish to go to my mother to-day. I shall go to her to-morrow.'

'I might offer to conduct you-now!'

'You are kind; I have Skepsey.' She relieved the situation of its
cold-toned strain in adding: 'He is a host.'

'But I may come?--now! Have I not the right? You do not deny it me?'

'You are very generous.'

'I claim the right, then. Always. And subsequently, soon after, my mother
hopes to welcome you at Cronidge. She will be glad to hear of your naming
of a day. My father bids me . . . he and all our family.'

'They are very generous.'

'I may send them word this evening of a day you name?'

'No, Mr. Sowerby.

'Dudley?'

'I cannot say it. I have to see my parents.'

'Between us, surely?'

'My whole heart thanks you for your goodness to me. I am unable to say
more.'

He had again observed and he slightly crisped under the speculative look
she directed on him: a simple unstrained look, that had an air of reading
right in, and was worse to bear with than when the spark leaped upon some
thought from her eyes: though he had no imagination of anything he
concealed--or exposed, and he would have set it down to her temporary
incredulousness of his perfect generosity or power to overcome the
world's opinion of certain circumstances. That had been a struggle! The
peculiar look was not renewed. She spoke warmly of her gratitude. She
stated, that she must of necessity see her parents at once. She submitted
to his entreaty to conduct her to them on the morrow. It was in the
manner of one who yielded step by step, from inability to contend.

Her attitude continuing unchanged, he became sensible of a monotony in
the speech with which he assailed it, and he rose to leave, not
dissatisfied. She, at his urgent request, named her train for London in
the early morning. He said it was not too early. He would have desired to
be warmed; yet he liked her the better for the moral sentiment
controlling the physical. He had appointments with relatives or
connections in the town, and on that pretext he departed, hoping for the
speedy dawn of the morrow as soon as he had turned his back on the house.

No, not he the man to have pity of women underfoot! That was the thought,
unrevolved, unphrased, all but unconscious, in Nesta: and while her heart
was exalting him for his generosity. Under her present sense of the
chilling shadow, she felt the comfort there was in being grateful to him
for the golden beams which his generosity cast about her. But she had an
intelligence sharp to pierce, virgin though she was; and with the mark in
sight, however distant, she struck it, unerring as an Artemis for blood
of beasts: those shrewd young wits, on the lookout to find a champion,
athirst for help upon a desolate road, were hard as any judicial to
pronounce the sentence upon Dudley in that respect. She raised him high;
she placed herself low; she had a glimpse of the struggle he had gone
through; love of her had helped him, she believed. And she was melted;
and not the less did the girl's implacable intuition read with the
keenness of eye of a man of the world the blunt division in him, where
warm humanity stopped short at the wall of social concrete forming a part
of this rightly esteemed young citizen. She, too, was divided: she was at
his feet; and she rebuked herself for daring to judge--or rather, it was,
for having a reserve in her mind upon a man proving so generous with her.
She was pulled this way and that by sensibilities both inspiring to blind
gratitude and quickening her penetrative view. The certainty of an
unerring perception remained.

Dorothea and Virginia were seated in the room below, waiting for their
carriage, when the hall-door spoke of the Hon. Dudley's departure; soon
after, Nesta entered to them. She swam up to Dorothea's lap, and dropped
her head on it, kneeling.

The ladies feared she might be weeping. Dorothea patted her thick brown
twisted locks of hair. Unhappiness following such an interview, struck
them as an ill sign.

Virginia bent to the girl's ear, and murmured: 'All well?'

She replied: 'He has been very generous.'

Her speaking of the words renewed an oppression, that had darkened her on
the descent of stairs. For sensibilities sharp as Nesta's, are not to be
had without their penalties: and she who had gone nigh to summing in a
flash the nature of Dudley, sank suddenly under that affliction often
besetting the young adventurous mind, crushing to young women:--the
fascination exercised upon them by a positive adverse masculine attitude
and opinion. Young men know well what it is: and if young women have by
chance overcome their timidity, to the taking of any step out of the trim
pathway, they shrink, with a sense of forlornest isolation. It becomes a
subjugation; inciting to revolt, but a heavy weight to cast off. Soon it
assumed its material form for the contention between her and Dudley, in
the figure of Mrs. Marsett. The Nesta who had been instructed to know
herself to be under a shadow, heard, she almost justified Dudley's
reproaches to her, for having made the acquaintance of the unhappy woman,
for having visited her, for having been, though but for a minute, at the
mercy of a coarse gentleman's pursuit. The recollection was a smart
buffet.

Her lighted mind punished her thus through her conjuring of Dudley's
words, should news of her relations with Mrs. Marsett reach him:--and she
would have to tell him. Would he not say: 'I have borne with the things
concerning your family. All the greater reason why I must insist'--he
would assuredly say he insisted (her humour caught at the word, as being
the very word one could foresee and clearly see him uttering in a fit of
vehemence) on her immediate abandonment of 'that woman.'

And with Nesta's present enlightenment by dusky beams, upon her
parentage, she listened abjectly to Dudley, or the opinion of the
majority. Would he not say or think, that her clinging to Mrs. Marsett
put them under a kind of common stamp, or gave the world its option to
class them together?

These were among the ideas chasing in a head destined to be a
battle-field for the enrichment of a harvest-field of them, while the
girl's face was hidden on Dorothea's lap, and her breast heaved and
heaved.

She distressed them when she rose, by saying she must instantly see her
mother.

They saw the pain their hesitation inflicted, and Dorothea said: 'Yes,
dear; any day you like.'

'To-morrow--I must go to her to-morrow!'

A suggestion of her mother's coming down, was faintly spoken by one lady,
echoed in a quaver by the other.

Nesta shook her head. To quiet the kind souls, she entreated them to give
their promise that they would invite her again.

Imagining the Hon. Dudley to have cast her off, both ladies embraced her:
not entirely yielding-up their hearts to her, by reason of the pernicious
new ideas now in the world to sap our foundations of morality; which
warned them of their duty to uphold mentally his quite justifiable
behaviour, even when compassionating the sufferings of the guiltless
creature loved by them.




CHAPTER XXXIV

CONTAINS DEEDS UNRELATED AND EXPOSITIONS OF FEELINGS

All through the afternoon and evening Skepsey showed indifference to
meals by continuing absent: and he was the one with whom Nesta would have
felt at home; more at home than with her parents. He and the cool world
he moved in were a transparency of peace to her mind; even to his giving
of some portion of it, when she had the dear little man present to her in
a vivid image of a fish in a glass globe, wandering round and round, now
and then shooting across, just as her Skepsey did: he carried his head
semihorizontally at his arrowy pace; plain to read though he was, he
appeared, under that image created of him, animated by motives inducing
to speculation.

She thought of him till she could have reproached him for not returning
and helping her to get away from the fever of other thoughts:--this
anguish twisting about her parents, and the dreadful trammels of
gratitude to a man afflictingly generous, the frown of congregated
people.

The latter was the least of evils; she had her charges to bring against
them for injustice: uncited, unstirred charges, they were effective as a
muffled force to sustain her: and the young who are of healthy lively
blood and clean conscience have either emotion or imagination to fold
them defensively from an enemy world; whose power to drive them forth
into the wilderness they acknowledge. But in the wilderness their souls
are not beaten down by breath of mortals; they burn straight flame there
up to the parent Spirit.

She could not fancy herself flying thither;--where to be shorn and naked
and shivering is no hardship, for the solitude clothes, and the sole true
life in us resolves to that steady flame;--she was restrained by Dudley's
generosity, which held her fast to have the forgiveness for her
uncommitted sin dashed in her face. He surprised her; the unexpected
quality in him seemed suddenly to have snared her fast: and she did not
obtain release after seeing behind it;--seeing it, by the light of what
she demanded, personal, shallow, a lover's generosity. So her keen
intellect saw it; and her young blood (for the youthful are thus divided)
thrilled in thinking it must be love! The name of the sacred passion
lifted it out of the petty cabin of the individual into a quiring
cathedral universal, and subdued her. It subdued her with an unwelcome
touch of tenderness when she thought of it as involving tenderness for
her mother, some chivalrous respect for her mother. Could he love the
daughter without some little, which a more intimate knowledge of her dear
mother would enlarge? The girl's heart flew to her mother, clung to her,
vindicated her dumbly. It would not inquire, and it refused to hear,
hungering the while. She sent forth her flights of stories in elucidation
of the hidden; and they were like white bird after bird winging to covert
beneath a thundercloud; until her breast ached for the voice of the
thunder: harsh facts: sure as she was of her never losing her filial hold
of the beloved. She and her mother grew together, they were one.
Accepting the shadow, they were the closer one beneath it. She had
neither vision nor active thought of her father, in whom her pride was.

At the hour of ten, the ladies retired for the enjoyment of their sweet
reward. Manton, their maid, came down to sit with Nesta on the watch for
Skepsey. Perrin, the footman, returning, as late as twenty minutes to
eleven, from his tobacco promenade along the terrace, reported to Manton
'a row in town'; and he repeated to Nesta the policeman's opinion and his
own of the 'Army' fellows, and the way to treat them. Both were for
rigour.

'The name of "Army" attracts poor Skepsey so, I am sure he would join it,
if they would admit him,' Nesta said.

'He has an immense respect for a young woman, who belongs to his "Army";
and one doesn't know what may have come,' said Manton.

Two or three minutes after eleven, a feeble ring at the bell gained
admission for some person: whispering was heard in the passage.

Manton played eavesdropper, and suddenly bursting on Skepsey, arrested
him when about to dash upstairs. His young mistress's voice was a
sufficient command; he yielded; he pitched a smart sigh and stepped into
her presence for his countenance to be seen, or the show of a
countenance, that it presented.

'Skepsey wanted to rush to bed without saying good night to me?' said
she; leaving unnoticed, except for woefulness of tone, his hurried
shuffle of remarks on 'his appearance,' and 'little accidents'; ending
with an inclination of his disgraceful person to the doorway, and a
petition: 'If I might, Miss Nesta?' The implied pathetic reference to a
surgically-treated nose under a cross of strips of plaster, could not
obtain dismissal for him. And he had one eye of sinister hue, showing
beside its lighted-grey fellow as if a sullen punished dragonwhelp had
couched near some quick wood-pigeon. The two eyes blinked rapidly. He was
a picture of Guilt in the nude, imploring to be sent into concealment.

The cruelty of detaining him was evident.

'Yes, if you must,' Nesta said. 'But, dear Skepsey, will it be the
magistrate again to-morrow?'

He feared it would be; he fancied it would needs be. He concluded by
stating, that he was bound to appear before the magistrate in the
morning; and he begged assistance to keep it from the knowledge of the
Miss Duvidneys, who had been so kind to him.

'Has there been bailing of you again, Skepsey?'

'A good gentleman, a resident,' he replied; 'a military gentleman;
indeed, a colonel of the cavalry; but, it may so be, retired; and anxious
about our vast possessions; though he thinks a translation of a French
attack on England unimportant. He says, the Germans despise us most.'

'Then this gentleman thinks you have a good case?'

'He is a friend of Captain Dartrey's.'

Hearing that name, Nesta said: 'Now, Skepsey, you must tell me
everything. You are not to mind your looks. I believe, I do always
believe you mean well.'

'Miss Nesta, it depends upon the magistrate's not being prejudiced
against the street-processionists!

'But you may expect justice from the magistrate, if your case is good?'

'I would not say no, Miss Nesta. But we find, the opinion of the public
has its effect with magistrates--their sentences. They are severe on
boxing. They have latterly treated the "Army" with more consideration,
owing to the change in the public view. I myself have changed.'

'Have you joined it?'

'I cannot say I am a member of it.'

'You walked in the ranks to-day, and you were maltreated? Your friend was
there?'

'I walked with Matilda Pridden; that is, parallel, along the pavement.'

'I hope she came out of it unhurt?'

'It is thanks to Captain Dartrey, Miss Nesta?'

This time Nesta looked her question.

Manton interposed: 'You are to speak, Mr. Skepsey'; and she stopped a
flood of narrative, that was knocking in his mind to feel its head and to
leap--an uninterrupted half-minute more would have shaped the story for
the proper flow.

He began, after attending to the throb of his bruises in a manner to
correct them rather than solace; and the beginning was the end: 'Captain
Dartrey rescued us, before Matilda Pridden suffered harm, to mention--the
chin, slight, teeth unshaken; a beautiful set. She is angry with Captain
Dartrey, for having recourse to violence in her defence: it is against
her principles. "Then you die," she says; and our principles are to gain
more by death. She says, we are alive in them; but worse if we abandon
them for the sake of living.--I am a little confused; she is very
abstruse.--Because, that is the corruptible life, she says. I have found
it quite impossible to argue with her; she has always a complete answer;
wonderful. In case of Invasion, we are to lift our voices to the Lord;
and the Lord's will shall be manifested. If we are robbed, we ask, How
came we by the goods? It is unreasonable; it strikes at rights of
property. But I have to go on thinking. When in danger, she sings without
excitement. When the blow struck her, she stopped singing only an
instant. She says, no one fears, who has real faith. She will not let me
call her brave. She cannot admire Captain Dartrey. Her principles are
opposed. She said to him, "Sir, you did what seemed to you right." She
thinks every blow struck sends us back to the state of the beasts. Her
principles . . .'

'How was it Captain Dartrey happened to be present, Skepsey?'

'She is very firm. You cannot move her.--Captain Dartrey was on his way
to the station, to meet a gentleman from London, Miss Nesta. He carried a
stick--a remarkable stick--he had shown to me in the morning, and he has
given it me now. He says, he has done his last with it. He seems to have
some of Matilda Pridden's ideas about fighting, when it's over. He was
glad to be rid of the stick, he said.'

'But who attacked you? What were the people?'

'Captain Dartrey says, England may hold up her head while she breeds
young women like Matilda Pridden: right or wrong, he says: it is the
substance.'

Hereupon Manton, sick of Miss Pridden, shook the little man with a
snappish word, to bring him to attention. She got him together
sufficiently for him to give a lame version of the story; flat until he
came to his heroine's behaviour, when he brightened a moment, and he sank
back absorbed in her principles and theories of life. It was understood
by Nesta, that the processionists, going at a smart pace, found their way
blocked and were assaulted in one of the sidestreets; and that Skepsey
rushed to the defence of Matilda Pridden; and that, while they were
engaged, Captain Dartrey was passing at the end of the street, and
recognized one he knew in the thick of it and getting the worst of it,
owing to numbers. 'I will show you the stick he did it with, Miss Nests';
said Skepsey, regardless of narrative; and darted out of the room to
bring in the Demerara supple-jack; holding which, he became inspired to
relate something of Captain Dartrey's deeds.

They gave no pleasure to his young lady, as he sadly perceived:--thus it
is with the fair sex ever, so fond of heroes! She shut her eyes from the
sight of the Demerara supple-jack descending right and left upon the
skulls of a couple of bully lads. 'That will do--you were rescued. And
now go to bed, Skepsey; and be up at seven to breakfast with me,' Nesta
said, for his battle-damaged face would be more endurable to behold after
an interval, she hoped; and she might in the morning dissociate its evil
look from the deeds of Captain Dartrey.

The thought of her hero taking active part in a streetfray, was repulsive
to her; it swamped his brilliancy. And this distressed her, by
withdrawing the support which the thought of him had been to her since
mid-day. She lay for sleepless hours, while nursing a deeper pain, under
oppression of repugnance to battle-dealing, bloodshedding men. It was
long before she grew mindful of the absurdity of the moan recurring
whenever reflection wearied. Translated into speech, it would have run:

'In a street of the town! with a stick!'--The vulgar picture pursued her
to humiliation; it robbed her or dimmed her possession of the one bright
thing she had remaining to her. So she deemed it during the heavy sighs
of night; partly conscious, that in some strange way it was as much as
tossing her to the man who never could have condescended to the
pugnacious using of a stick in a street. He, on the contrary, was a cover
to the shamefaced.

Her heart was weak that night. She hovered above it, but not so detached
as to scorn it for fawning to one--any one--who would offer her and her
mother a cover from scorn. And now she exalted Dudley's generosity, now
clung to a low idea of a haven in her father's wealth; and she was
unaware, that the second mood was deduced from the first. She did know
herself cowardly: she had, too, a critic in her clear head, to spurn at
the creature who could think of purchasing the world's respect. Dudley's
generosity sprang up to silence the voice. She could praise him, on a
review of it, for delicacy, moreover; and the delicacy laid her under a
more positive obligation. Her sense of it was not without a toneless
quaint faint savour of the romantic, that her humour little humorously
caught at, to paint her a picture of former heroes of fiction, who win
their trying lady by their perfection of good conduct on a background of
high birth; and who are not seen to be wooden before the volume closes.
Her fatigue of sleeplessness plunged her into the period of poke-bonnets
and peaky hats to admire him; giving her the kind of sweetness we may
imagine ourselves to get in the state of tired horse munching hay. If she
had gone to her bed with a noble or simply estimable plain image of one
of her friends in her heart, to sustain it, she would not have been thus
abject. Skepsey's discoloured eye, and Captain Dartrey's behaviour behind
it, threw her upon Dudley's generosity, as being the shield for an
outcast. Girls, who see at a time of need their ideal extinguished in its
appearing tarnished, are very much at the disposal of the pressing
suitor. Nesta rose in the black winter morn, summoning the best she could
think of to glorify Dudley, that she might not feel so doomed.

According to an agreement overnight, she went to the bedroom of Dorothea
and Virginia, to assure them of her having slept well, and say the
good-bye to them and their Tasso. The little dog was the growl of a
silken ball in a basket. His mistresses excused him, because of his being
unused to the appearance of any person save Manton in their bedroom.
Dorothea, kissing her, said: 'Adieu, dear child; and there is home with
us always, remember. And, after breakfast, however it may be,
you will, for our greater feeling of security, have--she has our
orders--Manton--your own maid we consider too young for a guardian--to
accompany you. We will not have it on our consciences, that by any
possibility harm came to you while you were under our charge. The good
innocent girl we received from the hands of your father, we return to
him; we are sure of that.'

Nesta said: 'Mr. Sowerby promised he would come.'

'However it may be,' Dorothea repeated her curtaining phrase.

Virginia put in a word of apology for Tasso's temper he enjoyed
ordinarily a slumber of half an hour's longer duration. He was, Dorothea
feelingly added, regularity itself. Virginia murmured: 'Except once!' and
both were appalled by the recollection of that night. It had,
nevertheless, caused them to reperuse the Rev. Stuart Rem's published
beautiful sermon ON DIRT; the words of which were an antidote to the
night of Tasso in the nostrils of Mnemosyne; so that Dorothea could reply
to her sister, slightly by way of a reproval, quoting Mr. Stuart Rem at
his loftiest: '"Let us not bring into the sacred precincts Dirt from the
roads, but have a care to spread it where it is a fructification."'
Virginia produced the sequent sentence, likewise weighty. Nesta stood
between the thin division of their beds, her right hand given to one, her
left to the other. They had the semblance of a haven out of storms.

She reflected, after shutting the door of their room, that the residing
with them had been a means of casting her--it was an effort to remember
how--upon the world where the tree of knowledge grows. She had eaten; and
she might be the worse for it; but she was raised to a height that would
not let her look with envy upon peace and comfort. Luxurious quiet people
were as ripening glass-house fruits. Her bitter gathering of the
knowledge of life had sharpened her intellect; and the intellect, even in
the young, is, and not less usefully, hard metal rather than fallow soil.
But for the fountain of human warmth at her breast, she might have been
snared by the conceit of intellect, to despise the simple and
conventional, or shed the pity which is charity's contempt. She had only
to think of the kindness of the dear good ladies; her heart jumped to
them at once. And when she fancied hearing those innocent souls of women
embracing her and reproaching her for the knowledge of life she now bore,
her words down deep in her bosom were: It has helped me to bear the shock
of other knowledge! How would she have borne it before she knew of the
infinitely evil? Saving for the tender compassion weeping over her
mother, she had not much acute personal grief.

For this world condemning her birth, was the world tolerant of that
infinitely evil! Her intellect fortified her to be combative by day,
after the night of imagination; which splendid power is not so
serviceable as the logical mind in painful seasons: for night revealed
the world snorting Dragon's breath at a girl guilty of knowing its
vilest. More than she liked to recall, it had driven her scorched, half
withered, to the shelter of Dudley. The daylight, spreading thin at the
windows, restored her from that weakness. 'We will quit England,' she
said, thinking of her mother and herself, and then of her father's surely
following them. She sighed thankfully, half way through the breakfast
with Skepsey, at sight of the hour by the clock; she was hurriedly
sentient of the puzzle of her feelings, when she guessed at a chance that
Dudley would be delayed. She supposed herself as possibly feeling not so
well able to keep every thought of her head brooding on her mother in
Dudley's company.

Skepsey's face was just sufferable by light of day, if one pitied
reflecting on his honest intentions; it ceased to discolour another. He
dropped a few particulars of his hero in action; but the heroine
eclipsed. He was heavier than ever with his Matilda Pridden. At the hour
for departure, Perrin had a conveyance at the door. Nesta sent off
Skepsey with a complimentary message to Captain Dartrey. Her maid Mary
begged her to finish her breakfast; Manton suggested the waiting a
further two or three minutes. 'We must not be late,' Nesta said; and when
the minute-hand of the clock marked ample time for the drive to the
station, she took her seat and started, keeping her face resolutely set
seaward, having at her ears the ring of a cry that was to come from
Manton. But Manton was dumb; she spied no one on the pavement who
signalled to stop them. And no one was at the station to greet them. They
stepped into a carriage where they were alone. Dudley with his dreaded
generosity melted out of Nesta's thoughts, like the vanishing
steam-wreath on the dip between the line and the downs.

She passed into music, as she always did under motion of carriages and
trains, whether in happiness or sadness: and the day being one that had a
sky, the scenic of music swung her up to soar. None of her heavy burdens
enchained, though she knew the weight of them, with those of other
painful souls. The pipeing at her breast gave wings to large and small of
the visible; and along the downs went stateliest of flowing dances; a
copse lengthened to forest; a pool of cattle-water caught grey for
flights through enchantment. Cottage-children, wherever seen in groups,
she wreathed above with angels to watch them. Her mind all the while was
busy upon earth, embracing her mother, eyeing her father. Imagination and
our earthly met midway, and still she flew, until she was brought to the
ground by a shot. She struggled to rise, uplifting Judith Marsett: a
woman not so very much older than her own teens, in the count of years,
and ages older; and the world pulling at her heels to keep her low. That
unhappiest had no one but a sisterly girl to help her: and how she clung
to the slender help! Who else was there?

The good and the bad in the woman struck separate blows upon the girl's
resonant nature. She perceived the good, and took it into her
reflections. The bad she divined: it approached like some threat of
inflammation. Natures resonant as that which animated this girl, are
quick at the wells of understanding: and she had her intimations of the
world's wisdom in withholding contagious presences from the very mangy of
the young, who may not have an, aim, or ideal or strong human compassion,
for a preservative. She was assured of her possessing it. She asked
herself in her mother's voice, and answered mutely. She had the
certainty: for she rebuked the slavish feverishness of the passion, as
betrayed by Mrs. Marsett; and the woman's tone, as of strung wires
ringing on a rage of the wind. Then followed her cry for the man who
could speak to Captain Marsett of his duty in honour. An image of one,
accompanying the faster beats of her heart, beguiled her to think away
from the cause. He, the one man known to her, would act the brother's
part on behalf of the hapless creature.

Nesta just imagined her having supplicated him, and at once imagination
came to dust. She had to thank him she knelt to him. For the first time
of her life she found herself seized with her sex's shudder in the blood.




CHAPTER XXXV

IN WHICH AGAIN WE MAKE USE OF THE OLD LAMPS FOR LIGHTING AN ABYSMAL
DARKNESS

And if Nesta had looked out of her carriage-window soon after the train
began to glide, her eagle of imagination would have reeled from the
heights, with very different feelings, earlier, perhaps a captive, at
sight of the tardy gentleman rushing along the platform, and bending ear
to the footman Perrin, and staring for one lost.

The snaky tail of the train imparted to Dudley an apprehension of the
ominous in his having missed her. It wound away, and left regrets, which
raised a chorus of harsh congratulations from the opposite party of his
internal parliament.

Neither party could express an opinion without rousing the other to an
uproar.

He had met his cousin Southweare overnight. He had heard, that there was
talk of Miss Radnor. Her name was in the mouth of Major Worrell. It was
coupled with the name of Mrs. Marsett. A military captain, in the
succession to be Sir Edward Marsett, bestowed on her the shadow of his
name.

It could be certified, that Miss Radnor visited the woman at her house.
What are we to think of Miss Radnor, save that daughters of depraved
parents! . . . A torture undeserved is the Centaur's shirt for driving us
to lay about in all directions. He who had swallowed so much--a
thunderbolt: a still undigested discharge from the perplexing heavens
jumped frantic under the pressure upon him of more, and worse. A girl
getting herself talked of at a Club! And she of all young ladies should
have been the last to draw round her that buzz of tongues. On such a
subject!--The parents pursuing their career of cynical ostentation in
London, threw an evil eye of heredity on their offspring in the egg;
making anything credible, pointing at tendencies.

An alliance with her was impossible. So said disgust. Anger came like a
stronger beast, and extinguished the safety there was in the thing it
consumed, by growing so excessive as to require tempering with drops of
compassion; which prepared the way for a formal act of cold forgiveness;
and the moment that was conceived, he had a passion to commit the
horrible magnanimity, and did it on a grand scale, and dissolved his
Heart in the grandeur, and slaved himself again.

Far from expungeing the doubt of her, forgiveness gave it a stamp and an
edge. His renewed enslavement set him perusing his tyrant keenly, as
nauseated captives do; and he saw, that forgiveness was beside the case.
For this Nesta Victoria Radnor would not crave it or accept it. He had
mentally played the woman to her superior vivaciousness too long for him
to see her taking a culprit's attitude. What she did, she intended to do.
The mother would not have encouraged her. The father idolized her; and
the father was a frank hedonist, whose blood . . . speculation on
horseback gallops to barren extremes. Eyes like hers--if there had not
been the miserable dupes of girls! Conduct is the sole guide to female
character. That likewise may be the hypocrite's mask.

Popular artists, intent to gratify the national taste for effects called
realistic, have figured in scenes of battle the raying fragments of a man
from impact of a cannon-ball on his person. Truly thus it may be when
flesh contends. But an image of the stricken and scattered mind of the
man should, though deficient in the attraction, have a greater
significance, forasmuch as it does not exhibit him entirely liquefied and
showered into space; it leaves him his legs for the taking of further
steps. Dudley, standing on the platform of Nesta's train, one half minute
too late, according to his desire before he put himself in motion, was as
wildly torn as the vapour shredded streaming to fingers and threads off
the upright columnar shot of the shriek from the boiler. He wished every
mad antagonism to his wishes: that he might see her, be blind to her;
embrace, discard; heal his wound, and tear it wider. He thanked her for
the grossness of an offence precluding excuses. He was aware of a glimmer
of advocacy in the very grossness. He conjured-up her features, and they
said, her innocence was the sinner; they scoffed at him for the dupe he
was willing to be. She had enigma's mouth, with the eyes of morning.

More than most girls, she was the girl-Sphinx to him because of her
having ideas--or what he deemed ideas. She struck a toneing warmth
through his intelligence, not dissimilar to the livelier circulation of
the blood in the frame breathing mountain air. She really helped him,
incited him to go along with this windy wild modern time more cheerfully,
if not quite hopefully. For she had been the book of Romance he despised
when it appeared as a printed volume: and which might have educated the
young man to read some among our riddles in the book of humanity. The
white he was ready to take for silver the black were all black; the
spotted had received corruption's label. Her youthful French governess
Mademoiselle de Seilles was also peculiarly enigmatic at the mouth
conversant, one might expect, with the disintegrating literature of her
country. In public, the two talked of St. Louis. One of them in secret
visits a Mrs. Marsett. The Southweare women, the Hennen women, and Lady
Evelina Reddish, were artless candid creatures in their early days, not
transgressing in a glance. Lady Grace Halley had her fit of the
devotional previous to marriage. No girl known to Dudley by report or
acquaintance had committed so scandalous an indiscretion as Miss
Radnor's: it pertained to the insolently vile.

And on that ground, it started the voluble defence. For certain suspected
things will dash suspicion to the rebound, when they are very dark. As
soon as the charge against her was moderated, the defence expired. He
heard the world delivering its judgement upon her; and he sorrowfully
acquiesced. She passed from him.

When she was cut off, she sang him in the distance a remembered saying of
hers, with the full melody of her voice. One day, treating of modern
pessimism, he had draped a cadaverous view of our mortal being in a
quotation of the wisdom of the Philosopher Emperor: 'To set one's love
upon the swallow is a futility.' And she, weighing it, nodded, and
replied: 'May not the pleasure for us remain if we set our love upon the
beauty of the swallow's flight?'

There was, for a girl, a bit of idea, real idea, in that meaning, of
course, the picture we are to have of the bird's wings in motion, it has
often been admired. Oh! not much of an idea in itself: feminine and
vague. But it was pertinent, opportune; in this way she stimulated. And
the girl who could think it, and call on a Mrs. Marsett, was of the class
of mixtures properly to be handed over to chemical experts for analysis!

She had her aspirations on behalf of her sex: she and Mademoiselle de
Seilles discussed them; women were to do this, do that:--necessarily a
means of instructing a girl to learn what they did do. If the lower part
of her face had been as reassuring to him as the upper, he might have put
a reluctant faith in the pure-mindedness of these aspirations, without
reverting to her origin, and also to recent rumours of her father and
Lady Grace Halley. As it was, he inquired of the cognizant, whether an
intellectual precocity, devoted by preference to questions affecting the
state of women, did not rather more than suggest the existence of urgent
senses likewise. She, a girl under twenty, had an interest in public
matters, and she called on a Mrs. Marsett. To plead her simplicity, was
to be absolutely ignorant of her.

He neighboured sagacity when he pointed that interrogation relating to
Nesta's precociousness of the intelligence. For, as they say in
dactylomancy, the 'psychical' of women are not disposed in their
sensitive early days to dwell upon the fortunes of their sex: a thought
or two turns them facing away, with the repugnant shiver. They worship at
a niche in the wall. They cannot avoid imputing some share of foulness to
them that are for scouring the chamber; and the civilized male, keeping
his own chamber locked, quite shares their pale taper's view. The
full-blooded to the finger-tips, on the other hand, are likely to be
drawn to the subject, by noble inducement as often as by base: Nature at
flood being the cause in either instance. This young Nature of the good
and the bad, is the blood which runs to power of heart as well as to
thirsts of the flesh. Then have men to sound themselves, to discover how
much of Nature their abstract honourable conception or representative
eidolon of young women will bear without going to pieces; and it will not
be much, unless they shall have taken instruction from the poet's pen:
for a view possibly of Nature at work to cast the slough, when they see
her writhing as in her ugliest old throes. If they have learnt of
Nature's priest to respect her, they will less distrust those rare
daughters of hers who are moved by her warmth to lift her out of slime.
It is by her own live warmth that it has to be done: cold worship at a
niche in the wall will not do it.--Well, there is an index, for the
enlargement of your charity.

But facts were Dudley's teachers. Physically, morally, mentally, he read
the world through facts; that is to say, through the facts he
encountered: and he was in consequence foredoomed to a succession of
bumps; all the heavier from his being, unlike the horned kind, not
unimpressible by the hazy things outside his experience. Even at his
darkest over Nesta, it was his indigestion of the misconduct of her
parents, which denied to a certain still small advocate within him the
right to raise a voice: that good fellow struck the attitude for
pleading, and had to be silent; for he was Instinct; at best a stammering
speaker in the Court of the wigged Facts. Instinct of this Nesta Radnor's
character would have said a brave word, but for her deeds bearing witness
to her inheritance of a lawlessly adventurous temperament.

What to do? He was no nearer to an answer when the wintry dusk had fallen
on the promenading crowds. To do nothing, is the wisdom of those who have
seen fools perish. Facts had not taught him, that the doing nothing, for
a length of days after the first shock he sustained, was the reason of
how it came that Nesta knitted closer her acquaintance with the
'agreeable lady' she mentioned in her letter to Cronidge. Those excellent
counsellors of a mercantile community gave him no warnings, that the
'masterly inactive' part, so greatly esteemed by him for the conduct of
public affairs, might be perilous in dealings with a vivid girl: nor a
hint, that when facts continue undigested, it is because the sensations
are as violent as hysterical females to block them from the
understanding. His Robin Goodfellow instinct tried to be serviceable at a
crux of his meditations, where Edith Averst's consumptive brothers waved
faded hands at her chances of inheriting largely. Superb for the chances:
but what of her offspring? And the other was a girl such as the lusty
Dame Dowager of fighting ancestors would have signalled to the heir of
the House's honours for the perpetuation of his race. No doubt: and the
venerable Dame (beautiful in her old-lace frame, or say foliage) of the
Ages backward, temp: Ed: III. inflated him with a thought of her: and his
readings in modern books on heredity, pure blood, physical regeneration,
pronounced approval of Nesta Radnor: and thereupon instinct opened mouth
to speak; and a lockjaw seized it under that scowl of his presiding
mistrust of Nature.

He clung to his mistrust the more because of a warning he had from the
silenced natural voice: somewhat as we may behold how the Conservatism of
a Class, in a world of all the evidences showing that there is no stay to
things, comes of the intuitive discernment of its finality. His mistrust
was his own; and Nesta was not; not yet; though a step would make her his
own. Instinct prompting to the step, was a worthless adviser. It spurred
him, nevertheless.

He called at the Club for his cousin Southweare, with whom he was not in
sympathy; and had information that, Southweare said, 'made the girl out
all right.' Girls in these days do things which the sainted stay-at-homes
preceding them would not have dreamed of doing. Something had occurred,
relating to Major Worrell: he withdrew Miss Radnor's name, acknowledged
himself mistaken or amended his report of her, in some way, not quite
intelligible. Dudley was accosted by Simeon Fenellan; subsequently by
Dartrey. There was gossip over the latter gentleman's having been up
before the magistrate, talk of a queer kind of stick, and Dartrey said,
laughing, to Simeon: 'Rather lucky I bled the rascal';--whatever the
meaning. She nursed one of her adorations for this man, who had
yesterday, apparently, joined in a street-fray; so she partook of the
stain of the turbid defacing all these disorderly people.

At his hotel at breakfast the next morning, a newspaper furnished an
account of Captain Dartrey Fenellan's participation in the strife, after
mention of him as nephew of the Earl of Clanconan, 'now a visitor to our
town'; and his deeds were accordant with his birth. Such writing was
enough to send Dudley an eager listener to Colney Durance. What a people!

Mr. Dartrey Fenellan's card compelled Dudley presently to receive him.

Dartrey, not debarred by considerations, that an allusion to Miss Radnor
could be conveyed only in the most delicately obscure manner, spared him
no more than the plain English of his relations with her. Requested to
come to the Club, at a certain hour of the afternoon, that he might hear
Major Worrell's personal contradiction of scandal involving the young
lady's name, together with his apology, etc., Dudley declined: and he was
obliged to do it curtly; words were wanting. They are hard to find for
wounded sentiments rendered complex by an infusion of policy. His present
mood, with the something new to digest, held the going to Major Worrell a
wrong step; he behaved as if the speaking to Dartrey Fenellan pledged him
hardly less. And besides he had a physical abhorrence, under dictate of
moral reprobation, of the broad-shouldered sinewy man, whose look of wiry
alertness pictured the previous day's gory gutters.

Dartrey set sharp eyes on him for an instant, bowed; and went.




CHAPTER XXXVI

NESTA AND HER FATHER

The day of Nesta's return was one of a number of late when Victor was
robbed of his walk Westward by Lady Grace Halley, who seduced his
politeness with her various forms of blandishment to take a seat in her
carriage; and she was a practical speaker upon her quarter of the world
when she had him there. Perhaps she was right in saying--though she had
no right to say--that he and she together might have the world under
their feet. It was one of those irritating suggestions which expedite us
up to a bald ceiling, only to make us feel the gas-bladder's tight
extension upon emptiness: It moved him to examine the poor value of his
aim, by tying him to the contemptible means: One estimate involved the
other, whichever came first. Somewhere he had an idea, that would lift
and cleanse all degradations. But it did seem as if he were not enjoying:
things pleasant enough in the passage of them were barren, if not
prickly, in the retrospect.

He sprang out at the head of the park, for a tramp round it, in the gloom
of the girdle of lights, to recover his deadened relish of the thin
phantasmal strife to win an intangible prize. His dulled physical system
asked, as with the sensations of a man at the start from sleep in the
hurrying grip of steam, what on earth he wanted to get, and what was the
substance of his gains: what! if other than a precipitous intimacy, a
deep crumbling over deeper, with a little woman amusing him in remarks of
a whimsical nudity; hardly more. Nay, not more! he said; and at the end
of twenty paces, he saw much more; the campaign gathered a circling
suggestive brilliancy, like the lamps about the winter park; the Society,
lured with glitter, hooked by greed, composed a ravishing picture; the
little woman was esteemed as a serviceable lieutenant; and her hand was a
small soft one, agreeable to fondle--and avaunt! But so it is in war: we
must pay for our allies. What if it had been, that he and she together,
with their united powers . . . ? He dashed the silly vision aside, as
vainer than one of the bubble-empires blown by boys; and it broke,
showing no heart in it. His heart was Nataly's.

Let Colney hint his worst; Nataly bore the strain, always did bear any
strain coming in the round of her duties: and if she would but walk, or
if she danced at parties, she would scatter the fits of despondency
besetting the phlegmatic, like this day's breeze the morning fog; or as
he did with two minutes of the stretch of legs.

Full of the grandeur of that black pit of the benighted London, with its
ocean-voice of the heart at beat along the lighted outer ring, Victor
entered at his old door of the two houses he had knocked into one: a
surprise for Fredi!--and heard that his girl had arrived in the morning.

'And could no more endure her absence from her Mammy O!' The songful
satirical line spouted in him, to be flung at his girl, as he ran
upstairs to the boudoir off the drawing-room.

He peeped in. It was dark. Sensible of presences, he gradually discerned
a thick blot along the couch to the right of the door, and he drew near.
Two were lying folded together; mother and daughter. He bent over them.
His hand was taken and pressed by Fredi's; she spoke; she said tenderly:
'Father.' Neither of the two made a movement. He heard the shivering rise
of a sob, that fell. The dry sob going to the waste breath was Nataly's.
His girl did not speak again.

He left them. He had no thought until he stood in his dressing-room, when
he said 'Good!' For those two must have been lying folded together during
the greater part of the day: and it meant, that the mother's heart had
opened; the girl knew. Her tone: 'Father,' sweet, was heavy, too, with
the darkness it came out of.

So she knew. Good. He clasped them both in his heart; tempering his pity
of those dear ones with the thought, that they were of the sex which
finds enjoyment in a day of the mutual tear; and envying them; he
strained at a richness appearing in the sobs of their close union.

All of his girl's loving soul flew to her mother; and naturally: She
would not be harsh on her father. She would say he loved! And true: he
did love, he does love; loves no woman but the dear mother.

He flicked a short wring of the hand having taken pressure from an alien
woman's before Fredi pressed it, and absolved himself in the act;
thinking, How little does a woman know how true we can be to her when we
smell at a flower here and there!--There they are, stationary; women the
flowers, we the bee; and we are faithful in our seeming volatility;
faithful to the hive!--And if women are to be stationary, the reasoning
is not so bad. Funny, however, if they here and there imitatively spread
a wing, and treat men in that way? It is a breach of the convention; we
pay them our homage, that they may serve as flowers, not to be volatile
tempters. Nataly never had been one of the sort: Lady Grace was. No
necessity existed for compelling the world to bow to Lady Grace, while on
behalf of his Nataly he had to . . . Victor closed the curtain over a
gulf-revealed by an invocation of Nature, and showing the tremendous
force he partook of so largely, in her motive elements of the devourer.
Horrid to behold, when we need a gracious presentation of the
circumstances. She is a splendid power for as long as we confine her
between the banks: but she has a passion to discover cracks; and if we
give her headway, she will find one, and drive at it, and be through,
uproarious in her primitive licentiousness, unless we labour body and
soul like Dutchmen at the dam. Here she was, and not desired, almost
detested! Nature detested! It had come about through the battle for
Nataly; chiefly through Mrs. Burman's tenacious hold of the filmy thread
she took for life and was enabled to use as a means for the perversion
besides bar to the happiness of creatures really living. We may well
marvel at the Fates, and tell them they are not moral agents!

Victor's reflections came across Colney Durance, who tripped and stopped
them.

Dressed with his customary celerity, he waited for Nesta, to show her the
lighted grand double drawing-room: a further proof of how Fortune
favoured him: she was to be told, how he one day expressed a wish for
greater space, and was informed on the next, that the neighbour house was
being vacated, and the day following he was in treaty for the purchase of
it; returning from Tyrol, he found his place habitable.

Nesta came. Her short look at him was fond, her voice not faltering; she
laid her hand under his arm and walked round the spacious room, praising
the general design, admiring the porcelain, the ferns, friezes, hangings,
and the grand piano, the ebony inlaid music-stands, the firegrates and
plaques, the ottomans, the tone of neutral colour that, as in sound,
muted splendour. He told her it was a reception night, with music: and
added: 'I miss my . . . seen anybody lately?'

'Mr. Sowerby?' said she. 'He was to have escorted me back. He may have
overslept himself.'

She spoke it plainly; when speaking of the dear good ladies, she set a
gentle humour at play, and comforted him, as she intended, with a
souvenir of her lively spirit, wanting only in the manner of gaiety.

He allowed, that she could not be quite gay.

More deeply touched the next minute, he felt in her voice, in her look,
in her phrasing of speech, an older, much older daughter than the Fredi
whom he had conducted to Moorsedge. 'Kiss me,' he said.

She turned to him full-front, and kissed his right cheek and left, and
his forehead, saying: 'My love! my papa! my own dear dada!' all the words
of her girlhood in her new sedateness; and smiling: like the moral
crepuscular of a sunlighted day down a not totally inanimate Sunday
Londen street.

He strained her to his breast. 'Mama soon be here?'

'Soon.'

That was well. And possibly at the present moment applying, with her
cunning hand, the cosmetics and powders he could excuse for a concealment
of the traces of grief.

Satisfied in being a superficial observer, he did not spy to see more
than the world would when Nataly entered the dining-room at the quiet
family dinner. She performed her part for his comfort, though not
prattling; and he missed his Fredi's delicious warble of the prattle
running rill-like over our daily humdrum. Simeon Fenellan would have
helped. Then suddenly came enlivenment: a recollection of news in the
morning's paper. 'No harm before Fredi, my dear. She's a young woman now.
And no harm, so to speak-at least, not against the Sanfredini. She has
donned her name again, and a villa on Como, leaving her
'duque';--paragraph from a Milanese musical Journal; no particulars. Now,
mark me, we shall have her at Lakelands in the Summer. If only we could
have her now!'

'It would be a pleasure,' said Nataly. Her heart had a blow in the
thought, that a lady of this kind would create the pleasure by not
bringing criticism.

'The godmother?' he glistened upon Nesta.

She gave him low half-notes of the little blue butterfly's imitation of
the superb contralto; and her hand and head at turn to hint the
theatrical operatic attitude.

'Delicious!' he cried, his eyelids were bedewed at the vision of the
three of them planted in the past; and here again, out of the dark wood,
where something had required to be said, and had been said; and all was
happily over, owing to the goodness and sweetness of the two dear
innocents;--whom heaven bless! Jealousy of their naturally closer
heart-at-heart, had not a whisper for him; part of their goodness and
sweetness was felt to be in the not excluding him.

Nesta engaged to sing one of the 'old duets with her mother. She saw her
mother's breast lift in a mechanical effort to try imaginary notes, as if
doubtful of her capacity, more at home in the dumb deep sigh they fell
to. Her mother's heroism made her a sacred woman to the thoughts of the
girl, overcoming wonderment at the extreme submissiveness.

She put a screw on her mind to perceive the rational object there might
be for causing her mother to go through tortures in receiving and
visiting; and she was arrested by the louder question, whether she could
think such a man as her father irrational.

People with resounding names, waves of a steady stream, were announced by
Arlington, just as in the days, that seemed remote, before she went to
Moorsedge; only they were more numerous, and some of the titles had
ascended a stage. There were great lords, there were many great ladies;
and Lady Grace Halley shuffling amid them, like a silken shimmer in
voluminous robes.

They crowded about their host where he stood. 'He, is their Law!' Colney
said, speaking unintelligibly, in the absence of the Simeon Fenellan
regretted so loudly by Mr. Beaves Urmsing. They had an air of
worshipping, and he of swimming.

There were also City magnates, and Lakelands' neighbours: the gentleman
representing Pride of Port, Sir Abraham Quatley; and Colonel Corfe; Sir
Rodwell and Lady Blachington; Mrs. Fanning; Mr. Caddis. Few young men and
maids were seen. Dr. John Cormyn came without his wife, not mentioning
her. Mrs. Peter Yatt touched the notes for voices at the piano. Priscilla
Graves was a vacancy, and likewise the Rev. Septimus Barmby. Peridon and
Catkin, and Mr. Pempton took their usual places. There was no fluting. A
famous Canadian lady was the principal singer. A Galician violinist,
zig-zagging extreme extensions and contractions of his corporeal frame in
execution, and described by Colney as 'Paganini on wall,' failed to
supplant Durandarte in Nesta's memory. She was asked by Lady Grace for
the latest of Dudley. Sir Abraham Quatley named him with handsome
emphasis. Great dames caressed her; openly approved; shadowed the future
place among them.

Victor alluded at night to Mrs. John Cormyn's absence. He said: 'A
homoeopathic doctor's wife!' nothing more; and by that little, he
prepared Nesta for her mother's explanation. The great London people,
ignorant or not, were caught by the strong tide he created, and carried
on it. But there was a bruiting of the secret among their set; and the
one to fall away from her, Nataly marvellingly named Mrs. John Cormyn;
whose marriage was of her making. She did not disapprove Priscilla's
behaviour. Priscilla had come to her and, protesting affection, had
openly stated, that she required time and retirement to recover her
proper feelings. Nataly smiled a melancholy criticism of an inconsequent
or capricious woman, in relating to Nesta certain observations Priscilla
had dropped upon poor faithful Mr. Pempton, because of his concealment
from her of his knowledge of things for this faithful gentleman had been
one of the few not ignorant. The rumour was traceable to the City.

'Mother, we walk on planks,' Nesta said.

Nataly answered: 'You will grow used to it.'

Her mother's habitual serenity in martyrdom was deceiving. Nesta had a
transient suspicion, that she had grown, from use, to like the whirl of
company, for oblivion in the excitement; and as her remembrance of her
own station among the crowding people was a hot flush, the difference of
their feelings chilled her.

Nataly said: 'It is to-morrow night again; we do not rest.' She smiled;
and at once the girl read woman's armour on the dear face, and asked
herself, Could I be so brave? The question following was a speechless
wave, that surged at her father. She tried to fathom the scheme he
entertained. The attempt obscured her conception of the man he was. She
could not grasp him, being too young for knowing, that young heads cannot
obtain a critical hold upon one whom they see grandly succeeding it is
the sun's brilliance to their eyes.

Mother and daughter slept together that night, and their embrace was
their world.

Nesta delighted her father the next day by walking beside him into the,
City, as far as the end of the Embankment, where the carriage was in
waiting with her maid to bring her back; and at his mere ejaculation of a
wish, the hardy girl drove down in the afternoon for the walk home with
him. Lady Grace Halley was at the office. 'I'm an incorrigible Stock
Exchange gambler,' she said.

'Only,' Victor bade her beware, 'Mines are undulating in movement, and
their heights are a preparation for their going down.'

She said she 'liked a swing.'

Nesta looked at them in turn.

The day after and the day after, Lady Grace was present. She made play
with Dudley's name.

This coming into the City daily of a girl, for the sake of walking back
in winter weather with her father, struck her as ambiguous: either a
jealous foolish mother's device, or that of a weak man beating about for
protection. But the woman of the positive world soon read to the
contrary; helped a little by the man, no doubt. She read rather too much
to the contrary, and took the pedestrian girl for perfect simplicity in
her tastes, when Nesta had so far grown watchful as to feel relieved by
the lady's departure. Her mother, without sympathy for the lady, was too
great of soul for jealousy. Victor had his Nataly before him at a hint
from Lady Grace: and he went somewhat further than the exact degree when
affirming, that Nataly could not scheme, and was incapable of
suspecting.--Nataly could perceive things with a certain accuracy: she
would not stoop to a meanness. 'Plot? Nataly?' said he, and shrugged. In
fact, the void of plot, drama, shuffle of excitement, reflected upon
Nataly. He might have seen as tragic as ever dripped on Stage, had he
looked.

But the walk Westward with his girl, together with pride in a daughter
who clove her way through all weathers, won his heart to exultation. He
told her: 'Fredi does her dada so much good'; not telling her in what, or
opening any passage to the mystery of the man he was. She was trying to
be a student of life, with her eyes down upon hard earth, despite of her
winged young head; she would have compassed him better had he dilated in
sublime fashion; but he baffled her perusal of a man of power by the
simpleness of his enjoyment of small things coming in his way;--the
lighted shops, the crowd, emergence from the crowd, or the meeting near
midwinter of a soft warm wind along the Embankment, and dark Thames
magnificently coroneted over his grimy flow. There is no grasping of one
who quickens us.

His flattery of his girl, too, restored her broken feeling of personal
value; it permeated her nourishingly from the natural breath of him that
it was.

At times he touched deep in humaneness; and he set her heart leaping on
the flash of a thought to lay it bare, with the secret it held, for his
help. That was a dream. She could more easily have uttered the words to
Captain Dartrey, after her remembered abashing holy tremour of the vision
of doing it and casting herself on noblest man's compassionateness; and
her imagined thousand emotions;--a rolling music within her, a wreath of
cloudglory in her sky;--which had, as with virgins it may be, plighted
her body to him for sheer urgency of soul; drawn her by a single
unwitting-to-brain, conscious-in-blood, shy curl outward of the sheathing
leaf to the flowering of woman to him; even to the shore of that strange
sea, where the maid stands choosing this one man for her destiny, as in a
trance. So are these young ones unfolded, shade by shade; and a shade is
all the difference with them; they can teach the poet to marvel at the
immensity of vitality in 'the shadow of a shade.'

Her father shut the glimpse of a possible speaking to him of Mrs.
Marsett, with a renewal of his eulogistic allusions to Dudley Sowerby:
the 'perfect gentleman, good citizen'; prospective heir to an earldom
besides. She bowed to Dudley's merits; she read off the honorific
pedimental letters of a handsome statue, for a sign to herself that she
passed it.

She was unjust, as Victor could feel, though he did not know how coldly
unjust. For among the exorbitant requisitions upon their fellow-creatures
made by the young, is the demand, that they be definite: no mercy is in
them for the transitional. And Dudley--and it was under her influence,
and painfully, not ignobly--was in process of development: interesting to
philosophers, if not to maidens.

Victor accused her of paying too much heed to Colney Durance's epigrams
upon their friends. He quite joined with his English world in its
opinion, that epigrams are poor squibs when they do not come out of great
guns. Epigrams fired at a venerable nation, are surely the poorest of
popgun paper pellets. The English kick at the insolence, when they are
not in the mood for pelleting themselves, or when the armed Foreigner is
overshadowing and braceing. Colney's pretentious and laboured Satiric
Prose Epic of 'THE RIVAL TONGUES,' particularly offended him, as being a
clever aim at no hitting; and sustained him, inasmuch as it was an acid
friend's collapse. How could Colney expect his English to tolerate such a
spiteful diatribe! The suicide of Dr. Bouthoin at San Francisco was the
finishing stroke to the chances of success of the Serial;--although we
are promised splendid evolutions on the part of Mr. Semhians; who, after
brilliant achievements with bat and ball, abandons those weapons of Old
England's modern renown, for a determined wrestle with our English
pronunciation of words, and rescue of the spelling of them from the
printer. His headache over the present treatment of the verb 'To bid,'
was a quaint beginning for one who had soon to plead before Japanese, and
who acknowledged now 'in contrition of spirit,' that in formerly opposing
the scheme for an Academy, he helped to the handing of our noble language
to the rapid reporter of news for an apathetic public. Further, he
discovered in astonishment the subordination of all literary Americans to
the decrees of their literary authorities; marking a Transatlantic point
of departure, and contrasting ominously with the unruly Islanders
'grunting the higgledy-piggledy of their various ways, in all the
porker's gut-gamut at the rush to the trough.' After a week's privation
of bat and ball, he is, lighted or not, a gas-jet of satire upon his
countrymen. As for the 'pathetic sublimity of the Funeral of Dr.
Bouthoin,' Victor inveighed against an impious irony in the over dose of
the pathos; and the same might be suspected in Britannia's elegy upon
him, a strain of hot eulogy throughout. Mr. Semhians, all but
treasonably, calls it, Papboat and Brandy:--'our English literary diet of
the day': stimulating and not nourishing. Britannia's mournful
anticipation, that 'The shroud enwinding this my son is mine!'--should
the modern generation depart from the track of him who proved himself the
giant in mainly supporting her glory--was, no doubt, a high pitch of the
note of Conservatism. But considering, that Dr. Bouthoin 'committed
suicide under a depression of mind produced by a surfeit of unaccustomed
dishes, upon a physical system inspired by the traditions of exercise,
and no longer relieved by the practice'--to translate from Dr. Gannius:
we are again at war with the writer's reverential tone, and we know not
what to think: except, that Mr. Durance was a Saturday meat market's
butcher in the Satiric Art.

Nesta found it pleasanter to see him than to hear of his work: which, to
her present feeling, was inhuman. As little as our native public, had she
then any sympathy for the working in the idea: she wanted throbs, visible
aims, the Christian incarnate; she would have preferred the tale of
slaughter--periodically invading all English classes as a flush from the
undrained lower, Vikings all--to frigid sterile Satire. And truly it is
not a fruit-bearing rod. Colney had to stand on the defence of it against
the damsel's charges. He thought the use of the rod, while expressing
profound regret at a difference of opinion between him and those noble
heathens, beneficial for boys; but in relation to their seniors, and
particularly for old gentlemen, he thought that the sharpest rod to cut
the skin was the sole saving of them. Insensibility to Satire, he likened
to the hard-mouthed horse; which is doomed to the worser thing in
consequence. And consequently upon the lack of it, and of training to
appreciate it, he described his country's male venerables as being
distinguishable from annuitant spinsters only in presenting themselves
forked.

'He is unsuccessful and embittered, Victor said to Nesta. 'Colney will
find in the end, that he has lost his game and soured himself by never
making concessions. Here's this absurd Serial--it fails, of course; and
then he has to say, it's because he won't tickle his English, won't enter
into a "frowzy complicity" with their tastes.'

'But--I think of Skepsey honest creatures respect Mr. Durance, and he is
always ready to help them,' said Nesta.

'If he can patronize.'

'Does he patronize me, dada?'

'You are one of his exceptions. Marry a title and live in state--and then
hear him! I am successful, and the result of it is, that he won't
acknowledge wisdom in anything I say or do; he will hardly acknowledge
the success. It is "a dirty road to success," he says. So that, if
successful, I must have rolled myself in mire. I compelled him to admit
he was wrong about your being received at Moorsedge: a bit of a triumph!'

Nesta's walks with her father were no loss of her to Nataly; the girl
came back to her bearing so fresh and so full a heart; and her father was
ever prouder of her: he presented new features of her in his quotations
of her sayings, thoughtful sayings. 'I declare she helps one to think,'
he said. 'It 's not precocity; it 's healthy inquiry. She brings me
nearer ideas of my own, not yet examined, than any one else does. I say,
what a wife for a man!'

'She takes my place beside you, dear, now I am not quite strong,' said
Nataly. 'You have not seen . . .?'

'Dudley Sowerby? He's at Cronidge, I believe. His elder brother's in a
bad way. Bad business, this looking to a death.'

Nataly eyes revealed a similar gulf.

Let it be cast on Society, then! A Society opposing Nature forces us to
these murderous looks upon impediments. But what of a Society in the
dance with Nature? Victor did not approve of that. He began, under the
influence of Nesta's companionship, to see the Goddess Nature there is in
a chastened nature. And this view shook the curtain covering his lost
Idea. He felt sure he should grasp it soon and enter into its daylight: a
muffled voice within him said, that he was kept waiting to do so by the
inexplicable tardiness of a certain one to rise ascending to her
spiritual roost. She was now harmless to strike: Themison, Carling,
Jarniman, even the Rev. Groseman Buttermore, had been won to the cause of
humanity. Her ascent, considering her inability to do further harm below,
was most mysteriously delayed. Owing to it, in a manner almost as
mysterious, he was kept crossing a bridge having a slippery bit on it.
Thanks to his gallant Fredi, he had found his feet again. But there was a
bruise where, to his honour, he felt tenderest. And Fredi away, he might
be down again--for no love of a slippery bit, proved slippery, one might
guess, by a predecessor or two. Ta-ta-ta-to and mum! Still, in justice to
the little woman, she had been serviceable.

She would be still more so, if a member of Parliament now on his back
here we are with the murder-eye again!

Nesta's never speaking of Lakelands clouded him a little, as an
intimation of her bent of mind.

'And does my girl come to her dada to-day?' he said, on the fifth morning
since her return; prepared with a villanous resignation to hear, that
this day she abstained, though he had the wish for her coming.

'Why, don't you know,' said she, 'we all meet to have tea in Mr.
Durance's chambers; and I walk back with you, and there we are joined by
mama; and we are to have a feast of literary celebrities.'

'Colney's selection of them! And Simeon Fenellan, I hope. Perhaps
Dartrey. Perhaps . . . eh?'

She reddened. So Dudley Sowerby's unspoken name could bring the blush to
her cheeks. Dudley had his excuses in his brother's condition. His
father's health, too, was--but this was Dudley calculating. Where there
are coronets, calculations of this sort must needs occur; just as where
there are complications. Odd, one fancies it, that we walking along the
pavement of civilized life, should be perpetually summoning Orcus to our
aid, for the sake of getting a clear course.

'And supposing a fog, my dearie?' he said.

'The daughter in search of her father carries a lamp to light her to him
through densest fogs as well as over deserts,' etc. She declaimed a long
sentence, to set the ripple running in his features; and when he left the
room for a last word with Armandine, she flung arms round her mother's
neck, murmuring: 'Mother! mother!' a cry equal to 'I am sure I do right,'
and understood so by Nataly approving it; she too on the line of her
instinct, without an object in sight.




CHAPTER XXXVII

THE MOTHER-THE DAUGHTER

Taking Nesta's hand, on her entry into his chambers with her father,
Colney Durance bowed over it and kissed it. The unusual performance had a
meaning; she felt she was praised. It might be because she made herself
her father's companion. 'I can't persuade him to put on a great-coat,'
she said. 'You would defeat his aim at the particular waistcoat of his
ambition,' said Colney, goaded to speak, not anxious to be heard.

He kept her beside him, leading her about for introductions to multiform
celebrities of both sexes; among them the gentleman editing the Magazine
which gave out serially THE RIVAL TONGUES: and there was talk of a
dragon-throated public's queer appetite in Letters. The pained Editor
deferentially smiled at her cheerful mention of Delphica. 'In, book form,
perhaps!' he remarked, with plaintive' resignation; adding: 'You read
it?' And a lady exclaimed: 'We all read it!'

But we are the elect, who see signification and catch flavour; and we are
reminded of an insatiable monster how sometimes capricious is his gorge.
'He may happen to be in the humour for a shaking!' Colney's poor
consolation it was to say of the prospects of his published book: for the
funny monster has been known to like a shaking.

'He takes it kinder tickled,' said Fenellan, joining the group and
grasping Nesta's hand with a warmth that thrilled her and set her
guessing. 'A taste of his favourite Cayenne lollypop, Colney; it fetches
the tear he loves to shed, or it gives him digestive heat in the bag of
his literary receptacle-fearfully relaxed and enormous! And no wonder;
his is to lie him down on notion of the attitude for reading, his back;
and he has in a jiffy the funnel of the Libraries inserted into his
mouth, and he feels the publishers pouring their gallons through it
unlimitedly; never crying out, which he can't; only swelling, which he's
obliged to do, with a non-nutritious inflation; and that's his
intellectual enjoyment; bearing a likeness to the horrible old torture of
the baillir d'eau; and he's doomed to perish in the worst book-form of
dropsy. You, my dear Colney, have offended his police or excise, who
stand by the funnel, in touch with his palate, to make sure that nothing
above proof is poured in; and there's your misfortune. He's not half a
bad fellow, you find when you haven't got to serve him.'

'Superior to his official parasites, one supposes!' Colney murmured.

The celebrities were unaffectedly interested in a literary failure having
certain merits; they discussed it, to compliment the crownless author;
and the fervider they, the more was he endowed to read the meanness
prompting the generosity. Publication of a book, is the philosopher's
lantern upon one's fellows.

Colney was caught away from his private manufactory of acids by hearing
Simeon Fenellan relate to Victor some of the recent occurrences at
Brighton. Simeon's tone was unsatisfying; Colney would have the word; he
was like steel on the grindstone for such a theme of our national
grotesque-sublime.

'That Demerara Supple-jack, Victor! Don't listen to Simeon; he's a man of
lean narrative, fit to chronicle political party wrangles and such like
crop of carcase prose: this is epical. In DRINK we have Old England's
organic Epic; Greeks and Trojans; Parliamentary Olympus, ennobled
brewers, nasal fanatics, all the machinery to hand. Keep a straight eye
on the primary motives of man, you'll own the English produce the
material for proud verse; they're alive there! Dartrey's Demerara makes a
pretty episode of the battle. I haven't seen it--if it's possible to look
on it: but I hear it is flexible, of a vulgar appearance in repose,
Jove's lightning at one time, the thong of AEacus at another. Observe
Dartrey marching off to the Station, for the purpose of laying his
miraculous weapon across the shoulders of a son of Mars, who had
offended. But we have his name, my dear Victor! His name,
Simeon?--Worrell; a Major Worrell: his offence being probably, that he
obtained military instruction in the Service, and left it at his
convenience, for our poor patch and tatter British Army to take in his
place another young student, who'll grow up to do similarly. And Dartrey,
we assume, is off to stop that system. You behold Sir Dartrey twirling
the weapon in preparatory fashion; because he is determined we shall have
an army of trained officers instead of infant amateurs heading heroic
louts. Not a thought of Beer in Dartrey!--always unpatriotic, you 'll
say. Plato entreats his absent mistress to fix eyes on a star: eyes on
Beer for the uniting of you English! I tell you no poetic fiction. Seeing
him on his way, thus terribly armed, and knowing his intent, Venus, to
shield a former favourite servant of Mars, conjured the most diverting of
interventions, in the shape of a young woman in a poke-bonnet, and
Skepsey, her squire, marching with a dozen or so, informing bedevilled
mankind of the hideousness of our hymnification when it is not under
secluding sanction of the Edifice, and challengeing criticism; and that
was hard by, and real English, in the form of bludgeons, wielded by a
battalion of the national idol Bungay Beervat's boys; and they fell upon
the hymners. Here you fill in with pastoral similes. They struck the maid
adored by Skepsey. And that was the blow which slew them! Our little man
drove into the press with a pair of fists able to do their work. A
valiant skiff upon a sea of enemies, he was having it on the nob, and
suddenly the Demerara lightened. It flailed to thresh. Enough. to say,
brains would have come. The Bungays made a show of fight. No lack of
blood in them, to stock a raw shilling's worth or gush before Achilles
rageing. You perceive the picture, you can almost sing the ballad. We
want only a few names of the fallen. It was the carving of a maitre chef,
according to Skepsey: right-left-and point, with supreme precision: they
fell, accurately sliced from the joint. Having done with them, Dartrey
tossed the Demerara to Skepsey, and washed his hands of battle; and he
let his major go unscathed. Phlebotomy sufficient for the day!'

Nesta's ears hummed with the name of Major Worrell.

'Skepsey did come back to London with a rather damaged frontispiece,'
Victor said. 'He can't have joined those people?'

'They may suit one of your militant peacemakers,' interposed Fenellan.
'The most placable creatures alive, and the surest for getting-up a
shindy.'

'Suit him! They're the scandal of our streets.' Victor was pricked with a
jealousy of them for beguiling him of his trusty servant.

'Look at your country, see where it shows its vitality,' said Colney.
'You don't see elsewhere any vein in movement-movement,' he harped on the
word Victor constantly employed to express the thing he wanted to see.
'Think of that, when the procession sets your teeth on edge. They're
honest foes of vice, and they move:--in England! Pulpit-preaching has no
effect. For gross maladies, gross remedies. You may judge of what you are
by the quality of the cure. Puritanism, I won't attempt to paint--it
would barely be decent; but compare it with the spectacle of English
frivolity, and you'll admit it to be the best show you make. It may still
be the saving of you--on the level of the orderly ox: I 've not observed
that it aims at higher. And talking of the pulpit, Barmby is off to the
East, has accepted a Shoreditch curacy, Skepsey tells me.'

'So there's the reason for our not seeing him!' Victor turned to Nesta.

'Papa, you won't be angry with Skepsey if he has joined those people,'
said Nesta. 'I'm sure he thinks of serving his country, Mr. Durance.'

Colney smiled on her. 'And you too?'

'If women knew how!'

'They're hitting on more ways at present than the men--in England.'

'But, Mr. Durance, it speaks well for England when they're allowed the
chance here.'

'Good!' Fenellan exclaimed. 'And that upsets his placement of the modern
national genders: Germany masculine, France feminine, Old England what
remains.'

Victor ruffled and reddened on his shout of 'Neuter?'

Their circle widened. Nesta knew she was on promotion, by her being led
about and introduced to ladies. They were encouraging with her. One of
them, a Mrs. Marina Floyer, had recently raised a standard of feminine
insurrection. She said: 'I hear your praises from Mr. Durance. He rarely
praises. You have shown capacity to meditate on the condition of women,
he says.'

Nesta drew a shorter breath, with a hope at heart. She speculated in the
dark, as to whether her aim to serve and help was not so friendless. And
did Mr. Durance approve? But surely she stood in a glorious England if
there were men and women to welcome a girl to their councils. Oh! that is
the broad free England where gentlemen and gentlewomen accept of the
meanest aid to cleanse the land of its iniquities, and do not suffer
shame to smite a young face for touching upon horrors with a pure design.

She cried in her bosom: I feel! She had no other expression for that
which is as near as great natures may come to the conceiving of the
celestial spirit from an emissary angel; and she trembled, the fire ran
through her. It seemed to her, that she would be called to help or that
certainly they were nearing to an effacement of the woefullest of evils;
and if not helping, it would still be a blessedness for her to kneel
thanking heaven.

Society was being attacked and defended. She could but studiously listen.
Her father was listening. The assailant was a lady; and she had a
hearing, although she treated Society as a discrowned monarch on trial
for an offence against a more precious: viz., the individual cramped by
brutish laws: the individual with the ideas of our time, righteously
claiming expansion out of the clutches of a narrow old-world
disciplinarian-that giant hypocrite! She flung the gauntlet at externally
venerable Institutions; and she had a hearing, where horrification,
execration, the foul Furies of Conservatism would in a shortly antecedent
day have been hissing and snakily lashing, hounding her to expulsion.
Mrs. Marina Floyer gravely seconded her. Colney did the same. Victor
turned sharp on him. 'Yes,' Colney said; 'we unfold the standard of
extremes in this country, to get a single step taken: that's how we move:
we threaten death to get footway. Now, mark: Society's errors will be
admitted.'

A gentleman spoke. He began by admitting Society's errors. Nevertheless,
it so distinctly exists for the common good, that we may say of Society
in relation to the individual, it is the body to the soul. We may wash,
trim, purify, but we must not maim it. The assertion of our individuality
in opposition to the Government of Society--this existing Society--is a
toss of the cap for the erasure of our civilization, et caetera.

Platitudes can be of intense interest if they approach our case.--But, if
you please, we ask permission to wash, trim, purify, and we do not get
it.--But you have it! Because we take it at our peril; and you, who are
too cowardly to grant or withhold, call-up the revolutionary from the
pits by your slackness:--etc. There was a pretty hot debate. Both
assailant and defendant, to Victor's thinking, spoke well, and each the
right thing and he could have made use of both, but he could answer
neither. He beat about for the cause of this deficiency, and discovered
it in his position. Mentally, he was on the side of Society. Yet he was
annoyed to find the attack was so easily answerable when the defence
unfolded. But it was absurd to expect it would not be. And in fact, a
position secretly rebellious is equal to water on the brain for
stultifying us.

Before the controversy was over, a note in Nataly's handwriting called
him home. She wrote: 'Make my excuses. C. D. will give Nesta and some
lady dinner. A visitor here. Come alone, and without delay. Quite well,
robust. Impatient to consult with you, nothing else.'

Nesta was happy to stay; and Victor set forth.

The visitor? plainly Dudley. Nataly's trusting the girl to the chance of
some lady being present, was unlike her. Dudley might be tugging at the
cord; and the recent conversation upon Society, rendered one of its gilt
pillars particularly estimable.--A person in the debate had declared this
modern protest on behalf of individualism to represent Society's Criminal
Trial. And it is likely to be a long one. And good for the world, that we
see such a Trial!--Well said or not, undoubtedly Society is an old
criminal: not much more advanced than the state of spiritual worship
where bloody sacrifice was offered to a hungry Lord. But it has a case
for pleading. We may liken it, as we have it now, to the bumping
lumberer's raft; suitable along torrent waters until we come to smoother.
Are we not on waters of a certain smoothness at the reflecting
level?--enough to justify demands for a vessel of finer design. If
Society is to subsist, it must have the human with the logical argument
against the cry of the free-flags, instead of presenting a block's
obtuseness. That, you need not hesitate to believe, will be rolled
downward and disintegrated, sooner than later. A Society based on the
logical concrete of humane considerateness:--a Society prohibiting to
Mrs. Burman her wielding of a life-long rod . . . .

The personal element again to confuse inquiry!--And Skepsey and Barmby
both of them bent on doing work without inquiry of any sort! They were
enviable: they were good fellows. Victor clung to the theme because it
hinted of next door to his lost Idea. He rubbed the back of his head,
fancying a throb there. Are civilized creatures incapable of abstract
thought when their social position is dubious? For if so, we never can be
quit of those we forsake.--Apparently Mrs. Burman's unfathomed power lay
in her compelling him to summon the devilish in himself and play upon the
impish in Society, that he might overcome her.

Victor's house-door stopped this current.

Nataly took his embrace.

'Nothing wrong?' he said, and saw the something. It was a favourable
moment to tell her what she might not at another time regard as a small
affair. 'News in the City to-day of that South London borough being
vacated. Quatley urges me. A death again! I saw Pempton, too. Will you
credit me when I tell you he carries his infatuation so far, that he has
been investing in Japanese and Chinese Loans, because they are less
meat-eaters than others, and vegetarians are more stable, and outlast us
all!--Dudley the visitor?' 'Mr. Sowerby has been here,' she said, in a
shaking low voice.

Victor held her hand and felt a squeeze more nervous than affectionate.

'To consult with me,' she added. 'My maid will go at ten to bring Nesta;
Mr. Durance I can count on, to see her safe home. Ah!' she wailed.

Victor nodded, saying: 'I guess. And, my love, you will receive Mrs. John
Cormyn to-morrow morning. I can't endure gaps. Gaps in our circle must
never be. Do I guess?--I spoke to Colney about bringing her home.'

Nataly sighed: 'Ah! make what provision we will! Evil--Mr. Sowerby has
had a great deal to bear.'

'A worldling may think so.'

Her breast heaved, and the wave burst: but her restraining of tears froze
her speech.

'Victor! Our Nesta! Mr. Sowerby is unable to explain. And how the Miss
Duvidneys! . . . At that Brighton!'--The voice he heard was not his
darling's deep rich note, it had dropped to toneless hoarseness: 'She has
been permitted to make acquaintance--she has been seen riding with--she
has called upon--Oh! it is one of those abandoned women. In her house!
Our girl! Our Nesta! She was insulted by a man in the woman's house. She
is talked of over Brighton. The mother!--the daughter! And grant me
this--that never was girl more carefully . . . never till she was taken
from me. Oh! do not forget. You will defend me? You will say, that her
mother did with all her soul strive . . . It is not a rumour. Mr. Sowerby
has had it confirmed.' A sob caught her voice.

Victor's hands caressed to console: 'Dudley does not propose to . . ?'

'Nesta must promise . . . But how it happened? How! An acquaintance
with--contact with!--Oh! cruel!' Each time she ceased speaking, the
wrinkles of a shiver went over her, and the tone was of tears coming, but
she locked them in.

'An accident!' said Victor; 'some misunderstanding--there can't be harm.
Of course, she promises--hasn't to promise. How could a girl distinguish!
He does not cast blame on her?'

'Dear, if you would go down to Dartrey to-morrow. He knows:--it is over
the Clubs there; he will tell you, before a word to Nesta. Innocent, yes!
Mr. Sowerby has not to be assured of that. Ignorant of the character of
the dreadful woman? Ah, if I could ever in anything think her ignorant!
She frightens me. Mr. Sowerby is indulgent. He does me justice. My duty
to her--I must defend myself--has been my first thought. I said in my
prayers--she at least! . . . We have to see the more than common reasons
why she, of all girls, should--he did not hint it, he was delicate: her
name must not be public.'

'Yes, yes, Dudley is without parallel as a gentleman,' said Victor. 'It
does not suit me to hear the word "indulgent." My dear, if you were down
there, you would discover that the talk was the talk of two or three men
seeing our girl ride by--and she did ride with a troop: why, we've
watched them along the parade, often. Clear as day how it happened! I'll
go down early to-morrow.'

He fancied Nataly was appeased. And even out of this annoyance, there was
the gain of her being won to favour Dudley's hitherto but tolerated suit.

Nataly also had the fancy, that the calm following on her anguish, was a
moderation of it. She was kept strung to confide in her girl by the
recent indebtedness to her for words heavenly in the strengthening
comfort they gave. But no sooner was she alone than her torturing
perplexities and her abasement of the hours previous to Victor's coming
returned.

For a girl of Nesta's head could not be deceived; she had come home with
a woman's intelligence of the world, hard knowledge of it--a knowledge
drawn from foul wells, the unhappy mother imagined: she dreaded to probe
to the depth of it. She had in her wounded breast the world's idea, that
corruption must come of the contact with impurity.

Nataly renewed her cry of despair: 'The mother!--the daughter!'--her sole
revelation of the heart's hollows in her stammered speaking to Victor.

She thanked heaven for the loneliness of her bed, where she could repeat:
'The mother!--the daughter!' hearing the world's words:--the daughter
excused, by reason of her having such a mother; the mother unpitied for
the bruiting of her brazen daughter's name: but both alike consigned to
the corners of the world's dust-heaps. She cried out, that her pride was
broken. Her pride, her last support of life, had gone to pieces. The
tears she restrained in Victor's presence, were called on to come now,
and she had none. It might be, that she had not strength for weeping. She
was very weak. Rising from bed to lock her door against Nesta's entry to
the room on her return at night, she could hardly stand: a chill and a
clouding overcame her. The quitted bed seemed the haven of a drifted
wreck to reach.

Victor tried the handle of a locked door in the dark of the early winter
morning. 'The mother!--the daughter!' had swung a pendulum for some time
during the night in him, too. He would rather have been subjected to the
spectacle of tears than have heard that toneless voice, as it were the
dry torrent-bed rolling blocks instead of melodious, if afflicting,
waters.

He told Nesta not to disturb her mother, and murmured of a headache:
'Though, upon my word, the best cure for mama would be a look into
Fredi's eyes!' he said, embracing his girl, quite believing in her, just
a little afraid of her.




CHAPTER XXXVIII

NATALY, NESTA, AND DARTREY FENELLAN

Pleasant things, that come to us too late for our savour of the sweetness
in them, toll ominously of life on the last walk to its end. Yesterday,
before Dudley Sowerby's visit, Nataly would have been stirred where the
tears we shed for happiness or repress at a flattery dwell when seeing
her friend Mrs. John Cormyn enter her boudoir and hearing her speak
repentantly, most tenderly. Mrs. John said: 'You will believe I have
suffered, dear; I am half my weight, I do think': and she did not set the
smile of responsive humour moving; although these two ladies had a key of
laughter between them. Nataly took her kiss; held her hand, and at the
parting kissed her. She would rather have seen her friend than not: so
far she differed from a corpse; but she was near the likeness to the dead
in the insensibility to any change of light shining on one who best loved
darkness and silence. She cried to herself wilfully, that her pride was
broken: as women do when they spurn at the wounding of a dignity they
cannot protect and die to see bleeding; for in it they live.

The cry came of her pride unbroken, sore bruised, and after a certain
space for recovery combative. She said:

Any expiation I could offer where I did injury, I would not refuse; I
would humble myself and bless heaven for being able to pay my debt--what
I can of it. All I contend against is, injustice. And she sank into
sensational protests of her anxious care of her daughter, too proud to
phrase them.

Her one great affliction, the scourging affliction of her utter
loneliness;--an outcast from her family; daily, and she knew not how,
more shut away from the man she loved; now shut away from her
girl;--seemed under the hand of the angel of God. The abandonment of her
by friends, was merely the light to show it.

Midday's post brought her a letter from Priscilla Graves, entreating to
be allowed to call on her next day.--We are not so easily cast off!
Nataly said, bitterly, in relation to the lady whose offending had not
been so great. She wrote: 'Come, if sure that you sincerely wish to.'

Having fasted, she ate at lunch in her dressing-room, with some taste of
the food, haunted by an accusation of gluttony because of her eating at
all, and a vile confession, that she was enabled to eat, owing to the
receipt of Priscilla's empty letter: for her soul's desire was to be
doing a deed of expiation, and the macerated flesh seemed her assurance
to herself of the courage to make amends.--I must have some strength, she
said wearifully, in apology for the morsel consumed.

Nesta's being in the house with her, became an excessive irritation.
Doubts of the girl's possible honesty to speak a reptile truth under
question; amazement at her boldness to speak it; hatred of, the mouth
that could: and loathing of the words, the theme; and abomination of
herself for conjuring fictitious images to rouse real emotions; all ran
counterthreads, that produced a mad pattern in the mind, affrighting to
reason: and then, for its preservation, reason took a superrational leap,
and ascribed the terrible injustice of this last cruel stroke to the
divine scourge, recognized divine by the selection of the mortal spot for
chastisement. She clasped her breast, and said: It is mortal. And that
calmed her.

She said, smiling: I never felt my sin until this blow came! Therefore
the blow was proved divine. Ought it not to be welcomed?--and she
appearing no better than one of those, the leprous of the sex! And
brought to acknowledgement of the likeness by her daughter!

Nataly drank the poison distilled from her exclamations and was ice. She
had denied herself to Nesta's redoubled petition. Nesta knocking at the
door a third time and calling, tore the mother two ways: to have her girl
on her breast or snap their union in a word with an edge. She heard the
voice of Dartrey Fenellan.

He was admitted. 'No, dear,' she said to Nesta; and Nesta's, 'My own
mother,' consentingly said, in tender resignation, as she retired, sprang
a stinging tear to the mother's eyelids.

Dartrey looked at the door closing on the girl.

'Is it a very low woman?' Nataly asked him in a Church whisper, with a
face abashed.

'It is not,' said he, quick to meet any abruptness.

'She must be cunning.'

'In the ordinary way. We say it of Puss before the hounds.'

'To deceive a girl like Nesta!'

'She has done no harm.'

'Dartrey, you speak to a mother. You have seen the woman? She is?--ah!'

'She is womanly, womanly.'

'Quite one of those . . . ?'

'My dear soul! You can't shake them off in that way. She is one of us. If
we have the class, we can't escape from it. They are not to bear all the
burden because they exist. We are the bigger debtors. I tell you she is
womanly.'

'It sounds like horrid cynicism.'

'Friends of mine would abuse it for the reverse.'

'Do not make me hate your chivalry. This woman is a rod on my back.
Provided only she has not dropped venom into Nesta's mind!'

'Don't fear!'

'Can you tell me you think she has done no harm to my girl?'

'To Nesta herself?--not any: not to a girl like your girl.'

'To my girl's name? Speak at once. But I know she has. She induced Nesta
to go to her house. My girl was insulted in this woman's house.'

Dartrey's forehead ridged with his old fury and a gust of present
contempt. 'I can tell you this, that the fellow who would think harm of
it, knowing the facts 's not worthy of touching the tips of the fingers
of your girl.'

'She is talked of!'

'A good-looking girl out riding with a handsome woman on a parade of
idlers!'

'The woman is notorious.' Nataly said it shivering.

He shook his head. 'Not true.'

'She has an air of a lady?'

'She sits a horse well.'

'Would she to any extent deceive me--impose on me here?'

'No.'

'Ah!' Nataly moaned. . . .

'But what?' said Dartrey. 'There was no pretence. Her style is not worse
than that of some we have seen. There was no effort to deceive. The
woman's plain for you and me to read, she has few of the arts; one or two
tricks, if you like: and these were not needed for use. There are women
who have them, and have not been driven or let slip into the wilderness.'

'Yes; I know!--those ideas of yours!' Nataly had once admired him for his
knightliness toward the weakest women and the women underfoot. 'You have
spoken to this woman? She boasted of acquaintance with Nesta?'

'She thanked God for having met her.'

'Is it one of the hysterical creatures?'

Mrs. Marsett appeared fronting Dartrey.

He laughed to himself. 'A clever question. There is a leaning to
excitement of manner at times. It 's not hysteria. Allow for her
position.'

Nataly took the unintended blow, and bowed to it; and still more harshly
said: 'What rank of life does the woman come from?'

'The class educated for a skittish career by your popular Stage and your
Book-stalls. I am not precise?'

'Leave Mr. Durance. Is she in any degree commonly well bred? . . .
behaviour, talk-her English.'

'I trench on Mr. Durance in replying. Her English is passable. You may
hear . . .'

'Everywhere, of course! And this woman of slipshod English and excited
manners imposed upon Nesta!'

'It would not be my opinion.'

'Did not impose on her!'

'Not many would impose on Nesta Radnor for long.'

'Think what that says, Dartrey!'

'You have had a detestable version of the story.'

'Because an excited creature thanks God to you for having met her!'

'She may. She's a better woman for having met her. Don't suppose we're
for supernatural conversions. The woman makes no show of that. But she
has found a good soul among her sex--her better self in youth, as one
guesses; and she is grateful--feels farther from exile in consequence.
She has found a lady to take her by the hand!--not a common case. She can
never go to the utterly bad after knowing Nesta. I forget if she says it;
I say it. You have heard the story from one of your conventional
gentlemen.'

'A true gentleman. I have reason to thank him. He has not your ideas on
these matters, Dartrey. He is very sensitive . . . on Nesta's behalf.'

'With reference to marriage. I'll own I prefer another kind of gentleman.
I 've had my experience of that kind of gentleman. Many of the kind have
added their spot to the outcasts abominated for uncleanness--in holy
unction. Many?--I won't say all; but men who consent to hear black words
pitched at them, and help to set good women facing away from them, are
pious dolts or rascal dogs of hypocrites. They, if you'll let me quote
Colney Durance to you to-day--and how is it he is not in favour?--they
are tempting the Lord to turn the pillars of Society into pillars of
salt. Down comes the house. And priests can rest in sight of it!--They
ought to be dead against the sanctimony that believes it excommunicates
when it curses. The relationship is not dissolved so cheaply, though our
Society affects to think it is. Barmby's off to the East End of this
London, Victor informs me:--good fellow! And there he'll be groaning over
our vicious nature. Nature is not more responsible for vice than she is
for inhumanity. Both bad, but the latter's the worse of the two.'

Nataly interposed: 'I see the contrast, and see whom it's to strike.'

Dartrey sent a thought after his meaning. 'Hardly that. Let it stand. He
's only one with the world: but he shares the criminal infamy for
crushing hope out of its frailest victims. They're that--no sentiment.
What a world, too, look behind it!--brutal because brutish. The world may
go hang: we expect more of your gentleman. To hear of Nesta down there,
and doubt that she was about good work; and come complaining! He had the
privilege of speaking to her, remonstrating, if he wished. There are men
who think--men!--the plucking of sinners out of the mire a dirty
business. They depute it to certain officials. And your women--it's the
taste of the world to have them educated so, that they can as little take
the humane as the enlightened view. Except, by the way, sometimes, in
secret;--they have a sisterly breast. In secret, they do occasionally
think as they feel. In public, the brass mask of the Idol they call
Propriety commands or supplies their feelings and thoughts. I won't
repeat my reasons for educating them differently. At present we have but
half the woman to go through life with--and thank you.'

Dartrey stopped. 'Don't be disturbed,' he added. 'There's no ground for
alarm. Not of any sort.'

Nataly said: 'What name?'

'Her name is Mrs. Marsett.'

'The name is . . . ?'

'Captain Marsett: will be Sir Edward. He came back from the Continent
yesterday.'

A fit of shuddering seized Nataly. It grew in violence, and speaking out
of it, with a pause of sickly empty chatter of the jaws, she said:
'Always that name?'

'Before the maiden name? May have been or not.'

'Not, you say?'

'I don't accurately know.'

Dartrey sprang to his legs. 'My dear soul! dear friend--one of the best!
if we go on fencing in the dark, there'll be wounds. Your way of taking
this affair disappointed me. Now I understand. It's the disease of a
trouble, to fly at comparisons. No real one exists. I wished to protect
the woman from a happier sister's judgement, to save you from alarm
concerning Nesta:--quite groundless, if you'll believe me. Come, there's
plenty of benevolent writing abroad on these topics now: facts are more
looked at, and a good woman may join us in taking them without the
horrors and loathings of angels rather too much given to claim
distinction from the luckless. A girl who's unprotected may go through
adventures before she fixes, and be a creature of honest intentions.
Better if protected, we all agree. Better also if the world did not
favour the girl's multitude of enemies. Your system of not dealing with
facts openly is everyway favourable to them. I am glad to say, Victor
recognizes what corruption that spread of wealth is accountable for. And
now I must go and have a talk with the--what a change from the blue
butterfly! Eaglet, I ought to have said. I dine with you, for Victor may
bring news.'

'Would anything down there be news to you, Dartrey?'

'He makes it wherever he steps.'

'He would reproach me for not detaining you. Tell Nesta I have to lie
down after talking. She has a child's confidence in you.'

A man of middle age! he said to himself. It is the particular ejaculation
which tames the senior whose heart is for a dash of holiday. He resolved,
that the mother might trust to the discretion of a man of his age; and he
went down to Nesta, grave with the weight his count of years should give
him. Seeing her, the light of what he now knew of her was an ennobling
equal to celestial. For this fair girl was one of the active souls of the
world--his dream to discover in woman's form. She, the little Nesta, the
tall pure-eyed girl before him, was, young though she was, already in the
fight with evil: a volunteer of the army of the simply Christian. The
worse for it? Sowerby would think so. She was not of the order of young
women who, in sheer ignorance or in voluntary, consent to the peace with
evil, and are kept externally safe from the smirch of evil, and are the
ornaments of their country, glory of a country prizing ornaments higher
than qualities.

Dartrey could have been momentarily incredulous of things revealed by
Mrs. Marsett--not incredulous of the girl's heroism: that capacity he
caught and gauged in her shape of head, cut of mouth, and the
measurements he was accustomed to make at a glance:--but her beauty, or
the form of beauty which was hers, argued against her having set foot of
thought in our fens. Here and far there we meet a young saint vowed to
service along by those dismal swamps: and saintly she looks; not of this
earth. Nesta was of the blooming earth. Where do we meet girl or woman
comparable to garden-flowers, who can dare to touch to lift the spotted
of her sex? He was puzzled by Nesta's unlikeness in deeds and in aspect.
He remembered her eyes, on the day when he and Colonel Sudley beheld her;
presently he was at quiet grapple with her mind. His doubts cleared off.
Then the question came, How could a girl of heroical character be
attached to the man Sowerby? That entirely passed belief.

And was it possible his wishes beguiled his hearing? Her tones were
singularly vibrating.

They talked for a while before, drawing a deep breath, she said: 'I fancy
I am in disgrace with my mother.'

'You have a suspicion why?' said he.

'I have.'

She would have told him why: the words were at her lips. Previous to her
emotion on the journey home, the words would have come out. They were
arrested by the thunder of the knowledge, that the nobleness in him
drawing her to be able to speak of scarlet matter, was personally
worshipped.

He attributed the full rose upon her cheeks to the forbidding subject.

To spare pain, he said: 'No misunderstanding with the dear mother will
last the day through. Can I help?'

'Oh, Captain Dartrey!'

'Drop the captain. Dartrey will do.'

'How could I!'

'You're not wanting in courage, Nesta.'

'Hardly for that!'

'By-and-by, then.'

'Though I could not say Mr. Fenellan.'

'You see; Dartrey, it must be.'

'If I could!'

'But the fellow is not a captain: and he is a friend, an old friend, very
old friend: he'll be tipped with grey in a year or two.'

'I might be bolder then.'

'Imagine it now. There is no disloyalty in your calling your friends by
their names.'

Her nature rang to the implication. 'I am not bound.' Dartrey hung fast,
speculating on her visibly: 'I heard you were?'

'No. I must be free.'

'It is not an engagement?'

'Will you laugh?--I have never quite known. My father desired it: and my
desire is to please him. I think I am vain enough to think I read through
blinds and shutters. The engagement--what there was--has been, to my
reading, broken more than once. I have not considered it, to settle my
thoughts on it, until lately: and now I may suspect it to be broken. I
have given cause--if it is known. There is no blame elsewhere. I am not
unhappy, Captain Dartrey.'

'Captain by courtesy. Very well. Tell me how Nesta judges the engagement
to be broken?'

She was mentally phrasing before she said: 'Absence.'

'He was here yesterday.'

All that the visit embraced was in her expressive look, as of sight
drawing inward, like our breath in a spell of wonderment. 'Then I
understand; it enlightens me.

My own mother!--my poor mother! he should have come to me. I was the
guilty person, not she; and she is the sufferer. That, if in life were
direct retribution! but the very meaning of having a heart, is to suffer
through others or for them.'

'You have soon seen that, dear girl,' said Dartrey.

'So, my own mother, and loving me as she does, blames me!' Nesta sighed;
she took a sharp breath. 'You? do you blame me too?'

He pressed her hand, enamoured of her instantaneous divination and
heavenly candour.

But he was admonished, that to speak high approval would not be
honourable advantage taken of the rival condemning; and he said: 'Blame?
Some think it is not always the right thing to do the right thing. I've
made mistakes, with no bad design. A good mother's view is not often
wrong.'

'You pressed my hand,' she murmured.

That certainly had said more.

'Glad to again,' he responded. It was uttered airily and was meant to be
as lightly done.

Nesta did not draw back her hand. 'I feel strong when you press it.' Her
voice wavered, and as when we hear a flask sing thin at the filling,
ceased upon evidence of a heart surcharged. How was he to relax the
pressure!--he had to give her the strength she craved: and he vowed it
should be but for half a minute, half a minute longer.

Her tears fell; she eyed him steadily; she had the look of sunlight in
shower.

'Oldish men are the best friends for you, I suppose,' he said; and her
gaze turned elusive phrases to vapour.

He was compelled to see the fiery core of the raincloud lighting it for a
revealment, that allowed as little as it retained of a shadow of
obscurity.

The sight was keener than touch and the run of blood with blood to
quicken slumbering seeds of passion.

But here is the place of broken ground and tangle, which calls to
honourable men, not bent on sport, to be wary to guard the gunlock. He
stopped the word at his mouth. It was not in him to stop or moderate the
force of his eyes. She met them with the slender unbendingness that was
her own; a feminine of inspirited manhood. There was no soft expression,
only the direct shot of light, on both sides; conveying as much as is
borne from sun to earth, from earth to sun. And when such an exchange has
come between the two, they are past plighting, they are the wedded one.

Nesta felt it, without asking whether she was loved. She was his. She had
not a thought of the word of love or the being beloved. Showers of
painful blissfulness went through her, as the tremours of a shocked
frame, while she sat quietly, showing scarce a sign; and after he had let
her hand go, she had the pressure on it. The quivering intense of the
moment of his eyes and grasp was lord of her, lord of the day and of all
days coming. That is how Love slays Death. Never did girl so give her
soul.

She would have been the last to yield it unreservedly to a man untrusted
for the character she worshipped. But she could have given it to Dartrey,
despite his love of another, because it was her soul, without any of the
cravings, except to bestow.

He perceived, that he had been carried on for the number of steps which
are countless miles and do not permit the retreat across the desert
behind; and he was in some amazement at himself, remindful of the
different nature of our restraining power when we have a couple playing
on it. Yet here was this girl, who called him up to the heights of young
life again: and a brave girl; and she bled for the weak, had no shrinking
from the women underfoot: for the reason, that she was a girl sovereignly
pure, angelically tender. Was there a point of honour to hold him back?

Nataly entered the room. She kissed Nesta, and sat silent.

'Mother, will you speak of me to him, if I go out?' Nesta said.

'We have spoken,' her mother replied, vexed by the unmaidenly allusion to
that theme.

She would have asked, How did you guess I knew of it?--but that the, Why
should I speak of you to him? struck the louder note in her bosom: and
then, What is there that this girl cannot guess!--filled the mother's
heart with apprehensive dread: and an inward cry, What things will she
not set going, to have them discussed. And the appalling theme, sitting
offensive though draped in their midst, was taken for a proof of the
girl's unblushingness. After standing as one woman against the world so
long, Nataly was relieved to be on the side of a world now convictedly
unjust to her in the confounding of her with the shameless. Her mind had
taken the brand of that thought:--And Nesta had brought her to it:--And
Dudley Sowerby, a generous representative of the world, had kindly,
having the deputed power to do so, sustained her, only partially blaming
Nesta, not casting them off; as the world, with which Nataly felt, under
a sense of the protection calling up all her gratitude to young Dudley,
would have approved his doing.

She was passing through a fit of the cowardice peculiar to the tediously
strained, who are being more than commonly tried--persecuted, as they say
when they are not supplicating their tyrannical Authority for aid. The
world will continue to be indifferent to their view of it and behaviour
toward it until it ceases to encourage the growth of hypocrites.

These are moments when the faces we are observing drop their charm,
showing us our perversion internal, if we could but reflect, to see it.
Very many thousand times above Dudley Sowerby, Nataly ranked Dartrey
Fenellan; and still she looked at him, where he sat beside Nesta,
ungenially, critical of the very features, jealously in the interests of
Dudley; and recollecting, too, that she had once prayed for one exactly
resembling Dartrey Fenellan to be her Nesta's husband. But, as she would
have said, that was before the indiscretion of her girl had shown her to
require for her husband a man whose character and station guaranteed
protection instead of inciting to rebellion. And Dartrey, the loved and
prized, was often in the rebel ranks; he was dissatisfied with matters as
they are; was restless for action, angry with a country denying it to
him; he made enemies, he would surely bring down inquiries about Nesta's
head, and cause the forgotten or quiescent to be stirred; he would
scarcely be the needed hand for such a quiver of the lightnings as Nesta
was.

Dartrey read Nataly's brows. This unwonted uncomeliness of hers was an
indication to one or other of our dusky pits, not a revealing.




CHAPTER XXXIX

A CHAPTER IN THE SHADOW OF MRS. MARSETT

He read her more closely when Arlington brought in the brown paper
envelope of the wires--to which the mate of Victor ought to have become
accustomed. She took it; her eyelids closed, and her features were driven
to whiteness. 'Only these telegrams,' she said, in apology.

'Lakelands on fire?' Dartrey murmured to Nesta; and she answered: 'I
should not be sorry.'

Nataly coldly asked her why she would not be sorry.

Dartrey interposed: 'I'm sure she thinks Lakelands worries her mother.'

'That ranks low among the worries,' Nataly sighed, opening the envelope.

Nesta touched her arm: 'Mother! even before Captain Dartrey, if you will
let me!'--she turned to him: 'before . . .' at the end of her breath she
said: 'Dartrey Fenellan. You shall see my whole heart, mother.'

Her mother looked from her at him.

'Victor returns by the last train.  He telegraphs, that he dines with--'
She handed the paper to Dartrey.

'Marsett,' he read aloud; and she flushed; she was angry with him for not
knowing, that the name was a term of opprobrium flung at her.

'It's to tell you he has done what he thought good,' said Dartrey. 'In
other words, as I interpret, he has completed his daughter's work. So we
won't talk about it till he comes. You have no company this evening?'

'Oh! there is a pause to-night! It's nearly as unceasing as your brother
Simeon's old French lady in the ronde with her young bridegroom, till
they danced her to pieces. I do get now and then an hour's repose,'
Nataly added, with a vision springing up of the person to whom the story
had applied.

'My dear, you are a good girl to call me Dartrey,' the owner of the name
said to Nesta.

Nataly saw them both alert, in the terrible manner peculiar to both, for
the directest of the bare statements. She could have protested, that her
love of truth was on an equality with theirs; and certainly, that her
regard for decency was livelier. Pass the deficiency in a man. But a girl
who could speak, by allusion, of Mrs. Marsett--of the existence of a Mrs.
Marsett--in the presence of a man: and he excusing, encouraging: and this
girl her own girl;--it seemed to her, that the world reeled; she could
hardly acknowledge the girl; save under the penitential admission of her
sin's having found her out.

She sent Nesta to her room when they went upstairs to dress, unable to
endure her presence after seeing her show a placid satisfaction at
Dartrey's nod to the request for him to sleep in the house that night. It
was not at all a gleam of pleasure, hardly an expression; it was a manner
of saying, One drop more in my cup of good fortune! an absurd and an
offensive exhibition of silly optimism of the young, blind that they are!

For were it known, and surely the happening of it would be known, that
Dudley Sowerby had shaken off the Nesta of no name, who was the
abominable Mrs. Marsett's friend, a whirlwind with a trumpet would sweep
them into the wilderness on a blast frightfuller than any ever heard.

Nataly had a fit of weeping for want of the girl's embrace, against whom
her door was jealously locked. She hoped those two would talk much, madly
if they liked, during dinner, that she might not be sensible, through any
short silence, of the ardour animating them: especially glowing in Nesta,
ready behind her quiet mask to come brazenly forth. But both of them were
mercilessly ardent; and a sickness of the fear, that they might fall on
her to capture her and hurry her along with them perforce of the allayed,
once fatal, inflammable element in herself, shook the warmth from her
limbs: causing her to say to herself aloud in a ragged hoarseness, very
strangely: Every thought of mine now has a physical effect on me!

They had not been two minutes together when she descended to them. Yet
she saw the girl's heart brimming, either with some word spoken to her or
for joy of an unmaidenly confession. During dinner they talked, without
distressful pauses. Whatever said, whatever done, was manifestly another
drop in Nesta's foolish happy cup. Could it be all because Dartrey
Fenellan countenanced her acquaintance with that woman? The mother had
lost hold of her. The tortured mother had lost hold of herself.

Dartrey in the course of the evening, begged to hear the contralto; and
Nataly, refusing, was astounded by the admission in her blank mind of the
truth of man's list of charges against her sex, starting from their
capriciousness for she could have sung in a crowded room, and she had now
a desire for company, for stolid company or giddy, an ocean of it. This
led to her thinking, that the world of serious money-getters, and feasts,
and the dance, the luxurious displays, and the reverential Sunday
service, will always ultimately prove itself right in opposition to
critics and rebels, and to any one vainly trying to stand alone: and the
thought annihilated her; for she was past the age of the beginning again,
and no footing was left for an outsider not self-justified in being where
she stood. She heard Dartrey's praise of Nesta's voice for tearing her
mother's bosom with notes of intolerable sweetness; and it was haphazard
irony, no doubt; we do not the less bleed for the accident of a shot.

At last, after midnight Victor arrived.

Nesta most impudently expected to be allowed to remain. 'Pray, go, dear,'
her mother said. Victor kissed his Fredi. 'Some time to-morrow,' said he;
and she forbore to beseech him.

He stared, though mildly, at sight of her taking Dartrey's hand for the
good-night and deliberately putting her lips to it.

Was she a girl whose notion of rectifying one wrong thing done, was to do
another? Nataly could merely observe. A voice pertaining to no one
present, said in her ear:--Mothers have publicly slapped their daughter's
faces for less than that!--It was the voice of her incapacity to cope
with the girl. She watched Nesta's passage from the room, somewhat
affected by the simple bearing for which she was reproaching her.

'And our poor darling has not seen a mountain this year!' Victor
exclaimed, to have mentionable grounds for pitying his girl. 'I promised
Fredi she should never count a year without Highlands or Alps. You
remember, mama?--down in the West Highlands. Fancy the dear bit of
bundle, Dartrey!--we had laid her in her bed; she was about seven or
eight; and there she lay wide awake. "What 's Fredi thinking of?"--"I'm
thinking of the tops of the mountains at night, dada."--She could climb
them now; she has the legs.'

Nataly said: 'You have some report to make. You dined with those people?'

'The Marsetts: yes:--well-suited couple enough. It's to happen before
Winter ends--at once; before Christmas; positively before next Spring.
Fredi's doing! He has to manage, arrange.--She's a good-looking woman,
good height, well-rounded; well-behaved, too: she won't make a bad Lady
Marsett. Every time that woman spoke of our girl, the tears jumped to her
eyelids.'

'Come to me before you go to bed,' Nataly said, rising, her voice
foundering; 'Good-night, Dartrey.'

She turned to the door; she could not trust herself to shake hands with
composure. Not only was it a nauseous mixture she was forced to gulp from
Victor, it burned like a poison.

'Really Fredi's doing--chiefly,' said Victor, as soon as Dartrey and he
were alone, comfortably settled in the smoking-room. 'I played the man of
pomp with Marsett--good heavy kind of creature: attached to the woman.
She's the better horse, as far as brains go. Good enough Lady Marsett. I
harped on Major Worrell: my daughter insulted. He knew of it--spoke of
you properly. The man offered all apologies; he has told the Major he is
no gentleman, not a fit associate for gentlemen:--quite so--and has cut
him dead. Will marry her, as I said, make her as worthy as he can of the
honour of my daughter's acquaintance. Rather comical grimace, when he
vowed he'd fasten the tie. He doesn't like marriage. But, he can't give
her up. And she's for patronizing the institution. But she is ready to
say good-bye to him "rather than see the truest lady in the world
insulted"--her words. And so he swallows his dose for health, and looks a
trifle sourish. Antecedents, I suppose: has to stomach them. But if a
man's fond of a woman--if he knows he saves her from slipping lower--and
it's an awful world, for us to let a woman be under its wheels:--I say, a
woman who has a man to lean on, unless she's as downright corrupt as two
or three of the men we've known:--upon my word, Dartrey, I come round to
some of your ideas on these matters. It's this girl of mine, this wee bit
of girl in her little nightshirt with the frill, astonishes me
most:--"thinking of the tops of the mountains at night!" She has
positively done the whole of this work-main part. I smiled when I left
the house, to have to own our little Fredi starting us all on the road.
It seems, Marsett had sworn he would; amorous vow, you know; he never
came nearer to doing it. I hope it's his better mind now; I do hope the
man won't have cause to regret it. He speaks of Nesta--sort of rustic
tone of awe. Mrs. Marsett has impressed him. He expects the title soon,
will leave the army--the poor plucked British army, as you call it!--and
lead the life of a country squire: hunting! Well, it's not only the army,
it's over Great Britain, with this infernal wealth of ours!--and all for
pleasure--eh?--or Paradise lost for a sugar plum! Eh, Dartrey? Upon my
word, it appears to me, Esau's the Englishman, Jacob the German, of these
times. I wonder old Colney hasn't said it. If we're not plucked, as your
regiments are of the officers who have learnt their work, we're
emasculated:--the nation's half made-up of the idle and the servants of
the idle.'

'Ay, and your country squires and your manufacturers contrive to give the
army a body of consumptive louts fit for nothing else than to take the
shilling--and not worth it,' said Dartrey.

'Sounds like old Colney,' Victor remarked to himself. 'But, believe me,
I'm ashamed of the number of servants who wait on me. It wouldn't so much
matter, as Skepsey says, if they were trained to arms and self-respect.
That little fellow Skepsey's closer to the right notion, and the right
practice, too, than any of us. With his Matilda Pridden! He has jumped
out of himself to the proper idea of women, too. And there's a man who
has been up three times before the magistrates, and is considered a
disorderly subject--one among the best of English citizens, I declare! I
never think of Skepsey without the most extraordinary, witless kind of
envy--as if he were putting in action an idea I once had and never quite
got hold of again. The match for him is Fredi. She threatens to be just
as devoted, just as simple, as he. I positively doubt whether any of us
could stop her, if she had set herself to do a thing she thought right.'

'I should not like to think our trying it possible,' said Dartrey.

'All very well, but it's a rock ahead. We shall have to alter our course,
my friend. You know, I dined with that couple, after the private twenty
minutes with Marsett: he formally propounded the invitation, as we were
close on his hour, rather late: and I wanted to make the woman happy,
besides putting a seal of cordiality on his good intentions--politic! And
subsequently I heard from her, that--you'll think nothing of it!--Fredi
promised to stand by her at the altar.'

Dartrey said, shrugging: 'She needn't do that.'

'So we may say. You're dealing with Nesta Victoria. Spare me a contest
with that girl, I undertake to manage any man or woman living.'

'When the thing to be done is thought right by her.'

'But can we always trust her judgement, my dear Dartrey?'

'In this case, she would argue, that her resolution to keep her promise
would bind or help to bind Marsett to fulfil his engagement.'

'Odd, her mother has turned dead round in favour of that fellow Dudley
Sowerby! I don't complain; it suits; but one thinks--eh?--women!'

'Well, yes, one thinks or should think, that if you insist on having
women rooted to the bed of the river, they'll veer with the tides, like
water-weeds, and no wonder.'

'Your heterodoxy on that subject is a mania, Dartrey. We can't have women
independent.'

'Then don't be exclaiming about their vagaries.'

Victor mused: 'It's wonderful: that little girl of mine!--good height
now: but what a head she has! Oh, she'll listen to reason: only mark what
I say:--with that quiet air of hers, the husband, if a young fellow, will
imagine she's the most docile of wives in the world. And as to wife, I'm
not of the contrary opinion. But qua individual female, supposing her to
have laid fast hold of an idea of duty, it's he who'll have to turn the
corner second, if they're to trot in the yoke together. Or it may be an
idea of service to a friend--or to her sex! That Mrs. Marsett says she
feels for--"bleeds" for her sex. The poor woman didn't show to advantage
with me, because she was in a fever to please:--talks in jerks, hot
phrases. She holds herself well. At the end of the dinner she behaved
better. Odd, you can teach women with hints and a lead. But Marsett 's
Marsett to the end. Rather touching!--the poor fellow said: Deuce of a
bad look-out for me if Judith doesn't have a child! First-rate sportsman,
I hear. He should have thought of his family earlier. You know, Dartrey,
the case is to be argued for the family as well. You won't listen. And
for Society too! Off you go.'

A battery was opened on that wall of composite.

'Ah, well,' said Victor. 'But I may have to beg your help, as to the
so-called promise to stand at the altar. I don't mention it upstairs.'

He went to Nataly's room.

She was considerately treated, and was aware of being dandled, that she
might have sleep.

She consented to it, in a loathing of the topic.--Those women invade
us--we cannot keep them out! was her inward cry: with a reverberation of
the unfailing accompaniment: The world holds you for one of them!

Victor tasked her too much when his perpetual readiness to doat upon his
girl for whatever she did, set him exalting Nesta's conduct. She thought:
Was Nesta so sympathetic with her mother of late by reason of a moral
insensibility to the offence?

This was her torture through the night of a labouring heart, that
travelled to one dull shock, again and again repeated:--the apprehended
sound, in fact, of Dudley Sowerby's knock at the street door. Or
sometimes a footman handed her his letter, courteously phrased to
withdraw from the alliance. Or else he came to a scene with Nesta, and
her mother was dragged into it, and the intolerable subject steamed about
her. The girl was visioned as deadly. She might be indifferent to the
protection of Dudley's name. Robust, sanguine, Victor's child, she
might--her mother listened to a devil's whisper--but no; Nesta's aim was
at the heights; she was pure in mind as in body. No, but the world would
bring the accusation; and the world would trace the cause: Heredity, it
would say. Would it say falsely? Nataly harped on the interrogation until
she felt her existence dissolving to a dark stain of the earth, and she
found herself wondering at the breath she drew, doubting that another
would follow, speculating on the cruel force which keeps us to the act of
breathing.--Though I could draw wild blissful breath if I were galloping
across the moors! her worn heart said to her youth: and out of ken of the
world, I could regain a portion of my self-esteem. Nature thereat renewed
her old sustainment with gentle murmurs, that were supported by Dr.
Themison's account of the virtuous married lady who chafed at the yoke on
behalf of her sex, and deemed the independent union the ideal. Nataly's
brain had a short gallop over moorland. It brought her face to face with
Victor's girl, and she dropped once more to her remorse in herself and
her reproaches of Nesta. The girl had inherited from her father something
of the cataract's force which won its way by catching or by mastering,
uprooting, ruining!

In the morning she was heavily asleep. Victor left word with Nesta, that
the dear mother was not to be disturbed. Consequently, when Dudley called
to see Mrs. Victor Radnor, he was informed that Miss Radnor would receive
him.

Their interview lasted an hour.

Dudley came to Victor in the City about luncheon time.

His perplexity of countenance was eloquent. He had, before seeing the
young lady, digested an immense deal more, as it seemed to him, than any
English gentleman should be asked to consume. She now referred him to her
father, who had spent a day in Brighton, and would, she said, explain
whatever there was to be explained. But she added, that if she was
expected to abandon a friend, she could not. Dudley had argued with her
upon the nature of friendship, the measurement of its various dues; he
had lectured on the choice of friends, the impossibility for young
ladies, necessarily inexperienced, to distinguish the right class of
friends, the dangers they ran in selecting friends unwarranted by the
stamp of honourable families.

'And what did Fredi say to that?' Victor inquired.

'Miss Radnor said--I may be dense, I cannot comprehend--that the precepts
were suitable for seminaries of Pharisees. When it is a question of a
young lady associating with a notorious woman!'

'Not notorious. You spoil your case if you "speak extremely," as a friend
says. I saw her yesterday. She worships "Miss Radnor."'

Nesta will know when she is older; she will thank me,' said Dudley
hurriedly. 'As it is at present, I may reckon, I hope, that the
association ceases. Her name: I have to consider my family.'

'Good anchorage! You must fight it out with the girl. And depend upon
this--you're not the poorer for being the husband of a girl of character;
unless you try to bridle her. She belongs to her time. I don't mind
owning to you, she has given me a lead.--Fredi 'll be merry to-night.
Here's a letter I have from the Sanfredini, dated Milan, fresh this
morning; invitation to bring the god-child to her villa on Como in May;
desirous to embrace her. She wrote to the office. Not a word of her
duque. She has pitched him to the winds. You may like to carry it off to
Fredi and please her.'

'I have business,' Dudley replied.

'Away to it, then!' said Victor. 'You stand by me?--we expect our South
London borough to be open in January; early next year, at least; may be
February. You have family interest there.'

'Personally, I will do my best,' Dudley said; and he escaped, feeling,
with the universal censor's angry spite, that the revolutions of the
world had made one of the wealthiest of City men the head of a set of
Bohemians. And there are eulogists of the modern time! And the man's
daughter was declared to belong to it! A visit in May to the Italian
cantatrice separated from her husband, would render the maiden an
accomplished flinger of caps over the windmills.

At home Victor discovered, that there was not much more than a truce
between Nesta and Nataly. He had a medical hint from Dr. Themison, and he
counselled his girl to humour her mother as far as could be: particularly
in relation to Dudley, whom Nataly now, womanlike, after opposing,
strongly favoured. How are we ever to get a clue to the labyrinthine
convolutions and changeful motives of the sex! Dartrey's theories were
absurd. Did Nataly think them dangerous for a young woman? The guess
hinted at a clue of some sort to the secret of her veering.

'Mr. Sowerby left me with an adieu,' said Nesta.

'Mr. Sowerby! My dear, he is bound, bound in honour, bound at heart. You
did not dismiss him?'

'I repeated the word he used. I thought of mother. The blood leaves her
cheeks at a disappointment now. She has taken to like him.'

'Why, you like him!'

'I could not vow.'

'Tush.'

'Ah, don't press me, dada. But you will see, he has disengaged himself.'

He had done it, though not in formal speech. Slow digestion of his native
antagonism to these Bohemians, to say nothing of his judicial
condemnation of them, brought him painfully round to the writing of a
letter to Nataly; cunningly addressed to the person on whom his instinct
told him he had the strongest hold.

She schooled herself to discuss the detested matter forming Dudley's
grievance and her own with Nesta; and it was a woeful half-hour for them.
But Nataly was not the weeper.

Another interview ensued between Nesta and her suitor. Dudley bore no
resemblance to Mr. Barmby, who refused to take the word no from her, and
had taken it, and had gone to do holy work, for which she revered him.
Dudley took the word, leaving her to imagine freedom, until once more her
mother or her father, inspired by him, came interceding, her mother
actually supplicating. So that the reality of Dudley's love rose to
conception like a London dawn over Nesta; and how, honourably, decently,
positively, to sever herself from it, grew to be an ill-visaged problem.
She glanced in soul at Dartrey Fenellan for help; she had her wild
thoughts. Having once called him Dartrey, the virginal barrier to
thoughts was broken; and but for love of her father, for love and pity of
her mother, she would have ventured the step to make the man who had her
whole being in charge accept or reject her. Nothing else appeared in
prospect. Her father and mother were urgently one to favour Dudley; and
the sensitive gentleman presented himself to receive his wound and to
depart with it. But always he returned. At last, as if under tuition, he
refrained from provoking a wound; he stood there to win her upon any
terms; and he was a handsome figure, acknowledged by the damsel to be
increasing in good looks as more and more his pretensions became
distasteful to her. The slight cast of sourness on his lower features had
almost vanished, his nature seemed to have enlarged. He complimented her
for her 'generous benevolence,' vaguely, yet with evident sincereness; he
admitted, that the modern world is 'attempting difficulties with at least
commendable intentions'; and that the position of women demands
improvement, consideration for them also. He said feelingly: 'They have
to bear extraordinary burdens!' There he stopped.

The sharp intelligence fronting him understood, that this compassionate
ejaculation was the point where she, too, must cry halt. He had,
however--still under tuition, perhaps--withdrawn his voice from the
pursuit of her; and so she in gratitude silenced her critical mind
beneath a smooth conceit of her having led him two steps to a broader
tolerance. Susceptible as she was, she did not influence him without
being affected herself in other things than her vanity: his prudishness
affected her. Only when her heart flamed did she disdain that real haven
of refuge, with its visionary mount of superiority, offered by Society to
its effect, in the habit of ignoring the sins it fosters under
cloak;--not less than did the naked barbaric time, and far more to the
vitiation of the soul. He fancied he was moulding her; therefore winning
her. It followed, that he had the lover's desire for assurance of
exclusive possession; and reflecting, that he had greatly pardoned, he
grew exacting. He mentioned his objections to some of Mr. Dartrey
Fenellan's ideas.

Nesta replied: 'I have this morning had two letters to make me happy.'

A provoking evasion. He would rather have seen antagonism bridle and
stiffen her figure. 'Is one of them from that gentleman?'

'One is from my dear friend Louise de Seilles. She comes to me early next
month.'

'The other?'

'The other is also from a friend.'

'A dear friend?'

'Not so dear. Her letter gives me happiness.'

'She writes--not from France: from . . .? you tempt me to guess.'

'She writes to tell me, that Mr. Dartrey Fenellan has helped her in a way
to make her eternally thankful.'

'The place she writes from is . . . ?'

The drag of his lips betrayed his enlightenment insisted on doubting. He
demanded assurance.

'It matters in no degree,' she said.

Dudley 'thought himself excusable for inquiring.'

She bowed gently.

The stings and scorpions and degrading itches of this nest of wealthy
Bohemians enraged him.

'Are you--I beg to ask--are you still:--I can hardly think it--Nesta!--I
surely have a claim to advise:--it cannot be with your mother's
consent:--in communication, in correspondence with . . . ?'

Again she bowed her head; saying: 'It is true.'

'With that person?'

He could not but look the withering disgust of the modern world in a
conservative gentleman who has been lured to go with it a little way,
only to be bitten. 'I decline to believe it,' he said with forcible
sound.

'She is married,' was the rather shameless, exasperating answer.

'Married or not!' he cried, and murmured: 'I have borne--. These may be
Mr. Dartrey Fenellan's ideas; they are not mine. I have--Something at
least is due to me: Ask any lady:--there are clergymen, I know, clergymen
who are for uplifting--quite right, but not associating:--to call one of
them a friend! Ask any lady, any! Your mother . . .'

'I beg you will not distress my mother,' said Nesta.

'I beg to know whether this correspondence is to continue?' said Dudley.

'All my life, if I do not feel dishonoured by it.'

'You are.' He added hastily: 'Counsels of prudence--there is not a lady
living who would tell you otherwise. At all events, in public opinion, if
it were known--and it would certainly be known,--a lady, wife or
spinster, would suffer--would not escape the--at least shadow of
defilement from relationship, any degree of intimacy with . . . hard
words are wholesome in such a case: "touch pitch," yes! My sense is
coherent.'

'Quite,' said Nesta.

'And you do not agree with me?'

'I do not.'

'Do you pretend to be as able to judge as I?'

'In this instance, better.'

'Then I retire. I cannot retain my place here. You may depend upon it,
the world is not wrong when it forbids young ladies to have cognizance of
women leading disorderly lives.'

'Only the women, Mr. Sowerby?'

'Men, too, of course.'

'You do not exclude the men from Society.'

'Oh! one reads that kind of argument in books.'

'Oh! the worthy books, then. I would read them, if I could find them.'

'They are banned by self-respecting readers.'

'It grieves me to think differently.'

Dudley looked on this fair girl, as yet innocent girl; and contrasting
her with the foulness of the subject she dared discuss, it seemed to him,
that a world which did not puff at her and silence, if not extinguish,
was in a state of liquefaction.

Remembering his renewed repentances his absence, he said: 'I do hope you
may come to see, that the views shared by your mother and me are not
erroneous.'

'But do not distress her,' Nesta implored him. 'She is not well. When she
has grown stronger, her kind heart will move her to receive the lady, so
that she may not be deprived of the society of good women. I shall hope
she will not disapprove of me. I cannot forsake a friend.'

'I beg to say good-bye,' said Dudley.

She had seen a rigidity smite him as she spoke; and so little startling
was it, that she might have fancied it expected, save for her knowing
herself too serious to have played at wiles to gain her ends.

He 'wished her prudent advisers.'

She thanked him. 'In a few days, Louise de Seilles will be here.'

A Frenchwoman and Papist! was the interjection of his twist of brows.

Surely I must now be free? she thought when he had covered his farewell
under a salutation regretful in frostiness.

A week later, she had the embrace of her Louise, and Armandine was made
happy with a piece of Parisian riband.

Winter was rapidly in passage: changes were visible everywhere; Earth and
House of Commons and the South London borough exhibited them; Mrs. Burman
was the sole exception. To the stupefaction of physicians, in a manner to
make a sane man ask whether she was not being retained as an instrument
for one of the darker purposes of Providence--and where are we standing
if we ask such things?--she held on to her thread of life.

February went by. And not a word from Themison; nor from Carling, nor
from the Rev. Groseman Buttermore, nor from Jarniman. That is to say, the
two former accepted invitations to grand dinners; the two latter
acknowledged contributions to funds in which they were interested; but
they had apparently grown to consider Mrs. Burman as an establishment,
one of our fixtures. On the other hand, there was nothing to be feared
from her. Lakelands feared nothing: the entry into Lakelands was decreed
for the middle of April. Those good creatures enclosed the poor woman and
nourished her on comfortable fiction. So the death of the member for the
South London borough (fifteen years younger than the veteran in maladies)
was not to be called premature, and could by no possibility lead to an
exposure of the private history of the candidate for his vacant seat.




CHAPTER XL

AN EXPIATION

Nataly had fallen to be one of the solitary who have no companionship
save with the wound they nurse, to chafe it rather than try at healing.
So rational a mind as she had was not long in outliving mistaken
impressions; she could distinguish her girl's feeling, and her aim; she
could speak on the subject with Dartrey; and still her wound bled on.
Louise de Seilles comforted her partly, through an exaltation of Nesta.
Mademoiselle, however, by means of a change of tone and look when Dudley
Sowerby and Dartrey Fenellan were the themes, showed a too pronounced
preference of the more unstable one:--or rather, the man adventurous out
of the world's highways, whose image, as husband of such a daughter as
hers, smote the wounded mother with a chillness. Mademoiselle's
occasional thrill of fervency in an allusion to Dartrey, might have
tempted a suspicious woman to indulge suppositions, accounting for the
young Frenchwoman's novel tenderness to England, of which Nesta proudly,
very happily boasted. The suspicion proposed itself, and was rejected:
for not even the fever of an insane body could influence Nataly's
generous character, to let her moods divert and command her thoughts of
persons.

Her thoughts were at this time singularly lucid upon everything about
her; with the one exception of the reason why she had come to favour
Dudley, and how it was she had been smitten by that woman at Brighton to
see herself in her position altogether with the world's relentless,
unexamining hard eyes. Bitterness added, of Mrs. Marsett: She is made an
honest woman!--And there was a strain of the lower in Nataly, to reproach
the girl for causing the reflection to be cast on the unwedded. Otherwise
her mind was open; she was of aid to Victor in his confusion over some
lost Idea he had often touched on latterly. And she was the one who sent
him ahead at a trot under a light, by saying: 'You would found a new and
more stable aristocracy of the contempt of luxury' when he talked of
combatting the Jews with a superior weapon. That being, in fact, as
Colney Durance had pointed out to him, the weapon of self-conquest used
by them 'before they fell away to flesh-pottery.' Was it his Idea? He
fancied an aching at the back of his head when he speculated. But his
Idea had been surpassingly luminous, alive, a creation; and this came
before him with the yellow skin of a Theory, bred, born of books. Though
Nataly's mention of the aristocracy of self-denying discipline struck a
Lucifer in his darkness.

Nesta likewise helped: but more in what she did than in what she said:
she spoke intelligently enough to make him feel a certain increase of
alarm, amounting to a cursory secret acknowledgement of it, both at her
dealings with Dudley and with himself. She so quietly displaced the lady
visiting him at the City offices. His girl's disregard of hostile
weather, and her company, her talk, delighted him: still he remonstrated,
at her coming daily. She came: nor was there an instigation on the part
of her mother, clearly none: her mother asked him once whether he thought
she met the dreadful Brighton woman. His Fredi drove constantly to walk
back beside him Westward, as he loved to do whenever it was practicable;
and exceeding the flattery of his possession of the gallant daughter, her
conversation charmed him to forget a disappointment caused by the defeat
and entire exclusion of the lady visiting him so complimentarily for his
advice on stocks, shares, mines, et caetera. The lady resisted; she was
vanquished, as the shades are displaced by simple apparition of daylight.

His Fredi was like the daylight to him; she was the very daylight to his
mind, whatsoever their theme of converse for by stimulating that ready
but vagrant mind to quit the leash of the powerful senses and be a
ethereally excursive, she gave him a new enjoyment; which led to
reflections--a sounding of Nature, almost a question to her, on the verge
of a doubt. Are we, in fact, harmonious with the Great Mother when we
yield to the pressure of our natures for indulgence? Is she, when
translated into us, solely the imperious appetite? Here was Fredi, his
little Fredi--stately girl that she had grown, and grave, too, for all
her fun and her sail on wings--lifting him to pleasures not followed by
clamorous, and perfectly satisfactory, yet discomposingly violent,
appeals to Nature. They could be vindicated. Or could they, when they
would not bear a statement of the case? He could not imagine himself
stating it namelessly to his closest friend--not to Simeon Fenellan. As
for speaking to Dartrey, the notion took him with shivers:--Young Dudley
would have seemed a more possible confidant:--and he represented the
Puritan world.--And young Dudley was getting over Fredi's infatuation for
the woman she had rescued: he was beginning to fancy he saw a right
enthusiasm in it;--in the abstract; if only the fair maid would drop an
unseemly acquaintance. He had called at the office to say so. Victor
stammered the plea for him.

'Never, dear father,' came the smooth answer: a shocking answer in
contrast with the tones. Her English was as lucid as her eyes when she
continued up to the shock she dealt: 'Do not encourage a good man to
waste his thoughts upon me. I have chosen my mate, and I may never marry
him. I do not know whether he would marry me. He has my soul. I have no
shame in saying I love him. It is to love goodness, greatness of heart.
He is a respecter of women--of all women; not only the fortunate. He is
the friend of the weaker everywhere. He has been proved in fire. He does
not sentimentalize over poor women, as we know who scorns people for
doing:--and that is better than hardness, meaning kindly. He is not one
of the unwise advocates. He measures the forces against them. He reads
their breasts. He likes me. He is with me in my plans. He has not said,
has not shown, he loves me. It is too high a thought for me until I hear
it.'

'Has your soul!' was all that Victor could reply, while the whole
conception of Lakelands quaked under the crumbling structure.

Remonstrance, argument, a word for Dudley, swelled to his lips and sank
in dumbness. Her seeming intuition--if it was not a perception--of the
point where submission to the moods of his nature had weakened his
character, and required her defence of him, struck Victor with a serious
fear of his girl: and it was the more illuminatingly damnatory for being
recognized as the sentiment which no father should feel. He tried to
think she ought not to be so wise of the things of the world. An effort
to imagine a reproof, showed him her spirit through her eyes: in her
deeds too: she had already done work on the road:--Colney Durance,
Dartrey Fenellan, anything but sentimentalists either of them, strongly
backing her, upholding her. Victor could no longer so naturally name her
Fredi.

He spoke it hastily, under plea of some humorous tenderness, when he
ventured. When Dudley, calling on him in the City to discuss the
candidature for the South London borough, named her Fredi, that he might
regain a vantage of familiarity by imitating her father, it struck Victor
as audacious. It jarred in his recollection, though the heir of the
earldom spoke in the tone of a lover, was really at high pitch. He
appeared to be appreciating her, to have suffered stings of pain; he
offered himself; he made but one stipulation. Victor regretfully assured
him, he feared he could do nothing. The thought of his entry into
Lakelands, with Nesta Victoria refusing the foundation stone of the
place, grew dim.

But he was now canvassing for the Borough, hearty at the new business as
the braced swimmer on seas, which instantly he became, with an end in
view to be gained.

Late one April night, expecting Nataly to have gone to bed, and Nesta to
be waiting for him, he reached home, and found Nataly in her sitting-room
alone. 'Nesta was tired,' she said: 'we have had a scene; she refuses Mr.
Sowerby; I am sick of pressing it; he is very much in earnest, painfully;
she blames him for disturbing me; she will not see the right course:--a
mother reads her daughter! If my girl has not guidance!--she means
rightly, she is rash.'

Nataly could not utter all that her insaneness of feeling made her think
with regard to Victor's daughter--daughter also of the woman whom her
hard conscience accused of inflammability. 'Here is a note from Dr.
Themison, dear.'

Victor seized it, perused, and drew the big breath.

'From Themison,' he said; he coughed.

'Don't think to deceive me,' said she. 'I have not read the contents, I
know them.'

'The invitation at last, for to-morrow, Sunday, four P.M. Odd, that next
day at eight of the evening I shall be addressing our meeting in the
Theatre. Simeon speaks. Beaves Urmsing insists on coming, Tory though he
is. Those Tories are jollier fellows than--well, no wonder! There will be
no surgical . . . the poor woman is very low. A couple of days at the
outside. Of course, I go.'

'Hand me the note, dear.'

It had to be given up, out of the pocket.

'But,' said Victor, 'the mention of you is merely formal.'

She needed sleep: she bowed her head.

Nataly was the first at the breakfast-table in the morning, a fair Sunday
morning. She was going to Mrs. John Cormyn's Church, and she asked Nesta
to come with her.

She returned five minutes before the hour of lunch, having left Nesta
with Mrs. John. Louise de Seilles undertook to bring Nesta home at the
time she might choose. Fenellan, Mr. Pempton, Peridon and Catkin, lunched
and chatted. Nataly chatted. At a quarter to three o'clock Victor's
carriage was at the door. He rose: he had to keep an appointment. Nataly
said to him publicly: 'I come too.' He stared and nodded. In the
carriage, he said: 'I'm driving to the Gardens, for a stroll, to have a
look at the beasts. Sort of relief. Poor crazy woman! However, it 's a
comfort to her: so . . . !'

'I like to see them,' said Nataly. 'I shall see her. I have to do it.'

Up to the gate of the Gardens Victor was arguing to dissuade his dear
soul from this very foolish, totally unnecessary, step. Alighting, he put
the matter aside, for good angels to support his counsel at the final
moment.

Bears, lions, tigers, eagles, monkeys: they suggested no more than he
would have had from prints; they sprang no reflection, except, that the
coming hour was a matter of indifference to them. They were about him,
and exercised so far a distraction. He took very kindly to an old mother
monkey, relinquishing her society at sight of Nataly's heave of the
bosom. Southward, across the park, the dread house rose. He began quoting
Colney Durance with relish while sarcastically confuting the cynic, who
found much pasture in these Gardens. Over Southward, too, he would be
addressing a popular assembly to-morrow evening. Between now and then
there was a ditch to jump. He put on the sympathetic face of grief.
'After all, a caged wild beast hasn't so bad a life,' he said.--To be
well fed while they live, and welcome death as a release from the
maladies they develop in idleness, is the condition of wealthy
people:--creatures of prey? horrible thought! yet allied to his Idea, it
seemed. Yes, but these good caged beasts here set them an example, in not
troubling relatives and friends when they come to the gasp! Mrs. Burman's
invitation loomed as monstrous--a final act of her cruelty. His skin
pricked with dews. He thought of Nataly beside him, jumping the ditch
with him, as a relief--if she insisted on doing it. He hoped she would
not, for the sake of her composure.

It was a ditch void of bottom. But it was a mere matter of an hour, less.
The state of health of the invalid could bear only a few minutes. In any
case, we are sure that the hour will pass. Our own arrive? Certainly.

'Capital place for children,' he exclaimed. And here startlingly before
him in the clusters of boys and girls, was the difference between young
ones and their elders feeling quite as young: the careless youngsters
have not to go and sit in the room with a virulent old woman, and express
penitence and what not, and hear words of pardon, after their holiday
scamper and stare at the caged beasts.

Attention to the children precipitated him upon acquaintances, hitherto
cleverly shunned. He nodded them off, after the brightest of greetings.

Such anodyne as he could squeeze from the incarcerated wild creatures,
was exhausted. He fell to work at Nataly's 'aristocracy of the contempt
of luxury'; signifying, that we the wealthy will not exist to pamper
flesh, but we live for the promotion of brotherhood:--ay, and that our
England must make some great moral stand, if she is not to fall to the
rear and down. Unuttered, it caught the skirts of the Idea: it evaporated
when spoken. Still, this theme was almost an exorcism of Mrs. Burman. He
consulted his watch. 'Thirteen minutes to four. I must be punctual,' he
said. Nataly stepped faster.

Seated in the carriage, he told her he had never felt the horror of that
place before. 'Put me down at the corner of the terrace, dear: I won't
drive to the door.'

'I come with you, Victor,' she replied.

After entreaties and reasons intermixed, to melt her resolve, he saw she
was firm: and he asked himself, whether he might not be constitutionally
better adapted to persuade than to dissuade. The question thumped. Having
that house of drugs in view, he breathed more freely for the prospect of
feeling his Nataly near him beneath the roof.

'You really insist, dear love?' he appealed to her: and her answer: 'It
must be,' left no doubt: though he chose to say: 'Not because of standing
by me?' And she said: 'For my peace, Victor.' They stepped to the
pavement. The carriage was dismissed.

Seventeen houses of the terrace fronting the park led to the funereal
one: and the bell was tolled in the breast of each of the couple
advancing with an air of calmness to the inevitable black door.

Jarniman opened it. 'His mistress was prepared to see them.'--Not like
one near death.--They were met in the hall by the Rev. Groseman
Buttermore. 'You will find a welcome,' was his reassurance to them:
gently delivered, on the stoop of a large person. His whispered tones
were more agreeably deadening than his words.

Mr. Buttermore ushered them upstairs.

'Can she bear it?' Victor said, and heard: 'Her wish ten minutes.'

'Soon over,' he murmured to Nataly, with a compassionate exclamation for
the invalid.

They rounded the open door. They were in the drawing-room. It was
furnished as in the old time, gold and white, looking new; all the same
as of old, save for a division of silken hangings; and these were pale
blue: the colour preferred by Victor for a bedroom. He glanced at the
ceiling, to bathe in a blank space out of memory. Here she lived,--here
she slept, behind the hangings. There was refreshingly that little
difference in the arrangement of the room. The corner Northward was
occupied by the grand piano; and Victor had an inquiry in him:--tuned? He
sighed, expecting a sight to come through the hangings. Sensible that
Nataly trembled, he perceived the Rev. Groseman Buttermore half across a
heap of shawl-swathe on the sofa.

Mrs. Burman was present; seated. People may die seated; she had always
disliked the extended posture; except for the night's rest, she used to
say; imagining herself to be not inviting the bolt of sudden death, in
her attitude when seated by day:--and often at night the poor woman had
to sit up for the qualms of her dyspepsia!--But I 'm bound to think
humanely, be Christian, be kind, benignant, he thought, and he fetched
the spirit required, to behold her face emerge from a pale blue silk
veiling; as it were, the inanimate wasted led up from the mould by
morning.

Mr. Buttermore signalled to them to draw near.

Wasted though it was, the face of the wide orbits for sunken eyes was
distinguishable as the one once known. If the world could see it and
hear, that it called itself a man's wife! She looked burnt out.

Two chairs had been sent to front the sofa. Execution there! Victor
thought, and he garrotted the unruly mind of a man really feeling
devoutness in the presence of the shadow thrown by the dread Shade.

'Ten minutes,' Mr. Buttermore said low, after obligingly placing them on
the chairs.

He went. They were alone with Mrs. Burman.

No voice came. They were unsure of being seen by the floating grey of
eyes patient to gaze from their vast distance. Big drops fell from
Nataly's. Victor heard the French timepiece on the mantel-shelf, where a
familiar gilt Cupid swung for the seconds: his own purchase. The time of
day on the clock was wrong; the Cupid swung.

Nataly's mouth was taking breath of anguish at moments. More than a
minute of the terrible length of the period of torture must have gone:
two, if not three.

A quaver sounded. 'You have come.' The voice was articulate, thinner than
the telephonic, trans-Atlantic by deep-sea cable.

Victor answered: 'We have.'

Another minute must have gone in the silence. And when we get to five
minutes we are on the descent, rapidly counting our way out of the house,
into the fresh air, where we were half an hour back, among those happy
beasts in the pleasant Gardens!

Mrs. Burman's eyelids shut. 'I said you would come.'

Victor started to the fire-screen. 'Your sight requires protection.'

She dozed. 'And Natalia Dreighton!' she next said.

They were certainly now on the five minutes. Now for the slide downward
and outward! Nataly should never have been allowed to come.

'The white waistcoat!' struck his ears.

'Old customs with me, always!' he responded. 'The first of April, always.
White is a favourite. Pale blue, too. But I fear--I hope you have not
distressing nights? In my family we lay great stress on the nights we
pass. My cousins, the Miss Duvidneys, go so far as to judge of the
condition of health by the nightly record.'

'Your daughter was in their house.'

She knew everything!

'Very fond of my daughter--the ladies,' he remarked.

'I wish her well.'

'You are very kind.'

Mrs. Burman communed within or slept. 'Victor, Natalia, we will pray,'
she said.

Her trembling hands crossed their fingers. Nataly slipped to her knees.

The two women mutely praying, pulled Victor into the devotional hush. It
acted on him like the silent spell of service in a Church. He forgot his
estimate of the minutes, he formed a prayer, he refused to hear the Cupid
swinging, he droned a sound of sentences to deaden his ears. Ideas of
eternity rolled in semblance of enormous clouds. Death was a black bird
among them. The piano rang to Nataly's young voice and his. The gold and
white of the chairs welcomed a youth suddenly enrolled among the wealthy
by an enamoured old lady on his arm. Cupid tick-ticked.--Poor soul! poor
woman! How little we mean to do harm when we do an injury! An
incomprehensible world indeed at the bottom and at the top. We get on
fairly at the centre. Yet it is there that we do the mischief making such
a riddle of the bottom and the top. What is to be said! Prayer quiets
one. Victor peered at Nataly fervently on her knees and Mrs. Burman bowed
over her knotted fingers. The earnestness of both enforced an effort at a
phrased prayer in him. Plungeing through a wave of the scent of
Marechale, that was a tremendous memory to haul him backward and forward,
he beheld his prayer dancing across the furniture; a diminutive thin
black figure, elvish, irreverent, appallingly unlike his proper emotion;
and he brought his hands just to touch, and got to the edge of his chair,
with split knees. At once the figure vanished. By merely looking at
Nataly, he passed into her prayer. A look at Mrs. Burman made it
personal, his own. He heard the cluck of a horrible sob coming from him.
After a repetition of his short form of prayer deeply stressed, he
thanked himself with the word 'sincere,' and a queer side-thought on our
human susceptibility to the influence of posture. We are such creatures.

Nataly resumed her seat. Mrs. Burman had raised her head. She said: 'We
are at peace.' She presently said, with effort: 'It cannot last with me.
I die in nature's way. I would bear forgiveness with me, that I may have
it above. I give it here, to you, to all. My soul is cleansed, I trust.
Much was to say. My strength will not. Unto God, you both!'

The Rev. Groseman Buttermore was moving on slippered step to the back of
the sofa. Nataly dropped before the unseeing, scarce breathing, lady for
an instant. Victor murmured an adieu, grateful for being spared the
ceremonial shake of hands. He turned away, then turned back, praying for
power to speak, to say that he had found his heart, was grateful, would
hold her in memory. He fell on a knee before her, and forgot he had done
so when he had risen. They were conducted by the Rev. gentleman to the
hall-door: he was not speechless. Jarniman uttered something.

That black door closed behind them.




CHAPTER XLI

THE NIGHT OF THE GREAT UNDELIVERED SPEECH

To a man issuing from a mortuary where a skull had voice, London may be
restorative as air of Summer Alps. It is by contrast blooming life.
Observe the fellowship of the houses shoulder to shoulder; and that
straight ascending smoke of the preparation for dinner; and the good
policeman yonder, blessedly idle on an orderly Sabbath evening; and the
families of the minor people trotting homeward from the park to tea; here
and again an amiable carriage of the superimposed people driving to pay
visits; they are so social, friendly, inviting to him; they strip him of
the shroud, sing of the sweet old world. He cannot but be moved to the
extremity of the charitableness neighbouring on tears.

A stupefaction at the shock of the positive reminder, echo of the fact
still shouting in his breast, that he had seen Mrs. Burman, and that the
interview was over--the leaf turned and the book shut held Victor in a
silence until his gratefulness to London City was borne down by the more
human burst of gratitude to the dying woman, who had spared him, as much
as she could, a scene of the convulsive pathetic, and had not called on
him for any utterance of penitence. That worm-like thread of voice came
up to him still from sexton-depths: it sounded a larger forgiveness
without the word. He felt the sorrow of it all, as he told Nataly; at the
same time bidding her smell 'the marvellous oxygen of the park.' He
declared it to be quite equal to Lakelands.

She slightly pressed his arm for answer. Perhaps she did not feel so
deeply? She was free of the horrid associations with the scent of
Marechale. At any rate, she had comported herself admirably!

Victor fancied he must have shuddered when he passed by Jarniman at the
door, who was almost now seeing his mistress's ghost--would have the
privilege to-morrow. He called a cab and drove to Mrs. John Cormyn's, at
Nataly's request, for Nesta and mademoiselle: enjoying the Londonized
odour of the cab. Nataly did not respond to his warm and continued
eulogies of Mrs. Burman; she rather disappointed him. He talked of the
gold and white furniture, he just alluded to the Cupid: reserving his
mental comment, that the time-piece was all astray, the Cupid regular on
the swing:--strange, touching, terrible, if really the silly gilt figure
symbolized! . . . And we are a silly figure to be sitting in a cab
imagining such things!--When Nesta and mademoiselle were opposite, he had
the pleasure to see Nataly take Nesta's hand and hold it until they
reached home. Those two talking together in the brief words of their deep
feeling, had tones that were singularly alike: the mezzo-soprano filial
to the divine maternal contralto. Those two dear ones mounted to Nataly's
room.

The two dear ones showed themselves heart in heart together once more;
each looked the happier for it. Dartrey was among their dinner-guests,
and Nataly took him to her little blue-room before she went to bed. He
did not speak of their conversation to Victor, but counselled him to keep
her from excitement. 'My dear fellow, if you had seen her with Mrs.
Burman!' Victor said, and loudly praised her coolness. She was never
below a situation, he affirmed.

He followed his own counsel to humour his Nataly. She began panting at a
word about Mr. Barmby's ready services. When, however, she related the
state of affairs between Dartrey and Nesta, by the avowal of each of them
to her, he said, embracing her: 'Your wisdom shall guide us, my love,'
and almost extinguished a vexation by concealing it.

She sighed: 'If one could think, that a girl with Nesta's revolutionary
ideas of the duties of women, and their powers, would be safe--or at all
rightly guided by a man who is both one of the noblest and the wildest in
the ideas he entertains!'

Victor sighed too. He saw the earldom, which was to dazzle the gossips,
crack on the sky in a futile rocket-bouquet.

She was distressed; she moaned: 'My girl! my girl: I should wish to leave
her with one who is more fixed--the old-fashioned husband. New ideas must
come in politics, but in Society!--and for women! And the young having
heads, are the most endangered. Nesta vows her life to it! Dartrey
supports her!'

'See Colney,' said Victor. 'Odd, Colney does you good; some queer way he
has. Though you don't care for his RIVAL TONGUES,--and the last number
was funny, with Semhians on the Pacific, impressively addressing a
farewell to his cricket-bat, before he whirls it away to Neptune--and the
blue hand of his nation's protecting God observed to seize it!--Dead
failure with the public, of course! However, he seems to seem wise with
you. The poor old fellow gets his trouncing from the critics monthly. See
Colney to-morrow, my love. Now go to sleep. We have got over the worst. I
speak at my Meeting to-morrow and am a champagne-bottle of notes and
points for them.'

His lost Idea drew close to him in sleep: or he thought so, when awaking
to the conception of a people solidified, rich and poor, by the common
pride of simple manhood. But it was not coloured, not a luminous globe:
and the people were in drab, not a shining army on the march to meet the
Future. It looked like a paragraph in a newspaper, upon which a Leading
Article sits, dutifully arousing the fat worm of sarcastic humour under
the ribs of cradled citizens, with an exposure of its excellent folly. He
would not have it laughed at; still he could not admit it as more than a
skirt of the robe of his Idea. For let none think him a mere City
merchant, millionnaire, boon-fellow, or music-loving man of the world. He
had ideas to shoot across future Ages;--provide against the shrinkage of
our Coal-beds; against, and for, if you like, the thickening, jumbling,
threatening excess of population in these Islands, in Europe, America,
all over our habitable sphere. Now that Mrs. Burman, on her way to bliss,
was no longer the dungeon-cell for the man he would show himself to be,
this name for successes, corporate nucleus of the enjoyments, this Victor
Montgomery Radnor, intended impressing himself upon the world as a
factory of ideas. Colney's insolent charge, that the English have no
imagination--a doomed race, if it be true!--would be confuted. For our
English require but the lighted leadership to come into cohesion, and
step ranked, and chant harmoniously the song of their benevolent aim. And
that astral head giving, as a commencement, example of the right use of
riches, the nation is one, part of the riddle of the future solved.

Surely he had here the Idea? He had it so warmly, that his bath-water
heated. Only the vision was wanted.

On London Bridge he had seen it--a great thing done to the flash of
brilliant results. That was after a fall.

There had been a fall also of the scheme of Lakelands.

Come to us with no superstitious whispers of indications and
significations in the fall!--But there had certainly been a moral fall,
fully to the level of the physical, in the maintaining of that scheme of
Lakelands, now ruined by his incomprehensible Nesta--who had saved him
from falling further. His bath-water chilled. He jumped out and rubbed
furiously with his towels and flesh-brushes, chasing the Idea for simple
warmth, to have Something inside him, to feel just that sustainment; with
the cry: But no one can say I do not love my Nataly! And he tested it to
prove it by his readiness to die for her: which is heroically easier than
the devotedly living, and has a weight of evidence in our internal Courts
for surpassing the latter tedious performance.

His Nesta had knocked Lakelands to pieces. Except for the making of
money, the whole year of an erected Lakelands, notwithstanding
uninterrupted successes, was a blank. Or rather we have to wish it were a
blank. The scheme departs: payment for the enlisted servants of it is in
prospect. A black agent, not willingly enlisted, yet pointing to proofs
of service, refuses payment in ordinary coin; and we tell him we owe him
nothing, that he is not a man of the world, has no understanding of
Nature: and still the fellow thumps and alarums at a midnight door we are
astonished to find we have in our daylight house. How is it? Would other
men be so sensitive to him? Victor was appeased by the assurance of his
possession of an exceptionally scrupulous conscience; and he settled the
debate by thinking: 'After all, for a man like me, battling incessantly,
a kind of Vesuvius, I must have--can't be starved, must be fed--though,
pah! But I'm not to be questioned like other men.--But how about an
aristocracy of the contempt of distinctions?--But there is no escaping
distinctions! my aristocracy despises indulgence.--And indulges?--Say, an
exceptional nature! Supposing a certain beloved woman to pronounce on the
case?--She cannot: no woman can be a just judge of it.'---He cried: My
love of her is testified by my having Barmby handy to right her to-day,
tomorrow, the very instant the clock strikes the hour of my release!

Mention of the clock swung that silly gilt figure. Victor entered into
it, condemned to swing, and be a thrall. His intensity of sensation
launched him on an eternity of the swinging in ridiculous nakedness to
the measure of time gone crazy. He had to correct a reproof of Mrs.
Burman, as the cause of the nonsense. He ran down to breakfast, hopeing
he might hear of that clock stopped, and that sickening motion with it.

Another letter from the Sanfredini in Milan, warmly inviting to her villa
over Como, acted on him at breakfast like the waving of a banner. 'We
go,' Victor said to Nataly, and flattered-up a smile about her lips--too
much a resurrection smile. There was talk of the Meeting at the theatre:
Simeon Fenellan had spoken there in the cause of the deceased Member, was
known, and was likely to have a good reception. Fun and enthusiasm might
be expected.

'And my darling will hear her husband speak to-night,' he whispered as he
was departing; and did a mischief, he had to fear, for a shadowy knot
crossed Nataly's forehead, she seemed paler. He sent back Nesta and
mademoiselle, in consequence, at the end of the Green Park.

Their dinner-hour was early; Simeon Fenellan, Colney Durance, and Mr.
Peridon--pleasing to Nataly for his faithful siege of the French
fortress--were the only guests. When they rose, Nataly drew Victor aside.
He came dismayed to Nesta. She ran to her mother. 'Not hear papa speak?
Oh, mother, mother! Then I stay with her. But can't she come? He is going
to unfold ideas to us. There!'

'My naughty girl is not to poke her fun at orators,' Nataly said. 'No,
dearest; it would agitate me to go. I'm better here. I shall be at peace
when the night is over.'

'But you will be all alone here, dear mother.'

Nataly's eyes wandered to fall on Colney. He proposed to give her his
company. She declined it. Nesta ventured another entreaty, either that
she might be allowed to stay or have her mother with her at the Meeting.

'My love,' Nataly said, 'the thought of the Meeting--' She clasped at her
breast; and she murmured: 'I shall be comforted by your being with him.
There is no danger there. But I shall be happy, I shall be at peace when
this night is over.'

Colney persuaded her to have him for companion. Mr. Peridon, who was to
have driven with Nesta and mademoiselle, won admiration by proposing to
stay for an hour and play some of Mrs. Radnor's favourite pieces. Nesta
and Victor overbore Nataly's objections to the lover's generosity. So Mr.
Peridon was left. Nesta came hurrying back from the step of the carriage
to kiss her mother again, saying: 'Just one last kiss, my own! And she's
not to look troubled. I shall remember everything to tell my own mother.
It will soon be over.'

Her mother nodded; but the embrace was passionate.

Nesta called her father into the passage, bidding him prohibit any
delivery to her mother of news at the door. 'She is easily startled now
by trifles--you have noticed?'

Victor summoned his recollections and assured her he had noticed, as he
believed he had 'The dear heart of her is fretting for the night to be
over! And think! seven days, and she is in Lakelands. A fortnight, and we
have our first Concert. Durandarte! Oh, the dear heart 'll be at peace
when I tell her of a triumphant Meeting. Not a doubt of that, even though
Colney turns the shadow of his back on us.'

'One critic the less for you!' said Nesta. Skepsey was to meet her
carriage at the theatre.

Ten minutes later, Victor and Simeon Fenellan were proceeding thitherward
on foot.

'I have my speech,' said Victor. 'You prepare the way for me, following
our influential friend Dubbleson; Colewort winds up; any one else they
shout for. We shall have a great evening. I suspect I shall find Themison
or Jarniman when I get home. You don't believe in intimations? I've had
crapy processions all day before my eyes. No wonder, after yesterday!'

'Dubbleson mustn't drawl it out too long,' said Fenellan.

'We 'll drop a hint. Where's Dartrey?'

'He'll come. He's in one of his black moods: not temper. He's got a
notion he killed his wife by dragging her to Africa with him. She was not
only ready to go, she was glad to go. She had a bit of the heroine in her
and a certainty of tripping to the deuce if she was left to herself.'

'Tell Nataly that,' said Victor. 'And tell her about Dartrey. Harp on it.
Once she was all for him and our girl. But it's a woman--though the
dearest! I defy any one to hit on the cause of their changes. We must
make the best of things, if we're for swimming. The task for me to-night
will be, to keep from rolling out all I've got in my head. And I'm not
revolutionary, I'm for stability. Only I do see, that the firm
stepping-place asks for a long stride to be taken. One can't get the
English to take a stride--unless it's for a foot behind them: bother old
Colney! Too timid, or too scrupulous, down we go into the mire.
There!--But I want to say it! I want to save the existing order. I want,
Christianity, instead of the Mammonism we 're threatened with. Great
fortunes now are becoming the giants of old to stalk the land: or
mediaeval Barons. Dispersion of wealth, is the secret. Nataly's of that
mind with me. A decent poverty! She's rather wearying, wants a change.
I've a steam-yacht in my eye, for next month on the Mediterranean. All
our set. She likes quiet. I believe in my political recipe for it.'

He thumped on a method he had for preserving aristocracy--true
aristocracy, amid a positively democratic flood of riches.

'It appears to me, you're on the road of Priscilla Graves and Pempton,'
observed Simeon. 'Strike off Priscilla's viands and friend Pempton's
couple of glasses, and there's your aristocracy established; but with
rather a dispersed recognition of itself.'

'Upon my word, you talk like old Colney, except for a twang of your own,'
said Victor. 'Colney sours at every fresh number of that Serial. The
last, with Delphica detecting the plot of Falarique, is really not so
bad. The four disguised members of the Comedie Francaise on board the
vessel from San Francisco, to declaim and prove the superior merits of
the Gallic tongue, jumped me to bravo the cleverness. And Bobinikine
turning to the complexion of the remainder of cupboard dumplings
discovered in an emigrant's house-to-let! And Semhians--I forget what and
Mytharete's forefinger over the bridge of his nose, like a pensive
vulture on the skull of a desert camel! But, I complain, there's nothing
to make the English love the author; and it's wasted, he's basted, and
the book 'll have no sale. I hate satire.'

'Rough soap for a thin skin, Victor. Does it hurt our people much?'

'Not a bit; doesn't touch them. But I want my friends to succeed!'

Their coming upon Westminster Bridge changed the theme. Victor wished the
Houses of Parliament to catch the beams of sunset. He deferred to the
suggestion, that the Hospital's doing so seemed appropriate.

'I'm always pleased to find a decent reason for what is,' he said. Then
he queried: 'But what is, if we look at it, and while we look, Simeon?
She may be going--or she's gone already, poor woman! I shall have that
scene of yesterday everlastingly before my eyes, like a drop-curtain.
Only, you know, Simeon, they don't feel the end, as we in health imagine.
Colney would say, we have the spasms and they the peace. I 've a mind to
send up to Regent's Park with inquiries. It would look respectful. God
forgive me!--the poor woman perverts me at every turn. Though I will say,
a certain horror of death I had--she whisked me out of it yesterday. I
don't feel it any longer. What are you jerking at?'

'Only to remark, that if the thing's done for us, we haven't it so much
on our sensations.'

'More, if we're sympathetic. But that compels us to be philosophic--or
who could live! Poor woman!'

'Waft her gently, Victor!'

'Tush! Now for the South side of the Bridges; and I tell you, Simeon,
what I can't mention to-night: I mean to enliven these poor dear people
on their forsaken South of the City. I 've my scheme. Elected or not, I
shall hardly be accused of bribery when I put down my first instalment.'

Fenellan went to work with that remark in his brain for the speech he was
to deliver. He could not but reflect on the genial man's willingness and
capacity to do deeds of benevolence, constantly thwarted by the position
into which he had plunged himself.

They were received at the verge of the crowd outside the theatre-doors by
Skepsey, who wriggled, tore and clove a way for them, where all were
obedient, but the numbers lumped and clogged. When finally they reached
the stage, they spied at Nesta's box, during the thunder of the rounds of
applause, after shaking hands with Mr. Dubbleson, Sir Abraham Quatley,
Dudley Sowerby, and others; and with Beaves Urmsing--a politician 'never
of the opposite party to a deuce of a funny fellow!--go anywhere to hear
him,' he vowed.

'Miss Radnor and Mademoiselle de Seilles arrived quite safely,' said
Dudley, feasting on the box which contained them and no Dartrey Fenellan
in it.

Nesta was wondering at Dartrey's absence. Not before Mr. Dubbleson, the
chairman, the 'gentleman of local influence,' had animated the drowsed
wits and respiratory organs of a packed audience by yielding place to
Simeon, did Dartrey appear. Simeon's name was shouted, in proof of the
happy explosion of his first anecdote, as Dartrey took seat behind Nesta.
'Half an hour with the dear mother,' he said.

Nesta's eyes thanked him. She pressed the hand of a demure young woman
sitting close behind. Louise de Seilles. 'You know Matilda Pridden.'

Dartrey held his hand out. 'Has she forgiven me?'

Matilda bowed gravely, enfolding her affirmative in an outline of the no
need for it, with perfect good breeding. Dartrey was moved to think
Skepsey's choice of a woman to worship did him honour. He glanced at
Louise. Her manner toward Matilda Pridden showed her sisterly with Nesta.
He said: 'I left Mr. Peridon playing.--A little anxiety to hear that the
great speech of the evening is done; it's nothing else. I'll run to her
as soon as it's over.'

'Oh, good of you! And kind of Mr. Peridon!' She turned to Louise, who
smiled at the simple art of the exclamation, assenting.

Victor below, on the stage platform, indicated the waving of a hand to
them, and his delight at Simeon's ringing points: which were, to
Dartrey's mind, vacuously clever and crafty. Dartrey despised effects of
oratory, save when soldiers had to be hurled on a mark--or citizens
nerved to stand for their country.

Nesta dived into her father's brilliancy of appreciation, a trifle pained
by Dartrey's aristocratic air when he surveyed the herd of heads agape
and another cheer rang round. He smiled with her, to be with her, at a
hit here and there; he would not pretend an approval of this manner of
winning electors to consider the country's interests and their own. One
fellow in the crowded pit, affecting a familiarity with Simeon, that
permitted the taking of liberties with the orator's Christian name,
mildly amused him. He had no objection to hear 'Simmy' shouted, as Louise
de Seilles observed. She was of his mind, in regard to the rough
machinery of Freedom.

Skepsey entered the box.

'We shall soon be serious, Miss Nesta,' he said, after a look at Matilda
Pridden.

There was a prolonged roaring--on the cheerful side.

'And another word about security that your candidate will keep his
promises,' continued Simeon: 'You have his word, my friends!' And he told
the story of the old Governor of Goa, who wanted money and summoned the
usurers, and they wanted security; whereupon he laid his Hidalgo hand on
a cataract of Kronos-beard across his breast, and pulled forth three
white hairs, and presented them: 'And as honourably to the usurious Jews
as to the noble gentleman himself, that security was accepted!'

Emerging from hearty clamours, the illustrative orator fell upon the
question of political specifics:--Mr. Victor Radnor trusted to English
good sense too profoundly to be offering them positive cures, as they
would hear the enemy say he did. Yet a bit of a cure may be offered, if
we 're not for pushing it too far, in pursuit of the science of
specifics, in the style of the foreign physician, probably Spanish, who
had no practice, and wished for leisure to let him prosecute his
anatomical and other investigations to discover his grand medical
nostrum. So to get him fees meanwhile he advertised a cure for
dyspepsia--the resource of starving doctors. And sure enough his patient
came, showing the grand fat fellow we may be when we carry more of the
deciduously mortal than of the scraggy vital upon our persons. Any one at
a glance would have prescribed water-cresses to him: water-cresses
exclusively to eat for a fortnight. And that the good physician did. Away
went his patient, returning at the end of the fortnight, lean, and with
the appetite of a Toledo blade for succulent slices. He vowed he was the
man. Our estimable doctor eyed him, tapped at him, pinched his tender
parts; and making him swear he was really the man, and had eaten nothing
whatever but unadulterated water-cresses in the interval, seized on him
in an ecstasy by the collar of his coat, pushed him into the surgery,
knocked him over, killed him, cut him up, and enjoyed the felicity of
exposing to view the very healthiest patient ever seen under dissecting
hand, by favour of the fortunate discovery of the specific for him. All
to further science!--to which, in spite of the petitions of all the
scientific bodies of the civilized world, he fell a martyr on the
scaffold, poor gentleman! But we know politics to be no such empirical
science.

Simeon ingeniously interwove his analogy. He brought it home to Beaves
Urmsing, whose laugh drove any tone of apology out of it. Yet the orator
was asked: 'Do you take politics for a joke, Simmy?'

He countered his questioner: 'Just to liberate you from your moribund
state, my friend.' And he told the story of the wrecked sailor, found
lying on the sands, flung up from the foundered ship of a Salvation
captain, and how, that nothing could waken him, and there he lay fit for
interment; until presently a something of a voice grew down into his
ears; and it was his old chum Polly, whom he had tied to a board to give
her a last chance in the surges; and Polly shaking the wet from her
feathers, and shouting: 'Polly tho dram dry!'--which struck on the nob of
Jack's memory, to revive all the liquorly tricks of the cabin under
Salvationism, and he began heaving, and at last he shook in a lazy way,
and then from sputter to sputter got his laugh loose; and he sat up, and
cried; 'That did it! Now to business!' for he was hungry. 'And when I
catch the ring of this world's laugh from you, my friend . . . !'
Simeon's application of the story was drowned.

After the outburst, they heard his friend again interruptingly: 'You keep
that tongue of yours from wagging, as it did when you got round the old
widow woman for her money, Simmy!'

Victor leaned forward. Simeon towered. He bellowed

'And you keep that tongue of yours from committing incest on a lie!'

It was like a lightning-flash in the theatre. The man went under. Simeon
flowed. Conscience reproached him with the little he had done for Victor,
and he had now his congenial opportunity.

Up in the box, the powers of the orator were not so cordially esteemed.
To Matilda Pridden, his tales were barely decently the flesh and the
devil smothering a holy occasion to penetrate and exhort. Dartrey sat
rigid, as with the checked impatience for a leap. Nesta looked at Louise
when some one was perceived on the stage bending to her father: It was
Mr. Peridon; he never once raised his face. Apparently he was not
intelligible or audible but the next moment Victor sprang erect. Dartrey
quitted the box. Nesta beheld her father uttering hurried words to right
and left. He passed from sight, Mr. Peridon with him; and Dartrey did not
return.

Nesta felt her father's absence as light gone: his eyes rayed light.
Besides she had the anticipation of a speech from him, that would win
Matilda Pridden. She fancied Simeon Fenellan to be rather under the spell
of the hilarity he roused. A gentleman behind him spoke in his ear; and
Simeon, instead of ceasing, resumed his flow. Matilda Pridden's gaze on
him and the people was painful to behold: Nesta saw her mind. She set
herself to study a popular assembly. It could be serious to the call of
better leadership, she believed. Her father had been telling her of late
of a faith he had in the English, that they (or so her intelligence
translated his remarks) had power to rise to spiritual ascendancy, and be
once more the Islanders heading the world of a new epoch abjuring
materialism--some such idea; very quickening to her, as it would be to
this earnest young woman worshipped by Skepsey. Her father's absence and
the continued shouts of laughter, the insatiable thirst for fun, darkened
her in her desire to have the soul of the good working sister refreshed.
They had talked together; not much: enough for each to see at either's
breast the wells from the founts of life.

The box-door opened, Dartrey came in. He took her hand. She stood-up to
his look. He said to Matilda Pridden: 'Come with us; she will need you.'

'Speak it,' said Nesta.

He said to the other: 'She has courage.'

'I could trust to her,' Matilda Pridden replied.

Nesta read his eyes. 'Mother?'

His answer was in the pressure.

'Ill?'

'No longer.'

'Oh! Dartrey.' Matilda Pridden caught her fast.

'I can walk, dear,' Nesta said.

Dartrey mentioned her father.

She understood: 'I am thinking of him.'

The words of her mother: 'At peace when the night is over,' rang. Along
the gassy passages of the back of the theatre, the sound coming from an
applausive audience was as much a thunder as rage would have been. It was
as void of human meaning as a sea.




CHAPTER XLII

THE LAST

In the still dark hour of that April morning, the Rev. Septimus Barmby
was roused by Mr. Peridon, with a scribbled message from Victor, which he
deciphered by candlelight held close to the sheet of paper, between short
inquiries and communications, losing more and more the sense of it as his
intelligence became aware of what dread blow had befallen the stricken
man. He was bidden come to fulfil his promise instantly. He remembered
the bearing of the promise. Mr. Peridon's hurried explanatory narrative
made the request terrific, out of tragically lamentable. A semblance of
obedience had to be put on, and the act of dressing aided it. Mr. Barmby
prayed at heart for guidance further.

The two gentlemen drove Westward, speaking little; they had the dry sob
in the throat.

'Miss Radnor?' Mr. Barmby asked.

'She is shattered; she holds up; she would not break down.'

'I can conceive her to possess high courage.'

'She has her friend Mademoiselle de Seilles.'

Mr. Barmby remained humbly silent. Affectionate deep regrets moved him to
say: 'A loss irreparable. We have but one voice of sorrow. And how
sudden! The dear lady had no suffering, I trust.'

'She fell into the arms of Mr. Durance. She died in his arms. She was
unconscious, he says. I left her straining for breath. She said "Victor";
she tried to smile:--I understood I was not to alarm him.'

'And he too late!'

'He was too late, by some minutes.'

'At least I may comfort. Miss Radnor must be a blessing to him.'

'They cannot meet. Her presence excites him.'

That radiant home of all hospitality seemed opening on from darker
chambers to the deadly dark. The immorality in the moral situation could
not be forgotten by one who was professionally a moralist. But an
incorruptible beauty in the woman's character claimed to plead for her
memory. Even the rigorous in defence of righteous laws are softened by a
sinner's death to hear excuses, and may own a relationship, haply
perceive the faint nimbus of the saint. Death among us proves us to be
still not so far from the Nature saying at every avenue to the mind:
'Earth makes all sweet.'

Mr. Durance had prophesied a wailful end ever to the carol of Optimists!
Yet it is not the black view which is the right view. There is one
between: the path adopted by Septimus Barmby:--if he could but induce his
brethren to enter on it! The dreadful teaching of circumstances might
help to the persuading of a fair young woman, under his direction . . .
having her hand disengaged. Mr. Barmby started himself in the dream of
his uninterred passion for the maiden: he chased it, seized it, hurled it
hence, as a present sacrilege:--constantly, and at the pitch of our
highest devotion to serve, are we assailed by the tempter! Is it, that
the love of woman is our weakness? For if so, then would a celibate
clergy have grant of immunity. But, alas, it is not so with them! We have
to deplore the hearing of reports too credible. Again we are pushed to
contemplate woman as the mysterious obstruction to the perfect purity of
soul. Nor is there a refuge in asceticism. No more devilish nourisher of
pride do we find than in pain voluntarily embraced. And strangely, at the
time when our hearts are pledged to thoughts upon others, they are led by
woman to glance revolving upon ourself, our vile self! Mr. Barmby
clutched it by the neck.

Light now, as of a strong memory of day along the street, assisted him to
forget himself at the sight of the inanimate houses of this London, all
revealed in a quietness not less immobile than tombstones of an unending
cemetery, with its last ghost laid. Did men but know it!--The habitual
necessity to amass matter for the weekly sermon, set him noting his
meditative exclamations, the noble army of platitudes under haloes, of
good use to men: justifiably turned over in his mind for their good. He
had to think, that this act of the justifying of the act reproached him
with a lack of due emotion, in sympathy with agonized friends truly dear.
Drawing near the hospitable house, his official and a cordial emotion
united, as we see sorrowful crape-wreathed countenances. His heart struck
heavily when the house was visible.

Could it be the very house? The look of it belied the tale inside. But
that threw a ghostliness on the look.

Some one was pacing up and down. They greeted Dudley Sowerby. His ability
to speak was tasked. They gathered, that mademoiselle and 'a Miss
Pridden' were sitting with Nesta, and that their services in a crisis had
been precious. At such times, one of them reflected, woman has indeed her
place: when life's battle waxes red. Her soul must be capable of mounting
to the level of the man's, then? It is a lesson!

Dudley said he was waiting for Dr. Themison to come forth. He could not
tear himself from sight of the house.

The door opened to Dr. Themison departing, Colney Durance and Simeon
Fenellan bare-headed. Colney showed a face with stains of the lashing of
tears.

Dr. Themison gave his final counsels. 'Her father must not see her. For
him, it may have to be a specialist. We will hope the best. Mr. Dartrey
Fenellan stays beside him:--good. As to the ceremony he calls for, a form
of it might soothe:--any soothing possible! No music. I will return in a
few hours.'

He went on foot.

Mr. Barmby begged advice from Colney and Simeon concerning the message he
had received--the ceremony requiring his official presidency. Neither of
them replied. They breathed the morning air, they gave out long-drawn
sighs of relief, looking on the trees of the park.

A man came along the pavement, working slow legs hurriedly. Simeon ran
down to him.

'Humour, as much as you can,' Colney said to Mr. Barmby. 'Let him
imagine.'

'Miss Radnor?'

'Not to speak of her.'

'The daughter he so loves?'

Mr. Barmby's tender inquisitiveness was unanswered. Were they inducing
him to mollify a madman? But was it possible to associate the idea of
madness with Mr. Radnor?

Simeon ran back. 'Jarniman,' he remarked. 'It's over!'

'Now!' Colney's shoulders expressed the comment. 'Well, now, Mr. Barmby,
you can do the part desired. Come in. It's morning!' He stared at the
sky.

All except Dudley passed in.

Mr. Barmby wanted more advice, his dilemma being acute. It was moderated,
though not more than moderated, when he was informed of the death of Mrs.
Burman Radnor; an event that occurred, according to Jarniman's report,
forty-five minutes after Skepsey had a second time called for information
of it at the house in Regent's Park--five hours and a half, as Colney
made his calculation, after the death of Nataly. He was urged by some
spur of senseless irony to verify the calculation and correct it in the
minutes.

Dudley crossed the road. No sign of the awful interior was on any of the
windows of the house either to deepen awe or relieve. They were blank as
eyeballs of the mindless. He shivered. Death is our common cloak; but
Calamity individualizes, to set the unwounded speculating whether indeed
a stricken man, who has become the cause of woeful trouble, may not be
pointing a moral. Pacing on the Park side of the house, he saw Skepsey
drive up and leap out with a gentleman, Mr. Radnor's lawyer. Could it be,
that there was no Will written? Could a Will be executed now? The moral
was more forcibly suggested. Dudley beheld this Mr. Victor Radnor
successful up all the main steps, persuasive, popular, brightest of the
elect of Fortune, felled to the ground within an hour, he and all his
house! And if at once to pass beneath the ground, the blow would have
seemed merciful for him. Or if, instead of chattering a mixture of the
rational and the monstrous, he had been heard to rave like the utterly
distraught. Recollection of some of the things he shouted, was an
anguish: A notion came into the poor man, that he was the dead one of the
two, and he cried out: 'Cremation? No, Colney's right, it robs us of our
last laugh. I lie as I fall.' He 'had a confession for his Nataly, for
her only, for no one else.' He had 'an Idea.' His begging of Dudley to
listen without any punctilio (putting a vulgar oath before it), was the
sole piece of unreasonableness in the explanation of the idea: and that
was not much wilder than the stuff Dudley had read from reports of
Radical speeches. He told Dudley he thought him too young to be 'best man
to a widower about to be married,' and that Barmby was 'coming all haste
to do the business, because of no time to spare.'

Dudley knew but the half, and he did not envy Dartrey Fenellan his task
of watching over the wreck of a splendid intelligence, humouring and
restraining. According to the rumours, Mr. Radnor had not shown the
symptoms before the appearance of his daughter. For awhile he hung, and
then fell, like an icicle. Nesta came with a cry for her father. He rose:
Dartrey was by. Hugged fast in iron muscles, the unhappy creature raved
of his being a caged lion. These things Dudley had heard in the house.

There are scenes of life proper to the grave-cloth.

Nataly's dead body was her advocate with her family, with friends, with
the world. Victor had more need of a covering shroud to keep calamity
respected. Earth makes all sweet: and we, when the privilege is granted
us, do well to treat the terribly stricken as if they had entered to the
bosom of earth.

That night's infinite sadness was concentrated upon Nesta. She had need
of her strength of mind and body.

The night went past as a year. The year followed it as a refreshing
night. Slowly lifting her from our abysses, it was a good angel to the
girl. Permission could not be given for her to see her father. She had a
home in the modest home of Louise de Seilles on the borders of Dauphins;
and with French hearts at their best in winningness around her, she
learned again, as an art, the natural act of breathing calmly; she had by
degrees a longing for the snow-heights. When her imagination could perch
on them with love and pride, she began to recover the throb for a part in
human action. It set her nature flowing to the mate she had chosen, who
was her counsellor, her supporter, and her sword. She had awakened to new
life, not to sink back upon a breast of love, though thoughts of the
lover were as blows upon strung musical chords of her bosom. Her union
with Dartrey was for the having an ally and the being an ally, in
resolute vision of strife ahead, through the veiled dreams that bear the
blush. This was behind a maidenly demureness. Are not young women
hypocrites? Who shall fathom their guile! A girl with a pretty smile, a
gentle manner, a liking for wild flowers up on the rocks; and graceful
with resemblances to the swelling proportions of garden-fruits approved
in young women by the connoisseur eye of man; distinctly designed to
embrace the state of marriage, that she might (a girl of singularly lucid
and receptive eyes) the better give battle to men touching matters which
they howl at an eccentric matron for naming. So it was. And the yielding
of her hand to Dartrey, would have appeared at that period of her
revival, as among the baser compliances of the fleshly, if she had not
seen in him, whom she owned for leader, her fellow soldier, warrior
friend, hero, of her own heart's mould, but a greater.

She was on Como, at the villa of the Signora Giulia Sanfredini, when
Dudley's letter reached her, with the supplicating offer of the share of
his earldom. An English home meanwhile was proposed to her at the house
of his mother the Countess. He knew that he did not write to a brilliant
heiress. The generosity she had always felt that he possessed, he thus
proved in figures. They are convincing and not melting. But she was moved
to tears by his goodness in visiting her father, as well as by the
hopeful news he sent. He wrote delicately, withholding the title of her
father's place of abode. There were expectations of her father's perfect
recovery; the signs were auspicious; he appeared to be restored to the
'likeness to himself' in the instances Dudley furnished:--his appointment
with him for the flute-duet next day; and particularly his enthusiastic
satisfaction with the largeness and easy excellent service of the
residence 'in which he so happily found himself established.' He held it
to be, 'on the whole, superior to Lakelands.' The smile and the tear
rolled together in Nesta reading these words. And her father spoke
repeatedly of longing to embrace his Fredi, of the joy her last letter
had given him, of his intention to send an immediate answer: and he
showed Dudley a pile of manuscript ready for the post. He talked of
public affairs, was humorous over any extravagance or eccentricity in the
views he took; notably when he alluded to his envy of little Skepsey. He
said he really did envy; and his daughter believed it and saw fair
prospects in it.

Her grateful reply to the young earl conveyed all that was perforce
ungentle, in the signature of the name of Nesta Victoria Fenellan:--a
name he was to hear cited among the cushioned conservatives, and plead
for as he best could under a pressure of disapprobation, and compelled
esteem, and regrets.

The day following the report of her father's wish to see her, she and her
husband started for England. On that day, Victor breathed his last.
Dudley had seen the not hopeful but an ominous illumination of the
stricken man; for whom came the peace his Nataly had in earth. Often did
Nesta conjure up to vision the palpitating form of the beloved mother
with her hand at her mortal wound in secret through long years of the
wearing of the mask to keep her mate inspirited. Her gathered knowledge
of things and her ruthless penetrativeness made it sometimes hard for her
to be tolerant of a world, whose tolerance of the infinitely evil stamped
blotches on its face and shrieked in stains across the skin beneath its
gallant garb. That was only when she thought of it as the world
condemning her mother. She had a husband able and ready, in return for
corrections of his demon temper, to trim an ardent young woman's
fanatical overflow of the sisterly sentiments; scholarly friends, too,
for such restrainings from excess as the mind obtains in a lamp of
History exhibiting man's original sprouts to growth and fitful
continuation of them. Her first experience of the grief that is in
pleasure, for those who have passed a season, was when the old
Concert-set assembled round her. When she heard from the mouth of a
living woman, that she had saved her from going under the world's
waggon-wheels, and taught her to know what is actually meant by the good
living of a shapely life, Nesta had the taste of a harvest happiness
richer than her recollection of the bride's, though never was bride in
fuller flower to her lord than she who brought the dower of an equal
valiancy to Dartrey Fenellan. You are aware of the reasons, the many, why
a courageous young woman requires of high heaven, far more than the
commendably timid, a doughty husband. She had him; otherwise would that
puzzled old world, which beheld her step out of the ranks to challenge
it, and could not blast her personal reputation, have commissioned a paw
to maul her character, perhaps instructing the gossips to murmur of her
parentage. Nesta Victoria Fenellan had the husband who would have the
world respectful to any brave woman. This one was his wife.

Daniel Skepsey rejoices in service to his new master, owing to the
scientific opinion he can at any moment of the day apply for, as to the
military defences of the country; instead of our attempting to arrest the
enemy by vociferations of persistent prayer:--the sole point of
difference between him and his Matilda; and it might have been fatal but
that Nesta's intervention was persuasive. The two members of the Army
first in the field to enrol and give rank according to the merits of
either, to both sexes, were made one. Colney Durance (practically cynical
when not fancifully, men said) stood by Skepsey at the altar. His
published exercises in Satire produce a flush of the article in the
Reviews of his books. Meat and wine in turn fence the Hymen beckoning
Priscilla and Mr. Pempton. The forms of Religion more than the Channel's
division of races keep Louise de Seilles and Mr. Peridon asunder: and in
the uniting of them Colney is interested, because it would have so
pleased the woman of the loyal heart no longer beating. He let Victor's
end be his expiation and did not phrase blame of him. He considered the
shallowness of the abstract Optimist exposed enough in Victor's history.
He was reconciled to it when, looking on their child, he discerned, that
for a cancelling of the errors chargeable to them, the father and mother
had kept faith with Nature.




     ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS

     Admiration of an enemy or oppressor doing great deeds
     All of us an ermined owl within us to sit in judgement
     An incomprehensible world indeed at the bottom and at the top
     Aristocratic assumption of licence
     Arrest the enemy by vociferations of persistent prayer
     Ask not why, where reason never was
     Belief in the narrative by promoting nausea in the audience
     But what is it we do (excepting cricket, of course)
     Cannot be any goodness unless it is a practiced goodness
     Claim for equality puts an end to the priceless privileges
     Consent of circumstances
     Consent to take life as it is
     Continued trust in the man--is the alternative of despair
     Country prizing ornaments higher than qualities
     Cover of action as an escape from perplexity
     Critical fashion of intimates who know as well as hear
     Death is our common cloak; but Calamity individualizes
     Despises hostile elements and goes unpunished
     Dialogue between Nature and Circumstance
     Dithyrambic inebriety of narration
     Dudley was not gifted to read behind words and looks
     Eminently servile is the tolerated lawbreaker
     Exuberant anticipatory trustfulness
     Fell to chatting upon the nothings agreeably and seriously
     Feminine; coming when she willed and flying when wanted
     Fire smoothes the creases
     Frankness as an armour over wariness
     Greater our successes, the greater the slaves we become
     Half designingly permitted her trouble to be seen
     Half a dozen dozen left
     Happy the woman who has not more to speak
     Hard to bear, at times unbearable
     Haremed opinion of the unfitness of women
     He sinks terribly when he sinks at all
     He never acknowledged a trouble, he dispersed it
     He never explained
     He neared her, wooing her; and she assented
     He prattled, in the happy ignorance of compulsion
     Heathen vindictiveness declaring itself holy
     Honest creatures who will not accept a lift from fiction
     How little we mean to do harm when we do an injury
     How Success derides Ambition!
     If only been intellectually a little flexible in his morality
     If we are robbed, we ask, How came we by the goods?
     If we are really for Nature, we are not lawless
     In the pay of our doctors
     In bottle if not on draught (oratory)
     Intrusion of hard material statements, facts
     Judgeing of the destiny of man by the fate of individuals
     Kelts, as they are called, can't and won't forgive injuries
     Let but the throb be kept for others--That is the one secret
     Love must needs be an egoism
     Man with a material object in aim, is the man of his object
     Memory inspired by the sensations
     Nation's half made-up of the idle and the servants of the idle
     Naturally as deceived as he wished to be
     Nature and Law never agreed
     Nature could at a push be eloquent to defend the guilty
     Nature's logic, Nature's voice, for self-defence
     Next door to the Last Trump
     No companionship save with the wound they nurse
     Not to go hunting and fawning for alliances
     Not always the right thing to do the right thing
     Obeseness is the most sensitive of our ailments
     Official wrath at sound of footfall or a fancied one
     Once out of the rutted line, you are food for lion and jackal
     One wants a little animation in a husband
     Optional marriages, broken or renewed every seven years
     People of a provocative prosperity
     Pessimy is invulnerable
     Portrait of himself by the artist
     Put into her woman's harness of the bit and the blinkers
     Repeatedly, in contempt of the disgust of iteration
     Satirist is an executioner by profession
     Satirist too devotedly loves his lash to be a persuasive teacher
     Self-deceiver may be a persuasive deceiver of another
     Semblance of a tombstone lady beside her lord
     Share of foulness to them that are for scouring the chamber
     She was not his match--To speak would be to succumb
     She disdained to question the mouth which had bitten her
     Slap and pinch and starve our appetites
     Slave of existing conventions
     Smallest of our gratifications in life could give a happy tone
     Smothered in its pudding-bed of the grotesque (obesity)
     Snuffle of hypocrisy in her prayer
     Startled by the criticism in laughter
     State of feverish patriotism
     Statistics are according to their conjurors
     Subterranean recess for Nature against the Institutions of Man
     Tale, which leaves the man's mind at home
     The banquet to be fervently remembered, should smoke
     The homage we pay him flatters us
     The effects of the infinitely little
     The night went past as a year
     The old confession, that we cannot cook (The English)
     The worst of it is, that we remember
     The face of a stopped watch
     The impalpable which has prevailing weight
     There is little to be learnt when a little is known
     They helped her to feel at home with herself
     They kissed coldly, pressed a hand, said good night
     They do not live; they are engines
     Thought of differences with him caused frightful apprehensions
     To do nothing, is the wisdom of those who have seen fools perish
     Universal censor's angry spite
     Unshamed exuberant male has found the sweet reverse in his mate
     We have come to think we have a claim upon her gratitude
     We must have some excuse, if we would keep to life
     We cannot relinquish an idea that was ours
     We've all a parlous lot too much pulpit in us
     Whimpering fits you said we enjoy and must have in books
     Who enjoyed simple things when commanding the luxuries






LORD ORMONT AND HIS AMINTA, Complete


By George Meredith




CONTENTS.

BOOK 1.
I.        LOVE AT A SCHOOL
II.       LADY CHARLOTTE
III.      THE TUTOR
IV.       RECOGNITION
V.        IN WHICH THE SHADES OF BROWNY AND MATEY ADVANCE AND RETIRE

BOOK 2.
VI.       IN A MOOD OF LANGUOR
VII.      EXHIBITS EFFECTS OF A PRATTLER'S DOSES
VIII.     MRS. LAWRENCE FINCHLEY
IX.       A FLASH OF THE BRUISED WARRIOR
X.        A SHORT PASSAGE IN THE GAME PLAYED BY TWO
XI.       THE SECRETARY TAKEN AS AN ANTIDOTE

BOOK 3.
XII.      MORE OF CUPER'S BOYS
XIII.     WAR AT OLMER
XIV.      OLD LOVERS NEW FRIENDS
XV.       SHOWING A SECRET FISHED WITHOUT ANGLING
XVI.      ALONG TWO ROADS TO STEIGNTON

BOOK 4.
XVII.     LADY CHARLOTTE'S TRIUMPH
XVIII.    A SCENE ON THE ROAD BACK
XIX.      THE PURSUERS
XX.       AT THE SIGN OF THE JOLLY CRICKETERS
XXI.      UNDER-CURRENTS IN THE MINDS OF LADY CHARLOTTE AND LORD ORMONT
XXII.     TREATS OF THE FIRST DAY OF THE CONTENTION OF BROTHER AND SISTER
XXIII.    THE ORMONT JEWELS

BOOK 5.
XXIV.     LOVERS MATED
XXXV.     PREPARATIONS FOR A RESOLVE
XXVI.     VISITS OF FAREWELL
XXVII.    A MARINE DUET
XXVIII.   THE PLIGHTING
XXIX.     AMINTA TO HER LORD
XXX.      CONCLUSION




CHAPTER I.

LOVE AT A SCHOOL

A procession of schoolboys having to meet a procession of schoolgirls on
the Sunday's dead march, called a walk, round the park, could hardly go
by without dropping to a hum in its chatter, and the shot of incurious
half-eyes the petticoated creatures--all so much of a swarm unless you
stare at them like lanterns. The boys cast glance because it relieved
their heaviness; things were lumpish and gloomy that day of the week. The
girls, who sped their peep of inquisition before the moment of transit,
let it be seen that they had minds occupied with thoughts of their own.

Our gallant fellows forgot the intrusion of the foreign as soon as it had
passed. A sarcastic discharge was jerked by chance at the usher and the
governess--at the old game, it seemed; or why did they keep steering
columns to meet? There was no fun in meeting; it would never be happening
every other Sunday, and oftener, by sheer toss-penny accident. They were
moved like pieces for the pleasure of these two.

Sometimes the meeting occurred twice during the stupid march-out, when it
became so nearly vexatious to boys almost biliously oppressed by the
tedium of a day merely allowing them to shove the legs along, ironically
naming it animal excise, that some among them pronounced the sham
variation of monotony to be a bothering nuisance if it was going to
happen every Sunday, though Sunday required diversions. They hated the
absurdity in this meeting and meeting; for they were obliged to
anticipate it, as a part of their ignominious weekly performance; and
they could not avoid reflecting on it, as a thing done over again: it had
them in front and in rear; and it was a kind of broadside mirror,
flashing at them the exact opposite of themselves in an identically
similar situation, that forced a resemblance.

Touching the old game, Cuper's fold was a healthy school, owing to the
good lead of the head boy, Matey Weyburn, a lad with a heart for games to
bring renown, and no thought about girls. His emulation, the fellows
fancied, was for getting the school into a journal of the Sports. He used
to read one sent him by a sporting officer of his name, and talk
enviously of public schools, printed whatever they did--a privilege and
dignity of which, they had unrivalled enjoyment in the past, days, when
wealth was more jealously exclusive; and he was always prompting for
challenges and saving up to pay expenses; and the fellows were to laugh
at kicks and learn the art of self-defence--train to rejoice in whipcord
muscles. The son of a tradesman, if a boy fell under the imputation, was
worthy of honour with him, let the fellow but show grip and toughness. He
loathed a skulker, and his face was known for any boy who would own to
fatigue or confess himself beaten. "Go to bed," was one of his terrible
stings. Matey was good at lessons, too--liked them; liked Latin and
Greek; would help a poor stumbler.

Where he did such good work was in sharpening the fellows to excel. He
kept them to the grindstone, so that they had no time for rusty brooding;
and it was fit done by exhortations off a pedestal, like St. Paul at the
Athenians, it breathed out of him every day of the week. He carried a
light for followers. Whatever he demanded of them, he himself did it
easily. He would say to boys, "You're going to be men," meaning something
better than women. There was a notion that Matey despised girls.
Consequently, never much esteemed, they were in disfavour. The old game
was mentioned only because of a tradition of an usher and governess
leering sick eyes until they slunk away round a corner and married, and
set up a school for themselves--an emasculate ending. Comment on it came
of a design to show that the whole game had been examined dismissed as
uninteresting and profitless.

One of the boys alluded in Matey's presence to their general view upon
the part played by womankind on the stage, confident of a backing; and he
had it, in a way: their noble chief whisked the subject, as not worth a
discussion; but he turned to a younger chap, who said he detested girls,
and asked him how about a sister at home; and the youngster coloured, and
Matey took him and spun him round, with a friendly tap on the shoulder.

Odd remarks at intervals caused it to be suspected that he had ideas
concerning girls. They were high as his head above the school; and there
they were left, with Algebra and Homer, for they were not of a sort to
inflame; until the boys noticed how he gave up speaking, and fell to hard
looking, though she was dark enough to get herself named Browny. In the
absence of a fair girl of equal height to set beside her, Browny shone.

She had a nice mouth, ready for a smile at the corners, or so it was
before Matey let her see that she was his mark. Now she kept her mouth
asleep and her eyes half down, up to the moment of her nearing to pass,
when the girl opened on him, as if lifting her eyelids from sleep to the
window, a full side--look, like a throb, and no disguise--no slyness or
boldness either, not a bit of languishing. You might think her heart came
quietly out.

The look was like the fall of light on the hills from the first of
morning. It lasted half a minute, and left a ruffle for a good half-hour.
Even the younger fellows, without knowing what affected them, were moved
by the new picture of a girl, as if it had been a frontispiece of a
romantic story some day to be read. She looked compelled to look, but
consenting and unashamed; at home in submission; just the look that wins
observant boys, shrewd as dogs to read by signs, if they are interested
in the persons. They read Browny's meaning: that Matey had only to come
and snatch her; he was her master, and she was a brave girl, ready to go
all over the world with him; had taken to him as he to her, shot for
shot. Her taking to the pick of the school was a capital proof that she
was of the right sort. To be sure, she could not much help herself.

Some of the boys regretted her not being fair. But, as they felt, and
sought to explain, in the manner of the wag of a tail, with elbows and
eyebrows to one another's understanding, fair girls could never have let
fly such look; fair girls are softer, woollier, and when they mean to
look serious, overdo it by craping solemn; or they pinafore a jigging
eagerness, or hoist propriety on a chubby flaxen grin; or else they dart
an eye, or they mince and prim and pout, and are sigh-away and
dying-ducky, given to girls' tricks. Browny, after all, was the girl for
Matey.

She won a victory right away and out of hand, on behalf of her
cloud-and-moon sisters, as against the sunny-meadowy; for slanting
intermediates are not espied of boys in anything: conquered by Browny;
they went over to her colour, equal to arguing, that Venus at her
mightiest must have been dark, or she would not have stood a comparison
with the forest Goddess of the Crescent, swanning it through a lake--on
the leap for run of the chase--watching the dart, with her humming bow at
breast. The fair are simple sugary thing's, prone to fat, like broad-sops
in milk; but the others are milky nuts, good to bite, Lacedaemonian
virgins, hard to beat, putting us on our mettle; and they are for heroes,
and they can be brave. So these boys felt, conquered by Browny. A
sneaking native taste for the forsaken side, known to renegades, hauled
at them if her image waned during the week; and it waned a little, but
Sunday restored and stamped it.

By a sudden turn the whole upper-school had fallen to thinking of girls,
and the meeting on the Sunday was a prospect. One of the day-boarders had
a sister in the seminary of Miss Vincent. He was plied to obtain
information concerning Browny's name and her parents. He had it pat to
hand in answer. No parents came to see her; an aunt came now and then.
Her aunt's name was not wanted. Browny's name was Aminta Farrell.

Farrell might pass; Aminta was debated. This female Christian name had a
foreign twang; it gave dissatisfaction. Boy after boy had a try at it,
with the same effect: you could not speak the name without a pursing of
the month and a puckering of the nose, beastly to see, as one little
fellow reminded them on a day when Matey was in more than common favour,
topping a pitch of rapture, for clean bowling, first ball, middle stump
on the kick, the best bat of the other eleven in a match; and, says this
youngster, drawling, soon after the cheers and claps had subsided to
business, "Aminta."

He made it funny by saying it as if to himself and the ground, in a
subdued way, while he swung his leg on a half-circle, like a skater,
hands in pockets. He was a sly young rascal, innocently precocious
enough, and he meant no disrespect either to Browny or to Matey; but he
had to run for it, his delivery of the name being so like what was in the
breasts of the senior fellows, as to the inferiority of any Aminta to old
Matey, that he set them laughing; and Browny was on the field, to reprove
them, left of the tea-booth, with her school-mates, part of her head
under a scarlet parasol.

A girl with such a name as Aminta might not be exactly up to the standard
of old Matey, still, if he thought her so and she had spirit, the school
was bound to subscribe; and that look of hers warranted her for taking
her share in the story, like the brigand's wife loading gnus for him
while he knocks over the foremost carabineer on the mountain-ledge below,
who drops on his back with a hellish expression.

Browny was then clearly seen all round, instead of only front-face, as on
the Sunday in the park, when fellows could not spy backward after
passing. The pleasure they had in seeing her all round involved no fresh
stores of observation, for none could tell how she tied her back-hair,
which was the question put to them by a cynic of a boy, said to be queasy
with excess of sisters. They could tell that she was tall for a girl, or
tallish--not a maypole. She drank a cup of tea, and ate a slice of
bread-and-butter; no cake.

She appeared undisturbed when Matey, wearing his holiday white ducks, and
all aglow, entered the booth. She was not expected to faint, only she
stood for the foreign Aminta more than for their familiar Browny in his
presence. Not a sign of the look which had fired the school did she throw
at him. Change the colour and you might compare her to a lobster fixed on
end, with a chin and no eyes. Matey talked to Miss Vincent up to the
instant of his running to bat. She would have liked to guess how he knew
she had a brother on the medical staff of one of the regiments in India:
she asked him twice, and his cheeks were redder than cricket in the sun.
He said he read all the reports from India, and asked her whether she did
not admire Lord Ormont, our general of cavalry, whose charge at the head
of fifteen hundred horse in the last great battle shattered the enemy's
right wing, and gave us the victory--rolled him up and stretched him out
like a carpet for dusting. Miss Vincent exclaimed that it was really
strange, now, he should speak of Lord Ormont, for she had been speaking
of him herself in morning to one of her young ladies, whose mind was bent
on his heroic deeds. Matey turned his face to the group of young ladies,
quite pleased that one of them loved his hero; and he met a smile here
and there--not from Miss Aminta Farrell. She was a complete
disappointment to the boys that day. "Aminta" was mouthed at any
allusions to her.

So, she not being a match for Matey, they let her drop. The flush that
had swept across the school withered to a dry recollection, except when
on one of their Sunday afternoons she fanned the desert. Lord Ormont
became the subject of inquiry and conversation; and for his own sake--not
altogether to gratify Matey. The Saturday autumn evening's walk home,
after the race out to tea at a distant village, too late in the year for
cricket, too early for regular football, suited Matey, going at long
strides, for the story of his hero's adventures; and it was nicer than
talk about girls, and puzzling. Here lay a clear field; for he had the
right to speak of a cavalry officer: his father died of wounds in the
service, and Matey naturally intended to join the Dragoons; if he could
get enough money to pay for mess, he said, laughing. Lord Ormont was his
pattern of a warrior. We had in him a lord who cast off luxury to live
like a Spartan when under arms, with a passion to serve his country and
sustain the glory of our military annals. He revived respect for the
noble class in the hearts of Englishmen. He was as good an authority on
horseflesh as any Englishman alive; the best for the management of
cavalry: there never was a better cavalry leader. The boys had come to
know that Browny admired Lord Ormont, so they saw a double reason why
Matey should; and walking home at his grand swing in the October dusk,
their school hero drew their national hero closer to them.

Every fellow present was dead against the usher, Mr. Shalders, when he
took advantage of a pause to strike in with his "Murat!"

He harped on Murat whenever he had a chance. Now he did it for the
purpose of casting eclipse upon Major-General Lord Ormont, the son and
grandson of English earls; for he was an earl by his title, and Murat was
the son of an innkeeper. Shalders had to admit that Murat might have
served in the stables when a boy. Honour to Murat, of course, for
climbing the peaks! Shalders, too, might interest him in military affairs
and Murat; he did no harm, and could be amusing. It rather added to his
amount of dignity. It was rather absurd, at the same time, for an English
usher to be spouting and glowing about a French general, who had been a
stable-boy and became a king, with his Murat this, Murat that, and hurrah
Murat in red and white and green uniform, tunic and breeches, and a
chimney-afire of feathers; and how the giant he was charged at the head
of ten thousand horse, all going like a cataract under a rainbow over the
rocks, right into the middle of the enemy and through; and he a spark
ahead, and the enemy streaming on all sides flat away, as you see puffed
smoke and flame of a bonfire. That was fun to set boys jigging. No wonder
how in Russia the Cossacks feared him, and scampered from the shadow of
his plumes--were clouds flying off his breath! That was a fine warm
picture for the boys on late autumn or early winter evenings, Shalders
warming his back at the grate, describing bivouacs in the snow. They
liked well enough to hear him when he was not opposing Matey and Lord
Ormont. He perked on his toes, and fetched his hand from behind him to
flourish it when his Murat came out. The speaking of his name clapped him
on horseback--the only horseback he ever knew. He was as fond of giving
out the name Murat as you see in old engravings of tobacco-shops men
enjoying the emission of their whiff of smoke.

Matey was not inclined to class Lord Ormont alongside Murat, a first-rate
horseman and an eagle-eye, as Shalders rightly said; and Matey agreed
that forty thousand cavalry under your orders is a toss above fifteen
hundred; but the claim for a Frenchman of a superlative merit to swallow
and make nothing of the mention of our best cavalry generals irritated
him to call Murat a mountebank.

Shalders retorted, that Lord Ormont was a reprobate.

Matey hoped he would some day write us an essay on the morale of
illustrious generals of cavalry; and Shalders told him he did not advance
his case by talking nonsense.

Each then repeated to the boys a famous exploit of his hero. Their
verdict was favourable to Lord Ormont. Our English General learnt riding
before he was ten years old, on the Pampas, where you ride all day, and
cook your steak for your dinner between your seat and your saddle. He
rode with his father and his uncle, Muncastle, the famous traveller, into
Paraguay. He saw fighting before he was twelve. Before he was twenty he
was learning outpost duty in the Austrian frontier cavalry. He served in
the Peninsula, served in Canada, served in India, volunteered for any
chance of distinction. No need to say much of his mastering the picked
Indian swordsmen in single combat: he knew their trick, and was quick to
save his reins when they made a dash threatening the headstroke--about
the same as disabling sails in old naval engagements.

That was the part for the officer; we are speaking of the General. For
that matter, he had as keen an eye for the field and the moment for his
arm to strike as any Murat. One world have liked to see Murat matched
against the sabre of a wily Rajpoot! As to campaigns and strategy, Lord
Ormont's head was a map. What of Murat and Lord Ormont horse to horse and
sword to sword? Come, imagine that, if you are for comparisons. And if
Lord Ormont never headed a lot of thousands, it does not prove he was
unable. Lord Ormont was as big as Murat. More, he was a Christian to his
horses. How about Murat in that respect? Lord Ormont cared for his men:
did Murat so particularly much? And he was as cunning fronting odds, and
a thunderbolt at the charge. Why speak of him in the past? He is an
English lord, a lord by birth, and he is alive; things may be expected of
him to-morrow or next day.

Shalders here cut Matey short by meanly objecting to that.

"Men are mortal," he said, with a lot of pretended stuff, deploring our
human condition in the elegy strain; and he fell to reckoning the English
hero's age--as that he, Lord Ormont, had been a name in the world for the
last twenty-five years or more. The noble lord could be no chicken. We
are justified in calculating, by the course of nature, that his term of
activity is approaching, or has approached, or, in fact, has drawn to its
close.

"If your estimate, sir, approaches to correctness," rejoined
Matey--tellingly, his comrades thought.

"Sixty, as you may learn some day, is a serious age, Matthew Weyburn."

Matey said he should be happy to reach it with half the honours Lord
Ormont had won.

"Excepting the duels," Shalders had the impudence to say.

"If the cause is a good one!" cried Matey.

"The cause, or Lord Ormont has been maligned, was reprehensible in the
extremest degree." Shalders cockhorsed on his heels to his toes and back
with a bang.

"What was the cause, if you please, sir?" a boy, probably naughty,
inquired; and as Shalders did not vouchsafe a reply, the bigger boys
knew.

They revelled in the devilish halo of skirts on the whirl encircling Lord
Ormont's laurelled head.

That was a spark in their blood struck from a dislike of the tone assumed
by Mr. Shalders to sustain his argument; with his "men are mortal," and
talk of a true living champion as "no chicken," and the wordy drawl over
"justification for calculating the approach of a close to a term of
activity"--in the case of a proved hero!

Guardians of boys should make sure that the boys are on their side before
they raise the standard of virtue. Nor ought they to summon morality for
support of a polemic. Matey Weyburn's object of worship rode superior to
a morality puffing its phrasy trumpet. And, somehow, the sacrifice of an
enormous number of women to Lord Ormont's glory seemed natural; the very
thing that should be, in the case of a first-rate military hero and
commander--Scipio notwithstanding. It brightens his flame, and it is
agreeable to them. That is how they come to distinction: they have no
other chance; they are only women; they are mad to be singed, and they
rush pelf-mall, all for the honour of the candle.

Shortly after this discussion Matey was heard informing some of the
bigger fellows he could tell them positively that Lord Ormont's age was
under fifty-four--the prime of manhood, and a jolly long way off death!
The greater credit to him, therefore, if he bad been a name in the world
for anything like the period Shalders insinuated, "to get himself out of
a sad quandary." Matey sounded the queer word so as to fix it sticking to
the usher, calling him Mr. Peter Bell Shalders, at which the boys roared,
and there was a question or two about names, which belonged to verses,
for people caring to read poems.

To the joy of the school he displayed a greater knowledge of Murat than
Shalders had: named the different places in Europe where Lord Ormont and
Murat were both springing to the saddle at the same time--one a Marshal,
the other a lieutenant; one a king, to be off his throne any day, the
other a born English nobleman, seated firm as fate. And he accused Murat
of carelessness of his horses, ingratitude to his benefactor, circussy
style. Shalders went so far as to defend Murat for attending to the
affairs of his kingdom, instead of galloping over hedges and ditches to
swell Napoleon's ranks in distress. Matey listened to him there; he
became grave; he nodded like a man saying, "I suppose we must examine it
in earnest." The school was damped to hear him calling it a nice
question. Still, he said he thought he should have gone; and that settled
it.

The boys inclined to speak contemptuously of Shalders. Matey world not
let them; he contrasted Shalders with the other ushers, who had no
enthusiasms. He said enthusiasms were salt to a man; and he liked
Shalders for spelling at his battles and thinking he understood them, and
admiring Murat, and leading Virgil and parts of Lucan for his recreation.
He said he liked the French because they could be splendidly
enthusiastic. He almost lost his English flavour when he spoke in
downright approval of a small French fellow, coming from Orthez, near the
Pyrenees, for senselessly dashing and kicking at a couple of English who
jeered to hear Orthez named--a place trampled under Wellington's heels,
on his march across conquered France. The foreign little cockerel was a
clever lad, learning English fast, and anxious to show he had got hold of
the English trick of not knowing when he was beaten. His French vanity
insisted on his engaging the two, though one of them stood aside, and the
other let him drive his nose all the compass round at a poker fist. What
was worse, Matey examined these two, in the interests of fair play, as if
he doubted.

Little Emile Grenat set matters right with his boast to vindicate his
country against double the number, and Matey praised him, though he knew
Emile had been floored without effort by the extension of a single fist.
He would not hear the French abused; he said they were chivalrous, they
were fine fellows, topping the world in some things; his father had
fought them and learnt to respect them. Perhaps his father had learnt to
respect Jews, for there was a boy named Abner, he protected, who smelt
Jewish; he said they ran us Gentiles hard, and carried big guns.

Only a reputation like Matey's could have kept his leadership from a
challenge. Joseph Masner, formerly a rival, went about hinting and
shrugging; all to no purpose, you find boys born to be chiefs. On the day
of the snow-fight Matey won the toss, and chose J. Masner first pick; and
Masner, aged seventeen and some months, big as a navvy, lumbered across
to him and took his directions, proud to stand in the front centre, at
the head of the attack, and bear the brunt--just what he was fit for,
Matey gave no offence by choosing, half-way down the list, his little
French friend, whom he stationed beside himself, rather off his
battle-front, as at point at cricket, not quite so far removed. Two boys
at his heels piled ammunition. The sides met midway of a marshy ground,
where a couple of flat and shelving banks, formed for a broad new road,
good for ten abreast--counting a step of the slopes--ran transverse; and
the order of the game was to clear the bank and drive the enemy on to the
frozen ditch-water. Miss Vincent heard in the morning from the sister of
little Collett of the great engagement coming off; she was moved by
curiosity, and so the young ladies of her establishment beheld the young
gentlemen of Mr. Cuper's in furious division, and Matey's sore aim and
hard fling, equal to a slinger's, relieving J. Masner of a foremost
assailant with a spanker on the nob. They may have fancied him clever for
selecting a position rather comfortable, as things went, until they had
sight of him with his little French ally and two others, ammunition boys
to rear, descending one bank and scaling another right into the flank of
the enemy, when his old tower of a Masner was being heavily pressed by
numbers. Then came a fight hand to hand, but the enemy stood in a clamp;
not to split like a nut between crackers, they gave way and rolled,
backing in lumps from bank to ditch.

The battle was over before the young ladies knew. They wondered to see
Matey shuffling on his coat and hopping along at easy bounds to pay his
respects to Miss Vincent, near whom was Browny; and this time he and
Browny talked together. He then introduced little Emile to her. She spoke
of Napoleon at Brienne, and complimented Matey. He said he was cavalry,
not artillery, that day. They talked to hear one another's voices. By
constantly appealing to Miss Vincent he made their conversation together
seem as under her conduct; and she took a slide on some French phrases
with little Emile. Her young ladies looked shrinking and envious to see
the fellows wet to the skin, laughing, wrestling, linking arms; and some,
who were clown-faced with a wipe of scarlet, getting friends to rub their
cheeks with snow, all of them happy as larks in air, a big tea steaming
for them at the school. Those girls had a leap and a fail of the heart,
glad to hug themselves in their dry clothes, and not so warm as the
dripping boys were, nor so madly fond of their dress-circle seats to look
on at a play they were not allowed even to desire to share. They looked
on at blows given and taken in good temper, hardship sharpening jollity.
The thought of the difference between themselves and the boys must have
been something like the tight band--call it corset--over the chest,
trying to lift and stretch for draughts of air. But Browny's feeling
naturally was, that all this advantage for the boys came of Matey
Weyburn's lead.

Miss Vincent with her young ladies walked off in couples, orderly chicks,
the usual Sunday march of their every day. The school was coolish to
them; one of the fellows hummed bars of some hymn tune, rather faster
than church. And next day there was a murmur of letters passing between
Matey and Browny regularly, little Collett for postman. Anybody might
have guessed it, but the report spread a feeling that girls are not the
entirely artificial beings or flat targets we suppose. The school began
to brood, like air deadening on oven-heat. Winter is hen-mother to the
idea of love in schools, if the idea has fairly entered. Various girls of
different colours were selected by boys for animated correspondence, that
never existed and was vigorously prosecuted, with efforts to repress
contempt of them in courtship for their affections. They found their part
of it by no means difficult when they imagined the lines without the
words, or, better still, the letter without the lines. A holy
satisfaction belonged to the sealed thing; the breaking of the seal and
inspection of the contents imposed perplexity on that sentiment. They
thought of certain possible sentences Matey and Browny would exchange;
but the plain, conceivable, almost visible, outside of the letter had a
stronger spell for them than the visionary inside. This fancied
contemplation of the love-letter was reversed in them at once by the
startling news of Miss Vincent's discovery and seizure of the sealed
thing, and her examination of the burden it contained. Then their thirst
was for drama--to see, to drink every wonderful syllable those lovers had
written.

Miss Vincent's hand was upon one of Matey's letters. She had come across
the sister of little Collett, Selina her name was, carrying it. She saw
nothing of the others. Aminta was not the girl to let her. Nor did Mr.
Cuper dare demand from Matey a sight or restitution of the young lady's
half of the correspondence. He preached heavily at Matey; deplored that
the boy he most trusted, etc.--the school could have repeated it without
hearing. We know the master's lecture in tones--it sings up to sing down,
and touches nobody. As soon as he dropped to natural talk, and spoke of
his responsibility and Miss Vincent's, Matey gave the word of a man of
honour that he would not seek to communicate farther with Miss Farrell at
the school.

Now there was a regular thunder-hash among the boys on the rare occasions
when they met the girls. All that Matey and Browny were forbidden to
write they looked--much like what it had been before the discovery; and
they dragged the boys back from promised instant events. It was,
nevertheless, a heaving picture, like the sea in the background of a
marine piece at the theatre, which rouses anticipations of storm, and
shows readiness. Browny's full eyebrow sat on her dark eye like a cloud
of winter noons over the vanishing sun. Matey was the prisoner gazing at
light of a barred window and measuring the strength of the bars. She
looked unhappy, but looked unbeaten more. Her look at him fed the school
on thoughts of what love really is, when it is not fished out of books
and poetry. For though she was pale, starved and pale, they could see she
was never the one to be sighing; and as for him, he looked ground dower
all to edge. However much they puzzled over things, she made them feel
they were sure, as to her, that she drove straight and meant blood, the
life or death of it: all her own, if need be, and confidence in the
captain she had chosen. She could have been imagined saying, There is a
storm, but I am ready to embark with you this minute.

That sign of courage in real danger ennobled her among girls. The name
Browny was put aside for a respectful Aminta. Big and bright events to
come out in the world were hinted, from the love of such a couple. The
boys were not ashamed to speak the very word love. How he does love that
girl! Well, and how she loves him! She did, but the boys had to be seeing
her look at Matey if they were to put the girl on some balanced equality
with a fellow she was compelled to love. It seemed to them that he gave,
and that she was a creature carried to him, like driftwood along the
current of the flood, given, in spite of herself. When they saw those
eyes of hers they were impressed with an idea of her as a voluntary giver
too; pretty well the half to the bargain; and it confused their notion of
feminine inferiority. They resolved to think her an exceptional girl,
which, in truth, they could easily do, for none but an exceptional girl
could win Matey to love her.

Since nothing appeared likely to happen at the school, they speculated
upon what would occur out in the world, and were assisted to conjecture,
by a rumour, telling of Aminta Farrell's aunt as a resident at Dover.
Those were days when the benevolently international M. de Porquet had
begun to act as interpreter to English schools in the portico of the
French language; and under his guidance it was asked, in contempt of the
answer, Combien de postes d'ici a Douvres? But, accepting the rumour as a
piece of information, the answer became important. Ici was twenty miles
to the north-west of London. How long would it take Matey to reach
Donvres? Or at which of the combien did he intend to waylay and away with
Aminta? The boys went about pounding at the interrogative French phrase
in due sincerity, behind the burlesque of traveller bothering coachman.
Matey's designs could be finessed only by a knowledge of his character:
that he was not the fellow to give up the girl he had taken to; and
impediments might multiply, but he would bear them down. Three days
before the break-up of the school another rumour came tearing through it:
Aminta's aunt had withdrawn her from Miss Vincent's. And now rose the
question, two-dozen-mouthed, Did Matey know her address at Douvres? His
face grew stringy and his voice harder, and his eyes ready to burst from
a smother of fire. All the same, he did his work: he was the good old
fellow at games, considerate in school affairs, kind to the youngsters;
he was heard to laugh. He liked best the company of his little French
friend from Orthez, over whose shoulder his hand was laid sometimes as
they strolled and chatted in two languages. He really went a long way to
make French fellows popular, and the boys were sorry that little Emile
was off to finish his foreign education in Germany. His English was
pretty good, thanks to Matey. He went away, promising to remember Old
England, saying he was French first, and a Briton next. He had lots of
plunk; which accounted for Matey's choice of him as a friend among the
juniors.




CHAPTER II.

LADY CHARLOTTE

Love-passages at a school must produce a ringing crisis if they are to
leave the rosy impression which spans the gap of holidays. Neither Matey
nor Browny returned to their yoke, and Cuper's boys recollected the
couple chiefly on Sundays. They remembered several of Matey's doings and
sayings: his running and high leaping, his bowling, a maxim or two of
his, and the tight strong fellow he was; also that the damsel's colour
distinctly counted for dark. She became nearly black in their minds.
Well, and Englishmen have been known to marry Indian princesses: some
have a liking for negresses. There are Nubians rather pretty in pictures,
if you can stand thick lips. Her colour does not matter, provided the
girl is of the right sort. The exchange of letters between the lovers was
mentioned. The discovery by Miss Vincent of their cool habit of
corresponding passed for an incident; and there it remained, stiff as a
poet, not being heated by a story to run. So the foregone excitement lost
warmth, and went out like a winter sun at noon or a match lighted before
the candle is handy.

Lord Ormont continued to be a subject of discussion from time to time,
for he was a name in the newspapers; and Mr. Shalders had been worked by
Matey Weyburn into a state of raw antagonism at the mention of the
gallant General; he could not avoid sitting in judgement on him.

According to Mr. Shalders, the opinion of all thoughtful people in
England was with John Company and the better part of the Press to condemn
Lord Ormont in his quarrel with the Commissioner of one of the Indian
provinces, who had the support of the Governor of his Presidency and of
the Viceroy; the latter not unreservedly, yet ostensibly inclined to
condemn a too prompt military hand. The Gordian knot of a difficulty cut
is agreeable in the contemplation of an official chief hesitating to use
the sword and benefiting by having it done for him. Lord Ormont certainly
cut the knot.

Mr. Shalders was cornered by the boys, coming at him one after another
without a stop, vowing it was the exercise of a military judgement upon a
military question at a period of urgency, which had brought about the
quarrel with the Commissioner and the reproof of the Governor. He
betrayed the man completely cornered by generalizing. He said--

"We are a civilian people; we pride ourselves on having civilian
methods."

"How can that be if we have won India with guns and swords?"

"But that splendid jewel for England's tiara won," said he (and he might
as well have said crown), "we are bound to sheathe the sword and govern
by the Book of the Law."

"But if they won't have the Book of the Law!"

"They knew the power behind it."

"Not if we knock nothing harder than the Book of the Law upon their
skulls."

"Happily for the country, England's councils are not directed by boys!"

"Ah, but we're speaking of India, Mr. Shalders."

"You are presuming to speak of an act of insubordination committed by a
military officer under civilian command."

"What if we find an influential prince engaged in conspiracy?"

"We look for proof."

"Suppose we have good proof?"

"We summon him to exonerate himself."

"No; we mount and ride straight away into his territory, spot the
treason, deport him, and rule in his place!"

It was all very well for Mr. Shalders to say he talked to boys; he was
cornered again, as his shrug confessed.

The boys asked among themselves whether he would have taken the same view
if his Murat had done it!

These illogical boys fought for Matey Weyburn in their defence of Lord
Ormont. Somewhere, they wee sure, old Matey was hammering to the same
end--they could hear him. Thought of him inspired them to unwonted
argumentative energy, that they might support his cause; and scatter the
gloomy prediction of the school, as going to the dogs now Matey had left.

The subject provoked everywhere in Great Britain a division similar to
that between master and boys at Cuper's establishment: one party for our
modern English magisterial methods with Indians, the other for the
decisive Oriental at the early time, to suit their native tastes; and the
Book of the Law is to be conciliatingly addressed to their sentiments by
a benign civilizing Power, or the sword is out smartly at the hint of a
warning to protect the sword's conquests. Under one aspect we appear
potteringly European; under another, drunk of the East.

Lord Ormont's ride at the head of two hundred horsemen across a stretch
of country including hill and forest, to fall like a bolt from the blue
on the suspected Prince in the midst of his gathering warriors, was a
handsome piece of daring, and the high-handed treatment of the Prince was
held by his advocates to be justified by the provocation, and the result.
He scattered an unprepared body of many hundreds, who might have
enveloped him, and who would presumptively have stood their ground, had
they not taken his handful to be the advance of regiments. These are the
deeds that win empires! the argument in his favour ran. Are they of a
character to maintain empires? the counter-question was urged. Men of a
deliberative aspect were not wanting in approval of the sharp and summary
of the sword in air when we have to deal with Indians. They chose to
regard it as a matter of the dealing with Indians, and put aside the
question of the contempt of civil authority.

Counting the cries, Lord Ormont won his case. Festival aldermen, smoking
clubmen, buckskin squires, obsequious yet privately excitable tradesmen,
sedentary coachmen and cabmen, of Viking descent, were set to think like
boys about him: and the boys, the women, and the poets formed a tipsy
chorea. Journalists, on the whole, were fairly halved, as regarded
numbers. In relation to weight, they were with the burgess and the
presbyter; they preponderated heavily in the direction of England's
burgess view of all cases disputed between civilian and soldier. But that
was when the peril was over.

Admirers of Lord Ormont enjoyed a perusal of a letter addressed by him to
the burgess's journal; and so did his detractors. The printing of it was
an act of editorial ruthlessness. The noble soldier had no mould in his
intellectual or educational foundry for the casting of sentences; and the
editor's leading type to the letter, without further notice of the
writer--who was given a prominent place or scaffolding for the execution
of himself publicly, if it pleased him to do that thing--tickled the
critical mind. Lord Ormont wrote intemperately.

His Titanic hurling of blocks against critics did no harm to an enemy
skilled in the use of trimmer weapons, notably the fine one of letting
big missiles rebound. He wrote from India, with Indian heat--"curry and
capsicums," it was remarked. He dared to claim the countenance of the
Commander-in-chief of the Army of India for an act disapproved by the
India House. Other letters might be on their way, curryer than the
preceding, his friends feared; and might also be malevolently printed,
similarly commissioning the reverberation of them to belabour his name
before the public. Admirers were still prepared to admire; but aldermen
not at the feast, squire-archs not in the saddle or at the bottle, some
few of the juvenile and female fervent, were becoming susceptible to a
frosty critical tone in the public pronunciation of Lord Ormont's name
since the printing of his letter and the letters it called forth. None of
them doubted that his case was good. The doubt concerned the effect on it
of his manner of pleading it. And if he damaged his case, he compromised
his admirers. Why, the case of a man who has cleverly won a bold stroke
for his country must be good, as long as he holds his tongue. A grateful
country will right him in the end: he has only to wait, and not so very
long. "This I did: now examine it." Nothing more needed to be said by
him, if that.

True, he has a temper. It is owned that he is a hero. We take him with
his qualities, impetuosity being one, and not unsuited to his arm of the
service, as he has shown. If his temper is high, it is an element of a
character proved heroical. So has the sun his blotches, and we believe
that they go to nourish the luminary, rather than that they are a disease
of the photosphere.

Lord Ormont's apologists had to contend with anecdotes and dicta now
pouring in from offended Britons, for illustration of an impetuosity fit
to make another Charley XII. of Sweden--a gratuitous Coriolanus
haughtiness as well, new among a people accustomed socially to bow the
head to their nobles, and not, of late, expecting a kick for their pains.
Newspapers wrote of him that, "a martinet to subordinates, he was known
for the most unruly of lieutenants." They alluded to current sayings, as
that he "habitually took counsel of his horse on the field when a
movement was entrusted to his discretion." Numerous were the journalistic
sentences running under an air of eulogy of the lordly warrior purposely
to be tripped, and producing their damnable effect, despite the obvious
artifice. The writer of the letter from Bombay, signed Ormont, was a born
subject for the antithetical craftsmen's tricky springes.

He was, additionally, of infamous repute for morale in burgess
estimation, from his having a keen appreciation of female beauty and a
prickly sense of masculine honour. The stir to his name roused
pestilential domestic stories. In those days the aristocrat still claimed
licence, and eminent soldier-nobles, comporting themselves as imitative
servants of their god Mars, on the fields of love and war, stood
necessarily prepared to vindicate their conduct as the field of the
measured paces, without deeming themselves bounden to defend the course
they took. Our burgess, who bowed head to his aristocrat, and hired the
soldier to fight for him, could not see that such mis-behaviour
necessarily ensued. Lord Ormont had fought duels at home and abroad. His
readiness to fight again, and against odds, and with a totally unused
weapon, was exhibited by his attack on the Press in the columns of the
Press. It wore the comical face to the friends deploring it, which
belongs to things we do that are so very like us. They agreed with his
devoted sister, Lady Charlotte Eglett, as to the prudence of keeping him
out of England for a time, if possible.

At the first perusal of the letter, Lady Charlotte quitted her place in
Leicestershire, husband, horses, guests, the hunt, to scour across a
vacant London and pick up acquaintances under stress to be spots there in
the hunting season, with them to gossip for counsel on the subject of
"Ormont's hand-grenade," and how to stop and extinguish a second. She was
a person given to plain speech. "Stinkpot" she called it, when
acknowledging foul elements in the composition and the harm it did to the
unskilful balist. Her view of the burgess English imaged a mighty monster
behind bars, to whom we offer anything but our hand. As soon as he gets
held of that he has you; he won't let it loose with flesh on the bones.
We must offend him--we can't be man or woman without offending his tastes
and his worships; but while we keep from contact (i.e. intercommunication)
he may growl, he is harmless. Witness the many occasions when her brother
offended worse, and had been unworried, only growled at, and distantly,
not in a way to rouse concern; and at the neat review, or procession into
the City, or public display of any sort, Ormont had but to show himself,
he was the popular favourite immediately. He had not committed the folly
of writing a letter to a newspaper then.

Lady Charlotte paid an early visit to the office of the great London
solicitor, Arthur Abner, who wielded the law as an instrument of
protection for countless illustrious people afflicted by what they stir
or attract in a wealthy metropolis. She went simply to gossip of her
brother's affairs with a refreshing man of the world, not given to
circumlocutions, and not afraid of her: she had no deeper object; but
fancying she heard the clerk, on his jump from the stool, inform her that
Mr. Abner was out, "Out?" she cried, and rattled the room, thumping,
under knitted brows. "Out of town?" For a man of business taking
holidays, when a lady craves for gossip, disappointed her faith in him as
cruelly as the shut-up, empty inn the broken hunter knocking at a hollow
door miles off home.

Mr. Abner, hatted and gloved and smiling, came forth. "Going out, the man
meant, Lady Charlotte. At your service for five minutes."

She complimented his acuteness, in the remark, "You see I've only come to
chat," and entered his room.

He led her to her theme: "The excitement is pretty well over."

"My brother's my chief care--always was. I'm afraid he'll be pitchforking
at it again, and we shall have another blast. That letter ought never to
have been printed. That editor deserves the horsewhip for letting it
appear. If he prints a second one I shall treat him as a personal enemy."

"Better make a friend of him."

"How?"

"Meet him at my table."

She jumped an illumined half-about on her chair. "So I will, then. What
are the creature's tastes?"

"Hunts, does he?" The editor rose in her mind from the state of neuter to
something of a man. "I recollect an article in that paper on the Ormont
duel. I hate duelling, but I side with my brother. I had to laugh,
though. Luckily, there's no woman on hand at present, as far as I know.
Ormont's not likely to be hooked by garrison women or blacks. Those
coloured women--some of ours too--send the nose to the clouds; not a bad
sign for health. And there are men like that old Cardinal Guicciardini
tells of...hum! Ormont's not one of them. I hope he'll stay in India till
this blows over, or I shall be hearing of provocations."

"You have seen the Duke?"

She nodded. Her reserve was a summary of the interview. "Kind, as he
always is," she said. "Ormont has no chance of employment unless there's
a European war. They can't overlook him in case of war. He'll have to
pray for that."

"Let us hope we shan't get it."

"My wish; but I have to think of my brother. If he's in England with no
employment, he's in a mess with women and men both. He kicks if he's laid
aside to rust. He has a big heart. That's what I said: all he wants is to
serve his country. If you won't have war, give him Gibraltar or Malta, or
command of one of our military districts. The South-eastern 'll be vacant
soon. He'd like to be Constable of the Castle, and have an eye on
France."

"I think he's fond of the French?"

"Loves the French. Expects to have to fight them all the same. He loves
his country best. Here's the man everybody's abusing!"

"I demur, my lady. I was dining the other day with a client of mine, and
a youngster was present who spoke of Lord Ormont in a way I should like
you to have heard. He seemed to know the whole of Lord Ormont's career,
from the time of the ride to Paraguay up to the capture of the plotting
Rajah. He carried the table."

"Good boy! We must turn to the boys for justice, then. Name your day for
this man, this editor."

"I will see him. You shall have the day to-night."

Lady Charlotte and the editor met. She was racy, he anecdotal. Stag, fox,
and hare ran before them, over fields and through drawing-rooms: the
scent was rich. They found that they could talk to one another as they
thought; that he was not the Isle-bound burgess, nor she the postured
English great lady; and they exchanged salt, without which your current
scandal is of exhausted savour. They enjoyed the peculiar novel relish of
it, coming from a social pressman and a dame of high society. The
different hemispheres became known as one sphere to these birds of broad
wing convening in the upper blue above a quartered carcase earth.

A week later a letter, the envelope of a bulky letter in Lord Ormont's
handwriting, reached Lady Charlotte. There was a line from the editor:

   "Would it please your ladyship to have this printed?"

She read the letter, and replied:

   "Come to me for six days; you shall have the best mount in the
   county."

An editor devoid of malice might probably have forborne to print a letter
that appealed to Lady Charlotte, or touched her sensations, as if a
glimpse of the moon, on the homeward ride in winter on a nodding horse,
had suddenly bared to view a precipitous quarry within two steps. There
is no knowing: few men can forbear to tell a spicy story of their
friends; and an editor, to whom an exhibition of the immensely
preposterous on the part of one writing arrogantly must be provocative,
would feel the interests of his Journal, not to speak of the claims of
readers, pluck at him when he meditated the consignment of such a
precious composition to extinction. Lady Charlotte withheld a sight of
the letter from Mr. Eglett. She laid it in her desk, understanding well
that it was a laugh lost to the world. Poets could reasonably feign it to
shake the desk inclosing it. She had a strong sense of humour; her mind
reverted to the desk in a way to make her lips shut grimly. She sided
with her brother.

Only pen in hand did he lay himself open to the enemy. In his personal
intercourse he was the last of men to be taken at a disadvantage. Lady
Charlotte was brought round to the distasteful idea of some help coming
from a legitimate adjunct at his elbow: a restraining woman--wife, it had
to be said. And to name the word wife for Thomas Rowsley, Earl of Ormont,
put up the porcupine quills she bristled with at the survey of a sex
thirsting, and likely to continue thirsting, for such honour. What woman
had she known fit to bear the name? She had assumed the judicial seat
upon the pretensions of several, and dismissed them to their limbo, after
testifying against them. Who is to know the fit one in these mines of
deception? Women of the class offering wives decline to be taken on
trial; they are boxes of puzzles--often dire surprises. Her brother knew
them well enough to shy at the box. Her brother Rowsley had a funny
pride, like a boy at a game, at the never having been caught by one among
the many he made captive. She let him have it all to himself.

He boasted it to a sister sharing the pride exultant in the cry of the
hawk, scornful of ambitions poultry, a passed finger-post to the plucked,
and really regretful that no woman had been created fit for him. When she
was not aiding with her brother, women, however contemptible for their
weakness, appeared to her as better than barn-door fowl, or vermin in
their multitudes gnawing to get at the cheese-trap. She could be humane,
even sisterly, with women whose conduct or prattle did not outrage plain
sense, just as the stickler for the privileges of her class was
large-heartedly charitable to the classes flowing in oily orderliness
round about below it--if they did so flow. Unable to read woman's
character, except upon the broadest lines as it were the spider's main
threads of its web, she read men minutely, from the fact that they were
neither mysteries nor terrors to her; but creatures of importunate
appetites, humorous objects; very manageable, if we leave the road to
their muscles, dress their wounds, smoothe their creases, plume their
vanity; and she had an unerring eye for the man to be used when a blow
was needed, methods for setting him in action likewise. She knew how much
stronger than ordinary men the woman who can put them in motion. They can
be set to serve as pieces of cannon, under compliments on their superior
powers, which were not all undervalued by her on their own merits, for
she worshipped strength. But the said, with a certain amount of truth,
that the women unaware of the advantage Society gave them (as to
mastering men) were fools.

Tender, is not a word coming near to Lady Charlotte. Thoughtful on behalf
of the poor foolish victims of men she was. She had saved some, avenged
others. It should be stated, that her notion of saving was the saving of
them from the public: she had thrown up a screen. The saving of them from
themselves was another matter--hopeless, to her thinking. How preach at a
creature on the bend of passion's rapids! One might as well read a
chapter from the Bible to delirious patients. When once a woman is taken
with the love-passion, we must treat her as bitten; hide her antics from
the public: that is the principal business. If she recovers, she resumes
her place, and horrid old Nature, who drove her to the frenzy, is
unlikely to bother or, at least, overthrow her again, unless she is one
of the detestable wantons, past compassion or consideration. In the case
reviewed, the woman has gone through fire, and is none the worse for her
experiences: worth ten times what she was, to an honest man, if men could
be got to see it. Some do. Of those men who do not, Lady Charlotte spoke
with the old family-nurse humour, which is familiar with the tricks and
frailties of the infants; and it is a knife to probe the male, while
seemingly it does the part of the napkin--pities and pats. They expect a
return of much for the little that is next to nothing. They are fall of
expectations: and of what else? They are hard bargainers.

She thought this of men; and she liked men by choice. She had old nurse's
preference for the lustier male child. The others are puling things,
easier to rear, because they bend better; and less esteemed, though they
give less trouble, rouse less care. But when it came to the duel between
the man and the woman, her sense of justice was moved to join her with
the party of her unfairly handled sisters--a strong party, if it were not
so cowardly, she had to think.

Mr. Eglett, her husband, accepted her--accepted the position into which
he naturally fell beside her, and the ideas she imposed on him; for she
never went counter to his principles. These were the fixed principles of
a very wealthy man, who abhorred debt, and was punctilious in veracity,
scrupulous in cleanliness of mind and body, devoted to the honour of his
country, the interests of his class. She respected the high landmark
possessing such principles; and she was therefore enabled to lead without
the wish to rule. As it had been between them at the beginning, so it was
now, when they were grandparents running on three lines of progeny from
two daughters and a son: they were excellent friends. Few couples can say
more. The union was good English grey--that of a prolonged November, to
which we are reconciled by occasions for the hunt and the gun. She was,
nevertheless, an impassioned woman. The feeling for her brother helped to
satisfy her heart's fires, though as little with her brother as with her
husband was she demonstrative. Lord Ormont disrelished the caresses of
relatives.

She, for her part, had so strong a sympathy on behalf of poor gentlemen
reduced to submit to any but a young woman's hug, that when, bronzed from
India, he quitted the carriage and mounted her steps at Olmer, the desire
to fling herself on his neck and breast took form in the words: "Here you
are home again, Rowsley; glad to have you." They shook hands firmly.

He remained three days at Olmer. His temper was mild, his frame of mind
bad as could be. Angry evaporations had left a residuum of solid scorn
for these "English," who rewarded soldierly services as though it were a
question of damaged packages of calico. He threatened to take the first
offer of a foreign State "not in insurrection." But clear sky was
overhead. He was the Rowsley of the old boyish delight in field sports,
reminiscences of prowlings and trappings in the woods, gropings along
water-banks, enjoyment of racy gossip. He spoke wrathfully of "one of
their newspapers" which steadily persisted in withholding from
publication every letter he wrote to it, after printing the first. And if
it printed one, why not the others?

Lady Charlotte put it on the quaintness of editors.

He had found in London, perhaps, reason for saying that he should do well
to be "out of this country" as early as he could; adding, presently, that
he meant to go, though "it broke his heart to keep away from a six
months' rest at Steignton," his Wiltshire estate.

No woman was in the field. Lady Charlotte could have submitted to the
intrusion of one of those at times wholesome victims, for the sake of the
mollification the unhappy proud thing might bring to a hero smarting
under injustice at the hands of chiefs and authorities.

He passed on to Steignton, returned to London, and left England for
Spain, as he wrote word, saying he hoped to settle at Steignton neat
year. He was absent the next year, and longer. Lady Charlotte had the
surprising news that Steignton was let, shooting and all, for five years;
and he had no appointment out of England or at home. When he came to
Olmer again he was under one of his fits of reserve, best undisturbed.
Her sympathy with a great soldier snubbed, an active man rusting, kept
her from remonstrance.

Three years later she was made meditative by the discovery of a woman's
being absolutely in the field, mistress of the field; and having been
there for a considerable period, dating from about the time when he
turned his back on England to visit a comrade-in-arms condemned by the
doctors to pass the winter in Malaga; and it was a young woman, a girl in
her teens, a handsome girl. Handsome was to be expected; Ormont bargained
for beauty. But report said the girl was very handsome, and showed
breeding: she seemed a foreigner, walked like a Goddess, sat her horse
the perfect Amazon. Rumour called her a Spaniard.

"Not if she rides!" Lady Charlotte cut that short.

Rumour had subsequently more to say. The reporter in her ear did not
confirm it, and she was resolutely deaf to a story incredible of her
brother--the man, of all men living, proudest of his name, blood,
station. So proud was he by nature, too, that he disdained to complain of
rank injustice; he maintained a cheerful front against adversity and
obloquy. And this man of complete self-command, who has every form of
noble pride, gets cajoled like a twenty-year-old yahoo at college! Do you
imagine it? To suppose of a man cherishing the name of Ormont, that he
would bestow it legally on a woman, a stranger, and imperil his race by
mixing blood with a creature of unknown lineage, was--why, of course, it
was to suppose him struck mad, and there never had been madness among the
Ormonts: they were too careful of the purity of the strain. Lady
Charlotte talked. She was excited, and ran her sentences to blanks, a
cunning way for ministering consolation to her hearing, where the
sentence intended a question, and the blank ending caught up the query
tone and carried it dwindling away to the most distant of throttled
interrogatives. She had, in this manner, only to ask,--her hearing
received the comforting answer it desired; for she could take that thin
far sound as a travelling laughter of incredulity, triumphant derision.

This meant to her--though she scarcely knew it, though the most wilful of
women declined to know it--a state of alarm. She had said of her brother
in past days that he would have his time of danger after striking sixty.
The dangerous person was to be young.

But, then, Ormont had high principles with regard to the dues to his
family. His principles could always be trusted. The dangerous young
person would have to be a person of lineage, of a certain station at
least: no need for a titled woman, only for warranted good blood. Is that
to be found certificated out of the rolls of Society? It may just
possibly be found, without certificate, however, in those muddled caverns
where the excluded intermingle. Here and there, in a peasant family, or a
small country tradesman's just raised above a peasant, honest
regenerating blood will be found. Nobles wanting refreshment from the
soil might do worse than try a slip of one of those juicy weeds;
ill-fated, sickly Royalties would be set-up striding through another
half-century with such invigoration, if it could be done for them! There
are tales. The tales are honourably discredited by the crazy
constitutions of the heirs to the diadem.

Yes, but we are speculating on the matter seriously, as though it were
one of intimate concern to the family. What is there to make us think
that Ormont would marry? Impossible to imagine him intimidated. Unlikely
that he, a practised reader of women, having so little of the woman in
him, would be melted by a wily girl; as women in the twilight situation
have often played the trick to come into the bright beams. How? They do a
desperate thing, and call it generosity, and then they appeal from it to
my lord's generosity; and so the two generosities drive off in a close
carriage with a friend and a professional landlady for the blessing of
the parson, and are legitimately united. Women have won round fools to
give way in that way. And quite right too! thought Lady Charlotte, siding
with nature and justice, as she reflected that no woman created would win
round her brother to give way in that way. He was too acute. The moment
the woman showed sign of becoming an actress, her doom was written. "Poor
idiot!" was not uncharitably inscribed by the sisterly lady on the
tombstone of hopes aimed with scarce pardonable ambition at her brother.

She blew away the rumour. Ormont, she vowed, had not entitled any woman
to share and bear his title. And this was her interpretation of the
report: he permitted (if he did permit) the woman to take his name, that
he might have a scornful fling at the world maltreating him. Besides, the
name was not published, it was not to be seen in the papers; it passed
merely among male friends, tradesmen, servants: no great harm in that.

Listen further. Here is an unknown girl: why should he marry her? A girl
consenting to the place beside a man of his handsome ripe age, is either
bought, or she is madly enamoured; she does not dictate terms. Ormont is
not of the brute buyers in that market. One sees it is the girl who leads
the dance. A girl is rarely so madly enamoured as when she falls in love
with her grandfather; she pitches herself at his head. This had not
happened for the first time in Ormont's case; and he had never proposed
marriage. Why should he do it now?

But again, if the girl has breeding to some extent, he might think it her
due that she should pass under the safeguard of his name, out of sight.

Then, so far the report is trustworthy. We blow the rumour out of belief.
A young woman there is: she is not a wife. Lady Charlotte allowed her the
fairly respectable post of Hecate of the Shades, as long as the girl was
no pretender to the place and name in the upper sphere. Her deductions
were plausible, convincing to friends shaken by her vehement manner of
coming at them. She convinced herself by means of her multitude of
reasons for not pursuing inquiry. Her brother said nothing. There was no
need for him to speak. He seemed on one or two occasions in the act of
getting himself together for the communication of a secret; and she made
ready to listen hard, with ears, eyebrows, shut month, and a gleam at the
back of her eyes, for a signification of something she would refer him to
after he had spoken. He looked at her and held his peace, or virtually
held it,--that is, he said not one word on the subject she was to have
told him she had anticipated. Lady Charlotte ascribed it to his
recollection of the quick blusher, the pained blusher, she was in her
girlhood at mention or print of the story of men and women. Who, not
having known her, could conceive it! But who could conceive that, behind
the positive, plain-dealing, downright woman of the world, there was at
times, when a nerve was touched or an old blocked path of imagination
thrown open, a sensitive youthfulness; still quick to blush as far as the
skin of a grandmother matron might show it!




CHAPTER III.

THE TUTOR

There was no counting now on Lord Ormont's presence in the British
gathering seasons, when wheatears wing across our fields or swallows
return to their eaves. He forsook the hunt to roam the Continent, one of
the vulgar band of tourists, honouring town only when Mayflies had flown,
and London's indiscriminate people went about without their volatile
heads.

Lady Charlotte put these changed conditions upon the behaviour of the
military authorities to her brother, saying that the wonder was he did
not shake the dust of his country from his feet. In her wise head she
rejoiced to think he was not the donkey she sketched for admiration; and
she was partly consoled, or played at the taking of a comfort needed in
her perpetual struggle with a phantom of a fact, by the reflection that a
young woman on his arm would tense him to feel himself more at home
abroad. Her mind's habit of living warmly beside him in separation was
vexed by the fixed intrusion of a female third person, who checked the
run of intimate chatter, especially damped the fancied talk over early
days--of which the creature was ignorant; and her propinquity to him
arrested or broke the dialogue Lady Charlotte invented and pressed to
renew. But a wife, while letting him be seen, would have insisted on
appropriating the thought of him--all his days, past as well as present.
An impassioned sister's jealousy preferred that it should not be a wife
reigning to dispute her share of her brother in imagination.

Then came a rumour, telling of him as engaged upon the composition of his
Memoirs.

Lady Charlotte's impulsive outcry: "Writing them?" signified her grounds
for alarm.

Happily, Memoirs are not among the silly deeds done in a moment; they
were somewhere ahead and over the hills: a band of brigands rather than a
homely shining mansion, it was true; but distant; and a principal
question shrieked to know whether he was composing them for publication.
She could look forward with a girl's pleasure to the perusal of them in
manuscript, in a woody nook, in a fervour of partizanship, easily
avoiding sight of errors, grammatical or moral. She chafed at the
possible printing and publishing of them. That would be equivalent to an
exhibition of him clean-stripped for a run across London--brilliant in
himself, spotty in the offence. Published Memoirs indicate the end of a
man's activity, and that he acknowledges the end; and at a period of Lord
Ormont's life when the denial of it should thunder. They are his final
chapter, making mummy of the grand figure they wrap in the printed stuff.
They are virtually his apology. Can those knowing Lord Ormont hear him
apologize? But it is a craven apology if we stoop to expound: we are seen
as pleading our case before the public. Call it by any name you please,
and under any attitude, it is that. And set aside the writing: it may be
perfect; the act is the degradation. It is a rousing of swarms. His
friends and the public will see the proudest nobleman of his day,
pleading his case in mangled English, in the headlong of an out-poured,
undrilled, rabble vocabulary, doubling the ridicule by his
imperturbability over the ridicule he excites: he who is no more
ridiculous, cried the partizan sister, conjuring up the scene, not an ace
more ridiculous, than a judge of assize calling himself miserable sinner
on Sunday before the parson, after he has very properly condemned half a
score of weekday miserable sinners to penal servitude or the rope. Nobody
laughs at the judge. Everybody will be laughing at the scornful man down
half-way to his knee-cape with a stutter of an apology for having done
his duty to his country, after stigmatizing numbers for inability or
ill-will to do it. But Ormont's weapon is the sword, not a pen! Lady
Charlotte hunted her simile till the dogs had it or it ran to earth.

She struck at the conclusion, that the young woman had been persuading
him. An adoring young woman is the person to imagine and induce to the
commission of such folly. "What do you think? You have seen her, you
say?" she asked of a man she welcomed for his flavour of the worldling's
fine bile.

Lord Adderwood made answer: "She may be having a hand in it. She
worships, and that is your way of pulling gods to the ground."

"Does she understand good English?"

"Speaks it."

"Can she write?"

"I have never had a letter from her."

"You tell me Morsfield admires the woman--would marry her to-morrow, if
he could get her."

"He would go through the ceremony Ormont has performed, I do not doubt."

"I don't doubt all of you are ready. She doesn't encourage one?"

"On the contrary, all."

"She's clever. This has been going on for now seven years, and, as far as
I know, she has my brother fast."

"She may have done the clever trick of having him fast from the
beginning."

"She'd like people to think it."

"She has an aunt to advertise it."

"Ormont can't swallow the woman, I'm told."

"Trying, if one is bound to get her down!"

"Boasts of the connection everywhere she's admitted, Randeller says."

"Randeller procures the admission to various parti-coloured places."

"She must be a blinking moll-owl! And I ask any sane Christian or
Pagan--proof enough!--would my brother Rowsley let his wife visit those
places, those people? Monstrous to have the suspicion that he would, you
know him! Mrs. Lawrence Finchley, for example. I say nothing to hurt the
poor woman; I back her against her imbecile of a husband. He brings a
charge he can't support; she punishes him by taking three years' lease of
independence and kicks up the grass all over the paddock, and then comes
cuckoo, barking his name abroad to have her home again. You can win the
shyest filly to corn at last. She goes, and he digests ruefully the
hotch-potch of a dish the woman brings him. Only the world spies a
side-head at her, husbanded or not, though the main fault was his, and
she had a right to insist that he should be sure of his charge before he
smacked her in the face with it before the world. In dealing with a
woman, a man commonly prudent--put aside chivalry, justice, and the
rest--should bind himself to disbelieve what he can't prove. Otherwise,
let him expect his whipping, with or without ornament. My opinion is,
Lawrence Finchley had no solid foundation for his charge, except his
being an imbecile. She wasn't one of the adventurous women to jump the
bars,--the gate had to be pushed open, and he did it. There she is; and I
ask you, would my brother Rowsley let his wife be intimate with her? And
there are others. And, sauf votre respect, the men--Morsfield for one,
Randeller another!"

"They have a wholesome dread of the lion."

"If they smell a chance with the lion's bone--it's the sweeter for being
the lion's. These metaphors carry us off our ground. I must let these
Ormont Memoirs run and upset him, if they get to print. I've only to
oppose, printed they'll be. The same if I say a word of this woman, he
marries her to-morrow morning. You speak of my driving men. Why can't I
drive Ormont? Because I'm too fond of him. There you have the secret of
the subjection of women: they can hold their own, and a bit more, when
they've no enemy beating inside."

"Hearts!--ah, well, it's possible. I don't say no; I've not discovered
them," Lord Adderwood observed.

They are rarely discovered in the haunts he frequented.

Her allusion to Mrs. Lawrence Finchley rapped him smartly, and she
admired his impassiveness under the stroke. Such a spectacle was one of
her pleasures.

Lady Charlotte mentioned incidentally her want of a tutor for her
grandson Leo during the winter holidays. He suggested an application to
the clergyman of her parish. She was at feud with the Rev. Stephen
Hampton-Evey, and would not take, she said, a man to be a bootblack in
her backyard or a woman a scullery-wench in her kitchen upon his
recommendation. She described the person of Mr. Hampton-Evey, his manner
of speech, general opinions, professional doctrines; rolled him into a
ball and bowled him, with a shrug for lamentation, over the decay of the
good old order of manly English Protestant clergymen, who drank their
port, bothered nobody about belief, abstained from preaching their
sermon, if requested; were capital fellows in the hunting-field, too; for
if they came, they had the spur to hunt in the devil's despite. Now we
are going to have a kind of bitter, clawed, forked female, in vestments
over breeches. "How do you like that bundling of the sexes?"

Lord Adderwood liked the lines of division to be strictly and invitingly
definite. He was thinking, as he reviewed the frittered appearance of the
Rev. Stephen Hampton-Evey in Lady Charlotte's hinds, of the possibility
that Lord Ormont, who was reputed to fear nobody, feared her. In which
case, the handsome young woman passing among his associates as the pseudo
Lady Ormont might be the real one after all, and Isabella Lawrence
Finchley prove right in the warning she gave to dogs of chase.

The tutor required by Lady Charlotte was found for her by Mr. Abner.
Their correspondence on the subject filled the space of a week, and then
the gentleman hired to drive a creaky wheel came down from London to
Olmer, arriving late in the evening.

Lady Charlotte's blunt "Oh!" when he entered her room and bowed upon the
announcement of his name, was caused by an instantaneous perception and
refection that it would be prudent to keep her grand-daughter Philippa,
aged between seventeen and eighteen, out of his way.

"You are friend of Mr. Abner's, are you?"

He was not disconcerted. He replied, in an assured and pleasant voice, "I
have hardly the pretension to be called a friend, madam."

"Are you a Jew?"

Her abruptness knocked something like a laugh almost out of him, but he
restrained the signs of it.

"I am not."

"You wouldn't be ashamed to tell me you were one if you were?"

"Not at all."

"You like the Jews?"

"Those I know I like."

"Not many Christians have the good sense and the good heart of Arthur
Abner. Now go and eat. Come back to me when you've done. I hope you are
hungry. Ask the butler for the wine you prefer."

She had not anticipated the enrolment in her household of a man so young
and good-looking. These were qualifications for Cupid's business, which
his unstrained self-possession accentuated to a note of danger to her
chicks, because she liked the taste of him. Her grand-daughter Philippa
was in the girl's waxen age; another, Beatrice, was coming to it. Both
were under her care; and she was a vigilant woman, with an intuition and
a knowledge of sex. She did not blame Arthur Abner for sending her a
good-looking young man; she had only a general idea that tutors in a
house, and even visiting tutors, should smell of dust and wear a snuffy
appearance. The conditions will not always insure the tutors from
foolishness, as her girl's experience reminded her, but they protect the
girl.

"Your name is Weyburn; your father was an officer in the army, killed on
the battle-field, Arthur Abner tells me," was her somewhat severely-toned
greeting to the young tutor on his presenting himself the second time.

It had the sound of the preliminary of an indictment read in a Court of
Law.

"My father died of his wounds in hospital," he said.

"Why did you not enter the service?"

"Want of an income, my lady."

"Bad look-out. Army or Navy for gentlemen, if they stick to the school of
honour. The sedentary professions corrupt men: bad for the blood. Those
monastery monks found that out. They had to birch the devil out of them
three times a day and half the night, howling like full-moon dogs all
through their lives, till the flesh was off them. That was their
exercise, if they were for holiness. My brother, Lord Ormont, has never
been still in his youth or his manhood. See him now. He counts his years
by scores; and he has about as many wrinkles as you when you're smiling.
His cheeks are as red as yours now you're blushing. You ought to have
left off that trick by this time. It's well enough in a boy."

Against her will she was drawn to the young man, and her consciousness of
it plucked her back to caution with occasional jerks--quaint alternations
of the familiar and the harshly formal, in the stranger's experience.

"If I have your permission, Lady Charlotte," said he, "the reason why I
mount red a little--if I do it--is, you mention Lord Ormont, and I have
followed his career since I was the youngest of boys."

"Good to begin with the worship of a hero. He can't sham, can't
deceive--not even a woman; and you're old enough to understand the
temptation: they're so silly. All the more, it's a point of honour with a
man of honour to shield her from herself. When it's a girl--"

The young man's eyebrows bent.

"Chapters of stories, if you want to hear them," she resumed; "and I can
vouch some of them true. Lord Ormont was never one of the wolves in a
hood. Whatever you hear of him; you may be sure he laid no trap. He's
just the opposite to the hypocrite; so hypocrites date him. I've heard
them called high-priests of decency. Then we choose to be indecent and
honest, if there's a God to worship. Fear, they're in the habit of
saying--we are to fear God. A man here, a Rev. Hampton-Evey, you'll hear
him harp on 'fear God.' Hypocrites may: honest sinners have no fear. And
see the cause: they don't deceive themselves--that is why. Do you think
we call love what we fear? They love God, or they disbelieve. And if they
believe in Him, they know they can't conceal anything from Him. Honesty
means piety: we can't be one without the other. And here are
people--parsons--who talk of dying as going into the presence of our
Maker, as if He had been all the while outside the world He created.
Those parsons, I told the Rev. Hampton-Evey here, make infidels--they
make a puzzle of their God. I'm for a rational Deity. They preach up a
supernatural eccentric. I don't say all: I've heard good sermons, and met
sound-headed clergymen--not like that gaping Hampton-Evey, when a woman
tells him she thinks for herself. We have him sitting on our pariah. A
free-thinker startles him as a kind of demon; but a female free-thinker
is one of Satan's concubines. He took it upon himself to reproach
me--flung his glove at my feet, because I sent a cheque to a poor man
punished for blasphemy. The man had the right to his opinions, and he had
the courage of his opinions. I doubt whether the Rev. Hampton-Evey would
go with a willing heart to prison for his. All the better for him if he
comes head-up out of a trial. But now see: all these parsons and judges
and mobcaps insist upon conformity. A man with common manly courage comes
before them, and he's cast in penalties. Yet we know from history, in
England, France, Germany, that the time of nonconformity brought out the
manhood of the nation. Now, I say, a nation, to be a nation, must have
men--I mean brave men. That's what those hosts of female men combine to
try to stifle. They won't succeed, but we shall want a war to teach the
country the value of courage. You catch what I am driving at? They accuse
my brother of immorality because he makes no pretence to be better than
the men of his class."

Weyburn's eyelids fluttered. Her kite-like ascent into the general, with
the sudden drop on her choice morsel, switched his humour at the moment
when he was respectfully considering that her dartings and gyrations had
motive as mach as the flight of the swallow for food. They had meaning;
and here was one of the great ladies of the land who thought for herself,
and was thoughtful for the country. If she came down like a bird winged,
it was her love of her brother that did it. His look at Lady Charlotte
glistened.

She raised her defences against the basilisk fascinating Philippa; and
with a vow to keep them apart and deprive him of his chance, she relapsed
upon the stiff frigidity which was not natural to her. It lasted long
enough to put him on his guard under the seductions of a noble dame's
condescension to a familiar tone. But, as he was too well bred to show
the change in his mind for her change of manner, and as she was the
sister of his boyhood's hero, and could be full of flavour, his eyes
retained something of their sparkle. They were ready to lighten again, in
the way peculiar to him, when she, quite forgetting her defence of
Philippa, disburdened herself of her antagonisms and enthusiasms, her
hates and her loves all round the neighbourhood and over the world, won
to confidential communication by this young man's face. She confessed as
much, had he been guided to perceive it. She said, "Arthur Abner's a
reader of men: I can trust his word about them."

Presently, it is true, she added: "No man's to be relied upon where
there's a woman." She refused her implicit trust to saints--"if ever a
man really was a saint before he was canonized!"

Her penetrative instinct of sex kindled the scepticism. Sex she saw at
play everywhere, dogging the conduct of affairs, directing them at times;
she saw it as the animation of nature, senselessly stigmatized,
hypocritically concealed, active in our thoughts where not in our deeds;
and the declining of the decorous to see it, or admit the sight, got them
abhorred bad names from her, after a touch at the deadly poison coming of
that blindness, or blindfoldedness, and a grimly melancholy shrug over
the cruelties resulting--cruelties chiefly affecting women.

"You're too young to have thought upon such matters," she said, for a
finish to them.

That was hardly true.

"I have thought," said Weyburn, and his head fell to reckoning of the
small sum of his thoughts upon them.

He was pulled up instantly for close inspection by the judge. "What is
your age?"

"I am in my twenty-sixth year."

"You have been among men: have you studied women?"

"Not largely, Lady Charlotte. Opportunity has been wanting at French and
German colleges."

"It's only a large and a close and a pretty long study of them that can
teach you anything; and you must get rid of the poetry about them, and be
sure you haven't lost it altogether. That's what is called the golden
mean. I'm not for the golden mean in every instance; it's a way of
exhorting to brutal selfishness. I grant it's the right way in those
questions. You'll learn in time." Her scanning gaze at the young man's
face drove him along an avenue of his very possible chances of learning.
"Certain to. But don't tell me that at your age you have thought about
women. You may say you have felt. A young man's feelings about women are
better reading for him six or a dozen chapters farther on. Then he can
sift and strain. It won't be perfectly clear, but it will do."

Mr. Eglett hereupon threw the door open, and ushered in Master Leo.

Lady Charlotte noticed that the tutor shook the boy's hand offhandedly,
with not a whit of the usual obtrusive geniality, and merely dropped him
a word. Soon after, he was talking to Mr. Eglett of games at home and
games abroad. Poor fun over there! We head the world in field games, at
all events. He drew a picture of a foreigner of his acquaintance looking
on at football. On the other hand, French boys and German, having passed
a year or two at an English school, get the liking for our games, and do
a lot of good when they go home. The things we learn from them are to
dance, to sing, and to study:--they are more in earnest than we about
study. They teach us at fencing too. The tutor praised fencing as an
exercise and an accomplishment. He had large reserves of eulogy for
boxing. He knew the qualities of the famous bruisers of the time, cited
fisty names, whose owners were then to be seen all over an admiring land
in prints; in the glorious defensive-offensive attitude, England's
own--Touch me, if you dare! with bullish, or bull-dog, or oak-bole fronts
for the blow, handsome to pugilistic eyes.

The young tutor had lighted on a pet theme of Mr. Eglett's--the excelling
virtues of the practice of pugilism in Old England, and the school of
honour that it is to our lower population. "Fifty times better for them
than cock-fighting," he exclaimed, admitting that he could be an
interested spectator at a ring or the pit cock-fighting or ratting.

"Ratting seems to have more excuse," the tutor said, and made no sign of
a liking for either of those popular pastimes. As he disapproved without
squeamishness, the impulsive but sharply critical woman close by nodded;
and she gave him his dues for being no courtier.

Leo had to be off to bed. The tutor spared him any struggle over the
shaking of hands, and saying, "Goodnight, Leo," continued the
conversation. The boy went away, visibly relieved of the cramp that
seizes on a youngster at the formalities pertaining to these chilly and
fateful introductions.

"What do you think of the look of him?" Mr. Eglett asked.

The tutor had not appeared to inspect the boy. "Big head," he remarked.
"Yes, Leo won't want pushing at books when he's once in harness. He will
have six weeks of me. It's more than the yeomanry get for drill per
annum, and they're expected to know something of a soldier's duties.
There's a chance of putting him on the right road in certain matters.
We'll walk, or ride, or skate, if the frost holds to-morrow: no lessons
the first day."

"Do as you think fit," said lady Charlotte.

The one defect she saw in the tutor did not concern his pupil. And a
girl, if hit, would be unable to see that this tutor, judged as a man,
was to some extent despicable for accepting tutorships, and, one might
say, dishonouring the family of a soldier of rank and distinction, by
coming into houses at the back way, with footing enough to air his graces
when once established there. He ought to have knocked at every door in
the kingdom for help, rather than accept tutorships, and disturb
households (or providently-minded mistresses of them) with all sorts of
probably groundless apprehensions, founded naturally enough on the good
looks he intrudes.

This tutor committed the offence next day of showing he had a firm and
easy seat in the saddle, which increased Lady Charlotte's liking for him
and irritated her watchful forecasts. She rode with the young man after
lunch, "to show him the country," and gave him a taste of what he took
for her variable moods. He misjudged her. Like a swimmer going through
warm and cold springs of certain lake waters, he thought her a capricious
ladyship, dangerous for intimacy, alluring to the deeps and gripping with
cramps.

She pushed him to defend his choice of the tutor's profession.

"Think you understand boys?" she caught up his words; "you can't. You can
humour them, as you humour women. They're just as hard to read. And don't
tell me a young man can read women. Boys and women go on their instincts.
Egyptologists can spell you hieroglyphs; they'd be stumped, as Leo would
say, to read a spider out of an ink-pot over a sheet of paper."

"One gets to interpret by degrees, by observing their habits," the tutor
said, and vexed her with a towering complacency under provocation that
went some way further to melt the woman she was, while her knowledge of
the softness warned her still more of the duty of playing dragon round
such a young man in her house. The despot is alert at every issue, to
every chance; and she was one, the wakefuller for being benevolent; her
mind had no sleep by day.

For a month she subjected Mr. Matthew Weyburn to the microscope of her
observation and the probe of her instinct. He proved that he could manage
without cajoling a boy. The practical fact established, by agreement
between herself and the unobservant gentleman who was her husband, Lady
Charlotte allowed her meditations to drop an indifferent glance at the
speculative views upon education entertained by this young tutor. To her
mind they were flighty; but she liked him, and as her feelings dictated
to her mind when she had not to think for others, she spoke of his views
toleratingly, almost with an implied approval, after passing them through
the form of burlesque to which she customarily treated things failing to
waft her enthusiasm. In regard to Philippa, he behaved well: he bestowed
more of his attention on Beatrice, nearer Leo's age, in talk about games
and story-books and battles; nothing that he did when the girls were
present betrayed the strutting plumed cock, bent to attract, or the
sickly reptile, thirsty for a prize above him and meaning to have it,
like Satan in Eden. Still, of course, he could not help his being a
handsome fellow, having a vivid face and eyes transparent, whether blue
or green, to flame of the brain exciting them; and that becomes a picture
in the dream of girls--a picture creating the dream often. And Philippa
had asked her grandmother, very ingenuously indeed, with a most natural
candour, why "they saw so little of Leo's hero." Simple female child!

However, there was no harm done, and Lady Charlotte liked him. She liked
few. Forthwith, in the manner of her particular head, a restless head,
she fell to work at combinations.

Thus:--he is a nice young fellow, well bred, no cringing courtier,
accomplished, good at classics, fairish at mathematics, a scholar in
French, German, Italian, with a shrewd knowledge of the different races,
and with sound English sentiment too, and the capacity for writing good
English, although in those views of his the ideas are unusual, therefore
un-English, profoundly so. But his intentions are patriotic; they would
not displease Lord Ormont. He has a worship of Lord Ormont. All we can
say on behalf of an untried inferior is in that,--only the valiant admire
devotedly. Well, he can write grammatical, readable English. What if Lord
Ormont were to take him as a secretary while the Memoirs are in hand? He
might help to chasten the sentences laughed at by those newspapers. Or he
might, being a terrible critic of writing, and funny about styles, put it
in an absurd light, that would cause the Memoirs to be tossed into the
fire. He was made for the post of secretary! The young man's good looks
would be out of harm's way then. If any sprig of womankind come across
him there, it will, at any rate, not be a girl. Women must take care of
themselves. Only the fools among them run to mischief in the case of a
handsome young fellow.

Supposing a certain woman to be one of the fools? Lady Charlotte merely
suggested it in the dashing current of her meditations--did not strike it
out interrogatively. The woman would be a fine specimen among her class;
that was all. For the favourite of Lord Ormont to stoop from her place
beside him--ay, but women do; heroes have had the woeful experience of
that fact. First we see them aiming themselves at their hero; next they
are shooting an eye at the handsome man. The thirst of nature comes after
that of their fancy, in conventional women. Sick of the hero tried, tired
of their place in the market, no longer ashamed to acknowledge it, they
begin to consult their own taste for beauty--they have it quite as much
as the men have it; and when their worshipped figure of manliness, in a
romantic sombrero, is a threadbare giant, showing bruises, they sink on
their inherent desire for a dance with the handsome man. And the really
handsome man is the most extraordinary of the rarities. No wonder that
when he appears he slays them, walks over them like a pestilence!

This young Weyburn would touch the fancy of a woman of a romantic turn.
Supposing her enthusiastic in her worship of the hero, after a number of
years--for anything may be imagined where a woman is concerned--why,
another enthusiasm for the same object, and on the part of a stranger, a
stranger with effective eyes, rapidly leads to sympathy. Suppose the
reverse--the enthusiasm gone to dust, or become a wheezy old bellows, as
it does where there's disparity of age, or it frequently does--then the
sympathy with a good-looking stranger comes more rapidly still.

These were Lady Charlotte's glances right and left--idle flights of the
eye of a mounted Amazon across hedges at the canter along the main road
of her scheme; which was to do a service to the young man she liked and
to the brother she loved, for the marked advantage of both equally;
perhaps for the chance of a little gossip to follow about that tenacious
woman by whom her brother was held hard and fast, kept away from friends
and relatives, isolated, insomuch as to have given up living on his
estate--the old home!--because he would not disgrace it or incur odium by
taking her there.

In consequence of Lord Ormont's resistance to pressure from her on two or
three occasions, she chose to nurse and be governed by the maxim for
herself: Never propose a plan to him, if you want it adopted. That was
her way of harmlessly solacing love's vindictiveness for an injury.

She sent Arthur Abner a letter, thanking him for his recommendation of
young Mr. Weyburn, stating her benevolent wishes as regarded the young
man and "those hateful Memoirs," requesting that her name should not be
mentioned in the affair, because she was anxious on all grounds to have
the proposal accepted by her brother. She could have vowed to herself
that she wrote sincerely.

"He must want a secretary. He would be shy at an offer of one from me. Do
you hint it, if you get a chance. You gave us Mr. Weyburn, and Mr. Eglett
and I like him. Ormont would too, I am certain. You have obliged him
before; this will be better than anything you have done for us. It will
stop the Memoirs, or else give them a polish. Your young friend has made
me laugh over stuff taken for literature until we put on our spectacles.
Leo jogs along in harness now, and may do some work at school yet."

Having posted her letter, she left the issue to chance, as we may when
conscience is easy. An answer came the day before Weyburn's departure.
Arthur Abner had met Lord Ormont in the street, had spoken of the rumour
of Memoirs promised to the world, hinted at the possible need for a
secretary; "Lord Ormont would appoint a day to see Mr. Weyburn."

Lady Charlotte considered that to be as good as the engagement.

"So we keep you in the family," she said. "And now look here: you ought
to know my brother's ways, if you're going to serve him. You'll have to
guess at half of everything he tells you; he'll expect you to know the
whole. There's no man so secret. Why? He fears nothing; I can't tell why.
And what his mouth shuts on, he exposes as if in his hand. Of course he's
proud, and good reason. You'll see when you mustn't offend. A lady's in
the house--I hear of it. She takes his name, they say. She may be a
respectable woman--I've heard no scandal. We have to hear of a Lady
Ormont out of Society! We have to suppose it means there's not to be a
real one. He can't marry if he has allowed her to go about bearing his
name. She has a fool of an aunt, I'm told; as often in the house as not.
Good proof of his fondness for the woman, if he swallows half a year of
the aunt! Well, you won't, unless you've mere man's eyes, be able to help
seeing him trying to hide what he suffers from that aunt. He bears it,
like the man he is; but woe to another betraying it! She has a tongue
that goes like the reel of a rod, with a pike bolting out of the shallows
to the snag he knows--to wind round it and defy you to pull. Often my
brother Rowsley and I have fished the day long, and in hard weather, and
brought home a basket; and he boasted of it more than of anything he has
ever done since. That woman holds him away from me now. I say no harm of
her. She may be right enough from her point of view; or it mayn't be
owing to her. I wouldn't blame a woman. Well, but my point with you is,
you swallow the woman's aunt--the lady's aunt--without betraying you
suffer at all. Lord Ormont has eyes of an eagle for a speck above the
surface. All the more because the aunt is a gabbling idiot does he--I say
it seeing it--fire up to defend her from the sneer of the lip or half a
sign of it! No, you would be an your guard; I can trust you. Of course
you'd behave like the gentleman you are where any kind of woman's
concerned; but you mustn't let a shadow be seen, think what you may. The
woman--lady--calling herself Lady Ormont,--poor woman, I should do the
same in her place,--she has a hard game to play; I have to be for my
family: she has manners, I'm told; holds herself properly. She fancies
she brings him up to the altar, in the end, by decent behaviour. That's a
delusion. It's creditable to her, only she can't understand the claims of
the family upon a man like my brother. When you have spare
time--'kick-ups,' he need to call it, writing to me from school--come
here; you're welcome, after three days' notice. I shall be glad to see
you again. You've gone some way to make a man of Leo."

He liked her well: he promised to come. She was a sinewy bite of the
gentle sex, but she had much flavour, and she gave nourishment.

"Let me have three days' notice," she repeated.

"Not less, Lady Charlotte," said he.

Weyburn received intimation from Arthur Abner of the likely day Lord
Ormont would appoint, and he left Olmer for London to hold himself in
readiness. Lady Charlotte and Leo drove him to meet the coach. Philippa,
so strangely baffled in her natural curiosity, begged for a seat; she
begged to be allowed to ride. Petitions were rejected. She stood at the
window seeing "Grandmama's tutor," as she named him, carried off by
grandmama. Her nature was avenged on her tyrant grandmama: it brought up
almost to her tongue thoughts which would have remained subterranean,
under control of her habit of mind, or the nursery's modesty, if she had
been less tyrannically treated. They were subterranean thoughts, Nature's
original, such as the sense of injustice will rouse in young women; and
they are better unstirred, for they ripen girls over-rapidly when they
are made to revolve near the surface. It flashed on the girl why she had
been treated tyrannically.

"Grandmama has good taste in tutors," was all that she said while the
thoughts rolled over.




CHAPTER IV.

RECOGNITION

Our applicant for the post of secretary entered the street of Lord
Ormont's London house, to present himself to his boyhood's hero by
appointment.

He was to see, perhaps to serve, the great soldier. Things had come to
this; and he thought it singular. But for the previous introduction to
Lady Charlotte, he would have thought it passing wonderful. He ascribed
it to the whirligig.

The young man was not yet of an age to gather knowledge of himself and of
life from his present experience of the fact, that passionate devotion to
an object strikes a vein through circumstances, as a travelling run of
flame darts the seeming haphazard zigzags to catch at the dry of dead
wood amid the damp; and when passion has become quiescent in the admirer,
there is often the unsubsided first impulsion carrying it on. He will
almost sorely embrace his idol with one or other of the senses.

Weyburn still read the world as it came to him, by bite, marvelling at
this and that, after the fashion of most of us. He had not deserted his
adolescent's hero, or fallen upon analysis of a past season. But he was
now a young man, stoutly and cognizantly on the climb, with a good aim
overhead, axed green youth's enthusiasms a step below his heels: one of
the lovers of life, beautiful to behold, when we spy into them; generally
their aspect is an enlivenment, whatever may be the carving of their
features. For the sake of holy unity, this lover of life, whose gaze was
to the front in hungry animation, held fast to his young dreams,
perceiving a soul of meaning in them, though the fire might have gone
out; and he confessed to a past pursuit of delusions. Young men of this
kind will have, for the like reason, a similar rational sentiment on
behalf of our world's historic forward march, while admitting that
history has to be taken from far backward if we would gain assurance of
man's advance. It nerves an admonished ambition.

He was ushered into a London house's library, looking over a niggard
enclosure of gravel and dull grass, against a wall where ivy dribbled. An
armchair was beside the fireplace. To right and left of it a floreate
company of books in high cases paraded shoulder to shoulder, without a
gap; grenadiers on the line. Weyburn read the titles on their
scarlet-and-blue facings. They were approved English classics; honoured
veterans, who have emerged from the conflict with contemporary opinion,
stamped excellent, or have been pushed by the roar of contemporaneous
applauses to wear the leather-and-gilt uniform of our Immortals, until a
more qualmish posterity disgorges them. The books had costly bindings.
Lord Ormont's treatment of Literature appeared to resemble Lady
Charlotte's, in being reverential and uninquiring. The books she bought
to read were Memoirs of her time by dead men and women once known to her.
These did fatigue duty in cloth or undress. It was high drill with all of
Lord Ormont's books, and there was not a modern or a minor name among the
regiments. They smelt strongly of the bookseller's lump lots by order;
but if a show soldiery, they were not a sham, like a certain row of
venerably-titled backs, that Lady Charlotte, without scruple, left
standing to blow an ecclesiastical trumpet of empty contents; any one
might have his battle of brains with them, for the twining of an absent
key.

The door opened. Weyburn bowed to his old star in human shape: a grey
head on square shoulders, filling the doorway. He had seen at Olmer Lady
Charlotte's treasured miniature portrait of her brother; a perfect
likeness, she said--complaining the neat instant of injustice done to the
fire of his look.

Fire was low down behind the eyes at present. They were quick to scan and
take summary of their object, as the young man felt while observing for
himself. Height and build of body were such as might be expected in the
brother of Lady Charlotte and from the tales of his prowess. Weyburn had
a glance back at Cuper's boys listening to the tales.

The soldier-lord's manner was courteously military--that of an
established superior indifferent to the deferential attitude he must
needs enact. His curt nick of the head, for a response to the visitor's
formal salutation, signified the requisite acknowledgment, like a city
creditor's busy stroke of the type-stamp receipt upon payment.

The ceremony over, he pitched a bugle voice to fit the contracted area:
"I hear from Mr. Abner that you have made acquaintance with Olmer. Good
hunting country there."

"Lady Charlotte kindly gave me a mount, my lord."

"I knew your father by name--Colonel Sidney Weyburn. You lost him at
Toulouse. We were in the Peninsula; I was at Talavera with him. Bad day
for our cavalry."

"Our officers were young at their work then."

"They taught the Emperor's troops to respect a charge of English horse.
It was teaching their fox to set traps for them."

Lord Ormont indicated a chair. He stood.

"The French had good cavalry leaders," Weyburn said, for cover to a
continued study of the face,

"Montbrun, yes: Murat, Lassalle, Bessieres. Under the Emperor they had."

"You think them not at home in the saddle, my lord?"

"Frenchmen have nerves; horses are nerves. They pile excitement too high.
When cool, they're among the best. None of them had head for command of
all the arms."

"One might say the same of Seidlitz and Ziethen?"

"Of Ziethen. Seidlitz had a wider grasp, I suppose." He pursed his month,
pondering. "No; and in the Austrian service, too; generals of cavalry are
left to whistle for an independent command. There's a jealousy of our
branch!" The injured warrior frowned and hummed. He spoke his thought
mildly: "Jealousy of the name of soldier in this country! Out of the
service, is the place to recommend. I'd have advised a son of mine to
train for a jockey rather than enter it. We deal with that to-morrow, in
my papers. You come to me? Mr. Abner has arranged the terms? So I see you
at ten in the morning. I am glad to meet a young man--Englishman--who
takes an interest in the service."

Weyburn fancied the hearing of a step; he heard the whispering dress. It
passed him; a lady went to the armchair.  She took her seat, as she had
moved, with sedateness, the exchange of a toneless word with my lord. She
was a brune. He saw that when he rose to do homage.

Lord Ormont resumed: "Some are born to it, must be soldiers; and in peace
they are snubbed by the heads; in war they are abused by the country.
They don't understand in England how to treat an army; how to make one
either!

"The gentleman--Mr. Weyburn: Mr. Arthur Abner's recommendation," he added
hurriedly, with a light wave of his hand and a murmur, that might be the
lady's title; continuing: "A young man of military tastes should take
service abroad. They're in earnest about it over there. Here they play at
it; and an army's shipped to land without commissariat, ambulances,
medical stores, and march against the odds, as usual--if it can march!

"Albuera, my lord?"

"Our men can spurt, for a flick o' the whip. They're expected to be
constantly ready for doing prodigies--to repair the country's omissions.
All the country cares for is to hope Dick Turpin may get to York. Our men
are good beasts; they give the best in 'em, and drop. More's the scandal
to a country that has grand material and overtasks it. A blazing disaster
ends the chapter!"

This was talk of an injured veteran. It did not deepen the hue of his
ruddied skin. He spoke in the tone of matter of fact. Weyburn had been
prepared for something of the sort by his friend, Arthur Abner. He noted
the speaker's heightened likeness under excitement to Lady Charlotte.
Excitement came at an early call of their voices to both; and both had
handsome, open features, bluntly cut, nothing of aquiline or the
supercilious; eyes bluish-grey, in arched recesses, horny between the
thick lids, lively to shoot their meaning when the trap-mouth was active;
effectively expressing promptitute for combat, pleasure in attack,
wrestle, tag, whatever pertained to strife; an absolute sense of their
right.

As there was a third person present at this dissuasion of military
topics, the silence of the lady drew Weyburn to consult her opinion in
her look.

It was on him. Strange are the woman's eyes which can unoffendingly
assume the privilege to dwell on such a living object as a man without
become gateways for his return look, and can seem in pursuit of thoughts
while they enfold. They were large dark eyes, eyes of southern night.
They sped no shot; they rolled forth an envelopment. A child among toys,
caught to think of other toys, may gaze in that way. But these were a
woman's eyes.

He gave Lord Ormont his whole face, as an auditor should. He was
interested besides, as he told a ruffled conscience. He fell upon the
study of his old hero determinedly.

The pain of a memory waking under pillows, unable to do more than strain
for breath, distracted his attention. There was a memory: that was all he
knew. Or else he would have lashed himself for hanging on the beautiful
eyes of a woman. To be seeing and hearing his old hero was wonder enough.

Recollections of Lady Charlotte's plain hints regarding the lady present
resolved to the gross retort, that her eyes were beautiful. And he knew
them--there lay the strangeness. They were known beautiful eyes, in a
foreign land of night and mist.

Lord Ormont was discoursing with racy eloquence of our hold on India: his
views in which respect were those of Cuper's boys. Weyburn ventured a
dot-running description of the famous ride, and out flew an English
soldier's grievance. But was not the unjustly-treated great soldier well
rewarded, whatever the snubs and the bitterness, with these large dark
eyes in his house, for his own? Eyes like these are the beginning of a
young man's world; they nerve, inspire, arm him, colour his life; he
would labour, fight, die for them. It seemed to Weyburn a blessedness
even to behold them. So it had been with him at the early stage; and his
heart went swifter, memory fetched a breath. Memory quivered eyelids,
when the thought returned--of his having known eyes as lustrous. First
lights of his world, they had more volume, warmth, mystery--were sweeter.
Still, these in the room were sisters to them. They quickened throbs;
they seemed a throb of the heart made visible.

That was their endowment of light and lustre simply, and the mystical
curve of the lids. For so they could look only because the heart was
disengaged from them. They were but heavenly orbs.

The lady's elbow was on an arm of her chair, her forefinger at her left
temple. Her mind was away, one might guess; she could hardly be
interested in talk of soldiering and of foreign army systems, jealous
English authorities and officials, games, field-sports. She had personal
matters to think of.

Adieu until to-morrow to the homes she inhabited! The street was a
banishment and a relief when Weyburn's first interview with Lord Ormont
was over.

He rejoiced to tell his previous anticipations that he had not been
disappointed; and he bade hero-worshippers expect no gilded figure. We
gather heroes as we go, if we are among the growing: our constancy is
shown in the not discarding of our old ones. He held to his earlier hero,
though he had seen him, and though he could fancy he saw round him.

Another, too, had been a hero-lover. How did that lady of night's eyes
come to fall into her subjection?

He put no question as to the name she bore; it hung in a black
suspense--vividly at its blackest illuminated her possessor. A man is a
hero to some effect who wins a woman like this; and, if his glory
bespells her, so that she flings all to the winds for him, burns the
world; if, for solely the desperate rapture of belonging to him, she
consents of her free will to be one of the nameless and discoloured, he
shines in a way to make the marrow of men thrill with a burning envy. For
that must be the idolatrous devotion desired by them all.

Weyburn struck down upon his man's nature--the bad in us, when beauty of
woman is viewed; or say, the old original revolutionary, best kept
untouched; for a touch or a meditative pause above him, fetches him up to
roam the civilized world devouringly and lawlessly. It is the special
peril of the young lover of life, that an inflammability to beauty in
women is in a breath intense with him. He is, in truth, a thinly-sealed
volcano of our imperishable ancient father; and has it in him to be the
multitudinously-amorous of the mythologic Jove. Give him head, he can be
civilization's devil. Is she fair and under a shade?--then is she doubly
fair. The shadow about her secretes mystery, just as the forest breeds
romance: and mystery is a measureless realm. If we conceive it, we have a
mysterious claim on her who is the heart of it.

He marched on that road to the music of sonorous brass for some drunken
minutes.

The question came, What of the man who takes advantage of her
self-sacrifice?

It soon righted him, and he did Lord Ormont justice, and argued the case
against Lady Charlotte's naked hints.

This dark-eyed heroine's bearing was assured, beyond an air of
dependency. Her deliberate short nod to him at his leave-taking, and the
toneless few words she threw to my lord, signified sufficiently that she
did not stand defying the world or dreading it.

She had by miracle the eyes which had once charmed him--could
again--would always charm. She reminded him of Aminta Farrell's very eyes
under the couchant-dove brows--something of her mouth, the dimple running
from a corner. She had, as Aminta had, the self-collected and
self-cancelled look, a realm in a look, that was neither depth nor
fervour, nor a bestowal, nor an allurement; nor was it an exposure,
though there seemed no reserve. One would be near the meaning in
declaring it to bewilder men with the riddle of openhandedness. We read
it--all may read it--as we read inexplicable plain life; in which let us
have a confiding mind, despite the blows at our heart, and some
understanding will enter us.

He shut the door upon picture and speculations, returning to them by
another door.  The lady had not Aminta's freshness: she might be taken
for an elder sister of Aminta. But Weyburn wanted to have her position
defined before he set her beside Aminta. He writhed under Lady
Charlotte's tolerating scorn of "the young woman." It roused an uneasy
sentiment of semi-hostility in the direction of my lord; and he had no
personal complaint to make.

Lord Ormont was cordial on the day of the secretary's installation; as
if--if one might dare to guess it--some one had helped him to a friendly
judgement.

The lady of Aminta's eyes was absent at the luncheon table. She came into
the room a step, to speak to Lord Ormont, dressed for a drive to pay a
visit.

The secretary was unnoticed.

Lord Ormont put inquiries to him at table, for the why of his having
avoided the profession of arms; and apparently considered that the
secretary had made a mistake, and that he would have committed a greater
error in becoming a soldier--"in this country." A man with a grievance is
illogical under his burden. He mentioned the name "Lady Ormont"
distinctly during some remarks on travel. Lady Ormont preferred the
Continent.

Two days later she came to the armchair, as before, met Weyburn's eyes
when he raised them; gave him no home in hers--not a temporary shelter
from the pelting of interrogations. She hardly spoke. Why did she come?

But how was it that he was drawn to think of her? Absent or present, she
was round him, like the hills of a valley. She was round his
thoughts--caged them; however high, however far they flew, they were
conscious of her.

She took her place at the midday meal. She had Aminta's voice in some
tones; a mellower than Aminta's--the voice of one of Aminta's family. She
had the trick of Aminta's upper lip in speaking. Her look on him was
foreign; a civil smile as they conversed. She was very much at home with
my lord, whom she rallied for his addiction to his Club at a particular
hour of the afternoon. She conversed readily. She reminded him,
incidentally that her aunt would arrive early next day. He informed her,
some time after, of an engagement "to tiffin with a brother officer," and
she nodded.

They drove away together while the secretary was at his labour of sorting
the heap of autobiographical scraps in a worn dispatch-box, pen and
pencil jottings tossed to swell the mess when they had relieved an angry
reminiscence. He noticed, heedlessly at the moment, feminine handwriting
on some few clear sheets among them.

Next day he was alone in the library. He sat before the box, opened it
and searched, merely to quiet his annoyance for having left those sheets
of the fair amanuensis unexamined. They were not discoverable. They had
gone.

He stood up at the stir of the door. It was she, and she acknowledged his
bow; she took her steps to her chair.

He was informed that Lord Ormont had an engagement, and he remarked, "I
can do the work very well." She sat quite silent.

He read first lines of the scraps, laid them in various places, as in a
preparation for conjurer's tricks at cards; refraining from a glance,
lest he should disconcert the eyes he felt to be on him fitfully.

At last she spoke, and he knew Aminta in his hearing and sight.

"Is Emile Grenat still anglomane?"

An instant before her voice was heard he had been persuading himself that
the points of unlikeness between his young Aminta and this tall and
stately lady of the proud reserve in her bearing flouted the resemblance.




CHAPTER V.

IN WHICH THE SHADES OF BROWNY AND MATEY ADVANCE AND RETIRE

"Emile is as anglomane as ever, and not a bit less a Frenchman," Weyburn
said, in a tone of one who muffles a shock at the heart.

"It would be the poorer compliment to us," she rejoined.

They looked at one another; she dropped her eyelids, he looked away.

She had the grand manner by nature. She was the woman of the girl once
known.

"A soldier, is he?"

"Emile's profession and mine are much alike, or will be."

"A secretary?"

Her deadness of accent was not designed to carry her opinion of the post
of secretary.

It brought the reply: "We hope to be schoolmasters."

She drew in a breath; there was a thin short voice, hardly voice, as when
one of the unschooled minor feelings has been bruised. After a while she
said--

"Does he think it a career?"

"Not brilliant."

"He was formed for a soldier."

"He had to go as the road led."

"A young man renouncing ambition!"

"Considering what we can do best."

"It signifies the taste for what he does."

"Certainly that."

Weyburn had senses to read the word "schoolmaster" in repetition behind
her shut mouth. He was sharply sensible of a fall.

The task with his papers occupied him. If he had a wish, it was to sink
so low in her esteem as to be spurned. A kick would have been a
refreshment. Yet he was unashamed of the cause invoking it. We are
instruments to the touch of certain women, and made to play strange
tunes.

"Mr. Cuper flourishes?"

"The school exists. I have not been down there. I met Mr. Shalders
yesterday. He has left the school."

"You come up from Olmer?"

"I was at Olmer last week, Lady Ormont."

An involuntary beam from her eyes thanked him for her title at that
juncture of the dialogue. She grew more spirited.

"Mr. Shalders has joined the Dragoons, has he?"

"The worthy man has a happy imagination. He goes through a campaign
daily."

"It seems to one to dignify his calling."

"I like his enthusiasm."

The lady withdrew into her thoughts; Weyburn fell upon his work.

Mention of the military cloak of enthusiasm covering Shalders, brought
the scarce credible old time to smite at his breast, in the presence of
these eyes. A ringing of her title of Lady Ormont rendered the present
time the incredible.

"I can hardly understand a young Frenchman's not entering the army," she
said.

"The Napoleonic legend is weaker now," said he.

"The son of an officer!"

"Grandson."

"It was his choice to be,--he gave it up without reluctance?"

"Emile obeyed the command of his parents," Weyburn answered; and he was
obedient to the veiled direction of her remark, in speaking of himself:
"I had a reason, too."

"One wonders!"

"It would have impoverished my mother's income to put aside a small
allowance for me for years. She would not have hesitated. I then set my
mind on the profession of schoolmaster."

"Emile Grenat was a brave boy. Has he no regrets?"

"Neither of us has a regret."

"He began ambitiously."

"It's the way at the beginning."

"It is not usually abjured."

"I'm afraid we neither of us 'dignify our calling' by discontent with
it!"

A dusky flash, worth seeing, came on her cheeks. "I respect enthusiasms,"
she said; and it was as good to him to hear as the begging pardon, though
clearly she could not understand enthusiasm for the schoolmaster's
career.

Light of evidence was before him, that she had a friendly curiosity to
know what things had led to their new meeting under these conditions. He
sketched them cursorily; there was little to tell--little, that is;
appealing to a romantic mind for interest. Aware of it, by sympathy, he
degraded the narrative to a flatness about as cheering as a suburban
London Sunday's promenade. Sympathy caused the perverseness. He felt her
disillusionment; felt with it and spread a feast of it. She had to hear
of studies at Caen and at a Paris Lycee; French fairly mastered; German,
the same; Italian, the same; after studies at Heidelberg, Asti, and
Florence; between four and five months at Athens (he was needlessly
precise), in tutorship with a young nobleman: no events, nor a spot of
colour. Thus did he wilfully, with pain to himself, put an extinguisher
on the youth painted brilliant and eminent in a maiden's imagination.

"So there can no longer be thought of the army," she remarked; and the
remark had a sort of sigh, though her breathing was equable.

"Unless a big war knocks over all rules and the country comes praying us
to serve," he said.

"You would not refuse then?"

"Not in case of need. One may imagine a crisis when they would give
commissions to men of my age or older for the cavalry--heavy losses of
officers."

She spoke, as if urged by a sting to revert to the distasteful: "That
profession--must you not take...enter into orders if you aim at any
distinction?"

"And a member of the Anglican Church would not be allowed to exchange his
frock for a cavalry sabre," said he. "That is true. I do not propose to
settle as a schoolmaster in England."

"Where?"

"On the Continent."

"Would not America be better?"

"It would not so well suit the purpose in view for us."

"There are others besides?"

"Besides Emile, there is a German and an Italian and a Swiss."

"It is a Company?"

"A Company of schoolmasters! Companies of all kinds are forming. Colleges
are Companies. And they have their collegians. Our aim is at pupils; we
have no ambition for any title higher than School and Schoolmaster; it is
not a Company."

So, like Nature parading her skeleton to youthful adorers of her face, he
insisted on reducing to hideous material wreck the fair illusion, which
had once arrayed him in alluring promise.

She explained; "I said, America. You would be among Protestants in
America."

"Catholics and Protestants are both welcome to us, according to our
scheme. And Germans, French, English, Americans, Italians, if they will
come; Spaniards and Portuguese, and Scandinavians, Russians as well. And
Jews; Mahommedans too, if only they will come! The more mixed, the more
it hits our object."

"You have not stated where on the Continent it is to be."

"The spot fixed on is in Switzerland."

"You will have scenery."

"I hold to that, as an influence."

A cool vision of the Bernese Alps encircled the young schoolmaster; and
she said, "It would influence girls; I dare say."

"A harder matter with boys, of course--at first. We think we may make it
serve."

"And where is the spot? Is that fixed on?"

"Fifteen miles from Berne, on elevated land, neighbouring a water, not
quite to be called a lake, unless in an auctioneer's advertisement."

"I am glad of the lake. I could not look on a country home where there
was no swimming. You will be head of the school."

"There must be a head."

"Is the school likely to be established soon?"

He fell into her dead tone: "Money is required for establishments. I have
a Reversion coming some day; I don't dabble in post obits."

He waited for farther questions. They were at an end.

"You have your work to do, Mr. Weyburn."

Saying that, she bowed an implied apology for having kept him from it,
and rose. She bowed again as she passed through the doorway, in
acknowledgment of his politeness.

Here; then, was the end of the story of Browny and Matey. Such was his
thought under the truncheon-stroke of their colloquy. Lines of Browny's
letters were fiery waving ribands about him, while the coldly gracious
bow of the Lady wrote Finis.

The gulf between the two writings remained unsounded. It gave a heave to
the old passion; but stirred no new one; he had himself in hand now, and
he shut himself up when the questions bred of amazement buzzed and
threatened to storm. After all, what is not curious in this world? The
curious thing would be if curious things should fail to happen. Men have
been saying it since they began to count and turn corners. And let us
hold off from speculating when there is or but seems a shadow of
unholiness over that mole-like business. There shall be no questions; and
as to feelings, the same. They, if petted for a moment beneath the
shadow, corrupt our blood. Weyburn was a man to have them by the throat
at the birth.

Still they thronged; heavy work of strangling had to be done. Her tone of
disappointment with the schoolmaster bit him, and it flattered him. The
feelings leapt alive, equally venomous from the wound and the caress.
They pushed to see, had to be repelled from seeing, the girl Browny in
the splendid woman; they had lightning memories: not the pain of his grip
could check their voice on the theme touching her happiness or the
reverse. And this was an infernal cunning. He paused perforce to inquire,
giving them space for the breeding of their multitudes. Was she happy?
Did she not seem too meditative, enclosed, toneless, at her age? Vainly
the persecuted fellow said to himself: "But what is it to me now?"--The
Browny days were over. The passion for the younger Aminta was
over--buried; and a dream of power belonging to those days was not yet
more than visionary. It had moved her once, when it was a young
soldier's. She treated the schoolmaster's dream as vapour, and the old
days as dead and ghostless. She did rightly. How could they or she or he
be other than they were!

With that sage exclamation, he headed into the Browny days and breasted
them; and he had about him the living foamy sparkle of the very time,
until the Countess of Ormont breathed the word "Schoolmaster"; when, at
once, it was dusty land where buoyant waters had been, and the armies of
the facts, in uniform drab, with some feathers and laces, and a
significant surpliced figure, decorously covering the wildest of Cupids,
marched the standard of the winking gold-piece, which is their nourishing
sun and eclipser of all suns that foster dreams.

As you perceive, he was drawing swiftly to the vortex of the fools, and
round and round he went, lucky to float.

His view of the business of the schoolmaster plucked him from the whirl.
She despised it; he upheld it. He stuck to his view, finding their
antagonism on the subject wholesome for him. All that she succeeded in
doing was to rob it of the aurora colour clothing everything on which
Matey Weyburn set his aim. Her contempt of it, whether as a profession in
itself or as one suitable to the former young enthusiast for arms,
dwarfed it to appear like the starved plants under Greenland skies. But
those are of a sturdy genus; they mean to live; they live, perforce, of
the right to live; they will prove their right in a coming season, when
some one steps near and wonders at them, and from more closely observing;
gets to understand, learning that the significance and the charm of earth
will be as well shown by them as by her tropical fair flaunters or the
tenderly-nurtured exotics.

An unopened coffer of things to be said in defence of--no, on behalf
of--no, in honour of the Profession of Schoolmaster, perhaps to the
convincing of Aminta, Lady Ormont, was glanced at; a sentence or two
leapt out and stepped forward, and had to retire. He preferred to the
fathering of tricky, windy phrases, the being undervalued--even by her.
He was taught to see again how Rhetoric haunts, and Rhetoric bedevils,
the vindication of the clouded, especially in the case of a disesteemed
Profession requiring one to raise it and impose it upon the antagonistic
senses for the bewildering of the mind. One has to sound it loudly; there
is no treating it, as in the advocacy of the cases of flesh and blood,
with the masterly pathos of designed simplicity. And Weyburn was Cuper's
Matey Weyburn still in his loathing of artifice to raise emotion,
loathing of the affected, the stilted, the trumpet of speech--always
excepting school-exercises in the tongues, the unmasking of a Catiline,
the address of a General, Athenian or other, to troops.

He kept his coffer shut; and, for a consequence, he saw the contents as
an avenue of blossom leading to vistas of infinite harvest.

She was Lady Ormont: Aminta shared the title of his old hero! He refused
to speculate upon how it had come to pass, and let the curtain hang,
though dramas and romances, with the miracles involved in them, were
agitated by a transient glimpse at the curtain.

Well! and he hoped to be a member of the Profession she despised: hoped
it with all his heart. And one good effect of his giving his heart to the
hope was, that he could hold from speculating and from feeling, even from
pausing to wonder at the most wonderful turn of events. Blessed
antagonism drove him to be braced by thoughts upon the hardest of the
schoolmaster's tasks--bright winter thoughts, prescribing to him
satisfaction with a faith in the sowing, which may be his only reaping.
Away fly the boys in sheaves. After his toil with them, to instruct,
restrain, animate, point their minds, they leave him, they plunge into
the world and are gone. Will he see them again? It is a flickering
perhaps. To sustain his belief that he has done serviceable work, he must
be sore of his having charged them with good matter. How can the man do
it, if, during his term of apprenticeship, he has allowed himself to
dally here and there, down to moony dreamings over inscrutable beautiful
eyes of a married lady; for the sole reason that he meets her
unexpectedly, after an exchange of letters with her in long-past days at
school, when she was an inexperienced girl, who knew not what she vowed,
and he a flighty-headed youngster, crying out to be the arrow of any bow
that was handy? Yea, she was once that girl, named Browny by the boys.

Temptation threw warm light on the memory, and very artfully, by
conjuring up the faces, cries, characters, all the fun of the boys. There
was no possibility of forgetting her image in those days; he had,
therefore, to live with it and to live near the grown woman--Time's
present answer to the old riddle. It seemed to him, that instead of
sorting Lord Ormont's papers, he ought to be at sharp exercise. According
to his prescript, sharp exercise of lungs and limbs is a man's moral aid
against temptation. He knew it as the one trusty antidote for him, who
was otherwise the vessel of a temperament pushing to mutiny. Certainly it
is the best philosophy youth can pretend to practise; and Lord Ormont
kept him from it! Worse than that, the slips and sheets of paper in the
dispatch-box were not an exercise of the mind even; there was nothing to
grapple with--no diversion; criticism passed by them indulgently, if not
benevolently.

Quite apart from the subject inscribed on them, Weyburn had now and again
a blow at the breast, of untraceable origin. For he was well enough aware
that the old days when Browny imagined him a hero, in drinking his
praises of a brighter, were drowned. They were dead; but here was she the
bride of the proved hero. His praises might have helped in causing her
willingness--devotional readiness, he could fancy--to yield her hand.
Perhaps at the moment when the hero was penning some of the Indian slips
here, the boy at school was preparing Aminta; but he could not be
responsible for a sacrifice of the kind suggested by Lady Charlotte. And
no, there had been no such sacrifice, although Lord Ormont's inexplicable
treatment of his young countess, under cover of his notorious reputation
with women, conduced to the suspicion.

While the vagrant in Weyburn was thus engaged, his criticism of the
soldier-lord's field-English on paper let the stuff go tolerantly
unexamined, but with a degree of literary contempt at heart for the
writer who had that woman-scented reputation and expressed himself so
poorly. The sentiment was outside of reason. We do, nevertheless, expect
our Don Juans to deliver their minds a trifle elegantly; if not in
classic English, on paper; and when we find one of them inflicting
cruelty, as it appears, and the victim is a young woman, a beautiful
young woman, she pleads to us poetically against the bearish sentences of
his composition. We acknowledge, however, that a mere sentiment,
entertained possibly by us alone, should not be permitted to condemn him
unheard.

Lady Ormont was not seen again. After luncheon at a solitary table, the
secretary worked till winter's lamps were lit; and then shone freedom,
with assurance to him that he would escape from the miry mental ditch he
had been floundering in since Aminta revealed herself. Sunday was the
glorious day to follow, with a cleansing bath of a walk along the
southern hills; homely English scenery to show to a German friend, one of
his "Company." Half a dozen good lads were pledged to the walk; bearing
which in view, it could be felt that this nonsensical puzzlement over his
relations to the moods and tenses of a married woman would be bounced out
of recollection before nightfall. The landscape given off any of the airy
hills of Surrey would suffice to do it.

A lady stood among her boxes below, as he descended the stairs to cross
the hall. He knew her for the person Lady Charlotte called "the woman's
aunt," whom Lord Ormont could not endure--a forgiven old enemy, Mrs.
Nargett Pagnell.

He saluted. She stared, and corrected her incivility with "Ah, yes," and
a formal smile.

If not accidentally delayed on her journey, she had been needlessly the
cause why Lord Ormont hugged his Club during the morning and afternoon.
Weyburn was pushed to think of the matter by remembrance of his foregone
resentment at her having withdrawn Aminta from Miss Vincent's three days
earlier than the holiday time. The resentment was over; but a germ of it
must have sprang from the dust to prompt the kindling leap his memory
took, out of all due connection; like a lightning among the crags. It
struck Aminta smartly. He called to mind the conversation at table
yesterday. Had she played on Lord Ormont's dislike of the aunt to drive
him forth for some purpose of her own? If so, the little trick had been
done with deplorable spontaneity or adeptness of usage. What was the
purpose?--to converse with an old acquaintance, undisturbed by Lord
Ormont and her aunt? Neatly done, supposing the surmise correct.

But what was there in the purpose? He sifted rapidly for the gist of the
conversation; reviewed the manner of it, the words, the sound they had,
the feelings they touched; then owned that the question could not be
answered. Owning, further, that the recurrence of these idiotic
speculations, feelings, questions, wrote him down as both dull fellow and
impertinent, he was unabled to restore Aminta to the queenly place she
took above the schoolmaster, who was very soon laughing at his fever or
flash of the afternoon. The day had brought a great surprise, nothing
more. Twenty minutes of fencing in the a salle d'armes of an Italian
captain braced him to health, and shifted scenes of other loves, lighter
loves, following the Browny days--not to be called loves; in fact; hardly
beyond inclinations. Nevertheless, inclinations are an infidelity. To
meet a married woman, and be mooning over her because she gave him her
eyes and her handwriting when a girl, was enough to rouse an honest
fellow's laugh at himself, in the contemplation of his intermediate
amorous vagabondage. Had he ever known the veritable passion after Browny
sank from his ken? Let it be confessed, never. His first love was his
only true love, despite one shuddering episode, oddly humiliating to
recollect, though he had not behaved badly. So, then, by right of his
passion, thus did eternal justice rule it: that Browny belonged, to Matey
Weyburn, Aminta to Lord Ormont. Aminta was a lady blooming in the flesh,
Browny was the past's pale phantom; for which reason he could call her
his own, without harm done to any one, and with his usual appetite for
dinner, breakfast, lunch, whatever the meal supplied by the hour.

It would somewhat alarmingly have got to Mr. Weyburn's conscience through
a disturbance of his balance, telling him that he was on a perilous road,
if his relish for food had been blunted. He had his axiom on the subject,
and he was wrong in the general instance, for the appetites of rogues and
ogres are not known to fail. As regarded himself, he was eminently right;
and he could apply it to boys also, to all young people--the unlaunched,
he called them. He counted himself among the launched, no doubt, and had
breasted seas; but the boy was alive, a trencherman lad, in the coming
schoolmaster, and told him profitable facts concerning his condition;
besides throwing a luminous ray on the arcane of our elusive youthful. If
they have no stout zest for eating, put Query against them.

His customary enjoyment of dinner convinced Mr. Weyburn that he had not
brooded morbidly over his phantom Browny, and could meet Aminta, Countess
of Ormont, on the next occasion with the sentiments proper to a common
official. Did she not set him a commendable example? He admired her for
not concealing her disdain of the aspirant schoolmaster, quite
comprehending, by sympathy, why the woman should reproach the girl who
had worshipped heroes, if this was a full-grown specimen; and the reply
of the shamed girl, that in her ignorance she could not know better. He
spared the girl, but he laughed at the woman he commended, laughed at
himself.

Aminta's humour was being stirred about the same time. She and her aunt
were at the dinner-table in the absence of my lord. The dinner had passed
with the stiff dialogue peculiar to couples under supervision of their
inferiors; and, as soon as the room was clear, she had asked her aunt,
touching the secretary: "Have you seen him?"

Mrs. Nargett Pagnell's answer could have been amusing only to one whose
intimate knowledge of her found it characteristically salt; for she was a
lady of speech addressed ever directly or roundabout to the chief point
of business between herself and her hearer, and the more she was brief,
oblique, far-shooting, the more comically intelligible she was to her
niece. She bent her head to signify that she had seen the secretary, and
struck the table with both hands, exclaiming:

"Well, to be sure, Lord Ormont!"

Their discussion, before they descended the stairs to dinner, concerned
his lordship's extraordinary indifference to the thronging of handsome
young men around his young countess.

Here, the implication ran, is one established in the house.

Aminta's thoughts could be phrased: "Yes, that is true, for one part of
it."

As for the other part, the ascent of a Phoebus Apollo, with his golden
bow and quiver off the fairest of Eastern horizon skies, followed
suddenly by the sight of him toppling over in Mr. Cuper's long-skirted
brown coat, with spectacles and cane, is an image that hardly exceeds the
degradation she conceived. It was past ludicrous; yet admitted of no
woefulness, nothing soothingly pathetic. It smothered and barked at the
dreams of her blooming spring of life, to which her mind had latterly
been turning back, for an escape from sour, one may say cynical,
reflections, the present issue of a beautiful young woman's first savour
of battle with the world.




CHAPTER VI.

IN A MOOD OF LANGUOR

Up in Aminta's amber dressing-room; Mrs. Nargett Pagnell alluded sadly to
the long month of separation, and begged her niece to let her have in
plain words an exact statement of the present situation; adding, "Items
will do." Thereupon she slipped into prattle and held the field.

She was the known, worthy, good, intolerable woman whom the burgess turns
out for his world in regiments, that do and look and all but step alike;
and they mean well, and have conventional worships and material
aspirations, and very peculiar occult refinements, with a blind head and
a haphazard gleam of acuteness, impressive to acquaintances, convincing
themselves that they impersonate sagacity. She had said this, done that;
and it was, by proof, Providence consenting, the right thing. A niece,
written down in her girlhood, because of her eyes and her striking air
and excellent deportment, as mate for a nobleman, marries, him before she
is out of her teens. "I said, She shall be a countess." A countess she
is. Providence does not comply with our predictions in order to stultify
us. Admitting the position of affairs for the moment as extraordinary, we
are bound by what has happened to expect they will be conformable in the
end. Temporarily warped, we should say of them.

She could point to the reason: it was Lord Ormont's blunt
misunderstanding of her character. The burgess's daughter was refining to
an appreciation of the exquisite so rapidly that she could criticize
patricians. My lord had never forgiven her for correcting him in his
pronunciation of her name by marriage. Singular indeed; but men, even
great men, men of title, are so, some of them, whom you could least
suspect of their being so. He would speak the "g" in Nargett, and he,
declined--after a remonstrance he declined--to pass Pagnell under the
cedilla. Lord Ormont spoke the name like a man hating it, or an English
rustic: "Nargett Pagnell," instead, of the soft and elegant "Naryett
Pagnell," the only true way of speaking it; and she had always taken that
pronunciation of her name for a test of people's breeding. The expression
of his lordship's countenance under correction was memorable. Naturally,
in those honeymoony days, the young Countess of Ormont sided with her
husband the earl; she declared that her aunt had never dreamed of the
cedilla before the expedition to Spain. When, for example, Alfred Nargett
Pagnell had a laughing remark, which Aminta in her childhood must have
heard: "We rhyme with spaniel!"

That was the secret of Lord Ormont's prepossession against Aminta's aunt;
and who can tell? perhaps of much of his behaviour to the beautiful young
wife he at least admired, sincerely admired, though he caused her to hang
her head--cast a cloud on the head so dear to him!

Otherwise there was no interpreting his lordship. To think of herself as
personally disliked by a nobleman stupefied Mrs. Pagnell, from her just
expectation of reciprocal dealings in high society; for she confessed
herself a fly to a title. Where is the shame, if titles are created to
attract? Elsewhere than in that upper circle, we may anticipate hard
bargains; the widow of a solicitor had not to learn it. But when a
distinguished member and ornament of the chosen seats above blew cold
upon their gesticulatory devotee, and was besides ungrateful; she was
more than commonly assured of his being, as she called him, "a sphinx."
His behaviour to his legally wedded wife confirmed the charge.

She checked her flow to resume the question. "So, then, where are we now?
He allows you liberally for pin-money in addition to your own small
independent income. Satisfaction with that would warrant him to suppose
his whole duty done by you."

"We are where we were, aunty; the month has made no change," said Aminta
in languor.

"And you as patient as ever?"

"I am supposed to have everything a woman can require."

"Can he possibly think it? And I have to warn you, child, that lawyers
are not so absolving as the world is with some of the ladies Lord Ormont
allows you to call your friends. I have been hearing--it is not mere airy
tales one hears from lawyers about cases in Courts of Law. Tighten your
lips as you like; I say nothing to condemn or reflect on Mrs. Lawrence
Finchley. I have had my eyes a little opened, that is all. Oh, I know my
niece Aminta, when it's a friend to stand by; but our position--thanks to
your inscrutable lord and master--demands of us the utmost
scrupulousness, or it soon becomes a whirl and scandal flying about, and
those lawyers picking up and putting together. I have had a difficulty to
persuade them!... and my own niece! whom I saw married at the British
Embassy in Madrid, as I take good care to tell everybody; for it was my
doing; I am the responsible person! and by an English Protestant
clergyman, to all appearance able to walk erect in and out of any of
these excellent new Life Assurance offices they are starting for the
benefit of widows and orphans, and deceased within six days of the
ceremony--if ceremony one may call the hasty affair in those foreign
places. My dear, the instant I heard it I had a presentiment, 'All has
gone well up to now.' I remember murmuring the words. Then your letter,
received in that smelly Barcelona: Lord Ormont was carrying you off to
Granada--a dream of my infancy! It may not have been his manoeuvre, but
it was the beginning of his manoeuvres."

Aminta shuddered. "And tra-la-la, and castanets, and my Cid! my Cid! and
the Alhambra, the Sierra Nevada, and ay di me, Alhama; and Boabdil el
Chico and el Zagal and Fray Antonio Agapida!" She flung out the rattle,
yawning, with her arms up and her head back, in the posture of a woman
wounded. One of her aunt's chance shots had traversed her breast,
flashing at her the time, the scene, the husband, intensest sunniness on
sword-edges of shade,--and now the wedded riddle; illusion dropping mask,
romance in its anatomy, cold English mist. Ah, what a background is the
present when we have the past to the fore! That filmy past is diaphanous
on heaving ribs.

She smiled at the wide-eyed little gossip. "Don't speak of manaoeuvres,
dear aunt. And we'll leave Granada to the poets. I'm tired. Talk of our
own people, on your side and my father's, and as much as you please of
the Pagnell-Pagnells, they refresh me. Do they go on marrying?"

"Why, my child, how could they go on without it?"

Aminta pressed her hands at her eyelids. "Oh, me!" she sighed, feeling
the tear come with a sting from checked laughter. "But there are
marriages, aunty, that don't go on, though Protestant clergymen
officiated. Leave them unnoticed, I have really nothing to tell."

"You have not heard anything of Lady Eglett?"

"Lady Charlotte Eglett? No syllable. Or wait--my lord's secretary was
with her at Olmer; approved by her, I have to suppose."

"There, my dear, I say again I do dread that woman, if she can make a man
like Lord Ormont afraid of her. And no doubt she is of our old
aristocracy. And they tell me she is coarse in her conversation--like a
man. Lawyers tell me she is never happy but in litigation. Years back, I
am given to understand, she did not set so particularly good an example.
Lawyers hear next to everything. I am told she lifted her horsewhip on a
gentleman once, and then put her horse at him and rode him down. You will
say, the sister of your husband. No; not to make my niece a countess,
would I, if I had known the kind of family! Then one asks, Is she half as
much afraid of him? In that case, no wonder they have given up meeting.
Was formerly one of the Keepsake Beauties. Well, Lady Eglett, and Aminta,
Countess of Ormont, will be in that Peerage, as they call it, let her
only have her dues. My dear, I would--if I ever did--swear the woman is
jealous."

"Of me, aunty!"

"I say more; I say again, it would be a good thing for somebody if
somebody had his twitch of jealousy. Wives may be too meek. Cases and
cases my poor Alfred read to me, where an ill-behaving man was brought to
his senses by a clever little shuffle of the cards, and by the most
innocent of wives. A kind of poison to him, of course; but there are
poisons that cure. It might come into the courts; and the nearer the
proofs the happier he in withdrawing from his charge and effecting a
reconciliation. Short of guilt, of course. Men are so strange. Imagine
now, if a handsome young woman were known to be admired rather more than
enough by a good-looking gentleman near about her own age. Oh, I've no
patience with, the man for causing us to think and scheme! Only there are
men who won't be set right unless we do. My husband used to say, change
is such a capital thing in life's jogtrot; that men find it refreshing if
we now and then, reverse the order of our pillion-riding for them. A
spiritless woman in a wife is what they bear least of all. Anything
rather. Is Mr. Morsfield haunting Mrs. Lawrence Finchley's house as
usual?"

Aminta's cheeks unrolled their deep damask rose at the abrupt intrusion
of the name. "I meet him there."

"Lord Adderwood, Sir John Randeller; and the rest?"

"Two or three times a week."

"And the lady, wife of the captain, really a Lady Fair--Mrs.... month of
May: so I have to get at it."

"She may be seen there."

"Really a contrast, when you two are together! As to reputation, there is
an exchange of colours. Those lawyers hold the keys of the great world,
and a naughty world it is, I fear--with exceptions, who are the salt, but
don't taste so much. I can't help enjoying the people at Mrs. Lawrence
Finchley's. I like to feel I can amuse them, as they do me. One puzzles
for what they say--in somebody's absence, I mean. They must take Lord
Ormont for a perfect sphinx; unless they are so silly as to think they
may despise him, or suppose him indifferent. Oh, that upper class! It's a
garden, and we can't help pushing to enter it; and fair flowers, indeed,
but serpents too, like the tropics. It tries us more than anything else
in the world--well, just as good eating tries the constitution. He ought
to know it and feel it, and give his wife all the protection of his name,
instead of--not that he denies: I have brought him to that point; he
cannot deny it with me. But not to present her--to shun the Court; not to
introduce her to his family, to appear ashamed of her! My darling Aminta,
a month of absence for reflection on your legally-wedded husband's
conduct increases my astonishment. For usually men old enough to be the
grandfathers of their wives--"

"Oh, pray, aunty, pray, pray!" Aminta cried, and her body writhed. "No
more to-night. You mean well, I am sure. Let us wait. I shall sleep,
perhaps, if I go to bed early. I dare say I am spiritless--not worth more
than I get. I gave him the lead altogether; he keeps it. In everything
else he is kind; I have all the luxuries--enough to loathe them. Kiss me
and say good night."

Aminta made it imperative by rising. Her aunt stood up, kissed, and
exclaimed, "I tell you you are a queenly creature, not to be treated as
any puny trollop of a handmaid. And although he is a great nobleman, he
is not to presume to behave any longer, my dear, as if your family had no
claim on his consideration. My husband, Alfred Pagnell, would have laid
that before him pretty quick. You are the child of the Farrells and the
Solers, both old families; on your father's side you are linked with the
oldest nobility in Europe. It flushes one to think of it! Your
grandmother, marrying Captain Algernon Farrell, was the legitimate
daughter of a Grandee of Spain; as I have told Lord Ormont often, and I
defy him to equal that for a romantic marriage in the annals of his
house, or boast of bluer blood. Again, the Solers--"

"We take the Solers for granted, aunty, good night."

"Commoners, if you like; but established since the Conquest. That is, we
trace the pedigree. And to be treated, even by a great nobleman, as if we
were stuff picked up out of the ditch! I declare, there are times when I
sit and think and boil. Is it chivalrous, is it generous--is it, I say,
decent--is it what Alfred would have called a fair fulfilment of a pact,
for your wedded husband--? You may close my mouth! But he pretends to be
chivalrous and generous, and he has won a queen any wealthy gentleman in
England--I know of one, if not two--would be proud to have beside him in
equal state; and what is he to her? He is an extinguisher. Or is it the
very meanest miserliness, that he may keep you all to himself? There we
are again! I say he is an unreadable sphinx."

Aminta had rung the bell for her maid. Mrs. Pagnell could be counted on
for drawing in her tongue when the domestics were near.

A languor past delivery in sighs was on the young woman's breast. She
could have heard without a regret that the heart was to cease beating.
Had it been downright misery she would have looked about her with less of
her exanimate glassiness. The unhappy have a form of life: until they are
worn out, they feel keenly. She felt nothing. The blow to her pride of
station and womanhood struck on numbed sensations. She could complain
that the blow was not heavier.

A letter lying in her jewel-box called her to read it, for the chance of
some slight stir. The contents were known. The signature of Adolphus
Morsfield had a new meaning for her eyes, and dashed her at her husband
in a spasm of revolt and wrath against the man exposing her to these
letters, which a motion of her hand could turn to blood, and abstention
from any sign maintained in a Satanic whisper, saying, "Here lies one way
of solving the riddle." It was her husband who drove her to look that
way.

The look was transient, and the wrath: she could not burn. A small
portion of contempt lodged in her mind to shadow husbands precipitating
women on their armoury for a taste of vengeance. Women can always be
revenged--so speedily, so completely: they have but to dip. Husbands
driving wives to taste their power execrate the creature for her fall
deep downward. They are forgetful of causes.

Does it matter? Aminta's languor asked. The letter had not won a reply.
Thought of the briefest of replies was a mountain of effort, and she
moaned at her nervelessness in body and mind. To reply, to reproach the
man, to be flame--an image of herself under the form she desired--gave
her a momentary false energy, wherein the daring of the man, whose life
was at a loss for the writing of this letter, hung lighted. She had
therewith a sharp vision of his features, repellent in correctness, Greek
in lines, with close eyes, hollow temples, pressed lips--a face
indicating the man who can fling himself on a die. She had heard tales of
women and the man. Some had loved him, report said. Here were words to
say that he loved her. They might, poor man, be true. Otherwise she had
never been loved.

Memory had of late been paying visits to a droopy plant in the golden
summer drought on a gorgeous mid-sea island, and had taken her on board
to refresh her with voyages, always bearing down full sail on a couple of
blissful schools, abodes of bloom and briny vigour, sweet merriment,
innocent longings, dreams the shyest, dreams the mightiest. At night
before sleep, at morn before rising, often during day, and when vexed or
when dispirited, she had issued her command for the voyage. Sheer
refreshment followed, as is ever the case if our vessel carries no
freight of hopes. There could be no hopes. It was forgotten that they had
ever been seriously alive. But it carried an admiration. Now, an
admiration may endure, and this one had been justified all round. The
figure heroical, the splendid, active youth, hallowed Aminta's past. The
past of a bitterly humiliated Aminta was a garden in the coming kiss of
sunset, with that godlike figure of young manhood to hallow it. There he
stayed, perpetually assuring her of his triumphs to come.

She could have no further voyages. Ridicule convulsed her home of refuge.
For the young soldier-hero, to be unhorsed by misfortune, was one thing;
but the meanness of the ambition he had taken in exchange for the thirst
of glory, accused his nature. He so certainly involved her in the
burlesque of the transformation that she had to quench memory.

She was, therefore, having smothered a good part of herself, accountably
languid--a condition alternating with fire in Aminta; and as Mr.
Morsfield's letter supplied the absent element, her needy instinct pushed
her to read his letter through. She had not yet done that with attention.

Whether a woman loves a man or not, he is her lover if he dare tell her
he loves her, and is heard with attention. Aware that the sentences were
poison, she summoned her constitutional antagonism to the mad step
proposed, so far nullifying the virus as to make her shrink from the
madness. Even then her soul cried out to her husband, Who drives me to
read? or rather, to brood upon what she read. The brooding ensued, was
the thirst of her malady. The best antidote she could hit on was the
writer's face. Yet it expressed him, his fire and his courage--gifts she
respected in him, found wanting in herself. Read by Lord Ormont, this
letter would mean a deadly thing.

Aminta did her lord the justice to feel sure of him, that with her name
bearing the superscription, it might be left on her table, and world not
have him to peruse it. If he manoeuvred, it was never basely. Despite
resentment, her deepest heart denied his being indifferent either to her
honour or his own in relation to it. He would vindicate both at a stroke,
for a sign. Nevertheless, he had been behaving cruelly. She charged on
him the guilt of the small preludes, archeries, anglings, veilings,
evasions, all done with the eyelids and the mute of the lips, or a
skirmisher word or a fan's flourish, and which, intended to pique the
husband rather than incite the lover, had led Mrs. Lawrence Finchley to
murmur at her ear, in close assembly, without a distinct designation of
Mr. Morsfield, "Dangerous man to play little games with!" It had brought
upon her this letter of declaration, proposal, entreaty.

This letter was the man's life in her hands, and safe, of course. But
surely it was a proof that the man loved her?

Aminta was in her five-and-twentieth year; when the woman who is
uncertain of the having been loved, and she reputed beautiful, desirable,
is impelled by a sombre necessity to muse on a declaration, and nibble at
an idea of a test. If "a dangerous man to play little games with," he
could scarcely be dangerous to a woman having no love for him at all. It
meant merely that he would soon fall to writing letters like this, and he
could not expect an answer to it. But her heart really thanked him, and
wished the poor gentleman to take its dumb response as his reward, for
being the one sole one who had loved her.

Aminta dwelt on "the one sole one." Lord Ormont's treatment had detached
her from any belief in love on his part; and the schoolboy, now ambitions
to become a schoolmaster, was behind the screen unlikely to be lifted
again by a woman valuing her pride of youth, though he had--behold our
deceptions!--the sympathetic face entirely absent from that of Mr.
Adolphus Morsfield, whom the world would count quite as handsome--nay, it
boasted him. He enjoyed the reputation of a killer of ladies. Women have
odd tastes, Aminta thought, and examined the gentleman's handwriting. It
pleased her better. She studied it till the conventional phrases took a
fiery hue, and came at her with an invasive rush.

The letter was cast back into the box, locked up; there an end to it, or
no interdiction of sleep.

Sleep was a triumph. Aminta's healthy frame rode her over petty
agitations of a blood uninflamed, as lightly as she swam the troubled
sea-waters her body gloried to cleave. She woke in the morning peaceful
and mildly reflective, like one who walks across green meadows. Only by
degrees, by glimpses, was she drawn to remember the trotting, cantering,
galloping, leaping of an active heart during night. We cannot, men or
woman, control the heart in sleep at night. There had been wild leapings.
Night will lead an unsatisfied heart of a woman, by way of sleep, to
scale black mountains, jump jagged chasms. Sleep is a horse that laughs
at precipices and abysses. We bid women, moreover, be all heart. They are
to cultivate their hearts, pay much heed to their hearts. The vast realm
of feeling is open to these appointed keepers of the sanctuary household,
who may be withering virgins, may be childless matrons, may be
unhusbanded wives. Wandering in the vast realm which they are exhorted to
call their own, for the additional attractiveness it gives them, an
unsatisfied heart of woman will somewhat audaciously cross the borderland
a single step into the public road of the vast realm of thinking. Once
there, and but a single step on the road, she is a rebel against man's
law for her sex. Nor is it urgent on her that she should think defiantly
in order to feel herself the rebel. She may think submissively; with a
heart (the enlarged, the scientifically plumped, the pasture of epicurean
man), with her coveted heart in revolt, and from the mere act of thinking
at all.

Aminta reviewed perforce, dead against her will, certain of the
near-to-happiness ratings over-night. She thinned her lips, and her
cheeks glowed. An arm, on the plea of rescuing, had been round her. The
choice now offered her was, to yield to softness or to think. She took
the latter step, the single step of an unaccustomed foot, which women
educated simply to feet, will, upon extreme impulsion, take; and it held
a candle in a windy darkness. She saw no Justice there. The sensational
immensity touched sublime, short of that spirit of Justice required for
the true sublime. And void of Justice; what a sunless place is any realm!
Infants, the male and the female alike, first begin to know they feel
when it is refused them. When they know they feel, they have begun to
reflect. The void of Justice is a godless region. Women, to whom the
solitary thought has come as a blown candle, illumining the fringes of
their storm, ask themselves whether they are God's creatures or man's.
The question deals a sword-stroke of division between them and their
human masters. Young women, animated by the passions their feeling bosoms
of necessity breed, and under terror discover, do not distinguish an
abstract justice from a concrete. They are of the tribe too long
hereditarily enslaved to conceive an abstract. So it is with them, that
their God is the God of the slave, as it is with all but the bravest of
boys. He is a Thing to cry to, a Punisher, not much of a Supporter--the
Biblical Hebrew's right reading of Nature, favouring man, yet prompt to
confound him, and with woman for the instrument of vengeance. By such a
maze the blindfolded, are brought round to see Justice on earth. If women
can only believe in some soul of justice, they will feel they belong to
God--of the two; and the peril for them then is, that they will set the
one incomprehensible Power in opposition to the other, urging them
unsatisfied natures to make secret appeal away from man and his laws
altogether, at the cost of losing clear sight of the God who shines in
thought. It is a manner whereby the desperately harried among these
creatures of the petted heart arrive upon occasion at an agreeable,
almost reposeful, contemplation of the reverse of God.

There is little pleasure to be on the lecture-rostrum for a narrator
sensible to the pulses of his audience. Justice compels at times. In
truth, there are times when the foggy obscurities of the preacher are by
comparison broad daylight beside the whirling loose tissues of a woman
unexplained. Aminta was one born to prize rectitude, to walk on the
traced line uprightly; and while the dark rose overflowed the soft brown
of her cheeks, under musings upon her unlicenced heart's doings
overnight, she not only pleaded for woeful creatures of her sex burdened
as she and erring, she weighed them in the scales with men, and put her
heart where Justice pointed, sending men to kick aloft.

Her husband, the man-riddle: she was unable to rede or read him. Her will
could not turn him; nor her tongue combat; nor was it granted her to
pique the mailed veteran. Every poor innocent little bit of an art had
been exhausted. Her title was Lady Ormont her condition actually slave. A
luxuriously established slave, consorting with a singularly enfranchised
set,--as, for instance, Mrs. Lawrence Finchley and Lord Adderwood; Sir
John Randeller and Lady Staines; Mrs. May, Amy May, notorious wife of a
fighting captain, the loneliest of blondes; and other ladies, other
gentlemen, Mr. Morsfield in the list, paired or not yet paired: gossip
raged. Aminta was of a disposition too generously cordial to let her be
the rigorous critic of people with whom she was in touch. But her mind
knew relief when she recollected that her humble little school-mate,
Selina Collect, who had suffered on her behalf in old days, was coming up
to her from the Suffolk coast on a visit for a week. However much a slave
and an unloved woman, she could be a constant and protecting friend.
Besides, Lord Ormont was gracious to little Selina. She thought of his
remarks about the modest-minded girl after first seeing her. From that
she struck upon a notion of reserves of humaneness being in him, if she
might find the path to them: and thence, fortified by the repose her
picture of little Selina's merit had bestowed, she sprang to the idea of
valiancy, that she would woo him to listen to her, without inflicting a
scene. He had been a listening lover, seeming lover, once, later than the
Granada sunsets. The letter in her jewel-box urged Aminta to clear her
conscience by some means, for leaving it unburnt.




CHAPTER VII.

EXHIBITS EFFECTS OF A PRATTLER'S DOSES

The rules in Lord Ormont's household assisted to shelter him for some
hours of the day from the lady who was like a blast of sirocco under his
roof. He had his breakfast alone, as Lady Charlotte had it at Olmer; a
dislike of a common table in the morning was a family trait with both. At
ten o'clock the secretary arrived, and they were shut up together. At the
luncheon table Aminta usually presided. If my lord dined at home, he had
by that time established an equanimity rendering, his constant civility
to Mrs. Pagnell less arduous. The presence of a woman of tongue,
perpetually on the spring to gratify him and win him, was among the
burdens he bore for his Aminta.

Mrs. Pagnell soon perceived that the secretary was in favour. My lord and
this Mr. Weyburn had their pet themes of conversation, upon which the
wary aunt of her niece did not gaze like the wintry sun with the distant
smile her niece displayed over discussions concerning military
biographies, Hannibal's use of his elephants and his Numidian horse, the
Little St. Bernard, modern artillery, ancient slingers, English and
Genoese bowmen, Napoleon's tactics, his command to the troopers to "give
point," and English officers' neglect of sword exercise, and the "devil
of a day" Old England is to have on a day to come. My lord connected our
day of trial with India. Mrs. Pagnell assumed an air of studious
interest; she struck in to give her niece a lead, that Lord Ormont might
know his countess capable of joining the driest of subjects occupying
exalted minds. Aminta did not follow her; and she was extricated
gallantly by the gentlemen in turn.

The secretary behaved with a pretty civility. Aminta shook herself to
think tolerantly of him when he, after listening to the suggestion, put
interrogatively, that we should profit by Hannibal's example and train
elephants to serve as a special army corps for the perfect security of
our priceless Indian Empire, instanced the danger likely to result from
their panic fear of cannon, and forbore to consult Lord Ormont's eye.

Mrs. Pagnell knew that she had put her foot into it; but women advised of
being fools in what they say, are generally sustained by their sense of
the excellent motive which impelled them. Even to the Countess of Ormont,
she could have replied, "We might have given them a higher idea of
us"--if, that meant, the Countess of Ormont had entered the field beside
her, to the exclusion of a shrinking Aminta. She hinted as much
subsequently, and Aminta's consciousness of the troth was touched. The
young schoolmaster's company sat on her spirits, deadened her vocabulary.
Her aunt spoke of passing the library door and hearing the two gentlemen
loudly laughing. It seemed subserviency on the fallen young hero's part.
His tastes were low. He frequented the haunts of boxing men; her lord
informed her of his having made, or of his making, matches to run or swim
or walk certain distances against competitors or within a given time. He
had also half a dozen boys or more in tow, whom he raced out of town on
Sundays; a nucleus of the school he intended to form.

But will not Achilles become by comparison a common rushlight where was a
blazing torch, if we see him clap a clown's cap on the head whose golden
helm was fired by Pallas?

Nay, and let him look the hero still: all the more does he point finger
on his meanness of nature.

Turning to another, it is another kind of shame that a woman feels, if
she consents to an exchange of letters--shameful indeed, but not such a
feeling of deadly sickness as comes with the humiliating view of an
object of admiration degraded. Bad she may be; and she may be deceived,
vilely treated, in either case. And what is a woman's pride but the staff
and banner of her soul, beyond all gifts? He who wounds it cannot be
forgiven--never!--he has killed the best of her. Aminta found herself
sliding along into the sentiment, that the splendid idol of a girl's
worship is, if she discover him in the lapse of years as an
infinitesimally small one, responsible for the woman's possible reckless
fit of giddiness. And she could see her nonsense; she could not correct
it. Lines of the letters under signature of Adolphus were phosphorescent
about her: they would recur; and she charged their doing so on the
discovered meanness of the girl's idol. Her wicked memory was caused by
his having plunged her low.

Mrs. Pagnell performed the offices of attention to Mr. Weyburn in lieu of
the countess, who seemed to find it a task to sit at the luncheon table
with him, when Lady Ormont was absent. "Just peeped in," she said as she
entered the library, "to see if all was comfortable;" and gossip ensued,
not devoid of object. She extracted an astonishingly smooth description
of Lady Charlotte. Weyburn was brightness in speaking of the
much-misunderstood lady. "She's one of the living women of the world."

"You are sure you don't mean one of the worldly women?" Mrs. Pagnell
rejoiced.

"She has to be known to be liked," he owned.

"And you were, one hears, among the favoured?"

"I can scarcely pretend to that, ma'am."

"You were recommended."

"Lady Charlotte is devoted to her brother."

Mrs. Pagnell's bosom heaved. "How strange Lord Ormont is! One would
suppose, with his indignation at the country for its treatment of him,
admirers would be welcome. Oh dear, no! that is not the way. On board the
packet, on our voyage to Spain, my niece in her cabin, imploring mercy of
Neptune, as they say, I heard of Lord Ormont among the passengers. I
could hardly credit my ears. For I had been hearing of him from my niece
ever since her return from a select establishment for the education of
young ladies, not much more than a morning's drive out of London, though
Dover was my residence. She had got a hero! It was Lord Ormont! Lord
Ormont! all day: and when the behaviour of the country to him became
notorious, Aminta--my niece the countess--she could hardly contain
herself. A secret:--I promised her--it's not known to Lord Ormont
himself:--a printed letter in a metropolitan paper, copied into the
provincial papers, upholding him for one of the greatest of our patriot
soldiers and the saviour of India, was the work of her hands. You would,
I am sure, think it really well written. Meeting him on deck--the outline
of the coast of Portugal for an introductory subject, our Peninsular
battles and so forth--I spoke of her enthusiasm. The effect was, to cut
off all communication between us. I had only to appear, Lord Ormont
vanished. I said to myself, this is a character. However, the very
mention of him to my niece, as one of the passengers on board--medicine,
miraculous! She was up in half an hour, out pacing the deck before
evening, hardly leaning on my arm, and the colour positively beginning to
show on her cheeks again. He fled, of coarse. I had prepared her for his
eccentricities. Next morning she was out by herself. In the afternoon
Lord Ormont strode up to us his--military step--and most courteously
requested the honour of an introduction. I had broken the ice at last;
from that moment he was cordiality itself, until--I will not say, until
he had called her his own--a few little misunderstandings!--not with his
countess. You see, a resident aunt is translated mother-in-law by
husbands; though I spare them pretty frequently; I go to friends, they
travel. Here in London she must have a duenna. The marriage at Madrid, at
the Embassy:--well, perhaps it was a step for us, for commoners, though
we rank with the independent. Has her own little pin-money--an
inheritance. Perhaps Lady Eglett gives the world her version. She may
say, there was aiming at station. I reply, never was there a more
whole-hearted love-match! Absolutely the girl's heart has been his from
the period of her school-days. Oh! a little affair--she was persecuted by
a boy at a neighbouring school. Her mistress wrote me word--a very
determined Romeo young gentleman indeed--quite alarmed about him. In the
bud! I carried her off on the spot, and snapped it effectually. Warned he
meant to be desperate, I kept her away from my house at Dover four
months, place to place; and I did well. I heard on my return, that a
youth, answering to the schoolmistress's description of him, had been
calling several times, the first two months and longer. You have me
alluding to these little nonsensical nothings, because she seemed born to
create violent attachments, even at that early day; and Lady Eglett--Lady
Charlotte Eglett may hear; for there is no end to them, and impute them
to her, when really!--can she be made responsible for eyes innocent of
the mischief they appear destined to do? But I am disturbing you in your
work."

"You are very good, ma'am," said the ghost of the determined young
gentleman.

"A slight cold, have you?" Mrs. Pagnell asked solicitously.

"Dear me, no!" he gave answer with a cleared throat.

In charging him with more than he wanted to carry, she supplied him with
particulars he had wanted to know; and now he asked himself what could be
the gain of any amount of satisfied curiosity regarding a married Aminta.
She slew my lord on board a packet-boat; she bears the arrows that slay.
My lord married her where the first English chaplain was to be found;
that is not wonderful either. British Embassy, Madrid! Weyburn believed
the ceremony to have been performed there: at the same time, he could
hear Lady Charlotte's voice repeating with her varied intonation Mrs.
Pagnell's impressive utterances; and he could imagine how the somewhat
silly duenna aunt, so penetrable in her transparent artifices, struck
emphasis on the incredulity of people inclined to judge of the reported
ceremony by Lord Ormont's behaviour to his captive.

How explain that strange matter? But can there be a gain in trying to
sound it? Weyburn shuffled it away. Before the fit of passion seized him,
he could turn his eager mind from anything which had not a perceptible
point of gain, either for bodily strength or mental acquisition, or for
money, too, now that the school was growing palpable as an infant in arms
and agape for the breast. Thought of gain, and the bent to pursue it, is
the shield of Athene over young men in the press of the seductions. He
had to confess his having lost some bits of himself by reason of his
meditations latterly; and that loss, if we let it continue a space, will
show in cramp at the wrist, logs on the legs, a wheezy wind, for any
fellow vowed to physical trials of strength and skill. It will show
likewise in the brain beating broken wings--inability to shoot a thought
up out of the body for half a minute. And, good Lord! how quickly the
tight-strong fellow crumbles, when once the fragmentary disintegration
has begun! Weyburn cried out on a heart that bounded off at prodigal
gallops, and had to be nipped with reminders of the place of good leader
he was for taking among the young. Hang superexcellence! but we know
those moanings over the troubles of a married woman; we know their
sources, know their goal, or else we are the fiction-puppet or the
Bedlamite; and she is a married woman, married at the British Embassy,
Madrid, if you please! after a few weeks' acquaintance with her husband,
who doubtless wrote his name intelligibly in the registrar's book, but
does not prove himself much the hero when he drives a pen, even for so
little as the signing of his name! He signed his name, apparently not
more than partly pledging himself to the bond. Lord Ormont's
autobiographical scraps combined with Lady Charlotte's hints and Mrs.
Pagnell's communications, to provoke the secretary's literary contempt of
his behaviour to his wife. However, the former might be mended, and he
resumed the task.

It had the restorative effect of touching him to see his old hero in
action; whereby he was brought about to a proper modesty, so that he
really craved no more than for the mistress of this house to breathe the
liberal air of a public acknowledgment of her rightful position. Things
constituted by their buoyancy to float are remarkable for lively bobbings
when they are cast upon the waters; and such was the case with Weyburn,
until the agitation produced by Mrs. Pagnell left him free to sail away
in the society of the steadiest.

He decided that by not observing, not thinking, not feeling, about the
circumstances of the household into which Fate had thrown him, he would
best be able--probably it was the one way--to keep himself together; and
his resolution being honest all round, he succeeded in it as long as he
abstained from a very wakeful vigilance over simple eyesight. For if one
is nervously on guard to not-see, the matter starts up winged, and enters
us, and kindles the mind, and tingles through the blood; it has us as a
foe. The art of blind vision requires not only practice, but an intimate
knowledge of the arts of the traitor we carry within. Safest for him,
after all, was to lay fast hold of the particularly unimportant person he
was, both there and anywhere else. The Countess of Ormont's manner toward
him was to be read as a standing index of the course he should follow;
and he thanked her. He could not quite so sincerely thank her aunt. His
ingratitude for the sickly dose she had administered to him sprang a
doubt whether Lady Ormont now thanked her aunt on account of services
performed at the British Embassy, Madrid.

Certain looks of those eyes recently, when in colloquy with my lord,
removed the towering nobleman to a shadowed landscape.

Was it solely an effect of eyes commanding light, and having every shaft
of the quiver of the rays at her disposal? Or was it a shot from a
powerful individuality issuing out of bondage to some physical oppressor
no longer master of the soul, in peril of the slipping away of the body?
Her look on him was not hate: it was larger, more terribly divine. Those
eyes had elsewhere once looked love: they had planted their object in a
throbbing Eden. The man on whom they had looked shivered over the thought
of it after years of blank division.

Rather than have those eyes to look on him their displacing unintentness,
the man on whom they had once looked love would have chosen looks of
wrath, the darts that kill--blest darts of the celestial Huntress, giving
sweet sudden cessation of pain, in the one everlasting last flash of life
with thought that the shot was hers. Oh for the 'ayava behea' of the
Merciful in splendour!

These were the outcries of the man deciding simultaneously not to
observe, not to think, not to feel, and husbanding calculations upon
storage of gain for the future. Softness held the song below. It came of
the fact that his enforced resolution, for the sake of sanity, drove his
whole reflective mind backward upon his younger days, when an Evening and
a Morning star in him greeted the bright Goddess Browny or sang adieu,
and adored beyond all golden beams the underworld whither she had sunk,
where she was hidden.

Meanwhile, the worthy dame who had dosed him was out in her carriage,
busy paying visits to distinguished ladies of the great world, with the
best of excuses for an early call, which was gossip to impart, such as
the Countess of Ormont had not yet thought of mentioning; and two or
three of them were rather amusedly interested to hear that Lord Ormont
had engaged a handsome young secretary, "under the patronage of Lady
Charlotte Eglett, devoted to sports of all kinds, immensely favoured by
both." Gossip must often have been likened to the winged insect bearing
pollen to the flowers; it fertilizes many a vacuous reverie. Those
flowers of the upper garden are not, indeed, stationary and in need of
the missionary buzzer, but if they have been in one place unmoved for one
hour, they are open to take animation from their visitors. Aminta was
pleasantly surprised next day by the receipt of a note from Mrs. Lawrence
Finchley, begging to be invited to lunch if she came, as she had a
purpose in the wish to meet my lord.




[NOTE: The remainder of 'Lord Ormont and His Aminta' is taken from an
older edition which uses single rather than double quotation marks. D.W.]


CHAPTER VIII

MRS. LAWRENCE FINCHLEY

My lord had one of his wilful likings for Isabella Lawrence Finchley, and
he consented to the torture of an hour of Mrs. Nargett Pagnell in the
middle of the day, just to taste the favourite he welcomed at home as he
championed her abroad. The reasons were numerous and intimate why she
pleased him. He liked the woman, enjoyed the cause for battle that she
gave. Weyburn, on coming to the luncheon table, beheld a lady with the
head of a comely boy, the manner, softened in delicate feminine, of a
capital comrade. Her air of candour was her nature in her face; and it
carried a guileless roguery, a placid daring, a supersensual naughtiness,
a simplicity of repose amid the smoky reputation she created, that led
one to think the vapour calumnious or the creature privileged. That young
boy's look opened him at once; he had not to warm to her,--he flew.
Ordinarily the sweetest ladies will make us pass through cold mist and
cross a stile or two, or a broken bridge, before the formalities are
cleared away to grant us rights of citizenship. She was like those frank
lands where we have not to hand out a passport at the frontier and wait
for dubious inspection of it.

She prevailed with cognizant men and with the frivolous. Women were
capable of appreciating her, too: as Aminta did, despite some hinted
qualifications addressed shyly to her husband. But these were the very
matters exciting his particular esteem. He was of Lady Charlotte's mind,
in her hot zeal against injustice done to the creatures she despised; and
yet more than she applauded a woman who took up her idiot husband's
challenge to defend her good name, and cleared it, right or wrong, and
beat him down on his knees, and then started for her spell of the merry
canter over turf: an example to the English of the punishment they get
for their stupid Puritanic tyranny--sure to be followed by a national
helter-skelter down-hill headlong. And Mrs. Lawrence was not one of the
corrupt, he argued; she concealed what it was decent to conceal, without
pouting hypocritical pretences; she had merely dispensed with idle legal
formalities, in the prettiest curvetting airy wanton way, to divorce the
man who tried to divorce her, and 'whined to be forgiven when he found he
couldn't. Adderwood was ready to marry her to-morrow, if the donkey
husband would but go and bray his last. Half a dozen others were heads
off on the same course to that goal.'

That was her champion's perusal of a lady candidly asserting her right to
have breeched comrades, and paying for it in the advocacy which
compromises. She was taken to be and she was used as a weapon wherewith
to strike at our Pharisees. Women pushing out into the world for
independence, bleed heavy payments all round.

The earl's double-edged defence of her was partly a vindication of
another husband, who allowed his wife to call her friend; he was
nevertheless assured of her not being corrupt, both by his personal
knowledge of the lady, and his perception of her image in the bosom of
his wife. She did no harm there, he knew well. Although he was not a man
to put his trust in faces, as his young secretary inclined to do, Mrs.
Lawrence's look of honest boy did count among the pleadings. And somewhat
so might a government cruiser observe the intrusion of a white-sailed
yacht in protected sea-waters, where licenced trawlers are at the haul.

Talk over the table coursed as fluently as might be, with Mrs. Pagnell
for a boulder in the stream. Uninformed by malice, she led up to Lord
Adderwood's name, and perhaps more designedly spoke of Mr. Morsfield, on
whom her profound reading into the female heart of the class above her
caused her to harp, as 'a real Antinous,' that the ladies might discuss
him and Lord Ormont wax meditative.

Mrs. Lawrence pitied the patient gentleman, while asking him in her mind
who was the author of the domestic burden he had to bear.

'It reminds me I have a mission,' she said. 'There's a fencing match down
at a hall in the West, near the barracks; private and select: Soldier and
Civilian; I forget who challenged--Civilian, one judges; Soldiers are the
peaceful party. They want you to act "umpire," as they call it, on the
military side, my dear lord; and you will?--I have given my word you will
bring Lady Ormont. You will?--and not let me be confounded! Yes, and we
shall make a party. I see consent. Aminta will enjoy the switch of steel.
I love to see fencing. It rouses all that is diabolical in me.'

She sent a skimming look at the opposite.

'And I,' said he, much freshened.

'You fence?'

'Handle the foils.'

'If you must speak modestly! Are you in practice?'

'I spend in hour in Captain Chiallo's fencing rooms generally every
evening before dinner. I heard there the first outlines of the match
proposed. You are right; it was the civilian.'

'Mr. Morsfield, as I suspected.'

She smiled to herself, like one saying, Not badly managed, Mr. Morsfield!

'Italian school?' Lord Ormont inquired, with a screw of the eyelids.

'French, my lord.'

'The only school for teaching.'

'The simplest--has the most rational method. Italians are apt to be
tricky. But they were masters once, and now and then they send out a
fencer the French can't touch.'

'How would you account for it?'

'If I had to account for it, I should say, hotter blood, cool nerve,
quick brain.'

'Hum. Where are we, then?'

'We don't shine with the small sword.'

'We had men neatly pinked for their slashings in the Peninsula.'

'We've had clever Irishmen.'

'Hot enough blood! This man Morsfield--have you crossed the foils with
him?'

'Goes at it like a Spaniard; though Spaniards in Paris have been found
wary enough.'

My lord hummed. 'Fellow looks as if he would easily lose his head over
steel.'

'He can be dangerous.'

The word struck on something, and rang.

Mrs. Lawrence had a further murmur within her lips. Her travelling eye
met Aminta's and passed it.

'But not dangerous, surely, if the breast is padded?' said Mrs. Pagnell.

'Oh no, oh no; not in that case!' Mrs. Lawrence ran out her voluble
assent, and her eyelids blinked; her fair boy's face was mischief at
school under shadow of the master.

She said to Weyburn: 'Are you one in the list--to give our military a
lesson? They want it.'

His answer was unheard by Aminta. She gathered from Mrs. Lawrence's
pleased sparkle that he had been invited to stand in the list; and the
strange, the absurd spectacle of a young schoolmaster taking the heroic
attitude for attack and defence wrestled behind her eyes with a suddenly
vivid first-of-May cricketing field, a scene of snowballs flying, the
vision of a strenuous lighted figure scaling to noble young manhood.
Isabella Lawrence's look at him spirited the bright past out of the
wretched long-brown-coat shroud of the present, prompting her to grieve
that some woman's hand had not smoothed a small tuft of hair, disorderly
on his head a little above the left parting, because Isabella Lawrence
Finchley could have no recollection of how it used to toss feathery--wild
at his games.

My lord hummed again. 'I suspect we 're going to get a drubbing. This
fellow here has had his French maitre d'armes. Show me your hand, sir.'

Weyburn smiled, and extended his right hand, saying: 'The wrist wants
exercise.'

'Ha! square thumb, flesh full at the nails' ends; you were a bowler at
cricket.'

'Now examine the palms, my lord; I judge by the lines on the palms,' Mrs.
Pagnell remarked.

He nodded to her and rose.

Coffee had not been served, she reminded him; it was coming in, so down
he sat a yard from the table; outwardly equable, inwardly cursing coffee;
though he refused to finish a meal without his cup.

'I think the palms do betray something,' said Mrs. Lawrence; and Aminta
said: 'Everything betrays.'

'No, my dear,' Mrs. Pagnell corrected her; 'the extremities betray, and
we cannot read the centre. Is it not so, my lord?'

'It may be as you say, ma'am.'

She was disappointed in her scheme to induce a general examination of
palms, and especially his sphinx lordship's.

Weyburn controlled the tongue she so frequently tickled to an elvish
gavotte, but the humour on his face touched Mrs. Lawrence's to a subdued
good-fellow roguishness, and he felt himself invited to chat with her on
the walk for a reposeful ten minutes in Aminta's drawing-room.

Mrs. Pagnell, 'quite enjoying the company,' as she told her niece, was
dismayed to hear her niece tell her of a milliner's appointment, positive
for three o'clock; and she had written it in her head 'p.m., four
o'clock,' and she had mislaid or destroyed the milliner's note; and she
still had designs upon his lordship's palms, things to read and hint
around her off the lines. She departed.

Lord Ormont became genial; and there was no one present who did not
marvel that he should continue to decree a state of circumstances more or
less necessitating the infliction he groaned under. He was too lofty to
be questioned, even by his favourites. Mrs. Lawrence conjured the ghost
of Lady Charlotte for an answer: this being Lord Adderwood's idea.
Weyburn let his thoughts go on fermenting. Pride froze a beginning stir
in the bosom of Aminta.

Her lord could captivate a reluctant woman's bosom when he was genial. He
melted her and made her call up her bitterest pride to perform its recent
office. That might have failed; but it had support in a second letter
received from the man accounted both by Mrs. Lawrence and by Mr. Weyburn
'dangerous'; and the thought of who it was that had precipitated her to
'play little games' for the sole sake of rousing him through jealousy to
a sense of righteous duty, armed her desperately against him. She could
exult in having read the second letter right through on receipt of it,
and in remembering certain phrases; and notably in a reflection shot
across her bewildered brain by one of the dangerous man's queer mad
sentences: 'Be as iron as you like, I will strike you to heat'; and her
thought: Is there assurance of safety in a perpetual defence?--all while
she smiled on her genial lord, and signified agreement, with a smiting of
wonderment at her heart, when he alluded to a panic shout of the country
for defence, and said: 'Much crying of that kind weakens the power to
defend when the real attack comes.' Was it true?

'But say what you propose?' she asked.

Lord Ormont proposed vigilance and drill; a small degree of
self-sacrifice on the part of the population, and a look-out head in the
War Department. He proposed to have a nation of stout-braced men laughing
at the foreign bully or bandit, instead of being a pack of whimpering
women; whom he likened to the randomly protestant geese of our country
roadside, heads out a yard in a gabble of defence while they go backing.

So thereupon Aminta's notion of a resemblance in the mutual thought
subsided; she relapsed on the cushioning sentiment that she was a woman.
And--only a woman! he might exclaim, if it pleased him; though he would
never be able to say she was one of the whimpering. She, too, had the
choice to indulge in scorn of the superior man stone blind to proceedings
intimately affecting him--if he cared! One might doubt it.

Mrs. Lawrence listened to him with a mind more disengaged, and a flitting
disapproval of Aminta's unsympathetic ear, or reluctance to stimulate the
devout attention a bruised warrior should have in his tent. She did not
press on him the post of umpire. He consented--at her request, he
said--to visit the show; but refused any official position that would, it
was clearly enough implied, bring his name in any capacity whatever
before the country which had unpardonably maltreated him.

Feminine wits will be set working, when a point has been gained; and as
Mrs. Lawrence could now say she had persuaded Lord Ormont to gratify her
specially, she warmed to fancy she read him, and that she might have
managed the wounded and angry giant. Her minor intelligence, caracoling
unhampered by harassing emotions, rebuked Aminta's for not perceiving
that to win him round to whatever a woman may desire, she must be with
him, outstrip him even, along the line he chooses for himself; abuse the
country, rail at the Government, ridicule the title of English Army,
proscribe the name of India in his hearing. Little stings of jealousy are
small insect bites, and do not pique a wounded giant hardly sensible of
irritation under his huge, and as we assume for our purpose, justifiable
wrath. We have to speculate which way does the giant incline to go? and
turn him according to the indication.

Mrs. Lawrence was driven by her critic mood to think Aminta
relied--erroneously, after woman's old fashion--on the might of superb
dark eyes after having been captured. It seemed to her worse than a
beautiful woman's vanity, a childishness. But her boy's head held boy's
brains; and Lord Ormont's praise of the splendid creature's nerve when
she had to smell powder in Spain, and at bull-fights, and once at a
wrecking of their carriage down a gully on the road over the Alpujarras,
sent her away subdued, envious, happy to have kissed the cheek of the
woman who could inspire it.




CHAPTER IX.

A FLASH OF THE BRUISED WARRIOR

The winning of Lord Ormont's consent to look on at the little bout of
arms was counted an achievement; for even in his own rarefied upper
circle, where the fervid sentiments are not allowed to be seen plunging,
he had his troop of enthusiasts; and they were anxious that he should
make an appearance in public, to take what consolation a misunderstood
and injured man could get from evidence of the grateful esteem
entertained for him by a party of his countrymen, who might reasonably
expect at the same time to set eyes, at rather close quarters, on the
wonderful dark beauty, supposed a Spaniard, occasionally beheld riding
beside him. If it is possible to connect a woman with the devoutest of
their anticipations, the sons of leisure up there will do it. But, in
truth, an English world was having cause to ransack the dust-heaps for
neglected men of mettle. Our intermittent ague, known as dread of
invasion, was over the land. Twice down the columns of panic newspaper
correspondence Lord Ormont saw his name cited, with the effect on him
that such signs of national repentance approaching lodged a crabbed
sourness in his consulting-room, whether of head or breast.

He was assailed by a gusty appeal from Lady Charlotte, bidding him seize
the moment to proclaim his views while the secretary had a private
missive from her, wherein, between insistency and supplication, she
directed him to bring the subject before my lord every day, and be sure
to write out a fair copy of the epistle previous to the transmission of
it. 'Capua' was mentioned; she brought in 'a siren,' too. Her brother was
to be the soldier again--fling off silken bonds. The world might prate of
his morality; now was the hour for showing his patriotism, casting aside
his just anger, and backing his chief's opinion. 'A good chance to get
their names together.' To her brother she declared that the columns of
the leading journal were open to him--'in large type'; he was to take her
word for it; he had only to 'dictate away,' quite at his ease, just as he
talked at Olmer, and leave the bother of the scribe's business to his
aide. 'Lose no time,' she concluded; 'the country wants your ideas; let
us have your plan.'

The earl raised his shoulders, and kept his aide exclusively at the
Memoirs. Weyburn, however, read out to him, with accentuation, foolish
stuff in the recurrent correspondence of the daily sheets, and a
complacent burgess article, meant to be a summary of the controversy and
a recommendation to the country to bask in the sun of its wealth again.

'Ay, be the porker sow it's getting liker and liker to every year!' Lord
Ormont exclaimed, and sprang on his feet. 'Take a pen. Shut up that box.
We'll give 'em digestive biscuits for their weak stomachs. Invasion can't
be done, they say! I tell the doddered asses Napoleon would have been
over if Villeneuve had obeyed him to the letter. Villeneuve had a fit of
paralysis, owing to the prestige of Nelson--that 's as it happened. And
they swear at prestige, won't believe in it, because it's not fat bacon.
I tell them, after Napoleon's first battles, prestige did half his work
for him. It saved him at Essling from a plunge into the Danube; it saved
him at Moskowa; it would have marched him half over England at his first
jump on our shingle beach. But that squelch of fat citizens should be
told--to the devil with them! will they ever learn? short of a second
William!--there were eight-and-forty hours when the liberty of this
country hung wavering in the balance with those Boulogne boats. Now look
at Ulm and Austerlitz. Essling, Wagram; put the victors in those little
affairs to front our awkward squads. The French could boast a regimental
system, and chiefs who held them as the whist-player his hand of cards.
Had we a better general than the Archduke Charles? or cavalry and
artillery equal to the Hungarian? or drilled infantry numbering within
eighty thousand of the Boulogne-Wimereux camps? We had nothing but the
raw material of courage--pluck, and no science. Ask any boxing man what
he thinks of the chances. The French might have sacrificed a fleet to
land fifty thousand. Our fleet was our one chance. Any foreign General at
the head of fifty thousand trained, picked troops would risk it, and cut
an 'entrechat' for joy of the chance. We should have fought and bled and
been marched over--a field of Anglo-Saxon stubble! and Nelson riding the
Channel, undisputed lord of the waters. Heigh! by the Lord, this country
would have been like a man free to rub his skin with his hand and a
mortal disease in his blood. Are you ready? How anticipate a hostile
march on the capital, is our business.'

Striding up and down the library, Lord Ormont dropped his wrath to
dictate the practical measures for defence--detesting the cat's-cry
'defence,' he said; but the foe would bring his old growlers, and we
should have to season our handful of regulars and mob of levies, turn the
mass into troops. With plenty of food, and blows daily, Englishmen soon
get stomachs for the right way to play the game; bowl as well as bat; and
the sooner they give up the idea of shamming sturdy on a stiff hind leg,
the better for their chances. Only, it's a beastly thing to see that for
their favourite attitude;--like some dog of a fellow weak in the fists,
weaker in the midriff, at a fair, who cries, Come on, and prays his gods
you won't. All for peace, the rascal boasts himself, and he beats his
wife and kicks his curs at home. Is there any one to help him now, he
vomits gold and honours on the man he yesterday treated as a felon. Ha!

Bull the bumpkin disposed of, my lord drew leisurely back from the
foeman's landing-place, at the head of a body of serious Englishmen;
teaching them to be manageable as chess-pieces, ready as bow-strings to
let fly. Weyburn rejoiced to find himself transcribing crisp sentences,
hard on the matter, without garnish of scorn. Kent, Sussex, Surrey, all
the southern heights about London, round away to the south-western of the
Hampshire heathland, were accurately mapped in the old warrior's brain.
He knew his points of vantage by name; there were no references to
gazetteer or atlas. A chain of forts and earthworks enables us to choose
our ground, not for clinging to them, but for choice of time and place to
give battle. If we have not been playing double-dyed traitor to
ourselves, we have a preponderating field artillery; our yeomanry and
volunteer horsemen are becoming a serviceable cavalry arm; our infantry
prove that their heterogeneous composition can be welded to a handy mass,
and can stand fire and return it, and not be beaten by an acknowledged
defeat.

'That's English! yes, that's English! when they're at it,' my lord sang
out.

'To know how to take a licking, that wins in the end,' cried Weyburn; his
former enthusiasm for the hero mounting, enlightened by a reminiscence of
the precept he had hammered on the boys at Cuper's.

'They fall well. Yes, the English fall like men,' said my lord, pardoning
and embracing the cuffed nation. 'Bodies knocked over, hearts upright.
That's example; we breed Ironsides out of a sight like that. If it
weren't for a cursed feeble Government scraping 'conges' to the
taxpayer--well, so many of our good fellows would not have to fall. That
I say; for this thing is going to happen some day, mind you, sir! And I
don't want to have puncheons and hogsheads of our English blood poured
out merely to water the soil of a conquered country because English
Governments are a craven lot, not daring risk of office by offending the
taxpayer. But, on!'

Weyburn sent Lady Charlotte glowing words of the composition in progress.

They worked through a day, and a second day--talked of nothing else in
the intervals. Explanatory answers were vouchsafed to Aminta's modest
inquiries at Finch, as she pictured scenes of smoke, dust and blood from
the overpowering plain masculine lines they drew, terrible in bluntness.
The third morning Lord Ormont had map and book to verify distances and
attempt a scale of heights, take names of estates, farms, parishes,
commons, patches of woodland. Weyburn wrote his fair copy on folio paper,
seven-and-thirty pages. He read it aloud to the author on the afternoon
of the fourth day, with the satisfaction in his voice that he felt. My
lord listened and nodded. The plan for the defence of England's heart was
a good plan.

He signed to have the manuscript handed to him. A fortified London secure
of the Thames for abundant supplies, well able to breathe within
earthworks extending along the southern hills, was clearly shown to stand
the loss of two big battles on the Sussex weald or more East to
North-east, if fortune willed it.

He rose from his chair, paced some steps, with bent head, came back
thoughtfully, lifted the manuscript sheets for another examination. Then
he stooped to the fire, spreading the edges unevenly, so that they caught
flame. Weyburn spied at him. It was to all appearance the doing of a man
who had intended it and brought it to the predetermined conclusion.

'About time for you to be off for your turn at Chiallo's,' our country's
defender remarked, after tossing the last half-burnt lump under the grate
and shovelling at it.

'I will go, my lord,' said Weyburn--and he was glad to go.

He went, calculated his term of service under Lord Ormont. He was young,
not a philosopher. Waste of anything was abhorrent to a nature pointed at
store of daily gain, if it were only the gain in a new or a freshened
idea; and time lost, work lost, good counsel to the nation lost,
represented horrid vacuity to him, and called up the counter
demonstration of a dance down the halls of madness, for proof that we
should, at least, have jolly motion of limbs there before Perdition
struck the great gong. Ay, and we should be twirling with a fair form on
the arm: woman and man; as it ought to be; twirling downward, true, but
together. Such a companionship has a wisdom to raise it above the title
of madness. Name it, heartily, pleasure; and in contempt of the moralist
burgess, praise the dance of a woman and the man together high over a
curmudgeonly humping solitariness, that won't forgive an injury, nurses
rancour, smacks itself in the face, because it can't--to use the old
schoolboy words--take a licking!

These were the huddled, drunken sensations and thoughts entertained by
Weyburn, without his reflecting on the detachment from his old hero, of
which they were the sign. He criticized impulsively, and fancied he did
no more, and was not doing much though, in fact, criticism is the end of
worship; the Brutus blow at that Imperial but mortal bosom.

The person criticized was manifest. Who was the woman he twirled with?
She was unfeatured, undistinguished, one of the sex, or all the sex: the
sex to be shunned as our deadly sapper of gain, unless we find the chosen
one to super-terrestrialize it and us, and trebly outdo our gift of our
whole self for her.

She was indistinguishable, absolutely unknown; yet she murmured, or
seemed to murmur--for there was no sound--a complaint of Lord Ormont. And
she, or some soundless mouth of woman, said he was a splendid military
hero, a chivalrous man, a man of inflexible honour; but had no
understanding of how to treat a woman, or belief in her having equal life
with him on earth.

She was put aside rather petulantly, and she took her seat out of the
whirl with submission. Thinking she certainly was not Browny, whom he
would have known among a million, he tried to quit the hall, and he
twirled afresh, necessarily not alone; it is the unpardonable offence
both to the Graces and the Great Mother for man to valse alone. She
twirled on his arm, uninvited; accepted, as in the course of nature;
hugged, under dictate of the nature of the man steeled against her by the
counting of gain, and going now at desperation's pace, by very means of
those defensive locked steam-valves meant to preserve him from this
madness,--for the words of the red-lipped mate, where there were no
words, went through him like a music when the bow is over the viol,
sweeping imagination, and they said her life was wasting.

Was not she a priceless manuscript cast to the flames? Her lord had been
at some trouble to win her. Or his great fame and his shadowed fortunes
had won her. He took her for his own, and he would not call her his own.
He comported himself with absolute, with kindly deference to the lady
whose more than vital spark he let the gossips puff at and blur. He
praised her courage, visibly admired her person, admitted her in private
to be his equal, degraded her in public. Could anything account for the
behaviour of so manly and noble a gentleman?--Rhetoric made the attempt,
and Weyburn gave up the windy business.

Discovering that his fair partner of the wasting life was--he struggled
to quench the revelation--Aminta, he stopped the dance. If there was no
gain in whirling fancifully with one of the sex, a spin of a minute with
her was downright bankruptcy.

He was young, full of blood; his heart led him away from the door Lord
Ormont had exposed; at which a little patient unemotional watchfulness
might have intimated to him something besides the simple source of the
old hero's complex chapter of conduct. As it was, Weyburn did see the
rancour of a raw wound in operation. But he moralized and disapproved;
telling himself, truly enough, that so it would not have been with him;
instead of sounding at my lord's character, and his condition of the
unjustly neglected great soldier, for the purpose of asking how that raw
wound would affect an injured veteran, who compressed, almost repressed,
the roar of Achilles, though his military bright name was to him his
Briseis.




CHAPTER X

A SHORT PASSAGE IN THE GAME PLAYED BY TWO

Politest of men in the domestic circle and everywhere among women, Lord
Ormont was annoyed to find himself often gruffish behind the tie of his
cravat. Indeed, the temper of our eminently serene will feel the strain
of a doldrum-dulness that is goaded to activity by a nettle. The
forbearance he carried farther than most could do was tempted to kick,
under pressure of Mrs. Nargett Pagnell. Without much blaming Aminta, on
whose behalf he submitted to it, and whose resolution to fix in England
had brought it to this crisis, he magnanimously proposed to the Fair
Enemy he forced her to be, and liked to picture her as being, a month in
Paris.

Aminta declined it for herself; after six or more years of travelling,
she wished to settle, and know her country, she said: a repetition
remark, wide of the point, and indicatory to the game of Pull she was
again playing beneath her smooth visage, unaware that she had the wariest
of partners at the game.

'But go you--do, I beg,' she entreated. 'It will give you new
impressions; and I cannot bear to tie you down here.'

'How you can consent to be tied down here, is the wonder to me!' said he.
'When we travelled through the year, just visited England and were off
again, we were driving on our own road. Vienna in April and May--what do
you say? You like the reviews there, and the dances, concerts, Zigeuner
bands, military Bohemian bands. Or Egypt to-morrow, if you like--though
you can't be permitted to swim in the Nile, as you wanted. Come, Xarifa,
speak it. I go to exile without you. Say you come.'

She smiled firmly. The name of her honeymoon days was not a cajolery to
her.

His name had been that of the Christian Romancero Knight Durandarte, and
she gave it to him, to be on the proper level with him, while she still
declined.

'Well, but just a month in Paris! There's nothing doing here. And we both
like the French theatre.'

'London will soon be filling.'

'Well, but--' He stopped; for the filling of London did really concern
her, in the game of Pull she was covertly playing with him. 'You seem to
have caught the fever of this London; . . . no bands . . . . no reviews
. . . . Low comedy acting.' He muttered his objections to London.

'The society of people speaking one's own tongue, add that,' she ventured
to say.

'You know you are ten times more Spanish than English. Moorish, if you
like.'

'The slave of the gallant Christian Knight, converted, baptized, and
blissful. Oh, I know. But now we are settled in England, I have a wish to
study English society.'

'Disappointing, I assure you;--dinners heavy, dancing boorish, intrigue a
blind-man's-buff. We've been over it all before!'

'We have.'

'Admired, I dare say. You won't be understood.'

'I like my countrymen.'

'The women have good looks--of the ungarnished kind. The men are louts.'

'They are brave.'

'You're to see their fencing. You'll own a little goes a long way.'

'I think it will amuse me.'

'So I thought when I gave the nod to Isabella your friend.'

'You like her?'

'You, too.'

'One fancies she would make an encouraging second in a duel.'

'I will remember . . . when I call you out.'

'Oh, my dear lord, you have dozens to choose from leave me my one if we
are to enter the lists.'

'We are, it seems; unless you consent to take the run to Paris. You are
to say Tom or Rowsley.'

'The former, I can never feel at home in saying; Rowsley is Lady
Charlotte's name for you.'

The name of Lady Charlotte was an invitation to the conflict between
them. He passed it, and said 'Durandarte runs a mile on the mouth, and
the Coriolanus of their newspapers helps a stage-player to make lantern
jaws. Neither of them comes well from the lips of my girl. After seven
years she should have hit on a nickname, of none of the Christian suit. I
am not "at home" either with "my lord." However, you send me off to Paris
alone; and you'll be alone and dull here in this London. Incomprehensible
to me why!'

'We are both wondering?' said Aminta.

'You 're handsomer than when I met you first--by heaven you are!'

She flushed her dark brown-red late-sunset. 'Brunes are exceptional in
England.'

'Thousands admiring you, of course! I know, my love, I have a jewel.'

She asked him: 'What are jewels for?' and he replied, 'To excite
cupidity.'

'When they 're shut in a box?'

'Ware burglars! But this one is not shut up. She shuts herself up. And up
go her shoulders! Decide to be out of it, and come to Paris for some life
for a month. No? It's positive? When do you expect your little school
friend?'

'After Easter. Aunt will be away.'

'Your little friend likes the country. I'll go to my house agents. If
there 's a country house open on the upper Thames, you can have swimming,
boating, botanizing . . .'

He saw her throat swallow. But as he was offering agreeable things he
chose to not understand how he was to be compassionate.

'Steignton?' she said, and did her cause no good by saying it feebly.

His look of a bygone awake-in-sleep old look, drearily known to her, was
like a strip of sunlight on a fortress wall. It signified, Is the poor
soul pushing me back to that again?

She compelled herself to say: 'Your tenant there?'

'Matter of business . . . me and my tenant,' he remarked. 'The man pays
punctually.'

'The lease has expired.'

'Not quite. You are misinformed.'

'At Easter.'

'Ah! Question of renewing.'

'You were fond of the place.'

'I was fond of the place? Thank Blazes, I'm not what I was!' He paced
about. 'There's not a corner of the place that doesn't screw an eye at
me, because I had a dream there. La gloire!'

The rest he muttered. 'These English!' was heard. Aminta said: 'Am I
never to see Steignton?'

Lord Ormont invoked the Powers. He could not really give answer to this
female talk of the eternities.

'Beaten I can never be,' he said, with instinctive indulgence to the
greater creature. 'But down there at Steignton, I should be haunted by a
young donkey swearing himself the fellow I grew up out of. No doubt of
that. I don't like him the better for it. Steignton grimaces at a cavalry
officer fool enough at his own risks and penalties to help save India for
the English. Maunderers! You can't tell--they don't know themselves--what
they mean. Except that they 're ready to take anything you hand 'em, and
then pipe to your swinging. I served them well--and at my age, in full
activity, they condemn me to sit and gape!'

He stopped his pacing and gazed on the glass of the window.

'Would you wish me not to be present at this fencing?' said Aminta.

'Dear me! by all means, go, my love,' he replied.

Any step his Fair Enemy won in the secret game Pull between them, she was
undisputedly to keep.

She suggested: 'It might lead to unpleasantness.'

'Of what sort?'

'You ask?'

He emphasized: 'Have you forgotten? Something happened after that last
ball at Challis's Rooms. Their women as well as their men must be careful
not to cross me.'

Aminta had confused notions of her being planted in hostile territory,
and torn and knitted, trumpeted to the world as mended, but not
honourably mended in a way to stop corridor scandal. The ball at
Challis's Rooms had been one of her steps won: it had necessitated a
requirement for the lion in her lord to exhibit himself, and she had
gained nothing with Society by the step, owing to her poor performance of
the lion's mate. She had, in other words, shunned the countenance of some
scattered people pityingly ready to support her against the deadly
passive party known to be Lady Charlotte's.

She let her lord go; thinking that once more had she striven and gained
nothing: which was true of all their direct engagements. And she had
failed because of her being only a woman! Mr. Morsfield was foolishly
wrong in declaring that she, as a woman, had reserves of strength. He was
perhaps of Lady Charlotte's mind with regard to the existence of a
Countess of Ormont, or he would know her to be incredibly cowardly.
Cowardly under the boast of pride, too; well, then, say, if you like, a
woman!

Yet this mere shallow woman would not hesitate to meet the terrible Lady
Charlotte at any instant, on any terms: and what are we to think of a
soldier, hero, lion, dreading to tell her to her face that the persecuted
woman is his wife!

'Am I a woman they can be ashamed of?' she asked, and did not seek the
answer at her mirror. She was in her bedroom, and she put out a hand to
her jewel-box, fingered it, found it locked, and abandoned her idle
project. A gentleman was 'dangerous.' She had not found him so. He had
the reputation, perhaps, because he was earnest. Not so very many men are
earnest. She called to recollection how ludicrously practical he was in
the thick of his passion. His third letter (addressed to the Countess of
Ormont--whom he manifestly did not or would not take to be the veritable
Countess--and there was much to plead for his error), or was it his
fourth?--the letters were a tropical hail-storm: third or fourth, he
broke off a streaked thunderpeal, to capitulate his worldly possessions,
give the names and degrees of kinship of his relatives, the exact amount
of the rent-roll of his Yorkshire estates, of his funded property.

Silly man! but not contemptible. He proposed everything in honour, from
his view of it.

Whether in his third, fourth, or fifth letter. . . . How many had come?
She drew the key from her purse, and opened a drawer. The key of the
jewel-box was applied to the lock.

Mr. Morsfield had sent her six flaming letters. He not only took no
precautions, he boasted that he hailed the consequences of discovery.
Six!

She lifted a pen: it had to be done.

He was briefly informed that he disturbed her peace. She begged he would
abstain from any further writing to her.

The severity was in the brevity. The contrast of her style and his
appeared harsh. But it belonged to the position.

Having with one dash of the pen scribbled her three lines, she slipped
the letter into her pocket. That was done, and it had to be done; it
ought to have been done before. How simple it was when one contemplated
it as actually done! Aminta made the motion of a hand along the paper,
just a flourish. Soon after, her head dropped back on the chair, and her
eyes shut, she took in breath through parted lips. The brief lines of
writing had cut away a lump of her vitality.




CHAPTER XI

THE SECRETARY TAKEN AS AN ANTIDOTE

Dusty wayfarers along a white high-road who know of a bubbling little
spring across a stile, on the woodland borders of deep grass, are hailed
to sit aside it awhile: and Aminta's feverishness was cooled by now and
then a quiet conversation with the secretary ambitious to become a
school-master. Lady Charlotte liked him, so did her lord; Mrs. Lawrence
had chatted with him freshly, as it was refreshing to recollect; nobody
thought him a stunted growth.

In Aminta's realized recollections, amid the existing troubles of her
mind, the charge against him grew paler, and she could no longer quite
think that the young hero transformed into a Mr. Cuper had deceived her,
though he had done it--much as if she had assisted at the planting and
watched aforetime the promise of a noble tree, to find it, after an
interval of years, pollarded--a short trunk shooting out a shock of
small, slim, stiff branches; dwarfed and disgraced; serviceable perhaps;
not ludicrous or ugly, certainly, taking it for a pollard. And he was a
cool well-spring to talk with. He, supposed once to be a passionate
nature, scorned passion as a madness; he smiled in his merciful
executioner's way at the high society, of which her aim was to pass for
one among the butterflies or dragonflies; he had lost his patriotism; he
labelled our English classes the skimmers, the gorgers, the grubbers, and
stigmatized them with a friendly air; and uttered words of tolerance only
for farmers and surgeons and schoolmasters. But that was quite incidental
in the humorous run of his talk, diverting to hear while it lasted. He
had, of course, a right to his ideas.

No longer concerned in contesting them, she drank at the water of this
plain earth-well, and hoped she preferred it to fiery draughts, though it
was flattish, or, say, flavourless. In the other there was excess of
flavour--or, no, spice it had to be called. The young schoolmaster's
world seemed a sunless place, the world of traders bargaining for gain,
without a glimmer of the rich generosity to venture life, give it, dare
all for native land--or for the one beloved. Love pressed its claim on
heroical generosity, and instantly it suffused her, as an earth under
flush of sky. The one beloved! She had not known love; she was in her
five-and-twentieth year, and love was not only unknown to her, it was
shut away from her by the lock of a key that opened on no estimable
worldly advantage in exchange, but opened on a dreary, clouded round,
such as she had used to fancy it must be to the beautiful creamy
circus-horse of the tossing mane and flowing tail and superb step. She
was admired; she was just as much doomed to a round of paces, denied the
glorious fling afield, her nature's food. Hitherto she would have been
shamefaced as a boy in forming the word 'love': now, believing it denied
to her for good and all--for ever and ever--her bosom held and uttered
the word. She saw the word, the nothing but the word that it was, and she
envisaged it, for the purpose of saying adieu to it--good-bye even to the
poor empty word.

This condition was attributable to a gentleman's wild rageing with the
word, into which he had not infused the mystic spirit. He poured hot wine
and spiced. If not the spirit of love, it was really the passion of the
man. Her tremors now and again in the reading of his later letters
humiliated her, in the knowledge that they came of no response to him,
but from the temporary base acquiescence; which is, with women, a
terrible perception of the gulf of their unsatisfied nature.

The secretary, cheerful at his work, was found for just the opening of a
door. Sometimes she hesitated--to disturb him, she said to herself,--and
went up-stairs or out visiting. He protested that he could work on and
talk too. She was able to amuse her lord with some of his ideas. He had a
stock of them, all his own.

Ideas, new-born and naked original ideas, are acceptable at no time to
the humanity they visit to help uplift, it from the state of beast. In
the England of that, period original or unknown ideas were a smoking
brimstone to the nose, dread Arabian afrites, invisible in the air,
jumping out of vases, armed for the slaughter of the venerable and the
cherished, the ivy-clad and celestially haloed. They carried the
dishevelled Maenad's torch. A step with them, and we were on the
Phlegethon waters of the French Revolution. For a publication of simple
ideas men were seized, tried at law, mulcted, imprisoned, and not
pardoned after the term of punishment; their names were branded: the
horned elect butted at them; he who alluded to them offered them up,
wittingly or not, to be damned in the nose of the public for an execrable
brimstone stench.

Lord Ormont broke through his shouts or grunts at Aminta's report of the
secretary's ideas on various topics, particularly the proposal that the
lords of the land should head the land in a revolutionary effort to make
law of his crazy, top-heavy notions, with a self-satisfied ejaculation:
'He has not favoured me with any of these puffballs of his.'

The deduction was, that the author sagaciously considered them adapted
for the ear of a woman; they were womanish--i.e. flighty, gossamer. To
the host of males, all ideas are female until they are made facts.

This idea, proposing it to our aristocracy to take up his other ideas, or
reject them on pain of the forfeiture of their caste and headship with
the generations to follow, and a total displacing of them in history by
certain notorious, frowzy, scrubby pamphleteers and publishers, Lord
Ormont thought amazingly comical. English nobles heading the weavers,
cobblers, and barbers of England! He laughed, but he said, 'Charlotte
would listen to that.'

The dread, high-sitting Lady Charlotte was, in his lofty thinking, a
woman, and would therefore listen to nonsense, if it happened to strike a
particular set of bells hanging in her cranium. She patronized
blasphemous and traitorous law-breakers, just to keep up the pluck of the
people, not with a notion of maintaining our English aristocracy eminent
in history.

Lady Charlotte, however, would be the foremost to swoop down on the
secretary's ideas about the education of women.

On that subject, Aminta said she did not know what to think.

Now, if a man states the matter he thinks, and a woman does but listen,
whether inclining to agree or not, a perceptible stamp is left on soft
wax. Lord Ormont told her so, with cavalier kindness.

She confessed 'she did not know what to think,' when the secretary
proposed the education and collocation of boys and girls in one group,
never separated, declaring it the only way for them to learn to know and
to respect one another. They were to learn together, play together, have
matches together, as a scheme for stopping the mischief between them.

'But, my dear girl, don't you see, the devilry was intended by Nature.
Life would be the coldest of dishes without it.' And as for mixing the
breeched and petticoated in those young days--'I can't enter into it,' my
lord considerately said. 'All I can tell you is, I know boys.'

Aminta persisted in looking thoughtful. 'Things are bad, as they are
now,' she said.

'Always were--always will be. They were intended to be, if we are to call
them bad. Botched mendings will only make them worse.'

'Which side suffers?'

'Both; and both like it. One side must be beaten at any game. It's off
and on, pretty equal--except in the sets where one side wears thick
boots. Is this fellow for starting a mixed sexes school? Funny mothers!'

'I suppose--' Aminta said, and checked the supposition. 'The mothers
would not leave their girls unless they were confident . . . ?'

'There's to be a female head of the female department? He reckons on
finding a woman as big a fool as himself? A fair bit of reckoning enough.
He's clever at the pen. He doesn't bother me with his ideas; now and then
I 've caught a sound of his bee buzzing.'

The secretary was left undisturbed at his labours for several days.

He would have been gladdened by a brighter look of her eyes at her next
coming. They were introspective and beamless. She had an odd leaning to
the talk upon Cuper's boys. He was puzzled by what he might have classed,
in any other woman, as a want of delicacy, when she recurred to incidents
which were red patches of the school time, and had clearly lost their
glow for her.

A letter once written by him, in his early days at Cuper's, addressed to
J. Masner, containing a provocation to fight with any weapons, and
signed, 'Your Antagonist,' had been read out to the whole school, under
strong denunciation of the immorality, the unchristian-like conduct of
the writer, by Mr. Cuper; creating a sensation that had travelled to Miss
Vincent's establishment, where some of the naughtiest of the girls had
taken part with the audacious challenger, dreadful though the
contemplation of a possible duel so close to them was. And then the girls
heard that the anonymous 'Your Antagonist,' on being cited to proclaim
himself in public assembly of school-mates and masters, had jumped on his
legs and into the name of--one who was previously thought by Miss
Vincent's good girls incapable of the 'appalling wickedness,' as Mr.
Cuper called it, of signing 'Your Antagonist' to a Christian
school-fellow, having the design to provoke a breach of the law of the
land and shed Christian blood. Mr. Cuper delivered an impressive sermon
from his desk to the standing up boarders and day-scholars alike,
vilifying the infidel Greek word 'antagonist.'

'Do you remember the offender's name?' the Countess of Ormont said; and
Weyburn said--

'Oh yes, I 've not forgotten the incident.'

Her eyes, wherein the dead time hung just above the underlids, lingered,
as with the wish for him to name the name.

She said: 'I am curious to hear how you would treat a case of that sort.
Would you preach to the boys?

'Ten words at most. The right assumption is that both fellows were to
blame. I fancy the proper way would be to appeal to the naughty girls for
their opinion as to how the dispute should be decided.'

'You impose too much on them. And you are not speaking seriously.'

'Pardon me, I am. I should throw myself into the mind of a naughty
girl--supposing none of these at hand--and I should let it be known that
my eyes were shut to proceedings, always provided the weapons were not
such as would cause a shock of alarm in female bosoms.'

'You would at your school allow it to be fought out?'

'Judging by the characters of the boys. If they had heads to understand,
I would try them at their heads. Otherwise they are the better, they come
round quicker to good blood, at their age--I speak of English boys--for a
little hostile exercise of their fists. Well, for one thing, it teaches
them the value of sparring.'

'I must imagine I am not one of the naughty sisterhood,--for I cannot
think I should ever give consent to fighting of any description, unless
for the very best of reasons,' said the countess.

His eyes were at the trick of the quarter-minute's poising. Her lids
fluttered. 'Oh, I don't mean to say I was one of the good,' she added.

At the same time her enlivened memory made her conscious of a warning,
that she might, as any woman might, so talk on of past days as to take,
rather more than was required of the antidote she had come for.

The antidote was excellent; cooling, fortifying; 'quite a chalybeate,'
her aunt would say, and she was thankful. Her heart rose on a quiet wave
of the thanks, and pitched down to a depth of uncounted fathoms. Aminta
was unable to tell herself why.

Mrs. Lawrence Finchley had been announced. On her way to the drawing room
Aminta's brain fell upon a series of dots, that wound along a track to
the point where she accused herself of a repented coquettry--cause of the
burning letters she was doomed to receive and could not stop without
rousing her lion. She dotted backwards; there was no sign that she had
been guilty of any weakness other than the almost--at least, in
design--innocent first move, which had failed to touch Lord Ormont in the
smallest degree. Never failure more absolute!

She was about to inquire of her bosom's oracle whether she greatly cared
now. For an answer, her brain went dotting along from Mr. Cuper's school,
and a boy named Abner there, and a boy named Matey Weyburn, who protected
the little Jew-boy, up to Mr. Abner in London, who recommended him in due
season to various acquaintances; among them to Lady Charlotte Eglett.
Hence the introduction to Lord Ormont. How little extraordinary
circumstances are, if only we trace them to the source!

But if only it had appeared marvellous, the throbbing woman might have
seized on it, as a thing fateful, an intervention distinctly designed to
waken the best in her, which was, after all, the strongest. Yea, she
could hope and pray and believe it was the strongest.

She was listening to Isabella Lawrence Finchley, wishing she might have
followed to some end the above line of her meditations.

Mrs. Lawrence was changed, much warmer, pressing to be more than merely
friendly. Aminta twice gave her cheek for kisses. The secretary had
spoken of Mrs. Lawrence as having the look of a handsome boy; and
Aminta's view of her now underwent a change likewise. Compunction,
together with a sisterly taste for the boyish fair one flying her sail
independently, and gallantly braving the winds, induced her to kiss in
return.

'You do like me a morsel?' said Mrs. Lawrence. 'I fell in love with you
the last time I was here. I came to see Mr. Secretary--it's avowed; and I
have been thinking of you ever since, of no one else. Oh yes, for a man;
but you caught me. I've been hearing of him from Captain May. They fence
at those rooms. And it 's funny, Mr. Morsfield practises there, you know;
and there was a time when the lovely innocent Amy, Queen of Blondes, held
the seat of the Queen of Brunes. Ah, my dear, the infidelity of men
doesn't count. They are affected by the changeing moons. As long as the
captain is civil to him, we may be sure beautiful Amy has not complained.
Her husband is the pistol she carries in her pocket, and she has fired
him twice, with effect. Through love of you I have learnt the different
opinion the world of the good has of her and of me; I thought we ran
under a common brand. There are gradations. I went to throw myself at the
feet of my great-aunt; good old great-aunt Lady de Culme, who is a power
in the land. I let her suppose I came for myself, and she reproached me
with Lord Adder. I confessed to him and ten others. She is a dear, she's
ticklish, and at eighty-four she laughed! She looked into my eyes and saw
a field with never a man in it--just the shadow of a man. She admitted
the ten cancelled the one, and exactly named to me, by comparison with
the erring Amy, the sinner I am and must be, if I 'm to live. So, dear,
the end of it is,' and Mrs. Lawrence put her fingers to a silken amber
bow at Aminta's throat, and squared it and flattened it with dainty
precision, speaking on under dropped eyelids, intent upon her work, 'Lady
de Culme will be happy to welcome you whenever it shall suit the Countess
of Ormont to accompany her disreputable friend. But what can I do, dear?'
She raised her lids and looked beseechingly. 'I was born with this taste
for the ways and games and style of men. I hope I don't get on badly with
women; but if I 'm not allowed to indulge my natural taste, I kick the
stable-boards and bite the manger.'

Aminta threw her arms round her, and they laughed their mutual peal.

Caressing her still, Aminta said: 'I don't know whether I embrace a boy.'

'That idea comes from a man!' said Mrs. Lawrence. It was admitted. The
secretary was discussed.

Mrs. Lawrence remarked: 'Yes, I like talking with him; he's bright. You
drove him out of me the day I saw him. Doesn't he give you the idea of a
man who insists on capturing you and lets it be seen he doesn't care two
snaps of a finger?'

Aminta petitioned on his behalf indifferently: 'He 's well bred.'

She was inattentive to Mrs. Lawrence's answer. The allusion of the Queen
of Blondes had stung her in the unacknowledged regions where women
discard themselves and are most sensitive.

'Decide on coming soon to Lady de Culme,' said Mrs. Lawrence. 'Now that
her arms are open to you, she would like to have you in them. She is
old--. You won't be rigorous? no standing on small punctilios?

She would call, but she does not--h'm, it is M. le Comte that she does
not choose to--h'm. But her arms are open to the countess. It ought to be
a grand step. You may be assured that Lady Charlotte Eglett would not be
taken into them. My great-aunt has a great-aunt's memory. The Ormonts are
the only explanation--if it 's an apology--she can offer for the
behaviour of the husband of the Countess of Ormont. You know I like him.
I can't help liking a man who likes me. Is that the way with a boy, Mr.
Secretary? I must have another talk with the gentleman, my dear. You are
Aminta to me.'

'Always Aminta to you,' was the reply, tenderly given.

'But as for comprehending him, I'm as far off that as Lady de Culme, who
hasn't the liking for him I have.'

'The earl?' said Aminta, showing by her look that she was in the same
position.

Mrs. Lawrence shrugged: 'I believe men and women marry in order that they
should never be able to understand one another. The riddle's best read at
a moderate distance. It 's what they call the golden mean; too close, too
far, we're strangers. I begin to understand that husband of mine, now
we're on bowing terms. Now, I must meet the earl to-morrow. You will
arrange? His hand wants forcing. Upon my word, I don't believe it 's
more.'

Mrs. Lawrence contrasted him in her mind with the husband she knew, and
was invigorated by the thought that a placable impenetrable giant may
often be more pliable in a woman's hands than an irascible dwarf--until,
perchance, the latter has been soundly cuffed, and then he is docile to
trot like a squire, as near your heels as he can get. She rejoiced to be
working for the woman she had fallen in love with.

Aminta promised herself to show the friend a livelier affection at their
next meeting.

A seventh letter, signed 'Adolphus,' came by post, was read and locked up
in her jewel-box. They were all nigh destruction for a wavering minute or
so. They were placed where they lay because the first of them had been
laid there, the box being a strong one, under a patent key, and discovery
would mean the terrible. They had not been destroyed because they had, or
seemed to her to have, the language of passion. She could read them
unmoved, and appease a wicked craving she owned to having, and reproached
herself with having, for that language.

Was she not colour in the sight of men? Here was one, a mouthpiece of
numbers, who vowed that homage was her due, and devotion, the pouring
forth of the soul to her. What was the reproach if she read the stuff
unmoved?

But peruse and reperuse it, and ask impressions to tell our deepest
instinct of truthfulness whether language of this character can have been
written to two women by one hand! Men are cunning. Can they catch a tone?
Not that tone!

She, too, Mrs. Amy May, was colour in the sight of men. Yet it seemed
that he could not have written so to the Queen of Blondes. And she, by
repute, was as dangerous to slight as he to attract. Her indifference
exonerated him. Besides, a Queen of Blondes would not draw the hearts out
of men in England, as in Italy and in Spain. Aminta had got thus far when
she found 'Queen of Brunes' expunged by a mist: she imagined hearing the
secretary's laugh. She thought he was right to laugh at her. She retorted
simply: 'These are feelings that are poetry.'

A man may know nothing about them, and be an excellent schoolmaster.

Suggestions touching the prudence of taking Mrs. Lawrence into her
confidence, as regarded these troublesome letters of the man with the
dart in his breast, were shuffled aside for various reasons: her modesty
shrank; and a sense of honour toward the man forbade it. She would have
found it easier to do if she had conspired against her heart in doing it.
And yet, cold-bloodedly to expose him and pluck the clothing from a
passion--dear to think of only when it is profoundly secret--struck her
as an extreme baseness, of which not even the woman who perused and
reperused his letters could be guilty.

Her head rang with some of the lines, and she accused her head of the
crime of childishness, seeing that her heart was not an accomplice. At
the same time, her heart cried out violently against the business of a
visit to Lady de Culme, and all the steps it involved. Justly she accused
her heart of treason. Heart and head were severed. This, as she partly
apprehended, is the state of the woman who is already on the slope of her
nature's mine-shaft, dreading the rush downwards, powerless to break away
from the light.

Letters perused and reperused, coming from a man never fervently noticed
in person, conjure features one would wish to put beside the actual, to
make sure that the fiery lines he writes are not practising a
beguilement. Aminta had lost grasp of the semblance of the impassioned
man. She just remembered enough of his eyes to think there might be
healing in a sight of him.

Latterly she had refused to be exhibited to a tattling world as the great
nobleman's conquest:--The 'Beautiful Lady Doubtful' of a report that had
scorched her cars. Theatres, rides, pleasure-drives, even such houses as
she saw standing open to her had been shunned. Now she asked the earl to
ride in the park.

He complied, and sent to the stables immediately, just noted another of
her veerings. The whimsy creatures we are matched to contrast with, shift
as the very winds or feather-grasses in the wind. Possibly a fine day did
it. Possibly, too, her not being requested to do it.

He was proud of her bearing on horseback. She rode well and looked well.
A finer weapon wherewith to strike at a churlish world was never given
into the hands of man. These English may see in her, if they like, that
they and their laws and customs are defied. It does her no hurt, and it
hits them a ringing buffet.

Among the cavaliers they passed was Mr. Morsfield. He rode by slowly. The
earl stiffened his back in returning the salute. Both that and the
gentleman were observed by Aminta.

'He sees to having good blood under him,' said the earl. 'I admired his
mount,' she replied.

Interpreted by the fire of his writing, his features expressed character:
insomuch that a woman could say of another woman, that she admired him
and might reasonably do so. His gaze at her in the presence of her lord
was audacious.

He had the defect of his virtue of courage. Yet a man indisputably
possessing courage cannot but have an interesting face--though one may
continue saying, Pity that the eyes are not a little wider apart! He
dresses tastefully; the best English style. A portrait by a master hand
might hand him down to generations as an ancestor to be proud of. But
with passion and with courage, and a bent for snatching at the lion's
own, does he not look foredoomed to an early close? Her imagination
called up a portrait of Elizabeth's Earl of Essex to set beside him; and
without thinking that the two were fraternally alike, she sent him riding
away with the face of the Earl of Essex and the shadow of the unhappy
nobleman's grievous fortunes over his head.

But it is inexcuseable to let the mind be occupied recurrently by a man
who has not moved the feelings, wicked though it be to have the feelings
moved by him. Aminta rebuked her silly wits, and proceeded to speculate
from an altitude, seeing the man's projects in a singularly definite
minuteness, as if the crisis he invoked, the perils he braved, the mute
participation he implored of her for the short space until their fate
should be decided, were a story sharply cut on metal. Several times she
surprised herself in an interesting pursuit of the story; abominably
cold, abominably interested. She fell upon a review of small duties of
the day, to get relief; and among them a device for spiriting away her
aunt from the table where Mrs. Lawrence wished to meet Lord Ormont. It
sprang up to her call like an imp of the burning pit. She saw it
ingenious and of natural aspect. I must be a born intriguer! she said in
her breast. That was hateful; but it seemed worse when she thought of a
woman commanding the faculty and consenting to be duped and foiled. That
might be termed despicable; but what if she had not any longer the wish
to gain her way with her lord?

Those letters are acting like a kind of poison in me! her heart cried:
and it was only her head that dwelt on the antidote.




CHAPTER XII

MORE OF CUPER'S BOYS

Entering the dining-room at the appointed minute in a punctual household,
Mrs. Lawrence informed the company that she had seen a Horse Guards
orderly at the trot up the street. Weyburn said he was directing a boy to
ring the bell of the house for him. Lord Ormont went to the window.

'Amends and honours?' Mrs. Lawrence hummed and added an operatic flourish
of an arm. Something like it might really be imagined. A large square
missive was handed to the footman. Thereupon the orderly trotted off.

My lord took seat at table, telling the footman to lay 'that parcel'
beside the clock on the mantelpiece. Aminta and Mrs. Lawrence gave out a
little cry of bird or mouse, pitiable to hear: they could not wait, they
must know, they pished at sight of plates. His look deferred to their
good pleasure, like the dead hand of a clock under key; and Weyburn
placed the missive before him, seeing by the superscription that it was
not official.

It was addressed, in the Roman hand of a boy's copybook writing, to

     General the Earl of Ormont, I.C.B., etc.,
                  Horse Guards,
                       London.'

The earl's eyebrows creased up over the address; they came down low on
the contents.

He resumed his daily countenance. 'Nothing of importance,' he said to the
ladies.

Mrs. Lawrence knocked the table with her knuckles. Aminta put out a hand,
in sign of her wish.

'Pray let me see it.'

'After lunch will do.'

'No, no, no! We are women--we are women,' cried Mrs. Lawrence.

'How can it concern women?'

'As well ask how a battle-field concerns them!'

'Yes, the shots hit us behind you,' said Aminta; and she, too, struck the
table.

He did not prolong their torture. Weyburn received the folio sheet and
passed it on. Aminta read. Mrs. Lawrence jumped from her chair and ran to
the countess's shoulder; her red lips formed the petitioning word to the
earl for the liberty she was bent to take.

'Peep? if you like,' my lord said, jesting at the blank she would find,
and soft to the pretty play of her mouth.

When the ladies had run to the end of it, he asked them: 'Well; now
then?'

'But it's capital--the dear laddies!' Mrs. Lawrence exclaimed.

Aminta's eyes met Weyburn's.

She handed him the sheet of paper; upon the transmission of which empty
thing from the Horse Guards my lord commented: 'An orderly!'

Weyburn scanned it rapidly, for the table had been served.

The contents were these:

          'HIGH BRENT NEAR ARTSWELL.
                       'April 7th.

   'To GENERAL THE EARL OF ORMONT
             'Cavalry.

   'May it please your Lordship, we, the boys of Mr. Cuper's school,
   are desirous to bring to the notice of the bravest officer England
   possesses now living, a Deed of Heroism by a little boy and girl,
   children of our school laundress, aged respectively eight and six,
   who, seeing a little fellow in the water out of depth, and sinking
   twice, before the third time jumped in to save him, though unable to
   swim themselves; the girl aged six first, we are sorry to say; but
   the brother, Robert Coop, followed her example, and together they
   made a line, and she caught hold of the drowning boy, and he held
   her petycoats, and so they pulled. We have seen the place: it is
   not a nice one. They got him ashore at last. The park-keeper here
   going along found them dripping, rubbing his hands, and blowing into
   his nostrils. Name, T. Shellen, son of a small cobbler here, and
   recovered.

   'May it please your Lordship, we make bold to apply, because you
   have been for a number of years, as far as the oldest can recollect,
   the Hero of our school, and we are so bold as to ask the favour of
   General Lord Ormont's name to head a subscription we are making to
   circulate for the support of their sick mother, who has fallen ill.
   We think her a good woman. Gentlemen and ladies of the
   neighbourhood are willing to subscribe. If we have a great name to
   head the list, we think we shall make a good subscription. Names:--

        'Martha Mary Coop, mother.
        'Robert Coop.
        'Jane Coop, the girl, aged six.

   'If we are not taking too great a liberty, a subscription paper will
   follow. We are sure General the Earl of Ormont's name will help to
   make them comfortable.
        'We are obediently and respectfully,
               'DAVID GOWEN,
               'WALTER BENCH,
               'JAMES PANNERS PARSONS,
               'And seven others.'

Weyburn spared Aminta an answering look, that would have been a begging
of Browny to remember Matey.

'It 's genuine,' he said to Mrs. Lawrence, as he attacked his plate with
the gusto for the repast previously and benignly observed by her. 'It
ought to be the work of some of the younger fellows.'

'They spell correctly, on the whole.'

'Excepting,' said my lord, 'an article they don't know much about yet.'

Weyburn had noticed the word, and he smiled. 'Said to be the happy state!
The three signing their names are probably what we called bellman and
beemen, collector, and heads of the swarm-enthusiasts. If it is not the
work of some of the younger hands, the school has levelled on minors. In
any case it shows the school is healthy.'

'I subscribe,' said Mrs. Lawrence.

'The little girl aged six shall have something done for her,' said
Aminta, and turned her eyes on the earl.

He was familiar with her thrilled voice at a story of bravery. He said--

'The boys don't say the girl's brother turned tail.'

'Only that the girl's brother aged eight followed the lead of the little
girl aged six,' Mrs. Lawrence remarked. 'Well, I like the schoolboys,
too--"we are sorry to say!" But they 're good lads. Boys who can
appreciate brave deeds are capable of doing them.'

'Speak to me about it on Monday,' the earl said to Weyburn.

He bowed, and replied--

'I shall have the day to-morrow. I 'll walk it and call on Messrs.' (he
glanced at the paper) 'Gowen, Bench, and Parsons. I have a German friend
in London anxious to wear his legs down stumpier.'

'The name of the school?'

'It is called Cuper's.'

Aminta, on hearing the name of Cuper a second time, congratulated herself
on the happy invention of her pretext to keep Mrs. Pagnell from the table
at midday. Her aunt had a memory for names: what might she not have
exclaimed! There would have been little in it, but it was as well that
the 'boy of the name of Weyburn' at Cuper's should be unmentioned. By an
exaggeration peculiar to a disgust in fancy, she could hear her aunt
vociferating 'Weyburn!' and then staring at Mr. Weyburn opposite--perhaps
not satisfied with staring.

He withdrew after his usual hearty meal, during which his talk of boys
and their monkey tricks, and what we can train them to, had been pleasant
generally, especially to Mrs. Lawrence. Aminta was carried back to the
minute early years at High Brent. A line or two of a smile touched her
cheek.

'Yes, my dear countess, that is the face I want for Lady de Culme
to-day,' said Mrs. Lawrence.' She likes a smiling face. Aunty--aunty has
always been good; she has never been prim. I was too much for her, until
I reflected that she was very old, and deserved to know the truth before
she left us; and so I went to her; and then she said she wished to see
the Countess of Ormont, because of her being my dearest friend. I fancy
she entertains an 'arriere' idea of proposing her flawless niece Gracey,
Marchioness of Fencaster, to present you. She 's quite equal to the
fatigue herself. You 'll rejoice in her anecdotes. People were virtuous
in past days: they counted their sinners. In those days, too, as I have
to understand, the men chivalrously bore the blame, though the women were
rightly punished. Now, alas! the initiative is with the women, and men
are not asked for chivalry. Hence it languishes. Lady de Culme won't hear
of the Queen of Blondes; has forbidden her these many years!'

Lord Ormont, to whom the lady's prattle was addressed, kept his visage
moveless, except in slight jerks of the brows.

'What queen?'

'You insist upon renewing my old, old pangs of jealousy, my dear lord!
The Queen of Cyprus, they called her, in the last generation; she fights
our great duellist handsomely.'

'My dear Mrs. Lawrence!'

'He triumphs finally, we know, but she beats him every round.'

'It 's only tattle that says the duel has begun.'

'May is the month of everlasting beauty! There 's a widower marquis now
who claims the right to cast the glove to any who dispute it.'

'Mrs. May is too good-looking to escape from scandal.'

'Amy May has the good looks of the Immortals.'

'She can't be thirty.'

'In the calendar of women she counts thirty-four.'

'Malignity! Her husband's a lucky man.'

'The shots have proved it.'

Lord Ormont nodded his head over the hopeless task of defending a woman
from a woman, and their sharp interchange ceased. But the sight of his
complacency in defeat told Aminta that he did not respect his fair
client: it drew a sketch of the position he allotted his wife before the
world side by side with this Mrs. Amy May, though a Lady de Culme was
persuaded to draw distinctions.

He had, however, quite complacently taken the dose intended for him by
Mrs. Lawrence, who believed that the system of gently forcing him was the
good one.

The ladies drove away in the afternoon. The earl turned his back on
manuscript. He sent for a couple of walking sticks, and commanded Weyburn
to go through his parades. He was no tyro, merely out of practice, and
unacquainted with the later, simpler form of the great master of the
French school, by which, at serious issues, the guarding of the line can
be more quickly done: as, for instance, the 'parade de septime'
supplanting the slower 'parade de prime;' the 'parade de quarte' having
advantage over the 'parade de quince;' the 'parade de tierce' being
readier and stronger than the 'parade de sixte;' the same said for the
'parade de seconde' instead of the weak 'parade d'octave.'

These were then new points of instruction. Weyburn demonstrated them as
neatly as he could do with his weapon.

'Yes, the French think,' Lord Ormont said, grasping the stick to get
conviction of thumb-strength and finger-strength from the parades
advocated; 'their steel would thread the ribs of our louts before: they
could raise a cry of parry; so here they 're pleased to sneer at fencing,
as if it served no purpose but the duel. Fencing, for one thing, means,
that with a good stick in his hand, a clever fencer can double up a giant
or two, grant him choice of ground. Some of our men box; but the sword's
the weapon for an officer, and precious few of 'em are fit for more than
to kick the scabbard. Slashing comes easier to them: a plaguey cut, if it
does cut--say, one in six. Navy too. Their cutlass-drill is like a
woman's fling of the arm to fetch a slap from behind her shoulder.
Pinking beats chopping. These English 'll have their lesson. It 's like
what you call good writing: the simple way does the business, and that's
the most difficult to learn, because you must give your head to it, as
those French fellows do. 'Trop de finesse' is rather their fault.
Anything's better than loutishness. Well! the lesson 'll come.'

He continued. He spoke as he thought: he was not speaking what he was
thinking. His mind was directed on the visit of Aminta to Lady de Culme,
and the tolerably wonderful twist whereby Mrs. Lawrence Finchley had
vowed herself to his girl's interests. And he blamed neither of them;
only he could not understand how it had been effected, for Aminta and
Mrs. Lawrence had not been on such particularly intimate terms last week
or yesterday. His ejaculation, 'Women!' was, as he knew, merely ignorance
roaring behind a mask of sarcasm. But it allied him with all previous
generations on the male side, and that was its virtue. His view of the
shifty turns of women got no further, for the reason that he took small
account of the operations of the feelings, to the sole exercise of which
he by system condemned the sex.

He was also insensibly half a grain more soured by the homage of those
poor schoolboys, who called to him to take it for his reward in a country
whose authorities had snubbed, whose Parliament had ignored, whose Press
had abused him. The ridiculous balance made him wilfully oblivious that
he had seen his name of late eulogized in articles and in books for the
right martial qualities. Can a country treating a good soldier--not
serving it for pay--in so scurvy a fashion, be struck too hard with our
disdain? One cannot tell it in too plain a language how one despises its
laws, its moralities, its sham of society. The Club, some choice
anecdotists, two or three listeners to his dolences clothed as diatribes;
a rubber, and the sight of his girl at home, composed, with a week's
shooting now and then, his round of life now that she refused to travel.
What a life for a soldier in his vigour. Weyburn was honoured by the
earl's company on the walk to Chiallo's. In the street of elegant shops
they met Lord Adderwood, and he, as usual, appeared in the act of
strangling one of his flock of yawns, with gentlemanly consideration for
the public. Exercise was ever his temporary specific for these
incurables. Flinging off his coat, he cast away the cynic style
engendering or engendered by them. He and Weyburn were for a bout. Sir
John Randeller and Mr. Morsfield were at it, like Bull in training and
desperado foiled. A French 'maitre d'armes,' famed in 'escrime,' standing
near Captain Chiallo, looked amused in the eyes, behind a mask of
professional correctness. He had come on an excursion for the display of
his art. Sir John's very sturdy defence was pierced. Weyburn saluted the
Frenchman as an acquaintance, and they shook hands, chatted, criticized,
nodded. Presently he and his adversary engaged, vizored and in their
buckram, and he soon proved to be too strong for Adderwood, as the latter
expected and had notified to Lord Ormont before they crossed the steel.
My lord had a pleasant pricking excitement in the sound. There was a
pretty display between Weyburn and the 'escrimeur,' who neatly and kindly
trifled, took a point and returned one, and at the finish complimented
him. The earl could see that he had to be sufficiently alert.

Age mouthed an ugly word to the veteran insensible of it in his body,
when a desire to be one with these pairs of nimble wrists and legs was
like an old gamecock shown the pit and put back into the basket. He left
the place, carrying away an image of the coxcombical attitudinizing of
the man Morsfield at the salut, upon which he brought down his powers of
burlesque.

My lord sketched the scene he had just quitted to a lady who had stopped
her carriage. She was the still beautiful Mrs. Amy May, wife of the
famous fighting captain. Her hair was radiant in a shady street; her
eyelids tenderly toned round the almond enclosure of blue pebbles, bright
as if shining from the seawash. The lips of the fair woman could be seen
to say that they were sweet when, laughing or discoursing, they gave
sight of teeth proudly her own, rivalling the regularity of the grin of
dentistry. A Venus of nature was melting into a Venus of art, and there
was a decorous concealment of the contest and the anguish in the process,
for which Lord Ormont liked her well enough to wink benevolently at her
efforts to cheat the world at various issues, and maintain her duel with
Time. The world deserved that she should beat it, even if she had been
all deception.

She let the subject of Mr. Morsfield pass without remark from her, until
the exhaustion of open-air topics hinted an end of their conversation,
and she said--

'We shall learn next week what to think if the civilians. I have heard
Mr. Morsfield tell that he is 'de premiere force.' Be on your guard. You
are to know that I never forget a service, and you did me one once.' 'You
have reason . . . ?' said the earl.

'If anybody is the dragon to the treasure he covets he is a spadassin who
won't hesitate at provocations. Adieu.'

Lord Ormont's eye had been on Mr. Morsfield. He had seen what Mrs.
Pagnell counselled her niece to let, him see. He thanked Mr. Morsfield
for a tonic that made him young with anticipations of bracing; and he set
his head to work upon an advance half-way to meet the gentleman, and
safely exclude his wife's name.

Monday brought an account of Cuper's boys. Aminta received it while the
earl was at his papers for the morning's news of the weightier deeds of
men.

They were the right boys, Weyburn said; his interview with Gowen, Bench,
Parsons, and the others assured him that the school was breathing big
lungs. Mr. Cuper, too, had spoken well of them.

'You walked the twenty miles?' Aminta interrupted him.

'With my German friend: out and home: plenty of time in the day. He has
taken to English boys, but asks why enthusiasm and worship of great deeds
don't grow upward from them to their elders. And I, in turn, ask why
Germans insist on that point more even than the French do.'

'Germans are sentimental. But the English boys he saw belonged to a
school with traditions of enthusiasm sown by some one. The school
remembered?'

'Curiously, Mr. Cuper tells me, the hero of the school has dropped and
sprung up, stout as ever, twice--it tells me what I wish to
believe--since Lord Ormont led their young heads to glory. He can't say
how it comes. The tradition's there, and it 's kindled by some flying
spark.'

'They remember who taught the school to think of Lord Ormont?'

'I 'm a minor personage. I certainly did some good, and that 's a push
forward.'

'They speak of you?'

It was Aminta more than the Countess of Ormont speaking to him.

'You take an interest in the boys,' he said, glowing. 'Yes, well, they
have their talks. I happened to be a cricketer, counting wickets and
scores. I don't fancy it's remembered that it was I preached my lord. A
day of nine wickets and one catch doesn't die out of a school. The boy
Gowen was the prime spirit in getting up the subscription for the
laundress. But Bench and Parsons are good boys, too.'

He described them, dwelt on them. The enthusiast, when not lyrical, is
perilously near to boring. Aminta was glad of Mrs. Lawrence's absence.
She had that feeling because Matthew Weyburn would shun talk of himself
to her, not from a personal sense of tedium in hearing of the boys; and
she was quaintly reminded by suggestions, coming she knew not whence, of
a dim likeness between her and these boys of the school when their hero
dropped to nothing and sprang up again brilliantly--a kind of distant
cousinship, in her susceptibility to be kindled by so small a flying
spark as this one on its travels out of High Brent. Moreover, the dear
boys tied her to her girlhood, and netted her fleeting youth for the
moth-box. She pressed to hear more and more of them, and of the
school-laundress Weyburn had called to see, and particularly of the
child, little Jane, aged six. Weyburn went to look at the sheet of water
to which little Jane had given celebrity over the county. The girl stood
up to her shoulders when she slid off the bank and made the line for her
brother to hold, he in the water as well. Altogether, Cuper's boys were
justified in promoting a subscription, the mother being helpless.

'Modest little woman,' he said of Jane. 'We'll hope people won't spoil
her. Don't forget, Lady Ormont, that the brother did his part; he had
more knowledge of the danger than she.'

'You will undertake to convey our subscriptions? Lord Ormont spoke of the
little ones and the schoolboys yesterday.'

'I'll be down again among them next Sunday, Lady Ormont. On the Monday I
go to Olmer.'

'The girls of High Brent subscribe?'

There was a ripple under Weyburn's gravity.

'Messrs. Gowen, Bench, and Parsons thought proper to stop Miss Vincent at
the head of her detachment in the park.'

'On the Sunday?'

'And one of them handed her a paper containing a report of their
interview with Mrs. Coop and a neat eulogy of little Jane. But don't
suspect them, I beg. I believe them to be good, honest fellows. Bench,
they say, is religious; Gowen has written verses; Parsons generally
harum-scarum. They're boyish in one way or another, and that'll do. The
cricket of the school has been low: seems to be reviving.'

'Mr. Weyburn,' said the countess, after a short delay--and Aminta broke
through--'it pleases me to hear of them, and think they have not
forgotten you, or, at least, they follow the lead you gave. I should like
to know whether an idea I have is true: Is much, I mean constant, looking
down on young people likely to pull one's mind down to their level?'

'Likely enough to betray our level, if there 's danger,' he murmured.
'Society offers an example that your conjecture is not unfounded, Lady
Ormont. But if we have great literature and an interest in the world's
affairs, can there be any fear of it? The schoolmaster ploughs to make a
richer world, I hope. He must live with them, join with them in their
games, accustom them to have their heads knocked with what he wants to
get into them, leading them all the while, as the bigger schoolfellow
does, if he is a good fellow. He has to be careful not to smell of his
office. Doing positive good is the business of his every day--on a small
scale, but it 's positive, if he likes his boys. 'Avaunt favouritism!' he
must like all boys. And it 's human nature not so far removed from the
dog; only it's a supple human nature: there 's the beauty of it. We train
it. Nothing is more certain than that it will grow upward. I have the
belief that I shall succeed, because I like boys, and they like me. It
always was the case.'

'I know,' said Aminta.

Their eyes met. She looked moved at heart behind that deep forest of her
chestnut eyes.

'And I think I can inspire confidence in fathers and mothers,' he
resumed.' I have my boys already waiting for me to found the school. I
was pleased the other day: an English friend brought an Italian gentleman
to see me and discuss my system, up at Norwood, at my mother's--a Signor
Calliani. He has a nephew; the parents dote on him. The uncle confesses
that the boy wants--he has got hold of our word--"pluck." We had a talk.
He has promised to send me the lad when I am established in Switzerland.'

'When?' said Aminta.

'A relative from whom a Reversion comes is near the end. It won't be
later than September that I shall go. My Swiss friend has the school, and
would take me at once before he retires.'

'You make friends wherever you go,' said Aminta.

'Why shouldn't everybody? I'm convinced it's because I show people I mean
well, and I never nurse an injury, great or small. And besides, they see
I look forward. I do hope good for the world. If at my school we have all
nationalities--French boys and German, Italian, Russian,
Spaniard--without distinction of race and religion and station, and with
English intermixing--English games, English sense of honour and
conception of gentleman--we shall help to nationalize Europe. Emile
Grenat, Adolf Fleischer, and an Italian, Vincentino Chiuse, are prepared
to start with me: and they are men of attainments; they will throw up
their positions; they will do me the honour to trust to my leadership.
It's not scaling Alps or commanding armies, true.'

'It may be better,' said Aminta, and thought as she spoke.

'Slow work, if we have a taste for the work, doesn't dispirit. Otherwise,
one may say that an African or South American traveller has a more
exciting time. I shall manage to keep my head on its travels.'

'You have ideas about the education of girls?'

'They can't be carried out unaided.'

'Aid will come.'

Weyburn's confidence, high though it was, had not mounted to that pitch.

'One may find a mate,' he said. The woman to share and practically to aid
in developing such ideas is not easily found: that he left as implied.

Aminta was in need of poetry; but the young schoolmaster's plain,
well-directed prose of the view of a business in life was welcome to her.

Lord Ormont entered the room. She reminded him of the boys of High Brent
and the heroine Jane. He was ready to subscribe his five-and-twenty
guineas, he said. The amount of the sum gratified Weyburn, she could see.
She was proud of her lord, and of the boys and the little girl; and she
would have been happy to make the ardent young schoolmaster aware of her
growing interest in the young.

The night before the earl's departure on the solitary expedition to which
she condemned him, he surprised her with a visit of farewell, so that he
need not disturb her in the early morning, he said. She was reading
beside her open jewel-box, and she closed it with the delicate touch of a
hand turned backward while listening to him, with no sign of nervousness.




CHAPTER XIII

WAR AT OLMER

Lively doings were on the leap to animate Weyburn at Olmer during Easter
week. The Rev. Mr. Hampton-Evey, rector of Barborough, on hearing that
Lady Charlotte Eglett was engaged in knocking at the doors of litigation
with certain acts that constituted distinct breaches of the law and the
peace, and were a violation of the rights of her neighbour, Mr. Gilbert
Addicote, might hope that the troublesome parishioner whom he did not
often number among his congregation would grant him a term of repose.
Therein he was deceived. Alterations and enlargements of the church, much
required, had necessitated the bricking up of a door regarded by the lady
as the private entrance to the Olmer pew. She sent him notice of her
intention to batter at the new brickwork; so there was the prospect of a
pew-fight before him. But now she came to sit under him every Sunday; and
he could have wished her absent; for she diverted his thoughts from piety
to the selections of texts applicable in the case of a woman who sat with
arms knotted, and the frown of an intemperate schoolgirl forbidden
speech; while her pew's firelight startlingly at intervals danced her
sinister person into view, as from below. The lady's inaccessible and
unconquerable obtuseness to exhortation informed the picture with an evil
spirit that cried for wrestlings.

Regularly every week-day she headed the war now rageing between Olmer and
Addicotes, on the borders of the estates. It was open war, and herself to
head the cavalry. Weyburn, driving up a lane in the gig she had sent to
meet the coach, beheld a thicket of countrymen and boys along a ridge;
and it swayed and broke, and through it burst the figure of a mounted
warrior woman at the gallop, followed by what bore an appearance of horse
and gun, minus carriage, drivers at the flanks cracking whips on foot.
Off went the train, across a small gorse common, through a gate.

'That's another down,' said his whip. 'Sound good wood it is, not made to
fall. Her ladyship's at it hard to-day. She 'll teach Mr. Addicote a
thing or two about things females can do. That is, when they stand for
their rights.'

He explained to Weyburn that Mr. Addicote, a yeoman farmer and a good
hunting man, but a rare obstinate one, now learning his lesson from her
ladyship, was in dispute with her over rights of property on a stretch of
fir-trees lining the ridge where the estates of Olmer and Addicotes met.
Her ladyship had sworn that if he did not yield to her claim she would
cut down every tree of the ridge and sell the lot for timber under his
nose. She acted according to her oath, in the teeth of his men two feet
across the border. All the world knew the roots of those trees were for
the most part in Olmer soil, though Addicote shared the shade. All the
people about mourned for the felling of those trees. All blamed Mr.
Gilbert Addicote for provoking her ladyship, good hunting man though he
was. But as to the merits of the question, under the magnifier of the
gentlemen of the law, there were as many different opinions as wigs in
the land.

'And your opinion?' said Weyburn.

To which the young groom answered: 'Oh, I don't form an opinion, sir. I
'm of my mistress's opinion; and if she says, Do it, think as we like,
done it has to be.'

Lady Charlotte came at a trot through the gate, to supervise the
limbering-up of another felled tree. She headed it as before. The log
dragged bounding and twirling, rattling its chains; the crowd along the
ridge, forbidden to cheer, watching it with intense repression of the
roar. We have not often in England sight of a great lady challengeing an
unpopular man to battle and smacking him in the face like this to provoke
him. Weyburn was driven on a half-circle of the lane to the gate, where
he jumped out to greet Lady Charlotte trotting back for another smack in
the face of her enemy,--a third rounding of her Troy with the vanquished
dead at her heels, as Weyburn let a flimsy suggestion beguile his fancy,
until the Homeric was overwhelming even to a playful mind, and he put her
in a mediaeval frame. She really had the heroical aspect in a
grandiose-grotesque, fitted to some lines of Ariosto. Her head wore a
close hood, disclosing a fringe of grey locks, owlish to see about
features hooked for action.

'Ah, you! there you are: good--I'll join you in three minutes,' she sang
out to him, and cantered to the ridge.

Hardly beyond the stated number she was beside him again, ranging her
steed for the victim log to dance a gyration on its branches across the
lane and enter a field among the fallen compeers. One of her men had run
behind her. She slid from her saddle and tossed him the reins, catching
up her skirts.

'That means war, as much as they'll have it in England,' she said, seeing
his glance at the logs. 'My husband's wise enough to leave it to me, so I
save him trouble with neighbours. An ass of a Mr. Gilbert Addicote dares
us to make good our claim on our property, our timber, because half a
score of fir-tree roots go stretching on to his ground.'

She swished her whip. Mr. Gilbert Addicote received the stroke and
retired, a buried subject. They walked on at an even pace. 'You 'll see
Leo to-morrow. He worships you. You may as well give him a couple of
hours' coaching a day for the week. He'll be hanging about you, and you
won't escape him. Well, and my brother Rowsley: how is Lord Ormont? He
never comes to me now, since--Well, it 's nothing to me; but I like to
see my brother. She can't make any change here. Olmer and Lady Charlotte
's bosom were both implied. 'What do you think?--you 've noticed: is he
in good health? It 's the last thing he 'll be got to speak of.'

Weyburn gave the proper assurances.

'Not he!' said she. 'He's never ill. Men beat women in the long race, if
they haven't overdone it when young. My doctor wants me to renounce the
saddle. He says it 's time. Not if I 've got work for horseback!' she
nicked her head emphatically: 'I hate old age. They sha'nt dismount me
till a blow comes. Hate it! But I should despise myself if I showed
signs, like a worm under heel. Let Nature do her worst; she can't conquer
us as long as we keep up heart. You won't have to think of that for a
good time yet. Now tell me why Lord Ormont didn't publish the "Plan for
the Defence" you said he was writing; and he was, I know. He wrote it and
he finished it; you made the fair copy. Well, and he read it,--there!
see!' She took the invisible sheets in her hands and tore them. 'That's
my brother. He's so proud. It would have looked like asking the country,
that injured him, to forgive him. I wish it had been printed. But
whatever he does I admire. That--she might have advised, if she 'd been a
woman of public spirit or cared for his reputation. He never comes near
me. Did she read your copy?'

The question was meant for an answer.

Weyburn replied: 'Lady Ormont had no sight of it.'

'Ah! she's Lady Ormont to the servants, I know. She has an aunt living in
the house. If my brother's a sinner, and there's punishment for him, he
has it from that aunt. Pag . . . something. He bears with her. He 's a
Spartan. She 's his pack on his back, for what she covers and the game he
plays. It looks just tolerably decent with her in the house. She goes
gabbling a story about our Embassy at Madrid. To preserve propriety, as
they call it. Her niece doesn't stoop to any of those tricks, I 'm told.
I like her for that.'

Weyburn was roused: 'I think you would like Lady Ormont, if you knew her,
my lady.'

'The chances of my liking the young woman are not in the dice-box. You
call her Lady Ormont: you are not one of the servants. Don't call her
Lady Ormont to me.'

'It is her title, Lady Charlotte.' She let fly a broadside at him.

'You are one of the woman's dupes. I thought you had brains. How can you
be the donkey not to see that my brother Rowsley, Lord Ormont, would
never let a woman, lawfully bearing his name, go running the quadrille
over London in couples with a Lady Staines and a Mrs. Lawrence Finchley,
Lord Adderwood, and that man Morsfield, who boasts of your Lady Ormont,
and does it unwhipped--tell me why? Pooh, you must be the poorest fool
born to suppose it possible my brother would allow a man like that man
Morsfield to take his wife's name in his mouth a second time. Have you
talked much with this young person?'

'With Lady Ormont? I have had the honour occasionally.'

'Stick to the title and write yourself plush-breech. Can't you be more
than a footman? Try to be a man of the world; you're old enough for that
by now. I know she 's good-looking; the whole tale hangs on that. You
needn't be singing me mooncalf hymn tunes of "Lady Ormont, Lady Ormont,"
solemn as a parson's clerk; the young woman brought good looks to market;
and she got the exchange she had a right to expect. But it 's not my
brother Rowsley's title she has got--except for footmen and tradesmen.
When there's a true Countess of Ormont!..... Unless my brother has cut
himself from his family. Not he. He's not mad.'

They passed through Olmer park-gates. Lady Charlotte preceded him, and
she turned, waiting for him to rejoin her. He had taken his flagellation
in the right style, neither abashed nor at sham crow: he was easy, ready
to converse on any topic; he kept the line between supple courtier and
sturdy independent; and he was a pleasant figure of a young fellow.
Thinking which, a reminder that she liked him drew her by the road of
personal feeling, as usual with her, to reflect upon another, and a
younger, woman's observing and necessarily liking him too.

'You say you fancy I should like the person you call Lady Ormont?'

'I believe you would, my lady.'

'Are her manners agreeable?'

'Perfect; no pretension.'

'Ah! she sings, plays--all that?

'She plays the harp and sings.'

'You have heard her?'

'Twice.'

'She didn't set you mewing?'

'I don't remember the impulse; at all events, it was restrained.'

'She would me; but I'm an old woman. I detest their squalling and
strumming. I can stand it with Italians on the boards: they don't, stop
conversation. She was present at that fencing match where you plucked a
laurel? I had an account of it. I can't see the use of fencing in this
country. Younger women can, I dare say. Now, look. If we're to speak of
her, I can't call her Lady Ormont, and I don't want to hear you. Give me
her Christian name.'

'It is'--Weyburn found himself on a slope without a stay--'Aminta.'

Lady Charlotte's eye was on him. He felt intolerably hot; his vexation at
the betrayal of the senseless feeling made it worse, a conscious crimson.

'Aminta,' said she, rather in the style of Cuper's boys, when the name
was a strange one to them. 'I remember my Italian master reading out a
poem when I was a girl. I read poetry then. You wouldn't have imagined
that. I did, and liked it. I hate old age. It changes you so. None of my
children know me as I was when I had life in me and was myself, and my
brother Rowsley called me Cooey. They think me a hard old woman. I was
Cooey through the woods and over the meadows and down stream to Rowsley.
Old age is a prison wall between us and young people. They see a
miniature head and bust, and think it a flattery--won't believe it. After
I married I came to understand that the world we are in is a world to
fight in, or under we go. But I pity the young who have to cast
themselves off and take up arms. Young women above all.'

Why had she no pity for Aminta? Weyburn asked it of his feelings, and he
had the customary insurgent reply from them.

'You haven't seen Steignton yet,' she continued. 'No place on earth is
equal to Steignton for me. It 's got the charm. Here at Olmer I'm a
mother and a grandmother--the "devil of an old-woman" my neighbours take
me to be. She hasn't been to Steignton, either. No, and won't go there,
though she's working her way round, she supposes. He'll do everything for
his "Aminta," but he won't take her to Steignton. I'm told now she's won
Lady de Culme. That Mrs. Lawrence Finchley has dropped the curtsey to
her great-aunt and sworn to be a good girl, for a change, if Lady de
Culme will do the chaperon, and force Lord Ormont's hand. My brother
shrugs. There'll be a nice explosion one day soon. Presented? The Court
won't have her. That I know for positive. If she's pushed forward, she
'll be bitterly snubbed. It 's on the heads of those women--silly women!
I can't see the game Mrs. Lawrence Finchley's playing. She'd play for
fun. If they'd come to me, I 'd tell them I 've proof she 's not the
Countess of Ormont: positive proof. You look? I have it. I hold
something; and not before,--(he may take his Aminta to Steignton, he may
let her be presented, she may wear his name publicly, I say he's laughing
at them, snapping his fingers at them louder and louder the more they
seem to be pushing him into a corner, until--I know my brother
Rowsley!--and, poor dear fellow! a man like that, the best cavalry
general England ever had:--they'll remember it when there comes a cry for
a general from India: that's the way with the English; only their
necessities teach them to be just!)--he to be reduced to be
out-manoeuvring a swarm of women,--I tell them, not before my brother
Rowsley comes to me for what he handed to my care and I keep safe for
him, will I believe he has made or means to make his Aminta Countess of
Ormont.'

They were at the steps of the house. Turning to Weyburn there, the
inexhaustible Lady Charlotte remarked that their conversation had given
her pleasure. Leo was hanging on to one of his hands the next minute. A
small girl took the other. Philippa and Beatrice were banished damsels.

Lady Charlotte's breath had withered the aspect of Aminta's fortunes.
Weyburn could forgive her, for he was beginning to understand her. He
could not pardon 'her brother Rowsley,' who loomed in his mind
incomprehensible, and therefore black. Once he had thought the great
General a great man. He now regarded him as a mere soldier, a soured
veteran; socially as a masker and a trifler, virtually a callous angler
playing his cleverly-hooked fish for pastime.

What could be the meaning of Lady Charlotte's 'that, man Morsfield, who
boasts of your Lady Ormont, and does it unwhipped'?

Weyburn stopped his questioning, with the reflection that he had no right
to recollect her words thus accurately. The words, however, stamped
Morsfield's doings and sayings and postures in the presence of Aminta
with significance. When the ladies were looking on at the fencers,
Morsfield's perfect coxcombry had been noticeable. He knew the art of
airing a fine figure. Mrs. Lawrence Finchley had spoken of it, and Aminta
had acquiesced; in the gravely simple manner of women who may be thinking
of it much more intently than the vivacious prattler. Aminta confessed to
an admiration of masculine physical beauty; the picador, matador, of the
Spanish ring called up an undisguised glow that English ladies show
coldly when they condescend to let it be seen; as it were, a line or two
of colour on the wintriest of skies. She might, after all, at heart be
one of the leisured, jewelled, pretty-winged; the spending, never
harvesting, world she claimed and sought to enter. And what a primitive
world it was!--world of the glittering beast and the not too swiftly
flying prey, the savage passions clothed in silk. Surely desire to belong
to it writes us poor creatures. Mentally, she could hardly be maturer
than the hero-worshipping girl in the procession of Miss Vincent's young
seminarists. Probably so, but she carried magic. She was of the order of
women who walk as the goddesses of old, bearing the gift divine. And, by
the way, she had the step of the goddess. Weyburn repeated to himself the
favourite familiar line expressive of the glorious walk, and accused Lord
Ormont of being in cacophonous accordance with the perpetual wrong of
circumstance, he her possessor, the sole person of her sphere insensible
to the magic she bore! So ran his thought.

The young man chose to conceive that he thought abstractedly. He was, in
truth, often casting about for the chances of his meeting on some
fortunate day the predestined schoolmaster's wife: a lady altogether
praiseworthy for carrying principles of sound government instead of
magic. Consequently, susceptible to woman's graces though he knew himself
to be, Lady Ormont's share of them hung in the abstract for him. His
hopes were bent on an early escape to Switzerland and his life's work.

Lady Charlotte mounted to ride to the battle daily. She talked of her
brother Rowsley, and of 'Aminta,' and provoked an advocacy of the
Countess of Ormont, and trampled the pleas and defences to dust, much in
the same tone as on the first day; sometimes showing a peep of sweet
humaneness, like the ripe berry of a bramble, and at others rattling
thunder at the wretch of a woman audacious enough to pretend to a part in
her brother's title.

Not that she had veneration for titles. She considered them a tinsel, and
the devotee on his knee-caps to them a lump for a kick. Adding: 'Of
course I stand for my class; and if we can't have a manlier people--and
it 's not likely in a country treating my brother so badly--well, then,
let things go on as they are.' But it was the pretension to a part in the
name of Ormont which so violently offended the democratic aristocrat, and
caused her to resent it as an assault on the family honour, by 'a woman
springing up out of nothing'--a woman of no distinctive birth.

She was rational in her fashion; or Weyburn could at least see where and
how the reason in her took a twist. The Rev. Mr. Hampton-Evey would not
see it; he was, in charity to her ladyship, of a totally contrary
opinion, he informed Weyburn. The laborious pastor and much-enduring
Churchman met my lady's apologist as he was having a swing of the legs
down the lanes before breakfast, and he fell upon a series of complaints,
which were introduced by a declaration that 'he much feared' her ladyship
would have a heavy legal bill to pay for taking the law into her hands up
at Addicotes.

Her ladyship might, if she pleased, he said, encourage her domestics and
her husband's tenants and farm-labourers to abandon the church for the
chapel, and go, as she had done and threatened to do habitually, to the
chapel herself; but to denounce the ritual of the Orthodox Church under
the denomination of 'barbarous,' to say of the invoking supplications of
the service, that they were--she had been heard to state it more or less
publicly and repeatedly--suitable to abject ministers and throngs at the
court of an Indian rajah, that he did not hesitate to term highly
unbecoming in a lady of her station, subversive and unchristian. The
personal burdens inflicted on him by her ladyship he prayed for patience
to endure. He surprised Weyburn in speaking of Lady Charlotte as
'educated and accomplished.' She was rather more so than Weyburn knew,
and more so than was common among the great ladies of her time.

Weyburn strongly advised the reverend gentleman on having it out with
Lady Charlotte in a personal interview. He sketched the great lady's
combative character on a foundation of benevolence, and stressed her
tolerance for open dealing, and the advantage gained by personal dealings
with her--after a mauling or two. His language and his illustrations
touched an old-school chord in the Rev. Mr. Hampton-Evey, who hummed over
the project, profoundly disrelishing the introductory portion.

'Do me the honour to call and see me to-morrow, after breakfast, before
her ladyship starts for the fray on Addicote heights,' Weyburn said; 'and
I will ask your permission to stand by you. Her bark is terrific, we
know; and she can bite, but there's no venom.'

Finally, on a heave of his chest, Mr. Hampton-Evey consented to call, in
the interests of peace.

Weyburn had said it must be 'man to man with her, facing her and taking
steps'; and, although the prospect was unpleasant to repulsiveness, it
was a cheerful alternative beside Mr. Hampton-Evey's experiences and
anticipations of the malignant black power her ladyship could be when she
was not faced.

'Let the man come,' said Lady Charlotte. Her shoulders intimated
readiness for him.

She told Weyburn he might be present--insisted to have him present.
During the day Weyburn managed to slide in observations on the favourable
reports of Mr. Hampton-Evey's work among the poor--emollient doses that
irritated her to fret and paw, as at a checking of her onset.

In the afternoon the last disputed tree on the Addicotes' ridge was
felled and laid on Olmer ground. Riding with Weyburn and the joyful Leo,
she encountered Mr. Eglett and called out the news. He remarked, in the
tone of philosophy proper to a placable country gentleman obedient to
government on foreign affairs: 'Now for the next act. But no more
horseback now, mind!'

She muttered of not recollecting a promise. He repeated the interdict.
Weyburn could fancy seeing her lips form words of how she hated old age.

He had been four days at Olmer, always facing her, 'man to man,' in the
matter of Lady Ormont, not making way at all, but holding firm, and
winning respectful treatment. They sat alone in her private room, where,
without prelude, she discharged a fiery squib at impudent hussies caught
up to the saddle-bow of a hero for just a canter, and pretending to a
permanent seat beside him.

'You have only to see Lady Ormont; you will admit the justice of her
claim, my lady,' said he; and as evidently he wanted a fight, she let him
have it.

'You try to provoke me; you take liberties. You may call the woman
Aminta, I've told you; you insult me when you call the woman by my family
name.'

'Pardon me, my lady: I have no right to call Lady Ormont Aminta.'

'You've never done so, eh? Say!'

She had him at the edge of the precipice. He escaped by saying, 'Her
Christian name was asked the other day, and I mentioned it. She is
addressed by me as Lady Ormont.'

'And by her groom and her footman. They all do; it 's the indemnity to
that class of young woman. Her linendraper is Lady-Ormonting as you do. I
took you for a gentleman. Let me hear you give her that title again, you
shall hear her true one, that the world fits her with, from me.'

The time was near the half-hour bell before dinner, the situation between
them that of the fall of the breath to fetch words electrical. She left
it to him to begin the fight, and was not sorry that she had pricked him
for it.

A footman entered the room, bearer of a missive for Mr. Weyburn. Lord
Ormont's groom had brought it from London.

'Send in the man,' said Lady Charlotte.

Weyburn read

'The Countess of Ormont begs Mr. Weyburn to return instantly. There has
been an accident in his home. It may not be very serious. An arm--a shock
to the system from a fall. Messenger informs her, fear of internal
hemorrhage. Best doctors in attendance.'

He handed Lady Charlotte the letter. She humped at the first line,
flashed across the remainder, and in a lowered voice asked--

'Sister in the house?'

'My mother,' Weyburn said.

The groom appeared. He knew nothing. The Countess had given him orders to
spare no expense on the road to Olmer, without a minute's delay. He had
ridden and driven.

He looked worn. Lady Charlotte rang the bell for her butler. To him she
said--

'See that this man has a good feed of meat, any pastry you have, and a
bottle of port wine. He has earned a pipe of tobacco; make up a bed for
him. Despatch at once any one of the stable-boys to Loughton--the
Dolphin. Mr. Leeman there will have a chariot, fly, gig, anything,
ready-horsed in three hours from now. See Empson yourself; he will put my
stepper Mab to the light trap; no delay. Have his feed at Loughton. Tell
Mrs. Maples to send up now, here, a tray, whatever she has, within five
minutes--not later. A bottle of the Peace of Amiens Chambertin--Mr.
Eglett's. You understand. Mrs. Maples will pack a basket for the journey;
she will judge. Add a bottle of the Waterloo Bordeaux. Wait: a dozen of
Mr. Eglett's cigars. Brisk with all the orders. Go.'

She turned to Weyburn. 'You pack your portmanteau faster than a servant
will do it.'

He ran up-stairs.

She was beside the tray to welcome and inspirit his eating, and she
performed the busy butler's duty in pouring out wine for him. It was a
toned old Burgundy, happy in the year of its birth, the grandest of
instruments to roll the gambol-march of the Dionysiaca through the blood
of this frame and sound it to the spirit. She spoke no word of his cause
for departure. He drank, and he felt what earth can do to cheer one of
her stricken children and strengthen the beat of a heart with a dread
like a shot in it.

She, while he flew supporting the body of his most beloved to the sun of
Life in brighter hope, reckoned the stages of his journey.

'Leeman at Loughton will post you through the night to Mersley. Wherever
you bait, it is made known that you come from Olmer, and are one of us.
That passes you on up to London. Where can Lord Ormont be now?'

'In Paris.'

'Still in Paris? He leaves her. She did well to send as she did. You will
not pay for the posting along the road.'

'I will pay for myself--I have a 'purse,' Weyburn said; and continued,
'Oh, my lady; there is Mr. Hampton-Evey to-morrow morning: I promised to
stand by him.'

'I'll explain,' said Lady Charlotte. 'He shall not miss you. If he strips
the parson and comes as a man and a servant of the poor, he has nothing
to fear. You've done? The night before my brother Rowsley's first duel I
sat with him at supper and poured his wine out, and knew what was going
to happen, didn't say a word. No use in talking about feelings. Besides,
death is only the other side of the ditch, and one or other of us must go
foremost. Now then, good-bye. Empson's waiting by this time. Mr. Eglett
and Leo shall hear the excuses from me. Think of anything you may want,
while I count ten.'

She held his hand. He wanted her to be friendly to Lady Ormont, but could
not vex her at the last moment, touched as he was by her practical
kindness.

She pressed his hand and let it go.




CHAPTER XIV

OLD LOVERS NEW FRIENDS

The cottage inhabited by Weyburn's mother was on the southern hills over
London. He reached it late in the afternoon. His mother's old servant,
Martha, spied the roadway at the gate of the small square of garden. Her
steady look without welcome told him the scene he would meet beyond the
door, and was the dead in her eyes. He dropped from no height; he stood
on a level with the blow. His apprehensions on the road had lowered him
to meet it.

'Too late, Martha?'

'She's in heaven, my dear.'

'She is lying alone?'

'The London doctor left half an hour back. She's gone. Slipped, and fell,
coming from her room, all the way down. She prayed for grace to see her
son. She 'll watch over him, be sure. You 'll not find it lone and cold.
A lady sits with it--Lady Ormont, they call her--a very kind lady. My
mistress liked her voice. Ever since news of the accident, up to ten at
night; and never eats or drinks more than a poor tiny bit of
bread-and-butter, with a teacup.'

'Weyburn went up-stairs.

Aminta sat close to the bedside in a darkened room. They greeted
silently. He saw the white shell of the life that had flown; he took his
mother's hand and kissed it, and knelt, clasping it.

Fear of disturbing his prayer kept Aminta seated. Death was a stranger to
him. The still warm, half-cold, nerveless hand smote the fact of things
as they were through the prayer for things as we would have them. The
vitality of his prayer was the sole light he had. It drew sustainment
from the dead hand in his grasp, and cowered down to the earth claiming
all we touch. He tried to summon vision of a soaring spirituality; he
could not; his understanding and senses were too stricken. He prayed on.
His prayer was as a little fountain, not rising high out of earth, and in
the clutch of death; but its being it had from death, his love gave it
food.

Prayer is power within us to communicate with the desired beyond our
thirsts. The goodness of the dear good mother gone was in him for
assurance of a breast of goodness to receive her, whatever the nature of
the eternal secret may be. The good life gone lives on in the mind; the
bad has but a life in the body, and that not lasting,--it extends,
dispreads, it worms away, it perishes. Need we more to bid the mind
perceive through obstructive flesh the God who reigns, a devil
vanquished? Be certain that it is the pure mind we set to perceive. The
God discerned in thought is another than he of the senses. And let the
prayer be as a little fountain. Rising on a spout, from dread of the
hollow below, the prayer may be prolonged in words begetting words, and
have a pulse of fervour: the spirit of it has fallen after the first jet.
That is the delirious energy of our craving, which has no life in our
souls. We do not get to any heaven by renouncing the Mother we spring
from; and when there is an eternal secret for us, it is befit to believe
that Earth knows, to keep near her, even in our utmost aspirations.

Weyburn still knelt. He was warned to quit the formal posture of an
exhausted act by the thought, that he had come to reflect upon how he
might be useful to his boys in a like calamity.

Having risen, he became aware, that for some time of his kneeling
Aminta's hand had been on his head, and they had raised their souls in
unison. It was a soul's link. They gazed together on the calm, rapt
features. They passed from the room.

'I cannot thank you,' he said.

'Oh no; I have the reason for gratitude,' said she. 'I have learnt to
know and love her, and hope I may imitate when my time is near.'

"She . . . . at the last?'

'Peacefully; no pain. The breath had not left her very long before you
came.'

'I said I cannot; but I must--

'Do not.'

'Not in speech, then.'

They went into the tasteful little sitting-room below, where the
stillness closed upon them as a consciousness of loss.

'You have comforted her each day,' he said.

'It has been my one happiness.'

'I could not wish for better than for her to have known you.'

'Say that for me. I have gained. She left her last words for you with me.
They were love, love . . . pride in her son: thanks to God for having
been thought worthy to give him birth.'

'She was one of the noble women of earth.'

'She was your mother. Let me not speak any more. I think I will now go. I
am rarely given to these--'

The big drops were falling.

'You have not ordered your carriage?'

'It brings me here. I find my way home.'

'Alone?'

'I like the independence.'

'At night, too!'

'Nothing harmed me. Now it is daylight. A letter arrived for you from
High Brent this morning. I forgot to bring it. Yesterday two of your
pupils called here. Martha saw them.'

Her naming of the old servant familiarly melted him. 'You will not bear
to hear praise or thanks.'

'If I deserved them. I should like you to call on Dr. Buxton; he will
tell you more than we can. He drove with me the first day, after I had
sent you the local doctor's report. I had it from the messenger, his
assistant.'

Weyburn knew Dr. Buxton's address. He begged her to stay and take some
nourishment; ventured a remark on her wasted look.

'It is poor fare in cottages.'

'I have been feeding on better than bread and meat,' she said.' I should
have eaten if I had felt appetite. My looks will recover, such as they
are. I hope I have grown out of them; they are a large part of the
bondage of women. You would like to see me safe into some conveyance. Go
up-stairs for a few minutes; I will wait here.'

He obeyed her. Passing from the living to the dead, from the dead to the
living, they were united in his heart.

Her brevity of tone, and her speech, so practical upon a point of need,
under a crisis of distress, reminded him of Lady Charlotte at the time of
the groom's arrival with her letter.

Aminta was in no hurry to drive. She liked walking and looking down on
London, she said.

'My friend and schoolmate, Selina Collett, comes to me at Whitsuntide. We
have taken a house on the Upper Thames, above Marlow. You will come and
see us, if you can be persuaded to leave your boys. We have a boathouse,
and a bathing-plank for divers. The stream is quiet there between rich
meadows. It seems to flow as if it thought. I am not poetical; I tell you
only my impression. You shall be a great deal by yourself, as men prefer
to be.'

'As men are forced to be--I beg!' said he. 'Division is against my
theories.'

'We might help, if we understood one another, I have often fancied. I
know something of your theories. I should much like to hear you some day
on the scheme of the school in Switzerland, and also on the
schoolmaster's profession. She whom we have lost was full of it, and
spoke of it to me as much as her weakness would permit. The subject
seemed to give her strength.'

'She has always encouraged me,' said Weyburn.' I have lost her, but I
shall feel that she is not absent. She had ideas of her own about men and
women.'

'Some she mentioned.'

'And about marriage?'

'That too.'

Aminta shook herself out of a sudden stupor.

'Her mind was very clear up to the last hour upon all the subjects
interesting her son. She at one time regretted his not being a soldier,
for the sake of his father's memory. Then she learned to think he could
do more for the world as the schoolmaster. She said you can persuade.'

'We had our talks. She would have the reason, if she was to be won. I
like no other kind of persuasion.'

'I long to talk over the future school with you. That is, to hear your
plans.'

They were at the foot of the hill, in view of an inn announcing livery
stables. She wished to walk the whole distance. He shook his head.

The fly was ready for her soon, and he begged to see her safe home. She
refused, after taking her seat, but said: 'At any other time. We are old
friends. You will really go through the ceremony of consulting me about
the school?'

He replied: 'I am honoured.'

'Ah, not to me,' said Aminta. 'We will be the friends we--You will not be
formal with me?--not from this day?'

She put out her hand. He took it gently. The dead who had drawn them
together withheld a pressure. Holding the hand, he said: 'I shall crave
leave of absence for some days.'

'I shall see you on the day,' said she. 'If it is your desire: I will
send word.'

'We both mourn at heart. We should be in company. Adieu.'

Their hands fell apart. They looked. The old school time was in each
mind. They saw it as a shore-bank in grey outline across morning mist.
Years were between; and there was a division of circumstance, more
repelling than an abyss or the rush of deep wild waters.

Neither of them had regrets. Under their cloud, and with the grief they
shared, they were as happy as two could be in recovering one another as
friends.

On the day of the funeral Aminta drove to the spot where they had
parted--she walked to the churchyard.

She followed the coffin to its gravel-heap, wishing neither to see nor be
seen, only that she might be so far attached to the remains of the dead;
and the sense of blessedness she had in her bowed simplicity of feeling
was as if the sainted dead had cleansed and anointed her.

When the sods had been cast on, the last word spoken, she walked her way
back, happy in being alone, unnoticed. She was grateful to the chief
mourner for letting her go as she had come. That helped her to her sense
of purification, the haven out of the passions, hardly less quiet than
the repose into which the dear dead woman, his mother, had entered.

London lay beneath her. The might of the great hive hummed at the verge
of her haven of peace without disturbing. There she had been what none
had known of her: an ambitious girl, modest merely for lack of
intrepidity; paralyzed by her masterful lord; aiming her highest at a
gilt weathercock; and a disappointed creature, her breast a home of
serpents; never herself. She thought and hoped she was herself now. Alarm
lest this might be another of her moods, victim of moods as she had
latterly been, was a shadow armed with a dart playing round her to find
the weak spot. It sprang from her acknowledged weakness of nature; and
she cast about for how to keep it outside her and lean on a true though a
small internal support. She struck at her desires, to sound them.

They were yesterday for love; partly for distinction, for a woman having
beauty to shine in the sphere of beauty; but chiefly to love and be
loved, therefore to live. She had yesterday read letters of a man who
broke a music from the word--about as much music as there is in a
tuning--fork, yet it rang and lingered; and he was not the magical
musician. Now those letters were as dust of the road. The sphere of
beauty was a glass lamp-globe for delirious moths. She had changed.
Belief in the real change gave her full view of the compliant coward she
had been.

Her heart assured her she had natural courage. She felt that it could be
stubborn to resist a softness. Now she cared no more for the hackneyed
musical word; friendship was her desire. If it is not life's poetry, it
is a credible prose; a land of low undulations instead of Alps; beyond
the terrors and the deceptions. And she could trust her friend: he who
was a singular constancy. His mother had told her of his preserving
letters of a girl he loved when at school; and of his journeys to an
empty house at Dover. That was past; but, as the boy, so the man would be
in sincerity of feeling trustworthy to the uttermost.

She mused on the friend. He was brave. She had seen how he took his blow,
and sorrow as a sister, conquering emotion. It was not to be expected of
him by one who knew him when at school. Had he faults? He must have
faults. She, curiously, could see none. After consenting to his career as
a schoolmaster, and seeing nothing ludicrous in it, she endowed him with
the young school-hero's reputation, beheld him with the eyes of the girl
who had loved him--and burnt his old letters!--bitterly regretted that
she burnt his letters!--and who had applauded his contempt of ushers and
master opposing his individual will and the thing he thought it right to
do.

Musing thus, she turned a corner, on a sudden, in her mind, and ran
against a mirror, wherein a small figure running up to meet her, grew
large and nodded, with the laugh and eyes of Browny. So little had she
changed! The stedfast experienced woman rebuked that volatile, and some
might say, faithless girl. But the girl had her answer: she declared they
were one and the same, affirmed that the years between were a bad night's
dream, that her heart had been faithful, that he who conjures visions of
romance in a young girl's bosom must always have her heart, as a crisis
will reveal it to her. She had the volubility of the mettled Browny of
old, and was lectured. When she insisted on shouting 'Matey! Matey!' she
was angrily spurned and silenced.

Aminta ceased to recline in her carriage. An idea that an indolent
posture fostered vapourish meditations, counselled her sitting rigidly
upright and interestedly observing the cottages and merry gutter-children
along the squat straight streets of a London suburb. Her dominant
ultimate thought was, 'I, too, can work!' Like her courage, the plea of a
capacity to work appealed for confirmation to the belief which exists
without demonstrated example; and as she refrained from probing to the
inner sources of that mental outcry, it was allowed to stand and remain
among the convictions we store--wherewith to shape our destinies.

Childishly indeed, quite witlessly, she fell into a trick of repeating
the name of Matthew Weyburn in her breast and on her lips, after the
manner of Isabella Lawrence Finchley, when she had inquired for his
Christian name, and went on murmuring it, as if sucking a new bonbon,
with the remark: 'It sounds nice, it suits the mouth.' Little Selina
Collett had told, Aminta remembered, how those funny boys at Cuper's
could not at first get the name 'Aminta' to suit the mouth, but went
about making hideous faces in uttering it. She smiled at the
recollection, and thought, up to a movement of her lips, one is not
tempted to do that in saying Matthew Weyburn!




CHAPTER XV

SHOWING A SECRET FISHED WITHOUT ANGLING

That great couchant dragon of the devouring jaws and the withering
breath, known as our London world, was in expectation of an excitement
above yawns on the subject of a beautiful Lady Doubtful proposing
herself, through a group of infatuated influential friends, to a decorous
Court, as one among the ladies acceptable. The popular version of it
sharpened the sauce by mingling romance and cynicism very happily; for
the numerous cooks, when out of the kitchen, will furnish a piquant dish.
Thus, a jewel-eyed girl of half English origin (a wounded British officer
is amiably nursed in a castle near the famous Peninsula battlefield,
etc.), running wild down the streets of Seville, is picked up by Lord
Ormont, made to discard her tambourine, brought over to our shores, and
allowed the decoration of his name, without the legitimate adornment of
his title. Discontented with her position after a time, she now pushes
boldly to claim the place which will be most effective in serving her as
a bath. She has, by general consent, beauty; she must, seeing that she
counts influential friends, have witchery. Those who have seen her riding
and driving beside her lord, speak of Andalusian grace, Oriental lustre,
fit qualification for the fair slave of a notoriously susceptible old
warrior.

She won a party in the widening gossip world; and enough of a party in
the regent world to make a stream. Pretending to be the actual Countess
of Ormont, though not publicly acknowledged as his countess by the earl,
she had on her side the strenuous few who knew and liked her, some who
were pleased compassionately to patronize, all idle admirers of a
shadowed beautiful woman at bay, the devotees of any beauty in distress,
and such as had seen, such as imagined they had seen, such as could paint
a mental picture of a lady of imposing stature, persuasive appearance,
pathetic history, and pronounce her to be unjustly treated, with a
general belief that she was visible and breathing. She had the ready
enthusiasts, the responsive sentimentalists, and an honest active minor
number, of whom not every one could be declared perfectly unspotted in
public estimation, however innocent under verdict of the courts of law.

Against her was the livid cloud-bank over a flowery field, that has not
yet spoken audible thunder: the terrible aggregate social woman, of man's
creation, hated by him, dreaded, scorned, satirized, and nevertheless,
upheld, esteemed, applauded: a mark of civilization, on to which our
human society must hold as long as we have nothing humaner. She exhibits
virtue, with face of waxen angel, with paw of desert beast, and blood of
victims on it. Her fold is a genial climate and the material pleasures
for the world's sheepy: worshipping herself, she claims the
sanctification of a performed religion. She is gentle when unassailed,
going her way serenely, with her malady in the blood. When the skin bears
witness to it, she swallows an apothecary, and there is a short
convulsion. She is refreshed by cutting off diseased inferior members:
the superior betraying foul symptoms, she covers up and retains;
rationally, too, for they minister to her present existence, and she
lives all in the present. Her subjects are the mixed Subservient; among
her rebellious are earth's advanced, who have cold a morning on their
foreheads, and these would not dethrone her, they would but shame and
purify by other methods than the druggist. She loves nothing.
Undoubtedly, she dislikes the vicious. On that merit she subsists.

The vexatious thing in speaking of her is, that she compels to the use of
the rhetorician's brass instrument. As she is one of the Powers giving
life and death, one may be excused. This tremendous queen of the
congregation has brought discredit on her sex for the scourge laid on
quivering female flesh, and for the flippant indifference shown to misery
and to fine distinctions between right and wrong, good and bad; and
particularly for the undiscriminating hardness upon the starved of women.
We forget her having been conceived in the fear of men, shaped to gratify
them. She is their fiction of the state they would fain beguile
themselves to suppose her sex has reached, for their benefit; where she
may be queen of it in a corner, certain of a loyal support, if she will
only give men her half-the-world's assistance to uplift the fabric
comfortable to them; together with assurance of paternity, case of mind
in absence, exclusive possession, enormous and minutest, etc.; not by any
means omitting a regimental orderliness, from which men are privately
exempt, because they are men, or because they are grown boys--the brisker
at lessons after a vacation or a truancy, says the fiction.

In those days the world had oscillated, under higher leading than its
royal laxity, to rigidity. Tiny peccadilloes were no longer matter of
jest, and the sinner exposed stood 'sola' to receive the brand. A
beautiful Lady Doubtful needed her husband's countenance if she was to
take one of the permanent steps in public places. The party of Lady
Charlotte Eglett called on the livid cloud-bank aforesaid to discharge
celestial bolts and sulphur oil on the head of an impudent, underbred,
ambitious young slut, whose arts had bewitched a distinguished nobleman
not young in years at least, and ensnared the remainder wits of some
principal ancient ladies of the land. Professional Puritans, born
conservatives, malicious tattlers, made up a goodly tail to Lady
Charlotte's party. The epithet 'unbred' was accredited upon the quoted
sayings and doings of the pretentious young person's aunt, repeated
abroad by noblemen and gentlemen present when she committed herself; and
the same were absurd. They carried a laugh, and so they lived and
circulated. Lord Ormont submitted to the infliction of that horrid female
in his household! It was no wonder he stopped short of allying himself
with the family.

Nor was it a wonder that the naturally enamoured old warrior or invalided
Mars (for she had the gift of beauty) should deem it prudent to be out of
England when she and her crazy friends determined on the audacious move.
Or put it the other way--for it is just as confounding right side or
left--she and her friends take advantage of his absence to make the
clever push for an establishment, and socially force him to legalize
their union on his return. The deeds of the preceding reign had
bequeathed a sort of legendary credence to the wildest tales gossip could
invent under a demurrer.

But there was the fact, the earl was away. Lady Charlotte's party buzzed
everywhere. Her ladyship had come to town to head it. Her ladyship laid
trains of powder from dinner-parties, balls, routs, park-processions,
into the Lord Chamberlain's ear, and fired and exploded them, deafening
the grand official. Do you consider that virulent Pagan Goddesses and the
flying torch-furies are extinct? Error of Christians! We have
relinquished the old names and have no new ones for them; but they are
here, inextinguishable, threading the day and night air with their dire
squib-trail, if we would but see. Hissing they go, and we do not hear. We
feel the effects.

Upon the counsel of Mrs. Lawrence, Aminta sent a letter to Lord Ormont at
his hotel in Paris, informing him of the position of affairs. He had
delayed his return, and there had been none of his brief communications.

She wrote, as she knew, as she felt, coldly. She was guided by others,
and her name was up before the world, owing to some half-remembered
impulsion of past wishes, but her heart was numbed; she was not a woman
to have a wish without a beat of the heart in it. For her name she had a
feeling, to be likened rather to the losing gambler's contemplation of a
big stake he has flung, and sees it gone while fortune is undecided; and
he catches at a philosophy nothing other than his hug of a modest little
background pleasure, that he has always preferred to this accursed bad
habit of gambling with the luck against him. Reckless in the cast, she
was reckless of success.

Her letter was unanswered.

Then, and day by day more strongly, she felt for her name. She put a
false heart into it. She called herself to her hearing the Countess of
Ormont, and deigned to consult the most foolish friend she could have
chosen--her aunt; and even listened to her advice, that she should run
about knocking at all the doors open to her, and state her case against
the earl. It seemed the course to take, the moment for taking it. Was she
not asked if she could now at last show she had pride? Her pride ran
stinging through her veins, like a band of freed prisoners who head the
rout to fire a city. She charged her lord with having designedly--oh!
cunningly indeed left her to be the prey of her enemies at the hour when
he knew it behoved him to be her great defender. There had been no
disguise of the things in progress: they had been spoken of allusively,
quite comprehensibly, after the fashion common with two entertaining a
secret semi-hostility on a particular subject; one of them being the
creature that blushes and is educated to be delicate, reserved, and
timorous. He was not ignorant, and he had left her, and he would not
reply to her letter!

So fell was her mood, that an endeavour to conjure up the scene of her
sitting beside the death-bed of Matthew Weyburn's mother, failed to sober
and smooth it, holy though that time was. The false heart she had put
into the pride of her name was powerfuller than the heart in her bosom.
But to what end had the true heart counselled her of late? It had been a
home of humours and languors, an impotent insurgent, the sapper of her
character; and as we see in certain disorderly States a curative
incendiarism usurp the functions of the sluggish citizen, and the work of
re-establishment done by destruction, in peril of a total extinction,
Aminta's feverish anger on behalf of her name went a stretch to vivify
and give her dulled character a novel edge. She said good-bye to
cowardice. 'I have no husband to defend me--I must do it for myself.' The
peril of a too complete exercise of independence was just intimated to
her perceptions. On whom the blame? And let the motively guilty go mourn
over consequences! That Institution of Marriage was eyed. Is it not a
halting step to happiness? It is the step of a cripple,--and one leg or
the other poses for the feebler sex,--small is the matter which! And is
happiness our cry? Our cry is rather for circumstance and occasion to use
our functions, and the conditions are denied to women by Marriage--denied
to the luckless of women, who are many, very many: denied to Aminta,
calling herself Countess of Ormont, for one, denied to Mrs. Lawrence
Finchley for another, and in a base bad manner. She had defended her good
name triumphantly, only to enslave herself for life or snatch at the
liberty which besmirches.

Reviewing Mrs. Lawrence, Aminta's real heart pressed forward at the beat,
in tender pity of the woman for whom a yielding to love was to sin; and
unwomanly is the woman who does not love: men will say it. Aminta found
herself phrasing. 'Why was she unable to love her husband?--he is not
old.' She hurried in flight from the remark to confidences imparted by
other ladies, showing strange veins in an earthy world; after which, her
mind was bent to rebuke Mrs. Pagnell for the silly soul's perpetual
allusions to Lord Ormont's age. She did not think of his age. But she was
vividly thinking that she was young. Young, married, loveless, cramped in
her energies, publicly dishonoured--a Lady Doubtful, courting one friend
whom she liked among women, one friend whom she respected among men; that
was the sketch of her.

That was in truth the outline, as much as Aminta dared sketch of herself
without dragging her down lower than her trained instinct would bear to
look. Our civilization shuns nature; and most shuns it in the most
artificially civilized, to suit the market. They, however, are always
close to their mother nature, beneath their second nature's mask of
custom; and Aminta's unconscious concluding touch to the sketch: 'My
husband might have helped me to a footing in Society,' would complete it
as a coloured picture, if writ in tones.

She said it, and for the footing in Society she had lost her taste.

Mrs. Lawrence brought the final word from high quarters: that the
application must be deferred until Lord Ormont returned to town. It was
known before, that such would be the decision. She had it from the
eminent official himself, and she kicked about the room, setting her
pretty mouth and nose to pout and sniff, exactly like a boy whose chum
has been mishandled by a bully.

'Your dear good man is too much for us. I thought we should drive him.
'C'est un ruse homme de guerre.' I like him, but I could slap him. He
stops the way. Upon my word, he seems tolerably careless of his treasure.
Does he suppose Mrs. Paggy is a protection? Do you know she's devoted to
that man Morsfield? He listens to her stories. To judge by what he shouts
aloud, he intends carrying you off the first opportunity, divorcing, and
installing you in Cobeck Hall. All he fears is, that your lord won't
divorce. You should have seen him the other day; he marched up and down
the room, smacking his head and crying out: "Legal measures or any
weapons her husband pleases!" For he has come to believe that the lady
would have been off with him long before, if her lord had no claim to the
marital title. "It 's that husband I can't get over! that husband!" He
reminded me, to the life, of Lawrence Finchley with a headache the
morning after a supper, striding, with his hand on the shining middle of
his head: "It's that Welsh rabbit! that Welsh rabbit!" He has a poor
digestion, and he will eat cheese. The Welsh rabbit chased him into his
bed. But listen to me, dear, about your Morsfield. I told you he was
dangerous.'

'He is not my Morsfield,' said Aminta.

'Beware of his having a tool in Paggy. He boasts of letters.'

'Mine? Two: and written to request him to cease writing to me.'

'He stops at nothing. And, oh, my Simplicity! don't you see you gave him
a step in begging him to retire? Morsfield has lived a good deal among
our neighbours, who expound the physiology of women. He anatomizes us;
pulls us to pieces, puts us together, and then animates us with a breath
of his "passion"--sincere upon every occasion, I don't doubt. He spared
me, although he saw I was engaged. Perhaps it was because I 'm of no
definite colour. Or he thought I was not a receptacle for "passion." And
quite true,--Adder, the dear good fellow, has none. Or where should we
be? On a Swiss Alp, in a chalet, he shooting chamois, and I milking cows,
with 'ah-ahio, ah-ahio,' all day long, and a quarrel at night over curds
and whey. Well, and that 's a better old pensioner's limp to his end for
"passion" than the foreign hotel bell rung mightily, and one of the two
discovered with a dagger in the breast, and the other a don't-look lying
on the pavement under the window. Yes, and that's better than "passion"
splitting and dispersing upon new adventures, from habit, with two sparks
remaining of the fire.'

Aminta took Mrs. Lawrence's hands. 'Is it a lecture?'

She was kissed. 'Frothy gabble. I'm really near to "passion" when I
embrace you. You're the only one I could run away with; live with all
alone, I believe. I wonder men can see you while that silly lord of yours
is absent, and not begin Morsfielding. They're virtuous if they resist.
Paggy tells the world . . . well?' Aminta had reddened.

'What does my aunt tell the world?'

Mrs. Lawrence laid her smoothing hand absently on a frill of lace fichu
above a sternly disciplined bosom at half-heave. 'I think I can judge now
that you're not much hurt by this wretched business of the presentation.
The little service I could do was a moral lesson to me on the subject of
deuce-may-care antecedents. My brother Tom, too, was always playing
truant, as a boy. It 's in the blood.'

She seemed to be teasing, and Aminta cried: 'My aunt! Let me hear. She
tells the world--?'

'Paggy? ah, yes. Only that she says the countess has an exalted opinion
of Mr. Secretary's handwriting--as witnessed by his fair copy of the
Memoirs, of course.'

'Poor woman! How can she talk such foolishness! I guessed it.'

'You wear a dark red rose when you're guessing, 'ma mie,'--French for, my
Aminta.'

'But consider, Isabella, Mr. Weyburn has just had the heaviest of losses.
My aunt should spare mention of him.'

'Matthew Weyburn! we both like the name.' Mrs. Lawrence touched at her
friend and gazed. 'I've seen it on certain evenings--crimson over an
olive sky. What it forebodes, I can't imagine; but it's the end of a
lovely day. They say it threatens rain, if it begins one. It 's an
ominous herald.'

'You make me,' said Aminta. 'I must redden if you keep looking at me so
closely.'

'Now frown one little bit, please. I love to see you. I love to see a
secret disclose itself ingenuously.'

'But what secret, my dear?' cried Aminta's defence of her innocence; and
she gave a short frown.

'Have no fear. Mr. Secretary is not the man to be Morsfielding. And he
can enjoy his repast; a very good sign. But is he remaining long?'

'He is going soon, I hear.'

'He's a good boy. I could have taken to him myself, and not dreaded a
worrying. There 's this difference between you and me, though, my Aminta;
one of us has the fireplace prepared for what's-his-name--"passion." Kiss
me. How could you fancy you were going to have a woman for your friend
and keep hidden from her any one of the secrets that blush! and with
Paggy to aid! I am sure it means very little. Admiration for good
handwriting is--' a smile broke the sentence.

'You're astray, Isabella.'

'Not I, dear, I'm too fond of you.'

'You read what is not.'

'What is not yet written, you mean.'

'What never could be written.'

'I read what is in the blood, and comes out to me when I look. That lord
of yours should take to study you as I have done ever since I fell in
love with you. He 's not counselling himself well in keeping away.'

'Now you speak wisely,' said Aminta.

'Not a particle more wisely. And the reason is close at hand--see. You
are young, you attract--how could it be otherwise?--and you have
"passion" sleeping, and likely to wake with a spring whether roused or
not. In my observation good-man t'other fellow--the poet's friend--is
never long absent when the time is ripe--at least, not in places where we
gather together. Well, one is a buckler against the other: I don't say
with lovely Amy May,--with an honourable woman. But Aminta can smell
powder and grow more mettlesome. Who can look at you and be blind to
passion sleeping! The sight of you makes me dream of it--me, a woman,
cool as a wine-cellar or a well. So there's to help you to know yourself
and be on your guard. I know I'm not deceived, because I've fallen in
love with you, and no love can be without jealousy, so I have the needle
in my breast, that points at any one who holds a bit of you. Kind of
sympathetic needle to the magnet behind anything. You'll know it, if you
don't now. I should have felt the thing without the aid of Paggy. So,
then, imagine all my nonsense unsaid, and squeeze a drop or two of 'sirop
de bon conseil' out of it, as if it were your own wise meditations.' The
rest of Mrs. Lawrence's discourse was a swallow's wing skimming the city
stream. She departed, and Aminta was left to beat at her heart and ask
whether it had a secret.

But if there was one, the secret was out, and must have another name. It
had been a secret for her until she heard her friend speak those
pin-points that pricked her heart, and sent the blood coursing over her
face, like a betrayal, so like as to resemble a burning confession.

But if this confessed the truth, she was the insanest of women. No woman
could be surer that she had her wits. She had come to see things,
previously mysteries, with surprising clearness. As, for example, that
passion was part of her nature; therefore her very life, lying tranced.
She certainly could not love without passion such an abandonment was the
sole justification of love in a woman standing where she stood. And now
for the first time she saw her exact position before the world; and she
saw some way into her lord: saw that he nursed a wound, extracted balm
from anything enabling him to show the world how he despised it, and
undesigningly immolated her for the petty gratification.

It could not, in consequence, be the truth. To bear what she had borne
she must be a passionless woman; and she was glad of her present safety
in thinking it. Once it was absolutely true. She swam away to the
golden-circled Island of Once; landed, and dwelt there solitarily and
blissfully, looking forward to Sunday's walk round the park, looking back
on it. Proudly she could tell herself that her dreams of the Prince of
the island had not been illusions as far as he was concerned; for he had
a great soul. He did not aim at a tawdry glory. He was a loss to our
army--no loss to his country or the world. A woman might clasp her
feeling of pride in having foreseen distinction for him; and a little,
too, in distinguishing now the true individual distinction from the
feathered uniform vulgar. Where the girl's dreams had proved illusions,
she beheld in a title and luxuries, in a loveless marriage.

That was perilous ground. Still it taught her to see that the substantial
is the dust; and passion not being active, she could reflect. After a
series of penetrative flashes, flattering to her intelligence the more
startling they were, reflection was exhausted. She sank on her nature's
desire to join or witness agonistic incidents, shocks, wrestlings, the
adventures which are brilliant air to sanguine energies. Imagination shot
tap, and whirled the circle of a succession of them; and she had a
companion and leader, unfeatured, reverently obeyed, accepted as not to
be known, not to be guessed at, in the deepest hooded inmost of her being
speechlessly divined.

The sudden result of Aminta's turmoil was a determination that she must
look on Steignton. And what was to be gained by that? She had no idea.
And how had she stopped her imaginative flight with the thought of
looking on Steignton? All she could tell was, that it would close a
volume. She could not say why the volume must be closed.

Her orders for the journey down to Steignton were prompt. Mrs. Pagnell
had an engagement at the house of Lady Staines for the next day to meet
titles and celebrities, and it precluded her comprehension of the
project. She begged to have the journey postponed. She had pledged her
word, she said.

'To Mr. Morsfield?' said Aminta.

Her aunt was astounded.

'I did tell him we should be there, my dear.' 'He appears to have a
pleasure in meeting you.' 'He is one of the real gentlemen of the land.'

'You correspond with him?'

'I may not be the only one.'

'Foolish aunty! How can you speak to me in that senseless way?' cried
Aminta. 'You know the schemer he is, and that I have no protection from
his advances unless I run the risk of bloodshed.'

'My dear Aminta, whenever I go into society, and he is present, I know I
shall not be laughed at, or fall into that pit of one of their dead
silences, worse for me to bear than titters and faces. It is their way of
letting one feel they are of birth above us. Mr. Morsfield--purer blood
than many of their highest titles--is always polite, always deferential;
he helps me to feel I am not quite out of my element in the sphere I
prefer. We shall be travelling alone?'

'Have you any fear?'

'Not if nothing happens. Might we not ask that Mr. Weyburn?'

'He has much work to do. He will not long be here. He is absent to-day.'

Mrs. Pagnell remarked: 'I must say he earns his money easily.'

Aminta had softened herself with the allusion to the shortness of his
time with them. Her aunt's coarse hint, and the thought of his loss, and
the banishment it would be to her all the way to Steignton, checked a
sharp retort she could have uttered, but made it necessary to hide her
eyes from sight. She went to her bedroom, and flung herself on the bed.
Even so little as an unspoken defence of him shook her to floods of
tears.




CHAPTER XVI

ALONG TWO ROADS TO STEIGNTON

Unaccountable resolutions, if impromptu and springing from the female
breast, are popularly taken for caprices; and even when they divert the
current of a history, and all the more when they are very small matters
producing a memorable crisis. In this way does a lazy world consign
discussion to silence with the cynical closure. Man's hoary shrug at a
whimsy sex is the reading of his enigma still.

But ask if she has the ordinary pumping heart in that riddle of a breast:
and then, as the organ cannot avoid pursuit, we may get hold of it, and
succeed in spelling out that she is consequent, in her fashion. She is a
creature of the apparent moods and shifts and tempers only because she is
kept in narrow confines, resembling, if you like, a wild cat caged.
Aminta's journey down to Steignton turned the course of other fortunes
besides her own; and she disdained the minor adventure it was, while
dreaming it important; and she determined eagerly on going, without
wanting to go; and it was neither from a sense of duty nor in a spirit of
contrariety that she went. Nevertheless, with her heart in hand, her
movements are traceably as rational as a soldier's before the enemy or a
trader's matching his customer.

The wish to look on Steignton had been spoken or sighed for during long
years between Aminta and her aunt, until finally shame and anger clinched
the subject. To look on Steignton for once was now Aminta's phrasing of
her sudden resolve; it appeared as a holiday relief from recent worries,
and it was an expedition with an aim, though she had but the coldest
curiosity to see the place, and felt alien to it. Yet the thought, never
to have seen Steignton! roused phantoms of dead wishes to drive the
strange engine she was, faster than the living would have done. Her
reason for haste was rationally founded on the suddenness of her resolve,
which, seeing that she could not say she desired to go, seemed to come of
an external admonition; and it counselled quick movements, lest her
inspired obedience to the prompting should as abruptly breathe itself
out. 'And in that case I shall never have seen Steignton at all,' she
said, with perfect calmness, and did not attempt to sound her meaning.

She did know that she was a magazine of a great storage of powder. It
banked inoffensively dry. She had forgiven her lord, owning the real
nobleman he was in courtesy to women, whom his inherited ideas of them so
quaintly minimized and reduced to pretty insect or tricky reptile. They,
too, had the choice of being ultimately the one or the other in fact; the
latter most likely.

If, however, she had forgiven her lord, the shattering of their union was
the cost of forgiveness. In letting him stand high, as the lofty man she
had originally worshipped, she separated herself from him, to feel that
the humble she was of a different element, as a running water at a
mountain's base. They are one in the landscape; they are far from one in
reality. Aminta's pride of being chafed at the yoke of marriage.

Her aunt was directed to prepare for a start at an early hour the next
morning. Mrs. Pagnell wrote at her desk, and fussed, and ordered the
posting chariot, and bewailed herself submissively; for it was the
Countess of Ormont speaking when Aminta delivered commands, and the only
grievance she dared to mutter was 'the unexpectedness.' Her letters
having been despatched, she was amazed in the late evening to hear Aminta
give the footman orders for the chariot to be ready at the door an hour
earlier than the hour previously appointed. She remonstrated. Aminta
simply observed that it would cause less inconvenience to all parties. A
suspicion of her aunt's proceedings was confirmed by the good woman's
flustered state. She refrained from smiling.

She would have mustered courage to invite Matthew Weyburn as her escort,
if he had been at hand. He was attending to his affairs with
lawyers--mainly with his friend Mr. Abner. She studied map and gazetteer
till late into the night. Giving her orders to the postillion on the
pavement in the morning, she named a South-westerly direction out of
London, and after entering the chariot, she received a case from one of
the footmen.

'What is that, my dear?' said Mrs. Pagnell.

Aminta unlocked and laid it open. A pair of pistols met Mrs. Pagnell's
gaze.

'We shan't be in need of those things?' the lady said anxiously.

'One never knows, on the road, aunt.'

'Loaded? You wouldn't hesitate to fire; I'm sure.'

'At Mr. Morsfield himself, if he attempted to stop me.'

Mrs. Pagnell withdrew into her astonishment, and presently asked, in a
tone of some indignation: 'Why did you mention Mr. Morsfield, Aminta?'

'Did you not write to him yesterday afternoon, aunt?'

'You read the addresses on my letters!'

'Did you not supply him with our proposed route and the time for
starting?'

'Pistols!' exclaimed Mrs. Pagnell. 'One would fancy you think we are in
the middle of the last century. Mr. Morsfield is a gentleman, not a
highwayman.'

'He gives the impression of his being a madman.'

'The real madman is your wedded husband, Aminta, if wedding it was!'

It was too surely so, in Aminta's mind. She tried, by looking out of the
window, to forget her companion. The dullness of the roads and streets
opening away to flat fields combined with the postillion's unvarying jog
to sicken her thoughts over the exile from London she was undergoing, and
the chance that Matthew Weyburn might call at a vacant house next day, to
announce his term of service to the earl, whom he had said he much wanted
to see. He said it in his sharp manner when there was decision behind it.
Several times after contemplating the end of her journey, and not
perceiving any spot of pleasure ahead, an emotion urged her to turn back;
for the young are acutely reasoning when their breasts advise them to
quit a road where no pleasure beckons.

Unlike Matthew Weyburn, the tiptoe sparkle of a happy mind did not leap
from her at wayside scenes, a sweep of grass, distant hills, clouds in
flight. She required, since she suffered, the positive of events or
blessings to kindle her glow.

Matthew Weyburn might call at the house. Would he be disappointed? He had
preserved her letters of the old school-days. She had burnt his. But she
had not burnt the letters of Mr. Morsfield; and she cared nothing for
that man. Assuredly she merited the stigma branding women as
crack-brained. Yet she was not one of the fools; she could govern a
household, and she liked work, she had the capacity for devotedness. So,
therefore, she was a woman perverted by her position, and she shook her
bonds in revolt from marriage. Imagining a fall down some suddenly spied
chasm of her nature, she had a sisterly feeling for the women named
sinful. At the same time, reflecting that they are sinful only with the
sinful, she knelt thankfully at the feet of the man who had saved her
from such danger. Tears threatened. They were a poor atonement for the
burning of his younger letters. But not he--she was the sufferer, and she
whipped up a sensation of wincing at the flames they fell to, and at
their void of existence, committing sentimental idiocies worthy of a
lovesick girl, consciously to escape the ominous thought, which her
woman's perception had sown in her, that he too chafed at a marriage no
marriage: was true in fidelity, not true through infidelity, as she had
come to be. The thought implied misery for both. She entered a black
desolation, with the prayer that he might not be involved, for his own
sake: partly also on behalf of the sustaining picture the young
schoolmaster at his task, merry among his dear boys, to trim and point
them body and mind for their business in the world, painted for her a
weariful prospect of the life she must henceforth drag along.

Is a woman of the plain wits common to numbers ever deceived in her
perception of a man's feelings for her? Let her first question herself
whether she respects him. If she does not, her judgement will go easily
astray, intuition and observation are equally at fault, she has no key;
he has charmed her blood, that is all. But if she respects him, she
cannot be deceived; respect is her embrace of a man's character. Aminta's
vision was clear. She had therefore to juggle with the fact revealed,
that she might keep her heart from rushing out; and the process was a
disintegration of her feminine principle of docility under the world's
decrees. At each pause of her mental activity she was hurled against the
state of marriage. Compassion for her blameless fellow in misery brought
a deluge to sweep away institutions and landmarks.

But supposing the blest worst to happen, what exchange had she to bestow?
Her beauty? She was reputed beautiful. It had made a madman of one man;
and in her poverty of endowments to be generous with, she hovered over
Mr. Morsfield like a cruel vampire, for the certification that she had a
much-prized gift to bestow upon his rival.

But supposing it: she would then be no longer in the shiny garden of the
flowers of wealth; and how little does beauty weigh as all aid to an
active worker in the serious fighting world! She would be a kind of
potted rose-tree under his arm, of which he must eventually tire.

A very cold moment came, when it seemed that even the above supposition,
in the case of a woman who has been married, is shameful to her, a sin
against her lover, and should be obliterated under floods of scarlet.
For, if she has pride, she withers to think of pushing the most noble of
men upon his generosity. And, further, if he is not delicately
scrupulous, is there not something wanting in him? The very cold wave
passed, leaving the sentence: better dream of being plain friends.

Mrs. Pagnell had been quietly chewing her cud of the sullens, as was the
way with her after a snub. She now resumed her gossip of the naughty
world she knelt to and expected to see some day stricken by a bolt from
overhead; containing, as it did, such wicked members as that really
indefensible brazen Mrs. Amy May, who was only the daughter of a half-pay
naval captain, and that Marquis of Collestou, who would, they say,
decorate her with his title to-morrow, if her husband were but somewhere
else. She spread all sorts of report, about Mr. Morsfield, and he was
honour itself in his reserve about her. 'Depend upon it, Aminta--he was
not more than a boy then, and they say she aimed at her enfranchisement
by plotting the collision, for his Yorkshire revenues are immense, and he
is, you know, skilful in the use of arms, and Captain May has no
resources whatever: penury! no one cares to speculate how they
contrive!--but while that dreadful duelling--and my lord as bad as any in
his day-exists, depend upon it, an unscrupulous good-looking woman has as
many lives for her look of an eye or lift of a finger as a throned
Ottoman Turk on his divan.'

Aminta wished to dream. She gave her aunt a second dose, and the lady
relapsed again.

Power to dream had gone. She set herself to look at roadside things,
cottage gardens, old housewives in doorways, gaffer goodman meeting his
crony on the path, groups of boys and girls. She would take the girls,
Matthew Weyburn the boys. She had lessons to give to girls, she had
sympathy, pity, anticipation. That would be a life of happy service. It
might be a fruitful trial of the system he proposed, to keep the boys and
girls in company as much as possible, both at lessons and at games. His
was the larger view. Her lord's view appeared similar to that of her
aunt's 'throned Ottoman Turk on his divan.' Matthew Weyburn believed in
the bettering of the world; Lord Ormont had no belief like it.

Presently Mrs. Pagnell returned to the charge, and once more she was
nipped, and irritated to declare she had never known her niece's temper
so provoking. Aminta was launching a dream of a lass she had seen in a
field, near a white hawthorn, standing upright, her left arm aloft round
the pole of a rake, the rim of her bonnet tipped on her forehead; an
attitude of a rustic.

Britannia with helmet heeling at dignity. The girl's eyes hung to the
passing chariot, without movement of her head. It was Aminta who looked
back, and she saw the girl looking away. Among the superior dames and
damsels she had seen, there was not one to match that figure for stately
air, gallant ease, and splendour of pose. Matthew Weyburn would have
admired the girl. Aminta did better than envy, she cast off the last
vestiges of her bitter ambition to be a fine lady, and winged into the
bosom of the girl, and not shyly said 'yes' to Matthew Weyburn, and to
herself, deep in herself: 'A maid has no need to be shy.' Hardly
blushing, she walks on into the new life beside him, and hears him say:
'I in my way, you in yours; we are equals, the stronger for being
equals,' and she quite agrees, and she gives him the fuller heart for his
not requiring her to be absorbed--she is the braver mate for him. Does
not that read his meaning? Happiest of the girls of earth, she has
divined it at once, from never having had the bitter ambition to be a
slave, that she might wear rich tissues; and let herself be fettered,
that she might loll in idleness; lose a soul to win a title; escape
commonplace to discover it ghastlier under cloth of gold, and the animal
crowned, adored, fattened, utterly served, in the class called by consent
of human society the Upper.

Reason whispered a reminder of facts to her.

'But I am not the Countess of Ormont!' she said. She felt herself the
girl, her sensations were so intensely simple.

Proceeding to an argument, that the earl did not regard her as the
Countess of Ormont, or the ceremony at the British Embassy as one serious
and binding, she pushed her reason too far: sweet delusion waned. She
waited for some fresh scene to revive it.

Aminta sat unwittingly weaving her destiny.

While she was thus engaged, a carriage was rolling on the more westerly
road down to Steignton. Seated in it were Lady Charlotte Eglett and
Matthew Weyburn. They had met at Arthur Abner's office the previous day.
She went there straight from Lord Ormont's house-agent and upholsterer,
to have a queer bit of thunderous news confirmed, that her brother was
down at Steignton, refurnishing the house, and not for letting. She was
excited: she treated Arthur Abner's closed-volume reticence as a
corroboration of the house-agent's report, and hearing Weyburn speak of
his anxiety to see the earl immediately, in order to get release from his
duties, proposed a seat in her carriage; for down Steignton way she meant
to go, if only as excuse for a view of the old place. She kept asking
what Lord Ormont wanted down at Steignton refurnishing the house, and not
to let it! Her evasions of answers that, plain speculation would supply
were quaint. 'He hasn't my feeling for Steignton. He could let it--I
couldn't. Sacrilege to me to have a tenant in my old home where I was
born. He's furnishing to raise his rent. His country won't give him
anything to do, so he turns miser. That's my brother Rowsley's way of
taking on old age.'

Her brother Rowsley might also be showing another sign of his calamitous
condition. She said to Weyburn, in the carriage, that her brother Rowsley
might like having his hair clipped by the Philistine woman; which is one
of the ways of strong men to confess themselves ageing. 'Not,' said she,
with her usual keen justness 'not that I've, a word against Delilah. I
look upon her as a patriot; she dallied and she used the scissors on
behalf of her people. She wasn't bound to Samson in honour,--liked a
strong man, probably enough. She proved she liked her country better. The
Jews wrote the story of it, so there she stands for posterity to pelt
her, poor wretch.'

'A tolerably good analogy for the story of men and women generally,' said
Weyburn.

'Ah, well, you've a right to talk; you don't run miauling about women. It
's easy to be squashy on that subject. As for the Jews, I don't go by
their history, but now they 're down I don't side with the Philistines,
or Christians. They 're good citizens, and they 've got Samson in the
brain, too. That comes of persecution, a hard education. They beat the
world by counting in the head. That 's because they 've learnt the value
of fractions. Napoleon knew it in war, when he looked to the boots and
great-coats of his men; those were his fractions. Lord Ormont thinks he
had too hard-and-fast a system for the battle-field.'

'A greater strategist than tactician, my lady? It may be,' said Weyburn,
smiling at her skips.

'Massing his cannon to make a big hole for his cavalry, my brother says;
and weeding his infantry for the Imperial Guard he postponed the moment
to use.'

'At Moskowa?'

'Waterloo. I believe Lord Ormont would--there! his country 's lost him,
and chose it. They 'll have their day for repentance yet. What a rapture
to have a thousand horsemen following you! I suppose there never was a
man worthy of the name who roared to be a woman. I know I could have
shrieked half my life through to have been born male. It 's no matter
now. When we come to this hateful old age, we meet: no, we 're no sex
then--we 're dry sticks. I 'll tell you: my Olmer doctor--that 's an
impudent fellow who rode by staring into my carriage. The window's down.
He could see without pushing his hat in.'

Weyburn looked out after a man cantering on.

'A Mr. Morsfield,' he said. 'I thought it was he when I saw him go by.
I've met him at the fencing-rooms. He 's one of the violent fencers, good
for making his point, if one funks an attack.'

'That man Morsfield, is it? I wonder what he's doing on the road here. He
goes over London boasting--hum, nothing to me. But he 'll find Lord
Ormont's arm can protect a poor woman, whatever she is. He'd have had it
before, only Lord Ormont shuns a scandal. I was telling you, my Olmer
doctor forbade horse-riding, and my husband raised a noise like one of my
turkeycocks on the wing; so I 've given up the saddle, to quiet him. I
guessed. I went yesterday morning to my London physician. He sounded me,
pushed out his mouth and pulled down his nose, recommended avoidance of
excitement. "Is it heart?" I said. He said it was heart. That was the
best thing an old woman could hear. He said, when he saw I wasn't afraid,
it was likely to be quick; no doctors, no nurses and daily bulletins for
inquirers, but just the whites of the eyes, the laying-out, the
undertaker, and the family-vault. That's one reason why I want to see
Steignton before the blow that may fall any day, whether my brother
Rowsley's there or no. But that Olmer doctor of mine, Causitt, Peter
Causitt, shall pay me for being a liar or else an ignoramus when I told
him he was to tell me bluntly the nature of my disease.'

A horseman, in whom they recognized Mr. Morsfield, passed, clattering on
the road behind them.

'Some woman here about,' Lady Charlotte muttered. Weyburn saw him joined
by a cavalier, and the two consulted and pointed whips right and left.




CHAPTER XVII

LADY CHARLOTTE'S TRIUMPH

One of the days of sovereign splendour in England was riding down the
heavens, and drawing the royal mantle of the gold-fringed shadows over
plain and wavy turf, blue water and woods of the country round Steignton.
A white mansion shone to a length of oblong lake that held the sun-ball
suffused in mild yellow.

'There's the place,' Lady Charlotte said to Weyburn, as they had view of
it at a turn of the park. She said to herself--where I was born and bred!
and her sight gloated momentarily on the house and side avenues, a great
plane standing to the right of the house, the sparkle of a little river
running near; all the scenes she knew, all young and lively. She sprang
on her seat for a horse beneath her, and said, 'But this is healthy
excitement,' as in reply to her London physician's remonstrances. 'And
there's my brother Rowsley, talking to one of the keepers,' she cried.
'You see Lord Ormont? I can see a mile. Sight doesn't fail with me. He 's
insisting. 'Ware poachers when Rowsley's on his ground! You smell the air
here? Nobody dies round about Steignton. Their legs wear out and they lie
down to rest them. It 's the finest air in the world. Now look, the third
window left of the porch, first floor. That was my room before I married.
Strangers have been here and called the place home. It can never be home
to any but me and Rowsley. He sees the carriage. He little thinks! He's
dressed in his white corduroy and knee-breeches. Age! he won't know age
till he's ninety. Here he comes marching. He can't bear surprises. I'll
wave my hand and call.'

She called his name.

In a few strides he was at the carriage window. 'You, Charlotte?'

'Home again, Rowsley! Bring down your eyebrows, and let me hear you're
glad I 've come.'

'What made you expect you would find me here?'

'Anything-cats on the tiles at night. You can't keep a secret from me.
Here's Mr. Weyburn, good enough to be my escort. I 'll get out.'

She alighted, scorning help; Weyburn at her heels. The earl nodded to him
politely and not cordially. He was hardly cordial to Lady Charlotte.

That had no effect on her. 'A glorious day for Steignton,' she said. 'Ah,
there's the Buridon group of beeches; grander trees than grow at Buridon.
Old timber now. I knew them slim as demoiselles. Where 's the ash? We had
a splendid ash on the west side.'

'Dead and cut down long since,' replied the earl.

'So we go!'

She bent her steps to the spot: a grass-covered heave of the soil.

'Dear old tree!' she said, in a music of elegy: and to Weyburn: 'Looks
like a stump of an arm lopped off a shoulder in bandages. Nature does it
so. All the tenants doing well, Rowsley?'

'About the same amount of trouble with them.'

'Ours at Olmer get worse.'

'It's a process for the extirpation of the landlords.'

'Then down goes the country.'

'They 've got their case, their papers tell us.'

'I know they have; but we've got the soil, and we'll make a, fight of
it.'

'They can fight too, they say.'

'I should be sorry to think they couldn't if they're Englishmen.'

She spoke so like his old Charlotte of the younger days that her brother
partly laughed.

'Parliamentary fighting 's not much to your taste or mine. They 've lost
their stomach for any other. The battle they enjoy is the battle that
goes for the majority. Gauge their valour by that.'

'To be sure,' said his responsive sister. She changed her note. 'But what
I say is, let the nobles keep together and stick to their class. There's
nothing to fear then. They must marry among themselves, think of the
blood: it's their first duty. Or better a peasant girl! Middle courses
dilute it to the stuff in a publican's tankard. It 's an adulterous beast
who thinks of mixing old wine with anything.'

'Hulloa!' said the earl; and she drew up.

'You'll have me here till over to-morrow, Rowsley, so that I may have one
clear day at Steignton?'

He bowed. 'You will choose your room. Mr. Weyburn is welcome.'

Weyburn stated the purport of his visit, and was allowed to name an early
day for the end of his term of service.

Entering the house, Lady Charlotte glanced at the armour and stag
branches decorating corners of the hall, and straightway laid her head
forward, pushing after it in the direction of the drawing room. She went
in, stood for a minute, and came out. Her mouth was hard shut.

At dinner she had tales of uxorious men, of men who married mistresses,
of the fearful incubus the vulgar family of a woman of the inferior
classes ever must be; and her animadversions were strong in the matter of
gew-gaw modern furniture. The earl submitted to hear.

She was, however, keenly attentive whenever he proffered any item of
information touching Steignton. After dinner Weyburn strolled to the
points of view she cited as excellent for different aspects of her old
home.

He found her waiting to hear his laudation when he came back; and in the
early morning she was on the terrace, impatient to lead him down to the
lake. There, at the boat-house, she commanded him to loosen a skiff and
give her a paddle. Between exclamations, designed to waken louder from
him, and not so successful as her cormorant hunger for praise of
Steignton required, she plied him to confirm with his opinion an opinion
that her reasoning mind had almost formed in the close neighbourhood of
the beloved and honoured person providing it; for abstract ideas were
unknown to her. She put it, however, as in the abstract:--

'How is it we meet people brave as lions before an enemy, and rank
cowards where there's a botheration among their friends at home? And tell
me, too, if you've thought the thing over, what's the meaning of this? I
've met men in high places, and they've risen to distinction by their own
efforts, and they head the nation. Right enough, you'd say. Well, I talk
with them, and I find they've left their brains on the ladder that led
them up; they've only the ideas of their grandfather on general subjects.
I come across a common peasant or craftsman, and he down there has a mind
more open--he's wiser in his intelligence than his rulers and lawgivers
up above him. He understands what I say, and I learn from him. I don't
learn much from our senators, or great lawyers, great doctors,
professors, members of governing bodies--that lot. Policy seems to
petrify their minds when they 've got on an eminence. Now explain it, if
you can.'

'Responsibility has a certain effect on them, no doubt,' said Weyburn.
'Eminent station among men doesn't give a larger outlook. Most of them
confine their observation to their supports. It happens to be one of the
questions I have thought over. Here in England, and particularly on a
fortnight's run in the lowlands of Scotland once, I have, like you, my
lady, come now and then across the people we call common, men and women,
old wayside men especially; slow-minded, but hard in their grasp of
facts, and ready to learn, and logical, large in their ideas, though
going a roundabout way to express them. They were at the bottom of
wisdom, for they had in their heads the delicate sense of justice, upon
which wisdom is founded. That is what their rulers lack. Unless we have
the sense of justice abroad like a common air, there 's no peace, and no
steady advance. But these humble people had it. They reasoned from it,
and came to sound conclusions. I felt them to be my superiors. On the
other hand, I have not felt the same with "our senators, rulers, and
lawgivers." They are for the most part deficient in the liberal mind.'

'Ha! good, so far. How do you account for it?' said Lady Charlotte.

'I read it in this way: that the world being such as it is at present,
demanding and rewarding with honours and pay special services, the men
called great, who have risen to distinction, are not men of brains, but
the men of aptitudes. These men of aptitudes have a poor conception of
the facts of life to meet the necessities of modern expansion. They are
serviceable in departments. They go as they are driven, or they resist.
In either case, they explain how it is that we have a world moving so
sluggishly. They are not the men of brains, the men of insight and
outlook. Often enough they are foes of the men of brains.'

'Aptitudes; yes, that flashes a light into me,' said Lady Charlotte. 'I
see it better. It helps to some comprehension of their muddle. A man may
be a first-rate soldier, doctor, banker--as we call the usurer
now-a-days--or brewer, orator, anything that leads up to a figure-head,
and prove a foolish fellow if you sound him. I 've thought something like
it, but wanted the word. They say themselves, "Get to know, and you see
with what little wisdom the world is governed!" You explain how it is. I
shall carry "aptitudes" away.'

She looked straight at Weyburn. 'If I were a younger woman I could kiss
you for it.'

He bowed to her very gratefully.

'Remember, my lady, there's a good deal of the Reformer in that
definition.'

'I stick to my class. But they shall hear a true word when there's one
abroad, I can tell them. That reminds me--you ought to have asked; let me
tell you I'm friendly with the Rev. Mr. Hampton-Evey. We had a wrestle
for half an hour, and I threw him and helped him up, and he apologized
for tumbling, and I subscribed to one of his charities, and gave up about
the pew, but had an excuse for not sitting under the sermon. A poor good
creature. He 's got the aptitudes for his office. He won't do much to
save his Church. I knew another who had his aptitude for the classics,
and he has mounted. He was my tutor when I was a girl. He was fond of
declaiming passages from Lucian and Longus and Ovid. One day he was at it
with a piece out of Daphnis and Chloe, and I said, "Now translate." He
fetched a gurgle to say he couldn't, and I slapped his check. Will you
believe it? the man was indignant. I told him, if he would like to know
why I behaved in "that unmaidenly way," he had better apply at home. I
had no further intimations of his classical aptitudes; but he took me for
a cleverer pupil than I was. I hadn't a notion of the stuff he recited. I
read by his face. That was my aptitude--always has been. But think of the
donkeys parents are when they let a man have a chance of pouring his
barley-sugar and sulphur into the ears of a girl. Lots of girls have no
latent heckles and prickles to match his villany.--There's my brother
come back to breakfast from a round. You and I 'll have a drive before
lunch, and a ride or a stroll in the afternoon. There's a lot to see. I
mean you to get the whole place into your head. I 've ordered the
phaeton, and you shall take the whip, with me beside you. That's how my
husband and I spent three-quarters of our honeymoon.'

Each of the three breakfasted alone.

They met on the terrace. It was easily perceived that Lord Ormont stood
expecting an assault at any instant; prepared also to encounter and do
battle with his redoubtable sister. Only he wished to defer the
engagement. And he was magnanimous: he was in the right, she in the
wrong; he had no desire to grapple with her, fling and humiliate. The
Sphinx of Mrs. Pagnell had been communing with himself unwontedly during
the recent weeks.

What was the riddle of him? That, he did not read. But, expecting an
assault, and relieved by his sister Charlotte's departure with Weyburn,
he went to the drawing-room, where he had seen her sniff her strong
suspicions of a lady coming to throne it. Charlotte could believe that he
flouted the world with a beautiful young woman on his arm; she would not
believe him capable of doing that in his family home and native county;
so, then, her shrewd wits had nothing or little to learn. But her
vehement fighting against facts; her obstinate aristocratic prejudices,
which he shared; her stinger of a tongue: these in ebullition formed a
discomforting prospect. The battle might as well be conducted through the
post. Come it must!

Even her writing of the pointed truths she would deliver was an
unpleasant anticipation. His ears heated. Undoubtedly he could crush her.
Yet, supposing her to speak to his ears, she would say: 'You married a
young woman, and have been foiling and fooling her ever since, giving her
half a title to the name of wife, and allowing her in consequence to be
wholly disfigured before the world--your family naturally her chief
enemies, who would otherwise (Charlotte would proclaim it) have been her
friends. What! your intention was (one could hear Charlotte's voice) to
smack the world in the face, and you smacked your young wife's instead!'

His intention had been nothing of the sort. He had married, in a foreign
city, a young woman who adored him, whose features, manners, and carriage
of her person satisfied his exacting taste in the sex; and he had
intended to cast gossipy England over the rail and be a traveller for the
remainder of his days. And at the first she had acquiesced, tacitly
accepted it as part of the contract. He bore with the burden of an
intolerable aunt of hers for her sake. The two fell to work to conspire.
Aminta 'tired of travelling,' Aminta must have a London house. She
continually expressed a hope that 'she might set her eyes on Steignton
some early day.' In fact, she as good as confessed her scheme to plot for
the acknowledged position of Countess of Ormont in the English social
world. That was a distinct breach of the contract.

As to the babble of the London world about a 'very young wife,' he
scorned it completely, but it belonged to the calculation. 'A very
handsome young wife,' would lay commands on a sexagenarian vigilance
while adding to his physical glory. The latter he could forego among a
people he despised. It would, however, be an annoyance to stand
constantly hand upon sword-hilt. There was, besides, the conflict with
his redoubtable sister. He had no dread of it, in contemplation of the
necessity; he could crush his Charlotte. The objection was, that his
Aminta should be pressing him to do it. Examine the situation at present.
Aminta has all she needs--every luxury. Her title as Countess of Ormont
is not denied. Her husband justly refuses to put foot into English
society. She, choosing to go where she may be received, dissociates
herself from him, and he does not complain. She does complain. There is a
difference between the two.

He had always shunned the closer yoke with a woman because of these
vexatious dissensions. For not only are women incapable of practising,
they cannot comprehend magnanimity.

Lord Ormont's argumentative reverie to the above effect had been pursued
over and over. He knew that the country which broke his military career
and ridiculed his newspaper controversy was unforgiven by him. He did not
reflect on the consequences of such an unpardoning spirit in its
operation on his mind.

If he could but have passed the injury, he would ultimately--for his
claims of service were admitted--have had employment of some kind.
Inoccupation was poison to him; travel juggled with his malady of
restlessness; really, a compression of the warrior's natural forces. His
Aminta, pushed to it by the woman Pagnell, declined to help him in
softening the virulence of the disease. She would not travel; she would
fix in this London of theirs, and scheme to be hailed the accepted
Countess of Ormont. She manoeuvred; she threw him on the veteran
soldier's instinct, and it resulted spontaneously that he manoeuvred.

Hence their game of Pull, which occupied him a little, tickled him and
amused. The watching of her pretty infantile tactics amused him too much
to permit of a sidethought on the cruelty of the part he played. She had
every luxury, more than her station by right of birth would have
supplied.

But he was astonished to find that his Aminta proved herself clever,
though she had now and then said something pointed. She was in awe of
him: notwithstanding which, clearly she meant to win and pull him over.
He did not dislike her for it; she might use her weapons to play her
game; and that she should bewitch men--a, man like Morsfield--was not
wonderful. On the other hand, her conquest of Mrs. Lawrence Finchley
scored tellingly: that was unaccountably queer. What did Mrs. Lawrence
expect to gain? the sage lord asked. He had not known women devoid of a
positive practical object of their own when they bestirred themselves to
do a friendly deed.

Thanks to her conquest of Mrs. Lawrence, his Aminta was gaining
ground--daily she made an advance; insomuch that he had heard of himself
as harshly blamed in London for not having countenanced her recent and
rather imprudent move. In other words, whenever she gave a violent tug at
their game of Pull, he was expected to second it. But the world of these
English is too monstrously stupid in what it expects, for any of its
extravagances to be followed by interjections.

All the while he was trimming and rolling a field of armistice at
Steignton, where they could discuss the terms he had a right to dictate,
having yielded so far. Would she be satisfied with the rule of his
ancestral hall, and the dispensing of hospitalities to the county? No,
one may guess: no woman is ever satisfied. But she would have to
relinquish her game, counting her good round half of the honours.
Somewhat more, on the whole. Without beating, she certainly had
accomplished the miracle of bending him. To time and a wife it is no
disgrace for a man to bend. It is the form of submission of the bulrush
to the wind, of courtesy in the cavalier to a lady.

'Oh, here you are, Rowsley,' Lady Charlotte exclaimed at the drawing room
door. 'Well, and I don't like those Louis Quinze cabinets; and that
modern French mantelpiece clock is hideous. You seem to furnish in
downright contempt of the women you invite to sit in the room. Lord help
the wretched woman playing hostess in such a pinchbeck bric-a-brac shop,
if there were one! She 's spared, at all events.'

He stepped at slow march to one of the five windows. Lady Charlotte went
to another near by. She called to Weyburn--

'We had a regatta on that water when Lord Ormont came of age. I took an
oar in one of the boats, and we won a prize; and when I was landing I
didn't stride enough to the spring-plank, and plumped in.'

Some labourers of the estate passed in front.

Lord Ormont gave out a broken laugh. 'See those fellows walk! That 's the
raw material of the famous English infantry. They bend their knees
five-and-forty degrees for every stride; and when you drill them out of
that, they 're stiff as ramrods. I gymnasticized them in my regiment. I'd
have challenged any French regiment to out-walk or out-jump us, or any
crack Tyrolese Jagers to out-climb, though we were cavalry.'

'Yes, my lord, and exercised crack corps are wanted with us,' Weyburn
replied. 'The English authorities are adverse to it, but it 's against
nature--on the supposition that all Englishmen might enrol untrained in
Caesar's pet legion. Virgil shows knowledge of men when he says of the
row-boat straining in emulation, 'Possunt quia posse videntur.''

He talked on rapidly; he wondered that he did not hear Lady Charlotte
exclaim at what she must be seeing. From the nearest avenue a lady had
issued. She stood gazing at the house, erect--a gallant figure of a
woman--one hand holding her parasol, the other at her hip. He knew her.
She was a few paces ahead of Mrs. Pagnell, beside whom a gentleman
walked.

The cry came: 'It's that man Morsfield! Who brings that man Morsfield
here? He hunted me on the road; he seemed to be on the wrong scent. Who
are those women? Rowsley, are your grounds open every day of the week?
She threatens to come in!'

Lady Charlotte had noted that the foremost and younger of 'those women'
understood how to walk and how to dress to her shape and colour. She
inclined to think she was having to do with an intrepid foreign-bred
minx.

Aminta had been addressed by one of her companions, and had hastened
forward. It looked like the beginning of a run to enter the house.

Mrs. Pagnell ran after her. She ran cow-like.

The earl's gorge rose at the spectacle Charlotte was observing.

With Morsfield he could have settled accounts at any moment, despatching
Aminta to her chamber for an hour. He had, though he was offended, an
honourable guess that she had not of her free will travelled with the man
and brought him into the grounds. It was the presence of the intolerable
Pagnell under Charlotte's eyes which irritated him beyond the common
anger he felt at Aminta's pursuit of him right into Steignton. His mouth
locked. Lady Charlotte needed no speech from him for sign of the boiling;
she was too wary to speak while that went on.

He said to Weyburn, loud enough for his Charlotte to heir. 'Do me the
favour to go to the Countess of Ormont. Conduct her back to London. You
will say it is my command. Inform Mr. Morsfield, with my compliments, I
regret I have no weapons here. I understand him to complain of having to
wait. I shall be in town three days from this date.'

'My lord,' said Mr. Weyburn; and actually he did mean to supplicate. He
could imagine seeing Lord Ormont's eyebrows rising to alpine heights.

Lady Charlotte seized his arm.

'Go at once. Do as you are told. I'll have your portmanteau packed and
sent after you--the phaeton's out in the yard--to Rowsley, or Ashead, or
Dornton, wherever they put up. Now go, or we shall have hot work. Keep
your head on, and go.'

He went, without bowing.

Lady Charlotte rang for the footman.

The earl and she watched the scene on the sward below the terrace.

Aminta listened to Weyburn. Evidently there was no expostulation.

But it was otherwise with Mrs. Pagnell. She flung wild arms of a
semaphore signalling national events. She sprang before Aminta to stop
her retreat, and stamped and gibbed, for sign that she would not be
driven. She fell away to Mr. Morsfield, for simple hearing of her plaint.
He appeared emphatic. There was a passage between him and Weyburn.

'I suspect you've more than your match in young Weyburn, Mr. Morsfield,'
Lady Charlotte said, measuring them as they stood together. They turned
at last.

'You shall drive back to town with me, Rowsley,' said the fighting dame.

She breathed no hint of her triumph.




CHAPTER XVIII

A SCENE ON THE ROAD BACK

After refusing to quit the grounds of Steignton, in spite of the
proprietor, Mrs. Pagnell burst into an agitation to have them be at
speed, that they might 'shake the dust of the place from the soles of
their feet'; and she hurried past Aminta and Lord Ormont's insolent
emissary, carrying Mr. Morsfield beside her, perforce of a series of
imperiously-toned vacuous questions, to which he listened in rigid
politeness, with the ejaculation steaming off from time to time, 'A
scandal!'

He shot glances behind him.

Mrs. Pagnell was going too fast. She, however, world not hear of a halt,
and she was his main apology for being present; he was excruciatingly
attached to the horrid woman.

Weyburn spoke the commonplaces about regrets to Aminta.

'Believe me, it's long since I have been so happy,' she said.

She had come out of her stupefaction, and she wore no theatrical looks of
cheerfulness.

'I regret that you should be dragged away. But, if you say you do not
mind, it will be pleasant to me. I can excuse Lord Ormont's anger. I was
ignorant of his presence here. I thought him in Paris. I supposed the
place empty. I wished to see it once. I travelled as the niece of Mrs.
Pagnell. She is a little infatuated. . . . Mr. Morsfield heard of our
expedition through her. I changed the route. I was not in want of a
defender. I could have defended myself in case of need. We slept at
Ashead, two hours from Steignton. He and a friend accompanied us, not
with my consent. Lord Ormont could not have been aware of that. These
accidental circumstances happen. There may be pardonable intentions on
all sides.'

She smiled. Her looks were open, and her voice light and spirited; though
the natural dark rose-glow was absent from her olive cheeks.

Weyburn puzzled over the mystery of so volatile a treatment of a serious
matter, on the part of a woman whose feelings he had reason to know were
quick and deep. She might be acting, as women so cleverly do.

It could hardly be acting when she pointed to peeps of scenery, with a
just eye for landscape.

'You leave us for Switzerland very soon?' she said.

'The Reversion I have been expecting has fallen in, besides my
inheritance. My mother was not to see the school. But I shall not forget
her counsels. I can now make my purchase of the house and buildings, and
buy out my partner at the end of a year. My boys are jumping to start. I
had last week a letter from Emile.'

'Dear little Emile!'

'You like him?'

'I could use a warmer word. He knew me when I was a girl.'

She wound the strings of his heart suddenly tense, and they sang to their
quivering.

'You will let me hear of you, Mr. Weyburn?'

'I will write. Oh! certainly I will write, if I am told you are
interested in our doings, Lady Ormont.'

'I will let you know that I am.'

'I shall be happy in writing full reports.'

'Every detail, I beg. All concerning the school. Help me to feel I am a
boarder. I catch up an old sympathy I had for girls and boys. For boys!
any boys! the dear monkey boys! cherub monkeys! They are so funny. I am
sure I never have laughed as I did at Selina Collett's report, through
her brother, of the way the boys tried to take to my name; and their
sneezing at it, like a cat at a deceitful dish. "Aminta"--was that their
way?'

'Something--the young rascals!'

'But please repeat it as you heard them.'

'" Aminta."'

He subdued the mouthing.

'It didn't, offend me at all. It is one of my amusements to think of it.
But after a time they liked the name; and then how did they say it?'

He had the beloved Aminta on his lips.

He checked it, or the power to speak it failed. She drew in a sharp
breath.

'I hope your boys will have plenty of fun in them. They will have you for
a providence and a friend. I should wish to propose to visit your school
some day. You will keep me informed whether the school has vacancies. You
will, please, keep me regularly informed?'

She broke into sobs.

Weyburn talked on of the school, for a cover to the resuming of her
fallen mask, as he fancied it.

She soon recovered, all save a steady voice for converse, and begged him
to proceed, and spoke in the flow of the subject; but the quaver of her
tones was a cause of further melting. The tears poured, she could not
explain why, beyond assuring him that they were no sign of unhappiness.
Winds on the great waters against a strong tidal current beat up the wave
and shear and wing the spray, as in Aminta's bosom. Only she could know
that it was not her heart weeping, though she had grounds for a woman's
weeping. But she alone could be aware of her heart's running counter to
the tears.

Her agitation was untimely. Both Mrs. Pagnell and Mr. Morsfield observed
emotion at work. And who could wonder? A wife denied the admittance to
her husband's house by her husband! The most beautiful woman of her time
relentlessly humiliated, ordered to journey back the way she had come.

They had reached the gate of the park, and had turned.

'A scandal!'

Mr. Morsfield renewed his interjection vehemently, for an apology to his
politeness in breaking from Mrs. Pagnell.

Joining the lady, whose tears were of the nerves, he made offer of his
devotion in any shape; and she was again in the plight to which a
desperado can push a woman of the gentle kind. She had the fear of
provoking a collision if she reminded him, that despite her entreaties,
he had compelled her, seconded by her aunt as he had been, to submit to
his absurd protection on the walk across the park.

He seemed quite regardless of the mischief he had created; and,
reflecting upon how it served his purpose, he might well be. Intemperate
lover, of the ancient pattern, that he was, his aim to win the woman
acknowledged no obstacle in the means. Her pitiable position appealed to
the best of him; his inordinate desire of her aroused the worst. It was,
besides, an element of his coxcombry, that he should, in apeing the
utterly inconsiderate, rush swiftly to impersonate it when his passions
were cast on a die.

Weyburn he ignored as a stranger, an intruder, an inferior.

Aminta's chariot was at the gate.

She had to resign herself to the chances of a clash of men, and, as there
were two to one, she requested help of Weyburn's hand, that he might be
near her.

A mounted gentleman, smelling parasite in his bearing, held the bridle of
Morsfield's horse.

The ladies having entered the chariot, Morsfield sprang to the saddle,
and said: 'You, sir, had better stretch your legs to the inn.'

'There is room for you, Mr. Weyburn,' said Aminta.

Mrs. Pagnell puffed.

'I can't think we've room, my dear. I want that bit of seat in front for
my feet.'

Morsfield kicked at his horse's flanks, and between Weyburn and the
chariot step, cried: 'Back, sir!'

His reins were seized; the horse reared, the unexpected occurred.

Weyburn shouted 'Off!' to the postillion, and jumped in.

Morsfield was left to the shaking of a dusty coat, while the chariot
rolled its gentle course down the leafy lane into the high-road.

His friend had seized the horse's bridle-reins; and he remarked: 'I say,
Dolf, we don't prosper to-day.'

'He pays for it!' said Morsfield, foot in stirrup. 'You'll take him and
trounce him at the inn. I don't fight with servants. Better game. One
thing, Cumnock: the fellow's clever at the foils.'

'Foils to the devil! If I tackle the fellow, it won't be with the
buttons. But how has he pushed in?'

Morsfield reported 'the scandal!' in sharp headings.

'Turned her away. Won't have her enter his house--grandest woman in all
England! Sent his dog to guard. Think of it for an insult! It's insult
upon insult. I 've done my utmost to fire his marrow. I did myself a good
turn by following her up and entering that park with her. I shall
succeed; there 's a look of it. All I have--my life--is that woman's. I
never knew what this devil's torture was before I saw her.'

His friend was concerned for his veracity. 'Amy!'

'A common spotted snake. She caught me young, and she didn't carry me
off, as I mean to carry off this glory of her sex--she is: you've seen
her!--and free her, and devote every minute of the rest of my days to
her. I say I must win the woman if I stop at nothing, or I perish; and if
it 's a failure, exit 's my road. I 've watched every atom she touched in
a room, and would have heaped gold to have the chairs, tables, cups,
carpets, mine. I have two short letters written with her hand. I 'd give
two of my estates for two more. If I were a beggar, and kept them, I
should be rich. Relieve me of that dog, and I toss you a thousand-pound
note, and thank you from my soul, Cumnock. You know what hangs on it.
Spur, you dolt, or she'll be out of sight.'

They cantered upon application of the spur. Captain Cumnock was an
impecunious fearless rascal, therefore a parasite and a bully duellist; a
thick-built north-countryman; a burly ape of the ultra-elegant; hunter,
gamester, hard-drinker, man of pleasure. His known readiness to fight was
his trump-card at a period when the declining custom of the duel taxed
men's courage to brave the law and the Puritan in the interests of a
privileged and menaced aristocracy. An incident like the present was the
passion in the dice-box to Cumnock. Morsfield was of the order of men who
can be generous up to the pitch of their desires. Consequently, the world
accounted him open-handed and devoted when enamoured. Few men liked him;
he was a hero with some women. The women he trampled on; the men he
despised. To the lady of his choice he sincerely offered his fortune and
his life for the enjoyment of her favour. His ostentation and his
offensive daring combined the characteristics of the peacock and the
hawk. Always near upon madness, there were occasions when he could
eclipse the insane. He had a ringing renown in his class.

Chariot and horsemen arrived at the Roebuck Arms, at the centre of the
small town of Ashead, on the line from Steignton through Rowsley. The
pair of cavaliers dismounted and hustled Weyburn in assisting the ladies
to descend.

The ladies entered the inn; they declined refection of any sort. They had
biscuits and sweetmeats, and looked forward to tea at a farther stage.
Captain Cumnock stooped to their verdict on themselves, with marvel at
the quantity of flesh they managed to put on their bones from such
dieting.

'By your courtesy, sir, a word with you in the inn yard, if you please,'
he said to Weyburn in the inn-porch.

Weyburn answered, 'Half a minute,' and was informed that it was exactly
the amount of time the captain could afford to wait.

Weyburn had seen the Steignton phaeton and coachman in the earl's
light-blue livery. It was at his orders, he heard. He told the coachman
to expect hire shortly, and he followed the captain, with a heavy trifle
of suspicion that some brew was at work. He said to Aminta in the
passage--

'You have your settlement with the innkeeper. Don't, I beg, step into the
chariot till you see me.'

'Anything?' said she.

'Only prudence.'

'Our posting horses will be harnessed soon, I hope. I burn to get away.'

Mrs. Pagnell paid the bill at the bar of the inn. Morsfield poured out
for the injured countess or no-countess a dram of the brandy of passion,
under the breath.

'Deny that you singled me once for your esteem. Hardest-hearted of the
women of earth and dearest! deny that you gave me reason to hope--and
now! I have ridden in your track all this way for the sight of you, as
you know, and you kill me with frost. Yes, I rejoice that we were seen
together. Look on me. I swear I perish for one look of kindness. You have
been shamefully used, madam.'

'It seems to me I am being so,' said Aminta, cutting herself loose from
the man of the close eyes that wavered as they shot the dart.

Her action was too decided for him to follow her up under the observation
of the inn windows and a staring street.

Mrs. Pagnell came out. She went boldly to Morsfield and they conferred.
He was led by her to the chariot, where she pointed to a small padded
slab of a seat back to the horses. Turning to the bar, he said:--My
friend will look to my horse. Both want watering and a bucketful.
There!'--he threw silver--'I have to protect the ladies.'

Aminta was at the chariot door talking to her aunt inside.

'But I say I have been insulted--is the word--more than enough by Lord
Ormont to-day!' Mrs. Pagnell exclaimed; 'and I won't, I positively refuse
to ride up to London with any servant of his. It's quite sufficient that
it's his servant. I'm not titled, but I 'in not quite dirt. Mr. Morsfield
kindly offers his protection, and I accept. He is company.'

Nodding and smirking at Morsfield's approach, she entreated Aminta to
step up and in, for the horses were coming out of the yard.

Aminta looked round. Weyburn was perceived; and Morsfield's features
cramped at thought of a hitch in the plot.

'Possession,' Mrs. Pagnell murmured significantly. She patted the seat.
Morsfield sprang to Weyburn's place.

That was witnessed by Aminta and Weyburn. She stepped to consult him. He
said to the earl's coachman--a young fellow with a bright eye for
orders--

'Drive as fast as you can pelt for Dornton. I'm doing my lord's
commands.'

'Trust yourself to me, madam.' His hand stretched for Aminta to mount.
She took it without a word and climbed to the seat. A clatter of hoofs
rang out with the crack of the whip. They were away behind a pair of
steppers that could go the pace.




CHAPTER XIX

THE PURSUERS

For promptitude, the lady, the gentleman, and the coachman were in such
unison as to make it a reasonable deduction that the flight had been
concerted.

Never did any departure from the Roebuck leave so wide-mouthed a body of
spectators. Mrs. Pagnell's shrieks of 'Stop, oh! stop!' to the backs of
the coachman and Aminta were continued until they were far down the
street. She called to the innkeeper, called to the landlady and to
invisible constables for help. But her pangs were childish compared with
Morsfield's, who, with the rage of a conceited schemer tricked and the
fury of a lover beholding the rape of his beautiful, bellowed impotently
at Weyburn and the coachman out of hearing, 'Stop! you!' He was in the
state of men who believe that there is a virtue in imprecations, and he
shot loud oaths after them, shook his fist, cursed his friend Cumnock,
whose name he vociferated as a summons to him,--generally the baffled
plotter misconducted himself to an extreme degree, that might have
apprised Mrs. Pagnell of a more than legitimate disappointment on his
part.

Pursuit was one of the immediate ideas which rush forward to look back
woefully on impediments and fret to fever over the tardiness of
operations. A glance at the thing of wrinkles receiving orders to buckle
at his horses and pursue convinced them of the hopelessness; and
Morsfield was pricked to intensest hatred of the woman by hearing the
dire exclamation, 'One night, and her character's gone!'

'Be quiet, ma'am, if you please, or nothing can be done,' he cried.

'I tell you, Mr. Morsfield--don't you see?--he has thrown them together.
It is Lord Ormont's wicked conspiracy to rid himself of her. A secretary!
He'll beat any one alive in plots. She can't show her face in London
after this, if you don't overtake her. And she might have seen Lord
Ormont's plot to ruin her. He tired of her, and was ashamed of her
inferior birth to his own, after the first year, except on the Continent,
where she had her rights. Me he never forgave for helping make him the
happy man he might have been in spite of his age. For she is lovely! But
it's worse for a lovely woman with a damaged reputation. And that 's his
cunning. How she could be so silly as to play into it! She can't have
demeaned herself to look on that secretary! I said from the first he
seemed as if thrown into her way for a purpose. But she has pride: my
niece Aminta has pride. She might well have listened to flatterers--she
had every temptation--if it hadn't been for her pride. It may save her
yet. However good-looking, she will remember her dignity--unless he's a
villain. Runnings away! drivings together! inns oh! the story over
London! I do believe she has a true friend in you, Mr. Morsfield; and I
say, as I have said before, the sight of a devoted admirer would have
brought any husband of more than sixty to his senses, if he hadn't hoped
a catastrophe and determined on it. Catch them we can't, unless she
repents and relents; and prayers for that are our only resource. Now,
start, man, do!'

The postillion had his foot in position to spring. Morsfield bawled
Cumnock's name, and bestrode his horse. Captain Cumnock emerged from the
inn-yard with a dubitative step, pressing a handkerchief to his nose,
blinking, and scrutinizing the persistent fresh stains on it.

Stable-boys were at the rear. These, ducking and springing, surcharged
and copious exponents of the play they had seen, related, for the benefit
of the town, how that the two gentlemen had exchanged words in the yard,
which were about beastly pistols, which the slim gentleman would have
none of; and then the big one trips up, like dancing, to the other one
and flicks him a soft clap on the check--quite friendly, you may say; and
before he can square to it, the slim one he steps his hind leg half a
foot back, and he drives a straight left like lightning off the shoulder
slick on to t' other one's nob, and over he rolls, like a cart with the
shafts up down a bank; and he' a been washing his 'chops' and threatening
bullets ever since.

The exact account of the captain's framework in the process of the fall
was graphically portrayed in our blunt and racy vernacular, which a
society nourished upon Norman-English and English-Latin banishes from
print, largely to its impoverishment, some think.

By the time the primary narrative of the encounter in the inn yard had
given ground for fancy and ornament to present it in yet more luscious
dress, Lord Ormont's phaeton was a good mile on the road. Morsfield and
Captain Cumnock--the latter inquisitive of the handkerchief pressed
occasionally at his nose--trotted on tired steeds along dusty
wheel-tracks. Mrs. Pagnell was the solitary of the chariot, having a
horrid couple of loaded pistols to intimidate her for her protection, and
the provoking back view of a regularly jogging mannikin under a big white
hat with blue riband, who played the part of Time in dragging her along,
with worse than no countenance for her anxieties.

News of the fugitives was obtained at the rampant Red Lion in Dudsworth,
nine miles on along the London road, to the extent that the Earl of
Ormont's phaeton, containing a lady and a gentleman, had stopped there a
minute to send back word to Steignton of their comfortable progress, and
expectations of crossing the borders into Hampshire before sunset.
Morsfield and Cumnock shrugged at the bumpkin artifice. They left their
line of route to be communicated to the chariot, and chose, with
practised acumen, that very course, which was the main road, and rewarded
them at the end of half an hour with sight of the Steignton phaeton.

But it was returning. A nearer view showed it empty of the couple.

Morsfield bade the coachman pull up, and he was readily obeyed. Answers
came briskly.

Although provincial acting is not of the high class which conceals the
art, this man's look beside him and behind him at vacant seats had
incontestable evidence in support of his declaration, that the lady and
gentleman had gone on by themselves: the phaeton was a box of flown
birds.

'Where did you say they got out, you dog?' said Cumnock.

The coachman stood up to spy a point below. 'Down there at the bottom of
the road, to the right, where there's a stile across the meadows, making
a short cut by way of a bridge over the river to Busley and North
Tothill, on the high-road to Hocklebourne. The lady and gentleman thought
they 'd walk for a bit of exercise the remains of the journey.'

'Can't prove the rascal's a liar,' Cumnock said to Morsfield, who rallied
him savagely on his lucky escape from another knock-down blow, and tossed
silver on the seat, and said--

'We 'll see if there is a stile.'

'You'll see the stile, sir,' rejoined the man, and winked at their backs.

Both cavaliers, being famished besides baffled, were in sour tempers,
expecting to see just the dead wooden stile, and see it as a grin at
them. Cumnock called on Jove to witness that they had been donkeys enough
to forget to ask the driver how far round on the road it was to the other
end of the cross-cut.

Morsfield, entirely objecting to asinine harness with him, mocked at his
invocation and intonation of the name of Jove.

Cumnock was thereupon stung to a keen recollection of the allusion to his
knock-down blow, and he retorted that there were some men whose wit was
the parrot's.

Morsfield complimented him over the exhibition of a vastly superior and
more serviceable wit, in losing sight of his antagonist after one trial
of him.

Cumnock protested that the loss of time was caused by his friend's
dalliance with the Venus in the chariot.

Morsfield's gall seethed at a flying picture of Mrs. Pagnell, coupled
with the retarding reddened handkerchief business, and he recommended
Cumnock to pay court to the old woman, as the only chance he would have
of acquaintanceship with the mother of Love.

Upon that Cumnock confessed in humility to his not being wealthy.
Morsfield looked a willingness to do the deed he might have to pay for in
tenderer places than the pocket, and named the head as a seat of poverty
with him.

Cumnock then yawned a town fop's advice to a hustling street passenger to
apologize for his rudeness before it was too late. Whereat Morsfield,
certain that his parasitic thrasyleon apeing coxcomb would avoid
extremities, mimicked him execrably.

Now this was a second breach of the implied convention existing among the
exquisitely fine-bred silken-slender on the summits of our mundane
sphere, which demands of them all, that they respect one another's
affectations. It is commonly done, and so the costly people of a single
pattern contrive to push forth, flatteringly to themselves, luxuriant
shoots of individuality in their orchidean glass-house. A violation of
the rule is a really deadly personal attack. Captain Cumnock was
particularly sensitive regarding it, inasmuch as he knew himself not the
natural performer he strove to be, and a mimicry affected him as a
haunting check.

He burst out: 'Damned if I don't understand why you're hated by men and
women both!'

Morsfield took a shock. 'Infernal hornet!' he muttered; for his conquests
had their secret history.

'May and his wife have a balance to pay will trip you yet, you 'll find.'

'Reserve your wrath, sir, for the man who stretched you on your back.'

The batteries of the two continued exchangeing redhot shots, with the
effect, that they had to call to mind they were looking at the stile. A
path across a buttercup meadow was beyond it. They were damped to some
coolness by the sight.

'Upon my word, the trick seems neat!' said Cumnock staring at the
pastoral curtain.

'Whose trick?' he was asked sternly.

'Here or there 's not much matter; they 're off, unless they 're under a
hedge laughing.'

An ache of jealousy and spite was driven through the lover, who groaned,
and presently said--

'I ride on. That old woman can follow. I don't want to hear her
gibberish. We've lost the game--there 's no reckoning the luck. If
there's a chance, it's this way. It smells a trick. He and she--by all
the devils! It has been done in my family--might have been done again.
Tell the men on the plain they can drive home. There's a hundred-pound
weight on your tongue for silence.'

Cumnock cried: 'But we needn't be parting, Dolf! Stick together. Bad
luck's not repeated every day. Keep heart for the good.'

'My heart's shattered, Cumnock. I say it's impossible she can love a
husband twice her age, who treats her--you 've seen. Contempt of that
lady!

By heaven! once in my power, I swear she would have been sacred to me.
But she would have been compelled to face the public and take my hand. I
swear she would have been congratulated on the end of her sufferings.
Worship!--that's what I feel. No woman ever alive had eyes in her head
like that lady's. I repeat her name ten times every night before I go to
sleep. If I had her hand, no, not one kiss would I press on it without
her sanction. I could be in love with her cruelty, if only I had her near
me. I 've lost her--by the Lord, I 've lost her!'

'Pro tem.,' said the captain. 'A plate of red beef and a glass of port
wine alters the view. Too much in the breast, too little in the belly,
capsizes lovers. Old story. Horses that ought to be having a mash between
their ribs make riders despond. Say, shall we back to the town behind us,
or on? Back's the safest, if the chase is up.'

Morsfield declared himself incapable of turning and meeting that chariot.
He sighed heavily. Cumnock offered to cheer him with a song of Captain
Chanter's famous collection, if he liked; but Morsfield gesticulated
abhorrence, and set out at a trot. Song in defeat was a hiss of derision
to him.

He had failed. Having failed, he for the first time perceived the
wildness of a plot that had previously appeared to him as one of the
Yorkshire Morsfields' moves to win an object. Traditionally they stopped
at nothing. There would have been a sunburst of notoriety in the capture
and carrying off of the beautiful Countess of Ormont.

She had eluded him during the downward journey to Steignton. He came on
her track at the village at the junction of the roads above Ashead, and
thence, confiding in the half-connivance or utter stupidity of the fair
one's duenna, despatched a mounted man-servant to his coachman and
footmen, stationed ten miles behind, with orders that they should drive
forthwith to the great plain, and be ready at a point there for two
succeeding days. That was the plot, promptly devised upon receipt of Mrs.
Pagnell's communication; for the wealthy man of pleasure was a strategist
fit to be a soldier, in dexterity not far from rivalling the man by whom
he had been outdone.

An ascetic on the road to success, he dedicated himself to a term of hard
drinking under a reverse; and the question addressed to the chief towns
in the sketch counties his head contained was, which one near would be
likely to supply the port wine for floating him through garlanding dreams
of possession most tastily to blest oblivion.

He was a lover, nevertheless, honest in his fashion, and meant not worse
than to pull his lady through a mire, and wash her with Morsfield soap,
and crown her, and worship. She was in his blood, about him, above him;
he had plunged into her image, as into deeps that broke away in
phosphorescent waves on all sides, reflecting every remembered, every
imagined, aspect of the adored beautiful woman piercing him to extinction
with that last look of her at the moment of flight.

Had he been just a trifle more sincere in the respect he professed for
his lady's duenna, he would have turned on the road to Dornton and a
better fortune. Mrs. Pagnell had now become the ridiculous Paggy of Mrs.
Lawrence Finchley and her circle for the hypocritical gentleman; and he
remarked to Captain Cumnock, when their mutual trot was established:
'Paggy enough for me for a month--good Lord! I can't stand another dose
of her by herself.'

'It's a bird that won't roast or boil or stew,' said the captain.

They were observed trotting along below by Lord Ormont's groom of the
stables on promotion, as he surveyed the country from the chalk-hill rise
and brought the phaeton to a stand, Jonathan Boon, a sharp lad, whose
comprehension was a little muddled by 'the rights of it' in this
adventure. He knew, however, that he did well to follow the directions of
one who was in his lordship's pay, and stretched out the fee with the air
of a shake of the hand, and had a look of the winning side, moreover. A
born countryman could see that.

Boon watched the pair of horsemen trotting to confusion, and clicked in
his cheek. The provincial of the period when coaches were beginning to be
threatened by talk of new-fangled rails was proud to boast of his
outwitting Londoners on material points; and Boon had numerous tales of
how it had been done, to have the laugh of fellows thinking themselves
such razors. They compensated him for the slavish abasement of his whole
neighbourhood under the hectoring of the grand new manufacture of wit in
London:--the inimitable Metropolitan PUN, which came down to the country
by four-in-hand, and stopped all other conversation wherever it was
reported, and would have the roar--there was no resisting it. Indeed, to
be able to see the thing smartly was an entry into community with the
elect of the district; and when the roaring ceased and the thing was
examined, astonishment at the cleverness of it, and the wonderful
shallowness of the seeming deep hole, and the unexhausted bang it had to
go off like a patent cracker, fetched it out for telling over again; and
up went the roar, and up it went at home and in stable-yards, and at the
net puffing of churchwardens on a summer's bench, or in a cricket-booth
after a feast, or round the old inn's taproom fine. The pun, the
wonderful bo-peep of double meanings darting out to surprise and smack
one another from behind words of the same sound, sometimes the same
spelling, overwhelmed the provincial mind with awe of London's occult and
prolific genius.

Yet down yonder you may behold a pair of London gentlemen trotting along
on as fine a fool's errand as ever was undertaken by nincompoops bearing
a scaled letter, marked urgent, to a castle, and the request in it that
the steward would immediately upon perusal down with their you-know-what
and hoist them and birch them a jolly two dozen without parley.

Boon smacked his leg, and then drove ahead merrily.

For this had happened to his knowledge: the gentleman accompanying the
lady had refused to make anything of a halt at the Red Lion, and had said
he was sure there would be a small public-house at the outskirts of the
town, for there always was one; and he proved right, and the lady and he
had descended at the sign of the Jolly Cricketers, and Boon had driven on
for half an hour by order.

This, too, had happened, external to Boon's knowledge: the lady and the
gentleman had witnessed, through the small diamond window-panes of the
Jolly Cricketers' parlour, the passing-by of the two horsemen in pursuit
of them; and the gentleman had stopped the chariot coming on some fifteen
minutes later, but he did not do it at the instigation of the lady.




CHAPTER XX

AT THE SIGN OF THE JOLLY CRICKETERS

The passing by of the pair of horsemen, who so little suspected the
treasure existing behind the small inn's narrow window did homage in
Aminta's mind to her protector's adroitness. Their eyes met without a
smile, though they perceived the grisly comic of the incident. Their
thoughts were on the chariot to follow.

Aminta had barely uttered a syllable since the start of the flight from
Ashead. She had rocked in a swing between sensation and imagination,
exultant, rich with the broad valley of the plain and the high green
waves of the downs at their giant's bound in the flow of curves and sunny
creases to the final fling-off of the dip on sky. Here was a twisted
hawthorn carved clean to the way of the wind; a sheltered clump of
chestnuts holding their blossoms up, as with a thousand cresset-clasping
hands; here were grasses that nodded swept from green to grey; flowers
yellow, white, and blue, significant of a marvellous unknown through the
gates of colour; and gorse-covers giving out the bird, squares of young
wheat, a single fallow threaded by a hare, and cottage gardens, shadowy
garths, wayside flint-heap, woods of the mounds and the dells, fluttering
leaves, clouds: all were swallowed, all were the one unworried
significance. Scenery flew, shifted, returned; again the line of the
downs raced and the hollows reposed simultaneously. They were the same in
change to an eye grown older; they promised, as at the first, happiness
for recklessness. The whole woman was urged to delirious recklessness in
happiness, and she drank the flying scenery as an indication, a likeness,
an encouragement.

When her wild music of the blood had fallen to stillness with the stopped
wheels, she was in the musky, small, low room of the diamond
window-panes, at her companion's disposal for what he might deem the
best: he was her fate. But the more she leaned on a man of self-control,
the more she admired; and an admiration that may not speak itself to the
object present drops inward, stirs the founts; and if these are
repressed, the tenderness which is not allowed to weep will drown
self-pity, hardening the woman to summon scruples in relation to her
unworthiness. He might choose to forget, but the more she admired, the
less could her feminine conscience permit of an utter or of any
forgetfulness that she was not the girl Browny, whom he once
loved--perhaps loved now, under some illusion of his old passion for
her--does love now, ill-omened as he is in that! She read him by her
startled reading of her own heart, and she constrained her will to keep
from doing, saying, looking aught that would burden without gracing his
fortunes. For, as she felt, a look, a word, a touch would do the
mischief; she had no resistance behind her cold face, only the physical
scruple, which would become the moral unworthiness if in any way she
induced him to break his guard and blow hers to shreds. An honourable
conscience before the world has not the same certificate in love's pure
realm. They are different kingdoms. A girl may be of both; a married
woman, peering outside the narrow circle of her wedding-ring, should let
her eyelids fall and the unseen fires consume her.

Their common thought was now, Will the chariot follow?

What will he do if it comes? was an unformed question with Aminta.

He had formed and not answered it, holding himself, sincerely at the
moment, bound to her wishes. Near the end of Ashead main street she had
turned to him in her seat beside the driver, and conveyed silently, with
the dental play of her tongue and pouted lips, 'No title.'

Upon that sign, waxen to those lips, he had said to the driver, 'You took
your orders from Lady Charlotte?

And the reply, 'Her ladyship directed me sir, exonerated Lord Ormont so
far.

Weyburn remembered then a passage of one of her steady looks, wherein an
oracle was mute. He tried several of the diviner's shots to interpret it:
she was beyond his reach. She was in her blissful delirium of the flight,
and reproached him with giving her the little bit less to resent--she who
had no sense of resentment, except the claim on it to excuse.

Their landlady entered the room to lay the cloth for tea and eggs. She
made offer of bacon as well, homecured. She was a Hampshire woman, and
understood the rearing of pigs. Her husband had been a cricketer, and
played for his county. He didn't often beat Hampshire! They had a good
garden of vegetables, and grass-land enough for two cows. They made their
own bread, their own butter, but did not brew.

Weyburn pronounced for a plate of her home-cured. She had children, the
woman told him--two boys and a girl. Her husband wished for a girl. Her
eldest boy wished to be a sailor, and would walk miles to a pond to sail
bits of wood on it, though there had never been a sea-faring man in her
husband's family or her own. She agreed with the lady and gentleman that
it might be unwise to go contrary to the boy's bent. Going to school or
coming home, a trickle of water would stop him.

Aminta said to her companion in French, 'Have you money?'

She chased his blood. 'Some: sufficient. I think.' It stamped their
partnership.

'I have but a small amount. Aunt was our paymaster. We will buy the
little boy a boat to sail. You are pale.'

'I 've no notion of it.'

'Something happened it Ashead.'

'It would not have damaged my complexion.'

He counted his money. Aminta covertly handed him her purse. Their fingers
touched. The very minor circumstance of their landlady being in the room
dammed a flood.

Her money and his amounted to seventeen pounds. The sum-total was a
symbol of days that were a fiery wheel.

Honour and blest adventure might travel together two days or three, he
thought. If the chariot did not pass:--Lord Ormont had willed it. A man
could not be said to swerve in his duty when acting to fulfil the
master's orders, and Mrs. Pagnell was proved a hoodwinked duenna, and
Morsfield was in the air. The breathing Aminta had now a common purse
with her first lover. For three days or more they were, it would seem, to
journey together, alone together: the prosecution of his duty imposed it
on him. Sooth to say, Weyburn knew that a spice of passion added to a
bowl of reason makes a sophist's mess; but he fancied an absolute
reliance on Aminta's dignity, and his respect for her was another
barrier. He begged the landlady's acceptance of two shillings for her
boy's purchase of a boat, advising her to have him taught early to swim.
Both he and Aminta had a feeling that they could be helpful in some
little things on the road if the chariot did not pass.

Justification began to speak loudly against the stopping of the chariot
if it did pass. The fact that sweet wishes come second, and not so
loudly, assured him they were quite secondary; for the lover sunk to
sophist may be self-beguiled by the arts which render him the potent
beguiler.

'We are safe here,' he said, and thrilled her with the 'we' behind the
curtaining leaded window-panes.

'What is it you propose?' Her voice was lower than she intended. To that
she ascribed his vivid flush. It kindled the deeper of her dark hue.

He mentioned her want of luggage, and the purchase of a kit.

She said, 'Have we the means?'

'We can adjust the means to the ends.'

'We must be sparing of expenses.'

'Will you walk part of the way?'

'I should like it.'

'We shall be longer on the journey.'

'We shall not find it tiresome, I hope.'

'We can say so, if we do.'

'We are not strangers.'

The recurrence of the 'we' had an effect of wedding: it was fatalistic,
it would come; but, in truth, there was pleasure in it, and the pleasure
was close to consciousness of some guilt when vowing itself innocent.

And, no, they were not strangers; hardly a word could they utter without
cutting memory to the quick; their present breath was out of the far
past.

Love told them both that they were trembling into one another's arms, not
voluntarily, against the will with each of them; they knew it would be
for life; and Aminta's shamed reserves were matched to make an obstacle
by his consideration for her good name and her station, for his own claim
to honest citizenship also.

Weyburn acted on his instinct at sight of the postillion and the chariot;
he flung the window wide and shouted. Then he said, 'It is decided,' and
he felt the rightness of the decision, like a man who has given a
condemned limb to the surgeon.

Aminta was passive as a water-weed in the sway of the tide. Hearing it to
be decided, she was relieved. What her secret heart desired, she kept
secret, almost a secret from herself. He was not to leave her; so she had
her permitted wish, she had her companion plus her exclamatory aunt, who
was a protection, and she had learnt her need of the smallest protection.

'I can scarcely believe I see you, my dear, dear child!' Mrs. Pagnell
cried, upon entering the small inn parlour; and so genuine was her
satisfaction that for a time she paid no heed to the stuffiness of the
room, the meanness of the place, the unfitness of such a hostelry to
entertain ladies--the Countess of Ormont!

'Eat here?' Mrs. Pagnell asked, observing the preparations for the meal.
Her pride quailed, her stomach abjured appetite. But she forbore from
asking how it was that the Countess of Ormont had come to the place.

At a symptom of her intention to indulge in disgust; Aminta brought up
Mr. Morsfield by name; whereupon Mrs. Pagnell showed she had reflected on
her conduct in relation to the gentleman, and with the fear of the earl
if she were questioned.

Home-made bread and butter, fresh eggs and sparkling fat of bacon invited
her to satisfy her hunger. Aminta let her sniff at the teapot unpunished;
the tea had a rustic aroma of ground-ivy, reminding Weyburn of his
mother's curiosity to know the object of an old man's plucking of
hedgeside leaves in the environs of Bruges one day, and the simple reply
to her French, 'Tea for the English.' A hint of an anecdote interested
and enriched the stores of Mrs. Pagnell, so she capped it and partook of
the infusion ruefully.

'But the bread is really good,' she said, 'and we are unlikely to be seen
leaving the place by any person of importance.'

'Unless Mr. Morsfield should be advised to return this way,' said Aminta.

Her aunt proposed for a second cup. She was a manageable woman; the same
scourge had its instant wholesome effect on her when she snubbed the
secretary.

So she complimented his trencherman's knife, of which the remarkably fine
edge was proof enough that he had come heart-whole out of the trial of an
hour or so's intimate companionship with a beautiful woman, who had never
been loved, never could be loved by man, as poor Mr. Morsfield loved her!
He had sworn to having fasted three whole days and nights after his first
sight of Aminta. Once, he said, her eyes pierced him so that he dreamed
of a dagger in his bosom, and woke himself plucking at it. That was love,
as a born gentleman connected with a baronetcy and richer than many lords
took the dreadful passion. A secretary would have no conception of such
devoted extravagance. At the most he might have attempted to insinuate a
few absurd, sheepish soft nothings, and the Countess of Ormont would know
right well how to shrivel him with one of her looks. No lady of the land
could convey so much either way, to attract or to repel, as Aminta,
Countess of Ormont! And the man, the only man, insensible to her charm or
her scorn, was her own wedded lord and husband. Old, to be sure, and
haughty, his pride might not allow him to overlook poor Mr. Morsfield's
unintentional offence. But the presence of the countess's aunt was a
reply to any charge he might seek to establish. Unhappily, the case is
one between men on their touchiest point, when women are pushed aside,
and justice and religion as well. We might be living in a heathen land,
for aught that morality has to say.

Mrs. Pagnell fussed about being seen on her emergence from the Jolly
Cricketers. Aminta sent Weyburn to spy for the possible reappearance of
Mr. Morsfield. He reported a horseman; a butcher-boy clattered by. Aminta
took the landlady's hand, under her aunt's astonished gaze, and said: 'I
shall not forget your house and your attention to us.' She spoke with a
shake of her voice. The landlady curtseyed and smiled, curtseyed and
almost whimpered. The house was a poor one, she begged to say; they
didn't often have such guests, but whoever came to it they did their best
to give good food and drink.

Hearing from Weyburn that the chariot was bound to go through Winchester,
she spoke of a brother, a baker there, the last surviving member of her
family and, after some talk, Weyburn offered to deliver a message of
health and greeting at the baker's shop. There was a waving of hands,
much nodding and curtseying, as the postillion resumed his
demi-volts--all to the stupefaction of Mrs. Pagnell; but she dared not
speak, she had Morsfield on the mouth. Nor could she deny the excellent
quality of the bread and butter, and milk, too, at the sign of the Jolly
Cricketers. She admitted, moreover, that the food and service of the
little inn belonged in their unpretentious honesty to the, kind we call
old English: the dear old simple country English of the brotherly
interchange in sight of heaven--good stuff for good money, a matter with
a blessing on it.

'But,' said she, 'my dear Aminta, I do not and I cannot understand looks
of grateful affection at a small innkeeper's wife paid, and I don't doubt
handsomely paid, for her entertainment of you.'

'I feel it,' said Aminta; tears rushed to her eyelids, overflowing, and
her features were steady.

'Ah, poor dear! that I do understand,' her aunt observed. 'Any little
kindness moves you to-day; and well it may.'

'Yes, aunty,' said Aminta, and in relation to the cause of her tears she
was the less candid of the two.

So far did she carry her thanks for a kindness as to glance back through
her dropping tears at the sign-board of the Jolly Cricketers; where two
brave batsmen cross for the second of a certain three runs, if only the
fellow wheeling legs, face up after the ball in the clouds, does but miss
his catch: a grand suspensory moment of the game, admirably chosen by the
artist to arrest the wayfarer and promote speculation. For will he let
her slip through his fingers when she comes down? or will he have her
fast and tight? And in the former case, the bats are tearing their legs
off for just number nought. And in the latter, there 's a wicket down,
and what you may call a widower walking it bat on shoulder, parted from
his mate for that mortal innings, and likely to get more chaff than
consolation when he joins the booth.




CHAPTER XXI

UNDER-CURRENTS IN THE MINDS OF LADY CHARLOTTE AND LORD ORMONT

Another journey of travellers to London, in the rear of the chariot, was
not diversified by a single incident or refreshed by scraps of dialogue.
Lady Charlotte had her brother Rowsley with her, and he might be
taciturn,--she drove her flocks of thoughts, she was busily and
contentedly occupied. Although separation from him stirred her mind more
excitedly over their days and deeds of boy and girl, her having him near,
and having now won him to herself, struck her as that old time's harvest,
about as much as can be hoped for us from life, when we have tasted it.

The scene of the invasion of Steignton by the woman and her aunt, and
that man Morsfield, was a steel engraving among her many rapid and
featureless cogitations. She magnified the rakishness of the woman's hand
on hip in view of the house, and she magnified the woman's insolence in
bringing that man Morsfield--to share probably the hospitality of
Steignton during the master's absence! Her trick of caricature, whenever
she dealt with adversaries, was active upon the three persons under
observation of the windows. It was potent to convince her that her
brother Rowsley had cast the woman to her native obscurity. However, Lady
Charlotte could be just: the woman's figure, and as far as could be seen
of her face, accounted for Rowsley's entanglement.

Why chastize that man Morsfield at all? Calling him out would give a
further dip to the name of Ormont. A pretty idea, to be punishing a roan
for what you thank him for! He did a service; and if he's as mad about
her as he boasts, he can take her and marry her now Rowsley 's free of
her.

Morsfield says he wants to marry her--wants nothing better. Then let him.
Rowsley has shown him there 's no legal impediment. Pity that young
Weyburn had to be sent to do watch-dog duty. But Rowsley would not have
turned her back to travel alone: that is, without a man to guard. He 's
too chivalrous.

The sending of Weyburn, she now fancied, was her own doing, and Lady
Charlotte attributed it to her interpretation of her brother's heart of
chivalry; though it would have been the wiser course, tending straight
and swift to the natural end, if the two women and their Morsfield had
received the dismissal to travel as they came.

One sees it after the event. Yes, only Rowsley would not have dismissed
her without surety that she would be protected. So it was the right thing
prompted on the impulse of the moment. And young Weyburn would meet some
difficulty in protecting his 'Lady Ormont,' if she had no inclination for
it.

Analyzing her impulse of the moment, Lady Charlotte credited herself, not
unjustly, with a certain considerateness for the woman, notwithstanding
the woman's violent intrusion between brother and sister. Knowing the
world, and knowing the upper or Beanstalk world intimately, she winked at
nature's passions. But when the legitimate affection of a brother and
sister finds them interposing, they are, as little parsonically as
possible, reproved. If persistently intrusive, they are handed to the
constable.

How, supposing the case of a wife? Well, then comes the contest; and it
is with an inferior, because not a born, legitimacy of union; which may
be, which here and there is, affection; is generally the habit of
partnership. It is inferior, from not being the union of the blood; it is
a matter merely of the laws and the tastes. No love, she reasoned, is
equal to the love of brother and sister: not even the love of parents for
offspring, or of children for mother and father. Brother and sister have
the holy young days in common; they have lastingly the recollection of
their youth, the golden time when they were themselves, or the best of
themselves. A wife is a stranger from the beginning; she is necessarily
three parts a stranger up to the finish of the history. She thinks she
can absorb the husband. Not if her husband has a sister living! She may
cry and tear for what she calls her own: she will act prudently in bowing
her head to the stronger tie. Is there a wife in Europe who broods on her
husband's merits and his injuries as the sister of Thomas Rowsley, Earl
of Ormont does? or one to defend his good name, one to work for his
fortunes, as devotedly?

Over and over Lady Charlotte drove her flocks, of much the same pattern,
like billows before a piping gale. They might be similar--a puffed
iteration, and might be meaningless and wearisome; the gale was a power
in earnest.

Her brother sat locked-up. She did as a wife would not have done, and
held her peace. He spoke; she replied in a few words--blunt, to the
point, as no wife would have done.

Her dear, warm-hearted Rowsley was shaken by the blow he had been obliged
to deal to the woman--poor woman!--if she felt it. He was always the
principal sufferer where the feelings were concerned. He was never for
hurting any but the enemy.

His 'Ha, here we dine!' an exclamation of a man of imprisoned yawns at
the apparition of the turnkey, was delightful to her, for a proof of
health and sanity and enjoyment of the journey.

'Yes, and I've one bottle left, in the hamper, of the hock you like,' she
said. 'That Mr. Weyburn likes it too. He drank a couple coming down.'

She did not press for talk; his ready appetite was the flower of
conversation to her. And he slept well, he said. Her personal experience
on that head was reserved.

London enfolded them in the late evening of a day brewing storm. My lord
heard at the door of his house that Lady Ormont had not arrived. Yet she
had started a day in advance of him. He looked down, up and round at
Charlotte. He looked into an empty hall. Pagnell was not there. A sight
of Pagnell would, strange to say, have been agreeable.

Storm was in the air, and Aminta was on the road. Lightning has, before
now, frightened carriage-horses. She would not misconduct herself; she
would sit firm. No woman in England had stouter nerve--few men.

But the carriage might be smashed. He was ignorant of the road she had
chosen for her return. Out of Wiltshire there would be no cliffs,
quarries, river-banks, presenting dangers. Those dangers, however, spring
up when horses have the frenzy.

Charlotte was nodded at, for a signal to depart; and she drove off,
speculating on the bullet of a grey eye, which was her brother's adieu to
her.

The earl had apparently a curiosity to inspect vacant rooms. His Aminta's
drawing-room, her boudoir, her bed-chamber, were submissive in showing
bed, knickknacks, furniture. They told the tale of a corpse.

He washed and dressed, and went out to his club to dine, hating the faces
of the servants of the house, just able to bear with the attentions of
his valet.

Thunder was rattling at ten at night. The house was again the tomb.

She had high courage, that girl. She might be in a bed, with her
window-blind up, calmly waiting for the flashes: lightning excited her.
He had seen her lying at her length quietly, her black hair scattered on
the pillow, like shadow of twigs and sprays on moonlit grass, illuminated
intermittently; smiling to him, but her heart out and abroad, wild as any
witch's. If on the road, she would not quail. But it was necessary to be
certain of her having a trusty postillion.

He walked through the drench and scream of a burst cloud to the
posting-office. There, after some trouble, he obtained information
directing him to the neighbouring mews. He had thence to find his way to
the neighbouring pot-house.

The report of the postillion was, on the whole, favourable. The man
understood horses--was middle-aged--no sot; he was also a man with an eye
for weather, proverbially in the stables a cautious hand--slow 'Old
Slow-and-sure,' he was called; by name, Joshua Abnett.

'Oh, Joshua Abnett?' said the earl, and imprinted it on his memory, for
the service it was to do during the night.

Slow-and-sure Joshua Abnett would conduct her safely, barring accidents.
For accidents we must all be prepared. She was a heroine in an accident.
The earl recalled one and more: her calm face, brightened eyes, easy
laughter. Hysterics were not in her family.

She did wrong to let that fellow Morsfield accompany her. Possibly he had
come across her on the road, and she could not shake him off. Judging by
all he knew of her, the earl believed she would not have brought the
fellow into the grounds of Steignton of her free will. She had always a
particular regard for decency.

According to the rumour, Morsfield and the woman Pagnell were very thick
together. He barked over London of his being a bitten dog. He was near to
the mad dog's fate, as soon as a convenient apology for stopping his
career could be invented.

The thinking of the lesson to Morsfield on the one hand, and of the
slow-and-sure postillion Joshua Abriett on the other, lulled Lord Ormont
to a short repose in his desolate house. Of Weyburn he had a glancing
thought, that the young man would be a good dog to guard the countess
from a mad dog, as he had reckoned in commissioning him.

Next day was the day of sunlight Aminta loved.

It happens with the men who can strike, supposing them of the order of
civilized creatures, that when they have struck heavily, however deserved
the blow, a liking for the victim will assail them, if they discover no
support in hatred; and no sooner is the spot of softness touched than
they are invaded by hosts of the stricken person's qualities, which plead
to be taken as virtues, and are persuasive. The executioner did rightly.
But it is the turn for the victim to declare the blow excessive.

Now, a just man, who has overdone the stroke, will indemnify and console
in every way, short of humiliating himself.

He had an unusually clear vision of the scene at Steignton. Surprise and
wrath obscured it at the moment, for reflection to bring it out in sharp
outline; and he was able now to read and translate into inoffensive
English the inherited Spanish of it, which violated nothing of Aminta's
native 'donayre,' though it might look on English soil outlandish or
stagey.

Aminta stood in sunlight on the greensward. She stood hand on hip, gazing
at the house she had so long desired to see, without a notion that she
committed an offence. Implicitly upon all occasions she took her
husband's word for anything he stated, and she did not consequently
imagine him to be at Steignton. So, then, she had no thought of running
down from London to hunt and confound him, as at first it appeared. The
presence of that white-faced Morsfield vindicated her sufficiently so
far. And let that fellow hang till the time for cutting him down! Not
she, but Pagnell, seems to have been the responsible party. And, by the
way, one might prick the affair with Morsfield by telling him publicly
that his visit to inspect Steignton was waste of pains, for he would not
be accepted as a tenant in the kennels, et caetera.

Well, poor girl, she satisfied her curiosity, not aware that a few weeks
farther on would have done it to the full.

As to Morsfield, never once, either in Vienna or in Paris, had she,
warmly admired though she was, all eyes telescoping and sun-glassing on
her, given her husband an hour or half an hour or two minutes of anxiety.
Letters came. The place getting hot, she proposed to leave it.

She had been rather hardly tried. There are flowers we cannot keep
growing in pots. Her fault was, that instead of flinging down her glove
and fighting it out openly, she listened to Pagnell, and began the game
of Pull. If he had a zest for the game, it was to stump the woman
Pagnell. So the veteran fancied in his amended mind.

This intrusive sunlight chased him from the breakfast-table and out of
the house. She would be enjoying it somewhere; but the house empty of a
person it was used to contain had an atmosphere of the vaults, and inside
it the sunlight she loved had an effect of taunting him singularly.

He called on his upholsterer and heard news to please her. The house
hired for a month above Great Marlow was ready; her ladyship could enter
it to-morrow. It pleased my lord to think that she might do so, and not
bother him any more about the presentation at Court during the current
year. In spite of certain overtures from the military authorities, and
roused eulogistic citations of his name in the newspapers and magazines,
he was not on friendly terms with his country yet, having contracted the
fatal habit of irony, which, whether hitting or musing its object, stirs
old venom in our wound, twitches the feelings. Unfortunately for him,
they had not adequate expression unless he raged within; so he had to
shake up wrath over his grievances, that he might be satisfactorily
delivered; and he was judged irreconcilable when he had subsided into the
quietest contempt, from the prospective seat of a country estate, in the
society of a young wife who adored him.

An exile from the sepulchre of that house void of the consecration of
ashes, he walked the streets and became reconciled to street sunlight.
There were no carriage accidents to disturb him with apprehensions.
Besides, the slowness of the postillion Joshua Abnett, which probably
helped to the delay, was warrant of his sureness. And in an accident the
stringy fellow, young Weyburn, could be trusted for giving his attention
to the ladies--especially to the younger of the two, taking him for the
man his elders were at his age. As for Pagnell, a Providence watches over
the Pagnells! Mortals have no business to interfere.

An accident on water would be a frolic to his girl. Swimming was a gift
she had from nature. Pagnell vowed she swam out a mile at Dover when she
was twelve. He had seen her in blue water: he had seen her readiness to
jump to the rescue once when a market-woman, stepping out of a boat to
his yacht on the Tabus, plumped in. She had the two kinds of courage--the
impulsive and the reasoned. What is life to man or woman if we are not to
live it honourably? Men worthy of the name say this. The woman who says
and acts on it is--well, she is fit company for them. But only the woman
of natural courage can say it and act on it.

Would she come by Winchester, or choose the lower road by Salisbury and
Southampton, to smell the sea? perhaps-like her!--dismissing the chariot
and hiring a yacht for a voyage round the coast and up the Thames. She
had an extraordinary love of the sea, yet she preferred soldiers to
sailors. A woman? Never one of them more a woman! But it came of her
quickness to take the colour and share the tastes of the man to whom she
gave herself.

My lord was beginning to distinguish qualities in a character.

He was informed at the mews that Joshua Abnett was on the road still.
Joshua seemed to be a roadster of uncommon unprogressiveness, proper to a
framed picture.

While debating whether to lunch at his loathed club or at a home loathed
more, but open to bright enlivenment any instant, Lord Ormont beheld a
hat lifted and Captain May saluting him. They were near a famous
gambling-house in St. James's Street.

'Good! I am glad to see you,' he said. 'Tell me you know Mr. Morsfield
pretty well. I'm speaking of my affair. He has been trespassing down on
my grounds at Steignton, and I think of taking the prosecution of him
into my own hands. Is he in town?'

'I 've just left his lame devil Cumnock, my lord,' said May, after a
slight grimace. 'They generally run in tandem.'

'Will you let me know?'

'At once, when I hear.'

'You will call on me? Before noon?'

'Any service required?'

'My respects to your wife.'

'Your lordship is very good.'

Captain May bloomed at a civility paid to his wife. He was a smallish,
springy, firm-faced man, devotee of the lady bearing his name and
wielding him. In the days when duelling flourished on our land, frail
women could be powerful.

The earl turned from him to greet Lord Adderwood and a superior officer
of his Profession, on whom he dropped a frigid nod. He held that all but
the rank and file, and a few subalterns, of the service had abandoned him
to do homage to the authorities. The Club he frequented was not his
military Club. Indeed, lunching at any Club in solitariness that day,
with Aminta away from home, was bitter penance. He was rejoiced by Lord
Adderwood's invitation, and hung to him after the lunch; for a horrible
prospect of a bachelor dinner intimated astonishingly that he must have
become unawares a domesticated man.

The solitary later meal of a bachelor was consumed, if the word will suit
a rabbit's form of feeding. He fatigued his body by walking the streets
and the bridge of the Houses of Parliament, and he had some sleep under a
roof where a life like death, or death apeing life, would have seemed to
him the Joshua Abnett, if he had been one to take up images.

Next day he was under the obligation to wait at home till noon. Shortly
before noon a noise of wheels drew him to the window. A young lady, in
whom he recognized Aminta's little school friend, of some name, stepped
out of a fly. He met her in the hall.

She had expected to be welcomed by Aminta, and she was very timid on
finding herself alone with the earl. He, however, treated her as the
harbinger bird, wryneck of the nightingale, sure that Aminta would keep
her appointment unless an accident delayed. He had forgotten her name,
but not her favourite pursuit of botany; and upon that he discoursed, and
he was interested, not quite independently of the sentiment of her being
there as a guarantee of Aminta's return. Still he knew his English earth,
and the counties and soil for particular wild-flowers, grasses, mosses;
and he could instruct her and inspire a receptive pupil on the theme of
birds, beasts, fishes, insects, in England and other lands.

He remained discoursing without much weariness till four of the
afternoon. Then he had his reward. The chariot was at the door, and the
mounted figure of Joshua Abnett, on which he cast not a look or a
thought. Aminta was alone. She embraced Selina Collett warmly, and said,
in friendly tones, 'Ah! my lord, you are in advance of me.'

She had dropped Mrs. Pagnell and Mr. Weyburn at two suburban houses;
working upon her aunt's dread of the earl's interrogations as regarded
Mr. Morsfield. She had, she said, chosen to take the journey easily on
her return, and enjoyed it greatly.

My lord studied her manner more than her speech. He would have
interpreted a man's accurately enough. He read hers to signify that she
had really enjoyed her journey, 'made the best of it,' and did not intend
to be humble about her visit to Steignton without his permission; but
that, if hurt at the time, she had recovered her spirits, and was ready
for a shot or two--to be nothing like a pitched battle. And she might
fire away to her heart's content: wordy retorts would not come from him;
he had material surprises in reserve for her. His question concerning
Morsfield knew its answer, and would only be put under pressure.

Comparison of the friends Aminta and Selina was forced by their standing
together, and the representation in little Selina of the inferiority of
the world of women to his Aminta; he thought of several, and splendid
women, foreign and English. The comparison rose sharply now, with
Aminta's novel, airy, homely, unchallengeing assumption of an equal
footing beside her lord, in looks and in tones that had cast off
constraint of the adoring handmaid, to show the full-blown woman,
rightful queen of her half of the dominion. Between the Aminta of then
and now, the difference was marked as between Northern and Southern
women: the frozen-mouthed Northerner and the pearl and rose-nipped
Southerner; those who smirk in dropping congealed monosyllables, and
those who radiantly laugh out the voluble chatter.

Conceiving this to the full in a mind destitute of imagery, but
indicative of the thing as clearly as the planed, unpolished woodwork of
a cabinet in a carpenter's shop, Lord Ormont liked her the better for the
change, though she was not the woman whose absence from his house had
caused him to go mooning half a night through the streets, and though it
forewarned him of a tougher bit of battle, if battle there was to be.

He was a close reader of surfaces. But in truth, the change so notable
came of the circumstance, that some little way down below the surface he
perused, where heart weds mind, or nature joins intellect, for the two to
beget a resolution, the battle of the man and the woman had been fought,
and the man beaten.




CHAPTER XXII

TREATS OF THE FIRST DAY OF THE CONTENTION OF BROTHER AND SISTER

In the contest rageing at mid-sea still between the man and the woman, it
is the one who is hard to the attractions of the other that will make
choice of the spot and have the advantages. A short time earlier Lord
Ormont could have marked it out at his leisure. He would have been unable
to comprehend why it was denied him to do so now; for he was master of
himself, untroubled by conscience, unaware, since he was assured of his
Aminta's perfect safety and his restored sense of possession, that any
taint of softness in him had reversed the condition of their alliance. He
felt benevolently the much he had to bestow, and was about to bestow.
Meanwhile, without complicity on his part, without his knowledge, yet
absolutely involving his fate, the battle had gone against him in
Aminta's breast.

Like many of his class and kind, he was thoroughly acquainted with the
physical woman, and he took that first and very engrossing volume of the
great Book of Mulier for all the history. A powerful wing of imagination,
strong as the flappers of the great Roc of Arabian story, is needed to
lift the known physical woman even a very little way up into azure
heavens. It is far easier to take a snap-shot at the psychic, and tumble
her down from her fictitious heights to earth. The mixing of the two make
nonsense of her. She was created to attract the man, for an excellent
purpose in the main. We behold her at work incessantly. One is a fish to
her hook; another a moth to her light. By the various arts at her
disposal she will have us, unless early in life we tear away the
creature's coloured gauzes and penetrate to her absurdly simple
mechanism. That done, we may, if we please, dominate her. High priests of
every religion have successively denounced her as the chief enemy. To
subdue and bid her minister to our satisfaction is therefore a right
employment of man's unperverted superior strength. Of course, we keep to
ourselves the woman we prefer; but we have to beware of an uxorious
preference, or we are likely to resemble the Irishman with his wolf, and
dance imprisoned in the hug of our captive.

For it is the creature's characteristic to be lastingly awake, in her
moments of utmost slavishness most keenly awake to the chances of the
snaring of the stronger. Be on guard, then. Lord Ormont had been on guard
then and always: his instinct of commandership kept him on guard. He was
on guard now when his Aminta played, not the indignant and the frozen,
but the genially indifferent. She did it well, he admitted.

Had it been the indignant she played, he might have stooped to cajole the
handsome queen of gypsies she was, without acknowledgement of her right
to complain. Feeling that he was about to be generous, he shrugged. He
meant to speak in deeds.

Lady Charlotte's house was at the distance of a stroller's half-hour
across Hyde Park westward from his own. Thither he walked, a few minutes
after noon, prepared for cattishness. He could fancy that he had hitherto
postponed the visit rather on her account, considering that he would have
to crush her if she humped and spat, and he hoped to be allowed to do it
gently. There would certainly be a scene.

Lady Charlotte was at home.

'Always at home to you, Rowsley, at any hour. Mr. Eglett has driven down
to the City. There 's a doctor in a square there's got a reputation for
treating weak children, and he has taken down your grand-nephew Bobby to
be inspected. Poor boy comes of a poor stock on the father's side. Mr.
Eglett would have that marriage. Now he sees wealth isn't everything.
Those Benlews are rushlights. However, Elizabeth stood with her father to
have Robert Benlew, and this poor child 's the result. I wonder whether
they have consciences!'

My lord prolonged the sibilation of his 'Yes,' in the way of
absent-minded men. He liked little Bobby, but had to class the boy second
for the present.

'You have our family jewels in your keeping, Charlotte?'

'No, I haven't,--and you know I haven't, Rowsley.' She sprang to arms,
the perfect porcupine, at his opening words, as he had anticipated.

'Where are the jewels?'

'They're in the cellars of my bankers, and safe there, you may rely on
it.'

'I want them.'

'I want to have them safe; and there they stop.'

'You must get them and hand them over.'

'To whom?'

'To me.'

'What for?'

'They will be worn by the Countess of Ormont'

'Who 's she?'

'The lady who bears the title.'

'The only Countess of Ormont I know of is your mother and mine, Rowsley;
and she's dead.'

'The Countess of Ormont I speak of is alive.'

Lady Charlotte squared to him. 'Who gives her the title?'

'She bears it by right.'

'Do you mean to say, Rowsley, you have gone and married the woman since
we came up from Steignton?'

'She is my wife.'

'Anyhow, she won't have our family jewels.'

'If you had swallowed them, you'd have to disgorge.'

'I don't give up our family jewels to such people.'

'Do you decline to call on her?'

'I do: I respect our name and blood.'

'You will send the order to your bankers for them to deliver the jewels
over to me at my house this day.'

'Look here, Rowsley; you're gone cracked or senile. You 're in the hands
of one of those clever wenches who catch men of your age. She may catch
you; she shan't lay hold of our family jewels: they stand for the honour
of our name and blood.'

'They are to be at my house-door at four o'clock this afternoon.'

'They'll not stir.'

'Then I go down to order your bankers and give them the order.'

'My bankers won't attend to it without the order from me.'

'You will submit to the summons of my lawyers.'

'You're bent on a public scandal, are you?'

'I am bent on having the jewels.'

'They are not yours; you 've no claim to them; they are heirlooms in our
family. Things most sacred to us are attached to them. They belong to our
history. There 's the tiara worn by the first Countess of Ormont. There
's the big emerald of the necklace-pendant--you know the story of it. Two
rubies not counted second to any in England. All those diamonds! I wore
the cross and the two pins the day I was presented after my marriage.'

'The present Lady Ormont will wear them the day she is presented.'

'She won't wear them at Court.'

'She will.'

'Don't expect the Lady Ormont of tradesmen and footmen to pass the Lord
Chamberlain.'

'That matter will be arranged for next season. Now I 've done.'

'So have I; and you have my answer, Rowsley.' They quitted their chairs.

'You decline to call on my wife?' said the earl.

Lady Charlotte replied: 'Understand me, now. If the woman has won you
round to legitimize the connection, first, I've a proper claim to see her
marriage lines. I must have a certificate of her birth. I must have a
testified account of her life before you met her and got the worst of it.
Then, as the case may be, I 'll call on her.

'You will behave yourself when you call.'

'But she won't have our family jewels.'

'That affair has been settled by me.'

'I should be expecting to hear of them as decorating the person of one of
that man Morsfield's mistresses.'

The earl's brow thickened. 'Charlotte, I smacked your cheek when you were
a girl.'

'I know you did. You might again, and I wouldn't cry out. She travels
with that Morsfield; you 've seen it. He goes boasting of her. Gypsy or
not, she 's got queer ways.'

'I advise you, you had better learn at once to speak of her
respectfully.'

'I shall have enough to go through, if what you say's true, with
questions of the woman's antecedents and her people, and the date of the
day of this marriage. When was the day you did it? I shall have to give
an answer. You know cousins of ours, and the way they 'll be pressing,
and comparing ages and bawling rumours. None of them imagined my brother
such a fool as to be wheedled into marrying her. You say it's done,
Rowsley. Was it done yesterday or the day before?'

Lord Ormont found unexpectedly that she struck on a weak point. Married
from the first? Why not tell me of it? He could hear her voice as if she
had spoken the words. And how communicate the pell-mell of reasons?

'You're running vixen. The demand I make is for the jewels,' he said.

'You won't have them, Rowsley--not for her.'

'You think of compelling me to use force?'

'Try it.'

'You swear the jewels are with your bankers?'

'I left them in charge of my bankers, and they've not been moved by me.'

'Well, it must be force.'

'Nothing short of it when the honour of our family's concerned.'

It was rather worse than the anticipated struggle with this Charlotte,
though he had kept his temper. The error was in supposing that an hour's
sharp conflict would settle it, as he saw. The jewels required a siege.

'When does Eglett return?' he asked.

'Back to lunch. You stay and lunch here, Rowsley we don't often have
you.'

The earl contemplated her, measuring her powers of resistance for a
prolonged engagement. Odd that the pride which had withdrawn him from the
service of an offending country should pitch him into a series of tussles
with women, for its own confusion! He saw that, too, in his dim
reflectiveness, and held the country answerable for it.

Mr. Eglett was taken into confidence by him privately after lunch. Mr.
Eglett's position between the brother and sister was perplexing;
habitually he thought his wife had strong good sense, in spite of the
costliness of certain actions at law not invariably confirming his
opinion; he thought also that the earl's demand must needs be considered
obediently. At the same time, his wife's objections to the new Countess
of Ormont, unmasked upon the world, seemed very legitimate; though it
might be asked why the earl should not marry, marrying the lady who
pleased him. But if, in the words of his wife, the lady had no claim to
be called a lady, the marriage was deplorable. On the other hand, Lord
Ormont spoke of her in terms of esteem, and he was no fondling dotard.

How to compromise the matter for the sake of peace? The man perpetually
plunged into strife by his combative spouse, cried the familiar question
again; and at every suggestion of his on behalf of concord he heard from
Lady Charlotte that he had no principles, or else from Lord Ormont that
his head must be off his shoulders.

The man for peace had the smallest supply of language, and so, unless he
took a side and fought, his active part was football between them.

It went on through the afternoon up to five o'clock. No impression was
betrayed by Lady Charlotte.

She congratulated her brother on the recruit he had enlisted. He smiled
his grimmest of the lips drawn in. A combat, perceptibly of some
extension, would soon give him command of the man of peace; and energy to
continue attacks will break down the energies of any dogged defensive
stand.

He deferred the discussion with his unreasonable sister until the next
day at half-past twelve o'clock. Lady Charlotte nodded to the
appointment. She would have congratulated herself without irony on the
result of the first day's altercation but for her brother Rowsley's
unusual and ominous display of patience. Twice during the wrangle she had
to conceal a difficult breathing. She felt a numbness in one arm now it
was over, and mentally complimented her London physician on the
unerringness of his diagnosis. Her heart, however, complained of the
cruelty of having in the end, perhaps, if the wrangle should be
protracted, to yield, for sheer weakness, without ceasing to beat.




CHAPTER XXIII

THE ORMONT JEWELS

At half-past twelve of the noon next day Lord Ormont was at Lady
Charlotte's house door. She welcomed him affectionately, as if nothing
were in dispute; he nodded an acceptance of her greetings, with a blunt
intimation of the business to be settled; she put on her hump of the
feline defensive; then his batteries opened fire and hers barked back on
him. Each won admiration of the other's tenacity, all the more determined
to sap or split it. They had known one another's character, but they had
never seen it in such strong light. Never had their mutual and similar,
though opposed, resources been drawn out so copiously and unreservedly.
This was the shining scrawl of all that each could do to gain a fight.
They admired one another's contemptibly justifiable evasions, changes of
front, statements bordering the lie, even to meanness in the withdrawal
of admissions and the denial of the same ever having been made. That was
Charlotte! That was Rowsley! Anything to beat down the adversary.

As to will, the woman's will, of these two, equalled the man's. They were
matched in obstinacy and unscrupulousness.

Her ingenuitics of the defence eluded his attacks, and compelled him to
fall on heavy iteration of his demand for the jewels, an immediate
restitution of the jewels. 'Why immediate?' cried she.

He repeated it without replying to her.

'But, you tell me, Rowsley, why immediate? If you're in want of money for
her, you come to me, tell me, you shall have thousands. I'll drive down
to the City to-morrow and sell out stock. Mr. Eglett won't mind when he
hears the purpose. I shall call five thousand cheap, and don't ask to see
the money again.'

'Ah! double the sum to have your own way!' said he.

She protested that she valued her money. She furnished instances of her
carefulness of her money all along up to the present period of brutal old
age. Yet she would willingly part with five thousand or more to save the
family honour. Mr. Eglett would not only approve, he would probably
advance a good part of the money himself.

'Money! Who wants money?' thundered the earl, and jumped out of her trap
of the further diversion from the plain request. 'To-morrow, when I am
here, I shall expect to have the jewels delivered to me.'

'That you may hand them over to her. Where are they likely to be this
time next year? And what do you know about jewels? You may look at them
when you ask to see them, and not know imitation paste--like the stuff
Lady Beltus showed her old husband. Our mother wore them, and she prized
them. I'm not sure I wouldn't rather hear they were exhibited in a Bond
Street jeweller's shop or a Piccadilly pawnbroker's than have them on
that woman.'

'You speak of my wife.'

'For a season, perhaps; and off they're likely to go, to pay bills, if
her Adderwoods and her Morsfields are out of funds, as they call it.'

'You are aware you are speaking of my wife, Charlotte?'

'You daren't say my sister-in-law.'

He did not choose to say it; and once more she dared him. She could
imagine she scored a point.

They were summoned to lunch by Mr. Eglett; and there was an hour's
armistice; following which the earl demanded the restitution of the
jewels, and heard the singular question, childishly accentuated, 'What
for?'

Patience was his weapon and support, so he named his object with an air
of inveteracy in tranquillity they were for his wife to wear.

Lady Charlotte dared him to say they were for her sister-in-law.

He despised the transparent artifice of the challenge.

'But you have to own the difference,' she said. 'You haven't lost respect
for your family, thank God! No. It 's one thing to say she 's a wife: you
hang fire when it 's to say she 's my sister-in-law.'

'You'll have to admit the fact, Charlotte.'

'How long is it since I should have had to admit the fact?'

'From the date of my marriage.'

'Tell me the date.'

'No, you don't wear a wig, Charlotte; but you are fit to practise in the
Law-courts!' he said, exasperatedly jocular.

She had started a fresh diversion, and she pressed him for the date. 'I
'm supposed to have had a sister-in-law-how many weeks?--months?'

'Years.'

'Married years! And if you've been married years, where were you married?
Not in a church. That woman's no church-bride.'

'There are some clever women made idiots of by their trullish tempers.'

'Abuse away. I've asked you where you were married, Rowsley.'

'Go to Madrid. Go to the Embassy. Apply to the chaplain.'

'Married in Madrid! Who's ever married in Madrid! You flung her a yellow
handkerchief, and she tied it round her neck--that 's your ceremony! Now
you tell me you've been married years; and she's a young woman; you fetch
her over from Madrid, set her in a place where those Morsfields and other
fungi-fellows grow, and she has to think herself lucky to be received by
a Lady Staines and a Mrs. Lawrence Finchley, and she the talk of the
town, refused at Court, for all an honourable-enough old woman
countenanced her in pity; and I 'm asked to believe she was my brother's
wife, sister-in-law of mine, all the while! I won't.'

Lady Charlotte dilated on it for a length of time, merely to show she
declined to believe it; pouring Morsfield over him and the talk of the
town, the gypsy caught in Spain--now to be foisted on her as her
sister-in-law! She could fancy she produced an effect.

She did indeed unveil to him a portion of the sufferings his Aminta had
undergone; as visibly, too, the good argumentative reasons for his
previous avoidance of the deadly, dismal wrangle here forced on him. A
truly dismal, profitless wrangle! But the finish of it would be the
beginning of some solace to his Aminta.

The finish of it must be to-morrow. He refrained from saying so, and
simply appointed to-morrow for the resumption of the wrestle, departing
in his invincible coat of patience: which one has to wear when dealing
with a woman like Charlotte, he informed Mr. Eglett, on his way out at a
later hour than on the foregone day. Mr. Eglett was of his opinion, that
an introduction of lawyers into a family dispute was 'rats in the
pantry'; and he would have joined him in his gloomy laugh, if the thought
of Charlotte in a contention had not been so serious a matter. She might
be beaten; she could not be brought to yield.

She retired to her bedroom, and laid herself flat on her bed, immoveable,
till her maid undressed her for the night. A cup of broth and strip of
toast formed her sole nourishment. As for her doctor's possible
reproaches, the symptoms might crowd and do their worst; she fought for
the honour of her family.

At midday of the third day Lady Charlotte was reduced to the condition of
those fortresses which wave defiantly the flag, but deliver no further
shot, awaiting the assault. Her body, affected by hideous old age,
succumbed. Her will was unshaken. She would not write to her bankers. Mr.
Eglett might go to them, if he thought fit. Rowsley was to understand
that he might call himself married; she would have no flower-basket bunch
of a sister-in-law thrust upon her.

Lord Ormont and Mr. Eglett walked down to her bankers in the afternoon.
As a consequence of express injunctions given by my lady five years
previously, the assistant-manager sought an interview with her.

The jewels were lodged at her house the day ensuing. They were examined,
verified by the list in Lady Charlotte's family record-book, and then
taken away--forcibly, of course--by her brother.

He laughed in his dry manner; but the reminiscent glimpses, helping him
to see the humour of it, stirred sensations of the tug it had been with
that combative Charlotte, and excused him for having shrunk from the
encounter until he conceived it to be necessary.

Settlement of the affair with Morsfield now claimed his attention. The
ironical tolerance he practised in relation to Morsfield when Aminta had
no definite station before the world changed to an angry irritability at
the man's behaviour now that she had stepped forth under his
acknowledgement of her as the Countess of Ormont. He had come round to a
rather healthier mind regarding his country, and his introduction of the
Countess of Ormont to the world was his peace-offering.

As he returned home earlier on the third day, he found his diligent
secretary at work. The calling on Captain May and the writing to the sort
of man were acts obnoxious to his dignity; so he despatched Weyburn to
the captain's house, one in a small street of three narrow tenements
abutting on aristocracy and terminating in mews. Weyburn's mission was to
give the earl's address at Great Marlow for the succeeding days, and to
see Captain May, if the captain was at home. During his absence the
precious family jewel-box was locked in safety. Aminta and her friend,
little Miss Collett, were out driving, by the secretary's report. The
earl considered it a wholesome feature of Aminta's character that she
should have held to her modest schoolmate the fact spoke well for both of
them.

A look at the papers to serve for Memoirs was discomposing, and led him
to think the secretary could be parted with as soon as he pleased to go:
say, a week hence.

The Memoirs were no longer designed for issue. He had the impulse to
treat them on the spot as the Plan for the Defence of the Country had
been treated; and for absolutely obverse reasons. The secretary and the
Memoirs were associated: one had sprung out of the other. Moreover, the
secretary had witnessed a scene at Steignton. The young man had done his
duty, and would be thanked for that, and dismissed, with a touch of his
employer's hand. The young man would have made a good soldier--a better
soldier, good as he might be as a scribe. He ought to have been in his
father's footsteps, and he would then have disciplined or quashed his
fantastical ideas. Perhaps he was right on the point of toning the
Memoirs here and there. Since the scene at Steignton Lord Ormont's views
had changed markedly in relation to everybody about him, and most things.

Weyburn came back at the end of an hour to say that he had left the
address with Mrs. May, whom he had seen.

'A handsome person,' the earl observed.

'She must have been very handsome,' said Weyburn.

'Ah! we fall into their fictions, or life would be a bald business, upon
my word!'

Lord Ormont had not uttered it before the sentiment of his greater luck
with one of that queer world of the female lottery went through him on a
swell of satisfaction, just a wave.

An old-world eye upon women, it seemed to Weyburn. But the man who could
crown a long term of cruel injustice with the harshness to his wife at
Steignton would naturally behold women with that eye.

However, he was allowed only to generalize; he could not trust himself to
dwell on Lady Ormont and the Aminta inside the shell. Aminta and Lady
Ormont might think as one or diversely of the executioner's blow she had
undergone. She was a married woman, and she probably regarded the wedding
by law as the end a woman has to aim at, and is annihilated by hitting;
one flash of success, and then extinction, like a boy's cracker on the
pavement. Not an elevated image, but closely resembling that which her
alliance with Lord Ormont had been!

At the same time, no true lover of a woman advises her--imploring is
horrible treason--to slip the symbolic circle of the law from her finger,
and have in an instant the world for her enemy. She must consent to be
annihilated, and must have no feelings; particularly no mind. The mind is
the danger for her. If she has a mind alive, she will certainly push for
the position to exercise it, and run the risk of a classing with Nature's
created mates for reptile men.

Besides, Lady Ormont appeared, in the company of her friend Selina
Collett, not worse than rather too thoughtful; not distinctly unhappy.
And she was conversable, smiling. She might have had an explanation with
my lord, accepting excuses--or, who knows? taking the blame, and offering
them. Weakness is pliable. So pliable is it, that it has been known for a
crack of the masterly whip to fling off the victim and put on the
culprit! Ay, but let it be as it may with Lady Ormont, Aminta is of a
different composition. Aminta's eyes of the return journey to London were
haunting lights, and lured him to speculate; and for her sake he rejected
the thought that for him they meant anything warmer than the passing
thankfulness, though they were a novel assurance to him of her possession
beneath her smothering cloud of the power to resolve, and show forth a
brilliant individuality.

The departure of the ladies and my lord in the travelling carriage for
the house on the Upper Thames was passably sweetened to Weyburn by the
command to him to follow in a day or two, and continue his work there
until he left England. Aminta would not hear of an abandonment of the
Memoirs. She spoke on the subject to my lord as to a husband pardoned.

She was not less affable and pleasant with him out of Weyburn's hearing.
My lord earned her gratitude for his behaviour to Selina Collett, to whom
he talked interestedly of her favourite pursuit, as he had done on the
day when, as he was not the man to forget, her arrival relieved him of
anxiety. Aminta, noticed the box on the seat beside him.

They drove up to their country house in time to dress leisurely for
dinner. Nevertheless, the dinner-hour had struck several minutes before
she descended; and the earl, as if not expecting her, was out on the
garden path beside the river bank with Selina. She beckoned from the step
of the open French window.

He came to her at little Selina's shuffling pace, conversing upon
water-plants.

'No jewelry to-day?' he said.

And Aminta replied: 'Carstairs has shown me the box and given the key. I
have not opened it.'

'Time in the evening, or to-morrow. You guess the contents?'

'I presume I do.'

She looked feverish and shadowed.

He murmured kindly: 'Anything?'

'Not now: we will dine.'

She had missed, had lost, she feared, her own jewelbox; a casket of no
great treasure to others, but of a largely estimable importance to her.

After the heavy ceremonial entrance and exit of dishes, she begged the
earl to accompany her for an examination of the contents of the box.

As soon as her chamber-door was shut, she said, in accents of alarm:
'Mine has disappeared. Carstairs, I know, is to be trusted. She remembers
carrying the box out of my room; she believes she can remember putting it
into the fly. She had to confess that it had vanished, without her
knowing how, when my boxes were unpacked.'

'Is she very much upset?' said the earl.

'Carstairs? Why, yes, poor creature! you can imagine. I have no doubt she
feels for me; and her own reputation is concerned. What do you think is
best to be done?'

'To be done! Overhaul the baggage again in all the rooms.'

'We've not failed to do that.'

'Control yourself, my dear. If, by bad luck, they're lost, we can replace
them. The contents of this box, now, we could not replace. Open it, and
judge.'

'I have no curiosity--forgive me, I beg. And the servant's fly has been
visited, ransacked inside and out, footmen questioned; we have not left
anything we can conceive of undone. My lord, will you suggest?'

'The intrinsic value of the gems would not be worth--not worth Aminta's
one beat of the heart. Upon my word--not one!'

An amatory knightly compliment breasting her perturbation roused an
unwonted spite; and a swift reflection on it startled her with a
suspicion. She cast it behind her. He could be angler and fish, he would
not be cat and mouse.

She said, however, more temperately: 'It is not the value of the gems. We
are losing precious minutes!'

'Association of them with the giver? Is it that? If that has a value for
you, he is flattered.'

This betrayed him to the woman waxing as intensely susceptible in all her
being as powder to sparks.

'There is to be no misunderstanding, my lord,' she said. 'I like--I value
my jewels; but--I am alarmed lest the box should fall into hands--into
strange hands.'

'The box!' he exclaimed with an outline of a comic grimace; and, if
proved a voluptuary in torturing, he could instance half a dozen points
for extenuation: her charm of person, withheld from him, and to be
embraced; her innocent naughtiness; compensation coming to her in excess
for a transient infliction of pain. 'Your anxiety is about the box?'

'Yes, the box,' Aminta said firmly. 'It contains--'

'No false jewels? A thief might complain.'

'It contains letters, my lord.' 'Blackmail?'

'You would be at liberty to read them. I would rather they were burnt.'

'Ah!' The earl heaved his chest prodigiously. 'Blackmail letters are
better in a husband's hands, if they can be laid there.'

'If there is a necessity for him to read them--yes.'

'There may be a necessity, there can't be a gratification,--though there
are dogs of thick blood that like to scratch their sores,' he murmured to
himself. 'You used to show me these declaration epistles.'

'Not the names.'

'Not the names--no!'

'When we had left the country, I showed you why it had been my wish to
go.'

'Xarifa was and is female honour. Take the key, open that box; I will
make inquiries. But, my dear, you guess everything. Your little box was
removed for the bigger impression to be produced by this one.'

A flash came out of her dark eyes.

'No, you guess wrong this time, you clever shrew! I wormed nothing from
you,' said he. 'I knew you kept particular letters in that receptacle of
things of price: Aminta can't conceal. The man has worried you. Why not
have come to me?'

'Oblige me, my lord, by restoring me my box.'

'This is your box.'

Her bosom lifted with the words Oh, no! unspoken. He took the key and
opened the box. A dazzling tray of stones was revealed; underneath it the
constellations in cases, very heavens for the worldly Eve; and he doubted
that Eve could have gone completely out of her. But she had, as
observation instructed him, set her woman's mind on something else, and
must have it before letting her eyes fall on objects impossible for any
of her sex to see without coveting them.

He bowed. 'I will fetch it,' he said magnanimously. Her own box was
brought from his room. She then consented to look womanly at the Ormont
jewels, over which the battle; whereof she knew nothing, and nothing
could be told her, had been fought in her interests, for her sovereign
pleasure.

She looked and admired. They were beautiful jewels the great emerald was
wonderful, and there were two rubies to praise. She excused herself for
declining to put the circlet for the pendant round her neck, or a
glittering ring on her finger. Her remarks were encomiums, not quite so
cold as those of a provincial spinster of an ascetic turn at an
exhibition of the world's flycatcher gewgaws. He had divided Aminta from
the Countess of Ormont, and it was the wary Aminta who set a guard on
looks and tones before the spectacle of his noble bounty, lest any, the
smallest, payment of the dues of the countess should be demanded. Rightly
interpreting him to be by nature incapable of asking pardon, or
acknowledging a wrong done by him, however much he might crave exemption
from blame and seek for peace, she kept to her mask of injury, though she
hated unforgivingness; and she felt it little, she did it easily, because
her heart was dead to the man. My lord's hand touched her on her
shoulder, propitiatingly in some degree, in his dumb way.

Offended women can be emotional to a towering pride, that bends while it
assumes unbendingness: it must come to their sensations, as it were a
sign of humanity in the majestic, speechless king of beasts; and they are
pathetically melted, abjectly hypocritical; a nice confusion of
sentiments, traceable to a tender bosom's appreciation of strength and
the perceptive compassion for its mortality.

In a case of the alienated wife, whose blood is running another way, no
foul snake's bite is more poisonous than that indicatory touch, however
simple and slight. My lord's hand, lightly laid on Aminta's shoulder,
became sensible of soft warm flesh stiffening to the skeleton.




CHAPTER XXIV

LOVERS MATED

He was benevolently martial, to the extent of paternal, in thinking his
girl, of whom he deigned to think now as his countess, pardonably
foolish. Woman for woman, she was of a pattern superior to the world's
ordinary, and might run the world's elect a race. But she was pitifully
woman-like in her increase of dissatisfaction with the more she got.
Women are happier enslaved. Men, too, if their despot is an Ormont.
Colonel of his regiment, he proved that: his men would follow him
anywhere, do anything. Grand old days, before he was condemned by one
knows not what extraordinary round of circumstances to cogitate on women
as fluids, and how to cut channels for them, that they may course along
in the direction good for them, imagining it their pretty wanton will to
go that way! Napoleon's treatment of women is excellent example.
Peterborough's can be defended.

His Aminta could not reason. She nursed a rancour on account of the blow
she drew on herself at Steignton, and she declined consolation in her
being pardoned. The reconcilement evidently was proposed as a finale of
one of the detestable feminine storms enveloping men weak enough to let
themselves be dragged through a scene for the sake of domestic
tranquillity.

A remarkable exhibition of Aminta the woman was, her entire change of
front since he had taken her spousal chill. Formerly she was passive,
merely stately, the chiselled grande dame, deferential in her bearing and
speech, even when argumentative and having an opinion to plant. She had
always the independent eye and step; she now had the tongue of the
graceful and native great lady, fitted to rule her circle and hold her
place beside the proudest of the Ormonts. She bore well the small shuffle
with her jewel-box--held herself gallantly. There had been no female
feignings either, affected misapprehensions, gapy ignorances, and snaky
subterfuges, and the like, familiar to men who have the gentle twister in
grip. Straight on the line of the thing to be seen she flew, and struck
on it; and that is a woman's martial action. He would right heartily have
called her comrade, if he had been active himself. A warrior pulled off
his horse, to sit in a chair and contemplate the minute evolutions of the
sex is pettish with his part in such battle-fields at the stage beyond
amusement.

Seen swimming, she charmed him. Abstract views of a woman summon opposite
advocates: one can never say positively, That is she! But the visible
fair form of a woman is hereditary queen of us. We have none of your
pleadings and counter-pleadings and judicial summaries to obstruct a
ravenous loyalty. My lord beheld Aminta take her three quick steps on the
plank, and spring and dive and ascend, shaking the ends of her bound
black locks; and away she went with shut mouth and broad stroke of her
arms into the sunny early morning river; brave to see, although he had to
flick a bee of a question, why he enjoyed the privilege of seeing, and
was not beside her. The only answer confessed to a distaste for all
exercise once pleasurable.

She and her little friend boated or strolled through the meadows during
the day; he fished. When he and Aminta rode out for the hour before
dinner, she seemed pleased. She was amicable, conversable, all that was
agreeable as a woman, and she was the chillest of wives. My lord's
observations and reflections came to one conclusion: she pricked and
challenged him to lead up to her desired stormy scene. He met her and
meant to vanquish her with the dominating patience Charlotte had found
too much for her: women cannot stand against it.

To be patient in contention with women, however, one must have a
continuous and an exclusive occupation; and the tax it lays on us
conduces usually to impatience with men. My lord did not directly connect
Aminta's chillness and Morsfield's impudence; yet the sensation roused by
his Aminta participated in the desire to punish Morsfield speedily.
Without wishing for a duel, he was moved by the social sanction it had to
consider whether green youths and women might not think a grey head had
delayed it too long. The practice of the duel begot the peculiar animal
logic of the nobler savage, which tends to magnify an offence in the
ratio of our vanity, and hunger for a blood that is not demanded by the
appetite. Moreover, a waning practice, in disfavour with the new
generation, will be commended to the conservative barbarian, as partaking
of the wisdom of his fathers. Further, too, we may have grown slothful,
fallen to moodiness, done excess of service to Omphale, our tyrant lady
of the glow and the chill; and then undoubtedly the duel braces.

He left Aminta for London, submissive to the terms of intimacy dictated
by her demeanour, his unacknowledged seniority rendering their harshness
less hard to endure. She had not gratified him with a display of her
person in the glitter of the Ormont jewels; and since he was, under
common conditions, a speechless man, his ineptitude for amorous
remonstrances precipitated him upon deeds, that he might offer additional
proofs of his esteem and the assurance of her established position as his
countess. He proposed to engage Lady Charlotte in a conflict severer than
the foregoing, until he brought her to pay the ceremonial visit to her
sister-in-law. The count of time for this final trial of his
masterfulness he calculated at a week. It would be an occupation,
miserable occupation though it was. He hailed the prospect of chastising
Morsfield, for a proof that his tussels with women, prolonged study of
their tricks, manoeuvrings and outwittings of them, had not emasculated
him.

Aminta willingly promised to write from day to day. Her senses had his
absence insured to them by her anticipation of the task. She did not
conceive it would be so ponderous a task. What to write to him when
nothing occurred! Nothing did occur, unless the arrival of Mr. Weyburn
was to be named an event. She alluded to it: 'Mr. Weyburn has come,
expecting to find you here. The dispatch-box is here. Is he to await
you?'

That innocent little question was a day gained.

One day of boating on the upper reaches of the pastoral river, and walks
in woods and golden meadows, was felicity fallen on earth, the ripe fruit
of dreams. A dread surrounded it, as a belt, not shadowing the horizon;
and she clasped it to her heart the more passionately, like a mother her
rosy infant, which a dark world threatens and the universal fate.

Love, as it will be at her June of life, was teaching her to know the
good and bad of herself. Women, educated to embrace principles through
their timidity and their pudency, discover, amazed, that these are not
lasting qualities under love's influence. The blushes and the fears take
flight. The principles depend much on the beloved. Is he a man whose
contact with the world has given him understanding of life's laws, and
can hold him firm to the right course in the strain and whirling of a
torrent, they cling to him, deeply they worship. And if they tempt him,
it is not advisedly done. Nature and love are busy in conjunction. The
timidities and pudencies have flown; they may hover, they are not
present. You deplore it, you must not blame; you have educated them so.
Muscular principles are sown only out in the world; and, on the whole,
with all their errors, the worldly men are the truest as well as the
bravest of men. Her faith in his guidance was equal to her dependence.
The retrospect of a recent journey told her how he had been tried.

She could gaze tenderly, betray her heart, and be certain of safety. Can
wine match that for joy? She had no schemes, no hopes, but simply the
desire to bestow, the capacity to believe. Any wish to be enfolded by him
was shapeless and unlighted, unborn; though now and again for some chance
word or undefined thought she surprised the strange tenant of her breast
at an incomprehensibly faster beat, and knew it for her own and not her
own, the familiar the stranger--an utter stranger, as one who had snared
her in a wreath and was pulling her off her feet.

She was not so guileless at the thought of little Selina Collett here,
and of Selina as the letter-bearer of old; and the marvel that Matey and
Browny and Selina were together after all! Was it not a kind of summons
to her to call him Matey just once, only once, in play? She burned and
ached to do it. She might have taxed her ingenuity successfully to induce
little Selina to the boldness of calling him Matey--and she then
repeating it, as the woman who revived with a meditative effort
recollections of the girl. Ah, frightful hypocrite! Thoughts of the
pleasure of his name aloud on her lips in his hearing dissolved through
her veins, and were met by Matthew Weyburn's open face, before which
hypocrisy stood rent and stripped. She preferred the calmer, the truer
pleasure of seeing him modestly take lessons in the nomenclature of
weeds, herbs, grasses, by hedge and ditch. Selina could instruct him as
well in entomology, but he knew better the Swiss, Tyrolese, and Italian
valley-homes of beetle and butterfly species. Their simple talk was a
cool zephyr fanning Aminta.

The suggestion to unite the two came to her, of course, but their
physical disparity denied her that chance to settle her own difficulty,
and a whisper of one physically the match for him punished her. In
stature, in healthfulness, they were equals, perhaps: not morally or
intellectually. And she could claim headship of him on one little point
confided to her by his mother, who was bearing him, and startled by the
boom of guns under her pillow, when her husband fronted the enemy:
Matthew Weyburn, the fencer, boxer, cricketer, hunter, all things manly,
rather shrank from firearms--at least, one saw him put on a screw to
manipulate them. In danger--among brigands or mutineers, for example--she
could stand by him and prove herself his mate. Intellectually, morally,
she had to bow humbly. Nor had she, nor could she do more than lean on
and catch example from his prompt spiritual valiancy. It shone out from
him, and a crisis fulfilled the promise. Who could be his mate for
cheerful courage, for skill, the ready mind, easy adroitness, and for
self-command? To imitate was a woman's utmost.

Matthew Weyburn appeared the very Matey of the first of May cricketing
day among Cuper's boys the next morning, when seen pacing down the
garden-walk. He wore his white trousers of that happiest of old days--the
'white ducks' Aminta and Selina remembered. Selina beamed. 'Yes, he did;
he always wore them; but now it's a frock-coat instead of a jacket.'

'But now he will be a master instead of a schoolboy,' said Aminta. 'Let
us hope he will prosper.'

'He gives me the idea of a man who must succeed,' Selina said; and she
was patted, rallied, asked how she had the idea, and kissed; Aminta
saying she fancied it might be thought, for he looked so confident.

'Only not what the boys used to call "cocky,"' said Selina. 'He won't be
contemptuous of those he outstrips.'

'His choice of the schoolmaster's profession points to a modesty in him,
does it not, little woman?'

'He made me tell him, while you were writing your letters yesterday, all
about my brother and his prospects.'

'Yes, that is like him. And I must hear of your brother, "little
Collett." Don't forget, Sely, little Collett was our postman.'

The Countess of Ormont's humorous reference to the circumstance passed
with Selina for a sign of a poetic love of the past, and a present social
elevation that allowed her to review it impassively. She admired the
great lady and good friend who could really be interested in the fortunes
of a mere schoolmaster and a merchant's clerk. To her astonishment, by
some agency beyond her fathoming, she found herself, and hardly for her
own pleasure, pushing the young schoolmaster animatedly to have an
account of his aims in the establishment of the foreign school.

Weyburn smiled. He set a short look at Aminta; and she, conscious of her
detected diplomacy, had an inward shiver, mixed of the fascination and
repugnance felt by a woman who knows that under one man's eyes her
character is naked and anatomized. Her character?--her soul. He held it
in hand and probed it mercifully. She had felt the sweet sting again and
again, and had shrunk from him, and had crawled to him. The love of him
made it all fascination. How did he learn to read at any moment right to
the soul of a woman? Did experience teach him, or sentimental sympathy?
He was too young, he was too manly. It must be because of his being in
heart and mind the brother to the sister with women.

Thames played round them on his pastoral pipes. Bee-note and woodside
blackbird and meadow cow, and the fish of the silver rolling rings,
composed the leap of the music.

She gave her mind to his voice, following whither it went; half was in
air, higher than the swallow's, exalting him.

How is it he is the brother of women? They are sisters for him because he
is neither sentimentalist nor devourer. He will not flatter to feed on
them. The one he chooses, she will know love. There are women who go
through life not knowing love. They are inanimate automatic machines, who
lay them down at last, inquiring wherefore they were caused to move. She
is not of that sad flock. She will be mated; she will have the right to
call him Matey. A certain Browny called him Matey. She lived and died. A
certain woman apes Browny's features and inherits her passion, but has
forfeited her rights. Were she, under happiest conditions, to put her
hand in his, shame would burn her. For he is just--he is Justice; and a
woman bringing him less than his due, she must be a creature of the
slime!

This was the shadowy sentiment that made the wall of division between
them. There was no other. Lord Ormont had struck to fragments that
barrier of the conventional oath and ceremonial union. He was unjust--he
was Injustice. The weak may be wedded, they cannot be married; to
Injustice. And if we have the world for the buttress of injustice, then
is Nature the flaring rebel; there is no fixed order possible. Laws are
necessary instruments of the majority; but when they grind the sane human
being to dust for their maintenance, their enthronement is the rule of
the savage's old deity, sniffing blood-sacrifice. There cannot be a based
society upon such conditions. An immolation of the naturally constituted
individual arrests the general expansion to which we step, decivilizes
more, and is more impious to the God in man, than temporary revelries of
a licence that Nature soon checks.

Arrows of thoughts resembling these shot over the half of Aminta's mind
not listening. Her lover's head was active on the same theme while he
spoke. They converged to it from looks crossing or catching profiles, or
from tones, from a motion of hand, from a chance word. Insomuch that the
third person present was kept unobservant only by her studious and humble
speculations on the young schoolmaster's grand project to bring the
nationalities together, and teach Old England to the Continent--the
Continent to Old England: our healthy games, our scorn of the lie,
manliness; their intellectual valour, diligence, considerate manners.

'Just to name a few of the things for interchange,' said Weyburn. 'As to
method, we shall be their disciples. But I look forward to our fellows
getting the lead. No hurry. Why will they? you ask in petto. Well, they
're emulous, and they take a thrashing kindly. That 's the way to learn a
lesson. I 've seen our fellows beaten and beaten--never the courage
beaten out of them. In the end, they won and kept the field. They have a
lot to learn--principally not to be afraid of ideas. They lose heaps of
time before they can feel at home with ideas. They call themselves
practical for having an addiction to the palpable. It is a pretty wreath
they clap on their deficiencies. Practical dogs are for bones, horses for
corn. I want the practical Englishman to settle his muzzle in a nosebag
of ideas. When he has once got hold of them, he makes good stuff of them.
On the Continent ideas have wings and pay visits. Here, they're
stay-at-home. Then I want our fellows to have the habit of speaking from
the chest. They shall return to England with the whoop of the mountains
in them and ready to jump out. They shall have an Achillean roar; and
they shall sing by second nature. Don't fear: they'll give double for
anything they take. I've known Italians, to whom an Englishman's honesty
of mind and dealing was one of the dreams of a better humanity they had
put in a box. Frenchmen, too, who, when they came to know us, were
astonished at their epithet of perfide, and loved us.'

'Emile,' said Aminta. 'You remember Emile, Selina: the dear little French
boy at Mr. Cuper's?'

'Oh, I do,' Selina responded.

'He will work with Mr. Weyburn in Switzerland.'

'Oh, that will be nice!' the girl exclaimed.

Aminta squeezed Selina's hand. A shower of tears clouded her eyes. She
chose to fancy it was because of her envy of the modest, busy, peaceful
girl, who envied none. Conquers also sincerity in the sincerest. She was
vexed with her full breast, and had as little command of her thoughts as
of her feelings.

'Mr. Weyburn has ideas for the education of girls too,' she said.

'There's the task,' said he. 'It's to separate them as little as
possible. All the--passez-moi le mot--devilry between the sexes begins at
their separation. They 're foreigners when they meet; and their alliances
are not always binding. The chief object in life, if happiness be the
aim, and the growing better than we are, is to teach men and women how to
be one; for, if they 're not, then each is a morsel for the other to prey
on. Lady Charlotte Eglett's view is, that the greater number of them on
both sides hate one another.'

'Hate!' exclaimed Selina; and Aminta said: 'Is Lady Charlotte Eglett an
authority?'

'She has observed, and she thinks. She has in the abstract the justest of
minds: and that is the curious point about her. But one may say they are
trained at present to be hostile. Some of them fall in love and strike a
truce, and still they are foreigners. They have not the same standard of
honour. They might have it from an education in common.'

'But there must be also a lady to govern the girls?' Selina interposed.

'Ah, yes; she is not yet found!'

'Would it increase their mutual respect?--or show of respect, if you
like?' said Aminta, with his last remark at work as the shattering bell
of a city's insurrection in her breast.

'In time, under management; catching and grouping them young. A boy who
sees a girl do what he can't, and would like to do, won't take refuge in
his muscular superiority--which, by the way, would be lessened.'

'You suppose their capacities are equal?'

'Things are not equal. I suppose their excellencies to make a pretty
nearly equal sum in the end. But we 're not weighing them each. The
question concerns the advantage of both.'

'That seems just!'

Aminta threw no voice into the word 'just.' It was the word of the
heavens assuaging earth's thirst, and she was earth to him. Her soul
yearned to the man whose mind conceived it.

She said to Selina: 'We must plan an expedition next year or the year
after, and see how the school progresses.'

All three smiled; and Selina touched and held Aminta's hand shyly.
Visions of the unseen Switzerland awed her.

Weyburn named the Spring holiday time, the season of the flowering Alpine
robes. He promised welcome, pressed for a promise of the visit. Warmly it
was given. 'We will; we will indeed!'

'I shall look forward,' he said.

There was nothing else for him or for her, except to doat on the passing
minute that slipped when seized. The looking forward turned them to the
looking back at the point they had flown from, and yielded a momentary
pleasure, enough to stamp some section of a picture on their memories,
which was not the burning now Love lives for, in the clasp, if but of
hands. Desire of it destroyed it. They swung to the future, swung to the
present it made the past, sensible to the quick of the now they could not
hold. They were lovers. Divided lovers in presence, they thought and they
felt in pieces. Feelings and thoughts were forbidden to speech. She dared
look the very little of her heart's fulness, without the disloyalty it
would have been in him to let a small peep of his heart be seen. While
her hand was not clasped she could look tenderly, and her fettered state,
her sense of unworthiness muffled in the deeps, would keep her from the
loosening to passion.

He who read through her lustrous, transiently dwelling eyes had not that
security. His part, besides the watch over the spring of his hot blood,
was to combat a host, insidious among which was unreason calling her
Browny, urging him to take his own, to snatch her from a possessor who
forfeited by undervaluing her. This was the truth in a better-ordered
world: she belonged to the man who could help her to grow and to do her
work. But in the world we have around us, it was the distorted truth: and
keeping passion down, he was able to wish her such happiness as pertained
to safety from shipwreck, and for himself, that he might continue to walk
in the ranks of the sober citizens.

Oh, true and right, but she was gloriously beautiful! Day by day she
surpassed the wondrous Browny of old days. All women were eclipsed by
her. She was that fire in the night which lights the night and draws the
night to look at it. And more: this queen of women was beginning to have
a mind at work. One saw already the sprouting of a mind repressed. She
had a distinct ability; the good ambition to use her qualities. She
needed life and air--that is, comprehension of her, encouragement, the
companion mate. With what strength would she now endow him! The pride in
the sharp imagination of possessing her whispered a boast of the strength
her mate would have from her. His need and her need rushed together
somewhere down the skies. They could not, he argued, be separated
eternally.

He had to leave her. Selina, shocked at a boldness she could not
understand in herself, begged him to stay and tell her of Switzerland and
Alpine flowers and herbs, and the valleys for the gold beetle and the
Apollo butterfly. Aminta hinted that Lord Ormont might expect to find him
there, if he came the next morning; but she would not try to persuade,
and left the decision with him, loving him for the pain he inflicted by
going.

Why, indeed, should he stay? Both could ask; they were one in asking.
Anguish balanced pleasure in them both. The day of the pleasure was
heaven to remember, heaven to hope for; not so heavenly to pray for. The
praying for it, each knew, implored their joint will to decree the
perilous blessing. A shadowy sentiment of duty and rectitude, born of
what they had suffered, hung between them and the prayer for a renewal,
that would renew the tempting they were conscious of when the sweet, the
strained, throbbing day was over. They could hope for chance to renew it,
and then they would be irresponsible. Then they would think and wish
discreetly, so as to have it a happiness untainted. In refusing now to
take another day or pray for it, they deserved that chance should grant
it.

Aminta had said through Selina the utmost her self-defences could allow.
But the idea of a final parting cut too cruelly into her life, and she
murmured: 'I shall see you before you go for good?'

'I will come, here or in London.'

'I can trust?'

'Quite certain.'

A meeting of a few hasty minutes involved none of the dangers of a sunny,
long summer day; and if it did, the heart had its claims, the heart had
its powers of resistance. Otherwise we should be base verily.

He turned on a bow to leave her before there was a motion for the offer
of her hand.

After many musings and frettings, she reached the wisdom of that. Wisdom
was her only nourishment now. A cold, lean dietary it is; but he
dispensed it, and it fed her, or kept her alive. It became a proud
feeling that she had been his fellow in the achievement of a piece of
wisdom; though the other feeling, that his hand's kind formal touching,
without pressure of hers, would have warmed her to go through the next
interview with her lord, mocked at pure satisfaction. Did he distrust
himself? Or was it to spare her? But if so, her heart was quite bare to
him! But she knew it was.

Aminta drove her questioning heart as a vessel across blank circles of
sea, where there was nothing save the solitary heart for answer. It
answered intelligibly and comfortingly at last, telling her of proof
given that she could repose under his guidance with absolute faith. Was
ever loved woman more blest than she in such belief? She had it firmly;
and a blessedness, too, in this surety wavering beneath shadows of the
uncertainty. Her eyes knew it, her ears were empty of the words. Her
heart knew it, and it was unconfirmed by reason. As for his venturing to
love her, he feared none. And no sooner did that reflection surge than
she stood up beside him in revolt against her lion and lord. Her instinct
judged it impossible she could ever have yielded her heart to a man
lacking courage. Hence--what? when cowardice appeared as the sole
impediment to happiness now!

He had gone, and the day lived again for both of them--a day of sheer
gold in the translation from troubled earth to the mind. One another's
beauty through the visage into the character was newly perceived and
worshipped; and the beauties of pastoral Thames, the temple of peace,
hardly noticed in the passing of the day--taken as air to the breather;
until some chip of the scene, round which an emotion had curled, was
vivid foreground and gateway to shrouded romance: it might be the
stream's white face browning into willow-droopers, or a wagtail on a
water-lily leaf, or the fore-horse of an up-river barge at strain of
legs, a red-finned perch hung a foot above the pebbles in sun-veined
depths, a kingfisher on the scud under alders, the forest of the bankside
weeds.




CHAPTER XXV

PREPARATIONS FOR A RESOLVE

That day receded like a spent billow, and lapsed among the others
advancing, but it left a print deeper than events would have stamped.
Aminta's pen declined to run to her lord; and the dipping it in ink was
no acceleration of the process. A sentence, bearing likeness to an
artless infant's trot of the half-dozen steps to mother's lap, stumbled
upon the full stop midway. Desperate determination pushed it along, and
there was in consequence a dead stop at the head of the next sentence. A
woman whose nature is insurgent against the majesty of the man to whom
she must, among the singular injunctions binding her, regularly write,
sees no way between hypocrisy and rebellion. For rebellion, she, with the
pen in her hand, is avowedly not yet ripe, hypocrisy is abominable.

If she abstained from writing, he might travel down to learn the cause; a
similar danger, or worse, haunted the writing frigidly. She had to be the
hypocrite or else--leap.

But an honest woman who is a feeling woman, when she consents to play
hypocrite, cannot do it by halves. From writing a short cold letter,
Aminta wrote a short warm one, or very friendly. Length she could avoid,
because she was unable to fill a page. It seemed that she could not
compose a friendly few lines without letting her sex be felt in them.
What she had put away from her, so as not to feel it herself, the
simulation of ever so small a bit of feeling brought prominently back;
and where she had made a cast for flowing independent simplicity, she was
feminine, ultra-feminine to her reading of it.

Better take the leap than be guilty of double-dealing even on paper! The
nature of the leap she did not examine.

Her keen apprehension of the price payable for his benevolent intentions
caught scent of them in the air. Those Ormont jewels shone as emblems of
a detested subjection, the penalty for being the beautiful woman rageing
men proclaimed. Was there no scheme of some other sort, and far less
agreeable, to make amends for Steignton? She was shrewd at divination;
she guessed her lord's design. Rather than meet Lady Charlotte, she
proposed to herself the 'leap' immediately; knowing it must be a leap in
the dark, hoping it might be into a swimmer's water. She had her own
pin-money income, and she loathed the chain of her title. So the leap
would at least be honourable, as it assuredly would be unregretted,
whatever ensued.

While Aminta's heart held on to this debate, and in her bed, in her boat,
across the golden valley meadows beside her peaceful little friend, she
gathered a gradual resolution without sight of agencies or consequences,
Lord Ormont was kept from her by the struggle to master his Charlotte a
second time--compared with which the first was insignificant. And this
time it was curious: he could not subdue her physique, as he did before;
she was ready for him each day, and she was animated, much more voluble,
she was ready to jest. The reason being, that she fought now on plausibly
good grounds: on behalf of her independent action.

Previously, her intelligence of the ultimate defeat hanging over the more
stubborn defence of a weak position had harassed her to death's door. She
had no right to retain the family jewels; she had the most perfect of
established rights to refuse doing an ignominious thing. She refused to
visit the so-called Countess of Ormont, or leave her card, or take one
step to warrant the woman in speaking of her as her sister-in-law. And
no,--it did not signify that her brother Rowsley was prohibited by her
from marrying whom he pleased. It meant, that to judge of his acts as
those of a reasoning man, he would have introduced his wife to his
relatives--the relatives he had not quarrelled with--immediately upon his
marriage unless he was ashamed of the woman; and a wife he was ashamed of
was no sister-in-law for her nor aunt for her daughters. Nor should she
come playing the Black Venus among her daughters' husbands, Lady
Charlotte had it in her bosom to say additionally.

Lord Ormont was disconcerted by her manifest pleasure in receiving him
every day. Evidently she consented to the recurrence of a vexatious
dissension for the enjoyment of having him with her hourly. Her
dialectic, too, was cunning. Impetuous with meaning, she forced her way
to get her meaning out, in a manner effective to strike her blow.
Anything for a diversion or a triumph of the moment! He made no way. She
was the better fencer at the tongue.

Yet there was not any abatement of her deference to her brother; and this
little misunderstanding put aside, he was the Rowsley esteemed by her as
the chief of men. She foiled him, it might seem, to exalt him the more.
After he had left the house, visibly annoyed and somewhat stupefied, she
talked of him to her husband, of the soul of chivalry Rowsley was, the
loss to his country. Mr. Eglett was a witness to one of the altercations,
when she, having as usual the dialectical advantage, praised her brother,
to his face, for his magnanimous nature; regretting only that it could be
said he was weak on the woman side of him--which was, she affirmed, a
side proper to every man worth the name; but in his case his country
might complain. Of what?--Well, of a woman.--What had she done, for the
country to complain of her?--Why, then, arts or graces, she had bewitched
and weaned him from his public duty, his military service, his patriotic
ambition.

Lord Ormont's interrogations, heightening the effect of Charlotte's
charge, appeared to Mr. Eglett as a giving of himself over into her
hands; but the earl, after a minute of silence, proved he was a tricky
combatant. It was he who had drawn on Charlotte, that he might have his
opportunity to eulogize--'this lady, whom you continue to call the woman,
after I have told you she is my wife.' According to him, her appeals, her
entreaties, that he should not abandon his profession or let his ambition
rust, had been at one period constant.

He spoke fervently, for him eloquently; and he gained his point; he
silenced Lady Charlotte's tongue, and impressed Mr. Eglett.

When the latter and his wife were alone, he let her see that the Countess
of Ormont was becoming a personage in his consideration.

Lady Charlotte cried out: 'Hear these men where it's a good-looking woman
between the winds! Do you take anything Rowsley says for earnest? You
ought to know he stops at no trifle to get his advantage over you in a
dispute. That 's the soldier in him. It 's victory at any cost!--and I
like him for it. Do you tell me you think it possible my brother Rowsley
would keep smothered years under a bushel the woman he can sit here
magnifying because he wants to lime you and me: you to take his part, and
me to go and call the noble creature decked out in his fine fiction my
sister-in-law. Nothing 'll tempt me to believe my brother could behave in
such a way to the woman he respected!'

So Mr. Eglett opined. But he had been impressed.

He relieved his mind on the subject in a communication to Lord Adderwood;
who habitually shook out the contents of his to Mrs. Lawrence Finchley,
and she, deeming it good for Aminta to have information of the war waging
for her behoof, obtained her country address, with the resolve to drive
down, a bearer of good news to the dear woman she liked to think of, look
at, and occasionally caress; besides rather tenderly pitying her, now
that a change of fortune rendered her former trials conspicuous.

An incident, considered grave even in the days of the duel and the kicks
against a swelling public reprehension of the practice, occurred to
postpone her drive for four-and-twenty hours. London was shaken by
rumours of a tragic mishap to a socially well-known gentleman at the
Chiallo fencing rooms. The rumours passing from mouth to mouth acquired,
in the nature of them, sinister colours as they circulated. Lord Ormont
sent Aminta word of what he called 'a bad sort of accident at Chiallo's,'
without mentioning names or alluding to suspicions.

He treated it lightly. He could not have written of it with such
unconcern if it involved the secretary! Yet Aminta did seriously ask
herself whether he could; and she flew rapidly over the field of his
character, seizing points adverse, points favourably advocative,
balancing dubiously--most unjustly: she felt she was unjust. But in her
condition, the heart of a woman is instantly planted in jungle when the
spirits of the two men closest to her are made to stand opposed by a
sudden excitement of her fears for the beloved one. She cannot see
widely, and is one of the wild while the fit lasts; and, after it, that
savage narrow vision she had of the unbeloved retains its vivid print in
permanence. Was she unjust? Aminta cited corroboration of her being
accurate: such was Lord Ormont! and although his qualities of gallantry,
courtesy, integrity, honourable gentleman, presented a fair low-level
account on the other side, she had so stamped his massive selfishness and
icy inaccessibility to emotion on her conception of him that the
repulsive figure formed by it continued towering when her mood was
kinder.

Love played on love in the woman's breast. Her love had taken a fever
from her lord's communication of the accident at Chiallo's, and she
pushed her alarm to imagine the deadliest, and plead for the right of
confession to herself of her unrepented regrets. She and Matey Weyburn
had parted without any pressure of hands, without a touch. They were,
then, unplighted if now the grave divided them! No touch: mere glances!
And she sighed not, as she pleaded, for the touch, but for the plighting
it would have been. If now she had lost him, he could never tell herself
that since the dear old buried and night-walking schooldays she had said
once Matey to him, named him once to his face Matey Weyburn. A sigh like
the roll of a great wave breaking against a wall of rock came from her
for the possibly lost chance of naming him to his face Matey,--oh, and
seeing his look as she said it!

The boldness might be fancied: it could not be done. Agreeing with the
remote inner voice of her reason so far, she toned her exclamatory
foolishness to question, in Reason's plain, deep, basso-profundo
accompaniment tone, how much the most blessed of mortal women could do to
be of acceptable service to a young schoolmaster?

There was no reply to the question. But it became a nestling centre for
the skiey flock of dreams, and for really temperate soundings of her
capacities, tending to the depreciatory. She could do little. She
entertained the wish to work, not only 'for the sake of Somebody,' as her
favourite poet sang, but for the sake of working and serving--proving
that she was helpfuller than a Countess of Ormont, ranged with all the
other countesses in china and Dresden on a drawing-room mantelpiece for
show. She could organize, manage a household, manage people too, she
thought: manage a husband? The word offends. Perhaps invigorate him, here
and there perhaps inspire him, if he would let her breathe. Husbands
exist who refuse the right of breathing to their puppet wives. Above all,
as it struck her, she could assist, and be more than an echo of one
nobler, in breathing manliness, high spirit, into boys. With that idea
she grazed the shallows of reality, and her dreams whirred from the nest
and left it hungrily empty.

Selina Collett was writing under the verandah letters to her people in
Suffolk, performing the task with marvellous ease. Aminta noted it as a
mark of superior ability, and she had the envy of the complex nature
observing the simple. It accused her of some guiltiness, uncommitted and
indefensible. She had pushed her anxiety about 'the accident at
Chiallo's' to an extreme that made her the creature of her sensibilities.
In the midst of this quiet country life and landscape; these motionless
garden flowers headed by the smooth white river, and her gentle little
friend so homely here, the contemplation of herself was like a shriek in
music. Worse than discordant, she pronounced herself inferior, unfit
mentally as well as bodily for the dreams of companionship with any noble
soul who might have the dream of turning her into something better. There
are couples in the world, not coupled by priestly circumstance, who are
close to the true; union, by reason of generosity on the one part,
grateful devotion, as for the gift of life, on the other. For instance,
Mrs. Lawrence Finchley and Lord Adderwood, which was an instance without
resemblance; but Aminta's heart beat thick for what it wanted, and they
were the instance of two that did not have to snap false bonds of a
marriage-tie in order to walk together composedly outside it--in honour?
Oh yes, yes! She insisted on believing it was in honour.

She saw the couple issue from the boathouse. She had stepped into the
garden full of a presentiment; so she fancied, the moment they were seen.
She had, in fact, heard a noise in the boathouse while thinking of them,
and the effect on her was to spring an idea of mysterious interventions
at the sight.

Mrs. Lawrence rushed to her, and was embraced. 'You 're not astonished to
see me? Adder drove me down, and stopped his coach at the inn, and rowed
me the half-mile up. We will lunch, if you propose; but presently. My
dear, I have to tell you things. You have heard?'

'The accident?'

Aminta tried to read in Mrs. Lawrence's eyes whether it closely concerned
her.

Those pretty eyes, their cut of lids hinting at delicate affinities with
the rice-paper lady of the court of China, were trying to peer seriously.

'Poor man! One must be sorry for him: he--'

'Who?'

'You 've not heard, then?' Mrs. Lawrence dropped her voice: 'Morsfield.'

Aminta shivered. 'All I have heard-half a line from my lord this morning:
no name. It was at the fencing-rooms, he said.'

'Yes, he wouldn't write more;' said Mrs. Lawrence, nodding. 'You know, he
would have had to do it himself if it had not been done for him. Adder
saw him some days back in a brown consultation near his club with Captain
May. Oh, but of course it was accident! Did he call it so in his letter
to you?'

'One word of Mr. Morsfield: he is wounded?'

'Past cure: he has the thing he cried for, spoilt boy as he was from his
birth. I tell you truth, m' Aminta, I grieve to lose him. What with his
airs of the foreign-tinted, punctilious courtly gentleman covering a
survival of the ancient British forest boar or bear, he was a picture in
our modern set, and piquant. And he was devoted to our sex, we must
admit, after the style of the bears. They are for honey, and they have a
hug. If he hadn't been so much of a madman, I should have liked him for
his courage. He had plenty of that, nothing to steer it. A second cousin
comes in for his estates.'

'He is dead?' Aminta cried.

'Yes, dear, he is gone. What the women think of it I can't say. The
general feeling among the men is that some one of them would have had to
send him sooner or later. The curious point, Adder says, is his letting
it be done by steel. He was a dead shot, dangerous with the small sword,
as your Mr. Weyburn said, only soon off his head. But I used to be
anxious about the earl's meeting him with pistols. He did his best to
provoke it. Here, Adder,'--she spoke over her shoulder,--'tell Lady
Ormont all you know of the Morsfield-May affair.'

Lord Adderwood bowed compliance. His coolness was the masculine of Mrs.
Lawrence's hardly feminine in treating of a terrible matter, so that the
dull red facts had to be disengaged from his manner of speech before they
sank into Aminta's acceptance; of them as credible.

'They fought with foils, buttons off, preliminary ceremonies perfect;
salute in due order; guard, and at it.

Odd thing was, nobody at Chiallo's had a notion of the business till
Morsfield was pinked. He wouldn't be denied; went to work like a fellow
meaning to be skewered, if he couldn't do the trick: and he tried it. May
had been practising some weeks. He's well on the Continent by this time.
It'll blow over. Button off sheer accident. I wasn't lucky enough to see
the encounter: came in just when Chiallo was lashing his poll over
Morsfield flat on the ground. He had it up to the hilt. We put a buttoned
foil by the side of Morsfield, and all swore to secrecy. As it is, it 'll
go badly against poor Chiallo. Taste for fencing won't be much improved
by the affair. They quarrelled in the dressing room, and fetched the
foils and knocked off the buttons there. A big rascal toady squire of
Morsfield's did it for him. Morsfield was just up from Yorkshire. He said
he was expecting a summons elsewhere, bound to await it, declined
provocation for the present. May filliped him on the cheek.'

'Adder conveyed the information of her husband's flight to the consolable
Amy,' said Mrs. Lawrence.

'He had to catch the coach for Dover,' Adderwood explained. 'His wife was
at a dinner-party. I saw her at midnight.'

'Fair Amy was not so very greatly surprised?'

'Quite the soldier's wife!'

'She said she was used to these little catastrophes. But, Adder, what did
she say of her husband?'

'Said she was never anxious about him, for nothing would kill him.'

Mrs. Lawrence shook a doleful head at Aminta.

'You see, my dear Aminta, here's another, and probably her last, chance
of sharing the marquisate gone. Who can fail to pity her, except old
Time! And I 'm sure she likes her husband well enough. She ought: no
woman ever had such a servant. But the captain has not been known to
fight without her sanction, and the inference is--'Alas! woe! Fair Amy is
doomed to be the fighting captain's bride to the end of the chapter.
Adder says she looked handsome. A dinner-party suits her cosmetic
complexion better than a ball. The account of the inquest is in the day's
papers, and we were tolerably rejoiced we could drive out of London
without having to reply to coroner's questions.'

'He died-soon?' Aminta's voice was shaken.

Mrs. Lawrence touched at her breast, it might be for heart or lungs.
Judging by Aminta's voice and face, one could suppose she was harking
back, in woman's way, to her original sentiment for the man, now that he
lay prostrate.

Aminta read the unreproachful irony in the smile addressed to her. She
was too convulsed by her many emotions and shouting thoughts to think of
defending herself.

Selina, in the drawing-room, diligently fingered and classed brown-black
pressed weeds of her neophyte's botany-folios. The sight of her and her
occupation struck Aminta as that of a person in another world beyond this
world of blood, strangely substantial to view; and one heard her speak.

Guilty?--no. But she had wished to pique her lord. After the term of a
length of months, could it be that the unhappy man and she were punished
for the half-minute's acting of some interest in him? And Lord Ormont had
been seen consulting Captain May; or was it giving him directions?

Her head burned. All the barren interrogations were up, running and
knocking for hollow responses; and, saving a paleness of face, she
cloaked any small show of the riot. She was an amiable hostess. She had
ceased to comprehend Mrs. Lawrence, even to the degree of thinking her
unfeminine. She should have known that the 'angelical chimpanzee,' as a
friend, once told of his being a favourite with the lady, had called her,
could not simulate a feeling, and had not the slightest power of pretence
to compassion for an ill-fated person who failed to quicken her
enthusiasm. In that, too, she was a downright boy. Morsfield was a kind
of Bedlamite to her; amusing in his antics, and requiring to be
manoeuvred and eluded while he lived: once dead, just a tombstone, of
interest only to his family.

She beckoned Aminta to follow her; and, with a smirk of indulgent fun,
commended Lord Adderwood to a study of Selina Collett's botany-folios,
which the urbanest of indifferent gentlemen had slid his eyes over his
nose to inspect before the lunch.

'You ought to know what is going on in town, my dear Aminta. You have won
the earl to a sense of his duty, and he 's at work on the harder task of
winning Lady Charlotte Eglett to a sense of hers. It 's tremendous. Has
been forward some days, and no sign of yielding on either side. Mr.
Eglett, good man, is between them, catching it right and left; and he
deserves his luck for marrying her. Vows she makes him the best of wives.
If he 's content, I 've nothing to complain of. You must be ready to
receive her; my lord is sure to carry the day. You gulp. You won't be
seeing much of her. I 'm glad to say he is condescending to terms of
peace with the Horse Guards. We hear so. You may be throning it
officially somewhere next year. And all 's well that ends well! Say that
to me!'

'It is, when the end comes,' Aminta replied.

Mrs. Lawrence's cool lips were pressed to her cheek. The couple and their
waterman rowed away to the party they had left with the four-in-hand at
their inn.

A wind was rising. The trees gave their swish of leaves, the river
darkened the patch of wrinkles, the bordering flags amid the reed-blades
dipped and streamed.

Surcharged with unassimilated news of events, that made a thunder in her
head, Aminta walked down the garden path, meeting Selina and bearing her
on. She had a witch's will to rouse gales. Hers was not the woman's
nature to be driven cowering by stories of men's bloody deeds. She took
the field, revolted, dissevering herself from the class which tolerated
them--actuated by a reflective moralty, she believed; and loathed herself
for having aspired, schemed, to be a member of the class. But it was not
the class, it was against her lord as representative of the class, that
she was now the rebel, neither naming him nor imaging him. Her enveloping
mind was black on him. Such as one of those hard slaughtering men could
call her his own? She breathed short and breathed deep. Her bitter reason
had but the common pity for a madman despatched to his rest. Yet she knew
hatred of her lord in his being suspected as instigator or accomplice of
the hand that dealt the blow. He became to her thought a python whose
coils were about her person, insufferable to the gaze backward.

Moments like these are the mothers in travail of a resolve joylessly
conceived, undesired to clasp, Necessity's offspring. Thunderclouds have
as little love of the lightnings they fling.

Aminta was aware only of her torment. The trees were bending, the water
hissing, the grasses all this way and that, like hands of a delirious
people in surges of wreck. She scorned the meaningless shake of the
garments of earth, and exclaimed: 'If we were by the sea to-night!'

'I shall be to-morrow night,' said Selina. 'I shall think of you. Oh!
would you come with me?'

'Would you have me?'

'My mother will indeed be honoured by your consenting to come.'

'Write to her before the post is out.'

'We shall travel down together?'

Aminta nodded and smiled, and Selina kissed her hand in joy, saying, that
down home she would not be so shy of calling her Aminta. She was bidden
to haste.




CHAPTER XXVI

VISITS OF FAREWELL

The noise in London over Adolphus Morsfield's tragical end disturbed Lord
Ormont much less than the cessation of letters from his Aminta; and that
likewise, considering his present business on her behalf, he patiently
shrugged at and pardoned, foreseeing her penitent air. He could do it
lightly after going some way to pardon his offending country. For Aminta
had not offended, his robust observation of her was moved to the kindly
humorous by a reflective view here and there of the downright woman her
clever little shuffles exposed her to be, not worse. It was her sex that
made her one of the gliders in grasses, some of whom are venomous; but
she belonged to the order only as an innocuous blindworm. He could
pronounce her small by-play with Morsfield innocent, her efforts to climb
the stairs into Society quite innocent; judging her, of course, by her
title of woman. A woman's innocence has a rainbow skin. Set this one
beside other women, she comes out well, fairly well, well enough.

Now that the engagement with Charlotte assumed proportions of a series of
battle, properly to be entitled a campaign, he had, in his loneliness,
fallen into the habit of reflecting at the close of his day's work; and
the rubbing of that unused opaque mirror hanging inside a man of action
had helped him piecemeal to perceive bits of his conduct, entirely
approved by him, which were intimately connected, nevertheless, with a
train of circumstances that he disliked and could not charge justly upon
any other shoulders than his own. What was to be thought of it? He would
not be undergoing this botheration of the prolonged attempt to bring a
stubborn woman to a sense of her duty, if he had declared his marriage in
the ordinary style, and given his young countess her legitimate place
before the world. What impeded it? The shameful ingratitude of his
countrymen to the soldier who did it eminent service at a crisis of the
destinies of our Indian Empire! He could not condone the injury done to
him by entering among them again. Too like the kicked cur, that! He
retired--call it 'sulked in his tent,' if you like. His wife had to share
his fortunes. He being slighted, she necessarily was shadowed. For a
while she bore it contentedly enough; then began her mousy scratches to
get into the room off the wainscot, without blame from him; she behaved
according to her female nature.

Yes, but the battles with Charlotte forced on his recognition once more,
and violently, the singular consequences of his retirement and Coriolanus
quarrel with his countrymen. He had doomed himself ever since to a
contest with women. First it was his Queen of Amazons, who, if
vanquished, was not so easily vanquished, and, in fact, doubtfully,--for
now, to propitiate her, he had challenged, and must overcome or be
disgraced, the toughest Amazonian warrior man could stand against at cast
of dart or lock of arms. No day scored an advantage; and she did not
apparently suffer fatigue. He did: that is to say, he was worried and
hurried to have the wrangle settled and Charlotte at Aminta's feet. He
gained not an inch of ground. His principle in a contention of the sort
was to leave the woman to the practice of her obvious artifices, and
himself simply hammer, incessantly hammer. But Charlotte hammered as
well. The modest position of the defensive negative was not to her taste.
The moment he presented himself she flew out upon some yesterday's part
of the argument and carried the war across the borders, in attacks on his
character and qualities--his weakness regarding women, his incapacity to
forgive, and the rest. She hammered on that head. As for any prospect of
a termination of the strife, he could see none in her joyful welcome to
him and regretful parting and pleased appointment of the next meeting day
after day.

The absurdest of her devices for winding him off his aim was to harp on
some new word she had got hold of as, for example, to point out to him
his aptitudes, compliment him on his aptitudes, recommend him to study
and learn the limitations of his aptitudes! She revelled in something the
word unfolded to her.

However, here was the point: she had to be beaten. So, if she, too,
persisted in hammering, he must employ her female weapon of artifice with
her. One would gladly avoid the stooping to it in a civil dispute, in
which one is not so gloriously absolved for lying and entrapping as in
splendid war.

Weyburn's name was announced to him at an early hour on Thursday morning.
My lord nodded to the footman; he nodded to himself over a suggestion
started in a tactical intelligence by the name.

'Ah! you 're off?' he accosted the young man.

'I have come to take my leave, my lord.'

'Nothing new in the morning papers?'

'A report that Captain May intends to return and surrender.'

'Not before a month has passed, if he follows my counsel.'

'To defend his character.'

'He has none.'

'His reputation.'

'He has too much.'

'These charges against him must be intolerable.'

'Was he not a bit of a pupil of yours?'

'We practised two or three times-nothing more.'

'Morsfield was a wasp at a feast. Somebody had to crush him. I 've seen
the kind of man twice in my life and exactly the kind of man. If their
law puts down duelling, he rules the kingdom!'

'My lord, I should venture to say the kind of man can be a common
annoyance because the breach of the law is countenanced.'

'Bad laws are best broken. A society that can't get a scouring now and
then will be a dirty set.'

With a bend of the head, in apology for speaking of himself, Weyburn
said: 'I have acted on my view. I declined a challenge from a sort of
henchman of his.'

'Oh! a poacher's lurcher? You did right. Fight such fellows with
constables. You have seen Lady Charlotte?'

'I am on my way to her ladyship.'

'Do me this favour. Fourteen doors up the street of her residence, my
physician lives. I have to consult him at once. Dr. Rewkes.'

Weyburn bowed. Lady Charlotte could not receive him later than half-past
ten of the morning, he said. 'This morning she can,' said my lord. 'You
will tell Dr. Rewkes that it is immediate. I rather regret your going. I
shall be in a controversy with the Horse Guards about our cavalry
saddles. It would be regiments of raw backs the first fortnight of a
campaign.'

The earl discoursed on saddles; and passed to high eulogy of our
Hanoverian auxiliary troopers in the Peninsula; 'good husbands,' he named
them quaintly, speaking of their management of their beasts. Thence he
diverged to Frederic's cavalry, rarely matched for shrewdness and
endurance; to the deeds of the Liechtenstein Hussars; to the great things
Blucher did with his horsemen.

The subject was interesting; but Weyburn saw the clock at past the half
after ten. He gave a slight sign of restiveness, and was allowed to go
when the earl had finished his pro and con upon Arab horses and Mameluke
saddles. Lord Ormont nicked his head, just as at their first interview:
he was known to have an objection to the English shaking of hands.
'Good-morning,' he said; adding a remark or two, of which et cetera may
stand for an explicit rendering. It concerned the young man's prosperity:
my lord's conservative plain sense was in doubt of the prospering of a
giddy pate, however good a worker. His last look at the young man, who
had not served him badly, held an anticipation of possibly some day
seeing a tatterdemalion of shipwreck, a rueful exhibition of ideas put to
the business of life.

Weyburn left the message with Dr. Rewkes in person. It had not seemed to
him that Lord Ormont was one requiring the immediate attendance of a
physician. By way of accounting to Lady Charlotte for the lateness of his
call, he mentioned the summons he had delivered.

'Oh, that's why he hasn't come yet,' said she. 'We'll sit and talk till
he does come. I don't wonder if his bile has been stirred. He can't oil
me to credit what he pumps into others. His Lady Ormont! I believe in it
less than ever I did. Morsfield or no Morsfield--and now the poor wretch
has got himself pinned to the plank, like my grandson Bobby's
dragonflies, I don't want to say anything further of him--she doesn't
have much of a welcome at Steignton! If I were a woman to wager as men
do, I 'd stake a thousand pounds to five on her never stepping across the
threshold of Steignton. All very well in London, and that place he hires
up at Marlow. He respects our home. That 's how I know my brother Rowsley
still keeps a sane man. A fortune on it!--and so says Mr. Eglett. Any
reasonable person must think it. He made a fool of some Hampton-Evey at
Madrid, if he went through any ceremony--and that I doubt. But she and
old (what do they call her?) may have insisted upon the title, as much as
they could. He sixty; she under twenty, I'm told. Pagnell 's the name.
That aunt of a good-looking young woman sees a noble man of sixty
admiring her five feet seven or so--she's tall--of marketable
merchandise, and she doesn't need telling that at sixty he'll give the
world to possess the girl. But not his family honour! He stops at that.
Why? Lord Ormont 's made of pride! He'll be kind to her, he'll be
generous, he won't forsake her; she'll have her portion in his will, and
by the course of things in nature, she'll outlive him and marry, and be
happy, I hope. Only she won't enter Steignton. You remember what I say.
You 'll live when I 'm gone. It 's the thirst of her life to be mistress
of Steignton. Not she!--though Lord Ormont would have us all open our
doors to her; mine too, now he 's about it. He sets his mind on his plan,
and he forgets rights and dues--everything; he must have it as his will
dictates. That 's how he made such a capital soldier. You know the
cavalry leader he was. If they'd given him a field in Europe! His enemies
admit that. Twelve! and my clock's five minutes or more slow. What can
Rowsley be doing?'

She rattled backward on the scene at Steignton, and her brother's
handsome preservation of his dignity 'stood it like the king he is!' and
to the Morsfield-May encounter, which had prevented another; and Mrs. May
was rolled along in the tide, with a hint of her good reason for liking
Lord Ormont; also the change of opinion shown by the Press as to Lord
Ormont's grand exploit. Referring to it, she flushed and jigged on her
chair for a saddle beneath her. And that glorious Indian adventure warmed
her to the man who had celebrated it among his comrades when a boy at
school.

'You 're to teach Latin and Greek, you said. For you 're right: we
English can't understand the words we 're speaking, if we don't know a
good deal of Latin and some Greek. "Conversing in tokens, not standard
coin," you said, I remember; and there'll be a "general rabble tongue,"
unless we English are drilled in the languages we filched from. Lots of
lords and ladies want the drilling, then! I'll send some over to you for
Swiss air and roots of the English tongue. Oh, and you told me you
supported Lord Ormont on his pet argument for corps d'elite; and you
quoted Virgil to back it. Let me have that line again--in case of his
condescending to write to the papers on the subject.'

Weyburn repeated the half-line.

'Good: I won't forget now. And you said the French act on that because
they follow human nature, and the English don't. We "bully it," you said.
That was on our drive down to Steignton. I hope you 'll succeed. You 'll
be visiting England. Call on me in London or at Olmer--only mind and give
me warning. I shall be glad to see you. I 've got some ideas from you. If
I meet a man who helps me to read the world and men as they are, I 'm
grateful to him; and most people are not, you 'll find. They want you to
show them what they 'd like the world to be. We don't agree about a lady.
You 're in the lists, lance in rest, all for chivalry. You 're a man, and
a young man. Have you taken your leave of her yet? She'll expect it, as a
proper compliment.'

'I propose running down to take my leave of Lady Ormont to-morrow,'
replied Weyburn.

'She is handsome?'

She is very handsome.'

'Beautiful, do you mean?'

'Oh, my lady, it would only be a man's notion!'

'Now, that 's as good an answer as could be made! You 're sure to
succeed. I 'm not the woman's enemy. But let her keep her place. Why,
Rowsley can't be coming to-day! Did Lord Ormont look ill?'

'It did not strike me so.'

'He 's between two fires. A man gets fretted. But I shan't move a step. I
dare say she won't. Especially with that Morsfield out of the way. You do
mean you think her a beauty. Well, then, there'll soon be a successor to
Morsfield. Beauties will have their weapons, and they can hit on plenty;
and it 's nothing to me, as long as I save my brother from their arts.'

Weyburn felt he had done his penance in return for kindness. He bowed and
rose, Lady Charlotte stretched out her hand.

'We shall be sending you a pupil some day,' she said, and smiled.

'Forward your address as soon as you 're settled.' Her face gave a
glimpse of its youth in a cordial farewell smile.

Lord Ormont had no capacity to do the like, although they were strictly
brother and sister in appearance. The smallest difference in character
rendered her complex and kept him simple. She had a thirsting mind.

Weyburn fancied that a close intimacy of a few months would have enabled
him to lift her out of her smirching and depraving mean jealousies. He
speculated, as he trod the street, on little plots and surprises, which
would bring Lady Charlotte and Lady Ormont into presence, and end by
making friends of them. Supposing that could be done, Lady Ormont might
be righted by the intervention of Lady Charlotte after all.

Weyburn sent his dream flying with as dreamy an after-thought: 'Funny it
will be then for Lady Charlotte to revert to the stuff she has been
droning in my ear half an hour ago!--Look well behind, and we see spots
where we buzzed, lowed, bit and tore; and not until we have cast that
look and seen the brute are we human creatures.'

A crumb of reflection such as this could brace him, adding its modest
maravedi to his prized storehouse of gain, fortifying with assurances of
his having a concrete basis for his business in life. His great youthful
ambition had descended to it, but had sunk to climb on a firmer footing.

Arthur Abner had his next adieu. They talked of Lady Ormont, as to whose
position of rightful Countess of Ormont Mr. Abner had no doubt. He said
of Lady Charlotte: 'She has a clear head; but she loves her "brother
Rowsley" excessively; and any excess pushes to craziness.'

He spoke to Weyburn of his prospects in the usually, perhaps necessarily,
cheerless tone of men who recognize by contrast the one mouse's nibbling
at a mountain of evil. 'To harmonize the nationalities, my dear boy!
teach Christians to look fraternally on Jews! David was a harper, but the
setting of him down to roll off a fugue on one of your cathedral organs
would not impose a heavier task than you are undertaking. You have my
best wishes, whatever aid I can supply. But we 're nearer to King John's
time than to your ideal, as far as the Jews go.'

'Not in England.'

'Less in England,' Abner shrugged.

'You have beaten the Christians on the field they challenged you to enter
for a try. They feel the pinch in their interests and their vanity. That
will pass. I 'm for the two sides, under the name of Justice; and I give
the palm to whichever of the two first gets hold of the idea of Justice.
My old schoolmate's well?'

'Always asking after Matey Weyburn!'

'He shall have my address in Switzerland. You and I will be
corresponding.'

Now rose to view the visit to the lady who was Lady Ormont on the tongue,
Aminta at heart; never to be named Aminta even to himself. His heart
broke loose at a thought of it.

He might say Browny. For that was not serious with the intense present
signification the name Aminta had. Browny was queen of the old
school-time-enclosed it in her name; and that sphere enclosed her, not
excluding him. And the dear name of Browny played gently, humorously,
fervently, too, with life: not, pathetically, as that of Aminta did when
came a whisper of her situation, her isolation, her friendlessness;
hardly dissimilar to what could be imagined of a gazelle in the streets
of London city. The Morsfields were not all slain. The Weyburns would be
absent.

At the gate of his cottage garden Weyburn beheld a short unfamiliar
figure of a man with dimly remembered features. Little Collett he still
was in height. The schoolmates had not met since the old days of Cuper's.

Little Collett delivered a message of invitation from Selina, begging Mr.
Weyburn to accompany her brother on the coach to Harwich next day, and
spend two or three days by the sea. But Weyburn's mind had been set in
the opposite direction--up Thames instead of down.

He was about to refuse, but he checked his voice and hummed. Words of
Selina's letter jumped in italics. He perceived Lady Ormont's hand. For
one thing, would she be at Great Marlow alone? And he knew that hand--how
deftly it moved and moved others. Selina Collett would not have invited
him with underlinings merely to see a shoreside house and garden. Her
silence regarding a particular name showed her to be under injunction,
one might guess. At worst, it would be the loss of a couple of days;
worth the venture. They agreed to journey by coach next day.

Facing eastward in the morning, on a seat behind the coachman, Weyburn
had a seafaring man beside him, bound for the good port of Harwich, where
his family lived, and thence by his own boat to Flushing. Weyburn set him
talking of himself, as the best way of making him happy; for it is the
theme which pricks to speech, and so liberates an uncomfortably locked-up
stranger; who, if sympathetic to human proximity, is thankful. They
exchanged names, delighted to find they were both Matthews; whereupon
Matthew of the sea demanded the paw of Matthew of the land, and there was
a squeeze. The same with little Collett, after hearing of him as the old
schoolmate of the established new friend. Then there was talk. Little
Collett named Felixstowe as the village of his mother's house and garden
sloping to the sands. 'That 's it-you have it,' said the salted Matthew:
'peace is in that spot, and there I 've sworn to pitch my tent when I 'm
incapacitated for further exercise--profitable, so to speak. My eldest
girl has a bar of amber she picked up one wash of the tide at Felixstowe,
and there it had been lying sparkling, unseen, hours, the shore is that
solitary. What I like!--a quiet shore and a peopled sea. Ever been to
Brighton? There it 's t' other way.'

Not long after he had mentioned the time of early evening for their entry
into his port of Harwich, the coach turned quietly over on a bank of the
roadside, depositing outside passengers quite safely, in so
matter-of-course a way, that only the screams of an uninjured lady inside
repressed their roars of laughter. One of the wheels had come loose, half
a mile off the nearest town. Their entry into Harwich was thereby delayed
until half-past nine at night. Full of consideration for the new mates
now fast wedded to his heart by an accident. Matthew Shale proposed to
Matthew Weyburn, instead of the bother of crossing the ferry with a
portmanteau and a bag at that late hour, to sup at his house, try the
neighbouring inn for a short sleep, and ship on board his yawl, the
honest Susan, to be rowed ashore off the Swin to Felixstowe sands no
later than six o'clock of a summer's morning, in time for a bath and a
swim before breakfast. It sounded well--it sounded sweetly. Weyburn
suggested the counter proposal of supper for the three at the inn. But
the other Matthew said: 'I married a cook. She expects a big appetite,
and she always keeps warm when I 'm held away, no matter how late. Sure
to be enough.'

Beds were secured at the inn; after which came the introduction to Mrs.
Shale, the exhibition of Susan Shale's bar of amber, the dish of
fresh-fried whiting, the steak pudding, a grog, tobacco, rest at the inn,
and a rousing bang at the sleepers' doors when the unwonted supper in
them withheld an answer to the intimating knock. Young Matthew Shale, who
had slept on board the Susan, conducted them to her boat. His glance was
much drawn to the very white duck trousers Weyburn had put on, for a
souvenir of the approbation they had won at Marlow. They were on, and so
it was of no use for young Matthew to say they were likely to bear away a
token from the Susan. She was one among the damsels of colour, and free
of her tokens, especially to the spotless.

How it occurred, nobody saw; though everybody saw how naturally it must
occur for the white ducks to 'have it in the eye' by the time they had
been on board a quarter of an hour. Weyburn got some fun out of them, for
a counterbalance to a twitch of sentimental regret scarcely decipherable,
as that the last view of him should bear a likeness of Browny's
recollection of her first.

A glorious morning of flushed open sky and sun on sea chased all small
thoughts out of it. The breeze was from the west, and the Susan, lightly
laden, took the heave of smooth rollers with a flowing current-curtsey in
the motion of her speed. Fore-sail and aft were at their gentle strain;
her shadow rippled fragmentarily along to the silver rivulet and boat of
her wake. Straight she flew to the ball of fire now at spring above the
waters, and raining red gold on the line of her bows. By comparison she
was an ugly yawl, and as the creature of wind and wave beautiful.

They passed an English defensive fort, and spared its walls, in obedience
to Matthew Shale's good counsel that they should forbear from sneezing.
Little Collett pointed to the roof of his mother's house twenty paces
rearward of a belt of tamarisks, green amid the hollowed yellows of
shorebanks yet in shade, crumbling to the sands. Weyburn was attracted by
a diminutive white tent, of sentry-box shape, evidently a bather's, quite
as evidently a fair bather's. He would have to walk on some way for his
dip. He remarked to little Collett that ladies going into the water
half-dressed never have more than half a bath. His arms and legs flung
out contempt of that style of bathing, exactly in old Matey's
well-remembered way. Half a mile off shore, the Susan was put about to
flap her sails, and her boat rocked with the passengers. Turning from a
final cheer to friendly Matthew, Weyburn at the rudder espied one of
those unenfranchised ladies in marine uniform issuing through the
tent-slit. She stepped firmly, as into her element. A plain look at her,
and a curious look, and an intent look fixed her fast, and ran the shock
on his heart before he knew of a guess. She waded, she dipped; a head
across the breast of the waters was observed: this one of them could
swim. She was making for sea, a stone's throw off the direction of the
boat. Before his wits had grasped the certainty possessing them, fiery
envy and desire to be alongside her set his fingers fretting at buttons.
A grand smooth swell of the waters lifted her, and her head rose to see
her world. She sank down the valley, where another wave was mounding for
its onward roll: a gentle scene of Weyburn's favourite Sophoclean chorus.
Now she was given to him--it was she. How could it ever have been any
other! He handed his watch to little Collett, and gave him the ropes,
pitched coat and waistcoat on his knees, stood free of boots and socks,
and singing out, truly enough, the words of a popular cry, 'White ducks
want washing,' went over and in.




CHAPTER XXVII

A MARINE DUET

She soon had to know she was chased. She had seen the dive from the boat,
and received all illumination. With a chuckle of delighted surprise, like
a blackbird startled, she pushed seaward for joy of the effort, thinking
she could exult in imagination of an escape up to the moment of capture,
yielding then only to his greater will; and she meant to try it.

The swim was a holiday; all was new--nothing came to her as the same old
thing since she took her plunge; she had a sea-mind--had left her
earth-mind ashore. The swim, and Matey Weyburn pursuing her passed up,
out of happiness, through the spheres of delirium, into the region where
our life is as we would have it be a home holding the quiet of the
heavens, if but midway thither, and a home of delicious animation of the
whole frame, equal to wings.

He drew on her, but he was distant, and she waved an arm. The shout of
her glee sprang from her: 'Matey!' He waved; she heard his voice. Was it
her name? He was not so drunken of the sea as she: he had not leapt out
of bondage into buoyant waters, into a youth without a blot, without an
aim, satisfied in tasting; the dream of the long felicity.

A thought brushed by her: How if he were absent? It relaxed her stroke of
arms and legs. He had doubled the salt sea's rapture, and he had shackled
its gift of freedom. She turned to float, gathering her knees for the
funny sullen kick, until she heard him near. At once her stroke was
renewed vigorously; she had the foot of her pursuer, and she called,
'Adieu, Matey Weyburn!'

Her bravado deserved a swifter humiliation than he was able to bring down
on her: she swam bravely, and she was divine to see ahead as well as
overtake.

Darting to the close parallel, he said: 'What sea nymph sang me my name?'

She smote a pang of her ecstasy into him: 'Ask mine!'

'Browny!'

They swam; neither of them panted; their heads were water-flowers that
spoke at ease.

'We 've run from school; we won't go back.'

'We 've a kingdom.'

'Here's a big wave going to be a wall.'

'Off he rolls.'

'He's like the High Brent broad meadow under Elling Wood.'

'Don't let Miss Vincent hear you.'

'They 're not waves; they 're sighs of the deep.'

'A poet I swim with! He fell into the deep in his first of May morning
ducks. We used to expect him.'

'I never expected to owe them so much.'

Pride of the swimmer and the energy of her joy embraced Aminta, that she
might nerve all her powers to gain the half-minute for speaking at her
ease.

'Who 'd have thought of a morning like this? You were looked for last
night.'

'A lucky accident to our coach. I made friends with the skipper of the
yawl.'

'I saw the boat. Who could have dreamed--? Anything may happen now.'

For nothing further would astonish her, as he rightly understood her; but
he said: 'You 're prepared for the rites? Old Triton is ready.'

'Float, and tell me.'

They spun about to lie on their backs. Her right hand, at piano-work of
the octave-shake, was touched and taken, and she did not pull it away.
Her eyelids fell.

'Old Triton waits.'

'Why?'

'We 're going to him.'

'Yes?'

'Customs of the sea.'

'Tell me.'

'He joins hands. We say, "Browny-Matey," and it 's done.'

She splashed, crying 'Swim,' and after two strokes, 'You want to beat me,
Matey Weyburn.'

'How?'

'Not fair!'

'Say what.'

'Take my breath. But, yes! we'll be happy in our own way. We 're
sea-birds. We 've said adieu to land. Not to one another. We shall be
friends?'

'Always.'

'This is going to last?'

'Ever so long.'

They had a spell of steady swimming, companionship to inspirit it. Browny
was allowed place a little foremost, and she guessed not wherefore, in
her flattered emulation.

'I 'm bound for France.'

'Slew a point to the right: South-east by South. We shall hit Dunkerque.'

'I don't mean to be picked up by boats.'

'We'll decline.'

'You see I can swim.'

'I was sure of it.'

They stopped their talk--for the pleasure of the body to be savoured in
the mind, they thought; and so took Nature's counsel to rest their voices
awhile.

Considering that she had not been used of late to long immersions, and
had not broken her fast, and had talked much, for a sea-nymph, Weyburn
spied behind him on a shore seeming flat down, far removed.

'France next time,' he said: 'we'll face to the rear.'

'Now?' said she, big with blissful conceit of her powers and incredulous
of such a command from him.

'You may be feeling tired presently.'

The musical sincerity of her 'Oh no, not I!' sped through his limbs; he
had a willingness to go onward still some way.

But his words fastened the heavy land on her spirit, knocked at the habit
of obedience. Her stroke of the arms paused. She inclined to his example,
and he set it shoreward.

They swam silently, high, low, creatures of the smooth green roller. He
heard the water-song of her swimming. She, though breathing equably at
the nostrils, lay deep. The water shocked at her chin, and curled round
the under lip. He had a faint anxiety; and, not so sensible of a weight
in the sight of land as she was, he chattered, by snatches, rallied her,
encouraged her to continue sportive for this once, letting her feel it
was but a once and had its respected limit with him. So it was not out of
the world.

Ah, friend Matey! And that was right and good on land; but rightness and
goodness flung earth's shadow across her brilliancy here, and any stress
on 'this once' withdrew her liberty to revel in it, putting an end to
perfect holiday; and silence, too, might hint at fatigue. She began to
think her muteness lost her the bloom of the enchantment, robbing her of
her heavenly frolic lead, since friend Matey resolved to be as eminently
good in salt water as on land. Was he unaware that they were boy and girl
again?--she washed pure of the intervening years, new born, by blessing
of the sea; worthy of him here!--that is, a swimmer worthy of him, his
comrade in salt water.

'You're satisfied I swim well?' she said.

'It would go hard with me if we raced a long race.'

'I really was out for France.'

'I was ordered to keep you for England.' She gave him Browny's eyes.

'We've turned our backs on Triton.'

'The ceremony was performed.'

'When?'

'The minute I spoke of it and you splashed.'

'Matey! Matey Weyburn!'

'Browny Farrell!'

'Oh, Matey! she's gone!'

'She's here.'

'Try to beguile me, then, that our holiday's not over. You won't forget
this hour?'

'No time of mine on earth will live so brightly for me.'

'I have never had one like it. I could go under and be happy; go to old
Triton, and wait for you; teach him to speak your proper Christian name.
He hasn't heard it yet,--heard "Matey,"--never yet has been taught
"Matthew."'

'Aminta!'

'Oh, my friend! my dear!' she cried, in the voice of the wounded, like a
welling of her blood: 'my strength will leave me. I may play--not you:
you play with a weak vessel. Swim, and be quiet. How far do you count
it?'

'Under a quarter of a mile.'

'Don't imagine me tired.'

'If you are, hold on to me.'

'Matey, I'm for a dive.'

He went after the ball of silver and bubbles, and they came up together.
There is no history of events below the surface.

She shook off her briny blindness, and settled to the full sweep of the
arms, quite silent now. Some emotion, or exhaustion from the strain of
the swimmer's breath in speech, stopped her playfulness. The pleasure she
still knew was a recollection of the outward swim, when she had been
privileged to cast away sex with the push from earth, as few men will
believe that women, beautiful women, ever wish to do; and often and
ardently during the run ahead they yearn for Nature to grant them their
one short holiday truce.

But Aminta forgave him for bringing earth so close to her when there was
yet a space of salt water between her and shore; and she smiled at times,
that he might not think she was looking grave.




CHAPTER XXVIII

THE PLIGHTING

They touched sand at the first draw of the ebb, and this being earth,
Matey addressed himself to the guardian and absolving genii of
matter-of-fact, by saying; 'Did you inquire about the tides?'

Her head shook, stunned with what had passed. She waded to shore, after
motioning for him to swim on. Men, in comparison beside their fair
fellows, are so little sensationally complex, that his one feeling now,
as to what had passed, was relief at the idea of his presence having been
a warrantable protectorship.

Aminta's return from the sea-nymph to the state of woman crossed
annihiliation on the way back to sentience, and picked up meaningless
pebbles and shells of life, between the sea's verge and her tent's
shelter; hardly her own life to her understanding yet, except for the
hammer Memory became, to strike her insensible, at here and there a
recollected word or nakedness of her soul.

He swam along by the shore to where the boat was paddled, spying at her
bare feet on the sand, her woman's form. He waved, and the figure in the
striped tunic and trousers waved her response, apparently the same person
he had quitted.

Dry and clad, and decently formal under the transformation, they met at
Mrs. Collett's breakfast-table, and in each hung the doubt whether land
was the dream or sea. Both owned to a swim; both omitted mention of the
tale of white ducks. Little Collett had brought Matey's and his
portmanteau into the house, by favour of the cook, through the scullery.
He, who could have been a pictorial and suggestive narrator, carried a
spinning head off his shoulders from this wonderful Countess of Ormont to
Matey Weyburn's dark-eyed Browny at High Brent, and the Sunday walk in
Sir Peter Wensell's park. Away and back his head went. Browny was not to
be thought of as Browny; she was this grand Countess of Ormont; she had
married Matey Weyburn's hero: she would never admit she had been Browny.
Only she was handsome then, and she is handsome now; and she looks on
Matey Weyburn now just as she did then. How strange is the world! Or how
if we are the particular person destined to encounter the strange things
of the world? And fancy J. Masner, and Pinnett major, and young Oakes
(liked nothing better than a pretty girl, he strutted boasting at
thirteen), and the Frenchy, and the lot, all popping down at the table,
and asked the name of the lady sitting like Queen Esther--how they would
roar out! Boys, of course--but men, too!--very few men have a notion of
the extraordinary complications and coincidences and cracker-surprises
life contains. Here 's an instance; Matey Weyburn positively will wear
white ducks to play before Aminta Farrell on the first of May
cricketing-day. He happens to have his white ducks on when he sees the
Countess of Ormont swimming in the sea; and so he can go in just as if
they were all-right bathing-drawers. In he goes, has a good long swim
with her, and when he comes out, says, of his dripping ducks, 'tabula
votiva . . . avida vestimenta,' to remind an old schoolmate of his
hopping to the booth at the end of a showery May day, and dedicating them
to the laundry in these words. It seems marvellous. It was a quaint
revival, an hour after breakfast, for little Collett to be acting as
intermediary with Selina to request Lady Ormont's grant of a
five-minutes' interview before the church-bell summoned her. She was
writing letters, and sent the message: 'Tell Mr. Weyburn I obey.' Selina
delivered it, uttering 'obey' in a demurely comical way, as a word of
which the humour might be comprehensible to him.

Aminta stood at the drawing-room window. She was asking herself whether
her recent conduct shrieked coquette to him, or any of the abominable
titles showered on the women who take free breath of air one day after
long imprisonment.

She said: 'Does it mean you are leaving us?' the moment he was near.

'Not till evening or to-morrow, as it may happen,' he answered: 'I have
one or two things to say, if you will spare the time.'

'All my time,' said she, smiling to make less of the heart's reply; and
he stepped into the room.

They had not long back been Matey and Browny, and though that was in
another element, it would not sanction the Lady Ormont and Mr. Weyburn
now. As little could it be Aminta and Matthew. Brother and sister they
were in the spirit's world, but in this world the titles had a sound of
imposture. And with a great longing to call her by some allying name, he
rejected 'friend' for its insufficiency and commonness, notwithstanding
the entirely friendly nature of the burden to be spoken. Friend, was a
title that ran on quicksands: an excuse that tried for an excuse. He
distinguished in himself simultaneously, that the hesitation and beating
about for a name had its origin in an imperfect frankness when he sent
his message: the fretful desire to be with her, close to her, hearing
her, seeing her, besides the true wish to serve her. He sent it after
swinging round abruptly from an outlook over the bordering garden
tamarisks on a sea now featureless, desolately empty.

However, perceptibly silence was doing the work of a scourge, and he
said: 'I have been thinking I may have--and I don't mind fighting hard to
try it before I leave England on Tuesday or Wednesday--some influence
with Lady Charlotte Eglett. She is really one of the true women living,
and the heartiest of backers, if she can be taught to see her course. I
fancy I can do that. She 's narrow, but she is not one of the class who
look on the working world below them as, we'll say, the scavenger dogs on
the plains of Ilium were seen by the Achaeans. And my failure would be no
loss to you! Your name shall not be alluded to as empowering me to plead
for her help. But I want your consent, or I may be haunted and weakened
by the idea of playing the busy-body. One has to feel strong in a
delicate position. Well, you know what my position with her has been--one
among the humble; and she has taken contradictions, accepted views from
me, shown me she has warmth of heart to an extreme degree.'

Aminta slightly raised her hand. 'I will save you trouble. I have written
to Lord Ormont. I have left him.'

Their eyes engaged on the thunder of this. 'The letter has gone?'

'It was posted before my swim: posted yesterday.'

'You have fully and clearly thought it out to a determination?'

'Bit by bit--I might say, blow by blow.'

'It is no small matter to break a marriage-tie.'

'I have conversed with your mother.'

'Yes, she! and the woman happiest in marriage!'

'I know. It was hatred of injustice, noble sympathy. And she took me for
one of the blest among wives.'

'She loved God. She saw the difference between men's decrees for their
convenience, and God's laws. She felt for women. You have had a hard
trial Aminta.'

'Oh, my name! You mean it?'

'You heard it from me this morning.'

'Yes, there! I try to forget. I lost my senses. You may judge me harshly,
on reflection.'

'Judge myself worse, then. You had a thousand excuses. I had only my love
of you. There's no judgement against either of us, for us to see, if I
read rightly. We elect to be tried in the courts of the sea-god. Now we
'll sit and talk it over. The next ten minutes will decide our
destinies.'

His eyes glittered, otherwise he showed the coolness of the man
discussing business; and his blunt soberness refreshed and upheld her, as
a wild burst of passion would not have done.

Side by side, partly facing, they began their interchange.

'You have weighed what you abandon?'

'It weighs little.'

'That may be error. You have to think into the future.'

'My sufferings and experiences are not bad guides.'

'They count. How can you be sure you have all the estimates?'

'Was I ever a wife?'

'You were and are the Countess of Ormont.'

'Not to the world. An unacknowledged wife is a slave, surely.'

'You step down, if you take the step.'

'From what? Once I did desire that station--had an idea it was glorious.
I despise it: or rather the woman who had the desire.'

'But the step down is into the working world.'

'I have means to live humbly. I want no more, except to be taught to
work.'

'So says the minute. Years are before you. You have weighed well, that
you attract?'

She reddened and murmured: 'How small!' Her pout of spite at her
attractions was little simulated.

'Beauty and charm are not small matters. You have the gift, called fatal.
Then--looking right forward--you have faith in the power of resistance of
the woman living alone?'

He had struck at her breast. From her breast she replied.

'Hear this of me. I was persecuted with letters. I read them and did not
destroy them. Perhaps you saved me. Looking back, I see weakness, nothing
worse; but it is a confession.'

'Yes, you have courage. And that comes of a great heart. And therein lies
the danger.'

'Advise me of what is possible to a lonely woman.'

'You have resolved on the loneliness?'

'It means breathing to me.'

'You are able to see that Lord Ormont is a gentleman?'

'A chivalrous gentleman, up to the bounds of his intelligence.'

The bounds of his intelligence closed their four walls in a rapid
narrowing slide on Aminta's mind, and she exclaimed:

'If only to pluck flowers in fields and know their names, I must be free!
I say what one can laugh at, and you are good and don't. Is the
interrogatory exhausted?'

'Aminta, my beloved, if you are free, I claim you.'

'Have you thought--?'

The sense of a dissolving to a fountain quivered through her veins.

'Turn the tables and examine me.'

'But have you thought--oh! I am not the girl you loved. I would go
through death to feel I was, and give you one worthy of you.'

'That means what I won't ask you to speak at present but I must have
proof.'

He held out a hand, and hers was laid in his.

There was more for her to say, she knew. It came and fled, lightened and
darkened. She had yielded her hand to him here on land, not with the
licence and protection of the great holiday salt water; and she was
trembling from the run of his blood through hers at the pressure of
hands, when she said in undertones: 'Could we--we might be friends.'

'Meet and part as friends, you and I,' he replied.

His voice carried the answer for her, his intimate look had in it the
unfolding of the full flower of the woman to him, as she could not
conceal from such eyes; and feeling that, she was all avowal.

'It is for life, Matthew.'

'My own words to myself when I first thought of the chance.'

'But the school?'

'I shall not consider that we are malefactors. We have the world against
us. It will not keep us from trying to serve it. And there are hints of
humaner opinions; it's not all a huge rolling block of a Juggernaut. Our
case could be pleaded before it. I don't think the just would condemn us
heavily. I shall have to ask you to strengthen me, complete me. If you
love me, it is your leap out of prison, and without you, I am from this
time no better than one-third of a man. I trust you to weigh the position
you lose, and the place we choose to take in the world. It 's this--I
think this describes it. You know the man who builds his house below the
sea's level has a sleepless enemy always threatening. His house must be
firm and he must look to the dykes. We commit this indiscretion. With a
world against us, our love and labour are constantly on trial; we must
have great hearts, and if the world is hostile we are not to blame it. In
the nature of things it could not be otherwise. My own soul, we have to
see that we do--though not publicly, not insolently, offend good
citizenship. But we believe--I with my whole faith, and I may say it of
you--that we are not offending Divine law. You are the woman I can help
and join with; think whether you can tell yourself that I am the man. So,
then, our union gives us powers to make amends to the world, if the world
should grant us a term of peace for the effort. That is our risk;
consider it, Aminta, between now and tomorrow; deliberate. We don't go
together into a garden of roses.'

'I know. I should feel shame. I wish it to look dark,' said Aminta, her
hand in his, and yet with a fair-sailing mind on the stream of the blood.

Rationally and irrationally, the mixed passion and reason in two clear
heads and urgent hearts discussed the stand they made before a world
defied, neither of them quite perceiving what it was which coloured
reason to beauty, or what so convinced their intellects when passion
spoke the louder.

'I am to have a mate.'

'She will pray she may be one.'

'She is my first love.'

Aminta's lips formed 'mine,' without utterance.

Meanwhile his hand or a wizardry subdued her will, allured her body. She
felt herself being drawn to the sign and seal of their plighting for
life. She said, 'Matthew,' softly in protest; and he said, 'Never once
yet!' She was owing to his tenderness. Her deepened voice murmured: 'Is
this to deliberate?' Colour flooded the beautiful dark face, as of the
funeral hues of a sun suffusing all the heavens; firing earth.




CHAPTER XXIX

AMINTA TO HER LORD

On Friday, on Saturday, on Sunday, Lady Charlotte waited for her brother
Rowsley, until it was a diminished satisfaction that she had held her
ground and baffled his mighty will to subdue her. She did not sleep for
thinking of him on the Sunday night. Toward morning a fit of hazy
horrors, which others would have deemed imaginings, drove her from her
bed to sit and brood over Rowsley in a chair. What if it was a case of
heart with him too? Heart disease had been in the family. A man like
Rowsley, still feeling the world before him, as a man of his energies and
aptitudes, her humour added in the tide of his anxieties, had a right to
feel, would not fall upon resignation like a woman.

She was at the physician's door at eight o'clock. Dr. Rewkes reported
reassuringly; it was a simple disturbance in Lord Ormont's condition of
health, and he conveyed just enough of disturbance to send the impetuous
lady knocking and ringing at her brother's door upon the hour of nine.

The announcement of Lady Charlotte's early visit informed my lord that
Dr. Rewkes had done the spiriting required of him. He descended to the
library and passed under scrutiny.

'You don't look ill, Rowsley,' she said, reluctantly in the sound.

'I am the better for seeing you here, Charlotte. Shall I order breakfast
for you? I am alone.'

'I know you are. I've eaten. Rewkes tells me you've not lost appetite.'

'Have I the appearance of a man who has lost anything?' Prouder man, and
heartier and ruddier, could not be seen, she thought.

'You're winning the country to right you; that I know.'

'I don't ask it.'

'The country wants your services.'

'I have heard some talk of it. That lout comes to a knowledge of his
wants too late. If they promoted and offered me the command in India
to-morrow--'My lord struck the arm of his chair. 'I live at Steignton
henceforth; my wife is at a seaside place eastward. She left the
jewel-case when on her journey through London for safety; she is a
particularly careful person, forethoughtful. I take her down to Steignton
two days after her return. We entertain there in the autumn. You come?'

'I don't. I prefer decent society.'

'You are in her house now, ma'am.'

'If I have to meet the person, you mean, I shall be civil. The society
you've given her, I won't meet.'

'You will have to greet the Countess of Ormont if you care to meet your
brother.'

'Part, then, on the best terms we can. I say this, the woman who keeps
you from serving your country, she 's your country's enemy.'

'Hear my answer. The lady who is my wife has had to suffer for what you
call my country's treatment of me. It 's a choice between my country and
her. I give her the rest of my time.'

'That's dotage.'

'Fire away your epithets.'

'Sheer dotage. I don't deny she's a handsome young woman.'

'You'll have to admit that Lady Ormont takes her place in our family with
the best we can name.'

'You insult my ears, Rowsley.'

'The world will say it when it has the honour of her acquaintance.'

'An honour suspiciously deferred.'

'That's between the world and me.'

'Set your head to work, you'll screw the world to any pitch you
like--that I don't need telling.'

Lord Ormont's head approved the remark.

'Now,' said Lady Charlotte, 'you won't get the Danmores, the Dukerlys,
the Carminters, the Oxbridges any more than you get me.'

'You are wrong, ma'am. I had yesterday a reply from Lady Danmore to a
communication of mine.'

'It 's thickening. But while I stand, I stand for the family; and I 'm
not in it, and while I stand out of it, there 's a doubt either of your
honesty or your sanity.'

'There's a perfect comprehension of my sister!'

'I put my character in the scales against your conduct, and your Countess
of Ormont's reputation into the bargain.'

'You have called at her house; it 's a step. You 'll be running at her
heels next. She 's not obdurate.'

'When you see me running at her heels, it'll be with my head off. Stir
your hardest, and let it thicken. That man Morsfield's name mixed up with
a sham Countess of Ormont, in the stories flying abroad, can't hurt
anybody. A true Countess of Ormont--we 're cut to the quick.'

'We 're cut! Your quick, Charlotte, is known to court the knife.'

Letters of the morning's post were brought in.

The earl turned over a couple and took up a third, saying: 'I 'll attend
to you in two minutes'; and thinking once more: Queer world it is, where,
when you sheath the sword, you have to be at play with bodkins!

Lady Charlotte gazed on the carpet, effervescent with retorts to his last
observation, rightly conjecturing that the letter he selected to read was
from 'his Aminta.'

The letter apparently was interesting, or it was of inordinate length. He
seemed still to be reading. He reverted to the first page.

At the sound of the paper, she discarded her cogitations and glanced up.
His countenance had become stony. He read on some way, with a sudden drop
on the signature, a recommencement, a sound in the throat, as when men
grasp a comprehensible sentence of a muddled rigmarole and begin to have
hopes of the remainder. But the eye on the page is not the eye which
reads.

'No bad news, Rowsley?'

The earl's breath fell heavily.

Lady Charlotte left her chair, and walked about the room.

'Rowsley, I 'd like to hear if I can be of use.'

'Ma'am?' he said; and pondered on the word 'use,' staring at her.

'I don't intend to pry. I can't see my brother look like that, and not
ask.'

The letter was tossed on the table to her. She read these lines, dated
from Felixstowe:

   'MY DEAR LORD,

   'The courage I have long been wanting in has come at last, to break
   a tie that I have seen too clearly was a burden on you from the
   beginning. I will believe that I am chiefly responsible for
   inducing you to contract it. The alliance with an inexperienced
   girl of inferior birth, and a perhaps immoderate ambition, has taxed
   your generosity; and though the store may be inexhaustible, it is
   not truly the married state when a wife subjects the husband to such
   a trial. The release is yours, the sadness is for me. I have
   latterly seen or suspected a design on your part to meet my former
   wishes for a public recognition of the wife of Lord Ormont. Let me
   now say that these foolish wishes no longer exist. I rejoice to
   think that my staying or going will be alike unknown to the world.
   I have the means of a livelihood, in a modest way, and shall trouble
   no one.

   'I have said, the sadness is for me. That is truth. But I have to
   add, that I, too, am sensible of the release. My confession of a
   change of feeling to you as a wife, writes the close of all
   relations between us. I am among the dead for you; and it is a
   relief to me to reflect on the little pain I give . . .'

'Has she something on her conscience about that man Morsfield?' Lady
Charlotte cried.

Lord Ormont's prolonged Ah! of execration rolled her to a bundle.

Nevertheless her human nature and her knowledge of woman's, would out
with the words: 'There's a man!'

She allowed her brother to be correct in repudiating the name of the dead
Morsfield--chivalrous as he was on this Aminta's behalf to the last!--and
struck along several heads, Adderwood's, Weyburn's, Randeller's, for the
response to her suspicion. A man there certainly was. He would be
probably a young man. He would not necessarily be a handsome man. . . .
or a titled or a wealthy man. She might have set eyes on a gypsy
somewhere round Great Marlow--blood to blood; such things have been.
Imagining a wildish man for her, rather than a handsome one and one
devoted staidly to the founding of a school, she overlooked Weyburn, or
reserved him with others for subsequent speculation.

The remainder of Aminta's letter referred to her delivery of the Ormont
jewel-case at Lord Ormont's London house, under charge of her maid
Carstairs. The affairs of the household were stated very succinctly, the
drawer for labelled keys, whatever pertained to her management, in London
or at Great Marlow.

'She 's cool,' Lady Charlotte said, after reading out the orderly array
of items, in a tone of rasping irony, to convince her brother he was well
rid of a heartless wench.

Aminta's written statement of those items were stabs at the home she had
given him, a flashed picture of his loss. Nothing written by her touched
him to pierce him so shrewdly; nothing could have brought him so closely
the breathing image in the flesh of the woman now a phantom for him.

'Will she be expecting you to answer, Rowsley?'

'Will that forked tongue cease hissing!' he shouted, in the agony of a
strong man convulsed both to render and conceal the terrible, shameful,
unexampled gush of tears.

Lady Charlotte beheld her bleeding giant. She would rather have seen the
brother of her love grimace in woman's manner than let loose those
rolling big drops down the face of a rock. The big sob shook him, and she
was shaken to the dust by the sight. Now she was advised by her deep
affection for her brother to sit patient and dumb, behind shaded eyes:
praising in her heart the incomparable force of the man's love of the
woman contrasted with the puling inclinations of the woman for the man.

Neither opened mouth when they separated. She pressed and kissed a large
nerveless hand. Lord Ormont stood up to bow her forth. His ruddied skin
had gone to pallor resembling the berg of ice on the edge of Arctic seas,
when sunlight has fallen away from it.




CHAPTER XXX




CONCLUSION

The peaceful little home on the solitary sandy shore was assailed,
unwarned, beneath a quiet sky, some hours later, by a whirlwind, a
dust-storm, and rattling volleys. Miss Vincent's discovery, in the past
school-days, of Selina Collett's 'wicked complicity in a clandestine
correspondence' had memorably chastened the girl, who vowed at the time
when her schoolmistress, using the rod of Johnsonian English for the
purpose, exposed the depravity of her sinfulness, that she would never
again be guilty of a like offence. Her dear and lovely Countess of
Ormont, for whom she then uncomplainingly suffered, who deigned now to
call her friend, had spoken the kind good-bye, and left the house after
Mr. Weyburn's departure that same day; she, of course, to post by Harwich
to London; he to sail by packet from the port of Harwich for Flushing.
The card of an unknown lady, a great lady, the Lady Charlotte Eglett, was
handed to her mother at eight o'clock in the evening.

Lady Charlotte was introduced to the innocent country couple; the mother
knitting, the daughter studying a book of the botany of the Swiss Alps,
dreaming a distant day's journey over historic lands of various hues to
the unimaginable spectacle of earth's grandeur. Her visit lasted fifteen
minutes. From the moment of her entry, the room was in such turmoil as
may be seen where a water-mill wheel's paddles are suddenly set rounding
to pour streams of foam on the smooth pool below. A relentless catechism
bewildered their hearing. Mrs. Collett attempted an opposition of dignity
to those vehement attacks for answers. It was flooded and rolled over.
She was put upon her honour to reply positively to positive questions:
whether the Countess of Ormont was in this house at present; whether the
Countess of Ormont left the house alone or in company; whether a
gentleman had come to the house during the stay of the Countess of
Ormont; whether Lady Ormont had left the neighbourhood; the exact time of
the day when she quitted the house, and the stated point of her
destination.

Ultimately, protesting that they were incapable of telling what they did
not know--which Lady Charlotte heard with an incredulous shrug--they
related piecemeal what they did know, and Weyburn's name gave her scent.
She paid small heed to the tale of Mr. Weyburn's having come there in the
character of young Mr. Collett's old schoolmate. Mr. Weyburn had started
for the port of Harwich. This day, and not long subsequently, Lady Ormont
had started for the port of Harwich, on her way to London, if we like to
think it. Further corroboration was quite superfluous.

'Is there a night packet-boat from this port of yours?' Lady Charlotte
asked.

The household servants had to be consulted; and she, hurriedly craving
the excuse of their tedious mistress, elicited, as far as she could
understand them, that there might be and very nearly was, a night
packet-boat starting for Flushing. The cook, a native of Harwich, sent up
word of a night packet-boat starting at about eleven o'clock last year.

Lady Charlotte saw the chance as a wind-blown beacon-fire under press of
shades. Changeing her hawkish manner toward the simple pair, she gave
them view of a smile magical by contrast, really beautiful--the smile she
had in reserve for serviceable persons whom she trusted--while thanking
them and saying, that her anxiety concerned Lady Ormont's welfare.

Her brother had prophesied she would soon be 'running at his wife's
heels,' and so she was, but not 'with her head off,' as she had rejoined.
She might prove, by intercepting his Aminta, that her head was on. The
windy beacon-fire of a chance blazed at the rapid rolling of her
carriage-wheels, and sank to stifling smoke at any petty obstruction. Let
her but come to an interview with his Aminta, she would stop all that
nonsense of the woman's letter; carry her off--and her Weyburn plucking
at her other hand to keep her. Why, naturally, treated as she was by
Rowsley, she dropped soft eyes on a good-looking secretary. Any woman
would--confound the young fellow! But all 's right yet if we get to
Harwich in time; unless . . . as a certain coldfish finale tone of the
letter playing on the old string, the irrevocable, peculiar to women who
are novices in situations of the kind, appeared to indicate; they see in
their conscience-blasted minds a barrier to a return home, high as the
Archangelical gate behind Mother Eve, and they are down on their knees
blubbering gratitude and repentance if the gate swings open to them. It
is just the instant, granting the catastrophe, to have a woman back to
her duty. She has only to learn she has a magnanimous husband. If she
learns into the bargain how he suffers, how he loves her,--well, she
despises a man like that Lawrence Finchley all the more for the
'magnanimity' she has the profit of, and perceives to be feebleness. But
there 's woman in her good and her bad; she'll trick a man of age, and if
he forgives her, owning his own faults in the case, she won't scorn him
for it; the likelihood is, she 'll feel bound in honour to serve him
faithfully for the rest of their wedded days.

A sketch to her of Rowsley's deep love. . . . Lady Charlotte wandered
into an amazement at it. A sentence of her brother's recent speaking
danced in her recollection. He said of his country: That Lout comes to a
knowledge of his wants too late. True, Old England is always louting to
the rear, and has to be pricked in the rear and pulled by the neck before
she 's equal to the circumstances around her. But what if his words were
flung at him in turn! Short of 'Lout,' it rang correctly. 'Too late,' we
hope to clip from the end of the sentence likewise. We have then, if you
stress it--'comes to a knowledge of his wants;--a fair example of the
creatures men are; the greatest of men; who have to learn from the loss
of the woman--or a fear of the loss--how much they really do love her.

Well, and she may learn the same or something sufficiently like it, if
she 's caught in time, called to her face, Countess of Ormont,
sister-in-law, and smoothed, petted, made believe she 's now understood
and won't be questioned on a single particular--in fact, she marches back
in a sort of triumph; and all the past in a cupboard, locked up, without
further inquiry.

Her brother Rowsley's revealed human appearance of the stricken
man--stricken right into his big heart--precipitated Lady Charlotte's
reflections and urged her to an unavailing fever of haste during the
circuitous drive in moonlight to the port. She alighted at the principal
inn, and was there informed that the packetboat, with a favouring breeze
and tide, had started ten minutes earlier. She summoned the landlord, and
described a lady, as probably one of the passengers: 'Dark, holds herself
up high. Some such lady had dined at the inn on tea, and gone aboard the
boat soon after.

Lady Charlotte burned with the question: Alone? She repressed her
feminine hunger and asked to see the book of visitors. But the lady had
not slept at the inn, so had not been requested to write her name.

The track of the vessel could be seen from the pier, on the line of a bar
of moonlight; and thinking, that the abominable woman, if aboard she was,
had coolly provided herself with a continental passport--or had it done
for two by her accomplice, that Weyburn, before she left London--Lady
Charlotte sent a loathing gaze at the black figure of the boat on the
water, untroubled by any reminder of her share in the conspiracy of
events, which was to be her brother's chastisement to his end.

Years are the teachers of the great rocky natures, whom they round and
sap and pierce in caverns, having them on all sides, and striking deep
inward at moments. There is no resisting the years, if we have a heart,
and a common understanding. They constitute, in the sum of them, the
self-examination, whence issues, acknowledged or not, a belated
self-knowledge, to direct our final actions. She had the heart. Sight of
the high-minded, proud, speechless man suffering for the absence of a
runaway woman, not ceasing to suffer, never blaming the woman, and
consequently, it could be fancied, blaming himself, broke down Lady
Charlotte's defences and moved her to review her part in her brother
Rowsley's unhappiness. For supposing him to blame himself, her power to
cast a shadow of blame on him went from her, and therewith her
vindication of her conduct. He lived at Olmer. She read him by degrees,
as those who have become absolutely tongueless have to be read; and so
she gathered that this mortally (or lastingly) wounded brother of hers
was pleased by an allusion to his Aminta. He ran his finger on the lines
of a map of Spain, from Barcelona over to Granada; and impressed his nail
at a point appearing to be mountainous or woody. Lady Charlotte suggested
that he and his Aminta had passed by there. He told a story of a carriage
accident: added, 'She was very brave.' One day, when he had taken a
keepsake book of England's Beauties off the drawing-room table, his eyes
dwelt on a face awhile, and he handed it, with a nod, followed by a
slight depreciatory shrug. 'Like her, not so handsome,' Lady Charlotte
said.

He nodded again. She came to a knowledge of Aminta's favourite colours
through the dwelling of his look on orange and black, deepest rose, light
yellow, light blue. Her grand-daughters won the satisfied look if they
wore a combination touching his memory. The rocky are not imaginative,
and have to be struck from without for a kindling of them. Submissive
though she was to court and soothe her brother Rowsley, a spur of
jealousy burned in the composition of her sentiments, to set her going.
He liked visiting Mrs. Lawrence Finchley at her effaced good man's
country seat, Brockholm in Berkshire, and would stay there a month at a
time. Lady Charlotte learnt why. The enthusiast for Aminta, without
upholding her to her late lord, whom she liked well, talked of her openly
with him, confessed to a fondness for her. How much Mrs. Lawrence
ventured to say, Lady Charlotte could not know. But rivalry pushed her to
the extreme of making Aminta partially a topic; and so ready was he to
follow her lead in the veriest trifles recalling the handsome runaway;
that she had to excite his racy diatribes against the burgess English and
the pulp they have made of a glorious nation, in order not to think him
inclining upon dotage.

Philippa's occasional scoff in fun concerning 'grandmama's tutor,' hurt
Lady Charlotte for more reasons than one, notwithstanding the
justification of her fore-thoughtfulness. The girl, however, was
privileged; she was Bobby Benlew's dearest friend, and my lord loved the
boy; with whom nothing could be done at school, nor could a tutor at
Olmer control him. In fine, Bobby saddened the family and gained the
earl's anxious affection by giving daily proofs of his being an Ormont in
a weak frame; patently an Ormont, recurrently an invalid. His moral
qualities hurled him on his physical deficiencies. The local doctor and
Dr. Rewkes banished him twice to the seashore, where he began to bloom
the first week and sickened the next, for want of playfellows, jolly
fights and friendships. Ultimately they prescribed mountain air, Swiss
air, easy travelling to Switzerland, and several weeks of excursions at
the foot of the Alps. Bobby might possibly get an aged tutor, or find an
English clergyman taking pupils, on the way.

Thus it happened, that seven years after his bereavement, Lord Ormont and
Philippa and Bobby were on the famous Bernese Terrace, grandest of
terrestrial theatres where soul of man has fronting him earth's utmost
majesty. Sublime: but five minutes of it fetched sounds as of a plug in
an empty phial from Bobby's bosom, and his heels became electrical.

He was observed at play with a gentleman of Italian complexion. Past
guessing how it had come about, for the gentleman was an utter stranger.
He had at any rate the tongue of an Englishman. He had the style, too,
the slang and cries and tricks of an English schoolboy, though visibly a
foreigner. And he had the art of throwing his heart into that bit of
improvised game, or he would never have got hold of Bobby, shrewd to read
a masker.

Lugged-up by the boy to my lord and the young lady, he doffed and bowed.
'Forgive me, pray,' he said; 'I can't see an English boy without having a
spin with him; and I make so bold as to speak to English people wherever
I meet them, if they give me the chance. Bad manners? Better than that.
You are of the military profession, sir, I see. I am a soldier, fresh
from Monte Video. Italian, it is evident, under an Italian chief there. A
clerk on a stool, and hey presto plunged into the war a month after,
shouldering a gun and marching. Fifteen battles in eighteen months; and
Death a lady at a balcony we kiss hands to on the march below. Not a bit
more terrible! Ah, but your pardon, sir,' he hastened to say, observing
rigidity on the features of the English gentleman; 'would I boast? Not I.
Accept it as my preface for why I am moved to speak the English wherever
I meet them:--Uruguay, Buenos Ayres, La Plata, or Europe. I cannot resist
it. At least, he bent gracefully, 'I do not. We come to the grounds of my
misbehaviour. I have shown at every call I fear nothing, kiss hand of
welcome or adieu to Death. And I, a boy of the age of this youngster--he
's not like me, I can declare!--I was a sneak and a coward. It follows, I
was a liar and a traitor. Who cured me of that vileness, that scandal? I
will tell you--an Englishman and an Englishwoman: my schoolmaster and his
wife. My schoolmaster--my friend! He is the comrade of his boys: English,
French, Germans, Italians, a Spaniard in my time--a South American I have
sent him--two from Boston, Massachusetts--and clever!--all emulous to
excel, none boasting. But, to myself; I was that mean fellow. I did--I
could let you know: before this young lady--she would wither me with her
scorn, Enough, I sneaked, I lied. I let the blame fall on a schoolfellow
and a housemaid. Oh! a small thing, but I coveted it--a scarf. It
reminded me of Rome. Enough, there at the bottom of that pit, behold me.
It was not discovered, but my schoolfellow was unpunished, the housemaid
remained in service; I thought, I thought, and I thought until I could
not look in my dear friend Matthew's face. He said to me one day: "Have
you nothing to tell me, Giulio?" as if to ask the road to right or left.
Out it all came. And no sermon, no! He set me the hardest task I could
have. That was a penance!--to go to his wife, and tell it all to her.
Then I did think it an easier thing to go and face death--and death had
been my nightmare. I went, she listened, she took my hand she said: "You
will never do this again, I know, Giulio." She told me no English girl
would ever look on a man who was a coward and lied. From that day I have
made Truth my bride. And what the consequence? I know not fear! I could
laugh, knowing I was to lie down in my six-foot measure to-morrow. If I
have done my duty and look in the face of my dear Matthew and his wife!
Ah, those two! They are loved. They will be loved all over Europe. He
works for Europe and America--all civilized people--to be one country. He
is the comrade of his boys. Out of school hours, it is Christian names
all round--Matthew, Emile, Adolf, Emilio, Giulio, Robert, Marcel, Franz,
et caetera. Games or lessons, a boy can't help learning with him. He
makes happy fellows and brave soldiers of them without drill. Sir, do I
presume when I say I have your excuse for addressing you because you are
his countryman? I drive to the old school in half an hour, and next week
he and his dear wife and a good half of the boys will be on the tramp
over the Simplon, by Lago Maggiore, to my uncle's house in Milan for a
halt. I go to Matthew before I see my own people.'

He swept another bow of apology, chiefly to Philippa, as representative
of the sex claiming homage.

Lord Ormont had not greatly relished certain of the flowery phrases
employed by this young foreigner. 'Truth his bride,' was damnable: and if
a story had to be told, he liked it plain, without jerks and evolutions.
Many offences to our taste have to be overlooked in foreigners--Italians!
considered, before they were proved in fire, a people classed by nature
as operatic declaimers. Bobby had shown himself on the road out to Bern a
difficult boy, and stupefyingly ignorant. My lord had two or three ideas
working to cloudy combination in his head when he put a question,
referring to the management of the dormitories at the school. Whereupon
the young Italian introduced himself as Giulio Calliani, and proposed a
drive to inspect the old school, with its cricket and football fields,
lake for rowing and swimming, gymnastic fixtures, carpenter's shed,
bowling alley, and four European languages in the air by turns daily; and
the boys, too, all the boys rosy and jolly, according to the last report
received of them from his friend Matthew. Enthusiasm struck and tightened
the loose chord of scepticism in Lord Ormont; somewhat as if a dancing
beggar had entered a kennel-dog's yard, designing to fascinate the
faithful beast. It is a chord of one note, that is tightened to sound by
the violent summons to accept, which is a provocation to deny. At the
same time, the enthusiast's dance is rather funny; he is not an ordinary
beggar; to see him trip himself in his dance would be rather funnier.
This is to say, inspect the trumpeted school and retire politely. My lord
knew the Bern of frequent visits: the woman was needed beside him to
inspire a feeling for scenic mountains. Philippa's admiration of them was
like a new-pressed grape-juice after a draught of the ripe vintage.
Moreover, Bobby was difficult: the rejected of his English schools was a
stiff Ormont at lessons, a wheezy Benlew in the playground: exactly the
reverse of what should have been. A school of four languages in bracing
air, if a school with healthy dormitories, and a school of the trained
instincts we call gentlemanly, might suit Master Bobby for a trial. An
eye on the boys of the school would see in a minute what stuff they were
made of. Supposing this young Italianissimo with the English tongue to be
tolerably near the mark, with a deduction of two-thirds of the
enthusiasm, Bobby might stop at the school as long as his health held
out, or the master would keep him. Supposing half a dozen things and
more, the meeting with this Mr. Calliand was a lucky accident. But lucky
accidents are anticipated only by fools.

Lord Ormont consented to visit the school. He handed his card and invited
his guest; he had a carriage in waiting for the day, he said; and
obedient to Lady Charlotte's injunctions, he withheld Philippa from the
party. She and her maid were to pass the five hours of his absence in
efforts to keep their monkey Bobby out of the well of the solicitious
bears.

My lord left his carriage at the inn of the village lying below the
school-house on a green height. The young enthusiast was dancing him into
the condition of livid taciturnity, which could, if it would, flash out
pungent epigrams of the actual world at Operatic recitative.

'There's the old school-clock! Just in time for the half-hour before
dinner,' said Calliani, chattering two hundred to the minute, of the
habits and usages of the school, and how all had meals together, the
master, his wife, the teachers, the boys. 'And she--as for her!' Calliani
kissed finger up to the furthest skies: into which a self-respecting
sober Northener of the Isles could imagine himself to kick enthusiastic
gesticulators, if it were polite to do so.

The school-house faced the master's dwelling house, and these, with a
block of building, formed a three-sided enclosure, like barracks! Forth
from the school-house door burst a dozen shouting lads, as wasps from the
hole of their nest from a charge of powder. Out they poured whizzing; and
the frog he leaped, and pussy ran and doubled before the hounds, and
hockey-sticks waved, and away went a ball. Cracks at the ball anyhow, was
the game for the twenty-five minutes breather before dinner.

'French day!' said Calliani, hearing their cries. Then he bellowed
'Matthew!--Giulio!'

A lusty inversion of the order of the names and an Oberland jodel
returned his hail. The school retreating caught up the Alpine cry in the
distance. Here were lungs! Here were sprites!

Lord Ormont bethought him of the name of the master. 'Mr. Matthew, I
think you said, sir,' he was observing to Calliani, as the master came
nearer; and Calliani replied: 'His Christian name. But if the boys are
naughty boys, it is not the privilege. Mr. Weyburn.'

There was not any necessity to pronounce that name Calliani spoke it on
the rush to his friend.

Lord Ormont and Weyburn advanced the steps to the meeting. Neither of
them flinched in eye or limb.

At a corridor window of the dwelling-house a lady stood. Her colour was
the last of a summer day over western seas; her thought: 'It has come!'
Her mind was in her sight; her other powers were frozen.

The two men conversed. There was no gesture.

This is one of the lightning moments of life for the woman, at the
meeting of the two men between whom her person has been in dispute, may
still be; her soul being with one. And that one, dearer than the blood of
her body, imperilled by her.

She could ask why she exists, if a question were in her grasp. She would
ask for the meaning of the gift of beauty to the woman, making her
desireable to those two men, making her a cause of strife, a thing of
doom. An incessant clamour dinned about her: 'It has come!'

The two men walked conversing into the school-house. She was unconscious
of the seeing of a third, though she saw and at the back of her mind
believed she knew a friend in him. The two disappeared. She was
insensible stone, except for the bell-clang: 'It has come'; until they
were in view again, still conversing: and the first of her thought to
stir from petrifaction was: 'Life holds no secret.'

She tried, in shame of the inanimate creature she had become, to force
herself to think: and had, for a chastising result, a series of
geometrical figures shooting across her brain, mystically expressive of
the situation, not communicably. The most vivid and persistent was a
triangle. Interpret who may. The one beheld the two pass from view again,
still conversing.

They are on the gravel; they bow; they separate. He of the grey head
poised high has gone.

Her arm was pressed by a hand. Weyburn longed to enfold her, and she
desired it, and her soul praised him for refraining. Both had that
delicacy.

'You have seen, my darling,' Weyburn said. 'It has come, and we take our
chance. He spoke not one word, beyond the affairs of the school. He has a
grandnephew in want of a school: visited the dormitories, refectory, and
sheds: tasted the well-water, addressed me as Mr. Matthew. He had it from
Giulio. Came to look at the school of Giulio's "friend Matthew,":--you
hear him. Giulio little imagines!--Well, dear love, we stand with a squad
in front, and wait the word. It mayn't be spoken. We have counted long
before that something like it was bound to happen. And you are brave.
Ruin's an empty word for us two.'

'Yes, dear, it is: we will pay what is asked of us,' Aminta said. 'It
will be heavy, if the school . . . and I love our boys. I am fit to be
the school-housekeeper; for nothing else.'

'I will go to the boys' parents. At the worst, we can march into new
territory. Emile will stick to us. Adolf, too. The fresh flock will
come.'

Aminta cried in the voice of tears: 'I love the old so!'

'The likelihood is, we shall hear nothing further.'

'You had to bear the shock, Matthew.'

'Whatever I bore, and you saw, you shared.'

'Yes,' she said.

'Mais, n'oublions pas que c'est aujourd'hui jour francais; si, madame,
vous avez assez d'appetit pour diner avec nous?

'Je suis, comme toujours, aux ordres de Monsieur.' She was among the
bravest of women. She had a full ounce of lead in her breast when she sat
with the boys at their midday meal, showing them her familiar pleasant
face.

Shortly after the hour of the evening meal, a messenger from Bern
delivered a letter addressed to the Headmaster. Weyburn and Aminta were
strolling to the playground, thinking in common, as they usually did.
They read the letter together. These were the lines:

'Lord Ormont desires to repeat his sense of obligation to Mr. Matthew for
the inspection of the school under his charge, and will be thankful to
Mr. Calliani, if that gentleman will do him the favour to call at his
hotel at Bern to-morrow, at as early an hour as is convenient to him, for
the purpose of making arrangements, agreeable to the Head-master's rules,
for receiving his grandnephew Robert Benlew as a pupil at the school.'

The two raised eyes on one another, pained in their deep joy by the
religion of the restraint upon their hearts, to keep down the passion to
embrace.

'I thank heaven we know him to be one of the true noble men,' said
Aminta, now breathing, and thanking Lord Ormont for the free breath she
drew.

Weyburn spoke of an idea he had gathered from the earl's manner. But he
had not imagined the proud lord's great-heartedness would go so far as to
trust him with the guardianship of the boy. That moved, and that humbled
him, though it was far from humiliating.

Six months later, the brief communication arrived from Lady Charlotte

'She is a widow.

'Unlikely you will hear from me again. Death is always next door, you
said once. I look on the back of life.

'Tell Bobby, capital for him to write he has no longing for home
holidays. If any one can make a man of him, you will. That I know.

                  'CHARLOTTE EGLETT.'




     ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS

     A bird that won't roast or boil or stew
     A woman, and would therefore listen to nonsense
     A free-thinker startles him as a kind of demon
     A female free-thinker is one of Satan's concubines
     Acting is not of the high class which conceals the art
     Affected misapprehensions
     Ah! we fall into their fictions
     All that Matey and Browny were forbidden to write they looked
     And not be beaten by an acknowledged defeat
     Any excess pushes to craziness
     As well ask (women) how a battle-field concerns them!
     Bad luck's not repeated every day Keep heart for the good
     Bad laws are best broken
     Began the game of Pull
     Being in heart and mind the brother to the sister with women
     Botched mendings will only make them worse
     Bounds of his intelligence closed their four walls
     Boys who can appreciate brave deeds are capable of doing them
     Boys, of course--but men, too!
     But had sunk to climb on a firmer footing
     By nature incapable of asking pardon
     Cajoled like a twenty-year-old yahoo at college
     Careful not to smell of his office
     Challenged him to lead up to her desired stormy scene
     Chose to conceive that he thought abstractedly
     Consciousness of some guilt when vowing itself innocent
     Consign discussion to silence with the cynical closure
     Convictions we store--wherewith to shape our destinies
     Convincing themselves that they impersonate sagacity
     Could not understand enthusiasm for the schoolmaster's career
     Could we--we might be friends
     Curious thing would be if curious things should fail to happen
     Death is only the other side of the ditch
     Death is always next door
     Desire of it destroyed it
     Detestable feminine storms enveloping men weak enough
     Didn't say a word No use in talking about feelings
     Distaste for all exercise once pleasurable
     Divided lovers in presence
     Enthusiasm struck and tightened the loose chord of scepticism
     Enthusiast, when not lyrical, is perilously near to boring
     Exult in imagination of an escape up to the moment of capture
     Few men can forbear to tell a spicy story of their friends
     Greatest of men; who have to learn from the loss of the woman
     Having contracted the fatal habit of irony
     He had to shake up wrath over his grievances
     He had gone, and the day lived again for both of them
     He gave a slight sign of restiveness, and was allowed to go
     He loathed a skulker
     He took small account of the operations of the feelings
     He began ambitiously--It's the way at the beginning
     Her vehement fighting against facts
     Her duel with Time
     His aim to win the woman acknowledged no obstacle in the means
     His restored sense of possession
     Hopeless task of defending a woman from a woman
     How to compromise the matter for the sake of peace?
     I have all the luxuries--enough to loathe them
     I hate old age It changes you so
     I could be in love with her cruelty, if only I had her near me
     I look on the back of life
     I want no more, except to be taught to work
     I married a cook She expects a big appetite
     I'm for a rational Deity
     If the world is hostile we are not to blame it
     Ignorance roaring behind a mask of sarcasm
     Increase of dissatisfaction with the more she got
     Lawyers hold the keys of the great world
     Learn--principally not to be afraid of ideas
     Loathing of artifice to raise emotion
     Look well behind
     Lucky accidents are anticipated only by fools
     Magnify an offence in the ratio of our vanity
     Man who helps me to read the world and men as they are
     Meant to vanquish her with the dominating patience
     Men bore the blame, though the women were rightly punished
     Men who believe that there is a virtue in imprecations
     Naked original ideas, are acceptable at no time
     Napoleon's treatment of women is excellent example
     Necessity's offspring
     Never nurse an injury, great or small
     Nevertheless, inclinations are an infidelity
     No love can be without jealousy
     Not daring risk of office by offending the taxpayer
     Not the indignant and the frozen, but the genially indifferent
     Not men of brains, but the men of aptitudes
     Old age is a prison wall between us and young people
     One has to feel strong in a delicate position
     One night, and her character's gone
     One is a fish to her hook; another a moth to her light
     Orderliness, from which men are privately exempt
     Our love and labour are constantly on trial
     Passion added to a bowl of reason makes a sophist's mess
     People were virtuous in past days: they counted their sinners
     Perhaps inspire him, if he would let her breathe
     Person in another world beyond this world of blood
     Policy seems to petrify their minds
     Practical for having an addiction to the palpable
     Professional Puritans
     Published Memoirs indicate the end of a man's activity
     Rage of a conceited schemer tricked
     Regularity of the grin of dentistry
     Respect one another's affectations
     Screams of an uninjured lady
     Selfishness and icy inaccessibility to emotion
     She had to be the hypocrite or else--leap
     She had a thirsting mind
     Silence was doing the work of a scourge
     Smile she had in reserve for serviceable persons
     Snatch her from a possessor who forfeited by undervaluing her
     So says the minute Years are before you
     That pit of one of their dead silences
     The despot is alert at every issue, to every chance
     The spending, never harvesting, world
     The shots hit us behind you
     The terrible aggregate social woman
     The next ten minutes will decide our destinies
     The woman side of him
     The good life gone lives on in the mind
     The beat of a heart with a dread like a shot in it
     There is no history of events below the surface
     There are women who go through life not knowing love
     They want you to show them what they 'd like the world to be
     Things are not equal
     Things were lumpish and gloomy that day of the week
     This female talk of the eternities
     Titles showered on the women who take free breath of air
     To males, all ideas are female until they are made facts
     To time and a wife it is no disgrace for a man to bend
     To know how to take a licking, that wins in the end
     Uncommon unprogressiveness
     Venus of nature was melting into a Venus of art
     Violent summons to accept, which is a provocation to deny
     We cannot, men or woman, control the heart in sleep at night
     We shall want a war to teach the country the value of courage
     We don't go together into a garden of roses
     When duelling flourished on our land, frail women powerful
     Where heart weds mind, or nature joins intellect
     Who cries, Come on, and prays his gods you won't
     Why he enjoyed the privilege of seeing, and was not beside her
     With what little wisdom the world is governed
     Women are happier enslaved
     World against us It will not keep us from trying to serve
     Years are the teachers of the great rocky natures
     You'll have to guess at half of everything he tells you
     You're going to be men, meaning something better than women






THE AMAZING MARRIAGE


By George Meredith


1895




CONTENTS:

BOOK 1.
I.        ENTER DAME GOSSIP AS CHORUS
II.       MISTRESS GOSSIP TELLS OF THE ELOPEMENT OF THE COUNTESS OF
          CRESSETT WITH THE OLD BUCCANEER, AND OF CHARLES DUMP THE
          POSTILLION CONDUCTING THEM, AND OF A GREAT COUNTY FAMILY
III.      CONTINUATION OF THE INTRODUCTORY MEANDERINGS OF DAME GOSSIP,
          TOGETHER WITH HER SUDDEN EXTINCTION
IV.       MORNING AND FAREWELL TO AN OLD HOME
V.        A MOUNTAIN WALK IN MIST AND SUNSHINE
VI.       THE NATURAL PHILOSOPHER
VII.      THE LADY'S LETTER
VIII.     OF THE ENCOUNTER OF TWO STRANGE YOUNG MEN AND THEIR CONSORTING:
          IN WHICH THE MALE READER IS REQUESTED TO BEAR IN MIND WHAT WILD
          CREATURE HE WAS IN HIS YOUTH, WHILE THE FEMALE SHOULD MARVEL
          CREDULOUSLY
IX.       CONCERNING THE BLACK GODDESS FORTUNE AND THE WORSHIP OF HER,
          TOGETHER WITH AN INTRODUCTION OF SOME OF HER VOTARIES

BOOK 2.
X.        SMALL CAUSES
XI.       THE PRISONER OF HIS WORD
XII.      HENRIETTA'S LETTER TREATING OF THE GREAT EVENT
XIII.     AN IRRUPTION OF MISTRESS GOSSIP IN BREACH OF THE CONVENTION
XIV.      A PENDANT OF THE FOREGOING
XV.       OPENING STAGE OF THE HONEYMOON
XVI.      IN WHICH THE BRIDE FROM FOREIGN PARTS IS GIVEN A TASTE OF OLD
          ENGLAND
XVII.     RECORDS A SHADOW CONTEST CLOSE ON THE FOREGOING
XVIII.    DOWN WHITECHAPEL WAY
XIX.      THE GIRL MADGE

BOOK 3.
XX.       STUDIES IN FOG, GOUT, AN OLD SEAMAN, A LOVELY SERPENT, AND THE
          MORAL EFFECTS THAT MAY COME OF A BORROWED SHIRT
XXI.      IN WHICH WE HAVE FURTHER GLIMPSES OF THE WONDROUS MECHANISM OF
          OUR YOUNGER MAN
XXII.     A RIGHT-MINDED GREAT LADY
XXIII.    IN DAME GOSSIP'S VEIN
XXIV.     A KIDNAPPING AND NO GREAT HARM
XXV.      THE PHILOSOPHER MAN OF ACTION
XXVI.     AFTER SOME FENCING THE DAME PASSES OUR GUARD
XXVII.    WE DESCEND INTO A STEAMER'S ENGINE-ROOM
XXVIII.   BY CONCESSIONS TO MISTRESS GOSSIP A FURTHER INTRUSION IS
          AVERTED

BOOK 4.
XXIX.     CARINTHIA IN WALES
XXX.      REBECCA WYTHAN
XXXI.     WE HAVE AGAIN TO DEAL WITH THE EXAMPLES OF OUR YOUNGER MAN
XXXII.    IN WHICH WE SEE CARINTHIA PUT IN PRACTICE ONE OF HER OLD
          FATHER'S LESSONS
XXXIII.   A FRIGHTFUL DEBATE
XXXIV.    A SURVEY OF THE RIDE OF THE WELSH CAVALIERS ESCORTING THE
          COUNTESS OF FLEETWOOD TO KENTISH ESSLEMONT
XXXV.     IN WHICH CERTAIN CHANGES MAY BE DISCERNED
XXXVI.    BELOW THE SURFACE AND ABOVE
XXXVII.   BETWEEN CARINTHIA AND HER LORD
XXXVIII.  A DIP INTO THE SPRING'S WATERS

BOOK 5.
XXXIX.    THE RED WARNING FROM A SON OF VAPOUR
XL.       A RECORD OF MINOR INCIDENTS
XLI.      IN WHICH THE FATES ARE SEEN AND A CHOICE OF THE REFUGES FROM
          THEM
XLII.     THE RETARDED COURTSHIP
XLIII.    ON THE ROAD TO THE ACT OF PENANCE
XLIV.     BETWEEN THE EARL; THE COUNTESS AND HER BROTHER, AND OF A SILVER
          CROSS
XLV.      CONTAINS A RECORD OF WHAT WAS FEARED, WHAT WAS HOPED, AND WHAT
          HAPPENED
XLVI.     A CHAPTER OF UNDERCURRENTS AND SOME SURFACE FLASHES
XLVII.    THE LAST: WITH A CONCLUDING WORD BY THE DAME




CHAPTER I

ENTER DAME GOSSIP AS CHORUS

Everybody has heard of the beautiful Countess of Cressett, who was one of
the lights of this country at the time when crowned heads were running
over Europe, crying out for charity's sake to be amused after their
tiresome work of slaughter: and you know what a dread they have of
moping. She was famous for her fun and high spirits besides her good
looks, which you may judge of for yourself on a walk down most of our
great noblemen's collections of pictures in England, where you will
behold her as the goddess Diana fitting an arrow to a bow; and elsewhere
an Amazon holding a spear; or a lady with dogs, in the costume of the
day; and in one place she is a nymph, if not Diana herself, gazing at her
naked feet before her attendants loosen her tunic for her to take the
bath, and her hounds are pricking their ears, and you see antlers of a
stag behind a block of stone. She was a wonderful swimmer, among other
things, and one early morning, when she was a girl, she did really swim,
they say, across the Shannon and back to win a bet for her brother Lord
Levellier, the colonel of cavalry, who left an arm in Egypt, and changed
his way of life to become a wizard, as the common people about his
neighbourhood supposed, because he foretold the weather and had cures for
aches and pains without a doctor's diploma. But we know now that he was
only a mathematician and astronomer, all for inventing military engines.
The brother and sister were great friends in their youth, when he had his
right arm to defend her reputation with; and she would have done anything
on earth to please him.

There is a picture of her in an immense flat white silk hat trimmed with
pale blue, like a pavilion, the broadest brim ever seen, and she simply
sits on a chair; and Venus the Queen of Beauty would have been
extinguished under that hat, I am sure; and only to look at Countess
Fanny's eye beneath the brim she has tipped ever so slightly in her
artfulness makes the absurd thing graceful and suitable. Oh! she was a
cunning one. But you must be on your guard against the scandalmongers and
collectors of anecdotes, and worst of any, the critic, of our Galleries
of Art; for she being in almost all of them (the principal painters of
the day were on their knees for the favour of a sitting), they have to
speak of her pretty frequently, and they season their dish, the coxcombs
do, by hinting a knowledge of her history.

'Here we come to another portrait of the beautiful but, we fear, naughty
Countess of Cressett.'

You are to imagine that they know everything, and they are so indulgent
when they drop their blot on a lady's character.

They can boast of nothing more than having read Nymriey's Letters and
Correspondence, published, fortunately for him, when he was no longer to
be called to account below for his malicious insinuations, pretending to
decency in initials and dashes: That man was a hater of women and the
clergy. He was one of the horrid creatures who write with a wink at you,
which sets the wicked part of us on fire: I have known it myself, and I
own it to my shame; and if I happened to be ignorant of the history of
Countess Fanny, I could not refute his wantonness. He has just the same
benevolent leer for a bishop. Give me, if we are to make a choice, the
beggar's breech for decency, I say: I like it vastly in preference to a
Nymney, who leads you up to the curtain and agitates it, and bids you to
retire on tiptoe. You cannot help being angry with the man for both
reasons. But he is the writer society delights in, to show what it is
composed of. A man brazen enough to declare that he could hold us in
suspense about the adventures of a broomstick, with the aid of a yashmak
and an ankle, may know the world; you had better not know him--that is my
remark; and do not trust him.

He tells the story of the Old Buccaneer in fear of the public, for it was
general property, but of course he finishes with a Nymney touch: 'So the
Old Buccaneer is the doubloon she takes in exchange for a handful of
silver pieces.' There is no such handful to exchange--not of the kind he
sickeningly nudges at you. I will prove to you it was not Countess
Fanny's naughtiness, though she was indeed very blamable. Women should
walk in armour as if they were born to it; for these cold sneerers will
never waste their darts on cuirasses. An independent brave young
creature, exposing herself thoughtlessly in her reckless innocence, is
the victim for them. They will bring all society down on her with one of
their explosive sly words appearing so careless, the cowards. I say
without hesitation, her conduct with regard to Kirby, the Old Buccaneer,
as he was called, however indefensible in itself, warrants her at heart
an innocent young woman, much to be pitied. Only to think of her, I could
sometimes drop into a chair for a good cry. And of him too! and their
daughter Carinthia Jane was the pair of them, as to that, and so was
Chillon John, the son.

Those critics quoting Nymney should look at the portrait of her in the
Long Saloon of Cresset Castle, where she stands in blue and white,
completely dressed, near a table supporting a couple of holster pistols,
and then let them ask themselves whether they would speak of her so if
her little hand could move.

Well, and so the tale of her swim across the Shannon river and back drove
the young Earl of Cresset straight over to Ireland to propose for her, he
saying; that she was the girl to suit his book; not allowing her time to
think of how much he might be the man to suit hers. The marriage was what
is called a good one: both full of frolic, and he wealthy and rather
handsome, and she quite lovely and spirited.

No wonder the whole town was very soon agog about the couple, until at
the end of a year people began to talk of them separately, she going her
way, and he his. She could not always be on the top of a coach, which was
his throne of happiness.

Plenty of stories are current still of his fame as a four-in-hand
coachman. They say he once drove an Emperor and a King, a Prince
Chancellor and a pair of Field Marshals, and some ladies of the day, from
the metropolis to Richmond Hill in fifty or sixty odd minutes, having the
ground cleared all the way by bell and summons, and only a donkey-cart
and man, and a deaf old woman, to pay for; and went, as you can imagine,
at such a tearing gallop, that those Grand Highnesses had to hold on for
their lives and lost their hats along the road; and a publican at Kew
exhibits one above his bar to the present hour. And Countess Fanny was up
among them, they say. She was equal to it. And some say, that was the
occasion of her meeting the Old Buccaneer.

She met him at Richmond in Surrey we know for certain. It was on Richmond
Hill, where the old King met his Lass. They say Countess Fanny was
parading the hill to behold the splendid view, always admired so much by
foreigners, with their Achs and Hechs! and surrounded by her crowned
courtiers in frogged uniforms and moustachioed like sea-horses, a little
before dinner time, when Kirby passed her, and the Emperor made a remark
on him, for Kirby was a magnificent figure of a man, and used to be
compared to a three-decker entering harbour after a victory. He stood six
feet four, and was broad-shouldered and deep-chested to match, and walked
like a king who has humbled his enemy. You have seen big dogs. And so
Countess Fanny looked round. Kirby was doing the same. But he had turned
right about, and appeared transfixed and like a royal beast angry, with
his wound. If ever there was love at first sight, and a dreadful love,
like a runaway mail-coach in a storm of wind and lightning at black
midnight by the banks of a flooded river, which was formerly our
comparison for terrible situations, it was when those two met.

And, what! you exclaim, Buccaneer Kirby full sixty-five, and Countess
Fanny no more than three and twenty, a young beauty of the world of
fashion, courted by the highest, and she in love with him! Go and gaze at
one of our big ships coming out of an engagement home with all her flags
flying and her crew manning the yards. That will give you an idea of a
young woman's feelings for an old warrior never beaten down an inch by
anything he had to endure; matching him, I dare say, in her woman's
heart, with the Mighty Highnesses who had only smelt the outside edge of
battle. She did rarely admire a valiant man. Old as Methuselah, he would
have made her kneel to him. She was all heart for a real hero.

The story goes, that Countess Fanny sent her husband to Captain Kirby, at
the emperor's request, to inquire his name; and on hearing it, she struck
her hands on her bosom, telling his Majesty he saw there the bravest man
in the king's dominions; which the emperor scarce crediting, and
observing that the man must be, then, a superhuman being to be so
distinguished in a nation of the brave, Countess Fanny related the
well-known tale of Captain Kirby and the shipful of mutineers; and how
when not a man of them stood by him, and he in the service of the first
insurgent State of Spanish America, to save his ship from being taken
over to the enemy,--he blew her up, fifteen miles from land: and so he
got to shore swimming and floating alternately, and was called Old
Sky-high by English sailors, any number of whom could always be had to
sail under Buccaneer Kirby. He fought on shore as well; and once he came
down from the tops of the Andes with a black beard turned white, and went
into action with the title of Kirby's Ghost.

But his heart was on salt water; he was never so much at home as in a
ship foundering or splitting into the clouds. We are told that he never
forgave the Admiralty for striking him off the list of English naval
captains: which is no doubt why in his old age he nursed a grudge against
his country.

Ours, I am sure, was the loss; and many have thought so since. He was a
mechanician, a master of stratagems; and would say, that brains will beat
Grim Death if we have enough of them. He was a standing example of the
lessons of his own MAXIMS FOR MEN, a very curious book, that fetches a
rare price now wherever a copy is put up for auction. I shudder at them
as if they were muzzles of firearms pointed at me; but they were not
addressed to my sex; and still they give me an interest in the writer who
would declare, that 'he had never failed in an undertaking without
stripping bare to expose to himself where he had been wanting in
Intention and Determination.'

There you may see a truly terrible man.

So the emperor being immensely taken with Kirby's method of preserving
discipline on board ship, because (as we say to the madman, 'Your
strait-waistcoat is my easy-chair') monarchs have a great love of
discipline, he begged Countess Fanny's permission that he might invite
Captain Kirby to his table; and Countess Fanny (she had the name from the
ballad

       'I am the star of Prince and Czar,
        My light is shed on many,
        But I wait here till my bold Buccaneer
        Makes prize of Countess Fanny':--

for the popular imagination was extraordinarily roused by the elopement,
and there were songs and ballads out of number), Countess Fanny
despatched her husband to Captain Kirby again, meaning no harm, though
the poor man is laughed at in the songs for going twice upon his mission.

None of the mighty people repented of having the Old Buccaneer--for that
night, at all events. He sat in the midst of them, you may believe, like
the lord of that table, with his great white beard and hair--not a lock
of it shed--and his bronze lion-face, and a resolute but a merry eye that
he had. He was no deep drinker of wine, but when he did drink, and the
wine champagne, he drank to show his disdain of its powers; and the
emperor wishing for a narrative of some of his exploits, particularly the
blowing up of his ship, Kirby paid his Majesty the compliment of giving
it him as baldly as an official report to the Admiralty. So disengaged
and calm was he, with his bottles of champagne in him, where another
would have been sparkling and laying on the colours, that he was then and
there offered Admiral's rank in the Imperial navy; and the Old Buccaneer,
like a courtier of our best days, bows to Countess Fanny, and asks her,
if he is a free man to go: and, No, says she, we cannot spare you! And
there was a pretty wrangle between Countess Fanny and the emperor, each
pulling at the Old Buccaneer to have possession of him.

He was rarely out of her sight after their first meeting, and the
ridiculous excuse she gave to her husband's family was, she feared he
would be kidnapped and made a Cossack of! And young Lord Cressett, her
husband, began to grumble concerning her intimacy with a man old enough
to be her grandfather. As if the age were the injury! He seemed to think
it so, and vowed he would shoot the old depredator dead, if he found him
on the grounds of Cressett: 'like vermin,' he said, and it was considered
that he had the right, and no jury would have convicted him. You know
what those days were.

He had his opportunity one moonlight night, not far from the castle, and
peppered Kirby with shot from a fowling-piece at, some say, five paces'
distance, if not point-blank.

But Kirby had a maxim, Steady shakes them, and he acted on it to receive
his enemy's fire; and the young lord's hand shook, and the Old Buccaneer
stood out of the smoke not much injured, except in the coat-collar, with
a pistol cocked in his hand, and he said:

'Many would take that for a declaration of war, but I know it 's only
your lordship's diplomacy'; and then he let loose to his mad fun,
astounding Lord Cressett and his gamekeeper, and vowed, as the young lord
tried to relate subsequently, as well as he could recollect the
words--here I have it in print:--'that he was a man pickled in saltpetre
when an infant, like Achilles, and proof against powder and shot not
marked with cross and key, and fetched up from the square magazine in the
central depot of the infernal factory, third turning to the right off the
grand arcade in Kingdom-come, where the night-porter has to wear wet
petticoats, like a Highland chief, to make short work of the sparks
flying about, otherwise this world and many another would not have to
wait long for combustion.'

Kirby had the wildest way of talking when he was not issuing orders under
fire, best understood by sailors. I give it you as it stands here
printed. I do not profess to understand.

So Lord Cressett said: 'Diplomacy and infernal factories be hanged! Have
your shot at me; it's only fair.' And Kirby discharged his pistol at the
top twigs of an old oak tree, and called the young lord a Briton, and
proposed to take him in hand and make a man of him, as nigh worthy of his
wife as any one not an Alexander of Macedon could be.

So they became friendly, and the young lord confessed it was his family
that had urged him to the attack; and Kirby abode at the castle, and all
three were happy, in perfect honour, I am convinced: but such was not the
opinion of the Cressetts and Levelliers. Down they trooped to Cressett
Castle with a rush and a roar, crying on the disgrace of an old desperado
like Kirby living there; Dukes, Marchionesses, Cabinet Ministers, leaders
of fashion, and fire-eating colonels of the King's body-guard, one of
whom Captain John Peter Kirby laid on his heels at ten paces on an April
morning, when the duel was fought, as early as the blessed heavens had
given them light to see to do it. Such days those were!

There was talk of shutting up the infatuated lady. If not incarcerated,
she was rigidly watched. The earl her husband fell altogether to drinking
and coaching, and other things. The ballad makes her say:

       'My family my gaolers be,
        My husband is a zany;
        Naught see I clear save my bold Buccaneer
        To rescue Countess Fanny!'

and it goes on:

       'O little lass, at play on the grass,

        Come earn a silver penny,
        And you'll be dear to my bold Buccaneer
        For news of his Countess Fanny.'

In spite of her bravery, that poor woman suffered!

We used to learn by heart the ballads and songs upon famous events in
those old days when poetry was worshipped.

But Captain Kirby gave provocation enough to both families when he went
among the taverns and clubs, and vowed before Providence over his big
fist that they should rue their interference, and he would carry off the
lady on a day he named; he named the hour as well, they say, and that was
midnight of the month of June. The Levelliers and Cressetts foamed at the
mouth in speaking of him, so enraged they were on account of his age and
his passion for a young woman. As to blood, the Kirbys of Lincolnshire
were quite equal to the Cressetts of Warwick. The Old Buccaneer seems to
have had money too. But you can see what her people had to complain of:
his insolent contempt of them was unexampled. And their tyranny had
roused my lady's high spirit not a bit less; and she said right out:
'When he comes, I am ready and will go with him.'

There was boldness for you on both sides! All the town was laughing and
betting on the event of the night in June: and the odds were in favour of
Kirby; for though, Lord Cressett was quite the popular young English
nobleman, being a capital whip and free of his coin, in those days men
who had smelt powder were often prized above titles, and the feeling, out
of society, was very strong for Kirby, even previous to the fight on the
heath. And the age of the indomitable adventurer must have contributed to
his popularity. He was the hero of every song.

       "'What's age to me!" cries Kirby;
        "Why, young and fresh let her be,
        But it 's mighty better reasoned
        For a man to be well seasoned,
        And a man she has in me," cries Kirby.'

As to his exact age:

       "'Write me down sixty-three," cries Kirby.'

I have always maintained that it was an understatement. We must remember,
it was not Kirby speaking, but the song-writer. Kirby would not, in my
opinion, have numbered years he was proud of below their due quantity. He
was more, if he died at ninety-one; and Chillon Switzer John Kirby, born
eleven months after the elopement, was, we know, twenty-three years old
when the old man gave up the ghost and bequeathed him little besides a
law-suit with the Austrian Government, and the care of Carinthia Jane,
the second child of this extraordinary union; both children born in
wedlock, as you will hear. Sixty-three, or sixty-seven, near upon
seventy, when most men are reaping and stacking their sins with groans
and weak knees, Kirby was a match for his juniors, which they discovered.

Captain John Peter Avason Kirby, son of a Lincolnshire squire of an
ancient stock, was proud of his blood, and claimed descent from a chief
of the Danish rovers.

       '"What's rank to me!" cries Kirby;
        "A titled lass let her be,
          But unless my plans miscarry,
          I'll show her when we marry;
        As brave a pedigree," cries Kirby.'

That was the song-writer's answer to the charge that the countess had
stooped to a degrading alliance.

John Peter was fourth of a family of seven children, all males, and hard
at the bottle early in life: 'for want of proper occupation,' he says in
his Memoirs, and applauds his brother Stanson, the clergyman, for being
ahead of him in renouncing strong dunks, because he found that he 'cursed
better upon water.' Water, however, helped Stanson Kirby to outlive his
brothers and inherit the Lincolnshire property, and at the period of the
great scandal in London he was palsied, and waited on by his grandson and
heir Ralph Thorkill Kirby, the hero of an adventure celebrated in our Law
courts and on the English stage; for he took possession of his coachman's
wife, and was accused of compassing the death of the husband. He was not
hanged for it, so we are bound to think him not guilty.

The stage-piece is called 'Saturday Night', and it had an astonishing
run, but is only remembered now for the song of 'Saturday,' sung by the
poor coachman and labourers at the village ale-house before he starts to
capture his wife from the clutches of her seducer and meets his fate.
Never was there a more popular song: you heard it everywhere. I recollect
one verse:

       'O Saturday money is slippery metal,
        And Saturday ale it is tipsy stuff
        At home the old woman is boiling her kettle,
        She thinks we don't know when we've tippled enough.
        We drink, and of never a man are we jealous,
        And never a man against us will he speak
        For who can be hard on a set of poor fellows
        Who only see Saturday once a week!

You chorus the last two lines.

That was the very song the unfortunate coachman of Kirby Hall joined in
singing before he went out to face his end for the woman he loved. He
believed in her virtue to the very last.

'The ravished wife of my bosom,' he calls her all through the latter half
of the play. It is a real tragedy. The songs of that day have lost their
effect now, I suppose. They will ever remain pathetic to me; and to hear
the poor coachman William Martin invoking the name of his dear stolen
wife Elizabeth, jug in hand, so tearfully, while he joins the song of
Saturday, was a most moving thing. You saw nothing but handkerchiefs out
all over the theatre. What it is that has gone from our drama, I cannot
tell: I am never affected now as I was then; and people in a low station
of life could affect me then, without being flung at me, for I dislike an
entire dish of them, I own. We were simpler in our habits and ways of
thinking. Elizabeth Martin, according to report, was a woman to make
better men than Ralph Thorkill act evilly--as to good looks, I mean. She
was not entirely guiltless, I am afraid; though in the last scene, Mrs.
Kempson, who played the part (as, alas, she could do to the very life!),
so threw herself into the pathos of it that there were few to hold out
against her, and we felt that Elizabeth had been misled. So much for
morality in those days!

And now for the elopement.




CHAPTER II

MISTRESS GOSSIP TELLS OF THE ELOPEMENT OF THE COUNTESS OF CRESSETT WITH
THE OLD BUCCANEER, AND OF CHARLES DUMP THE POSTILLION CONDUCTING THEM,
AND OF A GREAT COUNTY FAMILY

The twenty-first of June was the day appointed by Captain Kirby to carry
off Countess Fanny, and the time midnight: and ten minutes to the stroke
of twelve, Countess Fanny, as if she scorned to conceal that she was in a
conspiracy with her grey-haired lover, notwithstanding that she was
watched and guarded, left the Marchioness of Arpington's ball-room and
was escorted downstairs by her brother Lord Levellier, sworn to baffle
Kirby. Present with him in the street and witness to the shutting of the
carriage-door on Countess Fanny, were brother officers of his, General
Abrane, Colonel Jack Potts, and Sir Upton Tomber.

The door fast shut, Countess Fanny kissed her hand to them and drew up
the window, seeming merry, and as they had expected indignation and
perhaps resistance, for she could be a spitfire in a temper and had no
fear whatever of firearms, they were glad to have her safe on such good
terms; and so General Abrane jumped up on the box beside the coachman,
Jack Potts jumped up between the footmen, and Sir Upton Tomber and the
one-armed lord, as soon as the carriage was disengaged from the ruck two
deep, walked on each side of it in the road all the way to Lord
Cressett's town house. No one thought of asking where that silly young
man was--probably under some table.

Their numbers were swelled by quite a host going along, for heavy bets
were on the affair, dozens having backed Kirby; and it must have appeared
serious to them, with the lady in custody, and constables on the
look-out, and Kirby and his men nowhere in sight. They expected an
onslaught at some point of the procession, and it may be believed they
wished it, if only that they might see something for their money. A
beautiful bright moonlight night it happened to be. Arm in arm among them
were Lord Pitscrew and Russett, Earl of Fleetwood, a great friend of
Kirby's; for it was a device of the Old Buccaneer's that helped the earl
to win the great Welsh heiress who made him, even before he took to
hoarding and buying,--one of the wealthiest noblemen in England; but she
was crazed by her marriage or the wild scenes leading to it; she never
presented herself in society. She would sit on the top of Estlemont
towers--as they formerly spelt it--all day and half the night in
midwinter, often, looking for the mountains down in her native West
country, covered with an old white flannel cloak, and on her head a tall
hat of her Welsh women-folk; and she died of it, leaving a son in her
likeness, of whom you will hear. Lord Fleetwood had lost none of his
faith in Kirby, and went on booking bets giving him huge odds, thousands!

He accepted fifty to one when the carriage came to a stop at the steps of
Lord Cressett's mansion; but he was anxious, and well he might be, seeing
Countess Fanny alight and pass up between two lines of gentlemen all
bowing low before her: not a sign of the Old Buccaneer anywhere to right
or left! Heads were on the look out, and vows offered up for his
appearance.

She was at the door and about to enter the house. Then it was; that with
a shout of the name of some dreadful heathen god, Colonel Jack Potts
roared out, 'She's half a foot short o' the mark!'

He was on the pavement, and it seems he measured her as she slipped by
him, and one thing and another caused him to smell a cheat; and General
Abrane, standing beside her near the door, cried: 'Where art flying now,
Jack?' But Jack Potts grew more positive and bellowed, 'Peel her wig!
we're done!'

And she did not speak a word, but stood huddled-up and hooded; and Lord
Levellier caught her up by the arm as she was trying a dash into the
hall, and Sir Upton Tomber plucked at her veil and raised it, and
whistled:

'Phew!'--which struck the rabble below with awe of the cunning of the Old
Buccaneer; and there was no need for them to hear General Abrane say:
'Right! Jack, we've a dead one in hand,' or Jack Potts reply:

'It's ten thousand pounds clean winged away from my pocket, like a string
of wild geese!'

The excitement of the varletry in the square, they say, was fearful to
hear. So the principal noblemen and gentlemen concerned thought it
prudent to hurry the young woman into the house and bar the door; and
there she was very soon stripped of veil and blonde false wig with long
curls, the whole framing of her artificial resemblance to Countess Fanny,
and she proved to be a good-looking foreign maid, a dark one, powdered,
trembling very much, but not so frightened upon hearing that her penalty
for the share she had taken in the horrid imposture practised upon them
was to receive and return a salute from each of the gentlemen in
rotation; which the hussy did with proper submission; and Jack Potts
remarked, that 'it was an honest buss, but dear at ten thousand!'

When you have been the victim of a deceit, the explanation of the
simplicity of the trick turns all the wonder upon yourself, you know, and
the backers of the Old Buccaneer and the wagerers against him crowed and
groaned in chorus at the maid's narrative of how the moment Countess
Fanny had thrown up the window of her carriage, she sprang out to a
carriage on the off side, containing Kirby, and how she, this little
French jade, sprang in to take her place. One snap of the fingers and the
transformation was accomplished. So for another kiss all round they let
her go free, and she sat at the supper-table prepared for Countess Fanny
and the party by order of Lord Levellier, and amused the gentlemen with
stories of the ladies she had served, English and foreign. And that is
how men are taught to think they know our sex and may despise it! I could
preach them a lesson. Those men might as well not believe in the
steadfastness of the very stars because one or two are reported lost out
of the firmament, and now and then we behold a whole shower of fragments
descending. The truth is, they have taken a stain from the life they
lead, and are troubled puddles, incapable of clear reflection. To listen
to the tattle of a chatting little slut, and condemn the whole sex upon
her testimony, is a nice idea of justice. Many of the gentlemen present
became notorious as woman-scorners, whether owing to Countess Fanny or
other things. Lord Levellier was, and Lord Fleetwood, the wicked man! And
certainly the hearing of naughty stories of us by the light of a grievous
and vexatious instance of our misconduct must produce an impression.
Countess Fanny's desperate passion for a man of the age of Kirby struck
them as out of nature. They talked of it as if they could have pardoned
her a younger lover.

All that Lord Cressett said, on the announcement of the flight of his
wife, was: 'Ah! Fan! she never would run in my ribbons.'

He positively declined to persue. Lord Levellier would not attempt to
follow her up without him, as it would have cost money, and he wanted all
that he could spare for his telescopes and experiments. Who, then, was
the gentleman who stopped the chariot, with his three mounted attendants,
on the road to the sea, on the heath by the great Punch-Bowl?

That has been the question for now longer than half a century, in fact
approaching seventy mortal years. No one has ever been able to say for
certain.

It occurred at six o'clock on the summer morning. Countess Fanny must
have known him,--and not once did she open her mouth to breathe his name.
Yet she had no objection to talk of the adventure and how Simon Fettle,
Captain Kirby's old ship's steward in South America, seeing horsemen
stationed on the ascent of the high road bordering the Bowl, which is
miles round and deep, made the postillion cease jogging, and sang out to
his master for orders, and Kirby sang back to him to look to his priming,
and then the postillion was bidden proceed, and he did not like it, but
he had to deal with pistols behind, where men feel weak, and he went
bobbing on the saddle in dejection, as if upon his very heart he jogged;
and soon the fray commenced. There was very little parleying between
determined men.

Simon Fettle was a plain kindly creature without a thought of malice, who
kept his master's accounts. He fired the first shot at the foremost man,
as he related in after days, 'to reduce the odds.' Kirby said to Countess
Fanny, just to comfort her, never so much as imagining she would be
afraid, 'The worst will be a bloody shirt for Simon to mangle,' for they
had been arranging to live cheaply in a cottage on the Continent, and
Simon Fettle to do the washing. She could not help laughing outright. But
when the Old Buccaneer was down striding in the battle, she took a pistol
and descended likewise; and she used it, too, and loaded again.

She had not to use it a second time. Kirby pulled the gentleman off his
horse, wounded in the thigh, and while dragging him to Countess Fanny to
crave her pardon, a shot intended for Kirby hit the poor gentleman in the
breast, and Kirby stretched him at his length, and Simon and he disarmed
the servant who had fired. One was insensible, one flying, and those two
on the ground. All in broad daylight; but so lonely is that spot, nothing
might have been heard of it, if at the end of the week the postillion who
had been bribed and threatened with terrible threats to keep his tongue
from wagging, had not begun to talk. So the scene of the encounter was
examined, and on one spot, carefully earthed over, blood-marks were
discovered in the green sand. People in the huts on the hill-top, a
quarter of a mile distant, spoke of having heard sounds of firing while
they were at breakfast, and a little boy named Tommy Wedger said he saw a
dead body go by in an open coach that morning; all bloody and mournful.
He had to appear before the magistrates, crying terribly, but did not
know the nature of an oath, and was dismissed. Time came when the boy
learned to swear, and he did, and that he had seen a beautiful lady
firing and killing men like pigeons and partridges; but that was after
Charles Dump, the postillion, had been telling the story.

Those who credited Charles Dump's veracity speculated on dozens of great
noblemen--and gentlemen known to be dying in love with Countess Fanny.
And this brings us to another family.

I do not say I know anything; I do but lay before you the evidence we
have to fix suspicion upon a notorious character, perfectly capable of
trying to thwart a man like Kirby, and with good reason to try, if she
had bewitched him to a consuming passion, as we are told.

About eleven miles distant, as the crow flies and a bold huntsman will
ride in that heath country, from the Punch-Bowl, right across the mounds
and the broad water, lies the estate of the Fakenhams, who intermarried
with the Coplestones of the iron mines, and were the wealthiest of the
old county families until Curtis Fakenham entered upon his inheritance.
Money with him was like the farm-wife's dish of grain she tosses in
showers to her fowls. He was more than what you call a lady-killer, he
was a woman-eater. His pride was in it as well as his taste, and when men
are like that, indeed they are devourers!

Curtis was the elder brother of Commodore Baldwin Fakenham, whose
offspring, like his own, were so strangely mixed up with Captain Kirby's
children by Countess Fanny, as you will hear. And these two brothers were
sons of Geoffrey Fakenham, celebrated for his devotion to the French
Countess Jules d'Andreuze, or some such name, a courtly gentleman, who
turned Papist on his death-bed in France, in Brittany somewhere, not to
be separated from her in the next world, as he solemnly left word;
wickedly, many think.

To show the oddness of things and how opposite to one another brothers
may be, his elder, the uncle of Curtis, and Baldwin, was the renowned old
Admiral Fakenham, better known along our sea-coasts and ports among
sailors as 'Old Showery,' because of a remark he once made to his
flag-captain, when cannon-balls were coming thick on them in a
hard-fought action. 'Hot work, sir,' his captain said. 'Showery,' replied
the admiral, as his cocked-hat was knocked off by the wind of a
cannon-ball. He lost both legs before the war was over, and said merrily,
'Stumps for life'' while they were carrying him below to the cockpit. In
my girlhood the boys were always bringing home anecdotes of old Admiral
Showery: not all of them true ones, perhaps, but they fitted him. He was
a rough seaman, fond, as they say, of his glass and his girl, and utterly
despising his brother Geoffrey for the airs he gave himself, and crawling
on his knees to a female Parleyvoo; and when Geoffrey died, the admiral
drank to his rest in the grave: 'There's to my brother Jeff,' he said,
and flinging away the dregs of his glass: 'There 's to the Frog!' and
flinging away the glass to shivers: 'There's to the Turncoat!'

He salted his language in a manner I cannot repeat; no epithet ever stood
by itself. When I was young the boys relished these dreadful words
because they seemed to smell of tar and battle-smoke, when every English
boy was for being a sailor and daring the Black Gentleman below. In all
truth, the bad words came from him; though an excellent scholar has
assured me they should be taken for aspirates, and mean no harm; and so
it may be, but heartily do I rejoice that aspirates, have been dropped by
people of birth; for you might once hear titled ladies guilty of them in
polite society, I do assure you.

We have greatly improved in that respect. They say the admiral's
reputation as a British sailor of the old school made him, rather his
name, a great favourite at Court; but to Court he could not be got to go,
and if the tale be true, their Majesties paid him a visit on board his
ship, in harbour one day, and sailors tell you that Old Showery gave his
liege lord and lady a common dish of boiled beef with carrots and
turnips, and a plain dumpling, for their dinner, with ale and port wine,
the merit of which he swore to; and he became so elate, that after the
cloth was removed, he danced them a hornpipe on his pair of wooden legs,
whistling his tune, and holding his full tumbler of hot grog in his hand
all the while, without so much as the spilling of a drop!--so earnest was
he in everything he did. They say his limit was two bottles of port wine
at a sitting, with his glass of hot grog to follow, and not a soul could
induce him to go beyond that. In addition to being a great seaman, he was
a very religious man and a stout churchman.

Well, now, the Curtis Fakenham of Captain Kirby's day had a good deal of
his uncle as well as his father in him, the spirit of one and the
outside, of the other; and, favoured or not, he had been distinguished
among Countess Fanny's adorers: she certainly chose to be silent about
the name of the assailant. And it has been attested on oath that two days
and a night subsequent to the date furnished by Charles Dump, Curtis
Fakenham was brought to his house, Hollis Grange, lame of a leg, with a
shot in his breast, that he carried to the family vault; and his head
gamekeeper, John Wiltshire, a resolute fellow, was missing from that
hour. Some said they had a quarrel, and Curtis was wounded and John
Wiltshire killed. Curtis was known to have been extremely attached to the
man. Yet when Wiltshire was inquired for, he let fall a word of 'having
more of Wiltshire than was agreeable to Hampshire'--his county. People
asked what that meant. Yet, according to the tale, it was the surviving
servant, by whom he, or whoever it may have been, was accidentally shot.

We are in a perfect tangle. On the other hand, it was never denied that
Curtis and John Wiltshire were in London together at the time of Countess
Fanny's flight: and Curtis Fakenham was one of the procession of armed
gentleman conducting her in her carriage, as they supposed; and he was
known to have started off, on the discovery of the cheat, with horrible
imprecations against Frenchwomen. It became known, too; that horses of
his were standing saddled in his innyard at midnight. And more, Charles
Dump the postillion was taken secretly to set eyes on him as they wheeled
him in his garden-walk, and he vowed it was the identical gentleman. But
this coming by and by to the ear of Curtis, he had Charles Dump fetched
over to confront him; and then the man made oath that he had never seen
Mr. Curtis Fakenham anywhere but there, in his own house at Hollis! One
does not really know what, to think of it.

This postillion made a small fortune. He was everywhere in request.
People were never tired of asking him how he behaved while the fight was
going on, and he always answered that he sat as close to his horse as he
could, and did not dream of dismounting; for, he said, 'he was a figure
on a horse, and naught when off it.' His repetition of the story, with
some adornments, and that same remark, made him the popular man of the
county; people said he might enter Parliament, and I think at one time it
was possible. But a great success is full of temptations. After being
hired at inns to fill them with his account of the battle, and tipped by
travellers from London to show the spot, he set up for himself as
innkeeper, and would have flourished, only he had contracted habits on
his rounds, and he fell to contradicting himself, so that he came to be
called Lying Charley; and the people of the country said it was 'he who
drained the Punch-Bowl, for though he helped to put the capital into it,
he took all the interest out of it.'

Yet we have the doctor of the village of Ipley, Dr. Cawthorne, a noted
botanist, assuring us of the absolute credibility of Charles Dump, whom
he attended in the poor creature's last illness, when Charles Dump
confessed he had lived in mortal terror of Squire Curtis, and had got the
trick of lying, through fear of telling the truth. Hence his ruin.

So he died delirious and contrite. Cawthorne, the great Turf man,
inherited a portrait of him from his father the doctor. It was often the
occasion of the story being told over again, and used to hang in the
patients' reception room, next to an oil-painting of the Punch-Bowl, an
admired landscape picture by a local artist, highly-toned and true to
every particular of the scene, with the bright yellow road winding
uphill, and the banks of brilliant purple heath, and a white thorn in
bloom quite beautiful, and the green fir trees, and the big Bowl black as
a cauldron,--indeed a perfect feast of harmonious contrasts in colours.

And now you know how it is that the names of Captain Kirby and Curtis
Fakenham are alive to the present moment in the district.

We lived a happy domestic life in those old coaching days, when county
affairs and county people were the topics of firesides, and the country
enclosed us to make us feel snug in our own importance. My opinion is,
that men and women grow to their dimensions only where such is the case.
We had our alarms from the outside now and again, but we soon relapsed to
dwell upon our private business and our pleasant little hopes and
excitements; the courtships and the crosses and the scandals, the
tea-parties and the dances, and how the morning looked after the stormy
night had passed, and the coach coming down the hill with a box of news
and perhaps a curious passenger to drop at the inn. I do believe we had a
liking for the very highwaymen, if they had any reputation for civility.
What I call human events, things concerning you and me, instead of the
deafening catastrophes now afflicting and taking all conversation out of
us, had their natural interest then. We studied the face of each morning
as it came, and speculated upon the secret of the thing it might have in
store for us or our heroes and heroines; we thought of them more than of
ourselves. Long after the adventures of the Punch-Bowl, our county was
anxious about Countess Fanny and the Old Buccaneer, wondering where they
were and whether they were prospering, whether they were just as much in
love as ever, and which of them would bury the other, and what the
foreign people abroad thought of that strange pair.




CHAPTER III

CONTINUATION OF THE INTRODUCTORY MEANDERINGS OF DAME GOSSIP, TOGETHER
WITH HER SUDDEN EXTINCTION

I have still time before me, according to the terms of my agreement with
the person to whom I have, I fear foolishly, entrusted the letters and
documents of a story surpassing ancient as well as modern in the
wonderment it causes, that would make the Law courts bless their hearts,
judges no less than the barristers, to have it running through them day
by day, with every particular to wrangle over, and many to serve as a
text for the pulpit. So to proceed.

It should be mentioned that the postillion Charles Dump is not
represented, and I have no conception of the reason why not, sitting on
horseback, in the portrait in the possession of the Cawthorne family. I
have not seen it, I am bound to admit. We had offended Dr. Cawthorne, by
once in an urgent case calling in another doctor, who, he would have it,
was a quack, that ought to have killed us, and we ceased to visit; but a
gentleman who was an established patient of Dr. Cawthorne's and had
frequent opportunities of judging the portrait, in the course of a
chronic malady, describes Charles Dump on his legs as a small man looking
diminished from a very much longer one by shrinkage in thickish wrinkles
from the shoulders to the shanks. His hat is enormous and very gay. He is
rather of sad countenance. An elevation of his collar behind the ears,
and pointed at the neck, gives you notions of his having dropped from
some hook. He stands with his forefinger extended, like a disused
semaphore-post, that seems tumbling and desponding on the hill by the
highroad, in his attitude while telling the tale; if standing it may be
called, where the whole figure appears imploring for a seat. That was his
natural position, as one would suppose any artist must have thought, and
a horse beneath him. But it has been suggested that the artist in
question was no painter of animals. Then why did he not get a painter of
animals to put in the horse? It is vain to ask, though it is notorious
that artists combine without bickering to do these things; and one puts
his name on the animal, the other on the human being or landscape.

My informant adds, that the prominent feature, telling a melancholy tale
of its own, is of sanguine colour, and while plainly in the act of
speaking, Charles Dump might be fancied about to drop off to sleep. He
was impressed by the dreaminess of the face; and I must say I regard him
as an interesting character. During my girlhood Napoleon Bonaparte alone
would have been his rival for filling an inn along our roads. I have
known our boys go to bed obediently and get up at night to run three
miles to THE WHEATSHEAF, only to stand on the bench or traveller's-rest
outside the window and look in at Charles Dump reciting, with just room
enough in the crowd to point his finger, as his way was.

He left a child, Mary Dump, who grew up to become lady's maid to Livia
Fakenham, daughter of Curtis, the beauty of Hampshire, equalled by no one
save her cousin Henrietta Fakenham, the daughter of Commodore Baldwin;
and they were two different kinds of beauties, not to be compared, and
different were their fortunes; for this lady was likened to the sun going
down on a cloudy noon, and that lady to the moon riding through a stormy
night. Livia was the young widow of Lord Duffield when she accepted the
Earl of Fleetwood, and was his third countess, and again a widow at
eight-and-twenty, and stepmother to young Croesus, the Earl of Fleetwood
of my story. Mary Dump testifies to her kindness of heart to her
dependents. If we are to speak of goodness, I am afraid there are other
witnesses.

I resent being warned that my time is short and that I have wasted much
of it over 'the attractive Charles.' What I have done I have done with a
purpose, and it must be a storyteller devoid of the rudiments of his art
who can complain of my dwelling on Charles Dump, for the world to have a
pause and pin its faith to him, which it would not do to a grander
person--that is, as a peg. Wonderful events, however true they are, must
be attached to something common and familiar, to make them credible.
Charles Dump, I say, is like a front-page picture to a history of those
old quiet yet exciting days in England, and when once you have seized him
the whole period is alive to you, as it was to me in the delicious
dulness I loved, that made us thirsty to hear of adventures and able to
enjoy to the utmost every thing occurring. The man is no more attractive
to me than a lump of clay. How could he be? But supposing I took up the
lump and told you that there where I found it, that lump of clay had been
rolled over and flung off by the left wheel of the prophet's Chariot of
Fire before it mounted aloft and disappeared in the heavens above!--you
would examine it and cherish it and have the scene present with you, you
may be sure; and magnificent descriptions would not be one-half so
persuasive. And that is what we call, in my profession, Art, if you
please.

So to continue: the Earl of Cressett fell from his coach-box in a fit,
and died of it, a fortnight after the flight of his wife; and the people
said she might as well have waited. Kirby and Countess Fanny were at
Lucerne or Lausanne, or some such place, in Switzerland when the news
reached them, and Kirby, without losing an hour, laid hold of an English
clergyman of the Established Church and put him through the ceremony of
celebrating his lawful union with the beautiful young creature he adored.
And this he did, he said, for the world to guard his Fan in a wider
circle than his two arms could compass, if not quite so well.

So the Old Buccaneer was ever after that her lawful husband, and as his
wedded wife, not wedded to a fool, she was an example to her sex, like
many another woman who has begun badly with a light-headed mate. It is
hard enough for a man to be married to a fool, but a man is only
half-cancelled by that burden, it has been said; whereas a woman finds
herself on board a rudderless vessel, and often the desperate thing she
does is to avoid perishing! Ten months, or eleven, some say, following
the proclamation of the marriage-tie, a son was born to Countess Fanny,
close by the castle of Chillon-on-the-lake, and he had the name of
Chillon Switzer John Kirby given to him to celebrate the fact.

Two years later the girl was born, and for the reason of her first seeing
the light in that Austrian province, she was christened Carinthia Jane.
She was her old father's pet; but Countess Fanny gloried in the boy. She
had fancied she would be a childless woman before he gave sign of coming;
and they say she wrote a little volume of Meditations in Prospect of
Approaching Motherhood, for the guidance of others in a similar
situation.

I have never been able to procure the book or pamphlet, but I know she
was the best of mothers, and of wives too. And she, with her old husband,
growing like a rose out of a weather-beaten rock, proved she was that,
among those handsome foreign officers poorly remarkable for their morals.
Not once had the Old Buccaneer to teach them a lesson. Think of it and
you will know that her feet did not stray--nor did her pretty eyes. Her
heart was too full for the cravings of vanity. Innocent ladies who get
their husbands into scrapes are innocent, perhaps; but knock you next
door in their bosoms, where the soul resides, and ask for information of
how innocence and uncleanness may go together. Kirby purchased a mine in
Carinthia, on the borders of Styria, and worked it himself. His native
land displeased him, so that he would not have been unwilling to see
Chillon enter the Austrian service, which the young man was inclined for,
subsequent to his return to his parents from one of the English public
schools, notwithstanding his passionate love for Old England. But Lord
Levellier explained the mystery in a letter to his half-forgiven sister,
praising the boy for his defence of his mother's name at the school,
where a big brutal fellow sneered at her, and Chillon challenged him to
sword or pistol; and then he walked down to the boy's home in
Staffordshire to force him to fight; and the father of the boy made him
offer an apology. That was not much balm to Master Chillon's wound. He
returned to his mother quite heavy, unlike a young man; and the unhappy
lady, though she knew, him to be bitterly sensitive on the point of
honour, and especially as to everything relating to her, saw herself
compelled to tell him the history of her life, to save him, as she
thought, from these chivalrous vindications of her good name. She may
have even painted herself worse than she was, both to excuse her
brother's miserliness to her son and the world's evil speaking of her.
Wisely or not, she chose this course devotedly to protect him from the
perils she foresaw in connection with the name of the once famous
Countess Fanny in the British Isles. And thus are we stricken by the days
of our youth. It is impossible to moralize conveniently when one is being
hurried by a person at one's elbow.

So the young man heard his mother out and kissed her, and then he went
secretly to Vienna and enlisted and served for a year as a private in the
regiment of Hussars, called, my papers tell me, Liechtenstein, and what
with his good conduct and the help of Kirby's friends, he would have
obtained a commission from the emperor, when, at the right moment to keep
a sprig of Kirby's growth for his country, Lord Levellier sent word that
he was down for a cornetcy in a British regiment of dragoons. Chillon
came home from a garrison town, and there was a consultation about his
future career. Shall it be England? Shall it be Austria? Countess Fanny's
voice was for England, and she carried the vote, knowing though she did
that it signified separation, and it might be alienation--where her son
would chance to hear things he could not refute. She believed that her
son by such a man as Kirby would be of use to his country, and her voice,
against herself, was for England.

It broke her heart. If she failed to receive the regular letter, she
pined and was disconsolate. He has heard more of me! was in her mind. Her
husband sat looking at her with his old large grey glassy eyes. You would
have fancied him awaiting her death as the signal for his own release.
But she, poor mother, behind her weeping lids beheld her son's filial
love of her wounded and bleeding. When there was anything to be done for
her, old Kirby was astir. When it was nothing, either in physic or
assistance, he was like a great corner of rock. You may indeed imagine
grief in the very rock that sees its flower fading to the withered shred.
On the last night of her life this old man of past ninety carried her in
his arms up a flight of stairs to her bed.

A week after her burial, Kirby was found a corpse in the mountain forest.
His having called the death of his darling his lightning-stroke must have
been the origin of the report that he died of lightning. He touched not a
morsel of food from the hour of the dropping of the sod on her coffin of
ebony wood. An old crust of their mahogany bread, supposed at first to be
a specimen of quartz, was found in one of his coat pockets. He kissed his
girl Carinthia before going out on his last journey from home, and spoke
some wandering words. The mine had not been worked for a year. She
thought she would find him at the mouth of the shaft, where he would
sometimes be sitting and staring, already dead at heart with the death he
saw coming to the beloved woman. They had to let her down with ropes,
that she might satisfy herself he was not below. She and her great dog
and a faithful man-servant discovered the body in the forest. Chillon
arrived from England to see the common grave of both his parents.

And now good-bye to sorrow for a while. Keep your tears for the living.
And first I am going to describe to you the young Earl of Fleetwood, son
of the strange Welsh lady, the richest nobleman of his time, and how he
persued and shunned the lady who had fascinated him, Henrietta, the
daughter of Commodore Baldwin Fakenham; and how he met Carinthia Jane;
and concerning that lovely Henrietta and Chillon Kirby-Levellier; and of
the young poet of ordinary parentage, and the giant Captain Abrane, and
Livia the widowed Countess of Fleetwood, Henrietta's cousin, daughter of
Curtis Fakenham; and numbers of others; Lord Levellier, Lord Brailstone,
Lord Simon Pitscrew, Chumley Potts, young Ambrose Mallard; and the
English pugilist, such a man of honour though he drank; and the
adventures of Madge, Carinthia Jane's maid. Just a few touches. And then
the marriage dividing Great Britain into halves, taking sides. After
that, I trust you may go on, as I would carry you were we all twenty
years younger, had I but sooner been in possession of these treasured
papers. I promise you excitement enough, if justice is done to them. But
I must and will describe the wedding. This young Earl of Fleetwood, you
should know, was a very powder-magazine of ambition, and never would he
break his word: which is right, if we are properly careful; and so he--

She ceases. According to the terms of the treaty, the venerable lady's
time has passed. An extinguisher descends on her, giving her the likeness
of one under condemnation of 'the Most Holy Inqusition, in the ranks of
an 'auto da fe'; and singularly resembling that victim at the first sharp
bite of the flames she will, be when she hears the version of her story.




CHAPTER IV

MORNING AND FAREWELL TO AN OLD HOME

Brother and sister were about to leave the mountainland for England. They
had not gone to bed overnight, and from the windows of their deserted
home, a little before dawn, they saw the dwindled moon, a late riser,
break through droves of hunted cloud, directly topping their ancient
guardian height, the triple peak and giant of the range, friendlier in
his name than in aspect for the two young people clinging to the scene
they were to quit. His name recalled old-days: the apparition of his head
among the heavens drummed on their sense of banishment.

To the girl, this was a division of her life, and the dawn held the
sword. She felt herself midswing across a gulf that was the grave of one
half, without a light of promise for the other. Her passionate excess of
attachment to her buried home robbed the future of any colours it might
have worn to bid a young heart quicken. And England, though she was of
British blood, was a foreign place to her, not alluring: her brother had
twice come out of England reserved in speech; her mother's talk of
England had been unhappy; her father had suffered ill-treatment there
from a brutal institution termed the Admiralty, and had never regretted
the not seeing England again. The thought that she was bound thitherward
enfolded her like a frosty mist. But these bare walls, these loud floors,
chill rooms, dull windows, and the vault-sounding of the ghostly house,
everywhere the absence of the faces in the house told her she had no
choice, she must go. The appearance of her old friend the towering
mountain-height, up a blue night-sky, compelled her swift mind to see
herself far away, yearning to him out of exile, an exile that had no
local features; she would not imagine them to give a centre of warmth,
her wilful grief preferred the blank. It resembled death in seeming some
hollowness behind a shroud, which we shudder at.

The room was lighted by a stable-lantern on a kitchen-table. Their seat
near the window was a rickety garden-bench rejected in the headlong sale
of the furniture; and when she rose, unable to continue motionless while
the hosts of illuminated cloud flew fast, she had to warn her brother to
preserve his balance. He tacitly did so, aware of the necessity.

She walked up and down the long seven-windowed saloon, haunted by her
footfall, trying to think, chafing at his quietness and acknowledging
that he did well to be quiet. They had finished their packing of boxes
and of wearing-apparel for the journey. There was nothing to think of,
nothing further to talk of, nothing for her to do save to sit and look,
and deaden her throbs by counting them. She soon returned to her seat
beside her brother, with the marvel in her breast that the house she
desired so much to love should be cold and repel her now it was a vacant
shell. Her memories could not hang within it anywhere. She shut her eyes
to be with the images of the dead, conceiving the method as her brother's
happy secret, and imitated his posture, elbows propped on knees to
support the chin. His quietness breathed of a deeper love than her own.

Meanwhile the high wind had sunk; the moon, after pushing her withered
half to the zenith, was climbing the dusky edge, revealed fitfully;
threads and wisps of thin vapour travelled along a falling gale, and
branched from the dome of the sky in migratory broken lines, like wild
birds shifting the order of flight, north and east, where the dawn sat in
a web, but as yet had done no more than shoot up a glow along the central
heavens, in amid the waves of deepened aloud: a mirror for night to see
her dark self in her own hue. A shiver between the silent couple pricked
their wits, and she said:

'Chillon, shall we run out and call the morning?'

It was an old game of theirs, encouraged by their hearty father, to be
out in the early hour on a rise of ground near the house and 'call the
morning.' Her brother was glad of the challenge, and upon one of the
yawns following a sleepless night, replied with a return to boyishness:
'Yes, if you like. It's the last time we shall do her the service here.
Let's go.'

They sprang up together and the bench fell behind them. Swinging the
lantern he carried inconsiderately, the ring of it was left on his
finger, and the end of candle rolled out of the crazy frame to the floor
and was extinguished. Chillon had no match-box. He said to her:

'What do you think of the window?--we've done it before, Carin. Better
than groping down stairs and passages blocked with lumber.'

'I'm ready,' she said, and caught at her skirts by instinct to prove her
readiness on the spot.

A drop of a dozen feet or so from the French window to a flower--bed was
not very difficult. Her father had taught her how to jump, besides the
how of many other practical things. She leaped as lightly as her brother,
never touching earth with her hands; and rising from the proper
contraction of the legs in taking the descent, she quoted her father:
'Mean it when you're doing it.'

'For no enemy's shot is equal to a weak heart in the act,'

Chillon pursued the quotation, laying his hand on her shoulder for a sign
of approval. She looked up at him.

They passed down the garden and a sloping meadow to a brook swollen by
heavy rains; over the brook on a narrow plank, and up a steep and stony
pathway, almost a watercourse, between rocks, to another meadow, level
with the house, that led ascending through a firwood; and there the
change to thicker darkness told them light was abroad, though whether of
the clouded moon or of the first grey of the quiet revolution was
uncertain. Metallic light of a subterranean realm, it might have been
thought.

'You remember everything of father,' Carinthia said. 'We both do,' said
Chillon.

She pressed her brother's arm. 'We will. We will never forget anything.'

Beyond the firwood light was visibly the dawn's. Half-way down the
ravines it resembled the light cast off a torrent water. It lay on the
grass like a sheet of unreflecting steel, and was a face without a smile
above. Their childhood ran along the tracks to the forest by the light,
which was neither dim nor cold, but grave; presenting tree and shrub and
dwarf growth and grass austerely, not deepening or confusing them. They
wound their way by borders of crag, seeing in a dell below the mouth of
the idle mine begirt with weedy and shrub-hung rock, a dripping
semi-circle. Farther up they came on the flat juniper and crossed a wet
ground-thicket of whortleberry: their feet were in the moist moss among
sprigs of heath; and a great fir-tree stretched his length, a peeled
multitude of his dead fellows leaned and stood upright in the midst of
scattered fire-stained members, and through their skeleton limbs the
sheer precipice of slate-rock of the bulk across the chasm, nursery of
hawk and eagle; wore a thin blue tinge, the sign of warmer light abroad.

'This way, my brother!' cried Carinthia, shuddering at a path he was
about to follow.

Dawn in the mountain-land is a meeting of many friends. The pinnacle, the
forest-head, the latschen-tufted mound, rock-bastion and defiant cliff
and giant of the triple peak, were in view, clearly lined for a common
recognition, but all were figures of solid gloom, unfeatured and
bloomless. Another minute and they had flung off their mail, and changed
to various, indented, intricate, succinct in ridge, scar and channel; and
they had all a look of watchfulness that made them one company. The smell
of rock-waters and roots of herb and moss grew keen; air became a wine
that raised the breast high to breathe it; an uplifting coolness pervaded
the heights. What wonder that the mountain-bred girl should let fly her
voice. The natural carol woke an echo. She did not repeat it.

'And we will not forget our home, Chillon,' she said, touching him gently
to comfort some saddened feeling.

The plumes of cloud now slowly entered into the lofty arch of dawn and
melted from brown to purpleblack. The upper sky swam with violet; and in
a moment each stray cloud-feather was edged with rose, and then suffused.
It seemed that the heights fronted East to eye the interflooding of
colours, and it was imaginable that all turned to the giant whose
forehead first kindled to the sun: a greeting of god and king.

On the morning of a farewell we fluctuate sharply between the very
distant and the close and homely: and even in memory the fluctuation
occurs, the grander scene casting us back on the modestly nestling, and
that, when it has refreshed us, conjuring imagination to embrace the
splendour and wonder. But the wrench of an immediate division from what
we love makes the things within us reach the dearest, we put out our
hands for them, as violently-parted lovers do, though the soul in days to
come would know a craving, and imagination flap a leaden wing, if we had
not looked beyond them.

'Shall we go down?' said Carinthia, for she knew a little cascade near
the house, showering on rock and fern, and longed to have it round her.

They descended, Chillon saying that they would soon have the mists
rising, and must not delay to start on their journey.

The armies of the young sunrise in mountain-lands neighbouring the
plains, vast shadows, were marching over woods and meads, black against
the edge of golden; and great heights were cut with them, and bounding
waters took the leap in a silvery radiance to gloom; the bright and
dark-banded valleys were like night and morning taking hands down the
sweep of their rivers. Immense was the range of vision scudding the peaks
and over the illimitable Eastward plains flat to the very East and
sources of the sun.

Carinthia said: 'When I marry I shall come here to live and die.'

Her brother glanced at her. He was fond of her, and personally he liked
her face; but such a confident anticipation of marriage on the part of a
portionless girl set him thinking of the character of her charms and the
attraction they would present to the world of men. They were expressive
enough; at times he had thought them marvellous in their clear cut of the
animating mind.--No one could fancy her handsome; and just now her hair
was in some disorder, a night without sleep had an effect on her
complexion.

'It's not usually the wife who decides where to live,' said he.

Her ideas were anywhere but with the dream of a husband. 'Could we stay
on another day?--'

'My dear girl! Another night on that crazy stool! 'Besides, Mariandl is
bound to go to-day to her new place, and who's to cook for us? Do you
propose fasting as well as watching?'

'Could I cook?' she asked him humbly.

'No, you couldn't; not for a starving regiment! Your accomplishments are
of a different sort. No, it's better to get over the pain at once, if we
can't escape it.

'That I think too,' said she, 'and we should have to buy provisions.
Then, brother, instantly after breakfast. Only, let us walk it. I know
the whole way, and it is not more than a two days' walk for you and me.
Consent. Driving would be like going gladly. I could never bear to
remember that I was driven away.

And walking will save money; we are not rich, you tell me, brother.'

'A few florins more or less!' he rejoined, rather frowning. 'You have
good Styrian boots, I see. But I want to be over at the Baths there soon;
not later than to-morrow.'

'But, brother, if they know we are coming they will wait for us. And we
can be there to-morrow night or the next morning!'

He considered it. He wanted exercise and loved this mountain-land; his
inclinations melted into hers; though he had reasons for hesitating.
'Well, we'll send on my portmanteau and your boxes in the cart; we'll
walk it. You're a capital walker, you're a gallant comrade; I wouldn't
wish for a better.' He wondered, as he spoke, whether any true-hearted
gentleman besides himself would ever think the same of this lonely girl.

Her eyes looked a delighted 'No-really?' for the sweetest on earth to her
was to be prized by her brother.

She hastened forward. 'We will go down and have our last meal at home,'
she said in the dialect of the country. 'We have five eggs. No meat for
you, dear, but enough bread and butter, some honey left, and plenty of
coffee. I should like to have left old Mariandl more, but we are unable
to do very much for poor people now. Milk, I cannot say. She is just the
kind soul to be up and out to fetch us milk for an early first breakfast;
but she may have overslept herself.'

Chillon smiled. 'You were right, Janet', about not going to bed last
night; we might have missed the morning.'

'I hate sleep: I hate anything that robs me of my will,' she replied.

'You'd be glad of your doses of sleep if you had to work and study.'

'To fall down by the wayside tired out--yes, brother, a dead sleep is
good. Then you are in the hands of God. Father used to say, four hours
for a man, six for a woman.'

'And four and twenty for a lord,' added Chillon. 'I remember.'

'A lord of that Admiralty,' she appealed to his closer recollection. 'But
I mean, brother, dreaming is what I detest so.'

'Don't be detesting, my dear; reserve your strength,' said he. 'I suppose
dreams are of some use, now and then.'

'I shall never think them useful.'

'When we can't get what we want, my good Carin.'

'Then we should not waste ourselves in dreams.'

'They promise falsely sometimes. That's no reason why we should reject
the consolation when we can't get what we want, my little sister.'

'I would not be denied.'

'There's the impossible.'

'Not for you, brother.'

Perhaps a half-minute after she had spoken, he said, 'pursuing a dialogue
within himself aloud rather than revealing a secret: 'You don't know her
position.'

Carinthia's heart stopped beating. Who was this person suddenly conjured
up?

She fancied she might not have heard correctly; she feared to ask and yet
she perceived a novel softness in him that would have answered. Pain of
an unknown kind made her love of her brother conscious that if she asked
she would suffer greater pain.

The house was in sight, a long white building with blinds down at some of
the windows, and some wide open, some showing unclean glass: the three
aspects and signs of a house's emptiness when they are seen together.

Carinthia remarked on their having met nobody. It had a serious meaning
for them. Formerly they were proud of outstripping the busy population of
the mine, coming down on them with wild wavings and shouts of sunrise.
They felt the death again, a whole field laid low by one stroke, and
wintriness in the season of glad life. A wind had blown and all had
vanished.

The second green of the year shot lively sparkles off the meadows, from a
fringe of coloured glovelets to a warm silver lake of dews. The firwood
was already breathing rich and sweet in the sun. The half-moon fell
rayless and paler than the fan of fleeces pushed up Westward, high
overhead, themselves dispersing on the blue in downy feathers, like the
mottled grey of an eagle's breast: the smaller of them bluish like traces
of the beaked wood-pigeon.

She looked above, then below on the slim and straightgrown flocks of
naked purple crocuses in bud and blow abounding over the meadow that
rolled to the level of the house, and two of these she gathered.




CHAPTER V

A MOUNTAIN WALK IN MIST AND SUNSHINE

Chillon was right in his forecast of the mists. An over-moistened earth
steaming to the sun obscured it before the two had finished breakfast,
which was a finish to everything eatable in the ravaged dwelling, with
the exception of a sly store for the midday meal, that old Mariandl had
stuffed into Chillon's leather sack--the fruit of secret begging on their
behalf about the neighbourhood. He found the sack heavy and bulky as he
slung it over his shoulders; but she bade him make nothing of such a
trifle till he had it inside him. 'And you that love tea so, my pretty
one, so that you always laughed and sang after drinking a cup with your
mother,' she said to Carinthia, 'you will find one pinch of it in your
bag at the end of the left-foot slipper, to remember your home by when
you are out in the world.'

She crossed the strap of the bag on her mistress's bosom, and was
embraced by Carinthia and Chillon in turns, Carinthia telling her to dry
her eyes, for that she would certainly come back and perhaps occupy the
house one day or other. The old soul moaned of eyes that would not be
awake to behold her; she begged a visit at her grave, though it was to be
in a Catholic burial-place and the priests had used her dear master and
mistress ill, not allowing them to lie in consecrated ground; affection
made her a champion of religious tolerance and a little afraid of
retribution. Carinthia soothed her, kissed her, gave the promise, and the
parting was over.

She and Chillon had on the previous day accomplished a pilgrimage to the
resting-place of their father and mother among humble Protestants,
iron-smelters, in a valley out of the way of their present line of march
to the glacier of the great snow-mountain marking the junction of three
Alpine provinces of Austria. Josef, the cart-driver with the boxes, who
was to pass the valley, vowed of his own accord to hang a fresh day's
wreath on the rails. He would not hear of money for the purchase, and
they humoured him. The family had been beloved. There was an offer of a
home for Carinthia in the castle of Count Lebern, a friend of her
parents, much taken with her, and she would have accepted it had not
Chillon overruled her choice, determined that, as she was English, she
must come to England and live under the guardianship of her uncle, Lord
Levellier, of whose character he did not speak.

The girl's cheeks were drawn thin and her lips shut as they departed; she
was tearless. A phantom ring of mist accompanied her from her first
footing outside the house. She did not look back. The house came swimming
and plunging after her, like a spectral ship on big seas, and her father
and mother lived and died in her breast; and now they were strong,
consulting, chatting, laughing, caressing; now still and white, caught by
a vapour that dived away with them either to right or left, but always
with the same suddenness, leaving her to question herself whether she
existed, for more of life seemed to be with their mystery than with her
speculations. The phantom ring of mist enclosing for miles the invariable
low-sweeping dark spruce-fir kept her thoughts on them as close as the
shroud. She walked fast, but scarcely felt that she was moving. Near
midday the haunted circle widened; rocks were loosely folded in it, and
heads of trees, whose round intervolving roots grasped the yellow
roadside soil; the mists shook like a curtain, and partly opened and
displayed a tapestry-landscape, roughly worked, of woollen crag and
castle and suggested glen, threaded waters, very prominent foreground,
Autumn flowers on banks; a predominant atmospheric greyness. The sun
threw a shaft, liquid instead of burning, as we see his beams beneath a
wave; and then the mists narrowed again, boiled up the valleys and
streams above the mountain, curled and flew, and were Python coils
pierced by brighter arrows of the sun. A spot of blue signalled his
victory above.

To look at it was to fancy they had been walking under water and had now
risen to the surface. Carinthia's mind stepped out of the chamber of
death. The different air and scene breathed into her a timid warmth
toward the future, and between her naming of the lesser mountains on
their side of the pass, she asked questions relating to England, and
especially the ladies she was to see at the Baths beyond the
glacier-pass. She had heard of a party of his friends awaiting him there,
without much encouragement from him to ask particulars of them, and she
had hitherto abstained, as she was rather shy of meeting her
countrywomen. The ladies, Chillon said, were cousins; one was a young
widow, the Countess of Fleetwood, and the other was Miss Fakenham, a
younger lady.

Carinthia murmured in German: 'Poor soul!' Which one was she pitying? The
widow, she said, in the tone implying, naturally.

Her brother assured her the widow was used to it, for this was her second
widowhood.

'She marries again!' exclaimed the girl.

'You don't like that idea?' said he.

Carinthia betrayed a delicate shudder.

Her brother laughed to himself at her expressive present tense. 'And
marries again!' he said. 'There will certainly be a third.'

'Husband?' said she, as at the incredible.

'Husband, let's hope,' he answered.

She dropped from her contemplation of the lady, and her look at her
brother signified: It will not be you!

Chillon was engaged in spying for a place where he could spread out the
contents of his bag. Sharp hunger beset them both at the mention of
eating. A bank of sloping green shaded by a chestnut proposed the seat,
and here he relieved the bag of a bottle of wine, slices of, meat, bread,
hard eggs, and lettuce, a chipped cup to fling away after drinking the
wine, and a supply of small butler-cakes known to be favourites with
Carinthia. She reversed the order of the feast by commencing upon one of
the cakes, to do honour to Mariandl's thoughtfulness. As at their
breakfast, they shared the last morsel.

'But we would have made it enough for our dear old dog Pluto as well, if
he had lived,' said Carinthia, sighing with her thankfulness and
compassionate regrets, a mixture often inspiring a tender babbling
melancholy. 'Dogs' eyes have such a sick look of love. He might have
lived longer, though he was very old, only he could not survive the loss
of father. I know the finding of the body broke his heart. He sprang
forward, he stopped and threw up his head. It was human language to hear
him, Chillon. He lay in the yard, trying to lift his eyes when I came to
him, they were so heavy; and he had not strength to move his poor old
tail more than once. He died with his head on my lap. He seemed to beg
me, and I took him, and he breathed twice, and that was his end. Pluto!
old dog! Well, for you or for me, brother, we could not have a better
wish. As for me, death! . . . When we know we are to die! Only let my
darling live! that is my prayer, and that we two may not be separated
till I am taken to their grave. Father bought ground for four--his wife
and himself and his two children. It does not oblige us to be buried
there, but could we have any other desire?'

She stretched her hand to her brother. He kissed it spiritedly.

'Look ahead, my dear girl. Help me to finish this wine. There 's nothing
like good hard walking to give common wine of the country a flavour--and
out of broken crockery.'

'I think it so good,' Carinthia replied, after drinking from the cup. 'In
England they, do not grow wine. Are the people there kind?'

'They're civilized people, of course.'

'Kind--warm to you, Chillon?'

'Some of them, when you know them. "Warm," is hardly the word. Winter's
warm on skates. You must do a great deal for yourself. They don't boil
over. By the way, don't expect much of your uncle.'

'Will he not love me?'

'He gives you a lodging in his house, and food enough, we'll hope. You
won't see company or much of him.'

'I cannot exist without being loved. I do not care for company. He must
love me a little.'

'He is one of the warm-hearted race--he's mother's brother; but where his
heart is, I 've not discovered.

Bear with him just for the present, my dear, till I am able to support
you.'

'I will,' she said.

The dreary vision of a home with an unloving uncle was not brightened by
the alternative of her brother's having to support her. She spoke of
money. 'Have we none, Chillon?'

'We have no debts,' he answered. 'We have a claim on the Government here
for indemnification for property taken to build a fortress upon one of
the passes into Italy. Father bought the land, thinking there would be a
yield of ore thereabout; and they have seized it, rightly enough, but
they dispute our claim for the valuation we put on it. A small sum they
would consent to pay. It would be a very small sum, and I 'm father's
son, I will have justice.'

'Yes!' Carthinia joined with him to show the same stout nature.

'We have nothing else except a bit to toss up for luck.'

'And how can I help being a burden on my brother?' she inquired, in
distress.

'Marry, and be a blessing to a husband,' he said lightly.

They performed a sacrifice of the empty bottle and cracked cup on the
site of their meal, as if it had been a ceremony demanded from
travellers, and leaving them in fragments, proceeded on their journey
refreshed.

Walking was now high enjoyment, notwithstanding the force of the sun, for
they were a hardy couple, requiring no more than sufficient nourishment
to combat the elements with an exulting blood. Besides they loved
mountain air and scenery, and each step to the ridge of the pass they
climbed was an advance in splendour. Peaks of ashen hue and pale dry red
and pale sulphur pushed up, straight, forked, twisted, naked, striking
their minds with an indeterminate ghostliness of Indian, so strange they
were in shape and colouring. These sharp points were the first to greet
them between the blue and green. A depression of the pass to the left
gave sight of the points of black fir forest below, round the girths of
the barren shafts. Mountain blocks appeared pushing up in front, and a
mountain wall and woods on it, and mountains in the distance, and cliffs
riven with falls of water that were silver skeins, down lower to meadows,
villages and spires, and lower finally to the whole valley of the foaming
river, field and river seeming in imagination rolled out from the hand of
the heading mountain.

'But see this in winter, as I did with father, Chillon!' said Carinthia.

She said it upon love's instinct to halo the scene with something beyond
present vision, and to sanctify it for her brother, so that this walk of
theirs together should never be forgotten.

A smooth fold of cloud, moveless along one of the upper pastures, and
still dense enough to be luminous in sunlight, was the last of the mist.

They watched it lying in the form of a fish, leviathan diminished, as
they descended their path; and the head was lost, the tail spread
peacockwise, and evaporated slowly in that likeness; and soft to a breath
of air as gossamer down, the body became a ball, a cock, a little lizard,
nothingness.

The bluest bright day of the year was shining. Chillon led the descent.
With his trim and handsome figure before her, Carinthia remembered the
current saying, that he should have been the girl and she the boy. That
was because he resembled their mother in face. But the build of his limbs
and shoulders was not feminine.

To her admiring eyes, he had a look superior to simple strength and
grace; the look of a great sky-bird about to mount, a fountain-like
energy of stature, delightful to her contemplation. And he had the mouth
women put faith in for decision and fixedness. She did, most fully; and
reflecting how entirely she did so, the thought assailed her: some one
must be loving him!

She allowed it to surprise her, not choosing to revert to an uneasy
sensation of the morning.

That some one, her process of reasoning informed her, was necessarily an
English young lady. She reserved her questions till they should cease
this hopping and heeling down the zigzag of the slippery path-track. When
children they had been collectors of beetles and butterflies, and the
flying by of a 'royal-mantle,' the purple butterfly grandly fringed,
could still remind Carinthia of the event it was of old to spy and chase
one. Chillon himself was not above the sentiment of their "very early
days"; he stopped to ask if she had been that lustrous blue-wing, a rarer
species, prized by youngsters, shoot through the chestnut trees: and they
both paused for a moment, gazing into the fairyland of infancy, she
seeing with her brother's eyes, this prince of the realm having escaped
her. He owned he might have been mistaken, as the brilliant fellow flew
swift and high between leaves, like an ordinary fritillary. Not the less
did they get their glimpse of the wonders in the sunny eternity of a
child's afternoon.

'An Auerhahn, Chillon!' she said, picturing the maturer day when she had
scaled perilous heights with him at night to stalk the blackcock in the
prime of the morning. She wished they could have had another such
adventure to stamp the old home on his heart freshly, to the exclusion of
beautiful English faces.

On the level of the valley, where they met the torrent-river, walking
side by side with him, she ventured an inquiry: 'English girls are fair
girls, are they not?'

'There are some dark also,' he replied.

'But the best-looking are fair?'

'Perhaps they are, with us.'

'Mother was fair.'

'She was.'

'I have only seen a few of them, once at Vies and at Venice, and those
Baths we are going to; and at Meran, I think.'

'You considered them charming?'

'Not all.'

It was touching that she should be such a stranger to her countrywomen!
He drew a portrait-case from his breast-pocket, pressing the spring, and
handed it to her, saying: 'There is one.' He spoke indifferently, but as
soon as she had seen the face inside it, with a look at him and a deep
breath; she understood that he was an altered brother, and that they were
three instead of two.

She handed it back to him, saying hushedly and only 'Yes.'

He did not ask an opinion upon the beauty she had seen. His pace
increased, and she hastened her steps beside him. She had not much to
learn when some minutes later she said; 'Shall I see her, Chillon?'

'She is one of the ladies we are to meet.'

'What a pity!' Carinthia stepped faster, enlightened as to his wish to
get to the Baths without delay; and her heart softened in reflecting how
readily he had yielded to her silly preference for going on foot.

Her cry of regret was equivocal; it produced no impression on him. They
reached a village where her leader deemed it adviseable to drive for the
remainder of the distance up the valley to the barrier snow-mountain. She
assented instantly, she had no longer any active wishes of her own, save
to make amends to her brother, who was and would ever be her brother: she
could not be robbed of their relationship.

Something undefined in her feeling of possession she had been robbed of,
she knew it by her spiritlessness; and she would fain have attributed it
to the idle motion of the car, now and them stupidly jolting her on,
after the valiant exercise of her limbs. They were in a land of
waterfalls and busy mills, a narrowing vale where the runs of grass grew
short and wild, and the glacier-river roared for the leap, more foam than
water, and the savagery, naturally exciting to her, breathed of its lair
among the rocks and ice-fields.

Her brother said: 'There he is.' She saw the whitecrowned king of the
region, of whose near presence to her old home she had been accustomed to
think proudly, end she looked at him without springing to him, and
continued imaging her English home and her loveless uncle, merely
admiring the scene, as if the fire of her soul had been
extinguished.--'Marry, and be a blessing to a husband.' Chillon's words
whispered of the means of escape from the den of her uncle.

But who would marry me! she thought. An unreproved sensation of melting
pervaded her; she knew her capacity for gratitude, and conjuring it up in
her 'heart, there came with it the noble knightly gentleman who would
really stoop to take a plain girl by the hand, release her, and say: 'Be
mine!' His vizor was down, of course. She had no power of imagining the
lineaments of that prodigy. Or was he a dream? He came and went. Her
mother, not unkindly, sadly, had counted her poor girl's chances of
winning attention and a husband. Her father had doated on her face; but,
as she argued, her father had been attracted by her mother, a beautiful
woman, and this was a circumstance that reflected the greater
hopelessness on her prospects. She bore a likeness to her father, little
to her mother, though he fancied the reverse and gave her the mother's
lips and hair. Thinking of herself, however, was destructive to the form
of her mirror of knightliness: he wavered, he fled for good, as the rosy
vapour born of our sensibility must do when we relapse to coldness, and
the more completely when we try to command it. No, she thought, a plain
girl should think of work, to earn her independence.

'Women are not permitted to follow armies, Chillon?' she said.

He laughed out. 'What 's in your head?'

The laugh abashed her; she murmured of women being good nurses for
wounded soldiers, if they were good walkers to march with the army; and,
as evidently it sounded witless to him, she added, to seem reasonable:
'You have not told me the Christian names of those ladies.'

He made queer eyes over the puzzle to connect the foregoing and the
succeeding in her remarks, but answered straightforwardly: 'Livia is one,
and Henrietta!

Her ear seized on the stress of his voice. 'Henrietta!' She chose that
name for the name of the person disturbing her; it fused best, she
thought, with the new element she had been compelled to take into her
system, to absorb it if she could.

'You're not scheming to have them serve as army hospital nurses, my
dear?'

'No, Chillon.'

'You can't explain it, I suppose?'

'A sister could go too, when you go to war, Chillon.'

A sister could go, if it were permitted by the authorities, and be near
her brother to nurse him in case of wounds; others would be unable to
claim the privilege. That was her meaning, involved with the hazy project
of earning an independence; but she could not explain it, and Chillon set
her down for one of the inexplicable sex, which the simple adventurous
girl had not previously seemed to be.

She was inwardly warned of having talked foolishly, and she held her
tongue. Her humble and modest jealousy, scarce deserving the title,
passed with a sigh or two. It was her first taste of life in the world.

A fit of heavy-mindedness ensued, that heightened the contrast her recent
mood had bequeathed, between herself, ignorant as she was, and those
ladies. Their names, Livia and Henrietta, soared above her and sang the
music of the splendid spheres. Henrietta was closer to earth, for her
features had been revealed; she was therefore the dearer, and the richer
for him who loved her, being one of us, though an over-earthly one; and
Carinthia gave her to Chillon, reserving for herself a handmaiden's place
within the circle of their happiness.

This done, she sat straight in the car. It was toiling up the steep
ascent of a glen to the mountain village, the last of her native
province. Her proposal to walk was accepted, and the speeding of her
blood, now that she had mastered a new element in it, soon restored her
to her sisterly affinity with natural glories. The sunset was on yonder
side of the snows. Here there was a feast of variously-tinted sunset
shadows on snow, meadows, rock, river, serrated cliff. The peaked cap of
the rushing rock-dotted sweeps of upward snow caught a scarlet
illumination: one flank of the white in heaven was violetted wonderfully.

At nightfall, under a clear black sky, alive with wakeful fires round
head and breast of the great Alp, Chillon and Carinthia strolled out of
the village, and he told her some of his hopes. They referred to
inventions of destructive weapons, which were primarily to place his
country out of all danger from a world in arms; and also, it might be
mentioned, to bring him fortune. 'For I must have money!' he said,
sighing it out like a deliberate oath. He and his uncle were associated
in the inventions. They had an improved rocket that would force military
chiefs to change their tactics: they had a new powder, a rifle, a model
musket--the latter based on his own plans; and a scheme for fortress
artillery likely to turn the preponderance in favour of the defensive
once again. 'And that will be really doing good,' said Chillon, 'for
where it's with the offensive, there's everlasting bullying and
plundering.'

Carinthia warmly agreed with him, but begged him be sure his uncle
divided the profits equally. She discerned what his need of money
signified.

Tenderness urged her to say: 'Henrietta! Chillon.'

'Well?' he answered quickly.

'Will she wait?'

'Can she, you should ask.'

'Is she brave?'

'Who can tell, till she has been tried?'

'Is she quite free?'

'She has not yet been captured.'

'Brother, is there no one else . . . ?'

'There's a nobleman anxious to bestow his titles on her.'

'He is rich?'

'The first or second wealthiest in Great Britain, they say.'

'Is he young?'

'About the same age as mine.'

'Is he a handsome young man?'

'Handsomer than your brother, my girl.'

'No, no, no!' said she. 'And what if he is, and your Henrietta does not
choose him? Now let me think what I long to think. I have her close to
me.'

She rocked a roseate image on her heart and went to bed with it by
starlight.

By starlight they sprang to their feet and departed the next morning, in
the steps of a guide carrying, Chillon said, 'a better lantern than we
left behind us at the smithy.'

'Father!' exclaimed Carinthia on her swift inward breath, for this one of
the names he had used to give to her old home revived him to her thoughts
and senses fervently.




CHAPTER VI

THE NATURAL PHILOSOPHER

Three parts down a swift decline of shattered slate, where travelling
stones loosened from rows of scree hurl away at a bound after one roll
over, there sat a youth dusty and torn, nursing a bruised leg, not in the
easiest of postures, on a sharp tooth of rock, that might at any moment
have broken from the slanting slab at the end of which it formed a stump,
and added him a second time to the general crumble of the mountain. He
had done a portion of the descent in excellent imitation of the detached
fragments, and had parted company with his alpenstock and plaid;
preserving his hat and his knapsack. He was alone, disabled, and
cheerful; in doubt of the arrival of succour before he could trust his
left leg to do him further service unaided; but it was morning still, the
sun was hot, the air was cool; just the tempering opposition to render
existence pleasant as a piece of vegetation, especially when there has
been a question of your ceasing to exist; and the view was of a
sustaining sublimity of desolateness: crag and snow overhead; a gloomy
vale below; no life either of bird or herd; a voiceless region where
there had once been roars at the bowling of a hill from a mountain to the
deep, and the third flank of the mountain spoke of it in the silence.

He would have enjoyed the scene unremittingly, like the philosopher he
pretended to be, in a disdain of civilization and the ambitions of men,
had not a contest with earth been forced on him from time to time to keep
the heel of his right foot, dug in shallow shale, fixed and supporting.
As long as it held he was happy and maintained the attitude of a
guitar-player, thrumming the calf of the useless leg to accompany tuneful
thoughts, but the inevitable lapse and slide of the foot recurred, and
the philosopher was exhibited as an infant learning to crawl. The seat,
moreover, not having been fashioned for him or for any soft purpose,
resisted his pressure and became a thing of violence, that required to be
humiliatingly coaxed. His last resource to propitiate it was counselled
by nature turned mathematician: tenacious extension solved the problem;
he lay back at his length, and with his hat over his eyes consented to
see nothing for the sake of comfort. Thus he was perfectly rational,
though when others beheld him he appeared the insanest of mortals.

A girl's voice gave out the mountain carol ringingly above. His heart and
all his fancies were in motion at the sound. He leaned on an elbow to
listen; the slide threatened him, and he resumed his full stretch,
determined to take her for a dream. He was of the class of youths who, in
apprehension that their bright season may not be permanent, choose to
fortify it by a systematic contempt of material realities unless they
come in the fairest of shapes, and as he was quite sincere in this
feeling and election of the right way to live, disappointment and
sullenness overcame him on hearing men's shouts and steps; despite his
helpless condition he refused to stir, for they had jarred on his dream.
Perhaps his temper, unknown to himself, had been a little injured by his
mishap, and he would not have been sorry to charge them with want of
common humanity in passing him; or he did not think his plight so bad,
else he would have bawled after them had they gone by: far the youths of
his description are fools only upon system,--however earnestly they
indulge the present self-punishing sentiment. The party did not pass;
they stopped short, they consulted, and a feminine tongue more urgent
than the others, and very musical, sweet to hear anywhere, put him in
tune. She said, 'Brother! brother!' in German. Our philosopher flung off
his hat.

'You see!' said the lady's brother.

'Ask him, Anton,'she said to their guide.

'And quick!' her brother added.

The guide scrambled along to him, and at a closer glance shouted: 'The
Englishman!' wheeling his finger to indicate what had happened to the
Tomnoddy islander.

His master called to know if there were broken bones, as if he could stop
for nothing else.

The cripple was raised. The gentleman and lady made their way to him, and
he tried his hardest to keep from tottering on the slope in her presence.
No injury had been done to the leg; there was only a stiffness, and an
idiotic doubling of the knee, as though at each step his leg pronounced a
dogged negative to the act of walking. He said something equivalent to
'this donkey leg,' to divert her charitable eyes from a countenance
dancing with ugly twitches. She was the Samaritan. A sufferer discerns
his friend, though it be not the one who physically assists him: he is
inclined by nature to put material aid at a lower mark than gentleness,
and her brief words of encouragement, the tone of their delivery yet
more, were medical to his blood, better help than her brother's iron arm,
he really believed. Her brother and the guide held him on each side, and
she led to pick out the safer footing for him; she looked round and
pointed to some projection that would form a step; she drew attention to
views here and there, to win excuses for his resting; she did not omit to
soften her brother's visible impatience as well, and this was the art
which affected her keenly sensible debtor most.

'I suppose I ought to have taken a guide,' he said.

'There's not a doubt of that,' said Chillon Kirby.

Carinthia halted, leaning on her staff: 'But I had the same wish. They
told us at the inn of an Englishman who left last night to sleep on the
mountain, and would go alone; and did I not say, brother, that must be
true love of the mountains?'

'These freaks get us a bad name on the Continent,' her brother replied.
He had no sympathy with nonsense, and naturally not with a youth who
smelt of being a dreamy romancer and had caused the name of Englishman to
be shouted in his ear in derision. And the fellow might delay his arrival
at the Baths and sight of the lady of his love for hours!

They managed to get him hobbling and slipping to the first green tuft of
the base, where long black tongues of slate-rubble pouring into the
grass, like shore-waves that have spent their burden, seem about to draw
back to bring the mountain down. Thence to the level pasture was but a
few skips performed sliding.

'Well, now,' said Chillon, 'you can stand?'

'Pretty well, I think.' He tried his foot on the ground, and then
stretched his length, saying that it only wanted rest. Anton pressed a
hand at his ankle and made him wince, but the bones were sound, leg and
hip not worse than badly bruised. He was advised by Anton to plant his
foot in the first running water he came to, and he was considerate enough
to say to Chillon:

'Now you can leave me; and let me thank you. Half an hour will set me
right. My name is Woodseer, if ever we meet again.'

Chillon nodded a hurried good-bye, without a thought of giving his name
in return. But Carinthia had thrown herself on the grass. Her brother
asked her in dismay if she was tired. She murmured to him: 'I should like
to hear more English.'

'My dear girl, you'll have enough of it in two or three weeks.'

'Should we leave a good deed half done, Chillon?'

'He shall have our guide.'

'He may not be rich.'

'I'll pay Anton to stick to him.'

'Brother, he has an objection to guides.'

Chillon cast hungry eyes on his watch: 'Five minutes, then.' He addressed
Mr. Woodseer, who was reposing, indifferent to time, hard-by: 'Your
objection to guides might have taught you a sharp lesson. It 's like
declining to have a master in studying a science--trusting to instinct
for your knowledge of a bargain. One might as well refuse an oar to row
in a boat.'

'I 'd rather risk it,' the young man replied. 'These guides kick the soul
out of scenery. I came for that and not for them.'

'You might easily have been a disagreeable part of the scene.'

'Why not here as well as elsewhere?'

'You don't care for your life?'

'I try not to care for it a fraction more than Destiny does.'

'Fatalism. I suppose you care for something?'

'Besides I've a slack purse, and shun guides and inns when I can. I care
for open air, colour, flowers, weeds, birds, insects, mountains. There's
a world behind the mask. I call this life; and the town's a boiling pot,
intolerably stuffy. My one ambition is to be out of it. I thank heaven I
have not another on earth. Yes, I care for my note-book, because it's of
no use to a human being except me. I slept beside a spring last night,
and I never shall like a bedroom so well. I think I have discovered the
great secret: I may be wrong, of course.' And if so, he had his
philosophy, the admission was meant to say.

Carinthia expected the revelation of a notable secret, but none came; or
if it did it eluded her grasp:--he was praising contemplation, he was
praising tobacco. He talked of the charm of poverty upon a settled income
of a very small sum of money, the fruit of a compact he would execute
with the town to agree to his perpetual exclusion from it, and to retain
his identity, and not be the composite which every townsman was. He
talked of Buddha. He said: 'Here the brook's the brook, the mountain's
the mountain: they are as they always were.'

'You'd have men be the same,' Chillon remarked as to a nursling prattler,
and he rejoined: 'They've lost more than they've gained; though, he
admitted, 'there has been some gain, in a certain way.'

Fortunately for them, young men have not the habit of reflecting upon the
indigestion of ideas they receive from members of their community,
sometimes upon exchange. They compare a view of life with their own view,
to condemn it summarily; and he was a curious object to Chillon as the
perfect opposite of himself.

'I would advise you,' Chillon said, 'to get a pair of Styrian boots, if
you intend to stay in the Alps. Those boots of yours are London make.'

'They 're my father's make,' said Mr. Woodseer.

Chillon drew out his watch. 'Come, Carinthia, we must be off.' He
proposed his guide, and, as Anton was rejected, he pointed the route over
the head of the valley, stated the distance to an inn that way, saluted
and strode.

Mr. Woodseer, partly rising, presumed, in raising his hat and thanking
Carinthia, to touch her fingers. She smiled on him, frankly extending her
open hand, and pointing the route again, counselling him to rest at the
inn, even saying: 'You have not yet your strength to come on with us?'

He thought he would stay some time longer: he had a disposition to smoke.

She tripped away to her brother and was watched through the whiffs of a
pipe far up the valley, guiltless of any consciousness of producing an
impression. But her mind was with the stranger sufficiently to cause her
to say to Chillon, at the close of a dispute between him and Anton on the
interesting subject of the growth of the horns of chamois: 'Have we been
quite kind to that gentleman?'

Chillon looked over his shoulder. 'He's there still; he's fond of
solitude. And, Carin, my dear, don't give your hand when you are meeting
or parting with people it's not done.'

His uninstructed sister said: 'Did you not like him?'

She was answered with an 'Oh,' the tone of which balanced lightly on the
neutral line. 'Some of the ideas he has are Lord Fleetwood's, I hear, and
one can understand them in a man of enormous wealth, who doesn't know
what to do with himself and is dead-sick of flattery; though it seems odd
for an English nobleman to be raving about Nature. Perhaps it's because
none else of them does.'

'Lord Fleetwood loves our mountains, Chillon?'

'But a fellow who probably has to make his way in the world!--and he
despises ambition!' . . . Chillon dropped him. He was antipathetic to
eccentrics, and his soldierly and social training opposed the profession
of heterodox ideas: to have listened seriously to them coming from the
mouth of an unambitious bootmaker's son involved him in the absurdity. He
considered that there was no harm in the lad, rather a commendable sort
of courage and some notion of manners; allowing for his ignorance of the
convenable in putting out his hand to take a young lady's, with the plea
of thanking her. He hoped she would be more on her guard.

Carinthia was sure she had the name of the nobleman wishing to bestow his
title upon the beautiful Henrietta. Lord Fleetwood! That slender thread
given her of the character of her brother's rival who loved the mountains
was woven in her mind with her passing experience of the youth they had
left behind them, until the two became one, a highly transfigured one,
and the mountain scenery made him very threatening to her brother. A
silky haired youth, brown-eyed, unconquerable in adversity, immensely
rich, fond of solitude, curled, decorated, bejewelled by all the elves
and gnomes of inmost solitude, must have marvellous attractions, she
feared. She thought of him so much, that her humble spirit conceived the
stricken soul of the woman as of necessity the pursuer; as shamelessly,
though timidly, as she herself pursued in imagination the enchanted
secret of the mountain-land. She hoped her brother would not supplicate,
for it struck her that the lover who besieged the lady would forfeit her
roaming and hunting fancy.

'I wonder what that gentleman is doing now,' she said to Chillon.

He grimaced slightly, for her sake; he would have liked to inform her,
for the sake of educating her in the customs of the world she was going
to enter, that the word 'gentleman' conveys in English a special
signification.

Her expression of wonder whether they were to meet him again gave Chillon
the opportunity of saying:

'It 's the unlikeliest thing possible--at all events in England.'

'But I think we shall,' said she.

'My dear, you meet people of your own class; you don't meet others.'

'But we may meet anybody, Chillon!'

'In the street. I suppose you would not stop to speak to him in the
street.'

'It would be strange to see him in the street!' Carinthia said.

'Strange or not!'

. . . . Chillon thought he had said sufficient. She was under his
protectorship, otherwise he would not have alluded to the observance of
class distinctions. He felt them personally in this case because of their
seeming to stretch grotesquely by the pretentious heterodoxy of the young
fellow, whom, nevertheless, thinking him over now that he was mentioned,
he approved for his manliness in bluntly telling his origin and status.

A chalet supplied them with fresh milk, and the inn of a village on a
perch with the midday meal. Their appetites were princely and swept over
the little inn like a conflagration. Only after clearing it did they
remember the rearward pedestrian, whose probable wants Chillon was urged
by Carthinia to speak of to their host. They pushed on, clambering up,
scurrying down, tramping gaily, till by degrees the chambers of
Carinthia's imagination closed their doors and would no longer
intercommunicate. Her head refused to interest her, and left all activity
to her legs and her eyes, and the latter became unobservant, except of
foot-tracks, animal-like. She felt that she was a fine machine, and
nothing else: and she was rapidly approaching those ladies!

'You will tell them how I walked with you,' she said.

'Your friends over yonder?' said he.

'So that they may not think me so ignorant, brother.' She stumbled on the
helpless word in a hasty effort to cloak her vanity.

He laughed. Her desire to meet the critical English ladies with a
towering reputation in one department of human enterprise was
comprehensible, considering the natural apprehensiveness of the half-wild
girl before such a meeting. As it often happens with the silly phrases of
simple people, the wrong word, foolish although it was, went to the heart
of the hearer and threw a more charitable light than ridicule on her. So
that they may know I can do something they cannot do, was the
interpretation. It showed her deep knowledge of her poorness in laying
bare the fact.

Anxious to cheer her, he said: 'Come, come, you can dance. You dance
well, mother has told me, and she was a judge. You ride, you swim, you
have a voice for country songs, at all events. And you're a bit of a
botanist too. You're good at English and German; you had a French
governess for a couple of years. By the way, you understand the use of a
walking-stick in self-defence: you could handle a sword on occasion.'

'Father trained me,' said Carthinia. 'I can fire a pistol, aiming.'

'With a good aim, too. Father told me you could. How fond he was of his
girl! Well, bear in mind that father was proud of you, and hold up your
head wherever you are.'

'I will,' she said.

He assured her he had a mind to have a bugle blown at the entrance of the
Baths for a challenge to the bathers to match her in warlike
accomplishments.

She bit her lips: she could not bear much rallying on the subject just
then:

'Which is the hard one to please?' she asked.

'The one you will find the kinder of the two.'

'Henrietta?'

He nodded.

'Has she a father?'

'A gallant old admiral: Admiral Baldwin Fakenham.'

'I am glad of that!' Carinthia sighed out heartily. 'And he is with her?
And likes you, Chillon?'

'On the whole, I think he does.'

'A brave officer!' Such a father would be sure to like him.

So the domestic prospect was hopeful.

At sunset they stood on the hills overlooking the basin of the Baths, all
enfolded in swathes of pink and crimson up to the shining grey of a high
heaven that had the fresh brightness of the morning.

'We are not tired in the slightest,' said Carinthia, trifling with the
vision of a cushioned rest below. 'I could go on through the night quite
comfortably.'

'Wait till you wake up in your little bed to-morrow,' Chillon replied
stoutly, to drive a chill from his lover's heart, that had seized it at
the bare suggestion of their going on.




CHAPTER VII

THE LADY'S LETTER

Is not the lover a prophet? He that fervently desires may well be one;
his hurried nature is alive with warmth to break the possible blow: and
if his fears were not needed they were shadows; and if fulfilled, was he
not convinced of his misfortune by a dark anticipation that rarely erred?
Descending the hills, he remembered several omens: the sun had sunk when
he looked down on the villas and clustered houses, not an edge of the orb
had been seen; the admiral's quarters in the broad-faced hotel had worn
an appearance resembling the empty house of yesterday; the encounter with
the fellow on the rocks had a bad whisper of impish tripping. And what
moved Carinthia to speak of going on?

A letter was handed to Chillon in the hall of the admiral's hotel, where
his baggage had already been delivered. The manager was deploring the
circumstance that his rooms were full to the roof, when Chillon said:

'Well, we must wash and eat'; and Carinthia, from watching her brother's
forehead during his perusal of the letter, declared her readiness for
anything. He gave her the letter to read by herself while preparing to
sit at table, unwilling to ask her for a further tax on her energies--but
it was she who had spoken of going on! He thought of it as of a debt she
had contracted and might be supposed to think payable to their
misfortune.

She read off the first two sentences.

'We can have a carriage here, Chillon; order a carriage; I shall get as
much sleep in a carriage as in a bed: I shall enjoy driving at night,'
she said immediately, and strongly urged it and forced him to yield, the
manager observing that a carriage could be had.

In the privacy of her room, admiring the clear flowing hand, she read the
words, delicious in their strangeness to her, notwithstanding the heavy
news, as though they were sung out of a night-sky:

       'Most picturesque of Castles!

        May none these marks efface,
        For they appeal from Tyranny . . .'

'We start at noon to-day. Sailing orders have been issued, and I could
only have resisted them in my own person by casting myself overboard. I
go like the boat behind the vessel. You were expected yesterday, at
latest this morning. I have seen boxes in the hall, with a name on them
not foreign to me. Why does the master tarry? Sir, of your valliance you
should have held to your good vow,--quoth the damozel, for now you see me
sore perplexed and that you did not your devoir is my affliction. Where
lingers chivalry, she should have proceeded, if not with my knight? I
feast on your regrets. I would not have you less than miserable: and I
fear the reason is, that I am not so very, very sure you will be so at
all or very hugely, as I would command it of you for just time enough to
see that change over your eyebrows I know so well.

'If you had seen a certain Henrietta yesterday you would have the picture
of how you ought to look. The admiral was heard welcoming a new
arrival--you can hear him. She ran down the stairs quicker than any
cascade of this district, she would have made a bet with Livia that it
could be no one else--her hand was out, before she was aware of the
difference it was locked in Lord F.'s!

'Let the guilty absent suffer for causing such a betrayal of
disappointment. I must be avenged! But if indeed you are unhappy and
would like to chide the innocent, I am full of compassion for the poor
gentleman inheriting my legitimate feelings of wrath, and beg merely that
he will not pour them out on me with pen and paper, but from his lips and
eyes.

'Time pressing, I chatter no more. The destination is Livia's beloved
Baden. We rest a night in the city of Mozart, a night at Munich, a night
at Stuttgart. Baden will detain my cousin full a week. She has Captain
Abrane and Sir Meeson Corby in attendance--her long shadow and her short:
both devoted to Lord F., to win her smile, and how he drives them! The
captain has been paraded on the promenade, to the stupefaction of the
foreigner. Princes, counts, generals, diplomats passed under him in awe.
I am told that he is called St. Christopher.

'Why do we go thus hastily?--my friend, this letter has to be concealed.
I know some one who sees in the dark.

'Think no harm of Livia. She is bent upon my worldly advantage, and that
is plain even to the person rejecting it. How much more so must it be to
papa, though he likes you, and when you are near him would perhaps, in a
fit of unworldliness, be almost as reckless as the creature he calls
madcap and would rather call countess. No! sooner with a
Will-o'-the-wisp, my friend. Who could ever know where the man was when
he himself never knows where he is. He is the wind that bloweth as it
listeth--because it is without an aim or always with a new one. And am I
the one to direct him? I need direction. My lord and sovereign must fix
my mind. I am volatile, earthly, not to be trusted if I do not worship.
He himself said to me that--he reads our characters. "Nothing but a
proved hero will satisfy Henrietta," his words! And the hero must be
shining like a beacon-fire kept in a blaze. Quite true; I own it. Is
Chillon Kirby satisfied? He ought to be.

'But oh!--to be yoked is an insufferable thought, unless we name all the
conditions. But to be yoked to a creature of impulses! Really I could
only describe his erratic nature by commending you to the study of a
dragon-fly. It would map you an idea of what he has been in the
twenty-four hours since we had him here. They tell me a vain sort of
person is the cause. Can she be the cause of his resolving to have a
residence here, to buy up half the valley--erecting a royal palace--and
marking out the site--raving about it in the wildest language, poetical
if it had been a little reasonable--and then, after a night, suddenly,
unaccountably, hating the place, and being under the necessity of flying
from it in hot haste, tearing us all away, as if we were attached to a
kite that will neither mount nor fall, but rushes about headlong. Has he
heard, or suspected? or seen certain boxes bearing a name? Livia has no
suspicion, though she thinks me wonderfully contented in so dull a place,
where it has rained nine days in a fortnight. I ask myself whether my
manner of greeting him betrayed my expectation of another. He has brains.
It is the greatest of errors to suppose him at all like the common run of
rich young noblemen. He seems to thirst for brilliant wits and original
sayings. His ambition is to lead all England in everything! I readily
acknowledge that he has generous ideas too; but try to hold him, deny him
his liberty, and it would be seen how desperate and relentless he would
be to get loose. Of this I am convinced: he would be either the most
abject of lovers, or a woman (if it turned out not to be love) would find
him the most unscrupulous of yoke-fellows. Yoke-fellow! She would not
have her reason in consenting. A lamb and a furious bull! Papa and I have
had a serious talk. He shuts his ears to my comparisons, but admits, that
as I am the principal person concerned, etc. Rich and a nobleman is too
tempting for an anxious father; and Livia's influence is paramount. She
has not said a syllable in depreciation of you. That is to her credit.
She also admits that I must yield freely if at all, and she grants me the
use of similes; but her tactics are to contest them one by one, and the
admirable pretender is not as shifty as the mariner's breeze, he is not
like the wandering spark in burnt paper, of which you cannot say whether
it is chasing or chased: it is I who am the shifty Pole to the steadiest
of magnets. She is a princess in other things besides her superiority to
Physics. There will be wild scenes at Baden.

'My Diary of to-day is all bestowed on you. What have I to write in it
except the pair of commas under the last line of yesterday--"He has not
come!" Oh! to be caring for a he.

'O that I were with your sister now, on one side of her idol, to correct
her extravagant idolatry! I long for her. I had a number of nice little
phrases to pet her with.

'You have said (I have it written) that men who are liked by men are the
best friends for women. In which case, the earl should be worthy of our
friendship; he is liked. Captain Abrane and Sir Meeson, in spite of the
hard service he imposes on them with such comical haughtiness, incline to
speak well of him, and Methuen Rivers--here for two days on his way to
his embassy at Vienna--assured us he is the rarest of gentlemen on the
point of honour of his word. They have stories of him, to confirm Livia's
eulogies, showing him punctilious to chivalry: No man alive is like him
in that, they say. He grieves me. All that you have to fear is my pity
for one so sensitive. So speed, sir! It is not good for us to be much
alone, and I am alone when you are absent.

'I hear military music!

'How grand that music makes the dullest world appear in a minute. There
is a magic in it to bring you to me from the most dreadful of
distances.--Chillon! it would kill me!--Writing here and you perhaps
behind the hill, I can hardly bear it;--I am torn away, my hand will not
any more. This music burst out to mock me! Adieu.

          'I am yours.

                    'Your HENRIETTA.

'A kiss to the sister. It is owing to her.'

Carinthia kissed the letter on that last line. It seemed to her to end in
a celestial shower.

She was oppressed by wonder of the writer who could run like the rill of
the mountains in written speech; and her recollection of the contents
perpetually hurried to the close, which was more in her way of writing,
for there the brief sentences had a throb beneath them.

She did not speak of the letter to her brother when she returned it. A
night in the carriage, against his shoulder, was her happy prospect, in
the thought that she would be with her dearest all night, touching him
asleep, and in the sweet sense of being near to the beloved of the
fairest angel of her sex. They pursued their journey soon after Anton was
dismissed with warm shakes of the hand and appointments for a possible
year in the future.

The blast of the postillion's horn on the dark highway moved Chillon to
say: 'This is what they call posting, my dear.'

She replied: 'Tell me, brother: I do not understand, "Let none these
marks efface," at the commencement, after most "picturesque of
Castles":--that is you.'

'They are quoted from the verses of a lord who was a poet, addressed to
the castle on Lake Leman. She will read them to you.'

'Will she?'

The mention of the lord set Carinthia thinking of the lord whom that
beautiful SHE pitied because she was forced to wound him and he was very
sensitive. Wrapped in Henrietta, she slept through the joltings of the
carriage, the grinding of the wheels, the blowing of the horn, the
flashes of the late moonlight and the kindling of dawn.




CHAPTER VIII

OF THE ENCOUNTER OF TWO STRANGE YOUNG MEN AND THEIR CONSORTING: IN WHICH
THE MALE READER IS REQUESTED TO BEAR IN MIND WHAT WILD CREATURE HE WAS IN
HIS YOUTH, WHILE THE FEMALE SHOULD MARVEL CREDULOUSLY.

The young man who fancied he had robed himself in the plain homespun of a
natural philosopher at the age of twenty-three journeyed limping
leisurely in the mountain maid Carinthia's footsteps, thankful to the
Fates for having seen her; and reproving the remainder of superstition
within him, which would lay him open to smarts of evil fortune if he,
encouraged a senseless gratitude for good; seeing that we are simply to
take what happens to us. The little inn of the village on the perch
furnished him a night's lodging and a laugh of satisfaction to hear of a
young lady and gentleman, and their guide, who had devoured everything
eatable half a day in advance of him, all save the bread and butter, and
a few scraps of meat, apologetically spread for his repast by the maid of
the inn: not enough for, a bantam cock, she said, promising eggs for
breakfast. He vowed with an honest heart, that it was more than enough,
and he was nourished by sympathy with the appetites of his precursors and
the maid's description of their deeds. That name, Carinthia, went a good
way to fill him.

Farther on he had plenty, but less contentment. He was compelled to
acknowledge that he had expected to meet Carinthia again at the Baths.
Her absence dealt a violent shock to the aerial structure he dwelt in;
for though his ardour for the life of the solitudes was unfeigned, as was
his calm overlooking of social distinctions, the self-indulgent dreamer
became troubled with an alarming sentience, that for him to share the
passions of the world of men was to risk the falling lower than most.
Women are a cause of dreams, but they are dreaded enemies of his kind of
dream, deadly enemies of the immaterial dreamers; and should one of them
be taken on board a vessel of the vapourish texture young Woodseer sailed
in above the clouds lightly while he was in it alone, questions of past,
future, and present, the three weights upon humanity, bear it down, and
she must go, or the vessel sinks. And cast out of it, what was he? The
asking exposed him to the steadiest wind the civilized world is known to
blow. From merely thinking upon one of the daughters of earth, he was
made to feel his position in that world, though he refused to understand
it, and assisted by two days of hard walking he reduced Carinthia to an
abstract enthusiasm, no very serious burden. His note-book sustained it
easily. He wrote her name in simple fondness of the name; a verse, and
hints for more, and some sentences, which he thought profound. They were
composed as he sat by the roadway, on the top of hills, and in a boat
crossing a dark green lake deep under wooded mountain walls: things of
priceless value.

It happened, that midway on the lake he perceived his boatman about to
prime a pistol to murder the mild-eyed stillness, and he called to the
man in his best German to desist. During the altercation, there passed a
countryman of his in another of the punts, who said gravely: 'I thank you
for that.' It was early morning, and they had the lake to themselves,
each deeming the other an intruder; for the courtship of solitude wanes
when we are haunted by a second person in pursuit of it; he is
discolouring matter in our pure crystal cup. Such is the worship of the
picturesque; and it would appear to say, that the spirit of man finds
itself yet in the society of barbarians. The case admits of good pleading
either way, even upon the issue whether the exclusive or the vulgar be
the more barbarous. But in those days the solicitation of the picturesque
had been revived by a poet of some impassioned rhetoric, and two devotees
could hardly meet, as the two met here, and not be mutually obscurants.

They stepped ashore in turn on the same small shoot of land where a
farm-house near a chapel in the shadow of cliffs did occasional service
for an inn. Each had intended to pass a day and a night in this lonely
dwelling-place by the lake, but a rival was less to be tolerated there
than in love, and each awaited the other's departure, with an air that
said: 'You are in my sunlight'; and going deeper, more sternly: 'Sir, you
are an offence to Nature's pudency!'

Woodseer was the more placable of the two; he had taken possession of the
bench outside, and he had his note-book and much profundity to haul up
with it while fish were frying. His countryman had rushed inside to avoid
him, and remained there pacing the chamber like a lion newly caged. Their
boatmen were brotherly in the anticipation of provision and payment.

After eating his fish, Woodseer decided abruptly, that as he could not
have the spot to himself, memorable as it would have been to intermarry
with Nature in so sacred a welldepth of the mountains, he had better be
walking and climbing. Another boat paddling up the lake had been spied:
solitude was not merely shared with a rival, but violated by numbers. In
the first case, we detest the man; in the second, we fly from an outraged
scene. He wrote a line or so in his book, hurriedly paid his bill, and
started, full of the matter he had briefly committed to his pages.

At noon, sitting beside the beck that runs from the lake, he was
overtaken by the gentleman he had left behind, and accosted in the
informal English style, with all the politeness possible to a nervously
blunt manner: 'This book is yours,--I have no doubt it is yours; I am
glad to be able to restore it; I should be glad to be the owner-writer of
the contents, I mean. I have to beg your excuse; I found it lying open; I
looked at the page, I looked through the whole; I am quite at your
mercy.'

Woodseer jumped at the sight of his note-book, felt for the emptiness of
his pocket, and replied: 'Thank you, thank you. It's of use to me, though
to no one else.'

'You pardon me?'

'Certainly. I should have done it myself.'

'I cannot offer you my apologies as a stranger.' Lord Fleetwood was the
name given.

Woodseer's plebeian was exchanged for it, and he stood up.

The young lord had fair, straight, thin features, with large restless
eyes that lighted quickly, and a mouth that was winning in his present
colloquial mood.

'You could have done the same? I should find it hard to forgive the man
who pried into my secret thoughts,' he remarked.

'There they are. If one puts them to paper! . . .' Woodseer shrugged.

'Yes, yes. They never last long enough with me. So far I'm safe. One page
led to another. You can meditate. I noticed some remarks on Religions.
You think deeply.'

Woodseer was of that opinion, but modesty urged him to reply with a small
flourish. 'Just a few heads of ideas. When the wind puffs down a sooty
chimney the air is filled with little blacks that settle pretty much like
the notes in this book of mine. There they wait for another puff, or my
fingers to stamp them.'

'I could tell you were the owner of that book,' said Lord Fleetwood. He
swept his forehead feverishly. 'What a power it is to relieve one's brain
by writing! May I ask you, which one of the Universities . . . ?'

The burden of this question had a ring of irony to one whom it taught to
feel rather defiantly, that he carried the blazon of a reeking tramp. 'My
University,' Woodseer replied, 'was a merchant's office in Bremen for
some months. I learnt more Greek and Latin in Bremen than business. I was
invalided home, and then tried a merchant's office in London. I put on my
hat one day, and walked into the country. My College fellows were
hawkers, tinkers, tramps and ploughmen, choughs and crows. A volume of
our Poets and a History of Philosophy composed my library. I had scarce
any money, so I learnt how to idle inexpensively--a good first lesson.
We're at the bottom of the world when we take to the road; we see men as
they were in the beginning--not so eager for harness till they get
acquainted with hunger, as I did, and studied in myself the old animal
having his head pushed into the collar to earn a feed of corn.'

Woodseer laughed, adding, that he had been of a serious mind in those
days of the alternation of smooth indifference and sharp necessity, and
he had plucked a flower from them.

His nature prompted him to speak of himself with simple candour, as he
had done spontaneously to Chillon Kirby, yet he was now anxious to let
his companion know at once the common stuff he was made of, together with
the great stuff he contained. He grew conscious of an over-anxiety, and
was uneasy, recollecting how he had just spoken about his naturalness,
dimly if at all apprehending the cause of this disturbance within. What
is a lord to a philosopher! But the world is around us as a cloak, if not
a coat; in his ignorance he supposed it specially due to a lord seeking
acquaintance with him, that he should expose his condition: doing the
which appeared to subject him to parade his intellectual treasures and
capacity for shaping sentences; and the effect upon Lord Fleetwood was an
incentive to the display. Nevertheless he had a fretful desire to escape
from the discomposing society of a lord; he fixed his knapsack and began
to saunter.

The young lord was at his elbow. 'I can't part with you. Will you allow
me?'

Woodseer was puzzled and had to say: 'If you wish it.'

'I do wish it: an hour's walk with you. One does not meet a man like you
every day. I have to join a circle of mine in Baden, but there's no
hurry; I could be disengaged for a week. And I have things to ask you,
owing to my indiscretion--but you have excused it.'

Woodseer turned for a farewell gaze at the great Watzmann, and saluted
him.

'Splendid,' said Lord Fleetwood; 'but don't clap names on the
mountains.--I saw written in your book: "A text for Dada." You write: "A
despotism would procure a perfect solitude, but kill the ghost." That was
my thought at the place where we were at the lake. I had it. Tell
me--though I could not have written it, and "ghost" is just the word, the
exact word--tell me, are you of Welsh blood? "Dad" is good
Welsh--pronounce it hard.'

Woodseer answered: 'My mother was a Glamorganshire woman. My father, I
know, walked up from Wales, mending boots on his road for a livelihood.
He is not a bad scholar, he knows Greek enough to like it. He is a
Dissenting preacher. When I strike a truism, I 've a habit of scoring it
to give him a peg or tuning-fork for one of his discourses. He's a man of
talent; he taught himself, and he taught me more than I learnt at school.
He is a thinker in his way. He loves Nature too. I rather envy him in
some respects. He and I are hunters of Wisdom on different tracks; and
he, as he says, "waits for me." He's patient!'

Ah, and I wanted to ask you,' Lord Fleetwood observed, bursting with it,
'I was puzzled by a name you write here and there near the end, and
permit me to ask, it: Carinthia! It cannot be the country? You write
after, the name: "A beautiful Gorgon--a haggard Venus." It seized me. I
have had the face before my eyes ever since. You must mean a woman. I
can't be deceived in allusions to a woman: they have heart in them. You
met her somewhere about Carinthia, and gave her the name? You write--may
I refer to the book?'

He received the book and flew through the leaves:

'Here--"A panting look": you write again: "A look of beaten flame: a look
of one who has run and at last beholds!" But that is a living face: I see
her! Here again: "From minute to minute she is the rock that loses the
sun at night and reddens in the morning." You could not create an idea of
a woman to move you like that. No one could, I am certain of it, certain;
if so, you 're a wizard--I swear you are. But that's a face high over
beauty. Just to know there is a woman like her, is an antidote. You
compare her to a rock. Who would imagine a comparison of a woman to a
rock! But rock is the very picture of beautiful Gorgon, haggard Venus.
Tell me you met her, you saw her. I want only to hear she lives, she is
in the world. Beautiful women compared to roses may whirl away with their
handsome dragoons! A pang from them is a thing to be ashamed of. And
there are men who trot about whining with it! But a Carinthia makes pain
honourable. You have done what I thought impossible--fused a woman's face
and grand scenery, to make them inseparable. She might be wicked for me.
I should see a bright rim round hatred of her!--the rock you describe. I
could endure horrors and not annihilate her! I should think her sacred.'

Woodseer turned about to have a look at the man who was even quicker than
he at realizing a person from a hint of description, and almost insanely
extravagant in the pitch of the things he uttered to a stranger. For
himself, he was open with everybody, his philosophy not allowing that
strangers existed on earth. But the presence of a lord brought the
conventional world to his feelings, though at the same time the title
seemed to sanction the exceptional abruptness and wildness of this lord.
As for suspecting him to be mad, it would have been a common idea: no
stretching of speech or overstepping of social rules could waken a
suspicion so spiritless in Woodseer.

He said: 'I can tell you I met her and she lives. I could as soon swim in
that torrent or leap the mountain as repeat what she spoke, or sketch a
feature of her. She goes into the blood, she is a new idea of women. She
has the face that would tempt a gypsy to evil tellings. I could think of
it as a history written in a line: Carinthia, Saint and Martyr! As for
comparisons, they are flowers thrown into the fire.'

'I have had that--I have thought that,' said Lord Fleetwood. 'Go on; talk
of her, pray; without comparisons. I detest them. How did you meet her?
What made you part? Where is she now? I have no wish to find her, but I
want thoroughly to believe in her.'

Another than Woodseer would have perceived the young lord's malady. Here
was one bitten by the serpent of love, and athirst for an image of the
sex to serve for the cooling herb, as youth will be. Woodseer put it down
to a curious imaginative fellowship with himself. He forgot the lord, and
supposed he had found his own likeness, less gifted in speech. After
talking of Carinthia more and more in the abstract, he fell upon his
discovery of the Great Secret of life, against which his hearer struggled
for a time, though that was cooling to him too; but ultimately there was
no resistance, and so deep did they sink into the idea of pure
contemplation, that the idea of woman seemed to have become a part of it.
No stronger proof of their aethereal conversational earnestness could be
offered. A locality was given to the Great Secret, and of course it was
the place where the most powerful recent impression had been stamped on
the mind of the discoverer: the shadowy valley rolling from the
slate-rock. Woodseer was too artistic a dreamer to present the passing
vision of Carinthia with any associates there. She passed: the solitude
accepted her and lost her; and it was the richer for the one swift gleam:
she brought no trouble, she left no regrets; she was the ghost of the
rocky obscurity. But now remembering her mountain carol, he chanced to
speak of her as a girl.

'She is a girl?' cried Lord Fleetwood, frowning over an utter revolution
of sentiment at the thought of the beautiful Gorgon being a girl; for,
rapid as he was to imagine, he had raised a solid fabric upon his
conception of Carinthia the woman, necessarily the woman--logically. Who
but the woman could look the Gorgon! He tried to explain it to be
impossible for a girl to wear the look: and his notion evidently was,
that it had come upon a beautiful face in some staring horror of a world
that had bitten the tender woman. She touched him sympathetically through
the pathos.

Woodseer flung out vociferously for the contrary. Who but a girl could
look the beautiful Gorgon! What other could seem an emanation of the
mountain solitude? A woman would instantly breathe the world on it to
destroy it. Hers would be the dramatic and not the poetic face. It would
shriek of man, wake the echoes with the tale of man, slaughter all.
quietude. But a girl's face has no story of poisonous intrusion. She
indeed may be cast in the terrors of Nature, and yet be sweet with
Nature, beautiful because she is purely of Nature. Woodseer did his best
to present his view irresistibly. Perhaps he was not clear; it was a
piece of skiamachy, difficult to render clear to the defeated.

Lord Fleetwood had nothing to say but 'Gorgon! a girl a Gorgon!' and it
struck Woodseer as intensely unreasonable, considering that he had seen
the girl whom, in his effort to portray her, he had likened to a
beautiful Gorgon. He recounted the scene of the meeting with her,
pictured it in effective colours, but his companion gave no response, nor
a nod. They ceased to converse, and when the young lord's hired carriage
drew up on the road, Woodseer required persuasion to accompany him. They
were both in their different stations young tyrants of the world, ready
to fight the world and one another for not having their immediate view of
it such as they wanted it. They agreed, however, not to sleep in the
city. Beds were to be had near the top of a mountain on the other side of
the Salza, their driver informed them, and vowing themselves to that
particular height, in a mutual disgust of the city, they waxed
friendlier, with a reserve.

Woodseer soon had experience that he was receiving exceptional treatment
from Lord Fleetwood, whose manservant was on the steps of the hotel in
Salzburg on the lookout for his master.

'Sir Meeson has been getting impatient, my lord,' said the man.

Sir Meeson Corby appeared; Lord Fleetwood cut him short: 'You 're in a
hurry; go at once, don't wait for me; I join you in Baden.--Do me the
favour to eat with me,' he turned to Woodseer. 'And here, Corby! tell the
countess I have a friend to bear me company, and there is to be an extra
bedroom secured at her hotel. That swinery of a place she insists on
visiting is usually crammed. With you there,' he turned to Woodseer, 'I
might find it agreeable.--You can take my man, Corby; I shall not want
the fellow.'

'Positively, my dear Fleetwood, you know,' Sir Meeson expostulated, 'I am
under orders; I don't see how--I really can't go on without you.'

'Please yourself. This gentleman is my friend, Mr. Woodseer.'

Sir Meeson Corby was a plump little beau of forty, at war with his fat
and accounting his tight blue tail coat and brass buttons a victory. His
tightness made his fatness elastic; he looked wound up for a dance, and
could hardly hold on a leg; but the presentation of a creature in a
battered hat and soiled garments, carrying a tattered knapsack half
slung, lank and with disorderly locks, as the Earl of Fleetwood's
friend--the friend of the wealthiest nobleman of Great Britain!--fixed
him in a perked attitude of inquiry that exhausted interrogatives.
Woodseer passed him, slouching a bow. The circular stare of Sir Meeson
seemed unable to contract. He directed it on Lord Fleetwood, and was then
reminded that he dealt with prickles.

'Where have you been?' he said, blinking to refresh his eyeballs. 'I
missed you, I ran round and round the town after you.'

'I have been to the lake.'

'Queer fish there!' Sir Meeson dropped a glance on the capture.

Lord Fleetwood took Woodseer's arm. 'Do you eat with us?' he asked the
baronet, who had stayed his eating for an hour and was famished; so they
strode to the dining-room.

'Do you wash, sir, before eating?' Sir Meeson said to Woodseer, caressing
his hands when they had seated themselves at table. 'Appliances are to be
found in this hotel.'

'Soap?' said Lord Fleetwood.

'Soap--at least, in my chamber.'

'Fetch it, please.'

Sir Meeson, of course, could not hear that. He requested the waiter to
show the gentleman to a room.

Lord Fleetwood ordered the waiter to bring a handbasin and towel. 'We're
off directly and must eat at once,' he said.

'Soap--soap! my dear Fleetwood,' Sir Meeson knuckled on the table, to
impress it that his appetite and his gorge demanded a thorough cleansing
of those fingers, if they were to sit at one board.

'Let the waiter fetch it.'

'The soap is in my portmanteau.'

'You spoke of it as a necessity for this gentleman and me. Bring it.'

Woodseer had risen. Lord Fleetwood motioned him down. He kept an eye
dead--as marble on Corby, who muttered: 'You can't mean that you ask me
. . . ?' But the alternative was forced on Sir Meeson by too strong a power
of the implacable eye; there was thunder in it, a continuity of gaze
forcefuller than repetitions of the word. He knew Lord Fleetwood. Men
privileged to attend on him were dogs to the flinty young despot: they
were sure to be called upon to expiate the faintest offence to him. He
had hastily to consider, that he was banished beyond appeal, with the
whole torture of banishment to an adorer of the Countess Livia, or else
the mad behest must be obeyed. He protested, shrugged, sat fast, and
sprang up, remarking, that he went with all the willingness imaginable.
It could not have been the first occasion.

He was affecting the excessively obsequious when he came back bearing his
metal soap-case. The performance was checked by another look solid as
shot, and as quick. Woodseer, who would have done for Sir Meeson Corby or
Lazarus what had been done for him, thought little of the service, but so
intense a peremptoriness in the look of an eye made him uncomfortable in
his own sense of independence. The humblest citizen of a free nation has
that warning at some notable exhibition of tyranny in a neighbouring
State: it acts like a concussion of the air.

Lord Fleetwood led an easy dialogue with him and Sir Meeson, on their
different themes immediately, which was not less impressive to an
observer. He listened to Sir Meeson's entreaties that he should start at
once for Baden, and appeared to pity the poor gentleman, condemned by his
office to hang about him in terror of his liege lady's displeasure.
Presently, near the close of the meal, drawing a ring from his finger, he
handed it to the baronet, and said, 'Give her that. She knows I shall
follow that.' He added to himself:--I shall have ill-luck till I have it
back! and he asked Woodseer whether he put faith in the virtue of
talismans.

'I have never possessed one,' said Woodseer, with his natural frankness.
'It would have gone long before this for a night's lodging.'

Sir Meeson heard him, and instantly urged Lord Fleetwood not to think of
dismissing his man Francis. 'I beg it, Fleetwood! I beg you to take the
man. Her ladyship will receive me badly, ring or no ring, if she hears of
your being left alone. I really can't present myself. I shall not go, not
go. I say no.'

'Stay, then,' said Fleetwood.

He turned to Woodseer with an air of deference, and requested the
privilege of glancing at his notebook again, and scanned it closely at
one of the pages. 'I believe it true,' he cried; 'I had a half
recollection of it--I have had some such thought, but never could put it
in words. You have thought deeply.'

'That is only a surface thought, or common reflection,' said Woodseer.

Sir Meeson stared at them in turn. Judging by their talk and the effect
produced on the earl, he took Woodseer for a sort of conjuror.

It was his duty to utter a warning.

He drew Fleetwood aside. A word was whispered, and they broke asunder
with a snap. Francis was called. His master gave him his keys, and
despatched him into the town to purchase a knapsack or bag for the outfit
of a jolly beggar. The prospect delighted Lord Fleetwood. He sang notes
from the deep chest, flaunting like an opera brigand, and contemplating
his wretched satellite's indecision with brimming amusement.

'Remember, we fight for our money. I carry mine,' he said to Woodseer.

'Wouldn't it be expedient, Fleetwood . . .' Sir Meeson suggested a
treasurer in the person of himself.

'Not a florin, Corby! I should find it all gambled away at Baden.'

'But I am not Abrane, I'm not Abrane! I never play, I have no mania,
none. It would be prudent, Fleetwood.'

'The slightest bulging of a pocket would show on you, Corby; and they
would be at you, they would fall on you and pluck you to have another
fling. I 'd rather my money should go to a knight of the road than feed
that dragon's jaw. A highwayman seems an honest fellow compared with your
honourable corporation of fly-catchers. I could surrender to him with
some satisfaction after a trial of the better man. I 've tried these
tables, and couldn't stir a pulse. Have you?'

It had to be explained to Woodseer what was meant by trying the tables.
'Not I,' said he, in strong contempt of the queer allurement.

Lord Fleetwood studied him half a minute, as if measuring and discarding
a suspicion of the young philosopher's possible weakness under
temptation.

Sir Meeson Corby accompanied the oddly assorted couple through the town
and a short way along the road to the mountain, for the sake of quieting
his conscience upon the subject of his leaving them together. He could
not have sat down a second time at a table with those hands. He said
it:--he could not have done the thing. So the best he could do was to let
them go. Like many of his class, he had a mind open to the effect of
striking contrasts, and the spectacle of the wealthiest nobleman in Great
Britain tramping the road, pack on back, with a young nobody for his
comrade, a total stranger, who might be a cut-throat, and was avowedly
next to a mendicant, charged him with quantities of interjectory matter,
that he caught himself firing to the foreign people on the highway.
Hundreds of thousands a year, and tramping it like a pedlar, with a
beggar for his friend! He would have given something to have an English
ear near him as he watched them rounding under the mountain they were
about to climb.




CHAPTER IX

CONCERNING THE BLACK GODDESS FORTUNE AND THE WORSHIP OF HER, TOGETHER
WITH AN INTRODUCTION OF SOME OF HER VOTARIES

In those early days of Fortune's pregnant alternations of colour between
the Red and the Black, exhibited publicly, as it were a petroleum spring
of the ebony-fiery lake below, Black-Forest Baden was the sprightliest'
of the ante-chambers of Hades. Thither in the ripeness of the year
trooped the devotees of the sable goddess to perform sacrifice; and
annually among them the beautiful Livia, the Countess of Fleetwood; for
nowhere else had she sensation of the perfect repose which is rocked to a
slumber by gales.

She was not of the creatures who are excited by an atmosphere of
excitement; she took it as the nymph of the stream her native wave, and
swam on the flood with expansive languor, happy to have the master
passions about her; one or two of which her dainty hand caressed,
fearless of a sting; the lady petted them as her swans. It surprised her
to a gentle contempt of men and women, that they should be ruffled either
by love or play. A withholding from the scene will naturally arouse
disturbing wishes; but to be present lulls; for then we live, we are in
our element. And who could expect, what sane person can desire, perpetual
good luck? Fortune, the goddess, and young Love, too, are divine in their
mutability: and Fortune would resemble a humdrum housewife, Love a
droning husband, if constancy were practised by them. Observe the
staggering and plunging of the blindfold wretch seeking to be persuaded
of their faithfulness.

She could make for herself a quiet centre in the heart of the whirlwind,
but the whirlwind was required. The clustered lights at the corner of the
vale under forest hills, the burst of music, the blazing windows of the
saloons of the Furies, and the gamblers advancing and retreating, with
their totally opposite views of consequences, and fashions of wearing or
tearing the mask; and closer, the figures shifting up and down the
promenade, known and unknown faces, and the histories half known, half
woven, weaving fast, which flew their, threads to provoke speculation;
pleasantly embraced and diverted the cool-blooded lady surrounded by her
courtiers, who could upon occasion supply the luminous clue or anecdote.
She had an intuitive liveliness to detect interchanges of eyes, the
shuttle of intrigue; the mild hypocrisy, the clever audacity, the
suspicion confirmed, the complication threatening to become resonant and
terrible; and the old crossing the young and the young outwitting the
old, wiles of fair traitors and dark, knaves of all suits of the pack. A
more intimate acquaintance with their lineaments inspired a regard for
them, such as poets may feign the throned high moon to entertain for
objects causing her rays to flash.

The simple fools, performing in character, were a neutral people,
grotesques and arabesques wreathed about the margins of the scene. Venus
or Fortune smote them to a relievo distinguishing one from another. Here,
however, as elsewhere, the core of interest was with the serious
population, the lovers and the players in earnest, who stood round the
furnace and pitched themselves into it, not always under a miscalculation
of their chances of emerging transfigured instead of serving for fuel.
These, the tragical children of folly, were astute: they played with
lightning, and they knew the conditions of the game; victories were to be
had.

The ulterior conditions of the game, the price paid for a victory, they
thought little of: for they were feverish worshippers of the phantasmal
deity called the Present; a god reigning over the Past, appreciable only
in the Future; whose whiff of actual being is composed of the embryo idea
of the union of these two periods. Still he is occasionally a benevolent
god to the appetites; which have but to be continuous to establish him in
permanence; and as nothing in us more readily supposes perpetuity than
the appetite rushing to destroy itself, the rational nature of the most
universal worship on earth is perceived at once.

Now, the price paid for a victory is this: that having been favoured in a
single instance by the spouse of the aforesaid eminent divinity--the
Black Goddess of the golden fringes--men believe in her for ever after,
behold her everywhere, they belong to her. Their faith as to sowing and
reaping has gone; and so has their capacity to see the actual as it is:
she has the power to attach them to her skirts the more by rewarding
their impassioned devotion with cuffs and scorns. They have ceased to
have a first notion upon anything without a second haunting it, which
directs them to propitiate Fortune.

But I am reminded by the convulsions of Dame Gossip, that the wisdom of
our ancestors makes it a mere hammering of commonplace to insist on such
reflections. Many of them, indeed, took the union of the Black Goddess
and the Rosy Present for the composition of the very Arch-Fiend. Some had
a shot at the strange conjecture, figuring her as tired of men in the end
and challengeing him below--equally tired of his easy conquests of men
since the glorious old times of the duelling saints. By virtue of his one
incorrigible weakness, which we know him to have as long as we have it
ourselves: viz., the belief in her existence, she is to get the better of
him.

Upon this point the experience of Captain Abrane has a value. Livia was a
follower of the Red and Black and the rounding ball in the person of the
giant captain, through whom she received her succession of sweetly
teasing thrills and shocks, as one of the adventurous company they formed
together. The place was known to him as the fair Philistine to another
muscular hero; he had been shorn there before, and sent forth tottering,
treating the friends he met as pillars to fall with him; and when the
operation was done thoroughly, he pronounced himself refreshed by it,
like a more sensible Samson, the cooler for his clipping. Then it was
that he relapsed undistractedly upon processes of his mind and he often
said he thought Fortune would beat the devil.

Her power is shown in the moving of her solicitors to think, instantly
after they have made their cast, that the reverse of it was what they
intended. It comes as though she had withdrawn the bandage from her
forehead and dropped a leaden glance on them, like a great dame angry to
have her signal misinterpreted. Well, then, distinguished by the goddess
in such a manner, we have it proved to us how she wished to favour: for
the reverse wins, and we who are pinched blame not her cruelty but our
blind folly. This is true worship. Henceforth the pain of her nip is
mingled with the dream of her kiss; between the positive and the imagined
of her we remain confused until the purse is an empty body on a gallows,
honour too, perhaps.

Captain Abrane was one of the Countess Livia's numerous courtiers on the
border of the promenade under the lighted saloons. A colossus inactive,
he had little to say among the chattering circle; for when seated, cards
were wanted to animate him: and he looked entirely out of place and
unfitted, like a great vessel's figure-head in a shipwright's yard.

She murmured: 'Not this evening?'

Abrane quoted promptly a line of nursery song 'How shall he cut it
without e'er a knife?'

'Have we run it down so low?' said she, with no reproach in her tone.

The captain shrugged over his clean abyss, where nothing was.

Yesterday their bank presented matronly proportions. But an importuned
goddess reduces the most voluminous to bare stitches within a few winks
of an eye.

Livia turned to a French gentleman of her court, M. de St. Ombre, and
pursued a conversation. He was a stately cavalier of the Gallicized
Frankish outlines, ready, but grave in his bearing, grave in his
delivery, trimly moustached, with a Guise beard.

His profound internal question relating to this un-English beauty of the
British Isles:--had she no passion in her nature? was not convinced by
her apparent insensibility to Fortune's whips.

Sir Meeson Corby inserted a word of Bull French out of place from time to
time.

As it might be necessary to lean on the little man for weapons of war,
supposing Lord Fleetwood delayed his arrival yet another day, Livia was
indulgent. She assisted him to think that he spoke the foreign tongue.

Mention of Lord Fleetwood set Sir Meeson harping again on his alarms, in
consideration of the vagabond object of the young lord had roamed away
with.

'You forget that Russett has gypsy in him: Welsh! it's about the same,'
said Livia. 'He can take excellent care of himself and his purse.'

'Countess, he is a good six days overdue.'

'He will be in time for the ball at the Schloss.'

Sir Meeson Corby produced an aspect of the word 'if,' so perkily, that
the dejected Captain Abrane laughed outright and gave him double reason
to fret for Lord Fleetwood's arrival, by saying: 'If he hangs off much
longer, I shall have to come on you for another fifty.'

Our two pedestrians out of Salzburg were standing up in the night of
cloud and pines above the glittering pool, having made their way along
the path from the hill anciently dedicated to the god Mercury; and at the
moment when Sir Meeson put forth his frilled wrists to say: 'If you had
seen his hands--the creature Fleetwood trotted off alone with!--you'd be
a bit anxious too'; the young lord called his comrade to gaze underneath
them: 'There they are, hard at it, at their play!--it's the word used for
the filthiest gutter scramble.'

They had come to know something of one another's humours; which are taken
by young men for their characters; and should the humours please, they
are friends, until further humours develop, trying these nascent
conservatives hard to suit them to their moods as well as the accustomed.
Lord Fleetwood had discovered in his companion, besides the spirit of
independence and the powers of thought impressed on him by Woodseer's
precocious flashes, a broad playfulness, that trenched on buffoonery; it
astonished, amused, and relieved him, loosening the spell of reverence
cast over him by one who could so wonderfully illumine his brain. Prone
to admire and bend the knee where he admired, he chafed at subjection,
unless he had the particular spell constantly renewed. A tone in him once
or twice of late, different from the comrade's, had warned Woodseer to be
guarded.

Susceptible, however, of the extreme contrast between the gamblers below
and Nature's lover beside him, Fleetwood returned to his enthusiasm
without thinking it a bondage.

'I shall never forget the walk we 've had. I have to thank you for the
noblest of pleasures. You 've taught me--well, a thousand things; the
things money can't buy. What mornings they were! And the dead-tired
nights! Under the rock and up to see the snowy peak pink in a gap of
thick mist. You were right: it made a crimsoning colour shine like a new
idea. Up in those mountains one walks with the divinities, you said. It's
perfectly true. I shall remember I did. I have a treasure for life! Now I
understand where you get your ideas. The life we lead down there is
hoggish. You have chosen the right. You're right, over and over again,
when you say, the dirty sweaters are nearer the angels for cleanliness
than my Lord and Lady Sybarite out of a bath, in chemical scents. A man
who thinks, loathes their High Society. I went through Juvenal at
college. But you--to be sure, you add example--make me feel the contempt
of it more. I am everlastingly indebted to you. Yes, I won't forget: you
preach against the despising of anything.

This was pleasant in Woodseer's ears, inasmuch as it established the
young nobleman as the pupil of his philosophy for the conduct of life;
and to fortify him, he replied:

'Set your mind on the beauty, and there'll be no room for comparisons.
Most of them are unjust, precious few instructive. In this case, they
spoil both pictures: and that scene down there rather hooks me; though I
prefer the Dachstein in the wane of the afterglow. You called it
Carinthia.'

'I did: the beautiful Gorgon, haggard Venus--if she is to be a girl!'
Fleetwood rejoined. 'She looked burnt out--a spectre.'

'One of the admirably damned,' said Woodseer, and he murmured with
enjoyment: 'Between the lights--that 's the beauty and the tragedy of
Purgatory!'

His comrade fell in with the pictured idea: 'You hit it:--not what you
called the "sublimely milky," and not squalid as you'll see the faces of
the gambling women at the tables below. Oblige me--may I beg?--don't clap
names on the mountains we've seen. It stamps guide-book on them, English
tourist, horrors. We'll moralize over the crowds at the tables down
there. On the whole, it's a fairish game: you know the odds against you,
as you don't on the Turf or the Bourse. Have your fling; but don't get
bitten. There's a virus. I'm not open to it. Others are.'

Hereupon Woodseer, wishing to have his individuality recognised in the
universality it consented to, remarked on an exchequer that could not
afford to lose, and a disposition free of the craving to win.

These were, no doubt, good reasons for abstaining, and they were grand
morality. They were, at the same time, customary phrases of the unfleshed
in folly. They struck Fleetwood with a curious reminder of the puking
inexperienced, whom he had seen subsequently plunge suicidally. He had a
sharp vision of the attractive forces of the game; and his elemental
nature exulted in siding with the stronger against a pretender to the
superhuman. For Woodseer had spoken a trifle loftily, as quite above
temptation. To see a forewarned philosopher lured to try the swim on
those tides, pulled along the current, and caught by the undertug of the
lasher, would be fun.

'We'll drop down on them, find our hotel, and have a look at what they're
doing,' he said, and stepped.

Woodseer would gladly have remained. The starlit black ridges about him
and the dragon's mouth yawing underneath were an opposition of spiritual
and mundane; innocent, noxious; exciting to the youthful philosopher. He
had to follow, and so rapidly in the darkness that he stumbled and fell
on an arm; a small matter.

Bed-chambers awaited them at the hotel, none of the party: and
Fleetwood's man-servant was absent.

'Gambling, the rascal!' he said. Woodseer heard the first note of the
place in that.

His leader was washed, neatly dressed, and knocking at his door very
soon, impatient to be off, and he flung a promise of 'supper presently'
to one whose modest purse had fallen into a debate with this lordly
hostelry, counting that a supper and a night there would do for it. They
hurried on to the line of promenaders, a river of cross-currents by the
side of seated groups; and the willowy swish of silken dresses, feminine
perfumery, cigar-smoke, chatter, laughter, told of pleasure reigning.

Fleetwood scanned the groups. He had seen enough in a moment and his face
blackened. A darting waiter was called to him.

He said to Woodseer, savagely, as it sounded: 'You shall have something
to joint your bones!' What cause of wrath he had was past a guess: a wolf
at his vitals bit him, hardening his handsome features.

The waiter darted back, bearing a tray and tall glasses filled each with
piled parti-coloured liqueurs, on the top of which an egg-yolk swam.
Fleetwood gave example. Swallowing your egg, the fiery-velvet triune
behind slips after it, in an easy milky way, like a princess's train on a
state-march, and you are completely, transformed, very agreeably; you
have become a merry demon. 'Well, yes, it's next to magic,' he replied to
Woodseer's astonished snigger after the draught, and explained, that it
was a famous Viennese four-of-the-morning panacea, the revellers'
electrical restorer. 'Now you can hold on for an hour or two, and then
we'll sup. At Rome?'

'Ay! Druids to-morrow!' cried the philosopher bewitched.

He found himself bowing to a most heavenly lady, composed of day and
night in her colouring, but more of night, where the western edge has
become a pale steel blade. Men were around her, forming a semi-circle.
The world of men and women was mere timber and leafage to this flower of
her sex, glory of her kind. How he behaved in her presence, he knew not;
he was beyond self-criticism or conscious reflection; simply the engine
of the commixed three liqueurs, with parlous fine thoughts, and a sense
of steaming into the infinite.

To leave her was to have her as a moon in the heavens and to think of her
creatively. A swarm of images rushed about her and away, took lustre and
shade. She was a miracle of greyness, her eyes translucently grey, a
dark-haired queen of the twilights; and his heart sprang into his brain
to picture the novel beauty; language became a flushed Bacchanal in a
ring of dancing similes. Lying beside a bank of silvery cinquefoil
against a clear evening sky, where the planet Venus is a point of new and
warmer light, one has the vision of her. Or something of Persephone
rising to greet her mother, when our beam of day first melts through her
as she kneels to gather an early bud of the year, would be near it. Or
there is a lake in mid-forest, that curls part in shadow under the foot
of morning: there we have her.

He strained to the earthly and the skyey likenesses of his marvel of
human beauty because they bestowed her on him in passing. All the while,
he was gazing on a green gaming-table.

The gold glittered, and it heaped or it vanished. Contemptuous of money,
beyond the limited sum for his needs, he gazed; imagination was blunted
in him to the hot drama of the business. Moreover his mind was engaged in
insisting that the Evening Star is not to be called Venus, because of
certain stories; and he was vowed to defend his lady from any allusion to
them. This occupied him. By degrees, the visible asserted its authority;
his look on the coin fell to speculating. Oddly, too, he was often
right;--the money, staked on the other side, would have won. He
considered it rather a plain calculation than a guess.

Philosophy withdrew him from his temporary interest in the tricks of a
circling white marble ball. The chuck farthing of street urchins has
quite as much dignity. He compared the creatures dabbling, over the board
to summer flies on butcher's meat, periodically scared by a cloth. More
in the abstract, they were snatching at a snapdragon bowl. It struck him,
that the gamblers had thronged on an invitation to drink the round of
seed-time and harvest in a gulp. Again they were desperate gleaners,
hopping, skipping, bleeding, amid a whizz of scythe-blades, for small
wisps of booty. Nor was it long before the presidency of an ancient hoary
Goat-Satan might be perceived, with skew-eyes and pucker-mouth, nursing a
hoof on a knee.

Our mediaeval Enemy sat symbolical in his deformities, as in old Italian
and Dutch thick-line engravings of him. He rolled a ball for souls,
excited like kittens, to catch it, and tumbling into the dozens of vacant
pits. So it seemed to Woodseer, whose perceptions were discoloured by
hereditary antagonism. Had he preserved his philosopher's eye, he would
have known that the Hoofed One is too wily to show himself, owing to his
ugliness. The Black Goddess and no other presides at her own game. She
(it is good for us to know it) is the Power who challenges the
individual, it is he who spreads the net for the mass. She liquefies the
brain of man; he petrifies or ossifies the heart. From her comes
craziness, from him perversity: a more provocative and, on the whole,
more contagious disease. The gambler does not seek to lead his fellows
into perdition; the snared of the Demon have pleasure in the act. Hence
our naturally interested forecasts of the contests between them: for if
he is beaten, as all must be at the close of an extended game with her,
we have only to harden the brain against her allurements and we enter a
clearer field.

Woodseer said to Fleetwood: 'That ball has a look of a nymph running
round and round till she changes to one of the Fates.'

'We'll have a run with her,' said Fleetwood, keener for business than for
metaphors--at the moment.

He received gold for a bank-note. Captain Abrane hurriedly begged a loan.
Both of them threw. Neither of them threw on the six numbers Woodseer
would have selected, and they lost. He stated that the number of 17 had
won before. Abrane tried the transversal enclosing this favoured number.
'Of course!' he cried, with foul resignation and a hostile glare: the
ball had seated itself and was grinning at him from the lowest of the
stalls.

Fleetwood quitted the table-numbers to throw on Pair; he won, won again,
pushed his luck and lost, dragging Abrane with him. The giant varied his
tone of acquiescence in Fortune's whims: 'Of course! I 've only to fling!
Luck hangs right enough till I put down my stake.'

'If the luck has gone three times, the chances . . . .' Woodseer was
rather inquiring than pronouncing. . . . Lord Fleetwood cut him short.
'The chances are equally the contrary!' and discomposed his argumentative
mind.

As argument in such a place was impossible, he had a wild idea of
example--'just to see'--; and though he smiled, his brain was liquefying.
Upon a calculation of the chances, merely for the humour of it, he laid a
silver piece on the first six, which had been neglected. They were now
blest. He laid his winnings on the numbed 17. Who would have expected it?
why, the player, surely! Woodseer comported himself like a veteran: he
had proved that you can calculate the chances. Instead of turning in
triumph to Lord Fleetwood, he laid gold pieces to hug the number 17, and
ten in the centre. And it is the truth, he hoped then to lose and have
done with it--after proving his case. The ball whirled, kicked, tried for
seat in two, in three points, and entered 17. The usual temporary
wonderment flew round the table; and this number was courted in dread,
avoided with apprehension.

Abrane let fly a mighty breath: 'Virgin, by Jove!'

Success was a small matter to Gower Woodseer. He displayed his contempt
of fortune by letting his heap of bank-notes lie on Impair, and he won.
Abrane bade him say 'Maximum' in a furious whisper. He did so, as one at
home with the word; and winning repeatedly, observed to Fleetwood: 'Now I
can understand what historians mean, in telling us of heroes rushing into
the fray and vainly seeking death. I always thought death was to be had,
if you were in earnest.'

Fleetwood scrutinized the cast of his features and the touch of his
fingers on the crispy paper.

'Come to another of these "green fields,"' he returned briefly. 'The game
here is child's play.'

Urging Virgin Luck not to quit his initiatory table, the captain
reluctantly went at their heels. Shortly before the tables were clad in
mantles for the night, he reported to Livia one of the great cases of
Virgin Luck; described it, from the silver piece to the big heap of
notes, and drew on his envy of the fellow to sketch the indomitable
coolness shown in following or in quitting a run. 'That fellow it is,
Fleetwood's tag-rag; holds his head like a street-fiddler; Woodler or
some name. But there's nothing to be done if we don't cultivate him. He
must have pocketed a good three thousand and more. They had a quarrel
about calculations of chances, and Fleet ran the V up his forehead at a
piece of impudence. Fellow says some high-flying stuff; Fleet brightens
like a Sunday chimney-sweep. If I believed in Black Arts, upon my word!'

'Russett is not usually managed with ease,' the lady said.

Her placid observation was directed on the pair then descending the
steps.

'Be careful how you address, this gentleman,' she counselled Abrane. 'The
name is not Woodier, I know. It must be the right name or none.'

Livia's fairest smile received them. She heard the captain accosting the
child of luck as Mr. Woodier, and she made a rustle in rising to take
Fleetwood's arm.

'We haven't dined, we have to sup,' said he.

'You are released at the end of the lamps. You redeem your ring, Russett,
and I will restore it. I have to tell you, Henrietta is here to-morrow.'

'She might be in a better place.'

'The place where she is to be seen is not generally undervalued by men.
It is not her fault that she is absent. The admiral was persuaded to go
and attend those cavalry manoeuvres with the Grand Duke, to whom he had
been civil when in command of the Mediterranean squadron. You know, the
admiral believes he has military--I mean soldierly-genius; and the
delusion may have given him wholesome exercise and helped him to forget
his gout. So far, Henrietta will have been satisfied. She cannot have
found much amusement among dusty troopers or at that court at Carlsruhe.
Our French milliner there has helped in retarding her quite against her
will. She has had to choose a balldress for the raw mountain-girl they
have with them, and get her fitted, and it's a task! Why take her to the
ball? But the admiral's infatuated with this girl, and won't hear of her
exclusion--because, he says, she understands a field of battle; and the
Ducal party have taken to her. Ah, Russett, you should not have flown! No
harm, only Henrietta does require a trifle of management. She writes,
that she is sure of you for the night at the Schloss.'

'Why, ma'am?'

'You have given your word. "He never breaks his lightest word," she
says.'

'It sounds like the beginning of respect.'

'The rarest thing men teach women to feel for them!'

'A respectable love match--eh? Good Lord! You'll be civil to my friend.
You have struck him to the dust. You have your one poetical admirer in
him.'

'I am honoured, Russett.'

'Cleared out, I suppose? Abrane is a funnel for pouring into that Bank.
Have your fun as you like it! I shall get supplies to-morrow. By the way,
you have that boy Cressett here. What are you doing with him?'

Livia spoke of watching over him and guarding him:

'He was at the table beside me, bursting to have a fling; and my friend
Mr. Woodseer said, it was "Adonis come to spy the boar":--the picture!'

Prompt as bugle to the breath, Livia proposed to bet him fifty pounds
that she would keep young Cressett from gambling a single louis. The
pretty saying did not touch her.

Fleetwood moved and bowed. Sir Meeson Corby simulated a petrifaction of
his frame at seeing the Countess of Fleetwood actually partly bent with
her gracious acknowledgement of the tramp's gawky homage.




CHAPTER X

SMALL CAUSES

A clock sounded one of the later morning hours of the night as Gower
Woodseer stood at his hotel door, having left Fleetwood with a band of
revellers. The night was now clear. Stars were low over the ridge of
pines, dropped to a league of our strange world to record the doings.
Beneath this roof lay the starry She. He was elected to lie beneath it
also: and he beheld his heavenly lady floating on the lull of soft white
cloud among her sister spheres. After the way of imaginative young men,
he had her features more accurately now she was hidden, and he idealized
her more. He could escape for a time from his coil of similes and paint
for himself the irids of her large, long, grey eyes darkly rimmed; purest
water-grey, lucid within the ring, beneath an arch of lashes. He had them
fast; but then he fell to contemplating their exceeding rareness; And the
mystery of the divinely grey swung a kindled fancy to the flight with
some queen-witch of woods, of whom a youth may dream under the spell of
twilights, East or West, among forest branches.

She had these marvellous eyes and the glamour for men. She had not yet
met a man with the poetical twist in the brain to prize her elementally.
All admitted the glamour; none of her courtiers were able to name it,
even the poetical head giving it a name did not think of the witch in her
looks as a witch in her deeds, a modern daughter of the mediaeval. To her
giant squire the eyes of the lady were queer: they were unlit glass lamps
to her French suppliant; and to the others, they were attractively
uncommon; the charm for them being in her fine outlines, her stature,
carriage of her person, and unalterable composure; particularly her
latent daring. She had the effect on the general mind of a lofty
crag-castle with a history. There was a whiff of gunpowder exciting the
atmosphere in the anecdotal part of the history known.

Woodseer sat for a certain time over his note-book. He closed it with a
thrilling conceit of the right thing written down; such as entomologists
feel when they have pinned the rare insect. But what is butterfly or
beetle compared with the chiselled sentences carved out of air to
constitute us part owner of the breathing image and spirit of an adored
fair woman? We repeat them, and the act of repeating them makes her come
close on ours, by virtue of the eagle thought in the stamped gold of the
lines.

Then, though she is not ever to be absolutely ours (and it is an
impoverishing desire that she should be), we have beaten out the golden
sentence--the essential she and we in one. But is it so precious after
all? A suspicious ring of an adjective drops us on a sickening descent.

The author dashed at his book, examined, approved, keenly enjoyed, and he
murderously scratched the adjective. She stood better without it, as a
bright planet star issuing from clouds, which are perhaps an adornment to
our hackneyed moon. This done, he restored the book to his coat's
breast-pocket, smiling or sneering at the rolls of bank-notes there,
disdaining to count them. They stuffed an inner waistcoat pocket and his
trousers also. They at any rate warranted that we can form a calculation
of the chances, let Lord Fleetwood rave as he may please.

Woodseer had caught a glimpse of the elbow-point of his coat when
flinging it back to the chair. There was distinctly abrasion.
Philosophers laugh at such things. But they must be the very ancient
pallium philosophers, ensconced in tubs, if they pretend to merriment
over the spectacle of nether garments gapped at the spot where man is
most vulnerable. He got loose from them and held them up to the candle,
and the rays were admitted, neither winking nor peeping. Serviceable old
clothes, no doubt. Time had not dealt them the final kick before they
scored a good record.

They dragged him, nevertheless, to a sort of confession of some weakness,
that he could not analyze for the swirl of emotional thoughts in the way;
and they had him to the ground. An eagle of the poetic becomes a mere
squat toad through one of these pretty material strokes. Where then is
Philosophy? But who can be philosopher and the fervent admirer of a
glorious lady? Ask again, who in that frowzy garb can presume to think of
her or stand within fifty miles of her orbit?

A dreary two hours brought round daylight. Woodseer quitted his restless
bed and entered the abjured habiliments, chivalrous enough to keep from
denouncing them until he could cast the bad skin they now were to his
uneasy sensations. He remembered having stumbled and fallen on the slope
of the hill into this vale, and probably then the mischief had occurred
though a brush would have, been sufficient, the slightest collision.
Only, it was odd that the accident should have come to pass just previous
to his introduction. How long antecedent was it? He belaboured his memory
to reckon how long it was from the moment of the fall to the first sight
of that lady.

His window looked down on the hotel stable-yard. A coach-house door was
open. Odd or not--and it certainly looked like fate--that he should be
bowing to his lady so shortly after the mishap expelling him, he had to
leave the place. A groom in the yard was hailed, and cheerily informed
him he could be driven to Carlsruhe as soon as the coachman had finished
his breakfast. At Carlsruhe a decent refitting might be obtained, and he
could return from exile that very day, thanks to the praiseworthy early
hours of brave old Germany.

He had swallowed a cup of coffee with a roll of stale bread, in the best
of moods, and entered his carriage; he was calling the order to start
when a shout surprised his ear: 'The fiddler bolts!'

Captain Abrane's was the voice. About twenty paces behind, Abrane,
Fleetwood, and one whom they called Chummy Potts, were wildly waving
arms. Woodseer could hear the captain's lowered roar: 'Race you, Chummy,
couple of louis, catch him first!' The two came pelting up to the
carriage abreast.

They were belated revellers, and had been carelessly strolling under the
pinky cloudlets bedward, after a prolonged carousal with the sons and
daughters of hilarious nations, until the apparition of Virgin Luck on
the wing shocked all prospect of a dead fight with the tables that day.

'Here, come, no, by Jove, you, Mr. Woodsir! won't do, not a bit! can't
let you go,' cried Abrane, as he puffed. 'What! cut and run and leave us,
post winnings--bankers--knock your luck on the head! What a fellow! Can't
let you. Countess never forgive us. You promised--swore it--play for her.
Struck all aheap to hear of your play! You've got the trick. Her purse
for you in my pocket. Never a fellow played like you. Cool as a cook over
a-gridiron! Comme un phare! St. Ombre says--that Frenchman. You
astonished the Frenchman! And now cut and run? Can't allow it. Honour of
the country at stake.'

'Hands off!' Woodseer bellowed, feeling himself a leaky vessel in dock,
his infirmities in danger of exposure. 'If you pull!--what the deuce do
you want? Stop!'

'Out you come,' said the giant, and laughed at the fun to his friends,
who were entirely harmonious when not violently dissenting, as is the way
with Night's rollickers before their beds have reconciled them to the
day-beams.

Woodseer would have had to come and was coming; he happened to say:
'Don't knock my pipe out of my mouth,' and touched a chord in the giant.

'All--right; smoke your pipe,' was answered to his remonstrance.

During the amnesty, Fleetwood inquired: 'Where are you going?'

'Far a drive,--to be sure. Don't you see!'

'You'll return?'

'I intend to return.'

'He's beastly excited,' quoth Abrane.

Fleetwood silenced him, though indeed Woodseer appeared suspiciously
restive.

'Step down and have a talk with me before you start. You're not to go
yet.'

'I must. I'm in a hurry.'

'What 's the hurry?'

'I want to smoke and think.'

'Takes a carriage on the top of the morning to smoke and think! Hark at
that!' Abrane sang out. 'Oh, come along quietly, you fellow, there's a
good fellow! It concerns us all, every man Jack; we're all bound up in
your fortunes. Fellow with luck like yours can't pretend to behave
independently. Out of reason!'

'Do you give me your word you return?' said Fleetwood.

Woodseer replied: 'Very well, I do; there, I give my word. Hang it! now I
know what they mean by "anything for a quiet life." Just a shake brings
us down on that cane-bottomed chair!'

'You return to-day?'

'To-day, yes, yes.'

Fleetwood signified the captive's release; and Abrane immediately
suggested:

'Pop old Chummy in beside the fellow to mount guard.'

Potts was hustled and precipitated into the carriage by the pair, with
whom he partook this last glimmer of their night's humorous
extravagances, for he was an easy creature. The carriage drove off.

'Keep him company!' they shouted.

'Escort him back!' said he, nodding.

He remarked to Woodseer: 'With your permission,' concerning the seat he
took, and that 'a draught of morning air would do him good.' Then he
laughed politely, exchanged wavy distant farewells with his comrades,
touched a breast-pocket for his case of cigars, pulled forth one,
obtained 'the loan of a light,' blew clouds and fell into the anticipated
composure, quite understanding the case and his office.

Both agreed as to the fine morning it was. Woodseer briefly assented to
his keeper's reiterated encomium on the morning, justified on oath. A
fine morning, indeed. 'Damned if I think I ever saw so fine a morning!'
Potts cried. He had no other subject of conversation with this hybrid:
and being equally disposed for hot discourse or for sleep, the
deprivation of the one and the other forced him to seek amusement in his
famous reading of character; which was profound among the biped equine,
jockeys, turfmen, sharpers, pugilists, demireps. He fronted Woodseer with
square shoulders and wide knees, an elbow on one, a fist on the other,
engaged in what he termed the 'prodding of his eel,' or 'nicking of his
man,' a method of getting straight at the riddle of the fellow by the
test of how long he could endure a flat mute stare and return look for
look unblinking. The act of smoking fortifies and partly covers the
insolence. But if by chance an equable, not too narrowly focussed,
counterstare is met, our impertinent inquisitor may resemble the
fisherman pulled into deep waters by his fish. Woodseer perused his man,
he was not attempting to fathom him: he had besides other stuff in his
head. Potts had naught, and the poor particle he was wriggled under
detection.

'Tobacco before breakfast!' he said disgustedly tossing his cigar to the
road. 'Your pipe holds on. Bad thing, I can tell you, that smoking on an
empty stomach. No trainer'd allow it, not for a whole fee or double.
Kills your wind. Let me ask you, my good sir, are you going to turn?
We've sat a fairish stretch. I begin to want my bath and a shave, linen
and coffee. Thirsty' as a dog.'

He heard with stupefaction, that he could alight on the spot, if he
pleased, otherwise he would be driven into Carlsruhe. And now they had a
lingual encounter, hot against cool; but the eyes of Chummy Potts having
been beaten, his arguments and reproaches were not backed by the powerful
looks which are an essential part of such eloquence as he commanded. They
fled from his enemy's currishly, even while he was launching epithets.
His pathetic position subjected him to beg that Woodseer would direct the
driver to turn, for he had no knowledge of 'their German lingo.' And said
he: 'You've nothing to laugh at, that I can see. I'm at your mercy, you
brute; caught in a trap. I never walk;--and the sun fit to fry a mackerel
along that road! I apologize for abusing you; I can't do more. You're an
infernally clever player--there! And, upon my soul, I could drink
ditchwater! But if you're going in for transactions at Carlsruhe, mark my
words, your luck's gone. Laugh as much as you like.'

Woodseer happened to be smiling over the excellent reason for not turning
back which inflicted the wofulness. He was not without sympathy for a
thirsty wretch, and guessing, at the sight of an avenue of limes to the
left of the road, that a wayside inn was below, he said: 'You can have
coffee or beer in two minutes,' and told the driver where to pull up.

The sight of a grey-jacketed, green-collared sportsman, dog at heel,
crossing the flat land to the hills of the forest, pricked him enviously,
and caused him to ask what change had come upon him, that he should be
hurrying to a town for a change of clothes. Just as Potts was about to
jump out, a carriage, with a second behind it, left the inn door. He
rubbed a hand on his unshaven chin, tried a glance at his shirt-front,
and remarking: 'It won't be any one who knows me,' stood to let the
carriages pass. In the first were a young lady and a gentleman: the lady
brilliantly fair, an effect of auburn hair and complexion, despite the
signs of a storm that had swept them and had not cleared from her
eyelids. Apparently her maid, a damsel sitting straight up, occupied the
carriage following; and this fresh-faced young person twice quickly and
bluntly bent her head as she was driven by. Potts was unacquainted with
the maid. But he knew the lady well, or well enough for her inattention
to be the bigger puzzle. She gazed at the Black Forest hills in the
steadiest manner, with eyes betraying more than they saw; which solved
part of the puzzle, of course. Her reasons for declining to see him were
exposed by the presence of the gentleman beside her. At the same time, in
so highly bred a girl, a defenceless exposure was unaccountable. Half a
nod and the shade of a smile would have been the proper course; and her
going along on the road to the valley seemed to say it might easily have
been taken; except that there had evidently been a bit of a scene.

Potts ranked Henrietta's beauty far above her cousin Livia's. He was
therefore personally offended by her disregard of him, and her bit of a
scene with the fellow carrying her off did him injury on behalf of his
friend Fleetwood. He dismissed Woodseer curtly. Thirsting more to gossip
than to drink, he took a moody draught of beer at the inn, and by the aid
of a conveyance, hastily built of rotten planks to serve his needs, and
drawn by a horse of the old wars,' as he reported on his arrival at
Baden,--reached that home of the maltreated innocents twenty minutes
before the countess and her party were to start for lunch up the
Lichtenthal. Naturally, he was abused for letting his bird fly: but as he
was shaven, refreshed, and in clean linen, he could pull his shirt-cuffs
and take seat at his breakfast-table with equanimity while Abrane
denounced him.

'I'll bet you the fellow's luck has gone,' said Potts. 'He 's no new hand
and you don't think him so either, Fleet. I've looked into the fellow's
eye and seen a leery old badger at the bottom of it. Talks vile stuff.
However, 'perhaps I didn't drive out on that sweltering Carlsruhe road
for nothing.'

He screwed a look at the earl, who sent Abrane to carry a message and
heard the story Potts had to tell.

'Henrietta Fakenham! no mistake about her; driving out from a pothouse;
man beside her, military man; might be a German. And, if you please,
quite unacquainted with your humble servant, though we were as close as
you to me. Something went wrong in that pothouse. Red eyes. There had
been a scene, one could swear. Behind the lady another carriage, and her
maid. Never saw the girl before, and sets to bowing and smirking at me,
as if I was the-fellow of all others! Comical. I made sure they were
bound for this place. They were on the Strasburg road. No sign of them?'

'You speak to me?' said Fleetwood.

Potts muttered. He had put his foot into it.

'You have a bad habit of speaking to yourself,' Fleetwood remarked, and
left him. He suffered from the rustics he had to deal with among his
class, and it was not needed that he should thunder at them to make his
wrath felt.

Livia swam in, asking: 'What has come to Russett? He passed me in one of
his black fits.'

The tale of the Carlsruhe road was repeated by Potts. She reproved him.
'How could you choose Russett for such a report as that! The admiral was
on the road behind. Henrietta--you're sure it was she? German girls have
much the same colouring. The gentleman with her must have been one of the
Court equerries. They were driving to some chateau or battlefield the
admiral wanted to inspect. Good-looking man? Military man?'

'Oh! the man! pretty fair, I dare say,' Potts rejoined. 'If it wasn't
Henrietta Fakenham, I see with the back of my head. German girl! The maid
was a German girl.'

'That may well be,' said Livia.

She conceived the news to be of sufficient importance for her to
countermand the drive up the Lichtenthal, and take the Carlsruhe road
instead; for Henrietta was weak, and Chillon Kirby an arch-plotter, and
pleader too, one of the desperate lovers. He was outstaying his leave of
absence already, she believed; he had to be in England. If he feared to
lose Henrietta, he would not hesitate to carry her off. Livia knew him,
and knew the power of his pleading with a firmer woman than Henrietta.




CHAPTER XI

THE PRISONER OF HIS WORD

Nothing to rouse alarm was discovered at Carlsruhe. Livia's fair cousin
was there with the red-haired gaunt girl of the mountains; and it was
frankly stated by Henrietta, that she had accompanied the girl a certain
distance along the Strasburg road, for her to see the last of her brother
Chillon on his way to England. Livia was not the woman to push inquiries.
On that subject, she merely said, as soon as they were alone together:

'You seem to have had the lion's share of the parting.'

'Yes, we passed Mr. Chumley Potts,' was Henrietta's immediate answer; and
her reference to him disarmed Livia.

They smiled at his name transiently, but in agreement: the tattler-spout
of their set was, a fatal person to encounter, and each deemed the sudden
apparition of him in the very early morning along the Carlsruhe road
rather magical.

'You place particular confidence in Russett's fidelity to his word,
Riette--as you have been hearing yourself called. You should be serious
by this time. Russett won't bear much more. I counted on the night of the
Ball for the grand effect. You will extinguish every woman there--and if
he is absent?'

'I shall excuse him.'

'You are not in a position to be so charitable. You ought to know your
position, and yourself too, a little better than you do. How could you
endure poverty? Chillon Kirby stands in his uniform, and all's told. He
can manoeuvre, we know. He got the admiral away to take him to those
reviews cleverly. But is he thinking of your interests when he does it?
He requires twenty years of active service to give you a roof to your
head. I hate such allusions. But look for a moment at your character: you
must have ordinary luxuries and pleasures, and if you were to find
yourself grinding against common necessities--imagine it! Russett is
quite manageable. He is, trust me! He is a gentleman; he has more ability
than most young men: he can do anything he sets his mind to do. He has
his great estates and fortune all in his own hands. We call him
eccentric. He is only young, with a lot of power. Add, he's in love, and
some one distracts him. Not love, do you say?--you look it. He worships.
He has no chance given him to show himself at his best. Perhaps he is off
again now. Will you bet me he is not?'

'I should incline to make the bet, if I betted,' said Henrietta. 'His
pride is in his word, and supposing he's in love, it's with his pride,
which never quits him.'

'There's firmness in a man who has pride of that kind. You must let me
take you back to Baden. I hold to having you with me to-day. You must
make an appearance there. The admiral will bring us his Miss Kirby
to-morrow, if he is bound to remain here to-night. There's no harm in his
bachelor dinners. I suspect his twinges of gout come of the prospect of
affairs when he lands in England. Remember our bill with Madame Clemence.
There won't be the ghost of a bank-note for me if Russett quits the
field; we shall all be stranded.'

Henrietta inquired: 'Does it depend on my going with you to-day?'

'Consider, that he is now fancying a thousand things. We won't talk of
the road to Paris.'

A shot of colour swept over Henrietta.

'I will speak to papa:--if he can let me go. He has taken to Miss Kirby.'

'Does she taste well?'

Henrietta debated. 'It's impossible to dislike her. Oh! she is wild! She
knows absolutely nothing of the world. She can do everything we can't--or
don't dare to try.--Men would like her. Papa's beginning to doat. He says
she would have made a first-rate soldier. She fears blood as little as
her morning cup of milk. One of the orderlies fell rather badly from a
frightened horse close by our carriage. She was out in a moment and had
his head on her lap, calling to papa to keep the carriage fast and block
the way of the squadron, for the man's leg was hurt. I really thought we
were lost. At these manoeuvres anything may happen, at any instant. Papa
will follow the horse-artillery. You know his vanity to be a military
quite as much as a naval commander like the Greeks and Romans, he says.
We took the bruised man into our carriage and drove him to camp,
Carinthia nursing him on the way.'

'Carinthia! She's well fitted with her name. What with her name and her
hair and her build and her singular style of attire, one wonders at her
coming into civilized parts. She 's utterly unlike Chillon.'

Henrietta reddened at the mention of one of her own thoughts in the
contrasting of the pair.

They had their points of likeness, she said.

It did not concern Livia to hear what these were. Back to Baden, with
means to procure the pleasant shocks of the galvanic battery there, was
her thought; for she had a fear of the earl's having again departed in a
huff at Henrietta's behaviour.

The admiral consented that his daughter should go, as soon as he heard
that Miss Kirby was to stay. He had when a young man met her famous
father; he vowed she was the Old Buccaneer young again in petticoats and
had made prize of an English man-of-war by storm; all the profit,
however, being his. This he proved with a courteous clasp of the girl and
a show of the salute on her cheek, which he presumed to take at the
night's farewell. 'She's my tonic,' he proclaimed heartily. She seemed to
Livia somewhat unstrung and toneless. The separation from her brother in
the morning might account for it. And a man of the admiral's age could be
excused if he exalted the girl. Senility, like infancy, is fond of plain
outlines for the laying on of its paints. The girl had rugged brows, a
short nose, red hair; no young man would look at her twice. She was
utterly unlike Chillon! Kissing her hand to Henrietta from the steps of
the hotel, the girl's face improved.

Livia's little squire, Sir Meeson Corby, ejaculated as they were driving
down the main street, 'Fleetwood's tramp! There he goes. Now see, Miss
Fakenham, the kind of object Lord Fleetwood picks up and calls
friend!--calls that object friend! . . But, what? He has been to a tailor
and a barber!'

'Stop the coachman. Run, tell Mr. Woodseer I wish him to join us,' Livia
said, and Sir Meeson had to thank his tramp for a second indignity. He
protested, he simulated remonstrance,--he had to go, really feeling a
sickness.

The singular-looking person, whose necessities or sense of the decencies
had, unknown to himself and to the others, put them all in motion that
day, swung round listening to the challenge to arms, as the puffy little
man's delivery of the countess's message sounded. He was respectably
clad, he thought, in the relief of his escape from the suit of clothes
discarded, and he silently followed Sir Meeson's trot to the carriage.
'Should have mistaken you for a German to-day, sir,' the latter said, and
trotted on.

'A stout one,' Woodseer replied, with his happy indifference to his
exterior.

His dark lady's eyes were kindly overlooking, like the heavens. Her fair
cousin, to whom he bowed, awakened him to a perception of the spectacle
causing the slight, quick arrest of her look, in an astonishment not
unlike the hiccup in speech, while her act of courtesy proceeded. At once
he was conscious of the price he paid for respectability, and saw the
Teuton skin on the slim Cambrian, baggy at shoulders, baggy at seat,
pinched at the knees, short at the heels, showing outrageously every spot
where he ought to have been bigger or smaller. How accept or how reject
the invitation to drive in such company to Baden!

'You're decided enough, sir, in your play, they tell me,' the vindictive
little baronet commented on his hesitation, and Woodseer sprang to the
proffered vacant place. But he had to speak of his fly waiting for him at
the steps of a certain hotel.

'Best hotel in the town!' Sir Beeson exclaimed pointedly to Henrietta,
reading her constraint with this comical object before her. It was the
admiral's hotel they stopped at.

'Be so good as to step down and tell the admiral he is to bring Madame
Clemence in his carriage to-morrow; and on your way, you will dismiss Mr.
Woodseer's fly,' Livia mildly addressed her squire. He stared: again he
had to go, muttering: 'That nondescript's footman!' and his mischance in
being checked and crossed and humiliated perpetually by a dirty-fisted
vagabond impostor astounded him. He sent the flyman to the carriage for
orders.

Admiral Fakenham and Carinthia descended. Sir Meeson heard her cry out:
'Is it you!' and up stood the pretentious lout in the German sack,
affecting the graces of a born gentleman fresh from Paris,--bowing,
smirking, excusing himself for something; and he jumped down to the young
lady, he talked intimately with her, with a joker's air; he roused the
admiral to an exchange of jokes, and the countess and Miss Fakenham more
than smiled; evidently at his remarks, unobservant of the preposterous
figure he cut. Sir Meeson Corby had intimations of the disintegration of
his country if a patent tramp burlesquing in those clothes could be
permitted to amuse English ladies of high station, quite at home with
them. Among the signs of England's downfall, this was decidedly one. What
to think of the admiral's favourite when, having his arm paternally on
her shoulder, she gave the tramp her hand at parting, and then blushed!
All that the ladies had to say about it was, that a spread of colour
rather went to change the character of her face.

Carinthia had given Woodseer her hand and reddened under the recollection
of Chillon's words to her as they mounted the rise of the narrow vale,
after leaving the lame gentleman to his tobacco on the grass below the
rocks. Her brother might have counselled her wisely and was to be obeyed.
Only, the great pleasure in seeing the gentleman again inspired
gratitude: he brought the scene to her; and it was alive, it chatted and
it beckoned; it neighboured her home; she had passed it on her walk away
from her home; the gentleman was her link to the mountain paths; he was
just outside an association with her father and mother. At least, her
thinking of them led to him, he to them. Now that she had lost Chillon,
no one was near to do so much. Besides, Chillon loved Henrietta; he was
her own. His heart was hers and his mind his country's. This gentleman
loved the mountains; the sight of him breathed mountain air. To see him
next day was her anticipation: for it would be at the skirts of hilly
forest land, where pinetrees are a noble family, different from the dusty
firs of the weariful plains, which had tired her eyes of late.

Baden was her first peep at the edges of the world since she had grown to
be a young woman. She had but a faint idea of the significance of
gambling. The brilliant lights, the band music, the sitting groups and
company of promenaders were novelties; the Ball of the ensuing night at
the Schloss would be a wonder, she acknowledged in response to Henrietta,
who was trying to understand her; and she admired her ball-dress, she
said, looking unintelligently when she heard that she would be guilty of
slaying numbers of gentlemen before the night was over. Madame Clemence
thought her chances in that respect as good as any other young lady's, if
only she could be got to feel interested. But at a word of the pine
forest, and saying she intended to climb the hills early with the light
in the morning, a pointed eagerness flushed Carinthia, the cold engraving
became a picture of colour.

She was out with the earliest light. Yesterday's parting between Chillon
and Henrietta had taught her to know some little about love; and if her
voice had been heeded by Chillon's beloved, it would not have been a
parting. Her only success was to bring a flood of tears from Henrietta.
The tears at least assured her that her brother's beautiful girl had no
love for the other one,--the young nobleman of the great wealth, who was
to be at the Ball, and had 'gone flying,' Admiral Fakenham shrugged to
say; for Lord Fleetwood was nowhere seen.

The much talk of him on the promenade overnight fetched his name to her
thoughts; he scarcely touched a mind that her father filled when she was
once again breathing early morning air among the stems of climbing pines,
broken alleys of the low-sweeping spruce branches and the bare straight
shafts carrying their heads high in the march upward. Her old father was
arch-priest of such forest land, always recoverable to her there. The
suggestion of mountains was enough to make her mind play, and her old
father and she were aware of one another without conversing in speech. He
pointed at things to observe; he shared her satisfied hunger for the
solitudes of the dumb and growing and wild sweet-smelling. He would not
let a sorrowful thought backward or an apprehensive idea forward disturb
the scene. A half-uprooted pine-tree stem propped mid-fall by standing
comrades, and the downy drop to ground and muted scurry up the bark of
long-brush squirrels, cocktail on the wary watch, were noticed by him as
well as by her; even the rotting timber drift, bark and cones on the
yellow pine needles, and the tortuous dwarf chestnut pushing level out,
with a strain of the head up, from a crevice of mossed rock, among ivy
and ferns; he saw what his girl saw. Power of heart was her conjuring
magician.

She climbed to the rock-slabs above. This was too easily done. The poor
bit of effort excited her frame to desire a spice of danger, her walk was
towering in the physical contempt of a mountain girl for petty lowland
obstructions. And it was just then, by the chance of things--by the
direction of events, as Dame Gossip believes it to be--while colour,
expression, and her proud stature marked her from her sex, that a
gentleman, who was no other than Lord Fleetwood, passed Carinthia, coming
out of the deeper pine forest.

Some distance on, round a bend of the path, she was tempted to adventure
by a projected forked head of a sturdy blunted and twisted little
rock-fostered forest tree pushing horizontally for growth about thirty
feet above the lower ground. She looked on it, and took a step down to
the stem soon after.

Fleetwood had turned and followed, merely for the final curious peep at
an unexpected vision; he had noticed the singular shoot of thick timber
from the rock, and the form of the goose-neck it rose to, the sprout of
branches off the bill in the shape of a crest. And now a shameful spasm
of terror seized him at sight of a girl doing what he would have dreaded
to attempt. She footed coolly, well-balanced, upright. She seated
herself.

And there let her be. She was a German girl, apparently. She had an air
of breeding, something more than breeding. German families of the nobles
give out, here and there, as the Great War showed examples of, intrepid
young women, who have the sharp lines of character to render them
independent of the graces. But, if a young woman out alone in the woods
was hardly to be counted among the well-born, she held rank above them.
Her face and bearing might really be taken to symbolize the forest life.
She was as individual a representative as the Tragic and Comic masks, and
should be got to stand between them for sign of the naturally
straight-growing untrained, a noble daughter of the woods.

Not comparable to Henrietta in feminine beauty, she was on an upper
plateau, where questions as to beauty are answered by other than the
shallow aspect of a girl. But would Henrietta eclipse her if they were
side by side? Fleetwood recalled the strange girl's face. There was in it
a savage poignancy in serenity unexampled among women--or modern women.
One might imagine an apotheosis of a militant young princess of Goths or
Vandals, the glow of blessedness awakening her martial ardours through
the languor of the grave:--Woodseer would comprehend and hit on the exact
image to portray her in a moment, Fleetwood thought, and longed for that
fellow.

He walked hurriedly back to the stunted rock tree. The damsel had
vanished. He glanced below. She had not fallen. He longed to tell
Woodseer he had seen a sort of Carinthia sister, cousin, one of the
family. A single glimpse of her had raised him out of his grovelling
perturbations, cooled and strengthened him, more than diverting the
course of the poison Henrietta infused, and to which it disgraced him to
be so subject. He took love unmanfully; the passion struck at his
weakness; in wrath at the humiliation, if only to revenge himself for
that, he could be fiendish; he knew it, and loathed the desired fair
creature who caused and exposed to him these cracks in his nature, whence
there came a brimstone stench of the infernal pits. And he was made for
better. Of this he was right well assured. Superior to station and to
wealth, to all mundane advantages, he was the puppet of a florid puppet
girl; and he had slept at the small inn of a village hard by, because it
was intolerable to him to see the face that had been tearful over her
lover's departure, and hear her praises of the man she trusted to keep
his word, however grievously she wounded him.

He was the prisoner of his word;--rather like the donkeys known as
married men: rather more honourable than most of them. He had to be
present at the ball at the Schloss and behold his loathed Henrietta,
suffer torture of chains to the rack, by reason of his having promised
the bitter coquette he would be there. So hellish did the misery seem to
him, that he was relieved by the prospect of lying a whole day long in
loneliness with the sunshine of the woods, occasionally conjuring up the
antidote face of the wood-sprite before he was to undergo it. But, as he
was not by nature a dreamer, only dreamed of the luxury of being one, he
soon looked back with loathing on a notion of relief to come from the
state of ruminating animal, and jumped up and shook off another of men's
delusions--that they can, if they have the heart to suffer pain, deaden
it with any semi-poetical devices, similar to those which Rufus Abrane's
'fiddler fellow' practised and was able to carry out because he had no
blood. The spite of a present entire opposition to Woodseer's professed
views made him exult in the thought, that the mouther of sentences was
likely to be at work stultifying them and himself in the halls there
below during the day. An imp of mischief offered consolatory sport in
those halls of the Black Goddess; already he regarded his recent
subservience to the conceited and tripped peripatetic philosopher as
among the ignominies he had cast away on his road to a general contempt;
which is the position of a supreme elevation for particularly sensitive
young men.

Pleasure in the scenery had gone, and the wood-sprite was a flitted
vapour; he longed to be below there, observing Abrane and Potts and the
philosopher confounded, and the legible placidity of Countess Livia.
Nevertheless, he hung aloft, feeding where he could, impatient of the
solitudes, till night, when, according to his guess, the ladies were at
their robing.

Half the fun was over: but the tale of it, narrated in turn by Abrane and
his Chummy Potts on the promenade, was a very good half. The fiddler had
played for the countess and handed her back her empty purse, with a bow
and a pretty speech. Nothing had been seen of him since. He had lost all
his own money besides. 'As of course he would,' said Potts. 'A fellow
calculating the chances catches at a knife in the air.'

'Every franc-piece he had!' cried Abrane. 'And how could the jackass
expect to keep his luck! Flings off his old suit and comes back here with
a rig of German bags--you never saw such a figure!--Shoreditch Jew's
holiday!--why, of course, the luck wouldn't stand that.'

They confessed ruefully to having backed him a certain distance,
notwithstanding. 'He took it so coolly, just as if paying for goods
across a counter.'

'And he had something to bear, Braney, when you fell on him,' said Potts,
and murmured aside: 'He can be smartish. Hears me call Braney Rufus, and
says he, like a fellow-chin on his fiddle--"Captain Mountain, Rufus Mus'.
Not bad, for a counter."'

Fleetwood glanced round: he could have wrung Woodseer's hand. He saw
young Cressett instead, and hailed him: 'Here you are, my gallant! You
shall flash your maiden sword tonight. When I was under your age by a
long count, I dealt sanctimoniousness a flick o' the cheek, and you
shall, and let 'em know you're a man. Come and have your first boar-hunt
along with me. Petticoats be hanged.'

The boy showed some recollection of the lectures of his queen, but he had
not the vocables for resistance to an imperative senior at work upon
sneaking inclinations. 'Promised Lady F.'--do you hear him?' Fleetwood
called to the couple behind; and as gamblers must needs be parasites,
manly were the things they spoke to invigorate the youthful plunger and
second the whim of their paymaster.

At half-past eleven, the prisoner of his word entered under the Schloss
partico, having vowed to himself on the way, that he would satisfy the
formulas to gain release by a deferential bow to the great personages,
and straightway slip out into the heavenly starlight, thence down among
the jolly Parisian and Viennese Bacchanals.




CHAPTER XII

HENRIETTA'S LETTER TREATING OF THE GREAT EVENT

By the first light of an autumn morning, Henrietta sat at her
travelling-desk, to shoot a spark into the breast of her lover with the
story of the great event of the night. For there had been one, one of our
biggest, beyond all tongues and trumpets and possible anticipations.
Wonder at it hammered on incredulity as she wrote it for fact, and in
writing had vision of her lover's eyes over the page.

'Monsieur Du Lac!

'Grey Dawn. 'You are greeted. This, if you have been tardy on the journey
home, will follow close on the heels of the prowest, I believe truest, of
knights, and bear perhaps to his quick mind some help to the solution he
dropped a hint of seeking.

'The Ball in every way a success. Grand Duke and Duchess perfect in
courtesy, not a sign of the German morgue. Livia splendid. Compared to
Day and Night. But the Night eclipses the Day. A summer sea of dancing.
Who, think you, eclipsed those two?

'I tell you the very truth when I say your Carinthia did. If you had seen
her,--the "poor dear girl" you sigh to speak of,--with the doleful
outlook on her fortunes: "portionless, unattractive!" Chillon, she was
magical!

You cannot ever have seen her irradiated with happiness. Her pleasure in
the happiness of all around her was part of the charm. One should be a
poet to describe her. It would task an artist to paint the rose-crystal
she became when threading her way through the groups to be presented.
This is not meant to say that she looked beautiful. It was the something
above beauty--more unique and impressive--like the Alpine snow-cloak
towering up from the flowery slopes you know so well and I a little.

'You choose to think, is it Riette who noticed my simple sister so
closely before . . . ? for I suppose you to be reading this letter a
second time and reflecting as you read. In the first place, acquaintance
with her has revealed that she is not the simple person--only in her
manner. Under the beams of subsequent events, it is true I see her more
picturesquely. But I noticed also just a suspicion of the "grenadier"
stride when she was on the march to make her curtsey. But Livia had no
cause for chills and quivers. She was not the very strange bird requiring
explanatory excuses; she dances excellently, and after the first dance, I
noticed she minced her steps in the walk with her partner. She catches
the tone readily. If not the image of her mother, she has inherited her
mother's bent for the graces; she needs but a small amount of practice.

'Take my assurance of that; and you know who has critical eyes. Your
anxiety may rest; she is equal to any station.

'As expected by me, my Lord Tyrant appeared, though late, near midnight.
I saw him bowing to the Ducal party. Papa had led your "simple sister"
there. Next I saw the Tyrant and Carinthia conversing. Soon they were
dancing together, talking interestedly, like cheerful comrades. Whatever
his faults, he has the merit of being a man of his word. He said he would
come, he did not wish to come, and he came.

'His word binds him--I hope not fatally; irrevocably, it certainly does.
There is charm of character in that. His autocrat airs can be forgiven to
a man who so profoundly respects his word.

'It occurred during their third dance. Your Riette was not in the
quadrille. O but she was a snubbed young woman last night! I refrain--the
examples are too minute for quotation.

'A little later and he had vanished. Carinthia Kirby may already be
written Countess of Fleetwood! His hand was offered and hers demanded in
plain terms. Her brother would not be so astounded if he had seen the
brilliant creature she was--is, I could say; for when she left me here,
to go to her bed, she still wore the "afterglow." She tripped over to me
in the ball-room to tell me. I might doubt, she had no doubt whatever. I
fancied he had subjected her to some degree of trifling. He was in a
mood. His moods are known to me. But no, he was precise; her report of
him strikes the ear as credible, in spite of the marvel it insists on our
swallowing.

"'Lord Fleetwood had asked me to marry him." Neither assurance nor
bashfulness; newspaper print; aid an undoubting air of contentment.

'Imagine me hearing it.

'"To be his wife?"

'"He said wife."

'"And you replied?"

'"I--said I would."

'"Tell me all?"

'"He said we were plighted."

'Now, "wife" is one of the words he abhors; and he loathes the hearing of
a girl as "engaged." However, "plighted" carried a likeness.

'I pressed her: "My dear Carinthia, you thought him in earnest?"

'"He was."

'"How do you judge?"

'"By his look when he spoke."

'"Not by his words?"

"'I repeat them to you."

'She has repeated them to me here in my bedroom. There is no variation.
She remembers every syllable. He went so far as to urge her to say
whether she would as willingly utter consent if they were in a church and
a clergyman at the altar-rails.

'That was like him.

'She made answer: "Wherever it may be, I am bound, if I say yes."

'She then adds: "He told me he joined hands with me."

'"Did he repeat the word 'wife'?"

'"He said it twice."

'I transcribe verbatim scrupulously. There cannot be an error, Chillon.
It seems to show, that he has embraced the serious meaning of the
word--or seriously embraced the meaning, reads' better. I have seen his
lips form "wife."

'But why wonder so staringly? They both love the mountains. Both are
wildish. She was looking superb. And he had seen her do a daring thing on
the rocks on the heights in the early morning, when she was out by
herself, unaware of a spectator, he not knowing who she was;--the Fates
had arranged it so. That was why he took to her so rapidly. So he told
her. She likes being admired. The preparation for the meeting does really
seem "under direction." She likes him too, I do think. Between her
repetitions of his compliments, she praised his tone of voice, his
features. She is ready to have the fullest faith in the sincerity of his
offer; speaks without any impatience for the fulfilment. If it should
happen, what a change in the fortunes of a girl--of more than one,
possibly.

'Now I must rest "eyelids fall." It will be with a heart galloping. No
rest for me till this letter flies. Good morning is my good night to you,
in a world that has turned over.'

Henrietta resumes:

'Livia will not hear of it, calls up all her pretty languor to put it
aside. It is the same to-day as last night. "Why mention Russett's
nonsense to me?" Carinthia is as quietly circumstantial as at first. She
and the Tyrant talked of her native home. Very desirous to see it! means
to build a mansion there! "He said it must be the most romantic place on
earth."

'I suppose I slept. I woke with my last line to you on my lips, and the
great news thundering. He named Esslemont and his favourite--always
uninhabited--Cader Argau. She speaks them correctly. She has an unfailing
memory. The point is, that it is a memory.

'Do not forget also--Livia is affected by her distaste--that he is a
gentleman. He plays with his nobility. With his reputation of gentleman,
he has never been known to play. You will understand the slightly
hypocritical air--it is not of sufficient importance for it to be alluded
to in papa's presence--I put on with her.

'Yes, I danced nearly all the dances. One, a princeling in scarlet
uniform, appearing fresh from under earth; Prussian: a weighty young Graf
in green, between sage and bottle, who seemed to have run off a tree in
the forest, and was trimmed with silver like dew-drops: one in your
Austrian white, dragon de Boheme, if I caught his French rightly. Others
as well, a list. They have the accomplishment. They are drilled in it
young, as girls are, and so few Englishmen--even English officers. How it
may be for campaigning, you can pronounce; but for dancing, the pantalon
collant is the perfect uniform. Your critical Henrietta had not to
complain of her partners, in the absence of the one.

'I shall be haunted by visions of Chillon's amazement until I hear or we
meet. I serve for Carinthia's mouthpiece, she cannot write it, she says.
It would be related in two copybook lines, if at all.

'The amazement over London! The jewel hand of the kingdom gone in a
flash, to "a raw mountain girl," as will be said. I can hear Lady Endor,
Lady Eldritch, Lady Cowry. The reasonable woman should be Lady Arpington.
I have heard her speak of your mother, seen by her when she was in
frocks.

'Enter the "plighted." Poor Livia! to be made a dowager of by any but a
damsel of the family. She may well ridicule "that nonsense of Russett's
last night"! Carinthia kisses, embraces, her brother. I am to say: "What
Henrietta tells you is true, Chillon." She is contented though she has
not seen him again and has not the look of expecting to see him. She
still wears the kind of afterglow.

'Chillon's Viennese waltz was played by the band: played a second time,
special request, conveyed to the leader by Prince Ferdinand. True, most
true, she longs to be home across the water. But be it admitted, that to
any one loving colour, music, chivalry, the Island of Drab is an exile.
Imagine, then, the strange magnetism drawing her there! Could warmer
proof be given?

'Adieu. Livia's "arch-plotter" will weigh the letter he reads to the
smallest fraction of a fraction before he moves a step.

'I could leave it and come to it again and add and add. I foresee in
Livia's mind a dread of the aforesaid "arch," and an interdict. So the
letter must be closed, sealed and into the box, with the hand I still
call mine, though I should doubt my right if it were contested fervently.
I am singing the waltz.

     'Adieu,
          'Ever and beyond it,
               'Your obedient Queen,
                        'HENRIETTA.

'P.S.-My Lord Tyrant has departed--as on other occasions. The prisoner of
his word is sure to take his airing before he presents himself to redeem
it. His valet is left to pay bills, fortunately for Livia. She entrusted
her purse yesterday to a man picked up on the road by my lord, that he
might play for her. Captain Abrane assured her he had a star, and Mr.
Potts thought him a rush compere, an adept of those dreadful gambling
tables. Why will she continue to play! The purse was returned to her,
without so much as a piece of silver in it; the man has flown. Sir M.
Corby says, he is a man whose hands betray him--or did to Sir M.; expects
to see him one day on the wrong side of the criminal bar. He struck me as
not being worse than absurd. He was, in any case, an unfit companion, and
our C. would help to rescue the Eccentric from such complicating
associates. I see worlds of good she may do. Happily, he is no slave of
the vice of gambling; so she would not suffer that anxiety. I wish it
could be subjoined, that he has no malicious pleasure in misleading
others. Livia is inconsolable over her pet, young Lord Cressett, whom he
yesterday induced to "try his luck"--with the result. We leave, if bills
are paid, in two days. Captain Abrane and Mr. Potts left this afternoon;
just enough to carry them home. Papa and your blissful sister out
driving. Riette within her four walls and signing herself,

             'THE PRISONER OF CHILLON.'




CHAPTER XIII

AN IRRUPTION. OF MISTRESS GOSSIP IN BREACH OF THE CONVENTION

'It is a dark land,' Carinthia said, on seeing our Island's lowered
clouds in swift motion, without a break of their folds, above the sheer
white cliffs.

--She said it, we know. That poor child Carinthia Jane, when first she
beheld Old England's shores, tossing in the packet-boat on a wild Channel
sea, did say it and think it, for it is in the family that she did; and
no wonder that she should, the day being showery from the bed of the sun,
after a frosty three days, at the close of autumn. We used to have an eye
of our own for English weather before printed Meteorological Observations
and Forecasts undertook to supplant the shepherd and the poacher, and the
pilot with his worn brown leather telescope tucked beneath his arm. All
three would have told you, that the end of a three days' frost in the
late season of the year and the early, is likely to draw the warm winds
from the Atlantic over Cornish Land's End and Lizard.

Quite by chance of things, Carinthia Jane looked on the land of her
father and mother for the first time under those conditions. There can be
no harm in quoting her remark. Only--I have to say it--experience causes
apprehension, that we are again to be delayed by descriptions, and an
exposition of feelings; taken for granted,--of course, in a serious
narrative; which it really seems these moderns think designed for a
frequent arrest of the actors in the story and a searching of the
internal state of this one or that one of them: who is laid out stark
naked and probed and expounded, like as in the celebrated picture by a
great painter--and we, thirsting for events as we are, are to stop to
enjoy a lecture on Anatomy. And all the while the windows of the
lecture-room are rattling, if not the whole fabric shaking, with exterior
occurrences or impatience for them to come to pass. Every explanation is
sure to be offered by the course events may take; so do, in mercy, I say,
let us bide for them.

She thought our Island all the darker because Henrietta had induced her
to talk on the boat of her mountain home and her last morning there for
the walk away with Chillon John. Soon it was to appear supernaturally
bright, a very magician's cave for brilliancy.

Now, this had happened--and comment on it to yourselves, remembering
always, that Chillon John was a lover, and a lover has his excuses,
though they will not obviate the penalties he may incur; and dreadful
they were. After reading Henrietta's letter to him, he rode out of his
Canterbury quarters across the country to the borders of Sussex, where
his uncle Lord Levellier lived, on the ridge of ironstone, near the wild
land of a forest, Croridge the name of the place. Now, Chillon John knew
his uncle was miserly, and dreaded the prospect of having to support a
niece in the wretched establishment at Lekkatts, or, as it was popularly
called, Leancats; you can understand why. But he managed to assure
himself he must in duty consult with the senior and chief member of .his
family on a subject of such importance as the proposal of marriage to his
lordship's niece.

The consultation was short: 'You will leave it to me,' his uncle said:
and we hear of business affairs between them, involving payment of moneys
due to the young man; and how, whenever he touched on them, his uncle
immediately fell back on the honour of the family and Carinthia Jane's
reputation, her good name to be vindicated, and especially that there
must be no delays, together with as close a reckoning as he could make of
the value of Lord Fleetwood's estates in Kent and in Staffordshire and
South Wales, and his house property in London.

'He will have means to support her,' said the old lord, shrugging as if
at his own incapacity for that burden.

The two then went to the workshops beside a large pond, where there was
an island bordered with birch trees and workmen's cottages near the main
building; and that was an arsenal containing every kind of sword and
lance and musket, rifle and fowling-piece and pistol, and more gunpowder
than was, I believe, allowed by law. For they were engaged in inventing a
new powder for howitzer shells, of tremendous explosive power.

Nothing further did either of them say, concerning the marriage. Nor did
Carinthia Jane hear any mention of Lord Fleetwood from her brother on the
landingplace at Dover. She was taken to Admiral Baldwin Fakenham's house
in Hampshire; and there she remained, the delight of his life, during two
months, patiently expecting and rebuking the unmaidenliness of her
expectations, as honest young women in her position used to do. So did
they sometimes wait for years; they have waited until they withered into
their graves, like the vapours of a brief winter's day: a moving picture
of a sex restrained by modesty in those purer times from the taking of
one step forward unless inquired for.

Two months she waited in our 'dark land.' January arrived, and her
brother. Henrietta communicated the news:

'My Janey, you are asked by Lord Fleetwood whether it is your wish that
he should marry you.'

Now, usually a well-born young woman's answer, if a willing one, is an
example of weak translation. Here it was the heart's native tongue,
without any roundabout, simple but direct.

'Oh, I will, I am ready, tell him.'

Remember, she was not speaking publicly.

Henrietta knew the man enough to be glad he did not hear. She herself
would have felt a little shock on his behalf: only, that answer suited
the scheme of the pair of lovers.

How far those two were innocent in not delivering the whole of Lord
Fleetwood's message to Carinthia Jane through Lord Levellier, we are
unable to learn. We may suspect the miserly nobleman of curtailing it for
his purposes; and such is my idea. But the answer would have been the
same, I am sure.

In consequence and straight away, Chillon John betakes him to Admiral
Baldwin and informs him of Lord Fleetwood's proposal on the night at
Baden, and renewal of it through the mouth of Lord Levellier, not
communicating, however (he may really not have known), the story of how
it had been wrung from the earl by a surprise movement on the part of the
one-armed old lord, who burst out on him in the street from the ambush of
a Club-window, where he had been stationed every day for a fortnight,
indefatigably to watch for the passing of the earl, as there seemed no
other way to find him. They say, indeed, there was a scene, judging by
the result, and it would have been an excellent scene for the stage;
though the two noblemen were to all appearance politely exchanging their
remarks. But the audience hearing what passes, appreciates the courteous
restraint of an attitude so contrasting with their tempers. Behind the
ostentation of civility, their words were daggers.

For it chanced, that the young earl, after a period of refuge at his
Welsh castle, supposing, as he well might, that his latest mad freak of
the proposal of his hand and title to the strange girl in a quadrille at
a foreign castle had been forgotten by her, and the risks of annoyance on
the subject had quite blown over, returned to town, happy in having done
the penance for his impulsiveness, and got clean again--that is to say,
struck off his fetters and escaped from importunities--the very morning
of the day when Lord Levellier sprang upon him! It shows the old
campaigner's shrewdness in guessing where his prey would come, and not
putting him on his guard by a call at his house. Out of the window he
looked for all the hours of light during an entire fortnight. 'In the
service of my sister's child,' he said. 'To save him from the cost of
maintaining her,' say his enemies. At any rate he did it.

He was likely to have done the worse which I suspect.

Now, the imparting of the wonderful news to Admiral Baldwin Fakenham was,
we read, the whiff of a tropical squall to lay him on his beam ends. He
could not but doubt; and his talk was like the sails of a big ship
rattling to the first puff of wind. He had to believe; and then, we read,
he was for hours like a vessel rolling in the trough of the sea. Of
course he was a disappointed father. Naturally his glance at the loss to
Henrietta of the greatest prize of the matrimonial market of all Europe
and America was vexing and saddening. Then he woke up to think of the
fortunes of his 'other girl,' as he named her, and cried: 'Crinny catches
him!'

He cried it in glee and rubbed his hands.

So thereupon, standing before him, Chillon John, from whom he had the
news, bent to him slightly, as his elegant manner was, and lengthened the
admiral's chaps with another proposal; easy, deliberate, precise, quite
the respectful bandit, if you please, determined on having his daughter
by all means, only much preferring the legal, formal, and friendly. Upon
that, in the moment of indecision, Henrietta enters, followed by Admiral
Baldwin's heroine, his Crinny, whom he embraced and kissed, congratulated
and kissed again. One sees the contrivance to soften him.

So it was done, down in that Hampshire household on the heights near the
downs, whence you might behold, off a terra firma resembling a roll of
billows, England's big battle-ships in line fronting the island; when
they were a spectacle of beauty as well as power: which now they are no
more, but will have to be, if they are both to float and to fight. For I
have, had quoted to me by a great admirer of the Old Buccaneer, one of
the dark sayings in his MAXIMS FOR MEN, where Captain John Peter Kirby
commends his fellow-men to dissatisfaction with themselves if they have
not put an end to their enemy handsomely.. And he advises the copying of
Nature in this; whose elements have always, he says, a pretty, besides a
thorough, style of doing it, when they get the better of us; and the one
by reason of the other. He instances the horse, the yacht, and chiefly
the sword, for proof, that the handsomest is the most effective. And he
prints large: 'UGLY IS ONLY HALF WAY TO A THING.' To an invention, I
suppose he intends to say. But looking on our huge foundering
sea-monsters and the disappearance of the unwieldy in Nature, and the
countenances of criminals, who are, he bids us observe, always in the
long run beaten, I seem to see a meaning our country might meditate on.

So, as I said, it was done; for Admiral Baldwin could refuse his Crinny
nothing; as little as he would deny anything to himself, the heartiest of
kindly hosts, fathers, friends. Carinthia Jane's grand good fortune
covered that pit, the question of money, somehow, and was, we may
conceive, a champagne wine in their reasoning faculties. The admiral was
in debt, Henrietta had no heritage, Chillon John was the heir of a
miserly uncle owing him sums and evading every application for them, yet
they behaved as people who had the cup of golden wishes. Perhaps it was
because Henrietta and her lover were so handsome a match as to make it
seem to them and others they must marry; and as to character, her father
could trust her to the man of her choice more readily than to the wealthy
young nobleman; of whose discreetness he had not the highest opinion. He
reconciled this view with his warm feeling for the Countess of Fleetwood
to be, by saying: 'Crinny will tame him!' His faith was in her dauntless
bold spirit, not thinking of the animal she was to tame.

Countess Livia, after receiving Henrietta's letter of information,
descended on them and thought them each and all a crazed set. Love, as a
motive of action for a woman, she considered the female's lunacy and
suicide. Men are born subject to it, happily, and thus the balance
between the lordly half of creation and the frail is rectified. We women
dress, and smile, sigh, if you like, to excite the malady. But if we are
the fools to share it, we lose our chance; instead of the queens, we are
the slaves, and instead of a life of pleasure, we pass from fever to
fever at a tyrant's caprice: he does rightly in despising us. Ay, and
many a worthy woman thinks the same. Educated in dependency as they are,
they come to the idea of love to snatch at it for their weapon of the
man's weakness. For which my lord calls them heartless, and poets are
angry with them, rightly or wrongly.

It must, I fear, be admitted for a truth, that sorrow is the portion of
young women who give the full measure of love to the engagement, marrying
for love. At least, Countess Livia could declare subsequently she had
foretold it and warned her cousin. Not another reflection do you hear
from me, if I must pay forfeit of my privilege to hurry you on past
descriptions of places and anatomy of character and impertinent talk
about philosophy in a story. When we are startled and offended by the
insinuated tracing of principal incidents to a thread-bare spot in the
nether garments of a man of no significance, I lose patience.

Henrietta's case was a secondary affair. What with her passion--it was
nothing less--and her lover's cunning arts, and her father's consent
given, and in truth the look of the two together, the dissuasion of them
from union was as likely to keep them apart as an exhortation addressed
to magnet and needle. Countess Livia attacked Carinthia Jane and the
admiral backing her. But the admiral, having given his consent to his
daughter's marriage, in consequence of the earl's pledged word to 'his
other girl,' had become a zealot for this marriage and there was only not
a grand altercation on the subject because Livia shunned annoyances.
Alone with Carinthia Jane, as she reported to Henrietta, she spoke to a
block, that shook a head and wore a thin smile and nursed its own idea of
the better knowledge of Edward Russett, Earl of Fleetwood, gained in the
run of a silly quadrille at a ball:

What is a young man's word to his partner in a quadrille?

Livia put the question, she put it twice rather sternly, and the girl
came out with: 'Oh, he meant it!'

The nature, the pride, the shifty and furious moods of Lord Fleetwood
were painted frightful to her.

She had conceived her own image of him.

Whether to set her down as an enamoured idiot or a creature not a whit
less artful than her brother, was Countess Livia's debate. Her
inclination was to misdoubt the daughter of the Old Buccaneer: she might
be simple, at her age, and she certainly was ignorant; but she clung to
her prize. Still the promise was extracted from her, that she would not
worry the earl to fulfil the word she supposed him to mean in its full
meaning.

The promise was unreluctantly yielded. No, she would not write. Admiral
Fakenham, too, engaged to leave the matter to a man of honour.

Meanwhile, Chillon John had taken a journey to Lekkatts; following which,
his uncle went to London. Lord Fleetwood heard that Miss Kirby kept him
bound. He was again the fated prisoner of his word.

And following that, not so very long, there was the announcement of the
marriage of Chillon John Kirby Levellier, Lieutenant in the King's Own
Hussars, and Henrietta, daughter of Admiral Baldwin Fakenham. A county
newspaper paragraph was quoted for its eulogy of the Beauty of
Hampshire--not too strong, those acquainted with her thought. Interest at
Court obtained an advancement for the bridegroom: he was gazetted Captain
during his honeymoon, and his prospects under his uncle's name were
considerd fair, though certain people said at the time, it was likely to
be all he would get while old Lord Levellier of Leancats remained in the
flesh.

Now, as it is good for those to tell who intend preserving their taste
for romance and hate anatomical lectures, we never can come to the exact
motives of any extraordinary piece of conduct on the part of man or
woman. Girls are to read; and the study of a boy starts from the monkey.
But no literary surgeon or chemist shall explain positively the cause of
the behaviour of men and women in their relations together; and speaking
to rescue my story, I say we must with due submission accept the facts.
We are not a bit the worse for wondering at them. So it happened that
Lord Fleetwood's reply to Lord Levellier's hammer--hammer by post and
messenger at his door, one may call it, on the subject of the celebration
of the marriage of the young Croesus and Carinthia Jane, in which there
was demand for the fixing of a date forthwith, was despatched on the day
when London had tidings of Henrietta Pakenham's wedding.

The letter, lost for many years, turned up in the hands of a Kentish
auctioneer, selling it on behalf of a farm-serving man, who had it from
Lord Levellier's cook and housemaid, among the things she brought him as
her wifely portion after her master's death, and this she had not found
saleable in her husband's village at her price, but she had got the habit
of sticking to the scraps, being proud of hearing it said that she had
skinned Leancats to some profit: and her expectation proved correct after
her own demise, for her husband putting it up at the auction; our
relative on the mother's side, Dr. Glossop, interested in the documents
and particulars of the story as he was, had it knocked down to him, in
contest with an agent of a London gentleman, going as high as two pounds
ten shillings, for the sum of two pounds and fifteen shillings. Count the
amount that makes for each word of a letter a marvel of brevity,
considering the purport! But Dr. Glossop was right in saying he had it
cheap. The value of that letter may now be multiplied by ten: nor for
that sum would he part with it.

Thus it ran, I need not refer to it in Bundle No. 3:

   'MY LORD: I drive to your church-door on the fourteenth of the month
   at ten A.M., to keep my appointment with Miss C. J. Kirby, if I do
   not blunder the initials.
             'Your lordship's obedient servant,
                            'FLEETWOOD.'

That letter will ever be a treasured family possession with us.

That letter was dated from Lord Fleetwood's Kentish mansion, Esslemont,
the tenth of the month. He must have quitted London for Esslemont, for
change of scene, for air, the moment after the news of Henrietta's
marriage. Carinthia Jane received the summons without transmission of the
letter from her uncle on the morning of the twelfth. It was a peremptory
summons.

Unfortunately, Admiral Fakenham, a real knight and chevalier of those
past times, would not let her mount the downs to have her farewell view
of the big ships unaccompanied by him; and partly and largely in pure
chivalry, no doubt; but her young idea of England's grandeur, as shown in
her great vessels of war, thrilled him, too, and restored his youthful
enthusiasm for his noble profession or made it effervesce. However it
was, he rode beside her and rejoiced to hear the young girl's talk of her
father as a captain of one of England's thunderers, and of the cruelty of
that Admiralty to him: at which Admiral Baldwin laughed, but had not the
heart to disagree with her, for he could belabour the Admiralty in
season, cause or no cause. Altogether he much enjoyed the ride,
notwithstanding intimations of the approach of 'his visitor,' as he
called his attacks of gout.

Riding home, however, the couple passed through a heavy rainfall, and the
next day, when he was to drive with the bride to Lekkatts, gout, the
fiercest he had ever known, chained him fast to his bed. Such are the
petty accidents affecting circumstances. They are the instruments of
Destiny.

There he lay, protesting that the ceremony could not possibly be for the
fourteenth, because Countess Livia had, he now remembered, written of her
engagement to meet Russett on the night of that day at a ball at Mrs.
Cowper Quillett's place, Canleys, lying south of the Surrey hills: a
house famed for its gatherings of beautiful women; whither Lord Fleetwood
would be sure to engage to go, the admiral now said; and it racked him
like gout in his mind, and perhaps troubled his conscience about handing
the girl to such a young man. But he was lying on his back, the posture
for memory to play the fiend with us, as we read in the BOOK of MAXIMS of
the Old Buccaneer. Admiral Baldwin wished heartily to be present at his
Crinny's wedding 'to see her launched,' if wedding it was to be, and he
vowed the date of the fourteenth, in Lord Levellier's announcement of it,
must be an error and might be a month in advance, and ought to be. But it
was sheer talking and raving for a solace to his disappointment or his
anxiety. He had to let Carinthia Jane depart under the charge of his
housekeeper, Mrs. Carthew, a staid excellent lady, poorly gifted with
observation.

Her report of the performance of the ceremony at Croridge village church,
a half mile from Lekkatts, was highly reassuring to the anxious old
admiral still lying on his back with memory and gout at their fiend's
play, and livid forecasts hovering. He had recollected that there had
been no allusion in Lord Levellier's message to settlements or any
lawyer's preliminaries, and he raged at himself for having to own it
would have been the first of questions on behalf of his daughter.

'All passed off correctly,' Mrs. Carthew said. 'The responses of the
bride and bridegroom were particularly articulate.'

She was reserved upon the question of the hospitality of Lekkatts. The
place had entertained her during her necessitated residence there, and
honour forbade her to smile concordantly at the rosy admiral's mention of
Leancats. She took occasion, however, to praise the Earl of Fleetwood's
eminently provident considerateness for his bride, inasmuch as he had
packed a hamper in his vehicle, which was a four-in-hand, driven by
himself.

Admiral Baldwin inquired: 'Bride inside?'

He was informed: 'The Countess of Fleetwood sat on the box on the left of
my lord.'

She had made no moan about the absence of bridesmaids.

'She appeared too profoundly happy to meditate an instant upon
deficiencies.'

'How did the bridegroom behave?'

'Lord Fleetwood was very methodical. He is not, or was not, voluntarily a
talker.'

'Blue coat, brass buttons, hot-house flower? old style or new?'

'His lordship wore a rather low beaver and a buttoned white overcoat, not
out of harmony with the bride's plain travelling-dress.'

'Ah! he's a good whip, men say. Keeps first-rate stables, hacks, and
bloods. Esslemont hard by will be the place for their honeymoon, I guess.
And he's a lucky dog, if he knows his luck.'

So said Admiral Baldwin. He was proceeding to say more, for he had a
prodigious opinion of the young countess and the benefit of her marriage
to the British race. As it concerned a healthy constitution and
motherhood, Mrs. Carthew coughed and retired. Nor do I reprove either of
them. The speculation and the decorum are equally commendable. Masculine
ideas are one thing; but let feminine ever be feminine, or our
civilization perishes.

At Croridge village church, then, one of the smallest churches in the
kingdom, the ceremony was performed and duly witnessed, names written in
the vestry book, the clergyman's fee, the clerk, and the pew-woman, paid
by the bridegroom. And thus we see how a pair of lovers, blind with the
one object of lovers in view; and a miserly uncle, all on edge to save
himself the expense of supporting his niece; and an idolatrous old
admiral, on his back with gout; conduced in turn and together to the
marriage gradually exciting the world's wonder, till it eclipsed the
story of the Old Buccaneer and Countess Fanny, which it caused to be
discussed afresh.

Mrs. Carthew remembered Carinthia Jane's last maiden remark and her first
bridal utterance. On the way, walking to the church of Croridge from
Lekkatts, the girl said: 'Going on my feet, I feel I continue the
mountain walk with my brother when we left our home.' And after leaving
the church, about to mount the coach, she turned to Mrs. Carthew, saying,
as she embraced her:

'A happy bride's kiss should bring some good fortune.' And looking down
from her place on the top of the coach:

'Adieu, dear Mrs. Carthew. A day of glory it is to-day.' She must
actually have had it in her sight as a day of glory: and it was a day of
the clouds off our rainy quarter, similar in every way to the day of her
stepping on English soil and saying: 'It is a dark land.' For the heart
is truly declared to be our colourist. A day having the gale in its
breast, sweeping the whole country and bending the trees for the twigs to
hiss like spray of the billows around our island, was a day of golden
splendour to the young bride of the Earl of Fleetwood, though he scarcely
addressed one syllable to her, and they sat side by side all but dumb, he
like a coachman driving an unknown lady fare, on a morning after a night
when his wife's tongue may have soured him for the sex.




CHAPTER XIV

A PENDANT OF THE FOREGOING

Mention has been omitted or forgotten by the worthy Dame, in her vagrant
fowl's treatment of a story she cannot incubate, will not relinquish, and
may ultimately addle, that the bridegroom, after walking with a
disengaged arm from the little village church at Croridge to his coach
and four at the cross of the roads to Lekkatts and the lowland, abruptly,
and as one pursuing a deferential line of conduct he had prescribed to
himself, asked his bride, what seat she would prefer.

He shouted: 'Ives!'

A person inside the coach appeared to be effectually roused.

The glass of the window dropped. The head of a man emerged. It was the
head of one of the bargefaced men of the British Isles, broad, and
battered flattish, with sentinel eyes.

In an instant the heavy-headed but not ill-looking fellow was nimble and
jumped from the coach.

'Napping, my lord,' he said.

Heavy though the look of him might be, his feet were light; they flipped
a bar of a hornpipe at a touch of the ground. Perhaps they were allowed
to go with their instinct for the dance, that his master should have a
sample of his wakefulness. He quenched a smirk and stood to take orders;
clad in a flat blue cap, a brown overcoat, and knee-breeches, as the
temporary bustle of his legs had revealed.

Fleet-wood heard the young lady say: 'I would choose, if you please, to
sit beside you.'

He gave a nod of enforced assent, glancing at the vacated box.

The man inquired: 'A knee and a back for the lady to mount up, my lord?'

'In!' was the smart command to him; and he popped in with the agility of
his popping out.

Then Carinthia made reverence to the grey lean figure of her uncle and
kissed Mrs. Carthew. She needed no help to mount the coach. Fleetwood's
arm was rigidly extended, and he did not visibly wince when this foreign
girl sprang to the first hand-grip on the coach and said: 'No, my
husband, I can do it'; unaided,' was implied.

Her stride from the axle of the wheel to the step higher would have been
a graceful spectacle on Alpine crags.

Fleetwood swallowed that, too, though it conjured up a mocking
recollection of the Baden woods, and an astonished wild donkey preparing
himself for his harness. A sour relish of the irony in his present
position sharpened him to devilish enjoyment of it, as the finest form of
loathing: on the principle that if we find ourselves consigned to the
nether halls, we do well to dance drunkenly. He had cried for
Romance--here it was!

He raised his hat to Mrs. Carthew and to Lord Levellier. Previous to the
ceremony, the two noblemen had interchanged the short speech of mannered
duellists punctiliously courteous in the opening act. Their civility was
maintained at the termination of the deadly work. The old lord's bosom
thanked the young one for not requiring entertainment and a repast; the
young lord's thanked the old one for a strict military demeanour at an
execution and the abstaining from any nonsensical talk over the affair.

A couple of liveried grooms at the horses' heads ran and sprang to the
hinder seats as soon as their master had taken the reins. He sounded the
whip caressingly: off those pretty trotters went.

Mrs. Carthew watched them, waving to the bride. She was on the present
occasion less than usually an acute or a reflective observer, owing to
her admiration of lordly state and masculine commandership; and her
thought was: 'She has indeed made a brilliant marriage!'

The lady thought it, notwithstanding an eccentricity in the wedding
ceremony, such as could not but be noticeable. But very wealthy noblemen
were commonly, perhaps necessarily, eccentric, for thus they proved
themselves egregious, which the world expected them to be.

Lord Levellier sounded loud eulogies of the illustrious driver's team.
His meditation, as he subsequently stated to Chillon, was upon his
vanquished antagonist's dexterity, in so conducting matters, that he had
to be taken at once, with naught of the customary preface and apology for
taking to himself the young lady, of which a handsome settlement, is the
memorial.

We have to suppose, that the curious occupant of the coach inside aroused
no curiosity in the pair of absorbed observers.

Speculations regarding the chances of a fall of rain followed the coach
until it sank and the backs of the two liveried grooms closed the chapter
of the wedding, introductory to the honeymoon at Esslemont, seven miles
distant by road, to the right of Lekkatts. It was out of sight that the
coach turned to the left, Northwestward.




CHAPTER XV

OPENING STAGE OF THE HONEYMOON

A famous maxim in the book of the Old Buccaneer, treating of PRECAUTION,
as 'The brave man's clean conscience,' with sound counsel to the
adventurous, has it:--

'Then you sail away into the tornado, happy as a sealed bottle of ripe
wine.'

It should mean, that brave men entering the jaws of hurricanes are found
to have cheerful hearts in them when they know they have done their best.
But, touching the picture of happiness, conceive the bounteous Bacchic
spirit in the devoutness of a Sophocles, and you find comparison
neighbour closely between the sealed wine-flask and the bride, who is
being driven by her husband to the nest of the unknown on her marriage
morn.

Seated beside him, with bosom at heave and shut mouth, in a strange land,
travelling cloud-like, rushing like the shower-cloud to the vale, this
Carinthia, suddenly wedded, passionately grateful for humbleness exalted,
virginly sensible of treasures of love to give, resembled the inanimate
and most inspiring, was mindless and inexpressive, past memory, beyond
the hopes, a thing of the thrilled blood and skylark air, since she laid
her hand in this young man's. His not speaking to her was accepted. Her
blood rather than recollection revived their exchanges during the dance
at Baden, for assurance that their likings were one, their aims
rapturously one; that he was she, she he, the two hearts making one soul.

Could she give as much as he? It was hardly asked. If we feel we can give
our breath of life, the strength of the feeling fully answers. It bubbles
perpetually from the depth like a well-spring in tumult. Two hearts that
make one soul do not separately count their gifts.

For the rest, her hunger to admire disposed her to an absorbing sentience
of his acts; the trifles, gestures, manner of this and that; which were
seized as they flew, and swiftly assimilated to stamp his personality.
Driving was the piece of skill she could not do. Her husband's mastery of
the reins endowed him with the beauty of those harmonious trotters he
guided and kept to their pace; and the humming rush of the pace, the
smooth torrent of the brown heath-knolls and reddish pits and hedge-lines
and grass-flats and copses pouring the counter-way of her advance,
belonged to his wizardry. The bearing of her onward was her abandonment
to him. Delicious as mountain air, the wind sang; it had a song of many
voices. Quite as much as on the mountains, there was the keen, the
blissful, nerve-knotting catch of the presence of danger in the steep
descents, taken as if swallowed, without swerve or check. She was in her
husband's hands. At times, at the pitch of a rapid shelving, that was
like a fall, her heart went down; and at the next throb exalted before it
rose, not reasoning why;--her confidence was in him; she was his comrade
whatever chanced. Up over the mountain-peaks she had known edged moments,
little heeded in their passage, when life is poised as a crystal pitcher
on the head, in peril of a step. Then she had been dependent on herself.
Now she had the joy of trusting to her husband.

His hard leftward eye had view of her askant, if he cared to see how she
bore the trial; and so relentlessly did he take the slopes, that the man
inside pushed out an inquiring pate, the two grooms tightened arms across
their chests. Her face was calmly set, wakeful, but unwrinkled: the
creature did not count among timid girls--or among civilized. She had got
what she wanted from her madman--mad in his impulses, mad in his reading
of honour. She was the sister of Henrietta's husband. Henrietta bore the
name she had quitted. Could madness go beyond the marrying of the
creature? He chafed at her containment, at her courage, her silence, her
withholding the brazen or the fawnish look-up, either of which he would
have hated.

He, however, was dragged to look down. Neither Gorgon nor Venus, nor a
mingling of them, she had the chasm of the face, recalling the face of
his bondage, seen first that night at Baden. It recalled and it was not
the face; it was the skull of the face, or the flesh of the spirit.
Occasionally she looked, for a twinkle or two, the creature or vision she
had been, as if to mock by reminding him. She was the abhorred delusion,
who captured him by his nerves, ensnared his word--the doing of a foul
witch. How had it leapt from his mouth? She must have worked for it. The
word spoken--she must have known it--he was bound, or the detested
Henrietta would have said: Not even true to his word!

To see her now, this girl, insisting to share his name, for a slip of his
tongue, despite the warning sent her through her uncle, had that face
much as a leaden winter landscape pretends to be the country radiant in
colour. She belonged to the order of the variable animals--a woman
indeed!--womanish enough in that. There are men who love women--the idea
of woman. Woman is their shepherdess of sheep. He loved freedom, loathed
the subjection of a partnership; could undergo it only in adoration of an
ineffable splendour. He had stepped to the altar fancying she might keep
to her part of the contract by appearing the miracle that subdued him.
Seen by light of day, this bitter object beside him was a witch without
her spells; that is, the skeleton of the seductive, ghastliest among
horrors and ironies. Let her have the credit of doing her work thoroughly
before the exposure. She had done it. She might have helped--such was the
stipulation of his mad freak in consenting to the bondage--yes, she might
have helped to soften the sting of his wound. She was beside him bearing
his name, for the perpetual pouring of an acid on the wound that vile
Henrietta--poisoned honey of a girl!--had dealt.

He glanced down at his possession:--heaven and the yawning pit were the
contrast! Poisoned honey is after all honey while you eat it. Here there
was nothing but a rocky bowl of emptiness. And who was she? She was the
sister of Henrietta's husband. He was expected to embrace the sister of
Henrietta's husband. Those two were on their bridal tour.

This creature was also the daughter of an ancient impostor and desperado
called the Old Buccaneer; a distinguished member of the family of the
Lincolnshire Kirbys, boasting a present representative grimly acquitted,
men said, on a trial for murder. An eminent alliance! Society considered
the Earl of Fleetwood wildish, though he could manage his affairs. He and
his lawyers had them under strict control. How of himself? The prize of
the English marriage market had taken to his bosom for his winsome bride
the daughter of the Old Buccaneer. He was to mix his blood with the blood
of the Lincolnshire Kirbys, lying pallid under the hesitating acquittal
of a divided jury.

How had he come to this pass, which swung him round to think almost
regretfully of the scorned multitude of fair besiegers in the market,
some of whom had their unpoetic charms?

He was renowned and unrivalled as the man of stainless honour: the one
living man of his word. He had never broken it--never would. There was
his distinction among the herd. In that, a man is princely above princes.
The nobility of Edward Russett, Earl of Fleetwood, surpassed the nobility
of common nobles. But, by all that is holy, he pays for his distinction.

The creature beside him is a franked issue of her old pirate of a father
in one respect--nothing frightens her. There she sits; not a screw of her
brows or her lips; and the coach rocked, they were sharp on a spill
midway of the last descent. It rocks again. She thinks it scarce worth
while to look up to reassure him. She is looking over the country.

'Have you been used to driving?' he said.

She replied: 'No, it is new to me on a coach.'

Carinthia felt at once how wild the wish or half expectation that he
would resume the glowing communion of the night which had plighted them.

She did not this time say 'my husband,' still it flicked a whip at his
ears.

She had made it more offensive, by so richly toning the official title
just won from him as to ring it on the nerves; one had to block it or be
invaded. An anticipation that it would certainly recur haunted every
opening of her mouth.

Now that it did not, he felt the gap, relieved, and yet pricked to
imagine a mimicry of her tones, for the odd foreignness of the word and
the sound. She had a voice of her own besides her courage. At the altar,
her responses had their music. No wonder: the day was hers. 'My husband'
was a manner of saying 'my fish.'

He, spoke very civilly. 'Oblige me by telling me what name you are
accustomed to answer to.'

She seemed unaware of an Arctic husband, and replied: 'My father called
me Carin--short for Carinthia. My mother called me Janey; my second name
is Jane. My brother Chillon says both. Henrietta calls me Janey.'

The creature appeared dead flesh to goads. But the name of her
sister-in-law on her lips returned the stroke neatly. She spared him one
whip, to cut him with another.

'You have not informed me which of these names you prefer.'

'Oh, my husband, it is as you shall please.'

Fleetwood smartened the trot of his team, and there was a to-do with the
rakish leaders.

Fairies of a malignant humour in former days used to punish the
unhappiest of the naughty men who were not favourites, by suddenly
planting a hump on their backs. Off the bedevilled wretches pranced, and
they kicked, they snorted, whinnied, rolled, galloped, outflying the
wind, but not the dismal rider. Marriage is our incubus now. No
explanation is offered of why we are afflicted; we have simply offended,
or some one absent has offended, and we are handy. The spiteful hag of
power ties a wife to us; perhaps for the reason, that we behaved in the
spirit of a better time by being chivalrously honourable. Wives are just
as inexplicable curses, just as ineradicable and astonishing as humps
imposed on shapely backs.

Fleetwood lashed his horses until Carinthia's low cry of entreaty rose to
surprise. That stung him.

'Leave the coachman to his devices: we have an appointment and must keep
it,' he said.

'They go so willingly.'

'Good beasts, in their way.'

'I do not like the whip.'

'I have the same objection.'

They were on the level of the vale, going along a road between farms and
mansions, meadows and gardenplots and park-palings. A strong warm wind
drove the pack of clouds over the tree-tops and charged at the branches.
English scenery, animating air; a rouse to the blood and the mind.
Carinthia did not ask for hues. She had come to love of the dark land
with the warm lifting wind, the big trees and the hedges, and the stately
houses, and people requiring to be studied, who mean well and are warm
somewhere below, as chimneypots are, though they are so stiff.

English people dislike endearments, she had found. It might be that her
husband disliked any show of fondness. He would have to be studied very
much. He was not like others, as Henrietta had warned her. From thinking
of him fervidly, she was already past the marvel of the thought that she
called him husband. At the same time, a curious intimation, gathered she
knew not whence, of the word 'husband' on a young wife's lips as being a
foreign sound in England, advised her to withhold it. His behaviour was
instructing her.

'Are you weather-wise?--able to tell when the clouds will hold off or
pelt,' he said, to be very civil to a neighbour.

She collected her understanding, apparently; treating a conversational
run of the tongue as a question to be pondered; and the horses paid for
it. Ordinarily he was gentle with his beasts. He lashed at her in his
heart for perverting the humanest of men.

'Father was,' she replied.

'Oh! I have heard of him.'

Her face lightened. 'Father had a great name in England.'

'The Old Buccaneer, I think.'

'I do not know. He was a seaman of the navy, like Admiral Fakenham is.
Weather at sea, weather on the mountains, he could foretell it always. He
wrote a book; I have a copy you will read. It is a book of Maxims. He
often speaks of the weather. English weather and women, he says. But not
my mother. My mother he stood aside by herself--pas capricieuse du tout!
Because she would be out in the weather and brave the weather. She rode,
she swam, best of any woman. If she could have known you, what pleasure
for me! Mother learnt to read mountain weather from father. I did it too.
But sometimes on the high fields' upper snows it is very surprising.
Father has been caught. Here the cloud is down near the earth and the
strong wind keeps the rain from falling. How long the wind will blow I
cannot guess. But you love the mountains. We spoke . . . And mountains'
adventures we both love. I will talk French if you like, for, I think,
German you do not speak. I may speak English better than French; but I am
afraid of my English with you.'

'Dear me!' quoth Fleetwood, and he murmured politely and cursorily,
attentive to his coachman business. She had a voice that clove the noise
of the wheels, and she had a desire to talk--that was evident. Talk of
her father set her prattling. It became clear also to his not dishonest,
his impressionable mind, that her baby English might be natural. Or she
was mildly playing on it, to give herself an air.

He had no remembrance of such baby English at Baden. There, however, she
was in a state of enthusiasm--the sort of illuminated transparency they
show at the end of fireworks. Mention of her old scapegrace of a father
lit her up again. The girl there and the girl here were no doubt the
same. It could not be said that she had duped him; he had done it for
himself--acted on by a particular agency. This creature had not the
capacity to dupe. He had armed a bluntwitted young woman with his idiocy,
and she had dealt the stroke; different in scarce a degree by nature from
other young women of prey.

But her look at times, and now and then her voice, gave sign that she
counted on befooling him as well, to reconcile him to his bondage. The
calculation was excessive. No woman had done it yet. Idiocy plunged him
the step which reawakened understanding; and to keep his whole mind alert
on guard against any sort of satisfaction with his bargain, he frankly
referred to the cause. Not female arts, but nature's impulses, it was his
passion for the wondrous in the look of a woman's face, the new morning
of the idea of women in the look, and the peep into imaginary novel
character, did the trick of enslaving him. Call it idiocy. Such it was.
Once acknowledged, it is not likely to recur. An implacable reason sits
in its place, with a keen blade for efforts to carry the imposture
further afield or make it agreeable. Yet, after giving his word to Lord
Levellier, he had prodded himself to think the burden of this wild young
woman might be absurdly tolerable and a laugh at the world.

A solicitude for the animal was marked by his inquiry 'You are not hungry
yet?'

'Oh no, not yet,' said she, oddly enlivened.

They had a hamper and were independent of stoppages for provision, he
informed her. What more delightful? cried her look, seeing the first
mid-day's rest and meal with Chillon on the walk over the mountain from
their empty home.

She could get up enthusiasm for a stocked hamper! And when told of some
business that drew him to a meadow they were nearing, she said she would
be glad to help, if she could. 'I learn quickly, I know.'

His head acquiesced. The daughter of the Old Buccaneer might learn the
business quickly, perhaps; a singularly cutting smile was on his tight
lips, in memory of a desire he had as a boy to join hands with an
Amazonian damsel and be out over the world for adventures, comrade and
bride as one. Here the creature sat. Life is the burlesque of young
dreams; or they precipitate us on the roar and grin of a recognized beast
world.

The devil possessing him gnawed so furiously that a partial mitigation of
the pain was afforded by sight of waving hats on a hill-rise of the road.
He flourished his whip. The hats continued at wind-mill work. It
signified brisk news to him, and prospect of glee to propitiate any
number of devils.

'You will want a maid to attend on you,' he said.

She replied: 'I am not used to attendance on me. Henrietta's maid would
help. I did not want her. I had no maid at home. I can do for myself.
Father and mother liked me to be very independent.'

He supposed he would have to hear her spelling her words out next.

The hill-top was gained; twenty paces of pretty trotting brought up the
coach beside an inn porch, in the style of the finish dear to whips, and
even imperative upon them, if they love their art. Two gentlemen stood in
the road, and a young woman at the inn door; a dark-haired girl of an
anxious countenance. Her puckers vanished at some signal from inside the
coach.

'All right, Madge; nothing to fear,' Fleetwood called to her, and she
curtseyed.

He alighted, saying to her, before he spoke to his friends: 'I've brought
him safe; had him under my eye the last four and twenty hours. He'll do
the trick to-day. You don't bet?'

'Oh! my lord, no.'

'Help the lady down. Out with you, Ines!'

The light-legged barge-faced man touched ground capering. He was greeted
'Kit' by the pair of gentlemen, who shook hands with him, after he had
faintly simulated the challenge to a jig with Madge. She flounced from
him, holding her arms up to the lady. Landlord, landlady, and hostler
besought the lady to stay for the fixing of a ladder. Carinthia stepped,
leaped, and entered the inn, Fleetwood remarking:

'We are very independent, Chummy Potts.'

'Cordy bally, by Jove!' Potts cried. But the moment after this disengaged
ejaculation, he was taken with a bewilderment. 'At the Opera?' he
questioned of his perplexity.

'No, sir, not at the Opera,' Fleetwood rejoined. 'The lady's last public
appearance was at the altar.'

'Sort of a suspicion of having seen her somewhere. Left her husband
behind, has she?'

'You see: she has gone in.'

The scoring of a proposition of Euclid on the forehead of Potts amused
him and the other gentleman, who was hailed 'Mallard!' and cared nothing
for problems involving the female of man when such work was to the fore
as the pugilistic encounter of the Earl of Fleetwood's chosen Kit Ines,
with Lord Brailstone's unbeaten and well-backed Ben Todds.

Ines had done pretty things from the age of seventeen to his twenty-third
year. Remarkably clever things they were, to be called great in the
annals of the Ring. The point, however, was, that the pockets of his
backers had seriously felt his latest fight. He received a dog's licking
at the hands of Lummy Phelps, his inferior in skill, fighting two to one
of the odds; and all because of his fatal addiction to the breaking of
his trainer's imposed fast in liquids on, the night before the battle.
Right through his training, up to that hour, the rascal was devout; the
majority's money rattled all on the snug safe side. And how did he get at
the bottle? His trainers never could say. But what made him turn himself
into a headlong ass, when he had only to wait a night to sit among
friends and worshippers drinking off his tumbler upon tumbler with the
honours? It was past his wits to explain. Endurance of his privation had
snapped in him; or else, which is more likely, this Genius of the Ring
was tempted by his genius on the summit of his perfected powers to
believe the battle his own, and celebrate it, as became a victor
despising the drubbed antagonist.

In any case, he drank, and a minor man gave him the dog's licking.. 'Went
into it puffy, came out of it bunged,' the chronicle resounding over
England ran. Old England read of an 'eyeless carcase' heroically stepping
up to time for three rounds of mashing punishment. If he had won the day
after all, the country would have been electrified. It sympathized on the
side of his backers too much to do more than nod a short approval of his
fortitude. To sink with flag flying is next to sinking the enemy. There
was talk of a girl present at the fight, and of how she received the
eyeless, almost faceless, carcase of her sweetheart Kit, and carried him
away in a little donkey-cart, comfortably cushioned to meet disaster.
This petty incident drew the attention of the Earl of Fleetwood, then
beginning to be known as the diamond of uncounted facets, patron of the
pick of all departments of manly activity in England.

The devotion of the girl Madge to her sweetheart was really a fine story.
Fleetwood touched on it to Mr. Mallard, speaking of it like the gentleman
he could be, while Chumley Potts wagged impatient acquiescence in a
romantic episode of the Ring, that kept the talk from the hotter theme.

'Money's Bank of England to-day, you think?' he interposed, and had his
answer after Mallard had said:

'The girl 's rather good-looking, too.'

'You may double your bets, Chummy. I had the fellow to his tea at my
dinner-table yesterday evening; locked him in his bedroom, and had him up
and out for a morning spin at six. His trainer, Flipper's on the field,
drove from Esslemont at nine, confident as trumps.'

'Deuce of a good-looking girl,' Potts could now afford to say; and he
sang out: 'Feel fit, lucky dog?'

'Concert pitch!' was the declaration of Kit Ives.

'How about Lord Brailstone's man?'

'Female partner in a quadrille, sir.'

'Ah!' Potts doated on his limbs with a butcher's eye for prize joints.

'Cock-sure has crowed low by sunset,' Mallard observed.

Fleetwood offered him to take his bets.

'You're heavy on it with Brailstone?' said Mallard.

'Three thousand.'

'I'd back you for your luck blindfold.'

A ruffle of sourness shot over the features of the earl, and was noticed
by both eager betters, who exchanged a glance.

Potts inspected his watch, and said half aloud: 'Liver, ten to one! That
never meant bad luck--except bad to act on. We slept here last night, you
know. It 's a mile and a quarter from the Royal Sovereign to the field of
glory. Pretty well time to start. Brailstone has a drive of a couple of
miles. Coaches from London down by this time. Abrane's dead on Ben Todds,
any odds. Poor old Braney! "Steady man, Todds." Backs him because he's a
"respectable citizen,"--don't drink. A prize-fighter total abstainer has
no spurts. Old Braney's branded for the losing side. You might bet
against Braney blindfold, Mallard. How long shall you take to polish him
off, Kit Ines?'

The opponent of Ben Todds calculated.

'Well, sir, steady Benny ought to be satisfied with his dose in, say,
about forty minutes. Maybe he won't own to it before an hour and ten.
He's got a proud English stomach.'

'Shall we be late?' Potts asked.

'Jump in,' Fleetwood said to his man. 'We may be five minutes after time,
Chummy. I had a longer drive, and had to get married on the way, and--ah,
here they are!'

'Lady coming?'

'I fancy she sticks to the coach; I don't know her tastes. Madge must see
her through it, that's positive.'

Potts deferred his astonishment at the things he was hearing and seeing,
which were only Fleetwood's riddles. The fight and the bets rang every
other matter out of his head. He beheld the lady, who had come down from
the coach like a columbine, mount it like Bean-stalk Jack. Madge was not
half so clever, and required a hand at her elbow.

After, giving hurried directions to Rundles, the landlord of the Royal
Sovereign, Fleetwood took the reins, and all three gentlemen touched hats
to the curtseying figure of Mrs. Rundles.

'You have heard, I dare say--it's an English scene,' he spoke, partly
turning his face, to Carinthia; 'particularly select to-day. Their
Majesties might look on, as the Caesars did in Rome. Pity we can't
persuade them. They ought to set the fashion. Here we have the English
people at their grandest, in prime condition, if they were not drunk
overnight; and dogged, perfectly awake, magnanimous, all for fair play;
fine fellows, upon my word. A little blood, of course.'

But the daughter of the Old Buccaneer would have inherited a tenderness
for the sight of blood. She should make a natural Lady Patroness of
England's National Sports. We might turn her to that purpose; wander over
England with a tail of shouting riff-raft; have exhibitions, join in
them, display our accomplishments; issue challenges to fence, shoot,
walk, run, box, in time: the creature has muscle. It's one way of
crowning a freak; we follow the direction, since the deed done can't be
undone; and a precious poetical life, too! You may get as royally
intoxicated on swipes as on choice wine; win a name for yourself as the
husband of such a wife; a name in sporting journals and shilling
biographies: quite a revival of the Peerage they have begun to rail at!

'I would not wish to leave you,' said Carinthia.

'You have chosen,' said Fleetwood.




CHAPTER XVI

IN WHICH THE BRIDE FROM FOREIGN PARTS IS GIVEN A TASTE OF OLD ENGLAND

Cheers at an open gate of a field saluted the familiar scarlet of the
Earl of Fleetwood's coach in Kentish land. They were chorister cheers,
the spontaneous ringing out of English country hearts in homage to the
nobleman who brightened the heaviness of life on English land with a
spectacle of the noble art distinguishing their fathers. He drove along
over muffling turf; ploughboys and blue butcher-boys, and smocked old
men, with an approach to a hundred-weight on their heels, at the trot to
right and left; all hoping for an occasional sight of the jewel called
Kitty, that he carried inside. Kitty was there.

Kitty's eyes are shut. Think of that: cradled innocence and angels'
dreams and the whole of the hymn just before ding-dong-bang on noses and
jaws! That means confidence? Looks like it. But Kitty's not asleep you
try him. He's only quiet because he has got to undergo great exertion.
Last fight he was knocked out of time, because he went into it honest
drunk, they tell. And the earl took him up, to give him a chance of
recovering his good name, and that's Christian. But the earl, he knows a
man as well as a horse. He's one to follow. Go to a fayte down at
Esslemont, you won't forget your day. See there, he's brought a lady on
the top o' the coach. That seems for to signify he don't expect it's
going to be much of a bloody business. But there's no accounting. Anyhow,
Broadfield 'll have a name in the papers for Sunday reading. In comes t'
other lord's coach. They've timed it together closes they have.

They were pronounced to be both the right sort of noblemen for the
country. Lord Brailstone's blue coach rattled through an eastern gate to
the corner of the thirty-acre meadow, where Lord Fleetwood had drawn up,
a toss from the ring. The meeting of the blue and scarlet coaches drew
forth Old England's thunders; and when the costly treasures contained in
them popped out heads, the moment was delirious. Kit Ines came after his
head on a bound. Ben Todds was ostentatiously deliberate: his party said
he was no dancing-master. He stepped out, grave as a barge emerging from
a lock, though alive to the hurrahs of supporters and punctilious in
returning the formal portion of his rival's too roguish nod. Their look
was sharp into the eyes, just an instant.

Brailstone and Fleetwood jumped to the grass and met, talking and
laughing, precise upon points of business, otherwise cordial:
plenipotentiaries of great powers, whom they have set in motion and bind
to the ceremonial opening steps, according to the rules of civilized
warfare. They had a short colloquy with newspaper reporters;--an
absolutely fair, square, upright fight of Britons was to be chronicled.
Captain Abrane, a tower in the crowd, registered bets whenever he could.
Curricles, gigs, carts, pony-traps, boys on ponies, a swarm on legs,
flowed to the central point and huddled there.

Was either champion born in Kent? An audacious boy proclaimed Kit Ines a
man of Kent. Why, of course he was! and that was why the Earl of
Fleetwood backed our cocky Kitty, and means to land him on the top of his
profession. Ben Todds was shuffled aside; as one of their Londoners,
destitute of county savour.

All very well, but have a spy at Benny Todds. Who looks the square man?
And hear what that big gentleman of the other lord's party says. A
gentleman of his height and weight has a right to his opinion. He 's dead
against Kit Ines: it's fists, not feet, he says, 'll do it to-day;
stamina, he says. Benny has got the stamina.

Todds' possession of the stamina, and the grand voice of Captain Abrane,
and the Father Christmas, roast-beef-of-Old England face of the umpire
declared to be on the side of Lord Brailstone's colour blue, darkened the
star of Kit Ines till a characteristic piece of behaviour was espied. He
dashed his cap into the ring and followed it, with the lightest of vaults
across the ropes. There he was, the first in the ring: and that stands
for promise of first blow, first blood, first flat knock-down, and last
to cry for quarter. His pair of seconds were soon after him. Fleetwood
mounted his box.

'Is it to fight?' said Carinthia.

'To see which is the master.'

'They fight to see?'

'Generally until one or the other can't see. You are not obliged to see
it; you can be driven away if you wish.'

'I will be here, if you are here.'

'You choose it.'

Fleetwood leaned over to Chumley Potts on the turf. 'Abrane's ruining
himself.'

Potts frankly hoped that his friend might be doing so. 'Todds is jolly
well backed. He's in prime condition. He's the favourite of the knowing
ones.'

'You wouldn't have the odds, if he weren't.'

'No; but the odds are like ten per cent.: they conjure the gale, and be
hanged,' said Potts; he swore at his betting mania, which destroyed the
pleasure of the show he loved.

All in the ring were shaking hands. Shots of a desire to question and
comment sped through Carinthia's veins and hurt her. She had gathered
that she spoke foolishly to her husband's ear, so she kept her mouth
shut, though the unanswered of her inquisitive ignorance in the strange
land pricked painfully at her bosom. She heard the girl behind her say:
'Our colours!' when the colour scarlet unwound with Lord Brailstone's
blue was tied to the stake: and her husband nodded; he smiled; he liked
to hear the girl.

Potts climbed up, crying: 'Toilets complete! Now for paws out, and then
at it, my hearties!'

Choice of corners under the leaden low cloud counted for little. A signal
was given; a man outside the ring eyed a watch, raised a hand; the two
umpires were on foot in their places; the pair of opposing seconds
hurried out cheery or bolt-business words to their men; and the champions
advanced to the scratch. Todds first, by the courtesy of Ines, whose
decorous control of his legs at a weighty moment was rightly read by his
party.

Their hands grasped firmly: thereupon becoming fists of a hostile couple
in position. And simply to learn which of us two is the better man! Or in
other words, with four simple fists to compass a patent fact and stand it
on the historic pedestal, with a little red writing underneath: you never
can patent a fact without it. But mark the differences of this kind of
contention from all other--especially the Parliamentary: this is
positive, it has a beginning and an end; and it is good-humoured from
beginning to end; trial of skill, trial of stamina; Nature and Art; Old
English; which made us what we are; and no rancours, no vows of
vengeance; the beaten man of the two bowing to the bit of history he has
helped to make.

Kittites had need to be confident in the skill of their lither lad. His
facer looked granite. Fronting that mass, Kit you might--not to lash
about for comparisons--call a bundle of bamboo. Ay, but well knitted,
springy, alive every inch of him; crafty, too, as you will soon bear
witness. He knows he has got his task, and he's the man to do it.

There was wary sparring, and mirrors watched them.

'Bigger fellow: but have no fear,' the earl said over his shoulder to
Madge.

She said in return: 'Oh, I don't know, I'm praying.'

Kit was now on his toes, all himself, like one who has found the key. He
feinted. Quick as lightning, he landed a bolt on Ben's jib, just at the
toll-bar of the bridge, between the eyes, and was off, out of reach,
elastic; Ben's counter fell short by a couple of inches. Cheers for first
blow.

The earl clucked to Madge. Her gaze at the ring was a sullen intensity.

Will you believe it?--Ben received a second spanking cracker on the
spectacles-seat: neat indeed; and, poor payment for the compliment, he
managed to dig a drive at the ribs. As much of that game as may suit you,
sturdy Ben! But hear the shout, and behold!

First blood to Kit Ines! That tell-tale nose of old Ben's has mounted the
Earl of Fleetwood's colours, and all his party are looking
Brailstone-blue.

'So far!' said Fleetwood. His grooms took an indication: the hamper was
unfastened; sandwiches were handed. Carinthia held one; she tried to
nibble, in obedience to her husband's example. Madge refused a bite of
food.

Hearing Carinthia say to her: 'I hope he will not be beaten, I hope, I
hope,' she made answer: 'You are very good, Miss'; and the young lady
flushed.

Gentlemen below were talking up to the earl. A Kentish squire of an
estate neighbouring Esslemont introduced a Welsh squire he had driven to
see the fun, by the name of Mr. Owain Wythan, a neighbour of the earl's
down in Wales. Refreshments were offered. Carinthia submissively sipped
the sparkling wine, which stings the lips when they are indisposed to it.
The voice of the girl Madge rang on the tightened chords of her breast.
Madge had said she was praying: and to pray was all that could be done by
two women. Her husband could laugh loudly with Mr. Potts and the other
gentlemen and the strangers. He was quite sure the man he supported would
win; he might have means of knowing. Carinthia clung to his bare words,
for the sake of the girl.

A roaring peal went up from the circle of combat. Kit had it this time.
Attacking Ben's peepers, he was bent on defending his own, and he caught
a bodyblow that sent him hopping back to his pair of seconds, five clear
hops to the rear, like a smashed surge-wave off the rock. He was
respectful for the remainder of the round. But hammering at the system he
had formed, in the very next round he dropped from a tremendous
repetition of the blow, and lay flat as a turbot. The bets against him
had simultaneously a see-saw rise.

'Bellows, he appears to have none,' was the comment of Chumley Potts.

'Now for training, Chummy!' said Lord Fleetwood.

'Chummy!' signifying a crow over Potts, rang out of the hollows of
Captain Abrane on Lord Brailstone's coach.

Carinthia put a hand behind her to Madge. It was grasped, in gratitude
for sympathy or in feminine politeness. The girl murmured: 'I've seen
worse.' She was not speaking to ears.

Lord Fleetwood sat watch in hand. 'Up,' he said; and, as if hearing him,
Kit rose from the ministering second's knee. He walked stiffly, squared
after the fashion of a man taught caution. Ben made play. They rounded
the ring, giving and taking. Ben rushed, and had an emollient; spouted
again and was corked; again, and received a neat red-waxen stopper. He
would not be denied at Kit's door, found him at home and hugged him. Kit
got himself to grass, after a spell of heavy fibbing, Ben's game.

It did him no great harm; it might be taken for an enlivener; he was dead
on his favourite spot the ensuing round, played postman on it. So
cleverly, easily, dancingly did he perform the double knock and the
retreat, that Chumley Potts was moved to forget his wagers and exclaim:
'Racket-ball, by Jove!'

'If he doesn't let the fellow fib the wind out of him,' Mallard addressed
his own crab eyeballs.

Lord Fleetwood heard and said coolly: 'Tightstrung. I kept him fasting
since he earned his breakfast. You don't wind an empty rascal fit for
action. A sword through the lungs won't kill when there's no air in
them.'

That was printed in the 'Few Words before the Encounter', in the Book Of
MAXIMS FOR MEN. Carinthia, hearing everything her husband uttered, burned
to remind him of the similarity between his opinions and her father's.

She was learning, that for some reason, allusions to her father were not
acceptable. She squeezed the hand of Madge, and felt a pressure, like a
scream, telling her the girl's heart was with the fight beneath them. She
thought it natural for her. She wished she could continue looking as
intently. She looked because her husband looked. The dark hills and
clouds curtaining the run of the stretch of fields relieved her sight.

The clouds went their way; the hills were solid, but like a blue smoke;
the scene here made them very distant and strange. Those two men were
still hitting, not hating one another; only to gratify a number of
unintelligible people and win a success. But the earth and sky seemed to
say, What is the glory? They were insensible to it, as they are not--they
are never insensible to noble grounds of strife. They bless the spot,
they light lamps on it; they put it into books of history, make it holy,
if the cause was a noble one or a good one.

Or supposing both those men loved the girl, who loved one of them! Then
would Carinthia be less reluctantly interested in their blows.

Her infant logic stumbled on for a reason while she repressed the torture
the scene was becoming, as though a reason could be found by her
submissive observation of it. And she was right in believing that a
reason for the scene must or should exist. Only, like other bewildered
instinctive believers, she could not summon the great universe or a
life's experience to unfold it. Her one consolation was in squeezing the
hand of the girl from time to time.

Not stealthily done, it was not objected to by the husband whose eye was
on all. But the persistence in doing it sank her from the benignity of
her station to the girl's level: it was conduct much too raw, and grated
on the deed of the man who had given her his name.

Madge pleased him better. She had the right to be excited, and she was
very little demonstrative. She had--well, in justice, the couple of them
had, only she had it more--the tone of the women who can be screwed to
witness a spill of blood, peculiarly catching to hear;--a tone of every
string in them snapped except the silver string. Catching to hear? It is
worth a stretching of them on the rack to hear that low buzz-hum of their
inner breast . . . By heaven! we have them at their best when they sing
that note.

His watch was near an hour of the contest, and Brailstone's man had
scored first knock-down blow, a particularly clean floorer. Thinking of
that, he was cheered by hearing Chummy Potts, whose opinions he despised,
cry out to Abrane:--

'Yeast to him!' For the face of Todds was visibly swelling to the ripest
of plums from Kit's deliveries.

Down he went. He had the sturdy legs which are no legs to a clean blow.
Odds were offered against him.

'Oh! pretty play with your right, Kit!' exclaimed Mallard, as Kit fetched
his man an ugly stroke on the round of the waist behind, and the crowd
sent up the name of the great organs affected: a sickener of a stroke, if
dealt soundly. It meant more than 4 showed. Kit was now for taking
liberties. Light as ever on his pins, he now and then varied his
attentions to the yeasty part, delivering a wakener in unexpected
quarters: masterly as the skilled cook's carving of a joint with hungry
guests for admirers.

'Eh, Madge?' the earl said.

She kept her sight fixed, replying: 'Yes, I think . . .' Carinthia joined
with her: 'I must believe it that he will: but will the other man, poor
man, submit? I entreat him to put away his pride. It is his--oh, poor
man!'

Ben was having it hot and fast on a torso physiognomy.

The voices of these alien women thrilled the fray and were a Bardic harp
to Lord Fleetwood.

He dropped a pleasant word on the heads in the curricle.

Mr. Owain Wythan looked up. 'Worthy of Theocritus. It's the Boxing Twin
and the Bembrycian giant. The style of each. To the letter!'

'Kit is assiduously fastening Ben's blinkers,' Potts remarked.

He explained to the incomprehensible lady he fancied he had somewhere
seen, that the battle might be known as near the finish by the behaviour
on board Lord Brailstone's coach.

'It's like Foreign Affairs and the Stock Exchange,' he said to the more
intelligent males. 'If I want to know exactly how the country stands, I
turn to the Money Article in the papers. That's a barometrical certainty.
No use inquiring abroad. Look at old Rufus Abrane. I see the state of the
fight on the old fellow's mug. He hasn't a bet left in him!'

'Captain Mountain--Rufus Mus!' cried Lord Fleetwood, and laughed at the
penetrative portrait Woodseer's epigram sketched; he had a desire for the
presence of the singular vagabond.

The Rufus Mus in the Captain Mountain exposed his view of the encounter,
by growing stiller, apparently growing smaller, without a squeak, like
the entrapped; and profoundly contemplative, after the style of the
absolutely detached, who foresee the fatal crash, and are calculating,
far ahead of events, the means for meeting their personal losses.

The close of the battle was on the visage of Rufus Abrane fifteen minutes
before that Elgin marble under red paint in the ring sat on the knee of a
succouring seconder, mopped, rubbed, dram-primed, puppy-peeping,
inconsolably comforted, preparatory to the resumption of the great-coat
he had so hopefully cast from his shoulders. Not downcast by any means.
Like an old Roman, the man of the sheer hulk with purple eyemounds found
his legs to do the manful thing, show that there was no bad blood, stand
equal to all forms. Ben Todds, if ever man in Old England, looked the
picture you might label 'Bellyful,' it was remarked. Kit Ines had an
appearance of springy readiness to lead off again. So they faced on the
opening step of their march into English History.

Vanquisher and vanquished shook hands, engaged in a parting rally of
good-humoured banter; the beaten man said his handsome word; the best man
capped it with a compliment to him. They drink of different cups to-day.
Both will drink of one cup in the day to come. But the day went too
clearly to crown the light and the tight and the right man of the two,
for moralizing to wag its tail at the end. Oldsters and youngsters agreed
to that. Science had done it: happy the backers of Science! Not one of
them alluded to the philosophical 'hundred years hence.' For when
England, thanks to a spirited pair of our young noblemen, has exhibited
one of her characteristic performances consummately, Philosophy is bidden
fly; she is a foreign bird.




CHAPTER XVII

RECORDS A SHADOW CONTEST CLOSE ON THE FOREGOING

Kit Ines cocked an eye at Madge, in the midst of the congratulations and
the paeans pumping his arms. As he had been little mauled, he could
present a face to her, expecting a wreath of smiles for the victor.

What are we to think of the contrarious young woman who, when he lay
beaten, drove him off the field and was all tenderness and devotion? She
bobbed her head, hardly more than a trifle pleased, one might say. Just
like females. They're riddles, not worth spelling. Then, drunk I'll get
to-night, my pretty dear! the man muttered, soured by her inopportune
staidness, as an opponent's bruisings could never have rendered him.

She smiled a lively beam in answer to the earl; 'Oh yes I 'm glad. It's
your doing, my lord.' Him it was that she thanked, and for the moment
prized most. The female riddle is hard to read, because it is compounded
of sensations, and they rouse and appeal to the similar cockatrices in
us, which either hiss back or coil upon themselves. She admired Kit Ines
for his valour: she hated that ruinous and besotting drink. It flung
skeletons of a married couple on the wall of the future. Nevertheless her
love had been all maternal to him when he lay chastised and disgraced on
account of his vice. Pity had done it. Pity not being stirred, her
admiration of the hero declared victorious, whose fortunes in uncertainty
had stopped the beating of her heart, was eclipsed by gratitude toward
his preserver, and a sentiment eclipsed becomes temporarily coldish,
against our wish and our efforts, in a way to astonish; making her think
that she cannot hold two sentiments at a time; when it is but the fact
that she is unable to keep the two equally warm.

Carinthia said to her: 'He is brave.'

'Oh yes, he's brave,' Madge assented.

Lord Brailstone, flourishing his whip, cried out: 'At Canleys to-night?'

The earl nodded: 'I shall be there.'

'You, too, Chummy?' came from Abrane.

'To see you dance,' Potts rejoined, and mumbled

'But will he dance! Old Braney's down on his luck; he's a specimen of a
fellow emptier and not lighter. And won't be till supper-time. But, I
say, Fleet, how the deuce?--funny sort of proceeding!--You haven't
introduced me.'

'The lady bears my name, Mr. Chumley Potts.'

With a bow to the lady's profile and a mention of a glimpse at Baden,
Potts ejaculated: 'It happened this morning?'

'You allude to the marriage. It happened this morning.'

'How do I get to Canleys?'

'I drive you. Another team from the Esslemont stables is waiting at the
Royal.'

'You stay at Canleys?'

'No.'

'No? Oh! Funny, upon my word. Though I don't know why not--except that
people . . .'

'Count your winnings, Chummy.'

Fleetwood remarked to his bride: 'Our friend has the habit of
soliloquizing in company. I forgot to tell you of an appointment of mine
at a place called Canleys, about twenty miles or more from here. I gave
my word, so I keep it. The landlady at the inn, Mrs. Rundles, motherly
kind of woman; she will be attentive. They don't cook badly, for an
English inn, I have heard. Madge here will act as your lady's-maid for
the time. You will find her serviceable; she's a bruiser's lass and
something above it. Ines informed me, Madge, you were going to friends of
yours at the Wells. You will stay at the Royal and wait on this lady, who
bears my name. You understand?--A girl I can trust for courage, if the
article is in request,' he resumed to his bride; and talked generally of
the inn and the management of it, and its favoured position outside the
village and contiguous to the river, upon which it subsisted.

Carinthia had heard. She was more than ever the stunned young woman she
had been since her mounting of the coach, between the village church and
Lekkatts.

She said not a word. Why should she? her object was won. Give her that,
and a woman's tongue will consent to rest. The dreaded weapon rest, also
when she is kept spinning by the whip. She gives out a pleasant hum, too.
Her complexion must be pronounced dull in repose. A bride on her travels
with an aspect of wet chalk, rather helps to scare mankind from marriage:
which may be good or bad; but she reflects a sicklier hue on the captured
Chessman calling her his own. Let her shine in privacy.

Fleetwood drew up at the Royal Sovereign, whereof the reigning monarch,
in blue uniform on the signboard, curtseyed to his equally windy
subjects; and a small congregation of the aged, and some cripples and
infants, greeted the patron of Old England's manfullest display, cheering
at news of the fight, brought them by many little runners.

'Your box has been conveyed to your room,' he said to his bride.

She bowed. This time she descended the coach by the aid of the ladder.

Ines, victorious in battle, had scant notice from his love. 'Yes, I 'm
glad,' and she passed him to follow her newly constituted mistress. His
pride was dashed, all the foam of the first draw on the top of him blown
off, as he figuratively explained the cause of his gloom to the earl. 'I
drink and I gets a licking--that girl nurses and cossets me. I don't
drink and I whops my man--she shows me her back. Ain't it encouragement,
my lord?'

'You ought to know them by this time, you dolt,' returned his patron, and
complimented him on his bearing in the fight. 'You shall have your two
hundred, and something will be added. Hold handy here till I mount. I
start in ten minutes.'

Whether to speak a polite adieu to the bride, whose absurd position she
had brought on her own head, was debated for half a minute. He considered
that the wet chalk-quarry of a beauty had at all events the merit of not
being a creature to make scenes. He went up to the sitting-room. If she
was not there, he would leave his excuses.

She was there, and seated; neither crying, nor smiling, nor pointedly
serious in any way, not conventionally at her ease either. And so clearly
was he impressed by her transparency in simplicity of expression, that he
took without a spurn at it the picture of a woman half drained of her
blood, veiling the wound. And a young woman, a stranger to suffering:
perhaps--as the creatures do looking for the usual flummery tenderness,
what they call happiness; wondering at the absence of it and the shifty
ghost of a husband she has got by floundering into the bog known as
Marriage. She would have it, and here she was!

He entered the situation and was possessed by the shivering delicacy of
it. Surface emotions were not seen on her. She might be a creature with a
soul. Here and there the thing has been found in women. It is priceless
when found, and she could not be acting. One might swear the creature had
no power to act.

She spoke without offence, the simplest of words, affected no
solicitudes, put on no gilt smiles, wore no reproaches: spoke to him as
if so it happened--he had necessarily a journey to perform. One could see
all the while big drops falling from the wound within. One could hear it
in her voice. Imagine a crack of the string at the bow's deep stress. Or
imagine the bow paralyzed at the moment of the deepest sounding. And yet
the voice did not waver. She had now the richness of tone carrying on a
music through silence.

Well, then, at least, he had not been the utterly duped fool he thought
himself since the consent was pledged to wed her.

More, she had beauty--of its kind. Or splendour or grandeur, was the term
for it. But it bore no name. None of her qualities--if they were
qualities--had a name. She stood with a dignity that the word did not
express. She endured meekly, when there was no meekness. Pain breathed
out of her, and not a sign of pain was visible. She had, under his
present observation of her, beauty, with the lines of her face breaking
in revolt from beauty--or requiring a superterrestrial illumination to
show the harmony. He, as he now saw, had erred grossly in supposing her
insensitive, and therefore slow of a woman's understanding. She drew the
breath of pain through the lips: red lips and well cut. Her brown eyes
were tearless, not alluring or beseeching or repelling; they did but
look, much like the skies opening high aloof on a wreck of storm. Her
reddish hair-chestnut, if you will--let fall a skein over one of the
rugged brows, and softened the ruggedness by making it wilder, as if a
great bird were winging across a shoulder of the mountain ridges.
Conceived of the mountains, built in their image, the face partook
alternately of mountain terror or splendour; wholly, he remembered, of
the splendour when her blood ran warm. No longer the chalk-quarry
face,--its paleness now was that of night Alps beneath a moon chasing the
shadows.

She might be casting her spells again.

'You remember I told you,' he said, 'I have given my word--I don't break
it--to be at a Ball. Your uncle was urgent to have the ceremony over.
These clashes occur. The people here--I have spoken of that: people of
good repute for attention to guests. I am uncertain of the time . . . we
have all to learn to wait. So then, good-bye till we meet.'

He was experiencing a novel nip of torment, of just the degree which
takes a partial appeasement from the inflicting of it, and calls up a
loathed compassion. She might have been in his arms for a step, though
she would not have been the better loved.

He was allowed his escape, bearing with him enough of husband to execrate
another enslaving pledge of his word, that begat a frenzy to wreak some
caresses on the creature's intolerably haunting image. Of course, he
could not return to her. How would she receive him? There was no salt in
the thought of it; she was too submissive.

However, there would be fun with Chummy Potts on the drive to Canleys;
fun with Rufus Abrane at Mrs. Cowper Quillett's; and with the Countess
Livia, smothered, struggling, fighting for life with the title of
Dowager. A desire for unbridled fun had hold of any amount of it, to
excess in any direction. And though this cloud as a dry tongue after much
wine craves water, glimpses of his tramp's walk with a fellow tramp on a
different road, enjoying strangely healthy vagabond sensations and vast
ideas; brought the vagrant philosopher refreshfully to his mind: chiefly
for the reason that while in Woodseer's company he had hardly suffered a
stroke of pain from the thought of Henrietta. She was now a married
woman, he was a married man by the register. Stronger proof of the
maddest of worlds could not be furnished.

Sane in so mad a world, a man is your flabby citizen among outlaws, good
for plucking. Fun, at any cost, is the one object worth a shot in such a
world. And the fun is not to stop. If it does, we are likely to be got
hold of, and lugged away to the altar--the terminus. That foul disaster
has happened, through our having temporarily yielded to a fit of the
dumps and treated a mad world's lunatic issue with some seriousness. But
fun shall be had with the aid of His Highness below. The madder the
world, the madder the fun. And the mixing in it of another element, which
it has to beguile us--romance--is not at all bad cookery. Poetic romance
is delusion--a tale of a Corsair; a poet's brain, a bottle of gin, and a
theatrical wardrobe. Comic romance is about us everywhere, alive for the
tapping.

A daughter of the Old Buccaneer should participate in it by right of
birth: she would expect it in order to feel herself perfectly at home.
Then, be sure, she finds an English tongue and prattles away as merrily
as she does when her old scapegrace of a father is the theme. Son-in-law
to him! But the path of wisdom runs in the line of facts, and to have
wild fun and romance on this pantomime path, instead of kicking to break
away from it, we follow things conceived by the genius of the situation,
for the delectation of the fair Countess of Fleetwood and the earl, her
delighted husband, quite in the spirit of the Old Buccaneer, father of
the bride.

Carinthia sat beside the fire, seeing nothing in the room or on the road.
Up in her bedchamber, the girl Madge was at her window. She saw Lord
Fleetwood standing alone, laughing, it seemed, at some thought; he threw
up his head. Was it a newly married man leaving his bride and laughing?
The bride was a dear lady, fit for better than to be driven to look on at
a prize-fight--a terrible scene to a lady. She was left solitary: and
this her wedding day? The earl had said it, he had said she bore his
name, spoke of coming from the altar, and the lady had blushed to hear
herself called Miss. The pressure of her hand was warm with Madge: her
situation roused the fervid latent sisterhood in the breast of women.

Before he mounted the coach, Lord Fleetwood talked to Kit Ives. He
pointed at an upper window, seemed to be issuing directions. Kit nodded;
he understood it, whatever it was. You might have said, a pair of
burglars. The girl ran downstairs to bid her lover good-bye and show him
she really rejoiced in his victory. Kit came to her saying: 'Given my
word of honour I won't make a beast of myself to-night. Got to watch over
you and your lady.'

Lord Fleetwood started his fresh team, casting no glance at the windows
of the room where his bride was. He and the gentlemen on the coach were
laughing.

His leaving of his young bride to herself this day was classed among the
murky flashes which distinguished the deeds of noblemen. But his laughter
on leaving her stamped it a cruelty; of the kind that plain mortals, who
can be monsters, commit. Madge conceived a pretext for going into the
presence of her mistress, whose attitude was the same as when she first
sat in the chair. The lady smiled and said: 'He is not hurt much?' She
thought for them about her.

The girl's, heart of sympathy thumped, and her hero became a very minute
object. He had spoken previously of the making or not making a beast of
himself; without inflicting a picture of the beast. His words took shape
now, and in consequence a little self-pity began to move. It stirred to
swell the great wave of pity for the lady, that was in her bosom. 'Oh,
he!' she said, and extinguished the thought of him; and at once her
under-lip was shivering, her eyes filled and poured.

Carinthia rose anxiously. The girl dropped at her feet. 'You have been so
good to me to-day, my lady! so good to me to-day! I can't help it--I
don't often just for this moment; I've been excited. Oh, he's well, he
will do; he's nothing. You say "poor child!" But I'm not; it's only.
excitement. I do long to serve you the best I can.'

She stood up in obedience and had the arms of her young mistress pressing
her. Tears also were streaming from Carinthia's eyes. Heartily she
thanked the girl for the excuse to cry.

They were two women. On the road to Canleys, the coach conveying men
spouted with the lusty anecdote, relieved of the interdict of a
tyrannical sex.




CHAPTER XVIII

DOWN WHITECHAPEL WAY

Contention begets contention in a land of the pirate races. Gigs were at
high rival speed along the road from the battle-field to London. They
were the electrical wires of the time for an expectant population
bursting to have report of so thundering an event as the encounter of two
champion light weights, nursed and backed by a pair of gallant young
noblemen, pick of the whole row of coronets above. London panted gaping
and the gigs flew with the meat to fill it.

Chumley Potts offered Ambrose Mallard fair odds that the neat little trap
of the chief sporting journal, which had a reputation to maintain, would
be over one or other of the bridges crossing the Thames first. Mallard
had been struck by the neat little trap of an impudent new and
lower-priced journal, which had a reputation to gain. He took the
proffered odds, on the cry as of a cracker splitting. Enormous
difficulties in regard to the testimony and the verifications were
discussed; they were overcome. Potts was ready for any amount of trouble;
Mallard the same. There was clearly a race. There would consequently be a
record. Visits to the offices of those papers, perhaps half a day at the
south end of London or on Westminster bridge, examining witnesses, corner
shopmen, watermen, and the like, would or should satisfactorily establish
the disputed point.

Fleetwood had his fun; insomuch that he laughed himself into a sentiment
of humaneness toward the couple of donkeys and forgot his contempt of
them. Their gamblings and their bets increased his number of dependents;
and imbeciles were preferable to dolts or the dry gilt figures of the
circle he had to move in. Matter for some astonishment had been furnished
to the latter this day; and would cause an icy Signor stare and rather an
angry Signora flutter. A characteristic of that upper circle, as he knew
it, is, that the good are dull, the vicious very bad. They had nothing to
please him but manners. Elsewhere this land is a land of no manners. Take
it and make the most of it, then, for its quality of brute honesty: which
is found to flourish best in the British prize-ring.

His irony landed him there. It struck the country a ringing blow. But it
struck an almost effacing one at the life of the young nobleman of
boundless wealth, whose highest renown was the being a patron of
prizefighters. Husband of the daughter of the Old Buccaneer as well!
perchance as a result. That philosopher tramp named her 'beautiful
Gorgon.' She has no beauty; and as for Gorgon, the creature has a look of
timid softness in waiting behind her rocky eyes. A barbaric damsel
beginning to nibble at civilization, is nearer the mark; and ought she to
be discouraged?

Fleetwood's wrath with his position warned him against the dupery of any
such alcove thoughts. For his wrath revenged him, and he feared the being
stripped of it, lest a certain fund of his own softness, that he knew of;
though few did, should pull him to the creature's feet. She belonged to
him indeed; so he might put her to the trial of whether she had a heart
and personal charm, without the ceremony of wooing--which, in his case,
tempted to the feeling desperately earnest and becoming enslaved. He
speculated upon her eyelids and lips, and her voice, when melting, as
women do in their different ways; here and there with an
execrable--perhaps pardonable--art; one or two divinely. The vision drew
him to a headlong plunge and swim of the amorous mind, occupying a
minute, filling an era. He corrected the feebleness, and at the same time
threw a practical coachman's glance on peculiarities of the road,
requiring some knowledge of it if traversed backward at a whipping pace
on a moonless night. The drive from Canleys to the Royal Sovereign could
be done by good pacers in an hour and a half, little more--with Ives and
the stables ready, and some astonishment in a certain unseen chamber.
Fleetwood chuckled at a vision of romantic devilry--perfectly legitimate
too. Something, more to inflict than enjoy, was due to him.

He did, not phrase it, that a talk with the fellow Woodseer of his
mountains and his forests, and nature, philosophy, poetry, would have
been particularly healthy for him, almost as good as the good counsel be
needed and solicited none to give him. It swept among his ruminations
while he pricked Potts and Mallard to supply his craving for satanical
fare.

Gower Woodseer; the mention of whom is a dejection to the venerable
source of our story, was then in the act of emerging from the Eastward
into the Southward of the line of Canterbury's pilgrims when they set
forth to worship, on his homeward course, after a walk of two days out of
Dover. He descended London's borough, having exactly twopence halfpenny
for refreshment; following a term of prudent starvation, at the end of
the walk. It is not a district seductive to the wayfarer's appetite; as,
for example, one may find the Jew's fry of fish in oil, inspiriting the
Shoreditch region, to be. Nourishment is afforded, according to the laws
of England's genius in the arts of refection, at uninviting shops, to the
necessitated stomach. A penn'orth of crumb of bread, assisted on its
laborious passage by a penn'orth of the rinsings of beer, left the
natural philosopher a ha'penny for dessert at the stall of an applewoman,
where he withstood an inclination toward the juicy fruit and chose nuts.
They extend a meal, as a grimace broadens the countenance, illusorily;
but they help to cheat an emptiness in time, where it is nearly as
offensive to our sensations as within us; and that prolonged occupation
of the jaws goes a length to persuade us we are filling. All the better
when the substance is indigestible. Tramps of the philosophical order,
who are the practically sagacious, prefer tough grain for the teeth.
Woodseer's munching of his nuts awakened to fond imagination the picture
of his father's dinner, seen one day and little envied: a small slice of
cold boiled mutton-flesh in a crescent of white fat, with a lump of dry
bread beside the plate.

Thus he returned to the only home he had, not disheartened, and bearing
scenes that outvied London's print-shops for polychrome splendour, an
exultation to recall. His condition, moreover, threw his father's life
and work into colour: the lean Whitechapel house of the minister among
the poor; the joy in the saving of souls, if he could persuade himself
that such good labour advanced: and at the fall of light, the pastime
task of bootmaking--a desireable occupation for a thinker. Thought flies
best when the hands are easily busy. Cobblers have excursive minds. Their
occasional rap at the pegs diversifies the stitchings and is often
happily timed to settle an internal argument. Seek in a village for
information concerning the village or the state of mankind, you will be
less disappointed at the cobbler's than elsewhere, it has been said.

As Gower had anticipated, with lively feelings of pleasure, Mr. Woodseer
was at the wonted corner of his back room, on the stool between two
tallow candleflames, leather scented strongly, when the wanderer stood
before him, in the image of a ball that has done with circling about a
stable point.

'Back?' the minister sang out at once, and his wrinkles gleamed:

Their hands grasped.

'Hungry, sir, rather.'

'To be sure, you are. One can read it on your boots. Mrs. Jones will
spread you a table. How many miles to-day? Show the soles. They tell a
tale of wear.'

They had worn to resemble the thin-edged layers of still upper cloud
round the peep of coming sky.

'About forty odd to-day, sir. They've done their hundreds of miles and
have now come to dock. I 'll ask Mrs. Jones to bring me a plate here.'

Gower went to the housekeeper in the kitchen. His father's front door was
unfastened by day; she had not set eyes on him yet, and Mr. Woodseer
murmured:

'Now she's got the boy. There 's clasping and kissing. He's all wild
Wales to her.'

The plate of meat was brought by Mary Jones with Gower beside her, and a
sniffle of her happiness audible. She would not, although invited to stay
and burning to hear Gower, wait in the room where father and son had to
talk together after a separation, long to love's counting. She was a
Welshwoman of the pure blood, therefore delicately mannered by nature.

'Yes, dear lad, tobacco helps you on to the marrow of your story, and I
too will blow the cloud,' said Mr. Woodseer, when the plate was pushed
aside and the pipe appeared.

So Gower's recital of his wanderings began, more puffs than speech at the
commencement. He was alternately picturesque and sententious until he
reached Baden; there he became involved, from thinking of a revelation of
beauty in woman.

Mr. Woodseer rapped the leather on his block.

'A place where they have started public gambling, I am told.'

'We must look into all the corners of the world to know it, sir, and the
world has to be riddled or it riddles us.'

'Ah. Did you ever tell a lie, Gower Woodseer?'

'I played.'

'You played. The Lord be thanked you have kept your straight tongue! The
Lord can always enter a heart of truth. Sin cannot dwell with it. But you
played for gain, and that was a licenced thieving; and that was a
backsliding; and there will have to be a climbing up. And what that
means, your hold on truth will learn. Touch sin and you accommodate
yourself to its vileness. Ay, you love nature. Nature is not anchorage
for vessels like men. If you loved the Book you would float in harbour.
You played. I do trust you lost.'

'You have your wish, sir.'

'To have won their money, Gower! Rather starve.'

'I did.'

'Your reason for playing, poor lad?'

'The reason eludes reason.'

'Not in you.'

'Sight of the tables; an itch to try them--one's self as well; a notion
that the losers were playing wrong. In fine, a bit of a whirl of a medley
of atoms; I can't explain it further.'

'Ah. The tippler's fumes in his head! Spotty business, Gower Woodseer.
"Lead us not into temptation" is worldly wisdom in addition to heavenly.'

After listening to an extended homily, with a general assent and
tobacco's phlegm, Gower replied to his father's 'You starved manfully?'
nodding: 'From Baden to Nancy. An Alsatian cottager at times helped me
along, milk and bread.'

'Wholesome for body and for soul.'

'Entering Nancy I subscribed to the dictum of our first fathers, which
dogs would deliver, if they could speak: that there is no driver like
stomach: and I went head on to the College, saw the Principal: plea of
urgency. No engagement possible, to teach either French or English. But
he was inquisitive touching the urgency. That was my chance. The French
are humane when they are not suspicious of you. They are generous, if you
put a light to their minds. As I was dealing with a scholarly one, I made
use of such ornamental literary skill as I possessed, to prove urgency.
He supplied me with bread, fruit, and wine. In the end he procured me
pupils. I lodged over a baker's shop. I had food walks, and learnt
something of forestry there--a taking study. When I had saved enough to
tramp it home, I said my adieux to that good friend and tramped away,
entering London with about the same amount in small coin as when I
entered Nancy. A manner of exactly hitting the mark, that some would not
find so satisfactory as it is to me.'

The minister sighed. 'There comes in the "philosophy," I suppose. When
will you understand, that this "philosophy" is only the passive of a
religious faith? It seems to suit you gentlemen of the road while you are
young. Work among the Whitechapel poor. It would be a way for discovering
the shallows of your "philosophy" earlier.'

Gower asked him: 'Going badly here, sir?'

'Murders, robberies, misusage of women, and misconduct of women!--Drink,
in short: about the same amount. Drink is their death's river, rolling
them on helpless as corpses, on to--may they find mercy! I and a few
stand--it's in the tide we stand here, to stop them, pluck them out, make
life a bit sweet to them before the poor bodies go beneath. But come!
all's not dark, we have our gleams. I speak distressed by one of our
girls: a good girl, I believe; and the wilfullest that ever had command
of her legs. A well-favoured girl! You'll laugh, she has given her heart
to a prize-fighter. Well, you can say, she might have chosen worse. He
drinks, she hates it; she loves the man and hates his vice. He swears
amendment, is hiccupping at night; fights a match on the morrow, and gets
beaten out of formation. No matter: whenever, wherever, that man goes to
his fight, that girl follows to nurse him after it. He's her hero. Women
will have one, and it's their lottery. You read of such things; here we
have it alive and walking. I am led to think they 're an honest couple.
They come of established families. Her mother was out of Caermarthen;
died under my ministration, saintly, forgiving the drunkard. You may
remember the greengrocer, Tobias Winch? He passed away in shrieks for one
drop. I had to pitch my voice to the top notes to get hearing for the
hymn. He was a reverent man, with the craving by fits. That should have
been a lesson to Madge.'

'A little girl at the greengrocer's hard by? She sold me apples; rather
pretty,' said Gower.

'A fine grown girl now--Madge Winch; a comely wench she is. It breaks her
sister Sarah's heart. They both manage the little shop; they make it
prosper in a small way; enough, and what need they more? Then Christopher
Ines has on one of his matches. Madge drives her cart out, if it 's near
town. She's off down into Kent to-day by coach, Sarah tells me. A great
nobleman patronizes Christopher; a Lord Fleetwood, a lord of wealth. And
he must be thoughtful for these people: he sent Sarah word that
Christopher should not touch drink. You may remember a butcher Ines in
the street next to us. Christopher was a wild lad, always at "best man"
with every boy he met: went to sea--ran away. He returned a pugilist. The
girl will be nursing him now. I have spoken to her of him; and I trust to
her; but I mourn her attachment to the man who drinks.'

'The lord's name?' said Gower.

'Lord Fleetwood, Sarah named him. And so it pleases him to spend his
money!'

'He has other tastes. I know something of him, sir. He promises to be a
patron of Literature as well. His mother was a South Wales woman.'

'Could he be persuaded to publish a grand edition of the Triads?' Mr.
Woodseer said at once.

'No man more likely.'

'If you see him, suggest it.'

'Very little chance of my meeting him again. But those Triads! They're in
our blood. They spring to tie knots in the head. They push me to condense
my thoughts to a tight ball. They were good for primitive times: but
they--or the trick of the mind engendered by them--trip my steps along
the lines of composition. I produce pellets instead of flowing sheets.
It'll come right. At present I 'm so bent to pick and perfect, polish my
phrase, that I lose my survey. As a consequence, my vocabulary falters.'

'Ah,' Mr. Woodseer breathed and smote. 'This Literature is to be your
profession for the means of living?'

'Nothing else. And I'm so low down in the market way of it, that I could
not count on twenty pounds per annum. Fifty would give me standing, an
independent fifty.'

'To whom are you crying, Gower?'

'Not to gamble, you may be sure.'

'You have a home.'

'Good work of the head wants an easy conscience. I've too much of you in
me for a comfortable pensioner.'

'Or is it not, that you have been living the gentleman out there, with
just a holiday title to it?'

Gower was hit by his father's thrust. 'I shall feel myself a pieman's
chuckpenny as long as I'm unproductive, now I 've come back and have to
own to a home,' he said.

Tea brought in by Mrs. Mary Jones rather brightened him until he
considered that the enlivenment was due to a purchase by money, of which
he was incapable, and he rejected it, like an honourable man.
Simultaneously, the state of depression threw critic shades on a prized
sentence or two among his recent confections. It was rejected for the
best of reasons and the most discomforting: because it racked our
English; signifying, that he had not yet learnt the right use of his
weapons.

He was in this wrestle, under a placid demeanour, for several days,
hearing the shouts of Whitechapel Kit's victory, and hearing of Sarah
Winch's anxiety on account of her sister Madge; unaffected by sounds of
joy or grief, in his effort to produce a supple English, with Baden's
Madonna for sole illumination of his darkness. To her, to the illimitable
gold-mist of perspective and the innumerable images the thought of her
painted for him, he owed the lift which withdrew him from contemplation
of himself in a very disturbing stagnant pool of the wastes; wherein
often will strenuous youth, grown faint, behold a face beneath a scroll
inscribed Impostor. All whose aim was high have spied into that pool, and
have seen the face. His glorious lady would not let it haunt him.

The spell she cast had likewise power to raise him clean out of a
neighbourhood hinting Erebus to the young man with thirst for air,
solitudes, and colour. Scarce imaginable as she was, she reigned here, in
the idea of her, more fixedly than where she had been visible; as it
were, by right of her being celestially removed from the dismal place. He
was at the same time not insensible to his father's contented
ministrations among these homes of squalor; they pricked the curiosity,
which was in the youthful philosopher a form of admiration. For his
father, like all Welshmen, loved the mountains. Yet here he lived,
exhorting, ministering, aiding, supported up to high good cheer by some,
it seemed, superhuman backbone of uprightness;--his religious faith?
Well, if so, the thing might be studied. But things of the frozen senses,
lean and hueless things, were as repellent to Gower's imagination as his
father's dishes to an epicure. What he envied was, the worthy old man's
heart of feeling for others: his feeling at present for the girl Sarah
Winch and her sister Madge, who had not been heard of since she started
for the fight. Mr. Woodseer had written to her relatives at the Wells,
receiving no consolatory answer.

He was relieved at last; and still a little perplexed. Madge had
returned, he informed Gower. She was well, she was well in health; he had
her assurances that she was not excited about herself.

'She has brought a lady with her, a great lady to lodge with her. She has
brought the Countess of Fleetwood to lodge with her.'

Gower heard those words from his father; and his father repeated them. To
the prostrate worshipper of the Countess of Fleetwood, they were a blow
on the head; madness had set in here, was his first recovering thought,
or else a miracle had come to pass. Or was it a sham Countess of
Fleetwood imposing upon the girl? His father was to go and see the great
lady, at the greengrocer's shop; at her request, according to Madge.
Conjectures shot their perishing tracks across a darkness that deepened
and made shipwreck of philosophy. Was it the very Countess of Fleetwood
penitent for her dalliance with the gambling passion, in feminine need of
pastor's aid, having had report from Madge of this good shepherd? His
father expressed a certain surprise; his countenance was mild. He
considered it a merely strange occurrence.

Perhaps, in a crisis, a minister of religion is better armed than a
philosopher. Gower would not own that, but he acknowledged the evidences,
and owned to envy; especially when he accompanied his father to the
greengrocer's shop, and Mr. Woodseer undisturbedly said:

'Here is the place.' The small stuffed shop appeared to grow portentously
cavernous and waveringly illumined.




CHAPTER XIX

THE GIRL MADGE

Customers were at the counter of the shop, and these rational figures,
together with the piles of cabbages, the sacks of potatoes, the pale
small oranges here and there, the dominant smell of red herrings, denied
the lurking of an angelical presence behind them.

Sarah Winch and a boy served at the counter. Sarah led the Mr. Woodseers
into a corner knocked off the shop and called a room. Below the top bars
of a wizened grate was a chilly fire. London's light came piecemeal
through a smut-streaked window. If the wonderful was to occur, this was
the place to heighten it.

'My son may be an intruder,' Mr. Woodseer said. 'He is acquainted with a
Lord Fleetwood . . .'

'Madge will know, sir,' replied Sarah, and she sent up a shrill cry for
Madge from the foot of the stairs.

The girl ran down swiftly. She entered listening to Sarah, looking at
Gower; to whom, after a bob and pained smile where reverence was owing,
she said, 'Can you tell me, sir, please, where we can find Lord Fleetwood
now?'

Gower was unable to tell. Madge turned to Mr. Woodseer, saying soon
after: 'Oh, she won't mind; she'll be glad, if he knows Lord Fleetwood.
I'll fetch her.'

The moments were of the palpitating order for Gower, although his common
sense lectured the wildest of hearts for expecting such a possibility as
the presence of his lofty lady here.

And, of course, common sense proved to be right: the lady was quite
another. But she struck on a sleeping day of his travels. Her face was
not one to be forgotten, and to judge by her tremble of a smile, she
remembered him instantly.

They were soon conversing, each helping to paint the scene of the place
where they had met.

'Lord Fleetwood has married me,' she said.

Gower bent his head; all stood silent.

'May I?' said Madge to her. 'It is Lord Fleetwood's wedded wife, sir. He
drove her from her uncle's, on her wedding day, the day of a prize-fight,
where I was; he told me to wait on his lady at an inn there, as I 've
done and will. He drove away that evening, and he hasn't'--the girl's
black eyebrows worked: 'I've not seen him since. He's a great nobleman,
yes. He left his lady at the inn, expenses paid. He left her with no
money. She stayed on till her heart was breaking. She has come to London
to find him. She had to walk part of the way. She has only a change of
linen we brought in a parcel. She's a stranger to England: she knows
nobody in London. She had no place to come to but this poor hole of ours
she 's so good as let welcome her. We can't do better, and it 's no use
to be ashamed. She 's not a lady to scorn poor people.'

The girl's voice hummed through Gower.

He said: 'Lord Fleetwood may not be in London,' and chafed at himself for
such a quaver.

'It's his house we want, sir, he has not been at his house in Kent. We
want his London house.'

'My dear lady,' said Mr. Woodseer; 'it might be as well to communicate
the state of things to your family without delay. My son will call at any
address you name; or if it is a country address, I can write the items,
with my assurances of your safety under my charge, in my house, which I
beg you to make your home. My housekeeper is known to Sarah and Madge for
an excellent Christian woman.'

Carinthia replied: 'You are kind to me, sir. I am grateful. I have an
uncle; I would not disturb my uncle; he is inventing guns and he wishes
peace. It is my husband I have come to find. He did not leave me in
anger.'

She coloured. With a dimple of tenderness at one cheek, looking from
Sarah to Madge, she said: 'I would not leave my friends; they are sisters
to me.' Sarah, at these words, caught up her apron. Madge did no more
than breathe deep and fast.

An unoccupied cold parlour in Mr. Woodseer's house that would be heated
for a guest, urged him to repeat his invitation, but he took the check
from Gower, who suggested the doubt of Mary Jones being so good an
attendant upon Lady Fleetwood as Madge. 'And Madge has to help in the
shop at times.'

Madge nodded, looked into the eyes of her mistress, which sanctioned her
saying: 'She will like it best here, she is my lady and I understand her
best. My lady gives no trouble: she is hardy, she's not like other
ladies. I and Sarah sleep together in the room next. I can hear anything
she wants. She takes us as if she was used to it.'

Sarah had to go to serve a customer. Madge made pretence of pricking her
ears and followed into the shop.

'Your first visit to London is in ugly weather, Lady Fleetwood,' said
Gower.

'It is my first,' she answered.

How the marriage came about, how the separation, could not be asked and
was not related.

'Our district is not all London, my dear lady,' said Mr. Woodseer. 'Good
hearts are here, as elsewhere, and as many, if one looks behind the dirt.
I have found it since I laboured amongst them, now twenty years. Unwashed
human nature, though it is natural to us to wash, is the most human, we
find.'

Gower questioned the naturalness of human nature's desire to wash; and
they wrangled good-humouredly, Carinthia's eyes dwelling on them each in
turn; until Mr. Woodseer, pursuing the theme started by him to interest
her, spoke of consolations derived from his labours here, in exchange for
the loss of his mountains. Her face lightened.

'You love the mountains?'

'I am a son of the mountains.'

'Ah, I love them! Father called me a daughter of the mountains. I was
born in the mountains. I was leaving my mountains on the day, I think it
yesterday, when I met this gentleman who is your son.'

'A glorious day it was!' Gower exclaimed.

'It was a day of great glory for me,' said Carinthia. 'Your foot did not
pain you for long?'

'The length of two pipes. You were with your brother.'

'With my brother. My brother has married a most beautiful lady. He is now
travelling his happy time--my Chillon!'

There came a radiance on her under-eyelids. There was no weeping.

Struck by the contrast between the two simultaneous honeymoons, and a
vision of the high-spirited mountain girl, seen in this place a young
bride seeking her husband, Gower Woodseer could have performed that
unphilosophical part. He had to shake himself. She seemed really a
soaring bird brought down by the fowler.

Lord Fleetwood's manner of abandoning her was the mystery.

Gower stood waiting for her initiative, when the minister interposed:
'There are books, books of our titled people-the Peers, books of the
Peerage. They would supply the address. My son will discover where to
examine them. He will find the address. Most of the great noblemen have a
London house.'

'My husband has a house in London,' Carinthia said.

'I know him, to some degree,' said Gower.

She remarked: 'I have heard that you do.'

Her lips were shut, as to any hint at his treatment of her.

Gower went into the shop to speak with Madge. The girl was talking in the
business tone to customers; she finished her commission hurriedly and
joined him on the pavement by the doorstep. Her voice was like the change
for the swing of a door from street to temple.

'You've seen how brave she is, sir. She has things to bear. Never cries,
never frets. Her marriage day--leastways . . . I can't, no girl can tell.
A great nobleman, yes. She waited, believing in him; she does. She hasn't
spoken to me of what she's had to bear. I don't know; I guess; I'm sure
I'm right--and him a man! Girls learn to know men, call them gentlemen or
sweeps. She thinks she has only to meet him to persuade him she 's fit to
be loved by him. She thinks of love. Would he--our tongues are tied
except among ourselves to a sister. Leaves her by herself, with only me,
after--it knocks me dumb! Many a man commits a murder wouldn't do that.
She could force him to--no, it isn't a house she wants, she wants him.
He's her husband, Mr. Woodseer. You will do what you can to help; I judge
by your father. I and Sarah 'll slave for her to be as comfortable--as
we--can make her; we can't give her what she 's used to. I shall count
the hours.'

'You sold me apples when your head was just above the counter,' said
Gower.

'Did I?--you won't lose time, sir?' she rejoined. 'Her box is down at the
beastly inn in Kent. Kind people, I dare say; their bill was paid any
extent, they said. And he might do as he liked in it--enter it like a
thief, if it pleased him, and off like one, and they no wiser. She walked
to his big house Esslemont for news of him. And I'm not a snivelling
wench either; but she speaks of him a way to make a girl drink her tears,
if they ain't to be let fall.'

'But you had a victory down there,' Gower hinted congratulations.

'Ah,' said she.

'Christopher Ines is all right now?'

'I've as good as lost my good name for Kit Ines, Mr. Woodseer.'

'Not with my dad, Madge.'

'The minister reads us at the heart. Shall we hear the street of his
house in London before night?'

'I may be late.'

'I'll be up, any hour, for a rap at the shutters. I want to take her to
the house early next morning. She won't mind the distance. She lies in
bed, her eyes shut or open, never sleeping, hears any mouse. It shouldn't
go on, if we can do a thing to help.'

'I'm off,' said Gower, unwontedly vexed at his empty pocket, that could
not offer the means for conveyance to a couple of young women.

The dark-browed girl sent her straight eyes at him. They pushed him to
hasten. On second thoughts, he stopped and hailed her; he was moved to
confirm an impression of this girl's features.

His mind was directed to the business burning behind them, honestly
enough, as soon as he had them in sight again.

'I ought to have the address of some of her people, in case,' he said.

'She won't go to her uncle, I 'm sure of that,' said Madge. 'He 's a lord
and can't be worried. It 's her husband to find first.'

'If he's to be found!--he's a lord, too. Has she no other relatives or
friends?'

'She loves her brother. He's an officer. He's away on honeymoon. There 's
an admiral down Hampshire way, a place I've been near and seen. I'd not
have you go to any of them, sir, without trying all we can do to find
Lord Fleetwood. It's Admiral Fakenham she speaks of; she's fond of him.
She's not minded to bother any of her friends about herself.'

'I shall see you to-night,' said Gower, and set his face Westward,
remembering that his father had named Caermarthen as her mother's
birthplace.

Just in that tone of hers do Welshwomen talk of their country; of its
history, when at home, of its mountains, when exiled: and in a language
like hers, bare of superlatives to signify an ardour conveyed by the fire
of the breath. Her quick devotion to a lady exciting enthusiasm through
admiring pity for the grace of a much-tried quiet sweetness, was
explained; apart from other reasons, feminine or hidden, which might
exist. Only a Welsh girl would be so quick and all in it, with a voice
intimating a heated cauldron under her mouth. None but a Welsh-blooded
girl, risking her good name to follow and nurse the man she considered a
hero, would carry her head to look virgin eyes as she did. One could
swear to them, Gower thought. Contact with her spirited him out of his
mooniness.

He had the Cymric and Celtic respect of character; which puts aside the
person's environments to face the soul. He was also an impressionable
fellow among his fellows, a philosopher only at his leisure, in his
courted solitudes. Getting away some strides from this girl of the
drilling voice,--the shudder-voice, he phrased it,--the lady for whom she
pleaded came clearer into his view and gradually absorbed him; though it
was an emulation with the girl Madge, of which he was a trifle conscious,
that drove him to do his work of service in the directest manner. He then
fancied the girl had caught something of the tone of her lady: the savage
intensity or sincerity; and he brooded on Carinthia's position, the
mixture of the astounding and the woful in her misadventure. One could
almost laugh at our human fate, to think of a drop off the radiant
mountain heights upon a Whitechapel greengrocer's shop, gathering the
title of countess midway.

But nothing of the ludicrous touched her; no, and if we bring reason to
scan our laugh at pure humanity, it is we who are in the place of the
ridiculous, for doing what reason disavows. Had he not named her,
Carinthia, Saint and Martyr, from a first perusal of her face? And Lord
Fleetwood had read and repeated it. Lord Fleetwood had become the
instrument to martyrize her? That might be; there was a hoard of bad
stuff in his composition besides the precious: and this was a nobleman
owning enormous wealth, who could vitiate himself by disposing of a
multitude of men and women to serve his will, a shifty will. Wealth
creates the magician, and may breed the fiend within him. In the hands of
a young man, wealth is an invitation to devilry. Gower's idea of the
story of Carinthia inclined to charge Lord Fleetwood with every possible
false dealing. He then quashed the charge, and decided to wait for
information.

At the second of the aristocratic Clubs of London's West, into which he
stepped like an easy member, the hall-porter did not examine his clothing
from German hat to boots, and gave him Lord Fleetwood's town address. He
could tell Madge at night by the door of the shuttered shop, that Lord
Fleetwood had gone down to Wales.

'It means her having to wait,' she said. 'The minister has been to the
coach-office, to order up her box from that inn. He did it in his name;
they can't refuse; no money's owing. She must have a change. Sally has
fifteen pounds locked up in case of need.'

Sally's capacity and economy fetched the penniless philosopher a slap.

'You've taken to this lady,' he said.

'She held my hand, while Kit Ines was at his work; and I was new to her,
and a prize-fighter's lass, they call me:--upon the top of that
nobleman's coach, where he made me sit, behind her, to see the fight; and
she his wedded lady that morning. A queer groom. He may keep Kit Ines
from drink, he's one of you men, and rides over anything in his way. I
can't speak about it; I could swear it before a judge, from what I know.
Those Rundles at that inn don't hear anything it suits him to do. All the
people down in those parts are slaves to him. And I thought he was a real
St. George before,--yes, ready I was to kiss the ground his feet crossed.
If you could, it's Chinningfold near where Admiral Fakenham lives, down
Hampshire way. Her friends ought to hear what's happened to her. They'll
find her in a queer place. She might go to the minister's. I believe
she's happier with us girls.'

Gower pledged his word to start for Chinningfold early as the light next
day. He liked the girl the better, in an amicable fashion, now that his
nerves had got free of the transient spell of her kettle tone--the hardly
varied one note of a heart boiling with sisterly devotion to a misused
stranger of her sex;--and, after the way of his race, imagination sprang
up in him, at the heels of the quieted senses, releasing him from the
personal and physical to grasp the general situation and place the
protagonist foremost.

He thought of Carinthia, with full vision of her. Some wrong had been
done, or some violation of the right, to guess from the girl Madge's
molten words in avoidance of the very words. It implied--though it might
be but one of Love's shrewder discords--such suspected traitorous dealing
of a man with their sister woman as makes the world of women all woman
toward her. They can be that, and their being so illuminates their hidden
sentiments in relation to the mastering male, whom they uphold.

But our uninformed philosopher was merely picking up scraps of sheddings
outside the dark wood of the mystery they were to him, and playing
imagination upon them. This primary element of his nature soon enthroned
his chosen lady above their tangled obscurities. Beneath her tranquil
beams, with the rapture of the knowledge that her name on earth was
Livia, he threaded East London's thoroughfares,--on a morning when day
and night were made one by fog, to journey down to Chinningfold, by
coach, in the service of the younger Countess of Fleetwood, whose right
to the title he did not doubt, though it directed surprise movements at
his understanding from time to time.




CHAPTER XX

STUDIES IN FOG, GOUT, AN OLD SEAMAN, A LOVELY SERPENT, AND THE MORAL
EFFECTS THAT MAY COME OF A BORROWED SHIRT

Money of his father's enabled Gower to take the coach; and studies in
fog, from the specked brown to the woolly white, and the dripping torn,
were proposed to the traveller, whose preference of Nature's face did not
arrest his observation of her domino and petticoats; across which blank
sheets he curiously read backward, that he journeyed by the aid of his
father's hard-earned, ungrudged piece of gold. Without it, he would have
been useless in this case of need. The philosopher could starve with
equanimity, and be the stronger. But one had, it seemed here clearly, to
put on harness and trudge along a line, if the unhappy were to have one's
help. Gradual experiences of his business among his fellows were teaching
an exercised mind to learn in regions where minds unexercised were
doctorial giants beside it.

The study of gout was offered at Chinningfold. Admiral Fakenham's butler
refused at first to take a name to his master. Gower persisted, stating
the business of his mission; and in spite of the very suspicious glib
good English spoken by a man wearing such a hat and suit, the butler was
induced to consult Mrs. Carthew.

She sprang up alarmed. After having seen the young lady happily married
and off with her lordly young husband, the arrival of a messenger from
the bride gave a stir the wrong way to her flowing recollections; the
scenes and incidents she had smothered under her love of the comfortable
stood forth appallingly. The messenger, the butler said, was no
gentleman. She inspected Gower and heard him speak. An anomaly had come
to the house; for he had the language of a gentleman, the appearance of a
nondescript; he looked indifferent, he spoke sympathetically; and he was
frank as soon as the butler was out of hearing. In return for the
compliment, she invited him to her sitting-room. The story of the young
countess, whom she had seen driven away by her husband from the church in
a coach and four, as being now destitute, praying to see her friends, in
the Whitechapel of London--the noted haunt of thieves and outcasts,
bankrupts and the abandoned; set her asking for the first time, who was
the man with dreadful countenance inside the coach? A previously
disregarded horror of a man. She went trembling to the admiral, though
his health was delicate, his temper excitable. It was, she considered, an
occasion for braving the doctor's interdict.

Gower was presently summoned to the chamber where Admiral Fakenham
reclined on cushions in an edifice of an arm-chair. He told a plain tale.
Its effect was to straighten the admiral's back, and enlarge in grey
glass a pair of sea-blue eyes. And, 'What's that? Whitechapel?' the
admiral exclaimed,--at high pitch, far above his understanding. The
particulars were repeated, whereupon the sick-room shook with,
'Greengrocer?' He stunned himself with another of the monstrous points in
his pet girl's honeymoon: 'A prizefight?'

To refresh a saving incredulity, he took a closer view of the messenger.
Gower's habiliments were those of the 'queer fish,' the admiral saw. But
the meeting at Carlsruhe was recalled to him, and there was a worthy
effort to remember it. 'Prize-fight!--Greengrocer! Whitechapel!' he rang
the changes rather more moderately; till, swelling and purpling, he
cried: 'Where's the husband?'

That was the emissary's question likewise.

'If I could have found him, sir, I should not have troubled you.'

'Disappeared? Plays the man of his word, then plays the madman!
Prize-fight the first day of her honeymoon? Good Lord! Leaves her at the
inn?'

'She was left.'

'When was she left?'

'As soon as the fight was over--as far as I understand.'

The admiral showered briny masculine comments on that bridegroom.

'Her brother's travelling somewhere in the Pyrenees--married my daughter.
She has an uncle, a hermit.' He became pale. 'I must do it. The rascal
insults us all. Flings her off the day he married her! It 's a slap in
the face to all of us. You are acquainted with the lady, sir. Would you
call her a red-haired girl?'

'Red-gold of the ballads; chestnut-brown, with threads of fire.'

'She has the eyes for a man to swear by. I feel the loss of her, I can
tell you. She was wine and no penalty to me. Is she much broken under
it?--if I 'm to credit . . . I suppose I must. It floors me.'

Admiral Baldwin's frosty stare returned on him. Gower caught an image of
it, as comparable, without much straining, to an Arctic region smitten by
the beams.

'Nothing breaks her courage,' he said.

'To be sure, my poor dear! Who could have guessed when she left my house
she was on her way to a prizefight and a greengrocer's in Whitechapel.
But the dog's not mad, though his bite 's bad; he 's an eccentric
mongrel. He wants the whip; ought to have had it regularly from his first
breeching. He shall whistle for her when he repents; and he will, mark
me. This gout here will be having a snap at the vitals if I don't start
to-night. Oblige me, half a minute.'

The admiral stretched his hand for an arm to give support, stood, and
dropped into the chair, signifying a fit of giddiness in the word 'Head.'

Before the stupor had passed, Mrs. Carthew entered, anxious lest the
admittance of a messenger of evil to her invalid should have been an
error of judgement. The butler had argued it with her. She belonged to
the list of persons appointed to cut life's thread when it strains, their
general kindness being so liable to misdirection.

Gower left the room and went into the garden. He had never seen a death;
and the admiral's peculiar pallor intimated events proper to days of cold
mist and a dripping stillness. How we go, was the question among his
problems:--if we are to go! his youthful frame insistingly added.

The fog down a wet laurel-walk contracted his mind with the chilling of
his blood, and he felt that he would have to see the thing if he was to
believe in it. Of course he believed, but life throbbed rebelliously, and
a picture of a desk near a lively fire-grate, books and pen and paper,
and a piece of writing to be approved of by the Hesper of ladies, held
ground with a pathetic heroism against the inevitable. He got his wits to
the front by walking faster; and then thought of the young countess and
the friend she might be about to lose. She could number her friends on
her fingers. Admiral Fakenham's exclamations of the name of the place
where she now was, conveyed an inky idea of the fall she had undergone.
Counting her absent brother, with himself, his father, and the two
Whitechapel girls, it certainly was an unexampled fall, to say of her,
that they and those two girls had become by the twist of circumstances
the most serviceable of her friends.

Her husband was the unriddled riddle we have in the wealthy young
lord,--burning to possess, and making, tatters of all he grasped, the
moment it was his own. Glints of the devilish had shot from him at the
gamingtables,--fine haunts for the study of our lower man. He could be
magnificent in generosity; he had little humaneness. He coveted beauty in
women hungrily, and seemed to be born hostile to them; or so Gower judged
by the light of the later evidence on unconsidered antecedent
observations of him. Why marry her to cast her off instantly? The crude
philosopher asked it as helplessly as the admiral. And, further, what did
the girl Madge mean by the drop of her voice to a hum of enforced
endurance under injury, like the furnace behind an iron door? Older men
might have understood, as he was aware; he might have guessed, only he
had the habit of scattering meditation upon the game of hawk and fowl.

Dame Gossip boils. Her one idea of animation is to have her dramatis
persona in violent motion, always the biggest foremost; and, indeed, that
is the way to make them credible, for the wind they raise and the
succession of collisions. The fault of the method is, that they do not
instruct; so the breath is out of them before they are put aside; for the
uninstructive are the humanly deficient: they remain with us like the
tolerated old aristocracy, which may not govern, and is but socially
seductive. The deuteragonist or secondary person can at times tell us
more of them than circumstances at furious heat will help them to reveal;
and the Dame will have him only as an index-post. Hence her endless
ejaculations over the mystery of Life, the inscrutability of
character,--in a plain world, in the midst of such readable people! To
preserve Romance (we exchange a sky for a ceiling if we let it go), we
must be inside the heads of our people as well as the hearts, more than
shaking the kaleidoscope of hurried spectacles, in days of a growing
activity of the head.

Gower Woodseer could not know that he was drawn on to fortune and the
sight of his Hesper by Admiral Fakenham's order that the visitor was to
stay at his house until he should be able to quit his bed, and journey
with him to London, doctor or no doctor. The doctor would not hear of it.
The admiral threatened it every night for the morning, every morning for
the night; and Gower had to submit to postponements balefully affecting
his linen. Remonstrance was not to be thought of; for at a mere show of
reluctance the courtly admiral flushed, frowned, and beat the bed where
he lay, a gouty volcano. Gower's one shirt was passing through the
various complexions, and had approached the Nubian on its way to negro.
His natural candour checked the downward course. He mentioned to Mrs.
Carthew, with incidental gravity, on a morning at breakfast, that this
article of his attire 'was beginning to resemble London snow.' She was
amused; she promised him a change more resembling country snow. 'It will
save me from buttoning so high up,' he said, as he thanked her. She then
remembered the daily increase of stiffness in his figure: and a
reflection upon his patient waiting, and simpleness, and lexicographer
speech to expose his minor needs, touched her unused sense of humour on
the side where it is tender in women, from being motherly.

In consequence, she spoke of him with a pleading warmth to the Countess
Livia, who had come down to see the admiral 'concerning an absurd but
annoying rumour running over London.' Gower was out for a walk. He knew
of the affair, Mrs. Carthew said, for an introduction to her excuses of
his clothing.

'But I know the man,' said Livia. 'Lord Fleetwood picked him up
somewhere, and brought him to us. Clever: Why, is he here?'

'He is here, sent to the admiral, as I understand, my lady.'

'Sent by whom?'

Having but a weak vocabulary to defend a delicate position, Mrs. Carthew
stuttered into evasions, after the way of ill-armed persons; and naming
herself a stranger to the circumstances, she feebly suggested that the
admiral ought not to be disturbed before the doctor's next visit; Mr.
Woodseer had been allowed to sit by his bed yesterday only for ten
minutes, to divert him with his talk. She protected in this wretched
manner the poor gentleman she sacrificed and emitted such a smell of
secresy, that Livia wrote three words on her card, for it to be taken to
Admiral Baldwin at once. Mrs. Carthew supplicated faintly; she was
unheeded.

The Countess of Fleetwood mounted the stairs--to descend them with the
knowledge of her being the Dowager Countess of Fleetwood! Henrietta had
spoken of the Countess of Fleetwood's hatred of the title of Dowager. But
when Lady Fleetwood had the fact from the admiral, would she forbear to
excite him? If she repudiated it, she would provoke him to fire 'one of
his broadsides,'--as they said in the family, to assert its and that
might exhaust him; and there was peril in that. And who was guilty? Mrs.
Carthew confessed her guilt, asking how it could have been avoided. She
made appeal to Gower on his return, transfixing him.

Not only is he no philosopher who has an idol, he has to learn that he
cannot think rationally; his due sense of weight and measure is lost, the
choice of his thoughts as well. He was in the house with his devoutly,
simply worshipped, pearl of women, and his whole mind fell to work
without ado upon the extravagant height of the admiral's shirt-collar
cutting his ears. The very beating of his heart was perplexed to know
whether it was for rapture or annoyance. As a result he was but
histrionically master of himself when the Countess Livia or the nimbus of
the lady appeared in the room.

She received his bow; she directed Mrs. Carthew to have the doctor
summoned immediately. The remorseful woman flew.

'Admiral Fakenham is very ill, Mr. Woodseer, he has had distracting news.
Oh, no, the messenger is not blamed. You are Lord Fleetwood's friend and
will not allow him to be prejudged. He will be in town shortly. I know
him well, you know him; and could you hear him accused of cruelty--and to
a woman? He is the soul of chivalry. So, in his way, is the admiral. If
he were only more patient! Let us wait for Lord Fleetwood's version. I am
certain it will satisfy me. The admiral wishes you to step up to him. Be
very quiet; you will be; consent to everything. I was unaware of his
condition: the things I heard were incredible. I hope the doctor will not
delay. Now go. Beg to retire soon.'

Livia spoke under her breath; she had fears.

Admiral Baldwin lay in his bed, submitting to a nurse-woman-sign of
extreme exhaustion. He plucked strength from the sight of Gower and
bundled the woman out of the room, muttering: 'Kill myself? Not half so
quick as they'd do it. I can't rest for that Whitechapel of yours. Please
fetch pen and paper: it's a letter.'

The letter began, 'Dear Lady Arpington.'

The dictation of it came in starts. Atone moment it seemed as if life's
ending shook the curtains on our stage and were about to lift. An old
friend in the reader of the letter would need no excuse for its jerky
brevity. It said that his pet girl, Miss Kirby, was married to the Earl
of Fleetwood in the first week of last month, and was now to be found at
a shop No. 45 Longways, Whitechapel; that the writer was ill, unable to
stir; that he would be in London within eight-and-forty hours at
furthest. He begged Lady Arpington to send down to the place and have the
young countess fetched to her, and keep her until he came.

Admiral Baldwin sat up to sign the letter.

'Yes, and write "miracles happen when the devil's abroad"--done it!' he
said, sinking back. 'Now seal, you'll find wax--the ring at my
watch-chain.'

He sighed, as it were the sound of his very last; he lay like a sleeper
twitched by a dream. There had been a scene with Livia. The dictating of
the letter took his remainder of strength out of him.

Gower called in the nurse, and went downstairs. He wanted the address of
Lady Arpington's town house.

'You have a letter for her?' said Livia, and held her hand for it in a
way not to be withstood.

'There's no superscription,' he remarked.

'I will see to that, Mr. Woodseer.'

'I fancy I am bound, Lady Fleetwood.'

'By no means.' She touched his arm. 'You are Lord Fleetwood's friend.'

A slight convulsion of the frame struck the admiral's shirt-collar at his
ears; it virtually prostrated him under foot of a lady so benign in
overlooking the spectacle he presented. Still, he considered; he had wits
alive enough, just to perceive a duty.

'The letter was entrusted to me, Lady Fleetwood.'

'You are afraid to entrust it to the post?'

'I was thinking of delivering it myself in town.'

'You will entrust it to me.'

'Anything on earth of my own.'

'The treasure would be valued. This you confide to my care.'

'It is important.'

'No.'

'Indeed it is.'

'Say that it is, then. It is quite safe with me. It may be important that
it should not be delivered. Are you not Lord Fleetwood's friend? Lady
Arpington is not so very, very prominent in the list with you and me.
Besides, I don't think she has come to town yet. She generally sees out
the end of the hunting season. Leave the letter to me: it shall go. You,
with your keen observation missing nothing, have seen that my uncle has
not his whole judgement at present. There are two sides to a case. Lord
Fleetwood's friend will know that it would be unfair to offer him up to
his enemies while he is absent. Things going favourably here, I drive
back to town to-morrow, and I hope you will accept a seat in my
carriage.'

He delivered his courtliest; he was riding on cloud.

They talked of Baden. His honourable surrender of her defeated purse was
a subject for gentle humour with her, venturesome compliment with him. He
spoke well; and though his hands were clean of Sir Meeson Corby's
reproach of them, the caricature of presentable men blushed absurdly and
seemed uneasy in his monstrous collar. The touching of him again would
not be required to set him pacing to her steps. His hang of the head
testified to the unerring stamp of a likeness Captain Abrane could affix
with a stroke: he looked the fiddler over his bow, playing wonderfully to
conceal the crack of a string. The merit of being one of her army of
admirers was accorded to him. The letter to Lady Arpington was retained.

Gower deferred the further mention of the letter until a visit to the
admiral's chamber should furnish an excuse; and he had to wait for it.
Admiral Baldwin's condition was becoming ominous. He sent messages
downstairs by the doctor, forbidding his guest's departure until they two
could make the journey together next day. The tortured and blissful young
man, stripped of his borrowed philosopher's cloak, hung conscience-ridden
in this delicious bower, which was perceptibly an antechamber of the
vaults, offering him the study he thirsted for, shrank from, and mixed
with his cup of amorous worship.




CHAPTER XXI

IN WHICH WE HAVE FURTHER GLIMPSES OF THE WONDROUS MECHANISM OF OUR
YOUNGER MAN

The report of Admiral Baldwin Fakenham as having died in the arms of a
stranger visiting the house, hit nearer the mark than usual. He yielded
his last breath as Gower Woodseer was lowering him to his pillow, shortly
after a husky whisper of the letter to Lady Arpington; and that was one
of Gower's crucial trials. It condemned him, for the pacifying of a dying
man, to the murmur and shuffle, which was a lie; and the lie burnt him,
contributed to the brand on his race. He and his father upheld a solitary
bare staff, where the Cambrian flag had flown, before their people had
been trampled in mire, to do as the worms. His loathing of any shadow of
the lie was a protest on behalf of Welsh blood against an English charge,
besides the passion for spiritual cleanliness: without which was no
comprehension, therefore no enjoyment, of Nature possible to him. For
Nature is the Truth.

He begged the countess to let him have the letter; he held to the
petition, with supplications; he spoke of his pledged word, his honour;
and her countenance did not deny to such an object as she beheld the
right to a sense of honour. 'We all have the sentiment, I hope, Mr.
Woodseer,' she said, stupefying the worshipper, who did not see it
manifested. There was a look of gentle intimacy, expressive of common
grounds between them, accompanying the dead words. Mistress of the
letter, and the letter safe under lock, the admiral dead, she had not to
bestow a touch of her hand on his coatsleeve in declining to return it. A
face languidly and benevolently querulous was bent on him, when he, so
clever a man, resumed his very silly petition.

She was moon out of cloud at a change of the theme. Gower journeyed to
London without the letter, intoxicated, and conscious of poison;
enamoured of it, and straining for health. He had to reflect at the
journey's end, that he had picked up nothing on the road, neither a thing
observed nor a thing imagined; he was a troubled pool instead of a
flowing river.

The best help to health for him was a day in his father's house. We are
perpetually at our comparisons of ourselves with others; and they are
mostly profitless; but the man carrying his religious light, to light the
darkest ways of his fellows, and keeping good cheer, as though the heart
of him ran a mountain water through the grimy region, plucked at Gower
with an envy to resemble him in practice. His philosophy, too, reproached
him for being outshone. Apart from his philosophy, he stood confessed a
bankrupt; and it had dwindled to near extinction. Adoration of a woman
takes the breath out of philosophy. And if one had only to say sheer
donkey, he consenting to be driven by her! One has to say worse in this
case; for the words are, liar and traitor.

Carinthia's attitude toward his father conduced to his emulous respect
for the old man, below whom, and indeed below the roadway of ordinary
principles hedged with dull texts, he had strangely fallen. The sight of
her lashed him. She made it her business or it was her pleasure to go the
rounds beside Mr. Woodseer visiting his poor people. She spoke of the
scenes she witnessed, and threw no stress on the wretchedness, having
only the wish to assist in ministering. Probably the great wretchedness
bubbling over the place blunted her feeling of loss at the word of
Admiral Baldwin's end; her bosom sprang up: 'He was next to father,' was
all she said; and she soon reverted to this and that house of the
lodgings of poverty. She had descended on the world. There was of course
a world outside Whitechapel, but Whitechapel was hot about her; the nests
of misery, the sharp note of want in the air, tricks of an urchin who had
amused her.

As to the place itself, she had no judgement to pronounce, except that:
'They have no mornings here'; and the childish remark set her quivering
on her heights, like one seen through a tear, in Gower's memory. Scarce
anything of her hungry impatience to meet her husband was visible: she
had come to London to meet him; she hoped to meet him soon: before her
brother's return, she could have added. She mentioned the goodness of
Sarah Winch in not allowing that she was a burden to support. Money and
its uses had impressed her; the quantity possessed by some, the utter
need of it for the first of human purposes by others. Her speech was not
of so halting or foreign an English. She grew rapidly wherever she was
planted.

Speculation on the conduct of her husband, empty as it might be, was
necessitated in Gower. He pursued it, and listened to his father
similarly at work: 'A young lady fit for any station, the kindest of
souls, a born charitable human creature, void of pride, near in all
she--does and thinks to the Shaping Hand, why should her husband forsake
her on the day of their nuptials.

She is most gracious; the simplicity of an infant. Can you imagine the
doing of an injury by a man to a woman like her?'

Then it was that Gower screwed himself to say:

'Yes, I can imagine it, I'm doing it myself. I shall be doing it till
I've written a letter and paid a visit.'

He took a meditative stride or two in the room, thinking without
revulsion of the Countess Livia under a similitude of the bell of the
plant henbane, and that his father had immunity from temptation because
of the insensibility to beauty. Out of which he passed to the writing of
the letter to Lord Fleetwood, informing his lordship that he intended
immediately to deliver a message to the Marchioness of Arpington from
Admiral Baldwin Fakenham, in relation to the Countess of Fleetwood. A
duty was easily done by Gower when he had surmounted the task of
conceiving his resolution to do it; and this task, involving an offence
to the Lady Livia and intrusion of his name on a nobleman's recollection,
ranked next in severity to the chopping off of his fingers by a man
suspecting them of the bite of rabies.

An interview with Lady Arpington was granted him the following day.

She was a florid, aquiline, loud-voiced lady, evidently having no seat
for her wonderments, after his account of the origin of his acquaintance
with the admiral had quieted her suspicions. The world had only to stand
beside her, and it would hear what she had heard. She rushed to the
conclusion that Lord Fleetwood had married a person of no family.

'Really, really, that young man's freaks appear designed for the express
purpose of heightening our amazement!' she exclaimed. 'He won't easily
get beyond a wife in the east of London, at a shop; but there's no
knowing. Any wish of Admiral Baldwin Fakenham's I hold sacred. At least I
can see for myself. You can't tell me more of the facts? If Lord
Fleetwood's in town, I will call him here at once. I will drive down to
this address you give me. She is a civil person?'

'Her breeding is perfect,' said Gower.

'Perfect breeding, you say?' Lady Arpington was reduced to a murmur. She
considered the speaker: his outlandish garb, his unprotesting
self-possession. He spoke good English by habit, her ear told her. She
was of an eminence to judge of a man impartially, even to the sufferance
of an opinion from him, on a subject that lesser ladies would have denied
to his clothing. Outwardly simple, naturally frank, though a tangle of
the complexities inwardly, he was a touchstone for true aristocracy, as
the humblest who bear the main elements of it must be. Certain humorous
turns in his conversation won him an amicable smile when he bowed to
leave: they were the needed finish of a favourable impression.

One day later the earl arrived in town, read Gower Woodseer's brief
words, and received the consequently expected summons, couched in a great
lady's plain imperative. She was connected with his family on the
paternal side.

He went obediently; not unwillingly, let the deputed historian of the
Marriage, turning over documents, here say. He went to Lady Arpington
disposed for marital humaneness and jog-trot harmony, by condescension;
equivalent to a submitting to the drone of an incessant psalm at the drum
of the ear. He was, in fact, rather more than inclined that way. When
very young, at the age of thirteen, a mood of religious fervour had
spiritualized the dulness of Protestant pew and pulpit for him. Another
fit of it, in the Roman Catholic direction, had proposed, during his
latest dilemma, to relieve him of the burden of his pledged word. He had
plunged for a short space into the rapturous contemplation of a monastic
life--'the clean soul for the macerated flesh,' as that fellow Woodseer
said once: and such as his friend, the Roman Catholic Lord Feltre,
moodily talked of getting in his intervals. He had gone down to a young
and novel trial establishment of English penitents in the forest of a
Midland county, and had watched and envied, and seen the escape from a
lifelong bondage to the 'beautiful Gorgon,' under cover of a white
flannel frock. The world pulled hard, and he gave his body into chains of
a woman, to redeem his word.

But there was a plea on behalf of this woman. The life she offered might
have psalmic iteration; the dead monotony of it in prospect did,
nevertheless, exorcise a devil. Carinthia promised, it might seem to
chase and keep the black beast out of him permanently, as she could, he
now conceived: for since the day of the marriage with her, the devil
inhabiting him had at least been easier, 'up in a corner.'

He held an individual memory of his bride, rose-veiled, secret to them
both, that made them one, by subduing him. For it was a charm; an actual
feminine, an unanticipated personal, charm; past reach of tongue to name,
wordless in thought. There, among the folds of the incense vapours of our
heart's holy of holies, it hung; and it was rare, it was distinctive of
her, and alluring, if one consented to melt to it, and accepted for
compensation the exorcising of a devil.

Oh, but no mere devil by title!--a very devil. It was alert and frisky,
flushing, filling the thin cold idea of Henrietta at a thought; and in
the thought it made Carinthia's intimate charm appear as no better than a
thing to enrich a beggar, while he knew that kings could never command
the charm. Not love, only the bathing in Henrietta's incomparable beauty
and the desire to be, desire to have been, the casket of it, broke the
world to tempest and lightnings at a view of Henrietta the married
woman--married to the brother of the woman calling him husband:--'It is
my husband.' The young tyrant of wealth could have avowed that he did not
love Henrietta; but not the less was he in the swing of a whirlwind at
the hint of her loving the man she had married. Did she? It might be
tried.

She? That Henrietta is one of the creatures who love pleasure, love
flattery, love their beauty: they cannot love a man. Or the love is a
ship that will not sail a sea.

Now, if the fact were declared and attested, if her shallowness were seen
proved, one might get free of the devil she plants in the breast.
Absolutely to despise her would be release, and it would allow of his
tasting Carinthia's charm, reluctantly acknowledged; not 'money of the
country' beside that golden Henrietta's.

Yet who can say?--women are such deceptions. Often their fairest,
apparently sweetest, when brought to the keenest of the tests, are
graceless; or worse, artificially consonant; in either instance barren of
the poetic. Thousands of the confidently expectant among men have been
unbewitched; a lamentable process; and the grimly reticent and the loudly
discursive are equally eloquent of the pretty general disillusion. How
they loathe and tear the mask of the sham attraction that snatched them
to the hag yoke, and fell away to show its grisly horrors within the
round of the month, if not the second enumeration of twelve by the clock!
Fleetwood had heard certain candid seniors talk, delivering their minds
in superior appreciation of unpretentious boor wenches, nature's
products, not esteemed by him. Well, of a truth, she--'Red Hair and
Rugged Brows,' as the fellow Woodseer had called her, in alternation with
'Mountain Face to Sun'--she at the unveiling was gentle, surpassingly;
graceful in the furnace of the trial. She wore through the critic ordeal
his burning sensitiveness to grace and delicacy cast about a woman, and
was rather better than not withered by it.

On the borders between maidenly and wifely, she, a thing of flesh like
other daughters of earth, had impressed her sceptical lord, inclining to
contempt of her and detestation of his bargain, as a flitting hue,
ethereal, a transfiguration of earthliness in the core of the earthly
furnace. And how?--but that it must have been the naked shining forth of
her character, startled to show itself:--'It is my husband':--it must
have been love.

The love that they versify, and strum on guitars, and go crazy over, and
end by roaring at as the delusion; this common bloom of the ripeness of a
season; this would never have utterly captured a sceptic, to vanquish him
in his mastery, snare him in her surrender. It must have been the
veritable passion: a flame kept alive by vestal ministrants in the
yewwood of the forest of Old Romance; planted only in the breasts of very
favourite maidens. Love had eyes, love had a voice that night,-love was
the explicable magic lifting terrestrial to seraphic. Though, true, she
had not Henrietta's golden smoothness of beauty. Henrietta, illumined
with such a love, would outdo all legends, all dreams of the tale of
love. Would she? For credulous men she would be golden coin of the
currency. She would not have a particular wild flavour: charm as of the
running doe that has taken a dart and rolls an eye to burst the hunter's
heart with pity.

Fleetwood went his way to Lady Arpington almost complacently, having
fought and laid his wilder self. He might be likened to the doctor's
patient entering the chemist's shop, with a prescription for a drug of
healing virtue, upon which the palate is as little consulted as a
robustious lollypop boy in the household of ceremonial parents, who have
rung for the troop of their orderly domestics to sit in a row and hearken
the intonation of good words.




CHAPTER XXII

A RIGHT-MINDED GREAT LADY

The bow, the welcome, and the introductory remarks passed rapidly as the
pull at two sides of a curtain opening on a scene that stiffens
courtliness to hard attention.

After the names of Admiral Baldwin and 'the Mr. Woodseer,' the name of
Whitechapel was mentioned by Lady Arpington. It might have been the name
of any other place.

'Ah, so far, then, I have to instruct you,' she said, observing the young
earl. 'I drove down there yesterday. I saw the lady calling herself
Countess of Fleetwood. By right? She was a Miss Kirby.'

'She has the right,' Fleetwood said, standing well up out of a discharge
of musketry.

'Marriage not contested. You knew of her being in that place?--I can't
describe it.'

'Your ladyship will pardon me?'

London's frontier of barbarism was named for him again, and in a tone to
penetrate.

He refrained from putting the question of how she had come there.

As iron as he looked, he said: 'She stays there by choice.'

The great lady tapped her foot on the floor.

'You are not acquainted with the district.'

'One of my men comes out of it.'

'The coming out of it! . . . However, I understand her story, that she
travelled from a village inn, where she had been left-without resources.
She waited weeks; I forget how many. She has a description of maid in
attendance on her. She came to London to find her husband. You were at
the mines, we heard. Her one desire is to meet her husband. But,
goodness! Fleetwood, why do you frown? You acknowledge the marriage, she
has the name of the church; she was married out of that old Lord
Levellier's house. You drove her--I won't repeat the flighty business.
You left her, and she did her best to follow you. Will the young men of
our time not learn that life is no longer a game when they have a woman
for partner in the match!

You don't complain of her flavour of a foreign manner? She can't be so
very . . . Admiral Baldwin's daughter has married her brother; and he is
a military officer. She has germs of breeding, wants only a little rub of
the world to smooth her. Speak to the point:--do you meet her here? Do
you refuse?'

'At present? I do.'

'Something has to be done.'

'She was bound to stay where I left her.'

'You are bound to provide for her becomingly.'

'Provision shall be made, of course.'

'The story will . . . unless--and quickly, too.'

I know, I know!'

Fleetwood had the clang of all the bells of London chiming Whitechapel at
him in his head, and he betrayed the irritated tyrant ready to decree
fire and sword, for the defence or solace of his tender sensibilities.

The black flash flew.

'It 's a thing to mend as well as one can,' Lady Arpington said. 'I am
not inquisitive: you had your reasons or chose to act without any. Get
her away from that place. She won't come to me unless it 's to meet her
husband. Ah, well, temper does not solve your problem; husband you are,
if you married her. We'll leave the husband undiscussed: with this
reserve, that it seems to me men are now beginning to play the
misunderstood.'

'I hope they know themselves better,' said Fleetwood; and he begged for
the name and number of the house in the Whitechapel street, where she who
was discernibly his enemy, and the deadliest of enemies, had now her
dwelling.

Her immediate rush to that place, the fixing of herself there for an
assault on him, was a move worthy the daughter of the rascal Old
Buccaneer; it compelled to urgent measures. He, as he felt horribly in
pencilling her address, acted under compulsion; and a woman prodded the
goad. Her mask of ingenuousness was flung away for a look of craft, which
could be power; and with her changed aspect his tolerance changed to
hatred.

'A shop,' Lady Arpington explained for his better direction: 'potatoes,
vegetable stuff. Honest people, I am to believe. She is indifferent to
her food, she says. She works, helping one of their ministers--one of
their denominations: heaven knows what they call themselves! Anything to
escape from the Church! She's likely to become a Methodist. With Lord
Feltre proselytizing for his Papist creed, Lord Pitscrew a declared
Mohammedan, we shall have a pretty English aristocracy in time. Well, she
may claim to belong to it now. She would not be persuaded against
visitations to pestiferous hovels. What else is there to do in such a
place? She goes about catching diseases to avoid bilious melancholy in
the dark back room of a small greengrocer's shop in Whitechapel.
There--you have the word for the Countess of Fleetwood's present
address.'

It drenched him with ridicule.

'I am indebted to your ladyship for the information,' he said, and
maintained his rigidity.

The great lady stiffened.

'I am obliged to ask you whether you intend to act on it at once. The
admiral has gone; I am in some sort deputed as a guardian to her, and I
warn you--very well, very well. In your own interests, it will be. If she
is left there another two or three days, the name of the place will stick
to her.'

'She has baptized herself with it already, I imagine,' said Fleetwood.
'She will have Esslemont to live in.'

'There will be more than one to speak as to that. You should know her.'

'I do not know her.'

'You married her.'

'The circumstances are admitted.'

'If I may hazard a guess, she is unlikely to come to terms without a
previous interview. She is bent on meeting you.'

'I am to be subjected to further annoyance, or she will take the name of
the place she at present inhabits, and bombard me with it. Those are the
terms.'

'She has a brother living, I remind you.'

'State the deduction, if you please, my lady.'

'She is not of 'a totally inferior family.'

'She had a father famous over England as the Old Buccaneer, and is a
diligent reader of his book of MAXIMS FOR MEN.'

'Dear me! Then Kirby--Captain Kirby! I remember. That's her origin, is
it?' the great lady cried, illumined. 'My mother used to talk of the
Cressett scandal. Old Lady Arpington, too. At any rate, it ended in their
union--the formalities were properly respected, as soon as they could
be.'

'I am unaware.'

'I detest such a tone of speaking. Speaking as you do now--married to the
daughter? You are not yourself, Lord Fleetwood.'

'Quite, ma'am, let me assure you. Otherwise the Kirby-Cressetts would be
dictating to me from the muzzle of one of the old rapscallion's Maxims.
They will learn that I am myself.'

'You don't improve as you proceed. I tell you this, you'll not have me
for a friend. You have your troops of satellites; but take it as equal to
a prophecy, you won't have London with you; and you'll hear of Lord
Fleetwood and his Whitechapel Countess till your ears ache.'

The preluding box on them reddened him.

'She will have the offer of Esslemont.'

'Undertake to persuade her in person.'

'I have spoken on that head.'

'Well, I may be mistaken,--I fancied it before I knew of the pair she
springs from: you won't get her consent to anything without your
consenting to meet her. Surely it's the manlier way. It might be settled
for to-morrow, here, in this room. She prays to meet you.'

With an indicated gesture of 'Save me from it,' Fleetwood bowed.

He left no friend thinking over the riddle of his conduct. She was a
loud-voiced lady, given to strike out phrases. The 'Whitechapel Countess'
of the wealthiest nobleman of his day was heard by her on London's
wagging tongue. She considered also that he ought at least have
propitiated her; he was in the position requiring of him to do something
of the kind, and he had shown instead the dogged pride which calls for a
whip. Fool as he must have been to go and commit himself to marriage with
a girl of whom he knew nothing or little, the assumption of pride
belonged to the order of impudent disguises intolerable to behold and
not, in a modern manner, castigate.

Notwithstanding a dislike of the Dowager Countess of Fleetwood, Lady
Arpington paid Livia an afternoon visit; and added thereby to the stock
of her knowledge and the grounds of her disapprobation.

Down in Whitechapel, it was known to the Winch girls and the Woodseers
that Captain Kirby and his wife had spent the bitterest of hours in
vainly striving to break their immoveable sister's will to remain there.

At the tea-time of simple people, who make it a meal, Gower's appetite
for the home-made bread of Mary Jones was checked by the bearer of a
short note from Lord Fleetwood. The half-dozen lines were cordial,
breathing of their walk in the Austrian highlands, and naming a renowned
city hotel for dinner that day, the hour seven, the reply yes or no by
messenger.

'But we are man to man, so there's no "No" between us two,' the note
said, reviving a scene of rosy crag and pine forest, where there had been
philosophical fun over the appropriate sexes of those our most important
fighting-ultimately, we will hope, to be united-syllables, and the when
for men, the when for women, to select the one of them as their weapon.

Under the circumstances, Gower thought such a piece of writing to him
magnanimous.

'It may be the solution,' his father remarked.

Both had the desire; and Gower's reply was the yes, our brave male word,
supposed to be not so compromising to men in the employment of it as a
form of acquiescence rather than insistent pressure.




CHAPTER XXIII

IN DAME GOSSIP'S VEIN

Right soon the London pot began to bubble. There was a marriage.

'There are marriages by the thousand every day of the year that is not
consecrated to prayer for the forgiveness of our sins,' the Old
Buccaneer, writing it with simple intent, says, by way of preface to a
series of Maxims for men who contemplate acceptance of the yoke.

This was a marriage high as the firmament over common occurrences, black
as Erebus to confound; it involved the wreck of expectations, disastrous
eclipse of a sovereign luminary in the splendour of his rise, Phaethon's
descent to the Shades through a smoking and a crackling world. Asserted
here, verified there, the rumour gathered volume, and from a serpent of
vapour resolved to sturdy concrete before it was tangible. Contradiction
retired into corners, only to be swept out of them. For this marriage,
abominable to hear of, was of so wonderful a sort, that the story filled
the mind, and the discrediting of the story threatened the great world's
cranium with a vacuity yet more monstrously abominable.

For he, the planet Croesus of his time, recently, scarce later than last
night, a glorious object of the mid-heavens above the market, has been
enveloped, caught, gobbled up by one of the nameless little witches
riding after dusk the way of the wind on broomsticks-by one of them! She
caught him like a fly in the hand off a pane of glass, gobbled him with
the customary facility of a pecking pullet.

But was the planet Croesus of his time a young man to be so caught, so
gobbled?

There is the mystery of it. On his coming of age, that young man gave
sign of his having a city head. He put his guardians deliberately aside,
had his lawyers and bailiffs and stewards thoroughly under control:
managed a particularly difficult step-mother; escaped the snares of her
lovely cousin; and drove his team of sycophants exactly the road he chose
to go and no other. He had a will.

The world accounted him wildish?

Always from his own offset, to his own ends. Never for another's
dictation or beguilement. Never for a woman. He was born with a suspicion
of the sex. Poetry decorated women, he said, to lime and drag men in the
foulest ruts of prose.

We are to believe he has been effectively captured?

It is positively a marriage; he admits it.

Where celebrated?

There we are at hoodman-blind for the moment. Three counties claim the
church; two ends of London.

She is not a person of society, lineage?

Nor of beauty. She is a witch; ordinarily petticoated and not squeaking
like a shrew-mouse in her flights, but not a whit less a moon-shade
witch. The kind is famous. Fairy tales and terrible romances tell of her;
she is just as much at home in life, and springs usually from the mire to
enthral our knightliest. Is it a popular hero? She has him, sooner or
later. A planet Croesus? He falls to her.

That is, if his people fail to attach him in legal bonds to a damsel of a
corresponding birth on the day when he is breeched.

Small is her need to be young--especially if it is the man who is very
young. She is the created among women armed with the deadly instinct for
the motive force in men, and shameless to attract it. Self-respecting
women treat men as their tamed housemates. She blows the horn of the wild
old forest, irresistible to the animal. O the droop of the eyelids, the
curve of a lip, the rustle of silks, the much heart, the neat ankle; and
the sparkling agreement, the reserve--the motherly feminine petition that
she may retain her own small petted babe of an opinion, legitimate or
not, by permission of superior authority!--proof at once of her
intelligence and her appreciativeness. Her infinitesimal spells are seen;
yet, despite experience, the magnetism in their repulsive display is
barely apprehended by sedate observers until the astounding capture is
proclaimed. It is visible enough then:--and O men! O morals! If she can
but trick the smallest bit in stooping, she has the pick of men.

Our present sample shows her to be young: she is young and a foreigner.
Mr. Chumley Potts vouches for it. Speaks foreign English. He thinks her
more ninny than knave: she is the tool of a wily plotter, picked up off
the highway road by Lord Fleetwood as soon as he had her in his eye. Sir
Meeson Corby wrings his frilled hands to depict the horror of the hands
of that tramp the young lord had her from. They afflict him malariously
still. The man, he says, the man as well was an infatuation, because he
talks like a Dictionary Cheap Jack, and may have had an education and
dropped into vagrancy, owing to indiscretions. Lord Fleetwood ran about
in Germany repeating his remarks. But the man is really an accomplished
violinist, we hear. She dances the tambourine business. A sister of the
man, perhaps, if we must be charitable. They are, some say, a couple of
Hungarian gypsies Lord F. found at a show and brought over to England,
and soon had it on his conscience that he ought to marry her, like the
Quixote of honour that he is; which is equal to saying crazy, as there is
no doubt his mother was.

The marriage is no longer disputable; poor Lady Fleetwood, whatever her
faults as a step-mother, does no longer deny the celebration of a
marriage; though she might reasonably discredit any such story if he, on
the evening of the date of the wedding day, was at a Ball, seen by her at
the supper-table; though it is admitted he left the Ball-room at night.
But the next day he certainly was in his place among the Peers and voted
against the Government, and then went down to his estates in Wales, being
an excellent holder of the reins, whether on the coach box or over the
cash box.

More and more wonderful, we hear that he drove his bride straight from
the church to the field of a prizefight, arranged for her special
delectation. She doats on seeing blood-shed and drinking champagne. Young
Mr. Mallard is our authority; and he says, she enjoyed it, and cheered
the victor for being her husband's man. And after the shocking
exhibition, good-bye; the Countess of Fleetwood was left sole occupant of
a wayside inn, and may have learnt in her solitude that she would have
been wise to feign disgust; for men to the smallest degree cultivated are
unable to pardon a want of delicacy in a woman who has chosen them, as
they are taught to think by their having chosen her.

So talked, so twittered, piped and croaked the London world over the
early rumours of the marriage, this Amazing Marriage; which it got to be
called, from the number of items flocking to swell the wonder.

Ravens ravening by night, poised peregrines by day, provision-merchants
for the dispensing of dainty scraps to tickle the ears, to arm the
tongues, to explode reputations, those great ladies, the Ladies Endor,
Eldritch, and Cowry, fateful three of their period, avenged and scourged
both innocence and naughtiness; innocence, on the whole, the least, when
their withering suspicion of it had hunted the unhappy thing to the bank
of Ophelia's ditch. Mallard and Chumley Potts, Captain Abrane, Sir Meeson
Corby, Lord Brailstone, were plucked at and rattled, put to the blush, by
a pursuit of inquiries conducted with beaks. High-nosed dames will
surpass eminent judges in their temerity on the border-line where Ahem
sounds the warning note to curtained decency. The courtly M. de St. Ombre
had to stand confused. He, however, gave another version of Captain
Abrane's 'fiddler,' and precipitated the great ladies into the
reflection, that French gentlemen, since the execrable French Revolution,
have lost their proper sense of the distinctions of Class. Homme
d'esprit, applied to a roving adventurer, a scarce other than vagabond,
was either an undiscriminating epithet or else a further example of the
French deficiency in humour.

Dexterous contriver, he undoubtedly is. Lady Cowry has it from Sir Meeson
Corby, who had it from the poor dowager, that Lord Fleetwood has
installed the man in his house and sits at the opposite end of his table;
fished him up from Whitechapel, where the countess is left serving
oranges at a small fruit-shop. With her own eyes, Lady Arpington saw her
there; and she can't be got to leave the place unless her husband drives
his coach down to fetch her. That he declines to do; so she remains the
Whitechapel Countess, all on her hind heels against the offer of a
shilling of her husband's money, if she 's not to bring him to his knees;
and goes about at night with a low Methodist singing hymns along those
dreadful streets, while Lord Fleetwood gives gorgeous entertainments. One
signal from the man he has hired, and he stops drinking--he will stop
speaking as soon as the man's mouth is open. He is under a complete
fascination, attributable, some say, to passes of the hands, which the
man won't wash lest he should weaken their influence.

For it cannot be simply his violin playing. They say he was a pupil of a
master of the dark art in Germany, and can practise on us to make us
think his commonest utterances extraordinarily acute and precious. Lord
Fleetwood runs round quoting him to everybody, quite ridiculously. But
the man's influence is sufficient to induce his patron to drive down and
fetch the Whitechapel Countess home in state, as she insists--if the man
wishes it. Depend upon it he is the key of the mystery.

Totally the contrary, Lady Arpington declares! the man is a learned man,
formerly a Professor of English Literature in a German University, and no
connection of the Whitechapel Countess whatever, a chance acquaintance at
the most. He operates on Lord Fleetwood with doses of German philosophy;
otherwise, a harmless creature; and has consented to wash and dress. It
is my lord who has had the chief influence. And the Countess Livia now
backs him in maintaining that there is nowhere a more honest young man to
be found. She may have her reasons.

As for the Whitechapel Countess . . . the whole story of the Old
Buccaneer and Countess Fanny was retold, and it formed a terrific halo,
presage of rains and hurricane tempest, over the girl the young earl had
incomprehensibly espoused to discard. Those two had a son and a daughter
born aboard:--in wedlock, we trust. The girl may be as wild a one as the
mother. She has a will as determined as her husband's. She is offered
Esslemont, the earl's Kentish mansion, for a residence, and she will none
of it until she has him down in the east of London on his knees to
entreat her. The injury was deep on one side or the other. It may be
almost surely prophesied that the two will never come together. Will
either of them deal the stroke for freedom? And which is the likelier?

Meanwhile Lord Fleetwood and his Whitechapel Countess composed the laugh
of London. Straightway Invention, the violent propagator, sprang from his
shades at a call of the great world's appetite for more, and, rushing
upon stationary Fact, supplied the required. Marvel upon marvel was
recounted. The mixed origin of the singular issue could not be examined,
where all was increasingly funny.

Always the shout for more produced it. She and her band of Whitechapel
boys were about in ambush to waylay the earl wherever he went. She stood
knocking at his door through a whole night. He dared not lug her before a
magistrate for fear of exposure. Once, riding in the park with a troop of
friends he had a young woman pointed out to him, and her finger was
levelled, and she cried: 'There is the English nobleman who marries a
girl and leaves her to go selling cabbages!'

He left town for the Island, and beheld his yacht sailing the Solent:--my
lady the countess was on board! A pair of Tyrolese minstrels in the
square kindled his enthusiasm at one of his dinners; he sent them a
sovereign; their humble, hearty thanks were returned to him in the name
of Die Grafin von Fleetwood.

The Ladies Endor, Eldritch, and Cowry sifted their best. They let pass
incredible stories: among others, that she had sent cards to the nobility
and gentry of the West End of London, offering to deliver sacks of
potatoes by newly-established donkey-cart at the doors of their
residences, at so much per sack, bills quarterly; with the postscript,
Vive L'aristocratie! Their informant had seen a card, and the stamp of
the Fleetwood dragoncrest was on it.

He has enemies, was variously said of the persecuted nobleman. But it was
nothing worse than the parasite that he had. This was the parasite's
gentle treason. He found it an easy road to humour; it pricked the slug
fancy in him to stir and curl; gave him occasion to bundle and bustle his
patron kindly. Abrane, Potts, Mallard, and Sir Meeson Corby were
personages during the town's excitement, besought for having something to
say. Petrels of the sea of tattle, they were buoyed by the hubbub they
created, and felt the tipsy happiness of being certain to rouse the laugh
wherever they alighted. Sir Meeson Corby, important to himself in an
eminent degree, enjoyed the novel sense of his importance with his
fellows. They crowded round the bore who had scattered them.

He traced the miserable catastrophe in the earl's fortunes to the cunning
of the rascal now sponging on Fleetwood and trying to dress like a
gentleman: a convicted tramp, elevated by the caprice of the young
nobleman he was plotting to ruin. Sir Meeson quoted Captain Abrane's
latest effort to hit the dirty object's name, by calling him 'Fleetwood's
Mr. Woodlouse.' And was the rascal a sorcerer? Sir Meeson spoke of him in
the hearing of the Countess Livia, and she, previously echoing his
disgust, corrected him sharply, and said: 'I begin to be of Russett's
opinion, that his fault is his honesty.' The rascal had won or partly won
the empress of her sex! This Lady Livia, haughtiest and most fastidious
of our younger great dames, had become the indulgent critic of the
tramp's borrowed plumes! Nay, she would not listen to a depreciatory word
on him from her cousin Henrietta Kirby-Levellier.

Perhaps, after all, of all places for an encounter between the Earl of
Fleetwood and the countess, those vulgar Gardens across the water, long
since abandoned by the Fashion, were the most suitable. Thither one fair
June night, for the sake of showing the dowager countess and her
beautiful cousin, the French nobleman, Sir Meeson Corby, and others, what
were the pleasures of the London lower orders, my lord had the whim to
conduct them,--merely a parade of observation once round;--the ladies
veiled, the gentlemen with sticks, and two servants following, one of
whom, dressed in quiet black, like the peacefullest of parsons, was my
lord's pugilist, Christopher Ives.

Now, here we come to history: though you will remember what History is.

The party walked round the Gardens unmolested nor have we grounds for
supposing they assumed airs of state in the style of a previous
generation. Only, as it happened, a gentleman of the party was a wag; no
less than the famous, well-seasoned John Rose Mackrell, bent on amusing
Mrs. Kirby-Levellier, to hear her lovely laughter; and his wit and his
anecdotes, both inexhaustible, proved, as he said, 'that a dried fish is
no stale fish, and a smoky flavour to an old chimney story will often
render it more piquant to the taste than one jumping fresh off the
incident.' His exact meaning in 'smoky flavour' we are not to know; but
whether that M. de St. Ombre should witness the effect of English humour
upon them, or that the ladies could permit themselves to laugh, their
voices accompanied the gentlemen in silvery volleys. There had been
'Mackrell' at Fleetwood's dinner-table; which was then a way of saying
that dry throats made no count of the quantity of champagne imbibed,
owing to the fits Rose Mackrell caused. However, there was loud laughter
as they strolled, and it was noticed; and Fleetwood crying out,
'Mackrell! Mackrell!' in delighted repudiation of the wag's last sally,
the cry of 'Hooray, Mackrell!' was caught up by the crowd. They were not
the primary offenders, for loud laughter in an isolated party is bad
breeding; but they had not the plea of a copious dinner.

So this affair began; inoffensively at the start, for my lord was
good-humoured about it.

Kit Ines, of the mercurial legs, must now give impromptu display of his
dancing. He seized a partner, in the manner of a Roman the Sabine, sure
of pleasing his patron; and the maid, passing from surprise to merriment,
entered the quadrille perforce, all giggles, not without emulation, for
she likewise had the passion for the dance. Whereby it befell that the
pair footed in a way to gather observant spectators; and if it had not
been that the man from whom the maid was willy-nilly snatched, conceived
resentment, things might have passed comfortably; for Kit's quips and
cuts and high capers, and the Sunday gravity of the barge face while the
legs were at their impish trickery, double motion to the music, won the
crowd to cheer. They conjectured him to be a British sailor. But the
destituted man said, sailor or no sailor,--bos'en be hanged! he should
pay for his whistle.

Honourably at the close of the quadrille, Kit brought her back; none the
worse for it, he boldly affirmed, and he thanked the man for the short
loan of her.--The man had an itch to strike. Choosing rather to be struck
first, he vented nasty remarks. My lord spoke to Kit and moved on. At the
moment of the step, Rose Mackrell uttered something, a waggery of some
sort, heard to be forgotten, but of such instantaneous effect, that the
prompt and immoderate laugh succeeding it might reasonably be taken for a
fling of scorn at himself, by an injured man. They were a party; he
therefore proceeded to make one, appealing to English sentiment and right
feeling. The blameless and repentant maid plucked at his coat to keep him
from dogging the heels of the gentlemen. Fun was promised; consequently
the crowd waxed.

'My lord,' had been let fall by Kit Ines. Conjoined to 'Mackrell,' it
rang finely, and a trumpeting of 'Lord Mackrell' resounded. Lord Mackrell
was asked for 'more capers and not so much sauce.' Various fish took part
in his title of nobility. The wag Mackrell continuing to be discreetly
silent, and Kit Ines acting as a pacific rearguard, the crowd fell in
love with their display of English humour, disposed to the surly
satisfaction of a big street dog that has been appeased by a smaller
one's total cessation of growls.

All might have gone well but for the sudden appearance of two figures of
young women on the scene. They fronted the advance of the procession.
They wanted to have a word with Lord Mackrell. Not a bit of it--he won't
listen, turns away; and one of the pair slips round him. It's regular
imploring: 'my lord! my lord!'

O you naughty Surrey melodram villain of a Lord Mackrell! Listen to the
young woman, you Mackrell, or you'll get Billingsgate! Here's Mr.
Jig-and-Reel behind here, says she's done him! By Gosh! What's up now?

One of the young ladies of the party ahead had rushed up to the young
woman dodging to stand in Lord Mackrell's way. The crowd pressed to see.
Kit Ines and his mate shouldered them off. They performed an envelopment
of the gentlemen and ladies, including the two young women. Kit left his
mate and ran to the young woman hitherto the quieter of the two. He
rattled at her. But she had a tongue of her own and rattled it at him.
What did she say?

Merely to hear, for no other reason,' a peace-loving crowd of clerks and
tradesmen, workmen and their girls, young aspirants to the professions,
night-larks of different classes, both sexes, there in that place for
simple entertainment, animated simply by the spirit of English humour,
contracted, so closing upon the Mackrell party as to seem threatening to
the most orderly and apprehensive member of it, who was the baronet, Sir
Meeson Corby.

He was a man for the constables in town emergencies, and he shouted.
'Cock Robin crowing' provoked a jolly round of barking chaff. The noise
in a dense ring drew Fleetwood's temper. He gave the word to Kit Ines,
and immediately two men dropped; a dozen staggered unhit. The fists
worked right and left; such a clearing of ground was never seen for
sickle or scythe. And it was taken respectfully; for Science proclaimed
her venerable self in the style and the perfect sufficiency of the
strokes. A bruiser delivered them. No shame to back away before a
bruiser. There was rather an admiring envy of the party claiming the
nimble champion on their side, until the very moderate lot of the
Mackrells went stepping forward along the strewn path with sticks
pointed.

If they had walked it like gentlemen, they would have been allowed to get
through. An aggressive minority, and with Cock Robin squealing for
constables in the midst, is that insolent upstart thing which howls to
have a lesson. The sticks were fallen on; bump came the mass. Kit Ines
had to fight his way back to his mate, and the couple scoured a clearish
ring, but the gentlemen were at short thrusts, affable in tone, to cheer
the spirits of the ladies:--'All right, my friend, you're a trifle
mistaken, it 's my stick, not yours.' Therewith the wrestle for the
stick.

The one stick not pointed was wrenched from the grasp of Sir Meeson
Corby; and by a woman, the young woman who had accosted my lord; not a
common young woman either, as she appeared when beseeching him. Her
stature rose to battle heights: she made play with Sir Meeson Corby's
ebony stick, using it in one hand as a dwarf quarterstaff to flail the
sconces, then to dash the point at faces; and she being a woman, a girl,
perhaps a lady, her cool warrior method of cleaving way, without so much
as tightening her lips, was found notable; and to this degree (vouched
for by Rose Mackrell, who heard it), that a fellow, rubbing his head,
cried: 'Damn it all, she's clever, though!' She took her station beside
Lord Fleetwood.

He had been as cool as she, or almost. Now he was maddened; she defended
him, she warded and thrust for him, only for him, to save him a touch;
unasked, undesired, detested for the box on his ears of to-morrow's
public mockery, as she would be, overwhelming him with ridicule. Have you
seen the kick and tug at the straps of the mettled pony in stables that
betrays the mishandling of him by his groom? Something so did Fleetwood
plunge and dart to be free of her, and his desperate soul cried out on
her sticking to him like a plaster!

Welcome were the constables. His guineas winked at their chief, as fair
women convey their meanings, with no motion of eyelids; and the officers
of the law knew the voice habituated to command, and answered two words
of his: 'Right, my lord,' smelling my lord in the unerring manner of
those days. My lord's party were escorted to the gates, not a little
jeered; though they by no means had the worst of the tussle. But the
puffing indignation of Sir Meesan Corby over his battered hat and torn
frill and buttons plucked from his coat, and his threat of the
magistrates, excited the crowd to derisive yells.

My lord spoke something to his man, handing his purse.

The ladies were spared the hearing of bad language. They, according to
the joint testimony of M. de St. Ombre and Mr. Rose Mackrell, comported
themselves throughout as became the daughters of a warrior race. Both
gentlemen were emphatic to praise the unknown Britomart who had done such
gallant service with Sir Meeson's ebony wand. He was beginning to fuss
vociferously about the loss of the stick--a family stick, goldheaded, the
family crest on it, priceless to the family--when Mrs. Kirby-Levellier
handed it to him inside the coach.

'But where is she?' M. de St. Ombre said, and took the hint of Livia's
touch on his arm in the dark.

At the silence following the question, Mr. Rose Mackrell murmured, 'Ah!'

He and the French gentleman understood that there might have been a
manifestation of the notorious Whitechapel Countess.

They were two; and a slower-witted third was travelling to his ideas on
the subject. Three men, witnesses of a remarkable incident in connection
with a boiling topic of current scandal,--glaringly illustrative of it,
moreover,--were unlikely to keep close tongues, even if they had been
sworn to secresy. Fleetwood knew it, and he scorned to solicit them; an
exaction of their idle vows would be merely the humiliation of himself.
So he tossed his dignity to recklessness, as the ultraconvivial give the
last wink of reason to the wine-cup. Persecuted as he was, nothing
remained for him but the nether-sublime of a statuesque desperation.

That was his feeling; and his way of cloaking it under light sallies at
Sir Meeson and easy chat with Henrietta made it visible to her, from its
being the contrary of what the world might expect a proud young nobleman
to exhibit. She pitied him: she had done him some wrong. She read into
him, too, as none else could. Seeing the solitary tortures behind the
pleasant social mask, she was drawn to partake of them; and the mask
seemed pathetic. She longed to speak a word in sympathy or relieve her
bosom of tears. Carinthia had sunk herself, was unpardonable, hardly
mentionable. Any of the tales told of her might be credited after this!
The incorrigible cause of humiliation for everybody connected with her
pictured, at a word of her name, the crowd pressing and the London world
acting audience. Livia spoke the name when they had reached their house
and were alone. Henrietta responded with the imperceptible shrug which is
more eloquent than a cry to tell of the most monstrous of loads. My lord,
it was thought by the ladies, had directed his man to convey her safely
to her chosen home, whence she might be expected very soon to be issuing
and striking the gong of London again.




CHAPTER XXIV

A KIDNAPPING AND NO GREAT HARM

Ladies who have the pride of delicate breeding are not more than rather
violently hurled back on the fortress it is, when one or other of the
gross mishaps of circumstance may subject them to a shock: and this
happening in the presence of gentlemen, they are sustained by the within
and the without to keep a smooth countenance, however severe their
affliction. Men of heroic nerve decline similarly to let explosions shake
them, though earth be shaken. Dragged into the monstrous grotesque of the
scene at the Gardens, Livia and Henrietta went through the ordeal,
masking any signs that they were stripped for a flagellation. Only, the
fair cousins were unable to perceive a comic element in the scene: and if
the world was for laughing, as their instant apprehension foresaw it, the
world was an ignoble beast. They did not discuss Carinthia's latest
craziness at night, hardly alluded to it while they were in the
interjectory state.

Henrietta was Livia's guest, her husband having hurried away to Vienna:
'To get money! money!' her angry bluntness explained his absence, and
dealt its blow at the sudden astounding poverty into which they had
fallen. She was compelled to practise an excessive, an incredible
economy:--'think of the smallest trifles!' so that her Chillon travelled
unaccompanied, they were separated. Her iterations upon money were the
vile constraint of an awakened interest and wonderment at its powers.
She, the romantic Riette, banner of chivalry, reader of poetry, struck a
line between poor and rich in her talk of people, and classed herself
with the fallen and pinched; she harped on her slender means, on the
enforced calculations preceding purchases, on the living in lodgings; and
that miserly Lord Levellier's indebtedness to Chillon--large sums! and
Chillon's praiseworthy resolve to pay the creditors of her father's
estate; and of how he travelled like a common man, in consequence of the
money he had given Janey--weakly, for her obstinacy was past endurance;
but her brother would not leave her penniless, and penniless she had been
for weeks, because of her stubborn resistance to the earl--quite
unreasonably, whether right or wrong--in the foul retreat she had chosen;
apparently with a notion that the horror of it was her vantage ground
against him: and though a single sign of submission would place the
richest purse in England at her disposal. 'She refuses Esslemont! She
insists on his meeting her! No child could be so witless. Let him be the
one chiefly or entirely to blame, she might show a little tact--for her
brother's sake! She loves her brother? No: deaf to him, to me, to every
consideration except her blind will.'

Here was the skeleton of the love match, earlier than Livia had expected.

It refreshed a phlegmatic lady's disposition for prophecy. Lovers
abruptly tossed between wind and wave may still be lovers, she knew: but
they are, or the weaker of the two is, hard upon any third person who
tugs at them for subsistence or existence. The condition, if they are
much beaten about, prepares true lovers, through their mutual tenderness,
to be bitterly misanthropical.

Livia supposed the novel economic pinches to be the cause of Henrietta's
unwonted harsh judgement of her sister-in-law's misconduct, or the crude
expression of it. She could not guess that Carinthia's unhappiness in
marriage was a spectre over the married happiness of the pair fretted by
the conscience which told them they had come together by doing much to
bring it to pass. Henrietta could see herself less the culprit when she
blamed Carinthia in another's hearing.

After some repose, the cousins treated their horrible misadventure as a
piece of history. Livia was cool; she had not a husband involved in it,
as Henrietta had; and London's hoarse laugh surely coming on them, spared
her the dread Henrietta suffered, that Chillon would hear; the most
sensitive of men on any matter touching his family.

'And now a sister added to the list! Will there be names, Livia?'

'The newspapers!' Livia's shoulders rose.

'We ought to have sworn the gentlemen to silence.'

'M. de St. Ombre is a tomb until he writes his Memoirs. I hold Sir Meeson
under lock. But a spiced incident, a notorious couple,--an anecdotal
witness to the scene,--could you expect Mr. Rose Mackrell to contain it?
The sacredest of oaths, my dear!'

That relentless force impelling an anecdotist to slaughter families for
the amusement of dinner-tables, was brought home to Henrietta by her
prospect of being a victim; and Livia reminding her of the excessive
laughter at Rose Mackrell's anecdotes overnight, she bemoaned her having
consented to go to those Gardens in mourning.

'How could Janey possibly have heard of the project to go?

'You went to please Russett, he to please you, and that wild-cat to
please herself,' said Livia. 'She haunts his door, I suppose, and follows
him, like a running footman. Every step she takes widens the breach. He
keeps his temper, yes, keeps his temper as he keeps his word, and one
morning it breaks loose, and all that's done has to be undone. It will
bemust. That extravaganza, as she is called, is fatal, dogs him with
burlesque--of all men!'

'Why not consent to meet her once, Chillon asks.'

'You are asking Russett to yield an inch on demand, and to a woman.'

'My husband would yield to a woman what he would refuse to all the men in
Europe and America,' said Henrietta; and she enjoyed her thrill of
allegiance to her chivalrous lord and courtier.

'No very extraordinary specimen of a newly married man, who has won the
Beauty of England and America for his wife-at some cost to some people,'
Livia rejoined.

There came a moisture on the eyelashes of the emotional young woman, from
a touch of compassion for the wealthy man who had wished to call her
wife, and was condemned by her rejection of him to call another woman
wife, to be wifeless in wedding her, despite his wealth.

She thinks he loves her; it is pitiable, but she thinks it--after the
treatment she has had. She begs to see him once.'

'And subdue him with a fit of weeping,' Livia was moved to say by sight
of the tear she hated. 'It would harden Russett--on other eyes, too!
Salt-water drops are like the forced agony scenes in a play: they bring
down the curtain, they don't win the critics. I heard her "my husband"
and saw his face.'

'You didn't hear a whimper with it,' Henrietta said. 'She's a mountain
girl, not your city madam on the boards. Chillon and I had her by each
hand, implored her to leave that impossible Whitechapel, and she
trembled, not a drop was shed by her. I can almost fancy privation and
squalor have no terrors for Janey. She sings to the people down there,
nurses them. She might be occupying Esslemont--our dream of an English
home! She is the destruction of the idea of romantic in connection with
the name of marriage. I talk like a simpleton. Janey upsets us all. My
lord was only--a little queer before he knew her: His Mr. Woodseer may be
encouraging her. You tell me the creature has a salary from him equal to
your jointure.'

'Be civil to the man while it lasts,' Livia said, attentive to a
degradation of tone--in her cousin, formerly of supreme self-containment.

The beautiful young woman was reminded of her holiday in town. She
brightened, and the little that it was, and the meanness of the
satisfaction, darkened her. Envy of the lucky adventurer Mr. Woodseer, on
her husband's behalf, grew horridly conscious for being reproved. So she
plucked resolution to enjoy her holiday and forget the contrasts of
life-palaces running profusion, lodgings hammered by duns; the pinch of
poverty distracting every simple look inside or out. There was no end to
it; for her husband's chivalrous honour forced him to undertake the
payment of her father's heavy debts. He was right and admirable, it could
not be contested; but the prospect for them was a grinding gloom, an
unrelieved drag, as of a coach at night on an interminable uphill flinty
road.

These were her sensations, and she found it diverting to be admired;
admired by many while she knew herself to be absorbed in the possession
of her by one. It bestowed the before and after of her marriage. She felt
she was really, had rapidly become, the young woman of the world, armed
with a husband, to take the flatteries of men for the needed diversion
they brought. None moved her; none could come near to touching the happy
insensibility of a wife who adored her husband, wrote to him daily,
thought of him by the minute. Her former worshippers were numerous at
Livia's receptions; Lord Fleetwood, Lord Brailstone, and the rest. Odd to
reflect on--they were the insubstantial but coveted wealth of the woman
fallen upon poverty, ignoble poverty! She could not discard her wealth.
She wrote amusingly of them, and fully, vivacious descriptions, to
Chillon; hardly so much writing to him as entering her heart's barred
citadel, where he resided at his ease, heard everything that befell about
her. If she dwelt on Lord Fleetwood's kindness in providing
entertainments, her object was to mollify Chillon's anger in some degree.
She was doing her utmost to gratify him, 'for the purpose of paving a way
to plead Janey's case.' She was almost persuading herself she was
enjoying the remarks of his friend, confidant, secretary, or what not,
Livia's worshipper, Mr. Woodseer, 'who does as he wills with my lord;
directs his charities, his pleasures, his opinions, all because he is
believed to have wonderful ideas and be wonderfully honest.' Henrietta
wrote: 'Situation unchanged. Janey still At that place'; and before the
letter was posted, she and Livia had heard from Gower Woodseer of the
reported disappearance of the Countess of Fleetwood and her maid. Gower's
father had walked up from Whitechapel, bearing news of it to the earl,
she said.

'And the earl is much disturbed?' was Livia's inquiry.

'He has driven down with my father,' Gower said carelessly, ambiguously
in the sound.

Troubled enough to desire the show of a corresponding trouble, Henrietta
read at their faces.

'May it not be--down there--a real danger?'

The drama, he could inform her, was only too naked down there for
disappearances to be common.

'Will it be published that she is missing?'

'She has her maid with her, a stout-hearted girl. Both have courage. I
don't think we need take measures just yet.'

'Not before it is public property?'

Henrietta could have bitten her tongue for laying her open to the censure
implied in his muteness. Janey perverted her.

Women were an illegible manuscript, and ladies a closed book of the
binding, to this raw philosopher, or he would not so coldly have judged
the young wife, anxious on her husband's account, that they might escape
another scorching. He carried away his impression.

Livia listened to a remark on his want of manners.

'Russett puts it to the credit of his honesty,' she said. 'Honesty is
everything with us at present. The man has made his honesty an excellent
speculation. He puts a piece on zero and the bank hands him a sackful. We
may think we have won him to serve us, up comes his honesty. That's how
we have Lady Arpington mixed in it--too long a tale. But be guided by me;
condescend a little.'

'My dear! my whole mind is upon that unhappy girl. It would break
Chillon's heart.'

Livia pished. 'There are letters we read before we crack the seal. She is
out of that ditch, and it suits Russett that she should be. He's not
often so patient. A woman foot to foot against his will--I see him
throwing high stakes. Tyrants are brutal; and really she provokes him
enough. You needn't be alarmed about the treatment she 'll meet. He won't
let her beat him, be sure.'

Neither Livia nor Gower wondered at the clearing of the mystery, before
it went to swell the scandal. A young nobleman of ready power, quick
temper, few scruples, and a taxed forbearance, was not likely to stand
thwarted and goaded-and by a woman. Lord Fleetwood acted his part,
inscrutable as the blank of a locked door. He could not conceal that he
was behind the door.




CHAPTER XXV

THE PHILOSOPHER MAN OF ACTION

Gower's bedroom window looked over the shrubs of the square, and as his
form of revolt from a city life was to be up and out with the sparrows in
the early flutter of morning, for a stretch of the legs where grass was
green and trees were not enclosed, he rarely saw a figure below when he
stood dressing. Now there appeared a petticoated one stationary against
the rails, with her face lifted. She fronted the house, and while he
speculated abstractedly, recognition rushed on him. He was down and
across the roadway at leaps.

'It's Madge here!'

The girl panted for her voice.

'Mr. Woodseer, I'm glad; I thought I should have to wait hours. She's
safe.'

'Where?'

'Will you come, sir?'

'Step ahead.'

Madge set forth to north of the square.

He judged of the well-favoured girl that she could steer her way through
cities: mouth and brows were a warning to challenger pirate craft of a
vessel carrying guns; and the red lips kept their firm line when they
yielded to the pressure for speech.

'It's a distance. She's quite safe, no harm; she's a prisoner; she's well
fed; she's not ill treated.'

'You 're out?'

'That's as it happens. I'm lucky in seeing you early. He don't mean to
hurt her; he won't be beaten. All she asks is ten minutes with him. If he
would!--he won't. She didn't mean to do him offence t' other night in
that place--you've heard. Kit Ines told me he was on duty there--going.
She couldn't help speaking when she had eyes on her husband. She kisses
the ground of his footsoles, you may say, let him be ever so unkind. She
and I were crossing to the corner of Roper Street a rainy night, on way
to Mile End, away down to one of your father's families, Mother Davis and
her sick daughter and the little ones, and close under the public-house
Goat and Beard we were seized on and hustled into a covered carriage that
was there, and they drove sharp. She 's not one to scream. We weren't
frightened. We both made the same guess. They drove us to the house she
's locked in, and me, too, up till three o'clock this morning.'

'You've seen nobody, Madge?'

'He 's fixed she 's to leave London, Mr. Woodseer. I've seen Kit Ines.
And she 's to have one of the big houses to her use. I guessed Kit Ines
was his broom. He defends it because he has his money to make--and be a
dirty broom for a fortune! But any woman's sure of decent handling with
Kit Ines--not to speak of lady. He and a mate guard the house. An old
woman cooks.'

'He guards the house, and he gave you a pass?'

'Not he. His pride's his obedience to his "paytron"--he calls his master,
and won't hear that name abused. We are on the first floor; all the lower
doors are locked day and night. New Street, not much neighbours; she
wouldn't cry out of the window. She 's to be let free if she'll leave
London.'

'You jumped it!'

'If I'd broke a leg, Mr. Kit Ines would have had to go to his drams. It
wasn't very high; and a flower-bed underneath. My mistress wanted to be
the one. She has to be careful. She taught me how to jump down not to
hurt. She makes you feel you can do anything. I had a bother to get her
to let me and be quiet herself. She's not one to put it upon others,
you'll learn. When I was down I felt like a stick in the ground and sat
till I had my feet, she at the window waiting; and I started for you. She
kissed her hand. I was to come to you, and then your father, you nowhere
seen. I wasn't spoken to. I know empty London.'

'Kit Ines was left sleeping in the house?'

'Snoring, I dare say: He don't drink on duty.'

'He must be kept on duty.'

'Drink or that kind of duty, it's a poor choice.'

'You'll take him in charge, Madge.'

'I've got a mistress to look after.'

'You've warmed to her.'

'That's not new; Mr. Woodseer. I do trust you, and you his friend. But
you are the minister's son, and any man not a great nobleman must have
some heart for her. You'll learn. He kills her so because she's fond of
him--loves him, however he strikes. No, not like a dog, as men say of us.
She'd die for him this night, need were. Live with her, you won't find
many men match her for brave; and she's good. My Sally calls her a Bible
saint. I could tell you stories of her goodness, short the time though
she's been down our way. And better there for her than at that inn he
left her at to pine and watch the Royal Sovereign come swing come smirk
in sailor blue and star to meet the rain--would make anybody disrespect
Royalty or else go mad! He's a great nobleman, he can't buy what she's
ready to give; and if he thinks he breaks her will now, it's because she
thinks she's obeying a higher than him, or no lord alive and Kit Ines to
back him 'd hold her. Women want a priest to speak to men certain times.
I wish I dared; we have to bite our tongues. He's master now, but, as I
believe God's above, if he plays her false, he's the one to be brought to
shame. I talk.'

'Talk on, Madge,' said Gower, to whom the girl's short-syllabled run of
the lips was a mountain rill compared with London park waters.

'You won't let him hurry her off where she'll eat her heart for never
seeing him again? She prays to be near him, if she's not to see him.'

'She speaks in that way?'

'I get it by bits. I'm with her so, it's as good as if I was inside her.
She can't obey when it goes the wrong way of her heart to him.'

'Love and wisdom won't pull together, and they part company for good at
the church door,' said Gower. 'This matrimony's a bad business.'

Madge hummed a moan of assent. 'And my poor Sally 'll have to marry. I
can't leave my mistress while she wants me, and Sally can't be alone. It
seems we take a step and harm's done, though it's the right step we
take.'

'It seems to me you've engaged yourself to follow Sally's lead, Madge.'

'Girls' minds turn corners, Mr. Woodseer.'

He passed the remark. What it was that girls' minds occasionally or
habitually did, or whether they had minds to turn, or whether they took
their whims for minds, were untroubled questions with a young man
studying abstract and adoring surface nature too exclusively to be aware
of the manifestation of her spirit in the flesh, as it is not revealed so
much by men. However, she had a voice and a face that led him to be
thoughtful over her devotedness to her mistress, after nearly losing her
character for the prize-fighter, and he had to thank her for invigorating
him. His disposition was to muse and fall slack, helpless to a friend.
Here walked a creature exactly the contrary. He listened to the steps of
the dissimilar pair on the detonating pavement, and eyed a church clock
shining to the sun.

She was sure of the direction: 'Out Camden way, where the murder was.'

They walked at a brisk pace, conversing or not.

'Tired? You must be,' he said.

'Not when I'm hot to do a thing.'

'There's the word of the thoroughbred!'

'You don't tire, sir,' said she. 'Sally and I see you stalking out for
the open country in the still of the morning. She thinks you look pale
for want of food, and ought to have some one put a biscuit into your
pocket overnight.'

'Who'd have guessed I was under motherly observation!'

'You shouldn't go so long empty, if you listen to trainers.'

'Capital doctors, no doubt. But I get a fine appetite.'

'You may grind the edge too sharp.'

He was about to be astonished, and reflected that she had grounds for her
sagacity. His next thought plunged him into contempt for Kit Ines, on
account of the fellow's lapses to sottishness. But there would be no
contempt of Kit Ines in a tussle with him. Nor could one funk the tussle
and play cur, if Kit's engaged young woman were looking on. We get to our
courage or the show of it by queer screws.

Contemplative over these matters, the philosopher transformed to man of
action heard Madge say she read directions in London by churches, and
presently exclaiming disdainfully, and yet relieved, 'Spooner Villas,'
she turned down a row of small detached houses facing a brickfield, that
had just contributed to the erection of them, and threatened the big city
with further defacements.

Madge pointed to the marks of her jump, deep in flower-bed earth under an
open window.

Gower measured the height with sensational shanks.

She smote at the door. Carinthia nodded from her window. Close upon that,
Kit Ines came bounding to the parlour window; he spied and stared. Gower
was known to him as the earl's paymaster; so he went to the passage and
flung the door open, blocking the way.

'Any commands, your honour?'

'You bring the countess to my lord immediately,' said Gower.

Kit swallowed his mouthful of surprise in a second look at Madge and the
ploughed garden-bed beneath the chamber window.

'Are the orders written, sir?'

'To me?--for me to deliver to you?--for you to do my lord's bidding?
Where's your head?'

Kit's finger-nails travelled up to it. Madge pushed past him. She and her
mistress, and Kit's mate, and the old woman receiving the word for a cup
of tea, were soon in the passage. Kit's mate had a ready obedience for
his pay, nothing else,--no counsel at all, not a suggestion to a head
knocked to a pudding by Madge's jump and my lord's paymaster here upon
the scene.

'My lady was to go down Wales way, sir.'

'That may be ordered after.'

'I 'm to take my lady to my lord?' and, 'Does it mean my lady wants a
fly?' Kit asked, and harked back on whether Madge had seen my lord.

'At five in the morning?--don't sham donkey with me,' said Gower.

The business looked inclined to be leaky, but which the way for proving
himself other than a donkey puzzled Kit: so much so, that a shove made
him partly grateful. Madge's clever countermove had stunned his
judgement. He was besides acting subordinate to his patron's paymaster;
and by the luck of it, no voice of woman interposed. The countess and her
maid stood by like a disinterested couple. Why be suspicious, if he was
to keep the countess, in sight? She was a nice lady, and he preferred her
good opinion. She was brave, and he did her homage. It might be, my lord
had got himself round to the idea of thanking her for saving his nob that
night, and his way was to send and have her up, to tell her he forgave
her, after the style of lords. Gower pricked into him by saying aside:
'Mad, I suppose, in case of a noise?' And he could not answer quite
manfully, lost his eyes and coloured. Neighbours might have required an
explanation of shrieks, he confessed. Men have sometimes to do nasty work
for their patrons.

They were afoot, walking at Carinthia's pace before half-past seven. She
would not hear of any conveyance. She was cheerful, and, as it was
pitiful to see, enjoyed her walk. Hearing of her brother's departure for
the Austrian capital, she sparkled. Her snatches of speech were short
flights out of the meditation possessing her. Gower noticed her easier
English, that came home to the perpetual student he was. She made use of
some of his father's words, and had assimilated them mentally besides
appropriating them: the verbalizing of 'purpose,' then peculiar to his
father, for example. She said, in reply to a hint from him: 'If my lord
will allow me an interview, I purpose to be obedient.' No one could
imagine of her that she spoke broken-spiritedly. Her obedience was to a
higher than a mortal lord: and Gower was touched to the quick through the
use of the word.

Contrasting her with Countess Livia and her cousin, the earl might think
her inferior on the one small, square compartment called by them the
world; but she carried the promise of growth, a character in expansion,
and she had at least natural grace, a deerlike step. Although her
picturesqueness did not swarm on him with images illuminating night,
subduing day, like the Countess Livia's, it was marked, it could tower
and intermittently eclipse; and it was of the uplifting and healing kind
by comparison, not a delicious balefulness.

The bigger houses, larger shops, austere streets of private residences,
were observed by the recent inhabitant of Whitechapel.

'My lord lives in a square,' she said.

'We shall soon be there now,' he encouraged her, doubtful though the
issue appeared.

'It is a summer morning for the Ortler, the Gross-Glockner, the
Venediger,--all our Alps, Mr. Woodseer.'

'If we could fly!'

'We love them.'

'Why, then we beat a wing--yes.'

'For I have them when I want them to sight. It is the feet are so
desirous. I feel them so this morning, after prisonership. I could not
have been driven to my lord.'

'I know the feeling,' said Gower; 'any movement of us not our own
impulse, hurries the body and deadens the mind. And by the way, my dear
lady, I spoke of the earl's commands to this man behind us walking with
your Madge. My father would accuse me of Jesuitry. Ines mentioned
commands, and I took advantage of it.'

'I feared,' said Carinthia. 'I go for my chance.'

Gower had a thought of the smaller creature, greater by position, to whom
she was going for her chance. He alluded to his experience of the earl's
kindness in relation to himself, from a belief in his 'honesty'; dotted
outlines of her husband's complex character, or unmixed and violently
opposing elements.

She remarked: 'I will try and learn.'

The name of the street of beautiful shops woke a happy smile on her
mouth. 'Father talked of it; my mother, too. He has it written down in
his Book of Maxims. When I was a girl, I dreamed of one day walking up
Bond Street.'

They stepped from the pavement and crossed the roadway for a side-street
leading to the square. With the swift variation of her aspect at times,
her tone changed.

'We are near. My lord will not be troubled by me. He has only to meet me.
There has been misunderstanding. I have vexed him; I could not help it. I
will go where he pleases after I have heard him give orders. He thinks me
a frightful woman. I am peaceful.'

Gower muttered her word 'misunderstanding.' They were at the earl's house
door. One tap at it, and the two applicants for admission would probably
be shot as far away from Lord Fleetwood as when they were on the Styrian
heights last autumn. He delivered the tap, amused by the idea. It was
like a summons to a genie of doubtful service.

My lord was out riding in the park.

Only the footman appeared at that early hour, and his countenance was
blank whitewash as he stood rigid against the wall for the lady to pass.
Madge followed into the morning room; Ines remained in the hall, where he
could have the opening speech with his patron, and where he soon had
communication with the butler.

This official entered presently to Gower, presenting a loaded forehead. A
note addressed to Mrs. Kirby-Levellier at the Countess Livia's house hard
by was handed to him for instant despatch. He signified a deferential
wish to speak.

'You can speak in the presence of the Countess of Fleetwood, Mr. Waytes,'
Gower said.

Waytes checked a bend of his shoulders. He had not a word, and he turned
to send the note. He was compelled to think that he saw a well-grown
young woman in the Whitechapel Countess.

Gower's note reached Henrietta on her descent to the breakfast-table. She
was, alone, and thrown into a torture of perplexity: for she wanted
advice as to the advice to be given to Janey, and Livia was an utterly
unprofitable person to consult in the case. She thought of Lady
Arpington, not many doors distant. Drinking one hasty cup of tea, she
sent for her bonnet, and hastened away to the great lady, whom she found
rising from breakfast with the marquis.

Lady Arpington read Gower's note. She unburdened herself: 'Oh! So it 's
no longer a bachelor's household!'

Henrietta heaved the biggest of sighs. 'I fear the poor dear may have
made matters worse.'

To which Lady Arpington said: 'Worse or better, my child!' and shrugged;
for the present situation strained to snapping.

She proposed to go forthwith, and give what support she could to the
Countess of Fleetwood.

They descended the steps of the house to the garden and the Green Park's
gravel walk up to Piccadilly. There they had view of Lord Fleetwood on
horseback leisurely turning out of the main way's tide. They saw him
alight at the mews. As they entered the square, he was met some doors
from the south corner by his good or evil genius, whose influence with
him came next after the marriage in the amazement it caused, and was
perhaps to be explained by it; for the wealthiest of young noblemen
bestowing his name on an unknown girl, would be the one to make an absurd
adventurer his intimate. Lord Fleetwood bent a listening head while Mr.
Gower Woodseer, apparently a good genius for the moment, spoke at his
ear.

How do we understand laughter at such a communication as he must be
hearing from the man? Signs of a sharp laugh indicated either his cruel
levity or that his presumptuous favourite trifled--and the man's talk
could be droll, Lady Arpington knew: it had, she recollected angrily,
diverted her, and softened her to tolerate the intruder into regions from
which her class and her periods excluded the lowly born, except at the
dinner-tables of stale politics and tattered scandal. Nevertheless, Lord
Fleetwood mounted the steps to his house door, still listening. His
'Asmodeus,' on the tongue of the world, might be doing the part of Mentor
really. The house door stood open.

Fleetwood said something to Gower; he swung round, beheld the ladies and
advanced to them, saluting. 'My dear Lady Arpington! quite so, you arrive
opportunely. When the enemy occupies the citadel, it's proper to
surrender. Say, I beg, she can have the house, if she prefers it. I will
fall back on Esslemont. Arrangements for her convenience will be made. I
thank you, by anticipation.'

His bow included Henrietta loosely. Lady Arpington had exclaimed: 'Enemy,
Fleetwood?' and Gower, in his ignorance of the smoothness of aristocratic
manners, expected a remonstrance; but Fleetwood was allowed to go on,
with his air of steely geniality and a decision, that his friend imagined
he could have broken down like an old partition board under the kick of a
sarcasm sharpening an appeal.

'Lord Fleetwood was on the point of going in,' he assured the great lady.

'Lord Fleetwood may regret his change of mind,' said she. 'The Countess
of Fleetwood will have my advice to keep her footing in this house.'

She and Henrietta sat alone with Carinthia for an hour. Coming forth,
Lady Arpington ejaculated to herself: 'Villany somewhere!--You will do
well, Henrietta, to take up your quarters with her a day or two. She can
hold her position a month. Longer is past possibility.'

A shudder of the repulsion from men crept over the younger lady. But she
was a warrior's daughter, and observed: 'My husband, her brother, will be
back before the month ends.'

'No need for hostilities to lighten our darkness,' Lady Arpington
rejoined. 'You know her? trust her?'

'One cannot doubt her face. She is my husband's sister. Yes, I do trust
her. I nail my flag to her cause.'

The flag was crimson, as it appeared on her cheeks; and that intimated a
further tale, though not of so dramatic an import as the cognizant short
survey of Carinthia had been.

These young women, with the new complications obtruded by them, irritated
a benevolent great governing lady, who had married off her daughters and
embraced her grandchildren, comfortably finishing that chapter; and
beheld now the apparition of the sex's ancient tripping foe, when
circumstances in themselves were quite enough to contend against on their
behalf. It seemed to say, that nature's most burdened weaker must always
be beaten. Despite Henrietta's advocacy and Carinthia's clear face, it
raised a spectral form of a suspicion, the more effective by reason of
the much required justification it fetched from the shades to plead
apologies for Lord Fleetwood's erratic, if not mad, and in any case ugly,
conduct. What otherwise could be his excuse? Such was his need of one,
that the wife he crushed had to be proposed for sacrifice, in the mind of
a lady tending strongly to side with her and condemn her husband.

Lady Arpington had counselled Carinthia to stay where she was, the Fates
having brought her there. Henrietta was too generous to hesitate in her
choice between her husband's sister and the earl. She removed from
Livia's house to Lord Fleetwood's. My lord was at Esslemont two days;
then established his quarters at Scrope's hotel, five minutes' walk from
the wedded lady to whom the right to bear his title was granted, an
interview with him refused. Such a squaring for the battle of spouses had
never--or not in mighty London--been seen since that old fight began.




CHAPTER XXVI

AFTER SOME FENCING THE DAME PASSES OUR GUARD

Dame Gossip at this present pass bursts to give us a review of the social
world siding for the earl or for his countess; and her parrot cry of
'John Rose Mackrell!' with her head's loose shake over the smack of her
lap, to convey the contemporaneous tipsy relish of the rich good things
he said on the subject of the contest, indicates the kind of intervention
it would be.

To save the story from having its vein tied, we may accept the reminder,
that he was the countess's voluble advocate at a period when her friends
were shy to speak of her. After relating the Vauxhall Gardens episode in
burlesque Homeric during the freshness of the scandal, Rose Mackrell's
enthusiasm for the heroine of his humour set in. He tracked her to her
parentage, which was new breath blown into the sunken tradition of some
Old Buccaneer and his Countess Fanny: and, a turn of great good luck
helping him to a copy of the book of the MAXIMS FOR MEN, he would quote
certain of the racier ones, passages of Captain John Peter Kirby's
personal adveres in various lands and waters illustrating the text, to
prove that the old warrior acted by the rule of his recommendations. They
had the repulsive attraction proper to rusty lumber swords and truncehons
that have tasted brains. They wove no mild sort of halo for the head of a
shillelagh-flourishing Whitechapel Countess descended from the writer and
doer.

People were willing to believe in her jump of thirty feet or more off a
suburban house-top to escape durance, and her midnight storming of her
lord's town house, and ousting of him to go find his quarters at Scrope's
hotel. He, too, had his band of pugilists, as it was known; and he might
have heightened a rageing scandal. The nobleman forbore. A woman's blow
gracefully taken adds a score of inches to our stature, floor us as it
may: we win the world's after-thoughts. Rose Mackrell sketched the
earl;--always alert, smart, quick to meet a combination and protect a
dignity never obtruded, and in spite of himself the laugh of the town.
His humour flickered wildly round the ridiculous position of a prominent
young nobleman, whose bearing and character were foreign to a position of
ridicule.

Nevertheless, the earl's figure continuing to be classic sculpture, it
allied him with the aristocracy of martyrs, that burn and do not wince.
He propitiated none, and as he could not but suffer shrewdly, he gained
esteem enough to shine through the woman's pitiless drenching of him.
During his term at Scrope's hotel, the carousals there were quite
old-century and matter of discourse. He had proved his return to sound
sense in the dismissal of 'the fiddler,' notoriously the woman's
lieutenant, or more; and nightly the revelry closed at the great gaming
tables of St. James's Street, while Whitechapel held the coroneted
square, well on her way to the Law courts, as Abrane and Potts reported;
and positively so, 'clear case.' That was the coming development and
finale of the Marriage. London waited for it.

A rich man's easy smile over losses at play, merely taught his emulous
troop to feel themselves poor devils in the pocket. But Fleetwood's
contempt of Sleep was a marvel, superhuman, and accused them of an
inferior vigour, hard for young men to admit by the example. He never
went to bed. Issuing from Fortune's hall-doors in the bright, lively,
summer morning, he mounted horse and was away to the hills. Or he took
the arm of a Roman Catholic nobleman, Lord Feltre, and walked with him
from the green tables and the establishment's renowned dry still Sillery
to a Papist chapel. As it was not known that he had given his word to
abjure his religion, the pious gamblers did no worse than spread an alarm
and quiet it, by the citation of his character for having a try at
everything.

Henrietta despatched at this period the following letter to Chillon:

'I am with Livia to-morrow. Janey starts for Wales to-morrow morning, a
voluntary exile. She pleaded to go back to that place where you had to
leave her, promising she would not come Westward; but was persuaded. Lady
Arpington approves. The situation was getting too terribly strained. We
met and passed my lord in the park.

'He was walking his horse-elegant cavalier that he is: would not look on
his wife. A woman pulled by her collar should be passive; if she pulls
her way, she is treated as a dog. I see nothing else in the intention of
poor Janey's last offence to him. There is an opposite counsel, and he
can be eloquent, and he will be heard on her side. How could she manage
the most wayward when she has not an idea of ordinary men! But, my
husband, they have our tie between them; it may move him. It subdues
her--and nothing else would have done that. If she had been in England a
year before the marriage, she would, I think, have understood better how
to guide her steps and her tongue for his good pleasure. She learns
daily, very quickly: observes, assimilates; she reads and has her
comments--would have shot far ahead of your Riette, with my advantages.

'Your uncle--but he will bear any charge on his conscience as long as he
can get the burden off his shoulders. Do not fret, my own! Reperuse the
above--you will see we have grounds for hope.

'He should have looked down on her! No tears from her eyes, but her eyes
were tears. She does not rank among beautiful women. She has her moments
for outshining them--the loveliest of spectres! She caught at my heart. I
cannot forget her face looking up for him to look down. A great painter
would have reproduced it, a great poet have rendered the impression.
Nothing short of the greatest. That is odd to say of one so simple as
she. But when accidents call up her reserves, you see mountain heights
where mists were--she is actually glorified. Her friend--I do believe a
friend--the Mr. Woodseer you are to remember meeting somewhere--a
sprained ankle--has a dozen similes ready for what she is when pain or
happiness vivify her. Or, it may be, tender charity. She says, that if
she feels for suffering people, it is because she is the child of
Chillon's mother. In like manner Chillon is the son of Janey's father.

'Mr. Woodseer came every other evening. Our only enlivenment. Livia
followed her policy, in refusing to call. We lived luxuriously; no money,
not enough for a box at the opera, though we yearned--you can imagine.
Chapters of philosophy read out and expounded instead. Janey likes them.
He sets lessons to her queer maid--reading, writing, pronunciation of
English. An inferior language to Welsh, for poetical purposes, we are
informed. So Janey--determining to apply herself to Welsh, and a
chameleon Riette dreading that she will be taking a contrary view of the
honest souls--as she feels them to be--when again under Livia's shadow.

'The message from Janey to Scrope's hotel was despatched half-an-hour
after we had driven in from the park; fruit of a brown meditation. I
wrote it--third person--a single sentence. Arrangements are made for her
to travel comfortably. It is funny--the shops for her purchases of
clothes, necessaries, etc., are specified; she may order to any extent.
Not a shilling of money for her poor purse. What can be the secret of
that? He does nothing without an object. To me, uniformly civil, no
irony, few compliments. Livia writes, that I am commended for keeping
Janey company. What can be the secret of a man scrupulously just with one
hand, and at the same time cruel with the other? Mr. Woodseer says, his
wealth:--"More money than is required for their needs, men go into
harness to Plutus,"--if that is clever.

'I have written my husband--as Janey ceases to call her own; and it was
pretty and touching to hear her "my husband."--Oh! a dull letter. But he
is my husband though he keeps absent--to be longed for--he is my husband
still, my husband always. Chillon is Henrietta's husband, the world cries
out, and when she is flattered she does the like, for then it is not too
presumptuous that she should name Henrietta Chillon's wife. In my ears,
husband has the sweeter sound. It brings an angel from overhead. Will it
bring him one-half hour sooner? My love! My dear! If it did, I should be
lisping "husband, husband, husband" from cock-crow to owl's cry. Livia
thinks the word foolish, if not detestable. She and I have our different
opinions. She is for luxury. I choose poverty and my husband. Poverty has
its beauty, if my husband is the sun of it. Elle radote. She would not
have written so dull a letter to her husband if she had been at the opera
last night, or listened to a distant street-band. No more--the next line
would be bleeding. He should have her blood too, if that were her
husband's--it would never be; but if it were for his good in the smallest
way. Chillon's wish is to give his blood for them he loves. Never did
woman try more to write worthily to her absent lord and fall so miserably
into the state of dripping babe from bath on nurse's knee. Cover me, my
lord; and love, my cause for--no, my excuse, my refuge from myself. We
are one? Oh! we are one!--and we have been separated eight and twenty
days.

                  'HENRIETTA KIRBY-LEVELLIER.'

That was a letter for the husband and lover to receive in a foreign land
and be warmed.

The tidings of Carinthia washed him clean of the grimy district where his
waxen sister had developed her stubborn insensibility;--resembling
craziness, every perversion of the refinement demanded by young
Englishmen of their ladies; and it pacified him with the belief that she
was now at rest, the disturbed history of their father and mother at rest
as well; his conscience in relation to the marriage likewise at rest.
Chillon had a wife. Her writing of the welcome to poverty stirred his
knowledge of his wife's nature. Carinthia might bear it and harden to
flint; Henrietta was a butterfly for the golden rays. His thoughts, all
his energies, were bent on the making of money to supply her need for the
pleasure she flew in--a butterfly's grub without it. Accurately so did
the husband and lover read his wife--adoring her the more.

Her letter's embracing close was costly to them. It hurried him to the
compromise of a debateable business, and he fell into the Austrian
Government's terms for the payment of the inheritance from his father;
calculating that--his sister's share deducted-money would be in hand to
pay pressing debts and enable Henrietta to live unworried by cares until
he should have squeezed debts, long due and increasing, out of the
miserly old lord, his uncle. A prospect of supplies for twelve months,
counting the hack and carriage Henrietta had always been used to, seemed
about as far as it was required to look by the husband hastening homeward
to his wife's call. Her letter was a call in the night. Besides, there
were his yet untried Inventions. The new gunpowder testing at Croridge
promised to provide Henrietta with many of the luxuries she could have
had, and had abandoned for his sake. The new blasting powder and a
destructive shell might build her the palace she deserved. His uncle was,
no doubt, his partner. If, however, the profits were divided, sufficient
wealth was assured. But his uncle remained a dubious image. The husband
and lover could enfold no positive prospect to suit his wife's tastes
beyond the twelve months.

We have Dame Gossip upon us.

--One minute let mention be of the excitement over Protestant England
when that rumour disseminated, telling of her wealthiest nobleman's visit
to a monastery, up in the peaks and snows; and of his dwelling among the
monks, and assisting in all their services day and night, hymning and
chanting, uttering not one word for one whole week: his Papistical
friend, Lord Feltre, with him, of course, after Jesuit arts had allured
him to that place of torrents and lightnings and canticles and demon
echoes, all as though expressly contrived for the horrifying of sinners
into penitence and confession and the monkish cowl up to life's end, not
to speak of the abjuration of worldly possessions and donation of them
into the keeping of the shaven brothers; when either they would have
settled a band of them here in our very midst, or they would have
impoverished--is not too strong a word--the country by taking the money's
worth of the mines, estates, mansions, freehold streets and squares of
our metropolis out of it without scruple; rejoicing so to bleed the
Protestant faith. Underrate it now--then it was a truly justifiable
anxiety: insomuch that you heard people of station, eminent titled
persons, asking, like the commonest low Radicals, whether it was prudent
legislation to permit of the inheritance of such vast wealth by a young
man, little more than a boy, and noted for freaks. And some declared it
could not be allowed for foreign monks to have a claim to inherit English
property. There was a general consent, that if the Earl of Fleetwood went
to the extreme of making over his property to those monks, he should be
pronounced insane and incapable. Ultimately the world was a little
pacified by hearing that a portion of it was entailed, Esslemont and the
Welsh mines.

So it might be; but what if he had no child! The marriage amazing
everybody scarcely promised fruit, it was thought. Countess Livia, much
besought for her opinion, scouted the possibility. And Carinthia Jane was
proclaimed by John Rose Mackrell (to his dying day the poor gentleman
tried vainly to get the second syllable of his name accentuated) a young
woman who would outlive twice over the husband she had. He said of his
name, it was destined to pass him down a dead fish in the nose of
posterity, and would affect his best jokes; which something has done, or
the present generation has lost the sense of genuine humour.

Thanks to him, the talk of the Whitechapel Countess again sprang up,
merrily as ever; and after her having become, as he said, 'a desiccated
celebrity,' she outdid cabinet ministers and naughty wives for a living
morsel in the world's mouth. She was denounced by the patriotic party as
the cause of the earl's dalliance with Rome.

The earl, you are to know, was then coasting along the Mediterranean, on
board his beautiful schooner yacht, with his Lord Feltre, bound to make
an inspection of Syrian monasteries, and forget, if he could, the face of
all faces, another's possession by the law.

Those two lords, shut up together in a yacht, were advised by their
situation to be bosom friends, and they quarrelled violently, and were
reconciled, and they quarrelled again; they were explosive chemicals;
until the touch of dry land relieved them of what they really fancied the
spell of the Fiend. For their argumentative topic during confinement was
Woman, when it was not Theology; and even off a yacht, those are subjects
to kindle the utmost hatred of dissension, if men are not perfectly
concordant. They agreed upon land to banish any talk of Women or
Theology, where it would have been comparatively innocent; so they both
desiring to be doing the thing they had sworn they would not do, the
thoughts of both were fastened on one or the other interdicted subject.
They hardly spoke; they perceived in their longing minds, that the
imagined spell of, the Fiend was indeed the bile of the sea, secreted
thickly for want of exercise, and they both regretted the days and nights
of their angry controversies; unfit pilgrims of the Holy Land, they
owned.

To such effect, Lord Fleetwood wrote to Gower Woodseer, as though there
had been no breach between them, from Jerusalem, expressing the wish to
hear his cool wood-notes of the philosophy of Life, fresh drawn from
Nature's breast; and urgent for an answer, to be addressed to his hotel
at Southampton, that he might be greeted on his return home first by his
'friend Gower.'

He wrote in the month of January. His arrival at Southampton was on the
thirteenth day of March; and there he opened a letter some weeks old, the
bearer of news which ought by rights to make husbands proudly happy.




CHAPTER XXVII

WE DESCEND INTO A STEAMER'S ENGINE-ROOM

Fleetwood had dropped his friend Lord Feltre at Ancona; his good fortune
was to be alone when the clang of bells rang through his head in the
reading of Gower's lines. Other letters were opened: from the Countess
Livia, from Lady Arpington, from Captain Kirby-Levellier. There was one
from his lawyers, informing him of their receipt of a communication dated
South Wales, December 11th, and signed Owain Wythan; to the effect, that
the birth of a son to the Earl of Fleetwood was registered on the day of
the date, with a copy of the document forwarded.

Livia scornfully stated the tattling world's 'latest.' The captain was as
brief, in ordinary words, whose quick run to the stop could be taken for
a challenge of the eye. It stamped the adversary's frown on Fleetwood
reading. Lady Arpington was more politic; she wrote of 'a healthy boy,'
and 'the healthy mother giving him breast,' this being 'the way for the
rearing of strong men.' She condescended to the particulars, that she
might touch him.

The earl had not been so reared: his mother was not the healthy mother.
One of his multitudinous, shifty, but ineradicable ambitions was to
exhibit an excellingly vigorous, tireless constitution. He remembered the
needed refreshment of the sea-breezes aboard his yacht during the week
following the sleep-discarded nights at Scrope's and the green tables.
For a week he hung to the smell of brine, in rapturous amity with Feltre,
until they yellowed, differed, wrangled, hated.

A powerful leaven was put into him by the tidings out of Wales. Gower,
good fellow, had gone down to see the young mother three weeks after the
birth of her child. She was already renewing her bloom. She had produced
the boy in the world's early manner, lightly, without any of the tragic
modern hovering over death to give the life. Gower compared it to a
'flush of the vernal orchard after a day's drink of sunlight.' That was
well: that was how it should be. One loathes the idea of tortured women.

The good fellow was perhaps absurdly poetical. Still we must have poetry
to hallow this and other forms of energy: or say, if you like, the right
view of them impels to poetry. Otherwise we are in the breeding yards,
among the litters and the farrows. It is a question of looking down or
looking up. If we are poor creatures--as we are if we do but feast and
gamble and beget--we shall run for a time with the dogs and come to the
finish of swine. Better say, life is holy! Why, then have we to thank her
who teaches it.

He gazed at the string of visions of the woman naming him husband, making
him a father: the imagined Carinthia--beautiful Gorgon, haggard Venus;
the Carinthia of the precipice tree-shoot; Carinthia of the ducal
dancing-hall; and she at the altar rails; she on the coach box; she
alternately softest of brides, doughtiest of Amazons. A mate for the
caress, an electrical heroine, fronted him.

Yes, and she was Lord Fleetwood's wife, cracking sconces,--a demoiselle
Moll Flanders,--the world's Whitechapel Countess out for an airing,
infernally earnest about it, madly ludicrous; the schemer to catch his
word, the petticoated Shylock to bind him to the letter of it; now
persecuting, haunting him, now immoveable for obstinacy; malignant to
stay down in those vile slums and direct tons of sooty waters on his head
from its mains in the sight of London, causing the least histrionic of
men to behave as an actor. He beheld her a skull with a lamp behind the
eyeholes.

But this woman was the woman who made him a father; she was the mother of
the heir of the House; and the boy she clasped and suckled as her boy was
his boy. They met inseparably in that new life.

Truly, there could not be a woman of flesh so near to a likeness with the
beatific image of Feltre's worshipped Madonna!

The thought sparkled and darkened in Fleetwood's mind, as a star passing
into cloud. For an uproarious world claimed the woman, jeered at all
allied with her; at her husband most, of course:--the punctilious noodle!
the golden jackass, tethered and goaded! He had choice among the pick of
women: the daughter of the Old Buccaneer was preferred by the wiseacre
Coelebs. She tricked him cunningly and struck a tremendous return blow in
producing her male infant.

By the way, was she actually born in wedlock? Lord Levellier's assurances
regarding her origin were, by the calculation, a miser's shuffles to
clinch his bargain. Assuming the representative of holy motherhood to be
a woman of illegitimate birth, the history of the House to which the
spotted woman gave an heir would suffer a jolt when touching on her. And
altogether the history fumed rank vapours. Imagine her boy in his
father's name a young collegian! No commonly sensitive lad could bear the
gibes of the fellows raking at antecedents: Fleetwood would be the name
to start roars. Smarting for his name, the earl chafed at the boy's
mother. Her production of a man-child was the further and grosser
offence.

The world sat on him. His confession to some degree of weakness, even to
folly, stung his pride of individuality so that he had to soothe the pain
by tearing himself from a thought of his folly's partner, shutting
himself up and away from her. Then there was a cessation of annoyance,
flatteringly agreeable: which can come to us only of our having done the
right thing, young men will think. He felt at once warmly with the world,
enjoyed the world's kind shelter, and in return for its eulogy of his
unprecedented attachment to the pledge of his word, admitted an
understanding of its laughter at the burlesque edition of a noble lady in
the person of the Whitechapel Countess. The world sat on him heavily.

He recurred to Gower Woodseer's letter.

The pictures and images in it were not the principal matter,--the
impression had been deep. A plain transcription of the young mother's
acts and words did more to portray her: the reader could supply
reflections.

Would her boy's father be very pleased to see him? she had asked.

And she spoke of a fear that the father would try to take her boy from
her.

'Never that--you have my word!' Fleetwood said; and he nodded
consentingly over her next remark--

'Not while I live, till he must go to school!'

The stubborn wife would be the last of women to sit and weep as a rifled
mother.

A child of the Countess Carinthia (he phrased it) would not be deficient
in will, nor would the youngster lack bravery.

For his part, comparison rushing at him and searching him, he owned that
he leaned on pride. To think that he did, became a theme for pride. The
mother had the primitive virtues, the father the developed: he was the
richer mine. And besides, he was he, the unriddled, complex, individual
he; she was the plain barbarian survival, good for giving her offspring
bone, muscle, stout heart.

Shape the hypothesis of a fairer woman the mother of the heir to the
earldom.

Henrietta was analyzed in a glimpse. Courage, animal healthfulness, she,
too, might--her husband not obstructing--transmit; and good looks, eyes
of the sapphire AEgean. And therewith such pliability as the Mother of
Love requires of her servants.

Could that woman resist seductions?

Fleetwood's wrath with her for refusing him and inducing him in spite to
pledge his word elsewhere, haphazard, pricked a curiosity to know whether
the woman could be--and easily! easily! he wagered--led to make her
conduct warrant for his contempt of her. Led,--that is, misled, you might
say, if you were pleading for a doll. But it was necessary to bait the
pleasures for the woman, in order to have full view of the precious fine
fate one has escaped. Also to get well rid of a sort of hectic in the
blood, which the woman's beauty has cast on that reflecting tide: a
fever-sign, where the fever has become quite emotionless and is merely
desirous for the stain of it to be washed out. As this is not the desire
to possess or even to taste, contempt will do it. When we know that the
weaver of the fascinations is purchasable, we toss her to the market
where men buy; and we walk released from vile subjection to one of the
female heap: subjection no longer, doubtless, and yet a stain of the past
flush, often colouring our reveries, creating active phantasms of a
passion absolutely extinct, if it ever was the veritable passion.

The plot--formless plot--to get release by the sacrifice or at least a
crucial temptation of the woman, that should wash his blood clean of her
image, had a shade of the devilish, he acknowledged; and the apology
offered no improvement of its aspect. She might come out of the trial
triumphant. And benefit for himself, even a small privilege, even the
pressure of her hand, he not only shrank from the thought of winning,-he
loathed the thought. He was too delicate over the idea of the married
woman whom he fancied he loved in her maidenhood. Others might press her
hand, lead her the dance: he simply wanted his release. She had set him
on fire; he conceived a method for trampling the remaining sparks and
erasing stain and scars; that was all. Henrietta rejected her wealthy
suitor: she might some day hence be seen crawling abjectly to wealth,
glad of a drink from the cup it holds, intoxicated with the draught. An
injured pride could animate his wealth to crave solace of such a
spectacle.

Devilish, if you like. He had expiated the wickedness in Cistercian
seclusion. His wife now drove him to sin again.

She had given him a son. That fluted of home and honourable life. She had
her charm, known to him alone.

But how, supposing she did not rub him to bristle with fresh irritations,
how go to his wife while Henrietta held her throne? Consideration was due
to her until she stumbled. Enough if she wavered. Almost enough is she
stood firm as a statue in the winds, and proved that the first page of
her was a false introduction. The surprising apparition of a beautiful
woman with character; a lightly-thrilled, pleasure-loving woman devoted
to her husband or protected by her rightful self-esteem, would loosen him
creditably. It had to be witnessed, for faith in it. He reverenced our
legendary good women, and he bowed to noble deeds; and he ascribed the
former to poetical creativeness, the latter operated as a scourging to
his flesh to yield its demoniacal inmates. Nothing of the kind was doing
at present.

Or stay: a studious re-perusal of Gower Woodseer's letter enriched a
little incident. Fleetwood gave his wife her name of Carinthia when he
had read deliberately and caught the scene.

Mrs. Wythan down in Wales related it to Gower. Carinthia and Madge,
trudging over the treeless hills, came on a birchen clump round a deep
hollow or gullypit; precipitous, the earl knew, he had peeped over the
edge in his infant days. There at the bottom, in a foot or so of water,
they espied a lamb; and they rescued the poor beastie by going down to
it, one or both. It must have been the mountain-footed one. A man would
hesitate, spying below. Fleetwood wondered how she had managed to climb
up, and carrying the lamb! Down pitches Madge Winch to help--they did it
between them. We who stand aloof admire stupidly. To defend himself from
admiring, he condemned the two women for the risk they ran to save a
probably broken-legged little beast: and he escaped the melting mood by
forcing a sneer at the sort of stuff out of which popular ballads are
woven. Carinthia was accused of letting her adventurous impulses and
sentimental female compassion swamp thought of a mother's duties. If both
those women had broken their legs the child might have cried itself into
fits for the mother, there she would have remained.

Gower wrote in a language transparent of the act, addressed to a reader
whose memory was to be impregnated. His reader would have flown away from
the simple occurrence on arabesques and modulated tones; and then
envisaging them critically, would have tossed his poor little story to
the winds, as a small thing magnified: with an object, being the next
thought about it. He knew his Fleetwood so far.

His letter concluded: 'I am in a small Surrey village over a baker's
shop, rent eight shillings per week, a dame's infant school opposite my
window, miles of firwood, heath, and bracken openings, for the winged or
the nested fancies. Love Nature, she makes you a lord of her boundless,
off any ten square feet of common earth. I go through my illusions and
come always back on that good truth. It says, beware of the world's
passion for flavours and spices. Much tasted, they turn and bite the
biter. My exemplars are the lately breeched youngsters with two pence in
their pockets for the gingerbread-nut booth on a fair day. I learn more
from one of them than you can from the whole cavalcade of your attendant
Ixionides.'

Mounting the box of his coach for the drive to London, Fleetwood had the
new name for the parasitic and sham vital troop at his ears.

'My Ixionides!' he repeated, and did not scorn them so much as he
rejoiced to be enlightened by the title. He craved the presence of the
magician who dropped illumination with a single word; wholesomer to think
of than the whole body of those Ixionides--not bad fellows, here and
there, he reflected, tolerantly, half laughing at some of their clownish
fun. Gower Woodseer and he had not quarrelled? No, they had merely parted
at one of the crossways. The plebeian could teach that son of the,
genuflexions, Lord Feltre, a lesson in manners. Woodseer was the better
comrade and director of routes. Into the forest, up on the heights; and
free, not locked; and not parroting day and night, but quick for all that
the world has learnt and can tell, though two-thirds of it be composed of
Ixionides: that way lies wisdom, and his index was cut that way.

Arrived in town, he ran over the headings of his letters, in no degree
anxious for a communication from Wales. There was none. Why none?

She might as well have scrawled her announcement of an event pleasing to
her, and, by the calculation, important to him, if not particularly
interesting. The mother's wifeish lines would, perhaps, have been tested
in a furnace. He smarted at the blank of any, of even two or three formal
words. She sulked? 'I am not a fallen lamb!' he said. Evidently one had
to be a shivering beast in trouble, to excite her to move a hand.

Through so slight a fissure as this piece of discontent cracked in him,
the crowd of his grievances with the woman rushed pell-mell, deluging
young shoots of sweeter feelings. She sulked! If that woman could not get
the command, he was to know her incapable of submission. After besmutting
the name she had filched from him, she let him understand that there was
no intention to repent. Possibly she meant war. In which case a man must
fly, or stand assailed by the most intolerable of vulgar farces;--to be
compared to a pelting of one on the stage.

The time came for him to knock at doors and face his public.




CHAPTER XXVIII

BY CONCESSIONS TO MISTRESS GOSSIP A FURTHER INTRUSION IS AVERTED

Livia welcomed him, with commiserating inquiry behind her languid
eyelids. 'You have all the latest?' it said.

He struck on the burning matter.

'You wish to know the part you have to play, ma'am.' 'Tell me, Russett.'

'You will contradict nothing.'

Her eyebrows asked, 'It means?'

'You have authority from me to admit the facts.'

'They are facts?' she remarked.

'Women love teasing round certain facts, apparently; like the Law courts
over their pet cases.'

'But, Russett, will you listen?'

'Has the luck been civil of late?'

'I think of something else at present. No, it has not.'

'Abrane?'

'Pray, attend to me. No, not Abrane.'

'I believe you've all been cleared out in my absence. St. Ombre?'

Her complexion varied. 'Mr. Ambrose Mallard has once or twice . . . But
let me beg you--the town is rageing with it. My dear Russett, a bold
front now; there 's the chance of your release in view.'

'A rascal in view! Name the sum.'

'I must reckon. My head is--can you intend to submit?'

'So it's Brosey Mallard now. You choose your deputy queerly. He's as bad
as Abrane, with steam to it. Chummy Potts would have done better.'

'He wins one night; loses every pound-note he has the next; and comes
vaunting--the "dry still Sillery" of the establishment,--a perpetual
chorus to his losses!'

'His consolation to you for yours. That is the gentleman. Chummy doesn't
change. Say, why not St. Ombre? He's cool.'

'There are reasons.'

'Let them rest. And I have my reasons. Do the same for them.'

'Yours concern the honour of the family.'

'Deeply: respect them.'

'Your relatives have to be thought of, though they are few and not too
pleasant.'

'If I had thought much of them, what would our relations be? They object
to dicing, and I to leading strings.'

She turned to a brighter subject, of no visible connection with the
preceding.

'Henrietta comes in May.'

'The month of her colours.'

'Her money troubles are terrible.'

'Both of you appear unlucky in your partners,--if winning was the object.
She shall have all the distractions we can offer.'

'Your visit to the Chartreuse alarmed her.'

'She has rejoiced her husband.'

'A girl. She feared the Jesuit in your friend.'

'Feltre and she are about equally affected by music. They shall meet.'

'Russett, this once: I do entreat you to take counsel with your good
sense, and remember that you stand where you are by going against my
advice. It is a perfect storm over London. The world has not to be
informed of your generosity; but a chivalry that invites the most
horrible of sneers at a man! And what can I say? I have said it was
impossible.'

'Add the postscript: you find it was perfectly possible.'

'I have to learn more than I care to hear.'

'Your knowledge is not in request: you will speak in my name.'

'Will you consult your lawyers, Russett, before you commit yourself?'

'I am on my way to Lady Arpington.'

'You cannot be thinking how serious it is.'

'I rather value the opinion of a hard-headed woman of the world.'

'Why not listen to me?'

'You have your points, ma'am.'

'She's a torch.'

'She serves my purpose.'

Livia shrugged sadly. 'I suppose it serves your purpose to be
unintelligible to me.'

He rendered himself intelligible immediately by saying, 'Before I go--a
thousand?'

'Oh, my dear Russett!' she sighed.

'State the amount.'

She seemed to be casting unwieldly figures and he helped her with, 'Mr.
Isaacs?'

'Not less than three, I fear.'

'Has he been pressing?'

'You are always good to us, Russett.'

'You are always considerate for the honour of the family, ma'am. Order
for the money with you here to-morrow. And I thank you for your advice.
Do me the favour to follow mine.

'Commands should be the word.'

'Phrase it as you please.'

'You know I hate responsibility.'

'The chorus in classical dramas had generally that sentiment, but the
singing was the sweeter for it.'

'Whom do you not win when you condescend to the mood, you dear boy?'

He restrained a bitter reply, touching the kind of persons he had won: a
girl from the mountains, a philosophical tramp of the roads, troops of
the bought.

Livia spelt at the problem he was. She put away the task of reading it.
He departed to see Lady Arpington, and thereby rivet his chains.

As Livia had said, she was a torch. Lady Endor, Lady Eldritch, Lady
Cowry, kindled at her. Again there were flights of the burning brands
over London. The very odd marriage; the no-marriage; the
two-ends-of-the-town marriage; and the maiden marriage a fruitful
marriage; the monstrous marriage of the countess productive in
banishment, and the unreadable earl accepting paternity; this Amazing
Marriage was again the riddle in the cracker for tattlers and gapers. It
rattled upon the world's native wantonness, the world's acquired decorum:
society's irrepressible original and its powerfully resisting second
nature. All the rogues of the fine sphere ran about with it, male and
female; and there was the narrative that suggestively skipped, and that
which trod the minuet measure, dropping a curtsey to ravenous curiosity;
the apology surrendering its defensible cause in supplications to
benevolence; and the benevolence damnatory in a too eloquent urgency;
followed by the devout objection to a breath of the subject, so
blackening it as to call forth the profanely circumstantial exposition.
Smirks, blushes, dead silences, and in the lower regions roars, hung
round it.

But the lady, though absent, did not figure poorly at all. Granting
Whitechapel and the shillelagh affair, certain whispers of her good
looks, contested only to be the more violently asserted; and therewith
Rose Mackrell's tale of her being a 'young woman of birth,' having a
'romantic story to tell of herself and her parentage,' made her latest
performance the champagne event of it hitherto. Men sparkled when they
had it on their lips.

How, then, London asked, would the Earl of Fleetwood move his pieces in
reply to his countess's particularly clever indication of the check
threatening mate?

His move had no relation to the game, it was thought at first. The world
could not suppose that he moved a simple pawn on his marriage board. He
purchased a shop in Piccadilly for the sale of fruit and flowers.

Lady Arpington was entreated to deal at the shop, Countess Livia had her
orders; his friends, his parasites and satellites, were to deal there.
Intensely earnest as usual, he besought great ladies to let him have the
overflow of their hothouses; and they classing it as another of the
mystifications of a purse crazy for repleteness, inquired: 'But is it you
we are to deal with?' And he quite seriously said: 'With me, yes, at
present.' Something was behind the curtain, of course. His gravity had
the effect of the ultra-comical in concealing it.

The shop was opened. We have the assurance of Rose Mackrell, that he
entered and examined the piles and pans of fruit, and the bouquets
cunningly arranged by a hand smelling French. The shop was roomy,
splendid windows lighted the yellow, the golden, the green and
parti-coloured stores. Four doors off, a chemist's motley in bellied
glasses crashed on the sight. Passengers along the pavement had presented
to them such a contrast as might be shown if we could imagine the Lethean
ferry-boatload brought sharp against Pomona's lapful. In addition to the
plucked flowers and fruits of the shop, Rose Mackrell more attentively
examined the samples doing service at the counters. They were three,
under supervision of a watchful-eyed fourth. Dame Gossip is for quoting
his wit. But the conclusion he reached, after quitting the shop and
pacing his dozen steps, is important; for it sent a wind over the town to
set the springs of tattle going as wildly as when the herald's trumpet
blew the announcement for the world to hear out of Wales.

He had observed, that the young woman supervising was deficient in the
ease of an established superior; her brows were troubled; she was,
therefore, a lieutenant elevated from a lower grade; and, to his
thinking, conducted the business during the temporary retirement of the
mistress of the shop.

And the mistress of the shop?

The question hardly needs be put.

Rose Mackrell or his humour answered it in unfaltering terms.

London heard, with the variety of feelings which are indistinguishable
under a flooding amazement, that the beautiful new fruit and flower shop
had been purchased and stocked by the fabulously wealthy young Earl of
Fleetwood, to give his Whitechapel Countess a taste for business, an
occupation, and an honourable means of livelihood.

There was, Dame Gossip thumps to say, a general belief in this report.
Crowds were on the pavement, peering through the shop-windows. Carriages
driving by stopped to look. My lord himself had been visible, displaying
his array of provisions to friends. Nor was credulity damped appreciably
when over the shop, in gold letters, appeared the name of Sarah Winch. It
might be the countess's maiden name, if she really was a married
countess.

But, in truth, the better informed of the town, having begun to think its
Croesus capable of any eccentricity, chose to believe. They were at the
pitch of excitement which demands and will swallow a succession of wilder
extravagances. To accelerate the delirium of the fun, nothing was too
much, because any absurdity was anticipated. And the earl's readiness to
be complimented on the shop's particular merits, his gratified air at an
allusion to it, whirled the fun faster. He seemed entirely unconscious
that each step he now took wakened peals.

For such is the fate of a man who has come to be dogged by the humourist
for the provision he furnishes; and, as it happens, he is the more
laughable if not in himself a laughable object. The earl's handsome
figure, fine style, and contrasting sobriety heightened the burlesque of
his call to admiration of a shop where Whitechapel would sit in
state-according to the fiction so closely under the lee of fact that they
were not strictly divisible. Moreover, Sarah Winch, whom Chumley Potts
drew into conversation, said, he vowed, she came up West from
Whitechapel. She said it a little nervously, but without blushing. Always
on the side of the joke, he could ask: 'Who can doubt?' Indeed,
scepticism poisoned the sport.

The Old Buccaneer has written: Friends may laugh; I am not roused. My
enemy's laugh is a bugle blown in the night.

Our enemy's laugh at us rouses to wariness, he would say. He can barely
mean, that a condition of drowsihead is other than providently warned by
laughter of friends. An old warrior's tough fibre would, perhaps, be
insensible to that small crackle. In civil life, however, the friend's
laugh at us is the loudest of the danger signals to stop our course: and
the very wealthy nobleman, who is known for not a fool, is kept from
hearing it. Unless he does hear it, he can have no suspicion of its being
about him: he cannot imagine such 'lese-majeste' in the subservient
courtiers too prudent to betray a sign. So Fleetwood was unwarned; and
his child-like unconsciousness of the boiling sentiments around,
seasoned, pricked, and maddened his parasites under compression to
invent, for a faint relief. He had his title for them, they their tales
of him.

Dame Gossip would recount the tales. She is of the order of persons
inclining to suspect the tittle of truth in prodigies of scandal. She is
rustling and bustling to us of 'Carinthia Jane's run up to London to see
Sarah Winch's grand new shop,' an eclipse of all existing grand London
western shops; and of Rose Mackrell's account of her dance of proud
delight in the shop, ending with a 'lovely cheese' just as my lord
enters; and then a scene, wild beyond any conceivable 'for pathos and
humour'--her pet pair of the dissimilar twins, both banging at us for
tear-drops by different roads, through a common aperture:--and the earl
has the Whitechapel baby boy plumped into his arms; and the countess
fetches him a splendid bob-dip and rises out of a second cheese to twirl
and fandango it; and, all serious on a sudden, request, whimperingly
beseech, his thanks to her for the crowing successor she has presented
him with: my lord ultimately, but carefully, depositing the infant on a
basket of the last oranges of the season, fresh from the Azores, by
delivery off my lord's own schooner-yacht in Southampton water; and
escaping, leaving his gold-headed stick behind him--a trophy for the
countess? a weapon, it may be.

Quick she tucks up her skirts, she is after him. Dame Gossip speaks
amusingly enough of the chase, and many eye-witnesses to the earl's
flight at top speed down the right side of the way along by the Green
Park; and of a Prince of the Blood, a portly Royal Duke on foot, bumped
by one or the other of them, she cannot precisely say which, but 'thinks
it to have been Carinthia Jane,' because the exalted personage, his shock
of surprise abating, turned and watched the chase, in much merriment. And
it was called, we are informed, 'The Piccadilly Hare and Hound' from that
day.

Some tradition of an extenuated nobleman pursued by a light-footed lady
amid great excitement, there is; the Dame attaches importance also to
verses of one of the ballads beginning to gain currency at the time
(issuing ostensibly from London's poetic centre, the Seven Dials, which
had, we are to conjecture, got the story by discolouring filtration
through footmen retailing in public-houses the stock of anecdotes they
gathered when stationed behind Rose Mackrell's chair, or Captain
Abrane's, or Chumley 'Potts's), and would have the whole of it quoted:--

    "'Tho' fair I be a powdered peruke,
     And once was a gaping silly,
     Your Whitechapel Countess will prove, Lord Duke,
     She's a regular tiger-lily.
     She'll fight you with cold steel
          or she'll run you off your legs
     Down the length of Piccadilly!"

That will satisfy; and perhaps indicate the hand.

'Popular sympathy, of course, was all on the side of the Fair, as ever in
those days when women had not forfeited it by stepping from their
sanctuary seclusion.'

The Dame shall expose her confusions. She really would seem to fancy that
the ballad verifies the main lines of the story, which is an impossible
one. Carinthia had not the means to travel: she was moneyless. Every bill
of her establishment was paid without stint by Mr. Howell Edwards, the
earl's manager of mines; but she had not even the means for a journey to
the Gowerland rocks she longed to see. She had none since she forced her
brother to take the half of her share of their inheritance, L1400, and
sent him the remainder.

Accepted by Chillon John as a loan, says Dame Gossip, and no sooner
received than consumed by the pressing necessities of a husband with the
Rose Beauty of England to support in the comforts and luxuries he deemed
befitting.

Still the Dame leans to her opinion that 'Carinthia Jane' may have been
seen about London: for 'where we have much smoke there must be fire.' And
the countess never denying an imputation not brought against her in her
hearing, the ballad was unchallenged and London's wags had it their own
way. Among the reasons why they so persistently hunted the earl, his air
of a smart correctness shadowed by this new absurdity invited them, as
when a spot of mud on the trimmest of countenances arrests observation:
Humour plucked at him the more for the good faith of his handsome look
under the prolific little disfigurement. Besides, a wealthy despot, with
no conception of any hum around him, will have the wags in his track as
surely as the flexibles in front: they avenge his exactions.

Fleetwood was honestly unaware of ridicule in the condition of inventive
mania at his heels. Scheming, and hesitating to do, one-half of his mind
was absorbed with the problem of how now to treat the mother of his boy.
Her behaviour in becoming a mother was acknowledged to be good: the
production of a boy was good--considerate, he almost thought. He grew so
far reconciled to her as to have intimations of a softness coming on; a
wish to hear her speak of the trifling kindness done to the sister of
Madge in reward of kindness done to her; wishes for looks he remembered,
secret to him, more his own than any possessions. Dozens of men had
wealth, some had beautiful wives; none could claim as his own that face
of the look of sharp steel melting into the bridal flower, when she
sprang from her bed to defend herself and recognized the intruder at her
window; stood smitten:--'It is my, husband.' Moonlight gave the variation
of her features.

And that did not appease the resentment tearing him from her, so
justifiable then, as he forced himself to think, now hideous. Glimpses of
the pictures his deeds painted of him since his first meeting with this
woman had to be shunned. He threw them off; they were set down to the
mystery men are. The degrading, utterly different, back view of them
teaches that Life is an irony. If the teaching is not accepted, and we
are to take the blame, can we bear to live? Therefore, either way the
irony of Life is proved. Young men straining at thought, in the grip of
their sensations, reach this logical conclusion. They will not begin by
examining the ground they stand on, and questioning whether they have
consciences at peace with the steps to rearward.

Having established Life as the coldly malignant element, which induces to
what it chastises, a loathing of womanhood, the deputed Mother of Life,
ensues, by natural sequence. And if there be one among women who disturbs
the serenity we choose to think our due, she wears for us the sinister
aspect of a confidential messenger between Nemesis and the Parcae.
Fleetwood was thus compelled to regard Carinthia as both originally and
successively the cause of his internal as well as his exterior
discomfort; otherwise those glimpses would have burnt into perpetual
stigmas. He had also to get his mind away from her. They pleaded against
him volubly with the rising of her image into it.

His manager at the mines had sent word of ominous discontent down there.
His presence might be required. Obviously, then, the threatened place was
unfitting for the Countess of Fleetwood. He despatched a kind of order
through Mr. Howell Edwards, that she should remove to Esslemont to escape
annoyances. Esslemont was the preferable residence. She could there
entertain her friends, could spend a pleasanter time there.

He waited for the reply; Edwards deferred it.

Were they to be in a struggle with her obstinate will once more?

Henrietta was preparing to leave London for her dismal, narrow, and,
after an absence, desired love-nest. The earl called to say farewell,
cool as a loyal wife could wish him to be, admiring perforce. Marriage
and maternity withdrew nothing--added to the fair young woman's bloom.

She had gone to her room to pack and dress. Livia received him. In the
midst of the casual commonplaces her memory was enlightened.

'Oh,' said she, and idly drew a letter out of a blottingpad, 'we have
heard from Wales.' She handed it to him.

Before he knew the thing he did, he was reading:

'There is no rest foamy brother, and I cannot help; I am kept so poor I
have not the smallest of sums. I do not wish to leave Wales--the people
begin to love me; and can one be mistaken? I know if I am loved or hated.
But if my lord will give me an allowance of money of some hundreds, I
will do his bidding; I will leave England or I will go to Esslemont; I
could say--to Mr. Woodseer, in that part of London. He would not permit.
He thinks me blacked by it, like a sweepboy coming from a chimney; and
that I have done injury to his title. No, Riette, to be a true sister, I
must bargain with my lord before I submit. He has not cared to come and
see his little son. His boy has not offended him. There may be some of me
in this dear. I know whose features will soon show to defend the mother's
good name. He is early my champion. He is not christened yet, and I hear
it accuse me, and I am not to blame,--I still wait my lord's answer.'

'Don't be bothered to read the whole,' Livia had said, with her hand out,
when his eyes were halfway down the page.

Fleetwood turned it, to read the signature: 'Janey.'

She seemed servile enough to some of her friends. 'Carinthia' would have
had--a pleasanter sound. He folded the letter.

'Why give me this? Take it,'--said he.

She laid it on the open pad.

Henrietta entered and had it restored to her, Livia remarking: 'I found
it in the blotter after all.'

She left them together, having to dress for the drive to the coach office
with Henrietta.

'Poor amusement for you this time.' Fleetwood bowed, gently smiling.

'Oh!' cried Henrietta, 'balls, routs, dinners, music--as much music as I
could desire, even I! What more could be asked? I am eternally grateful.'

'The world says, you are more beautiful than ever.'

'Happiness does it, then,--happiness owing to you, Lord Fleetwood.'

'Columelli pleases you?'

'His voice is heavenly! He carries me away from earth.'

'He is a gentleman, too-rare with those fellows.'

'A pretty manner. He will speak his compliments in his English.'

'You are seasoned to endure them in all languages. Pity another of your
wounded: Brailstone has been hard hit at the tables.

'I cannot pity gamblers.--May I venture?--half a word?'

'Tomes! But just a little compassion for the devoted. He wouldn't play so
madly--if, well, say a tenth dilution of the rapt hearing Columelli
gets.'

'Signor Columelli sings divinely.'

'You don't dislike Brailstone?'

'He is one of the agreeable.'

'He must put his feelings into Italian song!'

'To put them aside will do.'

'We are not to have our feelings?'

'Yes, on the proviso that ours are respected. But, one instant, Lord
Fleetwood, pray. She is--I have to speak of her as my sister. I am sure
she regrets . . . She writes very nicely.'

'You have a letter from her?'

Henrietta sighed that it would not bear exposure to him: 'Yes.'

'Nicely worded?'

'Well, yes, it is.'

He paused, not expecting that the letter would be shown, but silence
fired shots, and he had stopped the petition. 'We are to have you for a
week's yachting. You prescribe your company. Only be merciful. Exclusion
will mean death to some. Columelli will be touring in Switzerland. You
shall have him in the house when my new bit of ground Northwest of London
is open: very handy, ten miles out. We'll have the Opera troupe there,
and you shall command the Opera.'

Her beauty sweetened to thank him.

If, as Livia said, his passion for her was unchanged, the generosity
manifested in the considerate screen it wore over any physical betrayal
of it, deserved the lustre of her eyes. It dwelt a moment, vivid with the
heart close behind and remorseful for misreading of old his fine
character. Here was a young man who could be the very kindest of friends
to the woman rejecting him to wed another. Her smile wavered. How shall a
loving wife express warmth of sentiment elsewhere, without the one beam
too much, that plunges her on a tideway? His claim of nothing called for
everything short of the proscribed. She gave him her beauty in fullest
flower.

It had the appearance of a temptation; and he was not tempted, though he
admired; his thought being, Husband of the thing!

But he admired. That condition awakened his unsatisfied past days to
desire positive proof of her worthlessness. The past days writhed in him.
The present were loveless, entirely cold. He had not even the wish to
press her hand. The market held beautiful women of a like description. He
wished simply to see her proved the thing he read her to be: and not
proved as such by himself. He was unable to summon or imagine emotion
enough for him to simulate the forms by which fair women are wooed to
their perdition. For all he cared, any man on earth might try, succeed or
fail, as long as he had visual assurance that she coveted, a slave to the
pleasures commanded by the wealth once disdained by her. Till that time,
he could not feel himself perfectly free.

Dame Gossip prefers to ejaculate. Young men are mysteries! and bowl us
onward. No one ever did comprehend the Earl of Fleetwood, she says: he
was bad, he was good; he was whimsical and stedfast; a splendid figure, a
mark for ridicule; romantic and a close arithmetician; often a devil,
sometimes the humanest of creatures.

In fine, he was a millionaire nobleman, owning to a considerable infusion
of Welsh blood in the composition of him. Now, to the Cymry and to the
pure Kelt, the past is at their elbows continually. The past of their
lives has lost neither face nor voice behind the shroud; nor are the
passions of the flesh, nor is the animate soul, wanting to it. Other
races forfeit infancy, forfeit youth and manhood with their progression
to the wisdom age may bestow. These have each stage always alive, quick
at a word, a scent, a sound, to conjure up scenes, in spirit and in
flame. Historically, they still march with Cadwallader, with Llewellyn,
with Glendower; sing with Aneurin, Taliesin, old Llywarch: individually,
they are in the heart of the injury done them thirty years back or
thrilling to the glorious deed which strikes an empty buckler for most of
the sons of Time. An old sea rises in them, rolling no phantom billows to
break to spray against existing rocks of the shore. That is why, and even
if they have a dose of the Teuton in them, they have often to feel
themselves exiles when still in amicable community among the
preponderating Saxon English.

Add to the single differentiation enormous wealth--we convulse the
excellent Dame by terming it a chained hurricane, to launch in foul
blasts or beneficent showers, according to the moods during youth--and
the composite Lord Fleetwood comes nearer into our focus. Dame Gossip,
with her jigging to be at the butterwoman's trot, when she is not
violently interrupting, would suffer just punishment were we to digress
upon the morality of a young man's legal possession of enormous wealth as
well.

Wholly Cambrian Fleetwood was not. But he had to the full the Cambrian's
reverential esteem for high qualities. His good-bye with Henrietta, and
estimate of her, left a dusky mental, void requiring an orb of some sort
for contemplation; and an idea of the totally contrary Carinthia, the
woman he had avowedly wedded, usurped her place. Qualities were admitted.
She was thrust away because she had offended: still more because he had
offended. She bore the blame for forcing him to an examination of his
conduct at this point and that, where an ancestral savage in his
lineaments cocked a strange eye. Yet at the moment of the act of the deed
he had known himself the veritable Fleetwood. He had now to vindicate
himself by extinguishing her under the load of her unwomanliness: she was
like sun-dried linen matched beside oriental silk: she was rough, crisp,
unyielding. That was now the capital charge. Henrietta could never be
guilty of the unfeminine. Which did he prefer?

It is of all questions the one causing young men to screw wry faces when
they are asked; they do so love the feminine, the ultra-feminine, whom
they hate for her inclination to the frail. His depths were sounded, and
he answered independently of his will, that he must be up to the heroical
pitch to decide. Carinthia stood near him then. The confession was a
step, and fraught with consequences. Her unacknowledged influence
expedited him to Sarah Winch's shop, for sight of one of earth's honest
souls; from whom he had the latest of the two others down in Wales, and
of an infant there.

He dined the host of his Ixionides, leaving them early for a drive at
night Eastward, and a chat with old Mr. Woodseer over his punching and
sewing of his bootleather. Another honest soul. Mr. Woodseer thankfully
consented to mount his coach-box next day, and astonish Gower with a drop
on his head from the skies about the time of the mid-day meal.

There we have our peep into Dame Gossip's young man mysterious.




CHAPTER XXIX

CARINTHIA IN WALES

An August of gales and rains drove Atlantic air over the Welsh highlands.
Carinthia's old father had impressed on her the rapture of 'smelling
salt' when by chance he stood and threw up his nostrils to sniff largely
over a bed of bracken, that reminded him of his element, and her fancy
would be at strain to catch his once proud riding of the seas. She felt
herself an elder daughter of the beloved old father, as she breathed it
in full volume from the billowy West one morning early after sunrise and
walked sisterly with the far-seen inexperienced little maid, whom she saw
trotting beside him through the mountain forest, listening, storing his
words, picturing the magnetic, veined great gloom of an untasted world.

This elder daughter had undergone a shipwreck; but clear proof that she
had not been worsted was in the unclouded liveliness of the younger one
gazing forward. Imaginative creatures who are courageous will never be
lopped of the hopeful portion of their days by personal misfortune.
Carinthia could animate both; it would have been a hurt done to a living
human soul had she suffered the younger self to run overcast. Only, the
gazing forward had become interdicted to her experienced self. Nor could
she vision a future having any horizon for her child. She saw it in bleak
squares, and snuggled him between dangers weathered and dangers
apprehended.

The conviction that her husband hated her had sunk into her nature.
Hating the mother, he would not love her boy. He was her boy, and
strangely bestowed, not beautifully to be remembered rapturously or
gratefully, and with deep love of the father. She felt the wound
recollection dealt her. But the boy was her one treasure, and no treasure
to her husband. They were burdens, and the heir of his House, child of a
hated mother, was under perpetual menace from an unscrupulous tyrannical
man. The dread and antagonism were first aroused by the birth of her
child. She had not known while bearing him her present acute sensation of
the hunted flying and at bay. Previously, she could say: I did wrong
here; I did wrong there. Distrust had brought the state of war, which
allows not of the wasting of our powers in confessions.

Her husband fed her and he clothed her; the limitation of his bounty was
sharply outlined. Sure of her rectitude, a stranger to the world, she was
not very sensible of dishonour done to her name. It happened at times
that her father inquired of her how things were going with his little
Carin; and then revolt sprang up and answered on his behalf rather
fiercely. She was, however, prepared for any treaty including
forgiveness, if she could be at peace in regard to her boy, and have an
income of some help to her brother. Chillon was harassed on all sides;
she stood incapable of aiding; so foolishly feeble in the shadow of her
immense longing to strive for him, that she could think her husband had
purposely lamed her with an infant. Her love of her brother, now the one
man she loved, laid her insufficiency on the rack and tortured imbecile
cries from it.

On the contrary, her strange husband had blest her with an infant.
Everything was pardonable to him if he left her boy untouched in the
mother's charge. Much alone as she was, she raised the dead to pet and
cherish her boy. Chillon had seen him and praised him. Mrs. Owain Wythan,
her neighbour over a hill, praised him above all babes on earth, poor
childless woman!

She was about to cross the hill and breakfast with Mrs. Wythan. The time
for the weaning of the babe approached, and had as prospect beyond it her
dull fear that her husband would say the mother's work was done, and
seize the pretext to separate them: and she could not claim a longer term
to be giving milk, because her father had said: 'Not a quarter of a month
more than nine for the milk of the mother'--or else the child would draw
an unsustaining nourishment from the strongest breast. She could have
argued her exceptional robustness against another than he. But the dead
father wanting to build a great race of men and women ruled.

Carinthia knelt at the cradle of a princeling gone from the rich repast
to his alternative kingdom.

'You will bring him over when he wakes,' she said to Madge. 'Mrs. Wythan
would like to see him every day. Martha can walk now.'

'She can walk and hold a child in her two arms, my lady,' said Madge.
'She expects miners popping up out of the bare ground when she sees no
goblins.'

'They!--they know him, they would not hurt him, they know my son,' her
mistress answered.

The population of the mines in revolt had no alarms for her. The works
were empty down below. Men sat by the wayside brooding or strolled in
groups, now and then loudly exercising their tongues; or they stood in
circle to sing hymns: melancholy chants of a melancholy time for all.

How would her father have acted by these men? He would have been among
them. Dissensions in his mine were vapours of a day. Lords behaved
differently. Carinthia fancied the people must regard their master as a
foreign wizard, whose power they felt, without the chance of making their
cry to him heard. She, too, dealt with a lord. It was now his wish for
her to leave the place where she had found some shreds of a home in the
thought of being useful. She was gathering the people's language; many of
their songs she could sing, and please them by singing to them. They were
not suspicious of her; at least, their women had open doors for her; the
men, if shy, were civil. She had only to go below, she was greeted in the
quick tones of their speech all along the street of the slate-roofs.

But none loved the castle, and she as little, saving the one room in it
where her boy lay. The grey of Welsh history knew a real castle beside
the roaring brook frequently a torrent. This was an eighteenth century
castellated habitation on the verge of a small wood midway up the height,
and it required a survey of numberless happy recollections to illumine
its walls or drape its chambers. The permanently lighted hearth of a dear
home, as in that forsaken unfavoured old white house of the wooded
Austrian crags, it had not. Rather it seemed a place waiting for an ill
deed to be done in it and stop all lighting of hearths thereafter.

Out on the turf of the shaven hills, her springy step dispersed any misty
fancies. Her short-winged hive set to work in her head as usual, building
scaffoldings of great things to be done by Chillon, present evils
escaped. The rolling big bade hills with the riding clouds excited her as
she mounted, and she was a figure of gladness on the ridge bending over
to hospitable Plas Llwyn, where the Wythans lived, entertaining rich and
poor alike.

They had led the neighbourhood to call on the discarded Countess of
Fleetwood.

A warm strain of arms about her neck was Carinthia's welcome from Mrs.
Wythan lying along the couch in her boudoir; an established invalid, who
yearned sanely to life, and caught a spark of it from the guest eyed
tenderly by her as they conversed.

'Our boy?--our Chillon Kirby till he has his baptism names; he is well? I
am to see him?'

'He follows me. He sleeps almost through the night now.'

'Ah, my dear,' Mrs. Wythan sighed, imagining: 'It would disappoint me if
he did not wake me.'

'I wake at his old time and watch him.'

Carinthia put on the baby's face in the soft mould of slumber.

'I see him!' Mrs. Wythan cried. 'He is part mine. He has taught Owain to
love babies.'

A tray of breakfast was placed before the countess. 'Mr. Wythan is down
among his men?' she said.

'Every morning, as long as this agitation lasts. I need not say good
appetite to you after your walk. You have no fear of the men, I know.
Owain's men are undisturbed; he has them in hand. Absentee masters can't
expect continued harmony. Dear, he tells me Mr. Edwards awaits the earl.'

Drinking her tea, Carinthia's eyelids shut; she set down her cup, 'If he
must come,' she said. 'He wishes me to leave. I am to go again where I
have no friends, and no language to learn, and can be of no use. It is
not for me that I dread his coming. He speaks to command. The men ask to
be heard. He will have submission first. They do not trust him. His
coming is a danger. For me, I should wish him to come. May I say . . . ?'

'Your Rebecca bids you say, my darling.'

'It is, I am with the men because I am so like them. I beg to be heard.
He commands obedience. He is a great nobleman, but I am the daughter of a
greater man, and I have to say, that if those poor miners do harm, I will
not stand by and see an anger against injustice punished. I wish his
coming, for him to agree upon the Christian names of the boy. I feel his
coming will do me, injury in making me offend him worse. I would avoid
that. Oh, dear soul! I may say it to you:--he cannot hurt me any more. I
am spared loving him when I forgive him; and I do. The loving is the
pain. That is gone by.'

Mrs. Wythan fondled and kissed Carinthia's hand.

'Let me say in my turn; I may help you, dear. You know I have my
husband's love, as he mine. Am I, have I ever been a wife to him? Here I
lie, a dead weight, to be carried up and down, all of a wife that Owain
has had for years. I lie and pray to be taken, that my good man, my
proved good man, may be free to choose a healthy young woman and be
rewarded before his end by learning what a true marriage is. The big
simpleton will otherwise be going to his grave, thinking he was married!
I see him stepping about softly in my room, so contented if he does not
disturb me, and he crushes me with a desire to laugh at him while I
worship. I tricked him into marrying the prostrate invalid I am, and he
can't discover the trick, he will think it's a wife he has, instead of a
doctor's doll. Oh! you have a strange husband, it has been a strange
marriage for you, but you have your invincible health, you have not to
lie and feel the horror of being a deception to a guileless man, whose
love blindfolds him. The bitter ache to me is, that I can give nothing.
You abound in power to give.'

Carinthia lifted her open hands for sign of their emptiness.

'My brother would not want, if I could give. He may have to sell out of.
the army, he thinks, fears; and I must look on. Our mother used to say
she had done something for her country in giving a son like Chillon to
the British army. Poor mother! Our bright opening days all seem to end in
rain. We should turn to Mr. Wythan for a guide.'

'He calls you Morgan le Fay christianized.'

'What I am!' Carinthia raised and let fall her head. 'An example makes
dwarfs of us. When Mr. Wythan does penance for temper by descending into
his mine and working among his men for a day with the pick, seated, as he
showed me down below, that is an example. If I did like that, I should
have no firedamp in the breast, and not such a task to forgive, that when
I succeed I kill my feelings.'

The entry of Madge and Martha, the nurse-girl, with the overflowing
armful of baby, changed their converse into melodious exclamations.

'Kit Ines has arrived, my lady,' Madge said. 'I saw him on the road and
stopped a minute.'

Mrs. Wythan studied Carinthia. Her sharp invalid's ears had caught the
name. She beckoned. 'The man who--the fighting man?'

'It will be my child this time,' said Carinthia; 'I have no fear for
myself.' She was trembling, though her features were hard for the war her
lord had declared, as it seemed. 'Did he tell you his business here?' she
asked of Madge.

'He says, to protect you, my lady, since you won't leave.'

'He stays at the castle?'

'He is to stay there, he says, as long as the Welsh are out.'

'The "Welsh" are misunderstood by Lord Fleetwood,'

Mrs. Wythan said to Carinthia. 'He should live among them. They will not
hurt their lady. Protecting may be his intention; but we will have our
baby safe here. Not?' she appealed. 'And baby's mother. How otherwise?'

'You read my wishes,' Carinthia rejoined. 'The man I do not think a bad
man. He has a master. While I am bound to my child I must be restful, and
with the man at the castle Martha's goblins would jump about me day and
night. My boy makes a coward of his mother.'

'We merely take a precaution, and I have the pleasure of it,' said her
hostess. 'Give orders to your maid not less than a fortnight. It will
rejoice my husband so much.'

As with the warmly hospitable, few were the words. Madge was promised by
her mistress plenty of opportunities daily for seeing Kit Ines, and her
mouth screwed to one of women's dimples at a corner. She went off in a
cart to fetch boxes, thinking: We are a hunted lot! So she was not mildly
disposed for the company of Mr. Kit on her return to the castle.

England's champion light-weight thought it hard that his, coming down to
protect the castle against the gibbering heathen Welsh should cause a
clearing out, and solitariness for his portion.

'What's the good of innocence if you 're always going to suspect a man!'
he put it, like a true son of the pirates turned traders. 'I've got a
paytron, and a man in my profession must have a paytron, or where is he?
Where's his money for a trial of skill? Say he saves and borrows and
finds the lump to clap it down, and he's knocked out o' time. There he
is, bankrup', and a devil of a licking into the bargain. That 's the
cream of our profession, if a man has got no paytron.

No prize-ring can live without one. The odds are too hard on us. My lady
ought to take into account I behaved respectful when I was obliged to do
my lord's orders and remove her from our haunts, which wasn't to his
taste. Here I'm like a cannon for defending the house, needs be, and all
inside flies off scarified.'

'It strikes me, Kit Ines, a man with a paytron is no better than a tool
of a man,' said Madge.

'And don't you go to be sneering at honest tools,' Ines retorted. 'When
will women learn a bit of the world before they're made hags of by old
Father Wear-and-Tear! A young woman in her prime, you Madge! be such a
fool as not see I serve tool to stock our shop.'

'Your paytron bid you steal off with my lady's child, Kit Ines, you'd do
it to stock your shop.'

Ines puffed. 'If you ain't a girl to wallop the wind! Fancy me at that
game! Is that why my lady--but I can't be suspected that far? You make me
break out at my pores. My paytron's a gentleman: he wouldn't ask and I
couldn't act such a part. Dear Lord! it'd have to be stealing off, for my
lady can use a stick; and put it to the choice between my lady and her
child and any paytron living, paytron be damned, I'd say, rather'n go
against my notions of honour. Have you forgot all our old talk about the
prize-ring, the nursery of honour in Old England?'

'That was before you sold yourself to a paytron, Kit Ines.'

'Ah! Women wants mast-heading off and on, for 'em to have a bit of a
look-out over life as it is. They go stewing over books of adventure and
drop into frights about awful man. Take me, now; you had a no small
admiration for my manly valour once, and you trusted yourself to me, and
did you ever repent it?--owning you're not the young woman to tempt to t'
other way.'

'You wouldn't have found me talking to you here if I had.'

'And here I'm left to defend an empty castle, am I?'

'Don't drink or you'll have your paytron on you. He's good use there.'

'I ask it, can I see my lady?'

'Drunk nor sober you won't. Serve a paytron, be a leper, you'll find,
with all honest folk.'

Ines shook out an execrating leg at the foul word. 'Leper, you say? You
say that? You say leper to me?'

'Strut your tallest, Kit Ines. It's the money rattles in your pocket says
it.'

'It's my reputation for decent treatment of a woman lets you say it,
Madge Winch.'

'Stick to that as long as your paytron consents. It's the one thing
you've got left.'

'Benefit, you hussy, and mind you don't pull too stiff.'

'Be the woman and have the last word!'

His tongue was checked. He swallowed the exceeding sourness of a retort
undelivered, together with the feeling that she beat him in the wrangle
by dint of her being an unreasonable wench.

Madge huffed away to fill her boxes.

He stood by the cart, hands deep down his pockets, when she descended.
She could have laughed at the spectacle of a champion prize-fighter out
of employ, hulking idle, because he was dog to a paytron; but her
contempt of him declined passing in small change.

'So you're off. What am I to tell my lord when he comes?' Kit growled.
'His yacht's fetching for a Welsh seaport.'

She counted it a piece of information gained, and jumped to her seat,
bidding the driver start. To have pretty well lost her character for a
hero changed into a patron's dog, was a thought that outweighed the show
of incivility. Some little distance away, she reproached herself for not
having been so civil as to inquire what day my lord was expected, by his
appointment. The girl reflected on the strangeness of a body of
discontented miners bringing my lord and my lady close, perhaps to meet.




CHAPTER XXX

REBECCA WYTHAN

The earl was looked for at the, chief office of the mines, and each day
an expectation of him closed in disappointment, leaving it to be surmised
that there were more serious reasons for his continued absence during a
crisis than any discussed; whether indeed, as when a timepiece neglects
to strike the hour which is, by the reckoning of natural impatience,
past, the capital charge of 'crazy works' must not be brought against a
nobleman hitherto precise upon business, of a just disposition, fairly
humane. For though he was an absentee sucking the earth through a tube,
in Ottoman ease, he had never omitted the duty of personally attending on
the spot to grave cases under dispute. The son of the hardheaded father
came out at a crisis; and not too highhandedly: he could hear an opposite
argument to the end. Therefore, since he refused to comply without
hearing, he was wanted on the spot imperatively, now.

Irony perusing History offers the beaten and indolent a sugary acid in
the indication of the spites and the pranks, the whims and the tastes, at
the springs of main events. It is, taken by itself, destructive
nourishment. But those who labour in the field to shovel the clods of
earth to History, would be wiser of their fellows for a minor dose of it.
Mr. Howell Edwards consulting with Mr. Owain Wythan on the necessity,
that the earl should instantly keep his promise to appear among the men
and stop the fermentation, as in our younger days a lordly owner still
might do by small concessions and the physical influence--the
nerve-charm--could suppose him to be holding aloof for his pleasure or
his pride; perhaps because of illness or inability to conceive the actual
situation at a distance. He mentioned the presence of the countess, and
Mr. Wythan mentioned it, neither of them thinking a rational man would so
play the lunatic as to let men starve, and wreck precious mines, for the
sake of avoiding her.

Sullen days went by. On these days of the slate-cloud or the
leaden-winged, Carinthia walked over the hills to her staring or
down-eyed silent people, admitted without a welcome at some doors,
rejected at some. Her baskets from the castle were for the most part
received as graciously. She continued to direct them for delivery where
they were needed, and understood why a charity that supplied the place of
justice was not thanked. She and her people here were one regarding the
master, as she had said. They could not hurt her sensitiveness, she felt
too warmly with them. And here it was not the squalid, flat, bricked
east-corner of London at the close of her daily pilgrimage. Up from the
solitary street of the slate-roofs, she mounted a big hill and had the
life of high breathing. A perpetual escape out of the smoky, grimy city
mazes was trumpeted to her in the winds up there: a recollected contrast
lightened the skyless broad spaces overhead almost to sunniness. Having
air of the hills and activity for her limbs, she made sunshine for
herself. Regrets were at no time her nestlings.

Look backward only to correct an error of conduct for the next attempt,
says one of her father's Maxims; as sharply bracing for women as for men.
She did not look back to moan. Now that her hunger for the safety of her
infant was momentarily quieted, she could see Kit Ines hanging about the
lower ground, near the alehouse, and smile at Madge's comparison of him
to a drummed-out soldier, who would like to be taken for a holiday
pensioner.

He saluted; under the suspicion of his patron's lady his legs were
hampered, he dared not approach her; though his innocence of a deed not
proposed to him yet--and all to stock that girl Madge's shop, if done!
knocked at his ribs with fury to vindicate himself before the lady and
her maid. A gentleman met them and conducted them across the hills.

And two Taffy gentlemen would hardly be sufficient for the purpose,
supposing an ill-used Englishman inclined to block their way!--What, and
play footpad, Kit Ines? No, it's just a game in the head. But a true man
hates to feel himself suspected. His refuge is the beer of the country.

Next day there were the two gentlemen to conduct the lady and her maid;
and Taffy the first walks beside the countess; and that girl Madge
trudges along with no other than my lord's Mr. Woodseer, chattering like
a watering-can on a garden-bed: deuce a glance at Kit Ines. How can she
keep it up and the gentleman no more than nodding? How does he enjoy
playing second fiddle with the maid while Mr. tall brown-face Taffy
violins it to her ladyship a stone's throw in front? Ines had less
curiosity to know the object of Mr. Woodseer's appearance on the scene.
Idle, unhandsomely treated, and a cave of the yawns, he merely commented
on his observations.

'Yes, there he is, don't look at him,' Madge said to Gower; 'and whatever
he's here for, he has a bad time of it, and rather more than it's
pleasant for him to think over, if a slave to a "paytron" thinks at all.
I won't judge him; my mistress is bitten with the fear for the child,
worse than ever. And the earl, my lord, not coming, and he wanting her to
move again, seems to her he durstn't do it here and intends to snap at
the child on the road. She-'s forced to believe anything of such a
husband and father. And why does he behave so? I can't spell it. He's
kind to my Sally--you've seen the Piccadilly shop?--because she was . . .
she did her best in love and duty for my lady. And behaves like a husband
hating his wife's life on earth! Then he went down with good Mr.
Woodseer, and called on Sally, pretending to inquire, after she was
kidnapped by that Kit Ines acting to please his paytron, he must be shown
up to the room where she slept, and stands at the door and peeps in,
Sally's letter says, and asks if he may enter the room. He went to the
window looking on the chimneys she used to see, and touched an ornament
over the fireplace, called grandfather's pigtail case--he was a sailor;
only a ridiculous piece of china, that made my lady laugh about the story
of its holding a pigtail. But he turns it over because she did--Sally
told him. He couldn't be pretending when he bought the beautiful shop and
stocked it for Sally. He gets her lots of customers; and no rent to pay
till next Michaelmas a year. She's a made woman through him. He said to
her, he had heard from Mr. Woodseer the Countess of Fleetwood called her
sister; he shook her hand.'

'The Countess of Fleetwood called both of you her sisters, I think,' said
Gower.

'I'm her servant. I'd rather serve her than have a fortune.'

'You were born with a fortune one would like to have a nibble at, Madge.'

'I can't lay hand on it, then.'

'It's the capacity for giving, my dear.'

'Please, Mr. Gower, don't say that; you'll make me cry. He keeps his wife
so poor she hasn't a shilling of her own; she wearies about her brother;
she can't help. He can spend hundreds on my Sally for having been good to
her, in our small way--it's a fairy tale; and he won't hear of money for
his wife, except that she's never to want for anything it can buy.'

'You give what it can't buy.'

'Me. I'm "a pugilist's wench"--I've heard myself called. She was the
first who gave me a lift; never mind me. Have you come to take her away?
She'd trust herself and the child to you.'

'Take her?--reason with her as to the best we can do. He holds off from a
meeting just now. I fancy he's wearing round to it. His keeping his wife
without money passes comprehension. After serving him for a few months, I
had a store invested to support me for years--as much as I need before I
join the ranks of the pen. I was at my reading and writing and drowsing,
and down he rushes: I 'm in harness again. I can't say it's dead waste of
time; besides I pick up an independence for the days ahead. But I don't
respect myself for doing the work. Here's the difference between us two
servants, Madge: I think of myself, and you don't.'

'The difference is more like between the master and mistress we serve,
Mr. Gower.'

'Well, I'd rather be the woman in this case.'

'You know the reputation I've got. And can only just read, and can't
spell. My mistress teaches me bits of German and French on her walks.'

Gower took a new observation of this girl, whom he had not regarded as
like himself, a pushing blade among the grasses. He proposed to continue
her lessons, if she cared to learn; saying it could be done in letters.

'I won't be ashamed of writing, if you mean it,' said she. 'My mistress
will have a usefuller servant. She had a strange honeymoon of a marriage,
if ever was--and told me t' other day she was glad because it brought us
together--she a born lady!'

'A fling-above born ladies. She's quick as light to hit on a jewel where
there is one, whether it shines or not. She stands among the Verities of
the world.'

'Yes,' Madge said, panting for more. 'Do speak of her. When you praise
her, I feel she's not wasted. Mistress; and friend and wife--if he'd let
her be; and mother; never mother like her. The boy 'll be a sturdy.
She'll see he has every chance. He's a lucky little one to have that
mother.'

'You think her handsome, Madge?'

Gower asked it, wishing to hear a devotee's confusion of qualities and
looks.

The question was a drop on lower spheres, and it required definitions, to
touch the exact nature of the form of beauty, and excuse a cooler tone on
the commoner plane. These demanded language. She rounded the difficulty,
saying: 'You see engravings of archery; that 's her figure--her real
figure. I think her face . . . I can't describe . . . it flashes.'

'That's it,' said Gower, delighted with his perception of a bare mind at
work and hitting the mark perforce of warmth. 'When it flashes, it's
unequalled. There's the supremacy of irregular lines. People talk of
perfect beauty: suitable for paintings and statues. Living faces, if
they're to show the soul, which is the star on the peak of beauty, must
lend themselves to commotion. Nature does it in a breezy tree or over
ruffled waters. Repose has never such splendid reach as animation--I
mean, in the living face. Artists prefer repose. Only Nature can express
the uttermost beauty with her gathering and tuning of discords. Well,
your mistress has that beauty. I remember my impression when I saw her
first on her mountains abroad. Other beautiful faces of women go pale,
grow stale. The diversified in the harmony of the flash are Nature's own,
her radiant, made of her many notes, beyond our dreams to reproduce. We
can't hope to have a true portrait of your mistress. Does Madge
understand?'

The literary dose was a strong one for her; but she saw the index, and
got a lift from the sound. Her bosom heaved. 'Oh, I do try, Mr. Gower. I
think I do a little. I do more while you're talking. You are good to talk
so to me. You should have seen her the night she went to meet my lord at
those beastly Gardens Kit Ines told me he was going to. She was defending
him. I've no words. You teach me what's meant by poetry. I couldn't
understand that once.'

Their eyes were on the countess and her escort in advance. Gower's
praises of her mistress's peculiar beauty set the girl compassionately
musing. His eloquence upon the beauty was her clue.

Carinthia and Mr. Wythan started at a sharp trot in the direction of the
pair of ponies driven by a groom along the curved decline of the narrow
roadway. His whip was up for signal.

It concerned the house and the master of it. His groom drove rapidly
down, while he hurried on the homeward way, as a man will do, with the
dread upon him that his wife's last breath may have been yielded before
he can enfold her.

Carinthia walked to be overtaken, not daring to fever her blood at a
swifter pace; 'lamed with an infant,' the thought recurred.

'She is very ill, she has fainted, she lies insensible,' Madge heard from
her of Mrs. Wythan. 'We were speaking of her when the groom appeared. It
has happened twice. They fear the third. He fears it, though he laughs at
a superstition. Now step, I know you like walking, Mr. Woodseer. Once I
left you behind.'

'I have the whole scene of the angel and the cripple,' Gower replied.

'O that day!'

They 'were soon speculating on the unimpressionable house in its clump of
wood midway below, which had no response for anxieties.

A maid-servant at the garden gate, by Mr. Wythan's orders, informed
Carinthia that her mistress had opened her eyes: There was a hope of
weathering the ominous third time. But the hope was a bird of short
flight from bush to bush until the doctor should speak to confirm it.
Even the child was under the shadow of the house. Carinthia had him in
her arms, trusting to life as she hugged him, and seeing innumerable
darts out of all regions assailing her treasure.

'She wishes to have you,' Mr. Wythan came and said to her. 'Almost her
first word. The heart is quickening. She will live for me if she can.'

He whispered it. His features shot the sparkle.

Rebecca Wythan had strength to press Carinthia's hand faintly. She made
herself heard: 'No pain.' Her husband sat upright, quite still, attentive
for any sign. His look of quiet pleasure ready to show, sprightliness
dwelt on her. She returned the look, unable to give it greeting. Past the
sense of humour, she wanted to say: 'See the poor simple fellow who will
think it a wife that he has!' She did but look.

Carinthia spoke his name, 'Mr. Wythan,' by chance, and Rebecca breathed
heavily until she formed the words: 'Owain to me.'

'To me,' Owain added.

The three formed a chain of clasped hands.

It was in the mind of the sick lady to disburden herself of more than her
weakness could utter, so far was she above earthly links. The desire in
her was to be quit of the flesh, bearing a picture of her husband as
having the dues of his merits.

Her recovered strength next day brought her nearer to our laws. 'You will
call him Owain, Carinthia?' she said. 'He is not one to presume on
familiarity. I must be going soon. I cannot leave him the wife I would
choose. I can leave him the sister. He is a sure friend. He is the
knightly man women dream of. I harp on it because I long for testimony
that I leave him to have some reward. And this may be, between two so
pure at heart as you two.'

'Dear soul friend, yes, and Owain, yes, I can say it,' Carinthia
rejoined. 'Brother? I have only my Chillon. My life is now for him. I am
punished for separating myself from the son of my father. I have no heart
for a second brother. What I can give to my friend I will. I shall love
you in him, if I am to lose you.'

'Not Owain--it was I was the wretch refused to call on the lonely lady at
the castle until I heard she had done a romantic little bit of
thing--hushed a lambkin's bleating. My loss! my loss! And I could afford
it so poorly. Since then Carinthia has filled my days. I shudder to leave
you and think of your going back to the English. Their sneer withers.
They sent you down among us as a young woman to be shunned.'

'I did wildly, I was ungoverned, I had one idea,' said Carinthia. 'One
idea is a bullet, good for the day of battle to beat the foe, father
tells us. It was a madness in me. Now it has gone, I see all round. I see
straight, too. With one idea, we see nothing--nothing but itself. Whizz!
we go. I did. I shall no longer offend in that way. Mr. Gower Woodseer is
here from my lord.'

'With him the child will be safe.'

'I am not alarmed. It is to request--they would have me gone, to prepare
the way for my lord.'

'You have done, it; he has the castle to himself. I cannot-spare you. A
tyrant ordering you to go should be defied. My Lord Fleetwood puts
lightning into my slow veins.'

'We have talked: we shall be reproved by the husband and the doctor,'
said Carinthia.

Sullen days continued and rolled over to night at the mines. Gower's
mission was rendered absurd by the countess's withdrawal from the castle.
He spoke of it to Mr. Wythan once, and the latter took a big breath and
blew such a lord to the winds. 'Persuade our guest to leave us, that the
air may not be tainted for her husband when he comes? He needn't call;
he's not obliged to see her. She's offered Esslemont to live in? I
believe her instinct's right--he has designs on the child. A little more
and we shall have a mad dog in the fellow. He doubles my work by keeping
his men out. If she were away we should hear of black doings. Twenty
dozen of his pugilists wouldn't stop the burning.'

They agreed that persuasions need not be addressed to the countess. She
was and would remain Mr. Wythan's guest. As for the earl, Gower inclined
to plead hesitatingly, still to plead, on behalf of a nobleman owning his
influence and very susceptible to his wisdom, whose echo of a pointed
saying nearly equalled the satisfaction bestowed by print. The titled man
affected the philosopher in that manner; or rather, the crude
philosopher's relish of brilliant appreciation stripped him of his robe.
For he was with Owain Wythan at heart to scorn titles which did not
distinguish practical offices. A nation bowing to them has gone to pith,
for him; he had to shake himself, that he might not similarly stick; he
had to do it often. Objects elevated even by a decayed world have their
magnetism for us unless we nerve the mind to wakeful repulsion. He
protested he had reason to think the earl was humanizing, though he might
be killing a woman in the process. 'Could she wish for better?' he asked,
with at least the gravity of the undermining humourist; and he started
Owain to course an idea when he remarked of Lord Fleetwood: 'Imagine a
devil on his back on a river, flying a cherub.'

Owain sparkled from the vision of the thing to wrath with it.

'Ay, but while he's floating, his people are edging on starvation. And
I've a personal grievance. I keep, you know, open hall, bread and cheese
and beer, for poor mates. His men are favouring us with a call. We have
to cart treble from the town. If I straighten the sticks he dies to bend,
it'll be a grievance against me--and a fig for it! But I like to be at
peace with my neighbours, and waft them "penillion" instead of dealing
the "cleddyfal" of Llewellyn.'

At last the tension ceased; they had intelligence of the earl's arrival.

His countess was little moved by it; and the reason for that lay in her
imagination being absorbed. Henrietta had posted her a journal telling of
a deed of Chillon's: no great feat, but precious for its 'likeness to
him,' as they phrased it; that is, for the light it cast on their
conception of the man. Heading a squadron in a riotous Midland town, he
stopped a charge, after fire of a shot from the mob, and galloped up the
street to catch a staggering urchin to his saddle-bow, and place the mite
in safety. Then it was a simple trot of the hussars ahead; way was made
for him.

Now, to see what banquet there is for the big of heart in the world's hot
stress, take the view of Carinthia, to whom her brother's thoughtful
little act of gentleness at the moment of the red-of-the-powder smoke was
divinest bread and wine, when calamity hung around, with the future an
unfooted wilderness, her powers untried, her husband her enemy.




CHAPTER XXXI

WE HAVE AGAIN TO DEAL WITH THE EXAMPLES OF OUR YOUNGER MAN

The most urgent of Dames is working herself up to a grey squall in her
detestation of imagerial epigrams. Otherwise Gower Woodseer's dash at the
quintessential young man of wealth would prompt to the carrying of it
further, and telling how the tethered flutterer above a 'devil on his
back on a river' was beginning to pull if not drag his withholder and
teaser.

Fleetwood had almost a desire to see the small dot of humanity which drew
the breath from him;--and was indistinguishably the bubbly grin and
gurgle of the nurses, he could swear. He kicked at the bondage to our
common fleshly nature imposed on him by the mother of the little animal.
But there had been a mother to his father: odd movements of a warmish
curiosity brushed him when the cynic was not mounting guard. They were,
it seemed, external--no part of him: like blasts of a wayside furnace
across wintry air. They were, as it chanced, Nature's woman in him
plucking at her separated partner, Custom's man; something of an oriental
voluptuary on his isolated regal seat; and he would suck the pleasures
without a descent into the stale old ruts where Life's convict couple
walk linked to one another, to their issue more.

There was also a cold curiosity to see the male infant such a mother
would have. The grandson of Old Lawless might turn out a rascal,--he
would be no mean one, no coward.

That mother, too, who must have been a touch astonished to find herself a
mother:--Fleetwood laughed a curt bark, and heard rebukes, and pleaded
the marriage-trap to the man of his word; devil and cherub were at the
tug, or say, dog and gentleman, a survival of the schoolboy--that mother,
a girl of the mountains, perhaps wanted no more than smoothing by the
world. 'It is my husband' sounded foolish, sounded freshish,--a new note.
Would she repeat it? The bit of simplicity would bear repeating once.
Gower Woodseer says the creature grows and studies to perfect herself.
She's a good way off that, and may spoil herself in the process; but she
has a certain power. Her donkey obstinacy in refusing compliance, and her
pursuit of 'my husband,' and ability to drench him with ridicule, do not
exhibit the ordinary young female. She stamps her impression on the
people she meets. Her husband is shaken to confess it likewise, despite a
disagreement between them.

He has owned he is her husband: he has not disavowed the consequence.
That fellow, Gower Woodseer, might accuse the husband of virtually lying,
if he by his conduct implied her distastefulness or worse. By heaven! as
felon a deed as could be done. Argue the case anyhow, it should be
undone. Let her but cease to madden. For whatever the rawness of the
woman, she has qualities; and experience of the facile loves of London
very sharply defines her qualities. Think of her as raw, she has the gift
of rareness: forget the donkey obstinacy, her character grasps. In the
grasp of her character, one inclines, and her husband inclines, to become
her advocate. She has only to discontinue maddening.

The wealthy young noble prized any form of rareness wherever it was
visible, having no thought of the purchase of it, except with worship. He
could listen pleased to the talk of a Methodist minister sewing
bootleather. He picked up a roadside tramp and made a friend of him, and
valued the fellow's honesty, submitted to his lectures, pardoned his
insolence. The sight of Carinthia's narrow bedroom and strip of bed over
Sarah Winch's Whitechapel shop had gone a step to drown the bobbing
Whitechapel Countess. At least, he had not been hunted by that gaunt
chalk-quarry ghost since his peep into the room. Own it! she likewise has
things to forgive. Women nurse their larvae of ideas about fair dealing.
But observe the distinction: aid if women understood justice they would
be the first to proclaim, that when two are tied together, the one who
does the other serious injury is more naturally excused than the one
who-tenfold abhorrent if a woman!--calls up the grotesque to extinguish
both.

With this apology for himself, Lord Fleetwood grew tolerant of the person
honourably avowed as his wife. So; therefore, the barrier between him and
his thoughts of her was broken. The thoughts carrying red doses were
selected. Finally, the taste to meet her sprouted. If agreeable, she
could be wooed; if barely agreeable, tormented; if disagreeable, left as
before.

Although it was the hazard of a die, he decided to follow his taste. Her
stay at the castle had kept him long from the duties of his business; and
he could imagine it a grievance if he pleased, but he put it aside.
Alighting at his chief manager's office, he passed through the heated
atmosphere of black-browed, wiry little rebels, who withheld the salute
as they lounged: a posture often preceding the spring in compulsorily
idle workers. He was aware of instinct abroad, an antagonism to the
proprietor's rights. They roused him to stand by them, and were his own
form of instinct, handsomely clothed. It behoved that he should examine
them and the claims against them, to be sure of his ground. He and Mr.
Howell Edwards debated the dispute for an hour; agreeing, partially
differing. There was a weakness on the principle in Edwards. These
fellows fixed to the spot are for compromise too much. An owner of mines
has no steady reckoning of income if the rate of wage is perpetually to
shift according to current, mostly ignorant, versions of the prosperity
of the times. Are we so prosperous? It is far from certain. And if the
rate ascends, the question of easing it down to suit the discontinuance
of prosperity agitating our exchequer--whose demand is for
fixity--perplexes us further.

However, that was preliminary. He and Howell Edwards would dine and
wrangle it out. The earl knew himself a hot disputant after dinner.
Incidentally he heard of Lady Fleetwood as a guest of Mrs. Wythan; and
the circumstance was injurious to him because he stood against Mr.
Wythan's pampering system with his men.

Ines up at the castle smelt of beer, and his eyelids were sottish.
Nothing to do tries the virtue of the best. He sought his excuse in a
heavy lamentation over my lady's unjust suspicion of him,--a known man of
honour, though he did serve his paytron.

The cause of Lady Fleetwood's absence was exposed to her outraged lord,
who had sent the man purely to protect her at this castle, where she
insisted on staying. The suspicion cast on the dreary lusher was the
wife's wild shot at her husband. One could understand a silly woman's
passing terror. Her acting under the dictate of it struck the husband's
ribbed breast as a positive clap of hostilities between them across a
chasm.

His previous placable mood was immediately conceived by him to have been
one of his fits of generosity; a step to a frightful dutiful embrace of
an almost repulsive object. He flung the thought of her back on her
Whitechapel. She returned from that place with smiles, dressed in a
laundry white with a sprinkle of smuts, appearing to him as an adversary
armed and able to strike. There was a blow, for he chewed resentments;
and these were goaded by a remembered shyness of meeting her eyes when he
rounded up the slope of the hill, in view of his castle, where he
supposed she would be awaiting 'my husband.' The silence of her absence
was lively mockery of that anticipation.

Gower came on him sauntering about the grounds.

'You're not very successful down here,' Fleetwood said, without greeting.

'The countess likes the air of this country,' said Gower, evasively,
impertinently, and pointlessly; offensively to the despot employing him
to be either subservient or smart.

'I wish her to leave it.'

'She wishes to see you first.'

'She takes queer measures. I start to-morrow for my yacht at Cardiff.'
There the matter ended; for Fleetwood fell to talking of the mines. At
dinner and after dinner it was the topic, and after Howell Edwards had
departed.

When the man who has a heart will talk of nothing but what concerns his
interests, and the heart is hurt, it may be perceived by a cognizant
friend, that this is his proud mute way of petitioning to have the
tenderer subject broached. Gower was sure of the heart, armoured or
bandaged though it was,--a haunt of evil spirits as well,--and he began:
'Now to speak of me half a minute. You cajoled me out of my Surrey room,
where I was writing, in the vein . . .'

'I've had the scene before me!' the earl interposed. 'Juniper dells and
that tree of the flashing leaf, and that dear old boy, your father, young
as you and me, and saying love of Nature gives us eternal youth. On with
you.'

'I doubted whether I should be of use to you. I told you the amount of
alloy in my motives. A year with you, I have subsistence for ten years
assured to me.'

'Don't be a prosy dog, Gower Woodseer.'

'Will you come over to the Wythans before you go?'

'I will not.'

'You would lengthen your stride across a wounded beast?'

'I see no wound to the beast.'

'You can permit yourself to kick under cover of a metaphor.'

'Tell me what you drive at, Gower.'

'The request is, for you to spare pain by taking one step--an extra
strain on the muscles of the leg. It 's only the leg wants moving.'

'The lady has legs to run away, let them bring her back.'

'Why have me with you, then? I'm useless. But you read us all, see
everything, and wait only for the mood to do the right. You read me, and
I'm not open to everybody. You read the crux of a man like me in my novel
position. You read my admiration of a beautiful woman and effort to keep
honest. You read my downright preference of what most people would call
poverty, and my enjoyment of good cookery and good company. You enlist
among the crew below as one of our tempters. You find I come round to the
thing I like best. Therefore, you have your liking for me; and that's why
you turn to me again, after your natural infidelities. So much for me.
You read this priceless lady quite as clearly. You choose to cloud her
with your moods. She was at a disadvantage, 'arriving in a strange
country, next to friendless; and each new incident bred of a luckless
beginning--I could say more.'

Fleetwood nodded. 'You are read without the words: You read in history,
too, I suppose, that there are two sides to most cases. The loudest is
not often the strongest. However, now the lady shows herself crazed.
That's reading her charitably. Else she has to be taken for a spiteful
shrew, who pretends to suspect anything that's villanous, because she can
hit on no other way of striking.'

'Crazed, is a wide shot and hits half the world,' muttered Gower. 'Lady
Fleetwood had a troubled period after her marriage. She suffered a sort
of kidnapping when she was bearing her child. There's a book by an
Edinburgh doctor might be serviceable to you. It enlightens me. She will
have a distrust of you, as regards the child, until she understands you
by living with you under one roof.'

'Such animals these women are!' Good Lord!' Fleetwood ejaculated. 'I
marry one, and I 'm to take to reading medical books!' He yawned.

'You speak that of women and pretend to love Nature,' said Gower. 'You
hate Nature unless you have it served on a dish by your own cook. That's
the way to the madhouse or the monastery. There we expiate the sin of
sins. A man finds the woman of all women fitted to stick him in the soil,
and trim and point him to grow, and she's an animal for her pains! The
secret of your malady is, you've not yet, though you're on a healthy leap
for the practices of Nature, hopped to the primary conception of what
Nature means. Women are in and of Nature. I've studied them here--had
nothing to do but study them. That most noble of ladies' whole mind was
knotted to preserve her child during her time of endurance up to her
moment of trial. Think it over. It's your one chance of keeping sane.

And expect to hear flat stuff from me while you go on playing tyrant.'

'You certainly take liberties,' Fleetwood's mildest voice remarked.

'I told you I should try you, when you plucked me out of my Surrey nest.'

Fleetwood, passed from a meditative look to a malicious half-laugh. 'You
seem to have studied the "most noble of ladies" latterly rather like a
barrister with a brief for the defendant--plaintiff, if you like!'

'As to that, I'll help you to an insight of a particular weakness of
mine,' said Gower. 'I require to have persons of even the highest value
presented to me on a stage, or else I don't grasp them at all--they 're
simply pictures. I saw the lady; admired, esteemed, sufficiently, I
supposed, until her image appeared to me in the feelings of another. Then
I saw fathoms. No doubt, it was from feeling warmer. I went through the
blood of the other for my impression.'

'Name the other,' said the earl, and his features were sharp.

You can have the name,' Gower answered. 'It was the girl, Madge Winch.'

Fleetwood's hard stare melted to surprise and contemptuous amusement.
'You see the lady to be the "most noble of ladies" through the warming
you get by passing into the feelings of Madge Winch?'

Sarcasm was in the tone, and beneath it a thrill of compassionateness
traversed him and shot a remorseful sting with the vision of those two
young women on the coach at the scene of the fight. He had sentience of
their voices, nigh to hearing them. The forlorn bride's hand given to the
anxious girl behind her gushed an image of the sisterhood binding women
under the pangs they suffer from men. He craved a scourging that he might
not be cursing himself; and he provoked it, for Gower was very sensitive
to a cold breath on the weakness he had laid bare; and when Fleetwood
said: 'You recommend a bath in the feelings of Madge Winch?' the retort
came:--'It might stop you on the road to a cowl.'

Fleetwood put on the mask of cogitation to cover a shudder, 'How?'

'A question of the man or the monk with you, as I fancy I've told you
more than once!'

'You may fancy committing any impertinence and be not much out.'

'The saving of you is that you digest it when you've stewed it down.'

'You try me!'

'I don't impose the connection.'

'No, I take the blame for that.'

They sat in dumbness, fidgeted, sprang to their feet, and lighted bedroom
candles.

Mounting the stairs, Gower was moved to let fall a benevolent look on the
worried son of fortune. 'I warned you I should try you. It ought to be
done politely. If I have to speak a truth I 'm boorish. The divinely
damnable naked truth won't wear ornaments. It's about the same as
pitching a handful of earth.'

'You dirt your hands, hit or miss. Out of this corridor! Into my room,
and spout your worst,' cried the earl.

Gower entered his dressing-room and was bidden to smoke there.

'You're a milder boor when you smoke. That day down in Surrey with the
grand old bootmaker was one of our days, Gower Woodseer! There's no smell
of the boor in him. Perhaps his religion helps him, more than
Nature-worship: not the best for manners. You won't smoke your pipe?--a
cigar? Lay on, then, as hard as you like.'

'You're asking for the debauchee's last luxury--not a correction,' said
Gower, grimly thinking of how his whip might prove effective and punish
the man who kept him fruitlessly out of his bed.

'I want stuff for a place in the memory,' said Fleetwood; and the late
hour, with the profitless talk, made it a stinging taunt.

'You want me to flick your indecision.'

'That's half a hit.'

'I 'm to talk italics, for you to store a smart word or so.'

'True, I swear! And, please, begin.'

'You hang for the Fates to settle which is to be smothered in you, the
man or the lord--and it ends in the monk, if you hang much longer.'

'A bit of a scorpion in his intention,' Fleetwood muttered on a stride.
'I'll tell you this, Gower Woodseer; when you lay on in earnest, your
diction is not so choice. Do any of your remarks apply to Lady
Fleetwood?'

'All should. I don't presume to allude to Lady Fleetwood.'

'She has not charged you to complain?'

'Lady Fleetwood is not the person to complain or condescend to speak of
injuries.'

'She insults me with her insane suspicion.'

A swollen vein on the young nobleman's forehead went to confirm the idea
at the Wythans' that he was capable of mischief. They were right; he was
as capable of villany as of nobility. But he happened to be thanking
Gower Woodseer's whip for the comfortable numbness he felt at Carinthia's
behaviour, while detesting her for causing him to desire it and endure
it, and exonerate his prosy castigator.

He was ignorant of the revenge he had on Gower, whose diction had not
been particularly estimable. In the feebleness of a man vainly courting
sleep, the disarmed philosopher tossed from one side to the other through
the remaining hours of darkness, polishing sentences that were natural
spouts of choicest diction; and still the earl's virulent small sneer
rankled. He understood why, after a time. The fervour of advocacy, which
inspires high diction, had been wanting. He had sought more to lash the
earl with his personal disgust and partly to parade his contempt of a
lucrative dependency--than he had felt for the countess. No wonder his
diction was poor. It was a sample of limp thinness; a sort of tongue of a
Master Slender:--flavourless, unsatisfactory, considering its object:
measured to be condemned by its poor achievement. He had nevertheless a
heart to feel for the dear lady, and heat the pleading for her,
especially when it ran to its object, as along a shaft of the sun-rays,
from the passionate devotedness of that girl Madge.

He brooded over it till it was like a fire beneath him to drive him from
his bed and across the turfy roller of the hill to the Wythans', in the
front of an autumnal sunrise--grand where the country is shorn of surface
decoration, as here and there we find some unadorned human creature,
whose bosom bears the ball of warmth.




CHAPTER XXXII

IN WHICH WE SEE CARINTHIA PUT IN PRACTICE ONE OF HER OLD FATHER'S LESSONS

Seated at his breakfast-table, the earl saw Gower stride in, and could
have wagered he knew the destination of the fellow's morning walk. It
concerned him little; he would be leaving the castle in less than an
hour. She might choose to come or choose to keep away. The whims of
animals do not affect men unless they are professionally tamers. Petty
domestic dissensions are besides poor webs to the man pulling
singlehanded at ropes with his revolted miners. On the topic of wages,
too, he was Gower's master, and could hold forth: by which he taught
himself to feel that practical affairs are the proper business of men,
women and infants being remotely secondary; the picturesque and poetry,
consequently, sheer nonsense.

'I suppose your waiting here is useless, to quote you,' he said. 'The
countess can decide now to remain, if she pleases. Drive with me to
Cardiff--I miss you if you 're absent a week. Or is it legs? Drop me a
line of your stages on the road, and don't loiter much.'

Gower spoke of starting his legs next day, if he had to do the journey
alone: and he clouded the yacht for Fleetwood with talk of the Wye and
the Usk, Hereford and the Malvern Hills elliptical over the plains.

'Yes,' the earl acquiesced jealously; 'we ought to have seen--tramped
every foot of our own country. That yacht of mine, there she is, and I
said I would board her and have a fly with half a dozen fellows round the
Scottish isles. We're never free to do as we like.'

'Legs are the only things that have a taste of freedom,' said Gower.

They strolled down to Howell Edwards' office at nine, Kit Ines beside the
luggage cart to the rear.

Around the office and along to the street of the cottages crowds were
chattering, gesticulating; Ines fancied the foreign jabberers inclined to
threaten. Howell Edwards at the door of his office watched them
calculatingly. The lord of their destinies passed in with him, leaving
Gower to study the features of the men, and Ines to reckon the chance of
a fray.

Fleetwood came out presently, saying to Edwards:

'That concession goes far enough. Because I have a neighbour who yields
at every step? No, stick to the principle. I've said my final word. And
here's the carriage. If the mines are closed, more's the pity: but I'm
not responsible. You can let them know if you like, before I drive off;
it doesn't matter to me.'

The carriage was ready. Gower cast a glance up the hill. Three female
figures and a pannier-donkey were visible on the descent. He nodded to
Edwards, who took the words out of his mouth. 'Her ladyship, my lord.'

She was distinctly seen, and looked formidable in definition against the
cloud. Madge and the nurse-maid Martha were the two other young women. On
they came, and the, angry man seated in the carriage could not give the
order to start. Nor could he quite shape an idea of annoyance, though he
hung to it and faced at Gower a battery of the promise to pay him for
this. Tattling observers were estimated at their small importance there,
as everywhere, by one so high above them. But the appearance of the woman
of the burlesque name and burlesque actions, and odd ascension out of the
ludicrous into a form to cast a spell, so that she commanded serious
recollections of her, disturbed him. He stepped from his carriage. Again
he had his incomprehensible fit of shyness; and a vision of the
complacent, jowled, redundant, blue-coated monarch aswing in imbecile
merriment on the signboard of the Royal Sovereign inn; constitutionally
his total opposite, yet instigating the sensation.

In that respect his countess and he had shifted characters. Carinthia
came on at her bold mountain stride to within hail of him. Met by Gower,
she talked, smiled, patted her donkey, clutched his ear, lifted a silken
covering to show the child asleep; entirely at her ease and unhurried.
These women get aid from their pride of maternity. And when they can
boast a parson behind them, they are indecorous up to insolent in their
ostentation of it.

She resumed her advance, with a slight abatement of her challengeing
match, sedately; very collectedly erect; changed in the fulness of her
figure and her poised calm bearing.

He heard her voice addressing Gower: 'Yes, they do; we noticed the
slate-roofs, looking down on them. They do look like a council of rooks
in the hollow; a parliament, you said. They look exceedingly like, when a
peep of sunshine falls. Oh, no; not clergymen!'

She laughed at the suggestion.

She might be one of the actresses by nature.

Is the man unsympathetic with women a hater of Nature deductively? Most
women are actresses. As to worshipping Nature, we go back to the state of
heathen beast, Mr. Philosopher Gower could be answered . . . .

Fleetwood drew in his argument. She stood before him. There was on his
part an insular representation of old French court salute to the lady,
and she replied to it in the exactest measure, as if an instructed
proficient.

She stood unshadowed. 'We have come to bid you adieu, my lord,' she said,
and no trouble of the bosom shook her mellow tones. Her face was not the
chalk-quarry or the rosed rock; it was oddly individual, and, in a way,
alluring, with some gentle contraction of her eyelids. But evidently she
stood in full repose, mistress of herself.

Upon him, it appeared, the whole sensibility of the situation was to be
thrown. He hardened.

'We have had to settle business here,' he said, speaking resonantly, to
cover his gazing discomposedly, all but furtively.

The child was shown, still asleep. A cunning infant not a cry in him to
excuse a father for preferring concord or silence or the bachelor's
exemption.

'He is a strong boy,' the mother said. 'Our doctor promises he will ride
over all the illnesses.'

Fleetwood's answer set off with an alarum of the throat, and dwindled to
'We 'll hope so. Seems to sleep well.'

She had her rocky brows. They were not barren crags, and her shape was
Nature's ripeness, it was acknowledged: She stood like a lance in
air-rather like an Amazon schooled by Athene, one might imagine. Hues of
some going or coming flush hinted the magical trick of her visage. She
spoke in modest manner, or it might be indifferently, without a flaunting
of either.

'I wish to consult you, my lord. He is not baptized. His Christian
names?'

'I have no choice.'

'I should wish him to bear one of my brother's names.'

'I have no knowledge of your brother's names.'

'Chillon is one.'

'Ah! Is it, should you think, suitable to our climate?'

'Another name of my brother's is John.'

'Bull.' The loutish derision passed her and rebounded on him. 'That would
be quite at home.'

'You will allow one of your own names, my lord?'

'Oh, certainly, if you desire it, choose. There are four names you will
find in a book of the Peerage or Directory or so. Up at the castle--or
you might have written:--better than these questions on the public road.
I don't demur. Let it be as you like.'

'I write empty letters to tell what I much want,' Carinthia said.

'You have only to write your plain request.'

'If, now I see you, I may speak another request, my lord.'

'Pray,' he said, with courteous patience, and stepped forward down to the
street of the miners' cottages. She could there speak out-bawl the
request, if it suited her to do so.

On the point of speaking, she gazed round.

'Perfectly safe! no harm possible,' said he, fretful under the burden of
this her maniacal maternal anxiety.

'The men are all right, they would not hurt a child. What can rationally
be suspected!'

'I know the men; they love their children,' she replied. 'I think my
child would be precious to them. Mr. Woodseer and Mr. Edwards and Madge
are there.'

'Is the one more request--I mean, a mother's anxiety does not run to the
extent of suspecting everybody?'

'Some of the children are very pretty,' said Carinthia, and eyed the
bands of them at their games in the roadway and at the cottage doors.
'Children of the poor have happy mothers.'

Her eyes were homely, morning over her face. They were open now to what
that fellow Woodseer (who could speak to the point when he was not aiming
at it) called the parlour, or social sitting-room; where we may have
converse with the tame woman's mind, seeing the door to the clawing
recesses temporarily shut.

'Forgive me if I say you talk like the bigger child,' Fleetwood said
lightly, not ungenially; for the features he looked on were museful, a
picture in their one expression.

Her answer chilled him. 'It is true, my lord. I will not detain you. I
would beg to be supplied with money.'

He was like the leaves of a frosted plant, in his crisp curling
inward:--he had been so genial.

'You have come to say good-bye, that an opportunity to--as you put
it--beg for money. I am not sure of your having learnt yet the right
disposal of money.'

'I beg, my lord, to have two thousand pounds a year allowed me.'

'Ten--and it's a task to spend the sum on a single household--shall be
alloted to your expenditure at Esslemont;--stables, bills, et caetera.
You can entertain. My steward Leddings will undertake the management. You
will not be troubled with payings.'

Her head acknowledged the graciousness.--'I would have two thousand
pounds and live where I please.'

'Pardon me: the two, for a lady living where she pleases, exceeds the
required amount.'

'I will accept a smaller sum, my lord.'

'Money!-it seems a singular demand when all supplies are furnished.'

'I would have control of some money.'

'You are thinking of charities.'

'Not charities.'

'Edwards here has a provision for the hospital needs of the people. Mr.
Woodseer applies to me in cases he can certify. Leddings will do the same
at Esslemont.'

'I am glad, I am thankful. The money I would have is for my own use. It
is for me.'

'Ah. Scarcely that, I fancy.'

The remark should have struck home. He had a thirst for the sign of her
confessing to it. He looked. Something like a petrifaction of her wildest
face was shown.

Carinthia's eyes were hard out on a scattered knot of children down the
street.

She gathered up her skirts. Without a word to him, she ran, and running
shouted to the little ones around and ahead: 'In! in! indoors, children!
"Blant, i'r ty!" Mothers, mothers, ho! get them in. See the dog! "Ci!
Ci!" In with them! "Blant, i'r ty! Vr ty!"'

A big black mongrel appeared worrying at one of two petticoated urchins
on the ground.

She scurried her swiftest, with such warning Welsh as she had on the top
of her mountain cry; and doors flew wide, there was a bang of doors when
she darted by: first gust of terrible heavens that she seemed to the
cottagers.

Other shouts behind her rent the air, gathering to a roar, from the
breasts of men and women. 'Mad dog about' had been for days the rumour,
crossing the hills over the line of village, hamlet, farm, from Cardiff
port.

Dead hush succeeded the burst. Men and women stood off. The brute was at
the lady.

Her arms were straight above her head; her figure overhanging, on a bend
of the knees. Right and left, the fury of the slavering fangs shook her
loose droop of gown; and a dull, prolonged growl, like the clamour of a
far body of insurrectionary marching men, told of the rage.

Fleetwood hovered helpless as a leaf on a bough.

'Back--', I pray,' she said to him, and motioned it, her arms at high
stretch.

He held no weapon. The sweat of his forehead half blinded him. And she
waved him behind her, beckoned to the crowd to keep wide way, used her
lifted hands as flappers; she had all her wits. There was not a wrinkle
of a grimace. Nothing but her locked lips betrayed her vision of imminent
doom. The shaking of her gown and the snarl in the undergrowl sounded
insatiate.

The brute dropped hold. With a weariful jog of the head, it pursued its
course at an awful even swinging pace: Death's own, Death's doer, his
reaper,--he, the very Death of the Terrors.

Carinthia's cry rang for clear way to be kept on either side, and that
accursed went the path through a sharp-edged mob, as it poured pell-mell
and shrank back, closing for the chase to rear of it.

'Father taught me,' she said to the earl, not more discomposed than if
she had taken a jump.

'It's over!' he groaned, savagely white, and bellowed for guns, any
weapons. 'Your father? pray?' She was entreated to speak.

'Yes, it must be shot; it will be merciful to kill it,' she said. 'They
have carried the child indoors. The others are safe. Mr. Woodseer, run to
my nurse-girl, Martha. He goes,' she murmured, and resumed to the earl:
'Father told me women have a better chance than men with a biting dog. He
put me before him and drilled me. He thought of everything. Usually the
poor beast snaps--one angry bite, not more. My dress teased it.'

Fleetwood grinned civilly in his excitement; intending to yield patient
hearing, to be interested by any mortal thing she might choose to say.

She was advised by recollection to let her father rest.

'No, dear girl, not hurt, no scratch,--only my gown torn,' she said to
Madge; and Madge heaved and whimpered, and stooped to pin the frayed
strips. 'Quite safe; you see it is easy for women to escape, Mr.
Edwards.'

Carinthia's voice hummed over the girl's head

'Father made me practise it, in case. He forethought. Madge, you heard of
this dog. I told you how to act. I was not feverish. Our babe will not
feel it.'

She bade Madge open her hands. 'A scratch would kill. Never mind the
tearings; I will hold my dress. Oh! there is that one child bitten. Mr.
Edwards, mount a man for the doctor. I will go in to the child. He was
bitten. Lose not one minute, Mr. Edwards. I see you go.'

He bowed and hastened.

The child's mother was red eyes at her door for ease of her heart to the
lady. Carinthia stepped into the room, where the little creature was
fetching sobs after the spout of screams.

'God in heaven! she can't be going to suck the bite?' Fleetwood cried to
Madge, whose answer was disquieting 'If it's to save life, my mistress
won't stop at anything.'

His heart sprang with a lighted comprehension of Gower Woodseer's
meaning. This girl's fervour opened portals to new views of her mistress,
or opened eyes.




CHAPTER XXXIII

A FRIGHTFUL DEBATE

Pushing through a swarm into the cot, Fleetwood saw Carinthia on a knee
beside a girl's lap, where the stripped child lay. Its mother held a
basin for the dabbing at raw red spots.

A sting of pain touched the memory of its fright, and brought further
screams, then the sobs. Carinthia hummed a Styrian cradle-song as the
wailing lulled.

She glanced up; she said to the earl: 'The bite was deep; it was in the
blood. We may have time. Get me an interpreter. I must ask the mother. I
know not many words.'

'What now?' said he, at the looming of new vexations.

'We have no choice. Has a man gone? Dr. Griffiths would hurry fast. An
hour may be too late. The poison travels: Father advised it:--Fifty years
for one brave minute! This child should be helped to live.'

'We 'll do our best. Why an interpreter?'

'A poker in the fire. The interpreter--whether the mother will bear to
have it done.'

'Burn, do you mean?'

'It should be burnt.'

'Not by you?'

'Quick! Quick!'

'But will you--could you? No, I say!'

'If there is no one else.'

'You forget your own child.'

'He is near the end of his mother.'

'The doctor will soon arrive.'

'The poison travels. It cannot be overtaken unless we start nearly equal,
father said.'

'Work like that wants an experienced hand.'

'A steady one. I would not quake--not tremble.'

'I cannot permit it.'

'Mr. Wythan would know!--he would know!

'Do you hear, Lady Fleetwood--the dog may not be mad!'

'Signs! He ran heavy, he foamed.'

'Foam 's no sign.'

'Go; order to me a speaker of English and Welsh.'

The earl spun round, sensible of the novelty of his being commanded, and
submitting; but no sooner had he turned than he fell into her view of the
urgency, and he went, much like the boy we see at school, with a strong
hand on his collar running him in.

Madge entered, and said: 'Mr. Woodseer has seen baby and Martha and the
donkey all safe.'

'He is kind,' said Carinthia. 'Do we right to bathe the wound? It seems
right to wash it. Little things that seem right may be exactly wrong
after all, when we are ignorant. I know burning the wound is right.'

Madge asked: 'But, my lady, who is to do it?'

'You would do it, dear, if I shrank,' her mistress replied.

'Oh, my lady, I don't know, I can't say. Burning a child! And there's our
baby.'

'He has had me nearly his time.'

'Oh, my dear lady! Would the mother consent?'

'My Madge! I have so few of their words yet. You would hold the child to
save it from a dreadful end.'

'God help me, my lady--I would, as long as I live I will . . . . Oh! poor
infant, we do need our courage now.'

Seeing that her mistress had not a tear or a tremor, the girl blinked and
schooled her quailing heart, still under the wicked hope that the mother
would not consent; in a wonderment at this lady, who was womanly, and who
could hold the red iron at living flesh, to save the poor infant from a
dreadful end. Her flow of love to this dear lady felt the slicing of a
cut; was half revulsion, half worship; uttermost worship in estrangement,
with the further throbbing of her pulses.

The cottage door was pushed open for Lord Fleetwood and Howell Edwards,
whom his master had prepared to stand against immediate operations. A
mounted messenger had been despatched. But it was true, the doctor might
not be at home. Assuming it to be a bite of rabies, minutes lost meant
the terrible: Edwards bowed his head to that. On the other hand, he
foresaw the closest of personal reasons for hesitating to be in agreement
with the lady wholly. The countess was not so much a persuasive lady as
she was, in her breath and gaze, a sweeping and a wafting power. After a
short argument, he had the sense of hanging like a bank detached to
fatality of motion by the crack of a landslip, and that he would speedily
be on his manhood to volunteer for the terrible work.

He addressed the mother. Her eyes whitened from their red at his first
word of laying hot iron on the child: she ran out with the wild woman's
howl to her neighbours.

'Poor mother!' Carinthia sighed. 'It may last a year in the child's body,
and one day he shudders at water. Father saw a bitten man die. I could
fear death with the thought of that poison in me. I pray Dr. Griffiths
may come.'

Fleetwood shuffled a step. 'He will come, he will come.'

The mother and some women now packed the room.

A gabble arose between them and Edwards. They fired sharp snatches of
speech, and they darted looks at the lady and her lord.

'They do not know!' said Carinthia.

Gower brought her news that the dog had been killed; Martha and her
precious burden were outside, a mob of men, too. He was not alarmed; but
she went to the door and took her babe in her arms, and when the women
observed the lady holding her own little one, their looks were softened.
At a hint of explanation from Edwards, the guttural gabble rattled up to
the shrill vowels.

Fleetwood's endurance broke short. The packed small room, the
caged-monkey lingo, the wailful child, and the past and apprehended
debate upon the burning of flesh, composed an intolerable torture. He
said to Edwards: 'Go to the men; settle it with them. We have to follow
that man Wythan; no peace otherwise. Tell the men the body of the dog
must be secured for analysis. Mad or not, it's the same. These Welsh
mothers and grandmothers won't allow cautery at any price. Hark at them!'

He turned to Carinthia: 'Your ladyship will let Mr. Edwards or Mr.
Woodseer conduct you to the house where you are residing. You don't know
these excitable people. I wish you to leave.'

She replied softly: 'I stay for the doctor's coming.'

'Impossible for me to wait, and I can't permit you to be here.'

'It is life and death, and I must not be commanded.'

'You may be proposing gratuitous agony.'

'I would do it to my own child.'

The earl attacked Gower: 'Add your voice to persuade Lady Fleetwood.'

Gower said: 'What if I think with Lady Fleetwood?'

'You would see her do it?'

'Do it myself, if there was no one else'

'This dog-all of you have gone mad,' the earl cried.

'Griffiths may keep his head; it's the only chance. Take my word, these
Welshwomen just listen to them won't have it. You 'll find yourself in a
nest of Furies. It may be right to do, it's folly to propose it, madness
to attempt it. And I shall be bitten if I stop here a minute longer; I'm
gone; I can neither command nor influence. I should have thought Gower
Woodseer would have kept his wits.'

Fleetwood's look fell on Madge amid the group. Gower's perception of her
mistress through the girl's devotion to her moved him. He took Madge by
the hand, and the sensation came that it was the next thing to pressing
his wife's. 'You're a loyal girl. You have a mistress it 's an honour to
serve. You bind me. By the way, Ines shall run down for a minute before I
go.'

'Let him stay where he is,'' Madge said, having bobbed her curtsey.

'Oh, if he's not to get a welcome!' said the earl; and he could now fix a
steadier look on his countess, who would have animated him with either a
hostile face or a tender. She had no expression of a feeling. He bent to
her formally.

Carinthia's words were: 'Adieu, my lord.'

'I have only to say, that Esslemont is ready to receive you,' he
remarked, bowed more curtly, and walked out. . .

Gower followed him. They might as well have been silent, for any effect
from what was uttered between them. They spoke opinions held by each of
them--adverse mainly; speaking for no other purpose than to hold their
positions.

'Oh, she has courage, no doubt; no one doubted it,' Fleetwood said, out
of all relation to the foregoing.

Courage to grapple with his pride and open his heart was wanting in him.

Had that been done, even to the hint of it, instead of the lordly
indifference shown, Gower might have ventured on a suggestion, that the
priceless woman he could call wife was fast slipping away from him and
withering in her allegiance. He did allude to his personal sentiment.
'One takes aim at Philosophy; Lady Fleetwood pulls us up to pay tribute
to our debts.' But this was vague, and his hearer needed a present
thunder and lightning to shake and pierce him.

'I pledged myself to that yacht,' said Fleetwood, by way of reply, 'or
you and I would tramp it, as we did once-jolly old days! I shall have you
in mind. Now turn back. Do the best you can.'

They parted midway up the street, Gower bearing away a sharp contrast of
the earl and his countess; for, until their senses are dulled,
impressionable young men, however precociously philosophical, are
mastered by appearances; and they have to reflect under new lights before
vision of the linked eye and mind is given them.

Fleetwood jumped into his carriage and ordered the coachman to drive
smartly. He could not have admitted the feeling small; he felt the having
been diminished, and his requiring a rapid transportation from these
parts for him to regain his proper stature. Had he misconducted himself
at the moment of danger? It is a ghastly thought, that the craven impulse
may overcome us. But no, he could reassure his repute for manliness. He
had done as much as a man could do in such a situation.

At the same time, he had done less than the woman.

Needed she to have gone so far? Why precipitate herself into the jaws of
the beast?

Now she, proposes to burn the child's wound. And she will do it if they
let her. One, sees her at the work,--pale, flinty; no faces; trebly the
terrific woman in her mild way of doing the work. All because her old
father recommended it. Because she thinks it a duty, we will say; that is
juster. This young woman is a very sword in the hand of her idea of duty.
She can be feminine, too,--there is one who knows. She can be
particularly distant, too. If in timidity, she has a modest view of
herself--or an enormous conception of the magi that married her. Will she
take the world's polish a little?

Fleetwood asked with the simplicity of the superior being who will
consequently perhaps bestow the debt he owes. . .

But his was not the surface nature which can put a question of the sort
and pass it. As soon as it had been formed, a vision of the elemental
creature calling him husband smote to shivers the shell we walk on, and
caught him down among the lower forces, up amid the higher; an infernal
and a celestial contest for the extinction of the one or the other of
them, if it was not for their union. She wrestled with him where the
darknesses roll their snake-eyed torrents over between jagged horns of
the netherworld. She stood him in the white ray of the primal vital heat,
to bear unwithering beside her the test of light. They flew, they chased,
battled, embraced, disjoined, adventured apart, brought back the count of
their deeds, compared them,--and name the one crushed! It was the one
weighted to shame, thrust into the cellar-corner of his own disgust, by
his having asked whether that starry warrior spirit in the woman's frame
would 'take polish a little.'

Why should it be a contention between them? For this reason: he was
reduced to admire her act; and if he admired, he could not admire without
respecting; if he respected, perforce he reverenced; if he reverenced, he
worshipped. Therefore she had him at her feet. At the feet of any woman,
except for the trifling object! But at the feet of 'It is my husband!'
That would be a reversal of things.

Are not things reversed when the name Carinthia sounds in the thought of
him who laughed at the name not less angelically martial than Feltre's
adored silver trumpets of his Papal procession; sweeter of the new
morning for the husband of the woman; if he will but consent to the
worshipper's posture? Yes, and when Gower Woodseer's 'Malady of the
Wealthy,' as he terms the pivotting of the whole marching and wheeling
world upon the favoured of Fortune's habits and tastes, promises to quit
its fell clutch on him?

Another voice in the young nobleman cried: Pooh, dolt and dupe! and
surrounded her for half a league with reek of burnt flesh and shrieks of
a tortured child; giving her the aspect of a sister of the Parcw. But it
was not the ascendant' voice. It growled underneath, much like the deadly
beast at Carinthia's gown while she stood:--an image of her to dominate
the princeliest of men.

The princeliest must have won his title to the place before he can yield
other than complimentary station to a woman without violation of his
dignity; and vast wealth is not the title; worldly honours are not; deeds
only are the title. Fleetwood consented to tell himself that he had not
yet performed the deeds.

Therefore, for him to be dominated was to be obscured, eclipsed. A man
may outrun us; it is the fortune of war. Eclipsed behind the skirts of a
woman waving her upraised hands, with, 'Back, pray!'--no, that ignominy
is too horribly abominable! Be sure, the situation will certainly recur
in some form; will constantly recur. She will usurp the lead; she will
play the man.

Let matters go on as they are. We know our personal worth.

Arrived at this point in the perpetual round of the conflict Carinthia
had implanted, Fleetwood entered anew the ranks of the ordinary men of
wealth and a coronet, and he hugged himself. He enjoyed repose; knowing
it might be but a truce. Matters might go on as they were. Still, he
wished her away from those Wythans, residing at Esslemont. There she
might come eventually to a better knowledge of his personal worth:--'the
gold mine we carry in our bosoms till it is threshed out of us in sweat,'
that fellow Gower Woodseex says; adding, that we are the richer for not
exploring it. Philosophical cynicism is inconclusive. Fleetwood knew his
large capacities; he had proved them and could again. In case a certain
half foreseen calamity should happen:--imagine it a fact, imagine him
seized, besides admiring her character, with a taste for her person! Why,
then, he would have to impress his own mysteriously deep character on her
portion of understanding. The battle for domination would then begin.

Anticipation of the possibility of it hewed division between the young
man's pride of being and his warmer feelings. Had he been free of the
dread of subjection, he would have sunk to kiss the feet of the
statuesque young woman, arms in air, firm-fronted over the hideous death
that tore at her skirts.




CHAPTER XXXIV

A SURVEY OF THE RIDE OF THE WELSH CAVALIERS ESCORTING THE COUNTESS OF
FLEETWOOD TO KENTISH ESSLEMONT

A formal notification from the earl, addressed to the Countess of
Fleetwood in the third person, that Esslemont stood ready to receive her,
autocratically concealed her lord's impatience to have her there; and by
the careful precision with which the stages of her journey were marked,
as places where the servants despatched to convey their lady would find
preparations for her comfort, again alarmed the disordered mother's mind
on behalf of the child she deemed an object of the father's hatred,
second to his hatred of the mother. But the mother could defend herself,
the child was prey the child of a detested wife was heir to his title
and estates. His look at the child, his hasty one look down at her
innocent, was conjured before her as resembling a kick at a stone in his
path. His indifference to the child's Christian names pointed darkly over
its future.

The distempered wilfulness of a bruised young woman directed her
thoughts. She spoke them in the tone of reason to her invalid friend
Rebecca Wythan, who saw with her, felt with her, yearned to retain her
till breath was gone. Owain Wythan had his doubts of the tyrant guilty of
maltreating this woman of women. 'But when you do leave Wales,' he said,
'you shall be guarded up to your haven.'

Carinthia was not awake to his meaning then. She sent a short letter of
reply, imitating the style of her lord; very baldly stating, that she was
unable to leave Wales because of her friend's illness and her part as
nurse. Regrets were unmentioned.

Meanwhile Rebecca Wythan was passing to death. Not cheerlessly, more and
more faintly, her thread of life ran to pause, resembling a rill of the
drought; and the thinner-it grew, the shrewder were her murmurs for
Carinthia's ears in commending 'the most real of husbands of an unreal
wife' to her friendly care of him when he would no longer see the shadow
he had wedded. She had the privilege of a soul beyond our minor rules and
restrainings to speak her wishes to the true wife of a mock husband-no
husband; less a husband than this shadow of a woman a wife, she said; and
spoke them without adjuring the bowed head beside her to record a promise
or seem to show the far willingness, but merely that the wishes should be
heard on earth in her last breath, for a good man's remaining one chance
of happiness. On the theme touching her husband Owain, it was verily to
hear a soul speak, and have knowledge of the broader range, the rich
interflowings of the tuned discords, a spirit past the flesh can find.
Her mind was at the same time alive to our worldly conventions when other
people came under its light; she sketched them and their views in her
brief words between the gasps, with perspicuous, humorous bluntness, as
vividly as her twitched eyebrows indicated the laugh. Gower Woodseer she
read startlingly, if correctly.

Carinthia could not leave her. Attendance upon this dying woman was a
drinking at the springs of life.

Rebecca Wythan under earth, the earl was briefly informed of Lady
Fleetwood's consent to quit Wales, obedient to a summons two months
old,--and that she would be properly escorted; for the which her lord had
made provision. Consequently the tyrant swallowed his wrath, little
conceiving the monstrous blow she was about to strike.

In peril of fresh floods from our Dame, who should be satisfied with the
inspiring of these pages, it is owned that her story of 'the four and
twenty squires of Glamorgan and Caermarthen in their brass-buttoned green
coats and buckskins, mounted and armed, an escort of the Countess of
Fleetwood across the swollen Severn, along midwinter roads, up to the
Kentish gates of Esslemont,' has a foundation, though the story is not
the more credible for her flourish of documentary old ballad-sheets,
printed when London's wags had ears on cock to any whisper of the doings.
of their favourite Whitechapel Countess; and indeed hardly depended on
whispers.

Enthusiasm sufficient to troop forth four and twenty and more hundreds of
Cambrian gentlemen, and still more of the common folk, as far as they
could journey afoot, was over the two halves of the Principality, to give
the countess a reputable and gallant body-guard. London had intimations
of kindling circumstances concerning her, and magnified them in the
interests of the national humour: which is the English way of exalting to
criticize, criticizing to depreciate, and depreciating to restore,
ultimately to cherish, in reward for the amusement furnished by an
eccentric person, not devoid of merit.

These little tales of her, pricking cool blood to some activity, were
furze-fires among the Welsh. But where the latter heard Bardic strings
inviting a chorus, the former as unanimously obeyed the stroke of their
humorous conductor's baton for an outburst from the ribs or below. And it
was really funny to hear of Whitechapel's titled heroine roaming
Taffyland at her old pranks.

Catching a maddened bull by the horns in the marketplace, and hanging to
the infuriate beast, a wild whirl of clouts, till he is reduced to be a
subject for steaks, that is no common feat.

Her performances down mines were things of the underworld. England
clapped hands, merely objecting to her not having changed her garb for
the picador's or matador's, before she seized the bull. Wales adopted and
was proud of her in any costume. Welshmen North and South, united for the
nonce, now propose her gallantry as a theme to the rival Bards at the
next Eisteddfod. She is to sit throned in full assembly, oak leaves and
mistletoe interwoven on her head, a white robe and green sash to clothe
her, and the vanquished beast's horns on a gilded pole behind the dais;
hearing the eulogies respectively interpreted to her by Colonel Fluellen
Wythan at one ear, and Captain Agincourt Gower at the other. A splendid
scene; she might well insist to be present.

There, however, we are at the pitch of burlesque beyond her illustrious
lord's capacity to stand. Peremptory orders from England arrive,
commanding her return. She temporizes, postpones, and supplicates to have
the period extended up to the close of the Eisteddfod. My lord's orders
are imperatively repeated, and very blunt. He will not have her 'continue
playing the fool down there.' She holds her ground from August into
February, and then sets forth, to undergo the further process of her
taming at Esslemont in England; with Llewellyn and Vaughan and
Cadwallader, and Watkyn and Shenkyn and the remains of the race of Owen
Tudor, attending her; vowed to extract a receipt from the earl her lord's
responsible servitors for the safe delivery of their heroine's person at
the gates of Esslemont; ich dien their trumpeted motto.

Counting the number at four and twenty, it wears the look of an invasion.
But the said number is a ballad number, and has been since the antique
time. There was, at a lesser number, enough of a challenge about it for
squires of England, never in those days backward to pick up a glove or
give the ringing rejoinder for a thumb-bite, to ride out and tilt
compliments with the Whitechapel Countess's green cavaliers, rally their
sprites and entertain them exactly according to their degrees of dignity,
as exhibited by their 'haviour under something of a trial; and satisfy
also such temporary appetites as might be excited in them by (among other
matters left to the luck of events) a metropolitan play upon the Saxon
tongue, hard of understanding to the leeky cocks until their ready store
of native pepper seasons it; which may require a corresponding English
condiment to rectify the flavour of the stew.

Now the number of Saxe-Normans riding out to meet and greet the Welshmen
is declared to have not exceeded nine. So much pretends to be historic,
in opposition to the poetic version. They would, we may be sure, have
made it a point of honour to meet and greet their invading guests in
precisely similar numbers a larger would have overshot the mark of
courtesy; and doubtless a smaller have fallen deplorably short of it.
Therefore, an acquaintance with her chivalrous, if less impulsive,
countrymen compels to the dismissing of the Dame's ballad authorities.
She has every right to quote them for her own good pleasure, and may
create in others an enjoyment of what has been called 'the Mackrell fry.'

Her notion of a ballad is, that it grows like mushrooms from a scuffle of
feet on grass overnight, and is a sort of forest mother of the pied
infant reared and trimmed by historians to show the world its fatherly
antecedent steps. The hand of Rose Mackrell is at least suggested in more
than one of the ballads. Here the Welsh irruption is a Chevy Chase; next
we have the countess for a disputed Helen.

The lady's lord is not a shining figure. How can an undecided one be a
dispenser of light? Poetry could never allow him to say with her:

          'Where'er I go I make a name,
          And leave a song to follow.'

Yet he was the master of her fortunes at the time; all the material power
was his. Even doggerel verse (it is worth while to brood on the fact)
denies a surviving pre-eminence to the potent moody, reverses the
position between the driven and the driver. Poetry, however erratic, is
less a servant of the bully Present, or pomlious Past, than History. The
Muse of History has neither the same divination of the intrinsic nor the
devotion to it, though truly, she has possession of all the positive
matter and holds us faster by the crediting senses.

Nine English cavaliers, then, left London early on a January or February
morning in a Southerly direction, bearing East; and they were the Earl of
Fleetwood's intimates, of the half-dependent order; so we may suppose
them to have gone at his bidding. That they met the procession of the
Welsh, and claimed to take charge of the countess's carriage, near the
Kentish border-line, is an assertion supported by testimony fairly
acceptable.

Intelligence of the advancing party had reached the earl by courier, from
the date of the first gathering on the bridge of Pont-y-pridd; and from
Gloucester, along to the Thames at Reading; thence away to the Mole, from
Mickleham, where the Surrey chalk runs its final turfy spine
North-eastward to the slope upon Kentish soil.

Greatly to the astonishment of the Welsh cavaliers, a mounted footman,
clad in the green and scarlet facings of Lord Fleetwood's livery, rode up
to them a mile outside the principal towns and named the inn where the
earl had ordered preparations for the reception of them. England's
hospitality was offered on a princely scale. Cleverer fencing could not
be.

The meeting, in no sense an encounter, occurred close by a thirty-acre
meadow, famous over the county; and was remarkable for the punctilious
exchange of ceremonial speech, danger being present; as we see
powder-magazines protected by their walls and fosses and covered alleys.
Notwithstanding which, there was a scintillation of sparks.

Lord Brailstone, spokesman of the welcoming party, expressed comic
regrets that they had not an interpreter with them.

Mr. Owain Wythan, in the name of the Cambrian chivalry, assured him of
their comprehension and appreciation of English slang.

Both gentlemen kept their heads uncovered in a suspense; they might for a
word or two more of that savour have turned into the conveniently
spacious meadow. They were induced, on the contrary, to enter the channel
of English humour, by hearing Chumley Potts exclaim: 'His nob!' and all
of them laughed at the condensed description of a good hit back, at the
English party's cost.

Laughter, let it be but genuine, is of a common nationality, indeed a
common fireside; and profound disagreement is not easy after it. The Dame
professes to believe that 'Carinthia Jane' had to intervene as
peacemaker, before the united races took the table in Esslemont's
dining-hall for a memorable night of it, and a contest nearer the mark of
veracity than that shown in another of the ballads she would have us
follow. Whatever happened, they sat down at table together, and the point
of honour for them each and every was, not to be first to rise from it.
Once more the pure Briton and the mixed if not fused English engaged,
Bacchus for instrument this time, Bacchus for arbiter of the fray.

You may imagine! says the Dame. She cites the old butler at Esslemont,
'as having been much questioned on the subject by her family relative,
Dr. Glossop, and others interested to know the smallest items of the
facts,'--and he is her authority for the declaration that the Welsh
gentlemen and the English gentlemen, 'whatever their united number,'
consumed the number of nine dozen and a half of old Esslemont wine before
they rose, or as possibly sank, at the festive board at the hour of five
of the morning.

Years later, this butler, Joshua Queeney, 'a much enfeebled old man,'
retold and enlarged the tale of the enormous consumption of his best
wine; with a sacred oath to confirm it, and a tear expressive of
elegiacal feelings.

'They bled me twelve dozen, not a bottle less,' she quotes him, after a
minute description of his countenance and scrupulously brushed black
suit, pensioner though he had become. He had grown, during the interval,
to be more communicative as to particulars. The wines were four. Sherry
led off the parade pace, Hock the trot into the merry canter, Champagne
the racing gallop, Burgundy the grand trial of constitutional endurance
for the enforced finish. All these wines, except the sparkling, had their
date of birth in the precedent century. 'They went like water.'

Questioned anxiously by Dr. Glossop, Queeney maintained an impartial
attitude, and said there was no victor, no vanquished. They did not sit
in blocks. The tactics for preserving peace intermingled them. Each
English gentleman had a Welsh gentleman beside him; they both sat firm;
both fell together. The bottles or decanters were not stationary for the
guest to fill his glass, they circulated, returning to an empty glass.
All drank equally. Often the voices were high, the talk was loud. The
gentlemen were too serious to sing.

At one moment of the evening Queeney confidently anticipated a
'fracassy,' he said. One of the foreign party--and they all spoke
English, after five dozen bottles had gone the round, as correct as the
English themselves--remarked on the seventy-years Old Brown Sherry, that
'it had a Madeira flavour.' He spoke it approvingly. Thereupon Lord Simon
Pitscrew calls to Queeney, asking him 'why Madeira had been supplied
instead of Esslemont's renowned old Sherry?' A second Welsh gentleman
gave his assurances that his friend had not said it was Madeira. But Lord
Brailstone accused them of the worse unkindness to a venerable Old Brown
Sherry, in attributing a Madeira flavour to it. Then another Welsh
gentleman briskly and emphatically stated his opinion, that the
attribution of Madeira flavour to it was a compliment. At this, which
smelt strongly, he said, of insult, Captain Abrane called on the name of
their absent host to warrant the demand of an apology to the Old Brown
Sherry, for the imputation denying it an individual distinction. Chumley
Potts offered generally to bet that he would distinguish blindfold at a
single sip any Madeira from any first-class Sherry, Old Brown or Pale.
'Single sip or smell!' Ambrose Mallard cried, either for himself or his
comrade, Queeney could not say which.

Of all Lord Fleetwood's following, Mr. Potts and Mr. Mallard were, the
Dame informs us, Queeney's favourites, because they were so genial; and
he remembered most of what they said and did, being moved to it by 'poor
young Mr. Mallard's melancholy end and Mr. Potts's grief!'

The Welsh gentlemen, after paying their devoirs to the countess next
morning, rode on in fresh health and spirits at mid-day to Barlings, the
seat of Mr. Mason Fennell, a friend of Mr. Owain Wythan's. They shouted,
in an unseemly way, Queeney thought, at their breakfast-table, to hear
that three of the English party, namely, Captain Abrane, Mr. Mallard, and
Mr. Potts, had rung for tea and toast in bed. Lord Simon Pitscrew, Lord
Brailstone, and the rest of the English were sore about it; for it
certainly wore a look of constitutional inferiority on the English side,
which could boast of indubitably stouter muscles. The frenzied spirits of
the Welsh gentlemen, when riding off, let it be known what their opinion
was. Under the protection of the countess's presence, they were so cheery
as to seem triumphantly ironical; they sent messages of condolence to the
three in bed.

With an undisguised reluctance, the countess, holding Mr. Owain Wythan's
hand longer than was publicly decent, calling him by his Christian name,
consented to their departure. As they left, they defiled before her; the
vow was uttered by each, that at the instant of her summons he would
mount and devote himself to her service, individually or collectively.
She waved her hand to them. They ranged in line and saluted. She kissed
her hand. Sweeping the cavaliers' obeisance, gallantest of bows, they
rode away.

A striking scene, Dame Gossip says; but raises a wind over the clipped
adventure, and is for recounting what London believed about it. Enough
has been conceded for the stoppage of her intrusion; she is left in the
likeness of a full-charged pistol capless to the clapping trigger.

That which London believed, or affected to believe about it, would fill
chapters. There was during many months an impression of Lord Fleetwood's
countess as of a tenacious, dread, prevailing young woman, both intrepid
and astute, who had, by an exercise of various arts, legitimate in open
war of husband and wife, gathered the pick of the Principality to storm
and carry another of her husband's houses. The certification that her
cavaliers were Welsh gentlemen of wealth and position required a broader
sneer at the Welsh than was warranted by later and more intimate
acquaintance, if it could be made to redound to her discredit. So,
therefore, added to the national liking for a plucky woman, she gained
the respect for power. Whitechapel was round her like London's one
street's length extension of smoky haze, reminder of the morning's fog
under novel sunbeams.

Simultaneously, strange to say, her connubial antagonist, far from being
overshadowed, grew to be proportionately respected, and on the strength
of his deserts, apart from his title and his wealth. He defended himself,
as he was bound to do, by welcoming the picked Welsh squires with
hospitable embrace, providing ceremonies, receptions, and most
comfortable arrangements for them, along the route. But in thus gravely
entering into the knightly burlesque of the procession, and assisting to
swell the same, he not only drew the venom from it, he stood forth as
England's deputed representative, equal to her invasive challengeing
guests at all points, comic, tragic, or cordial. He saw that it had to be
treated as a national affair; and he parried the imputation which would
have injured his country's name for courtly breeding, had they been
ill-received, while he rescued his own good name from derision by joining
the extravagance.

He was well inspired. It was popularly felt to be the supreme of
clever-nay, noble-fencing. Really noble, though the cleverness was
conspicuous. A defensive stroke, protecting him against his fair one's
violent charge of horse, warded off an implied attack upon Old England,
in Old England's best-humoured easy manner.

Supposing the earl to have acted otherwise, his countess would virtually
have ridden over him, and wild Wales have cast a shadow on the chivalry
of magisterial England. He and his country stood to meet the issue
together the moment the Countess of Fleetwood and her escort crossed the
Welsh border; when it became a question between the hot-hearted, at their
impetuous gallop, and the sedatively minded, in an unfortified camp of
arm-chairs. The earl's adroitness, averting a collision fatal or
discomforting to both, disengaged him from an incumbent odium, of which,
it need hardly be stated, neither the lady nor her attendant cavaliers
had any notion at the hour of the assembly for the start for England on
the bridge of Pont-y-pridd. The hungry mother had the safety of her babe
in thought. The hotheaded Welshmen were sworn to guard their heroine.

That is the case presented by the Dame's papers, when the incredible is
excised. She claims the being a good friend to fiction in feeding popular
voracity with all her stores. But the Old Buccaneer, no professed friend
to it, is a sounder guide in the maxim, where he says: Deliver yourself
by permit of your cheque on the 'Bank of Reason, and your account is
increased instead of lessened.

Our account with credulity, he would signify.

The Dame does not like the shaking for a sifting. Romance, however, is
not a mountain made of gold, but a vein running some way through; and it
must be engineered, else either we are filled with wind from swallowing
indigestible substance, or we consent to a debasing of the currency,
which means her to-morrow's bankruptcy; and the spectacle of Romance in
the bankruptcy court degrades us (who believe we are allied to her) as
cruelly as it appals. It gives the cynic licence to bark day and night
for an entire generation.

Surely the Countess of Fleetwood's drive from the Welsh borders to
Esslemont, accompanied by the chosen of the land, followed by the vivats
of the whole Principality, and England gaping to hear the stages of her
progress, may be held sufficiently romantic without stuffing of surprises
and conflicts, adventures at inns, alarms at midnight, windings of a horn
over hilly verges of black heaths, and the rape of the child, the
pursuit, the recovery of the child, after a new set of heroine
performances on the part of a strung-wire mother, whose outcry in a waste
country district, as she clasps her boy to her bosom again: 'There's a
farm I see for milk for him!' the Dame repeats, having begun with an
admission that the tale has been contradicted, and is not produced on
authority. The end in design is to win the ear by making a fuss, and roll
event upon event for the braining of common intelligence, until her
narrative resembles dusty troopings along a road to the races.

Carinthia and her babe reached Esslemont, no matter what impediments.
There, like a stopped runner whose pantings lengthen to the longer
breath, her alarms over the infant subsided, ceasing for as long as she
clasped it or was in the room with it. Walking behind the precious
donkey-basket round the park, she went armed, and she soon won a fearful
name at Kentish cottage-hearths, though she 'was not black to see, nor
old. No, she was very young. But she did all the things that soldiers
do,--was a bit of a foreigner;--she brought a reputation up from the
Welsh land, and it had a raven's croak and a glow-worm's drapery and a
goblin's origin.

Something was hinted of her having agitated London once. Somebody dropped
word of her and that old Lord Levellier up at Croridge. She stalked park
and country at night. Stories, one or two near the truth, were told of a
restless and a very decided lady down these parts as well; and the earl
her husband daren't come nigh in his dread of her, so that he runs as if
to save his life out of every place she enters. And he's not one to run
for a trifle. His pride is pretty well a match for princes and
princesses.

All the same, he shakes in his shoes before her, durst hardly spy at
Esslemont again while she's in occupation. His managing gentleman comes
down from him, and goes up from her; that's how they communicate. One
week she's quite solitary; another week the house is brimful as can be.
She 's the great lady entertaining then. Yet they say it 's a fact, she
has not a shilling of her own to fling at a beggar. She 'll stock a
cottage wanting it with provision for a fortnight or more, and she'll
order the doctor in, and she'll call and see the right things done for
illness. 'But no money; no one's to expect money of her. The shots you
hear in Esslemont grounds out of season are she and her maid, always
alongside her, at it before a target on a bank, trying that old Lord
Levellier's gunpowder out of his mill; and he's got no money either; not
for his workmen, they say, until they congregate, and a threatening to
blow him up brings forth half their pay, on account. But he 's a known
miser. She's not that. She's a pleasant-faced lady for the poor. She has
the voice poor people like. It's only her enemy, maybe her husband, she
can be terrible to. She'd drive a hole through a robber stopping her on
the road, as soon as look at him.

This was Esslemont's atmosphere working its way to the earl, not so very
long after the establishment of his countess there. She could lay hold of
the English, too, it seemed. Did she call any gentleman of the district
by his Christian name? Lord Simon Pitscrew reported her doing so in the
case of one of the Welshmen. Those Welshmen! Apparently they are making a
push for importance in the kingdom!




CHAPTER XXXV

IN WHICH CERTAIN CHANGES MAY BE DISCERNED

Behind his white plaster of composure, Lord Fleetwood had alternately
raged and wondered during the passage of the Welsh cavalcade up Eastward:
a gigantic burlesque, that would have swept any husband of their heroine
off the scene had he failed to encounter it deferentially, preserving his
countenance and ostensibly his temper. An idiot of a woman, incurable in
her lunacy, suspects the father of the infant as guilty of designs done
to death in romances; and so she manages to set going solemnly a bigger
blazing Tom Fool's show than any known or written romance gives word of!
And that fellow, Gower Woodseer, pleads, in apology, for her husband's
confusion, physiologically, that it comes of her having been carried off
and kept a prisoner when she was bearing the child and knitting her whole
mind to ensure the child. But what sheer animals these women are, if they
take impressions in such a manner! And Mr. Philosopher argues that the
abusing of women proves the hating of Nature; names it 'the commonest
insanity, and the deadliest,' and men are 'planted in the bog of their
unclean animal condition until they do proper homage to the animal Nature
makes the woman be.' Oh, pish, sir!--as Meeson Corby had the habit of
exclaiming when Abrane's 'fiddler' argues him into a corner. The fellow
can fiddle fine things and occasionally clear sense:--'Men hating Nature
are insane. Women and Nature are close. If it is rather general to hate
Nature and maltreat women, we begin to see why the world is a mad world.'
That is the tune of the fiddler's fiddling. As for him, something
protects him. He was the slave of Countess Livia; like Abrane, Mallard,
Corby, St. Ombre, young Cressett, and the dozens. He is now her master.
Can a man like that be foolish, in saying of the Countess Carinthia, she
is 'not only quick to understand, she is in the quick of understanding'?
Gower Woodseer said it of her in Wales, and again on the day of his walk
up to London from Esslemont, after pedestrian exercise, which may heat
the frame, but cools the mind. She stamped that idea on a thoughtful
fellow.

He's a Welshman. They are all excitable,--have heads on hound's legs for
a flying figure in front. Still, they must have an object, definitely
seen by them--definite to them if dim to their neighbours; and it will
run in the poetic direction: and the woman to win them, win all classes
of them, within so short a term, is a toss above extraordinary. She is
named Carinthia--suitable name for the Welsh pantomimic procession. Or
cry out the word in an amphitheatre of Alpine crags,--it sounds at home.

She is a daughter of the mountains,--should never have left them. She is
also a daughter of the Old Buccaneer--no poor specimen of the fighting
Englishman of his day. According to Rose Mackrell, he, this Old
Buccaneer, it was, who, by strange adventures, brought the great Welsh
mines into the family! He would not be ashamed in spying through his
nautical glass, up or down, at his daughter's doings. She has not yet
developed a taste for the mother's tricks:--the mother, said to have been
a kindler. That Countess of Cressett was a romantic little fly-away bird.
Both parents were brave: the daughter would inherit gallantry. She
inherits a kind of thwarted beauty. Or it needs the situation seen in
Wales: her arms up and her unaffrighted eyes over the unappeasable growl.
She had then the beauty coming from the fathom depths, with the torch of
Life in the jaws of Death to light her: beauty of the nether kingdom
mounting to an upper place in the higher. Her beauty recognized, the name
of the man who married her is not Longears--not to himself, is the main
point; nor will it be to the world when he shows that it is not so to
himself.

Suppose he went to her, would she be trying at domination? The woman's
pitch above woman's beauty was perceived to be no intermittent beam, but
so living as to take the stamp of permanence. More than to say it was
hers, it was she. What a deadly peril brought into view was her
character-soul, some call it: generally a thing rather distasteful in
women, or chilling to the masculine temperament. Here it attracts. Here,
strange to say, it is the decided attraction, in a woman of a splendid
figure and a known softness. By rights, she should have more
understanding than to suspect the husband as guilty of designs done to
death in romances. However, she is not a craven who compliments him by
rearing him, and he might prove that there is no need for fear. But she
would be expecting explanations before the reconcilement. The bosom of
these women will keep on at its quick heaving until they have heard
certain formal words, oaths to boot. How speak them?

His old road of the ladder appeared to Fleetwood an excellent one for
obviating explanations and effecting the reconcilement without any
temporary seeming forfeit of the native male superiority. For there she
is at Esslemont now; any night the window could be scaled. 'It is my
husband.' The soul was in her voice when she said it.

He remembered that it had not ennobled her to him then; had not endeared;
was taken for a foreign example of the childish artless, imperfectly
suited to our English clime.' The tone of adorable utterances, however
much desired, is never for repetition; nor is the cast of divine sweet
looks; nor are the particular deeds-once pardonable, fitly pleaded. A
second scaling of her window--no, night's black hills girdle the scene
with hoarse echoes; the moon rushes out of her clouds grimacing. Even
Fleetwood's devil, much addicted to cape and sword and ladder, the
vulpine and the gryphine, rejected it.

For she had, by singular transformation since, and in spite of a deluging
grotesque that was antecedently incredible, she had become a personage,
counting her adherents; she could put half the world in motion on her
side. Yell those Welshmen to scorn, they were on a plane finding native
ground with as large a body of these English. His baser mind bowed to the
fact. Her aspect was entirely different; her attitude toward him as well:
insomuch that he had to chain her to her original features by the
conjuring of recollected phrases memorable for the vivid portraiture of
her foregone simplicity and her devotion to 'my husband.'

Yes, there she was at Essleinont, securely there, near him, to be seen
any day; worth claiming, too; a combatant figure, provocative of the
fight and the capture rather than repellent. The respect enforced by her
attitude awakened in him his inherited keen old relish for our
intersexual strife and the indubitable victory of the stronger, with the
prospect of slavish charms, fawning submission, marrowy spoil. Or
perhaps, preferably, a sullen submission, reluctant charms; far more
marrowy. Or who can say?--the creature is a rocket of the shot into the
fiery garland of stars; she may personate any new marvel, be an
unimagined terror, an overwhelming bewitchment: for she carries the
unexpected in her bosom. And does it look like such indubitable victory,
when the man, the woman's husband, divided from her, toothsome to the
sex, acknowledges within himself and lets the world know his utter
dislike of other women's charms, to the degree that herbal anchorites
positively could not be colder, could not be chaster: and he no forest
bird, but having the garden of the variety of fairest flowers at nod and
blush about him! That was the truth. Even Henrietta's beauty had the
effect of a princess's birthday doll admired on show by a contemptuous
boy.

Wherefore, then, did the devil in him seek to pervert this loveliest of
young women and feed on her humiliation for one flashing minute? The
taste had gone, the desire of the vengeance was extinct, personal
gratification could not exist. He spied into himself, and set it down to
one among the many mysteries.

Men uninstructed in analysis of motives arrive at this dangerous
conclusion, which spares their pride and caresses their indolence, while
it flatters the sense of internal vastness, and invites to headlong
intoxication. It allows them to think they are of such a compound, and
must necessarily act in that manner. They are not taught at the schools
or by the books of the honoured places in the libraries, to examine and
see the simplicity of these mysteries, which it would be here and there a
saving grace for them to see; as the minstrel, dutifully inclining to the
prosy in their behalf and morality's, should exhibit; he should arrest
all the characters of his drama to spring it to vision and strike
perchance the chord primarily if not continually moving them, that
readers might learn the why and how of a germ of evil, its flourishing
under rebuke, the persistency of it after the fell creative energy has
expired and pleasure sunk to be a phlegmatic dislike, almost a loathing.

This would here be done, but for signs of a barometric dead fall in Dame
Gossip's chaps, already heavily pendent. She would be off with us on one
of her whirling cyclones or elemental mad waltzes, if a step were taken
to the lecturing-desk. We are so far in her hands that we have to keep
her quiet. She will not hear of the reasons and the change of reasons for
one thing and the other. Things were so: narrate them, and let readers do
their reflections for themselves, she says, denouncing our conscientious
method as the direct road downward to the dreadful modern appeal to the
senses and assault on them for testimony to the veracity of everything
described; to the extent that, at the mention of a vile smell, it shall
be blown into the reader's nostrils, and corking-pins attack the
comfortable seat of him simultaneously with a development of surprises.
'Thither your conscientiousness leads.'

It is not perfectly visible. And she would gain information of the
singular nature of the young of the male sex in listening to the wrangle
between Lord Fleetwood and Gower Woodseer on the subject of pocket-money
for the needs of the Countess Carinthia. For it was a long and an angry
one, and it brought out both of them, exposing, of course, the more
complex creature the most. They were near a rupture, so scathing was
Gower's tone of irate professor to shirky scholar--or it might be put,
German professor to English scuffleshoe.

She is for the scene of 'Chillon John's' attempt to restore the
respiration of his bank-book by wager; to wit, that he would walk a mile,
run a mile, ride a mile, and jump ten hurdles, then score five
rifle-shots at a three hundred yards' distant target within a count of
minutes; twenty-five, she says; and vows it to have been one of the most
exciting of scenes ever witnessed on green turf in the land of wagers;
and that he was accomplishing it quite certainly when, at the first of
the hurdles, a treacherous unfolding and waving of a white flag caused
his horse to swerve and the loss of one minute, seven and twenty seconds,
before he cleared the hurdles; after which, he had to fire his shots
hurriedly, and the last counted blank, for being outside the circle of
the stated time.

So he was beaten. But a terrific uproar over the field proclaimed the
popular dissatisfaction. Presently there was a cleavage of the mob, and
behold a chase at the heels of the fellow to rival the very captain
himself for fleetness. He escaped, leaving his pole with the sheet nailed
to it, by way of flag, in proof of foul play; or a proof, as the other
side declared, of an innocently premature signalizing of the captain's
victory.

However that might be, he ran. Seeing him spin his legs at a hound's
pace, half a mile away, four countrymen attempted to stop him. All four
were laid on their backs in turn with stupefying celerity; and on rising
to their feet, and for the remainder of their natural lives, they swore
that no man but a Champion could have floored them so. This again may
have been due to the sturdy island pride of four good men knocked over by
one. We are unable to decide. Wickedness there was, the Dame says; and
she counsels the world to 'put and put together,' for, at any rate, 'a
partial elucidation of a most mysterious incident.' As to the
wager-money, the umpires dissented; a famous quarrel, that does not
concern us here, sprang out of the dispute; which was eventually, after
great disturbance 'of the country, referred to three leading sportsmen in
the metropolitan sphere, who pronounced the wager 'off,' being two to
one. Hence arose the dissatisfied third party, and the letters of this
minority to the newspapers, exciting, if not actually dividing, all
England for several months.

Now the month of December was the month of the Dame's mysterious
incident. From the date of January, as Madge Winch knew, Christopher Ines
had ceased to be in the service of the Earl of Fleetwood. At Esslemont
Park gates, one winter afternoon of a North-east wind blowing 'rum-shrub
into men for a stand against rheumatics,' as he remarked, Ines met the
girl by appointment, and informing her that he had money, and that Lord
Fleetwood was 'a black nobleman,' he proposed immediate marriage. The
hymeneal invitation, wafted to her on the breath of rum-shrub, obtained
no response from Madge until she had received evasive answers as to why
the earl dismissed him, and whence the stock of money came.

Lord Fleetwood, he repeated, was a black nobleman. She brought him to say
of his knowledge, that Lord Fleetwood hated, and had reason to hate,
Captain Levellier. 'Shouldn't I hate the man took my sweetheart from me
and popped me into the noose with his sister instead?' Madge was now
advised to be overcome by the smell of rum-shrub:--a mere fancy drink
tossed off by heroes in their idle moments, before they settle down to
the serious business of real drinking, Kit protested. He simulated
envious admiration of known heroes, who meant business, and scorned any
of the weak stuff under brandy, and went at it till the bottles were the
first to give in. For why? They had to stomach an injury from the world
or their young woman, and half-way on they shoved that young person and
all enemies aside, trampled 'em. That was what Old O'Devy signified; and
many's the man driven to his consolation by a cat of a girl, who's like
the elements in their puffs and spits at a gallant ship, that rides the
tighter and the tighter for all they can do to capsize. 'Tighter than
ever I was tight I'll be to-night, if you can't behave.'

They fell upon the smack of words. Kit hitched and huffed away,
threatening bottles. Whatever he had done, it was to establish the
petticoated hornet in the dignity of matron of a champion light-weight's
wholesome retreat of a public-house. A spell of his larkish hilarity was
for the punishment of the girl devoted to his heroical performances, as
he still considered her to be, though women are notoriously volatile, and
her language was mounting a stage above the kitchen.

Madge had little sorrow for him. She was the girl of the fiery heart, not
the large heart; she could never be devoted to more than one at a time,
and her mistress had all her heart. In relation to Kit, the thought of
her having sacrificed her good name to him, flung her on her pride of
chastity, without the reckoning of it as a merit. It was the inward
assurance of her independence: the young spinster's planting of the,
standard of her proud secret knowledge of what she is, let it be a thing
of worth or what you will, or the world think as it may. That was her
thought.

Her feeling, the much livelier animation, was bitter grief, because her
mistress, unlike herself, had been betrayed by her ignorance of the man
into calling him husband. Just some knowledge of the man! The warning to
the rescue might be there. For nothing did the dear lady weep except for
her brother's evil fortune. The day when she had intelligence from Mrs.
Levellier of her brother's defeat, she wept over the letter on her knees
long hours. 'Me, my child, my brother!' she cried more than once. She had
her suspicion of the earl then, and instantly, as her loving servant had.
The suspicion was now no dark light, but a clear day-beam to Madge. She
adopted Kit's word of Lord Fleetwood. 'A black nobleman he is! he is!'
Her mistress had written like a creature begging him for money. He did
not deign a reply. To her! When he had seen good proof she was the
bravest woman on earth; and she rushed at death to save a child, a common
child; as people say. And who knows but she saved that husband of hers,
too, from bites might have sent him out of the world barking, and all his
wealth not able to stop him!

They were in the month of March. Her dear mistress had been begging my
lord through Mr. Woodseer constantly of late for an allowance of money;
on her knees to him, as it seemed; and Mr. Woodseer was expected at
Esslemont. Her mistress was looking for him eagerly. Something her heart
was in depended on it, and only her brother could be the object, for now
she loved only him of these men; though a gentleman coming over from
Barlings pretty often would pour mines of money into her lap for half a
word.

Carinthia had walked up to Croridge in the morning to meet her brother at
Lekkatts. Madge was left guardian of the child. She liked a stroll any
day round Esslemont Park, where her mistress was beginning to strike
roots; as she soon did wherever she was planted, despite a tone of pity
for artificial waters and gardeners' arts. Madge respected them. She knew
nothing of the grandeur of wildness. Her native English veneration for
the smoothing hand of wealth led her to think Esslemont the home of all
homes for a lady with her husband beside her. And without him, too, if he
were wafted over seas and away: if there would but come a wind to do
that!

The wild North-easter tore the budded beeches. Master John Edward Russett
lay in the cradling-basket drawn by his docile donkey, Martha and Madge
to right and left of him; a speechless rustic, graduating in footman's
livery, to rear.

At slow march round by the wrinkled water, Madge saw the park gates flung
wide. A coach drove up the road along on the farther rim of the circle,
direct for the house. It stopped, the team turned leisurely and came at a
smart pace toward the carriage-basket. Lord Fleetwood was recognized.

He alighted, bidding one of his grooms drive to stables. Madge performed
her reverence, aware that she did it in clumsy style; his presence had
startled her instincts and set them travelling.

'Coldish for the youngster,' he said. 'All well, Madge?'

'Baby sleeps in the air, my lord,' she replied. 'My lady has gone to
Croridge.'

'Sharp air for a child, isn't it?'

'My lady teaches him to breathe with his mouth shut, like her father
taught her when she was little. Our baby never catches colds.'

Madge displayed the child's face.

The father dropped a glance on it from the height of skies.

'Croridge, you said?'

'Her uncle, Lord Levellier's.'

'You say, never catches cold?'

'Not our baby, my lord.'

Probably good management on the part of the mother. But the wife's
absence disappointed the husband strung to meet her, and an obtrusion of
her practical motherhood blurred the prospect demanded by his present
step.

'When do you expect her to return, Madge?'

'Before nightfall, my lord.'

'She walks?'

'Oh yes, my lady is fond of walking.'

'I suppose she could defend herself?'

'My lady walks with a good stick.'

Fleetwood weighed the chances; beheld her figure attacked, Amazonian.

'And tell me, my dear--Kit?'

I don't see more of Kit Ines.'

'What has the fellow done?'

'I'd like him to let me know why he was dismissed.'

'Ah. He kept silent on that point.'

'He let out enough.'

'You've punished him, if he's to lose a bonny sweetheart, poor devil!
Your sister Sally sends you messages?'

'We're both of us grateful, my lord.'

He lifted the thin veil from John Edward Russett's face with a loveless
hand.

'You remember the child bitten by a dog down in Wales. I have word from
my manager there. Poor little wretch has died--died raving.'

Madge's bosom went shivering up and sank. 'My lady was right. She's not
often wrong.'

'She's looking well?' said the earl, impatient with her moral
merits:--and this communication from Wales had been the decisive motive
agent in hurrying him at last to Esslemont. The next moment he heard
coolly of the lady's looking well. He wanted fervid eulogy of his wife's
looks, if he was to hear any.




CHAPTER XXXVI

BELOW THE SURFACE AND ABOVE

The girl was counselled by the tremor of her instincts to forbear to
speak of the minor circumstance, that her mistress had, besides a good
stick, a good companion on the road to Croridge: and she rejoiced to
think her mistress had him, because it seemed an intimation of justice
returning upon earth. She was combative, a born rebel against tyranny.
She weighed the powers, she felt to the worth of the persons coming into
her range of touch: she set her mistress and my lord fronting for a
wrestle, and my lord's wealth went to thin vapour, and her mistress's
character threw him. More dimly, my lord and the Welsh gentleman were put
to the trial: a tough one for these two men. She did not proclaim the
winner, but a momentary flutter of pity in the direction of Lord
Fleetwood did as much. She pitied him; for his presence at Esslemont
betrayed an inclination; he was ignorant of his lady's character, of how
firm she could be to defy him and all the world, in her gratitude to the
gentleman she thought of as her true friend, smiled at for his open
nature,--called by his Christian name.

The idea of a piece of information stinging Lord Fleetwood, the desire to
sting, so as to be an instrument of retribution (one of female human
nature's ecstasies); and her, abstaining, that she, might not pain the
lord who had been generous to her sister Sally, made the force in Madge's
breast which urges to the gambling for the undeveloped, entitled
prophecy. She kept it low and felt it thrill.

Lord Fleetwood, chatted; Madge had him wincing. He might pull the cover
off the child's face carelessly--he looked at the child. His look at the
child was a thought of the mother. If he thought of the mother, he would
be wanting to see her. If he heard her call a gentleman by his Christian
name, and heard the gentleman say 'Carinthia' my lord would begin to
shiver at changes. Women have to do unusual things when they would bring
that outer set to human behaviour. Perhaps my lord would mount the
coach-box and whip his horses away, adieu forever. His lady would not
weep. He might, perhaps, command her to keep her mouth shut from
gentlemen's Christian names, all except his own. His lady would not obey.
He had to learn something of changes that had come to others as well as
to himself. Ah, and then would he dare hint, as base men will? He may
blow foul smoke on her, she will shine out of it. He has to learn what
she is, that is his lesson; and let him pray all night and work hard all
day for it not to be too late. Let him try to be a little like Mr.
Woodseer, who worships the countess, and is hearty with the gentleman she
treats as her best of friends. There is the real nobleman.

Fleetwood chatted on airily. His instincts were duller than those of the
black-browed girl, at whom he gazed for idle satisfaction of eye from
time to time while she replied demurely and maintained her drama of, the
featureless but well-distinguished actors within her bosom,--a round,
plump bust, good wharfage and harbourage, he was thinking. Excellent
harbourage, supposing the arms out in pure good-will. A girl to hold her
voyager fast and safe! Men of her class had really a capital choice in a
girl like this. Men of another class as well, possibly, for temporary
anchorage out midchannel. No?--possibly not. Here and there a girl is a
Tartar. Ines talked of her as if she were a kind of religious edifice and
a doubt were sacrilege. She could impress the rascal: girls have their
arts for reaching the holy end, and still they may have a welcome for a
foreign ship.

The earl said humorously: 'You will grant me permission to lunch at your
mistress's table in her absence?' And she said: 'My lord!' And he
resumed, to waken her interest with a personal question: 'You like our
quiet country round Esslemont?' She said: 'I do,' and gave him plain look
for look. Her eye was undefended: he went into it, finding neither
shallow nor depth, simply the look, always the look; whereby he knew that
no story of man was there, and not the shyest of remote responsive
invitations from Nature's wakened and detected rogue. The bed of an
unmarried young woman's eye yields her secret of past and present to the
intrepid diver, if he can get his plunge; he holds her for the tenth of a
minute, that is the revealment. Jewel or oyster-shell, it is ours. She
cannot withhold it, he knew right well. This girl, then, was, he could
believe, one of the rarely exampled innocent in knowledge. He was
practised to judge.

Invitation or challenge or response from the handsomest he would have
scorned just then. His native devilry suffered a stir at sight of an
innocent in knowledge and spotless after experiences. By a sudden
singular twist, rather unfairly, naturally, as it happened, he attributed
it to an influence issuing from her mistress, to whom the girl was
devoted, whom consequently she copied; might physically, and also
morally, at a distance, resemble.

'Well, you've been a faithful servant to your lady, my dear; I hope
you'll be comfortable here,' he said. 'She likes the mountains.'

'My lady would be quite contented if she could pass two months of the
year in the mountains,' Madge answered.

'Look at me. They say people living together get a likeness to one
another. What's your opinion? Upon my word, your eyebrows remind me,
though they're not the colour--they have a bend!'

'You've seen my lady in danger, my lord.'

'Yes; well, there 's no one to resemble her there, she has her mark--kind
of superhuman business. We're none of us "fifty feet high, with
phosphorus heads," as your friend Mr. Gower Woodseer says of the
prodigiosities. Lady Fleetwood is back--when?'

'Before dark, she should be.'

He ran up the steps to the house.

At Lekkatts beneath Croridge a lean midday meal was being finished hard
on the commencement by a silent company of three. When eating is choking
to the younger members of the repast, bread and cold mutton-bone serve
the turn as conclusively as the Frenchman's buffet-dishes. Carinthia's
face of unshed tears dashed what small appetite Chillon had. Lord
Levellier plied his fork in his right hand ruminating, his back an arch
across his plate.

Riddles to the thwarted young, these old people will not consent to be
read by sensations. Carinthia watched his jaws at their work of eating
under his victim's eye-knowing Chillon to be no longer an officer in the
English service; knowing that her beloved had sold out for the mere money
to pay debts and support his Henrietta; knowing, as he must know, that
Chillon's act struck a knife to pierce his mother's breast through her
coffin-boards! This old man could eat, and he could withhold the means
due to his dead sister's son. Could he look on Chillon and not feel that
the mother's heart was beating in her son's fortunes? Half the money due
to Chillon would have saved him from ruin.

Lord Levellier laid his fork on the plate. He munched his grievance with
his bit of meat. The nephew and niece here present feeding on him were
not so considerate as the Welsh gentleman, a total stranger, who had
walked up to Lekkatts with the Countess of Fleetwood, and expressed the
preference to feed at an inn. Relatives are cormorants.

His fork on his plate released the couple. Barely half a dozen words,
before the sitting to that niggard restoration, had informed Carinthia of
the step taken by her brother. She beckoned him to follow her.

'The worst is done now, Chillon. I am silent. Uncle is a rock. You say we
must not offend. I have given him my whole mind. Say where Riette is to
live.'

'Her headquarters will be here, at a furnished house. She's, with her
cousin, the Dowager.'

'Yes. She should be with me.'

'She wants music. She wants--poor girl! let her have what comes to her.'

Their thoughts beneath their speech were like fish darting under shadow
of the traffic bridge.

'She loves music,' said Carinthia; 'it is almost life to her, like fresh
air to me. Next month I am in London; Lady Arpington is kind. She will
give me as much of their polish as I can take. I dare say I should feel
the need of it if I were an enlightened person.'

'For instance, did I hear "Owain," when your Welsh friend was leaving?'
Chillon asked.

'It was his dying wife's wish, brother.'

'Keep to the rules, dear.'

'They have been broken, Chillon.'

'Mend them.'

'That would be a step backward.'

'"The right one for defence!" father says.'

'Father says, "The habit of the defensive paralyzes will."'

'"Womanizes," he says, Carin. You quote him falsely, to shield the sex.
Quite right. But my sister must not be tricky. Keep to the rules. You're
an exceptional woman, and it would be a good argument, if you were not in
an exceptional position.'

'Owain is the exceptional man, brother.'

'My dear, after all, you have a husband.'

'I have a brother, I have a friend, I have no--I am a man's wife and the
mother of his child; I am free, or husband would mean dungeon. Does my
brother want an oath from me? That I can give him.'

'Conduct, yes; I couldn't doubt you,' said Chillon. 'But "the world's a
flood at a dyke for women, and they must keep watch," you've read.'

'But Owain is not our enemy,' said Carinthia, in her deeper tones,
expressive of conviction, and not thereby assuring to hear. 'He is a man
with men, a child with women. His Rebecca could describe him; I laugh now
at some of her sayings of him; I see her mouth, so tenderly comical over
her big "simpleton," she called him, and loved him so.'

The gentleman appeared on the waste land above the house. His very loose
black suit and a peculiar roll of his gait likened him to a mourning
boatswain who was jolly. In Lord Levellier's workshop his remarks were to
the point. Chillon's powders for guns and blasting interested him, and he
proposed to ride over from Barlings to witness a test of them.

'You are staying at Barlings?' Chillon said.

'Yes; now Carinthia is at Esslemont,' he replied, astoundingly the
simpleton.

His conversation was practical and shrewd on the walk with Chillon and
Carinthia down to Esslemont evidently he was a man well armed to
encounter the world; social usages might be taught him. Chillon gained a
round view of the worthy simple fellow, unlikely to turn out
impracticable, for he talked such good sense upon matters of business.

Carinthia saw her brother tickled and interested. A feather moved her.
Full of tears though she was, her, heart lay open to the heavens and
their kind, small, wholesome gifts. Her happiness in the walk with her
brother and her friend--the pair of them united by her companionship,
both of them showing they counted her their comrade--was the nearest to
the radiant day before she landed on an island, and imagined happiness
grew here, and found it to be gilt thorns, loud mockery. A shaving
North-easter tore the scream from hedges and the roar from copses under a
faceless breadth of sky, and she said, as they turned into Esslemont Park
lane: 'We have had one of our old walks to-day, Chillon!'

'You used to walk together long walks over in your own country,' said Mr.
Wythan.

'Yes, Owain, we did, and my brother never knew me tired.'

'Never knew you confess to it,' said Chillon, as he swallowed the name on
her lips.

'Walking was flying over there, brother.'

'Say once or twice in Wales, too,' Mr. Wythan begged of her.

'Wales reminded. Yes, ..Owain, I shall not forget Wales, Welsh people.
Mr. Woodseer says they have the three-stringed harp in their breasts, and
one string is always humming, whether you pull it or no.'

'That 's love of country! that 's their love of wild Wales, Carinthia.'

There was a quiet interrogation in Chillon's turn of the head at this
fervent simpleton.

'I love them for that hum,' said she. 'It joins one in me.'

'Call to them any day, they are up, ready to march!'

'Oh, dear souls!' Carinthia said.

Her breath drew in.

The three were dumb. They saw Lord Fleetwood standing in the park
gateway.




CHAPTER XXXVII

BETWEEN CARINTHIA AND HER LORD

The earl's easy grace of manner was a ceremonial mantle on him as he
grasped the situation in a look. He bent with deferential familiarity to
his countess, exactly toning the degree of difference which befitted a
salute to the two gentlemen, amiable or hostile.

'There and back?' he said, and conveyed a compliment to Carinthia's
pedestrian vigour in the wary smile which can be recalled for a snub.

She replied: 'We have walked the distance, my lord.'

Her smile was the braced one of an untired stepper.

'A cold wind for you.'

'We walked fast.'

She compelled him to take her in the plural, though he addressed her
separately, but her tones had their music.

'Your brother, Captain Kirby-Levellier, I believe?'

'My brother is not of the army now, my lord.'

She waved her hand for Madge to conduct donkey and baby to the house. He
noticed. He was unruffled.

The form of amenity expected from her, in relation to her brother, was
not exhibited. She might perhaps be feeling herself awkward at
introductions, and had to be excused.

'I beg,' he said, and motioned to Chillon the way of welcome into the
park, saw the fixed figure, and passed over the unspoken refusal, with a
remark to Mr. Wythan: 'At Barlings, I presume?'

'My tent is pitched there,' was the answer.

'Good-bye, my brother,' said Carinthia.

Chillon folded his arms round her. 'God bless you, dear love. Let me see
you soon.' He murmured:

'You can protect yourself.'

'Fear nothing for me, dearest.'

She kissed her brother's cheek. The strain of her spread fingers on his
shoulder signified no dread at her being left behind.

Strangers observing their embrace would have vowed that the pair were
brother and sister, and of a notable stock.

'I will walk with you to Croridge again when you send word you are
willing to go; and so, good-bye, Owain,' she said.

She gave her hand; frankly she pressed the Welshman's, he not a whit
behind her in frankness.

Fleetwood had a skimming sense of a drop upon a funny, whirly world. He
kept from giddiness, though the whirl had lasted since he beheld the form
of a wild forest girl, dancing, as it struck him now, over an abyss, on
the plumed shoot of a stumpy tree.

Ay, and she danced at the ducal schloss;--she mounted his coach like a
witch of the Alps up crags;--she was beside him pelting to the vale under
a leaden Southwester;--she sat solitary by the fireside in the room of
the inn.

Veil it. He consented to the veil he could not lift. He had not even
power to try, and his heart thumped.

London's Whitechapel Countess glided before him like a candle in the fog.

He had accused her as the creature destroying Romance. Was it gold in
place of gilding, absolute upper human life that the ridiculous object at
his heels over London proposed instead of delirious brilliancies, drunken
gallops, poison-syrups,--puffs of a young man's vapours?

There was Madge and the donkey basket-trap ahead on the road to the
house, bearing proof of the veiled had-been: signification of a
might-have-been. Why not a possible might-be? Still the might-be might
be. Looking on this shaven earth and sky of March with the wrathful wind
at work, we know that it is not the end: a day follows for the world. But
looking on those blown black funeral sprays, and the wrinkled chill
waters, and the stare of the Esslemont house-windows, it has an
appearance of the last lines of our written volume: dead Finis. Not
death; fouler, the man alive seeing himself stretched helpless for the
altering of his deeds; a coffin carrying him; the fatal whiteheaded
sacerdotal official intoning his aims on the march to front, the drear
craped files of the liveried, salaried mourners over his failure,
trooping at his heels.

Frontward was the small lake's grey water, rearward an avenue of limes.

But the man alive, if but an inch alive, can so take his life in his
clutch, that he does alter, cleanse, recast his deeds:--it is known;
priests proclaim it, philosophers admit it.

Can he lay his clutch on another's life, and wring out the tears shed,
the stains of the bruises, recollection of the wrongs?

Contemplate the wounded creature as a woman. Then, what sort of woman is
she? She was once under a fascination--ludicrously, painfully, intensely
like a sort of tipsy poor puss, the trapped hare tossed to her serpent;
and thoroughly reassured for a few caresses, quite at home, caged and at
home; and all abloom with pretty ways, modest pranks, innocent fondlings.
Gobbled, my dear!

It is the doom of the innocents, a natural fate. Smother the creature
with kindness again, show we are a point in the scale above that old
coiler snake--which broke no bones, bit not so very deep;--she will be,
she ought to be, the woman she was. That is, if she was then sincere, a
dose of kindness should operate happily to restore the honeymoony
fancies, hopes, trusts, dreams, all back, as before the honeymoon showed
the silver crook and shadowy hag's back of a decaying crescent. And true
enough, the poor girl's young crescent of a honeymoon went down
sickly-yellow rather early. It can be renewed. She really was at that
time rather romantic. She became absurd. Romance is in her, nevertheless.
She is a woman of mettle: she is probably expecting to be wooed. One
makes a hash of yesterday's left dish, but she may know no better. 'Add a
pickle,' as Chummy Potts used to say. The dish is rendered savoury by a
slight expenditure of attentions, just a dab of intimated soft stuff.

'Pleasant to see you established here, if you find the place agreeable,'
he said.

She was kissing her hand to her brother, all her eyes for him--or for the
couple; and they were hidden by the park lodge before she replied: 'It is
an admired, beautiful place.'

'I came,' said he, 'to have your assurance that it suits you.'

'I thank you, my lord.'

'"My lord" would like a short rest, Carinthia.'

She seemed placidly acquiescing. 'You have seen the boy?'

'Twice to-day. We were having a conversation just now.'

'We think him very intelligent.'

'Lady Arpington tells me you do the honours here excellently.'

'She is good to me.'

'Praises the mother's management of the young one. John Edward: Edward
for call-name. Madge boasts his power for sleeping.'

'He gives little trouble.'

'And babes repay us! We learn from small things. Out of the mouth of
babes wisdom? Well, their habits show the wisdom of the mother. A good
mother! There's no higher title. A lady of my acquaintance bids fair to
win it, they say.'

Carinthia looked in simplicity, saw herself, and said 'If a mother may
rear her boy till he must go to school, she is rewarded for all she
does.'

'Ah,' said he, nodding over her mania of the perpetual suspicion.
'Leddings, Queeney, the servants here, run smoothly?'

'They do: they are happy in serving.'

'You see, we English are not such bad fellows when we're known. The
climate to-day, for example, is rather trying.'

'I miss colours most in England,' said Carinthia. 'I like the winds. Now
and then we have a day to remember.'

'We 're to be "the artist of the day," Gower Woodseer says, and we get an
attachment to the dreariest; we are to study "small variations of the
commonplace"--dear me! But he may be right. The "sky of lead and scraped
lead" over those lines, he points out; and it's not a bad trick for
reconciling us to gloomy English weather. You take lessons from him?'

'I can always learn from him,' said Carinthia.

Fleetwood depicted his plodding Gower at the tussle with account-books.
She was earnest in sympathy; not awake to the comical; dull as the
clouds, dull as the discourse. Yet he throbbed for being near her took
impression of her figure, the play of her features, the carriage of her
body.

He was shut from her eyes. The clear brown eyes gave exchange of looks;
less of admission than her honest maid's.

Madge and the miracle infant awaited them on the terrace. For so foreign
did the mother make herself to him, that the appearance of the child,
their own child, here between them, was next to miraculous; and the
mother, who might well have been the most astonished, had transparently
not an idea beyond the verified palpable lump of young life she lifted in
her arms out of the arms of Madge, maternally at home with its presence
on earth.

Demonstrably a fine specimen, a promising youngster. The father was
allowed to inspect him. This was his heir: a little fellow of smiles,
features, puckered brows of inquiry; seeming a thing made already, and
active on his own account.

'Do people see likenesses?' he asked.

'Some do,' said the mother.

'You?'

She was constrained to give answer. 'There is a likeness to my father, I
have thought.'

There's a dotage of idolatrous daughters, he could have retorted; and his
gaze was a polite offer to humdrum reconcilement, if it pleased her.

She sent the child up the steps.

'Do you come in, my lord?'

'The house is yours, my lady.'

'I cannot feel it mine.'

'You are the mistress to invite or exclude.'

'I am ready to go in a few hours for a small income of money, for my
child and me.'

'--Our child.'

'Yes.'

'It is our child.'

'It is.'

'Any sum you choose to name. But where would you live?'

'Near my brother I would live.'

'Three thousand a year for pin-money, or more, are at your disposal. Stay
here, I beg. You have only to notify your wants. And we'll talk
familiarly now, as we're together. Can I be of aid to your brother? Tell
me, pray. I am disposed in every way to subscribe to your wishes. Pray,
speak, speak out.'

So the earl said. He had to force his familiar tone against the rebuke of
her grandeur of stature; and he was for inducing her to deliver her mind,
that the mountain girl's feebleness in speech might reinstate him. She
rejoined unhesitatingly: 'My brother would not accept aid from you, my
lord. I will take no money more than for my needs.'

'You spoke of certain sums down in Wales.'

'I did then.' Her voice was dead.

'Ah! You must be feeling the cold North-wind here.'

'I do not. You may feel the cold, my lord. Will you enter the house?'

'Do you invite me?'

'The house is your own.'

'Will the mistress of the house honour me so far?'

'I am not the mistress of the house, my lord.'

'You refuse, Carinthia?'

'I would keep from using those words. I have no right to refuse the entry
of the house to you.'

'If I come in?'

'I guard my rooms.'

She had been awake, then, to the thrusting and parrying behind masked
language.

'Good. You are quite decided, I may suppose.'

'I will leave them when I have a little money, or when I know of how I
may earn some.'

'The Countess of Fleetwood earning a little money?'

'I can put aside your title, my lord.'

'No, you can't put it aside while the man with the title lives, not even
if you're running off in earnest, under a dozen Welsh names. Why should
you desire to do it? The title entitles you to the command of half my
possessions. As to the house; don't be alarmed; you will not have to
guard your rooms. The extraordinary wild animal you--the impression may
have been produced; I see, I see. If I were in the house, I should not be
rageing at your doors; and it is not my intention to enter the house.
That is, not by right of ownership. You have my word.'

He bowed to her, and walked to the stables.

She had the art of extracting his word from him. The word given, she went
off with it, disengaged mistress of Esslemont. And she might have the
place for residence, but a decent courtesy required that she should
remain at the portico until he was out of sight. She was the first out of
sight, rather insolently.

She returned him without comment the spell he had cast on her, and he was
left to estimate the value of a dirited piece of metal not in the
currency, stamped false coin. An odd sense of impoverishment chilled him.
Chilly weather was afflicting the whole country, he was reminded, and he
paced about hurriedly until his horses were in the shafts. After all, his
driving away would be much more expected of him than a stay at the house
where the Whitechapel Countess resided, chill, dry, talking the language
of early Exercises in English, suitable to her Welshmen. Did she 'Owain'
them every one?

As he whipped along the drive and left that glassy stare of Esslemont
behind him, there came a slap of a reflection:--here, on the box of this
coach, the bride just bursting her sheath sat, and was like warm wax to
take impressions. She was like hard stone to retain them, pretty
evidently. Like women the world over, she thinks only of her side of the
case. Men disdain to plead theirs. Now money is offered her, she declines
it. Formerly, she made it the principal subject of her conversation.

Turn the mind to something brighter. Fleetwood strung himself to do so,
and became agitated by the question whether the bride sat to left or to
right of him when the South-wester blew-a wind altogether preferable to
the chill North-east. Women, when they are no longer warm, are colder
than the deadliest catarrh wind scything across these islands. Of course
she sat to left of him. In the line of the main road, he remembered a
look he dropped on her, a look over his left shoulder.

She never had a wooing: she wanted it, had a kind of right to it, or the
show of it. How to begin? But was she worth an effort? Turn to something
brighter. Religion is the one refuge from women, Feltre says: his Roman
Catholic recipe. The old shoemaker, Mr. Woodseer, hauls women into his
religion, and purifies them by the process,--fancies he does. He gets
them to wear an air. Old Gower, too, has his Religion of Nature, with
free admission for women, whom he worships in similes, running away from
them, leering sheepishly. No, Feltre's' rigid monastic system is the sole
haven. And what a world, where we have no safety except in renouncing it!
The two sexes created to devour one another must abjure their sex before
they gain 'The Peace,' as Feltre says, impressively, if absurdly. He will
end a monk if he has the courage of his logic. A queer spectacle--an
English nobleman a shaven monk!

Fleetwood shuddered. We are twisted face about to discover our being
saved by women from that horror--the joining the ranks of the nasal
friars. By what women? Bacchante, clearly, if the wife we have is a
North-easter to wither us, blood, bone, and soul.

He was hungry; he waxed furious with the woman who had flung him out upon
the roads. He was thirsty as well. The brightest something to refresh his
thoughts grew and glowed in the form of a shiny table, bearing tasty
dishes, old wines; at an inn or anywhere. But, out of London, an English
inn to furnish the dishes and the wines for a civilized and
self-respecting man is hard to seek, as difficult to find as a perfect
skeleton of an extinct species. The earl's breast howled derision of his
pursuit when he drew up at the; sign of the Royal Sovereign, in the dusky
hour, and handed himself desperately to Mrs. Rundles' mercy.

He could not wait for a dinner, so his eating was cold meat. Warned by a
sip, that his drinking, if he drank, was to be an excursion in chemical
acids, the virtues of an abstainer served for his consolation. Tolerant
of tobacco, although he did not smoke, he fronted the fire, envying Gower
Woodseer the contemplative pipe, which for half a dozen puffs wafted him
to bracing deserts, or primaeval forests, or old highways with the
swallow thoughts above him, down the Past, into the Future. A pipe is
pleasant dreams at command. A pipe is the concrete form of philosophy.
Why, then, a pipe is the alternative of a friar's frock for an escape
from women. But if one does not smoke! . . . Here and there a man is
visibly in the eyes of all men cursed: let him be blest by Fortune; let
him be handsome, healthy, wealthy, courted, he is cursed.

Fleetwood lay that night beneath the roof of the Royal Sovereign. Sleep
is life's legitimate mate. It will treat us at times as the faithless
wife, who becomes a harrying beast, behaves to her lord. He had no sleep.
Having put out his candle, an idea took hold of him, and he jumped up to
light it again and verify the idea that this room . . . He left the bed
and strode round it, going in the guise of an urgent somnambulist, or
ghost bearing burden of an imperfectly remembered mission. This was the
room.

Reason and cold together overcame his illogical scruples to lie down on
that bed soliciting the sleep desired. He lay and groaned, lay and
rolled. All night the Naval Monarch with the loose cheeks and jelly smile
of the swinging sign-board creaked. Flaws of the North-easter swung and
banged him. He creaked high, in complaint,--low, in some partial
contentment. There was piping of his boatswain, shrill piping--shrieks of
the whistle. How many nights had that most ill-fated of brides lain
listening to the idiotic uproar! It excused a touch of craziness. But how
many? Not one, not two, ten, twenty:--count, count to the exact number of
nights the unhappy girl must have heard those mad colloquies of the
hurricane boatswain and the chirpy king. By heaven! Whitechapel, after
one night of it, beckons as a haven of grace.




CHAPTER XXXVIII

A DIP INTO THE SPRING'S WATERS

The night Lord Fleetwood had passed cured him of the wound Carinthia
dealt, with her blunt, defensive phrase and her Welshman. Seated on his
coach-box, he turned for a look the back way leading to Esslemont, and
saw rosed crag and mountain forest rather than the soft undulations of
parkland pushing green meadows or brown copse up the slopes under his
eye. She had never been courted: she deserved a siege. She was a daughter
of the racy highlands. And she, who could say to her husband, 'I guard my
rooms,' without sign of the stage-face of scorn or defiance or flinging
of the glove, she would have to be captured by siege, it was clear. She
wore an aspect of the confident fortress, which neither challenges nor
cries to treat, but commands respect. How did she accomplish this miracle
of commanding respect after such a string of somersaults before the
London world?

He had to drive North-westward: his word was pledged to one of his donkey
Ixionides--Abrane, he recollected--to be a witness at some contemptible
exhibition of the fellow's muscular skill: a match to punt against a
Thames waterman: this time. Odd how it should come about that the giving
of his word forced him now to drive away from the woman once causing him
to curse his luck as the prisoner of his word! However, there was to be
an end of it soon--a change; change as remarkable as Harry Monmouth's at
the touching of his crown. Though in these days, in our jog-trot Old
England, half a step on the road to greatness is the utmost we can hop;
and all England jeers at the man attempting it. He caps himself with this
or that one of their titles. For it is not the popular thing among
Englishmen. Their hero, when they have done their fighting, is the
wealthy patron of Sport. What sort of creatures are his comrades? But he
cannot have comrades unless he is on the level of them. Yet let him be
never so high above them, they charge him and point him as a piece of
cannon; assenting to the flatteries they puff into him, he is their
engine. 'The idol of the hour is the mob's wooden puppet, and the doing
of the popular thing seed of no harvest,' Gower Woodseer says, moderately
well, snuffing incense of his happy delivery. Not to be the idol, to have
an aim of our own, there lies the truer pride, if we intend respect of
ourselves.

The Mr. Pulpit young men have in them, until their habits have fretted
him out, was directing Lord Fleetwood's meditations upon the errors of
the general man, as a cover for lateral references to his hitherto
erratic career: not much worse than a swerving from the right line, which
now seemed the desirable road for him, and had previously seemed so
stale, so repulsive. He was, of course, only half-conscious of his
pulpitizing; he fancied the serious vein of his thoughts attributable to
a tumbled night. Nevertheless, he had the question whether that
woman--poor girl!--was influencing his thoughts. For in a moment, the
very word 'respect' pitched him upon her character; to see it a character
that emerged beneath obstacles, and overcame ridicule, won suffrages, won
a reluctant husband's admiration, pricked him from distaste to what might
really be taste for her companionship, or something more alarming to
contemplate in the possibilities,--thirst for it. He was driving away,
and he longed to turn back. He did respect her character: a character
angular as her features were, and similarly harmonious, splendid in
action.

Respect seems a coolish form of tribute from a man who admires. He had to
say that he did not vastly respect beautiful women. Have they all the
poetry? Know them well, and where is it?

The pupil of Gower Woodseer asked himself to specify the poetry of woman.
She is weak and inferior, but she has it; civilized men acknowledge it;
and it is independent, or may be beside her gift of beauty. She has more
of it than we have. Then name it.

Well, the flowers of the field are frail things. Pluck one, and you have
in your hand the frailest of things. But reach through the charm of
colour and the tale of its beneficence in frailty to the poetry of the
flower, and secret of the myriad stars will fail to tell you more than
does that poetry of your little flower. Lord Feltre, at the heels of St.
Francis, agrees in that.

Well, then, much so with the flowers of the two hands and feet. We do
homage to those ungathered, and reserve our supremacy; the gathered, no
longer courted, are the test of men. When the embraced woman breathes
respect into us, she wings a beast. We have from her the poetry of the
tasted life; excelling any garden-gate or threshold lyrics called forth
by purest early bloom. Respect for her person, for her bearing, for her
character that is in the sum a beauty plastic to the civilized young
man's needs and cravings, as queenly physical loveliness has never so
fully been to him along the walks of life, and as ideal worships cannot
be for our nerving contentment. She brings us to the union of body and
soul; as good as to say, earth and heaven. Secret of all human
aspirations, the ripeness of the creeds, is there; and the passion for
the woman desired has no poetry equalling that of the embraced respected
woman.

Something of this went reeling through Fleetwood; positively to this end;
accompanied the while with flashes of Carinthia, her figure across the
varied scenes. Ridicule vanished. Could it ever have existed? If London
had witnessed the scene down in Wales, London never again would laugh at
the Whitechapel Countess.

He laughed amicably at himself for the citizen sobriety of these views,
on the part of a nobleman whose airy pleasure it had been to flout your
sober citizens, with their toad-at-the-hop notions, their walled
conceptions, their drab propriety; and felt a petted familiar within him
dub all pulpitizing, poetizing drivellers with one of those detested
titles, invented by the English as a corrective of their maladies or the
excesses of their higher moods. But, reflection telling him that he had
done injury to Carinthia--had inflicted the sorest of the wounds a young
woman a new bride can endure, he nodded acquiescence to the charge of
misbehaviour, and muzzled the cynic.

As a consequence, the truisms flooded him and he lost his guard against
our native prosiness. Must we be prosy if we are profoundly, uncynically
sincere? Do but listen to the stuff we are maundering! Extracts of
poetry, if one could hit upon the right, would serve for a relief and a
lift when we are in this ditch of the serious vein. Gower Woodseer would
have any number handy to spout. Or Felter:--your convinced and fervent
Catholic has quotations of images and Latin hymns to his Madonna or one
of his Catherines, by the dozen, to suit an enthusiastic fit of the
worship of some fair woman, and elude the prosy in commending her. Feltre
is enviable there. As he says, it is natural to worship, and only the
Catholics can prostrate themselves with dignity. That is matter for
thought. Stir us to the depths, it will be found that we are poor soupy
stuff. For estimable language, and the preservation of self-respect in
prostration, we want ritual, ceremonial elevation of the visible object
for the soul's adoring through the eye. So may we escape our foul or
empty selves.

Lord Feltre seemed to Fleetwood at the moment a more serviceable friend
than Gower Woodseer preaching 'Nature'--an abstraction, not inspiring to
the devout poetic or giving us the tongue above our native prosy. He was
raised and refreshed by recollected lines of a Gregorian chant he and
Feltre had heard together under the roof of that Alpine monastery.

The Dame collapses. There is little doubt of her having the world to back
her in protest against all fine filmy work of the exploration of a young
man's intricacies or cavities. Let her not forget the fact she has
frequently impressed upon us, that he was 'the very wealthiest nobleman
of his time,' instructive to touch inside as well as out. He had his
share of brains, too. And also she should be mindful of an alteration of
English taste likely of occurrence in the remote posterity she vows she
is for addressing after she has exhausted our present hungry generation.
The posterity signified will, it is calculable, it is next to certain,
have studied a developed human nature so far as to know the composition
of it a not unequal mixture of the philosophic and the romantic, and that
credible realism is to be produced solely by an involvement of those two
elements. Or else, she may be sure, her story once out of the mouth, goes
off dead as the spirits of a vapour that has performed the stroke of
energy. She holds a surprising event in the history of 'the wealthiest
nobleman of his time,' and she would launch it upon readers unprepared,
with the reference to our mysterious and unfathomable nature for an
explanation of the stunning crack on the skull.

This may do now. It will not do ten centuries hence. For the English,
too, are a changeable people in the sight of ulterior Time.

One of the good pieces of work Lord Fleetwood could suppose he had
performed was recalled to him near the turning to his mews by the
handsome Piccadilly fruit-shop. He jumped to the pavement, merely to
gratify. Sarah Winch with a word of Madge; and being emotional just then,
he spoke of Lady Fleetwood's attachment to Madge; and he looked at Sarah
straight, he dropped his voice: 'She said, you remember, you were sisters
to her.'

Sarah remembered that he had spoken of it before. Two brilliant drops
from the deepest of woman's ready well stood in her eyes.

He carried the light of them away. They were such pure jewels of tribute
to the Carinthia now seen by him as worshipping souls of devotees offer
to their Madonna for her most glorious adornment.




CHAPTER XXXIX

THE RED WARNING FROM A SON OF VAPOUR

Desiring loneliness or else Lord Feltre's company, Fleetwood had to grant
a deferred audience at home to various tradesmen, absurdly fussy about
having the house of his leased estate of Calesford furnished complete and
habitable on the very day stipulated by his peremptory orders that the
place should be both habitable and hospitable. They were right, they were
excused; grand entertainments of London had been projected, and he fell
into the weariful business with them, thinking of Henrietta's insatiable
appetite for the pleasures. He had taken the lease of this burdensome
Calesford, at an eight-miles' drive from the Northwest of town, to
gratify the devouring woman's taste which was, to have all the luxuries
of the town in a framework of country scenery.

Gower Woodseer and he were dining together in the evening. The
circumstance was just endurable, but Gower would play the secretary, and
doggedly subjected him to hear a statement of the woeful plight of
Countess Livia's affairs. Gower, commissioned to examine them, remarked:
'If we have all the figures!'

'If we could stop the bleeding!' Fleetwood replied. 'Come to the Opera
to-night; I promised. I promised Abrane for to-morrow. There's no end to
it. This gambling mania's a flux. Not one of them except your old enemy,
Corby, keeps clear of it; and they're at him for subsidies, as they are
at me, and would be at you or any passenger on the suspected of a purse.
Corby shines among them.'

That was heavy judgement enough, Gower thought. No allusion to Esslemont
ensued. The earl ate sparely, and silently for the most part.

He was warmed a little at the Opera by hearing Henrietta's honest
raptures over her Columelli in the Pirata. But Lord Brailstone sat behind
her, and their exchange of ecstasies upon the tattered pathos of

          E il mio tradito amor,

was not moderately offensive.

His countenance in Henrietta's presence had to be studied and interpreted
by Livia. Why did it darken? The demurest of fuliginous intriguers argued
that Brail stone was but doing the spiriting required of him, and would
have to pay the penalty unrewarded, let him Italianize as much as he
pleased. Not many months longer, and there would be the bit of an
outburst, the whiff of scandal, perhaps a shot, and the rupture of an
improvident alliance, followed by Henrietta's free hand to the moody
young earl, who would then have possession of the only woman he could
ever love: and at no cost. Jealousy of a man like Brailstone, however
infatuated the man, was too foolish. He must perceive how matters were
tending? The die-away acid eyeballs-at-the-ceiling of a pair of fanatics
per la musica might irritate a husband, but the lover should read and
know. Giddy as the beautiful creature deprived of her natural aliment
seems in her excuseable hunger for it, she has learnt her lesson, she is
not a reeling libertine.

Brailstone peered through his eyelashes at the same shadow of a frown
where no frown sat on his friend's brows. Displeasure was manifest, and
why? Fleetwood had given him the dispossessing shrug of the man out of
the run, and the hint of the tip for winning, with the aid of operatic
arias; and though he was in Fleetwood's books ever since the prize-fight,
neither Fleetwood nor the husband nor any skittishness of a timorous wife
could stop the pursuer bent to capture the fairest and most inflaming
woman of her day.

'I prefer your stage Columelli,' Fleetwood said.

'I come from exile!' said Henrietta; and her plea in excuse of ecstatics
wrote her down as confessedly treasonable to the place quitted.

Ambrose Mallard entered the box, beholding only his goddess Livia. Their
eyebrows and inaudible lips conversed eloquently. He retired like a
trumped card on the appearance of M. de St. Ombre. The courtly Frenchman
won the ladies to join him in whipping the cream of the world for five
minutes, and passed out before his flavour was exhausted. Brailstone took
his lesson and departed, to spy at them from other boxes and heave an
inflated shirt-front. Young Cressett, the bottle of effervescence, dashed
in, and for him Livia's face was motherly. He rattled a tale of the
highway robbery of Sir Meeson Corby on one of his Yorkshire moors. The
picture of the little baronet arose upon the narration, and it amused.
Chumley Potts came to 'confirm every item,' as he said. 'Plucked Corby
clean. Pistol at his head. Quite old style. Time, ten P.M. Suspects Great
Britain, King, Lords and Commons, and buttons twenty times tighter.
Brosey Mallard down on him for a few fighting men. Perfect answer to
Brosey.'

'Mr. Mallard did not mention the robbery,' Henrietta remarked.

'Feared to shock: Corby such a favoured swain,' Potts accounted for the
omission.

'Brosey spilling last night?' Fleetwood asked.

'At the palazzo, we were,' said Potts. 'Luck pretty fair first off.
Brosey did his trick, and away and away and away went he! More old Brosey
wins, the wiser he gets. I stayed.' He swung to Gower: 'Don't drink dry
Sillery after two A.M. You read me?'

'Egyptian, but decipherable,' said Gower.

The rising of the curtain drew his habitual groan from Potts, and he fled
to collogue with the goodly number of honest fellows in the house of
music who detested 'squallery.' Most of these afflicted pilgrims to the
London conservatory were engaged upon the business of the Goddess richly
inspiring the Heliconian choir, but rendering the fountain-waters heady.
Here they had to be, if they would enjoy the spectacle of London's
biggest and choicest bouquet: and in them, too, there was an unattached
air during Potts' cooling discourse of turf and tables, except when he
tossed them a morsel of tragedy, or the latest joke, not yet past the
full gallop on its course. Their sparkle was transient; woman had them
fast. Compelled to think of them as not serious members of our group, he
assisted at the crush-room exit, and the happy riddance of the beautiful
cousins dedicated to the merry London midnights' further pastures.

Fleetwood's word was extracted, that he would visit the 'palazzo' within
a couple of hours.

Potts exclaimed: 'Good. You promise. Hang me, if I don't think it 's the
only certain thing a man can depend upon in this world.'

He left the earl and Gower Woodseer to their lunatic talk. He still had
his ideas about the association of the pair. 'Hard-headed player of his
own game, that Woodseer, spite of his Mumbo-Jumbo-oracle kind of talk.'

Mallard's turn of luck downward to the deadly drop had come under Potts'
first inspection of the table. Admiring his friend's audacity, deploring
his rashness, reproving his persistency, Potts allowed his verdict to go
by results; for it was clear that Mallard and Fortune were in opposition.
Something like real awe of the tremendous encounter kept him from a
plunge or a bet. Mallard had got the vertigo, he reported the gambler's
launch on dementedness to the earl. Gower's less experienced optics
perceived it. The plainly doomed duellist with the insensible Black
Goddess offered her all the advantages of the Immortals challenged by
flesh. His effort to smile was a line cut awry in wood; his big eyes were
those of a cat for sociability; he looked cursed, and still he wore the
smile. In this condition, the gambler runs to emptiness of everything he
has, his money, his heart, his brains, like a coal-truck on the incline
of the rails to a collier.

Mallard applied to the earl for a loan of fifty guineas. He had them and
lost them, and he came, not begging, blustering for a second supply;
quite in the wrong tone, Potts knew. Fleetwood said: 'Back it with
pistols, Brosey'; and, as Potts related subsequently, 'Old Brosey had the
look of a staked horse.'

Fortune and he having now closed the struggle, perforce of his total
disarmament, he regained the wits we forfeit when we engage her. He said
to his friend Chummy: 'Abrane tomorrow? Ah, yes, punts a Thames waterman.
Start of--how many yards? Sunbury-Walton: good reach. Course of two
miles: Braney in good training. Straight business? I mayn't be there. But
you, Chummy, you mind, old Chums, all cases of the kind, safest back the
professional. Unless--you understand!'

Fleetwood could not persuade Gower to join the party. The philosopher's
pretext of much occupation masked a bashfully sentimental dislike of the
flooding of quiet country places by the city's hordes. 'You're right,
right,' said Fleetwood, in sympathy, resigned to the prospect of
despising his associates without a handy helper. He named Esslemont once,
shot up a look at the sky, and glanced it Eastward.

Three coaches were bound for Sunbury from a common starting-point at nine
of the morning. Lord Fleetwood, Lord Brailstone, and Lord Simon Pitscrew
were the whips. Two hours in advance of them, the earl's famous purveyors
of picnic feasts bowled along to pitch the riverside tent and spread the
tables. Our upper and lower London world reported the earl as out on
another of his expeditions: and, say what we will, we must think kindly
of a wealthy nobleman ever to the front to enliven the town's dusty eyes
and increase Old England's reputation for pre-eminence in the Sports.

He is the husband of the Whitechapel Countess--got himself into that
mess; but whatever he does, he puts the stamp of style on it. He and the
thing he sets his hand to, they're neat, they're finished, they're fitted
to trot together, and they've a shining polish, natural, like a lily of
the fields; or say Nature and Art, like the coat of a thoroughbred led
into the paddock by his groom, if you're of that mind.

Present at the start in Piccadilly, Gower took note of Lord Fleetwood's
military promptitude to do the work he had no taste for, and envied the
self-compression which could assume so pleasant an air. He heard here and
there crisp comments on his lordship's coach and horses and personal
smartness; the word 'style,' which reflects handsomely on the connoisseur
conferring it, and the question whether one of the ladies up there was
the countess. His task of unearthing and disentangling the monetary
affairs of 'one of the ladies' compelled the wish to belong to the party
soon to be towering out of the grasp of bricks, and delightfully gay,
spirited, quick for fun. A fellow, he thought, may brood upon Nature, but
the real children of Nature--or she loves them best--are those who have
the careless chatter, the ready laugh, bright welcome for a holiday. In
catching the hour, we are surely the bloom of the hour? Why, yes, and no
need to lose the rosy wisdom of the children when we wrap ourselves in
the patched old cloak of the man's.

On he went to his conclusions; but the Dame will have none of them,
though here was a creature bent on masonry-work in his act of thinking,
to build a traveller's-rest for thinkers behind him; while the volatile
were simply breaking their bubbles.

He was discontented all day, both with himself and the sentences he
coined. A small street-boy at his run along the pavement nowhither,
distanced him altogether in the race for the great Secret; precipitating
the thought, that the conscious are too heavily handicapped. The
unburdened unconscious win the goal. Ay, but they leave no legacy. So we
must fret and stew, and look into ourselves, and seize the brute and
scourge him, just to make one serviceable step forward: that is, utter a
single sentence worth the pondering for guidance.

Gower imagined the fun upon middle Thames: the vulcan face of Captain
Abrane; the cries of his backers, the smiles of the ladies, Lord
Fleetwood's happy style in the teeth of tattlean Aurora's chariot for
overriding it. One might hope, might almost see, that he was coming to
his better senses on a certain subject. As for style overriding the worst
of indignities, has not Scotia given her poet to the slack dependant of
the gallows-tree, who so rantingly played his jig and wheeled it round in
the shadow of that institution? Style was his, he hit on the right style
to top the situation, and perpetually will he slip his head out of the
noose to dance the poet's verse.

In fact, style is the mantle of greatness; and say that the greatness is
beyond our reach, we may at least pray to have the mantle.

Strangest of fancies, most unphilosophically, Gower conceived a woman's
love as that which would bestow the gift upon a man so bare of it as he.
Where was the woman? He embraced the idea of the sex, and found it
resolving to a form of one. He stood humbly before the one, and she waned
into swarms of her sisters. So did she charge him with the loving of her
sex, not her. And could it be denied, if he wanted a woman's love just to
give him a style? No, not that, but to make him feel proud of himself.
That was the heart's way of telling him a secret in owning to a weakness.
Within it the one he had thought of forthwith obtained her lodgement. He
discovered this truth, in this roundabout way, and knew it a truth by the
warm fireside glow the contemplation of her cast over him.

Dining alone, as he usually had to do, he was astonished to see the earl
enter his room.

'Ah, you always make the right choice!' Fleetwood said, and requested him
to come to the library when he had done eating.

Gower imagined an accident. A metallic ring was in the earl's voice.

One further mouthful finished dinner, for Gower was anxious concerning
the ladies. He joined the earl and asked.

'Safe. Oh yes. We managed to keep it from them,' said Fleetwood. 'Nothing
particular, perhaps you'll think. Poor devil of a fellow! Father and
mother alive, too! He did it out of hearing, that 'a one merit. Mallard:
Ambrose Mallard. He has blown his brains out.'

Seated plunged in the armchair, with stretched legs and eyes at the black
fire-grate, Fleetwood told of the gathering under the tent, and Mallard
seen, seen drinking champagne; Mallard no longer seen, not missed.

'He killed himself three fields off. He must have been careful to deaden
the sound. Small pocket-pistol hardly big enough to--but anything serves.
Couple of brats came running up to Chummy Potts:--"Gentleman's body
bloody in a ditch." Chummy came to me, and we went. Clean dead;--in the
mouth, pointed up; hole through the top of the skull. We're crockery!
crockery! I had to keep Chummy standing. I couldn't bring him back to our
party. We got help at a farm; the body lies there. And that's not the
worst. We found a letter to me in his pocket pencilled his last five
minutes. I don't see what he could have done except to go. I can't tell
you more. I had to keep my face, rowing and driving back. "But where is
Mr. Potts? Where can Mr. Mallard be?" Queer sensation, to hear the ladies
ask! Give me your hand.'

The earl squeezed Gower's hand an instant; and it was an act unknown for
him to touch or bear a touch; it said a great deal.

Late at night he mounted to Gower's room. The funeral of the day's
impressions had not been skaken off. He kicked at it and sunk under it as
his talk rambled. 'Add five thousand,' he commented, on the spread of
Livia's papers over the table. 'I've been having an hour with her. Two
thousand more, she says. Better multiply by two and a half for a woman's
confession. We have to trust to her for some of the debts of honour. See
her in the morning. No one masters her but you. Mind, the first to be
clear of must be St. Ombre. I like the fellow; but these Frenchmen--they
don't spare women. Ambrose,'--the earl's eyelids quivered. 'Jealousy
fired that shot. Quite groundless. She 's cool as a marble Venus, as you
said. Go straight from her house to Esslemont. I don't plead a case. Make
the best account you can of it. Say--you may say my eyes are opened. I
respect her. If you think that says little, say more. It can't mean more.
Whatever the Countess of Fleetwood may think due to her, let her name it.
Say my view of life, way of life, everything in me, has changed. I shall
follow you. I don't expect to march over the ground. She has a heap to
forgive. Her father owns or boasts, in that book of his Rose Mackrell
lent me, he never forgave an injury.'

Gower helped the quotation, rubbing his hands over it, for cover of his
glee at the words he had been hearing. 'Never forgave an injury without a
return blow for it. The blow forgives. Good for the enemy to get it. He
called his hearty old Pagan custom "an action of the lungs" with him. And
it's not in nature for injuries to digest in us. They poison the blood,
if we try. But then, there's a manner of hitting back. It is not to go an
inch beyond the exact measure, Captain Kirby warns us.'

Fleetwood sighed down to a low groan.

'Lord Feltre would have an answer for you. She's a wife; and a wife
hitting back is not a pleasant--well, petticoats make the difference. If
she's for amends, she shall exact them; and she may be hard to satisfy,
she shall have her full revenge. Call it by any other term you like. I
did her a wrong. I don't defend myself; it 's not yet in the Law Courts.
I beg to wipe it out, rectify it--choose your phrase--to the very
fullest. I look for the alliance with her to . . .'

He sprang up and traversed the room: 'We're all guilty of mistakes at
starting: I speak of men. Women are protected; and if they're not,
there's the convent for them, Feltre says. But a man has to live it on
before the world; and this life, with these flies of fellows . . . I fell
into it in some way. Absolutely like the first bird I shot as a
youngster, and stood over the battered head and bloody feathers,
wondering! There was Ambrose Mallard--the same splintered
bones--blood--come to his end; and for a woman; that woman the lady
bearing the title of half-mother to me. God help me! What are my sins?
She feels nothing, or about as much as the mortuary paragraph of the
newspapers, for the dead man; and I have Ambrose Mallard's look at her
and St. Ombre talking together, before he left the tent to cross the
fields. Borrow, beg, or steal for money to play for her! and not a
glimpse of the winning post.

St. Ombre 's a cool player; that 's at the bottom of the story. He's cool
because play doesn't bite him, as it did Ambrose. I should say the other
passion has never bitten him. And he's alive and presentable; Ambrose
under a sheet, with Chummy Potts to watch. Chummy cried like a brat in
the street for his lost mammy. I left him crying and sobbing. They have
their feelings, these "children of vapour," as you call them. But how did
I fall into the line with a set I despised? She had my opinion of her
gamblers, and retorted that young Cressett's turn for the fling is my
doing. I can't swear it's not. There's one of my sins. What's to wipe
them out! She has a tender feeling for the boy; confessed she wanted
governing. Why; she's young, in a way. She has that particular vice of
play. She might be managed. Here's a lesson for her! Don't you think she
might? The right man,--the man she can respect, fancy incorruptible! He
must let her see he has an eye for tricks. She's not responsible for--his
mad passion was the cause, cause of everything he did. The kind of woman
to send the shaft. You called her "Diana seated." You said, "She doesn't
hunt, she sits and lets fly her arrow." Well, she showed feeling for
young Cressett, and her hit at me was an answer. It struck me on the
mouth. But she's an eternal anxiety. A man she respects! A man to govern
her!'

Fleetwood hurried his paces. 'I couldn't have allowed poor Ambrose.
Besides, he had not a chance--never had in anything. It wants a head,
wants the man who can say no to her. "The Reveller's Aurora," you called
her. She has her beauty, yes. She respects you. I should be relieved--a
load off me! Tell her, all debts paid; fifty thousand invested, in her
name and her husband's. Tell her, speak it, there's my consent--if only
the man to govern her! She has it from me, but repeat it, as from me.
That sum and her portion would make a fair income for the two. Relieved?
By heaven, what a relief! Go early. Coach to Esslemont at eleven. Do my
work there. I haven't to repeat my directions. I shall present myself two
days after. I wish Lady Fleetwood to do the part of hostess at Calesford.
Tell her I depute you to kiss my son for me. Now I leave you. Good-night.
I shan't sleep. I remember your saying, "bad visions come under the
eyelids." I shall keep mine open and read--read her father's book of the
Maxims; I generally find two or three at a dip to stimulate. No wonder
she venerates him. That sort of progenitor is your "permanent
aristocracy." Hard enemy. She must have some of her mother in her, too.
Abuse me to her, admit the justice of reproaches, but say, reason, good
feeling--I needn't grind at it. Say I respect her. Advise her to swallow
the injury--not intended for insult. I don't believe anything higher than
respect can be offered to a woman. No defence of me to her, but I'll tell
you, that when I undertook to keep my word with her, I plainly
said--never mind; good-night. If we meet in the morning, let this
business rest until it 's done. I must drive to help poor Chums and see
about the Inquest.'

Fleetwood nodded from the doorway. Gower was left with humming ears.




CHAPTER XL

RECORD OF MINOR INCIDENTS

They went to their beds doomed to lie and roam as the solitaries of a
sleepless night. They met next day like a couple emerging from sirocco
deserts, indisposed for conversation or even short companionship, much of
the night's dry turmoil in their heads. Each would have preferred the
sight of an enemy; and it was hardly concealed by them, for they inclined
to regard one another as the author of their infernal passage through the
drear night's wilderness.

Fleetwood was the civiller; his immediate prospective duties being clear,
however abhorrent. But he had inflicted a monstrous disturbance on the
man he meant in his rash, decisive way to elevate, if not benefit.
Gower's imagination, foreign to his desires and his projects, was playing
juggler's tricks with him, dramatizing upon hypotheses, which mounted in
stages and could pretend to be soberly conceivable, assuming that the
earl's wild hints overnight were a credible basis. He transported himself
to his first view of the Countess Livia, the fountain of similes born of
his prostrate adoration, close upon the invasion and capture of him by
the combined liqueurs in the giddy Batlen lights; and joining the Arabian
magic in his breast at the time with the more magical reality now
proposed as a sequel to it, he entered the land where dreams confess they
are outstripped by revelations.

Yet it startled him to hear the earl say: 'You'll get audience at ten;
I've arranged; make the most of the situation to her. I refuse to help. I
foresee it 's the only way of solving this precious puzzle. You do me and
every one of us a service past paying. Not a man of her set worth. . . .
She--but you'll stop it; no one else can. Of course, you've had your
breakfast. Off, and walk yourself into a talkative mood, as you tell me
you do.'

'One of the things I do when I've nobody to hear,' said Gower,
speculating whether the black sprite in this young nobleman was for
sending him as a rod to scourge the lady: an ingenious device, that smelt
of mediaeval Courts and tickled his humour.

'Will she listen?' he said gravely.

'She will listen; she has not to learn you admire. You admit she has
helped to trim and polish, and the rest. She declares you're
incorruptible. There's the ground open. I fling no single sovereign more
into that quicksand, and I want not one word further on the subject. I
follow you to Esslemont. Pray, go.'

Fleetwood pushed into the hall. A footman was ordered to pack and deposit
Mr. Woodseer's portmanteau at the coach-office.

'The principal point is to make sure we have all the obligations,' Gower
said.

'You know the principal point,' said the earl. 'Relieve me.'

He faced to the opening street door. Lord Feltre stood in the framing of
it--a welcome sight. The 'monastic man of fashion,' of Gower's phrase for
him, entered, crooning condolences, with a stretched waxen hand for his
friend, a partial nod for Nature's worshipper--inefficient at any serious
issue of our human affairs, as the earl would now discover.

Gower left the two young noblemen to their greetings. Happily for him,
philosophy, in the present instance, after a round of profundities,
turned her lantern upon the comic aspect of his errand. Considering the
Countess Livia, and himself, and the tyrant, who benevolently and
providentially, or sardonically, hurled them to their interview, the
situation was comic, certainly, in the sense of its being an illumination
of this life's odd developments. For thus had things come about, that if
it were possible even to think of the lady's condescending, he, thanks to
the fair one he would see before evening, was armed and proof against his
old infatuation or any renewal of it. And he had been taught to read
through the beautiful twilighted woman, as if she were burnt paper held
at the fire consuming her. His hopes hung elsewhere. Nevertheless, an
intellectual demon-imp very lively in his head urged him to speculate on
such a contest between them, and weigh the engaging forces. Difficulties
were perceived, the scornful laughter on her side was plainly heard; but
his feeling of savage mastery, far from beaten down, swelled so as to
become irritable for the trial; and when he was near her house he held a
review of every personal disadvantage he could summon, incited by an
array of limping deficiencies that flattered their arrogant leader with
ideas of the power he had in spite of them.

In fact, his emancipation from sentiment inspired the genial mood to
tease. Women, having to encounter a male adept at the weapon for the
purpose, must be either voluble or supportingly proud to keep the skin
from shrinking: which is a commencement of the retrogression; and that
has frequently been the beginning of a rout. Now the Countess Livia was a
lady of queenly pose and the servitorial conventional speech likely at a
push to prove beggarly. When once on a common platform with a man of
agile tongue instigated by his intellectual demon to pursue inquiries
into her moral resources, after a ruthless exposure of the wrecked
material, she would have to be, after the various fashions, defiant, if
she was to hold her own against pressure; and seeing, as she must, the
road of prudence point to conciliation, it was calculable that she would
take it. Hence a string of possible events, astounding to mankind, but
equally calculable, should one care to give imagination headway. Gower
looked signally Captain Abrane's 'fiddler' while he waited at Livia's
house door. A studious intimacy with such a lady was rather like the
exposure of the silver moon to the astronomer's telescope.

The Dame will have nought of an interview and colloquy not found
mentioned in her collection of ballads, concerning a person quite
secondary in Dr. Glossop's voluminous papers. She as vehemently prohibits
a narration of Gower Woodseer's proposal some hours later, for the hand
of the Countess of Fleetwood's transfixed maid Madge, because of the
insignificance of the couple; and though it was a quaint idyll of an
affection slowly formed, rationally based while seeming preposterous,
tending to bluntly funny utterances on both sides. The girl was a
creature of the enthusiasms, and had lifted that passion of her
constitution into higher than the worship of sheer physical bravery. She
had pitied Mr. Gower Woodseer for his apparently extreme, albeit
reverential, devotion to her mistress. The plainly worded terms of his
asking a young woman of her position and her reputation to marry him came
on her like an intrusion of dazzling day upon the closed eyelids of the
night, requiring time, and her mistress's consent, and his father's
expressed approval, before she could yield him an answer that might
appear a forgetfulness of her station, her ignorance, her damaged
character. Gower protested himself, with truth, a spotted pard, an
ignoramus, and an outcast of all established classes, as the worshipper
of Nature cannot well avoid being.

'But what is it you like me for, Mr. Gower?' Madge longed to know, that
she might see a way in the strange land where he had planted her after a
whirl; and he replied: 'I 've thought of you till I can say I love you
because you have naturally everything I shoot at.'

The vastness of the compliment drove her to think herself empty of
anything.

He named courage, and its offspring, honesty, and devotedness, constancy.
Her bosom rose at the word.

'Yes, constancy,' he repeated; and 'growing girls have to "turn corners,"
as you told me once.'

'I did?' said she, reddening under a memory, and abashed by his
recollection of a moment she knew to have been weak with her, or noisy of
herself.

Madge went straightway to her mistress and related her great event, in
the tone of a confession of crime. Her mistress's approbation was timidly
suggested rather than besought.

It came on a flood. Carinthia's eyes filled; she exclaimed: 'Oh, that
good man!--he chooses my Madge for wife. She said it, Rebecca said it.
Mrs. Wythan saw and said Mr. Woodseer loved my Madge. I hear her saying
it. Then yes, and yes, from me for both your sakes, dear girl. He will
have the faithfullest, he will have the kindest--Oh! and I shall know
there can be a happy marriage in England.'

She summoned Gower; she clasped his hand, to thank him for appreciating
her servant and sister, and for the happiness she had in hearing it; and
she gazed at him and the laden brows of her Madge alternately,
encouraging him to repeat his recital of his pecuniary means, for the
poetry of the fact it verified, feasting on the sketch of a four-roomed
cottage and an agricultural labourer's widow for cook and housemaid;
Madge to listen to his compositions of the day in the evening; Madge to
praise him, Madge to correct his vanity.

Love was out of the count, but Carinthia's leaping sympathy decorated the
baldness of the sketch and spied his features through the daubed mask he
chose to wear as a member of the order of husbands, without taking it for
his fun. Dry material statements presented the reality she doated to
think of. Moreover, the marriage of these two renewed her belief in true
marriages, and their intention to unite was evidence of love.

'My journey to England was worth all troubles for the meeting Madge,' she
said. 'I can look with pleasure to that day of my meeting her first--the
day, it was then!'

She stopped. Madge felt the quivering upward of a whimper to a sob in her
breast. She slipped away.

'It's a day that has come round to be repaired, Lady Fleetwood,' said
Gower. 'If you will. Will you not? He has had a blow--the death of a
friend, violent death. It has broken him. He wants a month or so in your
mountains. I have thought him hard to deal with; he is humane. His
enormous wealth has been his tempter. Madge and I will owe him our means
of livelihood, enough for cottagers, until I carve my way. His feelings
are much more independent of his rank than those of most noblemen. He
will repeat your kind words to Madge and me; I am sure of it. He has had
heavy burdens; he is young, hardly formed yet. He needs a helper; I mean,
one allied to him. You forgive me? I left him with a Catholic lord for
comforter, who regards my prescript of the study of Nature, when we're in
grief, as about the same as an offer of a dish of cold boiled greens.
Silver and ivory images are more consoling. Neither he nor I can offer
the right thing for Lord Fleetwood. It will be found here. And then your
mountains. More than I, nearly as much as you, he has a poet's ardour for
mountain land. He and Mr. Wythan would soon learn to understand one
another on that head, if not as to management of mines.'

The pleading was crafty, and it was penetrative in the avoidance of
stress. Carinthia shook herself to feel moved. The endeavour chilled her
to a notion that she was but half alive. She let the question approach
her, whether Chillon could pardon Lord Fleetwood. She, with no idea of
benignness, might speak pardon's word to him, on a late autumn evening
years hence, perhaps, or to his friends to-morrow, if he would
considerately keep distant. She was upheld by the thought of her
brother's more honourable likeness to their father, in the certainty of
his refusal to speak pardon's empty word or touch an offending hand,
without their father's warrant for the injury wiped out; and as she had
no wish for that to be done, she could anticipate his withholding of the
word.

For her brother at wrestle with his fallen fortunes was now the beating
heart of Carinthia's mind. Her husband was a shadow there. He did obscure
it, and he might annoy, he was unable to set it in motion. He sat there
somewhat like Youth's apprehension of Death:--the dark spot seen mistily
at times through people's tears, or visioned as in an ambush beyond the
hills; occasionally challenged to stimulate recklessness; oftener
overlooked, acknowledged for the undesired remote of life's conditions,
life's evil, fatal, ill-assorted yoke-fellow; and if it was in his power
to burst out of his corner and be terrible to her, she could bring up a
force unnamed and unmeasured, that being the blood of her father in her
veins. Having done her utmost to guard her babe, she said her prayers;
she stood for peace or the struggle.

'Does Lord Fleetwood speak of coming here?' she said.

'To-morrow.'

'I go to Croridge to-morrow.'

'Your ladyship returns?'

'Yes, I return Mr. Gower, you have fifty minutes before you dress for
dinner.'

He thought only of the exceeding charity of the intimation; and he may be
excused for his not seeing the feminine full answer it was, in an
implied, unmeditated contrast. He went gladly to find his new comrade,
his flower among grass-blades, the wonderful creature astonishing him and
surcharging his world by setting her face at him, opening her breast to
him, breathing a young man's word of words from a woman's mouth. His
flower among grass-blades for a head looking studiously down, she was his
fountain of wisdom as well, in the assurance she gave him of the wisdom
of his choice.

But Madge had put up the 'prize-fighter's lass,' by way of dolly defence,
to cover her amazed confusion when the proposal of this well-liked
gentleman to a girl such as she sounded churchy. He knocked it over
easily; it left, however, a bee at his ear and an itch to transfer the
buzzer's attentions and tease his darling; for she had betrayed herself
as right good game. Nor is there happier promise of life-long domestic
enlivenment for a prescient man of Letters than he has in the
contemplation of a pretty face showing the sensitiveness to the sting,
which is not allowed to poison her temper, and is short of fetching
tears. The dear innocent girl gave this pleasing promise; moreover, she
could be twisted-to laugh at herself, just a little. Now, the young woman
who can do that has already jumped the hedge into the highroad of
philosophy, and may become a philosopher's mate in its by-ways, where the
minute discoveries are the notable treasures.

They had their ramble, agreeable to both, despite the admonitory dose
administered to one of them. They might have been espied at a point or
two from across the parkpalings; their laughter would have caught an
outside pedestrian's hearing. Whatever the case, Owain Wythan, riding
down off Croridge, big with news of her brother for the countess, dined
at her table, and walking up the lane to the Esslemont Arms on a moonless
night, to mount his horse, pitched against an active and, as it was
deemed by Gower's observation of his eyes, a scientific fist. The design
to black them finely was attributable to the dyeing accuracy of the
stroke. A single blow had done it. Mr. Wythan's watch and purse were
untouched; and a second look at the swollen blind peepers led Gower to
surmise that they were, in the calculation of the striker, his own.

He walked next day to the Royal Sovereign inn. There he came upon the
earl driving his phaeton. Fleetwood jumped down, and Gower told of the
mysterious incident, as the chief thing he had to tell, not rendering it
so mysterious in his narrative style. He had the art of indicating
darkly.

'Ines, you mean?' Fleetwood cried, and he appeared as nauseated and
perplexed as he felt. Why should Ines assault Mr. Wythan? It happened
that the pugilist's patron had, within the last fifteen minutes, driven
past a certain thirty-acre meadow, sight of which on his way to Carinthia
had stirred him. He had even then an idea of his old deeds dogging him to
bind him, every one of them, the smallest.

'But you've nothing to go by,' he said. 'Why guess at this rascal more
than another?'

Gower quoted Mrs. Rundles and the ostler for witnesses to Kit's visit
yesterday to the Royal Sovereign, though Kit shunned the bar of the
Esslemont Arms.

'I guess pretty clearly, because I suspect he was hanging about and saw
me and Madge together.'

'Consolations for failures in town?--by the way, you are complimented,
and I don't think you deserved it. However, there was just the chance to
stop a run to perdition. But, Madge? Madge? I'd swear to the girl!'

'Not so hard as I,' said Gower, and spoke of the oath to come between the
girl and him.

Fleetwood's dive into the girl's eyes drew her before him. He checked a
spirt of exclamations.

'You fancy the brute had a crack for revenge and mistook his man?'

'That's what I want her ladyship to know,' said Gower.

'How could you let her hear of it?'

'Nothing can be concealed from her.'

The earl was impressionable to the remark, in his disgust at the
incident. It added a touch of a new kind of power to her image.

'She's aware of my coming?'

'To-day or to-morrow.'

They scaled the phaeton and drove.

'You undervalue Lord Feltre. You avoid your adversaries,' Fleetwood now
rebuked his hearer. 'It 's an easy way to have the pull of them in your
own mind. You might learn from him. He's willing for controversy.
Nature-worship--or "aboriginal genuflexion," he calls it; Anglicanism,
Methodism; he stands to engage them. It can't be doubted, that in days of
trouble he has a faith "stout as a rock, with an oracle in it," as he
says; and he's right, "men who go into battle require a rock to back them
or a staff to lean on." You have your "secret," you think; as far as I
can see, it's to keep you from going into any form of battle.'

The new influence at work on the young nobleman was evident, if only in
the language used.

Gower answered mildly: 'That can hardly be said of a man who's going to
marry.'

'Perhaps not. Lady Fleetwood is aware?'

'Lady Fleetwood does me the honour to approve my choice.'

'You mean, you're dead on to it with this girl?'

'For a year or more.'

'Fond of her?'

'All my heart.'

'In love!'

'Yes, in love. The proof of it is, I 've asked her now I can support her
as a cottager leaning on the Three Per Cents.'

'Well, it helps you to a human kind of talk. It carries out your
theories. I never disbelieved in your honesty. The wisdom's another
matter. Did you ever tell any one, that there's not an act of a man's
life lies dead behind him, but it is blessing or cursing him every step
he takes?'

'By that,' rejoined Gower, 'I can say Lord Feltre proves there's wisdom
in the truisms of devoutness.'

He thought the Catholic lord had gone a step or two to catch an eel.

Fleetwood was looking on the backward of his days, beholding a melancholy
sunset, with a grimace in it.

'Lord Feltre might show you the "leanness of Philosophy";--you would
learn from hearing him:--"an old gnawed bone for the dog that chooses to
be no better than a dog."'

'The vertiginous roast haunch is recommended,' Gower said.

'See a higher than your own head, good sir. But, hang the man! he manages
to hit on the thing he wants.' Fleetwood set his face at Gower with
cutting heartiness. 'In love, you say, and Madge: and mean it to be the
holy business! Well, poor old Chummy always gave you credit for knowing
how to play your game. She has given proof she 's a good girl. I don't
see why it shouldn't end well. That attack on the Welshman's the bad
lookout. Explained, if you like, but women's impressions won't get
explained away. We must down on our knees or they. Her ladyship attentive
at all to affairs of the house?'

'Every day with Queeney; at intervals with Leddings.'

'Excellent! You speak like a fellow recording the devout observances of a
great dame with her minor and superior, ecclesiastical comforters.
Regular at church?'

'Her ladyship goes.'

'A woman without religion, Gower Woodseer, is a weed on the water, or
she's hard as nails. We shall see. Generally, Madge and the youngster
parade the park at this hour. I drive round to the stables. Go in and
offer your version of that rascally dog's trick. It seems the nearest we
can come at. He's a sot, and drunken dogs 'll do anything. I've had him
on my hands, and I've got the stain of him.'

They trotted through Esslemont Park gates. 'I've got that place,
Calesford, on my hands, too,' the earl said, suddenly moved to a liking
for his Kentish home.

He and Gower were struck by a common thought of the extraordinary burdens
his indulgence in impulses drew upon him. Present circumstances pictured
to Gower the opposing weighed and matured good reason for his choosing
Madge, and he complimented himself in his pity for the earl. But
Fleetwood, as he reviewed a body of acquaintances perfectly free from the
wretched run in harness, though they had their fits and their whims, was
pushed to the conclusion that fatalism marked his particular course
through life. He could not hint at such an idea to the unsympathetic
fellow, or rather, the burly antagonist to anything of the sort, beside
him. Lord Feltre would have understood and appreciated it instantly.
Where is aid to be had if we have the Fates against us? Feltre knew the
Power, he said; was an example of 'the efficacy of supplications'; he had
been 'fatally driven to find the Power,' and had found it--on the road to
Rome, of course: not a delectable road for an English nobleman, except
that the noise of another convert in pilgrimage on it would deal our
English world a lively smack, the very stroke that heavy body wants. But
the figure of a 'monastic man of fashion' was antipathetic to the earl,
and he flouted an English Protestant mass merely because of his being
highly individual, and therefore revolutionary for the minority.

He cast his bitter cud aside. 'My man should have arrived. Lady Fleetwood
at home?'

Gower spoke of her having gone to Croridge in the morning.

'Has she taken the child?'

'She has, yes. For the air of the heights.'

'For greater security. Lady Arpington praises the thoughtful mother. I
rather expected to see the child.'

'They can't be much later,' Gower supposed.

'You don't feel your long separation from "the object"?'

Letting him have his cushion for pins, Gower said 'It needs all my
philosophy:

He was pricked and probed for the next five minutes; not bad rallying,
the earl could be smart when he smarted. Then they descended the terrace
to meet Lady Fleetwood driving her pony-trap. She gave a brief single nod
to the salute of her lord, quite in the town-lady's manner, surprisingly.




CHAPTER XLI

IN WHICH THE FATES ARE SEEN AND A CHOICE OF THE REFUGES FROM THEM

The home of husband and wife was under one roof at last. Fleetwood went,
like one deported, to his wing of the house, physically sensible, in the
back turned to his wife's along the corridor, that our ordinary
comparison for the division of a wedded twain is correct. She was Arctic,
and Antarctic he had to be, perforce of the distance she put between
them. A removal of either of them from life--or from 'the act of
breathing,' as Gower Woodseer's contempt of the talk about death would
call it--was an imaginable way of making it a wider division. Ambrose
Mallard was far enough from his fatal lady now--farther than the Poles
asunder. Ambrose, if the clergy will allow him, has found his peace. .
But the road and the means he chose were a madman's.

The blotting of our character, to close our troubles, is the final proof
of our being 'sons of vapour,' according to Gower Woodseer's heartless
term for poor Ambrose and the lot. They have their souls; and above
philosophy, 'natural' or unnatural, they may find a shelter. They can
show in their desperation that they are made of blood, as philosophers
rather fail of doing. An insignificant brainless creature like Feltre had
wits, by the aid of his religion, to help or be charitable to his
fellows, particularly the sinners, in the crisis of life, surpassing any
philosopher's.

Information of her ladyship's having inspected the apartments, to see to
the minutest of his customary luxuries, cut at him all round. His valet
had it from the footmen and maids; and their speaking of it meant a
liking for their mistress; and that liking, added to her official
solicitude on his behalf, touched a soft place in him and blew an icy
wind; he was frozen where he was warmed. Here was evidence of her
intending the division to be a fixed gap. She had entered this room and
looked about her. He was here to feel her presence in her absence.

Some one or something had schooled her, too. Her large-eyed directness of
gaze was the same as at that inn and in Wales, but her easy sedateness
was novel, her English, almost the tone of the English world: he gathered
it, at least, from the few remarks below stairs.

His desire to be with her was the desire to escape the phantasm of the
woman haunting to subjugate him when they were separate. He could kill
illusion by magnifying and clawing at her visible angles and audible
false notes; and he did it until his recollections joined to the sight of
her, when a clash of the thought of what she had been and the thought of
what she was had the effect of conjuring a bitter sweet image that was a
more seductive illusion. Strange to think, this woman once loved the man
who was not half the value of the man she no longer loved. He took a shot
at cynicism, but hit no mark. This woman protected her whole sex.

They sat at the dinner-table alone, thanks to a handsome wench's
attractions for a philosopher. Married, and parents of a lusty son, this
was their first sitting at table together. The mouth that said 'I guard
my rooms' was not obtruded; she talked passingly of her brother, much of
Lady Arpington and of old Mr. Woodseer; and, though she reserved a smile,
there was no look of a lock on her face. She seemed pleased to be treated
very courteously; she returned the stately politeness in exactest
measure; very simply, as well. Her face had now an air of homeliness,
well suited to an English household interior. She could chat. Any pauses
occurring, he was the one guilty of them; she did not allow them to be
barrier chasms, or 'strids' for the leap with effort; she crossed them
like the mountain maid over a gorge's plank--kept her tones perfectly.
Her Madge and Mr. Gower Woodseer made a conversible topic. She was
inquisitive for accounts of Spanish history and the land of Spain.

They passed into the drawing-room. She had heard of the fate of the poor
child in Wales, she said, without a comment.

'I see now, I ought to have backed your proposal,' he confessed, and was
near on shivering. She kept silent, proudly or regretfully.

Open on her workbasket was a Spanish guide-book and a map attached to it.
She listened to descriptions of Cadiz, Malaga, Seville, Granada. Her
curiosity was chiefly for detailed accounts of Catalonia and the
Pyrenees.

'Hardly the place for you; there's a perpetual heaving of Carlism in
those mountains; your own are quieter for travellers,' he remarked; and
for a moment her lips moved to some likeness of a smile; a dimple in a
flowing thought.

He remarked the come and go of it.

He regretted his inability to add to her knowledge of the Spanish
Pyrenees.

Books helped her at present, she said.

Feeling acutely that hostility would have brought them closer than her
uninviting civility, he spoke of the assault on Mr. Wythan, and Gower
Woodseer's conjecture, and of his having long since discharged the rascal
Ines.

To which her unreproachful answer, 'You made use of those men, my lord,'
sent a cry ringing through him, recalling Feltre's words, as to the grip
men progressively are held in by their deeds done.

'Oh, quite true, we change our views and ways of life,' he said, thinking
she might set her considerations on other points of his character. But
this reflection was a piece of humility not yet in his particular
estimate of his character, and he spurned it: an act of pride that drove
his mind, for occupation, to contemplate hers; which speedily became an
embrace of her character, until he was asking whether the woman he called
wife and dared not clasp was one of those rarest, who can be idealized by
virtue of their being known. For the young man embracing a character
loses grasp of his own, is plucked out of himself and passes into it, to
see the creature he is with the other's eyes, and feel for the other as a
very self. Such is the privilege and the chastisement of the young.

Gower Woodseer's engagement with the girl Madge was a happier subject for
expatiation and agreement. Her deeper tones threw a light on Gower, and
where she saw goodness, he could at least behold the natural philosopher
practically philosophizing.

'The girl shall have a dowry from me,' he said; and the sum named was
large. Her head bent acknowledgingly; money had small weight with her
now. His perception of it stripped him and lamed him.

He wished her ladyship good-night. She stood up and performed a
semi-ceremonious obeisance, neatly adapted to their mutual position. She
had a well-bred mother.

Probably she would sleep. No such expectation could soothe the friend,
and some might be thinking misleader, of Ambrose Mallard, before he had
ocular proof that the body lay underground. His promise was given to
follow it to the grave, a grave in consecrated earth. Ambrose died of the
accidental shot of a pocket-pistol he customarily carried loaded. Two
intimate associates of the dead man swore to that habit of his. They lied
to get him undisputed Christian burial. Aha! The earl laughed outright at
Chummy Potts's nursery qualms. The old fellow had to do it, and he lied
like a man for the sake of Ambrose Mallard's family. So much is owing to
our friend.

Can ecclesiastical casuists decide upon cases of conscience affecting men
of the world?

A council sat upon the case the whole night long. A committee of the
worldly held argumentation in a lower chamber.

These are nights that weaken us to below the level of women. A shuttle
worked in Fleetwood's head. He defended the men of the world. Lord Feltre
oiled them, damned them, kindled them to a terrific expiatory blaze, and
extinguishingly salved and wafted aloft the released essence of them.
Maniacal for argument, Fleetwood rejected the forgiveness of sins, if
sins they be. Prove them sins, and the suffering is of necessity
everlasting, his insomnia logic insisted. Whichever side he took, his
wife was against him; not in speech, but in her look. She was a dumb
figure among the wranglers, clouded up to the neck. Her look said she
knew more of him than they knew.

He departed next day for London, after kissing his child; and he would
have done wisely to abstain from his exhibition of the paternal. Knowing
it a step to conciliation, he checked his impulsive warmth, under the
apprehension that the mother would take it for a piece of acting to
propitiate--and his lips pecked the baby's cheek. Its mother held arms
for it immediately.

Not without reason did his heart denounce her as a mere mother, with
little of a mind to see.

The recent series of feverishly sleepless nights disposed him to snappish
irritability or the thirst for tenderness. Gower had singular experiences
of him on the drive North-westward. He scarcely spoke; he said once: 'If
you mean to marry, you'll be wanting to marry soon, of course,' and his
curt nod before the reply was formulated appeared to signify, the sooner
the better, and deliverance for both of us. Honest though he might, be
sometimes deep and sometimes picturesque, the philosopher's day had come
to an end. How can Philosophy minister to raw wounds, when we are in a
rageing gale of the vexations, battered to right and left! Religion has a
nourishing breast: Philosophy is breastless. Religion condones offences:
Philosophy has no forgiveness, is an untenanted confessional: 'wide air
to a cry in anguish,' Feltre says.

All the way to London Fleetwood endured his companion, letting him talk
when he would.

He spent the greater part of the night discussing human affairs and
spiritual with Lord Feltre, whose dialectical exhortations and
insinuations were of the feeblest, but to an isolated young man, yearning
for the tenderness of a woman thinking but of her grievances, the
ointment brought comfort.

It soothed him during his march to and away from Ambrose Mallard's grave;
where it seemed to him curious and even pitiable that Chumley Potts
should be so inconsolably shaken. Well, and if the priests have the
secret of strengthening the backbone for a bend of the knee in calamity,
why not go to the priests, Chummy? Potts's hearing was not addressed; nor
was the chief person in the meditation affected by a question that merely
jumped out of his perturbed interior.

Business at Calesford kept Fleetwood hanging about London several days
further; and his hatred of a place he wasted time and money to decorate
grew immeasurable. It distorted the features of the beautiful woman for
whose pleasure the grand entertainments to be held there had, somewhere
or other--when felon spectres were abroad over earth--been conceived.

He could then return to Esslemont. Gower was told kindly, with
intentional coldness, that he could take a seat in the phaeton if he
liked; and he liked, and took it. Anything to get to that girl of his!

Whatever the earl's inferiors did, their inferior station was not
suffered to discolour it for his judgement. But an increasing antagonism
to Woodseer's philosophy--which the fellow carried through with perpetual
scorings of satisfaction--caused him to set a hard eye on the damsel
under the grisly spotting shadow of the sottish bruiser, of whom, after
once touching the beast, he could not rub his hands clean; and he chose
to consider the winning of the prize-fighter's lass the final triumph or
flag on the apex of the now despised philosophy. Vain to ask how he had
come to be mixed up with the lot, or why the stolidly conceited,
pretentious fellow had seat here, as by right, beside him! We sow and we
reap; 'plant for sugar and taste the cane,' some one says--this Woodseer,
probably; he can, when it suits him, tickle the ears of the worldlings.
And there is worthier stuff to remember; stuff to nourish: Feltre's
'wisdom of our fathers,' rightly named Religion.

More in the country, when he traversed sweep and rise of open land,
Carinthia's image began to shine, and she threw some of her light on
Madge, who made Woodseer appear tolerable, sagacious, absurdly enviable,
as when we have the fit to wish we were some four-foot. The fellow's
philosophy wore a look of practical craft.

He was going to the girl he liked, and she was, one could swear, an
honest girl; and she was a comely girl, a girl to stick to a man. Her
throwing over a sot was creditable. Her mistress loved her. That said
much for any mortal creature. Man or woman loved by Carinthia could not
be cowardly, could not be vile, must have high qualities. Next to
Religion, she stood for a test of us. Had she any strong sense of
Religion, in addition to the formal trooping to one of their pallid
Protestant churches? Lord Feltre might prove useful to her. For merely
the comprehension of the signification of Religion steadies us. It had
done that for him, the earl owned.

He broke a prolonged silence by remarking to Gower 'You haven't much to
say to-day'; and the answer was 'Very little. When I'm walking, I'm
picking up; and when I'm driving, I'm putting together.'

Gower was rallied on the pursuit of the personal object in both cases. He
pointed at sheep, shepherd, farmer, over the hedge, all similarly
occupied; and admitted shamelessly, that he had not a thought for
company, scarce a word to fling. 'Ideas in gestation are the dullest
matter you can have.'

'There I quite agree with you,' said Fleetwood. Abrane, Chummy Potts,
Brailstone, little Corby, were brighter comrades. And these were his
Ixionides! Hitherto his carving of a way in the world had been
sufficiently ill-considered. Was it preferable to be a loutish
philosopher? Since the death of Ambrose Mallard, he felt Woodseer's title
for that crew grind harshly; and he tried to provoke a repetition of it,
that he might burst out in wrathful defence of his friends--to be named
friends when they were vilified: defence of poor Ambrose at least, the
sinner who, or one as bad, might have reached to pardon through the
priesthood.

Gower offered him no chance..

Entering Esslemont air, Fleetwood tossed his black mood to the winds. She
breathed it. She was a mountain girl, and found it hard to forgive our
lowlands. She would learn tolerance, taking her flights at seasons. The
yacht, if she is anything of a sailor, may give her a taste of England's
pleasures. She will have a special allowance for distribution among old
Mr. Woodseer's people. As to the rest of the Countess of Fleetwood's
wishes, her family ranks with her husband's in claims of any kind on him.
There would be--she would require and had a right to demand--say, a warm
half-hour of explanations: he knew the tone for them, and so little did
he revolve it apprehensively, that his mind sprang beyond, to the hearing
from her mouth of her not intending further to 'guard her rooms.' How
quietly the words were spoken! There was a charm in the retrospect of her
mouth and manner. One of the rare women who never pout or attitudinize,
she could fling her glove gracefully--one might add, capturingly under
every aspect, she was a handsome belligerent. The words he had to combat
pleased his memory. Some good friend, Lady Arpington probably, had
instructed her in the art of dressing to match her colour.

Concerning himself, he made no stipulation, but he reflected on Lord
Feltre's likely estimate of her as a bit of a heathen. And it might be to
her advantage, were she and Feltre to have some conversations. Whatever
the faith, a faith should exist, for without the sentiment of religion, a
woman, he says, is where she was when she left the gates of Eden. A man
is not much farther. Feltre might have saved Ambrose Mallard. He is,
however, right in saying, that the woman with the sentiment of religion
in her bosom is a box of holy incense distinguishing her from all other
women. Empty of it, she is devil's bait. At best, she is a creature who
cannot overlook an injury, or must be exacting God knows what
humiliations before she signs the treaty.

Informed at the house that her ladyship had been staying up on Croridge
for the last two days, Fleetwood sent his hardest shot of the eyes at
Gower. Let her be absent: it was equal to the first move of war, and
absolved him from contemplated proposals to make amends. But the enforced
solitary companionship with this ruminator of a fellow set him asking
whether the godless dog he had picked up by the wayside was not incarnate
another of the sins he had to expiate. Day after day, almost hourly, some
new stroke fell on him. Why? Was he selected for persecution because he
was wealthy? The Fates were driving him in one direction, no doubt of
that.

This further black mood evaporated, and like a cessation of English
storm-weather bequeathed him gloom. Ashamed of the mood, he was
nevertheless directed by its final shadows to see the ruminating tramp in
Gower, and in Madge the prize-fighter's jilt: and round about Esslemont a
world eyeing an Earl of Fleetwood, who painted himself the man he was, or
was held to be, by getting together such a collection, from the daughter
of the Old Buccaneer to the ghastly corpse of Ambrose Mallard. Why,
clearly, wealth was the sole origin and agent of the mischief. With
somewhat less of it, he might have walked in his place among the nation's
elect, the 'herd of the gilt horns,' untroubled by ambitions and ideas.

Arriving thus far, he chanced to behold Gower and Madge walking over the
grounds near the western plantation, and he regretted the disappearance
of them, with the fellow talking hard into the girl's ear. Those two
could think he had been of some use. The man pretending to philosophical
depth was at any rate honest; one could swear to the honesty of the girl,
though she had been a reckless hussy. Their humble little hopes and means
to come to union approached, after a fashion, hymning at his ears. Those
two were pleasanter to look on than amorous lords and great ladies, who
are interesting only when they are wicked.

Four days of desolate wanderings over the estate were occupied chiefly in
his decreeing the fall of timber that obstructed views, and was the more
imperatively doomed for his bailiff's intercession. 'Sound wood' the
trees might be: they had to assist in defraying the expense of separate
establishments. A messenger to Queeney from Croridge then announced the
Countess's return 'for a couple of hours.' Queeney said it was the day
when her ladyship examined the weekly bills of the household. That was in
the early morning. The post brought my lord a letter from Countess Livia,
a most infrequent writer. She had his word to pay her debts; what next
was she for asking? He shrugged, opened the letter, and stared at the
half dozen lines. The signification of them rapped on his consciousness
of another heavy blow before he was perfectly intelligent.

All possible anticipation seemed here outdone: insomuch that he held
palpable evidence of the Fates at work to harass and drive him. She was
married to the young Earl of Cressett!'

Fleetwood printed the lines on his eyeballs. They were the politely
flowing feminine of a statement of the fact, which might have been in one
line. They flourished wantonly: they were deadly blunt. And of all men,
this youngster, who struck at him through her lips with the reproach,
that he had sped the good-looking little beast upon his road to
ruin:--perhaps to Ambrose Mallard's end!




CHAPTER XLII

THE RETARDED COURTSHIP

Carinthia reached Esslemont near noon. She came on foot, and had come
unaccompanied, stick in hand, her dress looped for the roads. Madge
bustled her shorter steps up the park beside her; Fleetwood met her on
the terrace.

'No one can be spared at Croridge,' she said. 'I go back before dark.'
Apology was not thought of; she seemed wound to the pitch.

He bowed; he led into the morning-room. 'The boy is at Croridge?'

'With me. He has his nurse. Madge was at home here more than there.'

'Why do you go back?'

'I am of use to my brother.'

'Forgive me--in what way?'

'He has enemies about him. They are the workmen of Lord Levellier. They
attacked Lekkatts the other night, and my uncle fired at them out of a
window and wounded a man. They have sworn they will be revenged. Mr.
Wythan is with my brother to protect him.'

'Two men, very well; they don't want, if there's danger, a woman's aid in
protecting him?'

She smiled, and her smile was like the hint of the steel blade an inch
out of sheath.

'My brother does not count me a weak woman.'

'Oh no! No one would think that,' Fleetwood said hurriedly and heartily.
'Least of all men, I, Carinthia. But you might be rash.'

'My brother knows me cautious.'

'Chillon?'

'It is my brother's name.'

'You used to call him by his name.

'I love his name.'

'Ah, well! I may be pardoned for wishing to hear what part you play
there.'

'I go the rounds with my brother.'

'Armed?'

'We carry arms.'

'Queer sight to see in England. But there are rascals in this country,
too.'

She was guilty of saying, though not pointedly: 'We do not hire
defenders.'

'In civilized lands . . .' he began and stopped 'You have Mr. Wythan?'

'Yes, we are three.'

'You call him, I think, Owain?'

'I do.'

'In your brother's hearing?'

'Yes, my lord; it would be in your hearing if you were near.'

'No harm, no doubt.'

'There is none.'

'But you will not call your brother Chillon to me.'

'You dislike the name.'

'I learn to like everything you do and say; and every person you like.'

'It is by Mr. Wythan's dead wife's request that I call him by his name.
He is our friend. He is a man to trust.'

'The situation . . .' Fleetwood hung swaying between the worldly view of
it and the white light of this woman's nature flashed on his emotion into
his mind. 'You shall be trusted for judging. If he is your friend, he is
my friend. I have missed the sight of our boy. You heard I was at
Esslemont?'

'I heard from Madge!'

'It is positive you must return to Croridge?'

'I must be with my brother, yes.'

'Your ladyship will permit me to conduct you.'

Her head assented. There was nothing to complain of, but he had not
gained a step.

The rule is, that when we have yielded initiative to a woman, we are
unable to recover it without uncivil bluster. So, therefore, women
dealing with gentlemen are allowed unreasonable advantages. He had never
granted it in colloquy or act to any woman but this one. Consequently, he
was to see, that if the gentleman in him was not put aside, the lady
would continue moving on lines of the independence he had likewise
yielded, or rather flung, to her. Unless, as a result, he besieged and
wooed his wife, his wife would hold on a course inclining constantly
farther from the union he desired. Yet how could he begin to woo her if
he saw no spark of womanly tenderness? He asked himself, because the
beginning of the wooing might be checked by the call on him for words of
repentance only just possible to conceive. Imagine them uttered, and she
has the initiative for life.

She would not have it, certainly, with a downright brute. But he was not
that. In an extremity of bitterness, he fished up a drowned old thought,
of all his torments being due to the impulsive half-brute he was. And
between the good and the bad in him, the sole point of strength was a
pride likely, as the smooth simplicity of her indifference showed him,
soon to be going down prostrate beneath her feet. Wholly a brute--well?
He had to say, that playing the perfect brute with any other woman he
would have his mastery. The summoning of an idea of personal power to
match this woman in a contest was an effort exhausting the idea.

They passed out of Esslemont gates together at that hour of the late
afternoon when South-westerly breezes, after a summer gale, drive their
huge white flocks over blue fields fresh as morning, on the march to pile
the crown of the sphere, and end a troubled day with grandeur. Up the
lane by the park they had open land to the heights of Croridge.

'Splendid clouds,' Fleetwood remarked.

She looked up, thinking of the happy long day's walk with her brother to
the Styrian Baths. Pleasure in the sight made her face shine superbly. 'A
flying Switzerland, Mr. Woodseer says,' she replied. 'England is
beautiful on days like these.--For walking, I think the English climate
very good.'

He dropped a murmur: 'It should suit so good a walker,' and burned to
compliment--her spirited easy stepping, and scorned himself for the
sycophancy it would be before they were on the common ground of a
restored understanding. But an approval of any of her acts threatened him
with enthusiasm for the whole of them, her person included; and a dam in
his breast had to keep back the flood.

'You quote Woodseer to me, Carinthia. I wish you knew Lord Feltre. He can
tell you of every cathedral, convent, and monastery in Europe and Syria.
Nature is well enough; she is, as he says, a savage. Men's works, acting
under divine direction to escape from that tangle, are better worthy of
study, perhaps. If one has done wrong, for example.'

'I could listen to him,' she said.

'You would not need--except, yes, one thing. Your father's book speaks of
not forgiving an injury.'

'My father does. He thinks it weakness to forgive an injury. Women do,
and are disgraced, they are thought slavish. My brother is much stronger
than I am. He is my father alive in that.'

'It is anti-Christian, some would think.'

'Let offending people go. He would not punish them. They may go where
they will be forgiven. For them our religion is a happy retreat; we are
glad they have it. My father and my brother say that injury forbids us to
be friends again. My father was injured by the English Admiralty: he
never forgave it; but he would have fought one of their ships and offered
his blood any day, if his country called to battle.'

'You have the same feeling, you mean.'

'I am a woman. I follow my brother, whatever he decides. It is not to say
he is the enemy of persons offending him; only that they have put the
division.'

'They repent?'

'If they do, they do well for themselves.'

'You would see them in sackcloth and ashes?'

'I would pray to be spared seeing them.'

'You can entirely forget--well, other moments, other feelings?'

'They may heighten the injury.'

'Carinthia, I should wish to speak plainly, if I could, and tell you....'

'You speak quite plainly, my lord.'

'You and I cannot be strangers or enemies.'

'We cannot be, I would not be. To be friends, we should be separate.'

'You say you are a woman; you have a heart, then?'--for, if not, what
have you? was added in the tone.

'My heart is my brother's,' she said.

'All your heart?'

'My heart is my brother's until one of us drops.'

'There is not another on earth beside your brother Chillon?'

'There is my child.'

The dwarf square tower of Croridge village church fronted them against
the sky, seen of both.

'You remember it,' he said; and she answered: 'I was married there.'

'You have not forgotten that injury, Carinthia?'

'I am a mother.'

'By all the saints! you hit hard. Justly. Not you. Our deeds are the hard
hitters. We learn when they begin to flagellate, stroke upon stroke!
Suppose we hold a costly thing in the hand and dash it to the ground--no
recovery of it, none! That must be what your father meant. I can't regret
you are a mother. We have a son, a bond. How can I describe the man I
was!' he muttered,--'possessed! sort of werewolf! You are my wife?'

'I was married to you, my lord.'

'It's a tie of a kind.'

'It binds me.'

'Obey, you said.'

'Obey it. I do.'

'You consider it holy?'

'My father and my mother spoke to me of the marriage-tie. I read the
service before I stood at the altar. It is holy. It is dreadful. I will
be true to it.'

'To your husband?'

'To his name, to his honour.'

'To the vow to live with him?'

'My husband broke that for me.'

'Carinthia, if he bids you, begs you to renew it? God knows what you may
save me from!'

'Pray to God. Do not beg of me, my lord. I have my brother and my little
son. No more of husband for me! God has given me a friend, too,--a man of
humble heart, my brother's friend, my dear Rebecca's husband. He can take
them from me: no one but God. See the splendid sky we have.'

With those words she barred the gates on him; at the same time she
bestowed the frank look of an amiable face brilliant in the lively red of
her exercise, in its bent-bow curve along the forehead, out of the line
of beauty, touching, as her voice was, to make an undertone of anguish
swell an ecstasy. So he felt it, for his mood was now the lover's. A
torture smote him, to find himself transported by that voice at his ear
to the scene of the young bride in thirty-acre meadow.

'I propose to call on Captain Kirby-Levellier tomorrow, Carinthia,' he
said. 'The name of his house?'

'My brother is not now any more in the English army,' she replied. 'He
has hired a furnished house named Stoneridge.'

'He will receive me, I presume?'

'My brother is a courteous gentleman, my lord.'

'Here is the church, and here we have to part for today. Do we?'

'Good-bye to you, my lord,' she said.

He took her hand and dropped the dead thing.

'Your idea is, to return to Esslemont some day or other?'

'For the present,' was her strange answer.

She bowed, she stepped on. On she sped, leaving him at the stammered
beginning of his appeal to her.

Their parting by the graveyard of the church that had united them was
what the world would class as curious. To him it was a further and a
well-marked stroke of the fatality pursuing him. He sauntered by the
graveyard wall until her figure slipped out of sight. It went like a
puffed candle, and still it haunted the corner where last seen. Her
vanishing seemed to say, that less of her belonged to him than the
phantom his eyes retained behind them somewhere.

There was in his pocket a memento of Ambrose Mallard, that the family had
given him at his request. He felt the lump. It had an answer for all
perplexities. It had been charged and emptied since it was in his
possession; and it could be charged again. The thing was a volume as big
as the world to study. For the touch of a finger, one could have its
entirely satisfying contents, and fly and be a raven of that night
wherein poor Ambrose wanders lost, but cured of human wounds.

He leaned on the churchyard wall, having the graves to the front of eyes
bent inward. They were Protestant graves, not so impressive to him as the
wreathed and gilt of those under dedication to Feltre's Madonna. But
whatever they were, they had ceased to nurse an injury or feel the pain
for having inflicted it. Their wrinkles had gone from them, whether of
anger or suffering. Ambrose Mallard lay as peaceful in consecrated
ground: and Chumley Potts would be unlikely to think that the helping to
lay Ambrose in his quiet last home would cost him a roasting until
priestly intercession availed. So Chummy continues a Protestant; dull
consciences can! But this is incomprehensible, that she, nursing her
injury, should be perfectly civil. She is a woman without emotion. She is
a woman full of emotion, one man knows. She ties him to her, to make him
feel the lash of his remorse. He feels it because of her casting him from
her--and so civilly. If this were a Catholic church, one might go in and
give the stained soul free way to get a cleansing. As it is, here are the
graves; the dead everywhere have their sanctity, even the heathen.

Fleetwood read the name of the family of Meek on several boards at the
head of the graves. Jonathan Meek died at the age of ninety-five. A
female Meek had eighty-nine years in this life. Ezra Meek gave up the
ghost prematurely, with a couplet, at eighty-one. A healthy spot,
Croridge, or there were virtues in the Meek family, he reflected, and had
a shudder that he did not trace to its cause, beyond an acknowledgement
of a desire for the warm smell of incense.




CHAPTER XLIII

ON THE ROAD TO THE ACT OF PENANCE

His customary wrestle with the night drove Lord Fleetwood in the
stillness of the hour after matins from his hated empty Esslemont up
again to the village of the long-lived people, enjoying the moist
earthiness of the air off the ironstone. He rode fasting, a good
preparatory state for the simple pleasures, which are virtually the Great
Nourisher's teats to her young. The earl was relieved of his dejection by
a sudden filling of his nostrils. Fat Esslemont underneath had no such
air. Except on the mornings of his walk over the Salzkammergut and Black
Forest regions, he had never consciously drawn that deep breath of the
satisfied rapture, charging the whole breast with thankfulness. Huntsmen
would know it, if the chase were not urgent to pull them at the tail of
the running beast. Once or twice on board his yacht he might have known
something like it, but the salt sea-breeze could not be disconnected from
his companion Lord Feltre, and a thought of Feltre swung vapour of
incense all about him. Breathing this air of the young sun's kiss of
earth, his invigoration repelled the seductions of the burnt Oriental
gums.

Besides, as he had told his friend, it was the sincerity of the Catholic
religion, not the seductiveness, that won him to a form of homage--the
bend of the head of a foreign observer at a midnight mass. Asceticism,
though it may not justify error, is a truth in itself, it is the essence
extracted of the scourge, flesh vanquished; and it stands apart from
controversy. Those monks of the forested mountain heights, rambling for
their herbs, know the blessedness to be found in mere breathing: a
neighbour readiness to yield the breath inspires it the more. For when we
do not dread our end, the sense of a free existence comes back to us: we
have the prized gift to infancy under the piloting of manhood. But before
we taste that happiness we must perform our penance; 'No living happiness
can be for the unclean,' as the holy father preached to his flock of the
monastery dispersing at matins.

Ay, but penance? penance? Is there not such a thing as the doing of
penance out of the Church, in the manly fashion? So to regain the right
to be numbered among the captains of the world's fighting men,
incontestably the best of comrades, whether or no they led away on a
cataract leap at the gates of life. Boldly to say we did a wrong will
clear our sky for a few shattering peals.

The penitential act means, youth put behind us, and a steady course
ahead. But, for the keeping of a steady course, men made of blood in the
walks of the world must be steadied. Say it plainly-mated. There is the
humiliating point of our human condition. We must have beside us and
close beside us the woman we have learned to respect; supposing ourselves
lucky enough to have found her; 'that required other scale of the human
balance,' as Woodseer calls her now he has got her, wiser than Lord
Feltre in reference to men and women. We get no balance without her. That
is apparently the positive law; and by reason of men's wretched
enslavement, it is the dance to dissolution when we have not honourable
union with women. Feltre's view of women sees the devilish or the
angelical; and to most men women are knaves or ninnies. Hence do we
behold rascals or imbeciles in the offspring of most men.

He embraced the respected woman's character, with the usual effect:--to
see with her sight; and she beheld a speckled creature of the
intermittent whims and moods and spites; the universal Patron, whose
ambition to be leader of his world made him handle foul brutes--corrupt
and cause their damnation, they retort, with curses, in their pangs. She
was expected to pardon the husband, who had not abstained from his
revenge on her for keeping him to the pledge of his word. And what a
revenge!--he had flung the world at her. She is consequently to be the
young bride she was on the memorable morning of the drive off these
heights of Croridge down to thirty-acre meadow! It must be a saint to
forgive such offences; and she is not one, she is deliciously not one,
neither a Genevieve nor a Griselda. He handed her the rod to chastise
him. Her exchange of Christian names with the Welshman would not do it;
she was too transparently sisterly, provincially simple; she was, in
fact, respected. Any whipping from her was child's play to him, on whom,
if he was to be made to suffer, the vision of the intense felicity of
austerest asceticism brought the sensation as bracingly as the Boreal
morning animates men of high blood in ice regions. She could but gently
sting, even if vindictive.

Along the heights, outside the village, some way below a turn of the road
to Lekkatts, a gentleman waved hand. The earl saluted with his whip, and
waited for him.

'Nothing wrong, Mr. Wythan?'

'Nothing to fear, my lord.'

'I get a trifle uneasy.'

'The countess will not leave her brother.'

A glow of his countess's friendliness for this open-faced,
prompt-speaking, good fellow of the faintly inky eyelids, and possibly
sheepish inclinations, melted Fleetwood. Our downright repentance of
misconduct toward a woman binds us at least to the tolerant recognition
of what poor scraps of consolement she may have picked up between then
and now--when we can stretch fist in flame to defy it on the oath of her
being a woman of honour.

The earl alighted and said: 'Her brother, I suspect, is the key of the
position.'

'He's worth it--she loves her brother,' said Mr. Wythan, betraying a
feature of his quick race, with whom the reflection upon a statement is
its lightning in advance.

Gratified by the instant apprehension of his meaning, Fleetwood
interpreted the Welshman's. 'I have to see the brother worthy of her
love. Can you tell me the hour likely to be convenient?'. . . . .

Mr. Wythan thought an appointment unnecessary which conveyed the
sufficient assurance of audience granted.

'You know her brother well, Mr. Wythan?'

'Know him as if I had known him for years. They both come to the mind as
faith comes--no saying how; one swears by them.'

Fleetwood eyed the Welsh gentleman, with an idea that he might readily do
the same by him.

Mr. Wythan's quarters were at the small village inn, whither he was on
his way to breakfast. The earl slipped an arm through the bridle reins
and walked beside him, listening to an account of the situation at
Lekkatts. It was that extraordinary complication of moves and checks
which presents in the main a knot, for the powers above to cut. A miserly
old lord withholds arrears of wages; his workmen strike at a critical
moment; his nephew, moved by common humanity, draws upon crippled
resources to supply their extremer needs, though they are ruining his
interests. They made one night a demonstration of the terrorizing sort
round Lekkatts, to give him a chorus; and the old lord fired at them out
of window and wounded a man. For that they vowed vengeance. All the new
gunpowder milled in Surrey was, for some purpose of his own, stored by
Lord Levellier on the alder island of the pond near his workshops, a
quarter of a mile below the house. They refused, whatever their object,
to let a pound of it be moved, at a time when at last the Government had
undertaken to submit it to experiments. And there they stood on ground
too strong for 'the Captain,' as they called him, to force, because of
the quantity stored at Lekkatts being largely beyond the amount under
cover of Lord Levellier's licence. The old lord was very ill, and he
declined to see a doctor, but obstinately kept from dying. His nephew had
to guard him and at the same time support an enemy having just cause of
complaint. This, however, his narrow means would not much longer permit
him to do. The alternative was then offered him of either siding
arbitrarily against the men and his conscience or of taking a course
'imprudent on the part of a presumptive heir,' Mr. Wythan said hurriedly
at the little inn's doorsteps.

'You make one of his lordship's guard?' said Fleetwood.

'The countess, her brother, and I, yes'

'Danger at all?'

'Not so much to fear while the countess is with us.'

'Fear is not a word for Carinthia.'

Her name on the earl's lips drew a keen shot of the eye from Mr. Wythan,
and he read the signification of the spoken name. 'You know what every
Cambrian living thinks of her, my lord.'

'She shall not have one friend the less for me.'

Fleetwood's hand was out for a good-bye, and the hand was grasped by one
who looked happy in doing it. He understood and trusted the man after
that, warmed in thinking how politic his impulses could be.

His intention of riding up to Croridge at noon to request his interview
with Mr. Kirby-Levellier was then stated.

'The key of the position, as you said,' Mr. Wythan remarked, not
proffering an opinion of it more than was expressed by a hearty, rosy
countenance, that had to win its way with the earl before excuse was
found for the venturesome repetition of his phrase.

Cantering back to that home of the loves of Gower Woodseer and Madge
Winch, the thought of his first act of penance done, without his feeling
the poorer for it, reconciled Fleetwood to the aspect of the hollow
place.

He could not stay beneath the roof. His task of breakfasting done, he was
off before the morning's delivery of letters, riding round the country
under Croridge, soon up there again. And Henrietta might be at home, he
was reminded by hearing band-music as he followed the directions to the
house named Stoneridge. The band consisted of eight wind instruments;
they played astonishingly well for itinerant musicians. By curious
chance, they were playing a selection from the Pirata; presently he heard
the notes to 'il mio tradito amor.' They had hit upon Henrietta's
favourite piece!

At the close of it he dismounted, flung the reins to his groom, and,
addressing a compliment to the leader, was deferentially saluted with a
'my lord.' Henrietta stood at the window, a servant held the door open
for him to enter; he went in, and the beautiful young woman welcomed him:
'Oh, my dear lord, you have given me such true delight! How very generous
of you!' He protested ignorance. She had seen him speak to the conductor
and receive the patron's homage; and who but he knew her adored of
operas, or would have had the benevolent impulse to think of solacing her
exile from music in the manner so sure of her taste! She was at her
loveliest: her features were one sweet bloom, as of the sunny flower
garden; and, touched to the heart by the music and the kindness, she
looked the look that kisses; innocently, he felt, feeling himself on the
same good ground while he could own he admired the honey creature, much
as an amateur may admire one of the pictures belonging to the nation.

'And you have come . . . ?' she said. 'We are to believe in happy
endings?'

He shrugged, as the modest man should, who says:

'If it depends on me'; but the words were firmly spoken and could be
credited.

'Janey is with her brother down at Lekkatts. Things are at a deadlock. A
spice of danger, enough to relieve the dulness; and where there is danger
Janey's at home.' Henrietta mimicked her Janey. 'Parades with her brother
at night; old military cap on her head; firearms primed; sings her
Austrian mountain songs or the Light Cavalry call, till it rings all day
in my ears--she has a thrilling contralto. You are not to think her wild,
my lord. She's for adventure or domesticity, "whichever the Fates
decree." She really is coming to the perfect tone.'

'Speak of her,' said the earl. 'She can't yet overlook . . . ?'

'It's in the family. She will overlook anything her brother excuses.'

'I'm here to see him.'

'I heard it from Mr. Wythan.'

'"Owain," I believe?'

Henrietta sketched apologies, with a sidled head, soft pout, wavy hand.
'He belongs to the order of primitive people. His wife--the same pattern,
one supposes--pledged them to their Christian names. The man is a
simpleton, but a gentleman; and Janey holds his dying wife's wish sacred.
We are all indebted to him.'

'Whatever she thinks right!' said Fleetwood.

The fair young woman's warm nature flew out to him on a sparkle of
grateful tenderness in return for his magnanimity, oblivious of the
inflamer it was: and her heart thanked him more warmly, without the
perilous show of emotion, when she found herself secure.

She was beautiful, she was tempting, and probably the weakest of players
in the ancient game of two; and clearly she was not disposed to the
outlaw game; was only a creature of ardour. That he could see, seeing the
misinterpretation a fellow like Brailstone would put upon a temporary
flush of the feminine, and the advantage he would take of it, perhaps not
unsuccessfully--the dog! He committed the absurdity of casting a mental
imprecation at the cunning tricksters of emotional women, and yelled at
himself in the worn old surplice of the converted rake. But letting his
mind run this way, the tradito amor of the band outside the lady's window
was instantly traced to Lord Brailstone; so convincingly, that he now
became a very counsel for an injured husband in denunciation of the
seductive compliment.

Henrietta prepared to conduct him to Lekkatts; her bonnet was brought.
She drew forth a letter from a silken work-bag, and raised it,--Livia's
handwriting. 'I 've written my opinion,' he said.

'Not too severe, pray.'

'Posted.'

'Livia wanted a protector.'

'And chose--what on earth are you saying!'

Livia and her boyish lord were abandoned on the spot, though Henrietta
could have affirmed stoutly that there was much to be pleaded, if a
female advocate dared it, and a man would but hear.

His fingers were at the leaves of a Spanish dictionary.

'Oh yes, and here we have a book of Travels in Spain,' she said.
'Everything Spanish for Janey now. You are aware?--no?'

He was unaware and desired to be told.

'Janey's latest idea; only she would have conceived the notion. You solve
our puzzle, my lord.'

She renewed the thanks she persisted in offering for the military music
now just ceasing: vexatiously, considering that it was bad policy for him
to be unmasking Brailstone to her. At the same time, the blindness which
rendered her unconscious of Brailstone's hand in sending members of a
military band to play selections from the favourite opera they had
jointly drunk of to ecstasy, was creditable; touching, when one thought
of the pursuer's many devices, not omitting some treason on the part of
her present friend.

'Tell me--I solve?' he said . . . .

Henrietta spied the donkey-basket bearing the two little ones.

'Yes, I hope so--on our way down,' she made answer. 'I want you to see
the pair of love-birds in a nest.'

The boy and girl were seen lying side by side, both fast asleep;
fair-haired girl, dark-haired boy, faced to one another.

'Temper?' said Fleetwood, when he had taken observation of them.

'Very imperious--Mr. Boy!' she replied, straightening her back under a
pretty frown, to convey the humour of the infant tyrant.

The father's mind ran swiftly on a comparison of the destinies of the two
children, from his estimate of their parents; many of Gower Woodseer's
dicta converging to reawaken thoughts upon Nature's laws, which a
knowledge of his own nature blackened. He had to persuade himself that
this child of his was issue of a loving union; he had to do it violently,
conjuring a vivid picture of the mother in bud, and his recognition of
her young charm; the pain of keeping to his resolve to quit her, lest she
should subjugate him and despoil him of his wrath; the fatalism in his
coming and going; the romantic freak it had been,--a situation then so
clearly wrought, now blurred past comprehension. But there must have been
love, or some love on his part. Otherwise he was bound to pray for the
mother to predominate in the child, all but excluding its father.

Carinthia's image, as a result, ascended sovereignty, and he hung to it.

For if we are human creatures with consciences, nothing is more certain
than that we make our taskmasters of those to whom we have done a wrong,
the philosopher says. Between Lord Feltre and Gower Woodseer, influenced
pretty equally by each of them, this young nobleman was wakening to the
claims of others--Youth's infant conscience. Fleetwood now conceived the
verbal supplication for his wife's forgiveness involved in the act of
penance; and verbal meant abject; with him, going so far, it would mean
naked, precise, no slurring. That he knew, and a tremor went over him.
Women, then, are really the half of the world in power as much as in
their number, if men pretend to a step above the savage. Or, well, his
wife was a power.

He had forgotten the puzzle spoken of by Henrietta, when she used the
word again and expressed her happiness in the prospect before
them--caused by his presence, of course.

'You are aware, my dear lord, Janey worships her brother. He was
defeated, by some dastardly contrivance, in a wager to do wonderful
feats--for money! money! money! a large stake. How we come off our high
horses! I hadn't an idea of money before I was married. I think of little
else. My husband has notions of honour; he engaged himself to pay a
legacy of debts; his uncle would not pay debts long due to him. He was
reduced to the shift of wagering on his great strength and skill. He
could have done it. His enemy managed--enemy there was! He had to sell
out of the army in consequence. I shall never have Janey's face of
suffering away from my sight. He is a soldier above all things. It seems
hard on me, but I cannot blame him for snatching at an opportunity to win
military distinction. He is in treaty for the post of aide to the
Colonel--the General of the English contingent bound for Spain, for the
cause of the Queen. My husband will undertake to be at the orders of his
chief as soon as he can leave this place. Janey goes with him, according
to present arrangements.'

Passing through a turnstile, that led from the road across a meadow-slope
to the, broken land below, Henrietta had view of the earl's hard white
face, and she hastened to say: 'You have altered that, my lord. She is
devoted to her brother; and her brother running dangers . . . and danger
in itself is an attraction to her. But her husband will have the first
claim. She has her good sense. She will never insist on going, if you
oppose. She will be ready to fill her station. It will be-her pride and
her pleasure.'

Henrietta continued in the vein of these assurances; and Carinthia's
character was shooting lightnings through him, withering that of the
woman who referred to his wife's good sense and her station; and
certainly would not have betrayed herself by such drawlings if she had
been very positive that Carinthia's disposition toward wealth and luxury
resembled hers. She knew the reverse; or so his contemptuously generous
effort to frame an apology for the stuff he was hearing considered it.
His wife was lost to him. That fact smote on his breast the moment he
heard of her desire to go with her brother.

Wildest of enterprises! But a criminal saw himself guilty of a large part
in the disaster the two heroical souls were striving desperately to
repair. If her Chillon went, Carinthia would go--sure as flame is drawn
to air. The exceeding splendour in the character of a young woman,
injured as she had been, soft to love, as he knew her, and giving her
husband no other rival than a beloved brother, no ground of complaint
save her devotion to her brother, pervaded him, without illuminating or
lifting; rather with an indication of a foul contrast, that prostrated
him.

Half of our funny heathen lives we are bent double to gather things we
have tossed away! was one of the numbers of apposite sayings that hummed
about him, for a chorus of the world's old wisdom in derision, when he
descended the heathy path and had sight of Carinthia beside her Chillon.
Would it be the same thing if he had it in hand again? Did he wish it to
be the same? Was not he another man? By the leap of his heart to the
woman standing down there, he was a better man.

But recent spiritual exercises brought him to see superstitiously how by
that sign she was lost to him; for everlastingly in this life the better
pays for the worse; thus is the better a proved thing.

Both Chillon and Carinthia, it is probable, might have been stirred to
deeper than compassion, had the proud young nobleman taken them into his
breast to the scouring of it; exposing the grounds of his former
brutality, his gradual enlightenment, his ultimate acknowledgement of the
pricelessness of the woman he had won to lose her. An imploring of
forgiveness would not have been necessary with those two, however great
their--or the woman's--astonishment at the revelation of an abysmal male
humanity. A complete exposure of past meanness is the deed of present
courage certain of its reward without as well as within; for then we show
our fellows that the slough is cast. But life is a continuous fight; and
members of the social world display its degree of civilization by
fighting in armour; most of them are born in it; and their armour is more
sensitive than their skins. It was Fleetwood's instinct of his inability
to fling it off utterly which warned him of his loss of the wife, whose
enthusiasm to wait on her brother in danger might have subsided into the
channel of duty, even tenderness, had he been able resolutely to strip
himself bare. This was the further impossible to him, because of a belief
he now imposed upon himself, to cover the cowardly shrinking from so
extreme a penitential act, that such confessions are due from men to the
priest only, and that he could confess wholly and absolutely to the
priest--to heaven, therefore, under seal, and in safety, but with perfect
repentance.

So, compelled to keep his inner self unknown, he fronted Chillon;
courteously, in the somewhat lofty seeming of a guarded manner, he
requested audience for a few minutes; observing the princely figure of
the once hated man, and understanding Henrietta's sheer womanly choice of
him; Carinthia's idolatry, too, as soon as he had spoken. The man was in
his voice.

Chillon said: 'It concerns my sister, I have to think. In that case, her
wish is to be present. Your lordship will shorten the number of minutes
for the interview by permitting it.'

Fleetwood encountered Carinthia's eyes. They did not entreat or defy.
They seconded her brother, and were a civil shining naught on her
husband. He bowed his head, constrained, feeling heavily the two to one.

She replied to the look: 'My brother and I have a single mind. We save
time by speaking three together, my lord.'

He was led into the long room of the workshop, where various patterns of
muskets, rifles, pistols, and swords were stars, crosses, wedges, over
the walls, and a varnished wooden model of a piece of cannon occupied the
middle place, on a block.

Contempt of military weapons and ridicule of the art of war were common
on those days among a people beginning to sit with habitual snugness at
the festive board provided for them by the valour of their fathers.
Fleetwood had not been on the side of the banqueting citizens, though his
country's journals and her feasted popular wits made a powerful current
to whelm opposition. But the appearance of the woman, his wife, here, her
head surrounded by destructive engines in the form of trophy, and the
knowledge that this woman bearing his name designed to be out at the
heels of a foreign army or tag-rag of uniformed rascals, inspired him to
reprobate men's bad old game as heartily as good sense does in the
abstract, and as derisively as it is the way with comfortable islanders
before the midnight trumpet-notes of panic have tumbled them to their
legs. He took his chair; sickened.

He was the next moment taking Carinthia's impression of Chillon,
compelled to it by an admiration that men and women have alike for shapes
of strength in the mould of grace, over whose firm build a flicker of
agility seems to run. For the young soldier's figure was visibly in its
repose prompt to action as the mind's movement. This was her brother; her
enthusiasm for her brother was explained to him. No sooner did he have
the conception of it than it plucked at him painfully; and, feeling
himself physically eclipsed by the object of Carinthia's enthusiasm, his
pride of the rival counselled him to preserve the mask on what was going
on within, lest it should be seen that he was also morally beaten at the
outset. A trained observation told him, moreover, that her Chillon's
correctly handsome features, despite their conventional urbanity, could
knit to smite, and held less of the reserves of mercy behind them than
Carinthia's glorious barbaric ruggedness. Her eyes, each time she looked
at her brother, had, without doating, the light as of the rise of happy
tears to the underlids as they had on a certain day at the altar, when
'my lord' was 'my husband,'--more shyly then. He would have said, as
beautifully, but for envy of the frank, pellucid worship in that look on
her proved hero. It was the jewel of all the earth to win back to
himself; and it subjected him, through his desire for it, to a
measurement with her idol, in character, quality, strength, hardness. He
heard the couple pronouncing sentence of his loss by anticipation.

Why had she primed her brother to propose the council of three?
Addressing them separately, he could have been his better or truer self.
The sensation of the check imposed on him was instructive as to her craft
and the direction of her wishes. She preferred the braving of hazards and
horrors beside her brother, in scorn of the advantages he could offer;
and he yearned to her for despising by comparison the bribe he proposed
in the hope that he might win her to him. She was with religion to let
him know the meanness of wealth.

Thus, at the edge of the debate, or contest, the young lord's essential
nobility disarmed him; and the revealing of it, which would have appealed
to Carinthia and Chillon both, was forbidden by its constituent pride,
which helped him to live and stood obstructing explanatory speech.




CHAPTER XLIV

BETWEEN THE EARL, THE COUNTESS AND HER BROTHER, AND OF A SILVER CROSS

Carinthia was pleased by hearing Lord Fleetwood say to her: 'Your Madge
and my Gower are waiting to have the day named for them.'

She said: 'I respect him so much for his choice of Madge. They shall not
wait, if I am to decide.'

'Old Mr. Woodseer has undertaken to join them.'

'It is in Whitechapel they will be married.'

The blow that struck was not intended, and Fleetwood passed it, under her
brother's judicial eye. Any small chance word may carry a sting for the
neophyte in penitence.

'My lawyers will send down the settlement on her, to be read to them
to-day or to-morrow. With the interest on that and the sum he tells me he
has in the Funds, they keep the wolf from the door--a cottage door. They
have their cottage. There's an old song of love in a cottage. His liking
for it makes him seem wiser than his clever sayings. He'll work in that
cottage.'

'They have a good friend to them in you, my lord. It will not be poverty
for their simple wants. I hear of the little cottage in Surrey where they
are to lodge at first, before they take one of their own.'

'We will visit them.'

'When I am in England I shall visit them often.'

He submitted.

'The man up here wounded is recovering?'

'Yes, my lord. I am learning to nurse the wounded, with the surgeon to
direct me.'

'Matters are sobering down?--The workmen?'

'They listen to reason so willingly when we speak personally, we find.'

The earl addressed Chillon. 'Your project of a Spanish expedition reminds
me of favourable reports of your chief.'

'Thoroughly able and up to the work,' Chillon answered.

'Queer people to meddle with.'

'We 're on the right side on the dispute.'

'It counts, Napoleon says. A Spanish civil war promises bloody doings.'

'Any war does that.'

'In the Peninsula it's war to the knife, a merciless business.'

'Good schooling for the profession.'

Fleetwood glanced: she was collected and attentive. 'I hear from Mrs.
Levellier that Carinthia would like to be your companion.'

'My sister has the making of a serviceable hospital nurse.'

'You hear the chatter of London!'

'I have heard it.'

'You encourage her, Mr. Levellier?'

'She will be useful--better there than here, my lord.'

'I claim a part in the consultation.'

'There 's no consultation; she determines to go.'

'We can advise her of all the risks.'

'She has weighed them, every one.'

'In the event of accidents, the responsibility for having persuaded her
would rest on you.'

'My brother has not persuaded me,' Carinthia's belltones intervened. 'I
proposed it. The persuasion was mine. It is my happiness to be near him,
helping, if I can.'

'Lady Fleetwood, I am entitled to think that your brother yielded to a
request urged in ignorance of the nature of the risks a woman runs.'

'My brother does not yield to a request without examining it all round,
my lord, and I do not. I know the risks. An evil that we should not
endure,--life may go. There can be no fear for me.'

She spoke plain truth. The soul of this woman came out in its radiance to
subdue him, as her visage sometimes did; and her voice enlarged her
words. She was a warrior woman, Life her sword, Death her target, never
to be put to shame, unconquerable. No such symbolical image smote him,
but he had an impression, the prose of it. As in the scene of the miners'
cottares, her lord could have knelt to her: and for an unprotesting
longer space now. He choked a sigh, shrugged, and said, in the world's
patient manner with mad people: 'You have set your mind on it; you see it
rose-coloured. You would not fear, no, but your friends would have good
reason to fear. It's a menagerie in revolt over there. It is not really
the place for you. Abandon the thought, I beg.'

'I shall, if my brother does not go,' said Carinthia.

Laughter of spite at a remark either silly or slyly defiant was checked
in Fleetwood by the horror of the feeling that she had gone, was
ankle-deep in bloody mire, captive, prey of a rabble soldiery, meditating
the shot or stab of the blessed end out of woman's half of our human
muddle.

He said to Chillon: 'Pardon me, war is a detestable game. Women in the
thick of it add a touch to the brutal hideousness of the whole thing.'

Chillon said: 'We are all of that opinion. Men have to play the game;
women serving in hospital make it humaner.'

'Their hospitals are not safe.'

'Well! Safety!'

For safety is nowhere to be had. But the earl pleaded: 'At least in our
country.'

'In our country women are safe?'

'They are, we may say, protected.'

'Laws and constables are poor protection for them.'

'The women we name ladies are pretty safe, as a rule.'

'My sister, then, was the exception.'

After a burning half minute the earl said: 'I have to hear it from you,
Mr. Levellier. You see me here.'

That was handsomely spoken. But Lord Fleetwood had been judged and put
aside. His opening of an old case to hint at repentance for brutality
annoyed the man who had let him go scathless for a sister's sake.

'The grounds of your coming, my lord, are not seen; my time is short.'

'I must, I repeat, be consulted with regard to Lady Fleetwood's
movements.'

'My sister does not acknowledge your claim.'

'The Countess of Fleetwood's acts involve her husband.'

'One has to listen at times to what old sailors call Caribbee!' Chillon
exclaimed impatiently, half aloud. 'My sister received your title; she
has to support it. She did not receive the treatment of a wife:--or lady,
or woman, or domestic animal. The bond is broken, as far as it bears on
her subjection. She holds to the rite, thinks it sacred. You can be at
rest as to her behaviour. In other respects, your lordship does not exist
for her.'

'The father of her child must exist for her.'

'You raise that curtain, my lord!'

In the presence of three it would not bear a shaking.

Carinthia said, in pity of his torture:--

'I have my freedom, and am thankful for it, to follow my brother, to
share his dangers with him. That is more to me than luxury and the
married state. I take only my freedom.'

'Our boy? You take the boy?'

'My child is with my sister Henrietta!

'Where?'

'We none know yet.'

'You still mistrust me?'

Her eyes were on a man that she had put from her peaceably; and she
replied, with sweetness in his ears, with shocks to a sinking heart, 'My
lord, you may learn to be a gentle father to the child. I pray you may.
My brother and I will go. If it is death for us, I pray my child may have
his father, and God directing his father.'

Her speech had the clang of the final.

'Yes, I hope--if it be the worst happening, I pray, too,' said he, and
drooped and brightened desperately: 'But you, too, Carinthia, you could
aid by staying, by being with the boy and me. Carinthia!' he clasped her
name, the vapour left to him of her: 'I have learnt learnt what I am,
what you are; I have to climb a height to win back the wife I threw away.
She was unknown to me; I to myself nearly as much. I sent a warning of
the kind of husband for you--a poor kind; I just knew myself well enough
for that. You claimed my word--the blessing of my life, if I had known
it! We were married; I played--I see the beast I played. Money is power,
they say. I see the means it is to damn the soul, unless we--unless a man
does what I do now.'

Fleetwood stopped. He had never spoken such words--arterial words, as
they were, though the commonest, and with moist brows, dry lips, he could
have resumed, have said more, have taken this woman, this dream of the
former bride, the present stranger, into his chamber of the brave aims
and sentenced deeds. Her brother in the room was the barrier; and she sat
mute, large-eyed, expressionless. He had plunged low in the man's
hearing; the air of his lungs was thick, hard to breathe, for shame of a
degradation so extreme.

Chillon imagined him to be sighing. He had to listen further. 'Soul' had
been an uttered word. When the dishonouring and mishandling brute of a
young nobleman stuttered a compliment to Carinthia on her 'faith in God's
assistance and the efficacy of prayer,' he jumped to his legs, not to be
shouting 'Hound!' at him. He said, under control: 'God's name shall be
left to the Church. My sister need not be further troubled. She has shown
she is not persuaded by me. Matters arranged here quickly,--we start. If
I am asked whether I think she does wisely to run the risks in an
insurrectionary country rather than remain at home exposed to the honours
and amusements your lordship offers, I think so; she is acting in her
best interests. She has the choice of being abroad with me or staying
here unguarded by me. She has had her experience. She chooses rightly.
Paint the risks she runs, you lay the colours on those she escapes.' She
thanks the treatment she has undergone for her freedom to choose. I am
responsible for nothing but the not having stood against her most
wretched marriage. It might have been foreseen. Out there in the war she
is protected. Here she is with--I spare your lordship the name.'

Fleetwood would have heard harsher had he not been Carinthia's husband.
He withheld his reply. The language moved him to proud hostility: but the
speaker was Carinthia's brother.

He said to her: 'You won't forget Gower and Madge?'

She gave him a smile in saying: 'It shall be settled for a day after next
week.'

The forms of courtesy were exchanged.

At the closing of the door on him, Chillon said: 'He did send a message:
I gathered it--without the words--from our Uncle Griphard. I thought him
in honour bound to you--and it suited me that I should.'

'I was a blindfold girl, dearest; no warning would have given me sight,'
said Carinthia. 'That was my treachery to the love of my brother. . I
dream of father and mother reproaching me.'

The misery of her time in England had darkened her mind's picture of the
early hour with Chillon on the heights above the forsaken old home; and
the enthusiasm of her renewed devotion to her brother giving it again, as
no light of a lost Eden, as the brilliant step she was taking with him
from their morning Eastern Alps to smoky-crimson Pyrenees and Spanish
Sierras; she could imagine the cavernous interval her punishment for
having abandoned a sister's duties in the quest of personal happiness.

But simultaneously, the growing force of her mind's intelligence, wherein
was no enthusiasm to misdirect by overcolouring, enabled her to gather
more than a suspicion of comparative feebleness in the man stripped of
his terrors. She penetrated the discrowned tyrant's nature some distance,
deep enough to be quit of her foregoing alarms. These, combined with his
assured high style, had woven him the magical coat, threadbare to quiet
scrutiny. She matched him beside her brother. The dwarfed object was then
observed; and it was not for a woman to measure herself beside him. She
came, however, of a powerful blood, and he was pressing her back on her
resources: without the measurement or a thought of it, she did that which
is the most ordinary and the least noticed of our daily acts in civilized
intercourse, she subjected him to the trial of the elements composing
him, by collision with what she felt of her own; and it was because she
felt them strongly, aware of her feeling them, but unaware of any
conflict, that the wrestle occurred. She flung him, pitied him, and
passed on along her path elsewhere. This can be done when love is gone.
It is done more or less at any meeting of men and men; and men and women
who love not are perpetually doing it, unconsciously or sensibly. Even in
their love, a time for the trial arrives among certain of them; and the
leadership is assumed, and submission ensues, tacitly; nothing of the
contention being spoken, perhaps, nothing definitely known.

In Carinthia's case, her revived enthusiasm for her brother drove to the
penetration of the husband pleading to thwart its course. His offer was
wealth: that is, luxury, amusement, ease. The sub-audible 'himself' into
the bargain was disregarded, not counting with one who was an upward rush
of fire at the thought that she was called to share her brother's
dangers.

Chillon cordially believed the earl to be the pestilent half madman,
junction with whom is a constant trepidation for the wife, when it is not
a screaming plight. He said so, and Carinthia let him retain his opinion.
She would have said it herself to support her scheme, though 'mad'
applied to a man moving in the world with other men was not understood by
her.

With Henrietta for the earl's advocate, she was patient as the deaf
rock-wall enthusiam can be against entreaties to change its direction or
bid it disperse: The 'private band of picked musicians' at the disposal
of the Countess of Fleetwood, and Opera singers (Henrietta mentioned
resonant names) hired for wonderful nights at Esslemont and Calesford or
on board the earl's beautiful schooner yacht, were no temptation. Nor did
Henrietta's allusions to his broken appearance move his wife, except in
her saying regretfully: 'He changes.'

On the hall table at Esslemont, a letter from his bankers informed the
earl of a considerable sum of money paid in to his account in the name of
Lord Brailstone. Chumley Potts, hanging at him like a dog without a
master since the death of his friend Ambrose, had journeyed down:
'Anxious about you,' he said. Anxious about or attracted by the possessor
of Ambrose Mallard's 'clean sweeper,' the silver-mounted small pistol;
sight of which he begged to have; and to lengthened his jaw on hearing it
was loaded. A loaded pistol, this dark little one to the right of the
earl's blotting-pad and pens, had the look of a fearful link with his
fallen chaps and fishy hue. Potts maundered moralities upon 'life,'
holding the thing in his hand, weighing it, eyeing the muzzle. He
'couldn't help thinking of what is going to happen to us after it all':
and 'Brosey knows now!' was followed by a twitch of one cheek and the
ejaculation 'Forever!' Fleetwood alive and Ambrose dead were plucking
the startled worldling to a peep over the verge into our abyss; and the
young lord's evident doing of the same commanded Chumley Potts' imitation
of him under the cloud Ambrose had become for both of them.

He was recommended to see Lord Feltre, if he had a desire to be
instructed on the subject of the mitigation of our pains in the regions
below. Potts affirmed that he meant to die a Protestant Christian.
Thereupon, carrying a leaden burden of unlaughed laughable stuff in his
breast, and Chummy's concluding remark to speed him: 'Damn it, no, we'll
stick to our religion!' Fleetwood strode off to his library, and with the
names of the Ixionides of his acquaintance ringing round his head,
proceeded to strike one of them off the number privileged at the moment
to intrude on him. Others would follow; this one must be the first to go.
He wrote the famous letter to Lord Brailstone, which debarred the wily
pursuer from any pretext to be running down into Mrs. Levellier's
neighbourhood, and also precluded the chance of his meeting the fair lady
at Calesford. With the brevity equivalent to the flick of a glove on the
cheek, Lord Brailstone was given to understand by Lord Fleetwood that
relations were at an end between them. No explanation was added; a single
sentence executed the work, and in the third person. He did not once
reflect on the outcry in the ear of London coming from the receiver of
such a letter upon payment of a debt.

The letter posted and flying, Lord Fleetwood was kinder to Chumley Potts;
he had a friendly word for Gower Woodseer; though both were heathens,
after their diverse fashions, neither of them likely ever to set out upon
the grand old road of Rome: Lord Feltre's 'Appian Way of the Saints and
Comforters.'

Chummy was pardoned when they separated at night for his reiterated
allusions to the temptation of poor Ambrose Mallard's conclusive little
weapon lying on the library table within reach of a man's arm-chair: in
its case, and the case locked, yes, but easily opened, 'provoking every
damnable sort of mortal curiosity!' The soundest men among us have their
fits of the blues, Fleetwood was told. 'Not wholesome!' Chummy shook his
head resolutely, and made himself comprehensibly mysterious. He meant
well. He begged his old friend to promise he would unload and keep it
unloaded. 'For I know the infernal worry you have--deuced deal worse than
a night's bad luck!' said he; and Fleetwood smiled sourly at the world's
total ignorance of causes. His wretchedness was due now to the fact that
the aforetime huntress refused to be captured. He took a silver cross
from a table-drawer and laid it on the pistol-case. 'There, Chummy,' he
said; that was all; not sermonizing or proselytizing. He was partly
comprehended by Chumley Potts, fully a week later. The unsuspecting
fellow, soon to be despatched in the suite of Brailstone, bore away an
unwontedly affectionate dismissal to his bed, and spoke some rather
squeamish words himself, as he recollected with disgust when he ran about
over London repeating his executioner's.

The Cross on the pistol-case may have conduced to Lord Fleetwood's
thought, that his days among unrepentant ephemeral Protestant sinners
must have their immediate termination. These old friends were the
plague-infected clothes he flung off his body. But the Cross where it
lay, forbidding a movement of the hand to that box, was authoritative to
decree his passage through a present torture, by the agency of the hand
he held back from the solution of his perplexity, at the cost which his
belief in the Eternal would pay. Henrietta had mentioned her husband's
defeat, by some dastardly contrivance. He had to communicate, for the
disburdening of his soul, not only that he was guilty, but the meanest of
criminals, in being no more than half guilty. His training told him of
the contempt women entertain toward the midway or cripple sinner, when
they have no special desire to think him innocent. How write, or even how
phrase his having merely breathed in his ruffian's hearing the wish that
he might hear of her husband's defeat! And with what object? Here, too, a
woman might, years hence, if not forgive, bend her head resignedly over
the man's vile nature, supposing strong passion his motive. But the name
for the actual motive? It would not bear writing, or any phrasing round
it. An unsceptred despot bidden take a fair woman's eyes into his breast,
saw and shrank. And now the eyes were Carinthia's: he saw a savage
bridegroom, and a black ladder-climber, and the sweetest of pardoning
brides, and the devil in him still insatiate for revenge upon her who
held him to his word.

He wrote, read, tore the page, trimmed the lamp, and wrote again. He
remembered Gower Woodseer's having warned him he would finish his career
a monk. Not, like Feltre, an oily convert, but under the hood, yes, and
extracting a chartreuse from his ramble through woods richer far than the
philosopher's milk of Mother Nature's bosom. There flamed the burning
signal of release from his torments; there his absolving refuge, instead
of his writing fruitless, intricate, impossible stuff to a woman. The
letter was renounced and shredded: the dedicated ascetic contemplated a
hooded shape, washed of every earthly fleck. It proved how men may by
power of grip squeeze raptures out of pain.




CHAPTER XLV

CONTAINS A RECORD OF WHAT WAS FEARED, WHAT WAS HOPED, AND WHAT HAPPENED

The Dame is at her thumps for attention to be called to 'the strangeness
of it,' that a poor, small, sparse village, hardly above a hamlet, on the
most unproductive of Kentish heights, part of old forest land, should at
this period become 'the cynosure of a city beautifully named by the poet
Great Augusta, and truly indeed the world's metropolis.'

Put aside her artful pother to rouse excitement at stages of a narrative,
London's general eye upon little Croridge was but another instance of the
extraordinary and not so wonderful. Lady Arpington, equal to a Parliament
in herself, spoke of the place and the countess courted by her repentant
lord. Brailstone and Chumley Potts were town criers of the executioner
letter each had received from the earl; Potts with his chatter of a
suicide's pistol kept loaded in a case under a two-inch-long silver
Cross, and with sundry dramatic taps on the forehead, Jottings over the
breast, and awful grimace of devoutness. There was no mistaking him. The
young nobleman of the millions was watched; the town spyglass had him in
its orbit. Tales of the ancestral Fleetwoods ran beside rumours of a
Papist priest at the bedside of the Foredoomed to Error's dying mother.
His wealth was counted, multiplied by the ready naughts of those who know
little and dread much. Sir Meeson Corby referred to an argument Lord
Fleetwood had held on an occasion hotly against the logical consistency
of the Protestant faith; and to his alarm lest some day 'all that immense
amount of money should slip away from us to favour the machinations of
Roman Catholicism!' The Countess of Cressett, Livia, anticipated her no
surprise at anything Lord Fleetwood might do: she knew him.

So thereupon, with the whirr of a covey on wing before the fowler, our
crested three of immemorial antiquity and a presumptive immortality, the
Ladies Endor, Eldritch, and Cowry, shot up again, hooting across the
dormant chief city Old England's fell word of the scarlet shimmer above
the nether pit-flames, Rome. An ancient horror in the blood of the
population, conceiving the word to signify, beak, fang, and claw, the
fiendish ancient enemy of the roasting day of yore, heard and echoed.
Sleepless at the work of the sapper, in preparation for the tiger's leap,
Rome is keen to spy the foothold of English stability, and her clasp of a
pillar of the structure sends tremors to our foundations.

The coupling of Rome and England's wealthiest nobleman struck a match to
terrorize the Fire Insurance of Smithfield. That meteoric, intractable,
perhaps wicked, but popular, reputedly clever; manifestly evil-starred,
enormously wealthy, young Earl of Fleetwood, wedded to an adventuress,
and a target for the scandals emanating from the woman, was daily,
without omission of a day, seen walking Piccadilly pavement in company
once more with the pervert, the Jesuit agent, that crafty Catesby of a
Lord Feltre, arm in arm the pair of them, and uninterruptedly conversing,
utterly unlike Englishmen. Mr. Rose Mackrell passed them, and his breezy
salutation of the earl was unobserved in my lord's vacant glass optics,
as he sketched the scene. London had report of the sinister tempter and
the imperilled young probationer undisguisedly entering the Roman
Catholic chapel of a fashionable district-chapel erected on pervert's
legacies, down a small street at the corner of a grandee square, by
tolerance or connivance of our constabulary,--entering it linked; and
linked they issued, their heads bent; for the operation of the tonsure,
you would say. Two English noblemen! But is there no legislation to stop
the disease? Our female government asks it vixenly of our impotent male;
which pretends, beneath an air of sympathy, that we should abstain from
any compulsory action upon the law to interfere, though the situation is
confessedly grave; and the aspect men assume is correspondingly, to the
last degree provokingly, grave-half alive that they are, or void of
patriotism, or Babylonian at heart!

Lord Fleetwood's yet undocked old associates vowed he 'smelt strong' of
the fumes of the whirled silver censer-balls. His disfavour had caused a
stoppage of supplies, causing vociferous abomination of their successful
rivals, the Romish priests. Captain Abrane sniffed, loud as a horse,
condemnatory as a cat, in speaking of him. He said: 'By George, it comes
to this; we shall have to turn Catholics for a loan!' Watchdogs of the
three repeated the gigantic gambler's melancholy roar. And, see what gap,
cried the ratiocination of alarm, see the landslip it is in our body,
national and religious, when exalted personages go that way to Rome!

As you and the world have reflected in your sager moods, an ordinary
pebble may roll where it likes, for individualism of the multitudinously
obscure little affects us. Not so the costly jewel, which is a
congregation of ourselves, in our envies and longings and genuflexions
thick about its lustres. The lapses of precious things must needs carry
us, both by weight and example, and it will ceaselessly be, that we are
possessed by the treasure we possess, we hang on it. A still, small voice
of England's mind under panic sent up these truisms containing
admonitions to the governing Ladies. They, the most conservative of
earthly bodies, clamoured in return, like cloud-scud witches that have
caught fire at their skirts from the torches of marsh-fire radicals. They
cited for his arrest the titled millionaire who made a slide for the
idiots of the kingdom; they stigmatized our liberty as a sophistry,
unless we have in it the sustaining element of justice; and where is the
justice that punishes his country for any fatal course a mad young
Croesus may take! They shackled the hands of testators, who endangered
the salvation of coroneted boys by having sanction to bequeath vast
wealth in bulk. They said, in truth, that it was the liberty to be
un-Christian. Finally, they screeched a petitioning of Parliament to
devote a night to a sitting, and empower the Lord Chancellor to lay an
embargo on the personal as well as the real estate of wealthy perverts;
in common prudence depriving Rome of the coveted means to turn our
religious weapons against us.

The three guardian ladies and their strings of followers headed over the
fevered and benighted town, as the records of the period attest,
windpiping these and similar Solan notes from the undigested cropful of
alarms Lord Fleetwood's expected conduct crammed into them. They and all
the world traced his present madness to the act foregoing: that marriage!
They reviewed it to deplore it, every known incident and the numbers
imagined; yet merely to deplore: frightful comparisons of then with now
rendered the historical shock to the marriage market matter for a sick
smile. Evil genius of some sort beside him the wealthy young nobleman is
sure to have. He has got rid of one to take up with a viler. First, a
sluttish trollop of German origin is foisted on him for life; next, he is
misled to abjure the faith of his fathers for Rome. But patently,
desperation in the husband of such a wife weakened his resistance to the
Roman Catholic pervert's insinuations. There we punctuate the full stop
to our inquiries; we have the secret.

And upon that, suddenly comes a cyclonic gust; and gossip twirls, whines,
and falls to the twanging of an entirely new set of notes, that furnish a
tolerably agreeable tune, on the whole. O hear! The Marchioness of
Arpington proclaims not merely acquaintanceship with Lord Fleetwood's
countess, she professes esteem for the young person. She has been heard
to say, that if the Principality of Wales were not a royal title, a
dignity of the kind would be conferred by the people of those mountains
on the Countess of Fleetwood: such unbounded enthusiasm there was for her
character when she sojourned down there. As it is, they do speak of her
in their Welsh by some title. Their bards are offered prizes to celebrate
her deeds. You remember the regiment of mounted Welsh gentlemen escorting
her to her Kentish seat, with their band of the three-stringed harps! She
is well-born, educated, handsome, a perfectly honest woman, and a sound
Protestant. Quite the reverse of Lord Fleetwood's seeking to escape her,
it is she who flies; she cannot forgive him his cruelties and
infidelities: and that is the reason why he threatens to commit the act
of despair. Only she can save him! She has flown for refuge to her uncle,
Lord Levellier's house at a place named Croridge--not in the
gazetteer--hard of access and a home of poachers, where shooting goes on
hourly; but most picturesque and romantic, as she herself is! Lady
Arpington found her there, nursing one of the wounded, and her uncle on
his death-bed; obdurate all round against her husband, but pensive when
supplicated to consider her country endangered by Rome. She is a fervent
patriot. The tales of her Whitechapel origin, and heading mobs wielding
bludgeons, are absolutely false, traceable to scandalizing anecdotists
like Mr. Rose Mackrell. She is the beautiful example of an injured wife
doing honour to her sex in the punishment of a faithless husband, yet so
little cherishing her natural right to deal him retribution, that we dare
hope she will listen to her patriotic duty in consenting to the
reconcilement, which is Lord Fleetwood's alternative: his wife or Rome!
They say she has an incommunicable charm, accounting for the price he
puts on her now she holds aloof and he misses it. Let her but rescue him
from England's most vigilant of her deadly enemies, she will be entitled
to the nation's lasting gratitude. She has her opportunity for winning
the Anglican English, as formerly she won the Dissenter Welsh. She may
yet be the means of leading back the latter to our fold.

A notation of the cries in air at a time of surgent public excitement can
hardly yield us music; and the wording of them, by the aid of compounds
and transplants, metaphors and similes only just within range of the
arrows of Phoebus' bow (i.e. the farthest flight known), would, while it
might imitate the latent poetry, expose venturesome writers to the wrath
of a people commendably believing their language a perfected instrument
when they prefer the request for a plateful, and commissioning their
literary police to brain audacious experimenters who enlarge or wing it
beyond the downright aim at that mark. The gossip of the time must
therefore appear commonplace, in resemblance to the panting venue a terre
of the toad, instead of the fiery steed's; although we have documentary
evidence that our country's heart was moved;--in no common degree, Dr.
Glossop's lucid English has it, at the head of a broadsheet ballad
discovered by him, wherein the connubially inclined young earl and the
nation in turn beseech the countess to resume her place at Esslemont, and
so save both from a terrific dragon's jaw, scarlet as the infernal
flames; described as fascinating--

          'The classes with the crests,
          And the lining to their vests,
          Till down they jump, and empty leave
          A headless trunk that rests.'

These ballads, burlesque to present reading, mainly intended for
burlesque by the wits who dogged without much enlivening an anxious
period of our history, when corner-stones were falling the way the young
lord of the millions threatened to go, did, there is little doubt,
according to another part of their design (Rose Mackrell boasts it
indirectly in his Memoirs), interpret public opinion, that is, the
English humour of it--the half laugh in their passing and not simulated
shudder.

Carinthia had a study of the humours of English character in the person
of the wounded man she nursed on little Croridge, imagining it the most
unobserved of English homes, and herself as unimportant an object. Daniel
Charner took his wound, as he took his medicine and his posset from her
hand, kindly, and seemed to have a charitable understanding of Lord
Levellier now that the old nobleman had driven a pellet of lead into him
and laid him flat. It pleased him to assure her that his mates were men
of their word, and had promised to pay the old lord with a 'rouse' for
it, nothing worse. Her father used to speak of the 'clean hearts of the
English' as to the husbanding of revenge; that is, the 'no spot of bad
blood' to vitiate them. Captain John Peter seconded all good-humoured
fighters 'for the long account': they will surely win; and it was one of
his maxims: 'My foe can spoil my face; he beats me if he spoils my
temper.'

Recalling the scene of her bridal day--the two strong Englishmen at the
shake of hands, that had spoiled one another's faces, she was enlightened
with a comprehension of her father's love for the people; seeing the
spiritual of the gross ugly picture, as not every man can do, and but a
warrior Joan among women. Chillon shall teach the Spanish people English
heartiness, she thought. Lord Fleetwood's remarks on the expedition would
have sufficed to stamp it righteous with her; that was her logic of the
low valuation of him. She fancied herself absolutely released at his
departure. Neither her sister Riette nor her friend Owain, administering
sentiment and common sense to her by turns, could conceive how the
passion for the recovery of her brother's military name fed the hope that
she might aid in it, how the hope fed the passion. She had besides her
hunger to be at the work she could do; her Chillon's glory for morning
sky above it.

Such was the mind Lady Arpington brought the world's wisdom to bear upon;
deeming it in the end female only in its wildness and obstinacy.
Carinthia's answers were few, barely varied. Her repetition of 'my
brother' irritated the great lady, whose argument was directed to make
her see that these duties toward her brother were primarily owing to her
husband, the man she would reclaim and could guide. And the Countess of
Fleetwood's position, her duty to society, her dispensing of splendid
hospitality, the strengthening of her husband to do his duty to the
nation, the saving of him from a fatal step-from Rome; these were
considerations for a reasonable woman to weigh before she threw up all to
be off on the maddest of adventures. 'Inconceivable, my dear child!' Lady
Arpington proceeded until she heard herself as droning.

Carinthia's unmoved aspect of courteous attention appeared to invoke the
prolongation of the sermon it criticized. It had an air of reversing
their positions while she listened to the charge of folly, and
incidentally replied.

Her reason for not fearing Roman Catholic encroachments was, she said,
her having known good Catholics in the country she came from. For
herself, she should die professing the faith of her father and mother.
Behind her correct demeanour a rustic intelligence was exhibited. She
appreciated her duty to her marriage oath: 'My husband's honour is quite
safe with me.' Neither England nor religion, nor woman's proper devotion
to a husband's temporal and spiritual welfare, had claims rivalling her
devotion to her brother. She could not explain a devotion that instigated
her to an insensate course. It seemed a kind of enthusiasm; and it was
coldly spoken; in the tone referring to 'her husband's honour.' Her
brother's enterprise had her approval because 'her mother's prayer was
for him to serve in the English army.' By running over to take a side in
a Spanish squabble? she was asked and answered: 'He will learn war; my
Chillon will show his value; he will come back a tried soldier.'

She counted on his coming back? She did.

'I cannot take a step forward without counting on success. We know the
chances we are to meet. My father has written of death. We do not fear
it, so it is nothing to us. We shall go together; we shall not have to
weep for one another.'

The strange young woman's avoidance of any popular sniffle of the
pathetic had a recognized merit.

'Tell me,' Lady Arpington said abruptly; 'this maid of yours, who is to
marry the secretary, or whatever he was--you are satisfied with her?'

'She is my dear servant Madge.' A cloud opened as Carinthia spoke the
name. 'She will be a true wife to him. They will always be my friends!'

Nothing against the earl in that direction, apparently; unless his
countess was blest with the density of frigidity.

Society's emissary sketched its perils for unprotected beautiful woman;
an outline of the London quadrille Henrietta danced in; and she glanced
at Carinthia and asked: 'Have you thought of it?'

Carinthia's eyes were on the great lady's. Their meaning was, 'You hit my
chief thought.' They were read as her farthest thought. For the hint of
Henrietta's weakness deadened her feelings with a reminder of warm and
continued solicitations rebutted; the beautiful creature's tortures at
the idea of her exile from England. An outwearied hopelessness expressed
a passive sentiment very like indifference in the clear wide gaze. She
replied: 'I have. My proposal to her was Cadiz, with both our young ones.
She will not.'

And there is an end to that part of the question! Lady Arpington
interpreted it, by the gaze more than the words, under subjection of the
young woman's character. Nevertheless, she bore away Carinthia's consent
to a final meeting with the earl at her house in London, as soon as
things were settled at Croridge. Chillon, whom she saw, was just as hard,
unforgiving, careless of his country's dearest interests; brother and
sister were one heart of their one blood. She mentioned the general
impression in town, that the countess and only she could save the earl
from Rome. A flash of polite laughter was Chillon's response. But after
her inspection of the elegant athlete, she did fancy it possible for a
young wife, even for Henrietta, to bear his name proudly in his
absence--if that was worth a moment's consideration beside the serious
issues involved in her appeal to the countess; especially when the
suggestion regarding young wives left unprotected, delicately conveyed to
the husband, had failed of its purpose. The handsome husband's brows
fluttered an interrogation, as if her clear-obscure should be further
lighted; and it could not be done. He weighed the wife by the measure of
the sister, perhaps; or his military head had no room for either. His
callousness to the danger of his country's disintegration, from the
incessant, becoming overt, attacks of a foreign priesthood might--an
indignant great lady's precipitation to prophecy said would--bring
chastisement on him. She said it, and she liked Henrietta, vowing to
defeat her forecast as well as she could in a land seeming forsaken by
stable principles; its nobles breaking up its national church, going over
to Rome, embracing the faith of the impostor Mahomet.

Gossip fed to the starvation bone of Lady Arpington's report, until one
late afternoon, memorable for the breeding heat in the van of elemental
artillery, newsboys waved damp sheets of fresh print through the streets,
and society's guardians were brought to confess, in shame and gladness,
that they had been growing sceptical of the active assistance of
Providence. At first the 'Terrible explosion of gunpowder at Croridge'
alarmed them lest the timely Power should have done too much. A day later
the general agitation was pacified; Lady Arpington circulated the word
'safe,' and the world knew the disaster had not engulphed Lady
Fleetwood's valuable life. She had the news by word of mouth from the
lovely Mrs. Kirby-Levellier, sister-in-law to the countess. We are
convinced we have proof of Providence intervening when some terrific
event of the number at its disposal accomplishes the thing and no more
than the thing desired. Pitiful though it may seem for a miserly old lord
to be blown up in his bed, it is necessarily a subject of congratulation
if the life, or poor remnant of a life, sacrificed was an impediment to
our righteous wishes. But this is a theme for the Dame, who would full
surely have committed another breach of the treaty, had there not been
allusion to her sisterhood's view of the government of human affairs.

On the day preceding the catastrophe, Chillon's men returned to work. He
and Carinthia and Mr. Wythan lunched with Henrietta at Stoneridge.
Walking down to Lekkatts, they were astounded to see the figure of the
spectral old lord on the plank to the powder store, clad in his long
black cloak, erect. He was crossing, he told them, to count his barrels;
a dream had disturbed him. Chillon fell to rapid talk upon various points
of business, and dispersed Lord Levellier's memory relating to his
errand. Leaning on Carinthia's arm, he went back to the house, where he
was put to bed in peace of mind. His resuscitated physical vigour blocked
all speculation for the young people assembled at Stoneridge that night.
They hardly spoke; they strangled thoughts forming as larvae of wishes.
Henrietta would be away to Lady Arpington's next day, Mr. Wythan to
Wales. The two voyagers were sadder by sympathy than the two whom they
were leaving to the clock's round of desert sameness. About ten at night
Chillon and Mr. Wythan escorted Carinthia, for the night's watch beside
her uncle, down to Lekkatts. It was midway that the knocks on air, as of
a muffled mallet at a door and at farther doors of caverns, smote their
ears and shook the ground.

After an instant of the silence following a shock, Carinthia touched her
brother's arm; and Chillon said:

'Not my powder!'

They ran till they had Lekkatts in sight. A half moon showed the house;
it stood. Fifty paces below, a column of opal smoke had begun to wreathe
and stretch a languid flag. The 'rouse' promised to Lord Levellier by
Daniel Charner's humorous mates had hit beyond its aim. Intended to give
him a start--or 'One-er in return,' it surpassed his angry shot at the
body of them in effect.

Carinthia entered his room and saw that he was lying stretched restfully.
She whispered of this to Chillon, and began upon her watch, reading her
Spanish phrasebook; and she could have wept, if she had been a woman for
tears. Her duty to stay in England with Chillon's fair wife crossed the
beckoning pages like a black smoke. Her passion to go and share her
brother's dangers left the question of its righteousness at each fall of
the big breath.

Her uncle's grey head on his pillow was like a flintstone in chalk under
her look by light of dawn; the chin had dropped.




CHAPTER XLVI

A CHAPTER OF UNDERCURRENTS AND SOME SURFACE FLASHES

Thus a round and a good old English practical repartee, worthy a place in
England's book of her historical popular jests; conceived ingeniously, no
bit murderously, even humanely, if Englishmen are to be allowed
indulgence of a jolly hit back for an injury--more a feint than a real
stroke--gave the miserly veteran his final quake and cut Chillon's knot.

Lord Levellier dead of the joke detracted from the funny idea there had
been in the anticipation of his hearing the libertine explosion of his
grand new powder, and coming out cloaked to see what walls remained
upright. Its cleverness, however, was magnified by the shades into which
it had despatched him. The man who started the 'rouse for old Griphard'
was named: nor did he shuffle his honours off. Chillon accused him, and
he regretfully grinned; he would have owned to it eloquently, excited by
the extreme ingenuity, but humour at the criminal bar is an abject thing,
that has to borrow from metaphysics for the expository words. He lacked
them entirely, and as he could not, fronting his master, supply the
defect with oaths, he drew up and let out on the dead old lord, who
wanted a few pounds of blasting powder, like anything else in everybody's
way. Chillon expected the lowest of his countrymen to show some degree of
chivalry upon occasions like the present. He was too young to perceive
how it is, that a block of our speech in the needed direction drives it
storming in another, not the one closely expressing us. Carinthia liked
the man; she was grieved to hear of his having got the sack summarily,
when he might have had a further month of service or a month's pay. Had
not the workmen's forbearance been much tried? And they had not stolen,
they had bought the powder, only intending to startle.

She touched her brother's native sense of fairness and vexed him with his
cowardly devil of impatience, which kicked at a simply stupid common man,
and behaved to a lordly offender, smelling rascal, civilly. Just as her
father would have--treated the matter, she said: 'Are we sorry for what
has happened, Chillon?' The man had gone, the injustice was done; the
master was left to reflect on the part played by his inheritance of the
half share of ninety thousand pounds in his proper respect for Lord
Levellier's memory. Harsh to an inferior is a horrible charge. But the
position of debtor to a titled cur brings a worse for endurance. Knowing
a part of Lord Fleetwood's message to Lord Levellier suppressed, the
bride's brother, her chief guardian, had treated the omission as of no
importance, and had all the while understood that he ought to give her
his full guess at the reading of it: or so his racked mind understood it
now. His old father had said: A dumb tongue can be a heavy liar; and,
Lies are usurers' coin we pay for ten thousand per cent. His harshness in
the past hour to a workman who had suffered with him and had not intended
serious mischief was Chillon's unsounded motive for the resolution to be
out of debt to the man he loathed. There is a Muse that smiles aloft
surveying our acts from the well-springs.

Carinthia heard her brother's fuller version of the earl's communication
to her uncle before the wild day of her marriage. 'Not particularly
fitted for the married state,' Chillon phrased it, saying: 'He seems to
have known himself, he was honest so far.' She was advised to think it
over, that the man was her husband.

She had her brother's heart in her breast, she could not misread him. She
thought it over, and felt a slight drag of compassion for the reluctant
bridegroom. That was a stretch long leagues distant from love with her;
the sort of feeling one has for strange animals hurt and she had in her
childish blindness done him a hurt, and he had bitten her. He was a weak
young nobleman; he had wealth for a likeness of strength; he had no glory
about his head. Why had he not chosen a woman to sit beside him who would
have fancied his coronet a glory and his luxury a kindness? But the poor
young nobleman did not choose! The sadly comic of his keeping to the
pledge of his word--his real wife--the tyrant of the tyrant--clothed him;
the vision of him at the altar, and on the coach, and at the Royal
Sovereign Inn, and into the dimness where a placidly smiling recollection
met a curtain and lost the smile.

Suppose that her duty condemned her to stay in England on guard over
Chillon's treasure! The perpetual struggle with a weak young nobleman of
aimless tempers and rightabout changes, pretending to the part of
husband, would, she foresaw, raise another figure of duty, enchaining a
weak young woman. The world supported his pretension; and her passion to
serve as Chillon's comrade sank at a damping because it was flame.
Chillon had done that; Lady Arpington, to some extent; Henrietta more. A
little incident, pointing in no direction, had left a shadow of a cloud,
consequent upon Lady Arpington's mention of Henrietta's unprotectedness.
Stepping up the hill to meet her sister, on the morning of Henrietta's
departure for London under the convoy of Mr. Wythan, Carinthia's long
sight spied Kit Ines, or a man like him, in the meadow between Lekkatts
and Croridge. He stood before Henrietta, and vanished light-legged at a
gesture. Henrietta was descending to take her leave of her busied
husband; her cheeks were flushed; she would not speak of the fellow,
except to reply, 'oh, a beggar,' and kept asking whether she ought not to
stay at Stoneridge. And if she did she would lose the last of the Opera
in London! How could she help to investigate the cause of an explosion so
considerate to them? She sang snatches of melodies, clung to her husband,
protested her inability to leave him, and went, appearing torn away. As
well bid healthy children lie abed on a bright summer morning, as think
of holding this fair young woman bound to the circle of safety when she
has her view of pleasure sparkling like the shore-sea mermaid's mirror.

Suspicions were not of the brood Carinthia's bosom harboured. Suspicion
of Chillon's wife Carinthia could not feel. An uncaptained vessel in the
winds on high seas was imagined without a picturing of it. The apparition
of Ives, if it was he, would not fit with any conjecture. She sent a
warning to Madge, and at the same time named the girl's wedding day for
her; pained in doing it. She had given the dear girl her word that she
would be present at this of all marriages. But a day or two days or more
would have to be spent away from Chillon; and her hunger for every hour
beside her brother confessed to the war going on within her, as to which
was her holier duty, the one on the line of her inclinations, or that one
pointing to luxury-choice between a battle-horse and a cushioned-chair;
between companionship with her glorious brother facing death, and
submission to a weak young nobleman claiming his husband's rights over
her. She had submitted, had forgotten his icy strangeness, had thought
him love; and hers was a breast for love, it was owned by the sobbing
rise of her breast at the thought. And she might submit again--in honour?
scorning the husband? Chillon scorned him. Yet Chillon left the decision
to her, specified his excuses. And Henrietta and Owain, Lady Arpington,
Gower Woodseer, all the world--Carinthia shuddered at the world's blank
eye on what it directs for the acquiescence of the woman. That shred of
herself she would become, she felt herself becoming it when the view of
her career beside her brother waned. The dead Rebecca living in her heart
was the only soul among her friends whose voice was her own against the
world's.

But there came a turn where she and Rebecca separated. Rebecca's
insurgent wishes taking shape of prophecy, robbed her of her friend
Owain, to present her an impossible object, that her mind could not
compass or figure. She bade Rebecca rest and let her keep the fancy of
Owain as her good ghost of a sun in the mist of a frosty morning; sweeter
to her than an image of love, though it were the very love, the love of
maidens' dreams, bursting the bud of romance, issuing its flower.
Delusive love drove away with a credulous maiden, under an English
heaven, on a coach and four, from a windy hill-top, to a crash below, and
a stunned recovery in the street of small shops, mud, rain, gloom,
language like musket-fire and the wailing wounded.

No regrets, her father had said; they unman the heart we want for
to-morrow. She kept her look forward at the dead wall Chillon had thrown
up. He did not reject her company; his prospect of it had clouded; and
there were allusions to Henrietta's loneliness. 'His Carin could do her
service by staying, if she decided that way.' Her enthusiasm dropped to
the level of life's common ground. With her sustainment gone, she beheld
herself a titled doll, and had sternly to shut her eyes on the behind
scenes, bar any shadowy approaches of womanly softness; thinking her
father's daughter dishonoured in the submissive wife of the weak young
nobleman Chillon despised as below the title of man.

Madge and Gower came to Stoneridge on their road to London three days
before their union. Madge had no fear of Ines, but said: 'I never let Mr.
Gower out of my sight.' Perforce of studying him with the thirsty wonder
consequent upon his proposal to her, she had got fast hold of the skirts
of his character; she 'knew he was happy because he was always making her
laugh at herself.' Her manner of saying, 'She hoped to give him a
comfortable home, so that he might never be sorry for what he had done,'
was toned as in a church, beautiful to her mistress. Speaking of my
lord's great kindness, her eyes yearned for a second and fell humbly. She
said of Kit Ives, 'He's found a new "paytron," Sarah says Mr. Woodseer
tells her, my lady. It's another nobleman, Lord Brailstone, has come into
money lately and hired him for his pugilist when it's not horseracing.'
Gower spoke of thanks to Lord Fleetwood for the independence allowing him
to take a wife and settle to work in his little Surrey home. He, too,
showed he could have said more and was advised not to push at a shut
gate. My lord would attend their wedding as well as my lady, Carinthia
heard from Madge; counting it a pity that wealthy noblemen had no
professions to hinder the doing of unprofitable things.

Her sensibility was warmer on the wedding-day of these two dear ones. He
graced the scene, she admitted, when reassured by his perfect reserve
toward her personally. He was the born nobleman in his friendliness with
the bridal pair and respectfulness to Mr. Woodseer. High social breeding
is an exquisite performance on the instrument we are, and his behaviour
to her left her mind at liberty for appreciation of it. Condescension was
not seen, his voice had no false note. During the ceremony his eyelids
blinked rapidly. At the close, he congratulated the united couple,
praising them each for the wisdom of their choice. He said to his
countess:

'This is one of the hopeful marriages; chiefly of your making.'

She replied: 'My prayers will be for them always.'

'They are fortunate who have your prayers,' he said, and turned to Sarah
Winch. She was to let him know when she also had found her 'great
philosopher.' Sarah was like a fish on a bank, taking gasps at the marvel
of it all; she blushed the pale pink of her complexion, and murmured of
'happiness.' Gower had gone headlong into happiness, where philosophers
are smirkers and mouthers of ordinary stuff. His brightest remark was to
put the question to his father: 'The three good things of the Isle of
Britain?' and treble the name of Madge Woodseer for a richer triad than
the Glamorgan man could summon. Pardonably foolish; but mindful of a past
condition of indiscipline, Nature's philosopher said to the old minister:
'Your example saved me for this day at a turn of my road, sir.' Nature's
poor wild scholar paid that tribute to the regimental sectarian. Enough
for proud philosophy to have done the thing demonstrably right, Gower's
look at his Madge and the world said. That 'European rose of the
coal-black order,' as one of his numerous pictures of her painted the
girl, was a torch in a cavern for dusky redness at her cheeks. Her
responses beneath the book Mr. Woodseer held open had flashed a distant
scene through Lord Fleetwood. Quaint to notice was her reverence for the
husband she set on a towering monument, and her friendly, wifely;
whispered jogs at the unpractical creature's forgetfulness of his wraps,
his books; his writing-desk--on this tremendous occasion, his pipe. Again
the earl could have sworn, that despite her antecedents, she brought her
husband honest dower, as surely as she gave the lucky Pagan a whole
heart; and had a remarkably fine bust to house the organ, too; and a
clarionet of a voice, curiously like her, mistress's. And not a bad
fellow, but a heathen dog, a worshipper of Nature, walked off with the
girl, whose voice had the ring of Carinthia's. The Powers do not explain
their dispensations.

These two now one by united good-will for the junction Lord Fleetwood
himself drove through Loudon to the hills, where another carriage awaited
them by his orders, in the town of London's race-course. As soon as they
were seated he nodded to them curtly from his box, and drove back,
leaving them puzzled. But his countess had not so very coldly seen him
start his horses to convey the modest bridal pair. His impulses to
kindness could be politic. Before quitting Whitechapel, she went with
Sarah to look at the old shop of the fruits and vegetables. They found it
shut, untenanted; Mr. Woodseer told them that the earl was owner of it by
recent purchase, and would not lease it. He had to say why; for the
countess was dull to the notion of a sentimental desecration in the
occupying of her bedchamber by poor tradespeople. She was little
flattered. The great nobleman of her imagination when she lay there
dwindled to a whimsy infant, despot of his nursery, capricious with his
toys; likely to damage himself, if left to himself.

How it might occur, she heard hourly from her hostess, Lady Arpington;
from Henrietta as well, in different terms. He seemed to her no longer
the stationed nobleman, but one of other idle men, and the saddest of
young men. His weakness cast a net on her. Worse than that drag of
compassion, she foresaw the chance of his having experience of her own
weakness, if she was to be one among idle women: she might drop to the
love of him again. Chillon's damping of her enthusiasm sank her to a mere
breathing body, miserably an animal body, no comrade for a valiant
brother; this young man's feeble consort, perhaps: and a creature
thirsting for pleasure, disposed to sigh in the prospect of caresses.
Enthusiasm gone, her spirited imagination of active work on the field of
danger beside her brother flapped a broken wing.

She fell too low in her esteem to charge it upon Henrietta that she stood
hesitating, leaning on the hated side of the debate; though she could
almost have blamed Chillon for refusing her his positive counsel, and not
ordering his wife to follow him. Once Lady Arpington, reasoning with her
on behalf of the husband who sought reconciliation, sneered at her
brother's project, condemned it the more for his resolve to carry it out
now that he had means. The front of a shower sprang to Carinthia's
eyelids. Now that her brother had means, he from whom she might be
divided was alert to keep his engagement and study war on the field, as
his father had done in foreign service, offering England a trained
soldier, should his country subsequently need him. The contrast of her
heroic brother and a luxurious idle lord scattering blood of bird or
stag, and despising the soldier's profession, had a singular bitter
effect, consequent on her scorn of words to defend the man her heart
idolized. This last of young women for weeping wept in the lady's
presence.

The feminine trick was pardoned to her because her unaccustomed betrayal
of that form of enervation was desired. It was read as woman's act of
self-pity over her perplexity: which is a melting act with the woman when
there is no man to be dissolved by it. So far Lady Arpington judged
rightly; Carinthia's tears, shed at the thought of her brother under the
world's false judgement of him, left her spiritless to resist her
husband's advocates. Unusual as they were, almost unknown, they were
thunder-drops and shook her.

All for the vivid surface, the Dame frets at stresses laid on
undercurrents. There is no bridling her unless the tale be here told of
how Lord Brailstone in his frenzy of the disconcerted rival boasted over
town the counterstroke he had dealt Lord Fleetwood, by sending Mrs.
Levellier a statement of the latter nobleman's base plot to thwart her
husband's wager, with his foul agent, the repentant and well-paid ruffian
in person, to verify every written word. The town's conception of the
necessity for the reunion of the earl and countess was too intense to let
exciting scandal prosper. Moreover, the town's bright anticipation of its
concluding festivity on the domain of Calesford argued such tattle down
to a baffled adorer's malice. The Countess of Cressett, having her
cousin, the beautiful Mrs. Kirby-Levellier, in her house, has denied Lord
Brailstone admission at her door, we can affirm. He has written to her
vehemently, has called a second time, has vowed publicly that Mrs.
Levellier shall have her warning against Lord Fleetwood. The madness of
jealousy was exhibited. Lady Arpington pronounced him in his conduct
unworthy the name of gentleman. And how foolish the scandal he
circulates! Lord Fleetwood's one aim is to persuade his offended wife to
take her place beside him. He expresses regret everywhere, that the death
of her uncle Lord Levellier withholds her presence from Calesford during
her term of mourning; and that he has given his word for the fete on a
particular day, before London runs quite dry. His pledge of his word is
notoriously inviolate. The Countess of Cressett--an extraordinary
instance of a thrice married woman corrected in her addiction to play by
her alliance with a rakish juvenile--declares she performs the part of
hostess at the request of the Countess of Fleetwood. Perfectly
convincing. The more so (if you have the gossips' keen scent of a
deduction) since Lord Fleetwood and young Lord Cressett and the Jesuit
Lord Feltre have been seen confabulating with very sacerdotal
countenances indeed. Three English noblemen! not counting eighty years
for the whole three! And dear Lady Cressett fears she may be called on to
rescue her boy-husband from a worse enemy than the green tables, if Lady
Fleetwood should unhappily prove unyielding, as it shames the gentle sex
to imagine she will be. In fact, we know through Mrs. Levellier, the
meeting of reconciliation between the earl and the countess comes off at
Lady Arpington's, by her express arrangement, to-morrow: 'none too soon,'
the expectant world of London declared it.

The meeting came to pass three days before the great day at Calesford.
Carinthia and her lord were alone together. This had been his burning
wish at Croridge, where he could have poured his heart to her and might
have moved the wife's. But she had formed her estimate of him there: she
had, in the comparison or clash of forces with him, grown to contemplate
the young man of wealth and rank, who had once been impatient of an
allusion to her father, and sought now to part her from her brother--stop
her breathing of fresh air. Sensationally, too, her ardour for the
exercise of her inherited gifts attributed it to him that her father's
daughter had lived the mean existence in England, pursuing a husband,
hounded by a mother's terrors. The influences environing her and pressing
her to submission sharpened her perusal of the small object largely
endowed by circumstances to demand it. She stood calmly discoursing, with
a tempered smile: no longer a novice in the social manner. An equal whom
he had injured waited for his remarks, gave ready replies; and he, bowing
to the visible equality, chafed at a sense of inferiority following his
acknowledgement of it. He was alone with her, and next to dumb; she froze
a full heart. As for his heart, it could not speak at all, it was a
swinging lump. The rational view of the situation was exposed to her; and
she listened to that favourably, or at least attentively; but with an
edge to her civil smile when he hinted of entertainments, voyages,
travels, an excursion to her native mountain land. Her brother would then
be facing death. The rational view, she admitted, was one to be
considered. Yes, they were married; they had a son; they were bound to
sink misunderstandings, in the interests of their little son. He ventured
to say that the child was a link uniting them; and she looked at him. He
blinked rapidly, as she had seen him do of late, but kept his eyes on her
through the nervous flutter of the lids; his pride making a determined
stand for physical mastery, though her look was but a look. Had there
been reproach in it, he would have found the voice to speak out. Her look
was a cold sky above a hungering man. She froze his heart from the marble
of her own.

And because she was for adventuring with her brother at bloody work of
civil war in the pay of a foreign government!--he found a short refuge in
that mute sneer, and was hurled from it by an apparition of the Welsh
scene of the bitten infant, and Carinthia volunteering to do the bloody
work which would have saved it; which he had contested, ridiculed. Right
then, her insanity now conjured the wretched figure of him opposing the
martyr her splendid humaneness had offered her to be, and dominated his
reason, subjected him to admire--on to worship of the woman, whatever she
might do. Just such a feeling for a woman he had dreamed of in his
younger time, doubting that he would ever meet the fleshly woman to
impose it. His heart broke the frost she breathed. Yet, if he gave way to
the run of speech, he knew himself unmanned, and the fatal habit of
superiority stopped his tongue after he had uttered the name he loved to
speak, as nearest to the embrace of her.

'Carinthia--so I think, as I said, we both see the common sense of the
position. I regret over and over again--we'll discuss all that when we
meet after this Calesford affair. I shall have things to say. You will
overlook, I am sure--well, men are men!--or try to. Perhaps I'm not worse
than--we'll say, some. You will, I know,--I have learnt it,--be of great
service, help to me; double my value, I believe; more than double it. You
will receive me--here? Or at Croridge or Esslemont; and alone together,
as now, I beg.'

That was what he said. Having said it, his escape from high tragics in
the comfortable worldly tone rejoiced him; to some extent also the
courteous audience she gave him. And her hand was not refused. Judging by
her aspect, the plain common-sense ground of their situation was accepted
for the best opening step to their union; though she must have had her
feelings beneath it, and God knew that he had! Her hand was friendly. He
could have thanked her for yielding her hand without a stage scene; she
had fine breeding by nature. The gracefullest of trained ladies could not
have passed through such an interview so perfectly in the right key; and
this was the woman he had seen at the wrestle with hideous death to save
a muddy street-child! She touched the gentleman in him. Hard as it was
while he held the hand of the wife, his little son's mother, who might be
called his bride, and drew him by the contact of their blood to a memory,
seeming impossible, some other world's attested reality,--she the angel,
he the demon of it,--unimaginable, yet present, palpable, a fact beyond
his mind, he let her hand fall scarce pressed. Did she expect more than
the common sense of it to be said? The 'more' was due to her, and should
partly be said at their next meeting for the no further separating; or
else he would vow in his heart to spread it out over a whole life's
course of wakeful devotion, with here and there a hint of his younger
black nature. Better that except for a desire seizing him to make
sacrifice of the demon he had been, offer him up hideously naked to her
mercy. But it was a thing to be done by hints, by fits, by small doses.
She could only gradually be brought to the comprehension of how the man
or demon found indemnification under his yoke of marriage in snatching
her, to torment, perhaps betray; and solace for the hurt to his pride in
spreading a snare for the beautiful Henrietta. A confession! It could be
to none but the priest.

Knowledge of Carinthia would have urged him to the confession
straightway. In spite of horror, the task of helping to wash a black soul
white would have been her compensation for loss of companionship with her
soldier brother. She would have held hot iron to the rabid wound and come
to a love of the rescued sufferer.

It seemed to please her when he spoke of Mr. Rose Mackrell's applications
to get back his volume of her father's Book of Maxims.

'There is mine,' she said.

For the sake of winning her quick gleam at any word of the bridal couple,
he conjured a picture of her Madge and his Gower, saying: 'That
marriage--as you will learn--proves him honest from head to foot; as she
is in her way, too.'

'Oh, she is,' was the answer.

'We shall be driving down to them very soon, Carinthia.'

'It will delight them to see either of us, my lord.'

'My lady, adieu until I am over with this Calesford,' he gestured, as in
fetters.

She spared him the my lording as she said adieu, sensitive as she was,
and to his perception now.

Lady Arpington had a satisfactory two minutes with him before he left the
house. London town, on the great day at Calesford, interchanged
communications, to the comforting effect, that the Countess of Fleetwood
would reign over the next entertainment.




CHAPTER XLVII

THE LAST: WITH A CONCLUDING WORD BY THE DAME

It is of seemingly good augury for the cause of a suppliant man, however
little for the man himself, when she who has much to pardon can depict
him in a manner that almost smiles, not unlike a dandling nurse the
miniature man-child sobbing off to sleep after a frenzy; an example of a
genus framed for excuses, and he more than others. Chillon was amused up
to inquisitive surprise by Carinthia's novel idea of her formerly dreaded
riddle of a husband. As she sketched the very rational alliance proposed
to her, and his kick at the fetters of Calesford, a shadowy dash for an
image of the solicitous tyrant was added perforce to complete the scene;
following which, her head moved sharply, the subject was flung over her
shoulder.

She was developing; she might hold her ground with the husband, if the
alliance should be resumed; and she would be a companion for Henrietta in
England: she was now independent, as to money, and she could break an
intolerable yoke without suffering privation. He kept his wrath under,
determined not to use his influence either way, sure though he was of her
old father's voting for her to quit the man and enter the field where
qualities would be serviceable. The man probably feared a scandal more
than the loss of his wife in her going. He had never been thrashed--the
sole apology Chillon discovered for him, in a flushed review of the
unavenged list of injuries Carinthia had sustained. His wise old father
insisted on the value of an early thrashing to trim and shape the growth
of most young men. There was no proof of Lord Fleetwood's having schemed
to thwart his wager, so he put that accusation by: thinking for an
instant, that if the man desired to have his wife with him, and she left
the country with her brother, his own act would recoil; or if she stayed
to hear of a villany, Carinthia's show of scorn could lash. Henrietta
praised my lord's kindness. He had been one of the adorers--as what man
would not be!--and upon her at least (he could hardly love her husband)
he had not wreaked his disappointment. A young man of huge wealth, having
nothing to do but fatten his whims, is the monster a rich country breeds
under the blessing of peace. His wife, if a match for him, has her work
traced out:--mean work for the child of their father, Chillon thought.
She might be doing braver, more suitable to the blood in her veins. But
women have to be considered as women, not as possible heroines; and
supposing she held her own with this husband of hers, which meant,
judging by the view of their unfolded characters at present, a certain
command of the freakish beast; she, whatever her task, would not be the
one set trotting. He came to his opinion through the estimate he had
recently formed of Lord Fleetwood, and a study of his changed sister.

Her brows gloomed at a recurrence to that subject. Their business of the
expedition absorbed her, each detail, all the remarks he quoted of his
chief, hopeful or weariful; for difficulties with the Spanish Government,
and with the English too, started up at every turn; and the rank and file
of the contingent were mostly a rough lot, where they were rather better
than soaked weeds. A small body of trained soldiers had sprung to the
call to arms; here and there an officer could wheel a regiment.

Carinthia breasted discouragement. 'English learn from blows, Chillon.'

'He might have added, they lose half their number by having to learn from
blows, Carin.'

'He said, "Let me lead Britons!"'

'When the canteen's fifty leagues to the rear, yes!'

'Yes, it is a wine country,' she sighed. 'But would the Spaniards have
sent for us if their experience told them they could not trust us?'

Chillon brightened rigorously: 'Yes, yes; there's just a something about
our men at their best, hard to find elsewhere. We're right in thinking
that. And our chief 's the right man.'

'He is Owain's friend and countryman,' said Carinthia, and pleased, her
brother for talking like a girl, in the midst of methodical calculations
of the cost of this and that, to purchase the supplies he would need. She
had an organizing head. On her way down from London she had drawn on
instructions from a London physician of old Peninsula experience to
pencil a list of the medical and surgical stores required by a
campaigning army; she had gained information of the London shops where
they were to be procured; she had learned to read medical prescriptions
for the composition of drugs. She was at her Spanish still, not behind
him in the ordinary dialogue, and able to correct him on points of
Spanish history relating to fortresses, especially the Basque. A French
bookseller had supplied her with the Vicomte d'Eschargue's recently
published volume of a Travels in Catalonia. Chillon saw paragraphs
marked, pages dog-eared, for reference. At the same time, the question of
Henrietta touched her anxiously. Lady Arpington's hints had sunk into
them both.

'I have thought of St. Jean de Luz, Chillon, if Riette would consent to
settle there. French people are friendly. You expect most of your work in
and round the Spanish Pyrenees.'

'Riette alone there?' said he, and drew her by her love of him into his
altered mind; for he did not object to his wife's loneliness at Cadiz
when their plan was new.

London had taught her that a young woman in the giddy heyday of her
beauty has to be guarded; her belonging to us is the proud burden
involving sacrifices. But at St. Jean de Luz, if Riette would consent to
reside there, Lord Fleetwood's absence and the neighbourhood of the war
were reckoned on to preserve his yokefellow from any fit of the
abominated softness which she had felt in one premonitory tremor during
their late interview, and deemed it vile compared with the life of action
and service beside, almost beside, her brother, sharing his dangers at
least. She would have had Chillon speak peremptorily to his wife
regarding the residence on the Spanish borders, adding, in a despair:
'And me with her to protect her!'

'Unfair to Riette, if she can't decide voluntarily,' he said.

All he refrained from was, the persuading her to stay in England and live
reconciled with the gaoler of the dungeon, as her feelings pictured it.

Chillon and Carinthia journeyed to London for purchases and a visit to
lawyer, banker, and tradesmen, on their way to meet his chief and Owain
Wythan at Southampton. They lunched with Livia. The morrow was the great
Calesford day; Henrietta carolled of it. Lady Arpington had been
afllictingly demure on the theme of her presence at Calesford within her
term of mourning. 'But I don't mourn, and I'm not related to the defunct,
and I can't be denied the pleasure invented for my personal
gratification,' Henrietta's happy flippancy pouted at the prudish
objections. Moreover, the adored Columelli was to be her slave of song.
The termination of the London season had been postponed a whole week for
Calesford: the utmost possible strain; and her presence was understood to
represent the Countess of Fleetwood, temporarily in decorous retirement.
Chillon was assured by her that the earl had expressed himself satisfied
with his wife's reasonableness. 'The rest will follow.' Pleading on the
earl's behalf was a vain effort, but she had her grounds for painting
Lord Fleetwood's present mood to his countess in warm colours. 'Nothing
short of devotion, Chillon!' London's extreme anxiety to see them united,
and the cause of it, the immense good Janey could do to her country,
should certainly be considered by her, Henrietta said. She spoke
feverishly. A mention of St. Jean de Luz for a residence inflicted, it
appeared, a more violent toothache than she had suffered from the
proposal of quarters in Cadiz. And now her husband had money? . . . she
suggested his reinstatement in the English army. Chillon hushed that: his
chief had his word. Besides, he wanted schooling in war. Why had he
married! His love for her was the answer; and her beauty argued for the
love. But possessing her, he was bound to win her a name. So his
reasoning ran to an accord with his military instincts and ambition.
Nevertheless, the mournful strange fact she recalled, that they had never
waltzed together since they were made one, troubled his countenance in
the mirror of hers. Instead of the waltz, grief, low worries, dulness, an
eclipse of her, had been the beautiful creature's portion.

It established mighty claims to a young husband's indulgence. She hummed
a few bars of his favourite old Viennese waltz, with 'Chillon!'
invitingly and reproachfully. His loathing of Lord Fleetwood had to
withstand an envious jump at the legs in his vison of her partner on the
morrow. He said: 'You'll think of some one absent.'

'You really do wish me to go, my darling? It is Chillon's wish?' She
begged for the words; she had them, and then her feverishness abated to a
simple sparkling composure.

Carinthia had observed her. She was heart-sick under pressure of thoughts
the heavier for being formless. They signified in the sum her doom to see
her brother leave England for the war, and herself crumble to pieces from
the imagined figure of herself beside him on or near the field. They
could not be phrased, for they accused the beloved brother of a weakness
in the excessive sense of obligation to the beautiful woman who had
wedded him. Driving down to Southampton by the night-coach, her
tenderness toward Henrietta held other thoughts unshaped, except one,
that moved in its twilight, murmuring of how the love of pleasure keeps
us blind children. And how the innocents are pushed by it to snap at
wicked bait, which the wealthy angle with, pointed a charitable index on
some of our social story. The Countess Livia, not an innocent like
Henrietta had escaped the poisoned tongues by contracting a third
marriage--'in time!' Lady Arpington said; and the knotty question was
presented to a young mind: Why are the innocents tempted to their ruin,
and the darker natures allowed an escape? Any street-boy could have told
her of the virtue in quick wits. But her unexercised reflectiveness was
on the highroad of accepted doctrines, with their chorus of the moans of
gossips for supernatural intervention to give us justice. She had not
learnt that those innocents, pushed by an excessive love of pleasure, are
for the term lower in the scale than their wary darker cousins, and must
come to the diviner light of intelligence through suffering.

However, the result of her meditations was to show her she was directed
to be Henrietta's guardian. After that, she had no thoughts; travelling
beside Chillon, she was sheer sore feeling, as of a body aching for its
heart plucked out. The bitterness of the separation to come between them
prophesied a tragedy. She touched his hand. It was warm now.

During six days of travels from port to port along the Southern and
Western coasts, she joined in the inspection of the English contingent
about to be shipped. They and their chief and her brother were plain to
sight, like sample print of a book's first page, blank sheets for the
rest of the volume. If she might have been one among them, she would have
dared the reckless forecast. Her sensations were those of a bird that has
flown into a room, and beats wings against the ceiling and the
window-panes. A close, hard sky, a transparent prison wall, narrowed her
powers, mocked her soul. She spoke little; what she said impressed
Chillon's chief, Owain Wythan was glad to tell her. The good friend had
gone counter to the tide of her breast by showing satisfaction with the
prospect that she would take her rightful place in the world. Her
concentrated mind regarded the good friend as a phantom of a man, the
world's echo. His dead Rebecca would have understood her passion to be
her brother's comrade, her abasement in the staying at home to guard his
butterfly. Owain had never favoured her project; he could not now
perceive the special dangers Chillon would be exposed to in her
separation from him. She had no means of explaining what she felt
intensely, that dangers, death, were nothing to either of them, if they
shared the fate together.

Her rejected petition to her husband for an allowance of money, on the
day in Wales, became the vivid memory which brings out motives in its
glow. Her husband hated her brother; and why? But the answer was lighted
fierily down another avenue. A true husband, a lord of wealth, would have
rejoiced to help the brother of his wife. He was the cause of Chillon's
ruin and this adventure to restore his fortunes. Could she endure a close
alliance with the man while her brother's life was imperilled? Carinthia
rebuked her drowsy head for not having seen his reason for refusing at
the time. 'How long I am before I see anything that does not stare in my
face!' She was a married woman, whose order of mind rendered her
singularly subject to the holiness of the tie; and she was a weak woman,
she feared. Already, at intervals, now that action on a foreign field of
the thunders and lightnings was denied, imagination revealed her
dissolving to the union with her husband, and cried her comment on
herself as the world's basest of women for submitting to it while
Chillon's life ran risks; until finally she said: 'Not before I have my
brother home safe!' an exclamation equal to a vow.

That being settled, some appearance of equanimity returned; she talked of
the scarlet business as one she participated in as a distant spectator.
Chillon's chief was hurrying the embarkation of his troops; within ten
days the whole expedition would be afloat. She was to post to London for
further purchases, he following to take leave of his wife and babe.
Curiously, but hardly remarked on during the bustle of work, Livia had
been the one to send her short account of the great day at Calesford;
Henrietta, the born correspondent, pencilling a couple of lines; she was
well, dreadfully fatigued, rather a fright from a trip of her foot and
fall over a low wire fence. Her message of love thrice underlined the
repeated word.

Henrietta was the last person Carinthia would have expected to meet
midway on the London road. Her name was called from a carriage as she
drove up to the door of the Winchester hostlery, and in the lady, over
whose right eye and cheek a covering fold of silk concealed a bandage,
the voice was her sister Riette's. With her were two babes and their
nursemaids.

'Chillon is down there--you have left him there?' Henrietta greeted her,
saw the reply, and stepped out of her carriage. 'You shall kiss the
children afterwards; come into one of the rooms, Janey.'

Alone together, before an embrace, she said, in the voice of tears
hardening to the world's business, 'Chillon must not enter London. You
see the figure I am. My character's in as bad case up there--thanks to
those men! My husband has lost his "golden Riette." When you see beneath
the bandage! He will have the right to put me away. His "beauty of
beauties"! I'm fit only to dress as a page-boy and run at his heels. My
hero! my poor dear! He thinking I cared for nothing but amusement,
flattery. Was ever a punishment so cruel to the noblest of generous
husbands! Because I know he will overlook it, make light of it, never
reproach his Riette. And the rose he married comes to him a shrivelled
leaf of a potpourri heap. You haven't seen me yet. I was their "beautiful
woman." I feel for my husband most.'

She took breath. Carinthia pressed her lips on the cheek sensible to a
hiss, and Henrietta pursued, in words liker to sobs: 'Anywhere, Cadiz,
St. Jean de Luz, hospital work either, anywhere my husband likes,
anything! I want to work, or I'll sit and rock the children. I'm awake at
last. Janey, we're lambs to vultures with those men. I don't pretend I
was the perfect fool. I thought myself so safe. I let one of them squeeze
my hand one day, he swears. You know what a passion is; you have it for
mountains and battles, I for music. I do remember, one morning before
sunrise, driving back to town out of Windsor,--a dance, the officers of
the Guards,--and my lord's trumpeter at the back of the coach blowing
notes to melt a stone, I found a man's hand had mine. I remember Lord
Fleetwood looking over his shoulder and smiling hard and lashing his
horses. But listen--yes, at Calesford it happened. He--oh, hear the name,
then; Chillon must never hear it;--Lord Brailstone was denied the right
to step on Lord Fleetwood's grounds. The Opera company had finished
selections from my Pirata. I went out for cool air; little Sir Meeson
beside me. I had a folded gauze veil over my head, tied at the chin in a
bow. Some one ran up to me--Lord Brailstone. He poured forth their
poetry. They suppose it the wine for their "beautiful woman." I dare say
I laughed or told him to go, and he began a tirade against Lord
Fleetwood. There's no mighty difference between one beast of prey and
another. Let me get away from them all! Though now! they would not lift
an eyelid. This is my husband's treasure returning to him. We have to be
burnt to come to our senses. Janey--oh! you do well!--it was fiendish;
old ballads, melodrama plays, I see they were built on men's deeds.
Janey, I could not believe it, I have to believe, it is forced down my
throat;--that man, your husband, because he could not forgive my choosing
Chillon, schemed for Chillon's ruin. I could not believe it until I saw
in the glass this disfigured wretch he has made of me. Livia serves him,
she hates him for the tyrant he is; she has opened my eyes. And not for
himself, no, for his revenge on me, for my name to be as my face is. He
tossed me to his dogs; fair game for them! You do well, Janey; he is
capable of any villany. And has been calling at Livia's door twice a day,
inquiring anxiously; begs the first appointment possible. He has no
shame; he is accustomed to buy men and women; he thinks his money will
buy my pardon, give my face a new skin, perhaps. A woman swears to you,
Janey, by all she holds holy on earth, it is not the loss of her
beauty--there will be a wrinkled patch on the cheek for life, the surgeon
says; I am to bear a brown spot, like a bruised peach they sell at the
fruit-shops cheap. Chillon's Riette! I think of that, the miserable wife
I am for him without the beauty he loved so! I think of myself as guilty,
a really guilty woman, when I compare my loss with my husband's.'

'Your accident, dearest Riette--how it happened?' Carinthia said,
enfolding her.

'Because, Janey, what have I ever been to Chillon but the good-looking
thing he was proud of? It's gone. Oh, the accident. Brailstone had pushed
little Corby away; he held my hand, kept imploring, he wanted the usual
two minutes, and all to warn me against--I've told you; and he saw Lord
Fleetwood coming. I got my hand free, and stepped back, my head spinning;
and I fell. That I recollect, and a sight of flames, like the end of the
world. I fell on one of the oil-lamps bordering the grass; my veil
lighted; I had fainted; those two men saw nothing but one another; and
little Sir Meeson was no help; young Lord Cressett dashed out the flames.
They brought me to my senses for a second swoon. Livia says I woke
moaning to be taken away from that hated Calesford. It was, oh! never to
see that husband of yours again. Forgive him, if you can. Not I. I carry
the mark of him to my grave. I have called myself "Skin-deep" ever since,
day and night--the name I deserve.'

'We will return to Chillon together, my own,' said Carinthia. 'It may not
be so bad.' And in the hope that her lovely sister exaggerated a
defacement leaving not much worse than a small scar, her heart threw off
its load of the recent perplexities, daylight broke through her dark
wood. Henrietta brought her liberty. How far guilty her husband might be,
she was absolved from considering; sufficiently guilty to release her.
Upon that conclusion, pity for the awakened Riette shed purer tear-drops
through the gratitude she could not restrain, could hardly conceal, on
her sister's behalf and her own. Henrietta's prompt despatch to Croridge
to fetch the babes, her journey down out of a sick-room to stop Chillon's
visit to London, proved her an awakened woman, well paid for the stain on
her face, though the stain were lasting. Never had she loved Henrietta,
never shown her so much love, as on the road to the deepening colours of
the West. Her sisterly warmth surprised the woeful spotted beauty with a
reflection that this martial Janey was after all a woman of feeling, one
whom her husband, if he came to know it and the depth of it, the rich
sound of it, would mourn in sackcloth to have lost.

And he did, the Dame interposes for the final word, he mourned his loss
of Carinthia Jane in sackcloth and ashes, notwithstanding that he had the
world's affectionate condolences about him to comfort him, by reason of
his ungovernable countess's misbehaviour once more, according to the
report, in running away with a young officer to take part in a foreign
insurrection; and when he was most the idol of his countrymen and
countrywomen, which it was once his immoderate aim to be, he mourned her
day and night, knowing her spotless, however wild a follower of her
father's MAXIMS FOR MEN. He believed--some have said his belief was not
in error--that the woman to aid and make him man and be the star in human
form to him, was miraculously revealed on the day of his walk through the
foreign pine forest, and his proposal to her at the ducal ball was an
inspiration of his Good Genius, continuing to his marriage morn, and then
running downwards, like an overstrained reel, under the leadership of his
Bad. From turning to turning of that descent, he saw himself advised to
retrieve the fatal steps, at each point attempting it just too late;
until too late by an hour, he reached the seaport where his wife had
embarked; and her brother, Chillon John, cruelly, it was the common
opinion, refused him audience. No syllable of the place whither she fled
abroad was vouchsafed to him; and his confessions of sins and repentance
of them were breathed to empty air. The wealthiest nobleman of all
England stood on the pier, watching the regiments of that doomed
expedition mount ship, ready with the bribe of the greater part of his
possessions for a single word to tell him of his wife's destination. Lord
Feltre, his companion, has done us the service to make his emotions
known. He describes them, true, as the Papist who sees every incident
contribute to precipitate sinners into the bosom of his Church. But this,
we have warrant for saying, did not occur before the earl had visited and
strolled in the woods with his former secretary, Mr. Gower Woodseer, of
whom so much has been told, and he little better than an infidel,
declaring his aim to be at contentedness in life. Lord Fleetwood might
envy for a while, he could not be satisfied with Nature.

Within six months of Carinthia Jane's disappearance, people had begun to
talk of strange doings at Calesford; and some would have it, that it was
the rehearsal of a play, in which friars were prominent characters, for
there the frocked gentry were seen flitting across the ground. Then the
world learnt too surely that the dreaded evil had happened, its
wealthiest nobleman had gone over to the Church of Rome! carrying all his
personal and unentailed estate to squander it on images and a dogma.
Calesford was attacked by the mob;--one of the notorious riots in our
history was a result of the Amazing Marriage, and roused the talk of it
again over Great Britain. When Carinthia Jane, after two years of
adventures and perils rarely encountered by women, returned to these
shores, she was, they say, most anxious for news of her husband; and
then, indeed, it has been conjectured, they might have been united to
walk henceforward as one for life, but for the sad fact that the Earl of
Fleetwood had two months and some days previously abjured his rank, his
remaining property, and his title, to become, there is one report, the
Brother Russett of the mountain monastery he visited in simple curiosity
once with his betraying friend, Lord Feltre. Or some say, and so it may
truly be, it was an amateur monastery established by him down among his
Welsh mountains, in which he served as a simple brother, without any
authority over the priests or what not he paid to act as his superiors.
Monk of some sort he would be. He was never the man to stop at anything
half way.

Mr. Rose Mackrell, in his Memoirs, was the first who revealed to the
world, that the Mademoiselle de Levellier of the French Count fighting
with the Carlists--falsely claimed by him as a Frenchwoman--was, in very
truth, Carinthia Jane, the Countess of Fleetwood, to whom Carlists and
Legitimises alike were indebted for tender care of them on the field and
in hospital; and who rode from one camp through the other up to the tent
of the Pretender to the throne of Spain, bearing her petition for her
brother's release; which was granted, in acknowledgement of her 'renowned
humanity to both conflicting armies,' as the words translated by Dr.
Glossop run. Certain it is she brought her wounded brother safe home to
England, and prisoners in that war usually had short shrift. For three
years longer she was the Countess of Fleetwood, 'widow of a living
suicide,' Mr. Rose Mackrell describes the state of the Marriage at that
period. No whisper of divorce did she tolerate.

Six months after it was proved that Brother Russett had perished of his
austerities, or his heart, we learn she said to the beseeching applicant
for her hand, Mr. Owain Wythan, with the gift of it, in compassion:
'Rebecca could foretell events.' Carinthia Jane had ever been ashamed of
second marriages, and the union with her friend Rebecca's faithful
simpleton gave it, one supposes, a natural air, for he as little as she
had previously known the wedded state. She married him, Henrietta has
written, because of his wooing her with dog's eyes instead of words. The
once famous beauty carried a wrinkled spot on her cheek to her grave; a
saving disfigurement, and the mark of changes in the story told you
enough to make us think it a providential intervention for such ends as
were in view.

So much I can say: the facts related, with some regretted omissions, by
which my story has so skeleton a look, are those that led to the
lamentable conclusion. But the melancholy, the pathos of it, the heart of
all England stirred by it, have been--and the panting excitement it was
to every listener--sacrificed in the vain effort to render events as
consequent to your understanding as a piece of logic, through an exposure
of character! Character must ever be a mystery, only to be explained in
some degree by conduct; and that is very dependent upon accident: and
unless we have a perpetual whipping of the tender part of the reader's
mind, interest in invisible persons must needs flag. For it is an infant
we address, and the storyteller whose art excites an infant to serious
attention succeeds best; with English people assuredly, I rejoice to
think, though I have to pray their patience here while that philosophy
and exposure of character block the course along a road inviting to
traffic of the most animated kind.




     ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS

     A dumb tongue can be a heavy liar
     Accounting his tight blue tail coat and brass buttons a victory
     Advised not to push at a shut gate
     Always the shout for more produced it ("News")
     Amused after their tiresome work of slaughter
     And her voice, against herself, was for England
     Anecdotist to slaughter families for the amusement
     As faith comes--no saying how; one swears by them
     As for comparisons, they are flowers thrown into the fire
     As if the age were the injury!
     Be the woman and have the last word!
     Bent double to gather things we have tossed away
     Brains will beat Grim Death if we have enough of them
     But a great success is full of temptations
     Call of the great world's appetite for more (Invented news)
     Charity that supplied the place of justice was not thanked
     Cock-sure has crowed low by sunset
     Contempt of military weapons and ridicule of the art of war
     Could affect me then, without being flung at me
     Country enclosed us to make us feel snug in our own importance
     Courage to grapple with his pride and open his heart was wanting
     Deeds only are the title
     Detested titles, invented by the English
     Did not know the nature of an oath, and was dismissed
     Dogs' eyes have such a sick look of love
     Drank to show his disdain of its powers
     Drink is their death's river, rolling them on helpless
     Earl of Cressett fell from his coach-box in a fit
     Enemy's laugh is a bugle blown in the night
     Everlastingly in this life the better pays for the worse
     Fatal habit of superiority stopped his tongue
     Father used to say, four hours for a man, six for a woman
     Father and she were aware of one another without conversing
     Festive board provided for them by the valour of their fathers
     Flung him, pitied him, and passed on
     Foe can spoil my face; he beats me if he spoils my temper
     Fond, as they say, of his glass and his girl
     Found that he 'cursed better upon water'
     Fun, at any cost, is the one object worth a shot
     Good-bye to sorrow for a while--Keep your tears for the living
     Had got the trick of lying, through fear of telling the truth
     Hard enough for a man to be married to a fool
     He did not vastly respect beautiful women
     He was a figure on a horse, and naught when off it
     He had wealth for a likeness of strength
     He wants the whip; ought to have had it regularly
     He was the prisoner of his word
     Heartily she thanked the girl for the excuse to cry
     Hearts that make one soul do not separately count their gifts
     Her intimacy with a man old enough to be her grandfather
     Himself in the worn old surplice of the converted rake
     I hate sleep: I hate anything that robs me of my will
     Ideas in gestation are the dullest matter you can have
     Injury forbids us to be friends again
     Innocence and uncleanness may go together
     It was an honest buss, but dear at ten thousand
     Lies are usurers' coin we pay for ten thousand per cent
     Life is the burlesque of young dreams
     Limit was two bottles of port wine at a sitting
     Little boy named Tommy Wedger said he saw a dead body go by
     Look backward only to correct an error of conduct in future
     Love of pleasure keeps us blind children
     Magnificent in generosity; he had little humaneness
     Make a girl drink her tears, if they ain't to be let fall
     Meditations upon the errors of the general man, as a cover
     Mighty Highnesses who had only smelt the outside edge of battle
     Never forgave an injury without a return blow for it
     No enemy's shot is equal to a weak heart in the act
     Not afford to lose, and a disposition free of the craving to win
     Not to be the idol, to have an aim of our own
     Objects elevated even by a decayed world have their magnetism
     On a morning when day and night were made one by fog
     One idea is a bullet
     Past, future, and present, the three weights upon humanity
     Pebble may roll where it likes--not so the costly jewel
     Poetic romance is delusion
     Push me to condense my thoughts to a tight ball
     Put material aid at a lower mark than gentleness
     Puzzle to connect the foregoing and the succeeding
     Quick to understand, she is in the quick of understanding
     Reflection upon a statement is its lightning in advance
     Religion condones offences: Philosophy has no forgiveness
     Religion is the one refuge from women
     Scorn titles which did not distinguish practical offices
     Sensitiveness to the sting, which is not allowed to poison
     Seventy, when most men are reaping and stacking their sins
     She seemed really a soaring bird brought down by the fowler
     She was thrust away because because he had offended
     She stood with a dignity that the word did not express
     She endured meekly, when there was no meekness
     Should we leave a good deed half done
     Showery, replied the admiral, as his cocked-hat was knocked off
     So much for morality in those days!
     So indulgent when they drop their blot on a lady's character
     Steady shakes them
     Strengthening the backbone for a bend of the knee in calamity
     Style is the mantle of greatness
     Sweetest on earth to her was to be prized by her brother
     That sort of progenitor is your "permanent aristocracy"
     The habit of the defensive paralyzes will
     The embraced respected woman
     The idol of the hour is the mob's wooden puppet
     The divinely damnable naked truth won't wear ornaments
     Their sneer withers
     There is no driver like stomach
     There's not an act of a man's life lies dead behind him
     They could have pardoned her a younger lover
     Those who have the careless chatter, the ready laugh
     Those who know little and dread much
     Thus are we stricken by the days of our youth
     Tighter than ever I was tight I'll be to-night
     To most men women are knaves or ninnies
     Touch sin and you accommodate yourself to its vileness
     Truth is, they have taken a stain from the life they lead
     Very little parleying between determined men
     Wakening to the claims of others--Youth's infant conscience
     Warm, is hardly the word--Winter's warm on skates
     We make our taskmasters of those to whom we have done a wrong
     We shall go together; we shall not have to weep for one another
     With one idea, we see nothing--nothing but itself
     Woman finds herself on board a rudderless vessel
     Women treat men as their tamed housemates
     Wooing her with dog's eyes instead of words
     Writer society delights in, to show what it is composed of
     You played for gain, and that was a licenced thieving
     You saw nothing but handkerchiefs out all over the theatre
     You are to imagine that they know everything
     You want me to flick your indecision






CELT AND SAXON


By George Meredith


1910.




CONTENTS

BOOK 1.
I.        WHEREIN AN EXCURSION IS MADE IN A CELTIC MIND
II.       MR. ADISTER
III.      CAROLINE
IV.       THE PRINCESS
V.        AT THE PIANOS CHIEFLY WITHOUT MUSIC
VI.       A CONSULTATION: WITH OPINIONS UPON WELSH WOMEN AND THE CAMBRIAN
          RACE
VII.      THE MINIATURE
VIII.     CAPTAIN CON AND MRS. ADISTER O'DONNELL
IX.       THE CAPTAIN'S CABIN
X.        THE BROTHERS
XI.       INTRODUCING A NEW CHARACTER

BOOK 2.
XII.      MISS MATTOCK
XIII.     THE DINNER-PARTY
XIV.      OF ROCKNEY
XV.       THE MATTOCK FAMILY
XVI.      OF THE GREAT MR. BULL AND THE CELTIC AND SAXON VIEW OF HIM:
          AND SOMETHING OF RICHARD ROCKNEY
XVII.     CROSSING THE RUBICON
XVIII.    CAPTAIN CON'S LETTER
X1X.      MARS CONVALESCENT




CHAPTER I

WHEREIN AN EXCURSION IS MADE IN A CELTIC MIND

A young Irish gentleman of the numerous clan O'Donnells, and a Patrick,
hardly a distinction of him until we know him, had bound himself, by
purchase of a railway-ticket, to travel direct to the borders of North
Wales, on a visit to a notable landowner of those marches, the Squire
Adister, whose family-seat was where the hills begin to lift and spy into
the heart of black mountains. Examining his ticket with an apparent
curiosity, the son of a greener island debated whether it would not be
better for him to follow his inclinations, now that he had gone so far as
to pay for the journey, and stay. But his inclinations were also subject
to question, upon his considering that he had expended pounds English for
the privilege of making the journey in this very train. He asked himself
earnestly what was the nature of the power which forced him to do it--a
bad genius or a good: and it seemed to him a sort of answer, inasmuch as
it silenced the contending parties, that he had been the victim of an
impetus. True; still his present position involved a certain outlay of
money simply, not at all his bondage to the instrument it had procured
for him, and that was true; nevertheless, to buy a ticket to shy it away
is an incident so uncommon, that if we can but pause to dwell on the
singularity of the act, we are unlikely to abjure our fellowship with
them who would not be guilty of it; and therefore, by the aid of his
reflections and a remainder of the impetus, Mr. Patrick O'Donnell stepped
into a carriage of the train like any ordinary English traveller, between
whom and his destination there is an agreement to meet if they can.

It is an experience of hesitating minds, be they Saxon or others, that
when we have submitted our persons to the charge of public companies,
immediately, as if the renouncing of our independence into their hands
had given us a taste of a will of our own, we are eager for the
performance of their contract to do what we are only half inclined to;
the train cannot go fast enough to please us, though we could excuse it
for breaking down; stoppages at stations are impertinences, and the
delivery of us at last on the platform is an astonishment, for it is not
we who have done it--we have not even desired it. To be imperfectly in
accord with the velocity precipitating us upon a certain point, is to be
going without our heads, which have so much the habit of supposing it
must be whither we intend, when we go in a determined manner, that a,
doubt of it distracts the understanding--decapitates us; suddenly to
alight, moreover, and find ourselves dropped at the heels of flying Time,
like an unconsidered bundle, is anything but a reconstruction of the
edifice. The natural revelry of the blood in speed suffers a violent
shock, not to speak of our notion of being left behind, quite isolated
and unsound. Or, if you insist, the condition shall be said to belong
exclusively to Celtic nature, seeing that it had been drawn directly from
a scion of one of those tribes.

Young Patrick jumped from the train as headless as good St. Denis. He was
a juvenile thinker, and to discover himself here, where he both wished
and wished not to be, now deeming the negative sternly in the ascendant,
flicked his imagination with awe of the influence of the railway service
upon the destinies of man. Settling a mental debate about a backward
flight, he drove across the land so foreign to his eyes and affections,
and breasted a strong tide of wishes that it were in a contrary
direction. He would rather have looked upon the desert under a
sand-storm, or upon a London suburb yet he looked thirstingly. Each
variation of landscape of the curved highway offered him in a moment
decisive features: he fitted them to a story he knew: the whole circle
was animated by a couple of pale mounted figures beneath no happy light.
For this was the air once breathed by Adiante Adister, his elder brother
Philip's love and lost love: here she had been to Philip flame along the
hill-ridges, his rose-world in the dust-world, the saintly in his
earthly. And how had she rewarded him for that reverential love of her?
She had forborne to kill him. The bitter sylph of the mountain lures men
to climb till she winds them in vapour and leaves them groping, innocent
of the red crags below. The delicate thing had not picked his bones:
Patrick admitted it; he had seen his brother hale and stout not long
back. But oh! she was merciless, she was a witch. If ever queen-witch
was, she was the crowned one!

For a personal proof, now: he had her all round him in a strange district
though he had never cast eye on her. Yonder bare hill she came racing up
with a plume in the wind: she was over the long brown moor, look where he
would: and vividly was she beside the hurrying beck where it made edges
and chattered white. He had not seen, he could not imagine her face:
angelic dashed with demon beauty, was his idea of the woman, and there is
little of a portrait in that; but he was of a world where the elemental
is more individual than the concrete, and unconceived of sight she was a
recognised presence for the green-island brain of a youth whose manner of
hating was to conjure her spirit from the air and let fly his own in
pursuit of her.

It has to be stated that the object of the youngster's expedition to
Earlsfont was perfectly simple in his mind, however much it went against
his nature to perform it. He came for the purpose of obtaining Miss
Adister's Continental address; to gather what he could of her from her
relatives, and then forthwith to proceed in search of her, that he might
plead with her on behalf of his brother Philip, after a four years'
division of the lovers. Could anything be simpler? He had familiarised
himself with the thought of his advocacy during those four years. His
reluctance to come would have been accountable to the Adisters by a
sentiment of shame at his family's dealings with theirs: in fact, a
military captain of the O'Donnells had in old days played the adventurer
and charmed a maid of a certain age into yielding her hand to him; and
the lady was the squire of Earlsfont's only sister: she possessed funded
property. Shortly after the union, as one that has achieved the goal of
enterprise, the gallant officer retired from the service nor did
north-western England put much to his credit the declaration of his
wife's pronouncing him to be the best of husbands. She naturally said it
of him in eulogy; his own relatives accepted it in some contempt, mixed
with a relish of his hospitality: his wife's were constant in citing his
gain by the marriage. Could he possibly have been less than that? they
exclaimed. An excellent husband, who might easily have been less than
that, he was the most devoted of cousins, and the liberal expenditure of
his native eloquence for the furtherance of Philip's love-suit was the
principal cause of the misfortune, if misfortune it could subsequently be
called to lose an Adiante.

The Adister family were not gifted to read into the heart of a young man
of a fanciful turn. Patrick had not a thought of shame devolving on him
from a kinsman that had shot at a mark and hit it. Who sees the shame of
taking an apple from a garden of the Hesperides? And as England
cultivates those golden, if sometimes wrinkled, fruits, it would have
seemed to him, in thinking about it, an entirely lucky thing for the
finder; while a question of blood would have fired his veins to rival
heat of self-assertion, very loftily towering: there were Kings in
Ireland: cry for one of them in Uladh and you will hear his name, and he
has descendants yet! But the youth was not disposed unnecessarily to
blazon his princeliness. He kept it in modest reserve, as common
gentlemen keep their physical strength. His reluctance to look on
Earlsfont sprang from the same source as unacknowledged craving to see
the place, which had precipitated him thus far upon his road: he had a
horror of scenes where a faithless girl had betrayed her lover. Love was
his visionary temple, and his idea of love was the solitary light in it,
painfully susceptible to coldair currents from the stories of love abroad
over the world. Faithlessness he conceived to be obnoxious to nature; it
stained the earth and was excommunicated; there could be no pardon of the
crime, barely any for repentance. He conceived it in the feminine; for
men are not those holy creatures whose conduct strikes on the soul with
direct edge: a faithless man is but a general villain or funny monster, a
subject rejected of poets, taking no hue in the flat chronicle of
history: but a faithless woman, how shall we speak of her! Women,
sacredly endowed with beauty and the wonderful vibrating note about the
very mention of them, are criminal to hideousness when they betray. Cry,
False! on them, and there is an instant echo of bleeding males in many
circles, like the poor quavering flute-howl of transformed beasts, which
at some remembering touch bewail their higher state. Those women are
sovereignly attractive, too, loathsomely. Therein you may detect the
fiend.

Our moralist had for some time been glancing at a broad, handsome old
country mansion on the top of a wooded hill backed by a swarm of mountain
heads all purple-dark under clouds flying thick to shallow, as from a
brush of sepia. The dim silver of half-lighted lakewater shot along below
the terrace. He knew the kind of sky, having oftener seen that than any
other, and he knew the house before it was named to him and he had flung
a discolouring thought across it. He contemplated it placably and
studiously, perhaps because the shower-folding armies of the fields above
likened its shadowed stillness to that of his Irish home. There had this
woman lived! At the name of Earlsfont she became this witch, snake,
deception. Earlsfont was the title and summary of her black story: the
reverberation of the word shook up all the chapters to pour out their
poison.




CHAPTER II

MR. ADISTER

Mr. Patrick O'Donnell drove up to the gates of Earlsfont notwithstanding
these emotions, upon which light matter it is the habit of men of his
blood too much to brood; though it is for our better future to have a
capacity for them, and the insensible race is the oxenish.

But if he did so when alone, the second man residing in the Celt put that
fellow by and at once assumed the social character on his being requested
to follow his card into Mr. Adister's library. He took his impression of
the hall that had heard her voice, the stairs she had descended, the door
she had passed through, and the globes she had perchance laid hand on,
and the old mappemonde, and the severely-shining orderly regiment of
books breathing of her whether she had opened them or not, as he bowed to
his host, and in reply to, 'So, sir! I am glad to see you,' said
swimmingly that Earlsfont was the first house he had visited in this
country: and the scenery reminded him of his part of Ireland: and on
landing at Holyhead he had gone off straight to the metropolis by
appointment to meet his brother Philip, just returned from Canada a full
captain, who heartily despatched his compliments and respects, and hoped
to hear of perfect health in this quarter of the world. And Captain Con
the same, and he was very flourishing.

Patrick's opening speech concluded on the sound of a short laugh coming
from Mr. Adister.

It struck the young Irishman's ear as injurious and scornful in relation
to Captain Con; but the remark ensuing calmed him:

'He has no children.'

'No, sir; Captain Con wasn't born to increase the number of our clan,'
Patrick rejoined; and thought: By heaven! I get a likeness of her out of
you, with a dash of the mother mayhap somewhere. This was his Puck-manner
of pulling a girdle round about from what was foremost in his head to the
secret of his host's quiet observation; for, guessing that such features
as he beheld would be slumped on a handsome family, he was led by the
splendid severity of their lines to perceive an illimitable pride in the
man likely to punish him in his offspring, who would inherit that as
well; so, as is the way with the livelier races, whether they seize first
or second the matter or the spirit of what they hear, the vivid
indulgence of his own ideas helped him to catch the right meaning by the
tail, and he was enlightened upon a domestic unhappiness, although Mr.
Adister had not spoken miserably. The 'dash of the mother' was thrown in
to make Adiante, softer, and leave a loophole for her relenting.

The master of Earlsfont stood for a promise of beauty in his issue,
requiring to be softened at the mouth and along the brows, even in men.
He was tall, and had clear Greek outlines: the lips were locked metal,
thin as edges of steel, and his eyes, when he directed them on the person
he addressed or the person speaking, were as little varied by motion of
the lids as eyeballs of a stone bust. If they expressed more, because
they were not sculptured eyes, it was the expression of his high and
frigid nature rather than any of the diversities pertaining to sentiment
and shades of meaning.

'You have had the bequest of an estate,' Mr. Adister said, to compliment
him by touching on his affairs.

'A small one; not a quarter of a county,' said Patrick.

'Productive, sir?'

''Tis a tramp of discovery, sir, to where bog ends and cultivation
begins.'

'Bequeathed to you exclusively over the head of your elder brother, I
understand.'

Patrick nodded assent. 'But my purse is Philip's, and my house, and my
horses.'

'Not bequeathed by a member of your family?'

'By a distant cousin, chancing to have been one of my godmothers.'

'Women do these things,' Mr. Adister said, not in perfect approbation of
their doings.

'And I think too, it might have gone to the elder,' Patrick replied to
his tone.

'It is not your intention to be an idle gentleman?'

'No, nor a vagrant Irishman, sir.'

'You propose to sit down over there?'

'When I've more brains to be of service to them and the land, I do.'

Mr. Adister pulled the arm of his chair. 'The professions are crammed. An
Irish gentleman owning land might do worse. I am in favour of some degree
of military training for all gentlemen. You hunt?'

Patrick's look was, 'Give me a chance'; and Mr. Adister continued: 'Good
runs are to be had here; you shall try them. You are something of a shot,
I suppose. We hear of gentlemen now who neither hunt nor shoot. You
fence?'

'That's to say, I've had lessons in the art.'

'I am not aware that there is now an art of fencing taught in Ireland.'

'Nor am I,' said Patrick; 'though there's no knowing what goes on in the
cabins.'

Mr. Adister appeared to acquiesce. Observations of sly import went by him
like the whispering wind.

'Your priests should know,' he said.

To this Patrick thought it well not to reply. After a pause between them,
he referred to the fencing.

'I was taught by a Parisian master of the art, sir.'

'You have been to Paris?'

'I was educated in Paris.'

'How? Ah!' Mr. Adister corrected himself in the higher notes of
recollection. 'I think I have heard something of a Jesuit seminary.'

'The Fathers did me the service to knock all I know into me, and call it
education, by courtesy,' said Patrick, basking in the unobscured frown of
his host.

'Then you are accustomed to speak French?' The interrogation was put to
extract some balm from the circumstance.

Patrick tried his art of fence with the absurdity by saying: 'All but
like a native.'

'These Jesuits taught you the use of the foils?'

'They allowed me the privilege of learning, sir.'

After meditation, Mr. Adister said: 'You don't dance?' He said it
speculating on the' kind of gentleman produced in Paris by the disciples
of Loyola.

'Pardon me, sir, you hit on another of my accomplishments.'

'These Jesuits encourage dancing?'

'The square dance--short of the embracing: the valse is under interdict.'

Mr. Adister peered into his brows profoundly for a glimpse of the devilry
in that exclusion of the valse.

What object had those people in encouraging the young fellow to be a
perfect fencer and dancer, so that he should be of the school of the
polite world, and yet subservient to them?

'Thanks to the Jesuits, then, you are almost a Parisian,' he remarked;
provoking the retort:

'Thanks to them, I've stored a little, and Paris is to me as pure a place
as four whitewashed walls:' Patrick added: 'without a shadow of a monk on
them.' Perhaps it was thrown in for the comfort of mundane ears afflicted
sorely, and no point of principle pertained to the slur on a monk.

Mr. Adister could have exclaimed, That shadow of the monk! had he been in
an exclamatory mood. He said: 'They have not made a monk of you, then.'

Patrick was minded to explain how that the Jesuits are a religious order
exercising worldly weapons. The lack of precise words admonished him of
the virtue of silence, and he retreated--with a quiet negative: 'They
have not.'

'Then, you are no Jesuit?' he was asked.

Thinking it scarcely required a response, he shrugged.

'You would not change your religion, sir?' said Mr. Adister in seeming
anger.

Patrick thought he would have to rise: he half fancied himself summoned
to change his religion or depart from the house.

'Not I,' said he.

'Not for the title of Prince?' he was further pressed, and he replied:

'I don't happen to have an ambition for the title of Prince.'

'Or any title!' interjected Mr. Adister, 'or whatever the devil can
offer!--or,' he spoke more pointedly, 'for what fools call a brilliant
marriage?'

'My religion?' Patrick now treated the question seriously and raised his
head: 'I'd not suffer myself to be asked twice.'

The sceptical northern-blue eyes of his host dwelt on him with their full
repellent stare.

The young Catholic gentleman expected he might hear a frenetic zealot
roar out: Be off!

He was not immediately reassured by the words 'Dead or alive, then, you
have a father!'

The spectacle of a state of excitement without a show of feeling was
novel to Patrick. He began to see that he was not implicated in a wrath
that referred to some great offender, and Mr. Adister soon confirmed his
view by saying: 'You are no disgrace to your begetting, sir!'

With that he quitted his chair, and hospitably proposed to conduct his
guest over the house and grounds.




CHAPTER III

CAROLINE

Men of the Adister family having taken to themselves brides of a very
dusty pedigree from the Principality, there were curious rough heirlooms
to be seen about the house, shields on the armoury walls and
hunting-horns, and drinking-horns, and spears, and chain-belts bearing
clasps of heads of beasts; old gold ornaments, torques, blue-stone
necklaces, under glass-cases, were in the library; huge rings that must
have given the wearers fearful fists; a shirt of coarse linen with a pale
brown spot on the breast, like a fallen beech-leaf; and many sealed
parchment-skins, very precious, for an inspection of which, as Patrick
was bidden to understand, History humbly knocked at the Earlsfont
hall-doors; and the proud muse made her transcripts of them kneeling. He
would have been affected by these wonders had any relic of Adiante
appeased his thirst. Or had there been one mention of her, it would have
disengaged him from the incessant speculations regarding the daughter of
the house, of whom not a word was uttered. No portrait of her was shown.
Why was she absent from her home so long? where was she? How could her
name be started? And was it she who was the sinner in her father's mind?
But the idolatrous love between Adiante and her father was once a legend:
they could not have been cut asunder. She had offered up her love of
Philip as a sacrifice to it: Patrick recollected that, and now with a
softer gloom on his brooding he released her from the burden of his grand
charge of unfaithfulness to the truest of lovers, by acknowledging that
he was in the presence of the sole rival of his brother. Glorious girl
that she was, her betrayal of Philip had nothing of a woman's base
caprice to make it infamous: she had sacrificed him to her reading of
duty; and that was duty to her father; and the point of duty was in this
instance rather a sacred one. He heard voices murmur that she might be
praised. He remonstrated with them, assuring them, as one who knew, that
a woman's first duty is her duty to her lover; her parents are her second
thought. Her lover, in the consideration of a real soul among the shifty
creatures, is her husband; and have we not the word of heaven directing
her to submit herself to him who is her husband before all others? That
peerless Adiante had previously erred in the upper sphere where she
received her condemnation, but such a sphere is ladder and ladder and
silver ladder high above your hair-splitting pates, you children of
earth, and it is not for you to act on the verdict in decrying her:
rather 'tis for you to raise hymns of worship to a saint.

Thus did the ingenious Patrick change his ground and gain his argument
with the celerity of one who wins a game by playing it without an
adversary. Mr. Adister had sprung a new sense in him on the subject of
the renunciation of the religion. No thought of a possible apostasy had
ever occurred to the youth, and as he was aware that the difference of
their faith had been the main cause of the division of Adiante and
Philip, he could at least consent to think well of her down here, that
is, on our flat surface of earth. Up there, among the immortals, he was
compelled to shake his head at her still, and more than sadly in certain
moods of exaltation, reprovingly; though she interested him beyond all
her sisterhood above, it had to be confessed.

They traversed a banqueting-hall hung with portraits, to two or three of
which the master of Earlsfont carelessly pointed, for his guest to be
interested in them or not as he might please. A reception-hall flung
folding-doors on a grand drawing-room, where the fires in the grates went
through the ceremony of warming nobody, and made a show of keeping the
house alive. A modern steel cuirass, helmet and plume at a corner of the
armoury reminded Mr. Adister to say that he had worn the uniform in his
day. He cast an odd look at the old shell containing him when he was a
brilliant youth. Patrick was marched on to Colonel Arthur's rooms, and to
Captain David's, the sailor. Their father talked of his two sons. They
appeared to satisfy him. If that was the case, they could hardly have
thrown off their religion. Already Patrick had a dread of naming the
daughter. An idea struck him that she might be the person who had been
guilty of it over there on the Continent. What if she had done it, upon a
review of her treatment of her lover, and gone into a convent to wait for
Philip to come and claim her?--saying, 'Philip, I've put the knife to my
father's love of me; love me double'; and so she just half swoons, enough
to show how the dear angel looks in her sleep: a trick of kindness these
heavenly women have, that we heathen may get a peep of their secret
rose-enfolded selves; and dream 's no word, nor drunken, for the blessed
mischief it works with us.

Supposing it so, it accounted for everything: for her absence, and her
father's abstention from a mention of her, and the pretty good sort of
welcome Patrick had received; for as yet it was unknown that she did it
all for an O'Donnell.

These being his reflections, he at once accepted a view of her that so
agreeably quieted his perplexity, and he leapt out of his tangle into the
happy open spaces where the romantic things of life are as natural as the
sun that rises and sets. There you imagine what you will; you live what
you imagine. An Adiante meets her lover another Adiante, the phantom
likeness of her, similar to the finger-tips, hovers to a meeting with
some one whose heart shakes your manful frame at but a thought of it. But
this other Adiante is altogether a secondary conception, barely descried,
and chased by you that she may interpret the mystical nature of the
happiness of those two, close-linked to eternity, in advance. You would
learn it, if she would expound it; you are ready to learn it, for the
sake of knowledge; and if you link yourself to her and do as those two
are doing, it is chiefly in a spirit of imitation, in sympathy with the
darting couple ahead . . . .

Meanwhile he conversed, and seemed, to a gentleman unaware of the
vaporous activities of his brain, a young fellow of a certain practical
sense.

'We have not much to teach you in: horseflesh,' Mr. Adister said,
quitting the stables to proceed to the gardens.

'We must look alive to keep up our breed, sir,' said Patrick. 'We're
breeding too fine: and soon we shan't be able to horse our troopers. I
call that the land for horses where the cavalry's well-mounted on a
native breed.'

'You have your brother's notions of cavalry, have you!'

'I leave it to Philip to boast what cavalry can do on the field. He
knows: but he knows that troopers must be mounted: and we're fineing more
and more from bone: with the sales to foreigners! and the only chance of
their not beating us is that they'll be so good as follow our bad
example. Prussia's well horsed, and for the work it's intended to do, the
Austrian light cavalry's a model. So I'm told. I'll see for myself. Then
we sit our horses too heavy. The Saxon trooper runs headlong to flesh.
'Tis the beer that fattens and swells him. Properly to speak, we've no
light cavalry. The French are studying it, and when they take to
studying, they come to the fore. I'll pay a visit to their breeding
establishments. We've no studying here, and not a scrap of system that I
see. All the country seems armed for bullying the facts, till the
periodical panic arrives, and then it 's for lying flat and roaring--and
we'll drop the curtain, if you please.'

'You say we,' returned Mr. Adister. 'I hear you launched at us English by
the captain, your cousin, who has apparently yet to learn that we are one
people.'

'We 're held together and a trifle intermixed; I fancy it's we with him
and with me when we're talking of army or navy,' said Patrick. 'But
Captain Con's a bit of a politician: a poor business, when there's
nothing to be done.'

'A very poor business!' Mr. Adister rejoined,

'If you'd have the goodness to kindle his enthusiasm, he'd be for the
first person plural, with his cap in the air,' said Patrick.

'I detest enthusiasm.

'You're not obliged to adore it to give it a wakener.

'Pray, what does that mean?'

Patrick cast about to reply to the formal challenge for an explanation.

He began on it as it surged up to him: 'Well, sir, the country that's got
hold of us, if we 're not to get loose. We don't count many millions in
Europe, and there's no shame in submitting to force majeure, if a stand
was once made; and we're mixed up, 'tis true, well or ill; and we're
stronger, both of us, united than tearing to strips: and so, there, for
the past! so long as we can set our eyes upon something to admire,
instead of a bundle squatting fat on a pile of possessions and vowing she
won't budge; and taking kicks from a big foot across the Atlantic, and
shaking bayonets out of her mob-cap for a little one's cock of the eye at
her: and she's all for the fleshpots, and calls the rest of mankind fools
because they're not the same: and so long as she can trim her ribands and
have her hot toast and tea, with a suspicion of a dram in it, she doesn't
mind how heavy she sits: nor that 's not the point, nor 's the land
question, nor the potato crop, if only she wore the right sort of face to
look at, with a bit of brightness about it, to show an idea inside
striking alight from the day that's not yet nodding at us, as the tops of
big mountains do: or if she were only braced and gallant, and cried,
Ready, though I haven't much outlook! We'd be satisfied with her for a
handsome figure. I don't know whether we wouldn't be satisfied with her
for politeness in her manners. We'd like her better for a spice of
devotion to alight higher up in politics and religion. But the key of the
difficulty's a sparkle of enthusiasm. It's part business, and the greater
part sentiment. We want a rousing in the heart of us; or else we'd be
pleased with her for sitting so as not to overlap us entirely: we'd feel
more at home, and behold her more respectfully. We'd see the policy of an
honourable union, and be joined to you by more than a telegraphic cable.
That's Captain Con, I think, and many like him.'

Patrick finished his airy sketch of the Irish case in a key signifying
that he might be one among the many, but unobtrusive.

'Stick to horses!' observed Mr. Adister.

It was pronounced as the termination to sheer maundering.

Patrick talked on the uppermost topic for the remainder of their stroll.

He noticed that his host occasionally allowed himself to say, 'You
Irish': and he reflected that the saying, 'You English,' had been hinted
as an offence.

He forgot to think that he had possibly provoked this alienation in a
scornfully proud spirit. The language of metaphor was to Mr. Adister
fool's froth. He conceded the use of it to the Irish and the Welsh as a
right that stamped them for what they were by adopting it; and they might
look on a country as a 'she,' if it amused them: so long as they were not
recalcitrant, they were to be tolerated, they were a part of us;
doubtless the nether part, yet not the less a part for which we are bound
to exercise a specially considerate care, or else we suffer, for we are
sensitive there: this is justice but the indications by fiddle-faddle
verbiage of anything objectionable to the whole in the part aroused an
irritability that speedily endued him with the sense of sanity opposing
lunacy; when, not having a wide command of the undecorated plain speech
which enjoyed his approval, he withdrew into the entrenchments of
contempt.

Patrick heard enough to let him understand why the lord of Earlsfont and
Captain Con were not on the best of terms. Once or twice he had a twinge
or suspicion of a sting from the tone of his host, though he was not
political and was of a mood to pity the poor gentleman's melancholy state
of solitariness, with all his children absent, his wife dead, only a
niece, a young lady of twenty, to lend an air of grace and warmth to his
home.

She was a Caroline, and as he had never taken a liking to a Caroline, he
classed her in the tribe of Carolines. To a Kathleen, an Eveleen, a Nora,
or a Bessy, or an Alicia, he would have bowed more cordially on his
introduction to her, for these were names with portraits and vistas
beyond, that shook leaves of recollection of the happiest of life--the
sweet things dreamed undesiringly in opening youth. A Caroline awakened
no soft association of fancies, no mysterious heaven and earth. The
others had variously tinted skies above them; their features wooed the
dream, led it on as the wooded glen leads the eye till we are deep in
richness. Nor would he have throbbed had one of any of his favourite
names appeared in the place of Caroline Adister. They had not moved his
heart, they had only stirred the sources of wonder. An Eveleen had
carried him farthest to imagine the splendours of an Adiante, and the
announcement of the coming of an Eveleen would perchance have sped a
little wild fire, to which what the world calls curiosity is frozenly
akin, through his veins.

Mr. Adister had spoken of his niece Caroline. A lacquey, receiving orders
from his master, mentioned Miss Adister. There was but one Miss Adister
for Patrick. Against reason, he was raised to anticipate the possible
beholding of her, and Caroline's entrance into the drawing-room brought
him to the ground. Disappointment is a poor term for the descent from an
immoderate height, but the acknowledgment that we have shot up
irrationally reconciles even unphilosophical youth to the necessity of
the fall, though we must continue sensible of a shock. She was the Miss
Adister; and how, and why? No one else accompanied them on their march to
the dinner-table. Patrick pursued his double task of hunting his thousand
speculations and conversing fluently, so that it is not astonishing if,
when he retired to his room, the impression made on him by this young
Caroline was inefficient to distinguish her from the horde of her
baptismal sisters. And she had a pleasant face: he was able to see that,
and some individuality in the look of it, the next morning; and then he
remembered the niceness of her manners. He supposed her to have been
educated where the interfusion of a natural liveliness with a veiling
retenue gives the title of lady. She had enjoyed the advantage of having
an estimable French lady for her governess, she informed him, as they
sauntered together on the terrace.

'A Protestant, of course,' Patrick spoke as he thought.

'Madame Dugue is a Catholic of Catholics, and the most honourable of
women.'

'That I'll believe; and wasn't for proselytisms,' said he.

'Oh, no: she was faithful to her trust.'

'Save for the grand example!'

'That,' said Caroline, 'one could strive to imitate without embracing her
faith.'

'There's my mind clear as print!' Patrick exclaimed. 'The Faith of my
fathers! and any pattern you like for my conduct, if it's a good one.'

Caroline hesitated before she said: 'You have noticed my Uncle Adister's
prepossession; I mean, his extreme sensitiveness on that subject.'

'He blazed on me, and he seemed to end by a sort of approval.'

She sighed. 'He has had cause for great unhappiness.'

'Is it the colonel, or the captain? Forgive me!'

Her head shook.

'Is it she? Is it his daughter? I must ask!'

'You have not heard?'

Oh! then, I guessed it,' cried Patrick, with a flash of pride in his
arrowy sagacity. 'Not a word have I heard, but I thought it out for
myself; because I love my brother, I fancy. And now, if you'll be so
good, Miss Caroline, let me beg, it's just the address, or the city, or
the country--where she is, can you tell me?--just whereabouts! You're
surprised: but I want her address, to be off, to see her; I'm anxious to
speak to her. It's anywhere she may be in a ring, only show me the ring,
I'll find her, for I've a load; and there's nothing like that for sending
you straight, though it's in the dark; it acts like an instinct. But you
know the clear address, and won't let me be running blindfold. She's on
the Continent and has been a long time, and it was the capital of
Austria, which is a Catholic country, and they've Irish blood in the
service there, or they had. I could drop on my knees to you!'

The declaration was fortunately hushed by a supplicating ardour, or Mr.
Adister would have looked more surprised than his niece. He stepped out
of the library window as they were passing, and, evidently with a mind
occupied by his own affairs, held up an opened letter for Caroline's
perusal. She took a view of the handwriting.

'Any others?' she said.

'You will consider that one enough for the day,' was his answer.

Patrick descended the terrace and strolled by the waterside, grieved at
their having bad news, and vexed with himself for being a stranger,
unable to console them.

Half an hour later they were all three riding to the market-town, where
Mr. Adister paid a fruitless call on his lawyer.

'And never is at home! never was known to be at home when wanted!' he
said, springing back to the saddle.

Caroline murmured some soothing words. They had a perverse effect.

'His partner! yes, his partner is at home, but I do not communicate upon
personal business with his partner; and by and by there will be, I
suppose, a third partner. I might as well deposit my family history in
the hands of a club. His partner is always visible. It is my belief that
Camminy has taken a partner that he may act the independent gentleman at
his leisure. I, meantime, must continue to be the mark for these letters.
I shall expect soon to hear myself abused as the positive cause of the
loss of a Crown!'

'Mr. Camminy will probably appear at the dinner hour,' said Caroline.

'Claret attracts him: I wish I could say as much of duty,' rejoined her
uncle.

Patrick managed to restrain a bubbling remark on the respective charms of
claret and duty, tempting though the occasion was for him to throw in a
conversational word or two.

He was rewarded for listening devoutly.

Mr. Adister burst out again: 'And why not come over here to settle this
transaction herself?--provided that I am spared the presence of her
Schinderhannes! She could very well come. I have now received three
letters bearing on this matter within as many months. Down to the sale of
her hereditary jewels! I profess no astonishment. The jewels may well go
too, if Crydney and Welvas are to go. Disrooted body and soul!--for a
moonshine title!--a gaming-table foreign knave!--Known for a knave!--A
young gentlewoman?--a wild Welsh . . . !'

Caroline put her horse to a canter, and the exclamations ended, leaving
Patrick to shuffle them together and read the riddle they presented, and
toss them to the wind, that they might be blown back on him by the powers
of air in an intelligible form.




CHAPTER IV

THE PRINCESS

Dinner, and a little piano-music and a song closed an evening that was
not dull to Patrick in spite of prolonged silences. The quiet course of
things within the house appeared to him to have a listening ear for big
events outside. He dreaded a single step in the wrong direction, and
therefore forbore to hang on any of his conjectures; for he might
perchance be unjust to the blessedest heroine on the surface of the
earth--a truly awful thought! Yet her name would no longer bear the
speaking of it to himself. It conjured up a smoky moon under confounding
eclipse.

Who was Schinderhannes?

Mr. Adister had said, her Schinderhannes.

Patrick merely wished to be informed who the man was, and whether he had
a title, and was much of a knave: and particularly Patrick would have
liked to be informed of the fellow's religion. But asking was not easy.

It was not possible. And there was a barrel of powder to lay a fiery head
on, for a pillow!

To confess that he had not the courage to inquire was as good as an
acknowledgment that he knew too much for an innocent questioner. And what
did he know? His brother Philip's fair angel forbade him to open the door
upon what he knew. He took a peep through fancy's keyhole, and delighted
himself to think that he had seen nothing.

After a turbulent night with Schinderhannes, who let him go no earlier
than the opening of a December day, Patrick hied away to one of the dusky
nooks by the lake for a bracing plunge. He attributed to his desire for
it the strange deadness of the atmosphere, and his incapacity to get an
idea out of anything he looked on: he had not a sensation of cold till
the stinging element gripped him. It is the finest school for the cure of
dreamers; two minutes of stout watery battle, with the enemy close all
round, laughing, but not the less inveterate, convinced him that, in
winter at least, we have only to jump out of our clothes to feel the
reality of things in a trice. The dip was sharpening; he could say that
his prescription was good for him; his craving to get an idea ceased with
it absolutely, and he stood in far better trim to meet his redoubtable
adversary of overnight; but the rascal was a bandit and had robbed him of
his purse; that was a positive fact; his vision had gone; he felt himself
poor and empty and rejoicing in the keenness of his hunger for breakfast,
singularly lean. A youth despoiled of his Vision and made sensible by the
activity of his physical state that he is a common machine, is eager for
meat, for excess of whatsoever you may offer him; he is on the highroad
of recklessness, and had it been the bottle instead of Caroline's
coffee-cup, Patrick would soon have received a priming for a delivery of
views upon the sex, and upon love, and the fools known as lovers, acrid
enough to win the applause of cynics.

Boasting was the best relief that a young man not without modesty could
find. Mr. Adister complimented him on the robustness of his habits, and
Patrick 'would like to hear of the temptation that could keep him from
his morning swim.'

Caroline's needle-thrust was provoked:

'Would not Arctic weather deter you, Mr. O'Donnell?' He hummed, and her
eyes filled with the sparkle.

'Short of Arctic,' he had to say. 'But a gallop, after an Arctic bath,
would soon spin the blood-upon an Esquimaux dog, of course,' he pursued,
to anticipate his critic's remark on the absence of horses, with a bow.

She smiled, accepting the mental alertness he fastened on her.

We must perforce be critics of these tear-away wits; which are, moreover,
so threadbare to conceal the character! Caroline led him to vaunt his
riding and his shooting, and a certain time passed before she perceived
that though he responded naturally to her first sly attacks, his gross
exaggerations upon them had not been the triumph of absurdity she
supposed herself to have evoked.

Her wish was to divert her uncle. Patrick discerned the intention and
aided her.

'As for entertainment,' he said, in answer to Mr. Adister's courteous
regrets that he would have to be a prisoner in the house until his legal
adviser thought proper to appear, 'I'll be perfectly happy if Miss
Caroline will give me as much of her company as she can spare. It 's
amusing to be shot at too, by a lady who 's a good marksman! And birds
and hares are always willing to wait for us; they keep better alive. I
forgot to say that I can sing.'

'Then I was in the presence of a connoisseur last night,' said Caroline.
Mr. Adister consulted his watch and the mantelpiece clock for a minute of
difference between them, remarking that he was a prisoner indeed, and for
the whole day, unless Camminy should decide to come. 'There is the
library,' he said, 'if you care for books; the best books on agriculture
will be found there. You can make your choice in the stables, if you
would like to explore the country. I am detained here by a man who seems
to think my business of less importance than his pleasures. And it is not
my business; it is very much the reverse but I am compelled to undertake
it as my own, when I abhor the business. It is hard for me to speak of
it, much more to act a part in it.'

'Perhaps,' Caroline interposed hurriedly, 'Mr. O'Donnell would not be
unwilling to begin the day with some duets?'

Patrick eagerly put on his shame-face to accept her invitation,
protesting that his boldness was entirely due to his delight in music.

'But I've heard,' said he, 'that the best fortification for the exercise
of the a voice is hearty eating, so I 'll pay court again to that
game-pie. I'm one with the pigs for truffles.'

His host thanked him for spreading the contagion of good appetite, and
followed his example. Robust habits and heartiness were signs with him of
a conscience at peace, and he thought the Jesuits particularly forbearing
in the amount of harm they had done to this young man. So they were still
at table when Mr. Camminy was announced and ushered in.

The man of law murmured an excuse or two; he knew his client's eye, and
how to thaw it.

'No, Miss Adister, I have not breakfasted,' he said, taking the chair
placed for him. 'I was all day yesterday at Windlemont, engaged in
assisting to settle the succession. Where estates are not entailed!'

'The expectations of the family are undisciplined and certain not to be
satisfied,' Mr. Adister carried on the broken sentence. 'That house will
fall! However, you have lost no time this morning.--Mr. Patrick
O'Donnell.'

Mr. Camminy bowed busily somewhere in the direction between Patrick and
the sideboard.

'Our lawyers have us inside out, like our physicians,' Mr. Adister
resumed, talking to blunt his impatience for a private discussion with
his own.

'Surgery's a little in their practice too, we think in Ireland,' said
Patrick.

Mr. Camminy assented: 'No doubt.' He was hungry, and enjoyed the look of
the table, but the look of his client chilled the prospect, considered in
its genial appearance as a feast of stages; having luminous extension;
so, to ease his client's mind, he ventured to say: 'I thought it might be
urgent.'

'It is urgent,' was the answer.

'Ah: foreign? domestic?'

A frown replied.

Caroline, in haste to have her duties over, that she might escape the
dreaded outburst, pressed another cup of tea on Mr. Camminy and groaned
to see him fill his plate. She tried to start a topic with Patrick.

'The princess is well, I hope?' Mr. Camminy asked in the voice of
discretion. 'It concerns her Highness?'

'It concerns my daughter and her inheritance from her mad grandmother!'
Mr. Adister rejoined loudly; and he continued like a retreating thunder:
'A princess with a title as empty as a skull! At best a princess of
swamps, and swine that fight for acorns, and men that fight for swine!'

Patrick caught a glance from Caroline, and the pair rose together.

'They did that in our mountains a couple of thousand years ago,' said Mr.
Camminy, 'and the cause was not so bad, to judge by this ham. Men must
fight: the law is only a quieter field for them.'

'And a fatter for the ravens,' Patrick joined in softly, as if carrying
on a song.

'Have at us, Mr. O'Donnell! I'm ashamed of my appetite, Miss Adister, but
the morning's drive must be my excuse, and I'm bounden to you for not
forcing me to detain you. Yes, I can finish breakfast at my leisure, and
talk of business, which is never particularly interesting to
ladies--though,' Mr. Camminy turned to her uncle, 'I know Miss Adister
has a head for it.'

Patrick hummed a bar or two of an air, to hint of his being fanatico per
la musica, as a pretext for their departure.

'If you'll deign to give me a lesson,' said he, as Caroline came away
from pressing her lips to her uncle's forehead.

'I may discover that I am about to receive one,' said she.

They quitted the room together.

Mr. Camminy had seen another Miss Adister duetting with a young Irishman
and an O'Donnell, with lamentable results to that union of voices, and he
permitted himself to be a little astonished at his respected client's
defective memory or indifference to the admonition of identical
circumstances.




CHAPTER V

AT THE PIANO, CHIEFLY WITHOUT MUSIC

Barely had the door shut behind them when Patrick let his heart out: 'The
princess?' He had a famished look, and Caroline glided along swiftly with
her head bent, like one musing; his tone alarmed her; she lent him her
ear, that she might get some understanding of his excitement, suddenly as
it seemed to have come on him; but he was all in his hungry
interrogation, and as she reached her piano and raised the lid, she saw
it on tiptoe straining for her answer.

'I thought you were aware of my cousin's marriage.'

'Was I?' said Patrick, asking it of himself, for his conscience would not
acknowledge an absolute ignorance. 'No: I fought it, I wouldn't have a
blot on her be suspected. She's married! She's married to one of their
princes!--married for a title!--and changed her religion! And Miss
Adister, you're speaking of Adiante?'

'My cousin Adiante.'

'Well did I hate the name! I heard it first over in France. Our people
wrote to me of her; and it's a name to set you thinking: Is she tender,
or nothing like a woman,--a stone? And I put it to my best friend there,
Father Clement, who's a scholar, up in everything, and he said it was a
name with a pretty sound and an ill meaning--far from tender; and a bad
history too, for she was one of the forty-nine Danaides who killed their
husbands for the sake of their father and was not likely to be the
fiftieth, considering the name she bore. It was for her father's sake she
as good as killed her lover, and the two Adiantes are like enough:
they're as like as a pair of hands with daggers. So that was my brother
Philip's luck! She's married! It's done; it's over, like death: no hope.
And this time it's against her father; it's against her faith. There's
the end of Philip! I could have prophesied it; I did; and when they
broke, from her casting him off--true to her name! thought I. She cast
him off, and she couldn't wait for him, and there's his heart broken. And
I ready to glorify her for a saint! And now she must have loved the man,
or his title, to change her religion. She gives him her soul! No praise
to her for that: but mercy! what a love it must be. Or else it's a spell.
But wasn't she rather one for flinging spells than melting? Except that
we're all of us hit at last, and generally by our own weapon. But she
loved Philip: she loved him down to shipwreck and drowning: she gave
battle for him, and against her father; all the place here and the
country's alive with their meetings and partings:--she can't have
married! She wouldn't change her religion for her lover: how can she have
done it for this prince? Why, it's to swear false oaths!--unless it's
possible for a woman to slip out of herself and be another person after a
death like that of a love like hers.'

Patrick stopped: the idea demanded a scrutiny.

'She's another person for me,' he said. 'Here's the worst I ever imagined
of her!--thousands of miles and pits of sulphur beyond the worst and the
very worst! I thought her fickle, I thought her heartless, rather a black
fairy, perched above us, not quite among the stars of heaven. I had my
ideas. But never that she was a creature to jump herself down into a gulf
and be lost for ever. She's gone, extinguished--there she is, under the
penitent's hoodcap with eyeholes, before the faggots! and that's what she
has married!--a burning torment, and none of the joys of martyrdom. Oh!
I'm not awake. But I never dreamed of such a thing as this--not the hard,
bare, lump-of-earth-fact:--and that's the only thing to tell me I'm not
dreaming now.'

He subsided again; then deeply beseeching asked:

'Have you by chance a portrait of the gentleman, Miss Adister? Is there
one anywhere?'

Caroline stood at her piano, turning over the leaves of a music-book,
with a pressure on her eyelids. She was near upon being thrilled in spite
of an astonishment almost petrifying: and she could nearly have smiled,
so strange was his fraternal adoption, amounting to a vivification--of
his brother's passion. He seemed quite naturally to impersonate Philip.
She wondered, too, in the coolness of her alien blood, whether he was a
character, or merely an Irish character. As to the unwontedness of the
scene, Ireland was chargeable with that; and Ireland also, a little at
his expense as a citizen of the polite world, relieved him of the extreme
ridicule attached to his phrases and images.

She replied: 'We have no portrait.'

'May I beg to know, have you seen him?' said Patrick. Caroline shook her
head.

'Is there no telling what he is like, Miss Adister?'

'He is not young.'

'An old man!'

She had not said that, and she wished to defend her cousin from the
charge of contracting such an alliance, but Patrick's face had brightened
out of a gloom of stupefaction; he assured her he was now ready to try
his voice with hers, only she was to excuse a touch of hoarseness; he
felt it slightly in his throat: and could he, she asked him, wonder at it
after his morning's bath?

He vindicated the saneness of the bath as well as he was able, showing
himself at least a good reader of music. On the whole, he sang
pleasantly, particularly French songs. She complimented him, with an
emphasis on the French. He said, yes, he fancied he did best in French,
and he had an idea of settling in France, if he found that he could not
live quietly in his own country.

'And becoming a Frenchman?'said Caroline.

'Why not?' said he. 'I 'm more at home with French people; they're mostly
of my creed; they're amiable, though they weren't quite kind to poor
Lally Tollendal. I like them. Yes, I love France, and when I'm called
upon to fix myself, as I suppose I shall be some day, I shan't have the
bother over there that I should find here.'

She spoke reproachfully: 'Have you no pride in the title of Englishman?'

'I 'm an Irishman.'

'We are one nation.'

'And it's one family where the dog is pulled by the collar.'

There was a retort on him: she saw, as it were, the box, but the lid
would not open to assist her to it, and she let it go by, thinking in her
patriotic derision, that to choose to be likened to the unwilling dog of
the family was evidence of a want of saving pride.

Besides, she could not trust to the glibness of her tongue in a contest
with a young gentleman to whom talking was as easy as breathing, even if
sometimes his volubility exposed him to attack. A superior position was
offered her by her being silent and critical. She stationed herself on
it: still she was grieved to think of him as a renegade from his country,
and she forced herself to say: 'Captain O'Donnell talks in that manner.'

'Captain Con is constitutionally discontented because he's a bard by
nature, and without the right theme for his harp,' said Patrick. 'He has
a notion of Erin as the unwilling bride of Mr. Bull, because her lord is
not off in heroics enough to please her, and neglects her, and won't let
her be mistress of her own household, and she can't forget that he once
had the bad trick of beating her: she sees the marks. And you mayn't
believe it, but the Captain's temper is to praise and exalt. It is. Irony
in him is only eulogy standing on its head: a sort of an upside down; a
perversion: that's our view of him at home. All he desires is to have us
on the march, and he'd be perfectly happy marching, never mind the
banner, though a bit of green in it would put him in tune, of course. The
banner of the Cid was green, Miss Adister: or else it's his pennon that
was. And there's a quantity of our blood in Spain too. We've watered many
lands.'

The poor young English lady's brain started wildly on the effort to be
with him, and to understand whether she listened to humour or emotion:
she reposed herself as well as she could in the contemplation of an
electrically-flashing maze, where every line ran losing itself in
another.

He added: 'Old Philip!' in a visible throb of pity for his brother; after
the scrupulous dubitation between the banner and the pennon of the Cid!

It would have comforted her to laugh. She was closer upon tears, and
without any reason for them in her heart.

Such a position brings the hesitancy which says that the sitting is at an
end.

She feared, as she laid aside her music-books, that there would be more
to come about Adiante, but he spared her. He bowed to her departing, and
strolled off by himself.




CHAPTER VI

A CONSULTATION: WITH OPINIONS UPON WELSHWOMEN AND THE CAMBRIAN RACE

Later in the day she heard that he was out scouring the country on one of
her uncle's horses. She had too many distressing matters to think of for
so singular a young man to have any other place than that which is given
to the fantastical in a troubled and serious mind. He danced there like
the whimsy sunbeam of a shaken water below. What would be his opinion of
Adiante if he knew of her determination to sell the two fair estates she
inherited from a grandmother whom she had venerated; that she might
furnish arms to her husband to carry out an audacious enterprise likely
to involve both of them in blood and ruin? Would he not bound up aloft
and quiver still more wildly? She respected, quaint though it was, his
imaginative heat of feeling for Adiante sufficiently to associate him
with her so far; and she lent him in fancy her own bewilderment and grief
at her cousin's conduct, for the soothing that his exaggeration of them
afforded her. She could almost hear his outcry.

The business of the hour demanded more of her than a seeking for
refreshment. She had been invited to join the consultation of her uncle
with his lawyer. Mr. Adister tossed her another letter from Vienna, of
that morning's delivery. She read it with composure. It became her task
to pay no heed to his loss of patience, and induce him to acquiesce in
his legal adviser's view which was, to temporise further, present an
array of obstacles, and by all possible suggestions induce the princess
to come over to England, where her father's influence with her would have
a chance of being established again; and it might then be hoped that she,
who had never when under sharp temptation acted disobediently to his
wishes at home, and who certainly would not have dreamed of contracting
the abhorred alliance had she been breathing the air of common sense
peculiar to her native land, would see the prudence, if not the solemn
obligation, of retaining to herself these family possessions. Caroline
was urgent with her uncle to act on such good counsel. She marvelled at
his opposition, though she detected the principal basis of it.

Mr. Adister had no ground of opposition but his own intemperateness. The
Welsh grandmother's legacy of her estates to his girl, overlooking her
brothers, Colonel Arthur and Captain David, had excessively vexed him,
despite the strong feeling he entertained for Adiante; and not simply
because of the blow he received in it unexpectedly from that old lady, as
the last and heaviest of the long and open feud between them, but also,
chiefly, that it outraged and did permanent injury to his ideas of the
proper balance of the sexes. Between himself and Mrs. Winnion Rhys the
condition of the balance had been a point of vehement disputation, she
insisting to have it finer up to equality, and he that the naturally
lighter scale should continue to kick the beam. Behold now the
consequence of the wilful Welshwoman's insanest of legacies! The estates
were left to Adiante Adister for her sole use and benefit, making almost
a man of her, and an unshackled man, owing no dues to posterity. Those
estates in the hands of a woman are in the hands of her husband; and the
husband a gambler and a knave, they are in the hands of the Jews--or gone
to smoke. Let them go. A devilish malignity bequeathed them: let them go
back to their infernal origin. And when they were gone, his girl would
soon discover that there was no better place to come to than her home;
she would come without an asking, and alone, and without much prospect of
the intrusion of her infamous Hook-nose in pursuit of her at Earlsfont.
The money wasted, the wife would be at peace. Here she would have leisure
to repent of all the steps she had taken since that fatal one of the
acceptance of the invitation to the Embassy at Vienna. Mr. Adister had
warned her both against her going and against the influence of her friend
Lady Wenchester, our Ambassadress there, another Welsh woman, with the
weathervane head of her race. But the girl would accept, and it was not
for him to hold out. It appeared to be written that the Welsh,
particularly Welsh women, were destined to worry him up to the end of his
days. Their women were a composition of wind and fire. They had no
reason, nothing solid in their whole nature. Englishmen allied to them
had to learn that they were dealing with broomstick witches and
irresponsible sprites. Irishwomen were models of propriety beside them:
indeed Irishwomen might often be patterns to their English sisterhood.
Mr. Adister described the Cambrian ladies as a kind of daughters of the
Fata Morgana, only half human, and deceptive down to treachery, unless
you had them fast by their spinning fancy. They called it being romantic.
It was the ante-chamber of madness. Mad, was the word for them. You
pleased them you knew not how, and just as little did you know how you
displeased them. And you were long hence to be taught that in a certain
past year, and a certain month, and on a certain day of the month, not
forgetting the hour of the day to the minute of the hour, and attendant
circumstances to swear loud witness to it, you had mortally offended
them. And you receive your blow: you are sure to get it: the one passion
of those women is for vengeance. They taste a wound from the lightest
touch, and they nurse the venom for you. Possibly you may in their
presence have had occasion to praise the military virtues of the builder
of Carnarvon Castle. You are by and by pierced for it as hard as they can
thrust. Or you have incidentally compared Welsh mutton with
Southdown:--you have not highly esteemed their drunken Bards:--you have
asked what the Welsh have done in the world; you are supposed to have
slighted some person of their family--a tenth cousin!--anything turns
their blood. Or you have once looked straight at them without speaking,
and you discover years after that they have chosen to foist on you their
idea of your idea at the moment; and they have the astounding presumption
to account this misreading of your look to the extent of a full
justification, nothing short of righteous, for their treachery and your
punishment! O those Welshwomen!

The much-suffering lord of Earlsfont stretched forth his open hand, palm
upward, for a testifying instrument to the plain truth of his catalogue
of charges. He closed it tight and smote the table. 'Like mother--and
grandmother too--like daughter!' he said, and generalised again to
preserve his dignity: 'They're aflame in an instant. You may see them
quiet for years, but it smoulders. You dropped the spark, and they time
the explosion.'

Caroline said to Mr. Camminy: 'You are sure you can give us the day?'

'All of it,' he replied, apologising for some show of restlessness. 'The
fact is, Miss Adister, I married a lady from over the borders, and though
I have never had to complain of her yet, she may have a finale in store.
It's true that I love wild Wales.'

'And so do I' Caroline raised her eyes to imagined mountains.

'You will pardon me, Camminy,' said Mr. Adister.

The lawyer cracked his back to bow to the great gentleman so
magnanimously humiliating himself. 'Sir! Sir!' he said. 'Yes, Welsh blood
is queer blood, I own. They find it difficult to forgive; and trifles
offend; and they are unhappily just as secretive as they are sensitive.
The pangs we cause them, without our knowing it, must be horrible. They
are born, it would seem, with more than the common allowance of kibes for
treading on: a severe misfortune for them. Now for their merits: they
have poetry in them; they are valiant; they are hospitable to teach the
Arab a lesson: I do believe their life is their friend's at
need--seriously, they would lay it down for him: or the wherewithal,
their money, their property, excepting the three-stringed harp of three
generations back, worth now in current value sixpence halfpenny as a
curiosity, or three farthings for firewood; that they'll keep against
their own desire to heap on you everything they have--if they love you,
and you at the same time have struck their imaginations. Offend them,
however, and it's war, declared or covert. And I must admit that their
best friend can too easily offend them. I have lost excellent clients, I
have never understood why; yet I respect the remains of their literature,
I study their language, I attend their gatherings and subscribe the
expenses; I consume Welsh mutton with relish; I enjoy the Triads, and can
come down on them with a quotation from Catwg the Wise: but it so chanced
that I trod on a kibe, and I had to pay the penalty. There's an Arabian
tale, Miss Adister, of a peaceful traveller who ate a date in the desert
and flung away the stone, which hit an invisible son of a genie in the
eye, and the poor traveller suffered for it. Well, you commit these
mortal injuries to the invisible among the Welsh. Some of them are hurt
if you call them Welsh. They scout it as the original Saxon title for
them. No, they are Cymry, Cambrians! They have forgiven the Romans. Saxon
and Norman are still their enemies. If you stir their hearts you find it
so. And, by the way, if King Edward had not trampled them into the mire
so thoroughly, we should hear of it at times even now. Instead of
penillions and englyns, there would be days for fiery triplets. Say the
worst of them, they are soundheaded. They have a ready comprehension for
great thoughts. The Princess Nikolas, I remember, had a special fondness
for the words of Catwg the Wise.'

'Adiante,' had murmured Caroline, to correct his indiscretion.

She was too late.

'Nikolas!' Mr. Adister thundered. 'Hold back that name in this house,
title and all, if you speak of my daughter. I refuse admission to it
here. She has given up my name, and she must be known by the one her
feather-brained grandmother proposed for her, to satisfy her pleasure in
a fine sound. English Christian names are my preference. I conceded
Arthur to her without difficulty. She had a voice in David, I recollect;
with very little profit to either of the boys. I had no voice in Adiante;
but I stood at my girl's baptism, and Adiante let her be. At least I
saved the girl from the addition of Arianrod. It was to have been Adiante
Arianrod. Can you credit it? Prince-pah! Nikolas? Have you a notion of
the sort of prince that makes an English lady of the best blood of
England his princess?'

The lawyer had a precise notion of the sort of prince appearing to Mr.
Adister in the person of his foreign son-in-law. Prince Nikolas had been
described to him before, with graphic touches upon the quality of the
reputation he bore at the courts and in the gambling-saloons of Europe.
Dreading lest his client's angry heat should precipitate him on the
prince again, to the confusion of a lady's ears, Mr. Camminy gave an
emphatic and short affirmative.

'You know what he is like?' said Mr. Adister, with a face of disgust
reflected from the bare thought of the hideous likeness.

Mr. Camminy assured him that the description of the prince's lineaments
would not be new. It was, as he was aware, derived from a miniature of
her husband, transmitted by the princess, on its flight out of her
father's loathing hand to the hearthstone and under his heel.

Assisted by Caroline, he managed to check the famous delineation of the
adventurer prince in which a not very worthy gentleman's chronic fever of
abomination made him really eloquent, quick to unburden himself in the
teeth of decorum.

'And my son-in-law! My son-in-law!' ejaculated Mr. Adister, tossing his
head higher, and so he stimulated his amazement and abhorrence of the
portrait he rather wondered at them for not desiring to have sketched for
their execration of it, alluringly foul as it was: while they in concert
drew him back to the discussion of his daughter's business, reiterating
prudent counsel, with a knowledge that they had only to wait for the
ebbing of his temper.

'Let her be informed, sir, that by coming to England she can settle the
business according to her wishes in one quarter of the time it would take
a Commission sent out to her--if we should be authorised to send out
one,' said Mr. Camminy. 'By committing the business to you, I fancy I
perceive your daughter's disposition to consider your feelings: possibly
to a reluctance to do the deed unsanctioned by her father. It would
appear so to a cool observer, notwithstanding her inattention to your
remonstrances.'

The reply was: 'Dine here and sleep here. I shall be having more of these
letters,' Mr. Adister added, profoundly sighing.

Caroline slipped away to mark a conclusion to the debate; and Mr. Camminy
saw his client redden fast and frown.

'Besides,' he spoke in a husky voice, descending upon a subject hateful,
'she tells me to-day she is not in a state to travel! Do you hear? Make
what you can of it.'

The proud and injured gentleman had the aspect of one who receives a blow
that it is impossible for him to resent. He could not speak the shame he
felt: it was literally in his flesh. But the cause had been sufficiently
hinted to set the lawyer staring as men do when they encounter situations
of grisly humour, where certain of the passions of man's developed nature
are seen armed and furious against our mild prevailing ancient mother
nature; and the contrast is between our utter wrath and her simple
exposition of the circumstances and consequences forming her laws. There
are situations which pass beyond the lightly stirred perceptive wits to
the quiet court of the intellect, to be received there as an addition to
our acquaintance with mankind. We know not of what substance to name
them. Humour in its intense strain has a seat somewhere about the mouth
of tragedy, giving it the enigmatical faint wry pull at a corner visible
at times upon the dreadful mask.

That Mr. Adister should be astonished at such a communication from the
princess, after a year of her marriage: and that he should take it for a
further outrage of his paternal sentiments, should actually redden and be
hoarse in alluding to it: the revelation of such points in our human
character set the humane old lawyer staring at the reserve space within
himself apart from his legal being, whereon he by fits compared his own
constitution with that of the individuals revealed to him by their acts
and confidential utterances. For him, he decided that he would have
rejoiced at the news.

Granting the prince a monster, however, as Mr. Adister unforcedly
considered him, it was not so cheering a piece of intelligence that
involved him yet closer with that man's rank blood: it curdled his own.
The marriage had shocked and stricken him, cleaving, in his love for his
daughter, a goodly tree and withering many flowers. Still the marriage
was but Adiante's gulf: he might be called father-in-law of her spangled
ruffian; son-in-law, the desperado-rascal would never be called by him.
But the result of the marriage dragged him bodily into the gulf: he
became one of four, numbering the beast twice among them. The subtlety of
his hatred so reckoned it; for he could not deny his daughter in the
father's child; he could not exclude its unhallowed father in the
mother's: and of this man's child he must know and own himself the
grandfather. If ever he saw the child, if drawn to it to fondle it, some
part of the little animal not his daughter's would partake of his
embrace. And if neither of his boys married, and his girl gave birth to a
son! darkness rolled upon that avenue of vision. A trespasser and
usurper-one of the demon's brood chased his very name out of Earlsfont!

'Camminy, you must try to amuse yourself,' he said briskly. 'Anything you
may be wanting at home shall be sent for. I must have you here to make
sure that I am acting under good advice. You can take one of the keepers
for an hour or two of shooting. I may join you in the afternoon. You will
find occupation for your gun in the north covers.'

He wandered about the house, looking into several rooms, and only
partially at rest when he discovered Caroline in one, engaged upon some
of her aquarelle sketches. He asked where the young Irishman was.

'Are you in search of him?' said she. 'You like him, uncle? He is out
riding, they tell me.'

'The youngster is used to south-western showers in that climate of his,'
Mr. Adister replied. 'I dare say we could find the Jesuit in him
somewhere. There's the seed. His cousin Con O'Donnell has filled him with
stuff about Ireland and England: the man has no better to do than to
train a parrot. What do you think of him, my love?'

The judgement was not easily formed for expression. 'He is not quite like
what I remember of his brother Philip. He talks much more, does he not?
He seems more Irish than his brother. He is very strange. His feelings
are strong; he has not an idea of concealing them. For a young man
educated by the Jesuits, he is remarkably open.'

'The Jesuits might be of service to me just now!' Mr. Adister addressed
his troubled soul, and spoke upon another conception of them: 'How has he
shown his feelings?'

Caroline answered quickly: 'His love of his brother. Anything that
concerns his brother moves him; it is like a touch on a musical
instrument. Perhaps I should say a native one.'

'Concerns his brother?' Mr. Adister inquired, and his look requesting
enlightenment told her she might speak.

'Adiante,' she said softly. She coloured.

Her uncle mused awhile in a half-somnolent gloom. 'He talks of this at
this present day?'

'It is not dead to him. He really appears to have hoped . . . he is
extraordinary. He had not heard before of her marriage. I was a witness
of the most singular scene this morning, at the piano. He gathered it
from what he had heard. He was overwhelmed by it. I could not exaggerate.
It was impossible to help being a little touched, though it was curious,
very strange.'

Her uncle's attentiveness incited her to describe the scene, and as it
visibly relieved his melancholy, she did it with a few vivid indications
of the quaint young Irishman's manner of speech. She concluded: 'At last
he begged to see a portrait of her husband.'

'Not of her?' said Mr. Adister abruptly.

'No; only of her husband.'

'Show him her portrait.'

A shade of surprise was on Caroline's forehead. 'Shall I?' She had a dim
momentary thought that the sight of the beautiful face would not be good
for Patrick.

'Yes; let him see the woman who could throw herself away on that branded
villain called a prince, abjuring her Church for a little fouler than
hangman to me and every gentleman alive. I desire that he should see it.
Submission to the demands of her husband's policy required it of her, she
says! Show it him when he returns; you have her miniature in your
keeping. And to-morrow take him to look at the full-length of her before
she left England and ceased to be a lady of our country. I will order it
to be placed in the armoury. Let him see the miniature of her this day.'

Mr. Adister resolved at the same time that Patrick should have his
portrait of the prince for a set-off to the face of his daughter. He
craved the relief it would be to him to lay his colours on the prince for
the sparkling amazement of one whom, according to Caroline's description,
he could expect to feel with him acutely, which neither his niece nor his
lawyer had done: they never did when he painted the prince. He was
unstrung, heavily plunged in the matter of his chagrin and grief: his
unhealed wound had been scraped and strewn with salt by his daughter's
letter; he had a thirst for the kind of sympathy he supposed he would
find in the young Irishman's horror at the husband of the incomparable
beauty now past redemption degraded by her hideous choice; lost to
England and to her father and to common respect. For none, having once
had the picture of the man, could dissociate them; they were like heaven
and its reverse, everlastingly coupled in the mind by their opposition of
characters and aspects. Her father could not, and he judged of others by
himself. He had been all but utterly solitary since her marriage, brooded
on it until it saturated him; too proud to speak of the thing in sadness,
or claim condolence for this wound inflicted on him by the daughter he
had idolised other than through the indirect method of causing people to
wonder at her chosen yoke-fellow. Their stupefaction refreshed him. Yet
he was a gentleman capable of apprehending simultaneously that he sinned
against his pride in the means he adopted to comfort his nature. But the
wound was a perpetual sickness needing soul-medicine. Proud as he was,
and unbending, he was not stronger than his malady, and he could
disguise, he could not contain, the cry of immoderate grief. Adiante had
been to him something beyond a creature beloved; she had with her
glorious beauty and great-heartedness been the sole object which had ever
inspirited his imagination. He could have thought no man, not the most
illustrious, worthy of her. And there she was, voluntarily in the hands
of a monster! 'Husband!' Mr. Adister broke away from Caroline, muttering:
'Her husband's policy!'

She was used to his interjections; she sat thinking more of the strange
request to her to show Mr. O'Donnell the miniature of Adiante. She had
often thought that her uncle regretted his rejection of Philip. It
appeared so to her now, though not by any consecutive process of
reasoning. She went to fetch the miniature, and gazing on it, she tried
to guess at Mr. O'Donnell's thoughts when doing the same; for who so
inflammable as he? And who, woman or man, could behold this lighted face,
with the dark raised eyes and abounding auburn tresses, where the
contrast of colours was in itself thrilling, and not admire, or more,
half worship, or wholly worship? She pitied the youth: she fancied that
he would not continue so ingenuously true to his brother's love of
Adiante after seeing it; unless one might hope that the light above
beauty distinguishing its noble classic lines, and the energy of
radiance, like a morning of chivalrous promise, in the eyes, would subdue
him to distant admiration. These were her flitting thoughts under the
spell of her queenly cousin's visage. She shut up the miniature-case, and
waited to hand it to young Mr. O'Donnell.




CHAPTER VII

THE MINIATURE

Patrick returned to Earlsfont very late; he had but ten minutes to dress
for dinner; a short allowance after a heated ride across miry tracks,
though he would have expended some of them, in spite of his punctilious
respect for the bell of the house entertaining him, if Miss Adister had
been anywhere on the stairs or corridors as he rushed away to his room.
He had things to tell; he had not been out over the country for nothing.

Fortunately for his good social principles, the butler at Earlsfont was a
wary supervisor of his man; great guest or little guest; Patrick's linen
was prepared for him properly studded; he had only to spring out of one
suit into another; and still more fortunately the urgency for a rapid
execution of the manoeuvre prevented his noticing a large square envelope
posted against the looking-glass of his toilette-table. He caught sight
of it first when pulling down his shirt-cuffs with an air of recovered
ease, not to say genial triumph, to think that the feat of grooming
himself, washing, dressing and stripping, the accustomed persuasive final
sweep of the brush to his hair-crop, was done before the bell had rung.
His name was on the envelope; and under his name, in smaller letters,

Adiante.

'Shall I?' said he, doing the thing he asked himself about doing tearing
open the paper cover of the portrait of her who had flitted in his head
for years unseen. And there she was, remote but present.

His underlip dropped; he had the look of those who bate breath and swarm
their wits to catch a sound. At last he remembered that the summoning
bell had been in his ears a long time back, without his having been
sensible of any meaning in it. He started to and fro. The treasure he
held declined to enter the breast-pocket of his coat, and the other
pockets he perhaps, if sentimentally, justly discarded as being beneath
the honour of serving for a temporary casket. He locked it up, with a vow
to come early to rest. Even then he had thoughts whether it might be
safe.

Who spoke, and what they uttered at the repast, and his own remarks, he
was unaware of. He turned right and left a brilliant countenance that had
the glitter of frost-light; it sparkled and was unreceptive. No wonder
Miss Adister deemed him wilder and stranger than ever. She necessarily
supposed the excess of his peculiarities to be an effect of the portrait,
and would have had him, according to her ideas of a young man of some
depth of feeling, dreamier. On the contrary, he talked sheer commonplace.
He had ridden to the spur of the mountains, and had put up the mare, and
groomed and fed her, not permitting another hand to touch her: all very
well, and his praises of the mare likewise, but he had not a syllable for
the sublime of the mountains. He might have careered over midland flats
for any susceptibility that he betrayed to the grandeur of the scenery
she loved. Ultimately she fancied the miniature had been overlooked in
his hurry to dress, and that he was now merely excited by his lively
gallop to a certain degree of hard brightness noticeable in hunting men
at their dinner.

The elixir in Patrick carried him higher than mountain crests. Adiante
illumined an expanded world for him, miraculous, yet the real one, only
wanting such light to show its riches. She lifted it out of darkness with
swift throbs of her heavenliness as she swam to his eyelids, vanished and
dazzled anew, and made these gleams of her and the dark intervals his
dream of the winged earth on her flight from splendour to splendour,
secresy to secresy;--follow you that can, the youth whose heart is an
opened mine, whose head is an irradiated sky, under the spell of imagined
magical beauty. She was bugle, banner, sunrise, of his inmost ambition
and rapture.

And without a warning, she fled; her features were lost; his power of
imagining them wrestled with vapour; the effort contracted his outlook.
But if she left him blind of her, she left him with no lessened bigness
of heart. He frankly believed in her revelation of a greater world and a
livelier earth, a flying earth and a world wealthier than grouped history
in heroic marvels: he fell back on the exultation of his having seen her,
and on the hope for the speedy coming of midnight, when the fountain of
her in the miniature would be seen and drunk of at his full leisure, and
his glorious elation of thrice man almost up to mounting spirit would be
restored to make him worthy of the vision.

Meanwhile Caroline had withdrawn and the lord of Earlsfont was fretting
at his theme. He had decided not to be a party in the sale of either of
his daughter's estates: let her choose other agents: if the iniquity was
committed, his hands would be clean of it. Mr. Adister spoke by way of
prelude to the sketch of 'this prince' whose title was a lurid delusion.
Patrick heard of a sexagenarian rake and Danube adventurer, in person a
description of falcon-Caliban, containing his shagginess in a frogged
hussar-jacket and crimson pantaloons, with hook-nose, fox-eyes, grizzled
billow of frowsy moustache, and chin of a beast of prey. This fellow,
habitually one of the dogs lining the green tables of the foreign Baths,
snapping for gold all day and half the night, to spend their winnings in
debauchery and howl threats of suicide, never fulfilled early enough,
when they lost, claimed his princedom on the strength of his father's
murder of a reigning prince and sitting in his place for six months, till
a merited shot from another pretender sent him to his account. 'What do
you say to such a nest of assassins, and one of them, an outcast and
blackleg, asking an English gentleman to acknowledge him as a member of
his family! I have,' said Mr. Adister, 'direct information that this
gibbet-bird is conspiring to dethrone--they call it--the present reigning
prince, and the proceeds of my daughter's estates are, by her desire--if
she has not written under compulsion of the scoundrel--intended to speed
their blood-mongering. There goes a Welshwoman's legacy to the sea, with
a herd of swine with devils in them!'

Mr. Camminy kept his head bent, his hand on his glass of port. Patrick
stared, and the working of his troubled brows gave the unhappy gentleman
such lean comfort as he was capable of taking. Patrick in sooth was
engaged in the hard attempt at the same time to do two of the most
difficult things which can be proposed to the ingenuity of sensational
youth: he was trying to excuse a respected senior for conduct that he
could not approve, while he did inward battle to reconcile his feelings
with the frightful addition to his hoard of knowledge: in other words, he
sought strenuously to mix the sketch of the prince with the dregs of the
elixir coming from the portrait of Adiante; and now she sank into
obscurity behind the blackest of brushes, representing her incredible
husband; and now by force of some natural light she broke through the
ugly mist and gave her adored the sweet lines and colours of the features
he had lost. There was an ebb and flow of the struggle, until, able to
say to himself that he saw her clearly as though the portrait was in the
palm of his hand, the battle of the imagination ceased and she was fairer
for him than if her foot had continued pure of its erratic step: fairer,
owing to the eyes he saw with; he had shaken himself free of the exacting
senses which consent to the worship of women upon the condition of their
possessing all the precious and the miraculous qualities; among others,
the gift of an exquisite fragility that cannot break; in short, upon
terms flattering to the individual devotee. Without knowing it he had
done it and got some of the upholding strength of those noblest of honest
men who not merely give souls to women--an extraordinary endowment of
them--but also discourse to them with their souls.

Patrick accepted Adiante's husband: the man was her husband. Hideous (for
there was no combating her father's painting of him), he was almost
interesting through his alliance:--an example of how much earth the
worshipper can swallow when he is quite sincere. Instead of his going
under eclipse, the beauty of his lady eclipsed her monster. He believed
in her right to choose according to her pleasure since her lover was
denied her. Sitting alone by his fire, he gazed at her for hours and bled
for Philip. There was a riddle to be answered in her cutting herself away
from Philip; he could not answer it; her face was the vindication and the
grief. The usual traverses besetting true lovers were suggested to him,
enemies and slanders and intercepted letters. He rejected them in the
presence of the beautiful inscrutable. Small marvel that Philip had loved
her. 'Poor fellow' Patrick cried aloud, and drooped on a fit of tears.

The sleep he had was urgently dream-ridden to goals that eluded him and
broadened to fresh races and chases waving something to be won which
never was won, albeit untiringly pursued amid a series of adventures,
tragic episodes; wild enthusiasm. The whole of it was featureless, a
shifting agitation; yet he must have been endowed to extricate a
particular meaning applied to himself out of the mass of tumbled events,
and closely in relation to realities, for he quitted his bed passionately
regretting that he had not gone through a course of drill and study of
the military art. He remembered Mr. Adister's having said that military
training was good for all gentlemen.

'I could join the French Foreign Legion,' he thought.

Adiante was as beautiful by day as by night. He looked. The riddle of her
was more burdensome in the daylight.

He sighed, and on another surging of his admiration launched the resolve
that he would serve her blindly, without one question. How, when, where,
and the means and the aim, he did not think of. There was she, and here
was he, and heaven and a great heart would show the way.

Adiante at eighteen, the full length of her, fresh in her love of Philip,
was not the same person to him, she had not the same secret; she was
beautiful differently. By right he should have loved the portrait best:
but he had not seen it first; he had already lived through a life of
emotions with the miniature, and could besides clasp the frame; and
moreover he fondled an absurd notion that the miniature would be
entrusted to him for a time, and was almost a possession. The pain of the
thought of relinquishing it was the origin of this foolishness. And
again, if it be fair to prove him so deeply, true to his brother though
he was (admiration of a woman does thus influence the tides of our blood
to render the noblest of us guilty of some unconscious wavering of our
loyalty), Patrick dedicated the full-length of Adiante to Philip, and
reserved the other, her face and neck, for himself.

Obediently to Mr. Adister's order, the portrait had been taken from one
of his private rooms and placed in the armoury, the veil covering the
canvas of late removed. Guns and spears and swords overhead and about,
the youthful figure of Adiante was ominously encompassed. Caroline stood
with Patrick before the portrait of her cousin; she expected him to show
a sign of appreciation. He asked her to tell him the Church whose forms
of faith the princess had embraced. She answered that it was the Greek
Church. 'The Greek,' said he, gazing harder at the portrait. Presently
she said: 'It was a perfect likeness.' She named the famous artist who
had painted it. Patrick's 'Ah' was unsatisfactory.

'We,' said she, 'think it a living image of her as she was then.'

He would not be instigated to speak.

'You do not admire it, Mr. O'Donnell?' she cried.

'Oh, but I do. That's how she looked when she was drawing on her gloves
with good will to go out to meet him. You can't see her there and not be
sure she had a heart. She part smiles; she keeps her mouth shut, but
there's the dimple, and it means a thought, like a bubble bursting up
from the heart in her breast. She's tall. She carries herself like a
great French lady, and nothing beats that. It's the same colour, dark
eyebrows and fair hair. And not thinking of her pride. She thinks of her
walk, and the end of it, where he's waiting. The eyes are not the same.'

'The same?' said Caroline.

'As this.' He tapped on the left side. She did not understand it at all.

'The bit of work done in Vienna,' said he.

She blushed. 'Do you admire that so much?'

'I do.'

'We consider it not to be compared to this.'

'Perhaps not. I like it better.'

'But why do you like that better?' said Caroline, deeming it his
wilfulness.

Patrick put out a finger. 'The eyes there don't seem to say, "I'm yours
to make a hero of you." But look,' he drew forth from under his waistcoat
the miniature, 'what don't they say here! It's a bright day for the
Austrian capital that has her by the river Danube. Yours has a landscape;
I've made acquaintance with the country, I caught the print of it on my
ride yesterday; and those are your mountains. But mine has her all to
herself while she's thinking undisturbed in her boudoir. I have her and
her thoughts; that's next to her soul. I've an idea it ought to be given
to Philip.' He craned his head round to woo some shadow of assent to the
daring suggestion. 'Just to break the shock 'twill be to my brother, Miss
Adister. If I could hand him this, and say, "Keep it, for you'll get
nothing more of her; and that's worth a kingdom."'

Caroline faltered: 'Your brother does not know?'

'Pity him. His blow 's to come. He can't or he 'd have spoken of it to
me. I was with him a couple of hours and he never mentioned a word of it,
nor did Captain Con. We talked of Ireland, and the service, and some
French cousins we have.'

'Ladies?' Caroline inquired by instinct.

'And charming,' said Patrick, 'real dear girls. Philip might have one, if
he would, and half my property, to make it right with her parents.
There'd be little use in proposing it. He was dead struck when the shaft
struck him. That's love! So I determined the night after I'd shaken his
hand I'd be off to Earlsfont and try my hardest for him. It's hopeless
now. Only he might have the miniature for his bride. I can tell him a
trifle to help him over his agony. She would have had him, she would,
Miss Adister, if she hadn't feared he'd be talked of as Captain Con has
been--about the neighbourhood, I mean, because he,' Patrick added
hurriedly, 'he married an heiress and sank his ambition for distinction
like a man who has finished his dinner. I'm certain she would. I have it
on authority.'

'What authority?' said Caroline coldly.

'Her own old nurse.'

'Jenny Williams?'

'The one! I had it from her. And how she loves her darling Miss Adiante!
She won't hear of "princess." She hates that marriage. She was all for my
brother Philip. She calls him "Our handsome lieutenant." She'll keep the
poor fellow a subaltern all his life.'

'You went to Jenny's inn?'

'The Earlsfont Arms, I went to. And Mrs. Jenny at the door, watching the
rain. Destiny directed me. She caught the likeness to Philip on a lift of
her eye, and very soon we sat conversing like old friends. We were soon
playing at old cronies over past times. I saw the way to bring her out,
so I set to work, and she was up in defence of her darling, ready to tell
me anything to get me to think well of her. And that was the main reason,
she said, why Miss Adiante broke with him and went abroad her dear child
wouldn't have Mr. Philip abused for fortune-hunting. As for the religion,
they could each have practised their own: her father would have consented
to the fact, when it came on him in that undeniable shape of two made
one. She says, Miss Adiante has a mighty soul; she has brave ideas. Miss
Deenly, she calls her. Ay, and so has Philip: though the worst is,
they're likely to drive him out of the army into politics and Parliament;
and an Irishman there is a barrow trolling a load of grievances. Ah, but
she would have kept him straight. Not a soldier alive knows the use of
cavalry better than my brother. He wanted just that English wife to
steady him and pour drops of universal fire into him; to keep him face to
face with the world, I mean; letting him be true to his country in a fair
degree, but not an old rainpipe and spout. She would have held him to his
profession. And, Oh dear! She's a friend worth having, lost to Ireland. I
see what she could have done there. Something bigger than an island, too,
has to be served in our days: that is, if we don't forget our duty at
home. Poor Paddy, and his pig, and his bit of earth! If you knew what we
feel for him! I'm a landlord, but I'm one with my people about evictions.
We Irish take strong root. And honest rent paid over to absentees,
through an agent, if you think of it, seems like flinging the money
that's the sweat of the brow into a stone conduit to roll away to a giant
maw hungry as the sea. It's the bleeding to death of our land!
Transactions from hand to hand of warm human flesh-nothing else will do:
I mean, for men of our blood. Ah! she would have kept my brother
temperate in his notions and his plans. And why absentees, Miss Adister?
Because we've no centre of home life: the core has been taken out of us;
our country has no hearth-fire. I'm for union; only there should be
justice, and a little knowledge to make allowance for the natural
cravings of a different kind of people. Well, then, and I suppose that
inter-marriages are good for both. But here comes a man, the boldest and
handsomest of his race, and he offers himself to the handsomest and
sweetest of yours, and she leans to him, and the family won't have him.
For he's an Irishman and a Catholic. Who is it then opposed the proper
union of the two islands? Not Philip. He did his best; and if he does
worse now he's not entirely to blame. The misfortune is, that when he
learns the total loss of her on that rock-promontory, he'll be dashing
himself upon rocks sure to shiver him. There's my fear. If I might take
him this . . . ?' Patrick pleaded with the miniature raised like the
figure of his interrogation.

Caroline's inward smile threw a soft light of humour over her features at
the simple cunning of his wind-up to the lecture on his country's case,
which led her to perceive a similar cunning simplicity in his
identification of it with Philip's. It startled her to surprise, for the
reason that she'd been reviewing his freakish hops from Philip to Ireland
and to Adiante, and wondering in a different kind of surprise, how and by
what profitless ingenuity he contrived to weave them together. Nor was
she unmoved, notwithstanding her fancied perception of his Jesuitry: his
look and his voice were persuasive; his love of his brother was deep; his
change of sentiment toward Adiante after the tale told him by her old
nurse Jenny, stood for proof of a generous manliness.

Before she had replied, her uncle entered the armoury, and Patrick was
pleading still, and she felt herself to be a piece of damask, a very
fiery dye.

To disentangle herself, she said on an impulse, desperately

'Mr. O'Donnell begs to have the miniature for his brother.'

Patrick swung instantly to Mr. Adister. 'I presumed to ask for it, sir,
to carry it to Philip. He is ignorant about the princess as yet; he would
like to have a bit of the wreck. I shan't be a pleasant messenger to him.
I should be glad to take him something. It could be returned after a
time. She was a great deal to Philip--three parts of his life. He has
nothing of her to call his own.'

'That!' said Mr. Adister. He turned to the virgin Adiante, sat down and
shut his eyes, fetching a breath. He looked vacantly at Patrick.

'When you find a man purely destructive, you think him a devil, don't
you?' he said.

'A good first cousin to one,' Patrick replied, watchful for a hint to
seize the connection.

'If you think of hunting to-day, we have not many minutes to spare before
we mount. The meet is at eleven, five miles distant. Go and choose your
horse. Caroline will drive there.'

Patrick consulted her on a glance for counsel. 'I shall be glad to join
you, sir, for to-morrow I must be off to my brother.'

'Take it,' Mr. Adister waved his hand hastily. He gazed at his idol of
untouched eighteen. 'Keep it safe,' he said, discarding the sight of the
princess. 'Old houses are doomed to burnings, and a devil in the family
may bring us to ashes. And some day . . . !' he could not continue his
thought upon what he might be destined to wish for, and ran it on to,
'Some day I shall be happy to welcome your brother, when it pleases him
to visit me.'

Patrick bowed, oppressed by the mighty gift. 'I haven't the word to thank
you with, sir.'

Mr. Adister did not wait for it.

'I owe this to you, Miss Adister,' said Patrick.

Her voice shook: 'My uncle loves those who loved her.'

He could see she was trembling. When he was alone his ardour of
gratefulness enabled him to see into her uncle's breast: the inflexible
frigidity; lasting regrets and remorse; the compassion for Philip in
kinship of grief and loss; the angry dignity; the stately generosity.

He saw too, for he was clear-eyed when his feelings were not over-active,
the narrow pedestal whereon the stiff figure of a man of iron pride must
accommodate itself to stand in despite of tempests without and within;
and how the statue rocks there, how much more pitiably than the common
sons of earth who have the broad common field to fall down on and our
good mother's milk to set them on their legs again.




CHAPTER VIII

CAPTAIN CON AND MRS. ADISTER O'DONNELL

Riding homeward from the hunt at the leisurely trot of men who have
steamed their mounts pretty well, Mr. Adister questioned Patrick
familiarly about his family, and his estate, and his brother's prospects
in the army, and whither he intended first to direct his travels:
questions which Patrick understood to be kindly put for the sake of
promoting conversation with a companion of unripe age by a gentleman who
had wholesomely excited his blood to run. They were answered, except the
last one. Patrick had no immediate destination in view.

'Leave Europe behind you,' said Mr. Adister warming, to advise him, and
checking the trot of his horse. 'Try South America.' The lordly gentleman
plotted out a scheme of colonisation and conquest in that region with the
coolness of a practised freebooter. 'No young man is worth a job,' he
said, 'who does not mean to be a leader, and as leader to have dominion.
Here we are fettered by ancestry and antecedents. Had I to recommence
without those encumbrances, I would try my fortune yonder. I stood
condemned to waste my youth in idle parades, and hunting the bear and
buffalo. The estate you have inherited is not binding on you. You can
realise it, and begin by taking over two or three hundred picked Irish
and English--have both races capable of handling spade and musket;
purchasing some thousands of acres to establish a legal footing there.

'You increase your colony from the mother country in the ratio of your
prosperity, until your power is respected, and there is a necessity for
the extension of your territory. When you are feared you will be on your
mettle. They will favour you with provocation. I should not doubt the
result, supposing myself to have under my sole command a trained body of
men of English blood--and Irish.'

'Owners of the soil,' rejoined Patrick, much marvelling.

'Undoubtedly, owners of the soil, but owing you service.'

'They fight sir'

'It is hardly to be specified in the calculation, knowing them. Soldiery
who have served their term, particularly old artillerymen, would be my
choice: young fellows and boys among them. Women would have to be taken.
Half-breeds are the ruin of colonists. Our men are born for conquest. We
were conquerors here, and it is want of action and going physically
forward that makes us a rusty people. There are--Mr. Adister's intonation
told of his proposing a wretched alternative,--'the Pacific Islands, but
they will soon be snapped up by the European and North American
Governments, and a single one of them does not offer space. It would
require money and a navy.' He mused. 'South America is the quarter I
should decide for, as a young man. You are a judge of horses; you ride
well; you would have splendid pastures over there; you might raise a
famous breed. The air is fine; it would suit our English stock. We are on
ground, Mr. O'Donnell, which my forefathers contested sharply and did not
yield.'

'The owners of the soil had to do that,' said Patrick. 'I can show the
same in my country, with a difference.'

'Considerably to your benefit.'

'Everything has been crushed there barring the contrary opinion.'

'I could expect such a remark from a rebel.'

'I'm only interpreting the people, sir.'

'Jump out of that tinder-box as soon as you can.'

'When I was in South America, it astonished me that no Englishman had
cast an eye on so inviting a land. Australia is not comparable with it.
And where colonisations have begun without system, and without hard
fighting to teach the settlers to value good leadership and respect their
chiefs, they tumble into Republics.'

Patrick would have liked to fling a word in about the Englishman's cast
of his eye upon inviting lands, but the trot was resumed, the lord of
Earlsfont having delivered his mind, and a minute made it happily too
late for the sarcastic bolt. Glad that his tongue had been kept from
wagging, he trotted along beside his host in the dusky evening over the
once contested land where the gentleman's forefathers had done their
deeds and firmly fixed their descendants. A remainder of dull red fire
prolonged the half-day above the mountain strongholds of the former
owners of the soil, upon which prince and bard and priest, and grappling
natives never wanting for fierceness, roared to-arms in the beacon-flames
from ridge to peak: and down they poured, and back they were pushed by
the inveterate coloniser--stationing at threatened points his old
'artillerymen' of those days and so it ends, that bard and priest and
prince; holy poetry, and divine prescription, and a righteous holding;
are as naught against him. They go, like yonder embers of the winter
sunset before advancing night: and to morrow the beacon-heaps are ashes,
the conqueror's foot stamps on them, the wind scatters them; strangest of
all, you hear victorious lawlessness appealing solemnly to God the law.

Patrick was too young to philosophise upon his ideas; or else the series
of pictures projected by the troops of sensations running through him
were not of a solidity to support any structure of philosophy. He
reverted, though rather in name than in spirit, to the abstractions,
justice, consistency, right. They were too hard to think of, so he
abandoned the puzzle of fitting them to men's acts and their consciences,
and he put them aside as mere titles employed for the uses of a police
and a tribunal to lend an appearance of legitimacy to the decrees of them
that have got the upper hand. An insurrectionary rising of his breast on
behalf of his country was the consequence. He kept it down by turning the
whole hubbub within him to the practical contemplation of a visionary
South America as the region for him and a fighting tenantry. With a
woman, to crown her queen there, the prospect was fair. But where dwelt
the woman possessing majesty suitable to such a dream in her heart or her
head? The best he had known in Ireland and in France, preferred the
charms of society to bold adventure.

All the same, thought he, it's queer counsel, that we should set to work
by buying a bit of land to win a clean footing to rob our neighbours: and
his brains took another shot at Mr. Adister, this time without
penetrating. He could very well have seen the matter he disliked in a man
that he disliked; but the father of Adiante had touched him with the gift
of the miniature.

Patrick was not asked to postpone his departure from Earlsfont, nor was
he invited to come again. Mr. Adister drove him to the station in the
early morning, and gave him a single nod from the phaeton-box for a
good-bye. Had not Caroline assured him at the leave-taking between them
that he had done her uncle great good by his visit, the blank of the
usual ceremonial phrases would have caused him to fancy himself an
intruder courteously dismissed, never more to enter the grand old Hall.
He was further comforted by hearing the stationmaster's exclamation of
astonishment and pleasure at the sight of the squire 'in his place'
handling the reins, which had not been witnessed for many a day and so it
appeared that the recent guest had been exceptionally complimented. 'But
why not a warm word, instead of turning me off to decipher a bit of
Egyptian on baked brick,' he thought, incurably Celtic as he was.

From the moment when he beheld Mr. Adister's phaeton mounting a hill that
took the first leap for the Cambrian highlands, up to his arrival in
London, scarcely one of his 'ideas' darted out before Patrick, as they
were in the habit of doing, like the enchanted bares of fairyland,
tempting him to pursue, and changing into the form of woman ever, at some
turn of the chase. For as he had travelled down to Earlsfont in the state
of ignorance and hopefulness, bearing the liquid brains of that young
condition, so did his acquisition of a particular fact destructive of
hope solidify them about it as he travelled back: in other words, they
were digesting what they had taken in. Imagination would not have stirred
for a thousand fleeting hares: and principally, it may be, because he was
conscious that no form of woman would anywhere come of them. Woman was
married; she had the ring on her finger! He could at his option look on
her in the miniature, he could think of her as being in the city where
she had been painted; but he could not conjure her out of space; she was
nowhere in the ambient air. Secretly she was a feeling that lay half
slumbering very deep down within him, and he kept the secret, choosing to
be poor rather than call her forth. He was in truth digesting with
difficulty, as must be the case when it is allotted to the brains to
absorb what the soul abhors.

'Poor old Philip!' was his perpetual refrain. 'Philip, the girl you loved
is married; and here's her portrait taken in her last blush; and the man
who has her hasn't a share in that!' Thus, throwing in the ghost of a
sigh for sympathy, it seemed to Patrick that the intelligence would have
to be communicated. Bang is better, thought he, for bad news than
snapping fire and feinting, when you're bound half to kill a fellow, and
a manly fellow.

Determined that bang it should be, he hurried from the terminus to
Philip's hotel, where he had left him, and was thence despatched to the
house of Captain Con O'Donnell, where he created a joyful confusion,
slightly dashed with rigour on the part of the regnant lady; which is not
to be wondered at, considering that both the gentlemen attending her,
Philip and her husband, quitted her table with shouts at the announcement
of his name, and her husband hauled him in unwashed before her, crying
that the lost was found, the errant returned, the Prodigal Pat recovered
by his kinsman! and she had to submit to the introduction of the
disturber: and a bedchamber had to be thought of for the unexpected
guest, and the dinner to be delayed in middle course, and her husband
corrected between the discussions concerning the bedchamber, and either
the guest permitted to appear at her table in sooty day-garb, or else a
great gap commanded in the service of her dishes, vexatious extreme for a
lady composed of orderliness. She acknowledged Patrick's profound salute
and his excuses with just so many degrees in the inclining of her head as
the polite deem a duty to themselves when the ruffling world has
disarranged them.

'Con!' she called to her chattering husband, 'we are in England, if you
please.'

'To be sure, madam,' said the captain, 'and so 's Patrick, thanks to the
stars. We fancied him gone, kidnapped, burned, made a meal of and
swallowed up, under the earth or the water; for he forgot to give us his
address in town; he stood before us for an hour or so, and then the
fellow vanished. We've waited for him gaping. With your permission I'll
venture an opinion that he'll go and dabble his hands and sit with us as
he is, for the once, as it happens.'

'Let it be so,' she rejoined, not pacified beneath her dignity. She named
the bedchamber to a footman.

'And I'll accompany the boy to hurry him on,' said the captain, hurrying
Patrick on as he spoke, till he had him out of the dining-room, when he
whispered: 'Out with your key, and if we can scramble you into your
evening-suit quick we shall heal the breach in the dinner. You dip your
hands and face, I'll have out the dress. You've the right style for her,
my boy: and mind, she is an excellent good woman, worthy of all respect:
but formality's the flattery she likes: a good bow and short speech. Here
we are, and the room's lighted. Off to the basin, give me the key; and
here's hot water in tripping Mary's hands. The portmanteau opens easy.
Quick! the door's shut on rosy Mary. The race is for domestic peace, my
boy. I sacrifice everything I can for it, in decency. 'Tis the secret of
my happiness.'

Patrick's transformation was rapid enough to satisfy the impatient
captain, who said: 'You'll tell her you couldn't sit down in her presence
undressed. I married her at forty, you know, when a woman has reached her
perfect development, and leans a trifle more to ceremonies than to
substance. And where have you been the while?'

'I'll tell you by and by,' said Patrick.

'Tell me now, and don't be smirking at the glass; your necktie's as neat
as a lady's company-smile, equal at both ends, and warranted not to relax
before the evening 's over. And mind you don't set me off talking
over-much downstairs. I talk in her presence like the usher of the Court
to the judge. 'Tis the secret of my happiness.'

'Where are those rascally dress-boots of mine?' cried Patrick.

Captain Con pitched the contents of the portmanteau right and left.
'Never mind the boots, my boy. Your legs will be under the table during
dinner, and we'll institute a rummage up here between that and the
procession to the drawing-room, where you'll be examined head to foot,
devil a doubt of it. But say, where have you been? She'll be asking, and
we're in a mess already, and may as well have a place to name to her,
somewhere, to excuse the gash you've made in her dinner. Here they are,
both of 'm, rolled in a dirty shirt!'

Patrick seized the boots and tugged them on, saying 'Earlsfont, then.'

'You've been visiting Earlsfont? Whack! but that's the saving of us! Talk
to her of her brother he sends her his love. Talk to her of the ancestral
hall--it stands as it was on the day of its foundation. Just wait about
five minutes to let her punish us, before you out with it. 'Twill come
best from you. What did you go down there for? But don't stand answering
questions; come along. Don't heed her countenance at the going in: we've
got the talisman. As to the dressing, it's a perfect trick of
harlequinade, and she'll own it after a dose of Earlsfont. And, by the
way, she's not Mrs. Con, remember; she's Mrs. Adister O'Donnell: and
that's best rolled out to Mistress. She's a worthy woman, but she was
married at forty, and I had to take her shaped as she was, for moulding
her at all was out of the question, and the soft parts of me had to be
the sufferers, to effect a conjunction, for where one won't and can't,
poor t' other must, or the union's a mockery. She was cast in bronze at
her birth, if she wasn't cut in bog-root. Anyhow, you'll study her.
Consider her for my sake. Madam, it should be--madam, call her,
addressing her, madam. She hasn't a taste for jokes, and she chastises
absurdities, and England's the foremost country of the globe, indirect
communication with heaven, and only to be connected with such a country
by the tail of it is a special distinction and a comfort for us; we're
that part of the kite!--but, Patrick, she's a charitable soul; she's a
virtuous woman and an affectionate wife, and doesn't frown to see me turn
off to my place of worship while she drum-majors it away to her own; she
entertains Father Boyle heartily, like the good woman she is to good men;
and unfortunate females too have a friend in her, a real friend--that
they have; and that 's a wonder in a woman chaste as ice. I do respect
her; and I'd like to see the man to favour me with an opportunity of
proving it on him! So you'll not forget, my boy; and prepare for a cold
bath the first five minutes. Out with Earlsfont early after that. All
these things are trifles to an unmarried man. I have to attend to 'm, I
have to be politic and give her elbow-room for her natural angles. 'Tis
the secret of my happiness.'

Priming his kinsman thus up to the door of the diningroom, Captain Con
thrust him in.

Mistress Adister O'Donnell's head rounded as by slow attraction to the
clock. Her disciplined husband signified an equal mixture of contrition
and astonishment at the passing of time. He fell to work upon his plate
in obedience to the immediate policy dictated to him.

The unbending English lady contrasted with her husband so signally that
the oddly united couple appeared yoked in a common harness for a
perpetual display of the opposition of the races. She resembled her
brother, the lord of Earlsfont, in her remarkable height and her calm air
of authority and self-sustainment. From beneath a head-dress built of
white curls and costly lace, half enclosing her high narrow forehead, a
pale, thin, straight bridge of nose descended prominently over her sunken
cheeks to thin locked lips. Her aspect suggested the repose of a winter
landscape, enjoyable in pictures, or on skates, otherwise nipping. . . .
Mental directness, of no greater breadth than her principal feature, was
the character it expressed; and candour of spirit shone through the
transparency she was, if that mild taper could be said to shine in proof
of a vitality rarely notified to the outer world by the opening of her
mouth; chiefly then, though not malevolently to command: as the portal of
some snow-bound monastery opens to the outcast, bidding it be known that
the light across the wolds was not deceptive and a glimmer of light
subsists among the silent within. The life sufficed to her. She was like
a marble effigy seated upright, requiring but to be laid at her length
for transport to the cover of the tomb.

Now Captain Con was by nature ruddy as an Indian summer flushed in all
its leaves. The corners of his face had everywhere a frank ambush, or
child's hiding-place, for languages and laughter. He could worm with a
smile quite his own the humour out of men possessing any; and even under
rigorous law, and it could not be disputed that there was rigour in the
beneficent laws imposed upon him by his wife, his genius for humour and
passion for sly independence came up and curled away like the smoke of
the illicit still, wherein the fanciful discern fine sprites indulging in
luxurious grimaces at a government long-nosed to no purpose. Perhaps, as
Patrick said of him to Caroline Adister, he was a bard without a theme.
He certainly was a man of speech, and the having fearfully to contain
himself for the greater number of the hours of the day, for the
preservation of the domestic felicity he had learnt to value, fathered
the sentiment of revolt in his bosom.

By this time, long after five minutes had elapsed, the frost presiding at
the table was fast withering Captain Con; and he was irritable to hear
why Patrick had gone off to Earlsfont, and what he had done there, and
the adventures he had tasted on the road; anything for warmth. His
efforts to fish the word out of Patrick produced deeper crevasses in the
conversation, and he cried to himself: Hats and crape-bands! mightily
struck by an idea that he and his cousins were a party of hired mourners
over the meat they consumed. Patrick was endeavouring to spare his
brother a mention of Earlsfont before they had private talk together. He
answered neither to a dip of the hook nor to a pull.

'The desert where you 've come from 's good,' said the captain, sharply
nodding.

Mrs. Adister O'Donnell ejaculated: 'Wine!' for a heavy comment upon one
of his topics, and crushed it.

Philip saw that Patrick had no desire to spread, and did not trouble him.

'Good horses in the stable too,' said the captain.

Patrick addressed Mrs. Adister: 'I have hardly excused myself to you,
madam.'

Her head was aloft in dumb apostrophe of wearifulness over another of her
husband's topics.

'Do not excuse yourself at all,' she said.

The captain shivered. He overhauled his plotting soul publicly: 'Why
don't you out with it yourself!' and it was wonderful why he had not done
so, save that he was prone to petty conspiracy, and had thought
reasonably that the revelation would be damp, gunpowder, coming from him.
And for when he added: 'The boy's fresh from Earlsfont; he went down to
look at the brav old house of the Adisters, and was nobly welcomed and
entertained, and made a vast impression,' his wife sedately remarked to
Patrick, 'You have seen my brother Edward.'

'And brings a message of his love to you, my dear,' the Captain bit his
nail harder.

'You have a message for me?' she asked; and Patrick replied: 'The captain
is giving a free translation. I was down there, and I took the liberty of
calling on Mr. Adister, and I had a very kind reception. We hunted, we
had a good day with the hounds. I think I remember hearing that you go
there at Christmas, madam.'

'Our last Christmas at Earlsfont was a sad meeting for the family. My
brother Edward is well?'

'I had the happiness to be told that I had been of a little service in
cheering him.'

'I can believe it,' said Mrs. Adister, letting her eyes dwell on the
young man; and he was moved by the silvery tremulousness of her voice.

She resumed: 'You have the art of dressing in a surprisingly short time.'

'There!' exclaimed Captain Con: for no man can hear the words which prove
him a prophet without showing excitement. 'Didn't I say so? Patrick's a
hero for love or war, my dear. He stood neat and trim from the silk socks
to the sprig of necktie in six minutes by my watch. And that's witness to
me that you may count on him for what the great Napoleon called
two-o'clock-in-the-morning courage; not too common even in his immortal
army:--when it's pitch black and frosty cold, and you're buried within in
a dream of home, and the trumpet springs you to your legs in a trice,
boots and trowsers, coat and sword-belt and shako, and one twirl to the
whiskers, and away before a second snap of the fingers to where the great
big bursting end of all things for you lies crouching like a
Java-Tiger--a ferocious beast painted undertaker's colour--for a leap at
you in particular out of the dark;--never waiting an instant to ask
what's the matter and pretend you don't know. That's rare, Philip; that's
bravery; Napoleon knew the thing; and Patrick has it; my hand's on the
boy's back for that.'

The captain was permitted to discourse as he pleased: his wife was wholly
given to the recent visitor to Earlsfont, whom she informed that Caroline
was the youngest daughter of General Adister, her second brother, and an
excellent maiden, her dear Edward's mainstay in his grief. At last she
rose, and was escorted to the door by all present. But Captain Con rather
shame-facedly explained to Patrick that it was a sham departure; they had
to follow without a single spin to the claretjug: he closed the door
merely to state his position; how at half-past ten he would be a free
man, according to the convention, to which his wife honourably adhered,
so he had to do likewise, as regarded his share of it. Thereupon he
apologised to the brothers, bitterly regretting that, with good wine in
the cellar, his could be no house for claret; and promising them they
should sit in their shirts and stretch their legs, and toast the old
country and open their hearts, no later than the minute pointing to the
time for his deliverance.

Mrs. Adister accepted her husband's proffered arm unhesitatingly at the
appointed stroke of the clock. She said: 'Yes,' in agreement with him, as
if she had never heard him previously enunciate the formula, upon his
pious vociferation that there should be no trifling with her hours of
rest.

'You can find your way to my cabin,' he said to Philip over his shoulder,
full of solicitude for the steps of the admirable lady now positively
departing.

As soon as the brothers were alone, Philip laid his hand on Patrick,
asking him, 'What does it mean?'

Patrick fired his cannon-shot: 'She's married!' Consulting his feelings
immediately after, he hated himself for his bluntness.

Philip tossed his head. 'But why did you go down there?'

'I went,' said Patrick, 'well, I went . . . . I thought you looked
wretched, and I went with an idea of learning where she was, and seeing
if I couldn't do something. It's too late now; all's over.'

'My dear boy, I've worse than that to think of.'

'You don't mind it?'

'That's old news, Patrick.'

'You don't care for her any more, Philip?'

'You wouldn't have me caring for a married woman?'

'She has a perfect beast for a husband.'

'I'm sorry she didn't make a better choice.'

'He's a prince.'

'So I hear.'

'Ah! And what worse, Philip, can you be having to think of?'

'Affairs,' Philip replied, and made his way to the cabin of Captain Con,
followed in wonderment by Patrick, who would hardly have been his dupe to
suppose him indifferent and his love of Adiante dead, had not the thought
flashed on him a prospect of retaining the miniature for his own, or for
long in his custody.




CHAPTER IX

THE CAPTAIN'S CABIN

Patrick left his brother at the second flight of stairs to run and fling
on a shooting-jacket, into which he stuffed his treasure, after one peep
that eclipsed his little dream of being allowed to keep it; and so he saw
through Philip.

The captain's cabin was the crown of his house-top, a builder's addition
to the roof, where the detestable deeds he revelled in, calling them
liberty, could be practised, according to the convention, and no one save
rosy Mary, in her sense of smell, when she came upon her morning business
to clean and sweep, be any the wiser of them, because, as it is known to
the whole world, smoke ascends, and he was up among the chimneys. Here,
he would say to his friends and fellow-sinners, you can unfold, unbosom,
explode, do all you like, except caper, and there 's a small square of
lead between the tiles outside for that, if the spirit of the jig comes
upon you with violence, as I have had it on me, and eased myself mightily
there, to my own music; and the capital of the British Empire below me.
Here we take our indemnity for subjection to the tyrannical female ear,
and talk like copious rivers meandering at their own sweet will. Here we
roll like dogs in carrion, and no one to sniff at our coats. Here we sing
treason, here we flout reason, night is out season at half-past ten.

This introductory ode to Freedom was his throwing off of steam, the
foretaste of what he contained. He rejoined his cousins, chirping
variations on it, and attired in a green silken suit of airy Ottoman
volume, full of incitement to the legs and arms to swing and set him up
for a Sultan. 'Now Phil, now Pat,' he cried, after tenderly pulling the
door to and making sure it was shut, 'any tale you've a mind
for--infamous and audacious! You're licensed by the gods up here, and may
laugh at them too, and their mothers and grandmothers, if the fit seizes
ye, and the heartier it is the greater the exemption. We're pots that
knock the lid and must pour out or boil over and destroy the furniture.
My praties are ready for peelin', if ever they were in this world! Chuck
wigs from sconces, and off with your buckram. Decency's a dirty petticoat
in the Garden of Innocence. Naked we stand, boys! we're not afraid of
nature. You're in the annexe of Erin, Pat, and devil a constable at the
keyhole; no rats; I'll say that for the Government, though it's a
despotism with an iron bridle on the tongue outside to a foot of the
door. Arctic to freeze the boldest bud of liberty! I'd like a French
chanson from ye, Pat, to put us in tune, with a right revolutionary
hurling chorus, that pitches Kings' heads into the basket like autumn
apples. Or one of your hymns in Gaelic sung ferociously to sound as
horrid to the Saxon, the wretch. His reign 's not for ever; he can't
enter here. You're in the stronghold defying him. And now cigars, boys,
pipes; there are the boxes, there are the bowls. I can't smoke till I
have done steaming. I'll sit awhile silently for the operation.
Christendom hasn't such a man as your cousin Con for feeling himself a
pig-possessed all the blessed day, acting the part of somebody else, till
it takes me a quarter of an hour of my enfranchisement and restoration of
my natural man to know myself again. For the moment, I'm froth, scum,
horrid boiling hissing dew of the agony of transformation; I am; I'm that
pig disgorging the spirit of wickedness from his poor stomach.'

The captain drooped to represent the state of the self-relieving victim
of the evil one; but fearful lest either of his cousins should usurp the
chair and thwart his chance of delivering himself, he rattled away
sympathetically with his posture in melancholy: 'Ay, we're poor
creatures; pigs and prophets, princes and people, victors and vanquished,
we 're waves of the sea, rolling over and over, and calling it life!
There's no life save the eternal. Father Boyle's got the truth. Flesh is
less than grass, my sons; 'tis the shadow that crosses the grass. I love
the grass. I could sit and watch grassblades for hours. I love an old
turf mound, where the grey grass nods and seems to know the wind and have
a whisper with it, of ancient times maybe and most like; about the big
chief lying underneath in the last must of his bones that a breath of air
would scatter. They just keep their skeleton shape as they are; for the
turf mound protects them from troubles: 'tis the nurse to that delicate
old infant!--Waves of the sea, did I say? We're wash in a hog-trough for
Father Saturn to devour; big chief and suckling babe, we all go into it,
calling it life! And what hope have we of reading the mystery? All we can
see is the straining of the old fellow's hams to push his old snout
deeper into the gobble, and the ridiculous curl of a tail totally devoid
of expression! You'll observe that gluttons have no feature; they're jaws
and hindquarters; which is the beginning and end of 'm; and so you may
say to Time for his dealing with us: so let it be a lesson to you not to
bother your wits, but leave the puzzle to the priest. He understands it,
and why? because he was told. There 's harmony in his elocution, and
there's none in the modern drivel about where we're going and what we
came out of. No wonder they call it an age of despair, when you see the
big wigs filing up and down the thoroughfares with a great advertisement
board on their shoulders, proclaiming no information to the multitude,
but a blank note of interrogation addressed to Providence, as if an
answer from above would be vouchsafed to their impudence! They haven't
the first principles of good manners. And some of 'm in a rage bawl the
answer for themselves. Hear that! No, Phil; No, Pat, no: devotion's good
policy.--You're not drinking! Are you both of ye asleep? why do ye leave
me to drone away like this, when it 's conversation I want, as in the
days of our first parents, before the fig-leaf?--and you might have that
for scroll and figure on the social banner of the hypocritical Saxon,
who's a gormandising animal behind his decency, and nearer to the
Arch-devourer Time than anything I can imagine: except that with a little
exertion you can elude him. The whisky you've got between you 's virgin
of the excise. I'll pay double for freepeaty any day. Or are you for
claret, my lads? No? I'm fortified up here to stand a siege in my old
round tower, like the son of Eremon that I am. Lavra Con! Con speaks at
last! I don't ask you, Pat, whether you remember Maen, who was born dumb,
and had for his tutors Ferkelne the bard and Crafting the harper, at
pleasant Dinree: he was grandson of Leary Lore who was basely murdered by
his brother Cova, and Cova spared the dumb boy, thinking a man without a
tongue harmless, as fools do: being one of their savings-bank tricks, to
be repaid them, their heirs, executors, administrators, and assigns at
compound interest, have no fear. So one day Maen had an insult put on
him; and 'twas this for certain: a ruffian fellow of the Court swore he
couldn't mention the name of his father; and in a thundering fury Maen
burst his tongue-tie, and the Court shouted Lavra Maen: and he had to go
into exile, where he married in the middle of delicious love-adventures
the beautiful Moira through the cunning of Craftine the harper. There's
been no harper in my instance but plenty of ruffians to swear I'm too
comfortable to think of my country.' The captain holloaed. 'Do they hear
that? Lord! but wouldn't our old Celtic fill the world with poetry if
only we were a free people to give our minds to 't, instead of to the
itch on our backs from the Saxon horsehair shirt we're forced to wear.
For, Pat, as you know, we're a loving people, we're a loyal people, we
burn to be enthusiastic, but when our skins are eternally irritated, how
can we sing? In a freer Erin I'd be the bard of the land, never doubt it.
What am I here but a discontented idle lout crooning over the empty
glories of our isle of Saints! You feel them, Pat. Phil's all for his
British army, his capabilities of British light cavalry. Write me the
history of the Enniskillens. I'll read it. Aha, my boy, when they 're off
at the charge! And you'll oblige me with the tale of Fontenoy. Why, Phil
has an opportunity stretching forth a hand to him now more than halfway
that comes to a young Irishman but once in a century: backed by the
entire body of the priesthood of Ireland too! and if only he was a
quarter as full of the old country as you and I, his hair would stand up
in fire for the splendid gallop at our head that's proposed to him. His
country's gathered up like a crested billow to roll him into Parliament;
and I say, let him be there, he 's the very man to hurl his gauntlet, and
tell 'm, Parliament, so long as you are parliamentary, which means the
speaking of our minds, but if you won't have it, then-and it 's on your
heads before Europe and the two Americas. We're dying like a nun that 'd
be out of her cloister, we're panting like the wife who hears of her
husband coming home to her from the field of honour, for that young man.
And there he is; or there he seems to be; but he's dead: and the
fisherman off the west coast after dreaming of a magical haul, gets more
fish than disappointment in comparison with us when we cast the net for
Philip. Bring tears of vexation at the emptiness we pull back for our
pains. Oh, Phil! and to think of your youth! We had you then. At least we
had your heart. And we should have had the length and strength of you,
only for a woman fatal to us as the daughter of Rhys ap Tudor, the
beautiful Nesta:--and beautiful she was to match the mother of the curses
trooping over to Ireland under Strongbow, that I'll grant you. But she
reined you in when you were a real warhorse ramping and snorting flame
from your nostrils, challenging any other to a race for Ireland; ay, a
Cuchullin you were, Philip, Culann's chain-bound: but she unmanned you.
She soaked the woman into you and squeezed the hero out of you. All for
Adiante! or a country left to slavery! that's the tale. And what are you
now? A paltry captain of hussars on the General's staff! One O'Donnell in
a thousand! And what is she?--you needn't frown, Phil; I'm her relative
by marriage, and she 's a lady. More than that, she shot a dart or two
into my breast in those days, she did, I'll own it: I had the catch of
the breath that warns us of convulsions. She was the morning star for
beauty, between night and day, and the best colour of both. Welshmen and
Irishmen and Englishmen tumbled into the pit, which seeing her was, and
there we jostled for a glimpse quite companionably; we were too hungry
for quarrelling; and to say, I was one of 'm, is a title to subsequent
friendship. True; only mark me, Philip, and you, Patrick: they say she
has married a prince, and I say no; she's took to herself a husband in
her cradle; she's married ambition. I tell you, and this prince of hers
is only a step she has taken, and if he chases her first mate from her
bosom, he'll prove himself cleverer than she, and I dare him to the
trial. For she's that fiery dragon, a beautiful woman with brains--which
Helen of Troy hadn't, combustible as we know her to have been: but brains
are bombshells in comparison with your old-fashioned pine-brands for
kindling men and cities. Ambition's the husband of Adiante Adister, and
all who come nigh her are steps to her aim. She never consulted her
father about Prince Nikolas; she had begun her march and she didn't mean
to be arrested. She simply announced her approaching union; and as she
couldn't have a scion of one of the Royal House of Europe, she put her
foot on Prince Nikolas. And he 's not to fancy he 's in for a peaceful
existence; he's a stone in a sling, and probably mistaken the rocking
that's to launch him through the air for a condition of remarkable ease,
perfectly remarkable in its lullaby motion; ha! well, and I've not heard
of ambition that didn't kill its votary: somehow it will; 'tis sure to.
There she lies!'

The prophetic captain pointed at the spot. He then said: 'And now I'm for
my pipe, and the blackest clay of the party, with your permission. I'll
just go to the window to see if the stars are out overhead. They're my
blessed guardian angels.'

There was a pause. Philip broke from a brown study to glance at his
brother. Patrick made a queer face.

'Fun and good-fellowship to-night, Con,' said Philip, as the captain
sadly reported no star visible.

'Have I ever flown a signal to the contrary?' retorted the captain.

'No politics, and I 'll thank you,' said Philip: 'none of your early
recollections. Be jovial.'

'You should have seen me here the other night about a month ago; I
smuggled up an old countrywoman of ours, with the connivance of rosy
Mary,' said Captain Con, suffused in the merriest of grins. 'She sells
apples at a stall at a corner of a street hard by, and I saw her sitting
pulling at her old pipe in the cold October fog morning and evening for
comfort, and was overwhelmed with compassion and fraternal sentiment; and
so I invited her to be at the door of the house at half-past ten, just to
have a roll with her in Irish mud, and mend her torn soul with a stitch
or two of rejoicing. She told me stories; and one was pretty good, of a
relative of hers, or somebody's--I should say, a century old, but she
told it with a becoming air of appropriation that made it family history,
for she's come down in the world, and this fellow had a stain of red upon
him, and wanted cleaning; and, "What!" says the good father, "Mika! you
did it in cold blood?" And says Mika, "Not I, your Riverence. I got
myself into a passion 'fore I let loose." I believe she smoked this
identical pipe. She acknowledged the merits of my whisky, as poets do
hearing fine verses, never clapping hands, but with the expressiveness of
grave absorption. That's the way to make good things a part of you. She
was a treat. I got her out and off at midnight, rosy Mary sneaking her
down, and the old girl quiet as a mouse for the fun's sake. The whole
intrigue was exquisitely managed.'

'You run great risks,' Philip observed.

'I do,' said the captain.

He called on the brothers to admire the 'martial and fumial' decorations
of his round tower, buzzing over the display of implements, while Patrick
examined guns and Philip unsheathed swords. An ancient clay pipe from the
bed of the Thames and one from the bed of the Boyne were laid side by
side, and strange to relate, the Irish pipe and English immediately, by
the mere fact of their being proximate, entered into rivalry; they all
but leapt upon one another. The captain judicially decided the case
against the English pipe, as a newer pipe of grosser manufacture, not so
curious by any means.

'This,' Philip held up the reputed Irish pipe, and scanned as he twirled
it on his thumb, 'This was dropped in Boyne Water by one of William's
troopers. It is an Orange pipe. I take it to be of English make.'

'If I thought that, I'd stamp my heel on the humbug the neighbour
minute,' said Captain Con. 'Where's the sign of English marks?'

'The pipes resemble one another,' said Philip, 'like tails of
Shannon-bred retrievers.'

'Maybe they 're both Irish, then?' the captain caught at analogy to
rescue his favourite from reproach.

'Both of them are Saxon.'

'Not a bit of it!'

'Look at the clay.'

'I look, and I tell you, Philip, it's of a piece with your lukewarmness
for the country, or you wouldn't talk like that.'

'There is no record of pipe manufactories in Ireland at the period you
name.'

'There is: and the jealousy of rulers caused them to be destroyed by
decrees, if you want historical evidence.'

'Your opposition to the Saxon would rob him of his pipe, Con!'

'Let him go to the deuce with as many pipes as he can carry; but he
shan't have this one.'

'Not a toss-up of difference is to be seen in the pair.'

'Use your eyes. The Irish bowl is broken, and the English has an inch
longer stem!'

'O the Irish bowl is broken!' Philip sang.

'You've the heart of a renegade-foreigner not to see it!' cried the
captain.

Patrick intervened saying: 'I suspect they're Dutch.'

'Well, and that 's possible.' Captain Con scrutinised them to calm his
temper: 'there's a Dutchiness in the shape.'

He offered Philip the compromise of 'Dutch' rather plaintively, but it
was not accepted, and the pipes would have mingled their fragments on the
hearthstone if Patrick had not stayed his arm, saying: 'Don't hurt them.'

'And I won't,' the captain shook his hand gratefully.

'But will Philip O'Donnell tell me that Ireland should lie down with
England on the terms of a traveller obliged to take a bedfellow? Come! He
hasn't an answer. Put it to him, and you pose him. But he 'll not stir,
though he admits the antagonism. And Ireland is asked to lie down with
England on a couch blessed by the priest! Not she. Wipe out our
grievances, and then we'll begin to talk of policy. Good Lord!--love? The
love of Ireland for the conquering country will be the celebrated
ceremony in the concluding chapter previous to the inauguration of the
millennium. Thousands of us are in a starving state at home this winter,
Patrick. And it's not the fault of England?--landlordism 's not? Who
caused the ruin of all Ireland's industries? You might as well say that
it 's the fault of the poor beggar to go limping and hungry because his
cruel master struck him a blow to cripple him. We don't want half and
half doctoring, and it's too late in the day for half and half oratory.
We want freedom, and we'll have it, and we won't leave it to the Saxon to
think about giving it. And if your brother Philip won't accept this
blazing fine offer, then I will, and you'll behold me in a new attitude.
The fellow yawns! You don't know me yet, Philip. They tell us over here
we ought to be satisfied. Fall upon our list of wrongs, and they set to
work yawning. You can only move them by popping at them over hedges and
roaring on platforms. They're incapable of understanding a complaint a
yard beyond their noses. The Englishman has an island mind, and when he's
out of it he's at sea.'

'Mad, you mean,' said Philip.

'I repeat my words, Captain Philip O'Donnell, late of the staff of the
General commanding in Canada.'

'The Irishman too has an island mind, and when he's out of it he's at
sea, and unable to manage his craft,' said Philip.

'You'll find more craft in him when he's buffeted than you reckoned on,'
his cousin flung back. 'And if that isn't the speech of a traitor sold to
the enemy, and now throwing off the mask, traitors never did mischief in
Ireland! Why, what can you discover to admire in these people? Isn't
their army such a combination of colours in the uniforms, with their
yellow facings on red jackets, I never saw out of a doll-shop, and never
saw there. And their Horse Guards, weedy to a man! fit for a doll-shop
they are, by my faith! And their Foot Guards: Have ye met the fellows
marching? with their feet turned out, flat as my laundress's irons, and
the muscles of their calves depending on the joints to get 'm along, for
elasticity never gave those bones of theirs a springing touch; and their
bearskins heeling behind on their polls; like pot-house churls daring the
dursn't to come on. Of course they can fight. Who said no? But they 're
not the only ones: and they 'll miss their ranks before they can march
like our Irish lads. The look of their men in line is for all the world
to us what lack-lustre is to the eye. The drill they 've had hasn't
driven Hodge out of them, it has only stiffened the dolt; and dolt won't
do any longer; the military machine requires intelligence in all ranks
now. Ay, the time for the Celt is dawning: I see it, and I don't often
spy a spark where there isn't soon a blaze. Solidity and stupidity have
had their innings: a precious long innings it has been; and now they're
shoved aside like clods of earth from the risin flower. Off with our
shackles! We've only to determine it to be free, and we'll bloom again;
and I'll be the first to speak the word and mount the colours. Follow me!
Will ye join in the toast to the emblem of Erin--the shamrock, Phil and
Pat?'

'Oh, certainly,' said Philip. 'What 's that row going on?' Patrick also
called attention to the singular noise in the room. 'I fancy the time for
the Celt is not dawning, but setting,' said Philip, with a sharp smile;
and Patrick wore an artful look.

A corner of the room was guilty of the incessant alarum. Captain Con
gazed in that direction incredulously and with remonstrance. 'The tinkler
it is!' he sighed. 'But it can't be midnight yet?' Watches were examined.
Time stood at half-past the midnight. He groaned: 'I must go. I haven't
heard the tinkler for months. It signifies she's cold in her bed. The
thing called circulation's unknown to her save by the aid of outward
application, and I 'm the warming pan, as legitimately I should be, I'm
her husband and her Harvey in one. Goodbye to my hop and skip. I ought by
rights to have been down beside her at midnight. She's the worthiest
woman alive, and I don't shirk my duty. Be quiet!' he bellowed at the
alarum; 'I 'm coming. Don't be in such a fright, my dear,' he admonished
it as his wife, politely. 'Your hand'll take an hour to warm if you keep
it out on the spring that sets the creature going.' He turned and
informed his company: 'Her hand'll take an hour to warm. Dear! how she
runs ahead: d' ye hear? That's the female tongue, and once off it won't
stop. And this contrivance for fetching me from my tower to her bed was
my own suggestion, in a fit of generosity! Ireland all over! I must hurry
and wash my hair, for she can't bear a perfume to kill a stink; she
carries her charitable heart that far. Good-night, I'll be thinking of ye
while I'm warming her. Sit still, I can't wait; 'tis the secret of my
happiness.' He fled. Patrick struck his knee on hearing the expected
ballad-burden recur.




CHAPTER X

THE BROTHERS

'Con has learnt one secret,' said Philip, quitting his chair.

Patrick went up to him, and, 'Give us a hug,' he said, and the hug was
given.

They were of an equal height, tall young men, alert, nervously braced
from head to foot, with the differences between soldier and civilian
marked by the succintly military bearing of the elder brother, whose
movements were precise and prompt, and whose frame was leopardlike in
indolence. Beside him Patrick seemed cubbish, though beside another he
would not have appeared so. His features were not so brilliantly regular,
but were a fanciful sketch of the same design, showing a wider pattern of
the long square head and the forehead, a wavering at the dip of the nose,
livelier nostrils: the nostrils dilated and contracted, and were
exceeding alive. His eyelids had to do with the look of his eyes, and
were often seen cutting the ball. Philip's eyes were large on the pent of
his brows, open, liquid, and quick with the fire in him. Eyes of that
quality are the visible mind, animated both to speak it and to render it
what comes within their scope. They were full, unshaded direct, the man
himself, in action. Patrick's mouth had to be studied for an additional
index to the character. To symbolise them, they were as a sword-blade
lying beside book.

Men would have thought Patrick the slippery one of the two: women would
have inclined to confide in him the more thoroughly; they bring feeling
to the test, and do not so much read a print as read the imprinting on
themselves; and the report that a certain one of us is true as steel,
must be unanimous at a propitious hour to assure them completely that the
steel is not two-edged in the fully formed nature of a man whom they have
not tried. They are more at home with the unformed, which lends itself to
feeling and imagination. Besides Patrick came nearer to them; he showed
sensibility. They have it, and they deem it auspicious of goodness, or of
the gentleness acceptable as an equivalent. Not the less was Philip the
one to inspire the deeper and the wilder passion.

'So you've been down there?' said Philip. 'Tell us of your welcome. Never
mind why you went: I think I see. You're the Patrick of fourteen, who
tramped across Connaught for young Dermot to have a sight of you before
he died, poor lad. How did Mr. Adister receive you?'

Patrick described the first interview.

Philip mused over it. 'Yes, those are some of his ideas: gentlemen are to
excel in the knightly exercises. He used to fence excellently, and he was
a good horseman. The Jesuit seminary would have been hard for him to
swallow once. The house is a fine old house: lonely, I suppose.'

Patrick spoke of Caroline Adister and pursued his narrative. Philip was
lost in thought. At the conclusion, relating to South America, he raised
his head and said: 'Not so foolish as it struck you, Patrick. You and I
might do that,--without the design upon the original owner of the soil!
Irishmen are better out of Europe, unless they enter one of the
Continental services.'

'What is it Con O'Donnell proposes to you?' Patrick asked him earnestly.

'To be a speaking trumpet in Parliament. And to put it first among the
objections, I haven't an independence; not above two hundred a year.'

'I'll make it a thousand,' said Patrick, 'that is, if my people can pay.'

'Secondly, I don't want to give up my profession. Thirdly, fourthly,
fifthly, once there, I should be boiling with the rest. I never could go
half way. This idea of a commencement gives me a view of the finish.
Would you care to try it?'

'If I'm no wiser after two or three years of the world I mean to make a
better acquaintance with,' Patrick replied. 'Over there at home one
catches the fever, you know. They have my feelings, and part of my
judgement, and whether that's the weaker part I can't at present decide.
My taste is for quiet farming and breeding.'

'Friendship, as far as possible; union, if the terms are fair,' said
Philip. 'It's only the name of union now; supposing it a concession that
is asked of them; say, sacrifice; it might be made for the sake of what
our people would do to strengthen the nation. But they won't try to
understand our people. Their laws, and their rules, their systems are
forced on a race of an opposite temper, who would get on well enough, and
thrive, if they were properly consulted. Ireland 's the sore place of
England, and I'm sorry for it. We ought to be a solid square, with Europe
in this pickle. So I say, sitting here. What should I be saying in
Parliament?'

'Is Con at all likely, do you think, Philip?'

'He might: and become the burlesque Irishman of the House. There must be
one, and the lot would be safe to fall on him.'

'Isn't he serious about it?'

'Quite, I fancy; and that will be the fun. A serious fellow talking
nonsense with lively illustrations, is just the man for House of Commons
clown. Your humorous rogue is not half so taking. Con would be the
porpoise in a fish tank there, inscrutably busy on his errand and watched
for his tumblings. Better I than he; and I should make a worse of it--at
least for myself.'

'Wouldn't the secret of his happiness interfere?'

'If he has the secret inside his common sense. The bulk of it I suspect
to be, that he enjoys his luxuries and is ashamed of his laziness; and so
the secret pulls both ways. One day a fit of pride may have him, or one
of his warm impulses, and if he's taken in the tide of it, I shall grieve
for the secret.'

'You like his wife, Philip?'

'I respect her. They came together,--I suppose, because they were near
together, like the two islands, in spite of the rolling waves between. I
would not willingly see the union disturbed. He warms her, and she houses
him. And he has to control the hot blood that does the warming, and she
to moderate the severity of her principles, which are an essential part
of the housing. Oh! shiver politics, Patrice. I wish I had been bred in
France: a couple of years with your Pere Clement, and I could have met
Irishmen and felt to them as an Irishman, whether they were disaffected
or not. I wish I did. When I landed the other day, I thought myself
passably cured, and could have said that rhetoric is the fire-water of
our country, and claptrap the springboard to send us diving into it. I
like my comrades-in-arms, I like the character of British officers, and
the men too--I get on well with them. I declare to you, Patrice, I burn
to live in brotherhood with them, not a rift of division at heart! I
never show them that there is one. But our early training has us; it
comes on us again; three or four days with Con have stirred me; I don't
let him see it, but they always do: these tales of starvations and
shootings, all the old work just as when I left, act on me like a smell
of powder. I was dipped in "Ireland for the Irish"; and a contented
Irishman scarcely seems my countryman.'

'I suppose it 's like what I hear of as digesting with difficulty,'
Patrick referred to the state described by his brother.

'And not the most agreeable of food,' Philip added.

'It would be the secret of our happiness to discover how to make the best
of it, if we had to pay penance for the discovery by living in an
Esquimaux shanty,' said Patrick.

'With a frozen fish of admirable principles for wife,' said Philip.

'Ah, you give me shudders!'

'And it's her guest who talks of her in that style! and I hope to be
thought a gentleman!' Philip pulled himself up. 'We may be all in the
wrong. The way to begin to think so, is to do them an injury and forget
it. The sensation's not unpleasant when it's other than a question of
good taste. But politics to bed, Patrice. My chief is right--soldiers
have nothing to do with them. What are you fiddling at in your coat
there?'

'Something for you, my dear Philip.' Patrick brought out the miniature.
He held it for his brother to look. 'It was the only thing I could get.
Mr. Adister sends it. The young lady, Miss Caroline, seconded me. They
think more of the big portrait: I don't. And it 's to be kept carefully,
in case of the other one getting damaged. That's only fair.'

Philip drank in the face upon a swift shot of his eyes.

'Mr. Adister sends it?' His tone implied wonder at such a change in
Adiante's father.

'And an invitation to you to visit him when you please.'

'That he might do,' said Philip: it was a lesser thing than to send her
likeness to him.

Patrick could not help dropping his voice: 'Isn't it very like?' For
answer the miniature had to be inspected closely.

Philip was a Spartan for keeping his feelings under.

'Yes,' he said, after an interval quick with fiery touches on the history
of that face and his life. 'Older, of course. They are the features, of
course. The likeness is not bad. I suppose it resembles her as she is
now, or was when it was painted. You 're an odd fellow to have asked for
it.'

'I thought you would wish to have it, Philip.'

'You're a good boy, Patrice. Light those candles we'll go to bed. I want
a cool head for such brains as I have, and bumping the pillow all night
is not exactly wholesome. We'll cross the Channel in a few days, and see
the nest, and the mother, and the girls.'

'Not St. George's Channel. Mother would rather you would go to France and
visit the De Reuils. She and the girls hope you will keep out of Ireland
for a time: it's hot. Judge if they're anxious, when it's to stop them
from seeing you, Philip!'

'Good-night, dear boy.' Philip checked the departing Patrick. 'You can
leave that.' He made a sign for the miniature to be left on the table.

Patrick laid it there. His brother had not touched it, and he could have
defended himself for having forgotten to leave it, on the plea that it
might prevent his brother from having his proper share of sleep; and
also, that Philip had no great pleasure in the possession of it. The two
pleas, however, did not make one harmonious apology, and he went straight
to the door in an odd silence, with the step of a decorous office-clerk,
keeping his shoulders turned on Philip to conceal his look of
destitution.




CHAPTER XI

INTRODUCING A NEW CHARACTER

Letters and telegrams and morning journals lay on the breakfast-table,
awaiting the members of the household with combustible matter. Bad news
from Ireland came upon ominous news from India. Philip had ten words of
mandate from his commanding officer, and they signified action, uncertain
where. He was the soldier at once, buckled tight and buttoned up over his
private sentiments. Vienna shot a line to Mrs. Adister O'Donnell. She
communicated it:'The Princess Nikolas has a son!' Captain Con tossed his
newspaper to the floor, crying:

'To-day the city'll be a chimney on fire, with the blacks in everybody's
faces; but I must go down. It's hen and chicks with the director of a
City Company. I must go.'

Did you say, madam?' Patrick inquired. 'A son,' said Mrs. Adister.

'And the military holloaing for reinforcements,' exclaimed Con. 'Pheu!
Phil!'

'That's what it comes to,' was Philip's answer. 'Precautionary measures,
eh?'

'You can make them provocative.' 'Will you beg for India?' 'I shall hear
in an hour.' 'Have we got men?'

'Always the question with us.'

'What a country!' sighed the captain. 'I'd compose ye a song of old
Drowsylid, except that it does no good to be singing it at the only time
when you can show her the consequences of her sluggery. A country of
compromise goes to pieces at the first cannon-shot of the advance, and
while she's fighting on it's her poor business to be putting herself
together again: So she makes a mess of the beginning, to a certainty. If
it weren't that she had the army of Neptune about her--'

'The worst is she may some day start awake to discover that her
protecting deity 's been napping too.--A boy or girl did you say, my
dear?'

His wife replied: 'A son.'

'Ah! more births.' The captain appeared to be computing. 'But this one's
out of England: and it's a prince I suppose they'll call him: and princes
don't count in the population for more than finishing touches, like the
crossing of t's and dotting of i's, though true they're the costliest,
like some flowers and feathers, and they add to the lump on Barney's
back. But who has any compassion for a burdened donkey? unless when you
see him standing immortal meek! Well, and a child of some sort must have
been expected? Because it's no miracle after marriage: worse luck for the
crowded earth!'

'Things may not be expected which are profoundly distasteful,' Mrs.
Adister remarked.

'True,' said her sympathetic husband. ''Tis like reading the list of the
dead after a battle where you've not had the best of it--each name 's a
startling new blow. I'd offer to run to Earlsfont, but here's my company
you would have me join for the directoring of it, you know, my dear, to
ballast me, as you pretty clearly hinted; and all 's in the city to-day
like a loaf with bad yeast, thick as lead, and sour to boot. And a howl
and growl coming off the wilds of Old Ireland! We're smitten to-day in
our hearts and our pockets, and it 's a question where we ought to feel
it most, for the sake of our families.'

'Do you not observe that your cousins are not eating?' said his wife,
adding, to Patrick: 'I entertain the opinion that a sound
breakfast-appetite testifies to the proper vigour of men.'

'Better than a doctor's pass: and to their habits likewise,' Captain Con
winked at his guests, begging them to steal ten minutes out of the fray
for the inward fortification of them.

Eggs in the shell, and masses of eggs, bacon delicately thin and curling
like Apollo's locks at his temples, and cutlets, caviar, anchovies in the
state of oil, were pressed with the captain's fervid illustrations upon
the brothers, both meditatively nibbling toast and indifferent to the
similes he drew and applied to life from the little fish which had their
sharpness corrected but not cancelled by the improved liquid they swam
in. 'Like an Irishman in clover,' he said to his wife to pay her a
compliment and coax an acknowledgement: 'just the flavour of the salt of
him.'

Her mind was on her brother Edward, and she could not look sweet-oily, as
her husband wooed her to do, with impulse to act the thing he was
imagining.

'And there is to-morrow's dinner-party to the Mattocks: I cannot travel
to Earlsfont,' she said.

'Patrick is a disengaged young verderer, and knows the route, and has a
welcome face there, and he might go, if you're for having it performed by
word of mouth. But, trust me, my dear, bad news is best communicated by
telegraph, which gives us no stupid articles and particles to quarrel
with. "Boy born Vienna doctor smiling nurse laughing." That tells it all,
straight to the understanding, without any sickly circumlocutory stuff;
and there's nothing more offensive to us when we're hurt at intelligence.
For the same reason, Colonel Arthur couldn't go, since you'll want him to
meet the Mattocks?'

Captain Con's underlip shone with a roguish thinness.

'Arthur must be here,' said Mrs. Adister. 'I cannot bring myself to write
it. I disapprove of telegrams.'

She was asking to be assisted, so her husband said:

'Take Patrick for a secretary. Dictate. He has a bold free hand and'll
supply all the fiorituri and arabesques necessary to the occasion
running.'

She gazed at Patrick as if to intimate that he might be enlisted, and
said: 'It will be to Caroline. She will break it to her uncle.'

'Right, madam, on the part of a lady I 've never known to be wrong! And
so, my dear, I must take leave of you, to hurry down to the tormented
intestines of that poor racked city, where the winds of panic are
violently engaged in occupying the vacuum created by knocking over what
the disaster left standing; and it 'll much resemble a colliery accident
there, I suspect, and a rescue of dead bodies. Adieu, my dear.' He
pressed his lips on her thin fingers.

Patrick placed himself at Mrs. Adister's disposal as her secretary. She
nodded a gracious acceptance of him.

'I recommended the telegraph because it's my wife's own style, and comes
better from wires,' said the captain, as they were putting on their
overcoats in the hall. 'You must know the family. "Deeds not words" would
serve for their motto. She hates writing, and doesn't much love talking.
Pat 'll lengthen her sentences for her. She's fond of Adiante, and she
sympathises with her brother Edward made a grandfather through the
instrumentality of that foreign hooknose; and Patrick must turn the two
dagger sentiments to a sort of love-knot and there's the task he'll have
to work out in his letter to Miss Caroline. It's fun about Colonel Arthur
not going. He's to meet the burning Miss Mattock, who has gold on her
crown and a lot on her treasury, Phil, my boy! but I'm bound in honour
not to propose it. And a nice girl, a prize; afresh healthy girl; and
brains: the very girl! But she's jotted down for the Adisters, if Colonel
Arthur can look lower than his nose and wag his tongue a bit. She's one
to be a mother of stout ones that won't run up big doctors' bills or ask
assistance in growing. Her name's plain Jane, and she 's a girl to breed
conquerors; and the same you may say of her brother John, who 's a mighty
fit man, good at most things, though he counts his fortune in millions,
which I've heard is lighter for a beggar to perform than in pounds, but
he can count seven, and beat any of us easy by showing them millions! We
might do something for them at home with a million or two, Phil. It all
came from the wedding of a railway contractor, who sprang from the
wedding of a spade and a clod--and probably called himself Mattock at his
birth, no shame to him.'

'You're for the city,' said Philip, after they had walked down the
street.

'Not I,' said Con. 'Let them play Vesuvius down there. I've got another
in me: and I can't stop their eruption, and they wouldn't relish mine. I
know a little of Dick Martin, who called on the people to resist, and
housed the man Liffey after his firing the shot, and I'm off to Peter
M'Christy, his brother-in-law. I'll see Distell too. I must know if it
signifies the trigger, or I'm agitated about nothing. Dr. Forbery'll be
able to tell how far they mean going for a patriotic song.

       "For we march in ranks to the laurelled banks,
        On the bright horizon shining,
        Though the fields between run red on the green,
        And many a wife goes pining."

Will you come, Phil?'

'I 'm under orders.'

'You won't engage yourself by coming.'

'I'm in for the pull if I join hands.'

'And why not?--inside the law, of course.'

'While your Barney skirmishes outside!'

'And when the poor fellow's cranium's cracking to fling his cap in the
air, and physician and politician are agreed it's good for him to do it,
or he'll go mad and be a dangerous lunatic! Phil, it must be a blow now
and then for these people over here, else there's no teaching their
imaginations you're in earnest; for they've got heads that open only to
hard raps, these English; and where injustice rules, and you'd spread a
light of justice, a certain lot of us must give up the ghost--naturally
on both sides. Law's law, and life's life, so long as you admit that the
law is bad; and in that case, it's big misery and chronic disease to let
it be and at worst a jump and tumble into the next world, of a score or
two of us if we have a wrestle with him. But shake the old villain; hang
on him and shake him. Bother his wig, if he calls himself Law. That 's
how we dust the corruption out of him for a bite or two in return. Such
is humanity, Phil: and you must allow for the roundabout way of moving to
get into the straight road at last. And I see what you're for saying: a
roundabout eye won't find it! You're wrong where there are dozens of
corners. Logic like yours, my boy, would have you go on picking at the
Gordian Knot till it became a jackasses' race between you and the rope
which was to fall to pieces last.--There 's my old girl at the stall,
poor soul! See her!'

Philip had signalled a cabman to stop. He stood facing his cousin with a
close-lipped smile that summarised his opinion and made it readable.

'I have no time for an introduction to her this morning,' he said.

'You won't drop in on Distell to hear the latest brewing? And, by the by,
Phil, tell us, could you give us a hint for packing five or six hundred
rifles and a couple of pieces of cannon?'

Philip stared; he bent a lowering frown on his cousin, with a twitch at
his mouth.

'Oh! easy!' Con answered the look; 'it's for another place and harder to
get at.'

He was eyed suspiciously and he vowed the military weapons were for
another destination entirely, the opposite Pole.

'No, you wouldn't be in for a crazy villainy like that!' said Philip.

'No, nor wink to it,' said Con. 'But it's a question about packing cannon
and small arms; and you might be useful in dropping a hint or two. The
matter's innocent. It's not even a substitution of one form of Government
for another: only a change of despots, I suspect. And here's Mr. John
Mattock himself, who'll corroborate me, as far as we can let you into the
secret before we've consulted together. And he's an Englishman and a
member of Parliament, and a Liberal though a landlord, a thorough stout
Briton and bulldog for the national integrity, not likely to play at arms
and ammunition where his country's prosperity 's concerned. How d' ye do,
Mr. Mattock--and opportunely, since it's my cousin, Captain Philip
O'Donnell, aide-de-camp to Sir Charles, fresh from Canada, of whom you've
heard, I'd like to make you acquainted with, previous to your meeting at
my wife's table tomorrow evening.'

Philip bowed to a man whose notion of the ceremony was to nod.

Con took him two steps aside and did all the talking. Mr. Mattock
listened attentively the first half-minute, after which it could be
perceived that the orator was besieging a post, or in other words a
Saxon's mind made up on a point of common sense. His appearance was
redolently marine; his pilot coat, flying necktie and wideish trowsers, a
general airiness of style on a solid frame, spoke of the element his blue
eyes had dipped their fancy in, from hereditary inclination. The colour
of a sandpit was given him by hair and whiskers of yellow-red on a ruddy
face. No one could express a negative more emphatically without wording
it, though he neither frowned nor gesticulated to that effect.

'Ah!' said Con, abruptly coming to an end after an eloquent appeal. 'And
I think I'm of your opinion: and the sea no longer dashes at the rock,
but makes itself a mirror to the same. She'll keep her money and nurse
her babe, and not be trying risky adventures to turn him into a reigning
prince. Only this: you'll have to persuade her the thing is impossible.
She'll not take it from any of us. She looks on you as Wisdom in the
uniform of a great commander, and if you say a thing can be done it 's
done.'

'The reverse too, I hope,' said Mr. Mattock, nodding and passing on his
way.

'That I am not so sure of,' Con remarked to himself. 'There's a change in
a man through a change in his position! Six months or so back, Phil, that
man came from Vienna, the devoted slave of the Princess Nikolas. He'd
been there on his father's business about one of the Danube railways, and
he was ready to fill the place of the prince at the head of his phantom
body of horse and foot and elsewhere. We talked of his selling her
estates for the purchase of arms and the enemy--as many as she had money
for. We discussed it as a matter of business. She had bewitched him: and
would again, I don't doubt, if she were here to repeat the dose. But in
the interim his father dies, he inherits; and he enters Parliament, and
now, mind you, the man who solemnly calculated her chances and speculates
on the transmission of rifled arms of the best manufacture and latest
invention by his yacht and with his loads of rails, under the noses of
the authorities, like a master rebel, and a chivalrous gentleman to boot,
pooh poohs the whole affair. You saw him. Grave as an owl, the dead
contrary of his former self!'

'I thought I heard you approve him,' said Philip.

'And I do. But the poor girl has ordered her estates to be sold to cast
the die, and I 'm taking the view of her disappointment, for she believes
he can do anything; and if I know the witch, her sole comfort lying in
the straw is the prospect of a bloody venture for a throne. The truth is,
to my thinking, it's the only thing she has to help her to stomach her
husband.'

'But it's rank idiocy to suppose she can smuggle cannon!' cried Philip.

'But that man Mattock's not an idiot and he thought she could. And it 's
proof he was under a spell. She can work one.'

'The country hasn't a port.'

'Round the Euxine and up the Danube, with the British flag at the stern.
I could rather enjoy the adventure. And her prince is called for. He's
promised a good reception when he drops down the river, they say. A bit
of a scrimmage on the landing-pier may be, and the first field or two,
and then he sits himself, and he waits his turn. The people change their
sovereigns as rapidly as a London purse. Two pieces of artillery and two
or three hundred men and a trumpet alter the face of the land there.
Sometimes a trumpet blown by impudence does it alone. They're
enthusiastic for any new prince. He's their Weekly Journal or Monthly
Magazine. Let them make acquaintance with Adiante Adister, I'd not swear
she wouldn't lay fast hold of them.'

Philip signalled to his driver, and Captain Con sang out his dinner-hour
for a reminder to punctuality, thoughtful of the feelings of his wife.




CHAPTER XII

MISS MATTOCK

Mrs. Adister O'Donnell, in common with her family, had an extreme dislike
of the task of composing epistles, due to the circumstance that she was
unable, unaided, to conceive an idea disconnected with the main theme of
her communication, and regarded, as an art of conjuring, the use of words
independent of ideas. Her native superiority caused her to despise the
art, but the necessity for employing it at intervals subjected her to
fits of admiration of the conjurer, it being then evident that a
serviceable piece of work, beyond her capacity to do, was lightly
performed by another. The lady's practical intelligence admitted the
service, and at the same time her addiction to the practical provoked
disdain of so flimsy a genius, which was identified by her with the
genius of the Irish race. If Irishmen had not been notoriously fighters,
famous for their chivalry, she would have looked on them as a kind of
footmen hired to talk and write, whose volubility might be encouraged and
their affectionateness deserved by liberal wages. The promptitude of
Irish blood to deliver the war-cry either upon a glove flung down or
taken up, raised them to a first place in her esteem: and she was a
peaceful woman abhorring sanguinary contention; but it was in her own
blood to love such a disposition against her principles.

She led Patrick to her private room, where they both took seats and he
selected a pen. Mr. Patrick supposed that his business would be to listen
and put her words to paper; a mechanical occupation permitting the
indulgence of personal phantasies; and he was flying high on them until
the extraordinary delicacy of the mind seeking to deliver itself forced
him to prick up all his apprehensiveness. She wished to convey that she
was pleased with the news from Vienna, and desired her gratification to
be imparted to her niece Caroline, yet not so as to be opposed to the
peculiar feelings of her brother Edward, which had her fullest sympathy;
and yet Caroline must by no means be requested to alter a sentence
referring to Adiante, for that would commit her and the writer jointly to
an insincerity.

'It must be the whole truth, madam,' said Patrick, and he wrote: 'My dear
Caroline,' to get the start. At once a magnificently clear course for the
complicated letter was distinguished by him. 'Can I write on and read it
to you afterward? I have the view,' he said.

Mrs. Adister waved to him to write on.

Patrick followed his 'My dear Caroline' with greetings very warm, founded
on a report of her flourishing good looks. The decision of Government to
send reinforcements to Ireland was mentioned as a prelude to the
information from Vienna of the birth of a son to the Princess Nikolas:
and then; having conjoined the two entirely heterogeneous pieces of
intelligence, the composer adroitly interfused them by a careless
transposition of the prelude and the burden that enabled him to play ad
libitum on regrets and rejoicings; by which device the lord of Earlsfont
might be offered condolences while the lady could express her strong
contentment, inasmuch as he deplored the state of affairs in the sister
island, and she was glad of a crisis concluding a term of suspense thus
the foreign-born baby was denounced and welcomed, the circumstances
lamented and the mother congratulated, in a breath, all under cover of
the happiest misunderstanding, as effective as the cabalism of Prospero's
wand among the Neapolitan mariners, by the skilful Irish development on a
grand scale of the rhetorical figure anastrophe, or a turning about and
about.

He read it out to her, enjoying his composition and pleased with his
reconcilement of differences. 'So you say what you feel yourself, madam,
and allow for the feelings on the other side,' he remarked. 'Shall I fold
it?

There was a smoothness in the letter particularly agreeable to her
troubled wits, but with an awful taste. She hesitated to assent: it
seemed like a drug that she was offered.

Patrick sketched a series of hooked noses on the blotter. He heard a
lady's name announced at the door, and glancing up from his work he
beheld a fiery vision.

Mrs. Adister addressed her affectionately: 'My dear Jane!' Patrick was
introduced to Miss Mattock.

His first impression was that the young lady could wrestle with him and
render it doubtful of his keeping his legs. He was next engaged in
imagining that she would certainly burn and be a light in the dark.
Afterwards he discovered her feelings to be delicate, her looks pleasant.
Thereupon came one of the most singular sensations he had ever known: he
felt that he was unable to see the way to please her. She confirmed it by
her remarks and manner of speaking. Apparently she was conducting a
business.

'You're right, my dear Mrs. Adister, I'm on my way to the Laundry, and I
called to get Captain Con to drive there with me and worry the manageress
about the linen they turn out: for gentlemen are complaining of their
shirt-fronts, and if we get a bad name with them it will ruin us. Women
will listen to a man. I hear he has gone down to the city. I must go and
do it alone. Our accounts are flourishing, I'm glad to say, though we
cannot yet afford to pay for a secretary, and we want one. John and I
verified them last night. We're aiming at steam, you know. In three or
four years we may found a steam laundry on our accumulated capital. If
only we can establish it on a scale to let us give employment to at least
as many women as we have working now! That is what I want to hear of. But
if we wait for a great rival steam laundry to start ahead of us, we shall
be beaten and have to depend on the charitable sentiments of rich people
to support the Institution. And that won't do. So it's a serious question
with us to think of taking the initiative: for steam must come. It 's a
scandal every day that it doesn't while we have coal. I'm for grand
measures. At the same time we must not be imprudent: turning off hands,
even temporarily, that have to feed infants, would be quite against my
policy.'

Her age struck Patrick as being about twenty-three.

'Could my nephew Arthur be of any use to you?' said Mrs. Adister.

'Colonel Adister?' Miss Mattock shook her head. 'No.'

'Arthur can be very energetic when he takes up a thing.' 'Can he? But,
Mrs. Adister, you are looking a little troubled. Sometimes you confide in
me. You are so good to us with your subscriptions that I always feel in
your debt.'

Patrick glanced at his hostess for a signal to rise and depart.

She gave none, but at once unfolded her perplexity, and requested Miss
Mattock to peruse the composition of Mr. Patrick O'Donnell and deliver an
opinion upon it.

The young lady took the letter without noticing its author. She read it
through, handed it back, and sat with her opinion evidently formed
within.

'What do you think of it?' she was asked.

'Rank jesuitry,' she replied.

'I feared so!' sighed Mrs. Adister. 'Yet it says everything I wish to
have said. It spares my brother and it does not belie me. The effect of a
letter is often most important. I cannot but consider this letter very
ingenious. But the moment I hear it is jesuitical I forswear it. But then
my dilemma remains. I cannot consent to give pain to my brother Edward:
nor will I speak an untruth, though it be to save him from a wound. I am
indeed troubled. Mr. Patrick, I cannot consent to despatch a jesuitical
letter. You are sure of your impression, my dear Jane?'

'Perfectly,' said Miss Mattock.

Patrick leaned to her. 'But if the idea in the mind of the person
supposed to be writing the letter is accurately expressed? Does it
matter, if we call it jesuitical, if the emotion at work behind it
happens to be a trifle so, according to your definition?'

She rejoined: 'I should say, distinctly it matters.'

'Then you'd not express the emotions at all?'

He flashed a comical look of astonishment as he spoke. She was not to be
diverted; she settled into antagonism.

'I should write what I felt.'

'But it might be like discharging a bullet.'

'How?'

'If your writing in that way wounded the receiver.'

'Of course I should endeavour not to wound!'

'And there the bit of jesuitry begins. And it's innocent while it 's no
worse than an effort to do a disagreeable thing as delicately as you
can.'

She shrugged as delicately as she could:

'We cannot possibly please everybody in life.'

'No: only we may spare them a shock: mayn't we?'

'Sophistries of any description, I detest.'

'But sometimes you smile to please, don't you?'

'Do you detect falseness in that?' she answered, after the demurest of
pauses.

'No: but isn't there a soupcon of sophistry in it?'

'I should say that it comes under the title of common civility.'

'And on occasion a little extra civility is permitted!'

'Perhaps: when we are not seeking a personal advantage.'

'On behalf of the Steam Laundry?'

Miss Mattock grew restless: she was too serious in defending her position
to submit to laugh, and his goodhumoured face forbade her taking offence.

'Well, perhaps, for that is in the interest of others.'

'In the interests of poor and helpless females. And I agree with you with
all my heart. But you would not be so considerate for the sore feelings
of a father hearing what he hates to hear as to write a roundabout word
to soften bad news to him?'

She sought refuge in the reply that nothing excused jesuitry.

'Except the necessities of civilisation,' said Patrick.

'Politeness is one thing,' she remarked pointedly.

'And domestic politeness is quite as needful as popular, you'll admit.
And what more have we done in the letter than to be guilty of that? And
people declare it's rarer: as if we were to be shut up in families to
tread on one another's corns! Dear me! and after a time we should be
having rank jesuitry advertised as the specific balsam for an unhappy
domesticated population treading with hard heels from desperate habit and
not the slightest intention to wound.'

'My dear Jane,' Mrs. Adister interposed while the young lady sat between
mildly staring and blinking, 'you have, though still of a tender age, so
excellent a head that I could trust to your counsel blindfolded. It is
really deep concern for my brother. I am also strongly in sympathy with
my niece, the princess, that beautiful Adiante: and my conscience
declines to let me say that I am not.'

'We might perhaps presume to beg for Miss Mattock's assistance in the
composition of a second letter more to her taste,' Patrick said slyly.

The effect was prompt: she sprang from her seat.

'Dear Mrs. Adister! I leave it to you. I am certain you and Mr. O'Donnell
know best. It's too difficult and delicate for me. I am horribly blunt.
Forgive me if I seemed to pretend to casuistry. I am sure I had no such
meaning. I said what I thought. I always do. I never meant that it was
not a very clever letter; and if it does exactly what you require it
should be satisfactory. To-morrow evening John and I dine with you, and I
look forward to plenty of controversy and amusement. At present I have
only a head for work.'

'I wish I had that,' said Patrick devoutly.

She dropped her eyes on him, but without letting him perceive that he was
a step nearer to the point of pleasing her.




CHAPTER XIII

THE DINNER-PARTY

Miss Mattock ventured on a prediction in her mind:

She was sure the letter would go. And there was not much to signify if it
did. But the curious fatality that a person of such a native uprightness
as Mrs. Adister should have been drawn in among Irishmen, set her
thoughts upon the composer of the letter, and upon the contrast of his
ingenuous look with the powerful cast of his head. She fancied a certain
danger about him; of what kind she could not quite distinguish, for it
had no reference to woman's heart, and he was too young to be much of a
politician, and he was not in the priesthood. His transparency was of a
totally different order from Captain Con's, which proclaimed itself
genuine by the inability to conceal a shoal of subterfuges. The younger
cousin's features carried a something invisible behind them, and she was
just perceptive enough to spy it, and it excited her suspicions. Irishmen
both she and her brother had to learn to like, owing to their bad repute
for stability: they are, moreover, Papists: they are not given to ideas:
that one of the working for the future has not struck them. In fine, they
are not solid, not law-supporting, not disposed to be (humbly be it said)
beneficent, like the good English. These were her views, and as she held
it a weakness to have to confess that Irishmen are socially more
fascinating than the good English, she was on her guard against them.

Of course the letter had gone. She heard of it before the commencement of
the dinner, after Mrs. Adister had introduced Captain Philip O'Donnell to
her, and while she was exchanging a word or two with Colonel Adister, who
stood ready to conduct her to the table. If he addressed any remarks to
the lady under his charge, Miss Mattock did not hear him; and she
listened--who shall say why? His unlike likeness to his brother had
struck her. Patrick opposite was flowing in speech. But Captain Philip
O'Donnell's taciturnity seemed no uncivil gloom: it wore nothing of that
look of being beneath the table, which some of our good English are
guilty of at their social festivities, or of towering aloof a Matterhorn
above it, in the style of Colonel Adister. Her discourse with the latter
amused her passing reflections. They started a subject, and he punctuated
her observations, or she his, and so they speedily ran to earth.

'I think,' says she, 'you were in Egypt this time last winter.'

He supplies her with a comma: 'Rather later.'

Then he carries on the line. 'Dull enough, if you don't have the right
sort of travelling crew in your boat.'

'Naturally,' she puts her semicolon, ominous of the full stop.

'I fancy you have never been in Egypt?'

'No'

There it is; for the tone betrays no curiosity about Egypt and her Nile,
and he is led to suppose that she has a distaste for foreign places.

Condescending to attempt to please, which he has reason to wish to
succeed in doing, the task of pursuing conversational intercourse
devolves upon him--

'I missed Parlatti last spring. What opinion have you formed of her?'

'I know her only by name at present.'

'Ah, I fancy you are indifferent to Opera.'

'Not at all; I enjoy it. I was as busy then as I am now.'

'Meetings? Dorcas, so forth.'

'Not Dorcas, I assure you. You might join if you would.'

'Your most obliged.'

A period perfectly rounded. At the same time Miss Mattock exchanged a
smile with her hostess, of whose benignant designs in handing her to the
entertaining officer she was not conscious. She felt bound to look happy
to gratify an excellent lady presiding over the duller half of a table of
eighteen. She turned slightly to Captain O'Donnell. He had committed
himself to speech at last, without tilting his shoulders to exclude the
company by devoting himself to his partner, and as he faced the table
Miss Mattock's inclination to listen attracted him. He cast his eyes on
her: a quiet look, neither languid nor frigid seeming to her both open
and uninviting. She had the oddest little shiver, due to she knew not
what. A scrutiny she could have borne, and she might have read a
signification; but the look of those mild clear eyes which appeared to
say nothing save that there was fire behind them, hit on some perplexity,
or created it; for she was aware of his unhappy passion for the beautiful
Miss Adister; the whole story had been poured into her ears; she had been
moved by it. Possibly she had expected the eyes of such a lover to betray
melancholy, and his power of containing the expression where the
sentiment is imagined to be most transparent may have surprised her,
thrilling her as melancholy orbs would not have done.

Captain Con could have thumped his platter with vexation. His wife's
diplomacy in giving the heiress to Colonel Adister for the evening had
received his cordial support while he manoeuvred cleverly to place Philip
on the other side of her; and now not a step did the senseless fellow
take, though she offered him his chance, dead sick of her man on the
right; not a word did he have in ordinary civility; he was a burning
disgrace to the chivalry of Erin. She would certainly be snapped up by a
man merely yawning to take the bite. And there's another opportunity gone
for the old country!--one's family to boot!

Those two were in the middle of the table, and it is beyond mortal,
beyond Irish, capacity, from one end of a table of eighteen to whip up
the whole body of them into a lively unanimous froth, like a dish of
cream fetched out of thickness to the airiest lightness. Politics, in the
form of a firebrand or apple of Discord, might knead them together and
cut them in batches, only he had pledged his word to his wife to shun
politics as the plague, considering Mr. Mattock's presence. And yet it
was tempting: the recent Irish news had stung him; he could say sharp
things from the heart, give neat thrusts; and they were fairly divided
and well matched. There was himself, a giant; and there was an
unrecognised bard of his country, no other than himself too; and there
was a profound politician, profoundly hidden at present, like powder in a
mine--the same person. And opposite to him was Mr. John Mattock, a worthy
antagonist, delightful to rouse, for he carried big guns and took the
noise of them for the shattering of the enemy, and this champion could be
pricked on to a point of assertion sure to fire the phlegm in Philip; and
then young Patrick might be trusted to warm to the work. Three heroes out
skirmishing on our side. Then it begins to grow hot, and seeing them at
it in earnest, Forbery glows and couches his gun, the heaviest weight of
the Irish light brigade. Gallant deeds! and now Mr. Marbury Dyke opens on
Forbery's flank to support Mattock hardpressed, and this artillery of
English Rockney resounds, with a similar object: the ladies to look on
and award the crown of victory, Saxon though they be, excepting Rockney's
wife, a sure deserter to the camp of the brave, should fortune frown on
them, for a punishment to Rockney for his carrying off to himself a
flower of the Green Island and holding inveterate against her native land
in his black ingratitude. Oh! but eloquence upon a good cause will win
you the hearts of all women, Saxon or other, never doubt of it. And Jane
Mattock there, imbibing forced doses of Arthur Adister, will find her
patriotism dissolving in the natural human current; and she and Philip
have a pretty wrangle, and like one another none the worse for not
agreeing: patriotically speaking, she's really unrooted by that
half-thawed colonel, a creature snow-bound up to his chin; and already
she's leaping to be transplanted. Jane is one of the first to give her
vote for the Irish party, in spite of her love for her brother John: in
common justice, she says, and because she hopes for complete union
between the two islands. And thereupon we debate upon union. On the
whole, yes: union, on the understanding that we have justice, before you
think of setting to work to sow the land with affection:--and that 's a
crop in a clear soil will spring up harvest-thick in a single summer
night across St. George's Channel, ladies! . . .

Indeed a goodly vision of strife and peace: but, politics forbidden, it
was entirely a dream, seeing that politics alone, and a vast amount of
blowing even on the topic of politics, will stir these English to enter
the arena and try a fall. You cannot, until you say ten times more than
you began by meaning, and have heated yourself to fancy you mean more
still, get them into any state of fluency at all. Forbery's anecdote now
and then serves its turn, but these English won't take it up as a start
for fresh pastures; they lend their ears and laugh a finale to it; you
see them dwelling on the relish, chewing the cud, by way of mental note
for their friends to-morrow, as if they were kettles come here merely for
boiling purposes, to make tea elsewhere, and putting a damper on the fire
that does the business for them. They laugh, but they laugh
extinguishingly, and not a bit to spread a general conflagration and
illumination.

The case appeared hopeless to Captain Con, bearing an eye on Philip. He
surveyed his inanimate eights right and left, and folded his combative
ardour around him, as the soldier's martial cloak when he takes his rest
on the field. Mrs. Marbury Dyke, the lady under his wing, honoured wife
of the chairman of his imagined that a sigh escaped him, and said in
sympathy: 'Is the bad news from India confirmed?'

He feared it was not bright, and called to Philip for the latest.

'Nothing that you have not had already in the newspapers,' Philip
replied, distinctly from afar, but very bluntly, as through a trumpet.

Miss Mattock was attentive. She had a look as good as handsome when she
kindled.

The captain persevered to draw his cousin out.

'Your chief has his orders?'

'There's a rumour to that effect.'

'The fellow's training for diplomacy,' Con groaned.

Philip spoke to Miss Mattock: he was questioned and he answered, and
answered dead as a newspaper telegraphic paragraph, presenting simply the
corpse of the fact, and there an end. He was a rival of Arthur Adister
for military brevity.

'Your nephew is quite the diplomatist,' said Mrs. Dyke, admiring Philip's
head.

'Cousin, ma'am. Nephews I might drive to any market to make the most of
them. Cousins pretend they're better than pigs, and diverge bounding from
the road at the hint of the stick. You can't get them to grunt more than
is exactly agreeable to them.'

'My belief is that if our cause is just our flag will triumph,' Miss
Grace Barrow, Jane Mattock's fellow-worker and particular friend,
observed to Dr. Forbery.

'You may be enjoying an original blessing that we in Ireland missed in
the cradle,' said he.

She emphasised: 'I speak of the just cause; it must succeed.'

'The stainless flag'll be in the ascendant in the long run,' he assented.

'Is it the flag of Great Britain you're speaking of, Forbery?' the
captain inquired.

'There's a harp or two in it,' he responded pacifically.

Mrs. Dyke was not pleased with the tone. 'And never will be out of it!'
she thumped her interjection.

'Or where 's your music?' said the captain, twinkling for an adversary
among the males, too distant or too dull to distinguish a note of
challenge. 'You'd be having to mount your drum and fife in their places,
ma'am.'

She saw no fear of the necessity.

'But the fife's a pretty instrument,' he suggested, and with a candour
that seduced the unwary lady to think dubiously whether she quite liked
the fife. Miss Barrow pronounced it cheerful.

'Oh, and martial!' he exclaimed, happy to have caught Rockney's
deliberate gaze. 'The effect of it, I'm told in the provinces is
astonishing for promoting enlistment. Hear it any morning in your London
parks, at the head of a marching regiment of your giant foot-Guards.
Three bangs of the drum, like the famous mountain, and the fife announces
himself to be born, and they follow him, left leg and right leg and
bearskin. And what if he's a small one and a trifle squeaky; so 's a
prince when the attendant dignitaries receive him submissively and hear
him informing the nation of his advent. It 's the idea that 's grand.'

'The idea is everything in military affairs,' a solemn dupe, a Mr.
Rumford, partly bald, of benevolent aspect, and looking more copious than
his flow, observed to the lady beside him. 'The flag is only an idea.'

She protested against the barbarism of war, and he agreed with her, but
thought it must be: it had always been: he deplored the fatality.
Nevertheless, he esteemed our soldiers, our sailors too. A city man
himself and a man of peace, he cordially esteemed and hailed the
victories of a military body whose idea was Duty instead of Ambition.

'One thing,' said Mrs. Dyke, evading the ambiguous fife, 'patriotic as I
am, I hope, one thing I confess; I never have yet brought myself to
venerate thoroughly our Royal Standard. I dare say it is because I do not
understand it.'

A strong fraternal impulse moved Mr. Rumford to lean forward and show her
the face of one who had long been harassed by the same incapacity to
digest that one thing. He guessed it at once, without a doubt of the
accuracy of the shot. Ever since he was a child the difficulty had
haunted him; and as no one hitherto had even comprehended his dilemma, he
beamed like a man preparing to embrace a recovered sister.

'The Unicorn!' he exclaimed.

'It is the Unicorn!' she sighed. 'The Lion is noble.'

'The Unicorn, if I may speak by my own feelings, certainly does not
inspire attachment, that is to say, the sense of devotion, which we
should always be led to see in national symbols,' Mr. Rumford resumed,
and he looked humorously rueful while speaking with some earnestness; to
show that he knew the subject to be of the minor sort, though it was not
enough to trip and jar a loyal enthusiasm in the strictly meditative.

'The Saxon should carry his White Horse, I suppose,' Dr. Forbery said.

'But how do we account for the horn on his forehead?' Mr. Rumford sadly
queried.

'Two would have been better for the harmony of the Unicorn's appearance,'
Captain Con remarked, desirous to play a floundering fish, and tender to
the known simple goodness of the ingenuous man. 'What do you say,
Forbery? The poor brute had a fall on his pate and his horn grew of it,
and it 's to prove that he has got something in his head, and is
dangerous both fore and aft, which is not the case with other horses,
who're usually wicked at the heels alone. That's it, be sure, or near it.
And his horn's there to file the subject nation's grievances for the Lion
to peruse at his leisure. And his colour's prophetic of the Horse to
come, that rides over all.'

'Lion and Unicorn signify the conquest of the two hemispheres, Matter and
Mind,' said Dr. Forbery. 'The Lion there's no mistake about. The Unicorn
sets you thinking. So it's a splendid Standard, and means the more for
not being perfectly intelligible at a glance.'

'But if the Lion, as they've whispered of late, Forbery, happens to be
stuffed with straw or with what's worse, with sawdust, a fellow bearing a
pointed horn at close quarters might do him mortal harm; and it must be a
situation trying to the patience of them both. The Lion seems to say "No
prancing!" as if he knew his peril; and the Unicorn to threaten a playful
dig at his flank, as if he understood where he's ticklish.'

Mr. Rumford drank some champagne and murmured with a shrug to the
acquiescent lady beside him: 'Irishmen!' implying that the race could not
be brought to treat serious themes as befitted the seriousness of the
sentiments they stir in their bosoms. He was personally a little hurt,
having unfolded a shy secret of his feelings, which were keenly patriotic
in a phlegmatic frame, and he retired within himself, assuring the lady
that he accepted our standard in its integrity; his objection was not
really an objection; it was, he explained to her, a ridiculous desire to
have a perfect comprehension of the idea in the symbol. But where there
was no seriousness everything was made absurd. He could, he said, laugh
as well as others on the proper occasion. As for the Lion being stuffed,
he warned England's enemies for their own sakes not to be deluded by any
such patent calumny. The strong can afford to be magnanimous and
forbearing. Only let not that be mistaken for weakness. A wag of his tail
would suffice.

The lady agreed. But women are volatile. She was the next moment laughing
at something she had heard with the largest part of her ear, and she
thought the worthy gentleman too simple, though she knew him for one who
had amassed wealth. Captain Con and Dr. Forbery had driven the Unicorn to
shelter, and were now baiting the Lion. The tremendous import of that wag
of his tail among the nations was burlesqued by them, and it came into
collision with Mr. Rumford's legendary forefinger threat. She excused
herself for laughing:

'They are so preposterous!'

'Yes, yes, I can laugh,' said he, soberly performing the act: and Mr.
Rumford covered the wound his delicate sensations had experienced under
an apology for Captain Con, that would redound to the credit of his
artfulness were it not notorious our sensations are the creatures and
born doctors of art in discovering unguents for healing their bruises.
'O'Donnell has a shrewd head for business. He is sound at heart. There is
not a drop of gout in his wine.'

The lady laughed again, as we do when we are fairly swung by the tide,
and underneath her convulsion she quietly mused on the preference she
would give to the simple English citizen for soundness.

'What can they be discussing down there?' Miss Mattock said to Philip,
enviously as poor Londoners in November when they receive letters from
the sapphire Riviera.

'I will venture to guess at nonsense,' he answered.

'Nothing political, then.'

'That scarcely follows; but a host at his own table may be trusted to
shelve politics.'

'I should not object.'

'To controversy?'

'Temperately conducted.'

'One would go a long way to see the exhibition.'

'But why cannot men be temperate in their political arguments?'

'The questions raised are too close about the roots of us.'

'That sounds very pessimist.'

'More duels come from politics than from any other source.'

'I fear it is true. Then women might set you an example.'

'By avoiding it?'

'I think you have been out of England for some time.'

'I have been in America.'

'We are not exactly on the pattern of the Americans.' Philip hinted a
bow. He praised the Republican people.

'Yes, but in our own way we are working out our own problems over here,'
said she. 'We have infinitely more to contend with: old institutions,
monstrous prejudices, and a slower-minded people, I dare say: much
slower, I admit. We are not shining to advantage at present. Still, that
is not the fault of English women.'

'Are they so spirited?'

Spirited was hardly the word Miss Mattock would have chosen to designate
the spirit in them. She hummed a second or two, deliberating; it flashed
through her during the pause that he had been guilty of irony, and she
reddened: and remembering a foregoing strange sensation she reddened
more. She had been in her girlhood a martyr to this malady of youth; it
had tied her to the stake and enveloped her in flames for no accountable
reason, causing her to suffer cruelly and feel humiliated. She knew the
pangs of it in public, and in private as well. And she had not conquered
it yet. She was angered to find herself such a merely physical victim of
the rushing blood: which condition of her senses did not immediately
restore her natural colour.

'They mean nobly,' she said, to fill an extending gap in the conversation
under a blush; and conscious of an ultra-swollen phrase, she snatched at
it nervously to correct it: 'They are becoming alive to the necessity for
action.' But she was talking to a soldier! 'I mean, their heads are
opening.' It sounded ludicrous. 'They are educating themselves
differently.' Were they? 'They wish to take their part in the work of the
world.' That was nearer the proper tone, though it had a ring of claptrap
rhetoric hateful to her: she had read it and shrunk from it in reports of
otherwise laudable meetings.

'Well, spirited, yes. I think they are. I believe they are. One has need
to hope so.'

Philip offered a polite affirmative, evidently formal.

Not a sign had he shown of noticing her state of scarlet. His grave
liquid eyes were unalterable. She might have been grateful, but the
reflection that she had made a step to unlock the antechamber of her
dearest deepest matters to an ordinary military officer, whose notions of
women were probably those of his professional brethren, impelled her to
transfer his polished decorousness to the burden of his masculine
antagonism-plainly visible. She brought the dialogue to a close. Colonel
Adister sidled an eye at a three-quarter view of her face. 'I fancy
you're feeling the heat of the room,' he said.

Jane acknowledged a sensibility to some degree of warmth.

The colonel was her devoted squire on the instant for any practical
service. His appeal to his aunt concerning one of the windows was
answered by her appeal to Jane's countenance for a disposition to rise
and leave the gentlemen. Captain Con, holding the door for the passage of
his wife and her train of ladies, received the injunction:

'Ten,' from her, and remarked: 'Minutes,' as he shut it. The shortness of
the period of grace proposed dejection to him on the one hand, and on the
other a stimulated activity to squeeze it for its juices without any
delay. Winding past Dr. Forbery to the vacated seat of the hostess he
frowned forbiddingly.

'It's I, is it!' cried the doctor. Was it ever he that endangered the
peace and placability of social gatherings! He sat down prepared rather
for a bout with Captain Con than with their common opponents,
notwithstanding that he had accurately read the mock thunder of his
brows.




CHAPTER XIV

OF ROCKNEY

Battles have been won and the streams of History diverted to new channels
in the space of ten minutes. Ladies have been won, a fresh posterity
founded, and grand financial schemes devised, revolts arranged, a yoke
shaken off, in less of mortal time. Excepting an inspired Epic song and
an original Theory of the Heavens, almost anything noteworthy may be
accomplished while old Father Scythe is taking a trot round a courtyard;
and those reservations should allow the splendid conception to pass for
the performance, when we bring to mind that the conception is the
essential part of it, as a bard poorly known to fame was constantly
urging. Captain Con had blown his Epic bubbles, not to speak of his
projected tuneful narrative of the adventures of the great Cuchullin, and
his Preaching of St. Patrick, and other national triumphs. He could own,
however, that the world had a right to the inspection of the Epic books
before it awarded him his crown. The celestial Theory likewise would have
to be worked out to the last figure by the illustrious astronomers to
whom he modestly ranked himself second as a benefactor of his kind,
revering him. So that, whatever we may think in our own hearts, Epic and
Theory have to remain the exception. Battles indeed have been fought, but
when you survey the field in preparation for them you are summoned to
observe the preluding courtesies of civilised warfare in a manner
becoming a chivalrous gentleman. It never was the merely flinging of your
leg across a frontier, not even with the abrupt Napoleon. You have
besides to drill your men; and you have often to rouse your foe with a
ringing slap, if he's a sleepy one or shamming sleepiness. As here, for
example: and that of itself devours more minutes than ten. Rockney and
Mattock could be roused; but these English, slow to kindle, can't subside
in a twinkling; they are for preaching on when they have once begun;
betray the past engagement, and the ladies are chilled, and your wife
puts you the pungent question: 'Did you avoid politics, Con?' in the
awful solitude of domestic life after a party. Now, if only there had
been freedom of discourse during the dinner hour, the ten disembarrassed
minutes allotted to close it would have afforded time sufficient for
hearty finishing blows and a soothing word or so to dear old innocent Mr.
Rumford, and perhaps a kindly clap of the shoulder to John Mattock, no
bad fellow at bottom. Rockney too was no bad fellow in his way. He wanted
no more than a beating and a thrashing. He was a journalist, a
hard-headed rascal, none of your good old-fashioned order of regimental
scribes who take their cue from their colonel, and march this way and
that, right about face, with as little impediment of principles to hamper
their twists and turns as the straw he tosses aloft at midnight to spy
the drift of the wind to-morrow. Quite the contrary; Rockney was his own
colonel; he pretended to think independently, and tried to be the
statesman of a leading article, and showed his intention to stem the
current of liberty, and was entirely deficient in sympathy with the
oppressed, a fanatical advocate of force; he was an inveterate Saxon,
good-hearted and in great need of a drubbing. Certain lines Rockney had
written of late about Irish affairs recurred to Captain Con, and the
political fires leaped in him; he sparkled and said: 'Let me beg you to
pass the claret over to Mr. Rockney, Mr. Rumford; I warrant it for the
circulating medium of amity, if he'll try it.'

''Tis the Comet Margaux,' said Dr. Forbery, topping anything Rockney might
have had to say, and anything would have served. The latter clasped the
decanter, poured and drank in silence.

''Tis the doctor's antidote, and best for being antedated,' Captain Con
rapped his friend's knuckles.

'As long as you're contented with not dating in double numbers,' retorted
the doctor, absolutely scattering the precious minutes to the winds, for
he hated a provocation.

'There's a golden mean, is there!'

'There is; there's a way between magnums of good wine and gout, and it's
generally discovered too late.'

'At the physician's door, then! where the golden mean is generally
discovered to be his fee. I've heard of poor souls packed off by him
without an obolus to cross the ferry. Stripped they were in all
conscience.'

'You remind me of a fellow in Dublin who called on me for medical advice,
and found he'd forgotten his purse. He offered to execute a deed to
bequeath me his body, naked and not ashamed.'

'You'd a right to cut him up at once, Forbery. Any Jury 'd have
pronounced him guilty of giving up the ghost before he called.'

'I let him go, body and all. I never saw him again.'

'The fellow was not a lunatic. As for your golden mean, there's a saying:
Prevention is better than cure: and another that caps it: Drink deep or
taste not.'

'That's the Pierian Spring.'

'And what is the wine on my table, sir?'

'Exhaustless if your verses come of it.'

'And pure, you may say of the verses and the fount.'

'And neither heady nor over-composed; with a blush like Diana confessing
her love for the young shepherd: it's one of your own comparisons.'

'Oh!' Con could have roared his own comparisons out of hearing. He was
angry with Forbery for his obstructive dulness and would not taste the
sneaking compliment. What could Forbery mean by paying compliments and
spoiling a game! The ten minutes were dancing away like harmless
wood-nymphs when the Satyr slumbers. His eyes ranged over his guests
despondently, and fixed in desperation on Mr. Rumford, whom his
magnanimous nature would have spared but for the sharp necessity to
sacrifice him.

The wine in Rumford at any rate let loose his original nature, if it
failed to unlock the animal in these other unexcitable Saxons.

'By the way, now I think of it, Mr. Rumford, the interpretation of your
Royal Standard, which perplexes you so much, strikes me as easy if you
'll examine the powerfully different colours of the two beasts in it.'

Mr. Rumford protested that he had abandoned his inquiry: it was a piece
of foolishness: he had no feeling in it whatever, none.

The man was a perfect snail's horn for coyness.

The circumstances did not permit of his being suffered to slip away: and
his complexion showed that he might already be classed among the roast.

'Your Lion:--Mr. Rumford, you should know, is discomposed, as a
thoughtful patriot, by the inexplicable presence of the Unicorn in the
Royal Standard, and would be glad to account for his one horn and the
sickly appearance of the beast. I'm prepared to say he's there to
represent the fair one half of the population.

Your Lion, my dear sir, may have nothing in his head, but his tawniness
tells us he imbibes good sound stuff, worthy of the reputation of a noble
brewery. Whereas your, Unicorn, true to the character of the numberless
hosts he stands for, is manifestly a consumer of doctor's drugs. And
there you have the symbolism of your country. Right or left of the
shield, I forget which, and it is of no importance to the point--you have
Grandgosier or Great Turk in all his majesty, mane and tail; and on the
other hand, you behold, as the showman says, Dyspepsia. And the pair are
intended to indicate that you may see yourselves complete by looking at
them separately; and so your Royal Standard is your national mirror; and
when you gaze on it fondly you're playing the part of a certain Mr.
Narcissus, who got liker to the Lion than to the Unicorn in the act. Now
will that satisfy you?'

'Quite as you please, quite as you please,' Mr. Rumford replied. 'One
loves the banner of one's country--that is all.' He rubbed his hands. 'I
for one am proud of it.'

'Far be it from me to blame you, my dear sir. Or there's the alternative
of taking him to stand for your sole great festival holiday, and
worshipping him as the personification of your Derbyshire race.'

A glittering look was in Captain Con's eye to catch Rockney if he would
but rise to it.

That doughty Saxon had been half listening, half chatting to Mr. Mattock,
and wore on his drawn eyelids and slightly drawn upper lip a look of
lambent pugnacity awake to the challenge, indifferent to the antagonist,
and disdainful of the occasion.

'We have too little of your enthusiasm for the flag,' Philip said to Mr.
Rumford to soothe him, in a form of apology for his relative.

'Surely no! not in England?' said Mr. Rumford, tempted to open his heart,
for he could be a bellicose gentleman by deputy of the flag. He
recollected that the speaker was a cousin of Captain Con's, and withdrew
into his wound for safety. 'Here and there, perhaps; not when we are
roused; we want rousing, we greatly prefer to live at peace with the
world, if the world will let us.'

'Not at any price?' Philip fancied his tone too quakerly.

'Indeed I am not one of that party!' said Mr. Rumford, beginning to glow;
but he feared a snare, and his wound drew him in again.

'When are you ever at peace!' quoth his host, shocked by the
inconsiderate punctuality of Mrs. Adister O'Donnell's household, for here
was the coffee coming round, and Mattock and Rockney escaping without a
scratch. 'There's hardly a day in the year when your scarlet mercenaries
are not popping at niggers.'

Rockney had the flick on the cheek to his manhood now, it might be hoped.

'Our what?' asked Mr. Rumford, honestly unable to digest the opprobrious
term.

'Paid soldiery, hirelings, executioners, whom you call volunteers, by a
charming euphemism, and send abroad to do the work of war while you
propound the doctrines of peace at home.'

Rockney's forehead was exquisitely eruptive, red and swelling. Mattock
lurched on his chair. The wine was in them, and the captain commended the
spiriting of it, as Prospero his Ariel.

Who should intervene at this instant but the wretched Philip, pricked on
the point of honour as a soldier! Are we inevitably to be thwarted by our
own people?

'I suppose we all work for pay,' said he. 'It seems to me a cry of the
streets to call us by hard names. The question is what we fight for.'

He spoke with a witless moderation that was most irritating, considering
the latest news from the old country.

'You fight to subjugate, to enslave,' said Con, 'that's what you're
doing, and at the same time your journals are venting their fine irony at
the Austrians and the Russians and the Prussians for tearing Poland to
strips with their bloody beaks.'

'We obey our orders, and leave you to settle the political business,'
Philip replied.

Forbery declined the fray. Patrick was eagerly watchful and dumb. Rockney
finished his coffee with a rap of the cup in the saucer, an appeal for
the close of the sitting; and as Dr. Forbery responded to it by pushing
back his chair, he did likewise, and the other made a movement.

The disappointed hero of a fight unfought had to give the signal for
rising. Double the number of the ten minutes had elapsed. He sprang up,
hearing Rockney say: 'Captain Con O'Donnell is a politician or nothing,'
and as he was the most placable of men concerning his personality, he
took it lightly, with half a groan that it had not come earlier, and
said, 'He thinks and he feels, poor fellow!'

All hope of a general action was over.

'That shall pass for the epitaph of the living,' said Rockney.

It was too late to catch at a trifle to strain it to a tussle. Con was
obliged to subjoin: 'Inscribe it on the dungeon-door of tyranny.' But the
note was peaceful.

He expressed a wish that the fog had cleared for him to see the stars of
heaven before he went to bed, informing Mr. Mattock that a long look in
among them was often his prayer at night, and winter a holy season to
him, for the reason of its showing them bigger and brighter.

'I can tell my wife with a conscience we've had a quiet evening, and
you're a witness to it,' he said to Patrick. That consolation remained.

'You know the secret of your happiness,' Patrick answered.

'Know you one of the secrets of a young man's fortune in life, and give
us a thrilling song at the piano, my son,' said Con: 'though we don't
happen to have much choice of virgins for ye to-night. Irish or French.
Irish are popular. They don't mind having us musically. And if we'd go on
joking to the end we should content them, if only by justifying their
opinion that we're born buffoons.'

His happy conscience enabled him to court his wife with assiduity and
winsomeness, and the ladies were once more elated by seeing how
chivalrously lover-like an Irish gentleman can be after years of wedlock.

Patrick was asked to sing. Miss Mattock accompanied him at the piano.
Then he took her place on the music-stool, and she sang, and with an
electrifying splendour of tone and style.

'But it's the very heart of an Italian you sing with!' he cried.

'It will surprise you perhaps to hear that I prefer German music,' said
she.

'But where--who had the honour of boasting you his pupil?'

She mentioned a famous master. Patrick had heard of him in Paris. He
begged for another song and she complied, accepting the one he selected
as the favourite of his brother Philip's, though she said: 'That one?'
with a superior air. It was a mellifluous love-song from a popular Opera
somewhat out of date. 'Well, it's in Italian!' she summed up her
impressions of the sickly words while scanning them for delivery. She had
no great admiration of the sentimental Sicilian composer, she confessed,
yet she sang as if possessed by him. Had she, Patrick thought, been bent
upon charming Philip, she could not have thrown more fire into the notes.
And when she had done, after thrilling the room, there was a gesture in
her dismissal of the leaves displaying critical loftiness. Patrick
noticed it and said, with the thrill of her voice lingering in him: 'What
is it you do like? I should so like to know.'

She was answering when Captain Con came up to the piano and remarked in
an undertone to Patrick: 'How is it you hit on the song Adiante Adister
used to sing?'

Miss Mattock glanced at Philip. He had applauded her mechanically, and it
was not that circumstance which caused the second rush of scarlet over
her face. This time she could track it definitely to its origin. A
lover's favourite song is one that has been sung by his love. She
detected herself now in the full apprehension of the fact before she had
sung a bar: it had been a very dim fancy: and she denounced herself
guilty of the knowledge that she was giving pain by singing the stuff
fervidly, in the same breath that accused her of never feeling things at
the right moment vividly. The reminiscences of those pale intuitions made
them always affectingly vivid.

But what vanity in our emotional state in a great jarring world where we
are excused for continuing to seek our individual happiness only if we
ally it and subordinate it to the well being of our fellows! The
interjection was her customary specific for the cure of these little
tricks of her blood. Leaving her friend Miss Barrow at the piano, she
took a chair in a corner and said; 'Now, Mr. O'Donnell, you will hear the
music that moves me.'

'But it's not to be singing,' said Patrick. 'And how can you sing so
gloriously what you don't care for? It puzzles me completely.'

She assured him she was no enigma: she hushed to him to hear.

He dropped his underlip, keeping on the conversation with his eyes until
he was caught by the masterly playing of a sonata by the chief of the
poets of sound.

He was caught by it, but he took the close of the introductory section,
an allegro con brio, for the end, and she had to hush at him again, and
could not resist smiling at her lullaby to the prattler. Patrick smiled
in response. Exchanges of smiles upon an early acquaintance between two
young people are peeps through the doorway of intimacy. She lost sight of
the Jesuit. Under the influence of good music, too, a not unfavourable
inclination towards the person sitting beside us and sharing that
sweetness, will soften general prejudices--if he was Irish, he was
boyishly Irish, not like his inscrutable brother; a better, or hopefuller
edition of Captain Con; one with whom something could be done to steady
him, direct him, improve him. He might be taught to appreciate Beethoven
and work for his fellows. 'Now does not that touch you more deeply than
the Italian?' said she, delicately mouthing: 'I, mio tradito amor!'

'Touch, I don't know,' he was honest enough to reply. 'It's you that
haven't given it a fair chance I'd like to hear it again. There's a
forest on fire in it.'

'There is,' she exclaimed. 'I have often felt it, but never seen it. You
exactly describe it. How true!'

'But any music I could listen to all day and all the night,' said he.

'And be as proud of yourself the next morning?'

Patrick was rather at sea. What could she mean?

Mrs. Adister O'Donnell stepped over to them, with the object of
installing Colonel Adister in Patrick's place.

The object was possibly perceived. Mrs. Adister was allowed no time to
set the manoeuvre in motion.

'Mr. O'Donnell is a great enthusiast for music, and could listen to it
all day and all night, he tells me,' said Miss Mattock. 'Would he not
sicken of it in a week, Mrs. Adister?'

'But why should I?' cried Patrick. 'It's a gift of heaven.'

'And, like other gifts of heaven, to the idle it would turn to evil.'

'I can't believe it.'

'Work, and you will believe it.'

'But, Miss Mattock, I want to work; I'm empty-handed. It 's true I want
to travel and see a bit of the world to help me in my work by and by. I'm
ready to try anything I can do, though.'

'Has it ever struck you that you might try to help the poor?'

'Arthur is really anxious, and only doubts his ability,' said Mrs.
Adister.

'The doubt throws a shadow on the wish,' said Miss Mattock. 'And can one
picture Colonel Adister the secretary of a Laundry Institution, receiving
directions from Grace and me! We should have to release him long before
the six months' term, when we have resolved to incur the expense of a
salaried secretary.'

Mrs. Adister turned her head to the colonel, who was then looking down
the features of Mrs. Rockney.

Patrick said: 'I'm ready, for a year, Miss Mattock.'

She answered him, half jocosely: 'A whole year of free service? Reflect
on what you are undertaking.'

'It's writing and accounts, no worse?'

'Writing and accounts all day, and music in the evening only now and
then.'

'I can do it: I will, if you'll have me.'

'Do you hear Mr. O'Donnell, Mrs. Adister?'

Captain Con fluttered up to his wife, and heard the story from Miss
Mattock.

He fancied he saw a thread of good luck for Philip in it. 'Our house
could be Patrick's home capitally,' he suggested to his wife. She was not
a whit less hospitable, only hinting that she thought the refusal of the
post was due to Arthur.

'And if he accepts, imagine him on a stool, my dear madam; he couldn't
sit it!'

Miss Mattock laughed. 'No, that is not to be thought of seriously. And
with Mr. O'Donnell it would be probationary for the first fortnight or
month. Does he know anything about steam?'

'The rudimentary idea,' said Patrick.

'That's good for a beginning,' said the captain; and he added: 'Miss
Mattock, I'm proud if one of my family can be reckoned worthy of
assisting in your noble work.'

She replied: 'I warn everybody that they shall be taken at their word if
they volunteer their services.'

She was bidden to know by the captain that the word of an Irish gentleman
was his bond. 'And not later than to-morrow evening I'll land him at your
office. Besides, he'll find countrywomen of his among you, and there's
that to enliven him. You say they work well, diligently, intelligently.'

She deliberated. 'Yes, on the whole; when they take to their work.
Intelligently certainly compared with our English. We do not get the best
of them in London. For that matter, we do not get the best of the
English--not the women of the north. We have to put up with the rejected
of other and better-paying departments of work. It breaks my heart
sometimes to see how near they are to doing well, but for such a little
want of ballast.'

'If they're Irish,' said Patrick, excited by the breaking of her heart,
'a whisper of cajolery in season is often the secret.'

Captain Con backed him for diplomacy. 'You'll learn he has a head, Miss
Mattock.'

'I am myself naturally blunt, and prefer the straightforward method,'
said she.

Patrick nodded. 'But where there's an obstruction in the road, it's
permissible to turn a corner.'

'Take 'em in flank when you can't break their centre,' said Con.

'Well, you shall really try whether you can endure the work for a short
time if you are in earnest,' Miss Mattock addressed the volunteer.

'But I am,' he said.

'We are too poor at present to refuse the smallest help.'

'And mine is about the smallest.'

'I did not mean that, Mr. O'Donnell.'

'But you'll have me?'

'Gladly.'

Captain Con applauded the final words between them. They had the genial
ring, though she accepted the wrong young man for but a shadow of the
right sort of engagement.

This being settled, by the sudden combination of enthusiastic Irish
impulse and benevolent English scheming, she very considerately resigned
herself to Mrs. Adister's lead and submitted herself to a further jolting
in the unprogressive conversational coach with Colonel Adister, whose
fault as a driver was not in avoiding beaten ways, but whipping wooden
horses.

Evidently those two were little adapted to make the journey of life
together, though they were remarkably fine likenesses of a pair in the
dead midway of the journey, Captain Con reflected, and he could have
jumped at the thought of Patrick's cleverness: it was the one bright
thing of the evening. There was a clear gain in it somewhere. And if
there was none, Jane Mattock was a good soul worth saving. Why not all
the benefaction on our side, and a figo for rewards! Devotees or
adventurers, he was ready in imagination to see his cousins play the part
of either, as the cross-roads offered, the heavens appeared to decree. We
turn to the right or the left, and this way we're voluntary drudges, and
that way we're lucky dogs; it's all according to the turn, the fate of
it. But never forget that old Ireland is weeping!

        O never forget that old Ireland is weeping
        The bitter salt tears of the mother bereft!

He hummed the spontaneous lines. He was accused of singing to himself,
and a song was vigorously demanded of him by the ladies.

He shook his head. 'I can't,' he sighed. 'I was plucking the drowned body
of a song out of the waters to give it decent burial. And if I sing I
shall be charged with casting a firebrand at Mr. Rockney.'

Rockney assured him that he could listen to anything in verse.

'Observe the sneer:--for our verses are smoke,' said Con.

Miss Mattock pressed him to sing.

But he had saddened his mind about old Ireland: the Irish news weighed
heavily on him, unrelieved by a tussle with Rockney. If he sang, it would
be an Irish song, and he would break down in it, he said; and he hinted
at an objection of his wife's to spirited Irish songs of the sort which
carry the sons of Erin bounding over the fences of tyranny and the brook
of tears. And perhaps Mr. Rockney might hear a tale in verse as hard to
bear as he sometimes found Irish prose!--Miss Mattock perceived that his
depression was genuine, not less than his desire to please her. 'Then it
shall be on another occasion,' she said.

'Oh! on another occasion I'm the lark to the sky, my dear lady.'

Her carriage was announced. She gave Patrick a look, with a smile, for it
was to be a curious experiment. He put on the proper gravity of a young
man commissioned, without a dimple of a smile. Philip bowed to her
stiffly, as we bow to a commanding officer who has insulted us and will
hear of it. But for that, Con would have manoeuvred against his wife to
send him downstairs at the lady's heels. The fellow was a perfect riddle,
hard to read as the zebra lines on the skin of a wild jackass--if
Providence intended any meaning when she traced them! and it's a moot
point: as it is whether some of our poets have meaning and are not
composers of zebra. 'No one knows but them above!' he said aloud,
apparently to his wife.

'What can you be signifying?' she asked him. She had deputed Colonel
Arthur to conduct Miss Mattock and Miss Barrow to their carriage, and she
supposed the sentence might have a mysterious reference to the plan she
had formed; therefore it might be a punishable offence. Her small round
eyes were wide-open, her head was up and high.

She was easily appeased, too easily.

'The question of rain, madam,' he replied to her repetition of his words.
'I dare say that was what I had in my mind, hearing Mr. Mattock and Mr.
Rockney agree to walk in company to their clubs.'

He proposed to them that they should delay the march on a visit to his
cabin near the clouds. They were forced to decline his invitation to the
gentle lion's mouth; as did Mr. Rumford, very briskly and thankfully. Mr.
Rockney was taken away by Mr. and Mrs. Marbury Dyke. So the party
separated, and the Englishmen were together, and the Irishmen together;
and hardly a syllable relating to the Englishmen did the Irishmen say,
beyond an allusion to an accident to John Mattock's yacht off the Irish
west-coast last autumn; but the Irishmen were subjected to some remarks
by the Englishmen, wherein their qualities as individuals and specimens
of a race were critically and neatly packed. Common sense is necessarily
critical in its collision with vapours, and the conscious possessors of
an exclusive common sense are called on to deliver a summary verdict, nor
is it an unjust one either, if the verdict be taken simply for an
estimate of what is presented upon the plain surface of to-day. Irishmen
are queer fellows, never satisfied, thirsting for a shindy. Some of them
get along pretty well in America. The air of their Ireland intoxicates
them. They require the strong hand: fair legislation, but no show of
weakness. Once let them imagine you are afraid of them, and they see
perfect independence in their grasp. And what would be the spectacle if
they were to cut themselves loose from England? The big ship might be
inconvenienced by the loss of the tender; the tender would fall adrift on
the Atlantic, with pilot and captain at sword and pistol, the crew
playing Donnybrook freely. Their cooler heads are shrewd enough to see
the folly, but it catches the Irish fancy to rush to the extreme, and we
have allowed it to be supposed that it frightens us. There is the capital
blunder, fons et origo.

Their leaders now pretend to work upon the Great Scale; they demand
everything on the spot upon their own interpretation of equity.
Concessions, hazy speeches, and the puling nonsense of our present
Government, have encouraged them so far and got us into the mess. Treat
them as policemen treat highwaymen: give them the law: and the law must
be tightened, like the hold on a rogue by his collar, if they kick at it.
Rockney was for sharp measures in repression, fair legislation in due
course.

'Fair legislation upon your own interpretation of fair,' said Mattock,
whose party opposed Rockney's. 'As to repression, you would have missed
that instructive scene this evening at Con O'Donnell's table, if you had
done him the kindness to pick up his glove. It 's wisest to let them
exhaust their energies upon one another. Hold off, and they're soon at
work.'

'What kind of director of a City Company does he make?' said Rockney.

Mattock bethought him that, on the whole, strange to say, Con O'Donnell
comported himself decorously as a director, generally speaking on the
reasonable side, not without shrewdness: he seemed to be sobered by the
money question.

'That wife of his is the salvation of him,' Rockney said, to account for
the Captain's shrewdness. 'She manages him cleverly. He knows the length
of his line. She's a woman of principle, and barring the marriage, good
sense too. His wife keeps him quiet, or we should be hearing of him.
Forbery 's a more dangerous man. There's no intentional mischief in Con
O'Donnell; it's only effervescence. I saw his game, and declined to
uncork him. He talks of a niece of his wife's: have you ever seen
her?--married to some Servian or Roumanian prince.'

Mattock answered: 'Yes.'

'Is she such a beauty?'

Again Mattock answered: 'Yes,' after affecting thoughtfulness.

'They seem to marry oddly in that family.'

Mattock let fly a short laugh at the remark, which had the ring of some
current phrase. 'They do,' he said.

Next morning Jane Mattock spoke to her brother of her recruit. He
entirely trusted to her discretion; the idea of a young Irish secretary
was rather comical, nevertheless. He had his joke about it, requesting to
have a sight of the secretary's books at the expiry of the week, which
was the length of time he granted this ardent volunteer for evaporating
and vanishing.

'If it releases poor Grace for a week, it will be useful to us,' Jane
said. 'Women are educated so shamefully that we have not yet found one we
can rely on as a competent person. And Mr. O'Donnell--did you notice him?
I told you I met him a day or two back--seems willing to be of use. It
cannot hurt him to try. Grace has too much on her hands.'

'She has a dozen persons.'

'They are zealous when they are led.'

'Beware of letting them suspect that they are led.'

'They are anxious to help the poor if they can discover how.'

'Good men, I don't doubt,' said John Mattock. 'Any proposals from curates
recently?'

'Not of late. Captain O'Donnell, the brother of our secretary, is
handsomer, but we do not think him so trustworthy. Did you observe him at
all?--he sat by me. He has a conspirator's head.'

'What is that?' her brother asked her.

'Only a notion of mine.'

She was directed to furnish a compendious report of the sayings, doings,
and behaviour of the Irish secretary in the evening.

'If I find him there,' she said.

Her brother was of opinion that Mr. Patrick O'Donnell would be as good as
his word, and might be expected to appear there while the novelty lasted.




CHAPTER XV

THE MATTOCK FAMILY

That evening's report of the demeanour of the young Irish secretary in
harness was not so exhilarating as John Mattock had expected, and he
inclined to think his sister guilty of casting her protecting veil over
the youth. It appeared that Mr. O'Donnell had been studious of his
duties, had spoken upon no other topic, had asked pertinent questions,
shown no flippancy, indulged in no extravagances. He seemed, Jane said,
eager to master details. A certain eagerness of her own in speaking of it
sharpened her clear features as if they were cutting through derision.
She stated it to propitiate her brother, as it might have done but for
the veracious picture of Patrick in the word 'eager,' which pricked the
scepticism of a practical man. He locked his mouth, looking at her with a
twinkle she refused to notice. 'Determined to master details' he could
have accepted. One may be determined to find a needle in a dust-heap; one
does not with any stiffness of purpose go at a dust-heap eagerly. Hungry
men have eaten husks; they have not betrayed eagerness for such dry
stuff. Patrick's voracity after details exhibited a doubtfully genuine
appetite, and John deferred his amusement until the termination of the
week or month when his dear good Jane would visit the office to behold a
vacated seat, or be assailed by the customary proposal. Irishmen were not
likely to be far behind curates in besieging an heiress. For that matter,
Jane was her own mistress and could very well take care of herself; he
had confidence in her wisdom.

He was besides of an unsuspicious and an unexacting temperament. The
things he would strongly object to he did not specify to himself because
he was untroubled by any forethought of them. Business, political,
commercial and marine, left few vacancies in his mind other than for the
pleasures he could command and enjoy. He surveyed his England with a
ruddy countenance, and saw the country in the reflection. His England saw
much of itself in him. Behind each there was more, behind the country a
great deal more, than could be displayed by a glass. The salient features
wore a resemblance. Prosperity and heartiness; a ready hand on, and over,
a full purse; a recognised ability of the second-rate order; a stout hold
of patent principles; inherited and embraced, to make the day secure and
supply a somniferous pillow for the night; occasional fits of anxiety
about affairs, followed by an illuminating conviction that the world is a
changing one and our construction not of granite, nevertheless that a
justifiable faith in the ship, joined to a constant study of the chart,
will pull us through, as it has done before, despite all assaults and
underminings of the common enemy and the particular; these, with the
humorous indifference of familiarity and constitutional annoyances,
excepting when they grew acute and called for drugs, and with
friendliness to the race of man of both colours, in the belief that our
Creator originally composed in black and white, together with a liking
for matters on their present footing in slow motion, partly under his
conductorship, were the prominent characteristics of the grandson of the
founder of the house, who had built it from a spade.

The story of the building was notorious; popular books for the inciting
of young Englishmen to dig to fortune had a place for it among the
chapters, where we read of the kind of man, and the means by which the
country has executed its later giant strides of advancement. The first
John Mattock was a representative of his time; he moved when the country
was moving, and in the right direction, finding himself at the auspicious
moment upon a line of rail. Elsewhere he would have moved, we may
suppose, for the spade-like virtues bear their fruits; persistent and
thrifty, solid and square, will fetch some sort of yield out of any soil;
but he would not have gone far. The Lord, to whom an old man of a mind
totally Hebrew ascribed the plenitude of material success, the Lord and
he would have reared a garden in the desert; in proximity to an oasis,
still on the sands, against obstacles. An accumulation of upwards of four
hundred thousand pounds required, as the moral of the popular books does
not sufficiently indicate, a moving country, an ardent sphere, to produce
the sum: and since, where so much was done, we are bound to conceive
others at work as well as he, it seems to follow that the exemplar
outstripping them vastly must have profited by situation at the start,
which is a lucky accident; and an accident is an indigestible lump in a
moral tale, real though the story be. It was not mentioned in the popular
books; nor did those worthy guides to the pursuit of wealth contain any
reminder of old John Mattock's dependence upon the conjoint labour of his
fellows to push him to his elevation. As little did they think of
foretelling a day, generations hence, when the empty heirs of his fellows
might prefer a modest claim (confused in statement) to compensation
against the estate he bequeathed: for such prophecy as that would have
hinted at a tenderness for the mass to the detriment of the individual,
and such tenderness as that is an element of our religion, not the drift
of our teaching.

He grumbled at the heavy taxation of his estate during life: yearly this
oppressed old man paid thousands of pounds to the Government. It was poor
encouragement to shoulder and elbow your way from a hovel to a mansion!

He paid the money, dying sour; a splendid example of energy on the road,
a forbidding one at the terminus. And here the moral of the popular books
turned aside from him to snatch at humanity for an instance of our
frailness and dealt in portentous shadows:--we are, it should be known,
not the great creatures we assume ourselves to be. Six months before his
death he appeared in the garb of a navvy, humbly soliciting employment at
his own house-door. There he appealed to the white calves of his footmen
for a day's work, upon the plea that he had never been a democrat.

The scene had been described with humanely-moralising pathos in the
various books of stories of Men who have come to Fortune, and it had for
a length of seasons an annual position in the foremost rank (on the line,
facing the door) in our exhibition of the chosen artists, where, as our
popular words should do, it struck the spectator's eye and his brain
simultaneously with pugilistic force: a reference to the picture in the
catalogue furnishing a recapitulation of the incident. 'I've worked a
good bit in my time, gentlemen, and I baint done yet':--SEE PROFESSOR
SUMMIT'S 'MEN WHO HAVE COME TO FORTUNE.' There is, we perceive at a
glance, a contrast in the bowed master of the Mansion applying to his
menials for a day's work at the rate of pay to able-bodied men:--which he
is not, but the deception is not disingenuous. The contrast flashed with
the rapid exchange of two prizefighters in a ring, very popularly. The
fustian suit and string below the knee, on the one side, and the purple
plush breeches and twinkling airy calves (fascinating his attention as he
makes his humble request to his own, these domestic knights) to right and
left of the doorway and in front, hit straight out of the canvas. And as
quickly as you perceive the contrast you swallow the moral. The dreaded
thing is down in a trice, to do what salutary work it may within you.
That it passed into the blood of England's middle-class population, and
set many heads philosophically shaking, and filled the sails of many a
sermon, is known to those who lived in days when Art and the classes
patronising our Native Art existed happily upon the terms of venerable
School-Dame and studious pupils, before the sickly era displacing
Exhibitions full of meaning for tricks of colour, monstrous atmospherical
vagaries that teach nothing, strange experiments on the complexion of the
human face divine--the feminine hyper-aethereally. Like the first John
Mattock, it was formerly of, and yet by dint of sturdy energy, above the
people. They learnt from it; they flocked to it thirsting and retired
from it thoughtful, with some belief of having drunk of nature in art, as
you will see the countless troops of urchins about the one cow of London,
in the Great City's Green Park.

A bequest to the nation of the best of these pictures of Old John, by a
very old Yorkshire collector, makes it milk for all time, a perpetual
contrast, and a rebuke. Compared with the portrait of Jane Mattock in her
fiery aureole of hair on the walls of the breakfast-room, it marks that
fatal period of degeneracy for us, which our critics of Literature as
well as Art are one voice in denouncing, when the complex overwhelms the
simple, and excess of signification is attempted, instead of letting
plain nature speak her uncorrupted tongue to the contemplative mind.
Degeneracy is the critical history of the Arts. Jane's hair was of a
reddish gold-inwoven cast that would, in her grandfather's epoch, have
shone unambiguously as carrots. The girl of his day thus adorned by
Nature, would have been shown wearing her ridiculous crown with some
decent sulkiness; and we should not have had her so unsparingly crowned;
the truth would have been told in a dexterous concealment--a rope of it
wound up for a bed of the tortoise-shell comb behind, and a pair of tight
cornucopias at the temples. What does our modern artist do but flare it
to right and left, lift it wavily over her forehead, revel in the
oriental superabundance, and really seem to swear we shall admire it,
against our traditions of the vegetable, as a poetical splendour. The
head of the heiress is in a Jovian shower. Marigolds are in her hand. The
whole square of canvas is like a meadow on the borders of June. It causes
blinking.

Her brother also is presented: a fine portrait of him, with clipped red
locks, in blue array, smiling, wearing the rose of briny breezes, a
telescope under his left arm, his right forefinger on a map, a view of
Spitzbergen through a cabin-window: for John had notions about the
north-west passage, he had spent a winter in the ice, and if an amateur,
was not the less a true sailor.

With his brass-buttoned blue coat, and his high coloured cheeks, and his
convict hair--a layer of brickdust--and his air of princely wealth, and
the icebergs and hummocks about him, he looks for adventure without a
thought of his heroism--the country all over.

There he stands, a lover of the sea, and a scientific seaman and engineer
to boot, practical in every line of his face, defying mankind to suspect
that he cherishes a grain of romance. On the wall, just above his
shoulder, is a sketch of a Viking putting the lighted brand to his ship
in mid sea, and you are to understand that his time is come and so should
a Viking die: further, if you will, the subject is a modern Viking, ready
for the responsibilities of the title. Sketches of our ancient wooden
walls and our iron and plated defences line the panellings. These
degenerate artists do work hard for their money.

The portrait of John's father, dated a generation back, is just the man
and little else, phantomly the man. His brown coat struggles out of the
obscurity of the background, but it is chiefly background clothing him.
His features are distinguishable and delicate: you would suppose him
appearing to you under the beams of a common candle, or cottage
coalfire--ferruginously opaque. The object of the artist (apart from the
triumph of tone on the canvas) is to introduce him as an elegant and
faded gentleman, rather retiring into darkness than emerging. He is the
ghost of the painter's impasto. Yet this is Ezra Mattock, who multipled
the inheritance of the hundreds of thousands into millions, and died,
after covering Europe, Asia, and the Americas with iron rails, one of the
few Christians that can hold up their heads beside the banking Jew as
magnates in the lists of gold. The portrait is clearly no frontispiece of
his qualities. He married an accomplished and charitable lady, and she
did not spoil the stock in refining it. His life passed quietly; his
death shook the country: for though it had been known that he had been
one of our potentates, how mightily he was one had not entered into the
calculations of the public until the will of the late Ezra Mattock, cited
in our prints, received comments from various newspaper articles. A
chuckle of collateral satisfaction ran through the empire. All England
and her dependencies felt the state of cousinship with the fruits of
energy; and it was an agreeable sentiment, coming opportunely, as it did,
at the tail of articles that had been discussing a curious manifestation
of late--to-wit, the awakening energy of the foreigner--a prodigious
apparition on our horizon. Others were energetic too! We were not, the
sermon ran, to imagine we were without rivals in the field. We were
possessed of certain positive advantages; we had coal, iron, and an
industrious population, but we were, it was to be feared, by no means a
thrifty race, and there was reason for doubt whether in the matter of
industry we were quite up to the mark of our forefathers. No
deterioration of the stock was apprehended, still the nation must be
accused of a lack of vigilance. We must look round us, and accept the
facts as they stood. So accustomed had we become to the predominance of
our position that it was difficult at first to realise a position of
rivalry that threatened our manufacturing interests in their hitherto
undisputed lead in the world's markets. The tale of our exports for the
last five years conveys at once its moral and its warning. Statistics
were then cited.

As when the gloomy pedagogue has concluded his exhortation, statistics
birched the land. They were started at our dinner-tables, and scourged
the social converse. Not less than in the articles, they were perhaps
livelier than in the preface; they were distressing nevertheless; they
led invariably to the question of our decadence. Carthage was named; a
great mercantile community absolutely obliterated! Senatorial men were
led to propose in their thoughtfullest tones that we should turn our
attention to Art. Why should we not learn to excel in Art? We excelled in
Poetry. Our Poets were cited: not that there was a notion that poems
would pay as an export but to show that if we excel in one of the Arts we
may in others of them. The poetry was not cited, nor was it necessary,
the object being to inflate the balloon of paradox with a light-flying
gas, and prove a poem-producing people to be of their nature born
artists; if they did but know it. The explosion of a particular trade
points to your taking up another. Energy is adapted to flourish equally
in every branch of labour.

It is the genius of the will, commanding all the crossroads. A country
breeding hugely must prove its energy likewise in the departments of the
mind, or it will ultimately be unable to feed its young--nay, to feast
its aldermen! Let us be up and alive.--Such was the exhortation of a
profound depression. Outside these dismal assemblies, in the streets, an
ancient song of raven recurrence croaked of 'Old England a-going down the
hill'; for there is a link of electricity between the street-boy and the
leading article in days when the Poles exchange salutations.

Mr. Ezra's legacy of his millions to son and daughter broke like a golden
evening on the borders of the raincloud. Things could not be so bad when
a plain untitled English gentleman bequeathed in the simplest manner
possible such giant heaps, a very Pelion upon Ossa, of wealth to his
children. The minds of the readers of journals were now directed to think
of the hoarded treasures of this favoured country. They might
approximately be counted, but even if counted they would be past
conception, like the sidereal system. The contemplation of a million
stupefies: consider the figures of millions and millions! Articles were
written on Lombard Street, the world's gold-mine, our granary of energy,
surpassing all actual and fabulous gold-mines ever spoken of: Aladdin's
magician would find his purse contracting and squeaking in the
comparison. Then, too, the store of jewels held by certain private
families called for remark and an allusion to Sindbad the sailor, whose
eyes were to dilate wider than they did in the valley of diamonds. Why,
we could, if we pleased, lie by and pass two or three decades as jolly
cricketers and scullers, and resume the race for wealth with the rest of
mankind, hardly sensible of the holiday in our pockets though we were the
last people to do it, we were the sole people that had the option. Our
Fortunatus' cap was put to better purposes, but to have the cap, and not
to be emasculated by the possession, might excuse a little reasonable
pride in ourselves.

Thus did Optimism and Pessimism have their turn, like the two great
parties in the State, and the subsiding see-saw restored a proper
balance, much to the nation's comfort. Unhappily, it was remembered,
there are spectators of its method of getting to an equipoise out of the
agitation of extremes. The peep at our treasures to regain composure had,
we fear, given the foreigner glimpses, and whetted the appetite of our
masses. No sooner are we at peace than these are heard uttering low
howls, and those are seen enviously glaring. The spectre, Panic, that
ever dogs the optimistic feast, warns us of a sack under our beds, and
robbers about to try a barely-bolted door. . . Then do we, who have so
sweetly sung our senses to sleep, start up, in their grip, rush to the
doctor and the blacksmith, rig alarums, proclaim ourselves intestinally
torn, defenceless, a prey to foes within and without. It is discovered to
be no worse than an alderman's dream, but the pessimist frenzy of the
night has tossed a quieting sop to the Radical, and summoned the
volunteers to a review. Laudatory articles upon the soldierly 'march
past' of our volunteers permit of a spell of soft repose, deeper than
prudent, at the end of it, India and Ireland consenting.

So much for a passing outline of John Bull--the shadow on the wall of
John Mattock. The unostentatious millionaire's legacy to his two children
affected Mr. Bull thrillingly, pretty nearly as it has here been dotted
in lining. That is historical. Could he believe in the existence of a son
of his, a master of millions, who had never sighed (and he had only to
sigh) to die a peer, or a baronet, or simple Knight? The downright
hard-nailed coffin fact was there; the wealthiest man in the country had
flown away to Shadowland a common Mr.! You see the straight deduction
from the circumstances:--we are, say what you will, a Republican people!
Newspaper articles on the watch sympathetically for Mr. Bull's latest
view of himself, preached on the theme of our peculiar Republicanism.
Soon after he was observed fondling the Crown Insignia. His bards flung
out their breezy columns, reverentially monarchial. The Republican was
informed that they were despised as a blatant minority. A maudlin fit of
worship of our nobility had hold of him next, and English aristocracy
received the paean. Lectures were addressed to democrats; our House of
Lords was pledged solemnly in reams of print. We were told that 'blood'
may always be betted on to win the race; blood that is blue will beat the
red hollow. Who could pretend to despise the honour of admission to the
ranks of the proudest peerage the world has known! Is not a great
territorial aristocracy the strongest guarantee of national stability?
The loudness of the interrogation, like the thunder of Jove, precluded
thought of an answer.

Mr. Bull, though he is not of lucid memory, kept an eye on the owner of
those millions. His bards were awake to his anxiety, and celebrated John
Mattock's doings with a trump and flourish somewhat displeasing to a
quietly-disposed commoner. John's entry into Parliament as a Liberal was
taken for a sign of steersman who knew where the tide ran. But your
Liberals are sometimes Radicals in their youth, and his choice of parties
might not be so much sagacity as an instance of unripe lightheadedness. A
young conservative millionaire is less disturbing. The very wealthy young
peer is never wanton in his politics, which seems to admonish us that the
heir of vast wealth should have it imposed on him to accept a peerage,
and be locked up as it were. A coronet steadies the brain. You may let
out your heels at the social laws, you are almost expected to do it, but
you are to shake that young pate of yours restively under such a splendid
encumbrance. Private reports of John, however, gave him credit for sound
opinions: he was moderate, merely progressive. When it was added that the
man had the habit of taking counsel with his sister, he was at once
considered as fast and safe, not because of any public knowledge of the
character of Jane Mattock. We pay this homage to the settled common sense
of women. Distinctly does she discountenance leaps in the dark, wild
driving, and the freaks of Radicalism.

John, as it happened, had not so grave a respect for the sex as for the
individual Jane. He thought women capable of acts of foolishness; his
bright-faced sister he could thoroughly trust for prudent conduct. He
gave her a good portion of his heart in confidence, and all of it in
affection. There were matters which he excluded from confidence, even
from intimate communication with himself. These he could not reveal; nor
could she perfectly open her heart to him, for the same reason. They both
had an established ideal of their personal qualities, not far above the
positive, since they were neither of them pretentious, yet it was a
trifle higher and fairer than the working pattern; and albeit they were
sincere enough, quite sincere in their mutual intercourse, they had, by
what each knew at times of the thumping organ within them, cause for
doubting that they were as transparent as the other supposed; and they
were separately aware of an inward smile at one another's partial
deception; which did not thwart their honest power of working up to the
respected ideal. The stroke of the deeper self-knowledge rarely shook
them; they were able to live with full sensations in the animated picture
they were to the eyes best loved by them. This in fact was their life.
Anything beside it was a dream, and we do not speak of our dreams--not of
every dream. Especially do we reserve our speech concerning the dream in
which we had a revelation of the proud frame deprived of a guiding will,
flung rudderless on the waves. Ah that abject! The dismantled ship has
the grandeur of the tempest about it, but the soul swayed by passion is
ignominiously bare-poled, detected, hooted by its old assumption. If
instinct plays fantastical tricks when we are sleeping, let it be ever
behind a curtain. We can be held guilty only if we court exposure. The
ideal of English gentleman and gentlewoman is closely Roman in the
self-repression it exacts, and that it should be but occasionally
difficult to them shows an affinity with the type. Do you perchance, O
continental observers of the race, call it hypocritical? It is their
nature disciplined to the regimental step of civilisation. Socially these
island men and women of a certain middle rank are veterans of an army,
and some of the latest enrolled are the stoutest defenders of the flag.

Brother and sister preserved their little secrets of character apart.
They could not be expected to unfold what they declined personally to
examine. But they were not so successful with the lady governing the
household, their widowed maternal aunt, Mrs. Lackstraw, a woman of
decisive penetration, and an insubordinate recruit of the army aforesaid.
To her they were without a mask; John was passion's slave, Jane the most
romantic of Eve's daughters. She pointed to incidents of their youth; her
vision was acutely retrospective. The wealth of her nephew and niece
caused such a view of them to be, as she remarked, anxious past
endurance. She had grounds for fearing that John, who might step to an
alliance with any one of the proudest houses in the Kingdom, would marry
a beggar-maid. As for Jane, she was the natural prey of a threadbare
poet. Mrs. Lackstraw heard of Mr. Patrick O'Donnell, and demanded the
right to inspect him. She doubted such perfect disinterestedness in any
young man as that he should slave at account-keeping to that Laundry
without a prospect of rich remuneration, and the tale of his going down
to the city for a couple of hours each day to learn the art of keeping
books was of very dubious import in a cousin of Captain Con O'Donnell.
'Let me see your prodigy,' she said, with the emphasis on each word.
Patrick was presented at her table. She had steeled herself against an
Irish tongue. He spoke little, appeared simple, professed no enthusiasm
for the Laundry. And he paid no compliments to Jane: of the two he was
more interested by the elder lady, whose farm and dairy in Surrey he
heard her tell of with a shining glance, observing that he liked thick
cream: there was a touch of home in it. The innocent sensuality in the
candid avowal of his tastes inspired confidence. Mrs. Lackstraw fished
for some account of his home. He was open to flow on the subject; he
dashed a few sketches of mother and sisters, dowerless girls, fresh as
trout in the stream, and of his own poor estate, and the peasantry, with
whom he was on friendly terms. He was an absentee for his education.
Sweet water, pure milk, potatoes and bread, were the things he coveted in
plenty for his people and himself, he said, calling forth an echo from
Mrs. Lackstraw, and an invitation to come down to her farm in the Spring.
'That is, Mr. O'Donnell, if you are still in London.'

'Oh, I'm bound apprentice for a year,' said he.

He was asked whether he did not find it tiresome work.

'A trifle so,' he confessed.

Then why did he pursue it, the question was put.

He was not alive for his own pleasure, and would like to feel he was
doing a bit of good, was the answer.

Could one, Mrs. Lackstraw asked herself, have faith in this young
Irishman? He possessed an estate. His brogue rather added to his air of
truthfulness. His easy manners and the occasional streak of correct
French in his dialogue cast a shadow on it. Yet he might be an ingenuous
creature precisely because of the suspicion roused by his quaint
unworldliness that he might be a terrible actor. Why not?--his heart was
evidently much more interested in her pursuits than in her niece's. The
juvenility of him was catching, if it was indeed the man, and not one of
the actor's properties. Mrs. Lackstraw thought it prudent to hint at the
latter idea to Jane while she decided in her generosity to embrace the
former. Oh! if all Irishmen shared his taste for sweet water, pure milk
and wholesome bread, what a true Union we should have! She had always
insisted on those three things as most to be desired on earth for the
masses, and she reminded Jane of it as a curious fact. Jane acquiesced,
having always considered it a curious fact that her aunt should combine
the relish of a country life with the intensest social ambition--a
passion so sensitive as to make the name her husband had inflicted on her
a pain and a burden. The name of Mattock gave her horrors. She spoke of
it openly to prove that Jane must marry a title and John become a peer.
Never was there such a name to smell of the soil. She declared her
incapacity to die happy until the two had buried Mattock. Her own one
fatal step condemned her, owing to the opinion she held upon the
sacredness of marriage, as Lackstraw on her tombstone, and to Lackstraw
above the earthly martyr would go bearing the designation which marked
her to be claimed by him. But for John and Jane the index of Providence
pointed a brighter passage through life. They had only to conquer the
weakness native to them--the dreadful tendency downward. They had, in the
spiritual sense, frail hearts. The girl had been secretive about the
early activity of hers, though her aunt knew of two or three adventures
wanting in nothing save boldness to have put an end to her independence
and her prospects:--hence this Laundry business! a clear sign of some
internal disappointment. The boy, however, had betrayed himself in his
mother's days, when it required all her influence and his father's
authority, with proof positive of the woman's unworthiness, to rescue him
from immediate disaster.

Mrs. Lackstraw's confidences on the theme of the family she watched over
were extended to Patrick during their strolls among the ducks and fowls
and pheasants at her farm. She dealt them out in exclamations, as much as
telling him that now they knew him they trusted him, notwithstanding the
unaccountable part he played as honorary secretary to that Laundry. The
confidences, he was aware, were common property of the visitors one after
another, but he had the knowledge of his being trusted as not every
Irishman would have been. A service of six months to the secretaryship
established his reputation as the strange bird of a queer species: not
much less quiet, honest, methodical, than an Englishman, and still
impulsive, Irish still; a very strange bird.

The disposition of the English to love the children of Erin, when not
fretted by them, was shown in the treatment Patrick received from the
Mattock family. It is a love resembling the affection of the stage-box
for a set of favourite performers, and Patrick, a Celt who had schooled
his wits to observe and meditate, understood his position with them as
one of the gallant and amusing race, as well as the reason why he had won
their private esteem. They are not willingly suspicious: it agitates
their minds to be so; and they are most easily lulled by the flattery of
seeing their special virtues grafted on an alien stock: for in this
admiration of virtues that are so necessary to the stalwart growth of
man, they become just sensible of a minor deficiency; the tree, if we
jump out of it to examine its appearance, should not be all trunk. Six
months of ungrudging unremunerated service, showing devotion to the good
cause and perfect candour from first to last, was English, and a poetic
touch beyond: so that John Mattock, if he had finished the sentence
instead of lopping it with an interjection, would have said: 'These Irish
fellows, when they're genuine and first rate!--are pretty well the pick
of the land.' Perhaps his pause on the interjection expressed a doubt of
our getting them genuine. Mr. O'Donnell was a sort of exceptional
Irishman, not devoid of practical ability in a small way--he did his
duties of secretary fairly well; apparently sincere--he had refrained
from courting Jane; an odd creature enough, what with his mixture of
impulsiveness and discretion; likeable, pleasant to entertain and talk
to; not one of your lunatics concerning his country--he could listen to
an Englishman's opinion on that head, listen composedly to Rockney,
merely seeming to take notes; and Rockney was, as Captain Con termed him,
Press Dragoon about Ireland, a trying doctor for a child of the patient.

On the whole, John Mattock could shake his hand heartily when he was
leaving our shores. Patrick was released by Miss Grace Barrow's discovery
at last of a lady capable of filling his place: a circumstance that he
did not pretend to regret. He relinquished his post and stood aside with
the air of a disciplined soldier. This was at the expiration of seven
months and two weeks of service. Only after he had gone, upon her
receiving his first letter from the Continent, did Jane distinguish in
herself the warmth of friendliness she felt for him, and know that of all
around her she, reproaching every one who had hinted a doubt, had been
the most suspicious of his pure simplicity. It was the vice of her
condition to be suspicious of the honesty of men. She thought of her
looks as less attractive than they were; of her wealth she had reason to
think that the scent transformed our sad sex into dogs under various
disguises. Remembering her chill once on hearing Patrick in a green lane
where they botanised among spring flowers call himself her Irish cousin,
as if he had advanced a step and betrayed the hoof, she called him her
Irish cousin now in good earnest. Her nation was retrospectively
enthusiastic. The cordiality of her letter of reply to the wandering
Patrick astonished him on the part of so cool a young lady; and Captain
Con, when he heard Miss Mattock speak of Patrick to his wife, came to the
conclusion that the leery lad had gone a far way toward doing the trick
for himself, though Jane said his correspondence was full of the deeds of
his brother in India. She quite sparkled in speaking of this boy.

She and the captain had an interchange of sparklings over absent Patrick,
at a discovery made by Miss Colesworth, the lady replacing him, in a nook
of the amateur secretary's official desk, under heaps of pamphlets and
slips, French and English and Irish journals, not at all bearing upon the
business of the Laundry. It was a blotting-pad stuffed with Patrick's
jottings. Jane brought it to Con as to the proper keeper of the
reliquary. He persuaded her to join him in examining it, and together
they bent their heads, turning leaf by leaf, facing, laughing, pursuing
the search for more, sometimes freely shouting.

Her inspection of the contents had previously been shy; she had just
enough to tell her they were funny. Dozens of scraps, insides of torn
envelopes, invitation-cards, ends of bills received from home, whatever
was handy to him at the moment, had done service for the overflow of Mr.
Secretary's private notes and reflections; the blotting-paper as well;
though that was devoted chiefly to sketches of the human countenance, the
same being almost entirely of the fair. Jane fancied she spied herself
among the number. Con saw the likeness, but not considering it a
complimentary one, he whisked over the leaf. Grace Barrow was
unmistakeable. Her dimpled cushion features, and very intent eyes gazing
out of the knolls and dingles, were given without caricature. Miss
Colesworth appeared on the last page, a half-length holding a big key,
demure between curls. The key was explained by a cage on a stool, and a
bird flying out. She had unlocked the cage for Patrick.

'He never seemed anxious to be released while he was at work,' said Jane,
after she and the captain had spelt the symbolling in turns.

'And never thirsted to fly till he flew, I warrant him,' said Con.

A repeated sketch of some beauty confused them both; neither of them
could guess the proud owner of those lineaments. Con proclaimed it to be
merely one of the lad's recollections, perhaps a French face. He thought
he might have seen a face rather resembling it, but could not call to
mind whose face it was.

'I dare say it's just a youngster's dream on a stool at a desk, as poets
write sonnets in their youth to nobody, till they're pierced by somebody,
and then there's a difference in their handwriting,' he said, vexed with
Patrick for squandering his opportunity to leave a compliment to the
heiress behind him.

Jane flipped the leaves back to the lady with stormy hair.

'But you'll have the whole book, and hand it to him when he returns; it
'll come best from you,' said Con. 'The man on horseback, out of uniform,
's brother Philip, of course. And man and horse are done to the life.
Pray, take it, Miss Mattock. I should lose it to a certainty; I should; I
can't be trusted. You'll take it!'

He pressed her so warmly to retain the bundle in her custody that she
carried it away.

Strange to say the things she had laughed at had been the things which
struck her feelings and sympathies. Patrick's notes here and there
recalled conversations he had more listened to than taken part in between
herself and Grace Barrow. Who could help laughing at his ideas about
women! But if they were crude, they were shrewd--or so she thought them;
and the jejuneness was, to her mind, chiefly in the dressing of them.
Grace agreed with her, for Grace had as good a right to inspect the
papers as she, and a glance had shown that there was nothing of peculiar
personal import in his notes: he did not brood on himself.

Here was one which tickled the ladies and formed a text for discussion.

'Women must take the fate of market-fruit till they earn their own
pennies, and then they 'll regulate the market. It is a tussle for money
with them as with us, meaning power. They'd do it as little by oratory as
they have done by millinery, for their oratory, just like their
millinery, appeals to a sentiment, and to a weaker; and nothing solid
comes of a sentiment. Power is built on work.'

To this was appended: 'The better for mankind in the developing process,
ay, and a bad day for us, boys, when study masks the charming eyes in
gig-lamps, and there is no pretty flying before us. Good-night to Cupid,
I fear. May be I am not seeing far enough, and am asking for the devil to
have the loveliest women as of old. Retro S. M.'

The youthful eye on their sex, the Irish voice, and the perceptible moral
earnestness in the background, made up a quaint mixture.




CHAPTER XVI

OF THE GREAT MR. BULL AND THE CELTIC AND SAXON VIEW OF HIM: AND SOMETHING
OF RICHARD ROCKNEY

Meanwhile India, our lubber giant, had ceased to kick a leg, and Ireland,
our fever-invalid, wore the aspect of an opiate slumber. The volcano we
couch on was quiet, the gritty morsel unabsorbed within us at an
armistice with the gastric juices. Once more the personification of the
country's prosperity had returned to the humming state of roundness.
Trade whipped him merrily, and he spun.

A fuller sketch of the figure of this remarkable emanation of us and
object of our worship, Bull, is required that we may breathe the
atmosphere of a story dealing with such very different views of the idol,
and learn to tolerate plain-speaking about him.

Fancy yourself delayed by stress of weather at an inn or an excursion,
and snapped up by some gossip drone of the district, who hearing whither
you are bound, recounts the history and nature of the place, to your
ultimate advantage, though you groan for the outer downpour to abate.--Of
Bull, then: our image, before the world: our lord and tyrant, ourself in
short--the lower part of us. Coldly worshipped on the whole, he can
create an enthusiasm when his roast-beef influence mounts up to peaceful
skies and the domestic English world spins with him. What he does not
like will then be the forbidding law of a most governable people, what he
does like the consenting. If it is declared that argument will be
inefficacious to move him, he is adored in the form of post. A hint of
his willingness in any direction, causes a perilous rush of his devotees.
Nor is there reason to suppose we have drawn the fanatical subserviency
from the example of our subject India. We may deem it native; perhaps of
its origin Aryan, but we have made it our own. Some have been so
venturesome as to trace the lordliness of Bull to the protecting smiles
of the good Neptune, whose arms are about him to encourage the
development of a wanton eccentricity. Certain weeds of the human bosom
are prompt to flourish where safeness would seem to be guaranteed. Men,
for instance, of stoutly independent incomes are prone to the same sort
of wilfulness as Bull's, the salve abject submission to it which we
behold in his tidal bodies of supporters. Neptune has done something. One
thinks he has done much, at a rumour of his inefficiency to do the
utmost. Spy you insecurity?--a possibility of invasion? Then indeed the
colossal creature, inaccessible to every argument, is open to any
suggestion: the oak-like is a reed, the bull a deer. But as there is no
attack on his shores, there is no proof that they are invulnerable.
Neptune is appealed to and replies by mouth of the latest passenger
across the Channel on a windy night:--Take heart, son John! They will
have poor stomachs for blows who intrude upon you. The testification to
the Sea-God's watchfulness restores his darling who is immediately as
horny to argument as before. Neptune shall have his share of the honours.

Ideal of his country Bull has none--he hates the word; it smells of
heresy, opposition to his image. It is an exercise of imagination to
accept an ideal, and his digestive organs reject it, after the manner of
the most beautiful likeness of him conjurable to the mind--that flowering
stomach, the sea-anemone, which opens to anything and speedily casts out
what it cannot consume. He is a positive shape, a practical corporation,
and the best he can see is the mirror held up to him by his bards of the
Press and his jester Frank Guffaw. There, begirt by laughing ocean-waves,
manifestly blest, he glorifies his handsome roundness, like that other
Foam-Born, whom the decorative Graces robed in vestments not so wonderful
as printed sheets. Rounder at each inspection, he preaches to mankind
from the text of a finger curved upon the pattern spectacles. Your
Frenchmen are revolutionising, wagering on tentative politics; your
Germans ploughing in philosophy, thumbing classics, composing music of a
novel order: both are marching, evolutionising, learning how to kill.
Ridiculous Germans! capricious Frenchmen! We want nothing new in musical
composition and abstract speculation of an indecent mythology, or
political contrivances and schemes of Government, and we do not want war.
Peace is the Goddess we court for the hand of her daughter Plenty, and we
have won that jolly girl, and you are welcome to the marriage-feast; but
avaunt new-fangled theories and howlings: old tunes, tried systems, for
us, my worthy friends.

Roundness admiring the growth of its globe may address majestic
invitation to the leaner kine. It can exhibit to the world that Peace is
a most desirable mother-in-law; and it is tempted to dream of capping the
pinnacle of wisdom when it squats on a fundamental truth. Bull's perusal
of the Horatian carpe diem is acute as that of the cattle in fat meads;
he walks like lusty Autumn carrying his garner to drum on, for a sign of
his diligent wisdom in seizing the day. He can read the page fronting
him; and let it be of dining, drinking, toasting, he will vociferously
confute the wiseacre bookworms who would have us believe there is no such
thing as a present hour for man.

In sad fact, the member for England is often intoxicate. Often do we have
him whirling his rotundity like a Mussulman dervish inflated by the
spirit to agitate the shanks, until pangs of a commercial crisis awaken
him to perceive an infructuous past and an unsown future, without one bit
of tracery on its black breast other than that which his apprehensions
project. As for a present hour, it swims, it vanishes, thinner than the
phantom banquets of recollection. What has he done for the growth of his
globe of brains?--the lesser, but in our rightful posture the upper, and
justly the directing globe, through whose directions we do, by feeding on
the past to sow the future, create a sensible present composed of
both--the present of the good using of our powers. What can he show in
the Arts? What in Arms? His bards--O faithless! but they are men--his
bards accuse him of sheer cattle-contentedness in the mead, of sterility
of brain, drowsihood, mid-noddyism, downright carcase-dulness. They
question him to deafen him of our defences, our intellectual eminence,
our material achievements, our poetry, our science; they sneer at his
trust in Neptune, doubt the scaly invulnerability of the God. They point
over to the foreigner, the clean-stepping, braced, self-confident
foreigner, good at arms, good at the arts, and eclipsing us in
industriousness manual and mental, and some dare to say, in splendour of
verse=-our supreme accomplishment.

Then with one big fellow, the collapse of pursiness, he abandons his
pedestal of universal critic; prostrate he falls to the foreigner; he is
down, he is roaring; he is washing his hands of English performances,
lends ear to foreign airs, patronises foreign actors, browses on reports
from camps of foreign armies. He drops his head like a smitten ox to all
great foreign names, moaning 'Shakespeare!' internally for a sustaining
apostrophe. He well-nigh loves his poets, can almost understand what
poetry means. If it does not pay, it brings him fame, respectfulness in
times of reverse. Brains, he is reduced to apprehend, brains are the
generators of the conquering energies. He is now for brains at all costs,
he has gained a conception of them. He is ready to knock knighthood on
the heads of men of brains--even literary brains. They shall be knights,
an ornamental body. To make them peers, and a legislative, has not struck
him, for he has not yet imagined them a stable body. They require
petting, to persuade them to flourish and bring him esteem.

This is Mr. Bull, our image before the world, whose pranks are passed as
though the vivid display of them had no bad effect on the nation.
Doubtless the perpetual mirror, the slavish mirror, is to blame, but his
nakedness does not shrink from the mirror, he likes it and he is proud of
it. Beneath these exhibitions the sober strong spirit of the country,
unfortunately not a prescient one, nor an attractively loveable, albeit
of a righteous benevolence, labours on, doing the hourly duties for the
sake of conscience, little for prospective security, little to win
affection. Behold it as the donkey of a tipsy costermonger, obedient to
go without the gift of expression. Its behaviour is honourable under a
discerning heaven, and there is ever something pathetic in a toilful
speechlessness; but it is of dogged attitude in the face of men. Salt is
in it to keep our fleshly grass from putrefaction; poets might proclaim
its virtues. They will not; they are averse. The only voice it has is the
Puritan bray, upon which one must philosophise asinically to unveil the
charm. So the world is pleased to let it be obscured by the paunch of
Bull. We have, however, isolated groups, individuals in all classes, by
no means delighting in his representation of them. When such is felt to
be the case among a sufficient number, his bards blow him away as a
vapour; we hear that he is a piece of our English humour--we enjoy
grotesques and never should agree to paint ourselves handsome: our subtle
conceit insists on the reverse. Nevertheless, no sooner are the hours
auspicious to fatness than Bull is back on us; he is our family goat,
ancestral ghost, the genius of our comfortable sluggishness. And he is at
times a mad Bull: a foaming, lashing, trampling, horn-driving, excessive,
very parlous Bull. It is in his history that frenzies catch him, when to
be yoked to him is to suffer frightful shakings, not to mention a
shattering of our timbers. It is but in days of the rousing of the
under-spirit of the country, days of storm imprudent to pray the advent
of, that we are well rid of him for a while. In the interim he does
mischief, serious mischief; he does worse than when, a juvenile, he paid
the Dannegelt for peace. Englishmen of feeling do not relish him. For men
with Irish and Cambrian blood in their veins the rubicund grotesque, with
his unimpressionable front and his noisy benevolence of the pocket, his
fits of horned ferocity and lapses of hardheartedness, is a shame and a
loathing. You attach small importance to images and symbols; yet if they
seem representative, and they sicken numbers of us, they are important.
The hat we wear, though it is not a part of the head, stamps the
character of our appearance and has a positive influence on our bearing.
Symbolical decorations will stimulate the vacant-minded to act up to
them, they encircle and solidify the mass; they are a sword of division
between Celts and Saxons if they are abhorrent to one section. And the
Celtic brotherhood are not invariably fools in their sensitiveness. They
serve you on the field of Mars, and on other fields to which the world
has given glory. These execrate him as the full-grown Golden Calf of
heathenish worship. And they are so restive because they are so
patriotic. Think a little upon the ideas of unpatriotic Celts regarding
him. You have heard them. You tell us they are you: accurately, they
affirm, succinctly they see you in his crescent outlines, tame bulk,
spasms of alarm and foot on the weaker; his imperviousness to whatsoever
does not confront the sensual eye of him with a cake or a fist, his
religious veneration of his habitual indulgences, his peculiar forms of
nightmare. They swear to his perfect personification of your moods, your
Saxon moods, which their inconsiderate spleen would have us take for
unmixedly Saxon. They are unjust, but many of them speak with a sense of
the foot on their necks, and they are of a blood demanding a
worshipworthy idea. And they dislike Bull's bellow of disrespect for
their religion, much bruited in the meadows during his periods of
Arcadia. They dislike it, cannot forget the sound: it hangs on the
afflicted drum of the ear when they are in another land, perhaps when the
old devotion to their priest has expired. For this, as well as for
material reasons, they hug the hatred they packed up among their bundles
of necessaries and relics, in the flight from home, and they instruct
their children to keep it burning. They transmit the sentiment of the
loathing of Bull, as assuredly they would be incapable of doing, even
with the will, were a splendid fire-eyed motherly Britannia the figure
sitting in the minds of men for our image--a palpitating figure, alive to
change, penetrable to thought, and not a stolid concrete of our
traditional old yeoman characteristic. Verily he lives for the present,
all for the present, will be taught in sorrow that there is no life for
him but of past and future: his delusion of the existence of a present
hour for man will not outlast the season of his eating and drinking
abundantly in security. He will perceive that it was no more than the
spark shot out from the clash of those two meeting forces; and penitently
will he gaze back on that misleading spark-the spectral planet it bids
wink to his unreceptive stars--acknowledging him the bare machine for
those two to drive, no instrument of enjoyment. He lives by reading
rearward and seeing vanward. He has no actual life save in power of
imagination. He has to learn this fact, the great lesson of all men.
Furthermore there may be a future closed to him if he has thrown too
extreme a task of repairing on that bare machine of his. The sight of a
broken-down plough is mournful, but the one thing to do with it is to
remove it from the field.

Among the patriotic of stout English substance, who blew in the trumpet
of the country, and were not bards of Bull to celebrate his firmness and
vindicate his shiftings, Richard Rockney takes front rank. A journalist
altogether given up to his craft, considering the audience he had gained,
he was a man of forethought besides being a trenchant writer, and he was
profoundly, not less than eminently, the lover of Great Britain. He had a
manner of utterance quite in the tone of the familiar of the antechamber
for proof of his knowing himself to be this person. He did not so much
write articles upon the health of his mistress as deliver Orphic
sentences. He was in one her physician, her spiritual director, her
man-at-arms. Public allusions to her were greeted with his emphatic
assent in a measured pitch of the voice, or an instantaneous flourish of
the rapier; and the flourish was no vain show. He meant hard steel to
defend the pill he had prescribed for her constitutional state, and the
monition for her soul's welfare. Nor did he pretend to special privileges
in assuming his militant stand, but simply that he had studied her case,
was intimate with her resources, and loved her hotly, not to say
inspiredly. Love her as well, you had his cordial hand; as wisely, then
all his weapons to back you. There were occasions when distinguished
officials and Parliamentary speakers received the impetus of Rockney's
approval and not hesitatingly he stepped behind them to bestow it. The
act, in whatever fashion it may have been esteemed by the objects
propelled, was a sign of his willingness to let the shadow of any man
adopting his course obscure him, and of the simplicity of his attachment.
If a bitter experience showed that frequently, indeed generally, they
travelled scarce a tottering stagger farther than they were precipitated,
the wretched consolation afforded by a side glance at a more enlightened
passion, solitary in its depth, was Rockney's. Others perchance might
equal his love, none the wisdom of it; actually none the vigilant
circumspection, the shaping forethought. That clear knowledge of the
right thing for the country was grasped but by fits by others. Enough to
profit them this way and yonder as one best can! You know the newspaper
Press is a mighty engine. Still he had no delight in shuffling a
puppetry; he would have preferred automatic figures. His calls for them
resounded through the wilderness of the wooden.

Any solid conviction of a capable head of a certainty impressed upon the
world, and thus his changes of view were not attributed to a fluctuating
devotion; they passed out of the range of criticism upon inconsistency,
notwithstanding that the commencement of his journalistic career smelt of
sources entirely opposed to the conclusions upon which it broadened. One
secret of the belief in his love of his country was the readiness of
Rockney's pen to support our nobler patriotic impulses, his relish of the
bluff besides. His eye was on our commerce, on our courts of Law, on our
streets and alleys, our army and navy, our colonies, the vaster than the
island England, and still he would be busy picking up needles and threads
in the island. Deeds of valour were noted by him, lapses of cowardice:
how one man stood against a host for law or humanity, how crowds looked
on at the beating of a woman, how a good fight was maintained in some sly
ring between two of equal brawn: and manufacturers were warned of the
consequences of their iniquities, Government was lashed for sleeping upon
shaky ordinances, colonists were gibbeted for the maltreating of natives:
the ring and fervour of the notes on daily events told of Rockney's hand
upon the national heart--with a faint, an enforced, reluctant indication
of our not being the men we were.

But after all, the main secret was his art of writing round English,
instead of laborious Latinised periods: and the secret of the art was his
meaning what he said. It was the personal throb. The fire of a mind was
translucent in Press columns where our public had been accustomed to the
rhetoric of primed scribes. He did away with the Biscay billow of the
leading article--Bull's favourite prose--bardic construction of sentences
that roll to the antithetical climax, whose foamy top is offered and
gulped as equivalent to an idea. Writing of such a kind as Rockney's was
new to a land where the political opinions of Joint Stock Companies had
rattled Jovian thunders obedient to the nod of Bull. Though not alone in
working the change, he was the foremost. And he was not devoid of style.
Fervidness is the core of style. He was a tough opponent for his betters
in education, struck forcibly, dexterously, was always alert for debate.
An encounter between Swift and Johnson, were it imaginable, would present
us probably the most prodigious Gigantomachy in literary polemics. It is
not imaginable among comparative pygmies. But Rockney's combat with his
fellow-politicians of the Press partook of the Swiftian against the
Johnsonian in form. He was a steam ram that drove straight at the bulky
broadside of the enemy.

Premiers of parties might be Captains of the State for Rockney: Rockney
was the premier's pilot, or woe to him. Woe to the country as well, if
Rockney's directions for steering were unheeded. He was a man of
forethought, the lover of Great Britain: he shouted his directions in the
voice of the lover of his mistress, urged to rebuke, sometimes to
command, the captain by the prophetic intimations of a holier alliance, a
more illumined prescience. Reefs here, shallows there, yonder a foul
course: this is the way for you! The refusal of the captain to go this
way caused Rockney sincerely to discredit the sobriety of his intellect.
It was a drunken captain. Or how if a traitorous? We point out the danger
to him, and if he will run the country on to it, we proclaim him guilty
either of inebriety or of treason--the alternatives are named: one or the
other has him. Simple unfitness can scarcely be conceived of a captain
having our common senses and a warranted pilot at his elbow.

Had not Rockney been given to a high expression of opinion, plain in
fervour, he would often have been exposed bare to hostile shafts. Style
cast her aegis over him. He wore an armour in which he could walk, run
and leap-a natural style. The ardour of his temperament suffused the
directness of his intelligence to produce it, and the two qualities made
his weakness and strength. Feeling the nerve of strength, the weakness
was masked to him, while his opponents were equally insensible to the
weakness under the force of his blows. Thus there was nothing to teach
him, or reveal him, except Time, whose trick is to turn corners of
unanticipated sharpness, and leave the directly seeing and ardent to dash
at walls.

How rigidly should the man of forethought govern himself, question
himself! how constantly wrestle with himself! And if he be a writer
ebullient by the hour, how snappishly suspect himself, that he may feel
in conscience worthy of a hearing and have perpetually a conscience in
his charge! For on what is his forethought founded? Does he try the ring
of it with our changed conditions? Bus a man of forethought who has to be
one of our geysers ebullient by the hour must live days of fever. His
apprehensions distemper his blood; the scrawl of them on the dark of the
undeveloped dazzles his brain. He sees in time little else; his very
sincereness twists him awry. Such a man has the stuff of the born
journalist, and journalism is the food of the age. Ask him, however,
midway in his running, what he thinks of quick breathing: he will answer
that to be a shepherd on the downs is to be more a man. As to the
gobbling age, it really thinks better of him than he of it.

After a term of prolonged preachification he is compelled to lash that he
may less despise the age. He has to do it for his own sake. O gobbling
age! swallowing all, digesting nought, us too you have swallowed, O
insensate mechanism! and we will let you know you have a stomach.
Furiously we disagree with you. We are in you to lead you or work you
pangs!

Rockney could not be a mild sermoniser commenting on events. Rather no
journalism at all for him! He thought the office of the ordinary daily
preacher cowlike. His gadfly stung him to warn, dictate, prognosticate;
he was the oracle and martyr of superior vision: and as in affairs of
business and the weighing of men he was of singularly cool sagacity, hard
on the downright, open to the humours of the distinct discrimination of
things in their roughness, the knowledge of the firmly-based materialism
of his nature caused him thoroughly to trust to his voice when he
delivered it in ardour--circumstance coming to be of daily recurrence.
Great love creates forethoughtfulness, without which incessant journalism
is a gabble. He was sure of his love, but who gave ear to his prescience?
Few: the echo of the country now and then, the Government not often. And,
dear me! those jog-trot sermonisers, mere commentators upon events,
manage somehow to keep up the sale of their journals: advertisements do
not flow and ebb with them as under the influence of a capricious moon.
Ah, what a public! Serve it honourably, you are in peril of collapsing:
show it nothing but the likeness of its dull animal face, you are
steadily inflated. These reflections within us! Might not one almost say
that the retreat for the prophet is the wilderness, far from the hustled
editor's desk; and annual should be the uplifting of his voice instead of
diurnal, if only to spare his blood the distemper? A fund of gout was in
Rockney's, and he had begun to churn it. Between gouty blood and luminous
brain the strife had set in which does not conduce to unwavering sobriety
of mind, though ideas remain closely consecutive and the utterance
resonant.

Never had he been an adulator of Bull. His defects as well as his
advantages as a politician preserved to him this virtue. Insisting on a
future, he could not do homage to the belying simulacrum of the present.
In the season of prosperity Rockney lashed the old fellow with the crisis
he was breeding for us; and when prostration ensued no English tongue was
loftier in preaching dignity and the means of recovery. Our monumental
image of the Misuse of Peace he pointed out unceasingly as at a despot
constructed by freemen out of the meanest in their natures to mock the
gift of liberty. His articles of foregone years were an extraordinary
record of events or conditions foreseen: seductive in the review of them
by a writer who has to be still foreseeing: nevertheless, that none of
them were bardic of Bull, and that our sound man would have acted wisely
in heeding some of the prescriptions, constituted their essential merit,
consolatory to think of, though painful. The country has gone the wrong
road, but it may yet cross over to the right one, when it perceives that
we were prophetic.

Compared with the bolts discharged at Bull by Rockney's artillery,
Captain Con O'Donnell's were popgun-pellets. Only Rockney fired to
chasten, Con O'Donnell for a diversion, to appease an animus. The
revolutionist in English journalism was too devoutly patriotic to
belabour even a pantomime mask that was taken as representative of us for
the disdainful fun of it. Behind the plethoric lamp, now blown with the
fleshpots, now gasping puffs of panic, he saw the well-minded valorous
people, issue of glorious grandsires; a nation under a monstrous
defacement, stupefied by the contemplation of the mask: his vision was of
the great of old, the possibly great in the graver strife ahead,
respecters of life, despisers of death, the real English whereas an
alienated Celtic satirist, through his vivid fancy and his disesteem, saw
the country incarnate in Bull, at most a roguish screw-kneed clown to be
whipped out of him. Celt and Saxon are much inmixed with us, but the
prevalence of Saxon blood is evinced by the public disregard of any
Celtic conception of the honourable and the loveable; so that the Celt
anxious to admire is rebutted, and the hatred of a Celt, quick as he is
to catch at images, has a figure of hugeous animalism supplied to his
malign contempt. Rockney's historic England, and the living heroic
England to slip from that dull hide in a time of trial, whether of war or
social suffering, he cannot see, nor a people hardening to Spartan
lineaments in the fire, iron men to meet disaster, worshippers of a
discerned God of Laws, and just men too, thinking to do justice; he has
Bull on the eye, the alternately braggart and poltroon, sweating in
labour that he may gorge the fruits, graceless to a scoffer. And this is
the creature to whose tail he is tied! Hereditary hatred is approved by
critical disgust. Some spirited brilliancy, some persistent generosity
(other than the guzzle's flash of it), might soften him; something
sweeter than the slow animal well-meaningness his placable brethren point
his attention to. It is not seen, and though he can understand the perils
of a severance, he prefers to rub the rawness of his wound and be ready
to pitch his cap in the air for it, out of sheer bloodloathing of a
connection that offers him nothing to admire, nothing to hug to his
heart. Both below and above the blind mass of discontent in his island,
the repressed sentiment of admiration-or passion of fealty and thirst to
give himself to a visible brighter--is an element of the division:
meditative young Patrick O'Donnell early in his reflections had noted
that:--and it is partly a result of our daily habit of tossing the straw
to the monetary world and doting on ourselves in the mirror, until our
habitual doings are viewed in a bemused complacency by us, and the
scum-surface of the country is flashed about as its vital being. A man of
forethought using the Press to spur Parliament to fitly represent the
people, and writing on his daily topics with strenuous original vigour,
even though, like Rockney, he sets the teeth of the Celt gnashing at him,
goes a step nearer to the bourne of pacification than Press and
Parliament reflecting the popular opinion that law must be passed to
temper Ireland's eruptiveness; for that man can be admired, and the Celt,
in combating him, will like an able and gallant enemy better than a
grudgingly just, lumbersome, dull, politic friend. The material points in
a division are always the stronger, but the sentimental are here very
strong. Pass the laws; they may put an extinguisher on the Irish
Vesuvian; yet to be loved you must be a little perceptibly admirable. You
may be so self-satisfied as to dispense with an ideal: your yoke-fellow
is not; it is his particular form of strength to require one for his
proper blooming, and he does bloom beautifully in the rays he courts.

Ah then, seek to be loved, and banish Bull. Believe in a future and
banish that gross obscuration of you. Decline to let that
old-yeoman-turned alderman stand any longer for the national man.
Speaking to the brain of the country, one is sure of the power of a
resolute sign from it to dismiss the brainless. Banish him your revels
and your debatings, prohibit him your Christmas, lend no ear either to
his panics or his testiness, especially none to his rages; do not report
him at all, and he will soon subside into his domestic, varied by
pothouse, privacy. The brain should lead, if there be a brain. Once free
of him, you will know that for half a century you have appeared bottom
upward to mankind. And you have wondered at the absence of love for you
under so astounding a presentation. Even in a Bull, beneficent as he can
dream of being, when his notions are in a similar state of inversion,
should be sheepish in hope for love.

He too, whom you call the Welshman, and deride for his delight in songful
gatherings, harps to wild Wales, his Cambrian highlands, and not to
England. You have not yet, though he is orderly and serviceable, allured
his imagination to the idea of England. Despite the passion for his
mountains and the boon of your raising of the interdict (within a hundred
years) upon his pastors to harangue him in his native tongue, he gladly
ships himself across the waters traversed by his Prince Madoc of
tradition, and becomes contentedly a transatlantic citizen, a member of
strange sects--he so inveterate in faithfulness to the hoar and the
legendary!--Anything rather than Anglican. The Cymry bear you no hatred;
their affection likewise is undefined. But there is reason to think that
America has caught the imagination of the Cambrian Celt: names of
Welshmen are numerous in the small army of the States of the Union; and
where men take soldier-service they are usually fixed, they and their
children. Here is one, not very deeply injured within a century, of
ardent temperament, given to be songful and loving; he leaves you and
forgets you. Be certain that the material grounds of division are not
all. To pronounce it his childishness provokes the retort upon your
presented shape. He cannot admire it. Gaelic Scots wind the same note of
repulsion.

And your poets are in a like predicament. Your poets are the most
persuasive of springs to a lively general patriotism. They are in the
Celtic dilemma of standing at variance with Bull; they return him his
hearty antipathy, are unable to be epical or lyrical of him, are
condemned to expend their genius upon the abstract, the quaint, the
picturesque. Nature they read spiritually or sensually, always
shrinkingly apart from him. They swell to a resemblance of their patron
if they stoop to woo his purse. He has, on hearing how that poets bring
praise to nations, as in fact he can now understand his Shakespeare to
have done, been seen to thump the midriff and rally them for their
shyness of it, telling them he doubts them true poets while they abstain
from singing him to the world-him, and the things refreshing the centre
of him. Ineffectual is that encouragement. Were he in the fire, melting
to the iron man, the backbone of him, it would be different. At his
pleasures he is anti-hymnic, repellent to song. He has perceived the
virtues of Peace, without the brother eye for the need of virtuousness to
make good use of them and inspire the poet. His own enrolled unrhythmical
bardic troops (humorous mercenaries when Celts) do his trumpeting best,
and offend not the Pierides.

This interlude, or rather inter-drone, repulsive to write, can hardly be
excluded from a theme dramatising Celtic views, and treating of a blood,
to which the idea of country must shine resplendently if we would have it
running at full tide through the arteries. Preserve your worship, if the
object fills your optics. Better worship that than nothing, as it is
better for flames to be blown out than not to ascend, otherwise it will
wreak circular mischief instead of illumining. You are requested simply
to recollect that there is another beside you who sees the object
obliquely, and then you will not be surprised by his irreverence. What
if, in the end, you were conducted to a like point of view? Self-worship,
it has been said, is preferable to no trimming of the faculty, but
worship does not necessarily cease with the extinction of this of the
voraciously carnal. An ideal of country, of Great Britain, is conceivable
that will be to the taste of Celt and Saxon in common, to wave as a
standard over their fraternal marching. Let Bull boo his drumliest at
such talk: it is, I protest, the thing we want and can have. He is the
obstruction, not the country; and against him, not against the country,
the shots are aimed which seem so malignant. Him the gay manipulators
propitiate who look at him through Literature and the Press, and across
the pulpit-cushions, like airy Macheath at Society, as carrion to batten
on. May plumpness be their portion, and they never hanged for it! But the
flattering, tickling, pleasantly pinching of Bull is one of those offices
which the simple starveling piper regards with afresh access of appetite
for the well-picked bone of his virtue. That ghastly apparition of the
fleshly present is revealed to him as a dead whale, having the harpoon of
the inevitable slayer of the merely fleshly in his oils. To humour him,
and be his piper for his gifts, is to descend to a carnival deep
underneath. While he reigns, thinks this poor starveling, Rome burns, or
the explosive powders are being secretly laid. He and his thousand
Macheaths are dancing the country the giddy pace, and there will, the
wretch dreads, be many a crater of scoria in the island, before he
stretches his inanimate length, his parasites upon him. The theme is
chosen and must be treated as a piper involved in his virtue conceives
it: that is, realistically; not with Bull's notion of the realism of the
butcher's shop and the pendent legs of mutton and blocks of beef painted
raw and glaring in their streaks, but with the realism of the active
brain and heart conjoined. The reasons for the division of Celt and
Saxon, what they think and say of one another, often without knowing that
they are divided, and the wherefore of our abusing of ourselves, brave
England, our England of the ancient fortitude and the future incarnation,
can afford to hear. Why not in a tale? It is he, your all for animal
pleasure in the holiday he devours and cannot enjoy, whose example
teaches you to shun the plaguey tale that carries fright: and so you find
him sour at business and sick of his relaxings, hating both because he
harnesses himself in turn bestially to each, growling at the smallest
admixture of them, when, if he would but chirp a little over his work,
and allow his pleasures to inspire a dose of thoughtfulness, he would be
happier, and--who knows?-become a brighter fellow, one to be rescued from
the pole-axe.

Now the rain is over, your carriage is at the door, the country smiles
and the wet highway waves a beckoning hand. We have worn through a cloud
with cloudy discourses, but we are in a land of shifting weathers,
'coelum crebris imbribus ac nebulis foedum,' not every chapter can be
sunshine.




CHAPTER XVII

CROSSING THE RUBICON

Rough weather on the Irish sea discharged a pallid file of passengers
from the boat at Holyhead just as the morning sun struck wave and
mountain with one of the sudden sparkling changes which our South-welters
have in their folds to tell us after a tumultuous night that we have only
been worried by Puck. The scene of frayed waters all rosy-golden, and
golden-banded heathery height, with the tinted sand, breaking to flights
of blue, was resplendent for those of our recent sea-farers who could
lift an eye to enjoy it. Freshness, illumination, then salt air, vivid
distances, were a bath for every sense of life. You could believe the
breast of the mountain to be heaving, the billows to be kissing fingers
to him, the rollers shattered up the cliff to have run to extinction to
scale him. He seemed in his clear-edged mass King of this brave new
boundless world built in a minute out of the wreck of the old.

An hour back the vessel was labouring through rueful chasms under
darkness, and then did the tricksy Southwest administer grisly slaps to
right and left, whizzing spray across the starboard beam, and drenching
the locks of a young lady who sat cloaked and hooded in frieze to teach
her wilfulness a lesson, because she would keep her place on deck from
beginning to end of the voyage. Her faith in the capacity of Irish frieze
to turn a deluge of the deeps driven by an Atlantic gale was shaken by
the time she sighted harbour, especially when she shed showers by
flapping a batlike wing of the cloak, and had a slight shudder to find
herself trickling within.

'Dear! and I'm wet to the skin,' she confided the fact to herself
vocally.

'You would not be advised,' a gentleman beside her said after a delicate
pause to let her impulsive naturalism of utterance fly by unwounded.

'And aren't you the same and worse? And not liking it either, I fear,
Sir!' she replied, for despite a manful smile his complexion was
tell-tale. 'But there 's no harm in salt. But you should have gone down
to the cabin with Father Boyle and you would have been sure of not
catching cold. But, Oh! the beautiful . . . look at it! And it's my first
view of England. Well, then, I'll say it's a beautiful country.'

Her companion looked up at the lighted sky, and down at the pools in
tarpaulin at his feet. He repressed a disposition to shudder, and with
the anticipated ecstasy of soon jumping out of wet clothes into dry, he
said: 'I should like to be on the top of that hill now.'

The young lady's eyes flew to the top.

'They say he looks on Ireland; I love him; and his name is Caer Gybi; and
it was one of our Saints gave him the name, I 've read in books. I'll be
there before noon.'

'You want to have a last gaze over to Erin?'

'No, it's to walk and feel the breeze. But I do, though.'

'Won't you require a little rest?'

'Sure and I've had it sitting here all night!' said she.

He laughed: the reason for the variation of exercise was conclusive.

Father Boyle came climbing up the ladder, uncertain of his legs; he
rolled and snatched and tottered on his way to them, and accepted the
gentleman's help of an arm, saying: 'Thank ye, thank ye, and good
morning, Mr. Colesworth. And my poor child! what sort of a night has it
been above, Kathleen?'

He said it rather twinkling, and she retorted:

'What sort of a night has it been below, Father Boyle?' Her twinkle was
livelier than his, compassionate in archness.

'Purgatory past is good for contemplation, my dear. 'Tis past, and
there's the comfort! You did well to be out of that herring-barrel, Mr.
Colesworth. I hadn't the courage, or I would have burst from it to take a
ducking with felicity. I haven't thrown up my soul; that's the most I can
say. I thought myself nigh on it once or twice. And an amazing kind
steward it was, or I'd have counted the man for some one else. Surely
'tis a glorious morning?'

Mr. Colesworth responded heartily in praise of the morning. He was
beginning to fancy that he felt the warmth of spring sunshine on his
back. He flung up his head and sniffed the air, and was very like a horse
fretful for the canter; so like as to give Miss Kathleen an idea of the
comparison. She could have rallied him; her laughing eyes showed the
readiness, but she forbore, she drank the scene. Her face, with the
threaded locks about forehead and cheeks, and the dark, the blue, the
rosy red of her lips, her eyes, her hair, was just such a south-western
sky as April drove above her, the same in colour and quickness; and much
of her spirit was the same, enough to stand for a resemblance. But who
describes the spirit? No one at the gates of the field of youth. When
Time goes reaping he will gather us a sheaf, out of which the picture
springs.

'There's our last lurch, glory to the breakwater!' exclaimed Father
Boyle, as the boat pitched finally outside the harbour fence, where a
soft calm swell received them with the greeting of civilised sea-nymphs.
'The captain'll have a quieter passage across. You may spy him on the
pier. We'll be meeting him on the landing.'

'If he's not in bed, from watching the stars all night,' said Miss
Kathleen.

'He must have had a fifty-lynx power of sight for that, my dear.'

'They did appear, though, and wonderfully bright,' she said. 'I saw them
come out and go in. It's not all cloud when the high wind blows.'

'You talk like a song, Kathleen.'

'Couldn't I rattle a throat if I were at home, Father!'

'Ah! we're in the enemy's country now.'

Miss Kathleen said she would go below to get the handbags from the
stewardess.

Mr. Colesworth's brows had a little darkened over the Rev. Gentleman's
last remark. He took two or three impatient steps up and down with his
head bent. 'Pardon me; I hoped we had come to a better understanding,' he
said. 'Is it quite fair to the country and to Miss O'Donnell to impress
on her before she knows us that England is the enemy?'

'Habit, Mr. Colesworth, habit! we've got accustomed to the perspective
and speak accordingly. There's a breach visible.'

'I thought you agreed with me that good efforts are being made on our
side to mend the breach.'

'Sir, you have a noble minority at work, no doubt; and I take you for one
of the noblest, as not objecting to stand next to alone.'

'I really thought, judging from our conversation at Mrs. O'Donnell's that
evening, that you were going to hold out a hand and lead your flock to
the right sort of fellowship with us.'

'To submission to the laws, Mr. Colesworth; 'tis my duty to do it as
pastor and citizen.'

'No, to more than that, sir. You spoke with friendly warmth.'

'The atmosphere was genial, if you remember the whisky and the fumes of
our tobacco at one o'clock!'

'I shall recollect the evening with the utmost pleasure. You were kind
enough to instruct me in a good many things I shall be sure to profit by.
I wish I could have spent more time in Ireland. As it is, I like Irishmen
so well that if the whole land were in revolt I should never call it the
enemy's country.'

'Excellently spoken, Mr. Colesworth,' said the priest. 'We 'll hope your
writings may do service to mend the breach. For there is one, as you
know, and more 's the pity; there's one, and it's wide and deep. As my
friend Captain Con O'Donnell says, it's plain to the naked eye as a pair
of particularly fat laundry drawers hung out to dry and ballooned in
extension--if mayhap you've ever seen the sight of them in that
state:--just held together by a narrow neck of thread or button, and
stretching away like a corpulent frog in the act of swimming on the wind.
His comparison touches the sentiment of disunion, sir.'

Mr. Colesworth had not ever seen such a pair of laundry drawers inflated
to symbolise the breach between Ireland and England; nor probably, if he
had, would the sentiment of national disunion have struck his mind: it
was difficult to him in the description. He considered his Rev. friend to
be something of a slippery fish, while Father Boyle's opinion of him
likewise referred him to an elemental substance, of slow movement-earth,
in short: for he continued to look argumentative after all had been said.

Or perhaps he threw a coveting eye on sweet Miss Kathleen and had his own
idea of mending a stitch of the breach in a quite domestic way. If so,
the Holy Father would have a word to say, let alone Kathleen. The maids
of his Church do not espouse her foes. For the men it is another matter:
that is as the case may be. Temporarily we are in cordial intercourse,
Mr. Colesworth.

Miss Kathleen returned to deck carrying her bags. The gentleman had to
descend, and subsequently an amiable dissension arose on the part of the
young lady and Mr. Colesworth. She, however, yielded one of her bags, and
he, though doubly laden, was happy. All very transparent to pastoral
observation, but why should they not be left to their chirruping
youthfulness? The captain was not in view, and Father Boyle wanted to go
to bed for refreshment, and Kathleen was an airy gossamer, with a boy
running after it, not by any means likely to catch it, or to keep it if
he did. Proceed and trip along, you young ones!

At the hotel they heard that Captain Con O'Donnell was a snug sleeper
upstairs. This, the captain himself very soon informed them, had not been
the kernel of the truth. He had fancied they would not cross the Channel
on so rattlesome a night, or Kathleen would have had an Irish kiss to
greet her landing in England. But the cousinly salute was little delayed,
news of the family in Ireland and England was exchanged, and then Mr.
Colesworth and the captain bowed to an introduction; and the captain, at
mention of his name, immediately cried out that Mr. Colesworth might
perchance be a relative of the highly intelligent admirable lady who had
undertaken the secretaryship, and by her vast ability got the entire
management, of Miss Mattock's benevolent institution, and was conducting
it with such success that it was fast becoming a grief to the generous
heart of the foundress of the same to find it not only self-paying, but
on the road to a fortune, inasmuch as it was already an article in the
decrees of fashion among the nobility and gentry of both sexes in the
metropolis to have their linen and laces washed at the Mattock laundry.

Mr. Colesworth said he was the brother of the lady in question, he had
also the pleasure of an acquaintance with Miss Mattock. He was vehemently
congratulated on the relationship, which bore witness, the captain armed,
to a certain hereditary share of brains greatly to be envied: brother of
Miss Colesworth, a title of distinction in itself! He was congratulated
not less cordially for his being so fortunate as to know Miss Mattock,
one of a million.

Captain Con retained the hand of Father Boyle and squeezed it during his
eulogies, at the same time dispensing nods and winks and sunny sparkles
upon Kathleen. Mr. Colesworth went upstairs to his room not unflattered.
The flattery enveloped him in the pleasant sense of a somehow now
established companionship for the day with a pleasant person from whom he
did not wish to separate.

'You made the gentleman's acquaintance, my dear . . . ?' said Con.

Kathleen answered: 'He made friends with our Patrick on the Continent, I
think it was in Germany, and came to us to study the old country, bearing
a letter from Patrick. He means to be one of their writers on the
newspapers. He studies everything; he has written books. He called on us
coming and called on us going and we came over together,' said Miss
Kathleen. 'But tell me: our Philip?'

'Books!' Con exclaimed. 'It's hard to discover a man in these days who
hasn't written books. Oh! Philip! Ease your heart about Philip. They're
nursing him, round. He was invalided at the right moment for him, no
fear. I gave him his chance of the last vacant seat up to the last hour,
and now the die is cast and this time I 'm off to it. Poor Philip--yes,
yes! we 're sorry to see him flat all his length, we love him; he's a
gallant soldier; alive to his duty; and that bludgeon sun of India
knocked him down, and that fall from his horse finished the business, and
there he lies. But he'll get up, and he might have accepted the seat and
spared me my probation: he's not married, I am, I have a wife, and Master
Philip divides me against my domestic self, he does. But let that be: I
serve duty too. Not a word to our friend up yonder. It's a secret with a
time-fuse warranted to explode safe enough when the minutes are up, and
make a powerful row when it does. It is all right over there, Father
Boyle, I suppose?'

'A walk over! a pure ceremonial,' said the priest, and he yawned
frightfully.

'You're for a nap to recompose you, my dear friend,' remarked the
captain.

'But you haven't confided anything of it to Mrs. Adister?'

'Not a syllable; no. That's to come. There's my contest! I had urgent
business in Ireland, and she 's a good woman, always willing to let me
go. I count on her kindness, there 's no mightier compliment to one's
wife. She'll know it when it's history. She's fond of history. Ay, she
hates fiction, and so I'm proud to tell her I offer her none. She likes a
trifling surprise too, and there she has it. Oh! we can whip up the
business to a nice little bowl of froth-flummery. But it's when the
Parliamentary voting is on comes the connubial pull. She's a good woman,
a dear good soul, but she's a savage patriot; and Philip might have saved
his kinsman if he had liked. He had only to say the word: I could have
done all the business for him, and no contest to follow by my fireside.
He's on his couch--Mars convalescent: a more dreadful attraction to the
ladies than in his crimson plumes! If the fellow doesn't let slip his
opportunity! with his points of honour and being an Irish Bayard. Why
Bayard in the nineteenth century's a Bedlamite, Irish or no. So I tell
him. There he is; you'll see him, Kathleen: and one of them as big an
heiress as any in England. Philip's no fool, you'll find.'

'Then he's coming all right, is he?' said Kathleen.

'He 's a soldier, and a good one, but he 's nothing more, and as for
patriotic inflammation, doesn't know the sensation.'

'Oh! but he's coming round, and you'll go and stroke down mother with
that,' Kathleen cried. 'Her heart's been heavy, with Patrick wandering
and Philip on his back. I'll soon be dressed for breakfast.'

Away she went.

'She's got an appetite, and looks like a strapped bit of steel after the
night's tumbling,' said the captain, seeing her trip aloft. 'I'm young as
that too, or not far off it. Stay, I'll order breakfast for four in a
quiet corner where we can converse--which, by the way, won't be possible
in the presence of that gaping oyster of a fellow, who looks as if he
were waiting the return of the tide.'

Father Boyle interposed his hand.

'Not for . . .' he tried to add 'four.' The attempt at a formation of the
word produced a cavernous yawn a volume of the distressful deep to the
beholder.

'Of course,' Captain Con assented. He proposed bed and a sedative
therein, declaring that his experience overnight could pronounce it good,
and that it should be hot. So he led his tired old friend to the bedroom,
asked dozens of questions, flurried a withdrawal of them, suggested the
answers, talked of his Rubicon, praised his wife, delivered a moan on her
behalf, and after assisting to half disrobe the scarce animate figure,
which lent itself like an artist's lay-model to the operation, departed
on his mission of the sedative.

At the breakfast for three he was able to tell Kathleen that the worthy
Father was warm, and on his way to complete restoration.

'Full fathom five the Father lies, in the ocean of sleep, by this time,'
said Con. 'And 'tis a curious fact that every man in that condition seems
enviable to men on their legs. And similarly with death; we'd rather not,
because of a qualm, but the picture of the finish of the leap across is a
taking one. These chops are done as if Nature had mellowed their
juiciness.'

'They are so nice,' Kathleen said.

'You deserve them, if ever girl in this world!'

'I sat on deck all night, and Mr. Colesworth would keep me company.'

'He could hardly do less, having the chance. But that notwithstanding,
I'm under an obligation to your cavalier. And how did you find Ireland,
sir? You've made acquaintance with my cousin, young Mr. Patrick
O'Donnell, I rejoice to hear.'

'Yes, through his hearing or seeing my name and suspecting I had a
sister,' said Mr. Colesworth, who was no longer in the resemblance of a
gaping oyster on the borders of the ebb. 'The country is not disturbed.'

'So the doctor thinks his patient is doing favourably! And you cottoned
to Patrick? And I don't wonder. Where was it?'

'We met in Trieste. He was about to start by one of the Austrian boats
for the East.'

'Not disturbed! no! with a rotten potato inside it paralysing digestion!'
exclaimed Con. 'Now Patrick had been having a peep at Vienna, hadn't he?'

'He had; he was fresh from Vienna when I met him. As to Ireland, the
harvest was only middling good last year.'

'And that's the bit of luck we depend on. A cloud too much, and it's
drowned! Had he seen, do you know, anybody in Vienna?--you were not long
together at Trieste?'

Mr. Colesworth had sufficient quickness to perceive that the two
questions could be answered as one, and saying: 'He was disappointed,'
revealed that he and Patrick had been long enough together to come to
terms of intimacy.

'To be sure, he gave you a letter of introduction to his family!' said
Con. 'And permit me to add, that Patrick's choice of a friend is mine on
trust. The lady he was for seeing, Mr. Colesworth, was just then
embarking on an adventure of a romantic character, particularly well
suited to her nature, and the end of it was a trifle sanguinary, and she
suffered a disappointment also, though not perhaps on that account.'

'I heard of it in England last year,' said Mr. Colesworth. 'Did she come
through it safely?'

'Without any personal disfigurement: and is in England now, under her
father's roof, meditating fresh adventures.'

Kathleen cried: 'Ye 're talking of the lady who was Miss Adister--I can
guess--Ah!' She humped her shoulders and sent a shudder up her neck.

'But she's a grand creature, Mr. Colesworth, and you ought to know her,'
said Con. 'That is, if you'd like to have an idea of a young Catherine or
a Semiramisminus an army and a country. There's nothing she's not capable
of aiming at. And there's pretty well nothing and nobody she wouldn't
make use of. She has great notions of the power of the British Press and
the British purse--each in turn as a key to the other. Now for an egg,
Kathleen.'

'I think I'll eat an egg,' Kathleen replied.

'Bless the honey heart of the girl! Life's in you, my dear, and calls for
fuel. I'm glad to see that Mr. Colesworth too can take a sight at the
Sea-God after a night of him. It augurs magnificently for a future
career. And let me tell you that the Pen demands it of us. The first of
the requisites is a stout stomach--before a furnished head! I'd not pass
a man to be anything of a writer who couldn't step ashore from a tempest
and consume his Titan breakfast.'

'We are qualifying for the literary craft, Miss O'Donnell,' said Mr.
Colesworth.

'It's for a walk in the wind up Caer Gybi, and along the coast I mean to
go,' said Kathleen.

'This morning?' the captain asked her.

She saw his dilemma in his doubtful look.

'When I've done. While you're discussing matters with Father Boyle.
I--know you're burning to. Sure it's yourself knows as well as anybody,
Captain Con, that I can walk a day long and take care of my steps. I've
walked the better half of Donegal alone, and this morning I'll have a
protector.'

Captain Con eyed the protector, approved of him, disapproved of himself,
thought of Kathleen as a daughter of Erin--a privileged and inviolate
order of woman in the minds of his countrymen--and wriggling internally
over a remainder scruple said: 'Mr. Colesworth mayhap has to write a bit
in the morning.'

'I'm unattached at present,' the latter said. 'I am neither a
correspondent nor a reporter, and if I were, the event would be wanting.'

'That remark, sir, shows you to be eminently a stranger to the official
duties,' observed the captain. 'Journalism is a maw, and the journalist
has to cram it, and like anything else which perpetually distends for
matter, it must be filled, for you can't leave it gaping, so when nature
and circumstance won't combine to produce the stuff, we have recourse to
the creative arts. 'Tis the necessity of the profession.'

'The profession will not impose that necessity upon me,' remarked the
young practitioner.

'Outside the wheels of the machine, sir, we indulge our hallucination of
immunity. I've been one in the whirr of them, relating what I hadn't
quite heard, and capitulating what I didn't think at all, in spite of the
cry of my conscience--a poor infant below the waters, casting up
ejaculatory bubbles of protestation. And if it is my reproach that I left
it to the perils of drowning, it's my pride that I continued to transmit
air enough to carry on the struggle. Not every journalist can say as
much. The Press is the voice of the mass, and our private opinion is
detected as a discord by the mighty beast, and won't be endured by him.'

'It's better not to think of him quite as a beast,' said Mr. Colesworth.

'Infinitely better: and I like your "guile," sir: But wait and tell me
what you think of him after tossing him his meat for a certain number of
years. There's Rockney. Do you know Rockney? He's the biggest single gun
they've got, and he's mad for this country, but ask him about the public,
you'll hear the menagerie-keeper's opinion of the brute that mauled his
loins.'

'Rockney,' said Mr. Colesworth, 'has the tone of a man disappointed of
the dictatorship.'

'Then you do know Rockney!' shouted Captain Con. 'That's the man in a
neat bit of drawing. He's a grand piece of ordnance. But wait for him
too, and tell me by and by. If it isn't a woman, you'll find, that primes
him, ay, and points him, and what's more, discharges him, I'm not Irish
born. Poor fellow! I pity him. He had a sweet Irish lady for his wife,
and lost her last year, and has been raging astray politically ever
since. I suppose it's hardly the poor creature's fault. None the less,
you know, we have to fight him. And now he 's nibbling at a bait--it 's
fun: the lady I mentioned, with a turn for adventure and enterprise: it's
rare fun: he 's nibbling, he'll be hooked. You must make her
acquaintance, Mr. Colesworth, and hold your own against her, if you can.
She's a niece of my wife's and I'll introduce you. I shall find her in
London, or at our lodgings at a Surrey farm we've taken to nurse my
cousin Captain Philip O'Donnell invalided from Indian awful climate!--on
my return, when I hope to renew the acquaintance. She has beauty, she has
brains. Resist her, and you 'll make a decent stand against Lucifer. And
supposing she rolls you up and pitches you over, her noticing you is a
pretty compliment to your pen. That 'll be consoling.'

Mr. Colesworth fancied, he said, that he was proof against feminine
blandishments in the direction of his writings.

He spoke as one indicating a thread to suggest a cable. The captain
applauded the fancy as a pleasing delusion of the young sprigs of
Journalism.

Upon this, Mr. Colesworth, with all respect for French intelligence,
denied the conclusiveness of French generalisations, which ascribed to
women universal occult dominion, and traced all great affairs to small
intrigues.

The captain's eyes twinkled on him, thinking how readily he would back
smart Miss Kathleen to do the trick, if need were.

He said to her before she started: 'Don't forget he may be a clever
fellow with that pen of his, and useful to our party.'

'I'll not forget,' said she.

For the good of his party, then, Captain Con permitted her to take the
walk up Caer Gybi alone with Mr. Colesworth: a memorable walk in the
recollections of the scribe, because of the wonderful likeness of the
young lady to the breezy weather and the sparkles over the deep, the
cloud that frowned, the cloud that glowed, the green of the earth
greening out from under wings of shadow, the mountain ranges holding
hands about an immensity of space. It was one of our giant days to his
emotions, and particularly memorable to him through the circumstance that
it insisted on a record in verse, and he was unused to the fetters of
metre: and although the verse was never seen by man, his attempt at it
confused his ideas of his expressive powers. Oddly too, while scourging
the lines with criticism, he had a fondness for them: they stamped a
radiant day in his mind, beyond the resources of rhetoric to have done it
equally.

This was the day of Captain Con's crossing the Rubicon between the secret
of his happiness and a Parliamentary career.




CHAPTER XVIII

CAPTAIN CON'S LETTER

Women may be able to tell you why the nursing of a military invalid
awakens tenderer anxieties in their bosoms than those called forth by the
drab civilian. If we are under sentence of death we are all of us
pathetic of course; but stretched upon the debateable couch of sickness
we are not so touching as the coloured coat: it has the distinction
belonging to colour. It smites a deeper nerve, or more than one; and
this, too, where there is no imaginary subjection to the charms of
military glory, in minds to which the game of war is lurid as the plumes
of the arch-slayer.

Jane Mattock assisting Mrs. Adister O'Donnell to restore Captain Philip
was very singularly affected, like a person shut off on a sudden from her
former theories and feelings. Theoretically she despised the soldier's
work as much as she shrank abhorrently from bloodshed. She regarded him
and his trappings as an ensign of our old barbarism, and could peruse
platitudes upon that theme with enthusiasm. The soldier personally, she
was accustomed to consider an inferior intelligence: a sort of schoolboy
when young, and schoolmaster when mature a visibly limited creature, not
a member of our broader world. Without dismissing any of these views she
found them put aside for the reception of others of an opposite
character; and in her soul she would have ascribed it to her cares of
nursing that she had become thoughtful, doubtful, hopeful, even
prayerful, surcharged with zeal, to help to save a good sword for the
country. If in a world still barbarous we must have soldiers, here was
one whom it would be grievous to lose. He had fallen for the country; and
there was a moving story of how he had fallen. She inclined to think more
highly of him for having courted exposure on a miserable frontier war
where but a poor sheaf of glory could be gathered. And he seemed to
estimate his professional duties apart from an aim at the laurels. A
conception of the possibility of a man's being both a soldier and morally
a hero edged its way into her understanding. It stood edgeways within,
desirous of avoiding a challenge to show every feature.

The cares of nursing were Jane's almost undividedly, except for the aid
she had from her friend Grace Barrow and from Miss Colesworth. Mrs.
Adister O'Donnell was a nurse in name only. 'She'll be seen by Philip
like as if she were a nightmare apparition of his undertaker's wraith,'
Captain Con said to Jane, when recommending his cousin to her charitable
nature, after he had taken lodgings at a farmhouse near Mrs. Lackstraw's
model farm Woodside on the hills. 'Barring the dress,' as he added, some
such impression of her frigid mournfulness might have struck a recumbent
invalid. Jane acknowledged it, and at first induced her aunt to join her
in the daily walk of half a mile to sit with him. Mrs. Lackstraw was a
very busy lady at her farm; she was often summoned to London by her
intuition of John's wish to have her presiding at table for the
entertainment of his numerous guests; she confessed that she supervised
the art of nursing better than she practised it, and supervision can be
done at a distance if the subordinate is properly attentive to the rules
we lay down, as Jane appeared to be. So Jane was left to him. She loved
the country; Springtide in the country set her singing; her walk to her
patient at Lappett's farm and homeward was an aethereal rapture for a
heart rocking easy in fulness. There was nothing to trouble it, no hint
of wild winds and heavy seas, not even the familiar insinuation from the
vigilant monitress, her aunt, to bid her be on her guard, beware of what
it is that great heiresses are courted for, steel her heart against
serpent speeches, see well to have the woman's precious word No at the
sentinel's post, and alert there. Mrs. Lackstraw, the most vigilant and
plain-spoken of her sex, had forborne to utter the usual warnings which
were to preserve Miss Mattock for her future Earl or Duke and the reason
why she forbore was a double one; a soldier and Papist could never be
thought perilous to a young woman scorning the sons of Mars and slaves of
sacerdotalism. The picture of Jane bestowing her hand on a Roman Catholic
in military uniform, refused to be raised before the mind.
Charitableness, humaneness, the fact that she was an admirable nurse and
liked to exercise her natural gift, perfectly accounted for Jane's trips
to Lappett's farm, and the jellies and fresh dairy dainties and neat
little dishes she was constantly despatching to the place. A suggestion
of possible danger might prove more dangerous than silence, by rendering
it attractive. Besides, Jane talked of poor Captain Philip as Patrick
O'Donnell's brother, whom she was bound to serve in return for Patrick's
many services to her; and of how unlike Patrick he was. Mrs. Lackstraw
had been apprehensive about her fancy for Patrick. Therefore if Captain
Philip was unlike him, and strictly a Catholic, according to report, the
suspicion of danger dispersed, and she was allowed to enjoy the pleasures
of the metropolis as frequently as she chose. The nursing of a man of
Letters, or of the neighbour to him, a beggar in rags, would not have
been so tolerated. Thus we perceive that wits actively awake inside the
ring-fence of prepossessions they have erected may lull themselves with
their wakefulness. Who would have thought!--is the cry when the strongest
bulwark of the fence is broken through.

Jane least of any would have thought what was coming to pass. The pale
square-browed young officer, so little Irish and winning in his brevity
of speech, did and said nothing to alarm her or strike the smallest
light. Grace Barrow noticed certain little changes of mood in Jane she
could scarcely have had a distinct suspicion at the time. After a recent
observation of him, on an evening stroll from Lappett's to Woodside, she
pronounced him interesting, but hard. 'He has an interesting head . . . I
should not like to offend him.' They agreed as to his unlikeness to fluid
Patrick; both eulogistic of the absent brother; and Jane, who could be
playful in privacy with friends, clapped a brogue on her tongue to
discourse of Patrick and apostrophise him: 'Oh! Pat, Pat, my dear cousin
Pat! why are you so long away from your desponding Jane? I 'll take to
poetry and write songs, if you don't come home soon. You've put seas
between us, and are behaving to me as an enemy. I know you 'll bring home
a foreign Princess to break the heart of your faithful. But I'll always
praise you for a dear boy, Pat, and wish you happy, and beg the good
gentleman your brother to give me a diploma as nurse to your first-born.
There now!'

She finished smiling brightly, and Grace was a trifle astonished, for her
friend's humour was not as a rule dramatic.

'You really have caught a twang of it from your friend Captain Con; only
you don't rattle the eighteenth letter of the alphabet in the middle of
words.'

'I've tried, and can't persuade my tongue to do it "first off," as boys
say, and my invalid has no brogue whatever to keep me in practice,' Jane
replied. 'One wonders what he thinks of as he lies there by the window.
He doesn't confide it to his hospital nurse.'

'Yes, he would treat her courteously, just in that military style,' said
Grace, realising the hospital attendance.

'It 's the style I like best:--no perpetual personal thankings and
allusions to the trouble he gives!' Jane exclaimed. 'He shows perfect
good sense, and I like that in all things, as you know. A red-haired
young woman chooses to wait on him and bring him flowers--he's brother to
Patrick in his love of wild flowers, at all events!--and he takes it
naturally and simply. These officers bear illness well. I suppose it 's
the drill.'

'Still I think it a horrid profession, dear.'

Grace felt obliged to insist on that: and her 'I think,' though it was
not stressed, tickled Jane's dormant ear to some drowsy wakefulness.

'I think too much honour is paid to it, certainly. But soldiers, of all
men, one would expect to be overwhelmed by a feeling of weakness. He has
never complained; not once. I doubt if he would have complained if Mrs.
Adister had been waiting on him all the while, or not a soul. I can
imagine him lying on the battle-field night after night quietly,
resolving not to groan.'

'Too great a power of self-repression sometimes argues the want of any
emotional nature,' said Grace.

Jane shook her head. She knew a story of him contradicting that.

The story had not recurred to her since she had undertaken her service.
It coloured the remainder of an evening walk home through the beechwoods
and over the common with Grace, and her walk across the same tracks early
in the morning, after Grace had gone to London. Miss Colesworth was
coming to her next week, with her brother if he had arrived in England.
Jane remembered having once been curious about this adventurous man of
Letters who lived by the work of his pen. She remembered comparing him to
one who was compelled to swim perpetually without a ship to give him rest
or land in view. He had made a little money by a book, and was expending
it on travels--rather imprudently, she fancied Emma Colesworth to be
thinking. He talked well, but for the present she was happier in her
prospect of nearly a week of loneliness. The day was one of sunshine,
windless, odorous: one of the rare placid days of April when the pettish
month assumes a matronly air of summer and wears it till the end of the
day. The beech twigs were strongly embrowned, the larches shot up green
spires by the borders of woods and on mounds within, deep ditchbanks
unrolled profuse tangles of new blades, and sharp eyes might light on a
late white violet overlooked by the children; primroses ran along the
banks. Jane had a maxim that flowers should be spared to live their life,
especially flowers of the wilds; she had reared herself on our poets;
hence Mrs. Lackstraw's dread of the arrival of one of the minstrel order:
and the girl, who could deliberately cut a bouquet from the garden, if
requested, would refuse to pluck a wildflower. But now they cried out to
her to be plucked in hosts, they claimed the sacrifice, and it seemed to
her no violation of her sentiment to gather handfuls making a bunch that
would have done honour to the procession of the children's May-day--a day
she excused for the slaughter because her idol and prophet among the
poets, wild nature's interpreter, was that day on the side of the
children. How like a bath of freshness would the thick faintly-fragrant
mass shine to her patient! Only to look at it was medicine! She believed,
in her lively healthfulness, that the look would give him a spring to
health, and she hurried forward to have them in water-the next sacred
obligation to the leaving of them untouched.

She had reared herself on our poets. If much brooding on them will
sometimes create a sentimentalism of the sentiment they inspire, that
also, after our manner of developing, leads to finer civilisation; and as
her very delicate feelings were not always tyrants over her clear and
accurate judgement, they rather tended to stamp her character than lead
her into foolishness. Blunt of speech, quick in sensibility, imaginative,
yet idealistic, she had the complex character of diverse brain and nerve,
and was often a problem to the chief person interested in it. She thought
so decisively, felt so shrinkingly; spoke so flatly, brooded so softly!
Such natures, in the painful effort to reconcile apparent antagonism and
read themselves, forget that they are not full grown. Longer than others
are they young: but meanwhile they are of an age when we are driven
abroad to seek and shape our destinies.

Passing through the garden-gate of Lappett's farm she made her way to the
south-western face of the house to beg a bowl of water of the farmer's
wife, and had the sweet surprise of seeing her patient lying under
swallows' eaves on a chair her brother had been commissioned to send from
London for coming uses. He was near the farm-wife's kitchen, but to
windward of the cooking-reek, pleasantly warmed, sufficiently shaded, and
alone, with open letter on the rug covering his legs. He whistled to
Jane's dog Wayland, a retriever, having Newfoundland relationships, of
smithy redness and ruggedness; it was the whistle that startled her to
turn and see him as she was in the act of handing Mrs. Lappett her
primroses.

'Out? I feared it would be a week. Is it quite prudent?' Jane said,
toning down her delight.

He answered with the half-smile that refers these questions to the
settled fact. Air had always brought him round; now he could feel he was
embarked for recovery: and he told her how the farmer and one of his men
had lent a shoulder to present him to his old and surest
physician--rather like a crippled ghost. M. Adister was upstairs in bed
with one of her headaches. Captain Con, then, was attending her, Jane
supposed: She spoke of him as the most devoted of husbands.

A slight hardening of Philip's brows, well-known to her by this time,
caused her to interrogate his eyes. They were fixed on her in his manner
of gazing with strong directness. She read the contrary opinion, and some
hieroglyphic matter besides.

'We all respect him for his single-hearted care of her,' she said. 'I
have a great liking for him. His tirades about the Saxon tyrant are not
worth mentioning, they mean nothing. He would be one of the first to rush
to the standard if there were danger; I know he would. He is truly
chivalrous, I am sure.'

Philip's broad look at her had not swerved. The bowl of primroses placed
beside him on a chair by the farmer's dame diverted it for a moment.

'You gathered them?' he said.

Jane drank his look at the flowers.

'Yes, on my way,' she replied. 'We can none of us live for ever; and
fresh water every day will keep them alive a good long time. They had it
from the clouds yesterday. Do they not seem a bath of country happiness!'
Evidently they did their service in pleasing him.

Seeing his fingers grope on the rug, she handed him his open letters.

He selected the second, passing under his inspection, and asked her to
read it.

She took the letter, wondering a little that it should be in Captain
Con's handwriting.

'I am to read it through?' she said, after a run over some lines.

He nodded. She thought it a sign of his friendliness in sharing family
secrets with her, and read:

'MY DEAR PHILIP,--Not a word of these contents, which will be delivered
seasonably to the lady chiefly concerned, by the proper person. She hears
this morning I 'm off on a hasty visit to Ireland, as I have been
preparing her of late to expect I must, and yours the blame, if any,
though I will be the last to fling it at you. I meet Father B. and pretty
Kitty before I cross. Judging by the wind this morning, the passage will
furnish good schooling for a spell of the hustings. But if I am in the
nature of things unable to command the waves, trust me for holding a mob
in leash; and they are tolerably alike. My spirits are up. Now the die is
cast. My election to the vacancy must be reckoned beforehand. I promise
you a sounding report from the Kincora Herald. They will not say of me
after that (and read only the speeches reported in the local paper) "what
is the man but an Irish adventurer!" He is a lover of his country, Philip
O'Donnell, and one of millions, we will hope. And that stigmatic title of
long standing, more than anything earthly, drove him to the step-to the
ruin of his domestic felicity perhaps. But we are past sighing.

'Think you, when he crossed the tide, Caius Julius Caesar sighed?

'No, nor thought of his life, nor his wife, but of the thing to be done.
Laugh, my boy! I know what I am about when I set my mind on a powerful
example. As the chameleon gets his colour, we get our character from the
objects we contemplate . . .'

Jane glanced over the edge of the letter sheet rosily at Philip.

His dryness in hitting the laughable point diverted her, and her mind
became suffused with a series of pictures of the chameleon captain
planted in view of the Roman to become a copy of him, so that she did not
peruse the terminating lines with her wakefullest attention:

'The liege lady of my heart will be the earliest to hail her hero
triumphant, or cherish him beaten--which is not in the prospect. Let
Ireland be true to Ireland. We will talk of the consolidation of the
Union by and by. You are for that, you say, when certain things are done;
and you are where I leave you, on the highway, though seeming to go at a
funeral pace to certain ceremonies leading to the union of the two
countries in the solidest fashion, to their mutual benefit, after a
shining example. Con sleeps with a corner of the eye open, and you are
not the only soldier who is a strategist, and a tactician too, aware of
when it is best to be out of the way. Now adieu and pax vobiscum. Reap
the rich harvest of your fall to earth. I leave you in the charge of the
kindest of nurses, next to the wife of my bosom the best of women.
Appreciate her, sir, or perish in my esteem. She is one whom not to love
is to be guilty of an offence deserving capital punishment, and a
bastinado to season the culprit for his execution. Have I not often
informed her myself that a flower from her hand means more than treasures
from the hands of others. Expect me absent for a week. The harangues will
not be closely reported. I stand by the truth, which is my love of the
land of my birth. A wife must come second to that if she would be first
in her husband's consideration. Hurrah me on, Philip, now it is action,
and let me fancy I hear you shouting it.'

The drop of the letter to the signature fluttered affectionately on a
number of cordial adjectives, like the airy bird to his home in the corn.




CHAPTER XIX

MARS CONVALESCENT

Jane's face was clear as the sky when she handed the letter back to
Philip. In doing so, it struck her that the prolonged directness of his
look was peculiar: she attributed it to some effect of the fresh Spring
atmosphere on a weakened frame. She was guessing at his reasons for
showing her the letter, and they appeared possibly serious.

'An election to Parliament! Perhaps Mrs. Adister should have a hint of
it, to soften the shock I fear it may be: but we must wait till her
headache has passed,' she said.

'You read to the end?' said Philip.

'Yes, Captain Con always amuses me, and I am bound to confess I have no
positive disrelish of his compliments. But this may prove a desperate
step. The secret of his happiness is in extreme jeopardy. Nothing would
stop him, I suppose?'

Philip signified that it was too late. He was moreover of opinion, and
stated it in his briefest, that it would be advisable to leave the
unfolding of the present secret to the captain.

Jane wondered why the letter had been shown. Her patient might be annoyed
and needing sympathy?

'After all,' she said, 'Captain Con may turn out to be a very good sort
of member of Parliament in his way.'

Philip's eyebrows lifted, and he let fall a breath, eloquent of his
thoughts.

'My brother says he is a serviceable director of the Company they are
associated in.'

'He finds himself among reasonable men, and he is a chameleon.'

'Parliament may steady him.'

'It is too much of a platform for Con's head.'

'Yes, there is more of poet than politician,' said she. 'That is a
danger. But he calls himself our friend; I think he really has a liking
for John and me.'

'For you he has a real love,' said Philip.

'Well, then, he may listen to us at times; he may be trusted not to wound
us. I am unmitigatedly for the one country--no divisions. We want all our
strength in these days of monstrous armies directed by banditti Councils.
England is the nation of the Christian example to nations. Oh! surely it
is her aim. At least she strives to be that. I think it, and I see the
many faults we have.'

Her patient's eyelids were down.

She proposed to send her name up to Mrs. Adister.

On her return from the poor lady racked with headache and lying little
conscious of her husband's powder-barrel under the bed, Jane found her
patient being worried by his official nurse, a farm-labourer's wife, a
bundle of a woman, whose lumbering assiduities he fenced with reiterated
humourous negatives to every one of her propositions, until she prefaced
the last two or three of the list with a 'Deary me!' addressed
consolatorily to herself. She went through the same forms each day, at
the usual hours of the day, and Jane, though she would have felt the
apathetic doltishness of the woman less, felt how hard it must be for him
to bear.

'Your sister will be with you soon,' she said. 'I am glad, and yet I hope
you will not allow her to put me aside altogether?'

'You shall do as you wish,' said Philip.

'Is she like Patrick? Her name is Kathleen, I know.'

'She is a raw Irish girl, of good Irish training, but Irish.'

'I hope she will be pleased with England. Like Patrick in face, I mean.'

'We think her a good-looking girl.'

'Does she play? sing?'

'Some of our ballads.'

'She will delight my brother. John loves Irish ballads.'

A silence of long duration fell between them. She fancied he would like
to sleep, and gently rose to slip away, that she might consult with Mrs.
Lappett about putting up some tentcover. He asked her if she was going.
'Not home,' she said. His hand moved, but stopped. It seemed to have
meant to detain her. She looked at a white fleece that came across the
sun, desiring to conjure it to stay and shadow him. It sailed by. She
raised her parasol.

His eyelids were shut, and she thought him asleep. Meditating on her
unanswered question of Miss Kathleen's likeness to Patrick, Jane imagined
a possibly greater likeness to her patient, and that he did not speak of
his family's exclamations on the subject because of Kathleen's being so
good-looking a girl. For if good-looking, a sister must resemble these
handsome features here, quiescent to inspection in their marble outlines
as a corse. So might he lie on the battle-field, with no one to watch
over him!

While she watched, sitting close beside him to shield his head from the
sunbeams, her heart began to throb before she well knew the secret of it.
She had sight of a tear that grew big under the lashes of each of his
eyelids, and rolled heavily. Her own eyes overflowed.

The fit of weeping was momentary, April's, a novelty with her. She
accused her silly visions of having softened her. A hasty smoothing to
right and left removed the traces; they were unseen; and when she
ventured to look at him again there was no sign of fresh drops falling.
His eyelids kept shut.

The arrival of her diurnal basket of provisions offered a refreshing
intervention of the commonplace. Bright air had sharpened his appetite:
he said he had been sure it would, and anticipated cheating the doctor of
a part of the sentence which condemned him to lie on his back up to the
middle of June, a log. Jane was hungry too, and they feasted together
gaily, talking of Kathleen on her journey, her strange impressions and
her way of proclaiming them, and of Patrick and where he might be now;
ultimately of Captain Con and Mrs. Adister.

'He has broken faith with her,' Philip said sternly. 'She will have the
right to tell him so. He never can be anything but a comic politician.
Still he was bound to consult his wife previous to stepping before the
public. He knows that he married a fortune.'

'A good fortune,' said Jane.

Philip acquiesced. 'She is an excellent woman, a model of uprightness;
she has done him all the good in the world, and here is he deceiving her,
lying--there is no other word: and one lie leads to another. When he
married a fortune he was a successful adventurer. The compact was
understood. His duty as a man of honour is to be true to his bond and
serve the lady. Falseness to his position won't wash him clean of the
title.'

Jane pleaded for Captain Con. 'He is chivalrously attentive to her.'

'You have read his letter,' Philip replied.

He crushed her charitable apologies with references to the letter.

'We are not certain that Mrs. Adister will object,' said she.

'Do you see her reading a speech of her husband's?' he remarked.
Presently with something like a moan:

'And I am her guest!'

'Oh! pray, do not think Mrs. Adister will ever allow you to feel the
lightest shadow . . .' said Jane.

'No; that makes it worse.'

Had this been the burden of his thoughts when those two solitary tears
forced their passage?

Hardly: not even in his physical weakness would he consent to weep for
such a cause.

'I forgot to mention that Mrs. Adister has a letter from her husband
telling her he has been called over to Ireland on urgent business,' she
said.

Philip answered: 'He is punctilious.'

'I wish indeed he had been more candid,' Jane assented to the sarcasm.

'In Ireland he is agreeably surprised by the flattering proposal of a
vacant seat, and not having an instant to debate on it, assumes the
consent of the heavenliest wife in Christendom.'

Philip delivered the speech with a partial imitation of Captain Con
addressing his wife on his return as the elected among the pure Irish
party. The effort wearied him.

She supposed he was regretting his cousin's public prominence in the
ranks of the malcontents. 'He will listen to you,' she said, while she
smiled at his unwonted display of mimicry.

'A bad mentor for him. Antics are harmless, though they get us laughed
at,' said Philip.

'You may restrain him from excesses.'

'Were I in that position, you would consider me guilty of greater than
any poor Con is likely to commit.'

'Surely you are not for disunion?'

'The reverse. I am for union on juster terms, that will hold it fast.'

'But what are the terms?'

He must have desired to paint himself as black to her as possible. He
stated the terms, which were hardly less than the affrighting ones blown
across the Irish sea by that fierce party. He held them to be just,
simply sensible terms. True, he spoke of the granting them as a sure
method to rally all Ireland to an ardent love of the British flag. But he
praised names of Irish leaders whom she had heard Mr. Rockney denounce
for disloyal insolence: he could find excuses for them and their
dupes--poor creatures, verily! And his utterances had a shocking
emphasis. Then she was not wrong in her idea of the conspirator's head,
her first impression of him!

She could not quit the theme: doing that would have been to be
indifferent: something urged her to it.

'Are they really your opinions?'

He seemed relieved by declaring that they were.

'Patrick is quite free of them,' said she.

'We will hope that the Irish fever will spare Patrick. He was at a Jesuit
college in France when he was wax. Now he's taking the world.'

'With so little of the Jesuit in him!'

'Little of the worst: a good deal of the best.'

'What is the best?'

'Their training to study. They train you to concentrate the brain upon
the object of study. And they train you to accept service: they fit you
for absolute service: they shape you for your duties in the world; and so
long as they don't smelt a man's private conscience, they are model
masters. Happily Patrick has held his own. Not the Jesuits would have a
chance of keeping a grasp on Patrick! He'll always be a natural boy and a
thoughtful man.'

Jane's features implied a gentle shudder.

'I shake a scarlet cloak to you?' said Philip.

She was directed by his words to think of the scarlet coat. 'I reflect a
little on the substance of things as well,' she said. 'Would not
Patrick's counsels have an influence?'

'Hitherto our Patrick has never presumed to counsel his elder brother.'

'But an officer wearing . . .'

'The uniform! That would have to be stripped off. There'd be an end to
any professional career.'

'You would not regret it?'

'No sorrow is like a soldier's bidding farewell to flag and comrades.
Happily politics and I have no business together. If the country favours
me with active service I'm satisfied for myself. You asked me for my
opinions: I was bound to give them. Generally I let them rest.'

Could she have had the temerity? Jane marvelled at herself.

She doubted that the weighty pair of tears had dropped for the country.
Captain Con would have shed them over Erin, and many of them. Captain
Philip's tone was too plain and positive: he would be a most practical
unhistrionic rebel.

'You would countenance a revolt?' she said, striking at that extreme to
elicit the favourable answer her tones angled for. And it was instantly:

'Not in arms.' He tried an explanation by likening the dissension to a
wrangle in a civilised family over an unjust division of property.

And here, as he was marking the case with some nicety and difficulty, an
itinerant barrel-organ crashed its tragic tale of music put to torture at
the gate. It yelled of London to Jane, throttled the spirits of the
woods, threw a smoke over the country sky, befouled the pure air she
loved.

The instrument was one of the number which are packed to suit all English
tastes and may be taken for a rough sample of the jumble of them, where a
danceless quadrille-tune succeeds a suicidal Operatic melody and is
followed by the weariful hymn, whose last drawl pert polka kicks aside.
Thus does the poor Savoyard compel a rich people to pay for their wealth.
Not without pathos in the abstract perhaps do the wretched machines
pursue their revolutions of their factory life, as incapable of
conceiving as of bestowing pleasure: a bald cry for pennies through the
barest pretence to be agreeable but Jane found it hard to be tolerant of
them out of London, and this one affecting her invalid and Mrs. Adister
must be dismissed. Wayland was growling; he had to be held by the collar.
He spied an objectionable animal. A jerky monkey was attached to the
organ; and his coat was red, his kepi was blue; his tailor had rigged him
as a military gentleman. Jane called to the farm-wife. Philip assured her
he was not annoyed. Jane observed him listening, and by degrees she
distinguished a maundering of the Italian song she had one day sung to
Patrick in his brother's presence.

'I remember your singing that the week before I went to India,' said
Philip, and her scarlet blush flooded her face.

'Can you endure the noise?' she asked him.

'Con would say it shrieks "murder." But I used to like it once.'

Mrs. Lappett came answering to the call. Her children were seen up the
garden setting to one another with squared aprons, responsive to a
livelier measure.

'Bless me, miss, we think it so cheerful!' cried Mrs. Lappett, and
glanced at her young ones harmonious and out of mischief.

'Very well,' said Jane, always considerate for children. She had
forgotten the racked Mrs. Adister.

Now the hymn of Puritanical gloom-the peacemaker with Providence
performing devotional exercises in black bile. The leaps of the children
were dashed. A sallow two or three minutes composed their motions, and
then they jumped again to the step for lively legs. The similarity to the
regimental band heading soldiers on the march from Church might have
struck Philip.

'I wonder when I shall see Patrick!' he said, quickened in spite of
himself by the sham sounds of music to desire changes and surprises.

Jane was wondering whether he could be a man still to brood tearfully
over his old love.

She echoed him. 'And I! Soon, I hope.'

The appearance of Mrs. Adister with features which were the acutest
critical summary of the discord caused toll to be paid instantly, and
they beheld a flashing of white teeth and heard Italian accents. The
monkey saluted militarily, but with painful suggestions of his foregone
drilling in the ceremony.

'We are safe nowhere from these intrusions,' Mrs. Adister said; 'not on
these hills!--and it must be a trial for the wretched men to climb them,
that thing on their backs.'

'They are as accustomed to it as mountain smugglers bearing packs of
contraband,' said Philip.

'Con would have argued him out of hearing before he ground a second
note,' she resumed. 'I have no idea when Con returns from his unexpected
visit to Ireland.'

'Within a fortnight, madam.'

'Let me believe it! You have heard from him? But you are in the air!
exposed! My head makes me stupid. It is now five o'clock. The air begins
to chill. Con will never forgive me if you catch a cold, and I would not
incur his blame.'

The eyes of Jane and Philip shot an exchange.

'Anything you command, madam,' said Philip.

He looked up and breathed his heaven of fresh air. Jane pitied, she could
not interpose to thwart his act of resignation. The farmer, home for tea,
and a footman, took him between them, crutched, while Mrs. Adister said
to Jane: 'The doctor's orders are positive:--if he is to be a man once
more, he must rest his back and not use his legs for months. He was near
to being a permanent cripple from that fall. My brother Edward had one
like it in his youth. Soldiers are desperate creatures.'

'I think Mr. Adister had his fall when hunting, was it not?' said Jane.

'Hunting, my dear.'

That was rather different from a fall on duty before the enemy, incurred
by severe exhaustion after sunstroke! . . .

Jane took her leave of Philip beside his couch of imprisonment in his
room, promising to return in the early morning. He embraced her old dog
Wayland tenderly. Hard men have sometimes a warm affection for dogs.

Walking homeward she likewise gave Wayland a hug. She called him 'dear
old fellow,' and questioned him of his fondness for her, warning him not
to be faithless ever to the mistress who loved him. Was not her old
Wayland as good a protector as the footman Mrs. Adister pressed her to
have at her heels? That he was!

Captain Con's behaviour grieved her. And it certainly revived an ancient
accusation against his countrymen. If he cared for her so much, why had
he not placed confidence in her and commissioned her to speak of his
election to his wife? Irishmen will never be quite sincere!--But why had
his cousin exposed him to one whom he greatly esteemed? However angry he
might be with Con O'Donnell in his disapproval of the captain's conduct,
it was not very considerate to show the poor man to her in his natural
colours. Those words: 'The consolidation of the Union:' sprang up. She
had a dim remembrance of words ensuing: 'ceremonies going at a funeral
pace . . . on the highway to the solidest kind of union:'--Yes, he wrote:
'I leave you to . . .' And Captain Philip showed her the letter:

She perceived motives beginning to stir. He must have had his intention:
and now as to his character!--Jane was of the order of young women
possessing active minds instead of figured paste-board fronts, who see
what there is to be seen about them and know what may be known instead of
decorously waiting for the astonishment of revelations. As soon as she
had asked herself the nature of the design of so honourable a man as
Captain Philip in showing her his cousin's letter, her blood spun round
and round, waving the reply as a torch; and the question of his character
confirmed it.

But could he be imagined seeking to put her on her guard? There may be
modesty in men well aware of their personal attractions: they can credit
individual women with powers of resistance. He was not vain to the degree
which stupefies the sense of there being weight or wisdom in others. And
he was honour's own. By these lights of his character she read the act.
His intention was . . . and even while she saw it accurately, the moment
of keen perception was overclouded by her innate distrust of her claim to
feminine charms. For why should he wish her to understand that he was no
fortune-hunter and treated heiresses with greater reserve than ordinary
women! How could it matter to him?

She saw the tears roll. Tears of men sink plummet-deep; they find their
level. The tears of such a man have more of blood than of water in
them.--What was she doing when they fell? She was shading his head from
the sun. What, then, if those tears came of the repressed desire to thank
her with some little warmth? He was honour's own, and warmhearted Patrick
talked of him as a friend whose heart was, his friend's. Thrilling to
kindness, and, poor soul! helpless to escape it, he felt perhaps that he
had never thanked her, and could not. He lay there, weak and tongue-tied:
hence those two bright volumes of his condition of weakness.

So the pursuit of the mystery ended, as it had commenced, in confusion,
but of a milder sort and partially transparent at one or two of the gates
she had touched. A mind capable of seeing was twisted by a nature that
would not allow of open eyes; yet the laden emotions of her nature
brought her round by another channel to the stage neighbouring sight,
where facts, dimly recognised for such--as they may be in truth, are
accepted under their disguises, because disguise of them is needed by the
bashful spirit which accuses itself of audaciousness in presuming to
speculate. Had she asked herself the reason of her extended speculation,
her foot would not have stopped more abruptly on the edge of a torrent
than she on that strange road of vapours and flying lights. She did not;
she sang, she sent her voice through the woods and took the splendid ring
of it for an assurance of her peculiarly unshackled state. She loved this
liberty. Of the men who had 'done her the honour,' not one had moved her
to regret the refusal. She lived in the hope of simply doing good, and
could only give her hand to a man able to direct and help her; one who
would bear to be matched with her brother. Who was he? Not discoverable;
not likely to be.

Therefore she had her freedom, an absolutely unflushed freedom, happier
than poor Grace Barrow's. Rumour spoke of Emma Colesworth having a wing
clipped. How is it that sensible women can be so susceptible? For,
thought Jane, the moment a woman is what is called in love, she can give
her heart no longer to the innocent things about her; she is cut away
from Nature: that pure well-water is tasteless to her. To me it is wine!

The drinking of the pure well-water as wine is among the fatal signs of
fire in the cup, showing Nature at work rather to enchain the victim than
bid her daughter go. Jane of course meant the poet's 'Nature.' She did
not reflect that the strong glow of poetic imagination is wanted to
hallow a passionate devotion to the inanimate for this evokes the
spiritual; and passionateness of any kind in narrower brains should be a
proclamation to us of sanguine freshets not coming from a spiritual
source. But the heart betraying deluded her. She fancied she had not ever
been so wedded to Nature as on that walk through the bursting beechwoods,
that sweet lonely walk, perfect in loneliness, where even a thought of a
presence was thrust away as a desecration and images of souls in thought
were shadowy.

Her lust of freedom gave her the towering holiday. She took the delirium
in her own pure fashion, in a love of the bankside flowers and the downy
edges of the young beech-buds fresh on the sprays. And it was no unreal
love, though too intent and forcible to win the spirit from the object.
She paid for this indulgence of her mood by losing the spirit entirely.
At night she was a spent rocket. What had gone she could not tell: her
very soul she almost feared. Her glorious walk through the wood seemed
burnt out. She struck a light to try her poet on the shelf of the elect
of earth by her bed, and she read, and read flatness. Not his the fault!
She revered him too deeply to lay it on him. Whose was it? She had a
vision of the gulfs of bondage.

Could it be possible that human persons were subject to the spells of
persons with tastes, aims, practices, pursuits alien to theirs? It was a
riddle taxing her to solve it for the resistance to a monstrous iniquity
of injustice, degrading her conception of our humanity. She attacked it
in the abstract, as a volunteer champion of our offended race. And Oh! it
could not be. The battle was won without a blow.

Thereupon came glimpses of the gulfs of bondage, delicious,
rose-enfolded, foreign; they were chapters of soft romance, appearing
interminable, an endless mystery, an insatiable thirst for the mystery.
She heard crashes of the opera-melody, and despising it even more than
the wretched engine of the harshness, she was led by it, tyrannically led
a captive, like the organ-monkey, until perforce she usurped the note,
sounded the cloying tune through her frame, passed into the vulgar
sugariness, lost herself.

And saying to herself: This is what moves them! she was moved. One thrill
of appreciation drew her on the tide, and once drawn from shore she
became submerged. Why am I not beautiful, was her thought. Those
voluptuous modulations of melting airs are the natural clothing of
beautiful women. Beautiful women may believe themselves beloved. They are
privileged to believe, they are born with the faith.




     ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS

     A country of compromise goes to pieces at the first cannon-shot
     A lady's company-smile
     A superior position was offered her by her being silent
     A whisper of cajolery in season is often the secret
     A contented Irishman scarcely seems my countryman
     Ah! we're in the enemy's country now
     And it's one family where the dog is pulled by the collar
     Arch-devourer Time
     As secretive as they are sensitive
     As if she had never heard him previously enunciate the formula
     Be politic and give her elbow-room for her natural angles
     Beautiful women may believe themselves beloved
     Becoming air of appropriation that made it family history
     Constitutionally discontented
     Could peruse platitudes upon that theme with enthusiasm
     Decency's a dirty petticoat in the Garden of Innocence
     England's the foremost country of the globe
     Enjoys his luxuries and is ashamed of his laziness
     Fires in the grates went through the ceremony of warming nobody
     Foamy top is offered and gulped as equivalent to an idea
     Foist on you their idea of your idea at the moment
     Grimaces at a government long-nosed to no purpose
     Hard men have sometimes a warm affection for dogs
     He judged of others by himself
     He was not alive for his own pleasure
     Hear victorious lawlessness appealing solemnly to God the law
     Her aspect suggested the repose of a winter landscape
     Here, where he both wished and wished not to be
     Hug the hatred they packed up among their bundles
     I never saw out of a doll-shop, and never saw there
     I 'm the warming pan, as legitimately I should be
     I detest enthusiasm
     I baint done yet
     Indirect communication with heaven
     Ireland 's the sore place of England
     Irishman there is a barrow trolling a load of grievances
     Irishmen will never be quite sincere
     Irony in him is only eulogy standing on its head
     Lack of precise words admonished him of the virtue of silence
     Loudness of the interrogation precluded thought of an answer
     Love the children of Erin, when not fretted by them
     Loves his poets, can almost understand what poetry means
     Married at forty, and I had to take her shaped as she was
     May lull themselves with their wakefulness
     Men must fight: the law is only a quieter field for them
     Mika! you did it in cold blood?
     Never forget that old Ireland is weeping
     No man can hear the words which prove him a prophet (quietly)
     Not every chapter can be sunshine
     Not likely to be far behind curates in besieging an heiress
     Not the great creatures we assume ourselves to be
     Not so much read a print as read the imprinting on themselves
     Not to bother your wits, but leave the puzzle to the priest
     Nursing of a military invalid awakens tenderer anxieties
     Old houses are doomed to burnings
     Our lawyers have us inside out, like our physicians
     Paying compliments and spoiling a game!
     Philip was a Spartan for keeping his feelings under
     Secret of the art was his meaning what he said
     Suggestion of possible danger might more dangerous than silence
     Taste a wound from the lightest touch, and they nurse the venom
     Tears of men sink plummet-deep
     Tears of such a man have more of blood than of water in them
     That fiery dragon, a beautiful woman with brains
     The race is for domestic peace, my boy
     They laugh, but they laugh extinguishingly
     Time, whose trick is to turn corners of unanticipated sharpness
     Twisted by a nature that would not allow of open eyes
     We're all of us hit at last, and generally by our own weapon
     We're smitten to-day in our hearts and our pockets
     Welsh blood is queer blood
     Where one won't and can't, poor t' other must
     Winds of panic are violently engaged in occupying the vacuum
     With a frozen fish of admirable principles for wife
     With death; we'd rather not, because of a qualm
     Withdrew into the entrenchments of contempt
     Woman's precious word No at the sentinel's post, and alert
     Would like to feel he was doing a bit of good
     You'll tell her you couldn't sit down in her presence undressed






THE ENTIRE SHORT WORKS OF GEORGE MEREDITH


CONTENTS:
   Farina
   Case of General Ople
   The Tale of Chloe
   The House on the Beach
   The Gentleman of Fifty
   The Sentimentalists
   Miscellaneous Prose




FARINA

By George Meredith



THE WHITE ROSE CLUB

In those lusty ages when the Kaisers lifted high the golden goblet of
Aachen, and drank, elbow upward, the green-eyed wine of old romance,
there lived, a bow-shot from the bones of the Eleven Thousand Virgins and
the Three Holy Kings, a prosperous Rhinelander, by name Gottlieb
Groschen, or, as it was sometimes ennobled, Gottlieb von Groschen; than
whom no wealthier merchant bartered for the glory of his ancient
mother-city, nor more honoured burgess swallowed impartially red juice
and white under the shadow of his own fig-tree.

Vine-hills, among the hottest sun-bibbers of the Rheingau, glistened in
the roll of Gottlieb's possessions; corn-acres below Cologne;
basalt-quarries about Linz; mineral-springs in Nassau, a legacy of the
Romans to the genius and enterprise of the first of German traders. He
could have bought up every hawking crag, owner and all, from Hatto's
Tower to Rheineck. Lore-ley, combing her yellow locks against the
night-cloud, beheld old Gottlieb's rafts endlessly stealing on the
moonlight through the iron pass she peoples above St. Goar. A wailful
host were the wives of his raftsmen widowed there by her watery music!

This worthy citizen of Cologne held vasty manuscript letters of the
Kaiser addressed to him:

'Dear Well-born son and Subject of mine, Gottlieb!' and he was easy with
the proudest princes of the Holy German Realm. For Gottlieb was a
money-lender and an honest man in one body. He laid out for the plenteous
harvests of usury, not pressing the seasons with too much rigour. 'I sow
my seed in winter,' said he, 'and hope to reap good profit in autumn; but
if the crop be scanty, better let it lie and fatten the soil.'

'Old earth's the wisest creditor,' he would add; 'she never squeezes the
sun, but just takes what he can give her year by year, and so makes sure
of good annual interest.'

Therefore when people asked Gottlieb how he had risen to such a pinnacle
of fortune, the old merchant screwed his eye into its wisest corner, and
answered slyly, 'Because I 've always been a student of the heavenly
bodies'; a communication which failed not to make the orbs and systems
objects of ardent popular worship in Cologne, where the science was long
since considered alchymic, and still may be.

Seldom could the Kaiser go to war on Welschland without first taking
earnest counsel of his Well-born son and Subject Gottlieb, and lightening
his chests. Indeed the imperial pastime must have ceased, and the Kaiser
had languished but for him. Cologne counted its illustrious citizen
something more than man. The burghers doffed when he passed; and scampish
leather-draggled urchins gazed after him with praeternatural respect on
their hanging chins, as if a gold-mine of great girth had walked through
the awe-struck game.

But, for the young men of Cologne he had a higher claim to reverence as
father of the fair Margarita, the White Rose of Germany; a noble maiden,
peerless, and a jewel for princes.

The devotion of these youths should give them a name in chivalry. In her
honour, daily and nightly, they earned among themselves black bruises and
paraded discoloured countenances, with the humble hope to find it
pleasing in her sight. The tender fanatics went in bands up and down
Rhineland, challenging wayfarers and the peasantry with staff and beaker
to acknowledge the supremacy of their mistress. Whoso of them journeyed
into foreign parts, wrote home boasting how many times his head had been
broken on behalf of the fair Margarita; and if this happened very often,
a spirit of envy was created, which compelled him, when he returned, to
verify his prowess on no less than a score of his rivals. Not to possess
a beauty-scar, as the wounds received in these endless combats were
called, became the sign of inferiority, so that much voluntary maiming
was conjectured to be going on; and to obviate this piece of treachery,
minutes of fights were taken and attested, setting forth that a certain
glorious cut or crack was honourably won in fair field; on what occasion;
and from whom; every member of the White Rose Club keeping his particular
scroll, and, on days of festival and holiday, wearing it haughtily in his
helm. Strangers entering Cologne were astonished at the hideous
appearance of the striplings, and thought they never had observed so ugly
a race; but they were forced to admit the fine influence of beauty on
commerce, seeing that the consumption of beer increased almost hourly.
All Bavaria could not equal Cologne for quantity made away with.

The chief members of the White Rose Club were Berthold Schmidt, the rich
goldsmith's son; Dietrich Schill, son of the imperial saddler; Heinrich
Abt, Franz Endermann, and Ernst Geller, sons of chief burghers, each of
whom carried a yard-long scroll in his cap, and was too disfigured in
person for men to require an inspection of the document. They were
dangerous youths to meet, for the oaths, ceremonies, and recantations
they demanded from every wayfarer, under the rank of baron, were what few
might satisfactorily perform, if lovers of woman other than the fair
Margarita, or loyal husbands; and what none save trained heads and
stomachs could withstand, however naturally manful. The captain of the
Club was he who could drink most beer without intermediate sighing, and
whose face reckoned the proudest number of slices and mixture of colours.
The captaincy was most in dispute between Dietrich Schill and Berthold
Schmidt, who, in the heat and constancy of contention, were gradually
losing likeness to man. 'Good coin,' they gloried to reflect, 'needs no
stamp.'

One youth in Cologne held out against the standing tyranny, and chose to
do beauty homage in his own fashion, and at his leisure. It was Farina,
and oaths were registered against him over empty beer-barrels. An axiom
of the White Rose Club laid it down that everybody must be enamoured of
Margarita, and the conscience of the Club made them trebly suspicious of
those who were not members. They had the consolation of knowing that
Farina was poor, but then he was affirmed a student of Black Arts, and
from such a one the worst might reasonably be feared. He might bewitch
Margarita!

Dietrich Schill was deputed by the Club to sound the White Rose herself
on the subject of Farina, and one afternoon in the vintage season, when
she sat under the hot vine-poles among maiden friends, eating ripe
grapes, up sauntered Dietrich, smirking, cap in hand, with his scroll
trailed behind him.

'Wilt thou?' said Margarita, offering him a bunch.

'Unhappy villain that I am!' replied Dietrich, gesticulating fox-like
refusal; 'if I but accept a favour, I break faith with the Club.'

'Break it to pleasure me,' said Margarita, smiling wickedly.

Dietrich gasped. He stood on tiptoe to see if any of the Club were by,
and half-stretched out his hand. A mocking laugh caused him to draw it
back as if stung. The grapes fell. Farina was at Margarita's feet
offering them in return.

'Wilt thou?' said Margarita, with softer stress, and slight excess of
bloom in her cheeks.

Farina put the purple cluster to his breast, and clutched them hard on
his heart, still kneeling.

Margarita's brow and bosom seemed to be reflections of the streaming
crimson there. She shook her face to the sky, and affected laughter at
the symbol. Her companions clapped hands. Farina's eyes yearned to her
once, and then he rose and joined in the pleasantry.

Fury helped Dietrich to forget his awkwardness. He touched Farina on the
shoulder with two fingers, and muttered huskily: 'The Club never allow
that.'

Farina bowed, as to thank him deeply for the rules of the Club. 'I am not
a member, you know,' said he, and strolled to a seat close by Margarita.

Dietrich glared after him. As head of a Club he understood the use of
symbols. He had lost a splendid opportunity, and Farina had seized it.
Farina had robbed him.

'May I speak with Mistress Margarita?' inquired the White Rose chief, in
a ragged voice.

'Surely, Dietrich! do speak,' said Margarita.

'Alone?' he continued.

'Is that allowed by the Club?' said one of the young girls, with a saucy
glance.

Dietrich deigned no reply, but awaited Margarita's decision. She
hesitated a second; then stood up her full height before him; faced him
steadily, and beckoned him some steps up the vine-path. Dietrich bowed,
and passing Farina, informed him that the Club would wring satisfaction
out of him for the insult.

Farina laughed, but answered, 'Look, you of the Club! beer-swilling has
improved your manners as much as fighting has beautified your faces. Go
on; drink and fight! but remember that the Kaiser's coming, and fellows
with him who will not be bullied.'

'What mean you?' cried Dietrich, lurching round on his enemy.

'Not so loud, friend,' returned Farina. 'Or do you wish to frighten the
maidens? I mean this, that the Club had better give as little offence as
possible, and keep their eyes as wide as they can, if they want to be of
service to Mistress Margarita.'

Dietrich turned off with a grunt.

'Now!' said Margarita.

She was tapping her foot. Dietrich grew unfaithful to the Club, and
looked at her longer than his mission warranted. She was bright as the
sunset gardens of the Golden Apples. The braids of her yellow hair were
bound in wreaths, and on one side of her head a saffron crocus was stuck
with the bell downward. Sweetness, song, and wit hung like dews of
morning on her grape-stained lips. She wore a scarlet corset with bands
of black velvet across her shoulders. The girlish gown was thin blue
stuff, and fell short over her firm-set feet, neatly cased in white
leather with buckles. There was witness in her limbs and the way she
carried her neck of an amiable, but capable, dragon, ready, when aroused,
to bristle up and guard the Golden Apples against all save the rightful
claimant. Yet her nether lip and little white chin-ball had a dreamy
droop; her frank blue eyes went straight into the speaker: the dragon
slept. It was a dangerous charm. 'For,' says the minnesinger, 'what
ornament more enchants us on a young beauty than the soft slumber of a
strength never yet called forth, and that herself knows not of! It sings
double things to the heart of knighthood; lures, and warns us; woos, and
threatens. 'Tis as nature, shining peace, yet the mother of storm.'

'There is no man,' rapturously exclaims Heinrich von der Jungferweide,
'can resist the desire to win a sweet treasure before which lies a dragon
sleeping. The very danger prattles promise.'

But the dragon must really sleep, as with Margarita.

'A sham dragon, shamming sleep, has destroyed more virgins than all the
heathen emperors,' says old Hans Aepfelmann of Duesseldorf.

Margarita's foot was tapping quicker.

'Speak, Dietrich!' she said.

Dietrich declared to the Club that at this point he muttered, 'We love
you.' Margarita was glad to believe he had not spoken of himself. He then
informed her of the fears entertained by the Club, sworn to watch over
and protect her, regarding Farina's arts.

'And what fear you?' said Margarita.

'We fear, sweet mistress, he may be in league with Sathanas,' replied
Dietrich.

'Truly, then,' said Margarita, 'of all the youths in Cologne he is the
least like his confederate.'

Dietrich gulped and winked, like a patient recovering wry-faced from an
abhorred potion.

'We have warned you, Fraulein Groschen!' he exclaimed. 'It now becomes
our duty to see that you are not snared.'

Margarita reddened, and returned: 'You are kind. But I am a Christian
maiden and not a Pagan soldan, and I do not require a body of tawny
guards at my heels.'

Thereat she flung back to her companions, and began staining her pretty
mouth with grapes anew.




THE TAPESTRY WORD

Fair maids will have their hero in history. Siegfried was Margarita's
chosen. She sang of Siegfried all over the house. 'O the old days of
Germany, when such a hero walked!' she sang.

'And who wins Margarita,' mused Farina, 'happier than Siegfried, has in
his arms Brunhild and Chrimhild together!'

Crowning the young girl's breast was a cameo, and the skill of some
cunning artist out of Welschland had wrought on it the story of the
Drachenfels. Her bosom heaved the battle up and down.

This cameo was a north star to German manhood, but caused many chaste
expressions of abhorrence from Aunt Lisbeth, Gottlieb's unmarried sister,
who seemed instinctively to take part with the Dragon. She was a
frail-fashioned little lady, with a face betokening the perpetual smack
of lemon, and who reigned in her brother's household when the good wife
was gone. Margarita's robustness was beginning to alarm and shock Aunt
Lisbeth's sealed stock of virtue.

'She must be watched, such a madl as that,' said Aunt Lisbeth. 'Ursula!
what limbs she has!'

Margarita was watched; but the spy being neither foe nor friend, nothing
was discovered against her. This did not satisfy Aunt Lisbeth, whose own
suspicion was her best witness. She allowed that Margarita dissembled
well.

'But,' said she to her niece, 'though it is good in a girl not to flaunt
these naughtinesses in effrontery, I care for you too much not to say--Be
what you seem, my little one!'

'And that am I!' exclaimed Margarita, starting up and towering.

'Right good, my niece,' Lisbeth squealed; 'but now Frau Groschen lies in
God's acre, you owe your duty to me, mind! Did you confess last week?'

'From beginning to end,' replied Margarita.

Aunt Lisbeth fixed pious reproach on Margarita's cameo.

'And still you wear that thing?'

'Why not?' said Margarita.

'Girl! who would bid you set it in such a place save Satan? Oh, thou poor
lost child! that the eyes of the idle youths may be drawn there! and thou
become his snare to others, Margarita! What was that Welsh wandering
juggler but the foul fiend himself, mayhap, thou maiden of sin! They say
he has been seen in Cologne lately. He was swarthy as Satan and limped of
one leg. Good Master in heaven, protect us! it was Satan himself I could
swear!'

Aunt Lisbeth crossed brow and breast.

Margarita had commenced fingering the cameo, as if to tear it away; but
Aunt Lisbeth's finish made her laugh outright.

'Where I see no harm, aunty, I shall think the good God is,' she
answered; 'and where I see there's harm, I shall think Satan lurks.'

A simper of sour despair passed over Aunt Lisbeth. She sighed, and was
silent, being one of those very weak reeds who are easily vanquished and
never overcome.

'Let us go on with the Tapestry, child,' said she.

Now, Margarita was ambitious of completing a certain Tapestry for
presentation to Kaiser Heinrich on his entry into Cologne after his last
campaign on the turbaned Danube. The subject was again her beloved
Siegfried slaying the Dragon on Drachenfels. Whenever Aunt Lisbeth
indulged in any bitter virginity, and was overmatched by Margarita's
frank maidenhood, she hung out this tapestry as a flag of truce. They
were working it in bits, not having contrivances to do it in a piece.
Margarita took Siegfried and Aunt Lisbeth the Dragon. They shared the
crag between them. A roguish gleam of the Rhine toward Nonnenwerth could
be already made out, Roland's Corner hanging like a sentinel across the
chanting island, as one top-heavy with long watch.

Aunt Lisbeth was a great proficient in the art, and had taught Margarita.
The little lady learnt it, with many other gruesome matters, in the
Palatine of Bohemia's family. She usually talked of the spectres of
Hollenbogenblitz Castle in the passing of the threads. Those were dismal
spectres in Bohemia, smelling of murder and the charnel-breath of
midnight. They uttered noises that wintered the blood, and revealed
sights that stiffened hair three feet long; ay, and kept it stiff!

Margarita placed herself on a settle by the low-arched window, and Aunt
Lisbeth sat facing her. An evening sun blazoned the buttresses of the
Cathedral, and shadowed the workframes of the peaceful couple to a
temperate light. Margarita unrolled a sampler sheathed with twists of
divers coloured threads, and was soon busy silver-threading Siegfried's
helm and horns.

'I told you of the steward, poor Kraut, did I not, child?' inquired Aunt
Lisbeth, quietly clearing her throat.

'Many times!' said Margarita, and went on humming over her knee

             'Her love was a Baron,
              A Baron so bold;
             She loved him for love,
              He loved her for gold.'

'He must see for himself, and be satisfied,' continued Aunt Lisbeth; 'and
Holy Thomas to warn him for an example! Poor Kraut!'

'Poor Kraut!' echoed Margarita.

       'The King loved wine, and the Knight loved wine,
         And they loved the summer weather:
        They might have loved each other well,
         But for one they loved together.'

'You may say, poor Kraut, child!' said Aunt Lisbeth. 'Well! his face was
before that as red as this dragon's jaw, and ever after he went about as
white as a pullet's egg. That was something wonderful!' 'That was it!'
chimed Margarita.

          'O the King he loved his lawful wife,
            The Knight a lawless lady:
          And ten on one-made ringing strife,
            Beneath the forest shady.'

'Fifty to one, child!' said Aunt Lisbeth: 'You forget the story. They
made Kraut sit with them at the jabbering feast, the only mortal there.
The walls were full of eye-sockets without eyes, but phosphorus instead,
burning blue and damp.'

'Not to-night, aunty dear! It frightens me so,' pleaded Margarita, for
she saw the dolor coming.

'Night! when it's broad mid-day, thou timid one! Good heaven take pity on
such as thou! The dish was seven feet in length by four broad. Kraut
measured it with his eye, and never forgot it. Not he! When the
dish-cover was lifted, there he saw himself lying, boiled!

"'I did not feel uncomfortable then," Kraut told us. "It seemed natural."

'His face, as it lay there, he says, was quite calm, only a little
wrinkled, and piggish-looking-like. There was the mole on his chin, and
the pucker under his left eyelid. Well! the Baron carved. All the guests
were greedy for a piece of him. Some cried out for breast; some for toes.
It was shuddering cold to sit and hear that! The Baroness said, "Cheek!"'

'Ah!' shrieked Margarita, 'that can I not bear! I will not hear it, aunt;
I will not!'

'Cheek!' Aunt Lisbeth reiterated, nodding to the floor.

Margarita put her fingers to her ears.

'Still, Kraut says, even then he felt nothing odd. Of course he was
horrified to be sitting with spectres as you and I should be; but the
first tremble of it was over. He had plunged into the bath of horrors,
and there he was. I 've heard that you must pronounce the names of the
Virgin and Trinity, sprinkling water round you all the while for three
minutes; and if you do this without interruption, everything shall
disappear. So they say. "Oh! dear heaven of mercy!" says Kraut, "what I
felt when the Baron laid his long hunting-knife across my left cheek!"'

Here Aunt Lisbeth lifted her eyes to dote upon Margarita's fright. She
was very displeased to find her niece, with elbows on the window-sill and
hands round her head, quietly gazing into the street.

She said severely, 'Where did you learn that song you were last singing,
Margarita? Speak, thou girl!'

Margarita laughed.

       'The thrush, and the lark, and the blackbird,
         They taught me how to sing:
        And O that the hawk would lend his eye,
         And the eagle lend his wing.'

'I will not hear these shameless songs,' exclaimed Aunt Lisbeth.

       'For I would view the lands they view,
         And be where they have been:
        It is not enough to be singing
         For ever in dells unseen!'

A voice was heard applauding her. 'Good! right good! Carol again,
Gretelchen! my birdie!'

Margarita turned, and beheld her father in the doorway. She tripped
toward him, and heartily gave him their kiss of meeting. Gottlieb glanced
at the helm of Siegfried.

'Guessed the work was going well; you sing so lightsomely to-day, Grete!
Very pretty! And that's Drachenfels? Bones of the Virgins! what a bold
fellow was Siegfried, and a lucky, to have the neatest lass in
Deutschland in love with him. Well, we must marry her to Siegfried after
all, I believe! Aha? or somebody as good as Siegfried. So chirrup on, my
darling!'

'Aunt Lisbeth does not approve of my songs,' replied Margarita,
untwisting some silver threads.

'Do thy father's command, girl!' said Aunt Lisbeth.

          'And doing his command,
            Should I do a thing of ill,
          I'd rather die to his lovely face,
            Than wanton at his will.'

'There--there,' said Aunt Lisbeth, straining out her fingers; 'you see,
Gottlieb, what over-indulgence brings her to. Not another girl in blessed
Rhineland, and Bohemia to boot, dared say such words!--than--I can't
repeat them!--don't ask me!--She's becoming a Frankish girl!'

'What ballad's that?' said Gottlieb, smiling.

'The Ballad of Holy Ottilia; and her lover was sold to darkness. And she
loved him--loved him----'

'As you love Siegfried, you little one?'

'More, my father; for she saw Winkried, and I never saw Siegfried. Ah! if
I had seen Siegfried! Never mind. She loved him; but she loved Virtue
more. And Virtue is the child of God, and the good God forgave her for
loving Winkried, the Devil's son, because she loved Virtue more, and He
rescued her as she was being dragged down--down--down, and was half
fainting with the smell of brimstone--rescued her and had her carried
into His Glory, head and feet, on the wings of angels, before all men, as
a hope to little maidens.

          'And when I thought that I was lost
            I found that I was saved,
          And I was borne through blessed clouds,
            Where the banners of bliss were waved.'

'And so you think you, too, may fall in, love with Devils' sons, girl?'
was Aunt Lisbeth's comment.

'Do look at Lisbeth's Dragon, little Heart! it's so like!' said Margarita
to her father.

Old Gottlieb twitted his hose, and chuckled.

'She's my girl! that may be seen,' said he, patting her, and wheezed up
from his chair to waddle across to the Dragon. But Aunt Lisbeth tartly
turned the Dragon to the wall.

'It is not yet finished, Gottlieb, and must not be looked at,' she
interposed. 'I will call for wood, and see to a fire: these evenings of
Spring wax cold': and away whimpered Aunt Lisbeth.

Margarita sang:

          'I with my playmates,
            In riot and disorder,
          Were gathering herb and blossom
            Along the forest border.'

'Thy mother's song, child of my heart!' said Gottlieb; 'but vex not good
Lisbeth: she loves thee!'

          'And do you think she loves me?
            And will you say 'tis true?
          O, and will she have me,
            When I come up to woo?'

'Thou leaping doe! thou chattering pie!' said Gottlieb.

          'She shall have ribbons and trinkets,
            And shine like a morn of May,
          When we are off to the little hill-church,
            Our flowery bridal way.'

'That she shall; and something more!' cried Gottlieb. 'But, hark thee,
Gretelchen; the Kaiser will be here in three days. Thou dear one! had I
not stored and hoarded all for thee, I should now have my feet on a
hearthstone where even he might warm his boot. So get thy best dresses
and jewels in order, and look thyself; proud as any in the land. A simple
burgher's daughter now, Grete; but so shalt thou not end, my butterfly,
or there's neither worth nor wit in Gottlieb Groschen!'

'Three days!' Margarita exclaimed; 'and the helm not finished, and the
tapestry-pieces not sewed and joined, and the water not shaded off.--Oh!
I must work night and day.'

'Child! I'll have no working at night! Your rosy cheeks will soon be
sucked out by oil-light, and you look no better than poor tallow Court
beauties--to say nothing of the danger. This old house saw Charles the
Great embracing the chief magistrate of his liege city yonder. Some swear
he slept in it. He did not sneeze at smaller chambers than our Kaisers
abide. No gold ceilings with cornice carvings, but plain wooden beams.'

          'Know that the men of great renown,
            Were men of simple needs:
          Bare to the Lord they laid them down,
            And slept on mighty deeds.'

'God wot, there's no emptying thy store of ballads, Grete: so much shall
be said of thee. Yes; times are changeing: We're growing degenerate. Look
at the men of Linz now to what they were! Would they have let the lads of
Andernach float down cabbage-stalks to them without a shy back? And why?
All because they funk that brigand-beast Werner, who gets redemption from
Laach, hard by his hold, whenever he commits a crime worth paying for. As
for me, my timber and stuffs must come down stream, and are too good for
the nixen under Rhine, or think you I would acknowledge him with a toll,
the hell-dog? Thunder and lightning! if old scores could be rubbed out on
his hide!'

Gottlieb whirled a thong-lashing arm in air, and groaned of law and
justice. What were they coming to!

Margarita softened the theme with a verse:

          'And tho' to sting his enemy,
          Is sweetness to the angry bee,
          The angry bee must busy be,
          Ere sweet of sweetness hiveth he.

The arch thrill of his daughter's voice tickled Gottlieb. 'That's it,
birdie! You and the proverb are right. I don't know which is best,

            'Better hive
             And keep alive
             Than vengeance wake
             With that you take.'

A clatter in the cathedral square brought Gottlieb on his legs to the
window. It was a company of horsemen sparkling in harness. One trumpeter
rode at the side of the troop, and in front a standard-bearer, matted
down the chest with ochre beard, displayed aloft to the good citizens of
Cologne, three brown hawks, with birds in their beaks, on an azure
stardotted field.

'Holy Cross!' exclaimed Gottlieb, low in his throat; 'the arms of Werner!
Where got he money to mount his men? Why, this is daring all Cologne in
our very teeth! 'Fend that he visit me now! Ruin smokes in that ruffian's
track. I 've felt hot and cold by turns all day.'

The horsemen came jingling carelessly along the street in scattered twos
and threes, laughing together, and singling out the maidens at the
gable-shadowed windows with hawking eyes. The good citizens of Cologne
did not look on them favourably. Some showed their backs and gruffly
banged their doors: others scowled and pocketed their fists: not a few
slunk into the side alleys like well-licked curs, and scurried off with
forebent knees. They were in truth ferocious-looking fellows these trusty
servants of the robber Baron Werner, of Werner's Eck, behind Andernach.
Leather, steel, and dust, clad them from head to foot; big and black as
bears; wolf-eyed, fox-nosed. They glistened bravely in the falling beams
of the sun, and Margarita thrust her fair braided yellow head a little
forward over her father's shoulder to catch the whole length of the grim
cavalcade. One of the troop was not long in discerning the young beauty.
He pointed her boldly out to a comrade, who approved his appetite, and
referred her to a third. The rest followed lead, and Margarita was as one
spell-struck when she became aware that all those hungry eyes were
preying on hers. Old Gottlieb was too full of his own fears to think for
her, and when he drew in his head rather suddenly, it was with a dismal
foreboding that Werner's destination in Cologne was direct to the house
of Gottlieb Groschen, for purposes only too well to be divined.

'Devil's breeches!' muttered Gottlieb; 'look again, Grete, and see if
that hell-troop stop the way outside.'

Margarita's cheeks were overflowing with the offended rose.

'I will not look at them again, father.'

Gottlieb stared, and then patted her.

'I would I were a man, father!'

Gottlieb smiled, and stroked his beard.

'Oh! how I burn!'

And the girl shivered visibly.

'Grete! mind to be as much of a woman as you can, and soon such raff as
this you may sweep away, like cobwebs, and no harm done.'

He was startled by a violent thumping at the streetdoor, and as brazen a
blast as if the dead were being summoned. Aunt Lisbeth entered, and
flitted duskily round the room, crying:

'We are lost: they are upon us! better death with a bodkin! Never shall
it be said of me; never! the monsters!'

Then admonishing them to lock, bar, bolt, and block up every room in the
house, Aunt Lisbeth perched herself on the edge of a chair, and reversed
the habits of the screech-owl, by being silent when stationary.

'There's nothing to fear for you, Lisbeth,' said Gottlieb, with
discourteous emphasis.

'Gottlieb! do you remember what happened at the siege of Mainz? and poor
Marthe Herbstblum, who had hoped to die as she was; and Dame
Altknopfchen, and Frau Kaltblut, and the old baker, Hans Topf's sister,
all of them as holy as abbesses, and that did not save them! and nothing
will from such godless devourers.'

Gottlieb was gone, having often before heard mention of the calamity
experienced by these fated women.

'Comfort thee, good heart, on my breast,' said Margarita, taking Lisbeth
to that sweet nest of peace and fortitude.

'Margarita! 'tis your doing! have I not said--lure them not, for they
swarm too early upon us! And here they are! and, perhaps, in five minutes
all will be over!

Herr Je!--What, you are laughing! Heavens of goodness, the girl is
delighted!'

Here a mocking ha-ha! accompanied by a thundering snack at the door,
shook the whole house, and again the trumpet burst the ears with fury.

This summons, which seemed to Aunt Lisbeth final, wrought a strange
composure in her countenance. She was very pale, but spread her dress
decently, as if fear had departed, and clasped her hands on her knees.

'The will of the Lord above must be done,' said she; 'it is impious to
complain when we are given into the hand of the Philistines. Others have
been martyred, and were yet acceptable.'

To this heroic speech she added, with cold energy: 'Let them come!'

'Aunt,' cried Margarita, 'I hear my father's voice with those men. Aunty!
I will not let him be alone. I must go down to him. You will be safe
here. I shall come to you if there's cause for alarm.'

And in spite of Aunt Lisbeth's astonished shriek of remonstrance, she
hurried off to rejoin Gottlieb.




THE WAGER

Ere Margarita had reached the landing of the stairs, she repented her
haste and shrank back. Wrapt in a thunder of oaths, she distinguished:
''Tis the little maiden we want; let's salute her and begone! or cap your
skull with something thicker than you've on it now, if you want a whole
one, happy father!'

'Gottlieb von Groschen I am,' answered her father, 'and the Kaiser----'

''S as fond of a pretty girl as we are! Down with her, and no more
drivelling! It's only for a moment, old Measure and Scales!'

'I tell you, rascals, I know your master, and if you're not punished for
this, may I die a beggar!' exclaimed Gottlieb, jumping with rage.

'May you die as rich as an abbot! And so you will, if you don't bring her
down, for I've sworn to see her; there 's the end of it, man!'

'I'll see, too, if the laws allow this villany!' cried Gottlieb.
'Insulting a peaceful citizen! in his own house! a friend of your
emperor! Gottlieb von Groschen!'

'Groschen? We're cousins, then! You wouldn't shut out your nearest kin?
Devil's lightning! Don't you know me? Pfennig? Von Pfennig! This here's
Heller: that's Zwanziger: all of us Vons, every soul! You're not decided?
This'll sharpen you, my jolly King Paunch!'

And Margarita heard the ruffian step as if to get swing for a blow. She
hurried into the passage, and slipping in front of her father, said to
his assailant:

'You have asked for me! I am here!'

Her face was colourless, and her voice seemed to issue from between a
tightened cord. She stood with her left foot a little in advance, and her
whole body heaving and quivering: her arms folded and pressed hard below
her bosom: her eyes dilated to a strong blue: her mouth ashy white. A
strange lustre, as of suppressed internal fire, flickered over her.

'My name 's Schwartz Thier, and so 's my nature!' said the fellow with a
grin; 'but may I never smack lips with a pretty girl again, if I harm
such a young beauty as this! Friendly dealing's my plan o' life.'

'Clear out of my house, then, fellow, and here's money for you,' said
Gottlieb, displaying a wrathfully-trembling handful of coin.

'Pish! money! forty times that wouldn't cover my bet! And if it did?
Shouldn't I be disgraced? jeered at for a sheep-heart? No, I'm no ninny,
and not to be diddled. I'll talk to the young lady! Silence, out there!
all's going proper': this to his comrades through the door. 'So, my
beautiful maiden! thus it stands: We saw you at the window, looking like
a fresh rose with a gold crown on. Here are we poor fellows come to
welcome the Kaiser. I began to glorify you. "Schwartz Thier!" says Henker
Rothhals to me, "I'll wager you odds you don't have a kiss of that fine
girl within twenty minutes, counting from the hand-smack!" Done! was my
word, and we clapped our fists together. Now, you see, that's
straightforward! All I want is, not to lose my money and be made a fool
of--leaving alone that sugary mouth which makes mine water'; and he drew
the back of his hand along his stubbled jaws: 'So, come! don't hesitate!
no harm to you, my beauty, but a compliment, and Schwartz Thier's your
friend and anything else you like for ever after. Come, time's up, pretty
well.'

Margarita leaned to her father a moment as if mortal sickness had seized
her. Then cramping her hands and feet, she said in his ear, 'Leave me to
my own care; go, get the men to protect thee'; and ordered Schwartz Thier
to open the door wide.

Seeing Gottlieb would not leave her, she joined her hands, and begged
him. 'The good God will protect me! I will overmatch these men. Look, my
father! they dare not strike me in the street: you they would fell
without pity. Go! what they dare in a house, they dare not in the
street.'

Schwartz Thier had opened the door. At sight of Margarita, the troop gave
a shout.

'Now! on the doorstep, full in view, my beauteous one! that they may see
what a lucky devil I am--and have no doubts about the handing over.'

Margarita looked behind. Gottlieb was still there, every member of him
quaking like a bog under a heavy heel. She ran to him. 'My father! I have
a device wilt thou spoil it, and give me to this beast? You can do
nothing, nothing! protect yourself and save me!'

'Cologne! broad day!' muttered Gottlieb, as if the enormity had
prostrated his belief in facts; and moved slowly back.

Margarita strode to the door-step. Schwartz Thier was awaiting her, his
arm circled out, and his leering face ducked to a level with his
victim's. This rough show of gallantry proved costly to him. As he was
gently closing his iron hold about her, enjoying before hand with grim
mouthridges the flatteries of triumph, Margarita shot past him through
the door, and was already twenty paces beyond the troop before either of
them thought of pursuing her. At the first sound of a hoof, Henker
Rothhals seized the rider's bridle-rein, and roared: 'Fair play for a
fair bet! leave all to the Thier!' The Thier, when he had recovered from
his amazement, sought for old Gottlieb to give him a back-hit, as
Margarita foresaw that he would. Not finding him at hand, out lumbered
the fellow as swiftly as his harness would allow, and caught a glimpse of
Margarita rapidly fleeting up the cathedral square.

'Only five minutes, Schwartz Thier!' some of the troop sung out.

'The devil can do his business in one,' was the retort, and Schwartz
Thier swung himself on his broad-backed charger, and gored the fine beast
till she rattled out a blast of sparkles from the flint.

In a minute he drew up in front of Margarita.

'So! you prefer settling this business in the square.

Good! my choice sweetheart!' and he sprang to her side.

The act of flight had touched the young girl's heart with the spirit of
flight. She crouched like a winded hare under the nose of the hound, and
covered her face with her two hands. Margarita was no wisp in weight, but
Schwartz Thier had her aloft in his arm as easily as if he had tossed up
a kerchief.

'Look all, and witness!' he shouted, lifting the other arm.

Henker Rothhals and the rest of the troop looked, as they came trotting
to the scene, with the coolness of umpires: but they witnessed something
other than what Schwartz Thier proposed. This was the sight of a
formidable staff, whirling an unfriendly halo over the head of the Thier,
and descending on it with such honest intent to confound and overthrow
him, that the Thier succumbed to its force without argument, and the
square echoed blow and fall simultaneously. At the same time the wielder
of this sound piece of logic seized Margarita, and raised a shout in the
square for all true men to stand by him in rescuing a maiden from the
clutch of brigands and ravishers. A crowd was collecting, but seemed to
consider the circle now formed by the horsemen as in a manner charmed,
for only one, a fair slender youth, came forward and ranged himself
beside the stranger.

'Take thou the maiden: I'll keep to the staff,' said this latter,
stumbling over his speech as if he was in a foreign land among old roots
and wolfpits which had already shaken out a few of his teeth, and made
him cautious about the remainder.

'Can it be Margarita!' exclaimed the youth, bending to her, and calling
to her: 'Margarita! Fraulein Groschen!'

She opened her eyes, shuddered, and said: 'I was not afraid! Am I safe?'

'Safe while I have life, and this good friend.'

'Where is my father?'

'I have not seen him.'

'And you--who are you? Do I owe this to you?'

'Oh! no! no! Me you owe nothing.'

Margarita gazed hurriedly round, and at her feet there lay the Thier with
his steel-cap shining in dints, and three rivulets of blood coursing down
his mottled forehead. She looked again at the youth, and a blush of
recognition gave life to her cheeks.

'I did not know you. Pardon me. Farina! what thanks can reward such
courage! Tell me! shall we go?'

'The youth eyed her an instant, but recovering himself, took a rapid
survey, and called to the stranger to follow and help give the young
maiden safe conduct home.

'Just then Henker Rothhals bellowed, 'Time's up!' He was answered by a
chorus of agreement from the troop. They had hitherto patiently acted
their parts as spectators, immovable on their horses. The assault on the
Thier was all in the play, and a visible interference of fortune in
favour of Henker Rothhals. Now general commotion shuttled them, and the
stranger's keen hazel eyes read their intentions rightly when he lifted
his redoubtable staff in preparation for another mighty swoop, this time
defensive. Rothhals, and half a dozen others, with a war-cry of curses,
spurred their steeds at once to ride him down. They had not reckoned the
length and good-will of their antagonist's weapon. Scarce were they in
motion, when round it whizzed, grazing the nostrils of their horses with
a precision that argued practice in the feat, and unhorsing two, Rothhals
among the number. He dropped heavily on his head, and showed signs of
being as incapable of combat as the Thier. A cheer burst from the crowd,
but fell short.

The foremost of their number was struck flat to the earth by a fellow of
the troop.

Calling on St. George, his patron saint, the stranger began
systematically to make a clear ring in his path forward. Several of the
horsemen essayed a cut at his arm with their long double-handed swords,
but the horses could not be brought a second time to the edge of the
magic circle; and the blood of these warriors being thoroughly up, they
now came at him on foot. In their rage they would have made short work
with the three, in spite of the magistracy of Cologne, had they not been
arrested by cries of 'Werner! Werner!'

At the South-west end of the square, looking Rhinewards, rode the
marauder Baron, in full armour, helm and hauberk, with a single retainer
in his rear. He had apparently caught sight of the brawl, and, either
because he distinguished his own men, or was seeking his natural element,
hastened up for his share in it, which was usually that of the king of
beasts. His first call was for Schwartz Thier. The men made way, and he
beheld his man in no condition to make military responses. He shouted for
Henker Rothhals, and again the men opened their ranks mutely, exhibiting
the two stretched out in diverse directions, with their feet slanting to
a common point. The Baron glared; then caught off his mailed glove, and
thrust it between his teeth. A rasping gurgle of oaths was all they
heard, and presently surged up,

'Who was it?'

Margarita's eyes were shut. She opened them fascinated with horror. There
was an unearthly awful and comic mixture of sounds in Werner's querulous
fury, that was like the noise of a complaining bear, rolling up from
hollow-chested menace to yawning lament. Never in her life had Margarita
such a shock of fear. The half gasp of a laugh broke on her trembling
lips. She stared at Werner, and was falling; but Farina's arm clung
instantly round her waist. The stranger caught up her laugh, loud and
hearty.

'As for who did it, Sir Baron,' he cried, is a cheery tone, 'I am the
man! As you may like to know why--and that's due to you and me both of
us--all I can say is, the Black Muzzle yonder lying got his settler for
merry-making with this peaceful maiden here, without her consent--an
offence in my green island they reckon a crack o' the sconce light
basting for, I warrant all company present,' and he nodded sharply about.
'As for the other there, who looks as if a rope had been round his neck
once and shirked its duty, he counts his wages for helping the devil in
his business, as will any other lad here who likes to come on and try.'

Werner himself, probably, would have given him the work he wanted; but
his eye had sidled a moment over Margarita, and the hardly-suppressed
applause of the crowd at the stranger's speech failed to bring his ire
into action this solitary time.

'Who is the maiden?' he asked aloud.

'Fraulein von Groschen,' replied Farina.

'Von Groschen! Von Groschen! the daughter of Gottlieb
Groschen?--Rascals!' roared the Baron, turning on his men, and out poured
a mud-spring of filthy oaths and threats, which caused Henker Rothhals,
who had opened his eyes, to close them again, as if he had already gone
to the place of heat.

'Only lend me thy staff, friend,' cried Werner.

'Not I! thwack 'em with your own wood,' replied the stranger, and fell
back a leg.

Werner knotted his stringy brows, and seemed torn to pieces with the
different pulling tides of his wrath. He grasped the mane of his horse
and flung abroad handfuls, till the splendid animal reared in agony.

'You shall none of you live over this night, villains! I 'll hang you,
every hag's son! My last orders were,--Keep quiet in the city, ye devil's
brood. Take that! and that!' laying at them with his bare sword. 'Off
with you, and carry these two pigs out of sight quickly, or I'll have
their heads, and make sure o' them.'

The latter injunction sprang from policy, for at the head of the chief
street there was a glitter of the city guard, marching with shouldered
spears.

'Maiden,' said Werner, with a bull's bow, 'let me conduct thee to thy
father.'

Margarita did not reply; but gave her hand to Farina, and took a step
closer to the stranger.

Werner's brows grew black.

'Enough to have saved you, fair maid,' he muttered hoarsely. 'Gratitude
never was a woman's gift. Say to your father that I shall make excuses to
him for the conduct of my men.'

Whereupon, casting a look of leisurely scorn toward the guard coming up
in the last beams of day, the Baron shrugged his huge shoulders to an
altitude expressing the various contemptuous shades of feudal coxcombry,
stuck one leather-ruffled arm in his side, and jolted off at an easy
pace.

'Amen!' ejaculated the stranger, leaning on his staff. 'There are Barons
in my old land; but never a brute beast in harness.'

Margarita stood before him, and took his two hands.

'You will come with me to my father! He will thank you. I cannot. You
will come?'

Tears and a sob of relief started from her.

The city guard, on seeing Werner's redoubtable back turned, had adopted
double time, and now came panting up, while the stranger bent smiling
under a fresh overflow of innocent caresses. Margarita was caught to her
father's breast.

'You shall have vengeance for this, sweet chuck,' cried old Gottlieb in
the intervals of his hugs.

'Fear not, my father; they are punished': and Margarita related the story
of the stranger's prowess, elevating him into a second Siegfried. The
guard huzzaed him, but did not pursue the Baron.

Old Gottlieb, without hesitation, saluted the astonished champion with a
kiss on either cheek.

'My best friend! You have saved my daughter from indignity! Come with us
home, if you can believe that a home where the wolves come daring us,
dragging our dear ones from our very doorsteps. Come, that we may thank
you under a roof at least. My little daughter! Is she not a brave lass?'

'She's nothing less than the white rose of Germany,' said the stranger,
with a good bend of the shoulders to Margarita.

'So she's called,' exclaimed Gottlieb; 'she 's worthy to be a man!'

'Men would be the losers, then, more than they could afford,' replied the
stranger, with a ringing laugh.

'Come, good friend,' said Gottlieb; 'you must need refreshment. Prove you
are a true hero by your appetite. As Charles the Great said to Archbishop
Turpin, "I conquered the world because Nature gave me a gizzard; for
everywhere the badge of subjection is a poor stomach." Come, all! A day
well ended, notwithstanding!'




THE SILVER ARROW

At the threshold of Gottlieb's house a number of the chief burgesses of
Cologne had corporated spontaneously to condole with him. As he came
near, they raised a hubbub of gratulation. Strong were the expressions of
abhorrence and disgust of Werner's troop in which these excellent
citizens clothed their outraged feelings; for the insult to Gottlieb was
the insult of all. The Rhinestream taxes were provoking enough to endure;
but that the licence of these free-booting bands should extend to the
homes of free and peaceful men, loyal subjects of the Emperor, was a sign
that the evil had reached from pricks to pokes, as the saying went, and
must now be met as became burgesses of ancient Cologne, and by joint
action destroyed.

'In! in, all of you!' said Gottlieb, broadening his smile to suit the
many. 'We 'll talk about that in-doors. Meantime, I've got a hero to
introduce to you: flesh and blood! no old woman's coin and young girl's
dream-o'day: the honest thing, and a rarity, my masters. All that over
some good Rhine-juice from above Bacharach. In, and welcome, friends!'

Gottlieb drew the stranger along with him under the carved old oak-wood
portals, and the rest paired, and reverentially entered in his wake.
Margarita, to make up for this want of courtesy, formed herself the last
of the procession. She may have had another motive, for she took occasion
there to whisper something to Farina, bringing sun and cloud over his
countenance in rapid flushes. He seemed to remonstrate in dumb show; but
she, with an attitude of silence, signified her wish to seal the
conversation, and he drooped again. On the door step she paused a moment,
and hung her head pensively, as if moved by a reminiscence. The youth had
hurried away some strides. Margarita looked after him. His arms were
straightened to his flanks, his hands clenched, and straining out from
the wrist. He had the aspect of one tugging against the restraint of a
chain that suddenly let out link by link to his whole force.

'Farina!' she called; and wound him back with a run. 'Farina! You do not
think me ungrateful? I could not tell my father in the crowd what you did
for me. He shall know. He will thank you. He does not understand you now,
Farina. He will. Look not so sorrowful. So much I would say to you.'

So much was rushing on her mind, that her maidenly heart became unruly,
and warned her to beware.

The youth stood as if listening to a nightingale of the old woods, after
the first sweet stress of her voice was in his ear. When she ceased, he
gazed into her eyes. They were no longer deep and calm like forest lakes;
the tender-glowing blue quivered, as with a spark of the young girl's
soul, in the beams of the moon then rising.

'Oh, Margarita!' said the youth, in tones that sank to sighs: 'what am I
to win your thanks, though it were my life for such a boon!'

He took her hand, and she did not withdraw it. Twice his lips dwelt upon
those pure fingers.

'Margarita: you forgive me: I have been so long without hope. I have
kissed your hand, dearest of God's angels!'

She gently restrained the full white hand in his pressure.

'Margarita! I have thought never before death to have had this sacred
bliss. I am guerdoned in advance for every grief coming before death.'

She dropped on him one look of a confiding softness that was to the youth
like the opened gate of the innocent garden of her heart.

'You pardon me, Margarita? I may call you my beloved? strive, wait, pray,
hope, for you, my star of life?'

Her face was so sweet a charity!

'Dear love! one word!--or say nothing, but remain, and move not. So
beautiful you are! Oh, might I kneel to you here; dote on you; worship
this white hand for ever.'

The colour had passed out of her cheeks like a blissful western red
leaving rich paleness in the sky; and with her clear brows levelled at
him, her bosom lifting more and more rapidly, she struggled against the
charm that was on her, and at last released her hand.

'I must go. I cannot stay. Pardon you? Who might not be proud of your
love!--Farewell!'

She turned to move away, but lingered a step from him, hastily touching
her bosom and either hand, as if to feel for a brooch or a ring. Then she
blushed, drew the silver arrow from the gathered gold-shot braids above
her neck, held it out to him, and was gone.

Farina clutched the treasure, and reeled into the street. Half a dozen
neighbours were grouped by the door.

'What 's the matter in Master Groschen's house now?' one asked, as he
plunged into the midst of them.

'Matter?' quoth the joy-drunken youth, catching at the word, and mused
off into raptures; 'There never was such happiness! 'Tis paradise within,
exile without. But what exile! A star ever in the heavens to lighten the
road and cheer the path of the banished one'; and he loosened his vest
and hugged the cold shaft on his breast.

'What are you talking and capering at, fellow?' exclaimed another: 'Can't
you answer about those shrieks, like a Christian, you that have just come
out of the house? Why, there's shrieking now! It 's a woman. Thousand
thunders! it sounds like the Frau Lisbeth's voice. What can be happening
to her?'

'Perhaps she's on fire,' was coolly suggested between two or three.

'Pity to see the old house burnt,' remarked one.

'House! The woman, man! the woman!'

'Ah!' replied the other, an ancient inhabitant of Cologne, shaking his
head, 'the house is oldest!'

Farina, now recovering his senses, heard shrieks that he recognized as
possible in the case of Aunt Lisbeth dreading the wickedness of an
opposing sex, and alarmed by the inrush of old Gottlieb's numerous
guests. To confirm him, she soon appeared, and hung herself halfway out
of one of the upper windows, calling desperately to St. Ursula for aid.
He thanked the old lady in his heart for giving him a pretext to enter
Paradise again; but before even love could speed him, Frau Lisbeth was
seized and dragged remorselessly out of sight, and he and the rosy room
darkened together.

Farina twice strode off to the Rhine-stream; as many times he returned.
It was hard to be away from her. It was harder to be near and not close.
His heart flamed into jealousy of the stranger. Everything threatened to
overturn his slight but lofty structure of bliss so suddenly shot into
the heavens. He had but to remember that his hand was on the silver
arrow, and a radiance broke upon his countenance, and a calm fell upon
his breast. 'It was a plight of her troth to me,' mused the youth. 'She
loves me! She would not trust her frank heart to speak. Oh, generous
young girl! what am I to dare hope for such a prize? for I never can be
worthy. And she is one who, giving her heart, gives it all. Do I not know
her? How lovely she looked thanking the stranger! The blue of her eyes,
the warm-lighted blue, seemed to grow full on the closing lids, like
heaven's gratitude. Her beauty is wonderful. What wonder, then, if he
loves her? I should think him a squire in his degree. There are squires
of high birth and low.'

So mused Farina with his arms folded and his legs crossed in the shadow
of Margarita's chamber. Gradually he fell into a kind of hazy doze. The
houses became branded with silver arrows. All up the Cathedral stone was
a glitter, and dance, and quiver of them. In the sky mazed confusion of
arrowy flights and falls. Farina beheld himself in the service of the
Emperor watching these signs, and expecting on the morrow to win glory
and a name for Margarita. Glory and the name now won, old Gottlieb was
just on the point of paternally blessing them, when a rude pat aroused
him from the delicious moon-dream.

'Hero by day! house-guard by night! That tells a tale,' said a cheerful
voice.

The moon was shining down the Cathedral square and street, and Farina saw
the stranger standing solid and ruddy before him. He was at first
prompted to resent such familiar handling, but the stranger's face was of
that bland honest nature which, like the sun, wins everywhere back a
reflection of its own kindliness.

'You are right,' replied Farina; 'so it is!'

'Pretty wines inside there, and a rare young maiden. She has a throat
like a nightingale, and more ballads at command than a piper's wallet.
Now, if I hadn't a wife at home.'

'You're married?' cried Farina, seizing the stranger's hand.

'Surely; and my lass can say something for herself on the score of brave
looks, as well as the best of your German maids here, trust me.'

Farina repressed an inclination to perform a few of those antics which
violent joy excites, and after rushing away and back, determined to give
his secret to the stranger.

'Look,' said he in a whisper, that opens the private doors of a
confidence.

But the stranger repeated the same word still more earnestly, and brought
Farina's eyes on a couple of dark figures moving under the Cathedral.

'Some lamb's at stake when the wolves are prowling,' he added: ''Tis now
two hours to the midnight. I doubt if our day's work be over till we hear
the chime, friend.'

'What interest do you take in the people of this house that you watch
over them thus?' asked Farina.

The stranger muffled a laugh in his beard.

'An odd question, good sooth. Why, in the first place, we like well
whatso we have done good work for. That goes for something. In the
second, I've broken bread in this house. Put down that in the reckoning.
In the third; well! in the third, add up all together, and the sum
total's at your service, young sir.'

Farina marked him closely. There was not a spot on his face for guile to
lurk in, or suspicion to fasten on. He caught the stranger's hand.

'You called me friend just now. Make me your friend. Look, I was going to
say: I love this maiden! I would die for her. I have loved her long. This
night she has given me a witness that my love is not vain. I am poor. She
is rich. I am poor, I said, and feel richer than the Kaiser with this she
has given me! Look, it is what our German girls slide in their back-hair,
this silver arrow!'

'A very pretty piece of heathenish wear!' exclaimed the stranger.

'Then, I was going to say--tell me, friend, of a way to win honour and
wealth quickly; I care not at how rare a risk. Only to wealth, or high
baronry, will her father give her!'

The stranger buzzed on his moustache in a pause of cool pity, such as
elders assume when young men talk of conquering the world for their
mistresses: and in truth it is a calm of mind well won!

'Things look so brisk at home here in the matter of the maiden, that I
should say, wait a while and watch your chance. But you're a boy of
pluck: I serve in the Kaiser's army, under my lord: the Kaiser will be
here in three days. If you 're of that mind then, I doubt little you may
get posted well: but, look again! there's a ripe brew yonder. Marry, you
may win your spurs this night even; who knows?--'S life! there's a tall
fellow joining those two lurkers.'

'Can you see into the murk shadow, Sir Squire?'

'Ay! thanks to your Styrian dungeons, where I passed a year's
apprenticeship:

       "I learnt to watch the rats and mice
         At play, with never a candle-end.
        They play'd so well; they sang so nice;
         They dubb'd me comrade; called me friend!"

So says the ballad of our red-beard king's captivity. All evil has a
good:

       "When our toes and chins are up,
        Poison plants make sweetest cup"

as the old wives mumble to us when we're sick. Heigho! would I were in
the little island well home again, though that were just their song of
welcome to me, as I am a Christian.'

'Tell me your name, friend,' said Farina.

'Guy's my name, young man: Goshawk's my title. Guy the Goshawk! so they
called me in my merry land. The cap sticks when it no longer fits. Then I
drove the arrow, and was down on my enemy ere he could ruffle a feather.
Now, what would be my nickname?

       "A change so sad, and a change so bad,
         Might set both Christian and heathen a sighing:
        Change is a curse, for it's all for the worse:
         Age creeps up, and youth is flying!"

and so on, with the old song. But here am I, and yonder's a game that
wants harrying; so we'll just begin to nose about them a bit.'

He crossed to the other side of the street, and Farina followed out of
the moonlight. The two figures and the taller one were evidently
observing them; for they also changed their position and passed behind an
angle of the Cathedral.

'Tell me how the streets cross all round the Cathedral you know the
city,' said the stranger, holding out his hand.

Farina traced with his finger a rough map of the streets on the
stranger's hand.

'Good! that's how my lord always marks the battlefield, and makes me show
him the enemy's posts. Forward, this way!'

He turned from the Cathedral, and both slid along close under the eaves
and front hangings of the houses. Neither spoke. Farina felt that he was
in the hands of a skilful captain, and only regretted the want of a
weapon to make harvest of the intended surprise; for he judged clearly
that those were fellows of Werner's band on the look-out. They wound down
numberless intersections of narrow streets with irregular-built houses
standing or leaning wry-faced in row, here a quaint-beamed cottage, there
almost a mansion with gilt arms, brackets, and devices. Oil-lamps unlit
hung at intervals by the corners, near a pale Christ on crucifix. Across
the passages they hung alight. The passages and alleys were too dusky and
close for the moon in her brightest ardour to penetrate; down the streets
a slender lane of white beams could steal: 'In all conscience,' as the
good citizens of Cologne declared, 'enough for those heathen hounds and
sons of the sinful who are abroad when God's own blessed lamp is out.'
So, when there was a moon, the expense of oil was saved to the Cologne
treasury, thereby satisfying the virtuous.

After incessant doubling here and there, listening to footfalls, and
themselves eluding a chase which their suspicious movements aroused, they
came upon the Rhine. A full flood of moonlight burnished the knightly
river in glittering scales, and plates, and rings, as headlong it rolled
seaward on from under crag and banner of old chivalry and rapine. Both
greeted the scene with a burst of pleasure. The grey mist of flats on the
south side glimmered delightful to their sight, coming from that drowsy
crowd and press of habitations; but the solemn glory of the river,
delaying not, heedless, impassioned-pouring on in some sublime conference
between it and heaven to the great marriage of waters, deeply shook
Farina's enamoured heart. The youth could not restrain his tears, as if a
magic wand had touched him. He trembled with love; and that delicate
bliss which maiden hope first showers upon us like a silver rain when she
has taken the shape of some young beauty and plighted us her fair
fleeting hand, tenderly embraced him.

As they were emerging into the spaces of the moon, a cheer from the
stranger arrested Farina.

'Seest thou? on the wharf there! that is the very one, the tallest of the
three. Lakin! but we shall have him.'

Wrapt in a long cloak, with low pointed cap and feather, stood the person
indicated. He appeared to be meditating on the flow of the water, unaware
of hostile presences, or quite regardless of them. There was a majesty in
his height and air, which made the advance of the two upon him more wary
and respectful than their first impulse had counselled. They could not
read his features, which were mantled behind voluminous folds: all save a
pair of very strange eyes, that, even as they gazed directly downward,
seemed charged with restless fiery liquid.

The two were close behind him: Guy the Goshawk prepared for one of those
fatal pounces on the foe that had won him his title. He consulted Farina
mutely, who Nodded readiness; but the instant after, a cry of anguish
escaped from the youth:

'Lost! gone! lost! Where is it? where! the arrow! The Silver Arrow! My
Margarita!'

Ere the echoes of his voice had ceased lamenting into the distance, they
found themselves alone on the wharf.




THE LILIES OF THE VALLEY

'He opened like a bat!' said the stranger.

'His shadow was red!' said Farina.

'He was off like an arrow!' said the stranger.

'Oh! pledge of my young love, how could I lose thee!' exclaimed the
youth, and his eyes were misted with tears.

Guy the Goshawk shook his brown locks gravely.

'Bring me a man, and I 'll stand up against him, whoever he be, like a
man; but this fellow has an ill scent and foreign ways about him, that he
has! His eye boils all down my backbone and tingles at my finger-tips.
Jesu, save us!'

'Save us!' repeated Farina, with the echo of a deadened soul.

They made the sign of the Cross, and purified the place with holy
ejaculations.

'I 've seen him at last; grant it be for the last time! That's my prayer,
in the name of the Virgin and Trinity,' said Guy. 'And now let's retrace
our steps: perchance we shall hunt up that bauble of yours, but I'm not
fit for mortal work this night longer.'

Burdened by their black encounter, the two passed again behind the
Cathedral. Farina's hungry glances devoured each footmark of their track.
Where the moon held no lantern for him, he went on his knees, and groped
for his lost treasure with a miser's eager patience of agony, drawing his
hand slowly over the stony kerb and between the interstices of the
thick-sown flints, like an acute-feeling worm. Despair grew heavy in his
breast. At every turning he invoked some good new saint to aid him, and
ran over all the propitiations his fancy could suggest and his religious
lore inspire. By-and-by they reached the head of the street where
Margarita dwelt. The moon was dipping down, and paler, as if touched with
a warning of dawn. Chill sighs from the open land passed through the
spaces of the city. On certain coloured gables and wood-crossed fronts,
the white light lingered; but mostly the houses were veiled in dusk, and
Gottlieb's house was confused in the twilight with those of his
neighbours, notwithstanding its greater stateliness and the old grandeur
of its timbered bulk. They determined to take up their position there
again, and paced on, Farina with his head below his shoulders, and Guy
nostril in air, as if uneasy in his sense of smell.

On the window-ledge of a fair-fitted domicile stood a flower-pot, a rude
earthen construction in the form of a river-barge, wherein grew some
valley lilies that drooped their white bells over the sides.

The Goshawk eyed them wistfully.

'I must smell those blessed flowers if I wish to be saved!' and he
stamped resolve with his staff.

Moved by this exclamation, Farina gazed up at them.

'How like a company of maidens they look floating in the vessel of life!'
he said.

Guy curiously inspected Farina and the flower-pot, shrugged, and with his
comrade's aid, mounted to a level with it, seized the prize and
redescended.

'There,' he cried, between long luxurious sniffs, 'that chases him out of
the nostril sooner than aught else, the breath of a fresh lass-like
flower! I was tormented till now by the reek of the damned rising from
under me. This is heaven's own incense, I think!'

And Guy inhaled the flowers and spake prettily to them.

'They have a melancholy sweetness, friend,' said Farina. 'I think of
whispering Fays, and Elf, and Erl, when their odour steals through me. Do
not you?'

'Nay, nor hope to till my wits are clean gone,' was the Goshawk's reply.
'To my mind, 'tis an honest flower, and could I do good service by the
young maiden who there set it, I should be rendering back good service
done; for if that flower has not battled the devil in my nose this night,
and beaten him, my head's a medlar!'

'I scarce know whether as a devout Christian I should listen to that,
friend,' Farina mildly remonstrated. 'Lilies are indeed emblems of the
saints; but then they are not poor flowers of earth, being transfigured,
lustrous unfadingly. Oh, Cross and Passion! with what silver serenity thy
glory enwraps me, gazing on these fair bells! I look on the white sea of
the saints. I am enamoured of fleshly anguish and martyrdom. All beauty
is that worn by wan-smiling faces wherein Hope sits as a crown on Sorrow,
and the pale ebb of mortal life is the twilight of joy everlasting.
Colourless peace! Oh, my beloved! So walkest thou for my soul on the
white sea ever at night, clad in the straight fall of thy spotless virgin
linen; bearing in thy hand the lily, and leaning thy cheek to it, where
the human rose is softened to a milky bloom of red, the espousals of
heaven with earth; over thee, moving with thee, a wreath of sapphire
stars, and the solitude of purity around!'

'Ah!' sighed the Goshawk, dandling his flower-pot; 'the moon gives
strokes as well's the sun. I' faith, moon-struck and maid-struck in one!
He'll be asking for his head soon. This dash of the monk and the minstrel
is a sure sign. That 's their way of loving in this land: they all go
mad, straight off. I never heard such talk.'

Guy accompanied these remarks with a pitiful glance at his companion.

'Come, Sir Lover! lend me a help to give back what we've borrowed to its
rightful owner. 'S blood! but I feel an appetite. This night-air takes me
in the wind like a battering ram. I thought I had laid in a stout
four-and-twenty hours' stock of Westphalian Wurst at Master Groschen's
supper-table. Good stuff, washed down with superior Rhine wine; say your
Liebfrauenmilch for my taste; though, when I first tried it, I grimaced
like a Merry-Andrew, and remembered roast beef and Glo'ster ale in my
prayers.'

The Goshawk was in the act of replacing the pot of lilies, when a blow
from a short truncheon, skilfully flung, struck him on the neck and
brought him to the ground. With him fell the lilies. He glared to the
right and left, and grasped the broken flower-pot for a return missile;
but no enemy was in view to test his accuracy of aim.

The deep-arched doorways showed their empty recesses the windows slept.

'Has that youth played me false?' thought the discomfited squire, as he
leaned quietly on his arm. Farina was nowhere near.

Guy was quickly reassured.

'By my fay, now! that's a fine thing! and a fine fellow! and a fleet
foot! That lad 'll rise! He'll be a squire some day. Look at him. Bowels
of a'Becket! 'tis a sight! I'd rather see that, now, than old Groschen 's
supper-table groaning with Wurst again, and running a river of
Rudesheimer! Tussle on! I'll lend a hand if there's occasion; but you
shall have the honour, boy, an you can win it.'

This crying on of the hound was called forth by a chase up the street, in
which the Goshawk beheld Farina pursue and capture a stalwart runaway,
who refused with all his might to be brought back, striving every two and
three of his tiptoe steps to turn against the impulse Farina had got on
his neck and nether garments.

'Who 'd have thought the lad was so wiry and mettlesome, with his soft
face, blue eyes, and lank locks? but a green mead has more in it than
many a black mountain. Hail, and well done! if I could dub you knight, I
would: trust me!' and he shook Farina by the hand.

Farina modestly stood aside, and allowed the Goshawk to confront his
prisoner.

'So, Sir Shy-i'the-dark! gallant Stick-i'the-back! Squire Truncheon, and
Knight of the noble order of Quicksilver Legs! just take your stand at
the distance you were off me when you discharged this instrument at my
head. By 'r lady! I smart a scratch to pay you in coin, and it's lucky
for you the coin is small, or you might reckon on it the same, trust me.
Now, back!'

The Goshawk lunged out with the truncheon, but the prisoner displayed no
hesitation in complying, and fell back about a space of fifteen yards.

'I suppose he guesses I've never done the stupid trick before,' mused
Guy, 'or he would not be so sharp.' Observing that Farina had also fallen
back in a line as guard, Guy motioned him to edge off to the right more,
bawling, 'Never mind why!'

'Now,' thought Guy, 'if I were sure of notching him, I'd do the speech
part first; but as I'm not--throwing truncheons being no honourable
profession anywhere--I'll reserve that. The rascal don't quail. We'll see
how long he stands firm.'

The Goshawk cleared his wrist, fixed his eye, and swung the truncheon
meditatively to and fro by one end. He then launched off the shoulder a
mighty down-fling, calmly, watching it strike the prisoner to earth, like
an ox under the hammer.

'A hit!' said he, and smoothed his wrist.

Farina knelt by the body, and lifted the head on his breast. 'Berthold!
Berthold!' he cried; 'no further harm shall hap to you, man! Speak!'

'You ken the scapegrace?' said Guy, sauntering up.

''Tis Berthold Schmidt, son of old Schmidt, the great goldsmith of
Cologne.'

'St. Dunstan was not at his elbow this time!'

'A rival of mine,' whispered Farina.

'Oho!' and the Goshawk wound a low hiss at his tongue's tip. 'Well! as I
should have spoken if his ears had been open: Justice struck the blow;
and a gentle one. This comes of taking a flying shot, and not standing up
fair. And that seems all that can be said. Where lives he?'

Farina pointed to the house of the Lilies.

'Beshrew me! the dog has some right on his side. Whew! yonder he lives?
He took us for some night-prowlers. Why not come up fairly, and ask my
business?

Smelling a flower is not worth a broken neck, nor defending your premises
quite deserving a hole in the pate. Now, my lad, you see what comes of
dealing with cut and run blows; and let this be a warning to you.'

They took the body by head and feet, and laid him at the door of his
father's house. Here the colour came to his cheek, and they wiped off the
streaks of blood that stained him. Guy proved he could be tender with a
fallen foe, and Farina with an ill-fated rival. It was who could suggest
the soundest remedies, or easiest postures. One lent a kerchief and
nursed him; another ran to the city fountain and fetched him water.
Meantime the moon had dropped, and morning, grey and beamless, looked on
the house-peaks and along the streets with steadier eye. They now both
discerned a body of men, far down, fronting Gottlieb's house, and drawn
up in some degree of order. All their charity forsook them at once.

'Possess thyself of the truncheon,' said Guy: 'You see it can damage.
More work before breakfast, and a fine account I must give of myself to
my hostess of the Three Holy Kings!'

Farina recovered the destructive little instrument.

'I am ready,' said he. 'But hark! there's little work for us there, I
fancy. Those be lads of Cologne, no grunters of the wild. 'Tis the White
Rose Club. Always too late for service.'

Voices singing a hunting glee, popular in that age, swelled up the clear
morning air; and gradually the words became distinct.

             The Kaiser went a-hunting,
               A-hunting, tra-ra:
          With his bugle-horn at springing morn,
          The Kaiser trampled bud and thorn:
                    Tra-ra!

        And the dew shakes green as the horsemen rear,
        And a thousand feathers they flutter with fear;
        And a pang drives quick to the heart of the deer;
          For the Kaiser's out a-hunting,
                  Tra-ra!
             Ta, ta, ta, ta,
             Tra-ra, tra-ra,
             Ta-ta, tra-ra, tra-ra!

the owner of the truncheon awoke to these reviving tones, and uttered a
faint responsive 'Tra-ra!'

'Hark again!' said Farina, in reply to the commendation of the Goshawk,
whose face was dimpled over with the harmony.

          The wild boar lay a-grunting,
             A-grunting, tra-ra!
        And, boom! comes the Kaiser to hunt up me?
        Or, queak! the small birdie that hops on the tree?
                  Tra-ra!
        O birdie, and boar, and deer, lie tame!
        For a maiden in bloom, or a full-blown dame,
        Are the daintiest prey, and the windingest game,
          When Kaisers go a-hunting,
                  Tra-ra!
             Ha, ha, ha, ha,
               Tra-ra, tra-ra,
             Ha-ha, tra-ra, tra-ra!

The voices held long on the last note, and let it die in a forest
cadence.

''Fore Gad! well done. Hurrah! Tra-ra, ha-ha, tra-ra! That's a trick
we're not half alive to at home,' said Guy. 'I feel friendly with these
German lads.'

The Goshawk's disposition toward German lads was that moment harshly
tested by a smart rap on the shoulder from an end of German oak, and a
proclamation that he was prisoner of the hand that gave the greeting, in
the name of the White Rose Club. Following that, his staff was wrested
from him by a dozen stout young fellows, who gave him no time to get his
famous distance for defence against numbers; and he and Farina were
marched forthwith to the chorusing body in front of Gottlieb Groschen's
house.




THE MISSIVES

Of all the inmates, Gottlieb had slept most with the day on his eyelids,
for Werner hung like a nightmare over him. Margarita lay and dreamed in
rose-colour, and if she thrilled on her pillowed silken couch like a
tense-strung harp, and fretted drowsily in little leaps and starts, it
was that a bird lay in her bosom, panting and singing through the night,
and that he was not to be stilled, but would musically utter the sweetest
secret thoughts of a love-bewitched maiden. Farina's devotion she knew
his tenderness she divined: his courage she had that day witnessed. The
young girl no sooner felt that she could love worthily, than she loved
with her whole strength. Muffed and remote came the hunting-song under
her pillow, and awoke dreamy delicate curves in her fair face, as it
thinned but did not banish her dream. Aunt Lisbeth also heard the song,
and burst out of her bed to see that the door and window were secured
against the wanton Kaiser. Despite her trials, she had taken her spell of
sleep; but being possessed of some mystic maiden belief that in cases of
apprehended peril from man, bed was a rock of refuge and fortified
defence, she crept back there, and allowed the sun to rise without her.
Gottlieb's voice could not awaken her to the household duties she loved
to perform with such a doleful visage. She heard him open his window, and
parley in angry tones with the musicians below.

'Decoys!' muttered Aunt Lisbeth; 'be thou alive to them, Gottlieb!'

He went downstairs and opened the street door, whereupon the scolding and
railing commenced anew.

'Thou hast given them vantage, Gottlieb, brother mine,' she complained;
'and the good heavens only can say what may result from such
indiscreetness.'

A silence, combustible with shuffling of feet in the passage and on the
stairs, dinned horrors into Aunt Lisbeth's head.

'It was just that sound in the left wing of Hollenbogenblitz,' she said:
'only then it was night and not morning. Ursula preserve me!'

'Why, Lisbeth! Lisbeth!' cried Gottlieb from below. 'Come down! 'tis full
five o' the morning. Here's company; and what are we to do without the
woman?'

'Ah, Gottlieb! that is like men! They do not consider how different it is
for us!' which mysterious sentence being uttered to herself alone,
enjoyed a meaning it would elsewhere have been denied.

Aunt Lisbeth dressed, and met Margarita descending. They exchanged the
good-morning of young maiden and old.

'Go thou first,' said Aunt Lisbeth.

Margarita gaily tripped ahead.

'Girl!' cried Aunt Lisbeth, 'what's that thing in thy back hair?'

'I have borrowed Lieschen's arrow, aunt. Mine has had an accident.'

'Lieschen's arrow! An accident! Now I will see to that after breakfast,
Margarita.'

'Tra-ra, ta-ta, tra-ra, tra-ra,' sang Margarita.

          'The wild boar lay a-grunting,
             A-grunting, tra-ra.'

'A maiden's true and proper ornament! Look at mine, child! I have worn it
fifty years. May I deserve to wear it till I am called! O Margarita!
trifle not with that symbol.'

       '"O birdie, and boar, and deer, lie tame!"

I am so happy, aunty.'

'Nice times to be happy in, Margarita.'

       "Be happy in Spring, sweet maidens all,
        For Autumn's chill will early fall."

So sings the Minnesinger, aunty; and

       '"A maiden in the wintry leaf
        Will spread her own disease of grief."

I love the Minnesingers! Dear, sweet-mannered men they are! Such lovers!
And men of deeds as well as song: sword on one side and harp on the
other. They fight till set of sun, and then slacken their armour to waft
a ballad to their beloved by moonlight, covered with stains of battle as
they are, and weary!'

'What a girl! Minnesingers! Yes; I know stories of those Minnesingers.
They came to the castle--Margarita, a bead of thy cross is broken. I will
attend to it. Wear the pearl one till I mend this. May'st thou never fall
in the way of Minnesingers. They are not like Werner's troop. They do not
batter at doors: they slide into the house like snakes.'

'Lisbeth! Lisbeth!' they heard Gottlieb calling impatiently.

'We come, Gottlieb!' and in a low murmur Margarita heard her say: 'May
this day pass without trouble and shame to the pious and the chaste.'

Margarita knew the voice of the stranger before she had opened the door,
and on presenting herself, the hero gave her a guardian-like salute.

'One may see,' he said, 'that it requires better men than those of Werner
to drive away the rose from that cheek.'

Gottlieb pressed the rosy cheek to his shoulder and patted her.

'What do you think, Grete? You have now forty of the best lads in Cologne
enrolled to protect you, and keep guard over the house night and day.
There! What more could a Pfalzgrafin ask, now? And voluntary service; all
to be paid with a smile, which I daresay my lady won't refuse them.
Lisbeth, you know our friend. Fear him not, good Lisbeth, and give us
breakfast. Well, sweet chuck, you're to have royal honours paid you. I
warrant they've begun good work already in locking up that idle moony
vagabond, Farina--'

'Him? What for, my father? How dared they! What has he done?'

'O, start not, my fairy maid! A small matter of breakage, pet! He tried
to enter Cunigonde Schmidt's chamber, and knocked down her pot of lilies:
for which Berthold Schmidt knocked him down, and our friend here, out of
good fellowship, knocked down Berthold. However, the chief offender is
marched off to prison by your trusty guard, and there let him cool
himself. Berthold shall tell you the tale himself: he'll be here to
breakfast, and receive your orders, mistress commander-in-chief.'

The Goshawk had his eye on Margarita. Her teeth were tight down on her
nether lip, and her whole figure had a strange look of awkwardness, she
was so divided with anger.

'As witness of the affair, I think I shall make a clearer statement, fair
maiden,' he interposed. 'In the first place, I am the offender. We passed
under the window of the Fraulein Schmidt, and 'twas I mounted to greet
the lilies. One shoot of them is in my helm, and here let me present them
to a worthier holder.'

He offered the flowers with a smile, and Margarita took them, radiant
with gratitude.

'Our friend Berthold,' he continued, 'thought proper to aim a blow at me
behind my back, and then ran for his comrades. He was caught, and by my
gallant young hero, Farina; concerning whose character I regret that your
respected father and I differ: for, on the faith of a soldier and true
man, he's the finest among the fine fellows I've yet met in Germany,
trust me. So, to cut the story short, execution was done upon Berthold by
my hand, for an act of treachery. He appears to be a sort of captain of
one of the troops, and not affectionately disposed to Farina; for the
version of the affair you have heard from your father is a little
invention of Master Berthold's own. To do him justice, he seemed equally
willing to get me under the cold stone; but a word from your good father
changed the current; and as I thought I could serve our friend better
free than behind bars, I accepted liberty. Pshaw! I should have accepted
it any way, to tell the truth, for your German dungeons are mortal
shivering ratty places. So rank me no hero, fair Mistress Margarita,
though the temptation to seem one in such sweet eyes was beginning to
lead me astray. And now, as to our business in the streets at this hour,
believe the best of us.'

'I will! I do!' said Margarita.

'Lisbeth! Lisbeth!' called Gottlieb. 'Breakfast, little sister! our
champion is starving. He asks for wurst, milk-loaves, wine, and all thy
rarest conserves. Haste, then, for the honour of Cologne is at stake.'

Aunt Lisbeth jingled her keys in and out, and soon that harmony drew a
number of domestics with platters of swine flesh, rolls of white wheaten
bread, the perpetual worst, milk, wine, barley-bread, and household
stores of dainties in profusion, all sparkling on silver, relieved by
spotless white cloth. Gottlieb beheld such a sunny twinkle across the
Goshawk's face at this hospitable array, that he gave the word of onset
without waiting for Berthold, and his guest immediately fell to, and did
not relax in his exertions for a full half-hour by the Cathedral clock,
eschewing the beer with a wry look made up of scorn and ruefulness, and
drinking a well-brimmed health in Rhine wine all round. Margarita was
pensive: Aunt Lisbeth on her guard. Gottlieb remembered Charles the
Great's counsel to Archbishop Turpin, and did his best to remain on earth
one of its lords dominant.

'Poor Berthold!' said he. ''Tis a good lad, and deserves his seat at my
table oftener. I suppose the flower-pot business has detained him. We'll
drink to him: eh, Grete?'

'Drink to him, dear father!--but here he is to thank you in person.'

Margarita felt a twinge of pity as Berthold entered. The livid stains of
his bruise deepened about his eyes, and gave them a wicked light whenever
they were fixed intently; but they looked earnest; and spoke of a combat
in which he could say that he proved no coward and was used with some
cruelty. She turned on the Goshawk a mute reproach; yet smiled and loved
him well when she beheld him stretch a hand of welcome and proffer a
brotherly glass to Berthold. The rich goldsmith's son was occupied in
studying the horoscope of his fortunes in Margarita's eyes; but when
Margarita directed his attention to Guy, he turned to him with a glance
of astonishment that yielded to cordial greeting.

'Well done, Berthold, my brave boy! All are friends who sit at table,'
said Gottlieb. 'In any case, at my table:

          "'Tis a worthy foe
          Forgives the blow
          Was dealt him full and fairly,"

says the song; and the proverb takes it up with, "A generous enemy is a
friend on the wrong side"; and no one's to blame for that, save old Dame
Fortune. So now a bumper to this jovial make-up between you. Lisbeth! you
must drink it.'

The little woman bowed melancholy obedience.

'Why did you fling and run?' whispered Guy to Berthold.

'Because you were two against one.'

'Two against one, man! Why, have you no such thing as fair play in this
land of yours? Did you think I should have taken advantage of that?'

'How could I tell who you were, or what you would do?' muttered Berthold,
somewhat sullenly.

'Truly no, friend! So you ran to make yourself twenty to two? But don't
be down on the subject. I was going to say, that though I treated you in
a manner upright, 'twas perhaps a trifle severe, considering your youth:
but an example's everything; and I must let you know in confidence, that
no rascal truncheon had I flung in my life before; so, you see, I gave
you all the chances.'

Berthold moved his lips in reply; but thinking of the figure of defeat he
was exhibiting before Margarita, caused him to estimate unfavourably what
chances had stood in his favour.

The health was drunk. Aunt Lisbeth touched the smoky yellow glass with a
mincing lip, and beckoned Margarita to withdraw.

'The tapestry, child!' she said. 'Dangerous things are uttered after the
third glass, I know, Margarita.'

'Do you call my champion handsome, aunt?'

'I was going to speak to you about him, Margarita. If I remember, he has
rough, good looks, as far as they go. Yes: but thou, maiden, art thou
thinking of him? I have thrice watched him wink; and that, as we know, is
a habit of them that have sold themselves. And what is frail womankind to
expect from such a brawny animal?'

          'And oh! to lace his armour up,
          And speed him to the field;
          To pledge him in a kissing-cup,
          The knight that will not yield!

I am sure he is tender, aunt. Notice how gentle he looks now and then.'

'Thou girl! Yes, I believe she is madly in love with him. Tender, and
gentle! So is the bear when you're outside his den; but enter it, maiden,
and try! Thou good Ursula, preserve me from such a fate.'

'Fear not, dear aunt! Have not a fear of it! Besides, it is not always
the men that are bad. You must not forget Dalilah, and Lot's wife, and
Pfalzgrafin Jutta, and the Baroness who asked for a piece of poor Kraut.
But, let us work, let us work!'

Margarita sat down before Siegfried, and contemplated the hero. For the
first time, she marked a resemblance in his features to Farina: the same
long yellow hair scattered over his shoulders as that flowing from under
Siegfried's helm; the blue eyes, square brows, and regular outlines.
'This is a marvel,' thought Margarita. 'And Farina! it was to watch over
me that he roamed the street last night, my best one! Is he not
beautiful?' and she looked closer at Siegfried.

Aunt Lisbeth had begun upon the dragon with her usual method, and was
soon wandering through skeleton halls of the old palatial castle in
Bohemia. The woolly tongue of the monster suggested fresh horrors to her,
and if Margarita had listened, she might have had fair excuses to forget
her lover's condition; but her voice only did service like a piece of
clock-work, and her mind was in the prison with Farina. She was long
debating how to win his release; and meditated so deeply, and exclaimed
in so many bursts of impatience, that Aunt Lisbeth found her heart
melting to the maiden. 'Now,' said she, 'that is a well-known story about
the Electress Dowager of Bavaria, when she came on a visit to the castle;
and, my dear child, be it a warning. Terrible, too!' and the little woman
shivered pleasantly. 'She had--I may tell you this, Margarita--yes, she
had been false to her wedded husband.--You understand, maiden; or, no!
you do not understand: I understand it only partly, mind. False, I
say----'

'False--not true: go on, dear aunty,' said Margarita, catching the word.

'I believe she knows as much as I do!' ejaculated Aunt Lisbeth; 'such are
girls nowadays. When I was young-oh! for a maiden to know anything
then--oh! it was general reprobation. No one thought of confessing it. We
blushed and held down our eyes at the very idea. Well, the Electress! she
was--you must guess. So she called for her caudle at eleven o'clock at
night. What do you think that was? Well, there was spirit in it: not to
say nutmeg, and lemon, and peach kernels. She wanted me to sit with her,
but I begged my mistress to keep me from the naughty woman: and no friend
of Hilda of Bayern was Bertha of Bohmen, you may be sure. Oh! the things
she talked while she was drinking her caudle.

Isentrude sat with her,'and said it was fearful!--beyond blasphemy! and
that she looked like a Bible witch, sitting up drinking and swearing and
glaring in her nightclothes and nightcap. She was on a journey into
Hungary, and claimed the hospitality of the castle on her way there. Both
were widows. Well, it was a quarter to twelve. The Electress dropped back
on her pillow, as she always did when she had finished the candle.
Isentrude covered her over, heaped up logs on the fire, wrapped her
dressing-gown about her, and prepared to sleep. It was Winter, and the
wind howled at the doors, and rattled the windows, and shook the
arras--Lord help us! Outside was all snow, and nothing but forest; as you
saw when you came to me there, Gretelchen. Twelve struck. Isentrude was
dozing; but she says that after the last stroke she woke with cold. A
foggy chill hung in the room. She looked at the Electress, who had not
moved. The fire burned feebly, and seemed weighed upon: Herr Je!--she
thought she heard a noise. No. Quite quiet! As heaven preserve her, says
slip, the smell in that room grew like an open grave, clammily putrid.
Holy Virgin! This time she was certain she heard a noise; but it seemed
on both sides of her. There was the great door leading to the first
landing and state-room; and opposite exactly there was the panel of the
secret passage. The noises seemed to advance as if step by step, and grew
louder in each ear as she stood horrified on the marble of the hearth.
She looked at the Electress again, and her eyes were wide open; but for
all Isentrude's calling, she would not wake. Only think! Now the noise
increased, and was a regular tramp-grate, tramp-screw sound-coming nearer
and nearer: Saints of mercy! The apartment was choking with vapours.
Isentrude made a dart, and robed herself behind a curtain of the bed just
as the two doors opened. She could see through a slit in the woven work,
and winked her eyes which she had shut close on hearing the scream of the
door-hinges--winked her eyes to catch a sight for moment--we are such
sinful, curious creatures!--What she saw then, she says she shall never
forget; nor I! As she was a living woman, there she saw the two dead
princes, the Prince Palatine of Bohemia and the Elector of Bavaria,
standing front to front at the foot of the bed, all in white armour, with
drawn swords, and attendants holding pine-torches. Neither of them spoke.
Their vizors were down; but she knew them by their arms and bearing: both
tall, stately presences, good knights in their day, and had fought
against the Infidel! So one of them pointed to the bed, and then a torch
was lowered, and the fight commenced. Isentrude saw the sparks fly, and
the steel struck till it was shattered; but they fought on, not caring
for wounds, and snorting with fury as they grew hotter. They fought a
whole hour. The poor girl was so eaten up with looking on, that she let
go the curtain and stood quite exposed among them. So, to steady herself,
she rested her hand on the bed-side; and--think what she felt--a hand as
cold as ice locked hers, and get from it she could not! That instant one
of the princes fell. It was Bohmen. Bayern sheathed his sword, and waved
his hand, and the attendants took up the slaughtered ghost, feet and
shoulders, and bore him to the door of the secret passage, while Bayern
strode after--'

'Shameful!' exclaimed Margarita. 'I will speak to Berthold as he
descends. I hear him coming. He shall do what I wish.'

'Call it dreadful, Grete! Dreadful it was. If Berthold would like to sit
and hear--Ah! she is gone. A good girl! and of a levity only on the
surface.'

Aunt Lisbeth heard Margarita's voice rapidly addressing Berthold. His
reply was low and brief. 'Refuses to listen to anything of the sort,'
Aunt Lisbeth interpreted it. Then he seemed to be pleading, and Margarita
uttering short answers. 'I trust 'tis nothing a maiden should not hear,'
the little lady exclaimed with a sigh.

The door opened, and Lieschen stood at the entrance.

'For Fraulein Margarita,' she said, holding a letter halfway out.

'Give it,' Aunt Lisbeth commanded.

The woman hesitated--''Tis for the Fraulein.'

'Give it, I tell thee!' and Aunt Lisbeth eagerly seized the missive, and
subjected it to the ordeal of touch. It was heavy, and contained
something hard. Long pensive pressures revealed its shape on the paper.
It was an arrow. 'Go!' said she to the woman, and, once alone, began,
bee-like, to buzz all over it, and finally entered. It contained
Margarita's Silver Arrow. 'The art of that girl!' And the writing said:

   'SWEETEST MAIDEN!

   'By this arrow of our betrothal, I conjure thee to meet me in all
   haste without the western gate, where, burning to reveal to thee
   most urgent tidings that may not be confided to paper, now waits,
   petitioning the saints, thy

                    'FARINA.'

Aunt Lisbeth placed letter and arrow in a drawer; locked it; and 'always
thought so.' She ascended the stairs to consult with Gottlieb. Roars of
laughter greeted her just as she lifted the latch, and she retreated
abashed.

There was no time to lose. Farina must be caught in the act of waiting
for Margarita, and by Gottlieb, or herself. Gottlieb was revelling. 'May
this be a warning to thee, Gottlieb,' murmured Lisbeth, as she hooded her
little body in Margarita's fur-cloak, and determined that she would be
the one to confound Farina.

Five minutes later Margarita returned. Aunt Lisbeth was gone. The dragon
still lacked a tip to his forked tongue, and a stream of fiery threads
dangled from the jaws of the monster. Another letter was brought into the
room by Lieschen.

'For Aunt Lisbeth,' said Margarita, reading the address. 'Who can it be
from?'

'She does not stand pressing about your letters,' said the woman; and
informed Margarita of the foregoing missive.

'You say she drew an arrow from it?' said Margarita, with burning face.
'Who brought this? tell me!' and just waiting to hear it was Farina's
mother, she tore the letter open, and read:

   'DEAREST LISBETH!

   'Thy old friend writes to thee; she that has scarce left eyes to see
   the words she writes. Thou knowest we are a fallen house, through
   the displeasure of the Emperor on my dead husband. My son, Farina,
   is my only stay, and well returns to me the blessings I bestow upon
   him. Some call him idle: some think him too wise. I swear to thee,
   Lisbeth, he is only good. His hours are devoted to the extraction
   of essences--to no black magic. Now he is in trouble-in prison.
   The shadow that destroyed his dead father threatens him. Now, by
   our old friendship, beloved Lisbeth! intercede with Gottlieb, that
   he may plead for my son before the Emperor when he comes--'

Margarita read no more. She went to the window, and saw her guard
marshalled outside. She threw a kerchief over her head, and left the
house by the garden gate.




THE MONK

By this time the sun stood high over Cologne. The market-places were
crowded with buyers and sellers, mixed with a loitering swarm of
soldiery, for whose thirsty natures winestalls had been tumbled up.
Barons and knights of the empire, bravely mounted and thickly followed,
poured hourly into Cologne from South Germany and North. Here, staring
Suabians, and round-featured warriors of the East Kingdom, swaggered up
and down, patting what horses came across them, for lack of occupation
for their hands. Yonder, huge Pomeranians, with bosks of beard stiffened
out square from the chin, hurtled mountainous among the peaceable
inhabitants. Troopers dismounted went straddling, in tight hose and
loose, prepared to drink good-will to whomsoever would furnish the best
quality liquor for that solemn pledge, and equally ready to pick a
quarrel with them that would not. It was a scene of flaring feathers,
wide-flapped bonnets, flaunting hose, blue and battered steel plates,
slashed woollen haunch-bags, leather-leggings, ensigns, and imperious
boots and shoulders. Margarita was too hurried in her mind to be
conscious of an imprudence; but her limbs trembled, and she instinctively
quickened her steps. When she stood under the sign of the Three Holy
Kings, where dwelt Farina's mother, she put up a fervent prayer of
thanks, and breathed freely.

'I had expected a message from Lisbeth,' said Frau Farina; 'but thou,
good heart! thou wilt help us?'

'All that may be done by me I will do,' replied Margarita; 'but his
mother yearns to see him, and I have come to bear her company.'

The old lady clasped her hands and wept.

'Has he found so good a friend, my poor boy! And trust me, dear maiden,
he is not unworthy, for better son never lived, and good son, good all!
Surely we will go to him, but not as thou art. I will dress thee. Such
throngs are in the streets: I heard them clattering in early this
morning. Rest, dear heart, till I return.'

Margarita had time to inspect the single sitting-room in which her lover
lived. It was planted with bottles, and vases, and pipes, and cylinders,
piling on floor, chair, and table. She could not suppress a slight
surprise of fear, for this display showed a dealing with hidden things,
and a summoning of scattered spirits. It was this that made his brow so
pale, and the round of his eye darker than youth should let it be! She
dismissed the feeling, and assumed her own bright face as Dame Farina
reappeared, bearing on her arm a convent garb, and other apparel.
Margarita suffered herself to be invested in the white and black robes of
the denial of life.

'There!' said the Frau Farina, 'and to seal assurance, I have engaged a
guard to accompany us. He was sorely bruised in a street combat
yesterday, and was billeted below, where I nursed and tended him, and he
is grateful, as man should be-though I did little, doing my utmost--and
with him near us we have nought to fear.'

'Good,' said Margarita, and they kissed and departed. The guard was
awaiting them outside.

'Come, my little lady, and with thee the holy sister! 'Tis no step from
here, and I gage to bring ye safe, as sure as my name's Schwartz
Thier!--Hey? The good sister's dropping. Look, now! I'll carry her.'

Margarita recovered her self-command before he could make good this
offer.

'Only let us hasten there,' she gasped.

The Thier strode on, and gave them safe-conduct to the prison where
Farina was confined, being near one of the outer forts of the city.

'Thank and dismiss him,' whispered Margarita.

'Nay! he will wait-wilt thou not, friend! We shall not be long, though it
is my son I visit here,' said Frau Farina.

'Till to-morrow morning, my little lady! The lion thanked him that
plucked the thorn from his foot, and the Thier may be black, but he's not
ungrateful, nor a worse beast than the lion.'

They entered the walls and left him.

For the first five minutes Schwartz Thier found employment for his
faculties by staring at the shaky, small-paned windows of the
neighbourhood. He persevered in this, after all novelty had been
exhausted, from an intuitive dread of weariness. There was nothing to
see. An old woman once bobbed out of an attic, and doused the flints with
water. Harassed by increasing dread of the foul nightmare of
nothing-to-do, the Thier endeavoured to establish amorous intelligence
with her. She responded with an indignant projection of the underjaw,
evanishing rapidly. There was no resource left him but to curse her with
extreme heartiness. The Thier stamped his right leg, and then his left,
and remembered the old woman as a grievance five minutes longer. When she
was clean forgotten, he yawned. Another spouse of the moment was wanted,
to be wooed, objurgated, and regretted. The prison-gate was in a secluded
street. Few passengers went by, and those who did edged away from the
ponderous, wanton-eyed figure of lazy mischief lounging there, as neatly
as they well could. The Thier hailed two or three. One took to his legs,
another bowed, smirked, gave him a kindly good-day, and affected to hear
no more, having urgent business in prospect. The Thier was a faithful
dog, but the temptation to betray his trust and pursue them was mighty.
He began to experience an equal disposition to cry and roar. He hummed a
ballad--

       'I swore of her I'd have my will,
         And with him I'd have my way:
        I learn'd my cross-bow over the hill:
         Now what does my lady say?

Give me the good old cross-bow, after all, and none of these lumbering
puff-and-bangs that knock you down oftener than your man!

       'A cross stands in the forest still,
         And a cross in the churchyard grey:
        My curse on him who had his will,
         And on him who had his way!

Good beginning, bad ending! 'Tisn't so always. "Many a cross has the
cross-bow built," they say. I wish I had mine, now, to peg off that old
woman, or somebody. I'd swear she's peeping at me over the gable, or
behind some cranny. They're curious, the old women, curse 'em! And the
young, for that matter. Devil a young one here.

       'When I'm in for the sack of a town,
         What, think ye, I poke after, up and down?
        Silver and gold I pocket in plenty,
         But the sweet tit-bit is my lass under twenty.

I should like to be in for the sack of this Cologne. I'd nose out that
pretty girl I was cheated of yesterday. Take the gold and silver, and
give me the maiden! Her neck's silver, and her hair gold. Ah! and her
cheeks roses, and her mouth-say no more! I'm half thinking Werner, the
hungry animal, has cast wolf's eyes on her. They say he spoke of her last
night. Don't let him thwart me. Thunderblast him! I owe him a grudge.
He's beginning to forget my plan o' life.'

A flight of pigeons across the blue top of the street abstracted the
Thier from these reflections. He gaped after them in despair, and fell to
stretching and shaking himself, rattling his lungs with loud reports. As
he threw his eyes round again, they encountered those of a monk opposite
fastened on him in penetrating silence. The Thier hated monks as a wild
beast shuns fire; but now even a monk was welcome.

'Halloo!' he sung out.

The monk crossed over to him.

'Friend!' said he, 'weariness is teaching thee wantonness. Wilt thou take
service for a night's work, where the danger is little, the reward
lasting?'

'As for that,' replied the Thier, 'danger comes to me like greenwood to
the deer, and good pay never yet was given in promises. But I'm bound for
the next hour to womankind within there. They're my masters; as they've
been of tough fellows before me.'

'I will seek them, and win their consent,' said the monk, and so left
him.

'Quick dealing!' thought the Thier, and grew brisker. 'The Baron won't
want me to-night: and what if he does? Let him hang himself--though, if
he should, 'twill be a pity I'm not by to help him.'

He paced under the wall to its farthest course. Turning back, he
perceived the monk at the gateway.

'A sharp hand!' thought the Thier.

'Intrude no question on me,' the monk began; 'but hold thy peace and
follow: the women release thee, and gladly.'

'That's not my plan o' life, now! Money down, and then command me': and
Schwartz Thier stood with one foot forward, and hand stretched out.

A curl of scorn darkened the cold features of the monk.

He slid one hand into a side of his frock above the girdle, and tossed a
bag of coin.

'Take it, if 'tis in thee to forfeit the greater blessing,' he cried
contemptuously.

The Thier peeped into the bag, and appeared satisfied.

'I follow,' said he; 'lead on, good father, and I'll be in the track of
holiness for the first time since my mother was quit of me.'

The monk hurried up the street and into the marketplace, oblivious of the
postures and reverences of the people, who stopped to stare at him and
his gaunt attendant. As they crossed the square, Schwartz Thier spied
Henker Rothhals starting from a wine-stall on horseback, and could not
forbear hailing him. Before the monk had time to utter a reproach, they
were deep together in a double-shot of query and reply.

'Whirr!' cried the Thier, breaking on some communication. 'Got her, have
they? and swung her across stream? I'm one with ye for my share, or call
me sheep!'

He waved his hand to the monk, and taking hold of the horse's rein, ran
off beside his mounted confederate, heavily shod as he was.

The monk frowned after him, and swelled with a hard sigh.

'Gone!' he exclaimed, 'and the accursed gold with him! Well did a voice
warn me that such service was never to be bought!'

He did not pause to bewail or repent, but returned toward the prison with
rapid footsteps, muttering: 'I with the prison-pass for two; why was I
beguiled by that bandit? Saw I not the very youth given into my hands
there, he that was with the damsel and the aged woman?'




THE RIDE AND THE RACE

Late in the noon a horseman, in the livery of the Kaiser's body-guard,
rode dry and dusty into Cologne, with tidings that the Kaiser was at
Hammerstein Castle, and commanding all convocated knights, barons,
counts, and princes, to assemble and prepare for his coming, on a certain
bare space of ground within two leagues of Cologne, thence to swell the
train of his triumphal entry into the ancient city of his empire.

Guy the Goshawk, broad-set on a Flemish mare, and a pack-horse beside
him, shortly afterward left the hotel of the Three Holy Kings, and
trotted up to Gottlieb's door.

'Tent-pitching is now my trade,' said he, as Gottlieb came down to him.
'My lord is with the Kaiser. I must say farewell for the nonce. Is the
young lady visible?'

'Nor young, nor old, good friend,' replied Gottlieb, with a countenance
somewhat ruffled. 'I dined alone for lack of your company. Secret
missives came, I hear, to each of them, and both are gadding. Now what
think you of this, after the scene of yesterday?--Lisbeth too!'

'Preaches from the old text, Master Groschen; "Never reckon on womankind
for a wise act." But farewell! and tell Mistress Margarita that I take it
ill of her not giving me her maiden hand to salute before parting. My
gravest respects to Frau Lisbeth. I shall soon be sitting with you over
that prime vintage of yours, or fortune's dead against me.'

So, with a wring of the hand, Guy put the spur to his round-flanked
beast, and was quickly out of Cologne on the rough roadway.

He was neither the first nor the last of the men-at-arms hastening to
obey the Kaiser's mandate. A string of horse and foot in serpentine knots
stretched along the flat land, flashing colours livelier than the
spring-meadows bordering their line of passage. Guy, with a nod for all,
and a greeting for the best-disposed, pushed on toward the van, till the
gathering block compelled him to adopt the snail's pace of the advance
party, and gave him work enough to keep his two horses from being jammed
with the mass. Now and then he cast a weather-eye on the heavens, and was
soon confirmed in an opinion he had repeatedly ejaculated, that 'the
first night's camping would be a drencher.' In the West a black bank of
cloud was blotting out the sun before his time. Northeast shone bare
fields of blue lightly touched with loosefloating strips and flakes of
crimson vapour. The furrows were growing purple-dark, and gradually a low
moaning obscurity enwrapped the whole line, and mufed the noise of hoof,
oath, and waggon-wheel in one sullen murmur.

Guy felt very much like a chopped worm, as he wriggled his way onward in
the dusk, impelled from the rear, and reduced to grope after the main
body. Frequent and deep counsel he took with a trusty flask suspended at
his belt. It was no pleasant reflection that the rain would be down
before he could build up anything like shelter for horse and man. Still
sadder the necessity of selecting his post on strange ground, and in
darkness. He kept an anxious look-out for the moon, and was presently
rejoiced to behold a broad fire that twinkled branchy beams through an
east-hill orchard.

'My lord calls her Goddess,' said Guy, wistfully. 'The title's
outlandish, and more the style of these foreigners but she may have it
to-night, an she 'll just keep the storm from shrouding her bright eye a
matter of two hours.'

She rose with a boding lustre. Drifts of thin pale upper-cloud leaned
down ladders, pure as virgin silver, for her to climb to her highest seat
on the unrebellious half-circle of heaven.

'My mind's made up!' quoth Guy to the listening part of himself. 'Out of
this I'll get.'

By the clearer ray he had discerned a narrow track running a white
parallel with the general route. At the expense of dislocating a mile of
the cavalcade, he struck into it. A dyke had to be taken, some heavy
fallows crossed, and the way was straight before him. He began to sneer
at the slow jog-trot and absence of enterprise which made the fellows he
had left shine so poorly in comparison with the Goshawk, but a sight of
two cavaliers in advance checked his vanity, and now to overtake them he
tasked his fat Flemish mare with unwonted pricks of the heel, that made
her fling out and show more mettle than speed.

The objects of this fiery chase did not at first awake to a sense of
being pursued. Both rode with mantled visages, and appeared profoundly
inattentive to the world outside their meditations. But the Goshawk was
not to be denied, and by dint of alternately roaring at them and
upbraiding his two stumping beasts, he at last roused the younger of the
cavaliers, who called to his companion loudly: without effect it seemed,
for he had to repeat the warning. Guy was close up with them, when the
youth exclaimed:

'Father! holy father! 'Tis Sathanas in person!'

The other rose and pointed trembling to a dark point in the distance as
he vociferated:

'Not here! not here; but yonder!'

Guy recognized the voice of the first speaker, and cried:

'Stay! halt a second! Have you forgotten the Goshawk?'

'Never!' came the reply, 'and forget not Farina!'

Spur and fleeter steeds carried them out of hearing ere Guy could throw
in another syllable. Farina gazed back on him remorsefully, but the Monk
now rated his assistant with indignation.

'Thou weak one! nothing less than fool! to betray thy name on such an
adventure as this to soul save the saints!'

Farina tossed back his locks, and held his forehead to the moon. All the
Monk's ghostly wrath was foiled by the one little last sweet word of his
beloved, which made music in his ears whenever annoyance sounded.

'And herein,' say the old writers, 'are lovers, who love truly, truly
recompensed for their toils and pains; in that love, for which they
suffer, is ever present to ward away suffering not sprung of love: but
the disloyal, who serve not love faithfully, are a race given over to
whatso this base world can wreak upon them, without consolation or
comfort of their mistress, Love; whom sacrificing not all to, they know
not to delight in.'

The soul of a lover lives through every member of him in the joy of a
moonlight ride. Sorrow and grief are slow distempers that crouch from the
breeze, and nourish their natures far from swift-moving things. A true
lover is not one of those melancholy flies that shoot and maze over muddy
stagnant pools. He must be up in the great air. He must strike all the
strings of life. Swiftness is his rapture. In his wide arms he embraces
the whole form of beauty. Eagle-like are his instincts; dove-like his
desires. Then the fair moon is the very presence of his betrothed in
heaven. So for hours rode Farina in a silver-fleeting glory; while the
Monk as a shadow, galloped stern and silent beside him. So, crowning them
in the sky, one half was all love and light; one, blackness and fell
purpose.




THE COMBAT ON DRACHENFELS

Not to earth was vouchsafed the honour of commencing the great battle of
that night. By an expiring blue-shot beam of moonlight, Farina beheld a
vast realm of gloom filling the hollow of the West, and the moon was soon
extinguished behind sluggish scraps of iron scud detached from the
swinging bulk of ruin, as heavily it ground on the atmosphere in the
first thunder-launch of motion.

The heart of the youth was strong, but he could not view without quicker
fawning throbs this manifestation of immeasurable power, which seemed as
if with a stroke it was capable of destroying creation and the works of
man. The bare aspect of the tempest lent terrors to the adventure he was
engaged in, and of which he knew not the aim, nor might forecast the
issue. Now there was nothing to illumine their path but such forked
flashes as lightning threw them at intervals, touching here a hill with
clustered cottages, striking into day there a May-blossom, a patch of
weed, a single tree by the wayside. Suddenly a more vivid and continuous
quiver of violet fire met its reflection on the landscape, and Farina saw
the Rhine-stream beneath him.

'On such a night,' thought he, 'Siegfried fought and slew the dragon!'

A blast of light, as from the jaws of the defeated dragon in his throes,
made known to him the country he traversed. Crimsoned above the water
glimmered the monster-haunted rock itself, and mid-channel beyond, flat
and black to the stream, stretched the Nuns' Isle in cloistral peace.

'Halt!' cried the Monk, and signalled with a peculiar whistle, to which
he seemed breathlessly awaiting an answer. They were immediately
surrounded by longrobed veiled figures.

'Not too late?' the Monk hoarsely asked of them.

'Yet an hour!' was the reply, in soft clear tones of a woman's voice.

'Great strength and valour more than human be mine,' exclaimed the Monk,
dismounting.

He passed apart from them; and they drew in a circle, while he prayed,
kneeling.

Presently he returned, and led Farina to a bank, drawing from some
hiding-place a book and a bell, which he gave into the hands of the
youth.

'For thy soul, no word!' said the Monk, speaking down his throat as he
took in breath. 'Nay! not in answer to me! Be faithful, and more than
earthly fortune is thine; for I say unto thee, I shall not fail, having
grace to sustain this combat.'

Thereupon he commenced the ascent of Drachenfels.

Farina followed. He had no hint of the Monk's mission, nor of the part
himself was to play in it. Such a load of silence gathered on his
questioning spirit, that the outcry of the rageing elements alone
prevented him from arresting the Monk and demanding the end of his
service there. That outcry was enough to freeze speech on the very lips
of a mortal. For scarce had they got footing on the winding path of the
crags, when the whole vengeance of the storm was hurled against the
mountain. Huge boulders were loosened and came bowling from above: trees
torn by their roots from the fissures whizzed on the eddies of the wind:
torrents of rain foamed down the iron flanks of rock, and flew off in
hoar feathers against the short pauses of darkness: the mountain heaved,
and quaked, and yawned a succession of hideous chasms.

'There's a devil in this,' thought Farina. He looked back and marked the
river imaging lurid abysses of cloud above the mountain-summit--yea! and
on the summit a flaming shape was mirrored.

Two nervous hands stayed the cry on his mouth.

'Have I not warned thee?' said the husky voice of the Monk. 'I may well
watch, and think for thee as for a dog. Be thou as faithful!'

He handed a flask to the youth, and bade him drink. Farina drank and felt
richly invigorated. The Monk then took bell and book.

'But half an hour,' he muttered, 'for this combat that is to ring through
centuries.'

Crossing himself, he strode wildly upward. Farina saw him beckon back
once, and the next instant he was lost round an incline of the highest
peak.

The wind that had just screamed a thousand death-screams, was now awfully
dumb, albeit Farina could feel it lifting hood and hair. In the unnatural
stillness his ear received tones of a hymn chanted below; now sinking,
now swelling; as though the voices faltered between prayer and
inspiration. Farina caught on a projection of crag, and fixed his eyes on
what was passing on the height.

There was the Monk in his brown hood and wrapper, confronting--if he
might trust his balls of sight--the red-hot figure of the Prince of
Darkness.

As yet no mortal tussle had taken place between them. They were arguing:
angrily, it was true: yet with the first mutual deference of practised
logicians. Latin and German was alternately employed by both. It thrilled
Farina's fervid love of fatherland to hear the German Satan spoke: but
his Latin was good, and his command over that tongue remarkable; for,
getting the worst of the argument, as usual, he revenged himself by
parodying one of the Church canticles with a point that discomposed his
adversary, and caused him to retreat a step, claiming support against
such shrewd assault.

'The use of an unexpected weapon in warfare is in itself half a victory.
Induce your antagonist to employ it as a match for you, and reckon on
completely routing him . . .' says the old military chronicle.

'Come!' said the Demon with easy raillery. 'You know your game--I mine! I
really want the good people to be happy; dancing, kissing, propagating,
what you will. We quite agree. You can have no objection to me, but a
foolish old prejudice--not personal, but class; an antipathy of the cowl,
for which I pardon you! What I should find in you to complain of--I have
only to mention it, I am sure--is, that perhaps you do speak a little too
much through your nose.'

The Monk did not fall into the jocular trap by retorting in the same
strain.

'Laugh with the Devil, and you won't laugh longest,' says the proverb.

Keeping to his own arms, the holy man frowned.

'Avaunt, Fiend!' he cried. 'To thy kingdom below! Thou halt raged over
earth a month, causing blights, hurricanes, and epidemics of the deadly
sins. Parley no more! Begone!'

The Demon smiled: the corners of his mouth ran up to his ears, and his
eyes slid down almost into one.

'Still through the nose!' said he reproachfully.

'I give thee Five Minutes!' cried the Monk.

'I had hoped for a longer colloquy,' sighed the Demon, jogging his left
leg and trifling with his tail.

'One Minute!' exclaimed the Monk.

'Truly so!' said the Demon. 'I know old Time and his habits better than
you really can. We meet every Saturday night, and communicate our best
jokes. I keep a book of them Down There!'

And as if he had reason to remember the pavement of his Halls, he stood
tiptoe and whipped up his legs.

'Two Minutes!'

The Demon waved perfect acquiescence, and continued:

'We understand each other, he and I. All Old Ones do. As long as he
lasts, I shall. The thing that surprises me is, that you and I cannot
agree, similar as we are in temperament, and playing for the long odds,
both of us. My failure is, perhaps, too great a passion for sport, aha!
Well, 'tis a pity you won't try and live on the benevolent principle. I
am indeed kind to them who commiserate my condition. I give them all they
want, aha! Hem! Try and not believe in me now, aha! Ho! . . . Can't you?
What are eyes? Persuade yourself you're dreaming. You can do anything
with a mind like yours, Father Gregory! And consider the luxury of
getting me out of the way so easily, as many do. It is my finest
suggestion, aha! Generally I myself nudge their ribs with the capital
idea--You're above bribes? I was going to observe--'

'Three!'

'Observe, that if you care for worldly honours, I can smother you with
that kind of thing. Several of your first-rate people made a bargain with
me when they were in the fog, and owe me a trifle. Patronage they call
it. I hook the high and the low. Too-little and too-much serve me better
than Beelzebub. A weak stomach is certainly more carnally virtuous than a
full one. Consequently my kingdom is becoming too respectable. They've
all got titles, and object to being asked to poke the fire
without--Honourable-and-with-Exceeding-Brightness-Beaming Baroness This!
Admirably-Benignant-Down-looking Highness That! Interrupts business,
especially when you have to ask them to fry themselves, according to the
rules . . . Would you like Mainz and the Rheingau? . . . You don't care
for Beauty--Puella, Puellae? I have plenty of them, too, below. The
Historical Beauties warmed up at a moment's notice. Modern ones made
famous between morning and night--Fame is the sauce of Beauty. Or,
no--eh?'

'Four!'

'Not quite so fast, if you please. You want me gone. Now, where's your
charity? Do you ask me to be always raking up those poor devils
underneath? While I'm here, they've a respite. They cannot think you
kind, Father Gregory! As for the harm, you see, I'm not the more
agreeable by being face to face with you--though some fair dames do take
to my person monstrously. The secret is, the quantity of small talk I can
command: that makes them forget my smell, which is, I confess,
abominable, displeasing to myself, and my worst curse. Your sort, Father
Gregory, are somewhat unpleasant in that particular--if I may judge by
their Legate here. Well, try small talk. They would fall desperately in
love with polecats and skunks if endowed with small talk. Why, they have
become enamoured of monks before now! If skunks, why not monks? And
again--'

'Five!'

Having solemnly bellowed this tremendous number, the holy man lifted his
arms to begin the combat.

Farina felt his nerves prick with admiration of the ghostly warrior
daring the Second Power of Creation on that lonely mountain-top. He
expected, and shuddered at thought of the most awful fight ever yet
chronicled of those that have taken place between heroes and the hounds
of evil: but his astonishment was great to hear the Demon, while Bell was
in air and Book aloft, retreat, shouting, 'Hold!'

'I surrender,' said he sullenly. 'What terms?'

'Instantaneous riddance of thee from face of earth.'

'Good!--Now,' said the Demon, 'did you suppose I was to be trapped into a
fight? No doubt you wish to become a saint, and have everybody talking of
my last defeat . . . . Pictures, poems, processions, with the Devil
downmost! No. You're more than a match for me.'

'Silence, Darkness!' thundered the Monk, 'and think not to vanquish thy
victor by flatteries. Begone!'

And again he towered in his wrath.

The Demon drew his tail between his legs, and threw the forked, fleshy,
quivering end over his shoulder. He then nodded cheerfully, pointed his
feet, and finicked a few steps away, saying: 'I hope we shall meet
again.'

Upon that he shot out his wings, that were like the fins of the
wyver-fish, sharpened in venomous points.

'Commands for your people below?' he inquired, leering with chin awry.
'Desperate ruffians some of those cowls. You are right not to acknowledge
them.'

Farina beheld the holy man in no mood to let the Enemy tamper with him
longer.

The Demon was influenced by a like reflection; for, saying, 'Cologne is
the city your Holiness inhabits, I think?' he shot up rocket-like over
Rhineland, striking the entire length of the stream, and its
rough-bearded castle-crests, slate-ledges, bramble-clefts, vine-slopes,
and haunted valleys, with one brimstone flash. Frankfort and the far Main
saw him and reddened. Ancient Trier and Mosel; Heidelberg and Neckar;
Limberg and Lahn, ran guilty of him. And the swift artery of these
shining veins, Rhine, from his snow cradle to his salt decease, glimmered
Stygian horrors as the Infernal Comet, sprung over Bonn, sparkled a fiery
minute along the face of the stream, and vanished, leaving a seam of
ragged flame trailed on the midnight heavens.

Farina breathed hard through his teeth.

'The last of him was awful,' said he, coming forward to where the Monk
knelt and grasped his breviary, 'but he was vanquished easily.'

'Easily?' exclaimed the holy man, gasping satisfaction: 'thou weakling!
is it for thee to measure difficulties, or estimate powers? Easily? thou
worldling! and so are great deeds judged when the danger's past! And what
am I but the humble instrument that brought about this wondrous conquest!
the poor tool of this astounding triumph! Shall the sword say, This is
the battle I won! Yonder the enemy I overthrow! Bow to me, ye lords of
earth, and worshippers of mighty acts? Not so! Nay, but the sword is
honoured in the hero's grasp, and if it break not, it is accounted
trusty. This, then, this little I may claim, that I was trusty! Trusty in
a heroic encounter! Trusty in a battle with earth's terror! Oh! but this
must not be said. This is to think too much! This is to be more than
aught yet achieved by man!'

The holy warrior crossed his arms, and gently bowed his head.

'Take me to the Sisters,' he said. 'The spirit has gone out of me! I am
faint, and as a child!'

Farina asked, and had, his blessing.

'And with it my thanks!' said the Monk. 'Thou hast witnessed how he can
be overcome! Thou hast looked upon a scene that will be the glory of
Christendom! Thou hast beheld the discomfiture of Darkness before the
voice of Light! Yet think not much of me: account me little in this
matter! I am but an instrument! but an instrument!--and again, but an
instrument!'

Farina drew the arms of the holy combatant across his shoulders and
descended Drachenfels.

The tempest was as a forgotten anguish. Bright with maiden splendour
shone the moon; and the old rocks, cherished in her beams, put up their
horns to blue heaven once more. All the leafage of the land shook as to
shake off a wicked dream, and shuddered from time to time, whispering of
old fears quieted, and present peace. The heart of the river fondled with
the image of the moon in its depths.

'This is much to have won for earth,' murmured the Monk. 'And what is
life, or who would not risk all, to snatch such loveliness from the
talons of the Fiend, the Arch-foe? Yet, not I! not I! say not, 'twas I
did this!'

Soft praises of melody ascended to them on the moist fragrance of air. It
was the hymn of the Sisters.

'How sweet!' murmured the Monk. 'Put it from me! away with it!'

Rising on Farina's back, and stirruping his feet on the thighs of the
youth, he cried aloud: 'I charge ye, whoso ye be, sing not this deed
before the emperor! By the breath of your nostrils; pause! ere ye whisper
aught of the combat of Saint Gregory with Satan, and his victory, and the
marvel of it, while he liveth; for he would die the humble monk he is.'

He resumed his seat, and Farina brought him into the circle of the
Sisters. Those pure women took him, and smoothed him, lamenting, and
filling the night with triumphing tones.

Farina stood apart.

'The breeze tells of dawn,' said the Monk; 'we must be in Cologne before
broad day.'

They mounted horse, and the Sisters grouped and reverenced under the
blessings of the Monk.

'No word of it!' said the Monk warningly. 'We are silent, Father!' they
answered. 'Cologne-ward!' was then his cry, and away he and Farina, flew.




THE GOSHAWK LEADS

Morning was among the grey eastern clouds as they rode upon the camp
hastily formed to meet the Kaiser. All there was in a wallow of
confusion. Fierce struggles for precedence still went on in the
neighbourhood of the imperial tent ground, where, under the standard of
Germany, lounged some veterans of the Kaiser's guard, calmly watching the
scramble. Up to the edge of the cultivated land nothing was to be seen
but brawling clumps of warriors asserting the superior claims of their
respective lords. Variously and hotly disputed were these claims, as many
red coxcombs testified. Across that point where the green field
flourished, not a foot was set, for the Kaiser's care of the farmer, and
affection for good harvests, made itself respected even in the heat of
those jealous rivalries. It was said of him, that he would have camped in
a bog, or taken quarters in a cathedral, rather than trample down a green
blade of wheat, or turn over one vine-pole in the empire. Hence the
presence of Kaiser Heinrich was never hailed as Egypt's plague by the
peasantry, but welcome as the May month wherever he went.

Father Gregory and Farina found themselves in the centre of a group ere
they drew rein, and a cry rose, 'The good father shall decide, and all's
fair,' followed by, 'Agreed! Hail and tempest! he's dropped down o'
purpose.'

'Father,' said one, 'here it is! I say I saw the Devil himself fly off
Drachenfels, and flop into Cologne. Fritz here, and Frankenbauch, saw him
too. They'll swear to him: so 'll I. Hell's thunder! will we. Yonder
fellows will have it 'twas a flash o' lightning, as if I didn't see him,
horns, tail, and claws, and a mighty sight 'twas, as I'm a sinner.'

A clash of voices, for the Devil and against him, burst on this accurate
description of the Evil spirit. The Monk sank his neck into his chest.

'Gladly would I hold silence on this, my sons,' said he, in a
supplicating voice.

'Speak, Father,' cried the first spokesman, gathering courage from the
looks of the Monk.

Father Gregory appeared to commune with himself deeply. At last, lifting
his head, and murmuring, 'It must be,' he said aloud:

''Twas verily Satan, O my sons! Him this night in mortal combat I
encountered and overcame on the summit of Drachenfels, before the eyes of
this youth; and from Satan I this night deliver ye! an instrument herein
as in all other.'

Shouts, and a far-spreading buzz resounded in the camp. Hundreds had now
seen Satan flying off the Drachenstein. Father Gregory could no longer
hope to escape from the importunate crowds that beset him for
particulars. The much-contested point now was, as to the exact position
of Satan's tail during his airy circuit, before descending into Cologne.
It lashed like a lion's. 'Twas cocked, for certain! He sneaked it between
his legs like a lurcher! He made it stumpy as a brown bear's! He carried
it upright as a pike!

'O my sons! have I sown dissension? Have I not given ye peace?' exclaimed
the Monk.

But they continued to discuss it with increasing frenzy.

Farina cast a glance over the tumult, and beheld his friend Guy beckoning
earnestly. He had no difficulty in getting away to him, as the fetters of
all eyes were on the Monk alone.

The Goshawk was stamping with excitement.

'Not a moment to be lost, my lad,' said Guy, catching his arm. 'Here,
I've had half-a-dozen fights already for this bit of ground. Do you know
that fellow squatting there?'

Farina beheld the Thier at the entrance of a tumbledown tent. He was
ruefully rubbing a broken head.

'Now,' continued Guy, 'to mount him is the thing; and then after the
wolves of Werner as fast as horse-flesh can carry us. No questions!
Bound, are you? And what am I? But this is life and death, lad! Hark!'

The Goshawk whispered something that sucked the blood out of Farina's
cheek.

'Look you--what's your lockjaw name? Keep good faith with me, and you
shall have your revenge, and the shiners I promise, besides my lord's
interest for a better master: but, sharp! we won't mount till we're out
of sight o' the hell-scum you horde with.'

The Thier stood up and staggered after them through the camp. There was
no difficulty in mounting him horses were loose, and scampering about the
country, not yet delivered from their terrors of the last night's
tempest.

'Here be we, three good men!' exclaimed Guy, when they were started, and
Farina had hurriedly given him the heads of his adventure with the Monk.
'Three good men! One has helped to kick the devil: one has served an
apprenticeship to his limb: and one is ready to meet him foot to foot any
day, which last should be myself. Not a man more do we want, though it
were to fish up that treasure you talk of being under the Rhine there,
and guarded by I don't know how many tricksy little villains. Horses can
be ferried across at Linz, you say?'

'Ay, thereabout,' grunted the Thier.

'We 're on the right road, then!' said Guy. 'Thanks to you both, I've had
no sleep for two nights--not a wink, and must snatch it going--not the
first time.'

The Goshawk bent his body, and spoke no more. Farina could not get a word
further from him. By the mastery he still had over his rein, the Goshawk
alone proved that he was of the world of the living. Schwartz Thier,
rendered either sullen or stunned by the latest cracked crown he had
received, held his jaws close as if they had been nailed.

At Linz the horses were well breathed. The Goshawk, who had been snoring
an instant before, examined them keenly, and shook his calculating head.

'Punch that beast of yours in the ribs,' said he to Farina. 'Ah! not a
yard of wind in him. And there's the coming back, when we shall have more
to carry. Well: this is my lord's money; but i' faith, it's going in a
good cause, and Master Groschen will make it all right, no doubt; not a
doubt of it.'

The Goshawk had seen some excellent beasts in the stables of the Kaiser's
Krone; but the landlord would make no exchange without an advance of
silver. This done, the arrangement was prompt.

'Schwartz Thier!--I've got your name now,' said Guy, as they were
ferrying across, 'you're stiff certain they left Cologne with the maiden
yesternoon, now?'

'Ah, did they! and she's at the Eck safe enow by this time.'

'And away from the Eck this night she shall come, trust me!'

'Or there will I die with her!' cried Farina.

'Fifteen men at most, he has, you said,' continued Guy.

'Two not sound, five true as steel, and the rest shillyshally. 'Slife,
one lock loose serves us; but two saves us: five we're a match for,
throwing in bluff Baron; the remainder go with victory.'

'Can we trust this fellow?' whispered Farina.

'Trust him!' roared Guy. 'Why, I've thumped him, lad; pegged and pardoned
him. Trust him? trust me! If Werner catches a sight of that snout of his
within half-a-mile of his hold, he'll roast him alive.'

He lowered his voice: 'Trust him? We can do nothing without him. I
knocked the devil out of him early this morning. No chance for his
Highness anywhere now. This Eck of Werner's would stand a siege from the
Kaiser in person, I hear. We must into it like weasels; and out as we
can.'

Dismissing the ferry-barge with stern injunctions to be in waiting from
noon to noon, the three leapt on their fresh nags.

'Stop at the first village,' said Guy; 'we must lay in provision. As
Master Groschen says, "Nothing's to be done, Turpin, without provender."'

'Goshawk!' cried Farina; 'you have time; tell me how this business was
done.'

The only reply was a soft but decided snore, that spoke, like a
voluptuous trumpet, of dreamland and its visions.

At Sinzig, the Thier laid his hand on Guy's bridle, with the words, 'Feed
here,' a brief, but effective, form of signal, which aroused the Goshawk
completely. The sign of the Trauben received them. Here, wurst reeking
with garlic, eggs, black bread, and sour wine, was all they could
procure. Farina refused to eat, and maintained his resolution, in spite
of Guy's sarcastic chiding.

'Rub down the beasts, then, and water them,' said the latter. 'Made a
vow, I suppose,' muttered Guy.

'That's the way of those fellows. No upright manly
take-the-thing-as-it-comes; but fly-sky-high whenever there's a dash on
their heaven. What has his belly done to offend him? It will be crying
out just when we want all quiet. I wouldn't pay Werner such a compliment
as go without a breakfast for him. Not I! Would you, Schwartz Thier?'

'Henker! not I!' growled the Thier. 'He'll lose one sooner.'

'First snatch his prey, or he'll be making, God save us! a meal for a
Kaiser, the brute.'

Guy called in the landlady, clapped down the score, and abused the wine.

'Sir,' said the landlady, 'ours is but a poor inn, and we do our best.'

'So you do,' replied the Goshawk, softened; 'and I say that a civil
tongue and rosy smiles sweeten even sour wine.'

The landlady, a summer widow, blushed, and as he was stepping from the
room, called him aside.

'I thought you were one of that dreadful Werner's band, and I hate him.'

Guy undeceived her.

'He took my sister,' she went on, 'and his cruelty killed her. He
persecuted me even in the lifetime of my good man. Last night he came
here in the middle of the storm with a young creature bright as an angel,
and sorrowful--'

'He's gone, you're sure?' broke in Guy.

'Gone! Oh, yes! Soon as the storm abated he dragged her on. Oh! the way
that young thing looked at me, and I able to do nothing for her.'

'Now, the Lord bless you for a rosy Christian!' cried Guy, and, in his
admiration, he flung his arm round her and sealed a ringing kiss on each
cheek.

'No good man defrauded by that! and let me see the fellow that thinks
evil of it. If I ever told a woman a secret, I 'd tell you one now, trust
me. But I never do, so farewell! Not another?'

Hasty times keep the feelings in a ferment, and the landlady was
extremely angry with Guy and heartily forgave him, all within a minute.

'No more,' said she, laughing: 'but wait; I have something for you.'

The Goshawk lingered on a fretting heel. She was quickly under his elbow
again with two flasks leaning from her bosom to her arms.

'There! I seldom meet a man like you; and, when I do, I like to be
remembered. This is a true good wine, real Liebfrauenmilch, which I only
give to choice customers.'

'Welcome it is!' sang Guy to her arch looks; 'but I must pay for it.'

'Not a pfennig!' said the landlady.

'Not one?'

'Not one!' she repeated, with a stamp of the foot.

'In other coin, then,' quoth Guy; and folding her waist, which did not
this time back away, the favoured Goshawk registered rosy payment on a
very fresh red mouth, receiving in return such lively discount, that he
felt himself bound in conscience to make up the full sum a second time.

'What a man!' sighed the landlady, as she watched the Goshawk lead off
along the banks; 'courtly as a knight, open as a squire, and gentle as a
page!'




WERNER'S ECK

A league behind Andernach, and more in the wintry circle of the sun than
Laach, its convenient monastic neighbour, stood the castle of Werner, the
Robber Baron. Far into the South, hazy with afternoon light, a yellow
succession of sandhills stretched away, spouting fire against the blue
sky of an elder world, but now dead and barren of herbage. Around is a
dusty plain, where the green blades of spring no sooner peep than they
become grimed with sand and take an aged look, in accordance with the
ungenerous harvests they promise. The aridity of the prospect is relieved
on one side by the lofty woods of Laach, through which the sun setting
burns golden-red, and on the other by the silver sparkle of a narrow
winding stream, bordered with poplars, and seen but a glistening mile of
its length by all the thirsty hills. The Eck, or Corner, itself, is
thick-set with wood, but of a stunted growth, and lying like a dark patch
on the landscape. It served, however, entirely to conceal the castle, and
mask every movement of the wary and terrible master. A trained eye
advancing on the copse would hardly mark the glimmer of the turrets over
the topmost leaves, but to every loophole of the walls lies bare the
circuit of the land. Werner could rule with a glance the Rhine's course
down from the broad rock over Coblentz to the white tower of Andernach.
He claimed that march as his right; but the Mosel was no hard ride's
distance, and he gratified his thirst for rapine chiefly on that river,
delighting in it, consequently, as much as his robber nature boiled over
the bound of his feudal privileges.

Often had the Baron held his own against sieges and restrictions, bans
and impositions of all kinds. He boasted that there was never a knight
within twenty miles of him that he had not beaten, nor monk of the same
limit not in his pay. This braggadocio received some warrant from his
yearly increase of licence; and his craft and his castle combined, made
him a notable pest of the region, a scandal to the abbey whose
countenance he had, and a frightful infliction on the poorer farmers and
peasantry.

The sun was beginning to slope over Laach, and threw the shadows of the
abbey towers half-way across the blue lake-waters, as two men in the garb
of husbandmen emerged from the wood. Their feet plunged heavily and their
heads hung down, as they strode beside a wain mounted with straw,
whistling an air of stupid unconcern; but a close listener might have
heard that the lumbering vehicle carried a human voice giving them
directions as to the road they were to take, and what sort of behaviour
to observe under certain events. The land was solitary. A boor passing
asked whether toll or tribute they were conveying to Werner. Tribute,
they were advised to reply, which caused him to shrug and curse as he
jogged on. Hearing him, the voice in the wain chuckled grimly. Their next
speech was with a trooper, who overtook them, and wanted to know what
they had in the wain for Werner. Tribute, they replied, and won the title
of 'brave pigs' for their trouble.

'But what's the dish made of?' said the trooper, stirring the straw with
his sword-point.

'Tribute,' came the answer.

'Ha! You've not been to Werner's school,' and the trooper swung a
sword-stroke at the taller of the two, sending a tremendous shudder
throughout his frame; but he held his head to the ground, and only seemed
to betray animal consciousness in leaning his ear closer to the wain.

'Blood and storm! Will ye speak?' cried the trooper.

'Never talk much; but an ye say nothing to the Baron,'--thrusting his
hand into the straw--'here's what's better than speaking.'

'Well said!--Eh? Liebfrauenmilch? Ho, ho! a rare bleed!'

Striking the neck of the flask on a wheel, the trooper applied it to his
mouth, and ceased not deeply ingurgitating till his face was broad to the
sky and the bottle reversed. He then dashed it down, sighed, and shook
himself.

'Rare news! the Kaiser's come: he'll be in Cologne by night; but first he
must see the Baron, and I'm post with the order. That's to show you how
high he stands in the Kaiser's grace. Don't be thinking of upsetting
Werner yet, any of you; mind, now!'

'That's Blass-Gesell,' said the voice in the wain, as the trooper trotted
on: adding, ''gainst us.'

'Makes six,' responded the driver.

Within sight of the Eck, they descried another trooper coming toward
them. This time the driver was first to speak.

'Tribute! Provender! Bread and wine for the high Baron Werner from his
vassals over Tonnistein.'

'And I'm out of it! fasting like a winter wolf,' howled the fellow.

He was in the act of addressing himself to an inspection of the wain's
contents, when a second flask lifted in air, gave a sop to his curiosity.
This flask suffered the fate of the former.

'A Swabian blockhead, aren't you?'

'Ay, that country,' said the driver. 'May be, Henker Rothhals happens to
be with the Baron?'

'To hell with him! I wish he had my job, and I his, of watching the
yellow-bird in her new cage, till she's taken out to-night, and then a
jolly bumper to the Baron all round.'

The driver wished him a fortunate journey, strongly recommending him to
skirt the abbey westward, and go by the Ahr valley, as there was
something stirring that way, and mumbling, 'Makes five again,' as he put
the wheels in motion.

'Goshawk!' said his visible companion; 'what do you say now?'

'I say, bless that widow!'

'Oh! bring me face to face with this accursed Werner quickly, my God!'
gasped the youth.

'Tusk! 'tis not Werner we want--there's the Thier speaking. No, no,
Schwartz Thier! I trust you, no doubt; but the badger smells at a hole,
before he goes inside it. We're strangers, and are allowed to miss our
way.'

Leaving the wain in Farina's charge, he pushed through a dense growth of
shrub and underwood, and came crouching on a precipitous edge of shrouded
crag, which commanded a view of the stronghold, extending round it, as if
scooped clean by some natural action, about a stone'sthrow distant, and
nearly level with the look-out tower. Sheer from a deep circular basin
clothed with wood, and bottomed with grass and bubbling water, rose a
naked moss-stained rock, on whose peak the castle firmly perched, like a
spying hawk. The only means of access was by a narrow natural bridge of
rock flung from this insulated pinnacle across to the mainland. One man,
well disposed, might have held it against forty.

'Our way's the best,' thought Guy, as he meditated every mode of gaining
admission. 'A hundred men an hour might be lost cutting steps up that
steep slate; and once at the top we should only have to be shoved down
again.'

While thus engaged, he heard a summons sounded from the castle, and
scrambled back to Farina.

'The Thier leads now,' said he, 'and who leads is captain. It seems
easier to get out of that than in. There's a square tower, and a round. I
guess the maiden to be in the round. Now, lad, no crying out--You don't
come in with us; but back you go for the horses, and have them ready and
fresh in yon watered meadow under the castle. The path down winds easy.'

'Man!' cried Farina, 'what do you take me for?--go you for the horses.'

'Not for a fool,' Guy rejoined, tightening his lip; 'but now is your time
to prove yourself one.'

'With you, or without you, I enter that castle!'

'Oh! if you want to be served up hot for the Baron's supper-mess, by all
means.'

'Thunder!' growled Schwartz Thier, 'aren't ye moving?'

The Goshawk beckoned Farina aside.

'Act as I tell you, or I'm for Cologne.'

'Traitor!' muttered the youth.

'Swearing this, that if we fail, the Baron shall need a leech sooner than
a bride.'

'That stroke must be mine!'

The Goshawk griped the muscle of Farina's arm till the youth was
compelled to slacken it with pain.

'Could you drive a knife through a six-inch wood-wall? I doubt this wild
boar wants a harder hit than many a best man could give. 'Sblood! obey,
sirrah. How shall we keep yon fellow true, if he sees we're at points?'

'I yield,' exclaimed Farina with a fall of the chest; 'but hear I nothing
of you by midnight--Oh! then think not I shall leave another minute to
chance. Farewell! haste! Heaven prosper you! You will see her, and die
under her eyes. That may be denied to me. What have I done to be refused
that last boon?'

'Gone without breakfast and dinner,' said Guy in abhorrent tones.

A whistle from the wain, following a noise of the castlegates being flung
open, called the Goshawk away, and he slouched his shoulders and strode
to do his part, without another word. Farina gazed after him, and dropped
into the covert.




THE WATER-LADY

'Bird of lovers! Voice of the passion of love! Sweet, deep,
disaster-toning nightingale!' sings the old minnesinger; 'who that has
not loved, hearing thee is touched with the wand of love's mysteries, and
yearneth to he knoweth not whom, humbled by overfulness of heart; but
who, listening, already loveth, heareth the language he would speak, yet
faileth in; feeleth the great tongueless sea of his infinite desires
stirred beyond his narrow bosom; is as one stript of wings whom the
angels beckon to their silver homes: and he leaneth forward to ascend to
them, and is mocked by his effort: then is he of the fallen, and of the
fallen would he remain, but that tears lighten him, and through the tears
stream jewelled shafts dropt down to him from the sky, precious ladders
inlaid with amethyst, sapphire, blended jasper, beryl, rose-ruby, ether
of heaven flushed with softened bloom of the insufferable Presences: and
lo, the ladders dance, and quiver, and waylay his eyelids, and a second
time he is mocked, aspiring: and after the third swoon standeth Hope
before him with folded arms, and eyes dry of the delusions of tears,
saying, Thou hast seen! thou hast felt! thy strength hath reached in thee
so far! now shall I never die in thee!'

'For surely,' says the minstrel, 'Hope is not born of earth, or it were
perishable. Rather know her the offspring of that embrace strong love
straineth the heavens with. This owe we to thy music, bridal nightingale!
And the difference of this celestial spirit from the smirking phantasy of
whom all stand soon or late forsaken, is the difference between painted
day with its poor ambitious snares, and night lifting its myriad tapers
round the throne of the eternal, the prophet stars of everlasting time!
And the one dieth, and the other liveth; and the one is unregretted, and
the other walketh in thought-spun raiment of divine melancholy; her ears
crowded with the pale surges that wrap this shifting shore; in her eyes a
shape of beauty floating dimly, that she will not attain this side the
water, but broodeth on evermore.

'Therefore, hold on thy cherished four long notes, which are as the very
edge where exultation and anguish melt, meet, and are sharpened to one
ecstasy, death-dividing bird! Fill the woods with passionate chuckle and
sob, sweet chaplain of the marriage service of a soul with heaven! Pour
out thy holy wine of song upon the soft-footed darkness, till, like a
priest of the inmost temple, 'tis drunken with fair intelligences!'

Thus the old minstrels and minnesingers.

Strong and full sang the nightingales that night Farina held watch by the
guilty castle that entombed his living beloved. The castle looked itself
a denser shade among the moonthrown shadows of rock and tree. The meadow
spread like a green courtyard at the castle's foot. It was of lush deep
emerald grass, softly mixed with grey in the moon's light, and showing
like jasper. Where the shadows fell thickest, there was yet a mist of
colour. All about ran a brook, and babbled to itself. The spring crocus
lifted its head in moist midgrasses of the meadow, rejoiced with
freshness. The rugged heights seemed to clasp this one innocent spot as
their only garden-treasure; and a bank of hazels hid it from the castle
with a lover's arm.

'The moon will tell me,' mused Farina; 'the moon will signal me the hour!
When the moon hangs over the round tower, I shall know 'tis time to
strike.'

The song of the nightingales was a full unceasing throb.

It went like the outcry of one heart from branch to branch. The four long
notes, and the short fifth which leads off to that hurried gush of music,
gurgling rich with passion, came thick and constant from under the
tremulous leaves.

At first Farina had been deaf to them. His heart was in the dungeon with
Margarita, or with the Goshawk in his dangers, forming a thousand
desperate plans, among the red-hot ploughshares of desperate action.
Finally, without a sense of being wooed, it was won. The tenderness of
his love then mastered him.

'God will not suffer that fair head to come to harm!' he thought, and
with the thought a load fell off his breast.

He paced the meadows, and patted the three pasturing steeds.
Involuntarily his sight grew on the moon. She went so slowly. She seemed
not to move at all. A little wing of vapour flew toward her; it whitened,
passed, and the moon was slower than before. Oh! were the heavens
delaying their march to look on this iniquity? Again and again he cried,
'Patience, it is not time!' He flung himself on the grass. The next
moment he climbed the heights, and was peering at the mass of gloom that
fronted the sky. It reared such a mailed head of menace, that his heart
was seized with a quivering, as though it had been struck. Behind lay
scattered some small faint-winkling stars on sapphire fields, and a stain
of yellow light was in a breach of one wall.

He descended. What was the Goshawk doing? Was he betrayed? It was surely
now time? No; the moon had not yet smitten the face of the castle. He
made his way through the hazel-bank among flitting nightmoths, and
glanced up to measure the moon's distance. As he did so, a first touch of
silver fell on the hoary flint.

'Oh, young bird of heaven in that Devil's clutch!'

Sounds like the baying of boar-hounds alarmed him. They whined into
silence.

He fell back. The meadow breathed peace, and more and more the
nightingales volumed their notes. As in a charmed circle of palpitating
song, he succumbed to languor. The brook rolled beside him fresh as an
infant, toying with the moonlight. He leaned over it, and thrice
waywardly dipped his hand in the clear translucence.

Was it his own face imaged there?

Farina bent close above an eddy of the water. It whirled with a strange
tumult, breaking into lines and lights a face not his own, nor the
moon's; nor was it a reflection. The agitation increased. Now a wreath of
bubbles crowned the pool, and a pure water-lily, but larger, ascended
wavering.

He started aside; and under him a bright head, garlanded with gemmed
roses, appeared. No fairer figure of woman had Farina seen. Her visage
had the lustrous white of moonlight, and all her shape undulated in a
dress of flashing silver-white, wonderful to see. The Lady of the Water
smiled on him, and ran over with ripples and dimples of limpid beauty.
Then, as he retreated on the meadow grass, she swam toward him, and
taking his hand, pressed it to her. After her touch the youth no longer
feared. She curved her finger, and beckoned him on. All that she did was
done flowingly. The youth was a shadow in her silver track as she passed
like a harmless wave over the closed crocuses; but the crocuses shivered
and swelled their throats of streaked purple and argent as at delicious
rare sips of a wine. Breath of violet, and ladysmock, and valley-lily,
mingled and fluttered about her. Farina was as a man working the day's
intent in a dream. He could see the heart in her translucent, hanging
like a cold dingy ruby. By the purity of his nature he felt that such a
presence must have come but to help. It might be Margarita's guardian
fairy!

They passed the hazel-bank, and rounded the castlecrag, washed by the
brook and, beneath the advancing moon, standing in a ring of brawling
silver. The youth with his fervid eyes marked the old weather-stains and
scars of long defiance coming into colour. That mystery of wickedness
which the towers had worn in the dusk, was dissolved, and he endured no
more the almost abashed sensation of competing littleness that made him
think there was nought to do, save die, combating single-handed such
massive power. The moon shone calmly superior, like the prowess of maiden
knights; and now the harsh frown of the walls struck resolution to his
spirit, and nerved him with hate and the contempt true courage feels when
matched against fraud and villany.

On a fallen block of slate, cushioned with rich brown moss and rusted
weather-stains, the Water-Lady sat, and pointed to Farina the path of the
moon toward the round tower. She did not speak, and if his lips parted,
put her cold finger across them. Then she began to hum a soft sweet
monotony of song, vague and careless, very witching to hear. Farina
caught no words, nor whether the song was of days in dust or in flower,
but his mind bloomed with legends and sad splendours of story, while she
sang on the slate-block under sprinkled shadows by the water.

He had listened long in trance, when the Water-Lady hushed, and stretched
forth a slender forefinger to the moon. It stood like a dot over the
round tower. Farina rose in haste. She did not leave him to ask her aid,
but took his hand and led him up the steep ascent. Halfway to the castle,
she rested. There, concealed by bramble-tufts, she disclosed the low
portal of a secret passage, and pushed it open without effort. She paused
at the entrance, and he could see her trembling, seeming to wax taller,
till she was like a fountain glittering in the cold light. Then she
dropped, as drops a dying bet, and cowered into the passage.

Darkness, thick with earth-dews, oppressed his senses. He felt the clammy
walls scraping close on him. Not the dimmest lamp, or guiding sound, was
near; but the lady went on as one who knew her way. Passing a low-vaulted
dungeon-room, they wound up stairs hewn in the rock, and came to a door,
obedient to her touch, which displayed a chamber faintly misted by a
solitary bar of moonlight. Farina perceived they were above the
foundation of the castle. The walls gleamed pale with knightly harness,
habergeons gaping for heads, breastplates of blue steel, halbert, and
hand-axe, greaves, glaives, boar-spears, and polished spur-fixed
heel-pieces. He seized a falchion hanging apart, but the lady stayed his
arm, and led to another flight of stone ending in a kind of corridor.
Noises of laughter and high feasting beset him at this point. The Lady of
the Water sidled her head, as to note a familiar voice; and then drew him
to a looped aperture.

Farina beheld a scene that first dazzled, but, as it grew into shape,
sank him with dismay. Below, and level with the chamber he had left, a
rude banqueting-hall glowed, under the light of a dozen flambeaux, with
smoking boar's flesh, deer's flesh, stone-flagons, and horn-beakers. At
the head of this board sat Werner, scarlet with furious feasting, and on
his right hand, Margarita, bloodless as a beautiful martyr bound to the
fire. Retainers of Werner occupied the length of the hall, chorusing the
Baron's speeches, and drinking their own healths when there was no call
for another. Farina saw his beloved alone. She was dressed as when he
parted with her last. The dear cameo lay on her bosom, but not heaving
proudly as of old. Her shoulders were drooped forward, and contracted her
bosom in its heaving. She would have had a humbled look, but for the
marble sternness of her eyes. They were fixed as eyes that see the way of
death through all earthly objects.

'Now, dogs!' cried the Baron, 'the health of the night! and swell your
lungs, for I'll have no cat's cry when Werner's bride is the toast. Monk
or no monk's leave, she's mine. Ay, my pretty one! it shall be made right
in the morning, if I lead all the Laach rats here by the nose. Thunder!
no disrespect to Werner's bride from Pope or abbot. Now, sing out!--or
wait! these fellows shall drink it first.'

He stretched and threw a beaker of wine right and left behind him, and
Farina's despair stiffened his limbs as he recognized the Goshawk and
Schwartz Thier strapped to the floor. Their beards were already moist
with previous libations similarly bestowed, and they received this in
sullen stillness; but Farina thought he observed a rapid glance of
encouragement dart from beneath the Goshawk's bent brows, as Margarita
momentarily turned her head half-way on him.

'Lick your chaps, ye beasts, and don't say Werner stints vermin good
cheer his nuptial-night. Now,' continued the Baron, growing huskier as he
talked louder: 'Short and ringing, my devil's pups:--Werner and his
Bride! and may she soon give you a young baron to keep you in better
order than I can, as, if she does her duty, she will.'

The Baron stood up, and lifted his huge arm to lead the toast.

'Werner and his Bride!'

Not a voice followed him. There was a sudden intimation of the call being
echoed; but it snapped, and ended in shuffling tones, as if the hall-door
had closed on the response.

'What 's this?' roared the Baron, in that caged wild beast voice
Margarita remembered she had heard in the Cathedral Square.

No one replied.

'Speak! or I'll rot you a fathom in the rock, curs!'

'Herr Baron!' said Henker Rothhals impressively; 'the matter is, that
there's something unholy among us.'

The Baron's goblet flew at his head before the words were uttered.

'I'll make an unholy thing of him that says it,' and Werner lowered at
them one by one.

'Then I say it, Herr Baron!' pursued Henker Rothhals, wiping his
frontispiece: 'The Devil has turned against you at last. Look up
there--Ah, it's gone now; but where's the man sitting this side saw it
not?'

The Baron made one spring, and stood on the board.

'Now! will any rascal here please to say so?'

Something in the cruel hang of his threatening hatchet jaw silenced many
in the act of confirming the assertion.

'Stand out, Henker Rotthals!'

Rotthals slid a hunting-knife up his wrist, and stepped back from the
board.

'Beast!' roared the Baron, 'I said I wouldn't shed blood to-night. I
spared a traitor, and an enemy----'

'Look again!' said Rothhals; 'will any fellow say he saw nothing there.'

While all heads, including Werner's, were directed to the aperture which
surveyed them, Rothhals tossed his knife to the Goshawk unperceived.

This time answers came to his challenge, but not in confirmation. The
Baron spoke with a gasping gentleness.

'So you trifle with me? I'm dangerous for that game. Mind you of
Blass-Gesell? I made a better beast of him by sending him three-quarters
of the road to hell for trial.' Bellowing, 'Take that!' he discharged a
broad blade, hitherto concealed in his right hand, straight at Rothhals.
It fixed in his cheek and jaw, wringing an awful breath of pain from him
as he fell against the wall.

'There's a lesson for you not to cross me, children!' said Werner,
striding his stumpy legs up and down the crashing board, and puffing his
monstrous girth of chest and midriff. 'Let him stop there awhile, to show
what comes of thwarting Werner!--Fire-devils! before the baroness,
too!--Something unholy is there? Something unholy in his jaw, I
think!--Leave it sticking! He's against meat last, is he? I'll teach you
who he's for!--Who speaks?'

All hung silent. These men were animals dominated by a mightier brute.

He clasped his throat, and shook the board with a jump, as he squeaked,
rather than called, a second time 'Who spoke?'

He had not again to ask. In this pause, as the Baron glared for his
victim, a song, so softly sung that it sounded remote, but of which every
syllable was clearly rounded, swelled into his ears, and froze him in his
angry posture.

       'The blood of the barons shall turn to ice,
         And their castle fall to wreck,
        When a true lover dips in the water thrice,
         That runs round Werner's Eck.

       'Round Werner's Eck the water runs;
         The hazels shiver and shake:
        The walls that have blotted such happy suns,
         Are seized with the ruin-quake.

       'And quake with the ruin, and quake with rue,
         Thou last of Werner's race!
        The hearts of the barons were cold that knew
         The Water-Dame's embrace.

       'For a sin was done, and a shame was wrought,
         That water went to hide:
        And those who thought to make it nought,
         They did but spread it wide.

       'Hold ready, hold ready to pay the price,
         And keep thy bridal cheer:
        A hand has dipped in the water thrice,
         And the Water-Dame is here.'




THE RESCUE

The Goshawk was on his feet. 'Now, lass,' said he to Margarita, 'now is
the time!' He took her hand, and led her to the door. Schwartz Thier
closed up behind her. Not a man in the hall interposed. Werner's head
moved round after them, like a dog on the watch; but he was dumb. The
door opened, and Farina entered. He bore a sheaf of weapons under his
arm. The familiar sight relieved Werner's senses from the charm. He
shouted to bar the prisoners' passage. His men were ranged like statues
in the hall. There was a start among them, as if that terrible noise
communicated an instinct of obedience, but no more. They glanced at each
other, and remained quiet.

The Goshawk had his eye on Werner. 'Stand back, lass!' he said to
Margarita. She took a sword from Farina, and answered, with white lips
and flashing eyes, 'I can fight, Goshawk!'

'And shall, if need be; but leave it to me now, returned Guy.

His eye never left the Baron. Suddenly a shriek of steel rang. All fell
aside, and the combatants stood opposed on clear ground. Farina, took
Margarita's left hand, and placed her against the wall between the Thier
and himself. Werner's men were well content to let their master fight it
out. The words spoken by Henker Rothhals, that the Devil had forsaken
him, seemed in their minds confirmed by the weird song which every one
present could swear he heard with his ears. 'Let him take his chance, and
try his own luck,' they said, and shrugged. The battle was between Guy,
as Margarita's champion, and Werner.

In Schwartz Thier's judgement, the two were well matched, and he
estimated their diverse qualities from sharp experience. 'For short work
the Baron, and my new mate for tough standing to 't!' Farina's summary in
favour of the Goshawk was, 'A stouter heart, harder sinews, and a good
cause. The combat was generally regarded with a professional eye, and few
prayers. Margarita solely there asked aid from above, and knelt to the
Virgin; but her, too, the clash of arms and dire earnest of mortal fight
aroused to eager eyes. She had not dallied with heroes in her dreams. She
was as ready to second Siegfried on the crimson field as tend him in the
silken chamber.

It was well that a woman's heart was there to mark the grace and glory of
manhood in upright foot-to-foot encounter. For the others, it was a mere
calculation of lucky hits. Even Farina, in his anxiety for her, saw but
the brightening and darkening of the prospect of escape in every attitude
and hard-ringing blow. Margarita was possessed with a painful exaltation.
In her eyes the bestial Baron now took a nobler form and countenance; but
the Goshawk assumed the sovereign aspect of old heroes, who, whether
persecuted or favoured of heaven, still maintained their stand,
remembering of what stuff they were, and who made them.

'Never,' say the old writers, with a fervour honourable to their
knowledge of the elements that compose our being, 'never may this bright
privilege of fair fight depart from us, nor advantage of it fail to be
taken! Man against man, or beast, singly keeping his ground, is as fine
rapture to the breast as Beauty in her softest hour affordeth. For if
woman taketh loveliness to her when she languisheth, so surely doth man
in these fierce moods, when steel and iron sparkle opposed, and their
breath is fire, and their lips white with the lock of resolution; all
their faculties knotted to a point, and their energies alive as the
daylight to prove themselves superior, according to the laws and under
the blessing of chivalry.'

'For all,' they go on to improve the comparison, 'may admire and delight
in fair blossoming dales under the blue dome of peace; but 'tis the rare
lofty heart alone comprehendeth, and is heightened by, terrific
splendours of tempest, when cloud meets cloud in skies black as the
sepulchre, and Glory sits like a flame on the helm of Ruin'

For a while the combatants aired their dexterity, contenting themselves
with cunning cuts and flicks of the sword-edge, in which Werner first
drew blood by a keen sweep along the forehead of the Goshawk. Guy had
allowed him to keep his position on the board, and still fought at his
face and neck. He now jerked back his body from the hip, and swung a
round stroke at Werner's knee, sending him in retreat with a snort of
pain. Before the Baron could make good his ground, Guy was level with him
on the board.

Werner turned an upbraiding howl at his men. They were not disposed to
second him yet. They one and all approved his personal battle with Fate,
and never more admired him and felt his power; but the affair was
exciting, and they were not the pillars to prop a falling house.

Werner clenched his two hands to his ponderous glaive, and fell upon Guy
with heavier fury. He was becoming not unworth the little womanly
appreciation Margarita was brought to bestow on him. The voice of the
Water-Lady whispered at her heart that the Baron warred on his destiny,
and that ennobles all living souls.

Bare-headed the combatants engaged, and the headpiece was the chief point
of attack. No swerving from blows was possible for either: ward, or take;
a false step would have ensured defeat. This also induced caution. Many a
double stamp of the foot was heard, as each had to retire in turn.

'Not at his head so much, he'll bear battering there all night long,'
said Henker Rothhals in a breathing interval. Knocks had been pretty
equally exchanged, but the Baron's head certainly looked the least
vulnerable, whereas Guy exhibited several dints that streamed freely. Yet
he looked, eye and bearing, as fresh as when they began, and the calm,
regular heave of his chest contrasted with Werner's quick gasps. His
smile, too, renewed each time the Baron paused for breath, gave Margarita
heart. It was not a taunting smile, but one of entire confidence, and
told all the more on his adversary. As Werner led off again, and the
choice was always left him, every expression of the Goshawk's face passed
to full light in his broad eyes.

The Baron's play was a reckless fury. There was nothing to study in it.
Guy became the chief object of speculation. He was evidently trying to
wind his man.

He struck wildly, some thought. Others judged that he was a random
hitter, and had no mortal point in aim. Schwartz Thier's opinion was
frequently vented. 'Too round a stroke--down on him! Chop-not slice!'

Guy persevered in his own fashion. According to Schwartz Thier, he
brought down by his wilfulness the blow that took him on the left
shoulder, and nigh broke him. It was a weighty blow, followed by a thump
of sound. The sword-edge swerved on his shoulder-blade, or he must have
been disabled. But Werner's crow was short, and he had no time to push
success. One of the Goshawk's swooping under-hits half severed his right
wrist, and the blood spirted across the board. He gasped and seemed to
succumb, but held to it still, though with slackened force. Guy now
attacked. Holding to his round strokes, he accustomed Werner to guard the
body, and stood to it so briskly right and left, that Werner grew
bewildered, lost his caution, and gave ground. Suddenly the Goshawk's
glaive flashed in air, and chopped sheer down on Werner's head. So shrewd
a blow it was against a half-formed defence, that the Baron dropped
without a word right on the edge of the board, and there hung, feebly
grasping with his fingers.

'Who bars the way now?' sang out Guy.

No one accepted the challenge. Success clothed him with terrors, and gave
him giant size.

'Then fare you well, my merry men all,' said Guy. 'Bear me no ill-will
for this. A little doctoring will right the bold Baron.'

He strode jauntily to the verge of the board, and held his finger for
Margarita to follow. She stepped forward. The men put their beards
together, muttering. She could not advance. Farina doubled his elbow, and
presented sword-point. Three of the ruffians now disputed the way with
bare steel. Margarita looked at the Goshawk. He was smiling calmly
curious as he leaned over his sword, and gave her an encouraging nod. She
made another step in defiance. One fellow stretched his hand to arrest
her. All her maidenly pride stood up at once. 'What a glorious girl!'
murmured the Goshawk, as he saw her face suddenly flash, and she
retreated a pace and swung a sharp cut across the knuckles of her
assailant, daring him, or one of them, with hard, bright eyes,
beautifully vindictive, to lay hand on a pure maiden.

'You have it, Barenleib!' cried the others, and then to Margarita: 'Look,
young mistress! we are poor fellows, and ask a trifle of ransom, and then
part friends.'

'Not an ace!' the Goshawk pronounced from his post.

'Two to one, remember.'

'The odds are ours,' replied the Goshawk confidently.

They ranged themselves in front of the hall-door. Instead of accepting
this challenge, Guy stepped to Werner, and laid his moaning foe
length-wise in an easier posture. He then lifted Margarita on the board,
and summoned them with cry of 'Free passage!' They answered by a sullen
shrug and taunt.

'Schwartz Thier! Rothhals! Farina! buckle up, and make ready then,' sang
Guy.

He measured the length, of his sword, and raised it. The Goshawk had not
underrated his enemies. He was tempted to despise them when he marked
their gradually lengthening chaps and eyeballs.

Not one of them moved. All gazed at him as if their marrows were freezing
with horror.

'What's this?' cried Guy.

They knew as little as he, but a force was behind them irresistible
against their efforts. The groaning oak slipped open, pushing them
forward, and an apparition glided past, soft as the pallid silver of the
moon. She slid to the Baron, and put her arms about him, and sang to him.
Had the Water-Lady laid an iron hand on all those ruffians, she could not
have held them faster bound than did the fear of her presence. The
Goshawk drew his fair charge through them, followed by Farina, the Thier,
and Rothhals. A last glimpse of the hall showed them still as old
cathedral sculpture staring at white light on a fluted pillar of the
wall.




THE PASSAGE OF THE RHINE

Low among the swarthy sandhills behind the Abbey of Laach dropped the
round red moon. Soft lengths of misty yellow stole through the glens of
Rhineland. The nightingales still sang. Closer and closer the moon came
into the hushed valleys.

There is a dell behind Hammerstein Castle, a ring of basking sward,
girdled by a silver slate-brook, and guarded by four high-peaked hills
that slope down four long wooded corners to the grassy base. Here, it is
said, the elves and earthmen play, dancing in circles with laughing feet
that fatten the mushroom. They would have been fulfilling the tradition
now, but that the place was occupied by a sturdy group of mortals, armed
with staves. The intruders were sleepy, and lay about on the inclines.
Now and then two got up, and there rang hard echoes of oak. Again all
were calm as cud-chewing cattle, and the white water ran pleased with
quiet.

It may be that the elves brewed mischief among them; for the oaken blows
were becoming more frequent. One complained of a kick: another demanded
satisfaction for a pinch. 'Go to,' drawled the accused drowsily in both
cases, 'too much beer last night!' Within three minutes, the company
counted a pair of broken heads. The East was winning on the West in
heaven, and the dusk was thinning. They began to mark, each, whom he had
cudgelled. A noise of something swiftly in motion made them alert. A
roebuck rushed down one of the hills, and scampered across the sward. The
fine beast went stretching so rapidly away as to be hardly distinct.

'Sathanas once more!' they murmured, and drew together.

The name passed through them like a watchword.

'Not he this time,' cried the two new-comers, emerging from the foliage.
'He's safe under Cologne--the worse for all good men who live there! But
come! follow to the Rhine! there 's work for us on the yonder side, and
sharp work.'

'Why,' answered several, 'we 've our challenge with the lads of
Leutesdorf and Wied to-day.'

'D' ye see this?' said the foremost of the others, pointing to a carved
ivory white rose in his cap.

'Brothers!' he swelled his voice, 'follow with a will, for the White Rose
is in danger!'

Immediately they ranked, and followed zealously through the buds of young
bushes, and over heaps of damp dead leaves, a half-hour's scramble, when
they defiled under Hammerstein, and stood before the Rhine. Their leader
led up the river, and after a hasty walk, stopped, loosened his hood, and
stripped.

'Now,' said he, strapping the bundle to his back, 'let me know the hound
that refuses to follow his leader when the White Rose is in danger.'

'Long live Dietrich!' they shouted. He dropped from the bank, and waded
in. He was soon supported by the remainder of the striplings, and all
struck out boldly into mid-stream.

Never heard history of a nobler Passage of the Rhine than this made
between Andernach and Hammerstein by members of the White Rose Club,
bundle on back, to relieve the White Rose of Germany from thrall and
shame!

They were taken far down by the rapid current, and arrived panting to
land. The dressing done, they marched up the pass of Tonnistein, and took
a deep draught at the spring of pleasant waters there open to wayfarers.
Arrived at the skirts of Laach, they beheld two farmer peasants lashed
back to back against a hazel. They released them, but could gain no word
of information, as the fellows, after a yawn and a wink, started off, all
heels, to make sure of liberty. On the shores of the lake the brotherhood
descried a body of youths, whom they hailed, and were welcomed to
companionship.

'Where's Berthold?' asked Dietrich.

He was not present.

'The more glory for us, then,' Dietrich said.

It was here seriously put to the captain, whether they should not halt at
the abbey, and reflect, seeing that great work was in prospect.

'Truly,' quoth Dietrich, 'dying on an empty stomach is heathenish, and
cold blood makes a green wound gape. Kaiser Conrad should be hospitable,
and the monks honour numbers. Here be we, thirty and nine; let us go!'

The West was dark blue with fallen light. The lakewaters were growing
grey with twilight. The abbey stood muffled in shadows. Already the
youths had commenced battering at the convent doors, when they were
summoned by the voice of the Goshawk on horseback. To their confusion
they beheld the White Rose herself on his right hand. Chapfallen Dietrich
bowed to his sweet mistress.

'We were coming to the rescue,' he stammered.

A laugh broke from the Goshawk. 'You thought the lady was locked up in
the ghostly larder; eh!'

Dietrich seized his sword, and tightened his belt.

'The Club allows no jesting with the White Rose, Sir Stranger.'

Margarita made peace. 'I thank you all, good friends. But quarrel not, I
pray you, with them that save me at the risk of their lives.'

'Our service is equal,' said the Goshawk, flourishing, 'Only we happen to
be beforehand with the Club, for which Farina and myself heartily beg
pardon of the entire brotherhood.'

'Farina!' exclaimed Dietrich. 'Then we make a prisoner instead of
uncaging a captive.'

'What 's this?' said Guy.

'So much,' responded Dietrich. 'Yonder's a runaway from two masters: the
law of Cologne, and the conqueror of Satan; and all good citizens are
empowered to bring him back, dead or alive.'

'Dietrich! Dietrich! dare you talk thus of the man who saved me?' cried
Margarita.

Dietrich sullenly persisted.

'Then, look!' said the White Rose, reddening under the pale dawn; 'he
shall not, he shall not go with you.'

One of the Club was here on the point of speaking to the White Rose,--a
breach of the captain's privilege. Dietrich felled him unresisting to
earth, and resumed:

'It must be done, Beauty of Cologne! the monk, Father Gregory, is now
enduring shame and scorn for lack of this truant witness.'

'Enough! I go!' said Farina.

'You leave me?' Margarita looked tender reproach. Weariness and fierce
excitement had given a liquid flame to her eyes and an endearing darkness
round their circles that matched strangely with her plump youth. Her
features had a soft white flush. She was less radiant, but never looked
so bewitching. An aspect of sweet human languor caught at the heart of
love, and raised tumults.

'It is a duty,' said Farina.

'Then go,' she beckoned, and held her hand for him to kiss. He raised it
to his lips. This was seen of all the Club.

As they were departing with Farina, and Guy prepared to demand admittance
into the convent, Dietrich chanced to ask how fared Dame Lisbeth.
Schwartz Thier was by, and answered, with a laugh, that he had quite
forgotten the little lady.

'We took her in mistake for you, mistress! She was a one to scream! The
moment she was kissed--mum as a cloister. We kissed her, all of us, for
the fun of it. No harm--no harm! We should have dropped her when we found
we had the old bird 'stead of the young one, but reckoned ransom, ye see.
She's at the Eck, rattling, I's wager, like last year's nut in the
shell!'

'Lisbeth! Lisbeth! poor Lisbeth; we will return to her. Instantly,' cried
Margarita.

'Not you,' said Guy.

'Yes! I!'

'No!' said Guy.

'Gallant Goshawk! best of birds, let me go!'

'Without me or Farina, never! I see I shall have no chance with my lord
now. Come, then, come, fair Irresistible! come, lads. Farina can journey
back alone. You shall have the renown of rescuing Dame Lisbeth.'

'Farina! forget not to comfort my father,' said Margarita.

Between Margarita's society and Farina's, there was little dispute in the
captain's mind which choice to make. Farina was allowed to travel single
to Cologne; and Dietrich, petted by Margarita, and gently jeered by Guy,
headed the Club from Laach waters to the castle of the Robber Baron.




THE BACK-BLOWS OF SATHANAS

Monk Gregory was pacing the high road between the Imperial camp and
suffering Cologne. The sun had risen through interminable distances of
cloud that held him remote in a succession of receding mounds and thinner
veils, realm beyond realm, till he showed fireless, like a phantom king
in a phantom land. The lark was in the breast of morning. The field-mouse
ran along the furrows. Dews hung red and grey on the weedy banks and
wayside trees. At times the nostril of the good father was lifted, and he
beat his breast, relapsing into sorrowful contemplation. Passed-any
citizen of Cologne, the ghostly head sunk into its cowl. 'There's a black
raven!' said many. Monk Gregory heard them, and murmured, 'Thou hast me,
Evil one! thou hast me!'

It was noon when Farina came clattering down from the camp.

'Father,' said he, 'I have sought thee.'

'My son!' exclaimed Monk Gregory with silencing hand, 'thou didst not
well to leave me contending against the tongues of doubt. Answer me not.
The maiden! and what weighed she in such a scale?--No more! I am
punished. Well speaks the ancient proverb:

        "Beware the back-blows of Sathanas!"

I, that thought to have vanquished him! Vanity has wrecked me, in this
world and the next. I am the victim of self-incense. I hear the demons
shouting their chorus--"Here comes Monk Gregory, who called himself
Conqueror of Darkness!" In the camp I am discredited and a scoff; in the
city I am spat upon, abhorred. Satan, my son, fights not with his
fore-claws. 'Tis with his tail he fights, O Farina!--Listen, my son! he
entered to his kingdom below through Cologne, even under the stones of
the Cathedral Square, and the stench of him abominably remaineth,
challenging the nostrils of holy and unholy alike. The Kaiser cannot
approach for him; the citizens are outraged. Oh! had I held my peace in
humbleness, I had truly conquered him. But he gave me easy victory, to
inflate me. I shall not last. Now this only is left, my son; that thou
bear living testimony to the truth of my statement, as I bear it to the
folly!'

Farina promised, in the face of all, he would proclaim and witness to his
victory on Drachenfels.

'That I may not be ranked an impostor!' continued the Monk. 'And how
great must be the virtue of them that encounter that dark spirit! Valour
availeth nought. But if virtue be not in' ye, soon will ye be puffed to
bursting with that devil's poison, self-incense. Surely, my son, thou art
faithful; and for this service I can reward thee. Follow me yet again.'

On the road they met Gottlieb Groschen, hastening to the camp. Dismay
rumpled the old merchant's honest jowl. Farina drew rein before him.

'Your daughter is safe, worthy Master Groschen,' said he.

'Safe?' cried Gottlieb; 'where is she, my Grete?'

Farina briefly explained. Gottlieb spread out his arms, and was going to
thank the youth. He saw Father Gregory, and his whole frame narrowed with
disgust.

'Are you in company with that pestilent animal, that curse of Cologne!'

'The good Monk--,' said Farina.

'You are leagued with him, then, sirrah! Expect no thanks from me.
Cologne, I say, is cursed! Meddling wretches! could ye not leave Satan
alone? He hurt us not. We were free of him. Cologne, I say, is cursed!
The enemy of mankind is brought by you to be the deadly foe of Cologne.'

So saying, Gottlieb departed.

'Seest thou, my son,' quoth the Monk, 'they reason not!'

Farina was dejected. Willingly would he, for his part, have left the soul
of Evil a loose rover for the sake of some brighter horizon to his hope.

No twinge of remorse accompanied Gottlieb. The Kaiser had allotted him an
encampment and a guard of honour for his household while the foulness
raged, and there Gottlieb welcomed back Margarita and Aunt Lisbeth on the
noon after his meeting with Farina. The White Rose had rested at Laach,
and was blooming again. She and the Goshawk came trotting in advance of
the Club through the woods of Laach, startling the deer with laughter,
and sending the hare with her ears laid back all across country. In vain
Dietrich menaced Guy with the terrors of the Club: Aunt Lisbeth begged of
Margarita not to leave her with the footmen in vain. The joyous couple
galloped over the country, and sprang the ditches, and leapt the dykes,
up and down the banks, glad as morning hawks, entering Andernach at a
round pace; where they rested at a hostel as capable of producing good
Rhine and Mosel wine then as now. Here they had mid-day's meal laid out
in the garden for the angry Club, and somewhat appeased them on their
arrival with bumpers of the best Scharzhofberger. After a refreshing
halt, three boats were hired. On their passage to the river, they
encountered a procession of monks headed by the Archbishop of Andernach,
bearing a small figure of Christ carved in blackthorn and varnished: said
to work miracles, and a present to the good town from two Hungarian
pilgrims.

'Are ye for Cologne?' the monks inquired of them.

'Direct down stream!' they answered.

'Send, then, hither to us Gregory, the conqueror of Darkness, that he may
know there is gratitude on earth and gratulation for great deeds,' said
the monks.

So with genuflexions the travellers proceeded, and entered the boats by
the Archbishop's White Tower. Hammerstein Castle and Rheineck they
floated under; Salzig and the Ahr confluence; Rolandseck and Nonnenwerth;
Drachenfels and Bonn; hills green with young vines; dells waving fresh
foliage. Margarita sang as they floated. Ancient ballads she sang that
made the Goshawk sigh for home, and affected the Club with delirious love
for the grand old water that was speeding them onward. Aunt Lisbeth was
not to be moved. She alone held down her head. She looked not Gottlieb in
the face as he embraced her. Nor to any questioning would she vouchsafe
reply. From that time forth, she was charity to woman; and the exuberant
cheerfulness and familiarity of the men toward her soon grew kindly and
respectful. The dragon in Aunt Lisbeth was destroyed. She objected no
more to Margarita's cameo.

The Goshawk quickly made peace with his lord, and enjoyed the
commendation of the Kaiser. Dietrich Schill thought of challenging him;
but the Club had graver business: and this was to pass sentence on
Berthold Schmidt for the crime of betraying the White Rose into the hands
of Werner. They had found Berthold at the Eck, and there consented to let
him remain until ransom was paid for his traitorous body. Berthold in his
mad passion was tricked by Werner, and on his release, by payment of the
ransom, submitted to the judgement of the Club, which condemned him to
fight them all in turn, and then endure banishment from Rhineland; the
Goshawk, for his sister's sake, interceding before a harsher tribunal.




THE ENTRY INTO COLOGNE

Seven days Kaiser Heinrich remained camped outside Cologne. Six times in
six successive days the Kaiser attempted to enter the city, and was
foiled.

'Beard of Barbarossa!' said the Kaiser, 'this is the first stronghold
that ever resisted me.'

The warrior bishops, electors, pfalzgrafs, and knights of the Empire, all
swore it was no shame not to be a match for the Demon.

'If,' said the reflective Kaiser, 'we are to suffer below what poor
Cologne is doomed to undergo now, let us, by all that is savoury, reform
and do penance.'

The wind just then setting on them dead from Cologne made the courtiers
serious. Many thought of their souls for the first time.

This is recorded to the honour of Monk Gregory.

On the seventh morning, the Kaiser announced his determination to make a
last trial.

It was dawn, and a youth stood before the Kaiser's tent, praying an
audience.

Conducted into the presence of the Kaiser, the youth, they say, succeeded
in arousing him from his depression, for, brave as he was, Kaiser
Heinrich dreaded the issue. Forthwith order was given for the cavalcade
to set out according to the rescript, Kaiser Heinrich retaining the youth
at his right hand. But the youth had found occasion to visit Gottlieb and
Margarita, each of whom he furnished with a flash, [flask?] curiously
shaped, and charged with a distillation.

As the head of the procession reached the gates of Cologne, symptoms of
wavering were manifest.

Kaiser Heinrich commanded an advance, at all cost.

Pfalzgraf Nase, as the old chronicles call him in their humour, but
assuredly a great noble, led the van, and pushed across the draw-bridge.

Hesitation and signs of horror were manifest in the assemblage round the
Kaiser's person. The Kaiser and the youth at his right hand were cheery.
Not a whit drooped they! Several of the heroic knights begged the
Kaiser's permission to fall back.

'Follow Pfalzgraf Nase!' the Kaiser is reported to have said.

Great was the wonderment of the people of Cologne to behold Kaiser
Heinrich riding in perfect stateliness up the main street toward the
Cathedral, while right and left of him bishops and electors were dropping
incapable.

The Kaiser advanced till by his side the youth rode sole.

'Thy name?' said the Kaiser.

He answered: 'A poor youth, unconquerable Kaiser! Farina I am called.'

'Thy recompense?' said the Kaiser.

He answered: 'The hand of a maiden of Cologne, most gracious Kaiser and
master!'

'She is thine!' said the Kaiser.

Kaiser Heinrich looked behind him, and among a host grasping the pommels
of their saddles, and reeling vanquished, were but two erect, a maiden
and an old man.

'That is she, unconquerable Kaiser!' Farina continued, bowing low.

'It shall be arranged on the spot,' said the Kaiser.

A word from Kaiser Heinrich sealed Gottlieb's compliance.

Said he: 'Gracious Kaiser and master! though such a youth could of
himself never have aspired to the possession of a Groschen, yet when the
Kaiser pleads for him, objection is as the rock of Moses, and streams
consent. Truly he has done Cologne good service, and if Margarita, my
daughter, can be persuaded--'

The Kaiser addressed her with his blazing brows.

Margarita blushed a ready autumn of rosy-ripe acquiescence.

'A marriage registered yonder!' said the Kaiser, pointing upward.

'I am thine, murmured Margarita, as Farina drew near her.

'Seal it! seal it!' quoth the Kaiser, in hearty good humour; 'take no
consent from man or maid without a seal.'

Farina tossed the contents of a flask in air, and saluted his beloved on
the lips.

This scene took place near the charred round of earth where the Foulest
descended to his kingdom below.

Men now pervaded Cologne with flasks, purifying the atmosphere. It became
possible to breathe freely.

'We Germans,' said Kaiser Heinrich, when he was again surrounded by his
courtiers, 'may go wrong if we always follow Pfalzgraf Nase; but this
time we have been well led.' Whereat there was obsequious laughter.

The Pfalzgraf pleaded a susceptible nostril.

'Thou art, I fear, but a timid mortal,' said the Kaiser.

'Never have I been found so on the German Field, Imperial Majesty!'
returned the Pfalzgraf. 'I take glory to myself that this Nether reek
overcomes me.'

'Even that we must combat, you see!' exclaimed Kaiser Heinrich; 'but come
all to a marriage this night, and take brides as soon as you will, all of
you. Increase, and give us loyal subjects in plenty. I count prosperity
by the number of marriages in my empire!'

The White Rose Club were invited by Gottlieb to the wedding, and took it
in vast wrath until they saw the, Kaiser, and such excellent stout German
fare present, when immediately a battle raged as to who should do the
event most honour, and was in dispute till dawn: Dietrich Schill being
the man, he having consumed wurst the length of his arm, and wine
sufficient to have floated a St. Goar salmon; which was long proudly
chronicled in his family, and is now unearthed from among the ancient
honourable records of Cologne.

The Goshawk was Farina's bridesman, and a very spiriting bridesman was
he! Aunt Lisbeth sat in a corner, faintly smiling.

'Child!' said the little lady to Margarita when they kissed at parting,
'your courage amazes me. Do you think? Do you know? Poor, sweet bird,
delivered over hand and foot!'

'I love him! I love him, aunty! that's all I know,' said Margarita:
'love, love, love him!'

'Heaven help you!' ejaculated Aunt Lisbeth.

'Pray with me,' said Margarita.

The two knelt at the foot of the bride-bed, and prayed very different
prayers, but to the same end. That done, Aunt Lisbeth helped undress the
White Rose, and trembled, and told a sad nuptial anecdote of the Castle,
and put her little shrivelled hand on Margarita's heart, and shrieked.

'Child! it gallops!' she cried.

''Tis happiness,' said Margarita, standing in her hair.

'May it last only!' exclaimed Aunt Lisbeth.

'It will, aunty! I am humble: I am true'; and the fair girl gathered the
frill of her nightgown.

'Look not in the glass,' said Lisbeth; 'not to-night! Look, if you can,
to-morrow.'

She smoothed the White Rose in her bed, tucked her up, and kissed her,
leaving her as a bud that waits for sunshine.




CONCLUSION

The shadow of Monk Gregory was seen no more in Cologne. He entered the
Calendar, and ranks next St. Anthony. For three successive centuries the
towns of Rhineland boasted his visits in the flesh, and the conqueror of
Darkness caused dire Rhenish feuds.

The Tailed Infernal repeated his famous Back-blow on Farina. The youth
awoke one morning and beheld warehouses the exact pattern of his own,
displaying flasks shaped even as his own, and a Farina to right and left
of him. In a week, they were doubled. A month quadrupled them. They
increased.

'Fame and Fortune,' mused Farina, 'come from man and the world: Love is
from heaven. We may be worthy, and lose the first. We lose not love
unless unworthy. Would ye know the true Farina? Look for him who walks
under the seal of bliss; whose darling is for ever his young sweet bride,
leading him from snares, priming his soul with celestial freshness. There
is no hypocrisy can ape that aspect. Least of all, the creatures of the
Damned! By this I may be known.'

Seven years after, when the Goshawk came into Cologne to see old friends,
and drink some of Gottlieb's oldest Rudesheimer, he was waylaid by false
Farinas; and only discovered the true one at last, by chance, in the
music-gardens near the Rhine, where Farina sat, having on one hand
Margarita, and at his feet three boys and one girl, over whom both bent
lovingly, like the parent vine fondling its grape bunches in summer
light.

     ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

     A generous enemy is a friend on the wrong side
     All are friends who sit at table
     Be what you seem, my little one
     Bed was a rock of refuge and fortified defence
     Civil tongue and rosy smiles sweeten even sour wine
     Dangerous things are uttered after the third glass
     Everywhere the badge of subjection is a poor stomach
     Face betokening the perpetual smack of lemon
     Gratitude never was a woman's gift
     It was harder to be near and not close
     Loving in this land: they all go mad, straight off
     Never reckon on womankind for a wise act
     Self-incense
     Sign that the evil had reached from pricks to pokes
     So are great deeds judged when the danger's past (as easy)
     Soft slumber of a strength never yet called forth
     Suspicion was her best witness
     Sweet treasure before which lies a dragon sleeping
     We like well whatso we have done good work for
     Weak reeds who are easily vanquished and never overcome
     Weak stomach is certainly more carnally virtuous than a full one
     Wins everywhere back a reflection of its own kindliness




THE CASE OF GENERAL OPLE AND LADY CAMPER

By George Meredith




CHAPTER I

An excursion beyond the immediate suburbs of London, projected long
before his pony-carriage was hired to conduct him, in fact ever since his
retirement from active service, led General Ople across a famous common,
with which he fell in love at once, to a lofty highway along the borders
of a park, for which he promptly exchanged his heart, and so gradually
within a stone's-throw or so of the river-side, where he determined not
solely to bestow his affections but to settle for life. It may be seen
that he was of an adventurous temperament, though he had thought fit to
loosen his sword-belt. The pony-carriage, however, had been hired for the
very special purpose of helping him to pass in review the lines of what
he called country houses, cottages, or even sites for building, not too
remote from sweet London: and as when Coelebs goes forth intending to
pursue and obtain, there is no doubt of his bringing home a wife, the
circumstance that there stood a house to let, in an airy situation, at a
certain distance in hail of the metropolis he worshipped, was enough to
kindle the General's enthusiasm. He would have taken the first he saw,
had it not been for his daughter, who accompanied him, and at the age of
eighteen was about to undertake the management of his house. Fortune,
under Elizabeth Ople's guiding restraint, directed him to an epitome of
the comforts. The place he fell upon is only to be described in the
tongue of auctioneers, and for the first week after taking it he modestly
followed them by terming it bijou. In time, when his own imagination,
instigated by a state of something more than mere contentment, had been
at work on it, he chose the happy phrase, 'a gentlemanly residence.' For
it was, he declared, a small estate. There was a lodge to it, resembling
two sentry-boxes forced into union, where in one half an old couple sat
bent, in the other half lay compressed; there was a backdrive to
discoverable stables; there was a bit of grass that would have appeared a
meadow if magnified; and there was a wall round the kitchen-garden and a
strip of wood round the flower-garden. The prying of the outside world
was impossible. Comfort, fortification; and gentlemanliness made the
place, as the General said, an ideal English home.

The compass of the estate was half an acre, and perhaps a perch or two,
just the size for the hugging love General Ople was happiest in giving.
He wisely decided to retain the old couple at the lodge, whose members
were used to restriction, and also not to purchase a cow, that would have
wanted pasture. With the old man, while the old woman attended to the
bell at the handsome front entrance with its gilt-spiked gates, he
undertook to do the gardening; a business he delighted in, so long as he
could perform it in a gentlemanly manner, that is to say, so long as he
was not overlooked. He was perfectly concealed from the road. Only one
house, and curiously indeed, only one window of the house, and further to
show the protection extended to Douro Lodge, that window an attic,
overlooked him. And the house was empty.

The house (for who can hope, and who should desire a commodious house,
with conservatories, aviaries, pond and boat-shed, and other joys of
wealth, to remain unoccupied) was taken two seasons later by a lady, of
whom Fame, rolling like a dust-cloud from the place she had left,
reported that she was eccentric. The word is uninstructive: it does not
frighten. In a lady of a certain age, it is rather a characteristic of
aristocracy in retirement. And at least it implies wealth.

General Ople was very anxious to see her. He had the sentiment of humble
respectfulness toward aristocracy, and there was that in riches which
aroused his admiration. London, for instance, he was not afraid to say he
thought the wonder of the world. He remarked, in addition, that the
sacking of London would suffice to make every common soldier of the
foreign army of occupation an independent gentleman for the term of his
natural days. But this is a nightmare! said he, startling himself with an
abhorrent dream of envy of those enriched invading officers: for Booty is
the one lovely thing which the military mind can contemplate in the
abstract. His habit was to go off in an explosion of heavy sighs when he
had delivered himself so far, like a man at war with himself.

The lady arrived in time: she received the cards of the neighbourhood,
and signalized her eccentricity by paying no attention to them, excepting
the card of a Mrs. Baerens, who had audience of her at once. By express
arrangement, the card of General Wilson Ople, as her nearest neighbour,
followed the card of the rector, the social head of the district; and the
rector was granted an interview, but Lady Camper was not at home to
General Ople. She is of superior station to me, and may not wish to
associate with me, the General modestly said. Nevertheless he was
wounded: for in spite of himself, and without the slightest wish to
obtrude his own person, as he explained the meaning that he had in him,
his rank in the British army forced him to be the representative of it,
in the absence of any one of a superior rank. So that he was
professionally hurt, and his heart being in his profession, it may be
honestly stated that he was wounded in his feelings, though he said no,
and insisted on the distinction. Once a day his walk for constitutional
exercise compelled him to pass before Lady Camper's windows, which were
not bashfully withdrawn, as he said humorously of Douro Lodge, in the
seclusion of half-pay, but bowed out imperiously, militarily, like a
generalissimo on horseback, and had full command of the road and levels
up to the swelling park-foliage. He went by at a smart stride, with a
delicate depression of his upright bearing, as though hastening to greet
a friend in view, whose hand was getting ready for the shake. This much
would have been observed by a housemaid; and considering his fine figure
and the peculiar shining silveriness of his hair, the acceleration of his
gait was noticeable. When he drove by, the pony's right ear was flicked,
to the extreme indignation of a mettlesome little animal. It ensued in
consequence that the General was borne flying under the eyes of Lady
Camper, and such pace displeasing him, he reduced it invariably at a step
or two beyond the corner of her grounds.

But neither he nor his daughter Elizabeth attached importance to so
trivial a circumstance. The General punctiliously avoided glancing at the
windows during the passage past them, whether in his wild career or on
foot. Elizabeth took a side-shot, as one looks at a wayside tree. Their
speech concerning Lady Camper was an exchange of commonplaces over her
loneliness: and this condition of hers was the more perplexing to General
Ople on his hearing from his daughter that the lady was very
fine-looking, and not so very old, as he had fancied eccentric ladies
must be. The rector's account of her, too, excited the mind. She had
informed him bluntly, that she now and then went to church to save
appearances, but was not a church-goer, finding it impossible to support
the length of the service; might, however, be reckoned in subscriptions
for all the charities, and left her pew open to poor people, and none but
the poor. She had travelled over Europe, and knew the East. Sketches in
watercolours of the scenes she had visited adorned her walls, and a pair
of pistols, that she had found useful, she affirmed, lay on the
writing-desk in her drawing-room. General Ople gathered from the rector
that she had a great contempt for men: yet it was curiously varied with
lamentations over the weakness of women. 'Really she cannot possibly be
an example of that,' said the General, thinking of the pistols.

Now, we learn from those who have studied women on the chess-board, and
know what ebony or ivory will do along particular lines, or hopping, that
men much talked about will take possession of their thoughts; and
certainly the fact may be accepted for one of their moves. But the whole
fabric of our knowledge of them, which we are taught to build on this
originally acute perception, is shattered when we hear, that it is
exactly the same, in the same degree, in proportion to the amount of work
they have to do, exactly the same with men and their thoughts in the case
of women much talked about. So it was with General Ople, and nothing is
left for me to say except, that there is broader ground than the
chessboard. I am earnest in protesting the similarity of the singular
couples on common earth, because otherwise the General is in peril of the
accusation that he is a feminine character; and not simply was he a
gallant officer, and a veteran in gunpowder strife, he was also (and it
is an extraordinary thing that a genuine humility did not prevent it, and
did survive it) a lord and conqueror of the sex. He had done his pretty
bit of mischief, all in the way of honour, of course, but hearts had
knocked. And now, with his bright white hair, his close-brushed white
whiskers on a face burnt brown, his clear-cut features, and a winning
droop of his eyelids, there was powder in him still, if not shot.

There was a lamentable susceptibility to ladies' charms. On the other
hand, for the protection of the sex, a remainder of shyness kept him from
active enterprise and in the state of suffering, so long as indications
of encouragement were wanting. He had killed the soft ones, who came to
him, attracted by the softness in him, to be killed: but clever women
alarmed and paralyzed him. Their aptness to question and require
immediate sparkling answers; their demand for fresh wit, of a kind that
is not furnished by publications which strike it into heads with a
hammer, and supply it wholesale; their various reading; their power of
ridicule too; made them awful in his contemplation.

Supposing (for the inflammable officer was now thinking, and deeply
thinking, of a clever woman), supposing that Lady Camper's pistols were
needed in her defence one night: at the first report proclaiming her
extremity, valour might gain an introduction to her upon easy terms, and
would not be expected to be witty. She would, perhaps, after the
excitement, admit his masculine superiority, in the beautiful old
fashion, by fainting in his arms. Such was the reverie he passingly
indulged, and only so could he venture to hope for an acquaintance with
the formidable lady who was his next neighbour. But the proud society of
the burglarious denied him opportunity.

Meanwhile, he learnt that Lady Camper had a nephew, and the young
gentleman was in a cavalry regiment. General Ople met him outside his
gates, received and returned a polite salute, liked his appearance and
manners and talked of him to Elizabeth, asking her if by chance she had
seen him. She replied that she believed she had, and praised his
horsemanship. The General discovered that he was an excellent sculler.
His daughter was rowing him up the river when the young gentleman shot
by, with a splendid stroke, in an outrigger, backed, and floating
alongside presumed to enter into conversation, during which he managed to
express regrets at his aunt's turn for solitariness. As they belonged to
sister branches of the same Service, the General and Mr. Reginald Roller
had a theme in common, and a passion. Elizabeth told her father that
nothing afforded her so much pleasure as to hear him talk with Mr. Roller
on military matters. General Ople assured her that it pleased him
likewise. He began to spy about for Mr. Roller, and it sometimes occurred
that they conversed across the wall; it could hardly be avoided. A hint
or two, an undefinable flying allusion, gave the General to understand
that Lady Camper had not been happy in her marriage. He was pained to
think of her misfortune; but as she was not over forty, the disaster was,
perhaps, not irremediable; that is to say, if she could be taught to
extend her forgiveness to men, and abandon her solitude. 'If,' he said to
his daughter, 'Lady Camper should by any chance be induced to contract a
second alliance, she would, one might expect, be humanized, and we should
have highly agreeable neighbours.' Elizabeth artlessly hoped for such an
event to take place.

She rarely differed with her father, up to whom, taking example from the
world around him, she looked as the pattern of a man of wise conduct.

And he was one; and though modest, he was in good humour with himself,
approved himself, and could say, that without boasting of success, he was
a satisfied man, until he met his touchstone in Lady Camper.




CHAPTER II

This is the pathetic matter of my story, and it requires pointing out,
because he never could explain what it was that seemed to him so cruel in
it, for he was no brilliant son of fortune, he was no great pretender,
none of those who are logically displaced from the heights they have been
raised to, manifestly created to show the moral in Providence. He was
modest, retiring, humbly contented; a gentlemanly residence appeased his
ambition. Popular, he could own that he was, but not meteorically; rather
by reason of his willingness to receive light than his desire to shed it.
Why, then, was the terrible test brought to bear upon him, of all men? He
was one of us; no worse, and not strikingly or perilously better; and he
could not but feel, in the bitterness of his reflections upon an
inexplicable destiny, that the punishment befalling him, unmerited as it
was, looked like absence of Design in the scheme of things, Above. It
looked as if the blow had been dealt him by reckless chance. And to
believe that, was for the mind of General Ople the having to return to
his alphabet and recommence the ascent of the laborious mountain of
understanding.

To proceed, the General's introduction to Lady Camper was owing to a
message she sent him by her gardener, with a request that he would cut
down a branch of a wychelm, obscuring her view across his grounds toward
the river. The General consulted with his daughter, and came to the
conclusion, that as he could hardly despatch a written reply to a verbal
message, yet greatly wished to subscribe to the wishes of Lady Camper,
the best thing for him to do was to apply for an interview. He sent word
that he would wait on Lady Camper immediately, and betook himself
forthwith to his toilette. She was the niece of an earl.

Elizabeth commended his appearance, 'passed him,' as he would have said;
and well she might, for his hat, surtout, trousers and boots, were worthy
of an introduction to Royalty. A touch of scarlet silk round the neck
gave him bloom, and better than that, the blooming consciousness of it.

'You are not to be nervous, papa,' Elizabeth said.

'Not at all,' replied the General. 'I say, not at all, my dear,' he
repeated, and so betrayed that he had fallen into the nervous mood. 'I
was saying, I have known worse mornings than this.' He turned to her and
smiled brightly, nodded, and set his face to meet the future.

He was absent an hour and a half.

He came back with his radiance a little subdued, by no means eclipsed;
as, when experience has afforded us matter for thought, we cease to shine
dazzlingly, yet are not clouded; the rays have merely grown serener. The
sum of his impressions was conveyed in the reflective utterance--'It only
shows, my dear, how different the reality is from our anticipation of
it!'

Lady Camper had been charming; full of condescension, neighbourly,
friendly, willing to be satisfied with the sacrifice of the smallest
branch of the wych-elm, and only requiring that much for complimentary
reasons.

Elizabeth wished to hear what they were, and she thought the request
rather singular; but the General begged her to bear in mind, that they
were dealing with a very extraordinary woman; 'highly accomplished,
really exceedingly handsome,' he said to himself, aloud.

The reasons were, her liking for air and view, and desire to see into her
neighbour's grounds without having to mount to the attic.

Elizabeth gave a slight exclamation, and blushed.

'So, my dear, we are objects of interest to her ladyship,' said the
General.

He assured her that Lady Camper's manners were delightful. Strange to
tell, she knew a great deal of his antecedent history, things he had not
supposed were known; 'little matters,' he remarked, by which his daughter
faintly conceived a reference to the conquests of his dashing days. Lady
Camper had deigned to impart some of her own, incidentally; that she was
of Welsh blood, and born among the mountains. 'She has a romantic look,'
was the General's comment; and that her husband had been an insatiable
traveller before he became an invalid, and had never cared for Art.
'Quite an extraordinary circumstance, with such a wife!' the General
said.

He fell upon the wych-elm with his own hands, under cover of the leafage,
and the next day he paid his respects to Lady Camper, to inquire if her
ladyship saw any further obstruction to the view.

'None,' she replied. 'And now we shall see what the two birds will do.'

Apparently, then, she entertained an animosity to a pair of birds in the
tree.

'Yes, yes; I say they chirp early in the morning,' said General Ople.

'At all hours.'

'The song of birds . . . ?' he pleaded softly for nature.

'If the nest is provided for them; but I don't like vagabond chirping.'

The General perfectly acquiesced. This, in an engagement with a clever
woman, is what you should do, or else you are likely to find yourself
planted unawares in a high wind, your hat blown off, and your coat-tails
anywhere; in other words, you will stand ridiculous in your bewilderment;
and General Ople ever footed with the utmost caution to avoid that
quagmire of the ridiculous. The extremer quags he had hitherto escaped;
the smaller, into which he fell in his agile evasions of the big, he had
hitherto been blest in finding none to notice.

He requested her ladyship's permission to present his daughter. Lady
Camper sent in her card.

Elizabeth Ople beheld a tall, handsomely-mannered lady, with good
features and penetrating dark eyes, an easy carriage of her person and an
agreeable voice, but (the vision of her age flashed out under the
compelling eyes of youth) fifty if a day. The rich colouring confessed to
it. But she was very pleasing, and Elizabeth's perception dwelt on it
only because her father's manly chivalry had defended the lady against
one year more than forty.

The richness of the colouring, Elizabeth feared, was artificial, and it
caused her ingenuous young blood a shudder. For we are so devoted to
nature when the dame is flattering us with her gifts, that we loathe the
substitute omitting to think how much less it is an imposition than a
form of practical adoration of the genuine.

Our young detective, however, concealed her emotion of childish horror.

Lady Camper remarked of her, 'She seems honest, and that is the most we
can hope of girls.'

'She is a jewel for an honest man,' the General sighed, 'some day!'

'Let us hope it will be a distant day.'

'Yet,' said the General, 'girls expect to marry.'

Lady Camper fixed her black eyes on him, but did not speak.

He told Elizabeth that her ladyship's eyes were exceedingly searching:
'Only,' said he, 'as I have nothing to hide, I am able to submit to
inspection'; and he laughed slightly up to an arresting cough, and made
the mantelpiece ornaments pass muster.

General Ople was the hero to champion a lady whose airs of haughtiness
caused her to be somewhat backbitten. He assured everybody, that Lady
Camper was much misunderstood; she was a most remarkable woman; she was a
most affable and highly intelligent lady. Building up her attributes on a
splendid climax, he declared she was pious, charitable, witty, and really
an extraordinary artist. He laid particular stress on her artistic
qualities, describing her power with the brush, her water-colour
sketches, and also some immensely clever caricatures. As he talked of no
one else, his friends heard enough of Lady Camper, who was anything but a
favourite. The Pollingtons, the Wilders, the Wardens, the Baerens, the
Goslings, and others of his acquaintance, talked of Lady Camper and
General Ople rather maliciously. They were all City people, and they
admired the General, but mourned that he should so abjectly have fallen
at the feet of a lady as red with rouge as a railway bill. His not seeing
it showed the state he was in. The sister of Mrs. Pollington, an amiable
widow, relict of a large City warehouse, named Barcop, was chilled by a
falling off in his attentions. His apology for not appearing at garden
parties was, that he was engaged to wait on Lady Camper.

And at one time, her not condescending to exchange visits with the
obsequious General was a topic fertile in irony. But she did condescend.
Lady Camper came to his gate unexpectedly, rang the bell, and was let in
like an ordinary visitor. It happened that the General was gardening--not
the pretty occupation of pruning--he was digging--and of necessity his
coat was off, and he was hot, dusty, unpresentable. From adoring earth as
the mother of roses, you may pass into a lady's presence without
purification; you cannot (or so the General thought) when you are caught
in the act of adoring the mother of cabbages. And though he himself loved
the cabbage equally with the rose, in his heart respected the vegetable
yet more than he esteemed the flower, for he gloried in his kitchen
garden, this was not a secret for the world to know, and he almost heeled
over on his beam ends when word was brought of the extreme honour Lady
Camper had done him. He worked his arms hurriedly into his fatigue
jacket, trusting to get away to the house and spend a couple of minutes
on his adornment; and with any other visitor it might have been
accomplished, but Lady Camper disliked sitting alone in a room. She was
on the square of lawn as the General stole along the walk. Had she kept
her back to him, he might have rounded her like the shadow of a dial,
undetected. She was frightfully acute of hearing. She turned while he was
in the agony of hesitation, in a queer attitude, one leg on the march,
projected by a frenzied tip-toe of the hinder leg, the very fatallest
moment she could possibly have selected for unveiling him.

Of course there was no choice but to surrender on the spot.

He began to squander his dizzy wits in profuse apologies. Lady Camper
simply spoke of the nice little nest of a garden, smelt the flowers,
accepted a Niel rose and a Rohan, a Cline, a Falcot, and La France.

'A beautiful rose indeed,' she said of the latter, 'only it smells of
macassar oil.'

'Really, it never struck me, I say it never struck me before,' rejoined
the General, smelling it as at a pinch of snuff. 'I was saying, I always
. . . .' And he tacitly, with the absurdest of smiles, begged permission
to leave unterminated a sentence not in itself particularly difficult

'I have a nose,' observed Lady Camper.

Like the nobly-bred person she was, according to General Ople's version
of the interview on his estate, when he stood before her in his gardening
costume, she put him at his ease, or she exerted herself to do so; and if
he underwent considerable anguish, it was the fault of his excessive
scrupulousness regarding dress, propriety, appearance.

He conducted her at her request to the kitchen garden and the handful of
paddock, the stables and coach-house, then back to the lawn.

'It is the home for a young couple,' she said.

'I am no longer young,' the General bowed, with the sigh peculiar to this
confession. 'I say, I am no longer young, but I call the place a
gentlemanly residence. I was saying, I . . .'

'Yes, yes!' Lady Camper tossed her head, half closing her eyes, with a
contraction of the brows, as if in pain.

He perceived a similar expression whenever he spoke of his residence.

Perhaps it recalled happier days to enter such a nest. Perhaps it had
been such a home for a young couple that she had entered on her marriage
with Sir Scrope Camper, before he inherited his title and estates.

The General was at a loss to conceive what it was.

It recurred at another mention of his idea of the nature of the
residence. It was almost a paroxysm. He determined not to vex her
reminiscences again; and as this resolution directed his mind to his
residence, thinking it pre-eminently gentlemanly, his tongue committed
the error of repeating it, with 'gentleman-like' for a variation.

Elizabeth was out--he knew not where. The housemaid informed him, that
Miss Elizabeth was out rowing on the water.

'Is she alone?' Lady Camper inquired of him.

'I fancy so,' the General replied.

'The poor child has no mother.'

'It has been a sad loss to us both, Lady Camper.'

'No doubt. She is too pretty to go out alone.'

'I can trust her.'

'Girls!'

'She has the spirit of a man.'

'That is well. She has a spirit; it will be tried.'

The General modestly furnished an instance or two of her spiritedness.

Lady Camper seemed to like this theme; she looked graciously interested.

'Still, you should not suffer her to go out alone,' she said.

'I place implicit confidence in her,' said the General; and Lady Camper
gave it up.

She proposed to walk down the lanes to the river-side, to meet Elizabeth
returning.

The General manifested alacrity checked by reluctance. Lady Camper had
told him she objected to sit in a strange room by herself; after that, he
could hardly leave her to dash upstairs to change his clothes; yet how,
attired as he was, in a fatigue jacket, that warned him not to imagine
his back view, and held him constantly a little to the rear of Lady
Camper, lest she should be troubled by it;--and he knew the habit of the
second rank to criticise the front--how consent to face the outer world
in such style side by side with the lady he admired?

'Come,' said she; and he shot forward a step, looking as if he had missed
fire.

'Are you not coming, General?'

He advanced mechanically.

Not a soul met them down the lanes, except a little one, to whom Lady
Camper gave a small silver-piece, because she was a picture.

The act of charity sank into the General's heart, as any pretty
performance will do upon a warm waxen bed.

Lady Camper surprised him by answering his thoughts. 'No; it's for my own
pleasure.'

Presently she said, 'Here they are.'

General Ople beheld his daughter by the river-side at the end of the
lane, under escort of Mr. Reginald Rolles.

It was another picture, and a pleasing one. The young lady and the young
gentleman wore boating hats, and were both dressed in white, and standing
by or just turning from the outrigger and light skiff they were about to
leave in charge of a waterman. Elizabeth stretched a finger at
arm's-length, issuing directions, which Mr. Rolles took up and worded
further to the man, for the sake of emphasis; and he, rather than
Elizabeth, was guilty of the half-start at sight of the persons who were
approaching.

'My nephew, you should know, is intended for a working soldier,' said
Lady Camper; 'I like that sort of soldier best.'

General Ople drooped his shoulders at the personal compliment.

She resumed. 'His pay is a matter of importance to him. You are aware of
the smallness of a subaltern's pay.

'I,' said the General, 'I say I feel my poor half-pay, having always been
a working soldier myself, very important, I was saying, very important to
me!'

'Why did you retire?'

Her interest in him seemed promising. He replied conscientiously, 'Beyond
the duties of General of Brigade, I could not, I say I could not, dare to
aspire; I can accept and execute orders; I shrink from responsibility!'

'It is a pity,' said she, 'that you were not, like my nephew Reginald,
entirely dependent on your profession.'

She laid such stress on her remark, that the General, who had just
expressed a very modest estimate of his abilities, was unable to reject
the flattery of her assuming him to be a man of some fortune. He coughed,
and said, 'Very little.' The thought came to him that he might have to
make a statement to her in time, and he emphasized, 'Very little indeed.
Sufficient,' he assured her, 'for a gentlemanly appearance.'

'I have given you your warning,' was her inscrutable rejoinder, uttered
within earshot of the young people, to whom, especially to Elizabeth, she
was gracious. The damsel's boating uniform was praised, and her sunny
flush of exercise and exposure.

Lady Camper regretted that she could not abandon her parasol: 'I freckle
so easily.'

The General, puzzling over her strange words about a warning, gazed at
the red rose of art on her cheek with an air of profound abstraction.

'I freckle so easily,' she repeated, dropping her parasol to defend her
face from the calculating scrutiny.

'I burn brown,' said Elizabeth.

Lady Camper laid the bud of a Falcot rose against the young girl's cheek,
but fetched streams of colour, that overwhelmed the momentary comparison
of the sunswarthed skin with the rich dusky yellow of the rose in its
deepening inward to soft brown.

Reginald stretched his hand for the privileged flower, and she let him
take it; then she looked at the General; but the General was looking,
with his usual air of satisfaction, nowhere.




CHAPTER III

'Lady Camper is no common enigma,' General Ople observed to his daughter.

Elizabeth inclined to be pleased with her, for at her suggestion the
General had bought a couple of horses, that she might ride in the park,
accompanied by her father or the little groom. Still, the great lady was
hard to read. She tested the resources of his income by all sorts of
instigation to expenditure, which his gallantry could not withstand; she
encouraged him to talk of his deeds in arms; she was friendly, almost
affectionate, and most bountiful in the presents of fruit, peaches,
nectarines, grapes, and hot-house wonders, that she showered on his
table; but she was an enigma in her evident dissatisfaction with him for
something he seemed to have left unsaid. And what could that be?

At their last interview she had asked him, 'Are you sure, General, you
have nothing more to tell me?'

And as he remarked, when relating it to Elizabeth, 'One might really be
tempted to misapprehend her ladyship's . . . I say one might commit
oneself beyond recovery. Now, my dear, what do you think she intended?'

Elizabeth was 'burning brown,' or darkly blushing, as her manner was.

She answered, 'I am certain you know of nothing that would interest her;
nothing, unless . . .'

'Well?' the General urged her.

'How can I speak it, papa?'

'You really can't mean . . .'

'Papa, what could I mean?'

'If I were fool enough!' he murmured. 'No, no, I am an old man. I was
saying, I am past the age of folly.'

One day Elizabeth came home from her ride in a thoughtful mood. She had
not, further than has been mentioned, incited her father to think of the
age of folly; but voluntarily or not, Lady Camper had, by an excess of
graciousness amounting to downright invitation; as thus, 'Will you
persist in withholding your confidence from me, General?' She added, 'I
am not so difficult a person.' These prompting speeches occurred on the
morning of the day when Elizabeth sat at his table, after a long ride
into the country, profoundly meditative.

A note was handed to General Ople, with the request that he would step in
to speak with Lady Camper in the course of the evening, or next morning.
Elizabeth waited till his hat was on, then said, 'Papa, on my ride
to-day, I met Mr. Rolles.'

'I am glad you had an agreeable escort, my dear.'

'I could not refuse his company.'

'Certainly not. And where did you ride?'

'To a beautiful valley; and there we met. . . . '

'Her ladyship?'

'Yes.'

'She always admires you on horseback.'

'So you know it, papa, if she should speak of it.'

'And I am bound to tell you, my child,' said the General, 'that this
morning Lady Camper's manner to me was . . . if I were a fool . . . I
say, this morning I beat a retreat, but apparently she . . . I see no way
out of it, supposing she . . .'

'I am sure she esteems you, dear papa,' said Elizabeth. 'You take to her,
my dear?' the General inquired anxiously; 'a little?--a little afraid of
her?'

'A little,' Elizabeth replied, 'only a little.'

'Don't be agitated about me.'

'No, papa; you are sure to do right.'

'But you are trembling.'

'Oh! no. I wish you success.'

General Ople was overjoyed to be reinforced by his daughter's good
wishes. He kissed her to thank her. He turned back to her to kiss her
again. She had greatly lightened the difficulty at least of a delicate
position.

It was just like the imperious nature of Lady Camper to summon him in the
evening to terminate the conversation of the morning, from the visible
pitfall of which he had beaten a rather precipitate retreat. But if his
daughter cordially wished him success, and Lady Camper offered him the
crown of it, why then he had only to pluck up spirit, like a good
commander who has to pass a fordable river in the enemy's presence; a
dash, a splash, a rattling volley or two, and you are over, established
on the opposite bank. But you must be positive of victory, otherwise,
with the river behind you, your new position is likely to be ticklish. So
the General entered Lady Camper's drawing-room warily, watching the fair
enemy. He knew he was captivating, his old conquests whispered in his
ears, and her reception of him all but pointed to a footstool at her
feet. He might have fallen there at once, had he not remembered a hint
that Mr. Reginald Rolles had dropped concerning Lady Camper's amazing
variability.

Lady Camper began.

'General, you ran away from me this morning. Let me speak. And, by the
way, I must reproach you; you should not have left it to me. Things have
now gone so far that I cannot pretend to be blind. I know your feelings
as a father. Your daughter's happiness . . .'

'My lady,' the General interposed, 'I have her distinct assurance that it
is, I say it is wrapt up in mine.'

'Let me speak. Young people will say anything. Well, they have a certain
excuse for selfishness; we have not. I am in some degree bound to my
nephew; he is my sister's son.'

'Assuredly, my lady. I would not stand in his light, be quite assured. If
I am, I was saying if I am not mistaken, I . . . and he is, or has the
making of an excellent soldier in him, and is likely to be a
distinguished cavalry officer.'

'He has to carve his own way in the world, General.'

'All good soldiers have, my lady. And if my position is not, after a
considerable term of service, I say if . . .'

'To continue,' said Lady Camper: 'I never have liked early marriages.
I was married in my teens before I knew men. Now I do know them,
and now . . . .'

The General plunged forward: 'The honour you do us now:--a mature
experience is worth:--my dear Lady Camper, I have admired you:--and your
objection to early marriages cannot apply to . . . indeed, madam, vigour,
they say . . . though youth, of course . . . yet young people, as you
observe . . . and I have, though perhaps my reputation is against it, I
was saying I have a natural timidity with your sex, and I am grey-headed,
white-headed, but happily without a single malady.'

Lady Camper's brows showed a trifling bewilderment. 'I am speaking of
these young people, General Ople.'

'I consent to everything beforehand, my dear lady. He should be, I say
Mr. Rolles should be provided for.'

'So should she, General, so should Elizabeth.'

'She shall be, she will, dear madam. What I have, with your permission,
if--good heaven! Lady Camper, I scarcely know where I am. She would
. . . . I shall not like to lose her: you would not wish it. In time
she will . . . . she has every quality of a good wife.'

'There, stay there, and be intelligible,' said Lady Camper. 'She has
every quality. Money should be one of them. Has she money?'

'Oh! my lady,' the General exclaimed, 'we shall not come upon your purse
when her time comes.'

'Has she ten thousand pounds?'

'Elizabeth? She will have, at her father's death . . . but as for my
income, it is moderate, and only sufficient to maintain a gentlemanly
appearance in proper self-respect. I make no show. I say I make no show.
A wealthy marriage is the last thing on earth I should have aimed at. I
prefer quiet and retirement. Personally, I mean. That is my personal
taste. But if the lady . . . . I say if it should happen that the lady .
. . . and indeed I am not one to press a suit: but if she who
distinguishes and honours me should chance to be wealthy, all I can do is
to leave her wealth at her disposal, and that I do: I do that
unreservedly. I feel I am very confused, alarmingly confused. Your
ladyship merits a superior . . . I trust I have not . . . I am entirely
at your ladyship's mercy.'

'Are you prepared, if your daughter is asked in marriage, to settle ten
thousand pounds on her, General Ople?'

The General collected himself. In his heart he thoroughly appreciated the
moral beauty of Lady Camper's extreme solicitude on behalf of his
daughter's provision; but he would have desired a postponement of that
and other material questions belonging to a distant future until his own
fate was decided.

So he said: 'Your ladyship's generosity is very marked. I say it is very
marked.'

'How, my good General Ople! how is it marked in any degree?' cried Lady
Camper. 'I am not generous. I don't pretend to be; and certainly I don't
want the young people to think me so. I want to be just. I have assumed
that you intend to be the same. Then will you do me the favour to reply
to me?'

The General smiled winningly and intently, to show her that he prized
her, and would not let her escape his eulogies.

'Marked, in this way, dear madam, that you think of my daughter's future
more than I. I say, more than her father himself does. I know I ought to
speak more warmly, I feel warmly. I was never an eloquent man, and if you
take me as a soldier, I am, as, I have ever been in the service, I was
saying I am Wilson Ople, of the grade of General, to be relied on for
executing orders; and, madam, you are Lady Camper, and you command me. I
cannot be more precise. In fact, it is the feeling of the necessity for
keeping close to the business that destroys what I would say. I am in
fact lamentably incompetent to conduct my own case.'

Lady Camper left her chair.

'Dear me, this is very strange, unless I am singularly in error,' she
said.

The General now faintly guessed that he might be in error, for his part.

But he had burned his ships, blown up his bridges; retreat could not be
thought of.

He stood, his head bent and appealing to her sideface, like one
pleadingly in pursuit, and very deferentially, with a courteous
vehemence, he entreated first her ladyship's pardon for his presumption,
and then the gift of her ladyship's hand.

As for his language, it was the tongue of General Ople. But his bearing
was fine. If his clipped white silken hair spoke of age, his figure
breathed manliness. He was a picture, and she loved pictures.

For his own sake, she begged him to cease. She dreaded to hear of
something 'gentlemanly.'

'This is a new idea to me, my dear General,' she said. 'You must give me
time. People at our age have to think of fitness. Of course, in a sense,
we are both free to do as we like. Perhaps I may be of some aid to you.
My preference is for absolute independence. And I wished to talk of a
different affair. Come to me tomorrow. Do not be hurt if I decide that we
had better remain as we are.'

The General bowed. His efforts, and the wavering of the fair enemy's
flag, had inspired him with a positive re-awakening of masculine passion
to gain this fortress. He said well: 'I have, then, the happiness, madam,
of being allowed to hope until to-morrrow?'

She replied, 'I would not deprive you of a moment of happiness. Bring
good sense with you when you do come.'

The General asked eagerly, 'I have your ladyship's permission to come
early?'

'Consult your happiness,' she answered; and if to his mind she seemed
returning to the state of enigma, it was on the whole deliciously. She
restored him his youth. He told Elizabeth that night; he really must
begin to think of marrying her to some worthy young fellow. 'Though,'
said he, with an air of frank intoxication, 'my opinion is, the young
ones are not so lively as the old in these days, or I should have been
besieged before now.'

The exact substance of the interview he forbore to relate to his
inquisitive daughter, with a very honourable discretion.




CHAPTER IV

Elizabeth came riding home to breakfast from a gallop round the park, and
passing Lady Camper's gates, received the salutation of her parasol. Lady
Camper talked with her through the bars. There was not a sign to tell of
a change or twist in her neighbourly affability. She remarked simply
enough, that it was her nephew's habit to take early gallops, and
possibly Elizabeth might have seen him, for his quarters were proximate;
but she did not demand an answer. She had passed a rather restless night,
she said. 'How is the General?'

'Papa must have slept soundly, for he usually calls to me through his
door when he hears I am up,' said Elizabeth.

Lady Camper nodded kindly and walked on.

Early in the morning General Ople was ready for battle. His forces were,
the anticipation of victory, a carefully arranged toilet, and an
unaccustomed spirit of enterprise in the realms of speech; for he was no
longer in such awe of Lady Camper.

'You have slept well?' she inquired.

'Excellently, my lady:

'Yes, your daughter tells me she heard you, as she went by your door in
the morning for a ride to meet my nephew. You are, I shall assume,
prepared for business.'

'Elizabeth? . . . to meet . . .?' General Ople's impression of anything
extraneous to his emotion was feeble and passed instantly. 'Prepared! Oh,
certainly'; and he struck in a compliment on her ladyship's fresh morning
bloom.

'It can hardly be visible,' she responded; 'I have not painted yet.'

'Does your ladyship proceed to your painting in the very early morning?'

'Rouge. I rouge.'

'Dear me! I should not have supposed it.'

'You have speculated on it very openly, General. I remember your trying
to see a freckle through the rouge; but the truth is, I am of a
supernatural paleness if I do not rouge, so I do. You understand,
therefore, I have a false complexion. Now to business.'

'If your ladyship insists on calling it business. I have little to
offer--myself!'

'You have a gentlemanly residence.'

'It is, my lady, it is. It is a bijou.'

'Ah!' Lady Camper sighed dejectedly.

'It is a perfect bijou!'

'Oblige me, General, by not pronouncing the French word as if you were
swearing by something in English, like a trooper.'

General Ople started, admitted that the word was French, and apologized
for his pronunciation. Her variability was now visible over a corner of
the battlefield like a thunder-cloud.

'The business we have to discuss concerns the young people, General.'

'Yes,' brightened by this, he assented: 'Yes, dear Lady Camper; it is a
part of the business; it is a secondary part; it has to be discussed; I
say I subscribe beforehand. I may say, that honouring, esteeming you as I
do, and hoping ardently for your consent . . . .

'They must have a home and an income, General.'

'I presume, dearest lady, that Elizabeth will be welcome in your home. I
certainly shall never chase Reginald out of mine.'

Lady Camper threw back her head. 'Then you are not yet awake, or you
practice the art of sleeping with open eyes! Now listen to me. I rouge, I
have told you. I like colour, and I do not like to see wrinkles or have
them seen. Therefore I rouge. I do not expect to deceive the world so
flagrantly as to my age, and you I would not deceive for a moment. I am
seventy.'

The effect of this noble frankness on the General, was to raise him from
his chair in a sitting posture as if he had been blown up.

Her countenance was inexorably imperturbable under his alternate blinking
and gazing that drew her close and shot her distant, like a mysterious
toy.

'But,' said she, 'I am an artist; I dislike the look of extreme age, so I
conceal it as well as I can. You are very kind to fall in with the
deception: an innocent and, I think, a proper one, before the world,
though not to the gentleman who does me the honour to propose to me for
my hand. You desire to settle our business first. You esteem me; I
suppose you mean as much as young people mean when they say they love. Do
you? Let us come to an understanding.'

'I can,' the melancholy General gasped, 'I say I can--I cannot--I cannot
credit your ladyship's . . .'

'You are at liberty to call me Angela.'

'Ange . . .' he tried it, and in shame relapsed. 'Madam, yes. Thanks.'

'Ah,' cried Lady Camper, 'do not use these vulgar contractions of decent
speech in my presence. I abhor the word "thanks." It is fit for
fribbles.'

'Dear me, I have used it all my life,' groaned the General.

'Then, for the remainder, be it understood that you renounce it. To
continue, my age is . . .'

'Oh, impossible, impossible,' the General almost wailed; there was really
a crack in his voice.

'Advancing to seventy. But, like you, I am happy to say I have not a
malady. I bring no invalid frame to a union that necessitates the leaving
of the front door open day and night to the doctor. My belief is, I could
follow my husband still on a campaign, if he were a warrior instead of a
pensioner.'

General Ople winced.

He was about to say humbly, 'As General of Brigade . . .'

'Yes, yes, you want a commanding officer, and that I have seen, and that
has caused me to meditate on your proposal,' she interrupted him; while
he, studying her countenance hard, with the painful aspect of a youth who
lashes a donkey memory in an examination by word of mouth, attempted to
marshal her signs of younger years against her awful confession of the
extremely ancient, the witheringly ancient. But for the manifest rouge,
manifest in spite of her declaration that she had not yet that morning
proceeded to her paintbrush, he would have thrown down his glove to
challenge her on the subject of her age. She had actually charms. Her
mouth had a charm; her eyes were lively; her figure, mature if you like,
was at least full and good; she stood upright, she had a queenly seat.
His mental ejaculation was, 'What a wonderful constitution!'

By a lapse of politeness, he repeated it to himself half aloud; he was
shockingly nervous.

'Yes, I have finer health than many a younger woman,' she said. 'An
ordinary calculation would give me twenty good years to come. I am a
widow, as you know. And, by the way, you have a leaning for widows. Have
you not? I thought I had heard of a widow Barcop in this parish. Do not
protest. I assure you I am a stranger to jealousy. My income . . .'

The General raised his hands.

'Well, then,' said the cool and self-contained lady, 'before I go
farther, I may ask you, knowing what you have forced me to confess, are
you still of the same mind as to marriage? And one moment, General. I
promise you most sincerely that your withdrawing a step shall not, as far
as it touches me, affect my neighbourly and friendly sentiments; not in
any degree. Shall we be as we were?'

Lady Camper extended her delicate hand to him.

He took it respectfully, inspected the aristocratic and unshrunken
fingers, and kissing them, said, 'I never withdraw from a position,
unless I am beaten back. Lady Camper, I . . .'

'My name is Angela.'

The General tried again: he could not utter the name.

To call a lady of seventy Angela is difficult in itself. It is, it seems,
thrice difficult in the way of courtship.

'Angela!' said she.

'Yes. I say, there is not a more beautiful female name, dear Lady
Camper.'

'Spare me that word "female" as long as you live. Address me by that
name, if you please.'

The General smiled. The smile was meant for propitiation and sweetness.
It became a brazen smile.

'Unless you wish to step back,' said she.

'Indeed, no. I am happy, Lady Camper. My life is yours. I say, my life is
devoted to you, dear madam.'

'Angela!'

General Ople was blushingly delivered of the name.

'That will do,' said she. 'And as I think it possible one may be admired
too much as an artist, I must request you to keep my number of years a
secret.'

'To the death, madam,' said the General.

'And now we will take a turn in the garden, Wilson Ople. And beware of
one thing, for a commencement, for you are full of weeds, and I mean to
pluck out a few: never call any place a gentlemanly residence in my
hearing, nor let it come to my ears that you have been using the phrase
elsewhere. Don't express astonishment. At present it is enough that I
dislike it. But this only,' Lady Camper added, 'this only if it is not
your intention to withdraw from your position.'

'Madam, my lady, I was saying--hem!--Angela, I could not wish to
withdraw.'

Lady Camper leaned with some pressure on his arm, observing, 'You have a
curious attachment to antiquities.'

'My dear lady, it is your mind; I say, it is your mind: I was saying, I
am in love with your mind,' the General endeavoured to assure her, and
himself too.

'Or is it my powers as an artist?'

'Your mind, your extraordinary powers of mind.'

'Well,' said Lady Camper, 'a veteran General of Brigade is as good a
crutch as a childless old grannam can have.'

And as a crutch, General Ople, parading her grounds with the aged woman,
found himself used and treated.

The accuracy of his perceptions might be questioned. He was like a man
stunned by some great tropical fruit, which responds to the longing of
his eyes by falling on his head; but it appeared to him, that she
increased in bitterness at every step they took, as if determined to make
him realize her wrinkles.

He was even so inconsequent, or so little recognized his position, as to
object in his heart to hear himself called Wilson.

It is true that she uttered Wilsonople as if the names formed one word.
And on a second occasion (when he inclined to feel hurt) she remarked, 'I
fear me, Wilsonople, if we are to speak plainly, thou art but a fool.'
He, perhaps, naturally objected to that. He was, however, giddy, and
barely knew.

Yet once more the magical woman changed. All semblance of harshness, and
harridan-like spike-tonguedness vanished when she said adieu.

The astronomer, looking at the crusty jag and scoria of the magnified
moon through his telescope, and again with naked eyes at the soft-beaming
moon, when the crater-ridges are faint as eyebrow-pencillings, has a
similar sharp alternation of prospect to that which mystified General
Ople.

But between watching an orb that is only variable at our caprice, and
contemplating a woman who shifts and quivers ever with her own, how vast
the difference!

And consider that this woman is about to be one's wife! He could have
believed (if he had not known full surely that such things are not) he
was in the hands of a witch.

Lady Camper's 'adieu' was perfectly beautiful--a kind, cordial, intimate,
above all, to satisfy his present craving, it was a lady-like adieu--the
adieu of a delicate and elegant woman, who had hardly left her anchorage
by forty to sail into the fifties.

Alas! he had her word for it, that she was not less than seventy. And,
worse, she had betrayed most melancholy signs of sourness and agedness as
soon as he had sworn himself to her fast and fixed.

'The road is open to you to retreat,' were her last words.

'My road,' he answered gallantly, 'is forward.'

He was drawing backward as he said it, and something provoked her to
smile.




CHAPTER V

It is a noble thing to say that your road is forward, and it befits a man
of battles. General Ople was too loyal a gentleman to think of any other
road. Still, albeit not gifted with imagination, he could not avoid the
feeling that he had set his face to Winter. He found himself suddenly
walking straight into the heart of Winter, and a nipping Winter. For her
ladyship had proved acutely nipping. His little customary phrases, to
which Lady Camper objected, he could see no harm in whatever. Conversing
with her in the privacy of domestic life would never be the flowing
business that it is for other men. It would demand perpetual vigilance,
hop, skip, jump, flounderings, and apologies.

This was not a pleasing prospect.

On the other hand, she was the niece of an earl. She was wealthy. She
might be an excellent friend to Elizabeth; and she could be, when she
liked, both commandingly and bewitchingly ladylike.

Good! But he was a General Officer of not more than fifty-five, in his
full vigour, and she a woman of seventy!

The prospect was bleak. It resembled an outlook on the steppes. In point
of the discipline he was to expect, he might be compared to a raw
recruit, and in his own home!

However, she was a woman of mind. One would be proud of her.

But did he know the worst of her? A dreadful presentiment, that he did
not know the worst of her, rolled an ocean of gloom upon General Ople,
striking out one solitary thought in the obscurity, namely, that he was
about to receive punishment for retiring from active service to a life of
ease at a comparatively early age, when still in marching trim. And the
shadow of the thought was, that he deserved the punishment!

He was in his garden with the dawn. Hard exercise is the best of opiates
for dismal reflections. The General discomposed his daughter by offering
to accompany her on her morning ride before breakfast. She considered
that it would fatigue him. 'I am not a man of eighty!' he cried. He could
have wished he had been.

He led the way to the park, where they soon had sight of young Rolles,
who checked his horse and spied them like a vedette, but, perceiving that
he had been seen, came cantering, and hailing the General with hearty
wonderment.

'And what's this the world says, General?' said he. 'But we all applaud
your taste. My aunt Angela was the handsomest woman of her time.'

The General murmured in confusion, 'Dear me!' and looked at the young
man, thinking that he could not have known the time.

'Is all arranged, my dear General?'

'Nothing is arranged, and I beg--I say I beg . . . I came out for fresh
air and pace.'..

The General rode frantically.

In spite of the fresh air, he was unable to eat at breakfast. He was
bound, of course, to present himself to Lady Camper, in common civility,
immediately after it.

And first, what were the phrases he had to avoid uttering in her
presence? He could remember only the 'gentlemanly residence.' And it was
a gentlemanly residence, he thought as he took leave of it. It was one,
neatly named to fit the place. Lady Camper is indeed a most eccentric
person! he decided from his experience of her.

He was rather astonished that young Rolles should have spoken so coolly
of his aunt's leaning to matrimony; but perhaps her exact age was unknown
to the younger members of her family.

This idea refreshed him by suggesting the extremely honourable nature of
Lady Camper's uncomfortable confession.

He himself had an uncomfortable confession to make. He would have to
speak of his income. He was living up to the edges of it.

She is an upright woman, and I must be the same! he said, fortunately not
in her hearing.

The subject was disagreeable to a man sensitive on the topic of money,
and feeling that his prudence had recently been misled to keep up
appearances.

Lady Camper was in her garden, reclining under her parasol. A chair was
beside her, to which, acknowledging the salutation of her suitor, she
waved him.

'You have met my nephew Reginald this morning, General?'

'Curiously, in the park, this morning, before breakfast, I did, yes. Hem!
I, I say I did meet him. Has your ladyship seen him?'

'No. The park is very pretty in the early morning.'

'Sweetly pretty.'

Lady Camper raised her head, and with the mildness of assured
dictatorship, pronounced: 'Never say that before me.'

'I submit, my lady,' said the poor scourged man.

'Why, naturally you do. Vulgar phrases have to be endured, except when
our intimates are guilty, and then we are not merely offended, we are
compromised by them. You are still of the mind in which you left me
yesterday? You are one day older. But I warn you, so am I.'

'Yes, my lady, we cannot, I say we cannot check time. Decidedly of the
same mind. Quite so.'

'Oblige me by never saying "Quite so." My lawyer says it. It reeks of the
City of London. And do not look so miserable.'

'I, madam? my dear lady!' the General flashed out in a radiance that
dulled instantly.

'Well,' said she cheerfully, 'and you're for the old woman?'

'For Lady Camper.'

'You are seductive in your flatteries, General. Well, then, we have to
speak of business.'

'My affairs----' General Ople was beginning, with perturbed forehead; but
Lady Camper held up her finger.

'We will touch on your affairs incidentally. Now listen to me, and do not
exclaim until I have finished. You know that these two young ones have
been whispering over the wall for some months. They have been meeting on
the river and in the park habitually, apparently with your consent.'

'My lady!'

'I did not say with your connivance.'

'You mean my daughter Elizabeth?'

'And my nephew Reginald. We have named them, if that advances us. Now,
the end of such meetings is marriage, and the sooner the better, if they
are to continue. I would rather they should not; I do not hold it good
for young soldiers to marry. But if they do, it is very certain that
their pay will not support a family; and in a marriage of two healthy
young people, we have to assume the existence of the family. You have
allowed matters to go so far that the boy is hot in love; I suppose the
girl is, too. She is a nice girl. I do not object to her personally. But
I insist that a settlement be made on her before I give my nephew one
penny. Hear me out, for I am not fond of business, and shall be glad to
have done with these explanations. Reginald has nothing of his own. He is
my sister's son, and I loved her, and rather like the boy. He has at
present four hundred a year from me. I will double it, on the condition
that you at once make over ten thousand--not less; and let it be yes or
no!--to be settled on your daughter and go to her children, independent
of the husband--cela va sans dire. Now you may speak, General.'

The General spoke, with breath fetched from the deeps:

'Ten thousand pounds! Hem! Ten! Hem, frankly--ten, my lady! One's
income--I am quite taken by surprise. I say Elizabeth's conduct--though,
poor child! it is natural to her to seek a mate, I mean, to accept a mate
and an establishment, and Reginald is a very hopeful fellow--I was
saying, they jump on me out of an ambush, and I wish them every
happiness. And she is an ardent soldier, and a soldier she must marry.
But ten thousand!'

'It is to secure the happiness of your daughter, General.'

'Pounds! my lady. It would rather cripple me.'

'You would have my house, General; you would have the moiety, as the
lawyers say, of my purse; you would have horses, carriages, servants; I
do not divine what more you would wish to have.'

'But, madam--a pensioner on the Government! I can look back on past
services, I say old services, and I accept my position. But, madam, a
pensioner on my wife, bringing next to nothing to the common estate! I
fear my self-respect would, I say would . . .'

'Well, and what would it do, General Ople?'

'I was saying, my self-respect as my wife's pensioner, my lady. I could
not come to her empty-handed.'

'Do you expect that I should be the person to settle money on your
daughter, to save her from mischances? A rakish husband, for example; for
Reginald is young, and no one can guess what will be made of him.'

'Undoubtedly your ladyship is correct. We might try absence for the poor
girl. I have no female relation, but I could send her to the sea-side to
a lady-friend.'

'General Ople, I forbid you, as you value my esteem, ever--and I repeat,
I forbid you ever--to afflict my ears with that phrase, "lady-friend!"'

The General blinked in a state of insurgent humility.

These incessant whippings could not but sting the humblest of men; and
'lady-friend,' he was sure, was a very common term, used, he was sure, in
the very best society. He had never heard Her Majesty speak at levees of
a lady-friend, but he was quite sure that she had one; and if so, what
could be the objection to her subjects mentioning it as a term to suit
their own circumstances?

He was harassed and perplexed by old Lady Camper's treatment of him, and
he resolved not to call her Angela even upon supplication--not that day,
at least.

She said, 'You will not need to bring property of any kind to the common
estate; I neither look for it nor desire it. The generous thing for you
to do would be to give your daughter all you have, and come to me.'

'But, Lady Camper, if I denude myself or curtail my income--a man at his
wife's discretion, I was saying a man at his wife's mercy . . . !'

General Ople was really forced, by his manly dignity, to make this
protest on its behalf. He did not see how he could have escaped doing so;
he was more an agent than a principal. 'My wife's mercy,' he said again,
but simply as a herald proclaiming superior orders.

Lady Camper's brows were wrathful. A deep blood-crimson overcame the
rouge, and gave her a terrible stormy look.

'The congress now ceases to sit, and the treaty is not concluded,' was
all she said.

She rose, bowed to him, 'Good morning, General,' and turned her back.

He sighed. He was a free man. But this could not be denied--whatever the
lady's age, she was a grand woman in her carriage, and when looking
angry, she had a queenlike aspect that raised her out of the reckoning of
time.

So now he knew there was a worse behind what he had previously known. He
was precipitate in calling it the worst. 'Now,' said he to himself, 'I
know the worst!'

No man should ever say it. Least of all, one who has entered into
relations with an eccentric lady.




CHAPTER VI

Politeness required that General Ople should not appear to rejoice in his
dismissal as a suitor, and should at least make some show of holding
himself at the beck of a reconsidering mind. He was guilty of running up
to London early next day, and remaining absent until nightfall; and he
did the same on the two following days. When he presented himself at Lady
Camper's lodge-gates, the astonishing intelligence, that her ladyship had
departed for the Continent and Egypt gave him qualms of remorse, which
assumed a more definite shape in something like awe of her triumphant
constitution. He forbore to mention her age, for he was the most
honourable of men, but a habit of tea-table talkativeness impelled him to
say and repeat an idea that had visited him, to the effect, that Lady
Camper was one of those wonderful women who are comparable to brilliant
generals, and defend themselves from the siege of Time by various
aggressive movements. Fearful of not being understood, owing to the
rarity of the occasions when the squat plain squad of honest Saxon
regulars at his command were called upon to explain an idea, he re-cast
the sentence. But, as it happened that the regulars of his vocabulary
were not numerous, and not accustomed to work upon thoughts and images,
his repetitions rather succeeded in exposing the piece of knowledge he
had recently acquired than in making his meaning plainer. So we need not
marvel that his acquaintances should suppose him to be secretly aware of
an extreme degree in which Lady Camper was a veteran.

General Ople entered into the gaieties of the neighbourhood once more,
and passed through the Winter cheerfully. In justice to him, however, it
should be said that to the intent dwelling of his mind upon Lady Camper,
and not to the festive life he led, was due his entire ignorance of his
daughter's unhappiness. She lived with him, and yet it was in other
houses he learnt that she was unhappy. After his last interview with Lady
Camper, he had informed Elizabeth of the ruinous and preposterous amount
of money demanded of him for a settlement upon her and Elizabeth, like
the girl of good sense that she was, had replied immediately, 'It could
not be thought of, papa.'

He had spoken to Reginald likewise. The young man fell into a dramatic
tearing-of-hair and long-stride fury, not ill becoming an enamoured
dragoon. But he maintained that his aunt, though an eccentric, was a
cordially kind woman. He seemed to feel, if he did not partly hint, that
the General might have accepted Lady Camper's terms. The young officer
could no longer be welcome at Douro Lodge, so the General paid him a
morning call at his quarters, and was distressed to find him breakfasting
very late, tapping eggs that he forgot to open--one of the surest signs
of a young man downright and deep in love, as the General knew from
experience--and surrounded by uncut sporting journals of past weeks,
which dated from the day when his blow had struck him, as accurately as
the watch of the drowned man marks his minute. Lady Camper had gone to
Italy, and was in communication with her nephew: Reginald was not further
explicit. His legs were very prominent in his despair, and his fingers
frequently performed the part of blunt combs; consequently the General
was impressed by his passion for Elizabeth. The girl who, if she was
often meditative, always met his eyes with a smile, and quietly said
'Yes, papa,' and 'No, papa,' gave him little concern as to the state of
her feelings. Yet everybody said now that she was unhappy. Mrs. Barcop,
the widow, raised her voice above the rest. So attentive was she to
Elizabeth that the General had it kindly suggested to him, that some one
was courting him through his daughter. He gazed at the widow. Now she was
not much past thirty; and it was really singular--he could have
laughed--thinking of Mrs. Barcop set him persistently thinking of Lady
Camper. That is to say, his mad fancy reverted from the lady of perhaps
thirty-five to the lady of seventy.

Such, thought he, is genius in a woman! Of his neighbours generally, Mrs.
Baerens, the wife of a German merchant, an exquisite player on the
pianoforte, was the most inclined to lead him to speak of Lady Camper.
She was a kind prattling woman, and was known to have been a governess
before her charms withdrew the gastronomic Gottfried Baerens from his
devotion to the well-served City club, where, as he exclaimed (ever
turning fondly to his wife as he vocalized the compliment), he had found
every necessity, every luxury, in life, 'as you cannot have dem out of
London--all save de female!' Mrs. Baerens, a lady of Teutonic extraction,
was distinguishable as of that sex; at least, she was not masculine. She
spoke with great respect of Lady Camper and her family, and seemed to
agree in the General's eulogies of Lady Camper's constitution. Still he
thought she eyed him strangely.

One April morning the General received a letter with the Italian
postmark. Opening it with his usual calm and happy curiosity, he
perceived that it was composed of pen-and-ink drawings. And suddenly his
heart sank like a scuttled ship. He saw himself the victim of a
caricature.

The first sketch had merely seemed picturesque, and he supposed it a
clever play of fancy by some travelling friend, or perhaps an actual
scene slightly exaggerated. Even on reading, 'A distant view of the city
of Wilsonople,' he was only slightly enlightened. His heart beat still
with befitting regularity. But the second and the third sketches betrayed
the terrible hand. The distant view of the city of Wilsonople was fair
with glittering domes, which, in the succeeding near view, proved to have
been soap-bubbles, for a place of extreme flatness, begirt with crazy
old-fashioned fortifications, was shown; and in the third view,
representing the interior, stood for sole place of habitation, a
sentry-box.

Most minutely drawn, and, alas! with fearful accuracy, a military
gentleman in undress occupied the box. Not a doubt could exist as to the
person it was meant to be.

The General tried hard to remain incredulous. He remembered too well who
had called him Wilsonople.

But here was the extraordinary thing that sent him over the neighbourhood
canvassing for exclamations: on the fourth page was the outline of a
lovely feminine hand, holding a pen, as in the act of shading, and under
it these words: 'What I say is, I say I think it exceedingly unladylike.'

Now consider the General's feelings when, turning to this fourth page,
having these very words in his mouth, as the accurate expression of his
thoughts, he discovered them written!

An enemy who anticipates the actions of our mind, has a quality of the
malignant divine that may well inspire terror. The senses of General Ople
were struck by the aspect of a lurid Goddess, who penetrated him, read
him through, and had both power and will to expose and make him
ridiculous for ever.

The loveliness of the hand, too, in a perplexing manner contested his
denunciation of her conduct. It was ladylike eminently, and it involved
him in a confused mixture of the moral and material, as great as young
people are known to feel when they make the attempt to separate them, in
one of their frenzies.

With a petty bitter laugh he folded the letter, put it in his
breast-pocket, and sallied forth for a walk, chiefly to talk to himself
about it. But as it absorbed him entirely, he showed it to the rector,
whom he met, and what the rector said is of no consequence, for General
Ople listened to no remarks, calling in succession on the Pollingtons,
the Goslings, the Baerens, and others, early though it was, and the lords
of those houses absent amassing hoards; and to the ladies everywhere he
displayed the sketches he had received, observing, that Wilsonople meant
himself; and there he was, he said, pointing at the capped fellow in the
sentry-box, done unmistakably. The likeness indeed was remarkable. 'She
is a woman of genius,' he ejaculated, with utter melancholy. Mrs.
Baerens, by the aid of a magnifying glass, assisted him to read a line
under the sentry-box, that he had taken for a mere trembling dash; it
ran, A gentlemanly residence.

'What eyes she has!' the General exclaimed; 'I say it is miraculous what
eyes she has at her time of . . . I was saying, I should never have known
it was writing.'

He sighed heavily. His shuddering sensitiveness to caricature was
increased by a certain evident dread of the hand which struck; the
knowing that he was absolutely bare to this woman, defenceless, open to
exposure in his little whims, foibles, tricks, incompetencies, in what
lay in his heart, and the words that would come to his tongue. He felt
like a man haunted.

So deeply did he feel the blow, that people asked how it was that he
could be so foolish as to dance about assisting Lady Camper in her
efforts to make him ridiculous; he acted the parts of publisher and agent
for the fearful caricaturist. In truth, there was a strangely double
reason for his conduct; he danced about for sympathy, he had the
intensest craving for sympathy, but more than this, or quite as much, he
desired to have the powers of his enemy widely appreciated; in the first
place, that he might be excused to himself for wincing under them, and
secondly, because an awful admiration of her, that should be deepened by
a corresponding sentiment around him, helped him to enjoy luxurious
recollections of an hour when he was near making her his own--his own, in
the holy abstract contemplation of marriage, without realizing their
probable relative conditions after the ceremony.

'I say, that is the very image of her ladyship's hand,' he was especially
fond of remarking, 'I say it is a beautiful hand.'

He carried the letter in his pocket-book; and beginning to fancy that she
had done her worst, for he could not imagine an inventive malignity
capable of pursuing the theme, he spoke of her treatment of him with
compassionate regret, not badly assumed from being partly sincere.

Two letters dated in France, the one Dijon, the other Fontainebleau,
arrived together; and as the General knew Lady Camper to be returning to
England, he expected that she was anxious to excuse herself to him. His
fingers were not so confident, for he tore one of the letters to open it.

The City of Wilsonople was recognizable immediately. So likewise was the
sole inhabitant.

General Ople's petty bitter laugh recurred, like a weak-chested patient's
cough in the shifting of our winds eastward.

A faceless woman's shadow kneels on the ground near the sentry-box,
weeping. A faceless shadow of a young man on horseback is beheld
galloping toward a gulf. The sole inhabitant contemplates his largely
substantial full fleshed face and figure in a glass.

Next, we see the standard of Great Britain furled; next, unfurled and
borne by a troop of shadows to the sentrybox. The officer within says, 'I
say I should be very happy to carry it, but I cannot quit this
gentlemanly residence.'

Next, the standard is shown assailed by popguns. Several of the shadows
are prostrate. 'I was saying, I assure you that nothing but this
gentlemanly residence prevents me from heading you,' says the gallant
officer.

General Ople trembled with protestant indignation when he saw himself
reclining in a magnified sentry-box, while detachments of shadows hurry
to him to show him the standard of his country trailing in the dust; and
he is maliciously made to say, 'I dislike responsibility. I say I am a
fervent patriot, and very fond of my comforts, but I shun
responsibility.'

The second letter contained scenes between Wilsonople and the Moon.

He addresses her as his neighbour, and tells her of his triumphs over the
sex.

He requests her to inform him whether she is a 'female,' that she may be
triumphed over.

He hastens past her window on foot, with his head bent, just as the
General had been in the habit of walking.

He drives a mouse-pony furiously by.

He cuts down a tree, that she may peep through.

Then, from the Moon's point of view, Wilsonople, a Silenus, is discerned
in an arm-chair winking at a couple too plainly pouting their lips for a
doubt of their intentions to be entertained.

A fourth letter arrived, bearing date of Paris. This one illustrated
Wilsonople's courtship of the Moon, and ended with his 'saying,' in his
peculiar manner, 'In spite of her paint I could not have conceived her
age to be so enormous.'

How break off his engagement with the Lady Moon? Consent to none of her
terms!

Little used as he was to read behind a veil, acuteness of suffering
sharpened the General's intelligence to a degree that sustained him in
animated dialogue with each succeeding sketch, or poisoned arrow whirring
at him from the moment his eyes rested on it; and here are a few samples:

'Wilsonople informs the Moon that she is "sweetly pretty."

'He thanks her with "thanks" for a handsome piece of lunar green cheese.

'He points to her, apparently telling some one, "my lady-friend."

'He sneezes "Bijou! bijou! bijou!"'

They were trifles, but they attacked his habits of speech; and he began
to grow more and more alarmingly absurd in each fresh caricature of his
person.

He looked at himself as the malicious woman's hand had shaped him. It was
unjust; it was no resemblance--and yet it was! There was a corner of
likeness left that leavened the lump; henceforth he must walk abroad with
this distressing image of himself before his eyes, instead of the
satisfactory reflex of the man who had, and was happy in thinking that he
had, done mischief in his time. Such an end for a conquering man was too
pathetic.

The General surprised himself talking to himself in something louder than
a hum at neighbours' dinner-tables. He looked about and noticed that
people were silently watching him.




CHAPTER VII

Lady Camper's return was the subject of speculation in the neighbourhood,
for most people thought she would cease to persecute the General with her
preposterous and unwarrantable pen-and-ink sketches when living so
closely proximate; and how he would behave was the question. Those who
made a hero of him were sure he would treat her with disdain. Others were
uncertain. He had been so severely hit that it seemed possible he would
not show much spirit.

He, for his part, had come to entertain such dread of the post, that Lady
Camper's return relieved him of his morning apprehensions; and he would
have forgiven her, though he feared to see her, if only she had promised
to leave him in peace for the future. He feared to see her, because of
the too probable furnishing of fresh matter for her ladyship's hand. Of
course he could not avoid being seen by her, and that was a particular
misery. A gentlemanly humility, or demureness of aspect, when seen,
would, he hoped, disarm his enemy. It should, he thought. He had borne
unheard-of things. No one of his friends and acquaintances knew, they
could not know, what he had endured. It has caused him fits of
stammering. It had destroyed the composure of his gait. Elizabeth had
informed him that he talked to himself incessantly, and aloud. She, poor
child, looked pale too. She was evidently anxious about him.

Young Rolles, whom he had met now and then, persisted in praising his
aunt's good heart. So, perhaps, having satiated her revenge, she might
now be inclined for peace, on the terms of distant civility.

'Yes! poor Elizabeth!' sighed the General, in pity of the poor girl's
disappointment; 'poor Elizabeth! she little guesses what her father has
gone through. Poor child! I say, she hasn't an idea of my sufferings.'

General Ople delivered his card at Lady Camper's lodgegates and escaped
to his residence in a state of prickly heat that required the brushing of
his hair with hard brushes for several minutes to comfort and
re-establish him.

He had fallen to working in his garden, when Lady Camper's card was
brought to him an hour after the delivery of his own; a pleasing
promptitude, showing signs of repentance, and suggesting to the General
instantly some sharp sarcasms upon women, which he had come upon in
quotations in the papers and the pulpit, his two main sources of
information.

Instead of handing back the card to the maid, he stuck it in his hat and
went on digging.

The first of a series of letters containing shameless realistic
caricatures was handed to him the afternoon following. They came fast and
thick. Not a day's interval of grace was allowed. Niobe under the shafts
of Diana was hardly less violently and mortally assailed. The deadliness
of the attack lay in the ridicule of the daily habits of one of the most
sensitive of men, as to his personal appearance, and the opinion of the
world. He might have concealed the sketches, but he could not have
concealed the bruises, and people were perpetually asking the unhappy
General what he was saying, for he spoke to himself as if he were
repeating something to them for the tenth time.

'I say,' said he, 'I say that for a lady, really an educated lady, to
sit, as she must--I was saying, she must have sat in an attic to have the
right view of me. And there you see--this is what she has done. This is
the last, this is the afternoon's delivery. Her ladyship has me correctly
as to costume, but I could not exhibit such a sketch to ladies.'

A back view of the General was displayed in his act of digging.

'I say I could not allow ladies to see it,' he informed the gentlemen,
who were suffered to inspect it freely.

'But you see, I have no means of escape; I am at her mercy from morning
to night,' the General said, with a quivering tongue, 'unless I stay at
home inside the house; and that is death to me, or unless I abandon the
place, and my lease; and I shall--I say, I shall find nowhere in England
for anything like the money or conveniences such a gent--a residence you
would call fit for a gentleman. I call it a bi . . . it is, in short, a
gem. But I shall have to go.'

Young Rolles offered to expostulate with his aunt Angela.

The General said, 'Tha . . . I thank you very much. I would not have her
ladyship suppose I am so susceptible. I hardly know,' he confessed
pitiably, 'what it is right to say, and what not--what not. I-I-I never
know when I am not looking a fool. I hurry from tree to tree to shun the
light. I am seriously affected in my appetite. I say, I shall have to
go.'

Reginald gave him to understand that if he flew, the shafts would follow
him, for Lady Camper would never forgive his running away, and was quite
equal to publishing a book of the adventures of Wilsonople.

Sunday afternoon, walking in the park with his daughter on his arm,
General Ople met Mr. Rolles. He saw that the young man and Elizabeth were
mortally pale, and as the very idea of wretchedness directed his
attention to himself, he addressed them conjointly on the subject of his
persecution, giving neither of them a chance of speaking until they were
constrained to part.

A sketch was the consequence, in which a withered Cupid and a fading
Psyche were seen divided by Wilsonople, who keeps them forcibly asunder
with policeman's fists, while courteously and elegantly entreating them
to hear him. 'Meet,' he tells them, 'as often as you like, in my company,
so long as you listen to me'; and the pathos of his aspect makes hungry
demand for a sympathetic audience.

Now, this, and not the series representing the martyrdom of the old
couple at Douro Lodge Gates, whose rigid frames bore witness to the close
packing of a gentlemanly residence, this was the sketch General Ople, in
his madness from the pursuing bite of the gadfly, handed about at Mrs.
Pollington's lawn-party. Some have said, that he should not have betrayed
his daughter; but it is reasonable to suppose he had no idea of his
daughter's being the Psyche. Or if he had, it was indistinct, owing to
the violence of his personal emotion. Assuming this to have been the very
sketch; he handed it to two or three ladies in turn, and was heard to
deliver himself at intervals in the following snatches: 'As you like, my
lady, as you like; strike, I say strike; I bear it; I say I bear it.
. . . If her ladyship is unforgiving, I say I am enduring. . . .
I may go, I was saying I may go mad, but while I have my reason I walk
upright, I walk upright.'

Mr. Pollington and certain City gentlemen hearing the poor General's
renewed soliloquies, were seized with disgust of Lady Camper's conduct,
and stoutly advised an application to the Law Courts.

He gave ear to them abstractedly, but after pulling out the whole chapter
of the caricatures (which it seemed that he kept in a case of morocco
leather in his breast-pocket), showing them, with comments on them, and
observing, 'There will be more, there must be more, I say I am sure there
are things I do that her ladyship will discover and expose,' he declined
to seek redress or simple protection; and the miserable spectacle was
exhibited soon after of this courtly man listening to Mrs. Barcop on the
weather, and replying in acquiescence: 'It is hot.--If your ladyship will
only abstain from colours. Very hot as you say, madam,--I do not complain
of pen and ink, but I would rather escape colours. And I dare say you
find it hot too?'

Mrs. Barcop shut her eyes and sighed over the wreck of a handsome
military officer.

She asked him: 'What is your objection to colours?'

His hand was at his breast-pocket immediately, as he said: 'Have you not
seen?'--though but a few minutes back he had shown her the contents of
the packet, including a hurried glance of the famous digging scene.

By this time the entire district was in fervid sympathy with General
Ople. The ladies did not, as their lords did, proclaim astonishment that
a man should suffer a woman to goad him to a state of semi-lunacy; but
one or two confessed to their husbands, that it required a great
admiration of General Ople not to despise him, both for his
susceptibility and his patience. As for the men, they knew him to have
faced the balls in bellowing battle-strife; they knew him to have endured
privation, not only cold but downright want of food and drink--an almost
unimaginable horror to these brave daily feasters; so they could not
quite look on him in contempt; but his want of sense was offensive, and
still more so his submission to a scourging by a woman. Not one of them
would have deigned to feel it. Would they have allowed her to see that
she could sting them? They would have laughed at her. Or they would have
dragged her before a magistrate.

It was a Sunday in early Summer when General Ople walked to morning
service, unaccompanied by Elizabeth, who was unwell. The church was of
the considerate old-fashioned order, with deaf square pews, permitting
the mind to abstract itself from the sermon, or wrestle at leisure with
the difficulties presented by the preacher, as General Ople often did,
feeling not a little in love with his sincere attentiveness for grappling
with the knotty point and partially allowing the struggle to be seen.

The Church was, besides, a sanctuary for him. Hither his enemy did not
come. He had this one place of refuge, and he almost looked a happy man
again.

He had passed into his hat and out of it, which he habitually did
standing, when who should walk up to within a couple of yards of him but
Lady Camper. Her pew was full of poor people, who made signs of retiring.
She signified to them that they were to sit, then quietly took her seat
among them, fronting the General across the aisle.

During the sermon a low voice, sharp in contradistinction to the monotone
of the preacher's, was heard to repeat these words: 'I say I am not sure
I shall survive it.' Considerable muttering in the same quarter was heard
besides.

After the customary ceremonious game, when all were free to move, of
nobody liking to move first, Lady Camper and a charity boy were the
persons who took the lead. But Lady Camper could not quit her pew, owing
to the sticking of the door. She smiled as with her pretty hand she twice
or thrice essayed to shake it open. General Ople strode to her aid. He
pulled the door, gave the shadow of a respectful bow, and no doubt he
would have withdrawn, had not Lady Camper, while acknowledging the
civility, placed her prayer-book in his hands to carry at her heels.
There was no choice for him. He made a sort of slipping dance back for
his hat, and followed her ladyship. All present being eager to witness
the spectacle, the passage of Lady Camper dragging the victim General
behind her was observed without a stir of the well-dressed members of the
congregation, until a desire overcame them to see how Lady Camper would
behave to her fish when she had him outside the sacred edifice.

None could have imagined such a scene. Lady Camper was in her carriage;
General Ople was holding her prayer-book, hat in hand, at the carriage
step, and he looked as if he were toasting before the bars of a furnace;
for while he stood there, Lady Camper was rapidly pencilling outlines in
a small pocket sketchbook. There are dogs whose shyness is put to it to
endure human observation and a direct address to them, even on the part
of their masters; and these dear simple dogs wag tail and turn their
heads aside waveringly, as though to entreat you not to eye them and talk
to them so. General Ople, in the presence of the sketchbook, was much
like the nervous animal. He would fain have run away. He glanced at it,
and round about, and again at it, and at the heavens. Her ladyship's
cruelty, and his inexplicable submission to it, were witnessed of the
multitude.

The General's friends walked very slowly. Lady Camper's carriage whirled
by, and the General came up with them, accosting them and himself
alternately. They asked him where Elizabeth was, and he replied, 'Poor
child, yes! I am told she is pale, but I cannot, believe I am so
perfectly, I say so perfectly ridiculous, when I join the responses.' He
drew forth half a dozen sheets, and showed them sketches that Lady Camper
had taken in church, caricaturing him in the sitting down and the
standing up. She had torn them out of the book, and presented them to him
when driving off. 'I was saying, worship in the ordinary sense will be
interdicted to me if her ladyship . . .,' said the General, woefully
shuffling the sketch-paper sheets in which he figured.

He made the following odd confession to Mr. and Mrs. Gosling on the
road:--that he had gone to his chest, and taken out his sword-belt to
measure his girth, and found himself thinner than when he left the
service, which had not been the case before his attendance at the last
levee of the foregoing season. So the deduction was obvious, that Lady
Camper had reduced him. She had reduced him as effectually as a harassing
siege.

'But why do you pay attention to her? Why . . . !' exclaimed Mr. Gosling,
a gentleman of the City, whose roundness would have turned a rifle-shot.

'To allow her to wound you so seriously!' exclaimed Mrs. Gosling.

'Madam, if she were my wife,' the General explained, 'I should feel it. I
say it is the fact of it; I feel it, if I appear so extremely ridiculous
to a human eye, to any one eye.'

'To Lady Camper's eye.'

He admitted it might be that. He had not thought of ascribing the
acuteness of his pain to the miserable image he presented in this
particular lady's eye. No; it really was true, curiously true: another
lady's eye might have transformed him to a pumpkin shape, exaggerated all
his foibles fifty-fold, and he, though not liking it, of course not,
would yet have preserved a certain manly equanimity. How was it Lady
Camper had such power over him?--a lady concealing seventy years with a
rouge-box or paint-pot! It was witchcraft in its worst character. He had
for six months at her bidding been actually living the life of a beast,
degraded in his own esteem; scorched by every laugh he heard; running,
pursued, overtaken, and as it were scored or branded, and then let go for
the process to be repeated.




CHAPTER VIII

Our young barbarians have it all their own way with us when they fall
into love-liking; they lead us whither they please, and interest us in
their wishings, their weepings, and that fine performance, their
kissings. But when we see our veterans tottering to their fall, we
scarcely consent to their having a wish; as for a kiss, we halloo at them
if we discover them on a byway to the sacred grove where such things are
supposed to be done by the venerable. And this piece of rank injustice,
not to say impoliteness, is entirely because of an unsound opinion that
Nature is not in it, as though it were our esteem for Nature which caused
us to disrespect them. They, in truth, show her to us discreet,
civilized, in a decent moral aspect: vistas of real life, views of the
mind's eye, are opened by their touching little emotions; whereas those
bully youngsters who come bellowing at us and catch us by the senses
plainly prove either that we are no better than they, or that we give our
attention to Nature only when she makes us afraid of her. If we cared for
her, we should be up and after her reverentially in her sedater steps,
deeply studying her in her slower paces. She teaches them nothing when
they are whirling. Our closest instructors, the true philosophers--the
story-tellers, in short-will learn in time that Nature is not of
necessity always roaring, and as soon as they do, the world may be said
to be enlightened. Meantime, in the contemplation of a pair of white
whiskers fluttering round a pair of manifestly painted cheeks, be assured
that Nature is in it: not that hectoring wanton--but let the young have
their fun. Let the superior interest of the passions of the aged be
conceded, and not a word shall be said against the young.

If, then, Nature is in it, how has she been made active? The reason of
her launch upon this last adventure is, that she has perceived the person
who can supply the virtue known to her by experience to be wanting. Thus,
in the broader instance, many who have journeyed far down the road, turn
back to the worship of youth, which they have lost. Some are for the
graceful worldliness of wit, of which they have just share enough to
admire it. Some are captivated by hands that can wield the rod, which in
earlier days they escaped to their cost. In the case of General Ople, it
was partly her whippings of him, partly her penetration; her ability,
that sat so finely on a wealthy woman, her indifference to conventional
manners, that so well beseemed a nobly-born one, and more than all, her
correction of his little weaknesses and incompetencies, in spite of his
dislike of it, won him. He began to feel a sort of nibbling pleasure in
her grotesque sketches of his person; a tendency to recur to the old ones
while dreading the arrival of new. You hear old gentlemen speak fondly of
the swish; and they are not attached to pain, but the instrument revives
their feeling of youth; and General Ople half enjoyed, while shrinking,
Lady Camper's foregone outlines of him. For in the distance, the
whip's-end may look like a clinging caress instead of a stinging flick.
But this craven melting in his heart was rebuked by a very worthy pride,
that flew for support to the injury she had done to his devotions, and
the offence to the sacred edifice. After thinking over it, he decided
that he must quit his residence; and as it appeared to him in the light
of duty, he, with an unspoken anguish, commissioned the house-agent of
his town to sell his lease or let the house furnished, without further
parley.

From the house-agent's shop he turned into the chemist's, for a tonic--a
foolish proceeding, for he had received bracing enough in the blow he had
just dealt himself, but he had been cogitating on tonics recently,
imagining certain valiant effects of them, with visions of a former
careless happiness that they were likely to restore. So he requested to
have the tonic strong, and he took one glass of it over the counter.

Fifteen minutes after the draught, he came in sight of his house, and
beholding it, he could have called it a gentlemanly residence aloud under
Lady Camper's windows, his insurgency was of such violence. He talked of
it incessantly, but forbore to tell Elizabeth, as she was looking pale,
the reason why its modest merits touched him so. He longed for the hour
of his next dose, and for a caricature to follow, that he might drink and
defy it. A caricature was really due to him, he thought; otherwise why
had he abandoned his bijou dwelling? Lady Camper, however, sent none. He
had to wait a fortnight before one came, and that was rather a likeness,
and a handsome likeness, except as regarded a certain disorderliness in
his dress, which he knew to be very unlike him. Still it despatched him
to the looking-glass, to bring that verifier of facts in evidence against
the sketch. While sitting there he heard the housemaid's knock at the
door, and the strange intelligence that his daughter was with Lady
Camper, and had left word that she hoped he would not forget his
engagement to go to Mrs. Baerens' lawn-party.

The General jumped away from the glass, shouting at the absent Elizabeth
in a fit of wrath so foreign to him, that he returned hurriedly to have
another look at himself, and exclaimed at the pitch of his voice, 'I say
I attribute it to an indigestion of that tonic. Do you hear?' The
housemaid faintly answered outside the door that she did, alarming him,
for there seemed to be confusion somewhere. His hope was that no one
would mention Lady Camper's name, for the mere thought of her caused a
rush to his head. 'I believe I am in for a touch of apoplexy,' he said to
the rector, who greeted him, in advance of the ladies, on Mr. Baerens'
lawn. He said it smilingly, but wanting some show of sympathy, instead of
the whisper and meaningless hand at his clerical band, with which the
rector responded, he cried, 'Apoplexy,' and his friend seemed then to
understand, and disappeared among the ladies.

Several of them surrounded the General, and one inquired whether the
series was being continued. He drew forth his pocket-book, handed her the
latest, and remarked on the gross injustice of it; for, as he requested
them to take note, her ladyship now sketched him as a person inattentive
to his dress, and he begged them to observe that she had drawn him with
his necktie hanging loose. 'And that, I say that has never been known of
me since I first entered society.'

The ladies exchanged looks of profound concern; for the fact was, the
General had come without any necktie and any collar, and he appeared to
be unaware of the circumstance. The rector had told them, that in answer
to a hint he had dropped on the subject of neckties, General Ople
expressed a slight apprehension of apoplexy; but his careless or merely
partial observance of the laws of buttonment could have nothing to do
with such fears. They signified rather a disorder of the intelligence.
Elizabeth was condemned for leaving him to go about alone. The situation
was really most painful, for a word to so sensitive a man would drive him
away in shame and for good; and still, to let him parade the ground in
the state, compared with his natural self, of scarecrow, and with the
dreadful habit of talking to himself quite rageing, was a horrible
alternative. Mrs. Baerens at last directed her husband upon the General,
trembling as though she watched for the operations of a fish torpedo; and
other ladies shared her excessive anxiousness, for Mr. Baerens had the
manner and the look of artillery, and on this occasion carried a
surcharge of powder.

The General bent his ear to Mr. Baerens, whose German-English and
repeated remark, 'I am to do it wid delicassy,' did not assist his
comprehension; and when he might have been enlightened, he was petrified
by seeing Lady Camper walk on the lawn with Elizabeth. The great lady
stood a moment beside Mrs. Baerens; she came straight over to him,
contemplating him in silence.

Then she said, 'Your arm, General Ople,' and she made one circuit of the
lawn with him, barely speaking.

At her request, he conducted her to her carriage. He took a seat beside
her, obediently. He felt that he was being sketched, and comported
himself like a child's flat man, that jumps at the pulling of a string.

'Where have you left your girl, General?'

Before he could rally his wits to answer the question, he was asked:

'And what have you done with your necktie and collar?'

He touched his throat.

'I am rather nervous to-day, I forgot Elizabeth,' he said, sending his
fingers in a dotting run of wonderment round his neck.

Lady Camper smiled with a triumphing humour on her close-drawn lips.

The verified absence of necktie and collar seemed to be choking him.

'Never mind, you have been abroad without them,' said Lady Camper, 'and
that is a victory for me. And you thought of Elizabeth first when I drew
your attention to it, and that is a victory for you. It is a very great
victory. Pray, do not be dismayed, General. You have a handsome
campaigning air. And no apologies, if you please; I like you well enough
as you are. There is my hand.'

General Ople understood her last remark. He pressed the lady's hand in
silence, very nervously.

'But do not shrug your head into your shoulders as if there were any
possibility of concealing the thunderingly evident,' said Lady Camper,
electrifying him, what with her cordial squeeze, her kind eyes, and her
singular language. 'You have omitted the collar. Well? The collar is the
fatal finishing touch in men's dress; it would make Apollo look
bourgeois.'

Her hand was in his: and watching the play of her features, a spark
entered General Ople's brain, causing him, in forgetfulness of collar and
caricatures, to ejaculate, 'Seventy? Did your ladyship say seventy?
Utterly impossible! You trifle with me.'

'We will talk when we are free of this accompaniment of carriage-wheels,
General,' said Lady Camper.

'I will beg permission to go and fetch Elizabeth, madam.'

'Rightly thought of. Fetch her in my carriage. And, by the way, Mrs.
Baerens was my old music-mistress, and is, I think, one year older than
I. She can tell you on which side of seventy I am.'

'I shall not require to ask, my lady,' he said, sighing.

'Then we will send the carriage for Elizabeth, and have it out
together at once. I am impatient; yes, General, impatient: for
what?--forgiveness.'

'Of me, my lady?' The General breathed profoundly.

'Of whom else? Do you know what it is?-I don't think you do. You English
have the smallest experience of humanity. I mean this: to strike so hard
that, in the end, you soften your heart to the victim. Well, that is my
weakness. And we of our blood put no restraint on the blows we strike
when we think them wanted, so we are always overdoing it.'

General Ople assisted Lady Camper to alight from the carriage, which was
forthwith despatched for Elizabeth.

He prepared to listen to her with a disconnected smile of acute
attentiveness.

She had changed. She spoke of money. Ten thousand pounds must be settled
on his daughter. 'And now,' said she, 'you will remember that you are
wanting a collar.'

He acquiesced. He craved permission to retire for ten minutes.

'Simplest of men! what will cover you?' she exclaimed, and peremptorily
bidding him sit down in the drawing-room, she took one of the famous pair
of pistols in her hand, and said, 'If I put myself in a similar position,
and make myself decodletee too, will that satisfy you? You see these
murderous weapons. Well, I am a coward. I dread fire-arms. They are laid
there to impose on the world, and I believe they do. They have imposed on
you. Now, you would never think of pretending to a moral quality you do
not possess. But, silly, simple man that you are! You can give yourself
the airs of wealth, buy horses to conceal your nakedness, and when you
are taken upon the standard of your apparent income, you would rather
seem to be beating a miserly retreat than behave frankly and honestly. I
have a little overstated it, but I am near the mark.'

'Your ladyship wanting courage!' cried the General.

'Refresh yourself by meditating on it,' said she. 'And to prove it to
you, I was glad to take this house when I knew I was to have a gallant
gentleman for a neighbour. No visitors will be admitted, General Ople, so
you are bare-throated only to me: sit quietly. One day you speculated on
the paint in my cheeks for the space of a minute and a half:--I had said
that I freckled easily. Your look signified that you really could not
detect a single freckle for the paint. I forgave you, or I did not. But
when I found you, on closer acquaintance, as indifferent to your
daughter's happiness as you had been to her reputation . . .'

'My daughter! her reputation! her happiness!'

General Ople raised his eyes under a wave, half uttering the outcries.

'So indifferent to her reputation, that you allowed a young man to talk
with her over the wall, and meet her by appointment: so reckless of the
girl's happiness, that when I tried to bring you to a treaty, on her
behalf, you could not be dragged from thinking of yourself and your own
affair. When I found that, perhaps I was predisposed to give you some of
what my sisters used to call my spice. You would not honestly state the
proportions of your income, and you affected to be faithful to the woman
of seventy. Most preposterous! Could any caricature of mine exceed in
grotesqueness your sketch of yourself? You are a brave and a generous man
all the same: and I suspect it is more hoodwinking than egotism--or
extreme egotism--that blinds you. A certain amount you must have to be a
man. You did not like my paint, still less did you like my sincerity; you
were annoyed by my corrections of your habits of speech; you were
horrified by the age of seventy, and you were credulous--General Ople,
listen to me, and remember that you have no collar on--you were credulous
of my statement of my great age, or you chose to be so, or chose to seem
so, because I had brushed your cat's coat against the fur. And then, full
of yourself, not thinking of Elizabeth, but to withdraw in the chivalrous
attitude of the man true to his word to the old woman, only stickling to
bring a certain independence to the common stock, because--I quote you!
and you have no collar on, mind--"you could not be at your wife's mercy,"
you broke from your proposal on the money question. Where was your
consideration for Elizabeth then?

'Well, General, you were fond of thinking of yourself, and I thought I
would assist you. I gave you plenty of subject matter. I will not say I
meant to work a homoeopathic cure. But if I drive you to forget your
collar, is it or is it not a triumph?

'No,' added Lady Camper, 'it is no triumph for me, but it is one for you,
if you like to make the most of it. Your fault has been to quit active
service, General, and love your ease too well. It is the fault of your
countrymen. You must get a militia regiment, or inspectorship of militia.
You are ten times the man in exercise. Why, do you mean to tell me that
you would have cared for those drawings of mine when marching?'

'I think so, I say I think so,' remarked the General seriously.

'I doubt it,' said she. 'But to the point; here comes Elizabeth. If you
have not much money to spare for her, according to your prudent
calculation, reflect how this money has enfeebled you and reduced you to
the level of the people round about us here--who are, what? Inhabitants
of gentlemanly residences, yes! But what kind of creature? They have no
mental standard, no moral aim, no native chivalry. You were rapidly
becoming one of them, only, fortunately for you, you were sensitive to
ridicule.'

'Elizabeth shall have half my money settled on her,' said the General;
'though I fear it is not much. And if I can find occupation, my lady...'

'Something worthier than that,' said Lady Camper, pencilling outlines
rapidly on the margin of a book, and he saw himself lashing a pony; 'or
that,' and he was plucking at a cabbage; 'or that,' and he was bowing to
three petticoated posts.

'The likeness is exact,' General Ople groaned.

'So you may suppose I have studied you,' said she. 'But there is no real
likeness. Slight exaggerations do more harm to truth than reckless
violations of it.

You would not have cared one bit for a caricature, if you had not nursed
the absurd idea of being one of our conquerors. It is the very tragedy of
modesty for a man like you to have such notions, my poor dear good
friend. The modest are the most easily intoxicated when they sip at
vanity. And reflect whether you have not been intoxicated, for these
young people have been wretched, and you have not observed it, though one
of them was living with you, and is the child you love. There, I have
done. Pray show a good face to Elizabeth.'

The General obeyed as well as he could. He felt very like a sheep that
has come from a shearing, and when released he wished to run away. But
hardly had he escaped before he had a desire for the renewal of the
operation. 'She sees me through, she sees me through,' he was heard
saying to himself, and in the end he taught himself, to say it with a
secret exultation, for as it was on her part an extraordinary piece of
insight to see him through, it struck him that in acknowledging the truth
of it, he made a discovery of new powers in human nature.

General Ople studied Lady Camper diligently for fresh proofs of her
penetration of the mysteries in his bosom; by which means, as it happened
that she was diligently observing the two betrothed young ones, he began
to watch them likewise, and took a pleasure in the sight. Their meetings,
their partings, their rides out and home furnished him themes of
converse. He soon had enough to talk of, and previously, as he
remembered, he had never sustained a conversation of any length with
composure and the beneficent sense of fulness. Five thousand pounds, to
which sum Lady Camper reduced her stipulation for Elizabeth's dowry, he
signed over to his dear girl gladly, and came out with the confession to
her ladyship that a well-invested twelve thousand comprised his fortune.
She shrugged she had left off pulling him this way and that, so his
chains were enjoyable, and he said to himself: 'If ever she should in the
dead of night want a man to defend her!' He mentioned it to Reginald, who
had been the repository of Elizabeth's lamentations about her father
being left alone, forsaken, and the young man conceived a scheme for
causing his aunt's great bell to be rung at midnight, which would
certainly have led to a dramatic issue and the happy re-establishment of
our masculine ascendancy at the close of this history. But he forgot it
in his bridegroom's delight, until he was making his miserable official
speech at the wedding-breakfast, and set Elizabeth winking over a tear.
As she stood in the hall ready to depart, a great van was observed in the
road at the gates of Douro Lodge; and this, the men in custody declared
to contain the goods and knick-knacks of the people who had taken the
house furnished for a year, and were coming in that very afternoon.

'I remember, I say now I remember, I had a notice,' the General said
cheerily to his troubled daughter.

'But where are you to go, papa?' the poor girl cried, close on sobbing.

'I shall get employment of some sort,' said he. 'I was saying I want it,
I need it, I require it.'

'You are saying three times what once would have sufficed for,' said Lady
Camper, and she asked him a few questions, frowned with a smile, and
offered him a lodgement in his neighbour's house.

'Really, dearest Aunt Angela?' said Elizabeth.

'What else can I do, child? I have, it seems, driven him out of a
gentlemanly residence, and I must give him a ladylike one. True, I would
rather have had him at call, but as I have always wished for a policeman
in the house, I may as well be satisfied with a soldier.'

'But if you lose your character, my lady?' said Reginald.

'Then I must look to the General to restore it.'

General Ople immediately bowed his head over Lady Camper's fingers.

'An odd thing to happen to a woman of forty-one!' she said to her great
people, and they submitted with the best grace in the world, while the
General's ears tingled till he felt younger than Reginald. This, his
reflections ran, or it would be more correct to say waltzed, this is the
result of painting!--that you can believe a woman to be any age when her
cheeks are tinted!

As for Lady Camper, she had been floated accidentally over the ridicule
of the bruit of a marriage at a time of life as terrible to her as her
fiction of seventy had been to General Ople; she resigned herself to let
things go with the tide. She had not been blissful in her first marriage,
she had abandoned the chase of an ideal man, and she had found one who
was tunable so as not to offend her ears, likely ever to be a fund of
amusement for her humour, good, impressible, and above all, very
picturesque. There is the secret of her, and of how it came to pass that
a simple man and a complex woman fell to union after the strangest
division.

     ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

     Can believe a woman to be any age when her cheeks are tinted
     Modest are the most easily intoxicated when they sip at vanity
     Nature is not of necessity always roaring
     Only to be described in the tongue of auctioneers
     Respected the vegetable yet more than he esteemed the flower
     She seems honest, and that is the most we can hope of girls
     Spare me that word "female" as long as you live
     The mildness of assured dictatorship
     When we see our veterans tottering to their fall




THE TALE OF CHLOE
AN EPISODE IN THE HISTORY OF BEAU BEAMISH

By George Meredith

       'Fair Chloe, we toasted of old,
         As the Queen of our festival meeting;
        Now Chloe is lifeless and cold;
         You must go to the grave for her greeting.
        Her beauty and talents were framed
         To enkindle the proudest to win her;
        Then let not the mem'ry be blamed
         Of the purest that e'er was a sinner!'

                    Captain Chanter's Collection.




CHAPTER I

A proper tenderness for the Peerage will continue to pass current the
illustrious gentleman who was inflamed by Cupid's darts to espouse the
milkmaid, or dairymaid, under his ballad title of Duke of Dewlap: nor was
it the smallest of the services rendered him by Beau Beamish, that he
clapped the name upon her rustic Grace, the young duchess, the very first
day of her arrival at the Wells. This happy inspiration of a wit never
failing at a pinch has rescued one of our princeliest houses from the
assaults of the vulgar, who are ever too rejoiced to bespatter and
disfigure a brilliant coat-of-arms; insomuch that the ballad, to which we
are indebted for the narrative of the meeting and marriage of the ducal
pair, speaks of Dewlap in good faith--

        O the ninth Duke of Dewlap I am, Susie dear!

without a hint of a domino title. So likewise the pictorial historian is
merry over 'Dewlap alliances' in his description of the society of that
period. He has read the ballad, but disregarded the memoirs of the beau.
Writers of pretension would seem to have an animus against individuals of
the character of Mr. Beamish. They will treat of the habits and manners
of highwaymen, and quote obscure broadsheets and songs of the people to
colour their story, yet decline to bestow more than a passing remark upon
our domestic kings: because they are not hereditary, we may suppose. The
ballad of 'The Duke and the Dairymaid,' ascribed with questionable
authority to the pen of Mr. Beamish himself in a freak of his gaiety, was
once popular enough to provoke the moralist to animadversions upon an
order of composition that 'tempted every bouncing country lass to sidle
an eye in a blowsy cheek' in expectation of a coronet for her pains--and
a wet ditch as the result! We may doubt it to have been such an occasion
of mischief. But that mischief may have been done by it to a
nobility-loving people, even to the love of our nobility among the
people, must be granted; and for the particular reason, that the hero of
the ballad behaved so handsomely. We perceive a susceptibility to
adulteration in their worship at the sight of one of their number, a
young maid, suddenly snatched up to the gaping heights of Luxury and
Fashion through sheer good looks. Remembering that they are accustomed to
a totally reverse effect from that possession, it is very perceptible how
a breach in their reverence may come of the change.

Otherwise the ballad is innocent; certainly it is innocent in design. A
fresher national song of a beautiful incident of our country life has
never been written. The sentiments are natural, the imagery is apt and
redolent of the soil, the music of the verse appeals to the dullest ear.
It has no smell of the lamp, nothing foreign and far-fetched about it,
but is just what it pretends to be, the carol of the native bird. A
sample will show, for the ballad is much too long to be given entire:

     Sweet Susie she tripped on a shiny May morn,
     As blithe as the lark from the green-springing corn,
     When, hard by a stile, 'twas her luck to behold
     A wonderful gentleman covered with gold!

     There was gold on his breeches and gold on his coat,
     His shirt-frill was grand as a fifty-pound note;
     The diamonds glittered all up him so bright,
     She thought him the Milky Way clothing a Sprite!

     'Fear not, pretty maiden,' he said with a smile;
     'And, pray, let me help you in crossing the stile.
     She bobbed him a curtsey so lovely and smart,
     It shot like an arrow and fixed in his heart.

     As light as a robin she hopped to the stone,
     But fast was her hand in the gentleman's own;
     And guess how she stared, nor her senses could trust,
     When this creamy gentleman knelt in the dust!

With a rhapsody upon her beauty, he informs her of his rank, for a
flourish to the proposal of honourable and immediate marriage. He cannot
wait. This is the fatal condition of his love: apparently a
characteristic of amorous dukes. We read them in the signs extended to
us. The minds of these august and solitary men have not yet been sounded;
they are too distant. Standing upon their lofty pinnacles, they are as
legible to the rabble below as a line of cuneiform writing in a page of
old copybook roundhand. By their deeds we know them, as heathendom knows
of its gods; and it is repeatedly on record that the moment they have
taken fire they must wed, though the lady's finger be circled with
nothing closer fitting than a ring of the bed-curtain. Vainly, as becomes
a candid country lass, blue-eyed Susan tells him that she is but a poor
dairymaid. He has been a student of women at Courts, in which furnace the
sex becomes a transparency, so he recounts to her the catalogue of
material advantages he has to offer. Finally, after his assurances that
she is to be married by the parson, really by the parson, and a real
parson--

     Sweet Susie is off for her parents' consent,
     And long must the old folk debate what it meant.
     She left them the eve of that happy May morn,
     To shine like the blossom that hangs from the thorn!

Apart from its historical value, the ballad is an example to poets of our
day, who fly to mythological Greece, or a fanciful and morbid
mediaevalism, or--save the mark!--abstract ideas, for themes of song, of
what may be done to make our English life poetically interesting, if they
would but pluck the treasures presented them by the wayside; and Nature
being now as then the passport to popularity, they have themselves to
thank for their little hold on the heart of the people. A living native
duke is worth fifty Phoebus Apollos to Englishmen, and a buxom young lass
of the fields mounting from a pair of pails to the estate of duchess, a
more romantic object than troops of your visionary Yseults and
Guineveres.




CHAPTER II

A certain time after the marriage, his Grace alighted at the Wells, and
did himself the honour to call on Mr. Beamish. Addressing that gentleman,
to whom he was no stranger, he communicated the purport of his visit.

'Sir, and my very good friend,' he said, 'first let me beg you to abate
the severity of your countenance, for if I am here in breach of your
prohibition, I shall presently depart in compliance with it. I could
indeed deplore the loss of the passion for play of which you effectually
cured me. I was then armed against a crueller, that allows of no interval
for a man to make his vow to recover!'

'The disease which is all crisis, I apprehend,' Mr. Beamish remarked.

'Which, sir, when it takes hold of dry wood, burns to the last splinter.
It is now'--the duke fetched a tender groan--'three years ago that I had
a caprice to marry a grandchild!'

'Of Adam's,' Mr. Beamish said cheerfully. 'There was no legitimate bar to
the union.'

'Unhappily none. Yet you are not to suppose I regret it. A most admirable
creature, Mr. Beamish, a real divinity! And the better known, the more
adored. There is the misfortune. At my season of life, when the greater
and the minor organs are in a conspiracy to tell me I am mortal, the
passion of love must be welcomed as a calamity, though one would not be
free of it for the renewal of youth. You are to understand, that with a
little awakening taste for dissipation, she is the most innocent of
angels. Hitherto we have lived . . . To her it has been a new world. But
she is beginning to find it a narrow one. No, no, she is not tired of my
society. Very far from that. But in her present station an inclination
for such gatherings as you have here, for example, is like a desire to
take the air: and the healthy habits of my duchess have not accustomed
her to be immured. And in fine, devote ourselves as we will, a term
approaches when the enthusiasm for serving as your wife's playfellow all
day, running round tables and flying along corridors before a knotted
handkerchief, is mightily relaxed. Yet the dread of a separation from her
has kept me at these pastimes for a considerable period beyond my relish
of them. Not that I acknowledge fatigue. I have, it seems, a taste for
reflection; I am now much disposed to read and meditate, which cannot be
done without repose. I settle myself, and I receive a worsted ball in my
face, and I am expected to return it. I comply; and then you would say a
nursery in arms. It would else be the deplorable spectacle of a beautiful
young woman yawning.'

'Earthquake and saltpetre threaten us less terribly,' said Mr. Beamish.

'In fine, she has extracted a promise that 'this summer she shall visit
the Wells for a month, and I fear I cannot break my pledge of my word; I
fear I cannot.'

'Very certainly I would not,' said Mr. Beamish.

The duke heaved a sigh. 'There are reasons, family reasons, why my
company and protection must be denied to her here. I have no wish . . .
indeed my name, for the present, until such time as she shall have found
her feet . . . and there is ever a penalty to pay for that. Ah, Mr.
Beamish, pictures are ours, when we have bought them and hung them up;
but who insures us possession of a beautiful work of Nature? I have
latterly betaken me to reflect much and seriously. I am tempted to side
with the Divines in the sermons I have read; the flesh is the habitation
of a rebellious devil.'

'To whom we object in proportion as we ourselves become quit of him,' Mr.
Beamish acquiesced.

'But this mania of young people for pleasure, eternal pleasure, is one of
the wonders. It does not pall on them; they are insatiate.'

'There is the cataract, and there is the cliff. Potentate to potentate,
duke--so long as you are on my territory, be it understood. Upon my way
to a place of worship once, I passed a Puritan, who was complaining of a
butterfly that fluttered prettily abroad in desecration of the Day of
Rest. "Friend," said I to him, "conclusively you prove to me that you are
not a butterfly." Surly did no more than favour me with the anathema of
his countenance.'

'Cousin Beamish, my complaint of these young people is, that they miss
their pleasure in pursuing it. I have lectured my duchess--'

'Ha!'

'Foolish, I own,' said the duke. 'But suppose, now, you had caught your
butterfly, and you could neither let it go nor consent to follow its
vagaries. That poses you.'

'Young people,' said Mr. Beamish, 'come under my observation in this poor
realm of mine--young and old. I find them prodigiously alike in their
love of pleasure, differing mainly in their capacity to satisfy it. That
is no uncommon observation. The young, have an edge which they are
desirous of blunting; the old contrariwise. The cry of the young for
pleasure is actually--I have studied their language--a cry for burdens.
Curious! And the old ones cry for having too many on their shoulders:
which is not astonishing. Between them they make an agreeable concert
both to charm the ears and guide the steps of the philosopher, whose
wisdom it is to avoid their tracks.'

'Good. But I have asked you for practical advice, and you give me an
essay.'

'For the reason, duke, that you propose a case that suggests hanging. You
mention two things impossible to be done. The alternative is, a garter
and the bedpost. When we have come upon crossways, and we can decide
neither to take the right hand nor the left, neither forward nor back,
the index of the board which would direct us points to itself, and
emphatically says, Gallows.'

'Beamish, I am distracted. If I refuse her the visit, I foresee
dissensions, tears, games at ball, romps, not one day of rest remaining
to me. I could be of a mind with your Puritan, positively. If I allow it,
so innocent a creature in the atmosphere of a place like this must suffer
some corruption. You should know that the station I took her from was
. . . it was modest. She was absolutely a buttercup of the fields. She has
had various masters. She dances . . . she dances prettily, I could say
bewitchingly. And so she is now for airing her accomplishments: such are
women!'

'Have you heard of Chloe?' said Mr. Beamish. 'There you have an example
of a young lady uncorrupted by this place--of which I would only remark
that it is best unvisited, but better tasted than longed for.'

'Chloe? A lady who squandered her fortune to redeem some ill-requiting
rascal: I remember to have heard of her. She is here still? And ruined,
of course?'

'In purse.'

'That cannot be without the loss of reputation.'

'Chloe's champion will grant that she is exposed to the evils of
improvidence. The more brightly shine her native purity, her goodness of
heart, her trustfulness. She is a lady whose exaltation glows in her
abasement.'

'She has, I see, preserved her comeliness,' observed the duke, with a
smile.

'Despite the flying of the roses, which had not her heart's patience.
'Tis now the lily that reigns. So, then, Chloe shall be attached to the
duchess during her stay, and unless the devil himself should interfere, I
guarantee her Grace against any worse harm than experience; and that,'
Mr. Beamish added, as the duke raised his arms at the fearful word, 'that
shall be mild. Play she will; she is sure to play. Put it down at a
thousand. We map her out a course of permissible follies, and she plays
to lose the thousand by degrees, with as telling an effect upon a
connubial conscience as we can produce.'

'A thousand,' said the duke, 'will be cheap indeed. I think now I have
had a description of this fair Chloe, and from an enthusiast; a brune?
elegantly mannered and of a good landed family; though she has thought
proper to conceal her name. And that will be our difficulty, cousin
Beamish.'

'She was, under my dominion, Miss Martinsward,' Mr. Beamish pursued. 'She
came here very young, and at once her suitors were legion. In the way of
women, she chose the worst among them; and for the fellow Caseldy she
sacrificed the fortune she had inherited of a maternal uncle. To release
him from prison, she paid all his debts; a mountain of bills, with the
lawyers piled above--Pelion upon Ossa, to quote our poets. In fact,
obeying the dictates of a soul steeped in generosity, she committed the
indiscretion to strip herself, scandalizing propriety. This was
immediately on her coming of age; and it was the death-blow to her
relations with her family. Since then, honoured even by rakes, she has
lived impoverished at the Wells. I dubbed her Chloe, and man or woman
disrespectful to Chloe packs. From being the victim of her generous
disposition, I could not save her; I can protect her from the shafts of
malice.'

'She has no passion for play?' inquired the duke.

'She nourishes a passion for the man for whom she bled, to the exclusion
of the other passions. She lives, and I believe I may say that it is the
motive of her rising and dressing daily, in expectation of his advent.'

'He may be dead.'

'The dog is alive. And he has not ceased to be Handsome Caseldy, they
say. Between ourselves, duke, there is matter to break her heart. He has
been the Count Caseldy of Continental gaming tables, and he is recently
Sir Martin Caseldy, settled on the estate she made him free to take up
intact on his father's decease.'

'Pah! a villain!'

'With a blacker brand upon him every morning that he looks forth across
his property, and leaves her to languish! She still--I say it to the
redemption of our sex--has offers. Her incomparable attractions of mind
and person exercise the natural empire of beauty. But she will none of
them. I call her the Fair Suicide. She has died for love; and she is a
ghost, a good ghost, and a pleasing ghost, but an apparition, a taper.

The duke fidgeted, and expressed a hope to hear that she was not of
melancholy conversation; and again, that the subject of her discourse was
not confined to love and lovers, happy or unhappy. He wished his duchess,
he said, to be entertained upon gayer topics: love being a theme he
desired to reserve to himself. 'This month!' he said, prognostically
shaking and moaning. 'I would this month were over, and that we were well
purged of it.'

Mr. Beamish reassured him. The wit and sprightliness of Chloe were so
famous as to be considered medical, he affirmed; she was besieged for her
company; she composed and sang impromptu verses, she played harp and
harpsichord divinely, and touched the guitar, and danced, danced like the
silvery moon on the waters of the mill pool. He concluded by saying that
she was both humane and wise, humble-minded and amusing, virtuous yet not
a Tartar; the best of companions for her Grace the young duchess.
Moreover, he boldly engaged to carry the duchess through the term of her
visit under a name that should be as good as a masquerade for concealing
his Grace's, while giving her all the honours due to her rank.

'You strictly interpret my wishes,' said the duke; 'all honours, the
foremost place, and my wrath upon man or woman gainsaying them!'

'Mine! if you please, duke,' said Mr. Beamish.

'A thousand pardons! I leave it to you, cousin. I could not be in safer
hands. I am heartily bounders to you. Chloe, then. By the way, she has a
decent respect for age?'

'She is reverentially inclined.'

'Not that. She is, I would ask, no wanton prattler of the charms and
advantages of youth?'

'She has a young adorer that I have dubbed Alonzo, whom she scarce
notices.'

'Nothing could be better. Alonzo: h'm! A faithful swain?'

'Life is his tree, upon which unceasingly he carves his mistress's
initials.'

'She should not be too cruel. I recollect myself formerly: I was . . .
Young men will, when long slighted, transfer their affections, and be
warmer to the second flame than to the first. I put you on your guard. He
follows her much? These lovers' paintings and puffings in the
neighbourhood of the most innocent of women are contagious.'

'Her Grace will be running home all the sooner.'

'Or off!--may she forgive me! I am like a King John's Jew, forced to lend
his treasure without security. What a world is ours! Nothing, Beamish,
nothing desirable will you have which is not coveted! Catch a prize, and
you will find you are at war with your species. You have to be on the
defensive from that moment. There is no such thing as peaceable
procession on earth. Let it be a beautiful young woman!--Ah!'

Mr. Beamish replied bracingly, 'The champion wrestler challenges all
comers while he wears the belt.'

The duke dejectedly assented. 'True; or he is challenged, say. Is there
any tale we could tell her of this Alonzo? You could deport him for the
month, my dear Beamish.'

'I commit no injustice unless with sufficient reason. It is an estimable
youth, as shown by his devotion to a peerless woman. To endow her with
his name and fortune is his only thought.'

'I perceive; an excellent young fellow! I have an incipient liking for
this young Alonzo. You must not permit my duchess to laugh at him.
Encourage her rather to advance his suit. The silliness of a young man
will be no bad spectacle. Chloe, then. You have set my mind at rest,
Beamish, and it is but another obligation added to the heap; so, if I do
not speak of payment, the reason is that I know you would not have me
bankrupt.'

The remainder of the colloquy of the duke and Mr. Beamish referred to the
date of her Grace's coming to the Wells, the lodgement she was to
receive, and other minor arrangements bearing upon her state and comfort;
the duke perpetually observing, 'But I leave it all to you, Beamish,'
when he had laid down precise instructions in these respects, even to the
specification of the shopkeepers, the confectioner and the apothecary,
who were to balance or cancel one another in the opposite nature of their
supplies, and the haberdasher and the jeweller, with whom she was to make
her purchases. For the duke had a recollection of giddy shops, and of
giddy shopmen too; and it was by serving as one for a day that a certain
great nobleman came to victory with a jealously guarded dame beautiful as
Venus. 'I would have challenged the goddess!' he cried, and subsided from
his enthusiasm plaintively, like a weak wind instrument. 'So there you
see the prudence of a choice of shops. But I leave it to you, Beamish.'
Similarly the great military commander, having done whatsoever a careful
prevision may suggest to insure him victory, casts himself upon
Providence, with the hope of propitiating the unanticipated and darkly
possible.




CHAPTER III

The splendid equipage of a coach and six, with footmen in scarlet and
green, carried Beau Beamish five miles along the road on a sunny day to
meet the young duchess at the boundary of his territory, and conduct her
in state to the Wells. Chloe sat beside him, receiving counsel with
regard to her prospective duties. He was this day the consummate beau,
suave, but monarchical, and his manner of speech partook of his external
grandeur. 'Spy me the horizon, and apprise me if somewhere you
distinguish a chariot,' he said, as they drew up on the rise of a hill of
long descent, where the dusty roadway sank between its brown hedges, and
crawled mounting from dry rush-spotted hollows to corn fields on a
companion height directly facing them, at a remove of about
three-quarters of a mile. Chloe looked forth, while the beau passingly
raised his hat for coolness, and murmured, with a glance down the sultry
track: 'It sweats the eye to see!'

Presently Chloe said, 'Now a dust blows. Something approaches. Now I
discern horses, now a vehicle; and it is a chariot!'

Orders were issued to the outriders for horns to be sounded.

Both Chloe and Beau Beamish wrinkled their foreheads at the disorderly
notes of triple horns, whose pealing made an acid in the air instead of
sweetness.

'You would say, kennel dogs that bay the moon!' said the wincing beau.
'Yet, as you know, these fellows have been exercised. I have had them out
in a meadow for hours, baked and drenched, to get them rid of their
native cacophony. But they love it, as they love bacon and beans. The
musical taste of our people is in the stage of the primitive appetite for
noise, and for that they are gluttons.'

'It will be pleasant to hear in the distance,' Chloe replied.

'Ay, the extremer the distance, the pleasanter to hear. Are they
advancing?'

'They stop. There is a cavalier at the window. Now he doffs his hat.'

'Sweepingly?'

Chloe described a semicircle in the grand manner.

The beau's eyebrows rose. 'Powers divine!' he muttered. 'She is let
loose from hand to hand, and midway comes a cavalier. We did not count on
the hawks. So I have to deal with a cavalier! It signifies, my dear
Chloe, that I must incontinently affect the passion if I am to be his
match: nothing less.'

'He has flown,' said Chloe.

'Whom she encounters after meeting me, I care not,' quoth the beau,
snapping a finger. 'But there has been an interval for damage with a lady
innocent as Eve. Is she advancing?'

'The chariot is trotting down the hill. He has ridden back. She has no
attendant horseman.'

'They were dismissed at my injunction ten miles off particularly to the
benefit of the cavaliering horde, it would appear. In the case of a
woman, Chloe, one blink of the eyelids is an omission of watchfulness.'

'That is an axiom fit for the harem of the Grand Signior.'

'The Grand Signior might give us profitable lessons for dealing with the
sex.'

'Distrust us, and it is a declaration of war!'

'Trust you, and the stopper is out of the smelling-bottle.'

'Mr. Beamish, we are women, but we have souls.'

'The pip in the apple whose ruddy cheek allures little Tommy to rob the
orchard is as good a preservative.'

'You admit that men are our enemies?'

'I maintain that they carry the banner of virtue.'

'Oh, Mr. Beamish, I shall expire.'

'I forbid it in my lifetime, Chloe, for I wish to die believing in one
woman.'

'No flattery for me at the expense of my sisters!'

'Then fly to a hermitage; for all flattery is at somebody's expense,
child. 'Tis an essence-extract of humanity! To live on it, in the fashion
of some people, is bad--it is downright cannibal. But we may sprinkle our
handkerchiefs with it, and we should, if we would caress our noses with
an air. Society, my Chloe, is a recommencement upon an upper level of the
savage system; we must have our sacrifices. As, for instance, what say
you of myself beside our booted bumpkin squires?'

'Hundreds of them, Mr. Beamish!'

'That is a holocaust of squires reduced to make an incense for me, though
you have not performed Druid rites and packed them in gigantic osier
ribs. Be philosophical, but accept your personal dues. Grant us ours too.
I have a serious intention to preserve this young duchess, and I expect
my task to be severe. I carry the banner aforesaid; verily and
penitentially I do. It is an error of the vulgar to suppose that all is
dragon in the dragon's jaws.'

'Men are his fangs and claws.'

'Ay, but the passion for his fiery breath is in woman. She will take her
leap and have her jump, will and will! And at the point where she will
and she won't, the dragon gulps and down she goes! However, the business
is to keep our buttercup duchess from that same point. Is she near?'

'I can see her,' said Chloe.

Beau Beamish requested a sketch of her, and Chloe began: 'She is
ravishing.'

Upon which he commented, 'Every woman is ravishing at forty paces, and
still more so in imagination.'

'Beautiful auburn hair, and a dazzling red and white complexion, set in a
blue coif.'

'Her eyes?'

'Melting blue.'

''Tis an English witch!' exclaimed the beau, and he compassionately
invoked her absent lord.

Chloe's optics were no longer tasked to discern the fair lady's
lineaments, for the chariot windows came flush with those of the beau on
the broad plateau of the hill. His coach door was opened. He sat upright,
levelling his privileged stare at Duchess Susan until she blushed.

'Ay, madam,' quoth he, 'I am not the first.'

'La, sir!' said she; 'who are you?'

The beau deliberately raised his hat and bowed. 'He, madam, of whose
approach the gentleman who took his leave of you on yonder elevation
informed you.'

She looked artlessly over her shoulder, and at the beau alighting from
his carriage. 'A gentleman?'

'On horseback.'

The duchess popped her head through the window on an impulse to measure
the distance between the two hills.

'Never!' she cried.

'Why, madam, did he deliver no message to announce me?' said the beau,
ruffling.

'Goodness gracious! You must be Mr. Beamish,' she replied.

He laid his hat on his bosom, and invited her to quit her carriage for a
seat beside him. She stipulated, 'If you are really Mr. Beamish?' He
frowned, and raised his head to convince her; but she would not be
impressed, and he applied to Chloe to establish his identity. Hearing
Chloe's name, the duchess called out, 'Oh! there, now, that's enough, for
Chloe's my maid here, and I know she's a lady born, and we're going to be
friends. Hand me to Chloe. And you are Chloe?' she said, after a frank
stride from step to step of the carriages. 'And don't mind being my maid?
You do look a nice, kind creature. And I see you're a lady born; I know
in a minute. You're dark, I'm fair; we shall suit. And tell
me--hush!--what dreadful long eyes he has! I shall ask you presently what
you think of me. I was never at the Wells before. Dear me! the coach has
turned. How far off shall we hear the bells to say I'm coming? I know I'm
to have bells. Mr. Beamish, Mr. Beamish! I must have a chatter with a
woman, and I'm in awe of you, sir, that I am, but men and men I see to
talk to for a lift of my finger, by the dozen, in my duke's
palace--though they're old ones, that's true--but a woman who's a lady,
and kind enough to be my maid, I haven't met yet since I had the right to
wear a coronet. There, I'll hold Chloe's hand, and that'll do. You would
tell me at once, Chloe, if I was not dressed to your taste; now, wouldn't
you? As for talkative, that's a sign with me of my liking people. I
really don't know what to say to my duke sometimes. I sit and think it so
funny to be having a duke instead of a husband. You're off!'

The duchess laughed at Chloe's laughter. Chloe excused herself, but was
informed by her mistress that it was what she liked.

'For the first two years,' she resumed, 'I could hardly speak a syllable.
I stammered, I reddened, I longed to be up in my room brushing and
curling my hair, and was ready to curtsey to everybody. Now I'm quite at
home, for I've plenty of courage--except about death, and I'm worse about
death than I was when I was a simple body with a gawk's "lawks!" in her
round eyes and mouth for an egg. I wonder why that is? But isn't death
horrible? And skeletons!' The duchess shuddered.

'It depends upon the skeleton,' said Beau Beamish, who had joined the
conversation. 'Yours, madam, I would rather not meet, because she would
precipitate me into transports of regret for the loss of the flesh. I
have, however, met mine own and had reason for satisfaction with the
interview.'

'Your own skeleton, sir!' said the duchess wonderingly and appalled.

'Unmistakably mine. I will call you to witness by an account of him.'

Duchess Susan gaped, and, 'Oh, don't!' she cried out; but added, 'It 's
broad day, and I've got some one to sleep anigh me after dark'; with
which she smiled on Chloe, who promised her there was no matter for
alarm.

'I encountered my gentleman as I was proceeding to my room at night,'
said the beau, 'along a narrow corridor, where it was imperative that one
of us should yield the 'pas;' and, I must confess it, we are all so
amazingly alike in our bones, that I stood prepared to demand place of
him. For indubitably the fellow was an obstruction, and at the first
glance repulsive. I took him for anybody's skeleton, Death's ensign, with
his cachinnatory skull, and the numbered ribs, and the extraordinary
splay feet--in fact, the whole ungainly and shaky hobbledehoy which man
is built on, and by whose image in his weaker moments he is haunted. I
had, to be frank, been dancing on a supper with certain of our choicest
Wits and Beauties. It is a recipe for conjuring apparitions. Now, then,
thinks I, my fine fellow, I will bounce you; and without a salutation I
pressed forward. Madam, I give you my word, he behaved to the full pitch
as I myself should have done under similar circumstances. Retiring upon
an inclination of his structure, he draws up and fetches me a bow of the
exact middle nick between dignity and service. I advance, he withdraws,
and again the bow, devoid of obsequiousness, majestically condescending.
These, thinks I, be royal manners. I could have taken him for the Sable
King in person, stripped of his mantle. On my soul, he put me to the
blush.'

'And is that all?' asked the duchess, relieving herself with a sigh.

'Why, madam,' quoth the beau, 'do you not see that he could have been
none other than mine own, who could comport himself with that grand air
and gracefulness when wounded by his closest relative? Upon his opening
my door for me, and accepting the 'pas,' which I now right heartily
accorded him, I recognized at once both him and the reproof he had
designedly dealt me--or the wine supper I had danced on, perhaps I should
say' and I protest that by such a display of supreme good breeding he
managed to convey the highest compliment ever received by man, namely the
assurance, that after the withering away of this mortal garb, I shall
still be noted for urbanity and elegancy. Nay, and more, immortally,
without the slip I was guilty of when I carried the bag of wine.'

Duchess Susan fanned herself to assist her digestion of the anecdote.

'Well, it's not so frightful a story, and I know you are the great Mr.
Beamish;' she said.

He questioned her whether the gentleman had signalled him to her on the
hill.

'What can he mean about a gentleman?' she turned to Chloe. 'My duke told
me you would meet me, sir. And you are to protect me. And if anything
happens, it is to be your fault.'

'Entirely,' said the beau. 'I shall therefore maintain a vigilant guard.'

'Except leaving me free. Oof! I've been boxed up so long. I declare,
Chloe, I feel like a best dress out for a holiday, and a bit afraid of
spoiling. I'm a real child, more than I was when my duke married me. I
seemed to go in and grow up again, after I was raised to fortune. And
nobody to tell of it! Fancy that! For you can't talk to old gentlemen
about what's going on in your heart.'

'How of young gentlemen?' she was asked by the beau.

And she replied, 'They find it out.'

'Not if you do not assist them,' said he.

Duchess Susan let her eyelids and her underlie half drop, as she looked
at him with the simple shyness of one of nature's thoughts in her head at
peep on the pastures of the world. The melting blue eyes and the cherry
lip made an exceedingly quickening picture. 'Now, I wonder if that is
true?' she transferred her slyness to speech.

'Beware the middle-aged!' he exclaimed.

She appealed to Chloe. 'And I'm sure they're the nicest.'

Chloe agreed that they were.

The duchess measured Chloe and the beau together, with a mind swift in
apprehending all that it hungered for.

She would have pursued the pleasing theme had she not been directed to
gaze below upon the towers and roofs of the Wells, shining sleepily in a
siesta of afternoon Summer sunlight.

With a spread of her silken robe, she touched the edifice of her hair,
murmuring to Chloe, 'I can't abide that powder. You shall see me walk in
a hoop. I can. I've done it to slow music till my duke clapped hands. I'm
nothing sitting to what I am on my feet. That's because I haven't got
fine language yet. I shall. It seems to come last. So, there 's the
place. And whereabouts do all the great people meet and prommy--?'

'They promenade where you see the trees, madam,' said Chloe.

'And where is it where the ladies sit and eat jam tarts with whipped
cream on 'em, while the gentlemen stand and pay compliments?'

Chloe said it was at a shop near the pump room.

Duchess Susan looked out over the house-tops, beyond the dusty hedges.

'Oh, and that powder!' she cried. 'I hate to be out of the fashion and a
spectacle. But I do love my own hair, and I have such a lot, and I like
the colour, and so does my duke. Only, don't let me be fingered at. If
once I begin to blush before people, my courage is gone; my singing
inside me is choked; and I've a real lark going on in me all day long,
rain or sunshine--hush, all about love and amusement.'

Chloe smiled, and Duchess Susan said, 'Just like a bird, for I don't know
what it is.'

She looked for Chloe to say that she did.

At the moment a pair of mounted squires rode up, and the coach stopped,
while Beau Beamish gave orders for the church bells to be set ringing,
and the band to meet and precede his equipage at the head of the bath
avenue: 'in honour of the arrival of her Grace the Duchess of Dewlap.'

He delivered these words loudly to his men, and turned an effulgent gaze
upon the duchess, so that for a minute she was fascinated and did not
consult her hearing; but presently she fell into an uneasiness; the signs
increased, she bit her lip, and after breathing short once or twice, 'Was
it meaning me, Mr. Beamish?' she said.

'You, madam, are the person whom we 'delight to honour,' he replied.

'Duchess of what?' she screwed uneasy features to hear.

'Duchess of Dewlap,' said he.

'It's not my title, sir.'

'It is your title on my territory, madam.'

She made her pretty nose and upper lip ugly with a sneer of 'Dew--! And
enter that town before all those people as Duchess of . . . Oh, no, I
won't; I just won't! Call back those men now, please; now, if you please.
Pray, Mr. Beamish! You'll offend me, sir. I'm not going to be a mock.
You'll offend my duke, sir. He'd die rather than have my feelings hurt.
Here's all my pleasure spoilt. I won't and I sha'n't enter the town as
duchess of that stupid name, so call 'em back, call 'em back this
instant. I know who I am and what I am, and I know what's due to me, I
do.'

Beau Beamish rejoined, 'I too. Chloe will tell you I am lord here.'

'Then I'll go home, I will. I won't be laughed at for a great lady ninny.
I'm a real lady of high rank, and such I'll appear. What 's a Duchess of
Dewlap? One might as well be Duchess of Cowstail, Duchess of Mopsend. And
those people! But I won't be that. I won't be played with. I see them
staring! No, I can make up my mind, and I beg you to call back your men,
or I'll go back home.' She muttered, 'Be made fun of--made a fool of!'

'Your Grace's chariot is behind,' said the beau.

His despotic coolness provoked her to an outcry and weeping: she
repeated, 'Dewlap! Dewlap!' in sobs; she shook her shoulders and hid her
face.

'You are proud of your title, are you, madam?' said he.

'I am.' She came out of her hands to answer him proudly. 'That I am!' she
meant for a stronger affirmation.

'Then mark me,' he said impressively; 'I am your duke's friend, and you
are under my charge here. I am your guardian and you are my ward, and you
can enter the town only on the condition of obedience to me. Now, mark
me, madam; no one can rob you of your real name and title saving
yourself. But you are entering a place where you will encounter a
thousand temptations to tarnish, and haply forfeit it. Be warned do
nothing that will.'

'Then I'm to have my own title?' said she, clearing up.

'For the month of your visit you are Duchess of Dewlap.'

'I say I sha'n't!'

'You shall.'

'Never, sir!'

'I command it.'

She flung herself forward, with a wail, upon Chloe's bosom. 'Can't you do
something for me?' she whimpered.

'It is impossible to move Mr. Beamish,' Chloe said.

Out of a pause, composed of sobs and sighs, the duchess let loose in a
broken voice: 'Then I 'm sure I think--I think I'd rather have met--have
met his skeleton!'

Her sincerity was equal to wit.

Beau Beamish shouted. He cordially applauded her, and in the genuine
kindness of an admiration that surprised him, he permitted himself the
liberty of taking and saluting her fingers. She fancied there was another
chance for her, but he frowned at the mention of it.

Upon these proceedings the exhilarating sound of the band was heard;
simultaneously a festival peal of bells burst forth; and an admonishment
of the necessity for concealing her chagrin and exhibiting both station
and a countenance to the people, combined with the excitement of the new
scenes and the marching music to banish the acuter sense of
disappointment from Duchess Susan's mind; so she very soon held herself
erect, and wore a face open to every wonder, impressionable as the blue
lake-surface, crisped here and there by fitful breezes against a level
sun.




CHAPTER IV

It was an axiom with Mr. Beamish, our first, if not our only
philosophical beau and a gentleman of some thoughtfulness, that the
social English require tyrannical government as much as the political are
able to dispense with it: and this he explained by an exposition of the
character of a race possessed of the eminent virtue of individual
self-assertion, which causes them to insist on good elbowroom wherever
they gather together. Society, however, not being tolerable where the
smoothness of intercourse is disturbed by a perpetual punching of sides,
the merits of the free citizen in them become their demerits when a
fraternal circle is established, and they who have shown an example of
civilization too notable in one sphere to call for eulogy, are often to
be seen elbowing on the ragged edge of barbarism in the other. They must
therefore be reduced to accept laws not of their own making, and of an
extreme rigidity.

Here too is a further peril; for the gallant spirits distinguishing them
in the state of independence may (he foresaw the melancholy experience of
a later age) abandon them utterly in subjection, and the glorious
boisterousness befitting the village green forsake them even in their
haunts of liberal association, should they once be thoroughly tamed by
authority. Our 'merrie England' will then be long-faced England, an
England of fallen chaps, like a boar's head, bearing for speech a lemon
in the mouth: good to feast on, mayhap; not with!

Mr. Beamish would actually seem to have foreseen the danger of a
transition that he could watch over only in his time; and, as he said, 'I
go, as I came, on a flash'; he had neither ancestry nor descendants: he
was a genius, he knew himself a solitary, therefore, in spite of his
efforts to create his like. Within his district he did effect something,
enough to give him fame as one of the princely fathers of our domestic
civilization, though we now appear to have lost by it more than formerly
we gained. The chasing of the natural is ever fraught with dubious
hazards. If it gallops back, according to the proverb, it will do so at
the charge: commonly it gallops off, quite off; and then for any kind of
animation our precarious dependence is upon brains: we have to live on
our wits, which are ordinarily less productive than land, and cannot be
remitted in entail.

Rightly or wrongly (there are differences of opinion about it) Mr.
Beamish repressed the chthonic natural with a rod of iron beneath his
rule. The hoyden and the bumpkin had no peace until they had given public
imitations of the lady and the gentleman; nor were the lady and the
gentleman privileged to be what he called 'free flags.' He could be
charitable to the passion, but he bellowed the very word itself (hauled
up smoking from the brimstone lake) against them that pretended to be
shamelessly guilty of the peccadilloes of gallantry. His famous accost of
a lady threatening to sink, and already performing like a vessel in that
situation: 'So, madam, I hear you are preparing to enrol yourself in the
very ancient order?' . . . (he named it) was a piece of insolence that
involved him in some discord with the lady's husband and 'the rascal
steward,' as he chose to term the third party in these affairs: yet it is
reputed to have saved the lady.

Furthermore, he attacked the vulgarity of persons of quality, and he has
told a fashionable dame who was indulging herself in a marked sneer of
disdain, not improving to her features, 'that he would be pleased to have
her assurance it was her face she presented to mankind': a thing--thanks
perhaps to him chiefly--no longer possible of utterance. One of the sex
asking him why he addressed his persecutions particularly to women:
'Because I fight your battles,' says he, 'and I find you in the ranks of
the enemy.' He treated them as traitors.

He was nevertheless well supported by a sex that compensates for dislike
of its friend before a certain age by a cordial recognition of him when
it has touched the period. A phalanx of great dames gave him the terrors
of Olympus for all except the natively audacious, the truculent and the
insufferably obtuse; and from the midst of them he launched decree and
bolt to good effect: not, of course, without receiving return missiles,
and not without subsequent question whether the work of that man was
beneficial to the country, who indeed tamed the bumpkin squire and his
brood, but at the cost of their animal spirits and their gift of speech;
viz. by making petrifactions of them. In the surgical operation of
tracheotomy, a successful treatment of the patient hangs, we believe, on
the promptness and skill of the introduction of the artificial windpipe;
and it may be that our unhappy countrymen when cut off from the source of
their breath were not neatly handled; or else that there is a physical
opposition in them to anything artificial, and it must be nature or
nothing. The dispute shall be left where it stands.

Now, to venture upon parading a beautiful young Duchess of Dewlap, with
an odour of the shepherdess about her notwithstanding her acquired art of
stepping conformably in a hoop, and to demand full homage of respect for
a lady bearing such a title, who had the intoxicating attractions of the
ruddy orchard apple on the tree next the roadside wall, when the owner is
absent, was bold in Mr. Beamish, passing temerity; nor would even he have
attempted it had he not been assured of the support of his phalanx of
great ladies. They indeed, after being taken into the secret, had
stipulated that first they must have an inspection of the transformed
dairymaid; and the review was not unfavourable. Duchess Susan came out of
it more scatheless than her duke. She was tongue-tied, and her tutored
walking and really admirable stature helped her to appease, the critics
of her sex; by whom her too readily blushful innocence was praised, with
a reserve, expressed in the remark, that she was a monstrous fine toy for
a duke's second childhood, and should never have been let fly from his
nursery. Her milliner was approved. The duke was a notorious connoisseur
of female charms, and would see, of course, to the decorous adornment of
her person by the best of modistes. Her smiling was pretty, her eyes were
soft; she might turn out good, if well guarded for a time; but these
merits of the woman are not those of the great lady, and her title was
too strong a beam on her character to give it a fair chance with her
critics. They one and all recommended powder for her hair and cheeks.
That odour of the shepherdess could be exorcised by no other means, they
declared. Her blushing was indecent.

Truly the critics of the foeman sex behaved in a way to cause the blushes
to swarm rosy as the troops of young Loves round Cytherea in her
sea-birth, when, some soaring, and sinking some, they flutter like her
loosened zone, and breast the air thick as flower petals on the summer's
breath, weaving her net for the world. Duchess Susan might protest her
inability to keep her blushes down; that the wrong was done by the
insolent eyes, and not by her artless cheeks. Ay, but nature, if we are
to tame these men, must be swathed and concealed, partly stifled,
absolutely stifled upon occasion. The natural woman does not move a foot
without striking earth to conjure up the horrid apparition of the natural
man, who is not as she, but a cannibal savage. To be the light which
leads, it is her business to don the misty vesture of an idea, that she
may dwell as an idea in men's minds, very dim, very powerful, but
abstruse, unseizable. Much wisdom was imparted to her on the subject, and
she understood a little, and echoed hollow to the remainder, willing to
show entire docility as far as her intelligence consented to be awake.
She was in that stage of the dainty, faintly tinged innocence of the
amorousness of themselves when beautiful young women who have not been
caught for schooling in infancy deem it a defilement to be made to appear
other than the blessed nature has made them, which has made them
beautiful, and surely therefore deserves to be worshipped. The lectures
of the great ladies and Chloe's counsels failed to persuade her to use
the powder puff-ball. Perhaps too, as timidity quitted her, she enjoyed
her distinctiveness in their midst.

But the distinctiveness of a Duchess of Dewlap with the hair and cheeks
of our native fields, was fraught with troubles outrunning Mr. Beamish's
calculations. He had perceived that she would be attractive; he had not
reckoned on the homogeneousness of her particular English charms. A
beauty in red, white, and blue is our goddess Venus with the apple of
Paris in her hand; and after two visits to the Pump Room, and one
promenade in the walks about the Assembly House, she had as completely
divided the ordinary guests of the Wells into male and female in opinion
as her mother Nature had done in it sex. And the men would not be
silenced; they had gazed on their divinest, and it was for the women to
succumb to that unwholesome state, so full of thunder. Knights and
squires, military and rural, threw up their allegiance right and left to
devote themselves to this robust new vision, and in their peculiar
manner, with a general View-halloo, and Yoicks, Tally-ho, and away we go,
pelt ahead! Unexampled as it is in England for Beauty to kindle the
ardours of the scent of the fox, Duchess Susan did more--she turned all
her followers into hounds; they were madmen: within a very few days of
her entrance bets raged about her, and there were brawls, jolly flings at
her character in the form of lusty encomium, givings of the lie, and upon
one occasion a knock-down blow in public, as though the place had never
known the polishing touch of Mr. Beamish.

He was thrown into great perplexity by that blow. Discountenancing the
duel as much as he could, an affair of the sword was nevertheless more
tolerable than the brutal fist: and of all men to be guilty of it, who
would have anticipated the young Alonzo, Chloe's quiet, modest lover! He
it was. The case came before Mr. Beamish for his decision; he had to
pronounce an impartial judgement, and for some time, during the
examination of evidence, he suffered, as he assures us in his Memoirs, a
royal agony. To have to strike with the glaive of Justice them whom they
most esteem, is the greatest affliction known to kings. He would have
done it: he deserved to reign. Happily the evidence against the gentleman
who was tumbled, Mr. Ralph Shepster, excused Mr. Augustus Camwell,
otherwise Alonzo, for dealing with him promptly to shut his mouth.

This Shepster, a raw young squire, 'reeking,' Beau Beamish writes of him,
'one half of the soil, and t' other half of the town,' had involved Chloe
in his familiar remarks upon the Duchess of Dewlap; and the personal
respect entertained by Mr. Beamish for Chloe so strongly approved
Alonzo's championship of her, that in giving judgement he laid stress on
young Alonzo's passion for Chloe, to prove at once the disinterestedness
of the assailant, and the judicial nature of the sentence: which was,
that Mr. Ralph Shepster should undergo banishment, and had the right to
demand reparation. The latter part of this decree assisted in effecting
the execution of the former. Shepster declined cold steel, calling it
murder, and was effusive of nature's logic on the subject.

'Because a man comes and knocks me down, I'm to go up to him and ask him
to run me through!'

His shake of the head signified that he was not such a noodle. Voluble
and prolific of illustration, as is no one so much as a son of nature
inspired to speak her words of wisdom, he defied the mandate, and refused
himself satisfaction, until in the strangest manner possible flights of
white feathers beset him, and he became a mark for persecution too trying
for the friendship of his friends. He fled, repeating his tale, that he
had seen 'Beamish's Duchess,' and Chloe attending her, at an assignation
in the South Grove, where a gentleman, unknown to the Wells, presented
himself to the adventurous ladies, and they walked together--a tale
ending with nods.

Shepster's banishment was one of those victories of justice upon which
mankind might be congratulated if they left no commotion behind. But, as
when a boy has been horsed before his comrades, dread may visit them, yet
is there likewise devilry in the school; and everywhere over earth a
summary punishment that does not sweep the place clear is likely to
infect whom it leaves remaining. The great law-givers, Lycurgus, Draco,
Solon, Beamish, sorrowfully acknowledge that they have had recourse to
infernal agents, after they have thus purified their circle of an
offender. Doctors confess to the same of their physic. The expelling
agency has next to be expelled, and it is a subtle poison, affecting our
spirits. Duchess Susan had now the incense of a victim to heighten her
charms; like the treasure-laden Spanish galleon for whom, on her voyage
home from South American waters, our enterprising light-craft privateers
lay in wait, she had the double attraction of being desirable and an
enemy. To watch above her conscientiously was a harassing business.

Mr. Beamish sent for Chloe, and she came to him at once. Her look was
curious; he studied it while they conversed. So looks one who is watching
the sure flight of an arrow, or the happy combinations of an intrigue.
Saying, 'I am no inquisitor, child,' he ventured upon two or three modest
inquisitions with regard to her mistress. The title he had disguised
Duchess Susan in, he confessed to rueing as the principal cause of the
agitation of his principality. 'She is courted,' he said, 'less like a
citadel waving a flag than a hostelry where the demand is for sitting
room and a tankard! These be our manners. Yet, I must own, a Duchess of
Dewlap is a provocation, and my exclusive desire to protect the name of
my lord stands corrected by the perils environing his lady. She is other
than I supposed her; she is, we will hope, an excellent good creature,
but too attractive for most and drawbridge and the customary defences to
be neglected.

Chloe met his interrogatory with a ready report of the young duchess's
innocence and good nature that pacified Mr. Beamish.

'And you?' said he.

She smiled for answer.

That smile was not the common smile; it was one of an eager exultingness,
producing as he gazed the twitch of an inquisitive reflection of it on
his lips. Such a smile bids us guess and quickens us to guess, warns us
we burn and speeds our burning, and so, like an angel wafting us to some
heaven-feasting promontory, lifts us out of ourselves to see in the
universe of colour what the mouth has but pallid speech to tell. That is
the very heart's language; the years are in a look, as mount and vale of
the dark land spring up in lightning.

He checked himself: he scarce dared to say it.

She nodded.

'You have seen the man, Chloe?'

Her smiling broke up in the hard lines of an ecstasy neighbouring pain.
'He has come; he is here; he is faithful; he has not forgotten me. I was
right. I knew! I knew!'

'Caseldy has come?'

'He has come. Do not ask. To have him! to see him! Mr. Beamish, he is
here.'

'At last!'

'Cruel!'

'Well, Caseldy has come, then! But now, friend Chloe, you should be made
aware that the man--'

She stopped her ears. As she did so, Mr. Beamish observed a thick silken
skein dangling from one hand. Part of it was plaited, and at the upper
end there was a knot. It resembled the commencement of her manufactory of
a whip: she swayed it to and fro, allowing him to catch and lift the
threads on his fingers for the purpose of examining her work. There was
no special compliment to pay, so he dropped it without remark.

Their faces had expressed her wish to hear nothing from him of Caseldy
and his submission to say nothing. Her happiness was too big; she
appeared to beg to lie down with it on her bosom, in the manner of an
outworn, young mother who has now first received her infant in her arms
from the nurse.




CHAPTER V

Humouring Chloe with his usual considerateness, Mr. Beamish forbore to
cast a shadow on her new-born joy, and even within himself to doubt the
security of its foundation. Caseldy's return to the Wells was at least
some assurance of his constancy, seeing that here they appointed to meet
when he and Chloe last parted. All might be well, though it was
unexplained why he had not presented himself earlier. To the lightest
inquiry Chloe's reply was a shiver of happiness.

Moreover, Mr. Beamish calculated that Caseldy would be a serviceable ally
in commanding a proper respect for her Grace the Duchess of Dewlap. So he
betook himself cheerfully to Caseldy's lodgings to deliver a message of
welcome, meeting, on his way thither, Mr. Augustus Camwell, with whom he
had a short conversation, greatly to his admiration of the enamoured
young gentleman's goodness and self-compression in speaking of Caseldy
and Chloe's better fortune. Mr. Camwell seemed hurried.

Caseldy was not at home, and Mr. Beamish proceeded to the lodgings of the
duchess. Chloe had found her absent. The two consulted. Mr. Beamish put
on a serious air, until Chloe mentioned the pastrycook's shop, for
Duchess Susan had a sweet tooth; she loved a visit to the pastrycook's,
whose jam tarts were dearer to her than his more famous hot mutton pies.
The pastry cook informed Mr. Beamish that her Grace had been in his shop,
earlier than usual, as it happened, and accompanied by a foreign-looking
gentleman wearing moustachois. Her Grace, the pastrycook said, had
partaken of several tarts, in common with the gentleman, who complimented
him upon his excelling the Continental confectioner. Mr. Beamish glanced
at Chloe. He pursued his researches down at the Pump Room, while she
looked round the ladies' coffee house. Encountering again, they walked
back to the duchess's lodgings, where a band stood playing in the road,
by order of her Grace; but the duchess was away, and had not been seen
since her morning's departure.

'What sort of character would you give mistress Susan of Dewlap, from
your personal acquaintance with it?' said Mr. Beamish to Chloe, as they
stepped from the door.

Chloe mused and said, 'I would add "good" to the unkindest comparison you
could find for her.'

'But accepting the comparison!' Mr. Beamish nodded, and revolved upon the
circumstance of their being very much in nature's hands with Duchess
Susan, of whom it might be said that her character was good, yet all the
more alive to the temptations besetting the Spring season. He allied
Chloe's adjective to a number of epithets equally applicable to nature
and to women, according to current ideas, concluding: 'Count, they call
your Caseldy at his lodgings. "The Count he is out for an airing." He is
counted out. Ah! you will make him drop that "Count" when he takes you
from here.'

'Do not speak of the time beyond the month,' said Chloe, so urgently on a
rapid breath as to cause Mr. Beamish to cast an inquiring look at her.

She answered it, 'Is not one month of brightness as much as we can ask
for?'

The beau clapped his elbows complacently to his sides in philosophical
concord with her sentiment.

In the afternoon, on the parade, they were joined by Mr. Camwell, among
groups of fashionable ladies and their escorts, pacing serenely, by
medical prescription, for an appetite. As he did not comment on the
absence of the duchess, Mr. Beamish alluded to it; whereupon he was
informed that she was about the meadows, and had been there for some
hours.

'Not unguarded,' he replied to Mr. Beamish.

'Aha!' quoth the latter; 'we have an Argus!' and as the duchess was not
on the heights, and the sun's rays were mild in cloud, he agreed to his
young friend's proposal that they should advance to meet her. Chloe
walked with them, but her face was disdainful; at the stiles she gave her
hand to Mr. Beamish; she did not address a word to Mr. Camwell, and he
knew the reason. Nevertheless he maintained his air of soldierly
resignation to the performance of duty, and held his head like a
gentleman unable to conceive the ignominy of having played spy. Chloe
shrank from him.

Duchess Susan was distinguished coming across a broad uncut meadow,
tirra-lirraing beneath a lark, Caseldy in attendance on her. She stopped
short and spoke to him; then came forward, crying ingenuously. 'Oh, Mr.
Beamish, isn't this just what you wanted me to do?'

'No, madam,' said he, 'you had my injunctions to the contrary.'

'La!' she exclaimed, 'I thought I was to run about in the fields now and
then to preserve my simplicity. I know I was told so, and who told me!'

Mr. Beamish bowed effusively to the introduction of Caseldy, whose
fingers he touched in sign of the renewal of acquaintance, and with a
laugh addressed the duchess:

'Madam, you remind me of a tale of my infancy. I had a juvenile comrade
of the tenderest age, by name Tommy Plumston, and he enjoyed the
privilege of intimacy with a component urchin yclept Jimmy Clungeon, with
which adventurous roamer, in defiance of his mother's interdict against
his leaving the house for a minute during her absence from home, he
departed on a tour of the district, resulting, perhaps as a consequence
of its completeness, in this, that at a distance computed at four miles
from the maternal mansion, he perceived his beloved mama with sufficient
clearness to feel sure that she likewise had seen him. Tommy consulted
with Jimmy, and then he sprang forward on a run to his frowning mama, and
delivered himself in these artless words, which I repeat as they were
uttered, to give you the flavour of the innocent babe: he said, "I frink
I frought I hear you call me, ma! and Jimmy Clungeon, he frought he frink
so too!" So, you see, the pair of them were under the impression that
they were doing right. There is a delicate distinction in the tenses of
each frinking where the other frought, enough in itself to stamp
sincerity upon the statement.'

Caseldy said, 'The veracity of a boy possessing a friend named Clungeon
is beyond contest.'

Duchess Susan opened her eyes. 'Four miles from home! And what did his
mother do to him?'

'Tommy's mama,' said Mr. Beamish, and with the resplendent licence of the
period which continued still upon tolerable terms with nature under the
compromise of decorous 'Oh-fie!' flatly declared the thing she did.

'I fancy, sir, that I caught sight of your figure on the hill yonder
about an hour or so earlier,' said Caseldy to Mr. Camwell.

'If it was at the time when you were issuing from that wood, sir, your
surmise is correct,' said the young gentleman.

'You are long-sighted, sir!'

'I am, sir.'

'And so am I.'

'And I,' said Chloe.

'Our Chloe will distinguish you accurately at a mile, and has done it,'
observed Mr. Beamish.

'One guesses tiptoe on a suspicion, and if one is wrong it passes, and if
one is right it is a miracle,' she said, and raised her voice on a song
to quit the subject.

'Ay, ay, Chloe; so then you had a suspicion, you rogue, the day we had
the pleasure of meeting the duchess, had you?' Mr. Beamish persisted.

Duchess Susan interposed. 'Such a pretty song! and you to stop her, sir!'

Caseldy took up the air.

'Oh, you two together!' she cried. 'I do love hearing music in the
fields; it is heavenly. Bands in the town and voices in the green fields,
I say! Couldn't you join Chloe, Mr .... Count, sir, before we come among
the people, here where it 's all so nice and still. Music! and my heart
does begin so to pit-a-pat. Do you sing, Mr. Alonzo?'

'Poorly,' the young gentleman replied.

'But the Count can sing, and Chloe's a real angel when she sings; and
won't you, dear?' she implored Chloe, to whom Caseldy addressed a prelude
with a bow and a flourish of the hand.

Chloe's voice flew forth. Caseldy's rich masculine matched it. The song
was gay; he snapped his finger at intervals in foreign style, singing
big-chested, with full notes and a fine abandonment, and the quickest
susceptibility to his fair companion's cunning modulations, and an eye
for Duchess Susan's rapture.

Mr. Beamish and Mr. Camwell applauded them.

'I never can tell what to say when I'm brimming'; the duchess let fall a
sigh. 'And he can play the flute, Mr. Beamish. He promised me he would go
into the orchestra and play a bit at one of your nice evening delicious
concerts, and that will be nice--Oh!'

'He promised you, madam, did he so?' said the beau. 'Was it on your way
to the Wells that he promised you?'

'On my way to the Wells!' she exclaimed softly. 'Why, how could anybody
promise me a thing before ever he saw me? I call that a strange thing to
ask a person. No, to-day, while we were promenading; and I should hear
him sing, he said. He does admire his Chloe so. Why, no wonder, is it,
now? She can do everything; knit, sew, sing, dance--and talk! She's never
uneasy for a word. She makes whole scenes of things go round you, like a
picture peep-show, I tell her. And always cheerful. She hasn't a minute
of grumps; and I'm sometimes a dish of stale milk fit only for pigs.

With your late hours here, I'm sure I want tickling in the morning, and
Chloe carols me one of her songs, and I say, "There's my bird!"'

Mr. Beamish added, 'And you will remember she has a heart.'

'I should think so!' said the duchess.

'A heart, madam!'

'Why, what else?'

Nothing other, the beau, by his aspect, was constrained to admit.

He appeared puzzled by this daughter of nature in a coronet; and more on
her remarking, 'You know about her heart, Mr. Beamish.'

He acquiesced, for of course he knew of her life-long devotion to
Caseldy; but there was archness in her tone. However, he did not expect a
woman of her education to have the tone perfectly concordant with the
circumstances. Speaking tentatively of Caseldy's handsome face and
figure, he was pleased to hear the duchess say, 'So I tell Chloe.'

'Well,' said he, 'we must consider them united; they are one.'

Duchess Susan replied, 'That's what I tell him; she will do anything you
wish.'

He repeated these words with an interjection, and decided in his mind
that they were merely silly. She was a real shepherdess by birth and
nature, requiring a strong guard over her attractions on account of her
simplicity; such was his reading of the problem; he had conceived it at
the first sight of her, and always recurred to it under the influence of
her artless eyes, though his theories upon men and women were astute, and
that cavalier perceived by long-sighted Chloe at Duchess Susan's coach
window perturbed him at whiles. Habitually to be anticipating the
simpleton in a particular person is the sure way of being sometimes the
dupe, as he would not have been the last to warn a neophyte; but abstract
wisdom is in need of an unappeased suspicion of much keenness of edge, if
we would have it alive to cope with artless eyes and our prepossessed
fancy of their artlessness.

'You talk of Chloe to him?' he said.

She answered. 'Yes, that I do. And he does love her! I like to hear him.
He is one of the gentlemen who don't make me feel timid with them.'

She received a short lecture on the virtues of timidity in preserving the
sex from danger; after which, considering that the lady who does not feel
timid with a particular cavalier has had no sentiment awakened, he
relinquished his place to Mr. Camwell, and proceeded to administer the
probe to Caseldy.

That gentleman was communicatively candid. Chloe had left him, and he
related how, summoned home to England and compelled to settle a dispute
threatening a lawsuit, he had regretfully to abstain from visiting the
Wells for a season, not because of any fear of the attractions of
play--he had subdued the frailty of the desire to play--but because he
deemed it due to his Chloe to bring her an untroubled face, and he wished
first to be the better of the serious annoyances besetting him. For some
similar reason he had not written; he wished to feast on her surprise.
'And I had my reward,' he said, as if he had been the person principally
to suffer through that abstinence. 'I found--I may say it to you, Mr.
Beamish love in her eyes. Divine by nature, she is one of the immortals,
both in appearance and in steadfastness.'

They referred to Duchess Susan. Caseldy reluctantly owned that it would
be an unkindness to remove Chloe from attendance on her during the short
remaining term of her stay at the Wells; and so he had not proposed it,
he said, for the duchess was a child, an innocent, not stupid by any
means; but, of course, her transplanting from an inferior to an exalted
position put her under disadvantages.

Mr. Beamish spoke of the difficulties of his post as guardian, and also
of the strange cavalier seen at her carriage window by Chloe.

Caseldy smiled and said, 'If there was one--and Chloe is rather
long--sighted--we can hardly expect her to confess it.'

'Why not, sir, if she be this piece of innocence?' Mr. Beamish was led to
inquire.

'She fears you, sir,' Caseldy answered. 'You have inspired her with an
extraordinary fear of you.'

'I have?' said the beau: it had been his endeavour to inspire it, and he
swelled somewhat, rather with relief at the thought of his possessing a
power to control his delicate charge, than with our vanity; yet would it
be audacious to say that there was not a dose of the latter. He was a
very human man; and he had, as we have seen, his ideas of the effect of
the impression of fear upon the hearts of women. Something, in any case,
caused him to forget the cavalier.

They were drawn to the three preceding them, by a lively dissension
between Chloe and Mr. Camwell.

Duchess Susan explained it in her blunt style: 'She wants him to go away
home, and he says he will, if she'll give him that double skein of silk
she swings about, and she says she won't, let him ask as long as he
pleases; so he says he sha'n't go, and I'm sure I don't see why he
should; and she says he may stay, but he sha'n't have her necklace, she
calls it. So Mr. Camwell snatches, and Chloe fires up. Gracious, can't
she frown!--at him. She never frowns at anybody but him.'

Caseldy attempted persuasion on Mr. Camwell's behalf. With his mouth at
Chloe's ear, he said, 'Give it; let the poor fellow have his memento;
despatch him with it.'

'I can hear! and that is really kind,' exclaimed Duchess Susan.

'Rather a missy-missy schoolgirl sort of necklace,' Mr. Beamish observed;
'but he might have it, without the dismissal, for I cannot consent to
lose Alonzo. No, madam,' he nodded at the duchess.

Caseldy continued his whisper: 'You can't think of wearing a thing like
that about your neck?'

'Indeed,' said Chloe, 'I think of it.'

'Why, what fashion have you over here?'

'It is not yet a fashion,' she said.

'A silken circlet will not well become any precious pendant that I know
of.'

'A bag of dust is not a very precious pendant,' she said.

'Oh, a memento mori!' cried he.

And she answered, 'Yes.'

He rallied her for her superstition, pursuing, 'Surely, my love, 'tis a
cheap riddance of a pestilent, intrusive jaloux. Whip it into his hands
for a mittimus.'

'Does his presence distress you?' she asked.

'I will own that to be always having the fellow dogging us, with his
dejected leer, is not agreeable. He watches us now, because my lips are
close by your cheek. He should be absent; he is one too many. Speed him
on his voyage with the souvenir he asks for.'

'I keep it for a journey of my own, which I may have to take,' said
Chloe.

'With me?'

'You will follow; you cannot help following me, Caseldy.'

He speculated on her front. She was tenderly smiling. 'You are happy,
Chloe?'

'I have never known such happiness,' she said. The brilliancy of her eyes
confirmed it.

He glanced over at Duchess Susan, who was like a sunflower in the sun.
His glance lingered a moment. Her abundant and glowing young charms were
the richest fascination an eye like his could dwell on. 'That is right,'
said he. 'We will be perfectly happy till the month ends. And after it?
But get us rid of Monsieur le Jeune; toss him that trifle; I spare him
that. 'Twill be bliss to him, at the cost of a bit of silk thread to us.
Besides, if we keep him to cure him of his passion here, might it not
be--these boys veer suddenly, like the winds of Albion, from one fair
object to t' other--at the cost of the precious and simple lady you are
guarding? I merely hint. These two affect one another, as though it could
be. She speaks of him. It shall be as you please, but a trifle like that,
my Chloe, to be rid of a green eye!'

'You much wish him gone?' she said.

He shrugged. 'The fellow is in our way.'

'You think him a little perilous for my innocent lady?'

'Candidly, I do.'

She stretched the half-plaited silken rope in her two hands to try the
strength of it, made a second knot, and consigned it to her pocket.

At once she wore her liveliest playfellow air, in which character no one
was so enchanting as Chloe could be, for she became the comrade of men
without forfeit of her station among sage sweet ladies, and was like a
well-mannered sparkling boy, to whom his admiring seniors have given the
lead in sallies, whims, and fights; but pleasanter than a boy, the soft
hues of her sex toned her frolic spirit; she seemed her sex's deputy, to
tell the coarser where they could meet, as on a bridge above the torrent
separating them, gaily for interchange of the best of either, unfired and
untempted by fire, yet with all the elements which make fire burn to
animate their hearts.

'Lucky the man who wins for himself that life-long cordial!' Mr. Beamish
said to Duchess Susan.

She had small comprehension of metaphorical phrases, but she was quick at
reading faces; and comparing the enthusiasm on the face of the beau with
Caseldy's look of troubled wonderment and regret, she pitied the lover
conscious of not having the larger share of his mistress's affections.
When presently he looked at her, the tender-hearted woman could have
cried for very compassion, so sensible did he show himself of Chloe's
preference of the other.




CHAPTER VI

That evening Duchess Susan played at the Pharaoh table and lost eight
hundred pounds, through desperation at the loss of twenty. After
encouraging her to proceed to this extremity, Caseldy checked her. He was
conducting her out of the Play room when a couple of young squires of the
Shepster order, and primed with wine, intercepted her to present their
condolences, which they performed with exaggerated gestures, intended for
broad mimicry of the courtliness imported from the Continent, and a very
dulcet harping on the popular variations of her Christian name, not
forgetting her singular title, 'my lovely, lovely Dewlap!'

She was excited and stunned by her immediate experience in the transfer
of money, and she said, 'I 'm sure I don't know what you want.'

'Yes!' cried they, striking their bosoms as guitars, and attempting the
posture of the thrummer on the instrument; 'she knows. She does know.
Handsome Susie knows what we want.' And one ejaculated, mellifluously,
'Oh!' and the other 'Ah!' in flagrant derision of the foreign ways they
produced in boorish burlesque--a self-consolatory and a common trick of
the boor.

Caseldy was behind. He pushed forward and bowed to them. 'Sirs, will you
mention to me what you want?'

He said it with a look that meant steel. It cooled them sufficiently to
let him place the duchess under the protectorship of Mr. Beamish, then
entering from another room with Chloe; whereupon the pair of rustic bucks
retired to reinvigorate their valiant blood.

Mr. Beamish had seen that there was cause for gratitude to Caseldy, to
whom he said, 'She has lost?' and he seemed satisfied on hearing the
amount of the loss, and commissioned Caseldy to escort the ladies to
their lodgings at once, observing, 'Adieu, Count!'

'You will find my foreign title of use to you here, after a bout or two,'
was the reply.

'No bouts, if possibly to be avoided; though I perceive how the flavour
of your countship may spread a wholesome alarm among our rurals, who will
readily have at you with fists, but relish not the tricky cold weapon.'

Mr. Beamish haughtily bowed the duchess away.

Caseldy seized the opportunity while handing her into her sedan to say,
'We will try the fortune-teller for a lucky day to have our revenge.'

She answered: 'Oh, don't talk to me about playing again ever; I'm nigh on
a clean pocket, and never knew such a sinful place as this. I feel I've
tumbled into a ditch. And there's Mr. Beamish, all top when he bows to
me. You're keeping Chloe waiting, sir.'

'Where was she while we were at the table?'

'Sure she was with Mr. Beamish.'

'Ah!' he groaned.

'The poor soul is in despair over her losses to-night,' he turned from
the boxed-up duchess to remark to Chloe. 'Give her a comfortable cry and
a few moral maxims.'

'I will,' she said. 'You love me, Caseldy?'

'Love you? I? Your own? What assurance would you have?'

'None, dear friend.'

Here was a woman easily deceived.

In the hearts of certain men, owing to an intellectual contempt of easy
dupes, compunction in deceiving is diminished by the lightness of their
task; and that soft confidence which will often, if but passingly, bid
betrayers reconsider the charms of the fair soul they are abandoning,
commends these armoured knights to pursue with redoubled earnest the
fruitful ways of treachery. Their feelings are warm for their prey,
moreover; and choosing to judge their victim by the present warmth of
their feelings, they can at will be hurt, even to being scandalized, by a
coldness that does not waken one suspicion of them. Jealousy would have a
chance of arresting, for it is not impossible to tease them back to
avowed allegiance; but sheer indifference also has a stronger hold on
them than a, dull, blind trustfulness. They hate the burden it imposes;
the blind aspect is only touching enough to remind them of the burden,
and they hate if for that, and for the enormous presumption of the belief
that they are everlastingly bound to such an imbecile. She walks about
with her eyes shut, expecting not to stumble, and when she does, am I to
blame? The injured man asks it in the course of his reasoning.

He recurs to his victim's merits, but only compassionately, and the
compassion is chilled by the thought that she may in the end start across
his path to thwart him. Thereat he is drawn to think of the prize she may
rob him of; and when one woman is an obstacle, the other shines desirable
as life beyond death; he must have her; he sees her in the hue of his
desire for her, and the obstacle in that of his repulsion. Cruelty is no
more than the man's effort to win the wished object.

She should not leave it to his imagination to conceive that in the end
the blind may awaken to thwart him. Better for her to cast him hence, or
let him know that she will do battle to keep him. But the pride of a love
that has hardened in the faithfulness of love cannot always be wise on
trial.

Caseldy walked considerably in the rear of the couple of chairs. He saw
on his way what was coming. His two young squires were posted at Duchess
Susan's door when she arrived, and he received a blow from one of them in
clearing a way for her. She plucked at his hand. 'Have they hurt you?'
she asked.

'Think of me to-night thanking them and heaven for this, my darling,' he
replied, with a pressure that lit the flying moment to kindle the after
hours.

Chloe had taken help of one of her bearers to jump out. She stretched a
finger at the unruly intruders, crying sternly, 'There is blood on
you--come not nigh me!' The loftiest harangue would not have been so
cunning to touch their wits. They stared at one another in the clear
moonlight. Which of them had blood on him? As they had not been for
blood, but for rough fun, and something to boast of next day, they
gesticulated according to the first instructions of the dancing master,
by way of gallantry, and were out of Caseldy's path when he placed
himself at his liege lady's service. 'Take no notice of them, dear,' she
said.

'No, no,' said he; and 'What is it?' and his hoarse accent and shaking
clasp of her arm sickened her to the sensation of approaching death.

Upstairs Duchess Susan made a show of embracing her. Both were trembling.
The duchess ascribed her condition to those dreadful men. 'What makes
them be at me so?' she said.

And Chloe said, 'Because you are beautiful.'

'Am I?'

'You are.'

'I am?'

'Very beautiful; young and beautiful; beautiful in the bud. You will
learn to excuse them, madam.'

'But, Chloe--' The duchess shut her mouth. Out of a languid reverie, she
sighed: 'I suppose I must be! My duke--oh, don't talk of him. Dear man!
he's in bed and fast asleep long before this. I wonder how he came to let
me come here.

I did bother him, I know. Am I very, very beautiful, Chloe, so that men
can't help themselves?'

'Very, madam.'

'There, good-night. I want to be in bed, and I can't kiss you because you
keep calling me madam, and freeze me to icicles; but I do love you,
Chloe.'

'I am sure you do.'

'I'm quite certain I do. I know I never mean harm. But how are we women
expected to behave, then? Oh, I'm unhappy, I am.'

'You must abstain from playing.'

'It's that! I've lost my money--I forgot. And I shall have to confess it
to my duke, though he warned me. Old men hold their fingers up--so! One
finger: and you never forget the sight of it, never. It's a round finger,
like the handle of a jug, and won't point at you when they're lecturing,
and the skin's like an old coat on gaffer's shoulders--or, Chloe! just
like, when you look at the nail, a rumpled counterpane up to the face of
a corpse. I declare, it's just like! I feel as if I didn't a bit mind
talking of corpses tonight. And my money's gone, and I don't much mind.
I'm a wild girl again, handsomer than when that----he is a dear, kind,
good old nobleman, with his funny old finger: "Susan! Susan!" I'm no
worse than others. Everybody plays here; everybody superior. Why, you
have played, Chloe.'

'Never!'

'I've heard you say you played once, and a bigger stake it was, you said,
than anybody ever did play.'

'Not money.'

'What then?'

'My life.'

'Goodness--yes! I understand. I understand everything to-night-men too.
So you did!--They're not so shamefully wicked, Chloe. Because I can't see
the wrong of human nature--if we're discreet, I mean. Now and then a
country dance and a game, and home to bed and dreams. There's no harm in
that, I vow. And that's why you stayed at this place. You like it,
Chloe?'

'I am used to it.'

'But when you're married to Count Caseldy you'll go?'

'Yes, then.'

She uttered it so joylessly that Duchess Susan added, with intense
affectionateness, 'You're not obliged to marry him, dear Chloe.'

'Nor he me, madam.'

The duchess caught at her impulsively to kiss her, and said she would
undress herself, as she wished to be alone.

From that night she was a creature inflamed.




CHAPTER VII

The total disappearance of the pair of heroes who had been the latest in
the conspiracy to vex his delicate charge, gave Mr. Beamish a high
opinion of Caseldy as an assistant in such an office as he held. They had
gone, and nothing more was heard of them. Caseldy confined his
observations on the subject to the remark that he had employed the best
means to be rid of that kind of worthies; and whether their souls had
fled, or only their bodies, was unknown. But the duchess had quiet
promenades with Caseldy to guard her, while Mr. Beamish counted the
remaining days of her visit with the impatience of a man having cause to
cast eye on a clock. For Duchess Susan was not very manageable now; she
had fits of insurgency, and plainly said that her time was short, and she
meant to do as she liked, go where she liked, play when she liked, and be
an independent woman--if she was so soon to be taken away and boxed in a
castle that was only a bigger sedan.

Caseldy protested he was as helpless as the beau. He described the
annoyance of his incessant running about at her heels in all directions
amusingly, and suggested that she must be beating the district to recover
her 'strange cavalier,' of whom, or of one that had ridden beside her
carriage half a day on her journey to the Wells, he said she had dropped
a sort of hint. He complained of the impossibility of his getting an hour
in privacy with his Chloe.

'And I, accustomed to consult with her, see too little of her,' said Mr.
Beamish. 'I shall presently be seeing nothing, and already I am sensible
of my loss.'

He represented his case to Duchess Susan:--that she was for ever driving
out long distances and taking Chloe from him, when his occupation
precluded his accompanying them; and as Chloe soon was to be lost to him
for good, he deeply felt her absence.

The duchess flung him enigmatical rejoinders: 'You can change all that,
Mr. Beamish, if you like, and you know you can. Oh, yes, you can. But you
like being a butterfly, and when you've made ladies pale you're happy:
and there they're to stick and wither for you. Never!--I've that pride. I
may be worried, but I'll never sink to green and melancholy for a man.'

She bridled at herself in a mirror, wherein not a sign of paleness was
reflected.

Mr. Beamish meditated, and he thought it prudent to speak to Caseldy
manfully of her childish suspicions, lest she should perchance in like
manner perturb the lover's mind.

'Oh, make your mind easy, my dear sir, as far as I am concerned,' said
Caseldy. 'But, to tell you the truth, I think I can interpret her creamy
ladyship's innuendos a little differently and quite as clearly. For my
part, I prefer the pale to the blowsy, and I stake my right hand on
Chloe's fidelity. Whatever harm I may have the senseless
cruelty--misfortune, I may rather call it--to do that heavenly-minded
woman in our days to come, none shall say of me that I was ever for an
instant guilty of the baseness of doubting her purity and constancy. And,
sir, I will add that I could perfectly rely also on your honour.'

Mr. Beamish bowed. 'You do but do me justice. But, say, what
interpretation?'

'She began by fearing you,' said Caseldy, creating a stare that was
followed by a frown. 'She fancies you neglect her. Perhaps she has a
woman's suspicion that you do it to try her.'

Mr. Beamish frenetically cited his many occupations. 'How can I be ever
dancing attendance on her?' Then he said, 'Pooh,' and tenderly fingered
the ruffles of his wrist. 'Tush, tush,' said he, 'no, no: though if it
came to a struggle between us, I might in the interests of my old friend,
her lord, whom I have reasons for esteeming, interpose an influence that
would make the exercise of my authority agreeable. Hitherto I have seen
no actual need of it, and I watch keenly. Her eye has been on Colonel
Poltermore once or twice his on her. The woman is a rose in June, sir,
and I forgive the whole world for looking--and for longing too. But I
have observed nothing serious.'

'He is of our party to the beacon-head to-morrow,' said Caseldy. 'She
insisted that she would have him; and at least it will grant me furlough
for an hour.'

'Do me the service to report to me,' said Mr. Beamish.

In this fashion he engaged Caseldy to supply him with inventions, and
prepared himself to swallow them. It was Poltermore and Poltermore, the
Colonel here, the Colonel there until the chase grew so hot that Mr.
Beamish could no longer listen to young Mr. Camwell's fatiguing drone
upon his one theme of the double-dealing of Chloe's betrothed. He became
of her way of thinking, and treated the young gentleman almost as coldly
as she. In time he was ready to guess of his own acuteness that the
'strange cavalier' could have been no other than Colonel Poltermore. When
Caseldy hinted it, Mr. Beamish said, 'I have marked him.' He added, in
highly self-satisfied style, 'With all your foreign training, my friend,
you will learn that we English are not so far behind you in the art of
unravelling an intrigue in the dark.' To which Caseldy replied, that the
Continental world had little to teach Mr. Beamish.

Poor Colonel Poltermore, as he came to be called, was clearly a victim of
the sudden affability of Duchess Susan. The transformation of a stiff
military officer into a nimble Puck, a runner of errands and a sprightly
attendant, could not pass without notice. The first effect of her
discriminating condescension on this unfortunate gentleman was to make
him the champion of her claims to breeding. She had it by nature, she was
Nature's great lady, he would protest to the noble dames of the circle he
moved in; and they admitted that she was different in every way from a
bourgeoise elevated by marriage to lofty rank: she was not vulgar. But
they remained doubtful of the perfect simplicity of a young woman who
worked such changes in men as to render one of the famous conquerors of
the day her agitated humble servant. By rapid degrees the Colonel had
fallen to that. When not by her side, he was ever marching with sharp
strides, hurrying through rooms and down alleys and groves until he had
discovered and attached himself to her skirts. And, curiously, the object
of his jealousy was the devoted Alonzo! Mr. Beamish laughed when he heard
of it. The lady's excitement and giddy mien, however, accused Poltermore
of a stage of success requiring to be combated immediately. There was
mention of Duchess Susan's mighty wish to pay a visit to the popular
fortune-teller of the hut on the heath, and Mr. Beamish put his veto on
the expedition. She had obeyed him by abstaining from play of late, so he
fully expected, that his interdict would be obeyed; and besides the
fortune-teller was a rogue of a sham astrologer known to have foretold to
certain tender ladies things they were only too desirous to imagine
predestined by an extraordinary indication of the course of planets
through the zodiac, thus causing them to sin by the example of celestial
conjunctions--a piece of wanton impiety. The beau took high ground in his
objections to the adventure. Nevertheless, Duchess Susan did go. She
drove to the heath at an early hour of the morning, attended by Chloe,
Colonel Poltermore, and Caseldy. They subsequently breakfasted at an inn
where gipsy repasts were occasionally served to the fashion, and they
were back at the wells as soon as the world was abroad. Their surprise
then was prodigious when Mr. Beamish, accosting them full in assembly,
inquired whether they were satisfied with the report of their fortunes,
and yet more when he positively proved himself acquainted with the
fortunes which had been recounted to each of them in privacy.

'You, Colonel Poltermore, are to be in luck's way up to the tenth
milestone,--where your chariot will overset and you will be lamed for
life.'

'Not quite so bad,' said the Colonel cheerfully, he having been informed
of much better.

'And you, Count Caseldy, are to have it all your own way with good luck,
after committing a deed of slaughter, with the solitary penalty of
undergoing a visit every night from the corpse.'

'Ghost,' Caseldy smilingly corrected him.

'And Chloe would not have her fortune told, because she knew it!' Mr.
Beamish cast a paternal glance at her. 'And you, madam,' he bent his
brows on the duchess, 'received the communication that "All for Love"
will sink you as it raised you, put you down as it took you up, furnish
the feast to the raven gentleman which belongs of right to the golden
eagle?'

'Nothing of the sort! And I don't believe in any of their stories,' cried
the duchess, with a burning face.

'You deny it, madam?'

'I do. There was never a word of a raven or an eagle, that I'll swear,
now.'

'You deny that there was ever a word of "All for Love"? Speak, madam.'

'Their conjuror's rigmarole!' she murmured, huffing. 'As if I listened to
their nonsense!'

'Does the Duchess of Dewlap dare to give me the lie?' said Mr. Beamish.

'That's not my title, and you know it,' she retorted.

'What's this?' the angry beau sang out. 'What stuff is this you wear?' He
towered and laid hand on a border of lace of her morning dress, tore it
furiously and swung a length of it round him: and while the duchess
panted and trembled at an outrage that won for her the sympathy of every
lady present as well as the championship of the gentlemen, he tossed the
lace to the floor and trampled on it, making his big voice intelligible
over the uproar: 'Hear what she does! 'Tis a felony! She wears the stuff
with Betty Worcester's yellow starch on it for mock antique! And let who
else wears it strip it off before the town shall say we are
disgraced--when I tell you that Betty Worcester was hanged at Tyburn
yesterday morning for murder!'

There were shrieks.

Hardly had he finished speaking before the assembly began to melt; he
stood in the centre like a pole unwinding streamers, amid a confusion of
hurrying dresses, the sound and whirl and drift whereof was as that of
the autumnal strewn leaves on a wind rising in November. The troops of
ladies were off to bereave themselves of their fashionable imitation old
lace adornment, which denounced them in some sort abettors and associates
of the sanguinary loathed wretch, Mrs. Elizabeth Worcester, their
benefactress of the previous day, now hanged and dangling on the
gallows-tree.

Those ladies who wore not imitation lace or any lace in the morning, were
scarcely displeased with the beau for his exposure of them that did. The
gentlemen were confounded by his exhibition of audacious power. The two
gentlemen nighest upon violently resenting his brutality to Duchess
Susan, led her from the room in company with Chloe.

'The woman shall fear me to good purpose,' Mr. Beamish said to himself.




CHAPTER VIII

Mr. Camwell was in the ante-room as Chloe passed out behind the two
incensed supporters of Duchess Susan.

'I shall be by the fir-trees on the Mount at eight this evening,' she
said.

'I will be there,' he replied.

'Drive Mr. Beamish into the country, that these gentlemen may have time
to cool.'

He promised her it should be done.

Close on the hour of her appointment, he stood under the fir-trees,
admiring the sunset along the western line of hills, and when Chloe
joined him he spoke of the beauty of the scene.

'Though nothing seems more eloquently to say farewell,' he added, with a
sinking voice.

'We could say it now, and be friends,' she answered.

'Later than now, you think it unlikely that you could forgive me, Chloe.'

'In truth, sir, you are making it hard for me.'

'I have stayed here to keep watch; for no pleasure of my own,' said he.

'Mr. Beamish is an excellent protector of the duchess.'

'Excellent; and he is cleverly taught to suppose she fears him greatly;
and when she offends him, he makes a display of his Jupiter's awfulness,
with the effect on woman of natural spirit which you have seen, and
others had foreseen, that she is exasperated and grows reckless. Tie
another knot in your string, Chloe.'

She looked away, saying, 'Were you not the cause? You were in collusion
with that charlatan of the heath, who told them their fortunes this
morning. I see far, both in the dark and in the light.'

'But not through a curtain. I was present.'

'Hateful, hateful business of the spy! You have worked a great mischief
Mr. Camwell. And how can you reconcile it to, your conscience that you
should play so base a part?'

'I have but performed my duty, dear madam.'

'You pretend that it is your devotion to me! I might be flattered if I
saw not so abject a figure in my service. Now have I but four days of my
month of happiness remaining, and my request to you is, leave me to enjoy
them. I beseech you to go. Very humbly, most earnestly, I beg your
departure. Grant it to me, and do not stay to poison my last days here.
Leave us to-morrow. I will admit your good intentions. I give you my hand
in gratitude. Adieu, Mr. Camwell.'

He took her hand. 'Adieu. I foresee an early separation, and this dear
hand is mine while I have it in mine. Adieu. It is a word to be repeated
at a parting like ours. We do not blow out our light with one breath: we
let it fade gradually, like yonder sunset.'

'Speak so,' said she.

'Ah, Chloe, to give one's life! And it is your happiness I have sought
more than your favor.'

'I believe it; but I have not liked the means. You leave us to-morrow?'

'It seems to me that to-morrow is the term.'

Her face clouded. 'That tells me a very uncertain promise.'

'You looked forth to a month of happiness--meaning a month of delusion.
The delusion expires to-night. You will awaken to see your end of it in
the morning. You have never looked beyond the month since the day of his
arrival.'

'Let him not be named, I supplicate you.'

'Then you consent that another shall be sacrificed for you to enjoy your
state of deception an hour longer?'

'I am not deceived, sir. I wish for peace, and crave it, and that is all
I would have.'

'And you make her your peace-offering, whom you have engaged to serve!
Too surely your eyes have been open as well as mine. Knot by knot--I have
watched you--where is it?--you have marked the points in that silken
string where the confirmation of a just suspicion was too strong for
you.'

'I did it, and still I continued merry?' She subsided from her
scornfulness on an involuntary 'Ah!' that was a shudder.

'You acted Light Heart, madam, and too well to hoodwink me. Meanwhile you
allowed that mischief to proceed, rather than have your crazy lullaby
disturbed.'

'Indeed, Mr. Camwell, you presume.'

'The time, and my knowledge of what it is fraught with, demand it and
excuse it. You and I, my dear and one only love on earth, stand outside
of ordinary rules. We are between life and death.'

'We are so always.'

'Listen further to the preacher: We have them close on us, with the
question, Which it shall be to-morrow. You are for sleeping on, but I say
no; nor shall that iniquity of double treachery be committed because of
your desire to be rocked in a cradle. Hear me out. The drug you have
swallowed to cheat yourself will not bear the shock awaiting you tomorrow
with the first light. Hear these birds! When next they sing, you will be
broad awake, and of me, and the worship and service I would have
dedicated to you, I do not . . . it is a spectral sunset of a day that
was never to be!--awake, and looking on what? Back from a monstrous
villainy to the forlorn wretch who winked at it with knots in a string.
Count them then, and where will be your answer to heaven? I begged it of
you, to save you from those blows of remorse; yes, terrible!'

'Oh, no!'

'Terrible, I say!'

'You are mistaken, Mr. Camwell. It is my soother. I tell my beads on it.'

'See how a persistent residence in this place has made a Pagan of the
purest soul among us! Had you . . . but that day was not to lighten me!
More adorable in your errors that you are than others by their virtues,
you have sinned through excess of the qualities men prize. Oh, you have a
boundless generosity, unhappily enwound with a pride as great. There is
your fault, that is the cause of your misery. Too generous! too proud!
You have trusted, and you will not cease to trust; you have vowed
yourself to love, never to remonstrate, never to seem to doubt; it is too
much your religion, rare verily. But bethink you of that inexperienced
and most silly good creature who is on the rapids to her destruction. Is
she not--you will cry it aloud to-morrow--your victim? You hear it within
you now.'

'Friend, my dear, true friend,' Chloe said in her deeper voice of melody,
'set your mind at ease about to-morrow and her. Her safety is assured. I
stake my life on it. She shall not be a victim. At the worst she will but
have learnt a lesson. So, then, adieu! The West hangs like a garland of
unwatered flowers, neglected by the mistress they adorned. Remember the
scene, and that here we parted, and that Chloe wished you the happiness
it was out of her power to bestow, because she was of another world, with
her history written out to the last red streak before ever you knew her.
Adieu; this time adieu for good!

Mr. Camwell stood in her path. 'Blind eyes, if you like,' he said, 'but
you shall not hear blind language. I forfeit the poor consideration for
me that I have treasured; hate me; better hated by you than shun my duty!
Your duchess is away at the first dawn this next morning; it has come to
that. I speak with full knowledge. Question her.'

Chloe threw a faltering scorn of him into her voice, as much as her
heart's sharp throbs would allow. 'I question you, sir, how you came to
this full knowledge you boast of?'

'I have it; let that suffice. Nay, I will be particular; his coach is
ordered for the time I name to you; her maid is already at a station on
the road of the flight.'

'You have their servants in your pay?'

'For the mine--the countermine. We must grub dirt to match deceivers.
You, madam, have chosen to be delicate to excess, and have thrown it upon
me to be gross, and if you please, abominable, in my means of defending
you. It is not too late for you to save the lady, nor too late to bring
him to the sense of honour.'

'I cannot think Colonel Poltermore so dishonourable.'

'Poor Colonel Poltermore! The office he is made to fill is an old one.
Are you not ashamed, Chloe?'

'I have listened too long,' she replied.

'Then, if it is your pleasure, depart.'

He made way for her. She passed him. Taking two hurried steps in the
gloom of the twilight, she stopped, held at her heart, and painfully
turning to him, threw her arms out, and let herself be seized and kissed.

On his asking pardon of her, which his long habit of respect forced him
to do in the thick of rapture and repetitions, she said, 'You rob no
one.'

'Oh,' he cried, 'there is a reward, then, for faithful love. But am I the
man I was a minute back? I have you; I embrace you; and I doubt that I am
I. Or is it Chloe's ghost?'

'She has died and visits you.'

'And will again?'

Chloe could not speak for languor.

The intensity of the happiness she gave by resting mutely where she was,
charmed her senses. But so long had the frost been on them that their
awakening to warmth was haunted by speculations on the sweet taste of
this reward of faithfulness to him, and the strange taste of her own
unfaithfulness to her. And reflecting on the cold act of speculation
while strong arm and glowing mouth were pressing her, she thought her
senses might really be dead, and she a ghost visiting the good youth for
his comfort. So feel ghosts, she thought, and what we call happiness in
love is a match between ecstasy and compliance. Another thought flew
through her like a mortal shot: 'Not so with those two! with them it will
be ecstasy meeting ecstasy; they will take and give happiness in equal
portions.' A pang of jealousy traversed her frame. She made the
shrewdness of it help to nerve her fervour in a last strain of him to her
bosom, and gently releasing herself, she said, 'No one is robbed. And
now, dear friend, promise me that you will not disturb Mr. Beamish.'

'Chloe,' said he, 'have you bribed me?'

'I do not wish him to be troubled.'

'The duchess, I have told you--'

'I know. But you have Chloe's word that she will watch over the duchess
and die to save her. It is an oath. You have heard of some arrangements.
I say they shall lead to nothing: it shall not take place. Indeed, my
friend, I am awake; I see as much as you see. And those . . . after being
where I have been, can you suppose I have a regret? But she is my dear
and peculiar charge, and if she runs a risk, trust to me that there shall
be no catastrophe; I swear it; so, now, adieu. We sup in company
to-night. They will be expecting some of Chloe's verses, and she must
sing to herself for a few minutes to stir the bed her songs take wing
from; therefore, we will part, and for her sake avoid her; do not be
present at our table, or in the room, or anywhere there. Yes, you rob no
one,' she said, in a voice that curled through him deliciously by
wavering; but I think I may blush at recollections, and I would rather
have you absent. Adieu! I will not ask for obedience from you beyond
to-night. Your word?'

He gave it in a stupor of felicity, and she fled.




CHAPTER IX

Chloe drew the silken string from her bosom, as she descended the dim
pathway through the furies, and set her fingers travelling along it for
the number of the knots. 'I have no right to be living,' she said. Seven
was the number; seven years she had awaited her lover's return; she
counted her age and completed it in sevens. Fatalism had sustained her
during her lover's absence; it had fast hold of her now. Thereby had she
been enabled to say, 'He will come'; and saying, 'He has come,' her touch
rested on the first knot in the string. She had no power to displace her
fingers, and the cause of the tying of the knot stood across her brain
marked in dull red characters, legible neither to her eye nor to her
understanding, but a reviving of the hour that brought it on her spirit
with human distinctness, except of the light of day: she had a sense of
having forfeited light, and seeing perhaps more clearly. Everything
assured her that she saw more clearly than others; she saw too when it
was good to cease to live.

Hers was the unhappy lot of one gifted with poet-imagination to throb
with the woman supplanting her and share the fascination of the man who
deceived. At their first meeting, in her presence, she had seen that they
were not strangers; she pitied them for speaking falsely, and when she
vowed to thwart this course of evil it to save a younger creature of her
sex, not in rivalry. She treated them both with a proud generosity
surpassing gentleness. All that there was of selfishness in her bosom
resolved to the enjoyment of her one month of strongly willed delusion.

The kiss she had sunk to robbed no one, not even her body's purity, for
when this knot was tied she consigned herself to her end, and had become
a bag of dust. The other knots in the string pointed to verifications;
this first one was a suspicion, and it was the more precious, she felt it
to be more a certainty; it had come from the dark world beyond us, where
all is known. Her belief that it had come thence was nourished by
testimony, the space of blackness wherein she had lived since, exhausting
her last vitality in a simulation of infantile happiness, which was
nothing other than the carrying on of her emotion of the moment of sharp
sour sweet--such as it may be, the doomed below attain for their
knowledge of joy--when, at the first meeting with her lover, the
perception of his treachery to the soul confiding in him, told her she
had lived, and opened out the cherishable kingdom of insensibility to her
for her heritage.

She made her tragic humility speak thankfully to the wound that slew her.
'Had it not been so, I should not have seen him,' she said:--Her lover
would not have come to her but for his pursuit of another woman.

She pardoned him for being attracted by that beautiful transplant of the
fields: pardoned her likewise. 'He when I saw him first was as beautiful
to me. For him I might have done as much.'

Far away in a lighted hall of the West, her family raised hands of
reproach. They were minute objects, keenly discerned as diminished
figures cut in steel. Feeling could not be very warm for them, they were
so small, and a sea that had drowned her ran between; and looking that
way she had scarce any warmth of feeling save for a white rhaiadr leaping
out of broken cloud through branched rocks, where she had climbed and
dreamed when a child. The dream was then of the coloured days to come;
now she was more infant in her mind, and she watched the scattered water
broaden, and tasted the spray, sat there drinking the scene, untroubled
by hopes as a lamb, different only from an infant in knowing that she had
thrown off life to travel back to her home and be refreshed. She heard
her people talk; they were unending babblers in the waterfall. Truth was
with them, and wisdom. How, then, could she pretend to any right to live?
Already she had no name; she was less living than a tombstone. For who
was Chloe? Her family might pass the grave of Chloe without weeping,
without moralizing. They had foreseen her ruin, they had foretold it,
they noised it in the waters, and on they sped to the plains, telling the
world of their prophecy, and making what was untold as yet a lighter
thing to do.

The lamps in an irregularly dotted line underneath the hill beckoned her
to her task of appearing as the gayest of them that draw their breath for
the day and have pulses for the morrow.




CHAPTER X

At midnight the great supper party to celebrate the reconciliation of Mr.
Beamish and Duchess Susan broke up, and beneath a soft fair sky the
ladies, with their silvery chatter of gratitude for amusement, caught
Chloe in their arms to kiss her, rendering it natural for their cavaliers
to exclaim that Chloe was blest above mortals. The duchess preferred to
walk. Her spirits were excited, and her language smelt of her origin, but
the superb fleshly beauty of the woman was aglow, and crying, 'I declare
I should burst in one of those boxes--just as if you'd stalled me!' she
fanned a wind on her face, and sumptuously spread her spherical skirts,
attended by the vanquished and captive Colonel Poltermore, a gentleman
manifestly bent on insinuating sly slips of speech to serve for here a
pinch of powder, there a match. 'Am I?' she was heard to say. She blew
prodigious deep-chested sighs of a coquette that has taken to roaring.

Presently her voice tossed out: 'As if I would!' These vivid
illuminations of the Colonel's proceedings were a pasture to the rearward
groups, composed of two very grand ladies, Caseldy, Mr. Beamish, a lord,
and Chloe.

'You man! Oh!' sprang from the duchess. 'What do I hear? I won't listen;
I can't, I mustn't, I oughtn't.'

So she said, but her head careened, she gave him her coy reluctant ear,
with total abandonment to the seductions of his whispers, and the lord
let fly a peal of laughter. It had been a supper of copious wine, and the
songs which rise from wine. Nature was excused by our midnight
naturalists.

The two great dames, admonished by the violence of the nobleman's
laughter, laid claim on Mr. Beamish to accompany them at their parting
with Chloe and Duchess Susan.

In the momentary shuffling of couples incident to adieux among a company,
the duchess murmured to Caseldy:

'Have I done it well.'

He praised her for perfection in her acting. 'I am at your door at three,
remember.'

'My heart's in my mouth,' said she.

Colonel Poltermore still had the privilege of conducting her the few
farther steps to her lodgings.

Caseldy walked beside Chloe, and silently, until he said, 'If I have not
yet mentioned the subject--'

'If it is an allusion to money let me not hear it to-night,' she replied.

'I can only say that my lawyers have instructions. But my lawyers cannot
pay you in gratitude. Do not think me in your hardest review of my
misconduct ungrateful. I have ever esteemed you above all women; I do,
and I shall; you are too much above me. I am afraid I am a composition of
bad stuff; I did not win a very particularly good name on the Continent;
I begin to know myself, and in comparison with you, dear Catherine----'

'You speak to Chloe,' she said. 'Catherine is a buried person. She died
without pain. She is by this time dust.'

The man heaved his breast. 'Women have not an idea of our temptations.'

'You are excused by me for all your errors, Caseldy. Always remember
that.'

He sighed profoundly. 'Ay, you have a Christian's heart.'

She answered, 'I have come to the conclusion that it is a Pagan's.'

'As for me,' he rejoined, 'I am a fatalist. Through life I have seen my
destiny. What is to be, will be; we can do nothing.'

'I have heard of one who expired of a surfeit that he anticipated, nay
proclaimed, when indulging in the last desired morsel,' said Chloe.

'He was driven to it.'

'From within.'

Caseldy acquiesced; his wits were clouded, and an illustration even
coarser and more grotesque would have won a serious nod and a sigh from
him. 'Yes, we are moved by other hands!'

'It is pleasant to think so: and think it of me tomorrow. Will you!' said
Chloe.

He promised it heartily, to induce her to think the same of him.

Their separation was in no way remarkable. The pretty formalities were
executed at the door, and the pair of gentlemen departed.

'It's quite dark still,' Duchess Susan said, looking up at the sky, and
she ran upstairs, and sank, complaining of the weakness of her legs, in a
chair of the ante-chamber of her bedroom, where Chloe slept. Then she
asked the time of the night. She could not suppress her hushed 'Oh!' of
heavy throbbing from minute to minute. Suddenly she started off at a
quick stride to her own room, saying that it must be sleepiness which
affected her so.

Her bedroom had a door to the sitting-room, and thence, as also from
Chloe's room, the landing on the stairs was reached, for the room ran
parallel with both bed-chambers. She walked in it and threw the window
open, but closed it immediately; opened and shut the door, and returned
and called for Chloe. She wanted to be read to. Chloe named certain
composing books. The duchess chose a book of sermons. 'But we're all such
dreadful sinners, it's better not to bother ourselves late at night.' She
dismissed that suggestion. Chloe proposed books of poetry. 'Only I don't
understand them except about larks, and buttercups, and hayfields, and
that's no comfort to a woman burning,' was the answer.

'Are you feverish, madam?' said Chloe. And the duchess was sharp on her:
'Yes, madam, I am.'

She reproved herself in a change of tone: 'No, Chloe, not feverish, only
this air of yours here is such an exciting air, as the doctor says; and
they made me drink wine, and I played before supper--Oh! my money; I used
to say I could get more, but now!' she sighed--'but there's better in the
world than money. You know that, don't you, you dear? Tell me. And I want
you to be happy; that you'll find. I do wish we could all be!' She wept,
and spoke of requiring a little music to compose her.

Chloe stretched a hand for her guitar. Duchess Susan listened to some
notes, and cried that it went to her heart and hurt her. 'Everything we
like a lot has a fence and a board against trespassers, because of such a
lot of people in the world,' she moaned. 'Don't play, put down that
thing, please, dear. You're the cleverest creature anybody has ever met;
they all say so. I wish I----Lovely women catch men, and clever women
keep them: I've heard that said in this wretched place, and it 's a nice
prospect for me, next door to a fool! I know I am.'

'The duke adores you, madam.'

'Poor duke! Do let him be--sleeping so woebegone with his mouth so, and
that chin of a baby, like as if he dreamed of a penny whistle. He
shouldn't have let me come here. Talk of Mr. Beamish. How he will miss
you, Chloe!'

'He will,' Chloe said sadly.

'If you go, dear.'

'I am going.'

'Why should you leave him, Chloe?'

'I must.'

'And there, the thought of it makes you miserable!'

'It does.'

'You needn't, I'm sure.'

Chloe looked at her.

The duchess turned her head. 'Why can't you be gay, as you were at the
supper-table, Chloe? You're out to him like a flower when the sun jumps
over the hill; you're up like a lark in the dews; as I used to be when I
thought of nothing. Oh, the early morning; and I'm sleepy. What a beast I
feel, with my grandeur, and the time in an hour or two for the birds to
sing, and me ready to drop. I must go and undress.'

She rushed on Chloe, kissed her hastily, declaring that she was quite
dead of fatigue, and dismissed her. 'I don't want help, I can undress
myself. As if Susan Barley couldn't do that for herself! and you may shut
your door, I sha'n't have any frights to-night, I'm so tired out.'

'Another kiss,' Chloe said tenderly.

'Yes, take it'--the duchess leaned her cheek--'but I'm so tired I don't
know what I'm doing.'

'It will not be on your conscience,' Chloe answered, kissing her warmly.

Will those words she withdrew, and the duchess closed the door. She ran a
bolt in it immediately.

'I'm too tired to know anything I'm doing,' she said to herself, and
stood with shut eyes to hug certain thoughts which set her bosom heaving.

There was the bed, there was the clock. She had the option of lying down
and floating quietly into the day, all peril past. It seemed sweet for a
minute. But it soon seemed an old, a worn, an end-of-autumn life, chill,
without aim, like a something that was hungry and toothless. The bed
proposing innocent sleep repelled her and drove her to the clock. The
clock was awful: the hand at the hour, the finger following the minute,
commanded her to stir actively, and drove her to gentle meditations on
the bed. She lay down dressed, after setting her light beside the clock,
that she might see it at will, and considering it necessary for the bed
to appear to have been lain on. Considering also that she ought to be
heard moving about in the process of undressing, she rose from the bed to
make sure of her reading of the guilty clock. An hour and twenty minutes!
she had no more time than that: and it was not enough for her various
preparations, though it was true that her maid had packed and taken a box
of the things chiefly needful; but the duchess had to change her shoes
and her dress, and run at bo-peep with the changes of her mind, a
sedative preface to any fatal step among women of her complexion, for so
they invite indecision to exhaust their scruples, and they let the blood
have its way. Having so short a space of time, she thought the matter
decided, and with some relief she flung despairing on the bed, and lay
down for good with her duke. In a little while her head was at work
reviewing him sternly, estimating him not less accurately than the male
moralist charitable to her sex would do. She quitted the bed, with a
spring to escape her imagined lord; and as if she had felt him to be
there, she lay down no more. A quiet life like that was flatter to her
idea than a handsomely bound big book without any print on the pages, and
without a picture. Her contemplation of it, contrasted with the life
waved to her view by the timepiece, set her whole system rageing; she
burned to fly. Providently, nevertheless, she thumped a pillow, and threw
the bedclothes into proper disorder, to inform the world that her limbs
had warmed them, and that all had been impulse with her. She then
proceeded to disrobe, murmuring to herself that she could stop now, and
could stop now, at each stage of the advance to a fresh dressing of her
person, and moralizing on her singular fate, in the mouth of an observer.
'She was shot up suddenly over everybody's head, and suddenly down she
went.' Susan whispered to herself: 'But it was for love!' Possessed by
the rosiness of love, she finished her business, with an attention to
everything needed that was equal to perfect serenity of mind. After which
there was nothing to do, save to sit humped in a chair, cover her face
and count the clock-tickings, that said, Yes--no; do--don't; fly--stay;
fly--fly! It seemed to her she heard a moving. Well she might with that
dreadful heart of hers!

Chloe was asleep, at peace by this time, she thought; and how she envied
Chloe! She might be as happy, if she pleased. Why not? But what kind of
happiness was it? She likened it to that of the corpse underground, and
shrank distastefully.

Susan stood at her glass to have a look at the creature about whom there
was all this disturbance, and she threw up her arms high for a languid,
not unlovely yawn, that closed in blissful shuddering with the sensation
of her lover's arms having wormed round her waist and taken her while she
was defenceless. For surely they would. She took a jewelled ring, his
gift, from her purse, and kissed it, and drew it on and off her finger,
leaving it on. Now she might wear it without fear of inquiries and
virtuous eyebrows. O heavenly now--if only it were an hour hence; and
going behind galloping horses!

The clock was at the terrible moment. She hesitated internally and
hastened; once her feet stuck fast, and firmly she said, 'No'; but the
clock was her lord. The clock was her lover and her lord; and obeying it,
she managed to get into the sitting-room, on the pretext that she merely
wished to see through the front window whether daylight was coming.

How well she knew that half-light of the ebb of the wave of darkness.

Strange enough it was to see it showing houses regaining their solidity
of the foregone day, instead of still fields, black hedges, familiar
shapes of trees. The houses had no wakefulness, they were but seen to
stand, and the light was a revelation of emptiness. Susan's heart was
cunning to reproach her duke for the difference of the scene she beheld
from that of the innocent open-breasted land. Yes, it was dawn in a
wicked place that she never should have been allowed to visit. But where
was he whom she looked for? There! The cloaked figure of a man was at the
corner of the street. It was he. Her heart froze; but her limbs were
strung to throw off the house, and reach air, breathe, and (as her
thoughts ran) swoon, well-protected. To her senses the house was a house
on fire, and crying to her to escape.

Yet she stepped deliberately, to be sure-footed in a dusky room; she
touched along the wall and came to the door, where a foot-stool nearly
tripped her. Here her touch was at fault, for though she knew she must be
close by the door, she was met by an obstruction unlike wood, and the
door seemed neither shut nor open. She could not find the handle;
something hung over it. Thinking coolly, she fancied the thing must be a
gown or dressing-gown; it hung heavily. Her fingers were sensible of the
touch of silk; she distinguished a depending bulk, and she felt at it
very carefully and mechanically, saying within herself, in her anxiety to
pass it without noise, 'If I should awake poor Chloe, of all people!' Her
alarm was that the door might creak. Before any other alarm had struck
her brain, the hand she felt with was in a palsy, her mouth gaped, her
throat thickened, the dust-ball rose in her throat, and the effort to
swallow it down and get breath kept her from acute speculation while she
felt again, pinched, plucked at the thing, ready to laugh, ready to
shriek. Above her head, all on one side, the thing had a round white top.
Could it be a hand that her touch had slid across? An arm too! this was
an arm! She clutched it, imagining that it clung to her. She pulled it to
release herself from it, desperately she pulled, and a lump descended,
and a flash of all the torn nerves of her body told her that a dead human
body was upon her.

At a quarter to four o'clock of a midsummer morning, as Mr. Beamish
relates of his last share in the Tale of Chloe, a woman's voice, in
piercing notes of anguish, rang out three shrieks consecutively, which
were heard by him at the instant of his quitting his front doorstep, in
obedience to the summons of young Mr. Camwell, delivered ten minutes
previously, with great urgency, by that gentleman's lacquey. On his
reaching the street of the house inhabited by Duchess Susan, he perceived
many night-capped heads at windows, and one window of the house in
question lifted but vacant. His first impression accused the pair of
gentlemen, whom he saw bearing drawn swords in no friendly attitude of an
ugly brawl that had probably affrighted her Grace, or her personal
attendant, a woman capable of screaming, for he was well assured that it
could not have been Chloe, the least likely of her sex to abandon herself
to the use of their weapons either in terror or in jeopardy. The
antagonists were Mr. Camwell and Count Caseldy. On his approaching them,
Mr. Camwell sheathed his sword, saying that his work was done. Caseldy
was convulsed with wrath, to such a degree as to make the part of an
intermediary perilous. There had been passes between them, and Caseldy
cried aloud that he would have his enemy's blood. The night-watch was
nowhere. Soon, however, certain shopmen and their apprentices assisted
Mr. Beamish to preserve the peace, despite the fury of Caseldy and the
provocations--'not easy to withstand,' says the chronicler--offered by
him to young Camwell. The latter said to Mr. Beamish: 'I knew I should be
no match, so I sent for you,' causing his friend astonishment, inasmuch
as he was assured of the youth's natural valour.

Mr. Beamish was about to deliver an allocution of reproof to them in
equal shares, being entirely unsuspicious of any other reason for the
alarum than this palpable outbreak of a rivalry that he would have
inclined to attribute to the charms of Chloe, when the house-door swung
wide for them to enter, and the landlady of the house, holding clasped
hands at full stretch, implored them to run up to the poor lady: 'Oh,
she's dead; she's dead, dead!'

Caseldy rushed past her.

'How, dead! good woman?' Mr. Beamish questioned her most incredulously,
half-smiling.

She answered among her moans: 'Dead by the neck; off the door--Oh!'

Young Camwell pressed his forehead, with a call on his Maker's name. As
they reached the landing upstairs, Caseldy came out of the sitting-room.

'Which?' said Camwell to the speaking of his face.

'She!' said the other.

'The duchess?' Mr. Beamish exclaimed.

But Camwell walked into the room. He had nothing to ask after that reply.

The figure stretched along the floor was covered with a sheet. The young
man fell at his length beside it, and his face was downward.

Mr. Beamish relates: 'To this day, when I write at an interval of fifteen
years, I have the tragic ague of that hour in my blood, and I behold the
shrouded form of the most admirable of women, whose heart was broken by a
faithless man ere she devoted her wreck of life to arrest one weaker than
herself on the descent to perdition. Therein it was beneficently granted
her to be of the service she prayed to be through her death. She died to
save. In a last letter, found upon her pincushion, addressed to me under
seal of secrecy toward the parties principally concerned, she anticipates
the whole confession of the unhappy duchess. Nay, she prophesies: "The
duchess will tell you truly she has had enough of love!" Those actual
words were reiterated to me by the poor lady daily until her lord arrived
to head the funeral procession, and assist in nursing back the shattered
health of his wife to a state that should fit her for travelling. To me,
at least, she was constant in repeating, "No more of love!" By her
behaviour to her duke, I can judge her to have been sincere. She spoke of
feeling Chloe's eyes go through her with every word of hers that she
recollected. Nor was the end of Chloe less effective upon the traitor. He
was in the procession to her grave. He spoke to none. There is a line of
the verse bearing the superscription, "My Reasons for Dying," that shows
her to have been apprehensive to secure the safety of Mr. Camwell:

          I die because my heart is dead
          To warn a soul from sin I die:
          I die that blood may not be shed, etc.

She feared he would be somewhere on the road to mar the fugitives, and
she knew him, as indeed he knew himself, no match for one trained in the
foreign tricks of steel, ready though he was to dispute the traitor's
way. She remembers Mr. Camwell's petition for the knotted silken string
in her request that it shall be cut from her throat and given to him.'

Mr. Beamish indulges in verses above the grave of Chloe. They are of a
character to cool emotion. But when we find a man, who is commonly of the
quickest susceptibility to ridicule as well as to what is befitting,
careless of exposure, we may reflect on the truthfulness of feeling by
which he is drawn to pass his own guard and come forth in his nakedness;
something of the poet's tongue may breathe to us through his mortal
stammering, even if we have to acknowledge that a quotation would scatter
pathos.

     ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

     All flattery is at somebody's expense
     Be philosophical, but accept your personal dues
     But I leave it to you
     Distrust us, and it is a declaration of war
     Happiness in love is a match between ecstasy and compliance
     If I do not speak of payment
     Intellectual contempt of easy dupes
     Invite indecision to exhaust their scruples
     Is not one month of brightness as much as we can ask for?
     No flattery for me at the expense of my sisters
     Nothing desirable will you have which is not coveted
     Primitive appetite for noise
     She might turn out good, if well guarded for a time
     The alternative is, a garter and the bedpost
     They miss their pleasure in pursuing it
     This mania of young people for pleasure, eternal pleasure
     Wits, which are ordinarily less productive than land




THE HOUSE ON THE BEACH

By George Meredith
A REALISTIC TALE




CHAPTER I

The experience of great officials who have laid down their dignities
before death, or have had the philosophic mind to review themselves while
still wielding the deputy sceptre, teaches them that in the exercise of
authority over men an eccentric behaviour in trifles has most exposed
them to hostile criticism and gone farthest to jeopardize their
popularity. It is their Achilles' heel; the place where their mother
Nature holds them as she dips them in our waters. The eccentricity of
common persons is the entertainment of the multitude, and the maternal
hand is perceived for a cherishing and endearing sign upon them; but
rarely can this be found suitable for the august in station; only,
indeed, when their sceptre is no more fearful than a grandmother's birch;
and these must learn from it sooner or later that they are uncomfortably
mortal.

When herrings are at auction on a beach, for example, the man of chief
distinction in the town should not step in among a poor fraternity to
take advantage of an occasion of cheapness, though it be done, as he may
protest, to relieve the fishermen of a burden; nor should such a
dignitary as the bailiff of a Cinque Port carry home the spoil of
victorious bargaining on his arm in a basket. It is not that his conduct
is in itself objectionable, so much as that it causes him to be popularly
weighed; and during life, until the best of all advocates can plead
before our fellow Englishmen that we are out of their way, it is prudent
to avoid the process.

Mr. Tinman, however, this high-stepping person in question, happened to
have come of a marketing mother. She had started him from a small shop to
a big one. He, by the practice of her virtues, had been enabled to start
himself as a gentleman. He was a man of this ambition, and prouder behind
it. But having started himself precipitately, he took rank among
independent incomes, as they are called, only to take fright at the
perils of starvation besetting one who has been tempted to abandon the
source of fifty per cent. So, if noble imagery were allowable in our time
in prose, might alarms and partial regrets be assumed to animate the
splendid pumpkin cut loose from the suckers. Deprived of that prodigious
nourishment of the shop in the fashionable seaport of Helmstone, he
retired upon his native town, the Cinque Port of Crikswich, where he
rented the cheapest residence he could discover for his habitation, the
House on the Beach, and lived imposingly, though not in total disaccord
with his old mother's principles. His income, as he observed to his
widowed sister and solitary companion almost daily in their privacy, was
respectable. The descent from an altitude of fifty to five per cent.
cannot but be felt. Nevertheless it was a comforting midnight bolster
reflection for a man, turning over to the other side between a dream and
a wink, that he was making no bad debts, and one must pay to be addressed
as esquire. Once an esquire, you are off the ground in England and on the
ladder. An esquire can offer his hand in marriage to a lady in her own
right; plain esquires have married duchesses; they marry baronets'
daughters every day of the week.

Thoughts of this kind were as the rise and fall of waves in the bosom of
the new esquire. How often in his Helmstone shop had he not heard titled
ladies disdaining to talk a whit more prettily than ordinary women; and
he had been a match for the subtlety of their pride--he understood it. He
knew well that at the hint of a proposal from him they would have spoken
out in a manner very different to that of ordinary women. The lightning,
only to be warded by an esquire, was in them. He quitted business at the
age of forty, that he might pretend to espousals with a born lady; or at
least it was one of the ideas in his mind.

And here, I think, is the moment for the epitaph of anticipation over
him, and the exclamation, alas! I would not be premature, but it is
necessary to create some interest in him, and no one but a foreigner
could feel it at present for the Englishman who is bursting merely to do
like the rest of his countrymen, and rise above them to shake them class
by class as the dust from his heels. Alas! then an--undertaker's pathos
is better than none at all--he was not a single-minded aspirant to our
social honours. The old marketing mother; to whom he owed his fortunes,
was in his blood to confound his ambition; and so contradictory was the
man's nature, that in revenge for disappointments, there were times when
he turned against the saving spirit of parsimony. Readers deep in Greek
dramatic writings will see the fatal Sisters behind the chair of a man
who gives frequent and bigger dinners, that he may become important in
his neighbourhood, while decreasing the price he pays for his wine, that
he may miserably indemnify himself for the outlay. A sip of his wine
fetched the breath, as when men are in the presence of the tremendous
elements of nature. It sounded the constitution more darkly-awful, and
with a profounder testimony to stubborn health, than the physician's
instruments. Most of the guests at Mr. Tinman's table were so constructed
that they admired him for its powerful quality the more at his
announcement of the price of it; the combined strength and cheapness
probably flattering them, as by another mystic instance of the national
energy. It must have been so, since his townsmen rejoiced to hail him as
head of their town. Here and there a solitary esquire, fished out of the
bathing season to dine at the house on the beach, was guilty of raising
one of those clamours concerning subsequent headaches, which spread an
evil reputation as a pall. A resident esquire or two, in whom a
reminiscence of Tinman's table may be likened to the hook which some old
trout has borne away from the angler as the most vivid of warnings to him
to beware for the future, caught up the black report and propagated it.

The Lieutenant of the Coastguard, hearing the latest conscious victim, or
hearing of him, would nod his head and say he had never dined at Tinman's
table without a headache ensuing and a visit to the chemist's shop;
which, he was assured, was good for trade, and he acquiesced, as it was
right to do in a man devoted to his country. He dined with Tinman again.
We try our best to be social. For eight months in our year he had little
choice but to dine with Tinman or be a hermit attached to a telescope.

"Where are you going, Lieutenant?" His frank reply to the question was,
"I am going to be killed;" and it grew notorious that this meant Tinman's
table. We get on together as well as we can. Perhaps if we were an
acutely calculating people we should find it preferable both for trade
and our physical prosperity to turn and kill Tinman, in contempt of
consequences. But we are not, and so he does the business gradually for
us. A generous people we must be, for Tinman was not detested. The
recollection of "next morning" caused him to be dimly feared.

Tinman, meanwhile, was awake only to the Circumstance that he made no
progress as an esquire, except on the envelopes of letters, and in his
own esteem. That broad region he began to occupy to the exclusion of
other inhabitants; and the result of such a state of princely isolation
was a plunge of his whole being into deep thoughts. From the hour of his
investiture as the town's chief man, thoughts which were long shots took
possession of him. He had his wits about him; he was alive to ridicule;
he knew he was not popular below, or on easy terms with people above him,
and he meditated a surpassing stroke as one of the Band of Esq., that had
nothing original about it to perplex and annoy the native mind, yet was
dazzling. Few members of the privileged Band dare even imagine the thing.

It will hardly be believed, but it is historical fact, that in the act of
carrying fresh herrings home on his arm, he entertained the idea of a
visit to the First Person and Head of the realm, and was indulging in
pleasing visions of the charms of a personal acquaintance. Nay, he had
already consulted with brother jurats. For you must know that one of the
princesses had recently suffered betrothal in the newspapers, and
supposing her to deign to ratify the engagement, what so reasonable on
the part of a Cinque Port chieftain as to congratulate his liege
mistress, her illustrious mother? These are thoughts and these are deeds
>which give emotional warmth and colour to the ejecter members of a
population wretchedly befogged. They are our sunlight, and our brighter
theme of conversation. They are necessary to the climate and the Saxon
mind; and it would be foolish to put them away, as it is foolish not to
do our utmost to be intimate with terrestrial splendours while we have
them--as it may be said of wardens, mayors, and bailiffs-at command.
Tinman was quite of this opinion. They are there to relieve our dulness.
We have them in the place of heavenly; and he would have argued that we
have a right to bother them too. He had a notion, up in the clouds, of a
Sailors' Convalescent Hospital at Crikswich to seduce a prince with, hand
him the trowel, make him "lay the stone," and then poor prince! refresh
him at table. But that was a matter for by and by.

His purchase of herrings completed, Mr. Tinman walked across the mound of
shingle to the house on the beach. He was rather a fresh-faced man, of
the Saxon colouring, and at a distance looking good-humoured. That he
should have been able to make such an appearance while doing daily battle
with his wine, was a proof of great physical vigour. His pace was
leisurely, as it must needs be over pebbles, where half a step is
subtracted from each whole one in passing; and, besides, he was aware of
a general breath at his departure that betokened a censorious assembly.
Why should he not market for himself? He threw dignity into his
retreating figure in response to the internal interrogation. The moment
>was one when conscious rectitude =pliers man should have a tail for its
just display. Philosophers have drawn attention to the power of the human
face to express pure virtue, but no sooner has it passed on than the
spirit erect within would seem helpless. The breadth of our shoulders is
apparently presented for our critics to write on. Poor duty is done by
the simple sense of moral worth, to supplant that absence of feature in
the plain flat back. We are below the animals in this. How charged with
language behind him is a dog! Everybody has noticed it. Let a dog turn
away from a hostile circle, and his crisp and wary tail not merely
defends him, it menaces; it is a weapon. Man has no choice but to surge
and boil, or stiffen preposterously. Knowing the popular sentiment about
his marketing--for men can see behind their backs, though they may have
nothing to speak with--Tinman resembled those persons of principle who
decline to pay for a "Bless your honour!" from a voluble beggar-woman,
and obtain the reverse of it after they have gone by. He was sufficiently
sensitive to feel that his back was chalked as on a slate. The only
remark following him was, "There he goes!"

He went to the seaward gate of the house on the beach, made practicable
in a low flint wall, where he was met by his sister Martha, to whom he
handed the basket. Apparently he named the cost of his purchase per
dozen. She touched the fish and pressed the bellies of the topmost, it
might be to question them tenderly concerning their roes. Then the couple
passed out of sight. Herrings were soon after this despatching their
odours through the chimneys of all Crikswich, and there was that much of
concord and festive union among the inhabitants.

The house on the beach had been posted where it stood, one supposes, for
the sake of the sea-view, from which it turned right about to face the
town across a patch of grass and salt scurf, looking like a square and
scornful corporal engaged in the perpetual review of an awkward squad of
recruits. Sea delighted it not, nor land either. Marine Parade fronting
it to the left, shaded sickly eyes, under a worn green verandah, from a
sun that rarely appeared, as the traducers of spinsters pretend those
virgins are ever keenly on their guard against him that cometh not. Belle
Vue Terrace stared out of lank glass panes without reserve, unashamed of
its yellow complexion. A gaping public-house, calling itself newly Hotel,
fell backward a step. Villas with the titles of royalty and bloody
battles claimed five feet of garden, and swelled in bowwindows beside
other villas which drew up firmly, commending to the attention a decent
straightness and unintrusive decorum in preference. On an elevated meadow
to the right was the Crouch. The Hall of Elba nestled among
weather-beaten dwarf woods further toward the cliff. Shavenness,
featurelessness, emptiness, clamminess scurfiness, formed the outward
expression of a town to which people were reasonably glad to come from
London in summer-time, for there was nothing in Crikswich to distract the
naked pursuit of health. The sea tossed its renovating brine to the
determinedly sniffing animal, who went to his meals with an appetite that
rendered him cordially eulogistic of the place, in spite of certain frank
whiffs of sewerage coming off an open deposit on the common to mingle
with the brine. Tradition told of a French lady and gentleman entering
the town to take lodgings for a month, and that on the morrow they took a
boat from the shore, saying in their faint English to a sailor veteran of
the coastguard, whom they had consulted about the weather, "It is better
zis zan zat," as they shrugged between rough sea and corpselike land. And
they were not seen again. Their meaning none knew. Having paid their bill
at the lodging-house, their conduct was ascribed to systematic madness.
English people came to Crikswich for the pure salt sea air, and they did
not expect it to be cooked and dressed and decorated for them. If these
things are done to nature, it is nature no longer that you have, but
something Frenchified. Those French are for trimming Neptune's beard!
Only wait, and you are sure to find variety in nature, more than you may
like. You will find it in Neptune. What say you to a breach of the
sea-wall, and an inundation of the aromatic grass-flat extending from the
house on the beach to the tottering terraces, villas, cottages: and
public-house transformed by its ensign to Hotel, along the frontage of
the town? Such an event had occurred of old, and had given the house on
the beach the serious shaking great Neptune in his wrath alone can give.
But many years had intervened. Groynes had been run down to intercept him
and divert him. He generally did his winter mischief on a mill and salt
marshes lower westward. Mr. Tinman had always been extremely zealous in
promoting the expenditure of what moneys the town had to spare upon the
protection of the shore, as it were for the propitiation or defiance of
the sea-god. There was a kindly joke against him an that subject among
brother jurats. He retorted with the joke, that the first thing for
Englishmen to look to were England's defences.

But it will not do to be dwelling too fondly on our eras of peace, for
which we make such splendid sacrifices. Peace, saving for the advent of a
German band, which troubled the repose of the town at intervals, had
imparted to the inhabitants of Crikswich, within and without, the
likeness to its most perfect image, together, it must be confessed, with
a degree of nervousness that invested common events with some of the
terrors of the Last Trump, when one night, just upon the passing of the
vernal equinox, something happened.




CHAPTER II

A carriage Stopped short in the ray of candlelight that was fitfully and
feebly capering on the windy blackness outside the open workshop of
Crickledon, the carpenter, fronting the sea-beach. Mr. Tinnnan's house
was inquired for. Crickledon left off planing; at half-sprawl over the
board, he bawled out, "Turn to the right; right ahead; can't mistake it."
He nodded to one of the cronies intent on watching his labours: "Not
unless they mean to be bait for whiting-pout. Who's that for Tinman, I
wonder?" The speculations of Crickledon's friends were lost in the scream
of the plane.

One cast an eye through the door and observed that the carriage was there
still. "Gentleman's got out and walked," said Crickledon. He was informed
that somebody was visible inside. "Gentleman's wife, mayhap," he said.
His friends indulged in their privilege of thinking what they liked, and
there was the usual silence of tongues in the shop. He furnished them
sound and motion for their amusement, and now and then a scrap of
conversation; and the sedater spirits dwelling in his immediate
neighbourhood were accustomed to step in and see him work up to
supper-time, instead of resorting to the more turbid and costly
excitement of the public-house.

Crickledon looked up from the measurement of a thumb-line. In the doorway
stood a bearded gentleman, who announced himself with the startling
exclamation, "Here's a pretty pickle!" and bustled to make way for a man
well known to them as Ned Crummins, the upholsterer's man, on whose back
hung an article of furniture, the condition of which, with a condensed
brevity of humour worthy of literary admiration, he displayed by mutely
turning himself about as he entered.

"Smashed!" was the general outcry.

"I ran slap into him," said the gentleman. "Who the deuce!--no bones
broken, that's one thing. The fellow--there, look at him: he's like a
glass tortoise."

"It's a chiwal glass," Crickledon remarked, and laid finger on the star
in the centre.

"Gentleman ran slap into me," said Crummins, depositing the frame on the
floor of the shop.

"Never had such a shock in my life," continued the gentleman. "Upon my
soul, I took him for a door: I did indeed. A kind of light flashed from
one of your houses here, and in the pitch dark I thought I was at the
door of old Mart Tinman's house, and dash me if I did n't go in--crash!
But what the deuce do you do, carrying that great big looking-glass at
night, man? And, look here tell me; how was it you happened to be going
glass foremost when you'd got the glass on your back?"

"Well, 't ain't my fault, I knows that," rejoined Crummins. "I came along
as careful as a man could. I was just going to bawl out to Master Tinman,
'I knows the way, never fear me'; for I thinks I hears him call from his
house, 'Do ye see the way?' and into me this gentleman runs all his
might, and smash goes the glass. I was just ten steps from Master
Tinman's gate, and that careful, I reckoned every foot I put down, that I
was; I knows I did, though."

"Why, it was me calling, 'I'm sure I can't see the way.'

"You heard me, you donkey!" retorted the bearded gentleman. "What was the
good of your turning that glass against me in the very nick when I dashed
on you?"

"Well, 't ain't my fault, I swear," said Crummins. "The wind catches
voices so on a pitch dark night, you never can tell whether they be on
one shoulder or the other. And if I'm to go and lose my place through no
fault of mine----"

"Have n't I told you, sir, I'm going to pay the damage? Here," said the
gentleman, fumbling at his waistcoat, "here, take this card. Read it."

For the first time during the scene in the carpenter's shop, a certain
pomposity swelled the gentleman's tone. His delivery of the card appeared
to act on him like the flourish of a trumpet before great men.

"Van Diemen Smith," he proclaimed himself for the assistance of Ned
Crummins in his task; the latter's look of sad concern on receiving the
card seeming to declare an unscholarly conscience.

An anxious feminine voice was heard close beside Mr. Van Diemen Smith.

"Oh, papa, has there been an accident? Are you hurt?"

"Not a bit, Netty; not a bit. Walked into a big looking-glass in the
dark, that's all. A matter of eight or ten pound, and that won't stump
us. But these are what I call queer doings in Old England, when you can't
take a step in the dark, on the seashore without plunging bang into a
glass. And it looks like bad luck to my visit to old Mart Tinman."

"Can you," he addressed the company, "tell me of a clean, wholesome
lodging-house? I was thinking of flinging myself, body and baggage, on
your mayor, or whatever he is--my old schoolmate; but I don't so much
like this beginning. A couple of bed-rooms and sitting-room; clean
sheets, well aired; good food, well cooked; payment per week in advance."

The pebble dropped into deep water speaks of its depth by the tardy
arrival of bubbles on the surface, and, in like manner, the very simple
question put by Mr. Van Diemen Smith pursued its course of penetration in
the assembled mind in the carpenter's shop for a considerable period,
with no sign to show that it had reached the bottom.

"Surely, papa, we can go to an inn? There must be some hotel," said his
daughter.

"There's good accommodation at the Cliff Hotel hard by," said Crickledon.

"But," said one of his friends, "if you don't want to go so far, sir,
there's Master Crickledon's own house next door, and his wife lets
lodgings, and there's not a better cook along this coast."

"Then why did n't the man mention it? Is he afraid of having me?" asked
Mr. Smith, a little thunderingly. "I may n't be known much yet in
England; but I'll tell you, you inquire the route to Mr. Van Diemen Smith
over there in Australia."

"Yes, papa," interrupted his daughter, "only you must consider that it
may not be convenient to take us in at this hour--so late."

"It's not that, miss, begging your pardon," said Crickledon. "I make a
point of never recommending my own house. That's where it is. Otherwise
you're welcome to try us."

"I was thinking of falling bounce on my old schoolmate, and putting Old
English hospitality to the proof," Mr. Smith meditated. "But it's late.
Yes, and that confounded glass! No, we'll bide with you, Mr. Carpenter.
I'll send my card across to Mart Tinman to-morrow, and set him agog at
his breakfast."

Mr. Van Diemen Smith waved his hand for Crickledon to lead the way.

Hereupon Ned Crummins looked up from the card he had been turning over
and over, more and more like one arriving at a condemnatory judgment of a
fish.

"I can't go and give my master a card instead of his glass," he remarked.

"Yes, that reminds me; and I should like to know what you meant by
bringing that glass away from Mr. Tinman's house at night," said Mr.
Smith. "If I'm to pay for it, I've a right to know. What's the meaning of
moving it at night? Eh, let's hear. Night's not the time for moving big
glasses like that. I'm not so sure I haven't got a case."

"If you'll step round to my master along o' me, sir," said Crummins,
"perhaps he'll explain."

Crummins was requested to state who his master was, and he replied,
"Phippun and Company;" but Mr. Smith positively refused to go with him.

"But here," said he, "is a crown for you, for you're a civil fellow.
You'll know where to find me in the morning; and mind, I shall expect
Phippun and Company to give me a very good account of their reason for
moving a big looking-glass on a night like this. There, be off."

The crown-piece in his hand effected a genial change in Crummins'
disposition to communicate. Crickledon spoke to him about the glass; two
or three of the others present jogged him. "What did Mr. Tinman want by
having the glass moved so late in the day, Ned? Your master wasn't
nervous about his property, was he?"

"Not he," said Crummins, and began to suck down his upper lip and agitate
his eyelids and stand uneasily, glimmering signs of the setting in of the
tide of narration.

He caught the eye of Mr. Smith, then looked abashed at Miss.

Crickledon saw his dilemma. "Say what's uppermost, Ned; never mind how
you says it. English is English. Mr. Tinman sent for you to take the
glass away, now, did n't he?"

"He did," said Crummins.

"And you went to him."

"Ay, that I did."

"And he fastened the chiwal glass upon your back"

"He did that."

"That's all plain sailing. Had he bought the glass?"

"No, he had n't bought it. He'd hired it."

As when upon an enforced visit to the dentist, people have had one tooth
out, the remaining offenders are more willingly submitted to the
operation, insomuch that a poetical licence might hazard the statement
that they shed them like leaves of the tree, so Crummins, who had shrunk
from speech, now volunteered whole sentences in succession, and how
important they were deemed by his fellow-townsman, Mr. Smith, and
especially Miss Annette Smith, could perceive in their ejaculations,
before they themselves were drawn into the strong current of interest.

And this was the matter: Tinman had hired the glass for three days.
Latish, on the very first day of the hiring, close upon dark, he had
despatched imperative orders to Phippun and Company to take the glass out
of his house on the spot. And why? Because, as he maintained, there was a
fault in the glass causing an incongruous and absurd reflection; and he
was at that moment awaiting the arrival of another chiwal-glass.

"Cut along, Ned," said Crickledon.

"What the deuce does he want with a chiwal-glass at all?" cried Mr.
Smith, endangering the flow of the story by suggesting to the narrator
that he must "hark back," which to him was equivalent to the jumping of a
chasm hindward. Happily his brain had seized a picture:

"Mr. Tinman, he's a-standin' in his best Court suit."

Mr. Tinmau's old schoolmate gave a jump; and no wonder.

"Standing?" he cried; and as the act of standing was really not
extraordinary, he fixed upon the suit: "Court?"

"So Mrs. Cavely told me, it was what he was standin' in, and as I found
'm I left 'm," said Crummins.

"He's standing in it now?" said Mr. Van Diemen Smith, with a great gape.

Crummins doggedly repeated the statement. Many would have ornamented it
in the repetition, but he was for bare flat truth.

"He must be precious proud of having a Court suit," said Mr. Smith, and
gazed at his daughter so glassily that she smiled, though she was
impatient to proceed to Mrs. Crickledon's lodgings.

"Oh! there's where it is?" interjected the carpenter, with a funny frown
at a low word from Ned Crummins. "Practicing, is he? Mr. Tinman's
practicing before the glass preparatory to his going to the palace in
London."

"He gave me a shillin'," said Crummins.

Crickledon comprehended him immediately. "We sha'n't speak about it,
Ned."

What did you see? was thus cautiously suggested.

The shilling was on Crummins' tongue to check his betrayal of the secret
scene. But remembering that he had only witnessed it by accident, and
that Mr. Tinman had not completely taken him into his confidence, he
thrust his hand down his pocket to finger the crown-piece lying in
fellowship with the coin it multiplied five times, and was inspired to
think himself at liberty to say: "All I saw was when the door opened. Not
the house-door. It was the parlour-door. I saw him walk up to the glass,
and walk back from the glass. And when he'd got up to the glass he bowed,
he did, and he went back'ards just so."

Doubtless the presence of a lady was the active agent that prevented
Crummins from doubling his body entirely, and giving more than a rapid
indication of the posture of Mr. Tinman in his retreat before the glass.
But it was a glimpse of broad burlesque, and though it was received with
becoming sobriety by the men in the carpenter's shop, Annette plucked at
her father's arm.

She could not get him to depart. That picture of his old schoolmate
Martin Tinman practicing before a chiwal glass to present himself at the
palace in his Court suit, seemed to stupefy his Australian intelligence.

"What right has he got to go to Court?" Mr. Van Diemen Smith inquired,
like the foreigner he had become through exile.

"Mr. Tinman's bailiff of the town," said Crickledon.

"And what was his objection to that glass I smashed?"

"He's rather an irritable gentleman," Crickledon murmured, and turned to
Crummins.

Crummins growled: "He said it was misty, and gave him a twist."

"What a big fool he must be! eh?" Mr. Smith glanced at Crickledon and the
other faces for the verdict of Tinman's townsmen upon his character.

They had grounds for thinking differently of Tinman.

"He's no fool," said Crickledon.

Another shook his head. "Sharp at a bargain."

"That he be," said the chorus.

Mr. Smith was informed that Mr. Tinman would probably end by buying up
half the town.

"Then," said Mr. Smith, "he can afford to pay half the money for that
glass, and pay he shall."

A serious view of the recent catastrophe was presented by his
declaration.

In the midst of a colloquy regarding the cost of the glass, during which
it began to be seen by Mr. Tinman's townsmen that there was
laughing-stuff for a year or so in the scene witnessed by Crummins, if
they postponed a bit their right to the laugh and took it in doses,
Annette induced her father to signal to Crickledon his readiness to go
and see the lodgings. No sooner had he done it than he said, "What on
earth made us wait all this time here? I'm hungry, my dear; I want
supper."

"That is because you have had a disappointment. I know you, papa," said
Annette.

"Yes, it's rather a damper about old Mart Tinman," her father assented.
"Or else I have n't recovered the shock of smashing that glass, and visit
it on him. But, upon my honour, he's my only friend in England, I have
n't a single relative that I know of, and to come and find your only
friend making a donkey of himself, is enough to make a man think of
eating and drinking."

Annette murmured reproachfully: "We can hardly say he is our only friend
in England, papa, can we?"

"Do you mean that young fellow? You'll take my appetite away if you talk
of him. He's a stranger. I don't believe he's worth a penny. He owns he's
what he calls a journalist."

These latter remarks were hurriedly exchanged at the threshold of
Crickledon's house.

"It don't look promising," said Mr. Smith.

"I didn't recommend it," said Crickledon.

"Why the deuce do you let your lodgings, then?"

"People who have come once come again."

"Oh! I am in England," Annette sighed joyfully, feeling at home in some
trait she had detected in Crickledon.




CHAPTER III

The story of the shattered chiwal-glass and the visit of Tinman's old
schoolmate fresh from Australia, was at many a breakfast-table before.
Tinman heard a word of it, and when he did he had no time to spare for
such incidents, for he was reading to his widowed sister Martha, in an
impressive tone, at a tolerably high pitch of the voice, and with a
suppressed excitement that shook away all things external from his mind
as violently as it agitated his body. Not the waves without but the
engine within it is which gives the shock and tremor to the crazy
steamer, forcing it to cut through the waves and scatter them to spray;
and so did Martin Tinman make light of the external attack of the card of
VAN DIEMEN SMITH, and its pencilled line: "An old chum of yours, eh,
matey?" Even the communication of Phippun & Co. concerning the
chiwal-glass, failed to divert him from his particular task. It was
indeed a public duty; and the chiwal-glass, though pertaining to it, was
a private business. He that has broken the glass, let that man pay for
it, he pronounced--no doubt in simpler fashion, being at his ease in his
home, but with the serenity of one uplifted. As to the name VAN DIEMEN
SMITH, he knew it not, and so he said to himself while accurately
recollecting the identity of the old chum who alone of men would have
thought of writing eh, matey?

Mr. Van Diemen Smith did not present the card in person. "At
Crickledon's," he wrote, apparently expecting the bailiff of the town to
rush over to him before knowing who he was.

Tinman was far too busy. Anybody can read plain penmanship or print, but
ask anybody not a Cabinet Minister or a Lord-in-Waiting to read out loud
and clear in a Palace, before a Throne. Oh! the nature of reading is
distorted in a trice, and as Tinman said to his worthy sister: "I can do
it, but I must lose no time in preparing myself." Again, at a reperusal,
he informed her: "I must habituate myself." For this purpose he had put
on the suit overnight.

The articulation of faultless English was his object. His sister Martha
sat vice-regally to receive his loyal congratulations on the illustrious
marriage, and she was pensive, less nervous than her brother from not
having to speak continuously, yet somewhat perturbed. She also had her
task, and it was to avoid thinking herself the Person addressed by her
suppliant brother, while at the same time she took possession of the
scholarly training and perfect knowledge of diction and rules of
pronunciation which would infallibly be brought to bear on him in the
terrible hour of the delivery of the Address. It was no small task
moreover to be compelled to listen right through to the end of the
Address, before the very gentlest word of criticism was allowed. She did
not exactly complain of the renewal of the rehearsal: a fatigue can be
endured when it is a joy. What vexed her was her failing memory for the
points of objection, as in her imagined High Seat she conceived them;
for, in painful truth, the instant her brother had finished she entirely
lost her acuteness of ear, and with that her recollection: so there was
nothing to do but to say: "Excellent! Quite unobjectionable, dear Martin,
quite:" so she said, and emphatically; but the addition of the word
"only" was printed on her contracted brow, and every faculty of Tinman's
mind and nature being at strain just then, he asked her testily: "What
now? what's the fault now?" She assured him with languor that there was
not a fault. "It's not your way of talking," said he, and what he said
was true. His discernment was extraordinary; generally he noticed
nothing.

Not only were his perceptions quickened by the preparations for the day
of great splendour: day of a great furnace to be passed through
likewise!--he, was learning English at an astonishing rate into the
bargain. A pronouncing Dictionary lay open on his table. To this he flew
at a hint of a contrary method, and disputes, verifications and triumphs
on one side and the other ensued between brother and sister. In his heart
the agitated man believed his sister to be a misleading guide. He dared
not say it, he thought it, and previous to his African travel through the
Dictionary he had thought his sister infallible on these points. He dared
not say it, because he knew no one else before whom he could practice,
and as it was confidence that he chiefly wanted--above all things,
confidence and confidence comes of practice, he preferred the going on
with his practice to an absolute certainty as to correctness.

At midday came another card from Mr. Van Diemen Smith bearing the
superscription: alias Phil R.

"Can it be possible," Tinman asked his sister, "that Philip Ribstone has
had the audacity to return to this country? I think," he added, "I am
right in treating whoever sends me this card as a counterfeit."

Martha's advice was, that he should take no notice of the card.

"I am seriously engaged," said Tinman. With a "Now then, dear," he
resumed his labours.

Messages had passed between Tinman and Phippun; and in the afternoon
Phippun appeared to broach the question of payment for the chiwal-glass.
He had seen Mr. Van Diemen Smith, had found him very strange, rather
impracticable. He was obliged to tell Tinman that he must hold him
responsible for the glass; nor could he send a second until payment was
made for the first. It really seemed as if Tinman would be compelled, by
the force of circumstances, to go and shake his old friend by the hand.
Otherwise one could clearly see the man might be off: he might be off at
any minute, leaving a legal contention behind him. On the other hand,
supposing he had come to Crikswich for assistance in money? Friendship is
a good thing, and so is hospitality, which is an essentially English
thing, and consequently one that it behoves an Englishman to think it his
duty to perform, but we do not extend it to paupers. But should a pauper
get so close to us as to lay hold of us, vowing he was once our friend,
how shake him loose? Tinman foresaw that it might be a matter of five
pounds thrown to the dogs, perhaps ten, counting the glass. He put on his
hat, full of melancholy presentiments; and it was exactly half-past five
o'clock of the spring afternoon when he knocked at Crickledon's door.

Had he looked into Crickledon's shop as he went by, he would have
perceived Van Diemen Smith astride a piece of timber, smoking a pipe. Van
Diemen saw Tinman. His eyes cocked and watered. It is a disgraceful fact
to record of him without periphrasis. In truth, the bearded fellow was
almost a woman at heart, and had come from the Antipodes throbbing to
slap Martin Tinman on the back, squeeze his hand, run over England with
him, treat him, and talk of old times in the presence of a trotting
regiment of champagne. That affair of the chiwal-glass had temporarily
damped his enthusiasm. The absence of a reply to his double transmission
of cards had wounded him; and something in the look of Tinman disgusted
his rough taste. But the well-known features recalled the days of youth.
Tinman was his one living link to the country he admired as the conqueror
of the world, and imaginatively delighted in as the seat of pleasures,
and he could not discard the feeling of some love for Tinman without
losing his grasp of the reason why, he had longed so fervently and
travelled so breathlessly to return hither. In the days of their youth,
Van Diemen had been Tinman's cordial spirit, at whom he sipped for
cheerful visions of life, and a good honest glow of emotion now and then.
Whether it was odd or not that the sipper should be oblivious, and the
cordial spirit heartily reminiscent of those times, we will not stay to
inquire.

Their meeting took place in Crickledon's shop. Tinman was led in by Mrs.
Crickledon. His voice made a sound of metal in his throat, and his air
was that of a man buttoned up to the palate, as he read from the card,
glancing over his eyelids, "Mr. Van Diemen Smith, I believe."

"Phil Ribstone, if you like," said the other, without rising.

"Oh, ah, indeed!" Tinman temperately coughed.

"Yes, dear me. So it is. It strikes you as odd?"

"The change of name," said Tinman.

"Not nature, though!"

"Ah! Have you been long in England?"

"Time to run to Helmstone, and on here. You've been lucky in business, I
hear."

"Thank you; as things go. Do you think of remaining in England?"

"I've got to settle about a glass I broke last night."

"Ah! I have heard of it. Yes, I fear there will have to be a settlement."

"I shall pay half of the damage. You'll have to stump up your part."

Van Diemen smiled roguishly.

"We must discuss that," said Tinman, smiling too, as a patient in bed may
smile at a doctor's joke; for he was, as Crickledon had said of him, no
fool on practical points, and Van Diemen's mention of the half-payment
reassured him as to his old friend's position in the world, and softly
thawed him. "Will you dine with me to-day?"

"I don't mind if I do. I've a girl. You remember little Netty? She's
walking out on the beach with a young fellow named Fellingham, whose
acquaintance we made on the voyage, and has n't left us long to
ourselves. Will you have her as well? And I suppose you must ask him.
He's a newspaper man; been round the world; seen a lot."

Tinman hesitated. An electrical idea of putting sherry at fifteen
shillings per dozen on his table instead of the ceremonial wine at
twenty-five shillings, assisted him to say hospitably, "Oh! ah! yes; any
friend of yours."

"And now perhaps you'll shake my fist," said Van Diemen.

"With pleasure," said Tinman. "It was your change of name, you know,
Philip."

"Look here, Martin. Van Diemen Smith was a convict, and my benefactor. Why
the deuce he was so fond of that name, I can't tell you; but his dying
wish was for me to take it and carry it on. He left me his fortune, for
Van Diemen Smith to enjoy life, as he never did, poor fellow, when he was
alive. The money was got honestly, by hard labour at a store. He did evil
once, and repented after. But, by Heaven!"--Van Diemen jumped up and
thundered out of a broad chest--"the man was one of the finest hearts
that ever beat. He was! and I'm proud of him. When he died, I turned my
thoughts home to Old England and you, Martin."

"Oh!" said Tinman; and reminded by Van Diemen's way of speaking, that
cordiality was expected of him, he shook his limbs to some briskness, and
continued, "Well, yes, we must all die in our native land if we can. I
hope you're comfortable in your lodgings?"

"I'll give you one of Mrs. Crickledon's dinners to try. You're as good as
mayor of this town, I hear?"

"I am the bailiff of the town," said Mr. Tinman.

"You're going to Court, I'm told."

"The appointment," replied Mr. Tinman, "will soon be made. I have not yet
an appointed day."

On the great highroad of life there is Expectation, and there is
Attainment, and also there is Envy. Mr. Tinman's posture stood for
Attainment shadowing Expectation, and sunning itself in the glass of
Envy, as he spoke of the appointed day. It was involuntary, and naturally
evanescent, a momentary view of the spirit.

He unbent, and begged to be excused for the present, that he might go and
apprise his sister of guests coming.

"All right. I daresay we shall see, enough of one another," said Van
Diemen. And almost before the creak of Tinman's heels was deadened on the
road outside the shop, he put the funny question to Crickledon, "Do you
box?"

"I make 'em," Crickledon replied.

"Because I should like to have a go in at something, my friend."

Van Diemen stretched and yawned.

Crickledon recommended the taking of a walk.

"I think I will," said the other, and turned back abruptly. "How long do
you work in the day?"

"Generally, all the hours of light," Crickledon replied; "and always up
to supper-time."

"You're healthy and happy?"

"Nothing to complain of."

"Good appetite?"

"Pretty regular."

"You never take a holiday?"

"Except Sundays."

"You'd like to be working then?"

"I won't say that."

"But you're glad to be up Monday morning?"

"It feels cheerfuller in the shop."

"And carpentering's your joy?"

"I think I may say so."

Van Diemen slapped his thigh. "There's life in Old England yet!"

Crickledon eyed him as he walked away to the beach to look for his
daughter, and conceived that there was a touch of the soldier in him.




CHAPTER IV

Annette Smith's delight in her native England made her see beauty and
kindness everywhere around her; it put a halo about the house on the
beach, and thrilled her at Tinman's table when she heard the thunder of
the waves hard by. She fancied it had been a most agreeable dinner to her
father and Mr. Herbert Fellingham--especially to the latter, who had
laughed very much; and she was astonished to hear them at breakfast both
complaining of their evening. In answer to which, she exclaimed, "Oh, I
think the situation of the house is so romantic!"

"The situation of the host is exceedingly so," said Mr. Fellingham; "but
I think his wine the most unromantic liquid I have ever tasted."

"It must be that!" cried Van Diemen, puzzled by novel pains in the head.
"Old Martin woke up a little like his old self after dinner."

"He drank sparingly," said Mr. Fellingham.

"I am sure you were satirical last night," Annette said reproachfully.

"On the contrary, I told him I thought he was in a romantic situation."

"But I have had a French mademoiselle for my governess and an Oxford
gentleman for my tutor; and I know you accepted French and English from
Mr. Tinman and his sister that I should not have approved."

"Netty," said Van Diemen, "has had the best instruction money could
procure; and if she says you were satirical, you may depend on it you
were."

"Oh, in that case, of course!" Mr. Fellingham rejoined. "Who could help
it?"

He thought himself warranted in giving the rein to his wicked satirical
spirit, and talked lightly of the accidental character of the letter H in
Tinman's pronunciation; of how, like somebody else's hat in a high wind,
it descended on somebody else's head, and of how his words walked about
asking one another who they were and what they were doing, danced
together madly, snapping their fingers at signification; and so forth. He
was flippant.

Annette glanced at her father, and dropped her eyelids.

Mr. Fellingham perceived that he was enjoined to be on his guard.

He went one step farther in his fun; upon which Van Diemen said, with a
frown, "If you please!"

Nothing could withstand that.

"Hang old Mart Tinman's wine!" Van Diemen burst out in the dead pause.
"My head's a bullet. I'm in a shocking bad temper. I can hardly see. I'm
bilious."

Mr. Fellingham counselled his lying down for an hour, and he went
grumbling, complaining of Mart Tinman's incredulity about the towering
beauty of a place in Australia called Gippsland.

Annette confided to Mr. Fellingham, as soon as they were alone, the
chivalrous nature of her father in his friendships, and his indisposition
to hear a satirical remark upon his old schoolmate, the moment he
understood it to be satire.

Fellingham pleaded: "The man's a perfect burlesque. He's as distinctly
made to be laughed at as a mask in a pantomime."

"Papa will not think so," said Annette; "and papa has been told that he
is not to be laughed at as a man of business."

"Do you prize him for that?"

"I am no judge. I am too happy to be in England to be a judge of
anything."

"You did not touch his wine!"

"You men attach so much importance to wine!"

"They do say that powders is a good thing after Mr. Tinman's wine,"
observed Mrs. Crickledon, who had come into the sitting-room to take away
the breakfast things.

Mr. Fellingham gave a peal of laughter; but Mrs Crickledon bade him be
hushed, for Mr. Van Diemen Smith had gone to lay down his poor aching
head on his pillow. Annette ran upstairs to speak to her father about a
doctor.

During her absence, Mr. Fellingham received the popular portrait of Mr.
Tinman from the lips of Mrs. Crickledon. He subsequently strolled to the
carpenter's shop, and endeavoured to get a confirmation of it.

"My wife talks too much," said Crickledon.

When questioned by a gentleman, however, he was naturally bound to answer
to the extent of his knowledge.

"What a funny old country it is!" Mr. Fellingham said to Annette, on
their walk to the beach.

She implored him not to laugh at anything English.

"I don't, I assure you," said he. "I love the country, too. But when one
comes back from abroad, and plunges into their daily life, it's difficult
to retain the real figure of the old country seen from outside, and one
has to remember half a dozen great names to right oneself. And Englishmen
are so funny! Your father comes here to see his old friend, and begins
boasting of the Gippsland he has left behind. Tinman immediately brags of
Helvellyn, and they fling mountains at one another till, on their first
evening together, there's earthquake and rupture--they were nearly at
fisticuffs at one time."

"Oh! surely no," said Annette. "I did not hear them. They were good
friends when you came to the drawingroom. Perhaps the wine did affect
poor papa, if it was bad wine. I wish men would never drink any. How much
happier they would be."

"But then there would cease to be social meetings in England. What should
we do?"

"I know that is a sneer; and you were nearly as enthusiastic as I was on
board the vessel," Annette said, sadly.

"Quite true. I was. But see what quaint creatures we have about us!
Tinman practicing in his Court suit before the chiwal-glass! And that
good fellow, the carpenter, Crickledon, who has lived with the sea
fronting him all his life, and has never been in a boat, and he confesses
he has only once gone inland, and has never seen an acorn!"

"I wish I could see one--of a real English oak," said Annette.

"And after being in England a few months you will be sighing for the
Continent."

"Never!"

"You think you will be quite contented here?"

"I am sure I shall be. May papa and I never be exiles again! I did not
feel it when I was three years old, going out to Australia; but it would
be like death to me now. Oh!" Annette shivered, as with the exile's
chill.

"On my honour," said Mr. Fellingham, as softly as he could with the wind
in his teeth, "I love the old country ten times more from your love of
it."

"That is not how I want England to be loved," returned Annette.

"The love is in your hands."

She seemed indifferent on hearing it.

He should have seen that the way to woo her was to humour her
prepossession by another passion. He could feel that it ennobled her in
the abstract, but a latent spite at Tinman on account of his wine, to
which he continued angrily to attribute as unwonted dizziness of the head
and slight irascibility, made him urgent in his desire that she should
separate herself from Tinman and his sister by the sharp division of
derision.

Annette declined to laugh at the most risible caricatures of Tinman. In
her antagonism she forced her simplicity so far as to say that she did
not think him absurd. And supposing Mr. Tinman to have proposed to the
titled widow, Lady Ray, as she had heard, and to other ladies young and
middle-aged in the neighbourhood, why should he not, if he wished to
marry? If he was economical, surely he had a right to manage his own
affairs. Her dread was lest Mr. Tinman and her father should quarrel over
the payment for the broken chiwal-glass: that she honestly admitted, and
Fellingham was so indiscreet as to roar aloud, not so very cordially.

Annette thought him unkindly satirical; and his thoughts of her reduced
her to the condition of a commonplace girl with expressive eyes.

She had to return to her father. Mr. Fellingham took a walk on the
springy turf along the cliffs; and "certainly she is a commonplace girl,"
he began by reflecting; with a side eye at the fact that his meditations
were excited by Tinman's poisoning of his bile. "A girl who can't see the
absurdity of Tinman must be destitute of common intelligence." After a
while he sniffed the fine sharp air of mingled earth and sea delightedly,
and he strode back to the town late in the afternoon, laughing at himself
in scorn of his wretched susceptibility to bilious impressions, and
really all but hating Tinman as the cause of his weakness--in the manner
of the criminal hating the detective, perhaps. He cast it altogether on
Tinman that Annette's complexion of character had become discoloured to
his mind; for, in spite of the physical freshness with which he returned
to her society, he was incapable of throwing off the idea of her being
commonplace; and it was with regret that he acknowledged he had gained
from his walk only a higher opinion of himself.

Her father was the victim of a sick headache, [Migraine--D.W.]and lay, a
groaning man, on his bed, ministered to by Mrs. Crickledon chiefly.
Annette had to conduct the business with Mr. Phippun and Mr. Tinman as to
payment for the chiwal-glass. She was commissioned to offer half the
price for the glass on her father's part; more he would not pay. Tinman
and Phippun sat with her in Crickledon's cottage, and Mrs. Crickledon
brought down two messages from her invalid, each positive, to the effect
that he would fight with all the arms of English law rather than yield
his point.

Tinman declared it to be quite out of the question that he should pay a
penny. Phippun vowed that from one or the other of them he would have the
money.

Annette naturally was in deep distress, and Fellingham postponed the
discussion to the morrow.

Even after such a taste of Tinman as that, Annette could not be induced
to join in deriding him privately. She looked pained by Mr. Fellingham's
cruel jests. It was monstrous, Fellingham considered, that he should draw
on himself a second reprimand from Van Diemen Smith, while they were
consulting in entire agreement upon the case of the chiwal-glass.

"I must tell you this, mister sir," said Van Diemen, "I like you, but
I'll be straightforward and truthful, or I'm not worthy the name of
Englishman; and I do like you, or I should n't have given you leave to
come down here after us two. You must respect my friend if you care for
my respect. That's it. There it is. Now you know my conditions."

"I 'm afraid I can't sign the treaty," said Fellingham.

"Here's more," said Van Diemen. "I'm a chilly man myself if I hear a
laugh and think I know the aim of it. I'll meet what you like except
scorn. I can't stand contempt. So I feel for another. And now you know."

"It puts a stopper on the play of fancy, and checks the throwing off of
steam," Fellingham remonstrated. "I promise to do my best, but of all the
men I've ever met in my life--Tinman!--the ridiculous! Pray pardon me;
but the donkey and his looking-glass! The glass was misty! He--as
particular about his reflection in the glass as a poet with his verses!
Advance, retire, bow; and such murder of the Queen's English in the very
presence! If I thought he was going to take his wine with him, I'd have
him arrested for high treason."

"You've chosen, and you know what you best like," said Van Diemen,
pointing his accents--by which is produced the awkward pause, the pitfall
of conversation, and sometimes of amity.

Thus it happened that Mr. Herbert Fellingham journeyed back to London a
day earlier than he had intended, and without saying what he meant to
say.




CHAPTER V

A month later, after a night of sharp frost on the verge of the warmer
days of spring, Mr. Fellingham entered Crikswich under a sky of perfect
blue that was in brilliant harmony with the green downs, the white cliffs
and sparkling sea, and no doubt it was the beauty before his eyes which
persuaded him of his delusion in having taken Annette for a commonplace
girl. He had come in a merely curious mood to discover whether she was
one or not. Who but a commonplace girl would care to reside in Crikswich,
he had asked himself; and now he was full sure that no commonplace girl
would ever have had the idea. Exquisitely simple, she certainly was; but
that may well be a distinction in a young lady whose eyes are expressive.

The sound of sawing attracted him to Crickledon's shop, and the
industrious carpenter soon put him on the tide of affairs.

Crickledon pointed to the house on the beach as the place where Mr. Van
Diemen Smith and his daughter were staying.

"Dear me! and how does he look?" said Fellingham.

"Our town seems to agree with him, sir."

"Well, I must not say any more, I suppose." Fellingham checked his
tongue. "How have they settled that dispute about the chiwal-glass?"

"Mr. Tinman had to give way."

"Really."

"But," Crickledon stopped work, "Mr. Tinman sold him a meadow."

"I see."

"Mr. Smith has been buying a goodish bit of ground here. They tell me
he's about purchasing Elba. He has bought the Crouch. He and Mr. Tinman
are always out together. They're over at Helmstone now. They've been to
London."

"Are they likely to be back to-day?"

"Certain, I should think. Mr. Tinman has to be in London to-morrow."

Crickledon looked. He was not the man to look artful, but there was a
lighted corner in his look that revived Fellingham's recollections, and
the latter burst out:

"The Address? I 'd half forgotten it. That's not over yet? Has he been
practicing much?"

"No more glasses ha' been broken."

"And how is your wife, Crickledon?"

"She's at home, sir, ready for a talk, if you've a mind to try her."

Mrs. Crickledon proved to be very ready. "That Tinman," was her theme. He
had taken away her lodgers, and she knew his objects. Mr. Smith repented
of leaving her, she knew, though he dared not say it in plain words. She
knew Miss Smith was tired to death of constant companionship with Mrs.
Cavely, Tinman's sister. She generally came once in the day just to
escape from Mrs. Cavely, who would not, bless you! step into a cottager's
house where she was not allowed to patronize. Fortunately Miss Smith had
induced her father to get his own wine from the merchants.

"A happy resolution," said Fellingham; "and a saving one."

He heard further that Mr. Smith would take possession of the Crouch next
month, and that Mrs. Cavely hung over Miss Smith like a kite.

"And that old Tinman, old enough to be her father!" said Mrs. Crickledon.

She dealt in the flashes which connect ideas. Fellingham, though a man,
and an Englishman, was nervously wakeful enough to see the connection.

"They'll have to consult the young lady first, ma'am."

"If it's her father's nod she'll bow to it; now mark me," Mrs. Crickledon
said, with emphasis. "She's a young lady who thinks for herself, but she
takes her start from her father where it's feeling. And he's gone
stone-blind over that Tinman."

While they were speaking, Annette appeared.

"I saw you," she said to Fellingham; gladly and openly, in the most
commonplace manner.

"Are you going to give me a walk along the beach?" said he.

She proposed the country behind the town, and that was quite as much to
his taste. But it was not a happy walk. He had decided that he admired
her, and the notion of having Tinman for a rival annoyed him. He
overflowed with ridicule of Tinman, and this was distressing to Annette,
because not only did she see that he would not control himself before her
father, but he kindled her own satirical spirit in opposition to her
father's friendly sentiments toward his old schoolmate.

"Mr. Tinman has been extremely hospitable to us," she said, a little
coldly.

"May I ask you, has he consented to receive instruction in deportment and
pronunciation?"

Annette did not answer.

"If practice makes perfect, he must be near the mark by this time."

She continued silent.

"I dare say, in domestic life, he's as amiable as he is hospitable, and
it must be a daily gratification to see him in his Court suit."

"I have not seen him in his Court suit."

"That is his coyness."

"People talk of those things."

"The common people scandalize the great, about whom they know nothing,
you mean! I am sure that is true, and living in Courts one must be keenly
aware of it. But what a splendid sky and-sea!"

"Is it not?"

Annette echoed his false rapture with a candour that melted him.

He was preparing to make up for lost time, when the wild waving of a
parasol down a road to the right, coming from the town, caused Annette to
stop and say, "I think that must be Mrs. Cavely. We ought to meet her."

Fellingham asked why.

"She is so fond of walks," Anisette replied, with a tooth on her lip

Fellingham thought she seemed fond of runs.

Mrs. Cavely joined them, breathless. "My dear! the pace you go at!" she
shouted. "I saw you starting. I followed, I ran, I tore along. I feared I
never should catch you. And to lose such a morning of English scenery!

"Is it not heavenly?"

"One can't say more," Fellingham observed, bowing.

"I am sure I am very glad to see you again, sir. You enjoy Crikswich?"

"Once visited, always desired, like Venice, ma'am. May I venture to
inquire whether Mr. Tinman has presented his Address?"

"The day after to-morrow. The appointment is made with him," said Mrs.
Cavely, more officially in manner, "for the day after to-morrow. He is
excited, as you may well believe. But Mr. Smith is an immense relief to
him--the very distraction he wanted. We have become one family, you
know."

"Indeed, ma'am, I did not know it," said Fellingham.

The communication imparted such satiric venom to his further remarks,
that Annette resolved to break her walk and dismiss him for the day.

He called at the house on the beach after the dinner-hour, to see Mr. Van
Diemen Smith, when there was literally a duel between him and Tinman; for
Van Diemen's contribution to the table was champagne, and that had been
drunk, but Tinman's sherry remained. Tinman would insist on Fellingham's
taking a glass. Fellingham parried him with a sedate gravity of irony
that was painfully perceptible to Anisette. Van Diemen at last backed
Tinman's hospitable intent, and, to Fellingham's astonishment, he found
that he had been supposed by these two men to be bashfully retreating
from a seductive offer all the time that his tricks of fence and
transpiercings of one of them had been marvels of skill.

Tinman pushed the glass into his hand.

"You have spilt some," said Fellingham.

"It won't hurt the carpet," said Tinman.

"Won't it?" Fellingham gazed at the carpet, as if expecting a flame to
arise.

He then related the tale of the magnanimous Alexander drinking off the
potion, in scorn of the slanderer, to show faith in his friend.

"Alexander--Who was that?" said Tinman, foiled in his historical
recollections by the absence of the surname.

"General Alexander," said Fellingham. "Alexander Philipson, or he
declared it was Joveson; and very fond of wine. But his sherry did for
him at last."

"Ah! he drank too much, then," said Tinman.

"Of his own!"

Anisette admonished the vindictive young gentleman by saying, "How long
do you stay in Crikswich, Mr. Fellingham?"

He had grossly misconducted himself. But an adversary at once offensive
and helpless provokes brutality. Anisette prudently avoided letting her
father understand that satire was in the air; and neither he nor Tinman
was conscious of it exactly: yet both shrank within themselves under the
sensation of a devilish blast blowing. Fellingham accompanied them and
certain jurats to London next day.

Yes, if you like: when a mayor visits Majesty, it is an important
circumstance, and you are at liberty to argue at length that it means
more than a desire on his part to show his writing power and his reading
power: it is full of comfort the people, as an exhibition of their
majesty likewise; and it is an encouragement to men to strive to become
mayors, bailiffs, or prime men of any sort; but a stress in the reporting
of it--the making it appear too important a circumstance--will surely
breathe the intimation to a politically-minded people that satire is in
the air, and however dearly they cherish the privilege of knocking at the
first door of the kingdom, and walking ceremoniously in to read their
writings, they will, if they are not in one of their moods for
prostration, laugh. They will laugh at the report.

All the greater reason is it that we should not indulge them at such
periods; and I say woe's me for any brother of the pen, and one in some
esteem, who dressed the report of that presentation of the Address of
congratulation by Mr. Bailiff Tinman, of Crikswich! Herbert Fellingham
wreaked his personal spite on Tinman. He should have bethought him that
it involved another than Tinman that is to say, an office--which the
fitful beast rejoices to paw and play with contemptuously now and then,
one may think, as a solace to his pride, and an indemnification for those
caprices of abject worship so strongly recalling the days we see through
Mr. Darwin's glasses.

He should not have written the report. It sent a titter over England. He
was so unwise as to despatch a copy of the newspaper containing it to Van
Diemen Smith. Van Diemen perused it with satisfaction. So did Tinman.
Both of these praised the able young writer. But they handed the paper to
the Coastguard Lieutenant, who asked Tinman how he liked it; and visitors
were beginning to drop in to Crikswich, who made a point of asking for a
sight of the chief man; and then came a comic publication, all in the
Republican tone of the time, with Man's Dignity for the standpoint, and
the wheezy laughter residing in old puns to back it, in eulogy of the
satiric report of the famous Address of congratulation of the Bailiff of
Crikswich.

"Annette," Van Diemen said to his daughter, "you'll not encourage that
newspaper fellow to come down here any more. He had his warning."




CHAPTER VI

One of the most difficult lessons for spirited young men to learn is,
that good jokes are not always good policy. They have to be paid for,
like good dinners, though dinner and joke shall seem to have been at
somebody else's expense. Young Fellingham was treated rudely by Van
Diemen Smith, and with some cold reserve by Annette: in consequence of
which he thought her more than ever commonplace. He wrote her a letter of
playful remonstrance, followed by one that appealed to her sentiments.

But she replied to neither of them. So his visits to Crikswich came to an
end.

Shall a girl who has no appreciation of fun affect us? Her expressive
eyes, and her quaint simplicity, and her enthusiasm for England, haunted
Mr. Fellingham; being conjured up by contrast with what he met about him.
But shall a girl who would impose upon us the task of holding in our
laughter at Tinman be much regretted? There could be no companionship
between us, Fellingham thought.

On an excursion to the English Lakes he saw the name of Van Diemen Smith
in a visitors' book, and changed his ideas on the subject of
companionship. Among mountains, or on the sea, or reading history,
Annette was one in a thousand. He happened to be at a public ball at
Helmstone in the Winter season, and who but Annette herself came whirling
before him on the arm of an officer! Fellingham did not miss his chance
of talking to her. She greeted him gaily, and speaking with the
excitement of the dance upon her, appeared a stranger to the serious
emotions he was willing to cherish. She had been to the Lakes and to
Scotland. Next summer she was going to Wales. All her experiences were
delicious. She was insatiable, but satisfied.

"I wish I had been with you," said Fellingham.

"I wish you had," said she.

Mrs. Cavely was her chaperon at the ball, and he was not permitted to
enjoy a lengthened conversation sitting with Annette. What was he to
think of a girl who could be submissive to Mrs. Cavely, and danced with
any number of officers, and had no idea save of running incessantly over
England in the pursuit of pleasure? Her tone of saying, "I wish you had,"
was that of the most ordinary of wishes, distinctly, if not designedly
different from his own melodious depth.

She granted him one waltz, and he talked of her father and his whimsical
vagrancies and feeling he had a positive liking for Van Diemen, and he
sagaciously said so.

Annette's eyes brightened. "Then why do you never go to see him? He has
bought Elba. We move into the Hall after Christmas. We are at the Crouch
at present. Papa will be sure to make you welcome. Do you not know that
he never forgets a friend or breaks a friendship?"

"I do, and I love him for it," said Fellingham.

If he was not greatly mistaken a gentle pressure on the fingers of his
left hand rewarded him.

This determined him. It should here be observed that he was by birth the
superior of Annette's parentage, and such is the sentiment of a better
blood that the flattery of her warm touch was needed for him to overlook
the distinction.

Two of his visits to Crikswich resulted simply in interviews and
conversations with Mrs. Crickledon. Van Diemen and his daughter were in
London with Tinman and Mrs. Cavely, purchasing furniture for Elba Hall.
Mrs. Crickledon had no scruple in saying, that Mrs. Cavely meant her
brother to inhabit the Hall, though Mr. Smith had outbid him in the
purchase. According to her, Tinman and Mr. Smith had their differences;
for Mr. Smith was a very outspoken gentleman, and had been known to call
Tinman names that no man of spirit would bear if he was not scheming.

Fellingham returned to London, where he roamed the streets famous for
furniture warehouses, in the vain hope of encountering the new owner of
Elba.

Failing in this endeavour, he wrote a love-letter to Annette.

It was her first. She had liked him. Her manner of thinking she might
love him was through the reflection that no one stood in the way. The
letter opened a world to her, broader than Great Britain.

Fellingham begged her, if she thought favourably of him, to prepare her
father for the purport of his visit. If otherwise, she was to interdict
the visit with as little delay as possible and cut him adrift.

A decided line of conduct was imperative. Yet you have seen that she was
not in love. She was only not unwilling to be in love. And Fellingham was
just a trifle warmed. Now mark what events will do to light the fires.

Van Diemen and Tinman, old chums re-united, and both successful in life,
had nevertheless, as Mrs. Crickledon said, their differences. They
commenced with an opposition to Tinman's views regarding the expenditure
of town moneys. Tinman was ever for devoting them to the patriotic
defence of "our shores;" whereas Van Diemen, pointing in detestation of
the town sewerage reeking across the common under the beach, loudly
called on him to preserve our lives, by way of commencement. Then Van
Diemen precipitately purchased Elba at a high valuation, and Tinman had
expected by waiting to buy it at his own valuation, and sell it out of
friendly consideration to his friend afterwards, for a friendly
consideration. Van Diemen had joined the hunt. Tinman could not mount a
horse. They had not quarrelled, but they had snapped about these and
other affairs. Van Diemen fancied Tinman was jealous of his wealth.
Tinman shrewdly suspected Van Diemen to be contemptuous of his dignity.
He suffered a loss in a loan of money; and instead of pitying him, Van
Diemen had laughed him to scorn for expecting security for investments at
ten per cent. The bitterness of the pinch to Tinman made him frightfully
sensitive to strictures on his discretion. In his anguish he told his
sister he was ruined, and she advised him to marry before the crash. She
was aware that he exaggerated, but she repeated her advice. She went so
far as to name the person. This is known, because she was overheard by
her housemaid, a gossip of Mrs. Crickledon's, the subsequently famous
"Little Jane."

Now, Annette had shyly intimated to her father the nature of Herbert
Fellingham's letter, at the same time professing a perfect readiness to
submit to his directions; and her father's perplexity was very great, for
Annette had rather fervently dramatized the young man's words at the ball
at Helmstone, which had pleasantly tickled him, and, besides, he liked
the young man. On the other hand, he did not at all like the prospect of
losing his daughter; and he would have desired her to be a lady of title.
He hinted at her right to claim a high position. Annette shrank from the
prospect, saying, "Never let me marry one who might be ashamed of my
father!"

"I shouldn't stomach that," said Van Diemen, more disposed in favour of
the present suitor.

Annette was now in a tremor. She had a lover; he was coming. And if he
did not come, did it matter? Not so very much, except to her pride. And
if he did, what was she to say to him? She felt like an actress who may
in a few minutes be called on the stage, without knowing her part. This
was painfully unlike love, and the poor girl feared it would be her
conscientious duty to dismiss him--most gently, of course; and perhaps,
should he be impetuous and picturesque, relent enough to let him hope,
and so bring about a happy postponement of the question. Her father had
been to a neighbouring town on business with Mr. Tinman. He knocked at
her door at midnight; and she, in dread of she knew not what--chiefly
that the Hour of the Scene had somehow struck--stepped out to him
trembling. He was alone. She thought herself the most childish of mortals
in supposing that she could have been summoned at midnight to declare her
sentiments, and hardly noticed his gloomy depression. He asked her to
give him five minutes; then asked her for a kiss, and told her to go to
bed and sleep. But Annette had seen that a great present affliction was
on him, and she would not be sent to sleep. She promised to listen
patiently, to bear anything, to be brave. "Is it bad news from home?" she
said, speaking of the old home where she had not left her heart, and
where his money was invested.

"It's this, my dear Netty," said Van Diemen, suffering her to lead him
into her sitting-room; "we shall have to leave the shores of England."

"Then we are ruined."

"We're not; the rascal can't do that. We might be off to the Continent,
or we might go to America; we've money. But we can't stay here. I'll not
live at any man's mercy."

"The Continent! America!" exclaimed the enthusiast for England. "Oh,
papa, you love living in England so!"

"Not so much as all that, my dear. You do, that I know. But I don't see
how it's to be managed. Mart Tinman and I have been at tooth and claw
to-day and half the night; and he has thrown off the mask, or he's dashed
something from my sight, I don't know which. I knocked him down."

"Papa!"

"I picked him up."

"Oh," cried Annette, "has Mr. Tinman been hurt?"

"He called me a Deserter!"

Anisette shuddered.

She did not know what this thing was, but the name of it opened a cabinet
of horrors, and she touched her father timidly, to assure him of her
constant love, and a little to reassure herself of his substantial
identity.

"And I am one," Van Diemen made the confession at the pitch of his voice.
"I am a Deserter; I'm liable to be branded on the back. And it's in Mart
Tinman's power to have me marched away to-morrow morning in the sight of
Crikswich, and all I can say for myself, as a man and a Briton, is, I did
not desert before the enemy. That I swear I never would have done. Death,
if death's in front; but your poor mother was a handsome woman, my child,
and there--I could not go on living in barracks and leaving her
unprotected. I can't tell a young woman the tale. A hundred pounds came
on me for a legacy, as plump in my hands out of open heaven, and your
poor mother and I saw our chance; we consulted, and we determined to risk
it, and I got on board with her and you, and over the seas we went, first
to shipwreck, ultimately to fortune."

Van Diemen laughed miserably. "They noticed in the hunting-field here I
had a soldier-like seat. A soldier-like seat it'll be, with a brand on
it. I sha'n't be asked to take a soldier-like seat at any of their tables
again. I may at Mart Tinman's, out of pity, after I've undergone my
punishment. There's a year still to run out of the twenty of my term of
service due. He knows it; he's been reckoning; he has me. But the worst
cat-o'-nine-tails for me is the disgrace. To have myself pointed at,
'There goes the Deserter' He was a private in the Carbineers, and he
deserted.' No one'll say, 'Ay, but he clung to the idea of his old
schoolmate when abroad, and came back loving him, and trusted him, and
was deceived."

Van Diemen produced a spasmodic cough with a blow on his chest. Anisette
was weeping.

"There, now go to bed," said he. "I wish you might have known no more
than you did of our flight when I got you on board the ship with your
poor mother; but you're a young woman now, and you must help me to think
of another cut and run, and what baggage we can scrape together in a
jiffy, for I won't live here at Mart Tinman's mercy."

Drying her eyes to weep again, Annette said, when she could speak: "Will
nothing quiet him? I was going to bother you with all sorts of silly
questions, poor dear papa; but I see I can understand if I try. Will
nothing--Is he so very angry? Can we not do something to pacify him? He
is fond of money. He--oh, the thought of leaving England! Papa, it will
kill you; you set your whole heart on England. We could--I could--could I
not, do you not think?--step between you as a peacemaker. Mr. Tinman is
always very courteous to me."

At these words of Annette's, Van Diemen burst into a short snap of savage
laughter. "But that's far away in the background, Mr. Mart Tinman!" he
said. "You stick to your game, I know that; but you'll find me flown,
though I leave a name to stink like your common behind me. And," he
added, as a chill reminder, "that name the name of my benefactor. Poor
old Van Diemen! He thought it a safe bequest to make."

"It was; it is! We will stay; we will not be exiled," said Annette. "I
will do anything. What was the quarrel about, papa?"

"The fact is, my dear, I just wanted to show him--and take down his
pride--I'm by my Australian education a shrewder hand than his old
country. I bought the house on the beach while he was chaffering, and
then I sold it him at a rise when the town was looking up--only to make
him see. Then he burst up about something I said of Australia. I will
have the common clean. Let him live at the Crouch as my tenant if he
finds the house on the beach in danger."

"Papa, I am sure," Annette repeated--"sure I have influence with Mr.
Tinman."

"There are those lips of yours shutting tight," said her father. "Just
listen, and they make a big O. The donkey! He owns you've got influence,
and he offers he'll be silent if you'll pledge your word to marry him.
I'm not sure he didn't say, within the year. I told him to look sharp not
to be knocked down again. Mart Tinman for my son-in-law! That's an upside
down of my expectations, as good as being at the antipodes without a
second voyage back! I let him know you were engaged."

Annette gazed at her father open-mouthed, as he had predicted; now with a
little chilly dimple at one corner of the mouth, now at another--as a
breeze curves the leaden winter lake here and there. She could not get
his meaning into her sight, and she sought, by looking hard, to
understand it better; much as when some solitary maiden lady, passing
into her bedchamber in the hours of darkness, beholds--tradition telling
us she has absolutely beheld foot of burglar under bed; and lo! she
stares, and, cunningly to moderate her horror, doubts, yet cannot but
believe that there is a leg, and a trunk, and a head, and two terrible
arms, bearing pistols, to follow. Sick, she palpitates; she compresses
her trepidation; she coughs, perchance she sings a bar or two of an aria.
Glancing down again, thrice horrible to her is it to discover that there
is no foot! For had it remained, it might have been imagined a harmless,
empty boot. But the withdrawal has a deadly significance of animal
life. . . .

In like manner our stricken Annette perceived the object; so did she
gradually apprehend the fact of her being asked for Tinman's bride, and
she could not think it credible. She half scented, she devised her plan
of escape from another single mention of it. But on her father's
remarking, with a shuffle, frightened by her countenance, "Don't listen
to what I said, Netty. I won't paint him blacker than he is"--then
Annette was sure she had been proposed for by Mr. Tinman, and she fancied
her father might have revolved it in his mind that there was this means
of keeping Tinman silent, silent for ever, in his own interests.

"It was not true, when you told Mr. Tinman I was engaged, papa," she
said.

"No, I know that. Mart Tinman only half-kind of hinted. Come, I say!
Where's the unmarried man wouldn't like to have a girl like you, Netty!
They say he's been rejected all round a circuit of fifteen miles; and
he's not bad-looking, neither--he looks fresh and fair. But I thought it
as well to let him know he might get me at a disadvantage, but he
couldn't you. Now, don't think about it, my love."

"Not if it is not necessary, papa," said Annette; and employed her
familiar sweetness in persuading him to go to bed, as though he were the
afflicted one requiring to be petted.




CHAPTER VII

Round under the cliffs by the sea, facing South, are warm seats in
winter. The sun that shines there on a day of frost wraps you as in a
mantle. Here it was that Mr. Herbert Fellingham found Annette, a
chalk-block for her chair, and a mound of chalk-rubble defending her from
the keen-tipped breath of the east, now and then shadowing the smooth
blue water, faintly, like reflections of a flight of gulls.

Infants are said to have their ideas, and why not young ladies? Those who
write of their perplexities in descriptions comical in their length are
unkind to them, by making them appear the simplest of the creatures of
fiction; and most of us, I am sure, would incline to believe in them if
they were only some bit more lightly touched. Those troubled sentiments
of our young lady of the comfortable classes are quite worthy of mention.
Her poor little eye poring as little fishlike as possible upon the
intricate, which she takes for the infinite, has its place in our
history, nor should we any of us miss the pathos of it were it not that
so large a space is claimed for the exposure. As it is, one has almost to
fight a battle to persuade the world that she has downright thoughts and
feelings, and really a superhuman delicacy is required in presenting her
that she may be credible. Even then--so much being accomplished the
thousands accustomed to chapters of her when she is in the situation of
Annette will be disappointed by short sentences, just as of old the
Continental eater of oysters would have been offended at the offer of an
exchange of two live for two dozen dead ones. Annette was in the grand
crucial position of English imaginative prose. I recognize it, and that
to this the streamlets flow, thence pours the flood. But what was the
plain truth? She had brought herself to think she ought to sacrifice
herself to Tinman, and her evasions with Herbert, manifested in tricks of
coldness alternating with tones of regret, ended, as they had commenced,
in a mysterious half-sullenness. She had hardly a word to say. Let me
step in again to observe that she had at the moment no pointed intention
of marrying Tinman. To her mind the circumstances compelled her to embark
on the idea of doing so, and she saw the extremity in an extreme
distance, as those who are taking voyages may see death by drowning.
Still she had embarked.

"At all events, I have your word for it that you don't dislike me?" said
Herbert.

"Oh! no," she sighed. She liked him as emigrants the land they are
leaving.

"And you have not promised your hand?"

"No," she said, but sighed in thinking that if she could be induced to
promise it, there would not be a word of leaving England.

"Then, as you are not engaged, and don't hate me, I have a chance?" he
said, in the semi-wailful interrogative of an organ making a mere windy
conclusion.

Ocean sent up a tiny wave at their feet.

"A day like this in winter is rarer than a summer day," Herbert resumed
encouragingly.

Annette was replying, "People abuse our climate--"

But the thought of having to go out away from this climate in the
darkness of exile, with her father to suffer under it worse than herself,
overwhelmed her, and fetched the reality of her sorrow in the form of
Tinman swimming before her soul with the velocity of a telegraph-pole to
the window of the flying train. It was past as soon as seen, but it gave
her a desperate sensation of speed.

She began to feel that this was life in earnest.

And Herbert should have been more resolute, fierier. She needed a strong
will.

But he was not on the rapids of the masterful passion. For though going
at a certain pace, it was by his own impulsion; and I am afraid I must,
with many apologies, compare him to the skater--to the skater on easy,
slippery ice, be it understood; but he could perform gyrations as he
went, and he rather sailed along than dashed; he was careful of his
figuring. Some lovers, right honest lovers, never get beyond this quaint
skating-stage; and some ladies, a right goodly number in a foggy climate,
deceived by their occasional runs ahead, take them for vessels on the
very torrent of love. Let them take them, and let the race continue. Only
we perceive that they are skating; they are careering over a smooth icy
floor, and they can stop at a signal, with just half-a-yard of grating on
the heel at the outside. Ice, and not fire nor falling water, has been
their medium of progression.

Whether a man should unveil his own sex is quite another question. If we
are detected, not solely are we done for, but our love-tales too.
However, there is not much ground for anxiety on that head. Each member
of the other party is blind on her own account.

To Annette the figuring of Herbert was graceful, but it did not catch her
up and carry her; it hardly touched her: He spoke well enough to make her
sorry for him, and not warmly enough to make her forget her sorrow for
herself.

Herbert could obtain no explanation of the singularity of her conduct
from Annette, and he went straight to her father, who was nearly as
inexplicable for a time. At last he said:

"If you are ready to quit the country with us, you may have my consent."

"Why quit the country?" Herbert asked, in natural amazement.

Van Diemen declined to tell him.

But seeing the young man look stupefied and wretched he took a turn about
the room, and said: "I have n't robbed," and after more turns, "I have
n't murdered." He growled in his menagerie trot within the four walls.
"But I'm, in a man's power. Will that satisfy you? You'll tell me,
because I'm rich, to snap my fingers. I can't. I've got feelings. I'm in
his power to hurt me and disgrace me. It's the disgrace--to my disgrace I
say it--I dread most. You'd be up to my reason if you had ever served in
a regiment. I mean, discipline--if ever you'd known discipline--in the
police if you like--anything--anywhere where there's what we used to call
spiny de cor. I mean, at school. And I'm," said Van Diemen, "a rank idiot
double D. dolt, and flat as a pancake, and transparent as a pane of
glass. You see through me. Anybody could. I can't talk of my botheration
without betraying myself. What good am I among you sharp fellows in
England?"

Language of this kind, by virtue of its unintelligibility, set Mr.
Herbert Fellingham's acute speculations at work. He was obliged to lean
on Van Diemen's assertion, that he had not robbed and had not murdered,
to be comforted by the belief that he was not once a notorious
bushranger, or a defaulting manager of mines, or any other thing that is
naughtily Australian and kangarooly.

He sat at the dinner-table at Elba, eating like the rest of mankind, and
looking like a starved beggarman all the while.

Annette, in pity of his bewilderment, would have had her father take him
into their confidence. She suggested it covertly, and next she spoke of
it to him as a prudent measure, seeing that Mr. Fellingham might find out
his exact degree of liability. Van Diemen shouted; he betrayed himself in
his weakness as she could not have imagined him. He was ready to go, he
said--go on the spot, give up Elba, fly from Old England: what he could
not do was to let his countrymen know what he was, and live among them
afterwards. He declared that the fact had eternally been present to his
mind, devouring him; and Annette remembered his kindness to the
artillerymen posted along the shore westward of Crikswich, though she
could recall no sign of remorse. Van Diemen said: "We have to do with
Martin Tinman; that's one who has a hold on me, and one's enough. Leak
out my secret to a second fellow, you double my risks." He would not be
taught to see how the second might counteract the first. The singularity
of the action of his character on her position was, that though she knew
not a soul to whom she could unburden her wretchedness, and stood far
more isolated than in her Australian home, fever and chill struck her
blood in contemplation of the necessity of quitting England.

Deep, then, was her gratitude to dear good Mrs. Cavely for stepping in to
mediate between her father and Mr. Tinman. And well might she be amazed
to hear the origin of their recent dispute.

"It was," Mrs. Cavely said, "that Gippsland."

Annette cried: "What?"

"That Gippsland of yours, my dear. Your father will praise Gippsland
whenever my Martin asks him to admire the beauties of our neighbourhood.
Many a time has Martin come home to me complaining of it. We have no
doubt on earth that Gippsland is a very fine place; but my brother has
his idea's of dignity, you must know, and I only wish he had been more
used to contradiction, you may believe me. He is a lamb by nature. And,
as he says, 'Why underrate one's own country?' He cannot bear to hear
boasting. Well! I put it to you, dear Annette, is he so unimportant a
person? He asks to be respected, and especially by his dearest friend.
From that to blows! It's the way with men. They begin about trifles, they
drink, they quarrel, and one does what he is sorry for, and one says more
than he means. All my Martin desires is to shake your dear father's hand,
forgive and forget. To win your esteem, darling Annette, he would humble
himself in the dust. Will you not help me to bring these two dear old
friends together once more? It is unreasonable of your dear papa to go on
boasting of Gippsland if he is so fond of England, now is it not? My
brother is the offended party in the eye of the law. That is quite
certain. Do you suppose he dreams of taking advantage of it? He is
waiting at home to be told he may call on your father. Rank, dignity,
wounded feelings, is nothing to him in comparison with friendship."

Annette thought of the blow which had felled him, and spoke the truth of
her heart in saying, "He is very generous."

"You understand him." Mrs. Cavely pressed her hand. "We will both go to
your dear father. He may," she added, not without a gleam of feminine
archness, "praise Gippsland above the Himalayas to me. What my Martin so
much objected to was, the speaking of Gippsland at all when there was
mention of our Lake scenery. As for me, I know how men love to boast of
things nobody else has seen."

The two ladies went in company to Van Diemen, who allowed himself to be
melted. He was reserved nevertheless. His reception of Mr. Tinman
displeased his daughter. Annette attached the blackest importance to a
blow of the fist. In her mind it blazed fiendlike, and the man who
forgave it rose a step or two on the sublime. Especially did he do so
considering that he had it in his power to dismiss her father and herself
from bright beaming England before she had looked on all the cathedrals
and churches, the sea-shores and spots named in printed poetry, to say
nothing of the nobility.

"Papa, you were not so kind to Mr. Tinman as I could have hoped," said
Annette.

"Mart Tinman has me at his mercy, and he'll make me know it," her father
returned gloomily. "He may let me off with the Commander-in-chief. He'll
blast my reputation some day, though. I shall be hanging my head in
society, through him."

Van Diemen imitated the disconsolate appearance of a gallows body, in one
of those rapid flashes of spontaneous veri-similitude which spring of an
inborn horror painting itself on the outside.

"A Deserter!" he moaned.

He succeeded in impressing the terrible nature of the stigma upon
Annette's imagination.

The guest at Elba was busy in adding up the sum of his own impressions,
and dividing it by this and that new circumstance; for he was totally in
the dark. He was attracted by the mysterious interview of Mrs. Cavely and
Annette. Tinman's calling and departing set him upon new calculations.
Annette grew cold and visibly distressed by her consciousness of it.

She endeavoured to account for this variation of mood. "We have been
invited to dine at the house on the beach to-morrow. I would not have
accepted, but papa . . . we seemed to think it a duty. Of course the
invitation extends to you. We fancy you do not greatly enjoy dining
there. The table will be laid for you here, if you prefer."

Herbert preferred to try the skill of Mrs. Crickledon.

Now, for positive penetration the head prepossessed by a suspicion is
unmatched; for where there is no daylight; this one at least goes about
with a lantern. Herbert begged Mrs. Crickledon to cook a dinner for him,
and then to give the right colour to his absence from the table of Mr.
Tinman, he started for a winter day's walk over the downs as sharpening a
business as any young fellow, blunt or keen, may undertake; excellent for
men of the pen, whether they be creative, and produce, or slaughtering,
and review; good, then, for the silly sheep of letters and the butchers.
He sat down to Mrs. Crickledon's table at half-past six. She was, as she
had previously informed him, a forty-pound-a-year cook at the period of
her courting by Crickledon. That zealous and devoted husband had made his
first excursion inland to drop over the downs to the great house, and
fetch her away as his bride, on the death of her master, Sir Alfred
Pooney, who never would have parted with her in life; and every day of
that man's life he dirtied thirteen plates at dinner, nor more, nor less,
but exactly that number, as if he believed there was luck in it. And as
Crickledon said, it was odd. But it was always a pleasure to cook for
him. Mrs. Crickledon could not abide cooking for a mean eater. And when
Crickledon said he had never seen an acorn, he might have seen one had he
looked about him in the great park, under the oaks, on the day when he
came to be married.

"Then it's a standing compliment to you, Mrs. Crickledon, that he did
not," said Herbert.

He remarked with the sententiousness of enforced philosophy, that no wine
was better than bad wine.

Mrs. Crickledon spoke of a bottle left by her summer lodgers, who had
indeed left two, calling the wine invalid's wine; and she and her husband
had opened one on the anniversary of their marriage day in October. It
had the taste of doctor's shop, they both agreed; and as no friend of
theirs could be tempted beyond a sip, they were advised, because it was
called a tonic, to mix it with the pig-wash, so that it should not be
entirely lost, but benefit the constitution of the pig. Herbert sipped at
the remaining bottle, and finding himself in the superior society of an
old Manzanilla, refilled his glass.

"Nothing I knows of proves the difference between gentlefolks and poor
persons as tastes in wine," said Mrs. Crickledon, admiring him as she
brought in a dish of cutlets,--with Sir Alfred Pooney's favourite sauce
Soubise, wherein rightly onion should be delicate as the idea of love in
maidens' thoughts, albeit constituting the element of flavour. Something
of such a dictum Sir Alfred Pooney had imparted to his cook, and she
repeated it with the fresh elegance of, such sweet sayings when
transfused through the native mind:

"He said, I like as it was what you would call a young gal's blush at a
kiss round a corner."

The epicurean baronet had the habit of talking in that way.

Herbert drank to his memory. He was well-filled; he had no work to do,
and he was exuberant in spirits, as Mrs. Crickledon knew her countrymen
should and would be under those conditions. And suddenly he drew his hand
across a forehead so wrinkled and dark, that Mrs. Crickledon exclaimed,
"Heart or stomach?"

"Oh, no," said he. "I'm sound enough in both, I hope."

"That old Tinman's up to one of his games," she observed.

"Do you think so?"

"He's circumventing Miss Annette Smith."

"Pooh! Crickledon. A man of his age can't be seriously thinking of
proposing for a young lady."

He's a well-kept man. He's never racketed. He had n't the rackets in him.
And she may n't care for him. But we hear things drop."

"What things have you heard drop, Crickledon? In a profound silence you
may hear pins; in a hubbub you may hear cannon-balls. But I never believe
in eavesdropping gossip."

"He was heard to say to Mr. Smith," Crickledon pursued, and she lowered
her voice, "he was heard to say, it was when they were quarreling over
that chiwal, and they went at one another pretty hard before Mr. Smith
beat him and he sold Mr. Smith that meadow; he was heard to say, there
was worse than transportation for Mr. Smith if he but lifted his finger.
They Tinmans have awful tempers. His old mother died malignant, though
she was a saving woman, and never owed a penny to a Christian a hour
longer than it took to pay the money. And old Tinman's just such
another."

"Transportation!" Herbert ejaculated, "that's sheer nonsense, Crickledon.
I'm sure your husband would tell you so."

"It was my husband brought me the words," Mrs. Crickledon rejoined with
some triumph. "He did tell me, I own, to keep it shut: but my speaking to
you, a friend of Mr. Smith's, won't do no harm. He heard them under the
battery, over that chiwal glass: 'And you shall pay,' says Mr. Smith, and
'I sha'n't,' says old Tinman. Mr. Smith said he would have it if he had
to squeeze a deathbed confession from a sinner. Then old Tinman fires
out, 'You!' he says, 'you' and he stammered. 'Mr. Smith,' my husband said
and you never saw a man so shocked as my husband at being obliged to hear
them at one another Mr. Smith used the word damn. 'You may laugh, sir.'"

"You say it so capitally, Crickledon."

"And then old Tinman said, 'And a D. to you; and if I lift my finger,
it's Big D. on your back."

"And what did Mr. Smith say, then?"

"He said, like a man shot, my husband says he said, 'My God!'"

Herbert Fellingham jumped away from the table.

"You tell me, Crickledon, your husband actually heard that--just those
words?--the tones?"

"My husband says he heard him say, 'My God!' just like a poor man shot or
stabbed. You may speak to Crickledon, if you speaks to him alone, sir. I
say you ought to know. For I've noticed Mr. Smith since that day has
never looked to me the same easy-minded happy gentleman he was when we
first knew him. He would have had me go to cook for him at Elba, but
Crickledon thought I'd better be independent, and Mr. Smith said to me,
'Perhaps you're right, Crickledon, for who knows how long I may be among
you?'"

Herbert took the solace of tobacco in Crickledon's shop. Thence, with the
story confirmed to him, he sauntered toward the house on the beach.




CHAPTER VIII

The moon was over sea. Coasting vessels that had run into the bay for
shelter from the North wind lay with their shadows thrown shoreward on
the cold smooth water, almost to the verge of the beach, where there was
neither breath nor sound of wind, only the lisp at the pebbles.

Mrs. Crickledon's dinner and the state of his heart made young Fellingham
indifferent to a wintry atmosphere. It sufficed him that the night was
fair. He stretched himself on the shingle, thinking of the Manzanilla,
and Annette, and the fine flavour given to tobacco by a dry still air in
moonlight--thinking of his work, too, in the background, as far as mental
lassitude would allow of it. The idea of taking Annette to see his first
play at the theatre when it should be performed--was very soothing. The
beach rather looked like a stage, and the sea like a ghostly audience,
with, if you will, the broadside bulks of black sailing craft at anchor
for representatives of the newspaper piers. Annette was a nice girl; if a
little commonplace and low-born, yet sweet. What a subject he could make
of her father! "The Deserter" offered a new complication. Fellingham
rapidly sketched it in fancy--Van Diemen, as a Member of the Parliament
of Great Britain, led away from the House of Commons to be branded on the
bank! What a magnificent fall! We have so few intensely dramatic
positions in English real life that the meditative author grew enamoured
of this one, and laughed out a royal "Ha!" like a monarch reviewing his
well-appointed soldiery.

"There you are," said Van Diemen's voice; "I smelt your pipe. You're a
rum fellow, to belying out on the beach on a cold night. Lord! I don't
like you the worse for it. Twas for the romance of the moon in my young
days."

"Where is Annette?" said Fellingham, jumping to his feet.

"My daughter? She 's taking leave of her intended."

"What's that?" Fellingham gasped. "Good heavens, Mr. Smith, what do you
mean?"

"Pick up your pipe, my lad. Girls choose as they please, I suppose"

"Her intended, did you say, sir? What can that mean?"

"My dear good young fellow, don't make a fuss. We're all going to stay
here, and very glad to see you from time to time. The fact is, I oughtn't
to have quarrelled with Mart Tinman as I've done; I'm too peppery by
nature. The fact is, I struck him, and he forgave it. I could n't have
done that myself. And I believe I'm in for a headache to-morrow; upon my
soul, I do. Mart Tinman would champagne us; but, poor old boy, I struck
him, and I couldn't make amends--didn't see my way; and we joined hands
over the glass--to the deuce with the glass!--and the end of it is,
Netty--she did n't propose it, but as I'm in his--I say, as I had struck
him, she--it was rather solemn, if you had seen us--she burst into tears,
and there was Mrs. Cavely, and old Mart, and me as big a fool--if I'm not
a villain!"

Fellingham perceived a more than common effect of Tin man's wine. He
touched Van Diemen on the shoulder. "May I beg to hear exactly what has
happened?"

"Upon my soul, we're all going to live comfortably in Old England, and no
more quarreling and decamping," was the stupid rejoinder. "Except that I
did n't exactly--I think you said I exactly'?--I did n't bargain for old
Mart as my--but he's a sound man; Mart's my junior; he's rich. He's eco
. . . he's eco . . . you know--my Lord! where's my brains?--but he's
upright--'nomical!"

"An economical man," said Fellingham, with sedate impatience.

"My dear sir, I'm heartily obliged to you for your assistance," returned
Van Diemen. "Here she is."

Annette had come out of the gate in the flint wall. She started slightly
on seeing Herbert, whom she had taken for a coastguard, she said. He
bowed. He kept his head bent, peering at her intrusively.

"It's the air on champagne," Van Diemen said, calling on his lungs to
clear themselves and right him. "I was n't a bit queer in the house."

"The air on Tinman's champagne!" said Fellingham.

"It must be like the contact of two hostile chemical elements."

Annette walked faster.

They descended from the shingle to the scant-bladed grass-sweep running
round the salted town-refuse on toward Elba. Van Diemen sniffed,
ejaculating, "I'll be best man with Mart Tinman about this business!
You'll stop with us, Mr.----what's your Christian name? Stop with us as
long as you like. Old friends for me! The joke of it is that Nelson was
my man, and yet I went and enlisted in the cavalry. If you talk of
chemical substances, old Mart Tinman was a sneak who never cared a dump
for his country; and I'm not to speak a single sybbarel about that.....
over there . . . Australia . . . Gippsland! So down he went, clean over.
Very sorry for what we have done. Contrite. Penitent."

"Now we feel the wind a little," said Annette.

Fellingham murmured, "Allow me; your shawl is flying loose."

He laid his hands on her arms, and, pressing her in a tremble, said, "One
sign! It's not true? A word! Do you hate me?"

"Thank you very much, but I am not cold," she replied and linked herself
to her father.

Van Diemen immediately shouted, "For we are jolly boys! for we are jolly
boys! It's the air on the champagne. And hang me," said he, as they
entered the grounds of Elba, "if I don't walk over my property."

Annette interposed; she stood like a reed in his way.

"No! my Lord! I'll see what I sold you for!" he cried. "I'm an owner of
the soil of Old England, and care no more for the title of squire than
Napoleon Bonaparty. But I'll tell you what, Mr. Hubbard: your mother was
never so astonished at her dog as old Van Diemen would be to hear himself
called squire in Old England. And a convict he was, for he did wrong
once, but he worked his redemption. And the smell of my own property
makes me feel my legs again. And I'll tell you what, Mr. Hubbard, as
Netty calls you when she speaks of you in private: Mart Tinman's ideas of
wine are pretty much like his ideas of healthy smells, and when I'm
bailiff of Crikswich, mind, he'll find two to one against him in our town
council. I love my country, but hang me if I don't purify it--"

Saying this, with the excitement of a high resolve a upon him, Van Diemen
bored through a shrubbery-brake, and Fellingham said to Annette:

"Have I lost you?"

"I belong to my father," said she, contracting and disengaging her
feminine garments to step after him in the cold silver-spotted dusk of
the winter woods.

Van Diemen came out on a fish-pond.

"Here you are, young ones!" he said to the pair. "This way, Fellowman.
I'm clearer now, and it's my belief I've been talking nonsense. I'm
puffed up with money, and have n't the heart I once had. I say,
Fellowman, Fellowbird, Hubbard--what's your right name?--fancy an old
carp fished out of that pond and flung into the sea. That's exile! And if
the girl don't mind, what does it matter?"

"Mr. Herbert Fellingham, I think, would like to go to bed, papa," said
Annette.

"Miss Smith must be getting cold," Fellingham hinted.

"Bounce away indoors," replied Van Diemen, and he led them like a bull.

Annette was disinclined to leave them together in the smoking-room, and
under the pretext of wishing to see her father to bed she remained with
them, though there was a novel directness and heat of tone in Herbert
that alarmed her, and with reason. He divined in hideous outlines what
had happened. He was no longer figuring on easy ice, but desperate at the
prospect of a loss to himself, and a fate for Annette, that tossed him
from repulsion to incredulity, and so back.

Van Diemen begged him to light his pipe.

"I'm off to London to-morrow," said Fellingham. "I don't want to go, for
very particular reasons; I may be of more use there. I have a cousin
who's a General officer in the army, and if I have your permission--you
see, anything's better, as it seems to me, than that you should depend
for peace and comfort on one man's tongue not wagging, especially when he
is not the best of tempers if I have your permission--without mentioning
names, of course--I'll consult him."

There was a dead silence.

"You know you may trust me, sir. I love your daughter with all my heart.
Your honour and your interests are mine."

Van Diemen struggled for composure.

"Netty, what have you been at?" he said.

"It is untrue, papa!" she answered the unworded accusation.

"Annette has told me nothing, sir. I have heard it. You must brace your
mind to the fact that it is known. What is known to Mr. Tinman is pretty
sure to be known generally at the next disagreement."

"That scoundrel Mart!" Van Diemen muttered.

"I am positive Mr. Tinman did not speak of you, papa," said Annette, and
turned her eyes from the half-paralyzed figure of her father on Herbert
to put him to proof.

"No, but he made himself heard when it was being discussed. At any rate,
it's known; and the thing to do is to meet it."

"I'm off. I'll not stop a day. I'd rather live on the Continent," said
Van Diemen, shaking himself, as to prepare for the step into that desert.

"Mr. Tinman has been most generous!" Annette protested tearfully.

"I won't say no: I think you are deceived and lend him your own
generosity," said Herbert. "Can you suppose it generous, that even in the
extremest case, he should speak of the matter to your father, and talk of
denouncing him? He did it."

"He was provoked."

"A gentleman is distinguished by his not allowing himself to be
provoked."

"I am engaged to him, and I cannot hear it said that he is not a
gentleman."

The first part of her sentence Annette uttered bravely; at the conclusion
she broke down. She wished Herbert to be aware of the truth, that he
might stay his attacks on Mr. Tinman; and she believed he had only been
guessing the circumstances in which her father was placed; but the
comparison between her two suitors forced itself on her now, when the
younger one spoke in a manner so self-contained, brief, and full of
feeling.

She had to leave the room weeping.

"Has your daughter engaged herself, sir?" said Herbert.

"Talk to me to-morrow; don't give us up if she has we were trapped, it's
my opinion," said Van Diemen. "There's the devil in that wine of--Mart
Tinman's. I feel it still, and in the morning it'll be worse. What can
she see in him? I must quit the country; carry her off. How he did it, I
don't know. It was that woman, the widow, the fellow's sister. She talked
till she piped her eye--talked about our lasting union. On my soul, I
believe I egged Netty on! I was in a mollified way with that wine; all of
a sudden the woman joins their hands! And I--a man of spirit will despise
me!--what I thought of was, 'now my secret's safe!' You've sobered me,
young sir. I see myself, if that's being sober. I don't ask your opinion
of me; I am a deserter, false to my colours, a breaker of his oath. Only
mark this: I was married, and a common trooper, married to a handsome
young woman, true as steel; but she was handsome, and we were starvation
poor, and she had to endure persecution from an officer day by day. Bear
that situation in your mind. . . . Providence dropped me a hundred pounds
out of the sky. Properly speaking, it popped up out of the earth, for I
reaped it, you may say, from a relative's grave. Rich and poor 's all
right, if I'm rich and you're poor; and you may be happy though you're
poor; but where there are many poor young women, lots of rich men are a
terrible temptation to them. That's my dear good wife speaking, and had
she been spared to me I never should have come back to Old England, and
heart's delight and heartache I should not have known. She was my
backbone, she was my breast-comforter too. Why did she stick to me?
Because I had faith in her when appearances were against her. But she
never forgave this country the hurt to her woman's pride. You'll have
noticed a squarish jaw in Netty. That's her mother. And I shall have to
encounter it, supposing I find Mart Tinman has been playing me false. I'm
blown on somehow. I'll think of what course I'll take 'twixt now and
morning. Good night, young gentleman."

"Good night; sir," said Herbert, adding, "I will get information from the
Horse Guards; as for the people knowing it about here, you're not living
much in society--"

"It's not other people's feelings, it's my own," Van Diemen silenced him.
"I feel it, if it's in the wind; ever since Mart Tinman spoke the thing
out, I've felt on my skin cold and hot."

He flourished his lighted candle and went to bed, manifestly solaced by
the idea that he was the victim of his own feelings.

Herbert could not sleep. Annette's monstrous choice of Tinman in
preference to himself constantly assailed and shook his understanding.
There was the "squarish jaw" mentioned by her father to think of. It
filled him with a vague apprehension, but he was unable to imagine that a
young girl, and an English girl, and an enthusiastic young English girl,
could be devoid of sentiment; and presuming her to have it, as one must,
there was no fear, that she would persist in her loathsome choice when
she knew her father was against it.




CHAPTER IX

Annette did not shun him next morning. She did not shun the subject,
either. But she had been exact in arranging that she should not be more
than a few minutes downstairs before her father. Herbert found, that
compared with her, girls of sentiment are commonplace indeed. She had
conceived an insane idea of nobility in Tinman that blinded her to his
face, figure, and character--his manners, likewise. He had forgiven a
blow!

Silly as the delusion might be, it clothed her in whimsical
attractiveness.

It was a beauty in her to dwell so firmly upon moral quality. Overthrown
and stunned as he was, and reduced to helplessness by her brief and
positive replies, Herbert was obliged to admire the singular young lady,
who spoke, without much shyness, of her incongruous, destined mate though
his admiration had an edge cutting like irony. While in the turn for
candour, she ought to have told him, that previous to her decision she
had weighed the case of the diverse claims of himself and Tinman, and
resolved them according to her predilection for the peaceful residence of
her father and herself in England. This she had done a little
regretfully, because of the natural sympathy of the young girl
for the younger man. But the younger man had seemed to her
seriously-straightforward mind too light and airy in his wooing, like one
of her waltzing officers--very well so long as she stepped the measure
with him, and not forcible enough to take her off her feet. He had
changed, and now that he had become persuasive, she feared he would
disturb the serenity with which she desired and strove to contemplate her
decision. Tinman's magnanimity was present in her imagination to sustain
her, though she was aware that Mrs. Cavely had surprised her will, and
caused it to surrender unconsulted by her wiser intelligence.

"I cannot listen to you," she said to Herbert, after listening longer
than was prudent. "If what you say of papa is true, I do not think he
will remain in Crikswich, or even in England. But I am sure the old
friend we used, to speak of so much in Australia has not wilfully
betrayed him."

Herbert would have had to say, "Look on us two!" to proceed in his
baffled wooing; and the very ludicrousness of the contrast led him to see
the folly and shame of proposing it.

Van Diemen came down to breakfast looking haggard and restless. "I have
'nt had my morning's walk--I can't go out to be hooted," he said, calling
to his daughter for tea, and strong tea; and explaining to Herbert that
he knew it to be bad for the nerves, but it was an antidote to bad
champagne.

Mr. Herbert Fellingham had previously received an invitation on behalf of
a sister of his to Crikswich. A dull sense of genuine sagacity inspired
him to remind Annette of it. She wrote prettily to Miss Mary Fellingham,
and Herbert had some faint joy in carrying away the letter of her
handwriting.

"Fetch her soon, for we sha'n't be here long," Van Diemen said to him at
parting. He expressed a certain dread of his next meeting with Mart
Tinman.

Herbert speedily brought Mary Fellingham to Elba, and left her there. The
situation was apparently unaltered. Van Diemen looked worn, like a man
who has been feeding mainly on his reflections, which was manifest in his
few melancholy bits of speech. He said to Herbert: "How you feel a thing
when you are found out!" and, "It doesn't do for a man with a heart to do
wrong!" He designated the two principal roads by which poor sinners come
to a conscience. His own would have slumbered but for discovery; and, as
he remarked, if it had not been for his heart leading him to Tinman, he
would not have fallen into that man's power.

The arrival of a young lady of fashionable appearance at Elba was matter
of cogitation to Mrs. Cavely. She was disposed to suspect that it meant
something, and Van Diemen's behaviour to her brother would of itself have
fortified any suspicion. He did not call at the house on the beach, he
did not invite Martin to dinner, he was rarely seen, and when he appeared
at the Town Council he once or twice violently opposed his friend Martin,
who came home ruffled, deeply offended in his interests and his dignity.

"Have you noticed any difference in Annette's treatment of you, dear?"
Mrs. Cavely inquired.

"No," said Tinman; "none. She shakes hands. She asks after my health. She
offers me my cup of tea."

"I have seen all that. But does she avoid privacy with you?"

"Dear me, no! Why should she? I hope, Martha, I am a man who may be
confided in by any young lady in England."

"I am sure you may, dear Martin."

"She has an objection to name the . . . the day," said Martin. "I have
informed her that I have an objection to long engagements. I don't like
her new companion: She says she has been presented at Court. I greatly
doubt it."

"It's to give herself a style, you may depend. I don't believe her!"
exclaimed Mrs. Cavely, with sharp personal asperity.

Brother and sister examined together the Court Guide they had purchased
on the occasion at once of their largest outlay and most thrilling
gratification; in it they certainly found the name of General Fellingham.
"But he can't be related to a newspaper-writer," said Mrs. Cavely.

To which her brother rejoined, "Unless the young man turned scamp. I hate
unproductive professions."

"I hate him, Martin." Mrs. Cavely laughed in scorn, "I should say, I pity
him. It's as clear to me as the sun at noonday, he wanted Annette. That's
why I was in a hurry. How I dreaded he would come that evening to our
dinner! When I saw him absent, I could have cried out it was Providence!
And so be careful--we have had everything done for us from on High as
yet--but be careful of your temper, dear Martin. I will hasten on the
union; for it's a shame of a girl to drag a man behind her till he 's old
at the altar. Temper, dear, if you will only think of it, is the weak
point."

"Now he has begun boasting to me of his Australian wines!" Tinman
ejaculated.

"Bear it. Bear it as you do Gippsland. My dear, you have the retort in
your heart:--Yes! but have you a Court in Australia?"

"Ha! and his Australian wines cost twice the amount I pay for mine!"

"Quite true. We are not obliged to buy them, I should hope. I would,
though--a dozen--if I thought it necessary, to keep him quiet."

Tinman continued muttering angrily over the Australian wines, with a word
of irritation at Gippsland, while promising to be watchful of his temper.

"What good is Australia to us," he asked, "if it does n't bring us
money?"

"It's going to, my dear," said Mrs. Cavely. "Think of that when he begins
boasting his Australia. And though it's convict's money, as he
confesses--"

"With his convict's money!" Tinman interjected tremblingly. "How long am
I expected to wait?"

"Rely on me to hurry on the day," said Mrs. Cavely. "There is no other
annoyance?"

"Wherever I am going to buy, that man outbids me and then says it's the
old country's want of pluck and dash, and doing things large-handed! A
man who'd go on his knees to stop in England!" Tinman vociferated in a
breath; and fairly reddened by the effort: "He may have to do it yet. I
can't stand insult."

"You are less able to stand insult after Honours," his sister said, in
obedience to what she had observed of him since his famous visit to
London. "It must be so, in nature. But temper is everything just now.
Remember, it was by command of temper, and letting her father put himself
in the wrong, you got hold of Annette. And I would abstain even from
wine. For sometimes after it, you have owned it disagreed. And I have
noticed these eruptions between you and Mr. Smith--as he calls
himself--generally after wine."

"Always the poor! the poor! money for the poor!" Tinman harped on further
grievances against Van Diemen. "I say doctors have said the drain on the
common is healthy; it's a healthy smell, nourishing. We've always had it
and been a healthy town. But the sea encroaches, and I say my house and
my property is in danger. He buys my house over my head, and offers me
the Crouch to live in at an advanced rent. And then he sells me my house
at an advanced price, and I buy, and then he votes against a penny for
the protection of the shore! And we're in Winter again! As if he was not
in my power!"

"My dear Martin, to Elba we go, and soon, if you will govern your
temper," said Mrs. Cavely. "You're an angel to let me speak of it so, and
it's only that man that irritates you. I call him sinfully ostentatious."

"I could blow him from a gun if I spoke out, and he knows it! He's
wanting in common gratitude, let alone respect," Tinman snorted.

"But he has a daughter, my dear."

Tinman slowly and crackingly subsided.

His main grievance against Van Diemen was the non-recognition of his
importance by that uncultured Australian, who did not seem to be
conscious of the dignities and distinctions we come to in our country.
The moneyed daughter, the prospective marriage, for an economical man
rejected by every lady surrounding him, advised him to lock up his temper
in submission to Martha.

"Bring Annette to dine with us," he said, on Martha's proposing a visit
to the dear young creature.

Martha drank a glass of her brother's wine at lunch, and departed on the
mission.

Annette declined to be brought. Her excuse was her guest, Miss
Fellingham.

"Bring her too, by all means--if you'll condescend, I am sure," Mrs.
Cavely said to Mary.

"I am much obliged to you; I do not dine out at present," said the London
lady.

"Dear me! are you ill?"

"No."

"Nothing in the family, I hope?"

"My family?"

"I am sure, I beg pardon," said Mrs. Cavely, bridling with a spite
pardonable by the severest moralist.

"Can I speak to you alone?" she addressed Annette.

Miss Fellingham rose.

Mrs. Cavely confronted her. "I can't allow it; I can't think of it. I'm
only taking a little liberty with one I may call my future
sister-in-law."

"Shall I come out with you?" said Annette, in sheer lassitude assisting
Mary Fellingham in her scheme to show the distastefulness of this lady
and her brother.

"Not if you don't wish to."

"I have no objection."

"Another time will do."

"Will you write?"

"By post indeed!"

Mrs. Cavely delivered a laugh supposed to, be peculiar to the English
stage.

"It would be a penny thrown away," said Annette. "I thought you could
send a messenger."

Intercommunication with Miss Fellingham had done mischief to her high
moral conception of the pair inhabiting the house on the beach. Mrs.
Cavely saw it, and could not conceal that she smarted.

Her counsel to her brother, after recounting the offensive scene to him
in animated dialogue, was, to give Van Diemen a fright.

"I wish I had not drunk that glass of sherry before starting," she
exclaimed, both savagely and sagely. "It's best after business. And these
gentlemen's habits of yours of taking to dining late upset me. I'm afraid
I showed temper; but you, Martin, would not have borne one-tenth of what
I did."

"How dare you say so!" her brother rebuked her indignantly; and the house
on the beach enclosed with difficulty a storm between brother and sister,
happily not heard outside, because of loud winds raging.

Nevertheless Tinman pondered on Martha's idea of the wisdom of giving Van
Diemen a fright.




CHAPTER X

The English have been called a bad-tempered people, but this is to judge
of them by their manifestations; whereas an examination into causes might
prove them to be no worse tempered than that man is a bad sleeper who
lies in a biting bed. If a sagacious instinct directs them to
discountenance realistic tales, the realistic tale should justify its
appearance by the discovery of an apology for the tormented souls. Once
they sang madrigals, once they danced on the green, they revelled in
their lusty humours, without having recourse to the pun for fun, an
exhibition of hundreds of bare legs for jollity, a sentimental wailing
all in the throat for music. Evidence is procurable that they have been
an artificially-reared people, feeding on the genius of inventors,
transposers, adulterators, instead of the products of nature, for the
last half century; and it is unfair to affirm of them that they are
positively this or that. They are experiments. They are the sons and
victims of a desperate Energy, alluring by cheapness, satiating with
quantity, that it may mount in the social scale, at the expense of their
tissues. The land is in a state of fermentation to mount, and the shop,
which has shot half their stars to their social zenith, is what verily
they would scald themselves to wash themselves free of. Nor is it in any
degree a reprehensible sign that they should fly as from hue and cry the
title of tradesman. It is on the contrary the spot of sanity, which bids
us right cordially hope. Energy, transferred to the moral sense, may
clear them yet.

Meanwhile this beer, this wine, both are of a character to have killed
more than the tempers of a less gifted people. Martin Tinman invited Van
Diemen Smith to try the flavour of a wine that, as he said, he thought of
"laying down."

It has been hinted before of a strange effect upon the minds of men who
knew what they were going to, when they received an invitation to dine
with Tinman. For the sake of a little social meeting at any cost, they
accepted it; accepted it with a sigh, midway as by engineering
measurement between prospective and retrospective; as nearly mechanical
as things human may be, like the Mussulman's accustomed cry of Kismet.
Has it not been related of the little Jew babe sucking at its mother's
breast in Jerusalem, that this innocent, long after the Captivity, would
start convulsively, relinquishing its feast, and indulging in the purest.
Hebrew lamentation of the most tenacious of races, at the passing sound
of a Babylonian or a Ninevite voice? In some such manner did men, unable
to refuse, deep in what remained to them of nature, listen to Tinman; and
so did Van Diemen, sighing heavily under the operation of simple animal
instinct.

"You seem miserable," said Tinman, not oblivious of his design to give
his friend a fright.

"Do I? No, I'm all right," Van Diemen replied. "I'm thinking of
alterations at the Hall before Summer, to accommodate guests--if I stay
here."

"I suppose you would not like to be separated from Annette."

"Separated? No, I should think I shouldn't. Who'd do it?"

"Because I should not like to leave my good sister Martha all to herself
in a house so near the sea--"

"Why not go to the Crouch, man?"

"Thank you."

"No thanks needed if you don't take advantage of the offer."

They were at the entrance to Elba, whither Mr. Tinman was betaking
himself to see his intended. He asked if Annette was at home, and to his
great stupefaction heard that she had gone to London for a week.

Dissembling the spite aroused within him, he postponed his very strongly
fortified design, and said, "You must be lonely."

Van Diemen informed him that it would be for a night only, as young
Fellingham was coming down to keep him company.

"At six o'clock this evening, then," said Tinman. "We're not fashionable
in Winter."

"Hang me, if I know when ever we were!" Van Diemen rejoined.

"Come, though, you'd like to be. You've got your ambition, Philip, like
other men."

"Respectable and respected--that 's my ambition, Mr. Mart."

Tinman simpered: "With your wealth!"

"Ay, I 'm rich--for a contented mind."

"I 'm pretty sure you 'll approve my new vintage," said Tinman. "It's
direct from Oporto, my wine-merchant tells me, on his word."

"What's the price?"

"No, no, no. Try it first. It's rather a stiff price."

Van Diemen was partially reassured by the announcement. "What do you call
a stiff price?"

"Well!--over thirty."

"Double that, and you may have a chance."

"Now," cried Tinman, exasperated, "how can a man from Australia know
anything about prices for port? You can't divest your ideas of diggers'
prices. You're like an intoxicating drink yourself on the tradesmen of
our town. You think it fine--ha! ha! I daresay, Philip, I should be doing
the same if I were up to your mark at my banker's. We can't all of us be
lords, nor baronets."

Catching up his temper thus cleverly, he curbed that habitual runaway,
and retired from his old friend's presence to explode in the society of
the solitary Martha.

Annette's behaviour was as bitterly criticized by the sister as by the
brother.

"She has gone to those Fellingham people; and she may be thinking of
jilting us," Mrs. Cavely said.

"In that case, I have no mercy," cried her brother. "I have borne"--he
bowed with a professional spiritual humility--"as I should, but it may
get past endurance. I say I have borne enough; and if the worst comes to
the worst, and I hand him over to the authorities--I say I mean him no
harm, but he has struck me. He beat me as a boy and he has struck me as a
man, and I say I have no thought of revenge, but I cannot have him here;
and I say if I drive him out of the country back to his Gippsland!"

Martin Tinman quivered for speech, probably for that which feedeth
speech, as is the way with angry men.

"And what?--what then?" said Martha, with the tender mellifluousness of
sisterly reproach. "What good can you expect of letting temper get the
better of you, dear?"

Tinman did not enjoy her recent turn for usurping the lead in their
consultations, and he said, tartly, "This good, Martha. We shall get the
Hall at my price, and be Head People here. Which," he raised his note,
"which he, a Deserter, has no right to pretend to give himself out to be.
What your feelings may be as an old inhabitant, I don't know, but I have
always looked up to the people at Elba Hall, and I say I don't like to
have a Deserter squandering convict's money there--with his
forty-pound-a-year cook, and his champagne at seventy a dozen. It's the
luxury of Sodom and Gomorrah."

"That does not prevent its being very nice to dine there," said Mrs.
Cavely; "and it shall be our table for good if I have any management."

"You mean me, ma'am," bellowed Tinman.

"Not at all," she breathed, in dulcet contrast. "You are good-looking,
Martin, but you have not half such pretty eyes as the person I mean. I
never ventured to dream of managing you, Martin. I am thinking of the
people at Elba."

"But why this extraordinary treatment of me, Martha?"

"She's a child, having her head turned by those Fellinghams. But she's
honourable; she has sworn to me she would be honourable."

"You do think I may as well give him a fright?" Tinman inquired hungrily.

"A sort of hint; but very gentle, Martin. Do be gentle--casual like--as
if you did n't want to say it. Get him on his Gippsland. Then if he
brings you to words, you can always laugh back, and say you will go to
Kew and see the Fernery, and fancy all that, so high, on Helvellyn or the
Downs. Why"--Mrs. Cavely, at the end of her astute advices and
cautionings, as usual, gave loose to her natural character--"Why that man
came back to England at all, with his boastings of Gippsland, I can't for
the life of me find out. It 's a perfect mystery."

"It is," Tinman sounded his voice at a great depth, reflectively. Glad of
taking the part she was perpetually assuming of late, he put out his hand
and said: "But it may have been ordained for our good, Martha."

"True, dear," said she, with an earnest sentiment of thankfulness to the
Power which had led him round to her way of thinking and feeling.




CHAPTER XI

Annette had gone to the big metropolis, which burns in colonial
imaginations as the sun of cities, and was about to see something of
London, under the excellent auspices of her new friend, Mary Fellingham,
and a dense fog. She was alarmed by the darkness, a little in fear, too,
of Herbert; and these feelings caused her to chide herself for leaving
her father.

Hearing her speak of her father sadly, Herbert kindly proposed to go down
to Crikswich on the very day of her coming. She thanked him, and gave him
a taste of bitterness by smiling favourably on his offer; but as he
wished her to discern and take to heart the difference between one man
and another, in the light of a suitor, he let her perceive that it cost
him heavy pangs to depart immediately, and left her to brood on his
example. Mary Fellingham liked Annette. She thought her a sensible girl
of uncultivated sensibilities, the reverse of thousands; not commonplace,
therefore; and that the sensibilities were expanding was to be seen in
her gradual unreadiness to talk of her engagement to Mr. Tinman, though
her intimacy with Mary warmed daily. She considered she was bound to
marry the man at some distant date, and did not feel unhappiness yet. She
had only felt uneasy when she had to greet and converse with her
intended; especially when the London young lady had been present.
Herbert's departure relieved her of the pressing sense of contrast. She
praised him to Mary for his extreme kindness to her father, and down in
her unsounded heart desired that her father might appreciate it even more
than she did.

Herbert drove into Crikswich at night, and stopped at Crickledon's, where
he heard that Van Diemen was dining with Tinman.

Crickledon the carpenter permitted certain dry curves to play round his
lips like miniature shavings at the name of Tinman; but Herbert asked,
"What is it now?" in vain, and he went to Crickledon the cook.

This union of the two Crickledons, male and female; was an ideal one,
such as poor women dream of; and men would do the same, if they knew how
poor they are. Each had a profession, each was independent of the other,
each supported the fabric. Consequently there was mutual respect, as
between two pillars of a house. Each saw the other's faults with a sly
wink to the world, and an occasional interchange of sarcasm that was
tonic, very strengthening to the wits without endangering the habit of
affection. Crickledon the cook stood for her own opinions, and directed
the public conduct of Crickledon the carpenter; and if he went astray
from the line she marked out, she put it down to human nature, to which
she was tolerant. He, when she had not followed his advice, ascribed it
to the nature of women. She never said she was the equal of her husband;
but the carpenter proudly acknowledged that she was as good as a man, and
he bore with foibles derogatory to such high stature, by teaching himself
to observe a neatness of domestic and general management that told him he
certainly was not as good as a woman. Herbert delighted in them. The cook
regaled the carpenter with skilful, tasty, and economic dishes; and the
carpenter, obedient to her supplications, had promised, in the event of
his outliving her, that no hands but his should have the making of her
coffin. "It is so nice," she said, "to think one's own husband will put
together the box you are to lie in, of his own make!" Had they been even
a doubtfully united pair, the cook's anticipation of a comfortable
coffin, the work of the best carpenter in England, would have kept them
together; and that which fine cookery does for the cementing of couples
needs not to be recounted to those who have read a chapter or two of the
natural history of the male sex.

"Crickledon, my dear soul, your husband is labouring with a bit of fun,"
Herbert said to her.

"He would n't laugh loud at Punch, for fear of an action," she replied.
"He never laughs out till he gets to bed, and has locked the door; and
when he does he says 'Hush!' to me. Tinman is n't bailiff again just yet,
and where he has his bailiff's best Court suit from, you may ask. He
exercises in it off and on all the week, at night, and sometimes in the
middle of the day."

Herbert rallied her for her gossip's credulity.

"It's truth," she declared. "I have it from the maid of the house, little
Jane, whom he pays four pound a year for all the work of the house: a
clever little thing with her hands and her head she is; and can read and
write beautiful; and she's a mind to leave 'em if they don't advance her.
She knocked and went in while he was full blaze, and bowing his poll to
his glass. And now he turns the key, and a child might know he was at
it."

"He can't be such a donkey!"

"And he's been seen at the window on the seaside. 'Who's your Admiral
staying at the house on the beach?' men have inquired as they come
ashore. My husband has heard it. Tinman's got it on his brain. He might
be cured by marriage to a sound-headed woman, but he 'll soon be wanting
to walk about in silk legs if he stops a bachelor. They tell me his old
mother here had a dress value twenty pound; and pomp's inherited. Save as
he may, there's his leak."

Herbert's contempt for Tinman was intense; it was that of the young and
ignorant who live in their imaginations like spendthrifts, unaware of the
importance of them as the food of life, and of how necessary it is to
seize upon the solider one among them for perpetual sustenance when the
unsubstantial are vanishing. The great event of his bailiff's term of
office had become the sun of Tinman's system. He basked in its rays. He
meant to be again the proud official, royally distinguished; meantime,
though he knew not that his days were dull, he groaned under the dulness;
and, as cart or cab horses, uncomplaining as a rule, show their view of
the nature of harness when they have release to frisk in a field, it is
possible that existence was made tolerable to the jogging man by some
minutes of excitement in his bailiff's Court suit. Really to pasture on
our recollections we ought to dramatize them. There is, however, only the
testimony of a maid and a mariner to show that Tinman did it, and those
are witnesses coming of particularly long-bow classes, given to magnify
small items of fact.

On reaching the hall Herbert found the fire alight in the smoking-room,
and soon after settling himself there he heard Van Diemen's voice at the
hall-door saying good night to Tinman.

"Thank the Lord! there you are," said Van Diemen, entering the room. "I
couldn't have hoped so much. That rascal!" he turned round to the door.
"He has been threatening me, and then smoothing me. Hang his oil! It's
combustible. And hang the port he's for laying down, as he calls it.
'Leave it to posterity,' says I. 'Why?' says he. 'Because the young ones
'll be better able to take care of themselves,' says I, and he insists on
an explanation. I gave it to him. Out he bursts like a wasp's nest. He
may have said what he did say in temper. He seemed sorry afterwards--poor
old Mart! The scoundrel talked of Horse Guards and telegraph wires."

"Scoundrel, but more ninny," said Herbert, full of his contempt. "Dare
him to do his worst. The General tells me they 'd be glad to overlook it
at the Guards, even if they had all the facts. Branding 's out of the
question."

"I swear it was done in my time," cried Van Diemen, all on fire.

"It's out of the question. You might be advised to leave England for a
few months. As for the society here--"

"If I leave, I leave for good. My heart's broken. I'm disappointed. I'm
deceived in my friend. He and I in the old days! What's come to him? What
on earth is it changes men who stop in England so? It can't be the
climate. And did you mention my name to General Fellingham?"

"Certainly not," said Herbert. "But listen to me, sir, a moment. Why not
get together half-a-dozen friends of the neighbourhood, and make a clean
breast of it. Englishmen like that kind of manliness, and they are sure
to ring sound to it."

"I couldn't!" Van Diemen sighed. "It's not a natural feeling I have about
it--I 've brooded on the word. If I have a nightmare, I see Deserter
written in sulphur on the black wall."

"You can't remain at his mercy, and be bullied as you are. He makes you
ill, sir. He won't do anything, but he'll go on worrying you. I'd stop
him at once. I'd take the train to-morrow and get an introduction to the
Commander-in-Chief. He's the very man to be kind to you in a situation
like this. The General would get you the introduction."

"That's more to my taste; but no, I couldn't," Van Diemen moaned in his
weakness. "Money has unmanned me. I was n't this kind of man formerly;
nor more was Mart Tinman, the traitor! All the world seems changeing for
the worse, and England is n't what she used to be."

"You let that man spoil it for you, sir." Herbert related Mrs.
Crickledon's tale of Mr. Tinman, adding, "He's an utter donkey. I should
defy him. What I should do would be to let him know to-morrow morning
that you don't intend to see him again. Blow for, blow, is the thing he
requires. He'll be cringing to you in a week."

"And you'd like to marry Annette," said Van Diemen, relishing,
nevertheless, the advice, whose origin and object he perceived so
plainly.

"Of course I should," said Herbert, franker still in his colour than his
speech.

"I don't see him my girl's husband." Van Diemen eyed the red hollow in
the falling coals. "When I came first, and found him a healthy man,
good-looking enough for a trifle over forty, I 'd have given her gladly,
she nodding Yes. Now all my fear is she's in earnest. Upon my soul, I had
the notion old Mart was a sort of a boy still; playing man, you know. But
how can you understand? I fancied his airs and stiffness were put on;
thought I saw him burning true behind it. Who can tell? He seems to be
jealous of my buying property in his native town. Something frets him. I
ought never to have struck him! There's my error, and I repent it. Strike
a friend! I wonder he didn't go off to the Horse Guards at once. I might
have done it in his place, if I found I couldn't lick him. I should have
tried kicking first."

"Yes, shinning before peaching," said Herbert, astonished almost as much
as he was disgusted by the inveterate sentimental attachment of Van
Diemen to his old friend.

Martin Tinman anticipated good things of the fright he had given the man
after dinner. He had, undoubtedly, yielded to temper, forgetting pure
policy, which it is so exceeding difficult to practice. But he had
soothed the startled beast; they had shaken hands at parting, and Tinman
hoped that the week of Annette's absence would enable him to mould her
father. Young Fellingham's appointment to come to Elba had slipped Mr.
Tinman's memory. It was annoying to see this intruder. "At all events,
he's not with Annette," said Mrs. Cavely. "How long has her father to run
on?"

"Five months," Tinman replied. "He would have completed his term of
service in five months."

"And to think of his being a rich man because he deserted," Mrs. Cavely
interjected. "Oh! I do call it immoral. He ought to be apprehended and
punished, to be an example for the good of society. If you lose time, my
dear Martin, your chance is gone. He's wriggling now. And if I could
believe he talked us over to that young impudent, who has n't a penny
that he does n't get from his pen, I'd say, denounce him to-morrow. I
long for Elba. I hate this house. It will be swallowed up some day; I
know it; I have dreamt it. Elba at any cost. Depend upon it, Martin, you
have been foiled in your suits on account of the mean house you inhabit.
Enter Elba as that girl's husband, or go there to own it, and girls will
crawl to you."

"You are a ridiculous woman, Martha," said Tinman, not dissenting.

The mixture of an idea of public duty with a feeling of personal rancour
is a strong incentive to the pursuit of a stern line of conduct; and the
glimmer of self-interest superadded does not check the steps of the
moralist. Nevertheless, Tinman held himself in. He loved peace. He
preached it, he disseminated it. At a meeting in the town he strove to
win Van Diemen's voice in favour of a vote for further moneys to protect
"our shores." Van Diemen laughed at him, telling him he wanted a
battery. "No," said Tinman, "I've had enough to do with soldiers."

"How's that?"

"They might be more cautious. I say, they might learn to know their
friends from their enemies."

"That's it, that's it," said Van Diemen. "If you say much more, my
hearty, you'll find me bidding against you next week for Marine Parade
and Belle Vue Terrace. I've a cute eye for property, and this town's
looking up."

"You look about you before you speculate in land and house property
here," retorted Tinman.

Van Diemen bore so much from him that he asked himself whether he could
be an Englishman. The title of Deserter was his raw wound. He attempted
to form the habit of stigmatizing himself with it in the privacy of his
chamber, and he succeeded in establishing the habit of talking to
himself, so that he was heard by the household, and Annette, on her
return, was obliged to warn him of his indiscretion. This development of
a new weakness exasperated him. Rather to prove his courage by defiance
than to baffle Tinman's ambition to become the principal owner of houses
in Crikswich, by outbidding him at the auction for the sale of Marine
Parade and Belle Vue Terrace, Van Diemen ran the houses up at the
auction, and ultimately had Belle Vue knocked down to him. So fierce was
the quarrel that Annette, in conjunction with Mrs. Cavely; was called on
to interpose with her sweetest grace. "My native place," Tinman said to
her; "it is my native place. I have a pride in it; I desire to own
property in it, and your father opposes me. He opposes me. Then says I
may have it back at auction price, after he has gone far to double the
price! I have borne--I repeat I have borne too much."

"Are n't your properties to be equal to one?" said Mrs. Cavely, smiling
mother--like from Tinman to Annette.

He sought to produce a fondling eye in a wry face, and said, "Yes, I will
remember that."

"Annette will bless you with her dear hand in a month or two at the
outside," Mrs. Cavely murmured, cherishingly.

"She will?" Tinman cracked his body to bend to her.

"Oh, I cannot say; do not distress me. Be friendly with papa," the girl
resumed, moving to escape.

"That is the essential," said Mrs. Cavely; and continued, when Annette
had gone, "The essential is to get over the next few months, miss, and
then to snap your fingers at us. Martin, I would force that man to sell
you Belle Vue under the price he paid for it, just to try your power."

Tinman was not quite so forcible. He obtained Belle Vue at auction price,
and his passion for revenge was tipped with fire by having it accorded as
a friend's favour.

The poisoned state of his mind was increased by a December high wind that
rattled his casements, and warned him of his accession of property
exposed to the elements. Both he and his sister attributed their
nervousness to the sinister behaviour of Van Diemen. For the house on the
beach had only, in most distant times, been threatened by the sea, and no
house on earth was better protected from man,--Neptune, in the shape of a
coastguard, being paid by Government to patrol about it during the hours
of darkness. They had never had any fears before Van Diemen arrived, and
caused them to give thrice their ordinary number of dinners to guests per
annum. In fact, before Van Diemen came, the house on the beach looked on
Crikswich without a rival to challenge its anticipated lordship over the
place, and for some inexplicable reason it seemed to its inhabitants to
have been a safer as well as a happier residence.

They were consoled by Tinman's performance of a clever stroke in
privately purchasing the cottages west of the town, and including
Crickledon's shop, abutting on Marine Parade. Then from the house on the
beach they looked at an entire frontage of their property.

They entered the month of February. No further time was to be lost, "or
we shall wake up to find that man has fooled us," Mrs. Cavely said.
Tinman appeared at Elba to demand a private interview with Annette. His
hat was blown into the hall as the door opened to him, and he himself was
glad to be sheltered by the door, so violent was the gale. Annette and
her father were sitting together. They kept the betrothed gentleman
waiting a very long time. At last Van Diemen went to him, and said,
"Netty 'll see you, if you must. I suppose you have no business with me?"

"Not to-day," Tinman replied.

Van Diemen strode round the drawing-room with his hands in his pockets.
"There's a disparity of ages," he said, abruptly, as if desirous to pour
out his lesson while he remembered it. "A man upwards of forty marries a
girl under twenty, he's over sixty before she's forty; he's decaying when
she's only mellow. I ought never to have struck you, I know. And you're
such an infernal bad temper at times, and age does n't improve that, they
say; and she's been educated tip-top. She's sharp on grammar, and a man
may n't like that much when he's a husband. See her, if you must. But she
does n't take to the idea; there's the truth. Disparity of ages and
unsuitableness of dispositions--what was it Fellingham said?--like two
barrel-organs grinding different tunes all day in a house."

"I don't want to hear Mr. Fellingham's comparisons," Tinman snapped.

"Oh! he's nothing to the girl," said Van Diemen. "She doesn't stomach
leaving me."

"My dear Philip! why should she leave you? When we have interests in
common as one household--"

"She says you're such a damned bad temper."

Tinman was pursuing amicably, "When we are united--" But the frightful
charge brought against his temper drew him up. "Fiery I may be. Annette
has seen I am forgiving. I am a Christian. You have provoked me; you have
struck me."

"I 'll give you a couple of thousand pounds in hard money to be off the
bargain, and not bother the girl," said Van Diemen.

"Now," rejoined Tinman, "I am offended. I like money, like most men who
have made it. You do, Philip. But I don't come courting like a pauper.
Not for ten thousand; not for twenty. Money cannot be a compensation to
me for the loss of Annette. I say I love Annette."

"Because," Van Diemen continued his speech, "you trapped us into that
engagement, Mart. You dosed me with the stuff you buy for wine, while
your sister sat sugaring and mollifying my girl; and she did the trick in
a minute, taking Netty by surprise when I was all heart and no head; and
since that you may have seen the girl turn her head from marriage like my
woods from the wind."

"Mr. Van Diemen Smith!" Tinman panted; he mastered himself. "You shall
not provoke me. My introductions of you in this neighbourhood, my
patronage, prove my friendship."

"You'll be a good old fellow, Mart, when you get over your hopes of being
knighted."

"Mr. Fellingham may set you against my wine, Philip. Let me tell you--I
know you--you would not object to have your daughter called Lady."

"With a spindle-shanked husband capering in a Court suit before he goes
to bed every night, that he may n't forget what a fine fellow he was one
day bygone! You're growing lean on it, Mart, like a recollection fifty
years old."

"You have never forgiven me that day, Philip!"

"Jealous, am I? Take the money, give up the girl, and see what friends
we'll be. I'll back your buyings, I'll advertise your sellings. I'll pay
a painter to paint you in your Court suit, and hang up a copy of you in
my diningroom."

"Annette is here," said Tinman, who had been showing Etna's tokens of
insurgency.

He admired Annette. Not till latterly had Herbert Fellingham been so true
an admirer of Annette as Tinman was. She looked sincere and she dressed
inexpensively. For these reasons she was the best example of womankind
that he knew, and her enthusiasm for England had the sympathetic effect
on him of obscuring the rest of the world, and thrilling him with the
reassuring belief that he was blest in his blood and his
birthplace--points which her father, with his boastings of Gippsland, and
other people talking of scenes on the Continent, sometimes disturbed in
his mind.

"Annette," said he, "I come requesting to converse with you in private."

"If you wish it--I would rather not," she answered.

Tinman raised his head, as often at Helmstone when some offending
shopwoman was to hear her doom.

He bent to her. "I see. Before your father, then!"

"It isn't an agreeable bit of business, to me," Van Diemen grumbled,
frowning and shrugging.

"I have come, Annette, to ask you, to beg you, entreat--before a third
person--laughing, Philip?"

"The wrong side of my mouth, my friend. And I'll tell you what: we're in
for heavy seas, and I 'm not sorry you've taken the house on the beach
off my hands."

"Pray, Mr. Tinman, speak at once, if you please, and I will do my best.
Papa vexes you."

"No, no," replied Tinman.

He renewed his commencement. Van Diemen interrupted him again.

"Hang your power over me, as you call it. Eh, old Mart? I'm a Deserter.
I'll pay a thousand pounds to the British army, whether they punish me or
not. March me off tomorrow!"

"Papa, you are unjust, unkind." Annette turned to him in tears.

"No, no," said Tinman, "I do not feel it. Your father has misunderstood
me, Annette."

"I am sure he has," she said fervently. "And, Mr. Tinman, I will
faithfully promise that so long as you are good to my dear father, I will
not be untrue to my engagement, only do not wish me to name any day. We
shall be such very good dear friends if you consent to this. Will you?"

Pausing for a space, the enamoured man unrolled his voice in lamentation:
"Oh! Annette, how long will you keep me?"

"There; you'll set her crying!" said Van Diemen. "Now you can run
upstairs, Netty. By jingo! Mart Tinman, you've got a bass voice for love
affairs."

"Annette," Tinman called to her, and made her turn round as she was
retiring. "I must know the day before the end of winter. Please. In kind
consideration. My arrangements demand it."

"Do let the girl go," said Van Diemen. "Dine with me tonight and I'll
give you a wine to brisk your spirits, old boy"

"Thank you. When I have ordered dinner at home, I----and my wine agrees
with ME," Tinman replied.

"I doubt it."

"You shall not provoke me, Philip."

They parted stiffly.

Mrs. Cavely had unpleasant domestic news to communicate to her brother,
in return for his tale of affliction and wrath. It concerned the
ungrateful conduct of their little housemaid Jane, who, as Mrs. Cavely
said, "egged on by that woman Crickledon," had been hinting at an advance
of wages.

"She didn't dare speak, but I saw what was in her when she broke a plate,
and wouldn't say she was sorry. I know she goes to Crickledon and talks
us over. She's a willing worker, but she has no heart."

Tinman had been accustomed in his shop at Helmstone--where heaven had
blessed him with the patronage of the rich, as visibly as rays of
supernal light are seen selecting from above the heads of prophets in the
illustrations to cheap holy books--to deal with willing workers that have
no hearts. Before the application for an advance of wages--and he knew
the signs of it coming--his method was to calculate how much he might be
asked for, and divide the estimated sum by the figure 4; which, as it
seemed to come from a generous impulse, and had been unsolicited, was
often humbly accepted, and the willing worker pursued her lean and hungry
course in his service. The treatment did not always agree with his males.
Women it suited; because they do not like to lift up their voices unless
they are in a passion; and if you take from them the grounds of temper,
you take their words away--you make chickens of them. And as Tinman said,
"Gratitude I never expect!" Why not? For the reason that he knew human
nature. He could record shocking instances of the ingratitude of human
nature, as revealed to him in the term of his tenure of the shop at
Helmstone. Blest from above, human nature's wickedness had from below too
frequently besulphured and suffumigated him for his memory to be dim; and
though he was ever ready to own himself an example that heaven
prevaileth, he could cite instances of scandal-mongering shop-women
dismissed and working him mischief in the town, which pointed to him in
person for a proof that the Powers of Good and Evil were still engaged in
unhappy contention. Witness Strikes! witness Revolutions!

"Tell her, when she lays the cloth, that I advance her, on account of
general good conduct, five shillings per annum. Add," said Tinman, "that
I wish no thanks. It is for her merits--to reward her; you understand me,
Martha?"

"Quite; if you think it prudent, Martin."

"I do. She is not to breathe a syllable to cook."

"She will."

"Then keep your eye on cook."

Mrs. Cavely promised she would do so. She felt sure she was paying five
shillings for ingratitude; and, therefore, it was with humility that she
owned her error when, while her brother sipped his sugared acrid liquor
after dinner (in devotion to the doctor's decree, that he should take a
couple of glasses, rigorously as body-lashing friar), she imparted to him
the singular effect of the advance of wages upon little Jane--"Oh, ma'am!
and me never asked you for it!" She informed her brother how little Jane
had confided to her that they were called "close," and how little Jane
had vowed she would--the willing little thing!--go about letting
everybody know their kindness.

"Yes! Ah!" Tinman inhaled the praise. "No, no; I don't want to be
puffed," he said. "Remember cook. I have," he continued, meditatively,
"rarely found my plan fail. But mind, I give the Crickledons notice to
quit to-morrow. They are a pest. Besides, I shall probably think of
erecting villas."

"How dreadful the wind is!" Mrs. Cavely exclaimed. "I would give that
girl Annette one chance more. Try her by letter."

Tinman despatched a business letter to Annette, which brought back a
vague, unbusiness-like reply. Two days afterward Mrs. Cavely reported to
her brother the presence of Mr. Fellingham and Miss Mary Fellingham in
Crikswich. At her dictation he wrote a second letter. This time the reply
came from Van Diemen:

   "My DEAR MARTIN,--Please do not go on bothering my girl. She does
   not like the idea of leaving me, and my experience tells me I could
   not live in the house with you. So there it is. Take it friendly.
   I have always wanted to be, and am,
                    "Your friend,
                            "PHIL."

Tinman proceeded straight to Elba; that is, as nearly straight as the
wind would allow his legs to walk. Van Diemen was announced to be out;
Miss Annette begged to be excused, under the pretext that she was unwell;
and Tinman heard of a dinner-party at Elba that night.

He met Mr. Fellingham on the carriage drive. The young Londoner presumed
to touch upon Tinman's private affairs by pleading on behalf of the
Crikledons, who were, he said, much dejected by the notice they had
received to quit house and shop.

"Another time," bawled Tinman. "I can't hear you in this wind."

"Come in," said Fellingham.

"The master of the house is absent," was the smart retort roared at him;
and Tinman staggered away, enjoying it as he did his wine.

His house rocked. He was backed by his sister in the assurance that he
had been duped.

The process he supposed to be thinking, which was the castigation of his
brains with every sting wherewith a native touchiness could ply immediate
recollection, led him to conclude that he must bring Van Diemen to his
senses, and Annette running to him for mercy.

He sat down that night amid the howling of the storm, wind whistling,
water crashing, casements rattling, beach desperately dragging, as by the
wide-stretched star-fish fingers of the half-engulphed.

He hardly knew what he wrote. The man was in a state of personal terror,
burning with indignation at Van Diemen as the main cause of his jeopardy.
For, in order to prosecute his pursuit of Annette, he had abstained from
going to Helmstone to pay moneys into his bank there, and what was
precious to life as well as life itself, was imperilled by those
two--Annette and her father--who, had they been true, had they been
honest, to say nothing of honourable, would by this time have opened Elba
to him as a fast and safe abode.

His letter was addressed, on a large envelope,

   "To the Adjutant-General,

   "HORSE GUARDS."

But if ever consigned to the Post, that post-office must be in London;
and Tinman left the letter on his desk till the morning should bring
counsel to him as to the London friend to whom he might despatch it under
cover for posting, if he pushed it so far.

Sleep was impossible. Black night favoured the tearing fiends of
shipwreck, and looking through a back window over sea, Tinman saw with
dismay huge towering ghostwhite wreaths, that travelled up swiftly on his
level, and lit the dark as they flung themselves in ruin, with a gasp,
across the mound of shingle at his feet.

He undressed: His sister called to him to know if they were in danger.
Clothed in his dressing-gown, he slipped along to her door, to vociferate
to her hoarsely that she must not frighten the servants; and one fine
quality in the training of the couple, which had helped them to prosper,
a form of self-command, kept her quiet in her shivering fears.

For a distraction Tinman pulled open the drawers of his wardrobe. His
glittering suit lay in one. And he thought, "What wonderful changes there
are in the world!" meaning, between a man exposed to the wrath of the
elements, and the same individual reading from vellum, in that suit, in a
palace, to the Head of all of us!

The presumption is; that he must have often done it before. The fact is
established, that he did it that night. The conclusion drawn from it is,
that it must have given him a sense of stability and safety.

At any rate that he put on the suit is quite certain.

Probably it was a work of ingratiation and degrees; a feeling of the
silk, a trying on to one leg, then a matching of the fellow with it. O
you Revolutionists! who would have no state, no ceremonial, and but one
order of galligaskins! This man must have been wooed away in spirit to
forgetfulness of the tempest scourging his mighty neighbour to a bigger
and a farther leap; he must have obtained from the contemplation of
himself in his suit that which would be the saving of all men, in
especial of his countrymen--imagination, namely.

Certain it is, as I have said, that he attired himself in the suit. He
covered it with his dressing-gown, and he lay down on his bed so garbed,
to await the morrow's light, being probably surprised by sleep acting
upon fatigue and nerves appeased and soothed.




CHAPTER XII

Elba lay more sheltered from South-east winds under the slopes of down
than any other house in Crikswich. The South-caster struck off the cliff
to a martello tower and the house on the beach, leaving Elba to repose,
so that the worst wind for that coast was one of the most comfortable for
the owner of the hall, and he looked from his upper window on a sea of
crumbling grey chalk, lashed unremittingly by the featureless piping
gale, without fear that his elevated grounds and walls would be open at
high tide to the ravage of water. Van Diemen had no idea of calamity
being at work on land when he sat down to breakfast. He told Herbert that
he had prayed for poor fellows at sea last night. Mary Fellingham and
Annette were anxious to finish breakfast and mount the down to gaze on
the sea, and receiving a caution from Van Diemen not to go too near the
cliff, they were inclined to think he was needlessly timorous on their
account.

Before they were half way through the meal, word was brought in of great
breaches in the shingle, and water covering the common. Van Diemen sent
for his head gardener, whose report of the state of things outside took
the comprehensive form of prophecy; he predicted the fall of the town.

"Nonsense; what do you mean, John Scott?" said Van Diemen, eyeing his
orderly breakfast table and the man in turns. "It does n't seem like
that, yet, does it?"

"The house on the beach won't stand an hour longer, sir."

"Who says so?"

"It's cut off from land now, and waves mast-high all about it."

"Mart Tinman?" cried Van Diemen.

All started; all jumped up; and there was a scampering for hats and
cloaks. Maids and men of the house ran in and out confirming the news of
inundation. Some in terror for the fate of relatives, others pleasantly
excited, glad of catastrophe if it but killed monotony, for at any rate
it was a change of demons.

The view from the outer bank of Elba was of water covering the space of
the common up to the stones of Marine Parade and Belle Vue. But at a
distance it had not the appearance of angry water; the ladies thought it
picturesque, and the house on the beach was seen standing firm. A second
look showed the house completely isolated; and as the party led by Van
Diemen circled hurriedly toward the town, they discerned heavy cataracts
of foam pouring down the wrecked mound of shingle on either side of the
house.

"Why, the outer wall's washed away," said Van Diemen. "Are they in real
danger?" asked Annette, her teeth chattering, and the cold and other
matters at her heart precluding for the moment such warmth of sympathy as
she hoped soon to feel for them. She was glad to hear her father say:

"Oh! they're high and dry by this time. We shall find them in the town
And we'll take them in and comfort them. Ten to one they have n't
breakfasted. They sha'n't go to an inn while I'm handy."

He dashed ahead, followed closely by Herbert. The ladies beheld them
talking to townsfolk as they passed along the upper streets, and did not
augur well of their increase of speed. At the head of the town water was
visible, part of the way up the main street, and crossing it, the ladies
went swiftly under the old church, on the tower of which were spectators,
through the churchyard to a high meadow that dropped to a stone wall
fixed between the meadow and a grass bank above the level of the road,
where now salt water beat and cast some spray. Not less than a hundred
people were in this field, among them Crickledon and his wife. All were
in silent watch of the house on the beach, which was to east of the
field, at a distance of perhaps three stonethrows. The scene was wild.
Continuously the torrents poured through the shingleclefts, and momently
a thunder sounded, and high leapt a billow that topped the house and
folded it weltering.

"They tell me Mart Tinman's in the house," Van Diemen roared to Herbert.
He listened to further information, and bellowed: "There's no boat!"

Herbert answered: "It must be a mistake, I think; here's Crickledon says
he had a warning before dawn and managed to move most of his things, and
the people over there must have been awakened by the row in time to get
off"

"I can't hear a word you say;" Van Diemen tried to pitch his voice higher
than the wind. "Did you say a boat? But where?"

Crickledon the carpenter made signal to Herbert. They stepped rapidly up
the field.

"Women feels their weakness in times like these, my dear," Mrs.
Crickledon said to Annette. "What with our clothes and our cowardice it
do seem we're not the equals of men when winds is high."

Annette expressed the hope to her that she had not lost much property.
Mrs. Crickledon said she was glad to let her know she was insured in an
Accident Company. "But," said she, "I do grieve for that poor man Tinman,
if alive he be, and comes ashore to find his property wrecked by water.
Bless ye! he wouldn't insure against anything less common than fire; and
my house and Crickledon's shop are floating timbers by this time; and
Marine Parade and Belle Vue are safe to go. And it'll be a pretty welcome
for him, poor man, from his investments."

A cry at a tremendous blow of a wave on the doomed house rose from the
field. Back and front door were broken down, and the force of water drove
a round volume through the channel, shaking the walls.

"I can't stand this," Van Diemen cried.

Annette was too late to hold him back. He ran up the field. She was
preparing to run after when Mrs. Crickledon touched her arm and implored
her: "Interfere not with men, but let them follow their judgements when
it's seasons of mighty peril, my dear. If any one's guilty it's me, for
minding my husband of a boat that was launched for a life-boat here, and
wouldn't answer, and is at the shed by the Crouch--left lying there, I've
often said, as if it was a-sulking. My goodness!"

A linen sheet bad been flung out from one of the windows of the house on
the beach, and flew loose and flapping in sign of distress.

"It looks as if they had gone mad in that house, to have waited so long
for to declare theirselves, poor souls," Mrs. Crickledon said, sighing.

She was assured right and left that signals had been seen before, and
some one stated that the cook of Mr. Tinman, and also Mrs. Cavely, were
on shore.

"It's his furniture, poor man, he sticks to: and nothing gets round the
heart so!" resumed Mrs. Crickledon. "There goes his bed-linen!"

The sheet was whirled and snapped away by the wind; distended doubled,
like a flock of winter geese changeing alphabetical letters on the
clouds, darted this way and that, and finally outspread on the waters
breaking against Marine Parade.

"They cannot have thought there was positive danger in remaining," said
Annette.

"Mr. Tinman was waiting for the cheapest Insurance office," a man
remarked to Mrs. Crickledon.

"The least to pay is to the undertaker," she replied, standing on tiptoe.
"And it's to be hoped he 'll pay more to-day. If only those walls don't
fall and stop the chance of the boat to save him for more outlay, poor
man! What boats was on the beach last night, high up and over the ridge
as they was, are planks by this time and only good for carpenters."

"Half our town's done for," one old man said; and another followed him
in a pious tone: "From water we came and to water we go."

They talked of ancient inroads of the sea, none so serious as this
threatened to be for them. The gallant solidity, of the house on the
beach had withstood heavy gales: it was a brave house. Heaven be thanked,
no fishing boats were out. Chiefly well-to-do people would be the
sufferers--an exceptional case. For it is the mysterious and unexplained
dispensation that: "Mostly heaven chastises we."

A knot of excited gazers drew the rest of the field to them. Mrs.
Crickledon, on the edge of the crowd, reported what was doing to Annette
and Miss Fellingham. A boat had been launched from the town. "Praise the
Lord, there's none but coastguard in it!" she exclaimed, and excused
herself for having her heart on her husband.

Annette was as deeply thankful that her father was not in the boat.

They looked round and saw Herbert beside them. Van Diemen was in the
rear, panting, and straining his neck to catch sight of the boat now
pulling fast across a tumbled sea to where Tinman himself was perceived,
beckoning them wildly, half out of one of the windows.

"A pound apiece to those fellows, and two if they land Mart Tinman dry;
I've promised it, and they'll earn it. Look at that! Quick, you rascals!"

To the east a portion of the house had fallen, melted away. Where it
stood, just below the line of shingle, it was now like a structure
wasting on a tormented submerged reef. The whole line was given over to
the waves.

"Where is his sister?" Annette shrieked to her father.

"Safe ashore; and one of the women with her. But Mart Tinman would stop,
the fool! to-poor old boy! save his papers and things; and has n't a head
to do it, Martha Cavely tells me. They're at him now! They've got him in!
There's another? Oh! it's a girl, who would n't go and leave him. They'll
pull to the field here. Brave lads!--By jingo, why ain't Englishmen
always in danger!--eh? if you want to see them shine!"

"It's little Jane," said Mrs. Crickledon, who had been joined by her
husband, and now that she knew him to be no longer in peril, kept her
hand on him to restrain him, just for comfort's sake.

The boat held under the lee of the house-wreck a minute; then, as if
shooting a small rapid, came down on a wave crowned with foam, to hurrahs
from the townsmen.

"They're all right," said Van Diemen, puffing as at a mist before his
eyes. "They'll pull westward, with the wind, and land him among us. I
remember when old Mart and I were bathing once, he was younger than me,
and could n't swim much, and I saw him going down. It'd have been hard to
see him washed off before one's eyes thirty years afterwards. Here they
come. He's all right. He's in his dressing-gown!"

The crowd made way for Mr. Van Diemen Smith to welcome his friend. Two of
the coastguard jumped out, and handed him to the dry bank, while Herbert,
Van Diemen, and Crickledon took him by hand and arm, and hoisted him on
to the flint wall, preparatory to his descent into the field. In this
exposed situation the wind, whose pranks are endless when it is once up,
seized and blew Martin Tinman's dressing-gown wide as two violently
flapping wings on each side of him, and finally over his head.

Van Diemen turned a pair of stupefied flat eyes on Herbert, who cast a
sly look at the ladies. Tinman had sprung down. But not before the.
world, in one tempestuous glimpse, had caught sight of the Court suit.

Perfect gravity greeted him from the crowd.

"Safe, old Mart! and glad to be able to say it," said Van Diemen.

"We are so happy," said Annette.

"House, furniture, property, everything I possess!" ejaculated Tinman,
shivering.

"Fiddle, man; you want some hot breakfast in you. Your sister has gone
on--to Elba. Come you too, old Man; and where's that plucky little girl
who stood by--"

"Was there a girl?" said Tinman.

"Yes, and there was a boy wanted to help." Van Diemen pointed at Herbert.

Tinman looked, and piteously asked, "Have you examined Marine Parade and
Belle Vue? It depends on the tide!"

"Here is little Jane, sir," said Mrs. Crickledon.

"Fall in," Van Diemen said to little Jane.

The girl was bobbing curtseys to Annette, on her introduction by Mrs.
Crickledon.

"Martin, you stay at my house; you stay at Elba till you get things
comfortable about you, and then you shall have the Crouch for a year,
rent free. Eh, Netty?"

Annette chimed in: "Anything we can do, anything. Nothing can be too
much."

Van Diemen was praising little Jane for her devotion to her master.

"Master have been so kind to me," said little Jane.

"Now, march; it is cold," Van Diemen gave the word, and Herbert stood by
Mary rather dejectedly, foreseeing that his prospects at Elba were
darkened.

"Now then, Mart, left leg forward," Van Diemen linked his arm in his
friend's.

"I must have a look," Tinman broke from him, and cast a forlorn look of
farewell on the last of the house on the beach.

"You've got me left to you, old Mart; don't forget that," said Van
Diemen.

Tinman's chest fell. "Yes, yes," he responded. He was touched.

"And I told those fellows if they landed you dry they should have--I'd
give them double pay; and I do believe they've earned their money."

"I don't think I'm very wet, I'm cold," said Tinman.

"You can't help being cold, so come along."

"But, Philip!" Tinman lifted his voice; "I've lost everything. I tried to
save a little. I worked hard, I exposed my life, and all in vain."

The voice of little Jane was heard.

"What's the matter with the child?" said Van Diemen.

Annette went up to her quietly.

But little Jane was addressing her master.

"Oh! if you please, I did manage to save something the last thing when
the boat was at the window, and if you please, sir, all the bundles is
lost, but I saved you a papercutter, and a letter Horse Guards, and here
they are, sir."

The grateful little creature drew the square letter and paper-cutter from
her bosom, and held them out to Mr. Tinman.

It was a letter of the imposing size, with THE HORSE GUARDS very
distinctly inscribed on it in Tinman's best round hand, to strike his
vindictive spirit as positively intended for transmission, and give him
sight of his power to wound if it pleased him; as it might.

"What!" cried he, not clearly comprehending how much her devotion had
accomplished for him.

"A letter to the Horse Guards!" cried Van Diemen.

"Here, give it me," said little Jane's master, and grasped it nervously.

"What's in that letter?" Van Diemen asked. "Let me look at that letter.
Don't tell me it's private correspondence."

"My dear Philip, dear friend, kind thanks; it's not a letter," said
Tinman.

"Not a letter! why, I read the address, 'Horse Guards.' I read it as it
passed into your hands. Now, my man, one look at that letter, or take the
consequences."

"Kind thanks for your assistance, dear Philip, indeed! Oh! this? Oh! it's
nothing." He tore it in halves.

His face was of the winter sea-colour, with the chalk wash on it.

"Tear again, and I shall know what to think of the contents," Van Diemen
frowned. "Let me see what you've said. You've sworn you would do it, and
there it is at last, by miracle; but let me see it and I'll overlook it,
and you shall be my house-mate still. If not!----"

Tinman tore away.

"You mistake, you mistake, you're entirely wrong," he said, as he pursued
with desperation his task of rendering every word unreadable.

Van Diemen stood fronting him; the accumulation of stores of petty
injuries and meannesses which he had endured from this man, swelled under
the whip of the conclusive exhibition of treachery. He looked so black
that Annette called, "Papa!"

"Philip," said Tinman. "Philip! my best friend!"

"Pooh, you're a poor creature. Come along and breakfast at Elba, and you
can sleep at the Crouch, and goodnight to you. Crickledon," he called to
the houseless couple, "you stop at Elba till I build you a shop."

With these words, Van Diemen led the way, walking alone. Herbert was
compelled to walk with Tinman.

Mary and Annette came behind, and Mary pinched Annette's arm so sharply
that she must have cried out aloud had it been possible for her to feel
pain at that moment, instead of a personal exultation, flying wildly over
the clash of astonishment and horror, like a sea-bird over the foam.

In the first silent place they came to, Mary murmured the words: "Little
Jane."

Annette looked round at Mrs. Crickledon, who wound up the procession,
taking little Jane by the hand. Little Jane was walking demurely, with a
placid face. Annette glanced at Tinman. Her excited feelings nearly rose
to a scream of laughter. For hours after, Mary had only to say to her:
"Little Jane," to produce the same convulsion. It rolled her heart and
senses in a headlong surge, shook her to burning tears, and seemed to her
ideas the most wonderful running together of opposite things ever known
on this earth. The young lady was ashamed of her laughter; but she was
deeply indebted to it, for never was mind made so clear by that
beneficent exercise.

     ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

     Adversary at once offensive and helpless provokes brutality
     Causes him to be popularly weighed
     Distinguished by his not allowing himself to be provoked
     Eccentric behaviour in trifles
     Excited, glad of catastrophe if it but killed monotony
     Generally he noticed nothing
     Good jokes are not always good policy
     I make a point of never recommending my own house
     Indulged in their privilege of thinking what they liked
     Infants are said to have their ideas, and why not young ladies?
     Lend him your own generosity
     Men love to boast of things nobody else has seen
     Naughtily Australian and kangarooly
     Not in love--She was only not unwilling to be in love
     Rich and poor 's all right, if I'm rich and you're poor
     She began to feel that this was life in earnest
     She dealt in the flashes which connect ideas
     She sought, by looking hard, to understand it better
     Sunning itself in the glass of Envy
     That which fine cookery does for the cementing of couples
     The intricate, which she takes for the infinite
     Tossed him from repulsion to incredulity, and so back
     Two principal roads by which poor sinners come to a conscience




THE GENTLEMAN OF FIFTY AND THE DAMSEL OF NINETEEN

(An early uncompleted and hitherto unpublished fragment.)

By GEORGE MEREDITH




CHAPTER I

HE

Passing over Ickleworth Bridge and rounding up the heavily-shadowed river
of our narrow valley, I perceived a commotion as of bathers in a certain
bright space immediately underneath the vicar's terrace-garden steps. My
astonishment was considerable when it became evident to me that the vicar
himself was disporting in the water, which, reaching no higher than his
waist, disclosed him in the ordinary habiliments of his cloth. I knew my
friend to be one of the most absent-minded of men, and my first effort to
explain the phenomenon of his appearance there, suggested that he might
have walked in, the victim of a fit of abstraction, and that he had not
yet fully comprehended his plight; but this idea was dispersed when I
beheld the very portly lady, his partner in joy and adversity, standing
immersed, and perfectly attired, some short distance nearer to the bank.
As I advanced along the bank opposed to them, I was further amazed to
hear them discoursing quite equably together, so that it was impossible
to say on the face of it whether a catastrophe had occurred, or the great
heat of a cloudless summer day had tempted an eccentric couple to seek
for coolness in the directest fashion, without absolute disregard to
propriety. I made a point of listening for the accentuation of the 'my
dear' which was being interchanged, but the key-note to the harmony
existing between husband and wife was neither excessively unctuous, nor
shrewd, and the connubial shuttlecock was so well kept up on both sides
that I chose to await the issue rather than speculate on the origin of
this strange exhibition. I therefore, as I could not be accused of an
outrage to modesty, permitted myself to maintain what might be
invidiously termed a satyr-like watch from behind a forward flinging
willow, whose business in life was to look at its image in a brown depth,
branches, trunk, and roots. The sole indication of discomfort displayed
by the pair was that the lady's hand worked somewhat fretfully to keep
her dress from ballooning and puffing out of all proportion round about
her person, while the vicar, who stood without his hat, employed a spongy
handkerchief from time to time in tempering the ardours of a vertical
sun. If you will consent to imagine a bald blackbird, his neck being
shrunk in apprehensively, as you may see him in the first rolling of the
thunder, you will gather an image of my friend's appearance.

He performed his capital ablutions with many loud 'poofs,' and a casting
up of dazzled eyes, an action that gave point to his recital of the
invocation of Chryses to Smintheus which brought upon the Greeks disaster
and much woe. Between the lines he replied to his wife, whose remarks
increased in quantity, and also, as I thought, in emphasis, under the
river of verse which he poured forth unbaffled, broadening his chest to
the sonorous Greek music in a singular rapture of obliviousness.

A wise man will not squander his laughter if he can help it, but will
keep the agitation of it down as long as he may. The simmering of humour
sends a lively spirit into the mind, whereas the boiling over is but a
prodigal expenditure and the disturbance of a clear current: for the
comic element is visible to you in all things, if you do but keep your
mind charged with the perception of it, as I have heard a great expounder
deliver himself on another subject; and he spoke very truly. So, I
continued to look on with the gravity of Nature herself, and I could not
but fancy, and with less than our usual wilfulness when we fancy things
about Nature's moods, that the Mother of men beheld this scene with half
a smile, differently from the simple observation of those cows whisking
the flies from their flanks at the edge of the shorn meadow and its
aspens, seen beneath the curved roof of a broad oak-branch. Save for this
happy upward curve of the branch, we are encompassed by breathless
foliage; even the gloom was hot; the little insects that are food for
fish tried a flight and fell on the water's surface, as if panting. Here
and there, a sullen fish consented to take them, and a circle spread,
telling of past excitement.

I had listened to the vicar's Homeric lowing for the space of a minute or
so--what some one has called, the great beast-like, bellow-like, roar and
roll of the Iliad hexameter: it stopped like a cut cord. One of the
numerous daughters of his house appeared in the arch of white
cluster-roses on the lower garden-terrace, and with an exclamation, stood
petrified at the extraordinary spectacle, and then she laughed outright.
I had hitherto resisted, but the young lady's frank and boisterous
laughter carried me along, and I too let loose a peal, and discovered
myself. The vicar, seeing me, acknowledged a consciousness of his absurd
position with a laugh as loud. As for the scapegrace girl, she went off
into a run of high-pitched shriekings like twenty woodpeckers, crying: I
Mama, mama, you look as if you were in Jordan!'

The vicar cleared his throat admonishingly, for it was apparent that Miss
Alice was giving offence to her mother, and I presume he thought it was
enough for one of the family to have done so.

'Wilt thou come out of Jordan?' I cried.

'I am sufficiently baptized with the water,' said the helpless man. . .

'Indeed, Mr. Amble,' observed his spouse, 'you can lecture a woman for
not making the best of circumstances; I hope you'll bear in mind that
it's you who are irreverent. I can endure this no longer. You deserve Mr.
Pollingray's ridicule.'

Upon this, I interposed: 'Pray, ma'am, don't imagine that you have
anything but sympathy from me.'--but as I was protesting, having my mouth
open, the terrible Miss Alice dragged the laughter remorselessly out of
me.

They have been trying Frank's new boat, Mr. Pollingray, and they've upset
it. Oh! oh' and again there was the woodpeckers' chorus.

'Alice, I desire you instantly to go and fetch John the gardener,' said
the angry mother.

'Mama, I can't move; wait a minute, only a minute. John's gone about the
geraniums. Oh! don't look so resigned, papa; you'll kill me! Mama, come
and take my hand. Oh! oh!'

The young lady put her hands in against her waist and rolled her body
like a possessed one.

'Why don't you come in through the boat-house?' she asked when she had
mastered her fit.

'Ah!' said the vicar. I beheld him struck by this new thought.

'How utterly absurd you are, Mr. Amble!' exclaimed his wife, 'when you
know that the boat-house is locked, and that the boat was lying under the
camshot when you persuaded me to step into it.'

Hearing this explanation of the accident, Alice gave way to an
ungovernable emotion.

'You see, my dear,' the vicar addressed his wife, she can do nothing;
it's useless. If ever patience is counselled to us, it is when accidents
befall us, for then, as we are not responsible, we know we are in other
hands, and it is our duty to be comparatively passive. Perhaps I may say
that in every difficulty, patience is a life-belt. I beg of you to be
patient still.'

'Mr. Amble, I shall think you foolish,' said the spouse, with a nod of
more than emphasis.

My dear, you have only to decide,' was the meek reply.

By this time, Miss Alice had so far conquered the fiend of laughter that
she could venture to summon her mother close up to the bank and extend a
rescuing hand. Mrs. Amble waded to within reach, her husband following.
Arrangements were made for Alice to pull, and the vicar to push; both in
accordance with Mrs. Amble's stipulations, for even in her extremity of
helplessness she affected rule and sovereignty. Unhappily, at the
decisive moment, I chanced (and I admit it was more than an inadvertence
on my part, it was a most ill-considered thing to do) I chanced, I say,
to call out--and that I refrained from quoting Voltaire is something in
my favour:

'How on earth did you manage to tumble in?'

There can be no contest of opinion that I might have kept my curiosity
waiting, and possibly it may be said with some justification that I was
the direct cause of my friend's unparalleled behaviour; but could a
mortal man guess that in the very act of assisting his wife's return to
dry land, and while she was--if I may put it so--modestly in his hands,
he would turn about with a quotation that compared him to old Palinurus,
all the while allowing his worthy and admirable burden to sink lower and
dispread in excess upon the surface of the water, until the vantage of
her daughter's help was lost to her; I beheld the consequences of my
indiscretion, dismayed. I would have checked the preposterous Virgilian,
but in contempt of my uplifted hand and averted head, and regardless of
the fact that his wife was then literally dependent upon him, the vicar
declaimed (and the drenching effect produced by Latin upon a lady at such
a season, may be thought on):

        Vix primos inopina quies laxaverat artus,
        Et super incumbens, cum puppis parte revulsa
        Cumque gubernaclo liquidas projecit in undas.'

It is not easy when you are unacquainted with the language, to retort
upon Latin, even when the attempt to do so is made in English. Very few
even of the uneducated ears can tolerate such anti-climax vituperative as
English after sounding Latin. Mrs. Amble kept down those sentiments which
her vernacular might have expressed. I heard but one groan that came from
her as she lay huddled indistinguishably in the, arms of her husband.

'Not--praecipitem! I am happy to say,' my senseless friend remarked
further, and laughed cheerfully as he fortified his statement with a run
of negatives. 'No, no'; in a way peculiar to him. 'No, no. If I plant my
grey hairs anywhere, it will be on dry land: no. But, now, my dear; he
returned to his duty; why, you're down again. Come: one, two, and up.'

He was raising a dead weight. The passion for sarcastic speech was
manifestly at war with common prudence in the bosom of Mrs. Amble;
prudence, however, overcame it. She cast on him a look of a kind that
makes matrimony terrific in the dreams of bachelors, and then wedding her
energy to the assistance given she made one of those senseless springs of
the upper half of the body, which strike the philosophic eye with the
futility of an effort that does not arise from a solid basis. Owing to
the want of concert between them, the vicar's impulsive strength was
expended when his wife's came into play. Alice clutched her mother
bravely. The vicar had force enough to stay his wife's descent; but Alice
(she boasts of her muscle) had not the force in the other direction--and
no wonder. There are few young ladies who could pull fourteen stone sheer
up a camshot.

Mrs. Amble remained in suspense between the two.

Oh, Mr. Pollingray, if you were only on this side to help us,' Miss Alice
exclaimed very piteously, though I could see that she was half mad with
the internal struggle of laughter at the parents and concern for them.

'Now, pull, Alice,' shouted the vicar.

'No, not yet,' screamed Mrs. Amble; I'm sinking.'

'Pull, Alice.'

'Now, Mama.'

'Oh!'

'Push, Papa.'

'I'm down.'

'Up, Ma'am; Jane; woman, up.'

'Gently, Papa: Abraham, I will not.'

'My dear, but you must.'

'And that man opposite.'

'What, Pollingray? He's fifty.'

I found myself walking indignantly down the path. Even now I protest my
friend was guilty of bad manners, though I make every allowance for him;
I excuse, I pass the order; but why--what justifies one man's bawling out
another man's age? What purpose does it serve? I suppose the vicar wished
to reassure his wife, on the principle (I have heard him enunciate it)
that the sexes are merged at fifty--by which he means, I must presume,
that something which may be good or bad, and is generally silly--of
course, I admire and respect modesty and pudeur as much as any
man--something has gone: a recognition of the bounds of division. There
is, if that is a lamentable matter, a loss of certain of our young tricks
at fifty. We have ceased to blush readily: and let me ask you to define a
blush. Is it an involuntary truth or an ingenuous lie? I know that this
will sound like the language of a man not a little jealous of his
youthful compeers. I can but leave it to rightly judging persons to
consider whether a healthy man in his prime, who has enough, and is not
cursed by ambition, need be jealous of any living soul.

A shriek from Miss Alice checked my retreating steps. The vicar was
staggering to support the breathing half of his partner while she
regained her footing in the bed of the river. Their effort to scale the
camshot had failed. Happily at this moment I caught sight of Master
Frank's boat, which had floated, bottom upwards, against a projecting
mud-bank of forget-me-nots. I contrived to reach it and right it, and
having secured one of the sculls, I pulled up to the rescue; though not
before I had plucked a flower, actuated by a motive that I cannot account
for. The vicar held the boat firmly against the camshot, while I, at the
imminent risk of joining them (I shall not forget the combined expression
of Miss Alice's retreating eyes and the malicious corners of her mouth)
hoisted the lady in, and the river with her. From the seat of the boat
she stood sufficiently high to project the step towards land without
peril. When she had set her foot there, we all assumed an attitude of
respectful attention, and the vicar, who could soar over calamity like a
fairweather swallow, acknowledged the return of his wife to the element
with a series of apologetic yesses and short coughings.

'That would furnish a good concert for the poets,' he remarked. 'A
parting, a separation of lovers; "even as a body from the watertorn," or
"from the water plucked"; eh? do you think--"so I weep round her, tearful
in her track," an excellent--'

But the outraged woman, dripping in grievous discomfort above him, made a
peremptory gesture.

'Mr. Amble, will you come on shore instantly, I have borne with your
stupidity long enough. I insist upon your remembering, sir, that you have
a family dependent upon you. Other men may commit these follies.'

This was a blow at myself, a bachelor whom the lady had never persuaded
to dream of relinquishing his freedom.

'My dear, I am coming,' said the vicar.

'Then, come at once, or I shall think you idiotic,' the wife retorted.

'I have been endeavouring,' the vicar now addressed me, 'to prove by a
practical demonstration that women are capable of as much philosophy as
men, under any sudden and afflicting revolution of circumstances.'

'And if you get a sunstroke, you will be rightly punished, and I shall
not be sorry, Mr. Amble.'

'I am coming, my dear Jane. Pray run into the house and change your
things.'

'Not till I see you out of the water, sir.'

'You are losing your temper, my love.'

'You would make a saint lose his temper, Mr. Amble.'

'There were female saints, my dear,' the vicar mildly responded; and
addressed me further: 'Up to this point, I assure you, Pollingray, no
conduct could have been more exemplary than Mrs. Amble's. I had got her
into the boat--a good boat, a capital boat--but getting in myself, we
overturned. The first impulse of an ordinary woman would have been to
reproach and scold; but Mrs. Amble succumbed only to the first impulse.
Discovering that all effort unaided to climb the bank was fruitless, she
agreed to wait patiently and make the best of circumstances; and she did;
and she learnt to enjoy it. There is marrow in every bone. My dear. Jane,
I have never admired you so much. I tried her, Pollingray, in
metaphysics. I talked to her of the opera we last heard, I think fifty
years ago. And as it is less endurable for a woman to be patient in
tribulation--the honour is greater, when she overcomes the fleshy trial.
Insomuch,' the vicar put on a bland air of abnegation of honour, 'that I
am disposed to consider any male philosopher our superior; when you've
found one, ha, ha--when you've found one. O sol pulcher! I am ready to
sing that the day has been glorious, so far. Pulcher ille dies.'

Mrs. Amble appealed to me. 'Would anybody not swear that he is mad to see
him standing waist-deep in the water and the sun on his bald head, I am
reduced to entreat you not to--though you have no family of your own--not
to encourage him. It is amusing to you. Pray, reflect that such folly is
too often fatal. Compel him to come on shore.'

The logic of the appeal was no doubt distinctly visible in the lady's
mind, though it was not accurately worded. I saw that I stood marked to
be the scape goat of the day, and humbly continued to deserve well,
notwithstanding. By dint of simple signs and nods of affirmative, and a
constant propulsion of my friend's arm, I drew him into the boat, and
thence projected him up to the level with his wife, who had perhaps
deigned to understand that it was best to avoid the arresting of his
divergent mind by any remark during the passage, and remained silent. No
sooner was he established on his feet, than she plucked him away.

'Your papa's hat,' she called, flashing to her daughter, and streamed up
the lawn into the rose-trellised pathways leading on aloft to the
vicarage house. Behind roses the weeping couple disappeared. The last I
saw of my friend was a smiting of his hand upon his head in a vain effort
to catch at one of the fleeting ideas sowed in him by the quick passage
of objects before his vision, and shaken out of him by abnormal hurry.
The Rev. Abraham Amble had been lord of his wife in the water, but his
innings was over. He had evidently enjoyed it vastly, and I now
understood why he had chosen to prolong it as much as possible. Your
eccentric characters are not uncommonly amateurs of petty artifice. There
are hours of vengeance even for henpecked men.

I found myself sighing over the enslaved condition of every Benedict of
my acquaintance, when the thought came like a surprise that I was alone
with Alice. The fair and pleasant damsel made a clever descent into the
boat, and having seated herself, she began to twirl the scull in the
rowlock, and said: 'Do you feel disposed to join me in looking after the
other scull and papa's hat, Mr. Pollingray?' I suggested 'Will you not
get your feet wet? I couldn't manage to empty all the water in the boat.'

'Oh' cried she, with a toss of her head; I wet feet never hurt young
people.'

There was matter for an admonitory lecture in this. Let me confess I was
about to give it, when she added: But Mr. Pollingray, I am really afraid
that your feet are wet! You had to step into the water when you righted
the boat:

My reply was to jump down by her side with as much agility as I could
combine with a proper discretion. The amateur craft rocked threateningly,
and I found myself grasped by and grasping the pretty damsel, until by
great good luck we were steadied and preserved from the same misfortune
which had befallen her parents. She laughed and blushed, and we tottered
asunder.

'Would you have talked metaphysics to me in the water, Mr. Pollingray?'

Alice was here guilty of one of those naughty sort of innocent speeches
smacking of Eve most strongly; though, of course, of Eve in her best
days.

I took the rudder lines to steer against the sculling of her single
scull, and was Adam enough to respond to temptation: 'I should perhaps
have been grateful to your charitable construction of it as being
metaphysics.'

She laughed colloquially, to fill a pause. It had not been coquetry:
merely the woman unconsciously at play. A man is bound to remember the
seniority of his years when this occurs, for a veteran of ninety and a
worn out young debauchee will equally be subject to it if they do not
shun the society of the sex. My long robust health and perfect
self-reliance apparently tend to give me unguarded moments, or lay me
open to fitful impressions. Indeed there are times when I fear I have the
heart of a boy, and certainly nothing more calamitous can be conceived,
supposing that it should ever for one instant get complete mastery of my
head. This is the peril of a man who has lived soberly. Do we never know
when we are safe? I am, in reflecting thereupon, positively prepared to
say that if there is no fool like what they call an old fool (and a man
in his prime, who can be laughed at, is the world's old fool) there is
wisdom in the wild oats theory, and I shall come round to my nephew's way
of thinking: that is, as far as Master Charles by his acting represents
his thinking. I shall at all events be more lenient in my judgement of
him, and less stern in my allocutions, for I shall have no text to preach
from.

We picked up the hat and the scull in one of the little muddy bays of our
brown river, forming an amphitheatre for water-rats and draped with great
dockleaves, nettle-flowers, ragged robins, and other weeds for which the
learned young lady gave the botanical names. It was pleasant to hear her
speak with the full authority of absolute knowledge of her subject. She
has intelligence. She is decidedly too good for Charles, unless he
changes his method of living.

'Shall we row on?' she asked, settling her arms to work the pair of
sculls.

'You have me in your power,' said I, and she struck out. Her shape is
exceedingly graceful; I was charmed by the occasional tightening in of
her lips as she exerted her muscle, while at intervals telling me of her
race with one of her boastful younger brothers, whom she had beaten. I
believe it is only when they are using physical exertion that the eyes of
young girls have entire simplicity--the simplicity of nature as opposed
to that other artificial simplicity which they learn from their
governesses, their mothers, and the admiration of witlings. Attractive
purity, or the nice glaze of no comprehension of anything which is
considered to be improper in a wicked world, and is no doubt very useful,
is not to my taste. French girls, as a rule, cannot compete with our
English in the purer graces. They are only incomparable when as women
they have resort to art.

Alice could look at me as she rowed, without thinking it necessary to
force a smile, or to speak, or to snigger and be foolish. I felt towards
the girl like a comrade.

We went no further than Hatchard's mile, where the water plumps the poor
sleepy river from a sidestream, and, as it turned the boat's head quite
round, I let the boat go. These studies of young women are very well as a
pastime; but they soon cease to be a recreation. She forms an agreeable
picture when she is rowing, and possesses a musical laugh. Now and then
she gives way to the bad trick of laughing without caring or daring to
explain the cause for it. She is moderately well-bred. I hope that she
has principle. Certain things a man of my time of life learns by
associating with very young people which are serviceable to him. What a
different matter this earth must be to that girl from what it is to me! I
knew it before. And--mark the difference--I feel it now.




CHAPTER II

SHE

Papa never will cease to meet with accidents and adventures. If he only
walks out to sit for half an hour with one of his old dames, as he calls
them, something is sure to happen to him, and it is almost as sure that
Mr. Pollingray will be passing at the time and mixed up in it.

Since Mr. Pollingray's return from his last residence on the Continent, I
have learnt to know him and like him. Charles is unjust to his uncle. He
is not at all the grave kind of man I expected from Charles's
description. He is extremely entertaining, and then he understands the
world, and I like to hear him talk, he is so unpretentious and uses just
the right words. No one would imagine his age, from his appearance, and
he has more fun than any young man I have listened to.

But, I am convinced I have discovered his weakness. It is my fatal.
peculiarity that I cannot be with people ten minutes without seeing some
point about them where they are tenderest. Mr. Pollingray wants to be
thought quite youthful. He can bear any amount of fatigue; he is always
fresh and a delightful companion; but you cannot get him to show even a
shadow of exhaustion or to admit that he ever knew what it was to lie
down beaten. This is really to pretend that he is superhuman. I like him
so much that I could wish him superior to such--it is nothing other
than--vanity. Which is worse? A young man giving himself the air of a
sage, or--but no one can call Mr. Pollingray an old man. He is a
confirmed bachelor. That puts the case. Charles, when he says of him that
he is a 'gentleman in a good state of preservation,' means to be
ironical. I doubt whether Charles at fifty would object to have the same
said of Mr. Charles Everett. Mr. Pollingray has always looked to his
health. He has not been disappointed. I am sure he was always very good.
But, whatever he was, he is now very pleasant, and he does not talk to
women as if he thought them singular, and feel timid, I mean, confused,
as some men show that they feel--the good ones. Perhaps he felt so once,
and that is why he is still free. Charles's dread that his uncle will
marry is most unworthy. He never will, but why should he not? Mama
declares that he is waiting for a woman of intellect, I can hear her:
'Depend upon it, a woman of intellect will marry Dayton Manor.' Should
that mighty event not come to pass, poor Charles will have to sink the
name of Everett in that of Pollingray. Mr. Pollingray's name is the worst
thing about him. When I think of his name I see him ten times older than
he is. My feelings are in harmony with his pedigree concerning the age of
the name. One would have to be a woman of profound intellect to see the
advantage of sharing it.

'Mrs. Pollingray!' She must be a lady with a wig.

It was when we were rowing up by Hatchard's mill that I first perceived
his weakness, he was looking at me so kindly, and speaking of his
friendship for papa, and how glad he was to be fixed at last, near to us
at Dayton. I wished to use some term of endearment in reply, and said, I
remember, 'Yes, and we are also glad, Godpapa.' I was astonished that he
should look so disconcerted, and went on: 'Have you forgotten that you
are my godpapa?'

He answered: 'Am I? Oh! yes--the name of Alice.'

Still he looked uncertain, uncomfortable, and I said, 'Do you want to
cancel the past, and cast me off?'

'No, certainly not'; he, I suppose, thought he was assuring me.

I saw his lips move at the words I cancel the past,' though he did not
speak them out. He positively blushed. I know the sort of young man he
must have been. Exactly the sort of young man mama would like for a
son-in-law, and her daughters would accept in pure obedience when reduced
to be capable of the virtue by rigorous diet, or consumption.

He let the boat go round instantly. This was enough for me. It struck me
then that when papa had said to mama (as he did in that absurd situation)
'He is fifty,' Mr. Pollingray must have heard it across the river, for he
walked away hurriedly. He came back, it is true, with the boat, but I
have my own ideas. He is always ready to do a service, but on this
occasion I think it was an afterthought. I shall not venture to call him
'Godpapa' again.

Indeed, if I have a desire, it is that I may be blind to people's
weakness. My insight is inveterate. Papa says he has heard Mr. Pollingray
boast of his age. If so, there has come a change over him. I cannot be
deceived. I see it constantly. After my unfortunate speech, Mr.
Pollingray shunned our house for two whole weeks, and scarcely bowed to
us when coming out of church. Miss Pollingray idolises him--spoils him.
She says that he is worth twenty of Charles. Nous savons ce que nous
savons, nous autres. Charles is wild, but Charles would be above these
littlenesses. How could Miss Pollingray comprehend the romance of
Charles's nature?

My sister Evelina is now Mr. Pollingray's favourite. She could not say
Godpapa to him, if she would. Persons who are very much petted at home,
are always establishing favourites abroad. For my part, let them praise
me or not, I know that I can do any thing I set my mind upon. At present
I choose to be frivolous. I know I am frivolous. What then? If there is
fun in the world am I not to laugh at it? I shall astonish them by and
by. But, I will laugh while I can. I am sure, there is so much misery in
the world, it is a mercy to be able to laugh. Mr. Pollingray may think
what he likes of me. When Charles tells me that I must do my utmost to
propitiate his uncle, he cannot mean that I am to refrain from laughing,
because that is being a hypocrite, which I may become when I have gone
through all the potential moods and not before.

It is preposterous to suppose that I am to be tied down to the views of
life of elderly people.

I dare say I did laugh a little too much the other night, but could I
help it? We had a dinner party. Present were Mr. Pollingray, Mrs.
Kershaw, the Wilbury people (three), Charles, my brother Duncan, Evelina,
mama, papa, myself, and Mr. and Mrs. (put them last for emphasis) Romer
Pattlecombe, Mrs. Pattlecombe (the same number of syllables as
Pollingray, and a 'P' to begin with) is thirty-one years her husband's
junior, and she is twenty-six; full of fun, and always making fun of him,
the mildest, kindest, goody old thing, who has never distressed himself
for anything and never will. Mrs. Romer not only makes fun, but is fun.
When you have done laughing with her, you can laugh at her. She is the
salt of society in these parts. Some one, as we were sitting on the lawn
after dinner, alluded to the mishap to papa and mama, and mama, who has
never forgiven Mr. Pollingray for having seen her in her ridiculous
plight, said that men were in her opinion greater gossips than women.
'That is indisputable, ma'am,' said Mr. Pollingray, he loves to bewilder
her; 'only, we never mention it.'

'There is an excuse for us,' said Mrs. Romer; 'our trials are so great,
we require a diversion, and so we talk of others.'

'Now really,' said Charles, 'I don't think your trials are equal to
ours.'

For which remark papa bantered him, and his uncle was sharp on him; and
Charles, I know, spoke half seriously, though he was seeking to draw Mrs.
Romer out: he has troubles.

From this, we fell upon a comparison of sufferings, and Mrs. Romer took
up the word. She is a fair, smallish, nervous woman, with delicate hands
and outlines, exceedingly sympathetic; so much so that while you are
telling her anything, she makes half a face in anticipation, and is ready
to shriek with laughter or shake her head with uttermost grief; and
sometimes, if you let her go too far in one direction, she does both. All
her narrations are with ups and downs of her hands, her eyes, her chin,
and her voice. Taking poor, good old Mr. Romer by the roll of his coat,
she made as if posing him, and said: 'There! Now, it's all very well for
you to say that there is anything equal to a woman's sufferings in this
world. I do declare you know nothing of what we unhappy women have to
endure. It's dreadful! No male creature can possibly know what tortures I
have to undergo.'

Mama neatly contrived, after interrupting her, to divert the subject. I
think that all the ladies imagined they were in jeopardy, but I knew Mrs.
Romer was perfectly to be trusted. She has wit which pleases, jusqu'aux
ongles, and her sense of humour never overrides her discretion with more
than a glance--never with preparation.

'Now,' she pursued, 'let me tell you what excruciating trials I have to
go through. This man,' she rocked the patient old gentleman to and fro,
'this man will be the death of me. He is utterly devoid of a sense of
propriety. Again and again I say to him--cannot the tailor cut down these
trowsers of yours? Yes, Mr. Amble, you preach patience to women, but this
is too much for any woman's endurance. Now, do attempt to picture to
yourself what an agony it must be to me:--he will shave, and he will wear
those enormously high trowsers that, when they are braced, reach up
behind to the nape of his neck! Only yesterday morning, as I was lying in
bed, I could see him in his dressing-room. I tell you: he will shave, and
he will choose the time for shaving early after he has braced these
immensely high trowsers that make such a placard of him. Oh, my goodness!
My dear Romer, I have said to him fifty times if I have said it once, my
goodness me! why can you not get decent trowsers such as other men wear?
He has but one answer--he has been accustomed to wear those trowsers, and
he would not feel at home in another pair. And what does he say if I
continue to complain? and I cannot but continue to complain, for it is
not only moral, it is physical torment to see the sight he makes of
himself; he says: "My dear, you should not have married an old man."
What! I say to him, must an old man wear antiquated trowsers? No! nothing
will turn him; those are his habits. But, you have not heard the worst.
The sight of those hideous trowsers totally destroying all shape in the
man, is horrible enough; but it is absolutely more than a woman can bear
to see him--for he will shave--first cover his face with white soap with
that ridiculous centre-piece to his trowsers reaching quite up to his
poll, and then, you can fancy a woman's rage and anguish! the figure
lifts its nose by the extremist tip. Oh! it's degradation! What respect
can a woman have for her husband after that sight? Imagine it! And I have
implored him to spare me. It's useless. You sneer at our hbops and say
that you are inconvenienced by them but you gentlemen are not
degraded,--Oh! unutterably!--as I am every morning of my life by that
cruel spectacle of a husband.'

I have but faintly sketched Mrs. Romer's style. Evelina, who is prudish
and thinks her vulgar, refused to laugh, but it came upon me, as the
picture of 'your own old husband,' with so irresistibly comic an effect
that I was overcome by convulsions of laughter. I do not defend myself.
It was as much a fit as any other attack. I did all I could to arrest it.
At last, I ran indoors and upstairs to my bedroom and tried hard to
become dispossessed. I am sure I was an example of the sufferings of my
sex. It could hardly have been worse for Mrs. Romer than it was for me. I
was drowned in internal laughter long after I had got a grave face. Early
in the evening Mr. Pollingray left us.




CHAPTER III

HE

I am carried by the fascination of a musical laugh. Apparently I am
doomed to hear it at my own expense. We are secure from nothing in this
life.

I have determined to stand for the county. An unoccupied man is a prey to
every hook of folly. Be dilettante all your days, and you might as fairly
hope to reap a moral harvest as if you had chased butterflies. The
activities created by a profession or determined pursuit are necessary to
the growth of the mind.

Heavens! I find myself writing like an illegitimate son of La
Rochefoucauld, or of Vauvenargues. But, it is true that I am fifty years
old, and I am not mature. I am undeveloped somewhere.

The question for me to consider is, whether this development is to be
accomplished by my being guilty of an act of egregious folly.

Dans la cinquantaine! The reflection should produce a gravity in men.
Such a number of years will not ring like bridal bells in a man's ears. I
have my books about me, my horses, my dogs, a contented household. I move
in the centre of a perfect machine, and I am dissatisfied. I rise early.
I do not digest badly. What is wrong?

The calamity of my case is that I am in danger of betraying what is wrong
with me to others, without knowing it myself. Some woman will be
suspecting and tattling, because she has nothing else to do. Girls have
wonderfully shrewd eyes for a weakness in the sex which they are
instructed to look upon as superior. But I am on my guard.

The fact is manifest: I feel I have been living more or less uselessly.
It is a fat time. There are a certain set of men in every prosperous
country who, having wherewithal, and not being compelled to toil, become
subjected to the moral ideal. Most of them in the end sit down with our
sixth Henry or second Richard and philosophise on shepherds. To be no
better than a simple hind! Am I better? Prime bacon and an occasional
draft of shrewd beer content him, and they do not me. Yet I am sound, and
can sit through the night and be ready, and on the morrow I shall stand
for the county.

I made the announcement that I had thoughts of entering Parliament,
before I had half formed the determination, at my sister's lawn party
yesterday.

'Gilbert!' she cried, and raised her hands. A woman is hurt if you do not
confide to her your plans as soon as you can conceive them. She must be
present to assist at the birth, or your plans are unblessed plans.

I had been speaking aside in a casual manner to my friend Amble, whose
idea is that the Church is not represented with sufficient strength in
the Commons, and who at once, as I perceived, grasped the notion of
getting me to promote sundry measures connected with schools and clerical
stipends, for his eyes dilated; he said: 'Well, if you do, I can put you
up to several things,' and imparting the usual chorus of yesses to his
own mind, he continued absently: 'Pollingray might be made strong on
church rates. There is much to do. He has lived abroad and requires
schooling in these things. We want a man. Yes, yes, yes. It's a good
idea; a notion.'

My sister, however, was of another opinion. She did me the honour to take
me aside.

'Gilbert, were you serious just now?'

'Quite serious. Is it not my characteristic?'

'Not on these occasions. I saw the idea come suddenly upon you. You were
looking at Charles.'

'Continue: and at what was he looking?'

'He was looking at Alice Amble.'

'And the young lady?'

'She looked at you.'

I was here attacked by a singularly pertinacious fly, and came out of the
contest with a laugh.

'Did she have that condescension towards me? And from the glance, my
resolution to enter Parliament was born? It is the French vaudevilliste's
doctrine of great events from little causes. The slipper of a soubrette
trips the heart of a king and changes the destiny of a nation-the history
of mankind. It may be true. If I were but shot into the House from a
little girl's eye!'

With this I took her arm gaily, walked with her, and had nearly
overreached myself with excess of cunning. I suppose we are reduced to
see more plainly that which we systematically endeavour to veil from
others. It is best to flutter a handkerchief, instead of nailing up a
curtain. The principal advantage is that you may thereby go on deceiving
yourself, for this reason: few sentiments are wholly matter of fact; but
when they are half so, you make them concrete by deliberately seeking
either to crush or conceal them, and you are doubly betrayed--betrayed to
the besieging eye and to yourself. When a sentiment has grown to be a
passion (mercifully may I be spared!) different tactics are required. By
that time, you will have already betrayed yourself too deeply to dare to
be flippant: the investigating eye is aware that it has been purposely
diverted: knowing some things, it makes sure of the rest from which you
turn it away. If you want to hide a very grave case, you must speak
gravely about it.--At which season, be but sure of your voice, and
simulate a certain depth of sentimental philosophy, and you may once
more, and for a long period, bewilder the investigator of the secrets of
your bosom. To sum up: in the preliminary stages of a weakness, be
careful that you do not show your own alarm, or all will be suspected.
Should the weakness turn to fever, let a little of it be seen, like a
careless man, and nothing will really be thought.

I can say this, I can do this; and is it still possible that a pin's
point has got through the joints of the armour of a man like me?

Elizabeth quitted my side with the conviction that I am as considerate an
uncle as I am an affectionate brother.

I said to her, apropos, 'I have been observing those two. It seems to me
they are deciding things for themselves.'

'I have been going to speak to you about them Gilbert,' said she.

And I: 'The girl must be studied. The family is good. While Charles is in
Wales, you must have her at Dayton. She laughs rather vacantly, don't you
think? but the sound of it has the proper wholesome ring. I will give her
what attention I can while she is here, but in the meantime I must have a
bride of my own and commence courting.'

'Parliament, you mean,' said Elizabeth with a frank and tender smile. The
hostess was summoned to welcome a new guest, and she left me, pleased
with her successful effort to reach my meaning, and absorbed by it.

I would not have challenged Machiavelli; but I should not have
encountered the Florentine ruefully. I feel the same keen delight in
intellectual dexterity. On some points my sister is not a bad match for
me. She can beat me seven games out of twelve at chess; but the five I
win sequently, for then I am awake. There is natural art and artificial
art, and the last beats the first. Fortunately for us, women are
strangers to the last. They have had to throw off a mask before they
have, got the schooling; so, when they are thus armed we know what we
meet, and what are the weapons to be used.

Alice, if she is a fine fencer at all, will expect to meet the ordinary
English squire in me. I have seen her at the baptismal font! It is
inconceivable. She will fancy that at least she is ten times more subtle
than I. When I get the mastery--it is unlikely to make me the master.
What may happen is, that the nature of the girl will declare itself,
under the hard light of intimacy, vulgar. Charles I cause to be absent
for six weeks; so there will be time enough for the probation. I do not
see him till he returns. If by chance I had come earlier to see him and
he to allude to her, he would have had my conscience on his side, and
that is what a scrupulous man takes care to prevent.

I wonder whether my friends imagine me to be the same man whom they knew
as Gilbert Pollingray a month back? I see the change, I feel the change;
but I have no retrospection, no remorse, no looking forward, no feeling:
none for others, very little, for myself. I am told that I am losing
fluency as a dinner-table talker. There is now more savour to me in a
silvery laugh than in a spiced wit. And this is the man who knows women,
and is far too modest to give a decided opinion upon any of their merits.
Search myself through as I may, I cannot tell when the change began, or
what the change consists of, or what is the matter with me, or what charm
there is in the person who does the mischief. She is the counterpart of
dozens of girls; lively, brown-eyed, brown-haired, underbred--it is not
too harsh to say so--underbred slightly; half-educated, whether
quickwitted I dare not opine. She is undoubtedly the last whom I or
another person would have fixed upon as one to work me this unmitigated
evil. I do not know her, and I believe I do not care to know her, and I
am thirsting for the hour to come when I shall study her. Is not this to
have the poison of a bite in one's blood? The wrath of Venus is not a
fable. I was a hard reader and I despised the sex in my youth, before the
family estates fell to me; since when I have playfully admired the sex; I
have dallied with a passion, and not read at all, save for diversion: her
anger is not a fable. You may interpret many a mythic tale by the facts
which lie in your own blood. My emotions have lain altogether dormant in
sentimental attachment. I have, I suppose, boasted of, Python slain, and
Cupid has touched me up with an arrow. I trust to my own skill rather
than to his mercy for avoiding a second from his quiver. I will
understand this girl if I have to submit to a close intimacy with her for
six months. There is no doubt of the elegance of her movements. Charles
might as well take his tour, and let us see him again next year. Yes, her
movements are (or will be) gracious. In a year's time she will have
acquired the fuller tones and poetry of womanliness. Perhaps then, too,
her smile will linger instead of flashing. I have known infinitely
lovelier women than she. One I have known! but let her be. Louise and I
have long since said adieu.




CHAPTER IV

SHE

Behold me installed in Dayton Manor House, and brought here for the
express purpose (so Charles has written me word) of my being studied,
that it may be seen whether I am worthy to be, on some august future
occasion--possibly--a member (Oh, so much to mumble!) of this great
family. Had I known it when I was leaving home, I should have
countermanded the cording of my boxes. If you please, I do the packing,
and not the cording. I must practise being polite, or I shall be
horrifying these good people.

I am mortally offended. I am very very angry. I shall show temper.
Indeed, I have shown it. Mr. Pollingray must and does think me a goose.
Dear sir, and I think you are justified. If any one pretends to guess
how, I have names to suit that person. I am a ninny, an ape, and mind I
call myself these bad things because I deserve worse. I am flighty, I
believe I am heartless. Charles is away, and I suffer no pangs. The truth
is, I fancied myself so exceedingly penetrating, and it was my vanity
looking in a glass. I saw something that answered to my nods and
howd'ye-do's and--but I am ashamed, and so penitent I might begin making
a collection of beetles. I cannot lift up my head.

Mr. Pollingray is such a different man from the one I had imagined! What
that one was, I have now quite forgotten. I remember too clearly what the
wretched guesser was. I have been three weeks at Dayton, and if my
sisters know me when I return to the vicarage, they are not foolish
virgins. For my part, I know that I shall always hate Mrs. Romer
Pattlecombe, and that I am unjust to the good woman, but I do hate her,
and I think the stories shocking, and wonder intensely what it was that I
could have found in them to laugh at. I shall never laugh again for many
years. Perhaps, when I am an old woman, I may. I wish the time had come.
All young people seem to me so helplessly silly. I am one of them for the
present, and have no hope that I can appear to be anything else. The
young are a crowd--a shoal of small fry. Their elders are the select of
the world.

On the morning of the day when I was to leave home for Dayton, a distance
of eight miles, I looked out of my window while dressing--as early as
halfpast seven--and I saw Mr. Pollingray's groom on horseback, leading up
and down the walk a darling little, round, plump, black cob that made my
heart leap with an immense bound of longing to be on it and away across
the downs. And then the maid came to my door with a letter:

'Mr. Pollingray, in return for her considerate good behaviour and saving
of trouble to him officially, begs his goddaughter to accept the
accompanying little animal: height 14 h., age 31 years; hunts, is
sure-footed, and likely to be the best jumper in the county.'

I flew downstairs. I rushed out of the house and up to my treasure, and
kissed his nose and stroked his mane. I could not get my fingers away
from him. Horses are so like the very best and beautifullest of women
when you caress them. They show their pleasure so at being petted. They
curve their necks, and paw, and look proud. They take your flattery like
sunshine and are lovely in it. I kissed my beauty, peering at his
black-mottled skin, which is like Allingborough Heath in the twilight.
The smell of his new saddle and bridle-leather was sweeter than a garden
to me. The man handed me a large riding-whip mounted with silver. I
longed to jump up and ride till midnight.

Then mama and papa came out and read the note and looked, at my darling
little cob, and my sisters saw him and kissed me, for they are not
envious girls. The most distressing thing was that we had not a
riding-habit in the family. I was ready to wear any sort. I would have
ridden as a guy rather than not ride at all. But mama gave me a promise
that in two days a riding-habit should be sent on to Dayton, and I had to
let my pet be led back from where he came. I had no life till I was
following him. I could have believed him to be a fairy prince who had
charmed me. I called him Prince Leboo, because he was black and good. I
forgive anybody who talks about first love after what my experience has
been with Prince Leboo.

What papa thought of the present I do not know, but I know very well what
mama thought: and for my part I thought everything, not distinctly
including that, for I could not suppose such selfishness in one so
generous as Mr. Pollingray. But I came to Dayton in a state of arrogant
pride, that gave assurance if not ease to my manners. I thanked Mr.
Pollingray warmly, but in a way to let him see it was the matter of a
horse between us. 'You give, I register thanks, and there's an end.'

'He thinks me a fool! a fool!

'My habit,' I said, 'comes after me. I hope we shall have some rides
together.'

'Many,' replied Mr. Pollingray, and his bow inflated me with ideas of my
condescension.

And because Miss Pollingray (Queen Elizabeth he calls her) looked half
sad, I read it--! I do not write what I read it to be.

Behold the uttermost fool of all female creation led over the house by
Mr. Pollingray. He showed me the family pictures.

'I am no judge of pictures, Mr. Pollingray.'

'You will learn to see the merits of these.'

'I'm afraid not, though I were to study them for years.'

'You may have that opportunity.'

'Oh! that is more than I can expect.'

'You will develop intelligence on such subjects by and by.'

A dull sort of distant blow struck me in this remark; but I paid no heed
to it.

He led me over the gardens and the grounds. The Great John Methlyn
Pollingray planted those trees, and designed the house, and the
flower-garden still speaks of his task; but he is not my master, and
consequently I could not share his three great-grandsons' veneration for
him. There are high fir-woods and beech woods, and a long ascending
narrow meadow between them, through which a brook falls in continual
cascades. It is the sort of scene I love, for it has a woodland grandeur
and seclusion that leads, me to think, and makes a better girl of me. But
what I said was: 'Yes, it is the place of all others to come and settle
in for the evening of one's days.'

'You could not take to it now?' said Mr. Pollingray.

'Now?' my expression of face must have been a picture.

'You feel called upon to decline such a residence in the morning of your
days?'

He persisted in looking at me as he spoke, and I felt like something
withering scarlet.

I am convinced he saw through me, while his face was polished brass. My
self-possession returned, for my pride was not to be dispersed
immediately.

'Please, take me to the stables,' I entreated; and there I was at home.
There I saw my Prince Leboo, and gave him a thousand caresses.'

'He knows me already,' I said.

Then he is some degrees in advance of me,' said Mr. Pollingray.

Is not cold dissection of one's character a cruel proceeding? And I
think, too, that a form of hospitality like this by which I am invited to
be analysed at leisure, is both mean and base. I have been kindly treated
and I am grateful, but I do still say (even though I may have improved
under it) it is unfair.

To proceed: the dinner hour arrived. The atmosphere of his own house
seems to favour Mr. Pollingray as certain soils and sites favour others.
He walked into the dining-room between us with his hands behind him,
talking to us both so easily and smoothly cheerfully--naturally and
pleasantly--inimitable by any young man! You hardly feel the change of
room. We were but three at table, but there was no lack of entertainment.
Mr. Pollingray is an admirable host; he talks just enough himself and
helps you to talk. What does comfort me is that it gives him real
pleasure to see a hearty appetite. Young men, I know it for a certainty,
never quite like us to be so human. Ah! which is right? I would not miss
the faith in our nobler essence which Charles has. But, if it nobler? One
who has lived longer in the world ought to know better, and Mr.
Pollingray approves of naturalness in everything. I have now seen through
Charles's eyes for several months; so implicitly that I am timid when I
dream of trusting to another's judgement. It is, however, a fact that I
am not quite natural with Charles.

Every day Mr. Pollingray puts on evening dress out of deference to his
sister. If young men had these good habits they would gain our respect,
and lose their own self-esteem less early.

After dinner I sang. Then Mr. Pollingray read an amusing essay to us, and
retired to his library. Miss Pollingray sat and talked to me of her
brother, and of her nephew--for whom it is that Mr. Pollingray is
beginning to receive company, and is going into society. Charles's
subsequently received letter explained the 'receive company.' I could not
comprehend it at the time.

'The house has been shut up for years, or rarely inhabited by us for more
than a month in the year. Mr. Pollingray prefers France. All his
associations, I may say his sympathies, are in France. Latterly he seems
to have changed a little; but from Normandy to Touraine and Dauphiny--we
had a triangular home over there. Indeed, we have it still. I am never
certain of my brother.'

While Miss Pollingray was speaking, my eyes were fixed on a Vidal crayon
drawing, faintly coloured with chalks, of a foreign lady--I could have
sworn to her being French--young, quite girlish, I doubt if her age was
more than mine.

She is pretty, is she not?' said Miss Pollingray.

She is almost beautiful,' I exclaimed, and Miss Pollingray, seeing my
curiosity, was kind enough not to keep me in suspense.

'That is the Marquise de Mazardouin--nee Louise de Riverolles. You will
see other portraits of her in the house. This is the most youthful of
them, if I except one representing a baby, and bearing her initials.'

I remembered having noticed a similarity of feature in some of the
portraits in the different rooms. My longing to look at them again was
like a sudden jet of flame within me. There was no chance of seeing them
till morning; so, promising myself to dream of the face before me, I
dozed through a conversation with my hostess, until I had got the French
lady's eyes and hair and general outline stamped accurately, as I hoped,
on my mind. I was no sooner on my way to bed than all had faded. The
torment of trying to conjure up that face was inconceivable. I lay, and
tossed, and turned to right and to left, and scattered my sleep; but by
and by my thoughts reverted to Mr. Pollingray, and then like sympathetic
ink held to the heat, I beheld her again; but vividly, as she must have
been when she was sitting to the artist. The hair was naturally crisped,
waving thrice over the forehead and brushed clean from the temples,
showing the small ears, and tied in a knot loosely behind. Her eyebrows
were thick and dark, but soft; flowing eyebrows; far lovelier, to my
thinking, than any pencilled arch. Dark eyes, and full, not prominent. I
find little expression of inward sentiment in very prominent eyes. On the
contrary they seem to have a fish-like dependency of gaze on what is
without, and show fishy depths, if any. For instance, my eyes are rather
prominent, and I am just the little fool--but the French lady is my
theme. Madame la Marquise, your eyes are sweeter to me than celestial. I
never saw such candour and unaffected innocence in eyes before. Accept
the compliment of the pauvre Anglaise. Did you do mischief with them? Did
Vidal's delicate sketch do justice to you? Your lips and chin and your
throat all repose in such girlish grace, that if ever it is my good
fortune to see you, you will not be aged to me!

I slept and dreamed of her.

In the morning, I felt certain that she had often said: 'Mon cher
Gilbert,' to Mr. Pollingray. Had he ever said: 'Ma chere Louise?' He
might have said: 'Ma bien aimee!' for it was a face to be loved.

My change of feeling towards him dates from that morning. He had
previously seemed to me a man so much older. I perceived in him now a
youthfulness beyond mere vigour of frame. I could not detach him from my
dreams of the night. He insists upon addressing me by the terms of our
'official' relationship, as if he made it a principle of our intercourse.

'Well, and is your godpapa to congratulate you on your having had a quiet
rest?' was his greeting.

I answered stupidly: 'Oh, yes, thank you,' and would have given worlds
for the courage to reply in French, but I distrusted my accent. At
breakfast, the opportunity or rather the excuse for an attempt, was
offered. His French valet, Francois, waits on him at breakfast. Mr.
Pollingray and his sister asked for things in the French tongue, and, as
if fearing some breach of civility, Mr. Pollingray asked me if I knew
French.

Yes, I know it; that is, I understand it,' I stuttered. Allons, nous
parlerons francais,' said he. But I shook my head, and remained like a
silly mute.

I was induced towards the close of the meal to come out with a few French
words. I was utterly shamefaced. Mr. Pollingray has got the French manner
of protesting that one is all but perfect in one's speaking. I know how
absurd it must have sounded. But I felt his kindness, and in my heart I
thanked him humbly. I believe now that a residence in France does not
deteriorate an Englishman. Mr. Pollingray, when in his own house, has the
best qualities of the two countries. He is gay, and, yes, while he makes
a study of me, I am making a study of him. Which of us two will know the
other first? He was papa's college friend--papa's junior, of course, and
infinitely more papa's junior now. I observe that weakness in him, I
mean, his clinging to youthfulness, less and less; but I do see it, I
cannot be quite in error. The truth is, I begin to feel that I cannot
venture to mistrust my infallible judgement, or I shall have no
confidence in myself at all.

After breakfast, I was handed over to Miss Pollingray, with the
intimation that I should not see him till dinner.

'Gilbert is anxious to cultivate the society of his English neighbours,
now that he has, as he supposes, really settled among them,' she remarked
to me. 'At his time of life, the desire to be useful is almost a malady.
But, he cherishes the poor, and that is more than an occupation, it is a
virtue.'

Her speech has become occasionally French in the construction of the
sentences.

'Mais oui,' I said shyly, and being alone with her, I was not rebuffed by
her smile, especially as she encouraged me on.

I am, she told me, to see a monde of French people here in September. So,
the story of me is to be completer, or continued in September. I could
not get Miss Pollingray to tell me distinctly whether Madame la Marquise
will be one of the guests. But I know that she is not a widow. In that
case, she has a husband. In that case, what is the story of her relations
towards Mr. Pollingray? There must be some story. He would not surely
have so many portraits of her about the house (and they travel with him
wherever he goes) if she were but a lovely face to him. I cannot
understand it. They were frequent, constant visitors to one another's
estates in France; always together. Perhaps a man of Mr. Pollingray's
age, or perhaps M. le Marquis--and here I lose myself. French habits are
so different from ours. One thing I am certain of: no charge can be
brought against my Englishman. I read perfect rectitude in his face. I
would cast anchor by him. He must have had a dreadful unhappiness.

Mama kept her promise by sending my riding habit and hat punctually, but
I had run far ahead of all the wishes I had formed when I left home, and
I half feared my ride out with Mr. Pollingray. That was before I had
received Charles's letter, letting me know the object of my invitation
here. I require at times a morbid pride to keep me up to the work. I
suppose I rode befittingly, for Mr. Pollingray praised my seat on
horseback. I know I can ride, or feel the 'blast of a horse like my
own'--as he calls it. Yet he never could have had a duller companion. My
conversation was all yes and no, as if it went on a pair of crutches like
a miserable cripple. I was humiliated and vexed. All the while I was
trying to lead up to the French lady, and I could not commence with a
single question. He appears to, have really cancelled the past in every
respect save his calling me his goddaughter. His talk was of the English
poor, and vegetation, and papa's goodness to his old dames in Ickleworth
parish, and defects in my education acknowledged by me, but not likely to
restore me in my depressed state. The ride was beautiful. We went the
length of a twelve-mile ridge between Ickleworth and Hillford, over high
commons, with immense views on both sides, and through beech-woods,
oakwoods, and furzy dells and downs spotted with juniper and
yewtrees--old picnic haunts of mine, but Mr. Pollingray's fresh delight
in the landscape made them seem new and strange. Home through the valley.

The next day Miss Pollingray joined us, wearing a feutre gris and green
plume, which looked exceedingly odd until you became accustomed to it.
Her hair has decided gray streaks, and that, and the Queen Elizabeth
nose, and the feutre gris!--but she is so kind, I could not even smile in
my heart. It is singular that Mr. Pollingray, who's but three years her
junior, should look at least twenty years younger--at the very least. His
moustache and beard are of the colour of a corn sheaf, and his blue eyes
shining over them remind me of summer. That describes him. He is summer,
and has not fallen into his autumn yet. Miss Pollingray helped me to talk
a little. She tried to check her brother's enthusiasm for our scenery,
and extolled the French paysage. He laughed at her, for when they were in
France it was she who used to say, 'There is nothing here like England!'
Miss Fool rode between them attentive to the jingling of the bells in her
cap: 'Yes' and 'No' at anybody's command, in and out of season.

Thank you, Charles, for your letter! I was beginning to think my
invitation to Dayton inexplicable, when that letter arrived. I cannot but
deem it an unworthy baseness to entrap a girl to study her without a
warning to her. I went up to my room after I had read it, and wrote in
reply till the breakfast-bell rang. I resumed my occupation an hour
later, and wrote till one o'clock. In all, fifteen pages of writing,
which I carefully folded and addressed to Charles; sealed the envelope,
stamped it, and destroyed it. I went to bed. 'No, I won't ride out
to-day, I have a headache!' I repeated this about half-a-dozen times to
nobody's knocking on the door, and when at last somebody knocked I tried
to repeat it once, but having the message that Mr. Pollingray
particularly wished to have my company in a ride, I rose submissively and
cried. This humiliation made my temper ferocious. Mr. Pollingray observed
my face, and put it down in his notebook. 'A savage disposition,' or, no,
'An untamed little rebel'; for he has hopes of me. He had the cruelty to
say so.

'What I am, I shall remain,' said I.

He informed me that it was perfectly natural for me to think it; and on
my replying that persons ought to know themselves best: 'At my age,
perhaps,' he said, and added, 'I cannot speak very confidently of my
knowledge of myself.'

'Then you make us out to be nothing better than puppets, Mr. Pollingray.'

'If we have missed an early apprenticeship to the habit of self-command,
ma filleule.'

'Merci, mon parrain.'

He laughed. My French, I suppose.

I determined that, if he wanted to study me, I would help him.

'I can command myself when I choose, but it is only when I choose.'

This seemed to me quite a reasonable speech, until I found him looking
for something to follow, in explanation, and on coming to sift my
meaning, I saw that it was temper, and getting more angry, continued:

'The sort of young people who have such wonderful command of themselves
are not the pleasantest.'

'No,' he said; 'they disappoint us. We expect folly from the young.'

I shut my lips. Prince Leboo knew that he must go, and a good gallop
reconciled me to circumstances. Then I was put to jumping little furzes
and ditches, which one cannot pretend to do without a fair appearance of
gaiety; for, while you are running the risk of a tumble, you are
compelled to look cheerful and gay, at least, I am. To fall frowning will
never do. I had no fall. My gallant Leboo made my heart leap with love of
him, though mill-stones were tied to it. I may be vexed when I begin, but
I soon ride out a bad temper. And he is mine! I am certainly inconstant
to Charles, for I think of Leboo fifty times more. Besides, there is no
engagement as yet between Charles and me. I have first to be approved
worthy by Mr. and Miss Pollingray: two pairs of eyes and ears, over which
I see a solemnly downy owl sitting, conning their reports of me. It is a
very unkind ordeal to subject any inexperienced young woman to. It was
harshly conceived and it is being remorselessly executed. I would
complain more loudly--in shrieks--if I could say I was unhappy; but every
night I look out of my window before going to bed and see the long falls
of the infant river through the meadow, and the dark woods seeming to
enclose the house from harm: I dream of the old inhabitant, his
ancestors, and the numbers and numbers of springs when the wildflowers
have flourished in those woods and the nightingales have sung there. And
I feel there will never be a home to me like Dayton.




CHAPTER V

HE

For twenty years of my life I have embraced the phantom of the fairest
woman that ever drew breath. I have submitted to her whims, I have
worshipped her feet, I have, I believe, strengthened her principle. I
have done all in my devotion but adopt her religious faith. And I have,
as I trusted some time since, awakened to perceive that those twenty
years were a period of mere sentimental pastime, perfectly useless,
fruitless, unless, as is possible, it has saved me from other follies.
But it was a folly in itself. Can one's nature be too stedfast? The
question whether a spice of frivolousness may not be a safeguard has
often risen before me. The truth, I must learn to think, is, that my
mental power is not the match for my ideal or sentimental apprehension
and native tenacity of attachment. I have fallen into one of the pits of
a well-meaning but idle man. The world discredits the existence of pure
platonism in love. I myself can barely look back on those twenty years of
amatory servility with a full comprehension of the part I have been
playing in them. And yet I would not willingly forfeit the exalted
admiration of Louise for my constancy: as little willingly as I would
have imperilled her purity. I cling to the past as to something in which
I have deserved well, though I am scarcely satisfied with it. According
to our English notions I know my name. English notions, however, are not
to be accepted in all matters, any more than the flat declaration of a
fact will develop it in alt its bearings. When our English society shall
have advanced to a high civilization, it will be less expansive in
denouncing the higher stupidities. Among us, much of the social judgement
of Bodge upon the relations of men to women is the stereotyped opinion of
the land. There is the dictum here for a man who adores a woman who is
possessed by a husband. If he has long adored her, and known himself to
be preferred by her in innocency of heart; if he has solved the problem
of being her bosom's lord, without basely seeking to degrade her to being
his mistress; the epithets to characterise him in our vernacular will
probably be all the less flattering. Politically we are the most
self-conscious people upon earth, and socially the frankest animals. The
terrorism of our social laws is eminently serviceable, for without it
such frank animals as we are might run into bad excesses. I judge rather
by the abstract evidence than by the examples our fair matrons give to
astounded foreigners when abroad.

Louise writes that her husband is paralysed. The Marquis de Mazardouin is
at last tasting of his mortality. I bear in mind the day when he married
her. She says that he has taken to priestly counsel, and, like a woman,
she praises him for that. It is the one thing which I have not done to
please her. She anticipates his decease. Should she be free--what then?
My heart does not beat the faster for the thought. There are twenty years
upon it, and they make a great load. But I have a desire that she should
come over to us. The old folly might rescue me from the new one. Not that
I am any further persecuted by the dread that I am in imminent danger
here. I have established a proper mastery over my young lady. 'Nous avons
change de role'. Alice is subdued; she laughs feebly, is becoming
conscious--a fact to be regretted, if I desired to check the creature's
growth. There is vast capacity in the girl. She has plainly not centred
her affections upon Charles, so that a man's conscience might be at ease
if--if he chose to disregard what is due to decency. But, why, when I
contest it, do I bow to the world's opinion concerning disparity of years
between husband and wife? I know innumerable cases of an old husband
making a young wife happy. My friend, Dr. Galliot, married his ward, and
he had the best wife of any man of my acquaintance. She has been
publishing his learned manuscripts ever since his death. That is an
extreme case, for he was forty-five years her senior, and stood bald at
the altar. Old General Althorpe married Julia Dahoop, and, but for his
preposterous jealousy of her, might be cited in proof that the ordinary
reckonings are not to be a yoke on the neck of one who earnestly seeks to
spouse a fitting mate, though late in life. But, what are fifty years?
They mark the prime of a healthy man's existence. He has by that time
seen the world, can decide, and settle, and is virtually more
eligible--to use the cant phrase of gossips--than a young man, even for a
young girl. And may not some fair and fresh reward be justly claimed as
the crown of a virtuous career?

I say all this, yet my real feeling is as if I were bald as Dr. Galliot
and jealous as General Althorpe. For, with my thorough knowledge of
myself, I, were I like either one of them, should not have offered myself
to the mercy of a young woman, or of the world. Nor, as I am and know
myself to be, would I offer myself to the mercy of Alice Amble. When my
filleule first drove into Dayton she had some singularly audacious ideas
of her own. Those vivid young feminine perceptions and untamed
imaginations are desperate things to encounter. There is nothing beyond
their reach. Our safety from them lies in the fact that they are always
seeing too much, and imagining too wildly; so that, with a little help
from us, they may be taught to distrust themselves; and when they have
once distrusted themselves, we need not afterwards fear them: their
supernatural vitality has vanished. I fancy my pretty Alice to be in this
state now. She leaves us to-morrow. In the autumn we shall have her with
us again, and Louise will scan her compassionately. I desire that they
should meet. It will be hardly fair to the English girl, but, if I stand
in the gap between them, I shall summon up no small quantity of dormant
compatriotic feeling. The contemplation of the contrast, too, may save me
from both: like the logic ass with the two trusses of hay on either side
of him.




CHAPTER VI

SHE

I am at home. There was never anybody who felt so strange in her home. It
is not a month since I left my sisters, and I hardly remember that I know
them. They all, and even papa, appear to be thinking about such petty
things. They complain that I tell them nothing. What have I to tell? My
Prince! my own Leboo, if I might lie in the stall with you, then I should
feel thoroughly happy! That is, if I could fall asleep. Evelina declares
we are not eight miles from Dayton. It seems to me I am eight millions of
miles distant, and shall be all my life travelling along a weary road to
get there again just for one long sunny day. And it might rain when I got
there after all! My trouble nobody knows. Nobody knows a thing!

The night before my departure, Miss Pollingray did me the honour to
accompany me up to my bedroom. She spoke to me searchingly about Charles;
but she did not demand compromising answers. She is not in favour of
early marriages, so she merely wishes to know the footing upon which we
stand: that of friends. I assured her we were simply friends. 'It is the
firmest basis of an attachment,' she said; and I did not look hurried.

But I gained my end. I led her to talk of the beautiful Marquise. This is
the tale. Mr. Pollingray, when a very young man, and comparatively poor,
went over to France with good introductions, and there saw and fell in
love with Louise de Riverolles. She reciprocated his passion. If he would
have consented to abjure his religion and worship with her, Madame de
Riverolles, her mother, would have listened to her entreaties. But
Gilbert was firm. Mr. Pollingray, I mean, refused to abandon his faith.
Her mother, consequently, did not interfere, and Monsieur de Riverolles,
her father, gave her to the Marquis de Marzardouin, a roue young
nobleman, immensely rich, and shockingly dissipated. And she married him.
No, I cannot understand French girls. Do as I will, it is quite
incomprehensible to me how Louise, loving another, could suffer herself
to be decked out in bridal finery and go to the altar and take the
marriage oaths. Not if perdition had threatened would I have submitted. I
have a feeling that Mr. Pollingray should have shown at least one year's
resentment at such conduct; and yet I admire him for his immediate
generous forgiveness of her. It was fatherly. She was married at sixteen.
His forgiveness was the fruit of his few years' seniority, said Miss
Pollingray, whose opinion of the Marquise I cannot arrive at. At any
rate, they have been true and warm friends ever since, constantly
together interchangeing visits. That is why Mr. Pollingray has been more
French than English for those long years.

Miss Pollingray concluded by asking me what I thought of the story. I
said: 'It is very strange French habits are so different from ours. I
dare say . . . I hope . . . , perhaps . . . indeed, Mr. Pollingray seems
happy now.' Her idea of my wits must be that they are of the schoolgirl
order--a perfect receptacle for indefinite impressions.

'Ah!' said she. 'Gilbert has burnt his heart to ashes by this time.'

I slept with that sentence in my brain. In the morning, I rose and
dressed, dreaming. As I was turning the handle of my door to go down to
breakfast, suddenly I swung round in a fit of tears. It was so piteous to
think that he should have waited by her twenty years in a slow anguish,
his heart burning out, without a reproach or a complaint. I saw him, I
still see him, like a martyr.

'Some people,' Miss Pollingray said, I permitted themselves to think evil
of my brother's assiduous devotion to a married woman. There is not a
spot on his character, or on that of the person whom Gilbert loved.'

I would believe it in the teeth of calumny. I would cling to my, belief
in him if I were drowning.

I consider that those twenty years are just nothing, if he chooses to
have them so. He has lived embalmed in a saintly affection. No wonder he
considers himself still youthful. He is entitled to feel that his future
is before him.

No amount of sponging would get the stains away from my horrid red
eyelids. I slunk into my seat at the breakfast-table, not knowing that
one of the maids had dropped a letter from Charles into my hand, and that
I had opened it and was holding it open. The letter, as I found
afterwards, told me that Charles has received an order from his uncle to
go over to Mr. Pollingray's estate in Dauphiny on business. I am not
sorry that they should have supposed I was silly enough to cry at the
thought of Charles's crossing the Channel. They did imagine it, I know;
for by and by Miss Pollingray whispered: 'Les absents n'auront pas tort,
cette fois, n'est-ce-pas? 'And Mr. Pollingray was cruelly gentle: an air
of 'I would not intrude on such emotions'; and I heightened their
delusions as much as I could: there was no other way of accounting for my
pantomime face. Why should he fancy I suffered so terribly? He talked
with an excited cheerfulness meant to relieve me, of course, but there
was no justification for his deeming me a love-sick kind of woe-begone
ballad girl. It caused him likewise to adopt a manner--what to call it, I
cannot think: tender respect, frigid regard, anything that accompanies
and belongs to the pressure of your hand with the finger-tips. He said
goodbye so tenderly that I would have kissed his sleeve. The effort to
restrain myself made me like an icicle. Oh! adieu, mon parrain!

     ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

     A wise man will not squander his laughter if he can help it
     A woman is hurt if you do not confide to her your plans
     Gentleman in a good state of preservation
     Imparting the usual chorus of yesses to his own mind
     In every difficulty, patience is a life-belt
     Knew my friend to be one of the most absent-minded of men
     Rapture of obliviousness
     Telling her anything, she makes half a face in anticipation
     When you have done laughing with her, you can laugh at her




THE SENTIMENTALISTS

AN UNFINISHED COMEDY

By George Meredith

              DRAMATIS PERSONAE
HOMEWARE.
PROFESSOR SPIRAL.

ARDEN,............. In love with Astraea.

SWITHIN,........... Sympathetics. OSIER,

DAME DRESDEN,...... Sister to Homeware.

ASTRAEA,........... Niece to Dame Dresden and Homeware.

LYRA,.............. A Wife.
LADY OLDLACE.
VIRGINIA.
WINIFRED.

              THE SENTIMENTALISTS

              AN UNFINISHED COMEDY

The scene is a Surrey garden in early summer. The paths are shaded by
tall box-wood hedges. The--time is some sixty years ago.

                 SCENE I

       PROFESSOR SPIRAL, DAME DRESDEN, LADY OLDLACE,
         VIRGINIA, WINIFRED, SWITHIN, and OSIER

(As they slowly promenade the garden, the professor is delivering one of
his exquisite orations on Woman.)

SPIRAL: One husband! The woman consenting to marriage takes but one. For
her there is no widowhood. That punctuation of the sentence called death
is not the end of the chapter for her. It is the brilliant proof of her
having a soul. So she exalts her sex. Above the wrangle and clamour of
the passions she is a fixed star. After once recording her obedience to
the laws of our common nature--that is to say, by descending once to
wedlock--she passes on in sovereign disengagement--a dedicated widow.

   (By this time they have disappeared from view. HOMEWARE appears;
   he craftily avoids joining their party, like one who is unworthy of
   such noble oratory. He desires privacy and a book, but is disturbed
   by the arrival of ARDEN, who is painfully anxious to be polite to
   'her uncle Homeware.')

                 SCENE II

               HOMEWARE, ARDEN

ARDEN: A glorious morning, sir.

HOMEWARE: The sun is out, sir.

ARDEN: I am happy in meeting you, Mr. Homeware.

HOMEWARE: I can direct you to the ladies, Mr. Arden. You will find them
up yonder avenue.

ARDEN: They are listening, I believe, to an oration from the mouth of
Professor Spiral.

HOMEWARE: On an Alpine flower which has descended to flourish on English
soil. Professor Spiral calls it Nature's 'dedicated widow.'

ARDEN: 'Dedicated widow'?

HOMEWARE: The reference you will observe is to my niece Astraea.

ARDEN: She is dedicated to whom?

HOMEWARE: To her dead husband! You see the reverse of Astraea, says the
professor, in those world-infamous widows who marry again.

ARDEN: Bah!

HOMEWARE: Astraea, it is decided, must remain solitary, virgin cold, like
the little Alpine flower. Professor Spiral has his theme.

ARDEN: He will make much of it. May I venture to say that I prefer my
present company?

HOMEWARE: It is a singular choice. I can supply you with no weapons for
the sort of stride in which young men are usually engaged. You belong to
the camp you are avoiding.

ARDEN: Achilles was not the worse warrior, sir, for his probation in
petticoats.

HOMEWARE: His deeds proclaim it. But Alexander was the better chieftain
until he drank with Lais.

ARDEN: No, I do not plead guilty to Bacchus.

HOMEWARE: You are confessing to the madder form of drunkenness.

ARDEN: How, sir, I beg?

HOMEWARE: How, when a young man sees the index to himself in everything
spoken!

ARDEN: That might have the look. I did rightly in coming to you, sir.

HOMEWARE: 'Her uncle Homeware'?

ARDEN: You read through us all, sir.

HOMEWARE: It may interest you to learn that you are the third of the
gentlemen commissioned to consult the lady's uncle Homeware.

ARDEN: The third.

HOMEWARE: Yes, she is pursued. It could hardly be otherwise. Her
attractions are acknowledged, and the house is not a convent. Yet, Mr.
Arden, I must remind you that all of you are upon an enterprise held to
be profane by the laws of this region. Can you again forget that Astraea
is a widow?

ARDEN: She was a wife two months; she has been a widow two years.

HOMEWARE: The widow of the great and venerable Professor Towers is not to
measure her widowhood by years. His, from the altar to the tomb. As it
might be read, a one day's walk!

ARDEN: Is she, in the pride of her youth, to be sacrificed to a whimsical
feminine delicacy?

HOMEWARE: You have argued it with her?

ARDEN: I have presumed.

HOMEWARE: And still she refused her hand!

ARDEN: She commended me to you, sir. She has a sound judgement of
persons.

HOMEWARE: I should put it that she passes the Commissioners of Lunacy, on
the ground of her being a humorous damsel. Your predecessors had also
argued it with her; and they, too, discovered their enemy in a whimsical
feminine delicacy. Where is the difference between you? Evidently she
cannot perceive it, and I have to seek: You will have had many
conversations with Astraea?

ARDEN: I can say, that I am thrice the man I was before I had them.

HOMEWARE: You have gained in manhood from conversations with a widow in
her twenty-second year; and you want more of her.

ARDEN: As much as I want more wisdom.

HOMEWARE: You would call her your Muse?

ARDEN: So prosaic a creature as I would not dare to call her that.

HOMEWARE: You have the timely mantle of modesty, Mr. Arden. She has
prepared you for some of the tests with her uncle Homeware.

ARDEN: She warned me to be myself, without a spice of affectation.

HOMEWARE: No harder task could be set a young man in modern days. Oh, the
humorous damsel. You sketch me the dimple at her mouth.

ARDEN: Frankly, sir, I wish you to know me better; and I think I can bear
inspection. Astraea sent me to hear the reasons why she refuses me a
hearing.

HOMEWARE: Her reason, I repeat, is this; to her idea, a second wedlock is
unholy. Further, it passes me to explain. The young lady lands us where
we were at the beginning; such must have been her humorous intention.

ARDEN: What can I do?

HOMEWARE: Love and war have been compared. Both require strategy and
tactics, according to my recollection of the campaign.

ARDEN: I will take to heart what you say, sir.

HOMEWARE: Take it to head. There must be occasional descent of lovers'
heads from the clouds. And Professor Spiral,--But here we have a belated
breeze of skirts.

   (The reference is to the arrival of LYRA, breathless.)

                SCENE III

             HOMEWARE, ARDEN, LYRA

LYRA: My own dear uncle Homeware!

HOMEWARE: But where is Pluriel?

LYRA: Where is a woman's husband when she is away from him?

HOMEWARE: In Purgatory, by the proper reckoning. But hurry up the avenue,
or you will be late for Professor Spiral's address.

LYRA: I know it all without hearing. Their Spiral! Ah, Mr. Arden! You
have not chosen badly. The greater my experience, the more do I value my
uncle Homeware's company.

   (She is affectionate to excess but has a roguish eye withal, as of
   one who knows that uncle Homeware suspects all young men and most
   young women.)

HOMEWARE: Agree with the lady promptly, my friend.

ARDEN: I would gladly boast of so lengthened an experience, Lady Pluriel.

LYRA: I must have a talk with Astraea, my dear uncle. Her letters breed
suspicions. She writes feverishly. The last one hints at service on the
West Coast of Africa.

HOMEWARE: For the draining of a pestiferous land, or an enlightenment of
the benighted black, we could not despatch a missionary more effective
than the handsomest widow in Great Britain.

LYRA: Have you not seen signs of disturbance?

HOMEWARE: A great oration may be a sedative.

LYRA: I have my suspicions.

HOMEWARE: Mr. Arden, I could counsel you to throw yourself at Lady
Pluriel's feet, and institute her as your confessional priest.

ARDEN: Madam, I am at your feet. I am devoted to the lady.

LYRA: Devoted. There cannot be an objection. It signifies that a man asks
for nothing in return!

HOMEWARE: Have a thought upon your words with this lady, Mr. Arden!

ARDEN: Devoted, I said. I am. I would give my life for her.

LYRA: Expecting it to be taken to-morrow or next day? Accept my
encomiums. A male devotee is within an inch of a miracle. Women had been
looking for this model for ages, uncle.

HOMEWARE: You are the model, Mr Arden!

LYRA: Can you have intended to say that it is in view of marriage you are
devoted to the widow of Professor Towers?

ARDEN: My one view.

LYRA: It is a star you are beseeching to descend.

ARDEN: It is.

LYRA: You disappoint me hugely. You are of the ordinary tribe after all;
and your devotion craves an enormous exchange, infinitely surpassing the
amount you bestow.

ARDEN: It does. She is rich in gifts; I am poor. But I give all I have.

LYRA: These lovers, uncle Homeware!

HOMEWARE: A honey-bag is hung up and we have them about us. They would
persuade us that the chief business of the world is a march to the altar.

ARDEN: With the right partner, if the business of the world is to be
better done.

LYRA: Which right partner has been chosen on her part, by a veiled woman,
who marches back from the altar to discover that she has chained herself
to the skeleton of an idea, or is in charge of that devouring tyrant, an
uxorious husband. Is Mr. Arden in favour with the Dame, uncle?

HOMEWARE: My sister is an unsuspicious potentate, as you know. Pretenders
to the hand of an inviolate widow bite like waves at a rock.

LYRA: Professor Spiral advances rapidly.

HOMEWARE: Not, it would appear, when he has his audience of ladies and
their satellites.

LYRA: I am sure I hear a spring-tide of enthusiasm coming.

ARDEN: I will see.

   (He goes up the path.)

LYRA: Now! my own dear uncle, save me from Pluriel. I have given him the
slip in sheer desperation; but the man is at his shrewdest when he is
left to guess at my heels. Tell him I am anywhere but here. Tell him I
ran away to get a sense of freshness in seeing him again. Let me have one
day of liberty, or, upon my word, I shall do deeds; I shall console young
Arden: I shall fly to Paris and set my cap at presidents and foreign
princes. Anything rather than be eaten up every minute, as I am. May no
woman of my acquaintance marry a man of twenty years her senior! She
marries a gigantic limpet. At that period of his life a man becomes too
voraciously constant.

HOMEWARE: Cupid clipped of wing is a destructive parasite.

LYRA: I am in dead earnest, uncle, and I will have a respite, or else let
decorum beware!

   (Arden returns.)

ARDEN: The ladies are on their way.

LYRA: I must get Astraea to myself.

HOMEWARE: My library is a virgin fortress, Mr. Arden. Its gates are open
to you on other topics than the coupling of inebriates.

   (He enters the house--LYRA disappears in the garden--Spiral's
   audience reappear without him.)

                 SCENE IV

       DAME DRESDEN, LADY OLDLACE, VIRGINIA, WINIFRED,
             ARDEN, SWITHIN, OSIER

LADY OLDLACE: Such perfect rhythm!

WINIFRED: Such oratory!

LADY OLDLACE: A master hand. I was in a trance from the first sentence to
the impressive close.

OSIER: Such oratory is a whole orchestral symphony.

VIRGINIA: Such command of intonation and subject!

SWITHIN: That resonant voice!

LADY OLDLACE: Swithin, his flow of eloquence! He launched forth!

SWITHIN: Like an eagle from a cliff.

OSIER: The measure of the words was like a beat of wings.

SWITHIN: He makes poets of us.

DAME DRESDEN: Spiral achieved his pinnacle to-day!

VIRGINIA: How treacherous is our memory when we have most the longing to
recall great sayings!

OSIER: True, I conceive that my notes will be precious.

WINIFRED: You could take notes!

LADY OLDLACE: It seems a device for missing the quintessential.

SWITHIN: Scraps of the body to the loss of the soul of it. We can allow
that our friend performed good menial service.

WINIFRED: I could not have done the thing.

SWITHIN: In truth; it does remind one of the mess of pottage.

LADY OLDLACE: One hardly felt one breathed.

VIRGINIA: I confess it moved me to tears.

SWITHIN: There is a pathos for us in the display of perfection. Such
subtle contrast with our individual poverty affects us.

WINIFRED: Surely there were passages of a distinct and most exquisite
pathos.

LADY OLDLACE: As in all great oratory! The key of it is the pathos.

VIRGINIA: In great oratory, great poetry, great fiction; you try it by
the pathos. All our critics agree in stipulating for the pathos. My tears
were no feminine weakness, I could not be a discordant instrument.

SWITHIN: I must make confession. He played on me too.

OSIER: We shall be sensible for long of that vibration from the touch of
a master hand.

ARDEN: An accomplished player can make a toy-shop fiddle sound you a
Stradivarius.

DAME DRESDEN: Have you a right to a remark, Mr. Arden? What could have
detained you?

ARDEN: Ah, Dame. It may have been a warning that I am a discordant
instrument. I do not readily vibrate.

DAME DRESDEN: A discordant instrument is out of place in any civil
society. You have lost what cannot be recovered.

ARDEN: There are the notes.

OSIER: Yes, the notes.

SWITHIN: You can be satisfied with the dog's feast at the table, Mr.
Arden!

OSIER: Ha!

VIRGINIA: Never have I seen Astraea look sublimer in her beauty than with
her eyes uplifted to the impassioned speaker, reflecting every variation
of his tones.

ARDEN: Astraea!

LADY OLDLACE: She was entranced when he spoke of woman descending from
her ideal to the gross reality of man.

OSIER: Yes, yes. I have the words [reads]: 'Woman is to the front of man,
holding the vestal flower of a purer civilization. I see,' he says, 'the
little taper in her hands transparent round the light, against rough
winds.'

DAME DRESDEN: And of Astraea herself, what were the words? 'Nature's
dedicated widow.'

SWITHIN: Vestal widow, was it not?

VIRGINIA: Maiden widow, I think.

DAME DRESDEN: We decide for 'dedicated.'

WINIFRED: Spiral paid his most happy tribute to the memory of her late
husband, the renowned Professor Towers.

VIRGINIA: But his look was at dear Astraea.

ARDEN: At Astraea? Why?

VIRGINIA: For her sanction doubtless.

ARDEN: Ha!

WINIFRED: He said his pride would ever be in his being received as the
successor of Professor Towers.

ARDEN: Successor!

SWITHIN: Guardian was it not?

OSIER: Tutor. I think he said.

   (The three gentlemen consult Osier's notes uneasily.)

DAME DRESDEN: Our professor must by this time have received in full
Astraea's congratulations, and Lyra is hearing from her what it is to be
too late. You will join us at the luncheon table, if you do not feel
yourself a discordant instrument there, Mr. Arden?

ARDEN (going to her): The allusion to knife and fork tunes my strings
instantly, Dame.

DAME DRESDEN: You must help me to-day, for the professor will be tired,
though we dare not hint at it in his presence. No reference, ladies, to
the great speech we have been privileged to hear; we have expressed our
appreciation and he could hardly bear it.

ARDEN: Nothing is more distasteful to the orator!

VIRGINIA: As with every true genius, he is driven to feel humbly human by
the exultation of him.

SWITHIN: He breathes in a rarified air.

OSIER: I was thrilled, I caught at passing beauties. I see that here and
there I have jotted down incoherencies, lines have seduced me, so that I
missed the sequence--the precious part. Ladies, permit me to rank him
with Plato as to the equality of women and men.

WINIFRED: It is nobly said.

OSIER: And with the Stoics, in regard to celibacy.

   (By this time all the ladies have gone into the house.)

ARDEN: Successor! Was the word successor?

   (ARDEN, SWITHIN, and OSIER are excitedly searching the notes
   when SPIRAL passes and strolls into the house. His air of
   self-satisfaction increases their uneasiness they follow him.
   ASTRAEA and LYRA come down the path.)

                 SCENE V

               ASTRAEA, LYRA

LYRA: Oh! Pluriel, ask me of him! I wish I were less sure he would not be
at the next corner I turn.

ASTRAEA: You speak of your husband strangely, Lyra.

LYRA: My head is out of a sack. I managed my escape from him this morning
by renouncing bath and breakfast; and what a relief, to be in the railway
carriage alone! that is, when the engine snorted. And if I set eyes on
him within a week, he will hear some truths. His idea of marriage is, the
taking of the woman into custody. My hat is on, and on goes Pluriel's. My
foot on the stairs; I hear his boot behind me. In my boudoir I am alone
one minute, and then the door opens to the inevitable. I pay a visit, he
is passing the house as I leave it. He will not even affect surprise. I
belong to him, I am cat's mouse. And he will look doating on me in
public. And when I speak to anybody, he is that fearful picture of all
smirks. Fling off a kid glove after a round of calls; feel your
hand--there you have me now that I am out of him for my half a day, if
for as long.

ASTRAEA: This is one of the world's happy marriages!

LYRA: This is one of the world's choice dishes! And I have it planted
under my nostrils eternally. Spare me the mention of Pluriel until he
appears; that's too certain this very day. Oh! good husband! good kind of
man! whatever you please; only some peace, I do pray, for the
husband-haunted wife. I like him, I like him, of course, but I want to
breathe. Why, an English boy perpetually bowled by a Christmas pudding
would come to loathe the mess.

ASTRAEA: His is surely the excess of a merit.

LYRA: Excess is a poison. Excess of a merit is a capital offence in
morality. It disgusts, us with virtue. And you are the cunningest of
fencers, tongue, or foils. You lead me to talk of myself, and I hate the
subject. By the way, you have practised with Mr. Arden.

ASTRAEA: A tiresome instructor, who lets you pass his guard to compliment
you on a hit.

LYRA: He rather wins me.

ASTRAEA: He does at first.

LYRA: Begins Plurielizing, without the law to back him, does he?

ASTRAEA: The fencing lessons are at an end.

LYRA: The duetts with Mr. Swithin's violoncello continue?

ASTRAEA: He broke through the melody.

LYRA: There were readings in poetry with Mr. Osier, I recollect.

ASTRAEA: His own compositions became obtrusive.

LYRA: No fencing, no music, no poetry! no West Coast of Africa either, I
suppose.

ASTRAEA: Very well! I am on my defence. You at least shall not
misunderstand me, Lyra. One intense regret I have; that I did not live in
the time of the Amazons. They were free from this question of marriage;
this babble of love. Why am I so persecuted? He will not take a refusal.
There are sacred reasons. I am supported by every woman having the sense
of her dignity. I am perverted, burlesqued by the fury of wrath I feel at
their incessant pursuit. And I despise Mr. Osier and Mr. Swithin because
they have an air of pious agreement with the Dame, and are conspirators
behind their mask.

LYRA: False, false men!

ASTRAEA: They come to me. I am complimented on being the vulnerable spot.

LYRA: The object desired is usually addressed by suitors, my poor
Astraea!

ASTRAEA: With the assumption, that as I am feminine I must necessarily be
in the folds of the horrible constrictor they call Love, and that I leap
to the thoughts of their debasing marriage.

LYRA: One of them goes to Mr. Homeware.

ASTRAEA: All are sent to him in turn. He can dispose of them.

LYRA: Now that is really masterly fun, my dear; most creditable to you!
Love, marriage, a troop of suitors, and uncle Homeware. No, it would not
have occurred to me, and--I am considered to have some humour. Of course,
he disposes of them. He seemed to have a fairly favourable opinion of Mr.
Arden.

ASTRAEA: I do not share it. He is the least respectful of the sentiments
entertained by me. Pray, spare me the mention of him, as you say of your
husband. He has that pitiful conceit in men, which sets them thinking
that a woman must needs be susceptible to the declaration of the mere
existence of their passion. He is past argument. Impossible for him to
conceive a woman's having a mind above the conditions of her sex. A
woman, according to him, can have no ideal of life, except as a ball to
toss in the air and catch in a cup. Put him aside. . . . We creatures are
doomed to marriage, and if we shun it, we are a kind of cripple. He is
grossly earthy in his view of us. We are unable to move a step in thought
or act unless we submit to have a husband. That is his reasoning. Nature!
Nature! I have to hear of Nature! We must be above Nature, I tell him,
or, we shall be very much below. He is ranked among our clever young men;
and he can be amusing. So far he passes muster; and he has a pleasant
voice. I dare say he is an uncle Homeware's good sort of boy. Girls like
him. Why does he not fix his attention upon one of them; Why upon me? We
waste our time in talking of him . . . . The secret of it is, that he has
no reverence. The marriage he vaunts is a mere convenient arrangement for
two to live together under command of nature. Reverence for the state of
marriage is unknown to him. How explain my feeling? I am driven into
silence. Cease to speak of him . . . . He is the dupe of his
eloquence--his passion, he calls it. I have only to trust myself to him,
and--I shall be one of the world's married women! Words are useless. How
am I to make him see that it is I who respect the state of marriage by
refusing; not he by perpetually soliciting. Once married, married for
ever. Widow is but a term. When women hold their own against him, as I
have done, they will be more esteemed. I have resisted and conquered. I
am sorry I do not share in the opinion of your favourite.

LYRA: Mine?

ASTRAEA: You spoke warmly of him.

LYRA: Warmly, was it?

ASTRAEA: You are not blamed, my dear: he has a winning manner.

LYRA: I take him to be a manly young fellow, smart enough; handsome too.

ASTRAEA: Oh, he has good looks.

LYRA: And a head, by repute.

ASTRAEA: For the world's work, yes.

LYRA: Not romantic.

ASTRAEA: Romantic ideas are for dreamy simperers.

LYRA: Amazons repudiate them.

ASTRAEA: Laugh at me. Half my time I am laughing at myself. I should
regain my pride if I could be resolved on a step. I am strong to resist;
I have not strength to move.

LYRA: I see the sphinx of Egypt!

ASTRAEA: And all the while I am a manufactory of gunpowder in this quiet
old-world Sabbath circle of dear good souls, with their stereotyped
interjections, and orchestra of enthusiasms; their tapering delicacies:
the rejoicing they have in their common agreement on all created things.
To them it is restful. It spurs me to fly from rooms and chairs and beds
and houses. I sleep hardly a couple of hours. Then into the early morning
air, out with the birds; I know no other pleasure.

LYRA: Hospital work for a variation: civil or military. The former
involves the house-surgeon: the latter the grateful lieutenant.

ASTRAEA: Not if a woman can resist . . . I go to it proof-armoured.

LYRA: What does the Dame say?

ASTRAEA: Sighs over me! Just a little maddening to hear.

LYRA: When we feel we have the strength of giants, and are bidden to sit
and smile! You should rap out some of our old sweet-innocent garden oaths
with her--'Carnation! Dame!' That used to make her dance on her
seat.--'But, dearest Dame, it is as natural an impulse for women to have
that relief as for men; and natural will out, begonia! it will!' We ran
through the book of Botany for devilish objurgations. I do believe our
misconduct caused us to be handed to the good man at the altar as the
right corrective. And you were the worst offender.

ASTRAEA: Was I? I could be now, though I am so changed a creature.

LYRA: You enjoy the studies with your Spiral, come!

ASTRAEA: Professor Spiral is the one honest gentleman here. He does
homage to my principles. I have never been troubled by him: no silly
hints or side-looks--you know, the dog at the forbidden bone.

LYRA: A grand orator.

ASTRAEA: He is. You fix on the smallest of his gifts. He is
intellectually and morally superior.

LYRA: Praise of that kind makes me rather incline to prefer his
inferiors. He fed gobble-gobble on your puffs of incense. I coughed and
scraped the gravel; quite in vain; he tapped for more and more.

ASTRAEA: Professor Spiral is a thinker; he is a sage. He gives women
their due.

LYRA: And he is a bachelor too--or consequently.

ASTRAEA: If you like you may be as playful with me as the Lyra of our
maiden days used to be. My dear, my dear, how glad I am to have you here!
You remind me that I once had a heart. It will beat again with you beside
me, and I shall look to you for protection. A novel request from me. From
annoyance, I mean. It has entirely altered my character. Sometimes I am
afraid to think of what I was, lest I should suddenly romp, and perform
pirouettes and cry 'Carnation!' There is the bell. We must not be late
when the professor condescends to sit for meals.

LYRA: That rings healthily in the professor.

ASTRAEA: Arm in arm, my Lyra.

LYRA: No Pluriel yet!

   (They enter the house, and the time changes to evening of the same
   day. The scene is still the garden.)

                 SCENE VI

               ASTRAEA, ARDEN

ASTRAEA: Pardon me if I do not hear you well.

ARDEN: I will not even think you barbarous.

ASTRAEA: I am. I am the object of the chase.

ARDEN: The huntsman draws the wood, then, and not you.

ASTRAEA:
        At any instant I am forced to run,
        Or turn in my defence: how can I be
        Other than barbarous? You are the cause.

ARDEN: No: heaven that made you beautiful's the cause.

ASTRAEA:
        Say, earth, that gave you instincts. Bring me down
        To instincts! When by chance I speak awhile
        With our professor, you appear in haste,
        Full cry to sight again the missing hare.
        Away ideas! All that's divinest flies!
        I have to bear in mind how young you are.

ARDEN:
        You have only to look up to me four years,
        Instead of forty!

ASTRAEA: Sir?

ARDEN
          There's my misfortune!
        And worse that, young, I love as a young man.
        Could I but quench the fire, I might conceal
        The youthfulness offending you so much.

ASTRAEA: I wish you would. I wish it earnestly.

ARDEN: Impossible. I burn.

ASTRAEA: You should not burn.

ARDEN
        'Tis more than I. 'Tis fire. It masters will.
        You would not say I should not' if you knew fire.
        It seizes. It devours.

ASTRAEA: Dry wood.

ARDEN:
        Cold wit!
        How cold you can be! But be cold, for sweet
        You must be. And your eyes are mine: with them
        I see myself: unworthy to usurp
        The place I hold a moment. While I look
        I have my happiness.

ASTRAEA: You should look higher.

ARDEN:
        Through you to the highest. Only through you!
          Through you
        The mark I may attain is visible,
        And I have strength to dream of winning it.
        You are the bow that speeds the arrow: you
        The glass that brings the distance nigh. My world
        Is luminous through you, pure heavenly,
        But hangs upon the rose's outer leaf,
        Not next her heart. Astraea! my own beloved!

ASTRAEA: We may be excellent friends. And I have faults.

ARDEN: Name them: I am hungering for more to love.

ASTRAEA:
        I waver very constantly: I have
        No fixity of feeling or of sight.
        I have no courage: I can often dream
        Of daring: when I wake I am in dread.
        I am inconstant as a butterfly,
        And shallow as a brook with little fish!
        Strange little fish, that tempt the small boy's net,
        But at a touch straight dive! I am any one's,
        And no one's! I am vain.
        Praise of my beauty lodges in my ears.
        The lark reels up with it; the nightingale
        Sobs bleeding; the flowers nod; I could believe
        A poet, though he praised me to my face.

ARDEN:
        Never had poet so divine a fount
        To drink of!

ASTRAEA:
        Have I given you more to love

ARDEN:
        More! You have given me your inner mind,
        Where conscience in the robes of Justice shoots
        Light so serenely keen that in such light
        Fair infants, I newly criminal of earth,'
        As your friend Osier says, might show some blot.
        Seraphs might! More to love? Oh! these dear faults
        Lead you to me like troops of laughing girls
        With garlands. All the fear is, that you trifle,
        Feigning them.

ASTRAEA:
        For what purpose?

ARDEN:
             Can I guess?
ASTRAEA:

        I think 'tis you who have the trifler's note.
        My hearing is acute, and when you speak,
        Two voices ring, though you speak fervidly.
        Your Osier quotation jars. Beware!
        Why were you absent from our meeting-place
        This morning?


ARDEN:
          I was on the way, and met
        Your uncle Homeware

ASTRAEA: Ah!

ARDEN: He loves you.

ASTRAEA:
        He loves me: he has never understood.
        He loves me as a creature of the flock;
        A little whiter than some others.
        Yes; He loves me, as men love; not to uplift;
        Not to have faith in; not to spiritualize.
        For him I am a woman and a widow
        One of the flock, unmarked save by a brand.
        He said it!--You confess it! You have learnt
        To share his error, erring fatally.

ARDEN: By whose advice went I to him?

ASTRAEA:
               By whose?
        Pursuit that seemed incessant: persecution.
        Besides, I have changed since then: I change; I change;
        It is too true I change. I could esteem
        You better did you change. And had you heard
        The noble words this morning from the mouth
        Of our professor, changed were you, or raised
        Above love-thoughts, love-talk, and flame and flutter,
        High as eternal snows. What said he else,
        My uncle Homeware?

ARDEN:
             That you were not free:
        And that he counselled us to use our wits.

ASTRAEA:
        But I am free I free to be ever free!
        My freedom keeps me free! He counselled us?
        I am not one in a conspiracy.
        I scheme no discord with my present life.
        Who does, I cannot look on as my friend.
        Not free? You know me little. Were I chained,
        For liberty I would sell liberty
        To him who helped me to an hour's release.
        But having perfect freedom . . .

ARDEN: No.

ASTRAEA:
        Good sir,
        You check me?

ARDEN: Perfect freedom?

ASTRAEA: Perfect!

ARDEN: No!

ASTRAEA: Am I awake? What blinds me?

ARDEN:
                  Filaments
        The slenderest ever woven about a brain
        From the brain's mists, by the little sprite called
          Fancy.
        A breath would scatter them; but that one breath
        Must come of animation. When the heart
        Is as, a frozen sea the brain spins webs.

ASTRAEA:
        'Tis very singular!
        I understand.
        You translate cleverly. I hear in verse
        My uncle Homeware's prose. He has these notions.
        Old men presume to read us.

ARDEN:
        Young men may.
        You gaze on an ideal reflecting you
        Need I say beautiful? Yet it reflects
        Less beauty than the lady whom I love
        Breathes, radiates. Look on yourself in me.
        What harm in gazing? You are this flower
        You are that spirit. But the spirit fed
        With substance of the flower takes all its bloom!
        And where in spirits is the bloom of the flower?

ASTRAEA:
        'Tis very singular. You have a tone
        Quite changed.

ARDEN:
        You wished a change. To show you, how
        I read you . . .

ASTRAEA:
        Oh! no, no. It means dissection.
        I never heard of reading character
        That did not mean dissection. Spare me that.
        I am wilful, violent, capricious, weak,
        Wound in a web of my own spinning-wheel,
        A star-gazer, a riband in the wind . . .

ARDEN:
        A banner in the wind! and me you lead,
        And shall! At least, I follow till I win.

ASTRAEA:
        Forbear, I do beseech you.

ARDEN:
               I have had
        Your hand in mine.

ASTRAEA:
        Once.

ARDEN:
               Once!
        Once! 'twas; once, was the heart alive,
        Leaping to break the ice. Oh! once, was aye
        That laughed at frosty May like spring's return.
        Say you are terrorized: you dare not melt.
        You like me; you might love me; but to dare,
        Tasks more than courage. Veneration, friends,
        Self-worship, which is often self-distrust,
        Bar the good way to you, and make a dream
        A fortress and a prison.

ASTRAEA:
               Changed! you have changed
        Indeed. When you so boldly seized my hand
        It seemed a boyish freak, done boyishly.
        I wondered at Professor Spiral's choice
        Of you for an example, and our hope.
        Now you grow dangerous. You must have thought,
        And some things true you speak-save 'terrorized.'
        It may be flattering to sweet self-love
        To deem me terrorized.--'Tis my own soul,
        My heart, my mind, all that I hold most sacred,
        Not fear of others, bids me walk aloof.
        Who terrorizes me? Who could? Friends? Never!
        The world? as little. Terrorized!

ARDEN:
               Forgive me.

ASTRAEA:
        I might reply, Respect me. If I loved,
        If I could be so faithless as to love,
        Think you I would not rather noise abroad
        My shame for penitence than let friends dwell
        Deluded by an image of one vowed
        To superhuman, who the common mock
        Of things too human has at heart become.

ARDEN:
        You would declare your love?

ASTRAEA:
               I said, my shame.
        The woman that's the widow is ensnared,
        Caught in the toils! away with widows!--Oh!
        I hear men shouting it.

ARDEN:
        But shame there's none
        For me in loving: therefore I may take
        Your friends to witness? tell them that my pride
        Is in the love of you?

ASTRAEA:
               'Twill soon bring
        The silence that should be between us two,
        And sooner give me peace.

ARDEN:
        And you consent?

ASTRAEA:
        For the sake of peace and silence I consent,
        You should be warned that you will cruelly
        Disturb them. But 'tis best. You should be warned
        Your pleading will be hopeless. But 'tis best.
        You have my full consent. Weigh well your acts,
        You cannot rest where you have cast this bolt
        Lay that to heart, and you are cherished, prized,
        Among them: they are estimable ladies,
        Warmest of friends; though you may think they soar
        Too loftily for your measure of strict sense
        (And as my uncle Homeware's pupil, sir,
        In worldliness, you do), just minds they have:
        Once know them, and your banishment will fret.
        I would not run such risks. You will offend,
        Go near to outrage them; and perturbate
        As they have not deserved of you. But I,
        Considering I am nothing in the scales
        You balance, quite and of necessity
        Consent. When you have weighed it, let me hear.
        My uncle Homeware steps this way in haste.
        We have been talking long, and in full view!

                SCENE VII

             ASTRAEA, ARDEN, HOMEWARE

HOMEWARE:
        Astraea, child! You, Arden, stand aside.
        Ay, if she were a maid you might speak first,
        But being a widow she must find her tongue.
        Astraea, they await you. State the fact
        As soon as you are questioned, fearlessly.
        Open the battle with artillery.

ASTRAEA:
        What is the matter, uncle Homeware?

HOMEWARE (playing fox):
                  What?
        Why, we have watched your nice preliminaries
        From the windows half the evening. Now run in.
        Their patience has run out, and, as I said,
        Unlimber and deliver fire at once.
        Your aunts Virginia and Winifred,
        With Lady Oldlace, are the senators,
        The Dame for Dogs. They wear terrific brows,
        But be not you affrighted, my sweet chick,
        And tell them uncle Homeware backs your choice,
        By lawyer and by priests! by altar, fount,
        And testament!

ASTRAEA:
        My choice! what have I chosen?

HOMEWARE:
        She asks? You hear her, Arden?--what and whom!

ARDEN:
        Surely, sir! . . . heavens! have you . . .

HOMEWARE:
                  Surely the old fox,
        In all I have read, is wiser than the young:
        And if there is a game for fox to play,
        Old fox plays cunningest.

ASTRAEA:
        Why fox? Oh! uncle,
        You make my heart beat with your mystery;
        I never did love riddles. Why sit they
        Awaiting me, and looking terrible?

HOMEWARE:
        It is reported of an ancient folk
        Which worshipped idols, that upon a day
        Their idol pitched before them on the floor

ASTRAEA:
        Was ever so ridiculous a tale!

HOMEWARE
        To call the attendant fires to account
        Their elders forthwith sat . . .

ASTRAEA:
                  Is there no prayer
        Will move you, uncle Homeware?

HOMEWARE:
               God-daughter,
        This gentleman for you I have proposed
        As husband.

ASTRAEA:
        Arden! we are lost.

ARDEN:
                  Astraea!
        Support him! Though I knew not his design,
        It plants me in mid-heaven. Would it were
        Not you, but I to bear the shock. My love!
        We lost, you cry; you join me with you lost!
        The truth leaps from your heart: and let it shine
        To light us on our brilliant battle day
        And victory

ASTRAEA:
        Who betrayed me!

HOMEWARE:
               Who betrayed?
        Your voice, your eyes, your veil, your knife and fork;
        Your tenfold worship of your widowhood;
        As he who sees he must yield up the flag,
        Hugs it oath-swearingly! straw-drowningly.
        To be reasonable: you sent this gentleman
        Referring him to me . . . .

ASTRAEA:
                    And that is false.
        All's false. You have conspired. I am disgraced.
        But you will learn you have judged erroneously.
        I am not the frail creature you conceive.
        Between your vision of life's aim, and theirs
        Who presently will question me, I cling
        To theirs as light: and yours I deem a den
        Where souls can have no growth.

HOMEWARE:
        But when we touched
        The point of hand-pressings, 'twas rightly time
        To think of wedding ties?

ASTRAEA:
        Arden, adieu!

          (She rushes into house.)

                SCENE VIII

               ARDEN, HOMEWARE

ARDEN:
        Adieu! she said. With her that word is final.

HOMEWARE:
        Strange! how young people blowing words like clouds
        On winds, now fair, now foul, and as they please
        Should still attach the Fates to them.

ARDEN:
               She's wounded
        Wounded to the quick!

HOMEWARE:
             The quicker our success: for short
        Of that, these dames, who feel for everything,
        Feel nothing.

ARDEN:
             Your intention has been kind,
        Dear sir, but you have ruined me.

HOMEWARE:
             Good-night. (Going.)

ARDEN:
        Yet she said, we are lost, in her surprise.

HOMEWARE:
        Good morning. (Returning.)

ARDEN:
             I suppose that I am bound
        (If I could see for what I should be glad!)
        To thank you, sir.

HOMEWARE:
             Look hard but give no thanks.
        I found my girl descending on the road
        Of breakneck coquetry, and barred her way.
        Either she leaps the bar, or she must back.
        That means she marries you, or says good-bye.
                    (Going again.)

ARDEN:
        Now she's among them. (Looking at window.)

HOMEWARE:
        Now she sees her mind.

ARDEN:
        It is my destiny she now decides!

HOMEWARE:
        There's now suspense on earth and round the spheres.

ARDEN:
        She's mine now: mine! or I am doomed to go.

HOMEWARE:
        The marriage ring, or the portmanteau now!

ARDEN:
        Laugh as you like, air! I am not ashamed
        To love and own it.

HOMEWARE:
        So the symptoms show.
        Rightly, young man, and proving a good breed.
        To further it's a duty to mankind
        And I have lent my push, But recollect:
        Old Ilion was not conquered in a day.
                  (He enters house.)

ARDEN:
        Ten years! If I may win her at the end!

                 CURTAIN

     ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

     A great oration may be a sedative
     A male devotee is within an inch of a miracle
     Above Nature, I tell him, or, we shall be very much below
     As in all great oratory! The key of it is the pathos
     Back from the altar to discover that she has chained herself
     Cupid clipped of wing is a destructive parasite
     Excess of a merit is a capital offence in morality
     His idea of marriage is, the taking of the woman into custody
     I am a discordant instrument I do not readily vibrate
     I like him, I like him, of course, but I want to breathe
     I who respect the state of marriage by refusing
     Love and war have been compared--Both require strategy
     Peace, I do pray, for the husband-haunted wife
     Period of his life a man becomes too voraciously constant
     Pitiful conceit in men
     Rejoicing they have in their common agreement
     Self-worship, which is often self-distrust
     Suspects all young men and most young women
     Their idol pitched before them on the floor
     Were I chained,  For liberty I would sell liberty
     Woman descending from her ideal to the gross reality of man
     Your devotion craves an enormous exchange



MISCELLANEOUS PROSE




CONTENTS:
     INTRODUCTION TO W. M. THACKERAY'S "THE FOUR GEORGES"
     A PAUSE IN THE STRIFE.
     CONCESSION TO THE CELT.
     LESLIE STEPHEN.
     CORRESPONDENCE FROM THE SEAT OF WAR IN ITALY LETTERS WRITTEN TO THE
    'MORNING POST' FROM THE SEAT OF WAR IN ITALY.




INTRODUCTION TO W. M. THACKERAY'S "THE FOUR GEORGES"


WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY was born at Calcutta, July 18, 1811, the only
child of Richmond and Anne Thackeray. He received the main part of his
education at the Charterhouse, as we know to our profit. Thence he passed
to Cambridge, remaining there from February 1829 to sometime in 1830. To
judge by quotations and allusions, his favourite of the classics was
Horace, the chosen of the eighteenth century, and generally the voice of
its philosophy in a prosperous country. His voyage from India gave him
sight of Napoleon on the rocky island. In his young manhood he made his
bow reverentially to Goethe of Weimar; which did not check his hand from
setting its mark on the sickliness of Werther.

He was built of an extremely impressionable nature and a commanding good
sense. He was in addition a calm observer, having 'the harvest of a quiet
eye.' Of this combination with the flood of subjects brought up to
judgement in his mind, came the prevalent humour, the enforced
disposition to satire, the singular critical drollery, notable in his
works. His parodies, even those pushed to burlesque, are an expression of
criticism and are more effective than the serious method, while they
rarely overstep the line of justness. The Novels by Eminent Hands do not
pervert the originals they exaggerate. 'Sieyes an abbe, now a ferocious
lifeguardsman,' stretches the face of the rollicking Irish novelist
without disfeaturing him; and the mysterious visitor to the palatial
mansion in Holywell Street indicates possibilities in the Oriental
imagination of the eminent statesman who stooped to conquer fact through
fiction. Thackeray's attitude in his great novels is that of the
composedly urbane lecturer, on a level with a select audience, assured of
interesting, above requirements to excite. The slow movement of the
narrative has a grace of style to charm like the dance of the Minuet de
la Cour: it is the limpidity of Addison flavoured with salt of a racy
vernacular; and such is the veri-similitude and the dialogue that they
might seem to be heard from the mouths of living speakers. When in this
way the characters of Vanity Fair had come to growth, their author was
rightly appreciated as one of the creators in our literature, he took at
once the place he will retain. With this great book and with Esmond and
The Newcomes, he gave a name eminent, singular, and beloved to English
fiction.

Charges of cynicism are common against all satirists, Thackeray had to
bear with them. The social world he looked at did not show him heroes,
only here and there a plain good soul to whom he was affectionate in the
unhysterical way of an English father patting a son on the head. He
described his world as an accurate observer saw it, he could not be
dishonest. Not a page of his books reveals malevolence or a sneer at
humanity. He was driven to the satirical task by the scenes about him.
There must be the moralist in the satirist if satire is to strike. The
stroke is weakened and art violated when he comes to the front. But he
will always be pressing forward, and Thackeray restrained him as much as
could be done, in the manner of a good-humoured constable. Thackeray may
have appeared cynical to the devout by keeping him from a station in the
pulpit among congregations of the many convicted sinners. That the
moralist would have occupied it and thundered had he presented us with
the Fourth of the Georges we see when we read of his rejecting the
solicitations of so seductive a personage for the satiric rod.

Himself one of the manliest, the kindliest of human creatures, it was the
love of his art that exposed him to misinterpretation. He did stout
service in his day. If the bad manners he scourged are now lessened to
some degree we pay a debt in remembering that we owe much to him, and if
what appears incurable remains with us, a continued reading of his works
will at least help to combat it.




A PAUSE IN THE STRIFE--1886

Our 'Eriniad,' or ballad epic of the enfranchisement of the sister island
is closing its first fytte for the singer, and with such result as those
Englishmen who have some knowledge of their fellows foresaw. There are
sufficient reasons why the Tories should always be able to keep together,
but let them have the credit of cohesiveness and subordination to
control. Though working for their own ends, they won the esteem of their
allies, which will count for them in the struggles to follow. Their
leaders appear to have seen what has not been distinctly perceptible to
the opposite party--that the break up of the Liberals means the defection
of the old Whigs in permanence, heralding the establishment of a powerful
force against Radicalism, with a capital cry to the country. They have
tactical astuteness. If they seem rather too proud of their victory, it
is merely because, as becomes them, they do not look ahead. To rejoice in
the gaining of a day, without having clear views of the morrow, is
puerile enough. Any Tory victory, it may be said, is little more than a
pause in the strife, unless when the Radical game is played 'to dish the
Whigs,' and the Tories are now fast bound down by their incorporation of
the latter to abstain from the violent springs and right-about-facings of
the Derby-Disraeli period. They are so heavily weighted by the new
combination that their Jack-in-the-box, Lord Randolph, will have to stand
like an ordinary sentinel on duty, and take the measurement of his
natural size. They must, on the supposition of their entry into office,
even to satisfy their own constituents, produce a scheme. Their majority
in the House will command it.

To this extent, then, Mr. Gladstone has not been defeated. The question
set on fire by him will never be extinguished until the combustible
matter has gone to ashes. But personally he meets a sharp rebuff. The
Tories may well raise hurrahs over that. Radicals have to admit it, and
point to the grounds of it. Between a man's enemies and his friends there
comes out a rough painting of his character, not without a resemblance to
the final summary, albeit wanting in the justly delicate historical touch
to particular features. On the one side he is abused as 'the one-man
power'; lauded on the other for his marvellous intuition of the popular
will. One can believe that he scarcely wishes to march dictatorially, and
full surely his Egyptian policy was from step to step a misreading of the
will of the English people. He went forth on this campaign, with the
finger of Egypt not ineffectively levelled against him a second time.
Nevertheless he does read his English; he has, too, the fatal tendency to
the bringing forth of Bills in the manner of Jove big with Minerva. He
perceived the necessity, and the issue of the necessity; clearly defined
what must come, and, with a higher motive than the vanity with which his
enemies charge him, though not with such high counsel as Wisdom at his
ear, fell to work on it alone, produced the whole Bill alone, and then
handed it to his Cabinet to digest, too much in love with the thing he
had laid and incubated to permit of any serious dismemberment of its
frame. Hence the disruption. He worked for the future, produced a Bill
for the future, and is wrecked in the present. Probably he can work in no
other way than from the impulse of his enthusiasm, solitarily. It is a
way of making men overweeningly in love with their creations. The
consequence is likely to be that Ireland will get her full measure of
justice to appease her cravings earlier than she would have had as much
from the United Liberal Cabinet, but at a cost both to her and to
England. Meanwhile we are to have a House of Commons incapable of
conducting public business; the tradesmen to whom the Times addressed
pathetic condolences on the loss of their season will lose more than one;
and we shall be made sensible that we have an enemy in our midst, until a
people, slow to think, have taken counsel of their native generosity to
put trust in the most generous race on earth.




CONCESSION TO THE CELT--1886

Things are quiet outside an ant-hill until the stick has been thrust into
it. Mr. Gladstone's Bill for helping to the wiser government of Ireland
has brought forth our busy citizens on the top-rubble in traversing
counterswarms, and whatever may be said against a Bill that deals roughly
with many sensitive interests, one asks whether anything less violently
impressive would have roused industrious England to take this question at
last into the mind, as a matter for settlement. The Liberal leader has
driven it home; and wantonly, in the way of a pedestrian demagogue, some
think; certainly to the discomposure of the comfortable and the myopely
busy, who prefer to live on with a disease in the frame rather than at
all be stirred. They can, we see, pronounce a positive electoral
negative; yet even they, after the eighty and odd years of our domestic
perplexity, in the presence of the eighty and odd members pledged for
Home Rule, have been moved to excited inquiries regarding measures--short
of the obnoxious Bill. How much we suffer from sniffing the vain incense
of that word practical, is contempt of prevision! Many of the measures
now being proposed responsively to the fretful cry for them, as a better
alternative to correction by force of arms, are sound and just. Ten years
back, or at a more recent period before Mr. Parnell's triumph in the
number of his followers, they would have formed a basis for the
appeasement of the troubled land. The institution of county boards, the
abolition of the detested Castle, something like the establishment of a
Royal residence in Dublin, would have begun the work well. Materially and
sentimentally, they were the right steps to take. They are now proposed
too late. They are regarded as petty concessions, insufficient and
vexatious. The lower and the higher elements in the population are fused
by the enthusiasm of men who find themselves marching in full body on a
road, under a flag, at the heels of a trusted leader; and they will no
longer be fed with sops. Petty concessions are signs of weakness to the
unsatisfied; they prick an appetite, they do not close breaches. If our
object is, as we hear it said, to appease the Irish, we shall have to
give them the Parliament their leader demands. It might once have been
much less; it may be worried into a raving, perhaps a desperate
wrestling, for still more. Nations pay Sibylline prices for want of
forethought. Mr. Parnell's terms are embodied in Mr. Gladstone's Bill, to
which he and his band have subscribed. The one point for him is the
statutory Parliament, so that Ireland may civilly govern herself; and
standing before the world as representative of his country, he addresses
an applausive audience when he cites the total failure of England to do
that business of government, as at least a logical reason for the claim.
England has confessedly failed; the world says it, the country admits it.
We have failed, and not because the so-called Saxon is incapable of
understanding the Celt, but owing to our system, suitable enough to us,
of rule by Party, which puts perpetually a shifting hand upon the reins,
and invites the clamour it has to allay. The Irish--the English too in
some degree--have been taught that roaring; in its various forms, is the
trick to open the ears of Ministers. We have encouraged by irritating
them to practise it, until it has become a habit, an hereditary
profession with them. Ministers in turn have defensively adopted the arts
of beguilement, varied by an exercise of the police. We grew accustomed
to periods of Irish fever. The exhaustion ensuing we named tranquillity,
and hoped that it would bear fruit. But we did not plant. The Party in
office directed its attention to what was uppermost and urgent--to that
which kicked them. Although we were living, by common consent; with a
disease in the frame, eruptive at intervals, a national disfigurement
always a danger, the Ministerial idea of arresting it for the purpose of
healing was confined, before the passing of Mr. Gladstone's well-meant
Land Bill, to the occasional despatch of commissions; and, in fine, we
behold through History the Irish malady treated as a form of British
constitutional gout. Parliament touched on the Irish only when the Irish
were active as a virus. Our later alternations of cajolery and repression
bear painful resemblance to the nervous fit of rickety riders compounding
with their destinations that they may keep their seats. The cajolery was
foolish, if an end was in view; the repression inefficient. To repress
efficiently we have to stifle a conscience accusing us of old injustice,
and forget that we are sworn to freedom. The cries that we have been
hearing for Cromwell or for Bismarck prove the existence of an impatient
faction in our midst fitter to wear the collars of those masters whom
they invoke than to drop a vote into the ballot-box. As for the prominent
politicians who have displaced their rivals partly on the strength of an
implied approbation of those cries, we shall see how they illumine the
councils of a governing people. They are wiser than the barking dogs.
Cromwell and Bismarck are great names; but the harrying of Ireland did
not settle it, and to Germanize a Posen and call it peace will find echo
only in the German tongue. Posen is the error of a master-mind too much
given to hammer at obstacles. He has, however, the hammer. Can it be
imagined in English hands? The braver exemplar for grappling with
monstrous political tasks is Cavour, and he would not have hinted at the
iron method or the bayonet for a pacification. Cavour challenged debate;
he had faith in the active intellect, and that is the thing to be prayed
for by statesmen who would register permanent successes. The Irish, it is
true, do not conduct an argument coolly. Mr. Parnell and his eighty-five
have not met the Conservative leader and his following in the Commons
with the gravity of platonic disputants. But they have a logical
position, equivalent to the best of arguments. They are representatives,
they would say, of a country admittedly ill-governed by us; and they have
accepted the Bill of the defeated Minister as final. Its provisions are
their terms of peace. They offer in return for that boon to take the
burden we have groaned under off our hands. If we answer that we think
them insincere, we accuse these thrice accredited representatives of the
Irish people of being hypocrites and crafty conspirators; and numbers in
England, affected by the weapons they have used to get to their present
strength, do think it; forgetful that our obtuseness to their constant
appeals forced them into the extremer shifts of agitation. Yet it will
hardly be denied that these men love Ireland; and they have not shown
themselves by their acts to be insane. To suppose them conspiring for
separation indicates a suspicion that they have neither hearts nor heads.
For Ireland, separation is immediate ruin. It would prove a very short
sail for these conspirators before the ship went down. The vital
necessity of the Union for both, countries, obviously for the weaker of
the two, is known to them; and unless we resume our exasperation of the
wild fellow the Celt can be made by such a process, we have not rational
grounds for treating him, or treating with him, as a Bedlamite. He has
besides his passions shrewd sense; and his passions may be rightly
directed by benevolent attraction. This is language derided by the
victorious enemy; it speaks nevertheless what the world, and even
troubled America, thinks of the Irish Celt. More of it now on our side of
the Channel would be serviceable. The notion that he hates the English
comes of his fevered chafing against the harness of England, and when
subject to his fevers, he is unrestrained in his cries and deeds. That
pertains to the nature of him. Of course, if we have no belief in the
virtues of friendliness and confidence--none in regard to the
Irishman--we show him his footing, and we challenge the issue. For the
sole alternative is distinct antagonism, a form of war. Mr. Gladstone's
Bill has brought us to that definite line. Ireland having given her
adhesion to it, swearing that she does so in good faith, and will not
accept a smaller quantity, peace is only to be had by our placing trust
in the Irish; we trust them or we crush them. Intermediate ways are but
the prosecution of our ugly flounderings in Bogland; and dubious as we
see the choice on either side, a decisive step to right or left will not
show us to the world so bemired, to ourselves so miserably inefficient,
as we appear in this session of a new Parliament. With his eighty-five,
apart from external operations lawful or not, Mr. Parnell can act as a
sort of lumbricus in the House. Let journalists watch and chronicle
events: if Mr. Gladstone has humour, they will yet note a peculiar smile
on his closed mouth from time to time when the alien body within the
House, from which, for the sake of its dignity and ability to conduct its
affairs, he would have relieved it till the day of a warmer intelligence
between Irish and English, paralyzes our machinery business. An
ably-handled coherent body in the midst of the liquid groups will make it
felt that Ireland is a nation, naturally dependent though she must be. We
have to do with forces in politics, and the great majority of the Irish
Nationalists in Ireland has made them a force.

No doubt Mr. Matthew Arnold is correct in his apprehensions of the
dangers we may fear from a Dublin House of Commons. The declarations and
novel or ultra theories might almost be written down beforehand. I
should, for my part, anticipate a greater danger in the familiar attitude
of the English metropolitan Press and public toward an experiment they
dislike and incline to dread:--the cynical comments, the quotations
between inverted commas, the commiserating shrug, cold irony, raw banter,
growl of menace, sharp snap, rounds of laughter. Frenchmen of the Young
Republic, not presently appreciated as offensive, have had some of these
careless trifles translated for them, and have been stung. We favoured
Germany with them now and then, before Germany became the first power in
Europe. Before America had displayed herself as greatest among the giants
that do not go to pieces, she had, as Americans forgivingly remember,
without mentioning, a series of flicks of the whip. It is well to learn
manners without having them imposed on us. There are various ways for
tripping the experiment. Nevertheless, when the experiment is tried,
considering that our welfare is involved in its not failing, as we have
failed, we should prepare to start it cordially, cordially assist it.
Thoughtful political minds regard the measure as a backward step; yet
conceiving but a prospect that a measure accepted by Home Rulers will
possibly enable the Irish and English to step together, it seems better
worth the venture than to pursue a course of prospectless discord!
Whatever we do or abstain from doing has now its evident dangers, and
this being imminent may appear the larger of them; but if a weighing of
the conditions dictates it, and conscience approves, the wiser proceeding
is to make trial of the untried. Our outlook was preternaturally black,
with enormous increase of dangers when the originator of our species
venturesomely arose from the posture of the 'quatre pattes'. We consider
that we have not lost by his temerity. In states of dubitation under
impelling elements, the instinct pointing to courageous action is,
besides the manlier, conjecturably the right one.




LESLIE STEPHEN--1904

When that noble body of scholarly and cheerful pedestrians, the Sunday
Tramps, were on the march, with Leslie Stephen to lead them, there was
conversation which would have made the presence of a shorthand writer a
benefaction to the country. A pause to it came at the examination of the
leader's watch and Ordnance map under the western sun, and void was given
for the strike across country to catch the tail of a train offering
dinner in London, at the cost of a run through hedges, over ditches and
fellows, past proclamation against trespassers, under suspicion of being
taken for more serious depredators in flight. The chief of the Tramps had
a wonderful calculating eye in the observation of distances and the
nature of the land, as he proved by his discovery of untried passes in
the higher Alps, and he had no mercy for pursy followers. I have often
said of this life-long student and philosophical head that he had in him
the making of a great military captain. He would not have been opposed to
the profession of arms if he had been captured early for the service,
notwithstanding his abomination of bloodshed. He had a high, calm
courage, was unperturbed in a dubious position, and would confidently
take the way out of it which he conceived to be the better. We have not
to deplore that he was diverted from the ways of a soldier, though
England, as the country has been learning of late, cannot boast of many
in uniform who have capacity for leadership. His work in literature will
be reviewed by his lieutenant of Tramps, one of the ablest of
writers!--[Frederic W. Maitland.]--The memory of it remains with us, as
being the profoundest and the most sober criticism we have had in our
time. The only sting in it was an inoffensive humorous irony that now and
then stole out for a roll over, like a furry cub, or the occasional
ripple on a lake in grey weather. We have nothing left that is like it.

One might easily fall into the pit of panegyric by an enumeration of his
qualities, personal and literary. It would not be out of harmony with the
temper and characteristics of a mind so equable. He, the equable, whether
in condemnation or eulogy. Our loss of such a man is great, for work was
in his brain, and the hand was active till close upon the time when his
breathing ceased. The loss to his friends can be replaced only by an
imagination that conjures him up beside them. That will be no task to
those who have known him well enough to see his view of things as they
are, and revive his expression of it. With them he will live despite the
word farewell.




        CORRESPONDENCE FROM THE SEAT OF WAR IN ITALY

LETTERS WRITTEN TO THE MORNING POST FROM THE SEAT OF WAR IN ITALY FROM
OUR OWN CORRESPONDENT

FERRARA, June 22, 1866.

Before this letter reaches London the guns will have awakened both the
echo of the old river Po and the classical Mincio. The whole of the
troops, about 110,000 men, with which Cialdini intends to force the
passage of the first-named river are already massed along the right bank
of the Po, anxiously waiting that the last hour of to-morrow should
strike, and that the order for action should be given. The telegraph will
have already informed your readers that, according to the intimation sent
by General Lamarmora on Tuesday evening to the Austrian headquarters, the
three days fixed by the general's message before beginning hostilities
will expire at twelve p.m. of the 23rd of June.

Cialdini's headquarters have been established in this city since
Wednesday morning, and the famous general, in whom the fourth corps he
commands, and the whole of the nation, has so much confidence, has
concentrated the whole of his forces within a comparatively narrow
compass, and is ready for action. I believe therefore that by to-morrow
the right bank of the Po will be connected with the mainland of the
Polesine by several pontoon bridges, which will enable Cialdini's corps
d'armee to cross the river, and, as everybody here hopes, to cross it in
spite of any defence the Austrians may make.

On my way to this ancient city last evening I met General Cadogan and two
superior Prussian officers, who by this time must have joined Victor
Emmanuel's headquarters at Cremona; if not, they have been by this time
transferred elsewhere, more on the front, towards the line of the Mincio,
on which, according to appearance, the first, second, and third Italian
corps d'armee seem destined to operate. The English general and the two
Prussian officers above mentioned are to follow the king's staff, the
first as English commissioner, the superior in rank of the two others in
the same capacity.

I have been told here that, before leaving Bologna, Cialdini held a
general council of the commanders of the seven divisions of which his
powerful corps d'armee is formed, and that he told them that, in spite of
the forces the enemy has massed on the left bank of the Po, between the
point which faces Stellata and Rovigo, the river must be crossed by his
troops, whatever might be the sacrifice this important operation
requires. Cialdini is a man who knows how to keep his word, and, for this
reason, I have no doubt he will do what he has already made up his mind
to accomplish. I am therefore confident that before two or three days
have elapsed, these 110,000 Italian troops, or a great part of them, will
have trod, for the Italians, the sacred land of Venetia.

Once the river Po crossed by Cialdini's corps d'armee, he will boldly
enter the Polesine and make himself master of the road which leads by
Rovigo towards Este and Padua. A glance at the map will show your readers
how, at about twenty or thirty miles from the first-mentioned town, a
chain of hills, called the Colli Euganei, stretches itself from the last
spur of the Julian Alps, in the vicinity of Vicenza, gently sloping down
towards the sea. As this line affords good positions for contesting the
advance of an army crossing the Po at Lago Scuro, or at any other point
not far from it, it is to be supposed that the Austrians will make a
stand there, and I should not be surprised at all that Cialdini's first
battle, if accepted by the enemy, should take place within that
comparatively narrow ground which is within Montagnana, Este, Terradura,
Abano, and Padua. It is impossible to suppose that Cialdini's corps
d'armee, being so large, is destined to cross the Po only at one point of
the river below its course: it is extremely likely that part of it should
cross it at some point above, between Revere and Stellata, where the
river is in two or three instances only 450 metres wide. Were the Italian
general to be successful--protected as he will be by the tremendous fire
of the powerful artillery he disposes of--in these twofold operations,
the Austrians defending the line of the Colli Euganei could be easily
outflanked by the Italian troops, who would have crossed the river below
Lago Scuro. Of course these are mere suppositions, for nobody, as you may
imagine, except the king, Cialdini himself, Lamarmora, Pettiti, and
Menabrea, is acquainted with the plan of the forthcoming campaign. There
was a rumour at Cialdini's headquarters to-day that the Austrians had
gathered in great numbers in the Polesine, and especially at Rovigo, a
small town which they have strongly fortified of late, with an apparent
design to oppose the crossing of the Po, were Cialdini to attempt it at
or near Lago Scuro. There are about Rovigo large tracts of marshes and
fields cut by ditches and brooks, which, though owing to the dryness of
the season [they] cannot be, as it was generally believed two weeks ago,
easily inundated, yet might well aid the operations the Austrians may
undertake in order to check the advance of the Italian fourth corps
d'armee. The resistance to the undertaking of Cialdini may be, on the
part of the Austrians, very stout, but I am almost certain that it will
be overcome by the ardour of Italian troops, and by the skill of their
illustrious leader.

As I told you above, the declaration of war was handed over to an
Austrian major for transmission to Count Stancowick, the Austrian
governor of Mantua, on the evening of the 19th, by Colonel Bariola,
sous-chef of the general staff, who was accompanied by the Duke Luigi of
Sant' Arpino, the husband of the amiable widow of Lord Burghersh. The
duke is the eldest son of Prince San Teodoro, one of the wealthiest
noblemen of Naples. In spite of his high position and of his family ties,
the Duke of Sant' Arpino, who is well known in London fashionable
society, entered as a volunteer in the Italian army, and was appointed
orderly officer to General Lamarmora. The choice of such a gentleman for
the mission I am speaking of was apparently made with intention, in order
to show the Austrians, that the Neapolitan nobility is as much interested
in the national movement as the middle and lower classes of the Kingdom,
once so fearfully misruled by the Bourbons. The Duke of Sant' Arpino is
not the only Neapolitan nobleman who has enlisted in the Italian army
since the war with Austria broke out. In order to show you the importance
which must be given to this pronunciamiento of the Neapolitan noblemen,
allow me to give you here a short list of the names of those of them who
have enlisted as private soldiers in the cavalry regiments of the regular
army: The Duke of Policastro; the Count of Savignano Guevara, the eldest
son of the Duke of Bovino; the Duke d'Ozia d'Angri, who had emigrated in
1860, and returned to Naples six months ago; Marquis Rivadebro Serra;
Marquis Pisicelli, whose family had left Naples in 1860 out of devotion
to Francis II.; two Carraciolos, of the historical family from which
sprung the unfortunate Neapolitan admiral of this name, whose head Lord
Nelson would have done better not to have sacrificed to the cruelty of
Queen Caroline; Prince Carini, the representative of an illustrious
family of Sicily, a nephew of the Marquis del Vasto; and Pescara, a
descendant of that great general of Charles V., to whom the proud Francis
I. of France was obliged to surrender and give up his sword at the battle
of Pavia. Besides these Neapolitan noblemen who have enlisted of late as
privates, the Italian army now encamped on the banks of the Po and of the
Mincio may boast of two Colonnas, a prince of Somma, two Barons Renzi, an
Acquaviva, of the Duke of Atri, two Capece, two Princes Buttera, etc. To
return to the mission of Colonel Bariola and the Duke of Sant' Arpino, I
will add some details which were told me this morning by a gentleman who
left Cremona yesterday evening, and who had them from a reliable source.
The messenger of General Lamarmora had been directed to proceed from
Cremona to the small village of Le Grazie, which, on the line of the
Mincio, marks the Austrian and Italian frontier.

On the right bank of the Lake of Mantua, in the year 1340, stood a small
chapel containing a miraculous painting of the Madonna, called by the
people of the locality 'Santa Maria delle Grazie.' The boatmen and
fishermen of the Mincio, who had been, as they said, often saved from
certain death by the Madonna--as famous in those days as the modern Lady
of Rimini, celebrated for the startling feat of winking her
eyes--determined to erect for her a more worthy abode.

Hence arose the Santuario delle Grazie. Here, as at Loretto and other
holy localities of Italy, a fair is held, in which, amongst a great
number of worldly things, rosaries, holy images, and other miraculous
objects are sold, and astounding boons are said to be secured at the most
trifling expense. The Santuario della Madonna delle Grazie enjoying a
far-spread reputation, the dumb, deaf, blind, and halt-in short, people
afflicted with all sorts of infirmities--flock thither during the fair,
and are not wanting even on the other days of the year. The church of Le
Grazie is one of the most curious of Italy. Not that there is anything
remarkable in its architecture, for it is an Italian Gothic structure of
the simplest style. But the ornamental part of the interior is most
peculiar. The walls of the building are covered with a double row of wax
statues, of life size, representing a host of warriors, cardinals,
bishops, kings, and popes, who--as the story runs--pretended to have
received some wonderful grace during their earthly existence. Amongst the
grand array of illustrious personages, there are not a few humbler
individuals whose history is faithfully told (if you choose to credit it)
by the painted inscriptions below. There is even a convict, who, at the
moment of being hanged, implored succour of the all-powerful Madonna,
whereupon the beam of the gibbet instantly broke, and the worthy
individual was restored to society--a very doubtful benefit after all. On
Colonel Bariola and the Duke of Sant' Arpino arriving at this place,
which is only five miles distant from Mantua, their carriage was
naturally stopped by the commissaire of the Austrian police, whose duty
was to watch the frontier. Having told him that they had a despatch to
deliver either to the military governor of Mantua or to some officer sent
by him to receive it, the commissaire at once despatched a mounted
gendarme to Mantua. Two hours had scarcely elapsed when a carriage drove
into the village of Le Grazie, from which an Austrian major of infantry
alighted and hastened to a wooden hut where the two Italian officers were
waiting. Colonel Bariola, who was trained in the Austrian military school
of Viller Nashstad, and regularly left the Austrian service in 1848,
acquainted the newly-arrived major with his mission, which was that of
delivering the sealed despatch to the general in command of Mantua and
receiving for it a regular receipt. The despatch was addressed to the
Archduke Albert, commander-in-chief of the Austrian army of the South,
care of the governor of Mantua. After the major had delivered the
receipt, the three messengers entered into a courteous conversation,
during which Colonel Bariola seized an opportunity of presenting the
duke, purposely laying stress on the fact of his belonging to one of the
most illustrious families of Naples. It happened that the Austrian major
had also been trained in the same school where Colonel Bariola was
brought up--a circumstance of which he was reminded by the Austrian
officer himself. Three hours had scarcely elapsed from the arrival of the
two Italian messengers of war at Le Grazie, on the Austrian frontier,
when they were already on their way back to the headquarters of Cremona,
where during the night the rumour was current that a telegram had been
received by Lamarmora from Verona, in which Archduke Albert accepted the
challenge. Victor Emmanuel, whom I saw at Bologna yesterday, arrived at
Cremona in the morning at two o'clock, but by this time his Majesty's
headquarters must have removed more towards the front, in the direction
of the Oglio. I should not be at all surprised were the Italian
headquarters to be established by to-morrow either at Piubega or
Gazzoldo, if not actually at Goito, a village, as you know, which marks
the Italian-Austrian frontier on the Mincio. The whole of the first,
second, and third Italian corps d'armee are by this time concentrated
within that comparatively narrow space which lies between the position of
Castiglione, Delle Stiviere, Lorrato, and Desenzano, on the Lake of
Garda, and Solferino on one side; Piubega, Gazzoldo, Sacca, Goito, and
Castellucchio on the other. Are these three corps d'armee to attack when
they hear the roar of Cialdini's artillery on the right bank of the Po?
Are they destined to force the passage of the Mincio either at Goito or
at Borghetto? or are they destined to invest Verona, storm Peschiera, and
lay siege to Mantua? This is more than I can tell you, for, I repeat it,
the intentions of the Italian leaders are enveloped in a veil which
nobody--the Austrians included--has as yet been able to penetrate. One
thing, however, is certain, and it is this, that as the clock of Victor
Emmanuel marks the last minute of the seventy-second hour fixed by the
declaration delivered at Le Grazie on Wednesday by Colonel Bariola to the
Austrian major, the fair land where Virgil was born and Tasso was
imprisoned will be enveloped by a thick cloud of the smoke of hundreds
and hundreds of cannon. Let us hope that God will be in favour of right
and justice, which, in this imminent and fierce struggle, is undoubtedly
on the Italian side.

CREMONA, June 30, 1866.

The telegraph will have already informed you of the concentration of the
Italian army, whose headquarters have since Tuesday been removed from
Redondesco to Piadena, the king having chosen the adjacent villa of
Cigognolo for his residence. The concentrating movements of the royal
army began on the morning of the 27th, i.e., three days after the bloody
fait d'armes of the 24th, which, narrated and commented on in different
manners according to the interests and passions of the narrators, still
remains for many people a mystery. At the end of this letter you will see
that I quote a short phrase with which an Austrian major, now prisoner of
war, portrayed the results of the fierce struggle fought beyond the
Mincio. This officer is one of the few survivors of a regiment of
Austrian volunteers, uhlans, two squadrons of which he himself commanded.
The declaration made by this officer was thoroughly explicit, and conveys
the exact idea of the valour displayed by the Italians in that terrible
fight. Those who incline to overrate the advantages obtained by the
Austrians on Sunday last must not forget that if Lamarmora had thought
proper to persist in holding the positions of Valeggio, Volta, and Goito,
the Austrians could not have prevented him. It seems the Austrian
general-in-chief shared this opinion, for, after his army had carried
with terrible sacrifices the positions of Monte Vento and Custozza, it
did not appear, nor indeed did the Austrians then give any signs, that
they intended to adopt a more active system of warfare. It is the
business of a commander to see that after a victory the fruit of it
should not be lost, and for this reason the enemy is pursued and
molested, and time is not left him for reorganization. Nothing of this
happened after the 24th--nothing has been done by the Austrians to secure
such results. The frontier which separates the two dominions is now the
same as it was on the eve of the declaration of war. At Goito, at
Monzambano, and in the other villages of the extreme frontier, the
Italian authorities are still discharging their duties. Nothing is
changed in those places, were we to except that now and then an Austrian
cavalry party suddenly makes its appearance, with the only object of
watching the movements of the Italian army. One of these parties, formed
by four squadrons of the Wurtemberg hussar regiment, having advanced at
six o'clock this morning on the right bank of the Mincio, met the fourth
squadron of the Italian lancers of Foggia and were beaten back, and
compelled to retire in disorder towards Goito and Rivolta. In this
unequal encounter the Italian lancers distinguished themselves very much,
made some Austrian hussars prisoners, and killed a few more, amongst whom
was an officer. The same state of thing, prevails at Rivottella, a small
village on the shores of the Lake of Garda, about four miles distant from
the most advanced fortifications of Peschiera. There, as elsewhere, some
Austrian parties advanced with the object of watching the movements of
the Garibaldians, who occupy the hilly ground, which from Castiglione,
Eseuta, and Cartel Venzago stretches to Lonato, Salo, and Desenzano, and
to the mountain passes of Caffaro. In the last-named place the
Garibaldians came to blows with the Austrians on the morning of the 28th,
and the former got the best of the fray. Had the fait d'armes of the
24th, or the battle of Custozza, as Archduke Albrecht calls it, been a
great victory for the Austrians, why should the imperial army remain in
such inaction? The only conclusion we must come to is simply this, that
the Austrian losses have been such as to induce the commander-in-chief of
the army to act prudently on the defensive. We are now informed that the
charges of cavalry which the Austrian lancers and the Hungarian hussars
had to sustain near Villafranca on the 24th with the Italian horsemen of
the Aorta and Alessandria regiments have been so fatal to the former that
a whole division of the Kaiser cavalry must be reorganised before it can
be brought into the field main.

The regiment of Haller hussars and two of volunteer uhlans were almost
destroyed in that terrible charge. To give you an idea of this cavalry
encounter, it is sufficient to say that Colonel Vandoni, at the head of
the Aorta regiment he commands, charged fourteen times during the short
period of four hours. The volunteer uhlans of the Kaiser regiment had
already given up the idea of breaking through the square formed by the
battalion, in the centre of which stood Prince Humbert of Savoy, when
they were suddenly charged and literally cut to pieces by the Alessandria
light cavalry, in spite of the long lances they carried. This weapon and
the loose uniform they wear makes them resemble the Cossacks of the Don.
There is one circumstance, which, if I am not mistaken, has not as yet
been published by the newspapers, and it is this. There was a fight on
the 25th on a place at the north of Roverbella, between the Italian
regiment of Novara cavalry and a regiment of Hungarian hussars, whose
name is not known. This regiment was so thoroughly routed by the Italians
that it was pursued as far as Villafranca, and had two squadrons put hors
de combat, whilst the Novara regiment only lost twenty-four mounted men.
I think it right to mention this, for it proves that, the day after the
bloody affair of the 24th, the Italian army had still a regiment of
cavalry operating at Villafranca, a village which lay at a distance of
fifteen kilometres from the Italian frontier. A report, which is much
accredited here, explains how the Italian army did not derive the
advantages it might have derived from the action of the 24th. It appears
that the orders issued from the Italian headquarters during the previous
night, and especially the verbal instructions given by Lamarmora and
Pettiti to the staff officers of the different army corps, were either
forgotten or misunderstood by those officers. Those sent to Durando, the
commander of the first corps, seem to have been as follows: That he
should have marched in the direction of Castelnuovo, without, however,
taking part in the action. Durando, it is generally stated, had strictly
adhered to the orders sent from the headquarters, but it seems that
General Cerale understood them too literally. Having been ordered to
march on Castelnuovo, and finding the village strongly held by the
Austrians, who received his division with a tremendous fire, he at once
engaged in the action instead of falling back on the reserve of the first
corps and waiting new instructions. If such was really the case, it is
evident that Cerale thought that the order to march which he had received
implied that he was to attack and get possession of Castelnuovo, had this
village, as it really was, already been occupied by the enemy. In
mentioning this fact I feel bound to observe that I write it under the
most complete reserve, for I should be sorry indeed to charge General
Cerale with having misunderstood such an important order.

I see that one of your leading contemporaries believes that it would be
impossible for the king or Lamarmora to say what result they expected
from their ill-conceived and worse-executed attempt. The result they
expected is, I think, clear enough; they wanted to break through the
quadrilateral and make their junction with Cialdini, who was ready to
cross the Po during the night of the 24th. That the attempt was
ill-conceived and worse-executed, neither your contemporary nor the
public at large has, for the present, the right to conclude, for no one
knows as yet but imperfectly the details of the terrible fight. What is
certain, however, is that General Durando, perceiving that the Cerale
division was lost, did all that he could to help it. Failing in this he
turned to his two aides-de-camp and coolly said to them:

'Now, gentlemen, it is time for you to retire, for I have a duty to
perform which is a strictly personal one--the duty of dying.' On saying
these words he galloped to the front and placed himself at about twenty
paces from a battalion of Austrian sharp-shooters which were ascending
the hill. In less than five minutes his horse was killed under him, and
he was wounded in the right hand. I scarcely need add that his
aides-de-camp did not flinch from sharing Durando's fate. They bravely
followed their general, and one, the Marquis Corbetta, was wounded in the
leg; the other, Count Esengrini, had his horse shot under him. I called
on Durando, who is now at Milan, the day before yesterday. Though a
stranger to him, he received me at once, and, speaking of the action of
the 24th, he only said: 'I have the satisfaction of having done my duty.
I wait tranquilly the judgement of history.'

Assuming, for argument's sake, that General Cerale misunderstood the
orders he had received, and that, by precipitating his movement, he
dragged into the same mistake the whole of Durando's corps--assuming, I
say, this to be the right version, you can easily explain the fact that
neither of the two contending parties are as yet in a position clearly to
describe the action of the 24th. Why did neither the one nor the other
display and bring into action the whole forces they could have had at
their disposal? Why so many partial engagements at a great distance one
from the other? In a word, why that want of unity, which, in my opinion,
constituted the paramount characteristic of that bloody struggle? I may
be greatly mistaken, but I am of opinion that neither the Italian
general-in-chief nor the Austrian Archduke entertained on the night of
the 23rd the idea of delivering a battle on the 24th. There, and only
there, lies the whole mystery of the affair. The total want of unity of
action on the part of the Italians assured to the Austrians, not the
victory, but the chance of rendering impossible Lamarmora's attempt to
break through the quadrilateral. This no one can deny; but, on the other
hand, if the Italian army failed in attaining its object, the
failure-owing to the bravery displayed both by the soldiers and by the
generals-was far from being a disastrous or irreparable one. The Italians
fought from three o'clock in the morning until nine in the evening like
lions, showing to their enemies and to Europe that they know how to
defend their country, and that they are worthy of the noble enterprise
they have undertaken.

But let me now register one of the striking episodes of that memorable
day. It was five o'clock p.m. when General Bixio, whose division held an
elevated position not far from Villafranca, was attacked by three strong
Austrian brigades, which had debouched at the same time from three
different roads, supported with numerous artillery. An officer of the
Austrian staff, waving a white handkerchief, was seen galloping towards
the front of Bixio's position, and, once in the presence of this general,
bade him surrender. Those who are not personally acquainted with Bixio
cannot form an idea of the impression this bold demand must have made on
him. I have been told that, on hearing the word 'surrender,' his face
turned suddenly pale, then flushed like purple, and darting at the
Austrian messenger, said, 'Major, if you dare to pronounce once more the
word surrender in my presence, I tell you--and Bixio always keeps his
word--that I will have you shot at once.' The Austrian officer had
scarcely reached the general who had sent him, than Bixio, rapidly moving
his division, fell with such impetuosity on the Austrian column, which
were ascending the hill, that they were thrown pellmell in the valley,
causing the greatest confusion amongst their reserve. Bixio himself led
his men, and with his aides-de-camp, Cavaliere Filippo Fermi, Count
Martini, and Colonel Malenchini, all Tuscans, actually charged the enemy.
I have been told that, on hearing this episode, Garibaldi said, 'I am not
at all surprised, for Bixio is the best general I have made.' Once the
enemy was repulsed, Bixio was ordered to manoeuvre so as to cover the
backward movement of the army, which was orderly and slowly retiring on
the Mincio. Assisted by the co-operation of the heavy cavalry, commanded
by General Count de Sonnaz, Bixio covered the retreat, and during the
night occupied Goito, a position which he held till the evening of the
27th.

In consequence of the concentrating movement of the Italian army which I
have mentioned at the beginning of this letter, the fourth army corps
(Cialdini's) still holds the line of the Po. If I am rightly informed,
the decree for the formation of the fourth army corps was signed by the
king yesterday. This corps is that of Garibaldi, and is about 40,000
strong. An officer who has just returned from Milan told me this morning
that he had had an opportunity of speaking with the Austrian prisoners
sent from Milan to the fortress of Finestrelle in Piedmont. Amongst them
was an officer of a uhlan regiment, who had all the appearance of
belonging to some aristocratic family of Austrian Poland. Having been
asked if he thought Austria had really gained the battle on the 24th, he
answered: 'I do not know if the illusions of the Austrian army go so far
as to induce it to believe it has obtained a victory--I do not believe
it. He who loves Austria cannot, however, wish she should obtain such
victories, for they are the victories of Pyrrhus!

There is at Verona some element in the Austrian councils of war which we
don't understand, but which gives to their operations in this present
phase of the campaign just as uncertain and as vacillating a character as
it possessed during the campaign of 1859. On Friday they are still beyond
the Mincio, and on Saturday their small fleet on the Lake of Garda steams
up to Desenzano, and opens fire against this defenceless city and her
railway station, whilst two battalions of Tyrolese sharp-shooters occupy
the building. On Sunday they retire, but early yesterday they cross the
Mincio, at Goito and Monzambano, and begin to throw two bridges over the
same river, between the last-named place and the mills of Volta. At the
same time they erect batteries at Goito, Torrione, and Valeggio, pushing
their reconnoitring parties of hussars as far as Medole, Castiglione
delle Stiviere, and Montechiara, this last-named place being only at a
distance of twenty miles from Brescia. Before this news reached me here
this morning I was rather inclined to believe that they were playing at
hide-and-seek, in the hope that the leaders of the Italian army should be
tempted by the game and repeat, for the second time, the too hasty attack
on the quadrilateral. This news, which I have from a reliable source,
has, however, changed my former opinion, and I begin to believe that the
Austrian Archduke has really made up his mind to come out from the
strongholds of the quadrilateral, and intends actually to begin war on
the very battlefields where his imperial cousin was beaten on the 24th
June 1859. It may be that the partial disasters sustained by Benedek in
Germany have determined the Austrian Government to order a more active
system of war against Italy, or, as is generally believed here, that the
organisation of the commissariat was not perfect enough with the army
Archduke Albert commands to afford a more active and offensive action. Be
that as it may, the fact is that the news received here from several
parts of Upper Lombardy seems to indicate, on the part of the Austrians,
the intention of attacking their adversaries.

Yesterday whilst the peaceable village of Gazzoldo--five Italian miles
from Goito--was still buried in the silence of night it was occupied by
400 hussars, to the great consternation of the people who were roused
from their sleep by the galloping of their unexpected visitors. The
sindaco, or mayor of the village, who is the chemist of the place, was, I
hear, forcibly taken from his house and compelled to escort the Austrians
on the road leading to Piubega and Redondesco. This worthy magistrate,
who was not apparently endowed with sufficient courage to make at least
half a hero, was so much frightened that he was taken ill, and still is
in a very precarious condition. These inroads are not always accomplished
with impunity, for last night, not far from Guidizzuolo, two squadrons of
Italian light cavalry--Cavalleggieri di Lucca, if I am rightly
informed--at a sudden turn of the road leading from the last-named
village to Cerlongo, found themselves almost face to face with four
squadrons of uhlans. The Italians, without numbering their foes, set
spurs to their horses and fell like thunder on the Austrians, who, after
a fight which lasted more than half an hour, were put to flight, leaving
on the ground fifteen men hors de combat, besides twelve prisoners.

Whilst skirmishing of this kind is going on in the flat ground of
Lombardy which lies between the Mincio and the Chiese, a more decisive
action has been adopted by the Austrian corps which is quartered in the
Italian Tyrol and Valtellina. A few days ago it was generally believed
that the mission of this corps was only to oppose Garibaldi should he try
to force those Alpine passes. But now we suddenly hear that the Austrians
are already masters of Caffaro, Bagolino, Riccomassino, and Turano, which
points they are fortifying. This fact explains the last movements made by
Garibaldi towards that direction. But whilst the Austrians are massing
their troops on the Tyrolese Alps the revolution is spreading fast in the
more southern mountains of the Friuli and Cadorre, thus threatening the
flank and rear of their army in Venetia. This revolutionary movement may
not have as yet assumed great proportions, but as it is the effect of a
plan proposed beforehand it might become really imposing, more so as the
ranks of those Italian patriots are daily swollen by numerous deserters
and refractory men of the Venetian regiments of the Austrian army.

Although the main body of the Austrians seems to be still concentrated
between Peschiera and Verona, I should not wonder if they crossed the
Mincio either to-day or to-morrow, with the object of occupying the
heights of Volta, Cavriana, and Solferino, which, both by their position
and by the nature of the ground, are in themselves so many fortresses.
Supposing that the Italian army should decide for action--and there is
every reason to believe that such will be the case--it is not unlikely
that, as we had already a second battle at Custozza, we may have a second
one at Solferino.

That at the Italian headquarters something has been decided upon which
may hasten the forward movement of the army, I infer from the fact that
the foreign military commissioners at the Italian headquarters, who,
after the 24th June had gone to pass the leisure of their camp life at
Cremona, have suddenly made their appearance at Torre Malamberti, a villa
belonging to the Marquis Araldi, where Lamarmora's staff is quartered. A
still more important event is the presence of Baron Ricasoli, whom I met
yesterday evening on coming here. The President of the Council was coming
from Florence, and, after stopping a few hours at the villa of Cicognolo,
where Victor Emmanuel and the royal household are staying, he drove to
Torre Malamberti to confer with General Lamarmora and Count Pettiti. The
presence of the baron at headquarters is too important an incident to be
overlooked by people whose business is that of watching the course of
events in this country. And it should be borne in mind that on his way to
headquarters Baron Ricasoli stopped a few hours at Bologna, where he had
a long interview with Cialdini. Nor is this all; for the most important
fact I have to report to-day is, that whilst I am writing (five o'clock
a.m.) three corps of the Italian army are crossing the Oglio at different
points--all three acting together and ready for any occurrence. This
reconnaissance en force may, as you see, be turned into a regular battle
should the Austrians have crossed the Mincio with the main body of their
army during the course of last night. You see that the air around me
smells enough of powder to justify the expectation of events which are
likely to exercise a great influence over the cause of right and
justice--the cause of Italy.

MARCARIA, July 3, Evening.

Murray's guide will save me the trouble of telling you what this little
and dirty hole of Marcaria is like. The river Oglio runs due south, not
far from the village, and cuts the road which from Bozzolo leads to
Mantua. It is about seven miles from Castellucchio, a town which, since
the peace of Villafranca, marked the Italian frontier in Lower Lombardy.
Towards this last-named place marched this morning the eleventh division
of the Italians under the command of General Angioletti, only a month ago
Minister of the Marine in Lamarmora's Cabinet. Angioletti's division of
the second corps was, in the case of an attack, to be supported by the
fourth and eighth, which had crossed the Oglio at Gazzuolo four hours
before the eleventh had started from the place from which I am now
writing. Two other divisions also moved in an oblique line from the upper
course of the above-mentioned river, crossed it on a pontoon bridge, and
were directed to maintain their communications with Angioletti's on the
left, whilst the eighth and fourth would have formed its right. These
five divisions were the avant garde of the main body of the Italian army.
I am not in a position to tell you the exact line the army thus advancing
from the Oglio has followed, but I have been told that, in order to avoid
the possibility of repeating the errors which occurred in the action of
the 24th, the three corps d'armee have been directed to march in such a
manner as to enable them to present a compact mass should they meet the
enemy. Contrary to all expectations, Angioletti's division was allowed to
enter and occupy Castellucchio without firing a shot. As its vanguard
reached the hamlet of Ospedaletto it was informed that the Austrians had
left Castellucchio during the night, leaving a few hussars, who, in their
turn, retired on Mantua as soon as they saw the cavalry Angioletti had
sent to reconnoitre both the country and the borough of Castellucchio.

News has just arrived here that General Angioletti has been able to push
his outposts as far as Rivolta on his left, and still farther forward on
his front towards Curtalone. Although the distance from Rivolta to Goito
is only five miles, Angioletti, I have been told, could not ascertain
whether the Austrians had crossed the Mincio in force.

What part both Cialdini and Garibaldi will play in the great struggle
nobody can tell. It is certain, however, that these two popular leaders
will not be idle, and that a battle, if fought, will assume the
proportions of an almost unheard of slaughter.

GENERAL HEADQUARTERS OF THE ITALIAN ARMY, TORRE MALIMBERTI, July 7, 1866.

Whilst the Austrian emperor throws himself at the feet of the ruler of
France--I was almost going to write the arbiter of Europe--Italy and its
brave army seem to reject disdainfully the idea of getting Venetia as a
gift of a neutral power. There cannot be any doubt as to the feeling in
existence since the announcement of the Austrian proposal by the Moniteur
being one of astonishment, and even indignation so far as Italy herself
is concerned. One hears nothing but expressions of this kind in whatever
Italian town he may be, and the Italian army is naturally anxious that
she should not be said to relinquish her task when Austrians speak of
having beaten her, without proving that she can beat them too. There are
high considerations of honour which no soldier or general would ever
think of putting aside for humanitarian or political reasons, and with
these considerations the Italian army is fully in accord since the 24th
June. The way, too, in which the Kaiser chose to give up the
long-contested point, by ignoring Italy and recognising France as a party
to the Venetian question, created great indignation amongst the Italians,
whose papers declare, one and all, that a fresh insult has been offered
to the country. This is the state of public opinion here, and unless the
greatest advantages are obtained by a premature armistice and a hurried
treaty of peace, it is likely to continue the same, not to the entire
security of public order in Italy. As a matter of course, all eyes are
turned towards Villa Pallavicini, two miles from here, where the king is
to decide upon either accepting or rejecting the French emperor's advice,
both of which decisions are fraught with considerable difficulties and no
little danger. The king will have sought the advice of his ministers,
besides which that of Prussia will have been asked and probably given.
The matter may be decided one way or the other in a very short time, or
may linger on for days to give time for public anxiety and fears to be
allayed and to calm down. In the meantime, it looks as if the king and
his generals had made up their mind not to accept the gift. An attack on
the Borgoforte tete-de-pont on the right side of the Po, began on 5th at
half-past three in the morning, under the immediate direction of General
Cialdini. The attacking corps was the Duke of Mignano's. All the day
yesterday the gun was heard at Torre Malamberti, as it was also this
morning between ten and eleven o'clock. Borgoforte is a fortress on the
left side of the Po, throwing a bridge across this river, the right end
of which is headed by a strong tete-de-pont, the object of the present
attack. This work may be said to belong to the quadrilateral, as it is
only an advanced part of the fortress of Mantua, which, resting upon its
rear, is connected to Borgoforte by a military road supported on the
Mantua side by the Pietolo fortress. The distance between Mantua and
Borgoforte is only eleven kilometres. The fete-de-poet is thrown upon the
Po; its structure is of recent date, and it consists of a central part
and of two wings, called Rocchetta and Bocca di Ganda respectively. The
lock here existing is enclosed in the Rocchetta work.

Since I wrote you my last letter Garibaldi has been obliged to desist
from the idea of getting possession of Bagolino, Sant' Antonio, and Monte
Suello, after a fight which lasted four hours, seeing that he had to deal
with an entire Austrian brigade, supported by uhlans, sharp-shooters
(almost a battalion) and twelve pieces of artillery. These positions were
subsequently abandoned by the enemy, and occupied by Garibaldi's
volunteers. In this affair the general received a slight wound in his
left leg, the nature of which, however, is so very trifling, that a few
days will be enough to enable him to resume active duties. It seems that
the arms of the Austrians proved to be much superior to those of the
Garibaldians, whose guns did very bad service. The loss of the latter
amounted to about 100 killed and 200 wounded, figures in which the
officers appear in great proportion, owing to their having been always at
the head of their men, fighting, charging, and encouraging their comrades
throughout. Captain Adjutant-Major Battino, formerly of the regular army,
died, struck by three bullets, while rushing on the Austrians with the
first regiment. On abandoning the Caffaro line, which they had reoccupied
after the Lodrone encounter--in consequence of which the Garibaldians had
to fall back because of the concentration following the battle of
Custozza--the Austrians have retired to the Lardara fortress, between the
Stabolfes and Tenara mountains, covering the route to Tione and Trento,
in the Italian Tyrol. The third regiment of volunteers suffered most, as
two of their companies had to bear the brunt of the terrible Austrian
fire kept up from formidable positions. Another fight was taking place
almost at the same time in the Val Camonico, i.e., north of the Caffaro,
and of Rocca d'Anfo, Garibaldi's point d'appui. This encounter was
sustained in the same proportions, the Italians losing one of their
bravest and best officers in the person of Major Castellini, a Milanese,
commander of the second battalion of Lombardian bersaglieri. Although
these and Major Caldesi's battalion had to fall back from Vezza, a strong
position was taken near Edalo, while in the rear a regiment kept Breno
safe.

Although still at headquarters only two days ago, Baron Ricasoli has been
suddenly summoned by telegram from Florence, and, as I hear, has just
arrived. This is undoubtedly brought about by the new complications,
especially as, at a council of ministers presided over by the baron, a
vote, the nature of which is as yet unknown, was taken on the present
state of affairs. As you know very well in England, Italy has great
confidence in Ricasoli, whose conduct, always far from obsequious to the
French emperor, has pleased the nation. He is thought to be at this
moment the right man in the right place, and with the great acquaintance
he possesses of Italy and the Italians, and with the co-operation of such
an honest man as General Lamarmora, Italy may be pronounced safe, both
against friends and enemies.

From what I saw this morning, coming back from the front, I presume that
something, and that something new perhaps, will be attempted to-morrow.
So far, the proposed armistice has had no effect upon the dispositions at
general headquarters, and did not stay the cannon's voice. In the middle
of rumours, of hopes and fears, Italy's wish to push on with the war has
as yet been adhered to by her trusted leaders.




HEADQUARTERS OF THE FIRST ARMY CORPS,

PIADENA, July 8, 1866.

As I begin writing you, no doubt can be entertained that some movement is
not only in contemplation at headquarters, but is actually provided to
take place to-day, and that it will probably prove to be against the
Austrian positions at Borgoforte, on the left bank of the Po. Up to this
time the tete-de-pout on the right side of the river had only been
attacked by General the Duke of Mignano's guns. It would now, on the
contrary, be a matter of cutting the communications between Borgoforte
and Mantua, by occupying the lower part of the country around the latter
fortress, advancing upon the Valli Veronesi, and getting round the
quadrilateral into Venetia. While, then, waiting for further news to tell
us whether this plan has been carried into execution, and whether it will
be pursued, mindless of the existence of Mantua and Borgoforte on its
flanks, one great fact is already ascertained, that the armistice
proposed by the Emperor Napoleon has not been accepted, and that the war
is to be continued. The Austrians may shut themselves up in their
strongholds, or may even be so obliging as to leave the king the
uncontested possession of them by retreating in the same line as their
opponents advance; the pursuit, if not the struggle, the war, if not the
battle, will be carried on by the Italians. At Torre Malamberti, where
the general headquarters are, no end of general officers were to be seen
yesterday hurrying in all directions. I met the king, Generals Brignone,
Gavone, Valfre, and Menabrea within a few minutes of one another, and
Prince Amadeus, who has entirely recovered from his wound, had been
telegraphed for, and will arrive in Cremona to-day. No precise
information is to be obtained respecting the intentions of the Austrians,
but it is to be hoped for the Italian army, and for the credit of its
generals, that more will be known about them now than was known on the
eve of the famous 24th of June, and on its very morning. The heroism of
the Italians on that memorable day surpasses any possible idea that can
be formed, as it did also surpass all expectations of the country. Let me
relate you a few out of many heroic facts which only come to light when
an occasion is had of speaking with those who have been eyewitnesses of
them, as they are no object of magnified regimental--orders or, as yet,
of well-deserved honours. Italian soldiers seem to think that the army
only did its duty, and that, wherever Italians may fight, they will
always show equal valour and firmness. Captain Biraghi, of Milan,
belonging to the general staff, having in the midst of the battle
received an order from General Lamarmora for General Durando, was
proceeding with all possible speed towards the first army corps, which
was slowly retreating before the superior forces of the enemy and before
the greatly superior number of his guns, when, while under a perfect
shower of grape and canister, he was all of a sudden confronted by, an
Austrian officer of cavalry who had been lying in wait for the Italian
orderly. The Austrian fires his revolver at Biraghi; and wounds him in
the arm. Nothing daunted, Biraghi assails him and makes him turn tail;
then, following in pursuit, unsaddles him, but has his own horse shot
down under him. Biraghi disentangles himself, kills his antagonist, and
jumps upon the latter's horse. This, however, is thrown down also in a
moment by a cannon ball, so that the gallant captain has to go back on
foot, bleeding, and almost unable to walk. Talking of heroism, of
inimitable endurance, and strength of soul, what do you think of a man
who has his arm entirely carried away by a grenade, and yet keeps on his
horse, firm as a rock, and still directs his battery until
hemorrhage--and hemorrhage alone--strikes him down at last, dead! Such
was the case with a Neapolitan--Major Abate, of the artillery--and his
name is worth the glory of a whole army, of a whole war; and may only
find a fit companion in that of an officer of the eighteenth battalion of
bersaglieri, who, dashing at an Austrian flag-bearer, wrenches the
standard out of his hands with his left one, has it clean cut away by an
Austrian officer standing near, and immediately grapples it with his
right, until his own soldiers carry him away with his trophy! Does not
this sound like Greek history repeated--does it not look as if the brave
men of old had been born again, and the old facts renewed to tell of
Italian heroism? Another bersagliere--a Tuscan, by name Orlandi Matteo,
belonging to that heroic fifth battalion which fought against entire
brigades, regiments, and battalions, losing 11 out of its 16 officers,
and about 300 out of its 600 men--Orlandi, was wounded already, when,
perceiving an Austrian flag, he makes a great effort, dashes at the
officer, kills him, takes the flag, and, almost dying, gives it over to
his lieutenant. He is now in a ward of the San Domenico Hospital in
Brescia, and all who have learnt of his bravery will earnestly hope that
he may survive to be pointed out as one of the many who covered
themselves with fame on that day. If it is sad to read of death
encountered in the field by so many a patriotic and brave soldiers, it is
sadder still to learn that not a few of them were barbarously killed by
the enemy, and killed, too, when they were harmless, for they lay wounded
on the ground. The Sicilian colonel, Stalella, a son-in-law of Senator
Castagnetto, and a courageous man amongst the most courageous of men; was
struck in the leg by a bullet, and thrown down from his horse while
exciting his men to repulse the Austrians, which in great masses were
pressing on his thinned column. Although retreating, the regiment sent
some of his men to take him away, but as soon as he had been put on a
stretcher [he] had to be put down, as ten or twelve uhlans were galloping
down, obliging the men to hide themselves in a bush. When the uhlans got
near the colonel, and when they had seen him lying down in agony, they
all planted their lances in his body.

Is not this wanton cruelty--cruelty even unheard of cruelty that no
savage possesses? Still these are facts, and no one will ever dare to
deny them from Verona and Vienna, for they are known as much as it was
known and seen that the uhlans and many of the Austrian soldiers were
drunk when they began fighting, and that alighting from the trains they
were provided with their rations and with rum, and that they fought
without their haversacks. This is the truth, and nothing beyond it has to
the honour of the Italians been asserted, whether to the disgrace or
credit of their enemies; so that while denying that they ill-treat
Austrian prisoners, they are ready to state that theirs are well treated
in Verona, without thinking of slandering and calumniating as the Vienna
papers have done.

This morning Prince Amadeus arrived in Cremona, where a most spontaneous
and hearty reception was given him by the population and the National
Guard. He proceeded at once by the shortest way to the headquarters, so
that his wish to be again at the front when something should be done has
been accomplished. This brave young man, and his worthy brother, Prince
Humbert, have won the applause of all Italy, which is justly proud of
counting her king and her princes amongst the foremost in the field.

I have just learned from a most reliable source that the Austrians have
mined the bridge of Borghetto on the Mincio, so that, should it be blown
up, the only two, those of Goito and Borghetto, would be destroyed, and
the Italians obliged to make provisional ones instead. I also hear that
the Venetian towns are without any garrison, and that most probably all
the forces are massed on two lines, one from Peschiera to Custozza and
the other behind the Adige.

You will probably know by this time that the garrison of Vienna had on
the 3rd been directed to Prague. The news we receive from Prussia is on
the whole encouraging, inasmuch as the greatly feared armistice has been
repulsed by King William. Some people here think that France will not be
too hard upon Italy for keeping her word with her ally, and that the
brunt of French anger or disapproval will have to be borne by Prussia.
This is the least she can expect, as you know!

It is probable that by to-morrow I shall be able to write you more about
the Italo-Austrian war of 1866.

GONZAGA, July 9, 1866.

I write you from a villa, only a mile distant from Gonzaga, belonging to
the family of the Counts Arrivabene of Mantua. The owners have never
reentered it since 1848, and it is only the fortune of war which has
brought them to see their beautiful seat of the Aldegatta, never, it is
to be hoped for them, to be abandoned again. It is, as you see, 'Mutatum
ab illo.' Onward have gone, then, the exiled patriots! onward will go the
nation that owns them! The wish of every one who is compelled to remain
behind is that the army, that the volunteers, that the fleet, should all
cooperate, and that they should, one and all, land on Venetian ground, to
seek for a great battle, to give the army back the fame it deserves, and
to the country the honour it possesses. The king is called upon to
maintain the word nobly given to avenge Novara, and with it the new
Austrian insulting proposal. All, it is said, is ready. The army has been
said to be numerous; if to be numerous and brave, means to deserve
victory, let the Italian generals prove what Italian soldiers are worthy
of. If they will fight, the country will support them with the boldest of
resolutions--the country will accept a discussion whenever the
Government, having dispersed all fears, will proclaim that the war is to
be continued till victory is inscribed on Italy's shield.

As I am not far from Borgoforte, I am able to learn more than the mere
cannon's voice can tell me, and so will give you some details of the
action against the tete-de-pont, which began, as I told you in one of my
former letters, on the 4th. In Gorgoforte there were about 1500
Austrians, and, on the night from the 5th to the 6th, they kept up from
their four fortified works a sufficiently well-sustained fire, the object
of which was to prevent the enemy from posting his guns. This fire,
however, did not cause any damage, and the Italians were able to plant
their batteries. Early on the 6th, the firing began all along the line,
the Italian 16-pounders having been the first to open fire. The Italian
right was commanded by Colonel Mattei, the left by Colonel Bangoni, who
did excellent work, while the other wing was not so successful. The
heaviest guns had not yet arrived owing to one of those incidents always
sure to happen when least expected, so that the 40-pounders could not be
brought to bear against the forts until later in the day. The damage done
to the works was not great for the moment, but still the advantage had
been gained of feeling the strength of the enemy's positions and finding
the right way to attack them. The artillerymen worked with great vigour,
and were only obliged to desist by an unexpected order which arrived
about two p.m. from General Cialdini. The attack was, however, resumed on
the following day, and the condition of the Monteggiana and Rochetta
forts may be pronounced precarious. As a sign of the times, and more
especially of the just impatience which prevails in Italy about the
general direction of the army movements, it may not be without importance
to notice that the Italian press has begun to cry out against the
darkness in which everything is enveloped, while the time already passed
since the 24th June tells plainly of inaction. It is remarked that the
bitter gift made by Austria of the Venetian provinces, and the suspicious
offer of mediation by France, ought to have found Italy in greatly
different condition, both as regards her political and military position.
Italy is, on the contrary, in exactly the same state as when the Archduke
Albert telegraphed to Vienna that a great success had been obtained over
the Italian army. These are facts, and, however strong and worthy of
respect may be the reasons, there is no doubt that an extraordinary delay
in the resumption of hostilities has occurred, and that at the present
moment operations projected are perfectly mysterious. Something is let
out from time to time which only serves to make the subsequent absence of
news more and more puzzling. For the present the first official relation
of the unhappy fight of the 24th June is published, and is accordingly
anxiously scanned and closely studied. It is a matter of general remark
that no great military knowledge is required to perceive that too great a
reliance was placed upon supposed facts, and that the indulgence of
speculations and ideas caused the waste of so much precious blood. The
prudence characterising the subsequent moves of the Austrians may have
been caused by the effects of their opponents' arrangements, but the
Italian commanders ought to have avoided the responsibility of giving the
enemy the option to move.

It is clear that to mend things the utterance of generous and patriotic
cries is not sufficient, and that it must be shown that the vigour of the
body is not at all surpassed by the vigour of the mind. It is also clear
that many lives might have been spared if there had been greater proofs
of intelligence on the part of those who directed the movement.

The situation is still very serious. Such an armistice as General von
Gablenz could humiliate himself enough to ask from the Prussians has been
refused, but another which the Emperor of the French has advised them to
accept might ultimately become a fact. For Italy, the purely Venetian
question could then also be settled, while the Italian, the national
question, the question of right and honour which the army prizes so much,
would still remain to be solved.

GONZAGA, July 12, 1866.

Travelling is generally said to be troublesome, but travelling with and
through brigades, divisions, and army corps, I can certify to be more so
than is usually agreeable. It is not that Italian officers or Italian
soldiers are in any way disposed to throw obstacles in your way; but
they, unhappily for you, have with them the inevitable cars with the
inevitable carmen, both of which are enough to make your blood freeze,
though the barometer stands very high. What with their indolence, what
with their number and the dust they made, I really thought they would
drive me mad before I should reach Casalmaggiore on my way from Torre
Malamberti. I started from the former place at three a.m., with beautiful
weather, which, true to tradition, accompanied me all through my journey.
Passing through San Giovanni in Croce, to which the headquarters of
General Pianell had been transferred, I turned to the right in the
direction of the Po, and began to have an idea of the wearisome sort of
journey which I would have to make up to Casalmaggiore. On both sides of
the way some regiments belonging to the rear division were still camped,
and as I passed it was most interesting to see how busy they were cooking
their 'rancio,' polishing their arms, and making the best of their time.
The officers stood leisurely about gazing and staring at me, supposing,
as I thought, that I was travelling with some part in the destiny of
their country. Here and there some soldiers who had just left the
hospitals of Brescia and Milan made their way to their corps and shook
hands with their comrades, from whom only illness or the fortune of war
had made them part. They seemed glad to see their old tent, their old
drum, their old colour-sergeant, and also the flag they had carried to
the battle and had not at any price allowed to be taken. I may state
here, en passant, that as many as six flags were taken from the enemy in
the first part of the day of Custozza, and were subsequently abandoned in
the retreat, while of the Italians only one was lost to a regiment for a
few minutes, when it was quickly retaken. This fact ought to be
sufficient by itself to establish the bravery with which the soldiers
fought on the 24th, and the bravery with which they will fight if, as
they ardently wish; a new occasion is given to them.

As long as I had only met troops, either marching or camping on the road,
all went well, but I soon found myself mixed with an interminable line of
cars and the like, forming the military and the civil train of the moving
army. Then it was that it needed as much patience to keep from jumping
out of one's carriage and from chastising the carrettieri, as they would
persist in not making room for one, and being as dumb to one's entreaties
as a stone. When you had finished with one you had to deal with another,
and you find them all as obstinate and as egotistical as they are from
one end of the world to the other, whether it be on the Casalmaggiore
road or in High Holborn. From time to time things seemed to proceed all
right, and you thought yourself free from further trouble, but you soon
found out your mistake, as an enormous ammunition car went smack into
your path, as one wheel got entangled with another, and as imperturbable
Signor Carrettiere evidently took delight at a fresh opportunity for
stoppage, inaction, indolence, and sleep. I soon came to the conclusion
that Italy would not be free when the Austrians had been driven away, for
that another and a more formidable foe--an enemy to society and comfort,
to men and horses, to mankind in general would have still to be beaten,
expelled, annihilated, in the shape of the carrettiere. If you employ
him, he robs you fifty times over; if you want him to drive quickly, he
is sure to keep the animal from going at all; if, worse than all, you
never think of him, or have just been plundered by him, he will not move
an inch to oblige you. Surely the cholera is not the only pestilence a
country may be visited with; and, should Cialdini ever go to Vienna, he
might revenge Novara and the Spielberg by taking with him the carrettieri
of the whole army.

At last Casalmaggiore hove in sight, and, when good fortune and the
carmen permitted, I reached it. It was time! No iron-plated Jacob could
ever have resisted another two miles' journey in such company. At
Casalmaggiore I branched off. There were, happily, two roads, and not the
slightest reason or smallest argument were needed to make me choose that
which my cauchemar had not chosen. They were passing the river at
Casalmaggiore. I went, of course, for the same purpose, somewhere else.
Any place was good enough--so I thought, at least, then. New adventures,
new miseries awaited me--some carrettiere, or other, guessing that I was
no friend of his, nor of the whole set of them, had thrown the jattatura
on me.

I alighted at the Colombina, after four hours' ride, to give the horses
time to rest a little. The Albergo della Colombina was a great
disappointment, for there was nothing there that could be eaten. I
decided upon waiting most patiently, but most unlike a few cavalry
officers, who, all covered with dust, and evidently as hungry and as
thirsty as they could be, began to swear to their hearts' content. In an
hour some eggs and some salame, a kind of sausage, were brought up, and
quickly disposed of. A young lieutenant of the thirtieth infantry
regiment of the Pisa brigade took his place opposite, and we were soon
engaged in conversation. He had been in the midst and worst part of the
battle of Custozza, and had escaped being taken prisoner by what seemed a
miracle. He told me how, when his regiment advanced on the Monte Croce
position, which he practically described to me as having the form of an
English pudding, they were fired upon by batteries both on their flanks
and front. The lieutenant added, however, rather contemptuously, that
they did not even bow before them, as the custom appears to be--that is,
to lie down, as the Austrians were firing very badly. The cross-fire got,
however, so tremendous that an order had to be given to keep down by the
road to avoid being annihilated. The assault was given, the whole range
of positions was taken, and kept too for hours, until the infallible rule
of three to one, backed by batteries, grape, and canister, compelled them
to retreat, which they did slowly and in order. It was then that their
brigade commander, Major General Rey de Villarey, who, though a native of
Mentone, had preferred remaining with his king from going over to the
French after the cession, turning to his son, who was also his
aide-de-camp, said in his dialect, 'Now, my son, we must die both of us,'
and with a touch of the spurs was soon in front of the line and on the
hill, where three bullets struck him almost at once dead. The horse of
his son falling while following, his life was spared. My lieutenant at
this moment was so overcome with hunger and fatigue that he fell down,
and was thought to be dead. He was not so, however, and had enough life
to hear, after the fight was over, the Austrian Jagers pass by, and again
retire to their original positions, where their infantry was lying down,
not dreaming for one moment of pursuing the Italians. Four of his
soldiers--all Neapolitans he heard coming in search of him, while the
bullets still hissed all round; and, as soon as he made a sign to them,
they approached, and took him on their shoulders back to where was what
remained of the regiment. It is highly creditable to Italian unity to
hear an old Piedmontese officer praise the levies of the new provinces,
and the lieutenant took delight in relating that another Neapolitan was
in the fight standing by him, and firing as fast as he could, when a
shell having burst near him, he disdainfully gave it a look, and did not
even seek to save himself from the jattatura.

The gallant lieutenant had unfortunately to leave at last, and I was
deprived of many an interesting tale and of a brave man's company. I
started, therefore, for Viadana, where I purposed passing the Po, the
left bank of which the road was now following parallel with the stream.
At Viadana, however, I found no bridge, as the military had demolished
what existed only the day before, and so had to look out for in
formation. As I was going about under the porticoes which one meets in
almost all the villages in this neighbourhood, I was struck by the sight
of an ancient and beautiful piece of art--for so it was--a Venetian
mirror of Murano. It hung on the wall inside the village draper's shop,
and was readily shown me by the owner, who did not conceal the pride he
had in possessing it. It was one of those mirrors one rarely meets with
now, which were once so abundant in the old princes' castles and palaces.
It looked so deep and true, and the gilt frame was so light, and of such
a purity and elegance, that it needed all my resolution to keep from
buying it, though a bargain would not have been effected very easily. The
mirror, however, had to be abandoned, as Dosalo, the nearest point for
crossing the Po, was still seven miles distant. By this time the sun was
out in all its force, and the heat was by no means agreeable. Then there
was dust, too, as if the carrettieri had been passing in hundreds, so
that the heat was almost unbearable. At last the Dosalo ferry was
reached, the road leading to it was entered, and the carriage was, I
thought, to be at once embarked, when a drove of oxen were discovered to
have the precedence; and so I had to wait. This under such a sun, on a
shadeless beach, and with the prospect of having to stay there for two
hours at least, was by no means pleasant. It took three-quarters of an
hour to put the oxen in the boat, it took half an hour to get them on the
other shore, and another hour to have the ferry boat back. The panorama
from the beach was splendid, the Po appeared in all the mighty power of
his waters, and as you looked with the glass at oxen and trees on the
other shore, they appeared to be clothed in all the colours of the
rainbow, and as if belonging to another world. Several peasants were
waiting for the boat near me, talking about the war and the Austrians,
and swearing they would, if possible, annihilate some of the latter. I
gave them the glass to look with, and I imagined that they had never seen
one before, for they thought it highly wonderful to make out what the
time was at the Luzzara Tower, three miles in a straight line on the
other side. The revolver, too, was a subject of great admiration, and
they kept turning, feeling, and staring at it, as if they could not make
out which way the cartridges were put in. One of these peasants, however,
was doing the grand with the others, and once on the subject of history
related to all who would hear how he had been to St. Helena, which was
right in the middle of Moscow, where it was so very cold that his nose
had got to be as large as his head. The poor man was evidently mixing one
night's tale with that of the next one, a tale probably heard from the
old Sindaco, who is at the same time the schoolmaster, the notary, and
the highest municipal authority in the place.

I started in the ferry boat with them at last. While crossing they got to
speak of the priests, and were all agreed, to put it in the mildest way,
in thinking extremely little of them, and only differed as to what
punishment they should like them to suffer.

On the side where we landed lay heaps of ammunition casks for the corps
besieging Borgoforte. Others were conveyed upon cars by my friends the
carrettieri, of whom it was decreed I should not be quit for some time to
come. Entering Guastalla I found only a few artillery officers, evidently
in charge of what we had seen carried along the route. Guastalla is a
neat little town very proud of its statue of Duke Ferrante Gonzaga, and
the Croce Rossa is a neat little inn, which may be proud of a smart young
waiter, who actually discovered that, as I wanted to proceed to Luzzara,
a few miles on, I had better stop till next morning, I did not take his
advice, and was soon under the gate of Luzzara, a very neat little place,
once one of the many possessions where the Gonzagas had a court, a
palace, and a castle. The arms over the archway may still be seen, and
would not be worth any notice but for a remarkable work of terracotta
representing a crown of pines and pine leaves in a wonderful state of
preservation. The whole is so artistically arranged and so natural, that
one might believe it to be one of Luca della Robbia's works. Luzzara has
also a great tower, which I had seen in the distance from Dosalo, and the
only albergo in the place gives you an excellent Italian dinner. The wine
might please one of the greatest admirers of sherry, and if you are not
given feather beds, the beds are at least clean like the rooms
themselves. Here, as it was getting too dark, I decided upon stopping, a
decision which gave me occasion to see one of the finest sunsets I ever
saw. As I looked from the albergo I could see a gradation of colours,
from the purple red to the deepest of sea blue, rising like an immense
tent from the dark green of the trees and the fields, here and there
dotted with little white houses, with their red roofs, while in front the
Luzzara Tower rose majestically in the twilight. As the hour got later
the colours deepened, and the lower end of the immense curtain gradually
disappeared, while the stars and the planets began shining high above. A
peasant was singing in a field near by, and the bells of a church were
chiming in the distance. Both seemed to harmonise wonderfully. It was a
scene of great loveliness.

At four a.m. I was up, and soon after on the road to Reggiolo, and then
to Gonzaga. Here the vegetation gets to be more luxuriant, and every inch
of ground contributes to the immense vastness of the whole. Nature is
here in full perfection, and as even the telegraphic wire hangs leisurely
down from tree to tree, instead of being stuck upon poles, you feel that
the romantic aspect of the place is too beautiful to be encroached upon.
All is peace, beauty, and happiness, all reveals to you that you are in
Italy.

In Gonzaga, which only a few days ago belonged to the Austrians, the
Italian tricolour is out of every window. As the former masters retired
the new advanced; and when a detachment of Monferrato lancers entered the
old castle town the joy of the inhabitants seemed to be almost bordering
on delirium. The lancers soon left, however. The flag only remains.

July 11.

Cialdini began passing the Po on the 8th, and crossed at three points,
i.e., Carbonara, Carbonarola, and Follonica. Beginning at three o'clock
in the morning, he had finished crossing upon the two first pontoon
bridges towards midnight on the 9th. The bridge thrown up at Follonica
was still intact up to seven in the morning on the 10th, but the troops
and the military and the civil train that remained followed the Po
without crossing to Stellata, in the supposed direction of Ponte
Lagoscura.

Yesterday guns were heard here at seven o'clock in the morning, and up to
eleven o'clock, in the direction of Legnano, towards, I think, the Adige.
The firing was lively, and of such a nature as to make one surmise that
battle had been given. Perhaps the Austrians have awaited Cialdini under
Legnano, or they have disputed the crossing of the Adige. Rovigo was
abandoned by the Austrians in the night of the 9th and 10th. They have
blown up the Rovigo and Boara fortresses, have destroyed the tete-de-pont
on the Adige, and burnt all bridges. They may now seek to keep by the
left side of this river up to Legnano, so as to get under the protection
of the quadrilateral, in which case, if Cialdini can cross the river in
time, the shock would be almost inevitable, and would be a reason for
yesterday's firing. They may also go by rail to Padua, when they would
have Cialdini between them and the quadrilateral. In any case, if this
general is quick, or if they are not too quick for him, according to
possible instructions, a collision is difficult to be avoided.

Baron Ricasoli has left Florence for the camp, and all sorts of rumours
are afloat as to the present state of negotiations as they appear
unmistakably to exist. The opinions are, I think, divided in the high
councils of the Crown, and the country is still anxious to know the
result of this state of affairs. A splendid victory by Cialdini might at
this moment solve many a difficulty. As it is, the war is prosecuted
everywhere except by sea, for Garibaldi's forces are slowly advancing in
the Italian Tyrol, while the Austrians wait for them behind the walls of
Landaro and Ampola. The Garibaldians' advanced posts were, by the latest
news, near Darso.

The news from Prussia is still contradictory; while the Italian press is
unanimous in asking with the country that Cialdini should advance, meet
the enemy, fight him, and rout him if possible. Italy's wishes are
entirely with him.

NOALE, NEAR TREVISO, July 17, 1866.

From Lusia I followed General Medici's division to Motta, where I left
it, not without regret, however, as better companions could not easily be
found, so kind were the officers and jovial the men. They are now
encamped around Padua, and will to-morrow march on Treviso, where the
Italian Light Horse have already arrived, if I judge so from their having
left Noale on the 15th. From the right I hear that the advanced posts
have proceeded as far as Mira on the Brenta, twenty kilometres from
Venice itself, and that the first army corps is to concentrate opposite
Chioggia. This corps has marched from Ferrara straight on to Rovigo,
which the forward movement of the fourth, or Cialdini's corps d'armee,
had left empty of soldiers. General Pianell has still charge of it, and
Major-General Cadalini, formerly at the head of the Siena brigade,
replaces him in the command of his former division. General Pianell has
under him the gallant Prince Amadeus, who has entirely recovered from his
chest wound, and of whom the brigade of Lombardian grenadiers is as proud
as ever. They could not wish for a more skilled commander, a better
superior officer, and a more valiant soldier. Thus the troops who fought
on the 24th June are kept in the second line, while the still fresh
divisions under Cialdini march first, as fast as they can. This, however,
is of no avail. The Italian outposts on the Piave have not yet crossed
it, for the reason that they must keep distances with their regiments,
but will do so as soon as these get nearer to the river. If it was not
that this is always done in regular warfare, they could beat the country
beyond the Piave for a good many miles without even seeing the shadow of
an Austrian. To the simple private, who does not know of diplomatic
imbroglios and of political considerations, this sudden retreat means an
almost as sudden retracing of steps, because he remembers that this
manoeuvre preceded both the attacks on Solferino and on Custozza by the
Austrians. To the officer, however, it means nothing else than a fixed
desire not to face the Italian army any more, and so it is to him a
source of disappointment and despondency. He cannot bear to think that
another battle is improbable, and may be excused if he is not in the best
of humour when on this subject. This is the case not only with the
officers but with the volunteers, who have left their homes and the
comfort of their domestic life, not to be paraded at reviews, but to be
sent against the enemy. There are hundreds of these in the regular
army-in the cavalry especially, and the Aosta Lancers and the regiment of
Guides are half composed of them. If you listen to them, there ought not
to be the slightest doubt or hesitation as to crossing the Isongo and
marching upon Vienna. May Heaven see their wishes accomplished, for,
unless crushed by sheer force, Italy is quite decided to carry war into
the enemy's country.

The decisions of the French government are looked for here with great
anxiety, and not a few men are found who predict them to be unfavourable
to Italy. Still, it is hard for every one to believe that the French
emperor will carry things to extremities, and increase the many
difficulties Europe has already to contend with.

To-day there was a rumour at the mess table that the Austrians had
abandoned Legnano, one of the four fortresses of the quadrilateral. I do
not put much faith in it at present, but it is not improbable, as we may
expect many strange things from the Vienna government. It would have been
much better for them, since Archduke Albert spoke in eulogistic terms of
the king, of his sons, and of his soldiers, while relating the action of
the 24th, to have treated with Italy direct, thus securing peace, and
perhaps friendship, from her. But the men who have ruled so despotically
for years over Italian subjects cannot reconcile themselves to the idea
that Italy has at last risen to be a nation, and they even take slyly an
opportunity to throw new insult into her face. You can easily see that
the old spirit is still struggling for empire; that the old contempt is
still trying to make light of Italians; and that the old Metternich ideas
are still fondly clung to. Does not this deserve another lesson? Does not
this need another Sadowa to quiet down for ever? Yes; and it devolves
upon Italy to do it. If so, let only Cialdini's army alone, and the day
may be nigh at hand when the king may tell the country that the task has
been accomplished.

A talk on the present state of political affairs, and on the peculiar
position of Italy, is the only subject worth notice in a letter from the
camp. Everything else is at a standstill, and the movements of the fine
army Cialdini now disposes of, about 150,000 men, are no longer full of
interest. They may, perhaps, have some as regards an attack on Venice,
because Austrian soldiers are still garrisoning it, and will be obliged
to fight if they are assailed. It is hoped, if such is the case, that the
beautiful queen of the Adriatic will be spared a scene of devastation,
and that no new Haynau will be found to renew the deeds of Brescia and
Vicenza.

The king has not yet arrived, and it seems probable he will not come for
some time, until indeed the day comes for Italian troops to make their
triumphal entry into the city of the Doges.

The heat continues intense, and this explains the slowness in advancing.
As yet no sickness has appeared, and it must be hoped that the troops
will be healthy, as sickness tries the morale much more than half-a-dozen
Custozzas.

P.S.--I had finished writing when an officer came rushing into the inn
where I am staying and told me that he had just heard that an Italian
patrol had met an Austrian one on the road out of the village, and routed
it. This may or may not be true, but it was must curious to see how
delighted every one was at the idea that they had found 'them' at last.
They did not care much about the result of the engagement, which, as I
said, was reported to have been favourable. All that they cared about was
that they were close to the enemy. One cannot despair of an army which is
animated with such spirits. You would think, from the joy which brightens
the face of the soldiers you meet now about, that a victory had been
announced for the Italian arms.

DOLO, NEAR VENICE, July 20, 1866.

I returned from Noale to Padua last evening, and late in the night I
received the intimation at my quarters that cannon was heard in the
direction of Venice. It was then black as in Dante's hell, and raining
and blowing with violence--one of those Italian storms which seem to
awake all the earthly and heavenly elements of creation. There was no
choice for it but to take to the saddle, and try to make for the front.
No one who has not tried it can fancy what work it is to find one's way
along a road on which a whole corps d'amee is marching with an enormous
materiel of war in a pitch dark night. This, however, is what your
special correspondent was obliged to do. Fortunately enough, I had
scarcely proceeded as far as Ponte di Brenta when I fell in with an
officer of Cialdini's staff, who was bound to the same destination,
namely, Dolo. As we proceeded along the road under a continuous shower of
rain, our eyes now and then dazzled by the bright serpent-like flashes of
the lightning, we fell in with some battalion or squadron, which advanced
carefully, as it was impossible for them as well as for us to
discriminate between the road and the ditches which flank it, for all the
landmarks, so familiar to our guides in the daytime, were in one dead
level of blackness. So it was that my companion and myself, after
stumbling into ditches and out of them, after knocking our horses' heads
against an ammunition car, or a party of soldiers sheltered under some
big tree, found ourselves, after three hours' ride, in this village of
Dolo. By this time the storm had greatly abated in its violence, and the
thunder was but faintly heard now and then at such a distance as to
enable us distinctly to hear the roar of the guns. Our horses could
scarcely get through the sticky black mud, into which the white
suffocating dust of the previous days had been turned by one night's
rain. We, however, made our way to the parsonage of the village, for we
had already made up our minds to ascend the steeple of the church to get
a view of the surrounding country and a better hearing of the guns if
possible. After a few words exchanged with the sexton--a staunch Italian,
as he told us he was--we went up the ladder of the church spire. Once on
the wooden platform, we could hear more distinctly the boom of the guns,
which sounded like the broadsides of a big vessel. Were they the guns of
Persano's long inactive fleet attacking some of Brondolo's or Chioggia's
advanced forts? Were the guns those of some Austrian man-of-war which had
engaged an Italian ironclad; or were they the 'Affondatore,' which left
the Thames only a month ago, pitching into Trieste? To tell the truth,
although we patiently waited two long hours on Dolo church spire, when
both I and my companion descended we were not in a position to solve
either of these problems. We, however, thought then, and still think,
they were the guns of the Italian fleet which had attacked an Austrian
fort.

CIVITA VECCHIA, July 22, 1866.

Since the departure from this port of the old hospital ship 'Gregeois'
about a year ago, no French ship of war had been stationed at Civita
Vecchia; but on Wednesday morning the steam-sloop 'Catinat,' 180 men,
cast anchor in the harbour, and the commandant immediately on
disembarking took the train for Rome and placed himself in communication
with the French ambassador. I am not aware whether the Pontifical
government had applied for this vessel, or whether the sending it was a
spontaneous attention on the part of the French emperor, but, at any
rate, its arrival has proved a source of pleasure to His Holiness, as
there is no knowing what may happen In troublous times like the present,
and it is always good to have a retreat insured.

Yesterday it was notified in this port, as well as at Naples, that
arrivals from Marseilles would be, until further notice, subjected to a
quarantine of fifteen days in consequence of cholera having made its
appearance at the latter place. A sailing vessel which arrived from
Marseilles in the course of the day had to disembark the merchandise it
brought for Civita Vecchia into barges off the lazaretto, where the
yellow flag was hoisted over them. This vessel left Marseilles five days
before the announcement of the quarantine, while the 'Prince Napoleon' of
Valery's Company, passenger and merchandise steamer, which left
Marseilles only one day before its announcement, was admitted this
morning to free pratique. Few travellers will come here by sea now.

MARSEILLES, July 24.

Accustomed as we have been of late in Italy to almost hourly bulletins of
the progress of hostilities, it is a trying condition to be suddenly
debarred of all intelligence by finding oneself on board a steamer for
thirty-six hours without touching at any port, as was my case in coming
here from Civita Vecchia on board the 'Prince Napoleon.' But, although
telegrams were wanting, discussions on the course of events were rife on
board among the passengers who had embarked at Naples and Civita Vecchia,
comprising a strong batch of French and Belgian priests returning from a
pilgrimage to Rome, well supplied with rosaries and chaplets blessed by
the Pope and facsimiles of the chains of St. Peter. Not much sympathy for
the Italian cause was shown by these gentlemen or the few French and
German travellers who, with three or four Neapolitans, formed the
quarterdeck society; and our Corsican captain took no pains to hide his
contempt at the dilatory proceedings of the Italian fleet at Ancona. We
know that the Prussian minister, M. d'Usedom, has been recently making
strenuous remonstrances at Ferrara against the slowness with which the
Italian naval and military forces were proceeding, while their allies,
the Prussians, were already near the gates of Vienna; and the
conversation of a Prussian gentleman on board our steamer, who was
connected with that embassy, plainly indicated the disappointment felt at
Berlin at the rather inefficacious nature of the diversion made in
Venetia, and on the coast of Istria by the army and navy of Victor
Emmanuel. He even attributed to his minister an expression not very
flattering either to the future prospects of Italy as resulting from her
alliance with Prussia, or to the fidelity of the latter in carrying out
the terms of it. I do not know whether this gentleman intended his
anecdote to be taken cum grano salis, but I certainly understood him to
say that he had deplored to the minister the want of vigour and the
absence of success accompanying the operations of the Italian allies of
Prussia, when His Excellency replied: 'C'est bien vrai. Ils nous ont
tromps; mais que voulez-vous y faire maintenant? Nous aurons le temps de
les faire egorger apres.'

It is difficult to suppose that there should exist a preconceived
intention on the part of Prussia to repay the sacrifices hitherto made,
although without a very brilliant accompaniment of success, by the
Italian government in support of the alliance, by making her own separate
terms with Austria and leaving Italy subsequently exposed to the
vengeance of the latter, but such would certainly be the inference to be
drawn from the conversation just quoted.

It was only on arriving in the port of Marseilles, however, that the full
enmity of most of my travelling companions towards Italy and the Italians
was manifested. A sailor, the first man who came on board before we
disembarked, was immediately pounced upon for news, and he gave it as
indeed nothing less than the destruction, more or less complete, of the
Italian fleet by that of the Austrians. At this astounding intelligence
the Prussian burst into a yell of indignation. 'Fools! blockheads!
miserables! Beaten at sea by an inferior force! Is that the way they mean
to reconquer Venice by dint of arms? If ever they do regain Venetia it
will be through the blood of our Brandenburghers and Pomeranians, and not
their own.' During this tirade a little old Belgian in black, with the
chain of St. Peter at his buttonhole by way of watchguard, capered off to
communicate the grateful news to a group of his ecclesiastical
fellow-travellers, shrieking out in ecstasy:

'Rosses, Messieurs! Ces blagueurs d'Italiens ont ete rosses par mer,
comme ils avaient ete rosses par terre.' Whereupon the reverend gentlemen
congratulated each other with nods, and winks, and smiles, and sundry
fervent squeezes of the hand. The same demonstrations would doubtless
have been made by the Neapolitan passengers had they belonged to the
Bourbonic faction, but they happened to be honest traders with cases of
coral and lava for the Paris market, and therefore they merely stood
silent and aghast at the fatal news, with their eyes and mouths as wide
open as possible. I had no sooner got to my hotel than I inquired for the
latest Paris journal, when the France was handed me, and I obtained
confirmation in a certain degree of the disaster to the Italian fleet
narrated by the sailor, although not quite in the same formidable
proportions.

Before quitting the subject of my fellow-passengers on board the 'Prince
Napoleon' I must mention an anecdote related to me, respecting the state
of brigandage, by a Russian or German gentleman, who told me he was
established at Naples. He was complaining of the dangers he had
occasionally encountered in crossing in a diligence from Naples to Foggia
on business; and then, speaking of the audacity of brigands in general,
he told me that last year he saw with his own eyes; in broad daylight,
two brigands walking about the streets of Naples with messages from
captured individuals to their relations, mentioning the sums which had
been demanded for their ransoms. They were unarmed, and in the common
peasants' dresses, and whenever they arrived at one of the houses to
which they were addressed for this purpose, they stopped and opened a
handkerchief which one of them carried in his hand, and took out an ear,
examining whether the ticket on it corresponded with the address of the
house or the name of the resident. There were six ears, all ticketed with
the names of the original owners in the handkerchief, which were
gradually dispensed to their families in Naples to stimulate: prompt
payment of the required ransoms. On my inquiring how it was that the
police took no notice of such barefaced operations, my informant told me
that, previous to the arrival of these brigand emissaries in town, the
chief always wrote to the police authorities warning them against
interfering with them, as the messengers were always followed by spies in
plain clothes belonging to the band who would immediately report any
molestation they might encounter in the discharge of their delicate
mission, and the infallible result of such molestation would be first the
putting to death of all the hostages held for ransom; and next, the
summary execution of several members of gendarmery and police force
captured in various skirmishes by the brigands, and held as prisoners of
war.

Such audacity would seem incredible if we had not heard and read of so
many similar instances of late.

     ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

     A very doubtful benefit
     Americans forgivingly remember, without mentioning
     As becomes them, they do not look ahead
     Charges of cynicism are common against all satirists
     Fourth of the Georges
     Here and there a plain good soul to whom he was affectionate
     Holy images, and other miraculous objects are sold
     It is well to learn manners without having them imposed on us
     Men overweeningly in love with their creations
     Must be the moralist in the satirist if satire is to strike
     Not a page of his books reveals malevolence or a sneer
     Petty concessions are signs of weakness to the unsatisfied
     Statesman who stooped to conquer fact through fiction
     The social world he looked at did not show him heroes
     The exhaustion ensuing we named tranquillity
     Utterance of generous and patriotic cries is not sufficient
     We trust them or we crush them
     We grew accustomed to periods of Irish fever




ON THE IDEA OF COMEDY AND OF THE USES OF THE COMIC SPIRIT {1}

[This etext was prepared from the 1897 Archibald Constable and Company
edition by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk]

Good Comedies are such rare productions, that notwithstanding the wealth
of our literature in the Comic element, it would not occupy us long to
run over the English list. If they are brought to the test I shall
propose, very reputable Comedies will be found unworthy of their station,
like the ladies of Arthur's Court when they were reduced to the ordeal of
the mantle.

There are plain reasons why the Comic poet is not a frequent apparition;
and why the great Comic poet remains without a fellow. A society of
cultivated men and women is required, wherein ideas are current and the
perceptions quick, that he may be supplied with matter and an audience.
The semi-barbarism of merely giddy communities, and feverish emotional
periods, repel him; and also a state of marked social inequality of the
sexes; nor can he whose business is to address the mind be understood
where there is not a moderate degree of intellectual activity.

Moreover, to touch and kindle the mind through laughter, demands more
than sprightliness, a most subtle delicacy. That must be a natal gift in
the Comic poet. The substance he deals with will show him a startling
exhibition of the dyer's hand, if he is without it. People are ready to
surrender themselves to witty thumps on the back, breast, and sides; all
except the head: and it is there that he aims. He must be subtle to
penetrate. A corresponding acuteness must exist to welcome him. The
necessity for the two conditions will explain how it is that we count him
during centuries in the singular number.

'C'est une etrange entreprise que celle de faire rire les honnetes gens,'
Moliere says; and the difficulty of the undertaking cannot be
over-estimated.

Then again, he is beset with foes to right and left, of a character
unknown to the tragic and the lyric poet, or even to philosophers.

We have in this world men whom Rabelais would call agelasts; that is to
say, non-laughers; men who are in that respect as dead bodies, which if
you prick them do not bleed. The old grey boulder-stone that has finished
its peregrination from the rock to the valley, is as easily to be set
rolling up again as these men laughing. No collision of circumstances in
our mortal career strikes a light for them. It is but one step from being
agelastic to misogelastic, and the [Greek text which cannot be
reproduced], the laughter-hating, soon learns to dignify his dislike as
an objection in morality.

We have another class of men, who are pleased to consider themselves
antagonists of the foregoing, and whom we may term hypergelasts; the
excessive laughers, ever-laughing, who are as clappers of a bell, that
may be rung by a breeze, a grimace; who are so loosely put together that
a wink will shake them.

'. . . C'est n'estimer rien qu'estioner tout le monde,'

and to laugh at everything is to have no appreciation of the Comic of
Comedy.

Neither of these distinct divisions of non-laughers and over-laughers
would be entertained by reading The Rape of the Lock, or seeing a
performance of Le Tartuffe. In relation to the stage, they have taken in
our land the form and title of Puritan and Bacchanalian. For though the
stage is no longer a public offender, and Shakespeare has been revived on
it, to give it nobility, we have not yet entirely raised it above the
contention of these two parties. Our speaking on the theme of Comedy will
appear almost a libertine proceeding to one, while the other will think
that the speaking of it seriously brings us into violent contrast with
the subject.

Comedy, we have to admit, was never one of the most honoured of the
Muses. She was in her origin, short of slaughter, the loudest expression
of the little civilization of men. The light of Athene over the head of
Achilles illuminates the birth of Greek Tragedy. But Comedy rolled in
shouting under the divine protection of the Son of the Wine-jar, as
Dionysus is made to proclaim himself by Aristophanes. Our second Charles
was the patron, of like benignity, of our Comedy of Manners, which began
similarly as a combative performance, under a licence to deride and
outrage the Puritan, and was here and there Bacchanalian beyond the
Aristophanic example: worse, inasmuch as a cynical licentiousness is more
abominable than frank filth. An eminent Frenchman judges from the quality
of some of the stuff dredged up for the laughter of men and women who sat
through an Athenian Comic play, that they could have had small delicacy
in other affairs when they had so little in their choice of
entertainment. Perhaps he does not make sufficient allowance for the
regulated licence of plain speaking proper to the festival of the god,
and claimed by the Comic poet as his inalienable right, or for the fact
that it was a festival in a season of licence, in a city accustomed to
give ear to the boldest utterance of both sides of a case. However that
may be, there can be no question that the men and women who sat through
the acting of Wycherley's Country Wife were past blushing. Our tenacity
of national impressions has caused the word theatre since then to prod
the Puritan nervous system like a satanic instrument; just as one has
known Anti-Papists, for whom Smithfield was redolent of a sinister smoke,
as though they had a later recollection of the place than the lowing
herds. Hereditary Puritanism, regarding the stage, is met, to this day,
in many families quite undistinguished by arrogant piety. It has subsided
altogether as a power in the profession of morality; but it is an error
to suppose it extinct, and unjust also to forget that it had once good
reason to hate, shun, and rebuke our public shows.

We shall find ourselves about where the Comic spirit would place us, if
we stand at middle distance between the inveterate opponents and the
drum-and-fife supporters of Comedy: 'Comme un point fixe fait remarquer
l'emportement des autres,' as Pascal says. And were there more in this
position, Comic genius would flourish.

Our English idea of a Comedy of Manners might be imaged in the person of
a blowsy country girl--say Hoyden, the daughter of Sir Tunbelly Clumsy,
who, when at home, 'never disobeyed her father except in the eating of
green gooseberries'--transforming to a varnished City madam; with a loud
laugh and a mincing step; the crazy ancestress of an accountably fallen
descendant. She bustles prodigiously and is punctually smart in her
speech, always in a fluster to escape from Dulness, as they say the dogs
on the Nile-banks drink at the river running to avoid the crocodile. If
the monster catches her, as at times he does, she whips him to a froth,
so that those who know Dulness only as a thing of ponderousness, shall
fail to recognise him in that light and airy shape.

When she has frolicked through her five Acts to surprise you with the
information that Mr. Aimwell is converted by a sudden death in the world
outside the scenes into Lord Aimwell, and can marry the lady in the light
of day, it is to the credit of her vivacious nature that she does not
anticipate your calling her Farce. Five is dignity with a trailing robe;
whereas one, two, or three Acts would be short skirts, and degrading.
Advice has been given to householders, that they should follow up the
shot at a burglar in the dark by hurling the pistol after it, so that if
the bullet misses, the weapon may strike and assure the rascal he has it.
The point of her wit is in this fashion supplemented by the rattle of her
tongue, and effectively, according to the testimony of her admirers. Her
wit is at once, like steam in an engine, the motive force and the warning
whistle of her headlong course; and it vanishes like the track of steam
when she has reached her terminus, never troubling the brains afterwards;
a merit that it shares with good wine, to the joy of the Bacchanalians.
As to this wit, it is warlike. In the neatest hands it is like the sword
of the cavalier in the Mall, quick to flash out upon slight provocation,
and for a similar office--to wound. Commonly its attitude is entirely
pugilistic; two blunt fists rallying and countering. When harmless, as
when the word 'fool' occurs, or allusions to the state of husband, it has
the sound of the smack of harlequin's wand upon clown, and is to the same
extent exhilarating. Believe that idle empty laughter is the most
desirable of recreations, and significant Comedy will seem pale and
shallow in comparison. Our popular idea would be hit by the sculptured
group of Laughter holding both his sides, while Comedy pummels, by way of
tickling him. As to a meaning, she holds that it does not conduce to
making merry: you might as well carry cannon on a racing-yacht. Morality
is a duenna to be circumvented. This was the view of English Comedy of a
sagacious essayist, who said that the end of a Comedy would often be the
commencement of a Tragedy, were the curtain to rise again on the
performers. In those old days female modesty was protected by a fan,
behind which, and it was of a convenient semicircular breadth, the ladies
present in the theatre retired at a signal of decorum, to peep, covertly
askant, or with the option of so peeping, through a prettily fringed
eyelet-hole in the eclipsing arch.

'Ego limis specto sic per flabellum clanculum.'-TERENCE.

That fan is the flag and symbol of the society giving us our so-called
Comedy of Manners, or Comedy of the manners of South-sea Islanders under
city veneer; and as to Comic idea, vacuous as the mask without the face
behind it.

Elia, whose humour delighted in floating a galleon paradox and wafting it
as far as it would go, bewails the extinction of our artificial Comedy,
like a poet sighing over the vanished splendour of Cleopatra's
Nile-barge; and the sedateness of his plea for a cause condemned even in
his time to the penitentiary, is a novel effect of the ludicrous. When
the realism of those 'fictitious half-believed personages,' as he calls
them, had ceased to strike, they were objectionable company, uncaressable
as puppets. Their artifices are staringly naked, and have now the effect
of a painted face viewed, after warm hours of dancing, in the morning
light. How could the Lurewells and the Plyants ever have been praised for
ingenuity in wickedness? Critics, apparently sober, and of high
reputation, held up their shallow knaveries for the world to admire.
These Lurewells, Plyants, Pinchwifes, Fondlewifes, Miss Prue, Peggy,
Hoyden, all of them save charming Milamant, are dead as last year's
clothes in a fashionable fine lady's wardrobe, and it must be an
exceptionably abandoned Abigail of our period that would look on them
with the wish to appear in their likeness. Whether the puppet show of
Punch and Judy inspires our street-urchins to have instant recourse to
their fists in a dispute, after the fashion of every one of the actors in
that public entertainment who gets possession of the cudgel, is open to
question: it has been hinted; and angry moralists have traced the
national taste for tales of crime to the smell of blood in our
nursery-songs. It will at any rate hardly be questioned that it is
unwholesome for men and women to see themselves as they are, if they are
no better than they should be: and they will not, when they have improved
in manners, care much to see themselves as they once were. That comes of
realism in the Comic art; and it is not public caprice, but the
consequence of a bettering state. {2} The same of an immoral may be said
of realistic exhibitions of a vulgar society.

The French make a critical distinction in ce qui remue from ce qui
emeut--that which agitates from that which touches with emotion. In the
realistic comedy it is an incessant remuage--no calm, merely bustling
figures, and no thought. Excepting Congreve's Way of the World, which
failed on the stage, there was nothing to keep our comedy alive on its
merits; neither, with all its realism, true portraiture, nor much
quotable fun, nor idea; neither salt nor soul.

The French have a school of stately comedy to which they can fly for
renovation whenever they have fallen away from it; and their having such
a school is mainly the reason why, as John Stuart Mill pointed out, they
know men and women more accurately than we do. Moliere followed the
Horatian precept, to observe the manners of his age and give his
characters the colour befitting them at the time. He did not paint in raw
realism. He seized his characters firmly for the central purpose of the
play, stamped them in the idea, and by slightly raising and softening the
object of study (as in the case of the ex-Huguenot, Duke de Montausier,
{3} for the study of the Misanthrope, and, according to St. Simon, the
Abbe Roquette for Tartuffe), generalized upon it so as to make it
permanently human. Concede that it is natural for human creatures to live
in society, and Alceste is an imperishable mark of one, though he is
drawn in light outline, without any forcible human colouring. Our English
school has not clearly imagined society; and of the mind hovering above
congregated men and women, it has imagined nothing. The critics who
praise it for its downrightness, and for bringing the situations home to
us, as they admiringly say, cannot but disapprove of Moliere's comedy,
which appeals to the individual mind to perceive and participate in the
social. We have splendid tragedies, we have the most beautiful of poetic
plays, and we have literary comedies passingly pleasant to read, and
occasionally to see acted. By literary comedies, I mean comedies of
classic inspiration, drawn chiefly from Menander and the Greek New Comedy
through Terence; or else comedies of the poet's personal conception, that
have had no model in life, and are humorous exaggerations, happy or
otherwise. These are the comedies of Ben Jonson, Massinger, and Fletcher.
Massinger's Justice Greedy we can all of us refer to a type, 'with fat
capon lined' that has been and will be; and he would be comic, as Panurge
is comic, but only a Rabelais could set him moving with real animation.
Probably Justice Greedy would be comic to the audience of a country booth
and to some of our friends. If we have lost our youthful relish for the
presentation of characters put together to fit a type, we find it hard to
put together the mechanism of a civil smile at his enumeration of his
dishes. Something of the same is to be said of Bobadil, swearing 'by the
foot of Pharaoh'; with a reservation, for he is made to move faster, and
to act. The comic of Jonson is a scholar's excogitation of the comic;
that of Massinger a moralist's.

Shakespeare is a well-spring of characters which are saturated with the
comic spirit; with more of what we will call blood-life than is to be
found anywhere out of Shakespeare; and they are of this world, but they
are of the world enlarged to our embrace by imagination, and by great
poetic imagination. They are, as it were--I put it to suit my present
comparison--creatures of the woods and wilds, not in walled towns, not
grouped and toned to pursue a comic exhibition of the narrower world of
society. Jaques, Falstaff and his regiment, the varied troop of Clowns,
Malvolio, Sir Hugh Evans and Fluellen--marvellous Welshmen!--Benedict and
Beatrice, Dogberry, and the rest, are subjects of a special study in the
poetically comic.

His Comedy of incredible imbroglio belongs to the literary section. One
may conceive that there was a natural resemblance between him and
Menander, both in the scheme and style of his lighter plays. Had
Shakespeare lived in a later and less emotional, less heroical period of
our history, he might have turned to the painting of manners as well as
humanity. Euripides would probably, in the time of Menander, when Athens
was enslaved but prosperous, have lent his hand to the composition of
romantic comedy. He certainly inspired that fine genius.

Politically it is accounted a misfortune for France that her nobles
thronged to the Court of Louis Quatorze. It was a boon to the comic poet.
He had that lively quicksilver world of the animalcule passions, the huge
pretensions, the placid absurdities, under his eyes in full activity;
vociferous quacks and snapping dupes, hypocrites, posturers,
extravagants, pedants, rose-pink ladies and mad grammarians, sonneteering
marquises, high-flying mistresses, plain-minded maids, inter-threading as
in a loom, noisy as at a fair. A simply bourgeois circle will not furnish
it, for the middle class must have the brilliant, flippant, independent
upper for a spur and a pattern; otherwise it is likely to be inwardly
dull as well as outwardly correct. Yet, though the King was benevolent
toward Moliere, it is not to the French Court that we are indebted for
his unrivalled studies of mankind in society. For the amusement of the
Court the ballets and farces were written, which are dearer to the rabble
upper, as to the rabble lower, class than intellectual comedy. The French
bourgeoisie of Paris were sufficiently quick-witted and enlightened by
education to welcome great works like Le Tartuffe, Les Femmes Savantes,
and Le Misanthrope, works that were perilous ventures on the popular
intelligence, big vessels to launch on streams running to shallows. The
Tartuffe hove into view as an enemy's vessel; it offended, not Dieu mais
les devots, as the Prince de Conde explained the cabal raised against it
to the King.

The Femmes Savantes is a capital instance of the uses of comedy in
teaching the world to understand what ails it. The farce of the
Precieuses ridiculed and put a stop to the monstrous romantic jargon made
popular by certain famous novels. The comedy of the Femmes Savantes
exposed the later and less apparent but more finely comic absurdity of an
excessive purism in grammar and diction, and the tendency to be idiotic
in precision. The French had felt the burden of this new nonsense; but
they had to see the comedy several times before they were consoled in
their suffering by seeing the cause of it exposed.

The Misanthrope was yet more frigidly received. Moliere thought it dead.
'I cannot improve on it, and assuredly never shall,' he said. It is one
of the French titles to honour that this quintessential comedy of the
opposition of Alceste and Celimene was ultimately understood and
applauded. In all countries the middle class presents the public which,
fighting the world, and with a good footing in the fight, knows the world
best. It may be the most selfish, but that is a question leading us into
sophistries. Cultivated men and women, who do not skim the cream of life,
and are attached to the duties, yet escape the harsher blows, make acute
and balanced observers. Moliere is their poet.

Of this class in England, a large body, neither Puritan nor Bacchanalian,
have a sentimental objection to face the study of the actual world. They
take up disdain of it, when its truths appear humiliating: when the facts
are not immediately forced on them, they take up the pride of
incredulity. They live in a hazy atmosphere that they suppose an ideal
one. Humorous writing they will endure, perhaps approve, if it mingles
with pathos to shake and elevate the feelings. They approve of Satire,
because, like the beak of the vulture, it smells of carrion, which they
are not. But of Comedy they have a shivering dread, for Comedy enfolds
them with the wretched host of the world, huddles them with us all in an
ignoble assimilation, and cannot be used by any exalted variety as a
scourge and a broom. Nay, to be an exalted variety is to come under the
calm curious eye of the Comic spirit, and be probed for what you are. Men
are seen among them, and very many cultivated women. You may distinguish
them by a favourite phrase: 'Surely we are not so bad!' and the remark:
'If that is human nature, save us from it!' as if it could be done: but
in the peculiar Paradise of the wilful people who will not see, the
exclamation assumes the saving grace.

Yet should you ask them whether they dislike sound sense, they vow they
do not. And question cultivated women whether it pleases them to be shown
moving on an intellectual level with men, they will answer that it does;
numbers of them claim the situation. Now, Comedy is the fountain of sound
sense; not the less perfectly sound on account of the sparkle: and Comedy
lifts women to a station offering them free play for their wit, as they
usually show it, when they have it, on the side of sound sense. The
higher the Comedy, the more prominent the part they enjoy in it. Dorine
in the Tartuffe is common-sense incarnate, though palpably a
waiting-maid. Celimene is undisputed mistress of the same attribute in
the Misanthrope; wiser as a woman than Alceste as man. In Congreve's Way
of the World, Millamant overshadows Mirabel, the sprightliest male figure
of English comedy.

But those two ravishing women, so copious and so choice of speech, who
fence with men and pass their guard, are heartless! Is it not preferable
to be the pretty idiot, the passive beauty, the adorable bundle of
caprices, very feminine, very sympathetic, of romantic and sentimental
fiction? Our women are taught to think so. The Agnes of the Ecole des
Femmes should be a lesson for men. The heroines of Comedy are like women
of the world, not necessarily heartless from being clear-sighted: they
seem so to the sentimentally-reared only for the reason that they use
their wits, and are not wandering vessels crying for a captain or a
pilot. Comedy is an exhibition of their battle with men, and that of men
with them: and as the two, however divergent, both look on one object,
namely, Life, the gradual similarity of their impressions must bring them
to some resemblance. The Comic poet dares to show us men and women coming
to this mutual likeness; he is for saying that when they draw together in
social life their minds grow liker; just as the philosopher discerns the
similarity of boy and girl, until the girl is marched away to the
nursery. Philosopher and Comic poet are of a cousinship in the eye they
cast on life: and they are equally unpopular with our wilful English of
the hazy region and the ideal that is not to be disturbed.

Thus, for want of instruction in the Comic idea, we lose a large audience
among our cultivated middle class that we should expect to support
Comedy. The sentimentalist is as averse as the Puritan and as the
Bacchanalian.

Our traditions are unfortunate. The public taste is with the idle
laughers, and still inclines to follow them. It may be shown by an
analysis of Wycherley's Plain Dealer, a coarse prose adaption of the
Misanthrope, stuffed with lumps of realism in a vulgarized theme to hit
the mark of English appetite, that we have in it the keynote of the
Comedy of our stage. It is Moliere travestied, with the hoof to his foot
and hair on the pointed tip of his ear. And how difficult it is for
writers to disentangle themselves from bad traditions is noticeable when
we find Goldsmith, who had grave command of the Comic in narrative,
producing an elegant farce for a Comedy; and Fielding, who was a master
of the Comic both in narrative and in dialogue, not even approaching to
the presentable in farce.

These bad traditions of Comedy affect us not only on the stage, but in
our literature, and may be tracked into our social life. They are the
ground of the heavy moralizings by which we are outwearied, about Life as
a Comedy, and Comedy as a jade, {4} when popular writers, conscious of
fatigue in creativeness, desire to be cogent in a modish cynicism:
perversions of the idea of life, and of the proper esteem for the society
we have wrested from brutishness, and would carry higher. Stock images of
this description are accepted by the timid and the sensitive, as well as
by the saturnine, quite seriously; for not many look abroad with their
own eyes, fewer still have the habit of thinking for themselves. Life, we
know too well, is not a Comedy, but something strangely mixed; nor is
Comedy a vile mask. The corrupted importation from France was noxious; a
noble entertainment spoilt to suit the wretched taste of a villanous age;
and the later imitations of it, partly drained of its poison and made
decorous, became tiresome, notwithstanding their fun, in the perpetual
recurring of the same situations, owing to the absence of original study
and vigour of conception. Scene v. Act 2 of the Misanthrope, owing, no
doubt, to the fact of our not producing matter for original study, is
repeated in succession by Wycherley, Congreve, and Sheridan, and as it is
at second hand, we have it done cynically--or such is the tone; in the
manner of 'below stairs.' Comedy thus treated may be accepted as a
version of the ordinary worldly understanding of our social life; at
least, in accord with the current dicta concerning it. The epigrams can
be made; but it is uninstructive, rather tending to do disservice. Comedy
justly treated, as you find it in Moliere, whom we so clownishly
mishandled, the Comedy of Moliere throws no infamous reflection upon
life. It is deeply conceived, in the first place, and therefore it cannot
be impure. Meditate on that statement. Never did man wield so shrieking a
scourge upon vice, but his consummate self-mastery is not shaken while
administering it. Tartuffe and Harpagon, in fact, are made each to whip
himself and his class, the false pietists, and the insanely covetous.
Moliere has only set them in motion. He strips Folly to the skin,
displays the imposture of the creature, and is content to offer her
better clothing, with the lesson Chrysale reads to Philaminte and Belise.
He conceives purely, and he writes purely, in the simplest language, the
simplest of French verse. The source of his wit is clear reason: it is a
fountain of that soil; and it springs to vindicate reason, common-sense,
rightness and justice; for no vain purpose ever. The wit is of such
pervading spirit that it inspires a pun with meaning and interest. {5}
His moral does not hang like a tail, or preach from one character
incessantly cocking an eye at the audience, as in recent realistic French
Plays: but is in the heart of his work, throbbing with every pulsation of
an organic structure. If Life is likened to the comedy of Moliere, there
is no scandal in the comparison.

Congreve's Way of the World is an exception to our other comedies, his
own among them, by virtue of the remarkable brilliancy of the writing,
and the figure of Millamant. The comedy has no idea in it, beyond the
stale one, that so the world goes; and it concludes with the jaded
discovery of a document at a convenient season for the descent of the
curtain. A plot was an afterthought with Congreve. By the help of a
wooden villain (Maskwell) marked Gallows to the flattest eye, he gets a
sort of plot in The Double Dealer. {6} His Way of the World might be
called The Conquest of a Town Coquette, and Millamant is a perfect
portrait of a coquette, both in her resistance to Mirabel and the manner
of her surrender, and also in her tongue. The wit here is not so salient
as in certain passages of Love for Love, where Valentine feigns madness
or retorts on his father, or Mrs. Frail rejoices in the harmlessness of
wounds to a woman's virtue, if she 'keeps them from air.' In The Way of
the World, it appears less prepared in the smartness, and is more
diffused in the more characteristic style of the speakers. Here, however,
as elsewhere, his famous wit is like a bully-fencer, not ashamed to lay
traps for its exhibition, transparently petulant for the train between
certain ordinary words and the powder-magazine of the improprieties to be
fired. Contrast the wit of Congreve with Moliere's. That of the first is
a Toledo blade, sharp, and wonderfully supple for steel; cast for
duelling, restless in the scabbard, being so pretty when out of it. To
shine, it must have an adversary. Moliere's wit is like a running brook,
with innumerable fresh lights on it at every turn of the wood through
which its business is to find a way. It does not run in search of
obstructions, to be noisy over them; but when dead leaves and viler
substances are heaped along the course, its natural song is heightened.
Without effort, and with no dazzling flashes of achievement, it is full
of healing, the wit of good breeding, the wit of wisdom.

'Genuine humour and true wit,' says Landor, {7} 'require a sound and
capacious mind, which is always a grave one. Rabelais and La Fontaine are
recorded by their countrymen to have been reveurs. Few men have been
graver than Pascal. Few men have been wittier.'

To apply the citation of so great a brain as Pascal's to our countryman
would be unfair. Congreve had a certain soundness of mind; of capacity,
in the sense intended by Landor, he had little. Judging him by his wit,
he performed some happy thrusts, and taking it for genuine, it is a
surface wit, neither rising from a depth nor flowing from a spring.

'On voit qu'il se travaille e dire de bons mots.'

He drives the poor hack word, 'fool,' as cruelly to the market for wit as
any of his competitors. Here is an example, that has been held up for
eulogy:

WITWOUD: He has brought me a letter from the fool my brother, etc. etc.

MIRABEL: A fool, and your brother, Witwoud?

WITWOUD: Ay, ay, my half-brother. My half-brother he is; no nearer, upon
my honour.

MIRABEL: Then 'tis possible he may be but half a fool.

By evident preparation. This is a sort of wit one remembers to have heard
at school, of a brilliant outsider; perhaps to have been guilty of
oneself, a trifle later. It was, no doubt, a blaze of intellectual
fireworks to the bumpkin squire, who came to London to go to the theatre
and learn manners.

Where Congreve excels all his English rivals is in his literary force,
and a succinctness of style peculiar to him. He had correct judgement, a
correct ear, readiness of illustration within a narrow range, in
snapshots of the obvious at the obvious, and copious language. He hits
the mean of a fine style and a natural in dialogue. He is at once precise
and voluble. If you have ever thought upon style you will acknowledge it
to be a signal accomplishment. In this he is a classic, and is worthy of
treading a measure with Moliere. The Way of the World may be read out
currently at a first glance, so sure are the accents of the emphatic
meaning to strike the eye, perforce of the crispness and cunning polish
of the sentences. You have not to look over them before you confide
yourself to him; he will carry you safe. Sheridan imitated, but was far
from surpassing him. The flow of boudoir Billingsgate in Lady Wishfort is
unmatched for the vigour and pointedness of the tongue. It spins along
with a final ring, like the voice of Nature in a fury, and is, indeed,
racy eloquence of the elevated fishwife.

Millamant is an admirable, almost a lovable heroine. It is a piece of
genius in a writer to make a woman's manner of speech portray her. You
feel sensible of her presence in every line of her speaking. The
stipulations with her lover in view of marriage, her fine lady's
delicacy, and fine lady's easy evasions of indelicacy, coquettish airs,
and playing with irresolution, which in a common maid would be
bashfulness, until she submits to 'dwindle into a wife,' as she says,
form a picture that lives in the frame, and is in harmony with Mirabel's
description of her:

'Here she comes, i' faith, full sail, with her fan spread, and her
streamers out, and a shoal of fools for tenders.'

And, after an interview:

'Think of you! To think of a whirlwind, though 'twere in a whirlwind,
were a case of more steady contemplation, a very tranquillity of mind and
mansion.'

There is a picturesqueness, as of Millamant and no other, in her voice,
when she is encouraged to take Mirabel by Mrs. Fainall, who is 'sure she
has a mind to him':

MILLAMANT: Are you? I think I have--and the horrid man looks as if he
thought so too, etc. etc.

One hears the tones, and sees the sketch and colour of the whole scene in
reading it.

Celimene is behind Millamant in vividness. An air of bewitching
whimsicality hovers over the graces of this Comic heroine, like the
lively conversational play of a beautiful mouth.

But in wit she is no rival of Celimene. What she utters adds to her
personal witchery, and is not further memorable. She is a flashing
portrait, and a type of the superior ladies who do not think, not of
those who do. In representing a class, therefore, it is a lower class, in
the proportion that one of Gainsborough's full-length aristocratic women
is below the permanent impressiveness of a fair Venetian head.

Millamant side by side with Celimene is an example of how far the
realistic painting of a character can be carried to win our favour; and
of where it falls short. Celimene is a woman's mind in movement, armed
with an ungovernable wit; with perspicacious clear eyes for the world,
and a very distinct knowledge that she belongs to the world, and is most
at home in it. She is attracted to Alceste by her esteem for his honesty;
she cannot avoid seeing where the good sense of the man is diseased.

Rousseau, in his letter to D'Alembert on the subject of the Misanthrope,
discusses the character of Alceste, as though Moliere had put him forth
for an absolute example of misanthropy; whereas Alceste is only a
misanthrope of the circle he finds himself placed in: he has a touching
faith in the virtue residing in the country, and a critical love of sweet
simpleness. Nor is he the principal person of the comedy to which he
gives a name. He is only passively comic. Celimene is the active spirit.
While he is denouncing and railing, the trial is imposed upon her to make
the best of him, and control herself, as much as a witty woman, eagerly
courted, can do. By appreciating him she practically confesses her
faultiness, and she is better disposed to meet him half .way than he is
to bend an inch: only she is une ame de vingt ans, the world is pleasant,
and if the gilded flies of the Court are silly, uncompromising fanatics
have their ridiculous features as well. Can she abandon the life they
make agreeable to her, for a man who will not be guided by the common
sense of his class; and who insists on plunging into one extreme--equal
to suicide in her eyes--to avoid another? That is the comic question of
the Misanthrope. Why will he not continue to mix with the world smoothly,
appeased by the flattery of her secret and really sincere preference of
him, and taking his revenge in satire of it, as she does from her own not
very lofty standard, and will by and by do from his more exalted one?

Celimene is worldliness: Alceste is unworldliness. It does not quite
imply unselfishness; and that is perceived by her shrewd head. Still he
is a very uncommon figure in her circle, and she esteems him, l'homme aux
rubans verts, 'who sometimes diverts but more often horribly vexes her,'
as she can say of him when her satirical tongue is on the run. Unhappily
the soul of truth in him, which wins her esteem, refuses to be tamed, or
silent, or unsuspicious, and is the perpetual obstacle to their good
accord. He is that melancholy person, the critic of everybody save
himself; intensely sensitive to the faults of others, wounded by them; in
love with his own indubitable honesty, and with his ideal of the simpler
form of life befitting it: qualities which constitute the satirist. He is
a Jean Jacques of the Court. His proposal to Celimene when he pardons
her, that she should follow him in flying humankind, and his frenzy of
detestation of her at her refusal, are thoroughly in the mood of Jean
Jacques. He is an impracticable creature of a priceless virtue; but
Celimene may feel that to fly with him to the desert: that is from the
Court to the country

'Ou d'etre homme d'honneur on ait la liberte,'

she is likely to find herself the companion of a starving satirist, like
that poor princess who ran away with the waiting-man, and when both were
hungry in the forest, was ordered to give him flesh. She is a fieffee
coquette, rejoicing in her wit and her attractions, and distinguished by
her inclination for Alceste in the midst of her many other lovers; only
she finds it hard to cut them off--what woman with a train does not?--and
when the exposure of her naughty wit has laid her under their rebuke, she
will do the utmost she can: she will give her hand to honesty, but she
cannot quite abandon worldliness. She would be unwise if she did.

The fable is thin. Our pungent contrivers of plots would see no
indication of life in the outlines. The life of the comedy is in the
idea. As with the singing of the sky-lark out of sight, you must love the
bird to be attentive to the song, so in this highest flight of the Comic
Muse, you must love pure Comedy warmly to understand the Misanthrope: you
must be receptive of the idea of Comedy. And to love Comedy you must know
the real world, and know men and women well enough not to expect too much
of them, though you may still hope for good.

Menander wrote a comedy called Misogynes, said to have been the most
celebrated of his works. This misogynist is a married man, according to
the fragment surviving, and is a hater of women through hatred of his
wife. He generalizes upon them from the example of this lamentable
adjunct of his fortunes, and seems to have got the worst of it in the
contest with her, which is like the issue in reality, in the polite
world. He seems also to have deserved it, which may be as true to the
copy. But we are unable to say whether the wife was a good voice of her
sex: or how far Menander in this instance raised the idea of woman from
the mire it was plunged into by the comic poets, or rather satiric
dramatists, of the middle period of Greek Comedy preceding him and the
New Comedy, who devoted their wit chiefly to the abuse, and for a
diversity, to the eulogy of extra-mural ladies of conspicuous fame.
Menander idealized them without purposely elevating. He satirized a
certain Thais, and his Thais of the Eunuchus of Terence is neither
professionally attractive nor repulsive; his picture of the two Andrians,
Chrysis and her sister, is nowhere to be matched for tenderness. But the
condition of honest women in his day did not permit of the freedom of
action and fencing dialectic of a Celimene, and consequently it is below
our mark of pure Comedy.

Sainte-Beuve conjures up the ghost of Menander, saying: For the love of
me love Terence. It is through love of Terence that moderns are able to
love Menander; and what is preserved of Terence has not apparently given
us the best of the friend of Epicurus. [Greek text which cannot be
reproduced] the lover taken in horror, and [Greek text] the damsel shorn
of her locks, have a promising sound for scenes of jealousy and a too
masterful display of lordly authority, leading to regrets, of the kind
known to intemperate men who imagined they were fighting with the weaker,
as the fragments indicate.

Of the six comedies of Terence, four are derived from Menander; two, the
Hecyra and the Phormio, from Apollodorus. These two are inferior in comic
action and the peculiar sweetness of Menander to the Andria, the Adelphi,
the Heautontimorumenus, and the Eunuchus: but Phormio is a more dashing
and amusing convivial parasite than the Gnatho of the last-named comedy.
There were numerous rivals of whom we know next to nothing--except by the
quotations of Athenaeus and Plutarch, and the Greek grammarians who cited
them to support a dictum--in this as in the preceding periods of comedy
in Athens, for Menander's plays are counted by many scores, and they were
crowned by the prize only eight times. The favourite poet with critics,
in Greece as in Rome, was Menander; and if some of his rivals here and
there surpassed him in comic force, and out-stripped him in competition
by an appositeness to the occasion that had previously in the same way
deprived the genius of Aristophanes of its due reward in Clouds and
Birds, his position as chief of the comic poets of his age was
unchallenged. Plutarch very unnecessarily drags Aristophanes into a
comparison with him, to the confusion of the older poet. Their aims, the
matter they dealt in, and the times, were quite dissimilar. But it is no
wonder that Plutarch, writing when Athenian beauty of style was the
delight of his patrons, should rank Menander at the highest. In what
degree of faithfulness Terence copied Menander, whether, as he states of
the passage in the Adelphi taken from Diphilus, verbum de verbo in the
lovelier scenes--the description of the last words of the dying Andrian,
and of her funeral, for instance--remains conjectural. For us Terence
shares with his master the praise of an amenity that is like Elysian
speech, equable and ever gracious; like the face of the Andrian's young
sister:

'Adeo modesto, adeo venusto, ut nihil supra.'

The celebrated 'flens quam familiariter,' of which the closest rendering
grounds hopelessly on harsh prose, to express the sorrowful confidingness
of a young girl who has lost her sister and dearest friend, and has but
her lover left to her; 'she turned and flung herself on his bosom,
weeping as though at home there': this our instinct tells us must be
Greek, though hardly finer in Greek. Certain lines of Terence, compared
with the original fragments, show that he embellished them; but his taste
was too exquisite for him to do other than devote his genius to the
honest translation of such pieces as the above. Menander, then; with him,
through the affinity of sympathy, Terence; and Shakespeare and Moliere
have this beautiful translucency of language: and the study of the comic
poets might be recommended, if for that only.

A singular ill fate befell the writings of Menander. What we have of him
in Terence was chosen probably to please the cultivated Romans; {8} and
is a romantic play with a comic intrigue, obtained in two instances, the
Andria and the Eunuchus, by rolling a couple of his originals into one.
The titles of certain of the lost plays indicate the comic illumining
character; a Self-pitier, a Self-chastiser, an Ill-tempered man, a
Superstitious, an Incredulous, etc., point to suggestive domestic themes.

Terence forwarded manuscript translations from Greece, that suffered
shipwreck; he, who could have restored the treasure, died on the way
home. The zealots of Byzantium completed the work of destruction. So we
have the four comedies of Terence, numbering six of Menander, with a few
sketches of plots--one of them, the Thesaurus, introduces a miser, whom
we should have liked to contrast with Harpagon--and a multitude of small
fragments of a sententious cast, fitted for quotation. Enough remains to
make his greatness felt.

Without undervaluing other writers of Comedy, I think it may be said that
Menander and Moliere stand alone specially as comic poets of the feelings
and the idea. In each of them there is a conception of the Comic that
refines even to pain, as in the Menedemus of the Heautontimorumenus, and
in the Misanthrope. Menander and Moliere have given the principal types
to Comedy hitherto. The Micio and Demea of the Adelphi, with their
opposing views of the proper management of youth, are still alive; the
Sganarelles and Arnolphes of the Ecole des Maris and the Ecole des
Femmes, are not all buried. Tartuffe is the father of the hypocrites;
Orgon of the dupes; Thraso, of the braggadocios; Alceste of the 'Manlys';
Davus and Syrus of the intriguing valets, the Scapins and Figaros. Ladies
that soar in the realms of Rose-Pink, whose language wears the nodding
plumes of intellectual conceit, are traceable to Philaminte and Belise of
the Femmes Savantes: and the mordant witty women have the tongue of
Celimene. The reason is, that these two poets idealized upon life: the
foundation of their types is real and in the quick, but they painted with
spiritual strength, which is the solid in Art.

The idealistic conceptions of Comedy gives breadth and opportunities of
daring to Comic genius, and helps to solve the difficulties it creates.
How, for example, shall an audience be assured that an evident and
monstrous dupe is actually deceived without being an absolute fool? In Le
Tartuffe the note of high Comedy strikes when Orgon on his return home
hears of his idol's excellent appetite. 'Le pauvre homme!' he exclaims.
He is told that the wife of his bosom has been unwell. 'Et Tartuffe?' he
asks, impatient to hear him spoken of, his mind suffused with the thought
of Tartuffe, crazy with tenderness, and again he croons, 'Le pauvre
homme!' It is the mother's cry of pitying delight at a nurse's recital of
the feats in young animal gluttony of her cherished infant. After this
masterstroke of the Comic, you not only put faith in Orgon's roseate
prepossession, you share it with him by comic sympathy, and can listen
with no more than a tremble of the laughing muscles to the instance he
gives of the sublime humanity of Tartuffe:

'Un rien presque suffit pour le scandaliser, Jusque-le, qu'il se vint
l'autre jour accuser D'avoir pris une puce en faisant sa priere, Et de
l'avoir tuee avec trop de colere.'

And to have killed it too wrathfully! Translating Moliere is like humming
an air one has heard performed by an accomplished violinist of the pure
tones without flourish.

Orgon, awakening to find another dupe in Madame Pernelle, incredulous of
the revelations which have at last opened his own besotted eyes, is a
scene of the double Comic, vivified by the spell previously cast on the
mind. There we feel the power of the poet's creation; and in the sharp
light of that sudden turn the humanity is livelier than any realistic
work can make it.

Italian Comedy gives many hints for a Tartuffe; but they may be found in
Boccaccio, as well as in Machiavelli's Mandragola. The Frate Timoteo of
this piece is only a very oily friar, compliantly assisting an intrigue
with ecclesiastical sophisms (to use the mildest word) for payment. Frate
Timoteo has a fine Italian priestly pose.

DONNA: Credete voi, che'l Turco passi questo anno in Italia?

F. TIM.: Se voi non fate orazione, si.

Priestly arrogance and unctuousness, and trickeries and casuistries,
cannot be painted without our discovering a likeness in the long Italian
gallery. Goldoni sketched the Venetian manners of the decadence of the
Republic with a French pencil, and was an Italian Scribe in style.

The Spanish stage is richer in such Comedies as that which furnished the
idea of the Menteur to Corneille. But you must force yourself to believe
that this liar is not forcing his vein when he piles lie upon lie. There
is no preceding touch to win the mind to credulity. Spanish Comedy is
generally in sharp outline, as of skeletons; in quick movement, as of
marionnettes. The Comedy might be performed by a troop of the corps de
ballet; and in the recollection of the reading it resolves to an animated
shuffle of feet. It is, in fact, something other than the true idea of
Comedy. Where the sexes are separated, men and women grow, as the
Portuguese call it, affaimados of one another, famine-stricken; and all
the tragic elements are on the stage. Don Juan is a comic character that
sends souls flying: nor does the humour of the breaking of a dozen
women's hearts conciliate the Comic Muse with the drawing of blood.

German attempts at Comedy remind one vividly of Heine's image of his
country in the dancing of Atta Troll. Lessing tried his hand at it, with
a sobering effect upon readers. The intention to produce the reverse
effect is just visible, and therein, like the portly graces of the poor
old Pyrenean Bear poising and twirling on his right hind-leg and his
left, consists the fun. Jean Paul Richter gives the best edition of the
German Comic in the contrast of Siebenkas with his Lenette. A light of
the Comic is in Goethe; enough to complete the splendid figure of the
man, but no more.

The German literary laugh, like the timed awakenings of their Barbarossa
in the hollows of the Untersberg, is infrequent, and rather
monstrous--never a laugh of men and women in concert. It comes of
unrefined abstract fancy, grotesque or grim, or gross, like the peculiar
humours of their little earthmen. Spiritual laughter they have not yet
attained to: sentimentalism waylays them in the flight. Here and there a
Volkslied or Marchen shows a national aptitude for stout animal laughter;
and we see that the literature is built on it, which is hopeful so far;
but to enjoy it, to enter into the philosophy of the Broad Grin, that
seems to hesitate between the skull and the embryo, and reaches its
perfection in breadth from the pulling of two square fingers at the
corners of the mouth, one must have aid of 'the good Rhine wine,' and be
of German blood unmixed besides. This treble-Dutch lumbersomeness of the
Comic spirit is of itself exclusive of the idea of Comedy, and the poor
voice allowed to women in German domestic life will account for the
absence of comic dialogues reflecting upon life in that land. I shall
speak of it again in the second section of this lecture.

Eastward you have total silence of Comedy among a people intensely
susceptible to laughter, as the Arabian Nights will testify. Where the
veil is over women's-faces, you cannot have society, without which the
senses are barbarous and the Comic spirit is driven to the gutters of
grossness to slake its thirst. Arabs in this respect are worse than
Italians--much worse than Germans; just in the degree that their system
of treating women is worse.

M. Saint-Marc Girardin, the excellent French essayist and master of
critical style, tells of a conversation he had once with an Arab
gentleman on the topic of the different management of these difficult
creatures in Orient and in Occident: and the Arab spoke in praise of many
good results of the greater freedom enjoyed by Western ladies, and the
charm of conversing with them. He was questioned why his countrymen took
no measures to grant them something of that kind of liberty. He jumped
out of his individuality in a twinkling, and entered into the sentiments
of his race, replying, from the pinnacle of a splendid conceit, with
affected humility of manner: 'YOU can look on them without
perturbation--but WE!' . . . And after this profoundly comic
interjection, he added, in deep tones, 'The very face of a woman!' Our
representative of temperate notions demurely consented that the Arab's
pride of inflammability should insist on the prudery of the veil as the
civilizing medium of his race.

There has been fun in Bagdad. But there never will be civilization where
Comedy is not possible; and that comes of some degree of social equality
of the sexes. I am not quoting the Arab to exhort and disturb the
somnolent East; rather for cultivated women to recognize that the Comic
Muse is one of their best friends. They are blind to their interests in
swelling the ranks of the sentimentalists. Let them look with their
clearest vision abroad and at home. They will see that where they have no
social freedom, Comedy is absent: where they are household drudges, the
form of Comedy is primitive: where they are tolerably independent, but
uncultivated, exciting melodrama takes its place and a sentimental
version of them. Yet the Comic will out, as they would know if they
listened to some of the private conversations of men whose minds are
undirected by the Comic Muse: as the sentimental man, to his
astonishment, would know likewise, if he in similar fashion could receive
a lesson. But where women are on the road to an equal footing with men,
in attainments and in liberty--in what they have won for themselves, and
what has been granted them by a fair civilization--there, and only
waiting to be transplanted from life to the stage, or the novel, or the
poem, pure Comedy flourishes, and is, as it would help them to be, the
sweetest of diversions, the wisest of delightful companions.

Now, to look about us in the present time, I think it will be
acknowledged that in neglecting the cultivation of the Comic idea, we are
losing the aid of a powerful auxiliar. You see Folly perpetually sliding
into new shapes in a society possessed of wealth and leisure, with many
whims, many strange ailments and strange doctors. Plenty of common-sense
is in the world to thrust her back when she pretends to empire. But the
first-born of common-sense, the vigilant Comic, which is the genius of
thoughtful laughter, which would readily extinguish her at the outset, is
not serving as a public advocate.

You will have noticed the disposition of common-sense, under pressure of
some pertinacious piece of light-headedness, to grow impatient and angry.
That is a sign of the absence, or at least of the dormancy, of the Comic
idea. For Folly is the natural prey of the Comic, known to it in all her
transformations, in every disguise; and it is with the springing delight
of hawk over heron, hound after fox, that it gives her chase, never
fretting, never tiring, sure of having her, allowing her no rest.

Contempt is a sentiment that cannot be entertained by comic intelligence.
What is it but an excuse to be idly minded, or personally lofty, or
comfortably narrow, not perfectly humane? If we do not feign when we say
that we despise Folly, we shut the brain. There is a disdainful attitude
in the presence of Folly, partaking of the foolishness to Comic
perception: and anger is not much less foolish than disdain. The struggle
we have to conduct is essence against essence. Let no one doubt of the
sequel when this emanation of what is firmest in us is launched to strike
down the daughter of Unreason and Sentimentalism: such being Folly's
parentage, when it is respectable.

Our modern system of combating her is too long defensive, and carried on
too ploddingly with concrete engines of war in the attack. She has time
to get behind entrenchments. She is ready to stand a siege, before the
heavily armed man of science and the writer of the leading article or
elaborate essay have primed their big guns. It should be remembered that
she has charms for the multitude; and an English multitude seeing her
make a gallant fight of it will be half in love with her, certainly
willing to lend her a cheer. Benevolent subscriptions assist her to hire
her own man of science, her own organ in the Press. If ultimately she is
cast out and overthrown, she can stretch a finger at gaps in our ranks.
She can say that she commanded an army and seduced men, whom we thought
sober men and safe, to act as her lieutenants. We learn rather gloomily,
after she has flashed her lantern, that we have in our midst able men and
men with minds for whom there is no pole-star in intellectual navigation.
Comedy, or the Comic element, is the specific for the poison of delusion
while Folly is passing from the state of vapour to substantial form.

O for a breath of Aristophanes, Rabelais, Voltaire, Cervantes, Fielding,
Moliere! These are spirits that, if you know them well, will come when
you do call. You will find the very invocation of them act on you like a
renovating air--the South-west coming off the sea, or a cry in the Alps.

No one would presume to say that we are deficient in jokers. They abound,
and the organisation directing their machinery to shoot them in the wake
of the leading article and the popular sentiment is good.

But the Comic differs from them in addressing the wits for laughter; and
the sluggish wits want some training to respond to it, whether in public
life or private, and particularly when the feelings are excited.

The sense of the Comic is much blunted by habits of punning and of using
humouristic phrase: the trick of employing Johnsonian polysyllables to
treat of the infinitely little. And it really may be humorous, of a kind,
yet it will miss the point by going too much round about it.

A certain French Duke Pasquier died, some years back, at a very advanced
age. He had been the venerable Duke Pasquier in his later years up to the
period of his death. There was a report of Duke Pasquier that he was a
man of profound egoism. Hence an argument arose, and was warmly
sustained, upon the excessive selfishness of those who, in a world of
troubles, and calls to action, and innumerable duties, husband their
strength for the sake of living on. Can it be possible, the argument ran,
for a truly generous heart to continue beating up to the age of a
hundred? Duke Pasquier was not without his defenders, who likened him to
the oak of the forest--a venerable comparison.

The argument was conducted on both sides with spirit and earnestness,
lightened here and there by frisky touches of the polysyllabic playful,
reminding one of the serious pursuit of their fun by truant boys, that
are assured they are out of the eye of their master, and now and then
indulge in an imitation of him. And well might it be supposed that the
Comic idea was asleep, not overlooking them! It resolved at last to this,
that either Duke Pasquier was a scandal on our humanity in clinging to
life so long, or that he honoured it by so sturdy a resistance to the
enemy. As one who has entangled himself in a labyrinth is glad to get out
again at the entrance, the argument ran about to conclude with its
commencement.

Now, imagine a master of the Comic treating this theme, and particularly
the argument on it. Imagine an Aristophanic comedy of THE CENTENARIAN,
with choric praises of heroical early death, and the same of a stubborn
vitality, and the poet laughing at the chorus; and the grand question for
contention in dialogue, as to the exact age when a man should die, to the
identical minute, that he may preserve the respect of his fellows,
followed by a systematic attempt to make an accurate measurement in
parallel lines, with a tough rope-yarn by one party, and a string of
yawns by the other, of the veteran's power of enduring life, and our
capacity for enduring HIM, with tremendous pulling on both sides.

Would not the Comic view of the discussion illumine it and the disputants
like very lightning? There are questions, as well as persons, that only
the Comic can fitly touch.

Aristophanes would probably have crowned the ancient tree, with the
consolatory observation to the haggard line of long-expectant heirs of
the Centenarian, that they live to see the blessedness of coming of a
strong stock. The shafts of his ridicule would mainly have been aimed at
the disputants. For the sole ground of the argument was the old man's
character, and sophists are not needed to demonstrate that we can very
soon have too much of a bad thing. A Centenarian does not necessarily
provoke the Comic idea, nor does the corpse of a duke. It is not provoked
in the order of nature, until we draw its penetrating attentiveness to
some circumstance with which we have been mixing our private interests,
or our speculative obfuscation. Dulness, insensible to the Comic, has the
privilege of arousing it; and the laying of a dull finger on matters of
human life is the surest method of establishing electrical communications
with a battery of laughter--where the Comic idea is prevalent.

But if the Comic idea prevailed with us, and we had an Aristophanes to
barb and wing it, we should be breathing air of Athens. Prosers now
pouring forth on us like public fountains would be cut short in the
street and left blinking, dumb as pillar-posts, with letters thrust into
their mouths. We should throw off incubus, our dreadful familiar--by some
called boredom--whom it is our present humiliation to be just alive
enough to loathe, never quick enough to foil. There would be a bright and
positive, clear Hellenic perception of facts. The vapours of Unreason and
Sentimentalism would be blown away before they were productive. Where
would Pessimist and Optimist be? They would in any case have a diminished
audience. Yet possibly the change of despots, from good-natured old
obtuseness to keen-edged intelligence, which is by nature merciless,
would be more than we could bear. The rupture of the link between dull
people, consisting in the fraternal agreement that something is too
clever for them, and a shot beyond them, is not to be thought of lightly;
for, slender though the link may seem, it is equivalent to a cement
forming a concrete of dense cohesion, very desirable in the estimation of
the statesman.

A political Aristophanes, taking advantage of his lyrical Bacchic
licence, was found too much for political Athens. I would not ask to have
him revived, but that the sharp light of such a spirit as his might be
with us to strike now and then on public affairs, public themes, to make
them spin along more briskly.

He hated with the politician's fervour the sophist who corrupted
simplicity of thought, the poet who destroyed purity of style, the
demagogue, 'the saw-toothed monster,' who, as he conceived, chicaned the
mob, and he held his own against them by strength of laughter, until
fines, the curtailing of his Comic licence in the chorus, and ultimately
the ruin of Athens, which could no longer support the expense of the
chorus, threw him altogether on dialogue, and brought him under the law.
After the catastrophe, the poet, who had ever been gazing back at the men
of Marathon and Salamis, must have felt that he had foreseen it; and that
he was wise when he pleaded for peace, and derided military coxcombry,
and the captious old creature Demus, we can admit. He had the Comic
poet's gift of common-sense--which does not always include political
intelligence; yet his political tendency raised him above the Old Comedy
turn for uproarious farce. He abused Socrates, but Xenophon, the disciple
of Socrates, by his trained rhetoric saved the Ten Thousand. Aristophanes
might say that if his warnings had been followed there would have been no
such thing as a mercenary Greek expedition under Cyrus. Athens, however,
was on a landslip, falling; none could arrest it. To gaze back, to uphold
the old times, was a most natural conservatism, and fruitless. The aloe
had bloomed. Whether right or wrong in his politics and his criticisms,
and bearing in mind the instruments he played on and the audience he had
to win, there is an idea in his comedies: it is the Idea of Good
Citizenship.

He is not likely to be revived. He stands, like Shakespeare, an
unapproachable. Swift says of him, with a loving chuckle:

'But as for Comic Aristophanes, The dog too witty and too profane is.'

Aristophanes was 'profane,' under satiric direction, unlike his rivals
Cratinus, Phrynichus, Ameipsias, Eupolis, and others, if we are to
believe him, who in their extraordinary Donnybrook Fair of the day of
Comedy, thumped one another and everybody else with absolute heartiness,
as he did, but aimed at small game, and dragged forth particular women,
which he did not. He is an aggregate of many men, all of a certain
greatness. We may build up a conception of his powers if we mount
Rabelais upon Hudibras, lift him with the songfulness of Shelley, give
him a vein of Heinrich Heine, and cover him with the mantle of the
Anti-Jacobin, adding (that there may be some Irish in him) a dash of
Grattan, before he is in motion.

But such efforts at conceiving one great one by incorporation of minors
are vain, and cry for excuse. Supposing Wilkes for leading man in a
country constantly plunging into war under some plumed Lamachus, with
enemies periodically firing the land up to the gates of London, and a
Samuel Foote, of prodigious genius, attacking him with ridicule, I think
it gives a notion of the conflict engaged in by Aristophanes. This
laughing bald-pate, as he calls himself, was a Titanic pamphleteer, using
laughter for his political weapon; a laughter without scruple, the
laughter of Hercules. He was primed with wit, as with the garlic he
speaks of giving to the game-cocks, to make them fight the better. And he
was a lyric poet of aerial delicacy, with the homely song of a jolly
national poet, and a poet of such feeling that the comic mask is at times
no broader than a cloth on a face to show the serious features of our
common likeness. He is not to be revived; but if his method were studied,
some of the fire in him would come to us, and we might be revived.

Taking them generally, the English public are most in sympathy with this
primitive Aristophanic comedy, wherein the comic is capped by the
grotesque, irony tips the wit, and satire is a naked sword. They have the
basis of the Comic in them: an esteem for common-sense. They cordially
dislike the reverse of it. They have a rich laugh, though it is not the
gros rire of the Gaul tossing gros sel, nor the polished Frenchman's
mentally digestive laugh. And if they have now, like a monarch with a
troop of dwarfs, too many jesters kicking the dictionary about, to let
them reflect that they are dull, occasionally, like the pensive monarch
surprising himself with an idea of an idea of his own, they look so. And
they are given to looking in the glass. They must see that something ails
them. How much even the better order of them will endure, without a
thought of the defensive, when the person afflicting them is protected
from satire, we read in Memoirs of a Preceding Age, where the vulgarly
tyrannous hostess of a great house of reception shuffled the guests and
played them like a pack of cards, with her exact estimate of the strength
of each one printed on them: and still this house continued to be the
most popular in England; nor did the lady ever appear in print or on the
boards as the comic type that she was.

It has been suggested that they have not yet spiritually comprehended the
signification of living in society; for who are cheerfuller, brisker of
wit, in the fields, and as explorers, colonisers, backwoodsmen? They are
happy in rough exercise, and also in complete repose. The intermediate
condition, when they are called upon to talk to one another, upon other
than affairs of business or their hobbies, reveals them wearing a curious
look of vacancy, as it were the socket of an eye wanting. The Comic is
perpetually springing up in social life, and, it oppresses them from not
being perceived.

Thus, at a dinner-party, one of the guests, who happens to have enrolled
himself in a Burial Company, politely entreats the others to inscribe
their names as shareholders, expatiating on the advantages accruing to
them in the event of their very possible speedy death, the salubrity of
the site, the aptitude of the soil for a quick consumption of their
remains, etc.; and they drink sadness from the incongruous man, and
conceive indigestion, not seeing him in a sharply defined light, that
would bid them taste the comic of him. Or it is mentioned that a newly
elected member of our Parliament celebrates his arrival at eminence by
the publication of a book on cab-fares, dedicated to a beloved female
relative deceased, and the comment on it is the word 'Indeed.' But,
merely for a contrast, turn to a not uncommon scene of yesterday in the
hunting-field, where a brilliant young rider, having broken his
collar-bone, trots away very soon after, against medical interdict, half
put together in splinters, to the most distant meet of his neighbourhood,
sure of escaping his doctor, who is the first person he encounters. 'I
came here purposely to avoid you,' says the patient. 'I came here
purposely to take care of you,' says the doctor. Off they go, and come to
a swollen brook. The patient clears it handsomely: the doctor tumbles in.
All the field are alive with the heartiest relish of every incident and
every cross-light on it; and dull would the man have been thought who had
not his word to say about it when riding home.

In our prose literature we have had delightful Comic writers. Besides
Fielding and Goldsmith, there is Miss Austen, whose Emma and Mr. Elton
might walk straight into a comedy, were the plot arranged for them.
Galt's neglected novels have some characters and strokes of shrewd
comedy. In our poetic literature the comic is delicate and graceful above
the touch of Italian and French. Generally, however, the English elect
excel in satire, and they are noble humourists. The national disposition
is for hard-hitting, with a moral purpose to sanction it; or for a rosy,
sometimes a larmoyant, geniality, not unmanly in its verging upon
tenderness, and with a singular attraction for thick-headedness, to
decorate it with asses' ears and the most beautiful sylvan haloes. But
the Comic is a different spirit.

You may estimate your capacity for Comic perception by being able to
detect the ridicule of them you love, without loving them less: and more
by being able to see yourself somewhat ridiculous in dear eyes, and
accepting the correction their image of you proposes.

Each one of an affectionate couple may be willing, as we say, to die for
the other, yet unwilling to utter the agreeable word at the right moment;
but if the wits were sufficiently quick for them to perceive that they
are in a comic situation, as affectionate couples must be when they
quarrel, they would not wait for the moon or the almanac, or a Dorine, to
bring back the flood-tide of tender feelings, that they should join hands
and lips.

If you detect the ridicule, and your kindliness is chilled by it, you are
slipping into the grasp of Satire.

If instead of falling foul of the ridiculous person with a satiric rod,
to make him writhe and shriek aloud, you prefer to sting him under a
semi-caress, by which he shall in his anguish be rendered dubious whether
indeed anything has hurt him, you are an engine of Irony.

If you laugh all round him, tumble him, roll him about, deal him a smack,
and drop a tear on him, own his likeness to you and yours to your
neighbour, spare him as little as you shun, pity him as much as you
expose, it is a spirit of Humour that is moving you.

The Comic, which is the perceptive, is the governing spirit, awakening
and giving aim to these powers of laughter, but it is not to be
confounded with them: it enfolds a thinner form of them, differing from
satire, in not sharply driving into the quivering sensibilities, and from
humour, in not comforting them and tucking them up, or indicating a
broader than the range of this bustling world to them.

Fielding's Jonathan Wild presents a case of this peculiar distinction,
when that man of eminent greatness remarks upon the unfairness of a trial
in which the condemnation has been brought about by twelve men of the
opposite party; for it is not satiric, it is not humorous; yet it is
immensely comic to hear a guilty villain protesting that his own 'party'
should have a voice in the Law. It opens an avenue into villains'
ratiocination. {9} And the Comic is not cancelled though we should
suppose Jonathan to be giving play to his humour. I may have dreamed this
or had it suggested to me, for on referring to Jonathan Wild, I do not
find it.

Apply the case to the man of deep wit, who is ever certain of his
condemnation by the opposite party, and then it ceases to be comic, and
will be satiric.

The look of Fielding upon Richardson is essentially comic. His method of
correcting the sentimental writer is a mixture of the comic and the
humorous. Parson Adams is a creation of humour. But both the conception
and the presentation of Alceste and of Tartuffe, of Celimene and
Philaminte, are purely comic, addressed to the intellect: there is no
humour in them, and they refresh the intellect they quicken to detect
their comedy, by force of the contrast they offer between themselves and
the wiser world about them; that is to say, society, or that assemblage
of minds whereof the Comic spirit has its origin.

Byron had splendid powers of humour, and the most poetic satire that we
have example of, fusing at times to hard irony. He had no strong comic
sense, or he would not have taken an anti-social position, which is
directly opposed to the Comic; and in his philosophy, judged by
philosophers, he is a comic figure, by reason of this deficiency. 'So
bald er philosophirt ist er ein Kind,' Goethe says of him. Carlyle sees
him in this comic light, treats him in the humorous manner.

The Satirist is a moral agent, often a social scavenger, working on a
storage of bile.

The Ironeist is one thing or another, according to his caprice. Irony is
the humour of satire; it may be savage as in Swift, with a moral object,
or sedate, as in Gibbon, with a malicious. The foppish irony fretting to
be seen, and the irony which leers, that you shall not mistake its
intention, are failures in satiric effort pretending to the treasures of
ambiguity.

The Humourist of mean order is a refreshing laugher, giving tone to the
feelings and sometimes allowing the feelings to be too much for him. But
the humourist of high has an embrace of contrasts beyond the scope of the
Comic poet.

Heart and mind laugh out at Don Quixote, and still you brood on him. The
juxtaposition of the knight and squire is a Comic conception, the
opposition of their natures most humorous. They are as different as the
two hemispheres in the time of Columbus, yet they touch and are bound in
one by laughter. The knight's great aims and constant mishaps, his
chivalrous valiancy exercised on absurd objects, his good sense along the
highroad of the craziest of expeditions; the compassion he plucks out of
derision, and the admirable figure he preserves while stalking through
the frantically grotesque and burlesque assailing him, are in the
loftiest moods of humour, fusing the Tragic sentiment with the Comic
narrative.

The stroke of the great humourist is world-wide, with lights of Tragedy
in his laughter.

Taking a living great, though not creative, humourist to guide our
description: the skull of Yorick is in his hands in our seasons of
festival; he sees visions of primitive man capering preposterously under
the gorgeous robes of ceremonial. Our souls must be on fire when we wear
solemnity, if we would not press upon his shrewdest nerve. Finite and
infinite flash from one to the other with him, lending him a two-edged
thought that peeps out of his peacefullest lines by fits, like the
lantern of the fire-watcher at windows, going the rounds at night. The
comportment and performances of men in society are to him, by the vivid
comparison with their mortality, more grotesque than respectable. But ask
yourself, Is he always to be relied on for justness? He will fly straight
as the emissary eagle back to Jove at the true Hero. He will also make as
determined a swift descent upon the man of his wilful choice, whom we
cannot distinguish as a true one. This vast power of his, built up of the
feelings and the intellect in union, is often wanting in proportion and
in discretion. Humourists touching upon History or Society are given to
be capricious. They are, as in the case of Sterne, given to be
sentimental; for with them the feelings are primary, as with singers.
Comedy, on the other hand, is an interpretation of the general mind, and
is for that reason of necessity kept in restraint. The French lay marked
stress on mesure et gout, and they own how much they owe to Moliere for
leading them in simple justness and taste. We can teach them many things;
they can teach us in this.

The Comic poet is in the narrow field, or enclosed square, of the society
he depicts; and he addresses the still narrower enclosure of men's
intellects, with reference to the operation of the social world upon
their characters. He is not concerned with beginnings or endings or
surroundings, but with what you are now weaving. To understand his work
and value it, you must have a sober liking of your kind and a sober
estimate of our civilized qualities. The aim and business of the Comic
poet are misunderstood, his meaning is not seized nor his point of view
taken, when he is accused of dishonouring our nature and being hostile to
sentiment, tending to spitefulness and making an unfair use of laughter.
Those who detect irony in Comedy do so because they choose to see it in
life. Poverty, says the satirist, has nothing harder in itself than that
it makes men ridiculous. But poverty is never ridiculous to Comic
perception until it attempts to make its rags conceal its bareness in a
forlorn attempt at decency, or foolishly to rival ostentation. Caleb
Balderstone, in his endeavour to keep up the honour of a noble household
in a state of beggary, is an exquisitely comic character. In the case of
'poor relatives,' on the other hand, it is the rich, whom they perplex,
that are really comic; and to laugh at the former, not seeing the comedy
of the latter, is to betray dulness of vision. Humourist and Satirist
frequently hunt together as Ironeists in pursuit of the grotesque, to the
exclusion of the Comic. That was an affecting moment in the history of
the Prince Regent, when the First Gentleman of Europe burst into tears at
a sarcastic remark of Beau Brummell's on the cut of his coat. Humour,
Satire, Irony, pounce on it altogether as their common prey. The Comic
spirit eyes but does not touch it. Put into action, it would be farcical.
It is too gross for Comedy.

Incidents of a kind casting ridicule on our unfortunate nature instead of
our conventional life, provoke derisive laughter, which thwarts the Comic
idea. But derision is foiled by the play of the intellect. Most of
doubtful causes in contest are open to Comic interpretation, and any
intellectual pleading of a doubtful cause contains germs of an Idea of
Comedy.

The laughter of satire is a blow in the back or the face. The laughter of
Comedy is impersonal and of unrivalled politeness, nearer a smile; often
no more than a smile. It laughs through the mind, for the mind directs
it; and it might be called the humour of the mind.

One excellent test of the civilization of a country, as I have said, I
take to be the flourishing of the Comic idea and Comedy; and the test of
true Comedy is that it shall awaken thoughtful laughter.

If you believe that our civilization is founded in common-sense (and it
is the first condition of sanity to believe it), you will, when
contemplating men, discern a Spirit overhead; not more heavenly than the
light flashed upward from glassy surfaces, but luminous and watchful;
never shooting beyond them, nor lagging in the rear; so closely attached
to them that it may be taken for a slavish reflex, until its features are
studied. It has the sage's brows, and the sunny malice of a faun lurks at
the corners of the half-closed lips drawn in an idle wariness of half
tension. That slim feasting smile, shaped like the long-bow, was once a
big round satyr's laugh, that flung up the brows like a fortress lifted
by gunpowder. The laugh will come again, but it will be of the order of
the smile, finely tempered, showing sunlight of the mind, mental richness
rather than noisy enormity. Its common aspect is one of unsolicitous
observation, as if surveying a full field and having leisure to dart on
its chosen morsels, without any fluttering eagerness. Men's future upon
earth does not attract it; their honesty and shapeliness in the present
does; and whenever they wax out of proportion, overblown, affected,
pretentious, bombastical, hypocritical, pedantic, fantastically delicate;
whenever it sees them self-deceived or hoodwinked, given to run riot in
idolatries, drifting into vanities, congregating in absurdities, planning
short-sightedly, plotting dementedly; whenever they are at variance with
their professions, and violate the unwritten but perceptible laws binding
them in consideration one to another; whenever they offend sound reason,
fair justice; are false in humility or mined with conceit, individually,
or in the bulk--the Spirit overhead will look humanely malign and cast an
oblique light on them, followed by volleys of silvery laughter. That is
the Comic Spirit.

Not to distinguish it is to be bull-blind to the spiritual, and to deny
the existence of a mind of man where minds of men are in working
conjunction.

You must, as I have said, believe that our state of society is founded in
common-sense, otherwise you will not be struck by the contrasts the Comic
Spirit perceives, or have it to look to for your consolation. You will,
in fact, be standing in that peculiar oblique beam of light, yourself
illuminated to the general eye as the very object of chase and doomed
quarry of the thing obscure to you. But to feel its presence and to see
it is your assurance that many sane and solid minds are with you in what
you are experiencing: and this of itself spares you the pain of satirical
heat, and the bitter craving to strike heavy blows. You share the sublime
of wrath, that would not have hurt the foolish, but merely demonstrate
their foolishness. Moliere was contented to revenge himself on the
critics of the Ecole des Femmes, by writing the Critique de l'Ecole des
Femmes, one of the wisest as well as the playfullest of studies in
criticism. A perception of the comic spirit gives high fellowship. You
become a citizen of the selecter world, the highest we know of in
connection with our old world, which is not supermundane. Look there for
your unchallengeable upper class! You feel that you are one of this our
civilized community, that you cannot escape from it, and would not if you
could. Good hope sustains you; weariness does not overwhelm you; in
isolation you see no charms for vanity; personal pride is greatly
moderated. Nor shall your title of citizenship exclude you from worlds of
imagination or of devotion. The Comic spirit is not hostile to the
sweetest songfully poetic. Chaucer bubbles with it: Shakespeare
overflows: there is a mild moon's ray of it (pale with super-refinement
through distance from our flesh and blood planet) in Comus. Pope has it,
and it is the daylight side of the night half obscuring Cowper. It is
only hostile to the priestly element, when that, by baleful swelling,
transcends and overlaps the bounds of its office: and then, in extreme
cases, it is too true to itself to speak, and veils the lamp: as, for
example, the spectacle of Bossuet over the dead body of Moliere: at which
the dark angels may, but men do not laugh.

We have had comic pulpits, for a sign that the laughter-moving and the
worshipful may be in alliance: I know not how far comic, or how much
assisted in seeming so by the unexpectedness and the relief of its
appearance: at least they are popular, they are said to win the ear.
Laughter is open to perversion, like other good things; the scornful and
the brutal sorts are not unknown to us; but the laughter directed by the
Comic spirit is a harmless wine, conducing to sobriety in the degree that
it enlivens. It enters you like fresh air into a study; as when one of
the sudden contrasts of the comic idea floods the brain like reassuring
daylight. You are cognizant of the true kind by feeling that you take it
in, savour it, and have what flowers live on, natural air for food. That
which you give out--the joyful roar--is not the better part; let that go
to good fellowship and the benefit of the lungs. Aristophanes promises
his auditors that if they will retain the ideas of the comic poet
carefully, as they keep dried fruits in boxes, their garments shall smell
odoriferous of wisdom throughout the year. The boast will not be thought
an empty one by those who have choice friends that have stocked
themselves according to his directions. Such treasuries of sparkling
laughter are wells in our desert. Sensitiveness to the comic laugh is a
step in civilization. To shrink from being an object of it is a step in
cultivation. We know the degree of refinement in men by the matter they
will laugh at, and the ring of the laugh; but we know likewise that the
larger natures are distinguished by the great breadth of their power of
laughter, and no one really loving Moliere is refined by that love to
despise or be dense to Aristophanes, though it may be that the lover of
Aristophanes will not have risen to the height of Moliere. Embrace them
both, and you have the whole scale of laughter in your breast. Nothing in
the world surpasses in stormy fun the scene in The Frogs, when Bacchus
and Xanthias receive their thrashings from the hands of businesslike
OEacus, to discover which is the divinity of the two, by his
imperviousness to the mortal condition of pain, and each, under the
obligation of not crying out, makes believe that his horrible bellow--the
god's iou--iou being the lustier--means only the stopping of a sneeze, or
horseman sighted, or the prelude to an invocation to some deity: and the
slave contrives that the god shall get the bigger lot of blows. Passages
of Rabelais, one or two in Don Quixote, and the Supper in the Manner of
the Ancients, in Peregrine Pickle, are of a similar cataract of laughter.
But it is not illuminating; it is not the laughter of the mind. Moliere's
laughter, in his purest comedies, is ethereal, as light to our nature, as
colour to our thoughts. The Misanthrope and the Tartuffe have no audible
laughter; but the characters are steeped in the comic spirit. They
quicken the mind through laughter, from coming out of the mind; and the
mind accepts them because they are clear interpretations of certain
chapters of the Book lying open before us all. Between these two stand
Shakespeare and Cervantes, with the richer laugh of heart and mind in
one; with much of the Aristophanic robustness, something of Moliere's
delicacy.

The laughter heard in circles not pervaded by the Comic idea, will sound
harsh and soulless, like versified prose, if you step into them with a
sense of the distinction. You will fancy you have changed your habitation
to a planet remoter from the sun. You may be among powerful brains too.
You will not find poets--or but a stray one, over-worshipped. You will
find learned men undoubtedly, professors, reputed philosophers, and
illustrious dilettanti. They have in them, perhaps, every element
composing light, except the Comic. They read verse, they discourse of
art; but their eminent faculties are not under that vigilant sense of a
collective supervision, spiritual and present, which we have taken note
of. They build a temple of arrogance; they speak much in the voice of
oracles; their hilarity, if it does not dip in grossness, is usually a
form of pugnacity.

Insufficiency of sight in the eye looking outward has deprived them of
the eye that should look inward. They have never weighed themselves in
the delicate balance of the Comic idea so as to obtain a suspicion of the
rights and dues of the world; and they have, in consequence, an irritable
personality. A very learned English professor crushed an argument in a
political discussion, by asking his adversary angrily: 'Are you aware,
sir, that I am a philologer?'

The practice of polite society will help in training them, and the
professor on a sofa with beautiful ladies on each side of him, may become
their pupil and a scholar in manners without knowing it: he is at least a
fair and pleasing spectacle to the Comic Muse. But the society named
polite is volatile in its adorations, and to-morrow will be petting a
bronzed soldier, or a black African, or a prince, or a spiritualist:
ideas cannot take root in its ever-shifting soil. It is besides addicted
in self-defence to gabble exclusively of the affairs of its rapidly
revolving world, as children on a whirligoround bestow their attention on
the wooden horse or cradle ahead of them, to escape from giddiness and
preserve a notion of identity. The professor is better out of a circle
that often confounds by lionizing, sometimes annoys by abandoning, and
always confuses. The school that teaches gently what peril there is lest
a cultivated head should still be coxcomb's, and the collisions which may
befall high-soaring minds, empty or full, is more to be recommended than
the sphere of incessant motion supplying it with material.

Lands where the Comic spirit is obscure overhead are rank with raw crops
of matter. The traveller accustomed to smooth highways and people not
covered with burrs and prickles is amazed, amid so much that is fair and
cherishable, to come upon such curious barbarism. An Englishman paid a
visit of admiration to a professor in the Land of Culture, and was
introduced by him to another distinguished professor, to whom he took so
cordially as to walk out with him alone one afternoon. The first
professor, an erudite entirely worthy of the sentiment of scholarly
esteem prompting the visit, behaved (if we exclude the dagger) with the
vindictive jealousy of an injured Spanish beauty. After a short prelude
of gloom and obscure explosions, he discharged upon his faithless admirer
the bolts of passionate logic familiar to the ears of flighty
caballeros:--'Either I am a fit object of your admiration, or I am not.
Of these things one--either you are competent to judge, in which case I
stand condemned by you; or you are incompetent, and therefore
impertinent, and you may betake yourself to your country again,
hypocrite!' The admirer was for persuading the wounded scholar that it is
given to us to be able to admire two professors at a time. He was driven
forth.

Perhaps this might have occurred in any country, and a comedy of The
Pedant, discovering the greedy humanity within the dusty scholar, would
not bring it home to one in particular. I am mindful that it was in
Germany, when I observe that the Germans have gone through no comic
training to warn them of the sly, wise emanation eyeing them from aloft,
nor much of satirical. Heinrich Heine has not been enough to cause them
to smart and meditate. Nationally, as well as individually, when they are
excited they are in danger of the grotesque, as when, for instance, they
decline to listen to evidence, and raise a national outcry because one of
German blood has been convicted of crime in a foreign country. They are
acute critics, yet they still wield clubs in controversy. Compare them in
this respect with the people schooled in La Bruyere, La Fontaine,
Moliere; with the people who have the figures of a Trissotin and a Vadius
before them for a comic warning of the personal vanities of the caressed
professor. It is more than difference of race. It is the difference of
traditions, temper, and style, which comes of schooling.

The French controversialist is a polished swordsman, to be dreaded in his
graces and courtesies. The German is Orson, or the mob, or a marching
army, in defence of a good case or a bad--a big or a little. His irony is
a missile of terrific tonnage: sarcasm he emits like a blast from a
dragon's mouth. He must and will be Titan. He stamps his foe underfoot,
and is astonished that the creature is not dead, but stinging; for, in
truth, the Titan is contending, by comparison, with a god.

When the Germans lie on their arms, looking across the Alsatian frontier
at the crowds of Frenchmen rushing to applaud L'ami Fritz at the Theatre
Francais, looking and considering the meaning of that applause, which is
grimly comic in its political response to the domestic moral of the
play--when the Germans watch and are silent, their force of character
tells. They are kings in music, we may say princes in poetry, good
speculators in philosophy, and our leaders in scholarship. That so gifted
a race, possessed moreover of the stern good sense which collects the
waters of laughter to make the wells, should show at a disadvantage, I
hold for a proof, instructive to us, that the discipline of the comic
spirit is needful to their growth. We see what they can reach to in that
great figure of modern manhood, Goethe. They are a growing people; they
are conversable as well; and when their men, as in France, and at
intervals at Berlin tea-tables, consent to talk on equal terms with their
women, and to listen to them, their growth will be accelerated and be
shapelier. Comedy, or in any form the Comic spirit, will then come to
them to cut some figures out of the block, show them the mirror, enliven
and irradiate the social intelligence.

Modern French comedy is commendable for the directness of the study of
actual life, as far as that, which is but the early step in such a
scholarship, can be of service in composing and colouring the picture. A
consequence of this crude, though well-meant, realism is the collision of
the writers in their scenes and incidents, and in their characters. The
Muse of most of them is an Aventuriere. She is clever, and a certain
diversion exists in the united scheme for confounding her. The object of
this person is to reinstate herself in the decorous world; and either,
having accomplished this purpose through deceit, she has a nostalgie de
la boue, that eventually casts her back into it, or she is exposed in her
course of deception when she is about to gain her end. A very good,
innocent young man is her victim, or a very astute, goodish young man
obstructs her path. This latter is enabled to be the champion of the
decorous world by knowing the indecorous well. He has assisted in the
progress of Aventurieres downward; he will not help them to ascend. The
world is with him; and certainly it is not much of an ascension they
aspire to; but what sort of a figure is he? The triumph of a candid
realism is to show him no hero. You are to admire him (for it must be
supposed that realism pretends to waken some admiration) as a credibly
living young man; no better, only a little firmer and shrewder, than the
rest. If, however, you think at all, after the curtain has fallen, you
are likely to think that the Aventurieres have a case to plead against
him. True, and the author has not said anything to the contrary; he has
but painted from the life; he leaves his audience to the reflections of
unphilosophic minds upon life, from the specimen he has presented in the
bright and narrow circle of a spy-glass.

I do not know that the fly in amber is of any particular use, but the
Comic idea enclosed in a comedy makes it more generally perceptible and
portable, and that is an advantage. There is a benefit to men in taking
the lessons of Comedy in congregations, for it enlivens the wits; and to
writers it is beneficial, for they must have a clear scheme, and even if
they have no idea to present, they must prove that they have made the
public sit to them before the sitting to see the picture. And writing for
the stage would be a corrective of a too-incrusted scholarly style, into
which some great ones fall at times. It keeps minor writers to a definite
plan, and to English. Many of them now swelling a plethoric market, in
the composition of novels, in pun-manufactories and in journalism;
attached to the machinery forcing perishable matter on a public that
swallows voraciously and groans; might, with encouragement, be attending
to the study of art in literature. Our critics appear to be fascinated by
the quaintness of our public, as the world is when our beast-garden has a
new importation of magnitude, and the creatures appetite is reverently
consulted. They stipulate for a writer's popularity before they will do
much more than take the position of umpires to record his failure or
success. Now the pig supplies the most popular of dishes, but it is not
accounted the most honoured of animals, unless it be by the cottager. Our
public might surely be led to try other, perhaps finer, meat. It has good
taste in song. It might be taught as justly, on the whole, and the sooner
when the cottager's view of the feast shall cease to be the humble one of
our literary critics, to extend this capacity for delicate choosing in
the direction of the matter arousing laughter.




Footnotes:

{1} A lecture delivered at the London Institution, February 1st, 1877.

{2} Realism in the writing is carried to such a pitch in THE OLD
BACHELOR, that husband and wife use imbecile connubial epithets to one
another.

{3} Tallemant des Reaux, in his rough portrait of the Duke, shows the
foundation of the character of Alceste.

{4} See Tom Jones, book viii. chapter I, for Fielding's opinion of our
Comedy. But he puts it simply; not as an exercise in the
quasi-philosophical bathetic.

{5} Femmes Savantes:

BELISE: Veux-tu toute la vie offenser la grammaire?

MARTINE: Qui parle d'offenser grand'mere ni grand-pere?'

The pun is delivered in all sincerity, from the mouth of a rustic.

{6} Maskwell seems to have been carved on the model of Iago, as by the
hand of an enterprising urchin. He apostrophizes his 'invention'
repeatedly. 'Thanks, my invention.' He hits on an invention, to say: 'Was
it my brain or Providence? no matter which.' It is no matter which, but
it was not his brain.

{7} Imaginary Conversations: Alfieri and the Jew Salomon.

{8} Terence did not please the rough old conservative Romans; they liked
Plautus better, and the recurring mention of the vetus poeta in his
prologues, who plagued him with the crusty critical view of his
productions, has in the end a comic effect on the reader.

{9} The exclamation of Lady Booby, when Joseph defends himself: 'YOUR
VIRTUE! I shall never survive it!' etc., is another instance.--Joseph
Andrews. Also that of Miss Mathews in her narrative to Booth: 'But such
are the friendships of women.'--Amelia.




     ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS FOR THE PG SHORT WORKS OF MEREDITH:

     A wise man will not squander his laughter if he can help it
     A woman is hurt if you do not confide to her your plans
     A generous enemy is a friend on the wrong side
     A very doubtful benefit
     A great oration may be a sedative
     A male devotee is within an inch of a miracle
     Above Nature, I tell him, or, we shall be very much below
     Adversary at once offensive and helpless provokes brutality
     All are friends who sit at table
     All flattery is at somebody's expense
     Americans forgivingly remember, without mentioning
     As becomes them, they do not look ahead
     As in all great oratory! The key of it is the pathos
     Back from the altar to discover that she has chained herself
     Be what you seem, my little one
     Be philosophical, but accept your personal dues
     Bed was a rock of refuge and fortified defence
     But I leave it to you
     Can believe a woman to be any age when her cheeks are tinted
     Causes him to be popularly weighed
     Charges of cynicism are common against all satirists
     Civil tongue and rosy smiles sweeten even sour wine
     Cupid clipped of wing is a destructive parasite
     Dangerous things are uttered after the third glass
     Distinguished by his not allowing himself to be provoked
     Distrust us, and it is a declaration of war
     Eccentric behaviour in trifles
     Everywhere the badge of subjection is a poor stomach
     Excess of a merit is a capital offence in morality
     Excited, glad of catastrophe if it but killed monotony
     Face betokening the perpetual smack of lemon
     Fourth of the Georges
     Generally he noticed nothing
     Gentleman in a good state of preservation
     Good jokes are not always good policy
     Gratitude never was a woman's gift
     Happiness in love is a match between ecstasy and compliance
     Here and there a plain good soul to whom he was affectionate
     His idea of marriage is, the taking of the woman into custody
     Holy images, and other miraculous objects are sold
     I who respect the state of marriage by refusing
     I make a point of never recommending my own house
     I like him, I like him, of course, but I want to breathe
     I am a discordant instrument I do not readily vibrate
     If I do not speak of payment
     Imparting the usual chorus of yesses to his own mind
     In every difficulty, patience is a life-belt
     Indulged in their privilege of thinking what they liked
     Infants are said to have their ideas, and why not young ladies?
     Intellectual contempt of easy dupes
     Invite indecision to exhaust their scruples
     Is not one month of brightness as much as we can ask for?
     It was harder to be near and not close
     It is well to learn manners without having them imposed on us
     Knew my friend to be one of the most absent-minded of men
     Lend him your own generosity
     Love and war have been compared--Both require strategy
     Loving in this land: they all go mad, straight off
     Men love to boast of things nobody else has seen
     Men overweeningly in love with their creations
     Modest are the most easily intoxicated when they sip at vanity
     Must be the moralist in the satirist if satire is to strike
     Nature is not of necessity always roaring
     Naughtily Australian and kangarooly
     Never reckon on womankind for a wise act
     No flattery for me at the expense of my sisters
     Not a page of his books reveals malevolence or a sneer
     Not in love--She was only not unwilling to be in love
     Nothing desirable will you have which is not coveted
     Only to be described in the tongue of auctioneers
     Peace, I do pray, for the husband-haunted wife
     Period of his life a man becomes too voraciously constant
     Petty concessions are signs of weakness to the unsatisfied
     Pitiful conceit in men
     Primitive appetite for noise
     Rapture of obliviousness
     Rejoicing they have in their common agreement
     Respected the vegetable yet more than he esteemed the flower
     Rich and poor 's all right, if I'm rich and you're poor
     Self-incense
     Self-worship, which is often self-distrust
     She seems honest, and that is the most we can hope of girls
     She sought, by looking hard, to understand it better
     She might turn out good, if well guarded for a time
     She began to feel that this was life in earnest
     She dealt in the flashes which connect ideas
     Sign that the evil had reached from pricks to pokes
     So are great deeds judged when the danger's past (as easy)
     Soft slumber of a strength never yet called forth
     Spare me that word "female" as long as you live
     Statesman who stooped to conquer fact through fiction
     Sunning itself in the glass of Envy
     Suspects all young men and most young women
     Suspicion was her best witness
     Sweet treasure before which lies a dragon sleeping
     Telling her anything, she makes half a face in anticipation
     That which fine cookery does for the cementing of couples
     The intricate, which she takes for the infinite
     The social world he looked at did not show him heroes
     The alternative is, a garter and the bedpost
     The exhaustion ensuing we named tranquillity
     The mildness of assured dictatorship
     Their idol pitched before them on the floor
     They miss their pleasure in pursuing it
     This mania of young people for pleasure, eternal pleasure
     Tossed him from repulsion to incredulity, and so back
     Two principal roads by which poor sinners come to a conscience
     Utterance of generous and patriotic cries is not sufficient
     We grew accustomed to periods of Irish fever
     We like well whatso we have done good work for
     We trust them or we crush them
     Weak reeds who are easily vanquished and never overcome
     Weak stomach is certainly more carnally virtuous than a full one
     Were I chained, For liberty I would sell liberty
     When we see our veterans tottering to their fall
     When you have done laughing with her, you can laugh at her
     Wins everywhere back a reflection of its own kindliness
     Wits, which are ordinarily less productive than land
     Woman descending from her ideal to the gross reality of man
     Your devotion craves an enormous exchange






THE POETRY OF GEORGE MEREDITH

Contents:
     A Reading of Life, and Other Poems
     Poems, Volume 1.
     Poems, Volume 2.
     Poems, Volume 3.


A Reading Of life


[This Project Gutenberg Etext was orignally prepared from a 1901
edition by David Price]



     Contents:


     A Reading of Life - The Vital Choice
     A Reading of Life - With The Huntress
     A Reading of Life - With The Persuader
     A Reading of Life - The Test Of Manhood
     The Cageing Of Ares
     The Night-Walk
     The Hueless Love
     Song In The Songless
     Union In Disseverance
     The Burden Of Strength
     The Main Regret
     Alternation
     Hawarden
     At The Close
     Forest History
     A Garden Idyl
     Foresight And Patience
     The Invective Of Achilles
     The Invective of Achilles - V. 225.
     Marshalling Of The Achaians
     Agamemnon In The Fight
     Paris And Diomedes
     Hypnos On Ida
     Clash In Arms Of The Achaians And Trojans
     The Horses Of Achilles
     The Mares Of The Camargue



     Poem: A Reading of Life - The vital choice



     I.

     Or shall we run with Artemis
     Or yield the breast to Aphrodite?
     Both are mighty;
     Both give bliss;
     Each can torture if divided;
     Each claims worship undivided,
     In her wake would have us wallow.

     II.

     Youth must offer on bent knees
     Homage unto one or other;
     Earth, the mother,
     This decrees;
     And unto the pallid Scyther
     Either points us shun we either
     Shun or too devoutly follow.



     Poem: A Reading of Life - With The Huntress



     Through the water-eye of night,
     Midway between eve and dawn,
     See the chase, the rout, the flight
     In deep forest; oread, faun,
     Goat-foot, antlers laid on neck;
     Ravenous all the line for speed.
     See yon wavy sparkle beck
     Sign of the Virgin Lady's lead.
     Down her course a serpent star
     Coils and shatters at her heels;
     Peals the horn exulting, peals
     Plaintive, is it near or far.
     Huntress, arrowy to pursue,
     In and out of woody glen,
     Under cliffs that tear the blue,
     Over torrent, over fen,
     She and forest, where she skims
     Feathery, darken and relume:
     Those are her white-lightning limbs
     Cleaving loads of leafy gloom.
     Mountains hear her and call back,
     Shrewd with night: a frosty wail
     Distant: her the emerald vale
     Folds, and wonders in her track.
     Now her retinue is lean,
     Many rearward; streams the chase
     Eager forth of covert; seen
     One hot tide the rapturous race.
     Quiver-charged and crescent-crowned,
     Up on a flash the lighted mound
     Leaps she, bow to shoulder, shaft
     Strung to barb with archer's craft,
     Legs like plaited lyre-chords, feet
     Songs to see, past pitch of sweet.
     Fearful swiftness they outrun,
     Shaggy wildness, grey or dun,
     Challenge, charge of tusks elude:
     Theirs the dance to tame the rude;
     Beast, and beast in manhood tame,
     Follow we their silver flame.
     Pride of flesh from bondage free,
     Reaping vigour of its waste,
     Marks her servitors, and she
     Sanctifies the unembraced.
     Nought of perilous she reeks;
     Valour clothes her open breast;
     Sweet beyond the thrill of sex;
     Hallowed by the sex confessed.
     Huntress arrowy to pursue,
     Colder she than sunless dew,
     She, that breath of upper air;
     Ay, but never lyrist sang,
     Draught of Bacchus never sprang
     Blood the bliss of Gods to share,
     High o'er sweep of eagle wings,
     Like the run with her, when rings
     Clear her rally, and her dart,
     In the forest's cavern heart,
     Tells of her victorious aim.
     Then is pause and chatter, cheer,
     Laughter at some satyr lame,
     Looks upon the fallen deer,
     Measuring his noble crest;
     Here a favourite in her train,
     Foremost mid her nymphs, caressed;
     All applauded. Shall she reign
     Worshipped? O to be with her there!
     She, that breath of nimble air,
     Lifts the breast to giant power.
     Maid and man, and man and maid,
     Who each other would devour
     Elsewhere, by the chase betrayed,
     There are comrades, led by her,
     Maid-preserver, man-maker.



     Poem: A Reading of Life - With The Persuader



     Who murmurs, hither, hither: who
     Where nought is audible so fills the ear?
     Where nought is visible can make appear
     A veil with eyes that waver through,
     Like twilight's pledge of blessed night to come,
     Or day most golden? All unseen and dumb,
     She breathes, she moves, inviting flees,
     Is lost, and leaves the thrilled desire
     To clasp and strike a slackened lyre,
     Till over smiles of hyacinth seas,
     Flame in a crystal vessel sails
     Beneath a dome of jewelled spray,
     For land that drops the rosy day
     On nights of throbbing nightingales.

     Landward did the wonder flit,
     Or heart's desire of her, all earth in it.
     We saw the heavens fling down their rose;
     On rapturous waves we saw her glide;
     The pearly sea-shell half enclose;
     The shoal of sea-nymphs flush the tide;
     And we, afire to kiss her feet, no more
     Behold than tracks along a startled shore,
     With brightened edges of dark leaves that feign
     An ambush hoped, as heartless night remain.

     More closely, warmly: hither, hither! she,
     The very she called forth by ripened blood
     For its next breath of being, murmurs; she,
     Allurement; she, fulfilment; she,
     The stream within us urged to flood;
     Man's cry, earth's answer, heaven's consent; O she,
     Maid, woman and divinity;
     Our over-earthly, inner-earthly mate
     Unmated; she, our hunger and our fruit
     Untasted; she our written fate
     Unread; Life's flowering, Life's root:
     Unread, divined; unseen, beheld;
     The evanescent, ever-present she,
     Great Nature's stern necessity
     In radiance clothed, to softness quelled;
     With a sword's edge of sweetness keen to take
     Our breath for bliss, our hearts for fulness break.

     The murmur hushes down, the veil is rent.
     Man's cry, earth's answer, heaven's consent,
     Her form is given to pardoned sight,
     And lets our mortal eyes receive
     The sovereign loveliness of celestial white;
     Adored by them who solitarily pace,
     In dusk of the underworld's perpetual eve,
     The paths among the meadow asphodel,
     Remembering. Never there her face
     Is planetary; reddens to shore sea-shell
     Around such whiteness the enamoured air
     Of noon that clothes her, never there.
     Daughter of light, the joyful light,
     She stands unveiled to nuptial sight,
     Sweet in her disregard of aid
     Divine to conquer or persuade.
     A fountain jets from moss; a flower
     Bends gently where her sunset tresses shower.
     By guerdon of her brilliance may be seen
     With eyelids unabashed the passion's Queen.

     Shorn of attendant Graces she can use
     Her natural snares to make her will supreme.
     A simple nymph it is, inclined to muse
     Before the leader foot shall dip in stream:
     One arm at curve along a rounded thigh;
     Her firm new breasts each pointing its own way
     A knee half bent to shade its fellow shy,
     Where innocence, not nature, signals nay.
     The bud of fresh virginity awaits
     The wooer, and all roseate will she burst:
     She touches on the hour of happy mates;
     Still is she unaware she wakens thirst.

     And while commanding blissful sight believe
     It holds her as a body strained to breast,
     Down on the underworld's perpetual eve
     She plunges the possessor dispossessed;
     And bids believe that image, heaving warm,
     Is lost to float like torch-smoke after flame;
     The phantom any breeze blows out of form;
     A thirst's delusion, a defeated aim.

     The rapture shed the torture weaves;
     The direst blow on human heart she deals:
     The pain to know the seen deceives;
     Nought true but what insufferably feels.
     And stabs of her delicious note,
     That is as heavenly light to hearing, heard
     Through shelter leaves, the laughter from her throat,
     We answer as the midnight's morning's bird.

     She laughs, she wakens gleeful cries;
     In her delicious laughter part revealed;
     Yet mother is she more of moans and sighs,
     For longings unappeased and wounds unhealed.
     Yet would she bless, it is her task to bless:
     Yon folded couples, passing under shade,
     Are her rich harvest; bidden caress, caress,
     Consume the fruit in bloom; not disobeyed.
     We dolorous complainers had a dream,
     Wrought on the vacant air from inner fire,
     We saw stand bare of her celestial beam
     The glorious Goddess, and we dared desire.

     Thereat are shown reproachful eyes, and lips
     Of upward curl to meanings half obscure;
     And glancing where a wood-nymph lightly skips
     She nods: at once that creature wears her lure.
     Blush of our being between birth and death:
     Sob of our ripened blood for its next breath:
     Her wily semblance nought of her denies;
     Seems it the Goddess runs, the Goddess hies,
     The generous Goddess yields. And she can arm
     Her dwarfed and twisted with her secret charm;
     Benevolent as Earth to feed her own.
     Fully shall they be fed, if they beseech.
     But scorn she has for them that walk alone;
     Blanched men, starved women, whom no arts can pleach.
     The men as chief of criminals she disdains,
     And holds the reason in perceptive thought.
     More pitiable, like rivers lacking rains,
     Kissing cold stones, the women shrink for drought.
     Those faceless discords, out of nature strayed,
     Rank of the putrefaction ere decayed,
     In impious singles bear the thorny wreaths:
     Their lives are where harmonious Pleasure breathes
     For couples crowned with flowers that burn in dew.
     Comes there a tremor of night's forest horn
     Across her garden from the insaner crew,
     She darkens to malignity of scorn.
     A shiver courses through her garden-grounds:
     Grunt of the tusky boar, the baying hounds,
     The hunter's shouts, are heard afar, and bring
     Dead on her heart her crimsoned flower of Spring.
     These, the irreverent of Life's design,
     Division between natural and divine
     Would cast; these vaunting barrenness for best,
     In veins of gathered strength Life's tide arrest;
     And these because the roses flood their cheeks,
     Vow them in nature wise as when Love speaks.
     With them is war; and well the Goddess knows
     What undermines the race who mount the rose;
     How the ripe moment, lodged in slumberous hours,
     Enkindled by persuasion overpowers:
     Why weak as are her frailer trailing weeds,
     The strong when Beauty gleams o'er Nature's needs,
     And timely guile unguarded finds them lie.
     They who her sway withstand a sea defy,
     At every point of juncture must be proof;
     Nor look for mercy from the incessant surge
     Her forces mixed of craft and passion urge
     For the one whelming wave to spring aloof.
     She, tenderness, is pitiless to them
     Resisting in her godhead nature's truth.
     No flower their face shall be, but writhen stem;
     Their youth a frost, their age the dirge for youth.
     These miserably disinclined,
     The lamentably unembraced,
     Insult the Pleasures Earth designed
     To people and beflower the waste.
     Wherefore the Pleasures pass them by:
     For death they live, in life they die.

     Her head the Goddess from them turns,
     As from grey mounds of ashes in bronze urns.
     She views her quivering couples unconsoled,
     And of her beauty mirror they become,
     Like orchard blossoms, apple, pear and plum,
     Free of the cloud, beneath the flood of gold.
     Crowned with wreaths that burn in dew,
     Her couples whirl, sun-satiated,
     Athirst for shade, they sigh, they wed,
     They play the music made of two:
     Oldest of earth, earth's youngest till earth's end:
     Cunninger than the numbered strings,
     For melodies, for harmonies,
     For mastered discords, and the things
     Not vocable, whose mysteries
     Are inmost Love's, Life's reach of Life extend.

     Is it an anguish overflowing shame
     And the tongue's pudency confides to her,
     With eyes of embers, breath of incense myrrh,
     The woman's marrow in some dear youth's name,
     Then is the Goddess tenderness
     Maternal, and she has a sister's tones
     Benign to soothe intemperate distress,
     Divide despair from hope, and sighs from moans.
     Her gentleness imparts exhaling ease
     To those of her milk-bearer votaries
     As warm of bosom-earth as she; of the source
     Direct; erratic but in heart's excess;
     Being mortal and ill-matched for Love's great force;
     Like green leaves caught with flames by his impress.
     And pray they under skies less overcast,
     That swiftly may her star of eve descend,
     Her lustrous morning star fly not too fast,
     To lengthen blissful night will she befriend.

     Unfailing her reply to woman's voice
     In supplication instant. Is it man's,
     She hears, approves his words, her garden scans,
     And him: the flowers are various, he has choice.
     Perchance his wound is deep; she listens long;
     Enjoys what music fills the plaintive song;
     And marks how he, who would be hawk at poise
     Above the bird, his plaintive song enjoys.

     She reads him when his humbled manhood weeps
     To her invoked: distraction is implored.
     A smile, and he is up on godlike leaps
     Above, with his bright Goddess owned the adored.
     His tales of her declare she condescends;
     Can share his fires, not always goads and rends:
     Moreover, quits a throne, and must enclose
     A queenlier gem than woman's wayside rose.
     She bends, he quickens; she breathes low, he springs
     Enraptured; low she laughs, his woes disperse;
     Aloud she laughs and sweeps his varied strings.
     'Tis taught him how for touch of mournful verse
     Rarely the music made of two ascends,
     And Beauty's Queen some other way is won.
     Or it may solve the riddle, that she lends
     Herself to all, and yields herself to none,
     Save heavenliest: though claims by men are raised
     In hot assurance under shade of doubt:
     And numerous are the images bepraised
     As Beauty's Queen, should passion head the rout.

     Be sure the ruddy hue is Love's: to woo
     Love's Fountain we must mount the ruddy hue.
     That is her garden's precept, seen where shines
     Her blood-flower, and its unsought neighbour pines.
     Daughter of light, the joyful light,
     She bids her couples face full East,
     Reflecting radiance, even when from her feast
     Their outstretched arms brown deserts disunite,
     The lion-haunted thickets hold apart.
     In love the ruddy hue declares great heart;
     High confidence in her whose aid is lent
     To lovers lifting the tuned instrument,
     Not one of rippled strings and funeral tone.
     And doth the man pursue a tightened zone,
     Then be it as the Laurel God he runs,
     Confirmed to win, with countenance the Sun's.

     Should pity bless the tremulous voice of woe
     He lifts for pity, limp his offspring show.
     For him requiring woman's arts to please
     Infantile tastes with babe reluctances,
     No race of giants! In the woman's veins
     Persuasion ripely runs, through hers the pains.
     Her choice of him, should kind occasion nod,
     Aspiring blends the Titan with the God;
     Yet unto dwarf and mortal, she, submiss
     In her high Lady's mandate, yields the kiss;
     And is it needed that Love's daintier brute
     Be snared as hunter, she will tempt pursuit.
     She is great Nature's ever intimate
     In breast, and doth as ready handmaid wait,
     Until perverted by her senseless male,
     She plays the winding snake, the shrinking snail,
     The flying deer, all tricks of evil fame,
     Elusive to allure, since he grew tame.

     Hence has the Goddess, Nature's earliest Power,
     And greatest and most present, with her dower
     Of the transcendent beauty, gained repute
     For meditated guile. She laughs to hear
     A charge her garden's labyrinths scarce confute,
     Her garden's histories tell of to all near.
     Let it be said, But less upon her guile
     Doth she rely for her immortal smile.
     Still let the rumour spread, and terror screens
     To push her conquests by the simplest means.
     While man abjures not lustihead, nor swerves
     From earth's good labours, Beauty's Queen he serves.

     Her spacious garden and her garden's grant
     She offers in reward for handsome cheer:
     Choice of the nymphs whose looks will slant
     The secret down a dewy leer
     Of corner eyelids into haze:
     Many a fair Aphrosyne
     Like flower-bell to honey-bee:
     And here they flicker round the maze
     Bewildering him in heart and head:
     And here they wear the close demure,
     With subtle peeps to reassure:
     Others parade where love has bled,
     And of its crimson weave their mesh:
     Others to snap of fingers leap,
     As bearing breast with love asleep.
     These are her laughters in the flesh.
     Or would she fit a warrior mood,
     She lights her seeming unsubdued,
     And indicates the fortress-key.
     Or is it heart for heart that craves,
     She flecks along a run of waves
     The one to promise deeper sea.

     Bands of her limpid primitives,
     Or patterned in the curious braid,
     Are the blest man's; and whatsoever he gives,
     For what he gives is he repaid.
     Good is it if by him 'tis held
     He wins the fairest ever welled
     From Nature's founts: she whispers it: Even I
     Not fairer! and forbids him to deny,
     Else little is he lover. Those he clasps,
     Intent as tempest, worshipful as prayer, -
     And be they doves or be they asps, -
     Must seem to him the sovereignty fair;
     Else counts he soon among life's wholly tamed.
     Him whom from utter savage she reclaimed,
     Half savage must he stay, would he be crowned
     The lover. Else, past ripeness, deathward bound,
     He reasons; and the totterer Earth detests,
     Love shuns, grim logic screws in grasp, is he.
     Doth man divide divine Necessity
     From Joy, between the Queen of Beauty's breasts
     A sword is driven; for those most glorious twain
     Present her; armed to bless and to constrain.
     Of this he perishes; not she, the throned
     On rocks that spout their springs to the sacred mounts.
     A loftier Reason out of deeper founts
     Earth's chosen Goddess bears: by none disowned
     While red blood runs to swell the pulse, she boasts,
     And Beauty, like her star, descends the sky;
     Earth's answer, heaven's consent unto man's cry,
     Uplifted by the innumerable hosts.

     Quickened of Nature's eye and ear,
     When the wild sap at high tide smites
     Within us; or benignly clear
     To vision; or as the iris lights
     On fluctuant waters; she is ours
     Till set of man: the dreamed, the seen;
     Flushing the world with odorous flowers:
     A soft compulsion on terrene
     By heavenly: and the world is hers
     While hunger after Beauty spurs.

     So is it sung in any space
     She fills, with laugh at shallow laws
     Forbidding love's devised embrace,
     The music Beauty from it draws.



     Poem: A Reading of Life - The Test Of Manhood



     Like a flood river whirled at rocky banks,
     An army issues out of wilderness,
     With battle plucking round its ragged flanks;
     Obstruction in the van; insane excess
     Oft at the heart; yet hard the onward stress
     Unto more spacious, where move ordered ranks,
     And rise hushed temples built of shapely stone,
     The work of hands not pledged to grind or slay.
     They gave our earth a dress of flesh on bone;
     A tongue to speak with answering heaven gave they.
     Then was the gracious birth of man's new day;
     Divided from the haunted night it shone.

     That quiet dawn was Reverence; whereof sprang
     Ethereal Beauty in full morningtide.
     Another sun had risen to clasp his bride:
     It was another earth unto him sang.

     Came Reverence from the Huntress on her heights?
     From the Persuader came it, in those vales
     Whereunto she melodiously invites,
     Her troops of eager servitors regales?
     Not far those two great Powers of Nature speed
     Disciple steps on earth when sole they lead;
     Nor either points for us the way of flame.
     From him predestined mightier it came;
     His task to hold them both in breast, and yield
     Their dues to each, and of their war be field.

     The foes that in repulsion never ceased,
     Must he, who once has been the goodly beast
     Of one or other, at whose beck he ran,
     Constrain to make him serviceable man;
     Offending neither, nor the natural claim
     Each pressed, denying, for his true man's name.

     Ah, what a sweat of anguish in that strife
     To hold them fast conjoined within him still;
     Submissive to his will
     Along the road of life!
     And marvel not he wavered if at whiles
     The forward step met frowns, the backward smiles.
     For Pleasure witched him her sweet cup to drain;
     Repentance offered ecstasy in pain.
     Delicious licence called it Nature's cry;
     Ascetic rigours crushed the fleshly sigh;
     A tread on shingle timed his lame advance
     Flung as the die of Bacchanalian Chance,
     He of the troubled marching army leaned
     On godhead visible, on godhead screened;
     The radiant roseate, the curtained white;
     Yet sharp his battle strained through day, through night.

     He drank of fictions, till celestial aid
     Might seem accorded when he fawned and prayed;
     Sagely the generous Giver circumspect,
     To choose for grants the egregious, his elect;
     And ever that imagined succour slew
     The soul of brotherhood whence Reverence drew.

     In fellowship religion has its founts:
     The solitary his own God reveres:
     Ascend no sacred Mounts
     Our hungers or our fears.
     As only for the numbers Nature's care
     Is shown, and she the personal nothing heeds,
     So to Divinity the spring of prayer
     From brotherhood the one way upward leads.
     Like the sustaining air
     Are both for flowers and weeds.
     But he who claims in spirit to be flower,
     Will find them both an air that doth devour.

     Whereby he smelt his treason, who implored
     External gifts bestowed but on the sword;
     Beheld himself, with less and less disguise,
     Through those blood-cataracts which dimmed his eyes,
     His army's foe, condemned to strive and fail;
     See a black adversary's ghost prevail;
     Never, though triumphs hailed him, hope to win
     While still the conflict tore his breast within.

     Out of that agony, misread for those
     Imprisoned Powers warring unappeased,
     The ghost of his black adversary rose,
     To smother light, shut heaven, show earth diseased.
     And long with him was wrestling ere emerged
     A mind to read in him the reflex shade
     Of its fierce torment; this way, that way urged;
     By craven compromises hourly swayed.

     Crouched as a nestling, still its wings untried,
     The man's mind opened under weight of cloud.
     To penetrate the dark was it endowed;
     Stood day before a vision shooting wide.
     Whereat the spectral enemy lost form;
     The traversed wilderness exposed its track.
     He felt the far advance in looking back;
     Thence trust in his foot forward through the storm.

     Under the low-browed tempest's eye of ire,
     That ere it lightened smote a coward heart,
     Earth nerved her chastened son to hail athwart
     All ventures perilous his shrouded Sire;
     A stranger still, religiously divined;
     Not yet with understanding read aright.
     But when the mind, the cherishable mind,
     The multitude's grave shepherd, took full flight,
     Himself as mirror raised among his kind,
     He saw, and first of brotherhood had sight:
     Knew that his force to fly, his will to see,
     His heart enlarged beyond its ribbed domain,
     Had come of many a grip in mastery,
     Which held conjoined the hostile rival twain,
     And of his bosom made him lord, to keep
     The starry roof of his unruffled frame
     Awake to earth, to heaven, and plumb the deep
     Below, above, aye with a wistful aim.

     The mastering mind in him, by tempests blown,
     By traitor inmates baited, upward burned;
     Perforce of growth, the Master mind discerned,
     The Great Unseen, nowise the Dark Unknown.
     To whom unwittingly did he aspire
     In wilderness, where bitter was his need:
     To whom in blindness, as an earthy seed
     For light and air, he struck through crimson mire.
     But not ere he upheld a forehead lamp,
     And viewed an army, once the seeming doomed,
     All choral in its fruitful garden camp,
     The spiritual the palpable illumed.

     This gift of penetration and embrace,
     His prize from tidal battles lost or won,
     Reveals the scheme to animate his race:
     How that it is a warfare but begun;
     Unending; with no Power to interpose;
     No prayer, save for strength to keep his ground,
     Heard of the Highest; never battle's close,
     The victory complete and victor crowned:
     Nor solace in defeat, save from that sense
     Of strength well spent, which is the strength renewed.
     In manhood must he find his competence;
     In his clear mind the spiritual food:
     God being there while he his fight maintains;
     Throughout his mind the Master Mind being there,
     While he rejects the suicide despair;
     Accepts the spur of explicable pains;
     Obedient to Nature, not her slave:
     Her lord, if to her rigid laws he bows;
     Her dust, if with his conscience he plays knave,
     And bids the Passions on the Pleasures browse:-
     Whence Evil in a world unread before;
     That mystery to simple springs resolved.
     His God the Known, diviner to adore,
     Shows Nature's savage riddles kindly solved.
     Inconscient, insensitive, she reigns
     In iron laws, though rapturous fair her face.
     Back to the primal brute shall he retrace
     His path, doth he permit to force her chains
     A soft Persuader coursing through his veins,
     An icy Huntress stringing to the chase:
     What one the flash disdains;
     What one so gives it grace.

     But is he rightly manful in her eyes,
     A splendid bloodless knight to gain the skies,
     A blood-hot son of Earth by all her signs,
     Desireing and desireable he shines;
     As peaches, that have caught the sun's uprise
     And kissed warm gold till noonday, even as vines.
     Earth fills him with her juices, without fear
     That she will cast him drunken down the steeps.
     All woman is she to this man most dear;
     He sows for bread, and she in spirit reaps:
     She conscient, she sensitive, in him;
     With him enwound, his brave ambition hers:
     By him humaner made; by his keen spurs
     Pricked to race past the pride in giant limb,
     Her crazy adoration of big thews,
     Proud in her primal sons, when crags they hurled,
     Were thunder spitting lightnings on the world
     In daily deeds, and she their evening Muse.

     This man, this hero, works not to destroy;
     This godlike - as the rock in ocean stands; -
     He of the myriad eyes, the myriad hands
     Creative; in his edifice has joy.
     How strength may serve for purity is shown
     When he himself can scourge to make it clean.
     Withal his pitch of pride would not disown
     A sober world that walks the balanced mean
     Between its tempters, rarely overthrown:
     And such at times his army's march has been.

     Near is he to great Nature in the thought
     Each changing Season intimately saith,
     That nought save apparition knows the death;
     To the God-lighted mind of man 'tis nought.
     She counts not loss a word of any weight;
     It may befal his passions and his greeds
     To lose their treasures, like the vein that bleeds,
     But life gone breathless will she reinstate.

     Close on the heart of Earth his bosom beats,
     When he the mandate lodged in it obeys,
     Alive to breast a future wrapped in haze,
     Strike camp, and onward, like the wind's cloud-fleets.
     Unresting she, unresting he, from change
     To change, as rain of cloud, as fruit of rain;
     She feels her blood-tree throbbing in her grain,
     Yet skyward branched, with loftier mark and range.

     No miracle the sprout of wheat from clod,
     She knows, nor growth of man in grisly brute;
     But he, the flower at head and soil at root,
     Is miracle, guides he the brute to God.
     And that way seems he bound; that way the road,
     With his dark-lantern mind, unled, alone,
     Wearifully through forest-tracts unsown,
     He travels, urged by some internal goad.

     Dares he behold the thing he is, what thing
     He would become is in his mind its child;
     Astir, demanding birth to light and wing;
     For battle prompt, by pleasure unbeguiled.
     So moves he forth in faith, if he has made
     His mind God's temple, dedicate to truth.
     Earth's nourishing delights, no more gainsaid,
     He tastes, as doth the bridegroom rich in youth.
     Then knows he Love, that beckons and controls;
     The star of sky upon his footway cast;
     Then match in him who holds his tempters fast,
     The body's love and mind's, whereof the soul's.
     Then Earth her man for woman finds at last,
     To speed the pair unto her goal of goals.

     Or is't the widowed's dream of her new mate?
     Seen has she virulent days of heat in flood;
     The sly Persuader snaky in his blood;
     With her the barren Huntress alternate;
     His rough refractory off on kicking heels
     To rear; the man dragged rearward, shamed, amazed;
     And as a torrent stream where cattle grazed,
     His tumbled world. What, then, the faith she feels?
     May not his aspect, like her own so fair
     Reflexively, the central force belie,
     And he, the once wild ocean storming sky,
     Be rebel at the core? What hope is there?

     'Tis that in each recovery he preserves,
     Between his upper and his nether wit,
     Sense of his march ahead, more brightly lit;
     He less the shaken thing of lusts and nerves;
     With such a grasp upon his brute as tells
     Of wisdom from that vile relapsing spun.
     A Sun goes down in wasted fire, a Sun
     Resplendent springs, to faith refreshed compels.



     Poem: The Cageing Of Ares



     [Iliad, v. V. 385 - Dedicated to the Council at The Hague.]

     How big of breast our Mother Gaea laughed
     At sight of her boy Giants on the leap
     Each over other as they neighboured home,
     Fronting the day's descent across green slopes,
     And up fired mountain crags their shadows danced.
     Close with them in their fun, she scarce could guess,
     Though these two billowy urchins reeked of craft,
     It signalled some adventurous master-trick
     To set Olympians buzzing in debate,
     Lest it might be their godhead undermined,
     The Tyranny menaced. Ephialtes high
     On shoulders of his brother Otos waved
     For the bull-bellowings given to grand good news,
     Compact, complexioned in his gleeful roar
     While Otos aped the prisoner's wrists and knees,
     With doleful sniffs between recurrent howls;
     Till Gaea's lap receiving them, they stretched,
     And both upon her bosom shaken to speech,
     Burst the hot story out of throats of both,
     Like rocky head-founts, baffling in their glut
     The hurried spout. And as when drifting storm
     Disburdened loses clasp of here and yon
     A peak, a forest mound, a valley's gleam
     Of grass and the river's crooks and snaky coils,
     Signification marvellous she caught,
     Through gurglings of triumphant jollity,
     Which now engulphed and now gave eye; at last
     Subsided, and the serious naked deed,
     With mountain-cloud of laughter banked around,
     Stood in her sight confirmed: she could believe
     That these, her sprouts of promise, her most prized,
     These two made up of lion, bear and fox,
     Her sportive, suckling mammoths, her young joy,
     Still by the reckoning infants among men,
     Had done the deed to strike the Titan host
     In envy dumb, in envious heart elate:
     These two combining strength and craft had snared,
     Enmeshed, bound fast with thongs, discreetly caged
     The blood-shedder, the terrible Lord of War;
     Destroyer, ravager, superb in plumes;
     The barren furrower of anointed fields;
     The scarlet heel in towns, foul smoke to sky,
     Her hated enemy, too long her scourge:
     Great Ares. And they gagged his trumpet mouth
     When they had seized on his implacable spear,
     Hugged him to reedy helplessness despite
     His godlike fury startled from amaze.
     For he had eyed them nearing him in play,
     The giant cubs, who gambolled and who snarled,
     Unheeding his fell presence, by the mount
     Ossa, beside a brushwood cavern; there
     On Earth's original fisticuffs they called
     For ease of sharp dispute: whereat the God,
     Approving, deemed that sometime trained to arms,
     Good servitors of Ares they would be,
     And ply the pointed spear to dominate
     Their rebel restless fellows, villain brood
     Vowed to defy Immortals. So it chanced
     Amusedly he watched them, and as one
     The lusty twain were on him and they had him.
     Breath to us, Powers of air, for laughter loud!
     Cock of Olympus he, superb in plumes!
     Bound like a wheaten sheaf by those two babes!
     Because they knew our Mother Gaea loathed him,
     Knew him the famine, pestilence and waste;
     A desolating fire to blind the sight
     With splendour built of fruitful things in ashes;
     The gory chariot-wheel on cries for justice;
     Her deepest planted and her liveliest voice,
     Heard from the babe as from the broken crone.
     Behold him in his vessel of bronze encased,
     And tumbled down the cave. But rather look -
     Ah, that the woman tattler had not sought,
     Of all the Gods to let her secret fly,
     Hermes, after the thirteen songful months!
     Prompting the Dexterous to work his arts,
     And shatter earth's delirious holiday,
     Then first, as where the fountain runs a stream,
     Resolving to composure on its throbs.
     But see her in the Seasons through that year;
     That one glad year and the fair opening month.
     Had never our Great Mother such sweet face!
     War with her, gentle war with her, each day
     Her sons and daughters urged; at eve were flung,
     On the morrow stood to challenge; in their strength
     Renewed, indomitable; whereof they won,
     From hourly wrestlings up to shut of lids,
     Her ready secret: the abounding life
     Returned for valiant labour: she and they
     Defeated and victorious turn by turn;
     By loss enriched, by overthrow restored.
     Exchange of powers of this conflict came;
     Defacement none, nor ever squandered force.
     Is battle nature's mandate, here it reigned,
     As music unto the hand that smote the strings;
     And she the rosier from their showery brows,
     They fruitful from her ploughed and harrowed breast.
     Back to the primal rational of those
     Who suck the teats of milky earth, and clasp
     Stability in hatred of the insane,
     Man stepped; with wits less fearful to pronounce
     The mortal mind's concept of earth's divorced
     Above; those beautiful, those masterful,
     Those lawless. High they sit, and if descend,
     Descend to reap, not sowing. Is it just?
     Earth in her happy children asked that word,
     Whereto within their breast was her reply.
     Those beautiful, those masterful, those lawless,
     Enjoy the life prolonged, outleap the years;
     Yet they ('twas the Great Mother's voice inspired
     The audacious thought), they, glorious over dust,
     Outleap not her; disrooted from her soar,
     To meet the certain fate of earth's divorced,
     And clap lame wings across a wintry haze,
     Up to the farthest bourne: immortal still,
     Thenceforth innocuous; lovelier than when ruled
     The Tyranny. This her voice within them told,
     When softly the Great Mother chid her sons
     Not of the giant brood, who did create
     Those lawless Gods, first offspring of our brain
     Set moving by an abject blood, that waked
     To wanton under elements more benign,
     And planted aliens on Olympian heights; -
     Imagination's cradle poesy
     Become a monstrous pressure upon men; -
     Foes of good Gaea; until dispossessed
     By light from her, born of the love of her,
     Their lordship the illumined brain rejects
     For earth's beneficent, the sons of Law,
     Her other name. So spake she in their heart,
     Among the wheat-blades proud of stalk; beneath
     Young vine-leaves pushing timid fingers forth,
     Confidently to cling. And when brown corn
     Swayed armied ranks with softened cricket song,
     With gold necks bent for any zephyr's kiss;
     When vine-roots daily down a rubble soil
     Drank fire of heaven athirst to swell the grape;
     When swelled the grape, and in it held a ray,
     Rich issue of the embrace of heaven and earth;
     The very eye of passion drowsed by excess,
     And yet a burning lion for the spring;
     Then in that time of general cherishment,
     Sweet breathing balm and flutes by cool wood-side,
     He the harsh rouser of ire being absent, caged,
     Then did good Gaea's children gratefully
     Lift hymns to Gods they judged, but praised for peace,
     Delightful Peace, that answers Reason's call
     Harmoniously and images her Law;
     Reflects, and though short-lived as then, revives,
     In memories made present on the brain
     By natural yearnings, all the happy scenes;
     The picture of an earth allied to heaven;
     Between them the known smile behind black masks;
     Rightly their various moods interpreted;
     And frolic because toilful children borne
     With larger comprehension of Earth's aim
     At loftier, clearer, sweeter, by their aid.



     Poem: The Night-Walk



     Awakes for me and leaps from shroud
     All radiantly the moon's own night
     Of folded showers in streamer cloud;
     Our shadows down the highway white
     Or deep in woodland woven-boughed,
     With yon and yon a stem alight.

     I see marauder runagates
     Across us shoot their dusky wink;
     I hear the parliament of chats
     In haws beside the river's brink;
     And drops the vole off alder-banks,
     To push his arrow through the stream.
     These busy people had our thanks
     For tickling sight and sound, but theme
     They were not more than breath we drew
     Delighted with our world's embrace:
     The moss-root smell where beeches grew,
     And watered grass in breezy space;
     The silken heights, of ghostly bloom
     Among their folds, by distance draped.
     'Twas Youth, rapacious to consume,
     That cried to have its chaos shaped:
     Absorbing, little noting, still
     Enriched, and thinking it bestowed;
     With wistful looks on each far hill
     For something hidden, something owed.
     Unto his mantled sister, Day
     Had given the secret things we sought
     And she was grave and saintly gay;
     At times she fluttered, spoke her thought;
     She flew on it, then folded wings,
     In meditation passing lone,
     To breathe around the secret things,
     Which have no word, and yet are known;
     Of thirst for them are known, as air
     Is health in blood: we gained enough
     By this to feel it honest fare;
     Impalpable, not barren, stuff.

     A pride of legs in motion kept
     Our spirits to their task meanwhile,
     And what was deepest dreaming slept:
     The posts that named the swallowed mile;
     Beside the straight canal the hut
     Abandoned; near the river's source
     Its infant chirp; the shortest cut;
     The roadway missed; were our discourse;
     At times dear poets, whom some view
     Transcendent or subdued evoked
     To speak the memorable, the true,
     The luminous as a moon uncloaked;
     For proof that there, among earth's dumb,
     A soul had passed and said our best.
     Or it might be we chimed on some
     Historic favourite's astral crest,
     With part to reverence in its gleam,
     And part to rivalry the shout:
     So royal, unuttered, is youth's dream
     Of power within to strike without.
     But most the silences were sweet,
     Like mothers' breasts, to bid it feel
     It lived in such divine conceit
     As envies aught we stamp for real.

     To either then an untold tale
     Was Life, and author, hero, we.
     The chapters holding peaks to scale,
     Or depths to fathom, made our glee;
     For we were armed of inner fires,
     Unbled in us the ripe desires;
     And passion rolled a quiet sea,
     Whereon was Love the phantom sail.



     Poem: The Hueless Love



     Unto that love must we through fire attain,
     Which those two held as breath of common air;
     The hands of whom were given in bond elsewhere;
     Whom Honour was untroubled to restrain.

     Midway the road of our life's term they met,
     And one another knew without surprise;
     Nor cared that beauty stood in mutual eyes;
     Nor at their tardy meeting nursed regret.

     To them it was revealed how they had found
     The kindred nature and the needed mind;
     The mate by long conspiracy designed;
     The flower to plant in sanctuary ground.

     Avowed in vigilant solicitude
     For either, what most lived within each breast
     They let be seen: yet every human test
     Demanding righteousness approved them good.

     She leaned on a strong arm, and little feared
     Abandonment to help if heaved or sank
     Her heart at intervals while Love looked blank,
     Life rosier were she but less revered.

     An arm that never shook did not obscure
     Her woman's intuition of the bliss -
     Their tempter's moment o'er the black abyss,
     Across the narrow plank - he could abjure.

     Then came a day that clipped for him the thread,
     And their first touch of lips, as he lay cold,
     Was all of earthly in their love untold,
     Beyond all earthly known to them who wed.

     So has there come the gust at South-west flung
     By sudden volt on eves of freezing mist,
     When sister snowflake sister snowdrop kissed,
     And one passed out, and one the bell-head hung.



     Poem: Song In The Songless



     They have no song, the sedges dry,
     And still they sing.
     It is within my breast they sing,
     As I pass by.
     Within my breast they touch a string,
     They wake a sigh.
     There is but sound of sedges dry;
     In me they sing.



     Poem: Union In Disseverance



     Sunset worn to its last vermilion he;
     She that star overhead in slow descent:
     That white star with the front of angel she;
     He undone in his rays of glory spent

     Halo, fair as the bow-shot at his rise,
     He casts round her, and knows his hour of rest
     Incomplete, were the light for which he dies,
     Less like joy of the dove that wings to nest.

     Lustrous momently, near on earth she sinks;
     Life's full throb over breathless and abased:
     Yet stand they, though impalpable the links,
     One, more one than the bridally embraced.



     Poem: The Burden Of Strength



     If that thou hast the gift of strength, then know
     Thy part is to uplift the trodden low;
     Else in a giant's grasp until the end
     A hopeless wrestler shall thy soul contend.



     Poem: The Main Regret



     [Written for the Charing Cross Album]

     I.

     Seen, too clear and historic within us, our sins of omission
     Frown when the Autumn days strike us all ruthlessly bare.
     They of our mortal diseases find never healing physician;
     Errors they of the soul, past the one hope to repair.

     II.

     Sunshine might we have been unto seed under soil, or have scattered
     Seed to ascendant suns brighter than any that shone.
     Even the limp-legged beggar a sick desperado has flattered
     Back to a half-sloughed life cheered by the mere human tone.



     Poem: Alternation



     Between the fountain and the rill
     I passed, and saw the mighty will
     To leap at sky; the careless run,
     As earth would lead her little son.

     Beneath them throbs an urgent well,
     That here is play, and there is war.
     I know not which had most to tell
     Of whence we spring and what we are.



     Poem: Hawarden



     When comes the lighted day for men to read
     Life's meaning, with the work before their hands
     Till this good gift of breath from debt is freed,
     Earth will not hear her children's wailful bands
     Deplore the chieftain fall'n in sob and dirge;
     Nor they look where is darkness, but on high.
     The sun that dropped down our horizon's verge,
     Illumes his labours through the travelled sky,
     Now seen in sum, most glorious; and 'tis known
     By what our warrior wrought we hold him fast.
     A splendid image built of man has flown;
     His deeds inspired of God outstep a Past.
     Ours the great privilege to have had one
     Among us who celestial tasks has done.



     Poem: At The Close



     To Thee, dear God of Mercy, both appeal,
     Who straightway sound the call to arms. Thou know'st;
     And that black spot in each embattled host,
     Spring of the blood-stream, later wilt reveal.
     Now is it red artillery and white steel;
     Till on a day will ring the victor's boast,
     That 'tis Thy chosen towers uppermost,
     Where Thy rejected grovels under heel.
     So in all times of man's descent insane
     To brute, did strength and craft combining strike,
     Even as a God of Armies, his fell blow.
     But at the close he entered Thy domain,
     Dear God of Mercy, and if lion-like
     He tore the fall'n, the Eternal was his Foe.



     Poem: Forest History



     I.

     Beneath the vans of doom did men pass in.
     Heroic who came out; for round them hung
     A wavering phantom's red volcano tongue,
     With league-long lizard tail and fishy fin:

     II.

     Old Earth's original Dragon; there retired
     To his last fastness; overthrown by few.
     Him a laborious thrust of roadway slew.
     Then man to play devorant straight was fired.

     III.

     More intimate became the forest fear
     While pillared darkness hatched malicious life
     At either elbow, wolf or gnome or knife
     And wary slid the glance from ear to ear.

     IV.

     In chillness, like a clouded lantern-ray,
     The forest's heart of fog on mossed morass,
     On purple pool and silky cotton-grass,
     Revealed where lured the swallower byway.

     V.

     Dead outlook, flattened back with hard rebound
     Off walls of distance, left each mounted height.
     It seemed a giant hag-fiend, churning spite
     Of humble human being, held the ground.

     VI.

     Through friendless wastes, through treacherous woodland, slow
     The feet sustained by track of feet pursued
     Pained steps, and found the common brotherhood
     By sign of Heaven indifferent, Nature foe.

     VII.

     Anon a mason's work amazed the sight,
     And long-frocked men, called Brothers, there abode.
     They pointed up, bowed head, and dug and sowed;
     Whereof was shelter, loaf, and warm firelight.

     VIII.

     What words they taught were nails to scratch the head.
     Benignant works explained the chanting brood.
     Their monastery lit black solitude,
     As one might think a star that heavenward led.

     IX.

     Uprose a fairer nest for weary feet,
     Like some gold flower nightly inward curled,
     Where gentle maidens fled a roaring world,
     Or played with it, and had their white retreat.

     X.

     Into big books of metal clasps they pored.
     They governed, even as men; they welcomed lays.
     The treasures women are whose aim is praise,
     Was shown in them: the Garden half restored.

     XI.

     A deluge billow scoured the land off seas,
     With widened jaws, and slaughter was its foam.
     For food, for clothing, ambush, refuge, home,
     The lesser savage offered bogs and trees.

     XII.

     Whence reverence round grey-haired story grew:
     And inmost spots of ancient horror shone
     As temples under beams of trials bygone;
     For in them sang brave times with God in view.

     XIII.

     Till now trim homesteads bordered spaces green,
     Like night's first little stars through clearing showers.
     Was rumoured how a castle's falcon towers
     The wilderness commanded with fierce mien.

     XIV.

     Therein a serious Baron stuck his lance;
     For minstrel songs a beauteous Dame would pout.
     Gay knights and sombre, felon or devout,
     Pricked onward, bound for their unsung romance.

     XV.

     It might be that two errant lords across
     The block of each came edged, and at sharp cry
     They charged forthwith, the better man to try.
     One rode his way, one couched on quiet moss.

     XVI.

     Perchance a lady sweet, whose lord lay slain,
     The robbers into gruesome durance drew.
     Swift should her hero come, like lightning's blue!
     She prayed for him, as crackling drought for rain.

     XVII.

     As we, that ere the worst her hero haps,
     Of Angels guided, nigh that loathly den:
     A toady cave beside an ague fen,
     Where long forlorn the lone dog whines and yaps.

     XVIII.

     By daylight now the forest fear could read
     Itself, and at new wonders chuckling went.
     Straight for the roebuck's neck the bowman spent
     A dart that laughed at distance and at speed.

     XIX.

     Right loud the bugle's hallali elate
     Rang forth of merry dingles round the tors;
     And deftest hand was he from foreign wars,
     But soon he hailed the home-bred yeoman mate.

     XX.

     Before the blackbird pecked the turf they woke;
     At dawn the deer's wet nostrils blew their last.
     To forest, haunt of runs and prime repast,
     With paying blows, the yokel strained his yoke.

     XXI.

     The city urchin mooned on forest air,
     On grassy sweeps and flying arrows, thick
     As swallows o'er smooth streams, and sighed him sick
     For thinking that his dearer home was there.

     XXII.

     Familiar, still unseized, the forest sprang
     An old-world echo, like no mortal thing.
     The hunter's horn might wind a jocund ring,
     But held in ear it had a chilly clang.

     XXIII.

     Some shadow lurked aloof of ancient time;
     Some warning haunted any sound prolonged,
     As though the leagues of woodland held them wronged
     To hear an axe and see a township climb.

     XXIV.

     The forest's erewhile emperor at eve
     Had voice when lowered heavens drummed for gales.
     At midnight a small people danced the dales,
     So thin that they might dwindle through a sieve

     XXV.

     Ringed mushrooms told of them, and in their throats,
     Old wives that gathered herbs and knew too much.
     The pensioned forester beside his crutch,
     Struck showers from embers at those bodeful notes.

     XXVI.

     Came then the one, all ear, all eye, all heart;
     Devourer, and insensibly devoured;
     In whom the city over forest flowered,
     The forest wreathed the city's drama-mart.

     XXVII.

     There found he in new form that Dragon old,
     From tangled solitudes expelled; and taught
     How blindly each its antidote besought;
     For either's breath the needs of either told.

     XXVIII.

     Now deep in woods, with song no sermon's drone,
     He showed what charm the human concourse works:
     Amid the press of men, what virtue lurks
     Where bubble sacred wells of wildness lone.

     XXIX.

     Our conquest these: if haply we retain
     The reverence that ne'er will overrun
     Due boundaries of realms from Nature won,
     Nor let the poet's awe in rapture wane.



     Poem: A Garden Idyl



     With sagest craft Arachne worked
     Her web, and at a corner lurked,
     Awaiting what should plump her soon,
     To case it in the death-cocoon.
     Sagaciously her home she chose
     For visits that would never close;
     Inside my chalet-porch her feast
     Plucked all the winds but chill North-east.

     The finished structure, bar on bar,
     Had snatched from light to form a star,
     And struck on sight, when quick with dews,
     Like music of the very Muse.
     Great artists pass our single sense;
     We hear in seeing, strung to tense;
     Then haply marvel, groan mayhap,
     To think such beauty means a trap.
     But Nature's genius, even man's
     At best, is practical in plans;
     Subservient to the needy thought,
     However rare the weapon wrought.
     As long as Nature holds it good
     To urge her creatures' quest for food
     Will beauty stamp the just intent
     Of weapons upon service bent.
     For beauty is a flower of roots
     Embedded lower than our boots;
     Out of the primal strata springs,
     And shows for crown of useful things

     Arachne's dream of prey to size
     Aspired; so she could nigh despise
     The puny specks the breezes round
     Supplied, and let them shake unwound;
     Assured of her fat fly to come;
     Perhaps a blue, the spider's plum;
     Who takes the fatal odds in fight,
     And gives repast an appetite,
     By plunging, whizzing, till his wings
     Are webbed, and in the lists he swings,
     A shrouded lump, for her to see
     Her banquet in her victory.

     This matron of the unnumbered threads,
     One day of dandelions' heads
     Distributing their gray perruques
     Up every gust, I watched with looks
     Discreet beside the chalet-door;
     And gracefully a light wind bore,
     Direct upon my webster's wall,
     A monster in the form of ball;
     The mildest captive ever snared,
     That neither struggled nor despaired,
     On half the net invading hung,
     And plain as in her mother tongue,
     While low the weaver cursed her lures,
     Remarked, "You have me; I am yours."

     Thrice magnified, in phantom shape,
     Her dream of size she saw, agape.
     Midway the vast round-raying beard
     A desiccated midge appeared;
     Whose body pricked the name of meal,
     Whose hair had growth in earth's unreal;
     Provocative of dread and wrath,
     Contempt and horror, in one froth,
     Inextricable, insensible,
     His poison presence there would dwell,
     Declaring him her dream fulfilled,
     A catch to compliment the skilled;
     And she reduced to beaky skin,
     Disgraceful among kith and kin

     Against her corner, humped and aged,
     Arachne wrinkled, past enraged,
     Beyond disgust or hope in guile.
     Ridiculously volatile
     He seemed to her last spark of mind;
     And that in pallid ash declined
     Beneath the blow by knowledge dealt,
     Wherein throughout her frame she felt
     That he, the light wind's libertine,
     Without a scoff, without a grin,
     And mannered like the courtly few,
     Who merely danced when light winds blew,
     Impervious to beak and claws,
     Tradition's ruinous Whitebeard was;
     Of whom, as actors in old scenes,
     Had grannam weavers warned their weans,
     With word, that less than feather-weight,
     He smote the web like bolt of Fate.

     This muted drama, hour by hour,
     I watched amid a world in flower,
     Ere yet Autumnal threads had laid
     Their gray-blue o'er the grass's blade,
     And still along the garden-run
     The blindworm stretched him, drunk of sun.
     Arachne crouched unmoved; perchance
     Her visitor performed a dance;
     She puckered thinner; he the same
     As when on that light wind he came.

     Next day was told what deeds of night
     Were done; the web had vanished quite;
     With it the strange opposing pair;
     And listless waved on vacant air,
     For her adieu to heart's content,
     A solitary filament.



     Poem: Foresight And Patience



     Sprung of the father blood, the mother brain,
     Are they who point our pathway and sustain.
     They rarely meet; one soars, one walks retired.
     When they do meet, it is our earth inspired.

     To see Life's formless offspring and subdue
     Desire of times unripe, we have these two,
     Whose union is right reason: join they hands,
     The world shall know itself and where it stands;
     What cowering angel and what upright beast
     Make man, behold, nor count the low the least,
     Nor less the stars have round it than its flowers.
     When these two meet, a point of time is ours.

     As in a land of waterfalls, that flow
     Smooth for the leap on their great voice below,
     Some eddies near the brink borne swift along,
     Will capture hearing with the liquid song,
     So, while the headlong world's imperious force
     Resounded under, heard I these discourse.

     First words, where down my woodland walk she led,
     To her blind sister Patience, Foresight said:

     - Your faith in me appals, to shake my own,
     When still I find you in this mire alone.

     - The few steps taken at a funeral pace
     By men had slain me but for those you trace.

     - Look I once back, a broken pinion I:
     Black as the rebel angels rained from sky!

     - Needs must you drink of me while here you live,
     And make me rich in feeling I can give.

     - A brave To-be is dawn upon my brow:
     Yet must I read my sister for the How.
     My daisy better knows her God of beams
     Than doth an eagle that to mount him seems.
     She hath the secret never fieriest reach
     Of wing shall master till men hear her teach.

     - Liker the clod flaked by the driving plough,
     My semblance when I have you not as now.
     The quiet creatures who escape mishap
     Bear likeness to pure growths of the green sap:
     A picture of the settled peace desired
     By cowards shunning strife or strivers tired.
     I listen at their breasts: is there no jar
     Of wrestlings and of stranglings, dead they are,
     And such a picture as the piercing mind
     Ranks beneath vegetation. Not resigned
     Are my true pupils while the world is brute.
     What edict of the stronger keeps me mute,
     Stronger impels the motion of my heart.
     I am not Resignation's counterpart.
     If that I teach, 'tis little the dry word,
     Content, but how to savour hope deferred.
     We come of earth, and rich of earth may be;
     Soon carrion if very earth are we!
     The coursing veins, the constant breath, the use
     Of sleep, declare that strife allows short truce;
     Unless we clasp decay, accept defeat,
     And pass despised; "a-cold for lack of heat,"
     Like other corpses, but without death's plea.

     - My sister calls for battle; is it she?

     - Rather a world of pressing men in arms,
     Than stagnant, where the sensual piper charms
     Each drowsy malady and coiling vice
     With dreams of ease whereof the soul pays price!
     No home is here for peace while evil breeds,
     While error governs, none; and must the seeds
     You sow, you that for long have reaped disdain,
     Lie barren at the doorway of the brain,
     Let stout contention drive deep furrows, blood
     Moisten, and make new channels of its flood!

     - My sober little maid, when we meet first,
     Drinks of me ever with an eager thirst.
     So can I not of her till circumstance
     Drugs cravings. Here we see how men advance
     A doubtful foot, but circle if much stirred,
     Like dead weeds on whipped waters. Shout the word
     Prompting their hungers, and they grandly march,
     As to band-music under Victory's arch.
     Thus was it, and thus is it; save that then
     The beauty of frank animals had men.

     - Observe them, and down rearward for a term,
     Gaze to the primal twistings of the worm.
     Thence look this way, across the fields that show
     Men's early form of speech for Yes and No.
     My sister a bruised infant's utterance had;
     And issuing stronger, to mankind 'twas mad.
     I knew my home where I had choice to feel
     The toad beneath a harrow or a heel.

     - Speak of this Age.

     - When you it shall discern
     Bright as you are, to me the Age will turn.

     - For neither of us has it any care;
     Its learning is through Science to despair.

     - Despair lies down and grovels, grapples not
     With evil, casts the burden of its lot.
     This Age climbs earth.

     - To challenge heaven.

     - Not less
     The lower deeps. It laughs at Happiness!
     That know I, though the echoes of it wail,
     For one step upward on the crags you scale.
     Brave is the Age wherein the word will rust,
     Which means our soul asleep or body's lust,
     Until from warmth of many breasts, that beat
     A temperate common music, sunlike heat
     The happiness not predatory sheds!

     - But your fierce Yes and No of butting heads,
     Now rages to outdo a horny Past.
     Shades of a wild Destroyer on the vast
     Are thrown by every novel light upraised.
     The world's whole round smokes ominously, amazed
     And trembling as its pregnant AEtna swells.
     Combustibles on hot combustibles
     Run piling, for one spark to roll in fire
     The mountain-torrent of infernal ire
     And leave the track of devils where men built.
     Perceptive of a doom, the sinner's guilt
     Confesses in a cry for help shrill loud,
     If drops the chillness of a passing cloud,
     To conscience, reason, human love; in vain:
     None save they but the souls which them contain.
     No extramural God, the God within
     Alone gives aid to city charged with sin.
     A world that for the spur of fool and knave,
     Sweats in its laboratory, what shall save?
     But men who ply their wits in such a school,
     Must pray the mercy of the knave and fool.

     - Much have I studied hard Necessity!
     To know her Wisdom's mother, and that we
     May deem the harshness of her later cries
     In labour a sure goad to prick the wise,
     If men among the warnings which convulse,
     Can gravely dread without the craven's pulse.
     Long ere the rising of this Age of ours,
     The knave and fool were stamped as monstrous Powers.
     Of human lusts and lassitudes they spring,
     And are as lasting as the parent thing.
     Yet numbering locust hosts, bent they to drill,
     They might o'ermatch and have mankind at will.

     Behold such army gathering: ours the spur,
     No scattered foe to face, but Lucifer.
     Not fool or knave is now the enemy
     O'ershadowing men, 'tis Folly, Knavery!
     A sea; nor stays that sea the bastioned beach.
     Now must the brother soul alive in each,
     His traitorous individual devildom
     Hold subject lest the grand destruction come.
     Dimly men see it menacing apace
     To overthrow, perchance uproot the race.
     Within, without, they are a field of tares:
     Fruitfuller for them when the contest squares,
     And wherefore warrior service they must yield,
     Shines visible as life on either field.
     That is my comfort, following shock on shock,
     Which sets faith quaking on their firmest rock.
     Since with his weapons, all the arms of Night,
     Frail men have challenged Lucifer to fight,
     Have matched in hostile ranks, enrolled, erect,
     The human and Satanic intellect,
     Determined for their uses to control
     What forces on the earth and under roll,
     Their granite rock runs igneous; now they stand
     Pledged to the heavens for safety of their land.
     They cannot learn save grossly, gross that are:
     Through fear they learn whose aid is good in war.

     - My sister, as I read them in my glass,
     Their field of tares they take for pasture grass.
     How waken them that have not any bent
     Save browsing - the concrete indifferent!
     Friend Lucifer supplies them solid stuff:
     They fear not for the race when full the trough.
     They have much fear of giving up the ghost;
     And these are of mankind the unnumbered host.

     - If I could see with you, and did not faint
     In beating wing, the future I would paint.
     Those massed indifferents will learn to quake:
     Now meanwhile is another mass awake,
     Once denser than the grunters of the sty.
     If I could see with you! Could I but fly!

     - The length of days that you with them have housed,
     An outcast else, approves their cause espoused.

     - O true, they have a cause, and woe for us,
     While still they have a cause too piteous!
     Yet, happy for us when, their cause defined,
     They walk no longer with a stumbler blind,
     And quicken in the virtue of their cause,
     To think me a poor mouther of old saws!
     I wait the issue of a battling Age;
     The toilers with your "troughsters" now engage;
     Instructing them through their acutest sense,
     How close the dangers of indifference!
     Already have my people shown their worth,
     More love they light, which folds the love of Earth.
     That love to love of labour leads: thence love
     Of humankind - earth's incense flung above.

     - Admit some other features: Faithless, mean;
     Encased in matter; vowed to Gods obscene;
     Contemptuous of the impalpable, it swells
     On Doubt; for pastime swallows miracles;
     And if I bid it face what I observe,
     Declares me hoodwinked by my optic nerve!

     - Oft has your prophet, for reward of toil,
     Seen nests of seeming cockatrices coil:
     Disowned them as the unholiest of Time,
     Which were his offspring, born of flame on slime.
     Nor him, their sire, have known the filial fry:
     As little as Time's earliest knew the sky.
     Perchance among them shoots a lustrous flame
     At intervals, in proof of whom they came.
     To strengthen our foundations is the task
     Of this tough Age; not in your beams to bask,
     Though, lighted by your beams, down mining caves
     The rock it blasts, the hoarded foulness braves.
     My sister sees no round beyond her mood;
     To hawk this Age has dressed her head in hood.
     Out of the course of ancient ruts and grooves,
     It moves: O much for me to say it moves!
     About his AEthiop Highlands Nile is Nile,
     Though not the stream of the paternal smile:
     And where his tide of nourishment he drives,
     An Abyssinian wantonness revives.
     Calm as his lotus-leaf to-day he swims;
     He is the yellow crops, the rounded limbs,
     The Past yet flowing, the fair time that fills;
     Breath of all mouths and grist of many mills.

     To-morrow, warning none with tempest-showers,
     He is the vast Insensate who devours
     His golden promise over leagues of seed,
     Then sits in a smooth lake upon the deed.
     The races which on barbarous force begin,
     Inherit onward of their origin,
     And cancelled blessings will the current length
     Reveal till they know need of shaping strength.
     'Tis not in men to recognize the need
     Before they clash in hosts, in hosts they bleed.
     Then may sharp suffering their nature grind;
     Of rabble passions grow the chieftain Mind.
     Yet mark where still broad Nile boasts thousands fed,
     For tens up the safe mountains at his head.
     Few would be fed, not far his course prolong,
     Save for the troublous blood which makes him strong.

     - That rings of truth! More do your people thrive;
     Your Many are more merrily alive
     Than erewhile when I gloried in the page
     Of radiant singer and anointed sage.
     Greece was my lamp: burnt out for lack of oil;
     Rome, Python Rome, prey of its robber spoil!
     All structures built upon a narrow space
     Must fall, from having not your hosts for base.
     O thrice must one be you, to see them shift
     Along their desert flats, here dash, there drift;
     With faith, that of privations and spilt blood,
     Comes Reason armed to clear or bank the flood!
     And thrice must one be you, to wait release
     From duress in the swamp of their increase.
     At which oppressive scene, beyond arrest,
     A darkness not with stars of heaven dressed,
     Philosophers behold; desponding view.
     Your Many nourished, starved my brilliant few;
     Then flinging heels, as charioteers the reins,
     Dive down the fumy AEtna of their brains.
     Belated vessels on a rising sea,
     They seem: they pass!

     - But not Philosophy!

     - Ay, be we faithful to ourselves: despise
     Nought but the coward in us! That way lies
     The wisdom making passage through our slough.
     Am I not heard, my head to Earth shall bow;
     Like her, shall wait to see, and seeing wait.
     Philosophy is Life's one match for Fate.
     That photosphere of our high fountain One,
     Our spirit's Lord and Reason's fostering sun,
     Philosophy, shall light us in the shade,
     Warm in the frost, make Good our aim and aid.
     Companioned by the sweetest, ay renewed,
     Unconquerable, whose aim for aid is Good!
     Advantage to the Many: that we name
     God's voice; have there the surety in our aim.
     This thought unto my sister do I owe,
     And irony and satire off me throw.
     They crack a childish whip, drive puny herds,
     Where numbers crave their sustenance in words.
     Now let the perils thicken: clearer seen,
     Your Chieftain Mind mounts over them serene.
     Who never yet of scattered lamps was born
     To speed a world, a marching world to warn,
     But sunward from the vivid Many springs,
     Counts conquest but a step, and through disaster sings.




     Fragments of the Iliad in English Hexameter Verse




     Poem: The Invective Of Achilles



     [Iliad, B. I. V. 149]

     "Heigh me! brazen of front, thou glutton for plunder, how can one,
     Servant here to thy mandates, heed thee among our Achaians,
     Either the mission hie on or stoutly do fight with the foemen?
     I, not hither I fared on account of the spear-armed Trojans,
     Pledged to the combat; they unto me have in nowise a harm done;
     Never have they, of a truth, come lifting my horses or oxen;
     Never in deep-soiled Phthia, the nurser of heroes, my harvests
     Ravaged, they; for between us is numbered full many a darksome
     Mountain, ay, therewith too the stretch of the windy sea-waters.
     O hugely shameless! thee did we follow to hearten thee, justice
     Pluck from the Dardans for him, Menelaos, thee too, thou dog-eyed!
     Whereof little thy thought is, nought whatever thou reckest.
     Worse, it is thou whose threat 'tis to ravish my prize from me,
     portion
     Won with much labour, the which my gift from the sons of Achaia.
     Never, in sooth, have I known my prize equal thine when Achaians
     Gave some flourishing populous Trojan town up to pillage.
     Nay, sure, mine were the hands did most in the storm of the combat,
     Yet when came peradventure share of the booty amongst us,
     Bigger to thee went the prize, while I some small blessed thing
     bore
     Off to the ships, my share of reward for my toil in the bloodshed!
     So now go I to Phthia, for better by much it beseems me
     Homeward go with my beaked ships now, and I hold not in prospect,
     I being outraged, thou mayst gather here plunder and wealth-store."



     Poem: The Invective of Achilles - V. 225.



     "Bibber besotted, with scowl of a cur, having heart of a deer,
     thou!
     Never to join to thy warriors armed for the press of the conflict,
     Never for ambush forth with the princeliest sons of Achaia
     Dared thy soul, for to thee that thing would have looked as a
     death-stroke.
     Sooth, more easy it seems, down the lengthened array of Achaians,
     Snatch at the prize of the one whose voice has been lifted against
     thee.
     Ravening king of the folk, for that thou hast thy rule over
     abjects;
     Else, son of Atreus, now were this outrage on me thy last one.
     Nay, but I tell thee, and I do swear a big oath on it likewise:
     Yea, by the sceptre here, and it surely bears branches and leaf-
     buds
     Never again, since first it was lopped from its trunk on the
     mountains,
     No more sprouting; for round it all clean has the sharp metal
     clipped off
     Leaves and the bark; ay, verify now do the sons of Achaia,
     Guardian hands of the counsels of Zeus, pronouncing the judgement,
     Hold it aloft; so now unto thee shall the oath have its portent;
     Loud will the cry for Achilles burst from the sons of Achaia
     Throughout the army, and thou chafe powerless, though in an
     anguish,
     How to give succour when vast crops down under man-slaying Hector
     Tumble expiring; and thou deep in thee shalt tear at thy heart-
     strings,
     Rage-wrung, thou, that in nought thou didst honour the flower of
     Achaians."



     Poem: Marshalling Of The Achaians



     [Iliad, B. II V. 455]

     Like as a terrible fire feeds fast on a forest enormous,
     Up on a mountain height, and the blaze of it radiates round far,
     So on the bright blest arms of the host in their march did the
     splendour
     Gleam wide round through the circle of air right up to the sky-
     vault.
     They, now, as when swarm thick in the air multitudinous winged
     flocks,
     Be it of geese or of cranes or the long-necked troops of the wild-
     swans,
     Off that Asian mead, by the flow of the waters of Kaistros;
     Hither and yon fly they, and rejoicing in pride of their pinions,
     Clamour, shaped to their ranks, and the mead all about them
     resoundeth;
     So those numerous tribes from their ships and their shelterings
     poured forth
     On that plain of Scamander, and horrible rumbled beneath them
     Earth to the quick-paced feet of the men and the tramp of the
     horse-hooves.
     Stopped they then on the fair-flower'd field of Scamander, their
     thousands
     Many as leaves and the blossoms born of the flowerful season.
     Even as countless hot-pressed flies in their multitudes traverse,
     Clouds of them, under some herdsman's wonning, where then are the
     milk-pails
     Also, full of their milk, in the bountiful season of spring-time;
     Even so thickly the long-haired sons of Achaia the plain held,
     Prompt for the dash at the Trojan host, with the passion to crush
     them.
     Those, likewise, as the goatherds, eyeing their vast flocks of
     goats, know
     Easily one from the other when all get mixed o'er the pasture,
     So did the chieftains rank them here there in their places for
     onslaught,
     Hard on the push of the fray; and among them King Agamemnon,
     He, for his eyes and his head, as when Zeus glows glad in his
     thunder,
     He with the girdle of Ares, he with the breast of Poseidon.



     Poem: Agamemnon In The Fight



     [Iliad, B. XI. V. 148]

     These, then, he left, and away where ranks were now clashing the
     thickest,
     Onward rushed, and with him rushed all of the bright-greaved
     Achaians.
     Foot then footmen slew, that were flying from direful compulsion,
     Horse at the horsemen (up from off under them mounted the dust-
     cloud,
     Up off the plain, raised up cloud-thick by the thundering horse-
     hooves)
     Hewed with the sword's sharp edge; and so meanwhile Lord Agamemnon
     Followed, chasing and slaughtering aye, on-urgeing the Argives.

     Now, as when fire voracious catches the unclipped wood-land,
     This way bears it and that the great whirl of the wind, and the
     scrubwood
     Stretches uptorn, flung forward alength by the fire's fury rageing,
     So beneath Atreides Agamemnon heads of the scattered
     Trojans fell; and in numbers amany the horses, neck-stiffened,
     Rattled their vacant cars down the roadway gaps of the war-field,
     Missing the blameless charioteers, but, for these, they were
     outstretched
     Flat upon earth, far dearer to vultures than to their home-mates.



     Poem: Paris And Diomedes



     [Iliad; B. XI V. 378]

     So he, with a clear shout of laughter,
     Forth of his ambush leapt, and he vaunted him, uttering thiswise:
     "Hit thou art! not in vain flew the shaft; how by rights it had
     pierced thee
     Into the undermost gut, therewith to have rived thee of life-
     breath!
     Following that had the Trojans plucked a new breath from their
     direst,
     They all frighted of thee, as the goats bleat in flight from a
     lion."
     Then unto him untroubled made answer stout Diomedes:
     "Bow-puller, jiber, thy bow for thy glorying, spyer at virgins!
     If that thou dared'st face me here out in the open with weapons,
     Nothing then would avail thee thy bow and thy thick shot of arrows.
     Now thou plumest thee vainly because of a graze of my footsole;
     Reck I as were that stroke from a woman or some pettish infant.
     Aye flies blunted the dart of the man that's emasculate,
     noughtworth!
     Otherwise hits, forth flying from me, and but strikes it the
     slightest,
     My keen shaft, and it numbers a man of the dead fallen straightway.
     Torn, troth, then are the cheeks of the wife of that man fallen
     slaughtered,
     Orphans his babes, full surely he reddens the earth with his blood-
     drops,
     Rotting, round him the birds, more numerous they than the women."



     Poem: Hypnos On Ida



     [Iliad, B. XIV. V. 283]

     They then to fountain-abundant Ida, mother of wild beasts,
     Came, and they first left ocean to fare over mainland at Lektos,
     Where underneath of their feet waved loftiest growths of the
     woodland.
     There hung Hypnos fast, ere the vision of Zeus was observant,
     Mounted upon a tall pine-tree, tallest of pines that on Ida
     Lustily spring off soil for the shoot up aloft into aether.
     There did he sit well-cloaked by the wide-branched pine for
     concealment,
     That loud bird, in his form like, that perched high up in the
     mountains,
     Chalkis is named by the Gods, but of mortals known as Kymindis.



     Poem: Clash In Arms Of The Achaians And Trojans



     [Iliad, B. XIV. V. 394]

     Not the sea-wave so bellows abroad when it bursts upon shingle,
     Whipped from the sea's deeps up by the terrible blast of the
     Northwind;
     Nay, nor is ever the roar of the fierce fire's rush so arousing,
     Down along mountain-glades, when it surges to kindle a woodland;
     Nay, nor so tonant thunders the stress of the gale in the oak-
     trees'
     Foliage-tresses high, when it rages to raveing its utmost;
     As rose then stupendous the Trojan's cry and Achaians',
     Dread upshouting as one when together they clashed in the conflict.



     Poem: The Horses Of Achilles



     [Iliad, B. XVII. V. 426]

     So now the horses of Aiakides, off wide of the war-ground,
     Wept, since first they were ware of their charioteer overthrown
     there,
     Cast down low in the whirl of the dust under man-slaying Hector.
     Sooth, meanwhile, then did Automedon, brave son of Diores,
     Oft, on the one hand, urge them with flicks of the swift whip, and
     oft, too,
     Coax entreatingly, hurriedly; whiles did he angrily threaten.
     Vainly, for these would not to the ships, to the Hellespont
     spacious,
     Backward turn, nor be whipped to the battle among the Achaians.
     Nay, as a pillar remains immovable, fixed on the tombstone,
     Haply, of some dead man or it may be a woman there-under;
     Even like hard stood they there attached to the glorious war-car,
     Earthward bowed with their heads; and of them so lamenting
     incessant
     Ran the hot teardrops downward on to the earth from their eyelids,
     Mourning their charioteer; all their lustrous manes dusty-clotted,
     Right side and left of the yoke-ring tossed, to the breadth of the
     yoke-bow.
     Now when the issue of Kronos beheld that sorrow, his head shook
     Pitying them for their grief, these words then he spake in his
     bosom;
     "Why, ye hapless, gave we to Peleus you, to a mortal
     Master; ye that are ageless both, ye both of you deathless!
     Was it that ye among men most wretched should come to have heart-
     grief?
     'Tis most true, than the race of these men is there wretcheder
     nowhere
     Aught over earth's range found that is gifted with breath and has
     movement."



     Poem: The Mares Of The Camargue



     [From the MIREIO of Mistral]

     A hundred mares, all white! their manes
     Like mace-reed of the marshy plains
     Thick-tufted, wavy, free o' the shears:
     And when the fiery squadron rears
     Bursting at speed, each mane appears
     Even as the white scarf of a fay
     Floating upon their necks along the heavens away.

     O race of humankind, take shame!
     For never yet a hand could tame,
     Nor bitter spur that rips the flanks subdue
     The mares of the Camargue. I have known,
     By treason snared, some captives shown;
     Expatriate from their native Rhone,
     Led off, their saline pastures far from view:

     And on a day, with prompt rebound,
     They have flung their riders to the ground,
     And at a single gallop, scouring free,
     Wide-nostril'd to the wind, twice ten
     Of long marsh-leagues devour'd, and then,
     Back to the Vacares again,
     After ten years of slavery just to breathe salt sea

     For of this savage race unbent,
     The ocean is the element.
     Of old escaped from Neptune's car, full sure,
     Still with the white foam fleck'd are they,
     And when the sea puffs black from grey,
     And ships part cables, loudly neigh
     The stallions of Camargue, all joyful in the roar;

     And keen as a whip they lash and crack
     Their tails that drag the dust, and back
     Scratch up the earth, and feel, entering their flesh, where he,
     The God, drives deep his trident teeth,
     Who in one horror, above, beneath,
     Bids storm and watery deluge seethe,
     And shatters to their depths the abysses of the sea.

     Cant. iv.




     Poems by George Meredith--Volume 1


     [This etext was prepared from the 1912 Times Book Club "Surrey
     Edition" by David Price]



     CHILLIANWALLAH



     Chillanwallah, Chillanwallah!
     Where our brothers fought and bled,
     O thy name is natural music
     And a dirge above the dead!
     Though we have not been defeated,
     Though we can't be overcome,
     Still, whene'er thou art repeated,
     I would fain that grief were dumb.

     Chillianwallah, Chillianwallah!
     'Tis a name so sad and strange,
     Like a breeze through midnight harpstrings
     Ringing many a mournful change;
     But the wildness and the sorrow
     Have a meaning of their own -
     Oh, whereof no glad to-morrow
     Can relieve the dismal tone!

     Chillianwallah, Chillianwallah!
     'Tis a village dark and low,
     By the bloody Jhelum river
     Bridged by the foreboding foe;
     And across the wintry water
     He is ready to retreat,
     When the carnage and the slaughter
     Shall have paid for his defeat.

     Chillianwallah, Chillianwallah!
     'Tis a wild and dreary plain,
     Strewn with plots of thickest jungle,
     Matted with the gory stain.
     There the murder-mouthed artillery,
     In the deadly ambuscade,
     Wrought the thunder of its treachery
     On the skeleton brigade.

     Chillianwallah, Chillianwallah!
     When the night set in with rain,
     Came the savage plundering devils
     To their work among the slain;
     And the wounded and the dying
     In cold blood did share the doom
     Of their comrades round them lying,
     Stiff in the dead skyless gloom.

     Chillianwallah, Chillianwallah!
     Thou wilt be a doleful chord,
     And a mystic note of mourning
     That will need no chiming word;
     And that heart will leap with anguish
     Who may understand thee best;
     But the hopes of all will languish
     Till thy memory is at rest.



     THE DOE: A FRAGMENT (From 'WANDERING WILLIE')



     And--'Yonder look! yoho! yoho!
     Nancy is off!' the farmer cried,
     Advancing by the river side,
     Red-kerchieft and brown-coated;--'So,
     My girl, who else could leap like that?
     So neatly! like a lady! 'Zounds!
     Look at her how she leads the hounds!'
     And waving his dusty beaver hat,
     He cheered across the chase-filled water,
     And clapt his arm about his daughter,
     And gave to Joan a courteous hug,
     And kiss that, like a stubborn plug
     From generous vats in vastness rounded,
     The inner wealth and spirit sounded:
     Eagerly pointing South, where, lo,
     The daintiest, fleetest-footed doe
     Led o'er the fields and thro' the furze
     Beyond: her lively delicate ears
     Prickt up erect, and in her track
     A dappled lengthy-striding pack.

     Scarce had they cast eyes upon her,
     When every heart was wagered on her,
     And half in dread, and half delight,
     They watched her lovely bounding flight;
     As now across the flashing green,
     And now beneath the stately trees,
     And now far distant in the dene,
     She headed on with graceful ease:
     Hanging aloft with doubled knees,
     At times athwart some hedge or gate;
     And slackening pace by slow degrees,
     As for the foremost foe to wait.
     Renewing her outstripping rate
     Whene'er the hot pursuers neared,
     By garden wall and paled estate,
     Where clambering gazers whooped and cheered.
     Here winding under elm and oak,
     And slanting up the sunny hill:
     Splashing the water here like smoke
     Among the mill-holms round the mill.

     And--'Let her go; she shows her game,
     My Nancy girl, my pet and treasure!'
     The farmer sighed: his eyes with pleasure
     Brimming: ''Tis my daughter's name,
     My second daughter lying yonder.'
     And Willie's eye in search did wander,
     And caught at once, with moist regard,
     The white gleams of a grey churchyard.
     'Three weeks before my girl had gone,
     And while upon her pillows propped,
     She lay at eve; the weakling fawn -
     For still it seems a fawn just dropt
     A se'nnight--to my Nancy's bed
     I brought to make my girl a gift:
     The mothers of them both were dead:
     And both to bless it was my drift,
     By giving each a friend; not thinking
     How rapidly my girl was sinking.
     And I remember how, to pat
     Its neck, she stretched her hand so weak,
     And its cold nose against her cheek
     Pressed fondly: and I fetched the mat
     To make it up a couch just by her,
     Where in the lone dark hours to lie:
     For neither dear old nurse nor I
     Would any single wish deny her.
     And there unto the last it lay;
     And in the pastures cared to play
     Little or nothing: there its meals
     And milk I brought: and even now
     The creature such affection feels
     For that old room that, when and how,
     'Tis strange to mark, it slinks and steals
     To get there, and all day conceals.
     And once when nurse who, since that time,
     Keeps house for me, was very sick,
     Waking upon the midnight chime,
     And listening to the stair-clock's click,
     I heard a rustling, half uncertain,
     Close against the dark bed-curtain:
     And while I thrust my leg to kick,
     And feel the phantom with my feet,
     A loving tongue began to lick
     My left hand lying on the sheet;
     And warm sweet breath upon me blew,
     And that 'twas Nancy then I knew.
     So, for her love, I had good cause
     To have the creature "Nancy" christened.'

     He paused, and in the moment's pause,
     His eyes and Willie's strangely glistened.
     Nearer came Joan, and Bessy hung
     With face averted, near enough
     To hear, and sob unheard; the young
     And careless ones had scampered off
     Meantime, and sought the loftiest place
     To beacon the approaching chase.

     'Daily upon the meads to browse,
     Goes Nancy with those dairy cows
     You see behind the clematis:
     And such a favourite she is,
     That when fatigued, and helter skelter,
     Among them from her foes to shelter,
     She dashes when the chase is over,
     They'll close her in and give her cover,
     And bend their horns against the hounds,
     And low, and keep them out of bounds!
     From the house dogs she dreads no harm,
     And is good friends with all the farm,
     Man, and bird, and beast, howbeit
     Their natures seem so opposite.
     And she is known for many a mile,
     And noted for her splendid style,
     For her clear leap and quick slight hoof;
     Welcome she is in many a roof.
     And if I say, I love her, man!
     I say but little: her fine eyes full
     Of memories of my girl, at Yule
     And May-time, make her dearer than
     Dumb brute to men has been, I think.
     So dear I do not find her dumb.
     I know her ways, her slightest wink,
     So well; and to my hand she'll come,
     Sidelong, for food or a caress,
     Just like a loving human thing.
     Nor can I help, I do confess,
     Some touch of human sorrowing
     To think there may be such a doubt
     That from the next world she'll be shut out,
     And parted from me! And well I mind
     How, when my girl's last moments came,
     Her soft eyes very soft and kind,
     She joined her hands and prayed the same,
     That she "might meet her father, mother,
     Sister Bess, and each dear brother,
     And with them, if it might be, one
     Who was her last companion."
     Meaning the fawn--the doe you mark -
     For my bay mare was then a foal,
     And time has passed since then:- but hark!'

     For like the shrieking of a soul
     Shut in a tomb, a darkened cry
     Of inward-wailing agony
     Surprised them, and all eyes on each
     Fixed in the mute-appealing speech
     Of self-reproachful apprehension:
     Knowing not what to think or do:
     But Joan, recovering first, broke through
     The instantaneous suspension,
     And knelt upon the ground, and guessed
     The bitterness at a glance, and pressed
     Into the comfort of her breast
     The deep-throed quaking shape that drooped
     In misery's wilful aggravation,
     Before the farmer as he stooped,
     Touched with accusing consternation:
     Soothing her as she sobbed aloud:-
     'Not me! not me! Oh, no, no, no!
     Not me! God will not take me in!
     Nothing can wipe away my sin!
     I shall not see her: you will go;
     You and all that she loves so:
     Not me! not me! Oh, no, no, no!'
     Colourless, her long black hair,
     Like seaweed in a tempest tossed
     Tangling astray, to Joan's care
     She yielded like a creature lost:
     Yielded, drooping toward the ground,
     As doth a shape one half-hour drowned,
     And heaved from sea with mast and spar,
     All dark of its immortal star.
     And on that tender heart, inured
     To flatter basest grief, and fight
     Despair upon the brink of night,
     She suffered herself to sink, assured
     Of refuge; and her ear inclined
     To comfort; and her thoughts resigned
     To counsel; her wild hair let brush
     From off her weeping brows; and shook
     With many little sobs that took
     Deeper-drawn breaths, till into sighs,
     Long sighs, they sank; and to the 'hush!'
     Of Joan's gentle chide, she sought
     Childlike to check them as she ought,
     Looking up at her infantwise.
     And Willie, gazing on them both,
     Shivered with bliss through blood and brain,
     To see the darling of his troth
     Like a maternal angel strain
     The sinful and the sinless child
     At once on either breast, and there
     In peace and promise reconciled
     Unite them: nor could Nature's care
     With subtler sweet beneficence
     Have fed the springs of penitence,
     Still keeping true, though harshly tried,
     The vital prop of human pride.



     BEAUTY ROHTRAUT (From Moricke)



     What is the name of King Ringang's daughter?
     Rohtraut, Beauty Rohtraut!
     And what does she do the livelong day,
     Since she dare not knit and spin alway?
     O hunting and fishing is ever her play!
     And, heigh! that her huntsman I might be!
     I'd hunt and fish right merrily!
     Be silent, heart!

     And it chanced that, after this some time, -
     Rohtraut, Beauty Rohtraut, -
     The boy in the Castle has gained access,
     And a horse he has got and a huntsman's dress,
     To hunt and to fish with the merry Princess;
     And, O! that a king's son I might be!
     Beauty Rohtraut I love so tenderly.
     Hush! hush! my heart.

     Under a grey old oak they sat,
     Beauty, Beauty Rohtraut!
     She laughs: 'Why look you so slyly at me?
     If you have heart enough, come, kiss me.'
     Cried the breathless boy, 'kiss thee?'
     But he thinks, kind fortune has favoured my youth;
     And thrice he has kissed Beauty Rohtraut's mouth.
     Down! down! mad heart.

     Then slowly and silently they rode home, -
     Rohtraut, Beauty Rohtraut!
     The boy was lost in his delight:
     'And, wert thou Empress this very night,
     I would not heed or feel the blight;
     Ye thousand leaves of the wild wood wist
     How Beauty Rohtraut's mouth I kiss'd.
     Hush! hush! wild heart.'



     THE OLIVE BRANCH



     A dove flew with an Olive Branch;
     It crossed the sea and reached the shore,
     And on a ship about to launch
     Dropped down the happy sign it bore.

     'An omen' rang the glad acclaim!
     The Captain stooped and picked it up,
     'Be then the Olive Branch her name,'
     Cried she who flung the christening cup.

     The vessel took the laughing tides;
     It was a joyous revelry
     To see her dashing from her sides
     The rough, salt kisses of the sea.

     And forth into the bursting foam
     She spread her sail and sped away,
     The rolling surge her restless home,
     Her incense wreaths the showering spray.

     Far out, and where the riot waves
     Run mingling in tumultuous throngs,
     She danced above a thousand graves,
     And heard a thousand briny songs.

     Her mission with her manly crew,
     Her flag unfurl'd, her title told,
     She took the Old World to the New,
     And brought the New World to the Old.

     Secure of friendliest welcomings,
     She swam the havens sheening fair;
     Secure upon her glad white wings,
     She fluttered on the ocean air.

     To her no more the bastioned fort
     Shot out its swarthy tongue of fire;
     From bay to bay, from port to port,
     Her coming was the world's desire.

     And tho' the tempest lashed her oft,
     And tho' the rocks had hungry teeth,
     And lightnings split the masts aloft,
     And thunders shook the planks beneath,

     And tho' the storm, self-willed and blind,
     Made tatters of her dauntless sail,
     And all the wildness of the wind
     Was loosed on her, she did not fail;

     But gallantly she ploughed the main,
     And gloriously her welcome pealed,
     And grandly shone to sky and plain
     The goodly bales her decks revealed;

     Brought from the fruitful eastern glebes
     Where blow the gusts of balm and spice,
     Or where the black blockaded ribs
     Are jammed 'mongst ghostly fleets of ice,

     Or where upon the curling hills
     Glow clusters of the bright-eyed grape,
     Or where the hand of labour drills
     The stubbornness of earth to shape;

     Rich harvestings and wealthy germs,
     And handicrafts and shapely wares,
     And spinnings of the hermit worms,
     And fruits that bloom by lions' lairs.

     Come, read the meaning of the deep!
     The use of winds and waters learn!
     'Tis not to make the mother weep
     For sons that never will return;

     'Tis not to make the nations show
     Contempt for all whom seas divide;
     'Tis not to pamper war and woe,
     Nor feed traditionary pride;

     'Tis not to make the floating bulk
     Mask death upon its slippery deck,
     Itself in turn a shattered hulk,
     A ghastly raft, a bleeding wreck.

     It is to knit with loving lip
     The interests of land to land;
     To join in far-seen fellowship
     The tropic and the polar strand.

     It is to make that foaming Strength
     Whose rebel forces wrestle still
     Thro' all his boundaried breadth and length
     Become a vassal to our will.

     It is to make the various skies,
     And all the various fruits they vaunt,
     And all the dowers of earth we prize,
     Subservient to our household want.

     And more, for knowledge crowns the gain
     Of intercourse with other souls,
     And Wisdom travels not in vain
     The plunging spaces of the poles.

     The wild Atlantic's weltering gloom,
     Earth-clasping seas of North and South,
     The Baltic with its amber spume,
     The Caspian with its frozen mouth;

     The broad Pacific, basking bright,
     And girdling lands of lustrous growth,
     Vast continents and isles of light,
     Dumb tracts of undiscovered sloth;

     She visits these, traversing each;
     They ripen to the common sun;
     Thro' diverse forms and different speech,
     The world's humanity is one.

     O may her voice have power to say
     How soon the wrecking discords cease,
     When every wandering wave is gay
     With golden argosies of peace!

     Now when the ark of human fate,
     Long baffled by the wayward wind,
     Is drifting with its peopled freight,
     Safe haven on the heights to find;

     Safe haven from the drowning slime
     Of evil deeds and Deluge wrath; -
     To plant again the foot of Time
     Upon a purer, firmer path;

     'Tis now the hour to probe the ground,
     To watch the Heavens, to speak the word,
     The fathoms of the deep to sound,
     And send abroad the missioned bird,

     On strengthened wing for evermore,
     Let Science, swiftly as she can,
     Fly seaward on from shore to shore,
     And bind the links of man to man;

     And like that fair propitious Dove
     Bless future fleets about to launch;
     Make every freight a freight of love,
     And every ship an Olive Branch.



     SONG



     Love within the lover's breast
     Burns like Hesper in the west,
     O'er the ashes of the sun,
     Till the day and night are done;
     Then when dawn drives up her car -
     Lo! it is the morning star.

     Love! thy love pours down on mine
     As the sunlight on the vine,
     As the snow-rill on the vale,
     As the salt breeze in the sail;
     As the song unto the bird,
     On my lips thy name is heard.

     As a dewdrop on the rose
     In thy heart my passion glows,
     As a skylark to the sky
     Up into thy breast I fly;
     As a sea-shell of the sea
     Ever shall I sing of thee.



     THE WILD ROSE AND THE SNOWDROP



     The Snowdrop is the prophet of the flowers;
     It lives and dies upon its bed of snows;
     And like a thought of spring it comes and goes,
     Hanging its head beside our leafless bowers.
     The sun's betrothing kiss it never knows,
     Nor all the glowing joy of golden showers;
     But ever in a placid, pure repose,
     More like a spirit with its look serene,
     Droops its pale cheek veined thro' with infant green.

     Queen of her sisters is the sweet Wild Rose,
     Sprung from the earnest sun and ripe young June;
     The year's own darling and the Summer's Queen!
     Lustrous as the new-throned crescent moon.
     Much of that early prophet look she shows,
     Mixed with her fair espoused blush which glows,
     As if the ethereal fairy blood were seen;
     Like a soft evening over sunset snows,
     Half twilight violet shade, half crimson sheen.

     Twin-born are both in beauteousness, most fair
     In all that glads the eye and charms the air;
     In all that wakes emotions in the mind
     And sows sweet sympathies for human kind.
     Twin-born, albeit their seasons are apart,
     They bloom together in the thoughtful heart;
     Fair symbols of the marvels of our state,
     Mute speakers of the oracles of fate!

     For each, fulfilling nature's law, fulfils
     Itself and its own aspirations pure;
     Living and dying; letting faith ensure
     New life when deathless Spring shall touch the hills.
     Each perfect in its place; and each content
     With that perfection which its being meant:
     Divided not by months that intervene,
     But linked by all the flowers that bud between.
     Forever smiling thro' its season brief,
     The one in glory and the one in grief:
     Forever painting to our museful sight,
     How lowlihead and loveliness unite.

     Born from the first blind yearning of the earth
     To be a mother and give happy birth,
     Ere yet the northern sun such rapture brings,
     Lo, from her virgin breast the Snowdrop springs;
     And ere the snows have melted from the grass,
     And not a strip of greensward doth appear,
     Save the faint prophecy its cheeks declare,
     Alone, unkissed, unloved, behold it pass!
     While in the ripe enthronement of the year,
     Whispering the breeze, and wedding the rich air
     With her so sweet, delicious bridal breath, -
     Odorous and exquisite beyond compare,
     And starr'd with dews upon her forehead clear,
     Fresh-hearted as a Maiden Queen should be
     Who takes the land's devotion as her fee, -
     The Wild Rose blooms, all summer for her dower,
     Nature's most beautiful and perfect flower.



     THE DEATH OF WINTER



     When April with her wild blue eye
     Comes dancing over the grass,
     And all the crimson buds so shy
     Peep out to see her pass;
     As lightly she loosens her showery locks
     And flutters her rainy wings;
     Laughingly stoops
     To the glass of the stream,
     And loosens and loops
     Her hair by the gleam,
     While all the young villagers blithe as the flocks
     Go frolicking round in rings; -
     Then Winter, he who tamed the fly,
     Turns on his back and prepares to die,
     For he cannot live longer under the sky.

     Down the valleys glittering green,
     Down from the hills in snowy rills,
     He melts between the border sheen
     And leaps the flowery verges!
     He cannot choose but brighten their hues,
     And tho' he would creep, he fain must leap,
     For the quick Spring spirit urges.
     Down the vale and down the dale
     He leaps and lights, till his moments fail,
     Buried in blossoms red and pale,
     While the sweet birds sing his dirges!

     O Winter! I'd live that life of thine,
     With a frosty brow and an icicle tongue,
     And never a song my whole life long, -
     Were such delicious burial mine!
     To die and be buried, and so remain
     A wandering brook in April's train,
     Fixing my dying eyes for aye
     On the dawning brows of maiden May.



     SONG



     The moon is alone in the sky
     As thou in my soul;
     The sea takes her image to lie
     Where the white ripples roll
     All night in a dream,
     With the light of her beam,
     Hushedly, mournfully, mistily up to the shore.
     The pebbles speak low
     In the ebb and the flow,
     As I when thy voice came at intervals, tuned to adore:
     Nought other stirred
     Save my heart all unheard
     Beating to bliss that is past evermore.



     JOHN LACKLAND



     A wicked man is bad enough on earth;
     But O the baleful lustre of a chief
     Once pledged in tyranny! O star of dearth
     Darkly illumining a nation's grief!
     How many men have worn thee on their brows!
     Alas for them and us! God's precious gift
     Of gracious dispensation got by theft -
     The damning form of false unholy vows!
     The thief of God and man must have his fee:
     And thou, John Lackland, despicable prince -
     Basest of England's banes before or since!
     Thrice traitor, coward, thief! O thou shalt be
     The historic warning, trampled and abhorr'd
     Who dared to steal and stain the symbols of the Lord!



     THE SLEEPING CITY



     A Princess in the eastern tale
     Paced thro' a marble city pale,
     And saw in ghastly shapes of stone
     The sculptured life she breathed alone;

     Saw, where'er her eye might range,
     Herself the only child of change;
     And heard her echoed footfall chime
     Between Oblivion and Time;

     And in the squares where fountains played,
     And up the spiral balustrade,
     Along the drowsy corridors,
     Even to the inmost sleeping floors,

     Surveyed in wonder chilled with dread
     The seemingness of Death, not dead;
     Life's semblance but without its storm,
     And silence frosting every form;

     Crowned figures, cold and grouping slaves,
     Like suddenly arrested waves
     About to sink, about to rise, -
     Strange meaning in their stricken eyes;

     And cloths and couches live with flame
     Of leopards fierce and lions tame,
     And hunters in the jungle reed,
     Thrown out by sombre glowing brede;

     Dumb chambers hushed with fold on fold,
     And cumbrous gorgeousness of gold;
     White casements o'er embroidered seats,
     Looking on solitudes of streets, -

     On palaces and column'd towers,
     Unconscious of the stony hours;
     Harsh gateways startled at a sound,
     With burning lamps all burnish'd round; -

     Surveyed in awe this wealth and state,
     Touched by the finger of a Fate,
     And drew with slow-awakening fear
     The sternness of the atmosphere; -

     And gradually, with stealthier foot,
     Became herself a thing as mute,
     And listened,--while with swift alarm
     Her alien heart shrank from the charm;

     Yet as her thoughts dilating rose,
     Took glory in the great repose,
     And over every postured form
     Spread lava-like and brooded warm, -

     And fixed on every frozen face
     Beheld the record of its race,
     And in each chiselled feature knew
     The stormy life that once blushed thro'; -

     The ever-present of the past
     There written; all that lightened last,
     Love, anguish, hope, disease, despair,
     Beauty and rage, all written there; -

     Enchanted Passions! whose pale doom
     Is never flushed by blight or bloom,
     But sentinelled by silent orbs,
     Whose light the pallid scene absorbs. -

     Like such a one I pace along
     This City with its sleeping throng;
     Like her with dread and awe, that turns
     To rapture, and sublimely yearns; -

     For now the quiet stars look down
     On lights as quiet as their own;
     The streets that groaned with traffic show
     As if with silence paved below;

     The latest revellers are at peace,
     The signs of in-door tumult cease,
     From gay saloon and low resort,
     Comes not one murmur or report:

     The clattering chariot rolls not by,
     The windows show no waking eye,
     The houses smoke not, and the air
     Is clear, and all the midnight fair.

     The centre of the striving world,
     Round which the human fate is curled,
     To which the future crieth wild, -
     Is pillowed like a cradled child.

     The palace roof that guards a crown,
     The mansion swathed in dreamy down,
     Hovel, court, and alley-shed,
     Sleep in the calmness of the dead.

     Now while the many-motived heart
     Lies hushed--fireside and busy mart,
     And mortal pulses beat the tune
     That charms the calm cold ear o' the moon

     Whose yellowing crescent down the West
     Leans listening, now when every breast
     Its basest or its purest heaves,
     The soul that joys, the soul that grieves; -

     While Fame is crowning happy brows
     That day will blindly scorn, while vows
     Of anguished love, long hidden, speak
     From faltering tongue and flushing cheek

     The language only known to dreams,
     Rich eloquence of rosy themes!
     While on the Beauty's folded mouth
     Disdain just wrinkles baby youth;

     While Poverty dispenses alms
     To outcasts, bread, and healing balms;
     While old Mammon knows himself
     The greatest beggar for his pelf;

     While noble things in darkness grope,
     The Statesman's aim, the Poet's hope;
     The Patriot's impulse gathers fire,
     And germs of future fruits aspire; -

     Now while dumb nature owns its links,
     And from one common fountain drinks,
     Methinks in all around I see
     This Picture in Eternity; -

     A marbled City planted there
     With all its pageants and despair;
     A peopled hush, a Death not dead,
     But stricken with Medusa's head; -

     And in the Gorgon's glance for aye
     The lifeless immortality
     Reveals in sculptured calmness all
     Its latest life beyond recall.



     THE POETRY OF CHAUCER



     Grey with all honours of age! but fresh-featured and ruddy
     As dawn when the drowsy farm-yard has thrice heard Chaunticlere.
     Tender to tearfulness--childlike, and manly, and motherly;
     Here beats true English blood richest joyance on sweet English
     ground.



     THE POETRY OF SPENSER



     Lakes where the sunsheen is mystic with splendour and softness;
     Vales where sweet life is all Summer with golden romance:
     Forests that glimmer with twilight round revel-bright palaces;
     Here in our May-blood we wander, careering 'mongst ladies and
     knights.



     THE POETRY OF SHAKESPEARE



     Picture some Isle smiling green 'mid the white-foaming ocean; -
     Full of old woods, leafy wisdoms, and frolicsome fays;
     Passions and pageants; sweet love singing bird-like above it;
     Life in all shapes, aims, and fates, is there warm'd by one great
     human heart.



     THE POETRY OF MILTON



     Like to some deep-chested organ whose grand inspiration,
     Serenely majestic in utterance, lofty and calm,
     Interprets to mortals with melody great as its burthen
     The mystical harmonies chiming for ever throughout the bright
     spheres.



     THE POETRY OF SOUTHEY



     Keen as an eagle whose flight towards the dim empyrean
     Fearless of toil or fatigue ever royally wends!
     Vast in the cloud-coloured robes of the balm-breathing Orient
     Lo! the grand Epic advances, unfolding the humanest truth.



     THE POETRY OF COLERIDGE



     A brook glancing under green leaves, self-delighting, exulting,
     And full of a gurgling melody ever renewed -
     Renewed thro' all changes of Heaven, unceasing in sunlight,
     Unceasing in moonlight, but hushed in the beams of the holier orb.



     THE POETRY OF SHELLEY



     See'st thou a Skylark whose glistening winglets ascending
     Quiver like pulses beneath the melodious dawn?
     Deep in the heart-yearning distance of heaven it flutters -
     Wisdom and beauty and love are the treasures it brings down at eve.



     THE POETRY OF WORDSWORTH



     A breath of the mountains, fresh born in the regions majestic,
     That look with their eye-daring summits deep into the sky.
     The voice of great Nature; sublime with her lofty conceptions,
     Yet earnest and simple as any sweet child of the green lowly vale.



     THE POETRY OF KEATS



     The song of a nightingale sent thro' a slumbrous valley,
     Low-lidded with twilight, and tranced with the dolorous sound,
     Tranced with a tender enchantment; the yearning of passion
     That wins immortality even while panting delirious with death.



     VIOLETS



     Violets, shy violets!
     How many hearts with you compare!
     Who hide themselves in thickest green,
     And thence, unseen,
     Ravish the enraptured air
     With sweetness, dewy fresh and rare!

     Violets, shy violets!
     Human hearts to me shall be
     Viewless violets in the grass,
     And as I pass,
     Odours and sweet imagery
     Will wait on mine and gladden me!



     ANGELIC LOVE



     Angelic love that stoops with heavenly lips
     To meet its earthly mate;
     Heroic love that to its sphere's eclipse
     Can dare to join its fate
     With one beloved devoted human heart,
     And share with it the passion and the smart,
     The undying bliss
     Of its most fleeting kiss;
     The fading grace
     Of its most sweet embrace:-
     Angelic love, heroic love!
     Whose birth can only be above,
     Whose wandering must be on earth,
     Whose haven where it first had birth!
     Love that can part with all but its own worth,
     And joy in every sacrifice
     That beautifies its Paradise!
     And gently, like a golden-fruited vine,
     With earnest tenderness itself consign,
     And creeping up deliriously entwine
     Its dear delicious arms
     Round the beloved being!
     With fair unfolded charms,
     All-trusting, and all-seeing, -
     Grape-laden with full bunches of young wine!
     While to the panting heart's dry yearning drouth
     Buds the rich dewy mouth -
     Tenderly uplifted,
     Like two rose-leaves drifted
     Down in a long warm sigh of the sweet South!
     Such love, such love is thine,
     Such heart is mine,
     O thou of mortal visions most divine!



     TWILIGHT MUSIC



     Know you the low pervading breeze
     That softly sings
     In the trembling leaves of twilight trees,
     As if the wind were dreaming on its wings?
     And have you marked their still degrees
     Of ebbing melody, like the strings
     Of a silver harp swept by a spirit's hand
     In some strange glimmering land,
     'Mid gushing springs,
     And glistenings
     Of waters and of planets, wild and grand!
     And have you marked in that still time
     The chariots of those shining cars
     Brighten upon the hushing dark,
     And bent to hark
     That Voice, amid the poplar and the lime,
     Pause in the dilating lustre
     Of the spheral cluster;
     Pause but to renew its sweetness, deep
     As dreams of heaven to souls that sleep!
     And felt, despite earth's jarring wars,
     When day is done
     And dead the sun,
     Still a voice divine can sing,
     Still is there sympathy can bring
     A whisper from the stars!
     Ah, with this sentience quickly will you know
     How like a tree I tremble to the tones
     Of your sweet voice!
     How keenly I rejoice
     When in me with sweet motions slow
     The spiritual music ebbs and moans -
     Lives in the lustre of those heavenly eyes,
     Dies in the light of its own paradise, -
     Dies, and relives eternal from its death,
     Immortal melodies in each deep breath;
     Sweeps thro' my being, bearing up to thee
     Myself, the weight of its eternity;
     Till, nerved to life from its ordeal fire,
     It marries music with the human lyre,
     Blending divine delight with loveliest desire.



     REQUIEM



     Where faces are hueless, where eyelids are dewless,
     Where passion is silent and hearts never crave;
     Where thought hath no theme, and where sleep hath no dream,
     In patience and peace thou art gone--to thy grave!
     Gone where no warning can wake thee to morning,
     Dead tho' a thousand hands stretch'd out to save.

     Thou cam'st to us sighing, and singing and dying,
     How could it be otherwise, fair as thou wert?
     Placidly fading, and sinking and shading
     At last to that shadow, the latest desert;
     Wasting and waning, but still, still remaining.
     Alas for the hand that could deal the death-hurt!

     The Summer that brightens, the Winter that whitens,
     The world and its voices, the sea and the sky,
     The bloom of creation, the tie of relation,
     All--all is a blank to thine ear and thine eye;
     The ear may not listen, the eye may not glisten,
     Nevermore waked by a smile or a sigh.

     The tree that is rootless must ever be fruitless;
     And thou art alone in thy death and thy birth;
     No last loving token of wedded love broken,
     No sign of thy singleness, sweetness and worth;
     Lost as the flower that is drowned in the shower,
     Fall'n like a snowflake to melt in the earth.



     THE FLOWER OF THE RUINS



     Take thy lute and sing
     By the ruined castle walls,
     Where the torrent-foam falls,
     And long weeds wave:
     Take thy lute and sing,
     O'er the grey ancestral grave!
     Daughter of a King,
     Tune thy string.

     Sing of happy hours,
     In the roar of rushing time;
     Till all the echoes chime
     To the days gone by;
     Sing of passing hours
     To the ever-present sky; -
     Weep--and let the showers
     Wake thy flowers.

     Sing of glories gone:-
     No more the blazoned fold
     From the banner is unrolled;
     The gold sun is set.
     Sing his glory gone,
     For thy voice may charm him yet;
     Daughter of the dawn,
     He is gone!

     Pour forth all thy grief!
     Passionately sweep the chords,
     Wed them quivering to thy words;
     Wild words of wail!
     Shed thy withered grief -
     But hold not Autumn to thy bale;
     The eddy of the leaf
     Must be brief!

     Sing up to the night:
     Hard it is for streaming tears
     To read the calmness of the spheres;
     Coldly they shine;
     Sing up to their light;
     They have views thou may'st divine -
     Gain prophetic sight
     From their light!

     On the windy hills
     Lo, the little harebell leans
     On the spire-grass that it queens,
     With bonnet blue;
     Trusting love instils
     Love and subject reverence true;
     Learn what love instils
     On the hills!

     By the bare wayside
     Placid snowdrops hang their cheeks,
     Softly touch'd with pale green streaks,
     Soon, soon, to die;
     On the clothed hedgeside
     Bands of rosy beauties vie,
     In their prophesied
     Summer pride.

     From the snowdrop learn;
     Not in her pale life lives she,
     But in her blushing prophecy.
     Thus be thy hopes,
     Living but to yearn
     Upwards to the hidden scopes; -
     Even within the urn
     Let them burn!

     Heroes of thy race -
     Warriors with golden crowns,
     Ghostly shapes with marbled frowns
     Stare thee to stone;
     Matrons of thy race
     Pass before thee making moan;
     Full of solemn grace
     Is their pace.

     Piteous their despair!
     Piteous their looks forlorn!
     Terrible their ghostly scorn!
     Still hold thou fast; -
     Heed not their despair! -
     Thou art thy future, not thy past;
     Let them glance and glare
     Thro' the air.

     Thou the ruin's bud,
     Be not that moist rich-smelling weed
     With its arras-sembled brede,
     And ruin-haunting stalk;
     Thou the ruin's bud,
     Be still the rose that lights the walk,
     Mix thy fragrant blood
     With the flood!



     THE RAPE OF AURORA



     Never, O never,
     Since dewy sweet Flora
     Was ravished by Zephyr,
     Was such a thing heard
     In the valleys so hollow!
     Till rosy Aurora,
     Uprising as ever,
     Bright Phosphor to follow,
     Pale Phoebe to sever,
     Was caught like a bird
     To the breast of Apollo!

     Wildly she flutters,
     And flushes all over
     With passionate mutters
     Of shame to the hush
     Of his amorous whispers:
     But O such a lover
     Must win when he utters,
     Thro' rosy red lispers,
     The pains that discover
     The wishes that gush
     From the torches of Hesperus.

     One finger just touching
     The Orient chamber,
     Unflooded the gushing
     Of light that illumed
     All her lustrous unveiling.
     On clouds of glow amber,
     Her limbs richly blushing,
     She lay sweetly wailing,
     In odours that gloomed
     On the God as he bloomed
     O'er her loveliness paling.

     Great Pan in his covert
     Beheld the rare glistening,
     The cry of the love-hurt,
     The sigh and the kiss
     Of the latest close mingling;
     But love, thought he, listening,
     Will not do a dove hurt,
     I know,--and a tingling,
     Latent with bliss,
     Prickt thro' him, I wis,
     For the Nymph he was singling.



     SOUTH-WEST WIND IN THE WOODLAND



     The silence of preluded song -
     AEolian silence charms the woods;
     Each tree a harp, whose foliaged strings
     Are waiting for the master's touch
     To sweep them into storms of joy,
     Stands mute and whispers not; the birds
     Brood dumb in their foreboding nests,
     Save here and there a chirp or tweet,
     That utters fear or anxious love,
     Or when the ouzel sends a swift
     Half warble, shrinking back again
     His golden bill, or when aloud
     The storm-cock warns the dusking hills
     And villages and valleys round:
     For lo, beneath those ragged clouds
     That skirt the opening west, a stream
     Of yellow light and windy flame
     Spreads lengthening southward, and the sky
     Begins to gloom, and o'er the ground
     A moan of coming blasts creeps low
     And rustles in the crisping grass;
     Till suddenly with mighty arms
     Outspread, that reach the horizon round,
     The great South-West drives o'er the earth,
     And loosens all his roaring robes
     Behind him, over heath and moor.
     He comes upon the neck of night,
     Like one that leaps a fiery steed
     Whose keen black haunches quivering shine
     With eagerness and haste, that needs
     No spur to make the dark leagues fly!
     Whose eyes are meteors of speed;
     Whose mane is as a flashing foam;
     Whose hoofs are travelling thunder-shocks; -
     He comes, and while his growing gusts,
     Wild couriers of his reckless course,
     Are whistling from the daggered gorse,
     And hurrying over fern and broom,
     Midway, far off, he feigns to halt
     And gather in his streaming train.

     Now, whirring like an eagle's wing
     Preparing for a wide blue flight;
     Now, flapping like a sail that tacks
     And chides the wet bewildered mast;
     Now, screaming like an anguish'd thing
     Chased close by some down-breathing beak;
     Now, wailing like a breaking heart,
     That will not wholly break, but hopes
     With hope that knows itself in vain;
     Now, threatening like a storm-charged cloud;
     Now, cooing like a woodland dove;
     Now, up again in roar and wrath
     High soaring and wide sweeping; now,
     With sudden fury dashing down
     Full-force on the awaiting woods.

     Long waited there, for aspens frail
     That tinkle with a silver bell,
     To warn the Zephyr of their love,
     When danger is at hand, and wake
     The neighbouring boughs, surrendering all
     Their prophet harmony of leaves,
     Had caught his earliest windward thought,
     And told it trembling; naked birk
     Down showering her dishevelled hair,
     And like a beauty yielding up
     Her fate to all the elements,
     Had swayed in answer; hazels close,
     Thick brambles and dark brushwood tufts,
     And briared brakes that line the dells
     With shaggy beetling brows, had sung
     Shrill music, while the tattered flaws
     Tore over them, and now the whole
     Tumultuous concords, seized at once
     With savage inspiration,--pine,
     And larch, and beech, and fir, and thorn,
     And ash, and oak, and oakling, rave
     And shriek, and shout, and whirl, and toss,
     And stretch their arms, and split, and crack,
     And bend their stems, and bow their heads,
     And grind, and groan, and lion-like
     Roar to the echo-peopled hills
     And ravenous wilds, and crake-like cry
     With harsh delight, and cave-like call
     With hollow mouth, and harp-like thrill
     With mighty melodies, sublime,
     From clumps of column'd pines that wave
     A lofty anthem to the sky,
     Fit music for a prophet's soul -
     And like an ocean gathering power,
     And murmuring deep, while down below
     Reigns calm profound;--not trembling now
     The aspens, but like freshening waves
     That fall upon a shingly beach; -
     And round the oak a solemn roll
     Of organ harmony ascends,
     And in the upper foliage sounds

     A symphony of distant seas.
     The voice of nature is abroad
     This night; she fills the air with balm;
     Her mystery is o'er the land;
     And who that hears her now and yields
     His being to her yearning tones,
     And seats his soul upon her wings,
     And broadens o'er the wind-swept world
     With her, will gather in the flight
     More knowledge of her secret, more
     Delight in her beneficence,
     Than hours of musing, or the lore
     That lives with men could ever give!
     Nor will it pass away when morn
     Shall look upon the lulling leaves,
     And woodland sunshine, Eden-sweet,
     Dreams o'er the paths of peaceful shade; -
     For every elemental power
     Is kindred to our hearts, and once
     Acknowledged, wedded, once embraced,
     Once taken to the unfettered sense,
     Once claspt into the naked life,
     The union is eternal.



     WILL O' THE WISP



     Follow me, follow me,
     Over brake and under tree,
     Thro' the bosky tanglery,
     Brushwood and bramble!
     Follow me, follow me,
     Laugh and leap and scramble!
     Follow, follow,
     Hill and hollow,
     Fosse and burrow,
     Fen and furrow,
     Down into the bulrush beds,
     'Midst the reeds and osier heads,
     In the rushy soaking damps,
     Where the vapours pitch their camps,
     Follow me, follow me,
     For a midnight ramble!
     O! what a mighty fog,
     What a merry night O ho!
     Follow, follow, nigher, nigher -
     Over bank, and pond, and briar,
     Down into the croaking ditches,
     Rotten log,
     Spotted frog,
     Beetle bright
     With crawling light,
     What a joy O ho!
     Deep into the purple bog -
     What a joy O ho!
     Where like hosts of puckered witches
     All the shivering agues sit
     Warming hands and chafing feet,
     By the blue marsh-hovering oils:
     O the fools for all their moans!
     Not a forest mad with fire
     Could still their teeth, or warm their bones,
     Or loose them from their chilly coils.
     What a clatter,
     How they chatter!
     Shrink and huddle,
     All a muddle!
     What a joy O ho!
     Down we go, down we go,
     What a joy O ho!
     Soon shall I be down below,
     Plunging with a grey fat friar,
     Hither, thither, to and fro,
     Breathing mists and whisking lamps,
     Plashing in the shiny swamps;
     While my cousin Lantern Jack,
     With cook ears and cunning eyes,
     Turns him round upon his back,
     Daubs him oozy green and black,
     Sits upon his rolling size,
     Where he lies, where he lies,
     Groaning full of sack -
     Staring with his great round eyes!
     What a joy O ho!
     Sits upon him in the swamps
     Breathing mists and whisking lamps!
     What a joy O ho!
     Such a lad is Lantern Jack,
     When he rides the black nightmare
     Through the fens, and puts a glare
     In the friar's track.
     Such a frolic lad, good lack!
     To turn a friar on his back,
     Trip him, clip him, whip him, nip him.
     Lay him sprawling, smack!
     Such a lad is Lantern Jack!
     Such a tricksy lad, good lack!
     What a joy O ho!
     Follow me, follow me,
     Where he sits, and you shall see!



     SONG



     Fair and false! No dawn will greet
     Thy waking beauty as of old;
     The little flower beneath thy feet
     Is alien to thy smile so cold;
     The merry bird flown up to meet
     Young morning from his nest i' the wheat
     Scatters his joy to wood and wold,
     But scorns the arrogance of gold.

     False and fair! I scarce know why,
     But standing in the lonely air,
     And underneath the blessed sky,
     I plead for thee in my despair; -
     For thee cut off, both heart and eye
     From living truth; thy spring quite dry;
     For thee, that heaven my thought may share,
     Forget--how false! and think--how fair!



     SONG



     Two wedded lovers watched the rising moon,
     That with her strange mysterious beauty glowing,
     Over misty hills and waters flowing,
     Crowned the long twilight loveliness of June:
     And thus in me, and thus in me, they spake,
     The solemn secret of fist love did wake.

     Above the hills the blushing orb arose;
     Her shape encircled by a radiant bower,
     In which the nightingale with charmed power
     Poured forth enchantment o'er the dark repose:
     And thus in me, and thus in me, they said,
     Earth's mists did with the sweet new spirit wed.

     Far up the sky with ever purer beam,
     Upon the throne of night the moon was seated,
     And down the valley glens the shades retreated,
     And silver light was on the open stream.
     And thus in me, and thus in me, they sighed,
     Aspiring Love has hallowed Passion's tide.



     SONG



     I cannot lose thee for a day,
     But like a bird with restless wing
     My heart will find thee far away,
     And on thy bosom fall and sing,
     My nest is here, my rest is here; -
     And in the lull of wind and rain,
     Fresh voices make a sweet refrain,
     'His rest is there, his nest is there.'

     With thee the wind and sky are fair,
     But parted, both are strange and dark;
     And treacherous the quiet air
     That holds me singing like a lark,
     O shield my love, strong arm above!
     Till in the hush of wind and rain,
     Fresh voices make a rich refrain,
     'The arm above will shield thy love.'



     DAPHNE



     Musing on the fate of Daphne,
     Many feelings urged my breast,
     For the God so keen desiring,
     And the Nymph so deep distrest.

     Never flashed thro' sylvan valley
     Visions so divinely fair!
     He with early ardour glowing,
     She with rosy anguish rare.

     Only still more sweet and lovely
     For those terrors on her brows,
     Those swift glances wild and brilliant,
     Those delicious panting vows.

     Timidly the timid shoulders
     Shrinking from the fervid hand!
     Dark the tide of hair back-flowing
     From the blue-veined temples bland!

     Lovely, too, divine Apollo
     In the speed of his pursuit;
     With his eye an azure lustre,
     And his voice a summer lute!

     Looking like some burnished eagle
     Hovering o'er a fluttered bird;
     Not unseen of silver Naiad,
     And of wistful Dryad heard!

     Many a morn the naked beauty
     Saw her bright reflection drown
     In the flowing smooth-faced river,
     While the god came sheening down.

     Down from Pindus bright Peneus
     Tells its muse-melodious source;
     Sacred is its fountained birthplace,
     And the Orient floods its course.

     Many a morn the sunny darling
     Saw the rising chariot-rays,
     From the winding river-reaches,
     Mellowing in amber haze.

     Thro' the flaming mountain gorges
     Lo, the River leaps the plain;
     Like a wild god-stridden courser,
     Tossing high its foamy mane.

     Then he swims thro' laurelled sunlight,
     Full of all sensations sweet,
     Misty with his morning incense,
     To the mirrored maiden's feet!

     Wet and bright the dinting pebbles
     Shine where oft she paused and stood;
     All her dreamy warmth revolving,
     While the chilly waters wooed.

     Like to rosy-born Aurora,
     Glowing freshly into view,
     When her doubtful foot she ventures
     On the first cold morning blue.

     White as that Thessalian lily,
     Fairest Tempe's fairest flower,
     Lo, the tall Peneian virgin
     Stands beneath her bathing bower.

     There the laurell'd wreaths o'erarching
     Crown'd the dainty shuddering maid;
     There the dark prophetic laurel
     Kiss'd her with its sister shade.

     There the young green glistening leaflets
     Hush'd with love their breezy peal;
     There the little opening flowerets
     Blush'd beneath her vermeil heel!

     There among the conscious arbours
     Sounds of soft tumultuous wail,
     Mysteries of love, melodious,
     Came upon the lyric gale!

     Breathings of a deep enchantment,
     Effluence of immortal grace,
     Flitted round her faltering footstep,
     Spread a balm about her face!

     Witless of the enamour'd presence,
     Like a dreamy lotus bud
     From its drowsy stem down-drooping,
     Gazed she in the glowing flood.

     Softly sweet with fluttering presage,
     Felt she that ethereal sense,
     Drinking charms of love delirious,
     Reaping bliss of love intense!

     All the air was thrill'd with sunrise,
     Birds made music of her name,
     And the god-impregnate water
     Claspt her image ere she came.

     Richer for that glance unconscious!
     Dearer for that soft dismay!
     And the sudden self-possession!
     And the smile as bright as day!

     Plunging 'mid her scattered tresses,
     With her blue invoking eyes;
     See her like a star descending!
     Like a rosebud see her rise!

     Like a rosebud in the morning
     Dashing off its jewell'd dews,
     Ere unfolding all its fragrance
     It is gathered by the muse!

     Beauteous in the foamy laughter
     Bubbling round her shrinking waist,
     Lo! from locks and lips and eyelids
     Rain the glittering pearl-drops chaste!

     And about the maiden rapture
     Still the ruddy ripples play'd,
     Ebbing round in startled circlets
     When her arms began to wade;

     Flowing in like tides attracted
     To the glowing crescent shine!
     Clasping her ambrosial whiteness
     Like an Autumn-tinted vine!

     Sinking low with love's emotion!
     Levying with look and tone
     All love's rosy arts to mimic
     Cytherea's magic zone!

     Trembling up with adoration
     To the crimson daisy tip
     Budding from the snowy bosom -
     Fainter than the rose-red lip!

     Rising in a storm of wavelets,
     That for shelter, feigning fright,
     Prest to those twin-heaving havens,
     Harbour'd there beneath her light;

     Gleaming in a whirl of eddies
     Round her lucid throat and neck;
     Eddying in a gleam of dimples
     Up against her bloomy cheek;

     Bribing all the breezy water
     With rich warmth, the nymph to keep
     In a self-imprison'd plaisance,
     Tempting her from deep to deep.

     Till at last delirious passion
     Thrill'd the god to wild excess,
     And the fervour of a moment
     Made divinity confess;

     And he stood in all his glory!
     But so radiant, being near,
     That her eyes were frozen on him
     In a fascinated fear!

     All with orient splendour shining,
     All with roseate birth aglow,
     Gleam'd the golden god before her,
     With his golden crescent bow.

     Soon the dazzled light subsided,
     And he seem'd a beauteous youth,
     Form'd to gain the maiden's murmurs,
     And to pledge the vows of truth.

     Ah! that thus he had continued!
     O, that such for her had been!
     Graceful with all godlike beauty,
     But so humanly serene!

     Cheeks, and mouth, and mellow ringlets,
     Bounteous as the mid-day beam;
     Pleading looks and wistful tremour,
     Tender as a maiden's dream!

     Palms that like a bird's throbb'd bosom
     Palpitate with eagerness,
     Lips, the bridals of the roses,
     Dewy sweet from the caress!

     Lips and limbs, and eyes and ringlets,
     Swaying, praying to one prayer,
     Like a lyre, swept by a spirit,
     In the still, enraptur'd air.

     Like a lyre in some far valley,
     Uttering ravishments divine!
     All its strings to viewless fingers
     Yearning, modulations fine!

     Yearning with melodious fervour!
     Like a beauteous maiden flower,
     When the young beloved three paces
     Hovers from the bridal bower.

     Throbbing thro' the dawning stillness!
     As a heart within a breast,
     When the young beloved is stepping
     Radiant to the nuptial nest.

     O for Daphne! gentle Daphne
     Ever warmer by degrees
     Whispers full of hopes and visions
     Throng her ears like honey bees!

     Never yet was lonely blossom
     Woo'd with such delicious voice!
     Never since hath mortal maiden
     Dwelt on such celestial choice!

     Love-suffused she quivers, falters -
     Falters, sighs, but never speaks,
     All her rosy blood up-gushing
     Overflows her ripe young cheeks.

     Blushing, sweet with virgin blushes,
     All her loveliness a-flame,
     Stands she in the orient waters,
     Stricken o'er with speechless shame!

     Ah! but lovelier, ever lovelier,
     As more deep the colour glows,
     And the honey-laden lily
     Changes to the fragrant rose.

     While the god with meek embraces,
     Whispering all his sacred charms,
     Softly folds her, gently holds her,
     In his white encircling arms!

     But, O Dian! veil not wholly
     Thy pale crescent from the morn!
     Vanish not, O virgin goddess,
     With that look of pallid scorn!

     Still thy pure protecting influence
     Shed from those fair watchful eyes! -
     Lo! her angry orb has vanished,
     And the bright sun thrones the skies!

     Voicelessly the forest Virgin
     Vanished! but one look she gave -
     Keen as Niobean arrow
     Thro' the maiden's heart it drave.

     Thus toward that throning bosom
     Where all earth is warmed,--each spot
     Nourished with autumnal blessings -
     Icy chill was Daphne caught.

     Icy chill! but swift revulsion
     All her gentler self renewed,
     Even as icy Winter quickens
     With bud-opening warmth imbued.

     Even as a torpid brooklet,
     That to the night-gleaming moon
     Flashed in turn the frozen glances,
     Melts upon the breast of noon.

     But no more--O never, never,
     Turns she to that bosom bright,
     Swiftly all her senses counsel,
     All her nerves are strung to flight.

     O'er the brows of radiant Pindus
     Rolls a shadow dark and cold,
     And a sound of lamentation
     Issues from its mournful fold.

     Voice of the far-sighted Muses!
     Cry of keen foreboding song!
     Every cleft of startled Tempe
     Tingles with it sharp and long.

     Over bourn and bosk and dingle,
     Over rivers, over rills,
     Runs the sad subservient Echo
     Toward the dim blue distant hills!

     And another and another!
     'Tis a cry more wild than all;
     And the hills with muffled voices
     Answer 'Daphne!' to the call.

     And another and another!
     'Tis a cry so wildly sweet,
     That her charmed heart turns rebel
     To the instinct of her feet;

     And she pauses for an instant;
     But his arms have scarcely slid
     Round her waist in cestian girdles,
     And his low voluptuous lid

     Lifted pleading, and the honey
     Of his mouth for hers athirst,
     Ruby glistening, raised for moisture -
     Like a bud that waits to burst

     In the sweet espousing showers -
     And his tongue has scarce begun
     With its inarticulate burthen,
     And the clouds scarce show the sun

     As it pierces thro' a crevice
     Of the mass that closed it o'er,
     When again the horror flashes -
     And she turns to flight once more!

     And again o'er radiant Pindus
     Rolls the shadow dark and cold,
     And the sound of lamentation
     Issues from its sable fold!

     And again the light winds chide her
     As she darts from his embrace -
     And again the far-voiced echoes
     Speak their tidings of the chase.

     Loudly now as swiftly, swiftly,
     O'er the glimmering sands she speeds;
     Wildly now as in the furzes
     From the piercing spikes she bleeds.

     Deeply and with direful anguish,
     As above each crimson drop
     Passion checks the god Apollo,
     And love bids him weep and stop. -

     He above each drop of crimson
     Shadowing--like the laurel leaf
     That above himself will shadow -
     Sheds a fadeless look of grief.

     Then with love's remorseful discord,
     With its own desire at war,
     Sighing turns, while dimly fleeting
     Daphne flies the chase afar.

     But all nature is against her!
     Pan, with all his sylvan troop,
     Thro' the vista'd woodland valleys
     Blocks her course with cry and whoop!

     In the twilights of the thickets
     Trees bend down their gnarled boughs,
     Wild green leaves and low curved branches
     Hold her hair and beat her brows.

     Many a brake of brushwood covert,
     Where cold darkness slumbers mute,
     Slips a shrub to thwart her passage,
     Slides a hand to clutch her foot.

     Glens and glades of lushest verdure
     Toil her in their tawny mesh,
     Wilder-woofed ways and alleys
     Lock her struggling limbs in leash.

     Feathery grasses, flowery mosses,
     Knot themselves to make her trip;
     Sprays and stubborn sprigs outstretching
     Put a bridle on her lip;

     Many a winding lane betrays her,
     Many a sudden bosky shoot,
     And her knee makes many a stumble
     O'er some hidden damp old root,

     Whose quaint face peers green and dusky
     'Mongst the matted growth of plants,
     While she rises wild and weltering,
     Speeding on with many pants.

     Tangles of the wild red strawberry
     Spread their freckled trammels frail;
     In the pathway creeping brambles
     Catch her in their thorny trail.

     All the widely sweeping greensward
     Shifts and swims from knoll to knoll;
     Grey rough-fingered oak and elm wood
     Push her by from bole to bole.

     Groves of lemon, groves of citron,
     Tall high-foliaged plane and palm,
     Bloomy myrtle, light-blue olive,
     Wave her back with gusts of balm.

     Languid jasmine, scrambling briony,
     Walls of close-festooning braid,
     Fling themselves about her, mingling
     With her wafted looks, waylaid.

     Twisting bindweed, honey'd woodbine,
     Cling to her, while, red and blue,
     On her rounded form ripe berries
     Dash and die in gory dew.

     Running ivies dark and lingering
     Round her light limbs drag and twine;
     Round her waist with languorous tendrils
     Reels and wreathes the juicy vine;

     Reining in the flying creature
     With its arms about her mouth;
     Bursting all its mellowing bunches
     To seduce her husky drouth;

     Crowning her with amorous clusters;
     Pouring down her sloping back
     Fresh-born wines in glittering rillets,
     Following her in crimson track.

     Buried, drenched in dewy foliage,
     Thus she glimmers from the dawn,
     Watched by every forest creature,
     Fleet-foot Oread, frolic Faun.

     Silver-sandalled Arethusa
     Not more swiftly fled the sands,
     Fled the plains and fled the sunlights,
     Fled the murmuring ocean strands.

     O, that now the earth would open!
     O, that now the shades would hide!
     O, that now the gods would shelter!
     Caverns lead and seas divide!

     Not more faint soft-lowing Io
     Panted in those starry eyes,
     When the sleepless midnight meadows
     Piteously implored the skies!

     Still her breathless flight she urges
     By the sanctuary stream,
     And the god with golden swiftness
     Follows like an eastern beam.

     Her the close bewildering greenery
     Darkens with its duskiest green, -
     Him each little leaflet welcomes,
     Flushing with an orient sheen.

     Thus he nears, and now all Tempe
     Rings with his melodious cry,
     Avenues and blue expanses
     Beam in his large lustrous eye!

     All the branches start to music!
     As if from a secret spring
     Thousands of sweet bills are bubbling
     In the nest and on the wing.

     Gleams and shines the glassy river
     And rich valleys every one;
     But of all the throbbing beauty
     Brightest! singled by the sun!

     Ivy round her glimmering ancle,
     Vine about her glowing brow,
     Never sure was bride so beauteous,
     Daphne, chosen nymph, as thou!

     Thus he nears! and now she feels him
     Breathing hot on every limb;
     And he hears her own quick pantings -
     Ah! that they might be for him.

     O, that like the flower he tramples,
     Bending from his golden tread,
     Full of fair celestial ardours,
     She would bow her bridal head.

     O, that like the flower she presses,
     Nodding from her lily touch,
     Light as in the harmless breezes,
     She would know the god for such!

     See! the golden arms are round her -
     To the air she grasps and clings!
     See! his glowing arms have wound her -
     To the sky she shrieks and springs!

     See! the flushing chace of Tempe
     Trembles with Olympian air -
     See! green sprigs and buds are shooting
     From those white raised arms of prayer!

     In the earth her feet are rooting! -
     Breasts and limbs and lifted eyes,
     Hair and lips and stretching fingers,
     Fade away--and fadeless rise.

     And the god whose fervent rapture
     Clasps her finds his close embrace
     Full of palpitating branches,
     And new leaves that bud apace,

     Bound his wonder-stricken forehead; -
     While in ebbing measures slow
     Sounds of softly dying pulses
     Pause and quiver, pause and go;

     Go, and come again, and flutter
     On the verge of life,--then flee!
     All the white ambrosial beauty
     Is a lustrous Laurel Tree!

     Still with the great panting love-chase
     All its running sap is warmed; -
     But from head to foot the virgin
     Is transfigured and transformed.

     Changed!--yet the green Dryad nature
     Is instinct with human ties,
     And above its anguish'd lover
     Breathes pathetic sympathies;

     Sympathies of love and sorrow;
     Joy in her divine escape;
     Breathing through her bursting foliage
     Comfort to his bending shape.

     Vainly now the floating Naiads
     Seek to pierce the laurel maze,
     Nought but laurel meets their glances,
     Laurel glistens as they gaze.

     Nought but bright prophetic laurel!
     Laurel over eyes and brows,
     Over limbs and over bosom,
     Laurel leaves and laurel boughs!

     And in vain the listening Dryad
     Shells her hand against her ear! -
     All is silence--save the echo
     Travelling in the distance drear.



     LONDON BY LAMPLIGHT



     There stands a singer in the street,
     He has an audience motley and meet;
     Above him lowers the London night,
     And around the lamps are flaring bright.

     His minstrelsy may be unchaste -
     'Tis much unto that motley taste,
     And loud the laughter he provokes
     From those sad slaves of obscene jokes.

     But woe is many a passer by
     Who as he goes turns half an eye,
     To see the human form divine
     Thus Circe-wise changed into swine!

     Make up the sum of either sex
     That all our human hopes perplex,
     With those unhappy shapes that know
     The silent streets and pale cock-crow.

     And can I trace in such dull eyes
     Of fireside peace or country skies?
     And could those haggard cheeks presume
     To memories of a May-tide bloom?

     Those violated forms have been
     The pride of many a flowering green;
     And still the virgin bosom heaves
     With daisy meads and dewy leaves.

     But stygian darkness reigns within
     The river of death from the founts of sin;
     And one prophetic water rolls
     Its gas-lit surface for their souls.

     I will not hide the tragic sight -
     Those drown'd black locks, those dead lips white,
     Will rise from out the slimy flood,
     And cry before God's throne for blood!

     Those stiffened limbs, that swollen face, -
     Pollution's last and best embrace,
     Will call, as such a picture can,
     For retribution upon man.

     Hark! how their feeble laughter rings,
     While still the ballad-monger sings,
     And flatters their unhappy breasts
     With poisonous words and pungent jests.

     O how would every daisy blush
     To see them 'mid that earthy crush!
     O dumb would be the evening thrush,
     And hoary look the hawthorn bush!

     The meadows of their infancy
     Would shrink from them, and every tree,
     And every little laughing spot,
     Would hush itself and know them not.

     Precursor to what black despairs
     Was that child's face which once was theirs!
     And O to what a world of guile
     Was herald that young angel smile!

     That face which to a father's eye
     Was balm for all anxiety;
     That smile which to a mother's heart
     Went swifter than the swallow's dart!

     O happy homes! that still they know
     At intervals, with what a woe
     Would ye look on them, dim and strange,
     Suffering worse than winter change!

     And yet could I transplant them there,
     To breathe again the innocent air
     Of youth, and once more reconcile
     Their outcast looks with nature's smile;

     Could I but give them one clear day
     Of this delicious loving May,
     Release their souls from anguish dark,
     And stand them underneath the lark; -

     I think that Nature would have power
     To graft again her blighted flower
     Upon the broken stem, renew
     Some portion of its early hue; -

     The heavy flood of tears unlock,
     More precious than the Scriptured rock;
     At least instil a happier mood,
     And bring them back to womanhood.

     Alas! how many lost ones claim
     This refuge from despair and shame!
     How many, longing for the light,
     Sink deeper in the abyss this night!

     O, crying sin! O, blushing thought!
     Not only unto those that wrought
     The misery and deadly blight;
     But those that outcast them this night!

     O, agony of grief! for who
     Less dainty than his race, will do
     Such battle for their human right,
     As shall awake this startled night?

     Proclaim this evil human page
     Will ever blot the Golden Age
     That poets dream and saints invite,
     If it be unredeemed this night?

     This night of deep solemnity,
     And verdurous serenity,
     While over every fleecy field
     The dews descend and odours yield.

     This night of gleaming floods and falls,
     Of forest glooms and sylvan calls,
     Of starlight on the pebbly rills,
     And twilight on the circling hills.

     This night! when from the paths of men
     Grey error steams as from a fen;
     As o'er this flaring City wreathes
     The black cloud-vapour that it breathes!

     This night from which a morn will spring
     Blooming on its orient wing;
     A morn to roll with many more
     Its ghostly foam on the twilight shore.

     Morn! when the fate of all mankind
     Hangs poised in doubt, and man is blind.
     His duties of the day will seem
     The fact of life, and mine the dream:

     The destinies that bards have sung,
     Regeneration to the young,
     Reverberation of the truth,
     And virtuous culture unto youth!

     Youth! in whose season let abound
     All flowers and fruits that strew the ground,
     Voluptuous joy where love consents,
     And health and pleasure pitch their tents:

     All rapture and all pure delight;
     A garden all unknown to blight;
     But never the unnatural sight
     That throngs the shameless song this night!



     SONG



     Under boughs of breathing May,
     In the mild spring-time I lay,
     Lonely, for I had no love;
     And the sweet birds all sang for pity,
     Cuckoo, lark, and dove.

     Tell me, cuckoo, then I cried,
     Dare I woo and wed a bride?
     I, like thee, have no home-nest;
     And the twin notes thus tuned their ditty, -
     'Love can answer best.'

     Nor, warm dove with tender coo,
     Have I thy soft voice to woo,
     Even were a damsel by;
     And the deep woodland crooned its ditty, -
     'Love her first and try.'

     Nor have I, wild lark, thy wing,
     That from bluest heaven can bring
     Bliss, whatever fate befall;
     And the sky-lyrist trilled this ditty, -
     'Love will give thee all.'

     So it chanced while June was young,
     Wooing well with fervent song,
     I had won a damsel coy;
     And the sweet birds that sang for pity,
     Jubileed for joy.



     PASTORALS



     I

     How sweet on sunny afternoons,
     For those who journey light and well,
     To loiter up a hilly rise
     Which hides the prospect far beyond,
     And fancy all the landscape lying
     Beautiful and still;

     Beneath a sky of summer blue,
     Whose rounded cloudlets, folded soft,
     Gaze on the scene which we await
     And picture from their peacefulness;
     So calmly to the earth inclining
     Float those loving shapes!

     Like airy brides, each singling out
     A spot to love and bless with love,
     Their creamy bosoms glowing warm,
     Till distance weds them to the hills,
     And with its latest gleam the river
     Sinks in their embrace.

     And silverly the river runs,
     And many a graceful wind he makes,
     By fields where feed the happy flocks,
     And hedge-rows hushing pleasant lanes,
     The charms of English home reflected
     In his shining eye:

     Ancestral oak, broad-foliaged elm,
     Rich meadows sunned and starred with flowers,
     The cottage breathing tender smoke
     Against the brooding golden air,
     With glimpses of a stately mansion
     On a woodland sward;

     And circling round, as with a ring,
     The distance spreading amber haze,
     Enclosing hills and pastures sweet;
     A depth of soft and mellow light
     Which fills the heart with sudden yearning
     Aimless and serene!

     No disenchantment follows here,
     For nature's inspiration moves
     The dream which she herself fulfils;
     And he whose heart, like valley warmth,
     Steams up with joy at scenes like this
     Shall never be forlorn.

     And O for any human soul
     The rapture of a wide survey -
     A valley sweeping to the West,
     With all its wealth of loveliness,
     Is more than recompense for days
     That taught us to endure.

     II

     Yon upland slope which hides the sun
     Ascending from his eastern deeps,
     And now against the hues of dawn
     One level line of tillage rears;
     The furrowed brow of toil and time;
     To many it is but a sweep of land!

     To others 'tis an Autumn trust,
     But unto me a mystery; -
     An influence strange and swift as dreams;
     A whispering of old romance;
     A temple naked to the clouds;
     Or one of nature's bosoms fresh revealed,

     Heaving with adoration! there
     The work of husbandry is done,
     And daily bread is daily earned;
     Nor seems there ought to indicate
     The springs which move in me such thoughts,
     But from my soul a spirit calls them up.

     All day into the open sky,
     All night to the eternal stars,
     For ever both at morn and eve
     Men mellow distances draw near,
     And shadows lengthen in the dusk,
     Athwart the heavens it rolls its glimmering line!

     When twilight from the dream-hued West
     Sighs hush! and all the land is still;
     When, from the lush empurpling East,
     The twilight of the crowing cock
     Peers on the drowsy village roofs,
     Athwart the heavens that glimmering line is seen.

     And now beneath the rising sun,
     Whose shining chariot overpeers
     The irradiate ridge, while fetlock deep
     In the rich soil his coursers plunge -
     How grand in robes of light it looks!
     How glorious with rare suggestive grace!

     The ploughman mounting up the height
     Becomes a glowing shape, as though
     'Twere young Triptolemus, plough in hand,
     While Ceres in her amber scarf
     With gentle love directs him how
     To wed the willing earth and hope for fruits!

     The furrows running up are fraught
     With meanings; there the goddess walks,
     While Proserpine is young, and there -
     'Mid the late autumn sheaves, her voice
     Sobbing and choked with dumb despair -
     The nights will hear her wailing for her child!

     Whatever dim tradition tells,
     Whatever history may reveal,
     Or fancy, from her starry brows,
     Of light or dreamful lustre shed,
     Could not at this sweet time increase
     The quiet consecration of the spot.

     Blest with the sweat of labour, blest
     With the young sun's first vigorous beams,
     Village hope and harvest prayer, -
     The heart that throbs beneath it holds
     A bliss so perfect in itself
     Men's thoughts must borrow rather than bestow.

     III

     Now standing on this hedgeside path,
     Up which the evening winds are blowing
     Wildly from the lingering lines
     Of sunset o'er the hills;
     Unaided by one motive thought,
     My spirit with a strange impulsion
     Rises, like a fledgling,
     Whose wings are not mature, but still
     Supported by its strong desire
     Beats up its native air and leaves
     The tender mother's nest.

     Great music under heaven is made,
     And in the track of rushing darkness
     Comes the solemn shape of night,
     And broods above the earth.
     A thing of Nature am I now,
     Abroad, without a sense or feeling
     Born not of her bosom;
     Content with all her truths and fates;
     Ev'n as yon strip of grass that bows
     Above the new-born violet bloom,
     And sings with wood and field.

     IV

     Lo, as a tree, whose wintry twigs
     Drink in the sun with fibrous joy,
     And down into its dampest roots
     Thrills quickened with the draught of life,
     I wake unto the dawn, and leave my griefs to drowse.

     I rise and drink the fresh sweet air:
     Each draught a future bud of Spring;
     Each glance of blue a birth of green;
     I will not mimic yonder oak
     That dallies with dead leaves ev'n while the primrose peeps.

     But full of these warm-whispering beams,
     Like Memnon in his mother's eye, -
     Aurora! when the statue stone
     Moaned soft to her pathetic touch, -
     My soul shall own its parent in the founts of day!

     And ever in the recurring light,
     True to the primal joy of dawn,
     Forget its barren griefs; and aye
     Like aspens in the faintest breeze
     Turn all its silver sides and tremble into song.

     V

     Now from the meadow floods the wild duck clamours,
     Now the wood pigeon wings a rapid flight,
     Now the homeward rookery follows up its vanguard,
     And the valley mists are curling up the hills.

     Three short songs gives the clear-voiced throstle,
     Sweetening the twilight ere he fills the nest;
     While the little bird upon the leafless branches
     Tweets to its mate a tiny loving note.

     Deeper the stillness hangs on every motion;
     Calmer the silence follows every call;
     Now all is quiet save the roosting pheasant,
     The bell-wether's tinkle and the watch-dog's bark.

     Softly shine the lights from the silent kindling homestead,
     Stars of the hearth to the shepherd in the fold;
     Springs of desire to the traveller on the roadway;
     Ever breathing incense to the ever-blessing sky!

     VI

     How barren would this valley be,
     Without the golden orb that gazes
     On it, broadening to hues
     Of rose, and spreading wings of amber;
     Blessing it before it falls asleep.

     How barren would this valley be,
     Without the human lives now beating
     In it, or the throbbing hearts
     Far distant, who their flower of childhood
     Cherish here, and water it with tears!

     How barren should I be, were I
     Without above that loving splendour,
     Shedding light and warmth! without
     Some kindred natures of my kind
     To joy in me, or yearn towards me now!

     VII

     Summer glows warm on the meadows, and speedwell, and gold-cups, and
     daisies
     Darken 'mid deepening masses of sorrel, and shadowy grasses
     Show the ripe hue to the farmer, and summon the scythe and the hay-
     makers
     Down from the village; and now, even now, the air smells of the
     mowing,
     And the sharp song of the scythe whistles daily; from dawn, till the
     gloaming
     Wears its cool star, sweet and welcome to all flaming faces afield
     now;
     Heavily weighs the hot season, and drowses the darkening foliage,
     Drooping with languor; the white cloud floats, but sails not, for
     windless
     Heaven's blue tents it; no lark singing up in its fleecy white
     valleys;
     Up in its fairy white valleys, once feathered with minstrels,
     melodious
     With the invisible joy that wakes dawn o'er the green fields of
     England.
     Summer glows warm on the meadows; then come, let us roam thro' them
     gaily,
     Heedless of heat, and the hot-kissing sun, and the fear of dark
     freckles.
     Never one kiss will he give on a neck, or a lily-white forehead,
     Chin, hand, or bosom uncovered, all panting, to take the chance
     coolness,
     But full sure the fiery pressure leaves seal of espousal.
     Heed him not; come, tho' he kiss till the soft little upper-lip
     loses
     Half its pure whiteness; just speck'd where the curve of the rosy
     mouth reddens.

     Come, let him kiss, let him kiss, and his kisses shall make thee the
     sweeter.
     Thou art no nun, veiled and vowed; doomed to nourish a withering
     pallor!
     City exotics beside thee would show like bleached linen at mid-day,
     Hung upon hedges of eglantine! Thou in the freedom of nature,
     Full of her beauty and wisdom, gentleness, joyance, and kindness!
     Come, and like bees will we gather the rich golden honey of
     noontide;
     Deep in the sweet summer meadows, border'd by hillside and river,
     Lined with long trenches half-hidden, where smell of white meadow-
     sweet, sweetest,
     Blissfully hovers--O sweetest! but pluck it not! even in the
     tenderest
     Grasp it will lose breath and wither; like many, not made for a
     posy.

     See, the sun slopes down the meadows, where all the flowers are
     falling!
     Falling unhymned; for the nightingale scarce ever charms the long
     twilight:
     Mute with the cares of the nest; only known by a 'chuck, chuck,' and
     dovelike
     Call of content, but the finch and the linnet and blackcap pipe
     loudly.
     Round on the western hill-side warbles the rich-billed ouzel;
     And the shrill throstle is filling the tangled thickening copses;
     Singing o'er hyacinths hid, and most honey'd of flowers, white
     field-rose.
     Joy thus to revel all day in the grass of our own beloved country;
     Revel all day, till the lark mounts at eve with his sweet 'tirra-
     lirra':
     Trilling delightfully. See, on the river the slow-rippled surface
     Shining; the slow ripple broadens in circles; the bright surface
     smoothens;
     Now it is flat as the leaves of the yet unseen water-lily.
     There dart the lives of a day, ever-varying tactics fantastic.
     There, by the wet-mirrored osiers, the emerald wing of the
     kingfisher
     Flashes, the fish in his beak! there the dab-chick dived, and the
     motion
     Lazily undulates all thro' the tall standing army of rushes.

     Joy thus to revel all day, till the twilight turns us homeward!
     Till all the lingering deep-blooming splendour of sunset is over,
     And the one star shines mildly in mellowing hues, like a spirit
     Sent to assure us that light never dieth, tho' day is now buried.
     Saying: to-morrow, to-morrow, few hours intervening, that interval
     Tuned by the woodlark in heaven, to-morrow my semblance, far
     eastward,
     Heralds the day 'tis my mission eternal to seal and to prophecy.
     Come then, and homeward; passing down the close path of the meadows.
     Home like the bees stored with sweetness; each with a lark in the
     bosom,
     Trilling for ever, and oh! will yon lark ever cease to sing up
     there?



     TO A SKYLARK



     O skylark! I see thee and call thee joy!
     Thy wings bear thee up to the breast of the dawn;
     I see thee no more, but thy song is still
     The tongue of the heavens to me!

     Thus are the days when I was a boy;
     Sweet while I lived in them, dear now they're gone:
     I feel them no longer, but still, O still
     They tell of the heavens to me.



     SONG--SPRING



     When buds of palm do burst and spread
     Their downy feathers in the lane,
     And orchard blossoms, white and red,
     Breathe Spring delight for Autumn gain;
     And the skylark shakes his wings in the rain;

     O then is the season to look for a bride!
     Choose her warily, woo her unseen;
     For the choicest maids are those that hide
     Like dewy violets under the green.



     SONG--AUTUMN



     When nuts behind the hazel-leaf
     Are brown as the squirrel that hunts them free,
     And the fields are rich with the sun-burnt sheaf,
     'Mid the blue cornflower and the yellowing tree;
     And the farmer glows and beams in his glee;

     O then is the season to wed thee a bride!
     Ere the garners are filled and the ale-cups foam;
     For a smiling hostess is the pride
     And flower of every Harvest Home.



     SORROWS AND JOYS



     Bury thy sorrows, and they shall rise
     As souls to the immortal skies,
     And there look down like mothers' eyes.

     But let thy joys be fresh as flowers,
     That suck the honey of the showers,
     And bloom alike on huts and towers.

     So shall thy days be sweet and bright;
     Solemn and sweet thy starry night,
     Conscious of love each change of light.

     The stars will watch the flowers asleep,
     The flowers will feel the soft stars weep,
     And both will mix sensations deep.

     With these below, with those above,
     Sits evermore the brooding dove,
     Uniting both in bonds of love.

     For both by nature are akin;
     Sorrow, the ashen fruit of sin,
     And joy, the juice of life within.

     Children of earth are these; and those
     The spirits of divine repose -
     Death radiant o'er all human woes.

     O, think what then had been thy doom,
     If homeless and without a tomb
     They had been left to haunt the gloom!

     O, think again what now they are -
     Motherly love, tho' dim and far,
     Imaged in every lustrous star.

     For they, in their salvation, know
     No vestige of their former woe,
     While thro' them all the heavens do flow.

     Thus art thou wedded to the skies,
     And watched by ever-loving eyes,
     And warned by yearning sympathies.



     SONG



     The flower unfolds its dawning cup,
     And the young sun drinks the star-dews up,
     At eve it droops with the bliss of day,
     And dreams in the midnight far away.

     So am I in thy sole, sweet glance
     Pressed with a weight of utterance;
     Lovingly all my leaves unfold,
     And gleam to the beams of thirsty gold.

     At eve I droop, for then the swell
     Of feeling falters forth farewell; -
     At midnight I am dreaming deep,
     Of what has been, in blissful sleep.

     When--ah! when will love's own fight
     Wed me alike thro' day and night,
     When will the stars with their linking charms
     Wake us in each other's arms?



     SONG



     Thou to me art such a spring
     As the Arab seeks at eve,
     Thirsty from the shining sands;
     There to bathe his face and hands,
     While the sun is taking leave,
     And dewy sleep is a delicious thing.

     Thou to me art such a dream
     As he dreams upon the grass,
     While the bubbling coolness near
     Makes sweet music in his ear;
     And the stars that slowly pass
     In solitary grandeur o'er him gleam.

     Thou to me art such a dawn
     As the dawn whose ruddy kiss
     Wakes him to his darling steed;
     And again the desert speed,
     And again the desert bliss,
     Lightens thro' his veins, and he is gone!



     ANTIGONE



     The buried voice bespake Antigone.

     'O sister! couldst thou know, as thou wilt know,
     The bliss above, the reverence below,
     Enkindled by thy sacrifice for me;
     Thou wouldst at once with holy ecstasy
     Give thy warm limbs into the yearning earth.
     Sleep, Sister! for Elysium's dawning birth, -
     And faith will fill thee with what is to be!
     Sleep, for the Gods are watching over thee!
     Thy dream will steer thee to perform their will,
     As silently their influence they instil.
     O Sister! in the sweetness of thy prime,
     Thy hand has plucked the bitter flower of death;
     But this will dower thee with Elysian breath,
     That fade into a never-fading clime.
     Dear to the Gods are those that do like thee
     A solemn duty! for the tyranny
     Of kings is feeble to the soul that dares
     Defy them to fulfil its sacred cares:
     And weak against a mighty will are men.
     O, Torch between two brothers! in whose gleam
     Our slaughtered House doth shine as one again,
     Tho' severed by the sword; now may thy dream
     Kindle desire in thee for us, and thou,
     Forgetting not thy lover and his vow,
     Leaving no human memory forgot,
     Shalt cross, not unattended, the dark stream
     Which runs by thee in sleep and ripples not.
     The large stars glitter thro' the anxious night,
     And the deep sky broods low to look at thee:
     The air is hush'd and dark o'er land and sea,
     And all is waiting for the morrow light:
     So do thy kindred spirits wait for thee.
     O Sister! soft as on the downward rill,
     Will those first daybeams from the distant hill
     Fall on the smoothness of thy placid brow,
     Like this calm sweetness breathing thro' me now:
     And when the fated sounds shall wake thine eyes,
     Wilt thou, confiding in the supreme will,
     In all thy maiden steadfastness arise,
     Firm to obey and earnest to fulfil;
     Remembering the night thou didst not sleep,
     And this same brooding sky beheld thee creep,
     Defiant of unnatural decree,
     To where I lay upon the outcast land;
     Before the iron gates upon the plain;
     A wretched, graveless ghost, whose wailing chill
     Came to thy darkened door imploring thee;
     Yearning for burial like my brother slain; -
     And all was dared for love and piety!
     This thought will nerve again thy virgin hand
     To serve its purpose and its destiny.'

     She woke, they led her forth, and all was still.


     Swathed round in mist and crown'd with cloud,
     O Mountain! hid from peak to base -
     Caught up into the heavens and clasped
     In white ethereal arms that make
     Thy mystery of size sublime!
     What eye or thought can measure now
     Thy grand dilating loftiness!
     What giant crest dispute with thee
     Supremacy of air and sky!
     What fabled height with thee compare!
     Not those vine-terraced hills that seethe
     The lava in their fiery cusps;
     Nor that high-climbing robe of snow,
     Whose summits touch the morning star,
     And breathe the thinnest air of life;
     Nor crocus-couching Ida, warm
     With Juno's latest nuptial lure;
     Nor Tenedos whose dreamy eye
     Still looks upon beleaguered Troy;
     Nor yet Olympus crown'd with gods
     Can boast a majesty like thine,
     O Mountain! hid from peak to base,
     And image of the awful power
     With which the secret of all things,
     That stoops from heaven to garment earth,
     Can speak to any human soul,
     When once the earthly limits lose
     Their pointed heights and sharpened lines,
     And measureless immensity
     Is palpable to sense and sight.



     SONG



     No, no, the falling blossom is no sign
     Of loveliness destroy'd and sorrow mute;
     The blossom sheds its loveliness divine; -
     Its mission is to prophecy the fruit.

     Nor is the day of love for ever dead,
     When young enchantment and romance are gone;
     The veil is drawn, but all the future dread
     Is lightened by the finger of the dawn.

     Love moves with life along a darker way,
     They cast a shadow and they call it death:
     But rich is the fulfilment of their day;
     The purer passion and the firmer faith.



     THE TWO BLACKBIRDS



     A blackbird in a wicker cage,
     That hung and swung 'mid fruits and flowers,
     Had learnt the song-charm, to assuage
     The drearness of its wingless hours.

     And ever when the song was heard,
     From trees that shade the grassy plot
     Warbled another glossy bird,
     Whose mate not long ago was shot.

     Strange anguish in that creature's breast,
     Unwept like human grief, unsaid,
     Has quickened in its lonely nest
     A living impulse from the dead.

     Not to console its own wild smart, -
     But with a kindling instinct strong,
     The novel feeling of its heart
     Beats for the captive bird of song.

     And when those mellow notes are still,
     It hops from off its choral perch,
     O'er path and sward, with busy bill,
     All grateful gifts to peck and search.

     Store of ouzel dainties choice
     To those white swinging bars it brings;
     And with a low consoling voice
     It talks between its fluttering wings.

     Deeply in their bitter grief
     Those sufferers reciprocate,
     The one sings for its woodland life,
     The other for its murdered mate.

     But deeper doth the secret prove,
     Uniting those sad creatures so;
     Humanity's great link of love,
     The common sympathy of woe.

     Well divined from day to day
     Is the swift speech between them twain;
     For when the bird is scared away,
     The captive bursts to song again.

     Yet daily with its flattering voice,
     Talking amid its fluttering wings,
     Store of ouzel dainties choice
     With busy bill the poor bird brings.

     And shall I say, till weak with age
     Down from its drowsy branch it drops,
     It will not leave that captive cage,
     Nor cease those busy searching hops?

     Ah, no! the moral will not strain;
     Another sense will make it range,
     Another mate will soothe its pain,
     Another season work a change.

     But thro' the live-long summer, tried,
     A pure devotion we may see;
     The ebb and flow of Nature's tide;
     A self-forgetful sympathy.



     JULY



     I

     Blue July, bright July,
     Month of storms and gorgeous blue;
     Violet lightnings o'er thy sky,
     Heavy falls of drenching dew;
     Summer crown! o'er glen and glade
     Shrinking hyacinths in their shade;
     I welcome thee with all thy pride,
     I love thee like an Eastern bride.
     Though all the singing days are done
     As in those climes that clasp the sun;
     Though the cuckoo in his throat
     Leaves to the dove his last twin note;
     Come to me with thy lustrous eye,
     Golden-dawning oriently,
     Come with all thy shining blooms,
     Thy rich red rose and rolling glooms.
     Though the cuckoo doth but sing 'cuk, cuk,'
     And the dove alone doth coo;
     Though the cushat spins her coo-r-roo, r-r-roo -
     To the cuckoo's halting 'cuk.'

     II

     Sweet July, warm July!
     Month when mosses near the stream,
     Soft green mosses thick and shy,
     Are a rapture and a dream.
     Summer Queen! whose foot the fern
     Fades beneath while chestnuts burn;
     I welcome thee with thy fierce love,
     Gloom below and gleam above.
     Though all the forest trees hang dumb,
     With dense leafiness o'ercome;
     Though the nightingale and thrush,
     Pipe not from the bough or bush;
     Come to me with thy lustrous eye,
     Azure-melting westerly,
     The raptures of thy face unfold,
     And welcome in thy robes of gold!
     Tho' the nightingale broods--'sweet-chuck-sweet' -
     And the ouzel flutes so chill,
     Tho' the throstle gives but one shrilly trill
     To the nightingale's 'sweet-sweet.'



     SONG



     I would I were the drop of rain
     That falls into the dancing rill,
     For I should seek the river then,
     And roll below the wooded hill,
     Until I reached the sea.

     And O, to be the river swift
     That wrestles with the wilful tide,
     And fling the briny weeds aside
     That o'er the foamy billows drift,
     Until I came to thee!

     I would that after weary strife,
     And storm beneath the piping wind,
     The current of my true fresh life
     Might come unmingled, unimbrined,
     To where thou floatest free.

     Might find thee in some amber clime,
     Where sunlight dazzles on the sail,
     And dreaming of our plighted vale
     Might seal the dream, and bless the time,
     With maiden kisses three.



     SONG



     Come to me in any shape!
     As a victor crown'd with vine,
     In thy curls the clustering grape, -
     Or a vanquished slave:
     'Tis thy coming that I crave,
     And thy folding serpent twine,
     Close and dumb;
     Ne'er from that would I escape;
     Come to me in any shape!
     Only come!

     Only come, and in my breast
     Hide thy shame or show thy pride;
     In my bosom be caressed,
     Never more to part;
     Come into my yearning heart;
     I, the serpent, golden-eyed,
     Twine round thee;
     Twine thee with no venomed test;
     Absence makes the venomed nest;
     Come to me!

     Come to me, my lover, come!
     Violets on the tender stem
     Die and wither in their bloom,
     Under dewy grass;
     Come, my lover, or, alas!
     I shall die, shall die like them,
     Frail and lone;
     Come to me, my lover, come!
     Let thy bosom be my tomb:
     Come, my own!



     THE SHIPWRECK OF IDOMENEUS



     Swept from his fleet upon that fatal night
     When great Poseidon's sudden-veering wrath
     Scattered the happy homeward-floating Greeks
     Like foam-flakes off the waves, the King of Crete
     Held lofty commune with the dark Sea-god.
     His brows were crowned with victory, his cheeks
     Were flushed with triumph, but the mighty joy
     Of Troy's destruction and his own great deeds
     Passed, for the thoughts of home were dearer now,
     And sweet the memory of wife and child,
     And weary now the ten long, foreign years,
     And terrible the doubt of short delay -
     More terrible, O Gods! he cried, but stopped;
     Then raised his voice upon the storm and prayed.
     O thou, if injured, injured not by me,
     Poseidon! whom sea-deities obey
     And mortals worship, hear me! for indeed
     It was our oath to aid the cause of Greece,
     Not unespoused by Gods, and most of all
     By thee, if gentle currents, havens calm,
     Fair winds and prosperous voyage, and the Shape
     Impersonate in many a perilous hour,
     Both in the stately councils of the Kings,
     And when the husky battle murmured thick,
     May testify of services performed!
     But now the seas are haggard with thy wrath,
     Thy breath is tempest! never at the shores
     Of hostile Ilium did thy stormful brows
     Betray such fierce magnificence! not even
     On that wild day when, mad with torch and glare,
     The frantic crowds with eyes like starving wolves
     Burst from their ports impregnable, a stream
     Of headlong fury toward the hissing deep;
     Where then full-armed I stood in guard, compact
     Beside thee, and alone, with brand and spear,
     We held at bay the swarming brood, and poured
     Blood of choice warriors on the foot-ploughed sands!
     Thou, meantime, dark with conflict, as a cloud
     That thickens in the bosom of the West
     Over quenched sunset, circled round with flame,
     Huge as a billow running from the winds
     Long distances, till with black shipwreck swoln,
     It flings its angry mane about the sky.
     And like that billow heaving ere it burst;
     And like that cloud urged by impulsive storm
     With charge of thunder, lightning, and the drench
     Of torrents, thou in all thy majesty
     Of mightiness didst fall upon the war!
     Remember that great moment! Nor forget
     The aid I gave thee; how my ready spear
     Flew swiftly seconding thy mortal stroke,
     Where'er the press was hottest; never slacked
     My arm its duty, nor mine eye its aim,
     Though terribly they compassed us, and stood
     Thick as an Autumn forest, whose brown hair,
     Lustrous with sunlight, by the still increase
     Of heat to glowing heat conceives like zeal
     Of radiance, till at the pitch of noon
     'Tis seized with conflagration and distends
     Horridly over leagues of doom'd domain;
     Mingling the screams of birds, the cries of brutes,
     The wail of creatures in the covert pent,
     Howls, yells, and shrieks of agony, the hiss
     Of seething sap, and crash of falling boughs
     Together in its dull voracious roar.
     So closely and so fearfully they throng'd,
     Savage with phantasies of victory,
     A sea of dusky shapes; for day had passed
     And night fell on their darkened faces, red
     With fight and torchflare; shrill the resonant air
     With eager shouts, and hoarse with angry groans;
     While over all the dense and sullen boom,
     The din and murmur of the myriads,
     Rolled with its awful intervals, as though
     The battle breathed, or as against the shore
     Waves gather back to heave themselves anew.
     That night sleep dropped not from the dreary skies,
     Nor could the prowess of our chiefs oppose
     That sea of raging men. But what were they?
     Or what is man opposed to thee? Its hopes
     Are wrecks, himself the drowning, drifting weed
     That wanders on thy waters; such as I
     Who see the scattered remnants of my fleet,
     Remembering the day when first we sailed,
     Each glad ship shining like the morning star
     With promise for the world. Oh! such as I
     Thus darkly drifting on the drowning waves.
     O God of waters! 'tis a dreadful thing
     To suffer for an evil unrevealed;
     Dreadful it is to hear the perishing cry
     Of those we love; the silence that succeeds
     How dreadful! Still my trust is fixed on thee
     For those that still remain and for myself.
     And if I hear thy swift foam-snorting steeds
     Drawing thy dusky chariot, as in
     The pauses of the wind I seem to hear,
     Deaf thou art not to my entreating prayer!
     Haste then to give us help, for closely now
     Crete whispers in my ears, and all my blood
     Runs keen and warm for home, and I have yearning,
     Such yearning as I never felt before,
     To see again my wife, my little son,
     My Queen, my pretty nursling of five years,
     The darling of my hopes, our dearest pledge
     Of marriage, and our brightest prize of love,
     Whose parting cry rings clearest in my heart.
     O lay this horror, much-offended God!
     And making all as fair and firm as when
     We trusted to thy mighty depths of old, -
     I vow to sacrifice the first whom Zeus
     Shall prompt to hail us from the white seashore
     And welcome our return to royal Crete,
     An offering, Poseidon, unto thee!

     Amid the din of elemental strife,
     No voice may pierce but Deity supreme:
     And Deity supreme alone can hear,
     Above the hurricane's discordant shrieks,
     The cry of agonized humanity.

     Not unappeased was He who smites the waves,
     When to his stormy ears the warrior's vow
     Entered, and from his foamy pinnacle
     Tumultuous he beheld the prostrate form,
     And knew the mighty heart. Awhile he gazed,
     As doubtful of his purpose, and the storm,
     Conscious of that divine debate, withheld
     Its fierce emotion, in the luminous gloom
     Of those so dark irradiating eyes!
     Beneath whose wavering lustre shone revealed
     The tumult of the purpling deeps, and all
     The throbbing of the tempest, as it paused,
     Slowly subsiding, seeming to await
     The sudden signal, as a faithful hound
     Pants with the forepaws stretched before its nose,
     Athwart the greensward, after an eager chase;
     Its hot tongue thrust to cool, its foamy jaws
     Open to let the swift breath come and go,
     Its quick interrogating eyes fixed keen
     Upon the huntsman's countenance, and ever
     Lashing its sharp impatient tail with haste:
     Prompt at the slightest sign to scour away,
     And hang itself afresh by the bleeding fangs,
     Upon the neck of some death-singled stag,
     Whose royal antlers, eyes, and stumbling knees
     Will supplicate the Gods in mute despair.
     This time not mute, nor yet in vain this time!
     For still the burden of the earnest voice
     And all the vivid glories it revoked
     Sank in the God, with that absorbed suspense
     Felt only by the Olympians, whose minds
     Unbounded like our mortal brain, perceive
     All things complete, the end, the aim of all;
     To whom the crown and consequence of deeds
     Are ever present with the deed itself.

     And now the pouring surges, vast and smooth,
     Grew weary of restraint, and heaved themselves
     Headlong beneath him, breaking at his feet
     With wild importunate cries and angry wail;
     Like crowds that shout for bread and hunger more.
     And now the surface of their rolling backs
     Was ridged with foam-topt furrows, rising high
     And dashing wildly, like to fiery steeds,
     Fresh from the Thracian or Thessalian plains,
     High-blooded mares just tempering to the bit,
     Whose manes at full-speed stream upon the winds,
     And in whose delicate nostrils when the gust
     Breathes of their native plains, they ramp and rear,
     Frothing the curb, and bounding from the earth,
     As though the Sun-god's chariot alone
     Were fit to follow in their flashing track.
     Anon with gathering stature to the height
     Of those colossal giants, doomed long since
     To torturous grief and penance, that assailed
     The sky-throned courts of Zeus, and climbing, dared
     For once in a world the Olympic wrath, and braved
     The electric spirit which from his clenching hand
     Pierces the dark-veined earth, and with a touch
     Is death to mortals, fearfully they grew!
     And with like purpose of audacity
     Threatened Titanic fury to the God.
     Such was the agitation of the sea
     Beneath Poseidon's thought-revolving brows,
     Storming for signal. But no signal came.
     And as when men, who congregate to hear
     Some proclamation from the regal fount,
     With eager questioning and anxious phrase
     Betray the expectation of their hearts,
     Till after many hours of fretful sloth,
     Weary with much delay, they hold discourse
     In sullen groups and cloudy masses, stirred
     With rage irresolute and whispering plot,
     Known more by indication than by word,
     And understood alone by those whose minds
     Participate;--even so the restless waves
     Began to lose all sense of servitude,
     And worked with rebel passions, bursting, now
     To right, and now to left, but evermore
     Subdued with influence, and controlled with dread
     Of that inviolate Authority.
     Then, swiftly as he mused, the impetuous God
     Seized on the pausing reins, his coursers plunged,
     His brows resumed the grandeur of their ire;
     Throughout his vast divinity the deeps
     Concurrent thrilled with action, and away,
     As sweeps a thunder-cloud across the sky
     In harvest-time, preluded by dull blasts;
     Or some black-visaged whirlwind, whose wide folds
     Rush, wrestling on with all 'twixt heaven and earth,
     Darkling he hurried, and his distant voice,
     Not softened by delay, was heard in tones
     Distinctly terrible, still following up
     Its rapid utterance of tremendous wrath
     With hoarse reverberations; like the roar
     Of lions when they hunger, and awake
     The sullen echoes from their forest sleep,
     To speed the ravenous noise from hill to hill
     And startle victims; but more awful, He,
     Scudding across the hills that rise and sink,
     With foam, and splash, and cataracts of spray,
     Clothed in majestic splendour; girt about
     With Sea-gods and swift creatures of the sea;
     Their briny eyes blind with the showering drops;
     Their stormy locks, salt tongues, and scaly backs,
     Quivering in harmony with the tempest, fierce
     And eager with tempestuous delight; -
     He like a moving rock above them all
     Solemnly towering while fitful gleams
     Brake from his dense black forehead, which display'd
     The enduring chiefs as their distracted fleets
     Tossed, toiling with the waters, climbing high,
     And plunging downward with determined beaks,
     In lurid anguish; but the Cretan king
     And all his crew were 'ware of under-tides,
     That for the groaning vessel made a path,
     On which the impending and precipitous waves
     Fell not, nor suck'd to their abysmal gorge.

     O, happy they to feel the mighty God,
     Without his whelming presence near: to feel
     Safety and sweet relief from such despair,
     And gushing of their weary hopes once more
     Within their fond warm hearts, tired limbs, and eyes
     Heavy with much fatigue and want of sleep!
     Prayers did not lack; like mountain springs they came,
     After the earth has drunk the drenching rains,
     And throws her fresh-born jets into the sun
     With joyous sparkles;--for there needed not
     Evidence more serene of instant grace,
     Immortal mercy! and the sense which follows
     Divine interposition, when the shock
     Of danger hath been thwarted by the Gods,
     Visibly, and through supplication deep, -
     Rose in them, chiefly in the royal mind
     Of him whose interceding vow had saved.
     Tears from that great heroic soul sprang up;
     Not painful as in grief, nor smarting keen
     With shame of weeping; but calm, fresh, and sweet;
     Such as in lofty spirits rise, and wed
     The nature of the woman to the man;
     A sight most lovely to the Gods! They fell
     Like showers of starlight from his steadfast eyes,
     As ever towards the prow he gazed, nor moved
     One muscle, with firm lips and level lids,
     Motionless; while the winds sang in his ears,
     And took the length of his brown hair in streams
     Behind him. Thus the hours passed, and the oars
     Plied without pause, and nothing but the sound
     Of the dull rowlocks and still watery sough,
     Far off, the carnage of the storm, was heard.
     For nothing spake the mariners in their toil,
     And all the captains of the war were dumb:
     Too much oppressed with wonder, too much thrilled
     By their great chieftain's silence, to disturb
     Such meditation with poor human speech.
     Meantime the moon through slips of driving cloud
     Came forth, and glanced athwart the seas a path
     Of dusky splendour, like the Hadean brows,
     When with Elysian passion they behold
     Persephone's complacent hueless cheeks.
     Soon gathering strength and lustre, as a ship
     That swims into some blue and open bay
     With bright full-bosomed sails, the radiant car
     Of Artemis advanced, and on the waves
     Sparkled like arrows from her silver bow
     The keenness of her pure and tender gaze.

     Then, slowly, one by one the chiefs sought rest;
     The watches being set, and men to relieve
     The rowers at midseason. Fair it was
     To see them as they lay! Some up the prow,
     Some round the helm, in open-handed sleep;
     With casques unloosed, and bucklers put aside;
     The ten years' tale of war upon their cheeks,
     Where clung the salt wet locks, and on their breasts
     Beards, the thick growth of many a proud campaign;
     And on their brows the bright invisible crown
     Victory sheds from her own radiant form,
     As o'er her favourites' heads she sings and soars.
     But dreams came not so calmly; as around
     Turbulent shores wild waves and swamping surf
     Prevail, while seaward, on the tranquil deeps,
     Reign placid surfaces and solemn peace,
     So, from the troubled strands of memory, they
     Launched and were tossed, long ere they found the tides
     That lead to the gentle bosoms of pure rest.
     And like to one who from a ghostly watch
     In a lone house where murder hath been done,
     And secret violations, pale with stealth
     Emerges, staggering on the first chill gust
     Wherewith the morning greets him, feeling not
     Its balmy freshness on his bloodless cheek, -
     But swift to hide his midnight face afar,
     'Mongst the old woods and timid-glancing flowers
     Hastens, till on the fresh reviving breasts
     Of tender Dryads folded he forgets
     The pallid witness of those nameless things,
     In renovated senses lapt, and joins
     The full, keen joyance of the day, so they
     From sights and sounds of battle smeared with blood,
     And shrieking souls on Acheron's bleak tides,
     And wail of execrating kindred, slid
     Into oblivious slumber and a sense
     Of satiate deliciousness complete.

     Leave them, O Muse, in that so happy sleep!
     Leave them to reap the harvest of their toil,
     While fast in moonlight the glad vessel glides,
     As if instinctive to its forest home.
     O Muse, that in all sorrows and all joys,
     Rapturous bliss and suffering divine,
     Dwellest with equal fervour, in the calm
     Of thy serene philosophy, albeit
     Thy gentle nature is of joy alone,
     And loves the pipings of the happy fields,
     Better than all the great parade and pomp
     Which forms the train of heroes and of kings,
     And sows, too frequently, the tragic seeds
     That choke with sobs thy singing,--turn away
     Thy lustrous eyes back to the oath-bound man!
     For as a shepherd stands above his flock,
     The lofty figure of the king is seen,
     Standing above his warriors as they sleep:
     And still as from a rock grey waters gush,
     While still the rock is passionless and dark,
     Nor moves one feature of its giant face,
     The tears fall from his eyes, and he stirs not.

     And O, bright Muse! forget not thou to fold
     In thy prophetic sympathy the thought
     Of him whose destiny has heard its doom:
     The Sacrifice thro' whom the ship is saved.
     Haply that Sacrifice is sleeping now,
     And dreams of glad tomorrows. Haply now,
     His hopes are keenest, and his fervent blood
     Richest with youth, and love, and fond regard!
     Round him the circle of affections blooms,
     And in some happy nest of home he lives,
     One name oft uttering in delighted ears,
     Mother! at which the heart of men are kin
     With reverence and yearning. Haply, too,
     That other name, twin holy, twin revered,
     He whispers often to the passing winds
     That blow toward the Asiatic coasts;
     For Crete has sent her bravest to the war,
     And multitudes pressed forward to that rank,
     Men with sad weeping wives and little ones.
     That other name--O Father! who art thou,
     Thus doomed to lose the star of thy last days?
     It may be the sole flower of thy life,
     And that of all who now look up to thee!
     O Father, Father! unto thee even now
     Fate cries; the future with imploring voice
     Cries 'Save me,' 'Save me,' though thou hearest not.
     And O thou Sacrifice, foredoomed by Zeus;
     Even now the dark inexorable deed
     Is dealing its relentless stroke, and vain
     Are prayers, and tears, and struggles, and despair!
     The mother's tears, the nation's stormful grief,
     The people's indignation and revenge!
     Vain the last childlike pleading voice for life,
     The quick resolve, the young heroic brow,
     So like, so like, and vainly beautiful!
     Oh! whosoe'er ye are the Muse says not,
     And sees not, but the Gods look down on both.



     THE LONGEST DAY



     On yonder hills soft twilight dwells
     And Hesper burns where sunset dies,
     Moist and chill the woodland smells
     From the fern-covered hollows uprise;
     Darkness drops not from the skies,
     But shadows of darkness are flung o'er the vale
     From the boughs of the chestnut, the oak, and the elm,
     While night in yon lines of eastern pines
     Preserves alone her inviolate realm
     Against the twilight pale.

     Say, then say, what is this day,
     That it lingers thus with half-closed eyes,
     When the sunset is quenched and the orient ray
     Of the roseate moon doth rise,
     Like a midnight sun o'er the skies!
     'Tis the longest, the longest of all the glad year,
     The longest in life and the fairest in hue,
     When day and night, in bridal light,
     Mingle their beings beneath the sweet blue,
     And bless the balmy air!

     Upward to this starry height
     The culminating seasons rolled;
     On one slope green with spring delight,
     The other with harvest gold,
     And treasures of Autumn untold:
     And on this highest throne of the midsummer now
     The waning but deathless day doth dream,
     With a rapturous grace, as tho' from the face
     Of the unveiled infinity, lo, a far beam
     Had fall'n on her dim-flushed brow!

     Prolong, prolong that tide of song,
     O leafy nightingale and thrush!
     Still, earnest-throated blackcap, throng
     The woods with that emulous gush
     Of notes in tumultuous rush.
     Ye summer souls, raise up one voice!
     A charm is afloat all over the land;
     The ripe year doth fall to the Spirit of all,
     Who blesses it with outstretched hand;
     Ye summer souls, rejoice!



     TO ROBIN REDBREAST



     Merrily 'mid the faded leaves,
     O Robin of the bright red breast!
     Cheerily over the Autumn eaves,
     Thy note is heard, bonny bird;
     Sent to cheer us, and kindly endear us
     To what would be a sorrowful time
     Without thee in the weltering clime:
     Merry art thou in the boughs of the lime,
     While thy fadeless waistcoat glows on thy breast,
     In Autumn's reddest livery drest.

     A merry song, a cheery song!
     In the boughs above, on the sward below,
     Chirping and singing the live day long,
     While the maple in grief sheds its fiery leaf,
     And all the trees waning, with bitter complaining,
     Chestnut, and elm, and sycamore,
     Catch the wild gust in their arms, and roar
     Like the sea on a stormy shore,
     Till wailfully they let it go,
     And weep themselves naked and weary with woe.

     Merrily, cheerily, joyously still
     Pours out the crimson-crested tide.
     The set of the season burns bright on the hill,
     Where the foliage dead falls yellow and red,
     Picturing vainly, but foretelling plainly
     The wealth of cottage warmth that comes
     When the frost gleams and the blood numbs,
     And then, bonny Robin, I'll spread thee out crumbs
     In my garden porch for thy redbreast pride,
     The song and the ensign of dear fireside.



     SONG



     The daisy now is out upon the green;
     And in the grassy lanes
     The child of April rains,
     The sweet fresh-hearted violet, is smelt and loved unseen.

     Along the brooks and meads, the daffodil
     Its yellow richness spreads,
     And by the fountain-heads
     Of rivers, cowslips cluster round, and over every hill.

     The crocus and the primrose may have gone,
     The snowdrop may be low,
     But soon the purple glow
     Of hyacinths will fill the copse, and lilies watch the dawn.

     And in the sweetness of the budding year,
     The cuckoo's woodland call,
     The skylark over all,
     And then at eve, the nightingale, is doubly sweet and dear.

     My soul is singing with the happy birds,
     And all my human powers
     Are blooming with the flowers,
     My foot is on the fields and downs, among the flocks and herds.

     Deep in the forest where the foliage droops,
     I wander, fill'd with joy.
     Again as when a boy,
     The sunny vistas tempt me on with dim delicious hopes.

     The sunny vistas, dim with hurrying shade,
     And old romantic haze:-
     Again as in past days,
     The spirit of immortal Spring doth every sense pervade.

     Oh! do not say that this will ever cease; -
     This joy of woods and fields,
     This youth that nature yields,
     Will never speak to me in vain, tho' soundly rapt in peace.



     SUNRISE



     The clouds are withdrawn
     And their thin-rippled mist,
     That stream'd o'er the lawn
     To the drowsy-eyed west.
     Cold and grey
     They slept in the way,
     And shrank from the ray
     Of the chariot East:
     But now they are gone,
     And the bounding light
     Leaps thro' the bars
     Of doubtful dawn;
     Blinding the stars,
     And blessing the sight;
     Shedding delight
     On all below;
     Glimmering fields,
     And wakening wealds,
     And rising lark,
     And meadows dark,
     And idle rills,
     And labouring mills,
     And far-distant hills
     Of the fawn and the doe.
     The sun is cheered
     And his path is cleared,
     As he steps to the air
     From his emerald cave,
     His heel in the wave,
     Most bright and bare;
     In the tide of the sky
     His radiant hair
     From his temples fair
     Blown back on high;
     As forward he bends,
     And upward ascends,
     Timely and true,
     To the breast of the blue;
     His warm red lips
     Kissing the dew,
     Which sweetened drips
     On his flower cupholders;
     Every hue
     From his gleaming shoulders
     Shining anew
     With colour sky-born,
     As it washes and dips
     In the pride of the morn.
     Robes of azure,
     Fringed with amber,
     Fold upon fold
     Of purple and gold,
     Vine-leaf bloom,
     And the grape's ripe gloom,
     When season deep
     In noontide leisure,
     With clustering heap
     The tendrils clamber
     Full in the face
     Of his hot embrace,
     Fill'd with the gleams
     Of his firmest beams.
     Autumn flushes,
     Roseate blushes,
     Vermeil tinges,
     Violet fringes,
     Every hue
     Of his flower cupholders,
     O'er the clear ether
     Mingled together,
     Shining anew
     From his gleaming shoulders!
     Circling about
     In a coronal rout,
     And floating behind,
     The way of the wind,
     As forward he bends,
     And upward ascends,
     Timely and true,
     To the breast of the blue.
     His bright neck curved,
     His clear limbs nerved,
     Diamond keen
     On his front serene,
     While each white arm strains
     To the racing reins,
     As plunging, eyes flashing,
     Dripping, and dashing,
     His steeds triple grown
     Rear up to his throne,
     Ruffling the rest
     Of the sea's blue breast,
     From his flooding, flaming crimson crest!



     PICTURES OF THE RHINE



     I

     The spirit of Romance dies not to those
     Who hold a kindred spirit in their souls:
     Even as the odorous life within the rose
     Lives in the scattered leaflets and controls
     Mysterious adoration, so there glows
     Above dead things a thing that cannot die;
     Faint as the glimmer of a tearful eye,
     Ere the orb fills and all the sorrow flows.
     Beauty renews itself in many ways;
     The flower is fading while the new bud blows;
     And this dear land as true a symbol shows,
     While o'er it like a mellow sunset strays
     The legendary splendour of old days,
     In visible, inviolate repose.

     II

     About a mile behind the viny banks,
     How sweet it was, upon a sloping green,
     Sunspread, and shaded with a branching screen,
     To lie in peace half-murmuring words of thanks!
     To see the mountains on each other climb,
     With spaces for rich meadows flowery bright;
     The winding river freshening the sight
     At intervals, the trees in leafy prime;
     The distant village-roofs of blue and white,
     With intersections of quaint-fashioned beams
     All slanting crosswise, and the feudal gleams
     Of ruined turrets, barren in the light; -
     To watch the changing clouds, like clime in clime;
     Oh sweet to lie and bless the luxury of time.

     III

     Fresh blows the early breeze, our sail is full;
     A merry morning and a mighty tide.
     Cheerily O! and past St. Goar we glide,
     Half hid in misty dawn and mountain cool.
     The river is our own! and now the sun
     In saffron clothes the warming atmosphere;
     The sky lifts up her white veil like a nun,
     And looks upon the landscape blue and clear; -
     The lark is up; the hills, the vines in sight;
     The river broadens with his waking bliss
     And throws up islands to behold the light;
     Voices begin to rise, all hues to kiss; -
     Was ever such a happy morn as this!
     Birds sing, we shout, flowers breathe, trees shine with one delight!

     IV

     Between the two white breasts of her we love,
     A dewy blushing rose will sometimes spring;
     Thus Nonnenwerth like an enchanted thing
     Rises mid-stream the crystal depths above.
     On either side the waters heave and swell,
     But all is calm within the little Isle;
     Content it is to give its holy smile,
     And bless with peace the lives that in it dwell.
     Most dear on the dark grass beneath its bower
     Of kindred trees embracing branch and bough,
     To dream of fairy foot and sudden flower;
     Or haply with a twilight on the brow,
     To muse upon the legendary hour,
     And Roland's lonely love and Hildegard's sad vow.

     V

     Hark! how the bitter winter breezes blow
     Round the sharp rocks and o'er the half-lifted wave,
     While all the rocky woodland branches rave
     Shrill with the piercing cold, and every cave,
     Along the icy water-margin low,
     Rings bubbling with the whirling overflow;
     And sharp the echoes answer distant cries
     Of dawning daylight and the dim sunrise,
     And the gloom-coloured clouds that stain the skies
     With pictures of a warmth, and frozen glow
     Spread over endless fields of sheeted snow;
     And white untrodden mountains shining cold,
     And muffled footpaths winding thro' the wold,
     O'er which those wintry gusts cease not to howl and blow.

     VI

     Rare is the loveliness of slow decay!
     With youth and beauty all must be desired,
     But 'tis the charm of things long past away,
     They leave, alone, the light they have inspired:
     The calmness of a picture; Memory now
     Is the sole life among the ruins grey,
     And like a phantom in fantastic play
     She wanders with rank weeds stuck on her brow,
     Over grass-hidden caves and turret-tops,
     Herself almost as tottering as they;
     While, to the steps of Time, her latest props
     Fall stone by stone, and in the Sun's hot ray
     All that remains stands up in rugged pride,
     And bridal vines drink in his juices on each side.



     TO A NIGHTINGALE



     O nightingale! how hast thou learnt
     The note of the nested dove?
     While under thy bower the fern hangs burnt
     And no cloud hovers above!
     Rich July has many a sky
     With splendour dim, that thou mightst hymn,
     And make rejoice with thy wondrous voice,
     And the thrill of thy wild pervading tone!
     But instead of to woo, thou hast learnt to coo:
     Thy song is mute at the mellowing fruit,
     And the dirge of the flowers is sung by the hours
     In silence and twilight alone.

     O nightingale! 'tis this, 'tis this
     That makes thee mock the dove!
     That thou hast past thy marriage bliss,
     To know a parent's love.
     The waves of fern may fade and burn,
     The grasses may fall, the flowers and all,
     And the pine-smells o'er the oak dells
     Float on their drowsy and odorous wings,
     But thou wilt do nothing but coo,
     Brimming the nest with thy brooding breast,
     'Midst that young throng of future song,
     Round whom the Future sings!



     INVITATION TO THE COUNTRY



     Now 'tis Spring on wood and wold,
     Early Spring that shivers with cold,
     But gladdens, and gathers, day by day,
     A lovelier hue, a warmer ray,
     A sweeter song, a dearer ditty;
     Ouzel and throstle, new-mated and gay,
     Singing their bridals on every spray -
     Oh, hear them, deep in the songless City!
     Cast off the yoke of toil and smoke,
     As Spring is casting winter's grey,
     As serpents cast their skins away:
     And come, for the Country awaits thee with pity
     And longs to bathe thee in her delight,
     And take a new joy in thy kindling sight;
     And I no less, by day and night,
     Long for thy coming, and watch for, and wait thee,
     And wonder what duties can thus berate thee.

     Dry-fruited firs are dropping their cones,
     And vista'd avenues of pines
     Take richer green, give fresher tones,
     As morn after morn the glad sun shines.

     Primrose tufts peep over the brooks,
     Fair faces amid moist decay!
     The rivulets run with the dead leaves at play,
     The leafless elms are alive with the rooks.

     Over the meadows the cowslips are springing,
     The marshes are thick with king-cup gold,
     Clear is the cry of the lambs in the fold,
     The skylark is singing, and singing, and singing.

     Soon comes the cuckoo when April is fair,
     And her blue eye the brighter the more it may weep:
     The frog and the butterfly wake from their sleep,
     Each to its element, water and air.

     Mist hangs still on every hill,
     And curls up the valleys at eve; but noon
     Is fullest of Spring; and at midnight the moon
     Gives her westering throne to Orion's bright zone,
     As he slopes o'er the darkened world's repose;
     And a lustre in eastern Sirius glows.

     Come, in the season of opening buds;
     Come, and molest not the otter that whistles
     Unlit by the moon, 'mid the wet winter bristles
     Of willow, half-drowned in the fattening floods.
     Let him catch his cold fish without fear of a gun,
     And the stars shall shield him, and thou wilt shun!
     And every little bird under the sun
     Shall know that the bounty of Spring doth dwell
     In the winds that blow, in the waters that run,
     And in the breast of man as well.



     THE SWEET O' THE YEAR



     Now the frog, all lean and weak,
     Yawning from his famished sleep,
     Water in the ditch doth seek,
     Fast as he can stretch and leap:
     Marshy king-cups burning near
     Tell him 'tis the sweet o' the year.

     Now the ant works up his mound
     In the mouldered piny soil,
     And above the busy ground
     Takes the joy of earnest toil:
     Dropping pine-cones, dry and sere,
     Warn him 'tis the sweet o' the year.

     Now the chrysalis on the wall
     Cracks, and out the creature springs,
     Raptures in his body small,
     Wonders on his dusty wings:
     Bells and cups, all shining clear,
     Show him 'tis the sweet o' the year.

     Now the brown bee, wild and wise,
     Hums abroad, and roves and roams,
     Storing in his wealthy thighs
     Treasure for the golden combs:
     Dewy buds and blossoms dear
     Whisper 'tis the sweet o' the year.

     Now the merry maids so fair
     Weave the wreaths and choose the queen,
     Blooming in the open air,
     Like fresh flowers upon the green;
     Spring, in every thought sincere,
     Thrills them with the sweet o' the year.

     Now the lads, all quick and gay,
     Whistle to the browsing herds,
     Or in the twilight pastures grey
     Learn the use of whispered words:
     First a blush, and then a tear,
     And then a smile, i' the sweet o' the year.

     Now the May-fly and the fish
     Play again from noon to night;
     Every breeze begets a wish,
     Every motion means delight:
     Heaven high over heath and mere
     Crowns with blue the sweet o' the year.

     Now all Nature is alive,
     Bird and beetle, man and mole;
     Bee-like goes the human hive,
     Lark-like sings the soaring soul:
     Hearty faith and honest cheer
     Welcome in the sweet o' the year.



     AUTUMN EVEN-SONG



     The long cloud edged with streaming grey
     Soars from the West;
     The red leaf mounts with it away,
     Showing the nest
     A blot among the branches bare:
     There is a cry of outcasts in the air.

     Swift little breezes, darting chill,
     Pant down the lake;
     A crow flies from the yellow hill,
     And in its wake
     A baffled line of labouring rooks:
     Steel-surfaced to the light the river looks.

     Pale on the panes of the old hall
     Gleams the lone space
     Between the sunset and the squall;
     And on its face
     Mournfully glimmers to the last:
     Great oaks grow mighty minstrels in the blast.

     Pale the rain-rutted roadways shine
     In the green light
     Behind the cedar and the pine:
     Come, thundering night!
     Blacken broad earth with hoards of storm:
     For me yon valley-cottage beckons warm.



     THE SONG OF COURTESY



     I

     When Sir Gawain was led to his bridal-bed,
     By Arthur's knights in scorn God-sped:-
     How think you he felt?
     O the bride within
     Was yellow and dry as a snake's old skin;
     Loathly as sin!
     Scarcely faceable,
     Quite unembraceable;
     With a hog's bristle on a hag's chin! -
     Gentle Gawain felt as should we,
     Little of Love's soft fire knew he:
     But he was the Knight of Courtesy.

     II

     When that evil lady he lay beside
     Bade him turn to greet his bride,
     What think you he did?
     O, to spare her pain,
     And let not his loathing her loathliness vain
     Mirror too plain,
     Sadly, sighingly,
     Almost dyingly,
     Turned he and kissed her once and again.
     Like Sir Gawain, gentles, should we?
     SILENT, ALL! But for pattern agree
     There's none like the Knight of Courtesy.

     III

     Sir Gawain sprang up amid laces and curls:
     Kisses are not wasted pearls:-
     What clung in his arms?
     O, a maiden flower,
     Burning with blushes the sweet bride-bower,
     Beauty her dower!
     Breathing perfumingly;
     Shall I live bloomingly,
     Said she, by day, or the bridal hour?
     Thereat he clasped her, and whispered he,
     Thine, rare bride, the choice shall be.
     Said she, Twice blest is Courtesy!

     IV

     Of gentle Sir Gawain they had no sport,
     When it was morning in Arthur's court;
     What think you they cried?
     Now, life and eyes!
     This bride is the very Saint's dream of a prize,
     Fresh from the skies!
     See ye not, Courtesy
     Is the true Alchemy,
     Turning to gold all it touches and tries?
     Like the true knight, so may we
     Make the basest that there be
     Beautiful by Courtesy!



     THE THREE MAIDENS



     There were three maidens met on the highway;
     The sun was down, the night was late:
     And two sang loud with the birds of May,
     O the nightingale is merry with its mate.

     Said they to the youngest, Why walk you there so still?
     The land is dark, the night is late:
     O, but the heart in my side is ill,
     And the nightingale will languish for its mate.

     Said they to the youngest, Of lovers there is store;
     The moon mounts up, the night is late:
     O, I shall look on man no more,
     And the nightingale is dumb without its mate.

     Said they to the youngest, Uncross your arms and sing;
     The moon mounts high, the night is late:
     O my dear lover can hear no thing,
     And the nightingale sings only to its mate.

     They slew him in revenge, and his true-love was his lure;
     The moon is pale, the night is late:
     His grave is shallow on the moor;
     O the nightingale is dying for its mate.

     His blood is on his breast, and the moss-roots at his hair;
     The moon is chill, the night is late:
     But I will lie beside him there:
     O the nightingale is dying for its mate.



     OVER THE HILLS



     The old hound wags his shaggy tail,
     And I know what he would say:
     It's over the hills we'll bound, old hound,
     Over the hills, and away.

     There's nought for us here save to count the clock,
     And hang the head all day:
     But over the hills we'll bound, old hound,
     Over the hills and away.

     Here among men we're like the deer
     That yonder is our prey:
     So, over the hills we'll bound, old hound,
     Over the hills and away.

     The hypocrite is master here,
     But he's the cock of clay:
     So, over the hills we'll bound, old hound,
     Over the hills and away.

     The women, they shall sigh and smile,
     And madden whom they may:
     It's over the hills we'll bound, old hound,
     Over the hills and away.

     Let silly lads in couples run
     To pleasure, a wicked fay:
     'Tis ours on the heather to bound, old hound,
     Over the hills and away.

     The torrent glints under the rowan red,
     And shakes the bracken spray:
     What joy on the heather to bound, old hound,
     Over the hills and away.

     The sun bursts broad, and the heathery bed
     Is purple, and orange, and gray:
     Away, and away, we'll bound, old hound,
     Over the hills and away.



     JUGGLING JERRY



     I

     Pitch here the tent, while the old horse grazes:
     By the old hedge-side we'll halt a stage.
     It's nigh my last above the daisies:
     My next leaf 'll be man's blank page.
     Yes, my old girl! and it's no use crying:
     Juggler, constable, king, must bow.
     One that outjuggles all's been spying
     Long to have me, and he has me now.

     II

     We've travelled times to this old common:
     Often we've hung our pots in the gorse.
     We've had a stirring life, old woman!
     You, and I, and the old grey horse.
     Races, and fairs, and royal occasions,
     Found us coming to their call:
     Now they'll miss us at our stations:
     There's a Juggler outjuggles all!

     III

     Up goes the lark, as if all were jolly!
     Over the duck-pond the willow shakes.
     Easy to think that grieving's folly,
     When the hand's firm as driven stakes!
     Ay, when we're strong, and braced, and manful,
     Life's a sweet fiddle: but we're a batch
     Born to become the Great Juggler's han'ful:
     Balls he shies up, and is safe to catch.

     IV

     Here's where the lads of the village cricket:
     I was a lad not wide from here:
     Couldn't I whip off the bail from the wicket?
     Like an old world those days appear!
     Donkey, sheep, geese, and thatched ale-house -
     I know them!
     They are old friends of my halts, and seem,
     Somehow, as if kind thanks I owe them:
     Juggling don't hinder the heart's esteem.

     V

     Juggling's no sin, for we must have victual:
     Nature allows us to bait for the fool.
     Holding one's own makes us juggle no little;
     But, to increase it, hard juggling's the rule.
     You that are sneering at my profession,
     Haven't you juggled a vast amount?
     There's the Prime Minister, in one Session,
     Juggles more games than my sins 'll count.

     VI

     I've murdered insects with mock thunder:
     Conscience, for that, in men don't quail.
     I've made bread from the bump of wonder:
     That's my business, and there's my tale.
     Fashion and rank all praised the professor:
     Ay! and I've had my smile from the Queen:
     Bravo, Jerry! she meant: God bless her!
     Ain't this a sermon on that scene?

     VII

     I've studied men from my topsy-turvy
     Close, and, I reckon, rather true.
     Some are fine fellows: some, right scurvy:
     Most, a dash between the two.
     But it's a woman, old girl, that makes me
     Think more kindly of the race:
     And it's a woman, old girl, that shakes me
     When the Great Juggler I must face.

     VIII

     We two were married, due and legal:
     Honest we've lived since we've been one.
     Lord! I could then jump like an eagle:
     You danced bright as a bit o' the sun.
     Birds in a May-bush we were! right merry!
     All night we kiss'd, we juggled all day.
     Joy was the heart of Juggling Jerry!
     Now from his old girl he's juggled away.

     IX

     It's past parsons to console us:
     No, nor no doctor fetch for me:
     I can die without my bolus;
     Two of a trade, lass, never agree!
     Parson and Doctor!--don't they love rarely,
     Fighting the devil in other men's fields!
     Stand up yourself and match him fairly:
     Then see how the rascal yields!

     X

     I, lass, have lived no gipsy, flaunting
     Finery while his poor helpmate grubs:
     Coin I've stored, and you won't be wanting:
     You shan't beg from the troughs and tubs.
     Nobly you've stuck to me, though in his kitchen
     Many a Marquis would hail you Cook!
     Palaces you could have ruled and grown rich in,
     But our old Jerry you never forsook.

     XI

     Hand up the chirper! ripe ale winks in it;
     Let's have comfort and be at peace.
     Once a stout draught made me light as a linnet.
     Cheer up! the Lord must have his lease.
     May be--for none see in that black hollow -
     It's just a place where we're held in pawn,
     And, when the Great Juggler makes as to swallow,
     It's just the sword-trick--I ain't quite gone!

     XII

     Yonder came smells of the gorse, so nutty,
     Gold-like and warm: it's the prime of May.
     Better than mortar, brick and putty,
     Is God's house on a blowing day.
     Lean me more up the mound; now I feel it:
     All the old heath-smells! Ain't it strange?
     There's the world laughing, as if to conceal it,
     But He's by us, juggling the change.

     XIII

     I mind it well, by the sea-beach lying,
     Once--it's long gone--when two gulls we beheld,
     Which, as the moon got up, were flying
     Down a big wave that sparked and swelled.
     Crack, went a gun: one fell: the second
     Wheeled round him twice, and was off for new luck:
     There in the dark her white wing beckon'd:-
     Drop me a kiss--I'm the bird dead-struck!



     THE CROWN OF LOVE



     O might I load my arms with thee,
     Like that young lover of Romance
     Who loved and gained so gloriously
     The fair Princess of France!

     Because he dared to love so high,
     He, bearing her dear weight, shall speed
     To where the mountain touched on sky:
     So the proud king decreed.

     Unhalting he must bear her on,
     Nor pause a space to gather breath,
     And on the height she will be won;
     And she was won in death!

     Red the far summit flames with morn,
     While in the plain a glistening Court
     Surrounds the king who practised scorn
     Through such a mask of sport.

     She leans into his arms; she lets
     Her lovely shape be clasped: he fares.
     God speed him whole! The knights make bets:
     The ladies lift soft prayers.

     O have you seen the deer at chase?
     O have you seen the wounded kite?
     So boundingly he runs the race,
     So wavering grows his flight.

     - My lover! linger here, and slake
     Thy thirst, or me thou wilt not win.
     - See'st thou the tumbled heavens? they break!
     They beckon us up and in.

     - Ah, hero-love! unloose thy hold:
     O drop me like a cursed thing.
     - See'st thou the crowded swards of gold?
     They wave to us Rose and Ring.

     - O death-white mouth! O cast me down!
     Thou diest? Then with thee I die.
     - See'st thou the angels with their Crown?
     We twain have reached the sky.



     THE HEAD OF BRAN THE BLEST



     I

     When the Head of Bran
     Was firm on British shoulders,
     God made a man!
     Cried all beholders.

     Steel could not resist
     The weight his arm would rattle;
     He, with naked fist,
     Has brain'd a knight in battle.

     He marched on the foe,
     And never counted numbers;
     Foreign widows know
     The hosts he sent to slumbers.

     As a street you scan,
     That's towered by the steeple,
     So the Head of Bran
     Rose o'er his people.

     II

     'Death's my neighbour,'
     Quoth Bran the Blest;
     'Christian labour
     Brings Christian rest.
     From the trunk sever
     The Head of Bran,
     That which never
     Has bent to man!
     'That which never
     To men has bowed
     Shall live ever
     To shame the shroud:
     Shall live ever
     To face the foe;
     Sever it, sever,
     And with one blow.

     'Be it written,
     That all I wrought
     Was for Britain,
     In deed and thought:
     Be it written,
     That while I die,
     Glory to Britain!
     Is my last cry.

     'Glory to Britain!
     Death echoes me round.
     Glory to Britain!
     The world shall resound.
     Glory to Britain!
     In ruin and fall,
     Glory to Britain!
     Is heard over all.'

     IIII

     Burn, Sun, down the sea!
     Bran lies low with thee.

     Burst, Morn, from the main!
     Bran so shall rise again.

     Blow, Wind, from the field!
     Bran's Head is the Briton's shield.

     Beam, Star, in the West!
     Bright burns the Head of Bran the Blest.

     IV

     Crimson-footed, like the stork,
     From great ruts of slaughter,
     Warriors of the Golden Torque
     Cross the lifting water.
     Princes seven, enchaining hands,
     Bear the live head homeward.
     Lo! it speaks, and still commands:
     Gazing out far foamward.

     Fiery words of lightning sense
     Down the hollows thunder;
     Forest hostels know not whence
     Comes the speech, and wonder.
     City-Castles, on the steep,
     Where the faithful Seven
     House at midnight, hear, in sleep,
     Laughter under heaven.

     Lilies, swimming on the mere,
     In the castle shadow,
     Under draw their heads, and Fear
     Walks the misty meadow.
     Tremble not! it is not Death
     Pledging dark espousal:
     'Tis the Head of endless breath,
     Challenging carousal!

     Brim the horn! a health is drunk,
     Now, that shall keep going:
     Life is but the pebble sunk;
     Deeds, the circle growing!
     Fill, and pledge the Head of Bran!
     While his lead they follow,
     Long shall heads in Britain plan
     Speech Death cannot swallow!



     THE MEETING



     The old coach-road through a common of furze,
     With knolls of pine, ran white;
     Berries of autumn, with thistles, and burrs,
     And spider-threads, droop'd in the light.

     The light in a thin blue veil peered sick;
     The sheep grazed close and still;
     The smoke of a farm by a yellow rick
     Curled lazily under a hill.

     No fly shook the round of the silver net;
     No insect the swift bird chased;
     Only two travellers moved and met
     Across that hazy waste.

     One was a girl with a babe that throve,
     Her ruin and her bliss;
     One was a youth with a lawless love,
     Who clasped it the more for this.

     The girl for her babe hummed prayerful speech;
     The youth for his love did pray;
     Each cast a wistful look on each,
     And either went their way.



     THE BEGGAR'S SOLILOQUY



     I

     Now, this, to my notion, is pleasant cheer,
     To lie all alone on a ragged heath,
     Where your nose isn't sniffing for bones or beer,
     But a peat-fire smells like a garden beneath.
     The cottagers bustle about the door,
     And the girl at the window ties her strings.
     She's a dish for a man who's a mind to be poor;
     Lord! women are such expensive things.

     II

     We don't marry beggars, says she: why, no:
     It seems that to make 'em is what you do;
     And as I can cook, and scour, and sew,
     I needn't pay half my victuals for you.
     A man for himself should be able to scratch,
     But tickling's a luxury:- love, indeed!
     Love burns as long as the lucifer match,
     Wedlock's the candle! Now, that's my creed.

     III

     The church-bells sound water-like over the wheat;
     And up the long path troop pair after pair.
     The man's well-brushed, and the woman looks neat:
     It's man and woman everywhere!
     Unless, like me, you lie here flat,
     With a donkey for friend, you must have a wife:
     She pulls out your hair, but she brushes your hat.
     Appearances make the best half of life.

     IV

     You nice little madam! you know you're nice.
     I remember hearing a parson say
     You're a plateful of vanity pepper'd with vice;
     You chap at the gate thinks t' other way.
     On his waistcoat you read both his head and his heart:
     There's a whole week's wages there figured in gold!
     Yes! when you turn round you may well give a start:
     It's fun to a fellow who's getting old.

     V

     Now, that's a good craft, weaving waistcoats and flowers,
     And selling of ribbons, and scenting of lard:
     It gives you a house to get in from the showers,
     And food when your appetite jockeys you hard.
     You live a respectable man; but I ask
     If it's worth the trouble? You use your tools,
     And spend your time, and what's your task?
     Why, to make a slide for a couple of fools.

     VI

     You can't match the colour o' these heath mounds,
     Nor better that peat-fire's agreeable smell.
     I'm clothed-like with natural sights and sounds;
     To myself I'm in tune: I hope you're as well.
     You jolly old cot! though you don't own coal:
     It's a generous pot that's boiled with peat.
     Let the Lord Mayor o' London roast oxen whole:
     His smoke, at least, don't smell so sweet.

     VII

     I'm not a low Radical, hating the laws,
     Who'd the aristocracy rebuke.
     I talk o' the Lord Mayor o' London because
     I once was on intimate terms with his cook.
     I served him a turn, and got pensioned on scraps,
     And, Lord, Sir! didn't I envy his place,
     Till Death knock'd him down with the softest of taps,
     And I knew what was meant by a tallowy face!

     VIII

     On the contrary, I'm Conservative quite;
     There's beggars in Scripture 'mongst Gentiles and Jews:
     It's nonsense, trying to set things right,
     For if people will give, why, who'll refuse?
     That stopping old custom wakes my spleen:
     The poor and the rich both in giving agree:
     Your tight-fisted shopman's the Radical mean:
     There's nothing in common 'twixt him and me.

     IX

     He says I'm no use! but I won't reply.
     You're lucky not being of use to him!
     On week-days he's playing at Spider and Fly,
     And on Sundays he sings about Cherubim!
     Nailing shillings to counters is his chief work:
     He nods now and then at the name on his door:
     But judge of us two, at a bow and a smirk,
     I think I'm his match: and I'm honest--that's more.

     X

     No use! well, I mayn't be. You ring a pig's snout,
     And then call the animal glutton! Now, he,
     Mr. Shopman, he's nought but a pipe and a spout
     Who won't let the goods o' this world pass free.
     This blazing blue weather all round the brown crop,
     He can't enjoy! all but cash he hates.
     He's only a snail that crawls under his shop;
     Though he has got the ear o' the magistrates.

     XI

     Now, giving and taking's a proper exchange,
     Like question and answer: you're both content.
     But buying and selling seems always strange;
     You're hostile, and that's the thing that's meant.
     It's man against man--you're almost brutes;
     There's here no thanks, and there's there no pride.
     If Charity's Christian, don't blame my pursuits,
     I carry a touchstone by which you're tried.

     XII

     - 'Take it,' says she, 'it's all I've got':
     I remember a girl in London streets:
     She stood by a coffee-stall, nice and hot,
     My belly was like a lamb that bleats.
     Says I to myself, as her shilling I seized,
     You haven't a character here, my dear!
     But for making a rascal like me so pleased,
     I'll give you one, in a better sphere!

     XIII

     And that's where it is--she made me feel
     I was a rascal: but people who scorn,
     And tell a poor patch-breech he isn't genteel,
     Why, they make him kick up--and he treads on a corn.
     It isn't liking, it's curst ill-luck,
     Drives half of us into the begging-trade:
     If for taking to water you praise a duck,
     For taking to beer why a man upbraid?

     XIV

     The sermon's over: they're out of the porch,
     And it's time for me to move a leg;
     But in general people who come from church,
     And have called themselves sinners, hate chaps to beg.
     I'll wager they'll all of 'em dine to-day!
     I was easy half a minute ago.
     If that isn't pig that's baking away,
     May I perish!--we're never contented--heigho!



     BY THE ROSANNA--TO F. M. STANZER THAL, TYROL



     The old grey Alp has caught the cloud,
     And the torrent river sings aloud;
     The glacier-green Rosanna sings
     An organ song of its upper springs.
     Foaming under the tiers of pine,
     I see it dash down the dark ravine,
     And it tumbles the rocks in boisterous play,
     With an earnest will to find its way.
     Sharp it throws out an emerald shoulder,
     And, thundering ever of the mountain,
     Slaps in sport some giant boulder,
     And tops it in a silver fountain.
     A chain of foam from end to end,
     And a solitude so deep, my friend,
     You may forget that man abides
     Beyond the great mute mountain-sides.
     Yet to me, in this high-walled solitude
     Of river and rock and forest rude,
     The roaring voice through the long white chain
     Is the voice of the world of bubble and brain.



     PHANTASY



     I

     Within a Temple of the Toes,
     Where twirled the passionate Wili,
     I saw full many a market rose,
     And sighed for my village lily.

     II

     With cynical Adrian then I took flight
     To that old dead city whose carol
     Bursts out like a reveller's loud in the night,
     As he sits astride his barrel.

     III

     We two were bound the Alps to scale,
     Up the rock-reflecting river;
     Old times blew thro' me like a gale,
     And kept my thoughts in a quiver.

     IV

     Hawking ruin, wood-slope, and vine
     Reeled silver-laced under my vision,
     And into me passed, with the green-eyed wine
     Knocking hard at my head for admission.

     V

     I held the village lily cheap,
     And the dream around her idle:
     Lo, quietly as I lay to sleep,
     The bells led me off to a bridal.

     VI

     My bride wore the hood of a Beguine,
     And mine was the foot to falter;
     Three cowled monks, rat-eyed, were seen;
     The Cross was of bones o'er the altar.

     VII

     The Cross was of bones; the priest that read,
     A spectacled necromancer:
     But at the fourth word, the bride I led
     Changed to an Opera dancer.

     VIII

     A young ballet-beauty, who perked in her place,
     A darling of pink and spangles;
     One fair foot level with her face,
     And the hearts of men at her ankles.

     IX

     She whirled, she twirled, the mock-priest grinned,
     And quickly his mask unriddled;
     'Twas Adrian! loud his old laughter dinned;
     Then he seized a fiddle, and fiddled.

     X

     He fiddled, he glowed with the bottomless fire,
     Like Sathanas in feature:
     All through me he fiddled a wolfish desire
     To dance with that bright creature.

     XI

     And gathering courage I said to my soul,
     Throttle the thing that hinders!
     When the three cowled monks, from black as coal,
     Waxed hot as furnace-cinders.

     XII

     They caught her up, twirling: they leapt between-whiles:
     The fiddler flickered with laughter:
     Profanely they flew down the awful aisles,
     Where I went sliding after.

     XIII

     Down the awful aisles, by the fretted walls,
     Beneath the Gothic arches:-
     King Skull in the black confessionals
     Sat rub-a-dub-dubbing his marches.

     XIV

     Then the silent cold stone warriors frowned,
     The pictured saints strode forward:
     A whirlwind swept them from holy ground;
     A tempest puffed them nor'ward.

     XV

     They shot through the great cathedral door;
     Like mallards they traversed ocean:
     And gazing below, on its boiling floor,
     I marked a horrid commotion.

     XVI

     Down a forest's long alleys they spun like tops:
     It seemed that for ages and ages,
     Thro' the Book of Life bereft of stops,
     They waltzed continuous pages.

     XVII

     And ages after, scarce awake,
     And my blood with the fever fretting,
     I stood alone by a forest-lake,
     Whose shadows the moon were netting.

     XVIII

     Lilies, golden and white, by the curls
     Of their broad flat leaves hung swaying.
     A wreath of languid twining girls
     Streamed upward, long locks disarraying.

     XIX

     Their cheeks had the satin frost-glow of the moon;
     Their eyes the fire of Sirius.
     They circled, and droned a monotonous tune,
     Abandoned to love delirious.

     XX

     Like lengths of convolvulus torn from the hedge,
     And trailing the highway over,
     The dreamy-eyed mistresses circled the sedge,
     And called for a lover, a lover!

     XXI

     I sank, I rose through seas of eyes,
     In odorous swathes delicious:
     They fanned me with impetuous sighs,
     They hit me with kisses vicious.

     XXII

     My ears were spelled, my neck was coiled,
     And I with their fury was glowing,
     When the marbly waters bubbled and boiled
     At a watery noise of crowing.

     XXIII

     They dragged me low and low to the lake:
     Their kisses more stormily showered;
     On the emerald brink, in the white moon's wake,
     An earthly damsel cowered.

     XXIV

     Fresh heart-sobs shook her knitted hands
     Beneath a tiny suckling,
     As one by one of the doleful bands
     Dived like a fairy duckling.

     XXV

     And now my turn had come--O me!
     What wisdom was mine that second!
     I dropped on the adorer's knee;
     To that sweet figure I beckoned.

     XXVI

     Save me! save me! for now I know
     The powers that Nature gave me,
     And the value of honest love I know:-
     My village lily! save me!

     XXVII

     Come 'twixt me and the sisterhood,
     While the passion-born phantoms are fleeing!
     Oh, he that is true to flesh and blood
     Is true to his own being!

     XXVIII

     And he that is false to flesh and blood
     Is false to the star within him:
     And the mad and hungry sisterhood
     All under the tides shall win him!

     XXIX

     My village lily! save me! save!
     For strength is with the holy:-
     Already I shuddered to feel the wave,
     As I kept sinking slowly:-

     XXX

     I felt the cold wave and the under-tug
     Of the Brides, when--starting and shrinking -
     Lo, Adrian tilts the water-jug!
     And Bruges with morn is blinking.

     XXXI

     Merrily sparkles sunny prime
     On gabled peak and arbour:
     Merrily rattles belfry-chime
     The song of Sevilla's Barber.



     THE OLD CHARTIST



     Whate'er I be, old England is my dam!
     So there's my answer to the judges, clear.
     I'm nothing of a fox, nor of a lamb;
     I don't know how to bleat nor how to leer:
     I'm for the nation!
     That's why you see me by the wayside here,
     Returning home from transportation.

     II

     It's Summer in her bath this morn, I think.
     I'm fresh as dew, and chirpy as the birds:
     And just for joy to see old England wink
     Thro' leaves again, I could harangue the herds:
     Isn't it something
     To speak out like a man when you've got words,
     And prove you're not a stupid dumb thing?

     III

     They shipp'd me of for it; I'm here again.
     Old England is my dam, whate'er I be!
     Says I, I'll tramp it home, and see the grain:
     If you see well, you're king of what you see:
     Eyesight is having,
     If you're not given, I said, to gluttony.
     Such talk to ignorance sounds as raving.

     IV

     You dear old brook, that from his Grace's park
     Come bounding! on you run near my old town:
     My lord can't lock the water; nor the lark,
     Unless he kills him, can my lord keep down.
     Up, is the song-note!
     I've tried it, too:- for comfort and renown,
     I rather pitch'd upon the wrong note.

     V

     I'm not ashamed: Not beaten's still my boast:
     Again I'll rouse the people up to strike.
     But home's where different politics jar most.
     Respectability the women like.
     This form, or that form, -
     The Government may be hungry pike,
     But don't you mount a Chartist platform!

     VI

     Well, well! Not beaten--spite of them, I shout;
     And my estate is suffering for the Cause. -
     No,--what is yon brown water-rat about,
     Who washes his old poll with busy paws?
     What does he mean by't?
     It's like defying all our natural laws,
     For him to hope that he'll get clean by't.

     VII

     His seat is on a mud-bank, and his trade
     Is dirt:- he's quite contemptible; and yet
     The fellow's all as anxious as a maid
     To show a decent dress, and dry the wet.
     Now it's his whisker,
     And now his nose, and ear: he seems to get
     Each moment at the motion brisker!

     VIII

     To see him squat like little chaps at school,
     I could let fly a laugh with all my might.
     He peers, hangs both his fore-paws:- bless that fool,
     He's bobbing at his frill now!--what a sight!
     Licking the dish up,
     As if he thought to pass from black to white,
     Like parson into lawny bishop.

     IX

     The elms and yellow reed-flags in the sun,
     Look on quite grave:- the sunlight flecks his side;
     And links of bindweed-flowers round him run,
     And shine up doubled with him in the tide.
     I'M nearly splitting,
     But nature seems like seconding his pride,
     And thinks that his behaviour's fitting.

     X

     That isle o' mud looks baking dry with gold.
     His needle-muzzle still works out and in.
     It really is a wonder to behold,
     And makes me feel the bristles of my chin.
     Judged by appearance,
     I fancy of the two I'm nearer Sin,
     And might as well commence a clearance.

     XI

     And that's what my fine daughter said:- she meant:
     Pray, hold your tongue, and wear a Sunday face.
     Her husband, the young linendraper, spent
     Much argument thereon:- I'm their disgrace.
     Bother the couple!
     I feel superior to a chap whose place
     Commands him to be neat and supple.

     XII

     But if I go and say to my old hen:
     I'll mend the gentry's boots, and keep discreet,
     Until they grow TOO violent,--why, then,
     A warmer welcome I might chance to meet:
     Warmer and better.
     And if she fancies her old cock is beat,
     And drops upon her knees--so let her!

     XIII

     She suffered for me:- women, you'll observe,
     Don't suffer for a Cause, but for a man.
     When I was in the dock she show'd her nerve:
     I saw beneath her shawl my old tea-can
     Trembling . . . she brought it
     To screw me for my work: she loath'd my plan,
     And therefore doubly kind I thought it.

     XIV

     I've never lost the taste of that same tea:
     That liquor on my logic floats like oil,
     When I state facts, and fellows disagree.
     For human creatures all are in a coil;
     All may want pardon.
     I see a day when every pot will boil
     Harmonious in one great Tea-garden!

     XV

     We wait the setting of the Dandy's day,
     Before that time!--He's furbishing his dress, -
     He WILL be ready for it!--and I say,
     That yon old dandy rat amid the cress, -
     Thanks to hard labour! -
     If cleanliness is next to godliness,
     The old fat fellow's heaven's neighbour!

     XVI

     You teach me a fine lesson, my old boy!
     I've looked on my superiors far too long,
     And small has been my profit as my joy.
     You've done the right while I've denounced the wrong.
     Prosper me later!
     Like you I will despise the sniggering throng,
     And please myself and my Creator.

     XVII

     I'll bring the linendraper and his wife
     Some day to see you; taking off my hat.
     Should they ask why, I'll answer: in my life
     I never found so true a democrat.
     Base occupation
     Can't rob you of your own esteem, old rat!
     I'll preach you to the British nation.



     SONG



     Should thy love die;
     O bury it not under ice-blue eyes!
     And lips that deny,
     With a scornful surprise,
     The life it once lived in thy breast when it wore no disguise.

     Should thy love die;
     O bury it where the sweet wild-flowers blow!
     And breezes go by,
     With no whisper of woe;
     And strange feet cannot guess of the anguish that slumbers below.

     Should thy love die;
     O wander once more to the haunt of the bee!
     Where the foliaged sky
     Is most sacred to see,
     And thy being first felt its wild birth like a wind-wakened tree.

     Should thy love die;
     O dissemble it! smile! let the rose hide the thorn!
     While the lark sings on high,
     And no thing looks forlorn,
     Bury it, bury it, bury it where it was born.



     TO ALEX. SMITH, THE 'GLASGOW POET,' ON HIS SONNET TO 'FAME'



     Not vainly doth the earnest voice of man
     Call for the thing that is his pure desire!
     Fame is the birthright of the living lyre!
     To noble impulse Nature puts no ban.
     Nor vainly to the Sphinx thy voice was raised!
     Tho' all thy great emotions like a sea,
     Against her stony immortality,
     Shatter themselves unheeded and amazed.
     Time moves behind her in a blind eclipse:
     Yet if in her cold eyes the end of all
     Be visible, as on her large closed lips
     Hangs dumb the awful riddle of the earth; -
     She sees, and she might speak, since that wild call,
     The mighty warning of a Poet's birth.



     GRANDFATHER BRIDGEMAN



     I

     'Heigh, boys!' cried Grandfather Bridgeman, 'it's time before dinner
     to-day.'
     He lifted the crumpled letter, and thumped a surprising 'Hurrah!'
     Up jumped all the echoing young ones, but John, with the starch in
     his throat,
     Said, 'Father, before we make noises, let's see the contents of the
     note.'
     The old man glared at him harshly, and twinkling made answer: 'Too
     bad!
     John Bridgeman, I'm always the whisky, and you are the water, my
     lad!'

     II

     But soon it was known thro' the house, and the house ran over for
     joy,
     That news, good news, great marvels, had come from the soldier boy;
     Young Tom, the luckless scapegrace, offshoot of Methodist John;
     His grandfather's evening tale, whom the old man hailed as his son.
     And the old man's shout of pride was a shout of his victory, too;
     For he called his affection a method: the neighbours' opinions he
     knew.

     III

     Meantime, from the morning table removing the stout breakfast cheer,
     The drink of the three generations, the milk, the tea, and the beer
     (Alone in its generous reading of pints stood the Grandfather's
     jug),
     The women for sight of the missive came pressing to coax and to hug.
     He scattered them quick, with a buss and a smack; thereupon he began
     Diversions with John's little Sarah: on Sunday, the naughty old
     man!

     IV

     Then messengers sped to the maltster, the auctioneer, miller, and
     all
     The seven sons of the farmer who housed in the range of his call.
     Likewise the married daughters, three plentiful ladies, prime cooks,
     Who bowed to him while they condemned, in meek hope to stand high in
     his books.
     'John's wife is a fool at a pudding,' they said, and the light carts
     up hill
     Went merrily, flouting the Sabbath: for puddings well made mend a
     will.

     V

     The day was a van-bird of summer: the robin still piped, but the
     blue,
     As a warm and dreamy palace with voices of larks ringing thro',
     Looked down as if wistfully eyeing the blossoms that fell from its
     lap:
     A day to sweeten the juices: a day to quicken the sap.
     All round the shadowy orchard sloped meadows in gold, and the dear
     Shy violets breathed their hearts out: the maiden breath of the
     year!

     VI

     Full time there was before dinner to bring fifteen of his blood,
     To sit at the old man's table: they found that the dinner was good.
     But who was she by the lilacs and pouring laburnums concealed,
     When under the blossoming apple the chair of the Grandfather
     wheeled?
     She heard one little child crying, 'Dear brave Cousin Tom!' as it
     leapt;
     Then murmured she: 'Let me spare them!' and passed round the
     walnuts, and wept.

     VII

     Yet not from sight had she slipped ere feminine eyes could detect
     The figure of Mary Charlworth. 'It's just what we all might
     expect,'
     Was uttered: and: 'Didn't I tell you?' Of Mary the rumour
     resounds,
     That she is now her own mistress, and mistress of five thousand
     pounds.
     'Twas she, they say, who cruelly sent young Tom to the war.
     Miss Mary, we thank you now! If you knew what we're thanking you
     for!

     VIII

     But, 'Have her in: let her hear it,' called Grandfather Bridgeman,
     elate,
     While Mary's black-gloved fingers hung trembling with flight on the
     gate.
     Despite the women's remonstrance, two little ones, lighter than
     deer,
     Were loosed, and Mary, imprisoned, her whole face white as a tear,
     Came forward with culprit footsteps. Her punishment was to
     commence:
     The pity in her pale visage they read in a different sense.

     IX

     'You perhaps may remember a fellow, Miss Charlworth, a sort of black
     sheep,'
     The old man turned his tongue to ironical utterance deep:
     'He came of a Methodist dad, so it wasn't his fault if he kicked.
     He earned a sad reputation, but Methodists are mortal strict.
     His name was Tom, and, dash me! but Bridgeman! I think you might
     add:
     Whatever he was, bear in mind that he came of a Methodist dad.'

     X

     This prelude dismally lengthened, till Mary, starting, exclaimed,
     'A letter, Sir, from your grandson?' 'Tom Bridgeman that rascal is
     named,'
     The old man answered, and further, the words that sent Tom to the
     ranks
     Repeated as words of a person to whom they all owed mighty thanks.
     But Mary never blushed: with her eyes on the letter, she sate,
     And twice interrupting him faltered, 'The date, may I ask, Sir, the
     date?'

     XI

     'Why, that's what I never look at in a letter,' the farmer replied:
     'Facts first! and now I'll be parson.' The Bridgeman women descried
     A quiver on Mary's eyebrows. One turned, and while shifting her
     comb,
     Said low to a sister: 'I'm certain she knows more than we about
     Tom.
     She wants him now he's a hero!' The same, resuming her place,
     Begged Mary to check them the moment she found it a tedious case.

     XII

     Then as a mastiff swallows the snarling noises of cats,
     The voice of the farmer opened. '"Three cheers, and off with your
     hats!"
     - That's Tom. "We've beaten them, Daddy, and tough work it was, to
     be sure!
     A regular stand-up combat: eight hours smelling powder and gore.
     I entered it Serjeant-Major,"--and now he commands a salute,
     And carries the flag of old England! Heigh! see him lift foes on
     his foot!

     XIII

     '--An officer! ay, Miss Charlworth, he is, or he is so to be;
     You'll own war isn't such humbug: and Glory means something, you
     see.
     "But don't say a word," he continues, "against the brave French any
     more."
     - That stopt me: we'll now march together. I couldn't read further
     before.
     That "brave French" I couldn't stomach. He can't see their cunning
     to get
     Us Britons to fight their battles, while best half the winnings they
     net!'

     XIV

     The old man sneered, and read forward. It was of that desperate
     fight; -
     The Muscovite stole thro' the mist-wreaths that wrapped the chill
     Inkermann height,
     Where stood our silent outposts: old England was in them that day!
     O sharp worked his ruddy wrinkles, as if to the breath of the fray
     They moved! He sat bareheaded: his long hair over him slow
     Swung white as the silky bog-flowers in purple heath-hollows that
     grow.

     XV

     And louder at Tom's first person: acute and in thunder the 'I'
     Invaded the ear with a whinny of triumph, that seem'd to defy
     The hosts of the world. All heated, what wonder he little could
     brook
     To catch the sight of Mary's demure puritanical look?
     And still as he led the onslaught, his treacherous side-shots he
     sent
     At her who was fighting a battle as fierce, and who sat there
     unbent.

     XVI

     '"We stood in line, and like hedgehogs the Russians rolled under us
     thick.
     They frightened me there."--He's no coward; for when, Miss, they
     came at the quick,
     The sight, he swears, was a breakfast.--"My stomach felt tight: in
     a glimpse
     I saw you snoring at home with the dear cuddled-up little imps.
     And then like the winter brickfields at midnight, hot fire
     lengthened out.
     Our fellows were just leashed bloodhounds: no heart of the lot
     faced about.

     XVII

     '"And only that grumbler, Bob Harris, remarked that we stood one to
     ten:
     'Ye fool,' says Mick Grady, 'just tell 'em they know to compliment
     men!'
     And I sang out your old words: 'If the opposite side isn't God's,
     Heigh! after you've counted a dozen, the pluckiest lads have the
     odds.'
     Ping-ping flew the enemies' pepper: the Colonel roared, Forward,
     and we
     Went at them. 'Twas first like a blanket: and then a long plunge
     in the sea.


     XVIII

     '"Well, now about me and the Frenchman: it happened I can't tell
     you how:
     And, Grandfather, hear, if you love me, and put aside prejudice
     now":
     He never says "Grandfather"--Tom don't--save it's a serious thing.
     "Well, there were some pits for the rifles, just dug on our French-
     leaning wing:
     And backwards, and forwards, and backwards we went, and at last I
     was vexed,
     And swore I would never surrender a foot when the Russians charged
     next.

     XIX

     '"I know that life's worth keeping."--Ay, so it is, lad; so it is! -
     "But my life belongs to a woman."--Does that mean Her Majesty, Miss?
     -
     "These Russians came lumping and grinning: they're fierce at it,
     though they are blocks.
     Our fellows were pretty well pumped, and looked sharp for the little
     French cocks.
     Lord, didn't we pray for their crowing! when over us, on the hill-
     top,
     Behold the first line of them skipping, like kangaroos seen on the
     hop.

     XX

     '"That sent me into a passion, to think of them spying our flight!"
     Heigh, Tom! you've Bridgeman blood, boy! And, "'Face them!' I
     shouted: 'All right;
     Sure, Serjeant, we'll take their shot dacent, like gentlemen,' Grady
     replied.
     A ball in his mouth, and the noble old Irishman dropped by my side.
     Then there was just an instant to save myself, when a short wheeze
     Of bloody lungs under the smoke, and a red-coat crawled up on his
     knees.

     XXI

     '"'Twas Ensign Baynes of our parish."--Ah, ah, Miss Charlworth, the
     one
     Our Tom fought for a young lady? Come, now we've got into the fun!
     -
     "I shouldered him: he primed his pistol, and I trailed my musket,
     prepared."
     Why, that's a fine pick-a-back for ye, to make twenty Russians look
     scared!
     "They came--never mind how many: we couldn't have run very well,
     We fought back to back: 'face to face, our last time!' he said,
     smiling, and fell.

     XXII

     '"Then I strove wild for his body: the beggars saw glittering
     rings,
     Which I vowed to send to his mother. I got some hard knocks and
     sharp stings,
     But felt them no more than angel, or devil, except in the wind.
     I know that I swore at a Russian for showing his teeth, and he
     grinned
     The harder: quick, as from heaven, a man on a horse rode between,
     And fired, and swung his bright sabre: I can't write you more of
     the scene.

     XXIII

     '"But half in his arms, and half at his stirrup, he bore me right
     forth,
     And pitched me among my old comrades: before I could tell south
     from north,
     He caught my hand up, and kissed it! Don't ever let any man speak
     A word against Frenchmen, I near him! I can't find his name, tho' I
     seek.
     But French, and a General, surely he was, and, God bless him! thro'
     him
     I've learnt to love a whole nation."' The ancient man paused,
     winking dim.

     XXIV

     A curious look, half woeful, was seen on his face as he turned
     His eyes upon each of his children, like one who but faintly
     discerned
     His old self in an old mirror. Then gathering sense in his fist,
     He sounded it hard on his knee-cap. 'Your hand, Tom, the French
     fellow kissed!
     He kissed my boy's old pounder! I say he's a gentleman!' Straight
     The letter he tossed to one daughter; bade her the remainder relate.

     XXV

     Tom properly stated his praises in facts, but the lady preferred
     To deck the narration with brackets, and drop her additional word.
     What nobler Christian natures these women could boast, who, 'twas
     known,
     Once spat at the name of their nephew, and now made his praises
     their own!
     The letter at last was finished, the hearers breathed freely, and
     sign
     Was given, 'Tom's health!'--Quoth the farmer: 'Eh, Miss? are you
     weak in the spine?'

     XXVI

     For Mary had sunk, and her body was shaking, as if in a fit.
     Tom's letter she held, and her thumb-nail the month when the letter
     was writ
     Fast-dinted, while she hung sobbing: 'O, see, Sir, the letter is
     old!
     O, do not be too happy!'--'If I understand you, I'm bowled!'
     Said Grandfather Bridgeman, 'and down go my wickets!--not happy!
     when here,
     Here's Tom like to marry his General's daughter--or widow--I'll
     swear!

     XXVII

     'I wager he knows how to strut, too! It's all on the cards that the
     Queen
     Will ask him to Buckingham Palace, to say what he's done and he's
     seen.
     Victoria's fond of her soldiers: and she's got a nose for a fight.
     If Tom tells a cleverish story--there is such a thing as a knight!
     And don't he look roguish and handsome!--To see a girl snivelling
     there -
     By George, Miss, it's clear that you're jealous'--'I love him!' she
     answered his stare.

     XXVIII

     'Yes! now!' breathed the voice of a woman.--'Ah! now!' quiver'd low
     the reply.
     'And "now"'s just a bit too late, so it's no use your piping your
     eye,'
     The farmer added bluffly: 'Old Lawyer Charlworth was rich;
     You followed his instructions in kicking Tom into the ditch.
     If you're such a dutiful daughter, that doesn't prove Tom is a fool.
     Forgive and forget's my motto! and here's my grog growing cool!'

     XXIX

     'But, Sir,' Mary faintly repeated: 'for four long weeks I have
     failed
     To come and cast on you my burden; such grief for you always
     prevailed!
     My heart has so bled for you!' The old man burst on her speech:
     'You've chosen a likely time, Miss! a pretty occasion to preach!'
     And was it not outrageous, that now, of all times, one should come
     With incomprehensible pity! Far better had Mary been dumb.

     XXX

     But when again she stammered in this bewildering way,
     The farmer no longer could bear it, and begged her to go, or to
     stay,
     But not to be whimpering nonsense at such a time. Pricked by a
     goad,
     'Twas you who sent him to glory:- you've come here to reap what you
     sowed.
     Is that it?' he asked; and the silence the elders preserved plainly
     said,
     On Mary's heaving bosom this begging-petition was read.

     XXXI

     And that it was scarcely a bargain that she who had driven him wild
     Should share now the fruits of his valour, the women expressed, as
     they smiled.
     The family pride of the Bridgemans was comforted; still, with
     contempt,
     They looked on a monied damsel of modesty quite so exempt.
     'O give me force to tell them!' cried Mary, and even as she spoke,
     A shout and a hush of the children: a vision on all of them broke.

     XXXII

     Wheeled, pale, in a chair, and shattered, the wreck of their hero
     was seen;
     The ghost of Tom drawn slow o'er the orchard's shadowy green.
     Could this be the martial darling they joyed in a moment ago?
     'He knows it?' to Mary Tom murmured, and closed his weak lids at her
     'No.'
     'Beloved!' she said, falling by him, 'I have been a coward: I
     thought
     You lay in the foreign country, and some strange good might be
     wrought.

     XXXIII

     'Each day I have come to tell him, and failed, with my hand on the
     gate.
     I bore the dreadful knowledge, and crushed my heart with its weight.
     The letter brought by your comrade--he has but just read it aloud!
     It only reached him this morning!' Her head on his shoulder she
     bowed.
     Then Tom with pity's tenderest lordliness patted her arm,
     And eyed the old white-head fondly, with something of doubt and
     alarm.

     XXXIV

     O, take to your fancy a sculptor whose fresh marble offspring
     appears
     Before him, shiningly perfect, the laurel-crown'd issue of years:
     Is heaven offended? for lightning behold from its bosom escape,
     And those are mocking fragments that made the harmonious shape!
     He cannot love the ruins, till, feeling that ruins alone
     Are left, he loves them threefold. So passed the old grandfather's
     moan.

     XXXV

     John's text for a sermon on Slaughter he heard, and he did not
     protest.
     All rigid as April snowdrifts, he stood, hard and feeble; his chest
     Just showing the swell of the fire as it melted him. Smiting a rib,
     'Heigh! what have we been about, Tom! Was this all a terrible fib?'
     He cried, and the letter forth-trembled. Tom told what the cannon
     had done.
     Few present but ached to see falling those aged tears on his heart's
     son!

     XXXVI

     Up lanes of the quiet village, and where the mill-waters rush red
     Thro' browning summer meadows to catch the sun's crimsoning head,
     You meet an old man and a maiden who has the soft ways of a wife
     With one whom they wheel, alternate; whose delicate flush of new
     life
     Is prized like the early primrose. Then shake his right hand, in
     the chair -
     The old man fails never to tell you: 'You've got the French
     General's there!'



     THE PROMISE IN DISTURBANCE



     How low when angels fall their black descent,
     Our primal thunder tells: known is the pain
     Of music, that nigh throning wisdom went,
     And one false note cast wailful to the insane.
     Now seems the language heard of Love as rain
     To make a mire where fruitfulness was meant.
     The golden harp gives out a jangled strain,
     Too like revolt from heaven's Omnipotent.
     But listen in the thought; so may there come
     Conception of a newly-added chord,
     Commanding space beyond where ear has home.
     In labour of the trouble at its fount,
     Leads Life to an intelligible Lord
     The rebel discords up the sacred mount.



     MODERN LOVE



     I

     By this he knew she wept with waking eyes:
     That, at his hand's light quiver by her head,
     The strange low sobs that shook their common bed
     Were called into her with a sharp surprise,
     And strangled mute, like little gaping snakes,
     Dreadfully venomous to him. She lay
     Stone-still, and the long darkness flowed away
     With muffled pulses. Then, as midnight makes
     Her giant heart of Memory and Tears
     Drink the pale drug of silence, and so beat
     Sleep's heavy measure, they from head to feet
     Were moveless, looking through their dead black years,
     By vain regret scrawled over the blank wall.
     Like sculptured effigies they might be seen
     Upon their marriage-tomb, the sword between;
     Each wishing for the sword that severs all.

     II

     It ended, and the morrow brought the task.
     Her eyes were guilty gates, that let him in
     By shutting all too zealous for their sin:
     Each sucked a secret, and each wore a mask.
     But, oh, the bitter taste her beauty had!
     He sickened as at breath of poison-flowers:
     A languid humour stole among the hours,
     And if their smiles encountered, he went mad,
     And raged deep inward, till the light was brown
     Before his vision, and the world, forgot,
     Looked wicked as some old dull murder-spot.
     A star with lurid beams, she seemed to crown
     The pit of infamy: and then again
     He fainted on his vengefulness, and strove
     To ape the magnanimity of love,
     And smote himself, a shuddering heap of pain.

     III

     This was the woman; what now of the man?
     But pass him. If he comes beneath a heel,
     He shall be crushed until he cannot feel,
     Or, being callous, haply till he can.
     But he is nothing:- nothing? Only mark
     The rich light striking out from her on him!
     Ha! what a sense it is when her eyes swim
     Across the man she singles, leaving dark
     All else! Lord God, who mad'st the thing so fair,
     See that I am drawn to her even now!
     It cannot be such harm on her cool brow
     To put a kiss? Yet if I meet him there!
     But she is mine! Ah, no! I know too well
     I claim a star whose light is overcast:
     I claim a phantom-woman in the Past.
     The hour has struck, though I heard not the bell!

     IV

     All other joys of life he strove to warm,
     And magnify, and catch them to his lip:
     But they had suffered shipwreck with the ship,
     And gazed upon him sallow from the storm.
     Or if Delusion came, 'twas but to show
     The coming minute mock the one that went.
     Cold as a mountain in its star-pitched tent,
     Stood high Philosophy, less friend than foe:
     Whom self-caged Passion, from its prison-bars,
     Is always watching with a wondering hate.
     Not till the fire is dying in the grate,
     Look we for any kinship with the stars.
     Oh, wisdom never comes when it is gold,
     And the great price we pay for it full worth:
     We have it only when we are half earth.
     Little avails that coinage to the old!

     V

     A message from her set his brain aflame.
     A world of household matters filled her mind,
     Wherein he saw hypocrisy designed:
     She treated him as something that is tame,
     And but at other provocation bites.
     Familiar was her shoulder in the glass,
     Through that dark rain: yet it may come to pass
     That a changed eye finds such familiar sights
     More keenly tempting than new loveliness.
     The 'What has been' a moment seemed his own:
     The splendours, mysteries, dearer because known,
     Nor less divine: Love's inmost sacredness
     Called to him, 'Come!'--In his restraining start,
     Eyes nurtured to be looked at scarce could see
     A wave of the great waves of Destiny
     Convulsed at a checked impulse of the heart.

     VI

     It chanced his lips did meet her forehead cool.
     She had no blush, but slanted down her eye.
     Shamed nature, then, confesses love can die:
     And most she punishes the tender fool
     Who will believe what honours her the most!
     Dead! is it dead? She has a pulse, and flow
     Of tears, the price of blood-drops, as I know,
     For whom the midnight sobs around Love's ghost,
     Since then I heard her, and so will sob on.
     The love is here; it has but changed its aim.
     O bitter barren woman! what's the name?
     The name, the name, the new name thou hast won?
     Behold me striking the world's coward stroke!
     That will I not do, though the sting is dire.
     - Beneath the surface this, while by the fire
     They sat, she laughing at a quiet joke.

     VII

     She issues radiant from her dressing-room,
     Like one prepared to scale an upper sphere:
     - By stirring up a lower, much I fear!
     How deftly that oiled barber lays his bloom!
     That long-shanked dapper Cupid with frisked curls
     Can make known women torturingly fair;
     The gold-eyed serpent dwelling in rich hair
     Awakes beneath his magic whisks and twirls.
     His art can take the eyes from out my head,
     Until I see with eyes of other men;
     While deeper knowledge crouches in its den,
     And sends a spark up:- is it true we are wed?
     Yea! filthiness of body is most vile,
     But faithlessness of heart I do hold worse.
     The former, it were not so great a curse
     To read on the steel-mirror of her smile.

     VIII

     Yet it was plain she struggled, and that salt
     Of righteous feeling made her pitiful.
     Poor twisting worm, so queenly beautiful!
     Where came the cleft between us? whose the fault?
     My tears are on thee, that have rarely dropped
     As balm for any bitter wound of mine:
     My breast will open for thee at a sign!
     But, no: we are two reed-pipes, coarsely stopped:
     The God once filled them with his mellow breath;
     And they were music till he flung them down,
     Used! used! Hear now the discord-loving clown
     Puff his gross spirit in them, worse than death!
     I do not know myself without thee more:
     In this unholy battle I grow base:
     If the same soul be under the same face,
     Speak, and a taste of that old time restore!

     IX

     He felt the wild beast in him betweenwhiles
     So masterfully rude, that he would grieve
     To see the helpless delicate thing receive
     His guardianship through certain dark defiles.
     Had he not teeth to rend, and hunger too?
     But still he spared her. Once: 'Have you no fear?'
     He said: 'twas dusk; she in his grasp; none near.
     She laughed: 'No, surely; am I not with you?'
     And uttering that soft starry 'you,' she leaned
     Her gentle body near him, looking up;
     And from her eyes, as from a poison-cup,
     He drank until the flittering eyelids screened.
     Devilish malignant witch! and oh, young beam
     Of heaven's circle-glory! Here thy shape
     To squeeze like an intoxicating grape -
     I might, and yet thou goest safe, supreme.

     X

     But where began the change; and what's my crime?
     The wretch condemned, who has not been arraigned,
     Chafes at his sentence. Shall I, unsustained,
     Drag on Love's nerveless body thro' all time?
     I must have slept, since now I wake. Prepare,
     You lovers, to know Love a thing of moods:
     Not, like hard life, of laws. In Love's deep woods,
     I dreamt of loyal Life:- the offence is there!
     Love's jealous woods about the sun are curled;
     At least, the sun far brighter there did beam. -
     My crime is, that the puppet of a dream,
     I plotted to be worthy of the world.
     Oh, had I with my darling helped to mince
     The facts of life, you still had seen me go
     With hindward feather and with forward toe,
     Her much-adored delightful Fairy Prince!

     XI

     Out in the yellow meadows, where the bee
     Hums by us with the honey of the Spring,
     And showers of sweet notes from the larks on wing
     Are dropping like a noon-dew, wander we.
     Or is it now? or was it then? for now,
     As then, the larks from running rings pour showers:
     The golden foot of May is on the flowers,
     And friendly shadows dance upon her brow.
     What's this, when Nature swears there is no change
     To challenge eyesight? Now, as then, the grace
     Of heaven seems holding earth in its embrace.
     Nor eyes, nor heart, has she to feel it strange?
     Look, woman, in the West. There wilt thou see
     An amber cradle near the sun's decline:
     Within it, featured even in death divine,
     Is lying a dead infant, slain by thee.

     XII

     Not solely that the Future she destroys,
     And the fair life which in the distance lies
     For all men, beckoning out from dim rich skies:
     Nor that the passing hour's supporting joys
     Have lost the keen-edged flavour, which begat
     Distinction in old times, and still should breed
     Sweet Memory, and Hope,--earth's modest seed,
     And heaven's high-prompting: not that the world is flat
     Since that soft-luring creature I embraced
     Among the children of Illusion went:
     Methinks with all this loss I were content,
     If the mad Past, on which my foot is based,
     Were firm, or might be blotted: but the whole
     Of life is mixed: the mocking Past will stay:
     And if I drink oblivion of a day,
     So shorten I the stature of my soul.

     XIII

     'I play for Seasons; not Eternities!'
     Says Nature, laughing on her way. 'So must
     All those whose stake is nothing more than dust!'
     And lo, she wins, and of her harmonies
     She is full sure! Upon her dying rose
     She drops a look of fondness, and goes by,
     Scarce any retrospection in her eye;
     For she the laws of growth most deeply knows,
     Whose hands bear, here, a seed-bag--there, an urn.
     Pledged she herself to aught, 'twould mark her end!
     This lesson of our only visible friend
     Can we not teach our foolish hearts to learn?
     Yes! yes!--but, oh, our human rose is fair
     Surpassingly! Lose calmly Love's great bliss,
     When the renewed for ever of a kiss
     Whirls life within the shower of loosened hair!

     XIV

     What soul would bargain for a cure that brings
     Contempt the nobler agony to kill?
     Rather let me bear on the bitter ill,
     And strike this rusty bosom with new stings!
     It seems there is another veering fit,
     Since on a gold-haired lady's eyeballs pure
     I looked with little prospect of a cure,
     The while her mouth's red bow loosed shafts of wit.
     Just heaven! can it be true that jealousy
     Has decked the woman thus? and does her head
     Swim somewhat for possessions forfeited?
     Madam, you teach me many things that be.
     I open an old book, and there I find
     That 'Women still may love whom they deceive.'
     Such love I prize not, madam: by your leave,
     The game you play at is not to my mind.

     XV

     I think she sleeps: it must be sleep, when low
     Hangs that abandoned arm toward the floor;
     The face turned with it. Now make fast the door.
     Sleep on: it is your husband, not your foe.
     The Poet's black stage-lion of wronged love
     Frights not our modern dames:- well if he did!
     Now will I pour new light upon that lid,
     Full-sloping like the breasts beneath. 'Sweet dove,
     Your sleep is pure. Nay, pardon: I disturb.
     I do not? good!' Her waking infant-stare
     Grows woman to the burden my hands bear:
     Her own handwriting to me when no curb
     Was left on Passion's tongue. She trembles through;
     A woman's tremble--the whole instrument:-
     I show another letter lately sent.
     The words are very like: the name is new.

     XVI

     In our old shipwrecked days there was an hour,
     When in the firelight steadily aglow,
     Joined slackly, we beheld the red chasm grow
     Among the clicking coals. Our library-bower
     That eve was left to us: and hushed we sat
     As lovers to whom Time is whispering.
     From sudden-opened doors we heard them sing:
     The nodding elders mixed good wine with chat.
     Well knew we that Life's greatest treasure lay
     With us, and of it was our talk. 'Ah, yes!
     Love dies!' I said: I never thought it less.
     She yearned to me that sentence to unsay.
     Then when the fire domed blackening, I found
     Her cheek was salt against my kiss, and swift
     Up the sharp scale of sobs her breast did lift:-
     Now am I haunted by that taste! that sound!

     XVII

     At dinner, she is hostess, I am host.
     Went the feast ever cheerfuller? She keeps
     The Topic over intellectual deeps
     In buoyancy afloat. They see no ghost.
     With sparkling surface-eyes we ply the ball:
     It is in truth a most contagious game:
     HIDING THE SKELETON, shall be its name.
     Such play as this the devils might appal!
     But here's the greater wonder; in that we,
     Enamoured of an acting nought can tire,
     Each other, like true hypocrites, admire;
     Warm-lighted looks, Love's ephemerioe,
     Shoot gaily o'er the dishes and the wine.
     We waken envy of our happy lot.
     Fast, sweet, and golden, shows the marriage-knot.
     Dear guests, you now have seen Love's corpse-light shine.

     XVIII

     Here Jack and Tom are paired with Moll and Meg.
     Curved open to the river-reach is seen
     A country merry-making on the green.
     Fair space for signal shakings of the leg.
     That little screwy fiddler from his booth,
     Whence flows one nut-brown stream, commands the joints
     Of all who caper here at various points.
     I have known rustic revels in my youth:
     The May-fly pleasures of a mind at ease.
     An early goddess was a country lass:
     A charmed Amphion-oak she tripped the grass.
     What life was that I lived? The life of these?
     Heaven keep them happy! Nature they seem near.
     They must, I think, be wiser than I am;
     They have the secret of the bull and lamb.
     'Tis true that when we trace its source, 'tis beer.

     XIX

     No state is enviable. To the luck alone
     Of some few favoured men I would put claim.
     I bleed, but her who wounds I will not blame.
     Have I not felt her heart as 'twere my own
     Beat thro' me? could I hurt her? heaven and hell!
     But I could hurt her cruelly! Can I let
     My Love's old time-piece to another set,
     Swear it can't stop, and must for ever swell?
     Sure, that's one way Love drifts into the mart
     Where goat-legged buyers throng. I see not plain:-
     My meaning is, it must not be again.
     Great God! the maddest gambler throws his heart.
     If any state be enviable on earth,
     'Tis yon born idiot's, who, as days go by,
     Still rubs his hands before him, like a fly,
     In a queer sort of meditative mirth.

     XX

     I am not of those miserable males
     Who sniff at vice and, daring not to snap,
     Do therefore hope for heaven. I take the hap
     Of all my deeds. The wind that fills my sails
     Propels; but I am helmsman. Am I wrecked,
     I know the devil has sufficient weight
     To bear: I lay it not on him, or fate.
     Besides, he's damned. That man I do suspect
     A coward, who would burden the poor deuce
     With what ensues from his own slipperiness.
     I have just found a wanton-scented tress
     In an old desk, dusty for lack of use.
     Of days and nights it is demonstrative,
     That, like some aged star, gleam luridly.
     If for those times I must ask charity,
     Have I not any charity to give?

     XXI

     We three are on the cedar-shadowed lawn;
     My friend being third. He who at love once laughed
     Is in the weak rib by a fatal shaft
     Struck through, and tells his passion's bashful dawn
     And radiant culmination, glorious crown,
     When 'this' she said: went 'thus': most wondrous she.
     Our eyes grow white, encountering: that we are three,
     Forgetful; then together we look down.
     But he demands our blessing; is convinced
     That words of wedded lovers must bring good.
     We question; if we dare! or if we should!
     And pat him, with light laugh. We have not winced.
     Next, she has fallen. Fainting points the sign
     To happy things in wedlock. When she wakes,
     She looks the star that thro' the cedar shakes:
     Her lost moist hand clings mortally to mine.

     XXII

     What may the woman labour to confess?
     There is about her mouth a nervous twitch.
     'Tis something to be told, or hidden:- which?
     I get a glimpse of hell in this mild guess.
     She has desires of touch, as if to feel
     That all the household things are things she knew.
     She stops before the glass. What sight in view?
     A face that seems the latest to reveal!
     For she turns from it hastily, and tossed
     Irresolute steals shadow-like to where
     I stand; and wavering pale before me there,
     Her tears fall still as oak-leaves after frost.
     She will not speak. I will not ask. We are
     League-sundered by the silent gulf between.
     You burly lovers on the village green,
     Yours is a lower, and a happier star!

     XXIII

     'Tis Christmas weather, and a country house
     Receives us: rooms are full: we can but get
     An attic-crib. Such lovers will not fret
     At that, it is half-said. The great carouse
     Knocks hard upon the midnight's hollow door,
     But when I knock at hers, I see the pit.
     Why did I come here in that dullard fit?
     I enter, and lie couched upon the floor.
     Passing, I caught the coverlet's quick beat:-
     Come, Shame, burn to my soul! and Pride, and Pain -
     Foul demons that have tortured me, enchain!
     Out in the freezing darkness the lambs bleat.
     The small bird stiffens in the low starlight.
     I know not how, but shuddering as I slept,
     I dreamed a banished angel to me crept:
     My feet were nourished on her breasts all night.

     XXIV

     The misery is greater, as I live!
     To know her flesh so pure, so keen her sense,
     That she does penance now for no offence,
     Save against Love. The less can I forgive!
     The less can I forgive, though I adore
     That cruel lovely pallor which surrounds
     Her footsteps; and the low vibrating sounds
     That come on me, as from a magic shore.
     Low are they, but most subtle to find out
     The shrinking soul. Madam, 'tis understood
     When women play upon their womanhood,
     It means, a Season gone. And yet I doubt
     But I am duped. That nun-like look waylays
     My fancy. Oh! I do but wait a sign!
     Pluck out the eyes of pride! thy mouth to mine!
     Never! though I die thirsting. Go thy ways!

     XXV

     You like not that French novel? Tell me why.
     You think it quite unnatural. Let us see.
     The actors are, it seems, the usual three:
     Husband, and wife, and lover. She--but fie!
     In England we'll not hear of it. Edmond,
     The lover, her devout chagrin doth share;
     Blanc-mange and absinthe are his penitent fare,
     Till his pale aspect makes her over-fond:
     So, to preclude fresh sin, he tries rosbif.
     Meantime the husband is no more abused:
     Auguste forgives her ere the tear is used.
     Then hangeth all on one tremendous IF:-
     IF she will choose between them. She does choose;
     And takes her husband, like a proper wife.
     Unnatural? My dear, these things are life:
     And life, some think, is worthy of the Muse.

     XXVI

     Love ere he bleeds, an eagle in high skies,
     Has earth beneath his wings: from reddened eve
     He views the rosy dawn. In vain they weave
     The fatal web below while far he flies.
     But when the arrow strikes him, there's a change.
     He moves but in the track of his spent pain,
     Whose red drops are the links of a harsh chain,
     Binding him to the ground, with narrow range.
     A subtle serpent then has Love become.
     I had the eagle in my bosom erst:
     Henceforward with the serpent I am cursed.
     I can interpret where the mouth is dumb.
     Speak, and I see the side-lie of a truth.
     Perchance my heart may pardon you this deed:
     But be no coward:- you that made Love bleed,
     You must bear all the venom of his tooth!

     XXVII

     Distraction is the panacea, Sir!
     I hear my oracle of Medicine say.
     Doctor! that same specific yesterday
     I tried, and the result will not deter
     A second trial. Is the devil's line
     Of golden hair, or raven black, composed?
     And does a cheek, like any sea-shell rosed,
     Or clear as widowed sky, seem most divine?
     No matter, so I taste forgetfulness.
     And if the devil snare me, body and mind,
     Here gratefully I score:- he seemed kind,
     When not a soul would comfort my distress!
     O sweet new world, in which I rise new made!
     O Lady, once I gave love: now I take!
     Lady, I must be flattered. Shouldst thou wake
     The passion of a demon, be not afraid.

     XXVIII

     I must be flattered. The imperious
     Desire speaks out. Lady, I am content
     To play with you the game of Sentiment,
     And with you enter on paths perilous;
     But if across your beauty I throw light,
     To make it threefold, it must be all mine.
     First secret; then avowed. For I must shine
     Envied,--I, lessened in my proper sight!
     Be watchful of your beauty, Lady dear!
     How much hangs on that lamp you cannot tell.
     Most earnestly I pray you, tend it well:
     And men shall see me as a burning sphere;
     And men shall mark you eyeing me, and groan
     To be the God of such a grand sunflower!
     I feel the promptings of Satanic power,
     While you do homage unto me alone.

     XXIX

     Am I failing? For no longer can I cast
     A glory round about this head of gold.
     Glory she wears, but springing from the mould;
     Not like the consecration of the Past!
     Is my soul beggared? Something more than earth
     I cry for still: I cannot be at peace
     In having Love upon a mortal lease.
     I cannot take the woman at her worth!
     Where is the ancient wealth wherewith I clothed
     Our human nakedness, and could endow
     With spiritual splendour a white brow
     That else had grinned at me the fact I loathed?
     A kiss is but a kiss now! and no wave
     Of a great flood that whirls me to the sea.
     But, as you will! we'll sit contentedly,
     And eat our pot of honey on the grave.

     XXX

     What are we first? First, animals; and next
     Intelligences at a leap; on whom
     Pale lies the distant shadow of the tomb,
     And all that draweth on the tomb for text.
     Into which state comes Love, the crowning sun:
     Beneath whose light the shadow loses form.
     We are the lords of life, and life is warm.
     Intelligence and instinct now are one.
     But nature says: 'My children most they seem
     When they least know me: therefore I decree
     That they shall suffer.' Swift doth young Love flee,
     And we stand wakened, shivering from our dream.
     Then if we study Nature we are wise.
     Thus do the few who live but with the day:
     The scientific animals are they. -
     Lady, this is my sonnet to your eyes.

     XXXI

     This golden head has wit in it. I live
     Again, and a far higher life, near her.
     Some women like a young philosopher;
     Perchance because he is diminutive.
     For woman's manly god must not exceed
     Proportions of the natural nursing size.
     Great poets and great sages draw no prize
     With women: but the little lap-dog breed,
     Who can be hugged, or on a mantel-piece
     Perched up for adoration, these obtain
     Her homage. And of this we men are vain?
     Of this! 'Tis ordered for the world's increase!
     Small flattery! Yet she has that rare gift
     To beauty, Common Sense. I am approved.
     It is not half so nice as being loved,
     And yet I do prefer it. What's my drift?

     XXXII

     Full faith I have she holds that rarest gift
     To beauty, Common Sense. To see her lie
     With her fair visage an inverted sky
     Bloom-covered, while the underlids uplift,
     Would almost wreck the faith; but when her mouth
     (Can it kiss sweetly? sweetly!) would address
     The inner me that thirsts for her no less,
     And has so long been languishing in drouth,
     I feel that I am matched; that I am man!
     One restless corner of my heart or head,
     That holds a dying something never dead,
     Still frets, though Nature giveth all she can.
     It means, that woman is not, I opine,
     Her sex's antidote. Who seeks the asp
     For serpent's bites? 'Twould calm me could I clasp
     Shrieking Bacchantes with their souls of wine!

     XXXIII

     'In Paris, at the Louvre, there have I seen
     The sumptuously-feathered angel pierce
     Prone Lucifer, descending. Looked he fierce,
     Showing the fight a fair one? Too serene!
     The young Pharsalians did not disarray
     Less willingly their locks of floating silk:
     That suckling mouth of his upon the milk
     Of heaven might still be feasting through the fray.
     Oh, Raphael! when men the Fiend do fight,
     They conquer not upon such easy terms.
     Half serpent in the struggle grow these worms.
     And does he grow half human, all is right.'
     This to my Lady in a distant spot,
     Upon the theme: WHILE MIND IS MASTERING CLAY,
     GROSS CLAY INVADES IT. If the spy you play,
     My wife, read this! Strange love talk, is it not?

     XXXIV

     Madam would speak with me. So, now it comes:
     The Deluge or else Fire! She's well; she thanks
     My husbandship. Our chain on silence clanks.
     Time leers between, above his twiddling thumbs.
     Am I quite well? Most excellent in health!
     The journals, too, I diligently peruse.
     Vesuvius is expected to give news:
     Niagara is no noisier. By stealth
     Our eyes dart scrutinizing snakes. She's glad
     I'm happy, says her quivering under-lip.
     'And are not you?' 'How can I be?' 'Take ship!
     For happiness is somewhere to be had.'
     'Nowhere for me!' Her voice is barely heard.
     I am not melted, and make no pretence.
     With commonplace I freeze her, tongue and sense.
     Niagara or Vesuvius is deferred.

     XXXV

     It is no vulgar nature I have wived.
     Secretive, sensitive, she takes a wound
     Deep to her soul, as if the sense had swooned,
     And not a thought of vengeance had survived.
     No confidences has she: but relief
     Must come to one whose suffering is acute.
     O have a care of natures that are mute!
     They punish you in acts: their steps are brief.
     What is she doing? What does she demand
     From Providence or me? She is not one
     Long to endure this torpidly, and shun
     The drugs that crowd about a woman's hand.
     At Forfeits during snow we played, and I
     Must kiss her. 'Well performed!' I said: then she:
     "Tis hardly worth the money, you agree?'
     Save her? What for? To act this wedded lie!

     XXXVI

     My Lady unto Madam makes her bow.
     The charm of women is, that even while
     You're probed by them for tears, you yet may smile,
     Nay, laugh outright, as I have done just now.
     The interview was gracious: they anoint
     (To me aside) each other with fine praise:
     Discriminating compliments they raise,
     That hit with wondrous aim on the weak point:
     My Lady's nose of Nature might complain.
     It is not fashioned aptly to express
     Her character of large-browed steadfastness.
     But Madam says: Thereof she may be vain!
     Now, Madam's faulty feature is a glazed
     And inaccessible eye, that has soft fires,
     Wide gates, at love-time, only. This admires
     My Lady. At the two I stand amazed.

     XXXVII

     Along the garden terrace, under which
     A purple valley (lighted at its edge
     By smoky torch-flame on the long cloud-ledge
     Whereunder dropped the chariot) glimmers rich,
     A quiet company we pace, and wait
     The dinner-bell in prae-digestive calm.
     So sweet up violet banks the Southern balm
     Breathes round, we care not if the bell be late:
     Though here and there grey seniors question Time
     In irritable coughings. With slow foot
     The low rosed moon, the face of Music mute,
     Begins among her silent bars to climb.
     As in and out, in silvery dusk, we thread,
     I hear the laugh of Madam, and discern
     My Lady's heel before me at each turn.
     Our tragedy, is it alive or dead?

     XXXVIII

     Give to imagination some pure light
     In human form to fix it, or you shame
     The devils with that hideous human game:-
     Imagination urging appetite!
     Thus fallen have earth's greatest Gogmagogs,
     Who dazzle us, whom we can not revere:
     Imagination is the charioteer
     That, in default of better, drives the hogs.
     So, therefore, my dear Lady, let me love!
     My soul is arrowy to the light in you.
     You know me that I never can renew
     The bond that woman broke: what would you have?
     'Tis Love, or Vileness! not a choice between,
     Save petrifaction! What does Pity here?
     She killed a thing, and now it's dead, 'tis dear.
     Oh, when you counsel me, think what you mean!

     XXXIX

     She yields: my Lady in her noblest mood
     Has yielded: she, my golden-crowned rose!
     The bride of every sense! more sweet than those
     Who breathe the violet breath of maidenhood.
     O visage of still music in the sky!
     Soft moon! I feel thy song, my fairest friend!
     True harmony within can apprehend
     Dumb harmony without. And hark! 'tis nigh!
     Belief has struck the note of sound: a gleam
     Of living silver shows me where she shook
     Her long white fingers down the shadowy brook,
     That sings her song, half waking, half in dream.
     What two come here to mar this heavenly tune?
     A man is one: the woman bears my name,
     And honour. Their hands touch! Am I still tame?
     God, what a dancing spectre seems the moon!

     XL

     I bade my Lady think what she might mean.
     Know I my meaning, I? Can I love one,
     And yet be jealous of another? None
     Commits such folly. Terrible Love, I ween,
     Has might, even dead, half sighing to upheave
     The lightless seas of selfishness amain:
     Seas that in a man's heart have no rain
     To fall and still them. Peace can I achieve,
     By turning to this fountain-source of woe,
     This woman, who's to Love as fire to wood?
     She breathed the violet breath of maidenhood
     Against my kisses once! but I say, No!
     The thing is mocked at! Helplessly afloat,
     I know not what I do, whereto I strive.
     The dread that my old love may be alive
     Has seized my nursling new love by the throat.

     XLI

     How many a thing which we cast to the ground,
     When others pick it up becomes a gem!
     We grasp at all the wealth it is to them;
     And by reflected light its worth is found.
     Yet for us still 'tis nothing! and that zeal
     Of false appreciation quickly fades.
     This truth is little known to human shades,
     How rare from their own instinct 'tis to feel!
     They waste the soul with spurious desire,
     That is not the ripe flame upon the bough.
     We two have taken up a lifeless vow
     To rob a living passion: dust for fire!
     Madam is grave, and eyes the clock that tells
     Approaching midnight. We have struck despair
     Into two hearts. O, look we like a pair
     Who for fresh nuptials joyfully yield all else?

     XLII

     I am to follow her. There is much grace
     In woman when thus bent on martyrdom.
     They think that dignity of soul may come,
     Perchance, with dignity of body. Base!
     But I was taken by that air of cold
     And statuesque sedateness, when she said
     'I'm going'; lit a taper, bowed her head,
     And went, as with the stride of Pallas bold.
     Fleshly indifference horrible! The hands
     Of Time now signal: O, she's safe from me!
     Within those secret walls what do I see?
     Where first she set the taper down she stands:
     Not Pallas: Hebe shamed! Thoughts black as death
     Like a stirred pool in sunshine break. Her wrists
     I catch: she faltering, as she half resists,
     'You love . . .? love . . .? love . . .?' all on an indrawn breath.

     XLIII

     Mark where the pressing wind shoots javelin-like
     Its skeleton shadow on the broad-backed wave!
     Here is a fitting spot to dig Love's grave;
     Here where the ponderous breakers plunge and strike,
     And dart their hissing tongues high up the sand:
     In hearing of the ocean, and in sight
     Of those ribbed wind-streaks running into white.
     If I the death of Love had deeply planned,
     I never could have made it half so sure,
     As by the unblest kisses which upbraid
     The full-waked sense; or failing that, degrade!
     'Tis morning: but no morning can restore
     What we have forfeited. I see no sin:
     The wrong is mixed. In tragic life, God wot,
     No villain need be! Passions spin the plot:
     We are betrayed by what is false within.

     XLIV

     They say, that Pity in Love's service dwells,
     A porter at the rosy temple's gate.
     I missed him going: but it is my fate
     To come upon him now beside his wells;
     Whereby I know that I Love's temple leave,
     And that the purple doors have closed behind.
     Poor soul! if, in those early days unkind,
     Thy power to sting had been but power to grieve,
     We now might with an equal spirit meet,
     And not be matched like innocence and vice.
     She for the Temple's worship has paid price,
     And takes the coin of Pity as a cheat.
     She sees through simulation to the bone:
     What's best in her impels her to the worst:
     Never, she cries, shall Pity soothe Love's thirst,
     Or foul hypocrisy for truth atone!

     XLV

     It is the season of the sweet wild rose,
     My Lady's emblem in the heart of me!
     So golden-crowned shines she gloriously,
     And with that softest dream of blood she glows;
     Mild as an evening heaven round Hesper bright!
     I pluck the flower, and smell it, and revive
     The time when in her eyes I stood alive.
     I seem to look upon it out of Night.
     Here's Madam, stepping hastily. Her whims
     Bid her demand the flower, which I let drop.
     As I proceed, I feel her sharply stop,
     And crush it under heel with trembling limbs.
     She joins me in a cat-like way, and talks
     Of company, and even condescends
     To utter laughing scandal of old friends.
     These are the summer days, and these our walks.

     XLVI

     At last we parley: we so strangely dumb
     In such a close communion! It befell
     About the sounding of the Matin-bell,
     And lo! her place was vacant, and the hum
     Of loneliness was round me. Then I rose,
     And my disordered brain did guide my foot
     To that old wood where our first love-salute
     Was interchanged: the source of many throes!
     There did I see her, not alone. I moved
     Toward her, and made proffer of my arm.
     She took it simply, with no rude alarm;
     And that disturbing shadow passed reproved.
     I felt the pained speech coming, and declared
     My firm belief in her, ere she could speak.
     A ghastly morning came into her cheek,
     While with a widening soul on me she stared.

     XLVII

     We saw the swallows gathering in the sky,
     And in the osier-isle we heard them noise.
     We had not to look back on summer joys,
     Or forward to a summer of bright dye:
     But in the largeness of the evening earth
     Our spirits grew as we went side by side.
     The hour became her husband and my bride.
     Love, that had robbed us so, thus blessed our dearth!
     The pilgrims of the year waxed very loud
     In multitudinous chatterings, as the flood
     Full brown came from the West, and like pale blood
     Expanded to the upper crimson cloud.
     Love, that had robbed us of immortal things,
     This little moment mercifully gave,
     Where I have seen across the twilight wave
     The swan sail with her young beneath her wings.

     XLVIII

     Their sense is with their senses all mixed in,
     Destroyed by subtleties these women are!
     More brain, O Lord, more brain! or we shall mar
     Utterly this fair garden we might win.
     Behold! I looked for peace, and thought it near.
     Our inmost hearts had opened, each to each.
     We drank the pure daylight of honest speech.
     Alas! that was the fatal draught, I fear.
     For when of my lost Lady came the word,
     This woman, O this agony of flesh!
     Jealous devotion bade her break the mesh,
     That I might seek that other like a bird.
     I do adore the nobleness! despise
     The act! She has gone forth, I know not where.
     Will the hard world my sentience of her share
     I feel the truth; so let the world surmise.

     XLIX

     He found her by the ocean's moaning verge,
     Nor any wicked change in her discerned;
     And she believed his old love had returned,
     Which was her exultation, and her scourge.
     She took his hand, and walked with him, and seemed
     The wife he sought, though shadow-like and dry.
     She had one terror, lest her heart should sigh,
     And tell her loudly she no longer dreamed.
     She dared not say, 'This is my breast: look in.'
     But there's a strength to help the desperate weak.
     That night he learned how silence best can speak
     The awful things when Pity pleads for Sin.
     About the middle of the night her call
     Was heard, and he came wondering to the bed.
     'Now kiss me, dear! it may be, now!' she said.
     Lethe had passed those lips, and he knew all.

     L

     Thus piteously Love closed what he begat:
     The union of this ever-diverse pair!
     These two were rapid falcons in a snare,
     Condemned to do the flitting of the bat.
     Lovers beneath the singing sky of May,
     They wandered once; clear as the dew on flowers:
     But they fed not on the advancing hours:
     Their hearts held cravings for the buried day.
     Then each applied to each that fatal knife,
     Deep questioning, which probes to endless dole.
     Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul
     When hot for certainties in this our life! -
     In tragic hints here see what evermore
     Moves dark as yonder midnight ocean's force,
     Thundering like ramping hosts of warrior horse,
     To throw that faint thin fine upon the shore!



     THE PATRIOT ENGINEER



     'Sirs! may I shake your hands?
     My countrymen, I see!
     I've lived in foreign lands
     Till England's Heaven to me.
     A hearty shake will do me good,
     And freshen up my sluggish blood.'

     Into his hard right hand we struck,
     Gave the shake, and wish'd him luck.

     '--From Austria I come,
     An English wife to win,
     And find an English home,
     And live and die therein.
     Great Lord! how many a year I've pined
     To drink old ale and speak my mind!'

     Loud rang our laughter, and the shout
     Hills round the Meuse-boat echoed about.

     '--Ay, no offence: laugh on,
     Young gentlemen: I'll join.
     Had you to exile gone,
     Where free speech is base coin,
     You'd sigh to see the jolly nose
     Where Freedom's native liquor flows!'

     He this time the laughter led,
     Dabbling his oily bullet head.

     '--Give me, to suit my moods,
     An ale-house on a heath,
     I'll hand the crags and woods
     To B'elzebub beneath.
     A fig for scenery! what scene
     Can beat a Jackass on a green?'

     Gravely he seem'd, with gaze intense,
     Putting the question to common sense.

     '--Why, there's the ale-house bench:
     The furze-flower shining round:
     And there's my waiting-wench,
     As lissome as a hound.
     With "hail Britannia!" ere I drink,
     I'll kiss her with an artful wink.'

     Fair flash'd the foreign landscape while
     We breath'd again our native Isle.

     '--The geese may swim hard-by;
     They gabble, and you talk:
     You're sure there's not a spy
     To mark your name with chalk.
     My heart's an oak, and it won't grow
     In flower-pots, foreigners must know.'

     Pensive he stood: then shook his head
     Sadly; held out his fist, and said:

     '--You've heard that Hungary's floor'd?
     They've got her on the ground.
     A traitor broke her sword:
     Two despots held her bound.
     I've seen her gasping her last hope:
     I've seen her sons strung up b' the rope.

     'Nine gallant gentlemen
     In Arad they strung up!
     I work'd in peace till then:-
     That poison'd all my cup.
     A smell of corpses haunted me:
     My nostril sniff'd like life for sea.

     'Take money for my hire
     From butchers?--not the man!
     I've got some natural fire,
     And don't flash in the pan; -
     A few ideas I reveal'd:-
     'Twas well old England stood my shield!

     'Said I, "The Lord of Hosts
     Have mercy on your land!
     I see those dangling ghosts, -
     And you may keep command,
     And hang, and shoot, and have your day:
     They hold your bill, and you must pay.

     '"You've sent them where they're strong,
     You carrion Double-Head!
     I hear them sound a gong
     In Heaven above!"--I said.
     "My God, what feathers won't you moult
     For this!" says I: and then I bolt.

     'The Bird's a beastly Bird,
     And what is more, a fool.
     I shake hands with the herd
     That flock beneath his rule.
     They're kindly; and their land is fine.
     I thought it rarer once than mine.

     'And rare would be its lot,
     But that he baulks its powers:
     It's just an earthen pot
     For hearts of oak like ours.
     Think! Think!--four days from those frontiers,
     And I'm a-head full fifty years.

     'It tingles to your scalps,
     To think of it, my boys!
     Confusion on their Alps,
     And all their baby toys!
     The mountains Britain boasts are men:
     And scale you them, my brethren!'

     Cluck, went his tongue; his fingers, snap.
     Britons were proved all heights to cap.

     And we who worshipp'd crags,
     Where purple splendours burn'd,
     Our idol saw in rags,
     And right about were turn'd.
     Horizons rich with trembling spires
     On violet twilights lost their fires.

     And heights where morning wakes
     With one cheek over snow; -
     And iron-walled lakes
     Where sits the white moon low; -
     For us on youthful travel bent,
     The robing picturesque was rent.

     Wherever Beauty show'd
     The wonders of her face,
     This man his Jackass rode,
     High despot of the place.

     Fair dreams of our enchanted life
     Fled fast from his shrill island fife.

     And yet we liked him well;
     We laugh'd with honest hearts:-
     He shock'd some inner spell,
     And rous'd discordant parts.
     We echoed what we half abjured:
     And hating, smilingly endured.

     Moreover, could we be
     To our dear land disloyal?
     And were not also we
     Of History's blood-Royal?
     We glow'd to think how donkeys graze
     In England, thrilling at their brays.

     For there a man may view
     An aspect more sublime
     Than Alps against the blue:-
     The morning eyes of Time!
     The very Ass participates
     The glory Freedom radiates!



     CASSANDRA



     I

     Captive on a foreign shore,
     Far from Ilion's hoary wave,
     Agamemnon's bridal slave
     Speaks Futurity no more:
     Death is busy with her grave.

     II

     Thick as water, bursts remote
     Round her ears the alien din,
     While her little sullen chin
     Fills the hollows of her throat:
     Silent lie her slaughter'd kin.

     III

     Once to many a pealing shriek,
     Lo, from Ilion's topmost tower,
     Ilion's fierce prophetic flower
     Cried the coming of the Greek!
     Black in Hades sits the hour.

     IV

     Eyeing phantoms of the Past,
     Folded like a prophet's scroll,
     In the deep's long shoreward roll
     Here she sees the anchor cast:
     Backward moves her sunless soul.

     V

     Chieftains, brethren of her joy,
     Shades, the white light in their eyes
     Slanting to her lips, arise,
     Crowding quick the plains of Troy:
     Now they tell her not she lies.

     VI

     O the bliss upon the plains,
     Where the joining heroes clashed
     Shield and spear, and, unabashed,
     Challenged with hot chariot-reins
     Gods!--they glimmer ocean-washed.

     VII

     Alien voices round the ships,
     Thick as water, shouting Home.
     Argives, pale as midnight foam,
     Wax before her awful lips:
     White as stars that front the gloom.

     VIII

     Like a torch-flame that by day
     Up the daylight twists, and, pale,
     Catches air in leaps that fail,
     Crushed by the inveterate ray,
     Through her shines the Ten-Years' Tale.

     IX

     Once to many a pealing shriek,
     Lo, from Ilion's topmost tower,
     Ilion's fierce prophetic flower
     Cried the coming of the Greek!
     Black in Hades sits the hour.

     X

     Still upon her sunless soul
     Gleams the narrow hidden space
     Forward, where her fiery race
     Falters on its ashen goal:
     Still the Future strikes her face.

     XI

     See toward the conqueror's car
     Step the purple Queen whose hate
     Wraps red-armed her royal mate
     With his Asian tempest-star:
     Now Cassandra views her Fate.

     XII

     King of men! the blinded host
     Shout:- she lifts her brooding chin:
     Glad along the joyous din
     Smiles the grand majestic ghost:
     Clytemnestra leads him in.

     XIII

     Lo, their smoky limbs aloof,
     Shadowing heaven and the seas,
     Fates and Furies, tangling Threes,
     Tear and mix above the roof:
     Fates and fierce Eumenides.

     XIV

     Is the prophetess with rods
     Beaten, that she writhes in air?
     With the Gods who never spare,
     Wrestling with the unsparing Gods,
     Lone, her body struggles there.

     XV

     Like the snaky torch-flame white,
     Levelled as aloft it twists,
     She, her soaring arms, and wrists
     Drooping, struggles with the light,
     Helios, bright above all mists!

     XVI

     In his orb she sees the tower,
     Dusk against its flaming rims,
     Where of old her wretched limbs
     Twisted with the stolen power:
     Ilium all the lustre dims!

     XVII

     O the bliss upon the plains,
     Where the joining heroes clashed
     Shield and spear, and, unabashed,
     Challenged with hot chariot-reins
     Gods!--they glimmer ocean-washed.

     XVIII

     Thrice the Sun-god's name she calls;
     Shrieks the deed that shames the sky;
     Like a fountain leaping high,
     Falling as a fountain falls:
     Lo, the blazing wheels go by!

     XIX

     Captive on a foreign shore,
     Far from Ilion's hoary wave,
     Agamemnon's bridal slave
     Speaks Futurity no more:
     Death is busy with her grave.



     THE YOUNG USURPER



     On my darling's bosom
     Has dropped a living rosy bud,
     Fair as brilliant Hesper
     Against the brimming flood.
     She handles him,
     She dandles him,
     She fondles him and eyes him:
     And if upon a tear he wakes,
     With many a kiss she dries him:
     She covets every move he makes,
     And never enough can prize him.
     Ah, the young Usurper!
     I yield my golden throne:
     Such angel bands attend his hands
     To claim it for his own.



     MARGARET'S BRIDAL EVE



     I

     The old grey mother she thrummed on her knee:
     There is a rose that's ready;
     And which of the handsome young men shall it be?
     There's a rose that's ready for clipping.

     My daughter, come hither, come hither to me:
     There is a rose that's ready;
     Come, point me your finger on him that you see:
     There's a rose that's ready for clipping.

     O mother, my mother, it never can be:
     There is a rose that's ready;
     For I shall bring shame on the man marries me:
     There's a rose that's ready for clipping.

     Now let your tongue be deep as the sea:
     There is a rose that's ready;
     And the man'll jump for you, right briskly will he:
     There's a rose that's ready for clipping.

     Tall Margaret wept bitterly:
     There is a rose that's ready;
     And as her parent bade did she:
     There's a rose that's ready for clipping.

     O the handsome young man dropped down on his knee:
     There is a rose that's ready;
     Pale Margaret gave him her hand, woe's me!
     There's a rose that's ready for clipping.

     II

     O mother, my mother, this thing I must say:
     There is a rose in the garden;
     Ere he lies on the breast where that other lay:
     And the bird sings over the roses.

     Now, folly, my daughter, for men are men:
     There is a rose in the garden;
     You marry them blindfold, I tell you again:
     And the bird sings over the roses.

     O mother, but when he kisses me!
     There is a rose in the garden;
     My child, 'tis which shall sweetest be!
     And the bird sings over the roses.

     O mother, but when I awake in the morn!
     There is a rose in the garden;
     My child, you are his, and the ring is worn:
     And the bird sings over the roses.

     Tall Margaret sighed and loosened a tress:
     There is a rose in the garden;
     Poor comfort she had of her comeliness
     And the bird sings over the roses.

     My mother will sink if this thing be said:
     There is a rose in the garden;
     That my first betrothed came thrice to my bed;
     And the bird sings over the roses.

     He died on my shoulder the third cold night:
     There is a rose in the garden;
     I dragged his body all through the moonlight:
     And the bird sings over the roses.

     But when I came by my father's door:
     There is a rose in the garden;
     I fell in a lump on the stiff dead floor:
     And the bird sings over the roses.

     O neither to heaven, nor yet to hell:
     There is a rose in the garden;
     Could I follow the lover I loved so well!
     And the bird sings over the roses.

     III

     The bridesmaids slept in their chambers apart:
     There is a rose that's ready;
     Tall Margaret walked with her thumping heart:
     There's a rose that's ready for clipping.

     The frill of her nightgown below the left breast:
     There is a rose that's ready;
     Had fall'n like a cloud of the moonlighted West:
     There's a rose that's ready for clipping.

     But where the West-cloud breaks to a star:
     There is a rose that's ready;
     Pale Margaret's breast showed a winding scar:
     There's a rose that's ready for clipping.

     O few are the brides with such a sign!
     There is a rose that's ready;
     Though I went mad the fault was mine:
     There's a rose that's ready for clipping.

     I must speak to him under this roof to-night:
     There is a rose that's ready;
     I shall burn to death if I speak in the light:
     There's a rose that's ready for clipping.

     O my breast! I must strike you a bloodier wound:
     There is a rose that's ready;
     Than when I scored you red and swooned:
     There's a rose that's ready for clipping.

     I will stab my honour under his eye:
     There is a rose that's ready;
     Though I bleed to the death, I shall let out the lie:
     There's a rose that's ready for clipping.

     O happy my bridesmaids! white sleep is with you!
     There is a rose that's ready;
     Had he chosen among you he might sleep too!
     There's a rose that's ready for clipping.

     O happy my bridesmaids! your breasts are clean:
     There is a rose that's ready;
     You carry no mark of what has been!
     There's a rose that's ready for clipping.

     IV

     An hour before the chilly beam:
     Red rose and white in the garden;
     The bridegroom started out of a dream:
     And the bird sings over the roses.

     He went to the door, and there espied:
     Red rose and white in the garden;
     The figure of his silent bride:
     And the bird sings over the roses.

     He went to the door, and let her in:
     Red rose and white in the garden;
     Whiter looked she than a child of sin:
     And the bird sings over the roses.

     She looked so white, she looked so sweet:
     Red rose and white in the garden;
     She looked so pure he fell at her feet:
     And the bird sings over the roses.

     He fell at her feet with love and awe:
     Red rose and white in the garden;
     A stainless body of light he saw:
     And the bird sings over the roses.

     O Margaret, say you are not of the dead!
     Red rose and white in the garden;
     My bride! by the angels at night are you led?
     And the bird sings over the roses.

     I am not led by the angels about:
     Red rose and white in the garden;
     But I have a devil within to let out:
     And the bird sings over the roses.

     O Margaret! my bride and saint!
     Red rose and white in the garden;
     There is on you no earthly taint:
     And the bird sings over the roses.

     I am no saint, and no bride can I be:
     Red rose and while in the garden;
     Until I have opened my bosom to thee:
     And the bird sings over the roses.

     To catch at her heart she laid one hand:
     Red rose and white in the garden;
     She told the tale where she did stand:
     And the bird sings over the roses.

     She stood before him pale and tall:
     Red rose and white in the garden;
     Her eyes between his, she told him all:
     And the bird sings over the roses.

     She saw how her body grow freckled and foul:
     Red rose and white in the garden;
     She heard from the woods the hooting owl:
     And the bird sings over the roses.

     With never a quiver her mouth did speak:
     Red rose and white in the garden;
     O when she had done she stood so meek!
     And the bird sings over the roses.

     The bridegroom stamped and called her vile:
     Red rose and white in the garden;
     He did but waken a little smile:
     And the bird sings over the roses.

     The bridegroom raged and called her foul:
     Red rose and white in the garden;
     She heard from the woods the hooting owl:
     And the bird sings over the roses.

     He muttered a name full bitter and sore:
     Red rose and white in the garden;
     She fell in a lump on the still dead floor:
     And the bird sings over the roses.

     O great was the wonder, and loud the wail:
     Red rose and white in the garden;
     When through the household flew the tale:
     And the bird sings over the roses.

     The old grey mother she dressed the bier:
     Red rose and white in the garden;
     With a shivering chin and never a tear:
     And the bird sings over the roses.

     O had you but done as I bade you, my child!
     Red rose and white in the garden;
     You would not have died and been reviled:
     And the bird sings over the roses.

     The bridegroom he hung at midnight by the bier:
     Red rose and white in the garden;
     He eyed the white girl thro' a dazzling tear:
     And the bird sings over the roses.

     O had you been false as the women who stray:
     Red rose and white in the garden;
     You would not be now with the Angels of Day!
     And the bird sings over the roses.



     MARIAN



     I

     She can be as wise as we,
     And wiser when she wishes;
     She can knit with cunning wit,
     And dress the homely dishes.
     She can flourish staff or pen,
     And deal a wound that lingers;
     She can talk the talk of men,
     And touch with thrilling fingers.

     II

     Match her ye across the sea,
     Natures fond and fiery;
     Ye who zest the turtle's nest
     With the eagle's eyrie.
     Soft and loving is her soul,
     Swift and lofty soaring;
     Mixing with its dove-like dole
     Passionate adoring.

     III

     Such a she who'll match with me?
     In flying or pursuing,
     Subtle wiles are in her smiles
     To set the world a-wooing.
     She is steadfast as a star,
     And yet the maddest maiden:
     She can wage a gallant war,
     And give the peace of Eden.



     BY MORNING TWILIGHT



     Night, like a dying mother,
     Eyes her young offspring, Day.
     The birds are dreamily piping.
     And O, my love, my darling!
     The night is life ebb'd away:
     Away beyond our reach!
     A sea that has cast us pale on the beach;
     Weeds with the weeds and the pebbles
     That hear the lone tamarisk rooted in sand
     Sway
     With the song of the sea to the land.



     UNKNOWN FAIR FACES



     Though I am faithful to my loves lived through,
     And place them among Memory's great stars,
     Where burns a face like Hesper: one like Mars:
     Of visages I get a moment's view,
     Sweet eyes that in the heaven of me, too,
     Ascend, tho' virgin to my life they passed.
     Lo, these within my destiny seem glassed
     At times so bright, I wish that Hope were new.
     A gracious freckled lady, tall and grave,
     Went, in a shawl voluminous and white,
     Last sunset by; and going sow'd a glance.
     Earth is too poor to hold a second chance;
     I will not ask for more than Fortune gave:
     My heart she goes from--never from my sight!



     SHEMSELNIHAR



     O my lover! the night like a broad smooth wave
     Bears us onward, and morn, a black rock, shines wet.
     How I shuddered--I knew not that I was a slave,
     Till I looked on thy face:- then I writhed in the net.
     Then I felt like a thing caught by fire, that her star
     Glowed dark on the bosom of Shemselnihar.

     And he came, whose I am: O my lover! he came:
     And his slave, still so envied of women, was I:
     And I turned as a hissing leaf spits from the flame,
     Yes, I shrivelled to dust from him, haggard and dry.
     O forgive her:- she was but as dead lilies are:
     The life of her heart fled from Shemselnihar.

     Yet with thee like a full throbbing rose how I bloom!
     Like a rose by the fountain whose showering we hear,
     As we lie, O my lover! in this rich gloom,
     Smelling faint the cool breath of the lemon-groves near.
     As we lie gazing out on that glowing great star -
     Ah! dark on the bosom of Shemselnihar.

     Yet with thee am I not as an arm of the vine,
     Firm to bind thee, to cherish thee, feed thee sweet?
     Swear an oath on my lip to let none disentwine
     The life that here fawns to give warmth to thy feet.
     I on thine, thus! no more shall that jewelled Head jar
     The music thou breathest on Shemselnihar.

     Far away, far away, where the wandering scents
     Of all flowers are sweetest, white mountains among,
     There my kindred abide in their green and blue tents:
     Bear me to them, my lover! they lost me so young.
     Let us slip down the stream and leap steed till afar
     None question thy claim upon Shemselnihar.

     O that long note the bulbul gave out--meaning love!
     O my lover, hark to him and think it my voice!
     The blue night like a great bell-flower from above
     Drooping low and gold-eyed: O, but hear him rejoice!
     Can it be? 'twas a flash! that accurst scimiter
     In thought even cuts thee from Shemselnihar.

     Yes, I would that, less generous, he would oppress,
     He would chain me, upbraid me, burn deep brands for hate,
     Than with this mask of freedom and gorgeousness
     Bespangle my slavery, mock my strange fate.
     Would, would, would, O my lover, he knew--dared debar
     Thy coming, and earn curse of Shemselnihar!



     A ROAR THROUGH THE TALL TWIN ELM-TREES



     A roar thro' the tall twin elm-trees
     The mustering storm betrayed:
     The South-wind seized the willow
     That over the water swayed.

     Then fell the steady deluge
     In which I strove to doze,
     Hearing all night at my window
     The knock of the winter rose.

     The rainy rose of winter!
     An outcast it must pine.
     And from thy bosom outcast
     Am I, dear lady mine.



     WHEN I WOULD IMAGE



     When I would image her features,
     Comes up a shrouded head:
     I touch the outlines, shrinking;
     She seems of the wandering dead.

     But when love asks for nothing,
     And lies on his bed of snow,
     The face slips under my eyelids,
     All in its living glow.

     Like a dark cathedral city,
     Whose spires, and domes, and towers
     Quiver in violet lightnings,
     My soul basks on for hours.



     THE SPIRIT OF SHAKESPEARE



     Thy greatest knew thee, Mother Earth; unsoured
     He knew thy sons. He probed from hell to hell
     Of human passions, but of love deflowered
     His wisdom was not, for he knew thee well.
     Thence came the honeyed corner at his lips,
     The conquering smile wherein his spirit sails
     Calm as the God who the white sea-wave whips,
     Yet full of speech and intershifting tales,
     Close mirrors of us: thence had he the laugh
     We feel is thine: broad as ten thousand beeves
     At pasture! thence thy songs, that winnow chaff
     From grain, bid sick Philosophy's last leaves
     Whirl, if they have no response--they enforced
     To fatten Earth when from her soul divorced.



     CONTINUED



     How smiles he at a generation ranked
     In gloomy noddings over life! They pass.
     Not he to feed upon a breast unthanked,
     Or eye a beauteous face in a cracked glass.
     But he can spy that little twist of brain
     Which moved some weighty leader of the blind,
     Unwitting 'twas the goad of personal pain,
     To view in curst eclipse our Mother's mind,
     And show us of some rigid harridan
     The wretched bondmen till the end of time.
     O lived the Master now to paint us Man,
     That little twist of brain would ring a chime
     Of whence it came and what it caused, to start
     Thunders of laughter, clearing air and heart.



     ODE TO THE SPIRIT OF EARTH IN AUTUMN



     Fair Mother Earth lay on her back last night,
     To gaze her fill on Autumn's sunset skies,
     When at a waving of the fallen light
     Sprang realms of rosy fruitage o'er her eyes.
     A lustrous heavenly orchard hung the West,
     Wherein the blood of Eden bloomed again:
     Red were the myriad cherub-mouths that pressed,
     Among the clusters, rich with song, full fain,
     But dumb, because that overmastering spell
     Of rapture held them dumb: then, here and there,
     A golden harp lost strings; a crimson shell
     Burnt grey; and sheaves of lustre fell to air.
     The illimitable eagerness of hue
     Bronzed, and the beamy winged bloom that flew
     'Mid those bunched fruits and thronging figures failed.
     A green-edged lake of saffron touched the blue,
     With isles of fireless purple lying through:
     And Fancy on that lake to seek lost treasures sailed.

     Not long the silence followed:
     The voice that issues from thy breast,
     O glorious South-west,
     Along the gloom-horizon holloa'd;
     Warning the valleys with a mellow roar
     Through flapping wings; then sharp the woodland bore
     A shudder and a noise of hands:
     A thousand horns from some far vale
     In ambush sounding on the gale.
     Forth from the cloven sky came bands
     Of revel-gathering spirits; trooping down,
     Some rode the tree-tops; some on torn cloud-strips
     Burst screaming thro' the lighted town:
     And scudding seaward, some fell on big ships:
     Or mounting the sea-horses blew
     Bright foam-flakes on the black review
     Of heaving hulls and burying beaks.

     Still on the farthest line, with outpuffed cheeks,
     'Twixt dark and utter dark, the great wind drew
     From heaven that disenchanted harmony
     To join earth's laughter in the midnight blind:
     Booming a distant chorus to the shrieks
     Preluding him: then he,
     His mantle streaming thunderingly behind,
     Across the yellow realm of stiffened Day,
     Shot thro' the woodland alleys signals three;
     And with the pressure of a sea
     Plunged broad upon the vale that under lay.

     Night on the rolling foliage fell:
     But I, who love old hymning night,
     And know the Dryad voices well,
     Discerned them as their leaves took flight,
     Like souls to wander after death:
     Great armies in imperial dyes,
     And mad to tread the air and rise,
     The savage freedom of the skies
     To taste before they rot. And here,
     Like frail white-bodied girls in fear,
     The birches swung from shrieks to sighs;
     The aspens, laughers at a breath,
     In showering spray-falls mixed their cries,
     Or raked a savage ocean-strand
     With one incessant drowning screech.
     Here stood a solitary beech,
     That gave its gold with open hand,
     And all its branches, toning chill,
     Did seem to shut their teeth right fast,
     To shriek more mercilessly shrill,
     And match the fierceness of the blast.

     But heard I a low swell that noised
     Of far-off ocean, I was 'ware
     Of pines upon their wide roots poised,
     Whom never madness in the air
     Can draw to more than loftier stress
     Of mournfulness, not mournfulness
     For melancholy, but Joy's excess,
     That singing on the lap of sorrow faints:
     And Peace, as in the hearts of saints
     Who chant unto the Lord their God;
     Deep Peace below upon the muffled sod,
     The stillness of the sea's unswaying floor,
     Could I be sole there not to see
     The life within the life awake;
     The spirit bursting from the tree,
     And rising from the troubled lake?
     Pour, let the wines of Heaven pour!
     The Golden Harp is struck once more,
     And all its music is for me!
     Pour, let the wines of Heaven pour!
     And, ho, for a night of Pagan glee!

     There is a curtain o'er us.
     For once, good souls, we'll not pretend
     To be aught better than her who bore us,
     And is our only visible friend.
     Hark to her laughter! who laughs like this,
     Can she be dead, or rooted in pain?
     She has been slain by the narrow brain,
     But for us who love her she lives again.
     Can she die? O, take her kiss!

     The crimson-footed nymph is panting up the glade,
     With the wine-jar at her arm-pit, and the drunken ivy-braid
     Round her forehead, breasts, and thighs: starts a Satyr, and they
     speed:
     Hear the crushing of the leaves: hear the cracking of the bough!
     And the whistling of the bramble, the piping of the weed!

     But the bull-voiced oak is battling now:
     The storm has seized him half-asleep,
     And round him the wild woodland throngs
     To hear the fury of his songs,
     The uproar of an outraged deep.
     He wakes to find a wrestling giant
     Trunk to trunk and limb to limb,
     And on his rooted force reliant
     He laughs and grasps the broadened giant,
     And twist and roll the Anakim;
     And multitudes, acclaiming to the cloud,
     Cry which is breaking, which is bowed.

     Away, for the cymbals clash aloft
     In the circles of pine, on the moss-floor soft.
     The nymphs of the woodland are gathering there.
     They huddle the leaves, and trample, and toss;
     They swing in the branches, they roll in the moss,
     They blow the seed on the air.
     Back to back they stand and blow
     The winged seed on the cradling air,
     A fountain of leaves over bosom and back.

     The pipe of the Faun comes on their track
     And the weltering alleys overflow
     With musical shrieks and wind-wedded hair.
     The riotous companies melt to a pair.
     Bless them, mother of kindness!

     A star has nodded through
     The depths of the flying blue.
     Time only to plant the light
     Of a memory in the blindness.
     But time to show me the sight
     Of my life thro' the curtain of night;
     Shining a moment, and mixed
     With the onward-hurrying stream,
     Whose pressure is darkness to me;
     Behind the curtain, fixed,
     Beams with endless beam
     That star on the changing sea.

     Great Mother Nature! teach me, like thee,
     To kiss the season and shun regrets.
     And am I more than the mother who bore,
     Mock me not with thy harmony!
     Teach me to blot regrets,
     Great Mother! me inspire
     With faith that forward sets
     But feeds the living fire,
     Faith that never frets
     For vagueness in the form.
     In life, O keep me warm!
     For, what is human grief?
     And what do men desire?
     Teach me to feel myself the tree,
     And not the withered leaf.
     Fixed am I and await the dark to-be
     And O, green bounteous Earth!
     Bacchante Mother! stern to those
     Who live not in thy heart of mirth;
     Death shall I shrink from, loving thee?
     Into the breast that gives the rose,
     Shall I with shuddering fall?

     Earth, the mother of all,
     Moves on her stedfast way,
     Gathering, flinging, sowing.
     Mortals, we live in her day,
     She in her children is growing.

     She can lead us, only she,
     Unto God's footstool, whither she reaches:
     Loved, enjoyed, her gifts must be,
     Reverenced the truths she teaches,
     Ere a man may hope that he
     Ever can attain the glee
     Of things without a destiny!

     She knows not loss:
     She feels but her need,
     Who the winged seed
     With the leaf doth toss.

     And may not men to this attain?
     That the joy of motion, the rapture of being,
     Shall throw strong light when our season is fleeing,
     Nor quicken aged blood in vain,
     At the gates of the vault, on the verge of the plain?
     Life thoroughly lived is a fact in the brain,
     While eyes are left for seeing.
     Behold, in yon stripped Autumn, shivering grey,
     Earth knows no desolation.
     She smells regeneration
     In the moist breath of decay.

     Prophetic of the coming joy and strife,
     Like the wild western war-chief sinking
     Calm to the end he eyes unblinking,
     Her voice is jubilant in ebbing life.

     He for his happy hunting-fields
     Forgets the droning chant, and yields
     His numbered breaths to exultation
     In the proud anticipation:
     Shouting the glories of his nation,
     Shouting the grandeur of his race,
     Shouting his own great deeds of daring:
     And when at last death grasps his face,
     And stiffened on the ground in peace
     He lies with all his painted terrors glaring;
     Hushed are the tribe to hear a threading cry:
     Not from the dead man;
     Not from the standers-by:
     The spirit of the red man
     Is welcomed by his fathers up on high.



     MARTIN'S PUZZLE



     I

     There she goes up the street with her book in her hand,
     And her Good morning, Martin! Ay, lass, how d'ye do?
     Very well, thank you, Martin!--I can't understand!
     I might just as well never have cobbled a shoe!
     I can't understand it. She talks like a song;
     Her voice takes your ear like the ring of a glass;
     She seems to give gladness while limping along,
     Yet sinner ne'er suffer'd like that little lass.

     II

     First, a fool of a boy ran her down with a cart.
     Then, her fool of a father--a blacksmith by trade -
     Why the deuce does he tell us it half broke his heart?
     His heart!--where's the leg of the poor little maid!
     Well, that's not enough; they must push her downstairs,
     To make her go crooked: but why count the list?
     If it's right to suppose that our human affairs
     Are all order'd by heaven--there, bang goes my fist!

     III

     For if angels can look on such sights--never mind!
     When you're next to blaspheming, it's best to be mum.
     The parson declares that her woes weren't designed;
     But, then, with the parson it's all kingdom-come.
     Lose a leg, save a soul--a convenient text;
     I call it Tea doctrine, not savouring of God.
     When poor little Molly wants 'chastening,' why, next
     The Archangel Michael might taste of the rod.

     IV

     But, to see the poor darling go limping for miles
     To read books to sick people!--and just of an age
     When girls learn the meaning of ribands and smiles!
     Makes me feel like a squirrel that turns in a cage.
     The more I push thinking the more I revolve:
     I never get farther:- and as to her face,
     It starts up when near on my puzzle I solve,
     And says, 'This crush'd body seems such a sad case.'

     V

     Not that she's for complaining: she reads to earn pence;
     And from those who can't pay, simple thanks are enough.
     Does she leave lamentation for chaps without sense?
     Howsoever, she's made up of wonderful stuff.
     Ay, the soul in her body must be a stout cord;
     She sings little hymns at the close of the day,
     Though she has but three fingers to lift to the Lord,
     And only one leg to kneel down with to pray.

     VI

     What I ask is, Why persecute such a poor dear,
     If there's Law above all? Answer that if you can!
     Irreligious I'm not; but I look on this sphere
     As a place where a man should just think like a man.
     It isn't fair dealing! But, contrariwise,
     Do bullets in battle the wicked select?
     Why, then it's all chance-work! And yet, in her eyes,
     She holds a fixed something by which I am checked.

     VII

     Yonder riband of sunshine aslope on the wall,
     If you eye it a minute 'll have the same look:
     So kind! and so merciful! God of us all!
     It's the very same lesson we get from the Book.
     Then, is Life but a trial? Is that what is meant?
     Some must toil, and some perish, for others below:
     The injustice to each spreads a common content;
     Ay! I've lost it again, for it can't be quite so.

     VIII

     She's the victim of fools: that seems nearer the mark.
     On earth there are engines and numerous fools.
     Why the Lord can permit them, we're still in the dark;
     He does, and in some sort of way they're His tools.
     It's a roundabout way, with respect let me add,
     If Molly goes crippled that we may be taught:
     But, perhaps, it's the only way, though it's so bad;
     In that case we'll bow down our heads,--as we ought.

     IX

     But the worst of ME is, that when I bow my head,
     I perceive a thought wriggling away in the dust,
     And I follow its tracks, quite forgetful, instead
     Of humble acceptance: for, question I must!
     Here's a creature made carefully--carefully made!
     Put together with craft, and then stamped on, and why?
     The answer seems nowhere: it's discord that's played.
     The sky's a blue dish!--an implacable sky!

     X

     Stop a moment. I seize an idea from the pit.
     They tell us that discord, though discord, alone,
     Can be harmony when the notes properly fit:
     Am I judging all things from a single false tone?
     Is the Universe one immense Organ, that rolls
     From devils to angels? I'm blind with the sight.
     It pours such a splendour on heaps of poor souls!
     I might try at kneeling with Molly to-night.





     Poems by George Meredith - Volume 2


     [This etext was prepared from the 1912 Times Book Club "Surrey" edition
     by David Price]



     TO J. M.



     Let Fate or Insufficiency provide
     Mean ends for men who what they are would be:
     Penned in their narrow day no change they see
     Save one which strikes the blow to brutes and pride.
     Our faith is ours and comes not on a tide:
     And whether Earth's great offspring, by decree,
     Must rot if they abjure rapacity,
     Not argument but effort shall decide.
     They number many heads in that hard flock:
     Trim swordsmen they push forth: yet try thy steel.
     Thou, fighting for poor humankind, wilt feel
     The strength of Roland in thy wrist to hew
     A chasm sheer into the barrier rock,
     And bring the army of the faithful through.



     LINES TO A FRIEND VISITING AMERICA



     I

     Now farewell to you! you are
     One of my dearest, whom I trust:
     Now follow you the Western star,
     And cast the old world off as dust.

     II

     From many friends adieu! adieu!
     The quick heart of the word therein.
     Much that we hope for hangs with you:
     We lose you, but we lose to win.

     III

     The beggar-king, November, frets:
     His tatters rich with Indian dyes
     Goes hugging: we our season's debts
     Pay calmly, of the Spring forewise.

     IV

     We send our worthiest; can no less,
     If we would now be read aright, -
     To that great people who may bless
     Or curse mankind: they have the might.

     V

     The proudest seasons find their graves,
     And we, who would not be wooed, must court.
     We have let the blunderers and the waves
     Divide us, and the devil had sport.

     VI

     The blunderers and the waves no more
     Shall sever kindred sending forth
     Their worthiest from shore to shore
     For welcome, bent to prove their worth.

     VII

     Go you and such as you afloat,
     Our lost kinsfellowship to revive.
     The battle of the antidote
     Is tough, though silent: may you thrive!

     VIII

     I, when in this North wind I see
     The straining red woods blown awry,
     Feel shuddering like the winter tree,
     All vein and artery on cold sky.

     IX

     The leaf that clothed me is torn away;
     My friend is as a flying seed.
     Ay, true; to bring replenished day
     Light ebbs, but I am bare, and bleed.

     X

     What husky habitations seem
     These comfortable sayings! they fell,
     In some rich year become a dream:-
     So cries my heart, the infidel! . . .

     XI

     Oh! for the strenuous mind in quest,
     Arabian visions could not vie
     With those broad wonders of the West,
     And would I bid you stay? Not I!

     XII

     The strange experimental land
     Where men continually dare take
     Niagara leaps;--unshattered stand
     'Twixt fall and fall;--for conscience' sake,

     XIII

     Drive onward like a flood's increase; -
     Fresh rapids and abysms engage; -
     (We live--we die) scorn fireside peace,
     And, as a garment, put on rage,

     XIV

     Rather than bear God's reprimand,
     By rearing on a full fat soil
     Concrete of sin and sloth;--this land,
     You will observe it coil in coil.

     XV

     The land has been discover'd long,
     The people we have yet to know;
     Themselves they know not, save that strong
     For good and evil still they grow.

     XVI

     Nor know they us. Yea, well enough
     In that inveterate machine
     Through which we speak the printed stuff
     Daily, with voice most hugeous, mien

     XVII

     Tremendous:- as a lion's show
     The grand menagerie paintings hide:
     Hear the drum beat, the trombones blow!
     The poor old Lion lies inside! . . .

     XVIII

     It is not England that they hear,
     But mighty Mammon's pipers, trained
     To trumpet out his moods, and stir
     His sluggish soul: HER voice is chained:

     XIX

     Almost her spirit seems moribund!
     O teach them, 'tis not she displays
     The panic of a purse rotund,
     Eternal dread of evil days, -

     XX

     That haunting spectre of success
     Which shows a heart sunk low in the girths:
     Not England answers nobleness, -
     'Live for thyself: thou art not earth's.'

     XXI

     Not she, when struggling manhood tries
     For freedom, air, a hopefuller fate,
     Points out the planet, Compromise,
     And shakes a mild reproving pate:

     XXII

     Says never: 'I am well at ease,
     My sneers upon the weak I shed:
     The strong have my cajoleries:
     And those beneath my feet I tread.'

     XXIII

     Nay, but 'tis said for her, great Lord!
     The misery's there! The shameless one
     Adjures mankind to sheathe the sword,
     Herself not yielding what it won:-

     XXIV

     Her sermon at cock-crow doth preach,
     On sweet Prosperity--or greed.
     'Lo! as the beasts feed, each for each,
     God's blessings let us take, and feed!'

     XXV

     Ungrateful creatures crave a part -
     She tells them firmly she is full;
     Lost sheared sheep hurt her tender heart
     With bleating, stops her ears with wool:-

     XXVI

     Seized sometimes by prodigious qualms
     (Nightmares of bankruptcy and death), -
     Showers down in lumps a load of alms,
     Then pants as one who has lost a breath;

     XXVII

     Believes high heaven, whence favours flow,
     Too kind to ask a sacrifice
     For what it specially doth bestow; -
     Gives SHE, 'tis generous, cheese to mice.

     XXVIII

     She saw the young Dominion strip
     For battle with a grievous wrong,
     And curled a noble Norman lip,
     And looked with half an eye sidelong;

     XXIX

     And in stout Saxon wrote her sneers,
     Denounced the waste of blood and coin,
     Implored the combatants, with tears,
     Never to think they could rejoin.

     XXX

     Oh! was it England that, alas!
     Turned sharp the victor to cajole?
     Behold her features in the glass:
     A monstrous semblance mocks her soul!

     XXXI

     A false majority, by stealth,
     Have got her fast, and sway the rod:
     A headless tyrant built of wealth,
     The hypocrite, the belly-God.

     XXXII

     To him the daily hymns they raise:
     His tastes are sought: his will is done:
     He sniffs the putrid steam of praise,
     Place for true England here is none!

     XXXIII

     But can a distant race discern
     The difference 'twixt her and him?
     My friend, that will you bid them learn.
     He shames and binds her, head and limb.

     XXXIV

     Old wood has blossoms of this sort.
     Though sound at core, she is old wood.
     If freemen hate her, one retort
     She has; but one!--'You are my blood.'

     XXXV

     A poet, half a prophet, rose
     In recent days, and called for power.
     I love him; but his mountain prose -
     His Alp and valley and wild flower -

     XXXVI

     Proclaimed our weakness, not its source.
     What medicine for disease had he?
     Whom summoned for a show of force?
     Our titular aristocracy!

     XXXVII

     Why, these are great at City feasts;
     From City riches mainly rise:
     'Tis well to hear them, when the beasts
     That die for us they eulogize!

     XXXVIII

     But these, of all the liveried crew
     Obeisant in Mammon's walk,
     Most deferent ply the facial screw,
     The spinal bend, submissive talk.

     XXXIX

     Small fear that they will run to books
     (At least the better form of seed)!
     I, too, have hoped from their good looks,
     And fables of their Northman breed; -

     XL

     Have hoped that they the land would head
     In acts magnanimous; but, lo,
     When fainting heroes beg for bread
     They frown: where they are driven they go.

     XLI

     Good health, my friend! and may your lot
     Be cheerful o'er the Western rounds.
     This butter-woman's market-trot
     Of verse is passing market-bounds.

     XLII

     Adieu! the sun sets; he is gone.
     On banks of fog faint lines extend:
     Adieu! bring back a braver dawn
     To England, and to me my friend.

     November 15th, 1867.



     TIME AND SENTIMENT



     I see a fair young couple in a wood,
     And as they go, one bends to take a flower,
     That so may be embalmed their happy hour,
     And in another day, a kindred mood,
     Haply together, or in solitude,
     Recovered what the teeth of Time devour,
     The joy, the bloom, and the illusive power,
     Wherewith by their young blood they are endued
     To move all enviable, framed in May,
     And of an aspect sisterly with Truth:
     Yet seek they with Time's laughing things to wed:
     Who will be prompted on some pallid day
     To lift the hueless flower and show that dead,
     Even such, and by this token, is their youth.



     LUCIFER IN STARLIGHT



     On a starred night Prince Lucifer uprose.
     Tired of his dark dominion swung the fiend
     Above the rolling ball in cloud part screened,
     Where sinners hugged their spectre of repose.
     Poor prey to his hot fit of pride were those.
     And now upon his western wing he leaned,
     Now his huge bulk o'er Afric's sands careened,
     Now the black planet shadowed Arctic snows.
     Soaring through wider zones that pricked his scars
     With memory of the old revolt from Awe,
     He reached a middle height, and at the stars,
     Which are the brain of heaven, he looked, and sank.
     Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank,
     The army of unalterable law.



     THE STAR SIRIUS



     Bright Sirius! that when Orion pales
     To dotlings under moonlight still art keen
     With cheerful fervour of a warrior's mien
     Who holds in his great heart the battle-scales:
     Unquenched of flame though swift the flood assails,
     Reducing many lustrous to the lean:
     Be thou my star, and thou in me be seen
     To show what source divine is, and prevails.
     Long watches through, at one with godly night,
     I mark thee planting joy in constant fire;
     And thy quick beams, whose jets of life inspire
     Life to the spirit, passion for the light,
     Dark Earth since first she lost her lord from sight
     Has viewed and felt them sweep her as a lyre.



     SENSE AND SPIRIT



     The senses loving Earth or well or ill
     Ravel yet more the riddle of our lot.
     The mind is in their trammels, and lights not
     By trimming fear-bred tales; nor does the will
     To find in nature things which less may chill
     An ardour that desires, unknowing what.
     Till we conceive her living we go distraught,
     At best but circle-windsails of a mill.
     Seeing she lives, and of her joy of life
     Creatively has given us blood and breath
     For endless war and never wound unhealed,
     The gloomy Wherefore of our battle-field
     Solves in the Spirit, wrought of her through strife
     To read her own and trust her down to death.



     EARTH'S SECRET



     Not solitarily in fields we find
     Earth's secret open, though one page is there;
     Her plainest, such as children spell, and share
     With bird and beast; raised letters for the blind.
     Not where the troubled passions toss the mind,
     In turbid cities, can the key be bare.
     It hangs for those who hither thither fare,
     Close interthreading nature with our kind.
     They, hearing History speak, of what men were,
     And have become, are wise. The gain is great
     In vision and solidity; it lives.
     Yet at a thought of life apart from her,
     Solidity and vision lose their state,
     For Earth, that gives the milk, the spirit gives.



     INTERNAL HARMONY



     Assured of worthiness we do not dread
     Competitors; we rather give them hail
     And greeting in the lists where we may fail:
     Must, if we bear an aim beyond the head!
     My betters are my masters: purely fed
     By their sustainment I likewise shall scale
     Some rocky steps between the mount and vale;
     Meanwhile the mark I have and I will wed.
     So that I draw the breath of finer air,
     Station is nought, nor footways laurel-strewn,
     Nor rivals tightly belted for the race.
     Good speed to them! My place is here or there;
     My pride is that among them I have place:
     And thus I keep this instrument in tune.



     GRACE AND LOVE



     Two flower-enfolding crystal vases she
     I love fills daily, mindful but of one:
     And close behind pale morn she, like the sun
     Priming our world with light, pours, sweet to see,
     Clear water in the cup, and into me
     The image of herself: and that being done,
     Choice of what blooms round her fair garden run
     In climbers or in creepers or the tree
     She ranges with unerring fingers fine,
     To harmony so vivid that through sight
     I hear, I have her heavenliness to fold
     Beyond the senses, where such love as mine,
     Such grace as hers, should the strange Fates withhold
     Their starry more from her and me, unite.



     APPRECIATION



     Earth was not Earth before her sons appeared,
     Nor Beauty Beauty ere young Love was born:
     And thou when I lay hidden wast as morn
     At city-windows, touching eyelids bleared;
     To none by her fresh wingedness endeared;
     Unwelcome unto revellers outworn.
     I the last echoes of Diana's horn
     In woodland heard, and saw thee come, and cheered.
     No longer wast thou then mere light, fair soul!
     And more than simple duty moved thy feet.
     New colours rose in thee, from fear, from shame,
     From hope, effused: though not less pure a scroll
     May men read on the heart I taught to beat:
     That change in thee, if not thyself, I claim.



     THE DISCIPLINE OF WISDOM



     Rich labour is the struggle to be wise,
     While we make sure the struggle cannot cease.
     Else better were it in some bower of peace
     Slothful to swing, contending with the flies.
     You point at Wisdom fixed on lofty skies,
     As mid barbarian hordes a sculptured Greece:
     She falls. To live and shine, she grows her fleece,
     Is shorn, and rubs with follies and with lies.
     So following her, your hewing may attain
     The right to speak unto the mute, and shun
     That sly temptation of the illumined brain,
     Deliveries oracular, self-spun.
     Who sweats not with the flock will seek in vain
     To shed the words which are ripe fruit of sun.



     THE STATE OF AGE



     Rub thou thy battered lamp: nor claim nor beg
     Honours from aught about thee. Light the young.
     Thy frame is as a dusty mantle hung,
     O grey one! pendant on a loosened peg.
     Thou art for this our life an ancient egg,
     Or a tough bird: thou hast a rudderless tongue,
     Turning dead trifles, like the cock of dung,
     Which runs, Time's contrast to thy halting leg.
     Nature, it is most sure, not thee admires.
     But hast thou in thy season set her fires
     To burn from Self to Spirit through the lash,
     Honoured the sons of Earth shall hold thee high:
     Yea, to spread light when thy proud letter I
     Drops prone and void as any thoughtless dash.



     PROGRESS



     In Progress you have little faith, say you:
     Men will maintain dear interests, wreak base hates,
     By force, and gentle women choose their mates
     Most amorously from the gilded fighting crew:
     The human heart Bellona's mad halloo
     Will ever fire to dicing with the Fates.
     'Now at this time,' says History, 'those two States
     Stood ready their past wrestling to renew.
     They sharpened arms and showed them, like the brutes
     Whose haunches quiver. But a yellow blight
     Fell on their waxing harvests. They deferred
     The bloody settlement of their disputes
     Till God should bless them better.' They did right.
     And naming Progress, both shall have the word.



     THE WORLD'S ADVANCE



     Judge mildly the tasked world; and disincline
     To brand it, for it bears a heavy pack.
     You have perchance observed the inebriate's track
     At night when he has quitted the inn-sign:
     He plays diversions on the homeward line,
     Still that way bent albeit his legs are slack:
     A hedge may take him, but he turns not back,
     Nor turns this burdened world, of curving spine.
     'Spiral,' the memorable Lady terms
     Our mind's ascent: our world's advance presents
     That figure on a flat; the way of worms.
     Cherish the promise of its good intents,
     And warn it, not one instinct to efface
     Ere Reason ripens for the vacant place.



     A CERTAIN PEOPLE



     As Puritans they prominently wax,
     And none more kindly gives and takes hard knocks.
     Strong psalmic chanting, like to nasal cocks,
     They join to thunderings of their hearty thwacks.
     But naughtiness, with hoggery, not lacks
     When Peace another door in them unlocks,
     Where conscience shows the eyeing of an ox
     Grown dully apprehensive of an Axe.
     Graceless they are when gone to frivolousness,
     Fearing the God they flout, the God they glut.
     They need their pious exercises less
     Than schooling in the Pleasures: fair belief
     That these are devilish only to their thief,
     Charged with an Axe nigh on the occiput.



     THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS



     That Garden of sedate Philosophy
     Once flourished, fenced from passion and mishap,
     A shining spot upon a shaggy map;
     Where mind and body, in fair junction free,
     Luted their joyful concord; like the tree
     From root to flowering twigs a flowing sap.
     Clear Wisdom found in tended Nature's lap
     Of gentlemen the happy nursery.
     That Garden would on light supremest verge,
     Were the long drawing of an equal breath
     Healthful for Wisdom's head, her heart, her aims.
     Our world which for its Babels wants a scourge,
     And for its wilds a husbandman, acclaims
     The crucifix that came of Nazareth.



     A LATER ALEXANDRIAN



     An inspiration caught from dubious hues
     Filled him, and mystic wrynesses he chased;
     For they lead farther than the single-faced,
     Wave subtler promise when desire pursues.
     The moon of cloud discoloured was his Muse,
     His pipe the reed of the old moaning waste.
     Love was to him with anguish fast enlaced,
     And Beauty where she walked blood-shot the dews.
     Men railed at such a singer; women thrilled
     Responsively: he sang not Nature's own
     Divinest, but his lyric had a tone,
     As 'twere a forest-echo of her voice:
     What barrenly they yearn for seemed distilled
     From what they dread, who do through tears rejoice.



     AN ORSON OF THE MUSE



     Her son, albeit the Muse's livery
     And measured courtly paces rouse his taunts,
     Naked and hairy in his savage haunts,
     To Nature only will he bend the knee;
     Spouting the founts of her distillery
     Like rough rock-sources; and his woes and wants
     Being Nature's, civil limitation daunts
     His utterance never; the nymphs blush, not he.
     Him, when he blows of Earth, and Man, and Fate,
     The Muse will hearken to with graver ear
     Than many of her train can waken: him
     Would fain have taught what fruitful things and dear
     Must sink beneath the tidewaves, of their weight,
     If in no vessel built for sea they swim.



     THE POINT OF TASTE



     Unhappy poets of a sunken prime!
     You to reviewers are as ball to bat.
     They shadow you with Homer, knock you flat
     With Shakespeare: bludgeons brainingly sublime
     On you the excommunicates of Rhyme,
     Because you sing not in the living Fat.
     The wiry whizz of an intrusive gnat
     Is verse that shuns their self-producing time.
     Sound them their clocks, with loud alarum trump,
     Or watches ticking temporal at their fobs,
     You win their pleased attention. But, bright God
     O' the lyre, what bully-drawlers they applaud!
     Rather for us a tavern-catch, and bump
     Chorus where Lumpkin with his Giles hobnobs.



     CAMELUS SALTAT



     What say you, critic, now you have become
     An author and maternal?--in this trap
     (To quote you) of poor hollow folk who rap
     On instruments as like as drum to drum.
     You snarled tut-tut for welcome to tum-tum,
     So like the nose fly-teased in its noon's nap.
     You scratched an insect-slaughtering thunder-clap
     With that between the fingers and the thumb.
     It seemeth mad to quit the Olympian couch,
     Which bade our public gobble or reject.
     O spectacle of Peter, shrewdly pecked,
     Piper, by his own pepper from his pouch!
     What of the sneer, the jeer, the voice austere,
     You dealt?--the voice austere, the jeer, the sneer.



     CONTINUED



     Oracle of the market! thence you drew
     The taste which stamped you guide of the inept. -
     A North-sea pilot, Hildebrand yclept,
     A sturdy and a briny, once men knew.
     He loved small beer, and for that copious brew,
     To roll ingurgitation till he slept,
     Rations exchanged with flavour for the adept:
     And merrily plied him captain, mate and crew.
     At last this dancer to the Polar star
     Sank, washed out within, and overboard was pitched,
     To drink the sea and pilot him to land.
     O captain-critic! printed, neatly stitched,
     Know while the pillory-eggs fly fast, they are
     Not eggs, but the drowned soul of Hildebrand.



     MY THEME



     Of me and of my theme think what thou wilt:
     The song of gladness one straight bolt can check.
     But I have never stood at Fortune's beck:
     Were she and her light crew to run atilt
     At my poor holding little would be spilt;
     Small were the praise for singing o'er that wreck.
     Who courts her dooms to strife his bended neck;
     He grasps a blade, not always by the hilt.
     Nathless she strikes at random, can be fell
     With other than those votaries she deals
     The black or brilliant from her thunder-rift.
     I say but that this love of Earth reveals
     A soul beside our own to quicken, quell,
     Irradiate, and through ruinous floods uplift.



     CONTINUED



     'Tis true the wisdom that my mind exacts
     Through contemplation from a heart unbent
     By many tempests may be stained and rent:
     The summer flies it mightily attracts.
     Yet they seem choicer than your sons of facts,
     Which scarce give breathing of the sty's content
     For their diurnal carnal nourishment:
     Which treat with Nature in official pacts.
     The deader body Nature could proclaim.
     Much life have neither. Let the heavens of wrath
     Rattle, then both scud scattering to froth.
     But during calms the flies of idle aim
     Less put the spirit out, less baffle thirst
     For light than swinish grunters, blest or curst.



     ON THE DANGER OF WAR



     Avert, High Wisdom, never vainly wooed,
     This threat of War, that shows a land brain-sick.
     When nations gain the pitch where rhetoric
     Seems reason they are ripe for cannon's food.
     Dark looms the issue though the cause be good,
     But with the doubt 'tis our old devil's trick.
     O now the down-slope of the lunatic
     Illumine lest we redden of that brood.
     For not since man in his first view of thee
     Ascended to the heavens giving sign
     Within him of deep sky and sounded sea,
     Did he unforfeiting thy laws transgress;
     In peril of his blood his ears incline
     To drums whose loudness is their emptiness.



     TO CARDINAL MANNING



     I, wakeful for the skylark voice in men,
     Or straining for the angel of the light,
     Rebuked am I by hungry ear and sight,
     When I behold one lamp that through our fen
     Goes hourly where most noisome; hear again
     A tongue that loathsomeness will not affright
     From speaking to the soul of us forthright
     What things our craven senses keep from ken.
     This is the doing of the Christ; the way
     He went on earth; the service above guile
     To prop a tyrant creed: it sings, it shines;
     Cries to the Mammonites: Allay, allay
     Such misery as by these present signs
     Brings vengeance down; nor them who rouse revile.



     TO COLONEL CHARLES (DYING GENERAL C.B.B.)



     I

     An English heart, my commandant,
     A soldier's eye you have, awake
     To right and left; with looks askant
     On bulwarks not of adamant,
     Where white our Channel waters break.

     II

     Where Grisnez winks at Dungeness
     Across the ruffled strip of salt,
     You look, and like the prospect less.
     On men and guns would you lay stress,
     To bid the Island's foemen halt.

     III

     While loud the Year is raising cry
     At birth to know if it must bear
     In history the bloody dye,
     An English heart, a soldier's eye,
     For the old country first will care.

     IV

     And how stands she, artillerist,
     Among the vapours waxing dense,
     With cannon charged? 'Tis hist! and hist!
     And now she screws a gouty fist,
     And now she counts to clutch her pence.

     V

     With shudders chill as aconite,
     The couchant chewer of the cud
     Will start at times in pussy fright
     Before the dogs, when reads her sprite
     The streaks predicting streams of blood.

     VI

     She thinks they may mean something; thinks
     They may mean nothing: haply both.
     Where darkness all her daylight drinks,
     She fain would find a leader lynx,
     Not too much taxing mental sloth.

     VII

     Cleft like the fated house in twain,
     One half is, Arm! and one, Retrench!
     Gambetta's word on dull MacMahon:
     'The cow that sees a passing train':
     So spies she Russian, German, French.

     VIII

     She? no, her weakness: she unbraced
     Among those athletes fronting storms!
     The muscles less of steel than paste,
     Why, they of nature feel distaste
     For flash, much more for push, of arms.

     IX

     The poet sings, and well know we,
     That 'iron draws men after it.'
     But towering wealth may seem the tree
     Which bears the fruit INDEMNITY,
     And draw as fast as battle's fit,

     X

     If feeble be the hand on guard,
     Alas, alas! And nations are
     Still the mad forces, though the scarred.
     Should they once deem our emblem Pard
     Wagger of tail for all save war; -

     XI

     Mechanically screwed to flail
     His flanks by Presses conjuring fear; -
     A money-bag with head and tail; -
     Too late may valour then avail!
     As you beheld, my cannonier,

     XII

     When with the staff of Benedek,
     On the plateau of Koniggratz,
     You saw below that wedgeing speck;
     Foresaw proud Austria rammed to wreck,
     Where Chlum drove deep in smoky jets.

     February 1887.



     TO CHILDREN: FOR TYRANTS



     I

     Strike not thy dog with a stick!
     I did it yesterday:
     Not to undo though I gained
     The Paradise: heavy it rained
     On Kobold's flanks, and he lay.

     II

     Little Bruno, our long-ear pup,
     From his hunt had come back to my heel.
     I heard a sharp worrying sound,
     And Bruno foamed on the ground,
     With Koby as making a meal.

     III

     I did what I could not undo
     Were the gates of the Paradise shut
     Behind me: I deemed it was just.
     I left Koby crouched in the dust,
     Some yards from the woodman's hut.

     IV

     He bewhimpered his welting, and I
     Scarce thought it enough for him: so,
     By degrees, through the upper box-grove,
     Within me an old story hove,
     Of a man and a dog: you shall know.

     V

     The dog was of novel breed,
     The Shannon retriever, untried:
     His master, an old Irish lord,
     In an oaken armchair snored
     At midnight, whisky beside.

     VI

     Perched up a desolate tower,
     Where the black storm-wind was a whip
     To set it nigh spinning, these two
     Were alone, like the last of a crew,
     Outworn in a wave-beaten ship.

     VII

     The dog lifted muzzle, and sniffed;
     He quitted his couch on the rug,
     Nose to floor, nose aloft; whined, barked;
     And, finding the signals unmarked,
     Caught a hand in a death-grapple tug.

     VIII

     He pulled till his master jumped
     For fury of wrath, and laid on
     With the length of a tough knotted staff,
     Fit to drive the life flying like chaff,
     And leave a sheer carcase anon.

     IX

     That done, he sat, panted, and cursed
     The vile cross of this brute: nevermore
     Would he house it to rear such a cur!
     The dog dragged his legs, pained to stir,
     Eyed his master, dropped, barked at the door.

     X

     Then his master raised head too, and sniffed:
     It struck him the dog had a sense
     That honoured both dam and sire.
     You have guessed how the tower was afire.
     The Shannon retriever dates thence.

     XI

     I mused: saw the pup ease his heart
     Of his instinct for chasing, and sink
     Overwrought by excitement so new:
     A scene that for Koby to view
     Was the seizure of nerves in a link.

     XII

     And part sympathetic, and part
     Imitatively, raged my poor brute;
     And I, not thinking of ill,
     Doing eviller: nerves are still
     Our savage too quick at the root.

     XIII

     They spring us: I proved it, albeit
     I played executioner then
     For discipline, justice, the like.
     Yon stick I had handy to strike
     Should have warned of the tyrant in men.

     XIV

     You read in your History books,
     How the Prince in his youth had a mind
     For governing gently his land.
     Ah, the use of that weapon at hand,
     When the temper is other than kind!

     XV

     At home all was well; Koby's ribs
     Not so sore as my thoughts: if, beguiled,
     He forgives me, his criminal air
     Throws a shade of Llewellyn's despair
     For the hound slain for saving his child.



     THE WOODS OF WESTERMAIN



     I

     Enter these enchanted woods,
     You who dare.
     Nothing harms beneath the leaves
     More than waves a swimmer cleaves.
     Toss your heart up with the lark,
     Foot at peace with mouse and worm,
     Fair you fare.
     Only at a dread of dark
     Quaver, and they quit their form:
     Thousand eyeballs under hoods
     Have you by the hair.
     Enter these enchanted woods,
     You who dare.

     II

     Here the snake across your path
     Stretches in his golden bath:
     Mossy-footed squirrels leap
     Soft as winnowing plumes of Sleep:
     Yaffles on a chuckle skim
     Low to laugh from branches dim:
     Up the pine, where sits the star,
     Rattles deep the moth-winged jar.
     Each has business of his own;
     But should you distrust a tone,
     Then beware.
     Shudder all the haunted roods,
     All the eyeballs under hoods
     Shroud you in their glare.
     Enter these enchanted woods,
     You who dare.

     III

     Open hither, open hence,
     Scarce a bramble weaves a fence,
     Where the strawberry runs red,
     With white star-flower overhead;
     Cumbered by dry twig and cone,
     Shredded husks of seedlings flown,
     Mine of mole and spotted flint:
     Of dire wizardry no hint,
     Save mayhap the print that shows
     Hasty outward-tripping toes,
     Heels to terror on the mould.
     These, the woods of Westermain,
     Are as others to behold,
     Rich of wreathing sun and rain;
     Foliage lustreful around
     Shadowed leagues of slumbering sound.
     Wavy tree-tops, yellow whins,
     Shelter eager minikins,
     Myriads, free to peck and pipe:
     Would you better? would you worse?
     You with them may gather ripe
     Pleasures flowing not from purse.
     Quick and far as Colour flies
     Taking the delighted eyes,
     You of any well that springs
     May unfold the heaven of things;
     Have it homely and within,
     And thereof its likeness win,
     Will you so in soul's desire:
     This do sages grant t' the lyre.
     This is being bird and more,
     More than glad musician this;
     Granaries you will have a store
     Past the world of woe and bliss;
     Sharing still its bliss and woe;
     Harnessed to its hungers, no.
     On the throne Success usurps,
     You shall seat the joy you feel
     Where a race of water chirps,
     Twisting hues of flourished steel:
     Or where light is caught in hoop
     Up a clearing's leafy rise,
     Where the crossing deerherds troop
     Classic splendours, knightly dyes.
     Or, where old-eyed oxen chew
     Speculation with the cud,
     Read their pool of vision through,
     Back to hours when mind was mud;
     Nigh the knot, which did untwine
     Timelessly to drowsy suns;
     Seeing Earth a slimy spine,
     Heaven a space for winging tons.
     Farther, deeper, may you read,
     Have you sight for things afield,
     Where peeps she, the Nurse of seed,
     Cloaked, but in the peep revealed;
     Showing a kind face and sweet:
     Look you with the soul you see't.
     Glory narrowing to grace,
     Grace to glory magnified,
     Following that will you embrace
     Close in arms or aery wide.
     Banished is the white Foam-born
     Not from here, nor under ban
     Phoebus lyrist, Phoebe's horn,
     Pipings of the reedy Pan.
     Loved of Earth of old they were,
     Loving did interpret her;
     And the sterner worship bars
     None whom Song has made her stars.
     You have seen the huntress moon
     Radiantly facing dawn,
     Dusky meads between them strewn
     Glimmering like downy awn:
     Argent Westward glows the hunt,
     East the blush about to climb;
     One another fair they front,
     Transient, yet outshine the time;
     Even as dewlight off the rose
     In the mind a jewel sows.
     Thus opposing grandeurs live
     Here if Beauty be their dower:
     Doth she of her spirit give,
     Fleetingness will spare her flower.
     This is in the tune we play,
     Which no spring of strength would quell;
     In subduing does not slay;
     Guides the channel, guards the well:
     Tempered holds the young blood-heat,
     Yet through measured grave accord,
     Hears the heart of wildness beat
     Like a centaur's hoof on sward.
     Drink the sense the notes infuse,
     You a larger self will find:
     Sweetest fellowship ensues
     With the creatures of your kind.
     Ay, and Love, if Love it be
     Flaming over I and ME,
     Love meet they who do not shove
     Cravings in the van of Love.
     Courtly dames are here to woo,
     Knowing love if it be true.
     Reverence the blossom-shoot
     Fervently, they are the fruit.
     Mark them stepping, hear them talk,
     Goddess, is no myth inane,
     You will say of those who walk
     In the woods of Westermain.
     Waters that from throat and thigh
     Dart the sun his arrows back;
     Leaves that on a woodland sigh
     Chat of secret things no lack;
     Shadowy branch-leaves, waters clear,
     Bare or veiled they move sincere;
     Not by slavish terrors tripped
     Being anew in nature dipped,
     Growths of what they step on, these;
     With the roots the grace of trees.
     Casket-breasts they give, nor hide,
     For a tyrant's flattered pride,
     Mind, which nourished not by light,
     Lurks the shuffling trickster sprite:
     Whereof are strange tales to tell;
     Some in blood writ, tombed in bell.
     Here the ancient battle ends,
     Joining two astonished friends,
     Who the kiss can give and take
     With more warmth than in that world
     Where the tiger claws the snake,
     Snake her tiger clasps infurled,
     And the issue of their fight
     People lands in snarling plight.
     Here her splendid beast she leads
     Silken-leashed and decked with weeds
     Wild as he, but breathing faint
     Sweetness of unfelt constraint.
     Love, the great volcano, flings
     Fires of lower Earth to sky;
     Love, the sole permitted, sings
     Sovereignly of ME and I.
     Bowers he has of sacred shade,
     Spaces of superb parade,
     Voiceful . . . But bring you a note
     Wrangling, howsoe'er remote,
     Discords out of discord spin
     Round and round derisive din:
     Sudden will a pallor pant
     Chill at screeches miscreant;
     Owls or spectres, thick they flee;
     Nightmare upon horror broods;
     Hooded laughter, monkish glee,
     Gaps the vital air.
     Enter these enchanted woods
     You who dare.

     IV

     You must love the light so well
     That no darkness will seem fell.
     Love it so you could accost
     Fellowly a livid ghost.
     Whish! the phantom wisps away,
     Owns him smoke to cocks of day.
     In your breast the light must burn
     Fed of you, like corn in quern
     Ever plumping while the wheel
     Speeds the mill and drains the meal.
     Light to light sees little strange,
     Only features heavenly new;
     Then you touch the nerve of Change,
     Then of Earth you have the clue;
     Then her two-sexed meanings melt
     Through you, wed the thought and felt.
     Sameness locks no scurfy pond
     Here for Custom, crazy-fond:
     Change is on the wing to bud
     Rose in brain from rose in blood.
     Wisdom throbbing shall you see
     Central in complexity;
     From her pasture 'mid the beasts
     Rise to her ethereal feasts,
     Not, though lightnings track your wit
     Starward, scorning them you quit:
     For be sure the bravest wing
     Preens it in our common spring,
     Thence along the vault to soar,
     You with others, gathering more,
     Glad of more, till you reject
     Your proud title of elect,
     Perilous even here while few
     Roam the arched greenwood with you.
     Heed that snare.
     Muffled by his cavern-cowl
     Squats the scaly Dragon-fowl,
     Who was lord ere light you drank,
     And lest blood of knightly rank
     Stream, let not your fair princess
     Stray: he holds the leagues in stress,
     Watches keenly there.
     Oft has he been riven; slain
     Is no force in Westermain.
     Wait, and we shall forge him curbs,
     Put his fangs to uses, tame,
     Teach him, quick as cunning herbs,
     How to cure him sick and lame.
     Much restricted, much enringed,
     Much he frets, the hooked and winged,
     Never known to spare.
     'Tis enough: the name of Sage
     Hits no thing in nature, nought;
     Man the least, save when grave Age
     From yon Dragon guards his thought.
     Eye him when you hearken dumb
     To what words from Wisdom come.
     When she says how few are by
     Listening to her, eye his eye.
     Self, his name declare.
     Him shall Change, transforming late,
     Wonderously renovate.
     Hug himself the creature may:
     What he hugs is loathed decay.
     Crying, slip thy scales, and slough!
     Change will strip his armour off;
     Make of him who was all maw,
     Inly only thrilling-shrewd,
     Such a servant as none saw
     Through his days of dragonhood.
     Days when growling o'er his bone,
     Sharpened he for mine and thine;
     Sensitive within alone;
     Scaly as the bark of pine.
     Change, the strongest son of Life,
     Has the Spirit here to wife.
     Lo, their young of vivid breed,
     Bear the lights that onward speed,
     Threading thickets, mounting glades,
     Up the verdurous colonnades,
     Round the fluttered curves, and down,
     Out of sight of Earth's blue crown,
     Whither, in her central space,
     Spouts the Fount and Lure o' the chase.
     Fount unresting, Lure divine!
     There meet all: too late look most.
     Fire in water hued as wine,
     Springs amid a shadowy host,
     Circled: one close-headed mob,
     Breathless, scanning divers heaps,
     Where a Heart begins to throb,
     Where it ceases, slow, with leaps.
     And 'tis very strange, 'tis said,
     How you spy in each of them
     Semblance of that Dragon red,
     As the oak in bracken-stem.
     And, 'tis said, how each and each:
     Which commences, which subsides:
     First my Dragon! doth beseech
     Her who food for all provides.
     And she answers with no sign;
     Utters neither yea nor nay;
     Fires the water hued as wine;
     Kneads another spark in clay.
     Terror is about her hid;
     Silence of the thunders locked;
     Lightnings lining the shut lid;
     Fixity on quaking rocked.
     Lo, you look at Flow and Drought
     Interflashed and interwrought:
     Ended is begun, begun
     Ended, quick as torrents run.
     Young Impulsion spouts to sink;
     Luridness and lustre link;
     'Tis your come and go of breath;
     Mirrored pants the Life, the Death;
     Each of either reaped and sown:
     Rosiest rosy wanes to crone.
     See you so? your senses drift;
     'Tis a shuttle weaving swift.
     Look with spirit past the sense,
     Spirit shines in permanence.
     That is She, the view of whom
     Is the dust within the tomb,
     Is the inner blush above,
     Look to loathe, or look to love;
     Think her Lump, or know her Flame;
     Dread her scourge, or read her aim;
     Shoot your hungers from their nerve;
     Or, in her example, serve.
     Some have found her sitting grave;
     Laughing, some; or, browed with sweat,
     Hurling dust of fool and knave
     In a hissing smithy's jet.
     More it were not well to speak;
     Burn to see, you need but seek.
     Once beheld she gives the key
     Airing every doorway, she.
     Little can you stop or steer
     Ere of her you are the seer.
     On the surface she will witch,
     Rendering Beauty yours, but gaze
     Under, and the soul is rich
     Past computing, past amaze.
     Then is courage that endures
     Even her awful tremble yours.
     Then, the reflex of that Fount
     Spied below, will Reason mount
     Lordly and a quenchless force,
     Lighting Pain to its mad source,
     Scaring Fear till Fear escapes,
     Shot through all its phantom shapes.
     Then your spirit will perceive
     Fleshly seed of fleshly sins;
     Where the passions interweave,
     How the serpent tangle spins
     Of the sense of Earth misprised,
     Brainlessly unrecognized;
     She being Spirit in her clods,
     Footway to the God of Gods.
     Then for you are pleasures pure,
     Sureties as the stars are sure:
     Not the wanton beckoning flags
     Which, of flattery and delight,
     Wax to the grim Habit-Hags
     Riding souls of men to night:
     Pleasures that through blood run sane,
     Quickening spirit from the brain.
     Each of each in sequent birth,
     Blood and brain and spirit, three,
     (Say the deepest gnomes of Earth),
     Join for true felicity.
     Are they parted, then expect
     Some one sailing will be wrecked:
     Separate hunting are they sped,
     Scan the morsel coveted.
     Earth that Triad is: she hides
     Joy from him who that divides;
     Showers it when the three are one
     Glassing her in union.
     Earth your haven, Earth your helm,
     You command a double realm;
     Labouring here to pay your debt,
     Till your little sun shall set;
     Leaving her the future task:
     Loving her too well to ask.
     Eglantine that climbs the yew,
     She her darkest wreathes for those
     Knowing her the Ever-new,
     And themselves the kin o' the rose.
     Life, the chisel, axe and sword,
     Wield who have her depths explored:
     Life, the dream, shall be their robe
     Large as air about the globe;
     Life, the question, hear its cry
     Echoed with concordant Why;
     Life, the small self-dragon ramped,
     Thrill for service to be stamped.
     Ay, and over every height
     Life for them shall wave a wand:
     That, the last, where sits affright,
     Homely shows the stream beyond.
     Love the light and be its lynx,
     You will track her and attain;
     Read her as no cruel Sphinx
     In the woods of Westermain,
     Daily fresh the woods are ranged;
     Glooms which otherwhere appal,
     Sounded: here, their worths exchanged
     Urban joins with pastoral:
     Little lost, save what may drop
     Husk-like, and the mind preserves.
     Natural overgrowths they lop,
     Yet from nature neither swerves,
     Trained or savage: for this cause:
     Of our Earth they ply the laws,
     Have in Earth their feeding root,
     Mind of man and bent of brute.
     Hear that song; both wild and ruled.
     Hear it: is it wail or mirth?
     Ordered, bubbled, quite unschooled?
     None, and all: it springs of Earth.
     O but hear it! 'tis the mind;
     Mind that with deep Earth unites,
     Round the solid trunk to wind
     Rings of clasping parasites.
     Music have you there to feed
     Simplest and most soaring need.
     Free to wind, and in desire
     Winding, they to her attached
     Feel the trunk a spring of fire,
     And ascend to heights unmatched,
     Whence the tidal world is viewed
     As a sea of windy wheat,
     Momently black, barren, rude;
     Golden-brown, for harvest meet,
     Dragon-reaped from folly-sown;
     Bride-like to the sickle-blade:
     Quick it varies, while the moan,
     Moan of a sad creature strayed,
     Chiefly is its voice. So flesh
     Conjures tempest-flails to thresh
     Good from worthless. Some clear lamps
     Light it; more of dead marsh-damps.
     Monster is it still, and blind,
     Fit but to be led by Pain.
     Glance we at the paths behind,
     Fruitful sight has Westermain.
     There we laboured, and in turn
     Forward our blown lamps discern,
     As you see on the dark deep
     Far the loftier billows leap,
     Foam for beacon bear.
     Hither, hither, if you will,
     Drink instruction, or instil,
     Run the woods like vernal sap,
     Crying, hail to luminousness!
     But have care.
     In yourself may lurk the trap:
     On conditions they caress.
     Here you meet the light invoked
     Here is never secret cloaked.
     Doubt you with the monster's fry
     All his orbit may exclude;
     Are you of the stiff, the dry,
     Cursing the not understood;
     Grasp you with the monster's claws;
     Govern with his truncheon-saws;
     Hate, the shadow of a grain;
     You are lost in Westermain:
     Earthward swoops a vulture sun,
     Nighted upon carrion:
     Straightway venom wine-cups shout
     Toasts to One whose eyes are out:
     Flowers along the reeling floor
     Drip henbane and hellebore:
     Beauty, of her tresses shorn,
     Shrieks as nature's maniac:
     Hideousness on hoof and horn
     Tumbles, yapping in her track:
     Haggard Wisdom, stately once,
     Leers fantastical and trips:
     Allegory drums the sconce,
     Impiousness nibblenips.
     Imp that dances, imp that flits,
     Imp o' the demon-growing girl,
     Maddest! whirl with imp o' the pits
     Round you, and with them you whirl
     Fast where pours the fountain-rout
     Out of Him whose eyes are out:
     Multitudes on multitudes,
     Drenched in wallowing devilry:
     And you ask where you may be,
     In what reek of a lair
     Given to bones and ogre-broods:
     And they yell you Where.
     Enter these enchanted woods,
     You who dare.



     A BALLAD OF PAST MERIDIAN



     I

     Last night returning from my twilight walk
     I met the grey mist Death, whose eyeless brow
     Was bent on me, and from his hand of chalk
     He reached me flowers as from a withered bough:
     O Death, what bitter nosegays givest thou!

     II

     Death said, I gather, and pursued his way.
     Another stood by me, a shape in stone,
     Sword-hacked and iron-stained, with breasts of clay,
     And metal veins that sometimes fiery shone:
     O Life, how naked and how hard when known!

     III

     Life said, As thou hast carved me, such am I.
     Then memory, like the nightjar on the pine,
     And sightless hope, a woodlark in night sky,
     Joined notes of Death and Life till night's decline
     Of Death, of Life, those inwound notes are mine.



     THE DAY OF THE DAUGHTER OF HADES



     I

     He who has looked upon Earth
     Deeper than flower and fruit,
     Losing some hue of his mirth,
     As the tree striking rock at the root,
     Unto him shall the marvellous tale
     Of Callistes more humanly come
     With the touch on his breast than a hail
     From the markets that hum.

     II

     Now the youth footed swift to the dawn.
     'Twas the season when wintertide,
     In the higher rock-hollows updrawn,
     Leaves meadows to bud, and he spied,
     By light throwing shallow shade,
     Between the beam and the gloom,
     Sicilian Enna, whose Maid
     Such aspect wears in her bloom
     Underneath since the Charioteer
     Of Darkness whirled her away,
     On a reaped afternoon of the year,
     Nigh the poppy-droop of Day.
     O and naked of her, all dust,
     The majestic Mother and Nurse,
     Ringing cries to the God, the Just,
     Curled the land with the blight of her curse:
     Recollected of this glad isle
     Still quaking. But now more fair,
     And momently fraying the while
     The veil of the shadows there,
     Soft Enna that prostrate grief
     Sang through, and revealed round the vines,
     Bronze-orange, the crisp young leaf,
     The wheat-blades tripping in lines,
     A hue unillumined by sun
     Of the flowers flooding grass as from founts:
     All the penetrable dun
     Of the morn ere she mounts.

     III

     Nor had saffron and sapphire and red
     Waved aloft to their sisters below,
     When gaped by the rock-channel head
     Of the lake, black, a cave at one blow,
     Reverberant over the plain:
     A sound oft fearfully swung
     For the coming of wrathful rain:
     And forth, like the dragon-tongue
     Of a fire beaten flat by the gale,
     But more as the smoke to behold,
     A chariot burst. Then a wail
     Quivered high of the love that would fold
     Bliss immeasurable, bigger than heart,
     Though a God's: and the wheels were stayed,
     And the team of the chariot swart
     Reared in marble, the six, dismayed,
     Like hoofs that by night plashing sea
     Curve and ramp from the vast swan-wave:
     For, lo, the Great Mother, She!
     And Callistes gazed, he gave
     His eyeballs up to the sight:
     The embrace of the Twain, of whom
     To men are their day, their night,
     Mellow fruits and the shearing tomb:
     Our Lady of the Sheaves
     And the Lily of Hades, the Sweet
     Of Enna: he saw through leaves
     The Mother and Daughter meet.
     They stood by the chariot-wheel,
     Embraced, very tall, most like
     Fellow poplars, wind-taken, that reel
     Down their shivering columns and strike
     Head to head, crossing throats: and apart,
     For the feast of the look, they drew,
     Which Darkness no longer could thwart;
     And they broke together anew,
     Exulting to tears, flower and bud.
     But the mate of the Rayless was grave:
     She smiled like Sleep on its flood,
     That washes of all we crave:
     Like the trance of eyes awake
     And the spirit enshrouded, she cast
     The wan underworld on the lake.
     They were so, and they passed.

     IV

     He tells it, who knew the law
     Upon mortals: he stood alive
     Declaring that this he saw:
     He could see, and survive.

     V

     Now the youth was not ware of the beams
     With the grasses intertwined,
     For each thing seen, as in dreams,
     Came stepping to rear through his mind,
     Till it struck his remembered prayer
     To be witness of this which had flown
     Like a smoke melted thinner than air,
     That the vacancy doth disown.
     And viewing a maiden, he thought
     It might now be morn, and afar
     Within him the memory wrought
     Of a something that slipped from the car
     When those, the august, moved by:
     Perchance a scarf, and perchance
     This maiden. She did not fly,
     Nor started at his advance:
     She looked, as when infinite thirst
     Pants pausing to bless the springs,
     Refreshed, unsated. Then first
     He trembled with awe of the things
     He had seen; and he did transfer,
     Divining and doubting in turn,
     His reverence unto her;
     Nor asked what he crouched to learn:
     The whence of her, whither, and why
     Her presence there, and her name,
     Her parentage: under which sky
     Her birth, and how hither she came,
     So young, a virgin, alone,
     Unfriended, having no fear,
     As Oreads have; no moan,
     Like the lost upon earth; no tear;
     Not a sign of the torch in the blood,
     Though her stature had reached the height
     When mantles a tender rud
     In maids that of youths have sight,
     If maids of our seed they be:
     For he said: A glad vision art thou!
     And she answered him: Thou to me!
     As men utter a vow.

     VI

     Then said she, quick as the cries
     Of the rainy cranes: Light! light!
     And Helios rose in her eyes,
     That were full as the dew-balls bright,
     Relucent to him as dews
     Unshaded. Breathing, she sent
     Her voice to the God of the Muse,
     And along the vale it went,
     Strange to hear: not thin, not shrill:
     Sweet, but no young maid's throat:
     The echo beyond the hill
     Ran falling on half the note:
     And under the shaken ground
     Where the Hundred-headed groans
     By the roots of great AEtna bound,
     As of him were hollow tones
     Of wondering roared: a tale
     Repeated to sunless halls.
     But now off the face of the vale
     Shadows fled in a breath, and the walls
     Of the lake's rock-head were gold,
     And the breast of the lake, that swell
     Of the crestless long wave rolled
     To shore-bubble, pebble and shell.
     A morning of radiant lids
     O'er the dance of the earth opened wide:
     The bees chose their flowers, the snub kids
     Upon hindlegs went sportive, or plied,
     Nosing, hard at the dugs to be filled:
     There was milk, honey, music to make:
     Up their branches the little birds billed:
     Chirrup, drone, bleat and buzz ringed the lake.
     O shining in sunlight, chief
     After water and water's caress,
     Was the young bronze-orange leaf,
     That clung to the tree as a tress,
     Shooting lucid tendrils to wed
     With the vine-hook tree or pole,
     Like Arachne launched out on her thread.
     Then the maiden her dusky stole
     In the span of the black-starred zone,
     Gathered up for her footing fleet.
     As one that had toil of her own
     She followed the lines of wheat
     Tripping straight through the fields, green blades,
     To the groves of olive grey,
     Downy-grey, golden-tinged: and to glades
     Where the pear-blossom thickens the spray
     In a night, like the snow-packed storm:
     Pear, apple, almond, plum:
     Not wintry now: pushing, warm!
     And she touched them with finger and thumb,
     As the vine-hook closes: she smiled,
     Recounting again and again,
     Corn, wine, fruit, oil! like a child,
     With the meaning known to men.
     For hours in the track of the plough
     And the pruning-knife she stepped,
     And of how the seed works, and of how
     Yields the soil, she seemed adept.
     Then she murmured that name of the dearth,
     The Beneficent, Hers, who bade
     Our husbandmen sow for the birth
     Of the grain making earth full glad.
     She murmured that Other's: the dirge
     Of life-light: for whose dark lap
     Our locks are clipped on the verge
     Of the realm where runs no sap.
     She said: We have looked on both!
     And her eyes had a wavering beam
     Of various lights, like the froth
     Of the storm-swollen ravine stream
     In flame of the bolt. What links
     Were these which had made him her friend?
     He eyed her, as one who drinks,
     And would drink to the end.

     VII

     Now the meadows with crocus besprent,
     And the asphodel woodsides she left,
     And the lake-slopes, the ravishing scent
     Of narcissus, dark-sweet, for the cleft
     That tutors the torrent-brook,
     Delaying its forceful spleen
     With many a wind and crook
     Through rock to the broad ravine.
     By the hyacinth-bells in the brakes,
     And the shade-loved white windflower, half hid,
     And the sun-loving lizards and snakes
     On the cleft's barren ledges, that slid
     Out of sight, smooth as waterdrops, all,
     At a snap of twig or bark
     In the track of the foreign foot-fall,
     She climbed to the pineforest dark,
     Overbrowing an emerald chine
     Of the grass-billows. Thence, as a wreath,
     Running poplar and cypress to pine,
     The lake-banks are seen, and beneath,
     Vineyard, village, groves, rivers, towers, farms,
     The citadel watching the bay,
     The bay with the town in its arms,
     The town shining white as the spray
     Of the sapphire sea-wave on the rock,
     Where the rock stars the girdle of sea,
     White-ringed, as the midday flock,
     Clipped by heat, rings the round of the tree.
     That hour of the piercing shaft
     Transfixes bough-shadows, confused
     In veins of fire, and she laughed,
     With her quiet mouth amused
     To see the whole flock, adroop,
     Asleep, hug the tree-stem as one,
     Imperceptibly filling the loop
     Of its shade at a slant of sun.
     The pipes under pent of the crag,
     Where the goatherds in piping recline,
     Have whimsical stops, burst and flag
     Uncorrected as outstretched swine:
     For the fingers are slack and unsure,
     And the wind issues querulous:- thorns
     And snakes!--but she listened demure,
     Comparing day's music with morn's.
     Of the gentle spirit that slips
     From the bark of the tree she discoursed,
     And of her of the wells, whose lips
     Are coolness enchanting, rock-sourced.
     And much of the sacred loon,
     The frolic, the Goatfoot God,
     For stories of indolent noon
     In the pineforest's odorous nod,
     She questioned, not knowing: he can
     Be waspish, irascible, rude,
     He is oftener friendly to man,
     And ever to beasts and their brood.
     For the which did she love him well,
     She said, and his pipes of the reed,
     His twitched lips puffing to tell
     In music his tears and his need,
     Against the sharp catch of his hurt.
     Not as shepherds of Pan did she speak,
     Nor spake as the schools, to divert,
     But fondly, perceiving him weak
     Before Gods, and to shepherds a fear,
     A holiness, horn and heel.
     All this she had learnt in her ear
     From Callistes, and taught him to feel.
     Yea, the solemn divinity flushed
     Through the shaggy brown skin of the beast,
     And the steeps where the cataract rushed,
     And the wilds where the forest is priest,
     Were his temple to clothe him in awe,
     While she spake: 'twas a wonder: she read
     The haunts of the beak and the claw
     As plain as the land of bread,
     But Cities and martial States,
     Whither soon the youth veered his theme,
     Were impervious barrier-gates
     To her: and that ship, a trireme,
     Nearing harbour, scarce wakened her glance,
     Though he dwelt on the message it bore
     Of sceptre and sword and lance
     To the bee-swarms black on the shore,
     Which were audible almost,
     So black they were. It befel
     That he called up the warrior host
     Of the Song pouring hydromel
     In thunder, the wide-winged Song.
     And he named with his boyish pride
     The heroes, the noble throng
     Past Acheron now, foul tide!
     With his joy of the godlike band
     And the verse divine, he named
     The chiefs pressing hot on the strand,
     Seen of Gods, of Gods aided, and maimed.
     The fleetfoot and ireful; the King;
     Him, the prompter in stratagem,
     Many-shifted and masterful: Sing,
     O Muse! But she cried: Not of them
     She breathed as if breath had failed,
     And her eyes, while she bade him desist,
     Held the lost-to-light ghosts grey-mailed,
     As you see the grey river-mist
     Hold shapes on the yonder bank.
     A moment her body waned,
     The light of her sprang and sank:
     Then she looked at the sun, she regained
     Clear feature, and she breathed deep.
     She wore the wan smile he had seen,
     As the flow of the river of Sleep,
     On the mouth of the Shadow-Queen.
     In sunlight she craved to bask,
     Saying: Life! And who was she? who?
     Of what issue? He dared not ask,
     For that partly he knew.

     VIII

     A noise of the hollow ground
     Turned the eye to the ear in debate:
     Not the soft overflowing of sound
     Of the pines, ranked, lofty, straight,
     Barely swayed to some whispers remote,
     Some swarming whispers above:
     Not the pines with the faint airs afloat,
     Hush-hushing the nested dove:
     It was not the pines, or the rout
     Oft heard from mid-forest in chase,
     But the long muffled roar of a shout
     Subterranean. Sharp grew her face.
     She rose, yet not moved by affright;
     'Twas rather good haste to use
     Her holiday of delight
     In the beams of the God of the Muse.
     And the steeps of the forest she crossed,
     On its dry red sheddings and cones
     Up the paths by roots green-mossed,
     Spotted amber, and old mossed stones.
     Then out where the brook-torrent starts
     To her leap, and from bend to curve
     A hurrying elbow darts
     For the instant-glancing swerve,
     Decisive, with violent will
     In the action formed, like hers,
     The maiden's, ascending; and still
     Ascending, the bud of the furze,
     The broom, and all blue-berried shoots
     Of stubborn and prickly kind,
     The juniper flat on its roots,
     The dwarf rhododaphne, behind
     She left, and the mountain sheep
     Far behind, goat, herbage and flower.
     The island was hers, and the deep,
     All heaven, a golden hour.
     Then with wonderful voice, that rang
     Through air as the swan's nigh death,
     Of the glory of Light she sang,
     She sang of the rapture of Breath.
     Nor ever, says he who heard,
     Heard Earth in her boundaries broad,
     From bosom of singer or bird
     A sweetness thus rich of the God
     Whose harmonies always are sane.
     She sang of furrow and seed,
     The burial, birth of the grain,
     The growth, and the showers that feed,
     And the green blades waxing mature
     For the husbandman's armful brown.
     O, the song in its burden ran pure,
     And burden to song was a crown.
     Callistes, a singer, skilled
     In the gift he could measure and praise,
     By a rival's art was thrilled,
     Though she sang but a Song of Days,
     Where the husbandman's toil and strife
     Little varies to strife and toil:
     But the milky kernel of life,
     With her numbered: corn, wine, fruit, oil
     The song did give him to eat:
     Gave the first rapt vision of Good,
     And the fresh young sense of Sweet
     The grace of the battle for food,
     With the issue Earth cannot refuse
     When men to their labour are sworn.
     'Twas a song of the God of the Muse
     To the forehead of Morn.

     IX

     Him loved she. Lo, now was he veiled:
     Over sea stood a swelled cloud-rack:
     The fishing-boat heavenward sailed,
     Bent abeam, with a whitened track,
     Surprised, fast hauling the net,
     As it flew: sea dashed, earth shook.
     She said: Is it night? O not yet!
     With a travail of thoughts in her look.
     The mountain heaved up to its peak:
     Sea darkened: earth gathered her fowl;
     Of bird or of branch rose the shriek.
     Night? but never so fell a scowl
     Wore night, nor the sky since then
     When ocean ran swallowing shore,
     And the Gods looked down for men.
     Broke tempest with that stern roar
     Never yet, save when black on the whirl
     Rode wrath of a sovereign Power.
     Then the youth and the shuddering girl,
     Dim as shades in the angry shower,
     Joined hands and descended a maze
     Of the paths that were racing alive
     Round boulder and bush, cleaving ways,
     Incessant, with sound of a hive.
     The height was a fountain-urn
     Pouring streams, and the whole solid height
     Leaped, chasing at every turn
     The pair in one spirit of flight
     To the folding pineforest. Yet here,
     Like the pause to things hunted, in doubt,
     The stillness bred spectral fear
     Of the awfulness ranging without,
     And imminent. Downward they fled,
     From under the haunted roof,
     To the valley aquake with the tread
     Of an iron-resounding hoof,
     As of legions of thunderful horse
     Broken loose and in line tramping hard.
     For the rage of a hungry force
     Roamed blind of its mark over sward:
     They saw it rush dense in the cloak
     Of its travelling swathe of steam;
     All the vale through a thin thread-smoke
     Was thrown back to distance extreme:
     And dull the full breast of it blinked,
     Like a buckler of steel breathed o'er,
     Diminished, in strangeness distinct,
     Glowing cold, unearthly, hoar:
     An Enna of fields beyond sun,
     Out of light, in a lurid web;
     And the traversing fury spun
     Up and down with a wave's flow and ebb;
     As the wave breaks to grasp and to spurn,
     Retire, and in ravenous greed,
     Inveterate, swell its return.
     Up and down, as if wringing from speed
     Sights that made the unsighted appear,
     Delude and dissolve, on it scoured.
     Lo, a sea upon land held career
     Through the plain of the vale half-devoured.
     Callistes of home and escape
     Muttered swiftly, unwitting of speech.
     She gazed at the Void of shape,
     She put her white hand to his reach,
     Saying: Now have we looked on the Three.
     And divided from day, from night,
     From air that is breath, stood she,
     Like the vale, out of light.

     X

     Then again in disorderly words
     He muttered of home, and was mute,
     With the heart of the cowering birds
     Ere they burst off the fowler's foot.
     He gave her some redness that streamed
     Through her limbs in a flitting glow.
     The sigh of our life she seemed,
     The bliss of it clothing in woe.
     Frailer than flower when the round
     Of the sickle encircles it: strong
     To tell of the things profound,
     Our inmost uttering song,
     Unspoken. So stood she awhile
     In the gloom of the terror afield,
     And the silence about her smile
     Said more than of tongue is revealed.
     I have breathed: I have gazed: I have been:
     It said: and not joylessly shone
     The remembrance of light through the screen
     Of a face that seemed shadow and stone.
     She led the youth trembling, appalled,
     To the lake-banks he saw sink and rise
     Like a panic-struck breast. Then she called,
     And the hurricane blackness had eyes.
     It launched like the Thunderer's bolt.
     Pale she drooped, and the youth by her side
     Would have clasped her and dared a revolt
     Sacrilegious as ever defied
     High Olympus, but vainly for strength
     His compassionate heart shook a frame
     Stricken rigid to ice all its length.
     On amain the black traveller came.
     Lo, a chariot, cleaving the storm,
     Clove the fountaining lake with a plough,
     And the lord of the steeds was in form
     He, the God of implacable brow,
     Darkness: he: he in person: he raged
     Through the wave like a boar of the wilds
     From the hunters and hounds disengaged,
     And a name shouted hoarsely: his child's.
     Horror melted in anguish to hear.
     Lo, the wave hissed apart for the path
     Of the terrible Charioteer,
     With the foam and torn features of wrath,
     Hurled aloft on each arm in a sheet;
     And the steeds clove it, rushing at land
     Like the teeth of the famished at meat.
     Then he swept out his hand.

     XI

     This, no more, doth Callistes recall:
     He saw, ere he dropped in swoon,
     On the maiden the chariot fall,
     As a thundercloud swings on the moon.
     Forth, free of the deluge, one cry
     From the vanishing gallop rose clear:
     And: Skiegeneia! the sky
     Rang; Skiegeneia! the sphere.
     And she left him therewith, to rejoice,
     Repine, yearn, and know not his aim,
     The life of their day in her voice,
     Left her life in her name.

     XII

     Now the valley in ruin of fields
     And fair meadowland, showing at eve
     Like the spear-pitted warrior's shields
     After battle, bade men believe
     That no other than wrathfullest God
     Had been loose on her beautiful breast,
     Where the flowery grass was clod,
     Wheat and vine as a trailing nest.
     The valley, discreet in grief,
     Disclosed but the open truth,
     And Enna had hope of the sheaf:
     There was none for the desolate youth
     Devoted to mourn and to crave.
     Of the secret he had divined
     Of his friend of a day would he rave:
     How for light of our earth she pined:
     For the olive, the vine and the wheat,
     Burning through with inherited fire:
     And when Mother went Mother to meet,
     She was prompted by simple desire
     In the day-destined car to have place
     At the skirts of the Goddess, unseen,
     And be drawn to the dear earth's face.
     She was fire for the blue and the green
     Of our earth, dark fire; athirst
     As a seed of her bosom for dawn,
     White air that had robed and nursed
     Her mother. Now was she gone
     With the Silent, the God without tear,
     Like a bud peeping out of its sheath
     To be sundered and stamped with the sere.
     And Callistes to her beneath,
     As she to our beams, extinct,
     Strained arms: he was shade of her shade.
     In division so were they linked.
     But the song which had betrayed
     Her flight to the cavernous ear
     For its own keenly wakeful: that song
     Of the sowing and reaping, and cheer
     Of the husbandman's heart made strong
     Through droughts and deluging rains
     With his faith in the Great Mother's love:
     O the joy of the breath she sustains,
     And the lyre of the light above,
     And the first rapt vision of Good,
     And the fresh young sense of Sweet:
     That song the youth ever pursued
     In the track of her footing fleet.
     For men to be profited much
     By her day upon earth did he sing:
     Of her voice, and her steps, and her touch
     On the blossoms of tender Spring,
     Immortal: and how in her soul
     She is with them, and tearless abides,
     Folding grain of a love for one goal
     In patience, past flowing of tides.
     And if unto him she was tears,
     He wept not: he wasted within:
     Seeming sane in the song, to his peers,
     Only crazed where the cravings begin.
     Our Lady of Gifts prized he less
     Than her issue in darkness: the dim
     Lost Skiegencia's caress
     Of our earth made it richest for him.
     And for that was a curse on him raised,
     And he withered rathe, dry to his prime,
     Though the bounteous Giver be praised
     Through the island with rites of old time
     Exceedingly fervent, and reaped
     Veneration for teachings devout,
     Pious hymns when the corn-sheaves are heaped
     And the wine-presses ruddily spout,
     And the olive and apple are juice
     At a touch light as hers lost below.
     Whatsoever to men is of use
     Sprang his worship of them who bestow,
     In a measure of songs unexcelled:
     But that soul loving earth and the sun
     From her home of the shadows he held
     For his beacon where beam there is none:
     And to join her, or have her brought back,
     In his frenzy the singer would call,
     Till he followed where never was track,
     On the path trod of all.



     THE LARK ASCENDING



     He rises and begins to round,
     He drops the silver chain of sound,
     Of many links without a break,
     In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake,
     All intervolved and spreading wide,
     Like water-dimples down a tide
     Where ripple ripple overcurls
     And eddy into eddy whirls;
     A press of hurried notes that run
     So fleet they scarce are more than one,
     Yet changeingly the trills repeat
     And linger ringing while they fleet,
     Sweet to the quick o' the ear, and dear
     To her beyond the handmaid ear,
     Who sits beside our inner springs,
     Too often dry for this he brings,
     Which seems the very jet of earth
     At sight of sun, her music's mirth,
     As up he wings the spiral stair,
     A song of light, and pierces air
     With fountain ardour, fountain play,
     To reach the shining tops of day,
     And drink in everything discerned
     An ecstasy to music turned,
     Impelled by what his happy bill
     Disperses; drinking, showering still,
     Unthinking save that he may give
     His voice the outlet, there to live
     Renewed in endless notes of glee,
     So thirsty of his voice is he,
     For all to hear and all to know
     That he is joy, awake, aglow;
     The tumult of the heart to hear
     Through pureness filtered crystal-clear,
     And know the pleasure sprinkled bright
     By simple singing of delight;
     Shrill, irreflective, unrestrained,
     Rapt, ringing, on the jet sustained
     Without a break, without a fall,
     Sweet-silvery, sheer lyrical,
     Perennial, quavering up the chord
     Like myriad dews of sunny sward
     That trembling into fulness shine,
     And sparkle dropping argentine;
     Such wooing as the ear receives
     From zephyr caught in choric leaves
     Of aspens when their chattering net
     Is flushed to white with shivers wet;
     And such the water-spirit's chime
     On mountain heights in morning's prime,
     Too freshly sweet to seem excess,
     Too animate to need a stress;
     But wider over many heads
     The starry voice ascending spreads,
     Awakening, as it waxes thin,
     The best in us to him akin;
     And every face to watch him raised,
     Puts on the light of children praised;
     So rich our human pleasure ripes
     When sweetness on sincereness pipes,
     Though nought be promised from the seas,
     But only a soft-ruffling breeze
     Sweep glittering on a still content,
     Serenity in ravishment
     For singing till his heaven fills,
     'Tis love of earth that he instils,
     And ever winging up and up,
     Our valley is his golden cup,
     And he the wine which overflows
     To lift us with him as he goes:
     The woods and brooks, the sheep and kine,
     He is, the hills, the human line,
     The meadows green, the fallows brown,
     The dreams of labour in the town;
     He sings the sap, the quickened veins;
     The wedding song of sun and rains
     He is, the dance of children, thanks
     Of sowers, shout of primrose-banks,
     And eye of violets while they breathe;
     All these the circling song will wreathe,
     And you shall hear the herb and tree,
     The better heart of men shall see,
     Shall feel celestially, as long
     As you crave nothing save the song.

     Was never voice of ours could say
     Our inmost in the sweetest way,
     Like yonder voice aloft, and link
     All hearers in the song they drink.
     Our wisdom speaks from failing blood,
     Our passion is too full in flood,
     We want the key of his wild note
     Of truthful in a tuneful throat;
     The song seraphically free
     Of taint of personality,
     So pure that it salutes the suns
     The voice of one for millions,
     In whom the millions rejoice
     For giving their one spirit voice.
     Yet men have we, whom we revere,
     Now names, and men still housing here,
     Whose lives, by many a battle-dint
     Defaced, and grinding wheels on flint,
     Yield substance, though they sing not, sweet
     For song our highest heaven to greet:
     Whom heavenly singing gives us new,
     Enspheres them brilliant in our blue,
     From firmest base to farthest leap,
     Because their love of Earth is deep,
     And they are warriors in accord
     With life to serve, and, pass reward,
     So touching purest and so heard
     In the brain's reflex of yon bird:
     Wherefore their soul in me, or mine,
     Through self-forgetfulness divine,
     In them, that song aloft maintains,
     To fill the sky and thrill the plains
     With showerings drawn from human stores,
     As he to silence nearer soars,
     Extends the world at wings and dome,
     More spacious making more our home,
     Till lost on his aerial rings
     In light, and then the fancy sings.



     PHOEBUS WITH ADMETUS



     I

     When by Zeus relenting the mandate was revoked,
     Sentencing to exile the bright Sun-God,
     Mindful were the ploughmen of who the steer had yoked,
     Who: and what a track showed the upturned sod!
     Mindful were the shepherds, as now the noon severe
     Bent a burning eyebrow to brown evetide,
     How the rustic flute drew the silver to the sphere,
     Sister of his own, till her rays fell wide.
     God! of whom music
     And song and blood are pure,
     The day is never darkened
     That had thee here obscure.

     II

     Chirping none, the scarlet cicadas crouched in ranks:
     Slack the thistle-head piled its down-silk grey:
     Scarce the stony lizard sucked hollows in his flanks:
     Thick on spots of umbrage our drowsed flocks lay.
     Sudden bowed the chestnuts beneath a wind unheard,
     Lengthened ran the grasses, the sky grew slate:
     Then amid a swift flight of winged seed white as curd,
     Clear of limb a Youth smote the master's gate.
     God! of whom music
     And song and blood are pure,
     The day is never darkened
     That had thee here obscure.

     III

     Water, first of singers, o'er rocky mount and mead,
     First of earthly singers, the sun-loved rill,
     Sang of him, and flooded the ripples on the reed,
     Seeking whom to waken and what ear fill.
     Water, sweetest soother to kiss a wound and cool,
     Sweetest and divinest, the sky-born brook,
     Chuckled, with a whimper, and made a mirror-pool
     Round the guest we welcomed, the strange hand shook.
     God! of whom music
     And song and blood are pure,
     The day is never darkened
     That had thee here obscure.

     IV

     Many swarms of wild bees descended on our fields:
     Stately stood the wheatstalk with head bent high:
     Big of heart we laboured at storing mighty yields,
     Wool and corn, and clusters to make men cry!
     Hand-like rushed the vintage; we strung the bellied skins
     Plump, and at the sealing the Youth's voice rose:
     Maidens clung in circle, on little fists their chins;
     Gentle beasties through pushed a cold long nose.
     God! of whom music
     And song and blood are pure,
     The day is never darkened
     That had thee here obscure.

     V

     Foot to fire in snowtime we trimmed the slender shaft:
     Often down the pit spied the lean wolf's teeth
     Grin against his will, trapped by masterstrokes of craft;
     Helpless in his froth-wrath as green logs seethe!
     Safe the tender lambs tugged the teats, and winter sped
     Whirled before the crocus, the year's new gold.
     Hung the hooky beak up aloft, the arrowhead
     Reddened through his feathers for our dear fold.
     God! of whom music
     And song and blood are pure,
     The day is never darkened
     That had thee here obscure.

     VI

     Tales we drank of giants at war with Gods above:
     Rocks were they to look on, and earth climbed air!
     Tales of search for simples, and those who sought of love
     Ease because the creature was all too fair.
     Pleasant ran our thinking that while our work was good,
     Sure as fruits for sweat would the praise come fast.
     He that wrestled stoutest and tamed the billow-brood
     Danced in rings with girls, like a sail-flapped mast.
     God! of whom music
     And song and blood are pure,
     The day is never darkened
     That had thee here obscure.

     VII

     Lo, the herb of healing, when once the herb is known,
     Shines in shady woods bright as new-sprung flame.
     Ere the string was tightened we heard the mellow tone,
     After he had taught how the sweet sounds came
     Stretched about his feet, labour done, 'twas as you see
     Red pomegranates tumble and burst hard rind.
     So began contention to give delight and be
     Excellent in things aimed to make life kind.
     God! of whom music
     And song and blood are pure,
     The day is never darkened
     That had thee here obscure.

     VIII

     You with shelly horns, rams! and, promontory goats,
     You whose browsing beards dip in coldest dew!
     Bulls, that walk the pastures in kingly-flashing coats!
     Laurel, ivy, vine, wreathed for feasts not few!
     You that build the shade-roof, and you that court the rays,
     You that leap besprinkling the rock stream-rent:
     He has been our fellow, the morning of our days!
     Us he chose for housemates, and this way went.
     God! of whom music
     And song and blood are pure,
     The day is never darkened
     That had thee here obscure.



     MELAMPUS



     I

     With love exceeding a simple love of the things
     That glide in grasses and rubble of woody wreck;
     Or change their perch on a beat of quivering wings
     From branch to branch, only restful to pipe and peck;
     Or, bristled, curl at a touch their snouts in a ball;
     Or cast their web between bramble and thorny hook;
     The good physician Melampus, loving them all,
     Among them walked, as a scholar who reads a book.

     II

     For him the woods were a home and gave him the key
     Of knowledge, thirst for their treasures in herbs and flowers.
     The secrets held by the creatures nearer than we
     To earth he sought, and the link of their life with ours:
     And where alike we are, unlike where, and the veined
     Division, veined parallel, of a blood that flows
     In them, in us, from the source by man unattained
     Save marks he well what the mystical woods disclose.

     III

     And this he deemed might be boon of love to a breast
     Embracing tenderly each little motive shape,
     The prone, the flitting, who seek their food whither best
     Their wits direct, whither best from their foes escape.
     For closer drawn to our mother's natural milk,
     As babes they learn where her motherly help is great:
     They know the juice for the honey, juice for the silk,
     And need they medical antidotes, find them straight.

     IV

     Of earth and sun they are wise, they nourish their broods,
     Weave, build, hive, burrow and battle, take joy and pain
     Like swimmers varying billows: never in woods
     Runs white insanity fleeing itself: all sane
     The woods revolve: as the tree its shadowing limns
     To some resemblance in motion, the rooted life
     Restrains disorder: you hear the primitive hymns
     Of earth in woods issue wild of the web of strife.

     V

     Now sleeping once on a day of marvellous fire,
     A brood of snakes he had cherished in grave regret
     That death his people had dealt their dam and their sire,
     Through savage dread of them, crept to his neck, and set
     Their tongues to lick him: the swift affectionate tongue
     Of each ran licking the slumberer: then his ears
     A forked red tongue tickled shrewdly: sudden upsprung,
     He heard a voice piping: Ay, for he has no fears!

     VI

     A bird said that, in the notes of birds, and the speech
     Of men, it seemed: and another renewed: He moves
     To learn and not to pursue, he gathers to teach;
     He feeds his young as do we, and as we love loves.
     No fears have I of a man who goes with his head
     To earth, chance looking aloft at us, kind of hand:
     I feel to him as to earth of whom we are fed;
     I pipe him much for his good could he understand.

     VII

     Melampus touched at his ears, laid finger on wrist
     He was not dreaming, he sensibly felt and heard.
     Above, through leaves, where the tree-twigs inter-twist,
     He spied the birds and the bill of the speaking bird.
     His cushion mosses in shades of various green,
     The lumped, the antlered, he pressed, while the sunny snake
     Slipped under: draughts he had drunk of clear Hippocrene,
     It seemed, and sat with a gift of the Gods awake.

     VIII

     Divinely thrilled was the man, exultingly full,
     As quick well-waters that come of the heart of earth,
     Ere yet they dart in a brook are one bubble-pool
     To light and sound, wedding both at the leap of birth.
     The soul of light vivid shone, a stream within stream;
     The soul of sound from a musical shell outflew;
     Where others hear but a hum and see but a beam,
     The tongue and eye of the fountain of life he knew.

     IX

     He knew the Hours: they were round him, laden with seed
     Of hours bestrewn upon vapour, and one by one
     They winged as ripened in fruit the burden decreed
     For each to scatter; they flushed like the buds in sun,
     Bequeathing seed to successive similar rings,
     Their sisters, bearers to men of what men have earned:
     He knew them, talked with the yet unreddened; the stings,
     The sweets, they warmed at their bosoms divined, discerned.

     X

     Not unsolicited, sought by diligent feet,
     By riddling fingers expanded, oft watched in growth
     With brooding deep as the noon-ray's quickening wheat,
     Ere touch'd, the pendulous flower of the plants of sloth,
     The plants of rigidness, answered question and squeeze,
     Revealing wherefore it bloomed, uninviting, bent,
     Yet making harmony breathe of life and disease,
     The deeper chord of a wonderful instrument.

     XI

     So passed he luminous-eyed for earth and the fates
     We arm to bruise or caress us: his ears were charged
     With tones of love in a whirl of voluble hates,
     With music wrought of distraction his heart enlarged.
     Celestial-shining, though mortal, singer, though mute,
     He drew the Master of harmonies, voiced or stilled,
     To seek him; heard at the silent medicine-root
     A song, beheld in fulfilment the unfulfilled.

     XII

     Him Phoebus, lending to darkness colour and form
     Of light's excess, many lessons and counsels gave,
     Showed Wisdom lord of the human intricate swarm,
     And whence prophetic it looks on the hives that rave,
     And how acquired, of the zeal of love to acquire,
     And where it stands, in the centre of life a sphere;
     And Measure, mood of the lyre, the rapturous lyre,
     He said was Wisdom, and struck him the notes to hear.

     XIII

     Sweet, sweet: 'twas glory of vision, honey, the breeze
     In heat, the run of the river on root and stone,
     All senses joined, as the sister Pierides
     Are one, uplifting their chorus, the Nine, his own.
     In stately order, evolved of sound into sight,
     From sight to sound intershifting, the man descried
     The growths of earth, his adored, like day out of night,
     Ascend in song, seeing nature and song allied.

     XIV

     And there vitality, there, there solely in song,
     Resides, where earth and her uses to men, their needs,
     Their forceful cravings, the theme are: there is it strong,
     The Master said: and the studious eye that reads,
     (Yea, even as earth to the crown of Gods on the mount),
     In links divine with the lyrical tongue is bound.
     Pursue thy craft: it is music drawn of a fount
     To spring perennial; well-spring is common ground.

     XV

     Melampus dwelt among men: physician and sage,
     He served them, loving them, healing them; sick or maimed,
     Or them that frenzied in some delirious rage
     Outran the measure, his juice of the woods reclaimed.
     He played on men, as his master, Phoebus, on strings
     Melodious: as the God did he drive and check,
     Through love exceeding a simple love of the things
     That glide in grasses and rubble of woody wreck.



     LOVE IN THE VALLEY



     Under yonder beech-tree single on the greensward,
     Couched with her arms behind her golden head,
     Knees and tresses folded to slip and ripple idly,
     Lies my young love sleeping in the shade.
     Had I the heart to slide an arm beneath her,
     Press her parting lips as her waist I gather slow,
     Waking in amazement she could not but embrace me:
     Then would she hold me and never let me go?

     * * *

     Shy as the squirrel and wayward as the swallow,
     Swift as the swallow along the river's light
     Circleting the surface to meet his mirrored winglets,
     Fleeter she seems in her stay than in her flight.
     Shy as the squirrel that leaps among the pine-tops,
     Wayward as the swallow overhead at set of sun,
     She whom I love is hard to catch and conquer,
     Hard, but O the glory of the winning were she won!

     * * *

     When her mother tends her before the laughing mirror,
     Tying up her laces, looping up her hair,
     Often she thinks, were this wild thing wedded,
     More love should I have, and much less care.
     When her mother tends her before the lighted mirror,
     Loosening her laces, combing down her curls,
     Often she thinks, were this wild thing wedded,
     I should miss but one for the many boys and girls.

     * * *

     Heartless she is as the shadow in the meadows
     Flying to the hills on a blue and breezy noon.
     No, she is athirst and drinking up her wonder:
     Earth to her is young as the slip of the new moon.
     Deals she an unkindness, 'tis but her rapid measure,
     Even as in a dance; and her smile can heal no less:
     Like the swinging May-cloud that pelts the flowers with hailstones
     Off a sunny border, she was made to bruise and bless.

     * * *

     Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping
     Wavy in the dusk lit by one large star.
     Lone on the fir-branch, his rattle-note unvaried,
     Brooding o'er the gloom, spins the brown eve-jar.
     Darker grows the valley, more and more forgetting:
     So were it with me if forgetting could be willed.
     Tell the grassy hollow that holds the bubbling well-spring,
     Tell it to forget the source that keeps it filled.

     * * *

     Stepping down the hill with her fair companions,
     Arm in arm, all against the raying West,
     Boldly she sings, to the merry tune she marches,
     Brave in her shape, and sweeter unpossessed.
     Sweeter, for she is what my heart first awaking
     Whispered the world was; morning light is she.
     Love that so desires would fain keep her changeless;
     Fain would fling the net, and fain have her free.

     * * *

     Happy happy time, when the white star hovers
     Low over dim fields fresh with bloomy dew,
     Near the face of dawn, that draws athwart the darkness,
     Threading it with colour, like yewberries the yew.
     Thicker crowd the shades as the grave East deepens
     Glowing, and with crimson a long cloud swells.
     Maiden still the morn is; and strange she is, and secret;
     Strange her eyes; her cheeks are cold as cold sea-shells.

     * * *

     Sunrays, leaning on our southern hills and lighting
     Wild cloud-mountains that drag the hills along,
     Oft ends the day of your shifting brilliant laughter
     Chill as a dull face frowning on a song.
     Ay, but shows the South-west a ripple-feathered bosom
     Blown to silver while the clouds are shaken and ascend
     Scaling the mid-heavens as they stream, there comes a sunset
     Rich, deep like love in beauty without end.

     * * *

     When at dawn she sighs, and like an infant to the window
     Turns grave eyes craving light, released from dreams,
     Beautiful she looks, like a white water-lily
     Bursting out of bud in havens of the streams.
     When from bed she rises clothed from neck to ankle
     In her long nightgown sweet as boughs of May,
     Beautiful she looks, like a tall garden lily
     Pure from the night, and splendid for the day.

     * * *

     Mother of the dews, dark eye-lashed twilight,
     Low-lidded twilight, o'er the valley's brim,
     Rounding on thy breast sings the dew-delighted skylark,
     Clear as though the dewdrops had their voice in him.
     Hidden where the rose-flush drinks the rayless planet,
     Fountain-full he pours the spraying fountain-showers.
     Let me hear her laughter, I would have her ever
     Cool as dew in twilight, the lark above the flowers.

     * * *

     All the girls are out with their baskets for the primrose;
     Up lanes, woods through, they troop in joyful bands.
     My sweet leads: she knows not why, but now she loiters,
     Eyes bent anemones, and hangs her hands.
     Such a look will tell that the violets are peeping,
     Coming the rose: and unaware a cry
     Springs in her bosom for odours and for colour,
     Covert and the nightingale; she knows not why.

     * * *

     Kerchiefed head and chin, she darts between her tulips,
     Streaming like a willow grey in arrowy rain:
     Some bend beaten cheek to gravel, and their angel
     She will be; she lifts them, and on she speeds again.
     Black the driving raincloud breasts the iron gate-way:
     She is forth to cheer a neighbour lacking mirth.
     So when sky and grass met rolling dumb for thunder,
     Saw I once a white dove, sole light of earth.

     * * *

     Prim little scholars are the flowers of her garden,
     Trained to stand in rows, and asking if they please.
     I might love them well but for loving more the wild ones.
     O my wild ones! they tell me more than these.
     You, my wild one, you tell of honied field-rose,
     Violet, blushing eglantine in life; and even as they,
     They by the wayside are earnest of your goodness,
     You are of life's, on the banks that line the way.

     * * *

     Peering at her chamber the white crowns the red rose,
     Jasmine winds the porch with stars two and three.
     Parted is the window; she sleeps; the starry jasmine
     Breathes a falling breath that carries thoughts of me.
     Sweeter unpossessed, have I said of her my sweetest
     Not while she sleeps: while she sleeps the jasmine breathes,
     Luring her to love; she sleeps; the starry jasmine
     Bears me to her pillow under white rose-wreaths.

     * * *

     Yellow with birdfoot-trefoil are the grass-glades;
     Yellow with cinquefoil of the dew-grey leaf:
     Yellow with stonecrop; the moss-mounds are yellow;
     Blue-necked the wheat sways, yellowing to the sheaf.
     Green-yellow, bursts from the copse the laughing yaffle;
     Sharp as a sickle is the edge of shade and shine:
     Earth in her heart laughs looking at the heavens,
     Thinking of the harvest: I look and think of mine.

     * * *

     This I may know: her dressing and undressing
     Such a change of light shows as when the skies in sport
     Shift from cloud to moonlight; or edging over thunder
     Slips a ray of sun; or sweeping into port
     White sails furl; or on the ocean borders
     White sails lean along the waves leaping green.
     Visions of her shower before me, but from eyesight
     Guarded she would be like the sun were she seen.

     * * *

     Front door and back of the mossed old farmhouse
     Open with the morn, and in a breezy link
     Freshly sparkles garden to stripe-shadowed orchard,
     Green across a rill where on sand the minnows wink.
     Busy in the grass the early sun of summer
     Swarms, and the blackbird's mellow fluting notes
     Call my darling up with round and roguish challenge:
     Quaintest, richest carol of all the singing throats!

     * * *

     Cool was the woodside; cool as her white dairy
     Keeping sweet the cream-pan; and there the boys from school,
     Cricketing below, rushed brown and red with sunshine;
     O the dark translucence of the deep-eyed cool!
     Spying from the farm, herself she fetched a pitcher
     Full of milk, and tilted for each in turn the beak.
     Then a little fellow, mouth up and on tiptoe,
     Said, 'I will kiss you': she laughed and leaned her cheek.

     * * *

     Doves of the fir-wood walling high our red roof
     Through the long noon coo, crooning through the coo.
     Loose droop the leaves, and down the sleepy road-way
     Sometimes pipes a chaffinch; loose droops the blue.
     Cows flap a slow tail knee-deep in the river,
     Breathless, given up to sun and gnat and fly.
     Nowhere is she seen; and if I see her nowhere,
     Lightning may come, straight rains and tiger sky.

     * * *

     O the golden sheaf, the rustling treasure-armful!
     O the nutbrown tresses nodding interlaced!
     O the treasure-tresses one another over
     Nodding! O the girdle slack about the waist!
     Slain are the poppies that shot their random scarlet
     Quick amid the wheatears: wound about the waist,
     Gathered, see these brides of earth one blush of ripeness!
     O the nutbrown tresses nodding interlaced!

     * * *

     Large and smoky red the sun's cold disk drops,
     Clipped by naked hills, on violet shaded snow:
     Eastward large and still lights up a bower of moon-rise,
     Whence at her leisure steps the moon aglow.
     Nightlong on black print-branches our beech-tree
     Gazes in this whiteness: nightlong could I.
     Here may life on death or death on life be painted.
     Let me clasp her soul to know she cannot die!

     * * *

     Gossips count her faults; they scour a narrow chamber
     Where there is no window, read not heaven or her.
     'When she was a tiny,' one aged woman quavers,
     Plucks at my heart and leads me by the ear.
     Faults she had once as she learnt to run and tumbled:
     Faults of feature some see, beauty not complete.
     Yet, good gossips, beauty that makes holy
     Earth and air, may have faults from head to feet.

     * * *

     Hither she comes; she comes to me; she lingers,
     Deepens her brown eyebrows, while in new surprise
     High rise the lashes in wonder of a stranger;
     Yet am I the light and living of her eyes.
     Something friends have told her fills her heart to brimming,
     Nets her in her blushes, and wounds her, and tames. -
     Sure of her haven, O like a dove alighting,
     Arms up, she dropped: our souls were in our names.

     * * *

     Soon will she lie like a white-frost sunrise.
     Yellow oats and brown wheat, barley pale as rye,
     Long since your sheaves have yielded to the thresher,
     Felt the girdle loosened, seen the tresses fly.
     Soon will she lie like a blood-red sunset.
     Swift with the to-morrow, green-winged Spring!
     Sing from the South-west, bring her back the truants,
     Nightingale and swallow, song and dipping wing.

     * * *

     Soft new beech-leaves, up to beamy April
     Spreading bough on bough a primrose mountain, you
     Lucid in the moon, raise lilies to the skyfields,
     Youngest green transfused in silver shining through:
     Fairer than the lily, than the wild white cherry:
     Fair as in image my seraph love appears
     Borne to me by dreams when dawn is at my eye-lids:
     Fair as in the flesh she swims to me on tears.

     * * *

     Could I find a place to be alone with heaven,
     I would speak my heart out: heaven is my need.
     Every woodland tree is flushing like the dogwood,
     Flashing like the whitebeam, swaying like the reed.
     Flushing like the dogwood crimson in October;
     Streaming like the flag-reed South-west blown;
     Flashing as in gusts the sudden-lighted whitebeam:
     All seem to know what is for heaven alone.



     THE THREE SINGERS TO YOUNG BLOOD



     Carols nature, counsel men.
     Different notes as rook from wren
     Hear we when our steps begin,
     And the choice is cast within,
     Where a robber raven's tale
     Urges passion's nightingale.

     Hark to the three. Chimed they in one,
     Life were music of the sun.
     Liquid first, and then the caw,
     Then the cry that knows not law.

     I

     As the birds do, so do we,
     Bill our mate, and choose our tree.
     Swift to building work addressed,
     Any straw will help a nest.
     Mates are warm, and this is truth,
     Glad the young that come of youth.
     They have bloom i' the blood and sap
     Chilling at no thunder-clap.
     Man and woman on the thorn
     Trust not Earth, and have her scorn.
     They who in her lead confide,
     Wither me if they spread not wide!
     Look for aid to little things,
     You will get them quick as wings,
     Thick as feathers; would you feed,
     Take the leap that springs the need.

     II

     Contemplate the rutted road:
     Life is both a lure and goad.
     Each to hold in measure just,
     Trample appetite to dust.
     Mark the fool and wanton spin:
     Keep to harness as a skin.
     Ere you follow nature's lead,
     Of her powers in you have heed;
     Else a shiverer you will find
     You have challenged humankind.
     Mates are chosen marketwise:
     Coolest bargainer best buys.
     Leap not, nor let leap the heart:
     Trot your track, and drag your cart.
     So your end may be in wool,
     Honoured, and with manger full.

     III

     O the rosy light! it fleets,
     Dearer dying than all sweets.
     That is life: it waves and goes;
     Solely in that cherished Rose
     Palpitates, or else 'tis death.
     Call it love with all thy breath.
     Love! it lingers: Love! it nears:
     Love! O Love! the Rose appears,
     Blushful, magic, reddening air.
     Now the choice is on thee: dare!
     Mortal seems the touch, but makes
     Immortal the hand that takes.
     Feel what sea within thee shames
     Of its force all other claims,
     Drowns them. Clasp! the world will be
     Heavenly Rose to swelling sea.



     THE ORCHARD AND THE HEATH



     I chanced upon an early walk to spy
     A troop of children through an orchard gate:
     The boughs hung low, the grass was high;
     They had but to lift hands or wait
     For fruits to fill them; fruits were all their sky.

     They shouted, running on from tree to tree,
     And played the game the wind plays, on and round.
     'Twas visible invisible glee
     Pursuing; and a fountain's sound
     Of laughter spouted, pattering fresh on me.

     I could have watched them till the daylight fled,
     Their pretty bower made such a light of day.
     A small one tumbling sang, 'Oh! head!'
     The rest to comfort her straightway
     Seized on a branch and thumped down apples red.

     The tiny creature flashing through green grass,
     And laughing with her feet and eyes among
     Fresh apples, while a little lass
     Over as o'er breeze-ripples hung:
     That sight I saw, and passed as aliens pass.

     My footpath left the pleasant farms and lanes,
     Soft cottage-smoke, straight cocks a-crow, gay flowers;
     Beyond the wheel-ruts of the wains,
     Across a heath I walked for hours,
     And met its rival tenants, rays and rains.

     Still in my view mile-distant firs appeared,
     When, under a patched channel-bank enriched
     With foxglove whose late bells drooped seared,
     Behold, a family had pitched
     Their camp, and labouring the low tent upreared.

     Here, too, were many children, quick to scan
     A new thing coming; swarthy cheeks, white teeth:
     In many-coloured rags they ran,
     Like iron runlets of the heath.
     Dispersed lay broth-pot, sticks, and drinking-can.

     Three girls, with shoulders like a boat at sea
     Tipped sideways by the wave (their clothing slid
     From either ridge unequally),
     Lean, swift and voluble, bestrid
     A starting-point, unfrocked to the bent knee.

     They raced; their brothers yelled them on, and broke
     In act to follow, but as one they snuffed
     Wood-fumes, and by the fire that spoke
     Of provender, its pale flame puffed,
     And rolled athwart dwarf furzes grey-blue smoke.

     Soon on the dark edge of a ruddier gleam,
     The mother-pot perusing, all, stretched flat,
     Paused for its bubbling-up supreme:
     A dog upright in circle sat,
     And oft his nose went with the flying steam.

     I turned and looked on heaven awhile, where now
     The moor-faced sunset broadened with red light;
     Threw high aloft a golden bough,
     And seemed the desert of the night
     Far down with mellow orchards to endow.



     EARTH AND MAN



     I

     On her great venture, Man,
     Earth gazes while her fingers dint the breast
     Which is his well of strength, his home of rest,
     And fair to scan.

     II

     More aid than that embrace,
     That nourishment, she cannot give: his heart
     Involves his fate; and she who urged the start
     Abides the race.

     III

     For he is in the lists
     Contentious with the elements, whose dower
     First sprang him; for swift vultures to devour
     If he desists.

     IV

     His breath of instant thirst
     Is warning of a creature matched with strife,
     To meet it as a bride, or let fall life
     On life's accursed.

     V

     No longer forth he bounds
     The lusty animal, afield to roam,
     But peering in Earth's entrails, where the gnome
     Strange themes propounds.

     VI

     By hunger sharply sped
     To grasp at weapons ere he learns their use,
     In each new ring he bears a giant's thews,
     An infant's head.

     VII

     And ever that old task
     Of reading what he is and whence he came,
     Whither to go, finds wilder letters flame
     Across her mask.

     VIII

     She hears his wailful prayer,
     When now to the Invisible he raves
     To rend him from her, now of his mother craves
     Her calm, her care.

     IX

     The thing that shudders most
     Within him is the burden of his cry.
     Seen of his dread, she is to his blank eye
     The eyeless Ghost.

     X

     Or sometimes she will seem
     Heavenly, but her blush, soon wearing white,
     Veils like a gorsebush in a web of blight,
     With gold-buds dim.

     XI

     Once worshipped Prime of Powers,
     She still was the Implacable: as a beast,
     She struck him down and dragged him from the feast
     She crowned with flowers.

     XII

     Her pomp of glorious hues,
     Her revelries of ripeness, her kind smile,
     Her songs, her peeping faces, lure awhile
     With symbol-clues.

     XIII

     The mystery she holds
     For him, inveterately he strains to see,
     And sight of his obtuseness is the key
     Among those folds.

     XIV

     He may entreat, aspire,
     He may despair, and she has never heed.
     She drinking his warm sweat will soothe his need,
     Not his desire.

     XV

     She prompts him to rejoice,
     Yet scares him on the threshold with the shroud.
     He deems her cherishing of her best-endowed
     A wanton's choice.

     XVI

     Albeit thereof he has found
     Firm roadway between lustfulness and pain;
     Has half transferred the battle to his brain,
     From bloody ground;

     XVII

     He will not read her good,
     Or wise, but with the passion Self obscures;
     Through that old devil of the thousand lures,
     Through that dense hood:

     XVIII

     Through terror, through distrust;
     The greed to touch, to view, to have, to live:
     Through all that makes of him a sensitive
     Abhorring dust.

     XIX

     Behold his wormy home!
     And he the wind-whipped, anywhither wave
     Crazily tumbled on a shingle-grave
     To waste in foam.

     XX

     Therefore the wretch inclined
     Afresh to the Invisible, who, he saith,
     Can raise him high: with vows of living faith
     For little signs.

     XXI

     Some signs he must demand,
     Some proofs of slaughtered nature; some prized few,
     To satisfy the senses it is true,
     And in his hand,

     XXII

     This miracle which saves
     Himself, himself doth from extinction clutch,
     By virtue of his worth, contrasting much
     With brutes and knaves.

     XXIII

     From dust, of him abhorred,
     He would be snatched by Grace discovering worth.
     'Sever me from the hollowness of Earth!
     Me take, dear Lord!'

     XXIV

     She hears him. Him she owes
     For half her loveliness a love well won
     By work that lights the shapeless and the dun,
     Their common foes.

     XXV

     He builds the soaring spires,
     That sing his soul in stone: of her he draws,
     Though blind to her, by spelling at her laws,
     Her purest fires.

     XXVI

     Through him hath she exchanged,
     For the gold harvest-robes, the mural crown,
     Her haggard quarry-features and thick frown
     Where monsters ranged.

     XXVII

     And order, high discourse,
     And decency, than which is life less dear,
     She has of him: the lyre of language clear,
     Love's tongue and source.

     XXVIII

     She hears him, and can hear
     With glory in his gains by work achieved:
     With grief for grief that is the unperceived
     In her so near.

     XXIX

     If he aloft for aid
     Imploring storms, her essence is the spur.
     His cry to heaven is a cry to her
     He would evade.

     XXX

     Not elsewhere can he tend.
     Those are her rules which bid him wash foul sins;
     Those her revulsions from the skull that grins
     To ape his end.

     XXXI

     And her desires are those
     For happiness, for lastingness, for light.
     'Tis she who kindles in his haunting night
     The hoped dawn-rose.

     XXXII

     Fair fountains of the dark
     Daily she waves him, that his inner dream
     May clasp amid the glooms a springing beam,
     A quivering lark:

     XXIII

     This life and her to know
     For Spirit: with awakenedness of glee
     To feel stern joy her origin: not he
     The child of woe.

     XXXIV

     But that the senses still
     Usurp the station of their issue mind,
     He would have burst the chrysalis of the blind:
     As yet he will;

     XXXV

     As yet he will, she prays,
     Yet will when his distempered devil of Self; -
     The glutton for her fruits, the wily elf
     In shifting rays; -

     XXXVI

     That captain of the scorned;
     The coveter of life in soul and shell,
     The fratricide, the thief, the infidel,
     The hoofed and horned; -

     XXXVII

     He singularly doomed
     To what he execrates and writhes to shun; -
     When fire has passed him vapour to the sun,
     And sun relumed,

     XXXVIII

     Then shall the horrid pall
     Be lifted, and a spirit nigh divine,
     'Live in thy offspring as I live in mine,'
     Will hear her call.

     XXXIX

     Whence looks he on a land
     Whereon his labour is a carven page;
     And forth from heritage to heritage
     Nought writ on sand.

     XL

     His fables of the Above,
     And his gapped readings of the crown and sword,
     The hell detested and the heaven adored,
     The hate, the love,

     XLI

     The bright wing, the black hoof,
     He shall peruse, from Reason not disjoined,
     And never unfaith clamouring to be coined
     To faith by proof.

     XLII

     She her just Lord may view,
     Not he, her creature, till his soul has yearned
     With all her gifts to reach the light discerned
     Her spirit through.

     XLIIII

     Then in him time shall run
     As in the hour that to young sunlight crows;
     And--'If thou hast good faith it can repose,'
     She tells her son.

     XLIV

     Meanwhile on him, her chief
     Expression, her great word of life, looks she;
     Twi-minded of him, as the waxing tree,
     Or dated leaf.



     A BALLAD OF FAIR LADIES IN REVOLT



     I

     See the sweet women, friend, that lean beneath
     The ever-falling fountain of green leaves
     Round the white bending stem, and like a wreath
     Of our most blushful flower shine trembling through,
     To teach philosophers the thirst of thieves:
     Is one for me? is one for you?

     II

     - Fair sirs, we give you welcome, yield you place,
     And you shall choose among us which you will,
     Without the idle pastime of the chase,
     If to this treaty you can well agree:
     To wed our cause, and its high task fulfil.
     He who's for us, for him are we!

     III

     - Most gracious ladies, nigh when light has birth,
     A troop of maids, brown as burnt heather-bells,
     And rich with life as moss-roots breathe of earth
     In the first plucking of them, past us flew
     To labour, singing rustic ritornells:
     Had they a cause? are they of you?

     IV

     - Sirs, they are as unthinking armies are
     To thoughtful leaders, and our cause is theirs.
     When they know men they know the state of war:
     But now they dream like sunlight on a sea,
     And deem you hold the half of happy pairs.
     He who's for us, for him are we!

     V

     - Ladies, I listened to a ring of dames;
     Judicial in the robe and wig; secure
     As venerated portraits in their frames;
     And they denounced some insurrection new
     Against sound laws which keep you good and pure.
     Are you of them? are they of you?

     VI

     - Sirs, they are of us, as their dress denotes,
     And by as much: let them together chime:
     It is an ancient bell within their throats,
     Pulled by an aged ringer; with what glee
     Befits the yellow yesterdays of time.
     He who's for us, for him are we!

     VII

     - Sweet ladies, you with beauty, you with wit;
     Dowered of all favours and all blessed things
     Whereat the ruddy torch of Love is lit;
     Wherefore this vain and outworn strife renew,
     Which stays the tide no more than eddy-rings?
     Who is for love must be for you.

     VIII

     - The manners of the market, honest sirs,
     'Tis hard to quit when you behold the wares.
     You flatter us, or perchance our milliners
     You flatter; so this vain and outworn She
     May still be the charmed snake to your soft airs!
     A higher lord than Love claim we.

     IX

     - One day, dear lady, missing the broad track,
     I came on a wood's border, by a mead,
     Where golden May ran up to moted black:
     And there I saw Queen Beauty hold review,
     With Love before her throne in act to plead.
     Take him for me, take her for you.

     X

     - Ingenious gentleman, the tale is known.
     Love pleaded sweetly: Beauty would not melt:
     She would not melt: he turned in wrath: her throne
     The shadow of his back froze witheringly,
     And sobbing at his feet Queen Beauty knelt.
     O not such slaves of Love are we!

     XI

     - Love, lady, like the star above that lance
     Of radiance flung by sunset on ridged cloud,
     Sad as the last line of a brave romance! -
     Young Love hung dim, yet quivering round him threw
     Beams of fresh fire, while Beauty waned and bowed.
     Scorn Love, and dread the doom for you.

     XII

     - Called she not for her mirror, sir? Forth ran
     Her women: I am lost, she cried, when lo,
     Love in the form of an admiring man
     Once more in adoration bent the knee,
     And brought the faded Pagan to full blow:
     For which her throne she gave: not we!

     XIII

     - My version, madam, runs not to that end.
     A certain madness of an hour half past,
     Caught her like fever; her just lord no friend
     She fancied; aimed beyond beauty, and thence grew
     The prim acerbity, sweet Love's outcast.
     Great heaven ward off that stroke from you!

     XIV

     - Your prayer to heaven, good sir, is generous:
     How generous likewise that you do not name
     Offended nature! She from all of us
     Couched idle underneath our showering tree,
     May quite withhold her most destructive flame;
     And then what woeful women we!

     XV

     - Quite, could not be, fair lady; yet your youth
     May run to drought in visionary schemes:
     And a late waking to perceive the truth,
     When day falls shrouding her supreme adieu,
     Shows darker wastes than unaccomplished dreams:
     And that may be in store for you.

     XVI

     - O sir, the truth, the truth! is't in the skies,
     Or in the grass, or in this heart of ours?
     But O the truth, the truth! the many eyes
     That look on it! the diverse things they see,
     According to their thirst for fruit or flowers!
     Pass on: it is the truth seek we.

     XVII

     - Lady, there is a truth of settled laws
     That down the past burns like a great watch-fire.
     Let youth hail changeful mornings; but your cause,
     Whetting its edge to cut the race in two,
     Is felony: you forfeit the bright lyre,
     Much honour and much glory you!

     XVIII

     - Sir, was it glory, was it honour, pride,
     And not as cat and serpent and poor slave,
     Wherewith we walked in union by your side?
     Spare to false womanliness her delicacy,
     Or bid true manliness give ear, we crave:
     In our defence thus chained are we.

     XIX

     - Yours, madam, were the privileges of life
     Proper to man's ideal; you were the mark
     Of action, and the banner in the strife:
     Yea, of your very weakness once you drew
     The strength that sounds the wells, outflies the lark:
     Wrapped in a robe of flame were you!

     XX

     - Your friend looks thoughtful. Sir, when we were chill,
     You clothed us warmly; all in honour! when
     We starved you fed us; all in honour still:
     Oh, all in honour, ultra-honourably!
     Deep is the gratitude we owe to men,
     For privileged indeed were we!

     XXI

     - You cite exceptions, madam, that are sad,
     But come in the red struggle of our growth.
     Alas, that I should have to say it! bad
     Is two-sexed upon earth: this which you do,
     Shows animal impatience, mental sloth:
     Man monstrous! pining seraphs you!

     XXII

     - I fain would ask your friend . . . but I will ask
     You, sir, how if in place of numbers vague,
     Your sad exceptions were to break that mask
     They wear for your cool mind historically,
     And blaze like black lists of a PRESENT plague?
     But in that light behold them we.

     XXIII

     - Your spirit breathes a mist upon our world,
     Lady, and like a rain to pierce the roof
     And drench the bed where toil-tossed man lies curled
     In his hard-earned oblivion! You are few,
     Scattered, ill-counselled, blinded: for a proof,
     I have lived, and have known none like you.

     XXIV

     - We may be blind to men, sir: we embrace
     A future now beyond the fowler's nets.
     Though few, we hold a promise for the race
     That was not at our rising: you are free
     To win brave mates; you lose but marionnettes.
     He who's for us, for him are we.

     XXV

     - Ah! madam, were they puppets who withstood
     Youth's cravings for adventure to preserve
     The dedicated ways of womanhood?
     The light which leads us from the paths of rue,
     That light above us, never seen to swerve,
     Should be the home-lamp trimmed by you.

     XXVI

     - Ah! sir, our worshipped posture we perchance
     Shall not abandon, though we see not how,
     Being to that lamp-post fixed, we may advance
     Beside our lords in any real degree,
     Unless we move: and to advance is now
     A sovereign need, think more than we.

     XXVII

     - So push you out of harbour in small craft,
     With little seamanship; and comes a gale,
     The world will laugh, the world has often laughed,
     Lady, to see how bold when skies are blue,
     When black winds churn the deeps how panic-pale,
     How swift to the old nest fly you!

     XXVIII

     - What thinks your friend, kind sir? We have escaped
     But partly that old half-tamed wild beast's paw
     Whereunder woman, the weak thing, was shaped:
     Men, too, have known the cramping enemy
     In grim brute force, whom force of brain shall awe:
     Him our deliverer, await we!

     XXIX

     - Delusions are with eloquence endowed,
     And yours might pluck an angel from the spheres
     To play in this revolt whereto you are vowed,
     Deliverer, lady! but like summer dew
     O'er fields that crack for rain your friends drop tears,
     Who see the awakening for you.

     XXX

     - Is he our friend, there silent? he weeps not.
     O sir, delusion mounting like a sun
     On a mind blank as the white wife of Lot,
     Giving it warmth and movement! if this be
     Delusion, think of what thereby was won
     For men, and dream of what win we.

     XXXI

     - Lady, the destiny of minor powers,
     Who would recast us, is but to convulse:
     You enter on a strife that frets and sours;
     You can but win sick disappointment's hue;
     And simply an accelerated pulse,
     Some tonic you have drunk moves you.

     XXXII

     - Thinks your friend so? Good sir, your wit is bright;
     But wit that strives to speak the popular voice,
     Puts on its nightcap and puts out its light.
     Curfew, would seem your conqueror's decree
     To women likewise: and we have no choice
     Save darkness or rebellion, we!

     XXXIII

     - A plain safe intermediate way is cleft
     By reason foiling passion: you that rave
     Of mad alternatives to right and left
     Echo the tempter, madam: and 'tis due
     Unto your sex to shun it as the grave,
     This later apple offered you.

     XXXIV

     - This apple is not ripe, it is not sweet;
     Nor rosy, sir, nor golden: eye and mouth
     Are little wooed by it; yet we would eat.
     We are somewhat tired of Eden, is our plea.
     We have thirsted long; this apple suits our drouth:
     'Tis good for men to halve, think we.

     XXXV

     - But say, what seek you, madam? 'Tis enough
     That you should have dominion o'er the springs
     Domestic and man's heart: those ways, how rough,
     How vile, outside the stately avenue
     Where you walk sheltered by your angel's wings,
     Are happily unknown to you.

     XXXVI

     - We hear women's shrieks on them. We like your phrase,
     Dominion domestic! And that roar,
     'What seek you?' is of tyrants in all days.
     Sir, get you something of our purity
     And we will of your strength: we ask no more.
     That is the sum of what seek we.

     XXXVII

     - O for an image, madam, in one word,
     To show you as the lightning night reveals,
     Your error and your perils: you have erred
     In mind only, and the perils that ensue
     Swift heels may soften; wherefore to swift heels
     Address your hopes of safety you!

     XXXVIII

     - To err in mind, sir . . . your friend smiles: he may!
     To err in mind, if err in mind we can,
     Is grievous error you do well to stay.
     But O how different from reality
     Men's fiction is! how like you in the plan,
     Is woman, knew you her as we!

     XXXIX

     - Look, lady, where yon river winds its line
     Toward sunset, and receives on breast and face
     The splendour of fair life: to be divine,
     'Tis nature bids you be to nature true,
     Flowing with beauty, lending earth your grace,
     Reflecting heaven in clearness you.

     XL

     - Sir, you speak well: your friend no word vouchsafes.
     To flow with beauty, breeding fools and worse,
     Cowards and worse: at such fair life she chafes,
     Who is not wholly of the nursery,
     Nor of your schools: we share the primal curse;
     Together shake it off, say we!

     XLI

     - Hear, then, my friend, madam! Tongue-restrained he stands
     Till words are thoughts, and thoughts, like swords enriched
     With traceries of the artificer's hands,
     Are fire-proved steel to cut, fair flowers to view. -
     Do I hear him? Oh, he is bewitched, bewitched!
     Heed him not! Traitress beauties you!

     XLII

     - We have won a champion, sisters, and a sage!
     - Ladies, you win a guest to a good feast!
     - Sir spokesman, sneers are weakness veiling rage.
     - Of weakness, and wise men, you have the key.
     - Then are there fresher mornings mounting East
     Than ever yet have dawned, sing we!

     XLIII

     - False ends as false began, madam, be sure!
     - What lure there is the pure cause purifies!
     - Who purifies the victim of the lure?
     - That soul which bids us our high light pursue.
     - Some heights are measured down: the wary wise
     Shun Reason in the masque with you!

     XLIV

     - Sir, for the friend you bring us, take our thanks.
     Yes, Beauty was of old this barren goal;
     A thing with claws; and brute-like in her pranks!
     But could she give more loyal guarantee
     Than wooing Wisdom, that in her a soul
     Has risen? Adieu: content are we!

     XLV

     Those ladies led their captive to the flood's
     Green edge. He floating with them seemed the most
     Fool-flushed old noddy ever crowned with buds.
     Happier than I! Then, why not wiser too?
     For he that lives with Beauty, he may boast
     His comrade over me and you.

     XLVI

     Have women nursed some dream since Helen sailed
     Over the sea of blood the blushing star,
     That beauty, whom frail man as Goddess hailed,
     When not possessing her (for such is he!),
     Might in a wondering season seen afar,
     Be tamed to say not 'I,' but 'we'?

     XLVII

     And shall they make of Beauty their estate,
     The fortress and the weapon of their sex?
     Shall she in her frost-brilliancy dictate,
     More queenly than of old, how we must woo,
     Ere she will melt? The halter's on our necks,
     Kick as it likes us, I and you.

     XLVIII

     Certain it is, if Beauty has disdained
     Her ancient conquests, with an aim thus high:
     If this, if that, if more, the fight is gained.
     But can she keep her followers without fee?
     Yet ah! to hear anew those ladies cry,
     He who's for us, for him are we!



     THE TWO MASKS



     Melpomene among her livid people,
     Ere stroke of lyre, upon Thaleia looks,
     Warned by old contests that one museful ripple
     Along those lips of rose with tendril hooks
     Forebodes disturbance in the springs of pathos,
     Perchance may change of masks midway demand,
     Albeit the man rise mountainous as Athos,
     The woman wild as Cape Leucadia stand.

     II

     For this the Comic Muse exacts of creatures
     Appealing to the fount of tears: that they
     Strive never to outleap our human features,
     And do Right Reason's ordinance obey,
     In peril of the hum to laughter nighest.
     But prove they under stress of action's fire
     Nobleness, to that test of Reason highest,
     She bows: she waves them for the loftier lyre.



     ARCHDUCHESS ANNE



     1--I

     In middle age an evil thing
     Befell Archduchess Anne:
     She looked outside her wedding-ring
     Upon a princely man.

     II

     Count Louis was for horse and arms;
     And if its beacon waved,
     For love; but ladies had not charms
     To match a danger braved.

     III

     On battlefields he was the bow
     Bestrung to fly the shaft:
     In idle hours his heart would flow
     As winds on currents waft.

     IV

     His blood was of those warrior tribes
     That streamed from morning's fire,
     Whom now with traps and now with bribes
     The wily Council wire.

     V

     Archduchess Anne the Council ruled,
     Count Louis his great dame;
     And woe to both when one had cooled!
     Little was she to blame.

     VI

     Among her chiefs who spun their plots,
     Old Kraken stood the sword:
     As sharp his wits for cutting knots
     Of babble he abhorred.

     VII

     He reverenced her name and line,
     Nor other merit had
     Save soldierwise to wait her sign,
     And do the deed she bade.

     VIII

     He saw her hand jump at her side
     Ere royally she smiled
     On Louis and his fair young bride
     Where courtly ranks defiled.

     IX

     That was a moment when a shock
     Through the procession ran,
     And thrilled the plumes, and stayed the clock,
     Yet smiled Archduchess Anne.

     X

     No touch gave she to hound in leash,
     No wink to sword in sheath:
     She seemed a woman scarce of flesh;
     Above it, or beneath.

     XI

     Old Kraken spied with kennelled snarl,
     His Lady deemed disgraced.
     He footed as on burning marl,
     When out of Hall he paced.

     XII

     'Twas seen he hammered striding legs,
     And stopped, and strode again.
     Now Vengeance has a brood of eggs,
     But Patience must be hen.

     XIII

     Too slow are they for wrath to hatch,
     Too hot for time to rear.
     Old Kraken kept unwinding watch;
     He marked his day appear.

     XIV

     He neighed a laugh, though moods were rough
     With standards in revolt:
     His nostrils took the news for snuff,
     His smacking lips for salt.

     XV

     Count Louis' wavy cock's plumes led
     His troops of black-haired manes,
     A rebel; and old Kraken sped
     To front him on the plains.

     XVI

     Then camp opposed to camp did they
     Fret earth with panther claws
     For signal of a bloody day,
     Each reading from the Laws.

     XVII

     'Forefend it, heaven!' Count Louis cried,
     'And let the righteous plead:
     My country is a willing bride,
     Was never slave decreed.

     XVIII

     'Not we for thirst of blood appeal
     To sword and slaughter curst;
     We have God's blessing on our steel,
     Do we our pleading first.'

     XIX

     Count Louis, soul of chivalry,
     Put trust in plighted word;
     By starlight on the broad brown lea,
     To bar the strife he spurred.

     XX

     Across his breast a crimson spot,
     That in a quiver glowed,
     The ruddy crested camp-fires shot,
     As he to darkness rode.

     XXI

     He rode while omens called, beware
     Old Kraken's pledge of faith!
     A smile and waving hand in air,
     And outward flew the wraith.

     XXII

     Before pale morn had mixed with gold,
     His army roared, and chilled,
     As men who have a woe foretold,
     And see it red fulfilled.

     XXIII

     Away and to his young wife speed,
     And say that Honour's dead!
     Another word she will not need
     To bow a widow's head.

     XXIV

     Old Kraken roped his white moustache
     Right, left, for savage glee:
     - To swing him in his soldier's sash
     Were kind for such as he!

     XXV

     Old Kraken's look hard Winter wears
     When sweeps the wild snow-blast:
     He had the hug of Arctic bears
     For captives he held fast.

     2--I

     Archduchess Anne sat carved in frost,
     Shut off from priest and spouse.
     Her lips were locked, her arms were crossed,
     Her eyes were in her brows.

     II

     One hand enclosed a paper scroll,
     Held as a strangled asp.
     So may we see the woman's soul
     In her dire tempter's grasp.

     III

     Along that scroll Count Louis' doom
     Throbbed till the letters flamed.
     She saw him in his scornful bloom,
     She saw him chained and shamed.

     IV

     Around that scroll Count Louis' fate
     Was acted to her stare,
     And hate in love and love in hate
     Fought fell to smite or spare.

     V

     Between the day that struck her old,
     And this black star of days,
     Her heart swung like a storm-bell tolled
     Above a town ablaze.

     VI

     His beauty pressed to intercede,
     His beauty served him ill.
     - Not Vengeance, 'tis his rebel's deed,
     'Tis Justice, not our will!

     VII

     Yet who had sprung to life's full force
     A breast that loveless dried?
     But who had sapped it at the source,
     With scarlet to her pride!

     VIII

     He brought her waning heart as 'twere
     New message from the skies.
     And he betrayed, and left on her
     The burden of their sighs.

     IX

     In floods her tender memories poured;
     They foamed with waves of spite:
     She crushed them, high her heart outsoared,
     To keep her mind alight.

     X

     - The crawling creature, called in scorn
     A woman!--with this pen
     We sign a paper that may warn
     His crowing fellowmen.

     XI

     - We read them lesson of a power
     They slight who do us wrong.
     That bitter hour this bitter hour
     Provokes; by turns the strong!

     XII

     - That we were woman once is known:
     That we are Justice now,
     Above our sex, above the throne,
     Men quaking shall avow.

     XIII

     Archduchess Anne ascending flew,
     Her heart outsoared, but felt
     The demon of her sex pursue,
     Incensing or to melt.

     XIV

     Those counterfloods below at leap
     Still in her breast blew storm,
     And farther up the heavenly steep
     Wrestled in angels' form.

     XV

     To disentangle one clear wish
     Not of her sex, she sought;
     And womanish to womanish
     Discerned in lighted thought.

     XVI

     With Louis' chance it went not well
     When at herself she raged;
     A woman, of whom men might tell
     She doted, crazed and aged.

     XVII

     Or else enamoured of a sweet
     Withdrawn, a vengeful crone!
     And say, what figure at her feet
     Is this that utters moan?

     XVIII

     The Countess Louis from her head
     Drew veil: 'Great Lady, hear!
     My husband deems you Justice dread,
     I know you Mercy dear.

     XIX

     'His error upon him may fall;
     He will not breathe a nay.
     I am his helpless mate in all,
     Except for grace to pray.

     XX

     'Perchance on me his choice inclined,
     To give his House an heir:
     I had not marriage with his mind,
     His counsel could not share.

     XXI

     'I brought no portion for his weal
     But this one instinct true,
     Which bids me in my weakness kneel,
     Archduchess Anne, to you.'

     XXII

     The frowning Lady uttered, 'Forth!'
     Her look forbade delay:
     'It is not mine to weigh your worth;
     Your husband's others weigh.

     XXIII

     'Hence with the woman in your speech,'
     For nothing it avails
     In woman's fashion to beseech
     Where Justice holds the scales.'

     XXIV

     Then bent and went the lady wan,
     Whose girlishness made grey
     The thoughts that through Archduchess Anne
     Shattered like stormy spray.

     XXV

     Long sat she there, as flame that strives
     To hold on beating wind:
     - His wife must be the fool of wives,
     Or cunningly designed!

     XXVI

     She sat until the tempest-pitch
     In her torn bosom fell;
     - His wife must be a subtle witch
     Or else God loves her well!

     3--I

     Old Kraken read a missive penned
     By his great Lady's hand.
     Her condescension called him friend,
     To raise the crest she fanned.

     II

     Swiftly to where he lay encamped
     It flew, yet breathed aloof
     From woman's feeling, and he stamped
     A heel more like a hoof.

     III

     She wrote of Mercy: 'She was loth
     Too hard to goad a foe.'
     He stamped, as when men drive an oath
     Devils transcribe below.

     IV

     She wrote: 'We have him half by theft.'
     His wrinkles glistened keen:
     And see the Winter storm-cloud cleft
     To lurid skies between!

     V

     When read old Kraken: 'Christ our Guide,'
     His eyes were spikes of spar:
     And see the white snow-storm divide
     About an icy star!

     VI

     'She trusted him to understand,'
     She wrote, and further prayed
     That policy might rule the land.
     Old Kraken's laughter neighed.

     VII

     Her words he took; her nods and winks
     Treated as woman's fog.
     The man-dog for his mistress thinks,
     Not less her faithful dog.

     VIII

     She hugged a cloak old Kraken ripped;
     Disguise to him he loathed.
     - Your mercy, madam, shows you stripped,
     While mine will keep you clothed.

     IX

     A rough ill-soldered scar in haste
     He rubbed on his cheek-bone.
     - Our policy the man shall taste;
     Our mercy shall be shown.

     X

     'Count Louis, honour to your race
     Decrees the Council-hall:
     You 'scape the rope by special grace,
     And like a soldier fall.'

     XI

     - I am a man of many sins,
     Who for one virtue die,
     Count Louis said.--They play at shins,
     Who kick, was the reply.

     XII

     Uprose the day of crimson sight,
     The day without a God.
     At morn the hero said Good-night:
     See there that stain on sod!

     XIII

     At morn the Countess Louis heard
     Young light sing in the lark.
     Ere eve it was that other bird,
     Which brings the starless dark.

     XIV

     To heaven she vowed herself, and yearned
     Beside her lord to lie.
     Archduchess Anne on Kraken turned,
     All white as a dead eye.

     XV

     If I could kill thee! shrieked her look:
     If lightning sprang from Will!
     An oaken head old Kraken shook,
     And she might thank or kill.

     XVI

     The pride that fenced her heart in mail
     By mortal pain was torn.
     Forth from her bosom leaped a wail,
     As of a babe new-born.

     XVII

     She clad herself in courtly use,
     And one who heard them prate
     Had said they differed upon views
     Where statecraft raised debate.

     XVIII

     The wretch detested must she trust,
     The servant master own:
     Confide to godless cause so just,
     And for God's blessing moan.

     XIX

     Austerely she her heart kept down,
     Her woman's tongue was mute
     When voice of People, voice of Crown,
     In cannon held dispute.

     XX

     The Crown on seas of blood, like swine,
     Swam forefoot at the throat:
     It drank of its dear veins for wine,
     Enough if it might float!

     XXI

     It sank with piteous yelp, resurged
     Electrical with fear.
     O had she on old Kraken urged
     Her word of mercy clear!

     XXII

     O had they with Count Louis been
     Accordant in his plea!
     Cursed are the women vowed to screen
     A heart that all can see!

     XXIII

     The godless drove unto a goal
     Was worse than vile defeat.
     Did vengeance prick Count Louis' soul
     They dressed him luscious meat.

     XXIV

     Worms will the faithless find their lies
     In the close treasure-chest.
     Without a God no day can rise,
     Though it should slay our best.

     XXV

     The Crown it furled a draggled flag,
     It sheathed a broken blade.
     Behold its triumph in the hag
     That lives with looks decayed!

     XXVI

     And lo, the man of oaken head,
     Of soldier's honour bare,
     He fled his land, but most he fled
     His Lady's frigid stare.

     XXVII

     Judged by the issue we discern
     God's blessing, and the bane.
     Count Louis' dust would fill an urn,
     His deeds are waving grain.

     XXVIII

     And she that helped to slay, yet bade
     To spare the fated man,
     Great were her errors, but she had
     Great heart, Archduchess Anne.



     THE SONG OF THEODOLINDA



     I

     Queen Theodolind has built
     In the earth a furnace-bed:
     There the Traitor Nail that spilt
     Blood of the anointed Head,
     Red of heat, resolves in shame:
     White of heat, awakes to flame.
     Beat, beat! white of heat,
     Red of heat, beat, beat!

     II

     Mark the skeleton of fire
     Lightening from its thunder-roof:
     So comes this that saw expire
     Him we love, for our behoof!
     Red of heat, O white of heat,
     This from off the Cross we greet.

     III

     Brown-cowled hammermen around
     Nerve their naked arms to strike
     Death with Resurrection crowned,
     Each upon that cruel spike.
     Red of heat the furnace leaps,
     White of heat transfigured sleeps.

     IV

     Hard against the furnace core
     Holds the Queen her streaming eyes:
     Lo! that thing of piteous gore
     In the lap of radiance lies,
     Red of heat, as when He takes,
     White of heat, whom earth forsakes.

     V

     Forth with it, and crushing ring
     Iron hymns, for men to hear
     Echoes of the deeds that sting
     Earth into its graves, and fear!
     Red of heat, He maketh thus,
     White of heat, a crown of us.

     VI

     This that killed Thee, kissed Thee, Lord!
     Touched Thee, and we touch it: dear,
     Dark it is; adored, abhorred:
     Vilest, yet most sainted here.
     Red of heat, O white of heat,
     In it hell and heaven meet.

     VII

     I behold our morning day
     When they chased Him out with rods
     Up to where this traitor lay
     Thirsting; and the blood was God's!
     Red of heat, it shall be pressed,
     White of heat, once on my breast!

     VIII

     Quick! the reptile in me shrieks,
     Not the soul. Again; the Cross
     Burn there. Oh! this pain it wreaks
     Rapture is: pain is not loss.
     Red of heat, the tooth of Death,
     White of heat, has caught my breath.

     IX

     Brand me, bite me, bitter thing!
     Thus He felt, and thus I am
     One with Him in suffering,
     One with Him in bliss, the Lamb.
     Red of heat, O white of heat,
     Thus is bitterness made sweet.

     X

     Now am I, who bear that stamp
     Scorched in me, the living sign
     Sole on earth--the lighted lamp
     Of the dreadful Day divine.
     White of heat, beat on it fast!
     Red of heat, its shape has passed.

     XI

     Out in angry sparks they fly,
     They that sentenced Him to bleed:
     Pontius and his troop: they die,
     Damned for ever for the deed!
     White of heat in vain they soar:
     Red of heat they strew the floor.

     XII

     Fury on it! have its debt!
     Thunder on the Hill accurst,
     Golgotha, be ye! and sweat
     Blood, and thirst the Passion's thirst.
     Red of heat and white of heat,
     Champ it like fierce teeth that eat.

     XIII

     Strike it as the ages crush
     Towers! for while a shape is seen
     I am rivalled. Quench its blush,
     Devil! But it crowns me Queen,
     Red of heat, as none before,
     White of heat, the circlet wore.

     XIV

     Lowly I will be, and quail,
     Crawling, with a beggar's hand:
     On my breast the branded Nail,
     On my head the iron band.
     Red of heat, are none so base!
     White of heat, none know such grace!

     XV

     In their heaven the sainted hosts,
     Robed in violet unflecked,
     Gaze on humankind as ghosts:
     I draw down a ray direct.
     Red of heat, across my brow,
     White of heat, I touch Him now.

     XVI

     Robed in violet, robed in gold,
     Robed in pearl, they make our dawn.
     What am I to them? Behold
     What ye are to me, and fawn.
     Red of heat, be humble, ye!
     White of heat, O teach it me!

     XVII

     Martyrs! hungry peaks in air,
     Rent with lightnings, clad with snow,
     Crowned with stars! you strip me bare,
     Pierce me, shame me, stretch me low,
     Red of heat, but it may be,
     White of heat, some envy me!

     XVIII

     O poor enviers! God's own gifts
     Have a devil for the weak.
     Yea, the very force that lifts
     Finds the vessel's secret leak.
     Red of heat, I rise o'er all:
     White of heat, I faint, I fall.

     XIX

     Those old Martyrs sloughed their pride,
     Taking humbleness like mirth.
     I am to His Glory tied,
     I that witness Him on earth!
     Red of heat, my pride of dust,
     White of heat, feeds fire in trust.

     XX

     Kindle me to constant fire,
     Lest the nail be but a nail!
     Give me wings of great desire,
     Lest I look within, and fail!
     Red of heat, the furnace light,
     White of heat, fix on my sight.

     XXI

     Never for the Chosen peace!
     Know, by me tormented know,
     Never shall the wrestling cease
     Till with our outlasting Foe,
     Red of heat to white of heat,
     Roll we to the Godhead's feet!
     Beat, beat! white of heat,
     Red of heat, beat, beat!



     A PREACHING FROM A SPANISH BALLAD



     I

     Ladies who in chains of wedlock
     Chafe at an unequal yoke,
     Not to nightingales give hearing;
     Better this, the raven's croak.

     II

     Down the Prado strolled my seigneur,
     Arm at lordly bow on hip,
     Fingers trimming his moustachios,
     Eyes for pirate fellowship.

     III

     Home sat she that owned him master;
     Like the flower bent to ground
     Rain-surcharged and sun-forsaken;
     Heedless of her hair unbound.

     IV

     Sudden at her feet a lover
     Palpitating knelt and wooed;
     Seemed a very gift from heaven
     To the starved of common food.

     V

     Love me? she his vows repeated:
     Fiery vows oft sung and thrummed:
     Wondered, as on earth a stranger;
     Thirsted, trusted, and succumbed.

     VI

     O beloved youth! my lover!
     Mine! my lover! take my life
     Wholly: thine in soul and body,
     By this oath of more than wife!

     VII

     Know me for no helpless woman;
     Nay, nor coward, though I sink
     Awed beside thee, like an infant
     Learning shame ere it can think.

     VIII

     Swing me hence to do thee service,
     Be thy succour, prove thy shield;
     Heaven will hear!--in house thy handmaid,
     Squire upon the battlefield.

     IX

     At my breasts I cool thy footsoles;
     Wine I pour, I dress thy meats;
     Humbly, when my lord it pleaseth,
     Lie with him on perfumed sheets:

     X

     Pray for him, my blood's dear fountain,
     While he sleeps, and watch his yawn
     In that wakening babelike moment,
     Sweeter to my thought than dawn! -

     XI

     Thundered then her lord of thunders;
     Burst the door, and, flashing sword,
     Loud disgorged the woman's title:
     Condemnation in one word.

     XII

     Grand by righteous wrath transfigured,
     Towers the husband who provides
     In his person judge and witness,
     Death's black doorkeeper besides!

     XIII

     Round his head the ancient terrors,
     Conjured of the stronger's law,
     Circle, to abash the creature
     Daring twist beneath his paw.

     XIV

     How though he hath squandered Honour
     High of Honour let him scold:
     Gilding of the man's possession,
     'Tis the woman's coin of gold.

     XV

     She inheriting from many
     Bleeding mothers bleeding sense
     Feels 'twixt her and sharp-fanged nature
     Honour first did plant the fence.

     XVI

     Nature, that so shrieks for justice;
     Honour's thirst, that blood will slake;
     These are women's riddles, roughly
     Mixed to write them saint or snake.

     XVII

     Never nature cherished woman:
     She throughout the sexes' war
     Serves as temptress and betrayer,
     Favouring man, the muscular.

     XVIII

     Lureful is she, bent for folly;
     Doating on the child which crows:
     Yours to teach him grace in fealty,
     What the bloom is, what the rose.

     XIX

     Hard the task: your prison-chamber
     Widens not for lifted latch
     Till the giant thews and sinews
     Meet their Godlike overmatch.

     XX

     Read that riddle, scorning pity's
     Tears, of cockatrices shed:
     When the heart is vowed for freedom,
     Captaincy it yields to head.

     XXI

     Meanwhile you, freaked nature's martyrs,
     Honour's army, flower and weed,
     Gentle ladies, wedded ladies,
     See for you this fair one bleed.

     XXII

     Sole stood her offence, she faltered;
     Prayed her lord the youth to spare;
     Prayed that in the orange garden
     She might lie, and ceased her prayer.

     XXIII

     Then commanding to all women
     Chastity, her breasts she laid
     Bare unto the self-avenger.
     Man in metal was the blade.



     THE YOUNG PRINCESS--A BALLAD OF OLD LAWS OF LOVE



     1--I

     When the South sang like a nightingale
     Above a bower in May,
     The training of Love's vine of flame
     Was writ in laws, for lord and dame
     To say their yea and nay.

     II

     When the South sang like a nightingale
     Across the flowering night,
     And lord and dame held gentle sport,
     There came a young princess to Court,
     A frost of beauty white.

     III

     The South sang like a nightingale
     To thaw her glittering dream:
     No vine of Love her bosom gave,
     She drank no wine of Love, but grave
     She held them to Love's theme.

     IV

     The South grew all a nightingale
     Beneath a moon unmoved:
     Like the banner of war she led them on;
     She left them to lie, like the light that has gone
     From wine-cups overproved.

     V

     When the South was a fervid nightingale,
     And she a chilling moon,
     'Twas pity to see on the garden swards,
     Against Love's laws, those rival lords
     As willow-wands lie strewn.

     VI

     The South had throat of a nightingale
     For her, the young princess:
     She gave no vine of Love to rear,
     Love's wine drank not, yet bent her ear
     To themes of Love no less.

     2--I

     The lords of the Court they sighed heart-sick,
     Heart-free Lord Dusiote laughed:
     I prize her no more than a fling o' the dice,
     But, or shame to my manhood, a lady of ice,
     We master her by craft!

     II

     Heart-sick the lords of joyance yawned,
     Lord Dusiote laughed heart-free:
     I count her as much as a crack o' my thumb,
     But, or shame of my manhood, to me she shall come
     Like the bird to roost in the tree!

     III

     At dead of night when the palace-guard
     Had passed the measured rounds,
     The young princess awoke to feel
     A shudder of blood at the crackle of steel
     Within the garden-bounds.

     IV

     It ceased, and she thought of whom was need,
     The friar or the leech;
     When lo, stood her tirewoman breathless by:
     Lord Dusiote, madam, to death is nigh,
     Of you he would have speech.

     V

     He prays you of your gentleness,
     To light him to his dark end.
     The princess rose, and forth she went,
     For charity was her intent,
     Devoutly to befriend.

     VI

     Lord Dusiote hung on his good squire's arm,
     The priest beside him knelt:
     A weeping handkerchief was pressed
     To stay the red flood at his breast,
     And bid cold ladies melt.

     VII

     O lady, though you are ice to men,
     All pure to heaven as light
     Within the dew within the flower,
     Of you 'tis whispered that love has power
     When secret is the night.

     VIII

     I have silenced the slanderers, peace to their souls!
     Save one was too cunning for me.
     I die, whose love is late avowed,
     He lives, who boasts the lily has bowed
     To the oath of a bended knee.

     IX

     Lord Dusiote drew breath with pain,
     And she with pain drew breath:
     On him she looked, on his like above;
     She flew in the folds of a marvel of love
     Revealed to pass to death.

     X

     You are dying, O great-hearted lord,
     You are dying for me, she cried;
     O take my hand, O take my kiss,
     And take of your right for love like this,
     The vow that plights me bride.

     XI

     She bade the priest recite his words
     While hand in hand were they,
     Lord Dusiote's soul to waft to bliss;
     He had her hand, her vow, her kiss,
     And his body was borne away.

     3--I

     Lord Dusiote sprang from priest and squire;
     He gazed at her lighted room:
     The laughter in his heart grew slack;
     He knew not the force that pushed him back
     From her and the morn in bloom.

     II

     Like a drowned man's length on the strong flood-tide,
     Like the shade of a bird in the sun,
     He fled from his lady whom he might claim
     As ghost, and who made the daybeams flame
     To scare what he had done.

     III

     There was grief at Court for one so gay,
     Though he was a lord less keen
     For training the vine than at vintage-press;
     But in her soul the young princess
     Believed that love had been.

     IV

     Lord Dusiote fled the Court and land,
     He crossed the woeful seas,
     Till his traitorous doing seemed clearer to burn,
     And the lady beloved drew his heart for return,
     Like the banner of war in the breeze.

     V

     He neared the palace, he spied the Court,
     And music he heard, and they told
     Of foreign lords arrived to bring
     The nuptial gifts of a bridegroom king
     To the princess grave and cold.

     VI

     The masque and the dance were cloud on wave,
     And down the masque and the dance
     Lord Dusiote stepped from dame to dame,
     And to the young princess he came,
     With a bow and a burning glance.

     VII

     Do you take a new husband to-morrow, lady?
     She shrank as at prick of steel.
     Must the first yield place to the second, he sighed.
     Her eyes were like the grave that is wide
     For the corpse from head to heel.

     VIII

     My lady, my love, that little hand
     Has mine ringed fast in plight:
     I bear for your lips a lawful thirst,
     And as justly the second should follow the first,
     I come to your door this night.

     IX

     If a ghost should come a ghost will go:
     No more the lady said,
     Save that ever when he in wrath began
     To swear by the faith of a living man,
     She answered him, You are dead.

     4--I

     The soft night-wind went laden to death
     With smell of the orange in flower;
     The light leaves prattled to neighbour ears;
     The bird of the passion sang over his tears;
     The night named hour by hour.

     II

     Sang loud, sang low the rapturous bird
     Till the yellow hour was nigh,
     Behind the folds of a darker cloud:
     He chuckled, he sobbed, alow, aloud;
     The voice between earth and sky.

     III

     O will you, will you, women are weak;
     The proudest are yielding mates
     For a forward foot and a tongue of fire:
     So thought Lord Dusiote's trusty squire,
     At watch by the palace-gates.

     IV

     The song of the bird was wine in his blood,
     And woman the odorous bloom:
     His master's great adventure stirred
     Within him to mingle the bloom and bird,
     And morn ere its coming illume.

     V

     Beside him strangely a piece of the dark
     Had moved, and the undertones
     Of a priest in prayer, like a cavernous wave,
     He heard, as were there a soul to save
     For urgency now in the groans.

     VI

     No priest was hired for the play this night:
     And the squire tossed head like a deer
     At sniff of the tainted wind; he gazed
     Where cresset-lamps in a door were raised,
     Belike on a passing bier.

     VII

     All cloaked and masked, with naked blades,
     That flashed of a judgement done,
     The lords of the Court, from the palace-door,
     Came issuing silently, bearers four,
     And flat on their shoulders one.

     VIII

     They marched the body to squire and priest,
     They lowered it sad to earth:
     The priest they gave the burial dole,
     Bade wrestle hourly for his soul,
     Who was a lord of worth.

     IX

     One said, farewell to a gallant knight!
     And one, but a restless ghost!
     'Tis a year and a day since in this place
     He died, sped high by a lady of grace
     To join the blissful host.

     X

     Not vainly on us she charged her cause,
     The lady whom we revere
     For faith in the mask of a love untrue
     To the Love we honour, the Love her due,
     The Love we have vowed to rear.

     XI

     A trap for the sweet tooth, lures for the light,
     For the fortress defiant a mine:
     Right well! But not in the South, princess,
     Shall the lady snared of her nobleness
     Ever shamed or a captive pine.

     XII

     When the South had voice of a nightingale
     Above a Maying bower,
     On the heights of Love walked radiant peers;
     The bird of the passion sang over his tears
     To the breeze and the orange-flower.



     KING HARALD'S TRANCE



     I

     Sword in length a reaping-hook amain
     Harald sheared his field, blood up to shank:
     'Mid the swathes of slain,
     First at moonrise drank.

     II

     Thereof hunger, as for meats the knife,
     Pricked his ribs, in one sharp spur to reach
     Home and his young wife,
     Nigh the sea-ford beach.

     III

     After battle keen to feed was he:
     Smoking flesh the thresher washed down fast,
     Like an angry sea
     Ships from keel to mast.

     IV

     Name us glory, singer, name us pride
     Matching Harald's in his deeds of strength;
     Chiefs, wife, sword by side,
     Foemen stretched their length!

     V

     Half a winter night the toasts hurrahed,
     Crowned him, clothed him, trumpeted him high,
     Till awink he bade
     Wife to chamber fly.

     VI

     Twice the sun had mounted, twice had sunk,
     Ere his ears took sound; he lay for dead;
     Mountain on his trunk,
     Ocean on his head.

     VII

     Clamped to couch, his fiery hearing sucked
     Whispers that at heart made iron-clang:
     Here fool-women clucked,
     There men held harangue.

     VIII

     Burial to fit their lord of war
     They decreed him: hailed the kingling: ha!
     Hateful! but this Thor
     Failed a weak lamb's baa.

     IX

     King they hailed a branchlet, shaped to fare,
     Weighted so, like quaking shingle spume,
     When his blood's own heir
     Ripened in the womb!

     X

     Still he heard, and doglike, hoglike, ran
     Nose of hearing till his blind sight saw:
     Woman stood with man
     Mouthing low, at paw.

     XI

     Woman, man, they mouthed; they spake a thing
     Armed to split a mountain, sunder seas:
     Still the frozen king
     Lay and felt him freeze.

     XII

     Doglike, hoglike, horselike now he raced,
     Riderless, in ghost across a ground
     Flint of breast, blank-faced,
     Past the fleshly bound.

     XIII

     Smell of brine his nostrils filled with might:
     Nostrils quickened eyelids, eyelids hand:
     Hand for sword at right
     Groped, the great haft spanned.

     XIV

     Wonder struck to ice his people's eyes:
     Him they saw, the prone upon the bier,
     Sheer from backbone rise,
     Sword uplifting peer.

     XV

     Sitting did he breathe against the blade,
     Standing kiss it for that proof of life:
     Strode, as netters wade,
     Straightway to his wife.

     XVI

     Her he eyed: his judgement was one word,
     Foulbed! and she fell: the blow clove two.
     Fearful for the third,
     All their breath indrew.

     XVII

     Morning danced along the waves to beach;
     Dumb his chiefs fetched breath for what might hap:
     Glassily on each
     Stared the iron cap.

     XVIII

     Sudden, as it were a monster oak
     Split to yield a limb by stress of heat,
     Strained he, staggered, broke
     Doubled at their feet.



     WHIMPER OF SYMPATHY



     Hawk or shrike has done this deed
     Of downy feathers: rueful sight!
     Sweet sentimentalist, invite
     Your bosom's Power to intercede.

     So hard it seems that one must bleed
     Because another needs will bite!
     All round we find cold Nature slight
     The feelings of the totter-knee'd.

     O it were pleasant with you
     To fly from this tussle of foes,
     The shambles, the charnel, the wrinkle!
     To dwell in yon dribble of dew
     On the cheek of your sovereign rose,
     And live the young life of a twinkle.



     YOUNG REYNARD



     I

     Gracefullest leaper, the dappled fox-cub
     Curves over brambles with berries and buds,
     Light as a bubble that flies from the tub,
     Whisked by the laundry-wife out of her suds.
     Wavy he comes, woolly, all at his ease,
     Elegant, fashioned to foot with the deuce;
     Nature's own prince of the dance: then he sees
     Me, and retires as if making excuse.

     II

     Never closed minuet courtlier! Soon
     Cub-hunting troops were abroad, and a yelp
     Told of sure scent: ere the stroke upon noon
     Reynard the younger lay far beyond help.
     Wild, my poor friend, has the fate to be chased;
     Civil will conquer: were 't other 'twere worse;
     Fair, by the flushed early morning embraced,
     Haply you live a day longer in verse.



     MANFRED



     I

     Projected from the bilious Childe,
     This clatterjaw his foot could set
     On Alps, without a breast beguiled
     To glow in shedding rascal sweat.
     Somewhere about his grinder teeth,
     He mouthed of thoughts that grilled beneath,
     And summoned Nature to her feud
     With bile and buskin Attitude.

     II

     Considerably was the world
     Of spinsterdom and clergy racked
     While he his hinted horrors hurled,
     And she pictorially attacked.
     A duel hugeous. Tragic? Ho!
     The cities, not the mountains, blow
     Such bladders; in their shapes confessed
     An after-dinner's indigest.



     HERNANI



     Cistercians might crack their sides
     With laughter, and exemption get,
     At sight of heroes clasping brides,
     And hearing--O the horn! the horn!
     The horn of their obstructive debt!

     But quit the stage, that note applies
     For sermons cosmopolitan,
     Hernani. Have we filched our prize,
     Forgetting . . .? O the horn! the horn!
     The horn of the Old Gentleman!



     THE NUPTIALS OF ATTILA



     I

     Flat as to an eagle's eye,
     Earth hung under Attila.
     Sign for carnage gave he none.
     In the peace of his disdain,
     Sun and rain, and rain and sun,
     Cherished men to wax again,
     Crawl, and in their manner die.
     On his people stood a frost.
     Like the charger cut in stone,
     Rearing stiff, the warrior host,
     Which had life from him alone,
     Craved the trumpet's eager note,
     As the bridled earth the Spring.
     Rusty was the trumpet's throat.
     He let chief and prophet rave;
     Venturous earth around him string
     Threads of grass and slender rye,
     Wave them, and untrampled wave.
     O for the time when God did cry,
     Eye and have, my Attila!

     II

     Scorn of conquest filled like sleep
     Him that drank of havoc deep
     When the Green Cat pawed the globe:
     When the horsemen from his bow
     Shot in sheaves and made the foe
     Crimson fringes of a robe,
     Trailed o'er towns and fields in woe;
     When they streaked the rivers red,
     When the saddle was the bed.
     Attila, my Attila!

     III

     He breathed peace and pulled a flower.
     Eye and have, my Attila!
     This was the damsel Ildico,
     Rich in bloom until that hour:
     Shyer than the forest doe
     Twinkling slim through branches green.
     Yet the shyest shall be seen.
     Make the bed for Attila!

     IV

     Seen of Attila, desired,
     She was led to him straightway:
     Radiantly was she attired;
     Rifled lands were her array,
     Jewels bled from weeping crowns,
     Gold of woeful fields and towns.
     She stood pallid in the light.
     How she walked, how withered white,
     From the blessing to the board,
     She who would have proudly blushed,
     Women whispered, asking why,
     Hinting of a youth, and hushed.
     Was it terror of her lord?
     Was she childish? was she sly?
     Was it the bright mantle's dye
     Drained her blood to hues of grief
     Like the ash that shoots the spark?
     See the green tree all in leaf:
     See the green tree stripped of bark! -
     Make the bed for Attila!

     V

     Round the banquet-table's load
     Scores of iron horsemen rode;
     Chosen warriors, keen and hard;
     Grain of threshing battle-dints;
     Attila's fierce body-guard,
     Smelling war like fire in flints.
     Grant them peace be fugitive!
     Iron-capped and iron-heeled,
     Each against his fellow's shield
     Smote the spear-head, shouting, Live,
     Attila! my Attila!
     Eagle, eagle of our breed,
     Eagle, beak the lamb, and feed!
     Have her, and unleash us! live,
     Attila! my Attila!

     VI

     He was of the blood to shine
     Bronze in joy, like skies that scorch.
     Beaming with the goblet wine
     In the wavering of the torch,
     Looked he backward on his bride.
     Eye and have, my Attila!
     Fair in her wide robe was she:
     Where the robe and vest divide,
     Fair she seemed surpassingly:
     Soft, yet vivid as the stream
     Danube rolls in the moonbeam
     Through rock-barriers: but she smiled
     Never, she sat cold as salt:
     Open-mouthed as a young child
     Wondering with a mind at fault.
     Make the bed for Attila!

     VII

     Under the thin hoop of gold
     Whence in waves her hair outrolled,
     'Twixt her brows the women saw
     Shadows of a vulture's claw
     Gript in flight: strange knots that sped
     Closing and dissolving aye:
     Such as wicked dreams betray
     When pale dawn creeps o'er the bed.
     They might show the common pang
     Known to virgins, in whom dread
     Hunts their bliss like famished hounds;
     While the chiefs with roaring rounds
     Tossed her to her lord, and sang
     Praise of him whose hand was large,
     Cheers for beauty brought to yield,
     Chirrups of the trot afield,
     Hurrahs of the battle-charge.

     VIII

     Those rock-faces hung with weed
     Reddened: their great days of speed,
     Slaughter, triumph, flood and flame,
     Like a jealous frenzy wrought,
     Scoffed at them and did them shame,
     Quaffing idle, conquering nought.
     O for the time when God decreed
     Earth the prey of Attila!
     God called on thee in his wrath,
     Trample it to mire! 'Twas done.
     Swift as Danube clove our path
     Down from East to Western sun.
     Huns! behold your pasture, gaze,
     Take, our king said: heel to flank
     (Whisper it, the war-horse neighs!)
     Forth we drove, and blood we drank
     Fresh as dawn-dew: earth was ours:
     Men were flocks we lashed and spurned:
     Fast as windy flame devours,
     Flame along the wind, we burned.
     Arrow javelin, spear, and sword!
     Here the snows and there the plains;
     On! our signal: onward poured
     Torrents of the tightened reins,
     Foaming over vine and corn
     Hot against the city-wall.
     Whisper it, you sound a horn
     To the grey beast in the stall!
     Yea, he whinnies at a nod.
     O for sound of the trumpet-notes!
     O for the time when thunder-shod,
     He that scarce can munch his oats,
     Hung on the peaks, brooded aloof,
     Champed the grain of the wrath of God,
     Pressed a cloud on the cowering roof,
     Snorted out of the blackness fire!
     Scarlet broke the sky, and down,
     Hammering West with print of his hoof,
     He burst out of the bosom of ire
     Sharp as eyelight under thy frown,
     Attila, my Attila!

     IX

     Ravaged cities rolling smoke
     Thick on cornfields dry and black,
     Wave his banners, bear his yoke.
     Track the lightning, and you track
     Attila. They moan: 'tis he!
     Bleed: 'tis he! Beneath his foot
     Leagues are deserts charred and mute;
     Where he passed, there passed a sea.
     Attila, my Attila!

     X

     - Who breathed on the king cold breath?
     Said a voice amid the host,
     He is Death that weds a ghost,
     Else a ghost that weds with Death?
     Ildico's chill little hand
     Shuddering he beheld: austere
     Stared, as one who would command
     Sight of what has filled his ear:
     Plucked his thin beard, laughed disdain.
     Feast, ye Huns! His arm be raised,
     Like the warrior, battle-dazed,
     Joining to the fight amain.
     Make the bed for Attila!

     XI

     Silent Ildico stood up.
     King and chief to pledge her well,
     Shocked sword sword and cup on cup,
     Clamouring like a brazen bell.
     Silent stepped the queenly slave.
     Fair, by heaven! she was to meet
     On a midnight, near a grave,
     Flapping wide the winding-sheet.

     XII

     Death and she walked through the crowd,
     Out beyond the flush of light.
     Ceremonious women bowed
     Following her: 'twas middle night.
     Then the warriors each on each
     Spied, nor overloudly laughed;
     Like the victims of the leech,
     Who have drunk of a strange draught.

     XIII

     Attila remained. Even so
     Frowned he when he struck the blow,
     Brained his horse, that stumbled twice,
     On a bloody day in Gaul,
     Bellowing, Perish omens! All
     Marvelled at the sacrifice,
     But the battle, swinging dim,
     Rang off that axe-blow for him.
     Attila, my Attila!

     XIV

     Brightening over Danube wheeled
     Star by star; and she, most fair,
     Sweet as victory half-revealed,
     Seized to make him glad and young;
     She, O sweet as the dark sign
     Given him oft in battles gone,
     When the voice within said, Dare!
     And the trumpet-notes were sprung
     Rapturous for the charge in line:
     She lay waiting: fair as dawn
     Wrapped in folds of night she lay;
     Secret, lustrous; flaglike there,
     Waiting him to stream and ray,
     With one loosening blush outflung,
     Colours of his hordes of horse
     Ranked for combat; still he hung
     Like the fever dreading air,
     Cursed of heat; and as a corse
     Gathers vultures, in his brain
     Images of her eyes and kiss
     Plucked at the limbs that could remain
     Loitering nigh the doors of bliss.
     Make the bed for Attila!

     XV

     Passion on one hand, on one,
     Destiny led forth the Hun.
     Heard ye outcries of affright,
     Voices that through many a fray,
     In the press of flag and spear,
     Warned the king of peril near?
     Men were dumb, they gave him way,
     Eager heads to left and right,
     Like the bearded standard, thrust,
     As in battle, for a nod
     From their lord of battle-dust.
     Attila, my Attila!
     Slow between the lines he trod.
     Saw ye not the sun drop slow
     On this nuptial day, ere eve
     Pierced him on the couch aglow?
     Attila, my Attila!
     Here and there his heart would cleave
     Clotted memory for a space:
     Some stout chief's familiar face,
     Choicest of his fighting brood,
     Touched him, as 'twere one to know
     Ere he met his bride's embrace.
     Attila, my Attila!
     Twisting fingers in a beard
     Scant as winter underwood,
     With a narrowed eye he peered;
     Like the sunset's graver red
     Up old pine-stems. Grave he stood
     Eyeing them on whom was shed
     Burning light from him alone.
     Attila, my Attila!
     Red were they whose mouths recalled
     Where the slaughter mounted high,
     High on it, o'er earth appalled,
     He; heaven's finger in their sight
     Raising him on waves of dead,
     Up to heaven his trumpets blown.
     O for the time when God's delight
     Crowned the head of Attila!
     Hungry river of the crag
     Stretching hands for earth he came:
     Force and Speed astride his name
     Pointed back to spear and flag.
     He came out of miracle cloud,
     Lightning-swift and spectre-lean.
     Now those days are in a shroud:
     Have him to his ghostly queen.
     Make the bed for Attila!

     XVI

     One, with winecups overstrung,
     Cried him farewell in Rome's tongue.
     Who? for the great king turned as though
     Wrath to the shaft's head strained the bow.
     Nay, not wrath the king possessed,
     But a radiance of the breast.
     In that sound he had the key
     Of his cunning malady.
     Lo, where gleamed the sapphire lake,
     Leo, with his Rome at stake,
     Drew blank air to hues and forms;
     Whereof Two that shone distinct,
     Linked as orbed stars are linked,
     Clear among the myriad swarms,
     In a constellation, dashed
     Full on horse and rider's eyes
     Sunless light, but light it was -
     Light that blinded and abashed,
     Froze his members, bade him pause,
     Caught him mid-gallop, blazed him home.
     Attila, my Attila!
     What are streams that cease to flow?
     What was Attila, rolled thence,
     Cheated by a juggler's show?
     Like that lake of blue intense,
     Under tempest lashed to foam,
     Lurid radiance, as he passed,
     Filled him, and around was glassed,
     When deep-voiced he uttered, Rome!

     XVII

     Rome! the word was: and like meat
     Flung to dogs the word was torn.
     Soon Rome's magic priests shall bleat
     Round their magic Pope forlorn!
     Loud they swore the king had sworn
     Vengeance on the Roman cheat,
     Ere he passed, as, grave and still,
     Danube through the shouting hill:
     Sworn it by his naked life!
     Eagle, snakes these women are:
     Take them on the wing! but war,
     Smoking war's the warrior's wife!
     Then for plunder! then for brides
     Won without a winking priest! -
     Danube whirled his train of tides
     Black toward the yellow East.
     Make the bed for Attila!

     XVIII

     Chirrups of the trot afield,
     Hurrahs of the battle-charge,
     How they answered, how they pealed,
     When the morning rose and drew
     Bow and javelin, lance and targe,
     In the nuptial casement's view!
     Attila, my Attila!
     Down the hillspurs, out of tents
     Glimmering in mid-forest, through
     Mists of the cool morning scents,
     Forth from city-alley, court,
     Arch, the bounding horsemen flew,
     Joined along the plains of dew,
     Raced and gave the rein to sport,
     Closed and streamed like curtain-rents
     Fluttered by a wind, and flowed
     Into squadrons: trumpets blew,
     Chargers neighed, and trappings glowed
     Brave as the bright Orient's.
     Look on the seas that run to greet
     Sunrise: look on the leagues of wheat:
     Look on the lines and squares that fret
     Leaping to level the lance blood-wet.
     Tens of thousands, man and steed,
     Tossing like field-flowers in Spring;
     Ready to be hurled at need
     Whither their great lord may sling.
     Finger Romeward, Romeward, King!
     Attila, my Attila!
     Still the woman holds him fast
     As a night-flag round the mast.

     XIX

     Nigh upon the fiery noon,
     Out of ranks a roaring burst.
     'Ware white women like the moon!
     They are poison: they have thirst
     First for love, and next for rule.
     Jealous of the army, she?
     Ho, the little wanton fool!
     We were his before she squealed
     Blind for mother's milk, and heeled
     Kicking on her mother's knee.
     His in life and death are we:
     She but one flower of a field.
     We have given him bliss tenfold
     In an hour to match her night:
     Attila, my Attila!
     Still her arms the master hold,
     As on wounds the scarf winds tight.

     XX

     Over Danube day no more,
     Like the warrior's planted spear,
     Stood to hail the King: in fear
     Western day knocked at his door.
     Attila, my Attila!
     Sudden in the army's eyes
     Rolled a blast of lights and cries:
     Flashing through them: Dead are ye!
     Dead, ye Huns, and torn piecemeal!
     See the ordered army reel
     Stricken through the ribs: and see,
     Wild for speed to cheat despair,
     Horsemen, clutching knee to chin,
     Crouch and dart they know not where.
     Attila, my Attila!
     Faces covered, faces bare,
     Light the palace-front like jets
     Of a dreadful fire within.
     Beating hands and driving hair
     Start on roof and parapets.
     Dust rolls up; the slaughter din.
     - Death to them who call him dead!
     Death to them who doubt the tale!
     Choking in his dusty veil,
     Sank the sun on his death-bed.
     Make the bed for Attila!

     XXI

     'Tis the room where thunder sleeps.
     Frenzy, as a wave to shore
     Surging, burst the silent door,
     And drew back to awful deeps
     Breath beaten out, foam-white. Anew
     Howled and pressed the ghastly crew,
     Like storm-waters over rocks.
     Attila, my Attila!
     One long shaft of sunset red
     Laid a finger on the bed.
     Horror, with the snaky locks,
     Shocked the surge to stiffened heaps,
     Hoary as the glacier's head
     Faced to the moon. Insane they look.
     God it is in heaven who weeps
     Fallen from his hand the Scourge he shook.
     Make the bed for Attila!

     XXII

     Square along the couch, and stark,
     Like the sea-rejected thing
     Sea-sucked white, behold their King.
     Attila, my Attila!
     Beams that panted black and bright,
     Scornful lightnings danced their sight:
     Him they see an oak in bud,
     Him an oaklog stripped of bark:
     Him, their lord of day and night,
     White, and lifting up his blood
     Dumb for vengeance. Name us that,
     Huddled in the corner dark
     Humped and grinning like a cat,
     Teeth for lips!--'tis she! she stares,
     Glittering through her bristled hairs.
     Rend her! Pierce her to the hilt!
     She is Murder: have her out!
     What! this little fist, as big
     As the southern summer fig!
     She is Madness, none may doubt.
     Death, who dares deny her guilt!
     Death, who says his blood she spilt!
     Make the bed for Attila!

     XXIII

     Torch and lamp and sunset-red
     Fell three-fingered on the bed.
     In the torch the beard-hair scant
     With the great breast seemed to pant:
     In the yellow lamp the limbs
     Wavered, as the lake-flower swims:
     In the sunset red the dead
     Dead avowed him, dry blood-red.

     XXIV

     Hatred of that abject slave,
     Earth, was in each chieftain's heart.
     Earth has got him, whom God gave,
     Earth may sing, and earth shall smart!
     Attila, my Attila!

     XXV

     Thus their prayer was raved and ceased.
     Then had Vengeance of her feast
     Scent in their quick pang to smite
     Which they knew not, but huge pain
     Urged them for some victim slain
     Swift, and blotted from the sight.
     Each at each, a crouching beast,
     Glared, and quivered for the word.
     Each at each, and all on that,
     Humped and grinning like a cat,
     Head-bound with its bridal-wreath.
     Then the bitter chamber heard
     Vengeance in a cauldron seethe.
     Hurried counsel rage and craft
     Yelped to hungry men, whose teeth
     Hard the grey lip-ringlet gnawed,
     Gleaming till their fury laughed.
     With the steel-hilt in the clutch,
     Eyes were shot on her that froze
     In their blood-thirst overawed;
     Burned to rend, yet feared to touch.
     She that was his nuptial rose,
     She was of his heart's blood clad:
     Oh! the last of him she had! -
     Could a little fist as big
     As the southern summer fig,
     Push a dagger's point to pierce
     Ribs like those? Who else! They glared
     Each at each. Suspicion fierce
     Many a black remembrance bared.
     Attila, my Attila!
     Death, who dares deny her guilt!
     Death, who says his blood she spilt!
     Traitor he, who stands between!
     Swift to hell, who harms the Queen!
     She, the wild contention's cause,
     Combed her hair with quiet paws.
     Make the bed for Attila!

     XXVI

     Night was on the host in arms.
     Night, as never night before,
     Hearkened to an army's roar
     Breaking up in snaky swarms:
     Torch and steel and snorting steed,
     Hunted by the cry of blood,
     Cursed with blindness, mad for day.
     Where the torches ran a flood,
     Tales of him and of the deed
     Showered like a torrent spray.
     Fear of silence made them strive
     Loud in warrior-hymns that grew
     Hoarse for slaughter yet unwreaked.
     Ghostly Night across the hive,
     With a crimson finger drew
     Letters on her breast and shrieked.
     Night was on them like the mould
     On the buried half alive.
     Night, their bloody Queen, her fold
     Wound on them and struck them through.
     Make the bed for Attila!

     XXVII

     Earth has got him whom God gave,
     Earth may sing, and earth shall smart!
     None of earth shall know his grave.
     They that dig with Death depart.
     Attila, my Attila!

     XXVIII

     Thus their prayer was raved and passed:
     Passed in peace their red sunset:
     Hewn and earthed those men of sweat
     Who had housed him in the vast,
     Where no mortal might declare,
     There lies he--his end was there!
     Attila, my Attila!

     XXIX

     Kingless was the army left:
     Of its head the race bereft.
     Every fury of the pit
     Tortured and dismembered it.
     Lo, upon a silent hour,
     When the pitch of frost subsides,
     Danube with a shout of power
     Loosens his imprisoned tides:
     Wide around the frighted plains
     Shake to hear his riven chains,
     Dreadfuller than heaven in wrath,
     As he makes himself a path:
     High leap the ice-cracks, towering pile
     Floes to bergs, and giant peers
     Wrestle on a drifted isle;
     Island on ice-island rears;
     Dissolution battles fast:
     Big the senseless Titans loom,
     Through a mist of common doom
     Striving which shall die the last:
     Till a gentle-breathing morn
     Frees the stream from bank to bank.
     So the Empire built of scorn
     Agonized, dissolved and sank.
     Of the Queen no more was told
     Than of leaf on Danube rolled.
     Make the bed for Attila!



     ANEURIN'S HARP



     I

     Prince of Bards was old Aneurin;
     He the grand Gododin sang;
     All his numbers threw such fire in,
     Struck his harp so wild a twang; -
     Still the wakeful Briton borrows
     Wisdom from its ancient heat:
     Still it haunts our source of sorrows,
     Deep excess of liquor sweet!

     II

     Here the Briton, there the Saxon,
     Face to face, three fields apart,
     Thirst for light to lay their thwacks on
     Each the other with good heart.
     Dry the Saxon sits, 'mid dinful
     Noise of iron knits his steel:
     Fresh and roaring with a skinful,
     Britons round the hirlas reel.

     III

     Yellow flamed the meady sunset;
     Red runs up the flag of morn.
     Signal for the British onset
     Hiccups through the British horn.
     Down these hillmen pour like cattle
     Sniffing pasture: grim below,
     Showing eager teeth of battle,
     In his spear-heads lies the foe.

     IV

     - Monster of the sea! we drive him
     Back into his hungry brine.
     - You shall lodge him, feed him, wive him,
     Look on us; we stand in line.
     - Pale sea-monster! foul the waters
     Cast him; foul he leaves our land.
     - You shall yield us land and daughters:
     Stay the tongue, and try the hand.

     V

     Swift as torrent-streams our warriors,
     Tossing torrent lights, find way;
     Burst the ridges, crowd the barriers,
     Pierce them where the spear-heads play;
     Turn them as the clods in furrow,
     Top them like the leaping foam;
     Sorrow to the mother, sorrow,
     Sorrow to the wife at home!

     VI

     Stags, they butted; bulls, they bellowed;
     Hounds, we baited them; oh, brave!
     Every second man, unfellowed,
     Took the strokes of two, and gave.
     Bare as hop-stakes in November's
     Mists they met our battle-flood:
     Hoary-red as Winter's embers
     Lay their dead lines done in blood.

     VII

     Thou, my Bard, didst hang thy lyre in
     Oak-leaves, and with crimson brand
     Rhythmic fury spent, Aneurin;
     Songs the churls could understand:
     Thrumming on their Saxon sconces
     Straight, the invariable blow,
     Till they snorted true responses.
     Ever thus the Bard they know!

     VIII

     But ere nightfall, harper lusty!
     When the sun was like a ball
     Dropping on the battle dusty,
     What was yon discordant call?
     Cambria's old metheglin demon
     Breathed against our rushing tide;
     Clove us midst the threshing seamen:-
     Gashed, we saw our ranks divide!

     IX

     Britain then with valedictory
     Shriek veiled off her face and knelt.
     Full of liquor, full of victory,
     Chief on chief old vengeance dealt.
     Backward swung their hurly-burly;
     None but dead men kept the fight.
     They that drink their cup too early,
     Darkness they shall see ere night.

     X

     Loud we heard the yellow rover
     Laugh to sleep, while we raged thick,
     Thick as ants the ant-hill over,
     Asking who has thrust the stick.
     Lo, as frogs that Winter cumbers
     Meet the Spring with stiffen'd yawn,
     We from our hard night of slumbers
     Marched into the bloody dawn.

     XI

     Day on day we fought, though shattered:
     Pushed and met repulses sharp,
     Till our Raven's plumes were scattered:
     All, save old Aneurin's harp.
     Hear it wailing like a mother
     O'er the strings of children slain!
     He in one tongue, in another,
     Alien, I; one blood, yet twain.

     XII

     Old Aneurin! droop no longer.
     That squat ocean-scum, we own,
     Had fine stoutness, made us stronger,
     Brought us much-required backbone:
     Claimed of Power their dues, and granted
     Dues to Power in turn, when rose
     Mightier rovers; they that planted
     Sovereign here the Norman nose.

     XIII

     Glorious men, with heads of eagles,
     Chopping arms, and cupboard lips;
     Warriors, hunters, keen as beagles,
     Mounted aye on horse or ships.
     Active, being hungry creatures;
     Silent, having nought to say:
     High they raised the lord of features,
     Saxon-worshipped to this day.

     XIV

     Hear its deeds, the great recital!
     Stout as bergs of Arctic ice
     Once it led, and lived; a title
     Now it is, and names its price.
     This our Saxon brothers cherish:
     This, when by the worth of wits
     Lands are reared aloft, or perish,
     Sole illumes their lucre-pits.

     XV

     Know we not our wrongs, unwritten
     Though they be, Aneurin? Sword,
     Song, and subtle mind, the Briton
     Brings to market, all ignored.
     'Gainst the Saxon's bone impinging,
     Still is our Gododin played;
     Shamed we see him humbly cringing
     In a shadowy nose's shade.

     XVI

     Bitter is the weight that crushes
     Low, my Bard, thy race of fire.
     Here no fair young future blushes
     Bridal to a man's desire.
     Neither chief, nor aim, nor splendour
     Dressing distance, we perceive.
     Neither honour, nor the tender
     Bloom of promise, morn or eve.

     XVII

     Joined we are; a tide of races
     Rolled to meet a common fate;
     England clasps in her embraces
     Many: what is England's state?
     England her distended middle
     Thumps with pride as Mammon's wife;
     Says that thus she reads thy riddle,
     Heaven! 'tis heaven to plump her life.

     XVIII

     O my Bard! a yellow liquor,
     Like to that we drank of old -
     Gold is her metheglin beaker,
     She destruction drinks in gold.
     Warn her, Bard, that Power is pressing
     Hotly for his dues this hour;
     Tell her that no drunken blessing
     Stops the onward march of Power.

     XIX

     Has she ears to take forewarnings
     She will cleanse her of her stains,
     Feed and speed for braver mornings
     Valorously the growth of brains.
     Power, the hard man knit for action,
     Reads each nation on the brow.
     Cripple, fool, and petrifaction
     Fall to him--are falling now!



     MEN AND MAN



     I

     Men the Angels eyed;
     And here they were wild waves,
     And there as marsh descried;
     Men the Angels eyed,
     And liked the picture best
     Where they were greenly dressed
     In brotherhood of graves.

     II

     Man the Angels marked:
     He led a host through murk,
     On fearful seas embarked;
     Man the Angels marked;
     To think without a nay,
     That he was good as they,
     And help him at his work.

     III

     Man and Angels, ye
     A sluggish fen shall drain,
     Shall quell a warring sea.
     Man and Angels, ye,
     Whom stain of strife befouls,
     A light to kindle souls
     Bear radiant in the stain.



     THE LAST CONTENTION



     I

     Young captain of a crazy bark!
     O tameless heart in battered frame!
     Thy sailing orders have a mark,
     And hers is not the name.

     II

     For action all thine iron clanks
     In cravings for a splendid prize;
     Again to race or bump thy planks
     With any flag that flies.

     III

     Consult them; they are eloquent
     For senses not inebriate.
     They trust thee on the star intent,
     That leads to land their freight.

     IV

     And they have known thee high peruse
     The heavens, and deep the earth, till thou
     Didst into the flushed circle cruise
     Where reason quits the brow.

     V

     Thou animatest ancient tales,
     To prove our world of linear seed:
     Thy very virtue now assails,
     A tempter to mislead.

     VI

     But thou hast answer I am I;
     My passion hallows, bids command:
     And she is gracious, she is nigh:
     One motion of the hand!

     VII

     It will suffice; a whirly tune
     These winds will pipe, and thou perform
     The nodded part of pantaloon
     In thy created storm.

     VIII

     Admires thee Nature with much pride;
     She clasps thee for a gift of morn,
     Till thou art set against the tide,
     And then beware her scorn.

     IX

     Sad issue, should that strife befall
     Between thy mortal ship and thee!
     It writes the melancholy scrawl
     Of wreckage over sea.

     X

     This lady of the luting tongue,
     The flash in darkness, billow's grace,
     For thee the worship; for the young
     In muscle the embrace.

     XI

     Soar on thy manhood clear from those
     Whose toothless Winter claws at May,
     And take her as the vein of rose
     Athwart an evening grey.



     PERIANDER



     I

     How died Melissa none dares shape in words.
     A woman who is wife despotic lords
     Count faggot at the question, Shall she live!
     Her son, because his brows were black of her,
     Runs barking for his bread, a fugitive,
     And Corinth frowns on them that feed the cur.

     II

     There is no Corinth save the whip and curb
     Of Corinth, high Periander; the superb
     In magnanimity, in rule severe.
     Up on his marble fortress-tower he sits,
     The city under him: a white yoked steer,
     That bears his heart for pulse, his head for wits.

     III

     Bloom of the generous fires of his fair Spring
     Still coloured him when men forbore to sting;
     Admiring meekly where the ordered seeds
     Of his good sovereignty showed gardens trim;
     And owning that the hoe he struck at weeds
     Was author of the flowers raised face to him.

     IV

     His Corinth, to each mood subservient
     In homage, made he as an instrument
     To yield him music with scarce touch of stops.
     He breathed, it piped; he moved, it rose to fly:
     At whiles a bloodhorse racing till it drops;
     At whiles a crouching dog, on him all eye.

     V

     His wisdom men acknowledged; only one,
     The creature, issue of him, Lycophron,
     That rebel with his mother in his brows,
     Contested: such an infamous would foul
     Pirene! Little heed where he might house
     The prince gave, hearing: so the fox, the owl!

     VI

     To prove the Gods benignant to his rule,
     The years, which fasten rigid whom they cool,
     Reviewing, saw him hold the seat of power.
     A grey one asked: Who next? nor answer had:
     One greyer pointed on the pallid hour
     To come: a river dried of waters glad.

     VII

     For which of his male issue promised grip
     To stride yon people, with the curb and whip?
     This Lycophron! he sole, the father like,
     Fired prospect of a line in one strong tide,
     By right of mastery; stern will to strike;
     Pride to support the stroke: yea, Godlike pride!

     VIII

     Himself the prince beheld a failing fount.
     His line stretched back unto its holy mount:
     The thirsty onward waved for him no sign.
     Then stood before his vision that hard son.
     The seizure of a passion for his line
     Impelled him to the path of Lycophron.

     IX

     The youth was tossing pebbles in the sea;
     A figure shunned along the busy quay,
     Perforce of the harsh edict for who dared
     Address him outcast. Naming it, he crossed
     His father's look with look that proved them paired
     For stiffness, and another pebble tossed.

     X

     An exile to the Island ere nightfall
     He passed from sight, from the hushed mouths of all.
     It had resemblance to a death: and on,
     Against a coast where sapphire shattered white,
     The seasons rolled like troops of billows blown
     To spraymist. The prince gazed on capping night.

     XI

     Deaf Age spake in his ear with shouts: Thy son!
     Deep from his heart Life raved of work not done.
     He heard historic echoes moan his name,
     As of the prince in whom the race had pause;
     Till Tyranny paternity became,
     And him he hated loved he for the cause.

     XII

     Not Lycophron the exile now appeared,
     But young Periander, from the shadow cleared,
     That haunted his rebellious brows. The prince
     Grew bright for him; saw youth, if seeming loth,
     Return: and of pure pardon to convince,
     Despatched the messenger most dear with both.

     XIII

     His daughter, from the exile's Island home,
     Wrote, as a flight of halcyons o'er the foam,
     Sweet words: her brother to his father bowed;
     Accepted his peace-offering, and rejoiced.
     To bring him back a prince the father vowed,
     Commanded man the oars, the white sails hoist.

     XIV

     He waved the fleet to strain its westward way
     On to the sea-hued hills that crown the bay:
     Soil of those hospitable islanders
     Whom now his heart, for honour to his blood,
     Thanked. They should learn what boons a prince confers
     When happiness enjoins him gratitude!

     XV

     In watch upon the offing, worn with haste
     To see his youth revived, and, close embraced,
     Pardon who had subdued him, who had gained
     Surely the stoutest battle between two
     Since Titan pierced by young Apollo stained
     Earth's breast, the prince looked forth, himself looked through.

     XVI

     Errors aforetime unperceived were bared,
     To be by his young masterful repaired:
     Renewed his great ideas gone to smoke;
     His policy confirmed amid the surge
     Of States and people fretting at his yoke.
     And lo, the fleet brown-flocked on the sea-verge!

     XVII

     Oars pulled: they streamed in harbour; without cheer
     For welcome shadowed round the heaving bier.
     They, whose approach in such rare pomp and stress
     Of numbers the free islanders dismayed
     At Tyranny come masking to oppress,
     Found Lycophron this breathless, this lone-laid.

     XVIII

     Who smote the man thrown open to young joy?
     The image of the mother of his boy
     Came forth from his unwary breast in wreaths,
     With eyes. And shall a woman, that extinct,
     Smite out of dust the Powerful who breathes?
     Her loved the son; her served; they lay close-linked!

     XIX

     Dead was he, and demanding earth. Demand
     Sharper for vengeance of an instant hand,
     The Tyrant in the father heard him cry,
     And raged a plague; to prove on free Hellenes
     How prompt the Tyrant for the Persian dye;
     How black his Gods behind their marble screens.



     SOLON



     I

     The Tyrant passed, and friendlier was his eye
     On the great man of Athens, whom for foe
     He knew, than on the sycophantic fry
     That broke as waters round a galley's flow,
     Bubbles at prow and foam along the wake.
     Solidity the Thunderer could not shake,
     Beneath an adverse wind still stripping bare,
     His kinsman, of the light-in-cavern look,
     From thought drew, and a countenance could wear
     Not less at peace than fields in Attic air
     Shorn, and shown fruitful by the reaper's hook.

     II

     Most enviable so; yet much insane
     To deem of minds of men they grow! these sheep,
     By fits wild horses, need the crook and rein;
     Hot bulls by fits, pure wisdom hold they cheap,
     My Lawgiver, when fiery is the mood.
     For ones and twos and threes thy words are good;
     For thine own government are pillars: mine
     Stand acts to fit the herd; which has quick thirst,
     Rejecting elegiacs, though they shine
     On polished brass, and, worthy of the Nine,
     In showering columns from their fountain burst.

     III

     Thus museful rode the Tyrant, princely plumed,
     To his high seat upon the sacred rock:
     And Solon, blank beside his rule, resumed
     The meditation which that passing mock
     Had buffeted awhile to sallowness.
     He little loved the man, his office less,
     Yet owned him for a flower of his kind.
     Therefore the heavier curse on Athens he!
     The people grew not in themselves, but, blind,
     Accepted sight from him, to him resigned
     Their hopes of stature, rootless as at sea.

     IV

     As under sea lay Solon's work, or seemed
     By turbid shore-waves beaten day by day;
     Defaced, half formless, like an image dreamed,
     Or child that fashioned in another clay
     Appears, by strangers' hands to home returned.
     But shall the Present tyrannize us? earned
     It was in some way, justly says the sage.
     One sees not how, while husbanding regrets;
     While tossing scorn abroad from righteous rage,
     High vision is obscured; for this is age
     When robbed--more infant than the babe it frets!

     V

     Yet see Athenians treading the black path
     Laid by a prince's shadow! well content
     To wait his pleasure, shivering at his wrath:
     They bow to their accepted Orient
     With offer of the all that renders bright:
     Forgetful of the growth of men to light,
     As creatures reared on Persian milk they bow.
     Unripe! unripe! The times are overcast.
     But still may they who sowed behind the plough
     True seed fix in the mind an unborn NOW
     To make the plagues afflicting us things past.



     BELLEROPHON



     I

     Maimed, beggared, grey; seeking an alms; with nod
     Of palsy doing task of thanks for bread;
     Upon the stature of a God,
     He whom the Gods have struck bends low his head.

     II

     Weak words he has, that slip the nerveless tongue
     Deformed, like his great frame: a broken arc:
     Once radiant as the javelin flung
     Right at the centre breastplate of his mark.

     III

     Oft pausing on his white-eyed inward look,
     Some undermountain narrative he tells,
     As gapped by Lykian heat the brook
     Cut from the source that in the upland swells.

     IV

     The cottagers who dole him fruit and crust
     With patient inattention hear him prate:
     And comes the snow, and comes the dust,
     Comes the old wanderer, more bent of late.

     V

     A crazy beggar grateful for a meal
     Has ever of himself a world to say.
     For them he is an ancient wheel
     Spinning a knotted thread the livelong day.

     VI

     He cannot, nor do they, the tale connect;
     For never singer in the land had been
     Who him for theme did not reject:
     Spurned of the hoof that sprang the Hippocrene.

     VII

     Albeit a theme of flame to bring them straight
     The snorting white-winged brother of the wave,
     They hear him as a thing by fate
     Cursed in unholy babble to his grave.

     VIII

     As men that spied the wings, that heard the snort,
     Their sires have told; and of a martial prince
     Bestriding him; and old report
     Speaks of a monster slain by one long since.

     IX

     There is that story of the golden bit
     By Goddess given to tame the lightning steed:
     A mortal who could mount, and sit
     Flying, and up Olympus midway speed.

     X

     He rose like the loosed fountain's utmost leap;
     He played the star at span of heaven right o'er
     Men's heads: they saw the snowy steep,
     Saw the winged shoulders: him they saw not more.

     XI

     He fell: and says the shattered man, I fell:
     And sweeps an arm the height an eagle wins;
     And in his breast a mouthless well
     Heaves the worn patches of his coat of skins.

     XII

     Lo, this is he in whom the surgent springs
     Of recollections richer than our skies
     To feed the flow of tuneful strings,
     Show but a pool of scum for shooting flies.



     PHAETHON--ATTEMPTED IN THE GALLIAMBIC MEASURE



     At the coming up of Phoebus the all-luminous charioteer,
     Double-visaged stand the mountains in imperial multitudes,
     And with shadows dappled men sing to him, Hail, O Beneficent!
     For they shudder chill, the earth-vales, at his clouding, shudder to
     black;
     In the light of him there is music thro' the poplar and river-sedge,
     Renovation, chirp of brooks, hum of the forest--an ocean-song.
     Never pearl from ocean-hollows by the diver exultingly,
     In his breathlessness, above thrust, is as earth to Helios.
     Who usurps his place there, rashest? Aphrodite's loved one it is!
     To his son the flaming Sun-God, to the tender youth, Phaethon,
     Rule of day this day surrenders as a thing hereditary,
     Having sworn by Styx tremendous, for the proof of his parentage,
     He would grant his son's petition, whatsoever the sign thereof.
     Then, rejoiced, the stripling answered: 'Rule of day give me; give
     it me,
     Give me place that men may see me how I blaze, and transcendingly
     I, divine, proclaim my birthright.' Darkened Helios, and his
     utterance
     Choked prophetic: 'O half mortal!' he exclaimed in an agony,
     'O lost son of mine! lost son! No! put a prayer for another thing:
     Not for this: insane to wish it, and to crave the gift impious!
     Cannot other gifts my godhead shed upon thee? miraculous
     Mighty gifts to prove a blessing, that to earth thou shalt be a joy?
     Gifts of healing, wherewith men walk as the Gods beneficently;
     As a God to sway to concord hearts of men, reconciling them;
     Gifts of verse, the lyre, the laurel, therewithal that thine origin
     Shall be known even as when I strike on the string'd shell with
     melody,
     And the golden notes, like medicine, darting straight to the
     cavities,
     Fill them up, till hearts of men bound as the billows, the ships
     thereon.'
     Thus intently urged the Sun-God; but the force of his eloquence
     Was the pressing on of sea-waves scattered broad from the rocks
     away.
     What shall move a soul from madness? Lost, lost in delirium,
     Rock-fast, the adolescent to his father, irreverent,
     'By the oath! the oath! thine oath!' cried. The effulgent foreseer
     then,
     Quivering in his loins parental, on the boy's beaming countenance
     Looked and moaned, and urged him for love's sake, for sweet life's
     sake, to yield the claim,
     To abandon his mad hunger, and avert the calamity.
     But he, vehement, passionate, called out: 'Let me show I am what I
     say,
     That the taunts I hear be silenced: I am stung with their
     whispering.
     Only, Thou, my Father, Thou tell how aloft the revolving wheels,
     How aloft the cleaving horse-crests I may guide peremptorily,
     Till I drink the shadows, fire-hot, like a flower celestial,
     And my fellows see me curbing the fierce steeds, the dear dew-
     drinkers:
     Yea, for this I gaze on life's light; throw for this any sacrifice.'

     All the end foreseeing, Phoebus to his oath irrevocable
     Bowed obedient, deploring the insanity pitiless.
     Then the flame-outsnorting horses were led forth: it was so
     decreed.
     They were yoked before the glad youth by his sister-ancillaries.
     Swift the ripple ripples follow'd, as of aureate Helicon,
     Down their flanks, while they impatient pawed desire of the
     distances,
     And the bit with fury champed. Oh! unimaginable delight!
     Unimagined speed and splendour in the circle of upper air!
     Glory grander than the armed host upon earth singing victory!
     Chafed the youth with their spirit surcharged, as when blossom is
     shaken by winds,
     Marked that labour by his sister Phaethontiades finished, quick
     On the slope of the car his forefoot set assured: and the morning
     rose:
     Seeing whom, and what a day dawned, stood the God, as in harvest
     fields,
     When the reaper grasps the full sheaf and the sickle that severs it:
     Hugged the withered head with one hand, with the other, to indicate
     (If this woe might be averted, this immeasurable evil),
     Laid the kindling course in view, told how the reins to manipulate:
     Named the horses fondly, fearful, caution'd urgently betweenwhiles:
     Their diverging tempers dwelt on, and their wantonness, wickedness,
     That the voice of Gods alone held in restraint; but the voice of
     Gods;
     None but Gods can curb. He spake: vain were the words: scarcely
     listening,
     Mounted Phaethon, swinging reins loose, and, 'Behold me, companions,
     It is I here, I!' he shouted, glancing down with supremacy;
     'Not to any of you was this gift granted ever in annals of men;
     I alone what only Gods can, I alone am governing day!'
     Short the triumph, brief his rapture: see a hurricane suddenly
     Beat the lifting billow crestless, roll it broken this way and that;
     -
     At the leap on yielding ether, in despite of his reprimand,
     Swayed tumultuous the fire-steeds, plunging reckless hither and yon;
     Unto men a great amazement, all agaze at the Troubled East:-
     Pitifully for mastery striving in ascension, the charioteer,
     Reminiscent, drifts of counsel caught confused in his arid wits;
     The reins stiff ahind his shoulder madly pulled for the mastery,
     Till a thunder off the tense chords thro' his ears dinned horrible.
     Panic seized him: fled his vision of inviolability;
     Fled the dream that he of mortals rode mischances predominant;
     And he cried, 'Had I petitioned for a cup of chill aconite,
     My descent to awful Hades had been soft, for now must I go
     With the curse by father Zeus cast on ambition immoderate.
     Oh, my sisters! Thou, my Goddess, in whose love I was enviable,
     From whose arms I rushed befrenzied, what a wreck will this body be,
     That admired of thee stood rose-warm in the courts where thy
     mysteries
     Celebration had from me, me the most splendidly privileged!
     Never more shall I thy temple fill with incenses bewildering;
     Not again hear thy half-murmurs--I am lost!--never, never more.
     I am wrecked on seas of air, hurled to my death in a vessel of
     flame!
     Hither, sisters! Father, save me! Hither, succour me, Cypria!'

     Now a wail of men to Zeus rang: from Olympus the Thunderer
     Saw the rage of the havoc wide-mouthed, the bright car
     superimpending
     Over Asia, Africa, low down; ruin flaming over the vales;
     Light disastrous rising savage out of smoke inveterately;
     Beast-black, conflagration like a menacing shadow move
     With voracious roaring southward, where aslant, insufferable,
     The bright steeds careered their parched way down an arc of the
     firmament.
     For the day grew like to thick night, and the orb was its beacon-
     fire,
     And from hill to hill of darkness burst the day's apparition forth.
     Lo, a wrestler, not a God, stood in the chariot ever lowering:
     Lo, the shape of one who raced there to outstrip the legitimate
     hours:
     Lo, the ravish'd beams of Phoebus dragged in shame at the chariot-
     wheels:
     Light of days of happy pipings by the mead-singing rivulets!
     Lo, lo, increasing lustre, torrid breath to the nostrils; lo,
     Torrid brilliancies thro' the vapours lighten swifter, penetrate
     them,
     Fasten merciless, ruminant, hueless, on earth's frame crackling
     busily.
     He aloft, the frenzied driver, in the glow of the universe,
     Like the paling of the dawn-star withers visibly, he aloft:
     Bitter fury in his aspect, bitter death in the heart of him.
     Crouch the herds, contract the reptiles, crouch the lions under
     their paws.
     White as metal in the furnace are the faces of human-kind:
     Inarticulate creatures of earth dumb all await the ultimate shock.
     To the bolt he launched, 'Strike dead, thou,' uttered Zeus, very
     terrible;
     'Perish folly, else 'tis man's fate'; and the bolt flew unerringly.
     Then the kindler stooped; from the torch-car down the measureless
     altitudes
     Leaned his rayless head, relinquished rein and footing, raised not a
     cry.
     Like the flower on the river's surface when expanding it vanishes,
     Gave his limbs to right and left, quenched: and so fell he
     precipitate,
     Seen of men as a glad rain-fall, sending coolness yet ere it comes:
     So he showered above them, shadowed o'er the blue archipelagoes,
     O'er the silken-shining pastures of the continents and the isles;
     So descending brought revival to the greenery of our earth.

     Lither, noisy in the breezes now his sisters shivering weep,
     By the river flowing smooth out to the vexed sea of Adria,
     Where he fell, and where they suffered sudden change to the
     tremulous
     Ever-wailful trees bemoaning him, a bruised purple cyclamen.



     SEED-TIME



     I

     Flowers of the willow-herb are wool;
     Flowers of the briar berries red;
     Speeding their seed as the breeze may rule,
     Flowers of the thistle loosen the thread.
     Flowers of the clematis drip in beard,
     Slack from the fir-tree youngly climbed;
     Chaplets in air, flies foliage seared;
     Heeled upon earth, lie clusters rimed.

     II

     Where were skies of the mantle stained
     Orange and scarlet, a coat of frieze
     Travels from North till day has waned,
     Tattered, soaked in the ditch's dyes;
     Tumbles the rook under grey or slate;
     Else enfolding us, damps to the bone;
     Narrows the world to my neighbour's gate;
     Paints me Life as a wheezy crone.

     III

     Now seems none but the spider lord;
     Star in circle his web waits prey,
     Silvering bush-mounds, blue brushing sward;
     Slow runs the hour, swift flits the ray.
     Now to his thread-shroud is he nigh,
     Nigh to the tangle where wings are sealed,
     He who frolicked the jewelled fly;
     All is adroop on the down and the weald.

     IV

     Mists more lone for the sheep-bell enwrap
     Nights that tardily let slip a morn
     Paler than moons, and on noontide's lap
     Flame dies cold, like the rose late born.
     Rose born late, born withered in bud! -
     I, even I, for a zenith of sun
     Cry, to fulfil me, nourish my blood:
     O for a day of the long light, one!

     V

     Master the blood, nor read by chills,
     Earth admonishes: Hast thou ploughed,
     Sown, reaped, harvested grain for the mills,
     Thou hast the light over shadow of cloud.
     Steadily eyeing, before that wail
     Animal-infant, thy mind began,
     Momently nearer me: should sight fail,
     Plod in the track of the husbandman.

     VI

     Verily now is our season of seed,
     Now in our Autumn; and Earth discerns
     Them that have served her in them that can read,
     Glassing, where under the surface she burns,
     Quick at her wheel, while the fuel, decay,
     Brightens the fire of renewal: and we?
     Death is the word of a bovine day,
     Know you the breast of the springing To-be.



     HARD WEATHER



     Bursts from a rending East in flaws
     The young green leaflet's harrier, sworn
     To strew the garden, strip the shaws,
     And show our Spring with banner torn.
     Was ever such virago morn?
     The wind has teeth, the wind has claws.
     All the wind's wolves through woods are loose,
     The wild wind's falconry aloft.
     Shrill underfoot the grassblade shrews,
     At gallop, clumped, and down the croft
     Bestrid by shadows, beaten, tossed;
     It seems a scythe, it seems a rod.
     The howl is up at the howl's accost;
     The shivers greet and the shivers nod.

     Is the land ship? we are rolled, we drive
     Tritonly, cleaving hiss and hum;
     Whirl with the dead, or mount or dive,
     Or down in dregs, or on in scum.
     And drums the distant, pipes the near,
     And vale and hill are grey in grey,
     As when the surge is crumbling sheer,
     And sea-mews wing the haze of spray.
     Clouds--are they bony witches?--swarms,
     Darting swift on the robber's flight,
     Hurry an infant sky in arms:
     It peeps, it becks; 'tis day, 'tis night.
     Black while over the loop of blue
     The swathe is closed, like shroud on corse.
     Lo, as if swift the Furies flew,
     The Fates at heel at a cry to horse!

     Interpret me the savage whirr:
     And is it Nature scourged, or she,
     Her offspring's executioner,
     Reducing land to barren sea?
     But is there meaning in a day
     When this fierce angel of the air,
     Intent to throw, and haply slay,
     Can for what breath of life we bear,
     Exact the wrestle?--Call to mind
     The many meanings glistening up
     When Nature to her nurslings kind,
     Hands them the fruitage and the cup!
     And seek we rich significance
     Not otherwhere than with those tides
     Of pleasure on the sunned expanse,
     Whose flow deludes, whose ebb derides?

     Look in the face of men who fare
     Lock-mouthed, a match in lungs and thews
     For this fierce angel of the air,
     To twist with him and take his bruise.
     That is the face beloved of old
     Of Earth, young mother of her brood:
     Nor broken for us shows the mould
     When muscle is in mind renewed:
     Though farther from her nature rude,
     Yet nearer to her spirit's hold:
     And though of gentler mood serene,
     Still forceful of her fountain-jet.
     So shall her blows be shrewdly met,
     Be luminously read the scene
     Where Life is at her grindstone set,
     That she may give us edgeing keen,
     String us for battle, till as play
     The common strokes of fortune shower.
     Such meaning in a dagger-day
     Our wits may clasp to wax in power.
     Yea, feel us warmer at her breast,
     By spin of blood in lusty drill,
     Than when her honeyed hands caressed,
     And Pleasure, sapping, seemed to fill.

     Behold the life at ease; it drifts.
     The sharpened life commands its course.
     She winnows, winnows roughly; sifts,
     To dip her chosen in her source:
     Contention is the vital force,
     Whence pluck they brain, her prize of gifts,
     Sky of the senses! on which height,
     Not disconnected, yet released,
     They see how spirit comes to light,
     Through conquest of the inner beast,
     Which Measure tames to movement sane,
     In harmony with what is fair.
     Never is Earth misread by brain:
     That is the welling of her, there
     The mirror: with one step beyond,
     For likewise is it voice; and more,
     Benignest kinship bids respond,
     When wail the weak, and them restore
     Whom days as fell as this may rive,
     While Earth sits ebon in her gloom,
     Us atomies of life alive
     Unheeding, bent on life to come.
     Her children of the labouring brain,
     These are the champions of the race,
     True parents, and the sole humane,
     With understanding for their base.
     Earth yields the milk, but all her mind
     Is vowed to thresh for stouter stock.
     Her passion for old giantkind,
     That scaled the mount, uphurled the rock,
     Devolves on them who read aright
     Her meaning and devoutly serve;
     Nor in her starlessness of night
     Peruse her with the craven nerve:
     But even as she from grass to corn,
     To eagle high from grubbing mole,
     Prove in strong brain her noblest born,
     The station for the flight of soul.



     THE SOUTH-WESTER



     Day of the cloud in fleets! O day
     Of wedded white and blue, that sail
     Immingled, with a footing ray
     In shadow-sandals down our vale! -
     And swift to ravish golden meads,
     Swift up the run of turf it speeds,
     Thy bright of head and dark of heel,
     To where the hilltop flings on sky,
     As hawk from wrist or dust from wheel,
     The tiptoe sealers tossed to fly:-
     Thee the last thunder's caverned peal
     Delivered from a wailful night:
     All dusky round thy cradled light,
     Those brine-born issues, now in bloom
     Transfigured, wreathed as raven's plume
     And briony-leaf to watch thee lie:
     Dark eyebrows o'er a dreamful eye
     Nigh opening: till in the braid
     Of purpled vapours thou wert rosed:
     Till that new babe a Goddess maid
     Appeared and vividly disclosed
     Her beat of life: then crimson played
     On edges of the plume and leaf:
     Shape had they and fair feature brief,
     The wings, the smiles: they flew the breast,
     Earth's milk. But what imperial march
     Their standards led for earth, none guessed
     Ere upward of a coloured arch,
     An arrow straining eager head
     Lightened, and high for zenith sped.
     Fierier followed; followed Fire.
     Name the young lord of Earth's desire,
     Whose look her wine is, and whose mouth
     Her music! Beauteous was she seen
     Beneath her midway West of South;
     And sister was her quivered green
     To sapphire of the Nereid eyes
     On sea when sun is breeze; she winked
     As they, and waved, heaved waterwise
     Her flood of leaves and grasses linked:
     A myriad lustrous butterflies
     A moment in the fluttering sheen;
     Becapped with the slate air that throws
     The reindeer's antlers black between
     Low-frowning and wide-fallen snows,
     A minute after; hooded, stoled
     To suit a graveside Season's dirge.
     Lo, but the breaking of a surge,
     And she is in her lover's fold,
     Illumined o'er a boundless range
     Anew: and through quick morning hours
     The Tropic-Arctic countercharge
     Did seem to pant in beams and showers.

     But noon beheld a larger heaven;
     Beheld on our reflecting field
     The Sower to the Bearer given,
     And both their inner sweetest yield,
     Fresh as when dews were grey or first
     Received the flush of hues athirst.
     Heard we the woodland, eyeing sun,
     As harp and harper were they one.
     A murky cloud a fair pursued,
     Assailed, and felt the limbs elude:
     He sat him down to pipe his woe,
     And some strange beast of sky became:
     A giant's club withheld the blow;
     A milky cloud went all to flame.
     And there were groups where silvery springs
     The ethereal forest showed begirt
     By companies in choric rings,
     Whom but to see made ear alert.
     For music did each movement rouse,
     And motion was a minstrel's rage
     To have our spirits out of house,
     And bathe them on the open page.
     This was a day that knew not age.
     Since flew the vapoury twos and threes
     From western pile to eastern rack;
     As on from peaks of Pyrenees
     To Graians; youngness ruled the track.
     When songful beams were shut in caves,
     And rainy drapery swept across;
     When the ranked clouds were downy waves,
     Breast of swan, eagle, albatross,
     In ordered lines to screen the blue,
     Youngest of light was nigh, we knew.
     The silver finger of it laughed
     Along the narrow rift: it shot,
     Slew the huge gloom with golden shaft,
     Then haled on high the volumed blot,
     To build the hurling palace, cleave
     The dazzling chasm; the flying nests,
     The many glory-garlands weave,
     Whose presence not our sight attests
     Till wonder with the splendour blent,
     And passion for the beauty flown,
     Make evanescence permanent,
     The thing at heart our endless own.

     Only at gathered eve knew we
     The marvels of the day: for then
     Mount upon mountain out of sea
     Arose, and to our spacious ken
     Trebled sublime Olympus round
     In towering amphitheatre.
     Colossal on enormous mound,
     Majestic gods we saw confer.
     They wafted the Dream-messenger
     From off the loftiest, the crowned:
     That Lady of the hues of foam
     In sun-rays: who, close under dome,
     A figure on the foot's descent,
     Irradiate to vapour went,
     As one whose mission was resigned,
     Dispieced, undraped, dissolved to threads;
     Melting she passed into the mind,
     Where immortal with mortal weds.

     Whereby was known that we had viewed
     The union of our earth and skies
     Renewed: nor less alive renewed
     Than when old bards, in nature wise,
     Conceived pure beauty given to eyes,
     And with undyingness imbued.
     Pageant of man's poetic brain,
     His grand procession of the song,
     It was; the Muses and their train;
     Their God to lead the glittering throng:
     At whiles a beat of forest gong;
     At whiles a glimpse of Python slain.
     Mostly divinest harmony,
     The lyre, the dance. We could believe
     A life in orb and brook and tree,
     And cloud; and still holds Memory
     A morning in the eyes of eve.



     THE THRUSH IN FEBRUARY



     I know him, February's thrush,
     And loud at eve he valentines
     On sprays that paw the naked bush
     Where soon will sprout the thorns and bines.

     Now ere the foreign singer thrills
     Our vale his plain-song pipe he pours,
     A herald of the million bills;
     And heed him not, the loss is yours.

     My study, flanked with ivied fir
     And budded beech with dry leaves curled,
     Perched over yew and juniper,
     He neighbours, piping to his world:-

     The wooded pathways dank on brown,
     The branches on grey cloud a web,
     The long green roller of the down,
     An image of the deluge-ebb:-

     And farther, they may hear along
     The stream beneath the poplar row.
     By fits, like welling rocks, the song
     Spouts of a blushful Spring in flow.

     But most he loves to front the vale
     When waves of warm South-western rains
     Have left our heavens clear in pale,
     With faintest beck of moist red veins:

     Vermilion wings, by distance held
     To pause aflight while fleeting swift:
     And high aloft the pearl inshelled
     Her lucid glow in glow will lift;

     A little south of coloured sky;
     Directing, gravely amorous,
     The human of a tender eye
     Through pure celestial on us:

     Remote, not alien; still, not cold;
     Unraying yet, more pearl than star;
     She seems a while the vale to hold
     In trance, and homelier makes the far.

     Then Earth her sweet unscented breathes,
     An orb of lustre quits the height;
     And like blue iris-flags, in wreaths
     The sky takes darkness, long ere quite.

     His Island voice then shall you hear,
     Nor ever after separate
     From such a twilight of the year
     Advancing to the vernal gate.

     He sings me, out of Winter's throat,
     The young time with the life ahead;
     And my young time his leaping note
     Recalls to spirit-mirth from dead.

     Imbedded in a land of greed,
     Of mammon-quakings dire as Earth's,
     My care was but to soothe my need;
     At peace among the littleworths.

     To light and song my yearning aimed;
     To that deep breast of song and light
     Which men have barrenest proclaimed;
     As 'tis to senses pricked with fright.

     So mine are these new fruitings rich
     The simple to the common brings;
     I keep the youth of souls who pitch
     Their joy in this old heart of things:

     Who feel the Coming young as aye,
     Thrice hopeful on the ground we plough;
     Alive for life, awake to die;
     One voice to cheer the seedling Now.

     Full lasting is the song, though he,
     The singer, passes: lasting too,
     For souls not lent in usury,
     The rapture of the forward view.

     With that I bear my senses fraught
     Till what I am fast shoreward drives.
     They are the vessel of the Thought.
     The vessel splits, the Thought survives.

     Nought else are we when sailing brave,
     Save husks to raise and bid it burn.
     Glimpse of its livingness will wave
     A light the senses can discern

     Across the river of the death,
     Their close. Meanwhile, O twilight bird
     Of promise! bird of happy breath!
     I hear, I would the City heard.

     The City of the smoky fray;
     A prodded ox, it drags and moans:
     Its Morrow no man's child; its Day
     A vulture's morsel beaked to bones.

     It strives without a mark for strife;
     It feasts beside a famished host:
     The loose restraint of wanton life,
     That threatened penance in the ghost!

     Yet there our battle urges; there
     Spring heroes many: issuing thence,
     Names that should leave no vacant air
     For fresh delight in confidence.

     Life was to them the bag of grain,
     And Death the weedy harrow's tooth.
     Those warriors of the sighting brain
     Give worn Humanity new youth.

     Our song and star are they to lead
     The tidal multitude and blind
     From bestial to the higher breed
     By fighting souls of love divined,

     They scorned the ventral dream of peace,
     Unknown in nature. This they knew:
     That life begets with fair increase
     Beyond the flesh, if life be true.

     Just reason based on valiant blood,
     The instinct bred afield would match
     To pipe thereof a swelling flood,
     Were men of Earth made wise in watch.

     Though now the numbers count as drops
     An urn might bear, they father Time.
     She shapes anew her dusty crops;
     Her quick in their own likeness climb.

     Of their own force do they create;
     They climb to light, in her their root.
     Your brutish cry at muffled fate
     She smites with pangs of worse than brute.

     She, judged of shrinking nerves, appears
     A Mother whom no cry can melt;
     But read her past desires and fears,
     The letters on her breast are spelt.

     A slayer, yea, as when she pressed
     Her savage to the slaughter-heaps,
     To sacrifice she prompts her best:
     She reaps them as the sower reaps.

     But read her thought to speed the race,
     And stars rush forth of blackest night:
     You chill not at a cold embrace
     To come, nor dread a dubious might.

     Her double visage, double voice,
     In oneness rise to quench the doubt.
     This breath, her gift, has only choice
     Of service, breathe we in or out.

     Since Pain and Pleasure on each hand
     Led our wild steps from slimy rock
     To yonder sweeps of gardenland,
     We breathe but to be sword or block.

     The sighting brain her good decree
     Accepts; obeys those guides, in faith,
     By reason hourly fed, that she,
     To some the clod, to some the wraith,

     Is more, no mask; a flame, a stream.
     Flame, stream, are we, in mid career
     From torrent source, delirious dream,
     To heaven-reflecting currents clear.

     And why the sons of Strength have been
     Her cherished offspring ever; how
     The Spirit served by her is seen
     Through Law; perusing love will show.

     Love born of knowledge, love that gains
     Vitality as Earth it mates,
     The meaning of the Pleasures, Pains,
     The Life, the Death, illuminates.

     For love we Earth, then serve we all;
     Her mystic secret then is ours:
     We fall, or view our treasures fall,
     Unclouded, as beholds her flowers

     Earth, from a night of frosty wreck,
     Enrobed in morning's mounted fire,
     When lowly, with a broken neck,
     The crocus lays her cheek to mire.



     THE APPEASEMENT OF DEMETER



     I

     Demeter devastated our good land,
     In blackness for her daughter snatched below.
     Smoke-pillar or loose hillock was the sand,
     Where soil had been to clasp warm seed and throw
     The wheat, vine, olive, ripe to Summer's ray.
     Now whether night advancing, whether day,
     Scarce did the baldness show:
     The hand of man was a defeated hand.

     II

     Necessity, the primal goad to growth,
     Stood shrunken; Youth and Age appeared as one;
     Like Winter Summer; good as labour sloth;
     Nor was there answer wherefore beamed the sun,
     Or why men drew the breath to carry pain.
     High reared the ploughshare, broken lay the wain,
     Idly the flax-wheel spun
     Unridered: starving lords were wasp and moth.

     III

     Lean grassblades losing green on their bent flags,
     Sang chilly to themselves; lone honey-bees
     Pursued the flowers that were not with dry bags;
     Sole sound aloud the snap of sapless trees,
     More sharp than slingstones on hard breastplates hurled.
     Back to first chaos tumbled the stopped world,
     Careless to lure or please.
     A nature of gaunt ribs, an earth of crags.

     IV

     No smile Demeter cast: the gloom she saw,
     Well draped her direful musing; for in gloom,
     In thicker gloom, deep down the cavern-maw,
     Her sweet had vanished; liker unto whom,
     And whose pale place of habitation mute,
     She and all seemed where Seasons, pledged for fruit
     Anciently, gaped for bloom:
     Where hand of man was as a plucked fowl's claw.

     V

     The wrathful Queen descended on a vale,
     That ere the ravished hour for richness heaved.
     Iambe, maiden of the merry tale,
     Beside her eyed the once red-cheeked, green-leaved.
     It looked as if the Deluge had withdrawn.
     Pity caught at her throat; her jests were gone.
     More than for her who grieved,
     She could for this waste home have piped the wail.

     VI

     Iambe, her dear mountain-rivulet
     To waken laughter from cold stones, beheld
     A riven wheatfield cracking for the wet,
     And seed like infant's teeth, that never swelled,
     Apeep up flinty ridges, milkless round.
     Teeth of the giants marked she where thin ground
     Rocky in spikes rebelled
     Against the hand here slack as rotted net.

     VII

     The valley people up the ashen scoop
     She beckoned, aiming hopelessly to win
     Her Mistress in compassion of yon group
     So pinched and wizened; with their aged grin,
     For lack of warmth to smile on mouths of woe,
     White as in chalk outlining little O,
     Dumb, from a falling chin;
     Young, old, alike half-bent to make the hoop.

     VIII

     Their tongues of birds they wagged, weak-voiced as when
     Dark underwaters the recesses choke;
     With cluck and upper quiver of a hen
     In grasp, past peeking: cry before the croak.
     Relentlessly their gold-haired Heaven, their fount
     Bountiful of old days, heard them recount
     This and that cruel stroke:
     Nor eye nor ear had she for piteous men.

     IX

     A figure of black rock by sunbeams crowned
     Through stormclouds, where the volumed shades enfold
     An earth in awe before the claps resound
     And woods and dwellings are as billows rolled,
     The barren Nourisher unmelted shed
     Death from the looks that wandered with the dead
     Out of the realms of gold,
     In famine for her lost, her lost unfound.

     X

     Iambe from her Mistress tripped; she raised
     The cattle-call above the moan of prayer;
     And slowly out of fields their fancy grazed,
     Among the droves, defiled a horse and mare:
     The wrecks of horse and mare: such ribs as view
     Seas that have struck brave ships ashore, while through
     Shoots the swift foamspit: bare
     They nodded, and Demeter on them gazed.

     XI

     Howbeit the season of the dancing blood,
     Forgot was horse of mare, yea, mare of horse:
     Reversed, each head at either's flank, they stood.
     Whereat the Goddess, in a dim remorse,
     Laid hand on them, and smacked; and her touch pricked.
     Neighing within, at either's flank they licked;
     Played on a moment's force
     At courtship, withering to the crazy nod.

     XII

     The nod was that we gather for consent;
     And mournfully amid the group a dame,
     Interpreting the thing in nature meant,
     Her hands held out like bearers of the flame,
     And nodded for the negative sideways.
     Keen at her Mistress glanced Iambe: rays
     From the Great Mother came:
     Her lips were opened wide; the curse was rent.

     XIII

     She laughed: since our first harvesting heard none
     Like thunder of the song of heart: her face,
     The dreadful darkness, shook to mounted sun,
     And peal on peal across the hills held chase.
     She laughed herself to water; laughed to fire;
     Laughed the torrential laugh of dam and sire
     Full of the marrowy race.
     Her laughter, Gods! was flesh on skeleton.

     XIV

     The valley people huddled, broke, afraid,
     Assured, and taking lightning in the veins,
     They puffed, they leaped, linked hands, together swayed,
     Unwitting happiness till golden rains
     Of tears in laughter, laughter weeping, smote
     Knowledge of milky mercy from that throat
     Pouring to heal their pains:
     And one bold youth set mouth at a shy maid.

     XV

     Iambe clapped to see the kindly lusts
     Inspire the valley people, still on seas,
     Like poplar-tops relieved from stress of gusts,
     With rapture in their wonderment; but these,
     Low homage being rendered, ran to plough,
     Fed by the laugh, as by the mother cow
     Calves at the teats they tease:
     Soon drove they through the yielding furrow-crusts.

     XVI

     Uprose the blade in green, the leaf in red,
     The tree of water and the tree of wood:
     And soon among the branches overhead
     Gave beauty juicy issue sweet for food.
     O Laughter! beauty plumped and love had birth.
     Laughter! O thou reviver of sick Earth!
     Good for the spirit, good
     For body, thou! to both art wine and bread!



     EARTH AND A WEDDED WOMAN



     I

     The shepherd, with his eye on hazy South,
     Has told of rain upon the fall of day.
     But promise is there none for Susan's drouth,
     That he will come, who keeps in dry delay.
     The freshest of the village three years gone,
     She hangs as the white field-rose hangs short-lived;
     And she and Earth are one
     In withering unrevived.
     Rain! O the glad refresher of the grain!
     And welcome waterspouts, had we sweet rain!

     II

     Ah, what is Marriage, says each pouting maid,
     When she who wedded with the soldier hides
     At home as good as widowed in the shade,
     A lighthouse to the girls that would be brides:
     Nor dares to give a lad an ogle, nor
     To dream of dancing, but must hang and moan,
     Her husband in the war,
     And she to lie alone.
     Rain! O the glad refresher of the grain!
     And welcome waterspouts, had we sweet rain!

     III

     They have not known; they are not in the stream;
     Light as the flying seed-ball is their play,
     The silly maids! and happy souls they seem;
     Yet Grief would not change fates with such as they.
     They have not struck the roots which meet the fires
     Beneath, and bind us fast with Earth, to know
     The strength of her desires,
     The sternness of her woe.
     Rain! O the glad refresher of the grain!
     And welcome waterspouts, had we sweet rain!

     IV

     Now, shepherd, see thy word, where without shower
     A borderless low blotting Westward spreads.
     The hall-clock holds the valley on the hour;
     Across an inner chamber thunder treads:
     The dead leaf trips, the tree-top swings, the floor
     Of dust whirls, dropping lumped: near thunder speaks,
     And drives the dames to door,
     Their kerchiefs flapped at cheeks.
     Rain! O the glad refresher of the grain!
     And welcome waterspouts of blessed rain!

     V

     Through night, with bedroom window wide for air,
     Lay Susan tranced to hear all heaven descend:
     And gurgling voices came of Earth, and rare,
     Past flowerful, breathings, deeper than life's end,
     From her heaved breast of sacred common mould;
     Whereby this lone-laid wife was moved to feel
     Unworded things and old
     To her pained heart appeal.
     Rain! O the glad refresher of the grain!
     And down in deluges of blessed rain!

     VI

     At morn she stood to live for ear and sight,
     Love sky or cloud, or rose or grasses drenched.
     A lureful devil, that in glow-worm light
     Set languor writhing all its folds, she quenched.
     But she would muse when neighbours praised her face,
     Her services, and staunchness to her mate:
     Knowing by some dim trace,
     The change might bear a date.
     Rain! O the glad refresher of the grain!
     Thrice beauteous is our sunshine after rain!



     MOTHER TO BABE



     I

     Fleck of sky you are,
     Dropped through branches dark,
     O my little one, mine!
     Promise of the star,
     Outpour of the lark;
     Beam and song divine.

     II

     See this precious gift,
     Steeping in new birth
     All my being, for sign
     Earth to heaven can lift,
     Heaven descend on earth,
     Both in one be mine!

     III

     Life in light you glass
     When you peep and coo,
     You, my little one, mine!
     Brooklet chirps to grass,
     Daisy looks in dew
     Up to dear sunshine.



     WOODLAND PEACE



     Sweet as Eden is the air,
     And Eden-sweet the ray.
     No Paradise is lost for them
     Who foot by branching root and stem,
     And lightly with the woodland share
     The change of night and day.

     Here all say,
     We serve her, even as I:
     We brood, we strive to sky,
     We gaze upon decay,
     We wot of life through death,
     How each feeds each we spy;
     And is a tangle round,
     Are patient; what is dumb
     We question not, nor ask
     The silent to give sound,
     The hidden to unmask,
     The distant to draw near.

     And this the woodland saith:
     I know not hope or fear;
     I take whate'er may come;
     I raise my head to aspects fair,
     From foul I turn away.

     Sweet as Eden is the air,
     And Eden-sweet the ray.



     THE QUESTION WHITHER



     I

     When we have thrown off this old suit,
     So much in need of mending,
     To sink among the naked mute,
     Is that, think you, our ending?
     We follow many, more we lead,
     And you who sadly turf us,
     Believe not that all living seed
     Must flower above the surface.

     II

     Sensation is a gracious gift,
     But were it cramped to station,
     The prayer to have it cast adrift
     Would spout from all sensation.
     Enough if we have winked to sun,
     Have sped the plough a season;
     There is a soul for labour done,
     Endureth fixed as reason.

     III

     Then let our trust be firm in Good,
     Though we be of the fasting;
     Our questions are a mortal brood,
     Our work is everlasting.
     We children of Beneficence
     Are in its being sharers;
     And Whither vainer sounds than Whence,
     For word with such wayfarers.



     OUTER AND INNER



     I

     From twig to twig the spider weaves
     At noon his webbing fine.
     So near to mute the zephyrs flute
     That only leaflets dance.
     The sun draws out of hazel leaves
     A smell of woodland wine.
     I wake a swarm to sudden storm
     At any step's advance.

     II

     Along my path is bugloss blue,
     The star with fruit in moss;
     The foxgloves drop from throat to top
     A daily lesser bell.
     The blackest shadow, nurse of dew,
     Has orange skeins across;
     And keenly red is one thin thread
     That flashing seems to swell.

     III

     My world I note ere fancy comes,
     Minutest hushed observe:
     What busy bits of motioned wits
     Through antlered mosswork strive.
     But now so low the stillness hums,
     My springs of seeing swerve,
     For half a wink to thrill and think
     The woods with nymphs alive.

     IV

     I neighbour the invisible
     So close that my consent
     Is only asked for spirits masked
     To leap from trees and flowers.
     And this because with them I dwell
     In thought, while calmly bent
     To read the lines dear Earth designs
     Shall speak her life on ours.

     V

     Accept, she says; it is not hard
     In woods; but she in towns
     Repeats, accept; and have we wept,
     And have we quailed with fears,
     Or shrunk with horrors, sure reward
     We have whom knowledge crowns;
     Who see in mould the rose unfold,
     The soul through blood and tears.



     NATURE AND LIFE



     I

     Leave the uproar: at a leap
     Thou shalt strike a woodland path,
     Enter silence, not of sleep,
     Under shadows, not of wrath;
     Breath which is the spirit's bath
     In the old Beginnings find,
     And endow them with a mind,
     Seed for seedling, swathe for swathe.
     That gives Nature to us, this
     Give we her, and so we kiss.

     II

     Fruitful is it so: but hear
     How within the shell thou art,
     Music sounds; nor other near
     Can to such a tremor start.
     Of the waves our life is part;
     They our running harvests bear:
     Back to them for manful air,
     Laden with the woodland's heart!
     That gives Battle to us, this
     Give we it, and good the kiss.



     DIRGE IN WOODS



     A wind sways the pines,
     And below
     Not a breath of wild air;
     Still as the mosses that glow
     On the flooring and over the lines
     Of the roots here and there.
     The pine-tree drops its dead;
     They are quiet, as under the sea.
     Overhead, overhead
     Rushes life in a race,
     As the clouds the clouds chase;
     And we go,
     And we drop like the fruits of the tree,
     Even we,
     Even so.



     A FAITH ON TRIAL



     On the morning of May,
     Ere the children had entered my gate
     With their wreaths and mechanical lay,
     A metal ding-dong of the date!
     I mounted our hill, bearing heart
     That had little of life save its weight:
     The crowned Shadow poising dart
     Hung over her: she, my own,
     My good companion, mate,
     Pulse of me: she who had shown
     Fortitude quiet as Earth's
     At the shedding of leaves. And around
     The sky was in garlands of cloud,
     Winning scents from unnumbered new births,
     Pointed buds, where the woods were browned
     By a mouldered beechen shroud;
     Or over our meads of the vale,
     Such an answer to sun as he,
     Brave in his gold; to a sound,
     None sweeter, of woods flapping sail,
     With the first full flood of our year,
     For their voyage on lustreful sea:
     Unto what curtained haven in chief,
     Will be writ in the book of the sere.
     But surely the crew are we,
     Eager or stamped or bowed;
     Counted thinner at fall of the leaf.
     Grief heard them, and passed like a bier.
     Due Summerward, lo, they were set,
     In volumes of foliage proud,
     On the heave of their favouring tides,
     And their song broadened out to the cheer
     When a neck of the ramping surf
     Rattles thunder a boat overrides.
     All smiles ran the highways wet;
     The worm drew its links from the turf;
     The bird of felicity loud
     Spun high, and a South wind blew.
     Weak out of sheath downy leaves
     Of the beech quivered lucid as dew,
     Their radiance asking, who grieves;
     For nought of a sorrow they knew:
     No space to the dread wrestle vowed,
     No chamber in shadow of night.
     At times as the steadier breeze
     Flutter-huddled their twigs to a crowd,
     The beam of them wafted my sight
     To league-long sun upon seas:
     The golden path we had crossed
     Many years, till her birthland swung
     Recovered to vision from lost,
     A light in her filial glance.
     And sweet was her voice with the tongue,
     The speechful tongue of her France,
     Soon at ripple about us, like rills
     Ever busy with little: away
     Through her Normandy, down where the mills
     Dot at lengths a rivercourse, grey
     As its bordering poplars bent
     To gusts off the plains above.
     Old stone chateau and farms,
     Home of her birth and her love!
     On the thread of the pasture you trace,
     By the river, their milk, for miles,
     Spotted once with the English tent,
     In days of the tocsin's alarms,
     To tower of the tallest of piles,
     The country's surveyor breast-high.
     Home of her birth and her love!
     Home of a diligent race;
     Thrifty, deft-handed to ply
     Shuttle or needle, and woo
     Sun to the roots of the pear
     Frogging each mud-walled cot.
     The elders had known her in arms.
     There plucked we the bluet, her hue
     Of the deeper forget-me-not;
     Well wedding her ripe-wheat hair.

     I saw, unsighting: her heart
     I saw, and the home of her love
     There printed, mournfully rent:
     Her ebbing adieu, her adieu,
     And the stride of the Shadow athwart.
     For one of our Autumns there! . . .
     Straight as the flight of a dove
     We went, swift winging we went.
     We trod solid ground, we breathed air,
     The heavens were unbroken. Break they,
     The word of the world is adieu:
     Her word: and the torrents are round,
     The jawed wolf-waters of prey.
     We stand upon isles, who stand:
     A Shadow before us, and back,
     A phantom the habited land.
     We may cry to the Sunderer, spare
     That dearest! he loosens his pack.
     Arrows we breathe, not air.
     The memories tenderly bound
     To us are a drifting crew,
     Amid grey-gapped waters for ground.
     Alone do we stand, each one,
     Till rootless as they we strew
     Those deeps of the corse-like stare
     At a foreign and stony sun.

     Eyes had I but for the scene
     Of my circle, what neighbourly grew.
     If haply no finger lay out
     To the figures of days that had been,
     I gathered my herb, and endured;
     My old cloak wrapped me about.
     Unfooted was ground-ivy blue,
     Whose rustic shrewd odour allured
     In Spring's fresh of morning: unseen
     Her favourite wood-sorrel bell
     As yet, though the leaves' green floor
     Awaited their flower, that would tell
     Of a red-veined moist yestreen,
     With its droop and the hues it wore,
     When we two stood overnight
     One, in the dark van-glow
     On our hill-top, seeing beneath
     Our household's twinkle of light
     Through spruce-boughs, gem of a wreath.

     Budding, the service-tree, white
     Almost as whitebeam, threw,
     From the under of leaf upright,
     Flecks like a showering snow
     On the flame-shaped junipers green,
     On the sombre mounds of the yew.
     Like silvery tapers bright
     By a solemn cathedral screen,
     They glistened to closer view.
     Turf for a rooks' revel striped
     Pleased those devourers astute.
     Chorister blackbird and thrush
     Together or alternate piped;
     A free-hearted harmony large,
     With meaning for man, for brute,
     When the primitive forces are brimmed.
     Like featherings hither and yon
     Of aery tree-twigs over marge,
     To the comb of the winds, untrimmed,
     Their measure is found in the vast.
     Grief heard them, and stepped her way on.
     She has but a narrow embrace.
     Distrustful of hearing she passed.
     They piped her young Earth's Bacchic rout;
     The race, and the prize of the race;
     Earth's lustihead pressing to sprout.

     But sight holds a soberer space.
     Colourless dogwood low
     Curled up a twisted root,
     Nigh yellow-green mosses, to flush
     Redder than sun upon rocks,
     When the creeper clematis-shoot
     Shall climb, cap his branches, and show,
     Beside veteran green of the box,
     At close of the year's maple blush,
     A bleeding greybeard is he,
     Now hale in the leafage lush.
     Our parasites paint us. Hard by,
     A wet yew-trunk flashed the peel
     Of our naked forefathers in fight;
     With stains of the fray sweating free;
     And him came no parasite nigh:
     Firm on the hard knotted knee,
     He stood in the crown of his dun;
     Earth's toughest to stay her wheel:
     Under whom the full day is night;
     Whom the century-tempests call son,
     Having striven to rend him in vain.

     I walked to observe, not to feel,
     Not to fancy, if simple of eye
     One may be among images reaped
     For a shift of the glance, as grain:
     Profitless froth you espy
     Ashore after billows have leaped.
     I fled nothing, nothing pursued:
     The changeful visible face
     Of our Mother I sought for my food;
     Crumbs by the way to sustain.
     Her sentence I knew past grace.
     Myself I had lost of us twain,
     Once bound in mirroring thought.
     She had flung me to dust in her wake;
     And I, as your convict drags
     His chain, by the scourge untaught,
     Bore life for a goad, without aim.
     I champed the sensations that make
     Of a ruffled philosophy rags.
     For them was no meaning too blunt,
     Nor aspect too cutting of steel.
     This Earth of the beautiful breasts,
     Shining up in all colours aflame,
     To them had visage of hags:
     A Mother of aches and jests:
     Soulless, heading a hunt
     Aimless except for the meal.
     Hope, with the star on her front;
     Fear, with an eye in the heel;
     Our links to a Mother of grace;
     They were dead on the nerve, and dead
     For the nature divided in three;
     Gone out of heart, out of brain,
     Out of soul: I had in their place
     The calm of an empty room.
     We were joined but by that thin thread,
     My disciplined habit to see.
     And those conjure images, those,
     The puppets of loss or gain;
     Not he who is bare to his doom;
     For whom never semblance plays
     To bewitch, overcloud, illume.
     The dusty mote-images rose;
     Sheer film of the surface awag:
     They sank as they rose; their pain
     Declaring them mine of old days.

     Now gazed I where, sole upon gloom,
     As flower-bush in sun-specked crag,
     Up the spine of the double combe
     With yew-boughs heavily cloaked,
     A young apparition shone:
     Known, yet wonderful, white
     Surpassingly; doubtfully known,
     For it struck as the birth of Light:
     Even Day from the dark unyoked.
     It waved like a pilgrim flag
     O'er processional penitents flown
     When of old they broke rounding yon spine:
     O the pure wild-cherry in bloom!

     For their Eastward march to the shrine
     Of the footsore far-eyed Faith,
     Was banner so brave, so fair,
     So quick with celestial sign
     Of victorious rays over death?
     For a conquest of coward despair; -
     Division of soul from wits,
     And these made rulers;--full sure,
     More starlike never did shine
     To illumine the sinister field
     Where our life's old night-bird flits.
     I knew it: with her, my own,
     Had hailed it pure of the pure;
     Our beacon yearly: but strange
     When it strikes to within is the known;
     Richer than newness revealed.
     There was needed darkness like mine.
     Its beauty to vividness blown
     Drew the life in me forward, chased,
     From aloft on a pinnacle's range,
     That hindward spidery line,
     The length of the ways I had paced,
     A footfarer out of the dawn,
     To Youth's wild forest, where sprang,
     For the morning of May long gone,
     The forest's white virgin; she
     Seen yonder; and sheltered me, sang;
     She in me, I in her; what songs
     The fawn-eared wood-hollows revive
     To pour forth their tune-footed throngs;
     Inspire to the dreaming of good
     Illimitable to come:
     She, the white wild cherry, a tree,
     Earth-rooted, tangibly wood,
     Yet a presence throbbing alive;
     Nor she in our language dumb:
     A spirit born of a tree;
     Because earth-rooted alive:
     Huntress of things worth pursuit
     Of souls; in our naming, dreams.
     And each unto other was lute,
     By fits quick as breezy gleams.
     My quiver of aims and desires
     Had colour that she would have owned;
     And if by humaner fires
     Hued later, these held her enthroned:
     My crescent of Earth; my blood
     At the silvery early stir;
     Hour of the thrill of the bud
     About to burst, and by her
     Directed, attuned, englobed:
     My Goddess, the chaste, not chill;
     Choir over choir white-robed;
     White-bosomed fold within fold:
     For so could I dream, breast-bare,
     In my time of blooming; dream still
     Through the maze, the mesh, and the wreck,
     Despite, since manhood was bold,
     The yoke of the flesh on my neck.
     She beckoned, I gazed, unaware
     How a shaft of the blossoming tree
     Was shot from the yew-wood's core.
     I stood to the touch of a key
     Turned in a fast-shut door.

     They rounded my garden, content,
     The small fry, clutching their fee,
     Their fruit of the wreath and the pole;
     And, chatter, hop, skip, they were sent,
     In a buzz of young company glee,
     Their natural music, swift shoal
     To the next easy shedders of pence.
     Why not? for they had me in tune
     With the hungers of my kind.
     Do readings of earth draw thence,
     Then a concord deeper than cries
     Of the Whither whose echo is Whence,
     To jar unanswered, shall rise
     As a fountain-jet in the mind
     Bowed dark o'er the falling and strewn.

     * * *

     Unwitting where it might lead,
     How it came, for the anguish to cease,
     And the Questions that sow not nor spin,
     This wisdom, rough-written, and black,
     As of veins that from venom bleed,
     I had with the peace within;
     Or patience, mortal of peace,
     Compressing the surgent strife
     In a heart laid open, not mailed,
     To the last blank hour of the rack,
     When struck the dividing knife:
     When the hand that never had failed
     In its pressure to mine hung slack.

     But this in myself did I know,
     Not needing a studious brow,
     Or trust in a governing star,
     While my ears held the jangled shout
     The children were lifting afar:
     That natures at interflow
     With all of their past and the now,
     Are chords to the Nature without,
     Orbs to the greater whole:
     First then, nor utterly then
     Till our lord of sensations at war,
     The rebel, the heart, yields place
     To brain, each prompting the soul.
     Thus our dear Earth we embrace
     For the milk, her strength to men.

     And crave we her medical herb,
     We have but to see and hear,
     Though pierced by the cruel acerb,
     The troops of the memories armed
     Hostile to strike at the nest
     That nourished and flew them warmed.
     Not she gives the tear for the tear.
     Weep, bleed, rave, writhe, be distraught,
     She is moveless. Not of her breast
     Are the symbols we conjure when Fear
     Takes leaven of Hope. I caught,
     With Death in me shrinking from Death,
     As cold from cold, for a sign
     Of the life beyond ashes: I cast,
     Believing the vision divine,
     Wings of that dream of my Youth
     To the spirit beloved: 'twas unglassed
     On her breast, in her depths austere:
     A flash through the mist, mere breath,
     Breath on a buckler of steel.
     For the flesh in revolt at her laws,
     Neither song nor smile in ruth,
     Nor promise of things to reveal,
     Has she, nor a word she saith:
     We are asking her wheels to pause.
     Well knows she the cry of unfaith.
     If we strain to the farther shore,
     We are catching at comfort near.
     Assurances, symbols, saws,
     Revelations in legends, light
     To eyes rolling darkness, these
     Desired of the flesh in affright,
     For the which it will swear to adore,
     She yields not for prayers at her knees;
     The woolly beast bleating will shear.
     These are our sensual dreams;
     Of the yearning to touch, to feel
     The dark Impalpable sure,
     And have the Unveiled appear;
     Whereon ever black she beams,
     Doth of her terrible deal,
     She who dotes over ripeness at play,
     Rosiness fondles and feeds,
     Guides it with shepherding crook,
     To her sports and her pastures alway.
     Not she gives the tear for the tear:
     Harsh wisdom gives Earth, no more;
     In one the spur and the curb:
     An answer to thoughts or deeds;
     To the Legends an alien look;
     To the Questions a figure of clay.
     Yet we have but to see and hear,
     Crave we her medical herb.
     For the road to her soul is the Real:
     The root of the growth of man:
     And the senses must traverse it fresh
     With a love that no scourge shall abate,
     To reach the lone heights where we scan
     In the mind's rarer vision this flesh;
     In the charge of the Mother our fate;
     Her law as the one common weal.

     We, whom the view benumbs,
     We, quivering upward, each hour
     Know battle in air and in ground
     For the breath that goes as it comes,
     For the choice between sweet and sour,
     For the smallest grain of our worth:
     And he who the reckoning sums
     Finds nought in his hand save Earth.
     Of Earth are we stripped or crowned.
     The fleeting Present we crave,
     Barter our best to wed,
     In hope of a cushioned bower,
     What is it but Future and Past
     Like wind and tide at a wave!
     Idea of the senses, bred
     For the senses to snap and devour:
     Thin as the shell of a sound
     In delivery, withered in light.
     Cry we for permanence fast,
     Permanence hangs by the grave;
     Sits on the grave green-grassed,
     On the roll of the heaved grave-mound.
     By Death, as by Life, are we fed:
     The two are one spring; our bond
     With the numbers; with whom to unite
     Here feathers wings for beyond:
     Only they can waft us in flight.
     For they are Reality's flower.
     Of them, and the contact with them,
     Issues Earth's dearest daughter, the firm
     In footing, the stately of stem;
     Unshaken though elements lour;
     A warrior heart unquelled;
     Mirror of Earth, and guide
     To the Holies from sense withheld:
     Reason, man's germinant fruit.
     She wrestles with our old worm
     Self in the narrow and wide:
     Relentless quencher of lies,
     With laughter she pierces the brute;
     And hear we her laughter peal,
     'Tis Light in us dancing to scour
     The loathed recess of his dens;
     Scatter his monstrous bed,
     And hound him to harrow and plough.
     She is the world's one prize;
     Our champion, rightfully head;
     The vessel whose piloted prow,
     Though Folly froth round, hiss and hoot,
     Leaves legible print at the keel.
     Nor least is the service she does,
     That service to her may cleanse
     The well of the Sorrows in us;
     For a common delight will drain
     The rank individual fens
     Of a wound refusing to heal
     While the old worm slavers its root.

     I bowed as a leaf in rain;
     As a tree when the leaf is shed
     To winds in the season at wane:
     And when from my soul I said,
     May the worm be trampled: smite,
     Sacred Reality! power
     Filled me to front it aright.
     I had come of my faith's ordeal.

     It is not to stand on a tower
     And see the flat universe reel;
     Our mortal sublimities drop
     Like raiment by glisterlings worn,
     At a sweep of the scythe for the crop.
     Wisdom is won of its fight,
     The combat incessant; and dries
     To mummywrap perching a height.
     It chews the contemplative cud
     In peril of isolate scorn,
     Unfed of the onward flood.
     Nor view we a different morn
     If we gaze with the deeper sight,
     With the deeper thought forewise:
     The world is the same, seen through;
     The features of men are the same.
     But let their historian new
     In the language of nakedness write,
     Rejoice we to know not shame,
     Not a dread, not a doubt: to have done
     With the tortures of thought in the throes,
     Our animal tangle, and grasp
     Very sap of the vital in this:
     That from flesh unto spirit man grows
     Even here on the sod under sun:
     That she of the wanton's kiss,
     Broken through with the bite of an asp,
     Is Mother of simple truth,
     Relentless quencher of lies;
     Eternal in thought; discerned
     In thought mid-ferry between
     The Life and the Death, which are one,
     As our breath in and out, joy or teen.
     She gives the rich vision to youth,
     If we will, of her prompting wise;
     Or men by the lash made lean,
     Who in harness the mind subserve,
     Their title to read her have earned;
     Having mastered sensation--insane
     At a stroke of the terrified nerve;
     And out of the sensual hive
     Grown to the flower of brain;
     To know her a thing alive,
     Whose aspects mutably swerve,
     Whose laws immutably reign.
     Our sentencer, clother in mist,
     Her morn bends breast to her noon,
     Noon to the hour dark-dyed,
     If we will, of her promptings wise:
     Her light is our own if we list.
     The legends that sweep her aside,
     Crying loud for an opiate boon,
     To comfort the human want,
     From the bosom of magical skies,
     She smiles on, marking their source:
     They read her with infant eyes.
     Good ships of morality they,
     For our crude developing force;
     Granite the thought to stay,
     That she is a thing alive
     To the living, the falling and strewn.
     But the Questions, the broods that haunt
     Sensation insurgent, may drive,
     The way of the channelling mole,
     Head in a ground-vault gaunt
     As your telescope's skeleton moon.
     Barren comfort to these will she dole;
     Dead is her face to their cries.
     Intelligence pushing to taste
     A lesson from beasts might heed.
     They scatter a voice in the waste,
     Where any dry swish of a reed
     By grey-glassy water replies.

     'They see not above or below;
     Farthest are they from my soul,'
     Earth whispers: 'they scarce have the thirst,
     Except to unriddle a rune;
     And I spin none; only show,
     Would humanity soar from its worst,
     Winged above darkness and dole,
     How flesh unto spirit must grow.
     Spirit raves not for a goal.
     Shapes in man's likeness hewn
     Desires not; neither desires
     The sleep or the glory: it trusts;
     Uses my gifts, yet aspires;
     Dreams of a higher than it.
     The dream is an atmosphere;
     A scale still ascending to knit
     The clear to the loftier Clear.
     'Tis Reason herself, tiptoe
     At the ultimate bound of her wit,
     On the verges of Night and Day.
     But is it a dream of the lusts,
     To my dustiest 'tis decreed;
     And them that so shuffle astray
     I touch with no key of gold
     For the wealth of the secret nook;
     Though I dote over ripeness at play,
     Rosiness fondle and feed,
     Guide it with shepherding crook
     To my sports and my pastures alway.
     The key will shriek in the lock,
     The door will rustily hinge,
     Will open on features of mould,
     To vanish corrupt at a glimpse,
     And mock as the wild echoes mock,
     Soulless in mimic, doth Greed
     Or the passion for fruitage tinge
     That dream, for your parricide imps
     To wing through the body of Time,
     Yourselves in slaying him slay.
     Much are you shots of your prime,
     You men of the act and the dream:
     And please you to fatten a weed
     That perishes, pledged to decay,
     'Tis dearth in your season of need,
     Down the slopes of the shoreward way; -
     Nigh on the misty stream,
     Where Ferryman under his hood,
     With a call to be ready to pay
     The small coin, whitens red blood.
     But the young ethereal seed
     Shall bring you the bread no buyer
     Can have for his craving supreme;
     To my quenchless quick shall speed
     The soul at her wrestle rude
     With devil, with angel more dire;
     With the flesh, with the Fates, enringed.
     The dream of the blossom of Good
     Is your banner of battle unrolled
     In its waver and current and curve
     (Choir over choir white-winged,
     White-bosomed fold within fold):
     Hopeful of victory most
     When hard is the task to sustain
     Assaults of the fearful sense
     At a mind in desolate mood
     With the Whither, whose echo is Whence;
     And humanity's clamour, lost, lost;
     And its clasp of the staves that snap;
     And evil abroad, as a main
     Uproarious, bursting its dyke.
     For back do you look, and lo,
     Forward the harvest of grain! -
     Numbers in council, awake
     To love more than things of my lap,
     Love me; and to let the types break,
     Men be grass, rocks rivers, all flow;
     All save the dream sink alike
     To the source of my vital in sap:
     Their battle, their loss, their ache,
     For my pledge of vitality know.
     The dream is the thought in the ghost;
     The thought sent flying for food;
     Eyeless, but sprung of an aim
     Supernal of Reason, to find
     The great Over-Reason we name
     Beneficence: mind seeking Mind.
     Dream of the blossom of Good,
     In its waver and current and curve,
     With the hopes of my offspring enscrolled!
     Soon to be seen of a host
     The flag of the Master I serve!
     And life in them doubled on Life,
     As flame upon flame, to behold,
     High over Time-tumbled sea,
     The bliss of his headship of strife,
     Him through handmaiden me.'



     CHANGE IN RECURRENCE



     I

     I stood at the gate of the cot
     Where my darling, with side-glance demure,
     Would spy, on her trim garden-plot,
     The busy wild things chase and lure.
     For these with their ways were her feast;
     They had surety no enemy lurked.
     Their deftest of tricks to their least
     She gathered in watch as she worked.

     II

     When berries were red on her ash,
     The blackbird would rifle them rough,
     Till the ground underneath looked a gash,
     And her rogue grew the round of a chough.
     The squirrel cocked ear o'er his hoop,
     Up the spruce, quick as eye, trailing brush.
     She knew any tit of the troop
     All as well as the snail-tapping thrush.

     III

     I gazed: 'twas the scene of the frame,
     With the face, the dear life for me, fled.
     No window a lute to my name,
     No watcher there plying the thread.
     But the blackbird hung peeking at will;
     The squirrel from cone hopped to cone;
     The thrush had a snail in his bill,
     And tap-tapped the shell hard on a stone.



     HYMN TO COLOUR



     I

     With Life and Death I walked when Love appeared,
     And made them on each side a shadow seem.
     Through wooded vales the land of dawn we neared,
     Where down smooth rapids whirls the helmless dream
     To fall on daylight; and night puts away
     Her darker veil for grey.

     II

     In that grey veil green grassblades brushed we by;
     We came where woods breathed sharp, and overhead
     Rocks raised clear horns on a transforming sky:
     Around, save for those shapes, with him who led
     And linked them, desert varied by no sign
     Of other life than mine.

     III

     By this the dark-winged planet, raying wide,
     From the mild pearl-glow to the rose upborne,
     Drew in his fires, less faint than far descried,
     Pure-fronted on a stronger wave of morn:
     And those two shapes the splendour interweaved,
     Hung web-like, sank and heaved.

     IV

     Love took my hand when hidden stood the sun
     To fling his robe on shoulder-heights of snow.
     Then said: There lie they, Life and Death in one.
     Whichever is, the other is: but know,
     It is thy craving self that thou dost see,
     Not in them seeing me.

     V

     Shall man into the mystery of breath,
     From his quick beating pulse a pathway spy?
     Or learn the secret of the shrouded death,
     By lifting up the lid of a white eye?
     Cleave thou thy way with fathering desire
     Of fire to reach to fire.

     VI

     Look now where Colour, the soul's bridegroom, makes
     The house of heaven splendid for the bride.
     To him as leaps a fountain she awakes,
     In knotting arms, yet boundless: him beside,
     She holds the flower to heaven, and by his power
     Brings heaven to the flower.

     VII

     He gives her homeliness in desert air,
     And sovereignty in spaciousness; he leads
     Through widening chambers of surprise to where
     Throbs rapture near an end that aye recedes,
     Because his touch is infinite and lends
     A yonder to all ends.

     VIII

     Death begs of Life his blush; Life Death persuades
     To keep long day with his caresses graced.
     He is the heart of light, the wing of shades,
     The crown of beauty: never soul embraced
     Of him can harbour unfaith; soul of him
     Possessed walks never dim.

     IX

     Love eyed his rosy memories: he sang:
     O bloom of dawn, breathed up from the gold sheaf
     Held springing beneath Orient! that dost hang
     The space of dewdrops running over leaf;
     Thy fleetingness is bigger in the ghost
     Than Time with all his host!

     X

     Of thee to say behold, has said adieu:
     But love remembers how the sky was green,
     And how the grasses glimmered lightest blue;
     How saint-like grey took fervour: how the screen
     Of cloud grew violet; how thy moment came
     Between a blush and flame.

     XI

     Love saw the emissary eglantine
     Break wave round thy white feet above the gloom;
     Lay finger on thy star; thy raiment line
     With cherub wing and limb; wed thy soft bloom,
     Gold-quivering like sunrays in thistle-down,
     Earth under rolling brown.

     XII

     They do not look through love to look on thee,
     Grave heavenliness! nor know they joy of sight,
     Who deem the wave of rapt desire must be
     Its wrecking and last issue of delight.
     Dead seasons quicken in one petal-spot
     Of colour unforgot.

     XIII

     This way have men come out of brutishness
     To spell the letters of the sky and read
     A reflex upon earth else meaningless.
     With thee, O fount of the Untimed! to lead,
     Drink they of thee, thee eyeing, they unaged
     Shall on through brave wars waged.

     XIV

     More gardens will they win than any lost;
     The vile plucked out of them, the unlovely slain.
     Not forfeiting the beast with which they are crossed,
     To stature of the Gods will they attain.
     They shall uplift their Earth to meet her Lord,
     Themselves the attuning chord!

     XV

     The song had ceased; my vision with the song.
     Then of those Shadows, which one made descent
     Beside me I knew not: but Life ere long
     Came on me in the public ways and bent
     Eyes deeper than of old: Death met I too,
     And saw the dawn glow through.



     MEDITATION UNDER STARS



     What links are ours with orbs that are
     So resolutely far:
     The solitary asks, and they
     Give radiance as from a shield:
     Still at the death of day,
     The seen, the unrevealed.
     Implacable they shine
     To us who would of Life obtain
     An answer for the life we strain
     To nourish with one sign.
     Nor can imagination throw
     The penetrative shaft: we pass
     The breath of thought, who would divine
     If haply they may grow
     As Earth; have our desire to know;
     If life comes there to grain from grass,
     And flowers like ours of toil and pain;
     Has passion to beat bar,
     Win space from cleaving brain;
     The mystic link attain,
     Whereby star holds on star.

     Those visible immortals beam
     Allurement to the dream:
     Ireful at human hungers brook
     No question in the look.
     For ever virgin to our sense,
     Remote they wane to gaze intense:
     Prolong it, and in ruthlessness they smite
     The beating heart behind the ball of sight:
     Till we conceive their heavens hoar,
     Those lights they raise but sparkles frore,
     And Earth, our blood-warm Earth, a shuddering prey
     To that frigidity of brainless ray.

     Yet space is given for breath of thought
     Beyond our bounds when musing: more
     When to that musing love is brought,
     And love is asked of love's wherefore.
     'Tis Earth's, her gift; else have we nought:
     Her gift, her secret, here our tie.
     And not with her and yonder sky?
     Bethink you: were it Earth alone
     Breeds love, would not her region be
     The sole delight and throne
     Of generous Deity?

     To deeper than this ball of sight
     Appeal the lustrous people of the night.
     Fronting yon shoreless, sown with fiery sails,
     It is our ravenous that quails,
     Flesh by its craven thirsts and fears distraught.
     The spirit leaps alight,
     Doubts not in them is he,
     The binder of his sheaves, the sane, the right:
     Of magnitude to magnitude is wrought,
     To feel it large of the great life they hold:
     In them to come, or vaster intervolved,
     The issues known in us, our unsolved solved:
     That there with toil Life climbs the self-same Tree,
     Whose roots enrichment have from ripeness dropped.
     So may we read and little find them cold:
     Let it but be the lord of Mind to guide
     Our eyes; no branch of Reason's growing lopped;
     Nor dreaming on a dream; but fortified
     By day to penetrate black midnight; see,
     Hear, feel, outside the senses; even that we,
     The specks of dust upon a mound of mould,
     We who reflect those rays, though low our place,
     To them are lastingly allied.

     So may we read, and little find them cold:
     Not frosty lamps illumining dead space,
     Not distant aliens, not senseless Powers.
     The fire is in them whereof we are born;
     The music of their motion may be ours.
     Spirit shall deem them beckoning Earth and voiced
     Sisterly to her, in her beams rejoiced.
     Of love, the grand impulsion, we behold
     The love that lends her grace
     Among the starry fold.
     Then at new flood of customary morn,
     Look at her through her showers,
     Her mists, her streaming gold,
     A wonder edges the familiar face:
     She wears no more that robe of printed hours;
     Half strange seems Earth, and sweeter than her flowers.



     WOODMAN AND ECHO



     Close Echo hears the woodman's axe,
     To double on it, as in glee,
     With clap of hands, and little lacks
     Of meaning in her repartee.
     For all shall fall,
     As one has done,
     The tree of me,
     Of thee the tree;
     And unto all
     The fate we wait
     Reveals the wheels
     Whereon we run:
     We tower to flower,
     We spread the shade,
     We drop for crop,
     At length are laid;
     Are rolled in mould,
     From chop and lop:
     And are we thick in woodland tracks,
     Or tempting of our stature we,
     The end is one, we do but wax
     For service over land and sea.
     So, strike! the like
     Shall thus of us,
     My brawny woodman, claim the tax.
     Nor foe thy blow,
     Though wood be good,
     And shriekingly the timber cracks:
     The ground we crowned
     Shall speed the seed
     Of younger into swelling sacks.

     For use he hews,
     To make awake
     The spirit of what stuff we be:
     Our earth of mirth
     And tears he clears
     For braver, let our minds agree;
     And then will men
     Within them win
     An Echo clapping harmony.



     THE WISDOM OF ELD



     We spend our lives in learning pilotage,
     And grow good steersmen when the vessel's crank!
     Gap-toothed he spake, and with a tottering shank
     Sidled to gain the sunny bench of Age.
     It is the sentence which completes that stage;
     A testament of wisdom reading blank.
     The seniors of the race, on their last plank,
     Pass mumbling it as nature's final page.
     These, bent by such experience, are the band
     Who captain young enthusiasts to maintain
     What things we view, and Earth's decree withstand,
     Lest dreaded Change, long dammed by dull decay,
     Should bring the world a vessel steered by brain,
     And ancients musical at close of day.



     EARTH'S PREFERENCE



     Earth loves her young: a preference manifest:
     She prompts them to her fruits and flower-beds;
     Their beauty with her choicest interthreads,
     And makes her revel of their merry zest;
     As in our East much were it in our West,
     If men had risen to do the work of heads.
     Her gabbling grey she eyes askant, nor treads
     The ways they walk; by what they speak oppressed.
     How wrought they in their zenith? 'Tis not writ;
     Not all; yet she by one sure sign can read:
     Have they but held her laws and nature dear,
     They mouth no sentence of inverted wit.
     More prizes she her beasts than this high breed
     Wry in the shape she wastes her milk to rear.



     SOCIETY



     Historic be the survey of our kind,
     And how their brave Society took shape.
     Lion, wolf, vulture, fox, jackal and ape,
     The strong of limb, the keen of nose, we find,
     Who, with some jars in harmony, combined,
     Their primal instincts taming, to escape
     The brawl indecent, and hot passions drape.
     Convenience pricked conscience, that the mind.
     Thus entered they the field of milder beasts,
     Which in some sort of civil order graze,
     And do half-homage to the God of Laws.
     But are they still for their old ravenous feasts,
     Earth gives the edifice they build no base:
     They spring another flood of fangs and claws.



     WINTER HEAVENS



     Sharp is the night, but stars with frost alive
     Leap off the rim of earth across the dome.
     It is a night to make the heavens our home
     More than the nest whereto apace we strive.
     Lengths down our road each fir-tree seems a hive,
     In swarms outrushing from the golden comb.
     They waken waves of thoughts that burst to foam:
     The living throb in me, the dead revive.
     Yon mantle clothes us: there, past mortal breath,
     Life glistens on the river of the death.
     It folds us, flesh and dust; and have we knelt,
     Or never knelt, or eyed as kine the springs
     Of radiance, the radiance enrings:
     And this is the soul's haven to have felt.





     Poems by George Meredith--Volume 3


     [This etext was prepared from the 1912 Times Book Club "Surrey" edition
     by David Price]



     A STAVE OF ROVING TIM
     (ADDRESSED TO CERTAIN FRIENDLY TRAMPS.)



     I

     The wind is East, the wind is West,
     Blows in and out of haven;
     The wind that blows is the wind that's best,
     And croak, my jolly raven!
     If here awhile we jigged and laughed,
     The like we will do yonder;
     For he's the man who masters a craft,
     And light as a lord can wander.
     So, foot the measure, Roving Tim,
     And croak, my jolly raven!
     The wind according to its whim
     Is in and out of haven.

     II

     You live in rows of snug abodes,
     With gold, maybe, for counting;
     And mine's the beck of the rainy roads
     Against the sun a-mounting.
     I take the day as it behaves,
     Nor shiver when 'tis airy;
     But comes a breeze, all you are on waves,
     Sick chickens o' Mother Carey!
     So, now for next, cries Roving Tim,
     And croak, my jolly raven!
     The wind according to its whim
     Is in and out of haven.

     III

     Sweet lass, you screw a lovely leer,
     To make a man consider.
     If you were up with the auctioneer,
     I'd be a handsome bidder.
     But wedlock clips the rover's wing;
     She tricks him fly to spider;
     And when we get to fights in the Ring,
     It's trumps when you play outsider.
     So, wrench and split, cries Roving Tim,
     And croak, my jolly raven!
     The wind according to its whim
     Is in and out of haven.

     IV

     Along my winding way I know
     A shady dell that's winking;
     The very corner for Self and Co
     To do a world of thinking.
     And shall I this? and shall I that?
     Till Nature answers, ne'ther!
     Strike match and light your pipe in your hat,
     Rejoicing in sound shoe-leather!
     So lead along, cries Roving Tim,
     And croak, my jolly raven!
     The wind according to its whim
     Is in and out of haven.

     V

     A cunning hand 'll hand you bread,
     With freedom for your capers.
     I'm not so sure of a cunning head;
     It steers to pits or vapours.
     But as for Life, we'll bear in sight
     The lesson Nature teaches;
     Regard it in a sailoring light,
     And treat it like thirsty leeches.
     So, fly your jib, cries Roving Tim,
     And top your boom, old raven!
     The wind according to its whim
     Is in and out of haven.

     VI

     She'll take, to please her dame and dad,
     The shopman nicely shaven.
     She'll learn to think o' the marching lad
     When perchers show they're craven.
     You say the shopman piles a heap,
     While I perhaps am fasting;
     And bless your wits, it haunts him in sleep,
     His tin-kettle chance of lasting!
     So hail the road, cries Roving Tim,
     And hail the rain, old raven!
     The wind according to its whim
     Is in and out of haven.

     VII

     He's half a wife, yon pecker bill;
     A book and likewise preacher.
     With any soul, in a game of skill,
     He'll prove your over-reacher.
     The reason is, his brains are bent
     On doing things right single.
     You'd wish for them when pitching your tent
     At night in a whirly dingle!
     So, off we go, cries Roving Tim,
     And on we go, old raven!
     The wind according to its whim
     Is in and out of haven.

     VIII

     Lord, no, man's lot is not for bliss;
     To call it woe is blindness:
     It'll here a kick, and it's there a kiss,
     And here and there a kindness.
     He starts a hare and calls her joy;
     He runs her down to sorrow:
     The dogs within him bother the boy,
     But 'tis a new day to-morrow.
     So, I at helm, cries Roving Tim,
     And you at bow, old raven!
     The wind according to its whim
     Is in and out of haven.



     JUMP-TO-GLORY JANE



     I

     A revelation came on Jane,
     The widow of a labouring swain:
     And first her body trembled sharp,
     Then all the woman was a harp
     With winds along the strings; she heard,
     Though there was neither tone nor word.

     II

     For past our hearing was the air,
     Beyond our speaking what it bare,
     And she within herself had sight
     Of heaven at work to cleanse outright,
     To make of her a mansion fit
     For angel hosts inside to sit.

     III

     They entered, and forthwith entranced,
     Her body braced, her members danced;
     Surprisingly the woman leapt;
     And countenance composed she kept:
     As gossip neighbours in the lane
     Declared, who saw and pitied Jane.

     IV

     These knew she had been reading books,
     The which was witnessed by her looks
     Of late: she had a mania
     For mad folk in America,
     And said for sure they led the way,
     But meat and beer were meant to stay.

     V

     That she had visited a fair,
     Had seen a gauzy lady there,
     Alive with tricks on legs alone,
     As good as wings, was also known:
     And longwhiles in a sullen mood,
     Before her jumping, Jane would brood.

     VI

     A good knee's height, they say, she sprang;
     Her arms and feet like those who hang:
     As if afire the body sped,
     And neither pair contributed.
     She jumped in silence: she was thought
     A corpse to resurrection caught.

     VII

     The villagers were mostly dazed;
     They jeered, they wondered, and they praised.
     'Twas guessed by some she was inspired,
     And some would have it she had hired
     An engine in her petticoats,
     To turn their wits and win their votes.

     VIII

     Her first was Winny Earnes, a kind
     Of woman not to dance inclined;
     But she went up, entirely won,
     Ere Jump-to-glory Jane had done;
     And once a vixen wild for speech,
     She found the better way to preach.

     IX

     No long time after, Jane was seen
     Directing jumps at Daddy Green;
     And that old man, to watch her fly,
     Had eyebrows made of arches high;
     Till homeward he likewise did hop,
     Oft calling on himself to stop!

     X

     It was a scene when man and maid,
     Abandoning all other trade,
     And careless of the call to meals,
     Went jumping at the woman's heels.
     By dozens they were counted soon,
     Without a sound to tell their tune.

     XI

     Along the roads they came, and crossed
     The fields, and o'er the hills were lost,
     And in the evening reappeared;
     Then short like hobbled horses reared,
     And down upon the grass they plumped:
     Alone their Jane to glory jumped.

     XII

     At morn they rose, to see her spring
     All going as an engine thing;
     And lighter than the gossamer
     She led the bobbers following her,
     Past old acquaintances, and where
     They made the stranger stupid stare.

     XIII

     When turnips were a filling crop,
     In scorn they jumped a butcher's shop:
     Or, spite of threats to flog and souse,
     They jumped for shame a public-house:
     And much their legs were seized with rage
     If passing by the vicarage.

     XIV

     The tightness of a hempen rope
     Their bodies got; but laundry soap
     Not handsomer can rub the skin
     For token of the washed within.
     Occasionally coughers cast
     A leg aloft and coughed their last.

     XV

     The weaker maids and some old men,
     Requiring rafters for the pen
     On rainy nights, were those who fell.
     The rest were quite a miracle,
     Refreshed as you may search all round
     On Club-feast days and cry, Not found!

     XVI

     For these poor innocents, that slept
     Against the sky, soft women wept:
     For never did they any theft;
     'Twas known when they their camping left,
     And jumped the cold out of their rags;
     In spirit rich as money-bags.

     XVII

     They jumped the question, jumped reply;
     And whether to insist, deny,
     Reprove, persuade, they jumped in ranks
     Or singly, straight the arms to flanks,
     And straight the legs, with just a knee
     For bending in a mild degree.

     XVIII

     The villagers might call them mad;
     An endless holiday they had,
     Of pleasure in a serious work:
     They taught by leaps where perils lurk,
     And with the lambkins practised sports
     For 'scaping Satan's pounds and quarts.

     XIX

     It really seemed on certain days,
     When they bobbed up their Lord to praise,
     And bobbing up they caught the glance
     Of light, our secret is to dance,
     And hold the tongue from hindering peace;
     To dance out preacher and police.

     XX

     Those flies of boys disturbed them sore
     On Sundays and when daylight wore:
     With withies cut from hedge or copse,
     They treated them as whipping-tops,
     And flung big stones with cruel aim;
     Yet all the flock jumped on the same.

     XXI

     For what could persecution do
     To worry such a blessed crew,
     On whom it was as wind to fire,
     Which set them always jumping higher?
     The parson and the lawyer tried,
     By meek persistency defied.

     XXII

     But if they bore, they could pursue
     As well, and this the Bishop too;
     When inner warnings proved him plain
     The chase for Jump-to-glory Jane.
     She knew it by his being sent
     To bless the feasting in the tent.

     XXIII

     Not less than fifty years on end,
     The Squire had been the Bishop's friend:
     And his poor tenants, harmless ones,
     With souls to save! fed not on buns,
     But angry meats: she took her place
     Outside to show the way to grace.

     XXIV

     In apron suit the Bishop stood;
     The crowding people kindly viewed.
     A gaunt grey woman he saw rise
     On air, with most beseeching eyes:
     And evident as light in dark
     It was, she set to him for mark.

     XXV

     Her highest leap had come: with ease
     She jumped to reach the Bishop's knees:
     Compressing tight her arms and lips,
     She sought to jump the Bishop's hips:
     Her aim flew at his apron-band,
     That he might see and understand.

     XXVI

     The mild inquiry of his gaze
     Was altered to a peaked amaze,
     At sight of thirty in ascent,
     To gain his notice clearly bent:
     And greatly Jane at heart was vexed
     By his ploughed look of mind perplexed.

     XXVII

     In jumps that said, Beware the pit!
     More eloquent than speaking it -
     That said, Avoid the boiled, the roast;
     The heated nose on face of ghost,
     Which comes of drinking: up and o'er
     The flesh with me! did Jane implore.

     XXVIII

     She jumped him high as huntsmen go
     Across the gate; she jumped him low,
     To coax him to begin and feel
     His infant steps returning, peel
     His mortal pride, exposing fruit,
     And off with hat and apron suit.

     XXIX

     We need much patience, well she knew,
     And out and out, and through and through,
     When we would gentlefolk address,
     However we may seek to bless:
     At times they hide them like the beasts
     From sacred beams; and mostly priests.

     XXX

     He gave no sign of making bare,
     Nor she of faintness or despair.
     Inflamed with hope that she might win,
     If she but coaxed him to begin,
     She used all arts for making fain;
     The mother with her babe was Jane.

     XXXI

     Now stamped the Squire, and knowing not
     Her business, waved her from the spot.
     Encircled by the men of might,
     The head of Jane, like flickering light,
     As in a charger, they beheld
     Ere she was from the park expelled.

     XXXII

     Her grief, in jumps of earthly weight,
     Did Jane around communicate:
     For that the moment when began
     The holy but mistaken man,
     In view of light, to take his lift,
     They cut him from her charm adrift!

     XXXIII

     And he was lost: a banished face
     For ever from the ways of grace,
     Unless pinched hard by dreams in fright.
     They saw the Bishop's wavering sprite
     Within her look, at come and go,
     Long after he had caused her woe.

     XXXIV

     Her greying eyes (until she sank
     At Fredsham on the wayside bank,
     Like cinder heaps that whitened lie
     From coals that shot the flame to sky)
     Had glassy vacancies, which yearned
     For one in memory discerned.

     XXXV

     May those who ply the tongue that cheats,
     And those who rush to beer and meats,
     And those whose mean ambition aims
     At palaces and titled names,
     Depart in such a cheerful strain
     As did our Jump-to-glory Jane!

     XXXVI

     Her end was beautiful: one sigh.
     She jumped a foot when it was nigh.
     A lily in a linen clout
     She looked when they had laid her out.
     It is a lily-light she bears
     For England up the ladder-stairs.



     THE RIDDLE FOR MEN



     I

     This Riddle rede or die,
     Says History since our Flood,
     To warn her sons of power:-
     It can be truth, it can be lie;
     Be parasite to twist awry;
     The drouthy vampire for your blood;
     The fountain of the silver flower;
     A brand, a lure, a web, a crest;
     Supple of wax or tempered steel;
     The spur to honour, snake in nest:
     'Tis as you will with it to deal;
     To wear upon the breast,
     Or trample under heel.

     II

     And rede you not aright,
     Says Nature, still in red
     Shall History's tale be writ!
     For solely thus you lead to light
     The trailing chapters she must write,
     And pass my fiery test of dead
     Or living through the furnace-pit:
     Dislinked from who the softer hold
     In grip of brute, and brute remain:
     Of whom the woeful tale is told,
     How for one short Sultanic reign,
     Their bodies lapse to mould,
     Their souls behowl the plain.



     THE SAGE ENAMOURED AND THE HONEST LADY



     I

     One fairest of the ripe unwedded left
     Her shadow on the Sage's path; he found,
     By common signs, that she had done a theft.
     He could have made the sovereign heights resound
     With questions of the wherefore of her state:
     He on far other but an hour before
     Intent. And was it man, or was it mate,
     That she disdained? or was there haply more?

     About her mouth a placid humour slipped
     The dimple, as you see smooth lakes at eve
     Spread melting rings where late a swallow dipped.
     The surface was attentive to receive,
     The secret underneath enfolded fast.
     She had the step of the unconquered, brave,
     Not arrogant; and if the vessel's mast
     Waved liberty, no challenge did it wave.
     Her eyes were the sweet world desired of souls,
     With something of a wavering line unspelt.
     They hold the look whose tenderness condoles
     For what the sister in the look has dealt
     Of fatal beyond healing; and her tones
     A woman's honeyed amorous outvied,
     As when in a dropped viol the wood-throb moans
     Among the sobbing strings, that plain and chide
     Like infants for themselves, less deep to thrill
     Than those rich mother-notes for them breathed round.
     Those voices are not magic of the will
     To strike love's wound, but of love's wound give sound,
     Conveying it; the yearnings, pains and dreams.
     They waft to the moist tropics after storm,
     When out of passion spent thick incense steams,
     And jewel-belted clouds the wreck transform.

     Was never hand on brush or lyre to paint
     Her gracious manners, where the nuptial ring
     Of melody clasped motion in restraint:
     The reed-blade with the breeze thereof may sing.
     With such endowments armed was she and decked
     To make her spoken thoughts eclipse her kind;
     Surpassing many a giant intellect,
     The marvel of that cradled infant mind.
     It clenched the tiny fist, it curled the toe;
     Cherubic laughed, enticed, dispensed, absorbed;
     And promised in fair feminine to grow
     A Sage's match and mate, more heavenly orbed.

     II

     Across his path the spouseless Lady cast
     Her shadow, and the man that thing became.
     His youth uprising called his age the Past.
     This was the strong grey head of laurelled name,
     And in his bosom an inverted Sage
     Mistook for light of morn the light which sank.
     But who while veins run blood shall know the page
     Succeeding ere we turn upon our blank?
     Comes Beauty with her tale of moon and cloud,
     Her silvered rims of mystery pointing in
     To hollows of the half-veiled unavowed,
     Where beats her secret life, grey heads will spin
     Quick as the young, and spell those hieroglyphs
     Of phosphorescent dusk, devoutly bent;
     They drink a cup to whirl on dizzier cliffs
     For their shamed fall, which asks, why was she sent!
     Why, and of whom, and whence; and tell they truth,
     The legends of her mission to beguile?

     Hard likeness to the toilful apes of youth
     He bore at times, and tempted the sly smile;
     And not on her soft lips was it descried.
     She stepped her way benevolently grave:
     Nor sign that Beauty fed her worm of pride,
     By tossing victim to the courtier knave,
     Let peep, nor of the naughty pride gave sign.
     Rather 'twas humbleness in being pursued,
     As pilgrim to the temple of a shrine.
     Had he not wits to pierce the mask he wooed?
     All wisdom's armoury this man could wield;
     And if the cynic in the Sage it pleased
     Traverse her woman's curtain and poor shield,
     For new example of a world diseased;
     Showing her shrineless, not a temple, bare;
     A curtain ripped to tatters by the blast;
     Yet she most surely to this man stood fair:
     He worshipped like the young enthusiast,
     Named simpleton or poet. Did he read
     Right through, and with the voice she held reserved
     Amid her vacant ruins jointly plead?

     Compassion for the man thus noble nerved
     The pity for herself she felt in him,
     To wreak a deed of sacrifice, and save;
     At least, be worthy. That our soul may swim,
     We sink our heart down bubbling under wave.
     It bubbles till it drops among the wrecks.
     But, ah! confession of a woman's breast:
     She eminent, she honoured of her sex!
     Truth speaks, and takes the spots of the confessed,
     To veil them. None of women, save their vile,
     Plays traitor to an army in the field.
     The cries most vindicating most defile.
     How shall a cause to Nature be appealed,
     When, under pressure of their common foe,
     Her sisters shun the Mother and disown,
     On pain of his intolerable crow
     Above the fiction, built for him, o'erthrown?
     Irrational he is, irrational
     Must they be, though not Reason's light shall wane
     In them with ever Nature at close call,
     Behind the fiction torturing to sustain;
     Who hear her in the milk, and sometimes make
     A tongueless answer, shivered on a sigh:
     Whereat men dread their lofty structure's quake
     Once more, and in their hosts for tocsin ply
     The crazy roar of peril, leonine
     For injured majesty. That sigh of dames
     Is rare and soon suppressed. Not they combine
     To shake the structure sheltering them, which tames
     Their lustier if not wilder: fixed are they,
     In elegancy scarce denoting ease;
     And do they breathe, it is not to betray
     The martyr in the caryatides.
     Yet here and there along the graceful row
     Is one who fetches breath from deeps, who deems,
     Moved by a desperate craving, their old foe
     May yield a trustier friend than woman seems,
     And aid to bear the sculptured floral weight
     Massed upon heads not utterly of stone:
     May stamp endurance by expounding fate.
     She turned to him, and, This you seek is gone;
     Look in, she said, as pants the furnace, brief,
     Frost-white. She gave his hearing sight to view
     The silent chamber of a brown curled leaf:
     Thing that had throbbed ere shot black lightning through.
     No further sign of heart could he discern:
     The picture of her speech was winter sky;
     A headless figure folding a cleft urn,
     Where tears once at the overflow were dry.

     III

     So spake she her first utterance on the rack.
     It softened torment, in the funeral hues
     Round wan Romance at ebb, but drove her back
     To listen to herself, herself accuse
     Harshly as Love's imperial cause allowed.
     She meant to grovel, and her lover praised
     So high o'er the condemnatory crowd,
     That she perforce a fellow phoenix blazed.

     The picture was of hand fast joined to hand,
     Both pushed from angry skies, their grasp more pledged
     Under the threatened flash of a bright brand
     At arm's length up, for severing action edged.
     Why, then Love's Court of Honour contemplate;
     And two drowned shorecasts, who, for the life esteemed
     Above their lost, invoke an advocate
     In Passion's purity, thereby redeemed.

     Redeemed, uplifted, glimmering on a throne,
     The woman stricken by an arrow falls.
     His advocate she can be, not her own,
     If, Traitress to thy sex! one sister calls.
     Have we such scenes of drapery's mournfulness
     On Beauty's revelations, witched we plant,
     Over the fair shape humbled to confess,
     An angel's buckler, with loud choiric chant.

     IV

     No knightly sword to serve, nor harp of bard,
     The lady's hand in her physician's knew.
     She had not hoped for them as her award,
     When zig-zag on the tongue electric flew
     Her charge of counter-motives, none impure:
     But muteness whipped her skin. She could have said,
     Her free confession was to work his cure,
     Show proofs for why she could not love or wed.
     Were they not shown? His muteness shook in thrall
     Her body on the verge of that black pit
     Sheer from the treacherous confessional,
     Demanding further, while perusing it.

     Slave is the open mouth beneath the closed.
     She sank; she snatched at colours; they were peel
     Of fruit past savour, in derision rosed.
     For the dark downward then her soul did reel.
     A press of hideous impulse urged to speak:
     A novel dread of man enchained her dumb.
     She felt the silence thicken, heard it shriek,
     Heard Life subsiding on the eternal hum:
     Welcome to women, when, between man's laws
     And Nature's thirsts, they, soul from body torn,
     Give suck at breast to a celestial cause,
     Named by the mouth infernal, and forsworn.
     Nathless her forehead twitched a sad content,
     To think the cure so manifest, so frail
     Her charm remaining. Was the curtain's rent
     Too wide? he but a man of that herd male?
     She saw him as that herd of the forked head
     Butting the woman harrowed on her knees,
     Clothed only in life's last devouring red.
     Confession at her fearful instant sees
     Judicial Silence write the devil fact
     In letters of the skeleton: at once,
     Swayed on the supplication of her act,
     The rabble reading, roaring to denounce,
     She joins. No longer colouring, with skips
     At tangles, picture that for eyes in tears
     Might swim the sequence, she addressed her lips
     To do the scaffold's office at his ears.

     Into the bitter judgement of that herd
     On women, she, deeming it present, fell.
     Her frenzy of abasement hugged the word
     They stone with, and so pile their citadel
     To launch at outcasts the foul levin bolt.
     As had he flung it, in her breast it burned.
     Face and reflect it did her hot revolt
     From hardness, to the writhing rebel turned;
     Because the golden buckler was withheld,
     She to herself applies the powder-spark,
     For joy of one wild demon burst ere quelled,
     Perishing to astound the tyrant Dark.

     She had the Scriptural word so scored on brain,
     It rang through air to sky, and rocked a world
     That danced down shades the scarlet dance profane;
     Most women! see! by the man's view dustward hurled,
     Impenitent, submissive, torn in two.
     They sink upon their nature, the unnamed,
     And sops of nourishment may get some few,
     In place of understanding, scourged and shamed.

     Barely have seasoned women understood
     The great Irrational, who thunders power,
     Drives Nature to her primitive wild wood,
     And courts her in the covert's dewy hour;
     Returning to his fortress nigh night's end,
     With execration of her daughters' lures.
     They help him the proud fortress to defend,
     Nor see what front it wears, what life immures,
     The murder it commits; nor that its base
     Is shifty as a huckster's opening deal
     For bargain under smoothest market face,
     While Gentleness bids frigid Justice feel,
     Justice protests that Reason is her seat;
     Elect Convenience, as Reason masked,
     Hears calmly cramped Humanity entreat;
     Until a sentient world is overtasked,
     And rouses Reason's fountain-self: she calls
     On Nature; Nature answers: Share your guilt
     In common when contention cracks the walls
     Of the big house which not on me is built.

     The Lady said as much as breath will bear;
     To happier sisters inconceivable:
     Contemptible to veterans of the fair,
     Who show for a convolving pearly shell,
     A treasure of the shore, their written book.
     As much as woman's breath will bear and live
     Shaped she to words beneath a knotted look,
     That held as if for grain the summing sieve.
     Her judge now brightened without pause, as wakes
     Our homely daylight after dread of spells.
     Lips sugared to let loose the little snakes
     Of slimy lustres ringing elfin bells
     About a story of the naked flesh,
     Intending but to put some garment on,
     Should learn, that in the subject they enmesh,
     A traitor lurks and will be known anon.
     Delusion heating pricks the torpid doubt,
     Stationed for index down an ancient track:
     And ware of it was he while she poured out
     A broken moon on forest-waters black.

     Though past the stage where midway men are skilled
     To scan their senses wriggling under plough,
     When yet to the charmed seed of speech distilled,
     Their hearts are fallow, he, and witless how,
     Loathing, had yielded, like bruised limb to leech,
     Not handsomely; but now beholding bleed
     Soul of the woman in her prostrate speech,
     The valour of that rawness he could read.
     Thence flashed it, as the crimson currents ran
     From senses up to thoughts, how she had read
     Maternally the warm remainder man
     Beneath his crust, and Nature's pity shed,
     In shedding dearer than heart's blood to light
     His vision of the path mild Wisdom walks.
     Therewith he could espy Confession's fright;
     Her need of him: these flowers grow on stalks;
     They suck from soil, and have their urgencies
     Beside and with the lovely face mid leaves.
     Veins of divergencies, convergencies,
     Our botanist in womankind perceives;
     And if he hugs no wound, the man can prize
     That splendid consummation and sure proof
     Of more than heart in her, who might despise,
     Who drowns herself, for pity up aloof
     To soar and be like Nature's pity: she
     Instinctive of what virtue in young days
     Had served him for his pilot-star on sea,
     To trouble him in haven. Thus his gaze
     Came out of rust, and more than the schooled tongue
     Was gifted to encourage and assure.
     He gave her of the deep well she had sprung;
     And name it gratitude, the word is poor.
     But name it gratitude, is aught as rare
     From sex to sex? And let it have survived
     Their conflict, comes the peace between the pair,
     Unknown to thousands husbanded and wived:
     Unknown to Passion, generous for prey:
     Unknown to Love, too blissful in a truce.
     Their tenderest of self did each one slay;
     His cloak of dignity, her fleur de luce;
     Her lily flower, and his abolla cloak,
     Things living, slew they, and no artery bled.
     A moment of some sacrificial smoke
     They passed, and were the dearer for their dead.

     He learnt how much we gain who make no claims.
     A nightcap on his flicker of grey fire
     Was thought of her sharp shudder in the flames,
     Confessing; and its conjured image dire,
     Of love, the torrent on the valley dashed;
     The whirlwind swathing tremulous peaks; young force,
     Visioned to hold corrected and abashed
     Our senile emulous; which rolls its course
     Proud to the shattering end; with these few last
     Hot quintessential drops of bryony juice,
     Squeezed out in anguish: all of that once vast!
     And still, though having skin for man's abuse,
     Though no more glorying in the beauteous wreath
     Shot skyward from a blood at passionate jet,
     Repenting but in words, that stand as teeth
     Between the vivid lips; a vassal set;
     And numb, of formal value. Are we true
     In nature, never natural thing repents;
     Albeit receiving punishment for due,
     Among the group of this world's penitents;
     Albeit remorsefully regretting, oft
     Cravenly, while the scourge no shudder spares.

     Our world believes it stabler if the soft
     Are whipped to show the face repentance wears.
     Then hear it, in a moan of atheist gloom,
     Deplore the weedy growth of hypocrites;
     Count Nature devilish, and accept for doom
     The chasm between our passions and our wits!

     Affecting lunar whiteness, patent snows,
     It trembles at betrayal of a sore.
     Hers is the glacier-conscience, to expose
     Impurities for clearness at the core.

     She to her hungered thundering in breast,
     YE SHALL NOT STARVE, not feebly designates
     The world repressing as a life repressed,
     Judged by the wasted martyrs it creates.
     How Sin, amid the shades Cimmerian,
     Repents, she points for sight: and she avers,
     The hoofed half-angel in the Puritan
     Nigh reads her when no brutish wrath deters.

     Sin against immaturity, the sin
     Of ravenous excess, what deed divides
     Man from vitality; these bleed within;
     Bleed in the crippled relic that abides.
     Perpetually they bleed; a limb is lost,
     A piece of life, the very spirit maimed.
     But culprit who the law of man has crossed
     With Nature's dubiously within is blamed;
     Despite our cry at cutting of the whip,
     Our shiver in the night when numbers frown,
     We but bewail a broken fellowship,
     A sting, an isolation, a fall'n crown.

     Abject of sinners is that sensitive,
     The flesh, amenable to stripes, miscalled
     Incorrigible: such title do we give
     To the poor shrinking stuff wherewith we are walled;
     And, taking it for Nature, place in ban
     Our Mother, as a Power wanton-willed,
     The shame and baffler of the soul of man,
     The recreant, reptilious. Do thou build
     Thy mind on her foundations in earth's bed;
     Behold man's mind the child of her keen rod,
     For teaching how the wits and passions wed
     To rear that temple of the credible God;
     Sacred the letters of her laws, and plain,
     Will shine, to guide thy feet and hold thee firm:
     Then, as a pathway through a field of grain,
     Man's laws appear the blind progressive worm,
     That moves by touch, and thrust of linking rings
     The which to endow with vision, lift from mud
     To level of their nature's aims and springs,
     Must those, the twain beside our vital flood,
     Now on opposing banks, the twain at strife
     (Whom the so rosy ferryman invites
     To junction, and mid-channel over Life,
     Unmasked to the ghostly, much asunder smites)
     Instruct in deeper than Convenience,
     In higher than the harvest of a year.
     Only the rooted knowledge to high sense
     Of heavenly can mount, and feel the spur
     For fruitfullest advancement, eye a mark
     Beyond the path with grain on either hand,
     Help to the steering of our social Ark
     Over the barbarous waters unto land.

     For us the double conscience and its war,
     The serving of two masters, false to both,
     Until those twain, who spring the root and are
     The knowledge in division, plight a troth
     Of equal hands: nor longer circulate
     A pious token for their current coin,
     To growl at the exchange; they, mate and mate,
     Fair feminine and masculine shall join
     Upon an upper plane, still common mould,
     Where stamped religion and reflective pace
     A statelier measure, and the hoop of gold
     Rounds to horizon for their soul's embrace.
     Then shall those noblest of the earth and sun
     Inmix unlike to waves on savage sea.
     But not till Nature's laws and man's are one,
     Can marriage of the man and woman be.

     V

     He passed her through the sermon's dull defile.
     Down under billowy vapour-gorges heaved
     The city and the vale and mountain-pile.
     She felt strange push of shuttle-threads that weaved.

     A new land in an old beneath her lay;
     And forth to meet it did her spirit rush,
     As bride who without shame has come to say,
     Husband, in his dear face that caused her blush.

     A natural woman's heart, not more than clad
     By station and bright raiment, gathers heat
     From nakedness in trusted hands: she had
     The joy of those who feel the world's heart beat,
     After long doubt of it as fire or ice;
     Because one man had helped her to breathe free;
     Surprised to faith in something of a price
     Past the old charity in chivalry:-
     Our first wild step to right the loaded scales
     Displaying women shamefully outweighed.
     The wisdom of humaneness best avails
     For serving justice till that fraud is brayed.
     Her buried body fed the life she drank.
     And not another stripping of her wound!
     The startled thought on black delirium sank,
     While with her gentle surgeon she communed,
     And woman's prospect of the yoke repelled.
     Her buried body gave her flowers and food;
     The peace, the homely skies, the springs that welled;
     Love, the large love that folds the multitude.
     Soul's chastity in honesty, and this
     With beauty, made the dower to men refused.
     And little do they know the prize they miss;
     Which is their happy fortune! Thus he mused

     For him, the cynic in the Sage had play
     A hazy moment, by a breath dispersed;
     To think, of all alive most wedded they,
     Whom time disjoined! He needed her quick thirst
     For renovated earth: on earth she gazed,
     With humble aim to foot beside the wise.
     Lo, where the eyelashes of night are raised
     Yet lowly over morning's pure grey eyes.



     'LOVE IS WINGED FOR TWO'



     Love is winged for two,
     In the worst he weathers,
     When their hearts are tied;
     But if they divide,
     O too true!
     Cracks a globe, and feathers, feathers,
     Feathers all the ground bestrew.

     I was breast of morning sea,
     Rosy plume on forest dun,
     I the laugh in rainy fleeces,
     While with me
     She made one.
     Now must we pick up our pieces,
     For that then so winged were we.



     'ASK, IS LOVE DIVINE'



     Ask, is Love divine,
     Voices all are, ay.
     Question for the sign,
     There's a common sigh.
     Would we, through our years,
     Love forego,
     Quit of scars and tears?
     Ah, but no, no, no!



     'JOY IS FLEET'



     Joy is fleet,
     Sorrow slow.
     Love, so sweet,
     Sorrow will sow.
     Love, that has flown
     Ere day's decline,
     Love to have known,
     Sorrow, be mine!



     THE LESSON OF GRIEF



     Not ere the bitter herb we taste,
     Which ages thought of happy times,
     To plant us in a weeping waste,
     Rings with our fellows this one heart
     Accordant chimes.

     When I had shed my glad year's leaf,
     I did believe I stood alone,
     Till that great company of Grief
     Taught me to know this craving heart
     For not my own.



     WIND ON THE LYRE



     That was the chirp of Ariel
     You heard, as overhead it flew,
     The farther going more to dwell,
     And wing our green to wed our blue;
     But whether note of joy or knell,
     Not his own Father-singer knew;
     Nor yet can any mortal tell,
     Save only how it shivers through;
     The breast of us a sounded shell,
     The blood of us a lighted dew.



     THE YOUTHFUL QUEST



     His Lady queen of woods to meet,
     He wanders day and night:
     The leaves have whisperings discreet,
     The mossy ways invite.

     Across a lustrous ring of space,
     By covert hoods and caves,
     Is promise of her secret face
     In film that onward waves.

     For darkness is the light astrain,
     Astrain for light the dark.
     A grey moth down a larches' lane
     Unwinds a ghostly spark.

     Her lamp he sees, and young desire
     Is fed while cloaked she flies.
     She quivers shot of violet fire
     To ash at look of eyes.



     THE EMPTY PURSE--A SERMON TO OUR LATER PRODIGAL SON



     Thou, run to the dry on this wayside bank,
     Too plainly of all the propellers bereft!
     Quenched youth, and is that thy purse?
     Even such limp slough as the snake has left
     Slack to the gale upon spikes of whin,
     For cast-off coat of a life gone blank,
     In its frame of a grin at the seeker, is thine;
     And thine to crave and to curse
     The sweet thing once within.
     Accuse him: some devil committed the theft,
     Which leaves of the portly a skin,
     No more; of the weighty a whine.

     Pursue him: and first, to be sure of his track,
     Over devious ways that have led to this,
     In the stream's consecutive line,
     Let memory lead thee back
     To where waves Morning her fleur-de-lys,
     Unflushed at the front of the roseate door
     Unopened yet: never shadow there
     Of a Tartarus lighted by Dis
     For souls whose cry is, alack!
     An ivory cradle rocks, apeep
     Through his eyelashes' laugh, a breathing pearl.
     There the young chief of the animals wore
     A likeness to heavenly hosts, unaware
     Of his love of himself; with the hours at leap.
     In a dingle away from a rutted highroad,
     Around him the earliest throstle and merle,
     Our human smile between milk and sleep,
     Effervescent of Nature he crowed.
     Fair was that season; furl over furl
     The banners of blossom; a dancing floor
     This earth; very angels the clouds; and fair
     Thou on the tablets of forehead and breast:
     Careless, a centre of vigilant care.
     Thy mother kisses an infant curl.
     The room of the toys was a boundless nest,
     A kingdom the field of the games,
     Till entered the craving for more,
     And the worshipped small body had aims.
     A good little idol, as records attest,
     When they tell of him lightly appeased in a scream
     By sweets and caresses: he gave but sign
     That the heir of a purse-plumped dominant race,
     Accustomed to plenty, not dumb would pine.
     Almost magician, his earliest dream
     Was lord of the unpossessed
     For a look; himself and his chase,
     As on puffs of a wind at whirl,
     Made one in the wink of a gleam.
     She kisses a locket curl,
     She conjures to vision a cherub face,
     When her butterfly counted his day
     All meadow and flowers, mishap
     Derided, and taken for play
     The fling of an urchin's cap.
     When her butterfly showed him an eaglet born,
     For preying too heedlessly bred,
     What a heart clapped in thee then!
     With what fuller colours of morn!
     And high to the uttermost heavens it flew,
     Swift as on poet's pen.
     It flew to be wedded, to wed
     The mystery scented around:
     Issue of flower and dew,
     Issue of light and sound:
     Thinner than either; a thread
     Spun of the dream they threw
     To kindle, allure, evade.
     It ran the sea-wave, the garden's dance,
     To the forest's dark heart down a dappled glade;
     Led on by a perishing glance,
     By a twinkle's eternal waylaid.
     Woman, the name was, when she took form;
     Sheaf of the wonders of life. She fled,
     Close imaged; she neared, far seen. How she made
     Palpitate earth of the living and dead!
     Did she not show thee the world designed
     Solely for loveliness? Nested warm,
     The day was the morrow in flight. And for thee,
     She muted the discords, tuned, refined;
     Drowned sharp edges beneath her cloak.
     Eye of the waters, and throb of the tree,
     Sliding on radiance, winging from shade,
     With her witch-whisper o'er ruins, in reeds,
     She sang low the song of her promise delayed;
     Beckoned and died, as a finger of smoke
     Astream over woodland. And was not she
     History's heroines white on storm?
     Remember her summons to valorous deeds.
     Shone she a lure of the honey-bag swarm,
     Most was her beam on the knightly: she led
     For the honours of manhood more than the prize;
     Waved her magnetical yoke
     Whither the warrior bled,
     Ere to the bower of sighs.
     And shy of her secrets she was; under deeps
     Plunged at the breath of a thirst that woke
     The dream in the cave where the Dreaded sleeps.

     Away over heaven the young heart flew,
     And caught many lustres, till some one said
     (Or was it the thought into hearing grew?),
     NOT THOU AS COMMONER MEN!
     Thy stature puffed and it swayed,
     It stiffened to royal-erect;
     A brassy trumpet brayed;
     A whirling seized thy head;
     The vision of beauty was flecked.
     Note well the how and the when,
     The thing that prompted and sped.
     Thereanon the keen passions clapped wing,
     Fixed eye, and the world was prey.
     No simple world of thy greenblade Spring,
     Nor world of thy flowerful prime
     On the topmost Orient peak
     Above a yet vaporous day.
     Flesh was it, breast to beak:
     A four-walled windowless world without ray,
     Only darkening jets on a river of slime,
     Where harsh over music as woodland jay,
     A voice chants, Woe to the weak!
     And along an insatiate feast,
     Women and men are one
     In the cup transforming to beast.
     Magian worship they paid to their sun,
     Lord of the Purse! Behold him climb.
     Stalked ever such figure of fun
     For monarch in great-grin pantomime?
     See now the heart dwindle, the frame distend;
     The soul to its anchorite cavern retreat,
     From a life that reeks of the rotted end;
     While he--is he pictureable? replete,
     Gourd-like swells of the rank of the soil,
     Hollow, more hollow at core.
     And for him did the hundreds toil
     Despised; in the cold and heat,
     This image ridiculous bore
     On their shoulders for morsels of meat!

     Gross, with the fumes of incense full,
     With parasites tickled, with slaves begirt,
     He strutted, a cock, he bellowed, a bull,
     He rolled him, a dog, in dirt.
     And dog, bull, cook, was he, fanged, horned, plumed;
     Original man, as philosophers vouch;
     Carnivorous, cannibal; length-long exhumed,
     Frightfully living and armed to devour;
     The primitive weapons of prey in his pouch;
     The bait, the line and the hook:
     To feed on his fellows intent.
     God of the Danae shower,
     He had but to follow his bent.
     He battened on fowl not safely hutched,
     On sheep astray from the crook;
     A lure for the foolish in fold:
     To carrion turning what flesh he touched.
     And O the grace of his air,
     As he at the goblet sips,
     A centre of girdles loosed,
     With their grisly label, Sold!
     Credulous hears the fidelity swear,
     Which has roving eyes over yielded lips:
     To-morrow will fancy himself the seduced,
     The stuck in a treacherous slough,
     Because of his faith in a purchased pair,
     False to a vinous vow.

     In his glory of banquet strip him bare,
     And what is the creature we view?
     Our pursy Apollo Apollyon's tool;
     A small one, still of the crew
     By serpent Apollyon blest:
     His plea in apology, blindfold Fool.
     A fool surcharged, propelled, unwarned;
     Not viler, you hear him protest:
     Of a popular countenance not incorrect.
     But deeds are the picture in essence, deeds
     Paint him the hooved and homed,
     Despite the poor pother he pleads,
     And his look of a nation's elect.
     We have him, our quarry confessed!
     And scan him: the features inspect
     Of that bestial multiform: cry,
     Corroborate I, O Samian Sage!
     The book of thy wisdom, proved
     On me, its last hieroglyph page,
     Alive in the horned and hooved?
     Thou! will he make reply.

     Thus has the plenary purse
     Done often: to do will engage
     Anew upon all of thy like, or worse.
     And now is thy deepest regret
     To be man, clean rescued from beast:
     From the grip of the Sorcerer, Gold,
     Celestially released.

     But now from his cavernous hold,
     Free may thy soul be set,
     As a child of the Death and the Life, to learn,
     Refreshed by some bodily sweat,
     The meaning of either in turn,
     What issue may come of the two:-
     A morn beyond mornings, beyond all reach
     Of emotional arms at the stretch to enfold:
     A firmament passing our visible blue.
     To those having nought to reflect it, 'tis nought;
     To those who are misty, 'tis mist on the beach
     From the billow withdrawing; to those who see
     Earth, our mother, in thought,
     Her spirit it is, our key.

     Ay, the Life and the Death are her words to us here,
     Of one significance, pricking the blind.
     This is thy gain now the surface is clear:
     To read with a soul in the mirror of mind
     Is man's chief lesson.--Thou smilest! I preach!
     Acid smiling, my friend, reveals
     Abysses within; frigid preaching a street
     Paved unconcernedly smooth
     For the lecturer straight on his heels,
     Up and down a policeman's beat;
     Bearing tonics not labelled to soothe.
     Thou hast a disgust of the sermon in rhyme.
     It is not attractive in being too chaste.
     The popular tale of adventure and crime
     Would equally sicken an overdone taste.
     So, then, onward. Philosophy, thoughtless to soothe,
     Lifts, if thou wilt, or there leaves thee supine.

     Thy condition, good sooth, has no seeming of sweet;
     It walks our first crags, it is flint for the tooth,
     For the thirsts of our nature brine.
     But manful has met it, manful will meet.
     And think of thy privilege: supple with youth,
     To have sight of the headlong swine,
     Once fouling thee, jumping the dips!
     As the coin of thy purse poured out:
     An animal's holiday past:
     And free of them thou, to begin a new bout;
     To start a fresh hunt on a resolute blast:
     No more an imp-ridden to bournes of eclipse:
     Having knowledge to spur thee, a gift to compare;
     Rubbing shoulder to shoulder, as only the book
     Of the world can be read, by necessity urged.
     For witness, what blinkers are they who look
     From the state of the prince or the millionnaire!
     They see but the fish they attract,
     The hungers on them converged;
     And never the thought in the shell of the act,
     Nor ever life's fangless mirth.
     But first, that the poisonous of thee be purged,
     Go into thyself, strike Earth.
     She is there, she is felt in a blow struck hard.
     Thou findest a pugilist countering quick,
     Cunning at drives where thy shutters are barred;
     Not, after the studied professional trick,
     Blue-sealing; she brightens the sight. Strike Earth,
     Antaeus, young giant, whom fortune trips!
     And thou com'st on a saving fact,
     To nourish thy planted worth.

     Be it clay, flint, mud, or the rubble of chips,
     Thy roots have grasp in the stern-exact:
     The redemption of sinners deluded! the last
     Dry handful, that bruises and saves.
     To the common big heart are we bound right fast,
     When our Mother admonishing nips
     At the nakedness bare of a clout,
     And we crave what the commonest craves.

     This wealth was a fortress-wall,
     Under which grew our grim little beast-god stout;
     Self-worshipped, the foe, in division from all;
     With crowds of illogical Christians, no doubt;
     Till the rescuing earthquake cracked.
     Thus are we man made firm;
     Made warm by the numbers compact.
     We follow no longer a trumpet-snout,
     At a trot where the hog is tracked,
     Nor wriggle the way of the worm.

     Thou wilt spare us the cynical pout
     At humanity: sign of a nature bechurled.
     No stenchy anathemas cast
     Upon Providence, women, the world.
     Distinguish thy tempers and trim thy wits.
     The purchased are things of the mart, not classed
     Among resonant types that have freely grown.

     Thy knowledge of women might be surpassed:
     As any sad dog's of sweet flesh when he quits
     The wayside wandering bone!
     No revilings of comrades as ingrates: thee
     The tempter, misleader, and criminal (screened
     By laws yet barbarous) own.

     If some one performed Fiend's deputy,
     He was for awhile the Fiend.
     Still, nursing a passion to speak,
     As the punch-bowl does, in the moral vein,
     When the ladle has finished its leak,
     And the vessel is loquent of nature's inane,
     Hie where the demagogues roar
     Like a Phalaris bull, with the victim's force:
     Hurrah to their jolly attack
     On a City that smokes of the Plain;
     A city of sin's death-dyes,
     Holding revel of worms in a corse;
     A city of malady sore,
     Over-ripe for the big doom's crack:
     A city of hymnical snore;
     Connubial truths and lies
     Demanding an instant divorce,
     Clean as the bright from the black.
     It were well for thy system to sermonize.
     There are giants to slay, and they call for their Jack.

     Then up stand thou in the midst:
     Thy good grain out of thee thresh,
     Hand upon heart: relate
     What things thou legally didst
     For the Archseducer of flesh.
     Omitting the murmurs of women and fate,
     Confess thee an instrument armed
     To be snare of our wanton, our weak,
     Of all by the sensual charmed.
     For once shall repentance be done by the tongue:
     Speak, though execrate, speak
     A word on grandmotherly Laws
     Giving rivers of gold to our young,
     In the days of their hungers impure;
     To furnish them beak and claws,
     And make them a banquet's lure.

     Thou the example, saved
     Miraculously by this poor skin!
     Thereat let the Purse be waved:
     The snake-slough sick of the snaky sin:
     A devil, if devil as devil behaved
     Ever, thou knowest, look thou but in,
     Where he shivers, a culprit fettered and shaved;
     O a bird stripped of feather, a fish clipped of fin!

     And commend for a washing the torrents of wrath,
     Which hurl at the foe of the dearest men prize
     Rough-rolling boulders and froth.
     Gigantical enginery they can command,
     For the crushing of enemies not of great size:
     But hold to thy desperate stand.
     Men's right of bequeathing their all to their own
     (With little regard for the creatures they squeezed);
     Their mill and mill-water and nether mill-stone
     Tied fast to their infant; lo, this is the last
     Of their hungers, by prudent devices appeased.
     The law they decree is their ultimate slave;
     Wherein we perceive old Voracity glassed.
     It works from their dust, and it reeks of their grave.
     Point them to greener, though Journals be guns;
     To brotherly fields under fatherly skies;
     Where the savage still primitive learns of a debt
     He has owed since he drummed on his belly for war;
     And how for his giving, the more will he get;
     For trusting his fellows, leave friends round his sons:
     Till they see, with the gape of a startled surprise,
     Their adored tyrant-monster a brute to abhor,
     The sun of their system a father of flies!

     So, for such good hope, take their scourge unashamed;
     'Tis the portion of them who civilize,
     Who speak the word novel and true:
     How the brutish antique of our springs may be tamed,
     Without loss of the strength that should push us to flower;
     How the God of old time will act Satan of new,
     If we keep him not straight at the higher God aimed;
     For whose habitation within us we scour
     This house of our life; where our bitterest pains
     Are those to eject the Infernal, who heaps
     Mire on the soul. Take stripes or chains;
     Grip at thy standard reviled.
     And what if our body be dashed from the steeps?
     Our spoken in protest remains.
     A young generation reaps.

     The young generation! ah, there is the child
     Of our souls down the Ages! to bleed for it, proof
     That souls we have, with our senses filed,
     Our shuttles at thread of the woof.
     May it be braver than ours,
     To encounter the rattle of hostile bolts,
     To look on the rising of Stranger Powers.
     May it know how the mind in expansion revolts
     From a nursery Past with dead letters aloof,
     And the piping to stupor of Precedents shun,
     In a field where the forefather print of the hoof
     Is not yet overgrassed by the watering hours,
     And should prompt us to Change, as to promise of sun,
     Till brain-rule splendidly towers.
     For that large light we have laboured and tramped
     Thorough forests and bogland, still to perceive
     Our animate morning stamped
     With the lines of a sombre eve.

     A timorous thing ran the innocent hind,
     When the wolf was the hypocrite fang under hood,
     The snake a lithe lurker up sleeve,
     And the lion effulgently ramped.
     Then our forefather hoof did its work in the wood,
     By right of the better in kind.
     But now will it breed yon bestial brood
     Three-fold thrice over, if bent to bind,
     As the healthy in chains with the sick,
     Unto despot usage our issuing mind.
     It signifies battle or death's dull knell.
     Precedents icily written on high
     Challenge the Tentatives hot to rebel.
     Our Mother, who speeds her bloomful quick
     For the march, reads which the impediment well.
     She smiles when of sapience is their boast.
     O loose of the tug between blood run dry
     And blood running flame may our offspring run!
     May brain democratic be king of the host!
     Less then shall the volumes of History tell
     Of the stop in progression, the slip in relapse,
     That counts us a sand-slack inch hard won
     Beneath an oppressive incumbent perhaps.

     Let the senile lords in a parchment sky,
     And the generous turbulents drunken of morn,
     Their battle of instincts put by,
     A moment examine this field:
     On a Roman street cast thoughtful eye,
     Along to the mounts from the bog-forest weald.
     It merits a glance at our history's maps,
     To see across Britain's old shaggy unshorn,
     Through the Parties in strife internecine, foot
     The ruler's close-reckoned direct to the mark.
     From the head ran the vanquisher's orderly route,
     In the stride of his forts through the tangle and dark.
     From the head runs the paved firm way for advance,
     And we shoulder, we wrangle! The light on us shed
     Shows dense beetle blackness in swarm, lurid Chance,
     The Goddess of gamblers, above. From the head,
     Then when it worked for the birth of a star
     Fraternal with heaven's in beauty and ray,
     Sprang the Acropolis. Ask what crown
     Comes of our tides of the blood at war,
     For men to bequeath generations down!
     And ask what thou wast when the Purse was brimmed:
     What high-bounding ball for the Gods at play:
     A Conservative youth! who the cream-bowl skimmed,
     Desiring affairs to be left as they are.

     So, thou takest Youth's natural place in the fray,
     As a Tentative, combating Peace,
     Our lullaby word for decay. -
     There will come an immediate decree
     In thy mind for the opposite party's decease,
     If he bends not an instant knee.
     Expunge it: extinguishing counts poor gain.
     And accept a mild word of police:-
     Be mannerly, measured; refrain
     From the puffings of him of the bagpipe cheeks.
     Our political, even as the merchant main,
     A temperate gale requires
     For the ship that haven seeks;
     Neither God of the winds nor his bellowsy squires.

     Then observe the antagonist, con
     His reasons for rocking the lullaby word.
     You stand on a different stage of the stairs.
     He fought certain battles, yon senile lord.
     In the strength of thee, feel his bequest to his heirs.
     We are now on his inches of ground hard won,
     For a perch to a flight o'er his resting fence.

     Does it knock too hard at thy head if I say,
     That Time is both father and son?
     Tough lesson, when senses are floods over sense! -
     Discern the paternal of Now
     As the Then of thy present tense.
     You may pull as you will either way,
     You can never be other than one.
     So, be filial. Giants to slay
     Demand knowing eyes in their Jack.

     There are those whom we push from the path with respect.
     Bow to that elder, though seeing him bow
     To the backward as well, for a thunderous back
     Upon thee. In his day he was not all wrong.
     Unto some foundered zenith he strove, and was wrecked.
     He scrambled to shore with a worship of shore.
     The Future he sees as the slippery murk;
     The Past as his doctrinal library lore.
     He stands now the rock to the wave's wild wash.
     Yet thy lumpish antagonist once did work
     Heroical, one of our strong.
     His gold to retain and his dross reject,
     Engage him, but humour, not aiming to quash.
     Detest the dead squat of the Turk,
     And suffice it to move him along.
     Drink of faith in the brains a full draught
     Before the oration: beware
     Lest rhetoric moonily waft
     Whither horrid activities snare.
     Rhetoric, juice for the mob
     Despising more luminous grape,
     Oft at its fount has it laughed
     In the cataracts rolling for rape
     Of a Reason left single to sob!

     'Tis known how the permanent never is writ
     In blood of the passions: mercurial they,
     Shifty their issue: stir not that pit
     To the game our brutes best play.

     But with rhetoric loose, can we check man's brute?
     Assemblies of men on their legs invoke
     Excitement for wholesome diversion: there shoot
     Electrical sparks between their dry thatch
     And thy waved torch, more to kindle than light.
     'Tis instant between you: the trick of a catch
     (To match a Batrachian croak)
     Will thump them a frenzy or fun in their veins.
     Then may it be rather the well-worn joke
     Thou repeatest, to stop conflagration, and write
     Penance for rhetoric. Strange will it seem,
     When thou readest that form of thy homage to brains!

     For the secret why demagogues fail,
     Though they carry hot mobs to the red extreme,
     And knock out or knock in the nail
     (We will rank them as flatly sincere,
     Devoutly detesting a wrong,
     Engines o'ercharged with our human steam),
     Question thee, seething amid the throng.
     And ask, whether Wisdom is born of blood-heat;
     Or of other than Wisdom comes victory here; -
     Aught more than the banquet and roundelay,
     That is closed with a terrible terminal wail,
     A retributive black ding-dong?
     And ask of thyself: This furious Yea
     Of a speech I thump to repeat,
     In the cause I would have prevail,
     For seed of a nourishing wheat,
     IS IT ACCEPTED OF SONG?
     Does it sound to the mind through the ear,
     Right sober, pure sane? has it disciplined feet?
     Thou wilt find it a test severe;
     Unerring whatever the theme.
     Rings it for Reason a melody clear,
     We have bidden old Chaos retreat;
     We have called on Creation to hear;
     All forces that make us are one full stream.
     Simple islander! thus may the spirit in verse,
     Showing its practical value and weight,
     Pipe to thee clear from the Empty Purse,
     Lead thee aloft to that high estate. -
     The test is conclusive, I deem:
     It embraces or mortally bites.
     We have then the key-note for debate:
     A Senate that sits on the heights
     Over discords, to shape and amend.

     And no singer is needed to serve
     The musical God, my friend.
     Needs only his law on a sensible nerve:
     A law that to Measure invites,
     Forbidding the passions contend.
     Is it accepted of Song?
     And if then the blunt answer be Nay,
     Dislink thee sharp from the ramping horde,
     Slaves of the Goddess of hoar-old sway,
     The Queen of delirious rites,
     Queen of those issueless mobs, that rend
     For frenzy the strings of a fruitful accord,
     Pursuing insensate, seething in throng,
     Their wild idea to its ashen end.
     Off to their Phrygia, shriek and gong,
     Shorn from their fellows, behold them wend!

     But thou, should the answer ring Ay,
     Hast warrant of seed for thy word:
     The musical God is nigh
     To inspirit and temper, tune it, and steer
     Through the shoals: is it worthy of Song,
     There are souls all woman to hear,
     Woman to bear and renew.
     For he is the Master of Measure, and weighs,
     Broad as the arms of his blue,
     Fine as the web of his rays,
     Justice, whose voice is a melody clear,
     The one sure life for the numbered long,
     From him are the brutal and vain,
     The vile, the excessive, out-thrust:
     He points to the God on the upmost throne:
     He is the saver of grain,
     The sifter of spirit from dust.
     He, Harmony, tells how to Measure pertain
     The virilities: Measure alone
     Has votaries rich in the male:
     Fathers embracing no cloud,
     Sowing no harvestless main:
     Alike by the flesh and the spirit endowed
     To create, to perpetuate; woo, win, wed;
     Send progeny streaming, have earth for their own,
     Over-run the insensates, disperse with a puff
     Simulacra, though solid they sail,
     And seem such imperial stuff:
     Yes, the living divide off the dead.

     Then thou with thy furies outgrown,
     Not as Cybele's beast will thy head lash tail
     So praeter-determinedly thermonous,
     Nor thy cause be an Attis far fled.
     Thou under stress of the strife
     Shalt hear for sustainment supreme
     The cry of the conscience of Life:
     KEEP THE YOUNG GENERATIONS IN HAIL,
     AND BEQUEATH THEM NO TUMBLED HOUSE!

     There hast thou the sacred theme,
     Therein the inveterate spur,
     Of the Innermost. See her one blink
     In vision past eyeballs. Not thee
     She cares for, but us. Follow her.
     Follow her, and thou wilt not sink.
     With thy soul the Life espouse:
     This Life of the visible, audible, ring
     With thy love tight about; and no death will be;
     The name be an empty thing,
     And woe a forgotten old trick:
     And battle will come as a challenge to drink;
     As a warrior's wound each transient sting.
     She leads to the Uppermost link by link;
     Exacts but vision, desires not vows.
     Above us the singular number to see;
     The plural warm round us; ourself in the thick,
     A dot or a stop: that is our task;
     Her lesson in figured arithmetic,
     For the letters of Life behind its mask;
     Her flower-like look under fearful brows.

     As for thy special case, O my friend, one must think
     Massilia's victim, who held the carouse
     For the length of a carnival year,
     Knew worse: but the wretch had his opening choice.
     For thee, by our law, no alternatives were:
     Thy fall was assured ere thou camest to a voice.
     He cancelled the ravaging Plague,
     With the roll of his fat off the cliff.
     Do thou with thy lean as the weapon of ink,
     Though they call thee an angler who fishes the vague
     And catches the not too pink,
     Attack one as murderous, knowing thy cause
     Is the cause of community. Iterate,
     Iterate, iterate, harp on the trite:
     Our preacher to win is the supple in stiff:
     Yet always in measure, with bearing polite:
     The manner of one that would expiate
     His share in grandmotherly Laws,
     Which do the dark thing to destroy,
     Under aspect of water so guilelessly white
     For the general use, by the devils befouled.

     Enough, poor prodigal boy!
     Thou hast listened with patience; another had howled.
     Repentance is proved, forgiveness is earned.
     And 'tis bony: denied thee thy succulent half
     Of the parable's blessing, to swineherd returned:
     A Sermon thy slice of the Scriptural calf!
     By my faith, there is feasting to come,
     Not the less, when our Earth we have seen
     Beneath and on surface, her deeds and designs:
     Who gives us the man-loving Nazarene,
     The martyrs, the poets, the corn and the vines.
     By my faith in the head, she has wonders in loom;
     Revelations, delights. I can hear a faint crow
     Of the cock of fresh mornings, far, far, yet distinct;
     As down the new shafting of mines,
     A cry of the metally gnome.
     When our Earth we have seen, and have linked
     With the home of the Spirit to whom we unfold,
     Imprisoned humanity open will throw
     Its fortress gates, and the rivers of gold
     For the congregate friendliness flow.
     Then the meaning of Earth in her children behold:
     Glad eyes, frank hands, and a fellowship real:
     And laughter on lips, as the birds' outburst
     At the flooding of light. No robbery then
     The feast, nor a robber's abode the home,
     For a furnished model of our first den!
     Nor Life as a stationed wheel;
     Nor History written in blood or in foam,
     For vendetta of Parties in cursing accursed.
     The God in the conscience of multitudes feel,
     And we feel deep to Earth at her heart,
     We have her communion with men,
     New ground, new skies for appeal.
     Yield into harness thy best and thy worst;
     Away on the trot of thy servitude start,
     Through the rigours and joys and sustainments of air.
     If courage should falter, 'tis wholesome to kneel.
     Remember that well, for the secret with some,
     Who pray for no gift, but have cleansing in prayer,
     And free from impurities tower-like stand.
     I promise not more, save that feasting will come
     To a mind and a body no longer inversed:
     The sense of large charity over the land,
     Earth's wheaten of wisdom dispensed in the rough,
     And a bell ringing thanks for a sustenance meal
     Through the active machine: lean fare,
     But it carries a sparkle! And now enough,
     And part we as comrades part,
     To meet again never or some day or soon.

     Our season of drought is reminder rude:-
     No later than yesternoon,
     I looked on the horse of a cart,
     By the wayside water-trough.
     How at every draught of his bride of thirst
     His nostrils widened! The sight was good:
     Food for us, food, such as first
     Drew our thoughts to earth's lowly for food.



     TO THE COMIC SPIRIT



     Sword of Common Sense! -
     Our surest gift: the sacred chain
     Of man to man: firm earth for trust
     In structures vowed to permanence:-
     Thou guardian issue of the harvest brain!
     Implacable perforce of just;
     With that good treasure in defence,
     Which is our gold crushed out of joy and pain
     Since first men planted foot and hand was king:
     Bright, nimble of the marrow-nerve
     To wield thy double edge, retort
     Or hold the deadlier reserve,
     And through thy victim's weapon sting:
     Thine is the service, thine the sport
     This shifty heart of ours to hunt
     Across its webs and round the many a ring
     Where fox it is, or snake, or mingled seeds
     Occasion heats to shape, or the poor smoke
     Struck from a puff-ball, or the troughster's grunt; -
     Once lion of our desert's trodden weeds;
     And but for thy straight finger at the yoke,
     Again to be the lordly paw,
     Naming his appetites his needs,
     Behind a decorative cloak:
     Thou, of the highest, the unwritten Law
     We read upon that building's architrave
     In the mind's firmament, by men upraised
     With sweat of blood when they had quitted cave
     For fellowship, and rearward looked amazed,
     Where the prime motive gapes a lurid jaw,
     Thou, soul of wakened heads, art armed to warn,
     Restrain, lest we backslide on whence we sprang,
     Scarce better than our dwarf beginning shoot,
     Of every gathered pearl and blossom shorn;
     Through thee, in novel wiles to win disguise,
     Seen are the pits of the disruptor, seen
     His rebel agitation at our root:
     Thou hast him out of hawking eyes;
     Nor ever morning of the clang
     Young Echo sped on hill from horn
     In forest blown when scent was keen
     Off earthy dews besprinkling blades
     Of covert grass more merrily rang
     The yelp of chase down alleys green,
     Forth of the headlong-pouring glades,
     Over the dappled fallows wild away,
     Than thy fine unaccented scorn
     At sight of man's old secret brute,
     Devout for pasture on his prey,
     Advancing, yawning to devour;
     With step of deer, with voice of flute,
     Haply with visage of the lily flower.

     Let the cock crow and ruddy morn
     His handmaiden appear! Youth claims his hour.
     The generously ludicrous
     Espouses it. But see we sons of day,
     Off whom Life leans for guidance in our fight,
     Accept the throb for lord of us;
     For lord, for the main central light
     That gives direction, not the eclipse;
     Or dost thou look where niggard Age,
     Demanding reverence for wrinkles, whips
     A tumbled top to grind a wolf's worn tooth; -
     Hoar despot on our final stage,
     In dotage of a stunted Youth; -
     Or it may be some venerable sage,
     Not having thee awake in him, compact
     Of wisdom else, the breast's old tempter trips;
     Or see we ceremonial state,
     Robing the gilded beast, exact
     Abjection, while the crackskull name of Fate
     Is used to stamp and hallow printed fact;
     A cruel corner lengthens up thy lips;
     These are thy game wherever men engage:
     These and, majestic in a borrowed shape,
     The major and the minor potentate,
     Creative of their various ape; -
     The tiptoe mortals triumphing to write
     Upon a perishable page
     An inch above their fellows' height; -
     The criers of foregone wisdom, who impose
     Its slough on live conditions, much for the greed
     Of our first hungry figure wide agape; -
     Call up thy hounds of laughter to their run.
     These, that would have men still of men be foes,
     Eternal fox to prowl and pike to feed;
     Would keep our life the whirly pool
     Of turbid stuff dishonouring History;
     The herd the drover's herd, the fool the fool,
     Ourself our slavish self's infernal sun:
     These are the children of the heart untaught
     By thy quick founts to beat abroad, by thee
     Untamed to tone its passions under thought,
     The rich humaneness reading in thy fun.
     Of them a world of coltish heels for school
     We have; a world with driving wrecks bestrewn.

     'Tis written of the Gods of human mould,
     Those Nectar Gods, of glorious stature hewn
     To quicken hymns, that they did hear, incensed,
     Satiric comments overbold,
     From one whose part was by decree
     The jester's; but they boiled to feel him bite.
     Better for them had they with Reason fenced
     Or smiled corrected! They in the great Gods' might
     Their prober crushed, as fingers flea.
     Crumbled Olympus when the sovereign sire
     His fatal kick to Momus gave, albeit
     Men could behold the sacred Mount aspire,
     The Satirist pass by on limping feet.
     Those Gods who saw the ejected laugh alight
     Below had then their last of airy glee;
     They in the cup sought Laughter's drowned sprite,
     Fed to dire fatness off uncurbed conceit.
     Eyes under saw them waddle on their Mount,
     And drew them down; to flattest earth they rolled.
     This know we veritable. O Sage of Mirth!
     Can it be true, the story men recount
     Of the fall'n plight of the great Gods on earth?
     How they being deathless, though of human mould,
     With human cravings, undecaying frames,
     Must labour for subsistence; are a band
     Whom a loose-cheeked, wide-lipped gay cripple leads
     At haunts of holiday on summer sand:
     And lightly he will hint to one that heeds
     Names in pained designation of them, names
     Ensphered on blue skies and on black, which twirl
     Our hearing madly from our seeing dazed,
     Add Bacchus unto both; and he entreats
     (His baby dimples in maternal chaps
     Running wild labyrinths of line and curl)
     Compassion for his masterful Trombone,
     Whose thunder is the brass of how he blazed
     Of old: for him of the mountain-muscle feats,
     Who guts a drum to fetch a snappish groan:
     For his fierce bugler horning onset, whom
     A truncheon-battered helmet caps . . .
     The creature is of earnest mien
     To plead a sorrow darker than the tomb.
     His Harp and Triangle, in tone subdued,
     He names; they are a rayless red and white;
     The dawn-hued libertine, the gibbous prude.
     And, if we recognize his Tambourine,
     He asks; exhausted names her: she has become
     A globe in cupolas; the blowziest queen
     Of overflowing dome on dome;
     Redundancy contending with the tight,
     Leaping the dam! He fondly calls, his girl,
     The buxom tripper with the goblet-smile,
     Refreshful. O but now his brows are dun,
     Bunched are his lips, as when distilling guile,
     To drop his venomous: the Dame of dames,
     Flower of the world, that honey one,
     She of the earthly rose in the sea-pearl,
     To whom the world ran ocean for her kiss;
     He names her, as a worshipper he names,
     And indicates with a contemptuous thumb.
     The lady meanwhile lures the mob, alike
     Ogles the bursters of the horn and drum.
     Curtain her close! her open arms
     Have suckers for beholders: she to this?
     For that she could not, save in fury, hear
     A sharp corrective utterance flick
     Her idle manners, for the laugh to strike
     Beauty so breeding beauty, without peer
     Above the snows, among the flowers? She reaps
     This mouldy garner of the fatal kick?
     Gross with the sacrifice of Circe-swarms,
     Astarte of vile sweets that slay, malign,
     From Greek resplendent to Phoenician foul,
     The trader in attractions sinks, all brine
     To thoughts of taste; is 't love?--bark, dog! hoot, owl!
     And she is blushless: ancient worship weeps.
     Suicide Graces dangle down the charms
     Sprawling like gourds on outer garden-heaps.
     She stands in her unholy oily leer
     A statue losing feature, weather-sick
     Mid draggled creepers of twined ivy sere.
     The curtain cried for magnifies to see! -
     We cannot quench our one corrupting glance:
     The vision of the rumour will not flee.
     Doth the Boy own such Mother?--shoot his dart
     To bring her, countless as the crested deeps,
     Her subjects of the uncorrected heart?
     False is that vision, shrieks the devotee;
     Incredible, we echo; and anew
     Like a far growling lightning-cloud it leaps.
     Low humourist this leader seems; perchance
     Pitched from his University career,
     Adept at classic fooling. Yet of mould
     Human those Gods were: deathless too:
     On high they not as meditatives paced:
     Prodigiously they did the deeds of flesh:
     Descending, they would touch the lowest here:
     And she, that lighted form of blue and gold,
     Whom the seas gave, all earth, all earth embraced;
     Exulting in the great hauls of her mesh;
     Desired and hated, desperately dear;
     Most human of them was. No more pursue!
     Enough that the black story can be told.
     It preaches to the eminently placed:
     For whom disastrous wreckage is nigh due,
     Paints omen. Truly they our throbber had;
     The passions plumping, passions playing leech,
     Cunning to trick us for the day's good cheer.
     Our uncorrected human heart will swell
     To notions monstrous, doings mad
     As billows on a foam-lashed beach;
     Borne on the tides of alternating heats,
     Will drug the brain, will doom the soul as well;
     Call the closed mouth of that harsh final Power
     To speak in judgement: Nemesis, the fell:
     Of those bright Gods assembled, offspring sour;
     The last surviving on the upper seats;
     As with men Reason when their hearts rebel.

     Ah, what a fruitless breeder is this heart,
     Full of the mingled seeds, each eating each.
     Not wiser of our mark than at the start,
     It surges like the wrath-faced father Sea
     To countering winds; a force blind-eyed,
     On endless rounds of aimless reach;
     Emotion for the source of pride,
     The grounds of faith in fixity
     Above our flesh; its cravings urging speech,
     Inspiring prayer; by turns a lump
     Swung on a time-piece, and by turns
     A quivering energy to jump
     For seats angelical: it shrinks, it yearns,
     Loves, loathes; is flame or cinders; lastly cloud
     Capping a sullen crater: and mankind
     We see cloud-capped, an army of the dark,
     Because of thy straight leadership declined;
     At heels of this or that delusive spark:
     Now when the multitudinous races press
     Elbow to elbow hourly more,
     A thickened host; when now we hear aloud
     Life for the very life implore
     A signal of a visioned mark;
     Light of the mind, the mind's discourse,
     The rational in graciousness,
     Thee by acknowledgement enthroned,
     To tame and lead that blind-eyed force
     In harmony of harness with the crowd,
     For payment of their dues; as yet disowned,
     Save where some dutiful lone creature, vowed
     To holy work, deems it the heart's intent;
     Or where a silken circle views it cowled,
     The seeming figure of concordance, bent
     On satiating tyrant lust
     Or barren fits of sentiment.

     Thou wilt not have our paths befouled
     By simulation; are we vile to view,
     The heavens shall see us clean of our own dust,
     Beneath thy breezy flitting wing:
     They make their mirror upon faces true;
     And where they win reflection, lucid heave
     The under tides of this hot heart seen through.
     Beneficently wilt thou clip
     All oversteppings of the plumed,
     The puffed, and bid the masker strip,
     And into the crowned windbag thrust,
     Tearing the mortal from the vital thing,
     A lightning o'er the half-illumed,
     Who to base brute-dominion cleave,
     Yet mark effects, and shun the flash,
     Till their drowsed wits a beam conceive,
     To spy a wound without a gash,
     The magic in a turn of wrist,
     And how are wedded heart and head regaled
     When Wit o'er Folly blows the mort,
     And their high note of union spreads
     Wide from the timely word with conquest charged;
     Victorious laughter, of no loud report,
     If heard; derision as divinely veiled
     As terrible Immortals in rose-mist,
     Given to the vision of arrested men:
     Whereat they feel within them weave
     Community its closer threads,
     And are to our fraternal state enlarged;
     Like warm fresh blood is their enlivened ken:
     They learn that thou art not of alien sort,
     Speaking the tongue by vipers hissed,
     Or of the frosty heights unsealed,
     Or of the vain who simple speech distort,
     Or of the vapours pointing on to nought
     Along cold skies; though sharp and high thy pitch;
     As when sole homeward the belated treads,
     And hears aloft a clamour wailed,
     That once had seemed the broomstick witch
     Horridly violating cloud for drought:
     He, from the rub of minds dispersing fears,
     Hears migrants marshalling their midnight train;
     Homeliest order in black sky appears,
     Not less than in the lighted village steads.
     So do those half-illumed wax clear to share
     A cry that is our common voice; the note
     Of fellowship upon a loftier plane,
     Above embattled castle-wall and moat;
     And toning drops as from pure heaven it sheds.
     So thou for washing a phantasmal air,
     For thy sweet singing keynote of the wise,
     Laughter--the joy of Reason seeing fade
     Obstruction into Earth's renewing beds,
     Beneath the stroke of her good servant's blade -
     Thenceforth art as their earth-star hailed;
     Gain of the years, conjunction's prize.
     The greater heart in thy appeal to heads
     They see, thou Captain of our civil Fort!
     By more elusive savages assailed
     On each ascending stage; untired
     Both inner foe and outer to cut short,
     And blow to chaff pretenders void of grist:
     Showing old tiger's claws, old crocodile's
     Yard-grin of eager grinders, slim to sight,
     Like forms in running water, oft when smiles,
     When pearly tears, when fluent lips delight:
     But never with the slayer's malice fired:
     As little as informs an infant's fist
     Clenched at the sneeze! Thou wouldst but have us be
     Good sons of mother soil, whereby to grow
     Branching on fairer skies, one stately tree;
     Broad of the tilth for flowering at the Court:
     Which is the tree bound fast to wave its tress;
     Of strength controlled sheer beauty to bestow.
     Ambrosial heights of possible acquist,
     Where souls of men with soul of man consort,
     And all look higher to new loveliness
     Begotten of the look: thy mark is there;
     While on our temporal ground alive,
     Rightly though fearfully thou wieldest sword
     Of finer temper now a numbered learn
     That they resisting thee themselves resist;
     And not thy bigger joy to smite and drive,
     Prompt the dense herd to butt, and set the snare
     Witching them into pitfalls for hoarse shouts.
     More now, and hourly more, and of the Lord
     Thou lead'st to, doth this rebel heart discern,
     When pinched ascetic and red sensualist
     Alternately recurrent freeze or burn,
     And of its old religions it has doubts.
     It fears thee less when thou hast shown it bare;
     Less hates, part understands, nor much resents,
     When the prized objects it has raised for prayer,
     For fitful prayer;--repentance dreading fire,
     Impelled by aches; the blindness which repents
     Like the poor trampled worm that writhes in mire; -
     Are sounded by thee, and thou darest probe
     Old institutions and establishments,
     Once fortresses against the floods of sin,
     For what their worth; and questioningly prod
     For why they stand upon a racing globe,
     Impeding blocks, less useful than the clod;
     Their angel out of them, a demon in.

     This half-enlightened heart, still doomed to fret,
     To hurl at vanities, to drift in shame
     Of gain or loss, bewailing the sure rod,
     Shall of predestination wed thee yet.
     Something it gathers of what things should drop
     At entrance on new times; of how thrice broad
     The world of minds communicative; how
     A straggling Nature classed in school, and scored
     With stripes admonishing, may yield to plough
     Fruitfullest furrows, nor for waxing tame
     Be feeble on an Earth whose gentler crop
     Is its most living, in the mind that steers,
     By Reason led, her way of tree and flame,
     Beyond the genuflexions and the tears;
     Upon an Earth that cannot stop,
     Where upward is the visible aim,
     And ever we espy the greater God,
     For simple pointing at a good adored:
     Proof of the closer neighbourhood. Head on,
     Sword of the many, light of the few! untwist
     Or cut our tangles till fair space is won
     Beyond a briared wood of austere brow,
     Believed of discord by thy timely word
     At intervals refreshing life: for thou
     Art verify Keeper of the Muse's Key;
     Thyself no vacant melodist;
     On lower land elective even as she;
     Holding, as she, all dissonance abhorred;
     Advising to her measured steps in flow;
     And teaching how for being subjected free
     Past thought of freedom we may come to know
     The music of the meaning of Accord.



     YOUTH IN MEMORY



     Days, when the ball of our vision
     Had eagles that flew unabashed to sun;
     When the grasp on the bow was decision,
     And arrow and hand and eye were one;
     When the Pleasures, like waves to a swimmer,
     Came heaving for rapture ahead! -
     Invoke them, they dwindle, they glimmer
     As lights over mounds of the dead.

     Behold the winged Olympus, off the mead,
     With thunder of wide pinions, lightning speed,
     Wafting the shepherd-boy through ether clear,
     To bear the golden nectar-cup.
     So flies desire at view of its delight,
     When the young heart is tiptoe perched on sight.
     We meanwhile who in hues of the sick year
     The Spring-time paint to prick us for our lost,
     Mount but the fatal half way up -
     Whereon shut eyes! This is decreed,
     For Age that would to youthful heavens ascend,
     By passion for the arms' possession tossed,
     It falls the way of sighs and hath their end;
     A spark gone out to more sepulchral night.
     Good if the arrowy eagle of the height
     Be then the little bird that hops to feed.

     Lame falls the cry to kindle days
     Of radiant orb and daring gaze.
     It does but clank our mortal chain.
     For Earth reads through her felon old
     The many-numbered of her fold,
     Who forward tottering backward strain,
     And would be thieves of treasure spent,
     With their grey season soured.
     She could write out their history in their thirst
     To have again the much devoured,
     And be the bud at burst;
     In honey fancy join the flow,
     Where Youth swims on as once they went,
     All choiric for spontaneous glee
     Of active eager lungs and thews;
     They now bared roots beside the river bent;
     Whose privilege themselves to see;
     Their place in yonder tideway know;
     The current glass peruse;
     The depths intently sound;
     And sapped by each returning flood
     Accept for monitory nourishment
     Those worn roped features under crust of mud,
     Reflected in the silvery smooth around:
     Not less the branching and high singing tree,
     A home of nests, a landmark and a tent,
     Until their hour for losing hold on ground.
     Even such good harvest of the things that flee
     Earth offers her subjected, and they choose
     Rather of Bacchic Youth one beam to drink,
     And warm slow marrow with the sensual wink.
     So block they at her source the Mother of the Muse.

     Who cheerfully the little bird becomes,
     Without a fall, and pipes for peck at crumbs,
     May have her dolings to the lightest touch;
     As where some cripple muses by his crutch,
     Unwitting that the spirit in him sings:
     'When I had legs, then had I wings,
     As good as any born of eggs,
     To feed on all aerial things,
     When I had legs!'
     And if not to embrace he sighs,
     She gives him breath of Youth awhile,
     Perspective of a breezy mile,
     Companionable hedgeways, lifting skies;
     Scenes where his nested dreams upon their hoard
     Brooded, or up to empyrean soared:
     Enough to link him with a dotted line.
     But cravings for an eagle's flight,
     To top white peaks and serve wild wine
     Among the rosy undecayed,
     Bring only flash of shade
     From her full throbbing breast of day in night.
     By what they crave are they betrayed:
     And cavernous is that young dragon's jaw,
     Crimson for all the fiery reptile saw
     In time now coveted, for teeth to flay,
     Once more consume, were Life recurrent May.
     They to their moment of drawn breath,
     Which is the life that makes the death,
     The death that makes ethereal life would bind:
     The death that breeds the spectre do they find.
     Darkness is wedded and the waste regrets
     Beating as dead leaves on a fitful gust,
     By souls no longer dowered to climb
     Beneath their pack of dust,
     Whom envy of a lustrous prime,
     Eclipsed while yet invoked, besets,
     And dooms to sink and water sable flowers,
     That never gladdened eye or loaded bee.
     Strain we the arms for Memory's hours,
     We are the seized Persephone.
     Responsive never to the soft desire
     For one prized tune is this our chord of life.
     'Tis clipped to deadness with a wanton knife,
     In wishes that for ecstasies aspire.
     Yet have we glad companionship of Youth,
     Elysian meadows for the mind,
     Dare we to face deeds done, and in our tomb
     Filled with the parti-coloured bloom
     Of loved and hated, grasp all human truth
     Sowed by us down the mazy paths behind.
     To feel that heaven must we that hell sound through:
     Whence comes a line of continuity,
     That brings our middle station into view,
     Between those poles; a novel Earth we see,
     In likeness of us, made of banned and blest;
     The sower's bed, but not the reaper's rest:
     An Earth alive with meanings, wherein meet
     Buried, and breathing, and to be.
     Then of the junction of the three,
     Even as a heart in brain, full sweet
     May sense of soul, the sum of music, beat.

     Only the soul can walk the dusty track
     Where hangs our flowering under vapours black,
     And bear to see how these pervade, obscure,
     Quench recollection of a spacious pure.
     They take phantasmal forms, divide, convolve,
     Hard at each other point and gape,
     Horrible ghosts! in agony dissolve,
     To reappear with one they drape
     For criminal, and, Father! shrieking name,
     Who such distorted issue did beget.
     Accept them, them and him, though hiss thy sweat
     Off brow on breast, whose furnace flame
     Has eaten, and old Self consumes.
     Out of the purification will they leap,
     Thee renovating while new light illumes
     The dusky web of evil, known as pain,
     That heavily up healthward mounts the steep;
     Our fleshly road to beacon-fire of brain:
     Midway the tameless oceanic brute
     Below, whose heave is topped with foam for fruit,
     And the fair heaven reflecting inner peace
     On righteous warfare, that asks not to cease.

     Forth of such passage through black fire we win
     Clear hearing of the simple lute,
     Whereon, and not on other, Memory plays
     For them who can in quietness receive
     Her restorative airs: a ditty thin
     As note of hedgerow bird in ear of eve,
     Or wave at ebb, the shallow catching rays
     On a transparent sheet, where curves a glass
     To truer heavens than when the breaker neighs
     Loud at the plunge for bubbly wreck in roar.
     Solidity and bulk and martial brass,
     Once tyrants of the senses, faintly score
     A mark on pebbled sand or fluid slime,
     While present in the spirit, vital there,
     Are things that seemed the phantoms of their time;
     Eternal as the recurrent cloud, as air
     Imperative, refreshful as dawn-dew.
     Some evanescent hand on vapour scrawled
     Historic of the soul, and heats anew
     Its coloured lines where deeds of flesh stand bald.
     True of the man, and of mankind 'tis true,
     Did we stout battle with the Shade, Despair,
     Our cowardice, it blooms; or haply warred
     Against the primal beast in us, and flung;
     Or cleaving mists of Sorrow, left it starred
     Above self-pity slain: or it was Prayer
     First taken for Life's cleanser; or the tongue
     Spake for the world against this heart; or rings
     Old laughter, from the founts of wisdom sprung;
     Or clap of wing of joy, that was a throb
     From breast of Earth, and did no creature rob:
     These quickening live. But deepest at her springs,
     Most filial, is an eye to love her young.
     And had we it, to see with it, alive
     Is our lost garden, flower, bird and hive.
     Blood of her blood, aim of her aim, are then
     The green-robed and grey-crested sons of men:
     She tributary to her aged restores
     The living in the dead; she will inspire
     Faith homelier than on the Yonder shores,
     Abhorring these as mire,
     Uncertain steps, in dimness gropes,
     With mortal tremours pricking hopes,
     And, by the final Bacchic of the lusts
     Propelled, the Bacchic of the spirit trusts:
     A fervour drunk from mystic hierophants;
     Not utterly misled, though blindly led,
     Led round fermenting eddies. Faith she plants
     In her own firmness as our midway road:
     Which rightly Youth has read, though blindly read;
     Her essence reading in her toothsome goad;
     Spur of bright dreams experience disenchants.
     But love we well the young, her road midway
     The darknesses runs consecrated clay.
     Despite our feeble hold on this green home,
     And the vast outer strangeness void of dome,
     Shall we be with them, of them, taught to feel,
     Up to the moment of our prostrate fall,
     The life they deem voluptuously real
     Is more than empty echo of a call,
     Or shadow of a shade, or swing of tides;
     As brooding upon age, when veins congeal,
     Grey palsy nods to think. With us for guides,
     Another step above the animal,
     To views in Alpine thought are they helped on.
     Good if so far we live in them when gone!

     And there the arrowy eagle of the height
     Becomes the little bird that hops to feed,
     Glad of a crumb, for tempered appetite
     To make it wholesome blood and fruitful seed.
     Then Memory strikes on no slack string,
     Nor sectional will varied Life appear:
     Perforce of soul discerned in mind, we hear
     Earth with her Onward chime, with Winter Spring.
     And ours the mellow note, while sharing joys
     No more subjecting mortals who have learnt
     To build for happiness on equipoise,
     The Pleasures read in sparks of substance burnt;
     Know in our seasons an integral wheel,
     That rolls us to a mark may yet be willed.
     This, the truistic rubbish under heel
     Of all the world, we peck at and are filled.



     PENETRATION AND TRUST



     I

     Sleek as a lizard at round of a stone,
     The look of her heart slipped out and in.
     Sweet on her lord her soft eyes shone,
     As innocents clear of a shade of sin.

     II

     He laid a finger under her chin,
     His arm for her girdle at waist was thrown:
     Now, what will happen and who will win,
     With me in the fight and my lady lone?

     III

     He clasped her, clasping a shape of stone;
     Was fire on her eyes till they let him in.
     Her breast to a God of the daybeams shone,
     And never a corner for serpent sin.

     IV

     Tranced she stood, with a chattering chin;
     Her shrunken form at his feet was thrown:
     At home to the death my lord shall win,
     When it is no tyrant who leaves me lone!



     NIGHT OF FROST IN MAY



     With splendour of a silver day,
     A frosted night had opened May:
     And on that plumed and armoured night,
     As one close temple hove our wood,
     Its border leafage virgin white.
     Remote down air an owl hallooed.
     The black twig dropped without a twirl;
     The bud in jewelled grasp was nipped;
     The brown leaf cracked a scorching curl;
     A crystal off the green leaf slipped.
     Across the tracks of rimy tan,
     Some busy thread at whiles would shoot;
     A limping minnow-rillet ran,
     To hang upon an icy foot.

     In this shrill hush of quietude,
     The ear conceived a severing cry.
     Almost it let the sound elude,
     When chuckles three, a warble shy,
     From hazels of the garden came,
     Near by the crimson-windowed farm.
     They laid the trance on breath and frame,
     A prelude of the passion-charm.

     Then soon was heard, not sooner heard
     Than answered, doubled, trebled, more,
     Voice of an Eden in the bird
     Renewing with his pipe of four
     The sob: a troubled Eden, rich
     In throb of heart: unnumbered throats
     Flung upward at a fountain's pitch,
     The fervour of the four long notes,
     That on the fountain's pool subside,
     Exult and ruffle and upspring:
     Endless the crossing multiplied
     Of silver and of golden string.
     There chimed a bubbled underbrew
     With witch-wild spray of vocal dew.

     It seemed a single harper swept
     Our wild wood's inner chords and waked
     A spirit that for yearning ached
     Ere men desired and joyed or wept.
     Or now a legion ravishing
     Musician rivals did unite
     In love of sweetness high to sing
     The subtle song that rivals light;
     From breast of earth to breast of sky:
     And they were secret, they were nigh:
     A hand the magic might disperse;
     The magic swung my universe.

     Yet sharpened breath forbade to dream,
     Where all was visionary gleam;
     Where Seasons, as with cymbals, clashed;
     And feelings, passing joy and woe,
     Churned, gurgled, spouted, interflashed,
     Nor either was the one we know:
     Nor pregnant of the heart contained
     In us were they, that griefless plained,
     That plaining soared; and through the heart
     Struck to one note the wide apart:-
     A passion surgent from despair;
     A paining bliss in fervid cold;
     Off the last vital edge of air,
     Leap heavenward of the lofty-souled,
     For rapture of a wine of tears;
     As had a star among the spheres
     Caught up our earth to some mid-height
     Of double life to ear and sight,
     She giving voice to thought that shines
     Keen-brilliant of her deepest mines;
     While steely drips the rillet clinked,
     And hoar with crust the cowslip swelled.

     Then was the lyre of earth beheld,
     Then heard by me: it holds me linked;
     Across the years to dead-ebb shores
     I stand on, my blood-thrill restores.
     But would I conjure into me
     Those issue notes, I must review
     What serious breath the woodland drew;
     The low throb of expectancy;
     How the white mother-muteness pressed
     On leaf and meadow-herb; how shook,
     Nigh speech of mouth, the sparkle-crest
     Seen spinning on the bracken-crook.



     THE TEACHING OF THE NUDE



     I

     A satyr spied a Goddess in her bath,
     Unseen of her attendant nymphs; none knew.
     Forthwith the creature to his fellows drew,
     And looking backward on the curtained path,
     He strove to tell; he could but heave a breast
     Too full, and point to mouth, with failing leers:
     Vainly he danced for speech, he giggled tears,
     Made as if torn in two, as if tight pressed,
     As if cast prone; then fetching whimpered tunes
     For words, flung heel and set his hairy flight
     Through forest-hollows, over rocky height.
     The green leaves buried him three rounds of moons.
     A senatorial Satyr named what herb
     Had hurried him outrunning reason's curb.

     II

     'Tis told how when that hieaway unchecked
     To dell returned, he seemed of tempered mood:
     Even as the valley of the torrent rude,
     The torrent now a brook, the valley wrecked.
     In him, to hale him high or hurl aheap,
     Goddess and Goatfoot hourly wrestled sore;
     Hourly the immortal prevailing more:
     Till one hot noon saw Meliboeus peep
     From thicket-sprays to where his full-blown dame,
     In circle by the lusty friskers gripped,
     Laughed the showered rose-leaves while her limbs were stripped.
     She beckoned to our Satyr, and he came.
     Then twirled she mounds of ripeness, wreath of arms.
     His hoof kicked up the clothing for such charms.



     BREATH OF THE BRIAR



     I

     O briar-scents, on yon wet wing
     Of warm South-west wind brushing by,
     You mind me of the sweetest thing
     That ever mingled frank and shy:
     When she and I, by love enticed,
     Beneath the orchard-apples met,
     In equal halves a ripe one sliced,
     And smelt the juices ere we ate.

     II

     That apple of the briar-scent,
     Among our lost in Britain now,
     Was green of rind, and redolent
     Of sweetness as a milking cow.
     The briar gives it back, well nigh
     The damsel with her teeth on it;
     Her twinkle between frank and shy,
     My thirst to bite where she had bit.



     EMPEDOCLES



     I

     He leaped. With none to hinder,
     Of Aetna's fiery scoriae
     In the next vomit-shower, made he
     A more peculiar cinder.
     And this great Doctor, can it be,
     He left no saner recipe
     For men at issue with despair?
     Admiring, even his poet owns,
     While noting his fine lyric tones,
     The last of him was heels in air!

     II

     Comes Reverence, her features
     Amazed to see high Wisdom hear,
     With glimmer of a faunish leer,
     One mock her pride of creatures.
     Shall such sad incident degrade
     A stature casting sunniest shade?
     O Reverence! let Reason swim;
     Each life its critic deed reveals;
     And him reads Reason at his heels,
     If heels in air the last of him!



     ENGLAND BEFORE THE STORM



     I

     The day that is the night of days,
     With cannon-fire for sun ablaze
     We spy from any billow's lift;
     And England still this tidal drift!
     Would she to sainted forethought vow
     A space before the thunders flood,
     That martyr of its hour might now
     Spare her the tears of blood.

     II

     Asleep upon her ancient deeds,
     She hugs the vision plethora breeds,
     And counts her manifold increase
     Of treasure in the fruits of peace.
     What curse on earth's improvident,
     When the dread trumpet shatters rest,
     Is wreaked, she knows, yet smiles content
     As cradle rocked from breast.

     III

     She, impious to the Lord of Hosts,
     The valour of her offspring boasts,
     Mindless that now on land and main
     His heeded prayer is active brain.
     No more great heart may guard the home,
     Save eyed and armed and skilled to cleave
     Yon swallower wave with shroud of foam,
     We see not distant heave.

     IV

     They stand to be her sacrifice,
     The sons this mother flings like dice,
     To face the odds and brave the Fates;
     As in those days of starry dates,
     When cannon cannon's counterblast
     Awakened, muzzle muzzle bowled,
     And high in swathe of smoke the mast
     Its fighting rag outrolled.

     1891.



     TARDY SPRING



     Now the North wind ceases,
     The warm South-west awakes;
     Swift fly the fleeces,
     Thick the blossom-flakes.

     Now hill to hill has made the stride,
     And distance waves the without end:
     Now in the breast a door flings wide;
     Our farthest smiles, our next is friend.
     And song of England's rush of flowers
     Is this full breeze with mellow stops,
     That spins the lark for shine, for showers;
     He drinks his hurried flight, and drops.
     The stir in memory seem these things,
     Which out of moistened turf and clay
     Astrain for light push patient rings,
     Or leap to find the waterway.
     'Tis equal to a wonder done,
     Whatever simple lives renew
     Their tricks beneath the father sun,
     As though they caught a broken clue;
     So hard was earth an eyewink back:
     But now the common life has come,
     The blotting cloud a dappled pack,
     The grasses one vast underhum.
     A City clothed in snow and soot,
     With lamps for day in ghostly rows,
     Breaks to the scene of hosts afoot,
     The river that reflective flows:
     And there did fog down crypts of street
     Play spectre upon eye and mouth:-
     Their faces are a glass to greet
     This magic of the whirl for South.
     A burly joy each creature swells
     With sound of its own hungry quest;
     Earth has to fill her empty wells,
     And speed the service of the nest;
     The phantom of the snow-wreath melt,
     That haunts the farmer's look abroad,
     Who sees what tomb a white night built,
     Where flocks now bleat and sprouts the clod.
     For iron Winter held her firm;
     Across her sky he laid his hand;
     And bird he starved, he stiffened worm;
     A sightless heaven, a shaven land.
     Her shivering Spring feigned fast asleep,
     The bitten buds dared not unfold:
     We raced on roads and ice to keep
     Thought of the girl we love from cold.

     But now the North wind ceases,
     The warm South-west awakes,
     The heavens are out in fleeces,
     And earth's green banner shakes.



     THE LABOURER



     For a Heracles in his fighting ire there is never the glory that
     follows
     When ashen he lies and the poets arise to sing of the work he has
     done.
     But to vision alive under shallows of sight, lo, the Labourer's
     crown is Apollo's,
     While stands he yet in his grime and sweat--to wrestle for fruits of
     the Sun.

     Can an enemy wither his cheer? Not you, ye fair yellow-flowering
     ladies,
     Who join with your lords to jar the chords of a bosom heroic, and
     clog.
     'Tis the faltering friend, an inanimate land, may drag a great soul
     to their Hades,
     And plunge him far from a beam of star till he hears the deep bay of
     the Dog.

     Apparition is then of a monster-task, in a policy carving new
     fashions:
     The winninger course than the rule of force, and the springs lured
     to run in a stream:
     He would bend tough oak, he would stiffen the reed, point Reason to
     swallow the passions,
     Bid Britons awake two steps to take where one is a trouble extreme!

     Not the less is he nerved with the Labourer's resolute hope: that
     by him shall be written,
     To honour his race, this deed of grace, for the weak from the strong
     made just:
     That her sons over seas in a rally of praise may behold a thrice
     vitalised Britain,
     Ashine with the light of the doing of right: at the gates of the
     Future in trust.



     FORESIGHT AND PATIENCE



     Sprung of the father blood, the mother brain,
     Are they who point our pathway and sustain.
     They rarely meet; one soars, one walks retired.
     When they do meet, it is our earth inspired.

     To see Life's formless offspring and subdue
     Desire of times unripe, we have these two,
     Whose union is right reason: join they hands,
     The world shall know itself and where it stands;
     What cowering angel and what upright beast
     Make man, behold, nor count the low the least,
     Nor less the stars have round it than its flowers.
     When these two meet, a point of time is ours.

     As in a land of waterfalls, that flow
     Smooth for the leap on their great voice below,
     Some eddies near the brink borne swift along
     Will capture hearing with the liquid song,
     So, while the headlong world's imperious force
     Resounded under, heard I these discourse.

     First words, where down my woodland walk she led,
     To her blind sister Patience, Foresight said:

     - Your faith in me appals, to shake my own,
     When still I find you in this mire alone.

     - The few steps taken at a funeral pace
     By men had slain me but for those you trace.

     - Look I once back, a broken pinion I:
     Black as the rebel angels rained from sky!

     - Needs must you drink of me while here you live,
     And make me rich in feeling I can give.

     - A brave To-be is dawn upon my brow:
     Yet must I read my sister for the How.
     My daisy better knows her God of beams
     Than doth an eagle that to mount him seems.
     She hath the secret never fieriest reach
     Of wing shall master till men hear her teach.

     - Liker the clod flaked by the driving plough,
     My semblance when I have you not as now.
     The quiet creatures who escape mishap
     Bear likeness to pure growths of the green sap:
     A picture of the settled peace desired
     By cowards shunning strife or strivers tired.
     I listen at their breasts: is there no jar
     Of wrestlings and of stranglings, dead they are,
     And such a picture as the piercing mind
     Ranks beneath vegetation. Not resigned
     Are my true pupils while the world is brute.
     What edict of the stronger keeps me mute,
     Stronger impels the motion of my heart.
     I am not Resignation's counterpart.
     If that I teach, 'tis little the dry word,
     Content, but how to savour hope deferred.
     We come of earth, and rich of earth may be;
     Soon carrion if very earth are we!

     The coursing veins, the constant breath, the use
     Of sleep, declare that strife allows short truce;
     Unless we clasp decay, accept defeat,
     And pass despised; 'a-cold for lack of heat,'
     Like other corpses, but without death's plea.

     - My sister calls for battle; is it she?

     - Rather a world of pressing men in arms,
     Than stagnant, where the sensual piper charms
     Each drowsy malady and coiling vice
     With dreams of ease whereof the soul pays price!
     No home is here for peace while evil breeds,
     While error governs, none; and must the seeds
     You sow, you that for long have reaped disdain,
     Lie barren at the doorway of the brain,
     Let stout contention drive deep furrows, blood
     Moisten, and make new channels of its flood!

     - My sober little maid, when we meet first,
     Drinks of me ever with an eager thirst.
     So can I not of her till circumstance
     Drugs cravings. Here we see how men advance
     A doubtful foot, but circle if much stirred,
     Like dead weeds on whipped waters. Shout the word
     Prompting their hungers, and they grandly march,
     As to band-music under Victory's arch.
     Thus was it, and thus is it; save that then
     The beauty of frank animals had men.

     - Observe them, and down rearward for a term,
     Gaze to the primal twistings of the worm.
     Thence look this way, across the fields that show
     Men's early form of speech for Yes and No.

     My sister a bruised infant's utterance had;
     And issuing stronger, to mankind 'twas mad.
     I knew my home where I had choice to feel
     The toad beneath a harrow or a heel.

     - Speak of this Age.

     - When you it shall discern
     Bright as you are, to me the Age will turn.

     - For neither of us has it any care;
     Its learning is through Science to despair.

     - Despair lies down and grovels, grapples not
     With evil, casts the burden of its lot.
     This Age climbs earth.

     -To challenge heaven.

     - Not less
     The lower deeps. It laughs at Happiness!
     That know I, though the echoes of it wail,
     For one step upward on the crags you scale.
     Brave is the Age wherein the word will rust,
     Which means our soul asleep or body's lust,
     Until from warmth of many breasts, that beat
     A temperate common music, sunlike heat
     The happiness not predatory sheds!

     - But your fierce Yes and No of butting heads
     Now rages to outdo a horny Past.
     Shades of a wild Destroyer on the vast
     Are thrown by every novel light upraised.
     The world's whole round smokes ominously, amazed
     And trembling as its pregnant Aetna swells.
     Combustibles on hot combustibles
     Run piling, for one spark to roll in fire
     The mountain-torrent of infernal ire
     And leave the track of devils where men built.
     Perceptive of a doom, the sinner's guilt
     Confesses in a cry for help shrill loud,
     If drops the chillness of a passing cloud,
     To conscience, reason, human love; in vain:
     None save they but the souls which them contain.
     No extramural God, the God within
     Alone gives aid to city charged with sin.
     A world that for the spur of fool and knave
     Sweats in its laboratory what shall save?
     But men who ply their wits in such a school
     Must pray the mercy of the knave and fool.

     - Much have I studied hard Necessity!
     To know her Wisdom's mother, and that we
     May deem the harshness of her later cries
     In labour a sure goad to prick the wise,
     If men among the warnings which convulse
     Can gravely dread without the craven's pulse.
     Long ere the rising of this age of ours,
     The knave and fool were stamped as monstrous Powers.
     Of human lusts and lassitudes they spring,
     And are as lasting as the parent thing.
     Yet numbering locust hosts, bent they to drill,
     They might o'ermatch and have mankind at will.
     Behold such army gathering; ours the spur,
     No scattered foe to face, but Lucifer.
     Not fool or knave is now the enemy
     O'ershadowing men, 'tis Folly, Knavery!
     A sea; nor stays that sea the bastioned beach.
     Now must the brother soul alive in each
     His traitorous individual devildom
     Hold subject lest the grand destruction come.
     Dimly men see it menacing apace
     To overthrow, perchance uproot, the race.
     Within, without, they are a field of tares:
     Fruitfuller for them when the contest squares,
     And wherefore warrior service they must yield,
     Shines visible as life on either field.
     That is my comfort, following shock on shock,
     Which sets faith quaking on their firmest rock.
     Since with his weapons, all the arms of Night,
     Frail men have challenged Lucifer to fight,
     Have matched in hostile ranks, enrolled, erect,
     The human and Satanic intellect,
     Determined for their uses to control
     What forces on the earth and under roll,
     Their granite rock runs igneous; now they stand
     Pledged to the heavens for safety of their land.
     They cannot learn save grossly, gross that are:
     Through fear they learn whose aid is good in war.

     - My sister, as I read them in my glass,
     Their field of tares they take for pasture grass.
     How waken them that have not any bent
     Save browsing--the concrete indifferent!
     Friend Lucifer supplies them solid stuff:
     They fear not for the race when full the trough.
     They have much fear of giving up the ghost;
     And these are of mankind the unnumbered host.

     - If I could see with you, and did not faint
     In beating wing, the future I would paint.
     Those massed indifferents will learn to quake:
     Now meanwhile is another mass awake,
     Once denser than the grunters of the sty.
     If I could see with you! Could I but fly!

     - The length of days that you with them have housed,
     An outcast else, approves their cause espoused.

     - O true, they have a cause, and woe for us,
     While still they have a cause too piteous!
     Yet, happy for us when, their cause defined,
     They walk no longer with a stumbler blind,
     And quicken in the virtue of their cause,
     To think me a poor mouther of old saws!
     I wait the issue of a battling Age;
     The toilers with your 'troughsters' now engage;
     Instructing them, through their acutest sense,
     How close the dangers of indifference!
     Already have my people shown their worth,
     More love they light, which folds the love of Earth.
     That love to love of labour leads: thence love
     Of humankind--earth's incense flung above.

     - Admit some other features: Faithless, mean;
     Encased in matter; vowed to Gods obscene;
     Contemptuous of the impalpable, it swells
     On Doubt; for pastime swallows miracles;
     And if I bid it face what I observe,
     Declares me hoodwinked by my optic nerve!

     - Oft has your prophet, for reward of toil,
     Seen nests of seeming cockatrices coil:
     Disowned them as the unholiest of Time,
     Which were his offspring, born of flame on slime.
     Nor him, their sire, have known the filial fry:
     As little as Time's earliest knew the sky.
     Perchance among them shoots a lustrous flame
     At intervals, in proof of whom they came.
     To strengthen our foundations is the task
     Of this tough Age; not in your beams to bask,
     Though, lighted by your beams, down mining caves
     The rock it blasts, the hoarded foulness braves.
     My sister sees no round beyond her mood;
     To hawk this Age has dressed her head in hood.
     Out of the course of ancient ruts and grooves,
     It moves: O much for me to say it moves!
     About his AEthiop Highlands Nile is Nile,
     Though not the stream of the paternal smile:
     And where his tide of nourishment he drives,
     An Abyssinian wantonness revives.
     Calm as his lotus-leaf to-day he swims;
     He is the yellow crops, the rounded limbs,
     The Past yet flowing, the fair time that fills;
     Breath of all mouths and grist of many mills.
     To-morrow, warning none with tempest-showers,
     He is the vast Insensate who devours
     His golden promise over leagues of seed,
     Then sits in a smooth lake upon the deed.
     The races which on barbarous force begin
     Inherit onward of their origin,
     And cancelled blessings will the current length
     Reveal till they know need of shaping strength.
     'Tis not in men to recognize the need
     Before they clash in hosts, in hosts they bleed.
     Then may sharp suffering their nature grind;
     Of rabble passions grow the chieftain Mind.
     Yet mark where still broad Nile boasts thousands fed,
     For tens up the safe mountains at his head.
     Few would be fed, not far his course prolong,
     Save for the troublous blood which makes him strong.
     - That rings of truth! More do your people thrive;
     Your Many are more merrily alive
     Than erewhile when I gloried in the page
     Of radiant singer and anointed sage.
     Greece was my lamp: burnt out for lack of oil;
     Rome, Python Rome, prey of its robber spoil!
     All structures built upon a narrow space
     Must fall, from having not your hosts for base.
     O thrice must one be you, to see them shift
     Along their desert flats, here dash, there drift;
     With faith, that of privations and spilt blood,
     Comes Reason armed to clear or bank the flood!
     And thrice must one be you, to wait release
     From duress in the swamp of their increase.
     At which oppressive scene, beyond arrest,
     A darkness not with stars of heaven dressed
     Philosophers behold; desponding view
     Your Many nourished, starved my brilliant few;
     Then flinging heels, as charioteers the reins,
     Dive down the fumy AEtna of their brains.
     Belated vessels on a rising sea,
     They seem: they pass!

     - But not Philosophy!

     - Ay, be we faithful to ourselves: despise
     Nought but the coward in us! That way lies
     The wisdom making passage through our slough.
     Am I not heard, my head to Earth shall bow;
     Like her, shall wait to see, and seeing wait.
     Philosophy is Life's one match for Fate.
     That photosphere of our high fountain One,
     Our spirit's Lord and Reason's fostering sun,
     Philosophy, shall light us in the shade,
     Warm in the frost, make Good our aim and aid.
     Companioned by the sweetest, ay renewed,
     Unconquerable, whose aim for aid is Good!
     Advantage to the Many: that we name
     God's voice; have there the surety in our aim.
     This thought unto my sister do I owe,
     And irony and satire off me throw.
     They crack a childish whip, drive puny herds,
     Where numbers crave their sustenance in words.
     Now let the perils thicken: clearer seen,
     Your Chieftain Mind mounts over them serene.
     Who never yet of scattered lamps was born
     To speed a world, a marching world to warn,
     But sunward from the vivid Many springs,
     Counts conquest but a step, and through disaster sings.



     THE WARNING



     We have seen mighty men ballooning high,
     And in another moment bump the ground.
     He falls; and in his measurement is found
     To count some inches o'er the common fry.
     'Twas not enough to send him climbing sky,
     Yet 'twas enough above his fellows crowned,
     Had he less panted. Let his faithful hound
     Bark at detractors. He may walk or lie.
     Concerns it most ourselves, who with our gas -
     This little Isle's insatiable greed
     For Continents--filled to inflation burst.
     So do ripe nations into squalor pass,
     When, driven as herds by their old private thirst,
     They scorn the brain's wild search for virtuous light.



     OUTSIDE THE CROWD



     To sit on History in an easy chair,
     Still rivalling the wild hordes by whom 'twas writ!
     Sure, this beseems a race of laggard wit,
     Unwarned by those plain letters scrawled on air.
     If more than hands' and armsful be our share,
     Snatch we for substance we see vapours flit.
     Have we not heard derision infinite
     When old men play the youth to chase the snare?
     Let us be belted athletes, matched for foes,
     Or stand aloof, the great Benevolent,
     The Lord of Lands no Robber-birds annex,
     Where Justice holds the scales with pure intent;
     Armed to support her sword;--lest we compose
     That Chapter for the historic word on Wrecks.



     TRAFALGAR DAY



     He leads: we hear our Seaman's call
     In the roll of battles won;
     For he is Britain's Admiral
     Till setting of her sun.

     When Britain's life was in her ships,
     He kept the sea as his own right;
     And saved us from more fell eclipse
     Than drops on day from blackest night.
     Again his battle spat the flame!
     Again his victory flag men saw!
     At sound of Nelson's chieftain name,
     A deeper breath did Freedom draw.

     Each trusty captain knew his part:
     They served as men, not marshalled kine:
     The pulses they of his great heart,
     With heads to work his main design.
     Their Nelson's word, to beat the foe,
     And spare the fall'n, before them shone.
     Good was the hour of blow for blow,
     And clear their course while they fought on.

     Behold the Envied vanward sweep! -
     A day in mourning weeds adored!
     Then Victory was wrought to weep;
     Then sorrow crowned with laurel soared.

     A breezeless flag above a shroud
     All Britain was when wind and wave,
     To make her, passing human, proud,
     Brought his last gift from o'er the grave!

     Uprose the soul of him a star
     On that brave day of Ocean days:
     It rolled the smoke from Trafalger
     To darken Austerlitz ablaze.
     Are we the men of old, its light
     Will point us under every sky
     The path he took; and must we fight,
     Our Nelson be our battle-cry!

     He leads: we hear our Seaman's call
     In the roll of battles won;
     For he is Britain's Admiral
     Till setting of her sun.



     THE REVOLUTION



     I

     Not yet had History's Aetna smoked the skies,
     And low the Gallic Giantess lay enchained,
     While overhead in ordered set and rise
     Her kingly crowns immutably defiled;
     Effulgent on funereal piled
     Across the vacant heavens, and distrained
     Her body, mutely, even as earth, to bear;
     Despoiled the tomb of hope, her mouth of air.

     II

     Through marching scores of winters racked she lay,
     Beneath a hoar-frost's brilliant crust,
     Whereon the jewelled flies that drained
     Her breasts disported in a glistering spray;
     She, the land's fount of fruits, enclosed with dust;
     By good and evil angels fed, sustained
     In part to curse, in part to pray,
     Sucking the dubious rumours, till men saw
     The throbs of her charged heart before the Just,
     So worn the harrowed surface had become:
     And still they deemed the dance above was Law,
     Amort all passion in a rebel dumb.

     III

     Then, on the unanticipated day,
     Earth heaved, and rose a veinous mound
     To roar of the underfloods; and off it sprang,
     Ravishing as red wine in woman's form,
     A splendid Maenad, she of the delirious laugh,
     Her body twisted flames with the smoke-cap crowned;
     She of the Bacchic foot; the challenger to the fray,
     Bewitchment for the embrace; who sang, who sang
     Intoxication to her swarm,
     Revolved them, hair, voice, feet, in her carmagnole,
     As with a stroke she snapped the Royal staff,
     Dealt the awaited blow on gilt decay
     (O ripeness of the time! O Retribution sure,
     If but our vital lamp illume us to endure!)
     And, like a glad releasing of her soul,
     Sent the word Liberty up to meet the midway blue,
     Her bridegroom in descent to her; and they joined,
     In the face of men they joined: attest it true,
     The million witnesses, that she,
     For ages lying beside the mole,
     Was on the unanticipated miracle day
     Upraised to midway heaven and, as to her goal,
     Enfolded, ere the Immaculate knew
     What Lucifer of the Mint had coined
     His bride's adulterate currency
     Of burning love corrupt of an infuriate hate;
     She worthy, she unworthy; that one day his mate:
     His mate for that one day of the unwritten deed.
     Read backward on the hoar-frost's brilliant crust;
     Beneath it read.
     Athirst to kiss, athirst to slay, she stood,
     A radiance fringed with grim affright;
     For them that hungered, she was nourishing food,
     For those who sparkled, Night.
     Read in her heart, and how before the Just
     Her doings, her misdoings, plead.

     IV

     Down on her leap for him the young Angelical broke
     To husband a resurgent France:
     From whom, with her dethroning stroke,
     Dishonour passed; the dalliance,
     That is occasion's yea or nay,
     In issues for the soul to pay,
     Discarded; and the cleft 'twixt deed and word,
     The sinuous lie which warbles the sweet bird,
     Wherein we see old Darkness peer,
     Cold Dissolution beck, she had flung hence;
     And hence the talons and the beak of prey;
     Hence all the lures to silken swine
     Thronging the troughs of indolence;
     With every sleek convolvement serpentine;
     The pride in elfin arts to veil an evil leer,
     And bid a goatfoot trip it like a fay.
     He clasped in this revived, uprisen France,
     A valorous dame, of countenance
     The lightning's upon cloud: unlit as yet
     On brows and lips the lurid shine
     Of seas in the night-wind's whirl; unstirred
     Her pouch of the centuries' injuries compressed;
     The shriek that tore the world as yet unheard:
     Earth's animate full flower she looked, intense
     For worship, wholly given him, fair
     Adoring or desiring; in her bright jet,
     Earth's crystal spring to sky: Earth's warrior Best
     To win Heaven's Pure up that midway
     We vision for new ground, where sense
     And spirit are one for the further flight; breast-bare,
     Bare-limbed; nor graceless gleamed her disarray
     In scorn of the seductive insincere,
     But martially nude for hot Bellona's play,
     And amorous of the loftiest in her view.

     V

     She sprang from dust to drink of earth's cool dew,
     The breath of swaying grasses share,
     Mankind embrace, their weaklings rear,
     At wrestle with the tyrannic strong;
     Her forehead clear to her mate, virgin anew,
     As immortals may be in the mortal sphere.
     Read through her launching heart, who had lain long
     With Earth and heard till it became her own
     Our good Great Mother's eve and matin song:
     The humming burden of Earth's toil to feed
     Her creatures all, her task to speed their growth,
     Her aim to lead them up her pathways, shown
     Between the Pains and Pleasures; warned of both,
     Of either aided on their hard ascent.
     Now when she looked, with love's benign delight
     After great ecstasy, along the plains,
     What foulest impregnation of her sight
     Transformed the scene to multitudinous troops
     Of human sketches, quaver-figures, bent,
     As were they winter sedges, broken hoops,
     Dry udder, vineless poles, worm-eaten posts,
     With features like the flowers defaced by deluge rains?
     Recked she that some perverting devil had limned
     Earth's proudest to spout scorn of the Maker's hand,
     Who could a day behold these deathly hosts,
     And see, decked, graced, and delicately trimmed,
     A ribanded and gemmed elected few,
     Sanctioned, of milk and honey starve the land:-
     Like melody in flesh, its pleasant game
     Olympianwise perform, cloak but the shame:
     Beautiful statures; hideous,
     By Christian contrast; pranked with golden chains,
     And flexile where is manhood straight;
     Mortuaries where warm should beat
     The brotherhood that keeps blood sweet:
     Who dared in cantique impious
     Proclaim the Just, to whom was due
     Cathedral gratitude in the pomp of state,
     For that on those lean outcasts hung the sucker Pains,
     On these elect the swelling Pleasures grew.
     Surely a devil's land when that meant death for each!
     Fresh from the breast of Earth, not thus,
     With all the body's life to plump the leech,
     Is Nature's way, she knew. The abominable scene
     Spat at the skies; and through her veins,
     To cloud celestially sown,
     Ran venom of what nourishment
     Her dark sustainer subterrene
     Supplied her, stretched supine on the rack,
     Alive in the shrewd nerves, the seething brains,
     Under derisive revels, prone
     As one clamped fast, with the interminable senseless blent.

     VI

     Now was her face white waves in the tempest's sharp flame-blink;
     Her skies shot black.
     Now was it visioned infamy to drink
     Of earth's cool dew, and through the vines
     Frolic in pearly laughter with her young,
     Watching the healthful, natural, happy signs
     Where hands of lads and maids like tendrils clung,
     After their sly shy ventures from the leaf,
     And promised bunches. Now it seemed
     The world was one malarious mire,
     Crying for purification: chief
     This land of France. It seemed
     A duteous desire
     To drink of life's hot flood, and the crimson streamed.

     VII

     She drank what makes man demon at the draught.
     Her skies lowered black,
     Her lover flew,
     There swept a shudder over men.
     Her heavenly lover fled her, and she laughed,
     For laughter was her spirit's weapon then.
     The Infernal rose uncalled, he with his crew.

     VIII

     As mighty thews burst manacles, she went mad:
     Her heart a flaring torch usurped her wits.
     Such enemies of her next-drawn breath she had!
     To tread her down in her live grave beneath
     Their dancing floor sunned blind by the Royal wreath,
     They ringed her steps with crafty prison pits.
     Without they girdled her, made nest within.
     There ramped the lion, here entrailed the snake.
     They forced the cup to her lips when she drank blood;
     Believing it, in the mother's mind at strain,
     In the mother's fears, and in young Liberty's wail
     Alarmed, for her encompassed children's sake,
     The sole sure way to save her priceless bud.
     Wherewith, when power had gifted her to prevail,
     Vengeance appeared as logically akin.
     Insanely rational they; she rationally insane;
     And in compute of sin, was hers the appealing sin.

     IX

     Amid the plash of scarlet mud
     Stained at the mouth, drunk with our common air,
     Not lack of love was her defect;
     The Fury mourned and raged and bled for France
     Breathing from exultation to despair
     At every wild-winged hope struck by mischance
     Soaring at each faint gleam o'er her abyss.
     Heard still, to be heard while France shall stand erect,
     The frontier march she piped her sons, for where
     Her crouching outer enemy camped,
     Attendant on the deadlier inner's hiss.
     She piped her sons the frontier march, the wine
     Of martial music, History's cherished tune;
     And they, the saintliest labourers that aye
     Dropped sweat on soil for bread, took arms and tramped;
     High-breasted to match men or elements,
     Or Fortune, harsh schoolmistress with the undrilled:
     War's ragged pupils; many a wavering line,
     Torn from the dear fat soil of champaigns hopefully tilled,
     Torn from the motherly bowl, the homely spoon,
     To jest at famine, ply
     The novel scythe, and stand to it on the field;
     Lie in the furrows, rain-clouds for their tents;
     Fronting the red artillery straighten spine;
     Buckle the shiver at sight of comrades strewn;
     Over an empty platter affect the merrily filled;
     Die, if the multiple hazards around said die;
     Downward measure a foeman mightily sized;
     Laugh at the legs that would run for a life despised;
     Lyrical on into death's red roaring jaw-gape, steeled
     Gaily to take of the foe his lesson, and give reply.
     Cheerful apprentices, they shall be masters soon!

     X

     Lo, where hurricane flocks of the North-wind rattle their thunder
     Loud through a night, and at dawn comes change to the great South-
     west,
     Hounds are the hounded in clouds, waves, forests, inverted the race:
     Lo, in the day's young beams the colossal invading pursuers
     Burst upon rocks and were foam;
     Ridged up a torrent crest;
     Crumbled to ruin, still gazing a glacial wonder;
     Turned shamed feet toe to heel on their track at a panic pace.
     Yesterday's clarion cock scudded hen of the invalid comb;
     They, the triumphant tonant towering upper, were under;
     They, violators of home, dared hope an inviolate home;
     They that had stood for the stroke were the vigorous hewers;
     Quick as the trick of the wrist with the rapier, they the pursuers.
     Heavens and men amazed heard the arrogant crying for grace;
     Saw the once hearth-reek rabble the scourge of an army dispieced;
     Saw such a shift of the hunt as when Titan Olympus clomb.
     Fly! was the sportsman's word; and the note of the quarry rang,
     Chase!

     XI

     Banners from South, from East,
     Sheaves of pale banners drooping hole and shred;
     The captive brides of valour, Sabine Wives
     Plucked from the foeman's blushful bed,
     For glorious muted battle-tongues
     Of deeds along the horizon's red,
     At cost of unreluctant lives;
     Her toilful heroes homeward poured,
     To give their fevered mother air of the lungs.
     She breathed, and in the breathing craved.
     Environed as she was, at bay,
     Safety she kissed on her drawn sword,
     And waved for victory, for fresh victory waved:
     She craved for victory as her daily bread;
     For victory as her daily banquet raved.

     XII

     Now had her glut of vengeance left her grey
     Of blood, who in her entrails fiercely tore
     To clutch and squeeze her snakes; herself the more
     Devitalizing: red washer Auroral ray;
     Desired if but to paint her pallid hue.
     The passion for that young horizon red,
     Which dowered her with the flags, the blazing fame,
     Like dotage of the past-meridian dame
     For some bright Sungod adolescent, swelled
     Insatiate, to the voracious grew,
     The glutton's inward raveners bred;
     Till she, mankind's most dreaded, most abhorred,
     Witless in her demands on Fortune, asked,
     As by the weaving Fates impelled,
     To have the thing most loathed, the iron lord,
     Controller and chastiser, under Victory masked.

     XIII

     Banners from East, from South,
     She hugged him in them, feared the scourge they meant,
     Yet blindly hugged, and hungering built his throne.
     So may you see the village innocent,
     With curtsey of shut lids and open mouth,
     In act to beg for sweets expect a loathly stone:
     See furthermore the Just in his measures weigh
     Her sufferings and her sins, dispense her meed.
     False to her bridegroom lord of the miracle day,
     She fell: from his ethereal home observed
     Through love, grown alien love, not moved to plead
     Against the season's fruit for deadly Seed,
     But marking how she had aimed, and where she swerved,
     Why suffered, with a sad consenting thought.
     Nor would he shun her sullen look, nor monstrous hold
     The doer of the monstrous; she aroused,
     She, the long tortured, suddenly freed, distraught,
     More strongly the divine in him than when
     Joy of her as she sprang from mould
     Drew him the midway heavens adown
     To clasp her in his arms espoused
     Before the sight of wondering men,
     And put upon the day a deathless crown.
     The veins and arteries of her, fold in fold,
     His alien love laid open, to divide
     The martyred creature from her crimes; he knew
     What cowardice in her valour could reside;
     What strength her weakness covered; what abased
     Sublimity so illumining, and what raised
     This wallower in old slime to noblest heights,
     Up to the union on the midway blue:-
     Day that the celestial grave Recorder hangs
     Among dark History's nocturnal lights,
     With vivid beams indicative to the quick
     Of all who have felt the vaulted body's pangs
     Beneath a mind in hopeless soaring sick.
     She had forgot how, long enslaved, she yearned
     To the one helping hand above;
     Forgot her faith in the Great Undiscerned,
     Whereof she sprang aloft to her Angelical love
     That day: and he, the bright day's husband, still with love,
     Though alien, though to an upper seat retired,
     Behold a wrangling heart, as 'twere her soul
     On eddies of wild waters cast;
     In wilderness division; fired
     For domination, freedom, lust,
     The Pleasures; lo, a witch's snaky bowl
     Set at her lips; the blood-drinker's madness fast
     Upon her; and therewith mistrust,
     Most of herself: a mouth of guile.
     Compassionately could he smile,
     To hear the mouth disclaiming God,
     And clamouring for the Just!
     Her thousand impulses, like torches, coursed
     City and field; and pushed abroad
     O'er hungry waves to thirsty sands,
     Flaring at further; she had grown to be
     The headless with the fearful hands;
     To slaughter, else to suicide, enforced.
     But he, remembering how his love began,
     And of what creature, pitied when was plain
     Another measure of captivity:
     The need for strap and rod;
     The penitential prayers again;
     Again the bitter bowing down to dust;
     The burden on the flesh for who disclaims the God,
     The answer when is call upon the Just.
     Whence her lost virtue had found refuge strode
     Her master, saying, 'I only; I who can!'
     And echoed round her army, now her chain.
     So learns the nation, closing Anarch's reign,
     That she had been in travail of a Man.



     NAPOLEON



     I

     Cannon his name,
     Cannon his voice, he came.
     Who heard of him heard shaken hills,
     An earth at quake, to quiet stamped;
     Who looked on him beheld the will of wills,
     The driver of wild flocks where lions ramped:
     Beheld War's liveries flee him, like lumped grass
     Nid-nod to ground beneath the cuffing storm;
     While laurelled over his Imperial form,
     Forth from her bearded tube of lacquey brass,
     Reverberant notes and long blew volant Fame.
     Incarnate Victory, Power manifest,
     Infernal or God-given to mankind,
     On the quenched volcano's cusp did he take stand,
     A conquering army's height above the land,
     Which calls that army offspring of its breast,
     And sees it mid the starry camps enshrined;
     His eye the cannon's flame,
     The cannon's cave his mind.

     II

     To weld the nation in a name of dread,
     And scatter carrion flies off wounds unhealed,
     The Necessitated came, as comes from out
     Electric ebon lightning's javelin-head,
     Threatening agitation in the revealed
     Founts of our being; terrible with doubt,
     With radiance restorative. At one stride
     Athwart the Law he stood for sovereign sway.
     That Soliform made featureless beside
     His brilliancy who neighboured: vapour they;
     Vapour what postured statues barred his tread.
     On high in amphitheatre field on field,
     Italian, Egyptian, Austrian,
     Far heard and of the carnage discord clear,
     Bells of his escalading triumphs pealed
     In crashes on a choral chant severe,
     Heraldic of the authentic Charlemagne,
     Globe, sceptre, sword, to enfold, to rule, to smite,
     Make unity of the mass,
     Coherent or refractory, by his might.

     Forth from her bearded tube of lacquey brass,
     Fame blew, and tuned the jangles, bent the knees
     Rebellious or submissive; his decrees
     Were thunder in those heavens and compelled:
     Such as disordered earth, eclipsed of stars,
     Endures for sign of Order's calm return,
     Whereunto she is vowed; and his wreckage-spars,
     His harried ships, old riotous Ocean lifts alight,
     Subdued to splendour in his delirant churn.
     Glory suffused the accordant, quelled,
     By magic of high sovereignty, revolt:
     And he, the reader of men, himself unread;
     The name of hope, the name of dread;
     Bloom of the coming years or blight;
     An arm to hurl the bolt
     With aim Olympian; bore
     Likeness to Godhead. Whither his flashes hied
     Hosts fell; what he constructed held rock-fast.
     So did earth's abjects deem of him that built and clove.
     Torch on imagination, beams he cast,
     Whereat they hailed him deified:
     If less than an eagle-speeding Jove, than Vulcan more.
     Or it might be a Vulcan-Jove,
     Europe for smithy, Europe's floor
     Lurid with sparks in evanescent showers,
     Loud echo-clap of hammers at all hours,
     Our skies the reflex of its furnace blast.

     III

     On him the long enchained, released
     For bride of the miracle day up the midway blue;
     She from her heavenly lover fallen to serve for feast
     Of rancours and raw hungers; she, the untrue,
     Yet pitiable, not despicable, gazed.
     Fawning, her body bent, she gazed
     With eyes the moonstone portals to her heart:
     Eyes magnifying through hysteric tears
     This apparition, ghostly for belief;
     Demoniac or divine, but sole
     Over earth's mightiest written Chief;
     Earth's chosen, crowned, unchallengeable upstart:
     The trumpet word to awake, transform, renew;
     The arbiter of circumstance;
     High above limitations, as the spheres.
     Nor ever had heroical Romance,
     Never ensanguined History's lengthened scroll,
     Shown fulminant to shoot the levin dart
     Terrific as this man, by whom upraised,
     Aggrandized and begemmed, she outstripped her peers;
     Like midnight's levying brazier-beacon blazed
     Defiant to the world, a rally for her sons,
     Day of the darkness; this man's mate; by him,
     Cannon his name,
     Rescued from vivisectionist and knave,
     Her body's dominators and her shame;
     By him with the rivers of ranked battalions, brave
     Past mortal, girt: a march of swords and guns
     Incessant; his proved warriors; loaded dice
     He flung on the crested board, where chilly Fears
     Behold the Reaper's ground, Death sitting grim,
     Awatch for his predestined ones,
     Mid shrieks and torrent-hooves; but these,
     Inebriate of his inevitable device,
     Hail it their hero's wood of lustrous laurel-trees,
     Blossom and fruit of fresh Hesperides,
     The boiling life-blood in their cheers.
     Unequalled since the world was man they pour
     A spiky girdle round her; these, her sons,
     His cataracts at smooth holiday, soon to roar
     Obstruction shattered at his will or whim:
     Kind to her ear as quiring Cherubim,
     And trampling earth like scornful mastodons.

     IV

     The flood that swept her to be slave
     Adoring, under thought of being his mate,
     These were, and unto the visibly unexcelled,
     As much of heart as abjects can she gave,
     Or what of heart the body bears for freight
     When Majesty apparent overawes;
     By the flash of his ascending deeds upheld,
     Which let not feminine pride in him have pause
     To question where the nobler pride rebelled.
     She read the hieroglyphic on his brow,
     Felt his firm hand to wield the giant's mace;
     Herself whirled upward in an eagle's claws,
     Past recollection of her earthly place;
     And if cold Reason pressed her, called him Fate;
     Offering abashed the servile woman's vow.
     Delirium was her virtue when the look
     At fettered wrists and violated laws
     Faith in a rectitude Supernal shook,
     Till worship of him shone as her last rational state,
     The slave's apology for gemmed disgrace.
     Far in her mind that leap from earth to the ghost
     Midway on high; or felt as a troubled pool;
     Or as a broken sleep that hunts a dream half lost,
     Arrested and rebuked by the common school
     Of daily things for truancy. She could rejoice
     To know with wakeful eyeballs Violence
     Her crowned possessor, and, on every sense
     Incumbent, Fact, Imperial Fact, her choice,
     In scorn of barren visions, aims at a glassy void.
     Who sprang for Liberty once, found slavery sweet;
     And Tyranny, on alert subservience buoyed,
     Spurred a blood-mare immeasureably fleet
     To shoot the transient leagues in a passing wink,
     Prompt for the glorious bound at the fanged abyss's brink.
     Scarce felt she that she bled when battle scored
     On riddled flags the further conjured line;
     From off the meteor gleam of his waved sword
     Reflected bright in permanence: she bled
     As the Bacchante spills her challengeing wine
     With whirl o' the cup before the kiss to lip;
     And bade drudge History in his footprints tread,
     For pride of sword-strokes o'er slow penmanship:
     Each step of his a volume: his sharp word
     The shower of steel and lead
     Or pastoral sunshine.

     V

     Persistent through the brazen chorus round
     His thunderous footsteps on the foeman's ground,
     A broken carol of wild notes was heard,
     As when an ailing infant wails a dream.
     Strange in familiarity it rang:
     And now along the dark blue vault might seem
     Winged migratories having but heaven for home,
     Now the lone sea-bird's cry down shocks of foam,
     Beneath a ruthless paw the captive's pang.

     It sang the gift that comes from God
     To mind of man as air to lung.
     So through her days of under sod
     Her faith unto her heart had sung,
     Like bedded seed by frozen clod,
     With view of wide-armed heaven and buds at burst,
     And midway up, Earth's fluttering little lyre.
     Even for a glimpse, for even a hope in chained desire
     The vision of it watered thirst.

     VI

     But whom those errant moans accused
     As Liberty's murderous mother, cried accursed,
     France blew to deafness: for a space she mused;
     She smoothed a startled look, and sought,
     From treasuries of the adoring slave,
     Her surest way to strangle thought;
     Picturing her dread lord decree advance
     Into the enemy's land; artillery, bayonet, lance;
     His ordering fingers point the dial's to time their ranks:
     Himself the black storm-cloud, the tempest's bayonet-glaive.
     Like foam-heads of a loosened freshet bursting banks,
     By mount and fort they thread to swamp the sluggard plains.
     Shines his gold-laurel sun, or cloak connivent rains.
     They press to where the hosts in line and square throng mute;
     He watchful of their form, the Audacious, the Astute;
     Eagle to grip the field; to work his craftiest, fox.
     From his brief signal, straight the stroke of the leveller falls;
     From him those opal puffs, those arcs with the clouded balls:
     He waves and the voluble scene is a quagmire shifting blocks;
     They clash, they are knotted, and now 'tis the deed of the axe on
     the log;
     Here away moves a spiky woodland, and yon away sweep
     Rivers of horse torrent-mad to the shock, and the heap over heap
     Right through the troughed black lines turned to bunches or shreds,
     or a fog
     Rolling off sunlight's arrows. Not mightier Phoebus in ire,
     Nor deadlier Jove's avengeing right hand, than he of the brain
     Keen at an enemy's mind to encircle and pierce and constrain,
     Muffling his own for a fate-charged blow very Gods may admire.
     Sure to behold are his eagles on high where the conflict raged.
     Rightly, then, should France worship, and deafen the disaccord
     Of those who dare withstand an irresistible sword
     To thwart his predestined subjection of Europe. Let them submit!
     She said it aloud, and heard in her breast, as a singer caged,
     With the beat of wings at bars, Earth's fluttering little lyre.
     No more at midway heaven, but liker midway to the pit:
     Not singing the spirally upward of rapture, the downward of pain
     Rather, the drop sheer downward from pressure of merciless weight.

     Her strangled thought got breath, with her worship held debate;
     To yield and sink, yet eye askant the mark she had missed.
     Over the black-blue rollers of that broad Westerly main,
     Steady to sky, the light of Liberty glowed
     In a flaming pillar, that cast on the troubled waters a road
     For Europe to cross, and see the thing lost subsist.
     For there 'twas a shepherd led his people, no butcher of sheep;
     Firmly there the banner he first upreared
     Stands to rally; and nourishing grain do his children reap
     From a father beloved in life, in his death revered.
     Contemplating him and his work, shall a skyward glance
     Clearer sight of our dreamed and abandoned obtain;
     Nay, but as if seen in station above the Republic, France
     Had view of her one-day's heavenly lover again;
     Saw him amid the bright host looking down on her; knew she had
     erred,
     Knew him her judge, knew yonder the spirit preferred;
     Yonder the base of the summit she strove that day to ascend,
     Ere cannon mastered her soul, and all dreams had end.

     VII

     Soon felt she in her shivered frame
     A bodeful drain of blood illume
     Her wits with frosty fire to read
     The dazzling wizard who would have her bleed
     On fruitless marsh and snows of spectral gloom
     For victory that was victory scarce in name.
     Husky his clarions laboured, and her sighs
     O'er slaughtered sons were heavier than the prize;
     Recalling how he stood by Frederic's tomb,
     With Frederic's country underfoot and spurned:
     There meditated; till her hope might guess,
     Albeit his constant star prescribe success,
     The savage strife would sink, the civil aim
     To head a mannered world breathe zephyrous
     Of morning after storm; whereunto she yearned;
     And Labour's lovely peace, and Beauty's courtly bloom,
     The mind in strenuous tasks hilarious.
     At such great height, where hero hero topped,
     Right sanely should the Grand Ascendant think
     No further leaps at the fanged abyss's brink
     True Genius takes: be battle's dice-box dropped!

     She watched his desert features, hung to hear
     The honey words desired, and veiled her face;
     Hearing the Seaman's name recur
     Wrathfully, thick with a meaning worse
     Than call to the march: for that inveterate Purse
     Could kindle the extinct, inform a vacant place,
     Conjure a heart into the trebly felled.
     It squeezed the globe, insufferably swelled
     To feed insurgent Europe: rear and van
     Were haunted by the amphibious curse;
     Here flesh, there phantom, livelier after rout:
     The Seaman piping aye to the rightabout,
     Distracted Europe's Master, puffed remote
     Those Indies of the swift Macedonian,
     Whereon would Europe's Master somewhiles doat,
     In dreamings on a docile universe
     Beneath an immarcessible Charlemagne.

     Nor marvel France should veil a seer's face,
     And call on darkness as a blest retreat.
     Magnanimously could her iron Emperor
     Confront submission: hostile stirred to heat
     All his vast enginery, allowed no halt
     Up withered avenues of waste-blood war,
     To the pitiless red mounts of fire afume,
     As 'twere the world's arteries opened! Woe the race!
     Ask wherefore Fortune's vile caprice should balk
     His panther spring across the foaming salt,
     From martial sands to the cliffs of pallid chalk!
     There is no answer: seed of black defeat
     She then did sow, and France nigh unto death foredoom.
     See since that Seaman's epicycle sprite
     Engirdle, lure and goad him to the chase
     Along drear leagues of crimson spotting white
     With mother's tears of France, that he may meet
     Behind suborned battalions, ranked as wheat
     Where peeps the weedy poppy, him of the sea;
     Earth's power to baffle Ocean's power resume;
     Victorious army crown o'er Victory's fleet;
     And bearing low that Seaman upon knee,
     Stay the vexed question of supremacy,
     Obnoxious in the vault by Frederic's tomb.

     VIII

     Poured streams of Europe's veins the flood
     Full Rhine or Danube rolls off morning-tide
     Through shadowed reaches into crimson-dyed:
     And Rhine and Danube knew her gush of blood
     Down the plucked roots the deepest in her breast.
     He tossed her cordials, from his laurels pressed.
     She drank for dryness thirstily, praised his gifts.
     The blooded frame a powerful draught uplifts
     Writhed the devotedness her voice rang wide
     In cries ecstatic, as of the martyr-Blest,
     Their spirits issuing forth of bodies racked,
     And crazy chuckles, with life's tears at feud;
     While near her heart the sunken sentinel
     Called Critic marked, and dumb in awe reviewed
     This torture, this anointed, this untracked
     To mortal source, this alien of his kind;
     Creator, slayer, conjuror, Solon-Mars,
     The cataract of the abyss, the star of stars;
     Whose arts to lay the senses under spell
     Aroused an insurrectionary mind.

     IX

     He, did he love her? France was his weapon, shrewd
     At edge, a wind in onset: he loved well
     His tempered weapon, with the which he hewed
     Clean to the ground impediments, or hacked,
     Sure of the blade that served the great man-miracle.
     He raised her, robed her, gemmed her for his bride,
     Did but her blood in blindness given exact.
     Her blood she gave, was blind to him as guide:
     She quivered at his word, and at his touch
     Was hound or steed for any mark he espied.
     He loved her more than little, less than much.
     The fair subservient of Imperial Fact
     Next to his consanguineous was placed
     In ranked esteem; above the diurnal meal,
     Vexatious carnal appetites above,
     Above his hoards, while she Imperial Fact embraced,
     And rose but at command from under heel.
     The love devolvent, the ascension love,
     Receptive or profuse, were fires he lacked,
     Whose marrow had expelled their wasteful sparks;
     Whose mind, the vast machine of endless haste,
     Took up but solids for its glowing seal.
     The hungry love, that fish-like creatures feel,
     Impelled for prize of hooks, for prey of sharks,
     His night's first quarter sicklied to distaste,
     In warm enjoyment barely might distract.
     A head that held an Europe half devoured
     Taste in the blood's conceit of pleasure soured.
     Nought save his rounding aim, the means he plied,
     Death for his cause, to him could point appeal.
     His mistress was the thing of uses tried.
     Frigid the netting smile on whom he wooed,
     But on his Policy his eye was lewd.
     That sharp long zig-zag into distance brooked
     No foot across; a shade his ire provoked.
     The blunder or the cruelty of a deed
     His Policy imperative could plead.
     He deemed nought other precious, nor knew he
     Legitimate outside his Policy.
     Men's lives and works were due, from their birth's date,
     To the State's shield and sword, himself the State.
     He thought for them in mass, as Titan may;
     For their pronounced well-being bade obey;
     O'er each obstructive thicket thunderclapped,
     And straight their easy road to market mapped.
     Watched Argus to survey the huge preserves
     He held or coveted; Mars was armed alert
     At sign of motion; yet his brows were murk,
     His gorge would surge, to see the butcher's work,
     The Reaper's field; a sensitive in nerves.
     He rode not over men to do them hurt.
     As one who claimed to have for paramour
     Earth's fairest form, he dealt the cancelling blow;
     Impassioned, still impersonal; to ensure
     Possession; free of rivals, not their foe.

     The common Tyrant's frenzies, rancour, spites,
     He knew as little as men's claim on rights.
     A kindness for old servants, early friends,
     Was constant in him while they served his ends;
     And if irascible, 'twas the moment's reek
     From fires diverted by some gusty freak.
     His Policy the act which breeds the act
     Prevised, in issues accurately summed
     From reckonings of men's tempers, terrors, needs:-
     That universal army, which he leads
     Who builds Imperial on Imperious Fact.
     Within his hot brain's hammering workshop hummed
     A thousand furious wheels at whirr, untired
     As Nature in her reproductive throes;
     And did they grate, he spake, and cannon fired:
     The cause being aye the incendiary foes
     Proved by prostration culpable. His dispense
     Of Justice made his active conscience;
     His passive was of ceaseless labour formed.
     So found this Tyrant sanction and repose;
     Humanly just, inhumanly unwarmed.
     Preventive fencings with the foul intent
     Occult, by him observed and foiled betimes,
     Let fool historians chronicle as crimes.
     His blows were dealt to clear the way he went:
     Too busy sword and mind for needless blows.
     The mighty bird of sky minutest grains
     On ground perceived; in heaven but rays or rains;
     In humankind diversities of masks,
     For rule of men the choice of bait or goads.
     The statesman steered the despot to large tasks;
     The despot drove the statesman on short roads.
     For Order's cause he laboured, as inclined
     A soldier's training and his Euclid mind.
     His army unto men he could present
     As model of the perfect instrument.
     That creature, woman, was the sofa soft,
     When warriors their dusty armour doffed,
     And read their manuals for the making truce
     With rosy frailties framed to reproduce.
     He farmed his land, distillingly alive
     For the utmost extract he might have and hive,
     Wherewith to marshal force; and in like scheme,
     Benign shone Hymen's torch on young love's dream.
     Thus to be strong was he beneficent;
     A fount of earth, likewise a firmament.

     The disputant in words his eye dismayed:
     Opinions blocked his passage. Rent
     Were Councils with a gesture; brayed
     By hoarse camp-phrase what argument
     Dared interpose to waken spleen
     In him whose vision grasped the unseen,
     Whose counsellor was the ready blade,
     Whose argument the cannonade.
     He loathed his land's divergent parties, loth
     To grant them speech, they were such idle troops;
     The friable and the grumous, dizzards both.
     Men were good sticks his mastery wrought from hoops;
     Some serviceable, none credible on oath.
     The silly preference they nursed to die
     In beds he scorned, and led where they should lie.
     If magic made them pliable for his use,
     Magician he could be by planned surprise.
     For do they see the deuce in human guise,
     As men's acknowledged head appears the deuce,
     And they will toil with devilish craft and zeal.
     Among them certain vagrant wits that had
     Ideas buzzed; they were the feebly mad;
     Pursuers of a film they hailed ideal;
     But could be dangerous fire-flies for a brain
     Subdued by fact, still amorous of the inane.
     With a breath he blew them out, to beat their wings
     The way of such transfeminated things,
     And France had sense of vacancy in Light.

     That is the soul's dead darkness, making clutch
     Wild hands for aid at muscles within touch;
     Adding to slavery's chain the stringent twist;
     Even when it brings close surety that aright
     She reads her Tyrant through his golden mist;
     Perceives him fast to a harsher Tyrant bound;
     Self-ridden, self-hunted, captive of his aim;
     Material grandeur's ape, the Infernal's hound;
     Enormous, with no infinite around;
     No starred deep sky, no Muse, or lame
     The dusty pattering pinions,
     The voice as through the brazen tube of Fame.

     X

     Hugest of engines, a much limited man,
     She saw the Lustrous, her great lord, appear
     Through that smoked glass her last privation brought
     To point her critic eye and spur her thought:
     A heart but to propel Leviathan;
     A spirit that breathed but in earth's atmosphere.
     Amid the plumed and sceptred ones
     Irradiatingly Jovian,
     The mountain tower capped by the floating cloud;
     A nursery screamer where dialectics ruled:
     Mannerless, graceless, laughterless, unlike
     Herself in all, yet with such power to strike,
     That she the various features she could scan
     Dared not to sum, though seeing: and befooled
     By power which beamed omnipotent, she bowed,
     Subservient as roused echo round his guns.
     Invulnerable Prince of Myrmidons,
     He sparkled, by no sage Athene schooled.
     Partly she read her riddle, stricken and pained;
     But irony, her spirit's tongue, restrained.
     The Critic, last of vital in the proud
     Enslaved, when most detectively endowed,
     Admired how irony's venom off him ran,
     Like rain-drops down a statue cast in bronze:
     Whereby of her keen rapier disarmed,
     Again her chant of eulogy began,
     Protesting, but with slavish senses charmed.

     Her warrior, chief among the valorous great
     In arms he was, dispelling shades of blame,
     With radiance palpable in fruit and weight.
     Heard she reproach, his victories blared response;
     His victories bent the Critic to acclaim,
     As with fresh blows upon a ringing sconce.
     Or heard she from scarred ranks of jolly growls
     His veterans dwarf their reverence and, like owls,
     Laugh in the pitch of discord, to exalt
     Their idol for some genial trick or fault,
     She, too, became his marching veteran.
     Again she took her breath from them who bore
     His eagles through the tawny roar,
     And murmured at a peaceful state,
     That bred the title charlatan,
     As missile from the mouth of hate,
     For one the daemon fierily filled and hurled,
     Cannon his name,
     Shattering against a barrier world;
     Her supreme player of man's primaeval game.

     The daemon filled him, and he filled her sons;
     Strung them to stature over human height,
     As march the standards down the smoky fight;
     Her cherubim, her towering mastodons!
     Directed vault or breach, break through
     Earth's toughest, seasons, elements, tame;
     Dash at the bulk the sharpened few;
     Count death the smallest of their debts:
     Show that the will to do
     Is masculine and begets!

     These princes unto him the mother owed;
     These jewels of manhood that rich hand bestowed.
     What wonder, though with wits awake
     To read her riddle, for these her offspring's sake; -
     And she, before high heaven adulteress,
     The lost to honour, in his glory clothed,
     Else naked, shamed in sight of men, self-loathed; -
     That she should quench her thought, nor worship less
     Than ere she bled on sands or snows and knew
     The slave's alternative, to worship or to rue!

     XI

     Bright from the shell of that much limited man,
     Her hero, like the falchion out of sheath,
     Like soul that quits the tumbled body, soared:
     And France, impulsive, nuptial with his plan,
     Albeit the Critic fretting her, adored
     Once more. Exultingly her heart went forth,
     Submissive to his mind and mood,
     The way of those pent-eyebrows North;
     For now was he to win the wreath
     Surpassing sunniest in camp or Court;
     Next, as the blessed harvest after years of blight,
     Sit, the Great Emperor, to be known the Good!

     Now had the Seaman's volvent sprite,
     Lean from the chase that barked his contraband,
     A beggared applicant at every port,
     To strew the profitless deeps and rot beneath,
     Slung northward, for a hunted beast's retort
     On sovereign power; there his final stand,
     Among the perjured Scythian's shaggy horde,
     The hydrocephalic aerolite
     Had taken; flashing thence repellent teeth,
     Though Europe's Master Europe's Rebel banned
     To be earth's outcast, ocean's lord and sport.

     Unmoved might seem the Master's taunted sword.
     Northward his dusky legions nightly slipped,
     As on the map of that all-provident head;
     He luting Peace the while, like morning's cock
     The quiet day to round the hours for bed;
     No pastoral shepherd sweeter to his flock.
     Then Europe first beheld her Titan stripped.
     To what vast length of limb and mounds of thews,
     How trained to scale the eminences, pluck
     The hazards for new footing, how compel
     Those timely incidents by men named luck,
     Through forethought that defied the Fates to choose,
     Her grovelling admiration had not yet
     Imagined of the great man-miracle;
     And France recounted with her comic smile
     Duplicities of Court and Cabinet,
     The silky female of his male in guile,
     Wherewith her two-faced Master could amuse
     A dupe he charmed in sunny beams to bask,
     Before his feint for camisado struck
     The lightning moment of the cast-off mask.

     Splendours of earth repeating heaven's at set
     Of sun down mountain cloud in masses arched;
     Since Asia upon Europe marched,
     Unmatched the copious multitudes; unknown
     To Gallia's over-runner, Rome's inveterate foe,
     Such hosts; all one machine for overthrow,
     Coruscant from the Master's hand, compact
     As reasoned thoughts in the Master's head; were shown
     Yon lightning moment when his acme might
     Blazed o'er the stream that cuts the sandy tract
     Borussian from Sarmatia's famished flat;
     The century's flower; and off its pinnacled throne,
     Rayed servitude on Europe's ball of sight.

     XII

     Behind the Northern curtain-folds he passed.
     There heard hushed France her muffled heart beat fast
     Against the hollow ear-drum, where she sat
     In expectation's darkness, until cracked
     The straining curtain-seams: a scaly light
     Was ghost above an army under shroud.
     Imperious on Imperial Fact
     Incestuously the incredible begat.
     His veterans and auxiliaries,
     The trained, the trustful, sanguine, proud,
     Princely, scarce numerable to recite, -
     Titanic of all Titan tragedies! -
     That Northern curtain took them, as the seas
     Gulp the great ships to give back shipmen white.

     Alive in marble, she conceived in soul,
     With barren eyes and mouth, the mother's loss;
     The bolt from her abandoned heaven sped;
     The snowy army rolling knoll on knoll
     Beyond horizon, under no blest Cross:
     By the vulture dotted and engarlanded.

     Was it a necromancer lured
     To weave his tense betraying spell?
     A Titan whom our God endured
     Till he of his foul hungers fell,
     By all his craft and labour scourged?
     A deluge Europe's liberated wave,
     Paean to sky, leapt over that vast grave.
     Its shadow-points against her sacred land converged.
     And him, her yoke-fellow, her black lord, her fate,
     In doubt, in fevered hope, in chills of hate,
     That tore her old credulity to strips,
     Then pressed the auspicious relics on her lips,
     His withered slave for foregone miracles urged.
     And he, whom now his ominous halo's round,
     A three parts blank decrescent sickle, crowned,
     Prodigious in catastrophe, could wear
     The realm of Darkness with its Prince's air;
     Assume in mien the resolute pretence
     To satiate an hungered confidence,
     Proved criminal by the sceptic seen to cower
     Beside the generous face of that frail flower.

     XIII

     Desire and terror then had each of each:
     His crown and sword were staked on the magic stroke;
     Her blood she gave as one who loved her leech;
     And both did barter under union's cloak.
     An union in hot fever and fierce need
     Of either's aid, distrust in trust did breed.
     Their traffic instincts hooded their live wits
     To issues. Never human fortune throve
     On such alliance. Viewed by fits,
     From Vulcan's forge a hovering Jove
     Evolved. The slave he dragged the Tyrant drove.
     Her awe of him his dread of her invoked:
     His nature with her shivering faith ran yoked.
     What wisdom counselled, Policy declined;
     All perils dared he save the step behind.
     Ahead his grand initiative becked:
     One spark of radiance blurred, his orb was wrecked.
     Stripped to the despot upstart, for success
     He raged to clothe a perilous nakedness.
     He would not fall, while falling; would not be taught,
     While learning; would not relax his grasp on aught
     He held in hand, while losing it; pressed advance,
     Pricked for her lees the veins of wasted France;
     Who, had he stayed to husband her, had spun
     The strength he taxed unripened for his throw,
     In vengeful casts calamitous,
     On fields where palsying Pyrrhic laurels grow,
     The luminous the ruinous.
     An incalescent scorpion,
     And fierier for the mounded cirque
     That narrowed at him thick and murk,
     This gambler with his genius
     Flung lives in angry volleys, bloody lightnings, flung
     His fortunes to the hosts he stung,
     With victories clipped his eagle's wings.
     By the hands that built him up was he undone:
     By the star aloft, which was his ram's-head will
     Within; by the toppling throne the soldier won;
     By the yeasty ferment of what once had been,
     To cloud a rational mind for present things;
     By his own force, the suicide in his mill.
     Needs never God of Vengeance intervene
     When giants their last lesson have to learn.
     Fighting against an end he could discern,
     The chivalry whereof he had none
     He called from his worn slave's abundant springs:
     Not deigning spousally entreat
     That ever blinded by his martial skill,
     But harsh to have her worship counted out
     In human coin, her vital rivers drained,
     Her infant forests felled, commanded die
     The decade thousand deaths for his Imperial seat,
     Where throning he her faith in him maintained;
     Bound Reason to believe delayed defeat
     Was triumph; and what strength in her remained
     To head against the ultimate foreseen rout,
     Insensate taxed; of his impenitent will,
     Servant and sycophant: without ally,
     In Python's coils, the Master Craftsman still;
     The smiter, panther springer, trapper sly,
     The deadly wrestler at the crucial bout,
     The penetrant, the tonant, tower of towers,
     Striking from black disaster starry showers.
     Her supreme player of man's primaeval game,
     He won his harnessed victim's rapturous shout,
     When every move was mortal to her frame,
     Her prayer to life that stricken he might lie,
     She to exchange his laurels for earth's flowers.

     The innumerable whelmed him, and he fell:
     A vessel in mid-ocean under storm.
     Ere ceased the lullaby of his passing bell,
     He sprang to sight, in human form
     Revealed, from no celestial aids:
     The shades enclosed him, and he fired the shades.

     Cannon his name,
     Cannon his voice, he came.
     The fount of miracles from drought-dust arose,
     Amazing even on his Imperial stage,
     Where marvels lightened through the alternate hours
     And winged o'er human earth's heroical shone.
     Into the press of cumulative foes,
     Across the friendly fields of smoke and rage,
     A broken structure bore his furious powers;
     The man no more, the Warrior Chief the same;
     Match for all rivals; in himself but flame
     Of an outworn lamp, to illumine nought anon.
     Yet loud as when he first showed War's effete
     Their Schoolman off his eagre mounted high,
     And summoned to subject who dared compete,
     The cannon in the name Napoleon
     Discoursed of sulphur earth to curtained sky.
     So through a tropic day a regnant sun,
     Where armies of assailant vapours thronged,
     His glory's trappings laid on them: comes night,
     Enwraps him in a bosom quick of heat
     From his anterior splendours, and shall seem
     Day instant, Day's own lord in the furnace gleam,
     The virulent quiver on ravished eyes prolonged,
     When severed darkness, all flaminical bright,
     Slips vivid eagles linked in rapid flight;
     Which bring at whiles the lionly far roar,
     As wrestled he with manacles and gags,
     To speed across a cowering world once more,
     Superb in ordered floods, his lordly flags.
     His name on silence thundered, on the obscure
     Lightened; it haunted morn and even-song:
     Earth of her prodigy's extinction long,
     With shudderings and with thrillings, hung unsure.

     Snapped was the chord that made the resonant bow,
     In France, abased and like a shrunken corse;
     Amid the weakest weak, the lowest low,
     From the highest fallen, stagnant off her source;
     Condemned to hear the nations' hostile mirth;
     See curtained heavens, and smell a sulphurous earth;
     Which told how evermore shall tyrant Force
     Beget the greater for its overthrow.
     The song of Liberty in her hearing spoke
     A foreign tongue; Earth's fluttering little lyre
     Unlike, but like the raven's ravening croak.
     Not till her breath of being could aspire
     Anew, this loved and scourged of Angels found
     Our common brotherhood in sight and sound:
     When mellow rang the name Napoleon,
     And dim aloft her young Angelical waved.
     Between ethereal and gross to choose,
     She swung; her soul desired, her senses craved.
     They pricked her dreams, while oft her skies were dun
     Behind o'ershadowing foemen: on a tide
     They drew the nature having need of pride
     Among her fellows for its vital dues:
     He seen like some rare treasure-galleon,
     Hull down, with masts against the Western hues.



     FRANCE--DECEMBER 1870



     I

     We look for her that sunlike stood
     Upon the forehead of our day,
     An orb of nations, radiating food
     For body and for mind alway.
     Where is the Shape of glad array;
     The nervous hands, the front of steel,
     The clarion tongue? Where is the bold proud face?
     We see a vacant place;
     We hear an iron heel.

     II

     O she that made the brave appeal
     For manhood when our time was dark,
     And from our fetters drove the spark
     Which was as lightning to reveal
     New seasons, with the swifter play
     Of pulses, and benigner day;
     She that divinely shook the dead
     From living man; that stretched ahead
     Her resolute forefinger straight,
     And marched toward the gloomy gate
     Of earth's Untried, gave note, and in
     The good name of Humanity
     Called forth the daring vision! she,
     She likewise half corrupt of sin,
     Angel and Wanton! can it be?
     Her star has foundered in eclipse,
     The shriek of madness on her lips;
     Shreds of her, and no more, we see.
     There is horrible convulsion, smothered din,
     As of one that in a grave-cloth struggles to be free.

     III

     Look not for spreading boughs
     On the riven forest tree.
     Look down where deep in blood and mire
     Black thunder plants his feet and ploughs
     The soil for ruin: that is France:
     Still thrilling like a lyre,
     Amazed to shivering discord from a fall
     Sudden as that the lurid hosts recall
     Who met in heaven the irreparable mischance.
     O that is France!
     The brilliant eyes to kindle bliss,
     The shrewd quick lips to laugh and kiss,
     Breasts that a sighing world inspire,
     And laughter-dimpled countenance
     Where soul and senses caught desire!

     IV

     Ever invoking fire from heaven, the fire
     Has grasped her, unconsumable, but framed
     For all the ecstasies of suffering dire.
     Mother of Pride, her sanctuary shamed:
     Mother of Delicacy, and made a mark
     For outrage: Mother of Luxury, stripped stark:
     Mother of Heroes, bondsmen: thro' the rains,
     Across her boundaries, lo the league-long chains!
     Fond Mother of her martial youth; they pass,
     Are spectres in her sight, are mown as grass!
     Mother of Honour, and dishonoured: Mother
     Of Glory, she condemned to crown with bays
     Her victor, and be fountain of his praise.
     Is there another curse? There is another:
     Compassionate her madness: is she not
     Mother of Reason? she that sees them mown
     Like grass, her young ones! Yea, in the low groan
     And under the fixed thunder of this hour
     Which holds the animate world in one foul blot
     Tranced circumambient while relentless Power
     Beaks at her heart and claws her limbs down-thrown,
     She, with the plungeing lightnings overshot,
     With madness for an armour against pain,
     With milkless breasts for little ones athirst,
     And round her all her noblest dying in vain,
     Mother of Reason is she, trebly cursed,
     To feel, to see, to justify the blow;
     Chamber to chamber of her sequent brain
     Gives answer of the cause of her great woe,
     Inexorably echoing thro' the vaults,
     ''Tis thus they reap in blood, in blood who sow:
     'This is the sum of self-absolved faults.'
     Doubt not that thro' her grief, with sight supreme,
     Thro' her delirium and despair's last dream,
     Thro' pride, thro' bright illusion and the brood
     Bewildering of her various Motherhood,
     The high strong light within her, tho' she bleeds,
     Traces the letters of returned misdeeds.
     She sees what seed long sown, ripened of late,
     Bears this fierce crop; and she discerns her fate
     From origin to agony, and on
     As far as the wave washes long and wan
     Off one disastrous impulse: for of waves
     Our life is, and our deeds are pregnant graves
     Blown rolling to the sunset from the dawn.

     V

     Ah, what a dawn of splendour, when her sowers
     Went forth and bent the necks of populations
     And of their terrors and humiliations
     Wove her the starry wreath that earthward lowers
     Now in the figure of a burning yoke!
     Her legions traversed North and South and East,
     Of triumph they enjoyed the glutton's feast:
     They grafted the green sprig, they lopped the oak.
     They caught by the beard the tempests, by the scalp
     The icy precipices, and clove sheer through
     The heart of horror of the pinnacled Alp,
     Emerging not as men whom mortals knew.
     They were the earthquake and the hurricane,
     The lightnings and the locusts, plagues of blight,
     Plagues of the revel: they were Deluge rain,
     And dreaded Conflagration; lawless Might.
     Death writes a reeling line along the snows,
     Where under frozen mists they may be tracked,
     Who men and elements provoked to foes,
     And Gods: they were of god and beast compact:
     Abhorred of all. Yet, how they sucked the teats
     Of Carnage, thirsty issue of their dam,
     Whose eagles, angrier than their oriflamme,
     Flushed the vext earth with blood, green earth forgets.
     The gay young generations mask her grief;
     Where bled her children hangs the loaded sheaf.
     Forgetful is green earth; the Gods alone
     Remember everlastingly: they strike
     Remorselessly, and ever like for like.
     By their great memories the Gods are known.

     VI

     They are with her now, and in her ears, and known.
     'Tis they that cast her to the dust for Strength,
     Their slave, to feed on her fair body's length,
     That once the sweetest and the proudest shone;
     Scoring for hideous dismemberment
     Her limbs, as were the anguish-taking breath
     Gone out of her in the insufferable descent
     From her high chieftainship; as were she death,
     Who hears a voice of justice, feels the knife
     Of torture, drinks all ignominy of life.
     They are with her, and the painful Gods might weep,
     If ever rain of tears came out of heaven
     To flatter Weakness and bid conscience sleep,
     Viewing the woe of this Immortal, driven
     For the soul's life to drain the maddening cup
     Of her own children's blood implacably:
     Unsparing even as they to furrow up
     The yellow land to likeness of a sea:
     The bountiful fair land of vine and grain,
     Of wit and grace and ardour, and strong roots,
     Fruits perishable, imperishable fruits;
     Furrowed to likeness of the dim grey main
     Behind the black obliterating cyclone.

     VII

     Behold, the Gods are with her, and are known.
     Whom they abandon misery persecutes
     No more: them half-eyed apathy may loan
     The happiness of pitiable brutes.
     Whom the just Gods abandon have no light,
     No ruthless light of introspective eyes
     That in the midst of misery scrutinize
     The heart and its iniquities outright.
     They rest, they smile and rest; have earned perchance
     Of ancient service quiet for a term;
     Quiet of old men dropping to the worm;
     And so goes out the soul. But not of France.
     She cries for grief, and to the Gods she cries,
     For fearfully their loosened hands chastize,
     And icily they watch the rod's caress
     Ravage her flesh from scourges merciless,
     But she, inveterate of brain, discerns
     That Pity has as little place as Joy
     Among their roll of gifts; for Strength she yearns.
     For Strength, her idol once, too long her toy.
     Lo, Strength is of the plain root-Virtues born:
     Strength shall ye gain by service, prove in scorn,
     Train by endurance, by devotion shape.
     Strength is not won by miracle or rape.
     It is the offspring of the modest years,
     The gift of sire to son, thro' those firm laws
     Which we name Gods; which are the righteous cause,
     The cause of man, and manhood's ministers.
     Could France accept the fables of her priests,
     Who blest her banners in this game of beasts,
     And now bid hope that heaven will intercede
     To violate its laws in her sore need,
     She would find comfort in their opiates:
     Mother of Reason! can she cheat the Fates?
     Would she, the champion of the open mind,
     The Omnipotent's prime gift--the gift of growth -
     Consent even for a night-time to be blind,
     And sink her soul on the delusive sloth,
     For fruits ethereal and material, both,
     In peril of her place among mankind?
     The Mother of the many Laughters might
     Call one poor shade of laughter in the light
     Of her unwavering lamp to mark what things
     The world puts faith in, careless of the truth:
     What silly puppet-bodies danced on strings,
     Attached by credence, we appear in sooth,
     Demanding intercession, direct aid,
     When the whole tragic tale hangs on a broken blade!

     She swung the sword for centuries; in a day
     It slipped her, like a stream cut off from source.
     She struck a feeble hand, and tried to pray,
     Clamoured of treachery, and had recourse
     To drunken outcries in her dream that Force
     Needed but hear her shouting to obey.
     Was she not formed to conquer? The bright plumes
     Of crested vanity shed graceful nods:
     Transcendent in her foundries, Arts and looms,
     Had France to fear the vengeance of the Gods?
     Her faith was on her battle-roll of names
     Sheathed in the records of old war; with dance
     And song she thrilled her warriors and her dames,
     Embracing her Dishonour: gave him France
     From head to foot, France present and to come,
     So she might hear the trumpet and the drum -
     Bellona and Bacchante! rushing forth
     On yon stout marching Schoolmen of the North.

     Inveterate of brain, well knows she why
     Strength failed her, faithful to himself the first:
     Her dream is done, and she can read the sky,
     And she can take into her heart the worst
     Calamity to drug the shameful thought
     Of days that made her as the man she served
     A name of terror, but a thing unnerved:
     Buying the trickster, by the trickster bought,
     She for dominion, he to patch a throne.

     VIII

     Henceforth of her the Gods are known,
     Open to them her breast is laid.
     Inveterate of brain, heart-valiant,
     Never did fairer creature pant
     Before the altar and the blade!

     IX

     Swift fall the blows, and men upbraid,
     And friends give echo blunt and cold,
     The echo of the forest to the axe.
     Within her are the fires that wax
     For resurrection from the mould.

     X

     She snatched at heaven's flame of old,
     And kindled nations: she was weak:
     Frail sister of her heroic prototype,
     The Man; for sacrifice unripe,
     She too must fill a Vulture's beak.
     Deride the vanquished, and acclaim
     The conqueror, who stains her fame,
     Still the Gods love her, for that of high aim
     Is this good France, the bleeding thing they stripe.

     XI

     She shall rise worthier of her prototype
     Thro' her abasement deep; the pain that runs
     From nerve to nerve some victory achieves.
     They lie like circle-strewn soaked Autumn-leaves
     Which stain the forest scarlet, her fair sons!
     And of their death her life is: of their blood
     From many streams now urging to a flood,
     No more divided, France shall rise afresh.
     Of them she learns the lesson of the flesh:-
     The lesson writ in red since first Time ran,
     A hunter hunting down the beast in man:
     That till the chasing out of its last vice,
     The flesh was fashioned but for sacrifice.

     Immortal Mother of a mortal host!
     Thou suffering of the wounds that will not slay,
     Wounds that bring death but take not life away! -
     Stand fast and hearken while thy victors boast:
     Hearken, and loathe that music evermore.
     Slip loose thy garments woven of pride and shame:
     The torture lurks in them, with them the blame
     Shall pass to leave thee purer than before.
     Undo thy jewels, thinking whence they came,
     For what, and of the abominable name
     Of her who in imperial beauty wore.

     O Mother of a fated fleeting host
     Conceived in the past days of sin, and born
     Heirs of disease and arrogance and scorn,
     Surrender, yield the weight of thy great ghost,
     Like wings on air, to what the heavens proclaim
     With trumpets from the multitudinous mounds
     Where peace has filled the hearing of thy sons:
     Albeit a pang of dissolution rounds
     Each new discernment of the undying ones,
     Do thou stoop to these graves here scattered wide
     Along thy fields, as sunless billows roll;
     These ashes have the lesson for the soul.
     'Die to thy Vanity, and strain thy Pride,
     Strip off thy Luxury: that thou may'st live,
     Die to thyself,' they say, 'as we have died
     From dear existence and the foe forgive,
     Nor pray for aught save in our little space
     To warn good seed to greet the fair earth's face.'
     O Mother! take their counsel, and so shall
     The broader world breathe in on this thy home,
     Light clear for thee the counter-changing dome,
     Strength give thee, like an ocean's vast expanse
     Off mountain cliffs, the generations all,
     Not whirling in their narrow rings of foam,
     But as a river forward. Soaring France!
     Now is Humanity on trial in thee:
     Now may'st thou gather humankind in fee:
     Now prove that Reason is a quenchless scroll;
     Make of calamity thine aureole,
     And bleeding head us thro' the troubles of the sea.



     ALSACE-LORRAINE



     I

     The sister Hours in circles linked,
     Daughters of men, of men the mates,
     Are gone on flow with the day that winked,
     With the night that spanned at golden gates.
     Mothers, they leave us, quickening seed;
     They bear us grain or flower or weed,
     As we have sown; is nought extinct
     For them we fill to be our Fates.
     Life of the breath is but the loan;
     Passing death what we have sown.

     Pearly are they till the pale inherited stain
     Deepens in us, and the mirrors they form on their flow
     Darken to feature and nature: a volumed chain,
     Sequent of issue, in various eddies they show.
     Theirs is the Book of the River of Life, to read
     Leaf by leaf by reapers of long-sown seed:
     There doth our shoot up to light from a spiriting sane
     Stand as a tree whereon numberless clusters grow:
     Legible there how the heart, with its one false move
     Cast Eurydice pallor on all we love.

     Our fervid heart has filled that Book in chief;
     Our fitful heart a wild reflection views;
     Our craving heart of passion suckling grief
     Disowns the author's work it must peruse;
     Inconscient in its leap to wreak the deed,
     A round of harvests red from crimson seed,
     It marks the current Hours show leaf by leaf,
     And rails at Destiny; nor traces clues;
     Though sometimes it may think what novel light
     Will strike their faces when the mind shall write.

     II

     Succourful daughters of men are the rosed and starred
     Revolving Twelves in their fluent germinal rings,
     Despite the burden to chasten, abase, depose.
     Fallen on France, as the sweep of scythe over sward,
     They breathed in her ear their voice of the crystal springs,
     That run from a twilight rise, from a twilight close,
     Through alternate beams and glooms, rejoicingly young.
     Only to Earth's best loved, at the breathless turns
     Where Life in fold of the Shadow reclines unstrung,
     And a ghostly lamp of their moment's union burns,
     Will such pure notes from the fountain-head be sung.

     Voice of Earth's very soul to the soul she would see renewed:
     A song that sought no tears, that laid not a touch on the breast
     Sobbing aswoon and, like last foxgloves' bells upon ferns
     In sandy alleys of woodland silence, shedding to bare.
     Daughters of Earth and men, they piped of her natural brood;
     Her patient helpful four-feet; wings on the flit or in nest;
     Paws at our old-world task to scoop a defensive lair;
     Snouts at hunt through the scented grasses; enhavened scuts
     Flashing escape under show of a laugh nigh the mossed burrow-mouth.
     Sack-like droop bronze pears on the nailed branch-frontage of huts,
     To greet those wedded toilers from acres where sweat is a shower.
     Snake, cicada, lizard, on lavender slopes up South,
     Pant for joy of a sunlight driving the fielders to bower.
     Sharpened in silver by one chance breeze is the olive's grey;
     A royal-mantle floats, a red fritillary hies;
     The bee, for whom no flower of garden or wild has nay,
     Noises, heard if but named, so hot is the trade he plies.
     Processions beneath green arches of herbage, the long colonnades;
     Laboured mounds that a foot or a wanton stick may subvert;
     Homely are they for a lowly look on bedewed grass-blades,
     On citied fir-droppings, on twisted wreaths of the worm in dirt.
     Does nought so loosen our sight from the despot heart, to receive
     Balm of a sound Earth's primary heart at its active beat:
     The motive, yet servant, of energy; simple as morn and eve;
     Treasureless, fetterless; free of the bonds of a great conceit:
     Unwounded even by cruel blows on a body that writhes;
     Nor whimpering under misfortune; elusive of obstacles; prompt
     To quit any threatened familiar domain seen doomed by the scythes;
     Its day's hard business done, the score to the good accompt.
     Creatures of forest and mead, Earth's essays in being, all kinds
     Bound by the navel-knot to the Mother, never astray,
     They in the ear upon ground will pour their intuitive minds,
     Cut man's tangles for Earth's first broad rectilinear way:
     Admonishing loftier reaches, the rich adventurous shoots,
     Pushes of tentative curves, embryonic upwreathings in air;
     Not always the sprouts of Earth's root-Laws preserving her brutes;
     Oft but our primitive hungers licentious in fine and fair.

     Yet the like aerial growths may chance be the delicate sprays,
     Infant of Earth's most urgent in sap, her fierier zeal
     For entry on Life's upper fields: and soul thus flourishing pays
     The martyr's penance, mark for brutish in man to heel.

     Her, from a nerveless well among stagnant pools of the dry,
     Through her good aim at divine, shall commune with Earth remake;
     Fraternal unto sororial, her, where abashed she may lie,
     Divinest of man shall clasp; a world out of darkness awake,
     As it were with the Resurrection's eyelids uplifted, to see
     Honour in shame, in substance the spirit, in that dry fount
     Jets of the songful ascending silvery-bright water-tree
     Spout, with our Earth's unbaffled resurgent desire for the mount,
     Though broken at intervals, clipped, and barren in seeming it be.
     For this at our nature arises rejuvenescent from Earth,
     However respersive the blow and nigh on infernal the fall,
     The chastisement drawn down on us merited: are we of worth
     Amid our satanic excrescences, this, for the less than a call,
     Will Earth reprime, man cherish; the God who is in us and round,
     Consenting, the God there seen. Impiety speaks despair;
     Religion the virtue of serving as things of the furrowy ground,
     Debtors for breath while breath with our fellows in service we
     share.
     Not such of the crowned discrowned
     Can Earth or humanity spare;
     Such not the God let die.

     III

     Eastward of Paris morn is high;
     And darkness on that Eastward side
     The heart of France beholds: a thorn
     Is in her frame where shines the morn:
     A rigid wave usurps her sky,
     With eagle crest and eagle-eyed
     To scan what wormy wrinkles hint
     Her forces gathering: she the thrown
     From station, lopped of an arm, astounded, lone,
     Reading late History as a foul misprint:
     Imperial, Angelical,
     At strife commingled in her frame convulsed;
     Shame of her broken sword, a ravening gall;
     Pain of the limb where once her warm blood pulsed;
     These tortures to distract her underneath
     Her whelmed Aurora's shade. But in that space
     When lay she dumb beside her trampled wreath,
     Like an unburied body mid the tombs,
     Feeling against her heart life's bitter probe
     For life, she saw how children of her race,
     The many sober sons and daughters, plied,
     By cottage lamplight through the water-globe,
     By simmering stew-pots, by the serious looms,
     Afield, in factories, with the birds astir,
     Their nimble feet and fingers; not denied
     Refreshful chatter, laughter, galliard songs.
     So like Earth's indestructible they were,
     That wrestling with its anguish rose her pride,
     To feel where in each breast the thought of her,
     On whom the circle Hours laid leaded thongs,
     Was constant; spoken sometimes in low tone
     At lip or in a fluttered look,
     A shortened breath: and they were her loved own;
     Nor ever did they waste their strength with tears,
     For pity of the weeper, nor rebuke,
     Though mainly they were charged to pay her debt,
     The Mother having conscience in arrears;
     Ready to gush the flood of vain regret,
     Else hearken to her weaponed children's moan
     Of stifled rage invoking vengeance: hell's,
     If heaven should fail the counter-wave that swells
     In blood and brain for retribution swift.
     Those helped not: wings to her soul were these who yet
     Could welcome day for labour, night for rest,
     Enrich her treasury, built of cheerful thrift,
     Of honest heart, beyond all miracles;
     And likened to Earth's humblest were Earth's best.

     IV

     Brooding on her deep fall, the many strings
     Which formed her nature set a thought on Kings,
     As aids that might the low-laid cripple lift;
     And one among them hummed devoutly leal,
     While passed the sighing breeze along her breast.
     Of Kings by the festive vanquishers rammed down
     Her gorge since fell the Chief, she knew their crown;
     Upon her through long seasons was its grasp,
     For neither soul's nor body's weal;
     As much bestows the robber wasp,
     That in the hanging apple makes a meal,
     And carves a face of abscess where was fruit
     Ripe ruddy. They would blot
     Her radiant leap above the slopes acute,
     Of summit to celestial; impute
     The wanton's aim to her divinest shot;
     Bid her walk History backward over gaps;
     Abhor the day of Phrygian caps;
     Abjure her guerdon, execrate herself;
     The Hapsburg, Hohenzollern, Guelph,
     Admire repentant; reverently prostrate
     Her person unto the belly-god; of whom
     Is inward plenty and external bloom;
     Enough of pomp and state
     And carnival to quench
     The breast's desires of an intemperate wench,
     The head's ideas beyond legitimate.

     She flung them: she was France: nor with far frown
     Her lover from the embrace of her refrained:
     But in her voice an interwoven wire,
     The exultation of her gross renown,
     Struck deafness at her heavens, and they waned
     Over a look ill-gifted to aspire.
     Wherefore, as an abandonment, irate,
     The intemperate summoned up her trumpet days,
     Her treasure-galleon's wondrous freight.
     The cannon-name she sang and shrieked; transferred
     Her soul's allegiance; o'er the Tyrant slurred,
     Tranced with the zeal of her first fawning gaze,
     To clasp his trophy flags and hail him Saint.

     V

     She hailed him Saint:
     And her Jeanne unsainted, foully sung!
     The virgin who conceived a France when funeral glooms
     Across a land aquake with sharp disseverance hung:
     Conceived, and under stress of battle brought her forth;
     Crowned her in purification of feud and foeman's taint;
     Taught her to feel her blood her being, know her worth,
     Have joy of unity: the Jeanne bescreeched, bescoffed,
     Who flamed to ashes, flew up wreaths of faggot fumes;
     Through centuries a star in vapour-folds aloft.

     For her people to hail her Saint,
     Were no lifting of her, Earth's gem,
     Earth's chosen, Earth's throb on divine:
     In the ranks of the starred she is one,
     While man has thought on our line:
     No lifting of her, but for them,
     Breath of the mountain, beam of the sun
     Through mist, out of swamp-fires' lures release,
     Youth on the forehead, the rough right way
     Seen to be footed: for them the heart's peace,
     By the mind's war won for a permanent miracle day.

     Her arms below her sword-hilt crossed,
     The heart of that high-hallowed Jeanne
     Into the furnace-pit she tossed
     Before her body knew the flame,
     And sucked its essence: warmth for righteous work,
     An undivided power to speed her aim.
     She had no self but France: the sainted man
     No France but self. Him warrior and clerk,
     Free of his iron clutch; and him her young,
     In whirled imagination mastodonized;
     And him her penmen, him her poets; all
     For the visioned treasure-galleon astrain;
     Sent zenithward on bass and treble tongue,
     Till solely through his glory France was prized.
     She who had her Jeanne;
     The child of her industrious;
     Earth's truest, earth's pure fount from the main;
     And she who had her one day's mate,
     In the soul's view illustrious
     Past blazonry, her Immaculate,
     Those hours of slavish Empire would recall;
     Thrill to the rattling anchor-chain
     She heard upon a day in 'I who can';
     Start to the softened, tremulous bugle-blare
     Of that Caesarean Italian
     Across the storied fields of trampled grain,
     As to a Vercingetorix of old Gaul
     Blowing the rally against a Caesar's reign.
     Her soul's protesting sobs she drowned to swear
     Fidelity unto the sainted man,
     Whose nimbus was her crown; and be again
     The foreigner in Europe, known of none,
     None knowing; sight to dazzle, voice to stun.
     Rearward she stepped, with thirst for Europe's van;
     The dream she nursed a snare,
     The flag she bore a pall.

     VI

     In Nature is no rearward step allowed.
     Hard on the rock Reality do we dash
     To be shattered, if the material dream propels.
     The worship to departed splendour vowed
     Conjured a simulacrum, wove her lash,
     For the slow measure timed her peal of bells.

     Thereof was the cannon-name a mockery round her hills;
     For the will of wills,
     Its flaccid ape,
     Weak as the final echo off a giant's bawl:
     Napoleon for disdain,
     His banner steeped in crape.
     Thereof the barrier of Alsace-Lorraine;
     The frozen billow crested to its fall;
     Dismemberment; disfigurement;
     Her history blotted; her proud mantle rent;
     And ever that one word to reperuse,
     With eyes behind a veil of fiery dews;
     Knelling the spot where Gallic soil defiled
     Showed her sons' valour as a frenzied child
     In arms of the mailed man.
     Word that her mind must bear, her heart put under ban,
     Lest burst it: unto her eyes a ghost,
     Incredible though manifest: a scene
     Stamped with her new Saint's name: and all his host
     A wattled flock the foeman's dogs between!

     VII

     Mark where a credible ghost pulls bridle to view that bare
     Corpse of a field still reddening cloud, and alive in its throes
     Beneath her Purgatorial Saint's evocative stare:
     Brand on his name, the gulf of his glory, his Legend's close.
     A lustreless Phosphor heading for daybeam Night's dead-born,
     His underworld eyeballs grip the cast of the land for a fray
     Expugnant; swift up the heights, with the Victor's instinctive scorn
     Of the trapped below, he rides; he beholds, and a two-fold grey,
     Even as the misty sun growing moon that a frost enrings,
     Is shroud on the shrouded; he knows him there in the helmeted ranks.
     The golden eagles flap lame wings,
     The black double-headed are round their flanks.
     He is there in midst of the pupils he harried to brains awake, trod
     into union; lo,
     These are his Epic's tutored Dardans, yon that Rhapsode's Achaeans
     to know.
     Nor is aught of an equipollent conflict seen, nor the weaker's
     flashed device;
     Headless is offered a breast to beaks deliberate, formal, assured,
     precise.
     Ruled by the mathematician's hand, they solve their problem, as on a
     slate.
     This is the ground foremarked, and the day; their leader modestly
     hazarded date.
     His helmeted ranks might be draggers of pools or reapers of plains
     for the warrior's guile
     Displayed; they haul, they rend, as in some orderly office
     mercantile.
     And a timed artillery speaks full-mouthed on a stuttering feeble
     reduced to nought.
     Can it be France, an army of France, tricked, netted, convulsive,
     all writhen caught?
     Arterial blood of an army's heart outpoured the Grey Observer sees:
     A forest of France in thunder comes, like a landslide hurled off her
     Pyrenees.
     Torrent and forest ramp, roll, sling on for a charge against iron,
     reason, Fate;
     It is gapped through the mass midway, bare ribs and dust ere the
     helmeted feel its weight.
     So the blue billow white-plumed is plunged upon shingle to screaming
     withdrawal, but snatched,
     Waved is the laurel eternal yielded by Death o'er the waste of brave
     men outmatched.
     The France of the fury was there, the thing he had wielded, whose
     honour was dearer than life;
     The Prussia despised, the harried, the trodden, was here; his pupil,
     the scholar in strife.

     He hated to heel, in a spasm of will,
     From sleep or debate, a mannikin squire
     With head of a merlin hawk and quill
     Acrow on an ear. At him rained fire
     From a blast of eyeballs hotter than speech,
     To say what a deadly poison stuffed
     The France here laid in her bloody ditch,
     Through the Legend passing human puffed.

     Credible ghost of the field which from him descends,
     Each dark anniversary day will its father return,
     Haling his shadow to spy where the Legend ends,
     That penman trumpeter's part in the wreck discern.

     There, with the cup it presents at her lips, she stands,
     France, with her future staked on the word it may pledge.
     The vengeance urged of desire a reserve countermands;
     The patience clasped totters hard on the precipice edge.
     Lopped of an arm, mother love for her own springs quick,
     To curdle the milk in her breasts for the young they feed,
     At thought of her single hand, and the lost so nigh.
     Mother love for her own, who raised her when she lay sick
     Nigh death, and would in like fountains fruitlessly bleed,
     Withholds the fling of her heart on the further die.

     Of love is wisdom. Is it great love, then wise
     Will our wild heart be, though whipped unto madness more
     By its mentor's counselling voice than thoughtfully reined.
     Desire of the wave for the shore,
     Passion for one last agony under skies,
     To make her heavens remorseful, she restrained

     VIII

     On her lost arm love bade her look;
     On her one hand to meditate;
     The tumult of her blood abate;
     Disaster face, derision brook:
     Forbade the page of her Historic Muse,
     Until her demon his last hold forsook,
     And smoothly, with no countenance of hate,
     Her conqueror she could scan to measure. Thence
     The strange new Winter stream of ruling sense,
     Cold, comfortless, but braced to disabuse,
     Ran through the mind of this most lowly laid;
     From the top billow of victorious War,
     Down in the flagless troughs at ebb and flow;
     A wreck; her past, her future, both in shade.
     She read the things that are;
     Reality unaccepted read
     For sign of the distraught, and took her blow
     To brain; herself read through;
     Wherefore her predatory Glory paid
     Napoleon ransom knew.
     Her nature's many strings hot gusts did jar
     Against the note of reason uttered low,
     Ere passionate with duty she might wed,
     Compel the bride's embrace of her stern groom,
     Joined at an altar liker to the tomb,
     Nest of the Furies their first nuptial bed,
     They not the less were mated and proclaimed
     The rational their issue. Then she rose.

     See how the rush of southern Springtide glows
     Oceanic in the chariot-wheel's ascent,
     Illuminated with one breath. The maimed,
     Tom, tortured, winter-visaged, suddenly
     Had stature; to the world's wonderment,
     Fair features, grace of mien, nor least
     The comic dimples round her April mouth,
     Sprung of her intimate humanity.
     She stood before mankind the very South
     Rapt out of frost to flowery drapery;
     Unshadowed save when somewhiles she looked East.

     IX

     Let but the rational prevail,
     Our footing is on ground though all else fail:
     Our kiss of Earth is then a plight
     To walk within her Laws and have her light.
     Choice of the life or death lies in ourselves;
     There is no fate but when unreason lours.
     This Land the cheerful toiler delves,
     The thinker brightens with fine wit,
     The lovelier grace as lyric flowers,
     Those rosed and starred revolving Twelves
     Shall nurse for effort infinite
     While leashed to brain the heart of France the Fair
     Beats tempered music and its lead subserves.
     Washed from her eyes the Napoleonic glare,
     Divinely raised by that in her divine,
     Not the clear sight of Earth's blunt actual swerves
     When her lost look, as on a wave of wine,
     Rolls Eastward, and the mother-flag descries
     Caress with folds and curves
     The fortress over Rhine,
     Beneath the one tall spire.
     Despite her brooding thought, her nightlong sighs,
     Her anguish in desire,
     She sees, above the brutish paw
     Alert on her still quivering limb -
     As little in past time she saw,
     Nor when dispieced as prey,
     As victrix when abhorred -
     A Grand Germania, stout on soil;
     Audacious up the ethereal dim;
     The forest's Infant; the strong hand for toil;
     The patient brain in twilights when astray;
     Shrewdest of heads to foil and counterfoil;
     The sceptic and devout; the potent sword;
     With will and armed to help in hewing way
     For Europe's march; and of the most golden chord
     Of the Heliconian lyre
     Excellent mistress. Yea, she sees, and can admire;
     Still seeing in what walks the Gallia leads;
     And with what shield upon Alsace-Lorraine
     Her wary sister's doubtful look misreads
     A mother's throbs for her lost: so loved: so near:
     Magnetic. Hard the course for her to steer,
     The leap against the sharpened spikes restrain.
     For the belted Overshadower hard the course,
     On whom devolves the spirit's touchstone, Force:
     Which is the strenuous arm, to strike inclined,
     That too much adamantine makes the mind;
     Forgets it coin of Nature's rich Exchange;
     Contracts horizons within present sight:
     Amalekite to-day, across its range
     Indisputable; to-morrow Simeonite.

     X

     The mother who gave birth to Jeanne;
     Who to her young Angelical sprang;
     Who lay with Earth and heard the notes she sang,
     And heard her truest sing them; she may reach
     Heights yet unknown of nations; haply teach
     A thirsting world to learn 'tis 'she who can.'

     She that in History's Heliaea pleads
     The nation flowering conscience o'er the beast;
     With heart expurged of rancour, tame of greeds;
     With the winged mind from fang and claw released; -
     Will such a land be seen? It will be seen; -
     Shall stand adjudged our foremost and Earth's Queen.
     Acknowledgement that she of God proceeds
     The invisible makes visible, as his priest,
     To her is yielded by a world reclaimed.
     And stands she mutilated, fancy-shamed,
     Yet strong in arms, yet strong in self-control,
     Known valiant, her maternal throbs repressed,
     Discarding vengeance, Giant with a soul; -
     My faith in her when she lay low
     Was fountain; now as wave at flow
     Beneath the lights, my faith in God is best; -
     On France has come the test
     Of what she holds within
     Responsive to Life's deeper springs.
     She above the nations blest
     In fruitful and in liveliest,
     In all that servant earth to heavenly bidding brings,
     The devotee of Glory, she may win
     Glory despoiling none, enrich her kind,
     Illume her land, and take the royal seat
     Unto the strong self-conqueror assigned.
     But ah, when speaks a loaded breath the double name,
     Humanity's old Foeman winks agrin.
     Her constant Angel eyes her heart's quick beat,
     The thrill of shadow coursing through her frame.
     Like wind among the ranks of amber wheat.
     Our Europe, vowed to unity or torn,
     Observes her face, as shepherds note the morn,
     And in a ruddy beacon mark an end
     That for the flock in their grave hearing rings.
     Specked overhead the imminent vulture wings
     At poise, one fatal movement indiscreet,
     Sprung from the Aetna passions' mad revolts,
     Draws down; the midnight hovers to descend;
     And dire as Indian noons of ulcer heat
     Anticipating tempest and the bolts,
     Hangs curtained terrors round her next day's door,
     Death's emblems for the breast of Europe flings;
     The breast that waits a spark to fire her store.
     Shall, then, the great vitality, France,
     Signal the backward step once more;
     Again a Goddess Fortune trace
     Amid the Deities, and pledge to chance
     One whom we never could replace?
     Now may she tune her nature's many strings
     To noble harmony, be seen, be known.

     It was the foreign France, the unruly, feared;
     Little for all her witcheries endeared;
     Theatrical of arrogance, a sprite
     With gaseous vapours overblown,
     In her conceit of power ensphered,
     Foredoomed to violate and atone;
     Her the grim conqueror's iron might
     Avengeing clutched, distrusting rent;
     Not that sharp intellect with fire endowed
     To cleave our webs, run lightnings through our cloud;
     Not virtual France, the France benevolent,
     The chivalrous, the many-stringed, sublime
     At intervals, and oft in sweetest chime;
     Though perilously instrument,
     A breast for any having godlike gleam.
     This France could no antagonist disesteem,
     To spurn at heel and confiscate her brood.
     Albeit a waverer between heart and mind,
     And laurels won from sky or plucked from blood,
     Which wither all the wreath when intertwined,
     This cherishable France she may redeem.
     Beloved of Earth, her heart should feel at length
     How much unto Earth's offspring it doth owe.
     Obstructions are for levelling, have we strength;
     'Tis poverty of soul conceived a foe.
     Rejected be the wrath that keeps unhealed
     Her panting wound; to higher Courts appealed
     The wrongs discerned of higher: Europe waits:
     She chooses God or gambles with the Fates.
     Shines the new Helen in Alsace-Lorraine,
     A darker river severs Rhine and Rhone,
     Is heard a deadlier Epic of the twain;
     We see a Paris burn
     Or France Napoleon.

     For yet he breathes whom less her heart forswears
     While trembles its desire to thwart her mind:
     The Tyrant lives in Victory's return.
     What figure with recurrent footstep fares
     Around those memoried tracks of scarlet mud,
     To sow her future from an ashen urn
     By lantern-light, as dragons' teeth are sown?
     Of bleeding pride the piercing seer is blind.
     But, cleared her eyes of that ensanguined scud
     Distorting her true features, to be shown
     Benignly luminous, one who bears
     Humanity at breast, and she might learn
     How surely the excelling generous find
     Renouncement is possession. Sure
     As light enkindles light when heavenly earthly mates,
     The flame of pure immits the flame of pure,
     Magnanimous magnanimous creates.
     So to majestic beauty stricken rears
     Hard-visaged rock against the risen glow;
     And men are in the secret with the spheres,
     Whose glory is celestially to bestow.

     Now nation looks to nation, that may live
     Their common nurseling, like the torrent's flower,
     Shaken by foul Destruction's fast-piled heap.
     On France is laid the proud initiative
     Of sacrifice in one self-mastering hour,
     Whereby more than her lost one will she reap;
     Perchance the very lost regain,
     To count it less than her superb reward.
     Our Europe, where is debtor each to each,
     Pass measure of excess, and war is Cain,
     Fraternal from the Seaman's beach,
     From answering Rhine in grand accord,
     From Neva beneath Northern cloud,
     And from our Transatlantic Europe loud,
     Will hail the rare example for their theme;
     Give response, as rich foliage to the breeze;
     In their entrusted nurseling know them one:
     Like a brave vessel under press of steam,
     Abreast the winds and tides, on angry seas,
     Plucked by the heavens forlorn of present sun,
     Will drive through darkness, and, with faith supreme,
     Have sight of haven and the crowded quays.



     THE CAGEING OF ARES



     [Iliad, v. V. 385--Dedicated to the Council at The Hague.]

     How big of breast our Mother Gaea laughed
     At sight of her boy Giants on the leap
     Each over other as they neighboured home,
     Fronting the day's descent across green slopes,
     And up fired mountain crags their shadows danced.
     Close with them in their fun, she scarce could guess,
     Though these two billowy urchins reeked of craft,
     It signalled some adventurous master-trick
     To set Olympians buzzing in debate,
     Lest it might be their godhead undermined,
     The Tyranny menaced. Ephialtes high
     On shoulders of his brother Otos waved
     For the bull-bellowings given to grand good news,
     Compact, complexioned in his gleeful roar
     While Otos aped the prisoner's wrists and knees,
     With doleful sniffs between recurrent howls;
     Till Gaea's lap receiving them, they stretched,
     And both upon her bosom shaken to speech,
     Burst the hot story out of throats of both,
     Like rocky head-founts, baffling in their glut
     The hurried spout. And as when drifting storm
     Disburdened loses clasp of here and yon
     A peak, a forest mound, a valley's gleam
     Of grass and the river's crooks and snaky coils,
     Signification marvellous she caught,
     Through gurglings of triumphant jollity,
     Which now engulphed and now gave eye; at last
     Subsided, and the serious naked deed,
     With mountain-cloud of laughter banked around,
     Stood in her sight confirmed: she could believe
     That these, her sprouts of promise, her most prized,
     These two made up of lion, bear and fox,
     Her sportive, suckling mammoths, her young joy,
     Still by the reckoning infants among men,
     Had done the deed to strike the Titan host
     In envy dumb, in envious heart elate:
     These two combining strength and craft had snared,
     Enmeshed, bound fast with thongs, discreetly caged
     The blood-shedder, the terrible Lord of War;
     Destroyer, ravager, superb in plumes;
     The barren furrower of anointed fields;
     The scarlet heel in towns, foul smoke to sky,
     Her hated enemy, too long her scourge:
     Great Ares. And they gagged his trumpet mouth
     When they had seized on his implacable spear,
     Hugged him to reedy helplessness despite
     His godlike fury startled from amaze.
     For he had eyed them nearing him in play,
     The giant cubs, who gambolled and who snarled,
     Unheeding his fell presence, by the mount
     Ossa, beside a brushwood cavern; there
     On Earth's original fisticuffs they called
     For ease of sharp dispute: whereat the God,
     Approving, deemed that sometime trained to arms,
     Good servitors of Ares they would be,
     And ply the pointed spear to dominate
     Their rebel restless fellows, villain brood
     Vowed to defy Immortals. So it chanced
     Amusedly he watched them, and as one
     The lusty twain were on him and they had him.
     Breath to us, Powers of air, for laughter loud!
     Cock of Olympus he, superb in plumes!
     Bound like a wheaten sheaf by those two babes!
     Because they knew our Mother Gaea loathed him,
     Knew him the famine, pestilence and waste;
     A desolating fire to blind the sight
     With splendour built of fruitful things in ashes;
     The gory chariot-wheel on cries for justice;
     Her deepest planted and her liveliest voice,
     Heard from the babe as from the broken crone.
     Behold him in his vessel of bronze encased,
     And tumbled down the cave. But rather look -
     Ah, that the woman tattler had not sought,
     Of all the Gods to let her secret fly,
     Hermes, after the thirteen songful months!
     Prompting the Dexterous to work his arts,
     And shatter earth's delirious holiday,
     Then first, as where the fountain runs a stream,
     Resolving to composure on its throbs.
     But see her in the Seasons through that year;
     That one glad year and the fair opening month.
     Had never our Great Mother such sweet face!
     War with her, gentle war with her, each day
     Her sons and daughters urged; at eve were flung,
     On the morrow stood to challenge; in their strength
     Renewed, indomitable; whereof they won,
     From hourly wrestlings up to shut of lids,
     Her ready secret: the abounding life
     Returned for valiant labour: she and they
     Defeated and victorious turn by turn;
     By loss enriched, by overthrow restored.
     Exchange of powers of this conflict came;
     Defacement none, nor ever squandered force.
     Is battle nature's mandate, here it reigned,
     As music unto the hand that smote the strings;
     And she the rosier from their showery brows,
     They fruitful from her ploughed and harrowed breast.
     Back to the primal rational of those
     Who suck the teats of milky earth, and clasp
     Stability in hatred of the insane,
     Man stepped; with wits less fearful to pronounce
     The mortal mind's concept of earth's divorced
     Above; those beautiful, those masterful,
     Those lawless. High they sit, and if descend,
     Descend to reap, not sowing. Is it just?
     Earth in her happy children asked that word,
     Whereto within their breast was her reply.
     Those beautiful, those masterful, those lawless,
     Enjoy the life prolonged, outleap the years;
     Yet they ('twas the Great Mother's voice inspired
     The audacious thought), they, glorious over dust,
     Outleap not her; disrooted from her soar,
     To meet the certain fate of earth's divorced,
     And clap lame wings across a wintry haze,
     Up to the farthest bourne: immortal still,
     Thenceforth innocuous; lovelier than when ruled
     The Tyranny. This her voice within them told,
     When softly the Great Mother chid her sons
     Not of the giant brood, who did create
     Those lawless Gods, first offspring of our brain
     Set moving by an abject blood, that waked
     To wanton under elements more benign,
     And planted aliens on Olympian heights; -
     Imagination's cradle poesy
     Become a monstrous pressure upon men; -
     Foes of good Gaea; until dispossessed
     By light from her, born of the love of her,
     Their lordship the illumined brain rejects
     For earth's beneficent, the sons of Law,
     Her other name. So spake she in their heart,
     Among the wheat-blades proud of stalk; beneath
     Young vine-leaves pushing timid fingers forth,
     Confidently to cling. And when brown corn
     Swayed armied ranks with softened cricket song,
     With gold necks bent for any zephyr's kiss;
     When vine-roots daily down a rubble soil
     Drank fire of heaven athirst to swell the grape;
     When swelled the grape, and in it held a ray,
     Rich issue of the embrace of heaven and earth;
     The very eye of passion drowsed by excess,
     And yet a burning lion for the spring;
     Then in that time of general cherishment,
     Sweet breathing balm and flutes by cool wood-side,
     He the harsh rouser of ire being absent, caged,
     Then did good Gaea's children gratefully
     Lift hymns to Gods they judged, but praised for peace,
     Delightful Peace, that answers Reason's call
     Harmoniously and images her Law;
     Reflects, and though short-lived as then, revives,
     In memories made present on the brain
     By natural yearnings, all the happy scenes;
     The picture of an earth allied to heaven;
     Between them the known smile behind black masks;
     Rightly their various moods interpreted;
     And frolic because toilful children borne
     With larger comprehension of Earth's aim
     At loftier, clearer, sweeter, by their aid.



     THE NIGHT-WALK



     Awakes for me and leaps from shroud
     All radiantly the moon's own night
     Of folded showers in streamer cloud;
     Our shadows down the highway white
     Or deep in woodland woven-boughed,
     With yon and yon a stem alight.

     I see marauder runagates
     Across us shoot their dusky wink;
     I hear the parliament of chats
     In haws beside the river's brink;
     And drops the vole off alder-banks,
     To push his arrow through the stream.
     These busy people had our thanks
     For tickling sight and sound, but theme
     They were not more than breath we drew
     Delighted with our world's embrace:
     The moss-root smell where beeches grew,
     And watered grass in breezy space;
     The silken heights, of ghostly bloom
     Among their folds, by distance draped.
     'Twas Youth, rapacious to consume,
     That cried to have its chaos shaped:
     Absorbing, little noting, still
     Enriched, and thinking it bestowed;
     With wistful looks on each far hill
     For something hidden, something owed.
     Unto his mantled sister, Day
     Had given the secret things we sought
     And she was grave and saintly gay;
     At times she fluttered, spoke her thought;
     She flew on it, then folded wings,
     In meditation passing lone,
     To breathe around the secret things,
     Which have no word, and yet are known;
     Of thirst for them are known, as air
     Is health in blood: we gained enough
     By this to feel it honest fare;
     Impalpable, not barren, stuff.

     A pride of legs in motion kept
     Our spirits to their task meanwhile,
     And what was deepest dreaming slept:
     The posts that named the swallowed mile;
     Beside the straight canal the hut
     Abandoned; near the river's source
     Its infant chirp; the shortest cut;
     The roadway missed; were our discourse;
     At times dear poets, whom some view
     Transcendent or subdued evoked
     To speak the memorable, the true,
     The luminous as a moon uncloaked;
     For proof that there, among earth's dumb,
     A soul had passed and said our best.
     Or it might be we chimed on some
     Historic favourite's astral crest,
     With part to reverence in its gleam,
     And part to rivalry the shout:
     So royal, unuttered, is youth's dream
     Of power within to strike without.
     But most the silences were sweet,
     Like mothers' breasts, to bid it feel
     It lived in such divine conceit
     As envies aught we stamp for real.

     To either then an untold tale
     Was Life, and author, hero, we.
     The chapters holding peaks to scale,
     Or depths to fathom, made our glee;
     For we were armed of inner fires,
     Unbled in us the ripe desires;
     And passion rolled a quiet sea,
     Whereon was Love the phantom sail.



     AT THE CLOSE



     To Thee, dear God of Mercy, both appeal,
     Who straightway sound the call to arms. Thou know'st;
     And that black spot in each embattled host,
     Spring of the blood-stream, later wilt reveal.
     Now is it red artillery and white steel;
     Till on a day will ring the victor's boast,
     That 'tis Thy chosen towers uppermost,
     Where Thy rejected grovels under heel.
     So in all times of man's descent insane
     To brute, did strength and craft combining strike,
     Even as a God of Armies, his fell blow.
     But at the close he entered Thy domain,
     Dear God of Mercy, and if lion-like
     He tore the fall'n, the Eternal was his Foe.



     A GARDEN IDYL



     With sagest craft Arachne worked
     Her web, and at a corner lurked,
     Awaiting what should plump her soon,
     To case it in the death-cocoon.
     Sagaciously her home she chose
     For visits that would never close;
     Inside my chalet-porch her feast
     Plucked all the winds but chill North-east.

     The finished structure, bar on bar,
     Had snatched from light to form a star,
     And struck on sight, when quick with dews,
     Like music of the very Muse.
     Great artists pass our single sense;
     We hear in seeing, strung to tense;
     Then haply marvel, groan mayhap,
     To think such beauty means a trap.
     But Nature's genius, even man's
     At best, is practical in plans;
     Subservient to the needy thought,
     However rare the weapon wrought.
     As long as Nature holds it good
     To urge her creatures' quest for food
     Will beauty stamp the just intent
     Of weapons upon service bent.
     For beauty is a flower of roots
     Embedded lower than our boots;
     Out of the primal strata springs,
     And shows for crown of useful things

     Arachne's dream of prey to size
     Aspired; so she could nigh despise
     The puny specks the breezes round
     Supplied, and let them shake unwound;
     Assured of her fat fly to come;
     Perhaps a blue, the spider's plum;
     Who takes the fatal odds in fight,
     And gives repast an appetite,
     By plunging, whizzing, till his wings
     Are webbed, and in the lists he swings,
     A shrouded lump, for her to see
     Her banquet in her victory.

     This matron of the unnumbered threads,
     One day of dandelions' heads
     Distributing their gray perruques
     Up every gust, I watched with looks
     Discreet beside the chalet-door;
     And gracefully a light wind bore,
     Direct upon my webster's wall,
     A monster in the form of ball;
     The mildest captive ever snared,
     That neither struggled nor despaired,
     On half the net invading hung,
     And plain as in her mother tongue,
     While low the weaver cursed her lures,
     Remarked, "You have me; I am yours."

     Thrice magnified, in phantom shape,
     Her dream of size she saw, agape.
     Midway the vast round-raying beard
     A desiccated midge appeared;
     Whose body pricked the name of meal,
     Whose hair had growth in earth's unreal;
     Provocative of dread and wrath,
     Contempt and horror, in one froth,
     Inextricable, insensible,
     His poison presence there would dwell,
     Declaring him her dream fulfilled,
     A catch to compliment the skilled;
     And she reduced to beaky skin,
     Disgraceful among kith and kin

     Against her corner, humped and aged,
     Arachne wrinkled, past enraged,
     Beyond disgust or hope in guile.
     Ridiculously volatile
     He seemed to her last spark of mind;
     And that in pallid ash declined
     Beneath the blow by knowledge dealt,
     Wherein throughout her frame she felt
     That he, the light wind's libertine,
     Without a scoff, without a grin,
     And mannered like the courtly few,
     Who merely danced when light winds blew,
     Impervious to beak and claws,
     Tradition's ruinous Whitebeard was;
     Of whom, as actors in old scenes,
     Had grannam weavers warned their weans,
     With word, that less than feather-weight,
     He smote the web like bolt of Fate.

     This muted drama, hour by hour,
     I watched amid a world in flower,
     Ere yet Autumnal threads had laid
     Their gray-blue o'er the grass's blade,
     And still along the garden-run
     The blindworm stretched him, drunk of sun.
     Arachne crouched unmoved; perchance
     Her visitor performed a dance;
     She puckered thinner; he the same
     As when on that light wind he came.

     Next day was told what deeds of night
     Were done; the web had vanished quite;
     With it the strange opposing pair;
     And listless waved on vacant air,
     For her adieu to heart's content,
     A solitary filament.



     A READING OF LIFE--THE VITAL CHOICE



     I

     Or shall we run with Artemis
     Or yield the breast to Aphrodite?
     Both are mighty;
     Both give bliss;
     Each can torture if divided;
     Each claims worship undivided,
     In her wake would have us wallow.

     II

     Youth must offer on bent knees
     Homage unto one or other;
     Earth, the mother,
     This decrees;
     And unto the pallid Scyther
     Either points us shun we either
     Shun or too devoutly follow.



     A READING OF LIFE--WITH THE HUNTRESS



     Through the water-eye of night,
     Midway between eve and dawn,
     See the chase, the rout, the flight
     In deep forest; oread, faun,
     Goat-foot, antlers laid on neck;
     Ravenous all the line for speed.
     See yon wavy sparkle beck
     Sign of the Virgin Lady's lead.
     Down her course a serpent star
     Coils and shatters at her heels;
     Peals the horn exulting, peals
     Plaintive, is it near or far.
     Huntress, arrowy to pursue,
     In and out of woody glen,
     Under cliffs that tear the blue,
     Over torrent, over fen,
     She and forest, where she skims
     Feathery, darken and relume:
     Those are her white-lightning limbs
     Cleaving loads of leafy gloom.
     Mountains hear her and call back,
     Shrewd with night: a frosty wail
     Distant: her the emerald vale
     Folds, and wonders in her track.
     Now her retinue is lean,
     Many rearward; streams the chase
     Eager forth of covert; seen
     One hot tide the rapturous race.
     Quiver-charged and crescent-crowned,
     Up on a flash the lighted mound
     Leaps she, bow to shoulder, shaft
     Strung to barb with archer's craft,
     Legs like plaited lyre-chords, feet
     Songs to see, past pitch of sweet.
     Fearful swiftness they outrun,
     Shaggy wildness, grey or dun,
     Challenge, charge of tusks elude:
     Theirs the dance to tame the rude;
     Beast, and beast in manhood tame,
     Follow we their silver flame.
     Pride of flesh from bondage free,
     Reaping vigour of its waste,
     Marks her servitors, and she
     Sanctifies the unembraced.
     Nought of perilous she reeks;
     Valour clothes her open breast;
     Sweet beyond the thrill of sex;
     Hallowed by the sex confessed.
     Huntress arrowy to pursue,
     Colder she than sunless dew,
     She, that breath of upper air;
     Ay, but never lyrist sang,
     Draught of Bacchus never sprang
     Blood the bliss of Gods to share,
     High o'er sweep of eagle wings,
     Like the run with her, when rings
     Clear her rally, and her dart,
     In the forest's cavern heart,
     Tells of her victorious aim.
     Then is pause and chatter, cheer,
     Laughter at some satyr lame,
     Looks upon the fallen deer,
     Measuring his noble crest;
     Here a favourite in her train,
     Foremost mid her nymphs, caressed;
     All applauded. Shall she reign
     Worshipped? O to be with her there!
     She, that breath of nimble air,
     Lifts the breast to giant power.
     Maid and man, and man and maid,
     Who each other would devour
     Elsewhere, by the chase betrayed,
     There are comrades, led by her,
     Maid-preserver, man-maker.



     A READING OF LIFE--WITH THE PERSUADER



     Who murmurs, hither, hither: who
     Where nought is audible so fills the ear?
     Where nought is visible can make appear
     A veil with eyes that waver through,
     Like twilight's pledge of blessed night to come,
     Or day most golden? All unseen and dumb,
     She breathes, she moves, inviting flees,
     Is lost, and leaves the thrilled desire
     To clasp and strike a slackened lyre,
     Till over smiles of hyacinth seas,
     Flame in a crystal vessel sails
     Beneath a dome of jewelled spray,
     For land that drops the rosy day
     On nights of throbbing nightingales.

     Landward did the wonder flit,
     Or heart's desire of her, all earth in it.
     We saw the heavens fling down their rose;
     On rapturous waves we saw her glide;
     The pearly sea-shell half enclose;
     The shoal of sea-nymphs flush the tide;
     And we, afire to kiss her feet, no more
     Behold than tracks along a startled shore,
     With brightened edges of dark leaves that feign
     An ambush hoped, as heartless night remain.

     More closely, warmly: hither, hither! she,
     The very she called forth by ripened blood
     For its next breath of being, murmurs; she,
     Allurement; she, fulfilment; she,
     The stream within us urged to flood;
     Man's cry, earth's answer, heaven's consent; O she,
     Maid, woman and divinity;
     Our over-earthly, inner-earthly mate
     Unmated; she, our hunger and our fruit
     Untasted; she our written fate
     Unread; Life's flowering, Life's root:
     Unread, divined; unseen, beheld;
     The evanescent, ever-present she,
     Great Nature's stern necessity
     In radiance clothed, to softness quelled;
     With a sword's edge of sweetness keen to take
     Our breath for bliss, our hearts for fulness break.

     The murmur hushes down, the veil is rent.
     Man's cry, earth's answer, heaven's consent,
     Her form is given to pardoned sight,
     And lets our mortal eyes receive
     The sovereign loveliness of celestial white;
     Adored by them who solitarily pace,
     In dusk of the underworld's perpetual eve,
     The paths among the meadow asphodel,
     Remembering. Never there her face
     Is planetary; reddens to shore sea-shell
     Around such whiteness the enamoured air
     Of noon that clothes her, never there.
     Daughter of light, the joyful light,
     She stands unveiled to nuptial sight,
     Sweet in her disregard of aid
     Divine to conquer or persuade.
     A fountain jets from moss; a flower
     Bends gently where her sunset tresses shower.
     By guerdon of her brilliance may be seen
     With eyelids unabashed the passion's Queen.

     Shorn of attendant Graces she can use
     Her natural snares to make her will supreme.
     A simple nymph it is, inclined to muse
     Before the leader foot shall dip in stream:
     One arm at curve along a rounded thigh;
     Her firm new breasts each pointing its own way
     A knee half bent to shade its fellow shy,
     Where innocence, not nature, signals nay.
     The bud of fresh virginity awaits
     The wooer, and all roseate will she burst:
     She touches on the hour of happy mates;
     Still is she unaware she wakens thirst.

     And while commanding blissful sight believe
     It holds her as a body strained to breast,
     Down on the underworld's perpetual eve
     She plunges the possessor dispossessed;
     And bids believe that image, heaving warm,
     Is lost to float like torch-smoke after flame;
     The phantom any breeze blows out of form;
     A thirst's delusion, a defeated aim.

     The rapture shed the torture weaves;
     The direst blow on human heart she deals:
     The pain to know the seen deceives;
     Nought true but what insufferably feels.
     And stabs of her delicious note,
     That is as heavenly light to hearing, heard
     Through shelter leaves, the laughter from her throat,
     We answer as the midnight's morning's bird.

     She laughs, she wakens gleeful cries;
     In her delicious laughter part revealed;
     Yet mother is she more of moans and sighs,
     For longings unappeased and wounds unhealed.
     Yet would she bless, it is her task to bless:
     Yon folded couples, passing under shade,
     Are her rich harvest; bidden caress, caress,
     Consume the fruit in bloom; not disobeyed.
     We dolorous complainers had a dream,
     Wrought on the vacant air from inner fire,
     We saw stand bare of her celestial beam
     The glorious Goddess, and we dared desire.

     Thereat are shown reproachful eyes, and lips
     Of upward curl to meanings half obscure;
     And glancing where a wood-nymph lightly skips
     She nods: at once that creature wears her lure.
     Blush of our being between birth and death:
     Sob of our ripened blood for its next breath:
     Her wily semblance nought of her denies;
     Seems it the Goddess runs, the Goddess hies,
     The generous Goddess yields. And she can arm
     Her dwarfed and twisted with her secret charm;
     Benevolent as Earth to feed her own.
     Fully shall they be fed, if they beseech.
     But scorn she has for them that walk alone;
     Blanched men, starved women, whom no arts can pleach.
     The men as chief of criminals she disdains,
     And holds the reason in perceptive thought.
     More pitiable, like rivers lacking rains,
     Kissing cold stones, the women shrink for drought.
     Those faceless discords, out of nature strayed,
     Rank of the putrefaction ere decayed,
     In impious singles bear the thorny wreaths:
     Their lives are where harmonious Pleasure breathes
     For couples crowned with flowers that burn in dew.
     Comes there a tremor of night's forest horn
     Across her garden from the insaner crew,
     She darkens to malignity of scorn.
     A shiver courses through her garden-grounds:
     Grunt of the tusky boar, the baying hounds,
     The hunter's shouts, are heard afar, and bring
     Dead on her heart her crimsoned flower of Spring.
     These, the irreverent of Life's design,
     Division between natural and divine
     Would cast; these vaunting barrenness for best,
     In veins of gathered strength Life's tide arrest;
     And these because the roses flood their cheeks,
     Vow them in nature wise as when Love speaks.
     With them is war; and well the Goddess knows
     What undermines the race who mount the rose;
     How the ripe moment, lodged in slumberous hours,
     Enkindled by persuasion overpowers:
     Why weak as are her frailer trailing weeds,
     The strong when Beauty gleams o'er Nature's needs,
     And timely guile unguarded finds them lie.
     They who her sway withstand a sea defy,
     At every point of juncture must be proof;
     Nor look for mercy from the incessant surge
     Her forces mixed of craft and passion urge
     For the one whelming wave to spring aloof.
     She, tenderness, is pitiless to them
     Resisting in her godhead nature's truth.
     No flower their face shall be, but writhen stem;
     Their youth a frost, their age the dirge for youth.
     These miserably disinclined,
     The lamentably unembraced,
     Insult the Pleasures Earth designed
     To people and beflower the waste.
     Wherefore the Pleasures pass them by:
     For death they live, in life they die.

     Her head the Goddess from them turns,
     As from grey mounds of ashes in bronze urns.
     She views her quivering couples unconsoled,
     And of her beauty mirror they become,
     Like orchard blossoms, apple, pear and plum,
     Free of the cloud, beneath the flood of gold.
     Crowned with wreaths that burn in dew,
     Her couples whirl, sun-satiated,
     Athirst for shade, they sigh, they wed,
     They play the music made of two:
     Oldest of earth, earth's youngest till earth's end:
     Cunninger than the numbered strings,
     For melodies, for harmonies,
     For mastered discords, and the things
     Not vocable, whose mysteries
     Are inmost Love's, Life's reach of Life extend.

     Is it an anguish overflowing shame
     And the tongue's pudency confides to her,
     With eyes of embers, breath of incense myrrh,
     The woman's marrow in some dear youth's name,
     Then is the Goddess tenderness
     Maternal, and she has a sister's tones
     Benign to soothe intemperate distress,
     Divide despair from hope, and sighs from moans.
     Her gentleness imparts exhaling ease
     To those of her milk-bearer votaries
     As warm of bosom-earth as she; of the source
     Direct; erratic but in heart's excess;
     Being mortal and ill-matched for Love's great force;
     Like green leaves caught with flames by his impress.
     And pray they under skies less overcast,
     That swiftly may her star of eve descend,
     Her lustrous morning star fly not too fast,
     To lengthen blissful night will she befriend.

     Unfailing her reply to woman's voice
     In supplication instant. Is it man's,
     She hears, approves his words, her garden scans,
     And him: the flowers are various, he has choice.
     Perchance his wound is deep; she listens long;
     Enjoys what music fills the plaintive song;
     And marks how he, who would be hawk at poise
     Above the bird, his plaintive song enjoys.

     She reads him when his humbled manhood weeps
     To her invoked: distraction is implored.
     A smile, and he is up on godlike leaps
     Above, with his bright Goddess owned the adored.
     His tales of her declare she condescends;
     Can share his fires, not always goads and rends:
     Moreover, quits a throne, and must enclose
     A queenlier gem than woman's wayside rose.
     She bends, he quickens; she breathes low, he springs
     Enraptured; low she laughs, his woes disperse;
     Aloud she laughs and sweeps his varied strings.
     'Tis taught him how for touch of mournful verse
     Rarely the music made of two ascends,
     And Beauty's Queen some other way is won.
     Or it may solve the riddle, that she lends
     Herself to all, and yields herself to none,
     Save heavenliest: though claims by men are raised
     In hot assurance under shade of doubt:
     And numerous are the images bepraised
     As Beauty's Queen, should passion head the rout.

     Be sure the ruddy hue is Love's: to woo
     Love's Fountain we must mount the ruddy hue.
     That is her garden's precept, seen where shines
     Her blood-flower, and its unsought neighbour pines.
     Daughter of light, the joyful light,
     She bids her couples face full East,
     Reflecting radiance, even when from her feast
     Their outstretched arms brown deserts disunite,
     The lion-haunted thickets hold apart.
     In love the ruddy hue declares great heart;
     High confidence in her whose aid is lent
     To lovers lifting the tuned instrument,
     Not one of rippled strings and funeral tone.
     And doth the man pursue a tightened zone,
     Then be it as the Laurel God he runs,
     Confirmed to win, with countenance the Sun's.

     Should pity bless the tremulous voice of woe
     He lifts for pity, limp his offspring show.
     For him requiring woman's arts to please
     Infantile tastes with babe reluctances,
     No race of giants! In the woman's veins
     Persuasion ripely runs, through hers the pains.
     Her choice of him, should kind occasion nod,
     Aspiring blends the Titan with the God;
     Yet unto dwarf and mortal, she, submiss
     In her high Lady's mandate, yields the kiss;
     And is it needed that Love's daintier brute
     Be snared as hunter, she will tempt pursuit.
     She is great Nature's ever intimate
     In breast, and doth as ready handmaid wait,
     Until perverted by her senseless male,
     She plays the winding snake, the shrinking snail,
     The flying deer, all tricks of evil fame,
     Elusive to allure, since he grew tame.

     Hence has the Goddess, Nature's earliest Power,
     And greatest and most present, with her dower
     Of the transcendent beauty, gained repute
     For meditated guile. She laughs to hear
     A charge her garden's labyrinths scarce confute,
     Her garden's histories tell of to all near.
     Let it be said, But less upon her guile
     Doth she rely for her immortal smile.
     Still let the rumour spread, and terror screens
     To push her conquests by the simplest means.
     While man abjures not lustihead, nor swerves
     From earth's good labours, Beauty's Queen he serves.

     Her spacious garden and her garden's grant
     She offers in reward for handsome cheer:
     Choice of the nymphs whose looks will slant
     The secret down a dewy leer
     Of corner eyelids into haze:
     Many a fair Aphrosyne
     Like flower-bell to honey-bee:
     And here they flicker round the maze
     Bewildering him in heart and head:
     And here they wear the close demure,
     With subtle peeps to reassure:
     Others parade where love has bled,
     And of its crimson weave their mesh:
     Others to snap of fingers leap,
     As bearing breast with love asleep.
     These are her laughters in the flesh.
     Or would she fit a warrior mood,
     She lights her seeming unsubdued,
     And indicates the fortress-key.
     Or is it heart for heart that craves,
     She flecks along a run of waves
     The one to promise deeper sea.

     Bands of her limpid primitives,
     Or patterned in the curious braid,
     Are the blest man's; and whatsoever he gives,
     For what he gives is he repaid.
     Good is it if by him 'tis held
     He wins the fairest ever welled
     From Nature's founts: she whispers it: Even I
     Not fairer! and forbids him to deny,
     Else little is he lover. Those he clasps,
     Intent as tempest, worshipful as prayer, -
     And be they doves or be they asps, -
     Must seem to him the sovereignty fair;
     Else counts he soon among life's wholly tamed.
     Him whom from utter savage she reclaimed,
     Half savage must he stay, would he be crowned
     The lover. Else, past ripeness, deathward bound,
     He reasons; and the totterer Earth detests,
     Love shuns, grim logic screws in grasp, is he.
     Doth man divide divine Necessity
     From Joy, between the Queen of Beauty's breasts
     A sword is driven; for those most glorious twain
     Present her; armed to bless and to constrain.
     Of this he perishes; not she, the throned
     On rocks that spout their springs to the sacred mounts.
     A loftier Reason out of deeper founts
     Earth's chosen Goddess bears: by none disowned
     While red blood runs to swell the pulse, she boasts,
     And Beauty, like her star, descends the sky;
     Earth's answer, heaven's consent unto man's cry,
     Uplifted by the innumerable hosts.

     Quickened of Nature's eye and ear,
     When the wild sap at high tide smites
     Within us; or benignly clear
     To vision; or as the iris lights
     On fluctuant waters; she is ours
     Till set of man: the dreamed, the seen;
     Flushing the world with odorous flowers:
     A soft compulsion on terrene
     By heavenly: and the world is hers
     While hunger after Beauty spurs.

     So is it sung in any space
     She fills, with laugh at shallow laws
     Forbidding love's devised embrace,
     The music Beauty from it draws.



     A READING OF LIFE--THE TEST OF MANHOOD



     Like a flood river whirled at rocky banks,
     An army issues out of wilderness,
     With battle plucking round its ragged flanks;
     Obstruction in the van; insane excess
     Oft at the heart; yet hard the onward stress
     Unto more spacious, where move ordered ranks,
     And rise hushed temples built of shapely stone,
     The work of hands not pledged to grind or slay.
     They gave our earth a dress of flesh on bone;
     A tongue to speak with answering heaven gave they.
     Then was the gracious birth of man's new day;
     Divided from the haunted night it shone.

     That quiet dawn was Reverence; whereof sprang
     Ethereal Beauty in full morningtide.
     Another sun had risen to clasp his bride:
     It was another earth unto him sang.

     Came Reverence from the Huntress on her heights?
     From the Persuader came it, in those vales
     Whereunto she melodiously invites,
     Her troops of eager servitors regales?
     Not far those two great Powers of Nature speed
     Disciple steps on earth when sole they lead;
     Nor either points for us the way of flame.
     From him predestined mightier it came;
     His task to hold them both in breast, and yield
     Their dues to each, and of their war be field.

     The foes that in repulsion never ceased,
     Must he, who once has been the goodly beast
     Of one or other, at whose beck he ran,
     Constrain to make him serviceable man;
     Offending neither, nor the natural claim
     Each pressed, denying, for his true man's name.

     Ah, what a sweat of anguish in that strife
     To hold them fast conjoined within him still;
     Submissive to his will
     Along the road of life!
     And marvel not he wavered if at whiles
     The forward step met frowns, the backward smiles.
     For Pleasure witched him her sweet cup to drain;
     Repentance offered ecstasy in pain.
     Delicious licence called it Nature's cry;
     Ascetic rigours crushed the fleshly sigh;
     A tread on shingle timed his lame advance
     Flung as the die of Bacchanalian Chance,
     He of the troubled marching army leaned
     On godhead visible, on godhead screened;
     The radiant roseate, the curtained white;
     Yet sharp his battle strained through day, through night.

     He drank of fictions, till celestial aid
     Might seem accorded when he fawned and prayed;
     Sagely the generous Giver circumspect,
     To choose for grants the egregious, his elect;
     And ever that imagined succour slew
     The soul of brotherhood whence Reverence drew.

     In fellowship religion has its founts:
     The solitary his own God reveres:
     Ascend no sacred Mounts
     Our hungers or our fears.
     As only for the numbers Nature's care
     Is shown, and she the personal nothing heeds,
     So to Divinity the spring of prayer
     From brotherhood the one way upward leads.
     Like the sustaining air
     Are both for flowers and weeds.
     But he who claims in spirit to be flower,
     Will find them both an air that doth devour.

     Whereby he smelt his treason, who implored
     External gifts bestowed but on the sword;
     Beheld himself, with less and less disguise,
     Through those blood-cataracts which dimmed his eyes,
     His army's foe, condemned to strive and fail;
     See a black adversary's ghost prevail;
     Never, though triumphs hailed him, hope to win
     While still the conflict tore his breast within.

     Out of that agony, misread for those
     Imprisoned Powers warring unappeased,
     The ghost of his black adversary rose,
     To smother light, shut heaven, show earth diseased.
     And long with him was wrestling ere emerged
     A mind to read in him the reflex shade
     Of its fierce torment; this way, that way urged;
     By craven compromises hourly swayed.

     Crouched as a nestling, still its wings untried,
     The man's mind opened under weight of cloud.
     To penetrate the dark was it endowed;
     Stood day before a vision shooting wide.
     Whereat the spectral enemy lost form;
     The traversed wilderness exposed its track.
     He felt the far advance in looking back;
     Thence trust in his foot forward through the storm.

     Under the low-browed tempest's eye of ire,
     That ere it lightened smote a coward heart,
     Earth nerved her chastened son to hail athwart
     All ventures perilous his shrouded Sire;
     A stranger still, religiously divined;
     Not yet with understanding read aright.
     But when the mind, the cherishable mind,
     The multitude's grave shepherd, took full flight,
     Himself as mirror raised among his kind,
     He saw, and first of brotherhood had sight:
     Knew that his force to fly, his will to see,
     His heart enlarged beyond its ribbed domain,
     Had come of many a grip in mastery,
     Which held conjoined the hostile rival twain,
     And of his bosom made him lord, to keep
     The starry roof of his unruffled frame
     Awake to earth, to heaven, and plumb the deep
     Below, above, aye with a wistful aim.

     The mastering mind in him, by tempests blown,
     By traitor inmates baited, upward burned;
     Perforce of growth, the Master mind discerned,
     The Great Unseen, nowise the Dark Unknown.
     To whom unwittingly did he aspire
     In wilderness, where bitter was his need:
     To whom in blindness, as an earthy seed
     For light and air, he struck through crimson mire.
     But not ere he upheld a forehead lamp,
     And viewed an army, once the seeming doomed,
     All choral in its fruitful garden camp,
     The spiritual the palpable illumed.

     This gift of penetration and embrace,
     His prize from tidal battles lost or won,
     Reveals the scheme to animate his race:
     How that it is a warfare but begun;
     Unending; with no Power to interpose;
     No prayer, save for strength to keep his ground,
     Heard of the Highest; never battle's close,
     The victory complete and victor crowned:
     Nor solace in defeat, save from that sense
     Of strength well spent, which is the strength renewed.
     In manhood must he find his competence;
     In his clear mind the spiritual food:
     God being there while he his fight maintains;
     Throughout his mind the Master Mind being there,
     While he rejects the suicide despair;
     Accepts the spur of explicable pains;
     Obedient to Nature, not her slave:
     Her lord, if to her rigid laws he bows;
     Her dust, if with his conscience he plays knave,
     And bids the Passions on the Pleasures browse:-
     Whence Evil in a world unread before;
     That mystery to simple springs resolved.
     His God the Known, diviner to adore,
     Shows Nature's savage riddles kindly solved.
     Inconscient, insensitive, she reigns
     In iron laws, though rapturous fair her face.
     Back to the primal brute shall he retrace
     His path, doth he permit to force her chains
     A soft Persuader coursing through his veins,
     An icy Huntress stringing to the chase:
     What one the flash disdains;
     What one so gives it grace.

     But is he rightly manful in her eyes,
     A splendid bloodless knight to gain the skies,
     A blood-hot son of Earth by all her signs,
     Desireing and desireable he shines;
     As peaches, that have caught the sun's uprise
     And kissed warm gold till noonday, even as vines.
     Earth fills him with her juices, without fear
     That she will cast him drunken down the steeps.
     All woman is she to this man most dear;
     He sows for bread, and she in spirit reaps:
     She conscient, she sensitive, in him;
     With him enwound, his brave ambition hers:
     By him humaner made; by his keen spurs
     Pricked to race past the pride in giant limb,
     Her crazy adoration of big thews,
     Proud in her primal sons, when crags they hurled,
     Were thunder spitting lightnings on the world
     In daily deeds, and she their evening Muse.

     This man, this hero, works not to destroy;
     This godlike--as the rock in ocean stands; -
     He of the myriad eyes, the myriad hands
     Creative; in his edifice has joy.
     How strength may serve for purity is shown
     When he himself can scourge to make it clean.
     Withal his pitch of pride would not disown
     A sober world that walks the balanced mean
     Between its tempters, rarely overthrown:
     And such at times his army's march has been.

     Near is he to great Nature in the thought
     Each changing Season intimately saith,
     That nought save apparition knows the death;
     To the God-lighted mind of man 'tis nought.
     She counts not loss a word of any weight;
     It may befal his passions and his greeds
     To lose their treasures, like the vein that bleeds,
     But life gone breathless will she reinstate.

     Close on the heart of Earth his bosom beats,
     When he the mandate lodged in it obeys,
     Alive to breast a future wrapped in haze,
     Strike camp, and onward, like the wind's cloud-fleets.
     Unresting she, unresting he, from change
     To change, as rain of cloud, as fruit of rain;
     She feels her blood-tree throbbing in her grain,
     Yet skyward branched, with loftier mark and range.

     No miracle the sprout of wheat from clod,
     She knows, nor growth of man in grisly brute;
     But he, the flower at head and soil at root,
     Is miracle, guides he the brute to God.
     And that way seems he bound; that way the road,
     With his dark-lantern mind, unled, alone,
     Wearifully through forest-tracts unsown,
     He travels, urged by some internal goad.

     Dares he behold the thing he is, what thing
     He would become is in his mind its child;
     Astir, demanding birth to light and wing;
     For battle prompt, by pleasure unbeguiled.
     So moves he forth in faith, if he has made
     His mind God's temple, dedicate to truth.
     Earth's nourishing delights, no more gainsaid,
     He tastes, as doth the bridegroom rich in youth.
     Then knows he Love, that beckons and controls;
     The star of sky upon his footway cast;
     Then match in him who holds his tempters fast,
     The body's love and mind's, whereof the soul's.
     Then Earth her man for woman finds at last,
     To speed the pair unto her goal of goals.

     Or is't the widowed's dream of her new mate?
     Seen has she virulent days of heat in flood;
     The sly Persuader snaky in his blood;
     With her the barren Huntress alternate;
     His rough refractory off on kicking heels
     To rear; the man dragged rearward, shamed, amazed;
     And as a torrent stream where cattle grazed,
     His tumbled world. What, then, the faith she feels?
     May not his aspect, like her own so fair
     Reflexively, the central force belie,
     And he, the once wild ocean storming sky,
     Be rebel at the core? What hope is there?

     'Tis that in each recovery he preserves,
     Between his upper and his nether wit,
     Sense of his march ahead, more brightly lit;
     He less the shaken thing of lusts and nerves;
     With such a grasp upon his brute as tells
     Of wisdom from that vile relapsing spun.
     A Sun goes down in wasted fire, a Sun
     Resplendent springs, to faith refreshed compels.



     THE HUELESS LOVE



     Unto that love must we through fire attain,
     Which those two held as breath of common air;
     The hands of whom were given in bond elsewhere;
     Whom Honour was untroubled to restrain.

     Midway the road of our life's term they met,
     And one another knew without surprise;
     Nor cared that beauty stood in mutual eyes;
     Nor at their tardy meeting nursed regret.

     To them it was revealed how they had found
     The kindred nature and the needed mind;
     The mate by long conspiracy designed;
     The flower to plant in sanctuary ground.

     Avowed in vigilant solicitude
     For either, what most lived within each breast
     They let be seen: yet every human test
     Demanding righteousness approved them good.

     She leaned on a strong arm, and little feared
     Abandonment to help if heaved or sank
     Her heart at intervals while Love looked blank,
     Life rosier were she but less revered.

     An arm that never shook did not obscure
     Her woman's intuition of the bliss -
     Their tempter's moment o'er the black abyss,
     Across the narrow plank--he could abjure.

     Then came a day that clipped for him the thread,
     And their first touch of lips, as he lay cold,
     Was all of earthly in their love untold,
     Beyond all earthly known to them who wed.

     So has there come the gust at South-west flung
     By sudden volt on eves of freezing mist,
     When sister snowflake sister snowdrop kissed,
     And one passed out, and one the bell-head hung.



     UNION IN DISSEVERANCE



     Sunset worn to its last vermilion he;
     She that star overhead in slow descent:
     That white star with the front of angel she;
     He undone in his rays of glory spent

     Halo, fair as the bow-shot at his rise,
     He casts round her, and knows his hour of rest
     Incomplete, were the light for which he dies,
     Less like joy of the dove that wings to nest.

     Lustrous momently, near on earth she sinks;
     Life's full throb over breathless and abased:
     Yet stand they, though impalpable the links,
     One, more one than the bridally embraced.



     SONG IN THE SONGLESS



     They have no song, the sedges dry,
     And still they sing.
     It is within my breast they sing,
     As I pass by.
     Within my breast they touch a string,
     They wake a sigh.
     There is but sound of sedges dry;
     In me they sing.



     THE BURDEN OF STRENGTH



     If that thou hast the gift of strength, then know
     Thy part is to uplift the trodden low;
     Else in a giant's grasp until the end
     A hopeless wrestler shall thy soul contend.



     THE MAIN REGRET



     [Written for the Charing Cross Album]

     I

     Seen, too clear and historic within us, our sins of omission
     Frown when the Autumn days strike us all ruthlessly bare.
     They of our mortal diseases find never healing physician;
     Errors they of the soul, past the one hope to repair.

     II

     Sunshine might we have been unto seed under soil, or have scattered
     Seed to ascendant suns brighter than any that shone.
     Even the limp-legged beggar a sick desperado has flattered
     Back to a half-sloughed life cheered by the mere human tone.



     ALTERNATION



     Between the fountain and the rill
     I passed, and saw the mighty will
     To leap at sky; the careless run,
     As earth would lead her little son.

     Beneath them throbs an urgent well,
     That here is play, and there is war.
     I know not which had most to tell
     Of whence we spring and what we are.



     FOREST HISTORY



     I

     Beneath the vans of doom did men pass in.
     Heroic who came out; for round them hung
     A wavering phantom's red volcano tongue,
     With league-long lizard tail and fishy fin:

     II

     Old Earth's original Dragon; there retired
     To his last fastness; overthrown by few.
     Him a laborious thrust of roadway slew.
     Then man to play devorant straight was fired.

     III

     More intimate became the forest fear
     While pillared darkness hatched malicious life
     At either elbow, wolf or gnome or knife
     And wary slid the glance from ear to ear.

     IV

     In chillness, like a clouded lantern-ray,
     The forest's heart of fog on mossed morass,
     On purple pool and silky cotton-grass,
     Revealed where lured the swallower byway.

     V

     Dead outlook, flattened back with hard rebound
     Off walls of distance, left each mounted height.
     It seemed a giant hag-fiend, churning spite
     Of humble human being, held the ground.

     VI

     Through friendless wastes, through treacherous woodland, slow
     The feet sustained by track of feet pursued
     Pained steps, and found the common brotherhood
     By sign of Heaven indifferent, Nature foe.

     VII

     Anon a mason's work amazed the sight,
     And long-frocked men, called Brothers, there abode.
     They pointed up, bowed head, and dug and sowed;
     Whereof was shelter, loaf, and warm firelight.

     VIII

     What words they taught were nails to scratch the head.
     Benignant works explained the chanting brood.
     Their monastery lit black solitude,
     As one might think a star that heavenward led.

     IX

     Uprose a fairer nest for weary feet,
     Like some gold flower nightly inward curled,
     Where gentle maidens fled a roaring world,
     Or played with it, and had their white retreat.

     X

     Into big books of metal clasps they pored.
     They governed, even as men; they welcomed lays.
     The treasures women are whose aim is praise,
     Was shown in them: the Garden half restored.

     XI

     A deluge billow scoured the land off seas,
     With widened jaws, and slaughter was its foam.
     For food, for clothing, ambush, refuge, home,
     The lesser savage offered bogs and trees.

     XII

     Whence reverence round grey-haired story grew:
     And inmost spots of ancient horror shone
     As temples under beams of trials bygone;
     For in them sang brave times with God in view.

     XIII

     Till now trim homesteads bordered spaces green,
     Like night's first little stars through clearing showers.
     Was rumoured how a castle's falcon towers
     The wilderness commanded with fierce mien.

     XIV

     Therein a serious Baron stuck his lance;
     For minstrel songs a beauteous Dame would pout.
     Gay knights and sombre, felon or devout,
     Pricked onward, bound for their unsung romance.

     XV

     It might be that two errant lords across
     The block of each came edged, and at sharp cry
     They charged forthwith, the better man to try.
     One rode his way, one couched on quiet moss.

     XVI

     Perchance a lady sweet, whose lord lay slain,
     The robbers into gruesome durance drew.
     Swift should her hero come, like lightning's blue!
     She prayed for him, as crackling drought for rain.

     XVII

     As we, that ere the worst her hero haps,
     Of Angels guided, nigh that loathly den:
     A toady cave beside an ague fen,
     Where long forlorn the lone dog whines and yaps.

     XVIII

     By daylight now the forest fear could read
     Itself, and at new wonders chuckling went.
     Straight for the roebuck's neck the bowman spent
     A dart that laughed at distance and at speed.

     XIX

     Right loud the bugle's hallali elate
     Rang forth of merry dingles round the tors;
     And deftest hand was he from foreign wars,
     But soon he hailed the home-bred yeoman mate.

     XX

     Before the blackbird pecked the turf they woke;
     At dawn the deer's wet nostrils blew their last.
     To forest, haunt of runs and prime repast,
     With paying blows, the yokel strained his yoke.

     XXI

     The city urchin mooned on forest air,
     On grassy sweeps and flying arrows, thick
     As swallows o'er smooth streams, and sighed him sick
     For thinking that his dearer home was there.

     XXII

     Familiar, still unseized, the forest sprang
     An old-world echo, like no mortal thing.
     The hunter's horn might wind a jocund ring,
     But held in ear it had a chilly clang.

     XXIII

     Some shadow lurked aloof of ancient time;
     Some warning haunted any sound prolonged,
     As though the leagues of woodland held them wronged
     To hear an axe and see a township climb.

     XXIV

     The forest's erewhile emperor at eve
     Had voice when lowered heavens drummed for gales.
     At midnight a small people danced the dales,
     So thin that they might dwindle through a sieve

     XXV

     Ringed mushrooms told of them, and in their throats,
     Old wives that gathered herbs and knew too much.
     The pensioned forester beside his crutch,
     Struck showers from embers at those bodeful notes.

     XXVI

     Came then the one, all ear, all eye, all heart;
     Devourer, and insensibly devoured;
     In whom the city over forest flowered,
     The forest wreathed the city's drama-mart.

     XXVII

     There found he in new form that Dragon old,
     From tangled solitudes expelled; and taught
     How blindly each its antidote besought;
     For either's breath the needs of either told.

     XXVIII

     Now deep in woods, with song no sermon's drone,
     He showed what charm the human concourse works:
     Amid the press of men, what virtue lurks
     Where bubble sacred wells of wildness lone.

     XXIX

     Our conquest these: if haply we retain
     The reverence that ne'er will overrun
     Due boundaries of realms from Nature won,
     Nor let the poet's awe in rapture wane.



     THE INVECTIVE OF ACHILLES--Iliad, i. 149



     "Heigh me! brazen of front, thou glutton for plunder, how can one,
     Servant here to thy mandates, heed thee among our Achaians,
     Either the mission hie on or stoutly do fight with the foemen?
     I, not hither I fared on account of the spear-armed Trojans,
     Pledged to the combat; they unto me have in nowise a harm done;
     Never have they, of a truth, come lifting my horses or oxen;
     Never in deep-soiled Phthia, the nurser of heroes, my harvests
     Ravaged, they; for between us is numbered full many a darksome
     Mountain, ay, therewith too the stretch of the windy sea-waters.
     O hugely shameless! thee did we follow to hearten thee, justice
     Pluck from the Dardans for him, Menelaos, thee too, thou dog-eyed!
     Whereof little thy thought is, nought whatever thou reckest.
     Worse, it is thou whose threat 'tis to ravish my prize from me,
     portion
     Won with much labour, the which my gift from the sons of Achaia.
     Never, in sooth, have I known my prize equal thine when Achaians
     Gave some flourishing populous Trojan town up to pillage.
     Nay, sure, mine were the hands did most in the storm of the combat,
     Yet when came peradventure share of the booty amongst us,
     Bigger to thee went the prize, while I some small blessed thing bore
     Off to the ships, my share of reward for my toil in the bloodshed!
     So now go I to Phthia, for better by much it beseems me
     Homeward go with my beaked ships now, and I hold not in prospect,
     I being outraged, thou mayst gather here plunder and wealth-store."



     THE INVECTIVE OF ACHILLES--Iliad, i. 225



     "Bibber besotted, with scowl of a cur, having heart of a deer, thou!
     Never to join to thy warriors armed for the press of the conflict,
     Never for ambush forth with the princeliest sons of Achaia
     Dared thy soul, for to thee that thing would have looked as a death-
     stroke.
     Sooth, more easy it seems, down the lengthened array of Achaians,
     Snatch at the prize of the one whose voice has been lifted against
     thee.
     Ravening king of the folk, for that thou hast thy rule over abjects;
     Else, son of Atreus, now were this outrage on me thy last one.
     Nay, but I tell thee, and I do swear a big oath on it likewise:
     Yea, by the sceptre here, and it surely bears branches and leaf-buds
     Never again, since first it was lopped from its trunk on the
     mountains,
     No more sprouting; for round it all clean has the sharp metal
     clipped off
     Leaves and the bark; ay, verify now do the sons of Achaia,
     Guardian hands of the counsels of Zeus, pronouncing the judgement,
     Hold it aloft; so now unto thee shall the oath have its portent;
     Loud will the cry for Achilles burst from the sons of Achaia
     Throughout the army, and thou chafe powerless, though in an anguish,
     How to give succour when vast crops down under man-slaying Hector
     Tumble expiring; and thou deep in thee shalt tear at thy heart-
     strings,
     Rage-wrung, thou, that in nought thou didst honour the flower of
     Achaians."



     MARSHALLING OF THE ACHAIANS--Iliad, ii 455



     Like as a terrible fire feeds fast on a forest enormous,
     Up on a mountain height, and the blaze of it radiates round far,
     So on the bright blest arms of the host in their march did the
     splendour
     Gleam wide round through the circle of air right up to the sky-
     vault.
     They, now, as when swarm thick in the air multitudinous winged
     flocks,
     Be it of geese or of cranes or the long-necked troops of the wild-
     swans,
     Off that Asian mead, by the flow of the waters of Kaistros;
     Hither and yon fly they, and rejoicing in pride of their pinions,
     Clamour, shaped to their ranks, and the mead all about them
     resoundeth;
     So those numerous tribes from their ships and their shelterings
     poured forth
     On that plain of Scamander, and horrible rumbled beneath them
     Earth to the quick-paced feet of the men and the tramp of the horse-
     hooves.
     Stopped they then on the fair-flower'd field of Scamander, their
     thousands
     Many as leaves and the blossoms born of the flowerful season.
     Even as countless hot-pressed flies in their multitudes traverse,
     Clouds of them, under some herdsman's wonning, where then are the
     milk-pails
     Also, full of their milk, in the bountiful season of spring-time;
     Even so thickly the long-haired sons of Achaia the plain held,
     Prompt for the dash at the Trojan host, with the passion to crush
     them.
     Those, likewise, as the goatherds, eyeing their vast flocks of
     goats, know
     Easily one from the other when all get mixed o'er the pasture,
     So did the chieftains rank them here there in their places for
     onslaught,
     Hard on the push of the fray; and among them King Agamemnon,
     He, for his eyes and his head, as when Zeus glows glad in his
     thunder,
     He with the girdle of Ares, he with the breast of Poseidon.



     AGAMEMNON IN THE FIGHT--Iliad, xi, 148



     These, then, he left, and away where ranks were now clashing the
     thickest,
     Onward rushed, and with him rushed all of the bright-greaved
     Achaians.
     Foot then footmen slew, that were flying from direful compulsion,
     Horse at the horsemen (up from off under them mounted the dust-
     cloud,
     Up off the plain, raised up cloud-thick by the thundering horse-
     hooves)
     Hewed with the sword's sharp edge; and so meanwhile Lord Agamemnon
     Followed, chasing and slaughtering aye, on-urgeing the Argives.

     Now, as when fire voracious catches the unclipped wood-land,
     This way bears it and that the great whirl of the wind, and the
     scrubwood
     Stretches uptorn, flung forward alength by the fire's fury rageing,
     So beneath Atreides Agamemnon heads of the scattered
     Trojans fell; and in numbers amany the horses, neck-stiffened,
     Rattled their vacant cars down the roadway gaps of the war-field,
     Missing the blameless charioteers, but, for these, they were
     outstretched
     Flat upon earth, far dearer to vultures than to their home-mates.



     PARIS AND DIOMEDES--Iliad, xi, 378



     So he, with a clear shout of laughter,
     Forth of his ambush leapt, and he vaunted him, uttering thiswise:
     "Hit thou art! not in vain flew the shaft; how by rights it had
     pierced thee
     Into the undermost gut, therewith to have rived thee of life-breath!
     Following that had the Trojans plucked a new breath from their
     direst,
     They all frighted of thee, as the goats bleat in flight from a
     lion."
     Then unto him untroubled made answer stout Diomedes:
     "Bow-puller, jiber, thy bow for thy glorying, spyer at virgins!
     If that thou dared'st face me here out in the open with weapons,
     Nothing then would avail thee thy bow and thy thick shot of arrows.
     Now thou plumest thee vainly because of a graze of my footsole;
     Reck I as were that stroke from a woman or some pettish infant.
     Aye flies blunted the dart of the man that's emasculate,
     noughtworth!
     Otherwise hits, forth flying from me, and but strikes it the
     slightest,
     My keen shaft, and it numbers a man of the dead fallen straightway.
     Torn, troth, then are the cheeks of the wife of that man fallen
     slaughtered,
     Orphans his babes, full surely he reddens the earth with his blood-
     drops,
     Rotting, round him the birds, more numerous they than the women."



     HYPNOS ON IDA--Iliad, xiv, 283



     They then to fountain-abundant Ida, mother of wild beasts,
     Came, and they first left ocean to fare over mainland at Lektos,
     Where underneath of their feet waved loftiest growths of the
     woodland.
     There hung Hypnos fast, ere the vision of Zeus was observant,
     Mounted upon a tall pine-tree, tallest of pines that on Ida
     Lustily spring off soil for the shoot up aloft into aether.
     There did he sit well-cloaked by the wide-branched pine for
     concealment,
     That loud bird, in his form like, that perched high up in the
     mountains,
     Chalkis is named by the Gods, but of mortals known as Kymindis.



     CLASH IN ARMS OF THE ACHAIANS AND TROJANS--Iliad, xvii, 426



     Not the sea-wave so bellows abroad when it bursts upon shingle,
     Whipped from the sea's deeps up by the terrible blast of the
     Northwind;
     Nay, nor is ever the roar of the fierce fire's rush so arousing,
     Down along mountain-glades, when it surges to kindle a woodland;
     Nay, nor so tonant thunders the stress of the gale in the oak-trees'
     Foliage-tresses high, when it rages to raveing its utmost;
     As rose then stupendous the Trojan's cry and Achaians',
     Dread upshouting as one when together they clashed in the conflict.



     THE HORSES OF ACHILLES--Iliad, xvii, 426



     So now the horses of Aiakides, off wide of the war-ground,
     Wept, since first they were ware of their charioteer overthrown
     there,
     Cast down low in the whirl of the dust under man-slaying Hector.
     Sooth, meanwhile, then did Automedon, brave son of Diores,
     Oft, on the one hand, urge them with flicks of the swift whip, and
     oft, too,
     Coax entreatingly, hurriedly; whiles did he angrily threaten.
     Vainly, for these would not to the ships, to the Hellespont
     spacious,
     Backward turn, nor be whipped to the battle among the Achaians.
     Nay, as a pillar remains immovable, fixed on the tombstone,
     Haply, of some dead man or it may be a woman there-under;
     Even like hard stood they there attached to the glorious war-car,
     Earthward bowed with their heads; and of them so lamenting incessant
     Ran the hot teardrops downward on to the earth from their eyelids,
     Mourning their charioteer; all their lustrous manes dusty-clotted,
     Right side and left of the yoke-ring tossed, to the breadth of the
     yoke-bow.
     Now when the issue of Kronos beheld that sorrow, his head shook
     Pitying them for their grief, these words then he spake in his
     bosom;
     "Why, ye hapless, gave we to Peleus you, to a mortal
     Master; ye that are ageless both, ye both of you deathless!
     Was it that ye among men most wretched should come to have heart-
     grief?
     'Tis most true, than the race of these men is there wretcheder
     nowhere
     Aught over earth's range found that is gifted with breath and has
     movement."



     THE MARES OF THE CAMARGUE--From the 'Mireio' of Mistral



     A hundred mares, all white! their manes
     Like mace-reed of the marshy plains
     Thick-tufted, wavy, free o' the shears:
     And when the fiery squadron rears
     Bursting at speed, each mane appears
     Even as the white scarf of a fay
     Floating upon their necks along the heavens away.

     O race of humankind, take shame!
     For never yet a hand could tame,
     Nor bitter spur that rips the flanks subdue
     The mares of the Camargue. I have known,
     By treason snared, some captives shown;
     Expatriate from their native Rhone,
     Led off, their saline pastures far from view:

     And on a day, with prompt rebound,
     They have flung their riders to the ground,
     And at a single gallop, scouring free,
     Wide-nostril'd to the wind, twice ten
     Of long marsh-leagues devour'd, and then,
     Back to the Vacares again,
     After ten years of slavery just to breathe salt sea

     For of this savage race unbent,
     The ocean is the element.
     Of old escaped from Neptune's car, full sure,
     Still with the white foam fleck'd are they,
     And when the sea puffs black from grey,
     And ships part cables, loudly neigh
     The stallions of Camargue, all joyful in the roar;

     And keen as a whip they lash and crack
     Their tails that drag the dust, and back
     Scratch up the earth, and feel, entering their flesh, where he,
     The God, drives deep his trident teeth,
     Who in one horror, above, beneath,
     Bids storm and watery deluge seethe,
     And shatters to their depths the abysses of the sea.

     Cant. iv.



     'ATKINS'



     Yonder's the man with his life in his hand,
     Legs on the march for whatever the land,
     Or to the slaughter, or to the maiming,
     Getting the dole of a dog for pay.
     Laurels he clasps in the words 'duty done,'
     England his heart under every sun:-
     Exquisite humour! that gives him a naming
     Base to the ear as an ass's bray.



     THE VOYAGE OF THE 'OPHIR'



     Men of our race, we send you one
     Round whom Victoria's holy name
     Is halo from the sunken sun
     Of her grand Summer's day aflame.
     The heart of your loved Motherland,
     To them she loves as her own blood,
     This Flower of Ocean bears in hand,
     Assured of gift as good.

     Forth for our Southern shores the fleet
     Which crowns a nation's wisdom steams,
     That there may Briton Briton greet,
     And stamp as fact Imperial dreams.
     Across the globe, from sea to sea,
     The long smoke-pennon trails above,
     Writes over sky how wise will be
     The Power that trusts to love.

     A love that springs from heart and brain
     In union gives for ripest fruit
     The concord Kings and States in vain
     Have sought, who played the lofty brute,
     And fondly deeming they possessed,
     On force relied, and found it break:
     That truth once scored on Britain's breast
     Now keeps her mind awake.

     Australian, Canadian,
     To tone old veins with streams of youth,
     Our trust be on the best in man
     Henceforth, and we shall prove that truth.
     Prove to a world of brows down-bent
     That in the Britain thus endowed,
     Imperial means beneficent,
     And strength to service vowed.



     THE CRISIS



     Spirit of Russia, now has come
     The day when thou canst not be dumb.
     Around thee foams the torrent tide,
     Above thee its fell fountain, Pride.
     The senseless rock awaits thy word
     To crumble; shall it be unheard?
     Already, like a tempest-sun,
     That shoots the flare and shuts to dun,
     Thy land 'twixt flame and darkness heaves,
     Showing the blade wherewith Fate cleaves,
     If mortals in high courage fail
     At the one breath before the gale.
     Those rulers in all forms of lust,
     Who trod thy children down to dust
     On the red Sunday, know right well
     What word for them thy voice would spell,
     What quick perdition for them weave,
     Did they in such a voice believe.
     Not thine to raise the avenger's shriek,
     Nor turn to them a Tolstoi cheek;
     Nor menace him, the waverer still,
     Man of much heart and little will,
     The criminal of his high seat,
     Whose plea of Guiltless judges it.
     For him thy voice shall bring to hand
     Salvation, and to thy torn land,
     Seen on the breakers. Now has come
     The day when thou canst not be dumb,
     Spirit of Russia:- those who bind
     Thy limbs and iron-cap thy mind,
     Take thee for quaking flesh, misdoubt
     That thou art of the rabble rout
     Which cries and flees, with whimpering lip,
     From reckless gun and brutal whip;
     But he who has at heart the deeds
     Of thy heroic offspring reads
     In them a soul; not given to shrink
     From peril on the abyss's brink;
     With never dread of murderous power;
     With view beyond the crimson hour;
     Neither an instinct-driven might,
     Nor visionary erudite;
     A soul; that art thou. It remains
     For thee to stay thy children's veins,
     The countertides of hate arrest,
     Give to thy sons a breathing breast,
     And Him resembling, in His sight,
     Say to thy land, Let there be Light.



     OCTOBER 21, 1905



     The hundred years have passed, and he
     Whose name appeased a nation's fears,
     As with a hand laid over sea;
     To thunder through the foeman's ears
     Defeat before his blast of fire;
     Lives in the immortality
     That poets dream and noblest souls desire.

     Never did nation's need evoke
     Hero like him for aid, the while
     A Continent was cannon-smoke
     Or peace in slavery: this one Isle
     Reflecting Nature: this one man
     Her sea-hound and her mortal stroke,
     With war-worn body aye in battle's van.

     And do we love him well, as well
     As he his country, we may greet,
     With hand on steel, our passing bell
     Nigh on the swing, for prelude sweet
     To the music heard when his last breath
     Hung on its ebb beside the knell,
     And VICTORY in his ear sang gracious Death.

     Ah, day of glory! day of tears!
     Day of a people bowed as one!
     Behold across those hundred years
     The lion flash of gun at gun:
     Our bitter pride; our love bereaved;
     What pall of cloud o'ercame our sun
     That day, to bear his wreath, the end achieved.

     Joy that no more with murder's frown
     The ancient rivals bark apart.
     Now Nelson to brave France is shown
     A hero after her own heart:
     And he now scanning that quick race,
     To whom through life his glove was thrown,
     Would know a sister spirit to embrace.



     THE CENTENARY OF GARIBALDI



     We who have seen Italia in the throes,
     Half risen but to be hurled to ground, and now
     Like a ripe field of wheat where once drove plough
     All bounteous as she is fair, we think of those
     Who blew the breath of life into her frame:
     Cavour, Mazzini, Garibaldi: Three:
     Her Brain, her Soul, her Sword; and set her free
     From ruinous discords, with one lustrous aim.

     That aim, albeit they were of minds diverse,
     Conjoined them, not to strive without surcease;
     For them could be no babblement of peace
     While lay their country under Slavery's curse.

     The set of torn Italia's glorious day
     Was ever sunrise in each filial breast.
     Of eagle beaks by righteousness unblest
     They felt her pulsing body made the prey.

     Wherefore they struck, and had to count their dead.
     With bitter smile of resolution nerved
     To try new issues, holding faith unswerved,
     Promise they gathered from the rich blood shed.

     In them Italia, visible to us then
     As living, rose; for proof that huge brute Force
     Has never being from celestial source,
     And is the lord of cravens, not of men.

     Now breaking up the crust of temporal strife,
     Who reads their acts enshrined in History, sees
     That Tyrants were the Revolutionaries,
     The Rebels men heart-vowed to hallowed life.

     Pure as the Archangel's cleaving Darkness thro',
     The Sword he sees, the keen unwearied Sword,
     A single blade against a circling horde,
     And aye for Freedom and the trampled few.

     The cry of Liberty from dungeon cell,
     From exile, was his God's command to smite,
     As for a swim in sea he joined the fight,
     With radiant face, full sure that he did well.

     Behold a warrior dealing mortal strokes,
     Whose nature was a child's: amid his foes
     A wary trickster: at the battle's close,
     No gentler friend this leopard dashed with fox.

     Down the long roll of History will run
     The story of these deeds, and speed his race
     Beneath defeat more hotly to embrace
     The noble cause and trust to another sun.

     And lo, that sun is in Italia's skies
     This day, by grace of his good sword in part.
     It beckons her to keep a warrior heart
     For guard of beauty, all too sweet a prize.

     Earth gave him: blessed be the Earth that gave.
     Earth's Master crowned his honest work on earth:
     Proudly Italia names his place of birth:
     The bosom of Humanity his grave.



     THE WILD ROSE



     High climbs June's wild rose,
     Her bush all blooms in a swarm;
     And swift from the bud she blows,
     In a day when the wooer is warm;
     Frank to receive and give,
     Her bosom is open to bee and sun:
     Pride she has none,
     Nor shame she knows;
     Happy to live.

     Unlike those of the garden nigh,
     Her queenly sisters enthroned by art;
     Loosening petals one by one
     To the fiery Passion's dart
     Superbly shy.
     For them in some glory of hair,
     Or nest of the heaving mounds to lie,
     Or path of the bride bestrew.
     Ever are they the theme for song.
     But nought of that is her share.
     Hardly from wayfarers tramping along,
     A glance they care not to renew.

     And she at a word of the claims of kin
     Shrinks to the level of roads and meads:
     She is only a plain princess of the weeds,
     As an outcast witless of sin:
     Much disregarded, save by the few
     Who love her, that has not a spot of deceit,
     No promise of sweet beyond sweet,
     Often descending to sour.
     On any fair breast she would die in an hour.
     Praises she scarce could bear,
     Were any wild poet to praise.
     Her aim is to rise into light and air.
     One of the darlings of Earth, no more,
     And little it seems in the dusty ways,
     Unless to the grasses nodding beneath;
     The bird clapping wings to soar,
     The clouds of an evetide's wreath.



     THE CALL



     Under what spell are we debased
     By fears for our inviolate Isle,
     Whose record is of dangers faced
     And flung to heel with even smile?
     Is it a vaster force, a subtler guile?

     They say Exercitus designs
     To match the famed Salsipotent
     Where on her sceptre she reclines;
     Awake: but were a slumber sent
     By guilty gods, more fell his foul intent.

     The subtler web, the vaster foe,
     Well may we meet when drilled for deeds:
     But in these days of wealth at flow,
     A word of breezy warning breeds
     The pained responses seen in lakeside reeds.

     We fain would stand contemplative,
     All innocent as meadow grass;
     In human goodness fain believe,
     Believe a cloud is formed to pass;
     Its shadows chase with draughts of hippocras.

     Others have gone; the way they went
     Sweet sunny now, and safe our nest.
     Humanity, enlightenment,
     Against the warning hum protest:
     Let the world hear that we know what is best.

     So do the beatific speak;
     Yet have they ears, and eyes as well;
     And if not with a paler cheek,
     They feel the shivers in them dwell,
     That something of a dubious future tell.

     For huge possessions render slack
     The power we need to hold them fast;
     Save when a quickened heart shall make
     Our people one, to meet what blast
     May blow from temporal heavens overcast.

     Our people one! Nor they with strength
     Dependent on a single arm:
     Alert, and braced the whole land's length,
     Rejoicing in their manhood's charm
     For friend or foe; to succour, not to harm.

     Has ever weakness won esteem?
     Or counts it as a prized ally?
     They who have read in History deem
     It ranks among the slavish fry,
     Whose claim to live justiciary Fates deny.

     It can not be declared we are
     A nation till from end to end
     The land can show such front to war
     As bids a crouching foe expend
     His ire in air, and preferably be friend.

     We dreading him, we do him wrong;
     For fears discolour, fears invite.
     Like him, our task is to be strong;
     Unlike him, claiming not by might
     To snatch an envied treasure as a right.

     So may a stouter brotherhood
     At home be signalled over sea
     For righteous, and be understood,
     Nay, welcomed, when 'tis shown that we
     All duties have embraced in being free.

     This Britain slumbering, she is rich;
     Lies placid as a cradled child;
     At times with an uneasy twitch,
     That tells of dreams unduly wild.
     Shall she be with a foreign drug defiled?

     The grandeur of her deeds recall;
     Look on her face so kindly fair:
     This Britain! and were she to fall,
     Mankind would breathe a harsher air,
     The nations miss a light of leading rare.



     ON COMO



     A rainless darkness drew o'er the lake
     As we lay in our boat with oars unshipped.
     It seemed neither cloud nor water awake,
     And forth of the low black curtain slipped
     Thunderless lightning. Scoff no more
     At angels imagined in downward flight
     For the daughters of earth as fabled of yore:
     Here was beauty might well invite
     Dark heavens to gleam with the fire of a sun
     Resurgent; here the exchanged embrace
     Worthy of heaven and earth made one.

     And witness it, ye of the privileged space,
     Said the flash; and the mountains, as from an abyss
     For quivering seconds leaped up to attest
     That given, received, renewed was the kiss;
     The lips to lips and the breast to breast;
     All in a glory of ecstasy, swift
     As an eagle at prey, and pure as the prayer
     Of an infant bidden joined hands uplift
     To be guarded through darkness by spirits of air,
     Ere setting the sails of sleep till day.
     Slowly the low cloud swung, and far
     It panted along its mirrored way;
     Above loose threads one sanctioning star,
     The wonder of what had been witnessed, sealed,
     And with me still as in crystal glassed
     Are the depths alight, the heavens revealed,
     Where on to the Alps the muteness passed.



     MILTON--DECEMBER 9, 1608: DECEMBER 9, 1908



     What splendour of imperial station man,
     The Tree of Life, may reach when, rooted fast,
     His branching stem points way to upper air
     And skyward still aspires, we see in him
     Who sang for us the Archangelical host,
     Made Morning, by old Darkness urged to the abyss;
     A voice that down three centuries onward rolls;
     Onward will roll while lives our English tongue,
     In the devout of music unsurpassed
     Since Piety won Heaven's ear on Israel's harp.

     The face of Earth, the soul of Earth, her charm,
     Her dread austerity; the quavering fate
     Of mortals with blind hope by passion swayed,
     His mind embraced, the while on trodden soil,
     Defender of the Commonwealth, he joined
     Our temporal fray, whereof is vital fruit,
     And, choosing armoury of the Scholar, stood
     Beside his peers to raise the voice for Freedom:
     Nor has fair Liberty a champion armed
     To meet on heights or plains the Sophister
     Throughout the ages, equal to this man,
     Whose spirit breathed high Heaven, and drew thence
     The ethereal sword to smite.

     Were England sunk
     Beneath the shifting tides, her heart, her brain,
     The smile she wears, the faith she holds, her best,
     Would live full-toned in the grand delivery
     Of his cathedral speech: an utterance
     Almost divine, and such as Hellespont,
     Crashing its breakers under Ida's frown,
     Inspired: yet worthier he, whose instrument
     Was by comparison the coarse reed-pipe;
     Whereof have come the marvellous harmonies,
     Which, with his lofty theme, of infinite range,
     Abash, entrance, exalt.

     We need him now,
     This latest Age in repetition cries:
     For Belial, the adroit, is in our midst;
     Mammon, more swoln to squeeze the slavish sweat
     From hopeless toil: and overshadowingly
     (Aggrandized, monstrous in his grinning mask
     Of hypocritical Peace,) inveterate Moloch
     Remains the great example.

     Homage to him
     His debtor band, innumerable as waves
     Running all golden from an eastern sun,
     Joyfully render, in deep reverence
     Subscribe, and as they speak their Milton's name,
     Rays of his glory on their foreheads bear.



     IRELAND



     Fire in her ashes Ireland feels
     And in her veins a glow of heat.
     To her the lost old time, appeals
     For resurrection, good to greet:
     Not as a shape with spectral eyes,
     But humanly maternal, young
     In all that quickens pride, and wise
     To speak the best her bards have sung.

     You read her as a land distraught,
     Where bitterest rebel passions seethe.
     Look with a core of heart in thought,
     For so is known the truth beneath.
     She came to you a loathing bride,
     And it has been no happy bed.
     Believe in her as friend, allied
     By bonds as close as those who wed.

     Her speech is held for hatred's cry;
     Her silence tells of treason hid:
     Were it her aim to burst the tie,
     She sees what iron laws forbid.
     Excess of heart obscures from view
     A head as keen as yours to count.
     Trust her, that she may prove her true
     In links whereof is love the fount.

     May she not call herself her own?
     That is her cry, and thence her spits
     Of fury, thence her graceless tone
     At justice given in bits and bits.
     The limbs once raw with gnawing chains
     Will fret at silken when God's beams
     Of Freedom beckon o'er the plains
     From mounts that show it more than dreams.

     She, generous, craves your generous dole;
     That will not rouse the crack of doom.
     It ends the blundering past control
     Simply to give her elbow-room.
     Her offspring feels they are a race,
     To be a nation is their claim;
     Yet stronger bound in your embrace
     Than when the tie was but a name.

     A nation she, and formed to charm,
     With heart for heart and hands all round.
     No longer England's broken arm,
     Would England know where strength is found.
     And strength to-day is England's need;
     To-morrow it may be for both
     Salvation: heed the portents, heed
     The warnings; free the mind from sloth.

     Too long the pair have danced in mud,
     With no advance from sun to sun.
     Ah, what a bounding course of blood
     Has England with an Ireland one!
     Behold yon shadow cross the downs,
     And off away to yeasty seas.
     Lightly will fly old rancour's frowns
     When solid with high heart stand these.



     THE YEARS HAD WORN THEIR SEASONS' BELT



     The years had worn their seasons' belt,
     From bud to rosy prime,
     Since Nellie by the larch-pole knelt
     And helped the hop to climb.

     Most diligent of teachers then,
     But now with all to learn,
     She breathed beyond a thought of men,
     Though formed to make men burn.

     She dwelt where 'twixt low-beaten thorns
     Two mill-blades, like a snail,
     Enormous, with inquiring horns,
     Looked down on half the vale.

     You know the grey of dew on grass
     Ere with the young sun fired,
     And you know well the thirst one has
     For the coming and desired.

     Quick in our ring she leapt, and gave
     Her hand to left, to right.
     No claim on her had any, save
     To feed the joy of sight.

     For man and maid a laughing word
     She tossed, in notes as clear
     As when the February bird
     Sings out that Spring is near.

     Of what befell behind that scone,
     Let none who knows reveal.
     In ballad days she might have been
     A heroine rousing steel.

     On us did she bestow the hour,
     And fixed it firm in thought;
     Her spirit like a meadow flower
     That gives, and asks for nought.

     She seemed to make the sunlight stay
     And show her in its pride.
     O she was fair as a beech in May
     With the sun on the yonder side.

     There was more life than breath can give,
     In the looks in her fair form;
     For little can we say we live
     Until the heart is warm.



     FRAGMENTS



     Open horizons round,
     O mounting mind, to scenes unsung,
     Wherein shall walk a lusty Time:
     Our Earth is young;
     Of measure without bound;
     Infinite are the heights to climb,
     The depths to sound.


     A wilding little stubble flower
     The sickle scorned which cut for wheat,
     Such was our hope in that dark hour
     When nought save uses held the street,
     And daily pleasures, daily needs,
     With barren vision, looked ahead.
     And still the same result of seeds
     Gave likeness 'twixt the live and dead.


     From labours through the night, outworn,
     Above the hills the front of morn
     We see, whose eyes to heights are raised,
     And the world's wise may deem us crazed.
     While yet her lord lies under seas,
     She takes us as the wind the trees'
     Delighted leafage; all in song
     We mount to her, to her belong.


     This love of nature, that allures to take
     Irregularity for harmony
     Of larger scope than our hard measures make,
     Cherish it as thy school for when on thee
     The ills of life descend.



     IL Y A CENT ANS



     That march of the funereal Past behold;
     How Glory sat on Bondage for its throne;
     How men, like dazzled insects, through the mould
     Still worked their way, and bled to keep their own.

     We know them, as they strove and wrought and yearned;
     Their hopes, their fears; what page of Life they wist:
     At whiles their vision upon us was turned,
     Baffled by shapes limmed loosely on thick mist.

     Beneath the fortress bulk of Power they bent
     Blunt heads, adoring or in shackled hate,
     All save the rebel hymned him; and it meant
     A world submitting to incarnate Fate.

     From this he drew fresh appetite for sway,
     And of it fell: whereat was chorus raised,
     How surely shall a mad ambition pay
     Dues to Humanity, erewhile amazed.

     'Twas dreamed by some the deluge would ensue,
     So trembling was the tension long constrained;
     A spirit of faith was in the chosen few,
     That steps to the millennium had been gained.

     But mainly the rich business of the hour,
     Their sight, made blind by urgency of blood,
     Embraced; and facts, the passing sweet or sour,
     To them were solid things that nought withstood.

     Their facts are going headlong on the tides,
     Like commas on a line of History's page;
     Nor that which once they took for Truth abides,
     Save in the form of youth enlarged from age.

     Meantime give ear to woodland notes around,
     Look on our Earth full-breasted to our sun:
     So was it when their poets heard the sound,
     Beheld the scene: in them our days are one.

     What figures will be shown the century hence?
     What lands intact? We do but know that Power
     From piety divorced, though seen immense,
     Shall sink on envy of the humblest flower.

     Our cry for cradled Peace, while men are still
     The three-parts brute which smothers the divine,
     Heaven answers: Guard it with forethoughtful will,
     Or buy it; all your gains from War resign.

     A land, not indefensibly alarmed,
     May see, unwarned by hint of friendly gods,
     Between a hermit crab at all points armed,
     And one without a shell, decisive odds.



     YOUTH IN AGE



     Once I was part of the music I heard
     On the boughs or sweet between earth and sky,
     For joy of the beating of wings on high
     My heart shot into the breast of the bird.

     I hear it now and I see it fly,
     And a life in wrinkles again is stirred,
     My heart shoots into the breast of the bird,
     As it will for sheer love till the last long sigh.



     TO A FRIEND LOST (TOM TAYLOR)



     When I remember, friend, whom lost I call,
     Because a man beloved is taken hence,
     The tender humour and the fire of sense
     In your good eyes; how full of heart for all,
     And chiefly for the weaker by the wall,
     You bore that lamp of sane benevolence;
     Then see I round you Death his shadows dense
     Divide, and at your feet his emblems fall.
     For surely are you one with the white host,
     Spirits, whose memory is our vital air,
     Through the great love of Earth they had: lo, these,
     Like beams that throw the path on tossing seas,
     Can bid us feel we keep them in the ghost,
     Partakers of a strife they joyed to share.



     M. M.



     Who call her Mother and who calls her Wife
     Look on her grave and see not Death but Life.



     THE LADY C. M.



     To them that knew her, there is vital flame
     In these the simple letters of her name.
     To them that knew her not, be it but said,
     So strong a spirit is not of the dead.



     ON THE TOMBSTONE OF
     JAMES CHRISTOPHER WILSON
     (d. APRIL 11, 1884)
     IN HEADLEY CHURCHYARD, SURREY



     Thou our beloved and light of Earth hast crossed
     The sea of darkness to the yonder shore.
     There dost thou shine a light transferred, not lost,
     Through love to kindle in our souls the more.



     GORDON OF KHARTOUM



     Of men he would have raised to light he fell:
     In soul he conquered with those nerveless hands.
     His country's pride and her abasement knell
     The Man of England circled by the sands.



     J. C. M.



     A fountain of our sweetest, quick to spring
     In fellowship abounding, here subsides:
     And never passage of a cloud on wing
     To gladden blue forgets him; near he hides.



     THE EMPEROR FREDERICK OF OUR TIME



     With Alfred and St. Louis he doth win
     Grander than crowned head's mortuary dome:
     His gentle heroic manhood enters in
     The ever-flowering common heart for home.



     ISLET THE DACHS



     Our Islet out of Helgoland, dismissed
     From his quaint tenement, quits hates and loves.
     There lived with us a wagging humourist
     In that hound's arch dwarf-legged on boxing-gloves.



     ON HEARING THE NEWS FROM VENICE
     (THE DEATH OF ROBERT BROWNING)



     Now dumb is he who waked the world to speak,
     And voiceless hangs the world beside his bier.
     Our words are sobs, our cry of praise a tear:
     We are the smitten mortal, we the weak.
     We see a spirit on Earth's loftiest peak
     Shine, and wing hence the way he makes more clear:
     See a great Tree of Life that never sere
     Dropped leaf for aught that age or storms might wreak.
     Such ending is not Death: such living shows
     What wide illumination brightness sheds
     From one big heart, to conquer man's old foes:
     The coward, and the tyrant, and the force
     Of all those weedy monsters raising heads
     When Song is murk from springs of turbid source.

     December 13, 1889.



     HAWARDEN



     When comes the lighted day for men to read
     Life's meaning, with the work before their hands
     Till this good gift of breath from debt is freed,
     Earth will not hear her children's wailful bands
     Deplore the chieftain fall'n in sob and dirge;
     Nor they look where is darkness, but on high.
     The sun that dropped down our horizon's verge
     Illumes his labours through the travelled sky,
     Now seen in sum, most glorious; and 'tis known
     By what our warrior wrought we hold him fast.
     A splendid image built of man has flown;
     His deeds inspired of God outstep a Past.
     Ours the great privilege to have had one
     Among us who celestial tasks has done.



     AT THE FUNERAL
     FEBRUARY 2, 1901



     Her sacred body bear: the tenement
     Of that strong soul now ranked with God's Elect
     Her heart upon her people's heart she spent;
     Hence is she Royalty's lodestar to direct.

     The peace is hers, of whom all lands have praised
     Majestic virtues ere her day unseen.
     Aloft the name of Womanhood she raised,
     And gave new readings to the Title, Queen.



     ANGELA BURDETT-COUTTS



     Long with us, now she leaves us; she has rest
     Beneath our sacred sod:
     A woman vowed to Good, whom all attest,
     The daylight gift of God.



     THE YEAR'S SHEDDINGS



     The varied colours are a fitful heap:
     They pass in constant service though they sleep;
     The self gone out of them, therewith the pain:
     Read that, who still to spell our earth remain.